Then, Tell Me What You'll Do To Me
a brief foray into Genso Suikoden V
by Mithrigil Galtirglin
Gizel loved words.
Actively.
Unconditionally.
"Shh!"
Perhaps the way he'd loved his mother, when she was alive.
"This way!"
He brought them flowers he'd picked himself, and pretended to escort them across veins of traffic, when they were really guiding him.
"In here?"
"In here."
He studied them, their nuances, how others treated them, their deceptive strength.
"Get down!"
When he touched them, he was cautious, as if his presence did them a disservice; he was, somehow, lesser than they.
"Where—"
They'd come to the woods for words. Gizel and Sialeeds, that is, not the words themselves. The words went wherever they pleased and did whatever they wished. Gizel and Sialeeds, conversely…well, when Stormfist guards showed up in the forest beyond the fortress, the young aristocrats had to run from them, even if they weren't being chased.
Especially if they weren't being chased.
Gizel whirled around to shut the cabin door, as quickly and quietly as he could. When he turned back, Sialeeds was nowhere to be seen. It didn't occur to Gizel to worry—she'd been there a second ago, had probably found some place to hide already—and besides, he also had to save himself. A breakneck assessment of the room revealed few hiding places for a young man of Gizel's stature; the wardrobe was too short and frail, the table and chairs round and undressed, the rug absent. Without a word, he dropped to his knees and wriggled under the bed, feet first, torso following, closing his eyes to the wafting dust.
He was face to face with Sialeeds when he opened his eyes again.
They both lay on their sides, or mostly. She had claimed the position along the wall, her knees delicately bent to accommodate her long legs, hands clasped between her breasts as if that would make her smaller. He was nearly on his side, facing her only because of how he'd decided to slink in, tilting to allow for his widening shoulders and the cut of his summer jacket. Their legs nearly touched, but there was at least a palm's breadth between their faces, enough so that when they burst out laughing they could see every feature of the other's. Sialeeds' eyes sparkled amid her pale silver lashes, and she wrinkled her nose, either at Gizel or the dust. She could barely see his cheeks flushing.
They laughed; they shushed each other; they lay there and stared. It occurred to Gizel that he was dancing with death, lying half-petrified under a bed with the heir apparent to Falena's throne. Something welled up in his heart, then, and he felt the warmth leave his cheeks, perspiring gently into the sanded wood floor. He wondered if he would feel this way were she not breaking so many rules just to be here, with him.
God, how he wanted to touch her. But then, even the agony was exhilarating.
They listened to the threat, what little of it there was, pass, in the form of trampling feet and barked orders. Apparently the bandits had never left the Stormfist guards' sights, and the cabin was safer even than it had looked. Sialeeds sighed and shook her head in relief, almost catching her silver hair in the bedsprings, falling out of its twist in thick, humid curls. Outside, the shouts and footsteps faded, and even the wind ceased to rustle.
He caught Sialeeds' eyes again—she'd been glancing down between their bodies, perhaps thinking some of the same things Gizel had been, if he wanted to flatter himself by entertaining the thought. She was two years his senior, and if she'd been more inclined to the elegant arts to which her elder sister ascribed he'd have been horribly intimidated. As it stood, he was always on guard around her, even if their adventures grew more daring as they became more familiar with each other. In the imposed absence of touch, there were many words between them. Even their silences carried a few.
They lay there a minute even after the breeze returned beyond the cabin window, more intent on each other than the absent danger. In the end it was only a glaring discomfort in his shoulder and the increasing tightness of his cravat that prompted Gizel to move. With an admittedly sheepish nod, he carefully excised himself from under the bed, patted the dust off his jacket and jodhpurs, and stepped back to allow Sialeeds to slink out as well. Any other woman would almost demand him to hold out his hand and help her to her feet; the rules surrounding her position disallowed even that courtesy.
She slapped the dust off her clothes even more harshly than he had, and ran her fingers through her hair, which actually mussed it further. She looked up at Gizel when she was done, and he imagined his smile was just as almost-awkward, with low eyelids and a knowing flicker at the corner of his lip.
"You were pretty careful not to touch me," she said, raising an eyebrow as if she'd expected otherwise.
Gizel stepped back slightly, not quite feigning offense, but knowing that the situation had to be lightened somehow. "You seem to think I take up more space than you. I'd say, figuring my shoulders for your—"
"Stuff it, Gizel," she snapped, more petulant than angry.
"But of course," he drawled, smirking and bowing half at the waist.
The roll of her eyes was slightly derisive, but she continued to smile, betraying, perhaps, pride. "You came close a few times, though."
"Well, Sialeeds, we were under a bed," Gizel offered, turning up a palm and cocking his head as if to shrug. "You're already expecting miracles for me not to touch you at all—what do you want, for the moon and stars to crawl under your very skin and proclaim to all who behold you, 'she is a goddess'?"
He'd truly flattered her, he realized. Her cheeks sank softly and her smirk parted, and she even glanced out the window, over his shoulder.
The words went wherever they pleased. "Besides," he went on with a smirk of his own, "you wanted it."
She turned back to him and scoffed. "You're horrible."
"Am I?"
"Correct, but horrible," she said, too plainly to be entirely a joke.
"If I didn't actually agree with the rules attached to your position, I'd wonder why you hadn't broken them yet." Only after he said this did he realize it was a rather strong compliment, however true.
"Honestly?" Sialeeds asked before Gizel could brood on the matter further. "Because you wanted it too. It's one of the few things you're forthcoming about," she added with a renewed smile.
"And you enjoy it when I don't get what I want," he offered, smirking back.
"No, you enjoy when you don't get what you want. It gives you something to do."
"So by not giving me what I want, you're giving me what I want?"
She sighed. "I cannot wait for you to grow up and turn the Senate on its head."
Gizel suppressed the urge to betray all the pride he felt at that particular comment. "You look forward to words."
Outside, the wind rustled particularly loudly, and hundreds of thick leaves brushed against each other heavily. Both Sialeeds and Gizel quickly darted glances out the window. Sialeeds was the first to turn back, shaking her head self-deprecatingly. "This surprises you?"
"Considering words are all we're allowed to have right now," Gizel said as he regarded her again, "I venture we'll grow sick of them."
All traces of nervousness on her face dissipated. "All right, this I have to hear you try and justify," she said, putting a hand on her hip and raising her eyebrows daringly.
Again, Gizel turned up his palms in offering, his innocence part earnest, part exaggerated. "Don't you think that when we're actually permitted to do all the things we're thinking about doing—and I assume you're contriving at least some of the same things—that we'll give up on words, if just for a while? I mean," he went on, lowering his voice a little, "one can't very well talk when one's lips—"
"I'm one to think that the instant you're allowed to get your paws on me, you'll completely lose interest and go chasing after Alenia," Sialeeds interrupted, with a knuckle raised to her lips as if she was appraising a sculpture.
"You don't give yourself enough credit." Besides, he thought to himself, cousin Alenia makes things too easy.
Sialeeds tossed her hair gently and chided, "You'll never get sick of chatter."
"Then tell me what you'll do to me," he said before he could stop himself.
"What?"
"Tell me what you'll do to me, the next time I come close to touching you." He forced the words out quicker than they need have been, perhaps because he was afraid to hesitate. "If I'm going to grow up and lose interest, give me an idea of what I'll be missing." He wondered if the sweat under his collar had been there since running from the guards, or if it was a recent development.
"…You really are horrible," she said, batting her eyelashes at the floor.
"You need not come up with a new situation. In fact, why not just go with what you would have done to me back there," he gestured at the bed, "if you felt like breaking the rules? I'm interested to hear," he concluded, even though he was more interested in taking the focus of the conversation off himself.
By her narrow eyes he was half-expecting—and half-hoping, even—for her to say 'I'dve kicked you in the shins'. She'd throw a barb, and he would parry, and the thread of thought would fray and never have to be taken up again.
The words went wherever they pleased. "Well, then…" she began with a proud smirk that signaled to Gizel precisely how far over his head those words had buried him, "if I remember correctly, the most logical part of you to have touched me, lying there like we were, would have been your knee against my thigh. Probably an accident," she added, tapping her clear fingernails on her leg to demonstrate. "I'm not sure if you'd blush or pretend to ignore it or apologize…probably pretend to ignore it, but in a way that made it quite clear to me that you were pretending to ignore it. Your breath would catch. Like this—" She drew in a low, sharp gasp that made her chest heave slightly, once, from her abdomen up, then burst out giggling, briefly.
Even before Gizel could chastise himself for so obviously regarding her breasts, Sialeeds went on, considering dramatically with a long finger curled under her upturned chin. "So, hm…I'd probably wait a while, half a minute, and try to make you think I thought it wasn't an accident." Her expression was somewhere between a pout and a smirk. "I'd get a little closer to you, try and get you in the same knee, with the same thigh…that'd catch your eyes. I think I'd take your hand—no, your wrist. Slowly. Maybe just get it with my knuckles and make you think you're hallucinating."
"I probably would. Believe I was hallucinating, I mean," Gizel admitted. To be honest with himself, he was not entirely sure he was lucid at the moment. The thought of how happy Sialeeds would be, knowing how in her thrall she had him, kept him on a reticent sort of guard.
"Liar," she said as if she knew. "You'd take one look at me and know exactly what I was doing." With another toss of her hair and a redoubled smirk, she sat back on the bed with her palms leaning on the coverlet, glancing out the window at a passing shadow. She seemed softer to him. "You wouldn't try anything funny as long as the guards were outside, that much I know…so I'd probably wind up trying to make you take the blame. Lure you in, you know?"
"How?"
"Hm…well, as you so love to make clear, I have breasts. If I move my shoulders backward just a little—" she said, and did, "—I give the illusion of being closer to you. Plus, if my hand was still near your wrist, it'd move too."
Gizel hid behind a composed smile. "And what if I just dove in and kissed you?"
"And ruin a perfectly good intrigue?"
"No."
"You've said it yourself, you agree with the rules." She smiled back at him, and tossed her hair, and it gleamed in the light from the window now that the shadow she'd been watching pass was gone. "But you wouldn't be breaking them if I was the one to touch you, technically…" She trailed off, leaning back a little and glancing at the ceiling. She seemed, to Gizel…relaxed, even. He wondered what he had done to make her so apparently comfortable. "Hm, I think I would probably get myself all the way to the wall, just so it would look as bad as possible when Galleon or whoever barged in."
"I'd let you," he said in a heartbeat.
"I know." Her eyes were almost too…serious, honest, as she slid along the bedcovers to sit with her back against the wall, leaning slightly forward and adjusting her shoulders, as if testing for an idea. "I think, if I only had my knuckles against you at this point, I'd have to move on…how sensitive are you between the bones of your arm?" Her question was sudden, probably meant to catch Gizel off guard. "I mean, it might not matter in the jacket you're wearing right now, I don't think if I got my fingers up your sleeve I'd have much control over where they touched."
"I—" Gizel began, to prevent himself from gulping childishly.
"It doesn't matter," she said quickly, almost apologetically shaking her head. "I'd stop. As soon as I could tell that you noticed, I'd stop." She looked up at him, and could have whispered, but said clearly instead, "You'd have to come to me."
"I—"
"You would, though. I know you would." She raised her arms over her head and stretched, too naturally to be for his benefit. "But you still wouldn't touch me," she said with the strained yawn to her voice that often came when people were more intent on their bodies than their words. "Not intentionally, at least. Maybe you'd get me with your knees again. But no, you'd get right in my face without laying a finger on me. Probably eye-to-eye…which means…come here, a moment." Her voice had softened a little, the way her cheeks had when he called upon the moon and stars, earlier.
He sat on the edge of the bed, beside her, with only the politest of hesitation. She pushed off the wall and inched forward again, to hang her legs over the bed's edge—close, again, but not touching, as she assessed something about the positions of their bodies.
"Yes," she concluded to an unvoiced question, "your torso is longer than mine." She looked up—up, he realized, when did that happen?—at him and explained. "You'd have had to lower yourself in order to get face-to-face with me, which means my hands would be higher…"
He was more intent on her eyes at the moment, but hands were a pleasant thought. "…and you would…?"
There was something very distant about they way she responded, as if she was moving a marker along a gameboard. "Put my hand on your hip," she said. "The way you'd do to me if we were dancing. The way they do in the islands, I mean. But only for a second. It…" her speech had gotten more harried, and here it stopped, short, "…it was the first thing to come to mind. Probably not the best idea. Besides, I wouldn't be able to feel any of your skin that way, and that's the whole point of this, right? You, not your clothes." Again, she trailed off, "So…so I'd probably reach up to your hair. I've always wondered how it was physically different than mine…"
Inwardly, he could tell that she was trying to deviate from the subject…but he found his own voice lowering, tilting forward to get a closer look at her windblown and dust-raked once-regal twist. "Thinner," he muttered. "I mean, the strands themselves are thinner. I can see that from here…"
"It looks soft. In contrast to the rest of you." She was just as quiet.
"A compliment."
She sighed, "Men," and lolled her head—very close to Gizel's shoulder, he noticed, if she did not. "They think being coarse is a good thing. I imagine you're not as stony as you look," she went on, looking up at his face again as if to amend an almost-mistake, "you know…you missed a spot shaving this morning…"
Gizel reached up self-consciously and touched his fingertips to the place she seemed to be peering at. She's right. "Thank you," he said, finding her eyes.
He found them. He found himself unable to describe them, even to himself. The words regrouped and assaulted his sinuses, curious horrified audacious thirsty scared "Keep your hand there—" she whispered, rather choked, raising her own hand dubiously, "—no, don't press it, just leave it there. Like you're only touching the hair, not the skin."
With his eyes locked on hers, Gizel complied. He could feel his blinking slow and the eyelids retreat. He was so nervous that even his curiosity was dwarfed by the tightness in his chest. He was struck by the warmth in her eyes, as if she'd seen and coveted and almost felt ashamed. Outside, a bird warbled, strangulated and guttural but oh, how it needed to speak. Gizel knew how it felt.
"…Lower your hand," Sialeeds whispered, her own right hand hovering just out of reach of his. "Slowly. To your chin." Her voice cracked, the way Gizel kept telling himself his would finally stop doing.
He did as she said. His fingertips were barely on his cheek at all, but his skin ran cold through every spidery nerve.
"There," she said when his fingers were just under his lips. Why was her breathing so ragged, he wondered. "Now—"
Gizel knew her request before she could voice it. He almost didn't want to hear her describe it aloud. His lips were slightly parted as he rested his fingertips on the lower one, unable to escape her eyes. She blinked, and her lashes were a flash of silver, a sprite's cage in that one flickering moment and still not enough to keep that expression-beyond-words inside her. He felt his ring-finger trembling, drifting away from the surface of his skin, and he closed his lips, his eyes, and even tilted his face away. "Sialeeds…"
Her voice wavered, troubled, the way she'd sounded the first time he'd said too much. "Don't stop that…"
He looked up, back into her eyes, what he thought was a bit more daringly, his fingers still on his chin.
He noticed that her hand, still uncertain, was also trembling. He'd seen that expression on the face of the first man he'd wounded, shirking from touching the gash on his face for fear that would make it real. "Keep…keep your lips closed. But—"
Again, he understood. He tried to keep his eyes on hers, and drew his middle finger across his lips, with the same ghost-touch she'd tried to elucidate before. He couldn't help but part his lips a little, and was aware of his breath, and hoped it wasn't as loud as it felt.
"Down," she whispered when he eyed her uncertainly. "Past your chin to your neck." Her voice was a scant breath as she watched him follow her words, and he wondered if she actually felt the same stinging chills under her skin. "Softer than that…yes. Right where your head meets your neck…"
Again, his ring finger ended up moving lower, past his collar, instinctively. He turned up his chin, and for some reason she edged back suddenly. Her hand caught on the hem of his jacket where it lay pooled on the covers, and the gesture tugged his hand down as far as his chest. He stopped, hunched forward urgently, his fist resting high as if swearing an oath, and looked straight into her wary eyes.
"You wouldn't have stopped there," he breathed, low.
"Who are you to tell me what I wouldn't have done?" she challenged, and he could tell she was angry but not with him.
"If you had I would…" When the words abandoned him, he closed his eyes, moistened his lips, and took a deep breath to summon them back. "Sialeeds, close your eyes."
"You're not going to—"
Bring your hands up to your face," he commanded in a whisper, quickly. "Get your hair out of the way..."
He watched as she did so, and he caught her also moistening her lips, only because she bit the lower one so…nervously, almost. She touched her fingertips to her cheeks once she'd brushed the stray silver hairs aside, and to the deeper patches under her eyes, and Gizel felt his throat rake dry at the thought of those hands surrogating his own.
"Keep…keep one hand on your cheek. And your eyes, closed…could you…" he didn't want to plead, but his body didn't seem to understand anything but imagination, "…could you just touch your eyelashes?" He sounded young, and he hated that he sounded young, but the words went whatever they pleased. "They've…always fascinated me. Don't ever paint them like your sister does."
"I won't," she whispered.
"Don't…" The hitch, crack, in his voice seemed to make Sialeeds open her eyes, first darting at the hand he'd brought back to his collar, resting the way she'd been trying to get him to, stroking downward around the bridge of his jacket and cravat. Something drew her eyes back to his, smoldering, like pale grey coals about to die. "Don't change."
Her breath caught and eyes widened. The smallest finger of her right hand drifted across her open lower lash, so quickly it may have been an accident, and Gizel could swear the hairs had pricked his hand as she gulped in air, parched, her chest rising in pulses. "Would you…would you kiss me?"
"I…"
She inched back along the bed until she was against the wall again, and lay down lengthwise, just as she had under it. "If…" she tried to say, too dry to be a sigh but too free to be anything else. "…I mean, if I'd done all that…"
With his fingers still along his neck, Gizel sank down to face her, as they had lain, but still he made no move to touch her. "I think…"
"I…I'd let you."
"I know."
They were practically against each other, she with her back to the wall, he bending just slightly, so that his chest did not press against hers. He reached up an arm as if to touch her face, but hesitated, shaking, his palm meeting only humid summer air. He watched, paralyzed, as she wormed a hand toward his collar, but stopped, mere specs of dust away from his sweating skin.
"…Your hair's still in your eyes," he said.
"Yes…"