Chapter 29: I Made Clothes And Then This Happened!
"Too big," Neve muttered, pulling the measuring tape tighter. "Or is it too small? How do people deal with these things?"
The cave was quiet. Cael had left before dawn with the other beastmen, the sound of them moving through the village waking Neve up briefly before he turned over and went back to sleep for another hour.
Winter was coming in two days, so everyone was moving and getting busy.
He had the sewing kit spread across the mat in front of him, and the two pieces of linen laid flat and was trying to remember everything he had ever passively absorbed about sewing, which was not very much. He had watched exactly one video about it once while procrastinating on an assignment. He retained approximately forty per cent of it.
"Okay," he said to himself. "I’m just going to cut simple shapes, nothing complicated. I am not making a suit. I am making rectangles that wrap around a body."
He started with Cael.
The wrapper was the easiest place to begin because it was essentially a large rectangle with a finished edge. He cut the white linen first with the kitchen knife, making clean lines that the spike never could have managed and started pinning the edges with the small pins from the kit.
Threading the needle took four attempts.
On the fifth attempt, he got it, immediately pulled too hard, and the thread came out the other end.
"Okay," he said again.
He threaded it again. Slower this time and got it. He tied the end and started sewing.
His first stitch was too long. His second was too short. By the fifth one, he had found something approximately consistent and kept going.
The measuring tape went around his own waist for the pants. He wrote the numbers in the dirt with his finger to remember them, realised that was not a reliable system, and wrote them on the corner of the animal skin instead.
He cut. Pinned. Sewed.
The problem with the shorts for Cael was the shifting issue. If Cael shifted with shorts on, they would rip straight off him, and that was both a practical problem and a visual one that Neve did not need in his life.
"A wrapper," he decided. "He can drop it before he shifts. Easy."
He kept working.
.
.
Five hours disappeared.
He looked up at some point, and the light in the cave had moved significantly, and his fingers had the specific ache of extended fine work, and there was a pile of finished items beside him that was larger than he had planned.
He counted them.
Cael’s wrapper. It was large and practical with a belt made from leftover animal skin he had cut into strips and braided together. He had added a loop at the side to hang things from and threaded some cowrie shells he had found at the back of the cave along the edge because they were there and they looked good. He was sure Cael would appreciate the decoration even if he didn’t know that it was a deliberate choice.
For himself, he made shorts with a hole for his tail that had taken three attempts to get the placement right. A simple shirt from the red linen, loose through the shoulders, the collar open. Longer pants for colder days, cut from the white linen with the red shirt as a guide. A pair of short boxers because he was a person who wore underwear, and that was non-negotiable.
He held up the boxers and looked at them.
They were not perfect. One leg hole was slightly bigger than the other, and the waistband sat at a slight angle.
"Good enough," he said, and put them on.
The feeling of actual waistband elastic against his skin was so normal after being absent from his body for the last several days.
He put the red shirt on.
Then the shorts.
He looked down at himself.
He was wearing actual clothes that he had made from fabric he had acquired in a beast world using a sewing kit the system gave him as a reward for treating a two-year coma.
He felt disproportionately emotional about it, shook it off, and picked up Cael’s wrapper and belt to fold them.
That was when the smell hit him.
Blood. Heavy and close and coming from outside.
Neve dropped the wrapper and was at the cave entrance before he had fully decided to move.
Cael was coming up the path with the rest of the hunting group, blood across his chest and shoulder, dark and wet and immediately alarming.
"CAEL—"
Neve was already running toward him. He closed the distance fast, hands going to Cael’s chest before he had fully stopped moving, pressing at the skin, trying to find the wound.
"Are you hurt? What happened? Where is it—"
Cael caught both his hands. "Neve."
"There’s blood everywhere, where are you hurt—"
"Neve." His voice was steady. Calm. "It’s not mine."
Neve looked up.
Around them, the other hunters had stopped walking and stood still with expressions that were somewhere between startled and flushed. All of them looking at Neve... at the worried face, the red shirt, the tail moving in agitation.
Cael glared at them.
They found somewhere else very quickly.
Neve looked down.
At the ground around Cael’s feet. At the things piled there that weren’t just a successful hunt. Vegetables. The carrot-things and the onion-things and several large potatoes, carried alongside the animal catches, some of them slightly squashed from being held with everything else.
The field. Cael had found the field.
"We went further than usual," Cael said. "I picked up your scent near a field. I gathered what I could." He looked at the vegetables with the expression of someone who had done something they weren’t certain about. "Some of them tore when I was carrying them. I’m not sure which ones were good."
Neve looked at the pile, then at Cael.
He stared at the blood that wasn’t his spread across his chest from a hunt he had extended specifically to collect vegetables for Neve, so Neve wouldn’t have to go back out before winter.
"You’re so sweet," Neve said.
He put his hand on Cael’s face.
Cael went very still under it. His eyes moved across Neve’s face.
"Come inside," Neve said. "I have something to show you."
.
.
Cael stared at the clothes that were laid out on the mat where Neve had folded them. The wrapper, the belt with the cowrie shells, everything arranged carefully.
"These are yours?" he asked.
"The wrapper and belt are yours," Neve said. "The rest are mine."
Cael looked at the red shirt and shorts Neve was wearing. He saw the waistband visible above them. At the tail coming through the hole in the back.
"You made these," he said.
"This morning," Neve said.
Cael looked at his own items on the mat. He reached out and touched the cowrie shells along the belt edge.
"Put it on," Neve said. "Let me see if it fits."
Cael picked up the wrapper.
This was when Neve realised he had to help Cael put on the clothes. He almost saw realised how difficult it was because it required closeness between them, and Cael was not currently wearing anything under the sparse animal skin, and that animal skin was coming off now and...
Neve focused on the wrapper edge.
He stepped forward, took the fabric, and started positioning it around Cael, trying to do this efficiently and professionally and absolutely not notice anything.
His hands moved the fabric around Cael’s waist. He had to get close to reach around him properly. The fabric went where it was supposed to go. He pulled it into place, and the warmth of Cael’s skin came through the linen, and Neve kept his eyes on what his hands were doing.
He pulled the belt around and threaded it through. He adjusted the fall of the wrapper and checked the length.
He stood back to see it properly.
Cael stood in the middle of the cave in a white linen wrapper with a braided animal skin belt with cowrie shells and looked... good. So fucking good. The tattoos above the wrapper line. The shoulders. The fit was right.
"Do you like it?" Neve asked.
Cael looked down at himself. Then at Neve. Then at himself again.
"I’m going to show the village," he said.
Neve laughed. "Dinner first. And you didn’t forget the bamboo?"
"There was too much to carry. I’ll go before evening."
"Take your time." Neve turned back toward the kitchen. "I’ll start arranging the fresh vegetables."
He was already thinking about what he could make with what Cael had brought back. The soup had worked well. He could do something more substantial tonight. Roasted root vegetables alongside the meat, maybe, now that he had the kitchen set up.
He went up on his toes without planning it and pressed a kiss to Cael’s jaw.
He dropped back down, smiling.
Cael had gone completely still. His hand came up slowly and touched his own jaw where Neve’s mouth had been. He looked at Neve with an expression that had lost every piece of the usual nothing.
"You didn’t do it properly," Cael said quietly. "I was too tall."
Neve looked at him.
"Huh?"
Cael went down on one knee.
Then the other.
He was kneeling in front of Neve, eye level now, both of Neve’s hands taken into his.
"Do it properly," Cael said. "Neve."
The way he said the name did something specific to Neve’s dick that he was not going to examine right now.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to Cael’s.
He meant to make it three seconds. Just brief and affectionate.
Cael’s hand came up to the back of his head, and the kiss stopped being brief.
Cael’s mouth was warm, and as he moved like someone who had been waiting for permission, and now that they had it was not going to waste it.
His tongue pressed in slow and deliberate, and Neve’s hands grabbed the front of the wrapper without deciding to, and his brain produced one clear, coherent thought...
’Fuck, this wasn’t what I planned...’