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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | After the end of the War Against The Nightmare and the storm, Siamus and Avrenne settle in for the evening. Romance RP, rated A for Adults. 3k-ish words. |
| Rating: | A for Adults Only 18+ |
Chain: Siarenne
In his bedroom, Siamus has drawn back one of the heavy dark blue drapes, and is leaning against the window gazing out at the driving rain.
The sky is lighter now, a misty gray dawn rising outside, and the rain is a steady, soothing wash of sound, flashing silver here and there in the brightening air. Siamus has his arms folded across his chest, his shirt still drying and bloodstained, and he is resting his forehead against the cold glass.
Unusual for her, Avrenne lets herself into Siamus' bedroom from the hallway, quietly. Perhaps she had hoped that he might be sleeping already and had not wanted to wake him, because she looks first to the bed, before she flicks her eyes around the room. She slips inside, closing the door quietly behind her, watching him as she crosses the room to him there. She isn't trying to be silent — her dark blue velvet dress that she still wears makes gentle swishing sounds as she walks — but it isn't until she's almost close enough to touch him, one hand reaching out but not yet touching, that she finally says, "Siamus."
He startles nonetheless, a barely-perceptible twitch, covered smoothly as he glances down at her. He summons the usual, slanted smile as he straightens from the window, but his gaze is grave and tired.
"Your Grace. Are ye well?"
It's a question he's been asking people a lot in the last couple of hours.
"I'm well." She sets a hand briefly over her belly, a light little touch. "We both are." Then both hands go up to him, to hold his face gently between her hands — no warmer than they should be — smiling up at him, just looking at him there for a moment — his hair having dried as it did after, his clothing in its less than pristine state, and the marks of exhaustion on him — and you would think from her expression that she is currently gazing upon the most beautiful person in existence.
"You always are such a fine figure of a man," she tells him. He knows this. "But there really are times when you simply take my breath away. How extraordinary you look, storm-touched."
His smile softens, his gaze warms. He reaches in turn to wrap a warm hand around the side of her neck, his fingertips gentle in the hair at her nape.
What he says, though, is, "I expect your Lady Moore thinks me mad. And I had no idea, Your Grace, that such an exquisite lady could swear like a sailor."
"What?" Hold on, rewinding the tape. "Oh," she says, and then laughs, warm as a fire in hearth on a stormy winter night, her face lit with it, head tipping back into his hand. "Well. I suppose it seemed appropriate at the time to those particular exceptional circumstances." Ah, yes. The Exceptional Circumstances. What can't they excuse?
Siamus nods faux-solemnly. "Aye. It was an appropriate moment."
He glances up and out the window again. The sky has lightened enough that the cliff's edge and the rain-lashed slate of the sea beyond are now visible. "I'm still — no' sure exactly what happened. I suppose I can ask Annai." His hold on Avrenne's neck tightens, and he draws her gently but inexorably in against him. Sorry about the damp shirt. "After," he says, almost a sigh. "After a rest."
Avrenne is clearly unbothered by the damp, turning her cheek a little to press a kiss to his chest, wrapping her arms around neck. "After a rest," she agrees. "Will you come sit, and indulge me a little in letting me undress you? I want to touch you, and look at you, and you should lie down soon."
"Which of us is that indulging?" Siamus asks rhetorically. "I'll no' decline such a pretty request." His hold on her loosens, and he trails a hand down to the small of her back to urge her with him toward the bed's edge.
He settles down on it heavily; the unwieldy movement and the slump of his shoulders both betray the weight of fatigue on him despite his still-gleaming expression.
It's definitely indulging at least Avrenne, who steps closer to him with a sweet smile, hands moving over his shoulders in petting strokes before she sets them at his collar. She leans into him, pressing slow, light kisses to his cheek and jaw, as she deftly unbuttons his shirt — three buttons exactly — and then she dips her head to press a kiss as light as a raindrop to his bare skin, fingers moving already onto the next three, quick and delicate.
He exhales a soft laugh of recognition and leans back a little, bracing himself casually with his hands on the mattress, which has the bonus effect of affording Avrenne even easier access. "There aren't forty," he tells her.
"There are 16," she agrees. "Which would be more elegantly divisible by four, but you have already undone the four of your cuffs, leaving only twelve, and therefore now quite easily divided by three four times," she tells him, her voice low and warm in this soothing litany of simple math, as she continues to work, another three down, another kiss, a soft touch of her tongue in a playful flick. She kneels carefully to allow herself easier access to his trousers, her hands skimming over his thighs briefly in appreciation before they turn to their task.
Siamus exhales again, but he's not laughing this time. His head drops back, his eyes closed. "Tides, ye have such a pretty way wi' numbers."
He may or may not actually mean numbers.
I mean, he may actually, though.
She folds back his unbuttoned trousers into a triangle, fingers pressing it down lightly across him tracing the lines of it, and leans forward. "And you always make for such interesting math," she says against his bared skin there, breath warm, before she kisses him. It is, as she knows, every gentleman's favorite compliment.
She also may or may not mean math.
Actually, she probably does. But also.
"Avrenne," he says, and slides his hand into her hair. "Pet, ye must be exhausted, the night ye've had —" His voice is hoarse.
She doesn't remark on how exhausted he must be, what sort of night he has had. But then again, she probably knows he knows.
"I will sleep soon," she assures him, fingers light and stroking, encouraging, as her lips press in points of a mirrored triangle of his skin. "We both must. As soon as is reasonable, I need you to make love to me for hours and hours, and we really are at our most efficient use of the time when we're both well rested." And she has the literal data to prove it. (Math!) "I will wait easier if you might perhaps indulge me in a little taste now." Can she have a little Siamus cookie before bed, as a treat?
He makes a low sound and does not argue further, drawing his fingers softly through her hair.
She starts slowly, and it does seem by the way she takes him that she is indulging something for herself, not quite entirely on the known formula for him so much as her own desire of action, soft kisses and slow drags of her lips against him.
But it does shift, as she focuses back on her math, of the y = mx+b of what she knows pleases him most. It might strike him after a moment or two, how much the rhythm she settles into resembles the pattering beat of the rain against the window — perhaps deliberately chosen, perhaps unconsciously mirrored — moving with the storm outside. In either case, she's utterly focused on him, eager to please, showing her love in every stroke and touch as best she can.
Siamus is silent, still braced back on the bed with one hand, his other hand moving ceaselessly, gently in her hair. He watches her for a time, dark-eyed and intent, and then he lifts his gaze and watches the window.
She can feel the tension drawing taut in him, hear the shift and new rasp of his breathing, and then he closes his eyes and whispers her name a moment before his climax rocks through him.
She holds onto him tightly, and doesn't let go for several good long seconds, drawing the moment out. Only after he softens does she gently release him, pressing warm kisses along his skin, one hand moving lightly across his thigh in that touch of something precious. At last she tips her head up to look at him, stroking her fingertips across her lips in the same suggestive way she did earlier in the hall after her cookie, as if she's brushing crumbs from them.
He is gazing down at her with such a look of stricken tenderness that he might as well just go ahead and say the l-word in Common out loud. You're not fooling anyone, Siamus. He looks like he'd be willing to consider getting a tattoo of a heart with her initials in it, if he were asked right now.
He takes his hand from her hair to touch her cheek. "You're good to me," he tells her.
She turns her face into his hand, kissing his palm, touching her hand against his. "As you deserve." She gasps lightly in some wave of emotion, pressing harder into his hand, still looking up at him with an intensity of her own that makes her eyes brighter. "You are," she says, and there are telltale two sharp little breaths that speak of the verge of tears, but she's smiling as well, "the most wonderful man I have ever had the privilege of knowing."
His brow knits; his answering smile down at her is involuntary, an instinctual mirror of hers, but his gaze is baffled, searching. "What's brought that on, mermaid?"
She presses another kiss to his hand. "Everything." It takes her a breath, but then she presses up back into a stand, her hands moving again to his shirt, this time to more actually remove it, sliding under the fabric. Her hands are pleasantly warm compared to the coolness of the damp shirt, but it's an ordinary woman's warmth, the fire far away. She's looking over his face, smiling at him. And then perhaps in more specific answer, she says, "You stayed."
He reaches for her again in counterpoint, resting his hands on her hips, and his expression does the smallest peculiar flicker; he is recalibrating something.
"I did," he says. "Ye know I'm a man for the war, ordinarily. I'll fight it for the ones at home. But — I am home, and here's where danger was. I couldn't leave ye to that, Avrenne. Wi'the children and the household and all. What kind of man would I be?"
"A good one, all the same," she answers. She shakes her head a little, pulling the shirt away from him; she leaves it on the floor. That's future problems. "I would not have been disappointed, Siamus. I would not have resented you, or even disagreed with your choice, if you had gone. I know you would be coming back, that you would never, never truly abandon us." There's that faith in her eyes, that trust of surety in what she's saying. Her chin lifts.
"And I know that I am capable, that if it is only I there as the House, that I can do it. I will not fall on my own. I can, and would, handle it." She sets her hand on his cheek, pausing in her removal of his clothes. "But every time it has come to that point that you might choose to leave, or to stay and shield me from what you might, whether that is Society's gossip or a night of terror, you have always chosen to stay with me."
"I would not abandon you," Siamus says. "I know ye're a capable woman, Avrenne, and a brave and a fierce one. But I will stand in shelter of ye, when I can. It's my honor to." He may mean this in multiple senses.
She smiles back at him, blinking a little harder, leaning forward to press kisses along his face, cheek, jaw, temple, brow, lips — everywhere within reach. "I know. I know," she repeats. "You make me feel safe. Protected. Respected. Cherished. Everything I have ever dared to want from a man, hoped for. You give me everything. Always." At the last she kisses his lips, insistently and passionately, trying in some small way to convey what she's saying but in action.
He slides his hands up from her hips to her waist — well, where her waist used to be generally before she was full of baby — and then around to her back, and he lets himself fall back onto the bed and pulls her down with him at the same time. "I treat ye like my wife, Avrenne, and I treat ye like ye deserve. And tides take me if I should fail ye in that."
Avrenne is even easier to topple over than usual, and she goes very willingly with him, her own hands still wandering over him, kissing various pieces of him in proximity. Her voice is low, touched with that sultry note, but soft. "That is exactly how you treat me. So is it any wonder that there are times I feel it so keenly? How I love you. How I want you. How grateful I am for you." Another kiss. A slow petting along his torso. "You are so wonderful."
He slides a hand slowly up her back. "If I didn't know ye already knew I'd give ye whatever ye asked, I'd suspect ye wanted something from me, wi'all this honey talk." He's smiling, his eyes closed. "If we get this gown off ye, I'd give ye something."
His tone is getting drowsier. He definitely doesn't either sound or look ready to 'give her something' at present.
After a silence during which one might reasonably assume he'd dozed off, he says, still without opening his eyes, "I'm grateful as well, mo chroi. Ye know I love you."
He can feel her brushing her fingers along his hair, stroking touches that move along his chest as if trying to encourage a slow, deep breathing. "I do know," she agrees, softer and quieter now, but still honey sweet. He can hear that touch of a playfulness to her voice, might even with his eyes closed see the smile she wears.
"And with a man who looks after his people with such courage, generosity, conviction, and kindness, and with this so good of a man who — I'll admit to you here — is of such aching handsomeness at times that it will put to test even the most composed of lady's willpower to not grab him and drag him off somewhere to have her way," not that she didn't try, "is it any wonder that I want something of you?" She leans in closer, the touch of her breath and the brush of her lips against his ear. "Shall I tell you what it is?"
His smile widens a little. He still doesn't open his eyes. His eyelids might be too heavy now. "To get your gown off ye?"
She laughs, soft and warm as a blanket, the sound reaching out and wrapping around him. Her voice is down to near a whisper, but not quite. "Have me as your wife all my life," she tells him. "Give me all your children, your firstborn and all those to come. Let me love you until the stars go out at the end of everything." She drops her voice a little further. "And get this gown off me for when you wake."
"My joy," he says. "Haven't I promised ye all that already? All my life, all my children. And your gown." His hand moves a little clumsily at her back, searching for a button. Does this gown have buttons on the back? Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's self-removing. Maybe it's the thought that counts. His hand goes slack against her. His breathing has slowed. "My homeward star," he half-whispers, and then he doesn't say anything else.
Avrenne smiles at him, waiting until she's sure he's fallen asleep, before she presses a soft kiss to his cheek. "You give me everything I want," she agrees, nothing but a whisper of sound more for the speaker than the listener. She lingers for long enough that her eyes slip closed longer than she means them to twice, before she rises back up.
With such care that you would think him fragile, or perhaps simply exquisitely precious, Avrenne finishes divesting Siamus of the rest of his clothing, and with much more brisk efficiency finishes his work with her dress — three discreet buttons on the left side and a lift off her — before she hesitates a long moment at her hair. Decision made, she lets it down, setting the many pins on the nightstand, finger combing it out of the chignon, letting the new, shall we say face framing layers instead of recently sheared front of her burned hair to be generous, hang around her face.
She extinguishes the lights by mundane means rather than magical, and at last — with some effort — turns the covers down and covers both of them with it (how decorous! like a married couple), settling herself back in Siamus' arms as if she'd never left them.