chasing daybreak

The body she has kept at such a distance for so many years has, for that time, mercifully granted her one small favour while she dragged it through hell and back. It had been no loss to her that it had all but forgotten itself and any normal rhythms.

And, with that, there had been control. Nothing more to worry about than a Hyuran or Elezen woman need trouble herself with. Battered and bruised and kept permanently on the cusp of giving up, her traitorous body had at least failed to signal any demands and wanting not of her own inviting.

Years passed and children brought into the world, and now, now it chooses to...

An arm slips around her waist, and, just as she registers it as an unbearable threat to her control, shadows envelop her and haul her into the darkness of an unfamiliar forest that is nevertheless the perfect – their preferred – location for—

She turns, aiming a savage swing at Hades that she anticipates will be met with a shield, only for him to merely lift a hand and deflect her strike in an overtly casual fashion, his study of her intense.

It is infuriating.

There can be no telling him. No making of herself an obligation. A duty.

And who is to say it would be any better to give in? She has no recollection of it being pleasurable. A disappointment only, the stranger in her bed too pleased to be there and too set on his own enjoyment to be of any use to her. A frustrating, ridiculous debacle. She should have known it would be no different even with mindless need driving her.

Fire next, hoping Hades will fight. Not embers coaxed to life or a mage’s conjuring trick, but that terrible flame that he will understand is the raw, unfiltered strength that she is so ashamed to revel in.

Defence again; a agonising patience in golden eyes.

She sends him back and back once more, wreathing herself in blood and scarlet, until her eyes blur with awful tears and he effortlessly captures her wrists and pins her against the nearest tree, pressing close in a deliberately provocative manner.

Her body betrays her, pleading as she shifts against him all too desperately, and the brush of his lips over the pulse in her neck is so glorious that she blushes to hear the sound that she yields to him.

“I know,” he utters lowly, anchoring a hand at her hip, “what this is.”

“You don’t,” she refutes.

He can’t. Surely he must believe that she is merely burning her way through temper and agitation in their usual inelegant way, for all that he has not played his part.

“...Not all women of your race suffer from the affliction, and I confess I believed you were among that number, yet...”

He slips a hand between them, her answer to lunge forward and secure his bottom lip to bite down on instead of her own.

Hades’ hiss is of the delighted variety, followed by a low note of dark, rich amusement.

And yet he sobers as he bows his head to hers to murmur, “I think you are well. I think you are well and thriving and this is the... consequence...”

He needn’t sound so pleased.

(He loves her. Of course he is pleased that she is no longer the skeletal, exhausted figure that returned from the edge of the universe.)

“And I think that you should allow me to bring you home and let our husband worship you, just as he has been aching to all day...”

She knows very well that command of herself is unravelling further when she hears herself say, “Do you want to watch?”

The hand between them strays along a leisurely path that drags a tight curse from her.

“For a time,” he allows, all smug satisfaction.

It is not so difficult to give herself into his care.

Nor to seek out the kisses she has craved for hour upon hour.

Nor to let days unfold ahead where she knows nothing but warmth and devotion...

And pleasure.

for @feistierermine bday !! sorry if this read ansgty !! but going full under read more to explain that whenever I think about Thesa loving the world it always fall back to the moment she loved it the most, which is by the end of endwalker. this girl wants to live and love so SO much!!