sheffiesharpe (sheffiesharpe) wrote in het_challenge, @ 2008-02-13 21:19:00 |
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Current mood: | content |
"Smoke," Final Fantasy XII (Basch/Fran)
Title: Smoke
Author: sheffiesharpe
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Pairing: Basch/Fran
Rating: NC-17
Length: 4700
Warnings: Presence of narcotics?
Recipient: laylah, most excellent of mods
Basch and Fran wait for Balthier and Vaan to return from seeking a map for the mines, standing in a side-street because for both of them, sky is better than ceiling, enough so that they will risk it, with caution. Enjoying the luxury of a simple lean, eyes closed because hers are open, Basch is not expecting the warm pressure of her hand on his, nor the way her body turns against him, pushing him toward the rough stone that lines Bhujerba’s streets.
“This way, slowly,” Fran says, and he does not question it. She shepherds him with hands splayed on his sides, her head tilted toward his neck. The stone rasps his bicep near raw, so steadily she moves him, blocking his view of the street with her hair, her ears. She is so close, lean and strong and touching him—the sensation runs hot over his skin and for a moment, that is all he can feel. But her face is serious, and then he sees the white-furred twitch of her ear four steps before he hears the sound himself: the mithril-clad crunch of Imperial armor. A door falls open behind him, Fran’s hand at the base of his spine, and he stumbles back into darkness.
He should face forward, should turn, but half of him cannot put his back to Fran—two years without anything like this kind of contact and her who is unlike anyone he has known—and the other half is still trying to see what danger it is that Fran is steering him away from. Whether a squadron of regular hoplites or the heavy helms of Magisters. He knows they are here—at least one of the five—has seen the cruisers that transport more than skystone to the Empire, the ones that carry her strongest hands outward, lets them grip and crease the borders of every map. He wonders if it is his brother. Wonders if he would know if it were, if there is anything left to feel, to spark some latent blood too deep to have spilled already. He doesn’t think there is. In Nalbina, he’d felt nothing before his twin’s coming, no premonition, not even a lingering dread—but he wants to know.
While the dusking light in the street still silhouettes Fran against the street, he opens his mouth to ask, but she shakes her head. Her finger arcs down simply from her ear—not his brother’s bull-headed helm. He is not sure if the heat in his gut is anger or relief, or the effect of Fran’s long fingers seeping warmth even through his vest. Whatever it is, though, he can’t say—the light fades, his view blocked, because Fran closes the door behind her.
With the setting sun cut out, the place reveals itself, a dim blue glow hazed with something, and the scent hits him too late, sweet and foggy, and Fran touches him again, her fingers on his forearm.
“I would not have come here but for the soldiers.” Her voice falters over some slow music that swirls through the room, its divided dark corners. “I cannot—on the far side, another door, an inn.” Her claws tighten, and he can see the white around her eyes disappearing entirely, and while he knows her sensitivity to smell, it hits only now how dangerous this place, a den for smokers of opiates, to her. She shoves him—it might be faltering—and his foot touches a velvet cushion. It is unoccupied, though someone sprawls on a pile of them beside it, a long pipe blooming from a face shrouded by shadow.
For a moment, Basch can only look at Fran, be fascinated by the way the whiteness of her hair seems to draw in the wreathing smoke, and he cannot turn to face the room. What sweetness first dripped false syrup along the back of his throat is turning to a kind of freshness, and Fran’s nails bite into his wrist: it is the pleasure of it that spurs him.
He turns his hand, reverses their grip, and his fingertips revel in how warm, in the particular texture of her skin that might make his touch stutter in another air. Fran sighs at his tug, and they must go. It is difficult still, though, for him to turn his back finally to her, to part the narcotic haze and seek the door she has said is there.
No one, at least, looks up as they pass, though more than once a hand reaches, brushes the back of his own leg and slides along Fran’s armor and skin. The anger burns away some of the cloud, and he would feel those hands crunch under his boot, but the way Fran does not lash out with her own sharp heels keeps him moving only forward. They have to get out. Even his skin is going dreamy; she is a weight in his fingers, and where she had held fast to his wrist, her hand is limp. As he skirts yet another pile of pipe-strewn cushions, Fran stumbles, and he cannot let her fall. He murmurs apology even as he lifts her, but when he touches her, he knows himself insincere and apologizes again for that. His words are maybe unspoken—he cannot tell.
She is dense in his arms, an opiate deadness in her, but she sighs against him, tilts her cheek against his shoulder as though the rough red fabric of his vest pleases her skin. The flush comes slow and detached, wreathing upward like the smoke that coats the low ceiling, thick around his eyes. While they stand, they are in the worst of it, and when he can feel himself stirring at the drooping brush of her ears on his arms, he knows: they must get out now. It has been too long; his mind grows loose. He can hear himself wanting her, how she has molded against him, and that pushes him forward, too.
There are three sets of doors before the smoke scent starts to clear, thick black and violet curtains that cling like vines, and it is that cling that finally shoves them into the dimming light, into another street.
Basch slumps against the cool stone, tries to clear his senses, but everything is too slow, too warm, Fran’s body pulling down his arms, and there are people looking at him. People are watching how his hand is spread across the outside of her knee where he cradles her legs, along the curve of her ribcage, and the nearness of her armor-clad breasts is suddenly overwhelming. Another person stops to stare, and a man raises his chin and looks toward another part of the street, and Basch wonders if one of the sainikah or parijanah are near. They cannot risk that, cannot risk how a woman’s tongue moves from a cluck at the place they have come from to a kind of darkening hiss—it sinks in his stomach, what he knows they are thinking. There is no way to defend himself here, and the way the smoke’s memory still clings, he hears the heavy step of armored feet, the helplessness of it, the indefensibility of his position—he does not know if Fran even hears anything—they must get out of the street.
An inn, she said; he remembers, and it is there, cat-cornered from the pipe den. Sick as it makes him, he hopes this will go unremarked here: his eyes that feel both raw and lazy, how Fran is slumped into him, how she still turns her cheek and breathes against him. How his hands are spread on her body. He sickens himself: he cannot bring himself to wish their closeness otherwise.
She barely stirs as he crosses the street, and he has been through such places before, but never has it weighed so heavy on his senses. The two years he has lost, then, have taken more from him than he knows. Sun that is so often too bright. A stomach that does not understand spice or richness. Everything that thrills at even this contact, despite the circumstances. The anger that follows helps.
It is all he can do to suppress it in favor of the slow-burning lust and muzzy sensation when the inn clerk makes no hesitation to give him a key. The clerk’s eyes do narrow when Basch says they must have a room with a window, but that caution passes when Basch slurs for the highest floor available. Maybe the numbness of his tongue helps, and that the room on the third floor—the clerk says he can settle the reckoning when they leave. That the rate is less if he is finished—and those are the very words; Basch’s anger spikes, and shame—before the taverns close, so the room can be let again.
But that is just as well, because he cannot reach his purse without letting go of Fran, and he would not put her down, won’t let this person see her stumble. The clerk smirks when he hangs the key from Basch’s fingertip, half an inch from Fran’s skin, and he is sure his anger shows because the man does not touch her. Basch knows the man wants to, can see it, and the anger rises—for himself—because he wants the same, more than this, not like this, but his fingers angle toward her thigh, not her knee, and he swallows and swallows against the contact as he climbs the stair.
There is a bed and a chair, a hard wooden thing, and that is where he puts Fran first. She curls into it—instinct or some shred of coherency returning—and Basch lifts the window sash as high as it will go. Then he drags the bed that moves too easily, too flimsily, despite the drug, and he pushes down the thought as he pushes the bed: a frame so light—like he could snap the legs off with only the clench of his fists, let alone the rock of this want that will not dissipate. He knots his fingers on the wood and pulls it under the window. The desire does not come from that sweet smoke. That is real and raw and what was held in suspension by prison and privation is shaken loose. He puts his face to the night air and breathes.
He should go find Balthier—he would know how to fix this, fix Fran, who suffers from no ailment that he knows. But he will not leave her here; to think of her undefended, incapable, refuels the anger, and it still helps, helps him shove aside the other reason he is loathe to leave her side.
As if to remind him of that very thing in himself he hates, his blood leaps when he lifts her again, but she is not so heavy now. Her body assists him, though it seems she sleeps now. He turns her toward the open window, and her nostrils flare. He steps back, but the way she lies, the heel of one shoe has caught in the tawdry bedspread, the angle of her ankle lifting her leg, an awkward turn at her knee. The fabric is a swirled red, a cheap kind of silky and the weaving busy because that is what will best hide the marks of use. But there is luxury still in this: Basch lifts Fran’s foot, his palm under the arch, and he smoothes the cloth away from the hard black of Fran’s heel. He is careful not to touch her skin. He does not dare.
Once her leg lies flat, he throws himself into the chair, moves it as far away as he can—to the door. He cannot look at her, even though the disconnect is done fully now. That is worse; there is no denying that he wants her, even to let his fingertips rest now on the long thin bones of her foot, but nothing more is tangled save his thinking.
With hands clasped over his face, he hates the circumstance that put them here. Fran not with her partner because she cannot disappear in a crowd like Balthier can, because anyone looking for him (and the bounty hunters are) looks for Fran first. And Basch—he is yet dead. The time may come to claim otherwise, and soon, but not now, and so he can wish the rumor true for the way his body will not ease. He pushes his palms against his eyes and lets himself hate because he will not let himself do what his starved skin wants. He hates the faux silk of the bedspread, the leering man downstairs who thinks he is doing the exact thing that he cannot do, will not, no matter how long—the back of his eyelids turns red and swirled as the fabric as he pushes harder, but there is sound. He drops his hands and looks through the black that recedes to the room’s growing dark. Fran is sitting up, her nose to the window. When he stands, one ear turns toward him, and she stands, too.
“Are you—” The words break on his tongue and he wonders what she can hear. See. Smell. If his guilt is writ on his features.
“We leave.” She says nothing else, and when he reaches for the door, her long leg disappears into the open window, the night.
He does not protest that they have not paid—is fiercely glad for a moment—and hopes his fingers can find the same holds as hers on the sill, that his feet find the same narrow ledges in the stone, because if he fell now, he would not wait for himself.
* * *
In the coming day, he keeps still more to himself, though Fran seems to have taken no offense. She even speaks to him perhaps more than before—which is not to say much, because she is quiet and Vaan fills the silence for three—but he does not take that as absolution. He has betrayed her in his mind, and that is too much, is even worse when Balthier thanks him, off to one side and barely audible, for doing—not doing—what Balthier knows other men would not. After that, Basch does not even look at her.
Later, in another inn—this one slightly more reputable—Basch sits in his hired room, listening to Vaan fidget. They are all concerned for Penelo, and his mind is also on his queen, but he is listening, too (though he tries not to), to the soft murmur of Balthier and Fran’s voices on the other side of the wall. He cannot pick out words, suspects it’s no language he knows. But the pitch of her voice is a pleasure itself, soothing counterpoint to Vaan’s constant shifting. As he listens, it settles on his ears, comforts him in its unfamiliarity: she does not sound like anyone else he knows, does not remind him of anything, and there is such peace in that. But there is no peace, then, because the longer he listens, the more it warms him, the volume soft, and without effort, he remembers her skin against his hands, his chest. How her armor—her skin, too—had touched the bare patch where his vest does not cover. He shakes his head hard, sudden, and it’s enough to startle Vaan into dropping the gil piece he’s been tossing from hand to hand for some minutes now. Basch isn’t sure how the next things happen. He only knows that before Vaan can pick up the coin, Balthier is in their doorway. And then Basch is in the hallway, and Balthier is already in Basch’s chair.
“Pirate business, nothing you’d be interested in,” Balthier says. “And Fran’s sick of the sight of me. Let her look at you a while.”
And then the door is closed, and Fran’s is ajar, and there are steps on the landing, and instinct is too strong. He is in the room and closing the door behind himself before he understands where he has put himself. Fran sits again at the window but not as though seeking air. Rather, she watches, that constant observance, and he is reminded of his favorite uncle, a man who could spot a hare in a field not by sight of its ears but by where the long grasses stirred out of time with the wind. Her own long ears cant so slightly toward him, and she says, “If you care to sit,” without turning her eyes from the street below. She is using the only chair, and so he settles on the edge of the single bed. The blanket here makes no pretense at luxury, but that’s good, somehow, comfortable, and he rests his hands flat, leans back a little. The memory of yesterday coils tight and anxious for a moment, but Fran is still and calm and beautiful at the window, and though the desire is still there—has been from the first, will be always, because how can it not?—there is nothing dull and sick about it, so long as he can keep yesterday at bay.
She glances at him, once, her expression something unreadable but still calm. She unfolds her long legs and resettles them before her, stretched—toward him—and crossed at her knee, and she turns her eyes back to the street. Basch doesn’t know where to look again, though he would not turn his face if it were anyone else, and he does not want her to think he is avoiding her (though he has been). So he keeps his gaze forward, and though he does his best to look to the window, too, she occupies all of his periphery. Something in the street amuses her, because she smiles—only barely—and tilts her head so her hair sweeps soft against her back, hangs over the back of the chair. The room is too warm, though the air from the city is more cool, and if he stands, if he watches with her, perhaps he can think of something to say, rather than continue in this way that pulls too much blood to his cheeks, to his fingertips that seek texture (even now flexing in the blanket), to his groin because he cannot help himself.
He stands behind her, off to one side, a full pace between his body and the chair, and he leans into the wall, looks into the night. He can’t see what it was that she smiled at, but at least then he can ask.
“Something to pique a pirate’s interest?” His voice is too rough, too strained, but she tips her ear toward him. And his fingertips prickle, his lips gone dry.
“There is always something,” she says, and the shrug of her shoulders seems to echo. On the far side of the wall, Vaan is actually laughing, though Fran pays that no mind.
He cannot think of anything more to say, so he says nothing, only puts one hand on the sill, grips the night’s chill and tries to hold it, draw it in. Fran shifts in the chair, makes room, and he rests his elbows on the sill, too, rests his head on the window frame. It is cold, hard on his cheek, and he thinks of the scrape on his arm where Fran had pushed him through the alley. He dares not look at himself, then, either, and so closes his eyes, tries not to feel trapped by this darkness, too.
Fran’s hand on his shoulder startles him into standing too fast, and the back of his head thumps the raised sash. He cups his skull—it is nothing, it won’t even swell, but it was her touch—and looks at her. She is smiling again, this time wider, and standing, and he did not even hear her move before. She reaches for him, and everything strains—but her fingers only push his out of the way, part his hair, and there is the slightest familiar cool of magic.
“It is nothing—” His skin feels electrified.
“It is everything,” she says, and he realizes that her hand has not moved from his head, has only slipped to the back of his neck. He has to lift his eyes to look at her, and it takes longer than it should, getting caught on the sheer material that covers her stomach and how it counterpoints the black of her armor, on the hollow at the base of her throat, and finally because she is taller than he is. He does not know why, but that makes this easier, easier to stay here, when half of him thinks he should apologize, pull away—and then Fran pulls him closer.
He waits for a kiss that does not come.
Her fingers flex, her claws a delicate scrape that slides shivering all the way to his toes. She tilts her head—only slightly—and he can see it: she is testing the air, looking at him, through him, and even if she could not smell how he wants her, now she could see it, were she to look. “Perhaps I am wrong,” she says, “and you have no interest in me?”
For a long minute, he cannot even understand her question, so distracting is her voice, and the very idea confounds him. Were he truly dead, he thinks, he would still want her. Unresponsive to light, air, sound—all else—she could stir him—and she does, she has—and there is yesterday again. And as before, he is weak and cannot step back as he is certain he ought, though at least he can conjure the decency to look away, to stop overstepping with his gaze.
“It is not interest I lack.” He should say more. His tongue sticks.
Fran steps closer, and the edge of one of her cuisses scrapes at the front of his shorts. He is hard, has been since first she touched him. “Nor ability.”
“No.” His cheeks burn—his body on edge thus, to be so roused by so little—save Fran, extraordinary and exotic and sharp and nothing ‘little’—makes him feel like a stripling still. But if his body feels like a boy’s, then his mind must be as a man’s. “It is worthiness. Yesterday—”
“Is done.” She is laughing at him, not with her mouth, but her amusement is plain. She sniffs again, and her tongue touches the edge of her teeth. “Your interest has not been confined to the space of some few clouded hours. Nor has mine.” Her hand on the back of his neck flattens, and he cannot help but tilt into it. Her lips turn up at the corners, and for a moment, he is reminded of Balthier—pirates in all things—and she turns him toward the bed, stripping his vest as she turns him.
The instinct to turn again, shield that part of himself from view is strong, but he reminds himself that she was there when it was worse, was in Nalbina. Is why he is no longer there. It is the pads of her fingers that drag over his back, not claws, and he is grateful, grateful and needing more than the simple warmth of her touch. This is no time to be shepherded. He waits, though, until they stand beside the bed, to turn his head, to reach and catch her thick white hair, and put his mouth to hers. The angle is awkward, but it leaves the rest of the room in front of him, open and potential, and she is so steady behind him, the warm stiffness of her armor from the backs of his knees to where her bodice pushes at his shoulders—a good place to make a stand. Against what, he does not know, until her hands cross his chest, overlap and then draw back, bringing with them the thin halves of his undershirt, and then he knows: against this empty want in him, the desperation of his skin.
Now he shifts, faces her full, and she rakes her fingers through his hair where his scalp still tingles cool with her magic. If she is tall enough that he must lift his chin to reach her lips, then he need not move at all to press a kiss beneath her jaw, to drag his mouth down, and she lets him, encourages with hands splayed on his shoulders. He lets himself be fascinated with the hollow of her throat, tasting faint salt and wide sky until she tugs his hands to the back of her bodice. The row of clasps comes undone only because her fingers overlap his, and when she turns to place her armor on the chair, his touch stutters on the curve and flex of her torso. He would think himself in that opiate dream save the clarity of it all, the quickness with which she draws him to her breast, how her leg wraps his and tells him the throw is coming.
They tumble to the mattress, Fran straddling his thighs, shedding cuisses and greaves, but when she reaches for her shoes, he stops her.
“Let me,” he says, and she rolls to the side, to her back, and he is again touching her foot, cupping the arch in his palm and lifting. But this time, his fingers drift over the long thin bones, ease away the straps, slide full from her ankle to her knee. She puts her hands on another clasp at her hip, and when he would simply marvel again—Fran, bare, in a bed that, if not his, she has made theirs for the time being—she does not let him. Her claws rasp now on the fabric of his shorts, and the selfishness of reaching instead for his greaves—letting her fingers undo the buttons, cup him warm and sure while he tugs at the buckles—seems enormous, but Fran only pushes closer, pushes him back and back until he sits, and she is dropping the fabric beside his mismatched armor, his shoes.
She scratches soft over his legs and he aches with the fullness of wanting her, so perfect now that the want is not idle, not hollowed with guilt.
He fits his hands over her hips even as she straddles him again, tells him she is done with waiting. “Humes,” she says, “have the most peculiar patiences,” but she is speaking against his ear, her lips like velvet, her voice like smoke, still hot from flame. He could not argue that point if he wanted to because she is sinking, her mouth on his earlobe, as lush and wet—he buries his moan in her neck. This will not last, there is no making it so, and surely she knows, surely she knows or she would not lift and slide the way she does, would not tighten around him as her hands knead strong across his shoulders. There is no pain there anymore, had been almost nothing, but she finds his every nerve, sets it alight, and she opens her mouth against his apology, covers it with the dart of her tongue when he would ask forgiveness for the way he is so quickly undone.
She lifts, but does not pull away, rocking against him still, and he slides his hand between them. Fran shifts, all hot slickness around his fingers; she arches, and he bends to take her nipple between his teeth, reaches with his other hand to rub the base of her ear with his thumb. Her exhale is barely sound, but he holds fast to it, strokes the soft fur, the thin curved shell—and she squeezes, rolling into his hand, the thrust of his fingers, the cup of his palm, panting quick and sharp against his cheek. When she has slowed and settled against him, he pulls his hand to his mouth and tastes, the salt-sweet musk of her on his tongue, Fran’s arms around his neck, her thighs against his hips and flexing slight and more urgent—he kisses her again, every nerve alight, and he knows himself well and truly stolen.