Chapter Text
Sunlight, warm and welcome, spread over the lance leaned against the dining table of the Warrior’s room in the Pendants. From across the room, she stared at the black old thing and thought about how she’d be in trouble in perhaps half a bell. The sun’s angle would change. That little glint of light would shoot her way, sure as an arrow, and she would reluctantly have to adjust her position to keep it from blinding her. And that task she was loathe to do, given the intertwining she’d accomplished with her dear friend and lover, the Crystal Exarch.
The Warrior brought her eyes back to the bundle of red hair lying on her chest. When she drew her hand across his forehead, his gentle breaths stunted and he called her name. The sound brought a smile to her lips, but before she could respond, he was calling it again, raising himself like he’d heard his own name in the distance.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Something is wrong.” The night disappeared from his eyes. He pulled an arm out from beneath her and whipped the covers down with his other, only to lurch off the bed and step into the sunlight.
The glistening of his crystal skin caught the Warrior’s tired eyes for a moment, but her gaze drifted to her lover’s heaving chest, his naked shoulders drawing up and down with stress. “Raha?”
“Something...isn't right."
"I believe you mentioned."
Tail winding, he patted his chest and turned himself in circles, brought his hands up to his ears then finally back down to his center, where they came to a rest. His voice was dark and deep. "Oh. Oh no."
The Warrior drew the covers back over her chest and rolled onto her side. “Oh?” Even troubled as he was, his silhouette looked like glory. The light rounded his muscles like it was afraid to hit him too hard.
He turned over his shoulder, slow as the minute hand on a broken grandfather clock. He looked grim. He looked almost angry, as though the heat of his shoulders could have raised the hair from the back of his neck. “Forgive me. I mistakenly believed such things were beyond me.”
“Such things? What manner of thing ails you?”
He shifted his weight and hunched his back, like his stomach ached. “That this base biological imperative would rear its head…” He offered a sad smile.
It was a smile of which the Warrior was not overly fond. It reminded her of the days he spent covering his face, projecting confidence in the face of certain misfortune. “You’ll have to be frank with me.”
As his eyes slipped from the Warrior to the window, the corners of his lips turned down. “Please my love. Grant me this mercy. Rather than hear this shame from my lips, I’d have you understand the truth after I’ve returned to the Tower proper.” Nigh limping, he stepped over to the desk where his robes had ended up the night prior.
But she didn’t like the sound of that. “No,” she said, hopping out of bed. “You cannot honestly expect me to let you suffer alone.”
He started sorting through the fabrics. “This problem...if indeed I’ve diagnosed myself properly...is exactly the sort of problem best worked through—”
“I don’t want you to leave.”
“Alone.”
The Warrior stood naked just a few fulms away in all her scarred beauty. The Exarch could not help himself from staring, but she couldn’t figure out why he stared not with wonder but intensity—the fever of his eyes more closely resembled bloodlust than lust.
He clenched his hand into a fist, pressed his nails into his palm. The crystal arm steadied him on the back of the desk chair, but still he looked like a stiff wind would have had him on the floor. “I beg of you. Come not a step closer.” A growl, as much as it was a command.
The Warrior twitched her fingers and frowned. “Ra...ha…?”
A rush of air came from his lungs. He was practically draped over the wood now, head downturned and dark, eyelids shut so hard wrinkles framed his face. “Please,” he begged. “I can smell you well enough from here. And it’s...it’s intoxicating…” He spat the last word in time with a furious lash of his tail.
Intoxicating?
She cocked her head. “You mean to say...you like the way I smell? And this is a problem?”
“It is...more complicated than that.”
“You are having trouble coming to terms with your lust? The lust you have for your….for your lover?”
“You don’t understand,” he said, ears pinned back. “This is more than simple lust. This is every human onze of me yielding to a primal bidding, long dormant.” His eyelids fluttered and his cheeks grew ever redder. It was the gentlest expression he’d worn all morning, a vulnerable one. “This command is one I would shame myself to follow.”
The Warrior’s frown deepened. “What command.”
Those full lips quivered—perhaps in fear, perhaps in some kind of contemptible excitement. As he spoke the words, on some level he was imagining them coming to fruition. Yes, he imagined quite deeply and realized the words should never be allowed to escape his mouth.
He opened his eyes. “To breed.”
The Warrior blinked, opened her eyes wider, found her mouth following suit. “You mean—you are—”
He buried his head in his hands. “Please don’t say it.”
“I scarcely thought it possible.”
“Spare me from your teasing.”
“You’re in—”
“No.”
“You’re in a—”
His fist fell to the desk. The rest of his body shook into the gesture. “My love,” he said, like he was on his death bed. “If I’m made to silence you with force, there shall be no hope for my dignity.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs, snickering. “Dignity? I dare say we’ve shared some wonderfully undignified moments together over the past moons.”
“Yes, and they’re returning now to haunt me.”
Recalling some of their past experiences, she decided “haunt” was certainly not the word that applied in her situation. She chuckled. “I should like very much to help you through these trying times.”
He laughed like it hurt him to do so. “Ease my suffering, you mean?”
“It’s the least I can do.” Lips twisting into a smile, she leaned forward onto her knees. “I wonder if we couldn’t make an opportunity of this?”
“Oh dear.”
“Yes. Let’s make it a proper test of your endurance.” She rubbed her hands over her bare legs.
Face flushed, he fixed a stray hair and looked away. “By now I imagine you’re quite familiar with my endurance.”
“But I’ve never asked you to hold back, dear Exarch. I’m curious to see how you carry yourself in this state.”
He sighed her name. Was it amusement? The sound bore a sinister shade. “You may be surprised, my Warrior.”
"I love surprises, when they come from you." She scooted back onto the mattress proper and managed a coy expression. “Come here.”
The Exarch, despite his lofty title, turned his head away and walked as though under a spell, crawled onto the mattress and into her arms as though he were walking into his own grave. But once he was there, he melted. Sure, she felt his erection on her thigh, but what shocked her was how physically hot he had become. Feverish. Burning. Even his crystal seared.
While they kissed, he bucked lightly against her, nowhere near her sex but needy nonetheless. A laugh spilled from her mouth, and she took the opportunity to push him back and straddle him. “Let me see if I can’t break you,” she said.
He said nothing with his lips but volumes with his mad eyes. The last time she’d seen him so serious was—well, a time she didn’t like to remember. But the force of his hands gripping her thighs brought her back to the present, where she was rubbing him between her legs.
He hummed her name at first contact and turned his head away. “Are you sure you want this…”
“I want you always.” Slicker, she set his tip at her clit and rolled her hips back and forth. “Can you not tell how much I want you?”
“You know not what you may evoke, Warrior…”
“But you do, no? You have experienced this before?”
He grimaced. “I dealt with it much differently as a young man.”
That made her laugh. “Well, let’s make the most of this most curious affliction.” She lowered herself and felt him twitch inside her.
“Gods…you...” He craned his mouth open and closed. “Feel so good.”
“Mmm.” She traced the crystal of his chest and rode him. The fullness was pleasurable enough that when coupled with the idea of just how badly this man wanted her, she feared touching herself would spiral her far too soon. She wanted to draw out this experience...or at least outlast this man, who by his own admission was deep in lusty throes the likes of which she had never known.
But this she could not afford to tell him—which meant when he reached with his spoken hand to rub her clit, she had no defensible reason to tell him to stop. “Want you to feel good,” he said, misty gaze set between her legs.
The sensation caught her off guard, but she tried to hide it. With his fingers there, she wanted more and wanted it faster. “I feel plenty good, Raha.” Between the pleasure and the heat radiating from his skin, she was sweating. “And you? Do you want to give up?”
“Gods know I am capable of...of letting go even now.” He swallowed hard and met her gaze like she had a knife at his throat. “However, I will not.”
Leaning forward, she fingered his lip before pressing her own against him. He was so noble, even in this most vulnerable of positions. He spoke of his body’s command to breed, but now she battled her body’s command to tense and tense and ride and release.
The kiss was too much. Gods, she hoped he didn’t noticed her insides pulsing as she gently brought herself to orgasm, biting his lower lip in lieu of a pillow.
She rocked until the wave subsided. “I...I’m not tired of course,” she said before planting a thick kiss on the blue sliver at his neck. “But would you like to have your way for a while?”
“You think I’ll embarrass myself faster that way, do you?”
“Not at all.” Though her hips were motionless, his cock inside her was not. Each time he exhaled, she felt it throb. “I’m curious what a man in your condition would do with me.”
The fire brewed in his eyes again. “There’s not much I wouldn’t.”
“Well?”
Cool air slipped from his mouth now. Shifting his legs slightly, he gripped her thighs and fucked her from below. She fell forward and balanced herself on the bed to weigh against the momentum at work between her legs. After a while, his crystal arm moved to her breast, than her nipple. He rolled it, tested it, then squeezed so hard she couldn’t help but whine. So fresh after her poorly hidden orgasm, the sensation tingled well throughout her body, down to her fingertips, her toes, even the end of her tail.
Closing her eyes, she focused wholly on the hardness hitting her. There was something different about it, now. It’s not that he was bigger, more aroused, or physically different; his movements felt unhinged, like it was as natural for him to enter her as it was for fruit to surge and ripen, to grow sickly sweet and drip.
“Move,” he said after a while.
She meant to offer a few words of playful protest, but the thick scent of lust had her mind somewhere else entirely. Aching with want again, she slipped from him and wilted on the mattress.
In the blink of an eye, he pulled her by the waist and set her shoulders against the wall. After pausing for a tiny kiss, he drew her hips forward so he could slip back inside. She could do naught but huff and rear her head back into the wall, and all the while he drove in and out, panting against her neck. At first, he gripped her breasts and squeezed, toyed, rubbed—but soon he rode his hands down to her ass. Without missing a beat, he lifted her hips a few ilms and started moving her just as much as he moved himself. The angle was different—stronger—and though she wanted to reach out and grasp his neck or his chest, her arms grew limp as he found the spot that sent her every time.
She didn’t mean to come...but she did. Harder than she had before. And this time there was no hiding it.
“Hah…” He bit a smile into her neck.
With every thrust, he drew more wetness from her. Strong as she saw herself outside that room, Raha was her lover. She would let him hear her whimper.
“That is two for you now, isn’t it?” His hands were so warm, his breath so hot. “Ah, my friend. Do not presume I missed the signs of your first pleasure.”
Finally opening her eyes, she chanced to look down and watch him slip ever-determinedly into her pulsing entrance. Though he had indeed restrained himself thus far, seeing him pound her, use her—it made her feel full and needed. It sent shivers down her spine to think he was not just making love but breeding. Rutting. Surely as she was a warrior, she was his mate. Better to stay quiet and stare than speak and show him how inarticulate his ministrations had made her.
Her name slipped from his mouth, a gruff whisper. “Have I proven myself?”
“Not...yet…” Her eyes rolled back.
“Hm.” He pulled out, gripped her rib cage, and eased her back down to the sex-soaked mattress. She curled her arms over her chest and let him rub his warm cock over her throbbing clit. “I will warn you again. I’ve more than enough stamina to continue until you’ve finished twice—thrice more, if you are stubborn enough.”
“I dare say...you are all talk...Raha...”
As he pushed himself in, his eyes gleamed like ghostfire. “Forgive me, but you can hardly talk at all.”
Surging her hips up to accept him once more, she knew he was right. Her tongue slipped from her mouth with his first full stroke. “Fine.” She could have choked on pleasure. “Be finished then. But you’ll...you’ll not impress me.”
A growl warmed his throat. “Much as I want…” He leaned over her and a bead of sweat dripped from his shoulder to her collarbone. “Want to hear you say it...most of all.” Slower now, he fucked her—but deeper, too. Even the press of his balls against her body was enough to make her whine. “More than anything.”
The Warrior had stood defiant before all manner of foe, but here she had no choice but to admit: she had been wrong about the Exarch’s fortitude. Even in his beleaguered state, his devotion was greater than his instinct. She clasped her hands behind his burning neck and pulled him closer. “Want you so bad,” she said. This man. He had the right.
“Yes,” he said, forehead to forehead. She could feel his eyelashes on her brow. “Give in. Command me, Warrior.”
She felt as though some great power had fallen into her lap. A bit embarrassed, she realized she was staring at this lust-laden man the same way she beheld the Mother Crystal, perhaps even more reverently. So, without further delay, she swallowed hard, hitched her legs behind his hips and squeezed. “Give it to me.”
Flesh to flesh, he dug in deep and groaned. Heat—his heat—poured into her, seeped to her thighs as he sank in again and again...and again, like he’d waited another century to give her this orgasm. And even as she froze in pleasure, he took only a moment to catch his breath before rolling her onto her side and hanging her leg over his shoulder.
“Raha,” she said, tiny voice muffled by the pillow.
He grit his teeth and willed his cock back to her throbbing sex. “More,” he said, hardly opening his lips. He barely sounded like himself. And even in his head he struggled to recognize the sound of his own voice. Another force compelled him, a force he now internalized. Who am I to pretend I didn’t want this all along?
Perhaps a minute later he picked up the pace and leaked again into her entrance, already slick with her liquids and his seed. He sheathed himself deep within and held the position this time, took in every vibration of her sex as she took in every hot onze he delivered. When he finally pulled back, she shuddered and cried out.
“I—I am surprised!”
He fucked her once, with a thrust so committed the bed knocked against the wall. “Shh.”
“You fuck me like this...and...and shush me?”
Another bead of sweat fell from his brow, furled in something almost apologetic. “I told you I would shame myself.” His eyes popped open. “Is this still what you want?”
“You have more to give?”
He licked his fingertip and stared like an animal. "This is a biological trait meant to sustain entire tribes, not a single warrior's whims."
She blinked. "But I am no mere warrior. I am the Warrior of Light and Darkness."
His eyelids lowered and she could have sworn the corner of his lip ticked up. "That you may be. But if you'll have me...know you are taking on a historical burden carried not by one partner but by many.”
"Raha…” Heavy breaths poured from her mouth. “I've felt the weight of two worlds on my shoulders."
"Good," he said coming forward and pushing down on her shoulders. "That's a reasonable place to begin comparisons."
“Show me,” she said, turning her head but keeping her eyes locked on his familiar, unfamiliar face. “Show me, Raha.”
Exhaling, he spread her legs with a hand on each of her thighs. For the first time in centuries he forgot everything about destiny, duty, and fate.