#varndekai

[A really fun one, that night after the uh-oh that wasn't hatesex post-game lmao]

His vessel wakes just as he finishes ruminating on all that happened last night. Seeing her throws him into questioning all over again.

She--his captor? his mistress? his queen? ...his...?--lays on her front on account of her wings, face smothered in the overly plush silk covered pillows of which there were far too many on her bed. That veritable tidal wave of purple hair blocks her face from his view, but from the relative stillness and rise and fall of her back, she still slumbers.

She was sleeping next to him. Peacefully. No guards up or concerns that he may take the opportunity to finally end this and get his vengeance.

She knew he wouldn't. He knew he wouldn't.

What was this? This? This entire situation.

They had done something foolish last night, initiated by him in a moment of all too much mortal emotion he'd spent the night dissecting as his vessel slept--he himself didn't need sleep, he'd spent far too long in torpor anyway--and she had accepted it. Why? His arrogant and prideful mistress? For the first in their years-long arrangement she'd allowed him to take her, to lead and control from above as she almost always did, and it'd been an act of worship on his part. He'd given her the leash even as he'd pinned her down and demanded her to tell him to leave, to order him to stop, driven by what he'd identified later as all so much possessiveness, anger, fear, need, and... relief...

Now it was morning, and they had spent the night side by side as couples do. Romantic ones.

Why? What was all this, now? Something foolish. Something they couldn't undo. He only had himself to blame. He'd spared her, no, saved her, deliberately. She'd survived the battles with the Eldests, the actual and would-be, and it'd been because he'd... spared... her. No, he'd saved her, deliberately.

His vessel flexes its fingers as he looks at them through those once-steely grey eyes, now permanently tinted with daemonic red. He feels the claws that should be there, three times larger and suffused with death, suppressed by this mask he's gotten far too comfortable wearing. He feels the ghost of her throat beneath them, the too-weak pulse she'd had then as he'd lifted her broken and burned body from the ruins of the palace with ease. The Lantern King had been defeated but had left him a gift in a sense... one he'd been inexplicably unable to accept. Even as he'd tightened his grip about her throat and grabbed at the ragged remains of her wings fully prepared to sever that aggravating head from her shoulders, she'd only looked upon him--his true form--with a smile and blood-choked laughter, and had wished him luck before dropping the Oculus at his feet and succumbing to those injuries.

But she was still alive. He'd confirmed it last night, burying his vessel's face into her neck to taste her pulse and hear her blissful, hot breaths against his own as she clawed from beneath him. It was life and frantic passion he'd claimed, thrusting into her and drawing her close all as he'd growled praise and worship into those black-scaled ears of hers. She was alive.

Why?

He sees the look in her eyes from then as he'd been about to kill her. The acid green of them had been so amused and... accepting... She hadn't even attempted to fight back, even futile as that would've been... nor had she even looked upon him, the true him, with fear. She'd look at his full glory as if he'd still been in this mask. Before he'd really realized what he'd done, she'd been safely handed over to her traveling companions and other advisors under this all-too-comfortable-guise of Magister Varn; and now Maegar was a hero, having carried her from those ruins where no one else could find her.

Even as he looks at her now he feels nothing but that strange possessiveness. His dragon. His cage. His queen. His mistress. His...?

She stirs slightly as his vessel runs fingers down the curve of her back. That delicate porcelain skin is so very warm, so very alive, and even as skin turns to black leather around the violence that is her wings, the heat of life only surges all the more defiantly. Those fingers gently trace that brutality, so very much a reflection of who she is: elegance on the surface but all brutish force beneath. She, who strides with grace, but throws spells through force of will, magic shaped through her demanding it be so rather than through any skill as a true mage. Her wings are much the same, publicly laying so elegantly on her shoulders or clasped about her front, yet here, where they emerge, is a torn open hole scarred from where scales meet flesh. Theirs had been a bloody birth. It'd taken months for the scars to settle, and for the bleeding the fully cease.

He runs fingers up the main length of a wing right where it emerges, recalling that night she'd summoned him to her bathing room and demanding he work an entire tin of healing salve into them. The smell of blood hadn't left him for days. She'd rewarded him.

That was what they had been. Acts of deference for carnal rewards.

What were they now?

Morolai abruptly hisses and tenses and he freezes. His hand is frozen on her left wing where it'd been slowly feeling, mapping it out idly in his thoughts--the same wing she'd had torn out by the Eldest.

"...There are better ways to wake me."

An acidic eye glares at him through a gap in the periwinkle waves and pillows.

"It was not my intent to wake you... your majesty."

His voice is careful. He doesn't know what they are anymore and he has a feeling she doesn't either, based on how that eyes rolls and she only buries her face deeper into those pillows, choosing to be more vulnerable in his presence. She'd never shied away from showing weaknesses to him as an act of dominance, but this... he admitted it was different.

"...What time is it?"

"Around a quarter past seven." He doesn't need to check to confirm. He always knows.

She groans petulantly. "Don't wake me again."

He won't, choosing instead to rise. Distance is needed here. His thoughts are too muddied by strangeness when next to her, when he can feel and hear her intimately.