Broken Things
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Warnings: See all previous warnings re: depictions of m/m and m/f sexual activities. And dubious consent. And depressive thoughts.
During the day, she'd be on the periphery of the royal court, half honored guest and half pitied refugee. Raquesis came and went as she pleased and used the opportunities to drop in on Finn when he wasn't expecting her- at least until he learned he might expect her any day, at any possible time. Sometimes she did assist him in keeping Lord Leif amused. Sometimes she simply wanted to talk. Most of the time, though, she came to him expecting a fucking.
They fucked in the crumbling old bathhouse and beneath an overgrown pergola. They fucked in the stables. They fucked in a closet on the same floor as Lord Leif's apartments. Most of these encounters didn't last a quarter of an hour. She'd undo his trousers, he'd hike up her skirt, and it'd be over so fast that Finn didn't even know why they felt it was worth the risk of being caught.
In the event they did get caught, Finn intended to plead madness.
This particular evening, they'd overcome these exhibitionist leanings and were making love like civilized people- in her house and on a bed, not standing up in some dank closet or balanced on the back of a horse. She was spread out before him, her hair flowing across the pillows and her rosy nipples aimed at the ceiling.
She felt like gelatine inside, Finn thought as he stroked her with two fingers. Slippery and smooth like the fancy concoctions at Agustrian banquets. He tried to think of something more appropriately romantic, of rose petals moistened by dew and other images from song, but his thoughts kept drifting back to blobs of gelatine.
It got everywhere. Love-making with her left a glistening trail. There was so much of this stuff that it seemed their bodies rarely generated the kind of heat that he'd expected. They didn't generate much tonight, at least not as Finn felt it; he slipped inside of her without facing any resistance from her flesh or muscle, and when he began to thrust she responded with a stifled giggle.
"What's funny?"
"I had a sudden thought of this bakery in Zaxon. They made these odd little bread rolls tied in a knot, like a pair of folded arms. I don't know why that popped in my head just now."
"Ah," he said, not bothered at all by the idea that Raquesis was thinking of bakeries in Silesse when they were supposed to be making love. For all he knew, she was thinking of Lord Eldigan every night they spent together. If anything, it relieved him to hear her mind was on other things; that meant Finn didn't have to be troubled so much over his own thoughts whenever their bodies were joined.
-x-
"She has a smile that promises things," said Glade as they walked back from another lengthy session at the White Horse.
"What kinds of things?"
"I don't know. She looked at me once and I wasn't sure if she was going to try to seduce me or if she was going to call for me to be hauled off and shot."
Finn wondered for a moment if this might be a joke, but the sour turn to Glade's mouth indicated no joke was meant. Glade had nothing more to say on the subject of Raquesis, at least until they reached Finn's door and Glade made to turn and depart.
"Aren't you coming in?"
"I wasn't planning to," said Glade, and Finn- his hand already upon the door- felt a scrabbling moment of something like panic as he looked back at his friend.
Was Glade trying to tell him that something had changed, that things had to be different now? Because of Raquesis?
"Eh, I'm not needed anywhere tonight," Glade said after a moment, even as Finn was vowing to himself to tell Raquesis no the next time she popped up looking for amusement. And then things were normal again, with the two of them rushing up the stairs and Finn pulling at the buttons of Glade's black silk shirt. Glade's arm looked more impressively contoured than Finn remembered, and Finn wondered if Glade hadn't been putting in additional workouts when Finn was off engaged... elsewhere.
"And use some oil this time," Glade said as Finn pushed him down onto the bed. "Last time I was pretty sore afterward."
"Sure."
Even with a slick of oil to lessen the friction between their thighs, there was far more heat in Glade's taut body than Finn ever got out of Raquesis in her gooey softness. Finn wasn't desperately trying to summon up images of romance when he felt the stubble on Glade's cheek against his lips or Glade's firm shoulders flexing beneath his fingers. Soon enough they'd reversed position so that Glade was the one pinning Finn to the bed, and the sheer abandonment of letting Glade take control was nothing at all like the rote procedure of giving Raquesis a ride.
Even as Finn left an incipient bruise on Glade's collarbone with his lips, a question that couldn't be suppressed any longer rose up and he had to break free and voice it.
"Can't you go deeper?"
Finn saw Glade's eyes narrow in the dim evening light.
"Huh? Deeper how?"
"You know... inside."
"Oh, that. Yeah, we can give it a try."
Prince Quan had always used the bed, but Glade never pretended to be anything but a common military man in the bedroom and Finn didn't want him to put on airs of being Quan anyway, so they did it up against the wall with no more ceremony than reckless boys in the barracks. Glade hesitated for a moment before committing himself fully, but Finn was already seeing flashes of green and blue light behind his eyes just from Glade's hesitant prodding.
"Go on."
"Really?"
"Do it!"
After that, Finn didn't have the ability to form words, not until things were done and Glade was cleaning himself up. Glade was rougher than Quan, lacked Quan's delicate touch, but if anything Finn enjoyed himself more for it. Everything almost hurt, or maybe it did hurt, and that was just fine.
"Thank you," he said, between two jagged breaths.
"I'm just kind of surprised you liked all that," Glade replied as he glanced up from the soiled rag in his hand.
Finn wanted to say that the explosions of colors in his head might have been the best single experience he'd felt in years, but Glade looked skeptical enough of the whole mess that he didn't.
"It was indescribable," he offered.
"That covers a whole range of experiences," said Glade.
For the rest of the night, both before Glade took his leave and long after, Finn couldn't shake away the feeling that, this time, they'd perhaps gone a little too far.
-x-
Raquesis met him in the street in the morning; they walked together through the castle gates and then took a meandering path. Patches of mist hung ghostlike above the earth, making the familiar sights a little eerie. They took a detour by the practice yard and paused to watch as Glade led his third-years through their morning calisthenics.
"That's your friend? I've seen him once or twice before."
"That's Glade, yes."
"He has beautiful calves," she murmured.
The plain gray costume of the exercise yard didn't suit Glade the way his black shirt did, but the short trousers did show off his calves, and Finn acknowledged the truth in her statement.
"Such gloomy days," she said as they doubled back, headed for Lord Leif's apartments.
"It's fitting enough, given the times."
Autumn always did seem to last more than its share of the year in Leonster, stretching from the first cool nights at the summer's end to well past the official start to winter. It would seem gloomy to her, though; in Agustria it was summer that outstayed its welcome, as three unbroken months of blue skies with no trace of cloud left one longing for a good hard rain.
Today, the skies hinted at a rain that never came, and by ten that morning the fog burned away in patches to show elusive glimpses of the deep blue sky beyond. They took Lord Leif for a walk beyond the confines of his little courtyard to a garden that Princess Ethlyn had favored during her too-brief time in Leonster. Some lilies she'd brought from Chalphy were still in bloom; Finn held up Lord Leif so the prince could sniff at the blossoms that his mother had liked so much. Leif was not terribly impressed by the exotic lilies and instead plopped down onto the path and did his best to earnestly explain to them some thing whose grave import was encoded in a string of "fa," "ba," and "da."
"Lord Leif thinks we should have brought along his red bird," said Finn, referring to a soft toy the prince favored in recent months. "He's right and I'm sorry we didn't."
"If you say so. All I got out of it is that he thinks you're his father," said Raquesis as they both settled down on the ground at Leif's level. "Oh, don't look like that. It only makes sense; he sees more of you than almost anyone, including his own grandfather."
"We've been trying to teach him otherwise. He's shown portraits of his parents every morning and night so he knows their faces." And yet, Lord Leif still reached out for his nanny when asking for "nana" and hadn't once said the sacred word "mama" in response to Lady Ethlyn's portrait.
"Leif loves you," she said then, even as Leif settled into Finn's lap with a satisfied grunt.
"He shouldn't."
"It doesn't make you feel a least a little bit proud?" He didn't answer, didn't look at her, and when she spoke again her voice sounded less collected. "Well, then, how does it make you feel?"
"Inadequate."
"The Finn I remember from Silesse had more spirit than this."
"The Finn you remember has been idle so long he doesn't know his own purpose. Maybe if we move against Thracia he'll recover some of that spirit."
Perhaps he didn't entirely believe that himself, though. That might be why he was busy scrubbing a yellow dusting of pollen off Lord Leif's cheek while Raquesis spoke to the back of his head.
"You really want another war?"
"It seems we're getting a war whether we want it or not, and if we're to have a war then I want to win it." In case that wasn't unequivocal enough for her liking, he added, "I want to tear a hole through King Travant's gut and watch him die like an animal."
"Sounds fair," she offered. She'd taken one of the lily blossoms and had pulled it apart while they spoke, and now she let the mangled petals slip between her fingers. Finn looked at the rust-red remains of Ethlyn's lilies and decided that this was something he quite liked about Raquesis. She understood vengeance.
She understood what was necessary.
That said, on the small scale of their daily tasks Raquesis wanted something other than bloody revenge. Tonight she wanted a dinner, a proper evening dinner like the nobles had in Agustria, and this time he was happy to give it to her... not least because it wasn't an invitation into a closet or some abandoned building. They met at a smart place quite unlike the White Horse, one with foreign wine in the cellar and where the serving girls were probably not prostitutes. They were seated at the nicest table, the one beneath a small balcony draped in greenery, and for a moment it was almost like the good days in Agusty when they were all heroes.
They had the imported wine, which was good enough, and they ordered the dish this establishment was known for, beef wrapped in pastry. As they waited for the meal, sipping red wine from Miletos, the conversation stayed far from topics like the imminent war and the prospect of gutting King Travant, and far from the tangled string of tragedies that led a princess of Agustria to this improbable dinner in Leonster.
Finn had the thought that Raquesis looked especially pretty, with color in her face that matched the the froth of lace around her neck, white and pink like berries mashed into cream. The colors kept distracting him and it took a long moment before Finn realized the import of that band of lace. She'd laid off mourning entirely. Not a scrap of gray, or black, or even violet- just a soft blue dress edged in lace and colorful jewels in her ears.
"Is this a celebration?" Finn sorted through his memories for some anniversary of note that he'd blanked upon and came up empty.
"Maybe," she said, and offered him that cryptic smile that "promised things," as Glade put it. She then confessed to him that she was carrying a child, with said child due in a scant five months.
"I didn't want to trouble you until I was certain," she said.
Finn heard himself promising to marry her straightaway, heard it as though he were sitting at another table and watching some other person say what had to be said. He wasn't shocked, though, nor even surprised. He had no right to be surprised; what did he think the end result of all those furtive encounters in the dark might be?
After this revelation they had the roast beef with small mushrooms tucked under the crust and Raquesis insisted on a syllabub for dessert. Finn supposed it was all good, as Raquesis seemed happy, but by the time they left the restaurant he couldn't recall how any part of the meal had tasted. The syllabub had been very pretty, crowned with coils of sugar and candied violets, and that was all he remembered. Once he'd escorted his new fiancee to her home and dropped her off with a kiss, Finn stood a while in the street beneath the linden trees contemplating the shape of his own house in the darkness.
"I didn't realize when I asked to buy this place that I'd end up in more trouble instead of less."
That came out wrong, he decided, or at least it didn't express the scope of "trouble" properly. Wanting some space away from Quan and Ethlyn and from the burden of being on call every hour of the night no matter what his formal duties were just wasn't of the same magnitude as the sort of trouble he and Raquesis were presently in.
"Sometimes, I think I must do these things because..."
Because I don't much like myself.
He tried to cut the thought off before it formed silently in his head, but the thought materialized anyway, and once it existed he couldn't argue with it. If, in that moment, the street had opened up into a vast yawning chasm and the houses and the linden trees had all slid down into the void- and Finn with them- he might have been pleased by this.
But then, there was the baby to consider.
There always was something.
To Be Continued
A/N: In my headcanon, Finn got the house in the first place because being Quan's pet really was kind of problematic and he wanted to establish some degree of independence from his master. And then he felt even worse about Quan'n'Ethlyn meeting their untimely end.
I also don't find him particularly straight, but I think he can be talked into things when faced with a strong enough personality. Raquesis certainly has that.
