Shire's Grove - 1. Chapter 1

Anselm didn’t want to leave his bed this morning. Summer vacation had just begun, yet his body was feeling absolutely miserable. It was getting harder to breathe and he had to resort to using his mouth to get additional air into his lungs. His small body was quaking with aches and pain. His mother couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her fourteen year old son. He knew what was wrong however, and part of him was terrified of even asking for the cure.

“Come on Ans, you gotta be a Choir boy.” A friend of his had joked with him a week back. “I mean look at you, you haven’t hit puberty at all man. You’re the shortest kid in class.”

They had been on the bus back home from school at the time. Anselm’s curly strawberry blond head slumped downward at that. His mass of unruly curly locks concealed a lot of his facial features as he stared at the Bus’s floor beneath him. He had been getting teased more and more lately at the prospect of him not being a normal human. Of him potentially being a ‘Choir Boy’, the derogatory term for the subspecies of human called Orchestrals.

“I’d rather be dead.” Anselm had responded sullenly. “It wouldn’t be so bad if I would be a Conductor or something, but that ships sailed. There’s no dignity in being an Orchestral Kyle, you just don’t get it.”

“What’s so bad about being an Orchestral? Have you seen what they can do in the Games? Their magic powers are amazing! Plus their voices when they use those powers are amazing as well! Hell I have an Orchestral playlist I listen to all the time.”

Kyle shoved his smaller friend at the time a bit more forcefully to get him out of his funk. The taller tanned boy was one of the few who even talked to Anselm kindly anymore in school, and it had damaged his reputation as a popular kid. He was quite tall and good looking, and he was almost always being hounded to join various sports clubs for his physique. Yet he kept hanging around Anselm, which started raising questions about their relationship.

Kyle didn’t care though. He was trying to get his friend to see things in a different light. “You need to go out more man. You can’t just sit around to find out if you are an Orchestral or not. You know what happens if you aren’t awakened right? It was even covered in health class dude.”

“I don’t care anymore. I just… Why can’t I just be normal and like women? Why do I have to be like this? Not even a Conductor, but some bottom of the totem pole Choir Boy.”

Right now he was experiencing all the symptoms he had learned in health class. The symptoms of what happened to an Orchestral that wasn’t awakened in time. He knew from reading those sections in his class textbook over and over next to his laptop that he didn’t have a lot of time left. Within a day or so he’d probably just fade off and never wake up again. He drearily thought with a pang of fear that he didn’t want that to happen, but the stigma associated with being an Orchestral by the Hetero world was just too strong for him to reach out for help.

Downstairs, the doorbell began to ring wildly. Anselm’s mother who had been oblivious to this, merely thinking her son was sick with some flu, wondered what could possibly be ringing her doorbell so earnestly this morning while she had been making breakfast.

“Oh hi Kyle!” His mother had said opening the door, “I’m sorry but Anselm isn’t feeling to we-HEY where do you think you are going.”

“No time to really talk ma’am, but your son is an Orchestral and I can’t put off awakening him any longer. Whether he wants to awaken or not I can’t let him die like this!”

“Wh-what hold on, repeat that!? My son is a what?!”

“Talk later ma’am! Right now I got to get to his room. Please don’t interrupt if at all possible!”

“Ho-hold on just a minute!”

Kyle moved with long strides and a determined look on his face as he headed up the stairs directly towards his friend’s room. He had waited too long. He knew his friend was hurting at the prospect of being an Orchestral. He didn’t want to give up his independence like that. However Kyle simply couldn’t sit back and let his friend die if he knew he could do something to save him.

His mother had put some of those poisonous thoughts into his head about how bad Choir boys were, but that wasn’t going to matter. Once he was awakened he’d be under the care of his conductor, not his parents. It was tradition and law and had been that way since history had been recorded. They always had different names over the centuries, but regardless of the traditions and lore around it the concept was always the same.

There were hetero humans, the ones who comprised the vast majority of society and intermingled with the opposite sex. They did not have magic and usually ran the day to day goings on in the world. Then there were the Conductors and Orchestrals, sometimes referred to as Wizards and Familiars, Alpha’s and Omegas, and other similar delineations. These were a subspecies of human which normally were birthed among their own kind and lived in their own pocket societies among the greater hetero world. However it was not unheard of for a conductor or Orchestral to still be born in the hetero world. Though the men and women of that world generally loved the spectacle of an Orchestral performance and appreciated the firepower Conductors and Orchestrals could provide to national defense, they had very skewed perceptions on the relationships between this subspecies of human.

Perceptions that unfortunately wormed their way into the mind of Anselm and was convincing him to make a very terrible mistake. Kyle could feel Anselm’s presence more and more forcefully as he got closer to the door. He must be stewing in so much untapped magical power right then. He tried to open the door but it was locked. He didn’t have time to get Anselm’s mother to open it up. As far as he knew he didn’t need to actually see his strawberry blond haired friend yet, just get his attention.

“Anselm! This is your conductor! Start humming to get this door open!”

“K-kyle?” Anselm rose his head up groggily, he had heard the order coming from kyle. It had taken a moment for it to set in, but when it did he felt an involuntary noise vibrating his throat that made his head flop back into his pillow and his back arch slightly. A strange mixture of relief and ever growing anxiety gripped him as some of his fever seemed to lessen with the strangely echoing note emanating from his throat. Kyle heard the door unlock with a click and open itself of its own accord as he stepped inside and shut it tight. Now that he could see Anselm he knew he had come just in the nick of time. He looked so haggard, so feverish, his eyes filled with fear for so many different reasons right then.

Kyle raised his hand and instinctively began to gesture with it. He had been training in secret on the various conductor gestures since he had figured out he was one. He would have moved into the gated community down the road right away if he hadn’t also figured out that his friend was an Orchestral. He had hung back, biding his time and waiting for his friend to actually say he wanted to be awakened before he made his move. Yet he never did. Now that he was here in the room though, he could tell Anselm truly did not want to die, he was just very scared.

The door closed and magically locked itself quite tightly, sealing off both sound and kinetic force from bothering them from that place. Anselm's mother might try to bang on the door and stop him from awakening her son, but with those wards she wasn’t going to be able to do anything but bang on a force field.

He knew that was Anselm's specialty. He had been monitoring his much shorter friends magical aura and talking about it in forums online trying to glean what it could be. They all seemed to think Anselm was an Abjurationist Orchestral, the type of Orchestral that laid down defenses and were the tanks in combat situations. While not the best at combat, they could provide much needed support and draw firepower away from their more nimble but less sturdy Orchestral mates.

“Sing for me Ans, you can do it.” Kyle said in earnest as he continued to make his sweeping gestures. The feverish boy in bed turned his hum into long and mournful notes as he began to sing out words he did not understand. His fingers gripped into his bedsheets and his legs bent beneath his comforter as more of the haunting melody was drawn out of him. Anselm squeezed his eyes shut and tears spilled from his eyes as smaller objects around his room began to rise in the air slowly. Pencils, paper, comic books, socks and shoes, anything under a certain weight limit began to drift listlessly from the ground and slowly swirl around the bed of the mournfully singing boy.

Kyle couldn’t help but admire the beautiful, soulful notes he could draw out of his friend as he coaxed him to warble and sing out his awakening song. It was such a painful yet beautiful song, one filled with fear and longing all at the same time. He had been dreaming of being awakened for some time, but he had been too scared to let it happen in his waking life. His song spoke this and more to Kyle even as heavier objects in the room began to join in the ever rising dance around his bed.

His closet began to rumble with all the clutter inside of it that was banging at it for release. Anselm’s prized laptop had lifted off the table and unplugged itself to join in on the dance rotating in intricate patterns around the lad’s bed. Even his blankets and comforters began to rip themselves from being tucked inside of his bed and drifted up into the slow vortex above the strawberry blond boy as his song grew in greater and greater intensity.

Pain shot through Anselm’s face through a particularly long and powerful word, one that he hung in the air in an almost belting scream as something in his body began to change. He squeezed his eyes so tightly as his body lifted off the bed and began to float in the center of it all. He curled himself into a ball in the air as Kyle continued to conduct his voice out of him. He wanted to scream in pain as something shot out from his tailbone and pressed his pajama pants downwards, before growing out a truly impressive amount of fur on the new prehensile appendage.

A headache that had been growing in intensity gave way to the sensation of two ears growing on top of his head, long and pointed with tufts of strawberry blond fur. It had hurt so much to grow that tail and ears, only making his tears spill out with greater intensity. Yet at the same time those tears were that of relief, because they were finally coaxed out of him. He didn’t have to worry about dying anymore. He didn’t have to worry about whether or not he was a choir boy, an Orchestral, the evidence was right before his very eyes now. Irrefutable.

His eyes opened up to see that Kyle’s own eyes were crying as well. He could tell his friend had been so concerned about him. He hadn’t even known that Kyle was a Conductor. Did he try to tell him? Had Anselm just not been paying attention? Still his heart fluttered, cause he knew what the second part of an awakening entailed. He could already feel a heat growing inside of him that needed release.

Even as things floated in the room, still charged with his magical voice, kyle kicked off the ground and swam through the air like gravity itself had been turned off inside of it and grabbed onto his friend. With only the briefest hesitation he gripped the lad’s head and pulled him into a strong kiss. Anselm hummed into his conductor's mouth even as his back bumped into the wall and his head touched the ceiling of his room. His heart fluttered in panic as his pajama pants were unceremoniously yanked off of him and tossed to the ground, only for the fabric to be caught up into the orbit of small floating objects. His boxers were not far behind them.

Never breaking the kiss, Kyle laced his hands underneath his friend’s now bared legs beneath his knees and pushed them up and outwards to give him better access. He conducted Anselm's hum to undue his jean’s belt buckle and fly and coax out his quite hard shaft. He knew his friend was already lubricated and ready for him, he could smell the sweet scent wafting off of him and relished it so much it made him dig his teeth into Anselm's neck and nibble it in earnest. The lad gasped and his breath hitched at the new sensations even as he felt Kyle’s warm head lining itself up to enter him while they floated pressed against the wall and ceiling.

He bit his lip and let out a whimpering noise of slight protest as the nibbling on his neck grew harder and that far too hot shaft pressed itself so roughly inside of him. The smaller lad’s socked toes curled and he let out an echoing note into the room as he was filled so completely by someone he had known since they were little. Trembling hands gripped and laced into his deeply tanned friends black hair and pressed his face into his neck even further and groaned as he felt Kyle began to move inside of him. Even his bed was dislodged from the ground now as magic from his awakening permeated the room so thoroughly. His new tail, so long and impossibly bushy was twitching wildly behind him as his virgin rosebud was claimed with such eagerness. It hurt, yet at the same time it felt amazing even as he stared dreamily down at the floor of his room from high in the air, pressed ever further up against the ceiling. Kyle ended up needing to kneel on the wall itself to get himself easy enough access to piston his hips like he needed too right then. Anselm’s legs and arms were now firmly wrapped around his friend, embracing the sensation in while his new tail flicked about beneath the both of them.

Anselm flushed such a deep shade of red as his head was tugged forward roughly by his larger friend's tanned hand and let out a whimpering noise as his new and still quite tender animal-like ears were taken into Kyles mouth and nibbled on. His body shuddered at being claimed so passionately, letting out strange words out of his mouth, residual wild magical words from his awakening as his body was pounded into ever harder. He didn’t know what he was saying, but he felt like one of the words he kept singing out was Kyle’s name in whatever language this was.

Kyle gripped his friend's hair and tugged him to the side and dug his teeth into the tender flesh of his neck once again, this time drawing a slight trickle of blood to suck on as he finally climaxed inside of his friend. His Orchestral wasn’t far behind him, his small shaft now spurting his own seed for the first time onto his taller friend's shirt that he hadn’t even seen fit to take off in all of this. The only stripping that Kyle had done was to use his friend's voice to undo his belt buckle and jean’s fly to get his cock out. He hadn’t even taken his shoes off when he had entered the home.

The taller lad couldn’t pull himself out just yet as things began to settle themselves slowly down in the room. He kicked off the ceiling and drifted the two of them downwards onto the bed that had rested back onto the carpeted floor at a slightly off center angle. The two of them alighted onto the bed so lightly as he held onto Anselm who kept his arms and legs clamped around the taller boy so forcefully. His own shaft was going to need a few minutes to get to a point here it could be drawn out of his Orchestral. While they rode off the aftershocks of what they had done, Kyle tongued his friends slightly bleeding neck and kissed it while he admired the new tail that had grown out of the lad.

One could only describe the appendage as something belonging to a very large squirrel. Such was the bushy quality of the strawberry blond fur that twitched and spasmed in the aftershocks of their climax. It was so large that it would likely stick out over Anselm's head when it was at rest, and he’d probably need custom made clothes to accommodate the new appendage. Thankfully such tails were not so uncommon among Orchestrals that they wouldn’t be able to find such clothing in stores geared for him.

Kyle had taken on some changes himself. His human ears had become more pointed and his formerly black eyes had taken on a reddish hue to them. That was on top of his new canines that were larger and sharper than before, and could both draw blood and deliver an aphrodisiac like venom into whomever he bit. His nails had taken on a sharper look to them as well, and were now darker hued than they were before.

The wound he made on Anselm’s neck was now sealed up, though the mark still remained some. However he still wanted to taste the tender flesh of his friend some more. The strawberry blond boy flushed pink as he was pushed back slightly and had one of his arms lifted up into view for Kyle. That tanned hand gripped around Anselm’s smaller wrist lightly and, after the Conductor tenderly pulling back the pajama shirt’s sleeve to his elbow, the smaller boy winced and hissed as he watched Kyle sink his teeth right into his forearm and begin to suckle blood right from his veins. A warm, pleasant feeling replaced the pain of the sharp piercing sensation a minute later as Kyle’s now red eyes looked into his own green pair. Anselm couldn’t pull away since his Conductor’s cock was still firmly erect inside of him, engorged with something called a bulbus glandis, or colloquially known as a knot, which kept them firmly in place till that erection went down.

The strawberry blond lad bit his lip and flushed deeper shades of red as he closed one of his eyes at the sensation in his forearm, not able to take his eyes off of Kyle’s swallowing throat and passionately suckling mouth on his flesh. He didn’t take a lot of blood out of his Orchestral, just enough to feed an almost feral hunger for the magic that resided within his smaller companion. It wasn’t until everything had settled back down in the room and Kyle was licking the wound on Anselm's arm clean and healed that his cock calmed down enough to pull out of the smaller lad.

“Told ya you were a Choir Boy Ans.” Kyle said with a huskier quality to his voice as he tried to calm down his more dominating tendencies that came with being a Conductor. He wanted to control those urges until Anselm got more used to being what he was.

Anselm tried to get his new tail under control behind him, but for the life of him he had no idea how to get the thing to listen to his commands. Both his ears and tail seemed to have a mind of their own as they twitched and moved about, brushing up against his flannel pajama shirt’s back. He couldn’t help but gawk at how huge his own tail was.

“How am I going to sit in chairs with this thing?” He asked in the calming atmosphere. The awkward question coupled with their still excited nerves ended up throwing both lads into a fit of laughter as they hugged onto each other. Anselms laughter took on a sadder quality to it as he hugged Kyle and buried his head into his friend's neck.

“I was so scared. I couldn’t even move or breathe properly before you came in. I thought I was going to die here.”

“You’re safe now.” Kyle said as he patted his friends head. “I’ve been in contact with Shire’s Grove down the road from here. I’ve been holding off moving in until you awakened, but I have a place waiting for us inside there.”

“How long have you known?” Anselm asked quizzically, knowing that arranging such a thing with that gated community must not have been an easy feat.

“Roughly around when I hit puberty two years ago. You actually ended up awakening me by accident when you started humming something on the bus without thinking about it. I’ve had to keep myself hidden for quite awhile. It’s hard to keep these damn fangs up all the time and not drink any magic. I was getting really parched actually.”

“How the heck have you been holding off on feeding for two years?! Isn’t that super unhealthy for Conductors?”

“Ooh yeah,” Kyle said with a tone that belied how hard it had been. Suppressing himself all that time had been brutal. “but it was worth it. I wanted my first to be you.”

Anselm’s face flushed pink and he found himself having to hide himself in the larger teens chest just to wrap his head around that one. “Y-you didn’t have to wait like that. Conductors get a whole group of Orchestrals after a while right? I didn’t need to be the first.”

“Yes you did. I knew it the second I awakened. I’m glad I held out too, cause I don’t think I would have been able to save you had I had been in Shire’s Grove already.”

“Wh-what is my mom going to think?” Anselm thought in some alarm now that his brain wasn’t so lost in the moment like he had been. Kyle laughed dryly at that.

“We don’t have to worry about our parents anymore Ans, I’m an Awakened Conductor and I have you under my care now.” He spoke with some determination in his voice, “The only thing left is the paperwork, and even that they don’t have much say over. They can hem and haw all they like, but it’s not like a hetero relationship. We’re quite literally symbiotically linked together right now. We need each other to be healthy.”

“Strange, I would have thought she’d have been banging on the door wondering what was happening in here.”

“She probably has been.” Kyle said with a smirk, looking at the door, “I used your voice to seal off the door and silence it.”

“Wait, I'm one of those Shield Orchestrals? Oh boy I’m even lamer than I thought I was.” Anselm grumbled. If he had cool attack powers that’d be one thing, but being a support Orchestral was just even worse than being one in the first place. Suddenly the smaller boy let out a hitched noise as he felt his sensitive animal ears get bit by his conductor, making one of his eyes close in protest at the rough treatment.

“Hey!” Anselm said in something of a whine as he pulled back with a shove and looked up at Kyle grumpily, “What was that for?”

“No more badmouthing yourself,” Kyle said smugly, “Every time you do I’m gonna nip you from now on. I’m allowed to do that too, cause I’m your Conductor.” A toothy grin grew on his face as he teased his friend. He had known the lad since they were all the way back in Kindergarten, and he had picked up a very bad habit of admonishing himself and putting himself down that only encouraged people around him to do the same.

Now that he was his Conductor, he could finally do something about it. Anselm’s cheeks grew pink and he found he couldn’t hold the stare with his companion, and that break in eye contact earned him a peck on the cheek from the larger boy, which only made Anselm grumble half heartedly. He wanted to be angry about the nip but he couldn’t help but enjoy the affection he was getting afterwards.

They both enjoyed the calm for the moment, all the while wondering what their life was going to be like from now on.