As was his habit when the sun was out and the air this pleasant, Beuwen lay on his back, just fitting under the large, old, rock-steady shade tree he leaned against, half-listening to the breeze rustle the branches above him. His belly loomed large under the boughs, full to the brim with what were formally called calves, but which the massive mammaliform dragon affectionately called his booflets. He rubbed his belly lovingly, but gingerly, with his forepaws, as he rested and set his troubles aside for a moment.
The booflets, at least half a dozen of them, moved and stirred inside his belly as he began to nod off. No one knew the exact count. The last time he tried to get one, the ultrasound technician insisted that he couldn’t find equipment big enough to determine for certain. Six was the lower guess, based on the estimated size of one calf and his belly’s total volume. The higher guess was nine or ten. At any rate, it was obvious to anyone looking that the dragon was full to the brim with life growing within, from the pink, veined stretch of his belly to the four pairs of overfilled teats on its surface, to the constant warp and wriggle of his growing beebs.
All this growth meant that all Beuwen ever really wanted to do was sleep and eat: he needed as much energy as he could get, eating for at least seven after all, and couldn’t afford to waste it on something as frivolous as exercise. So, as was habit, he got comfortable under a shade tree and let himself behold the bright blue sky dotted with happy cottony clouds one more time, before he closed them and let himself drift off to a pleasant dreamland for a minute or sixty.
Beuwen awoke, half-curled, on his side. (Half-curled is as close as you’re going to get when you’re carrying your body weight in booflets.) He was still comfortable, mind you. Whatever part of him decides such things appeared to have simply determined that this long a nap was enough. Apparently he had turned over in his sleep. Not exactly a surprise.
...How long was this long a nap?
The big boof (his and his mate’s nickname for himself, hence “booflets”) stretched out in place, not unlike a scaled-up cat, then licked his lips for a second as he tried to clear off a couple particularly annoying fogbanks of sleep and focus on the world around him again.
Judging from the shadows, and from a bit of intuition, he surmised that he had been asleep for an hour and a half. He wasn’t exactly sure though. He wasn’t exactly wearing a watch—or anything else for that matter; he was a feral, on his own property, taking a nap. Who was going to complain?
Strictly speaking, he wasn’t wearing nothing: he was wearing his pince-nez spectacles.
Which had gotten horribly smudged as he slept, it appeared.
He took them off and rubbed them briefly across the fur of his belly to get the dirt off. Instead, that turned the smugdes into streaks. He tried again, breathing on the lenses this time and then folding his ears over them. This time the dirt was smeared out into a uniform fog. His vision was almost as bad with his glasses as without them now. He could barely see his own forepaws.
Well, his spectacles would still be dirty later. Beuwen leaned back against the tree again and closed his eyes, folding his forepaws over his belly once more and trying to enjoy the summer air.
After a few minutes of that, the dragon realized that he wasn’t going to be falling asleep again anytime soon. First, he’d already slept, so he couldn’t get himself tired again. Second, the calves were taking turns seeing which of his internal organs would make their dad squirm more when they kicked it.
The dragon sighed and rubbed his belly with a forepaw, cooing softly to his booflets: “Dinae worry, wee’ns, yer Da’s right here for ye...” This didn’t seem to have too much immediate effect, though, so he grunted and, carefully, rolled over, first onto his side, then up onto all fours, to try to make his way back to the homestead.
There was no sign that the beebs were going to let up. In fact, they were really throwing their weight around, so much that the dragon had to adjust his footing as he walked to compensate for their shifting weight. Granted, he had to do a little bit of that anyway: he could barely orient himself toward the house-shaped blob in his dirt-blurred vision, nevermind see the details of whatever happened to be around his feet.
As his stretch-marked belly jolted and warped in one direction or another, Beuwen slowly half-staggered down the hill, across the lawn, toward the front door. (Beuwen and his mate had had to get a big enough place to install a barn door so the dragon could actually get into the living room. There were still some places in the house that only his mate could enter without knocking down a wall. They renovated to fix this as they got the money.)
Eventually the front door was found, and after some failed attempts he found the handle, pushed the thumb pad to unlatch it and pulled the door open. The slightly cooler, ventilated air of the house’s interior met him, along with a vaguely brown and black patch in a green T-shirt sitting on the couch.
“Hey, hun.” The German Shepherd set something aside—most likely a book, knowing him—and rose from the couch to meet the dragon blinking in the barn door. Even in his half-blind state, Beuwen could see the dog’s belly bulging out in front of him, overfull with pups of his own. The dog eventually came close enough to the dragon that even without the currently-disabled aid of the dragon’s oversized glasses, the German Shepherd’s features came into clear focus.
The dark features of his face, framed by deep red eyeglass frames of his own, were a pleasant little visual reminder of how well they were made for each other. He didn’t have much time for looking. He lowered himself to his haunches and closed his eyes and for a second they kissed, the short, familiar kiss of a couple reuniting at home after a day’s work (or in this case rest) apart.
The German Shepherd spoke again. “You had a good nap?”
“Aye,” Beuwen replied, “until me spectacles got smudged. Canae see me own snoot in front of me.”
“Well, that can be fixed easy enough.” Beuwen’s Mister, he called him, reached up and gripped the side of one lens with each hand, then raised the pince-nez spectacles up and off of the dragon’s oversized snout before lowering them under his shoulder and beginning to walk to the sink. Beuwen padded what would have been silently on his paws behind him, were it not for the creak of the floorboards under the dragon’s and his booflets’ weight.
The Alsatian turned on the water and let it run for a second, then held first one lens, then the other, under the running stream. After a few seconds more, he flipped the spectacles over in his hands and much more quickly rinsed off the other side. A bit of dish soap and some careful scrubbing with a sponge later and the glasses were good as clean. Though...
For a moment, the pup held the glasses up, catching the light from the window in front of him.
The dirt was pretty much gone, but there were still a few streaks that needed buffing out.
This sort of large-scale optical-grade cleaning happened often enough—usually because Beuwen dropped his spectacles into something or another while tinkering or sleeping or doing things a very pregnant dragon lad does—that the two of them kept a roll of shop towels by the sink. The Mister ripped off a square from the blue roll and carefully rubbed out the last few streaks of grime and who-knew-what from the lenses, then held them up again in the sunlight.
Good as new.
“Alright, here you go.” He placed the pince-nez spectacles precisely on his consort’s snout.
Beuwen saw the world, and his partner in all things, in perfect focus again. “Thanke, love.” He lowered himself to his haunches and kissed the blushing dog on the top of his head, and one forepaw carefully cradled the German Shepherd’s puppy-filled belly.
“It wasn’t a problem,” the dragon’s beloved Mister replied.
“Thanke all the same.”
“Aye.” A mate’s affectations often bleed into the other one’s speech. “I’ll let you know when I got something heavy to push,” the pup continued— “or lift,” he blurted to correct for his accidental wordplay, “though for now I should be good.”
Beuwen smiled. “Well, when ye do, I’ll be under the ol’ shade tree.”
The Mister looked back toward the couch for half a second, then return to the dragon’s gaze. “Actually, I’m caught up on work, so I may join you.” The Shepherd put a hand to his own overstretched belly. “Not to mention the pups have been kicking up a storm, so I could use the rest.”
Beuwen smiled in silent assent, then they both went off to enjoy each other’s quiet company under the shade of a green-leafed tree.
Beuwen lay with his back against the shade tree’s trunk, as he had earlier, his eyes closed behind his spectacles. As he hadn’t had earlier, he now shared the space not just with his own growing young, but with a rather attractive German Shepherd and his own too-large litter of pups. The dog leaned back against the belly as he sat, eyes also closed, his hands clasped together over his own glasses. He could feel the booflets kicking in Beuwen’s belly behind him, and he could more than feel the pups kicking inside his own.
For a second, he opened his eyes and looked at the glasses themselves. They had gotten a little smudged in his hands.
He looked upward, toward Beuwen’s face.
His draconic mate’s spectaces had once more gotten dirty, just a bit, probably from the mammaliform dragon adjusting them a time too many, too recklessly. Beuwen didn’t seem to mind.
It was a pleasant day, better felt than seen anyway. This time around, both sets of lenses could wait.
The Alsatian laughed quietly to himself before closing his eyes once more and returning to his rest.
beuwens-folder: sometimes all you wanna do when you're full of young is take a nap under a shade tree and let the world pass you by.
