Author's Note

Some NSFW stuff between the first *** and the second ***.

Chapter 108: Day by Day

Letting a relationship progress seemed like a simple and straightforward idea, but Wild found that it was not. Despite reassurances from Doctor Fay and Artful, despite knowing that both of them were honest, truthful, and even believed in his eventual success, he was still sometimes - or perhaps oftentimes - wrapped in anxiety that, at best, he could temporarily banish to the corner of his mind, but no further. There was always nibbling doubt, fear of failure and rejection, and he had taken to writing down those thoughts when he could and when Artful wasn’t looking. He had slowly but surely been getting used to journaling, and it did help with sorting his thoughts to a certain degree.

I am waiting for something bad to happen.

Wild could count many occasions where bad things happened to him out of nowhere, and he had learned to expect them, in a way. It was in no way any kind of foresight, more of... anxiety, truthfully. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Anticipating trouble. Treating many things as signs of problems to come, even if they didn’t always result in that.

Spending time with Artful helped. Wild decided that he would not sleep alone ever again if he could help it, and while he didn’t voice that thought aloud, Artful seemed to have caught on anyway somehow, and the two had yet to spend a night separately. Wild didn’t complain at all, and he knew there was nothing - or very little - to complain about. Sometimes positions were awkward, true, and someone’s limb would end up poking the other in an uncomfortable way, but that was easily solved.

Sleeping together was, in some ways... perhaps even therapeutic. Wild had found that he barely dreamed anything of note when he was sleeping with Artful, and he woke up refreshed and more or less ready for the day to come. And tackling the said day alongside Artful eased something within Wild, a sort of other worry, one that wasn’t connected to his relationship.

Aside from their physical closeness during regular sleep, there was also intimacy. Nuzzles and kisses throughout the day had become a natural part of Wild’s life, and sometimes things heated up.

***

“Mmm, yeah...” Artful moaned under Wild as the two of them rubbed against each other, their cocks held together by Wild’s magic, which went up and down to stimulate them both.

Wild had found that frotting - which was rubbing cocks together - was rather enjoyable, mostly because of the physical closeness, of feeling the heat of Artful’s body against his, hearing the moans and feeling the twitches. Not as much as when Wild put Artful’s cock inside his mouth and worked his head up and down, but it still sent a shiver of excitement up Wild’s spine.

Truthfully speaking, sucking Artful off was a tiring job, one Wild was still getting used to. He needed to angle his head just right if he wanted to swallow the whole length, and keeping his mouth open for long led to his jaw aching a bit, and the longer he worked at it the worse the ache became. Of course, he also needed to be careful with his teeth, so that meant paying attention, so overall it was a bit tiring. Frotting, however, allowed him to simply enjoy the intimacy and not worry too much about anything other than cleanup afterwards.

Wild was on top, facing Artful, the two of them kissing and moaning together, going in a relatively slow rhythm. Wild half-remembered scenes from porn he had watched so long ago, and the way he had sex with Artful was certainly far from that. Neither of them was too loud, there was certainly no screaming, and no serious slapping of flesh against flesh. The pace, in comparison, was almost glacial. However, that was the point - they paused when they got too close to the finish, wanting to prolong the pleasure instead of rushing it like they did the first few times.

The two of them were still considering anal but had yet to come to actually doing it. Aside from the necessary preparations to avoid any unpleasant surprises, there was also some hesitation on Wild’s part. He had seen Artful’s anus, and he really didn’t think he would easily fit even with a generous application of lube. This reminded him that they did need a new bottle of lube since, according to Artful, his had almost run out. Getting a new bottle wouldn’t be an issue - the Royal Orphanage had a sort of limited fund for sexual activities. When Wild learned of it, he laughed in how absurd it sounded, and he knew such practice definitely didn’t exist anywhere on Earth, at least as far as he was aware. Certainly not in orphanages. When he thought of an orphanage, to his mind came a picture of rows of beds and strict matrons who were probably not even born through sex but just popped naturally into existence as they were.

Wild, at the moment, was not thinking about any of that, only about pleasuring Artful.

“I’m c-close...” Artful groaned, and Wild kissed him, their tongues sloppily working together. Not for long, though - Wild found that trying to push his tongue too far beyond his lips for long as uncomfortable. He had never before thought that sex could be so... difficult sometimes.

Wild focused on his magic, quickening its work on him because he was not as close as Artful, and he didn’t want to keep him waiting. Fortunately, soon enough, the two of them were very close to the finish together.

“Ah, f-fuck...” Artful exhaled, and then Wild felt a sticky sensation on his belly, Artful bucking into him. Moments later, he was cumming too, and the two were pressing together, moaning in orgasm, until both were spent entirely.

Wild allowed himself to collapse, yet not too much because, according to Artful, he was actually somewhat heavy. Artful, in comparison, was almost delicate, certainly far lighter than what their differences in physical size might suggest.

Afterwards, there was no immediate resting and going to sleep together after sex, no. Wild had found that such things didn’t happen unless both of them wanted to, first of all, go to sleep while feeling sticky - which was a no go - or they wanted to wake up sticky and, worst of all, with dry stickiness that pulled on the fur painfully. Instead, both of them cleaned up and took a shower, thoroughly scrubbing body liquid out of the fur.

***

While sex wasn’t what Wild imagined as a young teen, certainly nothing like porn suggested, Wild thought it was actually far better than that. It was not mindless, it was not fast and rough - even though Artful did tell him that he would like to try that eventually - and, most importantly, it had an emotional element to it that made everything better, much like seasoning in food.

Aside from their sexual activities and general intimacy, Wild and Artful spent their time together in different ways. Wild, remembering Luna’s advice, took more seriously to painting. He didn’t believe he had much of an imagination, and the ideas of what to paint just didn’t come to him, at least he could paint things that he could see. Naturally, he started with fruit and other relatively simple objects. Nothing was all that simple, however - he needed to study how light interacted with things in order for his paintings to be realistic. He learned of perspective and how to at least sketch properly three-dimensional things, though he hadn’t had much luck yet with things that weren’t close to a simple cube or triangle or other angular flat-sided things in shape. The less he thought about his skill at drawing people, the better. So far, what he could make in that department wasn’t far from childish stick figures.

“I began like this before I got my talent mark,” Artful told Wild, “Until something clicked, it was just, you know, frustrating mostly. It was nice, to draw things, but I still just couldn’t get it right. I saw what to draw, to paint, but somewhere between my eyes and my pencil or brush, there was, like, a disconnect.”

Wild nodded to that, recognizing his words as almost exactly the way he felt about it too. After all, he could see all these things, but why couldn’t he just copy what he saw and put it on paper? Unfortunately, that was what learning was for.

“Art has been developing for thousands of years,” the Art Club teacher explained to him, “All the techniques available to us now are tools that took a long while to discover.”

They then showed Wild how art progresses throughout history. It was all mostly stylized for the largest part of it, simple geometric shapes like circles or ovals for the eyes or squares and triangles for houses. Sometimes, ponies sprung up who could make realistic paintings, so real they seemed like photographs, but what they could do could hardly be replicated by those without the talent. It had taken a long time for those without art-related talent marks to figure out the techniques those with those marks employed on instinct.

Wild certainly did not have a talent for art, he found. His talent mark was... far from it, in fact. Still, he persisted despite his frustrations, and slowly but surely his imagination seemed to grow. He didn’t believe he would ever become a real artist or would spend all that much time painting or drawing, but it did help his magic - or, at least, it would do so in the future - and that was worth it in itself.

Artful, of course, had little talent for martial arts himself. Not that Wild had a talent mark for that either - it was training, training, and more training, for years, and he was only as good as he was because ponies, in general, didn’t put much into things associated with fighting, at least in comparison to humans. Wild knew he was good, but he wasn’t one of the best before he came to the new world.

However, it was not exactly martial arts that Artful was training in. It was self-defense, and it was almost something else entirely. Martial arts all had an element of performance, of art in some way, but self-defense was about pure function, and only a relatively small part of it was about actual fighting. Most of it was, in fact, about putting distance between yourself and the attacker, then escaping if at all possible. If not, it was about subduing the attacker as quickly as possible, then restraining them.

Artful was still working on the escaping part. While wings gave him a huge advantage, at least when it came to non-pegasi, he also needed to know how to escape if his wings were damaged or when they were otherwise not viable as an escape tool.

In practice, that meant a game of tag. Wild was one of the quickest non-pegasi around, and so he was assigned the job of being the theoretical assailant. Wild already had the ultimate cheat code to escaping bad situations - teleportation. After having learned how to do it, he had spent his time making it happen as quickly as possible no matter the situation. Since teleportation was non-destructive and only produced a flash of light at worst, Wild was allowed to practice it anywhere as long as it wasn’t too much. That meant that he was also faux-attacked at random times, which helped him train his response time and teleport away at the very first signs of trouble.

Tae, the self-defense teacher, was properly impressed by that.

“Well damn, you sure put a lot of effort into it,” he praised. Despite his steady words, he was still lying on the ground in a post-rain puddle of muddy water. He had tried to ambush Wild, who had bucked him and then teleported away before Tae was halfway to the ground. Once he recovered, Tae stood up, wincing slightly, “Oh, this’ll bruise. That’s a good result.”

Wild, of course, didn’t let the praise get to his head. He could still do better, and he would. After seeing what happened to that changeling in Canterlot, he was even more willing than before to train in case some anti-changeling idiot tried to beat him up or if a gang of such people attacked. Wild, eventually, would voice his opinion on it all publicly alongside Artful, and he expected the two of them would face some adversity.

Artful was, of course, fully aware of it, and he put his best efforts into the self-defense class. In comparison to Wild, he wasn’t doing too great, of course, but he still could escape more times than not, and he had a mean kick for those who came too close to him before he could escape. It wouldn’t stop a group of angry people, of course, but one or two people who tried to attack him would find themselves in some trouble, especially since Artful was also learning some hard hits aside from the classic pony buck.

The classic pony buck was, however, good enough to catch Wild when, simulating a possible attack scenario, he tried to catch Artful from behind. Ponies, overall, packed mean kicks even without much training and could do quite a lot of damage when startled, and still Wild didn’t expect to be sent flying through the air when Artful kicked him straight to the chest. He landed on the ground with an oomph of pain, feeling like he was hit by a freight train.

“Wild, are you alright?” Artful hurried over to where Wild lay on the ground, wheezing.

“I am... good,” Wild managed to get out before struggling to get up. He wobbled a bit, then shook it off and smiled at Artful even as he winced. His ribs were neither broken nor even cracked, but there would certainly be a bit of a bruise later down the line, “You kick good.”

In recompense for having hurt Wild, Artful later showered him in kisses and then did some more while Wild lay on his back recuperating, which Wild was not at all against. It didn’t even truly hurt that much past the initial shock of having air kicked right out of his lungs, but he did appreciate Artful’s care and apology nevertheless.

Artful, despite somewhat fulfilling the image of a fragile artist, had been growing in strength steadily since Wild introduced him to the self-defense classes. Some of the mild chub Artful had was almost gone, and his body shaped up nicely with growing muscle. While Artful didn’t have much of a passion for martial arts specifically or becoming strong in general, he still did his best, and he had found his efforts rewarded... in multiple ways.

The first time Wild offered him a massage, it was a bit of an awkward affair because, of course, Wild didn’t know a whole lot about providing a proper massage. However, with some directions from Artful, it had turned out pretty well, especially since Wild didn’t use his hooves but the hands. The amazing hands. The awesome hands. Artful couldn’t find enough words to praise those five-digited... things of pleasure and glory. Of course, he had already experienced what Wild could do with them in an intimate way, but a massage was truly not that far behind, especially when Wild worked his way around his flanks and near the base of his tail. Despite Wild’s inexperience, Artful could not find it in himself to voice any complain - after all, he had none.

Wild, in truth, found himself slowly but surely relaxing as days gone by and forward. Things had been... quite good, actually. No trouble so far despite how often he thought there would be trouble. He spent time with Artful - a lot of time - and he spent time training at the Martial Arts Club, and he spent time painting... it was, perhaps, the most peaceful Wild had ever been.

He could get used to it.