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kicktwine · 6 months

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get licked idiot (2142 words)

“Tataru,” Ch’ari blinks, one end of his mouth twitching. “You wouldn’t happen to have been… sewing upside-down, would you?”

“Why, no! Nothing of the sort. What makes you ask?”

“You’ve got, um...”

Tataru looks down in confusion and fusses with her clothes a moment, seeming satisfied as she straightens her overalls and completely misses the massive cowlick sticking straight up off her head. Ch’ari twitches.

To make matters worse, she sits down next to him — still armored in his dragoon gearset after a day of hunting fiends out near Coerthas — and snags a bottle of rum from behind the counter to pour herself a drink. “Though I admit I was a bit busy. You’ll have to wait and see what with,” she says, trying to have a little conversation with the midnight crew.

Nursing his own bottle (a cheap unopened mead that he never pours into a cup, not that he needs to), Ch’ari can’t figure out how to respond and just watches her take a sip. The cowlick bobs comically with the motion.

“Lemme just…” Ch’ari reaches over and flicks it. It pops back up.

“Hm? Oh, is there something in there?”

“Hold on.” Ch’ari licks his finger and combs it down. It stays for maybe a second, and then… pops back up. He bats it reflexively.

He’s aware his pupils are probably dilated as far as they’ll go, but this is his prey now. This is his quarry. This bouncy cowlick. It will submit to him, this cowlick.

He looms over Tataru’s head, and luckily she’s familiar enough with him to simply raise an eyebrow and not wonder if he’s going to eat her like a python. Ch’ari proceeds to insistently lick his fingers and smooth out her hair, as if she were a diminutive Miqo’te. He’s tempted just to — just to lick it down so his tongue can do the combing, but he’s not sure that Tataru would be amenable. He does care about her as a friend, and is aware Lalafell do not groom each other like his instincts want him to do. Even if it’s, getting fixed one strand at a time, infuriatingly, fighting him the whole way.

Eventually — eventually — Tataru’s hair looks… presentable. The cowlick, at least, is gone and not offending Ch’ari’s sensibilities, and the rest of it looks like it usually does outside her messy bun. Ch’ari growls at his work in satisfaction, and returns to his mead, starting to turn a bit pink despite his scowl.

“…Was it really that bad?”

“You looked like a coeurl toy,” Ch’ari mutters.

Tataru chirps a little delighted laugh. “Well! Then I’m glad I have you to protect me!”

••

For some reason, everyone had been fine upon arriving to Ishgard — freezing cold, yes, a bit miserable, but not sick. Alphinaud had, however, upon returning to the Rising Stones to recuperate after the defeat of Nidhogg, gotten a nasty cold and the worst sniffles known to man. He had been knocked out in bed for the past two days, and just barely able to shuffle about and pretend to be normal for about ten minutes in the morning for breakfast.

Key word “pretend”. Despite his airs, it was abundantly clear to anyone who looked at him from closer than five feet that he had dragged himself out of bed to be here, and as soon as he had a croissant in him he was going right back to bed. It was how Ch’ari knew the cold was bad — he wasn’t off making it worse somewhere and ignoring it.

Which is why Ch’ari almost excuses his dreadful upkeep. Unfortunately, it’s dreadful.

He slumps carefully into the seat next to the Warrior, a croissant in his hand and a wheeze escaping his nose. His hair is pulled back in a looser braid, which is messy, but forgivable; his whiskers, however, are entirely crooked. The soft fluff around the base of his ears looks glued on and sticking up in places, and his fringe is almost sideways. Unconscionable.

“Good morning, plague bringer,” Alisaie says by way of greeting. Alphinaud grunts in response.

Ch’ari does not greet him. Ch’ari places his hand on his head like he’s a pickle jar and starts licking his fluff.

Alphinaud jerks backwards, fast for a sick boy but dazed enough to be unable to break out of Ch’ari’s hold. The croissant drops to the table in a shower of crumbs. “A-Ari!” he splutters.

Whatever the fluff is made of, it’s thinner than Miqo’te hair, which means it’s thinner than his papillae are really good for combing through. No matter, he will just have to do a more thorough job. He continues to lick and Alphinaud continues to writhe, and as he does his ear keeps flicking Ch’ari in the eye every time he runs his tongue near it — Ch’ari brings his other hand up and slaps it down, trapping it against the Elezen’s head. He pins Alphinaud with a glare.

Alphinaud withers and stops trying to wriggle free, shrinking down in his seat. Pointedly ignoring Alisaie, who is watching the spectacle with her mouth open, Ch’ari snorts and continues his ministrations. One side done and straightened, he adjusts the boy’s head and works on the other.

Alisaie mouths something to her brother, who does not dignify it with a response, whatever it was. At least he’s given up on trying to get out of being cleaned, but Ch’ari could feel the heat coming off his face from a malm away. Wether it’s embarrassment or fever, he doesn’t care to know.

“You’re next if I catch you unkempt, red girl,” Ch’ari says, and he hears the click of a certain jaw being snapped shut. And an impulsive brush of hair being checked.

The fluff successfully smoothed out and clean, Ch’ari decides to spare Alphinaud any further public displays of affection and only gives his fringe a cursory swipe through.

“You may eat your croissant now.”

“…Thank… um. You,” Alphinaud mumbles, caught between a rock (mortification) and a hard place (critical unknown etiquette situation). He does not look at anyone else as he picks up his food and shuffles off back to bed.

••

Doman summers are humid. That is not the excuse Ch’ari has to make to get Alisaie to peel herself off the floor, but it is one of the ones he has ready.

It only takes two excuses — namely that everyone else is asleep and so should you be, and that he insists come over here the futon by the window is more comfortable than the stool yes even if it’s small you’ll get a horrible crick in your neck just slouching there. It probably helps that she’s allowed to keep watch over her brother, and Ch’ari isn’t forcing her to go to the room she’d been provided with to go to bed. He’d be a hypocrite, anyways.

She situates herself on the opposite end with a blanket, lost in thought. Ch’ari always thought the Leveilleur twins to be in their heads a bit often — as a negative trait, in the past, though it had morphed to being endearing to neutral in recent months. Always worried about such big pictures that the small ones scamper away outside their notice. Or always so preoccupied with what they can or can’t do to be useful, to change the things that aren’t fair about the world. So afraid of failure. Such a self-made burden on their fragile shoulders.

That trait drives them underneath all their sweet selflessness and stubborn idealism. And it gets worse and worse with fear, the kind of fear that narrows the world down to two or three people at a time when the world demands thousands be paid attention to.

Ch’ari has always been good at caring about two or three people at a time, and one or two things at a time. The title of hero is one he ultimately doesn’t deserve if one casts aside the ends and asks the means. He’s really more of a sword to be pointed, to intimidate. All the talk of politics, the big world important stuff his twins care about so so much, had washed over his ears a bit, ears that are not even now accustomed to a world bigger than a twenty yalm flat. He cares for the world and the whims of its protectors because there are people who live in it he cares about, as a sword loves its wielders, and they care for the world in that grand and wonderful way they do.

Ch’ari has his thoughts, Alisaie has hers. He thinks she’s probably running herself in circles about the fate of the star and the fates of her loved ones, and Ch’ari is here thinking only of how he might be able to get her to stop.

As it is, it’s ultimately not his decision. Guards patrol the Kienkan at night, and pass by windows with intermittent frequency, and it is as one shadow filters through the moonlight and shutters that Hydealyn deigns to grace him with a splitting migraine — but it’s a migraine he knows, it’s familiar. Not the overwhelming voice of the Call. He flinches backwards, claws to his head.

Alisaie startles and jumps to her hands and knees, gripping the blanket. Gods, not now, he has to-

“Echo. Echo—“ Ch’ari manages to choke out, before the memory takes him.

There is nothing.

It is a peaceable morning devoid of aught unusual, aside from its expansive, yawning emptiness — the soldier stands at the edge of the river, hand to his head in confusion as water sprites wink out and wither, far along the bank. No birds. No fish. No efts. Nothing. Even the babbling of the stream seems muted.

The nets are empty. He goes home.

Ch’ari comes out of the — short, but rather to the point — memory with a heavy shake of his head. He gets the message. At least the mother crystal is not one to dilly-dally when she has something to say, though he wants for priorities. There is so much going on, would Hydealyn have him abandon all else to fix this problem? Where to begin?

He comes back to awareness with Alisaie’s hands on his knees.

Bereft of a good reassurance, he gives her a little thumbs up. She nearly deflates with relief.

“Gods, Ch’ari. Do not do that again.”

“You’ll have to neg Hydealyn for that one.”

“Ari.”

“I’m fine. We’re fine,” he rasps. A dangerous wobble is sneaking into her eyes, born of stress and more stress and comatose family and the fear of being the only one left and in a room with her empty brothers. Ch’ari is struck as if with an axe at how much he would do to stop her.

Any other circumstance would be met with characteristic yelping and protesting and perhaps a death threat or a tussle, but Ch’ari beckons and helps Alisaie (so light! Like a chocobo chick) into the crook between him and the window and puts his head atop hers and curls his tail around her feet and she doesn’t protest. Instead she tucks her arms around herself and pulls her tail in against his legs and drops her head right on his chest and does not cry.

“We are fine,” she mutters.

“Very. And if we are not, we will be not fine together.” The axe still embedded deep in his chest, he does not much hesitate to start licking through her bangs to smooth them out.

She stiffens, her ears swiveling upwards as if to figure out what it is. Then, slowly, they drop back down, and her tense posture eases ever-so-slightly. Evidently, Alphinaud’s investigation into Miqo’te culture after his encounter with Ch’ari while sick was shared for scientific discussion. What fast learners. Even if Y’shtola had shared with him the disastrous results of Alphy asking her for tribal advice. Chuckling under his breath at the memory, his purr starts up without his bidding.

“…How are you vibrating?”

Ch’ari stops and heaves a great sigh, and then bullies her head back down from where it had tilted up at him quizzically. “Your brother asked the exact same thing. It’s not vibrating, it is purring. It means I’m happy.”

“Oh. …oh,” Alisaie says, quieting. She casts a long glance at the bed set up against the wall, its occupant not even snoring or shifting. “I wasn’t aware you could feel it.”

“Little opportunity to find out, th’ past while.”

She pauses for a long moment.

“Even now?”

“M’ happy you’re still here.” He turns his attention to her part, carefully grooming apart the mis-tied strands. “Not a fan of being alone.”

“I see.” Her tail shifts, the inflexible tip curling closer like either a stuffed toy to clutch or a protective sheet to block the world from hearing. “Neither am I.”

“Lucky.”

#cat time #claps HEY ok I finally feel like I’m getting some of my chops back #starting to Resolidify my writing #anyways. Ch’ari is a cat and grooms his friends even if they are wildly embarrassed about it #my writing #ffxiv #Ch’ari #alphinaud leveilleur #tataru taru #alisaie leveilleur #End of stormblood postpatch spoilers vaguely

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