Slide Sideways to Den's POV

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

Den was loved by her aunt and aunt's-mate, if not pampered quite as much as her cousins; but she was regularly lectured at to not “ruin her life like her mother did” by getting pregnant too young and too poor. Desperately eager to please her uncle and escape the stigma of her father's bad judgment, Den vowed fervently that she would never take the risk of getting pregnant until she had a mate and enough money to give a child everything it could possibly need. So Den's teenage anxieties about displeasing her uncle and being disapproved of by the other townspeople often centered around the idea of her getting pregnant. And now that she was an adult, just barely, she 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 her fear of becoming pregnant was more deep-seated than that of her fellow soldiers. They were only concerned about the possibility of losing their jobs; Den was concerned about losing her whole place in life, proving to her aunt that she hadn't been worth the effort and care her aunt had taken in raising her and the pride her aunt had in her 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 she feared because it would 'ruin her life', but also a **** which she longed for because the very nature of pregnancy promised birth, a spiritual rebirth into a more perfect life where Den could live out her 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 she knew that longing would eventually win; and to help her prepare to face that terrifying moment when everything would change, she fantasized about it. She imagined asking Mairr to make her pregnant, but she knew she wouldn't have the courage to ask, and Mairr would refuse anyway because Mairr didn't love her. 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 her.

She tried imagining going out to a bar when she was in heat, and letting anyone interested have a go at her; but again, she knew she would never be that wanton, and even found the idea a bit insulting, because an important part of her self-image was loyalty - you can't truly be helpful to someone without being loyal to them.

So then, although she was afraid of the idea because it was taboo, she imagined being **** – tied up and forcibly impregnated by a gang of Graciles. This idea appealed to her – the idea that it would be the Graciles' fault she got pregnant, while she was only being a good little dragon, and she also found very appealing the vision of the pregnant Gracile, belly bulging with fertility, slowly walking toward her to do the deed... this fantasy was Den's guilty pleasure, especially now that she has her own room in the barracks rather than sharing a room with her 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 hers, its Gracile parents would take the egg back after it was laid. Because the pregnancy had been **** upon her she might, horrifying thought, be expected afterward to go back to this barren, restricted life. To try to make this fantasy more fullfilling she added small refinements to it over time – she 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 her belly so large she couldn't possibly run away but could only lay in a nest and let the Graciles do whatever they wished with her; 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 she 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 her own cock in her 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 her sister-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 heat companion, not in heat of course, put on a show by beginning to masturbate and then finally, sensually, coupling with herself.

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

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

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

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

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

So that was how Den acquired a new favorite masturbation technique – fucking herself until she couldn't take it any more because she couldn't permit herself to take that final step, then pulling out and wringing an explosive climax from herself. Because as hard as she tried not to do it again, she couldn't resist. She reasoned that it wasn't that dangerous as long as she wasn't in heat. As scared of getting pregnant as she always was in the heat of the moment, logically she knew that she wasn't fertile when she wasn't in heat. After all, she had let Mairr top her and cum in her lots of times when she 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 she was due to go into heat or was already in heat. Den trusted Mairr and relied on her to keep Den from doing anything stupid in the 'heat' of the moment because Den knew she couldn't trust her own judgment then.

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