She was a robot? She was a ROBOT? (mithrigil) wrote in kinkfest, @ 2007-09-08 08:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | a: mithrigil, f: final fantasy xii, p: ashe/basch, september 08 |
Fic -- FFXII, Ashe/Basch
Title: making it all better
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Characters: Ashe and Basch
Rating: PG
Prompt: shared fantasies - here, in this place, you are safe.
making it all better
The tears make her cuts sting worse. They’re dirty and ragged and unbecoming but she can’t help trying to hide them. Cure will work, right? Or a potion. She doesn’t want her cheeks to look like this when Rasler comes again tomorrow, he’s beautiful now and she’s still a girl according to her father, still a girl when she looks in the mirror and dresses in the morning, and even more still a girl when she falls off a chocobo, apparently.
Basch breathes, once and quickly, and maybe it’s a laugh. Ashe does not want to be laughed at right now. But she looks up through those godsdamned tears and he’s smiling and she can never fault him for that.
“Not bad,” he says low, reaching into one of his bird’s saddlebags, pried off and unceremonious beside him in the sand. He uncaps his canteen quickly and pools the water into his hand—still gauntleted, which is maybe better for the water. But not better for the alcohol, or the potion, or Cure if it’s Cure. And besides, she likes his hands—
She’s thought about them when she probably oughtn’t.
The clean water, warm from the sun and his gauntlet, threads through the scrapes on her cheek. Ashe winces, digs her knees into her skirts and the sand underneath them. A few years ago she would have told him to let her do it herself, just to prove she could. One knee is redder than the other now; she’s let Basch or Vossler or Hrist or Dannid or anyone else fix her cuts ever since.
His eyes are intent on the little phial of stinging alcohol in his hands—the gauntlets are off—not on hers. She bites her lip. He has such big, yellow hands, hard in places from dead skin and so soft in others, like his fingertips, from scars and armor-polish and elixirs. She knows them from swimming lessons, from carrying her up to bed when she’d fall asleep at fetes, from him lifting and setting her down in the saddle in the first place. From him holding her cheek and letting her kiss him on the nose, before she figured out that it was a spell making it all better, not her lips.
She’s still biting her lip when he thumbs the cleanser over her cheek. It stings worse than tears. It stings worse than trying not to think about his hands.
He apologizes. She watches his lips, watches the sunlight make the beginnings of his beard flicker white and gold, and doesn’t actually hear him. Maybe he meets her eyes—maybe he sees that he shouldn’t be touching her either. She’s nearly fifteen, after all. Girls get married at fifteen all the time. And she’s going to marry Rasler, maybe next year, and—
“You take it so much easier now, your Highness,” he says, smiling down at her. “Remember when your nurses had to hold you still when they cleaned out the cuts? It does not hurt anymore?”
“No,” she corrects, sullen, before she can stop herself, “it hurts worse.”
A slight sigh rattles his armor. “Just a moment,” he assures her (or tries, because she isn’t assured at all), and looks down to uncork a potion. He’s so efficient, she thinks, trapped in the futility of watching his hands again, watching the potion dribble into but never off his sandwiched fingertips, watching the shadows in his cuirass change as she edges nearer to him, between his kneeling legs, deeper into the sand.
Curatives are always cold, and his hands are always warm. It’s never made sense.
“There,” he says low, smoothing the excess away as her skin knits shut. It tingles like sleep needles and frustration.
Not quite, she wants to say, like she used to. Not quite, because it means he would kiss her too. But her voice is lower now, and her body is larger, and she’s collapsed in the sand, so close to him already, that she knows if she said it aloud it would be—
Well, improper. To say the least.
.
.