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The room was dark despite the early hour and length of summer days. Edelgard loathed this time of year, where the rains came and smothered the city in relentless heat and damp, but at least the skies had waited for her to return to the palace before opening up. She collapsed into the daybed with violence. Rain beat against her shuttered windows, blasting today's intermittent torrents through the cracks in the laquered wood.
Hubert's soft laugh was lost in the roar of it as he shuffled around the room, hanging up her clothes to dry and getting her paperwork in order for tomorrow's meetings. Edelgard had kicked off of her shoes almost before she had walked in the door. She did not want to get ready for sleep, did not want to undress or move, so she waited for Hubert and dozed, feeling vaguely disgusting in the humidity.
Hubert’s role tonight had been to accompany her to the opera. Dorothea and Manuela had performed an almost nauseatingly embellished retelling of the war, a script which Dorothea had noisily confided had been co-authored by Hubert in all capacities but official. Hubert had nearly run her off for the comment, biting at her with more than his usual level of badinage. He had shown his hand in doing so; Edelgard knew he detested the opera and couldn’t imagine him dedicating any of his free time to making such a trivial production successful, and would never have believed it otherwise.
And it had been successful. Or, Edelgard believed this to be so. She had been assured by more than one artistic genius that it was as compelling a narrative as had ever been written. Edelgard loved opera, but she would never be able to revisit the past three hours without being seized by regret so strong it made her vision go white. She could not tell for herself whether it had been well written or well acted.
Hubert hadn’t asked her what she thought of it, though he could probably tell from her pinched red face and how waspish she became in the aftermath. She could practically hear him smiling to himself—his mean, feline smile, the one he wore when someone's harmless discomfort delighted him—as he moved about the room, letting Edelgard stew in her humiliation. “How much of that where are you responsible for?“
Here, with just the two of them, away from the needling of Dorothea and Manuela’s bubbly laughter, Hubert does not jump to the defense. Or maybe he had already reinforced his defenses. “Very little,” he said, and Edelguard could not tell how close to the truth it was. “Our esteemed director wanted to take creative liberties with your romantic entanglements. I redirected her attention to your more public accomplishments.”
Edelgard sat up all at once, burning with enbarrassment. She could see Hubert’s amusement now, though his expression was complicated. She stared at him in wordless shock as he began unlacing the ties of her corset.
“Manuela—” Edelgard pinched the bridge of her nose, jostled by the tugging at her back. “I told her...”
”Dorothea’s original script was acceptable. During the writing process she frequently sought my counsel. It was her wish to portray you in the most positive light, with the understanding that this would be a contemporary retelling of the war written by one of your generals, and that historians would scrutinize it, whether or not the performance itself was a success.” Hubert’s voice goes a bit flat with frustration. He had never been able to manipulate or intimidate Manuela Casagranda, and it must have taken considerable effort to convince her to compromise her vision. “We returned to it.”
Edelgard exhaled fully for the first time in hours, deflating out of the constricting ties of her dress as they finally came loose enough to breathe. “I hardly want to ask who she thought to pair me off with.”
It was a sardonic, throwaway comment, meant to give Hubert an opening to vent his frustrations and rail at contrived romantic subplots for their amusement. Hubert went quiet though, easing the lace ribbon from delicate eyelets with a gentle probing finger between the constricting ribbon and the silk of her undergarments.
His silence was not telling, exactly, but no matter what he was thinking—whether Hubert had been Manuela’s choice of suitor, or some other—she knew what he could not say, what he felt, why it was so vital that he save her from the speculation. She let her voice go soft. “Hubert. Thank you.”
He hummed, and let her go, and the opera replayed in her mind.
She wanted to say something disparaging about the script without insulting the friends and artists who had earned their wages on the audience’s approval. The actress who had played her was willowy and tall and stately in an almost romantic presumption of an emperor. She was cold and tragic, serious and acerbic. She waged her war like an act of martyrdom. The friends Edelgard loved and trusted in reality circled the Edelgard of fiction like light-starved moths. It hurt, in a way she couldn’t explain.
The false Hubert had been worst of all. It was not that he had been played inaccurately. Only that his role in her life had been so profoundly understated.
Even so, Hubert was right; she would not want something so personal to be paraded onstage, to be the subject of debate and analysis by scholars with the irreverent scrutiny she’d seen in Linhardt and Professor Hanneman.
Hubert was just so woven into the fabric of her life. Even this terrible dress had been his own selection; it was more delicate than her usual styles, and scooped from one shoulder to the other across her collar bones. Nothing like her usual sturdy gowns that buttoned to the neck and left her legs mobile. The material was a liquid lilac that shimmered like the surface of a lake even in the low light. With the bustier loosened, it was more a pile of tulle now, the skirt billowing over the bare tops of her thighs to her calves. Hubert had chosen it as a dress for peacetime.
The layers of thin material had still been oppressive in the heat though. She had cheated today, not wearing full stockings with her gown, but the difference in comfort had been enormous, and she wondered why she did not wear short stockings more often. Now that she had been unlaced, she longed for her light, airy nightgown. In the privacy of her room, she hiked up the skirts and freed the garter belts to the stone-chilled air.
Hubert stopped at the sound, but he caught himself before he turned fully, and returned to laying out her clothing for the next day. It was a subtle motion. But Hubert was a subtle man, and that small gesture banished complaints of the performance from her mind. She readjusted herself atop the daybed, gathering her skirts from one side of her body to the other just to make her clothing rustle.
She admitted, “It was not a terrible play, but I never want to hear about it again.”
He hummed in acknowledgment, focused with uncommon intensity on the top of a stack of papers he had been scanning overlong. Then her words caught up and he turned to her closet. “Lady Adrianne’s performance was as impressive as usual, but she could only be a pale imitation of the original.”
Edelgard grunted the comment off, and Hubert huffed the little sound that meant he was laughing at her, eyes and smile narrow. The armoire creaked as Hubert opened and closed its hinged doors, fanning a cloud of lavender perfume into the room.
His own legs were trim and long in his black summer trousers, the airy style he’d always favored. She was uncomfortable in her dress and had been waiting for him to finish his self-assigned menial tasks so she could order him to undress her properly.
“Hubert,” she started, and almost smiled to see him snap out of whatever daze he’d slipped into. He wore his usual trick of looking directly into her eyes with unwavering focus, shuttering out all else.
“Your Majesty?”
A fine strategy, but in this moment his talents were unwelcome. She could not be seductive, but he did not need her to be.
Edelgard tilted her head as she did when she required his attentions, and his eyes went dark at the slip of her clothes.
“That can wait until tomorrow. Finish what you started.”
While he worked, the storm waxed and waned, now battering the side of the palace so that it felt like the sheets of limestone would be washed away, then turning into a drizzle so gentle that she could barely hear it over the hum of the palace and the beating of her heart. The dress fell loose about her shoulders and Hubert, hands broad and soothingly cool in the heat, smoothed the sleeves down her arms.
“Your first meeting isn’t until mid morning.” He brushed her hair off her shoulder to find the clasp of her heavy necklace, gloved fingers skimming feather-light against the fine hairs at the back of her neck. The gold lifted, slithered cool and smooth across her nape. He left her hair pushed to the side like that, as he placed the jewelry aside, exposing her collar bone and jaw. She could hear the warmth of his voice, the quiet heat. “How can I serve you tonight?“
His hands gathered her hair once more, pulling it into a single neat fall of white. It hung cool against her bare shoulder blades as it slipped across his guiding palm.
She turned in his arms, and put her hand on the back of his neck.
Hubert is a frustrating man. He keeps his secrets and teases her at the worst times and is so bad at taking compliments that the effort it requires to convey one is almost not worth the bewildered response.
Still, he is honest in the ways that matter, now. and he belongs to her.
Hubert shivered beneath her, either suffocating on her cunt or hoping to. She pressed his head harder into the mattress, and his strong fingers clamped down with bruising strength across her broad, muscled thighs. Over her shoulder, she could see where his neglected erection had pushed itself free of his belt, glistening red as it peeked from beneath his trousers. He curled his spine like a cat, pressing himself into what little pressure he could steal.
The embarrassment of the night made her feel helpless and violent, impatient and desperate for distraction. The play blurred into one scream of memory, but for the two primary figures, a smear of red and black. Hardly connected beyond master and servant. Two solitary hearts, bound by loyalty and not love. “Harder,” she growled, twisting his hair at the roots. “Fuck me.”
With a wet, guttural rasp of assent, he gripped her by the hips and pulled her roughly against his face. His tongue was hot and fierce and did not treat her gently; Hubert licked deep, all the while shuddering desperate breaths that heated her core like breathing coals.
It didn't take long for the tight spring of frustration to release. She ground down against his nose and rode his face through it, allowing him to guide her thighs with his hands, rocking her just a bit higher into the air, shoving her down just a bit harder into his open mouth as he groaned helpless vibrations into her core.
“Hubert,” she called.
“Yes.” He peeled away only long enough to gasp one wet lungful of air before returning to her cunt. A strong, hard arm slipped around her waist, anchoring her to his face.
His tongue entered her again, and Edelgard cried in surprise, her raw nerves protesting. He was holding her so tightly she could barely rock against him. “Hubert!”
He pressed himself up into the yielding restriction of his belt, and came with a helpless groan into the heat of her.
He flips her over, presses her open, flattens himself to the bed and pleasures her that way. She drags him up, they kiss for what feels like hours. She presses him on his back and shoves her fingers past his teeth, pressing down against his tongue as she jerks him dry and catches her breath.
He can tell she’s in a rare mood. Hubert asks again how she would have him. She doesn’t reply, just shoves his face into her chest and wraps her body around him. His hand finds her core, and Edelgard ruts into the heel of his palm.
Across Enbarr, the Mittlefrank Opera Company is winding down the opening scene of their second performance of the day. Dorothea Arnault performs her own role, and watches with the rest of the Strike Force actors as Nolan kneels to Adrienne, swearing fealty to her alone for the failure of the Vestra patriarch to protect the Hresvelg legacy. Offstage, Manuela is watching the performance with unwavering attention, brow hard and dissatisfied.