15. a fierce kiss that ends with a bite on the lip, soothing it with a lick. (from this prompt list)
In the moment where Harr’s vision whites out—in his mind’s eye, the world is consumed by total infernal red.
The fleeting memory of Lancelot’s blue eyes tempers it to white limbo.
When his sight returns, only the two of them remain standing in a circle of felled cloaks. The sound of heavy breathing and panting mingles with a faint ringing—and Harr does not know whether it’s in his head or the resonance of his magic.
But this he knows for sure. Lancelot trembles and gasps for breath, brows furrowed, knuckles white around the pommel of his sword.
(Harr isn’t much better off.
The ambush took them both by surprise, twenty to two, crystal against raw energy.
In the fight, growing frustrated with the onslaught of magic, Lancelot resorted to brutal physicality and went in for the kill. All that mattered—
—all that mattered was taking them down.
Frantic screams of Stop him! Get him! from panicked cowards were punctuated by the desperate fluttering of cloaks and the groans of crumpling men. Harr sent blasts of magic that whipped viciously through the wind. Lancelot leapt into the fray like the wild whirlwind of a legendary beast, hitting, clawing, kicking—
But when his hand reached for his sword to draw life blood, to kill—Harr blinded the world.)
Harr staggers over to take inventory of Lancelot’s injuries.
“You’re rusty,” Harr rasps.
Lancelot’s knuckles are scraped raw to white bone through red flesh. A sheen of sweat covers his forehead; his face is ghostly pale with exertion, even with bruises blossoming across his jaw and temple. A streak of blood across his chin sends a wet, damp chill of fear down Harr’s back—but it’s from Lancelot’s split lower lip where a disciple must have struck back in self-defense.
Lancelot merely raises a shoulder in response, an attempt at a shrug, eyes half-lidded through the haze of pain.
“You're safe,” Lancelot grounds out.
It’s a question spoken like a command. Harr stares at him a little incredulously.
“No thanks to you,” Harr hisses. “What are you doing here?”
Lancelot’s cool gaze doesn’t waver, but Harr’s resolve to do no harm does. Even if Lancelot had helped him now, Lancelot had spurned him then. It was chance that he’d caught Lancelot in the forest. That group of disciples was even luckier to have happened upon the two of them.
“You won’t answer me?” Harr demands. “You’re working with Amon, are you not? So why did you help me? Why are you here?”
“Don’t be so conceited,” Lancelot replies. “I wasn’t helping you. I was responding to the situation. I have no need to explain myself to you.”
Hot rage simmers and boils in his flesh, enough to make his skin itch and bleed. That cold disdain—not even in their boarding school days, not even as a boy prince who’d deigned to indulge in commoner friends—not even then had Lancelot ever spoken to him like this. Lancelot knows how to make him angry, knows just exactly how to get under his skin and light the short fuse to his temper.
“I don’t understand you,” Harr says, trying to keep his anger in check. But Lancelot is unresponsive and composed, and Harr is only throwing himself futilely at an immovable wall, finding the heat of his fury dissipating. “Are we enemies, Lancelot?”
Lancelot’s mouth twists down into a frown. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“The Tower wants me dead if they can’t have me alive,” Harr spits, clenching his fist. “But you’re too weak to kill me now.“
Somehow, Lancelot twitches at the word kill, an unreadable emotion passing through the spider silk-thin crack in his unfeeling mask.
“I’m not,” Lancelot says too quietly.
“What?”
“I’m not,” Lancelot repeats slowly, “here to kill you.” His voice is precariously thin with pain—not physical. The blue ice in his gaze flips to scorching crimson fire without magic. “I don’t want you dead.”
A flash of white anger sheets down Harr’s spine again. “Don’t lie to m—”
But then his words are pressed back against his lips by Lancelot’s mouth, chased back in by Lancelot’s tongue as if he could take them back by swallowing them down. Anger turns to bewilderment—and then to nothing, blankness, when Lancelot steals the air for his own, sucking Harr’s breath greedily from his mouth.
Distantly, Harr registers Lancelot’s fingers curled into a fist around his cloak—registers a wetness different from saliva smearing over his lips, a kiss of metal—registers himself doing the same, reaching for the stiff collar of Lancelot’s uniform. He kisses back as good as he gets, refusing to lose. When the sheer ferocity of Lancelot’s overwhelming need intensifies and he pushes back, Harr bites down right over the broken skin of his lip.
A moan mixed with pain and pleasure is startled from Lancelot’s throat, and Lancelot’s legs go out from under him. Harr lets the red king almost sink to his knees in false reverence, cupping Lancelot’s face tenderly. He slides his tongue over the open wound to soothe in apology, and Lancelot trembles against the sting, clinging to Harr in repentance.
Harr pulls back from their bloody kiss, tasting iron and Lancelot—and he’s even more confused coming out of it than he was going in.
“I don’t want you to die,” Lancelot breathes in a moment of rare, vulnerable candor, looking up at Harr.
“Why?” Harr replies, hoping, for once, that Lancelot will tell him, that Lancelot will be honest with him, that Lancelot won’t leave him alone (with the truth that he tried to tell Lancelot years ago).
Lancelot gets to his feet, and his view has changed; Harr looks up into blue—no, red—and Lancelot, all bruises and scratches, smiles at him.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asks, voice kind—except this isn’t kind, this isn’t kind at all—and he vanishes in a flash of brilliant light and leaves Harr bereft.
