heorte | when i go towards you it is with my whole life.

She looks to him almost immediately in reply to the quiet shape of his hand on her cheek. Mortification—not for the subject, but for the ignorance; if she is reliably troubled by anything, it is not knowing—is one thing, but of all people Ellis has hardly ever treated her ill for it. Were he someone else, she might not meet his eye so readily. But she was being honest when she had said she trusted him. Admitting to being quite stupid requires a great deal of it.

"I suppose you usually do," she says, hand fidgeting in his grip.

And then her spare hand folds up from the ground, intercepting whatever his intentions might be so she might cover her eyes with dislodging his hand. Her laugh is a sudden thing, short and like the pouring out of held nervous energy she no longer has use for. Laughing at herself.

"Gods, how wretchedly serious. Forgive me."

The answering curve of a smile is all there is for a moment. It's a relief for him, in a way. The bright peal of laughter loosens the tight cinch of nervousness that had built in his own chest, settles the worry that he'd said too little to be a comfort to her.

"There's nothing to forgive."

Which is said very seriously, in spite of the lingering smile.

"I'm glad to know," is lighter somehow, Ellis' voice softening as he shifts up onto one elbow. Her face hidden leaves him with limited places to put his hands, so his hand drifts to her waist. "Come here, please?"

"Oh very well." Her hand is still over her eyes, that flurry feeling of ridiculousness light in her chest emphasized by the soft set of his fingers at her side. "Though I truly don't know where you find so much patience, Mister Ellis. It really is quite remarkable."

With some effort, Wysteria removes her hand from over her eyes and for a moment (a very small one; the span of a heartbeat or maybe less) simply regards him. Then with a great roll of the eyes for herself, she allows herself to shift down to meet him there on the clover in the warm sunshine.

The freed hand is caught, brought back to Ellis' mouth. He might have kissed her properly, but he devotes his attention to her knuckles instead, the trace of ink over her index finger that survived the ride, pond and emerge unscathed from the brief brush of Ellis' mouth. When he speaks, it's more or less against her skin, gaze cast down.

"I'm going to tell you something," he says, fingers of his opposite hand absently pressing lightly at her waist. "Even if you think you know everything, you still learn it all again with someone new."

Is this truth, or is it simply because Shanae and Cathán had been so different from each, and Ellis had been nearly a different person with each of them?

"And you're a faster learner than me," he reminds her. An undisputable truth, surely. But some of the humor softens as he looks at her, promises, "We'll make sense of the steps together."

She listens, study all intent and fixed on him—his face and the warmth of his breath against her knuckles, and his sturdy shape beside her. And when it comes her scoff is a manufactured, mild thing.

"Has anyone ever said how intolerably dashing you are? I imagine it must be very off putting to some people."

But not to her. The much is clear from the flush in her face and the sharp of fondness in her expression. It is, as far as promises go, a rather good one.

Richard's voice comes to him, dipping over the word noble.

Instead of trying to thread the line between deflection and protest, Ellis draws her hand down to the clover between them. He takes more care with the interlacing of their fingers than he might need to, settling the hold before he looks up at her.

The expression on Wysteria's face registers the same as if she were to put her hand on a bruise and apply pressure. It aches. He feels the thudding register of it in his chest.

When Ellis thinks of the first time he'd kissed her, the impression of how tightly she'd been holding onto his hand sticks in his mind. When Ellis kisses her now, it's his hand tightening in hers, hanging on to steady himself. It's a counterpoint to how open his kiss is, intent still mingled with careful restraint.

Somewhere, a long way away—worlds and worlds removed, in fact—a nervous woman who has spent a great deal of her mental energy being very concerned for her headstrong daughter's sense of propriety sense a disturbance in the atmosphere. Maybe somewhere, the Wysteria who is still in Kalvad laboring under what constitutes as tutelage from a man who has known only bitterness and contempt will receive a letter because of it. To My Darling Daughter—I was reading the attached passage this morning and all at once was reminded again of all my concern for you. Please write soon with every detail of your well being. Best wishes—

Maybe that does happen, in which case it would be very interesting to study its significance in terms of the relationship between Thedas and the places where rifters come from. At the very least, it would make an excellent footnote for any essay on the Fade as a conductor and manifester of thoughts and dreams into the physical plane. But happily, for it would distract from this moment, Wysteria is not actually thinking at all about something as silly as what her mother would say.

In fact it might be said she is thinking about very little at all, which is a singularly rare circumstance. Even the detail of the thing—the tight grasp of Ellis' fingers about hers and his hand careful at her waist and even the rasp of his beard and the sweet smell of the crushed clover—merge pleasantly together as the affection which lives warm in her chest rises and expands in answer to the sense of his resolution.

Like dancing, she'd said. She certainly treats it as such, following in his shadow. Her spare hand finds his neck and her fingers are gentle and careful about pushing up into his hair. But the shape of his kiss is answered in kind, warm and willing.

Something Ellis might have said to her: anytime he kisses her is enough for him.

There doesn't need to be anything else. There's no urgency in the way he kisses her, no broader intent than the easy, yielding nature of their kiss. Wysteria puts her hand in his hair and Ellis makes a soft sound into her mouth for it, absently encouraging.

As they continue, Ellis' body turns in towards her almost without any consideration of it, hand flexing at the dip of her waist over and over. The tunic is flimsy compared to the layers and rigid fabric of her usual attire, all the warmth of her skin banked beneath his palm. When he moves, it's so, so slowly, but the shift is necessary. It's necessary to hold her a little closer, to slide his hand up her back and draw her in to him. She is already quite close, and yet—

Even still, within the muddied tangle of resolution and encouragement and all else thudding through his chest, Ellis breaks first, again. His breath comes fast, nose bumping hers as he sets his forehead to hers, tries to gather himself. He has the same sensation as if he'd fallen from a height, trying to gather his bearings upon impact. It's not an entirely new sensation when it comes to Wysteria.

His hand is very tight in hers.

His hand is very tight in hers, and he has drawn her very close. Not flush, but near enough to it that the space which remains feels like something weighted. It's like something she could hold if both her hands were free. But they're occupied already and when he breaks back she is disinclined to retrieve her hands from him too.

His breath comes very hard. She can feel Ellis' pulse in his neck.

With her mouth tender from the shape of his kiss, she touches his neck and this his jaw and cheek. It's soothing thing--instinctive like stroking a nervous horse's shoulder without much thought as to why it seems so necessary to do.

"There, there," is a little soothing murmur in that narrow space. Her thumb strokes his cheek. She watches him from up close, so near this he is reduced to his cheek and his eyelashes and the wrinkle of his brow. "Tell me what you're thinking."

(How does it feel? Like a beetle in a cup.)

A breathless, huff of a laugh first, before Ellis says anything else.

"Of you," might be mistaken for calculation and charm, if Ellis were a different sort of man. But it's a raw, quiet thing, said into what little space remains between them while Ellis is thinking more of her mouth and her hands and the solicitous little touches she bestows, traveling from his neck to his cheek. "Always of you, and how much I..."

The shape of the thing doesn't resolve into words. Not yet. Or he knows the words, but they catch and snare on some jagged edge in his chest. He draws a breath, gives a slight, minute shake of his head.

"How lucky I am," comes easier, no less true for being easy to say. His hand splays across her back, between the wings of her shoulder blades, stopping short of drawing her in and closing that last slip of space between them.

It makes her smile, the line of her mouth faltering over wanting to laugh but not wanting to laugh quite literally in his face. She isn't blind, and she is an excellent reader, and Ellis sometimes makes himself so easy to read. It is to make up for when he is so impenetrable, she thinks. Or it is the best compliment he can give—to be so obvious about his feelings about her that it outstrips almost everything except maybe how he words it. The sweetness of it is so tender it's near to a bruise.

"You shouldn't say such things," she chides him, teasing and light while stroking the bristle of his cheek. "I will only use it against you. 'Oh Ellis, I couldn't possibly go to the archery range today. But before you insist, recall how lucky you are—'"

Before Wysteria can get too far into future excuses, Ellis leans back in to kiss her. He's smiling, and it interferes with the intention, makes for a poor kiss. It breaks on a chuckle, Ellis ducking his head just slightly.

"You're more dangerous than anyone gives you credit for," he tells her, low against her mouth. "All this time, I had no idea."

Not necessarily no idea, but still.

"But I still want to say it."

Among other things, all the things Ellis means to say and doesn't quite manage to verbalize the way he'd like.

Her laugh is delighted, equal parts self satisfaction and pleased for the humor that's re-entered his voice. It was a poor kiss, but she likes the feel of his smile against her skin—

"'Oh, but I simply must set this fire in the basement—'"

It seems required to give him some small measure of grief, though her own smile is curving and her hand is gentle and fond at his cheek. And then gentle still at the soft lay of his still damp tunic collar.

"Tell me again, then. How much you think of me. And when you say something I especially like, I will let you know."

A reminder to Ellis: finish the installation of vents in the basement.

But there's nothing to be done about the ventilation in her haunted house at this exact moment. What's meant to occupy his mind now is Wysteria's request, which exists alongside the burning awareness of her fingers at the collar of his tunic.

Ellis draws in a deep breath, fingers drumming lightly over her back as he pecks a brief kiss to her mouth. It would be nice to be able to say something sweeping and poetic. But Ellis doesn't have anything other than honesty, resolved carefully into words because she'd asked it of him.

"I think of you at all hours of the day," he tells her, humor turning solemn. "More so when you are away, or I am away, and I have to consider how long it will be until I see you again."

There is no reason to complain of distraction. Ellis has reconciled this particular desirous ache to a point where it exists neatly alongside whatever he might be occupied with, whether it's his work in the training yard or a mission taking him far afield.

In a murmur, punctuated with a softly laid kiss to the corner of her mouth, he admits, "It always seems to me that it will be too long. Even if it's only that I'll wake in the morning and be kept too busy to see you until the evening."

What had she been expecting? She doesn't quite know. For him to say something amusing, maybe, though in hindsight that seems ridiculous. The curve of her smile has faded somewhat under this serious litany—not dying, but softening. The set of her hand too at the edge of his shirt gentles into a faint, fiddling thing which quietly adjusts and readjusts.

Does she think of Ellis so often? No, she thinks. But there is also no one more in the world who she loves to talk to, who she wishes to tell everything all the time. And since when has she ever wished to share anything?

Up close and listening to him, she lapses into a rounded, attentive silence. She studies his warmth and the fine pattern of the wrinkles and the weather touched shape of his skin and how his neck rumbles under her hand as he speaks. He really is beautiful. And when he quiets—

'There. I liked that very much, thank you,' she doesn't say, though originally it's what she'd meant to. To be coy and arch and funny. Instead, she kisses him.

It's an abrupt all at once thing. Firm like a kind of affirmation ought to be, drawing him (or herself) close by his collar until that last sliver of space between them—that thing which had seemed so substantial—evaporates.

Somehow, the kiss is unexpected.

Ellis had prepared for a question. It had felt inevitable, Wysteria pressing him for something further with that edge of satisfaction in her voice and curving across her face. He'd always been pleased to see that look on her face, and maybe even more so when it's directed at him.

But instead, all that focus resolves at a speed Ellis shouldn't really be surprised by. She's so close, all at once. That carefully maintained pocket of space vanishes. He makes a soft sound into her mouth, hand lifting from her back to the nape of her neck, thumb at her cheek. For a long moment, he's more preoccupied with how neatly she fits in against him than her mouth or her hand curling in at his collar. A brief tremor of movement hitches through his body, his hand tightening on hers as he thinks and then reconsiders rolling her over into the clover.

"Wysteria," is said so quietly, blurred between one kiss and the next. If there was meant to be more, a question or a request, it's set aside in favor of kissing her. There's some end point. Ellis is aware of the inevitable moment when he'll need to draw back from her. But not yet.

It doesn't sound like a protest, or like he is drowning under her attention, and the following quality of his returning kiss and the wandering of his hand is sweet like a kind word or an especially sincere compliment. It's encouraging.

With the shape of that heavy sense of affection lodged high in her chest and expanding there, her hand at his collar briefly untangles. It finds its way to curl around the back of his neck, fingers pressing into dark hair. It's not a hurried thing, but neither is it gentle—the tenor having altered from touching to holding as a means to keep him close. That way when his kiss ends, she can easily demand another with a soft plaintive sound and a faint squeeze of the fingers.

(She can feel her heart beating because of how it jumps against the broad scope of Ellis's chest and against his palm where its curved almost in mirror image to her own.)

There is a wealth of things Ellis knows his body is good for, most all rooted in a form of violence. He is good with his mace and good with his fists and he is good at putting himself in the way of dangerous things and then putting those dangers into the dirt. But Riftwatch has reminded him of exceptions, all the tasks that require strength but don't need end in blood. Wysteria and Tony had spent a year instructing, in their way. But now—

In this moment, he considers: what if this all he was ever meant to do with his body? What if he was made to lay here with Wysteria's body curved in against him and kiss her every time she tightened her hands in his hair?

He cannot go far from her. (He knew that already.) Here, he can draw back far enough to draw a ragged breath against her mouth, then settle back at the murmured sound of protest. Where else would he go?

What a thing it is, to spend so long numb before being reminded that it was possible to feel such warmth, to thaw by degrees for months and months before arriving here. His mouth is so soft against hers, pliant and biddable, as his grip on her hand tightens and loosens by turns as he recalls the link there.

But when he says, "Wysteria," a second time, it's a quiet stall against the sound he can already hear from her, her coaxing grasp on him already urging him back. He has the sense of balancing at the top of a precipice, and good sense says to draw back, but it is impossible to disturb the arrangement of their bodies all at once.

It's funny, how much the sound of her name can be altered. Here, in this lack of space, it can be both like a steadying hand and something— different, more. Unbidden, she thinks of his hand on a cart team's rein. He squeezes her fingers in his and this second time when Ellis says her name, Wysteria allows herself to be gently checked by it.

Breathing warm and rounded near to his mouth, she is very aware of the heat of him under her hands and in the sturdy shape of his body against which she'd so eagerly pressed herself. The closeness is a sweet thing, born out of so much affection that she hardly considers the semantics of it. Only that she wants very much to be there, and that there is something lovely in the low murmuring shape of his voice in that place.

"Yes?" Her hand flexes in his hair. It's nearly an involuntary thing, though isn't quite.

It very nearly works. Ellis has long been in the habit of giving Wysteria most things she asks for, and that instinct coupled with the fact that he is not so much done with kissing her as he is drawing up short at the building pressure demanding more beyond that, sparks up a flinch of movement back towards her mouth.

His fingers stroke gently down her neck instead, as Ellis draws just slightly further back. Just enough to see, not enough to disturb her hands, more re-establish the space between them.

"I'll kiss you as long as you like," is not a hard thing to offer up. "But I think—I'd like to go slowly, beyond that."

This is perhaps too direct, but Ellis doesn't know how to talk around his intentions satisfactorily.

"And I need a minute. To breathe."

If she is disappointed to relinquish that space, no part of it shows in her face (visible now that they aren't cinched so close). She is flush, yes, but all fondness, and to breathe prompts a sudden, delighted burst of laughter from her. The hand in his hair softens and, turning her face, she plants a swift laughing kiss above the wrist of the hand he so gently traces her neck with.

"How pleasing to be dangerous in so many respects," she declares to the sky, and is still some measure of self-satisfied as she tips her face to look at him and say— "We may be as measured as you like, Ellis. I couldn't bear to exhaust you."

Yes, she is exceedingly dangerous. Ellis does not bother to reaffirm his agreement, or outline all the various ways in which Wysteria is a particular kind of menace. Instead, he ducks back in to kiss her, slowly and thoroughly. Despite all his claims of needing to catch his breath, he has enough for this.

"You," he says, softly against her mouth and painfully sincere. "You are perfect."

"The seems highly unlikely." She says it against his mouth, the opposite of an intimate whisper. There is a laugh in her voice still, clinging at the edges of that kiss no matter how slow or deliberately he has made it.

"But I love to hear you say it, so won't argue further. Now," she says, playing at serious in his arms. She gives his hair the smallest tug. "Kiss me just once more and try your best to be a little selfish about it. Then I will release you. Those are my terms."

Edited (Important additions) 2021-05-11 01:37 (UTC)

Impossible, he wants to say.

But coaxed forward by the sweet, appealing lilt of her voice and the gentle tug at his hair, Ellis lets go of her hand. He cups her face, reclaiming the scant space set between them so he can kiss her again.

In terms of being a last kiss, it's likely not very helpful. Ellis kisses her deeply, fingers sliding into Wysteria's hair, tips her head slightly back though it's not strictly necessary. Laid side by side, their difference in height isn't important. It's only as close to selfish as Ellis can get. There's the sense of sinking into her, of wanting so badly to get closer despite already being drawn flush together. The kiss spins out, on and on and on, until Ellis nips very lightly at her lower lip, and draws back enough to speak.

"There," is breathed out, his hands gentling and drifting to the nape of her neck. "Did that fulfill our bargain?

What is she expecting? Truthfully, she doesn't quite know. Something slow and firm, maybe. Sturdy and patient in that way he has which is not to humor her, but certainly a kind of indulgence. Even the press of fingers shifting into her hair isn't unexpected but—

But the way he tilts her chin up and this, how he absorbs the space they'd remade and fills it completely, is. There is a thrill in it that catches her breath. That becomes the most pleasant ache. The tangle of her fingers in his hair becomes a pressing thing, and between them where her other hand is at liberty she finds some unexamined grip on him. His side. The fabric of his damp tunic is easily clutched there.

The brief catch of teeth elicits the softest sound from her as he draws back. For a moment, her face remains tilted up—something heated and heavy through the whole of her—and her initial noise of protest is a formless, thoughtless thing. And brief, as a moment later she recalls her terms enough to regret them.

"Oh." Her hands on him come grudgingly undone. "Yes. I suppose it ought to."

And then, in a burst of lively self inflicted agony: "—Oh, how terrible! You must promise to never listen to me again, Ellis. And certainly never to make any other agreement with me!"

She thumps him in the shoulder for good measure before managing to both extricate herself and collapse dramatically onto her back in the clover.

(Which is, really, the best version of a last kiss she could have possibly contrived.)

coolcool yell your wishes at me for a new thing into discord and i will grant them

heorte - 2021-05-11 17:27 (UTC) - Expand

when i go towards you it is with my whole life.

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put a bow on this y/n

Yyy

coolcool yell your wishes at me for a new thing into discord and i will grant them