#proxivus

   They didn’t talk about what transpired today. Not the emotional ups and downs, or the political navigations, or the pathetic mess Corvus had been afterwards, realizing he might have finally reclaimed his destiny at his rightful Master’s side. It was difficult to process, let alone address, the hazardous accumulation of transgressive narrative from the last few hours. In fact, it felt like an utter chore to say anything at all.

Proxima had her body turned away from him as she undressed in favor of clothes that reminded him suddenly of their normalcy; he didn’t have to see her face to know her exhaustion was present, palpable, even, with how she moved like her limbs were filled under their surface with water. In the low light from the fluorescence of the city outside, her body took on the quality of water, too—translucent blue, hair rolling up and crashing down across her back, her motions so overstated by the constant occurrence of mere existence he wondered if he might just buckle under the weight of her enormity.

“Oh, Midnight—”

It had been so terribly quiet. His words shattered the very foundation of stillness. She snapped her attention to him, eyes widened, doe-like, in the low ambiance of illumination.

“Yes, my love?”

Corvus was beyond modesty, especially in the dark, where the shadows accrued across his lithe chest to replace the cloak he’d left thrown carelessly on the desk chair. He knew his horrible visage was worsened in the night. A beast by nature, or by universal law to counterbalance all the do-gooders that were compelled beyond his understanding to Make Things Right, assembled of equal parts horrible intent and predatory design. Maybe he was merely accustomed to justifying his own happenstance.

He said to her, “I think I will never know if I’m making the correct decisions,” and thought of the time he’d seen Black Dwarf break open a Shi’ar’s ribcage to expose their tender, beating heart, and the way it jolted, jolted, jolted in its meaty cocoon. The explicit, horrible vulnerability. “I think I will never know certainty again. What am I supposed to do when my life has been devoted to all that which has amounted to nothing?”

Proxima approached him slowly. She was the opposite of hesitation, always moving and speaking and thinking with the same absolution of momentum; a constant force awaiting a collision regardless of pace.

“My darling,” she whispered to him in the dark, her hands framing his face. “Am I nothing?”

They hadn’t been alone with each other in nearly five standard months. He’d been reminded of his loneliness when they reunited, albeit briefly, earlier that day—the swollen warmth of her mouth, the bend of her skin in his hands, their insatiable togetherness under the veil of his office shadows.

“That is not what I meant,” he said, stroking her cheek with his thumb. Without his gauntlets or battlesuit to disrupt their closeness, he could feel the lingering static of her power traversing the neurons under her skin, jumping to his fingertips by proximity. Something inside him unknotted. “No, you aren’t. Of course you aren’t.”

“But are you?”

That was how he felt, sometimes, when he wasn’t in her presence. “No,” he said, pressing lazy kisses along the length of her jawline, noting the dampness of her scent with each sudden intake of breath. “Yet, as of late—”

One of her hands went to the back of his head and anchored him in place. Their exposed skins, gray-on-blue, blue-on-gray, melded together, indistinguishable in the low light, in the encompassing darkness. “We are trying to get our footing,” she said. Her logic (and, he thought softly, her love for him) stood as a counterpoint to all the instances in his life that made him feel less than what he’d earned. “No matter where we are, when we are, or why—you are everything to me.”

He trembled in her embrace. He wanted to echo her words, to intake the sanctity of their marriage and every little fulfillment, and transpose it all into the atrocities of war, or of whatever was required of him, with or without purpose; to tear, to maim, to love. The truth of them.

“I am nothing without you,” he said, his mouth hot against her skin. His confession rang through her mind clear as a bell struck calmly and with total acceptance. “Oh, my dear Midnight.”

His teeth captured the soft junction of her neck, stimulating her nerves. She groaned at the reception of the desperate, self-contained violence in his actions. He bit her hard but not hard enough, the method of practiced power that didn’t hurt when it so easily could. Her leg entwined with his. Her fingers curled against his ribs, splaying out where she could feel his pulse fluttering beneath hard bone.

The wet heat of her lips pressed to the blade embedded in his skull, which tethered him to his unending existence, and he reasoned there wasn’t any meaning in that either.

“Take me to bed.”

  * * *

  Most times, the victor was decided by the basis of conviction alone, filling the precious time allotted to them with little, violent tendencies until one surrendered the struggle. If they hadn’t been interrupted by their Kree escort earlier in the office, Corvus suspected he would have retained the utter dominance that compelled his desire to make Proxima come for him right there against the wall. But he was so debilitated by exhaustion that his sense of time skewed at the edges where one memory met another, and it felt to him like that morning occurred in an entirely different time and place. He didn’t have the energy reserves in him to instigate or resist.

Proxima pushed him easily up against the cool metal that composed the headboard. She must have noticed his absence of strength because he saw the way her head tilted in silent questioning, suspending her weight above his left thigh. “My love?” she said, stroking the centerfold of his chest with her forefinger.

“Your beauty is distracting.”

Her thumb slipped into the waistband of his undershorts, running casually over the jut of his hipbone and raising bumps on his ash-gray skin. “I can be distracting in other ways.”

It felt natural to be alone with her again. He growled low in his chest, and his hands worked their way up her sides to her full breasts, contrasting her rain-cold skin with the dry heat of his palms. “I’ve missed you terribly,” he said, kissing the center of her sternum. “I often refrain from asking too much, however—”

“You can ask anything of me.”

“Then I want to enjoy this night. I want to worship you.” His hands went to her hips and he pushed her back, meeting only a moment of resistance from her weight before she submitted to his motions. He laid them out across the bed, which became, he thought, suddenly too small for the conjoined mass of them both. “Slow,” he added. “It’s been too long since I’ve given you all of me.”

Proxima’s expression was one of knowing. She guided his chin down and kissed him, always combative by fault of genetic disposition, her tongue pushing against his own and her teeth working at his bottom lip; she brought them so easily together in the privacy of a room he’d slept in for months alone, not easily, and only out of necessity.

Corvus gazed at her as she worked his mouth open, but she must have sensed his attention was on her because the pads of her thumbs pressed against his eyelids, forcing them closed. He became acutely aware of the featherlight pressure in her touch and how easily she could crook her fingers and gouge his eyes out. His spine prickled with the anticipation of her lethality.

 “We really mustn’t make a habit of being apart for so long,” she told him quietly, when she finally pulled away to settle on her back. Corvus delicately traced the swollen plush of her lower lip, already missing their connection. “I was not beyond taking you in the office, despite the interruption, though that speaks volumes on our lack of common decency.”

Corvus’ forefinger trekked along the curve of her shoulder, following the dip of her chest to her breast. “I should have cut his head from his shoulders and had you anyway.” His fingertip ran the circumference of her areola and she took in a sharp breath. “I care little for decency.”

Proxima groaned when he replicated his motion again, the fondness understated by the sweetness of it, how gentle he was being when he hardly ever was before. “And I care little for your—oh—stalling—”

“Am I distracting you?” he asked, flicking her perked nipple with his tongue.

Proxima’s only answer was a groan, barely emitted but somehow like a sudden gunshot in the stillness of the night. It rattled his entire being. Taking in her sounds and her presence, and threatening to shake apart under the strength of her existence alone. 

Corvus’ mouth indulged on her breasts, leaving love bites along the inner blue skin before settling on one nipple, and she arched her spine, pressing closer, telling him without words what she liked (as if he didn’t already possess such intimate knowledge. As if they hadn’t defaced every ship, bed, or closet they’d ever been in just to experience the emotional implications of how desperate they’d been when taking another body against their own). Her legs parted around his waist. One of her hands curled into the threadbare sheets.

Corvus placed his touch everywhere she wanted him to: on her other nipple to ensure they were both treated properly, on a seamed scar above her stomach from stray shrapnel of their first mission together, on the soft inside of her thighs where nerves roped into the junction of her hip. He nipped at the dip of her navel, startling a laugh out of her, and then a frustrated moan when he gently bit the band of her skivvies.

“Corvus, do not tease me, I’m—”

“Enjoying this quite a lot, apparently,” he said coyly, tracing her labia from over her garments with the tips of his fingers, and gathering the wetness that had accumulated. She rolled her hips in countermotion to his hand. “You are as insatiable as you are impatient. Look at me, my love.”

She opened her eyes and gazed down at him, noting the way his eyes flared crimson in the dark. A feeling of ice slid down her spine. “Corvus—”

“Don’t I always give you what you want?”

She hesitated. He kissed the scar on her stomach again, devoting himself to the repetition of ensuring every part of her, especially the damages that made her feel imperfect or skewed, was loved, and she said, “It’s been so very long since we were last together. Don’t you know how I ache?”

“I will remedy that very soon,” he said. “Be patient, Wife. Be patient and I will take care of you.”

She exhaled, sinking into the mattress, into the swirl of sheets, allowing him the ease of her surrender. His mouth was hot against the slope of her crotch and he worked his fingers under the hem of her skivvies, pulling them down her thighs as if shedding a layer of skin. The black fabric slid from her ankles. He bunched the cloth up in his hand and looked down at it in disbelief, realizing in that moment the horrifying fact that he’d been without her for entire weeks of his life—that he had felt for five agonizing months the quiet, enrapturing terror of loneliness in the universe, and wondered how he ever survived before her.

The skivvies were discarded to the floor. He sank easily between her legs, pulling one over his shoulder and bending the other open at the knee. “You’re beautiful, my lady Midnight,” he said, and saw her chest hitch. He transposed his words into his actions—into unfurling his tongue from behind the cage of his teeth and pushing it lovingly against her clit.

Her moan broke the shadows in the room. “Oh, my love…”

Corvus was experienced with how she liked to be treated. Five months wasn’t nearly long enough for him to forget, and muscle memory guided his hands so he was stroking her sides, her hips, her thighs, slow and tender, feeling her muscles flexing under the impressions of his fingertips—and his tongue worked at her opposingly, rough and steady, increasing the pressure and pace of his technique. He alternated the pleasures as he went, stroked her labia, circled her entrance, sucked her bud. Made her louder, made her gasp and roll her hips and utter his name.

Proxima thumbed at one of her nipples, still swollen from Corvus’ treatment, and whined into the dark as the pleasure tumbled through her body. She reached down with her other hand and took his into it, their fingers interlacing, offering a semblance of resistance against her oncoming orgasm. He glanced up from between her thighs, and she must have sensed his intentions because she met his gaze and the look in her eye ignited him inside, like a flare diffusing behind his chest. It was the surest feeling—even in the moments when he doubted this all wasn’t simply, absolutely, the final fleeting memories of his brain in death—that he was truly alive.

Corvus dutifully lavished her with his tongue. He gave her no indication of letting up, forcing her closer to the edge, maintaining his violent, loving pace even as she began to buck her hips against his face, amplifying the friction of his wonderful mouth against her beautiful cunt.

“My love—”

He knew. She didn’t have to say it, but gods did he adore hearing it.

“My love, I want to—”

A warning. A desperate plea. The fire burning low in her belly and raging upwards, burning a bright, hot path throughout her entire being.

“—come for you—”

He growled an acknowledgement, focusing on her clit as her sounds became erratic and loud and deliciously desperate. Her entire body seized up. Corvus had her at the edge and he left her there, right at the peak of coming, for a single moment to take in the pressure of her thighs suddenly around his head, of relishing in the knowledge that he was the only person who could make her feel this way, who could bring Proxima Midnight of the Black Order to the point of begging for release—and he sucked on her clit again, sending her careening into an orgasm so intense she cried out as if in agony, bucking her hips violently while he locked her against him with his other arm across her hips. His tongue stroked her womanhood as she rode through her ecstasy. His name slid from her mouth in a euphoric chant. Her body pulsed with each wave of pleasure; coming undone, falling apart.

Corvus maintained his momentum until she settled into the bed again; he easily released her, redirecting the affections of his mouth to her stomach. She twitched hard beneath him. Groaned and fidgeted and tried to regain control, never once releasing her grasp on his hand.

She came back to herself several long minutes after. “Corvus,” she whispered to him, earning his gaze. His eyes still burned with hunger, though they appeared more calculated—pensive, even, akin to the look of a wolf considering its own brood. He was anticipating her response, obvious as it was: “I have been patient.”

“Yes, you have.” He loomed over her and took in the sight of her hair fanned out beneath them, furling waves of water tinged silver like starlight. She possessed the aura and presence of a goddess, he was certain. A trifecta of beauty and power. The embodiment of mortal absolution sending a king to his knees and all she had to do was look at him.

Corvus wanted to worship her until his final breath.

She said, “I want to have all of you now.”

And she would have all of him, wherever and whenever, for now and for always.