Gespenst. FFXII, Vossler/Ashe
If it's too early to put up submissions for the Clichefest round, I'll take this down and save it.
If not,
Title: Gespenst
Author: mithrigil
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Pairing: Ashe and Vossler
Rating: Hard R
This is your spoiler warning.
Other warnings: Issues of consent, issues of corporeality.
Cliché: hurt/comfort redux: A has nightmares, B takes them away.
Gespenst
but what remains to you of that, that has not been tainted?
Mithrigil Galtirglin
Perhaps it is how long the wine had been left in the sun; long enough to grow sour with warmth, long enough for leather to supersede spice. The Queen is not the only one to complain, but no one forsakes. Better than none, her lady-in-waiting says, and her Captain agrees, and all assembled make a joke of it. And so all drink, to the bounty that allows them to complain at all, to the good that had been that allows them to belittle the bad.
Perhaps, also, it is the temper of the air, dry and sucking, so much that the crystal fans had no time to glisten. No breeze erases the caravan’s tracks, no sand climbs higher on the tentposts. The mail on her guards does not flicker, and their shadows stretch without wavering. The air chills without dampening. The desert is vindictive, more than once it was.
The Mist grows thicker-the Queen need not be a Viera to sense that-and the fiends grow stronger. Four years since the fall of Bahamut, and the Clans have not ceased to complain. The Queen is here, adesert, to ascertain the danger of the journey, the predicament of her people; they do not exaggerate. Perhaps they demand aright, that the palings must stretch further, that the Mist must be siphoned and not allayed.
But whatever the cause, naught will allay the Queen’s chapped body, aching head, fevershut eyes.
The perimeter and patrol are set and silent; the flaps of her pavilion, still. She sleeps alone. She is affianced, to be wed on her return to Rabanastre. To sleep alone is, perhaps, luxury, and here necessity, when sleep struggles in her grasp, throws her off like her own starch-grit sheets. No one else should have to tolerate her shifting, the sound of her knees nocking on the heavy bedroll, now rid of all the ridiculous pillows that seem so wrong in a desert tent.
She counts heartbeats and breaths; nothing. There are no shadows on the walls of the pavilion, without light to cast them. The sand muffles the tread of her guards, enshrouds them.
She wonders what once she did, to force sleep, when they had been a coterie; the act of wondering wakes her further, exacerbates the throbbing of her temples. An image, of Balthier’s vest glinting in the firelight, Fran’s ears turning to the approach of fiends, the flicker of a needle as Vaan stopped mending his pockets. Penelo’s fingertips shaking on the hilt of her sword. Basch’s, already silently drawn. Shared watches, against the scuttle of Urutan-Yensa, the padding of Couerls, the smacking of Marlboro tentacles on tile or plank.
Perhaps she should cease to remember.
Cold claims her, and the blankets itch for all their supposed worth. Her nightclothes scrape against her, wanting sweat. Her tongue and lips turn up to the ceiling, sore and dry, and then the rest of her, staring into the blackness.
She would pray, if she knew the gods cared. There is nothing here, she pleads, no sight, no sound, naught to keep me from sleep.
Naught but yourself, someone says.
An image, of this same dry Mist, screeching. Her wrists ache from handcuffs, her ears from the sound of solleret on metal, the creaking of Archadian plate, her skin from the cold of artificial pressure, from the lightheadedness of skystone.
“When we return to Dalmasca, we can announce that you are alive and well,” he says. His feet are steadier than hers on the plank, softer. Heavier.
“No,” Ashe commands, turning over. She has been through this.
The bedroll is as hard as her restraints. “I will then continue our negotiations with the Empire.” His voice is as hard as her restraints. The walls glow, threaded with crystal and power and alien design. The airlock hisses behind them, impersonal. “You will be Dalmasca again-in truth, and without bloodshed.”
Ashe breathes glass. Her pillow is caked with it.
His tread is still even beside her, deferent steps, martial and sure. “You denied them this. You prolonged this war.”
“You dare,” she chokes out into cloth and sand.
An image, of his body, skinned by the Mist.
She slams shut her eyes and then some, curls in on herself to put it from her mind. Happier times, of plenty, of freedom-
“But what remains to you of that, that has not been tainted?” he asks, behind her as they patrol.
“You,” she had said then, over the rush of the Waterway. She does not now.
An image, of his lowered eyes, in the muddle of darkness and death. Of the ghost behind him, rising from the filth. Of her own hand raised in warning, of his sword splitting the fiend in twain.
A sound, of its laughter.
“You denied me this,” he says, above her.
She dares not look. “You denied yourself,” she spits, through wine-dry teeth. “You damned yourself.”
“Majesty,” he breathes, and it rustles her hair.
Gripping pressure tilts her shoulder, her whole body, and she bucks up against it, flailing. The blanket gathers about her legs, and Ashe shivers for lack of it. She will not look.
“Your thumbs,” he instructs her. “Outside your fists. Not in.”
They are like that, curled on the hem of her blanket as she yanks it higher, slams her back down into the bedroll and feels the sand hiss beneath. The world stifles her, layers of dark, behind her eyes, the blanket, the walls of her tent, the Mist-strangled sky.
He is chill, Occurian blue, and made of light. His beard is black, catching the ink that drips from his eyes, his chest, his mangled hand. He is bare, ungirt, unarmed. “You denied yourself,” he repeats without mockery, kneeling over her, beside her, behind her.
His name crumbles on her lips.
Body or none, he pins her to the bedroll, pries the blankets away and Ashe cannot see how. Her hands shiver on, in, his chest, fists loosening to palms slick with sweat. His kiss is as forceful and empty as Dispel, opening her, pulling her mouth up into his absence, and now that her eyes are open she cannot look away. The ceiling of the tent is blue from him, so bright she can see the stitches in the cloth.
Throwing back her head, gasping, not knowing how this gespenst deprived her of air, she feels that same heavy magic on her neck, her shoulders. He grips her there so sure in sleep-needled flickers, and his blank tongue is so wet-his chin catches the neck of her nightdress, the ichor from his eyes pools on her breast-
“Vossler!” she shouts, hoarse and dry, throwing herself up through his body and-
-oh-
They are joined where she cannot see. Through her nightclothes, through-through everything-
An image, of his lips on her rings, perfunctory and still.
She writhes, and not in protest. Somehow he fills her, not thrusting but abating in stutters like static through a transmission, stretching her, and were she not already broken there she would cry out in pain, but-but her knees still part and his unstable touch still sets her trembling, wrenching beneath him. Again, he claims her lips with his, and her body with his hands, and the darkness that pours out of him twines around them both. Ashe swallows, the taste of wet and smoke and falling, and blinks past it, wants his eyes. Even now, he cannot look her in the eyes.
Beneath the ink, he has none.
--
“Perhaps it is the wine,” her lady-in-waiting says the next morning, wrapping a wrung cloth about a shard of ice magicite. “You are not the only one to have passed so ill a night, your Majesty.”
“Perhaps,” Ashe agrees, accepting the cloth and pressing it to her brow.
“There is talk of delaying the return to the city, to give those others some time to recover-”
“No,” Ashe says, too quickly. “…No,” she adds, after a too-heavy breath, and time. “We would benefit from a paling.”
---
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