As far as rattata went, Val’s existence was completely and utterly unremarkable. No rattata ever went on to do great things or carve themselves a confident place at the top of the totem pole. They scraped, scampered, scrounged, and generally did whatever it took to get by. And Val got by. In spite of all the difficulties that came with being a small, weak pokémon in a forest filled with predators and competitors alike, she got by. That night, Val was managing to get by a bit better than usual. Half through a keen sense of smell and half through blind luck, she’d managed to track down a bush of what looked like bluk berries. Darker skinned, perhaps, though it was difficult to tell in the low light. Whatever their coloration, they were pristine, untouched by any other creature without a single fruit out of place. Ripe and ready for the taking. Val didn’t question her luck. She didn’t have the luxury of doing so; stopping too long to question an opportunity meant risking it slipping away from you to be snatched away by some other equally hungry, equally desperate pokémon. Instead, she started pulling berries off of branches and stuffing them into her mouth, chewing and swallowing as quick as she could manage for fear of someone else happening along the scene and chasing her off. But none came. Val seemed to have happened upon some unnatural string of luck, because she had the freedom to stuff herself near to bursting, picking a good half of the bush’s branches clean before she’d finally stopped. They tasted sweet, sweeter than they ought to have been, with a strange tingling aftertaste that was unlike any bluk berry she’d ever eaten but was hardly unpleasant. By the time she was finished, her claws were covered with black bits of berry skin, her muzzle was dripping with juice, and for the first time in perhaps a month, Val felt full. She didn’t push her luck any farther by sticking around the bush, in case someone came along to pick the other half of the bush clean, though she made a mental note of where it was so that she could check it out the following night. Full as she was and with morning coming in, there was no point in doing anything but finding a safe place to sleep before the sun came up. Rattata didn’t fare too well in the day. Too easily spotted. But Val had learned how to find places to hide. She had spots catalogued in her mind, ready to scramble to any given one on a moment’s notice, with two more at the ready should it prove unusable. That was a lesson she’d learned a long time ago. This time, she’d chosen an old fallen tree, just under half an hour to the west. She pushed through the bushes clustered at one end of it, emerging on the other side of them into the entrance to the hollow log, just as she remembered. The other end of the trunk was buried in the earth, meaning no surprise entrances from behind. Val crawled inside, moving as far towards the back of the log as she could. She shot a glance back towards the entrance and saw only a single beam of moonlight making its way inside, having somehow managed to filter through both the canopy above and the bushes surrounding the log. Everything else was shrouded in shadows, including her. It was as much safety as one could hope to find in the forest. She direly needed it; she was more exhausted than she ought to have been, even given a night of foraging. Val laid out flat on the ground before huddling in on herself, tail curling around her as her eyes fluttered shut. For Val, as for every rattata and every other creature in the forest, every day was a struggle for survival. It was exhausting, and it meant that regardless of the constant threat and danger that comprised her daily life, she never had any problem falling asleep. Particularly with the rare pleasure of a proper meal inside her making her feel even sleepier. So Val slept, and perhaps from that mixture of plentiful food and strange exhaustion, she slept deeper than ever before. And she dreamed. --- Flynn’s favourite time was the stretch leading into dawn, just before night gave way to day. Everything active in the morning wasn’t up yet, but anything that’d been scurrying around all night was starting to get tired and slow down. It gave him a sense of power, he supposed. Like he owned the forest. Though not too much of one. He was a zorua, and anything as small as a zorua had to be acutely aware of just how powerful they really were. Yet at the same time, he didn’t allow himself to fall into the mindset that he was weak and that the only way for him to survive was through running and hiding. It was a careful balance, pride without the fall. Being able to create the illusion of being, say, a twelve foot tall charizard whenever there was danger certainly helped avoid that fall. He crept through the brush, ears perked, sniffing at the air, all his senses honed and ready for anything that might’ve been worthy of his attention. Not necessarily food—he wasn’t too hungry, having already managed a few good finds earlier in the night—but he wouldn’t be opposed, either. He was on the lookout for opportunity. You always had to be, if you wanted to thrive instead of just survive. Most of what he smelled was just the usual morass of odours the forest held, most of which were undetectable or meaningless—to a nose that didn’t know any better. To someone whose senses were a bit sharper, though, they made up a sort of landscape in their own right, as easy to navigate and get information from as the visible world. Anyone could pick up on the scent of flowering plants and the cool moisture of the night. Beneath that were where the subtleties laid. He could smell the scent of other pokémon who’d passed through, comings and goings that were too varied and weak to pick out much of anything. The stink of marked territory was easier to pick out, identifying the area as belonging to what smelled like a boltund—though not having seen any other trace of a boltund in the area, Flynn wasn’t too worried about infringing on it. Territories were claimed and lost with great frequency in the woods; you had to know when to respect them and when to ignore them. But still another scent: berries. The smell of berries didn’t tend to linger, which meant that it had to be fresh, potentially a worthy target. It was a faint thing, carried to Flynn’s nose by a stiff breeze. Orienting himself to face it, he started making his way towards its source, sniffing at the air to keep himself pointed in the right direction. --- Dreams were never a peaceful time for Val. She didn’t typically have nightmares as such; it was rare that she’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming or shivering in terror or anything of the like. It was more that dreams were a time for reflection rather than relaxation. Even when she was asleep, every fibre of her being was geared towards ensuring survival, and analyzing the threats she’d already survived was just another way of doing that. So some nights she’d relive moments where she’d barely managed to scramble away from the snapping jaws of a fearow, other times she’d once again know long stretches of hunger, whole days of starvation compressed into a few hours of sleep. She’d be thrown back into the handful of fights she’d managed to win, and the effort of evading opportunists as she limped away to lick her wounds. Any number of struggles with varying levels of success and injury, but all tied together by the threat of death and her managing to avoid it. All but one, anyway. Out of all of them, that one memory was the one that troubled her most of all, and maybe that was the reason why. Life or death struggles had clear cut outcomes, reasons, and lessons. Most such experiences could be boiled down to practising one behaviour or avoiding another. They were simple. This memory was not simple, and her mind had returned to it repeatedly in feverish attempts to extract its lesson, reliving the moment again and again. In the darkness of the dreamscape surrounding her, a pair of yellow eyes gleamed. --- Flynn’s nose had led him a great many places, but it had never led him astray. It had showcased its talents yet again by leading the zorua on a clear path through the forest, never once losing track of the scent he was after, until he’d tracked it all the way back to what seemed to be its source: a log, partly sunken into the earth, with a cluster of bushes around the high end. Following a hunch and a waft of particularly strong scent, Flynn moved up and peered past one of the bushes, and saw nothing but darkness behind. Darker than it ought to have been. Zorua weren’t slouches when it came to seeing in the dark, so even the absence of anything was indicative of something. It was easier to see once he’d circled around the bushes, watching how the shadows at the end of the log played as he did: it was hollow. Flynn would’ve tutted were silence not so deeply ingrained into his every action. This would’ve been a great place to stash something like berries, sure—if the one who’d stashed them had been smart enough to realise that hiding it from the nose was just as important as hiding it from the eye. He crept up to the entrance, outlines of his form shimmering in preparation to throw up a hasty illusion if needed, then peered over the lip of the log and let his eyes adjust to the gloom inside. There were no berries to be found. There was, however, a curious looking heap of fur at the far end of the log, with whiskers jutting out at odd angles and a curled tail wrapped around its perimeter. A rattata; a nothing. It rose and fell slowly with the rhythmic breathing of deep sleep, and judging from the smell, it was the source of the berry-scent that Flynn had tracked this far. A scent that, now that he’d gotten closer, he realised carried with it the subtle, cloying sweetness that he’d been taught to avoid. Poisonous. Not lethally so, but sleep-inducing. How deep a sleep, he couldn’t say, since he’d never eaten them. But the rattata clearly had. Flynn wasn’t irritated. He tried not to come into things with high expectations, and he tried to make the most out of any given situation. There was always something to be gained, even from a bottom-feeder like a rattata. After testing the log to ensure it wouldn’t creak or rock under his weight, Flynn hopped up into the mouth of the log. As he started towards the opposite end, the singular ray of light that penetrated the log rolled across his face, making his eyes glimmer briefly before the dark swallowed them up. --- Val’s dreams were not perfect depictions of the memories they were based on. Like any dreamer, her mind downplayed some things, exaggerated others. Things outside of her immediate focus were fuzzy and shifting, while whatever she brought her attention on distorted itself into a caricature of its real life counterpart. Trees were dense clusters of gnarled hands jutting out of the ground around her. The moonlight cast everything into a purple hue, the uneasy colour of a bruise. She was creeping along, moving between clusters of undergrowth, keeping low as ever she could. The thoughts of that moment flowed into her awareness, brushing aside hindsight and plunging her back into the same mindset she’d been in when everything she was experiencing had unfolded for the first time. As dark as it seemed, it was only perhaps an hour until dawn. When the sun came up, every pair of eyes flying above and padding along the ground would spot her, purple fur bright and garish against the surrounding greenery. She wasn’t ignorant. Val hadn’t been puttering around the woods this close to dawn without an idea of somewhere to hide. She’d had a perfect spot picked out, a deep, dark cave that by all rights should’ve been abandoned—until she came to it when she needed to hide and found it occupied by an ursaring. Asleep, thankfully, which meant that instead of getting chased off she was forced to creep off with her tail between her legs, frustrated and acutely aware of the dangers that laid ahead. Her dream didn’t focus on those prior moments because she’d already long since internalized the lesson they offered: never put all your eggs in one basket. Now, she never relied on one hideout being available without having two more in case it wasn’t. If the night ended there, she’d likely have put the experience out of her mind entirely. Val winced at the sound of leaves crunching under her paws. Every step seemed to be loud enough that she was sure every pokémon in the forest would hear it, nocturnal or otherwise. She was sure she hadn’t been that loud, but whatever primal part of her responsible for weaving her dream disagreed. She swore she could hear her footsteps echo off the trees. Yet as loud as the sounds she was making had been amplified, they weren’t enough to keep Val from hearing something else. A short, sharp snap like a branch being broken, something that she would’ve dismissed as coming from something she’d stepped on were it not for it being decidedly out of sync with her own footsteps. She whirled around in an instant, staring out into the gloom behind her with wide eyes, body almost vibrating from an inner conflict between the urge to stiffen and to shiver. There were a pair of yellow eyes staring at her from out of the darkness. As soon as she caught sight of them, they winked out of sight. Val was frozen in place, her stillness standing in stark contrast to the adrenaline that was pumping through her veins. There was something out there, following her, watching her where she couldn’t see it. It was impossible to tell what from just a glimpse of their eyes. It could be something that she’d have a fair chance of getting away from, or it could be something so fast that it would pounce on her and have its fangs sunk into her the moment she turned around. Regardless of what it might’ve been that was watching her, though, there were only two possible reactions to the situation: fight, or flight. The amount of things a rattata stood a chance of winning a fight against could probably be counted on one paw, and she didn’t think that whatever it was out there in the dark was one of them. Which left a singular option. Spinning around, Val broke off into a dead sprint into the night. As soon as she started running, she could hear another set of footsteps pick up behind her. Heavier than hers, more widely spaced, like the easy lope of some great beast. Closer and closer, until— --- Flynn stood astride Val, leaning down to sniff at the back of her neck. It was odd: her breathing had started off as the deep inhale-exhale of dead sleep, but when he’d started getting closer to her, it’d sped up accordingly, as if out of exertion—or fear. Yet her eyes were still shut tight. It must’ve been a reaction to whatever it was she saw in her dreams. Or maybe she was just faking being asleep to avoid whatever it was she thought he would do to her if he realised she was awake. No, absurd; he trusted the somnolent effect of the berries. Her reaction was puzzling, but ultimately, the reasons didn’t matter. Flynn would get what he wanted out of the situation either way. Flynn lowered himself down, draping his body across the rattata’s back and allowing his sheath to settle comfortably against her backside. A roll of his hips had Flynn grinding himself against her, providing just the sort of stimulation he needed to pull his sheath back and expose the tip of his cock, which dug ever so slightly into the crook of her tailhole. He stayed there for a moment, feeling it twitch and flex instinctively at his touch, and briefly considered making that the focus of his attentions. The idea was enough to push him that much further out of his sheath, the head of his halfway-extended cock pressing against the entrance to Val’s ass as if in eagerness to make it a reality, but he ultimately decided against it. After all, Flynn thought, shifting his hips down so that the underside of his cock rubbed between the folds of Val’s pussy, he was pretty sure he’d be able to stick an egg in her. It’d be a shame to have to walk back out into the night without leaving her something to remember him by. --- A look shot back over her shoulder had given Val the briefest glimpse of her assailant before he slammed into her back in a flying leap. It was difficult to make out details like fur colour or markings, but the huge ears and tail were a dead giveaway: a nickit. Not the most dangerous predator out there, which made a rattata like her that much more appealing a target. After all, her kind weren’t exactly renowned for their fighting abilities, making them easy prey. And now he had her pinned to the ground, two paws planted on her back and her muzzle buried in the grass. He’d been bigger than her, but every time she relived the moment in her mind, it got more difficult to tell by just how much. Her dreams had steadily exaggerated his size in the way dreams tend to do until she remembered him as having all the crushing weight and proud stature of a houndoom—and as much as she realised that was impossible, that didn’t keep it from feeling real when she dreamed it. Val supposed she should’ve been grateful that he never [i]felt[/i] nearly as large when he did what he always did to her in these dreams, only had the towering presence that struck terror into her that she’d feel if she were staring down the gaping maw of a dragon. She found the gratitude absent. His claws dug into the flesh of her back. She could feel the heat of his breath on the back of her neck. With no way to escape from under the weight of that hungry predator pressing down on her, she screwed her eyes shut and waited for the end, for the feel of sharp fangs tearing her throat out from behind. But it never came. Instead of teeth sinking into her flesh, she felt the wet warmth of a tongue lapping at the back of neck, almost like a delcatty grooming her kit—were it not for the possessive hunger that accompanied those licks, making it clear that there wasn’t an ounce of tenderness or care behind them. She could feel something just as warm and wet as that tongue pressing against the base of her tail, shifting up and down with the movement of the nickit’s hips. Her stomach sank, dread manifesting and panic intensifying in spite of the foreknowledge that came with having lived all of these events before. Val wanted to thrash and squirm like she had when all this had really happened, but by the odd logic of nightmares, she found she could do nothing but lie there with leaden limbs while the nickit shifted his hips down and aligned the head of his cock with her entrance. --- Flynn sunk himself halfway deep on his initial thrust, only prevented from driving himself as far as his knot by the crushing tightness of the rattata’s cunt. He could feel her shiver and clench at her entry, hear the soft, sighing whimpers that escaped her—not stifled, but simply weak, sleep preventing any force from asserting itself behind her vocalizations. He let out a low growl in his throat, drinking in the sensations of her squeezing around his cock as he ground his hips into her and worked himself deeper, a half inch at a time. Flynn found the whole situation very much to his liking, and not just because she had a warm, tight hole. That was nothing that he hadn’t had before, as pleasant as it might’ve been. No, it was more out of sadism, as dark types were well known for, but a more subtle sort than he usually indulged in. He’d had the kick-and-bite struggle of trying to take someone against their will before, and that was well and good, but this was different in a way that struck him. He was giving pain, but her reactions to it were meek and subdued, devoid of any resistance against him or even recognition that he was the one hurting her. That sort of boundless power, cloaked in anonymity; it was intoxicating. With a shove, he forced the last bit of his shaft into her, so that the bulge of his knot butted up against the puffy lips of Val’s pussy. Idly, Flynn wondered how it’d feel to force it inside. Perhaps he’d take the opportunity to do so when it arose. She seemed worth the trouble it’d take to jam it in her, if nothing else. --- Val could feel parts of herself that she’d never before known being suddenly and roughly probed by the nickit’s cock, the head of it carving a path through her insides as it drove itself deeper and deeper, knowing no limit but the great bulge at the base of the fox’s cock that her body refused to accommodate. It hurt, and it hurt bad. Whatever reputation rattata might’ve had for breeding, Val had not lived up to it in the slightest. The nickit had managed to steal her first time from her, and with that came all the pain that accompanied such a thing. He wasn’t so absurdly large that her body couldn’t handle him, but he threw what he had into her with no regard for how she felt taking it, and that meant the bit of size advantage he did have was felt with full, terrible intensity. Muscles gone long unused were stretched wide by his entry, quickly rubbed raw with friction by his frenetic pace. Concurrent with that physical pain was something more, an emotional and mental wounding—what would prove to be the far worse injury in the long run, as unbelievable as she’d find that claim in the moment. Even for a rattata, a pokémon that embodied vulnerability as a way of life, there was no greater vulnerability than having someone force themselves upon you. And as bad as that powerlessness might’ve been in the moment, it had worsened the longer it stayed in her memory, fermenting as her mind picked it apart over and over in an attempt to learn something while only managing to strangle itself in the attempt. The nickit felt like an enormous, slavering beast over top of her, claws digging deep gouges into the flesh of her back. Blood rolled down her back even as it rolled down her thighs, the end result of a hymen torn without a second’s attention given to its existence. Was it this bad when it had really happened? Val couldn’t say. The nauseating fullness, the pressure on her back, the feeling of being so small under something so large, so ready and able to kill her at any moment, it all had to be something that’d grown out of her own mind. She couldn’t have actually experienced any of this. It didn’t matter; real world events no longer mattered. The memory had taken on a life of its own, and it would haunt her in its own special way, unfettered by any needs for realism or accuracy. The nickit drew back from his initial thrust, leading into a second with all the same careless speed as the first. Val opened her mouth to scream and found herself capable of no more than a whisper, the dream having stripped her of even the bloodcurdling screams she’d made when the nickit had raped her for the first time. --- Flynn had worked himself into a steady rhythm, thrusting into the rattata at a speed low enough that he felt no fear of breaking the berries’ spell, but more than enough to have him moving steadily towards a release—and more than enough to have Val quietly whimpering beneath him, muscles tensing and sluggishly squirming at his touch. Though as things wore on, he found himself pushing his luck further, sliding in and out of Val’s cunt at ever increasing speeds until the sound of his hips slapping against the rattata’s echoed off the walls of the log. It seemed like nothing that any pokémon ought to be able to sleep through, yet in spite of all the clear signs of pain that she was giving off, her eyes never cracked open, only drew themselves shut tighter in a grimace. Any thought that she might’ve been faking it had been long since dismissed. The look on her face made it clear that if she had any ability to wake up, she’d have made use of it. Even so, he could hardly believe it. Was he really going to be able to fuck this rat and slip away scot-free, leaving her none the wiser until she woke up one day with a belly bulging with his eggs? It seemed almost too good to be true, but life had a way of seeming that way, if you were willing to take opportunities as they came. Leaning down to grab a mouthful of Val’s scruff in a mating bite and getting no greater reaction than a shudder and a whine from the rattata in response, Flynn took the opportunity that was presented to him, allowing any sense of restraint that had been holding him back to evaporate. --- The nickit, seemingly less intent on toying with her as much as using her as a quick way to get off, had steadily increased his speed. That apparent absence of sadism ought to have been a good thing, but it was difficult to recognize as such when he was slamming himself in and out of her with thrusts powerful enough to drive the air from her lungs. Fluid splattered across her thighs with every in-stroke, consisting primarily of the precum that the fox was pumping into her in a thick, steady stream. Though not entirely. Whatever spirit was watching over her must have had a deranged sense of humour, because Val knew she was making her own contribution to that sticky mess that had coated her from the base of her tail to the insides of her thighs. It was hardly her own choice; with all the pre the nickit was drooling, his thrusts had become smoother, better lubricated, and the constant pain of friction had finally begun to abate, allowing the other sensations that came with being penetrated to take precedence. Val wondered if she didn’t prefer the earlier agony more. She still had to deal with all the same pain of his claws and his heavy body slamming into hers; the only difference was now she had to deal with a faint yet distinctly present feeling of pleasure in her gut, like a spark that refused to be extinguished, only burning brighter and hotter with every one of the nickit’s thrusts. Wet shlicking sounds accompanied his every motion, indecent to hear coming from her own body, and the scent of sex had steadily increased until it was sure the area would be left reeking of it—to say nothing of herself. The scent of her own femininity was present in that miasma, just barely discernible through the fog of nickit musk that suffused the air around them. That blend of scents seemed to stand as a proclamation of what she most dearly wanted to reject: they were [i]mating.[/i] This horrible monster had pounced on her, pinned her down, taken her against her will, and she couldn’t even stop her body from reacting to it like he was a loving mate. Every time the nickit would bottom out in her, she could feel that bulge at the base of his cock slam against the quickly swelling lips of her pussy, which brought to mind a very pressing concern: was he going to try shoving that inside her? She didn’t even know what it was. Couldn’t possibly have known, with the anatomical differences between their two species being as stark as they were. Except, of course, she did know—now, now that it was all over and she’d come back here yet again. Perhaps not by name, but after having lived and relived this moment a hundred times before, she certainly knew it by function. But the contrivances of the nightmare meant that she could learn the fact anew every night, even as she felt the anticipation and dread that sprang from the suppressed knowledge of what it was. It felt big, much too big for her to take. Surely he understood that? The way his fangs gripped tighter around the back of her neck and he threw his weight into hers with even greater force, as if he could just jam it in her with brute force, suggested he did not. But her body couldn’t handle it, her folds stinging powerfully every time he slammed that [i]thing[/i] against them. He had to feel that it couldn’t fit; the incompatibility had to be obvious. But if it was, the nickit showed no signs of realising it. Instead, he let out a low growl that rolled through the jaws gripped around her neck and reverberated in her own throat. He clipped his thrusts, letting them become short, powerful things that battered his knot against her entrance. And, as if out of a need to match, there was a mirroring sensation coming from deeper inside of her as the head of the nickit’s cock glanced against her cervix, sending a shock through her core that had her jolting stiff beneath him. It was profoundly intense, but not purely painful. How deep had he gone that he was able to draw a reaction like that out of her? It was awful. She wanted him out. Yet when he brought his hips slapping against hers and slid against that spot inside of her again, her body clamped down, as if trying to keep him inside. That gripping was a reaction that only made the nickit’s presence inside Val feel that much worse, her sensitive insides failing to maintain a hold on him and instead getting dragged along by the unrelenting strength of his thrusts. Val shook from the pain of his claws in her back, from fear of that knot still trying to muscle its way into her, and from frustration at the pleasure her body couldn’t help but feel in spite of those things. Val suddenly realised she could speak. There was no rationale as to why then or how she knew, she simply knew. Her voice was faint and weak, but it was still more than the muteness her dreams typically offered her. She used the opportunity to beg, plead with the nickit, try to make him understand that there was no possible way she could handle what he was trying to force into her. She’d even kept herself from asking him to stop outright, since there was no hope he’d listen to such a demand—though as her words were interrupted by a whining moan, that omission might’ve appeared less a matter of restraint and more of enjoyment. The thought that she might look or sound as if she liked what was happening to her, that her only complaint laid in getting knotted and not everything the nickit had done to her from the moment he tackled her to the ground, made Val sick to her stomach. It made her want to scream, but even if she had the capability to, she couldn’t. Not if she hoped to pursue that slim hope of being listened to at all. But unsurprisingly, that wild hope of compassion from the nickit would prove to be misplaced. He didn’t heed her words and ease off, nor did he laugh at her attempts to convince him, like some sort of sadist drinking in her pain. He simply ignored them, paying them a lack of attention that could be equally attributed to a mindless, bestial nature as it could to intelligence that simply viewed her as unworthy of consideration. Whatever the case, the end result was the same: to this nickit, she was nothing more than a hole to fuck, and her words would fall on deaf ears. His thrusts grew even shorter and harder as he dropped all pretense of regular fucking and focused entirely on trying to work his knot into her. In spite of Val’s surety that there was no way he’d be able to fit inside her, she could feel his efforts starting to have an effect. Fatigued muscles were beaten into submission, giving way one at a time under the nickit’s onslaught. Val’s whining and whimpering was a constant, kept from becoming anything more forceful not from any attempt at suppression on her part, but from an inability to vocalize. Her brief moment of speech seemed a fluke; now, between the crushing weight of nickit above and the silence that suffused her dreams, there was no hope of raising protest. She was choked by her own impotence. It reached its peak alongside a feeling of utter defeat and futility when, with a buck of his hips, the nickit slammed his knot against Val’s entrance the same as he’d done so many times before—the only difference being that this time, she could feel herself start to give way and stretch wide to allow him entry. The size of that huge fist of a knot put everything she’d experienced up to that point to shame. Her eyes bulged out of her skull at the feel of it—or more particularly, at the fact that her body could even begin to take it, in clear contradiction of everything she’d pleaded and begged before. Yet she’d been correct; she [i]wouldn’t[/i] have been able to take anything like that, prior to the nickit, but he’d done well in brutalizing her until her body had been forced to. He’d broken her in. The idea that she could be moulded in such a way made her feel sick beyond her stomach, a sort of nausea of the soul. The more prominent sensations of pain and fullness as she tried to accommodate that knot sank it beneath her attention, but it would prove to be the feeling that would persist long after the nickit had left her lying in a used heap on the forest floor. Val grit her teeth and tensed what muscles she still could, bracing herself as the nickit continued pushing inside until his knot rested halfway inside her. Stretched around its widest point, she was caught in the grip of the most intense sensations thus far, the pain of her insides being pried so far apart mingling with other, more comfortable feelings—ones that Val found just as undesirable, anger and disgust flaring up at that familiar feeling winding up in her loins. But it was something just as impossible to resist as everything else the nickit had forced upon her. She could feel the head of his cock pressing flush against the entrance to her womb, adding yet more discomfort to the situation, more stimulation that left her writhing in a mix of pain and pleasure which had her claws digging furrows into the dirt. It made her want to kick and thrash, but the fox’s body held her down tight. Thinning out towards the root of his cock, the nickit’s knot was slipping inside her with less and less resistance, yet that decrease was being compensated for by the steadily increasing pressure felt against her cervix. If there was ever any indication that their two species weren’t meant to be paired together, this had to be it; he could barely even fit inside her, predator and prey as incompatible with each other as the names would imply. Yet he seemed intent on overcoming that incompatibility and bringing his violation of her to its foregone conclusion. He kept pushing, hips glued to hers and muscles working to force his knot past that last bit of resistance she was putting up so he could feel her wrapped around his cock in its entirety. The thought that he might shove right through into her womb in the attempt occurred to Val, and if she could’ve cringed any harder than she already was, she would’ve. Thankfully, she was spared such a fate and all the shrieking pain that would’ve no doubt accompanied it, though the nickit certainly flirted with the idea. The pointed head of his cock was wedged right against her cervix, and in spite of how small a part of her it might’ve been, she was acutely aware of the way he was squishing up against it. She couldn’t help but squirm at the feel of the nickit filling her so deeply and utterly, though such a reaction only served to worsen the situation. The slightest motion from either of them kicked up a firestorm of sensation in her gut, nerves never before touched lighting up in a frenzy, signalling pain and pleasure at once out of sheer confusion at how to react to such stimulation. At last, her dream sounds fell in line with the sounds she’d made that night in the waking world: nothing more than choking gasps, all her screams and cries robbed from her by the strangling pain of that nickit’s cock having successfully invaded her on a level deeper than any other. A relative silence had fallen that was broken only by breath, hers struggling to be drawn, the nickit’s being comprised of short, quick pants. Then, as the nickit forced his knot home with a shove, that silence was broken. A ragged wail ripped itself free from Val’s throat, undercut by a growl of pleasure from the nickit above as the rattata’s insides clamped down around him like a vice, a squeeze tighter than any that’d come before it as if she were welcoming his knot’s arrival. She came, harder than she ever had on any lonely night crouched in whatever forest hideaway, uncountable instances of masturbation that all paled in comparison to the real thing. Her body shook and seized from it, her vision unfocused, she could feel herself drenching the balls now resting against her body with her own juices. They dripped audibly to the ground below, tangible evidence of physical pleasure, a few drops of fluid that seemed so much more significant than a maelstrom of mental agony. It was only a few moments. Overwhelmingly intense moments, but moments nonetheless, then it was over. Brought to her peak at her lowest point, stripped of her own volition, made into less of a pokémon and more of a puppet, and left with only the aftershocks of that unwilling pleasure to distract her from the fact. Or perhaps not, for as Val realised when she felt that knot start to grow, it wasn’t over yet. Her eyes bugged out of her head in surprise as it started swelling up inside of her, working busily in an effort to tie them together. Just behind the lips of her pussy, her insides were stretched yet wider until her breaking point threatened to make itself known. Any chance of squirming her way off of the nickit’s cock that she might’ve possessed had been well and snuffed out. Val couldn’t help but clench tighter around him in response, an instinctual reaction that did nothing but help her feel just how much larger he was getting, that knot ballooning outwards until it seemed to take up her entire world. It was appreciated by the nickit, if nothing else, and he started humping at her with almost ridiculously short thrusts, the only kind of motion his swollen knot would permit. It was enough for Val to feel his whole shaft shifting inside of her, from the great bulge at the base of it rolling just behind her entrance to the head pushing and prodding against her cervix. The physicality of it was so intense in comparison to her usual nightmares that, for a moment, Val wondered if she hadn’t been flung back in time to when it’d all really happened. Consciousness seemed close enough to seize, like staring up at light glittering off the surface of a lake. But she made no move for it. Be it from exhaustion or the simple, paradoxical need for the traumatized to retraumatize themselves, she let herself slip back down into deep sleep and the horrors that always accompanied it. --- Flynn grinned and panted from his position over Val’s back, his hot breath washing over the back of the rattata’s head and making her ears twitch. He was right in the thick of it; pounded the rodent for all she was worth and then some, and now he had his knot locked tight inside her. He humped up against her with small motions so he could feel it grinding against the squeezing tightness of her walls. Fuck if she wasn’t tight. Sure, zorua were a bit bigger than rattata, but he was still blown away by the way she [i]clenched[/i] around him. Couldn’t have done better if she was trying, and judging by the painful grimace she’d had on her face the whole time he’d been using her, Flynn doubted that she was trying anything of the sort. The idea had even occurred to him, as wild as it was, that he might’ve somehow worked his way into her dreams. Like she was having some nightmare about some mysterious zorua giving it to her, unable to escape for the knot tying them together. He snickered silently at the thought. Well, the memory of that would be another something to leave her with on top of everything else. But at that moment, he was more concerned with the everything else; the way she was clamped down on him and practically wringing his cock meant that it wouldn’t be long before he was pumping her full. Flynn doubted that she’d be appreciative of it when she woke up, but she ought to; carrying a load of his eggs was probably the only real purpose a rodent like her could serve. Well, one of two purposes. But Flynn wasn’t particularly hungry at the moment. A spasm from the sleeping rattata brought with it a rippling squeeze that rolled up the length of Flynn’s cock, and that was enough to push him over the edge. With a low growl, quickly muffled as he grabbed a fresh hold on the back of Val’s neck, he pressed his hips as flush against the rat’s ass as he could, as if he could somehow sink himself yet deeper into her than he already was. A throb rolled through his shaft, a feeling that seemed to focus most prominently in his knot as a wonderful pulsing, like it was inflating the slightest bit more just to ensure they were tied as tight as possible right before he let loose. And on the next throb, his balls pulling up against his body in preparation for it, he did; heat rushed through him, cum rushing up through his shaft and into Val’s innermost depths with enough strength that Flynn could feel it wash back over him, forced as far down as the beginning of his knot from the pressure. But no further than that. She was plugged up well and good, and not a single drop would escape her until he was ready to tug himself free and make his exit. That fact was doubly confirmed with the next rope of seed that shot out of him, adding more to that steadily increasing amount of cum inside Val. As Flynn laid there over top of her, riding out his orgasm and drooling onto Val’s neck, he fantasized about pumping a fertile female full of his seed until her womb was packed full, her belly sloshing, her knees shaky, and there was positively no way she’d walk away anything but pregnant. The rattata beneath him didn’t factor too much into that fantasy, of course. He’d been picturing a beautiful female zorua, maybe a shiny. But the rat would suffice as a hole to sate his needs with while he thought of better things. Those thoughts added to his bliss while his orgasm rolled on, until it ended with him feeling like he’d drained every last drop he had in him into the rattata’s warm depths. Perhaps he didn’t produce quite as much as he did in his fantasy, but Flynn had been some time without a proper female, and he was sure he’d been [i]very[/i] productive. While it went without saying that ‘very productive’ for a zorua was well and beyond what any male rattata would be able to put out, Flynn felt the urge to see the fruits of his labour for himself. So, releasing his grip on the back of Val’s neck and exchanging it for two paws planted on her back, Flynn reared back and started prying himself free of the grip of her insides. It wasn’t an easy exit—a still-engorged knot and the unrelenting tightness of Val’s cunt made certain of that—but Flynn tackled it with all the same dedication that he had his entry. His cock tugged obscenely at Val’s folds as they clung stubbornly to his knot. Judging by the muted whimpers she was letting out, his going out was proving to be just as unpleasant for her as his going in had been. But in spite of the initial apparent lack of progress, to the point where it seemed like Flynn’s efforts were more effective as torture than anything else, it only took the span of a few seconds for things to pick up. One moment, he was tugging and pulling against muscles that refused to let up; the other, they’d suddenly released as if from exhaustion, and the bulge of his knot was allowed to slip free from the warm, wet walls that had been wrapped around it for so long. It was always something of a shame to give up such pleasure, but there was no time to feel bad about it; once his knot was out, the rest of his shaft was quick to follow. It slid through her loosened passage with ease, alongside a loud shlicking sound as her folds clung to him. Once he was out, Flynn stood up and took a step back, eager to survey the damage. He was not disappointed. Even in the darkness of the log, it was clear that yanking his knot out as he did had left Val gaping slightly, allowing an easy passage for his cum to flow back out. It oozed out of her in a thick tide, forming a small puddle between her legs. Productive, indeed. Maybe his idle fantasies weren’t as outlandish as they seemed, if that was the kind of thing he could pull off with only a rattata for company. Having had his fun and pumped a load into her, though, Flynn was left with the question of what to do next. A ‘mon of a darker temperament might choose to make use of such an easy victim in less savoury ways, though he hardly had the need or inclination to indulge in such things at the moment. A simpler and easier option would be to just turn around and leave, but that was lacking a certain touch. He was in no hurry, so there was no reason he couldn’t cap things off in a proper manner. Flynn stepped forward once again, but not into the same position lying on top of Val that he’d been in before. He kept moving, walking over top of her until he stood with his hindlegs planted astride her shoulders, leaving his cock dangling up above her head. It hung low between his thighs, not having had time to retract into his sheath, still shiny and dripping with mixed fluids. To Flynn, it wouldn’t do to walk away from having potentially bred someone without leaving something behind to make his presence known—something more uniquely identifiable as him than the eggs, that was. It was a matter of pride, because for all his greed, selfishness, and wanton cruelty, he was a distinctively proud being. And with the wild being what it was, there was only one manner in which he could make his presence known in a manner universal and unquestionable. He let out a long and lingering sigh, and the moment it finished, a stream of golden fluid started to pour out of the tip of his cock. It wasn’t often that he tried to piss while fully out of his sheath, but when he did, there was always a kind of satisfaction to it that he never found elsewhere. Probably by association; he only ever did it when there was something—or rather, someone—that he needed to mark, for precisely the same reason he was doing it now. And that was what this was: marking. Typically a territory thing, but he’d been around long enough that he’d encountered not just places, but [i]females[/i] who absolutely reeked of the mark of another male. The message was just as clear as if the scent had been sprayed across the trunk of a tree, and he’d steered clear of them. But he remembered the idea. His claim probably wouldn’t be very respected by any other pokémon. Zorua weren’t especially powerful compared to some of the beasts stalking the woods, mightyena or arcanine or any other number of species. On top of that, given their niche of illusion, the idea of a zorua trying to stake a claim that relied on being identifiable was inherently ridiculous. But that was all well and good, because whatever the reactions of those who encountered her afterwards, Flynn could be certain that his actions would stick in the mind of the one who he most wanted it to: the rattata herself. Flynn looked down at her, watching the way her muzzle wrinkled and her face contorted as his piss drenched the fur between her ears, rolling down the sides of her head in so many golden rivulets. One of her paws, movements slow and leaden with sleep, reached up to wipe it off of her snout, only succeeding in smearing it across her fur before it was replaced by more of the same. The zorua chuckled, taking a step back so that he could spray down her back as well, ensuring that he drenched the whole of her as best he could. Unplanned as the whole night’s events might’ve been, he was lucky enough to have stumbled into things with a rather full bladder; Flynn was going to have her utterly dripping with his urine by the time he was through, and with her asleep as she was, there’d be the whole night ahead for it to dry and let the smell of it seep into her fur. Maybe she’d go out to the river in the morning and try to scrub herself clean, but by then, it’d be altogether too late. She might be able to get rid of the most pungent of the smell, but anyone who got close enough would still be able to detect the subtler, lingering hints of his mark for days to come. Weeks, even. Weeks of never being able to fully cleanse herself of his influence, of every pokémon she passed by knowing just who had bred her. Thoughts along those lines kept Flynn’s mind occupied and his cock dangling free from his sheath while he continued to unload himself over Val, having worked his way down to the end of her back, right where her tail started. Her fur soaked up as much as it could, but much of it rolled right off her and formed a puddle below. She’d have to sleep in it the whole night, wallow in it. Flynn found the idea amusing. As luck would have it, Flynn only found himself running low once he’d finished soaking the last bit of dry fur on Val’s hindlegs. A few brief spurts to finish off, and he was done, drained dry for the second time that night. Steaming warm as it might’ve been coming out, Flynn could tell that what he’d drenched the rattata with was already starting to cool in the chill air of the night; she had started to shiver, huddling up on herself in an effort to retain heat. Ah, well. The sun was coming soon enough, Flynn was sure that she’d dry out fine. Satisfied and without reason to linger, he turned and trotted back towards the mouth of the log, eager to see what other surprises the night held in store in its final hours. Leaving Val to lie and twist in dreams that were more cognizant of what had happened than her conscious mind would ever realise. --- Val’s nightmares petered out into nothing after awhile, as they had a tendency to do, as if her brain had exhausted itself acting out the same dramas that it held night after night. That half of the night was comprised of nothing but dreamless oblivion, devoid of all thought or sensation except for a dim awareness of cold—a welcome reprieve. Time was impossible to track, but it passed until the day was gone and night had fallen once again, her waking hours. When she cracked her eyes, the first thing she felt was the matted fur of her cheeks. That wasn’t an unusual sensation for her; she was no stranger to crying in her sleep. What was unusual was the same sensation encompassing the entirety of her head, and even her body. An odd clumping and slight griminess, as if she’d been dipped in something dreadful and set out to dry. The rest of it came dropping into her awareness one by one after that, like her senses were turning on in sequence. The aching soreness that suffused her whole body, the painful feeling of claw marks on her back and what felt like bite marks on the back of her neck. Then, like a powerful wave washing over her, the stink of zorua. Even beyond what she recognized as the stench of dried piss, that was the most prominent smell, clinging to every inch of her like she’d been rolling in a pile of the awful things all night. Which, as she became aware of just how raw she felt in her most sensitive area, may not have been an inaccurate guess. Val tried to stand up. Her legs shook as she put weight on them, a trickle of what she had no doubt was anything but the cum of the pokémon who’d raped her ran down the inside of her thigh, and she dropped back down flat on her belly. Val’s breath shuddered, her chest heaved, but her eyes remained dry. Everything that she’d had to give, she’d given while in the clutches of her dreams, such that she didn’t even have a tear to shed now that reality had reared its ugly head and struck her low once again. She realised there was another lesson to be had from this. She wondered how many nights it’d take her to learn it.