Slide Sideways to Den's POV

Den was by nature a somewhat anxious dragon. One of his greatest fears in life was that other people would think he was 'weird' or 'bad', and his most heartfelt wish was to be helpful so that everyone would like him and approve of him. After a lot of training, and then a rough initiation, he had finally been accepted as a full-fledged soldier. It was a good job, especially for someone like him – the heat-of-the-moment child of a young unmated Robust who hadn't had the money to raise a child and couldn't get a mate once he was burdened with another man's offspring. In desperation Den's young father had begged Den's uncle to take the child, and he had reluctantly agreed, wanting to give his brother a second chance and not have his life ruined by one mistake. So Den grew up with his uncle and his uncle's mate and their two children. And Den's father did eventually find a mate, but only after moving to a different Robust city, after which Den saw him only once or twice a year when he would come back for a holiday.

Den was loved by his uncle and uncle's-mate, if not pampered quite as much as his cousins; but he was regularly lectured at to not “ruin his life like his father did” by getting pregnant too young and too poor. Desperately eager to please his uncle and escape the stigma of his father's bad judgment, Den vowed fervently that he would never take the risk of getting pregnant until he had a mate and enough money to give a child everything it could possibly need. So Den's teenage anxieties about displeasing his uncle and being disapproved of by the other townspeople often centered around the idea of him getting pregnant. And now that he was an adult, just barely, he had a job where becoming pregnant was forbidden. As officers frequently shouted at the new recruits, “There's no damn use for a pregnant soldier!”

Now, there is a strange relationship between anxiety and desire. It is almost intolerable to be always worrying about the same thing; one's subconscious mind does not want to be perpetually worried, it wants to find a solution to the problem. The subconscious is not logical; it does not come up with practical plans like figuring out how much money would be 'enough' to afford a child and calculating how many months of a soldier's pay would be enough to earn that amount, or what sort of job one could plan to switch to that did not forbid its practitioners from getting pregnant. No, the subconscious doesn't understand numbers or contingency plans, it only understands emotions. Most of the soldiers dealt with the prohibition on pregnancy by telling each other that being sexually submissive was not 'cool' – it was a 'victory' to convince another dragon to bear your child, and a sign of a weak fighting spirit to want to 'surrender' to bearing someone else's child. People often subconsciously protect themselves against milder fears of being tempted into trouble by deciding that the cause of the fear is disgusting and only sensible to avoid.

But Den yearned to be helpful, and what is a purer expression of helpfulness than nurturing a new life within oneself and lovingly caring for a child? And his fear of becoming pregnant was more deep-seated than that of his fellow soldiers. They were only concerned about the possibility of losing their jobs; Den was concerned about losing his whole place in life, proving to his uncle that he hadn't been worth the effort and care his uncle had taken in raising him and the pride his uncle had in his becoming a soldier. If one's subconscious can't nullify a dangerous temptation by surrounding it with disgust, it has only one other option – to go in the opposite direction and make the temptation seem extremely, erotically, desirable so the person will do it and get it over with, and consequently not have to be afraid of it any more. In a more **** form this type of desire is called Thanatos, which is the desire to die and thereby escape all the fears and pains of living. Becoming pregnant, then, was almost the equivalent of dying in Den's mind, a **** which he feared because it would 'ruin his life', but also a **** which he longed for because the very nature of pregnancy promised birth, a spiritual rebirth into a more perfect life where Den could live out his dream of being helpful and nurturing, free of unnatural, soul-cutting restrictions.

So Den lived on a knife's edge between fear and longing. Deep down he knew that longing would eventually win; and to help him prepare to face that terrifying moment when everything would change, he fantasized about it. He imagined asking Mairr to make him pregnant, but he knew he wouldn't have the courage to ask, and Mairr would refuse anyway because Mairr didn't love him. Which was a bit disappointing, because everyone wants to be loved, but good because Den didn't love Mairr either, and Den thought it would be terrible to be loved by someone and have to refuse them because you didn't love them back – it would be the total opposite of being helpful because you would have to hurt them with your rejection, but you wouldn't have any choice because you couldn't tell someone you loved them if you didn't, and you couldn't make yourself love someone. But more to the point, the unrealism of Mairr getting Den pregnant made that fantasy unappealing to him.

He tried imagining going out to a bar when he was in heat, and letting anyone interested have a go at him; but again, he knew he would never be that wanton, and even found the idea a bit insulting, because an important part of his self-image was loyalty; you could never be truly helpful to someone without being loyal to them.

So then, although he was afraid of the idea because it was taboo, he imagined being **** – tied up and forcibly impregnated by a gang of Graciles. This idea appealed to him – the idea that it would be the Graciles' fault he got pregnant, while he was only being a good little dragon, and he also found very appealing the vision of the pregnant Gracile, belly bulging with fertility, slowly walking toward him to do the deed... this fantasy was Den's guilty pleasure, especially now that he has his own room in the barracks rather than sharing a room with his two cousins.

But the lack of responsibility which made the **** fantasy feel safe was also what made it feel ultimately unfulfilling. It would be cheating. The child wouldn't be his, its Gracile parents would take the egg back after it was laid. Because the pregnancy had been **** upon him he might, horrifying thought, be expected afterwards to go back to this barren, restricted life. To try to make this fantasy more fullfilling he added small refinements to it over time – he was taken to live with the Graciles, implanted with a new egg as soon as the first one was laid, implanted with several eggs, making his belly so large he couldn't possibly run away but could only lay in a nest and let the Graciles do whatever they wished with him; but still the fantasy was ultimately unsatisfying because it was the 'crime' of deciding to become pregnant which was the truly frightening thing, and also because he longed to raise children, not carry an egg for four months only to have it taken back to its rightful parents.

Then one day some of Den's wilder fellow soldiers came back from a heat house whispering gossip about something shocking but erotic they had seen. (A heat house was where you could go to hire a professional heat companion if you didn't have a lover or a fuckbuddy you could trust to not get you pregnant, or had the money to hire someone more attractive than you could win by normal methods). Bearing a Gracile's child was taboo among the Robusts, but there was one thing more taboo still – bearing your own child.

The Graciles and Robusts were hermaphrodites, and their anatomy was arranged such that a flexible dragon could put his own cock in his own pussy. Conceiving a child by impregnating yourself was the worst possible form of ****, so forbidden that if it was even mentioned to children they were only told never ever to do it. Den had never even heard of the idea until his brother-soldiers came back talking about how shocking it had been to watch it happen, and arguing about whether it had been hot or just disturbing. Fucking oneself was so taboo it was not to be done even by dragons who weren't in heat, although it would technically be safe then – but the act was rumored to be intensely pleasurable and addictive, such that if one ever tried it it would be almost impossible to refrain from doing it when they were in heat. But that was exactly what the soldiers has just watched – a companion, not in heat of course, put on a show by beginning to masturbate and then finally, sensually, coupling with himself.

Den could not get the idea out of his mind – it seemed to burn there with the compelling throb of heat-desire, even though Den was in the middle of his cycle and not due to come into heat for another week and a half. He walked around with a hardon and a shamed blush the rest of the day, and such a persistent trickle of moisture between his legs that he worried it would soak right through the crotch of his uniform and be visible to everyone.

When his duties were finally all taken care of he was eager to hide from everyone in his room, only to realize that this left him alone in the dark with an achingly stiff prick and nothing to distract him from his new obsession. He tried to take refuge in his usual fantasies, but they seemed pale and dull in comparison with this new erotic image. He tried to laugh at the idea, telling himself that he probably wasn't even flexible enough to do it, if he tried he'd only end up looking stupid, and maybe even pulling a muscle. This was a reassuring thought – dangerously so. He thought that if he just proved he wasn't flexible enough he could forget about it.

So he tentatively tried to curl himself to bring the weeping red head of his cock to the even wetter mouth of his cunt. But he didn't know quite what the proper position was, and at first his dick far overshot the mark, getting wedged against his belly. He hitched his hips trying to correct his position... and corrected it a little too well, as this time his throbbing cock hit the mark and slid halfway into him. He gasped at the stunning double sensation of a hot wet tunnel clutching his shaft and a hard fat shaft shoving its way into his pussy, and an instinct faster than thought drove him to slam his shaft home so that he was completely filling and filled.

Den's thoughts ran together in a confused blur of “OhshitI'mfuckingmyselfIshouldnotbedoingthisitfeelssodamngood...” He tried to withdraw his cock, only to gasp at the sensation and involuntarily plunge it back in, which felt even better. He moaned aloud, his usual nervousness that the other soldiers might hear him driven completely out of his mind by the waves of pleasure.

"Oh my god... just a little more. I'm gonna cum- no wait! I can't cum, I can't get pregnant, I just can't...!" And, knowing that the time really wasn't right, that he just wasn't ready to take that last step off the edge of the cliff, that he simply couldn't cum now... well, he couldn't. He was trembling on the edge of orgasm, but just couldn't let himself cum – until in frustration he ripped his cock out of his cunt, stuffed one hand in his hungry hole and fisted his painfully hard prick with the other, and with two strokes he clenched around his fingers and shot all over his belly, the hardest he had ever cum in his life. He was too dazed afterwards to form a coherent thought – but somewhere deep down he was eminently satisfied to have come closer to the edge than he ever had before and escaped unscathed. And wrapped in that satisfaction, he fell solidly asleep.

So that was how Den acquired a new favorite masturbation technique – fucking himself until he couldn't take it any more because he couldn't permit himself to take that final step, then pulling out and wringing an explosive climax from himself. Because as hard as he tried not to do it again, he couldn't resist. He reasoned that it wasn't that dangerous as long as he wasn't in heat. As scared of getting pregnant as he always was in the heat of the moment, logically he knew that he wasn't fertile when he wasn't in heat. After all, he had let Mairr top him and cum in him lots of times when he wasn't in heat. Den preferred being the one getting fucked to being the one doing the fucking while Mairr didn't care, so they usually did it with Den on the bottom except when it was dangerous because he was due to go into heat or was already in heat. Den trusted Mairr and relied on him to keep Den from doing anything stupid in the 'heat' of the moment because Den knew he couldn't trust his own judgment then.

But, Den also told himself firmly that when he was due to go into heat he had to go see Mairr and distract himself by covering Mairr with kisses and burying himself in Mairr's hot hole... because Den didn't dare spend an hour alone while he was in heat. In that sea of lust and hormones it would be way to easy to forget the danger, to just do what he wanted so badly to do and let his fertile seed escape, let it pour out and fill his lonely womb. So, when Den's next heat cycle inexorably arrived, he was even more prompt (but also more apprehensive) than usual in notifying his captain that he was going on heat leave and setting off to find Mairr.