Chapter Text
Part Thee:
On the dispersion of Eikons
vii. Eikonic Autonomy
viii. Dangers of aforementioned Autonomy
ix. Appeasement and eventual Dispersion
Addendum 2: Exceptions
(see Clive Rosfield and Cidolfus Telamon)
Clive rolls over to his side, the last dregs of sleep and an oddly persistent sense of smugness clinging to his body like morning dew.
He begins the slow, arduous process of untangling himself from Cid.
It is a challenge every time, on account of the blasted tail that seems dead set on becoming a permanent accessory around Cid's waist. It wears his resolve to near nothingness, this — waking up day after day, temptation laid out all pretty and tantalizing before him when he knows it is not his to want, let alone have.
Though, the reminder probably can't hurt. Not too badly, in any case.
He lets himself get carried away and forgets, sometimes, that the privilege of having Cid's bed and Cid's touch is temporary.
He forgets that it is nothing but an imaginary, hollow fiction extended to him out of simple necessity. He can drown himself in his dreams all he likes, but the fact remains that Cid is this lenient not out of the goodness of his heart, but because Clive is an asset.
It is merely a safety measure, this closeness, and even then only out of want for an alternative, because Clive still can't fix himself.
Clive knows exactly where they stand — they are comrades and Dominants and outlaws, fighters for a worthy cause that will see them both in an early grave more likely than not. They are friends, yes, with banter and quips and a thousand casual touches shared between them, across shoulders and elbows and Cid's hand on Clive's chest and over his spine and tight in his hair and—
Clive knows where the line is, is the point.
Clive knows what they are to each other and what they will never be. The ache he feels sharp between his ribs is not new.
What is new, however, is the dull, unpleasant sensation that sparks through his ear.
Strange, he thinks, and sits up, fully alert now. His routine is quickly abandoned.
He feels Cid just barely stir next to him, but he does not yet rise. He pretends to sleep instead, even though Clive can very clearly hear the way his breaths shift to something measured and controlled as opposed to the real lull of sleep.
Clive has long since familiarized himself with pain of all kinds, with every hurt the world has to offer. This one feels harmless in comparison, but, be that as it may, he remembers suffering no wound in recent days. Tarja has more than made sure of that.
Strange, he thinks again, because this specific hurt is a childish one. He knows its kind, for he has felt it before, a lifetime ago.
He raises a hand to his left ear and feels the familiar, comforting grooves etched in metal there, the one remaining piece of Rosaria he carries with him always. The small cuff of silver is one of his most coveted, fiercely guarded belongings, few and scattered as they are — to find it in its place is a relief, always.
He worries the earring for only a moment before his fingers trail up, right to where he feels a minor soreness that can only come from—
A second earring.
That, honestly, he does not expect to find.
"What in the Flames' name...?"
He feels around the new, unknown accessory — it feels like a gem on one side, smooth and expertly cut, cast in metal and fastened with a simple clasp in the back. He checks his other ear and finds no twin to it, which is perplexing and comforting in equal measure.
Clive hasn't the faintest clue how this has possibly come to pass.
He shakes Cid by the shoulder and calls the tail back to his side, expecting the usual resistance and stubborn denial and uncalled for theatrics. For once, however, it curls back to his side with nary a twitch of protest, obedient as can be.
This immediately makes him wary, for multiple reasons.
"Cid," Clive says and shakes him again, only slightly urgent. "Cid, stop pretending to sleep and look at this."
"Are you on fire again?" Cid asks unhelpfully, face pressed into his shoddy pillow. He sounds waspish; gruff in that specific way he gets every time Clive wakes too close to him, their bodies tangled so tightly in a mess of limbs and heat and static that Clive does not know where one ends and the other begins.
"Worse," he answers and waits for Cid's curiosity to get the better of him.
"Worse? Now what could possibly be worse?" Cid then opens his eyes, forest green clear and full of that sharp awareness only a Lord Commander can possess.
Clive tucks his hair out of the way and points to his ear, "What is this?"
"What's w—"
He sees Cid only out of his periphery, head tilted to the side as it is, but his face seems to go through an impressive sequence of emotions in an impossibly short amount of time. All of them get discarded as swiftly as they'd appeared, leaving behind only a chagrined type of befuddlement.
Cid stares at Clive's ear and almost looks pained as he does.
"Did you get piss drunk and go on a bender while I was asleep?"
"What? Of course not!"
Cid makes a warped sound, like a chuckle that changed its mind on what it wants to be halfway through, "Sure looks like it to me."
"You're hilarious."
"I try my best just for you, lad."
Clive aims a kick somewhere in the general vicinity of Cid's shins, though the blankets tangled around their legs make it difficult to judge. He hits a knee or a thigh, maybe.
Cid grunts and takes the hint. He sits up, sleep rumpled and tousled and unfairly handsome.
"You didn't get the sudden urge to give me a make-over while I was asleep, did you?" Clive asks, eyes narrowed warily.
"The hell would I do that for?"
"Fun? Maybe to make me look like a real outlaw? You tell me, Cid."
Cid laughs, but it holds not a single shred of humor. "Oh, you already more than look the part with that new getup of yours, sweetheart, believe me."
He then reaches out and cups Clive's jaw like it's nothing, with no preemptive warning at all.
Clive is not braced for it.
Clive is not braced for the brush of a gloveless hand against his stubble. He is not braced for the caress against his cheek that follows, painfully light and oh so careful, like the skin there is something deserving of gentleness and not merely an ugly, loathsome smear of poison etched upon his very being.
His mouth parts slightly on his next breath, gets caught in a helpless little oh as Cid tilts his head to look at the earring proper. The brand on his cheek burns.
"Hm," Cid says, appraising, which tells Clive nothing at all. "Looks good on you, at least."
"What is it?" Clive hears himself ask, voice strained.
He wishes he had a mirror.
He wishes he could lean into Cid's touch without crumbling to cinders and ash.
(He should know better than to make wishes.)
"A sapphire. Real pretty one, too. It matches your eyes," Cid murmurs quietly in the space between them, too close and too far all at once. His thumb brushes over Clive's lobe, first over the Rosarian crest and then over the other earring, light as a feather, almost as if to savor it with touch more than sight.
A faint tickle of static follows wherever he touches.
Clive has to fight to keep his eyelids from fluttering, breathless from so little, from a mere handful of gilded words that melt sweet on his tongue like honey. He shivers.
The touch is so wholly distracting that it takes a moment for the words to actually register. When they finally do, Clive's shoulders pull ramrod straight at the realization. His entire body tenses.
"That must be worth a fortune," he breathes out with what little air is left in his lungs. Such faulty things, those are, especially when Cid is concerned.
"Aye," Cid agrees simply and does not offer any further insight. His fingers tease the messy locks of hair behind Clive's ear; a series of absentminded, thoughtless little motions that threaten to shatter him into a miserable pile of lavender-scented pieces.
"Why is it suddenly in my ear then?"
"Mm. No idea." Cid carefully holds the earring between forefinger and thumb, as if transfixed. It smarts a little bit, a barely there soreness that makes Clive hiss a breath between his teeth.
It is not entirely out of discomfort.
Cid opens his mouth and says, casual as a summer breeze, "It's one of mine, actually."
"It's—" Clive turns his head sharply, dislodging Cid's hand and buying himself a sliver of lucidity as he does. The tiny sting of pain is welcome. "It's yours?" he croaks out, a rosy flush working its way up his face.
He immediately leans a safe distance away, unaware of just how close he's gravitated towards Cid, collision course all charted out and waiting to happen. He goes to undo the clasp and return the earring at once, but he only manages to fumble with it, fingers unsteady, useless—
"None of that now," Cid chides, tone mild, and grabs Clive by the wrists. It brings his frantic tugging to a complete stop. "Keep it."
Clive's heart beats a wild, thunderous rhythm against his ribs. Cid can probably feel it, a distant part of his mind whispers. "But you just said—"
"And now I'm saying you should keep it."
Clive swallows. His mouth is dry. "I couldn't possibly—Cid, it belongs to you."
"For what it's worth, it was simply one of mine. Mind you, I was never going to be the one wearing it," Cid says, all faux amusement and faked levity. Clive knows this mask well. He hates it.
In a fit of righteous madness, he grabs Cid by the shoulders, because this does not sit right with him. Cid, foolish man that he is, lets him do as he pleases. His hold on Clive's wrists is loose, one clearly not meant to restrict.
The worn linen shirt under his hands is warm, Clive notices without meaning to, and Cid's skin beneath it promises to be warmer still. He furiously banishes the thought from his mind.
Not the time.
It will never be the time.
"I think our thief may have gone too far this time," Clive admits what they both most likely suspect. The tail comes to rest around Clive's hip, somehow pleased as punch with itself. Clive lowers his head.
"I'm sorry."
He hears Cid huff a faint laugh. It does not sound very humorous the second time around either.
"Whatever for? I almost want to commend the damn thing on its cunning. Bravo, you little menace, you've outdone yourself."
Clive grits his teeth against the burst of warmth that sparks all through his body when Cid lets go of him to pat the tail like one would pat a well-behaved animal. It responds all too happily to the touch, curling up all around his forearm like a living shackle.
Clive unconsciously finds himself counting the beats of Cid's heart like it is a symphony of one — thump, thump, thu-thump. He wavers.
"Though, quite frankly, how it managed to give you an entire second piercing without you being any the wiser is the more fascinating mystery to me. That, and how it found the bloody thing in the first place. Only you, Clive Rosfield, I swear — only you."
"It stole from you. It meddled with your affairs."
He remembers the unremarkable wooden box, then. He remembers tell him to ask for a blade next time and the tightly coiled fury in Cid's eyes at Clive being the oblivious messenger. He remembers that this bloody thing was probably a gift, too — one made for his daughter, perhaps, or someone else of equal import.
Guilt settles upon his shoulders like a familiar mantle, harsh and heavy. It rarely ever tends to leave these days. Months. Years. Whichever.
"I'm sorry," Clive says again and drops his gaze in shame.
It must be insulting, to see him wear something so precious when it is so clearly meant for another.
He realizes he must have spoken aloud only when he hears a coarse peal of laughter from Cid, jagged and rough around the edges for all that it comes out quiet. Without meaning to, Clive flinches.
"Oh, sweetheart, you are simply killing me here," Cid whispers to himself then, unreasonably sentimental, and lifts Clive's head with too gentle hands. He looks at him—makes sure Clive looks right back—and this, Clive fears, will be the straw that finally breaks the chocobo's back.
"I had it made for you, as a matter of fact."
Cid's eyes are lilacs in bloom — green and gold and violet, deep purpure and levin-lit amethyst, and Clive—
Stupid, hopeless Clive kisses him.
Easy as that.
Easy as you please, as if his entire world does not tear itself clean in two in the wake of the act — one half: everything before this; the other half: nothing but this.
It is not a good kiss.
It is clumsy and ungraceful, inelegant in every way, no more than a blunt press of lips, like an unpracticed grind of a whetstone against a long since dulled blade. It only bespeaks the depth of his deprivation that even such a lowly display is enough to make Clive's blood sing like a roaring fire in his veins, his heart beating a wild, stuttering staccato in his chest.
He savors it for all of half a second — the chapped warmth of Cid's mouth, the light bristle of his stubble, even the awkward way their noses bump against each other. In that time, a breathless moment of infinite possibility hangs over them like a tangible spell.
Cid could kiss him back, he imagines.
Cid could tilt his head and ease him into a kiss proper; could ply his mouth open and take anything he pleases — Clive would gladly give it, all, everything, his tattered heart on a silver platter in all its lovesick glory.
Cid does no such thing.
The spell breaks. Clive thinks his heart breaks along with it, too.
You cannot untake a bite out of an apple, is the thing. You can only choke on it as it gets stuck in your throat and teaches you the burden of sweetness, of knowledge and bitter.
Clive knows with startling clarity what is to come. He knows.
"You sweet, foolish boy," Cid breathes against his lips, pushing Clive back by only the smallest of margins, a mere sliver of space between them that holds volumes in its emptiness.
Clive keeps his eyes shut tight, if only to spare himself the humiliation of tears.
"Killing me, I tell you," Cid repeats, and his voice sounds wretched, stained deep by some fathomless ache. "Godsdamn it, lad, it's just a gaudy trinket. I wasn't even planning on ever giving it to you in the first place. Keep it if you want, or don't — it's your choice."
Cid's hands are rough, Clive can't help but notice, always so eager to tuck away every little scrap of knowledge about Cid he can, and always just as eager to make himself forget it in turn.
For a week and more has he been unwaveringly diligent, has he been so utterly dedicated to not let himself notice these countless, ruinous things — the touches and the words and the half-veiled invitations that hide in them, if only he were to let himself look a little deeper. He hasn't dared to, all this time, but what if maybe—
"Meddled in my affairs, he says. Aye, sure, and I'm plenty pissed about it too, make no mistake, but that doesn't mean you have to—" Cid stops with a bitten-off curse. He inhales shakily, lightning seeking ground, and tries again. "You owe me nothing for it, Clive. You needn't offer yourself as payment for something you neither asked for nor did yourself."
One of Cid's thumbs brushes idly against his cheekbone. It tickles.
Cid's hands are rough as they hold him in place, Clive keeps noticing, but they are also warm. A fine-spun lattice of nearly imperceptible scars runs all along his veins, like lightning etched lovingly upon his body. It makes him shudder as he feels it dance across his own skin, volatile and fleeting as a spark.
He tries to arrange the things Cid's just told him into something he can understand.
What he ends up asking in the silence that follows is an astonished, disbelieving, "It matches my eyes?"
"Oh, for the love of—" Cid shakes him lightly, but Clive keenly feels the way his pulse skips as he does; a single, jarring note amidst the all too precise melody he keeps time with still, thump, thu-thump, thu-thump.
"I make all those responsible, profound points and that's what you have to say? Really?"
Clive chances opening his eyes.
Before him, Cid is a dream.
He is close enough to touch, their foreheads nearly pressed together, sharing breath and warmth and more. He looks disheveled in the morning light, bereft of his usual composure and left only with open honesty. There is a tiny curve right at the corner of his mouth though, one that betrays the indignation in his voice as merely an act.
More devastating is a discovery of a different kind — from this close Clive can spot a faint dusting of freckles, one that starts from the bridge of Cid's nose and flows across the apples of his cheeks. It is a barely there constellation of dots, dispersed and faded enough to miss under normal circumstances, but Clive sees them clear as day now, breath catching in his throat. He struggles to resist the urge to place a kiss atop each and every one, here, and here, and here, and also here, too—
Cid's eyes are unbearably soft as he looks at Clive look at him — they are painted the color of fulmination, the hue of thunder as it scintillates betwixt sky and terra, bright and otherworldly.
Divine, in the way only Eikons can be.
And even clouded so, amidst them swim flecks of lovely green still, a shade Clive has much grown to like.
This time, he thinks all too boldly, this time he sees not the judgment of an arbiter.
This time, it is well and truly desire.
"No, no, tell me, please. It matches my eyes? Truly?" Clive asks around a smile he can't suppress. He doesn't try very hard, in all honesty. He feels like he's floating.
"Closest I could find," Cid answers with no shred of hesitation nor deceit. "Doesn't hold a candle to the real thing, mind, but you'll just have to forgive me that. I'm afraid old age has made a sentimental fool out of me." He grimaces slightly, "Well, more of a one, in any case."
Clive bumps their foreheads together. The tail slides off from Cid's wrist and moves to curl around his torso, pulling their chests that bit closer. Clive lets it.
"You were going to keep it a secret from me? Why?" Clive moves his hands as he speaks, trails them down until they come to a rest above where the tail is wrapped, steady around Cid's waist.
He's thought so much about that waist.
"Oh, I just figured you have better things to concern yourself with than little old me." Cid's eyes narrow dangerously when Clive leans closer still. "Clive, I meant it when I said—"
"I meant it, too."
The words he whispers against Cid's lips; presses them against his mouth like an offering. It is a frail promise that holds everything he is, simple and unvarnished.
The second kiss is better.
Still not good, but definitely better.
It is slower, this time. Clive tilts his head so the angle is less awkward and his eyes slip shut of their own accord. He lets himself fall into Cid as he's imagined so many times before; lets himself breathe a gasp when he feels Cid's hands grip the mess of his hair with bruising strength.
Cid still does not kiss him back, but only just.
Clive can feel the way his breath stutters when the second kiss turns into a third and then a fourth, the way his grip turns near painful, the way he forces himself to complete stillness. He wants to see how much it will take before something finally gives — either Clive's hope or Cid's restraint.
"I think I finally know what Ifrit has been trying to tell me this entire time," Clive murmurs against Cid. He accentuates the words with a teasing bite to Cid's bottom lip, just a slight tug that has him stifling a keen when Cid yanks his head back in response.
"Have you now? Care to share the good news, sweetheart?" Cid almost growls against his ear, tight and still so carefully restrained, and oh the things it does to Clive's sanity to hear him like this, to hear sweetheart drip heavy with intent, like an oath writ in profanity and filth.
Clive then damn near loses his mind when he feels the tail slither under Cid's shirt and trail low along the hem of Cid's pants, the skin of his body warm and inviting. It feels like Clive is touching him with his own hands.
He tries to form words through the haze of arousal that rises in him like volcanic smoke.
"Surely you must've figured it out already, what with all your timeless wisdom—hahh." This sound he does not manage to grasp in time, because Cid tilts his head back more, more, until Clive's neck lies exposed and Cid sees fit to trail blunt teeth all across the column of his throat.
Clive sees stars.
"Spell it out for me, darling, just in case I'm wrong," Cid commands, pitiless.
Clive struggles to think. Darling is a new one. Darling gets under his skin and makes a home for itself there.
"I think Ifrit doesn't like it when I, ah—when I run from—" Clive gasps when he feels the hot, wet lave of a tongue against his skin. "From things I want. Things we both want."
"Oh, both now, is it?"
"You've had me in your bed for a week now, you've seen how much I—hngh," Cid, bastard as he is, does his best to maul Clive's collarbones with his mouth, sucking a delightful series of bruises into the skin there with ruthless, calculated expertise.
It is as if he's considered how best to take Clive apart in great, painstaking detail before.
The thought is dry kindling upon a pyre. As it stands, it is one already stoked high enough to consume them both, if left unchecked.
"The tail certainly hasn't been very subtle," Clive says with what little breath he still has left in his lungs. As if to prove his point, the tail chooses that exact moment to slither against the sharp jut of Cid's hipbone, its meaning beyond plain. Clive slams his eyes shut against the influx of sensation.
"Quite," Cid agrees and removes one of his hands from Clive's hair.
Clive mourns the loss of proximity, right until he feels Cid grab the tail, holding it in place before it can go further still, greedy thing that it is. The heat he feels from the brush of bare skin against the coarse scales there makes his stomach clench painfully, arousal molten hot in his gut from it.
"But there is a difference between your Eikon wanting something and you wanting something, Clive. So kindly tell me — which is it?"
"Yes," Clive manages to rasp out, "Cid, please—"
He does not know what he is to beg for, only that he needs, like how fire needs something to burn—something, anything at all.
"You godsdamned fucking demon," is what his shoddy answer gets him, bitten into his skin and then against his lips too.
Cid finally kisses him and it is beyond good — it is hungry and all-consuming, laced with the taste of bitter apples and sharp ozone, because Cid wastes no time in pushing into his mouth.
Clive, as expected, falls apart before him.
He obediently lets Cid take as he will; lets him lick against his teeth and tongue, wet and messy and lewd, until spit trails between them when Cid pulls back for breath, only to then kiss him again, again, again, starved and merciless.
"Had you in my bed for a week, have I?" Cid bites savagely against his bottom lip, because he is a quick study and Clive is merely an open book before him, too eager and too responsive to every touch. "Maybe so, but I haven't had you even once. A damn shame, that."
"You could have," Clive challenges. It earns him a lovely tug to his hair and another bite. Clive arches into it, helpless to deny himself now.
"I could have, aye," Cid says simply and topples them onto the mattress until they are both horizontal. He straddles Clive's hips, holding him down, and the tail flicks itself free from his flimsy hold to fold across his back, flat along the vertebrae of his spine. It pushes Cid closer, impatient.
Clive pants for breath. "Maybe you should have."
"Maybe you should stop trying to test me, sweet thing," Cid speaks into his mouth, with the severity of a man slowly approaching the end of his patience. Clive's entire body thrums with anticipation. "Maybe you should run for the hills instead, because I've half a mind to ruin you entirely."
Clive finds it in himself to laugh, a breathless little giggle full of genuine mirth. "What makes you think you haven't already?"
Strangely, this makes Cid pause for a long moment.
"Maker above, you actually mean it," he whispers to himself with something like realization.
It sounds like deliverance and damnation both.
More importantly, it makes the air around them shift — makes it take on a new charge, voltaic and dangerous.
Cid stares intently at him, at the dark of his pupils that are no doubt blown wide, at the splotchy blush of red high atop his face and all the way down his neck, at the way he inhales shaky lungfuls of breath that do nothing to clear his head. He is aroused and that, too, is obvious at a glance — his cock tented in his pants, his hips trying uselessly to cant closer to Cid with aborted little motions he can't bring himself to stop.
Cid sits back on his knees. "D'you know what it was like," he begins lightly as he carefully undoes the laces holding Clive's sleep shirt closed, "to wake up with you wrapped around me day after day, knowing that if I so much as brushed a single hair on that pretty head of yours, you'd spook and drown yourself in all that useless guilt you like so much?"
Clive shivers, because it's true.
"D'you know," Cid pushes the shirt open, nimble fingers brushing featherlight across his shoulders, "just what you looked like, on that first night? You were made of fire, Clive. The most beautiful thing I've ever seen on this godsdamned earth," he sighs with something close to reverence. Then he chuckles, wry and worn, "I almost caved then and there, to be honest."
Clive's teeth ache. He can't listen to this. He can't—
"D'you know," Cid continues anyway, slow and unhurried, trailing his hands across Clive's chest like he's mapping out every scar and blemish there, "how much it fucking cost me to not bend you over the nearest surface whenever your Eikon and his tail would drive me mad with their antics?"
Clive moans, wanton and shameless. He needs—
"And now here we find ourselves again, just another morning where I have to try my very best not to ravish you, and what do I get for my troubles? Why, your Eikon all but asking me to do it!" Cid brushes a hand against his ear, where the silver cuff and the sapphire earring now sit. The sting of soreness barely registers.
"He even dressed you for me — clad you in the trinket I never hoped to give you, because I know damn well I've got no business courting pretty runaway marquesses, but—well."
"But you still had it made," Clive breathes it like a question, mind racing with possibility.
"Aye. I did. I seem to be losing my common sense, I fear. Little surprise there, honestly, considering you're involved."
"Me?"
"Yes. You." Cid's hands halt their journey at the narrowest point of his waist, almost as if fascinated by the way they cover it almost entirely. Clive's stuttering breath makes his abdomen twitch, anticipation running hot through every part of him.
Cid notices. He rubs his thumbs in slow circles, but goes no further.
Clive shakes against him and like the impatient, needy wretch that he is, says, "You'd best get on with all that ravishing then. I'm waiting."
"Oh, but what's the rush?" Cid asks, devilishly sweet. "I've waited this long already. And I've had ample time to think of just about every single way I can have you, each better than the last."
"Do I get to choose then?"
"Hah!" Cid laughs, tinted dark around the edges. "Maybe I'll let you, if you think you can be good for me. What say you, sweetheart?"
Clive, traitorously, shivers. Behind him, the tail twitches.
Cid notices that, too, his eyes sharp. He smirks.
"You like it when I call you that, don't you?" he asks in a low voice, tailing his hands back up Clive's chest, brushing over a nipple as he does. Goosebumps follow in his wake, even though the touch is searing hot.
Clive bites his lip to stop from crying.
"Sweetheart, darling, pretty thing," Cid whispers, voice rumbling like thunder, and leans down. He presses every word against Clive's skin with his lips, fleeting and ultimately unfulfilling. He throws a glance at Clive and clicks his tongue in disapproval. "None of that now, no, no. Don't you dare hide your sounds from me — I want to hear them all."
Then, Cid kisses him, slow and languid and deep enough to bruise.
Clive melts against him, a gasp on his lips that Cid gleefully swallows before it can leave his mouth. Delirious, Clive wraps his arms around Cid's shoulders, his neck, every part of him he can reach. He runs his fingers through Cid's short hair — it is unreasonably soft, some part of him notes with great interest. It also smells faintly of lavender.
"Good boy," Cid murmurs against him when one kiss breaks and another starts.
Clive's entire body responds to the praise; seeks it like a river seeks the sea — it knows nothing else. His hips buck uselessly without his permission, his cock begging for attention in its still clothed confines. He can only imagine how desperate he looks.
Cid hums in appreciation as he watches from above, eyes thoughtful even amidst the tempest that surges within them, bright and wild. "Tell me, Clive — what would you have me do? How would you like me to have you, hm?"
Clive keens weakly and tries to gather the remaining scraps of his wits. It proves to be remarkably difficult.
"Like this," he answers, which is not very descriptive at all. He tries again, "Like this, inside me, please."
Cid curses up a blue streak.
The next kiss is rough; is a demand that Clive happily surges to meet, all teeth and savage hunger.
They are both Eikons, after all.
"I suppose I can be persuaded," Cid bites against his throat as he goes down, hands quick to unfasten the flimsy buttons of Clive's pants. He rises then, just for a moment, to better slip them off of Clive's hips entirely.
The relief that follows is immeasurable.
Clive feels hot all over, a blaze burning bright beneath his skin. The tail writhes against the sheets, blindly seeking contact now that Cid has shifted more towards Clive's ankles to look at him in full, debauched and spread across his bed like a cheap courtesan. Clive struggles to shove the shirt all the way off his shoulders, the sleeves constricting his movement.
"Convince me, Clive," Cid commands from above, unbuttoning his own shirt with agonizing slowness.
Clive looks at him, at the vast distance now between them, and deems it unacceptable. The tail, suddenly all too eager to follow his command, wraps itself around one of Cid's wrists and tugs him forward with considerable force. Cid stumbles, but only barely — he catches himself on an elbow as he lands next to Clive, his eyes narrowed. The tail holds its grip.
Clive wastes no time staring, much as he'd like to. He pushes Cid down by the shoulders and removes the offending piece of fabric that calls itself a shirt from his body entirely — if a handful of buttons scatter in the process, then so be it.
"I've just changed my mind, actually," Clive says blithely, riled by the offered challenge. He settles across Cid's lap with one smooth sweep of his legs; makes a home for himself atop his hips and grinds down, quick and filthy. The friction is incredible, even through the remaining layers of cloth Cid still wears. "I think we'll prefer this."
We, he says, and it feels right.
It feels like something akin to a second heartbeat is pulsing in time with his own, Ifrit's approval and smug satisfaction nearly overwhelming as they burn as one in him. His Eikon has worked so diligently to get them here, after all — the least Clive can do is offer his thanks.
The tail, sensing this, relinquishes its hold only to curve downwards, a long, sinuous stroke of dark obsidian stark against the scarred plains of Cid's chest.
Lightning, it seems, loves not only his hands, but all of him.
Clive can relate.
So can Ifrit, apparently, because the tail makes short work of unfastening his pants, much more dexterous than Clive feels himself at present.
Cid simply stares up at him and his eyes are glazed over with sheer, ravenous want. He wets his lips briefly. When he speaks, however, his voice is infuriatingly steady. "I've not yet been convinced of neither one nor the other, sweet firelight."
Clive has this steadily growing suspicion about all those disarming, dangerous pet names. He loves them perhaps a bit too much — is helpless against each and every utterance of them, all of them melting on his tongue like spun sugar — but firelight is special amongst them all.
Firelight is Ifrit, not Clive.
Clive gets to be darling or sweetheart or maybe even love, if he can be so foolish as to hope. In turn, Ifrit gets to have firelight all for himself.
But this just now — sweet firelight running hot and igneous down his spine like liquid embers — this is both of them, together, and it means that Cid must know who he is addressing, must know that both Eikon and Dominant yearn for him just the same.
"We shall convince you just fine, Arbiter," Clive hears himself purr, his voice not entirely his own, an eerie subharmonic like the crackle of flame echoing in it. He blinks sparks out of his eyes and finds himself crawling over Cid like a predator on the prowl, too sharp nails leaving faint marks in the rumpled sheets beneath their bodies.
Cid's pupils are blown wide, a mere ring of green and violet around fathomless black. "Careful not to overstep, you fiery minx. You know I have little patience left for your games."
It is a threat, plain and simple.
Something in Clive curls with great pleasure to hear it. The tail, he realizes after a heartbeat, slightly disoriented by the feel of flames consuming him from the inside out.
Then he forgets what he has to be disoriented about, because lightning strikes against him, brutal and sharp, and Cid all but devours him with a kiss.
It brings him a measure of clarity, that — the wet slide of their mouths, the very human taste of spit and saliva and too bitter apples. Clive chases it eagerly, already addicted after just a handful of bites that can ill sate the ever-yawning hunger inside him.
This time, it is he who licks into Cid's mouth, hot and heady, a blaze of heat pulsing with every swipe of his tongue.
When they pull apart, Cid looks just about ready to smite him. Clive grins at that, reckless, audacious, all too happy to ruffle his feathers when this is the reward he gets for it.
"Convince you, you say, hm?" Clive hums as he rises to his haunches; places Cid's hands on his hips and revels in the way Cid grips him, strong enough to leave bruises.
Good. He wants them.
"What about — next time, you can have your way, anything you like," Clive promises, next time, and it is Ifrit promising just as well. He grinds his ass against Cid's hard cock and very nearly mewls from the hot spike of pleasure that runs straight through him.
It's not enough. It is not nearly enough, but it is a start. It is amenable.
"This time, you let us have you." Clive says, sultry like a vixen, and then blinks through blurry eyes. Magick and aether swirl around him without his permission, uncalled and unwarranted, so he tries to dispel them both, but his focus is very severely lacking at present.
"Are you really in a position to make demands of me?" Cid asks from below, eyes hooded.
He grins, "And are you in a position to deny us, Ramuh?"
Cid moves, lightning fast and vicious, and fists a hand in Clive's hair painfully, holding him in place. It is meant to hurt.
"I'm only going to ask this the once, so you'd best listen carefully or else." Cid's voice becomes a graveyard, becomes a tempest that holds enough fury to level the realm and all in it.
What he says is not a question.
"You give him back. You give him back right now and you stop meddling in his affairs. I've been plenty lenient with you so far, but you really mustn't forget who the stronger one here is, little firelight."
This time, there is not a single shred of kindness nor warmth in his voice when he speaks. There is only the certainty of a promise, the finality of a verdict decisively decreed.
Clive slumps in his hold, suddenly boneless. The tail wraps itself around Cid's ankle, sufficiently cowed for the moment.
"Are you all with me, Clive?" Cid asks neutrally, voice flat.
"The entire time," he answers, because it's true enough. And then, because he might actually combust if Cid doesn't touch him right now, says, "You're bossy."
"And you are susceptible to bad influences."
"Oh, they're not all that bad."
"I beg to differ."
"No," Clive says, "Not yet, you won't."
He reaches for the hand still delightfully fisted in his hair — untangles it from the strands of graphite and charcoal there and brings it to his lips instead. He lays a kiss on each fingertip, kittenish and coy, and then sucks a fore and middle finger right inside his mouth.
He laves his tongue hotly along the clever digits; learns the feel of lightning woven across every ridge and knuckle and callous there. He looks at Cid through half-lidded eyes and then closes them entirely once Cid presses deeper, presses down against his tongue and too sharp canines.
A third finger pushes in, then a fourth, and Clive offers each and every one of them the same attention, makes them all wet and slick until saliva is dribbling messy at the corner of his mouth.
"—ruin you, I'm going to fucking ruin you," Cid hisses as Clive swallows around his fingers, deep enough to feel them scrape against the back of his throat. He whines at the sensation, indecent and needy, and burns for so much more.
The tail comes to his aid — it wraps around Cid's wrist and tugs, until Cid's hand slips out of his mouth and a line of spit trails obscenely in its wake. It leads him along, makes his arm curve around Clive's back and his hand leave a wet path along the ridges of Clive's spine, where a mesh of scale and scoria has taken shape, pulsing with heat and aether in time with his heartbeat.
Cid lingers at the small of his back for a moment, at the place the tail stems from. He rubs experimentally at the border between skin and basalt there, the border between Clive and Ifrit, and everything in Clive flares bright at the touch, makes him writhe with sensation indescribable, searing hot and good, mind-numbingly good.
Good, but still not enough.
"More," Clive demands, half-mad with the desire of two, and rocks himself against Cid's clothed erection uselessly. It is not enough, it is not enough, it is not—
He feels the tail tug again, sharper.
Cid growls in warning, but finally, finally gets the hint and cups the swell of Clive's ass in one hand, the other wrapping deftly around Clive's leaking cock.
Against him, Clive sings.
"I'll give you more," Cid promises, and pumps him once, twice, the relief of it like godly mercy and salvation to his neglected, overheated body.
"Yes," Clive gasps, hips buckling, seeking more of that friction, that closeness, desperate for anything he can have, anything he can reach. He will take all—indiscriminate, all-consuming—oh, Flames, but they burn.
"Shh," Cid hushes him gently, sweetly, a too soft whisper against his ear, against the gem of sapphire that now sits there. "Calm down, sweet thing. I've got you."
He traces a finger around Clive's entrance, teases the rim with small, deliberate motions that make Clive's breath hitch pathetically. He leans into it as much as he can, tries to fuck himself upon it, clumsy, his entire body shaking—he is so empty and Ifrit wants—
"Bear with me for just a little while longer, Clive," Cid murmurs against him, coaxing, persuasive, all that infuriating charisma and charm Clive can't resist. "You deserve better than spit and a rough fuck. Won't you let me show you?"
Clive makes a garbled, wordless noise. The tail releases its hold.
It is permission enough.
He near howls when Cid pulls away from him, all that heat and skin and beautiful, beautiful lightning fleeting, fleeing, forsaking them, leaving them destitute, deprived, devoid of their one warmth, their one wish, the one thing they can finally allow themselves to want so wholly.
It feels like an eternity passes in agonizing slowness — cold and barren and desolate — until a veil of static slips around his shoulders, embraces him like a lover, intangible, volatile, carrying with it a premonition of thunder sure to follow.
Clive blinks at the sensation, flames licking at the corners of his vision, and feels as if emerging from a strange reverie. He sees Cid before him, their knees touching, Cid's hands cupping his face all too gently. A grievous, downright calamitous emotion sparks in the green and violet of his irises.
It is one that would surely undo Clive if he were to give it a proper name, so he doesn't.
He doesn't.
(Love, love, love, love—
Love, for us, ours, love, cry the flames at the center of his being, the tattered remains of his soul.
He tries so, so hard not to heed them, because he should know better — he should have learned his lesson by now, but hope is a deathless weed that refuses to wilt even when buried beneath so much ash and soot.)
"There you are," Cid says, his thumbs brushing little circles under the crescents of Clive's eyes. He might be brushing away tears. Clive can't tell.
"Here I am," he croaks, beyond embarrassed at his behavior, at the humiliating display courtesy of both himself and his Eikon.
It should be night, he thinks.
It should be night — dim and dark and clandestine.
It should be the flicker of candles around them instead of the first rays of morning, because Clive can't hide like this. He can't school his face into something less damning; can't tuck away the intensity of his longing between wayward shadows when there are none.
Can't pretend he is anything but heartsick, brimming with so much raw devotion that it overflows, dripping from him like ugly blots of tar, dirty and impossible to wash away.
"Let's try that again from the beginning, shall we?" Cid asks and offers him a kiss — just a simple press of their lips, close-mouthed and chaste.
This time, Clive feels the tear that slides down his cheek. Cid brushes it away, too.
"You would still—even after—?" The question doesn't quite make it in full, doesn't manage to find all of its parts in time, but Cid understands it all the same.
He offers Clive a small smile, private and sincere, a secret just between the two of them. "If that is what you want. You always have a choice, Clive. Always."
"I…" his voice trails off, wrought brittle and crumbling around the edges from all that Cid's words mean to him, all that Cid is to him.
"Yes," he says instead, because yes is simpler, because Cid could ask the world of him and Clive would lay it all at his feet — yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes, easy as that.
Gingerly, cautiously, Clive offers a kiss of his own.
Cid receives it gently. He cradles it between them like a budding flame, feeble and frail, but for once, it is a flame that does not feel destructive — it only feels warm.
It feels like absolution. It feels like belonging.
It feels like finally coming to a safe place to rest after stumbling in the dark for thirteen agonizing years, a hearth welcoming in the space between Cid's palms.
Cid kisses him like a dream — a pretty, pretty dream, a real kind one, just this once. He tilts Clive's head just so, angles their mouth so they fit just right, and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him.
Clive melts against this kindness, this unhurried tenderness that turns him pliant, turns him soft and yielding against every touch Cid graces him with.
He gasps, a single shiver running through him from head to toe, when he feels Cid's hand against his back, tracing lower and lower with quiet promise. Then he chokes on air, chokes on nothing at all, breathless and so full of longing, because Cid moves both their bodies, sits against the headboard and pulls Clive right into his lap, finally divested of all those troublesome clothes.
Clive keens and Cid keeps kissing him the entire time, swallowing every sound like it is something to savor.
"Much better like this, isn't it?" Cid asks against his mouth, leaving a scattering of soft caresses all over Clive's body, countless awfully distracting touches, here and there and over there, too, until Clive feels raw all over.
"Yes," he says, goosebumps rising everywhere Cid touches.
"I don't think I could ever get tired of looking at you, you know," Cid murmurs into his neck, trailing kiss after kiss as he goes. His stubble scratches pleasantly against Clive's skin. "You are a godsdamned marvel, Clive Rosfield."
Clive whines, high-pitched and broken. The way Cid says his name makes him want to do unspeakable things.
"Oh, sweetheart, but I haven't even begun with you," Cid laments, breath leaving him in a single, wounded exhale. "Look at you — so wound up already. Shall I help you with that? Will you let me?"
He then brushes the head of Clive's cock with his thumb, smears the bead of wetness gathered there, teasing and painfully quick. Clive shakes, on the edge of falling apart entirely. The tail tugs forcefully at his back; thrashes left and right, but does not dare touch Cid.
"Please," Clive musters between ragged breaths, unsure how much more of this he can survive without losing his mind, losing himself.
"Good boy," Cid rewards him with, voice low and filthy. "Nicely done, darling. You learn so well."
And then his other hand curls around Clive's back, drags blunt nails against skin and scale—hah, ahh, Cid, please—and finally, blissfully gives Clive what he so desperately craves.
A single, oil-slick digit makes its way inside him, smooth and effortless. Clive wails, relief and the still insatiable need for more threatening to unravel him entirely.
"Fuck. Gods, Clive, do you have any idea—" Cid cuts himself off sharply, the question discarded, and merely adds a second finger with no further preamble.
Clive's body takes it, made for it, reveling in finally being filled, even if it is not nearly enough, it is still not—
"That's it, steady now. Stay with me, sweetheart," Cid commands, and then moves his fingers in a way that has Clive biting his tongue so hard he tastes blood — all to silence the unholy sounds that want to wrench themselves free from his throat, the things he should not say, must not say, even now, especially now.
He pants against Cid's shoulder, mouths at the salt and sweat and ozone gathered at his neck in a poor attempt to keep himself afloat, to stop the conflagration raging inside him from consuming him whole, body and soul and all.
A futile endeavor, that, but he tries nonetheless.
The third finger that enters him is pure bliss—carnal, base—and as gratitude Clive bites against Cid's throat with teeth that are unnaturally sharp. To retaliate, Cid curls the fingers inside him skillfully, right until he finds the one spot that has Clive crying out a sob. He trembles with pleasure and mutters a prayer consisting only of broken pleas and Cid's name, over and over again.
"I enjoy a lovebite or two or even ten as much as anyone, truly, but I also rather enjoy having my arteries in one piece, if you don't mind," Cid says lightly and all of Clive folds at the admonishment, curls up against his chest, hands on his shoulders and mouth soft against the angry red impression of teeth he's left there, soothing it with light kisses and gentle licks of his tongue.
"Sorry, fuck, I'm sorry, I'm so sory, just—feels good, Cid, feels—a-ah," he babbles, heatdazed and feverish. His hips keep moving on their own accord, gyrating in little circles atop Cid's lap, and Clive can feel him, full and aroused and ready, so why must he waste time like this, why does he bother with these pointless, paltry, petty distractions—
"Ah-ah," Cid tuts and calmly adds a fourth finger, the stretch of it burning so lovely. "Down, firelight. He is mine to have, do you hear me?"
"Have me, then," Clive demands, the wick of his patience at its miserable end, all of him golden, all of him aglow with wisps of shining crimson. "I'm ready, so please—have me."
(It is pitiful, how much meaning can hide behind so little.
Have me, keep me, love me — they are all one and the same, in the end.
Pitiful. Pitiful.)
"Only since you asked so nicely," Cid removes his hand then, leaves Clive empty and aching, and Clive claws at his shoulders blindly, ruts into him, seeks contact, pressure, anything at all to fill him, them, please, they burn—
"Easy, love. Easy."
Clive, in essence, shatters.
"Again, again, say it again, please—"
"Oh, Clive," Cid whispers in his hair before he readjusts his grip; pulls Clive out of his hiding place in the crook of his neck and merely looks at him with such intense adoration in his eyes that Clive wants to cry from it.
And he is, he realizes with a tremor, because Cid kisses a single drop of salt from his cheek, gentle as a summer rain. Then, he kisses his mouth, simple and quick, and says, his voice like a benediction,
"I have you, love. I have you."
(Have you, have you, have you—keep you, love you—)
Clive sinks on Cid's cock with ecstasy sweet on his tongue, Cid's name broken on his lips, and love etched in illusory ink and aether and levin right there upon his heart, permanent, irrevocable, a part of him to revere and worship for as long as he breathes.
His entire body is aflame with nothing but pleasure, searing hot and white, pulling him apart at the seams. He sinks down and down until there is nowhere left to go, until he finally feels perfectly, blissfully full, sated for all of a single moment as his body adjusts, molds itself to better accommodate Cid's considerable size.
Then, the hunger sparks again, selfish, gluttonous, greedy.
He moves experimentally, just a small shift of his hips, just a barely there movement, just to see how it feels.
In response, he hears a hoarse, muted groan, stifled low and tightly contained.
He desperately tries to focus through the sweltering fog of need that blinds his vision. When he finally manages, he sees Cid looking right at him, lip bitten bloody and eyes wild, wracked with a desire so potent it bleeds into the rest of him. Purple sparks of lightning almost seem to reach for Clive, as if seeking to consume him back just as eagerly.
"...good?" Clive finds the witherwal to ask, though it's not much of a question. He cants his hips again and breathes an inhuman noise of pleasure when he feels Cid twitch inside him, the sensation intensified tenfold, his senses far sharper than normal, heightened to a red-hot, blistering point.
The tail at his back writhes.
Ifrit approves.
"Am I—is it—" he tries again, but it's useless, the words slipping between his fingers like so much smoke with every pulse of heat between them. "I'm—burning, I've been told, I, that I—aah, stop me, Cid, if, if it's not, fuck, hngh—"
"Stop you?" Cid asks and does not wait for an answer.
He thrusts into Clive exactly once, sharp and precise and absolutely glorious, burying as deep as their bodies will allow them before he stills again. Clive clutches at Cid's shoulders for support, all of him shaking, hanging on by a single thread perilously close to snapping.
His voice is gone and he is lost—entirely, forever.
"Clive," Cid grits out between his teeth, jaw tight, the candle of his indomitable patience finally burning close to its end, too—finally, finally. "Clive, dearest, you are downright heavenly."
He fucks into Clive then, slow and deep and still so awfully, painfully controlled, too brief to truly satisfy. Even so, pleasure licks all against Clive's insides, incandescent and bright, until he can think of nothing else.
There is nothing else, nothing but the two of them, together, their tryst, this, this, this—
"Forget whatever gods and their miserable Eikons, you are the only divine thing that exists, love."
Against him, Clive makes a noise — some wretched, off-key sound of raw emotion that borders on the edge of too much.
"Oh, sweet thing, you're so wet and tight and warm around me, why would I ever stop you? How could I? You're perfect, Clive." Cid's hands grip his hips with bruising strength; lift him up and set him down with measured ease as Clive can do nothing but tremble in his hold, undone by all of these blasphemous, wicked words, these impossible things he cannot hope to reconcile with himself.
"You're so fucking lovely and you have no godsdamned idea. Not a one!" Cid bites at his ear, at the earring there that marks Clive as his, lays claim on him even if stolen. It hurts, the flesh there still slightly sore, but it is a distant hurt — infinitesimal, imperceptible. Compared to the heat that surges through every part of him, it is nothing.
"Look at you spread out all pretty on my cock, like you're made for it—like you're made for me."
"Yes," Clive's voice says, steeped in fire and brimstone. "For you, all for you, always, evermore, Ramuh, please—"
(And there, they err.)
Cid immediately grips Clive's hair and pulls savagely, drags his head back, back, back, brutal, bruising.
With his other hand, he grips the tail at Clive's back — half-wild; awash with the beginnings of flickering flames — and tugs, a harsh reprimand.
Clive's entire spine arches, curves bowstring taut, blissed out, and he shamelessly sinks upon the lustful body so beautiful beneath him.
He is a living monument of pleasure and pain both, caught somewhere between the two, shocked, burning, all molten glass, malleable, meant to be molded and who better—
"Away," Cid directs, demands, decrees, and lightning snaps at the heels of his words. Then it snaps at his hands, too, wild and furious, and bites into Ifrit's flames with reckless abandon.
The sound that comes out of Clive is not made to fit a human mouth.
It is guttural. Primal. It scrapes raw against all the soft parts of his throat, because this is one Eikon testing another and Clive is merely their chosen meeting ground.
This is no longer amenable.
This is right. This is just.
Pleased, Ifrit submits.
With a shudder, Clive gasps, aether shimmering in fiery bursts across his veins. All of him feels aflame, feels aglow, but it steadily settles to a controlled burn — a wildfire brought to heel, one turned obedient, obeying.
"Testy bastard, ain't he?" Cid kisses against his ear, soothing the long-gone pain of a bite.
"Thank you," Clive warbles out unsteadily, voice a charred wreck. He tries to say more; tries to find any words at all, but Ifrit's searing pleasure is impossible to ignore, let alone deny. It surges through him, wild and hot, and Clive wants.
More than anything, he wants to have this. He wants to have Cid undone under him. He wants to see him fall apart right into Clive, wants to send them both over the edge, together, complete, and damn whatever consequences await them in the abyss below. He is beyond caring.
He sways on Cid's lap, on his cock, but just slightly — just enough to feel the wet heat of him pulsing inside. It makes his mouth water with desire. He has waited long enough.
Once he's gasped enough air to stop his vision from spinning so inconveniently, he begins moving in earnest.
"You're so patient," Clive says petulantly and turns his head; drags a sloppy kiss from Cid's jaw to the corner of his mouth. "All this boundless self-control of yours—making me work for it."
He fucks himself shamelessly, first with little rhythmic shifts of his hips and then gets progressively more erratic, inelegant, wanton moans spilling from his mouth right into Cid's.
It is good.
It is so, so good, and then it gets better, because Cid growls against him — a low, rough noise Clive will think about at night for the foreseeable future — and starts meeting him halfway. His hands return to their rightful place at Clive's hips, digging blunt nails into the supple flesh there, the pain a sting of pleasure. He angles Clive so his cock hits that one spot inside him, has his vision whiting out to nothing as his body becomes nothing but pleasure, nothing but Cid inside him, Cid around him, Cid kissing him and groaning against him and panting right in his mouth.
"Hahh—yes, fuck, I knew, I knew you'd feel so good inside me, Cid."
He's close. He's so perilously close, and Cid has barely touched him even once. He can come just from this — Cid's cock warm inside him and the vulgar sound of skin against skin as he rides him, single-mindedly chasing his own climax.
"Good?" Cid bites into his mouth, offended. "Oh, love, I can do you so much better than just good."
And he does.
He does, because he grabs Clive's leaking cock, swollen and red and twitching, and works him mercilessly with his hand. The glide is easy and wet, made effortless by how desperate Clive is, and of course Cid is a master at this, too.
Against him, Clive becomes an aria.
He is a territorial creature by nature, Clive is, selfish and greedy and deeply possessive of what is his—ours, ours—and this is no exception. He bites at Cid's shoulder, leaves mark after mark there to look upon later and savor.
"Ours—mine, you're mine, be mine, Cid, please, won't you—"
He comes, his mouth numb and body awash with cleansing flame, the moment he feels warmth spill hot inside him.
Clive stutters out a wordless prayer, a faithful, holy supplication to the thunderous god holding him so benevolently in his arms. He falls hard against Cid's body, sweat and come a sticky mess between them, and simply exists in the bliss of afterglow.
They do not move for a very long time.
He will never recover from this, Clive realizes distantly, an eternity later, once he can form thought again.
Well.
So be it then, a part of him says, covetous and vain. Let them be ruined, it says. Let them be spoiled for the entire world and for everyone in it, because nothing will ever compare to this, nothing and no one.
It sounds a lot like Ifrit.
It sounds a lot like something Clive cannot entirely disagree with.
Eventually, at some point, he will have to uncurl from his makeshift sanctuary against Cid, he knows. A little hideaway all of his own, tucked away at the crook of Cid's neck, where Clive doesn't have to face reality for a moment or two longer.
It is more than he has ever been granted before, when intimacy is concerned.
For now, he lies there, quiet and content as a kitten. In the depths of his soul, Ifrit croons with satisfaction, drunk to the horns with it. The tail curves around Cid's thigh and stays there, sleepy.
Clive feels hypersensitive, but he is unwilling to part them just yet. He wants this to last as long as possible, this silent uncertainty that does not condemn him with the aftermath. His body feebly protests the prolonged contact, sore and aching and so exquisitely filled, but he doesn't care.
It thrills him to the marrow, what they've done.
And then, unexpected amidst the stillness, Clive feels a brush against his hair. Clever fingers play with the strands there, absentminded and gentle.
The easy affection startles him.
Unfortunately, Clive has a wonderful, truly impeccable affinity for self-destruction, so he opens his mouth and says:
"He wasn't lying."
He's gotten this far already, already crossed line after line, all of them self-imposed but no less significant for it — he might as well finish the job while he's at it.
Clive Rosfield does not do things by halves, oh no. Better to burn his bridges in one go.
"Ifrit—we—it's true. What I said. What we said." He makes a frustrated huff. "Same thing."
Cid curses softly into his hair, unintelligible.
It feels faintly reminiscent of their first night, back in the infirmary so very long ago — Clive falling apart and so full of emotion, spilling in Cid's arms like a sunset.
Par for the course when it comes to dealing with him and Ifrit, he supposes.
"I know, Clive. I know," Cid says simply, and Clive does not know what to make of it at all.
He gathers what embers are left of his courage, the softly smoldering remains of his heart, and goes to meet his fate at the gallows.
(Except, gallows they are not.)
Clive leans back and carves space between them where there should be none. He does as he must.
Heavy with trepidation, he makes himself look at Cid.
He looks and he finds Cidolfus Telamon looking right back at him.
He looks and he finds the same look he knows with certainty to be in his own eyes, finds it mirrored in a glade of shining green and budding anemone, and the hope that unfurls petal soft in his chest at the sight is more than he can bear.
This is what seals his fate.
"I love you," he admits aloud, a confession long overdue for both of them.
And like with most things in his life, he just cannot leave well enough alone.
"I love you, I love you, I'm sorry, I love you—" he repeats, digging his grave a little deeper with each word, each useless repetition, but now that he's started, he finds that he can't stop.
He rests his hands on Cid's face and kisses him instead, messy and awkward, just to make himself stop saying all these unspeakable things. It doesn't matter at all anyway, because the taste of that same misbegotten love must be tangible on his lips, on his tongue, on every part of him, staining them both with every touch, guilty as charged.
"Forgive me," he asks weakly and waits for Cid's judgment.
Alas, what comes for him is not fulmin and fulgur, nor is bolts of levin and lightning, not even a single crash of thunder.
It is something worse.
It is the soft brush of scarred fingers against his hair, matted with sweat and clinging to his forehead unattractively. Cid brushes all of it away, those messy strands of black; makes sure Clive's face is bare, leaving him nowhere to hide behind, blush and brand and burning sparks of red still in his veins, all exposed and on hideous display.
"Oh, Clive. What is there to forgive? You've done no wrong."
"Cid, I—" Clive begins, but there is no excuse he can offer. He doesn't much want to, in truth, because he's never been one to lie, except maybe to himself.
I love you, he professes, and that's just the thing, isn't it?
You cannot take love away. It is done. It's already happened.
"You are just killing me, sweetheart, how many times do I have to say it?" Cid bumps their foreheads together like a stubborn coeurl. It results in a dull-sounding thunk that has Clive reeling from the sheer childishness of it.
Clive's skull rings with a bizarre emptiness after, as if all his frantic thoughts have just up and vanished, plucked away by Cid's innate affinity to chase away storms just as well as he can embody them.
And then, because Cid in this moment is beyond anything Clive can predict, he kisses his brow like he means to soothe an invisible hurt there.
"Don't rightly know if you've noticed, considering that thick head of yours — but I may have a bit of a soft spot for you, believe it or not," Cid murmurs against him, low and sweet. "Just in case it wasn't painfully obvious already."
He lifts Clive then, easy as you please, and lays him down on his side, careful the entire time. He slides out with an incredibly indecent, wet drag of his cock and gently shushes him when Clive whimpers against the sensation, unsure if his body wants to flinch away from it or push closer.
There is a faint trail of spent trickling between his legs, he realizes. It makes him flush bright crimson, but does nothing at all to stop Ifrit from preening like a hellhound glut on arrogance and pride, sated by the triumph of its grand scheme.
Cid settles on the sheets next to him between one blink and the next, mellow as a cloud.
He leans on one elbow and just looks at Clive, while with his other hand he caresses the disheveled strands of hair atop his head. Locks of dirtied pitch untangle between his skilled musician's fingers, a natural expert at weaving melodies from storm and tempest and from Clive, too.
He looks and looks and looks at Clive and his eyes are soft, the entire time.
All of him is soft — warm and inviting and so serenely offered, a beckoning home in the shape of person, the makeshift scaffolding upon which Clive has chosen to hang his entire world upon. All of him — soft, soft, soft.
It is, frankly, more than Clive can take.
"You have freckles," is what his mouth chooses to say for him in the poignant silence, deeming it paramount that Cid is made aware of this discovery.
"Pardon?" Cid asks, caught entirely off guard. Then he bristles, indignant in a way Clive has never seen him before, and near hisses a scalding, furious, "No."
"You do!" Clive laughs when Cid's head lands on his shoulder and he groans miserably, dramatic enough to think him at death's door.
"I do not, you are seeing things," Cid insists vehemently. "I barely see the sun as it is, how in the hells did you manage to—"
"No, no, here, look," Clive pulls him back by the hair, playful and sweet. He levels their faces and brushes a single fingertip against the sunny dots he knows to be there. "There's one here, and here, and here—"
And Clive kisses Cid's nose, just because he can.
Cid pretends to bite at him, an empty snap of his teeth that makes Clive bright, bright like the morning light that peeks through the windows and spills inside the room, casting everything in the gentle glow of sunrise.
A myriad of things bubble inside him — innumerable flecks of aurum and gold that rise weightless between his ribs, shining and brilliant. He feels drunk with it, Ifrit's elation impossible to separate from his own.
"You will take this secret to your grave, do you hear me, Clive Rosfield?"
"Hm…I don't know if I will. It seems like an important thing for the world to know, Cid. Almost as important as the truth of the mothercrystals, in fact."
"Sweetheart, you so much as breathe a word of this to another soul and I will end you."
"I don't believe you will, actually," Clive grins, defiant and cheeky. A newfound confidence thrums in his veins with every passing beat of his heart, surging and rebellious like an electric current. "If you do, what will become of all those ways you promised to have me, hm? Surely you must know better than to render so much careful planning obsolete?"
Cid — usually all controlled, precise movement and suave grace — scrambles away from Clive like he's suddenly discovered a new, life-threatening allergy. The accompanying noise he makes as he goes sparks a laugh from Clive; one that is rusty from lack of use, but still fits right in his mouth.
"I am not nearly inebriated enough for this," Cid complains as he rolls over and reaches for a cigar from the small bedside table on the other side. One of its legs wobbles as he unintentionally jostles it. "It's barely past the crack of dawn and you're already making me want to drink my weight in liquor. Well done, Clive."
The tail, disturbed by all the commotion, moves in a small, lazy circle and lays itself across Clive's waist. Cid crudely wipes off the mess at his stomach with the corner of a blanket and then oh so courteously throws it in Clive's general direction.
Modesty is a concept long dead to him, but Clive appreciates the effort nonetheless.
Cid bites the cigar between his teeth and sits back against the headboard with a muttured curse. He shamelessly hogs the threadbare blanket as he makes himself comfortable, but between them he makes sure to leave a respectable distance.
In that distance hides a choice, Clive thinks.
In that distance hides plausible deniability, if Clive were inclined to seek it.
He will always have a choice, that distance tells him. And Clive will still choose Cid, each and every time, without a single doubt.
Though, in all honesty, they are far beyond anything even resembling deniable plausibility by now.
Still, the fact that he thinks to offer it to Clive in the first place makes comfort melt saccharine sweet right down his spine. He savors it, just like he savors the faint taste of bitter apples still on his tongue.
He's developing a bit of a craving, he finds, and licks his lips.
Clive shuffles closer in lieu of words.
Then, merely as a selfish indulgence, he turns on his back and plops his head right across Cid's beautiful, maddeningly long legs so he can look up at him. He smiles in a way he hopes is charming.
Cid stares at him for so long without moving that Clive fears he's stopped breathing altogether.
Then, he blinks, groans, and presses both heels of his palms against his eyes, like he's trying to either wash away an image from his mind or burn it into his eyelids.
It all happens too fast to tell, really.
"Killing me, killing me, Gods above, but you are killing me, love."
"I thought you reviled those so-called gods, actually," Clive says nonchalantly, but his heart predictably skips a beat when Cid calls him love—lovely, loving, these gifts he'd thought forever lost to one such as him.
They are like warm embers he wants to cradle into the cracks running through his soul; wants to hold them safe between Ifrit's teeth like a priceless treasure for them both to covet.
"Like you've any room to talk — always and evermore, was it?"
Clive sputters, flimsy facade fleeing him entirely.
"I plead not guilty. That was my Eikon speaking."
Cid chuckles above him, mouth twisted in a sharp, roguish grin. "One and the same, Clive."
He then habitually reaches for a fire crystal that isn't there, as if he needs the useless thing when he's got a Dominant of Fire right there in his lap. Clive would feel insulted, he would, if only he weren't so godsawfully smitten at present.
"Ah, would you mind, dearest?" Cid asks with a wink.
The tail answers before Clive can.
It moves without any effort on Clive's part, just twists its way around their bodies until it can press a sharp, smoldering tip to the end of Cid's cigar, lighting it with an undeniably smug satisfaction.
Strange, Clive thinks, because for the first time since it appeared, he feels nothing from it. He does not feel a single thing, previous awareness gone entirely. Not as it moves and not as it calls to his flames so playfully. Nothing.
"Thank you kindly, firelight."
The moment Cid says this, a single spark of scarlet shimmers slightly in the air.
Then, another one joins it, and a another, and a another, and a small sky of glittering stars begins to form in the space around them, bleeding gilded and gold. Potent, fiery aether disperses in a beautiful display right before their eyes, like so many lightning bugs just fading away to nothingness in a slow procession.
"Oh," Clive whispers, a little breathless.
A week and a day he's had to suffer that menace of an Eikon and his theatrics; has put up with frustration and humiliation both; has sought a way to rid himself of the blasted tail so eager to make itself a nuisance at every opportunity.
Strange, he thinks after a week and a day — strange to mourn the absence of it so keenly now, when this is what he's been trying to accomplish all this time.
He will miss it, perhaps.
Just a little bit.
"That easy, eh?" Cid wonders when the last of the aether has gone.
"Nothing is ever easy with Ifrit," Clive says out of sheer reflex. "He's a handful and a half already. The last thing he needs is, Founder forbid, a good reputation."
Cid snorts, amused. "Perish the thought. I would never dare insult that hellion in such a blatant way."
Then, because Cid is still a bit of a bastard, he blows smoke right in Clive's face.
"Those things are vile," Clive says and tries not to make a face.
"Your Eikon seems to like 'em well enough."
"Yes, well. Ifrit can't be right about everything."
"Would you prefer Martelle's apples then? An apple a day to keep the physicker away?"
"Yes, actually."
"Come on, sweetheart, at least let me have one bad habit."
"Oh, I can think of a few," Clive presses a coy smirk into Cid's thigh, the flimsy blanket quickly fading to a distant memory.
"Menace," Cid hisses against the bite of teeth, but it is not one of pain. Clive relishes in it.
Morning welcomes them kindly that day, gracious and giving.
By noon, they will be outlaws again.
By noon, they will be rebels and villains and Branded and Dominants, desperate fools fighting for a desperate cause with no end to its bloody efforts in sight.
But that will all come later.
Now, in these golden hours of sunrise, they get to simply be.
[at the end of it]
"Loresman Harpocrates."
"Ah, Lady Jill! How lovely to see you. Please, sit, allow me to offer you a cup of tea."
"Thank you, but there is no need. I come with a favor to ask of you."
"Of course. How may I be of service?"
"I wish to leave a tome in your safekeeping. You must swear to guard it from every soul in the realm that would try to seek it."
"Oh my. That is rather grim sounding. Whatever does this forbidden tome contain?"
"Here."
"On the courting h…abits of…? Lady Jill, surely this is not…?"
She smiles, innocent as freshly fallen snow. "It is. Tarja finally wrangled me into penning it. Benna helped as well, obviously."
He laughs in a way that is incredibly lively for a man of his years.
"I fear our two resident outlaw kings might be awfully offended were they to learn of your joint endeavors."
"Which is why I must ask such a great boon of you. You know how Ifrit can get — the last thing we need is a repeat of the incident from five years ago."
Loresman Harpocrates is a man too refined to chortle in derision, but Jill can think of no other way to describe it. Her smile grows freely.
"It shall be my honor to assist you in this matter, my Lady," he assents then, gravely serious. "Even with so much water around the Hideaway now, I still fear what young Clive might do were he to be subjected to that ordeal again."
"Come now, it was a little bit funny, even back then."
Harpocrates looks at her with the politely reserved chagrin only people of noble upbringing are taught to.
"Well, I certainly had fun."
"Forget not, my dear Lady, that you are a Dominant as well. After so many years of direct observation, I have come to speculate that a certain brand of madness is inherent to harboring an Eikon. I fear you are not entirely free of it, either."
She laughs then, unfettered and breezy.
"Perhaps," she says lightly and considers the matter settled.