Welcome to Gaia! ::

After their discussion Zar had sat dismally on the couch immersed in the mingled scents of Barth and Calder until he could stand it no longer. Leaving the cabin he'd leapt forward, throwing out his arms even as they twisted shape, shifting into enormous hooked claws. He hit the ground running, tail arching out behind him. And he stayed that shape, running wide of the lake. It didn't matter that he was in danger here, that his parents could show any moment, he was in the kind of mood to give either of them a good run for their money if they wanted to take him or harm him.

But even motion only did so much and as his energy and drive ebbed away, as the adrenaline no longer took the edge off his feelings, he turned back towards the cabin.

On the way back he spotted someone out by the dock near the lake and unsure who it could be - he had left Calder up in his room after all - he made his way over. In this form he had no glasses, it was almost impossible to tell who he was looking at from a distance, and wouldn't Calder be in the water?

He tilted his head. "Isss that you?" he said as he slunk nearer.

"I thought you were going to ssssleeep." Zar exhaled, his voice in this shape always a deep throaty growl, arching into sibilance now and then. He couldn't help the predatory posture he adopted as he waited at the end of the dock, the way his tail seemed to sweep into tense zigzags of coiled energy. "Not ssswimming?"

The kelpie was an enigma the Zar. One minute he could swear he was deep down completely callous, classing everyone as his friends and thereby negating the whole concept of friend in the first place. Other times there were glimpses of something else, something genuinely sensitive and also - he noted, sitting out here overlooking the moonlit lake - very lonely.

"It'sss controllable now." he said.

He took a step onto the dock, intending to join Calder, only to have it creak precariously under his weight. He pulled back the offending forepaw and shifted once more out of that natural shape, back into his pinned and far lighter form. Only then did he make his way over to sit next to the other boil. Against his will his tail swept around him gently, throwing wide the emotional link. For a moment there was a flash of Zar's curiosity and something that could have been guilt before it was locked down neatly.

"I just don't know."

The tail only seemed encouraged by the lack of attention, slithering more and more around Calder, bundling its heavy muscled coils into his lap and around his feet, warm and startlingly soft in spite of the strength inherent in every inch of the appendage. Zar ignored it, intent instead on the emotions he felt from Calder. They were difficult to tolerate, amplifying his own negative emotions as he touched upon them, but he didn't pull away.

"I had no choice but to learn to shift." he said. "You know, I figured out eventually that that form. Well, it was just me. Me without the pin. I must have looked like that once. Before amity, before my parents fixed it for whatever reason. I guess bottling it so long it was bound to spill over somehow. I still don't have full control over it, it is a lot of ...urges. But I have to deal with those in this shape now too, I have to..manage a lot of instincts that I never did before."

He looked at the water dismally, once upon a time water would certainly have drowned him, water logging his wings and pulling him down and under every single time.

"I don't sleep a lot of the time." he said. "It is easy not to sleep, not to eat, neither fulfill me unless they are just right. They rarely are." He shook his head and his heavy horns slowly. "I was stretching my legs because running takes my mind off of absolutely everything for a short time."

"I don't know why either. I think it's probably what they've always told me, I wasn't demon enough. I think it likely was too much monster for them. Just like everything else about me that they tried to burn out with paperwork and making me some kind of slave drudge." He still felt like too much monster, like a creature that didn't belong to anyone's world, straddling some place in between one and the other. He wasn't cold enough to be a decent demon, he wasn't in control or smart. And he could not be a monster, he was not natural enough, not easy enough in his skin, always tense and cruel.

"Instincts are awful. But no instincts, trying to control a flood of them and cut it down to nothing at all is the worst thing I can even describe."

He tensed and shivered as his tail was cradled, derailed from his comments as the sensations seized his brain right out of his hands. It took a little bit for him to compose himself. The tail itself simply twined even more around Calder.

"I just know when its right." he said. "It is like. Hmm. It hits something in me that it doesn't normally. It's like the difference between a meal that fills you up completely and you just want to sleep it off and some small snack that just makes you want to go out and get more."

"I think demons are wary of anything that we can't control or - though we will never admit it - is stronger than us. My parents wanted to make sure I never got any ideas they didn't put there." he smiled very faintly. "Sending me to Amityville was their first mistake. Thinking they could control me forever was their second."

He couldn't help but feel complimented that at the very least Calder thought he was demon enough, but it quickly turned bittersweet as he went on to list all the reasons why he would never manage to be like a monster, reconfirming his worries that he would for ever be torn between worlds.

"I don't have any of those things any longer." he said, sadly. "If Barth doesn't take me in, I will be either killed by my parents or will have to live in my natural form like a monster, solitary. My options are few."

"Its not so much him that is the problem as.. well. All of this. I am always just an extra set of hands on deck, trying to take what is already more or less property of other individuals. I look forward and I think, can I see a future in this? Right now, I just don't know."

The more Calder touched his tail, the more the instincts they'd been talking about mere moments before seemed to waken, for a moment throwing the Incubus off his train of thought.

"Erm. And I wouldn't say like." he said, looking distressed at anything in this vein at all. "I certainly do not like him very much at all. It is more a sex thing, I suppose." he held up a hand placatingly. "Don't start worrying I am going to harm him though. That would be boring."

"And my form showed up as a serious threat to all I held close, I would never have inflicted it on anyone intentionally."

"An extra person, surplus to requirements. There are a lot of people competing for the attentions of one individual." He let out a sigh and flopped back onto the dock, wings splayed on the wood. His tail did not move from around Calder, thriving in the attention and changing in texture, turning slightly slimy wherever the Kelpie touched it. Zar didn't notice, too busy looking up at the sky overhead.

"I do not particularly hate it, no. It hurts often, it is uncomfortable and anxious and leaves me feeling rather bad about myself and my potential self worth." He took a deep breath and exhaled heavily. "But it is better than before when there was nothing at all, when all I had to look forward to was some unspecified time when I would dissipate permanently or become part of some twisted force like Insanity."

He rested a taloned claw on his face, looking weary. "Sex is everything to Incubi I am afraid. It is what we are, what we live and breathe. In principle it is only business, hollow enactments of out prime hunting instincts, like a minipet play fighting or play hunting. It is hunting without the fear payoff. It should be just an action."

"But it is not." he added after a moment. "Not all of the time. Sometimes I find myself fascinated or ensnared by the emotions that I encounter, on those occasions it is dangerous. Broken, taboo."

He shrugged his shoulders as the very tip of his tail stroked Calder's chin affectionately.

"But demons do not love."

"I don't want Christof's attention. I despise him." and he curled his lip at nothing, the tension running through his tail, cold black rage sparking over his hold on the emotional link before he swept it up once again and put it away, out of Calder's reach. "Nor do I much like the sound of friends. Friend is a lukewarm word, it is hazy and weak. It means nothing. I believe in all or nothing, yes or no, rule or submit. You offer none of those things, only a middle ground of nothing much at all. It is not something that makes me want to be part of it, you can't trust neutrality."

"I just do not know where you got the impression that it was ever equal. Not everyone in this arrangement wants to be together and that is part of the problem."

He tried very hard not to think about his tail, which made no difference as subconscious as it was, still trying to get close to the kelpie, exploring him bordering on invasively with its coils and providing him with more slime whether he wanted it or not.

"It is when I do it wrong." he said. "That I fret about sex. There should not be feeling attached at all, I should not get sentimental about prey in any way at all."

He wasn't sure what Calder was up to, only able to feel the lightning shocks of sensation at whatever it was, making it cloudy and difficult to think straight.

"Nn.. No. No, I don't think I did. I mean. At the time I think I thought I did. I didn't understand how it worked, I didn't understand what I felt was something else. It was the joy of possessing a thing, an object. Someone to do whatever I told them, someone to feel better about as I ground them under my heel." and it did feel good, so very good to be in control, to have a creature cower under him helpless, devoted and his.

But it was not love. Not really.

He danced his claws across the sky overhead as if he could touch the pinprick distant stars. "I enjoy hurting creeple." he said. "I enjoyed hurting him, I enjoyed owning him. I feel that is the opposite of love, some dark inverse of sadism."

Only then did he give Calder a sidelong look.

"I enjoy hurting you too, sometimes."