laylah
in
springkink
Final Fantasy XII (Gabranth/Drace)
Title: Such Luxury
Author: Laylah
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: ~2300
Summary: The lights are dim, scarcely brighter than candles, and steam hangs heavy as Mist over the tub sunk in the floor. "About time," Drace says. "Come join me."
The town looks tiny on the map, barely an afterthought scrawled in at the edge, one more little village on the Empire's northern border -- but Drace was adamant about stopping there, and she is the ranking officer on the border tour, so Gabranth has not questioned her. The chocobos have been less forgiving; there was some protest from the squad captain's hen when they made their third double-time stint for the afternoon, but Gabranth's black and Drace's red harried her into performing.
When they arrive, it looks worth the effort. Sasa is tucked into the side of a mountain, ranged for the most part around its inn, which is sprawling, brightly-painted enough for Trant, and hung with banners that flutter in the breeze.
"I'd not expect to find such a palace so far from anything," Gabranth says. "It seems excessive."
"It very nearly would be," Drace says, "save that they've one luxury here that even Archades cannot provide better." She reins in her chocobo outside the inn, and the patrol comes to a shifting, squawking halt behind her. "Hello, the house!" she calls, and the place comes alive.
The curtains at the front of the inn part for a woman in an embroidered robe, and three young men come jogging up from a side road -- from the stables, it seems -- and step up to take the first chocobos' reins. "Welcome back, your honor," the woman says, bowing as Drace swings down from the saddle. "It's always a pleasure to see you."
"Nowhere near the pleasure it is to pay you a visit," Drace says. "Marya, allow me to present his honor Judge Magister Gabranth, who makes his first border tour with me this season."
Gabranth dismounts, and the woman bows to him as well. "Welcome to you both, your honors, and to your men. If there's aught we can do to make your stay more pleasant, only ask and it is yours."
"Thank you," Gabranth says, nodding.
"We'll have a private dining room for the company," Drace says, "and four rooms for the night. Full course meal, please, and I at least will want a bath prepared after. If the men would ask other luxuries, please indulge them -- the empire will pay for anything they request, save companions." She smiles wryly. "Those they can finance themselves."
The inn hostess shows them inside, points out the dining room where the eight of them will eat, then takes them up the stairs to their rooms. They're small rooms, and spare, but appealing, and the one that Drace claims for the two of them is already appointed with armor stands. She removes helm, gauntlets, tassets, and pauldrons, and leaves her heavy maces in the room; Gabranth, though it unnerves him to go out as a Magister without his full plate, does likewise.
When they come down the narrow stairs to return to the dining room, he sees that the patrol squad has done likewise, almost fully unarmored to a man. It seems a luxury, something they've rarely been able to do since leaving the capital; much of the border is tense, if not actively hostile.
But not Sasa; Gabranth and Drace sit down at the low table and help themselves to glasses of the sweet plum wine being passed around, and the inn's staff bring dinner. The first course is a creamed vegetable soup, mildly spiced and golden; the second is poached fowl, served with a dish of rice and onion and mushrooms, so familiar it makes Gabranth briefly homesick; the third, a platter of earthy, aged cheese and tart mountain berries. There are sweet pastries at meal's end, even, and Drace licks honey from her bare fingertips with an unselfconscious pleasure that makes Gabranth's breath come short.
"A good night to you all," she says, when she rises from the table at last. "Enjoy yourselves, and don't any of you come down with worse hangovers than an esuna will cure."
There's laughter at that, and Drace cocks an eyebrow at Gabranth, so he rises as well. If the men have made note of the favor she shows him -- and he cannot imagine they have not; they are none of them stupid -- they have been discreet enough not to mention it. Among the small mercies that Gabranth has learned to appreciate in Archadia, that one ranks near the top of the list.
In their rented room, she removes the rest of her armor, and then her clothing as well, stripping with an unhurried efficiency. Gabranth watches the play of muscle in her legs, in her back, as she crosses the room to take a robe from a hook on the wall. "Will you be joining me?" she asks, as she shrugs into it.
"If that's my invitation," he says, and pulls at the laces of his cuirass.
"Come down to the far end of the hall," Drace says, "and take the rear stairs to the courtyard. You'll see the baths straight ahead. I'll let the attendant know to expect you."
Gabranth nods. "Thank you," he says, and bows shortly as she steps out. The door slides closed behind her, whisper quiet. Downstairs, it sounds as though some of the men at least are still at table, their laughter carrying up through the halls. It's a good sound, the release of tension after they've been riding hard for nearly a fortnight. Gabranth divests himself of armor and clothing, and takes the second robe that the inn provided -- the fabric is fluffy and warm, the cut generous, as though made for a man of considerably more bulk.
It's comfortable enough, for all that, and enough to preserve his modesty as he pads down the hall, down the stairs, and across the courtyard to the baths. The air outside has begun to chill, as the sun sets, but inside it's warm and humid, the light soft and welcoming. "I seek Judge Drace," he tells the woman on duty.
"Behind the second curtain, your honor," the woman says, and she also betrays no surprise at the impropriety; surely in a profession like this discretion is a virtue. Gabranth thanks her, and steps through the painted curtain.
The lights are dim, scarcely brighter than candles, and steam hangs heavy as Mist over the tub sunk in the floor. "About time," Drace says. "Come join me." Her voice has lost its Tsenoble precision, turning slow and rich the way it does when she's been drinking, or in the wake of climax. Gabranth's cock twitches, and he shrugs out of his robe.
"No wonder you were so adamant about staying the night here," he says, scrubbing away the worst of the grime and sweat from the road with the wash-cloths provided. "I wouldn't have thought to see such luxury before we got back to Archades."
"Sasa has one great advantage over even the capital," Drace says as Gabranth walks up to the edge of the bath. "It's not clogged with streetears and petty courtiers looking to turn one's every action in their favor." She's sitting on a ledge in the bath, the water lapping at the tops of her breasts, and her arms draped over the marble edge of the tub. Her eyes are dark, her gaze frank and appreciative as he lowers himself into the water.
It's hot, almost scalding but not quite, barely still tolerable; Drace is faintly flushed from it and Gabranth is sure that with his complexion he must be more so. But the heat is good for him, no question -- almost immediately he can feel the tension beginning to ease from muscles that had stayed taut and uncooperative since they began their patrol. He closes his eyes to better savor the feeling, and sighs with pleasure.
A clean scent, as of evergreen and winter blossoms, fills the air; Gabranth opens his eyes to see Drace setting a small glass bottle back on the edge of the tub. Oil shimmers on the water, faint in the low light. He finds himself briefly at a loss for words.
"Thank you," he says eventually, settling for honesty when eloquence will not come to him. "This is a most welcome diversion."
Drace smiles, and the water ripples as she moves. "Come over here," she says, "and thank me by rubbing my back."
The water makes him buoyant, almost weightless as he shifts to the other side of the bath, beside her. She turns her back, lets her head fall forward, and he lays both hands against her skin.
Her body is a map of the last two decades of Archadian warfare, military actions writ across her skin in the neat, indelible script of too-quickly-healed wounds: here, a rebellion in the old city; there, an outlying nation conquered; here, a campaign to quell the bands of robbers on the highway to Nabradia; there, the evacuation of a city lost to Mist and encroaching Jagd. He knows her scars nearly as well as his own, her scars and the cords of muscle beneath them that now loosen in his hands.
"Gabranth," she murmurs, sounding pleased, content, and reaches back to rest one hand against his thigh. "Gabranth."
"Drace." He digs his thumbs in below her shoulder blades, feels a stubborn knot give way, bends his head to press his lips to her skin.
"Yes," she says. She leans back against his chest, and turns her head so she can meet him for a kiss that's languid with the heat. He slides his hands forward, around her ribcage, and then upward. Her breasts are small, for she trains too hard to leave much spare flesh on her frame, but they're firm in his hands, and her back arches when he rolls her nipples between his fingers. She makes soft, hungry noises against his mouth, and the water splashes faintly as she writhes. The heat is dizzying.
She takes his right hand and pulls it down, pressing his fingers between her legs. Her flesh is swollen there, and stiff, and he shudders when he begins to stroke her. "Yes," she says again, her hands curled around his wrists, "don't stop, ah."
"I won't," Gabranth promises, his mouth against her throat. She rocks against him, and he reads what she wants in the way her fingers tighten against the tendons of his wrists. Sweat beads and prickles at his hairline, from the water, from her closeness. He doesn't speed up, doesn't press harder -- he made that mistake when first she allowed him this, grew careless in his own desire, but what she wants is for him to be steadfast, to give her more of exactly this stroke, until the relentlessness of it, not the force, makes her come undone, shivering and arching in his arms.
Beautiful, he would say, save that he knows better; it is a compliment she accepts grudgingly even for her swordsmanship, and not at all for anything softer. He presses his lips to her shoulder until the impulse has passed. "Good?" he says then.
"Very," Drace says, the word a sigh of pleasure. She releases his hands, and turns in his arms to face him. "But you know you're skilled, don't you?"
He would make some clever answer, if his wit were more ready, but she reaches for him and any hope of eloquence is lost with her hand closing around his cock. "Please," he says, thrusting into her hand.
She steers him backward, toward a higher ledge. "Up," she says. "Out of the water."
He boosts himself up onto the ledge; when he's seated there, the water scarcely laps at the tops of his thighs. Drace reaches for the bath oil, and pours some out in her hand. "Gods," Gabranth says. It's clear where this is going.
Drace smiles, warm and pleased with herself and very nearly smug. "If we have the luxury," she says, "should we not savor it?" She wraps one slick hand around the shaft of his cock, and cradles his balls in the other, and Gabranth leans back on his hands so he can thrust into her grip. The oil makes them slippery, and she compensates for that by gripping tight -- for he does prefer force, likes the aggression of it when they come together. He cannot keep silent, though he knows their privacy is but an illusion; despite the slickness of the oil, he can feel her sword-calluses as she strokes him, the faint hint of roughness in the midst of all this luxury. It's more than he can bear, more than he would want to -- why should he hold back? -- and he arches into her hands, the one careful, the other rough, and spills between them with her name on his lips.
She smiles, as she releases him, and her hands coax him back down into the water to rinse his skin clean. He reaches for her, catching her by the soft curve of her hip, and claims a proper kiss, with her arms twined round his neck and his about her waist. She moves slowly, heat-sated. Damp curls of hair cling to her brow.
When she pulls free from the kiss, she says, "All of the men are going to be hopelessly hung over in the morning. They won't want to leave early."
Gabranth blinks; it takes a moment before the haze of pleasure clears enough for him to recognize the invitation. "So we'd lose nothing by staying up a bit later ourselves, then?"
"I wouldn't think so," Drace says, smiling.
He runs his fingers up her spine, up the columns of muscle beside it. "If we returned to our room, and called for liquor, would they bring us something fine enough to match the rest of their hospitality?"
"I think they probably would," Drace says. She lets him go, and drifts toward the edge of the tub. "Shall we go investigate?"
Gabranth smiles. "Let's."
Author: Laylah
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: ~2300
Summary: The lights are dim, scarcely brighter than candles, and steam hangs heavy as Mist over the tub sunk in the floor. "About time," Drace says. "Come join me."
The town looks tiny on the map, barely an afterthought scrawled in at the edge, one more little village on the Empire's northern border -- but Drace was adamant about stopping there, and she is the ranking officer on the border tour, so Gabranth has not questioned her. The chocobos have been less forgiving; there was some protest from the squad captain's hen when they made their third double-time stint for the afternoon, but Gabranth's black and Drace's red harried her into performing.
When they arrive, it looks worth the effort. Sasa is tucked into the side of a mountain, ranged for the most part around its inn, which is sprawling, brightly-painted enough for Trant, and hung with banners that flutter in the breeze.
"I'd not expect to find such a palace so far from anything," Gabranth says. "It seems excessive."
"It very nearly would be," Drace says, "save that they've one luxury here that even Archades cannot provide better." She reins in her chocobo outside the inn, and the patrol comes to a shifting, squawking halt behind her. "Hello, the house!" she calls, and the place comes alive.
The curtains at the front of the inn part for a woman in an embroidered robe, and three young men come jogging up from a side road -- from the stables, it seems -- and step up to take the first chocobos' reins. "Welcome back, your honor," the woman says, bowing as Drace swings down from the saddle. "It's always a pleasure to see you."
"Nowhere near the pleasure it is to pay you a visit," Drace says. "Marya, allow me to present his honor Judge Magister Gabranth, who makes his first border tour with me this season."
Gabranth dismounts, and the woman bows to him as well. "Welcome to you both, your honors, and to your men. If there's aught we can do to make your stay more pleasant, only ask and it is yours."
"Thank you," Gabranth says, nodding.
"We'll have a private dining room for the company," Drace says, "and four rooms for the night. Full course meal, please, and I at least will want a bath prepared after. If the men would ask other luxuries, please indulge them -- the empire will pay for anything they request, save companions." She smiles wryly. "Those they can finance themselves."
The inn hostess shows them inside, points out the dining room where the eight of them will eat, then takes them up the stairs to their rooms. They're small rooms, and spare, but appealing, and the one that Drace claims for the two of them is already appointed with armor stands. She removes helm, gauntlets, tassets, and pauldrons, and leaves her heavy maces in the room; Gabranth, though it unnerves him to go out as a Magister without his full plate, does likewise.
When they come down the narrow stairs to return to the dining room, he sees that the patrol squad has done likewise, almost fully unarmored to a man. It seems a luxury, something they've rarely been able to do since leaving the capital; much of the border is tense, if not actively hostile.
But not Sasa; Gabranth and Drace sit down at the low table and help themselves to glasses of the sweet plum wine being passed around, and the inn's staff bring dinner. The first course is a creamed vegetable soup, mildly spiced and golden; the second is poached fowl, served with a dish of rice and onion and mushrooms, so familiar it makes Gabranth briefly homesick; the third, a platter of earthy, aged cheese and tart mountain berries. There are sweet pastries at meal's end, even, and Drace licks honey from her bare fingertips with an unselfconscious pleasure that makes Gabranth's breath come short.
"A good night to you all," she says, when she rises from the table at last. "Enjoy yourselves, and don't any of you come down with worse hangovers than an esuna will cure."
There's laughter at that, and Drace cocks an eyebrow at Gabranth, so he rises as well. If the men have made note of the favor she shows him -- and he cannot imagine they have not; they are none of them stupid -- they have been discreet enough not to mention it. Among the small mercies that Gabranth has learned to appreciate in Archadia, that one ranks near the top of the list.
In their rented room, she removes the rest of her armor, and then her clothing as well, stripping with an unhurried efficiency. Gabranth watches the play of muscle in her legs, in her back, as she crosses the room to take a robe from a hook on the wall. "Will you be joining me?" she asks, as she shrugs into it.
"If that's my invitation," he says, and pulls at the laces of his cuirass.
"Come down to the far end of the hall," Drace says, "and take the rear stairs to the courtyard. You'll see the baths straight ahead. I'll let the attendant know to expect you."
Gabranth nods. "Thank you," he says, and bows shortly as she steps out. The door slides closed behind her, whisper quiet. Downstairs, it sounds as though some of the men at least are still at table, their laughter carrying up through the halls. It's a good sound, the release of tension after they've been riding hard for nearly a fortnight. Gabranth divests himself of armor and clothing, and takes the second robe that the inn provided -- the fabric is fluffy and warm, the cut generous, as though made for a man of considerably more bulk.
It's comfortable enough, for all that, and enough to preserve his modesty as he pads down the hall, down the stairs, and across the courtyard to the baths. The air outside has begun to chill, as the sun sets, but inside it's warm and humid, the light soft and welcoming. "I seek Judge Drace," he tells the woman on duty.
"Behind the second curtain, your honor," the woman says, and she also betrays no surprise at the impropriety; surely in a profession like this discretion is a virtue. Gabranth thanks her, and steps through the painted curtain.
The lights are dim, scarcely brighter than candles, and steam hangs heavy as Mist over the tub sunk in the floor. "About time," Drace says. "Come join me." Her voice has lost its Tsenoble precision, turning slow and rich the way it does when she's been drinking, or in the wake of climax. Gabranth's cock twitches, and he shrugs out of his robe.
"No wonder you were so adamant about staying the night here," he says, scrubbing away the worst of the grime and sweat from the road with the wash-cloths provided. "I wouldn't have thought to see such luxury before we got back to Archades."
"Sasa has one great advantage over even the capital," Drace says as Gabranth walks up to the edge of the bath. "It's not clogged with streetears and petty courtiers looking to turn one's every action in their favor." She's sitting on a ledge in the bath, the water lapping at the tops of her breasts, and her arms draped over the marble edge of the tub. Her eyes are dark, her gaze frank and appreciative as he lowers himself into the water.
It's hot, almost scalding but not quite, barely still tolerable; Drace is faintly flushed from it and Gabranth is sure that with his complexion he must be more so. But the heat is good for him, no question -- almost immediately he can feel the tension beginning to ease from muscles that had stayed taut and uncooperative since they began their patrol. He closes his eyes to better savor the feeling, and sighs with pleasure.
A clean scent, as of evergreen and winter blossoms, fills the air; Gabranth opens his eyes to see Drace setting a small glass bottle back on the edge of the tub. Oil shimmers on the water, faint in the low light. He finds himself briefly at a loss for words.
"Thank you," he says eventually, settling for honesty when eloquence will not come to him. "This is a most welcome diversion."
Drace smiles, and the water ripples as she moves. "Come over here," she says, "and thank me by rubbing my back."
The water makes him buoyant, almost weightless as he shifts to the other side of the bath, beside her. She turns her back, lets her head fall forward, and he lays both hands against her skin.
Her body is a map of the last two decades of Archadian warfare, military actions writ across her skin in the neat, indelible script of too-quickly-healed wounds: here, a rebellion in the old city; there, an outlying nation conquered; here, a campaign to quell the bands of robbers on the highway to Nabradia; there, the evacuation of a city lost to Mist and encroaching Jagd. He knows her scars nearly as well as his own, her scars and the cords of muscle beneath them that now loosen in his hands.
"Gabranth," she murmurs, sounding pleased, content, and reaches back to rest one hand against his thigh. "Gabranth."
"Drace." He digs his thumbs in below her shoulder blades, feels a stubborn knot give way, bends his head to press his lips to her skin.
"Yes," she says. She leans back against his chest, and turns her head so she can meet him for a kiss that's languid with the heat. He slides his hands forward, around her ribcage, and then upward. Her breasts are small, for she trains too hard to leave much spare flesh on her frame, but they're firm in his hands, and her back arches when he rolls her nipples between his fingers. She makes soft, hungry noises against his mouth, and the water splashes faintly as she writhes. The heat is dizzying.
She takes his right hand and pulls it down, pressing his fingers between her legs. Her flesh is swollen there, and stiff, and he shudders when he begins to stroke her. "Yes," she says again, her hands curled around his wrists, "don't stop, ah."
"I won't," Gabranth promises, his mouth against her throat. She rocks against him, and he reads what she wants in the way her fingers tighten against the tendons of his wrists. Sweat beads and prickles at his hairline, from the water, from her closeness. He doesn't speed up, doesn't press harder -- he made that mistake when first she allowed him this, grew careless in his own desire, but what she wants is for him to be steadfast, to give her more of exactly this stroke, until the relentlessness of it, not the force, makes her come undone, shivering and arching in his arms.
Beautiful, he would say, save that he knows better; it is a compliment she accepts grudgingly even for her swordsmanship, and not at all for anything softer. He presses his lips to her shoulder until the impulse has passed. "Good?" he says then.
"Very," Drace says, the word a sigh of pleasure. She releases his hands, and turns in his arms to face him. "But you know you're skilled, don't you?"
He would make some clever answer, if his wit were more ready, but she reaches for him and any hope of eloquence is lost with her hand closing around his cock. "Please," he says, thrusting into her hand.
She steers him backward, toward a higher ledge. "Up," she says. "Out of the water."
He boosts himself up onto the ledge; when he's seated there, the water scarcely laps at the tops of his thighs. Drace reaches for the bath oil, and pours some out in her hand. "Gods," Gabranth says. It's clear where this is going.
Drace smiles, warm and pleased with herself and very nearly smug. "If we have the luxury," she says, "should we not savor it?" She wraps one slick hand around the shaft of his cock, and cradles his balls in the other, and Gabranth leans back on his hands so he can thrust into her grip. The oil makes them slippery, and she compensates for that by gripping tight -- for he does prefer force, likes the aggression of it when they come together. He cannot keep silent, though he knows their privacy is but an illusion; despite the slickness of the oil, he can feel her sword-calluses as she strokes him, the faint hint of roughness in the midst of all this luxury. It's more than he can bear, more than he would want to -- why should he hold back? -- and he arches into her hands, the one careful, the other rough, and spills between them with her name on his lips.
She smiles, as she releases him, and her hands coax him back down into the water to rinse his skin clean. He reaches for her, catching her by the soft curve of her hip, and claims a proper kiss, with her arms twined round his neck and his about her waist. She moves slowly, heat-sated. Damp curls of hair cling to her brow.
When she pulls free from the kiss, she says, "All of the men are going to be hopelessly hung over in the morning. They won't want to leave early."
Gabranth blinks; it takes a moment before the haze of pleasure clears enough for him to recognize the invitation. "So we'd lose nothing by staying up a bit later ourselves, then?"
"I wouldn't think so," Drace says, smiling.
He runs his fingers up her spine, up the columns of muscle beside it. "If we returned to our room, and called for liquor, would they bring us something fine enough to match the rest of their hospitality?"
"I think they probably would," Drace says. She lets him go, and drifts toward the edge of the tub. "Shall we go investigate?"
Gabranth smiles. "Let's."