Final Fantasy XII: Gabranth/Drace
Title: Cocoa, Prepackaged and Sweetened
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Characters: Gabranth and Drace
Author/Artist: mithrigil
Rating: R
Warnings: Allusions to and evidence of consensual rough play.
Word count: 1250
Summary: The morning after.
Cocoa, Prepackaged and Sweetened
Mithrigil Galtirglin
Upon waking, he realizes that they didn’t quite make it to bed. The sun is up, coming in low beneath the hem of the curtains, striving in a deliberate, long beam across the carpet and right into his eyes. The terries of the rug grate on his cheek, in the breaches left by stubble. His left shoulder, left hip, both calves ache, which is not quite unwelcome, and his arm is draped over something warmer than the floor, much warmer than the floor.
Drace, he recalls. Oh.
His neck curses as it cracks.
“Let me up,” she says. Her voice is woolen, hoarse near his ear. He has no idea how long she has been awake for, if he woke her or she him-do not bother, he decides, and obliges her, sliding his arm off her waist and raising his hips so she can excise her thigh from between his.
Oh, gods.
He is too fogged by sleep to catch her face, and she’s up already, her back to him, stretching. The muscles strain. She drapes an arm backward over her shoulder and clasps her hands, stalking easily across the room. He assumes that the adjoining room she shuts herself into is the water closet. Light creeps out from under it as well, though it doesn’t reach nearly as far as that from outside, still encroaching on his eyes.
Raising himself to fours, he hangs his head and digs the heels of his palms into the carpet. The recollection starts to assault him as he gathers his composure and stands. The room is lit grey, cold and somehow natural. The sheets of her bed are a haphazard tangle, a frozen white waterfall crushed on the leg of her endtable. She kisses like a villain in a song, to spite the hero, bound and powerless. He can take both her wrists in one hand.
She is done in the water closet, if the sounds attest true. The door creaks open without reticence. The light is still on in there, and though he turns to her, her face is overcast by it. The scars of her body, though, he sees much clearer now. He remembers how they taste. “Go on,” she tells him, already on her way somewhere else. “Something to drink?”
“-Tea?” he heaves, and catches barely a glimpse of her eyes before she is out the door of the bedroom and into the salon.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” she calls back.
A spell of gooseflesh is creeping up his arms, to muster against the sleep-needles in his legs. “Strong,” he manages, “and spiced.”
“Done.” He can hear the faint clanging from the kitchen, the rush of water. The layout of her apartments is similar to his, but a reflection-he almost staggers in the wrong direction before heading to where he intended.
Door closed, and fluorescent light paining him, he’s almost too wound up to piss. The pride is starting to hit him now, along with everything else; Drace, he thinks. He steadies himself on a freezing tile wall, nearly knocks over a glass bottle perched near there, he knows not what of. Drace. This had been a long time in coming, he believes it, or tells himself he does-there was ration to it, planning, there is her pessary on the sink beside him, he recalls his boots paired neatly by the door, no spirits to loosen them, no broken clasps-
Still.
By the time he’s done, and frankly he’s struck by the heavier sound of her toilet, he can hear the kettle screeching through the walls. He washes his hands and his face, neck, shoulders-she’s marked him there, right where the collarbones fork, she had been beneath him then, hindered his taking of her arms, her heels to the back of his knees-and the soap he understands now, it makes her scent make sense, another component of her.
He cleans the rest of himself off, cursorily, with disposable towels, rather than mar hers without permission. That done, he shuts the light, the door, and scans the bedroom floor for his shorts. Either it is still too dark, or they are buried, and either way-
“It’s steeped three minutes already,” he hears her not-quite call. “What are you, primping?”
The laugh that escapes him is less uneasy than he expected it could be. “Attempting to be courteous,” he says.
“Well, dispense with it. This tea turns to swill if you let it get cold.”
A measure of the ache leaves his limbs, and he shuts himself out of the bedroom as well, and this time does start the wrong way to the kitchen. When he turns back, she is leaning in the doorframe, arms crossed under her hanging breasts, shaking her head bemusedly. “I thought that might happen,” she says, not quite smiling.
So did I, he thinks, and not about the same thing. “Smells good.”
“Sit,” she tells him, cocking a head toward her couch and chairs, and backs into the kitchen. There is already service set up, plain practical cups and a kettle just like the ones at convocations, on a trivet and coasters of solid black rubber. One of the cups is already dark with tea-she’s told him where to sit, it seems, and he takes it, only realizing after that it’s the armchair, not the couch-the other is empty.
She emerges from the kitchen with a packet in hand, as he is stirring a level spoon of sugar into his tea. For some reason, the sound of the paper tearing feels loud and unstable as she sits across from him, tipping the contents of the packet into her mug. “Cocoa,” she tells him, before he quite notices that he’s staring.
“Prepackaged?”
“It’s faster,” she tells him plain, pouring water over it, then adding a dollop of cream with her spoon. Her hair clings to her face, the nape of her neck, and he wonders how much is recent water, how much sweat.
He considers this, and sips the tea. It’s a bit too hot to start, but the spices barrel straight to his eyes, his neck.
They drink in silence, for a while, for long enough for him to notice that the lights aren’t on in here either, that all the greyness comes from thin-curtained windows in rooms with open doors. The slick hide of her armchair is tepid on his skin, which still feels swollen from her nails and her feet-he sees his work on her as well, firm tracks of nearly-blue where her neck joins her torso, along her right breast, at the muscle of her waist, her raw wrists not quite hidden by the teacup. She pries the spoon out and sets it on her saucer, dripping dark.
“You’ll not magick it off?” he asks, tea set aside, reaching across to her, not hesitant but reverent at the leftmost bruise.
Gods, but she’s warm. “I am still considering that,” she says, not chiding but not wistful, either.
He knows her meaning. He hates her meaning. “I will not,” he says firmly, and his fingers press deeper, until he feels the pulse clouded by blood, dry beneath her skin.
“To have this at all is luxury,” she sighs, sinking the steam of her drink. “To have it again, decadence outright.”
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