#merlinsbane

“How’re you going?” Vanir asked with a bright grin as they ran. Anya puffed slightly but gave a grin in return. She looked over Vanir’s shoulder at the lake and her smile softened the lines around her eyes. She looked as young as she actually was.

Vanir turned to look and her mouth glowed with a happy hum as she watched the glittering reflections of the rising sun across the rippling lake beside them.

“Picked a good time for a run, huh?” Anya said beside her, slightly breathless. She gave Vanir a friendly wink as she turned back, then tapped her arm with the back of her hand.

Anya jerked her head to the side, indicating the small café several hundred meters ahead. “Race ya!” She said with a smirk then broke into a vicious sprint.

With a quick flick of her hands Vanir shifted her headphones back onto her head so the music pulsed directly around her audio detectors. It shivered through her wires like a shot of adrenalin in a bloodstream and she ran faster. Her feet pounded on the cobblestone path as synthetic muscles perfectly attuned to combat pumped.

She rushed after Anya, closing the gap between them despite Anya’s slight lead easily. She sprinted beside Anya and took a moment to look her in the eye and give a playful wink before she sped up further and ran ahead.

Vanir heard an angry grunt from behind through the lull in her music and a hand grasped the back of her shirt.

Anya yanked her shirt and pulled Vanir off balance so she skidded and slowed. Her headphones fell off her head and she batted them in an attempt to catch them while Anya sprinted ahead of her with a breathless laugh.

She caught her headphones after a moment and slipped them back over her neck to rest.

When she arrived at the café, Anya’s chest was rising and falling heavily with the exertion of the four hundred meter sprint, but her face was smug as ever as she leaned against the candy-cane painted signpost.

“Cheater.” Vanir sneered as she stepped into the café.

Anya shrugged. “Hey, you know the rules. Last one here pays for breakfast.”

The short French girl behind the counter beamed at Vanir and Anya as they came in. “Hi Annie!” She said, holding out a mug across the counter, “your coffee’s all ready, long black with a tiny splash of milk just the way you like it. Pancakes are cooking in the kitchen.”

Anya took the cup with quiet thanks and sipped at the steaming coffee as Vanir pulled out her wallet to pay. “You know us too well, Julie.” Vanir grinned.

She flashed her card at the teller and glimmer diverted from her account to the café in an instant. The girl giggled slightly – she seemed to do that a lot. Vanir waved through the little window into the kitchen as they headed back  “Good morning, Biǎomèi!” She called through the Frame as they cooked. They smiled and spared a hurried wave before flipping a pancake.

Anya pulled up a chair at an outdoor table and kicked her feet out across the path. She let out a satisfied sigh as she sipped her coffee. As Vanir sat down across from her Anya flicked her thumb and tossed a small coin to her. Vanir’s reflexes caught it before she registered what had been thrown. “Thanks, Vane’ka.” She smiled.

Ahead of them, the sun crested the gap between sheer mountains in full and shone a stunning display of lights across the lake like a golden river through the water.

“Twenty-two, fourteen.” Vanir said, getting a ‘hmm?’ in return from Anya. “You’re getting faster.” Vanir winked. “Guess you picked a good running partner.”

Anya snorted. “Yeah, having a tireless machine built to be fitter than any living human makes for a really fair workout partner.” She sipped her coffee and swallowed quietly. “I’d hate to see how fast you could run that without me beside you.”

“Your heart rate was elevated, Anya.” Pri says, but Anya brushes it off.

“How about you run some diagnostics on the ship while you wait again?” She says, brushing her knuckle against Pri’s flared shell as she spoke.

“I have to wait in the ship again?” Pri complains. Anya snickers.

“I’ll only be an hour or two, ya obeshchayu.”

Pri looks at Anya. If a Ghost could pout, Pri was coming as close as possible to the expression, folding their case about themselves with a glowering eye at their Guardian. “You never let me come with you on the Reef.”

As they dock, Anya rises from her seat. She scoops her Ghost in one hand and presses her lips to the shell above their eye, light as a feather. “You’ll understand when you are older.”

“You always say that!”

“Because it is true.” Anya smiles. She looks up through the front of her ship at the swirling clouds amid the shattered fleet of ships and salvage that makes up the reef. It is torn away in a moment as they enter a hangar, and they are plunged into darker territory. “It is always boring in the Reef, anyhow.” Anya lies as she prepares to disembark her large jumpship. “You would be more entertained staying here.”

-

Hands form lakes in the sheets on either side of Anya’s hips, and even as she presses her lips eagerly to the shining jaw line she feels a shiver of fear at its sharpness, like a knife against her tongue.

She presses her kiss across the bone and feels it willingly rise to make room for her affections. Teeth tease a pink imprint into an earlobe, but fearful breath mists across it unmasked. From the corner of her eye Anya can see the tilt of fine lips and a sliver of predatory teeth. She buries her face in the rough skin of an elegantly extended neck, pressing lips against the milky mystic waves while reaching to bite the breath within.

“It is afraid.” The words rumble through the throat within Anya’s grasp. She trades lips for teeth, a light pressure against tough skin. “It is not used to being entirely in my domain.”

Anya stays her tongue though the reason slips past her grasp. Whether fear or choice is the cause, she grasps her free hand in white hair and ignores the tingle across her other forearm from holding her half-sitting.

Life a wolf with a deer at its mercy, Anya holds the Queen’s throat in her jaws. Teeth mark territory and power against the fragility of breath, and the slightest taste of steel lets Anya know a canine pricked flesh.

Yet she feels like the deer in a wolf’s den.

“It is lost, uncertain.” The words bring a shiver across Anya’s neck and the bare skin of her shoulders and midriff make her feel more exposed than having a sniper’s sights trained across her heart. The Queen pulls away from her lips, forcing Anya to face her and depriving her of the strange comforting warmth of their stomachs pressed together.

“It knows where it is.” Anya insists, nails scratching at the skin over the Queen’s ribs as she tries to coax their bodies back together. The Queen lifts her head and smiles ever so slightly.

“But it fears that answer.” Blue blood trickles in the most delicate sliver down from the side of her throat. Anya watches breathlessly as its flow diverts upon Lilith’s collarbone and drifts inward, to trickle down between her breasts. Anya feels her face flush as she looks upon the Queen.

The sharp nail of a thumb presses up on Anya’s chin as the Queen holds her neck like a delicate flower, tilting her gaze upward to her eye. Anya feels the pressure movements of Lilith adjusting the way they lie so her legs sit over Anya’s hips. “But does it know where it wants to be?” She asks.

“It would not be here if it did not wish-“

“It is a poor liar.”

Anya frowns and glares up at the Queen’s smug expression. “I know what I want.” Anya says, and for the first time in their encounter within the Queen’s quarters, Anya feels power, control. She lets Lilith’s game fall away and crash against a cragged rock.

She wraps her fingers along the back of Lilith’s neck and pulls her close, pressing their lips together roughly. She feels Lilith smirking through the kiss, and leans back, bringing Her Majesty with her.

A finger from her other hand presses against Lilith’s throat, feathering across the warm and surprisingly coarse skin until she finds the slick of blood against the pad of her middle finger.

She kisses the Queen repeatedly, ignoring the hot breath escaping her lips between each kiss. Her finger traces the knife-edge river down to her collarbone. She feels the expertly disguised gasp against her lips as she follows further down, and smirks. The warm and wet trail smudges across Anya’s chest as Lilith presses their bodies together and smears the tiny blue streak of blood across two canvases of pale white skin.

-

Anya yawns like a wildcat stretching in an open prairie. Her eyes squeeze shut as she bares teeth from a stretched jaw and she lies back against the pillow to stare up at an unfamiliar ceiling.

Purple mists dance grey to her eyes across a barely-visible skylight, drifting somehow despite the breezeless state, while faint lines of jumpship trails carve through the semi-atmospheric clouds of dust and gas. She blinks. Something stirs beside her and she feels bristling against her shoulder like the fur of a startled cat.

Majesty curls beside her, draped with organic, uncomposed perfection across the sheets, as though a master’s hand had carved her lithe form from marble after centuries of practice. She seems almost peaceful, yet her ever-present storm rages across her skin. Battlescars and bruises are aplenty across Lilith’s skin, and when Anya brushes an experimental finger across a faint bullet wound on her belly the flesh feels like both leather and silk at once.

The Queen stirs quietly; her white hair dragging across a shared pillow and framing her face where it falls as well as it could if expertly painted. Even crownless, sleeping at her side with breath rising and falling with the long white scar across her right breast, there is regality to her.

Anya brushes hair from her Lilith’s throat, admiring for a moment the spec of blue where her tooth had pierced skin. Lilith made a split-second noise between a moan and a purr in reaction, and shifted her arm.

Blush spreads over Anya’s cheeks as Lilith’s snaking fingers move across her skin and remind her of their presence. She turns in the bed to face Lilith, and smiles at the gentle tickle of nails scratching along her hip beneath the band of her trousers.

It is a strange moment in their relationship; one of gentleness amidst their usual fights and scratches and blunt vicious kisses in the shadow. Anya feels calm, though her heart hammers as she drapes her arm across the Queen to tickle the small of her back and flick the waistband of her pants absently.

She tries to dismiss her mind, to simply focus on the knotted scar beneath her fingers that mirrors the entrant one on Lilith’s stomach. The stirring sense in her chest remains despite her efforts, and she closes her eyes against the familiar confusion, much as she felt with her partner for months. Some part of it is different. In fact, it is only the confusion of emotions that feels familiar, and the difference makes her rise.

“It is welcome to stay for a time.”

Anya looks back at Lilith. Her bright eyes are still closed, head resting peacefully upon the pillow, but her lips curve into a smirk. Anya pushes sheets away from her legs as she sits further up.

A finger hooks on the buckle of her belt. Lilith tugs at her, pulling her down roughly to wrap lips around her collarbone and draw blood to the surface like a vampire. Anya hums at the coarse tongue flicking her chest.

Sharp nails draw across her skin as they snake across the base of her spine and beneath her waistband.

Anya kisses Lilith’s hair, and then forces herself to sit. “I have stayed too long already.”

Lilith hums. “It cares too much what its other Guardians think.”

Anya swings her legs over the edge of the bed and gathers clothes strewn across the floor from the night’s activities. The Queen brushes her hand across Anya’s back gently and settles back into her bed. She rests her arms overhead to accent her chest and raise her breasts, and she smirks at Anya with a sly eye.

Anya pulls her shirt down to cover her hips and slips her feet into her boots. “Caring is not always bad.” She smiles.

-

Anya cringes as she boards the Birth of History and waits with baited breath for the tiny ball of anger she knows is coming.

“You’re late!” Pri flicks into a hover right before her face, pouting again.

“I know, mne zhal', Dorofey, things got away from me.” She cups the Ghost in her hands, cradling them to her chest as she steps through to the cockpit. She presses her lips to Pri’s forehead and allows them to nestle in the folds of her vest. “I promise not to be so long next time.”

As she fires up the engines of her ship and glides into the air with delicate fingers upon the controls, Pri pipes up from her neck. “Is this vest new?”

she reblogged this callout without any kind of context or warning and its bothering me?

because it feels very much like. i think it was michael jones(or some achievement hunter) who was retweeting a girl who was calling him out for something just to make fun of her and have hundreds of people target her