When Ashe speaks, whether it is to order or demand, both right and wrong, she never hesitates.
“You presume,” she says, “you know me better than I know myself.”
Vossler looks at Basch. Basch looks away, through the bedchamber’s window, a sun-stained horizon in his eyes. All of Ashe’s hesitation is in her gaze, and never her voice. Vossler will not meet her eyes.
“Such expectation you hold for me,” she continues, “one chain to draw me forward and another backward in such a way that I cannot move anywhere. It should not surprise you that I choose to pull back.”
Vossler does not know to whom she refers, or to what. Ashelia is, will be, queen, and she has had these years to accustom herself to that.
Strange, though, for Vossler has not.
“I just want you—“
Her breath catches.
After, Vossler wonders if she ever intended more words to follow.
.
Sweat-wet stains gold in candlelight.
Basch looks along the sheen of her flesh when he knows he should meet her eyes. Ashe is all curve even without any softening decadence, her flesh rising to meet him, motion and make hypnotic and sinuous. Nothing is straight but his own desire. All possible conclusions to this are as supple as she, beneath him. The coiled sinew of her arm draws his gaze along to her hand. Ashe’s fingers are tense, half-curled, and angled for Vossler. Basch grinds closer, deeper, until her fingers form a fist. The warmth, the slide – of this – of her –
Basch does not want to withdraw even to thrust – again, lest – she change her mind – again.
.
Vossler can’t help looking up from where he tries and fails to find convenience in his – or Basch’s – belongings. Basch’s shoulders flex as he leans, Ashe’s legs splayed, tensioned; she arches, voice husking, as he gives his full length.
There’s a trace of pique in Ashe’s voice when she gasps, “—too heavy.”
Vossler gives up, stands, approaches; he closes his hand in Basch’s hair.
--and she’s yet to take the weight of both of them.
.
The acute angle of Vossler’s lust commands Basch’s attention, yet not entirely. He is aware of Ashe’s burning gaze on where they meet; Basch’s mind is as full of her as his mouth is of Vossler, one the familiar and the other, not. Vossler tastes – the same, of a different sharpness to sweat, yet even that familiarity proves a distraction as Ashe’s pulse clenches tight around Basch’s own flesh. Her heels at his spine drive him closer; her fingers tremble as they trace the motion along the column of his throat. Vossler does not linger past wetting the head of his cock. His hand grips Basch’s shoulder, and the hair on his thighs rasps against Basch’s, where sweat proves more irritant than ease.
--gods, within and without both tight and hard – such fractured unity, that it draws from Basch, from the three of them, resounding, momentary harmony.
.
Vossler can’t tell if the heat is old heat from the stone walls, or the remnant of the day bolstered by too many candles in this still air. Perhaps it is the hunger of Basch’s flesh, or all his own; Vossler pushes through it regardless until heat becomes ache, tightness, need. Basch’s, or his, he can never tell, it is a familiar call he answers if too long since, that Basch holds his breath through it. A mistake, for when breath and control both break, he looses as a cry. Ashe meets Vossler’s eyes over Basch’s shoulder, wide; for that bare, sweat-slick moment of thrust and tension, Vossler had succeeded in forgetting her.
“Are you –“ Ashe asks, and reaches, not for Vossler.
“Yes,” Basch says, against her fingers on his lips. He angles his head so Vossler sees as Ashe’s fingers slide past Basch’s lips to the knuckle, the smallest finger crooked against his beard. Vossler has to close his eyes, uselessly; Basch’s voice blurs when he mouths around her, “yes,” and Vossler bites his tongue.
Basch strains to hold their paired weight suspended from Ashe’s flesh, his shoulders tense under Vossler’s hand, and fruitlessly; he gives at a deep thrust, falls. Vossler rocks forward with a growl that comes as involuntary as the motion, yet it is Ashe who gasps at the recoil, her hand suddenly a shackle that barely spans Vossler’s wrist. Her head lifts sharply, her own cry--
“--too heavy?” and Vossler says it, too mockingly, when he swore he wouldn’t say a word to her.
“Yes,” she says, startles herself, “rather, no – oh –“ and there is a trace of wonder in her voice, “oh, yes.”
.
Muscle and bone becomes a rope that binds Basch to their need, their sensation, the three of them lost within a labyrinth of thrust and recoil; all struggle and striving tightens the knots between them. This may be Ashe’s demand; yet this is Vossler’s arrangement.
I can’t touch her, said thickly, a lie that Basch wouldn’t hold against his heart-brother however cursedly firm Vossler holds against him. I can’t trust -- the unspoken truth, of what hopeless men do dream when granted every waking wish, --myself -- and how strange that statement from Vossler’s lips, he who trusts no one but his own flesh, and what despair, Basch cannot consider, would make Vossler doubt himself --
Ashe anchors Basch well away from any anxiety; Vossler’s force, drive, intention becomes his own. Harmony lies suspended between the two, heart-brother and queen. Basch can’t define his own desire against theirs; there is no twisting free and what motion he does make near undoes him with the glut of sensation. The friction and force of the one, the give and grasp of the other; hardness fills him -- so -- and muscle, flesh, bone all moving to him, for him, in him, against him, and Basch’s own desire is but an extension of Vossler – forceful – into her, and –
They twine about Basch, he and she, sinuous like an oily smoke, slick with sweat until all flesh blurs and bonds.
Basch comes, and forgets it has to end until it does.
.
Vossler can’t stop, won’t, mindless at last against the draw of Basch’s shuddering flesh, but Ashe foils his intent; she wriggles until they part. Basch collapses to his side with a sigh that sounds suspiciously like relief, slick, lax, his eyes half closed.
Ashe is bare now, and beneath Vossler, and Basch is not there to shield the sight –
She shines, sweat slick and candlelight-gold, every crease of her flesh lined, her thighs and the hair between matted. Vossler watches with a formless incredulity as her fingers slide along that wet – Basch’s - to draw circles along the pale flesh of her thigh. Basch’s. Hers. How much of hers—
Vossler can’t, he kneels over her still, can’t -- shouldn’t - hungers. Her motion mesmerizes, circles, spirals inwards, slicks Basch’s spend downwards. Vossler can’t. Can’t.
There’s more than a trace of pique in Ashe’s voice when she says: “Do you think to neglect your obligations, Vossler?”
Her labyrinth is bound within the walls of a room. She cuts off retreat before Vossler can move, before his hand could shift from the seductive curve of her knee to anything approximating a door handle. The flex of muscle across his shoulders must read as a flinch; Basch almost laughs and Ashe does, her smile a contrary curve on lips where only sorrow has lived. Her neck is livid where Basch’s beard has wrecked her.
Vossler’s hand delves the spend between Ashe’s legs, paired forefingers, sliding, finds the forward feel of her - open -- too agreeable.
“Not like that,” Ashe says. Her forefinger touches the very tip of his cock, cool, unbearably brief; he chokes back the urge to ignore her statement. Basch’s eyes are on him.
“--fastidious?” he manages. “The other, then.”
Ashe pushes against his hand, every fold and line of her stark, swollen, slick. She pulls away to kneel, then to stand. “Not like that either.”
Vossler can’t know the expression on his own face as he looks up at her, but Basch does laugh then.
.
“—but it’s all you see when you look at me, Vossler, as though your honor is in Dalmasca’s name only, and never your own conduct, Dalmasca, as though I’m worthless without her weight on my shoulders. Tell me if but once in that time you ever looked at me to see Ashelia, to see a woman instead of your own honor reflected from the sheen of a crown never there.”
Basch takes her hand. She is delicate in bone, but roughened, hardened. This Ashe is defined through such sharp contrasts; who she is bears no connection to the child he vaguely remembers. Her flesh feels familiar nonetheless. A woman, as she said, and she is right.
“Basch,” she says, at his touch, “tell him,” her eyes on --
“Vossler,” Basch says, needs--
“I want,” Ashe whispers, “or need regardless: know that I do demand.”
Vossler will not. “A woman or a queen to make such a demand?”
“What will you mourn when I die, the death of a woman or of a queen?”
“You are both,” Basch says.
“And can’t I be both, for you? Can I not have both – the dream of a woman and the dream of a queen?”
“But,” Basch says, the words sharp against the tightness in his throat, “a woman and a queen do not dream the same dream.”
Ashe meets Basch’s gaze, and she is sun-drowned in solitude.
“In this moment,” she whispers, “we do.”
After, Basch wonders that he succumbed so easily to the familial hurt that could hide behind that particular plural.
.
The length of her leg seen from below is from formidable, a pale curve marked with a clear line of tan, a border that Basch’s hand slides to cross as she arrays them in mirrored opposition on their backs, the weight of Vossler’s thighs pinning Basch’s legs, his own stretched alongside Vossler’s ribs. They both must stare up to see her where she stands, and she kneels, straddles them with a grimace, the span awkward until she folds her legs in with theirs. She faces Basch but does not look at him, looks instead Vossler over her shoulder, briefly.
Her fingers she presses to Basch’s lips, leans forward to do so, and he hears – feels – Vossler’s breath – more than his breath – thicken – tighten – at the view from his end.
“It’s not going to work how you want it,” Vossler says, stirring. “Let me –“
“Let me,” Ashe says, her smile still against Basch’s throat. Her hand reaches around, behind and under herself; she rocks back, sits upright, and claims Vossler so swift that Basch flinches where she doesn’t –
“The size of your disbelief,” she breathes as she sinks, “suspend it,” and Vossler chokes on a helpless sound.
Her touch intoxicates Basch despite the destruction of the last. A good thing he’s only half-hard when she threads him into herself again, fingers alongside his flesh, yet that shan’t last, for even now he’s thickening – and she – Vossler breathes something like a curse - and she, gods, smiling --
Basch arches as though he could hold them together with the strength of his spine’s curve.
Such an impossible triangle they make.
.
The air tastes like a dream, one of candle-smoke and the desert and sex.
Ashe’s words come from a mouth numb with the salt of Basch’s sweat. Her direction comes from hands slick with Basch’s come. If this is a dream, it’s hers, maybe Basch’s. She doesn’t know what to think of Vossler, recalcitrant and eager, two minds in one body, two desires, two faces through which he looks at her.
Ashe doesn’t know what they see when they look up at her like this, what they think when they know she spans the both of them. Dream and nightmare, depending on whose gaze she meets. Temptation and void. Flesh and divinity. Aggressor and victim.
At this moment, Ashe doesn’t care what they see. It’s her flesh they’re reacting to, who she is now, not who she needs to be. She reaches; they rise to her touch. This is a simple geometry, the oldest, basest kind. No higher meaning here, no aim but the inevitable conclusion. No choices, no chain of consequence, only the curve of their sinuous selves, long legs in triplicate, tangled and tawny. Basch’s hand rests on Vossler’s ankle; Vossler’s clenched on Basch’s thigh. Ashe commands an impossible contortion from them; a slick spanning conceit for her that she proves them both wrong and herself purely, gratifyingly right. The sound of male pride breaking is a harsh hissed one. She looks on Vossler over her shoulder; his own shoulders flex as he holds himself half-upright against her weight pinning his thighs, some last attempt to clasp at his right to control her own verticality. She finds him aching, his eyes vulnerable.
Ashelia holds Vossler’s gaze in the vice of her own, until he lies prone again.
.
Vossler can’t free himself from her vice, must wait for her release, and Ashe proves an unexpected vice in triplicate, of eyes and flesh and propriety, that he is triply caught, triply bound.
His mind contorts down choked paths he does not want them to; he can’t drive thought away with his usual ferocity of motion when Ashe holds him pinned, captured and consequential.
Like this, holding them, she barely has to move but that he loses command of his very breath. Their hard rigidity should prove impossible for her to deride, but she does it as well by candlelight as she does under the sun. His effort, scorned. His experience, mocked. Ashe breaks him every time she smiles, scars him every time she laughs. Even here, she ignores him to push her own intent on them. The roll of her hips is a burning friction, sweat and slick a reluctant lubricant. Her spiral tightens against him, against Basch, tightens even as she moves more boldly with each pass. As full as she is, it seems she hungers for more – and how he wants -- to hold their lengths matched and to the hilt – to give her that -- as if she longed to span them wholly, bodies and minds and souls, to eat them whole. Her rhythm is not theirs, not Vossler’s. She cares not if they meet it or not.
Such is the angle she forces on them that Vossler feels more of Basch than of her, a ridged heat, Ashe’s flesh the veil that lies between them. She restricts, felt more in Vossler’s gut than around his cock where lusts coils waiting to strike – and he wants her, gods, wants to drive her. He wants to feel the sweat-slick flesh of her thighs, her buttocks, cling and slip and slap against him instead of this gritted, clinging grind. Her rhythm infuriates. Tantalizes. A circuitous route to take for an expected conclusion. He has no leverage.
Basch succumbs first, again, too willing to abandon himself to whatever role the situation demands. Vossler feels it where they tangle together, in the shudder of Basch’s thighs under the weight of Vossler’s; the satin of Ashe’s flesh cannot hide the spasm. She bears down with a near-unbearable tightness. Basch sounds just shy of silence, a single sibilant escaping his lips with his last, arching effort, a lost attempt to drive deep that Ashe rides only to sink back as he goes slack.
She does not let Basch go even then, holds him prisoned within with her free hand as assurance. The space between them is hotly wet. Basch trembles against Vossler’s legs, tensed. Ashe’s orgasm claims Vossler’s as a prize. The rise, fall, clench, flex of her flesh demands his own hapless response; at the last he can lift as she sinks, as if commanded by her triumph.
After that, her heat proves unbearable, yet she will not move. Perhaps it’s the way she binds them, as though his flesh had melted into Basch’s, as though their sweat and Ashe’s slow stir had married them together as flesh and fluid beneath her, as though thought was impossible unless a consensus achieved. Between them, within them, as ever and never: everything longs for consensus.
Vossler closes his eyes, waits. In the depthless grey of Ashe’s eyes, in the storm-blue of Basch’s, Vossler sees no forever. No ties, no soft curve of a waiting smile. He sees the guarantee of his own death, signed, sealed, delivered.
He is not the one to demand this decision, nor any other. Yet Vossler needs to, must, and will. When he lifts Ashe from them, his hands too large on her slight hips, he will not meet her eyes.
.
“—I would have you behave as fitting a queen,” Vossler tries. “That you try to demand everything when you have our loyalties, when we are but men and bound to you so – ”
The next words feel as strange as a smile on Ashe’s lips. “If I request--”
“No word from you can be anything but an order,” Basch says, “or so our conduct has it. You are our queen.”
“If I were not your queen, then would you take me willingly? That I offer instead of demand?”
“You’re a child to think that offer or demand here makes a difference,” Vossler says, and Basch on his heels, “you’re a queen, not a woman to waste yourself on a whim.”
“And you,” Ashe responds, with a longing she cannot hide, “both of you, are clearly men. The dreams of men don’t change with regards to women, and you cannot deny that without calling me a liar as well as a whore.”
“Ashe.” Basch recoils from that more than he had when she slapped him; at the least, she has won her name on his lips.
“Don’t belittle Dalmasca with such a name,” Vossler growls, “and I will do her, and you, the same honor.”
“For Dalmasca?” Ashe asks, and of a sudden the anger flares, and she knows it for mask, shield, sword. “Fuck Dalmasca--”
After, Ashe wonders if all men would shatter so easily under the weight of one mistaken word.