#seriously tho here be aether sex which is weird but fun to write in a way I can't describe

[starswornoaths]

Make up day Prompt 4: Clinch

I wish I had eloquent summary words to put here, but I went off and wrote 4k words of socially distanced aether sex with heavy Dark Knight themes and unabashed use of its quest dialogue. Serella/Aymeric. Set post 4.2, long after Aymeric came out to her (which I’m saving for it’s own actual fic rather than a prompt response.) I’m off to hide my face in a pillow now.

word count: 4,108

By the time a surprise call to his personal linkpearl, Aymeric could admit he was in need of a break from the myriad reports yet piled on his desk. Though his hand cramped fiercely, he forced it to work long enough to answer.

“Dear one.” His ears perked when he heard his beloved’s softly sleepy voice sigh through the static.

“Ella.” Aymeric sank into his seat with a smile, already far less tense than he had been. “I had wondered when we could next speak. I pray you have been well.”

“Well enough, if terribly homesick.” Serella replied. “Have you been eating? Getting enough sleep?”

Her questions made his exhaustion more tangible; he had been attempting for the last several bells to stave off sleep and hunger both with an abundance of coffee and stubbornness. Reminded of the hour, his eyes burned with the want to slip shut.

“Inconsistently, though such is the way of it,” Aymeric answered honestly around a yawn.

“Don’t stay awake on my behalf. Please— did you work from home today?” At his assenting hum, she sighed. “Small miracles. I know you well enough to know you’ve been in the study all day. Go upstairs, dear one, and lie down.” 

He spared an agonized glance over at the final stack of reports yet to be sorted through. Much as he was more than ready— more than needing to lie down and rest, the end was close. When tired, faintly trembling fingers couldn’t even properly grip the paper for how blurred his depth perception had become, he knew it was high time and then some to admit defeat.

“I will— though promise you will keep talking?” He asked, and though he felt a might petulant for it, he could not help his need to hear her voice purring so soothingly in his ear. “I have missed you.”

“And I you, dear one. So very, very much.” 

The room began to sway when he stood, inspiring a frown to mar his brow. He had to take a moment to balance his weight appropriately on his feet before leaving the study.

“Truly?” His question caught around a tangle of emotion in his throat, on his surprise at the open longing in her tone.

“Enough that writing a letter wouldn’t do tonight. I needed to hear you.”

Aymeric took the few moments ascending the stairs in quiet contemplation. That they were well established in their relationship and affection mattered little; there were still moments such as this that caught him off guard with just how loved he felt. Loved, and cherished, and wanted, aye, and horribly, unbearably lonely in that moment; as he stepped into their bedroom and let the door close heavily behind him, he eyed the vast, empty bed and felt her absence keenly. Hers, Estinien’s both. Even the act of shedding his clothing and crawling beneath the downy soft duvet did little to make it feel warmer, nor adequately occupied.

“Would that you were here.” He sighed before he realized he had even spoken at all.

“I will be.” Serella promised him. 

In a moon’s time, he recalled somberly, and had to bite back the reminder. It was more like than not that she was counting down the hours as much as the rest of them were. He heard her shift— where was she, and what was she doing, he wondered. 

“But...if you can forgive my impatience, and you’re of like mind, I would feel you tonight.”

Such a sweet offer, open and honest in its yearning ache, welcome in the cold bed as a balm on his chilled skin. It was enough to make his breath hitch in his throat. Despite the exhaustion, despite the weariness and the burning in his eyes, this was kindling on a low roiling flame that he could not douse on his own, embers kicking to life in a roar of blood in his ears.

“Find me in the dark, my dear.” Aymeric all but begged.

A plea, a chant, a prayer murmured in the quiet dark. Laid bare beneath the covers, he offered himself to their church in the dark, unfurled himself to receive her blessing. Communion, where distance that could not be unmade was instead ignored entirely.  

Starved for her, near vibrating with anticipation as he was, he scarcely breathed as he waited, open and pliant and wanting. Wanting this, wanting her, wanting something to ground him and remind him that she was alright. Few though the times they had done this were, he was as familiar with her as his own heartbeat, even before he had tasted her aether. He waited for her to descend upon him, trembling but unafraid.

Aymeric gasped at the first soft brushes of her aether against his hand. He could not see her, he never could when they did this, even once she bridged the distance between them, but he felt the way her aether shaped itself in her image, to lace with his fingers, to hold his hand. With practiced breathing and a conscious effort to empty his mind, he could practically feel her clinch the tethers of her soul to his. He exhaled heavily around a smile, sinking into the dark. Into her.

“Ah, there you are.” Serella said, words wrapped around a sigh of relief.

Fingers unseen lightly traced the angles of his face— he could not count them, and he did not want to. He could feel her; the details mattered little. The trails they blazed on his skin tingled with the want of more, even as the touch itself bordered on almost too much. Already overwhelmed, he pressed his cheek into the pillow that yet had her scent to help him find some part of her here.

“You found me— ah! Rather quickly,” He rasped, chest heaving. 

“Of course I did. I would know you anywhere.” 

Her voice was calm and quiet. It slid over him like crushed velvet over silk sheets. With his eyes closed and her unseen hands drifting through his hair, he could almost swear the static of the linkpearl faded away. For a moment, he let himself believe she was home, here, with him. The hand she had reached out to hold was released in favor of tracing down the lines of his neck, along the path of his collarbone. He shuddered bodily against the fissure of contentment it shot through him.

“Would that I could reach you in kind.” He lamented softly, his mauldin thoughts offering a brief, lucid moment amid the floating feeling he was rapidly sinking into.

“In time. You’re getting better.” Serella reassured him.

Concentration on his own aether had not been a primary focus in his training as a knight, beyond knowing how to use Holy and Clemency. Having to learn to use his aether as an extension of himself rather than a resource to tap into proved difficult, but he was learning— and had ample incentive to master it.

And an apt, patient tutor that he did not deserve.

“Reach out for me,” She instructed in a breathy whisper.

His brow knit in concentration, mapping out the trail of her aether from where it touched him, trying desperately to find her in the dark. A grunt of mild frustration with himself escaped him when he struggled to push his aether outside of himself.

“Breathe deep through your nose─let the air fill your lungs, then let it pass from your lips.” He obeyed, chest rising and falling in heavy pants. Gently, she tutted, “Slower, slower…”

In the span of a few breaths, the bed fell away. There was only her scent in his nose, her aether embedded in his soul, touching, caressing, and his own reaching, reaching, searching— 

“Listen to my voice. Listen to your heartbeat. Listen…”

The more Aymeric focused, the less there was of him left to feel, and less of her to find. She thrummed in the space that was meant to be his chest, weightless and dissolved as he was. With every breath he grew lighter and slipped further into the abyss…

“Ella.” He sighed her name on a pleading exhale, in exaltation, in worship, in need.

As a lock gives in to a key, her name was as a causeway for him to at last find her in the dark. She was as a radiant sun, dark skin aglow in her own light, eyes twinkling like twin stars in his orbit, hair bleeding into the shadows until he couldn’t tell where the darkness ended and she began. It was only as a flash in his mind, gone as fast as a shooting star in the night sky, but he relished in her surprised grin, bright and toothy and all for him.

The small of his back left the bed at the shock of her fully wrapping herself around him, sinking into him, just a little, just enough. He could no longer tell whether it was because he pulled her in, or she had fallen into him. It no longer mattered.

“Oh, there you are.” He whispered in rapturous relief.

Her chuckle was all dark velvet and smoke against the shell of his ear. He shuddered, even as he welcomed the sensation.

“Did I not tell you? Have I not promised?” She pressed, and as she did he had to remind himself that it was not her mouth latching onto his neck. “You could call out to me in nothing more than a whisper, and I would still hear you a world away. I would still answer you from the grave.” That tingling, overwhelming sensation left his neck and brushed almost chastely against his brow. “Did you not know?”

“I did,” Aymeric panted as a single line of fire being drawn from the dip of his throat down, down, down his torso, plucking inspiration along his muscles that jolted his tailbone up from the mattress. “I did, I do, Ella, please—”

“Please what?”

Serella’s words might have been innocent, but those hands that were not there, searing and soft and aching as they were, had begun to trace lines along his chest, his sides, over the ever so faint flare of his hips down to the insides of his quivering thighs. If her words had ignited his blood, the sensation of her rippling across the surface of his very soul engulfed him entirely.

Another touch— the sensation of a hand carefully taking hold of his chin. He wondered if she could sense the way his throat bobbed with a heavy swallow. A press against his lips sent him quivering with the want to reciprocate and the urge to recoil from the overstimulation entirely.

“You need only ask.”

“I miss you.” Aymeric whispered, as though that could even encapsulate everything he felt, everything he wanted to say. Likely, she already knew it all anyroad. “Touch me?”

“You have to tell me where.” She hissed voice tight against her own need.

Likely, she could have felt for it, dipped her fingers deeper than the surface to pluck at his needs and taste them between her teeth, but that was not her way. She needed consent from him, for them both. Adoration, already insurmountable in its depth, swelled all the more in his chest. 

“I love you.” He sighed.

“That doesn’t tell me where I can touch.” A laugh, huffed in soft awe from half a world away, interrupted her. He felt it against his temple when she brushed her aether there in a kiss. “But I love you, too.”

Heat bloomed on his face, and crept outward to pull down to his chest, up to the tips of his ears. If she kept going in that low, purring voice of hers, he was certain that blush would only continue to spread. At the thought of answering, the heat practically doubled, his lucidity crumbling.

Back and forth, back and forth, aether rubbed against his hips, squeezing intermittently, comforting. It felt almost close enough to her hands that his mind could remember how the callouses on her palms felt. Ah, a brief moment of awareness flickered through the pleasurable haze: their connection was deepening. There was a startling amount of comfort to be found in that.

“Can you feel it? Where I want you?” He asked, more than half into the pillow for how deeply he breathed in her scent.

“...Yes.” She whispered as if in great reluctance.

“Then...then am I not telling you?”

His words tapered off at a caress, soft and cool as fresh fallen snow, stroked down his lips, his chin, his neck, and traced circles against his sternum. A shudder rippled through him, down to his toes. Overheated and overwhelmed, the duvet fell away— or he might have kicked it off. He gripped blindly at sheets and pillows, no less warm for how she encompassed him. 

Hesitation radiated from her— he would have known it even were they not tethered thus. With a demure, “please,” moaned into the pillow, surety chased the doubt away.

The pressure returned to his inner thigh, soft as a whisper, tickling the muscle there as he twitched and wriggled, delighted and frustrated all at once— until it slithered up, up, up—

Aymeric gasped wetly at the cool brush of aether slipping into him. Despite the lack of something solid he felt full as it slipped into him, expanded— or were those more fingers? The dark obscured everything but the pleasure that rippled across him. At a stroke against his clit, he squeezed his thighs, face flushing hotly at the wet squelch of him.

“Ohh, you haven’t had time to take care of yourself, have you?” Serella moaned in his ear. 

Any intelligible response he had died in a whine when she began to pump within him— and how peculiar, how he felt near full to bursting despite being so empty— when he made to reach for himself, to try to reconcile the ache between his thighs with how deliciously she had stretched to fill him, she tutted in his ear.

“You know better. Behave for me.” 

His ears burned. His hands shook, even as they returned to clutching at the sheets and her pillow. 

“What,” Aymeric stammered half into the pillow. “Would you have of me?”

“Everything, in time.” Her voice was all hushed husk and promise, and it settled deep in the pit of his chest. “But for now, open up for me.”

Another touch at the inside of his knee, a different hand— were there more than two? He could not tell anymore— coaxing his legs to go lax enough for him to ease. With a deep breath (slower, slower…) he let the muscles within him that had clinched ease. He felt Serella everywhere, whispers of warm aether that left him shivering, brushes of cold that left him panting. It was all he could do to hear her and obey (listen to my voice, listen…) and pray for salvation.

“There we are.” His shield cooed, and he felt little pecks of aether— if he focused, they felt almost wet, like open mouthed kisses— trail from his lips down to his fluttering pulse at his neck. “Such a good boy for me. So, so good.” 

She moved again, in him. Her rhythm was slow, methodical. Testing. He still could not divine with what part of her he was being filled, but reconciled that it no longer mattered: it was her, and that was enough. A lack of those familiarly lewd, wet noises that accompanied the slide of something inside him would have been jarring, were he not so sunk into the abyss as he was. 

“Need you here.” He whispered, and fought the urge to curl himself bodily around the pillow. 

“I am here. Find me in the dark, dear one.”

Even through the mounting pressure, even through the winding coil in his belly that warned him of his impending demise, he pushed out again, searching, needing. The pleasure was excruciating, exquisite. It was too much, it was not enough—

The tangle of hair in his fingers, luxurious and soft as a dream. Scars he had mapped out a thousand thousand times over in the dark of night, smoothed over with the passage of time. He felt them beneath his palms, relished in the delighted gasp it drew from her. It distracted him— his discovery and the pleasure she was dedicated to wringing out of him both— and he could not quite— he struggled to map where his hands should go— 

“Dearest.” He panted, hips stuttering against her touch, steadily growing surer, faster, greedier. His already closed eyes squeezed, his focus fraying as the pleasure mounted.

“I’m here, even when you can’t find me. It’s alright.” She was babbling— ah, she was close, riding his high through their shared connection. “I have you, let go, I have you—”

He did as he was told. He was hers to command. He was hers, always. 

His trust was returned a hundred fold, and along with more of those softer, gentle caresses through his hair, presses to his temple, his mouth, in heated kisses that he could not chase, that sliding piston of aether— more defined, the more he felt, with tendrils that tapered off like fingers that hooked, stroked, flexed inside of him— working him so hard he could no longer keep still. 

Head thrown back into her pillow, Aymeric helplessly cried out, restraint abandoned, as he felt himself build perilously toward release— himself, and her, too, he realized as Serella let out a muffled moan. It was effortless to picture her, teeth sunk into her bedroll, hands working at the natural kyanite foci she had, curled into herself to keep quiet in camp. Digging his heels into the mattress, he scrabbled for purchase, hips working in time with her stroking, even knowing it would do nothing.

“Please— c-close, please—”

Serella’s strained “mhm,” was nearly lost in the tinny static of the linkpearl, but it was maybe another few dexterous strokes— or perhaps it had been an hour of them, time had long since lost its meaning to him— when finally the coil snapped, and some distant part of him was grateful for the silencing enchantments she had put in place before her departure for how he all but wailed at the weight of his orgasm as it hit him. It was no release, it was a crushing, shattering constriction of his every nerve, the destruction of every thought that was not relevant to her or their shared pleasure, a calamity of every sense he possessed in his earthly body. 

There was no freedom from this blissful height, this agonizing climb beyond rapture: Serella continued.

“‘M not done,” She growled in his ear, and a sob tore from him. “Stay with me, ‘m close, ‘m close, be good for me—”

Just as Serella gave him the sensation of her touch, so, too, was he gifted with the feeling of her pleasure. Aymeric could feel her teeter on a knife’s edge, so perilously close to falling over—

Lacking in the mastery of aether touch, he yet had other weapons he could put to use.

“Please, my dear— you’re so good to me.” He moaned, blinking back the tears that welled from the overstimulation. At her choked back gasp, he curled on his side, thighs pressing in a way that left them both gasping when the motion pressed on his swollen oversensitive clit. “Come for me, won’t you? Oh—”

At the thrusting inside him growing more powerful, more insistent, he shuddered so violently he wound up holding himself up on his forearms, overstimulated into trying to rock backwards, moved into needing more, needing less—

Desperate, he clutched at the back of his own head, gathered a fistful of his hair, and pulled. The sharp stinging was pleasurable, in contrast to the smooth glide of her unseen fingers inside of him, and he could tell she felt that difference acutely.

“How fucking dare you—” Serella cursed through her teeth.

“Anything,” He panted, desperate, openly weeping at the way his whole body near vibrated with the overloading of his sense. His grip on his hair tightened. “Anything to help, anything for you, please, Ella—”

Blindly fumbling but no less eager to see to her pleasure, he reached out, out, out with one more push, and sunk his teeth into the pillow the moment he felt his aether press back against hers.

If his orgasm had robbed him of any sense and sensibility, her orgasm bowling him over while he tried to recover from the aftershocks of his own was enough to rob the breath from his lungs. He forgot how to even gasp for more of it, eyes rolling back in his head, mouth falling open to let go of the pillow, needing to let go of his hair for fear of ripping it out—

Aymeric was all but certain he cried out further at her release, but he only heard her muffled sighs, her strained, choked back cries of pleasure at each wave that rippled from her to him. Would that she were truly, physically here, he could drink in how vocal she could get, how he could get her to absolutely sing for him, when they had the time to properly indulge.

“Stay with me.” He whispered when he remembered how to breathe. “A while longer.”

“Lest we both crash. I know. I have you.” She panted into the connection.

Her aether slipped out of him as smoothly as it had entered. He shuddered, wincing at the realization that his thighs were positively dripping with his quim. Once he could get his legs under him, that would need tending to. 

Tomorrow, likely, he realized when he tested wiggling his toes and realized he could not feel it. 

Despite the emptiness between his legs, he could only curl up, reaching blindly for the blanket again, as her aether took to soothing him. Stroking at his hair, gently rubbing at the base of his skull where he had pulled— ah, a bit too hard, he realized belatedly. 

“You’re getting better at this.” Serella spoke up, voice a tired but pleased purr.

“And you are entirely too good at it.” He huffed, all pretense of annoyance undermined by his giddy laugh. “My legs have left me.”

“A pity. They’ll run into Estinien when he gets home, I’m sure. He’s due back tonight, yeah?”

Aymeric gave a tired hum, sinking into the mattress almost as deeply as he had in the abyss. Not nearly as deeply as he had wanted to sink into her, though he contented himself as best he could with the knowledge that he would be able to in time.

Distantly, he heard the front door unlock and creak open against the howling wind. His ear perked at familiar steps— and more familiar still cursing at the cold— as the door was hastily closed again.

“He must have heard us talk of him.” Aymeric teased in a tired mumble.

“Just came in? Sounds like him. I’ll let you sleep, dear one— tell him I’ll be home soon.”

“I will.” He paused, hand clenched in the pillow, nose buried into the fabric to try and chase her scent, to keep a part of her here with him. “Dream of us?”

“I always do. I love you.”

“As I love you.”

Aymeric scarcely closed the linkpearl before Estinien stepped into the bedroom. The dragoon seemed to know what was happening— Serella tapered off her aether from Aymeric slowly, gently, to avoid that awful hollow feeling that could come with severing such a connection too quickly. He settled into bed beside Aymeric with a chuckle that tapered off into a huff when he was almost immediately clung to. 

Aymeric could not help it; the last of her aether leaving him always left him needing something grounding, and if it was affection, more was the better. Regardless of how slowly she let go, there was always a bit of emptiness in the wake of her absence. Though, he supposed he felt that even when they had not done anything of the sort, whenever she was not home.

“Ella will be home soon.” He dutifully relayed her message.

“Three weeks, five days, give or take some hours.” Estinien nodded into the crook of Aymeric’s neck, sinking into him with a content sigh. “I know. I’ve been keeping track.”

The bed was not at full capacity, but it was occupied enough to not feel alone, and the two of them made that enough to drift off into gentle sleep, counting down the hours all the while.

#ffxivwrite2020 #ffxiv #Aymeric de Borel #Serella Arcbane #I am as ever your shield #unstoppable forces and immovable objects #tagging it lemon like it's 2006 babey \o/ #seriously tho here be aether sex which is weird but fun to write in a way I can't describe #anyway I'm off to scream into my pillow now #I hope this sparks joy!