Chapter Text
“Here I thought you knew my name,” she says, drowsily.
His heart stops. No, not the time. She sounds like she’s drifting – he looks at her face and her eyes are clouding. Still in pain, but nearly past it. When she’s past it, it’ll be too – He presses harder, hard enough it’s probably hurting her, but often that’s the only way to slow the bleeding. (Not because he’s clinging to her to keep her here with him, to keep her at all.) “De Sardet. Speak to me.” Fear is making him too sharp. “Marie.”
Her hand settles, weak, on his. “There it is.” He looks up, and she smiles at him – half-awake, but it nearly blinds him all the same. “Vasco,” she says softly, in return. It settles into the pit of his stomach, a heavy, aching thing: his name on her lips, here, now. She’s so pale.
“Stay with me, Marie,” he tells her, but he can see her fading, her eyes losing focus. “Marie!” He presses the wad of fabric harder against her wound. The backs of his fingers are cooling, tacky with her blood, but his palm is hot with it. No matter how hard he presses, the flow will not be staunched. “Come on, Marie. Talk to me!” He jostles her; her breath is thin, wheezing a little; those green eyes are going blank, her pupils dilating.
“Vasco,” she whispers. “What are you… doing here?” His throat goes tight. She’s losing track of her surroundings, probably can’t even remember what happened – he’s losing her. The shock is taking hold. Her pulse is rapid and thready under his fingers.
“Hold on,” he says, but her eyes won’t focus, her head is beginning to droop – “Marie! Look at me!” And she tries, she really does, but –
“Such a lovely day for a garden party,” she sighs. Her words are slurring, her eyes dropping shut.
“Marie!” Vasco’s voice breaks.
“Shh,” she whispers. “Shhh…”
“Just hold on,” he tells her. He tries to be firm, but his voice is shaking. “Just a little longer. Just stay with me a little longer, Marie.”
She’s silent. He jostles her slightly, and her head lolls against his arm, limp and aimless.
“Just a little longer,” he tells her.
He doesn’t know how long he kneels there, cradling her against him as her blood dries on his hands – until his legs go numb beneath him, until his arms and back begin to ache, until the muscles in his wrist and forearm cramp painfully from keeping his makeshift bandage pressed against the wound in her side. Her skin is cold, her body a dead weight against him; he checks for a pulse and doesn’t feel one and he doesn’t understand it, he refuses to understand it – it must be too weak for him to feel, but it’s there, it must be, it has to be. Siora will get here and she’ll use her magic and she’ll fix it and Marie will be all right if she can hold on a little longer, just a little longer…
Vasco jerks awake tangled in his sheets, with one arm asleep under him and the taste of salt on his lips.
“Fuck,” he mumbles. His heart is hammering against his ribs; fear is an ugly snarl in the pit of his stomach. He sits up, rubbing his usable hand over his face. He hasn’t had a nightmare that bad in a long time. Part of him wants to curl up and let the horror of it crush him, (the weight of her body in his arms, still and limp and cold,) but that would be pointless.
Marie is fine, he tells himself firmly, shaking sensation back into his numbed arm. The pins and needles make him grit his teeth, but the pain helps ground him a little. He flexes his stinging hand and glares at nothing in particular. That fight is a week gone, and Marie is fine; when he sees those scars again tonight they should be well-faded, fine and silver on her skin. Another week and they’ll have disappeared entirely. Almost losing a friend is always frightening (blood hot on his hands, the clamminess of her skin, the way she panted like every breath was a battle, stop it Vasco), but she was well looked-after and is none the worse for wear. There’s no reason to fuss over her. Best to simply put it out of his mind. (“Such a lovely day for a garden party.”) Vasco gets up, resolutely reaching for his shaving soap.
He mostly succeeds in thinking of other things, but he feels brittle all day, sort of thin, a drumskin stretched too tight, ready to break at the first blow. He snaps at some porters, avoids the Admiral, and generally keeps to himself. His feet want to make the trek up from the docks to the Silver Quarter to find Marie, but he’ll see her tonight at a quarter past nine, and in the meantime he oughtn’t bother her. The sea is restless, every wave a rough hand slapping at the quay; there’s a storm, he thinks, less than a day out from the island. (“Shh,” she whispers.)
Vasco’s watched men go into shock and die from blood loss before; they go babbling or begging, sometimes screaming, but mostly too confused at the end even to feel the pain – one sea-born lad got tangled in the lines some seven years ago and died asking his father to open a coconut for him, his left leg half torn off just above the knee, the blood a small, red sea around him on the deck as he stared blindly up at the sun above, not blinking. It’s a mercy that they don’t feel it, he supposes, but he hates how real his dreams are sometimes. To see Marie too addled by blood loss to even know him at the end… No, he needs to stop thinking about that, damn it.
The hours drag themselves along by interminable inches. At about eight thirty Vasco starts to get ready, bathing and douching, shaving, then reapplying his kohl and cleaning his boots before dressing again. The routine is somehow comforting: the hot water soothing him a little, the shaving soap on his face a simple, daily ritual, the act of tying his sash and doing up his belt oddly fortifying. He walks through the square with anticipation pressing hard against his ribs, and knocks on her door at precisely quarter past.
“Vasco!” Marie opens the door and beams at him, her green eyes bright with pleasure at his presence. She’s in her waistcoat, shirtsleeves, and stockinged feet, and it hits him all over again that she nearly died a week ago today and he almost had to watch it happen – he did watch it happen last night in that nightmare – and he can’t help himself. He takes her in his arms and kisses her right there on the stoop. She’s warm in his arms, strong and mobile and alive and pressing herself against him, heedless of any neighbors that might be watching, her arms around his neck, pulling him closer.
He doesn’t really realize what he’s done until she’s pulled him inside, but by then her back is against the door – fortunately closed – and she’s kissing him again with a smile on her lips. “It’s good to see you too,” she jokes, and then kisses him deeply, her tongue tracing the seam of his lips until he opens his mouth for her. Storms sink him, she tastes so good – tea and biscuits and herself, this woman he almost lost, this woman he –
“Sorry, de Sardet,” Vasco says, leaning his forehead against hers.
“For what?” Marie says.
“I should have waited until we were inside. I just…”
She chuckles. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” And she rubs the tip of her nose against his, a sweetly affectionate gesture that goes right to his heart and makes him ache. He kisses her, fierce with a longing he can’t articulate.
“Come on. Let me take you to bed,” Marie murmurs, taking his face between her hands and kissing him slow as honey. Vasco can’t think of anything to say in response that isn’t Always, so he just slips an arm around her waist and tugs her towards the stairs.
They undress each other gently, almost tenderly. Vasco revels in the chance to finally touch her; he wants to kiss every inch of her skin as he bares it to the golden lamplight. Marie runs her hands over him admiringly, the way she always does, but it feels like it means more tonight, though he’s sure that’s just his lingering fear speaking for her. He’s spent the day fighting the need to mourn the death he dreamed for her, and holding in her arms now feels like redemption, salvation, healing. She’s alive. She’s alive, and she’s here, and she wants him. Vasco never wants to be anywhere else.
“What would you like?” he asks her, and kisses her neck.
“Hmm,” she sighs, melting against him as he bites her the way she likes so much. “You did such terrifyingly good things to me with your mouth last week…”
“Terrifyingly?” He smiles against her skin.
“Terrifyingly,” she replies, deadly serious. The spark in her eyes is a wonderful thing.
“Shall I do them again?” he says.
“Yes, please.”
Vasco eases her towards the bed, urging her to sit with a touch, and then drops to his knees at her feet, his hands settling on her thighs. Marie looks down at him, running gentle fingers through his hair. He shuts his eyes, leaning into the touch. She cups his cheek in her hand.
“You’re beautiful,” she tells him softly.
Vasco looks up at her under his lashes, then turns his head to press a kiss to the center of her palm. “So are you,” he says. He ought to call her de Sardet now or say something droll, some way to reassert the distance that’s meant to be between them, but he can’t do it, he can’t even bear to think of it. Just this once, he wants to be close to her in every way he can. He runs a hand down to her knee and strokes the sensitive skin of her inner thigh with his thumb, urging her legs apart. Marie catches her breath and scoots forward, spreading her legs to let him closer.
“Lean back a little,” Vasco tells her, and she drops back onto her elbows, looking down at him under lowered lashes. He leans forward, stroking light fingers through the curls between her legs, and then parting her folds and lowering his mouth to her cunt.
By the taste and feel of her, she isn’t ready to take his fingers, so he licks her with a soft, wet tongue, bringing her up gently. She sighs with pleasure, her head dropping back; Vasco settles her thighs over his shoulders and reaches up to grip her hips, holding her close as he pleases her. The taste and smell of her is all around him, enough to make his head spin; he can feel himself getting hard as he kneels there between her legs.
“Oh,” she breathes, “oh Vasco…” He speeds up a little, teasing her pearl with the tip of his tongue, and she whimpers, her thighs tensing. “Oh, it feels so good.” Pleased heat prickles over his skin at the praise. “Oh, ah, ah,” she arches her back, and the lamplight gilds the curves of her breasts and the sweep of her ribcage in his eyes; she sucks in a breath and her belly hollows out; he wishes he could see her face – “ah, Vasco, oh Saints…”
She’s wet and ready for him now: he can feel it against his lips, can taste the tart almost-flavorlessness of her growing arousal, so he reaches down between them and penetrates her with a single finger, slow and careful. Marie cries out, and then says “More,” and he adds a second, and she moans his name. He crooks his fingers against that sensitive spot inside her and she cries out again, her thighs trembling against his shoulders as he licks her steadily. She’s tightening around him already, her cunt all heat and velvet clenching around his fingers, as though she’s drawing him deeper into her.
“You’re so good, you feel so good, oh Light, oh fuck – ” Her pleasure is a whispered chant. It’s her fingers clenched in the sheets. It’s how tight she is; it’s how she’s beginning to twitch around him. “Oh, Vasco, don’t stop, please don’t stop.” It’s her pounding heartbeat; it’s her breath coming quicker and shallower; it’s her hips canting downward as she arches up, pushing herself against his mouth. It’s her legs locked over his shoulders, pinning him against her. It’s the sound of her voice as she comes with his name on her lips; it’s the liquid heat that pours over him as he hears it, as he feels her shuddering under him. It’s her hand in his, their fingers laced together, clinging to each other as her climax breaks over them both like a shimmering wave.
Marie lies there for a moment afterward, catching her breath. Vasco kisses her pubic mound, her inner thigh; he leans back a little, letting her legs slip from his shoulders, and looks up at her. She smiles down at him lazily and rubs her thumb over his knuckle, their fingers still twined together. Vasco smiles up at her, warm with pleasure, his arousal a pleasant ache urging him onwards. Without breaking eye contact, he puts his fingers into his mouth and licks her slick from them, relishing the deep taste of her cunt and the way her eyes go dark and her lips part as she watches him.
“What would you like?” she asks him when he’s finished, her voice smoky, her eyes lingering on his mouth.
“I want you to fuck me,” Vasco says simply, but her eyes go even darker. She is flushed and radiant with pleasure and arousal, her chestnut hair falling around her narrow, elegant face. He truly, passionately wants to be under her, wants to feel her inside him again, hot and strong and very much alive.
“I think we can manage that,” she breathes, and the words are meant to be a joke but her tone promises so much more. Excitement prickles over Vasco’s skin.
She puts on her harness as he fetches the oil from her nightstand – he’s taken to leaving some here for just such occasions. He settles himself on the bed and watches her get ready, admires the lean lines of her, the curve of her arse, the way she holds that glass phallus in her hands. She strokes it and smiles at him, almost shyly.
“I need to warm it up,” she says. Vasco gives her a crooked smile and holds out his arms, and she comes to him, settling herself across his lap and giving him a slow, lazy kiss. He wraps his hand around her phallus and strokes it slowly, root to tip and back again. She’s right – it’s cold from sitting in a drawer, cold enough that he wouldn’t want it inside him, but it warms steadily against his skin as he continues to touch it.
“How will you have me?” he asks her.
Marie gives him a teasing look under her lashes. “However you like,” she says, amused.
“And what if I want you to choose?” he says.
“Hmm. Then I’d tell you to get on your hands and knees, but you needn’t if you don’t want – ”
“Oh, I want,” Vasco says. “There’s just one small problem.”
“And what is that?”
“There’s a beautiful woman currently sitting on my lap, and I’m afraid I can’t get up.”
Marie kisses him contemplatively. “She sounds like a dreadful nuisance.”
“You have no idea,” Vasco says, and he’s trying to sound dry but he can’t keep the affection out of his voice. Marie snuggles closer and kisses him with a smile on her lips.
“Shall I ask her to move?” she says.
“Not just yet,” Vasco murmurs, and he releases her cock to put his arms around her, pulling her against him, and kisses her deeply; Marie gives a little gasp as his tongue slips into her mouth, and then she’s kissing him back, matching his ardour, her hands tangling in his hair as she plunders his mouth with hers. By the time they break apart, they’re both panting a little.
“All right,” Vasco says, relaxing his embrace, “she can get up now if she likes.”
Marie chuckles, then kisses him softly and clambers out of his lap, giving him space to move. She picks up the oil and watches him move down the bed a little, then get up on his hands and knees. “Saints, look at you,” she says, half to herself. She reaches out and runs a gentle hand down the length of his spine to cup the curve of his arse. “You’re lovely.” And she kisses his shoulder.
Thank you, de Sardet, he could say sardonically, but his heart’s not in it. Those scars are four faint lines on her side, only visible because they catch the light when it hits them at an angle, so he just says, “Thank you,” soft and sincere. She beams at him, and Vasco feels his own smile blossoming under the light of her happiness. He will have to start accepting her compliments more often.
Marie moves behind him, and he listens as she slicks up her fingers and sets the flask out of the way; then her oiled fingers are trailing down his cleft, and he doesn’t care about anything else. She circles his arsehole with a gentle fingertip, so light on the sensitive skin; Vasco makes a soft, needy sound in his throat, arching into her touch a little and going down onto his elbows to expose himself to her more fully. He relaxes himself deliberately, opening for her, and he knows she feels it because he can hear the little catch in her breathing.
“You’re so beautiful,” she tells him.
“Please,” Vasco says, already desperate to feel her inside him. He’s hard, almost aching, and he wants the deep pleasure that only her fingers and her cock can give him.
She breaches him ever so slowly, and Vasco gasps as she enters him, then lets out a long breath as she goes deeper and deeper, until her knuckles are pressed against him and her finger is hilted in his arsehole. Storms, it feels so good and not enough at the same time, the delicious tease of a single finger. Marie fucks in and out of him slowly, adding a little more oil as she goes.
“You’re ready for two already, aren’t you,” she says, and her voice has that low, smoky quality to it that he’s grown to associate with the times that she takes command in bed; it never fails to get him harder. Every time he hears it, good things happen, and it makes him want to go to his knees at her feet, everything in him yearning to please her.
“Yes,” he pants, and Marie withdraws and then breaches him again, two fingers stretching his arsehole and making him moan, the delicious burn of it, the stroke of the pads of her fingertips over that secret spot deep inside him that sends darts of pleasure through his body whenever she she touches it. “Ah – ah!” Vasco drops his head down on the mattress, keeping his arse raised up for her: a sensual sort of genuflection. It doesn’t always take him like this, the need to please, the desire to be told what to do – he’s had lovers that he would never have accepted orders from, but with Marie it’s intense, almost desperate. She's soft, fond, relentless. He wants to give himself over to her so badly that it’s almost unbearably arousing every time she gives him an order in bed, and the feeling when she praises him for doing well…
She presses deeper into him, curling her fingers against that sensitive spot, and Vasco loses the ability to think for several seconds. He muffles a cry against the mattress, his hands fisting in the sheets. “Oh storms,” he gasps when he can speak again, “please, M – ” and she does it again, and again, and again. He’s nearly mindless with pleasure, clutching at those scarlet sheets like a lifeline, deaf and blind to the world around him as his body shudders and throbs with the ecstasy she gives him. Marie adds a third finger and all he feels is the blissful heat of it, how full he is, how deep she is inside him. But still he wants more, more.
“Please, Marie, please ah please, ah, ah!” He knows he’s babbling, but he can hardly hear himself over the roar of his pleasure.
“Please what?” Marie asks.
“Please – AH!” He has to bury his face in the mattress to muffle his shout as she curls her fingers firmly into him, the sudden, unexpected ecstasy of it swamping him completely. “Oh, fuck. Oh storms. Please fuck me,” he begs.
“You’re ready?”
“Ah – yes!”
“Alright,” she says, and withdraws her fingers. Vasco pants, suddenly empty, but he can hear the anticipation in her voice as she says, “Turn over.” He obeys without question, rolling onto his back and spreading his legs for her, his feet on the mattress, his knees up. Marie kneels above him, her glass phallus in her hands; she strokes oil along its length as he watches, her long, clever hands caressing the head, squeezing the shaft as if it were a real cock, as if she could feel it. Vasco raises his knees up higher, hooking his arms under them and drawing them up towards his chest, his legs falling open, letting her really see him. She drinks him in.
“Please,” he breathes, and her eyes are hot on his, and she leans forward and settles herself over him in one swift, decisive movement.
“Put your legs up on my shoulders,” she tells him, and he does, and the head of her cock is caressing his open, needy arsehole, and he’s never wanted anything as much as he wants this. Her hands are braced on either side of him on the mattress, and her eyes are locked on his. Marie licks her lips, and then rolls her hips forward, easing herself into him.
For the briefest moment, it burns, and then there’s just the long, slow slide of penetration, the way she fills him up. Her phallus is warm from her skin and his, from being pressed against their thighs as she pleasured him with her fingers, and clasped in their hands before that – if it weren’t so slick and perfect, it would feel real. But the silken slide of it is so good inside him, the sensation of fullness, the way the smoothly-molded head of it rubs over that sensitive spot, and the feeling of her hips pressed to his as she takes him.
She fucks him slowly at first, then faster, harder, building up to it, watching his face carefully all the while. Vasco clutches at the sheets as waves of pleasure break over him like he’s lying in the surf, half-drowned in it but awash in bliss. He knows he’s speaking – well, moaning, more accurately – but he has no idea what he’s saying, can hardly hear himself until after the fact, lost in the feeling of her fucking him into the mattress. So he lets the litany of pleas and prayers and helpless cries fall from his lips as she fills him with her cock over and over again.
He doesn’t realize what he’s said until it’s too late. “Oh fuck, please, Marie, ah, storms, fuck – ” Her name slips past his lips as easy as breathing when he’s like this, it seems, though it shouldn’t – it belies his friendly demeanour, his calling her de Sardet the rest of the time, it says I want more, it says This means too much to me. But her face is alight with it, her eyes fixed on his; he tries to look away, but she reaches down to cup his cheek in her hand, her thumb on his chin, turning him back to face her.
“I want to see you," she says softly, breathlessly, and then: "Say it again." Her voice is all silk and smoke and steel, and he doesn’t have it in him to deny her.
“Marie,” Vasco gasps. “Ah! Ah! Fuck!”
“Again,” she orders, her free hand wrapping around his cock; her fingers are still covered in oil, and he’s wet with his own slick.
“Ahh – ” Vasco groans helplessly as she strokes him in time with her thrusts. “Ah! Fuck! Marie – ”
“Again.” Her eyes are wide, rapt on him.
There’s something in his chest, something big and bright and heavy, filling him up and threatening to come bursting out of him, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. The pleasure is swamping him, the strokes of her slicked hand on his shaft, the pressure of her cock inside him, the way she's everywhere, hot skin and rosewater – he can’t think. All he can do is feel. “Marie,” he rasps. He's falling and she's going to catch him.
“Don’t stop. Please,” she breathes, and it shakes too much to be an order. It sounds punched out of her.
“Oh storms, storms sink – oh fuck, Marie, Marie, I – I – ” And the world goes white around him as he comes.
He lets her take care of him afterwards, partly because she seems to want to but mostly because he desperately wants her to hold him, to kiss and caress him, to cradle him against her. So Marie is the one who cleans the spend off his belly; she’s the one who goes over him with a damp cloth, tidying him up; she’s the one who tucks him in and kisses him softly; she’s the one who washes her phallus as he rests; she’s the one who snuggles up against him, warm in the dark, and gathers him against her chest. And Vasco lies there and lets the realization settle over him like a length of gossamer silk, like a light snow, slow and subtle, bit by inevitable bit, that he was not about to say I’m close or I’m coming or I need your cock or anything of the sort, that the words on the tip of his tongue just before he climaxed this evening were, in fact, I love you.