Actually, just angels. Just one angel. Just one angel, featuring Gross Wing Kink, where the sex is basically incidental to the grooming in terms of how much focus I actually put into it.
-
“You like what you see, big guy?” JD teases. “Oh, don’t be shy, I’m not.”
“I can see that.” Filat lifts an eyebrow. He’s wearing like three layers, even though they’re supposed to be here to swim and JD has stripped down to his trunks already.
The lake house belongs to Filat, technically, had been left to him by its previous occupants, people he’d known for a good fifty years or so. He hadn’t known what to do with it. He’d never wanted a house, or needed one, and this one had housed a lot of people, once upon a time. It’s a lot of space.
The lake is technically more of a good-sized pond, but that just means they don’t have to share it with anyone. The whole place, sprawling and green, existed out in the woods, in a mountain town just about three hours from JD. When Filat had invited him, he hadn’t hesitated. He hadn’t thought about how much further he’d have driven, or how long a trip he’d have packed for, if Filat asked. Then again, it’s only fair. Filat’s traveled further for him.
Anyway, there are two important things at play that have nothing to do with Filat — one, the place is not in Lodi, and two, the promise of an entirely secluded place to swim meant he could actually enjoy it.
“How am I the one not wearing a shirt right now?” He walks over to nudge at Filat, who simply reaches up and lets one big, square hand span JD’s ribcage. Too pale, under his clothes, but Filat looks on his pasty belly without judgment.
“I was just going to watch you.” He shakes his head. Looks up with his strange, pale eyes. He has dark hair and golden skin, and so there’s something striking about the silvery pale of his eyes. And the unnerving openness of them, there’s that, too. Always that.
He’s a handsome man. Shaped-entity. He has prominent features — the heavy brow and strong jawline, the big aquiline nose and full lips. Not handsome like ‘leading man in a romantic comedy’ handsome, handsome like you keep looking at him, like you’re trying to figure something about him out and you can’t turn away until you know him. Compelling. They’re good features, sure, but it’s not about that, it’s about being unsure how they all fit into one face, because even if you can’t tell what, you’re aware on a subconscious level that the real charm in him is something too immense to be contained in any one face, in any one body.
He smiles until he feels the corners of his lips lift and that’s where the smile normally stops. To the average eye, it means he never smiles at all. Knowing him, JD thinks he rarely stops smiling. Creation delights him too much.
“You should join me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t swim?” He laughs and grabs onto Filat’s arm and tugs him. Filat, of course, is impossible to move. Even if his body wasn’t a finely-chiseled slab of muscle, he’s an angel. Light as fucking air if he wants to be, a mack truck if he doesn’t. “I’ll teach you, come on. We can skinny dip if you want.”
“Of course I can swim.” Filat rolls his eyes, and lets JD put his full weight into leaning back against him, only their joined hands keeping him from landing on his ass in the water. “I can’t take off my clothes.”
“Oh.” JD gets his feet back under him and moves away from the water’s edge before plopping down. “Okay.”
“I didn’t expect it would disappoint you.”
“I mean I kind of expected we would both be taking our clothes off this weekend, but that’s fine, if you’re not — if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not that.” Filat’s voice goes soft, and then he sighs deeply. “Would it make you happy if I swam with you?”
“You don’t have to.”
He reaches over and pokes at the softness of JD’s stomach — the bulk of which is below the waistband of his trunks, because he’s high-waisted and he carries his pudge low. He always has, when he’s had any to speak of — his breasts are enough to want to keep strangers from seeing shirtless, but not enough to bother him personally, they’d dropped down to manageable proportions quickly back when he’d started T. His hips had slimmed a little, made the high waist a lot less dramatic, but he’d kept the soft roundness of his ass, and the thickness of his thighs, those had gone mostly unchanged. And for a while he’d been more muscle than fat, at least above the waist. Not hulking with it, but he’d built up his shoulders, got some good solid muscle in under the dwindling tits, finally got the arms he’d always wanted, not for how they looked but for what they could accomplish.
Having two puberties in a row did things to a young man’s metabolism, though, which had since ceased. He doesn’t mind it — getting some decent chub made the rest of him look right. If he packed any future weight on a little more evenly, he thinks he could whip his shirt off in public and people wouldn’t blink twice at his tits, provided they just got saggier with age.
He used to be terrified of getting old. He remembers when it scared the shit out of him to think of being twenty-six. Like his life was about to be over when it had barely just begun. And then Feofilakt, literal angel, came into his life, and…
Well, and a lot’s happened since he was a twink in distress sitting in the back booth of a strange Denny’s at three in the morning with a cup of coffee in his shaking hands and Filat explaining how he wasn’t his guardian angel, that every person didn’t have an individual guardian angel, but that in broad strokes you could call him a guardian angel, in that he hung around on earth and occasionally took it upon himself to guard shit, and he had picked JD up where he’d been stranded on the roadside outside the demon house.
The poking is, from Filat, affection. He’s figured that out, in the time they’ve known each other. He does a lot of very gentle prodding, and sometimes he reaches over and tucks in the tag on a shirt or fixes JD’s hair, which grows out too fast, and sometimes flops down to his eyebrows, and sometimes he has a way of just… nudging at him, like he’s a sheepdog and he has to drive JD into place, instead of simply telling him what he wants. Part bird and part cat and part sheepdog… all strange, by human standards, but a hell of a lot less strange than your average human, once you know what you’re dealing with. At least, Filat’s weirdness is very straightforward. And most of what he does boils down to affection, whether it’s poking or preening or nudging or squinting at a person. Or sitting several feet away acting like you don’t exist, but getting up and following you if you move to another room.
Also, most of what’s happened since meeting Filat had led JD to the pretty logical conclusion that the invitation to spend a weekend at this lake house and help him figure out what to do with it was going to involve a lot of being naked.
“I don’t… look my best.” Filat admits, after a long silence.
“You’re a brick house, dude. I’m…” JD waves a hand at himself. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got great tits, and my meat is — spiritually speaking — huge, and I know this pretty face still reels ’em in like it did when I was young — ”
“You’re very young.” He laughs — like most of his laughs, it’s breathy, near-silent and brief. “You are — spiritually speaking — possessed of the most enormous meat. You look nice. Always.”
“You just missed out on seeing me when I was, like… covered in acne and still experimenting with finding a deodorant strong enough for a man.”
Filat huffs out a sigh and strips out of a couple of layers. He’s usually in three, if not four, no matter the heat. He said he liked the weight of his clothes, which JD gets. He spent one summer struggling to avoid heatstroke or leaving the safe and increasingly sweaty cocoon of an old bomber jacket of his dad’s. But that had been around the time the tits first started coming in and the idea of anyone looking at them or getting close to him had been terrifying, and the idea of growing up disgusted and horrified him, and there had been something calming not just about the safety of the big puffy jacket hiding his body, but the weight of it, too, and the undeniable air of masculine cool it represented.
Leaning back on his elbows, JD can see that the back of Filat’s tee shirt is wet through across his back and stuck to his skin, and he knows angels don’t sweat. He’s seen him dressed for a rough winter in the middle of a Bakersfield summer.
When he peels it off, it sticks, in a way sweat doesn’t — too persistent. JD’s extracted himself from enough sweaty undershirts to know the level of adhesion you have to deal with. This makes a sound. It’s stiff when it comes away, and the skin beneath…
His skin is coming up in thick, scaly flakes, like if a patch of dandruff and a peeling sunburn had a weird, gross baby, and something thick and clear is beading across the affected patches — it’s at its worst across his upper back, but it goes all the way down, more or less.
“Oh.” JD says dumbly. “You… didn’t want me to see this.”
“It’s gross.” Filat says, childishly plaintive and — for once — the most human person JD’s ever known. “And it itches.”
“Well, here.” He moves to kneel behind the angel, scratching vigorously at the backs of his shoulders. It’s oil, not sweat — thicker and more viscous than the skin oil that led to the unfortunate acne years that JD suffered through. The skin flakes come up a little more, some of them fall to the grass. He peels a couple bits that don’t away, hesitant, but there’s no sign that it hurts to do so.
“You shouldn’t have to — ” Filat starts, like he hadn’t let out a soft little noise of pure relief when the scratching started. There’s a dry, reddened patch of skin down between his shoulder blades, and JD scratches at that next, getting a strangled moan out of him. “You don’t have to — ”
“Can you reach everything that itches?” He challenges him, rubbing the oil into that dry patch, watching the way that seems to tame the redness all but immediately.
“No, but — ”
“Well, okay.”
“JD…”
“You’ve literally saved my life. More than once.”
“One of those times, you were only in danger because I — ”
“More than once.” He repeats. More than more than once enough that the fact that he’d started trouble one time hardly matters.
“When I let my wings go long enough, it starts to affect my back.” Filat admits, with something almost like shame, or at least a grudging embarrassment.
“Wings?” JD rakes his nails down the sides of Filat’s back, the interest in his own voice clear — more hunger than curiosity.
He blames his weird xeno thing mostly on the fact that his own body had become monstrous right when he was figuring his way around lust, and it was easier to relate to all things weird and creepy than it was to relate to normal teen crushes. Mostly he’s into tentacles, but the fact that Filat is only just contained in a human form around people is hot. Knowing that he’s something weird and vast and powerful, with strange limbs and eyes? Even if his humanoid form wasn’t stacked and very good to look at in the face region, hot. Wings were never a turn on before he started thinking about being touched by an angel every time he reached for his favorite battery-operated devices, but now…
Also, the oiliness is kind of working for him. He sniffs experimentally at his fingers — the scent of it is sweet and a little powdery somehow, and barely musky. He doesn’t quite know what to say it smells like — there’s another note, too, that he can’t quite describe, but which reminds him forcibly of a scratch-and-sniff storybook he’d owned as a small child. He doesn’t remember the story, but he remembers every time he went through it, he dutifully sniffed every well-worn patch, even the ones he knew were bad. He wishes he knew which one he’s smelling now, only that it was neither his favorite nor his least favorite page. He thinks maybe it’s like a plant but not what kind. Not flowery. Grassy, maybe, or herbal. It’s all so much earthier than the usual scentless scent of being near Filat.
“I can only groom what I can reach.” Filat says, arching his back.
JD has dead skin under his nails, but he doesn’t really care. He runs his thumbnails under each fingernail in turn, to get rid of most of it, and that’s good enough. He peels away a couple more big flakes and then rubs the oil around to try and coat the dry patches.
“What do you usually do about it?”
“Eventually I’ll be recalled to debrief, upstairs. I’ll ask a brother for help. Get a lecture about the importance of being preened.”
“How long is it, usually, between your trips upstairs?”
“The last time they recalled me it was… not yet the turn of the century.”
“So, not that long — ”
“The previous century. I keep forgetting you’ve had another one since then.”
“We’re in it.”
“I know.”
“I was in high school around then.”
“Then I haven’t been back for roughly a hundred and thirty years, give or take.”
“Are you, like… not allowed to leave your post?”
“No. But I like it here better than there. And I would miss so much. Look, for you, Heaven is an eternity of everything you’ve ever loved. For me, it’s an office. I don’t like working in an office.”
“Me, neither.” JD leans in and sniffs him, the highest point where the oil is seeping from his skin. Leans in so close that his nose just touches it. “I could — I mean, could I? — help you out with that? Or would my face melt off?”
“No.” He chuckles. “There are things I can show you more easily than others, and… I would of course need to significantly dim the halo, but you know me. There’s no part of me that would melt your face off. You would do this for me?”
“Kind of always wanted to see your wings. Touch ‘em.” He admits, and they’ve been kinda-sorta-dating in their own weird way for a while, but his face still goes red saying it, and he’s glad it’s basically hidden behind Filat’s back.
At least, he’s glad for that until he remembers that Filat’s got eyes all over the place and even though most of them are immaterial and he keeps them on another plane of existence, it maybe doesn’t mean he can’t see him. There’s an almost-too-low-to-hear chuckle that suggests that he can.
“I would be in your debt. Move back, please.”
JD scoots back, and has to tug his trunks back up when dragging his ass along the ground tugs them down a little. He can feel the wall of air that the wings displace rush past him, before he can see them. Can hear it, or them, but for a moment he’s still just looking at Filat’s naked back, until suddenly he does see them.
They’re stunning. Sapphire blue, but the flight feathers and a couple rows above them are rimmed in soft black, giving them a lacy look, and there are silvery pale bars and rust red patches up at the shoulder, and when he spreads them wide, they’re huge. Each one is a good seven or eight feet long.
He can see what Filat means — there are places where they look neat and well-cared for, and then there’s the parts that are messy and dull, or overly-wet, some feathers out of alignment and some fluffing up repeatedly every time there’s an irritated twitch.
“Bluebird.” JD whistles. “Can I…?”
“Yes.” Filat moans the word out so forcefully that JD is fucking tingling.
He starts by stroking his fingertips along a well-groomed spot he can just stretch to reach — apparently, a spot they can both stretch to reach. It’s soft, and warm, and he sinks in a little. It reminds him of the one time he’d petted a duck, as a child, only on a much larger scale. But then, he guesses that’s the only time he’s ever touched something feathered. Any other contact with feathers would be ones that had come out of a well-used pillow, or been picked up on a hike. He’d had a collection of them once.
There wasn’t much to do in Lodi that wasn’t picking up cool rocks and feathers, and then organizing them along your bedroom windowsill. Well, he guesses if you like wine and aren’t a child, your options open up, but for him, it had been picking up cool rocks and feathers, and he was never going to grow up to love the town where he’d had to be a ‘girl’, and which most people knew chiefly through a song about how horrible it was to be stuck there, if they knew it at all.
Now that he knows what the wings are supposed to feel like, he sets to straightening out the parts that aren’t yet groomed.
“No — tug that one out.” Filat says, when he tries to set a bent one right. “That one’s loose.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Not really. I don’t — I don’t have a seasonal ‘molt’, they just drop when they need to drop, because there are already new ones growing in to replace them. It’s just like brushing your hair — some come out, but only because it’s time.”
He still tenses, when JD tugs, but there’s no indication that he’d lied about it being painless — just that the experience isn’t necessarily an easy one, when he’s gone without being touched for over a hundred and thirty years.
Filat offers minimal direction, and JD hums as he works, and for a while they both manage to ignore the whole ‘immense turn-on’ aspect of the whole thing, but he keeps stealing little sniffs at his weeping back, as he clears big flakes of skin and clumps of oil-sticky lint away from around his wings. The more he works, the better it smells. Something like hot metal and something almost like raspberry, and something that tickles his brain but isn’t a smell. It’s flowing a lot easier with the buildup cleared away, and he finds himself digging little clogs out of his wings, too, oil and flaking skin and bits of down that’s gotten all matted and gross.
Gross, but like… he’s dealt with his body, which is just as gross as anything Filat could whip out. Well, he’s good with it now, the acne from puberty and puberty two: electric boogaloo have subsided, he no longer has periods to contend with, outside of his yearly bout with the flu, his body’s no longer an enemy he views with mingled disgust and terror.
No, right now his body is just kind of a horny bastard.
“… Would it hurt me if I licked you?” He asks. With the irritation and build-up cleared away and the dry patches oiled and the wings preened, it’s just… it’s just Filat, with those wings, and with the muscles of his back shining, and licking him is the least embarrassing thing JD is ready to beg to do.
“… No. Why, did you want to?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Well… you may.” He nods, though it’s stilted and formal. Like he hadn’t been moaning freely the whole time JD had been working on him.
He shivers under JD’s tongue. The oil doesn’t taste like raspberry, despite the earlier inexplicable swirl of scent — it doesn’t taste like anything, really, except skin. It would be totally neutral if it didn’t zing through him like it wants to set him on fire, like some kind of… horny angel pheromone. Which apparently is a thing?
“Are angels secretly super horny?” JD asks, words slightly muffled by his attempt to get his mouth around as much of Filat’s skin as he possibly can. Hard to really get anything between his teeth without moving up, but he wants to stay where the scent, the not-taste, is the strongest. He noses his way towards one wing where it emerges. His hands drift to Filat’s waist.
“Not to my knowledge?” And Filat sounds breathless, jerks under his hands, heaves once — though it’s not with breath, he doesn’t actually need breath. He tries to remember to when he’s with people who might notice, he sometimes goes hours without bothering to if he’s just with JD.
It’s… sweet, he thinks. Weird, but sweet. JD wonders if Filat thinks it’s sweet when he doesn’t bother pretending he’s not weird. Well, Filat doesn’t think he’s weird — Filat thinks JD is normal. Filat makes it easy to just be two freaks together.
“You super horny right now, though?”
“I have never experienced lust. But… it is not prohibited, for me to enjoy a… shared ecstasy. It could come from a place of intense physical connection. We just can’t have children.”
“Oh, that is not a problem. That factory is shut down, buddy.” JD says, and then winces, because calling a guy ‘buddy’ when you’re trying to upgrade a relationship from ‘kind of sort of dating’ to ‘so dating that we’re comfortable fucking outside, right now’ feels bad. “I mean yeah, child free, one hundred percent. The, uh, the equipment has been uninstalled.”
“I would not be allowed to carry out earthly duties. And there would be a training seminar.” He sighs deeply. “And also — well, no matter. Uninstalling the equipment was wise.”
“Glad someone sees it that way.” He chuckles, and bites at Filat, right up at the top of where his wing connects to his shoulderblade.
It is, of course, much less sexy in practice than the idea had been, and he should have anticipated that. Feathers stick to his tongue a little, and he pulls away and smooths them back out, glad he’d at least cleared away all the skin flakes and… celestial sebum plugs.
“Do that again?” Filat asks, and he really hadn’t expected that.
“Lie down on your front.” JD nods, and he’s shaking, but he’s not the only one.
Filat spreads himself out on the grass, his wings wide and relaxed, and JD can put up with that mouthful-of-feathers feeling, if he’s into being bitten. He certainly looks biteable. He looks like polished bronze, even more beautiful against the bright blue feathers. JD’s hands aren’t as pale as his torso, but they’re still pale against Filat’s back, when he gently strokes over his skin first, and then his wings. He straddles his waist and bends over him, and bites, and when Filat moans and tells him ‘harder’, he goes harder. He grinds against him, through his swim trunks and Filat’s corduroy pants, and he honestly doesn’t need to ask for more. The angel’s got a tight, well-muscled ass, and it’s been long enough since JD’s really taken time — and toys — to treat himself right, he’s wound a little tighter than he’d realized now that he’s here.
Here. Lying on top of a literal angel, dry humping said angel, only it’s not really ‘dry’, because now his own chest and belly are coated in the same oil, and Filat’s not the only one currently exuding slick pheromone-laden liquid.
“Fuck.” He presses his forehead to the nape of Filat’s neck. Filat’s wings come up to either side of him, soft and warm and strong, a backwards hug. “I didn’t know my pussy still got this wet…”
“I don’t know what you’re saying, but I want you to know I am… very aroused.”
JD chuckles weakly, and nips at him again. “You wanna fuck me?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Good.”
Suddenly, Filat isn’t under him, he’s turned around and he’s flipped them — though JD’s legs are still wrapped around him. And seeing the spread of his wings from down on the ground is… nice.
“Holy shit, I’m gonna need you to — shit, is this you?” He reaches down between them, groping at what is definitely a fucking huge erection.
Which… okay, if JD had had the power to design his own earthly form and also the genitals of said earthly form, like if he’d been given that power back when he’d first started transitioning, of course he would have given himself an enormous dick. Just because he’s come to appreciate the appeal of what he’s got doesn’t mean he’s going to pretend there’s not also a lot of appeal to this.
“That is me, yes.” Filat nods, rolling his hips, rubbing himself up against JD’s hand. “What do you need me to do?”
“I need you to put that in me.”
And just like that, they’re both naked. He hopes his swim trunks still exist on this plane of existence, but not enough to stop and ask about them. He never gets much chance to use them, and anyway, they’re replaceable. And as long as he’s here, he has the feeling he’s going to be swimming naked anyway.
Filat is hesitant a moment, unsure, looks down at where JD is spread open waiting for him, and so JD slides a hand between his wings, and smears the oil around where he’s already, again, way wetter than he’d anticipated being. That does the trick. He watches Filat’s pupils widen, and watches the way his gaze fixes, the way his wings arch over them and how his feathers fan and catch the sunlight, making little rainbows shine through the blue. He grabs JD’s wrist, and sucks his fingers into his mouth, hot and wet, his tongue pushing between them as if to chase down every trace of mingled fluid, JD’s and his own. Different kinds of fluid, maybe, but…
“You like that?”
He slides in with a groan, buries his face down against JD’s throat.
“I want you to know that our coupling was inevitable…” He says, and yes, okay, weird pillow talk, but JD feels like it’s well established that they are both weird. The kind of weird that fits, though.
“Uh-huh… fuuuck, you are big.”
“I didn’t want to presume, or press, I mean… but the moment that we met I understood that I would love you. Physically, I mean. I perceived moments of you out of time. I was afraid to say anything, in case that… changed things. You have the ability to alter the course of your destiny.”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. No one has ever asked me to. I wouldn’t. Not if you’re it.”
“Wish you’d said something. Could’ve done this sooner. I just… oh shit, oh shit, do that again — I just thought maybe angels didn’t…”
“Didn’t get ‘super horny’?” Filat raises one eyebrow, which is unfair. He shouldn’t get to have mate-attracting wings and a Jeevesian sexual power in the precise lift of a single eyebrow, and also abs. JD has none of those things.
Well, he has abs. They exist. They are lovingly cushioned with the help of living down the block from a diner that will put a slice of pie into a milkshake, and a genetic predisposition to keep any abdominal muscles a well-kept secret.
JD comes. He blames the damn holy eyebrow of service top energy.
Filat doesn’t. He keeps going.
He keeps going until JD is an absolute wreck, wrung out after three orgasms and a fuck of a lot of plateauing between, until JD is shaking and babbling and soaked in sweat — not just sweat — and every fiber of his being is begging but not for anything specific he can name.
And then, Filat carries him into the lake, wades out with JD in his arms, supports him and helps clean him off. Well, as clean as the lake can be said to be, but it feels cleansing. It feels frigid against his heated skin and it carries away the sweat and the post-coital grossness and stickiness, and he wakes up a little, comes back to himself.
Filat carries him back to shore and lays him out on a blanket, clean and dry because they’d simply fucked in the grass.
“Do you like it where you live?” He asks, stretching like a cat before his wing settles over JD like a blanket, and JD immediately sets to preening through it some more. His hands are still clumsy after the overstim, but Filat just hums contentedly at his touch.
The question hangs in the air a while as JD recovers his ability to speak, but it’s a comfortable hang.
“Like it a hell of a lot better than Lodi.” He says at last, which is the only metric that’s mattered for half his life. That’s not the only thing he likes. Sure, he lives in a cheap, dusty town in what most people consider drive-through country, but he’s only a couple hours from the coast, where he can’t afford to live but he can go out and take a whale watching tour or pick around the tidepools at Moonstone beach with his camera, or he can go see the monarchs when they migrate through and get some good shots of them. Go to the botanical garden or one of the aquariums. He went to the James Dean memorial once and drove up to San Simeon to see Hearst Castle another time. A real vacation where he has to pay for where he sleeps at night is cost prohibitive, but a day trip… he can afford an extra tank of gas once in a while just to get out to where the air smells clean. Vary up his portfolio with coastal life and interesting architecture.
“It’s just… I have this house.”
“Hm?”
“And no one to live in it.” Filat adds pointedly.
“Oh.”
Andy would be within day trip distance, from here. Andy, who does live on the coast, but too far north to see much of, and who just shrugs and says it’s not San Francisco pricey where he’s at. His uncle’s even closer. Chris is a nomad and Josie’s out of state, but still, that’s half his family he could see whenever he wanted. Without rent hanging over his head, he could make the job situation work out — and he’s pretty sure Uncle Rob would pack his freezer full of food before he could even start the job hunt, whether or not he needed it.
Maybe… maybe he wouldn’t worry about the job situation — maybe he would actually go fulltime on his photography, or at least give it a shot. Why not? He’d have a safety net here. Chris could come stay in the giant house, whenever the wind blew his way, Josie could come out and visit, he’d have space to host at least a small family reunion, folks from his mom’s side that he knows. His mom, she’d be happy about him living in a house in a nice place, doing something he cares about. Doing someone he cares about. Well, okay, she does not need to know about his sex life, but she can’t complain about his having his own guardian angel. A guardian angel with real estate.
“You’d also be here, right?” He asks, just to be sure.
“Mm.” Filat’s wing squeezes gently at him. “I travel for work, but I would be here between. And I travel fast. I’ve never tried living in a house before… but, I will, if you would like that.”
“We can spend a lot of time outdoors.” JD laughs, and pulls him in for a kiss. “You know… let you spread those wings.”
