A Day In The Life Of [FFXII:OGC, Fran/Balthier]
Title: A Day In The Life Of
Author: ellnyx
Rating: M-NC-17
Content: Consensual sex, oral sex, gore (a hunt)
Prompt: Final Fantasy XII: OGC - Balthier/Fran, sex in the snow - as soon as they made camp, she jumped him.
Word count: 2800
Summary: The Strahl is downed, the pirates are completely broke, and if they're going to eat they have to hunt.
.
Balthier manages the cold better than Fran does, born into Archadian altitude, choosing as he does to fly grinning into the teeth of many a howling wet storm. Fran daydreams of beaches, basking lizard-like and lethargic, the blanket of humidity and warmth a comfort they have been too long without, on this hunt.
Balthier's eyes open with dawn, but he is unseeing for long moments, the chill stone of his bed no comfort. Fran did not sleep the night prior, a thank you for the several nights he had not; she does not mock his lassitude now. They do not breakfast. Balthier takes a handful of snow to rub across his face, brisk, his hand through his hair as though he does not dare hypothermia; Fran toys with a milky icicle snapped from their cave's mouth, and does not think of pastries, cream, star fruit and pomegranates.
Last's night snowfall was sparse and slow. Fran watched each flake arc through its desperate, dizzy spiral, as though that path could have any other terminus but the inevitable. Balthier scuffs his heel through that softness that masks the ice and rock below. The slurry will melt by midday, freeze by dusk, and is not quite thick enough to obscure their prey's path. Balthier hums with satisfaction and starts to walk. The dragon's direction proves aligned with their plans. All the day prior she and Balthier trapped these hills with an ambush as implacable as a glacier.
Once into the hills, Balthier takes the lead in pursuit. Fran's footing is sure, but despite his frequent missteps, Balthier's pace is faster. He reaches the hill's rocky crest before Fran does, lowers himself to a crouch to load his gun. He must pull off a glove first, does so with his teeth. His fingers have thinned with cold and hunger: a ring flies free. Balthier has accustomed himself to this occurrence. A bullet between clenched teeth, he catches spinning metal without thought, returns the ring to its customary finger, and turns to his gun. He is careful not to taste that bullet, spitting after he loads.
Fran stands and directs her breath's mist downwards, feels the warmth spill over her breasts. Balthier's gun withstands the cold and damp better than her bowstring; she keeps her weapon wrapped until Balthier cocks his gun. He winces at the echo, raises himself briefly to glance between mirror-black rocks, beckons her closer, all wordlessly.
Fran strips oilskin from her string, sniffs her arrow's fletch (one of the last) to determine it for the dragon's bane, and aims towards the sky. Balthier regards her trajectory, glances at their prey again, and gestures for her to lower her arc. She does, by increments, until he holds up a palm.
The dragon is intelligent. Despite their penchant for distant attack, it has tracked them by the trail of bullet and bow before, eye to arc and horn to heart, and each time they have fled with damage that could nearly have led to their deaths. Their belongings were the first casuality. Days, near a week now, they have herded it and run from it, goaded and fought and bled, leading that great beast from its warmer fields of preference into the snow, where its reptilian blood slows, and perhaps they have a chance. With height, with wit and concealment, Balthier proposed they could deceive it, to give it no opportunity to trace back to where they stand for another attack. They are sorely outmatched. Fletch and shot salt and pepper the dragon's jewelled hide already; Fran does not believe another arrow will take it to the floor. It will be their painstaking laid traps that drain the beast of life.
Balthier confirms his own skywards arc by glancing at her stance. To match her arrow, Bacchus' wine slicks all his bullets, a chance amphora looted from the absent corpse of a Seeq hunter less lucky than they; the distillation process kept Balthier focused through these past days of hunger.
Fran looses her arrow; Balthier counts a heartbeat's delay, and fires.
Below, the dragon is struck near in unison. Balthier's bullet fails to do more than enrage, a barking roar for proof; Fran's arrow, soaked in Bacchus' blind insanity, contains enough added substance to turn the dragon's blood against it.
After that, the matter is simple. The dragon's blind rage sets it against traps it cannot see, drains and sinkholes for its strength, sap spells and toxic clouds. When exhaustion would have it falter, Balthier reloads his gun, and Fran risks another arrow; the beast's rampage begins again. The weight of its footsteps shakes powdered snow as though the world is a sieve.
Fran's quiver is empty, Balthier's pouch deflated, and the bellowing beast suddenly silent.
Balthier grins up at Fran, the inhuman focus in his eyes of the past few days, the lines of worry, suddenly relinquished to relief, to victory. Fresh snowflakes catch in the ragged, stinking wolfskin that forms his hood, glittering. Fran smiles in return, the expression not so precious as she had once thought a smile to be, yet all the more precious for having shared.
Balthier leaps his rocky shield without thought to the drop below, sinking knee-deep into an icy bank. He wades through without concern, angling downwards as steeply as the slope will allow him. Fran pauses atop that crest and regards the scene. The traps have left small mark on the landscape. The dragon fell with its mouth open, eyeballs and tongue surrendering its last life as steam. Balthier comes to rest in that emission, only marginally taller than the beast's fangs. He sets one heel to the beast's lower jaw, both palms to the upper, and strains until his face reddens. The jaw moves by inches. Fran moves instead to the beast's belly, and draws her sword. The blade lost its edge in an earlier confrontation with hard neck-scale. Fran likes to think wounded metal can be appeased by a blood offering; she releases the beast's guts to the air, careful not to puncture a bowel that could have held her height, and Balthier's, crossways with ease. From inside the dragon's mouth, Balthier chips at great fangs with the butt of his once-favoured shotgun, one the beast had near-destroyed previously with a stray-swept claw.
They work without words. The labour of looting must be rapid, for dragonflesh is mistflesh, and returns to the world so swiftly once life is gone. They must anchor their loot in this world with the act of possession. Fran picks her way through gore, panting with effort and disgust. Balthier grunts in time with his efforts, but his pile of fangs grows before Fran reaches the dragon's milky stones. He emerges with saliva matting his hair, his raided wolf-fur discarded and once-white sleeves transparent with wet. Fran wades free of slippery intestine with her prizes held high. Balthier offers her a slick hand over the last coil. They have just enough time to hack through one great paw, their already damaged swords wielded as axes, Balthier to the left and Fran to the right and chopping in alternate time. When they reach the wristbone, Fran sets the point of her sword as deep into the joint as she can; Balthier balances awkwardly on the wide crossbrace of the sword and jumps, trusting his full weight to the blade.
Bone gives an instant before metal does, itself an instant before the dragon itself dissipates. Balthier tumbles into stained snow, laughing as though with a delirium. Fran offers him a hand to rise, which he takes.
The kiss on the upswing is unexpected, as unexpected as his delight. His lips taste like dead dragon's breath, his cheeks sticky. Fran will not imagine her own taste, the smell is heavy in her nostrils. Despite the spit cloying Balthier's hair, Fran's fingers come away marginally cleaner for their brief contact with his scalp.
They carry with them two ragged blankets, all the comfort they have had since their eviction from the holy lands and the Strahl's grounding: their loot overflows from their impromptu sacks. Balthier shoulders the larger, for pride Fran thinks, and hip-deep in snow he breaks the path forwards.
Fran keeps her eyes on the path he cuts, and despite her own burden, she smiles.
Their cave is a poor enough camp, but Fran is enthused to see it. Inside is scarcely warmer than outside, but it is a barrier between them and the ice-blue sky. While Balthier detaches viable meat from the dragon's paw, Fran starts a fire where the smoke will not foul their sleeping place. There is no fuel in the mountains; for several days Fran had improvised, and hopes Balthier will not ask her with what she works. He is strange about survival sometimes, as though anyone would care what lengths they had dared prior to death. Fran supplements magick so her natural blaze can burn hot enough to heat a flat volcanic stone through, which she does, before her scant fuel is consumed: the rock pings with trapped heat, and Balthier sets dragon steaks and meaty strips to cook. Their spice ran out long ago, unprepared for this venture as they were, but no matter. The smell of roasting meat has Fran's mouth water.
Balthier has his vest off, his shirt off before Fran can query what he does. His skin pinks almost instantly in the cold, nipples dark and hard. Scarcity writes itself on Balthier's flesh so swiftly: a concave stomach seeks a backbone to gnaw, breath and heartbeat both flickering too clear in the gaps between his ribs. Balthier regards his stained shirt in detail, only to disregard it, tossed over his shoulder, but his vest he sets aside with care. Belts and boots follow, leather trousers peeled free with obvious reluctance; that hide cracks, stiffened. Balthier shivers without surcease, but grins at her despite chattering teeth. His eyes are too bright, his cheekbones too hollow, his hair awry and still spit-wet and all of him too thin and shrinking with the cold: Fran thinks to tell him he looks like a raving madman, but withholds, for insanity aside, he also looks charming.
Her eyes must tell her tale of mixed disbelief and amusement, for Balthier's grin widens to a laugh. He leaps from the cave's mouth and out into the snow, shaking ferociously as he picks his way to a deeper bank. Fran walks out under the sky to keep him in sight; perhaps he is mad, and she with him, for it is cold out here despite clear skies and the lance of the sun. Her feet freeze even as her hair warms.
Balthier starts with his own hair, thrust head-first into powdery snow; he emerges gasping and red-raw, only to follow one white insanity with further fistfuls rubbed brisk across his limbs.
At once Fran realises what he does, and laughs. Only an Archadian would bathe in this weather, in a snowdrift, nonetheless; Fran laughs until a soft palmful of snow rubs brisk and freezing across her own cheek. When she opens her eyes, Balthier smirks at her, another handful held at the ready. She reaches to the clasps at the side of her bodice and looses them. Balthier treats his handful of snow as though it is a bar of soap, and their freezing circumstance a warm bathhouse; with meticulous care he starts to wipe her clean, starting with her face, her eyes, his fingers as cold as the ice. When Fran opens her eyes again, her lashes are wet with stars, her peripheral vision fragmented by them, but Balthier's face holds clear at the centre. She bends to gather her own handful of ice, which allows him to rub his palmful of chill across her spine. When Fran straightens she is shivering as hard as he, uncontrollably, skin so hard everything hurts. She rubs snow across Balthier's flanks, even as he tends the gore that still clings between her breasts.
Cold fingers slide between her thighs. Fran yelps, while Balthier snorts. His eyes are sparkling. She will not be so cruel as to push him on his back in this snow, but for that he is so warm against her palms: she pushes him. She kneels, knees freezing and her palms the worse, thinking to offer what little warmth remains to a manhood much in denial of its master's disregard for the weather. But Balthier's shudders turn so swift to need, his fingers lines of heat and contradictory ice against her thighs. He draws her upwards, so she crawls. His nose is a cold point buried in her curls, his tongue so warm. Balthier blows with narrowed lips to lave her with chill, then with soft warm breath to melt her again; and his tongue, broad and soft and everywhere, long and narrowed and precise - her voice echoes back from their surrounds, sharp as shattering.
Fran stands. Her knees are hurting too much to continue. Balthier seems not concerned for all of his shuddering, pale flesh turned ruddy with rejection of this weather. Snow crystals melt in the curls at his crotch; they have been away from civilisation for so long that neat trim has grown back to a thatch. Balthier stands, too, and takes her hand.
Fran's lips are chapped, Balthier's even worse, but their breath is warm and they are as good as clean as they will ever be without soap and hot water. When they kiss, she wonders for a moment if their breath will form a bridge of ice between them, but their heat overcomes. Balthier's hands will not let go of her hair, but neither will hers of his, for the warmth a scalp offers. They stagger in interlock, as though frozen together.
The cave feels much warmer than outside, and is full of the scent of near-cooked steak and the flatulent remnants of the campfire. The stone floor is too much of a discomfort, so much so neither of them attempts to bed down. Balthier's cock is as defiant as he is of the conditions, his skin flushed to match; he sets her shoulders against the rock without a word. Fran trusts him to take her weight like so, her heels crossed at the small of his back. One arm around her waist, Balthier licks the fingers of his free hand and returns to her cunt; he sucks in a breath of disbelief as he slides icy fingers home.
Fran braces herself against rock and his arms, and works to take him deep as only this position can let her. He warms one hand and then the other; but still, his cock is a shock inside her, hotter and harder than Balthier has any right to be, but good, so good. His breath comes in short bursts of steam, hers in clouds even shorter. Balthier does not last, his gasps unrestrained, unguarded, but the warmth his orgasm delivers is nearly enough; Fran rocks him deep, holds him for long moments after. Her belly warms as if she had drunk too much, whiskey or mahdu; he is hot liquor, inside her. He wants to drop his arms, he is shaking still, a different tempo now, but he holds her steady. His nose and lips press against her throat, his breath shaping her name.
Gradually, they disentangle. The cold returns painfully swift, but hot food and reasonably dry clothes await them, and better yet, a loot haul that will keep them flying for months. They eat the steaks as cooked as they come, some pieces bloody and some bone-dry, with fingers and a single knife shared between them. By the time they finish, Balthier's filled belly strains against his skin, his expression a mix of discomfort and satisfaction. Fran yawns, and startles her mouth closed with a dragonsbreath burp halfway through. Balthier is yawning too, and chokes himself when he tries to laugh.
One of them should stand to guard, but they are both so tired, days of strain and near-starvation surrendered. Fran arranges their loot into a tidy circle, a space in the middle to hold them both, puts one blanket on the floor and gestures Balthier to take the bed. He grabs her waist in passing and pulls her to the floor with him, her resistance so minimal. He wrestles the other blanket out of her hands and spreads it over the both of them. Their backs face out to the cold, heads bowed together so their breath warms the space between them. Cold fingers curl against Fran's breastbone, so she works her own hands under Balthier's arms for warmth.
Balthier's eyelids are already closed, fluttering as though he dreams a dragon's hot dreams; as well they both might, with dragon in their bellies and dragon bones for their bed.
.
Author: ellnyx
Rating: M-NC-17
Content: Consensual sex, oral sex, gore (a hunt)
Prompt: Final Fantasy XII: OGC - Balthier/Fran, sex in the snow - as soon as they made camp, she jumped him.
Word count: 2800
Summary: The Strahl is downed, the pirates are completely broke, and if they're going to eat they have to hunt.
.
Balthier manages the cold better than Fran does, born into Archadian altitude, choosing as he does to fly grinning into the teeth of many a howling wet storm. Fran daydreams of beaches, basking lizard-like and lethargic, the blanket of humidity and warmth a comfort they have been too long without, on this hunt.
Balthier's eyes open with dawn, but he is unseeing for long moments, the chill stone of his bed no comfort. Fran did not sleep the night prior, a thank you for the several nights he had not; she does not mock his lassitude now. They do not breakfast. Balthier takes a handful of snow to rub across his face, brisk, his hand through his hair as though he does not dare hypothermia; Fran toys with a milky icicle snapped from their cave's mouth, and does not think of pastries, cream, star fruit and pomegranates.
Last's night snowfall was sparse and slow. Fran watched each flake arc through its desperate, dizzy spiral, as though that path could have any other terminus but the inevitable. Balthier scuffs his heel through that softness that masks the ice and rock below. The slurry will melt by midday, freeze by dusk, and is not quite thick enough to obscure their prey's path. Balthier hums with satisfaction and starts to walk. The dragon's direction proves aligned with their plans. All the day prior she and Balthier trapped these hills with an ambush as implacable as a glacier.
Once into the hills, Balthier takes the lead in pursuit. Fran's footing is sure, but despite his frequent missteps, Balthier's pace is faster. He reaches the hill's rocky crest before Fran does, lowers himself to a crouch to load his gun. He must pull off a glove first, does so with his teeth. His fingers have thinned with cold and hunger: a ring flies free. Balthier has accustomed himself to this occurrence. A bullet between clenched teeth, he catches spinning metal without thought, returns the ring to its customary finger, and turns to his gun. He is careful not to taste that bullet, spitting after he loads.
Fran stands and directs her breath's mist downwards, feels the warmth spill over her breasts. Balthier's gun withstands the cold and damp better than her bowstring; she keeps her weapon wrapped until Balthier cocks his gun. He winces at the echo, raises himself briefly to glance between mirror-black rocks, beckons her closer, all wordlessly.
Fran strips oilskin from her string, sniffs her arrow's fletch (one of the last) to determine it for the dragon's bane, and aims towards the sky. Balthier regards her trajectory, glances at their prey again, and gestures for her to lower her arc. She does, by increments, until he holds up a palm.
The dragon is intelligent. Despite their penchant for distant attack, it has tracked them by the trail of bullet and bow before, eye to arc and horn to heart, and each time they have fled with damage that could nearly have led to their deaths. Their belongings were the first casuality. Days, near a week now, they have herded it and run from it, goaded and fought and bled, leading that great beast from its warmer fields of preference into the snow, where its reptilian blood slows, and perhaps they have a chance. With height, with wit and concealment, Balthier proposed they could deceive it, to give it no opportunity to trace back to where they stand for another attack. They are sorely outmatched. Fletch and shot salt and pepper the dragon's jewelled hide already; Fran does not believe another arrow will take it to the floor. It will be their painstaking laid traps that drain the beast of life.
Balthier confirms his own skywards arc by glancing at her stance. To match her arrow, Bacchus' wine slicks all his bullets, a chance amphora looted from the absent corpse of a Seeq hunter less lucky than they; the distillation process kept Balthier focused through these past days of hunger.
Fran looses her arrow; Balthier counts a heartbeat's delay, and fires.
Below, the dragon is struck near in unison. Balthier's bullet fails to do more than enrage, a barking roar for proof; Fran's arrow, soaked in Bacchus' blind insanity, contains enough added substance to turn the dragon's blood against it.
After that, the matter is simple. The dragon's blind rage sets it against traps it cannot see, drains and sinkholes for its strength, sap spells and toxic clouds. When exhaustion would have it falter, Balthier reloads his gun, and Fran risks another arrow; the beast's rampage begins again. The weight of its footsteps shakes powdered snow as though the world is a sieve.
Fran's quiver is empty, Balthier's pouch deflated, and the bellowing beast suddenly silent.
Balthier grins up at Fran, the inhuman focus in his eyes of the past few days, the lines of worry, suddenly relinquished to relief, to victory. Fresh snowflakes catch in the ragged, stinking wolfskin that forms his hood, glittering. Fran smiles in return, the expression not so precious as she had once thought a smile to be, yet all the more precious for having shared.
Balthier leaps his rocky shield without thought to the drop below, sinking knee-deep into an icy bank. He wades through without concern, angling downwards as steeply as the slope will allow him. Fran pauses atop that crest and regards the scene. The traps have left small mark on the landscape. The dragon fell with its mouth open, eyeballs and tongue surrendering its last life as steam. Balthier comes to rest in that emission, only marginally taller than the beast's fangs. He sets one heel to the beast's lower jaw, both palms to the upper, and strains until his face reddens. The jaw moves by inches. Fran moves instead to the beast's belly, and draws her sword. The blade lost its edge in an earlier confrontation with hard neck-scale. Fran likes to think wounded metal can be appeased by a blood offering; she releases the beast's guts to the air, careful not to puncture a bowel that could have held her height, and Balthier's, crossways with ease. From inside the dragon's mouth, Balthier chips at great fangs with the butt of his once-favoured shotgun, one the beast had near-destroyed previously with a stray-swept claw.
They work without words. The labour of looting must be rapid, for dragonflesh is mistflesh, and returns to the world so swiftly once life is gone. They must anchor their loot in this world with the act of possession. Fran picks her way through gore, panting with effort and disgust. Balthier grunts in time with his efforts, but his pile of fangs grows before Fran reaches the dragon's milky stones. He emerges with saliva matting his hair, his raided wolf-fur discarded and once-white sleeves transparent with wet. Fran wades free of slippery intestine with her prizes held high. Balthier offers her a slick hand over the last coil. They have just enough time to hack through one great paw, their already damaged swords wielded as axes, Balthier to the left and Fran to the right and chopping in alternate time. When they reach the wristbone, Fran sets the point of her sword as deep into the joint as she can; Balthier balances awkwardly on the wide crossbrace of the sword and jumps, trusting his full weight to the blade.
Bone gives an instant before metal does, itself an instant before the dragon itself dissipates. Balthier tumbles into stained snow, laughing as though with a delirium. Fran offers him a hand to rise, which he takes.
The kiss on the upswing is unexpected, as unexpected as his delight. His lips taste like dead dragon's breath, his cheeks sticky. Fran will not imagine her own taste, the smell is heavy in her nostrils. Despite the spit cloying Balthier's hair, Fran's fingers come away marginally cleaner for their brief contact with his scalp.
They carry with them two ragged blankets, all the comfort they have had since their eviction from the holy lands and the Strahl's grounding: their loot overflows from their impromptu sacks. Balthier shoulders the larger, for pride Fran thinks, and hip-deep in snow he breaks the path forwards.
Fran keeps her eyes on the path he cuts, and despite her own burden, she smiles.
Their cave is a poor enough camp, but Fran is enthused to see it. Inside is scarcely warmer than outside, but it is a barrier between them and the ice-blue sky. While Balthier detaches viable meat from the dragon's paw, Fran starts a fire where the smoke will not foul their sleeping place. There is no fuel in the mountains; for several days Fran had improvised, and hopes Balthier will not ask her with what she works. He is strange about survival sometimes, as though anyone would care what lengths they had dared prior to death. Fran supplements magick so her natural blaze can burn hot enough to heat a flat volcanic stone through, which she does, before her scant fuel is consumed: the rock pings with trapped heat, and Balthier sets dragon steaks and meaty strips to cook. Their spice ran out long ago, unprepared for this venture as they were, but no matter. The smell of roasting meat has Fran's mouth water.
Balthier has his vest off, his shirt off before Fran can query what he does. His skin pinks almost instantly in the cold, nipples dark and hard. Scarcity writes itself on Balthier's flesh so swiftly: a concave stomach seeks a backbone to gnaw, breath and heartbeat both flickering too clear in the gaps between his ribs. Balthier regards his stained shirt in detail, only to disregard it, tossed over his shoulder, but his vest he sets aside with care. Belts and boots follow, leather trousers peeled free with obvious reluctance; that hide cracks, stiffened. Balthier shivers without surcease, but grins at her despite chattering teeth. His eyes are too bright, his cheekbones too hollow, his hair awry and still spit-wet and all of him too thin and shrinking with the cold: Fran thinks to tell him he looks like a raving madman, but withholds, for insanity aside, he also looks charming.
Her eyes must tell her tale of mixed disbelief and amusement, for Balthier's grin widens to a laugh. He leaps from the cave's mouth and out into the snow, shaking ferociously as he picks his way to a deeper bank. Fran walks out under the sky to keep him in sight; perhaps he is mad, and she with him, for it is cold out here despite clear skies and the lance of the sun. Her feet freeze even as her hair warms.
Balthier starts with his own hair, thrust head-first into powdery snow; he emerges gasping and red-raw, only to follow one white insanity with further fistfuls rubbed brisk across his limbs.
At once Fran realises what he does, and laughs. Only an Archadian would bathe in this weather, in a snowdrift, nonetheless; Fran laughs until a soft palmful of snow rubs brisk and freezing across her own cheek. When she opens her eyes, Balthier smirks at her, another handful held at the ready. She reaches to the clasps at the side of her bodice and looses them. Balthier treats his handful of snow as though it is a bar of soap, and their freezing circumstance a warm bathhouse; with meticulous care he starts to wipe her clean, starting with her face, her eyes, his fingers as cold as the ice. When Fran opens her eyes again, her lashes are wet with stars, her peripheral vision fragmented by them, but Balthier's face holds clear at the centre. She bends to gather her own handful of ice, which allows him to rub his palmful of chill across her spine. When Fran straightens she is shivering as hard as he, uncontrollably, skin so hard everything hurts. She rubs snow across Balthier's flanks, even as he tends the gore that still clings between her breasts.
Cold fingers slide between her thighs. Fran yelps, while Balthier snorts. His eyes are sparkling. She will not be so cruel as to push him on his back in this snow, but for that he is so warm against her palms: she pushes him. She kneels, knees freezing and her palms the worse, thinking to offer what little warmth remains to a manhood much in denial of its master's disregard for the weather. But Balthier's shudders turn so swift to need, his fingers lines of heat and contradictory ice against her thighs. He draws her upwards, so she crawls. His nose is a cold point buried in her curls, his tongue so warm. Balthier blows with narrowed lips to lave her with chill, then with soft warm breath to melt her again; and his tongue, broad and soft and everywhere, long and narrowed and precise - her voice echoes back from their surrounds, sharp as shattering.
Fran stands. Her knees are hurting too much to continue. Balthier seems not concerned for all of his shuddering, pale flesh turned ruddy with rejection of this weather. Snow crystals melt in the curls at his crotch; they have been away from civilisation for so long that neat trim has grown back to a thatch. Balthier stands, too, and takes her hand.
Fran's lips are chapped, Balthier's even worse, but their breath is warm and they are as good as clean as they will ever be without soap and hot water. When they kiss, she wonders for a moment if their breath will form a bridge of ice between them, but their heat overcomes. Balthier's hands will not let go of her hair, but neither will hers of his, for the warmth a scalp offers. They stagger in interlock, as though frozen together.
The cave feels much warmer than outside, and is full of the scent of near-cooked steak and the flatulent remnants of the campfire. The stone floor is too much of a discomfort, so much so neither of them attempts to bed down. Balthier's cock is as defiant as he is of the conditions, his skin flushed to match; he sets her shoulders against the rock without a word. Fran trusts him to take her weight like so, her heels crossed at the small of his back. One arm around her waist, Balthier licks the fingers of his free hand and returns to her cunt; he sucks in a breath of disbelief as he slides icy fingers home.
Fran braces herself against rock and his arms, and works to take him deep as only this position can let her. He warms one hand and then the other; but still, his cock is a shock inside her, hotter and harder than Balthier has any right to be, but good, so good. His breath comes in short bursts of steam, hers in clouds even shorter. Balthier does not last, his gasps unrestrained, unguarded, but the warmth his orgasm delivers is nearly enough; Fran rocks him deep, holds him for long moments after. Her belly warms as if she had drunk too much, whiskey or mahdu; he is hot liquor, inside her. He wants to drop his arms, he is shaking still, a different tempo now, but he holds her steady. His nose and lips press against her throat, his breath shaping her name.
Gradually, they disentangle. The cold returns painfully swift, but hot food and reasonably dry clothes await them, and better yet, a loot haul that will keep them flying for months. They eat the steaks as cooked as they come, some pieces bloody and some bone-dry, with fingers and a single knife shared between them. By the time they finish, Balthier's filled belly strains against his skin, his expression a mix of discomfort and satisfaction. Fran yawns, and startles her mouth closed with a dragonsbreath burp halfway through. Balthier is yawning too, and chokes himself when he tries to laugh.
One of them should stand to guard, but they are both so tired, days of strain and near-starvation surrendered. Fran arranges their loot into a tidy circle, a space in the middle to hold them both, puts one blanket on the floor and gestures Balthier to take the bed. He grabs her waist in passing and pulls her to the floor with him, her resistance so minimal. He wrestles the other blanket out of her hands and spreads it over the both of them. Their backs face out to the cold, heads bowed together so their breath warms the space between them. Cold fingers curl against Fran's breastbone, so she works her own hands under Balthier's arms for warmth.
Balthier's eyelids are already closed, fluttering as though he dreams a dragon's hot dreams; as well they both might, with dragon in their bellies and dragon bones for their bed.
.