sheffiesharpe (sheffiesharpe) wrote in het_challenge, @ 2008-05-04 02:37:00 |
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Current mood: | accomplished |
"as a solution, it seems too simple," Final Fantasy XII, Fran/Gabranth
Author: sheffiesharpe
Title: as a solution, it seems too simple
Pairing: Fran/Gabranth
Rating: NSFW (so very not)
Length: 3100
Warnings: Blood play.
A/N: Roughly 10 years pre-game, not canon-contrary. Riddle referenced is this one, from the Exeter Book.
Request: Final Fantasy XII - Fran/Gabranth - His night off and her (k)night out, and really, what's a girl supposed to do? She has to entertain herself somehow, yeah. Bonus points for knife-play.
This tavern isn’t one Gabranth has been in before, barely within the respectable bounds of Nilbasse, but it is one of the few frequented by true travelers, and tonight he wants something other than soldiers’ talk or ardents’ prattle. Now, at least, his position is such that anyplace is a target for information, and so, even if he is noted by the custom, he will not be noted by his Bureau. Well. Not noted any more than usual. He nurses his ale—something local and unremarkable—and keeps his head down. No one speaks to him beyond a mumbled inquiry about taking the third chair at his table, and he savors the quiet of anonymous chatter. He deliberately deafens himself to threads of conversation as his ears pick them out, and instead he watches the head on his beer dissipate, tries to pick out the nearly imperceptible fizz despite the background noise, and sets his mind to turning over the latest riddle Zecht put to them. The solution is surely double-entendre, they always are, and the lines shift from a melancholy gravity—“No son will seek vengeance / On my slayer when battle-foes ring death”—to a kind of dangerous bawdry at its end, almost rapacious at its closing. The words strike sharper than they ought, and he scratches the back of his neck where the tavern’s heat prickles, but his fingers stray below his shirt’s collar to the hair-thin scars it hides. The door opens behind him—a breath of cooler air—and a murmur ripples through the crowded tavern. Gabranth makes it a point not to look, to enjoy not-knowing for a moment. Instead, he churns the rhyme on his tongue, mouthing the words, the alliterative halved lines. These are exercises in memory, too, he knows; their work requires so much verbatim that such idle occupations are training. Perhaps not idle, either—promotions have been made from less, and promotion is something he could use. Zecht shows him no favor, despite the fact that Gabranth’s fair hair stands out almost as much—especially when held up to Archadia’s ruling class—as Zecht’s dark skin.
He tries to put that from his mind—it’s a night off, something he knows he sorely needs—and repeats the last part of the riddle, the words barely mouthed into the humidity of the room. Someone approaches, and at the flicker of movement near to him, he knows it is not the meaty hand of someone seeking to take the empty chair. The hand that alights on the chair-back is long-fingered, cream-coffee-colored. Clawed. Gabranth lifts his eyes.
He has little experience with viera, as Archades is not a city of great diversity, despite its size. He remembers, though, the one time he saw a viera in Landis, high summer when he was but a boy. And he is certain that they were not supposed to see her, walking into the thick black heart of the Ronsenburg’s pine blanket, but in those days, there were many places no one expected the twins to be. The viera before him now—for a moment, he searches his memory, how strange it might be if—but it is not, for this one, whatever her untold age might be, is younger than the other had been, he is sure of it. The viera before him does not stoop at all, does not favor her right leg. Her legs. Where she stands to the side of the chair, and her legs are bare to the hip save the black openwork cuisses, her greaves. He cannot help the way his eyes linger, but he tries—succeeds—in dragging his eyes up.
Her face is impassive, and he feels his cheeks heat. He has been rude, and though most of the tavern stares openly, she is not looking at them. Her left ear twitches, and though she does not blink as she looks, he thinks the gesture not something born of annoyance.
“May I sit?” she says, her peculiar accent turning simple words into a sound he thinks he will remember longer than the phrase itself merits.
He nods, searching for something to say. The lines of the riddle wrap around his tongue, whorled like her armor, and he does not expect her to say anything, but she does.
“Have you parsed it yet?” She sips at the glass in her left hand, the red wine chilled—out of custom with the place; does she come here often?—and sweating the cup. When he does not answer—still trying to parse the question, for how could she know?—she supplies, “Your riddle. You were speaking it when I approached.” And her ear shifts again, cupping the air.
He wonders if she can hear his blood, if she heard words without breath. He shakes his head and tries to find his tongue. “It is a puzzle I am still solving,” he says. “You already know its answer?”
“Possibilities, though some answers are more convincing than others.” She traces a drop of condensation down to the table’s top with her fingertip, draws the water out in rays. He sees the wood pale where her claw scores it—only lightly, but it’s enough to hold his attention rapt while the water wicks after, re-darkens it all.
“There are multiple solutions?” Zecht is always looking for a specific answer, takes great pleasure in stripping away the guesses some of the younger staff make. And though Gabranth knows that equal cases could be made for several possibilities, it is easy enough—if one pays any attention, and Gabranth does—to know which one Zecht wants. Gabranth raises his pint to his lips, but does not drink deep. The ale is going tepid, the practice of drinking warm beer still foreign to him after almost a decade, and sitting across from her, he wants every bit of his wits about him. His body is unused to more than a dinner’s worth of wine now, too—so seldom has he had opportunity or luxury to indulge. But still—he thirsts, peculiarly, under his own skin, and envies the table where the wood is quenched.
“Aren’t there always?” She sketches lines on the cup, more still, and he is trying not to stare as the liquid beads. She looks his gaze up from her hand, and again, she does not seem bothered by his watch. She might be, though, if she knew why he looked. The thin white lines on his shoulders, his chest, his thighs—long healed, so long—seem to itch, and he ignores them as best he can, for she speaks again. “Have you a try yourself?”
The question startles him, goads him into an answer he is not ready to reveal. “A sword, most obviously.” It’s plausible all the way through, and he cannot bring himself now to say his other guess, the one that gives him pause to think, given those last few lines--Wrapped with wire / like a bright fool, I frustrate a woman; / Steal her joy, slake desire. She rants, / Rails, curses, claps hands, chants / Unholy incantations—bladed words / In a bloodless battle I cannot enjoy. A phallus, but if she knows the riddle, such a reading is surely distasteful, crude.
She inclines her head, brief agreement. “That is, to my knowledge, the most frequently accepted.” Her teeth are white, keen-looking.
And yet—as a solution, it seems too simple—and if he vexes their conversation, he is no worse off than when he arrived here, alone. So he says, “Though one could make a case for a solution more…bawdy,” he settles on, though that is not quite the word for it. Wholly perverse, most would call it, to draw deliberate blood from a lover—too unorthodox a practice, Gabranth has found, to risk seeking it often in Archades. He has contented himself with what is acceptable, diverted questions of those who actually ask (rather than simply assume some barbarian ritual), but the riddle’s frustration itches, too, under his own skin, the whiteness where he wants wine-dark stains—
The viera’s mouth turns so slightly up. “Is it not the lore of soldiers that the sword and the staff are one and the same?”
He cannot help but pursue. “How do you reconcile, then, the final lines? Surely the body is meant for pleasure, giving joy, filling desire. What place has the want for battle and blood there?” The conversation pricks his skin, how staidly she listens, save one claw still tracing pale scores into the table. He can see the bare hint of pressure, thinks it enough to break skin, were it his hand beneath.
“You know as well as I the two are not exclusive.” Her finger draws the three thin lines that mark his right forearm, the ones no one else has noticed—since they scabbed and healed, since before leaving home—under the pale hair. His mouth is dry, but he does not drink. She has not picked up her glass, either, save to coax more droplets down its side, gather them under her nails until gravity forces the condensation to roll down under its own weight.
He has to ask, outright, and though he pitches his voice as low as he can, his words are steady. “What are you proposing?” If it is not what he wants—needs—he can admit, must admit, now that there is the possibility, that it is need that prompts him now—he will leave now.
“Blood, but not battle. Release. Your skin wishes to have it, I wish to give it. If you are amenable.” Her words attract no notice he can see.
“What security do I have—” against rumor, against slander, against blackmail—but he does not know how to put that into words.
“That I know enough already, Judge, to slake Archadian thirst for gossip without benefiting either of us. But I have no desire to do so. I have a room, one street farther.” And he can see her ears cupping sound from the room. He wants to trust her. Wants even more what she is offering, and the longer he tries to formulate a case against his own want—he has done it to himself, for himself, before. When the need is strong enough. He could do that again. But whatever room he hired for it would be empty because he does not dare hire for such things. The risk is too great. The risk is still great. Greater, for the muscle on the viera’s long legs is well-defined, and her eyes are a predator’s. He wishes he knew if that were true of all of her kind, or if that is hers alone, due to what profession drives her, and he would lay stake that she is hunter or pirate, for if she were more respectably involved in the trades, she would not be in this public house. And it is surely wiser that he were not here at all, but he could not endure one more night of the communal mess or the striving of Nilbasse proper.
He stands before he even knows he has done so.
* * *
They do not exchange names. They do exchange the pleasure of lips and tongue, her fingers blessedly—reassuringly—deft on the ties of his shirt, his less apt, more curious on the catches of her corset. When the first one gives, he still does not hasten his hands, though his shirt is already stripped off, the night air a pleasing chill against his back. This time, he is not so rude as to stare, though perhaps that is why his touch lingers so on the small of her back—her skin so fascinatingly textured, nearly sueded—and on the curve of her shoulder. She removes her cuisses and greaves as he steps out of his trousers and shoes, and he is certain it is no coincidence that they are both bare at the same time. She backs him toward the bed, her tongue in his mouth and her hands on his hips. He holds her forearms, feels the minute flexing of the tendons there, the flat, sharp length of her claws shifting as they both move, and he settles himself on the worn coverlet easily. She kneels over him, asks if he prefers to be bound, but she does not look surprised when he says he will hold himself still.
The greatest challenge in it, anyway, is to keep from pressing into the cuts, not in keeping himself from pulling away. Though here, with her, the challenge is in not reaching for her, as well, though her thighs straddle his left leg, and she is so much warmer than the room warrants. He tries to remember, again—has he ever seen a viera bulkily clothed? He does not think so, though nor has he ever seen this much—the full curve of her breasts above the leanness of her ribs—he leans up, mouths at the yielding flesh while he reaches for her hand, sets her fingers against his chest. When he fits his fingers over hers, presses slightly, he cannot budge their position. She watches him with bemused red eyes.
“You will not rush me in this,” she says, and instead sets his hands just above her knees. She looks pleased at the way he cannot keep his thumbs from rubbing small circles on her thighs, and she edges higher, the white down between her legs and the heat of her body against him enough to make his cock twitch against his stomach.
It is not, though, until he has stilled even his fingers, that she leans down to set her mouth against his once more, and he learns the flat, sharp edge of her teeth while the pads of her fingers stroke warm along his ribs, following the muscled curve, and he opens his mouth to her more, tasting the softness of her cheek, and when her claw slips to the side, the first sweet-sharp bite into his skin, he tastes that, too. It is like he can breathe again—perhaps he sighs into her mouth—and she draws back, sits up more, and they both look, both watch the slow red beading. Her nostrils flare, her pupils dilated—she can smell the blood, he is certain—and his shoulders relax into the thin mattress, his head easy on the pillow. From here, he need not watch—should not watch, so he can make this last—and he tilts his head back, closes his eyes.
She traces each rib slowly, one at a time, and he thanks her with his stillness for the courtesy, be it so that he can feel each hair-fine cut or that she can revel in its making—both, surely both, or they would not be here. The line of his sternum is next, parallel lines from the base of his throat on, and he wonders if she plans on marking his body by its parts, outlined like the ghouls on Teufelsnacht, skeleton atop skin, but he feels anything but hollow here. The stinging slowness eases the constant clench in his chest, and in the darkness behind his lids, the heated weight of her on his thigh—she shifts, and she is slick against him—even his jaw loosens, the pressure in his temples given respite, at least, until he reports tomorrow morning. His jaw loosens, and he gives voice the soft sound she coaxes from him.
Her claws reach his collar bones, whorl knots at his shoulders, and he feels the lift and beginning of experience, of never crossing the cut over itself, never separating flesh from itself with closing lines. He wants to look, can feel the blood seeping now, gathering on itself and one drop rolls down toward the bed, but the hot pad of her finger stops it. Her hand lifts. Returns. And he cannot look now, not yet, wants her to take all she wants from him before he wants anything more. If he looks, he will want. If he looks, he will need.
The whole of him is alive and liquid, nothing spiked and stolid, and he luxuriates in exhaling each breath under her touch, inhaling into the keenness of her bladed body, and she sets her claws against him, ten points staggered over his pectorals. He exhales, and she leaves them there, her hips rocking minutely against his thigh, and when he starts to draw air into his lungs, he can feel the resistance. Her hands will not move if he breathes deeper. He fills his chest as through he were diving, and his skin gives, and her claws sink down, biting the muscle, and it takes everything he has to stop, not force them farther than is allowable; for tonight, he could draw breath for days, weeks. When he exhales, they slip free, and she slips against him, her palms gone flat on his forearms. She makes a sound that is nearly a growl; he must look, must see, and as he opens his eyes to the wash of red she’s made his body, she touches her hand to the bleeding points above his right nipple. He moans, and she leans farther forward, their lips slanting together as she arches. Her hand closes around his cock, slick, grip tight and her claws so close but not touching, stroking in time with how she grinds against him—he feels everything coil, and the slight copper taste on her tongue—the taste he knows, everything his own—and the bite of her teeth on his lower lip when she shudders against him, that growling, panted sound and her left hand tight as a vise on his arm, claws pricking new red, like the blood on his chest, like the blood on her palm—he arches, reaches now to cup her neck, to kiss as the climax shakes him white and red and the black behind his eyelids that still goes white and red where it stings when he flexes his arm that way, the cuts reopening and pulsed on his skin.
They hold still that way long enough that the seeping on his bicep stops, and then she sits up, sits back, and his blood is on her breasts, her stomach. He follows the motion of her body, sits up with her, licks the metallic salt-sweet from her skin, and her hands touch his back, claws pricking light and perfect and lucid through the cloud-cover of so long without this, without sight, without breath.