#when i have more energy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

naffeclipse · 3 months

Text

Cold Scales

Naga!Moon x Reader. Sickness.

The first sign of your fever hits you with a pulse of heat. You brushed it aside, believing the sun had been beating on you too long, and the jungle warmth was simmering your blood. Sun leads you to the cave come nightfall. The buzz of mosquitoes fills the air with a menacing hum.

Sun has always been warm to you, even when he told you that you are warmer. His melting yellow and golden jewel tone scales, his cornflower blue eyes, wide and endearing, fit alongside the heavy humidity in the afternoons. The small scarlet markings on his throat and hips are metal-red hot, too. He always kept you warm.

Moon is cool. You’re not sure if that’s due to the cold tones of his scales, gray-blue on his belly and along his arms, and deeper into midnight blue along his back and on top of his hood. He hides in the darkness after sunset. His red eyes, even darker still, only flash once it’s too late for his prey. You’ve seen how fast he strikes—before, when you were acting foolish and trying to escape their aid, and after, when you watched him and Sun hunt a meal.

You slip out of Sun’s embrace. His arms fall away, lethargic from the day you both put your energy into scavenging for berries and nuts and small mammals. A soft hiss leaves his lips. You wait a moment to ensure he doesn’t stir, though his coils unconsciously tense, searching for the little human he was holding.

Sun had mentioned you felt warmer than usual, but you convinced him you were only tired and worn out from the hot day. Still, he frowned when you laid down beside him on the cool cave floor.

The fever pulses deep within you. You feel it burn across your forehead with a ripple of sweat. Staggering out of the cave, what strength you have is quickly sapped by whatever attacks your body. You need less heat. You need to be cold and imagine gulping down icy water to soothe the dryness infecting your throat.

A small trail that’s been trampled by your feet and the width of snake tails leads you through the trees. Even in the dark, under the delirium of a fever, you find the edge of the glinting water reflecting the canopy of thick verdant leaves overhead.

You kneel, almost collapsing forward before you manage to catch yourself with both hands splashing into the pebble-bottom stream. The heavy breaths in your chest heave in and out. You sigh and tell yourself you’re being a baby—one little fever, and you’re struggling to concentrate on the water before you.

In the reflection of the stream, you catch two red eyes glowing above you, leaning out of a tree to survey your feeble attempts to quench your burning thirst. A hood of midnight and diamond yellow stars surround the visage.

“It’s nothing, Moon,” you whisper to the water. Slowly, you cup your hand and carefully bring it to your lips. The crisp coldness douses your heated lips, filling your mouth with a jolt due to the sharp contrast of cold and fire within you. When you swallow, you shiver.

The softest rustle echoes. A few branches quiver, then, you feel his presence behind you, cool as a tree’s shadow.

A large, blue-gray hand snakes around your forehead. Knuckles press against your temple, and you sigh in relief at his blissful, fresh touch.

“Fever,” Moon rasps, carrying the end of the word with a soft hiss of disdain, as if saying it with a curse will make it no longer reality.

“I just need a drink.” You cup your hand in the lazy flow of water again. “I’m fine.”

“Too warm,” he says when you greedily gulp another mouthful.

Water spills cut down the corners of your mouth. He presses closer to you. His thumb smoothly wipes away the drips falling off of your chin, then he shifts. Your mauve shirt with the sleeves cut off allows his frosty arms to offer a barrier against the next wave of heat crashing against you. He’s never felt so cold before—or have you never felt this feverish before?

“It’ll go away.”

You try to get to your feet but Moon’s hand on your waistline stops you from rising.

“Come here,” he rasps. “Let me see you, orchid.”

You would have given him a look at the pet name, but you don’t have the strength to muster the effort. He eases you back against his chest. His palms slide and cup your shoulders, his sharp fingertips slipping slightly under the frayed edges of your shirt and resting on the end of your collarbone. Is that a shiver from the elicit touch or sickly chills beginning to take hold?

“You’re flushed,” he hisses softly. A slight slip of his tongue, forked at the end, peeks out of his mouth as he leans closer. You moan unwittingly at his cool, flat cheek pressed against your clammy face.

“It was hot today.”

“You’re sick,” he decides.

This time, you groan out of refusal rather than relief.

“I’m not sick.” You slowly shift, managing to get to your knees to face him. The fever forces your shoulders down. You bow under the exhaustion taking hold.

Moon hisses in an amusement yet concerned note. His long tail drapes behind him, cutting across the ground like the connections of a constellation. It’s black in this lowlight, but in the day, when he sleepily shows himself, you’ve caught the iridescent indigo and jeweled blue tones of his beautiful scales.

“If you keep denying it, I will take drastic actions. Do you want that, orchid?” his tone lowers to a menacing threat, all dark cords and hisses, but you’ve learned to tune your senses to his hands and expression. He looks only at you, a slight frown playing along his wide mouth. His eyes are narrowed, displeased with your condition.

“No,” you shake your head, “You and Sun are so dramatic.”

“Says the stubborn flower,” he touches your cheek. You nearly collapse into his palm. The rasp of his laugh stings your pride as much as it soothes your aching chest.

“I’m not a flower,” you mutter as you feel his arms lower slightly, coaxing your hands over his shoulders. He rises higher on his tail, lifting your feet off the ground without effort, and you slump over his shoulder, little more than a child being carried to bed. Moon hums a low, hypnotic sound (that you’re sure is part of his allure, his power).

“Of course not,” he gives with amused demean.

You work up a growl at your throat that sounds weak even to your own ears. Moon shushes you with a soft stroke of his claws against your spine. The shudder that follows through your body is both cold and hot, and you hate that he silences you so simply, and that you like how he strikes back against your harshness.

“Easy, easy,” he murmurs as if calming a tiger. You want to snarl at him again but the brief spark is quickly smothered under an internal infernal cooking your core.

No one agitates you and reassures you as much as Moon.

He glides across the ground to his tree—it’s wide and high, thick with strong boughs and leafy but not too leafy. A perfect tree for a naga. Moon tends to lounge up there when he wants to escape the shadows of the cave you usually make your bed in. You wonder how he intends to hold you through the night up in its verdant limbs, but Moon hooks a hand behind your head and lowers you softly to the cool, moist ground at the base of the trunk.

“Moon?” For a piercing moment, you’re afraid. You refuse to let go of his arm as he draws away. Where is he going?

“Hold still,” he gently hisses.

You let go. You wait for him.

Slowly, his coils gather, curving in loops close to you. He draws himself around you, his long body following. The darkness shimmers. He takes you into his arms once more and guides you to his chest where he fully embraces you. The end of his tail drapes across your waist, sealing you within a deliciously cool embrace of the naga’s scales.

“Shush,” he says when you groan, soaking in his invigorating presence. “Sleep, orchid.”

You almost tell him that you can’t, or that you won’t, but the comfortable weight of his body surrounding you, the chill of his arms against your burning skin, and the soft tuck of his chin upon your sweaty head chases away the last of your resistance. You might have pressed back—saying you don’t need his help, but it’s hard to resist the frost-gentle relief of his presence. It’s hard to be stubborn when he feels so good.

“Close your eyes,” he murmurs against your hair. “You’ll feel better soon.”

The sweet caresses of his cool touch across your forehead eases your ache. Against your will, your eyelids flutter. He hums low, a lullaby you can’t name, and it soothes you gently into a dreamless sleep, comforted by a cool cradle of scales and songs.

#i'm burning up with a fever as we speak #i wrote this at like 1 am #because of the fever #if there are any mistakes no you don't see them #cold scales #naga au #naga!moon #moon x reader #naff writing #i'll add this to ao3 later #when i have more energy

573 notes · View notes

transmascissues · 2 months

Text

i absolutely cannot believe people are trying to start discourse about whether nex benedict was actually nonbinary / whether it was okay for him to describe himself as nonbinary to some people if he didn’t actually identify that way as if he isn’t literally DEAD because he was KILLED. this is a MURDERED CHILD and these monsters are so busy getting mad at the possibility that he might have been a trans boy who described himself as nonbinary to his family because that was easier for them to take that they’re turning a CHILD who was MURDERED into fucking discourse. even when we die at the hands of cis people’s violence, our own community finds a way to make us the villains of the story.

and all of this bullshit on top of the ways that cis people are already trying to say our grief over his death is unjustified. all of this on top of people claiming he wasn’t murdered and speculating on other causes of death (i literally saw someone say he “clearly went home and took the coward’s way out” and i have never been more disgusted) or claiming that he started the fight as if any action on his part could’ve been enough to justify his death. i am haunted by the sound of his father screaming that his child was not filth because that is what people have been saying about this poor kid, that’s how cruelly his memory is being treated, and even the trans community can’t get it’s shit together enough to look past the stupid discourse and see the tragedy in front of us. did you all forget that it was supposed to be up to us to grieve him in the way he deserves when the rest of the world fails to care if people like him live or die? did you all forget that this child was our sibling, the future of our community, a life that we should have had the chance to know and treasure while he was still here but that we now have a responsibility to hold close to our hearts in his absence? nex’s life was precious and it was ended far too soon and if you truly believe that anything is more important than mourning his life and fighting for a world where no more trans people have to meet such an awful fate, you’re a traitor to this community and you do not deserve the place you occupy within it.

i’m so tired. i can’t even imagine how tired his family must be, to see the public treat the child they’re grieving so horribly, to see the world fail their baby again. leave him alone. he was already robbed of peace in life; the least you can do is let him finally have it in death.

#as a trans man whose family still uses they/them and neutral terms for me and would describe me as nonbinary #because that was how i initially came out to them and me being a man is a much bigger hurdle than i have the energy to help them get over #it’s SO deeply disturbing to know that if my life ended in violence #my own community would be more concerned with how my family referred to me in death than with the fact that i was killed #how fucking dare you turn this poor child’s existence into discourse fodder when they aren’t even here to defend themselves #when you only even know who he is in the first place because he was killed #tw transphobic violence #nex benedict #tbh it feels wrong to even add my usual tags to this but i need people to see it so. here we go #transandrophobia #transandromisia #transmisandry #virilmisia #virilphobia #anti transmasculinity #transmascphobia #exorsexism #trans men #transmascs

700 notes · View notes