I’ve gone back and established a fun new tag called #smited writing. Anyway I have some ferdibertadetta that I smashed up in a blender and it came out smoother but here’s a snippet of the original version with a lot of chunks that didn’t make the cut. The premise of course is the classic One Bed
He had found himself wanting when Ferdinand and Bernadetta first climbed into bed alongside him. Both turned on their sides away from him, teetered at the edges of the mattress such that nary an inch of their backs would so much as brush against his arms. Bernadetta, who had let him rest against her back through hours of riding, who had kissed him for the first time and refused to leave his side thereafter until Ferdinand returned to the bedroom; Ferdinand, who had held him close throughout the day, carried him to safety, half-undressed him for hell’s sake—and now suddenly it was back to stiff propriety.
He, himself, was equally as guilty as they of that shy coldness, if not moreso. As Ferdinand moved about, Hubert bent himself at the middle to fit into the empty spaces above and below Bernadetta’s fetal curl, and managed to avoid touching or being touched by either of them. He could not initiate such contact, because that would mean admitting that he felt this want, that all the kisses and touches he had been given today had done nothing but awaken an insatiable hunger. It was a new weakness exposed, something between physical and psychological, this infinite backlog of human experiences he had denied himself for as long as he had been denying he was human.
Finally, Ferdinand decided how much of the blanket he wanted, and that was none at all. He pushed it away from himself with a soft huff. It was almost like the human warmth Hubert craved, clutching the blanket that Ferdinand had heated with his body, unfathomably hot for a chilly night in north Aegir in the early spring—
He let go just as Ferdinand pulled the blanket back to lay over the emptiness of the bed he left when he sat up at its edge. The moonlight from the window was enough to illuminate his two hands scrubbing through the roots of hair, then holding his face.
Hubert could not reach far enough to his right with his left hand. His palm settled inches short of Ferdinand’s waist, into the heavy warmth he left behind on the bed, and perhaps that was for the best.
Ferdinand turned at the sound of him shifting. “Hubert,” he breathed. “I am sorry—you were so still and silent, I thought you were surely asleep by now.”
There was a quip to be made about how anyone would seem still and silent in comparison with Ferdinand’s thrashing, but Hubert was too tired to speak it. “What’s the matter,” he whispered instead.
“Nothing,” Ferdinand responded so quickly that a crack of his voice slipped through.
Hubert was much too tired to guess at this.
“I am much too tired to guess at this,” he said.
Luckily, he had a companion for whom jumping to conclusions was a well-trained habit. She lifted up a head shrouded in mussed hair. Before Ferdinand could finish apologizing for waking her, she was speaking over him: “I-is there not enough space on the bed? Oh, I knew there wasn’t enough room with me, I should—”
Hubert’s hand was waiting to push her back to the bed when she tried to get up. “Absolutely not,” he said lazily, with an absent stroke of his thumb over the little warmth of her arm.
“No, Bernadetta,” said Ferdinand with an uncertain tone, “do not worry, I am just—”
“Bernadetta,” Hubert cut in, “are you cold?”
“Huh?” After a short pause for comprehension, she slipped her arms back under the heavy duvet in which she was deeply encircled, then gave it a flap for emphasis. “No, I’m—I’m great, actually.”
Hubert turned to his other side, where the blankets ran hotter than another human. “Ferdinand,” he said, “you are running a fever.”
The black silhouette of Ferdinand’s shoulders in the windowlight twitched an inch. “N-no—”
Bernadetta shot right back up again. “He’s what?!”
“No! I’m not—” After lifting his hands placatingly, he dropped his head into them with a muffled groan. “I am not running a fever, I am just… overheated. I confess, I, er—I am,” he said in a choked voice, “not accustomed to sleeping in so much clothing.”
“So much clothing?” Bernadetta repeated slowly and softly, puzzling over the thin cotton shirt and half-length pants she had seen him wear to bed.
In a pitch one-and-a-half octaves above his standard, Ferdinand stammered, “Well, that is to say—”
“He sleeps nude,” Hubert explained concisely for him.
Bernadetta gave a wincing squeak, while Ferdinand whirled up and around to protest, “I do not sleep nude, I—I simply—”
“Strip down to your smallclothes?” Hubert guessed.
He could almost hear the sound Ferdinand’s mouth made when it twisted into a knot. Bernadetta let out a quiet “Oh” that still sounded terrified, as was her default tone, but with a hint of relief that only Hubert was close enough to feel in her breath.
“Please, do not think anything of it. If possible, do not think of it at all,” Ferdinand said nervously when the silence dragged on. “I almost always get uncomfortably warm at night, even in winter. I apologize if I wake you by rising to cool myself with a walk—”
“W-wait, no, okay,” Bernadetta said, “we can… we can solve this, right? We can—um, can we turn off the furnace, or—”
“The single stove has pipes that heat the whole house,” Hubert said. “We would risk disturbing our hosts with cold.”
“O-okay.” Bernadetta pulled the blanket over her head as she curled up into her ball again. “Okay! Okay. Just, um, it’s okay. Yep. It’s fine. Wait—” She poked her head back out. Starlight caught her round eyes looking up at Hubert. “If, um, it’s okay with you? Maybe? I, I, I was just, oh, but I’m all the way over here—” She gestured at herself with a flap of blankets. “And you’re, you’re right there, so—so it should be your decision, you know, if you’re okay with—with—!”
“Wh—you don’t mean—Bernadetta,” Ferdinand sputtered, “you could not possibly mean—a-are you… implying that I should…?”
With an “eep!” she dove back under her blanket. “I don’t know, I don’t know!” she said through the muffle of the quilted fabric. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to—Hubert gets to decide, not me!”
Ferdinand jerked his head stiffly away from Hubert before speaking. The line of his throat was perpendicular to the window so that the moonlight followed the shadow of his Adam’s apple bobbing with a thick swallow. “Hubert,” he said in a strained voice, then his throat rose again, “of course, you could not possibly allow me to—yes, this is foolish, I should not even—”
“Ferdinand,” Hubert said, throaty and loud, “I am so fucking tired. Do whatever you need to do so that you stay asleep in this bed and stop bothering me.”
That shut everyone up rather quickly.
“Right,” Ferdinand said, soft and sheepish, as he slid off the mattress. “My apologies.”
Bernadetta stayed under her blanket. She did not speak, make a sound, or move again.
At some early point in his life, Hubert had decided to affect coldness in order to fit the role that Lady Edelgard needed him to play. At some point beyond that, some point he had not exactly noticed until just now, his affectation had become more than just that. Now, all he knew how to be was cold. Somehow, for reasons unfathomable, two outsiders saw and loved beyond that, saw and loved something Hubert had buried under practiced years of frigid ways, only for him to freeze up again just when they had coaxed him to the verge of safe vulnerability.
If inaction could lead to his desired result, he would feign a lack of interest. If something demanded that he ask for what he want, he would rewrite the script, manipulating the dialogue until his option was an inevitability instead of a choice, and pretending all the while that, of course, this did not particularly please him. If something as impersonal as mere condonation implied softness, he would fake reluctance.
What he wanted was for Ferdinand to feel comfortable both in his bed and in his company. Hubert made it into an insult to protect his secret, even when the secret was love.
