Stephen’s not expecting that tangent back to earlier in the year, and it catches him laughing, remembering how dreadful they’d been about avoiding each other.
Shaking his head over the prospective gifts, still amused, “Duly noted for next time. Although I would be displeased with receiving flowers or a necklace, for the record—” Gwenaëlle knows exactly how far his vanity goes and what sort of decoration he does favour, for those formal occasions when he accessorises a little more and she can nimbly set them in place for him: cufflinks, tie pins. Back in New York, a two-fingered ring if it’s magical.
And a pocketwatch, now.
That thumb running along his palm, his life-line, shouldn’t be as distracting as it is, except that it is. It’s nice to be here, warm and content in their shared bed in their shared home, with an actual holiday stretched ahead of them with no work on the day.
“Also, honestly, asking about camouflage might’ve been better than what you did lead with. I would very gladly have explained it to you. And wouldn’t have minded the reminder,” of Halamshiral, of other times, their first time,
as he drifts to replace his hand with his mouth and kiss the corner of her jaw instead, the angle of her cheek, the place where she’d been injured.
Stephen is spared, at least for the immediate moment, any protests about how well thought out and specific her unhinged tangent had been because the press of his lips is a welcome distraction— kindling heat and an unfamiliarly nervous energy in the pit of her stomach. He, probably, cannot feel with his mouth the place where she can almost feel with her fingers some nothing remnant,
she can feel the flutter of her wings beneath the flimsy fabric of her nightgown, and her stomach swoops, and she slides her fingers higher to loop through his.
“I know that it hasn’t exactly been,” what’s the word she’s looking for, “… recent, now,”
is a sort of set up that doesn’t go anywhere, exactly. She is very aware of her weight in his lap and the scrape of his morning-untidy beard against her skin and that she hasn’t stopped wanting him, actually, even as her own body has become a stranger landscape to her than it has ever been.
It is a very suggestive place that they find themselves in now. And yet it’s still a slow-building thing, handled carefully. He’s no stranger to dry spells; the car crash, his body morphed and changed and unfamiliar, the chronic pain dulling everything else. Gwenaëlle’s always had a stronger libido than him, and this entire year had largely been her coaxing him out of it and reminding that he did, in fact, have urges and desires.
And the shoe’s on the other foot, this time. First it had been her injuries themselves — a doctor’s stubborn prescribed bedrest — but then, as time went on, he had noticed where their sex life lapsed, conspicuous for its absence. The wings. Those robes, wrapped around her shoulders at night. It’s not a thing he misses overly much, in contrast to having her presence alone, her conversation, her wit.
“I don’t mind,” Stephen says quietly. They haven’t actually talked about it yet. He needs to say this. “You know I don’t mind, right?”
The way she rolls her lip in her teeth isn’t exactly no, I didn’t, but maybe that knowing is different to feeling it. Maybe,
“I mind,” she admits, resisting the usual impulse to prevaricate and dissemble about it. I mind— a bit. I mind— but it’s fine. I mind— it’s often Gwenaëlle reaching for him, it’s not as if he hasn’t been there, isn’t it fucking stupid to miss something she could have just done? Does she even get to say, I’ve missed that? and anyway, it’s been like, a month, she’s gone without sex for longer than that. They both have.
(So she resisted it out loud, but it’s harder, in her own head.)
She tips her forehead against his; their breath mingled, their hands clasped.
At length, “I know you’re not mad,” the shape of a worry she might have had, in some other bed, in some other era of her life. “I haven’t not wanted, exactly.” And she wants, now,
it’s never felt vulnerable to want, quite the way it does now.
“I know this might not be an exact cognate, so feel free to tell me to fuck off and that it’s actually something else, but I know— I remember—” Stephen’s tripping over his words again; not through that giddy stupid delight in finding out they did the same thing with their presents, but instead now the delicacy of it, trying to find the right words to express what he wants to.
He’s not a poet or a writer or a diplomat. Still, he tries.
“Needing to take a bit of time to get comfortable in your own skin again. To feel like you’re yourself again. They put metal pins in all my fingers to reconstruct them; at night it seemed like I could feel them there, inside me. My hands were crooked. Everything was the wrong shape. Obviously it’s not fucking faerie wings,” there’s a touch of dry humour in his voice, their similar coping mechanisms, “but I don’t know. I remember what that sort of thing felt like, is what I mean.”
The lack of haste to tell him that he’s wrong is probably enough of a confirmation that this is in fact exactly the right track— she rubs her thumb in restless circles against his skin, half for his sake and half for her own. Half because he’s reminded her of he has hands, and that she’s touching them, and that they are not entirely navigating unfamiliar territory. It’s a little reassuring, remembering her own words to him. Remembering how little it has mattered to her that the version of him in her bed isn’t the physically whole one he remembers, because it’s him, still,
“I don’t want to be celibate for ten years about it,” she says, and almost immediately feels petulant and foolish for it, pulling a face and then burying it in his shoulder. “I know you don’t mind, but—”
How to find the words. That she wants to feel like her skin is her own again, yes; that she wants to feel wanted in it, too, that she’s vain and stupid and what if he finds her stranger and less beautiful. What a small, stupid thing to need so badly.
She says, into his skin where his sleep shirt has slid sideways with their entangling, “You know, first it was the rage demon. And then it was the wyvern, and then it was fucking ancient Arlathan spirits and at what point does well, I still think I’m beautiful become just, delusional—”
Her voice gets smaller and more embarrassed the longer she speaks, until she stops.
In another world perhaps he might have reacted with more incredulous surprise, is that what this is about,
except that he is sometimes just as vain as her, in complementary ways. Worrying about his unlovely hands, his overnight grey streaks. As she hides her face in his shoulder, voice small against his skin, Stephen’s own voice is a little muffled and mostly spoken into her hair, but audible enough.
“If you need someone to say it out loud, Gwenaëlle,” he says, no archness or humour buried in it anymore, just solid patience, “you are still an absolute smokeshow. The scars tell a story. The gold eye makes you intimidating in a frighteningly sexy way; I’ve always thought so. If you could roll with the idea of tentacles, I’m more than fine with the wings. Plus they’re, I don’t know, colourful? Pretty? It’s not like they’re demonic bat wings or anything; although for the record, I would love you even with demonic bat wings, too.”
What was it she had said?
Warmly: “To steal some words from someone far more eloquent: I like everything about your body. It’s a roadmap that brought you to me.”
It does help, even as absurd as it makes her feel to admit it, to hear him say so in so many words. So directly, and so sincerely, and frighteningly sexy is a nice thing to hear he’s always thought, and — and it’s a good point, about the tentacles, because,
“I thought your hands wouldn’t get tired that way,”
which is nearly as sweet as it is indicative of a willingness to get down with some significantly freakier elements than, as he says, pretty faerie wings. She’s looked at them less than she might’ve, avoided the mirrors scattered through their home, kept them tucked behind her and beneath fabric as much as she could, done her best to conceal them even from herself. To feel ordinary, instead of to look at what’s been made new of her.
(She remembers how they had prismed the light when she showed them to Isaac, and can think, now in retrospect: there had been some surreal beauty about that, the way the sun had shattered a rainbow through her.)
Lifting her head, finally, she searches his face for the same sincerity in his voice, and, “Thank you. For being patient with me.” For not needing her to rush into anything she wasn’t ready for; for being willing to say the thing she needs to hear.
When she kisses him, it is not with great patience.
The first remark shakes another laugh out of him, surprised and amused, it is so batshit insane but also considerate and isn’t that just the perfect summary of Gwenaëlle Clothilde Decima Vauquelin Baudin,
and Stephen’s still smiling through “I survived a yearslong dry spell, what’s a few more weeks,” but then Gwenaëlle captures his mouth and swallows whatever he’d been about to say. He kisses her back, and there’s an edge to it that’s been tamped-down and absent since the beginning of Harvestmere; this isn’t a chaste peck to her cheek or forehead, nor the clinical touch of a doctor checking on her wounds, her fresh dressing. He pauses only long enough to move some of the gifting chaos out of the way, not wanting to accidentally crush that custom puzzle-box or that precious framed glass poem under a knee, a thigh. With the bed alcove, it’s easy enough to relocate their Satinalia presents to the not-too-distant floor.
They haven’t had to do that in a while.
And as his mouth opens against hers with the slide of tongue, he realises: he has actually missed this. Not enough to nudge or pry or ask, but now that the fire’s here with that slow ember sparking anew, he admits it to himself: he has missed her. This.
The nightgowns had been a comfort — a barrier when she felt that she needed one — but now, it’s fabric tangling tight and uncomfortable around her thigh when she tries to move closer to him, and she makes a small sound of frustration against his mouth before gripping it with her fist and hauling it loose in a way that is less provocative than it is determined. Determined to get nearer to him, mostly,
(she makes sure the coat has slid all the way to the floor, too, she didn’t spend weeks handstitching it for Stephen to come on it because she was thoughtlessly caught up,)
determined to feel like herself again. To feel herself, again, and while she’s at it: him.
Their hands released from one another for the sake of various rearrangements, she sinks them into his hair — thumbs those streaks she likes so much, twists morning-loose hair around her fingers, follows his tongue back into his mouth. Between kisses, she murmurs, “It’s very romantic of you to be prepared to engage in courtly love,” a warm, heated tease, “but I have a lot of very romantic feelings for you that are specifically in my cunt.”
Stephen laughs again when he has a moment to breathe, “What was I just saying about eloquence?”
Not that he’s complaining. He’s already stirring to life with the way she’s straddling his lap, hands twining into his hair, knees pressed either side of his comfortable rumpled trousers.
They have had each other in so many ways, learning and re-learning each other. Late at night, tipsy and clumsy and eager. In that fabled enchanted bathtub. The occasional misuse of their private offices.
Every version of Gwenaëlle is his favourite version of her, and here is another: bed-mussed and sleepy and warm, both of them waking up, cast in sunlight rather than dim shadows and moonlight. It means the room is bright, and he can see her in all detail; as he slides a hand to hike up her nightgown and help sweep the rest out of the way so he can reach bare skin. His other hand catches at Gwenaëlle’s uninjured cheek, the line of her throat, palming a breast as the strap of her nightgown starts to slip off one shoulder.
Only a few inches away: those wings, caught between skin and fabric.
The (slight) rise of her breast under his hand pebbles; beneath her nightgown there is only skin, where if she’d planned the morning to go this way there might not have been. (Her undergarments divide into two categories: finely and comfortably practical, for her work clothes, or outrageously frivolous and meant to be seen and admired and not long worn. ) It’s familiar and it’s not— it’s the same, and it’s not. She can feel the flutter of her pulse and the way her wings shift behind her,
and it’s not unpleasant, if she allows it not to be. In this moment, where they are warm and close and there’s so little fabric left between them that she can feel him stiffening against the inside of her thigh and she doesn’t push away the way that want pools in her belly, the way she has been. The soft gown is headed to her waist from two directions and she could just— leave it there, it’s not as if he can’t get to her.
She is tempted to, for a moment. There’s a hesitation felt mostly in the coil of tension before she moves, leaning back enough that she can grasp her nightgown with both hands and pull it free over her head, wings rising behind her almost the moment they’re not confined by fabric.
(It feels more of a relief than she likes to admit.)
She rarely hesitates like this, and so he feels it in that heartbeat of a pause, where ordinarily Gwenaëlle is a creature of such immediate want and gratification.
But she finally hauls that nightgown off, and those insectile wings are immediately arching, visible behind her, opening and unfurling like long-coiled muscles unfolding. Arms stretching after a long time spent motionless. This first time of theirs isn’t happening at night, where she could wreathe herself in shadows and almost pretend that she hasn’t been changed; here, Stephen has the time and space and lighting to finally stop and look at them properly.
He’d seen them newly-made and disconcertingly fresh, but despite literally living together, she’s successfully kept them under wraps more often than not, only occasionally loosening them even around him.
He could ignore the wings, attention going straight to her bare tits, but he doesn’t. This is new territory, when he used to know every inch of Gwenaëlle: each scar, each chapter in the book of her. And so, derailed and experimental, Stephen reaches out and runs a fingertip along the edge of iridescent wing, testing to see how it feels; how sensitive it might be, if it hurts, if he’ll have to avoid any incidental contact at all during a roll in the hay. Re-learning her.
That they are sensitive isn’t news to her, not when she’s been methodically binding them to her back daily with a newly constant awareness of the pressure of her clothes, her own body heat— but she hasn’t, really, allowed the kind of exploration that he’s engaged in now, even for herself. Finding the most comfortable way to keep them concealed is miles from the way she realises, her mouth opening with surprise, that she can feel the approach of his hand before he’s touched her only in the way it disturbs the air, a pre-emptive caress.
“…yes,” she says, not immediately. “I— ouais.” It’s an entirely different kind of sensitivity; not bad, not even odd, exactly, so much as momentarily disorienting. And a bizarrely thrilling reassurance: on these rare occasions she can be this vulnerable, she’s going to be really fucking difficult to sneak up on.
The way she relaxes is still more deliberate than it was, the last time they were this close, like this. Too many things are happening in her head and only most of them are about Stephen,
but that is still a priority, folding herself in nearer partly for the pleasure of it and partly to allow him easier reach, if he wants it. A better look, over her shoulder. The slide of her hand down his abdomen probably isn’t going to make focusing any easier, though.
forgot to slap the nsfw warning on the thread. anyway there it is.
Gwenaëlle sidles closer, and this way he can look down over her shoulderblades, see them in better detail. It’s probably not too dissimilar from his sensitivity in the tentacles that had coiled loose from his arm, but hers is lasting; has lasted; any hopes they had of it simply sloughing off over time has faded, as time went on and on and the wings remained just as solid and impermeable as ever.
Stephen’s in data-gathering mode now, carving this into his photographic memory: he presses his thumb, ever so lightly, against the curve where one of the wings moulds into her back. The connection to the skin seamless and imperceptible, as if it grew organically out of her. He starts to follow the pearlescent mosaic of them, trailing the delicate tracery of veins, the opal topography. The wings are beautiful, now that she’s finally letting him look at them, touch them, take in the way the sunlight shatters and reflects off them.
He winds up so absorbed and distracted that he is, accordingly, entirely unprepared by the time her hand reaches his cock.
Her wings connect to her back in four separate places, two paired; that broken-glass shimmer spidering across the skin nearest where they do, fading to nothing, to the ordinary and familiar texture of her body. Under his hand they twitch and flutter, firm with the scale required to fit a human body, but flexible, light, translucent. Shades of the stained glass she favoured all through this boat,
her hand wraps around the base of his cock and she murmurs, “Well, you don’t feel off-put,” very archly.
The light, exploratory touch is … distracting. Slowly learning this is different to the cacophony of sensations, early, that had mostly been pain, or the way hauling a heavy robe over her shoulders had a largely dulling effect, trapping her wings where mostly what she could feel has been herself. It’s different, allowing herself to expand into this space, and under his hands— the very purposeful way she touches him is almost an exercise in grounding. A point to focus on outside of herself as she is newly mapped.
It’s an effective redirect, immediately wrenching loose a hitch of breath, a strangled noise into her neck. “I’m definitely not not interested, if you must ask,” Stephen says, but there’s that thread of humour in it, just as warm, just as teasing. He runs his hand down that strip of bare skin between the wings (her wings, her, yes, they’re a part of her), following the dip of her spine and lower back and down, gauging a sense for the space they take up.
And if she wanted to regain some control over him and thus her environment, this is indubitably a good way to do it: Stephen’s head tips against Gwenaëlle’s, teeth grazing the skin of her neck, instantly lost in that familiar feeling of her hand around him. While he curls one arm low around her back — he knows she likes that feeling of being held, encircled — his free hand moves to mirror her, with the slide of his fingers between her legs.
“I’ve missed you,” he admits into her skin. “I know I never lost you. But, still—”
But, still. But even as she hasn’t been much further than his arm’s reach for weeks, she’s been remote in a way that he’s almost never known her to be— she’d been an almost aggressively open book from that first day, coming out swinging, loosing an arrow from the balcony adjoining what is now their bedroom. The small ways she’s held him, too, at a distance lately have been a gulf between them and it’s a physical relief to relax into him, to murmur,
“I know,” because she knows exactly what he’s talking about. Because she’s missed him, too, and saying so felt more selfish for being — her doing. (Sarrux’s doing. But no one responsible for that place is left to care; wouldn’t, if they were. And it feels like her responsibility, like things settled on her shoulders or beneath her shoulder-blades tend to.) “I know,” softer, a hitched breath where his fingers find her wetter than she’d realised, the slow build of heat between them winding taut inside her. The feel of his arm around her is different, her wings newly sensitive to the heat of his body and even where the lower set catches the scrape of the hair on his arm. They’re deceptive in their size, the length of about half her torso, seeming bigger when spread out but folding low; folded down, they rest just at the crest of her ass.
Everything feels heightened by the newness of touching this new part of her, by the raw sense of reconnection, and she leans back to chase his mouth with her own, one hand gripping the outside of his thigh and the other working the grip she has on his cock in a way that could reasonably be described as emphatically. The flutter of her wings over his arm is as strange as the way her hips shift to encourage his fingers inside her is familiar—
“I still need you,” she murmurs, and she means more than this, but: this, too.
“You still have me,” Stephen murmurs back, voice ragged with each quicker touch. He had beaten his hands bloody against the door to get back to her. Eventually blown the doors down. Ripped apart those mutated enemies with raw magic and fury; angrier than he’s ever been in Thedas, more outright terrified than he’s ever been in Thedas. They’d brought down the cavern that had done this to her.
But he had not rescued her. He’d been too late to stop this from happening to her.
And yet he’s still here. He’s here, mouth crashing against Gwenaëlle’s, thumb finding and circling her clit in that familiar cant of her hips. The wings remain a new variable; when he crooks his fingers a particular way, he finds that the wings flicker with movement, a shiver that starts in her spine and roils out to that dragonfly-buzzing. Reactive.
And they’ve already had to work around his limitations for a while, adjusting position and avoiding putting too much direct weight on his hands, but now there’s a faint thoughtful crease between his brow, working the problem and realising there’s a new consideration:
“This might be uncomfortable with you on your back,” he points out. He’d learned to carry his weight on his forearms when she wanted him above her and to fuck her into the mattress, and it had brought their bodies even closer— but now, if they did that, those delicate wings would be pinned beneath her, crushed.
But they’re adaptable; they’ll continue to find a way to make it work for both of them. He just wants to still be touching her.
It could not be more obvious from the way that the open mouthed gasp of her breath becomes a pout— she hadn’t considered that yet, and for a moment, her very real dismay is almost comical. The wheels turning as she tries to come up with a way that that isn’t problem — but there’s a difference, plainly, between the way she’s been binding them securely beneath her clothes and the prospect of crushing them beneath her body weight and his, and the
inevitable friction involved.
It’s hard to maintain petulant displeasure when he crooks his fingers like that and she can’t, breathing in deep in a way that seems to roll out through the shiver of her wings. Her thighs spread wider across his lap and she lets her frown go, her chin tipping up as she makes herself relax again, relax into this moment and not fuss over what was or won’t be.
“I could,” she starts, thinks, sighs— “I could roll over,” on her knees, or the both of them stretched on their sides; how much of the rest of her life is going to be finding somewhere for her limbs? probably all of it. Probably some of it, until that becomes natural and familiar, and she is a new person, again, again, again.
It’s a process. You remake yourself and are remade, over and over and over.
“All of the above,” Stephen says, warmly, his free hand tracing her jawline. A promise for the future. “We have time. We’ll try it all, eventually.”
But for right now— That practiced twist of her Gwenaëlle’s hand is simply too effective, they can’t be over before they’ve begun, so Stephen regretfully breaks contact and stills her movement in order to reach for the edges of his shirt and tug it off, throwing it somewhere in the room. Considering the options. On their sides feels like it could be intimate, languorous; a way to slowly ease awake on another morning, maybe, sprawled over each other with the languid press of him inside her,
but he’s a little hungrier than that, this particular morning. Their weeks apart stoking this starvation.
So he kisses her again, a decision taking shape. “Roll over,” he says (commands; he’s learned, too, that she likes it when he does that), and then there’s movement and readjustment in the bed. Gwenaëlle tipping back off his lap, the shimmy to kick his trousers further loose, his wet fingers against her hip, his cock hard and straining as he kneels behind her.
We have time is more soothing from a man who rewound it to buy her more than it might otherwise be — he’s a rifter, this war never ends, her ex-husband doesn’t even remember their relationship. How much fucking time do they have?
He says they do and she believes him.
She lets herself believe him, lets herself do that without unromantically picking it apart, just taking it as read and rolling over when he tells her to, her elbows and knees finding purchase in the bedding, the latter sliding apart as her hips rise, exhaling when she feels him against the back of her thigh. Her wings shift as she spreads them out, fluttering in her own peripheral vision in a way that hasn’t stopped being a little disorienting yet, and they flex in tandem with the way her cunt clenches around nothing, impatient.
The way her shoulders shift, he almost certainly knows what she’s doing before her hand is visible between her legs, a thing it had taken approximately thirty seconds the first time they’d ever done this to figure out he enjoys—
“We haven’t got to be anywhere today, right?” is probably not actually as true as she’d like it to be, but right now it feels impossible anything else could be as important.
“It’s a holiday,” Stephen says, and it is in fact the first holiday here he’s ever been able to savour, or had any reason whatsoever to care about the fact that work can wait and he doesn’t need to be anywhere and the infirmary can stay closed today. Come hell or high water.
“I’ll throw a fireball at anyone who fucking disturbs us—”
Compared to Gwenaëlle’s usual foul mouth, he doesn’t often curse to the same extent, which is how you know he means business.
His hips rock, slicking his cock with her; his thighs pressed against hers, knees spread and wings spread, hands braced against her hips; before he slowly sinks himself into her and plunges in to the hilt, re-accustomising to the sensation, the hot heat and pressure, the small ragged noise that wrenches out of him, the wanting, before he eventually starts to move.
His fireball threat makes her laugh, a sound that becomes something else and breathier as he sinks inside her; she grips the bedding underneath and presses her forehead into her arm, half-aware of the way her wings flick and flutter in simultaneous response. Reactive, as noted, alike to the way her toes curl against the outside of his calves or the particular arch of her back. That shuddering shiver runs through every part of her as he rocks in and out of her,
“That feels,” a little unsteadily, “I can feel—”
Just this once, she may not be talking about his cock.
It’s sort of strange, like— the way it feels to have magic used close to her. Or those very particular, pricey enchanted toys she’d always sort of thought were a bit overrated, all things considered, but the way that they might be made to vibrate, her efforts to keep her wings spread and out of the way are complicated by the way she can feel herself reflexively … something. That more insectoid buzzing, where often she keeps herself still, or bound, or slow when she’s conscious of it.
Stephen hits just that right, perfect spot inside of her and she doesn’t mean to slap him in the face—
The way your toes might involuntarily curl, your leg might quiver and cramp, the way your fingers press hard enough to bruise: a reflexive spasm, muscles seizing with pleasure, as Stephen snaps his hips against hers in growing urgency but then the wings thrash and flail and whack him in the face and he’s spluttering, one arm rising to try to ward his face, jerking in surprise. That ramming movement simply makes them flutter more, buzzing,
and instead of the extremely enjoyable sight of the curve of Gwenaëlle’s spine and ass, now he just has a whole faceful of her wings unfolding to their full uncontrolled breadth, all glittering and green.
It throws off his entire rhythm, grinding to a halt still buried inside her, gasping “Jesus christ”, and trying to gently bat them out of the way without hurting her.
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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no subject
Shaking his head over the prospective gifts, still amused, “Duly noted for next time. Although I would be displeased with receiving flowers or a necklace, for the record—” Gwenaëlle knows exactly how far his vanity goes and what sort of decoration he does favour, for those formal occasions when he accessorises a little more and she can nimbly set them in place for him: cufflinks, tie pins. Back in New York, a two-fingered ring if it’s magical.
And a pocketwatch, now.
That thumb running along his palm, his life-line, shouldn’t be as distracting as it is, except that it is. It’s nice to be here, warm and content in their shared bed in their shared home, with an actual holiday stretched ahead of them with no work on the day.
“Also, honestly, asking about camouflage might’ve been better than what you did lead with. I would very gladly have explained it to you. And wouldn’t have minded the reminder,” of Halamshiral, of other times, their first time,
as he drifts to replace his hand with his mouth and kiss the corner of her jaw instead, the angle of her cheek, the place where she’d been injured.
There isn’t even a scar remaining.
no subject
she can feel the flutter of her wings beneath the flimsy fabric of her nightgown, and her stomach swoops, and she slides her fingers higher to loop through his.
“I know that it hasn’t exactly been,” what’s the word she’s looking for, “… recent, now,”
is a sort of set up that doesn’t go anywhere, exactly. She is very aware of her weight in his lap and the scrape of his morning-untidy beard against her skin and that she hasn’t stopped wanting him, actually, even as her own body has become a stranger landscape to her than it has ever been.
no subject
And the shoe’s on the other foot, this time. First it had been her injuries themselves — a doctor’s stubborn prescribed bedrest — but then, as time went on, he had noticed where their sex life lapsed, conspicuous for its absence. The wings. Those robes, wrapped around her shoulders at night. It’s not a thing he misses overly much, in contrast to having her presence alone, her conversation, her wit.
“I don’t mind,” Stephen says quietly. They haven’t actually talked about it yet. He needs to say this. “You know I don’t mind, right?”
no subject
“I mind,” she admits, resisting the usual impulse to prevaricate and dissemble about it. I mind— a bit. I mind— but it’s fine. I mind— it’s often Gwenaëlle reaching for him, it’s not as if he hasn’t been there, isn’t it fucking stupid to miss something she could have just done? Does she even get to say, I’ve missed that? and anyway, it’s been like, a month, she’s gone without sex for longer than that. They both have.
(So she resisted it out loud, but it’s harder, in her own head.)
She tips her forehead against his; their breath mingled, their hands clasped.
At length, “I know you’re not mad,” the shape of a worry she might have had, in some other bed, in some other era of her life. “I haven’t not wanted, exactly.” And she wants, now,
it’s never felt vulnerable to want, quite the way it does now.
no subject
He’s not a poet or a writer or a diplomat. Still, he tries.
“Needing to take a bit of time to get comfortable in your own skin again. To feel like you’re yourself again. They put metal pins in all my fingers to reconstruct them; at night it seemed like I could feel them there, inside me. My hands were crooked. Everything was the wrong shape. Obviously it’s not fucking faerie wings,” there’s a touch of dry humour in his voice, their similar coping mechanisms, “but I don’t know. I remember what that sort of thing felt like, is what I mean.”
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“I don’t want to be celibate for ten years about it,” she says, and almost immediately feels petulant and foolish for it, pulling a face and then burying it in his shoulder. “I know you don’t mind, but—”
How to find the words. That she wants to feel like her skin is her own again, yes; that she wants to feel wanted in it, too, that she’s vain and stupid and what if he finds her stranger and less beautiful. What a small, stupid thing to need so badly.
She says, into his skin where his sleep shirt has slid sideways with their entangling, “You know, first it was the rage demon. And then it was the wyvern, and then it was fucking ancient Arlathan spirits and at what point does well, I still think I’m beautiful become just, delusional—”
Her voice gets smaller and more embarrassed the longer she speaks, until she stops.
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except that he is sometimes just as vain as her, in complementary ways. Worrying about his unlovely hands, his overnight grey streaks. As she hides her face in his shoulder, voice small against his skin, Stephen’s own voice is a little muffled and mostly spoken into her hair, but audible enough.
“If you need someone to say it out loud, Gwenaëlle,” he says, no archness or humour buried in it anymore, just solid patience, “you are still an absolute smokeshow. The scars tell a story. The gold eye makes you intimidating in a frighteningly sexy way; I’ve always thought so. If you could roll with the idea of tentacles, I’m more than fine with the wings. Plus they’re, I don’t know, colourful? Pretty? It’s not like they’re demonic bat wings or anything; although for the record, I would love you even with demonic bat wings, too.”
What was it she had said?
Warmly: “To steal some words from someone far more eloquent: I like everything about your body. It’s a roadmap that brought you to me.”
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“I thought your hands wouldn’t get tired that way,”
which is nearly as sweet as it is indicative of a willingness to get down with some significantly freakier elements than, as he says, pretty faerie wings. She’s looked at them less than she might’ve, avoided the mirrors scattered through their home, kept them tucked behind her and beneath fabric as much as she could, done her best to conceal them even from herself. To feel ordinary, instead of to look at what’s been made new of her.
(She remembers how they had prismed the light when she showed them to Isaac, and can think, now in retrospect: there had been some surreal beauty about that, the way the sun had shattered a rainbow through her.)
Lifting her head, finally, she searches his face for the same sincerity in his voice, and, “Thank you. For being patient with me.” For not needing her to rush into anything she wasn’t ready for; for being willing to say the thing she needs to hear.
When she kisses him, it is not with great patience.
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and Stephen’s still smiling through “I survived a yearslong dry spell, what’s a few more weeks,” but then Gwenaëlle captures his mouth and swallows whatever he’d been about to say. He kisses her back, and there’s an edge to it that’s been tamped-down and absent since the beginning of Harvestmere; this isn’t a chaste peck to her cheek or forehead, nor the clinical touch of a doctor checking on her wounds, her fresh dressing. He pauses only long enough to move some of the gifting chaos out of the way, not wanting to accidentally crush that custom puzzle-box or that precious framed glass poem under a knee, a thigh. With the bed alcove, it’s easy enough to relocate their Satinalia presents to the not-too-distant floor.
They haven’t had to do that in a while.
And as his mouth opens against hers with the slide of tongue, he realises: he has actually missed this. Not enough to nudge or pry or ask, but now that the fire’s here with that slow ember sparking anew, he admits it to himself: he has missed her. This.
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(she makes sure the coat has slid all the way to the floor, too, she didn’t spend weeks handstitching it for Stephen to come on it because she was thoughtlessly caught up,)
determined to feel like herself again. To feel herself, again, and while she’s at it: him.
Their hands released from one another for the sake of various rearrangements, she sinks them into his hair — thumbs those streaks she likes so much, twists morning-loose hair around her fingers, follows his tongue back into his mouth. Between kisses, she murmurs, “It’s very romantic of you to be prepared to engage in courtly love,” a warm, heated tease, “but I have a lot of very romantic feelings for you that are specifically in my cunt.”
(That’s not what she wrote in the poem.)
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Not that he’s complaining. He’s already stirring to life with the way she’s straddling his lap, hands twining into his hair, knees pressed either side of his comfortable rumpled trousers.
They have had each other in so many ways, learning and re-learning each other. Late at night, tipsy and clumsy and eager. In that fabled enchanted bathtub. The occasional misuse of their private offices.
Every version of Gwenaëlle is his favourite version of her, and here is another: bed-mussed and sleepy and warm, both of them waking up, cast in sunlight rather than dim shadows and moonlight. It means the room is bright, and he can see her in all detail; as he slides a hand to hike up her nightgown and help sweep the rest out of the way so he can reach bare skin. His other hand catches at Gwenaëlle’s uninjured cheek, the line of her throat, palming a breast as the strap of her nightgown starts to slip off one shoulder.
Only a few inches away: those wings, caught between skin and fabric.
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and it’s not unpleasant, if she allows it not to be. In this moment, where they are warm and close and there’s so little fabric left between them that she can feel him stiffening against the inside of her thigh and she doesn’t push away the way that want pools in her belly, the way she has been. The soft gown is headed to her waist from two directions and she could just— leave it there, it’s not as if he can’t get to her.
She is tempted to, for a moment. There’s a hesitation felt mostly in the coil of tension before she moves, leaning back enough that she can grasp her nightgown with both hands and pull it free over her head, wings rising behind her almost the moment they’re not confined by fabric.
(It feels more of a relief than she likes to admit.)
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But she finally hauls that nightgown off, and those insectile wings are immediately arching, visible behind her, opening and unfurling like long-coiled muscles unfolding. Arms stretching after a long time spent motionless. This first time of theirs isn’t happening at night, where she could wreathe herself in shadows and almost pretend that she hasn’t been changed; here, Stephen has the time and space and lighting to finally stop and look at them properly.
He’d seen them newly-made and disconcertingly fresh, but despite literally living together, she’s successfully kept them under wraps more often than not, only occasionally loosening them even around him.
He could ignore the wings, attention going straight to her bare tits, but he doesn’t. This is new territory, when he used to know every inch of Gwenaëlle: each scar, each chapter in the book of her. And so, derailed and experimental, Stephen reaches out and runs a fingertip along the edge of iridescent wing, testing to see how it feels; how sensitive it might be, if it hurts, if he’ll have to avoid any incidental contact at all during a roll in the hay. Re-learning her.
“Is that alright?” he asks, voice still quiet.
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“…yes,” she says, not immediately. “I— ouais.” It’s an entirely different kind of sensitivity; not bad, not even odd, exactly, so much as momentarily disorienting. And a bizarrely thrilling reassurance: on these rare occasions she can be this vulnerable, she’s going to be really fucking difficult to sneak up on.
The way she relaxes is still more deliberate than it was, the last time they were this close, like this. Too many things are happening in her head and only most of them are about Stephen,
but that is still a priority, folding herself in nearer partly for the pleasure of it and partly to allow him easier reach, if he wants it. A better look, over her shoulder. The slide of her hand down his abdomen probably isn’t going to make focusing any easier, though.
forgot to slap the nsfw warning on the thread. anyway there it is.
Gwenaëlle sidles closer, and this way he can look down over her shoulderblades, see them in better detail. It’s probably not too dissimilar from his sensitivity in the tentacles that had coiled loose from his arm, but hers is lasting; has lasted; any hopes they had of it simply sloughing off over time has faded, as time went on and on and the wings remained just as solid and impermeable as ever.
Stephen’s in data-gathering mode now, carving this into his photographic memory: he presses his thumb, ever so lightly, against the curve where one of the wings moulds into her back. The connection to the skin seamless and imperceptible, as if it grew organically out of her. He starts to follow the pearlescent mosaic of them, trailing the delicate tracery of veins, the opal topography. The wings are beautiful, now that she’s finally letting him look at them, touch them, take in the way the sunlight shatters and reflects off them.
He winds up so absorbed and distracted that he is, accordingly, entirely unprepared by the time her hand reaches his cock.
when it’s been nsfw for a minute,
her hand wraps around the base of his cock and she murmurs, “Well, you don’t feel off-put,” very archly.
The light, exploratory touch is … distracting. Slowly learning this is different to the cacophony of sensations, early, that had mostly been pain, or the way hauling a heavy robe over her shoulders had a largely dulling effect, trapping her wings where mostly what she could feel has been herself. It’s different, allowing herself to expand into this space, and under his hands— the very purposeful way she touches him is almost an exercise in grounding. A point to focus on outside of herself as she is newly mapped.
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And if she wanted to regain some control over him and thus her environment, this is indubitably a good way to do it: Stephen’s head tips against Gwenaëlle’s, teeth grazing the skin of her neck, instantly lost in that familiar feeling of her hand around him. While he curls one arm low around her back — he knows she likes that feeling of being held, encircled — his free hand moves to mirror her, with the slide of his fingers between her legs.
“I’ve missed you,” he admits into her skin. “I know I never lost you. But, still—”
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“I know,” because she knows exactly what he’s talking about. Because she’s missed him, too, and saying so felt more selfish for being — her doing. (Sarrux’s doing. But no one responsible for that place is left to care; wouldn’t, if they were. And it feels like her responsibility, like things settled on her shoulders or beneath her shoulder-blades tend to.) “I know,” softer, a hitched breath where his fingers find her wetter than she’d realised, the slow build of heat between them winding taut inside her. The feel of his arm around her is different, her wings newly sensitive to the heat of his body and even where the lower set catches the scrape of the hair on his arm. They’re deceptive in their size, the length of about half her torso, seeming bigger when spread out but folding low; folded down, they rest just at the crest of her ass.
Everything feels heightened by the newness of touching this new part of her, by the raw sense of reconnection, and she leans back to chase his mouth with her own, one hand gripping the outside of his thigh and the other working the grip she has on his cock in a way that could reasonably be described as emphatically. The flutter of her wings over his arm is as strange as the way her hips shift to encourage his fingers inside her is familiar—
“I still need you,” she murmurs, and she means more than this, but: this, too.
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But he had not rescued her. He’d been too late to stop this from happening to her.
And yet he’s still here. He’s here, mouth crashing against Gwenaëlle’s, thumb finding and circling her clit in that familiar cant of her hips. The wings remain a new variable; when he crooks his fingers a particular way, he finds that the wings flicker with movement, a shiver that starts in her spine and roils out to that dragonfly-buzzing. Reactive.
And they’ve already had to work around his limitations for a while, adjusting position and avoiding putting too much direct weight on his hands, but now there’s a faint thoughtful crease between his brow, working the problem and realising there’s a new consideration:
“This might be uncomfortable with you on your back,” he points out. He’d learned to carry his weight on his forearms when she wanted him above her and to fuck her into the mattress, and it had brought their bodies even closer— but now, if they did that, those delicate wings would be pinned beneath her, crushed.
But they’re adaptable; they’ll continue to find a way to make it work for both of them. He just wants to still be touching her.
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inevitable friction involved.
It’s hard to maintain petulant displeasure when he crooks his fingers like that and she can’t, breathing in deep in a way that seems to roll out through the shiver of her wings. Her thighs spread wider across his lap and she lets her frown go, her chin tipping up as she makes herself relax again, relax into this moment and not fuss over what was or won’t be.
“I could,” she starts, thinks, sighs— “I could roll over,” on her knees, or the both of them stretched on their sides; how much of the rest of her life is going to be finding somewhere for her limbs? probably all of it. Probably some of it, until that becomes natural and familiar, and she is a new person, again, again, again.
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“All of the above,” Stephen says, warmly, his free hand tracing her jawline. A promise for the future. “We have time. We’ll try it all, eventually.”
But for right now— That practiced twist of her Gwenaëlle’s hand is simply too effective, they can’t be over before they’ve begun, so Stephen regretfully breaks contact and stills her movement in order to reach for the edges of his shirt and tug it off, throwing it somewhere in the room. Considering the options. On their sides feels like it could be intimate, languorous; a way to slowly ease awake on another morning, maybe, sprawled over each other with the languid press of him inside her,
but he’s a little hungrier than that, this particular morning. Their weeks apart stoking this starvation.
So he kisses her again, a decision taking shape. “Roll over,” he says (commands; he’s learned, too, that she likes it when he does that), and then there’s movement and readjustment in the bed. Gwenaëlle tipping back off his lap, the shimmy to kick his trousers further loose, his wet fingers against her hip, his cock hard and straining as he kneels behind her.
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He says they do and she believes him.
She lets herself believe him, lets herself do that without unromantically picking it apart, just taking it as read and rolling over when he tells her to, her elbows and knees finding purchase in the bedding, the latter sliding apart as her hips rise, exhaling when she feels him against the back of her thigh. Her wings shift as she spreads them out, fluttering in her own peripheral vision in a way that hasn’t stopped being a little disorienting yet, and they flex in tandem with the way her cunt clenches around nothing, impatient.
The way her shoulders shift, he almost certainly knows what she’s doing before her hand is visible between her legs, a thing it had taken approximately thirty seconds the first time they’d ever done this to figure out he enjoys—
“We haven’t got to be anywhere today, right?” is probably not actually as true as she’d like it to be, but right now it feels impossible anything else could be as important.
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“I’ll throw a fireball at anyone who fucking disturbs us—”
Compared to Gwenaëlle’s usual foul mouth, he doesn’t often curse to the same extent, which is how you know he means business.
His hips rock, slicking his cock with her; his thighs pressed against hers, knees spread and wings spread, hands braced against her hips; before he slowly sinks himself into her and plunges in to the hilt, re-accustomising to the sensation, the hot heat and pressure, the small ragged noise that wrenches out of him, the wanting, before he eventually starts to move.
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“That feels,” a little unsteadily, “I can feel—”
Just this once, she may not be talking about his cock.
It’s sort of strange, like— the way it feels to have magic used close to her. Or those very particular, pricey enchanted toys she’d always sort of thought were a bit overrated, all things considered, but the way that they might be made to vibrate, her efforts to keep her wings spread and out of the way are complicated by the way she can feel herself reflexively … something. That more insectoid buzzing, where often she keeps herself still, or bound, or slow when she’s conscious of it.
Stephen hits just that right, perfect spot inside of her and she doesn’t mean to slap him in the face—
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and instead of the extremely enjoyable sight of the curve of Gwenaëlle’s spine and ass, now he just has a whole faceful of her wings unfolding to their full uncontrolled breadth, all glittering and green.
It throws off his entire rhythm, grinding to a halt still buried inside her, gasping “Jesus christ”, and trying to gently bat them out of the way without hurting her.
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🎀