The weight of Edward atop him didn't feel like... a conquest.
It felt like salvation. As his tongue tested the line of his lip, the diamond hard shell he had worn for two centuries fell away along with the rest of him, leaving behind a hollow, aching space that only here, only now, he could fill.
Greedling let out a shuddering, fragile breath, his hands— usually so lethal— trembling uncontrollably as they mapped the line of Edward's shoulders with the continuous, bewildered touch of someone who had never known how to be gentle.
This wasn't Greed the Avaricious.
This wasn't a Homunculus.
This was something softer, unformed, a soul that had been locked in a cold, inorganic core for two hundred years, suddenly exposed to the beauty of human affection. Beneath the linen of his black slacks, he was painfully aware of his own body's betrayals.
His cock was hard and pulsing in time with his own, erratic heart rate, aching, throbbing and hot, mirroring Edward's arousal. It was humiliating as it was intoxicating— a physical manifestation of hunger he finally understood to be appropriate, to be real.
Ling was there in the quiet spaces of his mind, a steadying presence, despite his entrapment, despite his permanent fix behind bars, despite having been pinned like the corpse of a preserved butterly to a shadowbox.
Where his own nature would have been brash, perhaps even fighting tooth and nail to stop himself from participating in this altogether, Ling's subconscious took over, guiding Greedling's hands to frame Edward's face, his thumbs brushing over his cheekbones with a reverence that both felt ancient and new.
It was a movement that spelled instinctive trust, a language he didn't know he spoke until it started pouring out of him. He was a monster or a Prince no longer— he was simply a human being, molted and shed of his older, many skins, who had finally come home.
He felt the hum of his own Stone, not as a source of power, but as a thundering heartbeat that echoed the skipping beat of his own.
The realization hit him out of nowhere, a chill breaking even more goosebumps out on the flesh of his forearms, the backs of his thighs— he was in love.
His brain racked with overwhelming vertigo, a sensation of falling upward into the light.
He parted his lips, meeting Edward's kiss with the adoration he was only just beginning to add to his lexicon, mirroring Ling's native tongue of the heart.
There was no sharpness of tooth or claw left within him now, no miles thick walls to throw up in defense or battling back, no struggle for individuality.
He leaned into the touch, his forehead resting against Edward's as he let out a tiny, choked sound— a whimper of unguarded longing that betrayed his true, core nature and all its ugliness for the intimacy of this surrender, for the beginning of love itself becoming a localized dialect between two people, love itself becoming a language they would learn together.
"I... I don't know how to do this," he whispered, his voice a ghost of its usual confidence, thick with shy, breathless wonder.
He pressed his face into the crook of Edward's neck, his eyes squeezed shut, feeling the balance of his own, once hollow existence finally aligning with his. "I've spent my whole life wanting everything, but I didn't know... I didn't know it was you. ... It was always you, Ed..."
He felt more exposed than ever, all his defiance and narcissism stripped away to the very marrow, and for the first time in centuries, he didn't want to hide anymore.
He reached up, his hand laying flat against the back of his skull, fingers winding tentatively into his long, golden hair, and pulled him closer still, so much closer, his movements slow, searching, and filled with quiet submission that demanded nothing yet gave everything.
There was nothing left to mask, and no reason to hide the way his heart— and his Stone— finally beat in time with Edward's, the only human who had ever truly seen him in all his being.
