[ The inside is more like her than the outside. Maybe that's something he'll have to come to easier terms with now, a renewed relevance of that old says about books and covers that was rendered redundant here centuries ago. Perhaps it'll come back into fashion in a world recently reacquainted with the physically written word.
None of which is relevant to much of anything other than a distraction from the peace he's filled with to follow Yennefer into her space. Peace which isn't common now, with two lives learning how to intertwine.
There's no need for the battle here. She is safe harbour, and all of him knows it now she's welcomed him inside. It's why, after he's taken a careful seat (let's not spill any wine on this beautifully kept couch), honesty spills out before he even thinks to clothe it in something more neutral. ]
Tired.
[ This is the hardest he's ever had to work to slip back into his own life after time away. Coming home to a physical place after an unfelt absence is one thing. Coming home to a life after living another as long as the one they just have? The stem of his wine glass trembles lightly where it hangs from fingers that do the same. He looks over to her, and his expression is slightly too firm for one man met with his own vulnerability, slightly too soft for another. ]
[ it's there in the tight line of her mouth, the glint in her violet eyes too dark to be called fire. furious because she'd been patronized by the very existence of the aerie, as if it meant to teach her a lesson — giving her all the power she'd thought she could use to get the love and respect she wanted, to redeem everything she'd given up for magic, then keeping it just out of reach. furious also that it had been snatched away in an instant.
she was already tired, though. she'd been tired there and tired before she'd come to earth at all. she has been tired for decades in a way that few understand, and she has long surpassed tired into pissed off. she drinks deeply from her own wine glass, her other hand positioned on her hip, as if poised to vent. ]
We thought we had the power of gods, but we were playthings. No control. [ certainly not enough to keep them there, and not enough to make a difference here either. ] And for what?
[ It's— very her. He finds himself smiling, not at her rage but the inevitability of it. Helplessly fond in the face of abject fury. He takes a sip of his wine to cover his mouth as she finishes the rest of her thought, though it stays in the light pinch around his eyes and at the corners of his lips. ]
I don't think having an answer would make you feel any better.
[ Some people hold impressive grudges. Is now the time to tease her? No. But old, old prevail. ]
[ she approaches and sets her glass down on a coaster on the coffee table. ]
Do you want to make me feel better?
[ the answer in itself might just, even if asking the question draws attention to the ways in which yennefer knows it will fall short. the aerie was no different than the djinn, was it? out of their control. and now it sat in the back of their minds. but she had wanted an encouraging answer to this particular question before the aerie, if she were to be honest with herself. ]
[ The question turns the tables on him and before he knows it he's looking up at her, atmosphere just subtly shifted, taking in a quiet breath. The answer isn't difficult to find no matter what the repercussions might be of giving it.
He makes her wait for it though, held breath released before he responds, steady with certainty and wry in the acknowledgement of being cornered. ]
Yes.
[ He can't think of a single, entirely straightforward moment with her prior to the Aerie. Not one. That ought to have told him something, but he'd never permitted himself pay attention before they'd been swept away to somewhere else entirely. Now two lives are one, and he's given himself barely any time to balance that either.
Thinking too hard about anything comes with its own set of perils. His answer is true. That's a good enough reason for him to give it. ]
[ this keeps happening to her. yennefer gets precisely what she wants, and somehow, it doesn't satisfy her. that trembling thing in her chest resolves into the warm affectionate certainty that he wants her. it would be easy, now, to slip into his lap, stroke the side of his face in a way that now feels familiar, not forbidden, and sink into the feeling. escape from her anger, or even take it out on him. he would let her dig her fingernails into his scars.
but it would sink them both into something that feels like a terrible idea, and geralt nags at the back of her mind. not only his importance to her, the thing she'd hoped to erase with enough time and distance, the thing born of a djinn's wish. but also that damned wish in the first place, and the way it had denied her a choice.
had the aerie done the same? did she have any more of a choice here? did he? ]
Is that the Cardinal talking, or the street magician cum sports bar manager?
[ they're both fucked either way, but she needs to know. ]
[ Said with that same blunt truth with which he's become accustomed over years and years to talking to her when things matter. No edge of apology even where one hums in him.
By his count, he's existed in four different realities within the little over a year that's passed chronologically in this one. People aren't supposed to be flung around in time and truth like that. He's managed to keep a handle on it up until now, but who he is here can never not be the sum of those parts he's agreed with himself to keep.
He's no more the Stephen Strange who first stepped groggily off a vehicle and into a firefight than he is the one who returned after a brief trip home, or the Stephen who lost his wife and raised three children in another god-given world, or the man who knew her so well in the one they've just left that her question even bears asking. He hasn't finished brewing yet. And he hasn't yet reached the stage in the process where he's inspected the elements going into the concoction. ]
Anything more specific than that, you'll have to wait. I'm not two men with one mouth.
[ Contrary to what he himself might like to believe. Two lives have been lived, yes, one considerably shorter (by some counts, infinitely longer by others) than the other and pockmarked with offshoots of its own, but he's going to have to find a way to be the sum of those parts and not just the mismatched components of an abandoned calculation. It's going to take a long time. He's not about to rush into any part of it now.
[ all that anger rises to a boil inside of her. just out of reach. everything she wants — and she wants everything — feels perpetually just out of her reach. strange is here, before her, honest and bright-eyed and wanting her, but refusing to give her the one thing she has decided that she needs in order to ...
to what? she hasn't even decided. yennefer is too much a creature of impulse and chaos for that. but it feels like the missing piece to make clearer the picture, to vindicate her of her own feelings in some way and twist this into a choice instead of some meddling of destiny or whatever bullshit.
but no. strange makes her sit in that uncertainty, and the anger it causes, with him. she should seize onto her spite and turn him out of her apartment for it, as she had spurned geralt for inflicting doubt upon her and poisoning the well of her every affection. she should stoke the flame of her anger for how he won't answer a simple goddamn question to give her what she needs, but at the core of that anger is not anger with him, but with the uncertainty that afflicts them both.
it has not been since the continent, since the dragon and geralt, that she'd felt so utterly out of control. and that's what she really needs. control. that which had been ripped away from her with the aerie, with the power that was owed to her.
and he will give her that, she thinks. she's too convinced of her entitlement to it to think any different.
so yennefer picks up the hem of her sheer robe, and the hem of the thinner night dress she wears underneath, all black satin, and she lifts her leg, digging her heel into the soft cushion beside his hip. the slim, tan expanse of leg stretches before him before disappearing under the now much shorter hem of that dress, and she levels her gaze on him. ]
Then make me feel better. [ it has the edge of an order to it. this will be a mistake, of course. it will further complicate the matter that neither of them has worked through, and it will be harder to step away or rebuke when she inevitably seeks to cast off the shackles of destiny, but just for now, it will soothe her aching ego. as she so often does, yennefer allows it to make the decisions. ]
[ She's close, so close, then closer, and this time the intake of breath isn't mediated or even voluntary. It's sharp, abrupt, and his breathing shallows after that, spurred on by the quickening of his pulse. He glances at the bare stretch of thigh she presents for him, follows it up to linger on the shadow where her leg disappears under the lifted hem of her nightdress.
They've never done this. Only they have, thousands of times, and the anticipation of her body is not unlike that of stepping over home's threshold after a long, long day. It's an invitation to shake off pretence.
Everything condenses down to Yennefer. To here and now and her.
If her foot ground into the cushion by his hip is the cocking of the gun, her words are the trigger pulled at the start of a race. He may not be a frantic creature held behind a gate but there's some echo of that same potential energy in the gaze he meets hers with, eyes blown dark and focus absolute. His free hand presses over the top of her foot (want, single-minded and made all the more fierce for the relief of her direction, feeds immediately across the bond), beginning a journey up her calf and along her thigh, fingers twitching against her skin as he works to keep the path smooth and steady. Meanwhile he leans slowly into her, chin tilting up to avoid breaking the connection and stretching past to place his wine glass down on the table behind her. The glass base touches the table at the same moment his fingertips tuck under the lifted hem of her nightdress. His breath skitters warm across the silk over her stomach.
Instinct and a centuries-- decades--? old streak of competitive mischief turns her order into an opportunity. His power reaches out for her, translating her neural processes into data to rummage through for the ones worth tweaking... there's her pulse. And the work of nerves. And— there. Blood vessels. Not difficult to find, so well travelled were these paths in a life that lives on inside of him. It's nothing at all to speed along their dilation in a few choice regions. A little more of a stretch to pepper in a handful of fluttering contractions of her pelvic muscles - a skill he remembers but hasn't learned. Worth it to watch for her reaction while his now empty hand presses to the small of her back, tremoring fingers gripping into the thin layers of fabric there for purchase.
His grip on her strengthens, holding her where she's chosen to be so he can finally turn his head to her thigh. He holds her gaze until the last possible moment, attention finally dipping away as he presses his mouth to her skin... a coaxing touch that gets to him more than he anticipates.
A huge swell of warmth, bordering on desperation, floods into their shared connection. It's spliced together with a clawing hunger that has him pull abruptly at her, drawing her closer with the hand at her back. That couple of inches of space closed leaves his nose nudging at the hem of her nightdress.
Startled into temporary stillness by the intensity of his own reaction, his panted breaths ghost along her inner thigh. ]
[ for the way her eyes dilate and cheeks redden with the sudden flush of arousal, she might as well have said prove it instead. stephen strange of sportsbars and children's birthday parties has never touched her like this — even if she still wonders whether or not he had allowed himself to imagine — but he plays her body with the precision of a theremin. systems in her own body, systems that she could never claim familiarity with, answer his call without him ever needing to speak.
the spark of blue light in his chest is new. the empathy bond catches it as the floodgates open, but they treat him to more than arousal, more than her deep affection. there is nailbiting unease too. beyond that, a deeper fear like the kind that comes from standing before a great ravine and peering down, aware that something great and terrible is either about to swallow you or you're about to master it. all the things which she would not speak. ]
Don't be afraid. [ she says, terrified. terrified that this will all go sideways; terrified it won't and she will wonder forevermore how much of it was aerie and how much of it was his own choice; terrified that it will do nothing at all for the gnawing pit inside of her, that fathomless hunger that can be satisfied by nothing less than everything.
yen reaches out to grab a fistful of thick black-and-gray hair at the crown of his head, pressing him closer. he has power beyond touch, but she isn't without her own means to steer this, and she won't let either of them dwell on what the empathy bond reveals. it makes her keenly aware that they have not done this, for all the times they have, because she had never let anyone but hux see the ugliness inside of her — and that was because what was in him was worse, she knew.
up, up, up, she urges him, under her dress to bare olive skin and tidy dark hair and the wet mess of his own making. ]
[ It all comes through at once, all of the trembling and steady good and— the rest, too. Until that moment, fear hadn't been part of his equation. Occupied by the experience of an old, old man with a mind filed away amongst millions of others, a little compartmentalisation is nothing. But now, with his journey already startled to a stop, her feelings find the crack and breach through into his own.
Her fear digs his fingertips harder into the flesh of her thigh, I'm here without the words. Her unease breeds an answering, subdued resistance.
It's so easy to forge ahead when ahead lies what you want, the shape of that desire blocking the view of any potential future consequences. She's all around him, thigh warm against his face and hand insistent in his hair and his want is no less fervent, his own entitlement and a greed that had once needed no curbing spurring him on to claim his comfort just as she does.
The hand around her thigh pushes up under her dress, following the curve of her, drawing himself toward the edge of the couch as his palm presses flat to the skin of her back, fingers splayed over her ribcage. She's anchored now, supported, and he's closer to her than he's ever been. ]
I'm not afraid of you.
[ Words direct to her mind where his mouth is busy with the crease of her inner thigh, at the point of almost no return. He wants nothing more than to give in to their shared want. There's the heat of her on his cheek conjuring up all his own too-rich memories of all the ways they've never been together, and God if he doesn't yearn.
But there's nothing they can hide from one another now. He feels her, all of her, and turmoil is impossible to bury when you're as overstimulated as they are now. No meditative calm here. Two instincts wage war in him, two opposing frustrations - one sharp and savage, one dull and deep. One pulling towards want and the other toward need, a line as fine as silk thread but helplessly absolute.
The deeper, steadier force wins out. Instead of sinking to the side he takes her at her earlier trajectory, tilts his head forward and up. Mouth abandons skin. His forehead rests on the soft stretch of her abdomen. ]
You're afraid of what comes after this.
[ And for as long as that's the case, the person he is now can't quite bring himself to forge on as though it isn't. ]
[ the brittle words snap on their way out. her expression is colder for the call-out, violet eyes shining and sharp instead of warm and bright. her grip on him tightens. she can sense his hesitation. it kicks up a low panic in her, which in turn curdles towards fury, as all yennefer's emotions do. ]
It's not your job to manage my fear. [ which is the farthest she can get into acknowledging it exists. better, she thinks, that she could boldly claim that she isn't afraid of anything — merely aware, merely astute enough to measure the real, practical possibilities of disappointments and threats. it's not true, though. her greed makes her constantly afraid of losing anything, even things that were never really hers. ] And it's too late to try.
[ too late to stop her from being afraid. every outcome from the moment she'd invited him under her skirt had been one that terrified her. this whiff of rejection might be the worst of all of them, though. ]
[ Torn two ways. A lot of him wants to relent to her vice grip and the ice in her tone, burn it all up the easiest way he can, do as he's told and make them both happier for it. But that fear isn't going away. And as it brews in her it draws in like a net around him. This is both of theirs to handle, no matter what she says. A pair of fish enjoying the ocean for the last (first) time. About to suffocate in open air.
Is it using her if she wants him to? If she's using him? Are they using one another at all if it matters enough for there to be a future worth fearing, even if there are consequences they're ignoring to take comfort in the now?
The rapid pattern of his thoughts translates into a fine, jagged stutter of anxiety. That's met with immediate derision and a flurry of snapshots and sense memories, times when sharing their bodies was the least complicated thing in the world. She'd given him a command. Why convolute it?
With a rough grunt of frustration and surrender he succumbs to himself and to her, sinking over the last slim stretch of skin and neat hair to where she's been waiting for him. The slick heat of her claws with hot talons at his insides and swallows whole any lingering doubt. Burden of indecision lifted, boundary crossed, he grips her tight as she does him and sets to work rediscovering a few choice ways he's many times but never yet taken her apart. ]
[ the relief of distraction sears through the tendrils of anxiety — his and hers, how quaint — gripping her. like tethers, cast off, and when his mouth closes over her skin, her head drops back in rapture and peace. for a time, let it be uncomplicated. he has worn this path over decades and he knows it well. traces his footsteps carefully, wringing sighs from her like water.
an old path, but it feels new. alcohol on a cut, scouring a wound that feels simultaneously recent and far away. she does not give of herself easily, and she had diligently fooled them both into believing she was at no such risk with him. that kinship and cooperation might be only that. now they are as tangled as she and geralt had been, and she has no one to blame. in that way, it feels like the resolving of a long-held chord.
yennefer grinds herself against his mouth, clinging tight. that other woman she had been, the cardinal, had been afraid to hold him too tight. holding too tight to things only ensured they would slip away. but he is still here, isn't he? if it's inevitable that he slip away, better she enjoy him before he does.
there are stars behind her eyelids. how long has she gone without seeing stars? yet she forces her eyes back open anyway, banishing them. stilling, breathing hard, she says, ] Not yet. [ she wouldn't want to risk the end of this. she would deny them both any kind of reprieve if it meant dragging this out. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
None of which is relevant to much of anything other than a distraction from the peace he's filled with to follow Yennefer into her space. Peace which isn't common now, with two lives learning how to intertwine.
There's no need for the battle here. She is safe harbour, and all of him knows it now she's welcomed him inside. It's why, after he's taken a careful seat (let's not spill any wine on this beautifully kept couch), honesty spills out before he even thinks to clothe it in something more neutral. ]
Tired.
[ This is the hardest he's ever had to work to slip back into his own life after time away. Coming home to a physical place after an unfelt absence is one thing. Coming home to a life after living another as long as the one they just have? The stem of his wine glass trembles lightly where it hangs from fingers that do the same. He looks over to her, and his expression is slightly too firm for one man met with his own vulnerability, slightly too soft for another. ]
How are you feeling?
no subject
[ it's there in the tight line of her mouth, the glint in her violet eyes too dark to be called fire. furious because she'd been patronized by the very existence of the aerie, as if it meant to teach her a lesson — giving her all the power she'd thought she could use to get the love and respect she wanted, to redeem everything she'd given up for magic, then keeping it just out of reach. furious also that it had been snatched away in an instant.
she was already tired, though. she'd been tired there and tired before she'd come to earth at all. she has been tired for decades in a way that few understand, and she has long surpassed tired into pissed off. she drinks deeply from her own wine glass, her other hand positioned on her hip, as if poised to vent. ]
We thought we had the power of gods, but we were playthings. No control. [ certainly not enough to keep them there, and not enough to make a difference here either. ] And for what?
no subject
I don't think having an answer would make you feel any better.
[ Some people hold impressive grudges. Is now the time to tease her? No. But old, old prevail. ]
no subject
Do you want to make me feel better?
[ the answer in itself might just, even if asking the question draws attention to the ways in which yennefer knows it will fall short. the aerie was no different than the djinn, was it? out of their control. and now it sat in the back of their minds. but she had wanted an encouraging answer to this particular question before the aerie, if she were to be honest with herself. ]
no subject
He makes her wait for it though, held breath released before he responds, steady with certainty and wry in the acknowledgement of being cornered. ]
Yes.
[ He can't think of a single, entirely straightforward moment with her prior to the Aerie. Not one. That ought to have told him something, but he'd never permitted himself pay attention before they'd been swept away to somewhere else entirely. Now two lives are one, and he's given himself barely any time to balance that either.
Thinking too hard about anything comes with its own set of perils. His answer is true. That's a good enough reason for him to give it. ]
no subject
but it would sink them both into something that feels like a terrible idea, and geralt nags at the back of her mind. not only his importance to her, the thing she'd hoped to erase with enough time and distance, the thing born of a djinn's wish. but also that damned wish in the first place, and the way it had denied her a choice.
had the aerie done the same? did she have any more of a choice here? did he? ]
Is that the Cardinal talking, or the street magician cum sports bar manager?
[ they're both fucked either way, but she needs to know. ]
no subject
[ Said with that same blunt truth with which he's become accustomed over years and years to talking to her when things matter. No edge of apology even where one hums in him.
By his count, he's existed in four different realities within the little over a year that's passed chronologically in this one. People aren't supposed to be flung around in time and truth like that. He's managed to keep a handle on it up until now, but who he is here can never not be the sum of those parts he's agreed with himself to keep.
He's no more the Stephen Strange who first stepped groggily off a vehicle and into a firefight than he is the one who returned after a brief trip home, or the Stephen who lost his wife and raised three children in another god-given world, or the man who knew her so well in the one they've just left that her question even bears asking. He hasn't finished brewing yet. And he hasn't yet reached the stage in the process where he's inspected the elements going into the concoction. ]
Anything more specific than that, you'll have to wait. I'm not two men with one mouth.
[ Contrary to what he himself might like to believe. Two lives have been lived, yes, one considerably shorter (by some counts, infinitely longer by others) than the other and pockmarked with offshoots of its own, but he's going to have to find a way to be the sum of those parts and not just the mismatched components of an abandoned calculation. It's going to take a long time. He's not about to rush into any part of it now.
Not when it's clearly important. ]
(nsfw)
to what? she hasn't even decided. yennefer is too much a creature of impulse and chaos for that. but it feels like the missing piece to make clearer the picture, to vindicate her of her own feelings in some way and twist this into a choice instead of some meddling of destiny or whatever bullshit.
but no. strange makes her sit in that uncertainty, and the anger it causes, with him. she should seize onto her spite and turn him out of her apartment for it, as she had spurned geralt for inflicting doubt upon her and poisoning the well of her every affection. she should stoke the flame of her anger for how he won't answer a simple goddamn question to give her what she needs, but at the core of that anger is not anger with him, but with the uncertainty that afflicts them both.
it has not been since the continent, since the dragon and geralt, that she'd felt so utterly out of control. and that's what she really needs. control. that which had been ripped away from her with the aerie, with the power that was owed to her.
and he will give her that, she thinks. she's too convinced of her entitlement to it to think any different.
so yennefer picks up the hem of her sheer robe, and the hem of the thinner night dress she wears underneath, all black satin, and she lifts her leg, digging her heel into the soft cushion beside his hip. the slim, tan expanse of leg stretches before him before disappearing under the now much shorter hem of that dress, and she levels her gaze on him. ]
Then make me feel better. [ it has the edge of an order to it. this will be a mistake, of course. it will further complicate the matter that neither of them has worked through, and it will be harder to step away or rebuke when she inevitably seeks to cast off the shackles of destiny, but just for now, it will soothe her aching ego. as she so often does, yennefer allows it to make the decisions. ]
(nsfw!)
They've never done this. Only they have, thousands of times, and the anticipation of her body is not unlike that of stepping over home's threshold after a long, long day. It's an invitation to shake off pretence.
Everything condenses down to Yennefer. To here and now and her.
If her foot ground into the cushion by his hip is the cocking of the gun, her words are the trigger pulled at the start of a race. He may not be a frantic creature held behind a gate but there's some echo of that same potential energy in the gaze he meets hers with, eyes blown dark and focus absolute. His free hand presses over the top of her foot (want, single-minded and made all the more fierce for the relief of her direction, feeds immediately across the bond), beginning a journey up her calf and along her thigh, fingers twitching against her skin as he works to keep the path smooth and steady. Meanwhile he leans slowly into her, chin tilting up to avoid breaking the connection and stretching past to place his wine glass down on the table behind her. The glass base touches the table at the same moment his fingertips tuck under the lifted hem of her nightdress. His breath skitters warm across the silk over her stomach.
Instinct and a centuries-- decades--? old streak of competitive mischief turns her order into an opportunity. His power reaches out for her, translating her neural processes into data to rummage through for the ones worth tweaking... there's her pulse. And the work of nerves. And— there. Blood vessels. Not difficult to find, so well travelled were these paths in a life that lives on inside of him. It's nothing at all to speed along their dilation in a few choice regions. A little more of a stretch to pepper in a handful of fluttering contractions of her pelvic muscles - a skill he remembers but hasn't learned. Worth it to watch for her reaction while his now empty hand presses to the small of her back, tremoring fingers gripping into the thin layers of fabric there for purchase.
His grip on her strengthens, holding her where she's chosen to be so he can finally turn his head to her thigh. He holds her gaze until the last possible moment, attention finally dipping away as he presses his mouth to her skin... a coaxing touch that gets to him more than he anticipates.
A huge swell of warmth, bordering on desperation, floods into their shared connection. It's spliced together with a clawing hunger that has him pull abruptly at her, drawing her closer with the hand at her back. That couple of inches of space closed leaves his nose nudging at the hem of her nightdress.
Startled into temporary stillness by the intensity of his own reaction, his panted breaths ghost along her inner thigh. ]
(nsfw -->)
the spark of blue light in his chest is new. the empathy bond catches it as the floodgates open, but they treat him to more than arousal, more than her deep affection. there is nailbiting unease too. beyond that, a deeper fear like the kind that comes from standing before a great ravine and peering down, aware that something great and terrible is either about to swallow you or you're about to master it. all the things which she would not speak. ]
Don't be afraid. [ she says, terrified. terrified that this will all go sideways; terrified it won't and she will wonder forevermore how much of it was aerie and how much of it was his own choice; terrified that it will do nothing at all for the gnawing pit inside of her, that fathomless hunger that can be satisfied by nothing less than everything.
yen reaches out to grab a fistful of thick black-and-gray hair at the crown of his head, pressing him closer. he has power beyond touch, but she isn't without her own means to steer this, and she won't let either of them dwell on what the empathy bond reveals. it makes her keenly aware that they have not done this, for all the times they have, because she had never let anyone but hux see the ugliness inside of her — and that was because what was in him was worse, she knew.
up, up, up, she urges him, under her dress to bare olive skin and tidy dark hair and the wet mess of his own making. ]
no subject
Her fear digs his fingertips harder into the flesh of her thigh, I'm here without the words. Her unease breeds an answering, subdued resistance.
It's so easy to forge ahead when ahead lies what you want, the shape of that desire blocking the view of any potential future consequences. She's all around him, thigh warm against his face and hand insistent in his hair and his want is no less fervent, his own entitlement and a greed that had once needed no curbing spurring him on to claim his comfort just as she does.
The hand around her thigh pushes up under her dress, following the curve of her, drawing himself toward the edge of the couch as his palm presses flat to the skin of her back, fingers splayed over her ribcage. She's anchored now, supported, and he's closer to her than he's ever been. ]
I'm not afraid of you.
[ Words direct to her mind where his mouth is busy with the crease of her inner thigh, at the point of almost no return. He wants nothing more than to give in to their shared want. There's the heat of her on his cheek conjuring up all his own too-rich memories of all the ways they've never been together, and God if he doesn't yearn.
But there's nothing they can hide from one another now. He feels her, all of her, and turmoil is impossible to bury when you're as overstimulated as they are now. No meditative calm here. Two instincts wage war in him, two opposing frustrations - one sharp and savage, one dull and deep. One pulling towards want and the other toward need, a line as fine as silk thread but helplessly absolute.
The deeper, steadier force wins out. Instead of sinking to the side he takes her at her earlier trajectory, tilts his head forward and up. Mouth abandons skin. His forehead rests on the soft stretch of her abdomen. ]
You're afraid of what comes after this.
[ And for as long as that's the case, the person he is now can't quite bring himself to forge on as though it isn't. ]
(cw: hints of dubcon ?? ? i think ? ?)
[ the brittle words snap on their way out. her expression is colder for the call-out, violet eyes shining and sharp instead of warm and bright. her grip on him tightens. she can sense his hesitation. it kicks up a low panic in her, which in turn curdles towards fury, as all yennefer's emotions do. ]
It's not your job to manage my fear. [ which is the farthest she can get into acknowledging it exists. better, she thinks, that she could boldly claim that she isn't afraid of anything — merely aware, merely astute enough to measure the real, practical possibilities of disappointments and threats. it's not true, though. her greed makes her constantly afraid of losing anything, even things that were never really hers. ] And it's too late to try.
[ too late to stop her from being afraid. every outcome from the moment she'd invited him under her skirt had been one that terrified her. this whiff of rejection might be the worst of all of them, though. ]
no subject
Is it using her if she wants him to? If she's using him? Are they using one another at all if it matters enough for there to be a future worth fearing, even if there are consequences they're ignoring to take comfort in the now?
The rapid pattern of his thoughts translates into a fine, jagged stutter of anxiety. That's met with immediate derision and a flurry of snapshots and sense memories, times when sharing their bodies was the least complicated thing in the world. She'd given him a command. Why convolute it?
With a rough grunt of frustration and surrender he succumbs to himself and to her, sinking over the last slim stretch of skin and neat hair to where she's been waiting for him. The slick heat of her claws with hot talons at his insides and swallows whole any lingering doubt. Burden of indecision lifted, boundary crossed, he grips her tight as she does him and sets to work rediscovering a few choice ways he's many times but never yet taken her apart. ]
no subject
an old path, but it feels new. alcohol on a cut, scouring a wound that feels simultaneously recent and far away. she does not give of herself easily, and she had diligently fooled them both into believing she was at no such risk with him. that kinship and cooperation might be only that. now they are as tangled as she and geralt had been, and she has no one to blame. in that way, it feels like the resolving of a long-held chord.
yennefer grinds herself against his mouth, clinging tight. that other woman she had been, the cardinal, had been afraid to hold him too tight. holding too tight to things only ensured they would slip away. but he is still here, isn't he? if it's inevitable that he slip away, better she enjoy him before he does.
there are stars behind her eyelids. how long has she gone without seeing stars? yet she forces her eyes back open anyway, banishing them. stilling, breathing hard, she says, ] Not yet. [ she wouldn't want to risk the end of this. she would deny them both any kind of reprieve if it meant dragging this out. ]