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The evening was, unquestionably, a success.
Leisure is scarce and hard to come by, for the Fifth Talon and those in his orbit. Sometimes even moreso than for the First Talon, who has designs only on stability, rather than visions of thrones and power that mean tangible, beneficial change. But tonight was warm, like laying under the afternoon sun in a field of tall grass. Comfortable and jovial and full of laughter and Lucanis’ lavish cooking and a lightness that they haven’t enjoyed in too long.
And— something else. Something that has Ashara musing, uncharacteristically quiet as the carriage trundles to their rented townhouse. She barely notices the lights passing, or the intense study Viago makes of her, scrutiny substituted for his usual discomfort. They draw to a stop and the driver helps her down and she drifts inside, lost in the winding path of what ifs and might bes until the door latches shut and Viago coughs, pointed.
“How fortunate no assailant chose to take advantage of your lax attention en route,” he says dryly, tucking his walking stick into the foyer stand.
Ashara flushes. She reaches for the clasp of her cloak and gives undoing it far more attention than it needs. “I was just… thinking.”
“Clearly.”
Something in the silence stretches taut at the absence of Viago’s usual reprimand. It beckons, expectant, and Ashara chews on her lip as she shakes her cloak and folds it with far more care than she has ever paid it before. Her fingers brush the soft leather of Viago’s gloves as she passes it to him, and she cracks.
“They were—sweet, don’t you think? Lucanis and Ari… and Ramon.” She tries and fails to keep her voice from catching. Her tongue trips over the memory of a lopsided smile stretched into chubby cheeks, wide, curious eyes and laughter like a gurgling stream. Fat little fists reaching, reaching, reaching for something and more.
(Bluntly pointed ears that poked out from ruffled brown waves. Not as sharp as his mother’s, nor as round as Lucanis’, just as they would be if—
Well. The tips of Ashara’s own ears go darker, still.)
“Sweet.” Viago tastes the word like wine, savoring it on his tongue as he considers. Ashara’s breath stagnates in her lungs; she fiddles with the laces of her tunic and forces her gaze to settle when it yearns to dart about every corner of the room. “I suppose so.”
That something lurches up Ashara’s throat. The tight burn of hope, the sharp swallow of uncertainty. She follows Viago to the study, to the decanter of brandy and the drop of reagent to ensure it remains clean. She wraps her hand around the textured glass and sips a larger measure than she might otherwise.
This time, there is no missing the intensity with which Viago watches her. It shivers down her spine and curls with promise in her core. She feels, as she often does, like a book spread open and thoroughly consumed, without recourse to know what the reader makes of her words.
“I take it that is something you want?”
Her fingers go white against her drink, as though she could squeeze a simple answer from the divots and design of the glass. “I—well. Yes, but not if— not unless— not without considering—“
Her teeth click together and she closes her eyes, drawing every bit of air in the room in through her nose. She tips the remaining too-big mouthful of brandy down her throat. “I just mean to say that we should talk about— what it would mean. For us, for everything. But… yes. Aside from all of that, yes.”
Viago doesn’t answer right away, but when Ashara finally steels herself to open her eyes she finds him… not laughing— humor rarely escapes him in such an unregulated fashion— but there is amusement playing at the corners of his mouth. Ashara huffs and crosses her arms. “Go on then. It’s foolish, you can say it.”
Foolish— because she is an elf, and Viago is the man who will one day be king. If they are to make the throne of Antiva a force to be respected and feared, it will require heirs that garner the same.
The burn of alcohol goes sour on her tongue as she considers the human queen that will bear them, and she turns away.
“Do not presume to put words in my mouth.” Viago’s voice is closer than she expects, the space between them falling to his silent steps. He plucks her empty glass from her hand and discards it. “Particularly ones so… ill-judged.”
Her throat goes dry. “Oh?”
Viago deposits his half-full glass beside hers and hums. His grip curls possessively at her hip and his other hand slides along her side, settling with intent over her middle.
Her lungs stutter, and stop.
“I was thinking,” he murmurs, breath teasing down the shell of her ear, “how you would look.”
He swipes his thumb over her navel and presses a kiss that’s mostly teeth into the soft, sensitive skin below her ear.
It comes easily to Ashara’s mind: her belly round and swollen and heavy. Marked in a way no one could ever challenge or change or revoke— not even him. And she— yearns. In her throat and her chest and the wetness gathering between her thighs. For tiny footsteps and giggling mischief and curls over blunt-edged ears. For the softness that fatherhood will paint around her lover, whether he knows it or not. Viago tugs her tunic loose of her trousers and she gasps at the slide against her overheated skin.
“And how,” she manages, tripping over the shapes he traces against her, the tease of his fingers below her waistband and back up again, “how would I look?”
There’s a beat where she regrets asking. Cringes, and thinks of half a dozen better lines, smoother or funnier or less prostrated on the altar of her own desire. And then Viago rucks her tunic up and traces the underside of her breasts and sucks an open-mouthed kiss against her neck.
“Perfect,” he says, not quite wrecked but a little bit hoarse, which for him amounts to the same. “You would look perfect.”
She turns— or he spins her, but either way his lips are a demand against hers. All consuming and covetous and desperate. He kisses her like a lifeline, like an antidote, like the answer to every question ever asked. Like he could drink the marrow right out of her bones and it still would not be enough.
Her legs wrap around his hips and she feels the hard line of his desire pressed against the inside of her thigh. Even the thin barrier of clothing is suddenly unbearable. She pulls back and fumbles with her trousers, all urgency and heat and need. Viago doesn’t bother— he frees himself from his smalls and bats her hands away, ruining some kind of paperwork as he lifts her onto the desk properly. He jerks her leggings down just enough to run the head of his cock through the slick mess between her thighs.
They both groan.
“Ask me.” Viago tips his forehead against hers, breath fanning hot over her face. Her hips twitch, reaching, but his hold on her is iron and he doesn’t let her take what they both want. Not yet. “Ask me, Ashara.”
“Fuck me,” she begs, grasping the lapels of his shirt and dragging him down into a messy, eager kiss. “Fuck a baby into me.”
He buries himself inside her with a groan that she echoes back against his lips. For a moment, time is still, stretching, Ashara’s breath caught in a gasp. Her body gives way to him as it always has, as sometimes it feels it must. She drinks in the sight of him, like this: pupils blown, hair curling free of his careful styling where it’s going silver at the temples. Despite how the precipice lingers, there is something frenzied, fast and frantic in the way he looks back at her. A realization he hadn’t considered—hadn’t allowed himself to consider— dawning as the sun in the desert, a slow burn and then all at once a blaze.
His hips snap; the moment shatters. A million tiny shards that refract her own pleasure back at her over and over and over as Viago drives himself into her with single-minded purpose.
It is— not different, it cannot be, not when he has held and touched and known her in every way. But there is an edge, like the pressure that heralds a thunderstorm, like the eerie calm before the crack of lightning, like the sharp steel of a dagger in a familiar hand. It could cut her, and she would thank it for the way she bleeds.
Viago splays one hand across her abdomen, thumb stroking the line from her navel to where they are joined in time with his thrusts. Not quite catching her clit, but not quite missing it either, enough to have her pleading, reaching, but Viago slows instead, grinding his hips into her.
“You like it, don’t you?” His fingers dip between them and draw up the obscene evidence of her desire, glistening in the flickering light. “All of me inside you, taking root, marking you, making you mine—“
“Yes,” Ashara gasps, fingers scrabbling for purchase at his shoulders. “Yes—fuck. I need it, Viago, please.”
“Please what?”
“Make a mess of me,” she begs. “Give me your cock, your cum, put your baby inside of me. Make me stretch, let them all see—“
She cuts off with a groan as Viago slides his slick-coated fingers into his mouth. He only hums, thoughtful, but his cock twitches inside her.
“I wonder if you’ll taste different with my child in you.”
A fresh wave of arousal floods out of her and she keens, reaching with her hips just as he ruts up into her again. The length of his cock drags along her cunt, again—again—again—
She tangles her fingers in his curls and kisses him with what little dexterity she can still claim, teeth clicking together. “Come inside me, Vi,” she pants, empty despite how he fills her, needing this, needing him.
“You first,” he says, fingers finding her clit once more. Circling it without mercy, short little jabs that demanded her to, “Come for me, Ashara, come so your cunt is ready to take our child, come on my cock, come—“
Our child— ours.
She shatters with a cry, nails curling into his scalp. It races like lightning up her spine and curls sparks around her throat and rushes fire through her veins, but she breathes in his ear because she needs—
“Inside me, Vi, please.”
His teeth close around her collarbone. A groan vibrates through his teeth as his cock jerks once, twice, and he spills inside of her, spend flooding her cunt. Warm and gratifying, twisting giddy pleasure up her spine.
She could be content there forever, she thinks, despite the insistent press of hardwood against her back and the strain of her twisted up trousers. Pillow Viago’s head against her chest and card her fingers through his hair until long after the sweat on their skin cools, and want for nothing else, ever again.
Apparently not a sentiment that Viago shares. He’s barely softened inside her before he draws back. Something aches in the space he leaves and panic freezes in her throat. She curls her fingers into the desk to keep from reaching out to stop him.
But she doesn’t need to— he’s not leaving, even as he pulls away. He slides out of her and a thin line of his spend follows, white against pink flesh and wiry curls, flattened by their exertions. His brow furrows, as though the way it leaks from her is a personal offense. He drags his fingers up the length of her cunt and pushes his cum back inside of her.
Her hips jerk and she whines, fingers flexing like they cannot decide whether to pull him closer or push him away. Despite the sensitive pleasure-pain sparking up her spine, her arousal stirs and stokes as he fucks his spend back into her. She slides her hand down; frames the slick heat of her cunt with her fingers, spreading herself open where leather slides against her flesh.
Viago inhales, short but keen; she looks up through her lashes. Watches his lips part and his tongue dance along his teeth as she smears her arousal over her clit and teases herself, rocking her hips now in time with his hand.
“What if it doesn’t take?” she asks, and behind the breathless, performative tease is a very real fear. A cold shadow lurking at the edge of her arousal, one hand around her throat.
Viago’s teeth click together and something sharpens around him, indignation, perhaps, or some lesser flavor of offense, objecting to even the suggestion. His thumb cuts through her path around her clit; the leather seam drags along it and she gasps, reaching for his wrist, his shoulder, for the anchor she has made of him.
He intercepts her hand and laces their fingers together. Between her legs, his fingers twist and splice and curl, conducting an obscene symphony of slick and heat and want all around them. Perhaps this will be one of those questions he does not deign to answer; perhaps she does not care, not while he’s playing her as a violin, driving her higher and higher and—
She comes again, pleasure streaking messy down his palm. Gasping and breathless, she trembles as though fireflies are dancing on her every nerve. Viago kisses the whimpers and cries as they fall off her lips, taking each one for his own.
“If it does not take,” he finally says, as her release settles into a warm, dull thud against her throat, “Then we do this again, and again, and again—“ he punctuates each insistence with a curl of his fingers, still inside her, shocks of pleasure-pain that fill the doubt-carved crevices of her mind. “Until it does.”
He kisses her stomach, her sternum, the hollow of her throat. Draws his fingers out of her and trails her own slick along the same path. A smirk catches at the corner of his mouth. “And again after it does, perhaps, and again after that, and—“
Relief spills through Ashara like an anchor thrown overboard. Sinks into her, unspooling in freefall, easy and allowed. She curls her fingers at the nape of his neck and buries her face in his shoulder and laughs, but thinks, giddy and overcome—
Until it does.