Work Text:
"You ought to hear the way he talks about you," The Warrior of Light giggled, eyes drifting skyward in memory, "Sighing like a maiden over her embroidery, until Alisaie points it out. Then he squeaks silent." Her expression darkened into a sisterly cruelty Estinien more frequently saw from Krile. He was briefly grateful that the Warrior's heretical gossip could not actually involve him. "Well, maybe not all sighing. I mean, there were Eulmore's showers. That was more of a moan, or maybe-"
Her artistic musings were lost in the vision that assaulted him, as complete as it was sudden. Alphinaud's apple cheeks flushed ripe, red as his parted lips. White whispers of steam mingling with the loose ringlets of his hair. The suffocating weight of water in the air, threatening to drown Estinien, even in the brittle wind of the Firmament's pristine new alleys. The memory of roses, a choking perfume of which the Warrior had often complained, blotted frigid reality for a steam-swirled moment.
He blinked once. Cat-like, languid, Estinien offered a vague noise of disapproval.
The great and implacable Warrior of Light laughed, clapped for his virtuosic performance. But, as she passed into the little estate she cheerfully called home she added, "Not too old for him now, eh?"
Estinien watched her door close in absolute stillness. He had practied his retreats diligently since the return of the Scions. Too often, his startled disappearance above the rooftops had revealed critical weaknesses to Krile or Tataru. Once, especially unpleasantly, to Dame Junius. He would not give the Warrior of Light any opportunity to add herself to his list of blighted women spying on him from infinite studies and offices.
Only when she was well downstairs, every light snuffed, did Estinien take his leave. The slate roofs of the as yet sparsely inhabited district shone with unseen frost below him.
There are hours until sunrise. The baths are abandoned. It hardly matters. There could be a dozen bathers or more and Estinien's privacy would be unblemished. Far overhead, there are no doubt flurries twisting on the whistling winds. But, the bath is surrounded on all sides with cleverly angled buildings that sluice the frigid breeze overhead, letting the steam curl thick and undisturbed. Even the nearest corner of the grand pool is completely obscured.
The silence is thicker still.
In the dark, undisturbed, Estinien floats.
His travels abroad had taught him a surprising wealth of techniques to combat the agony that blossomed anywhere Nidhogg's blight mottled his body with leather, ichor and scales. The weightlessness of a hot bath, buoyed by his own breath, is the easiest of them all. Far less taxing than the deep stretches Ishgard's chirurgeons favour for rehabilitation. Where even the idea of ease had once been shamefully luxuriant, now it is a strategic necessity. The stricken flesh where his muscles transition from human to dragon is prone to knots that threaten to tear his very bones from his joints.
For all the claims that the Firmament would better the life of each of Ishgard's wayward children, Estinien had not expected to benefit so directly from the reconstruction. But the installation of public baths far closer than Upper La Noscea was an especial convenience. If Commander de Borel had his way, these baths would soon be at his literal doorstep. For the moment Estinien had avoided the deed to any of the windbreak estates.
How many of his countryfolk had viewed the reconstruction with the same patriotic, patronizing apathy? How long had it been since his own opinions mirrored his kin's? It is odd to think they might all feel this strange and soothing gratitude.
Comfort.
A comfort of the spirit, spreading through the mundane meat of him, unmooring him from his own aching body for just these long and restive moments.
What a precious gift, given to him by the very people he had, however inadvertently, helped ravage. How many years, how many ways had he fought this peace, these moments? Estinien had once been a warrior of grand renown, even outside Ishgard's cloister. His relentless pursuit of victory was matched, exceeded by only two things he could yet name.
The first was Nidhogg's own wretched hunger for war eternal.
The second was Alphinaud's habit of leaving revolutionary peace in his wake. A tendency so wide-reaching that the whole of the planet had not been enough, and he'd collapsed into another world for years to overthrow slavers and dictators.
Years.
The complete details of the temporal shenanigans yet elude him. Still, he had made a point of untangling the time passed for the twins, at least. Almost three years in mind; less than a full year in body.
It is a truly fantastical story. A tale that strains against Estinien's very concept of reality. It should be hard for him to believe, even with the Warrior of Light's tendency for world-shattering cataclysm.
Instead, Alphinaud's posture haunts Estinien.
Alisaie had re-acclimated sooner to the lost ilms. By the time Estinien had met her, the martial forms of red magic had drilled her old height into her. She had moved with a fluid certainty that, when he had mistaken her for Alphinaud, had shaken Estinien's breath loose.
The change in Alphinaud was stranger than simple grace. His posture was that of a taller man.
Boy.
Alphinaud's posture was that of a taller boy than he is.
There are many reasons why someone might need to relearn their height. But Alphinaud lacks the artificially conditioned reflexes of a Fantasia potion; he bears no wounds that lock his knees or spine. The extra heartbeat between where his gaze lands--a neck, a chest, a shoulder--and the faces he means to meet leaves him looking off footed.
He had met, and meets still, Estinien's eyes on the first try. Estinien has only ever known him at this height. A companion of unchanged eyelines for Alphinaud's old, too young body. For the first time in the years they have known each other, Estinien's eyes were the easiest for Alphinaud to meet. The change was thrilling. Certainty born of long experience gives his soft jaw the illusion of a sterner cast. The man Alphinaud had become in the years that had passed for him in the First was at odds with--agonizingly visible behind--boyish cheeks and scholarly pallor.
The way his fine fringe fanned out to frame his eyes was heartstopping, the shimmering snow-white only making the fathomless blue bolder by contrast. A perfect encapsulation of the shift, that shining hair against dark blue.
Would that Estinien were an artist or a poet, that he might capture the essence of the change more completely than mortal memories so easily stained by Nidhogg's boiling, poison rage.
Alphinaud had never once wavered since his remarkable return to vitality. Every time they spoke, his eyes met Estinien's. No matter how Estinien's clumsy tongue struggled to capture in words the immensity of what Alphinaud had inspired. What Alphinaud had become.
No more a shivering waif of dubious standing, begging refuge at Ishgard's shuttered doorstep. Alphinaud now stands vanguard of a vast, unshuttered globe where Ishgard's last Azure Dragoon might forge a comrade's bond with the Black Wolf of Garlemald.
Estinien will kill the Warrior later for sullying this perfectly good bath with her histrionic implications about Aliphinaud's ancient fancies. What boy wouldn't yearn for an untouchable and emotionally distant older man guiding him through war-torn wilderness? Estinien was more representative of eternal war than the refuge Ishgard had shown Alphinaud. The boy's adolescent passions will have long since been cooled by frigid time and deeper understanding of the scale of horrors a warrior of Estienien's esteem had committed. And yet.
The memory of Alphinaud's wide, wet eyes drilling into Estinien's own as the boy refused to run, as he risked everything of Estienien's very soul. To save a loved one. The relief when Nidhogg's grip went lax for a fractured moment, just long enough to save the world in turn. The awe. As though Estinien had returned the red moon to the sky and undone the Calamity.
Those eyes crushed every wayward thought Estinien had, heavy as the sodden air above him, the steaming pool beneath.
It was an expression of purest faith repaid in full, a moment of divinity that would have set the most devout of Halone's worshippers ablaze with envy. All that force set upon the tiny, tattered sense of Estinien that had remained behind the unceasing roar of Nidhogg, and been enough to burn away the hatred and give him space to heal.
The baser hunger that curled behind the memory was surely more the Warrior of Light's fault than anyone else's, Alphinaud's least of all.
Still, Estinien is a grown man; one could even mistake him for responsible. There is no harm in just the thought.
The thought of Alphinaud's eyes fixed on Estinien's face, pupils blown too wide, edging into hypnotic fascination. Perhaps Estinien spends too much time thinking about that face. He has certainly never seen Alphinaud look hungry, nor startled by his own appetites. And yet, the conjuration comes to mind so easily. Alphinaud's youthful thirst for novelty, drinking every detail in and understanding nary one. His already dizzying gaze shuttered by a breathless sigh as Estinien's lips close around his cock, no doubt as slender and silken smooth as the rest of him.
Sharlayan lacks Garlemald's stoic convictions regarding pretty young boys, but Estinien has been the elder brother himself, and if little Alisaie has left his stones unturned, Estinien will eat his own spear.
In the transcendent steam, it is too easy to play pretend. To convince himself that this would be the first time Alphinaud has received such treatment. That Alphinaud's shocky breaths taken in time with the vague lapping of the bathwater on distant shores are born of novelty. Or perhaps the hair trigger sensitivity of youth. Certainly it couldn't Estinien's own pulse thrumming in his submerged ears, beating through his overheated veins. He's not too old for Alphinaud any longer, but Estinien is certainly older and, if not smarter or wiser, then more experienced at the very least. He flushes in the embrace of the hot water, and feels each heartbeat in his hardening cock. But he keeps his arms stretched wide, floating.
Alphinaud is pale as frozen milk, even moreso after his body laid empty in a dim room for so long. Once upon a time, the fine, snowy hair on his arms had stood in contrast to a traveller's tan, sunlight glinting off the snow to darken any exposed skin. His skinny legs, already sprung too tall for his childish body, had been constantly covered in layers of leather and wool. The thought of digging his fingers harsh into those thighs, watching blood bloom beneath that near translucent skin, lights twin fires of protective and predatory desire. It would be the work of an instant to kill him with tooth or claw, lapping at an arterial bloodspray between thigh and hip. But the fantasm of Estinien's mouth is already busy holding the squirming boy's cock. Alphinaud is too adolescent for it to be anything but half-grown. It wouldn't be difficult to swallow him whole and keep breathing.
Hypersensitive, the brush of his own hair drifting in the water and catching his neck drags Estinien's focus back to the waking world for a moment, his hands wrapped shameless around his cock. It's easy enough to adjust his fantasy to fit, a dreamlike shift from Alphinaud panting breathless above him, to laid flat on the down-feather bed yet reserved for him in the house de Fortemps. Clever, smooth fingers tangling against Estinien's scalp, never daring to pull. This dream of Alphinaud, after all, is a fascinating mockery of the childish innocence that clings yet to the boy's cheeks, if not his eyes. A bit of exaggerated delicacy adds flavour. Every shift and gasp from the boy would make Estinien's hair spill across his shoulders. It might tickle, save for the heat of desire.
Still, the sudden remembrance of his actual body gives him a moment's pause. He's too wiry to float easily with his arms drawn so close. If he were to actually stroke fiercely enough to bring himself off, he would certainly drown. He stretches one leg to the slick tiled floor of the pool, feeling the catch of the few still snarled muscles in his hips. A single gentle kick sends him drifting towards the edge of the bathing pool, where in-built steps of smooth stone can keep his head mostly above the water even as he stretches his legs along the length of the benches.
This also lets him keep his hips well below the waterline, where his hand can move in silence. Not that there is anyone living in this quarter yet; not that there is any risk of being seen. And yet, decades of careful secrecy are not easily overcome. It is always more comfortable to move in silence. No, it is more comfortable for Estinien to move in silence. A trait Alphinaud's awkward gait and constant speeches prove he does not share. Estinien sinks back into the imagined scene all too easily.
Estinien had no recitations and elocution lessons as a child, to say nothing of Alphinaud's often excessive vocabulary. It's as impossible to imagine the boy struck silent as it is to imagine his words. In Eorzean, at any rate. But, then, the boy speaks half the tongues of Hydaelyn. It doesn't take nearly as much effort to imagine nonsense whispers in smoothly articulated Sharlayan. The words don't matter, all that he cares about is driving the boy to babble senselessly.
He imagines pressing his tongue hard along the length and dragging a cracked groan out of Alphinaud, cutting through blissful recitation. Even in fantasy, Estinien cannot quite imagine Alphinaud's full attention staying fixed. No, his mind would wander like water off glazed tiles, but that's little difficulty. Estinien has long practice at catching flighty prey and dragging them to his level. The tickle in the roof of his mouth as he carelessly mimics the imagined movements is peculiar. A delicate counterpoint not unlike Alphinaud himself, compared to the calloused hand wrapped around Estinien's cock. His other hand trails bright, clawed scratches from his hip to his neck, further, to clutch at his own scalp. It's a sheepish indulgence, to drag his own fingers through his hair and hold tight, mimicking Alphinaud's imagined posture. But then, all of this is a sheepish indulgence, and better for it.
What would the boy do, exactly, if Estinien stared up at that flushed and lovely face from between Alphinaud's legs and demanded pain to ease the cloying heat of pleasure? Alphinaud is a healer through to his bones, but Sharlayan's academics begin their studies as Arcanists, and he has fought so many wars. If Estinien asked, sweetly or viciously enough, would the boy break his oaths of mending and send razor-bright poison deep into Estinien's lungs, savaging them in biolytic miasma?
The very notion is dangerously compelling. He hadn't meant for this to be quite so quick, but the thought of Alphinaud fighting him shatters down Estnien's spine in white hot promise. His breath held burning in his own chest is the only reason he doesn't dip beneath the water, spasming, as the image fractals into dust, leaving him with only the ghost of his name on Alphinaud's lips.
An ember of childish guilt flickers in his chest, for violating the pristine bath with his frankly excessive dragon-stained seed. But, there is no cause for it. This is not Kugane. The waters of the Firmament's baths are neither naturally drawn from the earth, nor considered especially inviolate by Ishgard's own people in the manner of the Far East. These baths are for the filthy to become clean. Dozens of enchantments tied to a veritable cacophony of fire and water clusters embedded beneath the tiles keep the pool steaming in even the cruellest blizzards, pure enough for emergency chirurgy. To the clever magics, there is little difference between his spilled seed and the teeming masses who use these baths to launder clothes and linens.
It's easy enough to push the heat of embarrassment aside, and linger instead in the warmth of the bath. Perhaps he will sleep here, and wake with the sunrise gleaming off Ishgard's frosted spires.
Or, perhaps not.
Time alone will tell.