Within Me There Lay an Invincible Summer (Final Fantasy VI, Leo/Celes) Title: Within Me There Lay an Invincible Summer Author:puella_nerdii Rating: light NC-17 Wordcount: 1,228 Warnings: explicit m/f sex, mentions of violence Prompt: Slow sex - "just this once, we can take our time" A/N: Title taken from Albert Camus. Lateness due to computer woes. Argh.
After Maranda, Celes receives two weeks’ leave. They wanted to give her a month. She wanted to return to the battlefield as soon as the healers were done looking her over. Two weeks was a fair compromise, Gesthal said, and wouldn’t hear her protests to the contrary.
She knows, of course, that all soldiers need to rest. When she crawls into her bed—no slippery bit of cloth stretched over the jagged ground but a real bed piled high with thick comforters and down pillows until the billowing softness of it all threatens to smother her—she feels needles of ice prickling a pathway through her veins. A sluggish weight beats at her temples. The thought of calling on her magic makes her colder still, especially when she sees patches of skin chapped raw from frostbite, or the steady trickle of red seeping from the stump of a neck.
Her eyes snap open. If she can’t rest, then what can the purpose of her leave possibly be?
She puts a kettle on the stove and busies herself with straightening her room. It takes little time. She has so few things that need to be put away. Her clothes are already folded in neat rows, her few books alphabetized by author. She looks askance at the walls of her bedroom. Perhaps she should buy paintings to hang on them. She can ask Leo what he thinks would look best.
She wants to ask Leo more things than that. The kettle whistles. She sips her tea and thinks on Leo’s face, replaces the ruins of Maranda with images of him and his grave smile, scrubs from her memory the sound of the dying town’s screams and thinks on Leo’s voice instead.
Celes did it for the good of the empire.
She wishes Leo was here to remind her of that.
Her fingers curl tightly around the handle of her cup. Her tea is cold by the time she hears a knock at her door.
“Leo,” she says, breathing in deeply. She feels the knots and lines in her face start to melt away.
“I apologize,” he says, stepping inside. “I should have visited you sooner.”
“No,” she reassures him. “I—thank you for coming.”
“It was my pleasure to do so,” he murmurs. He takes one of her hands in his and strokes her thumb, trying to get the blood to move through her hands again. It feels like her wrists end in blocks of ice.
“The tea’s cold,” she whispers, and she starts to tremble. She should not be doing this. She’s a soldier. A general. She knows how to stand tall.
Leo rests his hand in her hair and draws her head closer to his chest. He smells of soap and rain and leather, and no perfume has ever been so sweet. “It’s all right,” he tells her. “It’s going to be all right.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, flinching at the break in her voice.
“You do not need to be.”
She rolls onto the balls of her feet and presses her trembling lips hard against his mouth, but he rests his hands on her shoulders and gently pushes her back to the ground. “There need be no rush,” he says. “We can take our time.”
Celes closes her eyes and nods, a quick up-and-down jerk of her head. Her breathing steadies. “Shall we go to my bedroom?” she asks, still marveling a little at the audacity of the statement.
“I would be honored,” he replies, kissing the tips of her fingers. She feels them start to thaw.
Any deftness her hands formerly possessed flees when she fumbles with the buttons on her clothes; she presses her lips together and silently orders her fingers to be more nimble. They pay her little enough heed. She would offer to undress Leo, but she cannot say if she’s up to the task.
He comes to her after his own clothes lie folded on top of her dresser. The outlines of his body give off a faint glow in the moonlight, and her eyes are drawn to every inch of him: the thin strip of light running down the center of his nose, the shimmer of sweat on his chest, the wiry curls gathered between his legs. This time, Leo lets her rest her hands on his shoulders, and when their lips meet, it’s not a press but a brush, a dizzying waltz of tongues and breath warm enough to melt the freeze that seems to have gathered for so long in her lungs. Celes sighs into his mouth, her eyes lidded, and he responds by drawing his lips over her ear, tracing its shell.
He returns to the task of unbuttoning her shirt and plants a small kiss on the expanse of skin revealed whenever a button comes undone. The trail of kisses runs in a line from the hollow of her throat to her navel, soft and reverent.
“Oh,” she breathes, her fingers curling in his hair. “Leo…”
Leo slides her shirt from her shoulders, his hands warmer than her garments could ever be. “Is this too much?” he asks. “I would never seek to hurt you.”
She shakes her head, her breath catching in her chest. “No. It’s—lovely,” she sighs as he brushes his thumb against her nipple. Heat flares in her breast, in the pit of her stomach, in her groin. She melts into him, melts into the bed as he kisses her from head to toe, his lips singing wordless praises. You’re beautiful, they say when they leave a feather-light print on her navel. You’re strong, they whisper when they trace the curve of her bicep. Be here with me, they tell her when they trail against her inner thigh.
Then his lips go higher, and she gasps as his tongue warms her folds. She shivers. She can’t remember the last time she shivered. And she keeps trembling, because his kisses don’t cease; they linger at the swell of her cleft just long enough to call forth thin moans from some place deep inside her. “Ah. Yes,” Celes says, laboring to form words for this—this blaze gathering in her, burning her thoughts clear of everything but Leo, Leo and his hands and his mouth. “I—”
He lifts his head to look at her. “What is it?”
“I’m ready,” she whispers. “If you want to…”
“If you want me to stop,” he murmurs, steadying his hands on her hips, “you need only ask.”
“I don’t want that.” Her voice becomes more resolute. “I want—ah.”
He sinks into her, and the embers smoldering between her legs flare up again, but hardly in protest. Oh. Her mouth parts as she adjusts to the feel of him; he remains still then, bent over her, his breath matching the cadence of her heart. And then he moves, slow and sweet, and she moves with him, she would move with him forever if it meant staying like this, thinking of nothing else but the bed beneath her and him on top of her and the rest of the world falling away…
“Will you stay with me tonight?” Celes asks when she becomes aware of the world around her once more.
“Yes,” he says, kissing her one last time before he withdraws. “For as long as you need me.”