fic: Arrogare
Nov. 12th, 2009 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bonnefoisTitle: Arrogare
Series: FE8/Seima
Character/Pairing: Innes/Eirika
Word Count: 2184
Rating: R
A/N: The Gauntlet: 9) What is more arrogant than honesty? | Fairly PWP, post A support, with a non!incestuous Eirika for once! This is for Arroyo since their review was so sweet and they hoped I’d write this pairing. Awww, how could I resist? I actually started it almost immediately after the review, but things came up, and then I lost my porn inspiration and well, yeah. I hope I managed it well enough, for Eirika and Innes aren’t characters I write too often, and I generally ship them with other people.
The title comes from the Latin root word of arrogance, and means ‘claim for oneself’
--
He let another arrow fly loose to the target at the edge of camp. He’d nailed it to a tree, a thin thing bolstered by some scraggly brush around it. It was far from verdant, despite how close it was to the Darkling Woods it was. The Revenant had tainted the place, their rotting flesh tainting wherever it fell.
The arrow shot true, and hit the very middle. Bullseye. It echoed through the wood. Birds flew up from the bushes near him like black, like a cloud of insects. The crows were little more than oversized flies to him. Their incessant cawing was an annoyance, and their meat wasn’t even fit to eat.
The arrow hit the middle of the target, of course. Bullseye. Should he have wanted to, he could have taken down any of the birds. He hadn’t.
His fingers grew bloodied, and while it made the bowstring slippery, but he aimed every shot beyond the oceanic rush of pain. He was so wrapped within himself, he had not seen or heard her approach at first. It was that elegant, gentle voice that brought him out from the deadly nothingness of the calm.
“There could be beasts,” she said
Innes snorted, which summed up his unsaid opinion of such ‘beasts’ quite well.
“None have been spotted about here. Besides, I am not an unarmed man, nor a defenseless peasant.”
“They could swarm you.”
“A lesser man might have fear these beasts, but I do not. They are weaklings.”
“Ephraim said that you disappeared after the duel.”
There it was, left hanging in the air.
“Then by now you know the results. I have no right to claim you as mine, not as long as I remain defeated.”
Another shot. He attempted to focus only upon the target, ignoring the scent of nearness of her. The Arrow landed in the outer circle. Unacceptable. Especially in front of her
He stalked over to the target and wrenched it out, snapping the arrow in two. It fell to a pile of dead leaves, and he left it there, as if it had been the arrow’s fault and not his own mistake.
“I think you should leave,” he said, his voice even colder than usual.
“Not until I have had my say,” she said.
He didn’t look at her. “Suit yourself.”
“The challenge...What weapon did you choose?”
“Swords, as a way to even the battle. Spears would be to advantageous to him, bows too biased to me.”
“My brother taught me all I know of swords. He only uses a lance out of preference. I’m sure you’d have won if it had been a battle of archery – or arrogance.”
Archery was useless with her here. He would merely make a bigger fool of himself. He set himself to restringing his bow, despite it being just recently strung.
He needed something to keep his hands busy, he needed something to divert his attention.
“He is my brother, dear to me, but not the rival of this part of my heart. You should not be jealous of him any more than I should be jealous of Tana for holding your attention. I do not look to my brother for the mould of my husband, and it matters not to me if you’re better at sparring than him.”
“I made the terms of a deal and failed them. I have no right to claim you,” he said flatly. “That is all.”
Eirika shook her head in indignation. “Did you ever think to ask what I might want? That I might not wish to be considered a spoil of conquest? You’re acting childish.”
In a rush of anger, she pulled the bow from his hands, and forced him to look at her. If he hadn’t been surprised, he probably could have pulled it from her, but it was honestly a move he did not see coming.
Her anger melted away, as quickly as it came, and turned to concern when she saw the state of his hands. She held them up to the light. He’d rubbed the skin raw. The pain was a constant reminder of the failure, something almost pleasant in the way it brought him back to the ground and kept him focused.
“Your hands... You’ve worked yourself to this level... You’re going to get yourself killed at this rate if I don’t intervene,” she sighed.
“A few blisters are hardly life threatening,” Innes scoffed.
“I have no vulneraries after the last battle. Do you have any?” She said, ignoring his earlier comment.
“No. I gave mine to someone who actually needed them.”
She tore at her skirts and produced a long strip of cloth. He couldn’t bring himself to turn away from her, too hypnotized by her lovely curves and angles. There was an unstated grace to her, like water, shifting and quiet.
“Hold your hands like this,” she instructed.
He narrowed his eyes a brief moment before finally giving in to her request – or was it a command? She wrapped the makeshift bandage over him many times, rendering his hands useless for archery.
“You ran off before I could respond. As infuriating as you can be, the more I thought.....” she trailed off.
“Please, no more, Eirika. If you go on like this then I cannot hold myself back,” he said.
“And if I don’t want you to hold back...?” she said in soft whispers, fluttering across his skin.
“If I want you to go further?”
His voice caught in his throat. She was not coy, but honest. The question was told without guile of any kind.
“Then I could hardly refuse such an answer, even if I–”
She stopped him with a finger to his lips. “Shh. If you do not stop talking about my brother, I will have to assume that he is the one you are truly interested in.”
That shut him up entirely. Besides, the pressure of her finger on his lips was far too distracting. He parted his lips and kissed her fingertip, for fingers were extraordinarily sensitive. And her expression changed to one of slight shock at the feel of his tongue over the swirls and grooves of her skin.
Her lips were especially red, as if she had bit them, or arousal had come onto her, thick and heady to the point of dizziness. He wanted to touch her lips with his own fingers, to brush and feel them, but that was impossible in his current state. Thus, he covered her lips with his own. She kissed like a girl who had never been kissed, halting, clumsy and yet eager.
Likely, she hadn’t. With a brother like Ephraim, he’d have kept out any riff-raff who tried to seduce her, and she herself was guarded and reserved in the most ladylike of ways.
Her skin was beautiful. He buried his face against her neck, kissing, claiming, spoiling the exquisite skin with bruises to come later, bruises only he would know. He touched her lips, soft, pliant under his fingers. When he looked up, she was half-lidded in a state of repture. He loosed her breastplate and let it fall to the ground with a dull clank. Her gauntlets were next, and then her sheath and sword. She kicked off her tall boots, while he undid his belt.
When left with only her clothes, Innes took it carefully, as not to rip them. He wasn’t some lust-crazed country boy, he could control himself as a noble should. He pushed up her skirt, exposing her lace-edged underthings. Her breaths were uneven as he pulled them down, down down, her legs and then she stepped out and away from them. He undid her cloak and laid it on the ground while she undid the last of her garments.
She laid down upon the cloak slowly, all the while looking like a work of art. Everything about her was soft, and exquisite. He could just wait here, and watch her, but a slight shudder – from anticipation, nervousness, cold? – reawakened his resolve to finish the last of his clothes.
Her gaze was shy, yet it only took a kiss, a touch at her thigh to cast that shyness away, like an overly hot sweater she had found herself to need no longer. His hands explored her, every last inch. The curve of her breasts, now swelled with arousal, the nipples red and prominent. He kissed her in secret, unthought of places. Some of these places seemed nonsequitur at first. A knee, the side of her neck. Her right breast, the space between her breasts, the tip of each finger, her mouth.
He pushed her legs open and buried himself in her stomach, kissing down all the way. She moaned and shifted under him. She was slick, and he ran his fingers up and down her. Over her throbbing clit, to tease over her vagina without actually going inside her. She quivered, and gasped each time he touched her.
When her breaths were quite ragged, when it was slippery enough that he knew she was ready.
It would hurt. There was little he could do about that, but at the very least he could make whatever came after the hurt as pleasurable as possible. So much so as to erase the memory of any pain that happened beforehand.
“I...trust you,” she said. And it was such a sincere, beautiful statement. The usual lovers poetry, the sonnets and ballads were saccharine and trite compared to something so simple, and so true.
She pulled him close as he eased into her, so that as he felt her tense, and then ease.
The next cry that came from her wasn’t from pain.
He’d heard before from drunk nobles and soldiers alike that there’s nothing softer than a woman ready for ya amid the same kind of lewd laughter and alcohol tinged coughing.
It was not an exaggeration on their part, however. Moving inside her was breathtaking. Soft, warm, and so complete. Truly, here was a comfort that nothing but a woman could offer, and here, the sting of failure – especially failure to Ephriam of all people — fell away until there was only her. Her skin. Her pleasure. The flash of emotions in her eyes – love, pleasure, surprise, gentleness – all of which was caused by him, and aimed towards him.
There was a sensation of desperation as they moved faster, her around his back, holding tight to him, and a low moan at the back of her throat. Her cheeks, were flushed, as was the flesh of her breasts, her expression more tender than he had ever received from her, and that gaze which he wanted to capture, to win away and make solely his own was no focused only on him. He had no reason to believe that any other man was in her mind at this moment other than himself.
His only thought was Finally.
And then, fulfilment.
*
Afterwards, they did no go immediately back to camp, even with dark drawing ever nearer, and with it, a chill in the air, and the threat of the revenant looming in shadows nearby.
Still, he had no fears of dark, cold or the undead, and he wasn’t about to let any of them get in the way of basking in the afterglow. He would not have her guiltily pulling on her clothes like a scullery maid having as tryst between shifts.
“I look forward to taking you back to Frelia. I doubt that father will be surprised,” he said. “Tana will be excited. She will wish to help choose your rooms and all other sorts of aesthetic minded things.”
“But we will return from time to time, won’t we? Renais needs me as well as Frelia,” she said.
“We will visit Renais so often people will forget that I am Frelian. We will tire the bodyguards and horses from the constant trip there – at least every other day by my calculations.”
She laid her head against his chest and smiled.. “Thank you for being indulgent to me,” she said.
He traced over her cheek. “You are my weakness. Do not take undue advantage of this.”
“You know I wouldn’t do that,” she said, and tapped him playfully.
“Good,” he said. For nations would fall and cities would crumble if she ever did.
Series: FE8/Seima
Character/Pairing: Innes/Eirika
Word Count: 2184
Rating: R
A/N: The Gauntlet: 9) What is more arrogant than honesty? | Fairly PWP, post A support, with a non!incestuous Eirika for once! This is for Arroyo since their review was so sweet and they hoped I’d write this pairing. Awww, how could I resist? I actually started it almost immediately after the review, but things came up, and then I lost my porn inspiration and well, yeah. I hope I managed it well enough, for Eirika and Innes aren’t characters I write too often, and I generally ship them with other people.
The title comes from the Latin root word of arrogance, and means ‘claim for oneself’
--
He let another arrow fly loose to the target at the edge of camp. He’d nailed it to a tree, a thin thing bolstered by some scraggly brush around it. It was far from verdant, despite how close it was to the Darkling Woods it was. The Revenant had tainted the place, their rotting flesh tainting wherever it fell.
The arrow shot true, and hit the very middle. Bullseye. It echoed through the wood. Birds flew up from the bushes near him like black, like a cloud of insects. The crows were little more than oversized flies to him. Their incessant cawing was an annoyance, and their meat wasn’t even fit to eat.
The arrow hit the middle of the target, of course. Bullseye. Should he have wanted to, he could have taken down any of the birds. He hadn’t.
His fingers grew bloodied, and while it made the bowstring slippery, but he aimed every shot beyond the oceanic rush of pain. He was so wrapped within himself, he had not seen or heard her approach at first. It was that elegant, gentle voice that brought him out from the deadly nothingness of the calm.
“There could be beasts,” she said
Innes snorted, which summed up his unsaid opinion of such ‘beasts’ quite well.
“None have been spotted about here. Besides, I am not an unarmed man, nor a defenseless peasant.”
“They could swarm you.”
“A lesser man might have fear these beasts, but I do not. They are weaklings.”
“Ephraim said that you disappeared after the duel.”
There it was, left hanging in the air.
“Then by now you know the results. I have no right to claim you as mine, not as long as I remain defeated.”
Another shot. He attempted to focus only upon the target, ignoring the scent of nearness of her. The Arrow landed in the outer circle. Unacceptable. Especially in front of her
He stalked over to the target and wrenched it out, snapping the arrow in two. It fell to a pile of dead leaves, and he left it there, as if it had been the arrow’s fault and not his own mistake.
“I think you should leave,” he said, his voice even colder than usual.
“Not until I have had my say,” she said.
He didn’t look at her. “Suit yourself.”
“The challenge...What weapon did you choose?”
“Swords, as a way to even the battle. Spears would be to advantageous to him, bows too biased to me.”
“My brother taught me all I know of swords. He only uses a lance out of preference. I’m sure you’d have won if it had been a battle of archery – or arrogance.”
Archery was useless with her here. He would merely make a bigger fool of himself. He set himself to restringing his bow, despite it being just recently strung.
He needed something to keep his hands busy, he needed something to divert his attention.
“He is my brother, dear to me, but not the rival of this part of my heart. You should not be jealous of him any more than I should be jealous of Tana for holding your attention. I do not look to my brother for the mould of my husband, and it matters not to me if you’re better at sparring than him.”
“I made the terms of a deal and failed them. I have no right to claim you,” he said flatly. “That is all.”
Eirika shook her head in indignation. “Did you ever think to ask what I might want? That I might not wish to be considered a spoil of conquest? You’re acting childish.”
In a rush of anger, she pulled the bow from his hands, and forced him to look at her. If he hadn’t been surprised, he probably could have pulled it from her, but it was honestly a move he did not see coming.
Her anger melted away, as quickly as it came, and turned to concern when she saw the state of his hands. She held them up to the light. He’d rubbed the skin raw. The pain was a constant reminder of the failure, something almost pleasant in the way it brought him back to the ground and kept him focused.
“Your hands... You’ve worked yourself to this level... You’re going to get yourself killed at this rate if I don’t intervene,” she sighed.
“A few blisters are hardly life threatening,” Innes scoffed.
“I have no vulneraries after the last battle. Do you have any?” She said, ignoring his earlier comment.
“No. I gave mine to someone who actually needed them.”
She tore at her skirts and produced a long strip of cloth. He couldn’t bring himself to turn away from her, too hypnotized by her lovely curves and angles. There was an unstated grace to her, like water, shifting and quiet.
“Hold your hands like this,” she instructed.
He narrowed his eyes a brief moment before finally giving in to her request – or was it a command? She wrapped the makeshift bandage over him many times, rendering his hands useless for archery.
“You ran off before I could respond. As infuriating as you can be, the more I thought.....” she trailed off.
“Please, no more, Eirika. If you go on like this then I cannot hold myself back,” he said.
“And if I don’t want you to hold back...?” she said in soft whispers, fluttering across his skin.
“If I want you to go further?”
His voice caught in his throat. She was not coy, but honest. The question was told without guile of any kind.
“Then I could hardly refuse such an answer, even if I–”
She stopped him with a finger to his lips. “Shh. If you do not stop talking about my brother, I will have to assume that he is the one you are truly interested in.”
That shut him up entirely. Besides, the pressure of her finger on his lips was far too distracting. He parted his lips and kissed her fingertip, for fingers were extraordinarily sensitive. And her expression changed to one of slight shock at the feel of his tongue over the swirls and grooves of her skin.
Her lips were especially red, as if she had bit them, or arousal had come onto her, thick and heady to the point of dizziness. He wanted to touch her lips with his own fingers, to brush and feel them, but that was impossible in his current state. Thus, he covered her lips with his own. She kissed like a girl who had never been kissed, halting, clumsy and yet eager.
Likely, she hadn’t. With a brother like Ephraim, he’d have kept out any riff-raff who tried to seduce her, and she herself was guarded and reserved in the most ladylike of ways.
Her skin was beautiful. He buried his face against her neck, kissing, claiming, spoiling the exquisite skin with bruises to come later, bruises only he would know. He touched her lips, soft, pliant under his fingers. When he looked up, she was half-lidded in a state of repture. He loosed her breastplate and let it fall to the ground with a dull clank. Her gauntlets were next, and then her sheath and sword. She kicked off her tall boots, while he undid his belt.
When left with only her clothes, Innes took it carefully, as not to rip them. He wasn’t some lust-crazed country boy, he could control himself as a noble should. He pushed up her skirt, exposing her lace-edged underthings. Her breaths were uneven as he pulled them down, down down, her legs and then she stepped out and away from them. He undid her cloak and laid it on the ground while she undid the last of her garments.
She laid down upon the cloak slowly, all the while looking like a work of art. Everything about her was soft, and exquisite. He could just wait here, and watch her, but a slight shudder – from anticipation, nervousness, cold? – reawakened his resolve to finish the last of his clothes.
Her gaze was shy, yet it only took a kiss, a touch at her thigh to cast that shyness away, like an overly hot sweater she had found herself to need no longer. His hands explored her, every last inch. The curve of her breasts, now swelled with arousal, the nipples red and prominent. He kissed her in secret, unthought of places. Some of these places seemed nonsequitur at first. A knee, the side of her neck. Her right breast, the space between her breasts, the tip of each finger, her mouth.
He pushed her legs open and buried himself in her stomach, kissing down all the way. She moaned and shifted under him. She was slick, and he ran his fingers up and down her. Over her throbbing clit, to tease over her vagina without actually going inside her. She quivered, and gasped each time he touched her.
When her breaths were quite ragged, when it was slippery enough that he knew she was ready.
It would hurt. There was little he could do about that, but at the very least he could make whatever came after the hurt as pleasurable as possible. So much so as to erase the memory of any pain that happened beforehand.
“I...trust you,” she said. And it was such a sincere, beautiful statement. The usual lovers poetry, the sonnets and ballads were saccharine and trite compared to something so simple, and so true.
She pulled him close as he eased into her, so that as he felt her tense, and then ease.
The next cry that came from her wasn’t from pain.
He’d heard before from drunk nobles and soldiers alike that there’s nothing softer than a woman ready for ya amid the same kind of lewd laughter and alcohol tinged coughing.
It was not an exaggeration on their part, however. Moving inside her was breathtaking. Soft, warm, and so complete. Truly, here was a comfort that nothing but a woman could offer, and here, the sting of failure – especially failure to Ephriam of all people — fell away until there was only her. Her skin. Her pleasure. The flash of emotions in her eyes – love, pleasure, surprise, gentleness – all of which was caused by him, and aimed towards him.
There was a sensation of desperation as they moved faster, her around his back, holding tight to him, and a low moan at the back of her throat. Her cheeks, were flushed, as was the flesh of her breasts, her expression more tender than he had ever received from her, and that gaze which he wanted to capture, to win away and make solely his own was no focused only on him. He had no reason to believe that any other man was in her mind at this moment other than himself.
His only thought was Finally.
And then, fulfilment.
*
Afterwards, they did no go immediately back to camp, even with dark drawing ever nearer, and with it, a chill in the air, and the threat of the revenant looming in shadows nearby.
Still, he had no fears of dark, cold or the undead, and he wasn’t about to let any of them get in the way of basking in the afterglow. He would not have her guiltily pulling on her clothes like a scullery maid having as tryst between shifts.
“I look forward to taking you back to Frelia. I doubt that father will be surprised,” he said. “Tana will be excited. She will wish to help choose your rooms and all other sorts of aesthetic minded things.”
“But we will return from time to time, won’t we? Renais needs me as well as Frelia,” she said.
“We will visit Renais so often people will forget that I am Frelian. We will tire the bodyguards and horses from the constant trip there – at least every other day by my calculations.”
She laid her head against his chest and smiled.. “Thank you for being indulgent to me,” she said.
He traced over her cheek. “You are my weakness. Do not take undue advantage of this.”
“You know I wouldn’t do that,” she said, and tapped him playfully.
“Good,” he said. For nations would fall and cities would crumble if she ever did.
