InsaneJournal

Fic, FFTactics, Delita/Ovelia
Title: perhaps this is concession
Author: mithrigil
Fandom: Final Fantasy Tactics
Characters: Delita and Ovelia
Rating: Hard R
Prompt: issues of consent -- for greater good than merely one's own.

perhaps this is concession

“It has been five weeks, has it not.” It is a statement, not a question. He knows her cycle better than she does. He knows how long it has been. He merely desires to hang her reluctance over her head. She bites her lip to think so.

“...Yes,” she mutters, as once she did to teachers.

“Well then.” He unknots his mantle. “Let us try again.”

Shad had been on the bed; she slides off it, to remove and fold her nightgown. She wonders if her maids talk in the morning, before they wake her. She knows that she would, if she served a barren queen. Once her nightclothes are draped over the chaise, she snuffs the candles there. It is not the first time she has considered making a run for it in the dark.

Opposite the bed, he is doing the same, dousing candles. He is bare already, but non-threatening (for all the darkness that surrounds him, she has never seen him prepared, only felt it, and perhaps this is concession). He turns to her, the most staid of glances, and something like snakeskin winds through her spine, her elbows clench in, the carpet licks at her heels.

The silhouette of the king sits on the edge of the bed. The covers rustle as his hand spreads them, indicates her place. He says nothing.

Upon a time, Ovelia thinks as her answer across the carpet drags on like ceremony, conquered brides were sent with elixirs, to ease the pain of wedding the unknown. Delita is not unknown to her. She had thought they would be beyond potions, beyond arts, beyond contrivance. He does love her, she knows—of all the falsehood in his heart, he does not care enough to lie about that—but this is not an act of love. It is one of procreation. Only humans and dragons, she has been told, couple when they are past the birthing age, or when the woman is fruitless, or simply because they desire to.

He kisses her slow and smoothes her legs apart.

For the world of all other beasts, this is posterity.

He does not think of her—rather, he does not think solely of her during this endeavor. Even as he lowers his mouth to her neck, tightens his grip on her shoulders, he has wit about him enough to remind her of the salve on the nightstand, so that this will not hurt. Why do women not have adequate slick inside them?, she thinks, but does not say, and knows also that this is his way of assuring her that he knows his body is not in readiness, that the same gravity of duty chills him. So she slides out from under him and, clumsy through cold and dark, gathers enough on her hand to return to him and take his prick up. His skin there is goosefleshed, warming some under what the balm allows her to touch. He said once that her gentleness there is more arousing than any he has known. She blushes to recall that now, and his fingertips glance off her cheek, absently.

A hiss escapes his lips, above her ear. She shivers, and lets her hand off his prick, and reclaims her place on the bed, beneath him. The canopies retain their faint color, in this dark; the reds and golds of their makeshift crests, bought and falsified yet still demanding legacy.

-


.