Please do a spoiled Princess Heir AU! where reader is supposed to pick a husband but cant choose between Reiner and Jean so reader chooses to be with both! I need both of them 😩
a: When I saw this request I literally screamed cause OMFG yes. also huge warning this involves some like, real FILTHY smut of getting smashed by BOTH OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME >:) (This is my dream btw) I hope u all enjoy this and huge ty to the person who suggested this :) <3 (sorry if you didn't want smut :O)
The first word you ever said was more. Not mama or papa. More. You had wanted a second spoonful of something sweet, and when the nursemaid withdrew the spoon you had looked at her with what your father later described, as an expression of royal outrage, and said it clearly enough that the entire room heard. More! They gave it to you, naturally. They always did.
You are twenty years old and heir to the Kingdom of Paradis, and you have never—not once in the entire span of your living memory—been told no by anyone who mattered. Your tutors gave you whatever subject you wanted to pursue, your ladies gave you whatever gossip you asked for, the cooks gave you your favourite things on the nights you told them to. The Commander of the Royal Guards gave you fencing lessons at thirteen when you decided, abruptly, that you were bored of embroidery.
Your father gave you everything else. This was the thing about your father: he is a good king and a better man, and he has loved you with a completeness that borders on the political problem. You are his only child, your mother having died when you were four, and what little you know of grief you learned from watching him carry it so quietly over the years that you only recognised it for what it was when you were old enough to have your own. Since then it has been the two of you, and he has looked at you—always, as though you contain something irreplaceable. As though the universe would go wrong without you in it. It is wonderful, but it is also, in certain practical respects, a disaster.
It means that when you want something, you get it; and when you don't want something, it goes away. When you are bored, there is a festival or an event. When you are restless, there is a journey to take. You are not a cruel person, and you do not use this power badly of course. But you have never had to practice patience with wanting, and you have never had to practice the particular grief of wanting something that is simply not available in its entirety.
Until now.
Your father tells you about the ball on a Wednesday afternoon, when you are in the garden with your two ladies-in-waiting, Sasha and Mikasa, when he finds you. Sasha is doing a fairly poor job of pretending to embroider while eating the small pastries she has smuggled out of the kitchen in her sleeve. Mikasa is actually embroidering, with the focused precision she brings to everything. You are reading, which is to say you have a book open in your lap and have been staring at the same page for twenty minutes, thinking about nothing in particular.
Your father sits in the empty chair as though he was always going to, and says quickly: "My darling, I am holding a ball."
You look up from your book. "Really? When?"
"This Saturday."
"That's three days away!"
"Yes—"
"The kitchen will be furious—"
"The kitchen has been informed already."
He has the look. The love-and-apology-and-good-intentions look. You have been fluent in it your entire life, and it tells you now that this is not a casual ball. "I’m doing this ball specially as I’ve invited two princes to our court, to stay with us at our castle. I'd like you to meet them in a setting that's—comfortable."
"Comfortable?" you repeat. "You mean where you can keep a close eye on me?"
"Just a ball," he says patiently. "Dancing, and music."
"And the two princes are—"
"Prince Reiner of Marley, and Prince Jean of Trost."
Sasha drops a pastry, then she picks it up and pretends she didn't. "I see," you mumble.
"You know what this is about, don't you?” Your father asks.
"I know what this is about."
"I'm not ordering you to marry them," he says, the way he always says it, the way that means: I am asking you with my whole heart, which is the thing that works. "I'm asking you to meet them. To actually try to get to know them to see if they’re…suitable."
You look at him— this man who has given you everything, who has never once looked at you as a burden or a problem, who carries your mother's absence in his face every day and never lets it make him small— and you think, not for the first time: the very least you owe him is an attempt at grace.
"All right, Father," you say.
He smiles. You feel the weight of it, warm and not entirely uncomplicated. Sasha waits until he has gone back inside before she says, with tremendous solemnity: "Two princes?"
“It seems so,” you mutter.
"At the same time?"
"Sasha!"
"I'm just saying," she says.
Mikasa, who has not looked up from her embroidery, says: "She'll manage."
You are not sure if this is a compliment.
Saturday arrives the way important things tend to—faster than you planned for and with entirely too much expectation attached to it. Mikasa does your hair for over an hour, taking her time. She never rushes anything that matters, and apparently your hair matters tonight, which you suspect is her private opinion on the importance of the evening made tangible through the large amount of pins and ribbon. She works in silence until the very end, when she meets your eyes in the mirror and says, simply: "Perfect."
"Thank you," you smile at her in the mirror. She nods once and steps back.
Sasha, stationed at the door in her formal gown gives you a thorough once-over and pronounces: "Very intimidating—in a good way! Like a very beautiful problem."
The ballroom has been transformed with the particular extravagance your father deploys when he means something by it. Three hundred candles, flowers banking every surface, and the full orchestra in the gallery, playing something warm and sweeping. The court in its finest colours, arranged in the usual formations of power and alliance and old grudge. You take it in from the landing at the top of the stairs the way you always take things in— fully and quickly, before anyone can watch you doing it.
Your father is on the floor below, near the central floor, and he is not alone. Two men flank him a slight distance away from him—not together but not quite apart, placed with the careful choreography of a man who thinks about these things.
You find who you assume is Reiner first, and he was not difficult to find. He is built like a fixed point—broad-shouldered and solid, dressed in Marley's colours of deep burgundy and silver, standing with the grounded stillness of a man who knows how to be in a room without being moved by it. His golden blonde hair close-cropped, and jaw set heavily. Handsome in that specific, slightly worn way of someone who has come through something and made their peace with what it cost. He is holding a glass of wine and not drinking it, and is looking at absolutely nothing in particular with the focused blankness of a man who is, in fact, watching everything.
Then he looks up, and finds you at the top of the stairs—not slowly and not by accident. As though he already knew where to look. He goes very still.
You find Jean second, because Jean is harder to find—not because he is less present, but because he is moving. He is making his way around the edge of the room with the easy, slightly restless energy of someone who thinks better while in motion, pausing occasionally to take in a painting or a detail of the architecture with what appears to be genuine, if mildly critical, assessment. He is lean and angular where Reiner is broad, ashy light brown hair doing largely whatever it wants, dressed in Trost's navy and pale silver with an ease that suggests he dressed well because he chose to rather than because protocol required it. He has a glass and is actually drinking, quite heavily. He turns and catches you at the top of the stairs. His expression does a thing very quickly. Something unguarded that is there and then very deliberately isn't.
You descend slowly. Your father makes the introductions with the warmth of a man who genuinely means it, and both men bow respectfully— Reiner with a precision that is formal without being stiff, and Jean with a slightly more individual tilt that manages to be correct while also being entirely his own.
"Prince Reiner," your father says. "Prince Jean, I’d like to introduce my daughter."
He doesn't say heir, or future queen. He just says daughter, the way he has always said it, like it is the thing that matters most, the title that means the most to him— and for a moment you love him so much it sits heavy in your chest.
"Your Highness." Reiner spoke first, his voice low and unhurried, hazel eyes meeting yours with the kind of steadiness that doesn't need to announce itself.
"Your Highness." Jean spoke next, a fraction quicker, like he couldn't quite wait his turn, and he caught himself.
"Gentlemen," you say, with the pleasant composure of someone who has attended three hundred events and never once looked uncertain at the top of a staircase. "Welcome to the capital."
The orchestra begins something new. Your father, with the elegant ruthlessness of a man who has staged this entire evening, excuses himself to speak to someone across the room who very obviously does not need speaking to, and leaves the three of you standing together in the warm golden light.
A pause. The specific pause of three people recalibrating. "The ballroom is extraordinary," Reiner says, and he says it the way he seems to say most things, not as a compliment deployed for effect, but as a plain observation that happens to be true.
"Yes, and they put this together with three days' notice," you say. "The kitchen nearly revolted when they heard."
"Worth the risk," he nods.
Jean, beside you, says: "The ceiling is impressive. I wish my hall looked like this but the proportions are off—but in here they got it just right." You look at him oddly. He looks back, steady. "What? I have opinions about architecture."
"Most people don't lead the conversations with them..." You almost giggle.
"Most people aren't being honest then."
Reiner, on your other side, makes no visible expression. But something in his posture has adjusted, fractionally, the way a person adjusts when they have taken a reading of the room and filed it away. You turn to him. "Do you like architecture, my prince?"
"I can't say I do," he says. "Sounds rather—" A beat, almost imperceptible. "Boring."
Jean looks at Reiner, and Reiner looks at Jean. It is not unfriendly, but it is also not entirely easy. It is the look of two people who have assessed each other and arrived at a complicated verdict. You watch them watching each other, and you think to yourself: oh. This is going to be interesting.
The evening moves the way good evenings do—fast enough to feel alive, slow enough to remember. Your father circulates, occasionally steering the right people into your orbit with the subtle precision of a man who has been doing this his entire reign.
You danced with a duke’s son first, which felt awkward and quite unsettling. Then once with Jean, which is— notable. Jean dances the way he does most things: with complete commitment and no performance. He is good at it, better than he probably lets on— and he keeps his hand at your waist with the correct formality and also with a quality of attention that makes the correct formality feel like a choice rather than a rule. He talks while he dances, which most people don't, but Jean is constitutionally incapable of silence when there is something to say.
"How many of these have you attended?" he asks. "Events like this."
"Since I was sixteen? Hundreds, probably."
"Do you like them?"
"Sometimes." You consider. "When the music is good and the company is bearable and I'm not being watched too closely."
"You're being watched very closely tonight."
"I know."
"Does it bother you?"
"It depends," you say carefully. "On who's watching me."
He looks at you. Something moves in his expression, very quick and careful— and then the corner of his mouth shifts, just slightly. "That's a very interesting answer."
"I'm an interesting person."
"So am I," he says. "We'll see how that goes, shall we?"
The music ends. He steps back and bows with that same individual tilt, and you find yourself watching his hand release your waist and thinking about the particular warmth of it, and how you missed it already. You do not share this thought with anyone.
You do not dance with Reiner surprisingly, and this is not entirely accidental.
You find him instead, late in the evening, at the edge of the terrace doors, standing apart from the crowd with the glass of wine he has been incrementally not-drinking all night. He doesn't look up when you approach, but he knew you were coming. "The duchess isn't happy," you say, coming to stand beside him, nodding toward the far end of the room. "She's been trying to get your attention for forty minutes."
"I know," he says. "I've been trying not to look at her."
"Why?"
"She has a son she'd like placed on the Marleyan council." He says it without inflection. "I'd rather not have that conversation tonight."
You consider him for a moment. The firelight from inside makes the angles of his face look older than they are, or perhaps just more honest. "You came a long way," you admit, "for a ball."
"I came a long way," he says, "to meet you." No decoration on it, no careful framing. Just the thing.
You look at the room rather than at him. "And?"
A pause. Long enough that you think he is actually considering his answer rather than reaching for a flattering one. "And," he says, "I think the journey was worth it."
You look at him then. He is already looking at you, with those dark hazel eyes that hold more than his face tends to give away, and there is something in them that is quiet and certain and slightly too much. "Don't do that," you smile.
"Don't what?"
"Look at me like that when we've only just met."
Something moves in his expression, not embarrassment, exactly. More like: caught, and still choosing to hold it. "Sorry," he shrugs.
"You're not."
The almost-smile appeared, barely there. "No," he agrees. "I'm not."
You look back at the ballroom as your pulse is doing something unhelpful. You are twenty years old and heir to the Kingdom of Paradis and you have never in your life been looked at quite like that, and you are not going to let it show. You are not going to let it show.
You find Mikasa at eleven o'clock, as the ball begins its long slow unwinding, near the column by the east wall where she always stations herself at events—close enough to reach, far enough to observe. "Well?" you ask her quietly.
She looks at you for a moment with those careful eyes. "The Marleyan prince, Reiner," she says, "hasn't stopped tracking your position in the room all evening. Even when he was talking to someone else, he was still watching you."
"And Jean?"
"Prince Jean," she says, "watched you dance with the duke's son like someone who was about to explode any minute."
You are quiet for a moment, deep in thought. "And you're not going to tell me which one to pick?" You sigh.
"It's not my choice."
"No." You look out at the room. "But you have an opinion that matters to me."
"I always have an opinion," Mikasa says. "But I'm not sharing it yet."
"Why not?"
"Because you haven't spent enough time with either of them." A pause. "Yet." The word lands with weight, and you let it.
The ball ends, however the problem does not.
You walk in the royal gardens every morning, which Reiner discovers on the second day after the ball while staying at your castle— not, you suspect, by accident, but because Reiner seems like the kind of man who finds out the things he wants to know quietly and without fuss. He is simply there, on the Tuesday, at the start of the rose walk, in plain clothes rather than formal dress, looking at the red roses with the expression of a man who is waiting for something and intends to do so correctly.
"You seem to have learned your way round fast," you say when you get closer to him.
"One of your ladies told me you take this route most days in the garden."
"Did she now,” you sigh, knowing already who it would've been.
"Is that all right?" You consider him for a moment, this broad, quiet, carefully composed man in the cold morning light— and think that anyone else who turned up uninvited in your garden would irritate you, and that this is not, for reasons you intend to examine later, irritating you.
"You may as well walk with me," you tell him.
He falls into step beside you without ceremony. He is quiet in the way that people are only quiet when they are comfortable— not suppressing something, just content to let the morning be what it is. "You don't need to fill the silence with small talk," you observe, after a while.
"Neither do you."
"Most people do with me. They think I expect conversation from them."
"Do you?"
"Sometimes." You turn at the end of the path, along the outer wall where the espaliered pear trees stand bare against the stone. "When I have something to say, I'd rather say it than perform around it for their sake."
He thinks about this. "I know what you mean." Something in the way he says it makes you look at him. There's the edge of something old in his voice— not sadness, exactly, but the texture of a man who has spent years saying things he didn't entirely mean, wearing faces that weren't his, and has grown very tired of it.
"Marley," you say, carefully. "Is it much different from Paradis?"
A pause. Not evasive— considered. "Parts of it," he says. "Parts of it are……difficult to live in.” He looks at the pear trees. "Sorry, I don't talk about it much."
"You don't have to."
"I know." He glances at you, briefly. "I noticed you didn't push about it either."
"Pushing tells you what people already know. Waiting tells you what they trust you with."
Reiner is quiet for a moment. And then, quietly, he says: "That's a good way to put it."
You walk the rest of the path without speaking. When you reach the gate back to the palace, he stops. "Same time tomorrow?" he asks. Just that.
You look at him. His expression is careful. Hopeful in the specific way of a man who will accept no for an answer and would prefer not to.
"Tomorrow," you agree. He nods once, and goes. You watch him cross the courtyard and think about the particular way he looked at the pear trees.
Jean finds you in the library on the Wednesday. Not the third-floor one small one— the main library, which is large and cold and has north-facing windows. You are at the long table with the trade documents you have been meaning to review for a week, and he appears in the doorway with a book under his arm and an expression that says he is prepared to pretend this is a coincidence if you would like him to.
"You're not even going to pretend this is a coincidence?" you half smile.
"I heard you were in the library." He crosses to the table, uninvited, and sits—not beside you, but across, which is both respectful and somehow more direct. "I have questions about the northern trade routes. One of your ladies said you were the person to ask."
"Did she now?"
"She mentioned you were here. I inferred the rest." He opens his book— it is, you note, a volume of Paradis geography, which means he has been doing his reading— and sets it on the table between you. "The northeastern pass. Does it actually close in winter or is that an exaggeration?"
You look at him for a long moment. He looks back, patient, waiting.
"It closes," you say, "for approximately six weeks in deep winter. The exaggeration is for tariff purposes and has been since my grandfather's time."
"I knew it." Not triumphantm just satisfied. He pulls the map toward him. "So the Marleyan route through the southern valley is actually faster for winter goods—which means the current levy structure is—"
"Wrong," you interupted. "I know. I've been arguing about it for two years with the council. They don't like being told the levy structure is wrong."
"It is, though."
"Obviously."
He stares at you for a moment. Then he leans forward, forearms on the table, and says: "Show me where the error is. I want to see if it's the same place I think it is."
It is the same place. You spend two hours at the table with the maps spread between you, and Jean argues with you about three things and concedes two of them and is absolutely correct about the third, and at one point you are both leaning over the same section of map and his shoulder is three inches from yours and neither of you mentions it. When the light goes you sit back and realise you have entirely forgotten to be formal.
"You're good at this," Jean says simply.
"You don't sound surprised?"
"I'm not surprised," he says, with a directness that lands differently than flattery would. "I'm— I don't know. It's easier than what I expected talking to you."
"What did you expect?"
He considers this with genuine honesty. "More of a performance," he says. "More distance between us. The kind people use when they're not sure if you're safe."
"And now?"
"Now," he says, "I think you've been waiting for someone to just—talk to you. Normally."
The accuracy of this sits in the room between you. "That's perceptive."
"I know."
"And it's slightly annoying."
He smiles then— a real one, wide and briefly unguarded, and it changes his face entirely. "I've been told," he says.
The days layer themselves into a pattern. Reiner in the mornings, your garden, the two of you walking in a quiet that grows more comfortable by degrees. Jean in the afternoons, the library or the council chamber or wherever you happen to be, talking until the light goes. Evenings at the formal dinners where both men are present and you sit between them and feel like a compass between two different norths, the particular problem of caring in two directions at once.
They are civil to each other. Almost excessively civil— the specific civility of two people who are aware that the other is also there and have decided, independently and apparently simultaneously, to be fair about it. Reiner speaks to Jean with measured courtesy. Jean speaks to Reiner with the directness he uses for most things, which is the version of courtesy he actually does. They do not ignore each other, and most of the time they do not compete visibly.
But there are moments. Reiner's jaw tightening almost imperceptibly when you laugh at something Jean has said. Jean's posture shifting fractionally when Reiner appears at your shoulder at the evening reception. Just the small things. The things you see when you are looking, and you are always looking. You are in, you understand, a great deal of trouble.
It is Sasha who makes you say it out loud.
You are in your sitting room on a Thursday evening, having come from dinner feeling slightly undone in a way you cannot attribute to the food, which was perfectly good. Mikasa is by the window doing something with silk thread and focused attention. Sasha is on the window seat with her legs tucked under her and a plate of small cakes balanced on her knee, and she is watching you with the particular expression she wears when she has decided to say something and is choosing her moment. You are pretending to read, but you have been on the same page for a while now.
"Soo," Sasha says.
"No." You say.
"I haven't said anything!"
"You were about to."
"I was going to ask if you wanted a cake." She holds out the plate. "Do you want a cake?"
"No."
"You should eat something. I bet you hardly ate your dinner."
"Sasha—"
"It was because of the Marleyan prince sitting next to you, wasn't it," she says, with the guileless accuracy that is either her greatest gift or the thing that will one day get her reassigned to the outer provinces. "Or the Trost one. Or both!"
Silence, and Mikasa sets down her embroidery.
"I like both of them," you say quietly.
The words sit in the room. You have not said it out loud before, and it is substantially worse out loud than it was in your head. Sasha puts down the cake she was raising to her mouth. This is the most alarmed you have ever seen her. "Both?" she repeats.
"Both," you say again, because apparently you are committed.
"At the same time?"
"It's the same time, yes. That's how time works."
"I mean—you like them both at the same time? Simultaneously."
"Sasha, I understood your question."
She picks the cake back up, stares at it, puts it down again. "I don't know what to do with this information."
"Neither do I," you huff. "That's the problem. I want both of them."
Mikasa, who has been watching you with those dark, careful eyes since the moment you said it, says: "How long?"
"Since the ball."
"You've known for two weeks," Mikasa says, not as an accusation, just as the thing she is taking in, "and you didn't say anything."
"I was hoping it would resolve itself, you know? And I’d like one more than the other…"
Mikasa's expression says, very quietly, that she does not know what she expected. "Tell me," she says instead. The same voice she uses when you are upset and she is not going to make it worse. "Why both of them?"
So you tell them in great detail. You tell them about the garden and the way Reiner waits at the turn of the rose walk and the specific quality of his silence and the weight of the words you share together. You tell them about the library and Jean leaning over the trade maps and the moment you forgot to be formal. You tell them about the evenings, the compass-between-two-norths feeling, the moments of tightening jaw and shifted posture that you have been cataloguing for a fortnight.
You tell them all of it, which you have not done with another person in a very long time, and the sitting room is quiet and warm and both of your ladies are listening without interrupting, which is its own kind of gift. When you stop, Sasha says: "That's a lot."
"Yes."
"And you actually—are you sure you don't like one more than the other?"
You think about Reiner in the morning sun of the gardens, and then you think about Jean's face when he smiled properly, how it changed everything. "No," you say. "And even if I did, it's in a way that will not make the decision easy."
Sasha picks up her cake and eats it in one thoughtful bite. Then she says: "What are you going to do?"
"I don't know yet."
"Are you going to talk to your father?"
"Eventually."
"Because he's going to want you to choose."
"I know."
"And you can't have both."
"Sasha," Mikasa says.
"She knows that," Sasha says. "I'm not being mean. I'm just—" She looks at you, and her voice goes softer. "It's not fair, is it?"
"No," you say. "It really isn't."
Mikasa reaches across and puts her hand briefly on yours. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. The warmth of it says: I know. I'm here. I have always been here. You sit with your ladies in the warm sitting room, and outside the night is cold and somewhere in this castle two princes are sleeping in guest chambers that are nowhere near each other, and you have never wanted something you couldn't have, and you are still trying to figure out how.
The next morning you decided it was time to be straight with yourself, and speak to the both of them– together. You write the letters to them, asking them to meet you in the east drawing room at seven in the evening, sharp. Mikasa offers to write it and you wave her off, but not unkindly. Some things need to be your handwriting, with your weight behind them. Sasha brings you tea and then removes herself to the far corner of the room with tactful quiet, which is possibly the most disciplined thing you have ever seen her do. The letters are hand dropped off by Mikasa— and when she returns you sit back in your chair and let out a long breath and Sasha, from the corner, says quietly: "Do you want a cake now?"
"Yes," you say.
She brings you one. It is rather excellent. "Are you scared?" she asks.
"No," you say, and then, more honestly: "Maybe a little."
"What are you scared of?"
You think about it. The real answer, not the careful one. "I'm scared that they'll look at each other and look at me and one of them will decide it's not worth it."
Sasha is quiet for a moment. Then: "I don't think either of them is going to decide that."
"You don't know that."
"No." She tucks her feet under her on the chair. "But I've watched them both for a while. And neither of them looks at you like you're something that can be walked away from."
The east drawing room is the most private room in the castle that is not a bedroom. This is, you realise, as you stand in it at ten to seven waiting for the sound of footsteps in the corridor, possibly a choice that reveals something about your state of mind. It is a small room— smaller than most receiving rooms, which is why it is rarely used for anything official. Two low sofas facing each other across a dark wood table and two armchairs. A fireplace wide enough to heat and light the space properly. The tall windows look out onto the east garden, which is blue-grey and silent in the evening, the bare trees like ink lines against the last of the light.
You have had the fire built high. You have had wine brought and then second-guessed the wine and then decided the wine is fine, it is not a strange thing to have wine, you are a princess receiving guests in a private drawing room, this is entirely normal. Nothing about this is entirely normal.
You are wearing a dark, emerald green silk dress, the one with the low neckline, and your hair is down, falling in waves around you. You made this choice deliberately and you have not interrogated it. Mikasa is not in the room, which was your instruction. She stood outside your door when you gave it, looked at you for a long, searching moment, and then nodded once and said: "I'll be at the end of the corridor." Close enough, as always. You stand by the fireplace and watch the door and listen to the castle settle around you.
At seven o'clock precisely, there are footsteps in the corridor. Then a knock.
"Come in," you say.
They come in together, which is surprising, you had not imagined them arriving together, you had pictured one and then the other— but they have apparently encountered each other in the corridor and made the wordless decision that arriving separately would be more awkward than arriving at the same time. This tells you something about both of them, and you file it away alongside everything else you have collected.
Reiner fills the doorway the way he always fills spaces— wide-shouldered, solid, with that grounded stillness. He is dressed simply tonight, and there is something in the set of his jaw that tells you he has been sitting with your letter since yesterday evening and has arrived at some kind of decision about it, though what kind you cannot yet tell.
Jean is just behind his left shoulder, and his expression is the one he wears when he is being honest rather than composed— eyes a little too sharp, jaw a little too set, the careful neutrality not quite covering the thing underneath it. He sees you by the fireplace and something moves in his face that he controls quickly and not quite quickly enough.
"Close the door," you say steadily.
Jean closes it, and the three of you are alone in the small, firelit room.
You do not invite them to sit. You stay where you are by the fireplace, and they stand—not quite together, not quite apart, a foot of space between them that is doing a great deal of work, and you look at both of them for a moment before you speak. "Thank you for coming," you say. "Both of you."
Neither of them says you're welcome. Reiner watches you with those steady hazel eyes. Jean has his arms folded, not defensively— just the way he stands when he is paying close attention and wants his hands occupied. "I asked you here because I owe you both honesty," you begin. "And because what I have to say is the kind of thing that should be said in person and not in a letter—" you pause briefly.
"We're here now," Jean says quietly. Not impatient— just: it's all right, continue.
You look at the fire for a moment. Then at them. "I have fallen for both of you," you say. "And I want to be clear about that from the start, because I think the rest of this conversation makes more sense if you know that first. Not one more than the other. Not one as a choice and one as a runner-up. Both of you. Equally. In ways that are different from each other and that don't— cancel out, or resolve into a preference, no matter how many times I've tried to make them."
The room is very quiet. The fire shifts slightly beside you. Reiner has not moved. His expression has not changed. But something in his eyes has—the careful neutral quality gone, something more open underneath, more present. Jean has unfolded his arms, his hands are at his sides now and he is looking at you with an expression you have not seen from him before: not sharp, not composed. Just waiting.
"I know that's not a simple thing to say to two people at the same time," you continue. "I know it's—an uncomfortable thing to be in the room with. I know what the world expects me to do, and what my father needs me to do, and what both of your kingdoms are waiting for. I know all of that." You pause. "I'm telling you anyway, because you both deserve to know the thing that is actually true, rather than a version of it that's easier to manage."
"How long?" Reiner asks. His voice is very low.
"Since the ball."
He absorbs this. "The whole time? Both of us?"
"The whole time. Both of you."
Jean makes a sound that is not quite a laugh— too short and involuntary. "And you've been— what—walking in the garden with him every morning and arguing about trade routes with me every afternoon and—"
"Yes," you say quickly, interrupting him.
He looks at the ceiling briefly, then back at you. "All right," he says. Not angry, just— processing. Jean processes out loud, you have learned, it is simply what he does. "All right. So……what happens now?"
"I don't know," you say. "That's why you're both here. I don't think I can decide this by myself. I don't think it would be right to."
Reiner has been watching Jean speak with that careful, quiet attention he brings to everything. He looks at you now. "You said you've tried to make it resolve," he says. "Into a preference."
"Yes."
"And it won’t?”
"No."
A pause. "What does it feel like?" he asks. And the way he asks it, so carefully, like he has chosen the question with intention— tells you he is not asking to be difficult. He is asking because he actually wants to know. Because he is the kind of man who would rather have the whole true thing than the comfortable half of it. You look at him. "It feels," you say slowly, "like wanting two different kinds of warmth at the same time, because you find both so comforting in different ways. And I know that sounds—"
"No," he says softly. "I understand that." Jean is watching Reiner now, and his expression has shifted again— something more complicated, more reluctant. The expression of a man who did not come into this room expecting to understand his competition and is finding, inconveniently, that he does.
The fire pops. Outside the windows the garden is fully dark now.
You have said what you wanted to, and now all three of you are standing in it. "So," Jean says finally, in the voice he uses when he has decided to just say the thing. "What do you want? Right now. Not politically or long-term." His dark eyes find yours. "What do you actually want?"
The question lands in the centre of the room and sits there. You look at Jean, then at Reiner. You feel the fire warm at your back and the weight of the whole situation and the fact that you have never, in your entire life, been asked so directly what you want by two people who actually intend to listen to the answer.
"I want," you say, and your voice is very steady, "to kiss you both right now."
Silence. "Not at the same time," you add. "Separately. And I want—" you pause, because this is the part that is harder to say and that you are going to say anyway because you have started and you are not a person who leaves things half-said "—But I want the other one to be in the room when I do, because I'm not going to pretend, to either of you, that I don't want one more than the other."
The silence is different now. Jean's jaw is tight, but his eyes are very bright. He is looking at you like you have said something that has rearranged several of his interior furniture pieces and he is still taking stock of the new arrangement.
Reiner has gone very still, the particular stillness of a man who is holding something carefully because he is afraid of what he will do if he puts it down. "That's—" Jean starts.
"Unusual," Reiner finishes.
"Yes," you say. "I know, and you can say no–"
"You want us both to—" Jean starts. "You want to kiss him while I watch, and then kiss me while he watches."
"Yes….."
"And this is your solution?"
"This is what I want right now," you say. "I told you I didn't have a long term solution."
Jean looks at Reiner and Reiner looks at Jean. Something passes between them— not words, not warmth exactly, but the specific communication of two people who are realising they are in the same impossible situation and have arrived, independently, at the same impossible answer. Reiner looks back at you. "All right," he says.
You turn to Reiner.
He has not moved since he had stepped into the room. He is standing exactly where he was, close enough that you are suddenly aware of how much space he takes up. His eyes are on your face and they have been on your face and there is nothing in them now of the careful blankness he usually keeps there, nothing of the controlled neutral that he wears in public. Looking at you the way he has probably been looking at you since the ball and trying, until this moment, not to let you see it. You close the distance, and you have to tilt your chin up as he is significantly taller than you, and broader—and when you stop in front of him you are close enough to feel the warmth coming off him and to see the way his breath has changed, the slight deepening of it, the deliberate steadiness of a man who is keeping himself very controlled because he does not yet have permission to stop. You reach up and put your hand against his jaw.
He closes his eyes. Just for a second, just the space of a breath— and in that second his whole face does the thing it never does in public: it lets go. You rise up on your toes and kiss him. He is still for the first half-second, holding himself back with what must be an effort—and then his hand comes up and finds the side of your face, gentle but certain, the way he does everything, and he kisses you back with a restraint that is somehow more devastating than force would be. The kind of kiss that is not trying to take anything but is giving something, offering something, his thumb tracing along your cheekbone as though he is trying to memorise the shape of it. You pull back, very slowly. The air between you is warmer than it was.
Reiner keeps his hand at your face for a moment longer, his thumb still. His eyes are dark and his breath is not quite even and he is looking at you with an expression that has no name in any language you speak. You move away from Reiner and look at Jean to find he is already looking at you. He was looking at you the whole time—you knew he was, you could feel it— but seeing him now is different. His arm is still crossed over his chest, his hand still gripping his own wrist, and his knuckles have gone white. His jaw is tight. His eyes are so bright, the brightness of a man who has watched something he wanted very much and has held himself perfectly still for the duration and is now at the very outer edge of what still looks like composure. Jean crosses the room, stopping in front of you and he is so close— closer than formal, closer than proper, close enough that you have to look up to find his face and what's on it is nothing like composure. He is trying to be controlled. You can see the effort of it in the set of his jaw and the way his hands are at his sides rather than reaching. He is trying, and he is not quite managing. You reach up and take some of his shirt in your hand. You don't pull, just hold, just anchor him— and you feel him go very still at the contact, his breath catching in a way he doesn't try to hide.
He then kisses you roughly, and his hands come up to cup your face. He kisses you like he's been arguing for it in his head since the ball and has finally, finally been ruled in favour of, and you gasp a little against his mouth because the difference— the difference from Reiner, who was so careful, so deliberate—is startling and then it isn't.
His thumbs are at your cheekbones and you have fistfuls of his shirt. He kisses you with a thoroughness that is somehow deeply characteristic— the same thoroughness he brings to trade route arguments and architectural opinions and every other thing he has decided is worth his full attention— and you feel it everywhere, the warmth of it, the pressure of his hands holding your face like he has thought about this and is doing it right.
You pulled back, just enough to break the seal of your mouths and to drag a much-needed breath into your burning lungs. Your chest heaved, the tight lacing of your corset suddenly feeling like a cruel restraint. Your gaze met his, and you saw the same fire reflected in his dark eyes. He looked utterly undone, his lips swollen and wet, his cheeks flushed with a high, hectic colour. The low cut front of your silk gown had started to slip forward to expose the generous swell of your breasts and the delicate, intricate lace trim of your corset. Jean’s eyes dropped immediately, his gaze devouring the sight of your exposed skin— and you watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard, his throat working with a nervous, hungry click. He was a prince, a man trained from birth in poise and control, but right now, he looked like a starving man presented with a feast.
A wicked, utterly intoxicating thought bloomed in your mind, a thought so audacious it made you dizzy. Why should you have to settle for one? You were a princess, the heir to the throne. You had never been told ‘no’ in your entire life, and you had no intention of starting now, despite what your father had said to you about choosing one. The world was yours for the taking— and tonight, these two princes were part of that world. Reiner was standing near the fireplace now. one hand braced on the mantelpiece. He hadn’t moved a muscle since you had started to kiss Jean, his body frozen, but his eyes were fixed on the both of you. His expression was a fascinating, volatile mixture of shock, raw, unadulterated hunger, and a deep, simmering jealousy that was almost palpable. He had seen everything.
“Reiner,” you called out, your voice a husky, breathy command that cut through the thick silence of the room. “Come back.”
Jean’s head snapped up at your words, a flicker of confusion and something that looked suspiciously like betrayal crossing his features. But you kept your eyes locked on Reiner— your gaze a challenge, an invitation, a royal summons he dared not refuse to the princess. For a long moment, he didn’t move— he simply stared at you, his chest rising and falling with each deep, controlled breath. Then, with a deliberation that was thrilling, he walked back to you. He wasn’t walking towards a princess; he was walking towards the devil.
When Reiner reached you, you didn’t give him a moment to think or hesitate. You reached out, your fingers tangling in the stiff, high collar of his shirt, and you pulled him down to you. You crushed your mouth against his, a kiss that was all fire and impatience this time. It was a kiss of a man who had been watching you and Jean, and wanting. His hands, hesitant for only a second, found your hips, his fingers digging into the soft flesh through the thin silk of your gown, pulling you flush against him. You could feel the hard, rigid length of his cock pressing against your stomach, a testament to his desire of just kissing you.
A low, guttural sound ripped from Jean’s throat, a sound of pure, primal frustration. His hands tightened on your shoulders, a possessive grip that was both a protest and an acknowledgment of the new reality of the situation. You broke the kiss with Reiner, a thin strand of saliva connecting your lips for a fleeting moment, but you didn’t let him go— you simply turned your head, your body still pressed against Reiner’s, and captured Jean’s lips again. The contrast was dizzying and intoxicating; Jean’s kiss was forceful, possessive, a battle for dominance, while Reiner’s was exploratory, eager, a desperate plea for more. You were the axis they both spun around, the center of their universe.
You moved between them, turning your head from one to the other, alternating kisses, your hands tangling in Jean’s long hair round his neck and then Reiner’s pale golden strands. You pulled them closer, until you were sandwiched between their hard, muscular bodies. Reiner’s hands slid from your hips to the curve of your ass, squeezing hard, possessively, as he ground his erection against you. Jean’s fingers moved from your shoulders to your neck, his thumb stroking your pulse point as he tilted your head to deepen his kiss, to stake his claim when it was his turn. The air in the room grew thick, heavy, almost liquid with desire— the strong scent of their colognes, your perfume and the musky, primal scent of raw arousal that was coming from all three of you was mixing into the air. Your body sang under their touch, a symphony of sensation, heat pooling between your legs, a wet, slick warmth. Your nipples hardened into tight, sensitive points, pressing almost painfully against the restrictive lace of your corset and silk.
“Please,” Reiner breathed against your lips when you turned to him again, his voice ragged, broken with desperation. “L-let me taste you, please.”
His words, so direct, but so utterly perfect, sent a bolt of pure electricity straight through you. You pulled back slightly, your head spinning, your body thrumming with a need so fierce it was almost painful. You looked between them. Both men were flushed, their breathing ragged, their eyes dark and fathomless pools of pure need. The power you held over them in this moment was a potent, intoxicating drug, better than any wine, richer than any jewel. You, a princess, had two powerful princes utterly at your mercy right now.
“What do you want, Reiner?” you asked, your voice a low teasing purr, though you already knew. You just wanted to hear him say it.
He didn’t hesitate. He dropped to his knees before you, the fabric of his trousers whispering against the expensive rug. His hands moved immediately to the hem of your gown, his fingers trembling with anticipation as they brushed against your ankles. “I want to eat your cunt,” he said, his voice a raw, rough growl that was more of a confession than a request. “I want to bury my face in your pussy and make you cum until you can’t stand. I want to taste you, all of you.”
Jean made a strangled sound, a mix of shock and grudging approval. His hands moved from your shoulders to cup your breasts through the thin silk of your dress and corset, his thumbs immediately finding and brushing over your hardened nipples through the fabric. “He’s not wrong,” Jean murmured, his lips hot against the shell of your ear. His breath was warm, sending a shiver down your spine, his hair tickling your neck. “I bet you taste like fucking heaven.”
Your knees felt weak, your legs threatening to give out from under you— you leaned back against Jean for support, your head resting on his strong shoulder, trusting him to hold you up. Reiner, still on his knees in front of you, pushed your dress up your legs, his touch reverent, almost worshipful. His fingers traced the lines of your stockings, the delicate seam running up the back of your thigh. The feel of his warm hands on your bare skin above the stockings was exquisite torture.
“No one has ever said no to you, have they, Your Highness?” Jean asked, his voice a low, dark chuckle against your ear. His words were a statement, not a question, a recognition of the power you wielded so effortlessly. “You just take what you want….so used to daddy saying yes to you…”
You shook your head which was a small, breathless motion. You couldn’t form words, not when Reiner’s fingers were so close, so torturously close to where you needed them most and Jean was slowly fondling you. He looked up at you, his hazel eyes dark with a desperate, pleading hunger. He was waiting for your permission, for your command. “Don’t you dare stop now, Reiner,” you managed to say, your voice a husky command.
Reiner let out a groan of pure relief, a sound that vibrated through you as his fingers pulled down your undergarment, pulling them slowly and torturously, his eyes never leaving yours. The fabric whispered down your legs, a slow, teasing caress, until it pooled around your ankles. You stepped out of it, kicking the scrap of linen aside without a second thought. You were naked below for them, exposed and vulnerable, yet you had never felt more powerful.
Jean’s hands moved from your breasts to your shoulders to your back, his fingers working at the tiny buttons that held your silk gown in place. He pushed the dress down your arms, and the cool, heavy silk slid over your skin, whispering as it went, to pool in a soft heap around your hips. He made quick work of your corset, his fingers surprisingly deft as they worked the complicated lacing. With a final tug, the constricting garment came loose, and you took a deep, freeing breath. The cool air of the room hit your bare breasts, making your nipples pucker even more.
You stood between them now, completely naked and your dress a bunched-up ring of silk around your hips. Reiner’s hands explored your thighs, his touch a mixture of reverence and hunger as he mapped every inch of your skin, every dip and curve. Jean’s lips moved along the column of your neck, his teeth grazing your pulse point, a sharp, possessive bite that made you gasp. “Fuck, you’re beautiful,” Reiner breathed, his voice thick with awe. His fingers parted your slick folds, his touch gentle but sure. He circled your clit with his thumb, using your own wetness to make the glide smooth and easy— and the direct contact made you cry out, a sharp, high-pitched sound of pure pleasure. “So wet already.”
Jean chuckled against your neck, the sound a low, arrogant rumble. “I bet she’s been dripping like this since I kissed her,” he murmured, his hands moving to your now-freed breasts, cupping their heavy weight. His thumbs brushed over your nipples— sending jolts of pleasure straight to your clit. “These perfect fucking tits.”
Reiner leaned forward, his hot wet tongue replacing his thumb. The first touch against your sensitive, swollen clit was so intense it made your entire body jerk— your knees buckling, but Jean’s strong arms wrapped around your waist, holding you up, holding you steady for Reiner. Reiner’s tongue was a masterpiece of sin, hot and wet and impossibly talented. He explored every ridge and fold of your pussy, his movements slow and deliberate at first— learning you, tasting you. He found your clit and sucked it into his mouth, his tongue working the hard little nub in tight, relentless circles. The suction was exquisite, a pulling, aching pleasure that made you cry out again, your hands flying to his hair, your fingers tangling in the thick, golden strands.
“Jean,” you gasped, your head falling back against his shoulder. He kept one hand remained on your breast, kneading the soft flesh, pinching and rolling your nipple between his fingers, while the other slid down your stomach, his fingers tangling with yours in Reiner’s hair. He used his grip on your hand in Reiner’s hair to guide his movements, to press his face harder against your dripping cunt, to direct that talented tongue exactly where you wanted it.
Reiner increased his efforts, his tongue fucking your tight entrance, thrusting in and out in a lewd, wet rhythm, while his nose rubbed relentlessly against your clit. The dual sensations were overwhelming, a perfect storm of pleasure— and Jean’s demanding hands on your breasts and in Reiner’s hair, and Reiner’s sinful mouth on your pussy. It was too much and not enough all at once. Your hips began to move of their own accord, a slow, grinding rhythm against Reiner’s face. You were fucking his mouth, using his tongue for your pleasure, and the thought was so depraved, so perfect, that it made you moan. He moaned against you in response, the vibrations adding another layer of intense, indescribable pleasure that shot through you like lightning. Jean’s teeth found your earlobe, biting down gently, a sharp, possessive sting.
“You like that, don’t you?” he murmured, his voice a low, husky whisper that was pure filth. “Having two men worship you like this….one eating your pretty little cunt while the other plays with your tits.” You could only nod, your head thrashing against his shoulder, your mind going blank with pleasure. Reiner added a finger, then two, his thick digits stretching your tight hole open as his tongue continued its relentless assault on your clit. He curled his fingers inside you, finding that spongy, sensitive spot deep within, the spot that made your toes curl and your vision white out.
“Right there,” you gasped, your hands tightening in his hair, your knuckles white. “Fuck— right there. Don’t you dare stop–” Reiner responded with a renewed, almost frantic vigor. His fingers pumped faster, harder, their crooked tips hitting your g-spot with every thrust, while his tongue flicked your clit in a rapid, maddening rhythm. Jean’s hands became more demanding, more punishing. He pinched your nipples hard, rolling the sensitive buds between his rough fingers, sending sharp stabs of pain-pleasure straight to your core. The mix of sensations was pushing you higher and higher, closer to the edge of a precipice you had never before dared to approach.
Your orgasm built, a deep, low hum of pleasure starting in your stomach and spreading outward through your veins. It grew and grew, a tidal wave of sensation, until it was a roaring, unstoppable force. Reiner seemed to sense it, his movements becoming even more precise, more targeted— as he sucked your clit hard into his mouth, his tongue working it in tight, merciless circles while his fingers pressed insistently against your g-spot. “Fuck!” you cried out, your back arching, your body going rigid. “Fuck, I’m cu–”
The wave crashed over you before you could finish, an orgasm so intense it was almost violent. It ripped through you, stealing your breath and your sanity as your thighs shook uncontrollably, your pussy clamping down like a vise on Reiner’s fingers. He didn’t stop, not for a second. He drank from you, his tongue lapping at your cum, his fingers continuing their relentless assault, drawing out your orgasm until you were a sobbing, writhing mess, begging for mercy, for reprieve. When you finally came down, your body limp and spent, Reiner pulled back. His face was glistening, shining with your juices, from his chin to his forehead. He looked up at you, his eyes dark with a deep, primal satisfaction. Jean’s arms tightened around you, his body a solid, warm wall of muscle holding you upright as your legs trembled and threatened to give out completely.
“Stand up, Reiner,” Jean commanded, his voice rough with a desire that was now painfully obvious.
Reiner rose to his feet, his lips swollen and red from his efforts. He looked magnificent, his shirt disheveled, his hair a mess, his eyes burning with a dark fire. You turned in Jean’s arms, your hands moving to the complicated buttons of his shirt. You wanted to see him, to feel his skin against yours. He watched you, his eyes heavy-lidded with need, his chest rising and falling with each ragged breath as you made quick work of his shirt, your fingers clumsy with a desperate urgency. You ripped the last few buttons open, and his shirt joined your dress on the floor, revealing a muscular chest dusted with a trail of hair that led down to the waistband of his trousers. You ran your hands over his skin, feeling the hard ripple of muscle beneath the warm, slightly rough texture— he was so strong, so solid.
Reiner moved behind you, his hands on your hips as he began to press soft, open-mouthed kisses along your shoulders and the back of your neck. His touch was gentler than Jean’s, but no less hungry, no less possessive. You pushed Jean’s trousers down his legs, your breath catching in your throat when his cock sprang free, slapping slightly against his hard stomach— he was thick and long, the head already leaking a steady stream of sticky precum. The sight of him, hard and ready for you, made your own pussy throb with a renewed, insistent need.
You wrapped your hand around him, your fingers barely meeting as you stroked his hot, velvety length. He hissed, his head falling back, his throat working as he fought for control— you could feel the frantic, racing pulse of his heartbeat through the thick vein on the underside of his cock. “Y-your mouth,” he said, his voice strained, tight with a need that was bordering on pain. “I want your mouth on my cock…please...”
You sank down on the plush rug, the movement graceful and deliberate and looked up at him, a small, wicked smile playing on your lips. Reiner followed you down, kneeling behind you, his hands resting on your shoulders, his presence a warm, solid weight at your back. You leaned forward, your tongue darting out to taste the drop of precum beading at the slit of Jean’s cock. He tasted a little salty, and a flavor that was uniquely him— and you took the head of his cock into your mouth, your lips stretching to accommodate his impressive girth.
You took him deeper, inch by thick inch, your tongue swirling around the shaft, tracing the veins, exploring every ridge and bump. Jean’s hands tangled in your hair, his grip tightening as he began to guide your movements, setting a slow, deep rhythm. You relaxed your throat, taking him as deep as you could, until your nose was pressed against the coarse hair at his base and you were gagging, your eyes watering— the sound was wet, messy, and utterly depraved.
You moaned around his cock, the vibrations making him curse, a stream of low, guttural profanity. Reiner’s hands moved from your shoulders to your breasts, his fingers finding your nipples again. He pinched them, rolling the sensitive buds between his fingers, the sharp stabs of pleasure making your pussy clench around nothing. The dual sensations, Jean’s cock filling your mouth and Reiner’s hands on your tits, were almost too much to bear.
Jean began to thrust, his hips snapping forward, fucking your mouth in slow, deep, powerful strokes. He was using you, taking his pleasure, and the thought made you so wet you could feel it dripping onto the rug. You took it, welcoming the slight burn, the stretch of your jaw, the taste of him— and his movements became faster, more erratic as his need grew, his control fraying.
“Fuck, your mouth feels so good,” he gasped, his fingers tightening in your hair, holding you in place. “So fucking good.”
Reiner’s hands left your breasts, moving down your back in a slow, teasing caress. His fingers traced the curve of your ass, dipping into the crease between your legs. teasing your tighthole. You wiggled back against his touch, a silent invitation, wanting more, wanting everything.
“Reiner,” Jean said, his voice strained, his thrusts becoming shallow and quick. “Fuck her. I want to watch you fuck her while she sucks my cock.”
Reiner moved behind you, his hands on your hips to steady you and lift them up slightly. You felt the blunt, thick head of his cock nudging against your dripping entrance from behind— and he was even bigger than Jean, a thick, heavy piece of flesh that promised both pleasure and a delicious, stretching pain.
“Are you ready for me?” he asked, his voice a rough low growl. You nodded, your mouth still full of Jean’s throbbing dick. You couldn’t speak, but your body screamed its consent. Reiner pushed upward into you slowly, so slowly, stretching you open inch by agonizing inch. The burn was intense, a sharp, aching pleasure as your tight pussy adjusted to his massive size— you’d never felt so full, so completely and utterly possessed by a man.
He bottomed out with a deep, guttural groan, his heavy balls slapping against your clit. You paused for a moment, your body trembling, adjusting to his size, to the feeling of being so incredibly full— then, you began to move. The three of you found a rhythm, a primal, perfect beat— Jean thrusting into your mouth and Reiner pounding into you, your body caught between them, a vessel for their pleasure and your own. Each of Reiner’s powerful thrusts behind you pushed you further onto Jean’s cock, creating a delicious, friction-filled slide that had you seeing stars. Reiner’s movements were smooth and deep, hitting spots inside you you never knew existed, each thrust was a deliberate and devastating blow against your g-spot. Jean’s hands tightened in your hair, his movements becoming more erratic, his control finally shattering.
“Fuck, I’m– close,” he warned, his voice a strained, desperate gasp. “Where do you want it, Princess?”
You pulled back slightly, letting his cock fall from your mouth with a wet pop. You looked up at him, your lips swollen and wet. “In my mouth,” you said, your voice a husky, breathy command. “I want to taste you.”
That was all it took. Jean’s body tensed, his muscles locking as his cock pulsed in your hand, and then he came, thick, hot ropes of cum shooting into your open mouth, across your lips and your chin. You swallowed eagerly, savoring the taste, the feeling of him marking you— some of his release escaped, dripping down your chin in pearly white streams. Reiner continued to thrust, his movements becoming faster, more desperate as he chased his own release, his gaze now fixed on the sight of your face covered in Jean’s cum as you turned round to look at him.
Jean’s stumbled back toward the armchair, collapsing into it with a satisfied sigh. His cock glistened in the firelight, semi-hard and spent for the moment. "Please don’t stop on my account," he said, his voice thick with contentment. "Put on a show for me."
You turned your full attention to Reiner again at Jean’s words, pushing back against him, meeting his powerful thrusts with equal force. “Harder,” you demanded, your voice a raw, needy cry. “Fuck me harder–”
Reiner responded with a renewed, almost brutal vigor— his hands tightening on your hips, his fingers digging into your flesh hard enough to leave bruises. He slammed into you, the sound of skin slapping against wet, sweaty skin filling the room, a lewd, percussive rhythm. Each punishing thrust pushed you closer to another earth-shattering orgasm. Jean watched from the chair, his hand lazily stroking his semi-hard cock, a look of deep satisfaction on his face. “That’s it,” he encouraged, his voice a low, dark purr.
Reiner reached around, his fingers finding your swollen, sensitive clit as he rubbed tight, fast circles, matching the relentless rhythm of his thrusts. The added stimulation was the final, perfect push— your second orgasm built fast, a freight train of pleasure. When it hit, it was even more intense than the first, a full-body convulsion that made you almost scream, your pussy clamping down around Reiner’s thick cock like a silken vise. Reiner followed you over the edge a moment later, his cock pulsing deep inside you as he filled you with his hot, thick release. He collapsed against your back, his body heavy and sweaty, both of you breathing heavily, trying to catch your breath in the thick, sex-laden air.
After a long moment, Jean stirred, rising from the armchair. His cock was already hard again, a testament to his youthful vigor and the sheer depravity of the scene. “My turn,” he said, his voice already thick with renewed, predatory desire. You moved to lie back on the rug, spreading your legs invitingly as you smirked at him. Jean knelt between your thighs, his eyes dark with lust as he looked at your cum-filled pussy. He entered you in one smooth thrust, making you gasp at the sudden fullness— he wasn’t as thick as Reiner, but he was just as long, and he knew how to use every inch. "Wrap your legs around me," he commanded, and you complied eagerly.
He began to move, his strokes deep and measured. Unlike Reiner's powerful thrusts, Jean's movements were more controlled, each one designed to maximize pleasure between both of you. You wrapped your arms around his neck, grabbing onto his hair and pulling him down for a passionate kiss. The taste of his cum was still on your tongue as your lips met— and the kiss was deep and hungry, full of unspoken need. Jean's tongue explored your mouth as his cock explored your pussy, a perfect parallel of desire.
Reiner moved to kneel beside you, his hand wrapping around his recovering cock as he reached for your breast with his free hand, his fingers finding your sensitive nipple. "Don't mind me," he said, beginning to stroke himself in time with Jean's thrusts. "Just enjoying the view."
You turned your head to capture Reiner's lips in another kiss, tasting remnants of yourself on his tongue— and the three of you moved together in a tangle of limbs and desire, Jean's cock filling you while Reiner's hand worked your breast and his own erection.
Jean increased his pace, his movements becoming more urgent. "You feel so good," he murmured against your lips. "So fucking good–"
You arched your back, meeting his thrusts with equal force. Reiner's fingers tightened on your nipple, the slight pain mixing with pleasure to create an intoxicating sensation.
"Jean," you gasped, breaking the kiss to look into his eyes. "Don't stop—"
He responded with increased vigor, his hips snapping against yours with enough force to make your body slide across the rug, and Reiner's hand moved faster on his cock, his eyes fixed on where Jean's cock disappeared into your body. The room was filled with the sounds of sex—Jean's grunts, your moans, Reiner's harsh breathing, the wet slap of skin against skin. The firelight cast everything in a warm, golden glow, making the scene almost surreal in its intensity. Jean's movements became erratic, his control fraying as he approached his release. "I'm close," he warned, his voice strained. "Fuck, I'm so close."
You wrapped your legs tighter around his waist, pulling him deeper. "Cum in me," you demanded roughly.
Reiner groaned beside you, his hand flying over his cock. "Yes," he agreed. The dual encouragement sent Jean over the edge, and he buried himself deep inside you with a final, powerful thrust, his cock pulsing as he filled you with his hot release— and Reiner came at the same time, his cum spurting across your stomach and breasts in hot, white streams. The three of you collapsed together in a sweaty, satisfied heap, breathing heavily in the aftermath.
Jean rolled off you, his body limp with satisfaction as Reiner stretched out on your other side, his arm draped across your waist. The rug was damp beneath you, stained with cum and sweat, but you couldn't bring yourself to care. "That was..." Jean started, but seemed unable to find the words.
"Incredible," Reiner finished for him, then he asked, "What are you going to tell your father?"
"I suppose," you say softly, "I'll have to tell him I'm going to marry you both." They both look at you as you giggle. “Don’t worry. He can't say no to me.”
Your Reiner fics are so good! I need more Reiner love! Could you write a canon season 4 Reiner reunion with reader? Like before he and Bert revealed themselves, he and the reader were in love. Of course she felt betrayed, but forgave him over the years they were separated. He thought about her everyday while gone and he’s sooooo desperate and needs to have her back in his life and in his bed (take what you will with the desperate and needy parts, you’re a great spicy writer ;))
ask and you SHALL RECEIVE!! I hope u all enjoy this and big ty to the person who suggested this :) <3
The world was slowly ending somewhere to the west. You can't see it from here—the makeshift camp is tucked behind a ridge, fires kept low—but you could feel it. A tremor in the ground every few hours, faint and rhythmic, like a pulse. Connie said earlier that the horizon had a glow to it, and no one had argued with him, because no one wanted to be the person who looked.
The camp was tense, loaded with silence, everyone doing the careful, deliberate work of not looking at the people they weren't sure how to look at yet. It had the quality of a held breath. Mikasa was sat near you, sharpening her blades with the focused stillness of someone who'd decided that feelings were a problem for after. Jean and Connie had drifted toward each other the way they always did when things were bad—gravitationally, without discussion.
You looked over at Annie sat alone and looked at no one, which was simply her natural state, And Armin hovering close by her of course. And Reiner—
You'd known where Reiner was since the moment you arrived. That was the problem.
You'd been barely fourteen when you first understood that you were in trouble, when you had started training to join to Survey Corps. It wasn't a dramatic realisation. It crept up on you the way most true things did— sideways, in a quiet moment, when you weren't defending against it. You'd been sitting beside Reiner, who’d you known at this point for just over a year—after a brutal training session, both of you too tired to talk, and he'd tilted his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, and in the last light coming through the barracks window he'd looked so…handsome, that something in your chest had turned over quietly and said: oh. It's him. He used to look for you first always, in a crowd, in the mess hall, at the start of drills— his eyes would find you before he'd registered he was doing it, and when they did, something in his expression would settle. Like he'd been slightly disoriented until that moment.
You used to pretend not to notice. But you always noticed. The first time he kissed you was the night you’d joined the Scouts, it was raining and you were both soaked through and he'd pulled back afterward with this expression— stunned, almost— like he hadn't entirely meant to do it and wasn't even a little bit sorry. You'd laughed, and he'd smiled, and that was that. The simplest thing. You'd thought, later, that you should have known then it was far from a simple thing. He was gone soon after that, and didn’t even say goodbye.
Not gone like dead, at first. Gone like disappeared. Gone like, there one day, and then the breach in Wall Maria happened, and you had been stationed somewhere away from him, and when the dust settled, Reiner Braun was one of the few people you couldn't find.
Then the truth came out a few hours later though. What he was, and what he'd done. You remembered going very still when you heard it, the way the world had gone quiet and strange around the edges. People were angry around you, furious and betrayed— and you'd felt all of that too, eventually. But the first thing, the very first thing before the anger arrived, was this: Oh. He's alive. He's ok.
You'd hated yourself for that for a long time.
You hadn't spoken to him since the coalition between you all formed a few hours ago. Not for lack of opportunity. He'd tried multiple times— you'd seen him try, had watched him across fires and briefings and shared silences, watched him take a breath and start toward you and then stop when you gave him a death stare. He was giving you the choice of it. Which was almost worse, because it would have been easier if he'd just cornered you, given you something concrete to be angry at, instead of this quiet patient waiting that made your chest ache in ways you didn't know what to do with.
You were angry. Four years of grief had transmuted into something complicated and layered and it wasn't clean fury anymore, it had other things mixed into it, softer things, more shameful things— but the anger was still there underneath all of it, still real and burning. The problem was that so was everything else.
"He keeps looking at you." Jean pointed out, materialising beside you with the subtlety of a cavalry charge.
"I'm aware," you mumble.
"Like—" He seems to search for the word. "A lot. It's pissing me off now—"
"Jean."
"I'm just saying." He sits down beside you, shoulders your arm lightly. "You okay?"
You look at the low fire in front of you, at the ridge beyond the camp where the sky is a shade too dark on the western side, too uniform, like something big has eaten the stars. "I…..I don't know," you say, which is the most honest answer you have.
Jean nods but doesn't push it. One of his better qualities.
Across the camp, you feel, or rather than see Reiner's gaze. You've been feeling it for three hours.
He finds you a few feet away from the camp. You'd stepped away from the group to breathe for five minutes, just to be somewhere away from the sound of planning and Connie's forced cheerfulness and the distant subsonic wrongness of the rumbling. You'd sat down on a rock at the far end of the camp's perimeter and stared at the dark and tried to empty out your head.
You hear him before you see him, his footsteps were still heavy and uneven as he walked. "I know it's you," you call out without turning around.
A pause, then: "Okay."
He comes to stand a few feet away. Not beside you, far enough that it's a question, not an assumption. You can see him in your peripheral vision, his large frame still, hands loose at his sides. He's in the wrong uniform, you thought. He's always going to be in the wrong uniform now, and that knowledge sits in your sternum like a stone. "You've been avoiding me," he says quietly.
"Yes."
"Since we got here—"
"Also yes,” you interrupted.
He exhales slowly. "I'm not going to pretend that doesn't—" He stops himself, deciding to start differently. "Can we talk?"
"Apparently we already are."
"Properly." The word comes out with more weight than he probably meant. "Please."
You close your eyes for a moment and take a breath. Somewhere to the west, the world is being unmade one city at a time, and tomorrow you'll ride toward it with this impossible coalition and you might not come back from that, and you are sitting here trying to protect yourself from a conversation you've been running from for not only three hours, but four years.
"Fine," you say eventually. "Sit down."
He does, sitting down but leaving a careful distance between you. You notice. For a moment neither of you says anything and the silence is dense with everything that doesn't have words yet.
"I practiced this," he says finally. "What I was going to say to you. When I—if I ever saw you again. I had a whole speech planned—" He let out a short, humourless sound. "But now, I don't know where to start," he admits.
"Four years ago would've been a good place," you snap lightly.
Something crosses his face. "Yeah." He exhales. "I'm sorry." He says it plainly, no ornamentation. "I know that doesn't fix anything. I know it's not even close. But I need to say it first because everything else I want to say can't come before that."
You don't respond. He keeps going. "When I was young, I was stupid enough to think I could hold all of it at once—I used to think I could keep things separate. The mission, and then everything else—then you." He pauses. "That was never true. I don't think I was ever actually capable of keeping it separate. I just told myself I was."
"I had to listen to people call you a monster." The words come out before you could decide what to say. "I thought you were dead," you tell him quietly. "Before the truth came out. I had hours of thinking you were just…. gone. Dead in the chaos. I was already—" The word sticks. "I was already grieving."
Reiner's eyes close briefly, like he's absorbing a blow. "And then I found out you weren't dead. You were alive!" You laugh loudly, and it comes out wrong—short and hollow. "You were alive and you were the Armoured Titan! You were the thing that broke the wall and caused the destruction in the first place! You were—" Your voice hardens. "You were the reason half the people I'd trained with were dead."
He doesn't flinch. He takes it. "I remember thinking—" You stop, releasing you'd never said this out loud. Not to anyone. "I remember thinking it would've been easier if you had died." You look at your hands. "At least then I could've just….grieved you cleanly. Keep the version of you I knew and bury it and move on." You exhale. "Instead I had to keep fighting. Four years of being told you were the enemy, of looking across the sea and knowing you were on the other side, and trying to—" You stop.
"Trying to what?" he asks, the same way he asked before. Barely a whisper.
"Trying to make myself believe it." The admission costs something. "That you were just the enemy. That's all you were. That everything before was…..nothing, just strategy. A means to an end." You finally look at him. "I almost got there, a few times. I'd almost convinced myself."
"What stopped you?"
The answer sits in your chest, heavy and humiliating and much older than four years. "I'd think about you waiting in the mess hall for me in the mornings. Before drills. Every single time." You press your lips together. "Nobody made you do that. It wasn't useful to anyone or your mission. It was just—you. And I couldn't make it into anything other than what it was."
His jaw is tight. "That's what made it worse," you say. "When I finally stopped trying to hate you and just felt what was actually there." You hate how raw your voice sounds. "It would've been so much cleaner to just hate you. Four years of hating you would've been fine. Instead I had to figure out that I still—"
"Still what?" The words are barely sound as he speaks.
You shake your head, and he lets it go for now. He opens his mouth. "I thought about you every day." He says it like a confession, like something extracted from somewhere private and painful. "I know you have no reason to care about that and it doesn't earn me anything. But I need you to know it because it's the truest thing I can tell you and I've been carrying it for four years." His hands, you notice, are clasped together, pressed hard.
"Every day I would wake up and see your face. Your voice— I used to try to remember the exact sound of it and there were days I couldn't get it right and that—" His breath comes out uneven. "That was one of the worst things. Losing the details about you. Like the clearer everything got in Marley, the more I felt the details of you going blurry, and I couldn't—" He stops, collecting himself. You look at him in the dim light, at the years on him now, the new weight of him, the stubble gracing his face you'd grown to like over the past few minutes of being so close to him. He's looking at you with an expression made of nothing but honesty, no armour left, everything stripped back— and it's almost hard to look at directly.
"Why are you telling me this?" you ask him directly, but not unkindly.
"Because I might not get another chance." He says it simply, no drama. "Tomorrow we go towards something we might not come back from. And I've been running through this for longer than four years….and I don't want to die having not said it." He looks at you steadily. "You don't have to do anything with it. You don't owe me anything. I just need to say it."
"Then say it."
He's quiet for a moment. When he speaks, it's deliberate, slow, like every word is something he's chosen carefully. "I love you." Not loved. Not past tense. "I never stopped since the day I met you. Not for a single day of the last four years, not during any of it. I know that doesn't make anything simpler. I know it might make it worse. But it's true and it's been true for a long time and I—I can't sit in front of you and not say it. I can't. Not tonight."
The words settle over you like something heavy and warm and unbearable. You don't speak because your throat has gone tight in a way that makes speaking feel impossible. "You don't have to say anything back," he says quietly. "I mean it. I'm not asking you for—"
"Stop." Your voice comes out fractured. Just slightly, but he stops. He looks at you under the pale moonlight and he is so painfully, terribly good-looking now— not asking for anything, just waiting— and the four years of grief and anger and quiet three am forgiveness before the end of the world collide in your chest all at once, and the thing you've been holding back all night finally breaks. You close the distance between you quickly.
The kiss wasn't soft, not at first—it landed with all four years behind it, with the grief and the fury and the relief, with everything you couldn't say to him before he left and everything you swallowed in those months of being alone. He makes a sound low in his throat—surprised, then not, then something past surprise— and his hands come up to hold you like you're something he's been afraid to reach for, and he kisses you back with an urgency that makes it clear he's been carrying this just as long. His hand finds the back of your neck. The other presses flat against your back, pulling you closer, and you let him, you let yourself be pulled in because there is nowhere else to be right now, no better answer to any of this than here, here, right here.
"I've missed you," he whispered against your mouth, the words barely audible. "Every fucking day."
Your hands slid up his chest, feeling the hard muscle beneath his shirt. The steady beat of his heart thundered against your palms, and you felt the adrenaline rush through you. "Then show me," you murmured, the request hanging between you like a promise.
Reiner's mouth was crashing against yours again, all the years dissolving in that desperate kiss. His lips were chapped from the cold, his tongue pushing past your teeth with a hunger that bordered on violent. You met his intensity with your own, fingers tangling in his blonde hair as you pulled him closer. The taste of him, something uniquely Reiner that you'd almost forgotten— and had missed so dearly— flooded your senses.
The tree bark pressed into your back when he maneuvered you against it, his body caging yours against the rough surface. One of his thighs pushed between your legs, the pressure making you gasp into his mouth. His hands roamed your back, mapping the curves he hadn't touched in four long years, each movement conveying a desperate need that matched your own. You could feel his erection pressing against your stomach, thick and hard even through all the layers of clothing.
"I want to see you," he panted against your lips, his fingers already working at the buttons of your jacket. "All of you…please..."
Your own hands fumbled with his jacket, the fabric fighting against your trembling fingers. The cold air hit your skin as he finally pushed your jacket open, his palms flattening against your stomach through your shirt. His touch was electric, each point of contact sending jolts of desire straight to your core. Your pussy was already dripping, soaking through your underwear from just the thought of what was goimg to happen.
"Patience," you teased, even though your body screamed for more. You were willing to make him work for it. "We have all night."
Reiner's response was a low growl, his hands gripping your hips with bruising force. "Four years I’ve been waiting, and you're telling me to be patient?" His fingers dug into your flesh, the pain mixing with pleasure until you couldn't distinguish one from the other. "I've thought about this moment more times than I can count."
The raw confession made your knees weak. You sagged against the tree, trusting his brute strength to hold you up. "What exactly have you thought about?" Your voice was breathy, thin with arousal.
A dark flush spread across Reiner's cheeks. His hands moved to the hem of your shirt, fingers tracing the edge before slowly, torturously, sliding beneath. The rough calluses on his palms scraped against your sensitive skin as he explored your stomach, your sides, the curve of your waist. "Everything," he admitted, his voice thick with need. "I've thought about undressing you piece by piece, about learning every curve, every scar. About tasting you until you're screaming my name."
The crude words made your pussy clench with need. You wanted him—wanted all of him, right here against this tree where anyone from the camp could stumble upon you. You wanted him despite the years of anger, the years of hatred— all of it fizzled out now you had him here, in front of you. It all combined to make you dizzy with lust.
"Then stop thinking and start doing," you challenged, your hands finding his trousers. Reiner's breath hitched as your fingers brushed against his growing erection. Instead of rushing, though, he surprised you by slowing down. His hands withdrew from under your shirt, moving to the first button with deliberate care. Each button opened revealed another inch of skin to the cool night air, his mouth following the path with hot, open-mouthed kisses. He was taking his time, savouring every moment as if he believed you might disappear if he rushed.
Your head fell back against the tree, your fingers tightening in his hair. "Reiner," you moaned, his name a prayer on your lips.
"Shhh," he murmured against your stomach. "Let me take my time…please. Let me show you how much I've fucking missed you."
The words sent shivers down your spine. As if you were something sacred rather than someone about to be fucked against a tree in the middle of the woods— but the reverence in his touch made you believe it. His hands continued their slow exploration, pushing your shirt open until it hung from your shoulders. The cold air pebbled your nipples, and Reiner's gaze fixed on them with an intensity that made them ache.
"So beautiful," he breathed, before lowering his head to take one nipple into his mouth through the thin fabric of your bra. The lace provided just enough friction to drive you wild, his tongue swirling patterns that had you grinding against his thigh.
"More," you demanded, your voice barely recognisable. "I need more, Reiner! Please."
Reiner chuckled against your breast, the vibration making your toes curl. "Paitence. We have all night.” He smirked, repeating your words from earlier, but his hands moved to your back, expertly unhooking your bra with a flick of his fingers. The lace joined your shirt on the forest floor, leaving your upper body completely exposed to his hungry gaze. His hands cupped your breasts, testing their weight, his thumbs brushing against your nipples with feather-light touches that contrasted sharply with the roughness of his palms. "Perfect," he murmured, before lowering his head again.
This time there was no fabric between his mouth and your skin. His tongue circled your nipple, the wet heat of it making you cry out. He sucked gently at first, then harder, his teeth grazing the sensitive peak. Your hips bucked against his thigh, seeking friction you couldn't find. You were so turned on it hurt, your pussy throbbing with empty need. "Please," you whimpered, your hands tugging at his hair. "Reiner, please. I need you to touch me…."
He lifted his head, his hazel eyes dark with desire. "Where?" His voice was rough, desperate and pleading. "Tell me what you want–"
"Touch my pussy," you gasped. " I want your fingers inside me. I want you to make me come so hard I scream."
A slow smile spread across his face. His hands left your breasts, trailing down your stomach with maddening slowness. Each touch left trails of fire on your skin, your body arching to follow his movement. His fingers paused at the waistband of your trousers his gaze meeting yours in silent question. The moonlight filtered through the trees, casting shadows across his face that made him look almost dangerous.
"Keep going," you breathed, your hands covering his and pressing them lower. "Don't you dare stop now."
Reiner's fingers worked at your button, each metal button popping open with excruciating deliberation. The trousers pooled around your ankles, leaving you in nothing but your soaked panties. The cold air made you shiver, but Reiner's hands were there immediately, rubbing warmth back into your thighs. His fingers traced the edge of your panties, so close to where you needed him but not quite touching.
"So wet," he observed, his fingers tracing the edge of your panties. "And I've barely touched you…"
"You've been touching me for years," you corrected, your voice thick with emotion. "In my dreams. I used to touch myself thinking about you, imagining your hands on me,” you spoke boldly.
His eyes softened at that, his thumb stroking your hip. "Me too." Then his expression hardened again with desire, his fingers hooking in your panties, slowly dragging them down your legs. He knelt before you, his face level with your dripping cunt. For a moment, he just looked, his gaze so intense it felt like a physical touch. Then he leaned forward, his tongue parting your folds with a single, slow lick. The rough texture of his tongue against your sensitive flesh made you cry out.
Your knees buckled underneath you, but his hands were there, gripping your hips to hold you up. "Reiner," you cried out, your fingers scrabbling for purchase against the tree bark. The rough bark scraped your palms, but you barely noticed the pain.
He licked you again, this time circling your clit with the tip of his tongue. Your hips moved instinctively, grinding against his face as his hands held you steady, controlling your movements even as he drove you wild with his mouth. You could feel his stubble scraping against your inner thighs, adding another layer of sensation. "F-fuck," you moaned, your head falling back. "Right there, don't stop…"
Reiner responded by sucking your clit into his mouth, his tongue flicking the sensitive bundle of nerves with rapid strokes. Your orgasm built quickly, the pressure coiling in your stomach like a spring. His fingers joined his mouth, one thick digit pushing into your tight channel while his thumb continued circling your clit.
Your body arched off the tree as the orgasm crashed through you, waves of pleasure so intense they stole your breath. Reiner's mouth never stopped, his tongue continuing its relentless assault on your clit as his finger curled inside you, pressing against that spot that made your vision blur. Your hands tangled in his hair, holding him against you as you rode out the pleasure, your hips grinding against his face in desperate, needy circles.
"Reiner," you gasped, his name on your lips as the last tremors shook your body. "Fuck…." He didn't pull away immediately, instead slowing his movements, gentle licks replacing the frantic rhythm as he helped you come down from your high. When Reiner finally lifted his head, his face glistened with your arousal in the moonlight filtering through the trees. His eyes were dark, pupils blown wide with need, and his chest rose and fell with ragged breaths.
"You tasted…so fucking good," he rasped, his voice thick with desire. "Better than I ever imagined or dreamed of."
Your legs were still trembling as he moved you, pulling you onto the soft grass, kneeling between your thighs. The moonlight caught the massive bulge straining against his trousers, and you watched as he fumbled with releasing himself, his hands shaking slightly. His desperation was palpable, years of want and need finally boiling over.
"Need you," he breathed, finally getting his trousers down. "God, I need you so much." When he freed his cock, your breath caught. He was huge— thick and long, the head already leaking precum in the cool night air. He wrapped his hand around himself, stroking slowly as he looked down at you, his expression a mixture of worship and raw need.
"So long—I’ve been waiting for this," he whispered, more to himself than to you. "Of wanting this, wanting you." You reached up for his face, pulling him down for a kiss. You could taste yourself on his lips and tongue, and the intimacy of it all made your heart ache. His hands roamed your body, touching everywhere at once, your breasts, your hips, your thighs— as if he couldn't get enough of you. "Please," he begged against your mouth, his voice breaking. "Let me have you. I...I need to be inside you."
You nodded, unable to form words as so many emotions clogged your throat. He positioned himself at your entrance, the thick head of his cock nudging against your wet folds. His hands were gentle as he held your hips, but you could feel the tremor in them, the barely contained need.
The stretch was intense, a satisfying burn as he pushed into you inch by inch. You were so wet from your orgasm that he slid in easily, but the sheer size of him had you gasping slightly. He watched your face intently, his brow furrowed with concentration as he took his time, letting you adjust to his size. "Are you okay?" he asked, his voice strained with the effort of holding back. "Tell me if it's too much–"
You shook your head, wrapping your legs around his waist to pull him deeper. "More," you breathed. "I want all of you—"
That was all the encouragement he needed. With a groan, he buried himself to the hilt inside you, his balls pressed against your ass. The feeling of being completely full, of having him inside you after all these years of longing and waiting— it was overwhelming. You could feel his cock throbbing inside you, could feel how desperately he wanted to move. "Shit," he gasped, dropping his forehead to your shoulder. "You feel... fuck, you feel perfect..."
He started to move, slow at first, experimental thrusts that had you both gasping. The night air was chilly against your heated skin, but where your bodies joined, you were burning. His movements were careful, controlled, but you could feel his restraint fraying with each thrust. "Faster," you urged, digging your heels into his back. "Reiner, please, faster."
His control shattered at your words, and his hips snapped forward, driving into you with desperate, needy thrusts. The sound of skin slapping against skin filled the quiet woods, mingling with your loud moans and his ragged breathing. His hands gripped your hips almost bruisingly, holding you in place as he pounded into you.
"I-I can't last," he panted, his voice raw. "Been too—oh fuck, I'm gonna cum..." His movements became erratic, his thrusts losing their rhythm as his orgasm approached. You reached between your bodies, finding your clit and rubbing in tight circles. "Cum with me," he pleaded, his voice breaking. "Please, cum with me..."
His words sent you over the edge. Your pussy clenching around him as your second orgasm hit, even more intense than the first. With a hoarse cry he buried himself deep inside you, his cock pulsing as he spilled his own release. You could feel the warmth flooding your insides as he came, his body trembling with the force of his climax. He collapsed against you, his weight pressing you into the forest floor as he fought to catch his breath. His heart hammered against your chest, a wild, frantic rhythm that gradually slowed. For a long moment, neither of you spoke, just lay there tangled together in the aftermath.
"Shit," he finally whispered, lifting his head to look at you. His eyes were soft, filled with emotion as he brushed a strand of hair from your face. "That was... fuck, that was everything."
You smiled, tracing the line of his jaw with your fingertips. "Everything," you agreed. He settled back against you, his cock softening inside you but still connected. The woods were silent except for your breathing and the distant crackle of the campfire. In the moonlight, you could see the vulnerability in his eyes, the raw emotion he'd always kept hidden.
"I meant what I said…before. I love you," he said softly, the words hanging in the air between you. "I've always loved you."
Tears pricked at your eyes as you pulled him down for another kiss, slow and sweet this time, full of all the words you'd never said. You couldnt keep denying the feelings, and now, here in the quiet woods, everything had finally fallen into place. Your love for Reiner will always overpower the hate you had. "I love you too, Reiner," you whispered against his lips. "Always have."
He smiled, a genuine, unguarded smile that made your heart ache. "Guess we should head back to camp," he said reluctantly. "Before they send out a search party."
When you walk back into camp, the fire has burned lower and the night has gotten colder and Connie is holding with the expression of a man who has concerns. "Okay but what the fuck was that noise earlier," he's saying, gesturing broadly at the dark. "Because I am telling you, I am telling you, there is something in the trees. Jean, you heard it, right?"
"I heard something," Jean says, carefully non-committal, not looking up.
"It sounded like— I don't even know how to describe it. Like a— some kind of animal. Like a large animal in distress. It was moaning!" Connie looks around the group for support. His eyes land on you as you approach the fire. "Did you hear it? Out there? You were just out there."
You don't look at Reiner, but you can sense him smiling from two feet behind you. "Didn't hear anything," you say nonchalantly, sitting down beside Jean with perfect calm, reaching for the nearest canteen. "Quiet as anything."
"Quiet," Connie repeats, scandalised. "It was not quiet. Mikasa, you heard it right—"
"I heard something," Mikasa agrees, and then looks directly at you with an expression of profound understanding and you stare back at her with your most neutral face until she looks away. Jean, beside you, has gone very still in the way of someone who has just completed a calculation he wishes he hadn't. He takes a slow sip of whatever he's drinking and does not say anything— but his ear, you notice, has gone slightly red.
Reiner sits down across the fire, and when you glance up, he's looking at you with that smile still at the corner of his mouth— the one you remember, the exact one, the one he used to aim at you across mess hall tables and training yards like you were the only person in the room—and something in your chest does a slow, helpless turn. You look back at the fire before it can get worse.
"Could've been a fox," Reiner offers, the picture of innocence.
"It was not a fox," Connie says, and Jean makes a sound into his cup that might be a laugh strangled at birth. At long last, realisation crept onto Connie’s face. "Nobody in this camp," Connie announces, "tells me anything!"
summary: This season in the Royal Court of Paradis promises more than debutantes and dances...It promises a choice. Princess Y/N Reiss, presented for the second year in a row to court at her younger sister Historia's debut ball, stands at the very centre of it all, smiling politely while the entire kingdom quietly decides who she should belong to out of her admirable suitors.
The gentleman suitors: Eren Jeager, Jean Kirstein, Armin Arlert, Connie Springer, Reiner Braun, Erwin Smith and Levi Ackerman.
a/n: GUYS strap the fuck in for this one because its a long one! and a lot happens! Also please let me know in the comments ur faves because I cant decide :O
Reiner Braun knocked twice. Not too hard, not too soft. Correct in even that small thing, as though he had considered the force of it before raising his hand. Sasha showed him through, and he came into the drawing room, and the first thing you registered, properly, in the afternoon light, in a way the ballroom hadn't quite allowed for— was how large he was.
Not in a way that crowded the room. He was too composed for that, too deliberate in how he occupied space, as though he had spent years learning to carry himself in a way that did not alarm people. But he was broad across the shoulders in the way of someone built by years of military service rather than by any particular intention, and when he moved through the doorway the frame seemed briefly smaller for it. He was dressed carefully, a light coat over a clean shirt, the Marleyan military precision evident even in civilian dress, the kind of turned-out tidiness that was habit rather than effort. His hair was the colour of pale wheat, pushed back from a face that was broad and square-jawed and held very still in the way of someone who had learned, over a long time, that stillness was safer than expression. The stubble along his jaw was heavier than Jean's, darker at the chin, lighter at the sides, and his eyes, when they met yours across the room, were the colour of amber resin in the afternoon light. Heavy-lidded and steady, carrying something behind them that he was not yet ready to put down.
He bowed. Straightened. "Your Highness. I hope I haven't come too late in the day."
"Not at all," you said pleasantly. "Please, take a seat."
He sat. Sasha offered tea, and he paused before accepting, a brief, considering pause, as though the decision required more thought than it should have. Then he nodded, quiet, and accepted the cup in a hand that made it look considerably smaller than it was.
Petra had set aside her needlework. She sat near the window still, present and correct, but the afternoon had softened even her watchfulness into something more companionable. The house was quiet was quiet now, and The morning's visitors had taken their noise with them. What remained was the low fire, and the pale garden light, and Reiner Braun sitting across from you with his tea and the expression of a man who was not sure yet what kind of afternoon this was going to be.
"How are you finding the day?" you asked, because it was both the correct question and the true one.
He considered it with the seriousness he seemed to apply to most things. "Better than yesterday," he said.
It was so specific, and so honest, and so entirely unlike the standard answer, that you looked at him more carefully. "Better how?" you asked.
"Yesterday was—" He paused, looking briefly at his tea. "Busier than I expected. There were great many people there who know exactly how to be in a room together." A pause. "I spent most of the day feeling like I was reading something in a language I mostly understood. Almost. But not quite." He stopped. Something moved through his jaw— the registration of how much he had said. "Forgive me. I'm not being appropria—"
"Don't," you said, gently. "It's a very honest answer. I prefer those."
He looked at you, and his amber eyes did what they always did, sorted, assessed and measured the distance between safe and unsafe with the quiet efficiency of long practice. And then, slowly, something in them settled.
"The ball was easier," he said, after a moment. "In the second half." A pause that had weight in it. "The balcony and....the dancing."
"Because of knowing what was expected of you?" You asked him.
He was quiet for a moment. Long enough that you thought he might not answer. "Because of the company I had," he said, very quietly. He did not look away when he said it, and held your gaze with those steady, heavy-lidded eyes and the words sat between you, plain and entirely meant, and you felt the simplicity of them the way you felt simple things that were completely true.
You held his gaze and let him see you had received it, and did not make more of it than he had offered.
The conversation that followed was not like the conversations of the morning. It did not have Erwin's strategic warmth, or Armin's darting intellectual ease, or the charged, sparring quality that Jean carried everywhere he went. It was quieter than all of those. More..... careful. The kind of conversation that built itself slowly, one deliberate stone at a time, with pauses that neither of you felt the need to fill because the pauses were part of it, the breathing room a conversation needed when it was being constructed honestly rather than performed.
He told you about Marley. Not the politics, not the military apparatus, those things lived in the set of his shoulders and the economy of how he moved, and were already present without being named. He told you about the city he had grown up near, and the particular colour of the water there at low tide, which was a green so dark it was nearly black. He told you these things in the careful, selecting way of someone who had decided to show you something real and was choosing each piece with a deliberateness that was, in its own way, a kind of trust.
You told him about the estate in the off-season. About the way the house became itself again when the court went home, quieter, less performed, the rooms exhaling. About the walk along the north wall you did every morning when you were here in winter, and the view from the third-floor landing that you had never shown anyone because it had always felt like yours to keep.
He listened with his whole attention. Not the performed attentiveness of a morning call, the careful nodding of someone waiting for their turn, genuinely, completely present, in the way of a person for whom being given something true was not a small thing and who treated it accordingly.
The afternoon moved around you. At some point you had both turned slightly toward each other, the formal arrangement of the call giving way to the natural angle of two people who were actually talking. He was so much larger beside you than the chair suggested, the particular solidity, the way his forearms rested on his knees when he leaned forward and made the space between you feel simultaneously smaller and somehow not alarming.
You were in the middle of telling him about a disagreement you'd had with your father's master of ceremony over the arrangement of the debut flowers, a story that was mildly funny in the retelling if delivered correctly— when you landed the final detail with a precision that apparently worked, because Reiner Braun laughed.
Not a polished laugh, not the courtly sound that most men deployed in drawing rooms. A low sound, genuine and brief, caught somewhere in the chest before it fully arrived, something you would call, a low chuckle that was entirely unexpected.
It moved through you before you had time to prepare for it. Something in your chest did a slow, involuntary thing, not dramatic, not announced, simply present, the way warmth is present when you step into a room with a good fire and your body registers it before your mind does. You were aware, suddenly and specifically, of how close he was. Of the amber of his eyes, warmer now than they had been when he arrived. Of the slight parting of his lips after the laugh, and the way the afternoon light caught the heavier stubble at his jaw.
You returned your attention to your tea with the composure of a woman who was absolutely in full possession of herself. "The flowers were moved, of course," you said, finishing the story with perhaps slightly more dignity than you had planned for.
"Of course they were," he said, and his voice was still warm with what remained of the laugh, lower than usual, and you absolutely did not notice that either.
At half past one the clock chimed, and neither of you said anything about it. At a quarter to two Petra folded the last of her needlework with the quiet efficiency of someone concluding a task and made no move whatsoever to suggest the call had run its course. Outside the window the garden had gone soft and grey with the advancing afternoon, and the tea had been finished some time ago.
At two o'clock , which was an hour outside the morning call window, so far past the conventional duration that it had ceased to be a morning call in any formal sense and had become simply two people in a warm room, you both became aware, at the same moment, that the tea had been cold for quite some time.
Reiner looked at the cups, and a slow recognition moved across his face. He looked at you with an expression that was, briefly, entirely without the careful blankness, something startled and something warmer and something that didn't have a name yet.
"I've overstayed, I believe," he said.
"It's fine," you insisted.
"It isn't—I apologise." He stood, with the sudden abruptness of a large man registering a social error and moving to correct it, and the shift in scale as he rose was immediately apparent, he was very tall standing, the whole breadth of him reasserting itself, and the room rearranged around the fact of him being upright in it. "Mr Braun," you said, before he could finish the retreat into formality. "I didn't even notice, by the way," you said. "The time."
He looked at you. The amber eyes, doing their slow, habitual assessment, and then— slowly, the not-quite-smile came back, and this time it stayed. Just slightly. Just long enough to be real. "No," he said, quietly. "I didn't either."
He bowed, correctly, as always, the formality returned like armour he had picked back up, and moved toward the door. Sasha, who had been so still for the last hour you had nearly forgotten her presence, materialised to show him out. At the door he paused, and they all paused at this door, you had noticed, every one of them. As though the leaving of it required a final decision.
"Thank you," he said. The thank you was not only for the call and you could hear that it was not only for the call, but it was for the afternoon, and the honesty of it, and the low laugh that had escaped him in a drawing room where he had not expected to feel at ease. and then he went, and the house went quiet. You sat with the cold tea and the low fire and the particular quality of a room after someone large and careful and real has been in it and left it.
Petra folded the last of her needlework into its basket and stood with the serene efficiency of someone calling a morning closed. "I'll see about dinner," she said, which was not what she was going to see about, but which gave her a reason to leave the room, and she left it.
Sasha remained. She looked at the door through which Reiner had gone. Then at the clock. Then at you. "Two o'clock," she said.
"Yes," you sighed.
"He arrived at one!"
"Yes."
"That's—" She counted. "An hour past the window, and then another hour on top of that!"
You looked at the cold tea and the dying fire and the particular quality of the room after he had left it, which was quieter than it had been before he arrived and not in a bad way. Quieter the way something is quiet when something real has been in it.
"Yes," you said. "It is."
Sasha looked at you with the expression of someone exercising very significant restraint. "Go on then," you groaned. "What is it?"
"He has lovely eyes," she said, immediately. "Amber. I don't think I've ever seen that colour before on a person. And he's very....he's very big, isn't he. Like a—" She appeared to search for an appropriate comparison. "A very polite wardrobe?"
You laughed and it felt good, the laughing, easy and uncomplicated in the quiet of the afternoon. "Not a word to Historia," you tell her.
"Historia already knows," Sasha said, with complete certainty. "She's been on the landing for the last twenty minutes."
You looked at the ceiling, sighing. "Of course she has."
Connie arrived at two-fifteen, not long after Reiner. Sasha had answered the door to the drawing room, and there was a brief exchange in the hall, the content of which you could not fully hear but the quality of which was clear enough— Sasha's voice carrying the particular tone of someone delivering unwelcome information as kindly as possible, and Connie's voice carrying the particular tone of someone receiving unwelcome information and processing it in real time. He appeared in the drawing room doorway a moment later with Sasha looking annoyed behind him.
"So the window," he says, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. "Closes at one.. I, uh....didn't know that...."
"It does, unfortunately," you say.
He absorbed this. "Right." He looked at the clock, which confirmed, in the unambiguous way of clocks, that it was two-fifteen. "But I've been standing outside for— " He appeared to do the counting on his fingers. "A while," he settled on, with the equanimity of a man making his peace with a situation.
"Why were you standing outside?" you asked him. "Why didn't you call?"
"I was— " He stopped. The honesty with which he did everything applied also, it turned out, to situations that were slightly embarrassing. "I thought the window was two to three," he said. "I was waiting for two....."
You looked at him. He looked back with the open, undefended expression of someone who had made a mistake and had decided the fastest route through it was simply to own it completely. "I can come back tomorrow," he said, defeated. "If that's— if that would be—"
"Tomorrow would be perfect," you said, warmly, because it was impossible to be anything other than warm about this. "Maybe first thing? At ten?"
"At ten," he repeated, with the gravity of someone committing something important to memory. "Right. Yes." He straightened. "I'll— right." He turned to go, and then turned back. "You look very nice, by the way. The blue is— it's a beautiful colour on you."
"Thank you, Lord Springer," you said, your cheeks warming.
"Connie's fine," he said, already retreating. "See you tomorrow, Your Highness."
He went, and the door closed. Then, a beat of silence. Sasha, who had followed him to the door and was now leaning against the drawing room frame with her arms folded, looked at you with the expression of someone who had found the last twenty minutes deeply enjoyable.
"He stood outside for an hour," she scoffed. "Why didn't the fool come in?"
"I know," you signed. "I'm not sure what he was thinking."
"In the cold as well!"
"I know."
"I'm just saying," she said, "that there's something very— it's quite sweet, actually. In its way. In its weird, stupid way...." She pushed off the frame. "I'll see about the fire. It's getting cold."
She went, and Petra had been gone since Reiner left— about dinner, ostensibly. The drawing room was quiet, the afternoon light coming low and pale through the windows, and the fire had reduced to embers. Both your gifted books sat on the table, and the tea things had been cleared. The house had the particular stillness of an evening approaching, the busy morning fully spent.
You were not expecting anyone else, and you were not, you told yourself, waiting for anything.
But, you heard him before you saw him. Not his voice— no, he was not the sort of man whose voice preceded him. But the particular quality of the footsteps in the entrance hall. Measured and unhurried. The footsteps of someone who moved through the world with the absolute economy of a man who had never once taken an unnecessary step in his life and did not intend to start.
You knew them, already, after a single evening. You were on your way back from the library after putting your two books away, with the intention of later having of a quiet hour after dinner of reading— when you stepped into the corridor and found him there. He was standing near the entrance hall, still in his full military dress, and the sight of him in the low evening light of the corridor stopped you in a way that you did not entirely expect and did not entirely manage to conceal. The coat was a deep grey-green, double-breasted, the gold buttons polished and precise in two straight rows down the front. Gold epaulettes at his shoulders, heavy and formal, the rank of him worn without ceremony. Medals at his chest— several, each earned, each placed with the flat, factual accuracy of a man for whom decoration was simply the record of things that had happened. It was like he had dressed up for a non-existent event. His dark hair was swept back from his face and the line of his jaw was sharp in the fading light and he was looking at you with the same level, undecorated attention he always gave things. He had come in from outside. He had not, you registered, come from your father's study— which was deeper in the house, in the other wing, nowhere near this corridor. If he wasn't here to see your father, why was he here?
"General Ackerman," you said politely.
"Your Highness," he said. A pause.
"Were you here to see my father?" you asked, pleasantly, because you were curious how he would answer it.
He looked at you for a moment, and something moved through his expression— the fractional thing, around the jaw, the ghost of something that would have been a reaction on anyone else. "I had some business with my uncle, who's your father's personal guard," he said. "Kenny."
"And Kenny is with my father in— "
"The east wing," he said, without any change of expression. The east wing belonged to your father, and was in the opposite direction to the entrance hall. You had known this your entire life, having grown up in the house. You said nothing, and let the silence sit with everything it contained, and Levi Ackerman stood in it without apparent discomfort, which was either because he was entirely untroubled by the implication or because he had decided, some time before knocking, that he was willing to be caught. You suspected the latter.
"You could have sent a card," you said finally. "This morning, with the others. Or came to call during the window."
"I don't do morning calls or cards," he said gruffly.
"You don't do—" You looked at him in shock. "You're here right now!"
"I'm here to speak to my uncle," he said, and the flatness of it had, underneath it, the very slight quality of a man who was aware of precisely how unconvincing he was being and had concluded that this was acceptable.
You looked at him for a long moment, and he looked back. "Would you like to come into the drawing room?" you said. "There's still tea.....though it's probably cold."
"Fine," he said, which was not yes and was entirely yes, and he followed you into the drawing room with the unhurried certainty of a man who had decided to do something and was doing it. The fire needed building up, and you did it yourself— the small, practical task of it, adding wood from the basket, adjusting the grate, before Levi crossed the room and took over without preamble, crouching in front of the hearth with the efficient movements of someone for whom competence in small tasks was simply the baseline of existing in the world. He built the fire back up in less than a minute, set the poker back in its stand, and straightened.
"You didn't need to do that," you told him.
"I know," he answered simply.
You looked at him as he looked at the fire. The military coat sat on his shoulders with the ease of someone who had worn a uniform for so long it had become him, the epaulettes broad and gold in the firelight, the medals catching the light in small, precise points. He was not a large man in the way Reiner was large, or broad in the way Erwin was broad, he was simply solid. Present in a way that took up exactly the space he occupied and no more, and made that space feel, somehow, entirely accounted for.
"Sit down, General," you say. "Please."
He sat down, not in the chair across from yours, the conventional choice of most gentlemen today— he sat in the chair beside the fire, slightly angled, the chair that wasn't the formal one, the one that said something about how he intended the next hour to go. You sat across from him. Poured the tea, which was cold, as promised, but he accepted it without complaint, which was, from Levi, approximately the same as gratitude.
The quiet that settled between you was not the quiet of the morning— not the structured quiet of a formal call, the careful pauses of two people performing something. It was simply the quiet of an evening, and two people in it, and nothing that needed to be said immediately.
"Erwin brought me a book about about the History of Paradis," you tell him suddenly and unprovoked.
"Smith always does his research," he huffed.
"Do you?" you asked.
He looked at you. "I'm here, aren't I," he said, which was the most he had given you since he arrived and also, in its small, unembellished way, quite a lot. You held his gaze. The firelight made the grey of his eyes warmer than you had seen them, the usual flat directness of them softened fractionally by the low light, and he was looking at you with the same attention he had given you at the ball— the attention of someone who was actually seeing you, without the apparatus most people put between themselves and a princess.
"How was this morning?" Levi asked.
"Long," you admitted.
"I heard Yeager came early."
"Yes....I assumed he would."
"Everyone knew he would," He paused. "He doesn't, generally care about being appropriate."
"No," you agree. "But he means well..."
Levi looked at you for a moment. "Yes," he said, simply, with the tone of someone giving credit where it was genuinely due, without excess, without performance. "He does."
"And then Jean turned up during Eren's set...." you said.
"Lord Kirstein did that," he said. "On purpose."
"He was trying to time it so they'd overlap, I believe," You smiled.
"He timed it to the minute," Levi said, almost a smirk ghosting his face. "I would've done the same to the little brat."
You smiled. He looked at the smile with the expression of someone registering something they hadn't planned to register, and then looked back at the fire with the particular quality of a man who has noticed something and is choosing, for now, not to say so. The silence came back. Easy, warm, the fire doing most of the work.
"Can I ask you something?" you said finally.
"You can ask," Levi grunted.
"Why are you actually here?"
He was quiet for a long moment. The fire crackled, and outside the window the garden was dark, the last of the light gone. "All these events, and ," he said, finally. "Full of people saying things they've rehearsed." He didn't look at you as he spoke. "You're not loud and obnoxious like them. I noticed that last night at the ball." A pause. "I find it— nice," he said. "Being around someone who doesn't require managing." It was, you thought, the least romantic way anyone had ever said something that was entirely romantic. So stripped of flourish, so completely plain. As though what he meant by it wasn't that you were easy to be around but that you were the kind of person who made him feel, for a specific and rare period of time, like himself rather than the job of himself.
You understood that. In the specific way that a person understands something because they have felt it too. "You require very little managing yourself," you smirked.
"I require none," Levi said. "I'm aware it's a different problem."
"It isn't a problem at all," you say quietly.
He looked at you then. Full and directly, the way he had at the ball. The grey eyes, level and honest and giving very little away, except that they were here, in your drawing room at half past five in the evening, under the pretence of speaking to his uncle, and that was itself everything they were giving away.
"You should have people who don't make you work at just.....being in a room," Levi admits.
"I have Historia-" you began.
"Besides Historia." he interrupted.
You looked at him under the firelight. The medals at his chest, catching the light in small, precise points. "I'm working on it," you said, quietly, almost a whisper.
Something shifted in him, barely noticeable, the fractional thing, around the eyes, that you had learned to look for. And then, so small it might have been the light— the corner of his mouth moved. It was not the almost-smile, but the actual one. Brief, contained, gone almost before it arrived. But it was there.
Levi left without lingering, with the measured unhurried steps of a man who moved through the world at precisely his own pace and no one else's. The house absorbed the quiet he left behind, and you sat with it for a few minutes. Then you stood, smoothed your skirts, and went upstairs.
You didn't want to stay in the drawing room, or go the library, or anywhere that required you to be anyone in particular. So, you went to your room—your own room, the one that had been yours since you were small, that knew the particular weight of you and asked nothing in return for it, and you closed the door behind you and stood in the quiet of it and simply breathed. The day had been an extraordinary amount. You were not overwhelmed, you told yourself. You were simply full. The way a room was full when too many fires had been lit in it, warm past the point of comfort, the heat needing somewhere to go.
The evening air met you as you stepped out onto the balcony. It curved outward from the face of the house in a long, graceful arc of pale carved stone, the balustrade worn smooth in the places where you had rested your hands a hundred times before. Pink and white flowers trailed from the window boxes on either side of the arched doors— climbing roses and something smaller that wound itself through the carved scrollwork of the railing ,and the stone beneath them was the warm honey-gold colour it always went in the evening light, the ornate detailing catching the last of the sun in long pale shadows. Below, the garden fell away into the blue-grey of early evening. The gravel paths, the hedgerows, the far wall draped in ivy.
You leaned your arms on the balcony and let the quiet of it settle over you and thought about nothing in particular, which was itself a luxury. The evening smelled of roses and cut grass and somewhere beyond the garden wall, the distant warm-bread smell of the city going about its evening. You closed your eyes for a moment. Then, from somewhere below and to the left, came a sound.
A very specific sound. The sound of something— no, someone, finding purchase against stone. A controlled, deliberate kind of scrabbling. The sound of a person who was climbing something they had assessed and decided was climbable and was now in the process of proving themselves right. You opened your eyes and leaned over the balcony to look down.
Eren Yeager was halfway up the face of the building. He had found the old climbing rose, the one that ran up the left side of the balcony in thick, knotted ropes of stem and had been doing so for approximately forty years, which had made it, over time, almost architectural in its solidity. He had one hand gripping the iron bracket that anchored the rose to the stone, one boot finding a toehold in the carved decorative border that ran along the first floor, and he was looking up at you from below with the expression of a man who had made a decision and was committed to it.
He was also— you registered this with the specific helplessness of a woman watching something that should be alarming and finding it mostly impossible to look away from— extremely good at this. The lean and controlled movement of him against the building face, the easy physicality of someone for whom his body was simply a thing he trusted. He moved with the quiet efficiency of a man who had scaled worse than an old wall on considerably less sleep. He had something held carefully in his free hand.
"Eren," you whispered, in the carrying whisper of someone trying to be quiet and urgent at the same time. "What are you doing? You cannot—"
"Hang on, I'm almost there," he said, at a volume that was not nearly quiet enough.
"Shh—" you hissed. "You need to be quiet!"
"I am being quiet," he said, which was objectively untrue, and reached for the next handhold.
"You are not being quiet, Eren, if you fall—"
"I'm not going to fall," he said, with the serene certainty he always brought to these assessments, and pulled himself up another foot, and then another, and then, with a final, controlled movement— he was there, level with the balcony. His bare forearms came over the top of the stone, and you tried very hard not to notice how well-defined they were, and then he leaned on them; and his face was suddenly six inches from yours, and you were so startled by the proximity of it that you took a half-step back. He looked at you and smiled. His dark hair had come partly loose from where it had been tied— several strands fallen forward across his face, and there was a faint flush across his cheekbones from the climb, and his green eyes were very bright and very close and entirely, completely unrepentant.
He held out his hand that had been clasped shut, holding something. In it was a flower. Small, slightly squashed on one side from being held in a fist during the ascent, it was a deep pink, one of the roses from the garden below. He had clearly picked it on his way through and held it through the entire climb and presented it now with the focused seriousness of a man who had planned this part and was going to see it through. You looked at the flower, then at him, then at the flower again.
"So, you," you began, very quietly, "picked a flower from my garden, and then climbed the outside of my house too give it to me....?"
"Yes," he said simply.
"That's— " You stopped, pressing your lips together. You took the flower, because it seemed unkind not to, and because it was slightly crumpled and entirely genuine and you found, without quite deciding to, that you were charmed beyond what was reasonable. "That's very...."
"Please don't say ridiculous," he said.
"I was going to say sweet," you said softly, which was true and which surprised both of you slightly. Something in his expression went warm and a little undone.
He was still leaning over your balcony railing with his forearms on the stone, his chin almost level with his hands, and this close you could see the details of him properly— the green of his eyes that was neither quite brown nor quite blue but something that shifted between the two depending on the light, the dark sweep of his brows, the line of his jaw and the faint colour still across his cheekbones. He looked younger like this than he did in a drawing room, less managed and more himself.
"I kept thinking," he said, quieter now, "about this morning. About how I didn't get to— " He stopped, before starting again, more honestly. "I had things I wanted to say. And then I ran out of time."
"You could have written to me," you told him gently.
"I don't write things," he said. "I say them." He looked at you with the directness that never wavered, the quality of his attention that gave everything it had without asking permission. "I knew you would come to your room at some point, and I...I wanted to be there waiting."
"Eren—"
"I'm glad I came to the season," he said, in the tone of someone who had decided to say a thing and was going to say it before the moment closed. "I wasn't, before. I thought it was going to be formal and everyone performing for everyone else." His jaw shifted. "And the majority of it is....but then you're here too." He looked at you with those soft eyes, level and honest. "And that makes it different."
The evening was very quiet around you, and below, the garden settled into its evening blue. You opened your mouth to reply, when—
"Your Highness?"
Sasha's voice, coming from inside the house, somewhere at the bottom of the stairs, carrying with the particular projection of someone who had not yet started looking and had not yet found cause for alarm and would very shortly be doing both.
"Your Highness, dinner is in ten minutes, are you on the balcony?"
You and Eren looked at each other. "Go," you whispered quickly.
"But I'm—"
"Now," you whisper, in the most commanding whisper you had ever deployed. "Eren, go, she'll see you."
He looked at you for one half of a second with the expression of a man who was calculating whether ten more seconds was worth it and concluding, reluctantly, that it probably wasn't. Then he pushed back from the balustrade and found his footholds with the same quiet efficiency he'd arrived with, and descended the building face with considerably more speed than he'd gone up it, the rose shuddering again and shedding the last of its petals down onto the gravel below.
"Your Highness?" Sasha called again, closer now. You turned from the balcony and stepped back through the doors. Pulled them closed behind you with one hand, the small crumpled rose held in the other, and were standing with total composure at the centre of your room when Sasha opened the door.
She looked at you. "Dinner is in ten minutes," she said. "Petra said you'd gone up to your room—are you all right?"
"Perfectly," you reply with great tranquility. Sasha looked at the balcony doors, and then her eyes dropped to your hand, to the flower. A small pink rose, slightly squashed on one side, held between your fingers with the careful looseness of something recently acquired. Sasha looked at it for a long moment.
"Where did you— " she started.
"I found it," you said swiftly. "On the balcony."
Sasha looked at you with the expression of someone who was deciding, very deliberately, how much of what she was thinking to say out loud. Then, she said: "Dinner in ten minutes."
"Thank you, Sasha," you replied. she left you alone, and soon you stood in the quiet of your room and looked at the small crumpled flower in your hand. It was picked from your own garden, held through an entire climb up the outside of your house, presented over a balcony railing with complete seriousness by a man with bark dust on his coat and loose hair. You set it on your dressing table, carefully, leaning it against the mirror.
Then you looked at yourself in the glass, at the colour in your cheeks that had not been there when you came upstairs, at the expression you were wearing that was warm and a little helpless and absolutely not composed......and you pressed both hands briefly to your face. What a day.
. ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
The morning arrived gently, which you appreciated. You had been awake since before the house, in the particular way of someone whose mind had started its work ahead of the rest of them— not anxious, simply awake, and thinking, and aware of the small pink rose on the dressing table that you were definitely not looking at. You were still in your dressing gown when Sasha knocked.
"Lord Springer is downstairs," she said.
You looked at her. "It's only half past nine."
"It is," she agreed.
"The window— "
"Doesn't open until ten, I know, I told him." She groaned.
You looked at the ceiling, then at your dressing gown, then at Sasha. "Tell him to wait in the sitting room," you say. "I'll be ten minutes."
Sasha's expression did something warm. "I'll tell him fifteen," she said, which was accurate.
Connie was sitting in the small sitting room off the entrance hall, the informal one, not the drawing room, the one with the comfortable chairs that had no particular aspirations — with his hat on his knee and his coat slightly askew and the expression of a man who had arrived somewhere and was entirely pleased about it. He stood when you came in, bowing deeply and correctly. And then immediately sat back down with the comfortable ease of someone who had discharged his formalities and was now ready to actually be somewhere.
"I got the time right this time," he grinned.
"It isn't the time yet," you giggled, sitting across from him. "You're still too early, Lord Springer."
"It's close enough," he said, cheerfully. "And I brought these." He produced, from his coat pocket, a small paper bag that had clearly been picked up from somewhere on the way, slightly crumpled at the corner. He set it on the table between you with the offering energy of a golden retriever presenting something he had found.
You looked at it. "What is it?"
"Pastries," he said. "From the bakery on south street, the one with the blue door. I walked past it and they smelled— " He made a gesture that communicated extraordinary without requiring a word. "I got four. I ate one on the way, so there are three left for you to choose from."
You opened the bag, and there were, as promised, three pastries— slightly warm still, dusted with sugar, the kind that were completely impractical for any formal occasion and were for that reason exactly what you wanted at half past nine in the morning. Sasha arrived with the tea, took one look at the paper bag, and added some plates to the table.
"Some tea, Lord Springer?" you asked Connie.
"Yes please," he said, "Need something to go with the pastry," as he was already reaching for a pastry with the unself-conscious ease of someone who had been invited to do exactly this.
It was, you discovered over the next hour, a delicious pastry. And Connie Springer was, you had realised, very good company. Connie in the small informal sitting room with tea and sugar pastries and no particular agenda was something else— entirely relaxed and the warm unguarded energy of him filling the space without overwhelming it. He talked with his hands. He asked questions and then immediately got sidetracked by the answers in ways that sent the conversation off in entirely unexpected directions. He had opinions about everything and held them all with equal conviction regardless of their importance, from the provincial tax structure to the correct way to eat a pastry.
"You have to start from the middle," he said, demonstrating.
"That's— that's so wrong," you laughed.
"It's structurally efficient!" he told you. "You get the best part first. Why would you save the best part till last?"
"Because then you have something to look forward to."
"I don't need to look forward to things I already have, waiting in my hand" he said, with the absolute conviction of someone who had thought this through thoroughly.
You stared at him. "That is either the most foolish thing I've heard this week or the most wise advice I'll ever receive."
He considered this with great seriousness. "Both," he smiled.
You laughed— the proper kind, the unguarded kind, and he grinned at it with the wide, uncomplicated delight he always brought to the sound, and Sasha, from the corner where she was ostensibly doing something useful, made no effort whatsoever to hide that she was also laughing.
He told you about his life with the particular affectionate irreverence of someone who found everything about it both maddening and beloved. He told you about a horse that he had since last spring, which lead him on to tell you about a wager he had made with another lord about who could learn a particular manoeuvre first on horseback, which he had won; and the whole thing was recounted with such energetic specificity that you were crying laughing by the end of it, one hand pressed to your mouth, the other holding your tea, and Connie was laughing too, the loud real kind that he made no effort to modulate for the setting.
"He said," Connie managed, "that I had a—an advantage—"
"Advantage? " you laughed.
"Because my horse is shorter— "
You gave up trying to drink your tea, and Sasha had abandoned all pretence of anything and was simply laughing openly in the corner, which Connie either didn't notice or didn't mind, and the small sitting room was full of the warm, uncomplicated sound of it, and it was, you thought, when you had recovered enough to think anything— exactly what a morning ought to contain.
He stayed for an hour and a quarter, which was past the window technically, but the window had never been the point, and when he finally stood and gathered his coat and his hat he did so with the reluctant energy of someone who had somewhere else to be and wished he didn't.
"This was good," he said, with the simple directness that was his natural mode. "I mean that. This was actually really good."
"It was," you said, warmly and entirely honestly.
"Until we meet again, Your Highness." He bowed— warmly, slightly lopsided, and went, and the front door closed behind him, and the small sitting room settled into the particular quiet of somewhere that had just held a great deal of noise and warmth and was still carrying the shape of it. Sasha began collecting the tea things with the fond, unhurried air of someone who had enjoyed herself and was not trying to hide it.
"He's very— " she started. "Like a— jester, almost," she said, honestly. "I've never met anyone quite like him."
"No," you agreed. "I don't think anyone has."
You were still in the sitting room, the pastry bag now empty and the tea cold, the morning having advanced to somewhere around eleven— when you heard your father's voice in the entrance hall.
The door opened, and Rod Reiss stomped inside, and Historia followed behind him with the expression of someone who had already been told whatever was about to be said and was watching to see how you received it.
"Good morning," your father said, surveying the sitting room— the tea things and the empty pastry bag,with the expression of a man cataloguing and deciding not to comment. "You had a visitor? A suitor, I hope...?"
"Yes. Lord Springer called for tea," you said pleasantly.
"Mm," your father said, in the tone he used when he was moving past something rather than addressing it. You knew that tone well, he didn't approve yet he didn't disapprove, you were sure he was just pleased you were still receiving suitors. He settled into the chair Connie had vacated and folded his hands with the particular deliberateness of a man about to say something prepared. Historia sat on the arm of your chair. Her expression was carefully neutral, which told you more than any expression would have.
"We will be having a dinner event this evening," your father said. "Dont worry, it's still a relatively small dinner. Council business, largely, of my council members will be present, as will several of the senior advisors." He paused, with the quality of a man placing words very specifically. "Commander Smith has also been invited. And General Ackerman."
You absorbed this. "The whole council?" you asked.
"Yes," your father said. "There are matters regarding the Calvary eastern expansion that require discussion, and Erwin—Commander Smith has requested a discussion over dinner before the season's calendar becomes too full." He looked at you with the mild, assessing gaze that had been looking at you for twenty-two years and had learned to read you quite well. "You and Historia will join us for dinner, of course. It is a family matter, and you will need to know how to take it for when you become ruler one day."
"Of course," you nodded, your voice even despite the nerves you felt. Your hands, folded in your lap, were perfectly still.
"Good," your father said, and stood, and smoothed his coat in the way he did when a conversation was concluded. "Dinner at seven." He moved to the door, paused in the way he occasionally did, and added, with the specific, careful warmth of a man who was doing something he considered loving: "It will be a good opportunity, it will give you the chance to socialise with a few.....interested gentileman." He looked at you. "You present very well, my dear. It is worth reminding certain people of that."
He left, and the room was quiet again. Commander Smith has been invited.....and General Ackerman. Dinner. A formal table. Your father's council. And your father wanting to remind you of certain people sitting at the table. You knew what that meant. "It'll be fine," Historia said, quietly beside you.
"I know it will," you replied rather quickly. You looked at your hands. Historia looked at you with those clear eyes.
"What will you wear?" she asked, after a moment, in the gentle, practical tone of someone offering you something to do with the feeling.
You looked at the door. Thought about a formal table with Erwin's careful eyes and Levi's level ones and Armin's gentle gaze. "Something..... good," you said finally.
Historia nodded. "Come on then," she said, and stood, and held out her hand, and you took it, and the morning moved into the afternoon with the particular momentum of a day that had already been a great deal and was not yet finished.
The morning wasn't over yet however, as Jean's card arrived at half past eleven. Sasha brought it upstairs with the expression of being composed and professional. She set it on the dressing table beside the small pink rose without comment and then stood with her hands folded in a way that suggested she had further information and was waiting to be asked for it.
"Is there something else you need to say?" you ask her.
"He's uh....he's downstairs," she said finally. You looked at her. "He sent the card ahead," she said, holding back a smile. "By about four minutes? So, I mean, technically he did do it correctly." A pause. "He's in the entrance hall now."
You looked at the card. The handwriting was Jean's, the controlled hand, that was slightly more careful than his usual, as though he had written it more than once. Your Highness, it is a fine morning and I find myself wondering whether you might permit a walk in the royal gardens, if you are free and so inclined. I will call at half past eleven. — Lord Kirstein.
Very formal, you had thought, with the— Lord Kirstein at the end. You set the card down and looked at the window, at the garden below, at the morning which was, as stated, genuinely fine. It was the kind of clear, warm day that the season occasionally produced as though in apology for all the grey ones, the light honest and bright and entirely uncomplicated.
"Tell him I'll be down shortly," you said as Sasha turned to go. "Oh, and tell Petra— "
"Already waiting downstairs!" Sasha shouted over her shoulder as she shut the door.
He was standing near the entrance hall window when you came downstairs, turned slightly toward the garden outside it, and he had flowers. Not a single stem, not even a small polite arrangement. He had a proper bunch of them— bright red tulips, deep and saturated, their stems bound with a length of dark ribbon, held in one hand with the slightly self-conscious air of a man who had made a decision about flowers and was now standing in an entrance hall with the evidence of that decision and was committed to seeing it through. He turned when he heard you on the stairs, and looked up, and the expression that crossed his face arrived before he had decided on it— the unguarded one, the one that didn't go through any kind of management before it showed. He was, in the clear morning light of the entrance hall, even more handsome than you remembered. The clean line of his jaw, the hazel of his eyes warm in the light from the window, the slight stubble you had grown accustomed to. He was tall enough that he filled the entrance hall differently to most people who stood in it, the width of his shoulders in the dark coat carrying the easy, unhurried confidence of someone who was comfortable in the space he took up.
He bowed before he straightened, holding out the flowers. "These are for you," he said, which was, as an accompanying statement to giving someone flowers, so plainly obvious that it circled back around to being entirely endearing.
"Thank you," you smiled, taking them from him. The tulips were deep red, almost velvet in colour, their stems cool in your hands. "They're beautiful...."
"Red tulips," he said, with the slightly unnecessary specificity of someone filling a silence. And then, clearly feeling this required some explanation, "They mean— Well— " He stopped, a slight blush rising to his cheeks. Red tulips meant, if you recalled correctly, a declaration. A deep and perfect love, in the language of flowers— which meant that Jean had looked it up, or somehow knew that already.
"They're perfect," you tell him. And you meant it. Something in him settled at that. "It's a fine morning," you said, glancing at the window. "How about that walk now?"
"I'd like that," he said promptly, with absolutely no pretence of deliberating.
The royal gardens in late morning were warm and unhurried, the kind of day that felt made for being outside in. The gravel paths were dry and pale, the hedgerows neatly kept, the roses along the south wall fully open and giving off the warm, thick smell that gathered in the still air and was simply summer, distilled. You walked with Jean beside you, close in the natural way of two people who had stopped managing the distance between them, his arm offered and yours tucked through it with the ease of something that had become, over the last few days, familiar. Petra followed behind with Sasha, the two of them at the respectful distance that chaperoning required, their voices low and occasional.
He was different outdoors. You had noticed this before but the morning confirmed it— the last of the stiffness gone entirely, replaced by something looser and more straightforwardly himself. He talked about Trost again, easily now, without the careful weighing he had done in the sitting room. He told you about the river that ran through Trost, which flooded every spring and which the local farmers had a complicated and affectionate relationship with. He told you about the light there in autumn, the colour of the trees along the water, with the particular animation of someone who loved a place and didn't often have occasion to say so.
"You should see it," he said, and this time he didn't pull it back. He said it and let it stand, and glanced at you with those hazel eyes to see what you did with it.
"I'd like that," you smiled. He looked forward along the path, and small a thing moved through his expression— quiet and warm and not entirely contained.
The path curved south toward the rose wall and hedges, and it was here that Petra paused. You heard it rather than saw it—the slight slowing of footsteps behind you, and Sasha's quiet voice, and then Petra saying something about the arrangement of the south bed, the two of them drifting toward the gardener who was working there, their attention redirected by the natural logic of two women who found horticulture interesting.
Jean glanced back briefly, and you noticed him registering the distance, and yet neither of you stopped walking, creating more distance between you and the chaperones. The path narrowed slightly here, the hedgerow on one side and the rose wall on the other, the space between them close and warm and full of the smell of the flowers. You slowed without deciding to, the way you slowed in places that asked for it, and Jean slowed with you, and the morning was very quiet around you.
It was here that you became aware of a faint buzzing sound. The familiar low summer hum of something going about its business in the roses. You heard it first as simply part of the garden, then again slightly closer. Then as very specifically close, and you froze with the particular stillness of someone who has realised there was a bee on them. It had landed just below your collarbone, tucked into the hollow just below the pearl choker, warm from the morning; apparently exactly the right temperature for a bee that had been working the rose wall and had decided to investigate further. You stopped walking entirely and almost held your breath.
"Jean," you mumble quietly, not even using his proper title. He heard something in the way you said his name— not the title, his name, which you had not used before, and which arrived in his ears with a specificity that made him turn immediately and swiftly.
His eyes dropped, taking in the situation. Then his eyes flickered back up to yours. "Don't move," he said, in a low, even voice.
"I'm not moving!" You almost hissed with tremendous restraint. He stepped closer to you, and there was no architecture for this, no social calculus that applied. Petra was thirty feet away covered by the hedge, her back turned and Sasha with her. The path was narrow and the roses were on one side and Jean Kirstein was on the other, and he was close— properly and specifically close, the kind of close that the gardens and the chaperone protocol did not technically permit and that the situation had made entirely necessary.
You were aware of the warmth of him, of the height of him, the way standing beside him like this meant looking up at him, the line of his jaw sharp against the sky. Of the particular quality of his attention, and all of it, completely, on you— not even on the bee, not on the garden, on you, because the bee was manageable and you were the thing that mattered most to him right now.
He reached out his hand, slowly. The deliberate patience of someone who had decided this required care and was going to give it wholeheartedly. His fingers were long, and he extended them with a gentleness that sat entirely at odds with everything else about him. But not now. Now he was simply careful. He guided the bee, barely touching it, the faintest possible brush of his fingers, coaxing rather than directing, the patience of someone who understood the thing had its own timing and could not be rushed. And in doing so the back of his hand grazed your collarbone.
Warm skin against warm skin, the briefest, lightest contact, and the effect of it moved through you before you had time to prepare for it— a current, a specific and entirely localised shock that started at your collarbone and arrived in your chest and did not immediately leave. The bee finally lifted off; unhurried and entirely unbothered, returning to the roses with the indifference of something that had never understood what all the fuss was about. Jean's hand did not move. He didn't pull back, didn't withdraw, not completing the natural motion of a hand that has finished its task and has somewhere else to be. It stayed, lingering— his fingers at the edge of your neckline, the back of his hand just barely at your skin, the contact so light it was almost not contact and was entirely contact.
You looked up at him again, to find he was already looking at you. The colour of his eyes this close and in this light, was every colour at once— the brown and the green and the warm amber underneath, the colour that never resolved into one thing, shifting with what it was given. And they were very still on you. The usual movement in them— the calculation, the management, the careful working-out of everything, had stopped completely when on you. There was nothing in them right now except the simple, undecorated fact of you so close, with his hand still at your skin. You made no effort to move, and neither did he.
His jaw shifted slightly. A breath escaped, careful, controlled— and his eyes dropped, briefly, to where his hand still was, as though he had only just registered that it hadn't moved. "Are you...all right?" he said, so quietly it was almost a whisper.
"Yes," you whispered, almost breathlessly. Which was true. Which was also, in every specific circumstance, not the complete answer. His hand was still at your collarbone, the contact so light that it was barely there and absolutely there, and the warmth of it was something you were not going to stop feeling when it was gone. The moment had held, long past the point where it should have resolved into something ordinary— a step back, a cleared throat, the resumption of the walk.
Then Sasha's voice, from thirty feet away, bright and carrying: "Shall we continue along the south path, Your Highness?"
The moment broke instantly, and Jean drew his hand back— not quickly however, not with the guilt of someone caught, but slowly, deliberately, the way you put down something carefully rather than dropping it. He straightened, and looked at the rose wall, then back at you with an expression that was composed and was also, around the edges, not.
"Shall we?" he asked, and offered you his arm again.
You took it, continuing the path down south. The gravel was quiet underfoot, and Petra and Sasha fell back into their places behind you with the natural ease of women who were professionally unaware of the last five minutes that had just unfolded.
summary: It's Ancient Rome, and you are the emperor's daughter. While at The Colosseum to watch a game, a certain Gladiator catches your attention— they call him Reiner, and he has never lost in the arena. When your father plans to marry you off to a senator triple your age without your choice or say, you decide to make one last choice yourself....
Gladiator! Reiner x Female! Reader (oneshot)
a/n: Ok the way I ran to my laptop to write this when I saw people wanted a part two— I did not expect people to like the first part so much :') and I knew I needed to give Reiner and you a happy ending of course. I wrote this kinda sleep deprived and rushed so please ignore any errors. enjoy :)
The days between the garden and the feast were the longest of your life. Not because nothing happened in them—things happened, the ordinary machinery of the palace turned as it always did, meals and audiences and your father's advisors moving through the corridors with their scrolls and their whispered urgencies. But underneath all of it, constant and low and entirely ungovernable, was the knowledge of what had happened in the old garden under the pine trees. What had been said there, and done there, and what it had felt like to lie in the shade of an old pine with the city far away and his hands careful and certain and warm, as though you were something worth being careful with. You had not slept well since.
Not badly, exactly, but with the particular, restless wakefulness of someone whose body had learned something new about itself and had not yet finished processing the information. You lay in the dark of your chambers and stared at the ceiling and thought about the size of him, and the specific, deliberate quality of his attention, which felt different from every other kind of attention you had ever received because it had nothing transactional in it, nothing that was measuring your use or your value. The way he had touched you, done those unspeakable things to you on the stone bench— you had to admit it to yourself, you had recalled these memories more than once, and you had thought about very little else since.
You managed to stay away from him for two days.
The third morning you were in the upper colonnade before you had consciously decided to be, the scroll open in your hands, the training court below bright in the early light. He was already there. He always seemed to already be there, as though he slept less than other people or needed the early hours for something the rest of the day could not provide. He looked up when you appeared. No searching, but direct, immediate, as though he had simply known where to find you. And this time he held your gaze for longer than a second. Long enough that something moved through it, something that had not been there in the arena or the banquet— something that had been added in a garden and could not now be taken back out. His expression did not change, precisely—he was too controlled for that—but there was a quality to the stillness of it, a particular weight, that told you he had been lying awake too.
Long enough that your hand tightened slightly on the scroll before you composed yourself and looked deliberately back at the page. You heard, distantly, the sound of his practice resuming below, but you did not read a single word.
The fourth morning he was already looking at the colonnade when you arrived, before you had even reached the stone balustrade— as though he had been waiting to see you appear. As though the watching was something he had given up pretending not to do. You stood at the rail and looked down, and he looked up, and neither of you moved for a long moment. Then he gave you a single, small nod— private, the acknowledgment of something that existed between the two of you and nowhere else; and went back to his forms. You folded the scroll under your arm and stood there for a very long time just watching him train.
The feast was four days after the garden.
You dressed and you looked at your reflection and felt the particular, structural exhaustion of a woman preparing herself for a performance she did not choose and could not leave. Your silk stola was deep red— your father's choice, sent to your chambers that morning, along with a golden wreath crown to wear— and you wore both because you had not yet found the specific courage required to stop doing what you were told, and told yourself, quietly, that you were still collecting it.
"You look beautiful, my lady,” Mina said, behind you, her voice was careful.
"Thank you," you muttered. "But I know what it's really for."
She said nothing. She knew you well enough.
The palace was full. Senators, their wives, the careful hierarchy of seating arranged with the precision of a military campaign. Your father at the high table, already in conversation, already pleased with himself in the ambient, self-sustaining way of a powerful man among his peers. And along the far wall— You found him before you found your seat.
He was standing where he always stood, at the end of the row, arms loosely crossed, the lamplight warm across the breadth of his chest and shoulders. He was looking at the floor when you entered, that deliberate, stored inattention, and then his head came up, and the hazel eyes found you across the full length of the room, and for a moment you both simply…..stopped.
It was only a moment. Less than a moment. But it was the kind of moment that contains a great deal.
Something moved through his face. Very small and controlled. And given what you now knew about what lay beneath that careful surface— given what you had seen in the garden and in the specific way he had looked at you afterward with that expression that had no performance in it at all—it was very, completely unmistakable. You looked away before anyone could notice, took your seat, and arranged your expression into its correct configuration. You waited for this senator named Barro. And of course, he arrived late.
He was the sort of man who had been permitted to be late his entire life and had mistaken permission for entitlement so thoroughly that the distinction had long since ceased to exist for him, and he arrived with the unhurried confidence of someone who assumed his presence was worth waiting for, which was, you discovered, only the first of many things about him that would test your composure. He was not impressive, in the physical sense. Short— shorter than you had imagined, though you could not have said why you had imagined him at any height at all. He carried the heavy, settled weight of decades of comfortable eating, the soft, spreading bulk of a man who had long since stopped engaging with the question of his own form because the world had never required him to. His scalp showed pink beneath what remained of his hair, thin threads of grey swept sideways with the careful optimism of a man who had convinced himself the arrangement still served its purpose. His face was broad and fleshy, the nose veined at the tip, and several rings on thick fingers. A toga of the finest wool, and an atmosphere of expensive oil that arrived in the room some moments before he did. He kissed your hand, and his lips were dry and crusty.
"My lady." He straightened with the effortful quality of a man whose back had opinions about straightening. "You are very like your father."
"People say so," you agree.
"Intelligent." He lowered himself onto the couch with considerable deliberateness, the cushions absorbing his weight with a patience that spoke well of their construction. "One can see it. I find intelligence in a wife agreeable, provided it is applied to the right things."
"And what things would those be, Senator?"
"The management of a household." He reached for his wine, the thick fingers curling around the cup. "The comfort of a husband. The bearing of children." He glanced at you with the air of a man extending a kindness. "A clever woman makes an excellent home. That is where her gifts are best employed."
You smiled the smile that lived entirely on the surface of your face and had nothing whatsoever beneath it. "How fortunate," you grimace, "that we agree."
He seemed to find this satisfactory, and behind him you could see you father smiling. Across the room, the feast arranged itself around you like a painting of itself.
You were aware of Reiner in the way you were aware of the lamplight—constantly, without needing to look directly at it to know it was there. You could feel the particular quality of his attention from the far wall even when you were not watching him, the specific gravity of it, and you resisted looking for as long as you could manage, which was less long than you would have wished.
When you did look— he was watching you with an expression you had not seen on him in any public space before. Not the flat, professional attention he wore for rooms, nor the careful blankness of a man performing invisibility. This was something else entirely, something that had slipped past his control, and what it was— what lived in those hazel eyes across the length of the room— was unmistakably jealousy.
It was being controlled and ontained— kept still with the total self-command of a man who had spent years learning to keep still under very much worse. But there, in the tightness of the jaw and the quality of the stillness and the way his gaze moved from your face to the man beside you and back again with the flat, assessing look of something being weighed and found wanting. You looked away before your face could betray you.
You thought about the garden. About the weight of his hands and the specific unhurried warmth of him and the way he had looked at you afterward, in the light, with an expression that was open, in a way you did not think he allowed himself often. You thought about that look and you sat beside Barro and you smiled and you answered questions about the management of households and you felt the gulf between those two things like a physical dimension of the room.
The courses arrived in procession. A whole roasted boar, which Barro regarded with warm approval and addressed with the focused enthusiasm of a man greeting an old friend. Honeyed figs, some imported cheeses. Barro spoke between mouthfuls with the fluency of a man entirely untroubled by the coexistence of eating and sustained monologue, and the monologue was comprehensive.
He discussed the grain contracts and the senate and the disappointing quality of younger men and the regrettable influence of eastern fashions on domestic values. He discussed his first wife briefly and without particular feeling, and did not discuss his second wife at all, which was its own kind of statement. He discussed his houses—plural, and he was pleased that they were plural— and that the renovations were planned for the east wing of his largest estate he owned and how a woman's eye for decoration might be rather pleasant to have around. "I thought you might find that sort of thing agreeable," he said, dabbing his mouth. "Something softer, women often do."
"How thoughtful of you," you say, controlled and cool.
He patted your hand firmly. His hand was heavy and slightly damp, resting on yours with the proprietorial ease of a man who had, in his own mind, already completed this transaction and was simply allowing the formalities their necessary time. You did not move your hand. You looked at the rings sunk into the flesh of his fingers and thought— with a vividness that was entirely inappropriate and entirely beyond your control— about a different pair of hands on you instead. Roughened palms and careful thumbs and the specific gentleness of something very strong that had decided to be gentle, and had meant it.
You looked up to find Reiner was watching the hand on yours.
His jaw was set in a way you recognised, the way it set when he was absorbing something that required absorbing, when he was taking in a thing that cost him and choosing not to show the cost. But his eyes, when they moved from the joined hands to your face, were not controlled in the same way. They were very direct and carrying something in them that he had perhaps not intended you to be able to read from this distance and that you read with perfect clarity anyway.
Get your hand off her. He did not say it. He would not say it, would never say it, would never allow himself the gesture of saying it. But it was there, in the set of his shoulders and the absolute stillness of him and the particular quality of the way he was looking at Barro with the flat assessment of a man who had evaluated threats for a living and was conducting an evaluation.
You looked away before Barro noticed, but you were not quick enough. "Ah," he said, pleasantly, following your gaze to the far wall with the lazy ease of a man surveying a room he has already decided belongs to him. "Looking at your father's new toys, are we?"
The word settled in the room.
"The Bear, yes?" He tilted his head, examining Reiner with the expression of a man appraising livestock at market, taking in the height, the shoulders, the general dimensions, with the detached transactional interest of someone calculating utility. "I saw him at the arena not long ago. Considerable specimen." He reached for his wine. "Your father paid a remarkable sum for the contract, or so I hear." A comfortable shrug. "One must keep perspective, of course. The crowd makes heroes of them, gives the mob something to cheer, and there's a practical use in that. But at the end of the day—" a small, settled pause "—they're cattle in bronze. Valuable cattle. But one mustn't confuse the spectacle for the reality."
He refilled his cup and returned, with great contentment, to describing his Tuscan property. Cattle. The word sat in your chest beside the image of Reiner's face in the garden— the moment he had crouched down on the path beside you. The way he had listened to you. The way he had moaned your name later—
You looked at the senator beside you. At the rings and the thinning hair and the damp hands and the broad, fleshy, self-satisfied face of a man who had moved through his entire life without once being required to truly see another person, who had consumed two courses of boar while describing his properties and patted your hand with the confidence of ownership and referred to a man of more genuine dignity and more genuine humanity than he would ever possess as livestock— and felt it settle through you, cold and absolute and very clear.
This was not what your father had arranged for you, no. This was a room with no windows to escape.
Across the room, Reiner's eyes were still on you, and had perhaps not moved from you since Barro had looked away. The slight amber of them steady in the lamplight, direct and carrying something that his discipline could not, tonight, entirely conceal. His jaw was set and his hands were still. He was giving nothing to the room that the room had not already taken.
But you were not the room. You held his gaze for one long, still moment across all of it, and in that moment something passed between you that had no language for it and did not need any. Then you looked away, picked up your wine, drank it, and waited for the feast to end.
It ended, as all things did, eventually.
The guests began their unhurried departures, the senators exchanging their final courtesies, slaves moving to clear the platters. Barro took his leave of you with another dry kiss to your hand and you watched him go and felt nothing except the specific, bonedeep cold of a future closing in. Your father found you before you could leave.
He appeared at your side with the quiet efficiency of a man accustomed to having his movements facilitate outcomes, and steered you, gently but without real option, into the small anteroom off the main corridor—the one with the window that looked out over the dark garden, the city lights far below, the night sky enormous and indifferent above. "Well," he said, with the warmth of a man who considers himself generous. "What did you think of him?"
You looked at your father. At the face that was, as everyone always told you, so like yours…and thought how strange it was that two faces could be so similar and see so completely differently.
"He is very….certain of himself," you say carefully.
Your father laughed. "He is a man of consequence, certainty is his right." He looked at you with the fond, slightly distracted affection of a man who loves a thing without particularly attending to it. "I know he is not young….but he is stable, wealthy, and well-connected, and he will treat you well. He has agreed to a generous arrangement." A pause. "It has been settled. The formal ceremony will be before the end of the month."
The words landed in the quiet room.
Settled. Is this acceptable? Do you have any preference in the matter of your own life? Simply: settled. As though you were a column of figures that had been correctly added and the sum confirmed. "I….see," you mumble, at a loss for words.
"You'll grow accustomed," your father said, kindly. "They all do." He patted your shoulder once and left. You stood in the anteroom for a long moment. Then something cracked open in your chest— not loudly, not with drama, but with the quiet, definitive sound of something that has been under sustained pressure for a very long time finally giving way— and you turned and walked, with great speed and absolute purpose.
He opened the door before you had finished knocking.
He had heard your footsteps—had recognised them, specifically, in the corridor, no doubt— and when he opened the door and saw your face, something in his own shifted immediately. Not to alarm, but to attention. The full, complete attention of a man who had learned to read the difference between a person who was managing and a person who was not, and was not, in this instance, going to pretend he did not see it.
He stepped back and you came in, the door closing behind you. The room was a small, plain space— a burning lamp, a wooden pallet and small chest in the corner. His few things arranged with the deliberate tidiness of a man accustomed to limited space. He was in his tunic, hair slightly disheveled from the evening, the lamplight warm on the gold of it and the dark stubble along his jaw, and when he looked at you his expression had none of its public stillness in it. Just him. Just the real version, the one that existed underneath all the careful management, with the hazel eyes present and unguarded and entirely focused on you.
"How was it?" he asked lowly.
"He called you cattle." The words came out flat and hard. "When he noticed me looking at you, he said something along the lines of you being my father’s ‘toys’."
Something moved through his eyes. Sharp but quickly controlled, his jaw tightened. "And your father?" he said, after a moment.
"My father—" your voice fractured slightly on the word, and you stopped, and steadied it "—my father pulled me aside after the feast to inform me that it is settled. The ceremony will be before the end of the month. He said I would grow accustomed." The cold from the anteroom was still in your chest. "He said they all do." Reiner said nothing. He looked at you with an expression that had no deflection in it—no reassurance offered too quickly, no words supplied to fill the silence before it had been felt. He simply looked at you, and let it be what it was.
He crossed the room in two steps and stopped in front of you— close, not touching yet, looking down at you with those eyes that had never once been anything less than fully present. "You're trembling," he said quietly.
"I know."
"Is it anger?"
"Among other things…" He studied you. The hazel eyes moved over your face with that full, unhurried attention, reading you the way he read the arena—thoroughly, without missing anything.
"I've been thinking about you," he said suddenly, not even as an introduction to something longer. Just the statement, laid down plainly, the way he laid all his truest things down.
You looked up at him then. "Since I met you." He held your gaze. "Every hour, I lie on that pallet—" a brief, almost imperceptible tilt of his head toward the bed in the corner "—and I think about you until it's light enough to train, and then I train until I'm too tired to think, and then I think about you again." Something in his expression shifted, the careful surface giving way, just fractionally, to what lived under it, the thing he had been keeping on that very tight rein all evening from the far wall of the room. "I have thought about leaving. About taking what I can carry and going north, or somewhere across the sea, going anywhere that isn't—" he stopped. The jaw worked. "I told myself it wasn't my right, that I couldnt leave you. But I realised I had nothing to offer you. That you deserved—"
"Reiner," you tried to interrupt him softly.
"—better than a man who belongs to your father on paper," he finished. "That is still true. All of that is still true." His voice was low and very certain. "And I cannot stop thinking about you anyway."
The words were plain and enormous and exactly like him—no ornament, no performance, just the fact of it, offered without apology. "Then don't stop," you said suddenly, talking quicker than you could think. "Let’s leave together."
He was very still. "I mean it," you said. “I want to go….where-ever—north, across the sea, it doesn't matter. As long as I’m with you—" your throat tightened. “We need to go before my father makes the arrangement with Barro permanent and I lose the last chance I have to choose you." You looked up at him, all the way up, into those dark eyes that had seen you clearly from the first moment in the arena and had not looked away since. "I know what it costs you. I know what you risk. You're his property, and if we're caught—"
"I know what happens if we're caught," he said firmly, no fear in it, just the acknowledgement of a man who has weighed a thing and made his peace with the weight.
"Then you know why I'm asking."
"I know why you're asking." His voice was rough now, the roughness he only let through when he had stopped managing it. "And I know what it means that you came here to ask me. What it would cost you."
"I don't care what it costs me."
"I do." The words came out with a force that surprised you—quiet but certain, with the particular quality of something he had clearly thought about at length. "I care what it costs you. I have—" he exhaled, slow and controlled, "—I have thought about you every minute since we were last together in the garden, and not one of those minutes was I not also thinking about what is right for you. What you deserve. Whether I am—"
"You are what I deserve!" You snapped, your voice cracking slightly on it. "You are, Reiner."
His eyes held yours, the faint lamplight was warm between you as a small moment of silence stretched between. "Yes," he said quietly.
One word. Simple, direct, definitive—the way all his truest things were. And then his hands came to your face, both of them, the careful roughened warmth of them cupping you as though you were something he had been frightened to hold and had decided, finally, to hold anyway. His thumbs moved along your cheekbones. He looked at you up close, the hazel eyes very near and very steady, with an expression that had nothing held back in it— all the wanting that had been kept at careful distance across rooms and training courts and eleven days of deliberate restraint, present and unguarded and entirely, unmistakably his.
"I have wanted you," he said, very quietly, "more than I have wanted anything in my life. More than freedom. More than—" his voice dropped lower still "—more than I thought I was allowed to want anything, anymore."
Your eyes filled with tears, hot and stinging as they traced paths down your cheeks. You didn't try to stop them; you let them fall freely, marking the rawness of the moment. The air in the small chamber was thick with unspoken words, charged with the electricity of finally giving in to what had been simmering between you for weeks. Then he kissed you, and it was not gentle; it was a collision, hungry and desperate. It was the kiss of a starving man finally offered a feast, of a drowning man breaking the surface for air. His mouth was demanding, his lips parting yours with an urgent pressure that left you breathless. You tasted the salt on his skin, the rawness of his breath, the faint coppery tang of wine from earlier. His tongue swept into your mouth, claiming, exploring, possessing every inch of you with feverish intensity.
His hands, so large and scarred from years of training and battle, cupped your face, his thumbs wiping away your tears with a roughness that was somehow infinitely tender. The calloused pads of his thumbs scraped against your delicate skin, sending shivers down your spine. You met his desperation with your own, your hands fisting in the simple tunic he wore, pulling him closer, needing to feel the solid heat of him against you. The fabric was rough under your fingers, but beneath it you could feel the hard planes of his chest, the rapid thumping of his heart.
His need was a palpable thing, a current arcing between your bodies, and it was the most potent drug you had ever known. Your blood was on fire, every nerve ending alight with sensation. His hands moved from your face to grip your waist with a bruising intensity that made you gasp into his mouth. He pulled you flush against him, and you could feel his erection, hard and insistent pressing against your stomach through the layers of clothing. He broke the kiss, his breath coming in short, jagged hitches. His eyes were blown wide, the pupils swallowing the warm hazel of his irises. They shimmered with a needy, obsessive light that made your knees weak. "Gods," he breathed, his voice rough with emotion. "Do you have any idea what you do to me?"
He slid down your body, his face pressing into the crook of your neck, inhaling you like you were the only oxygen left in the city. You could feel his nose nuzzling against your pulse point, his lips brushing against the sensitive skin there. His breath was hot and ragged, ghosting across your throat. "You smell so good," he murmured against your skin. "Like vanilla."
His hands began to fumble with your stola, his fingers shaking with anticipation. The fine silk whispered as he pushed it upward, his knuckles brushing against your thighs as he slowly moved downwards until he finally managed to push the fabric up and expose your lower half and he froze, staring back up at you with a look of pure, unadulterated worship. His eyes roamed over your exposed flesh, taking in every curve, every dip, every detail like he was committing it to memory.
"Please," he whimpered against you, the sound vibrating against your thigh. It was a broken, desperate sound that went straight to your core. "Please, let me taste you. I need to know you're real–I need to feel you. I've dreamed about this–"
You felt a surge of affection mixed with apprehension, your hands tangling in his blonde hair. The strands were soft between your fingers, a stark contrast to the roughness of his hands. "No," you whispered, a playful but hesitant breath. "You shouldn't..."
Reiner let out a pathetic, broken sound— a genuine whimper that tore through you and made you clench with need. He pressed his forehead against your inner thigh, before looking up at you with dark hazel eyes that were practically begging. "Please... I'm begging you. I need this— I need you. I'll do anything, please— just let me taste you."
He sounded so desperate, so utterly undone by you, that you couldn't resist. Your resolve crumbled like dust in the wind. You let him push you backwards gently onto the stone floor. The cold hardness of the floor contrasted sharply with the heat building between your thighs. His calloused hands grasped your thighs, thumbs pressing into the soft flesh, spreading you open for him. He was on his knees on the cold stone floor, the rough fabric of his tunic bunching around his hips, and his breath was hot and ragged against your exposed skin as he looked up at you, his dark eyes wild with a desperate, aching hunger. You watched him, your chest heaving with anticipation, as he lowered his head between your thighs.
The moment his tongue hit your clit you let out a breathy gasp, your head hitting the stone floor behind you. Reiner didn't hold back. His tongue moved with desperate hunger, exploring and tasting as if he'd been starving for this moment. He licked you from your entrance to your clit in one long, slow stroke that made your toes curl. Your hips bucked involuntarily, and Reiner whimpered against your pussy, the sound vibrating through you and sending waves of pleasure coursing through your veins. The wet sounds of his mouth on you echoed around the small room, mingling with your increasingly desperate breaths. Reiner's whimpers grew louder, more frequent, betraying how completely undone he was by just pleasuring you. He was like a man dying of thirst who had just found an oasis, drinking from you as if his life depended on it.
"You taste like heaven," he murmured, pulling back for a split second, his lips glistening with your juices. "You're so beautiful—"
He dove back in with renewed fervor. His nose nudged against your clit as he buried his face in your heat, and he groaned low in his throat, the sound primal and possessive as you cried out. "Reiner," you breathed, your fingers tightening in his hair. "Oh, fuck."
He responded with another moan, his movements growing more confident, more demanding as one of his hands left your thigh to grip your ass, pulling you harder against his face. His other hand slid up your stomach, fingers splaying across your ribs, holding you steady. He ate you out with increasing desperation, like a starving man given a banquet, unable to get enough. He sucked your clit into his mouth, then released it with a wet pop, only to plunge his tongue back inside you, tasting, drinking, devouring.
You could feel the orgasm building, a tidal wave of heat crashing through your hips. The pressure was mounting, coiling deep inside you like a spring about to snap. Reiner seemed to sense it, his movements becoming more focused, more deliberate. He circled your clit with his tongue, then flattened it and pressed hard, sending shockwaves through your body. But as the peak approached, you made a quick decision— you wanted to feel him inside you when you came. Grabbing Reiner's shoulders, you pulled him up. "Stop," you breathed, your chest heaving. "I need you now. I need you inside me."
Reiner didn't need to be told twice. He looked like a man possessed, his face slick with your juices, his eyes burning with an unholy light. He hauled you to your feet and kissed you again, a messy, desperate clash of teeth and tongues— you could taste yourself on him, and it only fueled the fire. The intimacy of it, the raw honesty of your combined flavors, made your head spin.
He backed you toward the pallet, his hands roaming your body, tearing at the remaining fabric of your stola covering your top half. It fell away, pooling on the floor, and then his hands were on your bare skin. His calloused palms rasped against your sensitive flesh as he fondled your breasts, thumbs brushing over your nipples until they pebbled into tight, aching points. "You're perfect," he murmured against your mouth, his stubble rough against your upper lip. "Every inch of you is fucking perfect."
He lifted you as if you weighed nothing, laying you down on the thin, coarse blanket of his bed. The pallet was simple, just a straw mattress covered with a rough piece of linen used as a blanket, but it felt like the most luxurious bed in the world right now. He followed you down, covering your body with his own. The weight of him on you was glorious, a crushing, wonderful pressure that made you feel safe and possessed by him all at once.
He settled between your thighs, his cock nudging against your slick, swollen folds, and you could feel how thick and hard he was for you. There was no more time for preamble, for teasing, this was a need that had been dammed up for a few days, and now it was breaking free with the force of a flood. He looked down at you, his eyes burning with a fierce, possessive light, and then he drove into you.
A cry tore from your throat as he filled you, stretching you open with a single, powerful thrust. Reiner felt bigger than you'd remembered, and the sudden, overwhelming fullness was a delicious ache that had you'd forgotten how much you loved. He gave you no time to adjust, just setting a hard, fast rhythm as his hips snapped against yours. "You're too much," he gasped against your neck, his voice strained and ragged. "I won't last long with you wrapped around me like this."
His words sent a fresh wave of desire through you, and you tightened your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. You both moaned in sync, his rhythm becoming erratic. The friction of his body against yours, combined with the remnants of your earlier pleasure, pushed you toward the edge again. His breath was hot against your ear, punctuated by desperate whimpers and the slick sounds of your bodies joining. The pallet bed groaned under the assault, the sound mingling with your ragged breaths and his guttural grunts. His cock pounded into you, each stroke hitting a place deep inside you that made sparks flash behind your eyes– your nails raking down his back, leaving red furrows on his scarred skin.
He buried his face in the crook of your neck, his harsh breaths hot against your skin, and he fucked you with the desperate strength of a man who had finally found his one salvation. "You're so perfect," he repeated, his voice a raw growl in your ear. "So fucking perfect for me."
You could only whimper and moan in response, lost in the overwhelming sensations. He shifted his grip, one hand supporting your weight and the other reaching down to grind his thumb against your clit while he continued to hammer into you. The combination was overwhelming, and every thrust felt like it was reaching your heart.
"Tell me you're mine," he pleaded, his pace increasing, his breath hot and full of desperation.
"I'm yours!" you cried out, your voice cracking with pleasure. "J-just don't stop!"
"I'll never stop," he vowed, his movements becoming frantic, his body shaking with the effort of holding back his own release. "I'll spend the rest of my life worshipping you."
Suddenly, he pulled out, leaving you feeling empty and bereft for a moment. Before you could protest, he was flipping you over onto your stomach, his large hands gripping your hips and pulling you up onto your knees. He entered you from behind, his cock sliding back in with a wet, delicious sound that made you moan and whine. One of his hands reached around to play with your clit while the other gripped your breast, rolling your nipple between his thumb and forefinger, and the dual stimulation was almost too much to bear for you–your eyes rolling to the back of your head as you let out a long moan.
"Fuck, you feel so good like this," he grunted, his hips pistoning against you. "S-so deep. Can feel all of you."
He pushed you flat onto the pallet and drove into you relentlessly, the sound of skin slapping against skin filling the small room. Your breasts swung forward with each thrust, the nipples dragging against the coarse blanket and sending jolts of pleasure-pain through your body. You could feel another orgasm building, stronger than the first.
"Reiner," you gasped, pushing back against him. "Harder. Fuck me harder."
He obliged, his movements becoming almost brutal in their intensity. The pallet was knocking against the wall now, a steady, rhythmic sound that matched the pounding of your heart. You were completely lost to sensation, nothing existing but the feel of him inside you, the stretch and burn of his possession, the overwhelming pleasure that was building to an impossible crescendo. Just as you were about to come, he pulled out again. This time, he turned you onto your back once more, settling between your thighs with a look of fierce determination. He entered you slowly this time, his eyes locked on yours as he filled you inch by inch.
"I want to see you when you come," he said, his voice rough with emotion. "Want to see your face."
He began to move again, setting a slower but deeper rhythm. Each thrust was deliberate, measured, designed to hit that perfect spot inside you, to pleasure you. He leaned down to capture one of your nipples in his mouth, sucking hard, his tongue swirling around the sensitive peak.
You arched into his mouth, your hands tangling in his hair again. "Reiner," you moaned. "Oh fu—” He moved to the other breast, giving it the same attention. His teeth scraped gently against your nipple, sending a jolt straight to your clit. You could feel the orgasm building again, inexorable and overwhelming.
"Look at me," he commanded, his voice husky.
You forced your eyes open, meeting his intense gaze. The emotions swimming in the depths of his eyes took your breath away– desire, worship, need, and something else, something deeper and more terrifying than all the rest combined.
"I-I love you," you whispered, the words tearing from your throat without your permission. "Gods help me, but I love you."
Reiner froze for a second, his thrusts stilling and his eyes widening. Then he crushed his mouth to yours in a kiss that was somehow both brutal and tender. "I love you too," he rasped against your lips. "Fuck, I've loved you since the moment I first saw you."
He began to move again, his thrusts becoming harder and faster than before. His thumb found your clit again, rubbing tight and desperate circles that pushed you closer and closer to the edge. "Come for me again," he demanded. The combination of his words, his touch and his possession was too much; and he orgasm crashed over you like a tidal wave, stealing your breath, your vision, your very thoughts. You cried out his name, your body convulsing, your pussy clamping down around him like a vise. Reiner followed you over the edge with a hoarse cry, his body tensing as he poured himself into you. You could feel the pulse of his release, the warmth spreading through you as he filled you with his cum. He collapsed on top of you, his body shaking with the force of his orgasm, his face buried in the crook of your neck.
For a long moment, you just lay there, tangled together, your bodies slick with sweat and other fluids. The only sounds in the room were your ragged breaths gradually evening out, the pounding of your hearts slowly returning to normal.
He shifted his weight, rolling onto his side but keeping you wrapped in his arms. He looked down at you, his expression soft, almost vulnerable. "I meant it," he said quietly. "Every word."
You reached up to trace the scars on his face, your fingers gentle against the rough tissue. "I know," you whispered. "So did I."
You were lying on the floor of his small plain room a while later— his rough blanket beneath you, the pallet abandoned sometime earlier in favour of the warmer, closer arrangement of the floor and the lamp— and the city outside had gone to the particular silence of very late night, that specific hush where even Rome, which never fully slept, had at least agreed to rest its voice for a few hours. His arm was around you and your head was against his chest. You had been tracing, without deciding to, the line of an old scar along his ribs, and he had been watching the ceiling with the slow, settled focus of a man who is not sleeping but is not entirely awake either— just simply present. You had not spoken in a while, but you didn't need to. That was one of the things you had discovered about him, in pieces, over weeks of stolen mornings and one afternoon that had rearranged something permanent in you and now this—that his silences were not empty. They were full, they contained him, entirely, and being inside one felt like being let into something private.
His hand moved slowly through your hair, and you felt the rise and fall of his chest beneath your cheek. The lamp threw its low amber light across the ceiling and you watched it and thought about your father, and the senator named Barro you were to marry. and all the machinery of the life that was waiting for you on the other side of that door. And then, as if reading your thoughts, Reiner spoke very quietly into the dark. "I can't do another night of this."
You went still, listening to him.
"I can't do another night without you," he said. As though the clarification were necessary, which it was not, but which was very like him— precise, even in tenderness. "I can't lie on that pallet for any more nights knowing you're somewhere in this palace and I can't— I cant do anything about it." A pause as the hand in your hair stopped moving. "I cannot do any more days without you in my arms.” You lifted your head to look at him to find his hazel eyes were already on you. Close and low-lit and entirely without the careful management he wore for the world, but just him, the real underneath of him, which you had been permitted to see in the garden and in the dark and now here, and which you intended to spend a very long time learning.
"Then let’s not spend another night apart," you said. “Let’s leave now.”
He looked at you. "Now?"
"Now," you repeat. "Tonight. Right now." You held his gaze. "Unless you want to spend some more mornings training to go fight in the arena?"
Something moved through his expression— the dry, quiet flicker of it. Not quite a smile. "No," he huffed. "I don't."
"Then we leave."
He was quiet for a beat. Looking at you with that full, assessing attention, making certain— because he always made certain, always gave things their due— and then something in his face settled. The deliberate settling of a man who has been deliberating for weeks and has finally, cleanly, stopped. "There are merchant boats," he said, sitting up, his voice dropping into that quiet focused register. "At the port, it’ll take two hours by road. Its cargo ships, mostly, heading north up the coast. We can get a carriage there—they take passengers, no questions, if you have coin." He looked at you steadily. "And I have coin. Enough."
"How long have you known about all this?"
A pause, the almost-smile appearing again. "Longer than I should admit."
You sat up too. The low room, the lamplight, the small plain space that had become, over the last hours, the most important room in your life. You looked at him—at his eyes and the gold hair loose around his face and the broad warmth of his shoulders— and felt something in your chest that was not fear and was not hesitation, but was simply the clean, clear feeling of a decision that had already made itself. "All right," you said quietly. He reached out and tucked a piece of your hair behind your ear with the side of his thumb—a gesture so small and so tender that it hit somewhere behind your sternum. His eyes on yours, soft and serious at once, the way only his eyes managed to be.
"Are you certain?" he said.
"Reiner." You put your hand over his where it rested against your cheek. "I have never been more certain of anything."
He looked at you for one more moment. Then he brought your hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to your knuckles—not a courtly gesture, nothing performed, just warm and gentle, his eyes closing briefly, a man marking a moment because it deserved to be marked.
Then he stood, and pulled you gently to your feet, and that was that. "Here," he said.
He crossed to the small chest in the corner and pulled from it a dark wool tunic and a cloak, deep brown and plain, the kind of thing that belonged to someone who moved through the world without wanting to be remembered by it. He held them out.
You looked at the red stola pooled on the floor, and thought about your father requesting for you to wear it. You stepped over it without touching it and took what Reiner offered. The tunic was enormous— his shoulders being what they were, it fell almost to your knees and swallowed your hands entirely. You pushed the sleeves up and looked at him.
"Well?" you asked.
Something moved across his face, warm and a little helpless. "You look like you're wearing my tunic."
"That was the general idea."
"Yes," he said, lower. "I know."
He reached out and drew the hood of the cloak up himself, tucking a piece of your hair beneath it with quiet attention. His hands settled at either side of your face for a moment, just holding. Then he took your hand, and you left.
He did not let go of you once. Through the dark palace corridors, past the guttered torches and the sleeping household and the guards stationed at the outer walls with their backs to the inside— Reiner's hand stayed wrapped around yours, certain and complete. The kind of grip that said: I have you. I am not letting go.
He kept you behind him at every junction, checking each corridor before drawing you through. When voices sounded near the east colonnade he pulled you into the shadow of an archway and placed himself between you and the open passage, his body easy and still, his breathing slow. You stood in the dark against him and felt the steadiness of him and thought that this was what safety felt like, not the locked rooms and high walls of the palace, but this— a hand that didn't loosen, a body that turned toward you instead of away.
The voices passed. His grip eased. He moved, and you moved with him, and the gate was ahead, and then it was behind. The night air met you clean and cold, carrying woodsmoke and river and the stone-dust smell of a city at rest. You both stood for a moment in the moonlight outside the walls. Rome glittered below on the dark hillside, its torches scattered like something spilled.
Reiner lifted your joined hands and pressed his lips to your knuckles, slow and warm, his eyes open and on you. Then he turned toward the city, and you went with him.
The streets were quiet at this hour. He stayed close the entire way— not hovering, but present, a fraction of him always attending to the road behind and the corner ahead, his body shifting almost imperceptibly whenever anyone passed near. Once, outside the Forum, a figure stepped abruptly from a doorway and Reiner's grip closed around your hand so immediately it happened before thought. A beat of stillness, before the figure passed. His hand slowly eased.
You pressed your shoulder into his arm. He adjusted his path without comment so you fitted more easily against him, and said nothing, and kept walking. The carriage waited at the edge of the Forum district, plain, wooden and working, already loaded for the port. The driver looked at you both with the total incuriosity of a man who charged for discretion as a matter of course. Coin changed hands. Reiner helped you in, his hand steady at your back, and then he was beside you, and the carriage began to move.
Rome passed you by as you moved. Torchlight and shadow. A fountain in an empty square. The streets widening and then emptying as the city thinned, the buildings falling away, the road opening into dark hills and the enormous sky above them— more stars than the city ever let you see, cold and clear and entirely indifferent, which was exactly what you wanted.
Reiner's arm settled around you without ceremony, and you leaned into it the same way, and his arm adjusted to hold you more fully, and that was the whole agreement. Then his lips, warm and unhurried, pressed into the top of your head. Not to say anything. Not to comfort or signal or manage. Just because you were there, and he wanted to. You felt it move through you, slow and certain, all the way down to your toes.
You looked out the back of the carriage. Rome glowed on the horizon behind you—the palace,the Colosseum, your father, the old senator named Barro and his damp hands. All of it lit and distant, shrinking behind you with every turn of the wheels.
You looked at it for a moment. Then you turned away from the view and pressed yourself closer into Reiner's side, into the warmth of him, the solid steadiness of him. His arm tightened around you without being asked. His hand resumed its slow movement through your hair.
summary: This season in the Royal Court of Paradis promises more than debutantes and dances...It promises a choice. Princess Y/N Reiss, presented for the second year in a row to court at her younger sister Historia's debut ball, stands at the very centre of it all, smiling politely while the entire kingdom quietly decides who she should belong to out of her admirable suitors.
The gentleman suitors: Eren Jeager, Jean Kirstein, Armin Arlert, Connie Springer, Reiner Braun, Erwin Smith and Levi Ackerman.
a/n: ahhh part three! Thank you again for all the love on this series :D I hope you enjoy this one and please let me know in the comments who you would pick out of them in this part cause honestly I can’t pick eee
You were having a perfectly good dream when Petra opened the curtains. The light arrived with the specific cruelty of a bright morning after a late night, and you made a sound into your pillow that was not a word and pulled the cover over your head, which accomplished nothing except a brief, pleasant darkness before it was removed with cheerful efficiency from the other side of the bed. "Good morning, Your Highness!"
Sasha Braus, one of your ladies-waiting and personal companions over the years, had many qualities— and discretion about morning light was not among them. You opened one eye to find she was standing at the foot of your bed with the bright, uncomplicated energy of someone who had slept extremely well and had opinions about the day ahead, her hair tied back and her expression carrying the particular enthusiasm of a person who found most things genuinely exciting and mornings specifically so. She was holding the cover with both hands and showed no signs of returning it. "Sasha!" you said, into the pillow.
"The morning calls begin at ten," she says helpfully. "It's half past eight."
"That's an hour and a half, I have plenty of time–"
"An hour and twenty-eight minutes, actually," she said matter-of-factly. "And your hair took nearly two hours last night, so....."
You closed your one eye again, yet this accomplished nothing. Petra appeared at the side of the bed with a cup of tea and the expression of a woman who had been dressing members of the Reiss household since you were just a child, and had therefore seen every variation of this conversation and was entirely unmoved by it. She set the tea on the bedside table and then began moving through the room with the calm, systematic efficiency of a general preparing a campaign. "Your Highness," she said, without looking up from the wardrobe she was already examining, "Please, tell me, how was the evening?"
You opened your eyes and sat up, reaching for the tea. "Long," you said.
"Long good or long difficult?"
You considered the full scope of the previous evening, all the dances, the balcony, the coal in your chest that hadn't quite made its decision, and took a long sip of tea. "Long interesting, let's just say," you say simply.
Petra made a sound that suggested this was the answer she had expected. Sasha, who had absolutely no business looking as delighted as she did at this information.....looked extremely delighted. "Interesting how?" Sasha asked.
"Sasha, leave her alone–" Petra said.
"I'm just asking!"
"You're prying."
"I'm engaging," Sasha said, with great dignity, and then to you, in a slightly lower voice, "Was it the dancing? I heard that you had seven sets of dances–" She grinned. "That's a lot of gentlemen!"
"It was a debut ball," you tell her. "There were many great gentlemen there."
"But seven dances for you specifically," Sasha said. "When you weren't even the debtuee!"
"Sasha," Petra said again, in a tone that closed the subject. Sasha closed her mouth, looking deeply unsatisfied, and began laying out the morning things with the slightly martyred energy of someone performing a task under protest.
You were halfway through your tea and Petra had begun the work of assessing your hair with the focused expression of a woman preparing for battle, when the door opened, not knocked, opened– with the specific energy of someone who had been awake for some time and had things to say about it. Historia was already dressed, which was notable, because Historia was not, by nature, an early riser. The fact that she was standing in your doorway at half past eight in a morning dress with her hair already pinned and her eyes bright with barely-contained excitement told you everything about the quality of her night's sleep, which appeared to have been considerably better than yours.
"They'll start arriving at ten!" she squealed.
"Good morning to you as well," you mutter.
She crossed the room and sat at the foot of your bed with the ease of someone who had been doing exactly this since she was old enough to walk down the corridor unassisted. "Do you think they'll all come? The ones who signed your card, I mean. Erwin said he'd definitely call– Father accepted it personally! I think Eren will definitely come because he– "
"Historia!"
"-he was so determined last night! A-and Jean will probably come because– "
"Historia!"
She stopped, and then looked at you. Her eyes were practically dancing. "Are you not," you began, with great patience, "the least bit interested in who might come to call on you today? It was your debut last night! You are the reason any of this is happening."
Historia considered this with the thoughtfulness she brought to most things. "Of course," she said. "I'm sure someone very pleasant will call for me today," She paused. "However, I'm more interested in who's coming for you."
You just stared at her. "You had seven dances," she said, with the calm of someone presenting an airtight case. "The mathematical probability of them calling for you this morning is simply very high at the moment."
"Historia....."
"I'm excited for you," she said, and the simplicity of it, the genuine warmth of it, disarmed you entirely, and she reached over and covered your hand with hers. "Let me be excited for you! Last night was– you were different, with some of gentlemen. I told you so. And today some of them will be coming knocking at our door and I want to be there for it." She squeezed your hand once, briefly, and sat back. "Is that not allowed?"
You looked at her for a moment. Then you took another sip of tea. "You're impossible," you groan. "You know that?"
"I prefer invested," she said serenely. From the wardrobe, Sasha made a sound that was hastily converted into a cough.
"Right," you said, setting down your cup. "What am I to wear?"
This was, in retrospect, an invitation. All three of them turned to look at you at the same moment, Historia from the foot of the bed, Sasha from the dressing table and Petra from the wardrobe, with the coordinated energy of people who had been waiting for exactly this question and had opinions prepared. "Something simple," you said quickly, preemptively. "It's just morning calls, not another ball."
"Something memorable," Historia said, at the same time, in a completely different direction.
"The blue," Sasha said immediately, already turning back to the wardrobe with the purposeful energy of someone who had decided. "The ice blue one. With the gold at the neckline."
"Is that not a bit too much for a morning dress?" you asked hesitantly.
"It's not a ball gown either," Sasha said, undeterred, already moving hangers with the focused efficiency of someone on a mission. "It's perfectly suitable for receiving. It's very.....Beautiful," she finished, with enormous satisfaction.
The gown was ice blue satin, the colour of winter light through glass, shifting silver at the edges where the fabric caught the morning sun coming through the windows. The bodice gathered at a low, graceful neckline with a small gold brooch at the centre, and the sleeves were short and ruffled at the shoulder, layers of the same pale satin falling in soft tiers. The skirt pooled like water, like something poured rather than sewn. It was undeniably an extraordinary dress.
You looked at Petra for her opinion, and saw Petra was looking at the gown in Sasha's hands with the assessing expression of a woman who had dressed Reiss women for a long time and knew, better than anyone, what a garment could do. "It's appropriate for morning calls, especially for gentlemen suitors," she said, finally, with the considered authority of someone delivering a verdict. "It is also," she added, with the ghost of something that on anyone else you might have called a smile, "the correct choice."
You looked at the gown, at the ice blue satin and the gold brooch and the skirt that moved like water.
You thought about morning calls, about all the calling cards that will appear on a silver tray today. You thought, briefly and without intending to, spoke. "Fine."
Sasha's face broke into a grin of complete and unguarded triumph. Historia looked quietly, warmly pleased. Petra simply moved forward and began to work, with the calm efficiency of someone for whom the decision had always been inevitable.
"The pearl choker," Petra said, to Sasha, who was already looking for it. "And the gold bracelet."
"Her hair up or down?" Sasha asked.
"Up," Historia said, from the foot of the bed. "Definitely up!"
"Up," Petra confirmed. You sat in the chair before the mirror and looked at yourself in the morning light and thought, with the specific resignation of someone outnumbered in their own dressing room, that the morning calls hadn't even begun and it was already an extraordinary amount.
Three calling cards arrived at five minutes to ten for you. Petra brought them on the silver tray with a composed expression and set them beside your morning hot buttered roll and tea without comment. Three cards, slightly staggered, as though they had arrived in sequence and been arranged in the order of their coming. The first was neat. The handwriting precise and even, the name taking up exactly the space required and no more.
Commander E. Smith
The second had clearly been written in a hurry. The letters were large and slightly emphatic, pressed hard into the card as though the writer had strong feelings about the ink making contact with the paper.
E. Yeager
No title or initial flourish, just the name, occupying considerably more of the card than it needed to. The third had slipped beneath the other two, as though hoping not to be noticed, which had the opposite effect. The handwriting was smaller and more controlled, signed with a precision that suggested the writer had started over at least once.
Lord J. Kirstein
You were still looking at the three of them when Historia appeared in your doorway again. "Father's set up the east parlour for me," she said, coming to look over your shoulder at the tray. "He says it's more appropriate for me to receive separately, since it's my debut season." She paused, examining the cards. "Looks like you might have your hands full anyway...."
"I know," you say.
Historia straightened. "Father's chaperoning me. Petra and Sasha are staying with you." She gave you a look that was warm and entirely too knowing for this hour of the morning. "Try not to enjoy yourself too much."
"I won't," you smile.
The east parlour and the drawing room sat on opposite sides of the entrance hall, close enough that you could hear, distantly, the sound of the front door opening and closing, the murmur of voices in the corridor. Close enough that you were aware, in a background kind of way, of Historia's morning proceeding alongside yours, your father's measured tones occasionally carrying through the walls. It was, you thought, a very good arrangement. Your father chaperoning Historia meant he was occupied, and Petra chaperoning you meant everything was correct but laid back. Sasha chaperoning you meant the morning would be considerably more entertaining than it had any right to be.
Petra sat near the window with her needlework, upright and attentive, the picture of propriety. Sasha sat near the door with her hands folded in her lap and the barely-contained energy of someone who had been told to be quiet and was managing it by a significant effort of will.
The drawing room was pleasant in the morning light, the fire low, the curtains open to the garden, the tea things arranged on the table with the precision that Petra considered the minimum acceptable standard. You sat in the chair nearest the window, the ice-blue satin of your gown catching the light, and waited with the composed expression of a woman who was not particularly waiting for anything.
At nine fifty-one, someone knocked on the front door. Sasha was on her feet before the second knock, giving a look back to you and Petra. She reappeared in the drawing room doorway thirty seconds later.
"It's Mr Yeager," she said, with the careful composure of someone delivering information they find extremely interesting. "He's— I told him the window doesn't open until ten—"
Petra looked up from her needlework. Her expression did not change, which communicated a great deal. "Show him in, Sasha," you said finally.
A pause. "The window isn't—"
"Is nine minutes away," you replied. "Show him in."
Eren Yeager came through the door with his hat in his hands and the expression of a man who had arrived somewhere important and was aware of it. He was tall, taller than you had quite remembered at the ball, perhaps because the ballroom had been full of people to measure him against.....and he was dressed with a care that sat slightly at odds with the general impression he gave, which was of someone who was always slightly too much for whatever room he was in. Dark hair, tied back away from his face, and eyes that were green and very direct, and he was looking at you with the unguarded attention that you were beginning to understand was simply how he looked at things he was interested in.
He was, you thought, much more handsome in the daylight. "Good morning," you said.
"Good morning," he said. He looked at you, at the gown, at the room, at all of it, and something moved through his expression that he didn't try to hide. "You look...." He stopped, "Breathtaking."
"Thank you," you said pleasantly. "Please, sit down Mr Yeager."
He sat down, the hat went on his knee. From the window, Petra resumed her needlework. From the door, Sasha resumed her folded hands, though the quality of her attention had changed significantly. At ten o'clock, the call was officially begun.
Tea was offered and was accepted. Which meant he was welcome for the duration, and the conversation that had already been happening for nine minutes was now formally a morning call, which made it, in the eyes of society, a very strong statement of intent.
He asked you three questions in the first ten minutes, which was already more than most callers managed in the entire duration. Not courtly questions, not the careful, flattering ones designed to put a woman at ease without requiring her to say anything meaningful. Real questions, directed at you like he actually wanted the answers. His last question was delivered with the directness he brought to most things, leaning forward slightly with his elbows on his knees: "Do people treat you differently because of who your father is? Does it bother you?" It was not the question you had expected.
"Yes," you replied after a moment. "And sometimes."
He nodded slowly, like this was exactly the right answer. "Same," he said. "But for different reasons. But the assuming people decide what you are before they've talked to you. I find that— " He stopped before starting again. "Frustrating," he said, which was clearly not the first word that had occurred to him.
"What do they assume about you?" you asked.
"That I'm always angry about something," he said, simply. "Or that I'm going to do something about it." A pause. "Sometimes they're right."
You looked at him. "Are they right today?"
He looked back at you, and the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, but the shape of one. "Today I'm just having tea," he said. You were in the middle of deciding what to say to that when the second knock came at the front door.
Lord Jean Kirstein had arrived at twenty-two minutes past ten. This was, you noted, forty minutes after Eren— to the approximate minute.
He was shown into the drawing room by Sasha, who managed to keep her expression almost entirely neutral somehow, and he came through the door with the posture of someone who had dressed carefully and was carrying it well, the brown of his coat sitting cleanly on his broad shoulders, his ashy hair tidier than last night—as it had been pushed down and tamed, and his jaw was set with the particular precision of a man who had prepared himself for a specific situation and had arrived to find the situation slightly more specific than anticipated.
He saw Eren immediately, and the expression that crossed his face lasted less than a second. What replaced it was controlled and entirely correct, and his eyes moved to you and he bowed with a formality that was impeccable, but underneath its impeccability, was a small amount of excitement to see you.
"Your Highness," he said warmly. "Good morning."
"Lord Kirstein," you smiled. "Good morning. Please, sit down."
He sat down next to you, and Sasha offered tea. He accepted gracefully, which meant he was staying. Petra, by the window, continued her needlework, and the silence that settled over the drawing room had a very particular quality.
"Lord Kirstein," you said, because someone had to speak first. "I'm really glad you called."
Something shifted in his expression, the controlled surface of it softening at one corner. "I'm glad to be received," he said, and meant it entirely, and you could hear that he meant it.
"Yeager," Jean said, which was not a greeting and was not nothing at the same time.
"Kirstein," Eren said, which was the same. A pause that had considerable weight in it.
"Good morning, isn't it?" Eren said pleasantly.
"It is," Jean said, with the brevity of someone answering a question they do not want to ask. You took a sip of tea. You had known, in a general way, that Jean and Eren had history. This had been evident at the ball.....the specific, compressed quality of their dislike, and then Armin had mentioned they didn't see eye to eye when Eren was stationed in Trost. It was the slight tension that entered both of them when Trost was mentioned in passing.
It was Jean who mentioned it, actually, and he mentioned it to you rather than to Eren.....talking about his estate, the province he managed, the particular challenges of different boarders— and Eren, who had been looking at the window, went very still in a way that was noticeable if you were watching for it.
"Lord Yeager," you asked lightly, "have you spent much time in Trost?"
A beat, before he spoke. "Some," Eren said, but his voice was even. "I was stationed in Trost. Briefly."
Jean's jaw shifted. "I wasn't aware you'd been in that territory," you said, to neither of them in particular and both of them in general.
"It was a few years ago," Eren said. "Military business."
"Yes," Jean said, in the tone of someone confirming a fact they would prefer not to confirm. Another silence.
"More tea?" Sasha offered, into the silence, with the cheerful precision of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.
Both men accepted. They were, to their considerable credit, entirely civil for the duration. This was clearly an effort for both of them, and the effort was visible in the careful way they avoided each other and the careful way they engaged with you — two men in the same room, both wanting to be the one you were talking to, both too aware of the other to fully forget him.
Eren listened to Jean talk about Trost with the particular quality of someone listening for something specific in what was being said, and not finding it, and deciding not to say so. When you drew him into conversation he was direct and entirely himself, the focused attention, the real questions, the occasional remark that was so honest it arrived before the diplomatic version had a chance to form. He and Jean disagreed about something to do with the provincial tax structure.....which would have been tedious except that both of them cared about it for specific, real reasons, and the disagreement had the character of two people who were more similar than they wanted to be and found this irritating. At five past eleven, Eren's time was substantially exceeded.
You caught his eye and let him see, pleasantly and clearly, that you had noticed the time. He stood, set his hat straight, and bowed with a correctness that was genuine rather than practiced. Then he looked at Jean, and something moved through his expression, not warmth, exactly, not yet, but something that was not pure hostility either.
"Kirstein," he said.
Jean looked up. "Yeager."
He left and Sasha closed the door behind him. The drawing room settled after that, Not immediately, but there was still the particular quality of air that a room holds for a few moments after someone has left it, the echo of a presence that hasn't quite dispersed yet. Sasha had resumed her post by the door and Petra had resumed her needlework. And then Jean exhaled quietly, through his nose, and the whole carefully constructed architecture of his morning composure came down about three inches.
"He was here twenty minutes early," he said. To no one in particular, in the low, flat tone of a man who had been holding this thought for the better part of forty minutes and was releasing it, finally, into the open air where it belonged. You pressed your lips together. "Before ten," Jean added.
"Yes, he was." you said pleasantly.
He turned to look at you and you looked back at him. And the expression on his face , so entirely, transparently outraged, not angry, not hostile, simply the pure uncomplicated expression of a man who found the whole situation genuinely unreasonable....was so perfectly itself that you felt the laughter before you could stop it. And it arrived without permission, genuine and slightly undignified, and you pressed the back of your hand briefly to your mouth, which helped not at all.
Jean stared at you for one whole second, before he burst out laughing too. A short, startled sound, and then it kept going, and he shook his head, and the last of the morning's formality dissolved entirely into something warmer and considerably more human.
"He seems very keen," you managed.
"You don't say," Jean said, still shaking his head, the laughter still in his voice and his eyes, and it changed his whole face when it was there, the sharpness of him softening, the careful precision of his expression giving way to something younger and more open.
Petra turned a page of her needlework pattern with the unhurried serenity of a woman who intended to remember none of this. When you had both recovered, which took longer than was entirely dignified— the room felt different. Easier and more comfortable, like something had been set down that had been carried all morning.
Jean was sitting quite close to you now, and you weren't entirely sure when that had happened, at some point during the last hour the formal distance of two people performing a morning call correctly had given way to the natural proximity of two people who had simply stopped managing the impression they were making. His arm rested along the back of the settee behind you, easy and unself-conscious as his long fingers curled loosely over the edge. Not touching you, but close enough that you were aware of it with a specificity that was difficult to ignore.
He was looking at you with the open, unhurried expression he got when the performance was fully set aside, and in the warm light of the drawing room, close like this, you noticed things you hadn't at the ball. The hazel of his eyes, which weren't a simple colour but several at once, brown and green and something warmer underneath, shifting with the sunlight. The slight stubble along his jaw that the morning had brought forward, catching the light now in a way that made the line of his face even sharper than usual. He really was, you thought, with the calm objectivity of someone cataloguing a fact, exceptionally well-made.
This was not a particularly useful observation, so you returned your attention to your tea. "Tell me about Trost," you said, because the question had been sitting with you since Eren had gone still and because you wanted to know, and because Jean, you had found, was honest when you asked him things directly. He was quiet for a moment, turning his own cup once in his hands.
"What do you want to know?" he said.
"Whatever you want to tell me," you tell him, slowly taking a sip from your tea.
He looked at the fireplace, the easy warmth of the last few minutes settled into something more thoughtful.....not closed, not retreating, simply....considering. Choosing which door to open.
"Trost is mine," he said, finally. "The lordship, The land, the people, the decisions. It came to me quite recently, my father died a few months ago and— " He paused. "It all came at once." He turned the cup again. "I spent the first two months trying to figure out what I was doing and the next two trying to make sure no one could tell I'd been figuring it out."
"How did that go?" you asked.
"Well enough," he said. "Mostly. I made mistakes. I learned from them." He glanced at you. "I care about it, you know. I know that probably sounds fake—"
"It doesn't," you assure him.
He held your gaze for a moment. "No," he said, quietly. "I suppose you'd understand that."
"I would," you say. "More than you know."
He nodded, slow. "The name " He stopped. Something moved across his face that was less defended than what usually lived there. "My last name, Kirstein....is not an old name. Not the way Reiss is." He said it plainly, without apology, but the plainness of it had weight, the weight of something he had made his peace with and occasionally had to make his peace with again. "My grandfather was a farmer. My father bought the title. There are people in the capital who know that and remember it every time I walk into a room." His jaw shifted. "I spend a considerable amount of energy trying to be— to be worthy of it, the name, the title," He paused. "It's exhausting, if I'm honest."
"It sounds it," you sympathise. "And, for what it's worth— from where I'm sitting, you appear to be doing it very well."
He looked at you quickly, as though checking whether you meant it. You held his gaze without qualification, because you did mean it, and he seemed to find what he was looking for, because something in him settled. "Eren didn't think so," he said, quieter now. "In Trost when we first met."
"Tell me," you said, trying not to look too eager.
He exhaled slowly. "His regiment came through military business. Three weeks, maybe four he was there, long enough to have opinions about how things were run." The corner of his mouth pressed flat. "He had many, many opinions, and would be very loud about it....About my decisions, about how I managed the eastern border patrols, about a particular call I made regarding the supply routes that he—" He stopped. "He thought I was protecting the merchant interests at the expense of the people further out. And he said so. To anyone who would listen."
"Was he right?" you dared ask.
Jean was quiet for a moment."Partly," he said, finally, with the specific difficulty of someone saying something honest that costs them something. "I was trying to balance things that were genuinely in conflict and I weighted one side heavier than I should have." A pause. "But the way he went about it.....making it everyone's problem, loudly, without coming to me first, without—" His jaw tightened. "He doesn't consider consequences. He makes a decision and he acts on it and the fallout is everyone else's to manage." He looked at you. "That's not leadership. That's just.....conviction."
You were quiet for a moment. "Have you told him that?"
"Several times," Jean said, drily. "In Trost a considerable amount of times."
"And?"
"He told me I was too comfortable," Jean said. "That I was protecting what I had instead of doing what was right." He said it without anger, which told you the anger had already run its course and what was left was something more complicated. "And then he left, and I spent six months dealing with the consequences of what he'd stirred up, and here we both are." He looked at the door through which Eren had gone. "He's not wrong about everything," he said, carefully. "I'll give him that. He sees things. He's just.....he's too stubborn to consider that someone else might have already seen them and be working on it."
"Yes," you agree. "I think that's very precisely right."
He turned to look at you, and you smiled. The room was close and comfortable and there was nothing formal left in it. He leaned in slightly, just slightly, the natural angle of someone sharing something privately rather than across a room, and said, in a lower voice that was almost a murmur: "He also argued, for three weeks, that my dining hall chairs were the wrong height. He brought it up in front of guests multiple times."
You blinked. "The chairs?"
"The chairs," Jean confirmed, with the gravity of a man describing a genuine grievance. "Said they were 'impractical' and 'clearly chosen for aesthetics over function.'" He paused. "They're perfectly good chairs."
You laughed, a proper unguarded one, and he was so close that you could see the exact moment his expression shifted from performed-serious to genuinely pleased, the hazel of his eyes catching the light, warm and amused and entirely focused on you. "They're good chairs," he said again, quieter, and the curve of his mouth when he said it was the kind of curve that made it difficult to look at something else. You were, you noted distantly, not looking at something else.
He was very close. Close enough that you could see the fine detail of the stubble along his jaw, the slight shadow of it following the clean line of his chin. Close enough that when he exhaled, quiet and easy, you were aware of it. His arm was still along the back of the settee behind you, and neither of you had moved, and Petra was six feet away with her needlework, and none of that changed the particular quality of the moment, which had a warmth to it that had nothing to do with the fire.
Something in his expression was very still, not the controlled stillness of the morning, not the careful management of impression, but the stillness of someone who was precisely where they wanted to be and had noticed it. Neither of you said anything for a moment. Then,
"Your Highness."
Sasha's voice, from the door, carried the specific quality of someone fulfilling a professional obligation with considerable personal reluctance. You both turned to look at her. Sasha was looking at the clock on the mantelpiece with the expression of someone delivering news that was technically correct and personally inconvenient. "Lord Kirstein has been with us for—" She consulted the clock. "Just over an hour. Which is—" She looked at you, then at Jean. "Somewhat past the conventional duration...."
Jean straightened and the moment dissolved, not entirely, but the particular closeness of it retreating to something more appropriate. He cleared his throat and looked at his tea, which had been cold for some time. "Right," he said. "Of course."
He stood, adjusting his coat with the careful, particular movements of someone reassembling themselves , and you watched him do it, the easy competence of him, the broad shoulders settling back into his tall posture. He turned to you, his expression was composed again but not closed "Thank you," he said. "For the morning. For....." He paused, and the pause held everything he hadn't said in the last hour, everything that had passed between you that didn't have words around it yet. "All of it," he said simply.
"Thank you for coming," you smiled.
He held your gaze for a moment. Then he stepped forward, correctly, with the formal deliberateness of a man who was doing something proper, and took your hand where it rested at your side. He bowed over it, and pressed his lips to your knuckles. It was brief, and entirely within the bounds of acceptable. The kind of gesture that lords had made to ladies for generations and that meant, technically, nothing more than courtesy. But his lips were warm, and the pressure of them was gentle, and he didn't quite rush it, and when he straightened and met your eyes there was nothing courtly about the way he looked at you.
"Hopefully we shall see each other soon," he said, quietly.
"I hope so too," you said, which came out slightly less steady than you intended. The corner of his mouth curved— just once, and then he turned and went, and Sasha showed him out with the professional composure of a woman who was saving everything she had to say for the moment the front door closed. You looked at your hand. The warmth of it lingered there, at your knuckles, small and specific and entirely unhelpful, and you were aware, with a clarity that was slightly inconvenient given the number of other things you were supposed to be thinking about, that your heart was doing something it had not been doing an hour ago. Something giddy. Something light and warm and slightly ridiculous.
You pressed your hand briefly to your lap and looked at the fire with the composed expression of a woman who was entirely in control of herself. Sasha appeared in the doorway. She closed the door and turned around, opening her mouth. "Not a word," you said before she could speak.
"I was going to say," Sasha said, with enormous dignity, "that Commander Smith arrives at eleven-thirty."
"That's fifteen minutes," Petra said, from the window, without looking up.
You sat back in your chair. Looked at the ceiling. From across the hall, faintly, you could hear the sound of Historia laughing at something— bright and unguarded, and your father's warm response. Fifteen minutes. You straightened your skirts, poured a fresh cup of tea, and prepared to receive Commander Erwin Smith, who had sent his card the night before and would arrive, you were entirely certain, at exactly eleven-thirty. And of course, he did.
He arrived at eleven-thirty exactly, as though he had been standing outside the front door for several minutes and had waited for the precise moment before raising his hand to knock. Which, you thought, was entirely possible. With Erwin Smith, very little was accidental. Sasha showed him in with a slightly different quality to her composure than she had brought to the previous two, a shade more upright, a shade more deliberate, the particular manner of someone who was aware they were admitting someone significant and intended to do it correctly.
He came through the door of the drawing room and the room seemed to adjust around him in the subtle way rooms did when someone walked into them who was accustomed to being the most composed person in any given space. He was dressed impeccably, of course, the deep blue of his coat well-fitted across his broad shoulders, his blond hair swept back from the clean, handsome lines of his face. He carried himself with the same easy authority he had carried at the ball, and he brought something under his arm, which you noticed immediately. A book. Slim, leather-bound, held with the casual certainty of someone who had decided to bring it and had not second-guessed the decision.
He bowed with the warmth he brought to all things, genuine, measured and entirely intentional. "Your Highness. Good morning."
"Commander Smith." You gestured to the chair across from you. "Good morning. Please, sit."
He sat and Sasha offered him tea. He accepted, which you had expected, Erwin Smith was not a man who gave unnecessary signals in either direction. He accepted tea because he had come to call and intended to do so properly, and that was all the acceptance meant and also everything it meant. He set the book on the table between you.
"I wasn't sure what you read," he said, "so I brought something I thought might interest you, on the basis of our conversation last night." He paused. "The History of Paradis. The Reiss family gets three chapters." A brief movement at the corner of his mouth. "I thought you might enjoy reading about your own heritige from the outside."
You looked at the book, then back at him. "That's a very considered choice," you say.
"I try to be considered," he said, pleasantly. "It tends to be more useful than the alternative."
"What's the alternative?"
"Flowers," he said. "Which are lovely and last four days and don't tell you anything about whether the person you've given them to has a mind worth talking to."
You looked at him for a moment. "And the book does?"
"The book tells me how you respond to being seen," he said, simply. "Whether you find it interesting or whether you find it presumptuous." He held your gaze with the blue, attentive eyes that were always doing something behind whatever they were presenting. "I find the response considerably more informative than the gesture."
"And which am I?" you asked him, smiling lightly. "Interesting or presumptuous?"
"I haven't decided yet," he said, with the particular warmth of a man who had decided entirely and was enjoying the conversation too much to say so. The call proceeded with the ease of two people who were well-matched in a specific way....not identically, not mirror images, but complementary, the way two people are complementary when they have both developed the habit of thinking carefully and find it a relief to be in a room with someone else who does the same. He asked intelligent questions and received your answers with genuine attention, and he offered opinions that were considered and held them with a certainty that was not arrogance because it was consistently earned. He talked about the Royal Guards with the particular quality of a man who believed in something completely, and there was something almost formidable about it. Something that made you understand, in a way the ball had hinted at but not quite delivered, why men followed Erwin Smith into difficult places.
"You love doing your job," you noted at one point, which was not a question.
He looked at you. "Yes," he said. Simply, without qualification. "I do."
"Even the parts that are hard?"
"Especially those," he said, and the warmth in his expression was real and the steel underneath it was realer, and you found yourself thinking that Erwin was a man who would be very easy to admire and very complicated to know, and that the distance between those two things was where most people probably stopped. You were, you admitted to yourself quietly....curious about the distance. At twelve o'clock he stood, with the smooth inevitability of a man who kept time the way other people kept promises, as a matter of principle.
"Thank you for receiving me," he said.
"Thank you for the book," you tell him. "I shall let you know what I think."
He smiled, a warm, calibrated one, and then, at the door, paused in the way he had paused at the ball. The pause of a man who had something further and was deciding whether to give it. "You asked me last night," he said, "whether I was saying something that sounded like a compliment but was actually something more."
"I remember, yes," you said.
"I was," he said. "I am now as well." He held your gaze for a moment. "The season has a great many people in it, Your Highness. But, I find I am only genuinely interested in one person in particular." A beat. "I just wanted you to know that."
He left before you could decide what to do with it. The drawing room settled before Sasha let out a long breath that she had apparently been holding for some time. "He brought you a book!" Sasha said excitedly.
"Yes, he did..." you said simply.
"So he'll need a reason to come back," Sasha winked.
You looked at the slim, leather-bound volume on the table between the chairs. "I suppose he will."
Armin arrived at a quarter to one, which was within the window but only just, and he arrived with the slightly hurried quality of someone who had been working on something and had looked up and realised the time and come as promptly as the realisation allowed. He apologised profusely for not sending a card, and you noticed he was carrying a book as well, which made you smile before he had finished coming through the door.
He stopped when he saw your expression, and looked down at the book in his hands, then looked at the table, where Erwin's book still sat. Something moved across his face that was equal parts amusement and chagrin.
"Oh," he said.
"It happens," you giggle.
"Commander Smith?"
"Commander Smith," you confirmed.
Armin looked at both books for a moment before letting out a small smile followed by a chuckle. Then he sat down, set his book beside Erwin's, and accepted the tea Sasha offered with a quiet thank you that was so genuinely meant that Sasha blinked. His book, you noticed, was different from Erwin's. Not history related, but something slimmer, older, the spine worn with use. Philosophy, perhaps? Or maybe natural science. Something that had been read many times by someone who cared about it.
"It's about tidal patterns," he said, noticing your glance. "I know that sounds.... " He paused. "I was reading it this morning and there's a passage about the way water finds the lowest point in any landscape, regardless of how long it takes or how many obstacles are in the way, and I thought— " He stopped again, a faint rose colour rising in his cheeks. "I thought you might find it interesting. Based on something you said last night about things finding you when you weren't looking for them." He glanced at you. "It might be a stretch. It probably is a stretch....."
"It isn't," you admit, grinning at him. "Show me the passage."
He found it immediately, the book falling open to a page that had clearly been visited many times, and read it to you in a quiet, careful voice, the kind of voice that knew the words and meant them. And the passage was, as he had said it might be, about tidal patterns, and about the way water always finds its way regardless, and it was also, as he had clearly recognised, about something else entirely.
"That's lovely," you said, when he'd finished. "And you read it so beautifully as well."
"The author was trying to explain something about coastal erosion and ended up explaining everything else." He smiled, small and warm. "I think the best ideas do that. Arrive meaning one thing and turn out to mean several." The call proceeded easily, laterally, finding its own direction without needing to be steered. He talked about his work with the crown's advisory board with the particular animation of someone who was genuinely, completely absorbed in what he did. He asked you questions about the estate, about the season, about what you thought of various things, and listened to your answers with his whole attention. He was, you thought again, one of those people who made you want to give better answers than you had planned to. Who made you think harder and more honestly simply by being the person receiving your thoughts. He stood at five past one, slightly over time, with the slightly guilty expression of someone who had only just noticed.
"I went a little over," he said.
"Only a little...."
"I'm sorry, I tend to....conversations run away from me sometimes." He gathered his coat with a rueful smile.
"It's not a flaw," you tell him.
He looked at you. "No," he said, after a moment, with the warmth of someone receiving something they needed. "I suppose it isn't." He paused at the door with the book under his arm. "The tidal patterns book is yours, if you'd like it."
"I'd like it very much," you smile.
He smiled as well, the full, genuine one and left the book beside you and went, and you sat with the two books on the table in front of you and the pleasant, uncomplicated warmth of a call that had asked nothing of you except your honest attention and had given the same in return. Sasha looked at the books. "Two books," she said. "In one morning!"
"Yes," you reply.
"From two different gentlemen!"
"Hmm." You looked at her.
"I'm just observing," she said, with the innocence of someone who was doing a great deal more than observing. She collected the tea things onto the tray and moved toward the door. "The house is quiet," she added, glancing at the clock. "So there's time for callers," she said, and left, and the drawing room settled into the particular quiet of a house in the early afternoon when the business of the morning has finished and the business of the evening has not yet begun.
summary: It's Ancient Rome, and you are the emperor's daughter. While at The Colosseum to watch a game, a certain Gladiator catches your attention— they call him Reiner, and he has never lost in the arena. When your father plans to marry you off to a senator triple your age without your choice or say, you decide to make one last choice yourself....
Gladiator! Reiner x Female! Reader (oneshot)
a/n: someone take my laptop away from me right now I can’t stop writing AU reiner oneshots :') he's so handsome. Like I always say this is defo not historically accurate....but pls enjoy anyway.
The roar of the crowd hit you before the heat did. You pressed yourself closer to the stone balustrade of the imperial box, your silk stola pooling at your feet, the gold wreath your handmaiden had threaded into your hair already wilting in the brutal afternoon sun. The Colosseum breathed like a living thing around you, forty thousand Romans screaming as one, their voices crashing against the stone walls and rising into a sky the colour of hammered copper.
Your father, the Emperor, sat on the cushioned throne to your left, one ringed hand lifted in a gesture of bored indulgence. He had organised this particular set of games to celebrate the anniversary of some military victory— you had stopped paying attention during the formal announcements. Beside him, senators and patricians leaned into one another's ears, exchanging the currency of the powerful: gossip and false promises.
You weren't interested. Instead you chose to watch the sand. The gladiators entered through the Gate of Life in a column of two, and the crowd's noise shifted—a ripple of something sharper, anticipation cutting through the usual bloodlust. You had attended the games before, of course. You were expected to as the Emperor's daughter. You had learned to keep your expression composed, your hand fanning at a rate that suggested mild entertainment or divine boredom, depending on which you wished to project. But there was something about the last man through the gate.
He did not walk the way the others walked. The rest came out with their chins up, performing bravado for the mob—and you had learned, over years of attending these things, to read the difference between genuine confidence and the armoured fear that wore confidence as a mask. This one walked with his head slightly lowered and level, in the manner of a man who had stopped needing the crowd's approval some considerable time ago and had not found himself missing it. The crowd still roared for him anyway. His helmet was tucked under one arm, unbothered, as though he had made a private decision about when he would be ready and did not intend to be hurried.
You noticed the size of him first. He stood a full head above the man beside him, and it was not only height it was the breadth of him, the sheer physical scale, the kind of body that did not look assembled but forged. Shoulders that carried the width of someone who had done real work for years without stopping, chest and arms that the standard-issue bronze armour—worn and scored with the honest marks of sustained use— could barely contain. He carried a short sword and an oblong shield, the favoured style of a fighter who won on strength and precision rather than spectacle. Then you noticed everything else about him.
His hair was a pale gold, not the bright, showy gold of a man who knew he was handsome, but the natural, almost ashen blonde of someone who had simply been made that way and thought nothing of it. Thick, cropped close at the sides and slightly longer at the crown, swept back from his face in the functional way of a man unconcerned with presentation. Beneath it, the jaw was something that should not have been legal to possess…..square and heavy-boned, set with the kind of permanence that suggested it had never once been soft, dusted with several days of darker blonde stubble that sat not as style but as the simple mark of a man who had more important things to attend to. His brow was strong and drew slightly inward in its natural resting state, giving him an expression of perpetual, serious assessment. The face of a man built not for beauty but for purpose—and somehow, because of that, far more beautiful than he had any right to be.
Then he looked up. Even from this distance— thirty feet of open air and the full width of the arena floor, you felt the particular quality of those eyes. A soft hazel, the green and browns of deep water or ancient bronze. They moved over the crowd not with the performing sweep of a man seeking admiration, but with the flat, methodical attention of someone taking proper inventory of a space. They landed on the imperial box for a moment.
You did not look away. He did though, without hurry and embarrassment, in the way of a man who looks away because he has seen what he needed to see and not because he was startled into it. He put on his helmet. You felt the loss of his face as a small, specific, entirely unreasonable deprivation.
"Who is that?" you asked, leaning toward your handmaiden Mina, who stood two steps behind you. "That gladiator– the one at the back."
"His name’s Reiner, my lady," she murmured, low enough that only you could hear. "They call him the Ursus—which means ‘the Bear’. He’s fresh out of the Ludus Magnus. Twelve bouts, and twelve victories. He’s never lost."
The Bear. You looked at him settling his shield onto his forearm, rolling his neck once with the unhurried ease of long habit, and thought that yes—yes, that was exactly right. Not because he was lumbering or slow. Because of the particular quality of the danger in him. Contained—the kind of strength that did not need to announce itself.
You had seen gladiatorial combat your whole life. You knew the grammar of it— the footwork that told you more about a man's intention than his face did, the difference between a fighter who was performing and one who was solving a problem in real time. Most gladiators fought the former way, even the good ones. They understood that the crowd was the point.
Reiner fought as though the crowd did not exist. Every movement was purposeful and nothing more. When his opponent feinted right, Braun had already rotated, shield repositioned, gladius angled at the exact gap in the man's guard that the feint had opened. He was never reacting. He was always, already—there, half a second ahead, and it did not look like luck or instinct. It looked like thinking. Calm, thorough, and very fast.
There was a moment midway through the bout when his opponent landed a blow on his shield that should have rocked him— the force of it was visible even from the box, the kind of hit that sent other men stumbling, scrambling for footing. Reiner took it and did not move, not even a step. The shield arm absorbed it, and he used the man's own momentum to redirect him, turning the impact into a pivot, and suddenly the positions had reversed and his opponent was the one without ground. The crowd lost their minds. You did not, You were too busy watching his face.
For a single moment, when the pivot landed perfectly, something crossed his expression— not triumph, not satisfaction in the showy sense. Something quieter than that. The look of a man who had worked out the answer to a difficult problem and found it to be correct. Then it was gone, and the focused blankness was back, and he moved to finish the bout. It lasted nine minutes. At the end of it, Reiner had his opponent on one knee in the sand, the tip of his sword resting with studied, almost gentle precision against the man's throat. He held the position, waiting. Then he looked up— not to the crowd, not to the senators, but directly and without ceremony to your father's box.
The Emperor raised his hand, showing mercy. The crowd screamed their disapproval. Reiner removed his sword. He did not offer his opponent a hand—he had already turned away, shield returned to his side, walking back toward the Gate of Life with the same unhurried, level stride he had entered with. He did not raise his sword. He did not acknowledge the noise of the crowd of the fame of it. The crowd roared louder for his indifference than for anything else all afternoon.
You pressed your fingers against the warm stone of the balustrade and told yourself, with the practised composure of a woman who had been raised in a palace, that the heat rising in your face was the sun.
Your father's banquet was held eleven days later. The great dining room of the palace: mosaic floor depicting Neptune commanding the sea, frescoed ceiling in midnight blue that had required— your tutors had once told you — the grinding of lapis lazuli imported from the eastern provinces at extraordinary expense. High table, senators, their wives arranged in the careful hierarchy of seating. Oysters on beds of salt— roasted peacock dressed with its own tail feathers spread behind it like a war banner was served. You had attended a hundred banquets. You were, by now, very good at them. But tonight your father had done something unusual.
"A novelty," he had said, with the idle satisfaction of a man whose novelties would be praised regardless. "We shall have some of our finest gladiators present at the meal. Let Rome see that the Emperor values his champions."
Values. You had watched the men file in through the servants' entrance— not the main doors— and take positions along the far wall. Six of them, and they had been given no tunics. Only short lengths of rough cloth at the waist, leaving their shoulders, arms, and chests entirely bare. An efficient visual vocabulary: not guests. Not even servants. Objects. Living trophies, displayed beside the peacock and the silver platters and the lapis ceiling to demonstrate your father's reach. You couldn't stand it. And yet the moment you saw him, you forgot, briefly, to maintain your disapproval.
Reiner was at the far end of the row. You had told yourself, in the eleven days since the arena, that you had been dramatic about it. That distance and spectacle had done the work— that any man, seen at thirty feet in the full theatre of the Colosseum, might seem unreasonably compelling, and that proximity would resolve him into something different. Something easier to file away and cease thinking about. You had been wrong, and you understood that now immediately and completely.
Without armour, without distance, in the warm lamplight, he was simply himself, and that was considerably harder to be sensible about than the armoured version. Taller than you, which you had clocked even from the box— that his height up close, was the kind of fact that reorganised the dimensions of a room. And without bronze to cover it: the size of those shoulders, earned and real and not remotely incidental. The defined lines of his chest and torso in the soft gold light, the flat plane of his stomach, the shape of his arms when he crossed them in front of him— the veins visible even from where you sat across the room. Old scars here and there, pale against the warm tone of his skin. The marks of a life spent being very good at something very dangerous. His jaw was sharper in person, you thought, stubble heavier than at the arena, a shade darker than the pale hair above it. The strong brow set in its habitual expression, with those dark hazel eyes, the slight green of them visible now even across the room, currently directed at the floor.
Not in deference. Not the performed invisibility of a slave making himself small for his masters' comfort. It was more deliberate than that. The studied in attention of a man who had decided this room did not merit him, and had placed his attention elsewhere, somewhere it would be better used, and was simply waiting for the evening to be over. A senator's wife near you laughed too loudly, and his eyes moved— one involuntary flicker toward the sound, and that was when they found you.
A beat of complete stillness between you, across all that distance and lamplight and expensive blue ceiling. You did not look away. You held his gaze the way you had in the arena, with a directness that you were fully aware was not appropriate for an Emperor's daughter at a formal dinner, and you held it anyway, and waited. He looked away first. But not cleanly— not the efficient, unbothered way he had from the arena box. There was something in it this time. A slight tension moving through that heavy jaw. A controlled exhale, barely visible, that told you the looking-away had cost him something. That it had required effort, and that the effort had not been nothing.
You picked up your wine cup and turned to the senator on your left, who was explaining his nephew's appointment to the quaestorship, and did not hear a single word he said.
The opportunity came between the third and fourth courses. The banquet had reached its midpoint chaos— conversations overlapping, wine doing its work on senatorial dignity, slaves weaving between couches with pitchers and platters in a choreography that left plenty of room for movement if one wished to move. You rose with the excuse of relieving yourself and crossed the room.
He was still at his post. Arms crossed over his bare chest, back against the stone wall, watching the room with that flat, cataloguing attention. Up close the lamplight found everything— the line of his collarbone, the shadow of a bruise on his right shoulder, yellowing at the edges and days old. The way his arms looked when folded like that. You stopped two feet in front of him and looked up. He looked down at you.
The difference in height, at this distance, was a newly specific thing. Those amber eyes, up close, were steadier than you expected— not cold, but very settled. The eyes of someone who had a great deal of interior life and had learned to keep it quiet. "I saw you in the arena," you tell him. "You didn't raise your sword after you won– to the crowd."
"No." His voice was low. Deeper than you had anticipated, and very direct, in the way of someone who had stopped troubling themselves to ornament what they said.
"Why not?"
He considered you and your question, properly, the way you had watched him consider everything, as though giving a thing its due before responding. "Because I didn't win it for them."
"Then who did you win it for?"
A pause. Something shifted in his expression— not much, but perceptibly. A slight softening around that serious brow, as though the question had surprised something out of him. "That's not a short answer, my lady."
"The fourth course hasn't arrived yet," you smile. "I have time."
The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely— just the shape of something warmer than the careful blankness he wore in public spaces, something that lived close to the surface and surfaced only when he briefly forgot to prevent it. It made him look, for a single unguarded moment, like someone younger than the scars. "Do you always do this?" he said. Not unkindly. Almost quiet. "Ask the things you're not supposed to ask?"
"I ask what I want to know the answer to," you say. "The two tend to coincide more often than people find comfortable."
He looked at you. The kind of frank, unhurried appraisal that no man in this room would dare offer the Emperor's daughter, and which should have felt like an imposition and instead felt like the first honest thing that had happened to you all evening. Those eyes moved over your face with the same serious attention he gave the arena floor— actually looking, not performing looking. "You're not what I expected," he said quietly, only for you to hear.
"What did you expect?" You asked.
A breath. Something in his face shifted again, just fractionally, into a territory that was more unguarded than you thought he allowed himself. "Someone easier to stop thinking about."
The warmth moved through you before you could catch it, rising to your face faster than dignity could manage. Then footsteps—a senator, rounding the far end of the table, moving vaguely toward you, not looking yet but close enough to matter. Reiner's posture changed in an instant, the subtle, controlled shift of a very large man making himself somehow quieter, more composed.
"My lady." His voice dropped, almost a warning. "You shouldn't be talking to me."
You glanced at the senator, who had paused to address a slave and was not, at this moment, looking at you. You looked back at Reiner. "I'm aware of that."
He studied you. The amber eyes careful, the jaw held very still. "And?"
"And I don't particularly care."
The senator moved away. The moment settled. Reiner looked at you for another beat— something working behind those eyes, something deliberate and private— and then, quiet and entirely involuntary, the corner of his mouth pulled upward. Not a full smile. But the shape of one, underneath the careful surface, surfacing briefly before he put it back. It transformed him. That almost-smile— it made him look like someone you could make very poor decisions about, if you were not careful.
"I'm told you haven't lost in the arena," you say, because you needed to say something that was not that.
"Not yet."
"Does that concern you? The possibility of losing?"
He considered it the way he considered everything— seriously and without performance. "No." A pause. "Because I know what I'm capable of. And I know I'm not done yet." Not arrogance, just the flat, settled truth of a man who knew himself thoroughly, including the things that cost him. You understood the difference, and the understanding did something to your chest that you chose not to examine closely.
"Reiner, isn't it?" you ask softly, even though you knew the answer already. You were testing the weight of it in your mouth the way you had been wanting to do since the arena. "That's your name."
His jaw tightened. The almost-smile was gone. "My lady," he said—low, careful, a warning dressed as a formality. Don't.
You gave him a quiet nod and turned. Walked back across the mosaic floor, across Neptune's sea, across all that expensive lapis blue — took your seat, smiled at the senator's wife who said she had missed you, and ate the next four courses without tasting a single one of them.
Your father made the announcement at breakfast, four days later, with the same casual delivery he used for all things he had decided entirely alone and expected to be praised for.
"I've acquired the contract on the gladiator," he said, dipping bread into oil with the air of a man discussing a new horse. "The one who has been winning all these bouts. The Ursus, they call him."
The Ursus. You kept your expression exactly where it was. "The lanista was reluctant," your father continued, pleased with himself. "I paid him three times the market rate. But the crowd's reaction was remarkable—the man is clearly valuable, and I intend to display that value appropriately! He'll be quartered here at the palace until I send him to Tuscany, make him available for private matches and for the games in autumn."
"Quartered here?" you repeated, in your most neutral tone. “With…us?”
"In the lower wing. With proper supervision and training, of course." Your father waved a ring-heavy hand. "He is still a slave, whatever the crowd thinks of him."
You nodded and finished your bread, and said nothing further, and thought about the way Reiner had looked at you across the crowded arena with those careful, shifting eyes that missed nothing. Quartered here.
You saw him three days after his arrival, entirely by accident. Which meant, of course, that you had engineered it with considerable care.
Your habit of walking the upper colonnade in the late morning was well-established and above suspicion. The fact that the upper colonnade overlooked the palace's outer court— where your father had apparently instructed that his new acquisition be permitted to train daily— was a geographic coincidence you had only discovered after some careful and entirely casual questioning of the household staff.
You were reading. The scroll was open in your hands, and this was, technically, true, in the same way that it is technically true to say a ship is in the water while it is on fire. You had not read a word in twenty minutes. He was training below you, only the short training tunic, moving through sword forms alone with the same total, settled concentration you had watched from the arena box— but different at this proximity….more immediate. You could see the actual weight of each movement now, the way his body carried the work rather than performed it. The morning light cut across the planes of his face when he turned, caught the pale gold of his hair and the sheen of exertion across the broad width of his shoulders. The definition of his arms when he drove the practice blade through a form was not the kind of thing you could look at neutrally, and you had been trying.
You looked back at your scroll. He had not looked up.
The following morning you were reading in the colonnade again, the scroll open in your hands at what you were fairly certain was the same passage as yesterday. About halfway through the morning, he looked up. His gaze found you with no searching at all, as though he had known precisely where to look. Those eyes held yours for one flat, deliberate second— assessing and carrying the faint weight of someone who had filed a great deal of information away and was deciding what to do with it— and then he went back to his work. You smiled to yourself.
The senator's name was Barro, and he was fifty-three years old, your father informed you, over the morning meal, in the same tone he used when announcing new acquisitions. He had been married twice before. Both wives deceased. He controlled the grain contracts for three of the southern provinces, held six seats in the upper senate, and had expressed to your father a formal interest in the Emperor's unmarried daughter. The dowry arrangement was generous, your father noted— he asked very little, which spoke to his goodwill.
"It is a sensible match," your father said simply. "His connections in the south will be useful." He looked at you then—not unkindly, but with the particular quality of a man who has made a decision and is now informing a piece of furniture about it. "You are a woman now. This has gone on long enough. You will meet him at the feast, and then a formal date shall be set.”
You excused yourself quickly. Walked with perfect composure down the full length of the dining room, through the colonnade, and into the corridor that led to the private gardens. You made it as far as a stone bench, before your hands began to shake. Your future husband was fifty-three years old….
You sat on the edge of the bench and stared at the fresco opposite— some pastoral scene, sheep in a field, an entirely cheerful rendering of the world….and felt the future close around you like a room with no windows. You had always known this was coming. Every daughter of every powerful man in Rome knew this was coming. You had grown up watching it happen to other women, had noted the mechanics of it, had told yourself you had made your peace with it. But in reality, you had not made your peace with it.
The shaking moved from your hands to somewhere deeper, some structural place, and before you had entirely decided to you were on your feet and moving, not because you had anywhere to go but because stillness had become suddenly unbearable, and the walls of the palace were suddenly close and fragrant with wealth and absolutely, crushingly airless. You went outside.
The court outside was bright and hot at this hour, the midday sun high and merciless. You registered, peripherally, that someone was training, you could hear the sound of exertion, the rhythmic impact of a practice blade against the post— and then you were past it, moving along the lower path toward the old garden without consciously choosing to, your vision narrowed to the path immediately in front of you and the effort of keeping your breathing even.
You did not manage it. Somewhere on the lower path, with a few of the pine trees closing over you and the city noise muffled by distance and old stone, something in your chest cracked open, and what came out was not dignified. You found a mossy, stone bench at the base of one of the old pines— but you decided to not even take the bench, but the ground instead— and pressed your back to the bark and pulled your knees up and let the tears come, because there was no one here to see and you were so tired of performing composure for a life that had never once asked your permission.
You heard him before you saw him. and you recognised him just from his footsteps. Not footsteps exactly— he moved too quietly for that, for a man of his size it was almost unreasonable—but a change in the quality of the air. A particular, weighted stillness that preceded his presence the way pressure preceded a storm. You turned your face away and pressed the back of your wrist against your eyes, which was a futile exercise.
"My lady?" His voice was different here, low and careful– but something rougher in it than his usual register, something that was working not to show alarm and not quite succeeding.
"I'm fine," you sniffle.
A pause. "You're sitting on the ground."
"I'm aware of that."
Silence for a moment. Then the shift of weight, the quiet sound of something large and careful lowering itself— and his presence was suddenly at your level, close but not crowding, and when you finally turned your head he was there. Crouched on the path in his training tunic, hair tousled from exertion, jaw dark with days of stubble, those hazel eyes watching you with an expression that had none of its usual guardedness in it. Simply, openly concerned, in the way of someone who has no particular gift for concealing the things that matter to them, and has perhaps stopped trying. He looked— in the unmediated afternoon light, on the ground, in the old garden with the pine shadows moving over him— like something that had no business existing in the same world as that old senator named Barro, and that thought alone was what did it. Your eyes filled with tears again before you could stop them.
Something moved across his face. He looked, for a moment, genuinely at a loss— this man who fought for a living, confronted with a problem that fighting would not solve, the strong brow drawn in and the jaw held tight with the effort of not knowing what to do. And then he simply sat down on the path beside you. Not close enough to be improper. Close enough to be there.
"Tell me," he said simply. And you told him.
Not gracefully or in the rhetorically structured way you were trained to communicate, but haltingly, in pieces, the way things come out when you are sitting on the ground under a pine tree with your composure already in ruins. The senator, his age, and the word sensible in your father's mouth like something clean and reasonable. Reiner listened to you. He did not interrupt, did not offer comfort, did not produce the polite, deflecting sounds people made when they wanted a difficult thing to simply stop. He listened with his full, complete attention, his gaze on your face, and you felt the particular, almost foreign relief of being genuinely heard. When you finished, the garden was quiet.
"I know it is the way of things," you said, after a moment. Your voice was steadier. Wrung out, but steadier. "I have always known that. Since I was a girl."
"Knowing something is the way of things," he said gently, "doesn't make it easier to carry."
The word carry, and not accept, but carry, as though he understood it as a weight rather than a condition. You looked at him. "No," you agreed. "It doesn't."
Silence. The old fountain somewhere behind you ran its quiet commentary. "He is rather old," Reiner said, and there was something compressed in it. Something being held carefully still.
"Yes….he is.” A muscle moved in his jaw. "Reiner," you said softly.
He looked at you. Not the trained, careful look he usually had, but the real one. The one you had first seen from thirty feet above in the imperial box, the one that took nothing for granted and missed nothing. "I have spent my whole life doing what I was supposed to do," you say. "Sitting where I was placed. Smiling when I was told to. Being useful in the ways that were permitted." Your throat was tight. "I don't want– the first time I am truly chosen—I don't want it to be by a man my father sold me to." He was very still. The kind of stillness that in him was not absence but the opposite— everything present, everything attending. "I want to choose something," you said, and your voice had dropped to barely above a whisper now. "Once. Before I lose the right to."
"My lady—"
"I want you to kiss me."
The words settled in the quiet garden and stayed there. You watched his face— the way something moved through it like a tide he was working very hard against, the jaw set, his eyes intent, the whole of him suddenly still in the way of things that were exercising enormous and deliberate restraint. "You don't know what you're asking," he said lowly.
"I know exactly what I'm asking."
"If anyone came—"
"There is no one. You know there's no one." You held his gaze. "I am not asking the gladiator. I am not asking my father's property. I am asking you. Reiner." His name in your mouth, deliberate, the way you had learned it did something to him when you used it—the slight tension it drew through that heavy jaw, the fractional shift in those hazel eyes. "I am asking you for one thing I am allowed to choose, and then I will go and marry a man I have never met, and I will be grateful, and I will be good—" your voice cracked, only slightly, "—and I will not ask you for anything else."
"Don't say that," he said. Very quietly. The roughness in it, the way it was not quite level— told you more than he had intended.
"Reiner—"
"You deserve—" He stopped. The brow drawn in, that expression that lived somewhere between severity and something far more complicated and far more honest. "This isn't— I am not what you deserve. You deserve someone who can—"
"You are the only person in this palace," you interrupt him, "who has ever spoken to me as though I were real."
The garden held its breath, and he looked at you for a long moment— that full, assessing look that took nothing for granted— and something in it shifted. Not broke, just shifted, like the way stone shifts under long and patient pressure. His gaze moved, briefly and entirely involuntarily, to your mouth, and came back up.
"Once," he said. Very quietly. Like a man conceding something enormous. Your heart knocked against your ribs so hard you were certain he could hear it. He moved slowly, without the sudden quality of something decided in haste, giving you time and space and every opportunity to change your mind, which you did not take. His hand came to your face— careful and slightly callused, the hand of someone who worked—and the touch of it against your jaw was so startling in its gentleness that you went very still.
He tilted your chin up, fractionally, and then he kissed you. It was not urgent. That was what struck you first, the absence of urgency, the way he kissed you like he had time, like the afternoon sun had stopped and the city beyond the hill had gone quiet, like there was nothing in the world except this garden and this moment and the specific, unhurried warmth of him. His mouth was soft against yours and certain, the way all his movements were certain— considered, deliberate, entirely present. You reach up, your fingers diving into the thick, pale hair of his, gripping the strands tightly. Reiner lets out a guttural groan into your mouth, his muscles locking up as the sharp sensation of your grip fuels his fire. The sound sends a jolt of heat straight to to your core, and he kissed you a little deeper, his tongue tracing the seam of your lips until you opened for him with a soft sigh. The kiss transformed then, gaining heat and intensity, his mouth moving against yours with a hunger that had been carefully restrained until now. His other hand came to rest on your waist, fingers splayed wide against the thin fabric of your stola, and you could feel the heat of his palm through the material.
Reiner's kisses grew more demanding, more possessive, as if he were trying to memorise the shape of your mouth, the taste of you. You responded in kind, your fingers tightening in the fabric of his tunic, pulling him closer until there was no space left between your bodies. The sun beat down on you both through the trees, making your skin prickle with heat and sweat, the air thick with the scent of jasmine from the nearby flowers and something else. "Are you certain?" he murmured against your lips, his voice rough with desire. "Because once we start, I don't think I can stop-"
You answered by pulling him into another kiss, your tongue tangling with his as your hands roamed over the hard planes of his chest. Through his tunic, you could feel the ridges of muscle, the solid strength of him, and it made you clench with anticipation. His hands grew bolder too, sliding down to cup your ass through your dress, squeezing gently before lifting you slightly. Reiner broke the kiss long enough to look at you, his hazel eyes burning with an intensity that made your breath catch. "You're so beautiful," he said, his thumb stroking your cheekbone. "So fucking beautiful."
Then he was kissing you again, more desperately this time, his hands exploring your body with urgent reverence. He found the ties of your stola and loosened them with practiced ease, the fabric pooling around your feet until you stood before him in just your thin undertunic. The blazing sun kissed your bare skin as his hands mapped your curves, his calloused fingers leaving trails of fire everywhere they touched. You tugged at his tunic, desperate to feel his skin against yours, and he helped you pull it over his head. The sight of him shirtless again stole your breath– his well-defined pectorals and a stomach ridged with muscle. A fine sheen of sweat coated his skin, making him gleam in the sunlight, and you couldn't resist reaching out to trace the lines of his abdomen.
Reiner's breath hitched at your touch, and then he was lifting you effortlessly, your legs wrapping around his toned waist as he pressed your back against the rough bark of the nearby tree. The friction against your bare skin was delicious, and you rolled your hips against him, feeling his hard cock through the remaining fabric, causing him to let out a low groan. He supported you easily, his hands firm against your ass as he devoured your mouth, his kisses growing more frantic, more desperate.
"Reiner," you gasped loudly, not even caring who heard you anymore. He moved his attention to your neck, biting and sucking at the sensitive skin there. "Please...I need you..."
He set you down gently, turning you to face the tree as his hands pulled down your undertunic, kissing your spine gradually as his hands roamed over your body. He reached round to the front to squeeze your breasts, his calloused hand palming the newly exposed skin before pinching your nipples until they were hard pebbles begging for more attention. You whimpered and pressed yourself back against him, grinding your ass against his erection, needing more, needing everything from him.
He leads you away from the tree, towards the low, mossy stone bench. He bends you over it delicately, the cool stone a shocking contrast against your heated skin. His fingers found the hem of your undertunic, lifting it over your hips gingerly, and you heard the sharp intake of his breath as your bare ass was exposed to him. His hands caressed your cheeks, spreading them slightly, and you trembled with anticipation. When his fingers finally brushed against the wet heat between your legs, you cried out. "Please," you begged, not even sure what you were asking for.
"Are you sure?" he asked again, his voice thick with emotion.
"Yes," you breathed, pushing back against his hands. "Gods, yes, Reiner. I want you."
You heard the rustle of fabric as he freed his cock finally and felt the hot, hard length of him pressing against your entrance. He entered you slowly, deliberately, giving you time to adjust to his size. You were wet and ready for him, but still the stretch burned slightly, a delicious pain that made you gasp. "Are you…okay?" he asked, his voice strained with the effort of holding back.
You could only nod, pushing back against him, taking him deeper and getting used to him inside of you. He began to move then, slowly at first, then building a steady rhythm that had you panting and moaning his name into the hot air. The stone bench scraped against your palms, the sun beat down on your back, and Reiner's thick cock filled you perfectly, hitting spots inside you that you didn't even know existed. "F-fuck, you're tight," he groaned, his fingers digging into your hips as he thrusts relentlessly into you. "Feels so good– so perfect."
He reached around to rub your clit as he fucked you, his movements growing more confident and demanding as he chased his high. You could feel sweat dripping down your back, could hear the slap of skin against skin, could smell the combined scent of your arousal in the hot air around you. Your orgasm built quickly, a tight coil in your belly that threatened to snap at any moment.
Just as you felt yourself teetering on the edge he pulled out gently, leaving you empty and wanting. You whined in protest, turning to face him with confusion in your eyes.
"I-I want to see you," he breathed, his voice husky with desire. "I want to see your face."
You nodded, understanding immediately what he wanted. You pushed him down onto the soft grass beneath the bench, the sun slipping through the trees to beat down on his muscular chest. His cock stood proudly, slick with your arousal and glistening in the bright light as you licked your lips. You pulled your undertunic completely off, Reiner’s eyes trailing over your body with lust as you straddled him, positioning yourself above his hard length.
Slowly, you lowered yourself onto him, taking control as he filled you once again. His deep groan was music to your ears, his calloused hands rushing up to grip your hips as you began to move. The sun shone past the trees and warmed your back as you rode him, setting a pace that had both of you gasping for air. "Fuck, you're incredible," he panted, his voice strained with pleasure. "I can't last long like this– fuck." His praises fueled your desire, and he whimpered as you moved faster, bouncing harder on his thick cock. The heat and sweat intensified every sensation, made every slide of his dick against your walls feel more electric as your slick bodies were moulding together. Your breasts bounced with each movement, and Reiner's eyes were fixed onto them, his hands occasionally reaching up from his tight grip onto your hips to pinch your hardened nipples.
"Gods…yes," you moaned, feeling your orgasm surge again, stronger this time. "Just like that, Reiner."
At the encouragement Reiner began to thrust up to meet your downward movements, creating a rhythm that felt primal and raw. The grass beneath you provided a soft bed for your knees, but the rest of the world faded away. There was only the heat of the sun, the strength of his body beneath yours, the incredible fullness as he filled you again and again. "Yes," you cried out, gasping for breath. "Don't stop. P-please don't stop."
"Never," he grunted, his thrusts becoming harder and deeper. Your orgasm crashed over you without warning, waves of pleasure so intense they made your vision blur. Your pussy clenched around his cock, milking him as you cried out his name. He followed shortly soon after, chanting profanities as his thrusts became erratic, and he buried himself deep inside you, his hot cum filling you. He whispered your name in awe, his voice rough with emotion as he emptied himself deep within your still-pulsing walls.
You collapsed against his chest, both of you breathing heavily in the aftermath. The sun continued to beat down, but now it felt comforting rather than oppressive. Reiner's arms wrapped around you, holding you close as your bodies slowly cooled. You sat up slowly and shakily to look at him. He looked at you with such tenderness it made your heart ache, his thumb gently wiping a tear from your cheek that you didn't even realise had fallen during it.
"Are you okay?" he asked, his voice soft. You nodded, unable to speak, instead pulling him into another kiss. This one was different than the last— slower and gentler, full of unspoken emotions. When you finally parted, you rested your forehead against his, your bodies still tangled together in the dappled sunlight of the garden.
summary: When you are introduced to your new personal guard as the Royal Princess, you weren't pleased about it being Ser Reiner Braun. Until that one night when the storm hit, and you two end up alone in a mausoleum....
Knight! Reiner x Princess! Reader (oneshot)
a/n: this is the first time I' ve wrote smut so please be nice ee. hope you enjoy gentle knight! reiner, and lmk if u guys would like more oneshots :)
The morning your father summoned you, the sky was flat, grey and unyielding, as if the heavens themselves had been beaten into submission. You stood before him in the great hall, hands folded at your waist, doing your very best to look like a princess and not like someone who had just been crying in the chapel. Because crying in the chapel was where you had spent the better part of the previous evening, kneeling on cold stone, thinking of Ser Roland.
Ser Roland, with his habit of whistling off-key through the corridors. Ser Roland, who had been your personal guard for eleven years— since before your mother died, since before you understood what it meant that your father was a king and you were his only child and the world beyond the palace walls was not kind to girls with crowns. He had passed three weeks ago. A quiet death, in his sleep, after a winter that had been brutal on old bones. The palace physician said he had not suffered. You thought that was the sort of thing people said when they had nothing useful left to offer.
"I have made arrangements," your father said, from the high-backed throne he seemed to grow out of like bark from a tree. Solid and deliberate and so certain of everything that sometimes you wanted to shake him just to see if anything rattled loose. "Your new personal guard will begin his post tomorrow."
You looked up. "Tomorrow?"
"The appointment has been considered carefully." He did not look at you when he said it— he was reviewing something on the scroll across his knee, and that alone told you the decision was final. Your father only avoided your eyes when a conversation was already over. "He is one of the finest soldiers in the kingdom. He is very experienced, a real large man, his record is without flaw."
"I'm sure it is," you said, and you were proud of how steady your voice came out.
"You will extend him the same courtesy you extended Ser Roland."
"Ser Roland earned that courtesy over eleven years, Father."
"Then I suggest," your father said, and now he did look at you, grey eyes meeting yours with all the warmth of the November sky outside, "that you begin extending it now, so that eleven more years may follow."
You learned his name was Ser Reiner Braun. You learned this from the herald who announced him the following morning, and then you learned it again in the few seconds after the announcement when you simply stood and stared, because no one had warned you. He was enormous. Not in the lumbering, awkward way of some soldiers— not barrel-chested and slow —but built like something that had been carved specifically for the purpose of being immovable. Broad through the shoulder. Tall enough that he had to angle his chin down slightly to meet your eyes. His armour was polished silver-grey, the royal crest of your kingdom embossed over the left breast, a sword at his hip that looked like it had been used and cleaned and used again many times. His hair was short and pale gold, pushed back from a face that was...
Well, remarkably severe. That was what you decided, in those first few seconds. A strong jaw, a crease between his brows that looked like it had been there so long it was now simply part of the landscape. Green eyes, no, amber eyes, you realised close up— a colour that shouldn't have been soft but somehow was, at the edges. He dropped to one knee before you without being asked. The stone floor did not shake, but it felt like it should have.
"Princess," he said. His voice was low and even, like the first note of a bell before the full ring reaches you. "It is an honour to serve you."
You looked down at the top of his golden head. You thought about Ser Roland and you felt tears prick in your eyes.
"Rise," you said, and your voice only wavered a little. "And follow at three paces, please. Not two. Three."
He rose, and something moved across his face—not quite a smile, not quite the absence of one, and he settled behind you at exactly three paces, and that was how it began.
The trouble with Reiner Braun, you decided within the first week, was that he was extraordinarily good at his job. This was not, on its surface, a reasonable thing to find troubling. You understood that. But the quality of his attention was relentless in a way that felt almost rude. He was there in the morning when you left your chambers— three paces back, hand resting loosely at his sword hilt, eyes moving across every corridor before you reached it. He was there in the library when you read, stationed by the door, still as a statue, so quiet you sometimes forgot he existed until you looked up and found him watching the room with that same steady, unwavering focus. He was there at the evening meal, standing behind your chair at the high table, present and silent and entirely impossible to ignore.
"You don't have to stand during dinner, you know," you told him, on the eighth night of him being there.
"I prefer to stand," he said simply.
"You've been standing since dawn."
"Yes, Princess."
You turned in your chair to look at him properly. He looked back at you, calm and composed, like a man who had made peace with every possible discomfort. "That's absurd," you tell him.
"I'm sure it is," he said, and there it was again—that thing that was almost a smile, the slight softening around the eyes. Gone before you could name it. You turned back to your meal and ate rather more aggressively than was strictly ladylike.
By the third week, you had catalogued his most infuriating qualities. First: he never stumbled. Never tripped, never caught his shoulder on a doorframe, never made any of the small human errors that made other people tolerable. He moved through the palace with a precision that bordered on supernatural, always exactly where he needed to be, always three paces behind unless the corridor narrowed and then he fell to one pace, and always stepped back to three the moment space allowed.
Second: he was not cold. That would have been easier to resent. He was simply... contained. When you spoke to him, he answered, and his answers were not dismissive or curt— they were considered, measured, as if he weighed each word before releasing it. When you complained about the morning drills that kept you from sleeping past dawn, he said, The yard is at its quietest after the fourth hour, if it helps to know when to expect silence. When you mentioned that the library's east window let in a draught that made the candles flicker, he had it re-sealed by evening without being asked.
Third, and most maddening of all: he watched you.
Not in any way you could complain about. Not staring or leering, nothing inappropriate. Simply watching— alert and attentive in the way a person watches something they have been entrusted with. The way you might watch a flame in a lantern on a windy night, as if losing track of you would be a failure he had already decided he would not allow.
It should have felt intrusive. It did feel intrusive. It also, and this was the part you shoved firmly to the back of your mind and refused to examine, felt rather like being the most important thing in a room.
"You could at least pretend to find this boring," you said to him, on an afternoon when you had been forced to sit through three hours of petitions in court, and he had stood behind you through all of it without showing any sign of existing anywhere in time.
"Find what boring, Princess?"
"This." You gestured at the now-empty hall. "The standing and the watching. The endless quiet vigil of it."
He considered. "I was a soldier for a long time before this post," he replies. "I've stood longer watches in worse conditions."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't." And he reached past you to open the door, three paces ahead for once, holding it so you could pass through, and you walked out into the corridor and told yourself you were annoyed, and mostly you were.
By the fourth week, you had started doing things purely to test him, which you were not proud of.
You took your evening walks later than usual, when the garden was properly dark and the lantern-boys had gone to bed, just to see if he would say something. He didn't. He simply lit the small oil lamp he had apparently started carrying for exactly this scenario, and fell into step behind you without comment, and the pool of amber light moved through the dark garden around you both like a private world.
You rode out further than your usual route one afternoon, past the approved boundary markers, into the wilder part of the estate where the old stone walls crumbled and the trees grew in close and strange. He kept pace beside you on those stretches, not behind, and said nothing until you pulled up at the edge of a frost-thick meadow that technically fell outside the permitted riding grounds.
"Princess," he said.
"I know," you said.
A pause. "The ground is uneven from here. Your horse doesn't know the terrain."
"I know that too!"
He said nothing else. He simply positioned himself between you and the deepest shadow of the treeline, and waited, and after a while you turned back and rode toward the palace, and he rode at your side all the way home. You didn't say thank you. You weren't sure what you would have been thanking him for.
By the fifth week, you stopped fighting it. Not loudly or with any announcement. You simply... stopped constructing reasons to be irritated, and found that without the effort of building them, you were left with something quieter and more difficult. You noticed things.
The way he took his post before your door each morning with a kind of resolve that looked almost like a ritual— straightening his posture, settling his weight, becoming the person he needed to be for the day. The slight stubble that graced his face, the way he sometimes, when you were reading or working, allowed his gaze to settle somewhere distant, and in those unguarded moments he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with standing. Tired the way a person looks when they have survived things they haven't spoken of. You knew better than to ask. You were a princess, not a confessor. But you thought about it.
And you thought about the way he looked at you— that careful, focused attention—and you thought about how long it had been since anyone in your life had looked at you like you were worth keeping safe, rather than simply a thing that required managing.
You're being ridiculous, you told yourself, on the thirty-eighth night of his post, lying in bed with the fire dying to embers and the winter dark pressing against the window glass. You were absolutely certain you were being ridiculous.
The night it happened, you hadn't planned to ride far. It had been a suffocating kind of day— court functions and a meeting with your father's council that had gone two hours over its allotted time and left you feeling scraped hollow. You needed air and you needed space. You needed the particular silence that existed only on horseback, when the world narrowed to hoof-beats and wind and the smell of cold grass.
You told Reiner you were going to the east meadow and back. He said nothing. He simply went to saddle his horse too.
You rode out just after the eighth hour, when the last light was bruising the horizon purple and the stars were beginning to appear. The air was sharp with the cold that had been building all week, and there was something in it— a pressure, that your riding master had once told you meant weather coming. But the sky overhead was clear, and the east meadow was only twenty minutes away, and you thought you had time.
You did not have time, however. The storm came in from the north-west with very little warning. You were at the far edge of the meadow when the first crack of thunder split the sky so close overhead that your horse shied sideways, nearly unseating you. The temperature dropped in what felt like seconds. Rain followed in a wall— not drops but sheets, horizontal and vicious, the kind that didn't so much fall as attack. Your horse was not a battle-trained animal. She was well-bred and fast and she loved you, but she had a deep and well-founded fear of thunder, and at the second lightning strike, she panicked.
What happened next was not graceful. Reiner was beside you in seconds— you weren't even sure how, whether he had anticipated it or simply reacted faster than should have been possible— his hand closing around your horse's bridle with a grip that did not allow argument. He spoke to her in a voice so low you couldn't hear it over the rain, and she shuddered and stamped and gradually, unwillingly, stopped trying to bolt.
"There's a mausoleum close by, princess," he said, close to your ear, his voice cutting through the noise of the storm. "Fifty yards. Can you ride that far?"
You pushed soaked hair from your face, your heart was still slamming. "Yes."
"Stay close to me.” And you did.
The mausoleum was old— older than the palace by several centuries, according to what you'd once half-read in a history of the estate. It sat in the corner of the eastern grounds where the formal gardens gave way to older, wilder land, a square building of dark stone with a heavy iron door that had not been opened in living memory. The lock was rusted through; Reiner forced it with his shoulder, and it gave with a sound like a complaint, and you both stumbled inside.
The noise of the storm fell to a muffled roar. The silence inside was enormous by contrast. You stood in the dark, dripping, breathing hard.
Reiner moved by feel, found something— a wall-bracket, and a flint in his belt, and the small oil lamp that apparently he still carried everywhere, and after a moment there was a small, wavering pool of amber light. The interior was stone throughout. The walls were carved with old script you didn't recognise, and there were carved stone effigies along the far wall, the long resting shapes of ancestors you had never known. It should have been cold in the eerie way old places are cold. Instead it was simply stone-still and quiet, and the lamp made shadows dance, and outside the storm raged itself against the walls like it had a grievance, and you stood there and became aware, slowly, that you were shaking.
Not from cold. Or not only from cold. Reiner had moved to check the door— ensuring it would hold, you thought, or perhaps looking for any other entrance. He turned back, and in the lamplight his face was all shadow and gold, rain-dark hair plastered to his forehead, armour gleaming wet, and he looked at you and his expression changed.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm fine,” you insisted, but you shivered slightly. He crossed the space between you in three steps and removed his cloak with the quick efficiency of someone who had performed field care before, and put it around your shoulders. The weight of it was extraordinary, warm from his body and heavy, and he kept his hands on your shoulders for just a second before letting go, and you looked up at him in the lamplight and you thought: I cannot keep doing this.
"Reiner," you said. He took one step back. Giving you space. Always, always giving you exactly what you needed before you had to ask for it. "You don't have to keep your distance from me anymore," you tell him. He stilled. "I know now that you're just doing your job," you said, and your voice came out strange. "It's your post, and your duty, and that you would do this for anyone your king assigned you to protect, and I am being—I have been—" You stopped. "I have been unkind to you."
He said nothing. Watching you. "And you have been—" The words caught. You made yourself finish them. "You have been steadier than I deserved. More patient than I had any right to expect. And I have spent the last month trying not to notice that, and yet I am standing in a mausoleum in a thunderstorm, and I find I've run out of ways not to say it."
Lightning strobed through the narrow window-slits, and in that white flash you saw his face clearly— the furrowed brow, the careful set of his jaw, and something else beneath that. Something that looked, you thought, like a man trying very hard to hold very still. "Say what?" he asked quietly.
The thunder came a beat behind. You let it pass. "That I think about you," you admit. "Constantly. That I have been furious about it for weeks, because it isn't—I didn't ask for this, and I know it isn't —I know what is and isn't appropriate. I know what I am, and what you are, and I know all the reasons this is—"
"Don't," he interrupted.
You looked at him. He had taken the step back toward you that you had told him he didn't have to take. He was close now— close enough that you could see the rain still on his jaw, close enough that when he spoke his voice was very quiet and still somehow the only thing in the room. "Don't list the reasons to me, princess," he said. "I've spent a month listing them myself. Every night. I am very familiar with all of them."
The lamp flame wavered. "I was given a post," he said, "to protect someone I was told was difficult." His voice was careful and measured, but there was something under it now, something that the composure was holding by sheer effort. "That was the word they used. Difficult. And I came here prepared for that. I wasn't prepared for—" He stopped.
"For what?" you dared ask, and your voice came out barely above a whisper.
He looked at you for a long moment. Long enough that the storm outside seemed to recede, and the lamplight was everything, and you became aware of how completely alone you were in the world, in this strange ancient quiet room, with the rain locked outside. "You," he said simply and finally. "I wasn't prepared for you."
You breathed out, and you were not be able to say who moved first. You thought it was you, or it could have been him. You thought perhaps it was the thunder— a crack so loud it startled you both forward and the gap closed between you, and then there was no gap at all, and his hands came to your face with a gentleness that had no right to belong to hands that large, and he kissed you in the dark of an old tomb while a storm tried to bring the world down outside. He kissed you like someone who had decided. Like someone who had been waiting to decide for a very long time, and it was desperate, messy and wet. His cloak was still around your shoulders, warm and drying you from the rainwater at a surprising rate, and you reached up and gripped the front of his armour to keep yourself steady.
Reiner's hands moved to your shoulders, unbuckling the heavy cloak with practiced movements. The fabric pooled around your feet, leaving you suddenly chilled in your thin, slight damp riding dress. He spread his coat, the thick, dark wool thing that smelled of leather and him—across the stone floor. The contrast between the rough wool and the smooth marble beneath was stark.
His armor clinked softly as he knelt, the sound echoing in the sacred space. You watched his hands—calloused from sword practice, scarred from battles fought in your name—as they reached for the hem of your dress. The fabric whispered against your skin as he drew it upward, his knuckles brushing your thighs. Your breath hitched when his fingers traced the ribbon of your drawers and undergarments.
"May I?" he murmured, his voice deeper than usual, rougher. The stubble on his chin had caught the faint light from the high windows, making his jaw look like granite dusted with gold. You nodded eagerly, too breathless to even speak. His fingers work quickly at the laces of your upper undergarment, parting the silk until cool air of the tomb kisses your breasts, causing them to instantly harden. He lowers his head to take one of your nipples into his mouth, tongue circling the stiff peak while his hand palms the other. You arch, gasping loudly as you threaded your fingers through his golden hair. You had never felt anything so….sensational. Reiner groans against your skin and switches sides, teeth grazing lightly before he sucks harder, pulling off with a pop.
You lifted your hips without thinking, an automatic response to him as the silk slid down your legs, cool against your flushed skin. His eyes followed the movement, dark and hungry, before meeting yours again. Something passed between you then—a recognition, an acknowledgment that this moment had been inevitable, waiting behind every formal bow, every guarded glance across the room. He positioned himself between your legs, his broad shoulders forcing them to open wider. The cold stone seeped through the wool, but you barely noticed. His hands gripped your hips, thumbs pressing into the hollows there, holding you open for his gaze. You felt exposed, vulnerable, but also powerful—the way his breath quickened, the way his pupils swallowed the light, it made you feel wanted.
When his mouth first touched you, you jolted. His lips were softer than you'd imagined, softer than they looked against all that hardness of armor and duty. He started slow, exploring with gentle pressure, learning your shape. Your fingers tangled in his hair, which was still slightly wet from the rain. His stubble created a delicious friction against your inner thighs as he shifted, finding better angles– the roughness contrasted with the velvet of his tongue, now tracing patterns that made your toes curl. He found your clit with unerring precision, circling it once, twice, before sucking gently. Your back arched off the coat as he did, the pearls on your necklace rolling against your throat. The mausoleum's acoustics carried every sound—the wet slide of his tongue, your gasping breaths, the distant patter of rain against stone. Someone had carved prayers into these walls centuries ago, but this felt more sacred, more honest.
Reiner's technique was relentless, methodical yet passionate. He varied pressure and speed, reading your responses like a battle strategy. When your hips began to rock instinctively, he flattened his tongue, licking you from entrance to clit in one broad stroke. You cried out, the sound swallowed by the vaulted ceiling. "Like that, oh–" you managed, your voice breaking. "Gods, Reiner, like that."
He hummed against you, the vibration shooting through your entire body. His hands tightened on your hips, holding you in place as his tongue worked faster, harder. The stubble burned now, a sweet fire that only heightened the pleasure. You could feel the tension coiling in your belly, drawing tight as a bowstring. Your thighs began to tremble, muscles quivering with the effort of staying open. Reiner noticed, shifting to hook one arm under your knee, holding you wide and exposed. The new angle allowed him deeper, his tongue fucking you in rhythm with the circling pressure on your clit.
The pressure built and built, wave after wave of sensation crashing through you. Your fingers clenched in his hair, pulling perhaps too hard, but he only groaned and redoubled his efforts. The sounds he made—hungry, desperate sounds—sent you higher. When the orgasm hit, it shattered you. Your body convulsed, hips bucking against his mouth as pleasure ripped through you in pulses. You sobbed his name, the syllables echoing off marble and stone. He didn't stop, drawing it out, prolonging it until you were wrung out and shaking.
He finally lifted his head, his face glistening in the dim light. His chest heaved with each breath, the armor plates rising and falling. You watched him undo and set down his heavy armour hurriedly until he was bare chested in front of you, and then undoing his trousers with fumbling fingers, his usual grace abandoned to urgency. You thought about broad and handsome he was like this— all needy and desperate— his chiseled biceps flexing as he moved. "I can't wait anymore, princess—please," he growled, almost begging as his hands fumbled with the laces of his breeches. "I need to be inside you."
He freed his cock, thick and heavy, springing up against his stomach as you gulped at the sight of it. He stroked it once, the head flushed and angry before leaned forward, catching your mouth in a searing kiss, tasting yourself on his tongue. It was a dominant, possessive kiss, claiming your breath.
He lined himself up, the head of his cock nudging against your wet entrance. When he entered you, the stretch was perfect—painful enough to ground you, pleasurable enough to send sparks through your oversensitive flesh. He braced himself above you, his arms corded with muscle, the veins popping out of skin.
"Look at me," he commanded, and your eyes fluttered open to meet his. The intensity there stole your breath. "I've dreamed about this since the day I met you,” he grunts, before began to move, each thrust deliberate and deep. The wool coat beneath you provided little cushioning from the stone, but you didn't care. The sound of your bodies joining—wet, rhythmic, primal—filled the sacred space. His stubble scraped your neck as he buried his face there, his breath hot against your ear.
Your legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him deeper. The angle changed, and suddenly he was hitting something inside you that made stars burst behind your eyes. You clawed at his back, seeking purchase against the toned muscles bulging under your hands. "Harder," you breathlessly begged, and he obliged, his hips snapping forward with renewed force. The mausoleum seemed to spin around you—the stone angels on their perches watching, the carved saints bearing witness to this raw, human need.
"You're so beautiful," he panted, his rhythm increasing. The sound of skin slapping against skin filled the room, mingling with the roar of the rain. "Taking me so well…my perfect princess."
His rhythm grew erratic, his control finally breaking. You felt him swell inside you, his thrusts becoming shallower, faster as he chased the high. His hand reached down and found your clit again, rubbing in tight circles that pushed you toward another peak.
"Reiner," you moaned, my nails digging into his back. "Please."
"I know," he grunted, his thrusts becoming harder, faster. "I know. Let go for me again, princess.”
The command sent you over. Your second orgasm was sharper, more intense, your inner muscles clamping around him as pleasure blinded you. He followed you with a hoarse cry, his body stiffening as he spilled himself deep inside you.
For a long moment, you lay tangled together, Reiner still inside you, and the only sounds your ragged breathing and the rain still falling outside. Eventually, he shifted, his weight pressing you more firmly into the stone. His lips found your temple in a soft kiss, tender after the ferocity of moments before. "We should get dressed," he started, then stopped, clearly at a loss. The formal knight had returned, but his eyes still held the wildness of the man who had just claimed you.
You smiled, tracing the line of his jaw. "The storm's not over yet."
His answering grin was slow, dangerous. "No," he agreed, already hardening inside you again. "It's not, Princess.”
summary: This season in the Royal Court of Paradis promises more than debutantes and dances...It promises a choice. Princess Y/N Reiss, presented for the second year in a row to court at her younger sister Historia's debut ball, stands at the very centre of it all, smiling politely while the entire kingdom quietly decides who she should belong to out of her admirable suitors.
The gentleman suitors: Eren Jeager, Jean Kirstein, Armin Arlert, Connie Springer, Reiner Braun, Erwin Smith and Levi Ackerman.
a/n: ahhh part two guys! Thank you for all the love on the first part :D I hope you enjoy this one.
The formal dancing began with your father and Historia. This was tradition of course, the King opening the first set of a debut ball with the debutante herself, a declaration to the court that the evening had his blessing, that his daughter was presented with the full weight of the crown behind her. You had done it yourself only the previous year with your father, not that you thought it was most pleasant.
Your father led Historia onto the floor with a ceremony that was entirely genuine. His hand over hers. His posture straight and unhurried. His expression carried the gravity of a man who understood what this moment meant and refused to be anywhere other than fully inside it. Historia walked beside him with her head level, her train carried behind her, her face arranged in the quiet, composed grace she wore for things that mattered to her. Then, the music began. Your father smiled at her, and Historia smiled back, and they danced. You stood at the edge of the floor and watched, and the pride in your chest was so complete it left very little room for anything else.
The court watched too. Even the young men at the edges of the room, the ones who had spent the better part of the evening performing casual disinterest– had abandoned the performance entirely, because some things simply asked to be witnessed. Historia was luminous. She moved through the steps with a serenity that made it look effortless, which you knew it was not, because you had watched her practice in the long gallery upstairs more times than either of you had counted. But none of that showed. When the set ended, your father returned her to the edge of the floor with a bow that was formal and tender in equal measure. Historia inclined her head, and her eyes were very bright, and she came directly to you.
She didn't say anything. She simply found your hand and held it for a moment, and you held it back, and that was sufficient. Then the herald announced the first general set, the floor began to fill, and the season, properly, irrevocably had begun.
Lord Jean Kistein was at the edge of the floor waiting for you, which you noted without comment. He was standing very straight, hands clasped behind his back, with the expression of a man who had decided to conduct himself impeccably this evening and was so far succeeding through sheer application of will. "Your Highness," he said as his eyes never left you, and bowed correctly.
"Lord Kirstein," you said, and took his offered hand.
He led you onto the floor with a precision that was slightly stiffer than it needed to be, and then the music began, and the stiffness began to leave him by degrees....because Jean Kirstein, whatever else he was, was a genuinely good dancer. The kind of good that came from somewhere real rather than from lessons alone.He moved with a natural, easy confidence, led without making a performance of leading, and kept his attention on you with a focus that was flattering without being overwhelming. Every turn was careful without feeling cautious; every touch measured, like he was trying to make certain you were comfortable before himself. But yet, you noticed the small things about it, the way his thumb brushed softly a few times against the back of your glove when you smiled at something he said, the way his gaze dropped briefly to your mouth before he caught himself and looked back at your eyes. The way he always left the slightest respectful distance between you when the figures allowed closeness, as though he wanted to step nearer and was deliberately choosing not to out of respect. It was strangely compelling.
"You're better at this than you look," you said, after the first figure.
He cut a glance at you. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means you dance well," you said. "I'm not sure how else to interpret it."
"You said it like it surprised you."
"Hm," you said pleasantly. "You're welcome to take it however you like."
His jaw did something brief and complicated, and then, quietly, under his breath, he laughed. Just a short sound, almost involuntary. He pressed his lips together immediately after, as though trying to reclaim it, but it had already happened and you had already heard it, and something in the air between you shifted accordingly. "You're not what I expected," he said, after a moment.
"What did you expect?"
He considered this with more seriousness than the question perhaps warranted. "Someone more formal," he said. "More... " He turned you through a figure and brought you back with a smoothness that was entirely unconscious, his hand warm and steady at your waist. "More careful and guarded."
"I am careful and guarded," you answered.
"Yes, but you still feel....approchable." He said it like an observation rather than a compliment, which made it, somehow, more of one. "I've noticed since being here that most people at court, people are conscious of everything they say, you can feel them measuring it first to see how you'd react. Choosing the version that sounds the best." He glanced at you. "You don't do that."
"You don't either," you said. "From what I've seen tonight."
Something shifted in his expression, a slight defensiveness, quickly overridden by something more honest. "I try everyday to be a better person, someone more honest," he admitted. "More... worthy of things, I guess."
The vulnerability of the statement sat strangely tenderly between you. "And are you often cruel to yourself," you began softly, "or only on special occasions?"
That startled a laugh out of him, a wonderful sound to your ears– and when he looked back at you afterward, there was something openly fond in his expression that he had not entirely managed to hide. "I am serious, Your Highness," he laughed.
"I know." You changed your tone now, "I don't think that's something you're bad at. You've spent half the evening being respectful to people who haven't earned it," you replied. "That already makes you better at court than most."
He looked at you then, steadily, with the particular quality of someone recalibrating. "You believe so?" he said, slowly. You gave him a soft smile and nod, and the effect on him was immediate. A flustered, almost boyish smile spread across his face before he could stop it, softer and far more genuine than the polished expressions he wore for everyone else.
The dance settled into a comfortable rhythm. He was, you discovered, sharp and funny and intermittently honest in ways that seemed to surprise him, as though the conversation kept going somewhere he hadn't planned for and he was navigating it in real time. He asked you a question about the estate's architecture that turned out to be genuinely curious rather than conversational filler, and he listened to your answer with real attention. And then, just as the set reached its midpoint, just as the distance between your manner and his had narrowed to something comfortable– "Kirstein."
Jean's rhythm didn't break. But every other thing about him did, in the small, controlled way of someone who had heard a particular voice and had a particular reaction to it that he was managing in real time. His jaw set. His hand, where it held yours, stayed perfectly correct.
"We're in the middle of a set, Jeager" he said, without turning around.
Eren Yeager stepped into the edge of your figures with the focused energy of someone who had made a decision and was now executing it. He was looking at Jean with the kind of directness that didn't leave much room for anything else.
"I'm aware," Eren said. "But I think it's my turn now with her Highness now.”
"Then you're aware that it isn't your turn yet."
"I just wanted to–"
"Yeager." Jean's voice dropped, controlled and very precise. "Can you leave us alone?"
"No." Eren's eyes moved to you then briefly, and then back to Jean. "Kirstein. A word."
"Whatever you have to say, you can say after I've had this dance."
"It'll only take a—"
"After."
Eren looked at Jean. Jean looked at Eren. And in the space between them was something old and specific and entirely mutual, the compressed history of two people who had been in each other's orbit long enough to have accumulated a great deal of it. You wondered how they knew each other, and what had happened for the tension between them to be so high? Eren then looked at you, and his expression changed, not softened, exactly, but shifted. Became more direct. "Your Highness," he said. "May I have this dance?"
Jean's hand tightened, fractionally, around yours.
"She's already dancing," Jean said, and his voice had gone very quiet, which was worse than when it was loud. "With me. Which you can see. Because you're standing right here."
"The set's not been called," Eren said. "It's not formal. I'm asking." His eyes hadn't left yours. "May I?"
The floor had not stopped. The music had not paused. Around you, the other couples continued their figures with the serene obliviousness of people who were either genuinely unaware of what was happening three feet away from them or were very deliberately pretending to be. You suspected the latter.
You looked at Eren, at the set of his jaw, the absolute absence of apology in his expression, the simple, unadorned determination of a man who had decided something and was not going to pretend otherwise. Then you looked at Jean, at the controlled fury in his face, the muscle working in his jaw, the particular expression of someone who was very close to the edge of their considerable composure. You were going to have opinions about this later. Several of them.
But Eren was already holding out his hand, and Jean, to his credit, did not make a scene. He released you, stepping back. And looked at Eren with an expression that communicated, with complete clarity and without a single word, that this was not finished.
"We'll continue another time," Jean said to you, and his voice was even, and his eyes were not.
"I look forward to it," you said, gently.
He held your gaze for a moment. Then he turned and walked away, and he did not look back, and the deliberateness of it...the choosing not to look back, said everything he hadn't. Before you could dwell on it, Eren took your hand with a certainty that left very little room for second thoughts, his or yours. The moment his hand closed around yours, he drew you back into the set, his other hand settling at your waist as the dance carried you forward again. You noticed he danced closer than Jean had. Just enough that he almost wanted you to know it. For the first few moments, neither of you spoke. The tension from the interrupted dance still lingered between you, warm and sharp-edged. You could feel it in the way Eren moved, focused, restless and entirely aware of you.
Then you said to him, "That was not your finest hour, Mr Yeager"
"No," he agreed, immediately, almost admittingly. "It wasn't."
"He was in the middle of a dance...."
"I know."
"He was on my dance card too."
Eren's jaw shifted slightly. "I know." He navigated a turn, pulling you closer for a brief figure before separating you again. When he drew you back, his hand at your waist clenched against you almost imperceptibly. "I saw you two talking and I–" He stopped, starting again. "I didn't like it," he said, with the blunt simplicity of someone who had examined the diplomatic version of that sentence and found it not worth the effort.
You looked at him. "Why?"
He met your eyes without hesitation. "Because I wanted to be the one dancing with you." The honesty of it hit harder than it should have, and the next steps carried you together again, and this time when he leaned closer to speak, you could feel the warmth of his voice against the edge of your ear. "And I'm not very good," he murmured, "at standing still and watching while someone else has something I want."
Your breath caught softly, but he noticed. "You're impossible, Mr Yeager," you huff quietly.
Something almost amused flickered across his face. "Hm."
"You're going to have to apologise to him, you know," you tell him.
Something shifted in his jaw. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "I know."
"And mean it."
He looked at you with an expression that was briefly, almost imperceptibly, amused. "You don't pull your punches," he said.
"Neither do you," you said. "I thought we might as well be consistent."
He looked at you for a moment longer than the steps required. And then, unexpectedly, he smiled– the smile of someone who had been surprised by it. "Fair enough," he said.
You danced. The restlessness that was always present in him found, within the structure of the set, something to do with itself, he was focused, fully present, and there was something almost peaceful about it, the way an open flame is peaceful once it has found its proper hearth. He asked you questions with the direct, specific curiosity that was his natural mode, not flattering questions, not performed interest, but actual questions, the kind that expected real answers. What did you think of the capital in season? What did you find most tedious about court? If you could be anywhere tonight that wasn't here, where would it be? That last one surprised you into a pause.
"The library, most likely," you said, after a moment.
He nodded, like this was exactly right. "Yeah," he said. "I'd be outside. Anywhere outside." He glanced at the high windows, the dark sky beyond them. "I find it, all of this– " He gestured, slightly, at the general splendour of the room. "A lot."
"It is a lot," you agreed.
"You handle it better than I do."
"I've had more practice," you said.
Something moved through his face, something wry and a little resigned. "Well, I don't mind turning up to these things as long as you're at them," he said, and then seemed to register what he'd said, and looked away briefly, and the very tips of his ears went quietly, definitively pink. You said nothing. You were, privately, charmed.
The set drew to its close. He returned you to the edge of the floor and bowed with a seriousness that was genuine, and when he straightened he looked at you steadily. "Thank you," he said. "For the dance."
"Of course. And don't forget what I told you," you said.
He nodded once, slow. And then, "I'll apologise to him."
"Good," you said.
"But, I'm still not sorry I interrupted him to get longer with you," Eren smirked.
You held his gaze for a moment. "I know," you said, which was not the same as saying you wanted it, just that you appreciated it.
He smiled and stepped back, and you turned to find Armin waiting at the edge of the floor with the patient, attentive expression of someone who had watched the entire preceding sequence with great interest and had already formed several conclusions about it.
"So, Viscount– are you going to sweep me off my feet?" you said teasingly, as he offered you his hand.
"I can do that," he said, with complete serenity.
You laughed at his certainty, genuinely, and he smiled at the sound of it, warm and unassuming, and the dance began with the particular ease of something that required very little effort to begin. Armin was a careful dancer, not showy, not trying to impress, simply attentive to you. He moved through the figures with a thoughtfulness that was entirely characteristic, adjusting to the space, aware of you in a way that asked nothing except your presence. You found yourself settling into it almost immediately, the way you settled into rooms that were well-proportioned and quiet.
"I assume you saw the altercation between Jean and Eren," you said, after a moment. Because it was sitting there and because Armin, you suspected, already knew.
"I did," Armin said. You looked at him as he continued. "He was going to wait for his turn," Armin said, with the patient, fond resignation of someone explaining a person he had known for a very long time. "He genuinely was. He stood there watching for– " He considered. "Quite a while, actually. And then you laughed at something Jean said and he–" He tilted his head slightly. "Stopped waiting."
You absorbed this. "He's not malicious," Armin said, carefully. Not a defence, just an offering, clear-eyed and honest. "He just....when Eren wants something, the part of him that knows how to be patient tends to lose the argument. He's working on it." A small pause. "We're all working on it."
"The loyalty in that sentence is extraordinary," you admit.
Something warm moved through his expression. "He'd do anything for the people he cares about," he said simply. "That's not nothing, I think. Even when the execution needs work."
You looked at Armin, at the thoughtfulness that sat so naturally on him, the genuine kindness that wasn't soft so much as considered, that had clearly looked at the world clearly and chosen warmth anyway. "You're a good friend to him," you observe.
"I try to be," he said. "He makes it easy, most of the time. And the times he doesn't, " He smiled, small and rueful and fond. "Those are the times it matters most to try."
The conversation moved the way conversations with Armin moved, naturally, laterally, finding its own path without needing to be directed. From Eren to the structure of the evening, to a question he had about the history of the Reiss family seat that was so specific and so genuinely curious that you spent two full figures answering it and found you had enjoyed every second. He listened the way very few people listened, completely, with his whole attention, as though what you were saying was the most interesting thing in the room, which was, in its quiet way, one of the loveliest things a person could offer.
You were midway through explaining the original construction of the western wing of the estate when Armin's expression shifted slightly, his eyes flickering briefly toward your face.
Then, hesitantly, he says, "May I?"
You blinked. "May you what?"
"There's just–" He lifted one hand carefully, giving you every opportunity to move away if you wished to, but you didn't. Armin's fingers brushed softly against your temple as he tucked a few loose curls back from your face, the escaped strands having fallen free during the dancing. His touch was feather-light, almost cautious, and yet the brief brush of his knuckles against your cheek sent an entirely unexpected warmth through you.
The movement stilled between you both afterward, and his hand lingered for only half a second too long. Then Armin pulled back immediately, colour rushing all at once into his face.
"Oh–I'm sorry, I shouldn't have just–"
You laughed softly before he could finish, the sound warm and instinctive. "It's fine, please."
He still looked mortified. "I just thought it might bother you while dancing."
"That was very considerate of you, Viscount."
The pink in his cheeks deepened considerably, and you realised then that you were still standing slightly closer to him than the dance strictly required. And, perhaps more tellingly, you made no move to step away. And neither did he.
Armin cleared his throat gently and resumed the dance with visible effort toward composure, though every now and then you caught him glancing at you with an expression that seemed halfway between flustered and disbelieving. It was, you thought privately, rather adorable.
"Can I ask you something?" he said, as the set moved toward its close.
"Of course," you said.
"Did tonight go the way you expected it to?"
You considered the question, the honest version of it, not the diplomatic one. The small coal of something sitting quietly behind your sternum that had arrived without permission and had not yet left. "No," you say. "Not at all."
"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
You thought about it. "I'm not sure yet," you said.
He nodded slowly, like this was exactly the right answer. "That's usually how the interesting things start," he said.
The final notes of the set arrived. He returned you to the edge of the floor with a gentleness that was entirely his own and bowed with sincerity that asked nothing in return. "Thank you," he said. "That was genuinely the best conversation I've had all evening."
"For me as well," you said, and meant it completely.
He smiled, warm and unassuming and real, and went, and you stood at the edge of the great marble floor in the candlelight with the interval stretching ahead of you and three dances already behind you and the particular fullness of an evening that had given you considerably more than you had walked in expecting. Across the room, you could see Jean at the far edge, his back to the floor, a glass in his hand. You could see he was trying not to look at you, the deliberateness of it said everything. Near the column, Eren was already moving toward him, jaw set, shoulders straight, with the focused purposefulness of a man who had made a decision and was going to see it through. You watched him close the distance between them, watched Jean turn, watched the brief, taut silence before Eren said whatever he had gone over to say.
Jean's expression didn't soften. But it changed slightly.
Historia appeared at your side. "Well," she said.
"I know," you said.
"Lord Kirstein looked at you when you left with Eren like someone had–"
"I know, Historia."
"And Eren was–"
"Historia."
The interval did not last long enough. It rarely did, you found, the brief reprieve between sets always shorter than anticipated, the room always louder than you remembered, the candles always somehow brighter on the return. You had spent the better part of it with a glass of something cold and Historia at your elbow, deflecting her observations with the patient efficiency of long practice, watching the room resettle itself around the approaching second half of the evening. Across the floor, Jean had not moved from his position near the far wall. He was talking to someone now, a lord you didn't recognise– and he was doing it with the surface-level ease of a man who was very good at appearing composed, which was different from being composed, and you had spent enough time studying him tonight to know the difference.
Eren had returned from his conversation with Jean looking equal parts determined and chastened, which was, you suspected, as close to contrite as he was capable of getting and still entirely genuine. He had caught your eye across the room and gave a single, brief nod, a look of I did it– and you had inclined your head in return. Armin, standing beside him, had looked quietly pleased. And now the musicians were finding their opening notes again, the floor was clearing, and your card still had four names on it. You smoothed your gloves, set down your glass, and went to meet them.
Connie was not where you expected him to be.
Most men waiting for a set positioned themselves at the edge of the floor with some version of studied readiness, hands clasped, expression arranged, the posture of someone who had thought about this moment and prepared for it. Connie was standing slightly to the left of the correct location, in conversation with a passing footman about something that appeared, from his expression, to be both urgent and entirely trivial, and he only noticed you approaching because the footman's eyes moved to you first and Connie followed them with the guileless reflexes of someone who had not yet learned to pretend he wasn't looking.
"Oh!" He turned. Straightened. The conversation with the footman was abandoned mid-sentence without apparent guilt. "Your Highness. Sorry, I was just– " He gestured vaguely at the footman's retreating back. "Never mind. Hi. Hello." He bowed, slightly too quickly, and came back up with an expression of concentrated effort. "Good evening."
"Good evening, Lord Springer," you said, and took his offered hand before he could second-guess the offering of it. He led you onto the floor with the slightly stunned energy of someone who had not entirely expected to get this far and was now improvising, and the dance began, and within approximately thirty seconds you understood that Connie was not a bad dancer so much as an extremely enthusiastic one– he threw himself into the figures with a commitment that was more than compensated for any technical deficiency, and his hand in yours was warm and his grin was immediate and entirely unguarded.
"Right," he said, as though beginning a meeting he had called. "So. How's your evening going?"
You blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Your evening. Good so far? Bad? Somewhere in the middle?" He navigated a turn with cheerful approximation. "I saw the thing with Eren and Jean earlier, by the way. Just so you know, that's basically just Tuesday for them. You don't need to feel responsible."
"It's not Tuesday though," you giggle.
"Figuratively," he joked. "They've been like that since Eren was stationed in Trost a while back. I heard they were constantly at each other's throats......Eren does something, Jean gets annoyed, they both act like it's the other one's fault. It seems very—" He searched for the word. "Consistent," he landed on, with the air of a man choosing diplomacy.
"That's one word for it," you said.
"I have others," he said cheerfully. "But we're at a fancy ball so I'm trying to be....you know." He made a gesture that seemed to indicate the general concept of decorum. "Appropriate.”
"How's that going?"
He considered this with complete seriousness. "About a six out of ten," he said. "Which is honestly better than usual."
You laughed and snorted almost, without warning, the kind that arrived before you'd decided to allow it. Connie looked at the sound of it with an expression of pure, uncomplicated delight, like a man who had been aiming for something and exceeded it entirely by accident. "Yeah?" he said, pleased.
"Lord Springer," you laugh, composing yourself, "you are not at all what I expected."
"People say that," he said, without a trace of self-consciousness. "I think they expect me to be...I don't know, more– " He gestured vaguely at himself. "More something. And then I'm just this." He shrugged, easy and unbothered. "I figure it's better to just be this from the start. Saves everyone time."
You looked at him properly then, at the open, unguarded face, the complete absence of performance, the particular warmth of someone who had simply decided to be exactly what he was and had found it sufficient. "I think that's one of the wisest things anyone has said to me all evening," you said.
He pointed at you. "See, now I can't tell if you're being serious or very politely making fun of me."
"Both," you said. "Simultaneously."
He laughed, loud and real and entirely unworried about whether it was the right laugh for a formal ball– and several people nearby turned to look, and Connie didn't notice, and you found that enormously refreshing. The set continued, warm and easy and uncomplicated in the way that only things with no agenda manage to be. He told you about where he was from with an affectionate irreverence that made it clear he loved it, asked you questions that were simple and genuine, and listened to your answers with his whole face. He was not trying to impress you. He was simply cheerful and entirely himself, and it was, after the charged weight of the previous dances, something close to a relief. When the set ended he returned you to the floor's edge with a bow that was better than his opening one, and straightened with the satisfied expression of a man who felt the evening had gone well.
"Thanks for the dance," he said. "You're really easy to talk to, you know that?"
"You're not so difficult yourself," you say.
He grinned at that, wide and genuine and completely unguarded. "I'll take it," he said, and stepped back, and you watched him go with the particular warmth of someone who had been given, unexpectedly, exactly what they needed.
The contrast was immediate for your next dance. Where Connie had been all warmth and motion and uncomplicated presence, the foreign officer Reiner Braun was stillness. He was waiting at the correct position, at the correct time, with the correct and expected expression,and all of it was so precisely correct that you could see the effort it cost him, the way a well-built wall lets you see, if you look closely enough, the weight it's holding back. He bowed with a formality that was almost severe. "Your Highness."
"Mr Braun." You took his hand. He led you onto the floor and the dance began, and he was, technically, an excellent partner, his lead sure and steady, his timing perfect, his attention on you complete. He smiled at the right moments, and the smile was correct, but it did not reach his eyes, and you noticed.
"You're doing it again," you said, after the second figure. You couldn't quite help yourself.
He looked at you. "I beg your pardon?"
"The thing you were doing on the balcony," you said, gently. "Being very precisely correct about everything. It's like you're worried that you'll do something wrong."
A pause. Something moved through his jaw....controlled, contained. "I'm not sure what you mean, Your Highness," he said.
"I think you do," you said, not unkindly, just simply honest. He was quiet for a moment. The steps continued, and you let the silence sit, because you had learned from being on the balcony with him that Reiner Braun did not respond to being pushed.....only to being given space, and even then only on his own terms.
"Old habit," he said, eventually, his eyes fixed somewhere past your shoulder at the middle distance.
"Being correct?"
"Being– " He stopped, then started again, more carefully. "Ready," he said. "For whatever the people need from me."
You turned through a figure and came back to him and said, lightly, "And what do these people need from you, do you think?"
He was quiet for longer than the question warranted. And then, with the particular quality of a man who had not planned to say something and was saying it anyway– "I'm not entirely sure. That's part of the problem."
You looked at him. He was still watching the distance, stubbled jaw set and the careful blankness of his expression doing the work it always did. But there was something underneath it tonight that was closer to the surface than it had been on the balcony.... something that the warmth of the room and the lateness of the hour had caused his mask to have worn a little thin.
"This place," he said, after another moment, and the way he said this place encompassed, you felt, considerably more than the hall. "The capital–Paradis, is so different. The way everyone here– " He stopped. "Everyone knows how to act around here. The way to stand and the way to speak and what to say and when to say it." A pause. "Where I'm from, the rules are different, they way people act are different. I've been trying my hardest to fit in and follow the rules but–" He exhaled, once, through his nose. "They're not mine," he said.
"No," you said, gently. "I imagine they're not."
He looked at you then, properly, for the first time since the dance began– and something in his expression shifted, the composed surface cracking, barely, at one corner. "I was nervous," he admits. "For tonight." He said it the way someone says something they have not said aloud before and are testing the weight of it in the open air. "Coming here. I was...I don't generally attend things like this—" He stopped again, the habit of self-correction arriving before the sentence did. He seemed to notice it this time. "I was nervous," he said again, simply.
You held his gaze. "That's entirely understandable," you comfort him. "This is a room full of people who have spent their entire lives practicing how to be in it, who have grown up in and around Paradis. Walking into that from the outside is.... it's a great deal to ask of anyone."
Something in him eased. Not completely, not the whole wall, not anything so large–but a fraction, genuine and unperformed. "I almost didn't come onto the floor," he admitted. "For the dancing tonight. I considered finding a reason not to."
"What made you come?" you asked.
He considered this. "It seemed worse," he said, slowly, "to have come all this way and then stand at the edge of it." A beat. "And I had a dance saved with a beautiful woman," he added, quieter. As though it were a small thing, but it wasn't to you. You looked at him, at his golden hair and the careful face and the thing underneath it that was tired and real and doing its best ...and felt the particular warmth of being someone's reason for something.
"For what it's worth," you said, "you would never have known it. The nervousness." You paused. "You danced beautifully and were even better company."
Something softened across Reiner's face then. Not surprise exactly, more like relief and maybe something else. "Thank you," he said, and the words came lower this time, more sincere than polished. The next turn of the dance drew you closer together, his hand settling more firmly at your waist as the figures shifted. You became suddenly, acutely aware of the sheer size of him, and you realised Reiner Braun had the build of a man made for battlefields rather than ballrooms. You could feel his broad shoulders beneath his immaculate formal wear and strong arms that guided each movement with an ease so natural it barely felt deliberate. His gloved hand rested securely at your waist, large enough that the warmth of it seemed to press through silk and stays alike, steady and grounding in a way you had not expected.
There was strength in him that did not need displaying, you could feel it anyway. And yet, despite it, he danced carefully with you.....as though fully aware of his own size and perpetually trying not to overwhelm the space around him. It was strangely endearing. You looked up at him then and found him already watching you, his expression gentler now than it had been at the beginning of the dance.
"Thank you, again," he said. And then, after a moment, something moved across his face. "You make it easier being here. You made it easier on the balcony as well. I don't– " He seemed to search for the right word, and then seemed to decide against finding it and say the plain one instead. "I don't know how to explain it. You just....you don't make me feel like I have to perform myself at you."
You held his gaze for a moment. "I will take that," you say quietly, "as a very great compliment."
"It is," he said. Simply, without adornment. "It's the greatest one I have."
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It had the quality of something completed, a thought finished, a thing said that had needed saying, sitting between you now with the particular peace of honesty offered and received.
The final bars of the dance arrived, and he moved through the last of the figures with you. The music ended, and he stepped back and the wall came up again, gently, like a tide returning, and he bowed with the same precise formality with which he had begun. He went swiftly soon after. And you watched him disappear back into the crowd and held the shape of the last half hour carefully, the way you held things that felt fragile.....that felt, if handled wrong, like they might not survive it. Some people, you thought, took a great deal of patience and a great deal of gentleness to know.
You found that you did not mind the prospect.
Erwin Smith arrived for the third set with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never once in his life been late for anything he considered important. He was, you noticed again, extremely handsome– not in the way that announced itself, but in the way that accumulated, the kind of face that rewarded looking at. He looked like a man that would take care of you and ask for nothing in return as he towered over you now. He offered his hand with a warmth that was entirely convincing, led you onto the floor with an ease that made it feel like something he had done a hundred times, and smiled at you as the music began with the particular smile of a man who was exactly where he intended to be.
"You've had quite the evening, it appears" he said.
"Have I?" you said.
"Mm." His eyes were warm and attentive and told you very little about what was behind them, which was, you were beginning to understand, by design. "Four sets, and a minor diplomatic incident near the second figure of the first set."
"You were watching," you said.
"I'm always watching," he said, pleasantly. "Occupational habit."
"Mine too," you said.
Something moved in his expression– genuine interest, rising to the surface through the warmth. "Yes," he said. "I rather thought so." He guided you through a turning figure with the smooth, unhurried precision of a man for whom competence was simply the baseline. "What did you make of it? The evening, as a whole."
"Well, It's not over yet," you smile.
"No," he agreed. "But you've formed opinions." He said it as though it were a fact he had already established, which, given that he had known you for approximately three hours, should have been presumptuous and somehow wasn't.
"What makes you say that?" you asked.
"Because you've been watching this room all evening the same way I have," he said. "Filing things away. Weighing them." His eyes held yours steadily. "Most people at events like this are performing. You're assessing people."
"So are you," you point out.
"Yes," he said, without any deflection whatsoever. "But I've been doing it for twenty years. You do it naturally." He paused, and something in his expression shifted, the strategic warmth still present, but something more genuine sitting underneath it, looking at you with a directness that was almost Levi's in its honesty, though dressed in considerably more silk. "That's not a small thing to ignore in a person," he said.
It landed the way he had intended it to land– not as a compliment, exactly, because it was too specific for flattery. More like recognition. The particular regard of someone who had looked at you clearly and found the looking worthwhile. You held his gaze. "You're very good at that," you say.
"At what?"
"Saying something that sounds like a compliment," you said, "but is actually something else entirely."
A brief pause, And then Erwin Smith smiled– not the warm, calibrated smile of a man managing an impression, but something more unguarded, more genuine, the smile of someone who had been surprised by it. "You're the first person to have said that to me," he said.
"I doubt that," you said.
"The first person to say it to my face," he amended, and his eyes were warm and amused and, underneath both, something considerably more interesting than he had perhaps planned for when the evening began. You danced the remainder of the set in a conversation that moved with the particular ease of two people who were, in some important and not entirely comfortable way, quite well matched....he was sharp and you were sharper, he was measured and you were patient, and the exchange between you had the quality of a game played by two people who both knew they were playing and had decided to enjoy it anyway. When the set ended, he returned you to the edge of the floor and bowed with the immaculate grace that seemed to be his natural state.
"I hope," he said, as he straightened, "that I might call tomorrow morning."
A morning call.....for you? He was direct, but you admired that. You knew Erwin was the ideal man your father wanted for you, and you were sure he'd be pleased with Erwin's call in the morning. The proper next step for a man of his position who had decided he was interested and intended to proceed accordingly.
"You may," you said.
He smiled again, that warm, certain, the smile of a man who had asked a question he already knew the answer to and had asked it anyway because the form of things mattered. "Then I look forward to tomorrow," he said.
He went. And you stood at the edge of the marble floor with the fifth set approaching and the particular sensation of an evening that had accumulated, quietly and without your full permission, into something considerably larger than you had walked in expecting. Historia materialised at your side. She said nothing, for once. She simply linked her arm through yours and stood beside you and looked out at the room.
"The last set," she said, after a moment.
"Yes," you said.
"Levi Ackerman."
"Yes."
"Are you ready?" she asked, and her voice was gentle, and she meant it in a way that was larger than the question. You looked out at the room, at the candlelight and the marble floor and the hundred moving pieces of an evening that had surprised you at every turn.
"Ask me after," you said.
Historia nodded, and said nothing further, and the musicians raised their bows, and the seventh set began. The floor cleared slowly, the way it always did between sets, couples drifting apart, the geometry of the dancing dissolving back into the general movement of the room, voices rising again to fill the space the music had occupied. Around you, the evening had reached that particular hour where the candles had burned lower and the room had grown warmer and the careful formality of the earlier hours had softened at the edges, loosened by dancing and wine and the accumulated ease of a night gone well.
You stood at the edge of the marble and waited, and you were not, you told yourself, waiting for anyone specific. You were simply standing.
Historia had gone, claimed by your father for an introduction you had been happy to excuse yourself from.....and you were, for the first time since the herald had announced your name at the top of the staircase, entirely alone. It should have been a relief. Mostly it was. The room settled into the brief, suspended quiet of an in-between moment, and in that quiet you became aware....without turning, without any single definitive signal- that someone was approaching from your left. You knew who it was before you looked.
Levi Ackerman stopped beside you. Not in front of you, beside you, at the edge of the floor, looking out at it the same way you were looking out at it, with the flat, unhurried assessment he brought to everything. He did not say shall we, or if you're ready, or any of the things the other men had said.
He simply offered his hand, palm up, at his side. You looked at it for a moment, then you placed yours in it. His grip was immediate and certain, not performative, not tentative, not the careful correctness of a man remembering his manners. Just a hand closing around yours with the simple, unannounced intention of someone who did what they meant to do without requiring acknowledgment for meaning it.
He led you onto the floor as the music began. A waltz, slower than the previous sets, the tempo more deliberate, the kind of music that left room for things other than steps. His hand settled at your waist and you felt it immediately, the hold firm and closer than strictly required by the figure, not so close as to be improper. The exact distance of a man who knew precisely where the line was and had decided, without announcement, to stand at it. You placed your hand at his shoulder and felt the solidity of him, the military bearing worn without effort, the kind of stillness that came not from tension but from an absolute, settled knowledge of where he was in space and what he intended to do with it.
You began to move, and he led the way he did everything, without excess and simply and completely effective. He was not a showy dancer. Of course he wasn't. He moved through the figures with an economy of motion that was, in its own way, more striking than anything elaborate....nothing wasted, nothing uncertain, every step placed with the quiet precision of someone who had decided how this was going to go and was going about it accordingly. For a full figure, neither of you spoke.
The silence was not uncomfortable. It had the quality of comfortable silence, two people who had individually decided that most words were unnecessary and had arrived, separately, at the same conclusion. You found that you were not compelled to fill it, which was unusual. You were generally very good at filling silences when you needed to. You did not need to. Not with him.
"You've been on your feet all night, it seems," he said. It was not what you expected him to say. Not a compliment, not an observation about the room or the evening or anything that could be called conversational. Just....a fact. Noticed and stated.
"So have you, General," you reply.
"I'm used to it."
"So am I."
He looked at you then, a brief, sideways thing, assessing. "You're tired of it all, though," he said.
"I'm perfectly fine."
"I didn't say you weren't fine," he said, with the flat precision of someone correcting a misreading. "I said you were tired. Both things can be true."
You looked at him. He looked back, steady and undecorated, and there was something almost startling about it..... the complete absence of any attempt to be anything other than what he was, even now, even here, in the middle of a formal ball with the eyes of the court moving over everything. "Yes," you said, after a moment. "Both things can be true."
Something shifted in him, The fractional thing, around the eyes, that you were beginning to recognise as the closest he came to expression in public. The music turned. He moved with it, and you moved with him, and the hold at your waist tightened– not dramatically, not with any announcement, simply a degree more certain, a degree more.....present. As though the turning figure had required it and he had provided it without thinking about whether to.
You were aware of it completely. You were aware of his hand, and the warmth of it through the fabric of your gown, and the distance between you that was correct and also, somehow, charged, he way the air before a storm is charged, not with anything visible yet, with the simple pressure of something that has not yet decided to arrive. He gave nothing away, yet interested you the most.
"The General of the King's Royal Guard," you said, after a moment, because you needed to say something and you were choosing carefully, "does not generally attend debut balls out of personal preference."
"No," he said.
"You're here for my father?"
"I'm here because it's where I need to be," he said. Which was not the same answer, and you both knew it. He was watching the room– the perpetual tracking, the instinct that never fully switched off, and his jaw was set in its usual way, and his face gave nothing away, and his hand at your waist was exactly as certain as it had been at the start.
"Do you ever stop?" you asked. "Watching for things."
"No," he said.
"Not even now?"
A pause. "Less than usual," he said, and his eyes moved to yours as he said it, and stayed there, and the admission was so small and so unadorned that it arrived in your chest before you had fully processed it–less than usual, watching you, here, in the middle of the seventh set with the candlelight burning lower and the room warmer and his hand at your waist holding you like you were something worth holding. You held his gaze and did not look away, and he did not look away either, and the music moved around you and the floor moved under you and the world continued its general business entirely without your attention.
"You said earlier," he said, after a moment, "that you appreciated honesty."
"I did," you said.
"I meant what I said. About most people not liking it."
"I know you did," you said.
"Most people in your position especially," he said. The bluntness of it was not unkind.... it was simply accurate, delivered the way he delivered everything, without decoration. "You're used to people saying the right thing. The expected thing."
"Yes," you said.
"Does it bother you?"
You considered him for a moment, the grey eyes, the set jaw, the hand at your waist that had not shifted by a fraction. "It used to," you said, honestly. "Now I mostly find it– " You searched for the word. "Predictable." The fractional shift again. Around the eyes. Something that was not quite a smile but lived in the same neighbourhood.
"You're not predictable," he said. It was not delivered as a compliment, it was delivered as an observation, the way he delivered things that were simply true. But it landed the way a compliment lands when it comes from someone who does not give them carelessly, with weight, with meaning, with the specific value of a thing that has not been cheapened by overuse. You felt it, quietly, behind your sternum. That coal again.....still deciding.
"Neither are you," you said.
He said nothing. He looked at you for a moment longer, and what was in his eyes was not warm, exactly, warmth was not the word, warmth was too easy, too soft for whatever this was –but it was present, and it was real, and it was entirely, completely his.
Then the final notes of the set arrived, and the music ended. And Levi Ackerman did not step back. He did not release your hand and bow and turn away the way the others had. He held your gaze for one beat, two, and then he moved, not away from you but beside you, his hand dropping from your waist to offer his arm instead, with the simple, unannounced intention of someone who had decided the next thing to do and was doing it.
You looked at the offered arm, and then you took it. He walked you off the floor without ceremony, without comment, through the edge of the crowd that parted, slightly, instinctively, for him– in the unhurried way of a man who was going somewhere and fully expected to arrive. He brought you to the quieter margin of the room, near the tall windows that looked out onto the dark garden, and stopped. He dropped his arm. Turned to face you. And looked at you with those level, grey eyes in the low candlelight, and for a moment the room was very quiet.
"Thank you," you said. "For the dance."
"Tch," he said, which was not an acknowledgement and was not a dismissal and was, you were learning, simply the sound of Levi Ackerman receiving something he didn't have a prepared response to.
You almost smiled. "Good night, General Ackerman," you said.
"Your Highness," he said. The title, as always, delivered flat and plain, without performance. Then he turned, not away from you, but back to the room, back to the work of watching it that never fully stopped– and you watched the line of his shoulders as he went, and the set of his jaw, and the particular quality of his stillness in a room full of motion. And you stood at the edge of the marble floor in the low candlelight, and you pressed your hand– the one he had held, the one that still remembered the certainty of his grip, briefly to your side.
Historia found you approximately forty-five seconds later, which told you she had been watching from a very specific location for a very specific amount of time. She said nothing. She simply came and stood beside you, and looked out at the room the way you were looking out at the room, and after a moment she tucked her hand into yours with the quiet warmth of someone who understood everything and was going to be very gracious about not saying so. Not yet, anyway.
The great hall was emptying by degrees. It happened gradually, the way all endings happened.....not all at once, but in a slow, inevitable tide. The older guests first, the matrons and the senior lords, departing with the measured dignity of people who had made their appearances and were satisfied with them. Then the middle crowd, the families with daughters to chaperone and sons to shepherd home before the evening became too late to be respectable. And finally the younger set, reluctant and loud, lingering at the edges of the room with the specific energy of people who knew the night was over and were not yet willing to admit it.
The musicians had packed away their instruments. The candles had burned to their final hours, the flames low and warm and guttering slightly in the draught from the opened doors. The marble floor, which had been alive with movement all evening, was still now.....the reflection of the remaining lights caught in its polished surface like a second, quieter version of the night. You and Historia stood near the top of the entrance steps and watched it all wind down.
It was a thing you had done together since you were old enough to attend events like this one , lingered at the end of them, the two of you, in the last quiet before it became empty. It had simply become the way evenings ended. The two of you, and the room emptying, and a few minutes that belonged to no one but yourselves. Historia had her wrap around her shoulders now, the white satin of her gown catching the last of the candlelight, and she was watching the departing guests with an expression that was thoughtful and a little distant, the expression of someone turning an evening over in their hands to see how it felt from different angles. You stood beside her and did the same.
"Well," you said, after a while.
"Well," she agreed.
A couple passed below you, a young lord and his mother, the lord casting one last look back at the hall with the expression of someone leaving something he hadn't finished.....and you watched them go, and the doors closed behind them, and the room got a little quieter.
"How was it?" you asked her. "Truly."
Historia considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "Better than I expected," she said. "The dancing was.....I enjoyed the dancing. And Father was–" She paused, and something soft moved through her expression. "He was wonderful, wasn't he? At the beginning."
"He was," you said.
She was quiet for a moment, watching a group of young women make their farewells near the fountain. Then she said, lightly, the lightness slightly deliberate: "No one caught my attention, particularly."
You looked at her. "Not one?"
"Not....not in the way you mean." She adjusted her wrap with the small, precise movements of someone redirecting their hands. "They were all perfectly agreeable. A few were very charming." She paused. "But I kept thinking about whether the gentlemen were charming or whether they were performing charming. And then I spent so long thinking about it that I stopped enjoying the conversations." She tilted her head slightly. "That's probably my fault."
"It's not a fault," you said. "It's discernment."
"Father would say it's inconvenient timing," she said, and the wryness of it was fond rather than bitter.
"Father says a lot of things," you said.
She laughed and leaned her shoulder briefly against yours in the easy way she had always done, since you were small, since long before either of you had to be anything to anyone. You leaned back, just slightly. "There'll be morning calls tomorrow," you said, after a moment. "And promenades and all the rest of it. The season's only just begun, Historia. There's time for someone to catch your attention."
"I know," she said. "I'm not worried." She said it simply, and you believed her, because Historia's relationship with patience was one of her most quietly formidable qualities. "I just.....I want it to be real," she said. "When it happens. I want it to be someone who..... " She stopped, searching for it. "Someone who sees me," she said finally. "Not the debut. Not the title. Me."
You looked at her profile in the candlelight, the fine features, the gold hair, the particular quality of her stillness, and thought, with a completeness that surprised you, that whoever eventually saw Historia Reiss for what she actually was would be extraordinarily lucky. "They will," you said. "The right one will."
She smiled and then turned to look at you, and the smile shifted into something more knowing, more Historia, with that particular light in her eyes that meant she had been waiting for the right moment and had decided it had arrived. "The same will happen to you, you know," she said.
"Historia– "
"I'm serious." She turned to face you more fully, the wrap slipping slightly from one shoulder. "You danced with seven men tonight. Seven! And at least three of them looked at you like–" She gestured, briefly, at the air between you, as though the expression she needed was hovering there. "Like you were the most interesting thing in the room."
"They were being polite," you said.
"Lord Kirstein," she said, with the calm precision of someone laying down evidence, "watched you leave the floor after your set with Eren and did not speak to another person for the whole evening." You said nothing.
"Eren Yeager," she continued, "interrupted a formal set. Which is...unheard of!"
"He was being impulsive," you said. "That's simply how he is."
"Viscount Arlert told me, when I spoke to him during the interval, that he hoped very much to speak to you again," she said. "Unprompted. I didn't ask."
"Armin is kind to everyone."
"Erwin Smith has already requested a morning call," she said. "I heard Father accept it personally."
"He's thorough," you said. "It's a professional trait."
Historia looked at you with the expression of someone who has presented a complete and well-organised argument and is now waiting for the other person to run out of deflections. "And Levi Ackerman," she said, quieter now, more careful, "Walked you off the floor!"
Silence. "He was being– "
"Don't," Historia said, gently. "Don't say he was being polite. We both know that isn't what that was."
You looked out at the emptying room. The last few guests were making their farewells below, voices low, the great doors standing open to the night air. A footman was beginning the quiet work of extinguishing the nearest candles, the light retreating by degrees from one end of the hall.
"This isnt about me tonight," you said. It came out quieter than you intended.
"I know," Historia said. "You came for me, and it was my evening."
"I came for you and it was your evening," you agreed.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, very simply: "That doesn't mean love can't find you anyway."
You looked at her. She looked back with those clear, steady eyes that always saw more than was comfortable and offered what they saw with a kindness that made it impossible to be annoyed about.
"You sound very certain," you said.
"I watched you tonight," she said. "All evening." A small pause. "You were different. With some of them." She didn't specify which ones. She didn't need to. "Not....not performed differently. Actually different. Like someone who was trying very hard not to be interested and not entirely succeeding."
You opened your mouth, before you closed it again. "It won't come to anything," you said, eventually. Firmly. With considerable conviction.
"Of course not," Historia said, in the tone of someone agreeing in order to be kind rather than because they agreed.
You looked at her. She looked at the middle distance with the serene composure of someone who had said what they wanted to say and was content to let it sit.
"Historia."
"Mm?"
"Stop looking like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you know something."
She turned to you, and the look on her face was so entirely, perfectly innocent that it communicated, in the specific language of younger sisters, an enormous amount.
"I don't know anything," she said. "I'm simply.....hopeful."
You looked out at the hall. At the low candles and the still floor and the evening that was, finally, genuinely drawing to its close. You thought about the dances you had tonight, and the charming gentleman you had met, and you shook your head firmly. You did not, would not, and were absolutely not hoping she was right.
summary: This season in the Royal Court of Paradis promises more than debutantes and dances...It promises a choice. Princess Y/N Reiss, presented for the second year in a row to court at her younger sister Historia's debut ball, stands at the very centre of it all, smiling politely while the entire kingdom quietly decides who she should belong to out of her admirable suitors.
The gentleman suitors: Eren Jeager, Jean Kirstein, Armin Arlert, Connie Springer, Reiner Braun, Erwin Smith and Levi Ackerman.
a/n: this is my first ever post so pls be nice heh. I’ve started posting this story on Wattpad but decided to move it over to tumblr too :D. I can’t guarantee this is historically accurate, but it’s super bridgerton.
Wattpad book link: https://www.wattpad.com/1631427159?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=link&utm_content=share_writing&wp_page=create_story_details&wp_uname=lucyyx3x
Read Preface from the story A Gentleman's Pursuit ✦ Attack on Titan ✦ Bridgerton AU.ᐟ by lucyyx3x (Lucy) with 18 reads...
You looked up from where you had been fussing with the last of the buttons along Historia's back for the past thirty minutes. You looked up and met her eyes in the tall dressing mirror. She was trying to look composed, but was not quite managing it. "Historia," you said as gently as you could. "They are going to adore you."
"You don't know that!"
"I know the court of Paradis," you smoothed out the back of her gown with both hands, stepping around to face her properly. "And I know you! And I'm telling you, with complete confidence, that there will not be a soul there tonight that won't fall in love with you."
She held your gaze for a moment, searching your face for any doubt, or perhaps careful sisterly diplomacy. She found neither though, and something in her shoulders softened. "You promise you're not just saying that because you have to?"
"I promise. I'm saying it because it's true," you said. "And because your gown is extraordinary, your hair is perfect, and if you ask Petra to redo it one more time I think she might actually weep." From across the room, the ladies maid Petra made a sound close to a giggle. Historia laughed at that, and the sound of her laugh made you smile involuntarily. The gown truly was extraordinary. You had approved it yourself nearly three months ago, when it had been little more than a bolt of white satin and a set of sketches spread across the table. Now, assembled and inhabited by your beautiful younger sister, it was something else entirely. The satin was a pale white, the mantua sweeping from her shoulders in a long train behind her– months of embroidery along every hem. The headdress was magnificent, sat atop Historia's golden hair with an improbable, towering elegance– white feathers framing her face and the short veil falling just to her brow. She looked, in short, exactly as a princess making her debut before the Kingdom of Paradis was meant to look.
You stand before her in a deep rose silk, with sleeves gathered softly at the shoulders, feeling warm and quietly proud of your sister before you. The rose colour of the dress had been Historia's suggestion, actually–pressed upon you with gentle insistence. You had not argued with her, of course.
The knock came when you were adjusting the angle of the headdress. It was not really a knock, in the truest sense- it was the sound of your father letting everyone know he was coming in. Rod Reiss entered the way he always entered: as though the room had been built for him to stand in it. He was dressed up as well, the deep burgundy formal coat he was wearing was immaculate, his large gold chain resting at his collar. He was a short, stocky man, with Historia's large piercing blue eyes. Behind him, Kenny Ackerman took up his usual post against the doorframe.
Kenny was your father's personal guard, and he wore that role the way he wore everything else. He was angular and unhurried, a tall man that slumped against the wall as his arms folded across his chest; He surveyed the dressing chamber with the quiet efficiency of someone noting all the exits. He offered no greeting, as he never did in the years he had been your father's guard. It wasn't unfriendliness, exactly. It was simply that Kenny Ackerman had decided long ago that most words were unnecessary, and he had not yet encountered sufficient evidence to change his mind.
"My daughters!"
Rod crossed the room in four long strides, and the formality of him seemed to fall away somewhere in the middle of it. He took Historia's hands gently, drew them up, and looked at her with the expression he kept only for private rooms. Something between pride and wonder, and more than a little of the bittersweet. "Historia," he said, his voice soft and sweet. "You look beautiful."
"Thank you, Father," Historia grinned, her face blushing under your father's gaze. He turned to you, the look he gave you was different. Warmer, perhaps, in a different way.
"Rose suits you," he said.
"Historia said that, too," you smile.
"She was not wrong." He reached out and adjusted a fold at your shoulder with the easy authority of thirty years of managing a kingdom's appearance, and then stepped back to look at the two of you together. Something moved across his face that he didn't name, and you didn't ask him to. "You both will make the Reiss family proud this evening," he said. "Your sister makes her debut today, and you will stand beside her. As it should be."
Historia smiled at you over his shoulder. You grinned back at her. And then your father clasped his hands behind his back quickly, and there it was, the small shift in his posture that meant something else was coming. "Of course," he said, in the mild tone that was never quite as mild as it sounded, "last year's season was also a proud occasion."
You felt the air in the room change, the way it did before the weather got bad. "It was," you said, pleasantly.
"Your debut was very well received, my daughter, as a whole." He paused. "The family name upheld admirably."
"Father," you said.
"I am only noting–"
"Father."
"—that the one small matter left unresolved by you not finding a suitor–"
"We are here for Historia." Your voice was warm, and firm, and left very little room. "And I would like us all to be thinking about her this evening. Wouldn't you?"
Silence followed, and your father looked at you with the expression of a man who knew when he had been outmanoeuvred and was deciding whether to acknowledge it. He exhaled. Then, as if remembering something, his hand disappeared briefly into the folds of his coat, Your stomach dropping. "Since you seem determined to avoid making matters easier for yourself," he said, producing a neatly folded dance card and tying the ribbon and pencil around your wrist, "I have taken the liberty."
You looked down at it, resisting the urge to sigh aloud as your Father tied one around Historia's wrist. "Father, I hardly think I should have this–"
"I hardly think," he interrupted smoothly, "that a Princess of Paradis should spend an entire evening refusing perfectly eligible young men out of stubbornness. Look, your sister is wearing her's!"
You groan this time round. How wonderful. Now your avoidance has been formalised. He exhaled at last, deciding he had won enough victories for one conversation. He turned back to Historia, and just like that, the whole of him softened again– the way it always did when he looked at his younger daughter.
"You will be magnificent," he told her, cupping her cheek briefly with one hand. "I am absolutely certain of it."
Historia reached up and pressed her gloved fingers over his, just for a moment. "I know, Father."
You watched the two of them, a small jealousy sparking deep in your chest. You were quick to push it away. "Ready?" you asked Historia when your father stepped back.
Historia took a breath, squaring her shoulders. "Ready," she said.
You offered her your arm and she took it. Behind you, the train of her gown whispered across the floor as Petra and a second attendant moved smoothly to gather it, and Kenny peeled off the doorframe without a word to fall into place two steps behind your father.
The great hall of the Reiss estate had been transformed. You had seen it all happen before, had watched the staff work through the afternoon, carrying in arrangements and adjusting candelabras and consulting one another in hushed, urgent voices about the precise angle of every garland. But nothing prepares for the beauty of it all.
The courtyard hall opened to the evening sky above, the last of the dusk settling into a deep, dark blue at the edges of the arched windows, and below it the world had been remade in candlelight. Great chandeliers hung at intervals over the floor, each one blazing with dozens of flames that threw a warm, honeyed glow across everything; across the faces of what appeared to be the entire noble population of Paradis gathered in their finest and arranged in careful, watchful groups around the perimeter of the room. And at the centre of it all: the dance floor.Black and white marble, laid in great diagonal squares, polished to a mirror shine so that the chandeliers above were reflected in it like a second sky beneath your feet. It was the kind of floor that made you want to walk slowly, just to hear the sound of it. It was the kind of floor that made everything that happened on it feel, somehow, like it had been choreographed.
A fountain stood at the far end, dressed in blue flowers for the season, and beside it a small ensemble of musicians were already playing, something lilting and warm that floated across the room and asked nothing of you, which you appreciated. You stood at the top of the entrance staircase and took it all in for exactly two seconds before you became aware of the herald clearing his throat.
"His Majesty, King Rod Reiss. And their Royal Highnessness, Princesses Y/N and Historia Reiss of Paradis." The herald's voice carried the particular trained projection of a man who had been announcing people into rooms for twenty years and had developed absolute confidence in the power of his own lungs. The name rang out across the hall, and the hall responded, all conversations paused as every pair of eyes in the room found the top of the staircase and the three figures standing at it. Your father descended first, as was correct. He moved with the unhurried ease of a man who had never once in his life felt uncertain about entering a room, and the court parted for him the way it always did. You followed on his right, Historia on his left. It had been just the three of you for a long time now, the untimely demise of your other family members happening when you and Historia were just infants— the three of you were what remains of Paradis' royalty family.
You had done this before. Your own debut, a year and a half ago, had required this same walk, the same staircase, the same watching crowd, the same peculiar awareness of being seen from every angle at once. You remembered the feeling of it: not precisely unpleasant, but close and warm and requiring a great deal of the kind of stillness that didn't come naturally to you. It came more naturally now.
You kept your chin level and your expression composed, and let your eyes move across the room in a calm, unhurried sweep. You noted the clusters of matrons near the refreshment tables, they would be watching Historia most closely,commenting, and they would do so regardless of anything you or anyone else said about it, so there was very little point in minding them. You noted the younger men positioned with studied casualness near the edges of the floor, the ones who had made sure to be visible without appearing to try. You noted the musicians, who were very good. You noted the flowers, which were exceptional. You noted–A lone figure, near the far column.
You stared simply because your eyes had nowhere else to go. He stood half in shadow, removed from the brighter crush of conversation, as though the centre of the ballroom had rejected him– or perhaps as though he had rejected it himself. You could see he was tall, and lean, and currently looking at you with an expression of profound amazement.
As you got closer, you noticed he had a long face, a sharp jaw, and his light ash brown hair was longer round the back, the type of hair some people in court might call dishevelled and others might, generously, call rakish. He looked entirely unlike the other young men gathered there, where they wore their formal attire as if it were armour polished for display, he wore his as though elegance had bent itself reluctantly around him. Dark burgundy silk clung cleanly to his frame beneath a black jacket draped loosely over his shoulders, the deep red catching the candlelight every time he moved. A black cravat lay neatly at his throat, severe and deliberate, only softening the sharpness of him by very little.
He had one shoulder leaned carelessly against the marble, as though the entire spectacle bored him. The candlelight caught against the sharp lines of his jaw and the severe set of his mouth, making him look almost too composed, too controlled.
His eyes were light brown, steady, and disarmingly intent as they moved across the ballroom with the kind of controlled observation that made it feel like he noticed far more than he ever commented on. Until they stopped.....right on you. He was looking at you. Not at Historia, whose debut this was and who was drawing nearly every other gaze in the room. Not at your father. At you, with the kind of direct, unguarded attention that most people in a court setting learned very quickly to disguise. You held it for one half of a second, before you reached the bottom of the staircase and your father was already turning to speak to someone, and the moment dissolved into the ordinary beautiful noise of the evening.
The receiving line took the better part of an hour. This was standard. This was expected. You stood slightly behind and to the right of your father, which was your correct position as the elder daughter who was not debuting, and you smiled and inclined your head and said the appropriate things to the appropriate people, and kept half your attention on Historia the whole time, watching for the signs of strain that she was very good at hiding but that you had learned, over twenty years, to see anyway. She was holding up beautifully. Of course she was.
It was near the end of the receiving line, when you had begun to allow yourself the quiet thought that the worst of it was nearly over, that your father turned to you with a particular expression– the one that meant he had a plan and was about to include you in it whether you had opinions or not.
"There is a gentleman," he said, low enough for only you and Historia to hear, "that I should very much like to introduce you both to."
"Of course, Father," Historia said, because she was gracious. You said nothing, because you had learned that sometimes silence was more efficient than protest.
The gentleman in question was standing near the edge of the marble floor, which your father navigated toward with the unerring confidence of a man who had already decided how the next ten minutes would go. You clocked him straight away, he was the figure from the column. The one who had been looking. Up close, his eyes were startling. A beautiful hazel, unusually clear, and fixed, and you noticed a slight stubble around his chin. When your father drew his attention, he didn't even look at him and he was definitely not looking at Historia. He was looking at you again.
"Lord Jean Kirstein," your father said, with the warmth he reserved for people he approved of, "Lord of Trost. Jean, these are my daughters."
"Your Highnesses." Jean bowed, promptly– and then straightened and looked at you again, and there was absolutely nothing calculated about the way he did it. No performance, no careful courtly angling. Just a young man who apparently had not yet learned that it was considered polite to look less like he was paying attention.
"Lord Kirstein," you said, pleasantly.
"Just Jean is fine," he said, smiling.
Beside you, you felt your father's absolute stillness, which in Rod Reiss was the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Jean did not appear to notice. "Trost is a bit, well it's nothing like the capital," he said, and the bluntness of it was so out of keeping with the careful formality of everything around him that you almost smiled. "Your father's been trying to convince me the people in the inner walls are–" He stopped, realising your father's eyes were boring into him, and something moved across his face that was close to frustration with himself and embarrassment. "It's, uh, a very fine hall you have," he finished.
"It is," you agreed, and this time you did smile, just slightly, because there was something almost disarming about a man who said exactly what he was thinking at the moment he was thinking it, without the usual layer of court gloss over the top of it. Historia, at your elbow, made a very small sound that was not quite a giggle and you tried not to look at her. Your father moved smoothly into the ensuing moment, drawing Historia into conversation with two other young men nearby and Jean remained where he was, which was approximately one polite conversational distance away from you, looking like he wanted to say something further and was in the process of deciding what.
"You were watching, earlier," you said, because you were curious and because you had found, generally, that directness tended to catch people off guard in ways that were interesting. "Near the column over there."
Something shifted in his expression, not embarrassment, exactly. More like the expression of someone who had been caught doing something they hadn't thought of as catching-worthy. "I was," he said.
"Any particular reason?"
He considered this with a seriousness that suggested he was not about to offer you the standard compliment, the rehearsed line, the smooth court-appropriate deflection. "I wanted to see what you were like," he said. "People talk about the princesses of Paradis, your royal blood and beauty.....I wanted to see if any of it was true."
You blinked, just once. "And?"
The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "Still working that out," he said. "Before I lose the opportunity," he said, glancing toward the dance card tied neatly around your wrist, "may I?"
You followed his gaze. "My dance card?"
"If you'll allow it."
There was something unexpectedly earnest in the question, tucked neatly beneath his usual easy confidence. You extended your hand toward him. Jean smiled, warmer this time, less practiced– and reached for the pencil attached by its ribbon. His fingers were careful as he wrote, his handwriting quick but elegant.
Jean Kirstein.
When he finished, he handed it back, though his gaze lingered on you a moment longer. "I should like at least one dance," he said, his voice quieter now, stripped of some of its earlier bravado. Then, with the faintest return of his usual charm, he added, "Though I would be happy to argue for two."
You laughed softly. "I think one is the safer promise."
Jean smiled at that. "For now," he said.
You opened your mouth, to say what, exactly, you weren't entirely sure– and became aware, abruptly, that the thing you needed most in the world was something cold to drink, and that Historia was looking pinched around the eyes in the particular way that meant she was overwhelmed and managing it admirably but would very much appreciate a rescue. You reached out and touched her arm, light and brief.
"Will you excuse us," you said to the group and Jean, warm and perfectly cordial, "I think my sister and I could do with some refreshment."
Your father gave you a look, but you ignored him.
"'Still working that out'," Historia said, the moment you were three steps away, in a tone of voice that could only be described as delighted.
"He's straightforward," you said, steering her toward the refreshment table at a pace that was unhurried and also somewhat purposeful.
"He was looking at you the entire time!"
"He was being polite."
"He absolutely was not." Historia tucked her hand more firmly into the crook of your arm. "He didn't look at Father once after the introduction. He looked at you the whole time! He looked at you like–"
"Historia! You're meant to be nervous about your debut," you said. "You're not meant to be composing observations about the romantic intentions of provincial lords."
"I can do both," she said smugly. "I'm very good at managing my time."
You reached the refreshment table, and you were reaching for two glasses of something pale and chilled when you turned to hand one to Historia, and walked, with very little warning and considerable momentum, directly into someone. The collision was not violent, but it was definite. Your elbow connected with something solid, there was a sound of surprise, and you looked up from the immediate problem of not spilling anything to find that the someone you had walked into was another gentleman. He stood just slightly taller than you, dressed in a dark, well-fitted military uniform that looked more functional than decorative, as though he had not entirely committed to the idea of court as a place worth dressing for. But it was his eyes that held you first, a shining green. Sharp and unsoftened by the warmth of the room, fixed on you with immediate attention that did not feel accidental. His hair was long-ish, dark brown and tied back loosely but imperfectly, with strands falling forward as though they had never quite agreed with the restraint of being contained.
He was holding what had until very recently been a full glass of wine and was now a half-full glass of wine with the remainder on his sleeve, and he was staring at you with an expression somewhere between outrage and the particular dismay of a man who very much wants to say something cutting and has just remembered to whom he is speaking. You recognised him, distantly from around before. You could see he was a cavalry officer, minor gentry you believe. You had noted him as one of the studied-casualness young men earlier in the evening, positioned just so near the edge of the floor.
He opened his mouth, before closing it. Then opening it again. "I– " he started, and then something complicated happened in his expression, and he said, with the air of someone making a significant effort: "Are you all right, Your Highness?"
The effort was visible. It was, you thought. "Perfectly," you said. "I'm sorry about your sleeve. That was my fault entirely."
Something flickered across his face. He had clearly prepared himself to be gracious about being walked into by a princess and was now slightly wrongfooted by the princess apologising first. "It's- no, it's- " He glanced at the wine on his cuff with an expression of genuine mourning. "It's fine."
"It isn't," you said, and you took the glass from him and set it aside, and picked up one of the small linen cloths from the refreshment table, and held it out. "Here."
He took it. He was, you noticed, looking at you with an expression that had shifted, the affront was still there, somewhere underneath, but there was something more curious sitting over the top of it now. Historia, at your shoulder, was doing absolutely nothing to hide the fact that she was watching this exchange with great attention. He pressed the cloth briefly to his sleeve, realised it was a losing battle, and set it down with the dignity of a man accepting his losses. "Officer Eren Yeager," he said, with a bow that was correct but slightly stiffer than it needed to be. "I don't think we were formally introduced this evening, Your Highness.”
"We weren't," you agreed. "I'm sorry again about the wine."
"I'm sorry for being in the way," he said, which clearly cost him something, because the line of his jaw did a brief, complicated thing.
A small silence before you decide to fill it. "Do you often apologise for standing still in a room?" you asked, with perfect pleasantness.
His eyes sharpened. There it was, the combative thing, rising quickly to the surface, very thinly veiled by the social requirement not to be sharp with a princess at her sister's debut ball. "Do you often walk into people while fetching drinks?" he returned, and then caught himself, and added, stiffly: "Pardon me, Your Highness."
Historia made a sound beside you that was swiftly converted into a cough. For a moment, neither of you said anything. Eren's eyes remained fixed on yours, bright and sharpened now, the irritation still there but tempered by something else, something assessing. Then, unexpectedly, his gaze dropped to your wrist. To the ivory dance card tied there with pale ribbon. You followed his eyes, and when you looked back up, something in his expression had changed again– his jaw still tight, but as though he were debating with himself. Beside you, Historia made a tiny, entirely too interested sound, and you did your best to ignore her.
Eren opened his mouth. "...May I sign it?"
"My dance card?"
He gave the smallest nod, as though annoyed that he had asked at all. "If there's still room."
There was something almost absurd about it– this man, who looked as though he might rather challenge someone to a duel than make polite conversation, asking with such visible reluctance. And yet, you found yourself smiling. "There is."
You held out your wrist. Eren reached for the pencil attached by its ribbon, his fingers brushing lightly against your glove. His hand was steady as he wrote, quick and deliberate.
Eren Yeager.
When he handed it back, his eyes lifted to yours again. "I should like that dance," he said quietly.
You looked at this Eren Yeager, and he looked at you, and the mutual awareness of the moment sat between you- slightly ridiculous, slightly charged....but not entirely unpleasant. "Enjoy your evening, Mr Yeager," you said.
"Your Highness." Another bow. Slightly less stiff, you turned back to the refreshment table, collected two glasses successfully this time, and pressed one into Historia's hand without looking at her.
"Not a word," you said quickly.
"I wasn't going to say anything," she said. You began moving back toward the edge of the floor. "He has nice eyes," she added, after approximately four steps.
"Historia."
"I'm just saying–"
"You are not just saying."
She laughed, and this time she didn't try to hide it, and the sound of it was light and warm and lost itself in the noise of the chandeliers and the music and the beautiful, complicated evening that was becoming. Historia's laughter still lingered at your shoulder, soft and unguarded, as though the entire ballroom had briefly agreed to become something gentler than it actually was.
Across the room, your sister had not gone unnoticed for long. It was inevitable, really. A young nobleman, confident in the way men of a certain rank always were when they believed themselves agreeable– stepped neatly into Historia's path and bowed.
"Your Highness," he said, offering his hand with a practiced ease, "may I have the honour of signing your dance card?"
Historia blinked at him once. Then, as if the entire interaction amused her more than it should have, she glanced toward you, quick and playful. You gave her a look that was meant to be a warning, but it failed. She turned back to the man and placed her hand in his without hesitation.
"Of course," she said sweetly.
As they moved away, she looked back over her shoulder at you, laughter already forming in her eyes. And then she was gone into the crowd talking swiftly with the gentleman, swallowed by silk and spinning skirts and the soft percussion of polished shoes against marble.
You exhaled, turning toward the edge of the ballroom where the light fell thinner, the noise just slightly less consuming. You had done this enough times to know how to exist at the periphery of your own life at this point, half-present, half-observing, always aware of what was expected.For a moment, it was almost quiet.
"You must be Princess Y/N."
The voice was careful. Not loud. It arrived with the same restraint as someone stepping onto unfamiliar ground and testing whether it would hold their weight.
You turned to find a young man standing a respectful distance away. He had blonde hair, slightly unkempt in a way that suggested thoughtfulness more than vanity. His eyes a bright blue, clear, observant, and unsettlingly attentive, not in the way of someone trying to impress, but someone who was always noticing. There was something in his posture that felt almost cautious, as though he had learned the value of speaking only when necessary.
You recognised him after a brief pause and a small study of his face. He had been newly appointed to your father's council. Ah, of course, he was Home Secretary to the King. Viscount Armin Arlert.
"I am," you replied, your tone measured. "And you are Viscount Arlert."
A flicker of surprise crossed his face, quick, subtle, then carefully contained. "Yes, Your Highness," he said politely. "Viscount Armin Arlert. Pleasure to finally meet you and introduce myself."
There was a pause where most people might have tried to fill the silence with flattery or small talk, but he did neither. Instead, he seemed to weigh the moment itself, before you decided to break the silence. "You're... younger than I expected someone on the King's council to be," you said, honest before propriety could intervene. "Most of the men on the father's council are...extremely old."
His expression didn't harden, if anything, it softened slightly, as though he had already considered the observation long before it was spoken aloud, or that he was trying not to break into a grin.
"I hear that quite often," he admitted gently. "Though I suppose it's understandable.”
"And yet you are the Home Secretary," you added.
A faint, almost self-conscious breath left him, something like a restrained laugh that never fully arrived."I am," he agreed. "Though I suspect my appointment had less to do with age and more to do with... being difficult to overlook in matters of planning and problem solving."
That made you study him more closely, there was no arrogance in the way he spoke, nor false humility either. Something more precise, and kind. "I've been told I think things through too much," he added, as if offering clarification rather than defence. "But I've always found that useful in politics and leadership." A small pause. Then, softer, "Or dangerous. Depending on who is judging."
Despite yourself, your mouth curved faintly. Not quite the smile you intended to show, but it happened anyway. Across the ballroom, your gaze drifted.
Lord Jean Kirstein stood near the refreshments, glass in hand, leaning with the kind of studied casualness that suggested it had taken him significantly longer to perfect than he would ever admit. He was not speaking to anyone, nor performing for anyone nearby. Just drinking slowly, as though the ballroom itself was beneath his immediate concern.
And yet, his eyes were on you. Unwavering, not the fleeting glance of a passing curiosity, but something far more deliberate. As if the rest of the room had been reduced to background noise he had no intention of acknowledging. The glass lifted slightly again, unhurried, and he took another sip without breaking eye contact.
It should have been improper to such behaviour in front of the princess, but instead, it made something in your stomach tighten before you could stop it. You swallowed. Armin's voice gentled further, careful now in a way that suggested he had noticed the shift without pressing into it.
"Is something wrong, Your Highness?"
"No," you said quickly. You adjusted your posture, forcing your attention back to him, away from the weight of that distant stare.
"I should find my sister," you said. "I am meant to be chaperoning her."
"Of course," Armin replied at once, stepping slightly aside to allow you space as if he understood precisely what boundaries were not to be crossed. You had already begun to turn when he spoke again.
"Your Highness....if I may."
You paused as he hesitated, just briefly, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter. "Would it be improper to ask for your dance card?" The question wasn't smooth, It wasn't polished but It was sincere in a way that made it feel almost out of place in a room like this. You looked at him for a moment longer than etiquette strictly allowed, then extended your hand where your dance card was placed around your wrist.
"It would not be improper," you said.
Relief passed over his face, not dramatic, not obvious, but present in the way his shoulders eased slightly as he accepted your card. He took the small pencil, and for a moment his attention narrowed entirely to the page. Careful handwriting and deliberate strokes, as though precision itself mattered more than appearance. When he finished, he let go of it, giving a small incline of his head. You looked down at the card.
Armin Arlert.
"I look forward to our dance," he said quietly. "Until then."
There was no flourish in it, No attempt to impress, Only certainty. "Until then," you echoed, because it was expected, because it was correct, because anything more would have meant acknowledging something you were not prepared to name. You turned away, and as you stepped back into the moving tide of the ballroom, you felt it again, across the room, steady and unrelenting. Lord Kirstein's gaze.
You resisted the urge to look back. Historia appeared at your side only moments later, cheeks lightly flushed, her dance card already impressively occupied. She showed it to you with a small smile, far too many names written in neat succession for the evening to still be young– before her eyes drifted to your own. To the newly written name on your card.
"Viscount Arlert?" she murmured, amused.
You began folding the card closed. "Not a word."
Historia only smiled. Before she could offer one anyway, another sound reached you, very loud laughter. Not the polite kind. Not the restrained sort that slipped delicately behind gloved hands and disappeared into chandeliers. Something genuine, and entirely too boisterous for court. Both of you turned to find a young man standing near one of the side tables, laughing with such open ease that it seemed to ripple awkwardly through the guests nearest him, as though they had forgotten whether they were permitted to join in.
He was dressed very well, you thought, a formal coat, crisp collar, polished boots– but nothing about him looked particularly rehearsed. His hair was cropped close in a soft grey buzzcut, practical and neat, and his hazel eyes were bright with the kind of warmth that made him look entirely out of place among so much careful elegance.
As if he felt your attention, he looked up and caught you watching. His laughter stopped immediately. Not because he recognised you straight away, but because he appeared to realise, with dawning horror, that he had been far too loud in such a place.
Historia glanced between the two of you. Then, with the quiet efficiency of someone far more perceptive than she pretended to be, stepped slightly aside giving you a sly wink. "I'll let you have this one," she mumbles.
The young man was already approaching, stopping before you and bowing. It was not perfect, but he did it, and that was all that mattered. "Forgive me, Your Highness," he said immediately. "I'm afraid I may have just disgraced myself."
You tilted your head. "Only may have?"
His mouth twitched. "I was hoping for generosity, and forgiveness."
"I've not yet decided whether you deserve it."
"That seems fair." His eyes flickered briefly to Historia who was standing a few metres away, then back to you. "I should introduce myself before I make matters worse. Lord Connie Springer." He gave an awkward laugh. "This is uh....somehow more intimidating than I expected."
"You seem to recover from intimidation rather quickly, Lord Springer," you joke.
"I've found it's best not to linger in it."
That made you smile, and he noticed instantly, and smiled in return, an easy and immediate grin."I was laughing," he said, nodding vaguely toward the table behind him, "because some gentleman informed me that if I wished to survive this evening, I should avoid speaking too honestly and making jokes out of everything."
"And yet here you are. Speaking and joking."
"I've never been especially talented at following good advice." He lowered his voice slightly, as though sharing something confidential. "I already forgot the name of the lord who gave me the advice anyway"
You laughed, a proper one this time. Small, but impossible to suppress, and Connie looked absurdly pleased with himself.
"There," he said softly. "Now I feel accomplished."
"You find causing amusement an achievement?"
"In this room?" He glanced around at the carefully composed faces and lowered his voice further. "Very much so."
You looked at him. The way he seemed entirely unconcerned with saying precisely the correct thing, so long as what he said was true. The orchestra had changed to something slower now, gentler, the strings lifting softly through the ballroom like breath, and Your eyes drifted over Connie's shoulder. To Historia. She was already on the floor again, her hand resting delicately in the arm of yet another young gentleman whose name you had not managed to catch. She was smiling– genuinely. You watched her for a moment. Your sister looked happy, and at ease for once. As though the evening belonged to her in precisely the way it was meant to.
Beside you, Connie followed your gaze. "She looks less terrified than I would be."
You glanced at him. "You?"
He gave a quiet laugh. "If I were expected to dance with half the kingdom while everyone watched? Absolutely."
"You are not expected to."
"No," he agreed. "Which is fortunate. I'm a terrible dancer." Something in his expression shifted, just slightly but you noticed. A hesitation. "Though..." he said, a little more carefully now, "I was wondering..."
You looked back at him, and he was suddenly less at ease. "Would it be terribly presumptuous," he asked, "to request a place on your dance card?"
You blinked at him. Not because you were surprised, But because he sounded almost nervous asking. A strange contrast to the easy humour he had worn so naturally moments before. You instinctively held your arm out.
"You may."
The relief that crossed his face was immediate, And oddly charming. "Thank you."
He accepted it carefully, as though it were something more valuable than paper and ink. When he wrote, his handwriting was quicker than Armin's. Less deliberate and messier.
Connie Springer.
You watched him write it, then he let go of the card and stepped back with a small, almost sheepish smile. "I promise not to step on your feet."
"You seem very certain."
"I'm choosing optimism."
You smiled. "A bold strategy."
"It's all I have."
That made you laugh again. But when you looked past him, something in your chest felt suddenly... tight. Not unpleasant. Just, too much. Too many eyes on you. Historia was most likely dancing somewhere. Your father observing everyone around him. The walls closing in with candlelight and silk and expectation. You inhaled. It did not feel like enough. Connie noticed immediately.
"Your Highness?"
You shook your head.
"It's fine, I am well." But your voice felt thinner than you intended. You pressed a hand briefly against your bodice, as though it might somehow ease the strange pressure there. "I think," you said quietly, "I only need some air."
Connie straightened. Concern replaced amusement at once.
"Would you like me to-"
"No." Too quickly. You softened. "Thank you. I only need a moment."
He nodded at once. No questions asked, and you were grateful for that. With one last glance toward Historia–still dancing, still smiling, you slipped quietly from the edge of the ballroom. The dark night received you like a kindness. Cool air, the smell of the garden below, grass and something flowering, something sweet you couldn't name– and the music reduced by distance and stone to something soft and undemanding. You stood at the balustrade and put your hands on the cool stone and looked out at the dark shapes of the hedgerows and felt, for the first time since the herald had announced your name three hours ago, like yourself. You breathed.
"Your Highness."
You turned around sharply. There was a gentleman standing at the far end of the balcony, close enough to the wall that he was almost part of the shadow, the kind of position a person took when they wanted to be outside without quite being visible. He was large man, broad-shouldered, golden-haired with slight stubble beard gracing his face, and he was holding a glass he didn't appear to be drinking from, looking at you with an expression that was entirely correct and entirely unreadable. You recongised him instaly from the foreign military uniform. He was Reiner Braun. The Marleyan soldier who was visiting Paradis for the season. You had spoken to him briefly in the receiving line, he had said the right things in the right order with the precision of a man reciting them from memory, and then he had apparently come directly out here, which told you something.
"Mr Braun," you said. "I didn't see you there."
"I wasn't trying to be seen," he said, and then something shifted in his jaw, like he hadn't meant to say it quite so plainly. "Forgive me. I only meant–"
"No," you said. "I know what you meant."
He looked at you carefully. You turned back to the garden and left him the option of silence, because it seemed like the thing he needed most and also because you understood it, the wanting to be somewhere without having to perform being somewhere. You had just done the same thing. It seemed unkind to make him explain it. After a moment, he moved, not toward you, but to the balustrade a few feet away, close enough to be companionable, far enough to be proper. You noticed close up how brawny he was, and even in your side view you could see his large biceps through his military uniform. You swallowed slowly as he set his untouched glass on the stone rail and looked out at the same dark garden.
"It's a fine evening," he offered.
"It is," you agreed.
Another silence. More comfortable than the first. "You don't have to make conversation with me," you said, gently. "I came out here for the quiet as well."
Something in him shifted, not relaxing, exactly, because you got the sense that this warrior of a man Reiner Braun did not fully relax, that it was not a thing available to him. But some fraction of the careful bracing in his posture eased, and he exhaled slowly, and for a moment he looked less like a man performing composure and more like a man who was simply tired.
"Paradis is very–" he started, and stopped. Started again. "Loud," he settled on, finally, and the word had the quality of a significant understatement.
"It is," you said. "Especially during the season."
"How long does it usually last?"
"The season only runs a few months. The rest of the year is considerably quieter." You glanced at him. "Though I imagine that doesn't help much if you're here through the season."
"No," he said. "We don't do this type of thing where I come from."
He said it without self-pity, which you appreciated. Just the plain fact of it, offered and then left alone. There was something underneath the composure, you could feel it the way you could feel a current beneath still water, without being able to see it, but it was buried too deep for a balcony and a first conversation, and you had no intention of reaching for it.
"Well," you said instead, settling your arms on the stone. "It's a very nice view, isn't it?"
He looked at you. And for just a moment, brief, unguarded, there and then packed away again...but something almost warm moved across his face. Not quite a smile. The memory of one, perhaps. "It is," he said quietly. There was a brief silence after that, easy and undisturbed, the kind that felt less like absence and more like understanding. Then Reiner straightened slightly from where he had been leaning against the balcony rail, his gaze dropping to the small ivory dance card tied around your wrist with ribbon. "May I?"
You looked down, then back up at him. "You wish to sign my dance card?"
His mouth twitched, just enough to suggest amusement. "If I'm allowed to?"
You held out your wrist for the fifth time tonight. "Of course."
He took the attached pencil between his fingers, his hand brushing yours for only a moment, brief, but enough to make your breath catch unexpectedly. Without ceremony, he wrote his name in sharp, deliberate strokes.
Reiner Braun.
When he handed it back, his eyes met yours. "I should like that dance," he said quietly. You stayed until the music inside changed its tempo, and then you straightened and wished him a good evening.
Historia found you before you found her. She appeared at your elbow approximately four seconds after you stepped back through the glass doors, with the timing of someone who had been watching that end of the room with great attention. "You were outside for twelve minutes," she said.
"Were you counting?"
"I was concerned!"
"You were counting."
She looped her arm through yours with the serenity of someone declining to answer. "Father is looking for you," she said. "He has people he wants to introduce." You recognised the tone. Not wants to introduce in the general social sense. Wants to introduce in the specific, pointed, purposeful sense that meant your father had made a plan and was now executing it.
"Of course he does," you said.
Your father was holding court near the fountain in the hall, laughing obnoxiously at something. He saw you coming and his face did the thing it always did, warm and just slightly strategic– and he extended a hand toward you in the manner of someone presenting something he was pleased with.
Beside him stood two men. The first who caught your eye was tall, very tall, with blonde hair swept back from a broad and handsome face. He had the kind of presence that announced itself without effort, not loud, but settled, the way a large piece of furniture settles a room simply by being in it. His coat was immaculate, his bearing was immaculate....everything about him was immaculate. The smile he offered you as you approached was warm and measured in equal parts, and his eyes were blue and very attentive. You couldn't help but flash him a warm smile.
The second was considerably shorter, dark-haired, and pale. He stood slightly apart from your father in the way that people stand when they are present by requirement rather than inclination, and he was looking at the room with the flat, efficient gaze of someone cataloguing it for threats rather than enjoyment. His eyes, when they moved to you as you arrived, were a grey, hazy blue and entirely direct.
"This is my eldest," your father said, with quiet pride. "This is Commander Erwin Smith, the newly appointed Head of my Royal Guards. And this is his second in command, General Levi Ackerman."
Erwin smiled and bowed with a grace that was both correct and somehow personal, as though he had calibrated it specifically for you. "Your Highness. I've heard a great deal about you from your father."
"Flattering things, I hope," you said.
"Almost entirely." Something moved in his eyes, intelligent and amused. "Which I confess makes me curious about the rest."
It was a good line, and you appreciated it the way you appreciated a well-made thing, with recognition, without being moved. "Then I shall try to be surprising," you said pleasantly.
Erwin smiled. The smile reached his eyes, which were very blue and very careful. You then turned to Levi. He had not smiled once since you had walked over here. He had not bowed with particular warmth or delivered a line. He had simply looked at you, and he was still looking at you now, level, and direct, and with an absence of performance so complete that it took you a moment to identify what was strange about it.
Everyone performed. In a room like this, at an event like this, from the grand gestures of the senior lords to the careful positioning of the young officers trying to be noticed by the women of society. It was simply what court was, what the season was. A long, elaborate performance with very high stakes and very specific rules. Levi Ackerman was, however, not performing. He was just looking at you. The way a person looks at something they are actually seeing, without deciding in advance what they think about it.
"General Ackerman," you said.
"Your Highness," he said lowly, the title delivered like a fact.
"Are you enjoying the evening?" You ask politely.
A pause. Brief, but present. "Not particularly," he said.
Beside him, Erwin made a very small movement that suggested this was neither surprising nor the first time. "Levi," Erwin said, in the tone of someone who had long since stopped expecting different and was now simply noting.
"She asked," Levi said. Not defensive or apologetic. Just accurate.
You looked at him as he stared back at you. And there it was, that thing, that small, quiet thing that arrived without announcement, that didn't ask your permission or wait for a suitable moment. Just a click of recognition, somewhere behind your sternum. This one will not lie to you, it said. This one does not know how. "I appreciate it," you said.
"Most don't," he said.
"Most are used to being told what they want to hear," you quip back.
He held your gaze for a moment that was slightly longer than the conversation required. Then he looked away, back to the room, back to the hundred things he was perpetually tracking, and you were simply part of the general scene again. But the thing remained. Quiet, and certain, and sitting in your chest like a coal that hadn't yet decided whether to go out or catch alight.
"Your Highness." Erwin Smith had a way of appearing at one's side that felt less like approach and more like arrival, as though he had simply decided to be somewhere and the universe had arranged itself accordingly. He materialised from the direction of your father, who was still holding court by the fountain, and he carried himself with easy authority, the kind that didn't need a room to quiet in order to be felt. He was holding his own glass, and he inclined his head toward you with the warmth of someone who had decided, some time in the last half hour, that he liked you, not in the calculating way of a man assessing an asset, but with the particular regard of someone who found you genuinely interesting. "I wonder," he said, with a smile that was warm and unhurried and perfectly pitched, "whether you might have any sets remaining on your card this evening."
Your father, six feet away, had somehow become very still in the manner of a man pretending not to listen while listening to every word. You glanced at your dance card, the small, ribbon-bound thing that had acquired several names in the last hour, including one in Eren Yeager's handwriting that was slightly too large and slightly too emphatic for the space provided.....and then back at Erwin.
"I believe I still have some free," you said.
"Then I would very much like to claim one, if you'd allow me." He held out his hand for the card, and there was something in the gesture, so undemanding, as though it was entirely possible you might say no and he was genuinely prepared for that– that you found you respected. You held out your wrist with the card attached to. He signed it with a neat, composed hand, the letters of his name even and deliberate, and returned it to you with another inclination of his head.
"I look forward to it," he said. And then, to your father, with a seamless pivot: "Sir, you were saying about the eastern side of the walls–"
And just like that he was back in conversation with your father, as though the whole thing had been a perfectly ordinary exchange and not the kind of careful, considered move that it absolutely was. Your father, for his part, looked extremely pleased with himself. You looked down at your dance card, at the newly signed name composed in deliberate hand.
E. Smith
Historia appeared at your elbow so promptly that you suspected she had been standing just out of sight for the duration. "Erwin Smith," she said, in a tone of hushed delight, and the name had the quality of something she was tasting for the first time and finding excellent.
"Don't start," you said.
"I'm not doing anything." She looped her arm through yours and steered you, gently but with considerable purpose– away from your father and away from the fountain and toward the slightly quieter margins of the hall. "I'm simply observing that the Commander Erwin Smith, who is broadly considered to be the most eligible man in the capital and possibly the entire kingdom, has just signed your dance card!"
"He was being courteous."
"He was being strategic," Historia said, with the certainty of someone who had been watching the court her entire life and had drawn several conclusions from it. "Which, with Erwin Smith, is practically the same thing as being sincere. He doesn't do things without meaning them! Did you see the look on Fathers face? He was so pleased!"
You had no particular argument for this, so you said nothing as Historia rambled and squeezed your arm. She was glowing practically, from the dancing, from the evening, from the particular warmth of a debut going better than anticipated– and she looked so entirely herself, so entirely at ease in the thing she had been frightened of this morning, that something in you settled completely.
"Are you feeling well?" you ask her.
"I am extraordinarily well," she confirmed, and then her expression shifted into something softer, more genuine, the court-face falling away for just a moment. "Thank you. For helping me get ready–" She shook her head slightly, like the feeling was too big for the sentence. "All of it."
"Always," you said simply.
She smiled, then straightened, glanced toward the centre of the hall where the floor was beginning to be cleared and arranged for the formal sets, and dropped a swift, light kiss to your cheek. "I ought to go check myself before it all begins," she said, already drawing back. She gave you one last bright look over her shoulder. "Don't let Father sign anyone else to your card without asking you first."
"I never do," you said.
She laughed, and went, her train carried smoothly behind her by the attendant who had apparently been waiting precisely for this moment, and you watched her go with the warm, uncomplicated feeling of a job very well done. You turned back toward the hall and were looking at nothing in particular.....your gaze passing the couples beginning to arrange themselves, at the musicians consulting one another quietly over their instruments, at the slow, shifting patterns of a ball finding its second wind– and you were thinking, in a distant sort of way, that you had rather more names on your card than you had expected to acquire for an evening you had not intended to be the subject of, when someone spoke from approximately six inches behind your left shoulder.
"Card."
You turned around to find General Levi Ackerman standing behind you with his hands clasped at his back and his expression arranged in its usual way, which was to say— arranged in no particular way at all, offering nothing. He was looking at your dance card with the flat efficiency of a man examining a duty. You blinked at him. "I beg your pardon?"
"Your dance card." His eyes moved to yours. "Do you have a set free." It was not phrased as a question. It had the shape of a question, and the content of a question– but the inflection of a man stating a thing he had already thought through and knew the answer to.
"Yes," you said.
He held out his hand for the card, and you brought your wrist over to him.
He looked at it briefly, cataloguing, you thought, in the way he catalogued everything- and then took the pencil methodically in his hand and signed his name in small, economical letters that took up precisely the space required and not one stroke more.
Ackerman.
Just the surname. No initial, no flourish, no the small performative additions that most men included because they were, in the end, performing. He handed it back, his fingers didn't linger against yours. The exchange was brief and he gave a single, short nod and then he turned and walked back into the room, not toward your father, not toward Erwin, not toward any particular person or group– simply back into the general space of the evening, resuming his tracking of it.
You watched him go. Then you looked down at your dance card, at the seven names that now graced your card, and you were aware, distantly, of the fact that you were smiling. Not the smile you gave to ballrooms. Not the one that was warm and correct and meant to put people at ease. You closed the card as the musicians struck up the opening notes of the first formal set.
