Subject to Study (Naga!Brothers x Reader)

Chapter 4

I had dressed lighter than yesterday, a shirt made out of thinner material underneath my mesh vest and cargo shorts instead of the usual pants. I had applied bug spray to keep any insect from feeding off of me, but I was certain that Jyushi's scales had thoroughly rubbed that barrier off a long time ago.

Once again, my body was wrapped by his thick coils, much looser than yesterday but still keeping me close enough for him to feel my body warmth. I had my dried field journal propped on the coil resting in front of me, and had been busy sketching what he described as his clutchmates.

There were six nagas on the island in total, but each clutchmate he mentioned seemed to be a completely different species of snake. Jyushi didn't go into much physical description detail, but I was able to pull from memory the closest species that he was willing to describe.

Oso was described as one of the lazier 'brothers' that Jyushi had, sleeping and lounging during the daytime. He didn't seem to become very active until the evening, my mind labelling him as nocturnal and briefly sketching a tail pattern in the field journal. Jyushi had said that the end of his tail was completely red and partially faded into the black scales of his body.

Kara was more active during the daytime, but had stayed far away from where the previous teams had mapped out and wouldn't approach the temporary lab. The physical description was difficult to draw out, but the tail pattern blended into the main part of the body and marked him as a monocolored naga. There may have been a different color for the ventral scales, but the question went unanswered as Jyushi continued talking.

The third clutchmate Jyushi described was called Choro, a naga with a solid green-scaled body and tail. Choro was described as timid despite having bouts of anger when his shedding went wrong, and it went wrong almost every time due to stress from the first two clutchmates harassing him.

The fourth naga was named Ichi, and he often hung around Jyushi when he wasn't off on his own. The coloration of Ichi's scales fascinated me, hearing Jyushi call them a 'pale purple' with darker patches all along his back. There were only a few naturally occurring purple snakes, so I was intrigued to see what kind of naga Ichi was.

The last brother, or clutchmate, was called Todo. As Jyushi described what Todo looked like, I was stunned. The last naga had pink scales...not just shaded pink or a faint color that could be called 'pink', but a naturally occurring bright pink that he was born with. Jyushi didn't know much about Todo, since none of the brothers really stayed together.

Jyushi's arm shifted underneath my shirt as his hand traced along my back again, finding the divet of my spine under my skin and rubbing along the vertebrates. I wasn't worried about his hand wandering any further down, not with the ground rule we both had agreed to: neither party could explore the other without express permission.

My hunch about Jyushi being curious about me was pretty dead-on, as the first thirty minutes of us meeting again after noon were spent with him continuing his inspection from yesterday, and I kept my hands to myself while pouring over every visual detail I could see.

While Jyushi's humanoid half was completely devoid of scales, I did notice faint traces of the albino reticulated python pattern spread over his skin. Wherever hair sprouted on him, it took on the color of the scales that were underneath it. It explained why his hair was patterned just like his lower body.

The sun was high in the sky, its light filtered through the thick canopy before falling onto our skin and scales. Jyushi had pulled me onto a low hanging branch and wrapped his tail around it as an anchor point before laying me flat against him. I could feel his body begin to warm up from both the sunlight and my body heat, but Jyushi seemed to sink deeper into a drowsy state instead of a more active state like normal snakes would. The act made me wonder if he was more active during the nighttime, just 'storing' energy during the day before his internal clock kicked in and gave him more drive.