Cupbearers Of Wine and Hellebore

[onediagonalscar]

Leon propped himself on his elbows, feeling the hot bites like brands on his shoulders. He shivered as the sweat and saliva cooled on his chest, gooseflesh pricking the smooth skin. Aimlessly, he ran a thumb nail over his stomach, picking off a long nearly colourless hair that coiled like wormcast around his navel. Glancing into the beam of morning sunlight that had fingered its way through the shuttered window, he grinned sheepishly at the figure silhouetted against the glare. Always afterwards he felt oddly child-like and vulnerable, as if all the life-long layers he had built up had been stripped away and he had somehow exposed himself, still the small boy from the orphanage; abandoned, lost, alone.

He could feel those eyes on him. He wondered what it was they saw; whether the almost frightening sense of connection that he felt was in any way reciprocated. Sometimes – when Squall was kicking inside him and Leon was struggling to stay – he felt it almost incestuously, as if he were with his twin; or – worse – like there was a pale, distorting mirror hanging in front of him, a mirror that reflected his past. He almost never let himself wonder what it was that he wanted from this, or what he was expected to give.

The sound of bare feet on the floor brought him back out of himself; a hot breath in his ear insisting that he stay in the here-and-now. He opened his mouth to speak, but other lips were stealing his breath, another mouth taking his words before he knew what they even were. A hand on his chest and another tangled in his hair forced him back onto the bed. He wrapped his hands around the narrow waist and sighed as the cool hair brushed across his stomach.

With a groan Leon flattened himself against the mattress, helpless in the face of Riku’s terrible thirst, desperately hoping that he could quench it.