falling back into the easy sway of their bodies, two animals that have already found their limits, who have no desire to strain themselves when they can lay back into the familiar comfort of each others bodies. where they'd once shared a spark of heat in the bone-chilled shadowland, their frost bitten hearts, like blowing a warm breathe onto cold fingertips and savoring that warmth, now they share their compressed chests. collapsing in on themselves like a dwarf star, the beginning of a black hole.
wanting to say, tell me how you crossed the threshold of that temple, an object of desire made manifest. tell me how you stepped across the marble, it matters to me, what you're thinking now.
hand to mouth, a sip of his wine, sating his desire to press lips to skin. not wanting to kiss her snarling mouth, the jaw full of sharp teeth, but to her hands, the thinness of her wrists, the sweet slope of her too tense shoulders. a remembrance done in flesh and blood, a present tense caring to hide himself in.
his lips over hers and his smile like the first ray of the sun at the break of day.
there had been mercy in the darkness of the shadowlands - a realm that had not been bleached and blighted by the sun; but something darker. stranger. the night warden finds no such mercy on the road to the gate - her eyes are pained, sensitive; skin now heavily freckled - another mark of shame, another reminder that she is so far from home; and will never return. the night, at least, provides relief - temporary. welcoming. it is almost a pity, then, that the wizard does not grant her the lenience that the stars and shadows always had.
her eyes are burning, blurred - they often are these days; squinting up in the light that streams in from the haphazardly tied flap of her tent, keenly aware of gale against her, the memory of him; and that she did not have the sense to turn him away after they had finished. a weakness of both the mind and the heart; and the wizard had repaid her with distracted hands that could not hope to replicate her own regimented fingers.
head turns sidelong, burying into the warmth of his neck and away from the offending sun - it does little to alleviate the pain in her eyes; a soft sound of displeasure as she feels gale shift against her - waking, moving when she has not yet given him leave to.
" wizard. " an edge of admonishment in her voice with no heat; a blade the night warden sheathes for the time being; half-lidded eyes watching him warily as he moves; sluggish, unworried - far too comfortable for someone who is caught in her web ( there is another thought, barely simmering in the haze she has found herself in - gale is not so much tangled in her web as she is tangled in him ); but she allows him this - the privilege of not turning him away when she is satiated; the ability to touch her, and come away unscathed.
his lips are soft against the tender underside of her wrists, ghosting over bone and veins - an act of tenderness so sweet it may as well have been violence; red, red eyes fluttering shut at the sensation against the palms of her hands, her calloused fingertips as she hums in approval, fingers combing through his greying hair. wizard, she calls him - as if she does not know his name. as if she has not sighed it into his mouth and whispered it against his neck, his ear under the cover of darkness. his lips to her shoulders, her collarbones - no longer guarded or sharp as she ought to have been. no longer a blade, but a woman; raw and real. an exposed nerve, painful to the touch - ugly in some lights. her hand in his hair, slipping down to cradle the back of his neck and as with all things, the night warden holds on too tightly.
a part of her wishes to speak - to tell him that this silence suits him, that his deference does, too; sharp jabs to his underbelly where he is vulnerable. but the wizard ( no. her wizard. ) has yet to bring a blade to her back or a spell to her skin - and a moment is a moment that will be gone too quickly with the morning light; better left savoured, and kept for herself. instead, she curls into him - closer when she presses against his chest; when her leg, lithe and long, drapes over the curve of his hip. her body, always primed and ready for a battle she knows is imminent, melts into him - relaxes when she heaves a shuddering sigh.
his lips continue - the burn and drag of his beard against her sensitive skin; shuddering under the touch, leaning into him - looking up into the darkness of gale's eyes, the dawn of his smile, her own fingers tracing the lines of the netherese orb that curls down his cheek, cupping his jaw when he kisses her, all wanting; gentle. a gentleness she is still unused to, angling his head when they part so that she does not have to see the part of him that belongs to another, when she has marked him all the same - when he is hers, entirely.
" if your mind has not been muddied by those scrolls you consume - " a kiss to his jaw, her lips lazily trailing kisses up to his ear, nipping there. " - when you come to me tonight, ensure that you secure my tent properly. " another kiss - another mark of ruin; and when the night warden speaks, the venom she has laced herself with is nowhere to be found. all talk. " if you cannot obey, i will ensure that you do; and you will find no pleasure - nor the promise of it. "
looking at him now, hazy in the morning light that spills into her - no, their - tent, the night warden thinks that she might not mind the light all that much after all, if it brought gale to her like this.