a mouth that says O again and again
Viktor returned from his hours in the chapel strangely subdued, reluctant to reveal too much about the conversations he’d held with the Wayseeing stone. I don’t want to talk, he admitted, tired of bickering, of Yakov’s posturing and Lilia’s drama and even tired of Yuri’s protective fury. Can we just not talk?
This, too, was a clue: how companionable silence could be; the way Yuuri’s shoulder was strong enough to lean on, even if the brush of his fingers, undoing Viktor’s braid, was soft. Later he made little animals of flame dance on his fingertips; a child’s trick, like shadow puppets for children, inverted. It reminded Viktor of a time when the world had seemed simpler, proved enough to draw out his smile. That alone was its own kind of gratitude; he kissed the tips of those fingers, the ones that troubled his thoughts like a goldfish in a pond: a dance of bright orange, stirring up the waves, and yet:
What purpose had the pond even served, before the fish had been there?
- - -
Six weeks and two days after Beltane (one week and five days to Summer Solstice), 1017 II Age
In the end it was Yuri who settled the matter, unwittingly, perhaps, after two days of detente. He’d perched on a bench outside the pavilion, slicing a sour green apple into quarters, and whether he offered a piece to Viktor out of habit or to make peace would’ve been truly impossible to say.
“You might as well tell him what we all said,” Yuri muttered, “instead of sitting around in a sulk.” Viktor glanced back, and bit into the apple instead of the urge to send out a caustic remark; to fire barbed words instead of flawless arrows. Yura, after all, knew a thing or two about sulking. Nonetheless some of the sentiment must’ve bled over; either that or his brother read his gaze. “You keep this up like you’re all determined to do and he’ll know eventually anyway.”
He hadn’t said it, but the reminder was there: you’ll make him into one of us, so of course he’ll know.
After that he’d wanted to do it right; realized he had no idea whatsoever about what right was, no patience or interest in figuring it out. What he knew was that on the Western edge of the forest there were fields, and in those fields grew flowers, and they’d be harvested in time for the parades of Lughnasadh but they’d perhaps be starting to bud now.
He took Yuuri there because they weren’t in Mosciren and they weren’t in Hasetsuil. Because the markets of Shen-Osheth, with all their wonders, would’ve made for better gifts.
There were sunflowers, though, and those seemed appropriate, though they made it hard to remember his words or really, even, his purpose in making the whole excursion in the first place.
Not when Yuuri kept bending over to brush petals, to smell, to stand there wrapped up in sunlight healthy and hale and so, so golden. So beautiful it made his heart hurt, something Lilia talked about, sometimes, and which Viktor had never really understood until just now.
“Yuuri,” Viktor murmured: “Will you come to solstice with me?”
- - -
Litha (Summer Solstice), 1017 II Age
For the first and only time, Yuuri regretted leaving most of his possessions back in Shen-Osheth. He’d been in travelers’ clothes for weeks, comfortable and easy to wash and sparse, and though he’d probably looked ridiculous riding with the Northern Court, in all their traditional finery, it’d been an explainable difference.
Particularly after an emergency.
This, though, was Litha, a festival, and he’d be going with Viktor, who’d probably look every bit as regal as he had at Beltane. There was nothing to be done about it; even back in Hasetsuil he’d have looked a pauper by compare. Viktor doesn’t care, he reminded himself, so neither should you. Except he knew the way people would talk. Was it wrong to want to be an asset, instead of a piece of baggage to carry around for centuries to come?
Mila popped in, bright and early, more comfortable announcing herself outside of the room he was sharing with Viktor now that some new kind of norm had been established. She was likable, quick, had none of the reticence of her peers: “There’s a summons for you from Jean-Jacques,” she explained, and Viktor rose to attend to it. “Not you, Vitya. Him. It’s for Yuuri.”
Viktor blinked, and then his eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and then he’d shrugged and smirked a little bit on some score Yuuri couldn’t keep. Christophe. “Enjoy that,” quipped Viktor idly, and then he rolled back over, pretending as though he’d really go back to sleep.
It was Christophe who was waiting at the small council, python familiar curled around his arm, hands tucked idly behind his back. “… Jean-Jacques was looking for me?” Yuuri inquired, carefully, and he wasn’t sure he should like the answering grin he received, all crooked mischief, too broad and too bright to be trusted.
“Jean-Jacques is taking the morning off to spend some time with his lover,” Christophe hummed. “Besides, our lesson series has not yet gotten to fashion.” He clicked his tongue together. “The poor boy needs my help. But not so badly as you, I think. Out of the three shirts I’ve noticed you currently own, which shade of travel-worn beige were you actually planning on wearing while you accompany our future King to the festivities?”
Yuuri’s mouth opened and shut again, and then his eyes narrowed, a little bit stubbornly. “The beige that got washed yesterday,” he muttered back. Good, Christophe thought. The halfling had a spine in there somewhere, evidently; he was going to need it, if he intended to spend the rest of his days with Vitya.
Enjoy that, Viktor had said, and Yuuri realized that the High Prince had known exactly what he was in for. Christophe, on the other hand, was in his element, positively delighted, even. “Won’t do at all,” he chided, and shook his head. “Pity we’re not in Shen-Osheth. So many options. You know, everyone’ll be expecting red with you, that’s what everyone says with fire mages, but I think we can do something a little different, don’t you?”
“… do I have any say in this whatsoever?”
“Not particularly. It just makes me feel more polite when I ask.”
- - -
Christophe settled on clothes he wound up borrowing from an all-too-willing Emil: an embroidered tunic with a very faint motif of leaves stitched in pale, amber-colored thread; a navy waistcoat and matching cloak. “Why bother him for all the layers? It’s so hot, nobody’s going to stay in formal attire …” Yuuri, who always seemed to be a few degrees warmer than everyone else he knew, was quick to shrug out of the cloak, though he gently folded it over a nearby chair, too polite to cast off something which hadn’t been his in the first place.
“… Blue is one of his colors, you know,” Christophe murmured. “Not navy, like this, but it’s a nice reference for those of us who still love a little subtlety —“ Nonetheless, he didn’t sound entirely satisfied with his work, and before Yuuri could remark on how strange it was to have Christophe dressing him for the occasion, the empath had given him a sharp look. “I’m not dressing you like me,” he said firmly, and that, at least, Yuuri could believe. Then he’d insisted Yuuri would need a crown of flowers; this was the West, after all, and that Isabella — Jean-Jacques’ consort — made some of the best of them.
He had sunflowers and wheat and sprigs of sage in his hair, now, and he felt more than a little ridiculous walking back across the meadow to the pavilion where the Northerners waited. Crossing the grass, Yuuri’s breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t been wrong to expect Viktor in his silver cloak, in his fine robes; had known well enough what that would look like. It was the shafts of filtered sunlight coming down through the trees, perhaps, some illusion or trick of the light, the blue roses in his hair and the baby’s breath delicately twined through the silver circlet that made up his crown.
It was his smile, slow at first, and then broad; the heart-shaped perfection of his mouth, the endless cerulean brightness of his eyes.
Viktor’s kiss was like that smile, too; soft at first, before it bloomed.
“You clean up well.”
“About that.” Yuuri’s eyes narrowed subtly, but in good humor, because in the radiance of Viktor’s smile it was impossible not to smile back: “Don’t ever put me through that again.”
“Mm.” Viktor’s laugh, intoxicating. “I’ll consider it.”
- - -
Litha, too, was a festival of fire. The Westerners prepared a whole feast; roasting vegetables on open spits of flame, burning sage and incense in balefires carefully arranged near the lake, where none of the woods proper would catch a dangerous spark. They brewed a heady summer ale and they encouraged drinking of far too much of it, contests that left Jean-Jacques and Christophe well and properly drunk together at the encouragement of the rest of their court. Together they all gathered on the a far point of the southern shore, looking across the narrowest part of the lake to a hill on the northern side, where several mages had rowed over to complete one of the evening rituals: rolling a burning cask down the hill and into the lake, a real and physical representation of the waning strength of the sun.
Yuuri looked away, the way he always did this time of year, and Viktor’s fingers found his, twined them back together, squeezed. It was Viktor, too, who brought them back to the bonfires, who completed one leap through the flames but no more, though he watched and cheered when Yuuri did, delighted.
Viktor who pulled him close for the dances, silver fortune twisting on his fingertips.
Neither one of them saw the way Yuri’s eyes followed them around each sweeping circle, studious, attentive. “… He smiles more,” he told Otabek, finally, from where they sat, roasting pieces of fruit on long sticks in front of one of the fires.
“And?”
“It’s okay. It’s good to see him laugh.”
Otabek slipped an arm around Yuri’s waist, rested his chin on his shoulder. Leaning back against the banshee’s chest was comfortable and easy and effortless, and it made the blonde smile sometimes, to reflect on Otabek, a mage of shadows, strong at his back like Yuri’s shadow itself.
He was learning, too: how to detect the subtle mischief of Otabek’s voice, the slivers of contentment and play in its cadence: “I was asking,” murmured Otabek, whose smile deepened as Yuri’s fingers traced wispy patterns on his arm, echoes of the rising smoke, “about you.”
I smile more, too.
- - -
Fire, as it always did, proved a temptation too strong to resist, and Viktor must’ve sensed Yuuri’s impatience, or, at least, the subtle irritation of restraining himself in front of a crowd. “Dance with me again,” he’d whispered, and together they’d snuck away, back to the meadow and the two empty pavilions, away from the revelers who’d remain on the southern point for hours to come. Both cloaks lay folded over benches; Yuuri added the waistcoat to the pile, rolled up his sleeves.
Now Viktor stood opposite of him, with that thoughtful, piercing look that left Yuuri feeling exposed. At first that gaze had been unpleasant; too all-seeing, entirely too capable of ripping out his secrets. Now he had no secrets left. There was a strange, thrilling freedom in that. “What are you waiting for?”
Viktor held out one hand, and around his fingers curled the silvery threads of fortune, the whites and blues of ice and sea. “… If we do this, we’re going to finish it.”
The dance at Beltane.
What was it about Viktor that made it so easy to expand on his boundaries? After the first Samhain with the phoenix, Yuuri had sworn off the idea of bringing someone with him into the spirit’s cycles of death and resurrection, and then Viktor had come to him at Beltane, had moved as though he knew precisely where Yuuri was going to be, had incredible magic that reached for his. Viktor who stood looking at him now with eyes that haunted Yuuri’s dreams, with a subtle, patient smile.
Viktor whose heartbeat he remembered being so solid, so steady. Yuuri took his hand, an answering gold pooling in his palm, and then the world began to turn again on the perfect circles of their steps, and the dance of the phoenix, the dart and chase of the stag, the sheer ribbons of vermillion and azure, of silver and gold.
This time when he heard it, steady and lulling as a distant drumbeat, Yuuri didn’t run away.
“… You have such a fast heartbeat,” Viktor whispered, as he caught Yuuri by the waist, drew him closer as the magic knots around their entwined fingers circled more tightly, and sank into skin. The intentionality of it this time, struck him suddenly. There was a greater intimacy in this; this choosing, not because of the strange, irresistible chemistry of their magic or the ease of their bodies, but because of the knowing that had come out of their two tales, unveiled now.
Like a hummingbird.
At Beltane there had still been hidden mysteries, the worst they both had to offer, the parts they’d both admitted to keeping hidden at Shen-Osheth.
It had not been a lie, Beltane, but this was truer-truth.
Yuuri wasn’t sure who initiated the kiss this time, but it was fierce and firm and deep, not a siren song or a pyre, though he lost himself to it all the same. This was a benediction; this was a blessing. This was creation-song and good luck and red, red apples and life.
Viktor learned something else about that answering heartbeat, once he’d gotten Yuuri inside, and out of the tunic, dropping kisses down the line of the halfling’s throat and then onto the bared plane of his chest.
Yuuri’s skin felt electric under his touch; his chest twisted, tightened, not painfully, but:
Thump-thump. Thumpthump. Thumpthumpthumpthump.
Viktor let his fingers trail over the sensitive skin of abdomen, tug on the waistband of pants, trace hipbones. “Oh,” the Prince all but purred, grinning in the dark at Yuuri’s tell-tale, quickening heartbeat as his lover flushed, a blush that started over the bridge of his nose and spread, and which Viktor had every shameless intention to encourage.
There were places he’d been thinking about kissing for weeks, and if all of them did this, had Yuuri’s pulse quickening in the back of his thoughts, such a clear, physical reaction to a stimuli he was more than willing to provide, then … “Oh, Yuuri,” he hummed, delighted, and he knelt, which was simultaneously the strangest, most obscene, most magical, and most beautiful thing Yuuri had ever seen: the High Elf Prince on his knees, playing the worst kinds of tricks on his butterfly heart:
“… This is going to be entirely too much fun.”