A Gift

This is a WIP

There will be content here in the future. This article was created as a placeholder and referenced in another. While there is nothing here at the moment, there will be content eventually. <3

It was one thing to know, eventually, that he would receive a tag but another when the day finally arrived. Having no real idea of who he would Connect with, Denetan had always thought of being tagged in the abstract. Having his name filed alongside a complicated number. All of his information compiled and collected like he was some expensive collectable.

He’d been acutely aware growing up that he was a lower Shra, but it was quite another to have it stamped on metal, to be forever decorating his person. Someone would still have to get close enough to read it – but that was besides the point.

“You don’t like it.” Not a question. He glanced up from the metal tag presented in the black box, set on expensive velvet. Like it was a piece of jewelry and not something so binding. Kino had picked out the style and the metal – stainless steel, given Denetan’s work. A slender metal bar with the number stamped sideways. Unobtrusive, almost delicate. It looked like jewelry.

“That’s not it.” He held the box toward Kino, whose carefully neutral expression was hiding the disappointment that radiated through their connection. Denetan sat on the edge of the Shrie’s bed and turned his head a little, pulling out the metal stud he’d had as a placeholder. “Help me out?”

They both knew he could’ve done it on his own but that wasn’t really the point. Kino actually crawled on his lap, forcing Denetan to grip his hips to hold him in place, while he crowded Denetan so he could do as requested. < I can get a different one, > his Dha thought, a soft and subtle thing akin to a mental whisper.

Denetan squeezed Kino’s hips in an attempt to reassure him. “There is nothing wrong with the tag,” he said aloud, hoping the sound of the words would further cement their legitimacy. < I just didn’t know what it’d be like actually getting one. > He’d hesitated to admit as much to Kino, who was already sensitive in that moment, but he didn’t want the Shrie to think he was disappointed.

Denetan wasn’t. The moment was simply clashing with the abstract that had settled in his mind, from his past speculation. This was… Personal. Intimate. A real gift from someone that he cared about, not an industrial tag from a nondescript persona. It did not feel like he was being marked as property, but that Kino was… happy… to have something physical that identified Denetan as his. That they were together. After having to hide it for months and the chaos that had caused, this felt like… something more.

“I hadn’t ever thought about giving one,” Kino admitted, his attention on the silver that hung from Denetan’s ear. “I thought I had years of freedom left.”

Denetan looked up at the Shrie on his lap, unamused by the suggestion that it was Kino who was now bound when it was Kino who had bothered Denetan to begin with. “As did I,” Denetan remarked, tugging Kino a little closer. Securing him in place. He could feel his Dha toying with the tag, the weight of it slight but noticeable.

“We could always get you something different,” Kino added. Apparently stuck on the idea that Denetan didn’t want it. Or didn’t like it.

He huffed and rolled, half tossing Kino further up on the bed before he climbed over him. Moving the slight Shrie was never a problem for the trained Drahinuaw and it prompted a soft squeal of surprise from his Dha. “I like it, I promise,” Denetan murmured, catching Kino in a hard kiss. < It’s different coming from you. It’s better. > Which was the truth.

Context

This is a small moment between Kino and Denetan when the assassin-in-training receives his registration tag from Kinokinaver. Born a Kuad, were Denetan a common vnou, he would have in all likelihood been the Dha in a relationship. He knew from a young age, though, that as nobility he was on the Lower Shra spectrum so the idea of registration was known – a thing he thought about. What he never considered was how he’d feel receiving such a thing from someone he cares about and how that might change the entire moment.