The Gladiator ✦Attack on Titan✦
Reiner Braun .ᐟ Ancient Rome AU .ᐟ
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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 :)
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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.
"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.”
"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."
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.
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.
You did not look back again.
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