The Book Between Them by ShamanSquirrel < Submission | Inkbunny, the Furry Art Community

Keywords male 1287388, female 1171425, squirrel 33076, dragoness 14019, book 4822, writing 2280, story progression 2213, story series 2176, relationship 1433

The Book Between Them

A Silvania Story - SY 4529, Late Autumn

~ I ~
He had been writing it for two years.
Not continuously — there were months when the pages sat untouched, when a birth or a journey or simply the accumulated weight of daily life made the project feel like something belonging to another version of himself. But he had returned to it, each time, because the thing it was trying to do still seemed worth doing. Nobody had written it. Nobody was going to write it unless he did.
The title had come early: How to Please Your Dragoness. He had considered something more clinical — A Guide to Furfolk-Dragon Partnership Dynamics, perhaps, or Interspecies Intimacy: Practical Considerations — and had discarded each one as accurate but insufficient. The book was not only clinical. It was, in substantial parts, personal. That was the whole point of it.
It was a guide for furfolk in relationships with mammalian dragons of the Cygnagon lineage, covering the physical, emotional, and social terrain in the specific way that a healer-shaman who had navigated that terrain for almost five years could cover it. It addressed size and strength and the management of physical asymmetry, communication styles that diverged in ways neither party always understood, the particular vulnerabilities of a dragon in anthro form versus feral form, what a dragon's emotional signals looked like to a furfolk observer and what a furfolk's signals looked like to a dragon, how to disagree productively with a partner who could accidentally fold you in half, and a range of other topics he had organized into eleven chapters of which he had completed eight and a half.
He had not told Noraxia about it.
He had intended, at various points, to tell her. He had found, each time, that the conversation was difficult to begin without it sounding like something it wasn't — deceptive, or presumptuous, or embarrassingly earnest. He had kept writing instead, telling himself he would tell her when it was finished, then telling himself he would tell her when chapter nine was done, then running out of chapter-completion milestones and simply not telling her, until the evening he left the manuscript on the kitchen table by accident.

~ II ~
She was reading it when he came back into the kitchen.
He stopped in the doorway.
She turned a page.
He sat down.
She turned another page.
"How long," she said, without looking up, "have you been writing this?"
"Two years," he said. "Approximately."
"Two years."
"It wasn't finished. I was going to tell you when—"
"When what?"
He did not have a satisfactory answer for this and did not offer one.
Noraxia set the manuscript down and looked at him. Her expression looked like it required her to hold several feelings at once without resolving them prematurely. He had learned to wait this expression out rather than attempt to manage it.
"You wrote a book about me," she said.
"About us. About — how we work. For other people in similar situations. There are more of them than you might think. Nobody had written anything useful for—"
"Jukrit."
"Yes."
"I'm not angry about the subject."
"You're angry about the two years of not telling you."
"I'm not angry," she said precisely. "I am — annoyed. There is a distinction."
"Yes," he said. "There is."
She looked at the manuscript again. He watched her read the chapter heading that was currently facing her — chapter four, on the subject of communication asymmetries — and watched her expression move through something that was not quite amusement and not quite recognition and arrived somewhere that contained both.
"It's good," she said.
"Thank you."
"You're wrong about several things."
"I expected that."
"I should be co-authoring this," she said.
He had been hoping she would say it herself rather than him suggesting it. "Yes," he said. "You should."
"And you're not finished."
"Eight and a half chapters. Chapter nine is — proving difficult."
She pulled the manuscript toward her. "Start from the beginning," she said. "I want to read it properly. Then we'll talk about chapter nine."

~ III ~
She read it over three evenings, which was faster than he'd expected and characteristic of Noraxia reading anything she was genuinely engaged with. She was not a margin-writer but she had a system — small folded strips of paper at pages she wanted to return to, of which there were fourteen by the end — and Jukrit tried not to watch the accumulation of them with too much anxiety and largely failed.
On the fourth evening she sat down across from him with the manuscript, the fourteen folded strips, and a quality of readiness that he recognized as her settling into something she intended to take seriously.
"The first three chapters are excellent," she said. "Chapter four needs me. Chapter five is correct but told entirely from one side. Chapters six and seven I have almost no notes on — you got those right, which surprises me a little."
"Thank you," he said, with the careful tone of someone receiving a compliment that came with more to follow.
"Chapter eight is where it begins to go wrong."
"I thought you might say that."
"You've written the section on emotional expression as if the primary challenge is a furfolk learning to read a dragon." She set one hand on the relevant page. "That's not the primary challenge. The primary challenge is mutual. I have spent seven years learning to read you. That process is entirely absent from this chapter, which means the chapter is about half the conversation."
Jukrit sat with this for a moment. "I wrote from the perspective I had."
"Yes. That's why you need a co-author."
"Fair," he said.
"Chapter nine," she said, moving to it, "is proving difficult because you don't know what it's about yet. You've titled it 'When Things Go Wrong' and written four paragraphs and stopped."
"I've been thinking about it for three months."
"You're thinking about it clinically," she said. "Conflict resolution, damage repair, the mechanics of apology. That's not what the chapter is about."
"What is it about?"
"Trust," she said. "It's about what happens when you trust someone who is nothing like you with the parts of yourself that are most specifically yourself. It's about what that costs, and what it returns, and why it's worth the asymmetry." She looked at him. "That's not a clinical subject. That's why you can't write it clinically. It keeps stopping."
He looked at his four paragraphs and the three months they had taken. "Yes," he said. "That's exactly why it keeps stopping."

~ IV ~
They worked on chapter eight first, because it was the most structurally broken and because fixing it would tell them something about how the co-authorship was going to function.
It did not go smoothly, which was itself useful information.
Jukrit's instinct was to add Noraxia's perspective as a second thread running alongside his existing text — her observations in counterpoint to his, a dialogue built into the chapter's architecture. Noraxia's instinct was to pull the whole chapter apart and rebuild it from the center outward, starting with the questions rather than the observations. These were not compatible instincts, and they arrived at this incompatibility on the first evening, with sufficient firmness on both sides that they agreed to leave chapter eight for the night and come back to it.
"You write like a healer," Noraxia said, at the end of the second evening, which had not gone much better.
"I am a healer."
"You organize from the outside in. You observe, categorize, conclude. It's very useful in diagnosis and very limiting in anything that's primarily interior."
"And you write like—"
"Like a dragon," she said. "Yes. From the inside out. The feeling first, the framework built around it." She paused. "These are not incompatible approaches. They are, in fact, complementary. Which is the argument of the whole book, if I understand it correctly."
He looked at her. "Yes," he said. "That's the argument of the whole book."
"Then perhaps," she said, with the tone she used when she had arrived somewhere before him and was being patient about it, "we should write the chapter the way we actually function, rather than arguing about whose method is correct."
The third evening they rewrote chapter eight. It was longer than the original, built from both directions simultaneously, and it was better than anything he had written in the manuscript alone. He knew it immediately, reading it back. She knew it too. Neither of them made a large thing of this.

~ V ~
Lev found the manuscript on the kitchen table on a Saturday morning and picked it up cheerfully, seeming to regard all written objects as potentially interesting.
"What's this?" he said.
Jukrit looked up from his tea. "A book your father is writing."
"About what?"
Jukrit considered the range of accurate answers available to him. "About how to be in a relationship with someone very different from you," he said. "So that both people are happy and neither one gets hurt."
Lev looked at the title. "How to Please Your Dragoness," he read, with the careful precision of a child who had been working hard at reading for several months. He considered this. "Is Noraxia a dragoness?"
"She is."
"Is it hard? Being with someone very different?"
Jukrit looked at his tea. He thought about eight and a half chapters, two years of writing, and three evenings of productive argument over one chapter. He thought about seven years of learning to read a dragon and being read by one in return. He thought about feral form and anthro form and who loved you back across the distance of everything you didn't share.
"Yes," he said. "Sometimes. And worth it."
Lev put the manuscript back down and took a piece of fruit from the bowl on the table. "I think," he said, with consideration, "that if you really want to be with someone, the different parts are what make it interesting. The same parts are just—" He made a dismissive gesture. "The same."
He took his fruit and went to find Tassa.
Jukrit looked at the manuscript. Then he picked up his pen and wrote Lev's observation at the top of the first blank page of chapter nine, and looked at it for a while, and found that it was a better opening than anything he had written in three months.

~ VI ~
Chapter nine came more easily after that.
Not quickly — it was still the most interior thing in the book, and both Jukrit's outside-in instinct and Noraxia's inside-out one had to work harder here than anywhere else to find a shared language for what they were trying to say. But the direction was clear now, and direction was most of what had been missing.
The chapter opened, in its final form, with the observation that the hardest thing about trusting someone unlike you was not the difference itself but the specific vulnerability of handing someone a version of yourself that only existed in relation to them — the you that was only legible to this particular other, who had learned to read it over years of paying close attention. The risk of that was the risk of the whole enterprise. And the return on that risk was what Jukrit had spent two years trying to write a book about and Noraxia had, in three evenings of co-authorship, helped him understand he had been writing around rather than toward.
"I want to add something about the feral form," Noraxia said, reading the draft of the chapter on the fifth evening.
"What about it?"
"When I am feral, I am most myself. Not more myself than in anthro form — both are fully me. I am most readable in my anthro form, to someone who knows how to read me." She paused. "I want to write about what it means that I choose to be that way around you. What it means that you have never given me a reason not to."
He was quiet for a moment. "Yes," he said. "Write that. That belongs in the book."
"It's personal," she said.
"The whole book is personal," he said. "That's the point."
She wrote it. He read it when she finished and did not change a word of it, which was the first time in the co-authorship that he had left anything entirely as she wrote it. She noticed. She did not comment. Some things did not need comment.

~ VII ~
Chapter ten was the last complete chapter he had written, and it concerned the physical dimensions of an interspecies relationship in which one partner was substantially larger and more physically powerful than the other. He had written it carefully, clinically where it needed to be clinical and direct where it needed to be direct, and he had been quietly proud of it.
Noraxia read it, set it down, and said: "You forgot to mention that it's enjoyable."
He looked at her.
"It's very thorough on safety," she said. "It's thorough on communication and on the management of the physical asymmetry. It does not once suggest that any of this is, fundamentally, something that both parties find—" She appeared to be selecting the precise word. "Worthwhile. In a personal sense."
"I thought that was implied."
"It is not implied," she said. "It is a guide. Guides imply nothing. They state."
He looked at the chapter again. "I'll add a section," he said.
"We," she said. "We will add a section."
"We will add a section," he agreed.
The section they added was frank, warm, and specific. The two of them had been navigating the subject together for almost 5 years. When they read it back, Noraxia said it was the best thing in the book. Jukrit thought she was probably right and said so, and she looked at him with an expression that had no name.

~ VIII ~
Chapter eleven remained unwritten, which was as it should be — they had agreed it was the conclusion, and that the conclusion needed to come from both of them in a single voice rather than the interleaved two-voice structure of the rest of the book, and that they were not ready to write it yet.
"We'll know when we're ready," Noraxia said.
"How?"
"We'll have something to say that we don't know how to say yet," she said. "When we know how to say it, that's chapter eleven."
He accepted this. It was, like most things she said about process, more useful than what he would have come up with on his own.
The manuscript sat on the kitchen shelf in the evenings, no longer hiding, their combined handwriting on every page from chapter four onward — his small precise script and her larger more confident one, woven through each other in the margins and the revisions and the passages they had built from both directions simultaneously. Lev's observation still sat at the top of chapter nine's first page, unattributed but present.
Tarvek, next door, was six weeks old and doing what baby Iskret apparently did, which was sleep with conviction and wake with opinions. Mira was growing into the barn with steady confidence, She was a gheval foal who has decided the world is acceptable. Chenar was himself, and Bren was relieved about it, and Darit was visiting twice a week and standing near Mira attentively, since he was a sire who was not precisely sure what his role was yet.
Jukrit sat on the porch one evening and looked at all of it — the household, the catwalk, the whisperwood, the two moons doing what they did every evening without consultation — and thought that chapter eleven was probably about this. About what it looked like, from the outside, when the inside had gone well. About a life that had been built against all probability from the decision to trust someone unlike you.
He was not ready to write it yet.
He would be.

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