Final Fantasy XII, Ashe/Basch
Title: Pause
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Characters: Ashe and Basch
Author/Artist: mithrigil
Rating: PG
Word count: 1000
Summary: The party has just reached the Phon coast - after its longest, most taxing trek on foot so far.
Pause
Mithrigil Galtirglin
Basch staggers, sighs, collapses face-first into the sand. It is scalding, bliss, where the salt water of the coast clings to him, where the sun stabs past it, where grains and gravel splay with his stubble and into his cheeks. His skin is taut there, that odd slick mix between salt-wet and dry.
-He’s smiling.
Not too far off, he can hear the hunters still arguing, all good-natured, about this play or that. The sport had been good, and the company unassuming, the hunters asking no questions but “will you play” and “you know the rules?”
So Basch and Vaan had stripped down and joined them-Balthier, citing errands, had not-and the shadows changed directions, the men played so long. The water was never still enough to hold a glare. The ball left thin wakes when it skidded from man to man. It had been years, Basch thinks, years since the field, since a corps of men on the Nebra who’d thrown down everything on the shore, for a game. Years.
And sighing into the sand, he realizes that this is the first time in months that he’s stopped moving.
The sun has begun to set, and his back is too rent to burn. Basch nestles deeper into the dune, the sand surrounding him as he lets every muscle slacken. Even his hands treat the sand as a bed, not a hold. He could sleep here, he decides, with the sea gentle over his ears, the sun unmarred and dark-warm, and nothing but the shore, safe.
It is not quite so-he curls his fists around some sand to think of that-to keep his back unprotected is still unwise-but he is tired, and his limbs are heavy, and his body wants things even his mind cannot ignore. So he lays there like a crab come in with the tide. It is what he needs to be feeling.
He wakes-how long has it been since he dared sleep on his belly?-to the slide of two knees through the sand beside him, and a delicate hand on his shoulder.
She asks him how the sun feels on his scars.
How fatigued is he, he has to wonder, thinking more of how he did not wake at her approach than of her hands on his skin. He does not respond, but she does not repeat, and her touch stutters through sweat and salt water, her breath reacting to that with a stammer of its own.
“May I?” she asks, and it is as if she is also in the past, young and curious, seeing a wound unbandaged and not shrinking from the sight. Her voice, even, trips on its own strange edge. She is jarred, this is plain, but not by him-
“My Lady,” he breathes, and starts to gather himself, “is something amiss?”
-But then she stays him, splays her palms firm on his back, and her hands are callused like a soldier’s, as slick with sweat as he is, and her knee is between his in the sand. The sounds of the coast and the hunters, the others, so distant, stifle and die and her fingers are as soft, wet, rough. “Nothing,” she assures him, and it is not a lie, but perhaps as untrue as it would be for any of them, to say that nothing is wrong, now. “I-Just rest,” she instructs instead of admitting, “please, Basch…”
He must protest, but the words catch in his throat with the heat, with the heels of her palms kneading low on his back where the scars taper off, and become merely sound. His cheek is caked with sand when he arches up into her touch, and the grains begin to grate on him, hiss into his ear. The scars have never felt this attention, have never known the caresses that the skin now absent did-and it has been longer since this, for Basch, longer even than games in the river.
Silenced, he lets the sun set on the other side of his eyelids, and feels, passive and warm and red.
The touch is dulled when her hands knead higher, but he can still feel fascination in them, hesitant glides that he nearly fills with hesitation of his own. Her knee braced between his thighs is still, her breath not quite even, and not quite near. Plainly, she is worried, she has spoken with someone, remembered something else, but if this is how she will be allayed, Basch will let it be so. There is no harm in this-
-She means him no grudge.
Knots in places deeper than his skin uncoil. His heart slows, and the sand grows hotter.
And it is steady, nigh-imperceptible, but soon he can feel her lips a well as her hands, a kiss to the back of his neck, a slow, heady thing that petrifies him. There had been little kisses when she was a girl, before Cure and betrothals, to his knuckles or his nose. This is something different, something like her hands.
A deeper protestation becomes a deeper sigh.
Her lips leave his neck, and leave it hotter still, flushed down to the serration of scars. He breathes, and her title is on it, turning his mouth from the sand. Her full weight is atop his back, the clasps of her shirt and belt smooth on the scars, and there is something not quite right in this, in the motion of her hands sliding to a stop. Her chin is on his bare shoulder. Once, he carried her like this. His arms stutter at the memory, lifting up out of the sand. Her greaves are sun-warmed even more than his skin.
The kiss she rests on his lips is wet, insistent as the tide, as unstoppable, as slow. He does not retreat from it.
‘Thank you,” she says, almost without leaving him. She does not say for what.
It has been as long for her, he guesses, since touch, since rest.
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