Work Text:
Resplendent.
For eight days Hubert has sat enraptured, pitifully faint, occasionally dewy-eyed, at the sight of Ferdinand von Aegir sitting on the opposite bench of their carriage. He cannot tear his eyes away. It has been this way for years, distracting in proximity and damning from a distance, but now more than ever his control falters in the face of this man who eclipses the ravenous sun.
With every blink there is something new to categorize, a new brush stroke of unparalleled meaning upon the canvas. A flutter of Ferdinand’s nostrils in promise of his breathing, a pinch in the corner of his lips as he mulls over what waits them in Fhirdiad, the bitten arcs of his nails…and there, the frail strands that twist and knot into a garrote at Hubert’s throat: silver in Ferdinand’s hair like moonlit laurels, victorious.
Absence grows not fondness but madness.
Hubert breathes around the ligature. He has never borne—whatever this is that turns him inside out like a taxidermist’s pelt bucking all preservation. He has lived light of foot and heavy of thought, and now his body drags him ever down to the soil, and his mind is empty, his eyes capturing the burning world and unable to grasp it, unable to reach out for Ferdinand’s hand upon the cushioning. Never touching. He has to get this under control by the time they return to Fhirdiad. Edelgard and Fleche already harbor too many doubts of his suitability; he cannot go crawling into the Prime Minister’s lap in a feverish trance, gnawing his lip bloody when unbearable absence rattles through his bones.
But Ferdinand keeps reaching for his hand, and Hubert can deny him nothing. He strokes a still-nimble thumb over Ferdinand’s palm. His hands ache; he has not been diligent in the stretches needed to keep the deterioration at bay. Sometimes Ferdinand takes his hands and plays with his fingers, kissing each joint, and he thinks Ferdinand would help, if he asked, but he never asks.
“Read for me again the passage about revoking the tax levy upon Faerghan landowners under the Kleiman system,” Ferdinand prompts him. We cannot have them cheating the chessboard.
Hubert finds the appropriate page with haste.
“And now recollect for me whatever you can of the original system, if you please. There is something here that does not support the stated reasoning of the treaty provision…a reversal of a reversal, I believe. The loophole is cobbled together all wrong—rife for exploitation if we do not close it on the first pass.”
Even a half hour’s conversation has Hubert gasping through his teeth. Yet Ferdinand has no other way to pass the time, cannot read or enjoy the scenery as the carriage rattles along this barren landscape. He has only his grim, malingering companion. So Hubert reads and answers until his throat’s aching surpasses his hands, and then hours longer until the agony drips deep into his lungs.
Once Ferdinand is distracted piecing together a new argument under his breath, Hubert reaches for his poisons kit. These days what fills the vials preserves rather than destroys, yet at similar cost.
…Void take him, but he cannot take anything now. His reserves of morphium are dwindling; he used too much on the long journey to Gloucester, stewing over the possibility of being turned away. Ferdinand should have turned him away. He should have asked in Gloucester—surely they injected themselves regularly to bear the pain of fucking upon the rose thorns, or whatever they did for fun in that grotesque backwater.
Any more elixir today and he will ruin the carriage floor by one means or another.
The pain will have to be bearable. As long as Hubert is still alive, that makes the pain historically bearable. There is no reason to anticipate another outcome.
“Hubert?”
He cannot feel Ferdinand’s hand in his, but he knows it is there. He sees it is there.
Break my pretty neck in your hands, carve open my throat, refill your bones you mournful beast.
He does not close his eyes. He can see Ferdinand’s lips are not moving.
In finer form have I borne fruit? No. I have nothing at all, I have outlived my use, I am in your guilty, miserable little hands. No choice in this service.
You did this to me.
Bile scalds the back of his throat. He pulls his hand away from Ferdinand’s and claps the palm over his ear to drive off the buzzing ghosts.
Ah, another body to bleed and wake and weep and down and sleep for moons! Moons beyond counting! Will you sing for me now? I have done all I can for one crack of joy, most ardently granted in sundered tibia and shattered shell of my body—please, sir, please!—No running, wherever we go, no running from the sun that rises at the end of it all! Come and I will sing you the void that has taken me!
Remember I have never doubted you did this to me.
Breathe for me.
Remember I never wavered in my belief.
I have you. Breathe for me.
Remember what remains of me, my lips on the shell of your ear. There is no running from this.
“Hubert! Can you hear me, love? Breathe for me, in, in, out…yes, there we are.”
Ferdinand’s panic peaks on the same pitch now as it did with flame licking his cheeks. The carriage catches the dying evening light and burns scarlet, and Hubert reaches out to him through the blaze, hands grasping at Ferdinand’s cheeks and mouth to silence him, or kiss him, or carve him open once more.
Ferdinand presses down on those faithless hands until even they begin to warm against his flesh. He continues to mime deep breathing until finally, finally the fit begins to pass.
“Apologies,” Hubert rasps around lungs full of rusted spurs. “A lingering arrhythmia.”
“Your heart?” Ferdinand frowns.
“The space where one should be.”
Groaning at the macabre joke, Ferdinand pushes Hubert back against the cushion and joins him on the same side. He knocks loudly against the ceiling. “Driver? Please pull in for the night at the next inn along our route. If it is to be a city, then the next one past. Somewhere quiet, if you would.”
His arm makes its way around Hubert’s waist, then jolts at the surprise furnace of the puppy tucked between Hubert and the carriage wall. A speculative, sleepy little tongue darts out.
Hubert watches the way Ferdinand’s face so briskly shifts from surprise to delight to concern over where he last left his handkerchief. He cannot hear Ferdinand breathing over the emptiness of his head, but when Hubert drops his head to Ferdinand’s chest, that noble heart still beats strong.
Our ghosts will follow us wherever we go.
When they stop at an inn for the evening, it is easy for Hubert to disappear back into the persona of a perfect servant, as if Ferdinand were the invalid and not the nurse. Hubert fetches the room keys, their supper, and the hot water for Ferdinand’s bath. He sets out fresh clothes from the many piles of riding outfits packed in their suitcases, then takes the puppy out back for her evening business before pouring her into a warm basket in the stabled carriage, and finally dashes back up the stairs to ensure he will be available whenever Ferdinand finishes his soak.
He, too, is soaking. At first Hubert thinks the hound had unleashed one of her abominable rear emissions, but the reek is too familiar. Sweat. All of it sweat. That Ferdinand has not said a word shames Hubert to his core.
He must take care of it before Ferdinand emerges from his ablutions. This is the first time his urge to be…presentable…outweighs his urge to linger mournfully in the doorway and watch Ferdinand’s skin turn a healthy pink beneath its many scars, all of them closed. No festering caverns in his chest. No wounds betraying nature and refusing to heal.
Not like Hubert.
He hasn’t the morphium to spare, but now he hasn’t a choice, either. There is no way he can redress his wounds without something to blunt the effect of misfiring nerves. A half dose will have to suffice.
After a lifetime of service, nothing comes more naturally than peeling layers of clothing away from a warm body. Fewer knives, now. Fewer secrets. But if muscle memory falters at some absences, at least no one is watching. Not so for the next bit, which requires use of the mirror. Hubert untucks the edge of the outer bandage wrapped around his chest, a purely stabilizing layer that protects the gauze and salves beneath. He has to pry the first five inches of linen up with a fingernail, for the cloth has soaked into a solid mess of now-dried pus and plasma. As soon as he can get a grip, he carves swathes of it away in great rips of crust and fiber. It is barely him in the mirror, at least. Merely some cadaver he dissects through a series of reflections, none quite honest, none quite right.
When it is done, his hands are wet with blood. Cheeks, too. He hopes that is also blood; shock and the morphium dull him just the same.
Someone touches his hip from a hundred thousand miles away.
Ferdinand’s teeth twist in his lip. Anxious. Wanting. He’s wet, too—from the bath, not this…spoilage. His bare chest is unmarked, and Hubert’s ghastly visage shifts to a smile as he reaches out to lay a palm over that warm skin. The butchers never sampled his heart.
It is very quiet, like someone has been screaming and now they are not. Hubert’s throat feels fine. The crusting crack of the bandages, then, and Ferdinand barreling through walls with his infinite curiosity.
“Will water hurt?” Ferdinand asks so softly.
Him or his wounds? Kindness pains him deeper than infection. Let it melt him like the first downpour of spring.
“No,” he finally answers. For his wounds alone.
So Ferdinand brings a washcloth and bucket and settles upon the bed, then makes Hubert sit gracelessly on the edge between Ferdinand’s bent knees. That he cannot see the extent of the damage makes it easier for both to bear, though Hubert knows Ferdinand will not restrain his questions once the scars can speak on their own. He treats Hubert with the easy callousness of the battlefield; he does not ask if this or that hurts, if he need go slower, if it is meant to bleed. He merely prepares Hubert to return to the field, as every soldier must.
Relief sinks into Hubert’s bones like honey between the joints, a lassitude of belief: Ferdinand has not ruled him out. Not yet. Ferdinand scrubs him up with water tepid and burning, his touch a ghost through too many layers of cloth and decay and bone, and Hubert strains to follow his path. For a moment he loses Ferdinand through the drifting memory of his own death, of so many healers’ hands upon him and Ferdinand’s voice gone, gone, as strangers knit him back into a broken world. But then the ghosts pass him by, moving on without him, and the world returns in all its color. A pop of marigold behind his shoulder in the mirror, a lip bitten in diligent concentration.
His heart thrums queasily with the wretched desire to kiss this man that he loves.
“Almost done,” Ferdinand says with a kiss at the knot of Hubert’s spine, and all the flame in him ignites to a single point of sudden southern clarity.
Oh.
The other hell Hubert deserves. This one is sweeter than he can ever earn. But all of him is Ferdinand’s, so he takes what he is given.
Ferdinand finishes with the water and begins with the salve, which should sting like nettles as it settles thick upon his back, but only brings presence to the path of Ferdinand’s hands instead. Without a guide for the wound paths, Ferdinand seems to trace out Hubert’s stiff spine and ribcage with the vast breadth of those powerful hands. Hubert squirms at a solid sweep from nape to tailbone, then firm pressure to either side as easy and forceful as a chef with a knife, filleting Hubert down to the bone with every pass.
And then those hands spread over his shoulders, and Hubert can see them in the mirror, every scar and callous of long fingers and meaty palms. For all his work in wordsmithing, Ferdinand still has the rugged hands of a field general. Hubert closes his eyes against the meteor-strike of arousal that hits the moment those hands gently, so gently, encircle his neck to set the uppermost boundary of the salve.
It is too much to watch, but feeling is worse. Hubert chokes down a cry as Ferdinand reaches around to his chest, and Ferdinand pauses, then shifts their position until Hubert is sat upon his knee for a better vantage. Bastard, Hubert breathes, grinding against this new friction as Ferdinand tries to hold him ever firm to press healing into his every sundered chasm.
By the time Ferdinand begins upon the bandages, all of Hubert burns with frenzied fever. He opens his eyes for shattered glimpses of Ferdinand’s arms around him, Ferdinand’s hands binding him back into human form, Ferdinand gentling him at the hip as if his comfort can be assured by anything but Ferdinand’s cock splitting him open in the next five minutes. He will bear it beautifully, he will, and he says it with his body as he leans into every touch, throat too dry for words.
Ferdinand tucks in the final edge of clean linen bandage just over Hubert’s belly button. His hand drifts there, mere inches from where Hubert’s cock swells with urgency, and then retreats. Hubert’s breath hisses out between his teeth.
It is done. Except for how Ferdinand’s hands now trail their thoughtful touch down the outer line of Hubert’s arms. It cannot be inquiry—Hubert would list his physical maladies upon request, if not how very near they brought him to death—and there are few remaining abrasions along his shoulders. Once down to where magic has roasted up to his elbows and magerot burrowed into his forearms, Ferdinand pauses. He must feel the manic flex of tendon beneath the skin as Hubert retrains himself from the bestial desire coursing through him. He must, and yet he continues this obscene cruelty by moving his touch to Hubert’s torso instead, tracing the secure wrappings down to his waist. There is no bandaging over his hips, and the lone femur fracture he sustained was the most easily healed of all Hubert’s wounds. Still Ferdinand feels down the outer edge of Hubert’s legs, methodical, until he hits the knees and works his way back along the tender skin of Hubert’s inner thighs—
Ferdinand jerks his hands away as Hubert keens on a pulse of molten desire, his whole body tensing with frantic restraint.
“Sorry,” Ferdinand says, all wrong, all quiet and worried, “Sorry, should I…“
Hubert turns his head over his shoulder and spits murder at this vicious tease of a man. “Have it done with and fuck me already!”
Ferdinand freezes. His whole face goes slack, and Hubert clenches shut his eyes well before he turns away, unable to face whatever placating smile the masterful diplomat will assume. Of course Ferdinand has no such desire; it would be akin to shoving one’s cock in the wreckage of a meat grinder. His hands are still streaked in the grime of healing and decay, every piece of Hubert as rancid now on the outside as it has always been on the inside.
But Ferdinand’s hands find their way back to Hubert’s thighs, sliding inward. His lips burn against Hubert’s ear. “…When I take you apart, you will take the morphium after, not before.”
It is sheer malice to beg off as if the morphium is the issue, when Hubert’s head spins with or without it and all it does is dim the specter of war in his bones. Be it blood or venom running through his veins, the Hubert of this moment is all there is. All that remains.
With a groan of misery, Hubert tries to push to his feet, but Ferdinand’s bruising grip drags him back to the ledge of that loathsome, lovely lap.
“But for now…right here, I think.” Ferdinand’s breath whispers like a furnace at the back of Hubert’s neck, his hands now gentling over tomorrow’s bruises on Hubert’s thighs.
Hubert doesn’t understand. He tries to arch back, but Ferdinand leaves an unyielding distance between his chest and Hubert’s freshly-wrapped back. Whenever he squirms, Ferdinand simply holds his hips firm, and the ease of it ignites Hubert’s arousal while snuffing his breath like a flame. Maddening.
“Go on. Care for yourself,” Ferdinand instructs with polite interest, as if Hubert cannot feel him squirming alike now.
“You cannot be serious.”
“This part I trust you with.” He strokes lazily upward to the join of Hubert’s thigh, hooking a finger into the hem of Hubert’s smalls and listening to the choked gasp that escapes Hubert’s throat. “Be good, and I won’t even make you describe the scene.”
Hubert’s eyes flit back to the mirror at once. Everything he sees therein is unspeakable horror, but some part of him still wants to tell, wants to spill words like black bile down his chin for as long as Ferdinand is here, present, smiling. If Ferdinand asked it, every mortification would lose its meaning in sweetest service.
For now Hubert has been given a different command. His hand slips down into his smalls, at first not even bothering to pull himself out, just pawing at himself like a man possessed. No time for niceties when he has drifted so long on the edge, thinking only of that night in his tent when Ferdinand’s weight smothered him down, broke him to nothing.
Yet this warrants…more. Even if in this silence the show is for Hubert alone. So he tugs himself free and tries not to wince at what he sees in the mirror.
There is no beauty in the dissonance of his blackened hands wrapped stiffly around his member, some maudlin mess of eroticism in life and death conjoined. Yet the way his legs spread wanton across Ferdinand’s bare thighs, the crimson blush carved deep into every inch of Hubert’s exposed flesh next to Ferdinand’s copper-dusted skin of gold, the utter helplessness of his heaving chest, his bobbing throat, his teeth sinking deep into his tormented lip, the exquisite suffering of being hemmed in by Ferdinand’s immutable physicality on all sides—what cares the masterwork for beauty, when it lays beneath the artist’s hands?
But it is more than that. Ferdinand’s nudity strikes obscene, for it should be the reverse: Hubert stripped and sinking to his knees before the Prime Minister in all his finery, neatly pulling him from his slacks for a quick meal before all his meetings resume.
Hubert’s grip tightens at the image, the ring of his fingers catching rough as he fucks into his fist, and he breathes out a shaky reverie. If only it were Ferdinand’s hands on him instead. It would take the slightest shift of angle to break the unspoken rules and drag his cock over Ferdinand’s knuckles there upon his thigh. With every shiver of sound, Ferdinand’s grip tightens, holding him open, massaging down into sore muscle, and Hubert’s gaze fixes on every detail of tense, tender power. Of ownership.
He shudders to a stop, breathing hard through his mouth. Even the thought of disobedience sets his nerves screaming, and he squeezes down against the lightning shock of pleasure it rips out of him.
“Stage fright?” Ferdinand murmurs softly.
Only a quick vice-grip at the base keeps Hubert from spilling immediately. What need for a collar when Ferdinand could take him in hand at any moment, or deny him the same with equal effect? Two teasing little words; he needs no more than the slightest regard to set him aflame.
And yet he has not accomplished what Ferdinand asked of him. He should have let Ferdinand’s voice drag him over the edge, but all he knows is how to deny himself. Hubert gets both hands on his cock now, frustrated and bitterly inept at the art of pleasure. His hands are not right, too softened by medicine, too gaunt and rigid with disease, and his fist is as miserly now as it has been all these months of longing. But Ferdinand asked, and back in Fhirdiad all of Hubert’s mistakes will flock back around him, so he must do it here where no one knows his name, where there is only Ferdinand and he can be only Ferdinand’s, who still wanted what was left.
He wants Ferdinand to make him do it in truth. To bring him to the edge and ask what he sees, leave Hubert stewing in humiliation for hours to earn a few seconds of penitent bliss, rip every lurid word of fractured poetry from his throat. Make him beg, make him scream—not this raspy, quiet breathing that has been Ferdinand’s only reward.
But Ferdinand’s mouth settles at the nape of Hubert’s neck, first in a smile then a kiss, and Hubert’s pulse flutters with something that can only be love. Ferdinand’s mouth opens for sweet nothings and warm assurances.
And teeth close sharp upon Hubert’s throat, spearing him through in a single brutal strike of rapture.
Ferdinand holds him for a long while. His knuckles bump down the edges and valleys of the wrapped bandages along Hubert’s sides as if tracing his ribcage, then settle in for a lighter hold so he can carefully shift Hubert over to lie down upon the bed. At last Ferdinand rises, follows the smell of their dinner over to the table, reaches carefully through the air to find the edge of whatever container bears their water, and brings it over for Hubert to drink.
The pitcher is much too cold for how long it has lingered there, or perhaps all of Hubert is too warm, gutted and roasted upon the spit of Ferdinand’s care. He nuzzles into Ferdinand’s side instead of accepting the drink, painlessly present in a way that surely won’t last, and goes up on his knees for a kiss. “Let me—“
Ferdinand frowns. “You have taken care of me for years, Hubert. Please…allow me this.” He sits carefully next to Hubert and tries to get him to imbibe once more.
That wasn’t what Hubert meant, but Ferdinand is not easily swayed. So Hubert takes a long sip, then a second, then places the pitcher on the far bedside table so Ferdinand cannot immediately busy himself with volume and hydration judgments. He never had a chance to dress after his interrupted bath, and his cock still bobs free with blatant interest despite his honey-sweet words. Hubert reaches out to trace the dusting of copper down Ferdinand’s stomach and watch his handsome lance twitch.
It takes all of Hubert’s strength to postpone a thorough visual survey, and to drag his eyes back to Ferdinand’s face. “If you mean to take care of me, you will not leave me in your debt. At least take my mouth,” he offers on a low, sultry rumble.
Hubert could lie on his stomach to prevent himself from moving overly much or disturbing the bandages that Ferdinand worked so hard on. He steels himself to spin the image aloud and give Ferdinand a reason to shut him up with a proper mouthful.
Surprisingly, there is no need.
“Very well,” Ferdinand agrees. “I…suppose I have always been a proponent of equitable reciprocation.”
He does not seize Hubert by the face and arrange him inappropriately. Instead, he crawls onto the bed, carefully avoids where Hubert’s voice last sounded, and arranges himself upon the sheets with his cock an eager flag arching for victory. “Since you managed yourself so admirably, I will follow your most capable lead.”
And he takes himself in hand.
It punches the breath from Hubert’s lungs, though of course it is the natural reversal: he did not touch Hubert, so Hubert cannot touch him. But equitable it cannot be, since Hubert’s eyes are offered a full panoply of bare skin and flexing muscle, while Ferdinand merely received tortured breathing in place of generosity.
Yet for all the alluring showmanship, Hubert finds himself transfixed not by body or movement but the path his own hands would make upon Ferdinand’s skin. He would ignore no freckle, leave lonely no scar. The stiffness of Ferdinand’s nipples would scarcely go without worship for long, peaked pretty for attention Ferdinand denied them. And those parted lips, and the muscular bulge of his hips, and the silken rivers of his hair—for all that Hubert sits there spoiled for choice, Ferdinand ignores each glory in favor of brute simplicity.
Hubert could do so much better than Ferdinand allows himself. Each jerk of his wrist seems a clumsy, ill-timed attempt at slowing down, as if patience and eroticism coincide precisely. His usual must be plain utilitarian vigor. Ferdinand does not even make himself squirm.
Hubert could wrap both hands around Ferdinand’s cock and still have a mouthful remain. He imagines a finer touch instead, the torture of only the ring of his thumb and forefinger for pressure. A kiss at that soft spot just beneath the head, then another, each bestowed only when Ferdinand’s member twitched visibly for attention, until frustration finally outweighed pleasure and Ferdinand grabbed Hubert’s head to fuck down his throat all in one. Let them each teach the other a lesson in patience.
Most harrowing of all, somewhere along the way Ferdinand has forgotten how to sing. He handles himself in silence. His teeth grit together noiselessly, the tendons of his neck flaring with the force of repressing each sound, like all soldiers used to the thin walls of camp tents and shared barracks. It threatens each of Hubert’s carefully cultivated fantasies from the last five years, which cannot stand. When they’re together, properly, Ferdinand will pant and moan and howl, every noise torn out of him triumphant, even as he breaks Hubert in turn with praise and pain and gentleness.
Hubert can do gentle, too. For this man.
Ferdinand did not touch his cock, but did touch him. So once Hubert has categorized every failure of technique, he stretches out next to Ferdinand on the bed, close enough for heat to radiate between their bodies. With a bit of logic he manages to melt against the curve of Ferdinand’s body in a way that even his own corpse can find comfort in, then tucks his head against Ferdinand’s shoulder and splays a hand over his heart.
At once, Ferdinand groans and smothers his face into the mess of Hubert’s hair. His free arm wraps around Hubert’s waist, straining with care, as if his true focus even now is on treating Hubert with fastidious tenderness rather than chasing an iota of bliss.
They’ve come painfully, horrifically far from the days Hubert considered himself the level-headed one, but he still has this perfect man wrapped around his mauled charcoal fingers.
“It is not a lance in truth,” Hubert grumbles, all distaste save for the obvious wry smile twisting his tone. “Do you treat all your weapons so cruelly?”
Ferdinand pauses for a moment so jarringly fraught that Hubert almost swallows his traitor tongue. He twists to see Ferdinand’s face, and Ferdinand’s arm tightens around him as he is hauled gasping into a brutal kiss.
“When needs must.” He bites the words into the corner of Hubert’s lips. “When it pleases them.”
His cock drags over Hubert’s sharp hipbone in a smear of pulsing desire, breaking his own damn rules as Hubert moans into his mouth. The contact barely lasts; effortlessly, Ferdinand braces up on one arm over Hubert’s sprawled form. Every time Hubert tries to strain upwards for contact, Ferdinand takes his hand off his cock to gently push Hubert back down. He must be still for Ferdinand to continue. He cannot be still, not with Ferdinand’s cock looming heavy and red, not now that Ferdinand is touching himself to Hubert, not merely for him. To the iron taste of his lips and the impossible warmth of his skin and every last wretched inch of rank humanity left in him.
“When they are ready for it,” Ferdinand promises. And then he groans and spends in his palm, like a gentleman, instead of splattering across the fresh wrappings of Hubert’s chest.
A politeness and a lesson, and certainly not meant to make Hubert want to flay himself alive. If anything it is a promise of what Hubert may have once fully recuperated; once he has skin again to mark, as it were. This knowledge does not prevent Hubert’s petulant snarl of loss, though it soothes the sting of the teasing kisses Ferdinand presses to his cheeks in the aftermath, and once he has been carefully wrapped in Ferdinand’s warm arms his pulse slows down to an easy canter.
Not much remains of Hubert, but all of him is Ferdinand’s. Consequently, whatever grows back upon the trellis of his bones will also be Ferdinand’s to harvest and devour. In those terms even recuperation is an act of service.
From within the fortress of Ferdinand’s embrace, Hubert can almost make himself believe it. He glowers at the pitcher of water on the far table as he nods off into dreamless slumber.