WARNING: Adult, sexual content ahead. This little piece should probably be rated M.

Her Infinite Variety

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety ~ Antony and Cleopatra, Act II Scene II.

Elika.

Elika refused to open her eyes. There was no one in the room. No one. She knew it, just as she knew that she was alive again, that she was alone. Alone in the decrepit old inn room three coppers could buy, alone in the strange city full of such unfriendly faces, alone in the world...

No. The last one wasn't quite true. Elika fisted her hand in the sheets. She knew it wasn't true. It couldn't be. She would find her people, and then they would defeat Ahriman together and...

Elika.

It was torture, but she did not open her eyes. The echo was a figment of her imagination, she was sure of it. As it was, she'd almost bolted out of the rough bed the first three times she'd heard it. Not just because it was her name, but because it was him. She knew it. No one else pronounced her name that way, rolled it in their mouth like a godsend, a saviour, a life. She knew the echo was of him, and it galled her that she knew it. Galled her that it was following her around after she'd left him behind, damn it.

She hadn't thought his voice would follow her around in her thoughts.

His voice, whispering her name.

Elika.

It wasn't always a whisper. Sometimes it was a shout, full of fear and anger. He'd done that a few times in their two days together. Two days. Huh. She had heard her name for her entire lifetime of over two decades, and two days was all it took for her name to be imbued with something different, something richer, something that she didn't want.

Sometimes it was a cry, a plea for help, a prayer. Elika! When he was falling, and she was his only hope, his only light.

Elika rolled over, but kept her eyes shut. Two days it had taken to impress the memory of her name on his lips on her mind forever. Two days since she'd left him clutching at air. She was lingering in this city now, she knew. She should have moved on. But when she'd realised she had no food or water, and that people weren't going to give her anything for free, what else could she have done but stayed?

And she wasn't him, she wasn't a thief, so she did the only thing she could think of. Elika had pride, but she also had principles, and she convinced herself that if she was on the street, begging, she might find someone who knew where she could go next. Who knew how to find her people.

As it was, she'd found a lot of strangers were quite happy to walk past beggars, and a lot more who spat insults or leered. It was only after a group of them had stepped close and suggested things that made her ears burn, promising they'd pay her good money, that she'd snapped and blown them away.

That had earned her three coppers from a quivering bully. One in a thousand of them. Three coppers she'd immediately blown on lodgings from the approaching cold desert night.

"Elika."

This time, despite her stubbornness, Elika's eyes shot open and found the wall. The wall, and the shadow on it, outlined perfectly by the ghostly moonlight pouring through the curtains.

The curtains she was certain she'd closed.

No, it can't be.

A step. Not a phantom one - they'd been haunting her as well. It seemed she was so used to hearing the sound of his shoes, him running, him walking, him fighting that in the oddest moments she'd hear them again in the heartbeat of the crowd or through the boisterous din of the least hideous little place she'd checked into that would accept three coppers for a single room.

Another step.

"No." She said out loud, as if to deny the possibility. And, because Ahriman hated her, he spoke right back.

"Elika," he said softly, and that was all it took. Cold shot through her gut, clenched her throat closed and ripped her stomach open. She had never heard her name on his lips like that. The syllables seemed wrenched from a throat of sand, pouring as precious as water in the dry desert. It was more than a prayer, it was a quiet demand, and as the cold seized her she couldn't stay still any more. Fighting against the icy terror underneath the blazing anger, Elika turned and stood and glared.

It was a look that could have broke a lesser man to pieces, could have sent him running, could have made him cower, could have made him flinch. She wasn't aware of when she'd summoned her magic, but it glowed around her like a divine aura, highlighting the shadows in her face and the declivity in her mouth and making her an avenging angel of Heaven.

And of course, he just looked straight back at her, his heart on his face, and said "Elika."

It was like a breath of air on a glowing flame. She became a firestorm. Incandescent. "Ormazd take you! Why are you here?! I told you I was doing this alone!"

She did not question a small part of her that unfurled at his presence, a part that had expected this all along. A part that... no, she would not admit that. It wasn't possible. She covered up her confusion with more anger, until she thought she would swell with it and it would spill over into tears of blue fire.

"You ignorant bastard," she hissed. "You idiot. Why did you come after me?"

It looked like he might speak, interrupt at that, but she sure as Hell wasn't going to let him. He didn't deserve that. Didn't deserve a breath. The fact that she was sure she would break if he said her name again like he had was not one that she was even going to acknowledge. "To screw it up again! To fail!"

She ruthlessly pushed past the hurt look on his face, the one that she would never have expected in a million years. What right did he have to look hurt? "Or were you coming to gloat? Did you think I couldn't do it by myself? Well guess what! I can!"

The expression on his face was indescribable now. She didn't want to put words to it, afraid of what they might mean. And so instead of trying, she shored up her last weapon, sharpening the blade until it gleamed, and then brought it down with all her strength.

"I. DON'T. NEED. YOU!"

The words tore from her like a tsunami, took a life of their own. She half expected them to form a whirlwind that would rock him off his feet, send him crashing to the ground. But instead, to her shock, the wind seemed to part around him, and when the gale had blown itself out, he still stood there.

Calm.

Unmoving.

And ready to speak.

Elika blinked. She did not get angry often, but when she had, the pitiful remnants of her people in the City had learnt to avoid her for hours. No one, not even her father had been able to take such a sustained onslaught for so long. Let alone look so unaffected. If Elika hadn't been so angry, she might have been insulted. As it was, she couldn't think past the red haze swarming her eyes, so she didn't even realise the sheer power of whatever was driving him to stand there so calmly.

It was almost as if he had been waiting for her to be struck by surprise. The Prince arched his eyebrow, and she blinked again. She'd thought bitterly in the hours that had passed that if forty-eight hours had been enough for her to learn every way he breathed her name, it had surely been enough for her to never forget the way he raised his eyebrow. Only it obviously hadn't been, because the expression he wore now was like nothing she'd ever seen before. Hard. Unyielding. Sharp. And when he opened his mouth to speak, the shapes he formed weren't her name.

"How did you pay for this room?"

She blinked again. It seemed like she'd been doing that an awful lot in the past minute, since she'd screamed at him at the top of his lungs. She still couldn't process why he was still there, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyebrow arched, and not running for the hills or getting angry back.

"Well, Princess?" his smirk was more of a sneer now, an almost ugly thing, and she blinked again in surprise. Ugly was not a word that she had ever associated with him. There had been other words, words she'd found in forbidden scrolls that...

Not thinking about that right now.

Her head lifted defiantly. "I didn't steal it, like you would have," she said proudly. Her eyes dared him to argue he wouldn't have. He didn't. He just snorted.

"Let me see. You've probably been in this dump of a city for less than three hours. Not enough time to get a job." His eyes flashed suddenly. "Or at least, not the type of job that a girl like you would take."

The way he drawled it made her suddenly want to slap him. But before she could, his eyes narrowed and she stopped.

Well damn.

He said the words like he was biting them off, arriving at a conclusion that he would prefer to spit out than to contemplate. "Which means, knowing the sorry states of these streets and the lack of charity in the world you wanted to die to save... that you begged."

The last word came out like a vile curse word, and she blinked. Again. Before hardening her own features and crossing her own arms across her chest. She didn't notice his glance flicker down briefly before jumping back to her face again, nor the sudden heat in the room. "I don't need you," she repeated again, her words as icy as the sea. But this time, she wasn't sure if she was saying it to him or to herself.

He shook his head. Took a step forwards. She had to restrain herself from taking a step back, because suddenly she was very aware that they were alone in a small, dingy little room, and for some reason his presence was filling up the air. All she had to do was inhale, and she would breathe in the musky scent of him, the sweat. She suddenly didn't want to breathe.

Couldn't, because he'd taken another step forward, and now the glint of his eye was a challenge, and there was barely three inches between them and that was far too close.

Elika sat back on the bed. Or rather, she let her legs fall and her butt catch her. He might have smirked in the darkness, she couldn't quite tell. But his words were almost conversational when they came, and they contrasted so sharply with his body language, all intent and purpose, that she had to blink again.

"Tell me, Princess. Just who are you trying to convince?"

Her mind froze. She heard her voice run free. "I'm not trying to convince anyone."

"Really?" he seemed amused now, as if two minutes ago she hadn't yelled at him, hadn't been ready to strike him down with the same blue fire that had saved his life time and time again. "That's funny. Because I know you're proud, Princess. And you..."

He was looking at something, she wasn't sure what. She'd let her hands fall from the crooks of her elbows to steady her against the bed, and he was looking down at her, and she might have heard wrong, but his breath seemed to have caught in his throat. She wondered where the cool desert breeze was, given that he'd left the window open behind him. She wondered what he was thinking, what he was doing, and...

His voice cut through her rambling thoughts like a knife. "You," he said, his voice sounding strange. "Should never have to beg."

The oddness of his statement floored her. It was the only excuse she had for blinking again, and then her rather ineloquent response. "What?"

Suddenly he was crouching before her, his face looking up into hers. At this distance, or lack thereof, she could see how intense his eyes were, and they froze her voice in her throat.

"You heard me," he said. And his tone was no longer amused, or distant. It was raw with something that she couldn't identify, scraped with a fire so intense she was surprised she wasn't burning. "You should never have to beg. You're a Princess, a Queen, a fucking miracle and damn it, you stubborn little bitch, maybe you don't need me but..."

Without consciously recognising that she was doing it, Elika reached forwards and touched her palm to his cheek. The instant their skin met, she felt him shiver and subside, and suddenly he was turned away from her, eyes no longer boring into her own and claiming her soul, and she was surprised at the sense of loss she felt. At the coldness his soul left behind.

She swallowed. "But?" she asked.

His jaw clenched. His voice broke, stumbled, tripped, picked itself up and shoved itself forwards. He spoke into her hand, rather than to her, as if that imagined substitute was the difference between his life and death. "But... maybe I need you."

Elika blinked.

It was as if a spell had fallen over them both. Her skin was hot and cold at the same time, her empty stomach gnawing on something huge that froze her in spot. He didn't lift his eyes from the floor, and she didn't lift her eyes from him. And somehow, as she traced those well-known features of a face that she would never, ever forget, she realised what he'd done.

He'd followed her.

She'd known that at an intellectual level. Otherwise he obviously wouldn't have been there, in the flesh, confusing the hell out of her. But now she knew it at a level that was frightening, and for once in the last forty-eight hours, Elika felt the echoes fall away.

"You idiot," she said, but it was softer this time, and without malice. Still, he jerked as if stung, his eyes leaping back to hers. The movement took her hand from his cheek, and she left it in the air for a moment, shocked at the sudden coldness in her body. It was as if she'd been holding her fingers to a fire and then suddenly plunged it into ice. He was a fire, he was a firestorm, he was...

He was royally pissed off.

"Idiot am I?" he snapped. The shields were back, there was no sign he'd ever let them down so much, admitted to her something that she couldn't believe he would ever feel, let alone admit. "Well who was the little stupid moron who decided she'd beg on the streets of Kant'ar? You're lucky you weren't..."

She pressed a finger on his lips before he could say the word. She was surprised when he just stopped at the touch. Froze. She wondered how she could engender such a reaction. How she could make this vibrant, living soul in front of her, the guy with an ego larger than Ahriman, the man who boasted of horizon upon horizon and never looking back be so still.

And then, then, finally, her mind caught up with her, and she remembered what he'd said.

Maybe, I need you.

Maybe. I need you.

Maybe... I need you.

Three words. They might as well have been another triplet of words that she'd read about in romance scrolls, because she was so stunned at this moment that she wasn't sure she was breathing. She remembered, took a deep gasp, and then regretted it as the scent of him washed over her and made her tingle.

He was looking at her. She had never noticed, not in their forty-eight hours, that his lashes were so long. How the scar on his face, in an odd way, framed his wide, open, expressive eyes. How he could look so guarded, and yet so vulnerable at the same time.

Was this the man she'd been running from?

Was this the man that she'd hated?

Was this the man that she couldn't forgive?

Her finger was still on his lips. They were surprisingly soft. She realised this, and tried to snatch her hand back as if she'd been burnt. He realised her intent a second before she moved, and somehow his own hand flashed up as quick as a desert snake and grasped her around the wrist before she could pull away.

And then, because they were staring at each other so deeply they might as well have been excavating each other's souls, she saw the moment he thought fuck it and moved.

Elika had read about first kisses. She wasn't sure if there was any girl her age who hadn't. She knew that romance scrolls tended to overdo it a little, and she'd always doubted that they were that spine-tingling, toe-curlingly amazing. It was just one person's mouth meeting another person's after all.

This was something she hadn't read about. Something she hadn't expected. His mouth crashed into hers with the force of a desert storm, bringing the heat of a thousand fires behind it. She fell back under the surprise of it, he moved forwards with almost predatorial intent, the hand around her wrist pulling her fingers to splay across the bare V of his chest, the other curling around her hair to press her even more firmly into his mouth. It was hot and wet and so shocking that she didn't react for almost three seconds.

And then she started kissing him back.

Her eyes were closed, so she didn't see his leap like a barely banked fire as her tongue began to war with his for domination. His skin burnt under hers, and she suddenly wanted to feel more of it. She hadn't known that things could be rough and smooth at the same time. She hadn't known a lot of things. Her hand began to push at the vest he wore, the other moved to settle itself almost naturally against the band of his pants.

He broke off the kiss with a start, sitting back so fast on his heels she was surprised he didn't fall. His eyes shone in the moonlight as they stared at her.

"Princess?" he rasped, and then, as if the word hurt him. "Elika?"

The question those two words encompassed was so great they boggled her mind. She didn't know how she'd gotten from yelling at him to kissing the life out of him, but the little part of her that she could now admit had felt whole again when he'd showed up in her room snickered and told her it hadn't just been the few minutes he'd spent here. This had been a long time coming.

Ninety-six hours, to be precise.

That knowledge shut her brain down, and suddenly Elika felt herself reduced to a child again. Or, to be more precise, a very, very, aroused woman. "This needs to come off," she told him seriously, tugging at his vest. "Now."

She loved how he was so alive. How his eyes widened fractionally, and then became as round as the sun. "Are you serious?"

"Now," she repeated stubbornly, tugging the offending piece of material again.

The look he gave her was incredulous, but he wasted no time in shrugging it off and then turning his purely masculine gaze on to her. She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. He smirked.

"Like the view, Princess?" he drawled, all self-confidence and bravado again. She thought about shooting him down and decided it would be a waste. He was beautiful. It wasn't as if she hadn't noticed how strong he was, or how lithely his handsome body moved. Heck, she'd even checked out his ass. She giggled at the memory, and suddenly his hands were sliding up her arms, the gauntlet somehow vanished, and his eyes were heated.

"And just what are you laughing about?" he asked. She almost giggled again at the incredulity in his voice. "Nothing to laugh about, Princess. And why are you still clothed?"

She was about to retort when he did something with her hands and her top flicked up and over, leaving a very shocked and outraged Princess staring at a smirking Prince.

"Hey!" her voce most certainly did not just come out as a squeak. "What are you...?"

But he wasn't listening to her. His eyes were soft, almost reverent, and she realised with a start that she hadn't seen this look on him before either. Perhaps she hadn't known him quite as well as she'd thought. "God..." he breathed. The word sounded foreign in his voice - his cynical, practical, almost always blasphemous voice. "You're beautiful."

For a moment insecurity held her in its savage jaws. With the brief reprieve, the feeling of cool air pressing against suddenly bared skin, Elika blinked in remembrance of what he'd revealed that first day to her. He'd had several girls before. He hadn't made a secret of it. How practiced he was with that top-removing trick only proved it. She suddenly wondered how many women he'd whispered those words to, and that made her angry again.

Well, anger was only a little part of it. A vast part wanted to crawl away inside her skin and never look at him again.

Something must have shown on her face, because his eyes snapped away and to hers with an almost feverish intensity. "You don't believe me, do you?"

Elika fought the desire to laugh, to sob, and to slap him. None of them were appropriate, and Ormazd take him if he wasn't being just as pigheaded and stubborn as he had shown himself to be all this time.

He continued, undaunted. "Let me tell you this, Elika." The way he said her name just then, as if it was something unimaginably precious, was the only reason she didn't slap him when he said his next few words. "I've been with a lot of women, but I have never followed their stubborn asses over a desert, let alone stayed and fought an evil God with them."

He leaned forwards then and kissed her. Again. Let her feel the taste of warmth and awe in her mouth like fresh honey. When he pulled away, they were both panting.

"You are beautiful," he said firmly. And perhaps he was emboldened by how she hadn't protested, how she'd kissed him back. Or maybe he was just annoyed enough after following her for two days through the desert that he decided to say the words anyway, damn the consequences. "And, damn it, I have never loved a more infuriating, blind, intelligent, stubborn, intoxicating little minx."

Unsurprisingly, Elika blinked.

It seemed that he realised that he'd gone too far then, because he was suddenly back on his heels, almost crawling away from her. His grin was far too bright, far too sharp in the shadowed room. But before he could say anything, brush it over, laugh it off, Elika swallowed.

"You love me?"

The words sounded stupid and childish as soon as they left her lips, but she couldn't help them. It was a question that begged to be said, demanded to be answered. His eyes, guarded against the inevitable crushing of his hope, widened.

For the second time that night, she saw the moment he decided to toss caution to the winds.

"Of course I do, you idiot," he scowled. "Don't you think for a second I would have done any of this for anyone else. Hell... the moment I laid my eyes on you," he chucked, "When you threw yourself onto me... I was gone."

Elika knew she could do several things.

She could reject him. Savagely. Abandon him like she had on the balcony of that forgotten place. She could let him down more gently, but still turn him down nevertheless. She could laugh. She could go into denial. She could ignore him. She could...

So many possibilities, but as their eyes stepped into each other and she saw him, saw the truth laid out like a gleaming oasis before the burning sun, she swallowed.

They weren't touching now. She was so cold. She knew that the instant he touched her, she'd fill with heat again. And she wanted it. The cold in her was incessant now, a cold that not even the magic of her God could fill up. It was the cold of two deaths in less than a week, of a hideously uncertain future hanging over her head, of fear and a responsibility that she wasn't sure she could take, despite all her bravado and pride and her actions.

She didn't want to feel that cold anymore. And perhaps that was why she found herself opening her mouth, and saying in a foreign whisper. "Show me."

He blinked.

She felt oddly proud.

And then he licked his lips, his gaze intense. "You sure?"

She didn't trust herself to words anymore. She nodded.

And then she found herself lying back on the bed, his hands on her bare stomach, caressing her skin. His hands moving higher, cupping her. She gasped at the broad sweeps of his callused fingers on her. He silenced it with a blazing kiss that she eagerly returned, even as his hands moved down further, hooked around the waistband of her pants. He paused for a moment there, as if silently asking permission, and when she arched up into him he took it as a yes and pulled them gently down.

There was little time for awkwardness, or even the shyness that suddenly swamped her body, because his mouth was just as suddenly there, bringing heat to every inch of her. She gasped, and e chuckled against her skin, sending shivers up her spine. "That's it, Elika."

He paused, licked a blazing path again. His next words were tinged with pure male satisfaction. "I want to hear you moan for me."

He swiped an arc across her body with his fingers, and she managed to laugh through the burning ache of her body. "I... oh! I..."

He was doing something sinful with his mouth. She gasped, shuddered, and somehow found the ability to speak coherently again. "... thought you said I should never have to beg."

He nipped at a sensitive part of her that she didn't know she had. "This is different," he said savagely, and she dazedly wondered if she detected a possessive note in that tone. His next words dispelled any illusions. "You're mine."

She lay still for a moment, taking that in.

And then she was not still any more. She was up, surging, moving. Taking him by surprise. Pulling her to him, pulling other things down, feeling her hand splayed against his naked back. Because at the heart of her, she was someone who was fair, and she knew that in asking him to give himself to her, she'd given herself to him.

It had just taken a few minutes of his talented ministrations to realise that.

He gasped in her ear. She nipped at him with her teeth, exploring. His hands came up, stroking, loving. She lost herself in a whirl of colours that she hadn't known could exist in darkness, feelings that she didn't know could overcome despair, warmth that she didn't know could finally, finally drive out the cold. And when he whispered her name in her ear as he slid inside, she realised again that she didn't know every inflection with which he could breathe it, and she was seized with an irrational urge to spend forever finding out.

And so she turned, arched, until her lips were next to him; brushing his jawbone, his cheek, and then his ear. And while she wasn't ready to say the three words, even though she knew it in her heart, her soul, and the part of her deep inside receiving him, enveloping him, holding him... she spoke new sounds. New words, to make new echoes that would follow, would embrace them both wherever they went.

Because, finally, she had opened her eyes.

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A/N - I know this is very, very different from my usual fare. I hope you have enjoyed it nonetheless. Admittedly, this is only the second time I have ever written a scene like this, and as such, I can only hope I did it and the characters justice. Thanks once again for sharing this excitingly crazy ride with me.

-Shadowhawke