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From the streets, Borel Manor’s balcony door is as modest as the rest of the house. A simple composition of eight glass panes attempts to tempt Ishgard’s ration of daily sunlight into its master bedroom. They open out to a third-story skyline cluttered with weathered stone roofs and spires of sharpened steel. A dreary view, though even the manor’s fairer, more lavish sister estates in the Pillars can offer little more in regards to sightseeing.
She does, however, boast a most exquisite view whenever the estate’s master, the newly named Lord Commander of the Temple Knights, takes his tea there during the day's first and final bells. A faithful and modest structure as the rest of the house, he is the first bit of blue across Ishgard’s skies in the itchy pink of morning, and the last shred of it against an evening’s pitch. Though on moonless nights such as this one, naught but the chuffs of steam coming from his evening cup will be seen until morn’.
Yet the eyes that watch from an adjacent rooftop see every bit of him. Dark hair and skin as smooth as virgin snow: the very sight of him momentarily quenches the fire raging down his throat, even if his tongue turns to flint striking the roof of his mouth when sounding out the man’s name.
Aymeric. A name and a shape: one of the few that the body watching the Lord Commander’s faithful routine remembers while it crouches amongst the city’s jagged rooftops, inconspicuous as a brume mouser.
Estinien is what this body once was: an impetuous creature who met a fiery end in an unmarked cavern in the foothills of the Ever Lakes. Angry and alone, his was a heart scorched black before dragon’s fire ever swallowed it. And in those final moments, that heart cried out; and somehow, through the smoke choking his lungs and the flames licking at his skin, something heard him.
Something that refused to let him die. What-was-once-Estinien awoke with a splitting migraine beside a split dragon carcass. No weapon, no magic, no arrow, no man, nor goddess he had once believed in had come to his rescue.
Whatever had saved him–if it can be called that—changed him: whelped him into a lean bastard of monster and man. Black scales sprouted where the flesh had been charred. Barbed ridges burst from the vertebrae down his back, splitting into a whip-like tail and leathery wings. The white hair he got from a mother whose face he no longer remembers curls around two proud horns, fit for a ram in his autumn rut.
He has yet to encounter the full breadth of his transformed body. What he does glean from the terror of doomed trespassers and clean fragments of ice, is that he now looks more like the creature he had pursued than the man who had pursued it. Even so, what-was-once-Estinien knows not what he is.
Only what he wants.
For nigh a decade, his throat has only known an unquenchable burning unsated and unsatisfied by the blood of every scalekin, game, and unfortunate knight who happens to cross his path. Even sleep offers him no respite. The smokey madness in his nightmares always sends him pursuing something blue and soothing. But to think that the trail of blood that led him away now leads him back. To this rooftop. To this manor. To this man.
Ten years later. He will not abide by another moment apart.
In a leap, four sets of claws touch down on the Borel Manor balcony. On his knees, Estinien sits up and squints through the frosted glass. He’s never been this close to him—not in this form. While he looks on, his breath ebbs away at the rime clinging to the door frame, and the quiet shape of the man resting inside becomes clearer and clearer. Yet the sharper he is in focus, the sharper the pains in his abdomen. Growing and roiling hotter, he stoops to swallow a patch of snow bearing the lord’s boot print. In a cold crunch, it cools but does not absolve the needling ache.
While hunching down for another, a fat droplet rolls off the door's handle and splashes the scales on his nose. He looks up at the decorative curve, crooked like a finger inviting him in. It clicks when he reaches for it. No resistance. A testament to the aging bones of the house, perhaps. Or had its master deliberately left it unlocked for some reason?
…For someone?
Curtains batter Estinien as he slips like a chill wind into the bedroom. His tail snaps the door shut behind him and he stands in the middle of the master suite. Neither moon nor candlelight guides him. It makes no difference. Whatever he is can see fine in the dark—and can smell even better. With a gulp, he tastes the spent embers settling in a dead fireplace, the favorite sunning spots of the family cat, and even the tempting musk of the man wrapped in wool and whitefrost cotton sheets.
The tea by his bedside is especially pungent. The sharp excessive sweetness reminds him of the birchwoods scattered among Ferndale. Sweet enough it nearly masks the bitter powder the drink has been mixed with. He recalls this smell from somewhere and from someone else too: a sleeping drought given in a bowl of mutton stew to ease the twitching and turning of a shepherd boy’s night terrors.
Whatever hounds this man’s sleep, does not show on his face. Estinien approaches the bed and finds the very picture of peace. Covered neck to toe, the newly anointed Lord Commander of the Temple Knights sleeps with his chin tucked into the crook of his elbow, the way doves do. He curls a claw under the exposed side of his jaw.
“Good evening, Lord Commander,” greets an old soldier’s voice, gnarled from a decade of silence. He strokes up the curve of his cheek and tucks a stray black curl behind his ear. Not so much as a flinch acknowledges him, and his stomach lurches with relief and disappointment. The ache in him yet persists, craving to see more of him.
He slides his claws under the comforter and drags it ilm by ilm off of him and the bed. The sheet clinging to him comes next. Despite his talons, he is gentle. Like a good shepherd shears a lamb, he extracts him by tenderly following the shape of his arms and legs as to not wake him. Layer by layer, he frees the lord until only a light blue nightgown lays over him like a sheer layer of frost.
The hem falls just below the bend of his knees. He pinches it between his nails. It’s softer than any fabric he has ever known. The lace trim snags along his claw tips when he pushes it up and up, past where smalls should guard him. Yet only skin meets his scaled palms as he folds into the slant of his thigh and up between his legs.
“Ah…”
The little gasp startles him and his hand back. He drops to a crouch, one leg poised towards the window and an escape while he watches Aymeric’s toes curl into his fitted sheet. The lord shivers but does not rouse.
Relieved and still upon all fours, Estinien silently circles the pile he has made of the Lord Commander’s fine bedding. What a cruel creature he must be to abandon this vulnerable form to the mercy of another Coerthan winter. He should not allow it. Not again. Not this time.
Estinien hoists himself upon the mattress softer than lamb’s wool and crawls over the slumbering body. There, he lays himself parallel to Aymeric, mirroring the mortal shape he once had. Once snug against his back, he extends a wing over him with the same ease a man might throw his cloak over another.
Lulled by the scent of him so close, Estinien shuts his eyes. The void behind them conjures the forms of other bodies. Forms like what-Estinien-once-was, huddling close to endure an ice storm or sudden blizzard. Other unarmored knights would lay with him like this. His gut boils at the loathsome thought. In a kinder fate, they would lay like this as well. Beneath his wings, he reaches around Aymeric’s middle and pulls him closer.
While it consoles his mind, it does not comfort the pressure gnawing at his abdomen. His nose digs into Aymeric’s shoulder with a snore-like growl, hunting for a distraction of any kind. The lord’s steady breathing provides it. Estinien attempts to match it like how he taught his brother to count sheep. He holds his breath when Aymeric does and releases it for the same amount of length. Again and again, he does it—breathing just so, until he pulls Aymeric back like a bowstring that bumps just above his groin.
The contact sends a growl rippling down his throat and belly; down to where the nightgown glides softly over a smattering of stiff black scales. It still hurts. Estinien breaks off their synchrony and lifts his hips, pushing back up against Aymeric’s body, hoping it will help snuff the pain. Miraculously it does. So with a sigh, he bucks against him with the same tempo he had moved in time with him. At first, he follows his breathing, but quickly outpaces him when he can think of naught but fully ridding himself of the agony scorching every nerve bundling his belly and thigh.
And with a sudden thrust, his relief presents itself: a thick ruddy shaft of sensitive skin peeks through the mottled slit of flesh between Estinien’s legs.
A whine pries open Estinien’s jaw and sinks his teeth into the dip of Aymeric’s shoulder. His hips no longer move with the other body but work against it, dragging the full flushed shaft of his cock down his sleeping back. Down and down, he follows below the rise of his ass, slipping between the cheeks to let them squeeze and tease the ribbed bulge swelling around its middle.
The Lord Commander’s legs squirm underneath his movements. They part just enough that he can slip between, and Estinien welcomes the needy press of his thighs to warm his cock. Satisfied, at least for the moment, he relinquishes control of their pace and lets the unconscious body drift against him as it pleases.
Even in sleep, the lord feels so composed. With deep, patient breaths, he tames Estinien’s frantic rut into a long courtship. But modest as he may be, his body cannot completely conceal its appetite. Every exhale dots Estinien’s length with sweet sticky kisses wherever their nethers meet. Chin tucked against his bitten shoulder, Estinien draws up the hem of his nightgown to watch Aymeric slowly mark him up and down, ilm by ilm. What limited movements he has he uses to slide along his folds, pushing and prodding until he exposes a proud pink nub, flushed and wanting as his own member.
Aymeric’s thighs reward him with a squeeze that shoots down his throat, parching him and once more filling his lungs with the dreaded memory of smoke and fire. Estinien arches his back, mouth open in a gasp as the vision burns through him again. And again through the cinders, the smoke swirls into the shape of a sweet dark-haired boy, blue calming eyes soothing him as he shares his canteen. He washes the soot from Estinien’s eyes. They open and looking down, Estinien sees his heady length soaked and shiny from a selfless body. Sweet boy. Here he is in a moment of desperate need, offering to slake his thirst once more.
Estinien untangles himself and drops beside the poster bed. The chestnut frame groans as he kneels and spreads the sleeping man open. Bent over, his tongue explores him with a flick before following the line of his slit, dragging it along until his lips purse around the head of his swollen clit.
He sucks with a low hum, feeling the noise echo from the moan that slips past Aymeric’s dreaming lips. Estinien trains his narrow pupils on him in the dark, making sure he rouses him only in the way that matters as he better acquaints himself.
He starts by tasting him in slow circles, warm breath mixing with warm slick. A refreshing welcome that receives his tongue with eager and appreciative twitches. He works him deeper, jaws and nose adoring him with constant friction as he draws back to lap up each and every drop his body endows.
When he rolls his tongue back in, Aymeric’s thighs tremble underneath his claws. His walls squeeze around him, folding the thick of it to almost fill him. It leaves just enough room for only the tip to curl inside him. And when it swipes him from top to bottom, it strikes a match inside him. His legs cross over Estinien’s bristling back, drawing and drowning him within him.
And what can what-was-once-Estinien do but show his appreciation? What can he do but gulp down all that he provides when he gushes like a mountain spring for him? Sweat and slick dribble down his chin as he tries to keep up. His black scales shine with the taste of him, overwhelming and overpowering all good sense to remain quiet, especially when a sweet copper tang joins his tongue.
A red stripe marks where his horns and scales nick his knees and thighs. His nostrils flare from the blood. One time, one such trail had led him astray. This time, it’s only his tongue that follows it, cleaning his snow-like skin of his past mistakes.
And oh he is so sweet, and yet his throat still burns. Even as he nuzzles the space between Aymeric’s legs to drink him down again, his fangs are on edge. It is not enough. Estinien pictures taking him into his mouth as he does the game hares and pheasants he hunts the mountains, and hearing the dainty snap of bones under his teeth–
He pulls back from such a strangely tempting thought. Frustrated tears prick his eyes as he fans the sticky, satisfied parts of his lord with warm puffs of breath. Panting, Estinien grinds against the sheets bunching at Aymeric’s feet, cock heavy and jealous almost to the point of weeping as well.
As Aymeric’s legs slack, Estinien drags himself atop the bed again. He looks down at him the way cathedral gargoyles do over their marbled saints—and how marvelously marbled he is. His pale cheeks and chest are pinched pink and tender as his innermost parts. Only the gentlest bruises and scrapes stain him. Estinien touches where the nightgown hangs pert above his breasts and where an excited fluttering rises to meet his palm. The sleeping dove he had witnessed earlier this eve rattles about his rib cage, awake and excited. It coos to his fingertips a message as sincere as the satisfied smile spreading across the Lord Commander’s lips: this body wants to give Estinien more—it needs to guide him home.
And though what Estinien-once-was had refused him then, who is he to deny him now?
Fine threads catch Estinien’s claws as he grips the sheets on each side of the sleeping lord. His tail slithers under Aymeric’s scraped ankles and pulls them taut around his waist. The wings spring forth from his back again, covering them in one last act of modesty as he makes the tent they were always meant to share.
Bowing his horned head, he lifts up Aymeric’s hips by his tail and eases into him with a shiver. He yet remains guarded as his old balcony door that throws open wide for cold winds and curious creatures of the night. The lord’s mouth follows suit, falling open in a round, silent shape as he welcomes the first ilms of Estinien’s cockhead. There’s no resistance when he begins to move inside him, nor when he angles him to press the ribbed bulge outside of his entrance. Instead, it inspires a new noise out of him:
“...Estinien…”
He stalls….but it was only a moan, surely. An ancient wistfulness no doubt playing tricks upon his gnarled ears. For in the decade that has separated them, surely he does not remember that name, let alone dream of it.
Yet, he can’t push the sound out of his mind.
Estinien leans closer to his face, nostrils still full of the bitter powder lingering from the sleeping tea on his bedside table. He looks over at the little cup painted with demure blue roses entwining its base. What plagues a man so much that he requires such a brew? The anxiety of leadership? The weight of a highborn son’s social duty?
The guilt of a lost comrade?
He touches Aymeric’s cheekbone and traces just under where his eyes remain locked shut. What then does such a man dream of to escape? Estinien shuts his eyes and tries to imagine, fighting through his own charred nightmares and the few, flighty happy memories this body once held. Among them, he can see them and their stolen future. He sees Aymeric in simple comfortable garb outside of a cozy brick cottage unshackled from steel-tipped rooftops. Green fields dotted with bleating karakuls rise behind him as he pins their laundry made from their wool to dry. He has a babe saddled around his hips, fat cheeks, and silver curls. His blue tunic cinches high upon his waist, full and flowing over the shape of another on the way.
Estinien drags his claws down Aymeric’s nightgown and rumples the fabric, imagining how it would stretch around the swell of his belly. His cock jerks, picturing it. A little family of their own, free from both of their nightmares. No duties but to each other, no hunger but for one another. The shape of him forever changed by him and this meeting: their fate’s course finally corrected.
His tail knots around Aymeric’s ankles. He can think of naught else but giving him this gift and securing their future. And with the way the man clenches around his length, certainly he would welcome this burden. Certainly, this is what he dreams of.
Matted strands of his white mane hang in a tattered veil as he lowers his horned head to meet the other man’s. Throat sore and strained he can only croak as he rolls his hips in renewed earnest.
“Oh Aymeric…”
The chestnut bed acknowledges his motions. The wood aches like the first crackle of a campfire, answering his moans with its own. He worries not about the sound anymore. His knotted tail yanks up Aymeric’s ankles, drawing his hips up to fully take him. Not that he needs much force. His generous lord’s body is simply famished for him and eagerly devours Estinien’s bulge with its own ministrations.
Fully joined, he is all but folded over Aymeric, face-to-face while their bed turns into a roaring wyrm of wood and stained sheets, rocking with every thrust. Yet despite the noise and movements, the lord’s eyes remain firmly shut, even as his blissful breaths mist the scales covering Estinien’s neck and chest.
It is not enough.
“Wake…up…” he rasps, leaning against the slant of the elezen ears.“Please...wake up, love.”
He begs. He moans. He pleads. He has to. He needs to. Estinien needs him to wake up, or else the dream will just be a dream. He needs him to see that the wretched day from ten years ago is but a nightmare, and he is here now. Both of them are, and they can have a cottage and karakul. He needs him to wake and see him–save him; he needs him to rip the wings from his back, kiss the scorched scales from his arms and legs so that the ones from his eyes can fall at last and see what vengeance blinded him to ten years ago.
Estinien spreads Aymeric’s palms out and slots the spaces between his fingers. He shudders at the comparison. The gnarled claws, blistered and broken, are nearly a stone longer against the digits marked by delicate nicks from quills and arrow shafts. He curls his fingers under his in the hopes he can bury their monstrous shape.
“Please…please…”
He begs again, pushing into him over and over in the hopes he can stir him enough to wake that foolish boy who had once been spared his family’s fate only to meet it at the end of a trail of blood. If only the lord could pluck an arrow and sling it through that monster’s heart, he could yet save them—
And then something featherlight flits over the top of Estinien’s knuckles, soft as a mourning dove’s moan. He raises his head, and through the strands of his mother’s white hair sees the Lord Commander touching him. The dark eyelashes flutter. A sliver of blue peeks beneath them, each eclipsed in the dim light by a large dark pupil that regards him. His bottom lip falls open, glossy with spit shine and husky with sleep when it repeats:
“...Estinien…?”
Even expected, it startles him back, reminding him immediately how they are intimately joined. His knot snags just inside Aymeric, who howls with his pale back bent like a birch recurve. And regret once more burns through Estinien’s heart. He struggles to detach himself but the lord commander’s legs laced around his hips snap him back into place. Groaning and fumbling against his bed and body, Aymeric writhes underneath him gasping.
“No…” the lord rasps out between breaths, “...no–please…!”
Twisted between their limbs and sheets, Estinien swallows down the fire coursing through his throat. He uncurls his tail and turns his body away from Aymeric and towards the balcony window, where winter and escape await. If he can just make it—
“Stay…”
He looks back. Back at the pair of pale blue eyes that saw him off. They watch him half-lidded and lost between waking and dreaming. His thumb touches the center of Estinien’s forehead and wanders down the line of his nose, where it circles what little softness remains of his lips. It traces around every scab, scar, and scale, feeling only the softest, most mortal parts of him before wrapping his arms around his neck.
“Please stay, Estinien…” he drawls, embracing him like a drinking companion abandoned to his cups. “Do not go—do not leave me. If you leave me…you will not—”
What-was-once-Estinien snatches the words and Aymeric’s mouth between his teeth. Aymeric accepts him with a muted whimper and eyes sealed tight. The lord’s most modest mouth, however, is open and frantically kissing him, set to devour him as though he intends to be the famished beast who crawls through bedroom windows at ungodly hours.
It is not the only eager part of him either. Though freed, Aymeric’s legs remain locked around his waist, loosening only enough for him to slide down Estinien’s swollen length.
When he thrusts himself upon it again, Estinien tosses his horned head back.
His mouth releases him with a wet gasp and the chamber fills with moans and coos. Complete darkness finds the slit-like pupils rolling back in rapture. Soon his ears become numb to even that. Deafened in a moment of pure isolation, he feels just how fiercely Aymeric’s body grips him. And when his senses return, it is to the absolute vision of Ishgard’s dutiful Lord Commander sleepily swiving along his cock whilst pleading and begging to stay with him—to stay in him.
He can do that much at least.
His hips stutter alongside Aymeric’s words, but he does not need to speak. Neither of them do. Estinien should’ve listened and stayed with him then. He is listening now.
And leaning into him with a broken kiss from what-once-was-Estinien’s mouth, he spills into him the way moonlight does through his curtains—gentle, uninvited, but not unwanted.
The bed quiets as his hips slow and his head and lungs clear. Estinien stretches out, his throat no longing singing with fire; his loins no longer aching. He watches as the legs wrapped around him finish lapping up everything Estinien has spent before they too slow. But when the arms that had his shoulders in a vice suddenly go limp, Estinien sits up concerned.
“...Aymeric?”
The Lord Commander still breathes, though ever so slightly with his face half-swallowed by a plump downy pillow. Asleep again. With empty lungs, Estinien sighs and settles atop his chest like an oversized house cat. His wings fold back as lays his cheek against his chest and listens to the fluttering dove sinking back into its cage. He runs an idle claw down the bowman’s forearms to where the fingers end with several threads of pale hair pinched between their tips. He lets him have them. He’ll wake and tell himself these too-long strands are from his cat. Every cut, bruise, and throbbing muscle tomorrow will of course be from his training. As for the child—
What-was-once-Estinien compares his claws against the soft, tender shape of the sleeping lord’s again. He smells a change in his body—within both of them. Before it burned, Ferndale’s pastors used to preach against consorting with the likes of devils and dragons: how a pure heart was necessary to achieve final rest within the Fury’s Hallowed Halls. Those who did not would call abominations to their bedside. Nightkin, who lie between the legs of lords and ladies to pleasure them and fill their bellies with grotesque spawn to return and devour upon delivery.
Estinien squeezes the smaller hand with a low growl. Superstitious stories conjured by pious, repressed men. They are not—and he cannot be…
But then he knows not what he is. Only what he wants. The cottage. The karakul. A husband unburdened from the demands of knighthood and duty; a brood of moon-haired children scattered around their feet. Above all, he wants to stay as Aymeric bids him–as long as he is able to. He does so even as he starts to soften and retract from within him.
But it’s in his nature to leave, even when what-was-once-Estinien does not wish to.
Soon the morning light will be sifting through his comely windows while the lord readies to take his first cup of tea on the balcony.
Cupping Aymeric’s face, he vows to return in a moon’s time while kissing his jaw in a long slow line to his neck. He works down his chest, over the wrinkled folds of his nightgown, down to where it clings to the gentle swell of his belly. A low purr rattles his throat as he nuzzles against the skin. An apology–to both of them–if whatever he is can be capable of such a thing; if whatever he has sired will ever accept it.
And with a dance of curtain, whatever he is vanishes from the chamber, leaving the modest lord undisturbed in his dreaming.