There are three inspirations to which I wish to offer credit with respect to this story, all of which incidentally are pieces of Avatar: The Last Airbender-related tickle-fetish literature: "A Toph Day" by RedVelvetPotatoes, "The Ticklish Fire Prince" by SilverMikazuki129, and "Zuko's Beach Tickle" by Indigo-Bunny, all of which feature either Toph, Zuko, or in the case of Silver's story, both. Considering that the project that the two OCs featured here are a part of started life as an AtlA ripoff before developing into its own thing, I suppose it's quite appropriate. Regardless, a big thanks to all three of these writers for the inspiration for this piece.
If you want to know more about my original characters, I have a folder dedicated to them on my DeviantArt gallery, so go check it out when you get the chance! Granted, a good portion of the OCs in there have either been scrapped or are being reworked, but that's neither here nor there. XP
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Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus
by Skaea
Contains: M/F and F/M tickling, concentrating on foot tickling. SFW.
Word Count: 8,800
“Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus”
Latin meaning: “Never Tickle A Sleeping Dragon”
“Gwai? GWAI!” Rahu dared to raise his voice as he pushed his way through the forest undergrowth. “UGH, the moment I lay my eyes on that lump of dragon-blooded scum, I’m gonna KILL her…”
The morning sun had barely risen before the renegade son of Zmey Gorynych, King of the Balaurs, had awoken to find that his ornery companion, whom he had inadvertently rescued from a corrupt nobleman’s pit-fighting arena just a few weeks ago after they’d been pitted against each other — almost fatally, mind — was nowhere to be seen.
Obviously, looking for her would take a while, so he’d decided to pack up all their things and destroy all traces of their campsite from the previous evening before setting out to find her. Go figure that having lived as a wild animal for much of her childhood, she’d be much less averse to sleeping out in the woods instead of in a tent.
Still… She could be anywhere, a few meters away or a few miles. He couldn’t ever be sure. The fact that she could dive into the ground like water and slip out of sight at a moment’s notice didn’t help much.
“Oh, for the love of— GWAI!” Rahu called out again, hitching the travel bag strapped around his shoulders a little as he continued his trek, the wings growing from his shoulders wrapped around him like a scaly red cape. “We have to leave! RIGHT NOW!! If you don’t show up in the next fifteen seconds, I’ll—”
A flock of birds fluttering into the sky, startled by his voice, made him realize that he was being too loud, and the percent chance that he could attract the wrong kind of attention was definitely not zero. With a disappointed sigh, he decided to stop and just listen to the landscape around him.
It wasn’t long before he could pick out the distant sound of snoring through the rustling of the trees and the various noises of animals going about the start of their day. Following the sound, he eventually found what he’d been looking for.
Beneath the roots of a towering strangler fig at the edge of a small clearing, the remains of a few unripe but still partially eaten fruit from the tree in question scattered around it, was a mound of dirt covering an area of ground just a bit bigger than a human being. One glance at it revealed a very familiar-looking morning-star-like tail, pallid-scaled and lethal, sticking out of its base. Bingo.
For all his annoyance at his companion deciding to sleep this far from camp, Rahu was smart enough to keep a safe distance. In contrast to the benevolent nature of most other Oriental dragons, Gwai had some degree of dislike for all things in existence, but she ESPECIALLY hated being woken up by force, so he had to be careful. Tail spikes capable of piercing dragonhide were certainly not to be trifled with.
He’d obviously been flippant when he’d told himself he’d kill her earlier, but even if he’d been serious, that sentiment would’ve been immediately rescinded.
“Gwai?” he said quietly. “Are you awake?”
Only now did he realize that the snoring had stopped. Abruptly, it resumed, but he’d faked being asleep enough times back in his old hometown to recognize the trick.
“You don’t have to fool me, Gwai. I know you’re not happy about me waking you up. Though, well, you’re never happy anyway, so what do I care?”
“Go away,” the girl’s muffled voice responded from the other side of the dirt mound, her spiked tail club thumping against the ground a little.
“You always say that…” Rahu snorted twin puffs of smoke, his tone showing slight annoyance. “Look, I know how you feel regarding sleeping in, but honestly. If we stay put for too long, we might be discovered by Father’s guard, or your former captor, or anyone else who wants us in chains for Y Ddraig Goch knows what reason. Do you WANT us to get into a fight with them?”
“What, do dragons have scales?!” snarled Gwai. “You know what I’m capable of. I could take on a whole army with my tail tied to my back. No, I wouldn’t like it. But I still could.”
“Alright, alright. Stupid question.” Rahu shook his head, scolding himself for not realizing that sooner. “But you never know what could happen. So like it or not, and I know you don’t, we have to go.”
“YOU have to go. I’M staying put. All that walking from yesterday made my feet hurt anyway, and—”
“GWAI!” Rahu exhaled a small fireball as he raised his voice again. “I’m not asking you, I’m ORDERING you—”
“ORDERING?! Pffft, puh-LEASE. You’re sounding like your father, and I hate you even more than usual when you do. Just stop it and let me be miserable in peace for five more stupid minutes, will you?!”
There was an awkward pause as Rahu winced a little, having realized the truth in her words. He knew that he still had to put his foot down, though. Then he remembered something inside the travel bag…
“Five more minutes?” he asked, cocking his head a bit as he slipped his bag off his shoulders and set it down. Even with her head sticking out the other side of the dirt pile, Gwai could still hear the click of its latch being undone, followed by rummaging and the sound of something being pulled out of the bag. “I’m guessing this garlic sauce that just HAPPENED to be in my travel kit will just have to steal itself, then—”
“Oh, so you’re gonna bribe me, now?!” Gwai swished her tail in growing irritation. “Nuh-uh. No way! I’m not getting out of this dumb little hole, and there’s no way you can make me, you overgrown stink skink!”
Rahu felt his temper flare, and tasted the spicy flavor of his own venom. “Listen here, you LITTLE SH—”
SWOOSH! With a startled yell, the dragon-boy jumped back and toppled over backwards, dropping the jar of garlic sauce in the process, just in time to avoid Gwai’s tail club embedding its foot-long spikes in his head, having stepped just a little too close to the now royally ticked-off tuluhng. Instead, it was one of the roots of the strangler fig that suffered the fate of getting impaled with a tremendous THUNK, the impact making its boughs quiver even at the very top of the tree.
A second after Rahu sat up, cursing under his breath, another unripe fig fell from the heavens, getting itself impaled on the sole intact horn growing from the tugarin’s otherwise human-like, dark-haired head (and completely missing the bony stump where the left one had been broken off). He pulled the fruit off and tossed it aside without a care, silently wondering if chopping her tail off with one of his swords would get the message across or just make her grow a newer, bigger, and possibly even spikier one.
“Fine, then,” he grumbled. Standing up, he wondered what would happen if he decided to step back within range of Gwai’s tail, and promptly tapped the end of his own against the ground in front of him.
Gwai’s tail flexed, attempting to pull its spiked tip free from the massive root. But much to her horror, nothing happened. She tried again, still nothing. “Oh, COME ON!”
Rahu let out a snort of amusement. “Gwai, if you’re going to be so impassive, then I might as well take matters into my own hands. I’m coming in and digging you out myself.”
“Don’t you DARE!” Gwai shouted. “Once I get my tail free, I’ll—”
“I know you hate me, but you haven’t actually hurt me. Why?”
“I’ve TRIED to!”
Gwai could still feel Rahu’s treads getting closer, and a few seconds later, he’d started clawing at the dirt pile in a bid to extract the body within. The albino girl struggled to free her tail again almost immediately. She may have been in her humanoid form, but she could still beat the stuffing out of her taller companion — if only her most effective weapon could just un-stick itself from this blasted tree root!
Rahu, for his part, continued digging almost methodically. Gwai was tough enough to survive being excavated in this manner, he figured. He didn’t really think much of her well-being until one of his claws scratched against something a bit softer and smoother than the soil, and a yelp of pain came from the other side of the pile.
“Oi! Watch where you’re putting those loin-scratchers, you nitwit!”
“Hmph. Well, you should’ve told me how close I was to—” Rahu didn’t finish his sentence. He’d just noticed what he’d dug up, a white spot in the dirt that looked rather like human skin. If he didn’t know who he was trying to extract from the ground, he’d be much more concerned, but as it was, he was just curious as to what was going on.
Carefully, gently, he slid his claw into the soil around the spot, and began scraping the dirt away, revealing a stretch of surprisingly soft skin in a rather familiar shape.
Only then did he realize that Gwai’s voice had become a scream.
“EEEEHEHEHEHE! You bastahahard! Stop ihihit!”
Rahu paused. This was new, he thought. That long, slender shape looked oddly like the underside of someone’s foot, albeit with the sole area stretched to several times its normal length — longer than his forearm! — so the heel would have to be held off the ground while standing. But if, apart from a digitigrade rather than a plantigrade structure, this was otherwise exactly like a human foot…
An idea began forming in his head. Gwai seemed to tense up, as though she could tell what he was thinking (and knowing her, she probably could).
“You know… My sister Ketu and I used to play a game back when I was younger and still living in Father’s realm.” Rahu started digging around the pile near the sole he’d exposed, trying to find the other foot. “Well, the original version was which of us could stay still in bed with our eyes closed for the longest time, but that was at night; Ketu put a twist in it for the morning routine.” He shivered a little, but continued. “I figured, well, what would happen if I tried playing the updated version of this game with you?”
“Did I stutter, ash-for-brains?! I SAID, don’t you DARE!”
“Oh yes, I dare. You had it coming for refusing to get out of that hole in the ground.” A squeak from the buried girl told him that he’d found the other foot, and as gently as before, he started scraping the dirt from the stretched sole.
“W-whahahat did I just say?! Knock it ohohohoffff!!” The earth dragoness attempted to free her tail again, but its spikes were still stuck in the tree root. Every other part of her body — even her toes — was contained quite snugly in the soil, and she could only lie there with a growing sense of horror as Rahu continued to remove the soil from around the bottoms of her still firmly stuck feet.
“I’ve noticed a few interesting things about you, Gwai,” said Rahu, undeterred by the tuluhng’s warning and now appraising the pair of exposed, still-bandaged, super-long arches before him. “You may be unable to see, but your reliance on your other senses is more than enough to make up for it. In particular, your sense of touch is especially practiced due to being used more often than those of other people, giving you the ability to track the vibrations of things around you.”
He reached forward, flicking an index finger just an inch away from her left arch, and an indignant yelp came from the other side of the mound.
“Just as I thought. Your wave-tracking is exceptional, and certainly fitting of how you’ve often been compared to a crocamander that grew up in a city sewer. Crocamanders and some other aquatic amphibians use special organs in their skin to wave-track prey even in murky water. I hear Eastern dragons, as amphibians themselves, have the same sensory system.”
He flicked his other index finger even closer to her right arch, and she “EEP”-ed again.
“But I’m also guessing there’s a disadvantage to said sensory system. What would happen, for example, if TOO MUCH of a light touch is detected all at once? Such as… say… getting tickled on those tender arches of yours~?”
Gwai felt her entire body stiffen, having already put the pieces together. Rahu had confirmed her dread suspicion — she may have hated everything, but some things she despised more than others, and getting tickled was one of them. Her pointed teeth clenched in a snarl as she tried to vibrate her skin in a bid to free herself. “If you think you can get away with this—”
He couldn’t help but let out a sardonic chuckle. “Ah ah ah, your refusal only further validates what we both know. So… shall we get started?”
“OF COURSE NOT!” yelled Gwai. “You’d get better mileage out of tickling a DEAD LOG than me, you son of aaaAAAAAAHHHH!!”
Rahu had, sensibly, decided not to free Gwai’s toes from the dirt that had turned from her bunker into her prison. This left her extremely long, extremely sensitive arches unable to flex in self-defense as he started walking two claws per hand lightly up and down their lengths, the light flicks, pokes, and scritches sending lightning jolts up her spine.
“WAHAHAHAHAHA YOU AHAHAHAHASSSSS! I’M GONNA KIHIHILL YOHOHOUUUU!” she shrieked, her head shaking this way and that, her ability to concentrate long enough to free herself from the soil vanishing in an instant. “YAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! NOHOHO YOU DOHOHON’T! STOP IT! STOOOHOHOHOHOP IHIHIHIIIIIT!!”
“Don’t stop? Well, why didn’t you say so?” Rahu teased, enjoying the sensation of his claw tips dragging themselves along his travel buddy’s tender skin. “And I don’t care what you intend to do to me afterward, honestly, as long as I get to indulge for once in this opportunity.”
“BWAHAHAHAHAH I HATE YOU, RAHU! I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HAHAHAHAHATE YOHOHOHOHOUUU!”
“Then it appears I will keep at this until you agree to continue traveling with me. Coochie coo, Phantom Beast!”
Great. Just GREAT. As if the tickling was bad enough, now he was teasing her as well? He was giving her more and more reasons to loathe him for this, and they both knew it.
Still, even though agreeing was the one option that could save her from being tickle-tortured all morning, Gwai’s stubborn streak refused to break. Of course, the soil and the tree root her tail was lodged in weren’t going anywhere either, so all she could do was laugh herself sick, which was exactly what she did as her tormentor started wiggling three claws into each long sole, slipping under the bandages to get at the exact centers of her tightly stretched arches.
Rahu had been cautious about attracting attention, but Gwai had said earlier that she could take on an entire army, and he was inclined to believe her. So he felt somewhat safer making her scream loud enough to scare flocks of birds and small wyverns out of their perches from a significant distance away.
It was about a minute of tickling her senseless before Rahu started escalating the maddening sensation, with all five claws per hand scritching against each impossibly long sole like the legs of some sort of vile crustacean. He even used his wing claws to scratch at the spots where the arches met the heels, which was almost as bad as the tickling upon the centers of said arches.
Gwai was incapable of forming coherent death threats by this point; even if she could see, she wouldn’t have been able to thanks to the tears pouring from her sightless eyes and the locks of ratty bone-colored hair which had fallen over her face while she thrashed and shook her head this way and that, struggling in vain to get free.
Finally, he paused to let her breathe. Glancing over to check on her tail, he was relieved to see that its business end was still stuck in the tree root.
“Having fun yet, Gwai?” he asked, smirking.
“NO! I-I’ll kill you, P-Prince of the Tugarin!”
Rahu mimed flinching in fright. “Ooh, I’m so scared. In fact, I’m positively terrified of the myth, the living legend, the terror of the western Orient: the incredibly ticklish, silky-soft-arched Phantom Beast of Baihu!”
“Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be?!” She paused to draw a deep breath. “When I’m done with you, I’ll dig up your body after your funeral, conduct a ritual to raise you from the dead — somehow, I can learn — and then kill you a second time. And then after THAT, I’m NEVER speaking to you EVER AGAIN!!”
“In all honesty, I’d much rather you apologize for being such a Goch-damned brat. Or do you want me to continue tickling you instead?”
If Gwai could just pull her five-spiked tail club free, she’d gladly brain him with it right here, right now. But sadly for her, that just wasn’t to be.
“I will not apologize for being harsh,” she hissed. “Not after you tried to pull me out of this stinking hole I forced myself to sleep in because I want nothing more to do with the ridiculous nonsense we’ve been through since I met you. You'll have to pull me out yourself if you want me to come with you, and good luck with THAT!”
“Suit yourself, then,” Rahu replied with another dry chuckle. “You asked for it, YOU’RE GETTING IT.”
Picking up a few fallen leaves from the forest floor, he twirled them around in his fingers, the little air currents they made in the process registering upon Gwai's long soles and sending a CHILL from them straight to her brain. Even so, she refused to budge.
“You think those scare me? What good are a few leaves against a girl who spent eight years fighting off other dragons in some rich asshats pit-fighting ring? Huh? What are you doing?! You keep those away from me, you vile piece offfwaaaAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHH!”
A single leaf was brushing against each arch, but it was more than enough. In fact, from her perspective, it was somehow even WORSE than when he was using his fingers! No amount of flexing of her clawed toes was able to move her soles by even a millimeter, leaving her powerless to escape the maddening sensation.
“I'LL KILL YOHOHOHOU, RAHU! I'LL LITERALLY KIHIHIHIHILL YOUUUU!” Gwai screamed at the top of her lungs. That was all she could manage before Rahu slipped the leaves under her bandages and began brushing them against the sweet spots at the exact center of each elongated arch. “KYYYAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH GGHHGHHGHHHHH NOHOHOT THHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAH!”
Sensing that the strongest reaction was when those particular parts of her soles were tormented, Rahu decided to focus on those in particular. With her toes and tail still secure, Gwai was left entirely powerless as the most ticklish spots on her feet were relentlessly, almost ceaselessly assaulted.
The tickling lasted only about five minutes, but to the hopelessly stuck captive, it seemed to have gone on forever. Still, by the time he stopped to give her another breather, Rahu could tell that his companion was on the verge of passing out. He couldn’t help but let out an amused snort. He’d wanted to tickle her as a means of waking her up, not causing her to go unconscious again!
A few moments later, he’d walked over to the other side of the mound and was now crouched next to her head, the waterskin he’d removed from the bag at hand. She would have yelled at him for pitying her like this, but she was too exhausted to care by this point, so she gulped down nearly half the water he supplied her, for once, without a single complaint.
“Hhhh… hahhhh… I still th-think… it tastes like… s-someone took a piss in it,” she wheezed after she was done.
Rahu let out a laugh. “Still not giving up even after all that, huh?”
“I wake up when I FEEL like I have to wake up, idiot. And you’ve only made me even angrier still, so if you know what’s good for you, then BACK. OFF.”
“I’d take the hint, but your tail is still stuck. So while I can certainly understand how you feel, I highly doubt that you’d be able to do anything to make good on that threat.” He reached over, lifting his hand just enough to avoid her biting it, and patted her gently on the head. “Right?”
Gwai let loose a string of very unpleasant words in her native tongue, her milky pink eyes bulging round as a pair of cosmic pearls before she tried to twist her head around to snap at his wrist. “PETTING ME?! HOW DARE YOU?! WHEN I GET OUT OF HERE, I WILL TEAR YOU APART! PIECE BY HUANGLONG-DAMN PIECE!!”
Rahu’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, I almost forgot!” he said cheerfully.
Gwai sneered at him, attempting to flex her tail once again but still failing to dislodge it. “Forgot what?”
He grinned. “You need to have your feet cleaned.”
She froze, as still as a statue. Her eyes were as wide as they could go, her entire body tense, sweat trickling down her forehead. For the first time since he’d begun tickling her, all the fight went out of the partly transfigured and still very much stuck Oriental dragon, her mind suddenly overtaken by absolute terror.
“W-wait,” she said quietly. “You don’t understand. I need that healthy coating of soil on my feet. It… it helps me become one with the earth, a-and if you clean my soles now then I’m sure I’ll get them dirty again and your work will be for nothing and—”
“Your leg structure is such that only the balls of your feet touch the ground,” said Rahu. “I don’t see you dirtying the rest of your feet quite as often. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
Gwai began to panic in earnest. “FINE?! NO! I won’t be FINE! If you do what I think you’re gonna do, I could die of laughter and I’d HATE that!”
“Relax, Gwai. It’s just TICKLING. It’d never hurt anyone now, would it?”
By this point, Rahu had moved back to the side of the pile Gwai’s soles were sticking out of. He slid his claws under the bandages around her feet, and started sliding the wrappings down as low as they could go, tickling all the way. Her shrieks of laughter sure were satisfying, but this was just a prelude.
Shortly after that was over, the sound of rummaging could be heard again, and as a new surge of horror shot down the length of Gwai’s back and tail, Rahu pulled out a pair of washing brushes and a smaller version of the waterskin she’d nearly emptied earlier. Opening the mouth of said waterskin, he started squeezing an oil of some sort onto each of the brushes. Then, after re-closing the waterskin and putting it back in the bag, he picked the brushes up.
“One last chance, Gwai. Are you coming with me or not?”
“I — I —” Gwai hesitated. She absolutely, positively, DID NOT want to admit to being weak. A second more passed with not a peep from her, and that was the deciding factor.
“Your hesitance is tantamount to refusal,” said Rahu, moving towards the trapped feet before him with the oiled brushes poised to strike. “Might as well do it the hard way, then.”
“NO!! Do NOT do it the hard way! I’m warning you, if you even so much as THINK about the hard way, I SWEAR to Huanglong the Yellow Dragon of the East, I will make DAMN sure you don’t live long enough to regret— AAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
The soft, wiry bristles, covered in a cocktail of antiseptic oils, exfoliants, and aromatics, had begun scrubbing against each elongated arch. Up and down, round and round, Rahu worked her most ticklish spots without a single shred of mercy.
Gwai, poor poor Gwai, would swear her screaming could be heard for miles. She screamed and screamed and SCREAMED, before finally descending into hysterical laughter, incoherent sobbing, and unholy high-pitched sounds of utter mania as the hardest, most intense tickling yet paralyzed her from the neck down as though her feet had been subject to an electric shock.
Rahu spent another ten minutes scrubbing every inch of sole skin he could reach, making sure absolutely no part of his cohort’s arches was bereft of the cleaning solution. He recalled his days doing chores around his father’s home, especially scrubbing all the gilded tiles in the throne room, as a “life lesson” or “character-building experience”, though he’d equated it more to slavery. He had nonetheless picked up quite a few home maintenance skills in the process, and they were now being used to deadly effect on Gwai’s unfortunate and eventually squeaky-clean feet.
Finally, mercifully, it was over. Gwai had lost all the fight in her by this point, her head hanging limp with a trickle of drool coming from the corner of her mouth. She couldn’t even flex her tail anymore. She was still laughing and crying until her throat was raw even after he’d stopped, until finally her hysterics faded into gasps, panting, and moans of utter defeat.
“I… You… Uh…” she wheezed.
Rahu cocked his head. “Hmm?”
“FINE. I’ll go. As long as you keep those blasted brushes as far away from me as possible, I’ll listen to you. Now, pull my tail out, and then we’ll decide where to go from here.”
“If you promise you won’t hit me with it, it shall be as you will it. Which sounds weird of me to say, but—”
“Just get me free already! I don’t feel like hurting you anymore, so I won’t. Happy?!”
Rahu rolled his orange eyes with a snicker. “Fair enough.”
It took him quite a bit of tugging to pull the spike cluster on the end of Gwai’s tail out of the tree root, but after a minute of struggling, he managed to do it without skewering himself by accident. Several quick tugs after that, and he’d pulled her out of the dirt pile. He even slid her foot bandages back into place afterwards.
For a few long moments, she just lay there, face-down, still borderline catatonic, until he prodded her shoulder with the toe of his boot.
“Still alive?” he asked.
“Unfortunately.” Her voice was muffled, but her tone was still cold as death itself.
“There’s still some water left in the skin I have with me, but—”
She sprang to her feet all of a sudden, and then snatched the waterskin from him before downing the rest of the contents. As he watched with a look of consternation, she tossed it over her shoulder and leveled a sightless death glare at him.
“That was MEAN, Rahu. Very, very, VERY MEAN!”
“But it was necessary. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten out of the hole. I feel you regarding not being a morning person, I really do, but once again, we can’t stay put for long, not with so many enemies after us. The sooner we find civilization again, the better.”
Gwai pondered this for a moment. Then she sighed, and walked over to stand next to him. “Oh, alright. Considering that you haven’t left me for dead, I might as well trust your judgement.”
Rahu looked slightly tense. “So, well. Ahem. No hard feelings, right?”
“Eh. No hard feelings will be shared.” Gently, tenderly, Gwai wrapped her fingers around his upper arm. “Conditionally.”
“Wait, conditionally?” Rahu heard the icy shift in her vocal tone clear as day. “What do you mean by ‘conditionally’?”
“Dammit, are you really that dense?!” Her hand gripped his arm much tighter. “I am, of course, obligated to get you back for getting me out of bed like that, you great big ugly PEST!”
“Huh? OH NO NONONO WAI-” Rahu began to panic, but before he could even blink, she’d yanked him off his feet, spun around, and hurled him in the opposite direction, causing him to slide across the forest floor with a startled scream… straight into the tunnel in the dirt pile. He felt his head exit the hole on the other side, leaving his tail and feet sticking out the entrance, just in time for the impact to cause the pile to collapse on top of him. Luckily, he’d wrapped his wings around himself just in time, but they were now pinned under several hundred pounds of soil.
“Hnnngh! W-wait a second, I didn’t mean—!” The dragon-boy struggled to free himself, finding it difficult to breathe. Then a moment later he felt the ground around him begin to vibrate, and a small pocket began forming just above his torso.
“Aww, you DO care what I intend to do with you!” Gwai muttered sarcastically, raising her hands from the ground she’d pressed them against a second ago. “Of course, I wouldn’t want you to suffocate while stuck in that dirt pile. But you should stay VERY MUCH still while this plays out.”
Rahu was about to ask what would play out, but then he realized he had a very good guess. Sure enough, he felt her grab the tip of his tail and then wrap the length of it protruding from the mound around his ankles, looping it in a knot loose enough to avoid breaking his spine but tight enough to prevent him from undoing it to smack her with his tail blade.
Then, once his ankles were secure, she began to pull his boots off, and only a few seconds later, he heard them thumping against the forest floor, his bare feet exposed to the open air.
“No… Dragons Four, NO!” The exiled prince wiggled his feet around uselessly. “What are you doing?!”
“What should be done in retaliation for YOUR stupid actions, lizard-breath,” said Gwai, cracking her knuckles. The sound made the blood in Rahu’s veins feel like ice. “You know, when you were talking about that game from when you lived with your sister, SHE was the one who made up a new version of it, not you. That could mean only one thing.”
Rahu gulped. “W-wait, don’t tell me—?!”
“That’s right. This ‘Ketu’ girl was the tickler, and you were her prey. I’m assuming that’s correct, Your Majesty?” The last two words were delivered in a condescending drawl.
He nodded. “Th-that… was true, yes. But if you’ll accept my apology for tickling you instead of—”
“Nope, no bargaining. We’ve long since moved past that the last time I checked…”
Rahu was about to protest, but then he felt a pair of claws lightly scraping themselves up and down his arches, and the screaming began anew, albeit with a different person emitting it.
“AAAAHAHAHAHAHAH NOOOOO! GWAHAHAHAIIII! TH-THAT GAHAHAHAME WAS SUPPOSED T-TO BE A SECRET, YOU PFFFAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
“You straight-up told me, dum-dum,” Gwai replied bluntly, now moving her index talons up towards the balls of his feet. “And it seems I’ve found another thing you’ve been hiding. Oh, I am taking FULL advantage of this…”
Rahu shrieked at the top of his lungs as her claws found a particularly soft spot just below his toes. “GAHAHAHAHAHAH STOP IT! STOHOHOHOHOHOHOP!”
“Not a chance, hothead,” Gwai replied, continuing to scribble at the bases of his toes with wild abandon. “You made this hole, so now you’ve gotta lie in it!”
“WHAT THE HEHEHEHEHEHEHECK?! OKAY, F-FIRST OF ALL, YOU WERE THE ONE WHO DUG THE HOHOHOHOLE!”
Gwai cleared her throat loudly. “You are NOT allowed to talk back unless you want me to make the tickling last longer!”
“I WILL talk bahahahack, you Goch-damn NEHEHEHEHWWWT!!”
“Suit yourself, then,” Gwai snarled. “You asked for it, YOU’RE GETTING IT.”
Before he could respond, she’d pushed his toes away from her, but not before thumping her tail club against the ground. Just as the vibration passed through the dirt mound, she pushed a little harder, and his toes sank INTO the soil! This left his massive size fourteens unable to move at all, and one more thump of her tail later, the dirt had hardened so his toes were well and truly trapped.
“Noooo… Gwai, pleeeease!” The dragon prince tried to flex his toes and free his feet, but the ground held, leaving his arches trapped and his toes bent back as far as they could go.
Gwai “hmph”-ed in utter contempt, and then started stroking the bases and undersides of his toes with all ten of her claws, one per toe.
Rahu SHRIEKED at the top of his lungs. “YAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAIIEEEEEEEEE! NOOOOOOOHOHOHOHO! HAHAHAH THOSE ARE MY WORST SPOTS YOU MOHOHONSTEHEHER! I-I’M BEING TICKLED TO DEHEHEHEATH!!”
“Oh, how DARE you call me a monster,” Gwai snorted. “You’re giving me more excuses to tickle you even harder. Perhaps if you shut up for twenty seconds I’ll stooooop…”
Rahu couldn’t respond, at least not coherently. She was focusing on the most ticklish parts of his big soles and refusing to give him any breathing room (aside of course from the space within the dirt mound). His mind was now being overwhelmed by ticklish agony, his body unable to move, and all he could do was shake his head this way and that, blinded by tears and his own hair in the same way that Gwai had been earlier.
“YYIIIIIEEEEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEEE! NO NO NONONONONOOOHOHOHAHAHAHAHA!”
“And now you know how I felt when you tickled me senseless, firedrake scum!” Gwai hissed, moving her claws down towards his arches.
Rahu couldn’t muster a retort no matter how much he wanted (and indeed he VERY MUCH wanted to). His feet were, perhaps, even softer and more ticklish than Gwai’s, probably due to being contained in boots most of the time. His arches were not as sensitive as the balls of his feet or the undersides of his toes, but that wasn’t saying much — he was still howling like a man possessed as the luhng girl’s talons scritched and scribbled like so many quill pens against the soft, flawless surfaces.
Cycling from the bases of his toes to his arches and back, she continued tickling him like this with her trademark scowl still on her face, pointedly refusing to smile even while the satisfying sound of his laughter carried clear over the forest canopy.
For the next five minutes, all that his mind could register was this excruciating feeling. He would swear he was getting light-headed from all that laughing, having found it increasingly hard to breathe even without the dirt actually pressing down on him. But eventually, the scratching stopped.
“Had enough yet,” asked Gwai, “or do you still need more before you apologize to me?”
“Hhhh… haaaa… ghhhh…” Rahu was gasping for breath, blinking tears from his eyes, and seriously reevaluating his choices in life. “I HAD to get you out of the hole the way I did! Please understand—”
“YOU don’t understand! You NEVER understand! ISN’T THAT WHY YOUR FATHER DISOWNED YOU?!”
Rahu bared his fangs in a low, almost animalistic growl: “I’m going to do VIOLENCE to you.”
“Keep going, dumbass,” Gwai sneered at him. “Keep threatening me and denying what you know is the truth. You had the best intentions, but never got to see the full picture until it drop-kicked you in the balls. Sure, your bloodthirsty meanie-pants daddy wasn’t exactly in the right, and he certainly wasn’t right in his THREE STUPID HEADS! But I’m guessing that last part didn’t sink in until it was too late, didn’t it? You were just one guy in a a big, terrifying, deadly world, after all, and a dragon who chose to only see what he wanted to see, mind you! You wanted what was best for everyone, but kept forgetting to look at things from ANYONE ELSE’S perspective!”
The tone of her voice him shrivel like a raisin as she continued. “And when you tickled me ‘till I nearly passed out, you didn’t look at things from MY perspective, either.”
“Okay, okay! I know how you feel,” Rahu replied, breaking out in a cold sweat. “I’m sorry, please stop—”
“I don’t care WHAT you say. The damage has already been done, so just DEAL WITH IT.”
“Just stop using the claws, I can’t take much more of that!”
Gwai rubbed her chin in thought. Then her foot came into contact with the jar of garlic sauce on the forest floor, still lying where he’d dropped it, and an idea popped into her head.
She picked up the jar and then vigorously shook it. “Hmm… I have a feeling you didn’t actually want THIS. Guess that leaves me with the option of, oh, forcing down breakfast before my tummy starts complaining.”
The sound of the fluid sloshing within made him gasp in alarmed recognition. “You finally stole it… I knew it. I FREAKING KNEW YOU WOULD.”
“What? I find this stuff marginally less icky than the rest of the crap I’ve had to stomach.” She opened the jar and then, after taking a whiff of the contents just to make sure it was what she was looking for (and wincing at the smell), emptied it onto his feet. “And of course your foot sweat is gonna ruin it even more. Go figure.”
Rahu’s eyes widened as the feeling of the viscous fluid contacting his skin caused the pieces to come together in his head. “NO! No no no no NO! You can’t! You SHOULDN’T!”
“Hah!” Gwai laughed humorlessly. “I already have.”
Even as Rahu shook his head frantically, screaming “NO” repeatedly and rapidly, his pleading fell on deaf ears as Gwai moved forward and crouched down onto all fours like a wild beast before his large, sauced-up soles. A few seconds later, he lost the very last dregs of his composure as he felt something rough and slimy lapping up the garlic sauce upon his right arch.
“BWWWAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! EHEHEHEHEHEE PLEEEEEASE STOHOHOHOHAHAHAHAHAHAHAP! THIS IS TOHOHORTUREEHEHEHEHEHEEE!”
For her as much as it was for him, Gwai thought to herself as she continued licking at his ticklish arch. This stuff was even grosser than usual! How other creatures could pull this off when being used to tickle-torture people was beyond her.
How anyone else could stand this for longer than a half-second was beyond him, Rahu thought miserably.
Even through the haze of taste bud-induced madness, his screams of laughter and useless blasts of flame breath, nightmare flashbacks to when he'd visited the dungeons of his father’s realm came back to him. While the conventional methods were used more frequently, quite a few prisoners he'd passed by were instead kept in stocks, barefooted, with jars of milk or fish oil dripping constantly onto their feet. Surrounding their naked soles were cats of all shapes and sizes, from mundane house pets to more exotic fare like nekomatas, cat siths, and once even a six-legged leopard-sized feline imported from the far western continent. It didn't take a genius to guess what they were doing to all those milk-soaked soles.
And come to think of it, Gwai's rasping tongue did feel disturbingly similar…
Any possibility of going into a death spiral with this train of thought was eliminated a second later, however, when Gwai's long, relatively thin, and slightly forked tongue started licking that extremely sensitive portion of his sole just under his toes, occasionally flicking into the spaces between.
“HAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAIEEEEHEHEHEE!” Rahu screamed loudly. “OH GREAT DRAGONS FOUR, NOHOHOHOHO! NOT THE TOES AGAAAAHAHAHAHAAIINN!!”
Purposely ignoring his plea for mercy, Gwai refused to relent, making sure her tongue explored every square millimeter of the balls of his feet, and made sure to stimulate every bit of flesh between each and every toe and all over the stems as well. Her victim's laughter could be heard for miles, and the occasional blast of dragonfire lit up the forest with such intensity that it was amazing that he didn’t set off a wildfire in the process!
“GGGHHAHHAHAHEEHEHHAHGHGHAGHHGH ENOOOUGH! PLEHEHEHEASE STOP IT STOP IT STAHAHAHAP IHIHIT!”
“Alright, fine, I will. But only because I think I got all the sauce off.” She paused, letting him draw breath again and savor his respite.
“…from THIS foot.”
“Noooooo!”
To her credit, she wasted no time. Any hope of him preparing any bargain or order to stop her was immediately dashed when she started flicking her tongue in between the extremely sensitive gap between his big and index toe.
“YIIIIIIIII!!!”
And then, to his horror, she started gently nibbling at the ball of his foot.
“NGAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! OH DEAR GOCH, MERCEEEHEHEHEHEEEE!! THE NIBBLES ARE EVEN WOHOHOHOHORSE!!!”
Picking up on this, Gwai proceeded to nibble, kiss, and lick up and down and all around his sensitive, taut arch. The light pinching and pricking of her teeth against his skin drove him absolutely crazy, and his screams were getting so loud now that if any animals were nearby, they surely would have covered their ears or tried to flee outright.
This went on and on for another five very long minutes, and by the time she finally decided she’d had enough of the sauce, Rahu was a total mess. His forehead was drenched in sweat, his cheeks were soaked by his own tears, and his hair was a rat’s nest. He couldn’t even lift his head for a while as he gasped for breath, his feet still tingling.
And then he heard five words that made his blood turn ice-cold once again.
“So… STILL won’t break, huh?”
“I… I s-said I’m sorry—”
“Nuh-uh, no you didn’t. Which means there’s one more thing I’ve gotta do to get you to do just that.”
There was silence for a few seconds. “…and what, exactly, is this ‘one more thing?’”
Another second or two of silence. And then Rahu began to panic in earnest.
“Gwai?! This isn’t funny! Your lack of a response is making it more difficult for me to guess, but I don’t like it and I don’t want anything to do with it, so if you’ll just PLEASE accept my apology and stop tickling me, I’ll never—”
“You will. You enjoyed what you did. I could TELL.”
Then the sound of the smaller canteen opening could be heard, registering in Rahu’s ears as a miniature explosion.
“No…” he whispered, utterly terrified.
“Oh yes. I absolutely WILL.”
If Rahu could curl his toes, he would have done so as much as he could. “Please noooo…!”
“You had your chance, ash-breath. Besides, you’re a prince, aren’t you? I thought you liked being…” She pressed the bristles of one of the re-oiled brushes against the ball of his right foot with an expression of pure evil. “…SPOILED.”
And then, without giving him a second’s warning, she started frantically scrubbing the bases of his toes with both brushes.
For all Rahu knew, his pillar of fire breath could be seen for miles, and his blood-curdling scream might’ve been audible from even farther still.
“AAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEEEE!!!! EEEEHEHEHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NOOOOOOOOOOO! NOT THAT, ANYTHING BUT THAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAT!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOHOHOHOHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHHHP!!!”
She slid the brushes down towards his arches, scrubbing with all her hate-fueled might. “I won’t until you say the magic words, and even then, I might as well keep it going a little longer out of pure spite.”
“PLEEEEEEASE! NOW IHIHIHI’M GONNA BEHEHEHE THE ONE WHO’S G-GONNA DIE OF LAHAHAHAUGHTER! HEHEHEHELP! HEEEEHEHEHEHEHEHEELLLLP!!”
Undeterred, Gwai moved the brushes back up, up, up, until their bristles were teasing the stems of his toes. “Go on. Say it. SAY IT!”
“I’M SORREEEEHEHEHEHEHEHEE! I’M SORRY I TICKLED YOU AND I’M SORRY I NEARLY KILLED YOU IN THE PITFIGHTING AREHEHEHENAAAA! I’M SORRY I’M GORYNYCH’S SON AND I’M SORRY MY KINGDOM DROVE YOU OUT OF YOUR HOME JUST PLEHEHEHEHEHEHEEEAAAASE STOHOHOHOHOHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAHHHHHP!!!”
That last scream was punctuated by his hottest, brightest pillar of flame yet. His eyes squeezed shut, and just as well, because if he’d looked into it he’d probably have gone blind. Gwai, of course, was already blind to start with, but she could still feel the heat — and his sincerity — even from the other side of the dirt mound.
Finally, miraculously, it was over. Rahu drew a ragged breath, weeping waterfalls of tears, his head and the tip of his tail hanging limp.
Gwai regarded him, her clouded eyes bulged, first one eyelid twitching and then the other. She reared to full height, the brushes falling from her hands to the forest floor.
And then, once more without warning, she grabbed him by his ankles, and with one swift tug and a furious primal shriek, pulled him THROUGH the collapsing dirt pile, before swinging him around and then hurling him across the clearing. With an almighty crash, Rahu landed flat on his back and slid across the ground for several meters before coming to a halt, scattering a flurry of dead leaves into the air.
Coughing, spluttering, and spitting out smoke clouds and clods of soil, Rahu could barely muster the energy to lift his head, but managed through still-tearing eyes to get a blurry glimpse of his companion as she proceeded to vent her frustration by violently dismembering a nearby dead log. It took him quite a while to regain the strength to move his limbs again, and his feet still tingled for even longer still, but by the time he’d managed to sit up, she’d reduced the log to splinters, and had finally sunken into a fetal position with her back to the tree root she’d skewered earlier, her only movement being breathing.
It took a full minute for Rahu to regain the strength to get up, and another two to pick up the items that had been scattered during the quarrel between the two dragon-blooded folk. It wasn't until he’d packed that last, empty garlic sauce jar when he finally noticed Gwai’s emotional state.
She only barely noticed him sitting next to her, still barefoot but with his boots in his hands. He looked at her, and then gently nudged her with his elbow.
“I… I hope you’re not mad at me, Gwai. For trying to persuade you the way I did. That was very disrespectful of me, and I… I had it coming to me, being tickled to nigh insanity. So I guess we can call it even then, right?” He sighed in clear regret, and not just what he’d done to her this morning. “If you still want me to leave you alone, I won’t argue. I deserve it.”
There was a few seconds’ pause. But then, to Rahu’s surprise, Gwai’s gaze softened a little.
“You know…” she said finally. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, too.”
He turned his head to look at her. “Hmm?”
“I take back what I said about not apologizing for being harsh. Because truth be told… I do feel apologetic for that. All the time. I hate that I feel like that, yeah, but still.”
“Uh… Apology accepted, I guess. If you’ll accept mine, that is.”
“Ugh, I don’t like that I just said that! But yeah. I never wanted to be mean to you or anyone else, but there was no way the universe would let me be anything else BUT spiteful to people. Too many rejections, too many betrayals… No wonder I’ve refused to get attached to anybody.”
Rahu thought about her words for a few moments more. “That… actually isn’t too dissimilar to how I am with others. Not to your extent, admittedly, and I still can’t condone how rude you are to everybody, but I can still relate to SOME degree. I’ve been told that my desire to support even the worst off isn’t a popular one, and that few places openly welcome it. Wherever we go, wherever I go, it’s an unspoken rule that the strongest takes all. What difference does my looking out for the bottom of the food chain make when no one else cares?”
“Well, you might not believe this, and I’m going to hate myself later for saying it, but… I DO care.”
He looked at her, his eyebrows raised. “I thought you hated me?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I still do. You ARE, after all, the son of the abomination whose regime forced me out of my birthplace. I feel compelled to loathe your association with him on principle, and my goal in life is to violently avenge his actions with you as the objective. But at the same time, I have to admit you aren’t ENTIRELY the same as him. I should’ve realized that when you stopped yourself from landing the finishing blow when we fought each other back in the pit-fighting ring.”
He tensed up a little. “Don’t remind me. That was a fight to the death, remember? You would’ve killed me if I hadn’t had to tap into the strength of my bloodline.”
“I didn’t know better at the time. I don’t like that fact, but there you go. But truth be told… if I’d faced anyone else, one of us would be dead. In all my years of flopping my way around this Dragons-forsaken mortal world like an earthquake catfish out of water, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s never taken a swing at me with the intent to really, TRULY kill me, not even when you should’ve. In fact, you’ve never once held me in contempt despite vice versa. For all your acting so high and mighty, you’ve been just as decent to everyone else, too. THAT’S how you’re different from Zmey Gorynych.”
Rahu tilted his head, and then smacked his temple, a few loose motes of soil falling out of his ear. “I mean… I lost a family member to him. Because we tried to tell him to give up what he’d stolen before he went insane. There’s no way I can see myself being even remotely similar to Father in any capacity.”
“Still, as ridiculous as it’d be even to me to admit that I actually want something, I mean it when I say I want you to do more of that ‘mercy’ thing you showed me back there.” Gwai sniffled, and then looked away to wipe a tear from a blind pink eye. “Mercy is in of itself a strength. And if the world had more of it, perhaps I wouldn’t hate it as much as I do.”
She paused, and then curled her tail around herself and sulked. “Dammit, and now I’m mad at myself for feeling sorry for you! I shouldn’t be sympathetic to ANYONE. Not even myself, a gross little colorless wimp who shouldn’t even be alive.”
Having slipped his boots back on, he regarded her with a regretful expression for a few moments. Then, out of nowhere… he hugged her. Gwai briefly struggled, digging her teeth lightly into his sleeve, but then relented.
“Don’t be upset with yourself, Gwai,” said Rahu. “You survived in the wild for ten years despite your lack of color, and lasted seven more years fighting other dragons just to survive. And you still managed to power through all of that out of sheer force of will. Against all odds, you’re still here. And on top of that, even though you want nothing to do with Father, you still made the choice not to abandon me, but instead to try to make me a better person than him. If that isn’t strength of your own, I don’t know what is.”
Gwai hissed like a snake, her tail swishing for a moment, but then sighed, letting the tension out of her body. “Augh, I HATE being complimented! But just this once… I guess I’ll have to suck it up. Y’know, to humor you.”
“So, does that mean you’ll accept my apology? Both for tickling you senseless and, uh…”
“I’ll never forgive you for making me almost laugh myself to death, THAT’S for certain. But as for what happened back in the fighting pit? …I’ll think about it. Maybe.”
Rahu laughed a little. “Alright, then, let’s get going. We don’t have all day.” He stood up, and then helped her to her feet as well a second later. “Just one more thing, though… Whatever you do, do NOT let anyone else but us two know about ANY of this.”
Gwai, of course, folded her arms and scoffed. “I will make no such promises.”
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