Chapter Text
Throat aching from the sweet stretch of his work, Erend swallows the last of what Kotallo gives him. He pulls off. Laid out before him Kotallo trembles faintly. His knees, pulled up high around Erend’s ears, threaten to knock together until Erend rests a gentle palm across his belly and presses his mouth to the crook of Kotallo’s knee. Erend closes his eyes to breathe deep. He darts out his tongue to taste salt and herbed clay; Kotallo startles. He reaches for Erend.
“Here,” Kotallo pants sharply, “to me—!”
Erend rumbles deep and low in his chest. Arousal thumps loudly between his legs— but he drops a kiss to the velvet crease where Kotallo’s thigh and hip meet, and sits back.
“Next time, big man,” Erend rasps. He swallows, languishing in the emptiness Kotallo carved into him.
He leaves Kotallo laid out naked along his thin pallet. He tries not to look back; really, he does; but Erend needs to pull Kotallo’s privacy curtain good and plenty shut, and he naturally glimpses Kotallo pushing up onto his elbow with confusion splashed across his face. Erend’s fully dressed, though, so it’s no matter to stroll through the base and out. Easy, no fuss.
He doesn’t stop until he’s nearly knee-deep in snow. His hands shake from anything but the cold as he tears into his trousers and rips a glove off to shove two fingers inside, slicker than icemelt. The heel of his palm lends itself easily for Erend to grind on. He stuffs his free glove into his mouth to keep quiet; though really, he’d rather be overheard by the sunwings than anyone at base.
He comes like a hammer to the skull.
/~/
This is how he’s always done it.
Freebooters, Vanguard, didn’t matter; until he became Captain, anyway. Been a while, but Erend still remembers the pattern: Drink around the evening fire until someone catches his eye. Sit a little closer. Drink a little more. Hide in some dark corner for Erend to suck him off. If he turned out to be a bastard, spit. If he was nice, swallow. If he was a gentleman, promise him he could return the favor next time. Sneak off alone to an even darker corner for Erend to take care of himself. Drink at a different fire the next night, and the night after that, and so on.
He liked it that way. Erend always considered it a service, almost, something to bolster morale and troop cohesion. When Ersa was around she’d cuff him upside the head when he got a little too obvious, but even she couldn’t bellyache too much at the rotating cast of men covering Erend’s blind spots on the battlefield.
And, honestly, there’s never been any better way for Erend. He likes who he is — what he is — how he is — but there’s no one else like him, not in any land he’s crossed. Might not ever be anyone else. That’s fine. It’s just— how does he explain that when he was a little kid, the other boys shoved him away and called him stupid because he wasn’t really one of them, so he ran away crying into the Forge from whence the World-Machine came, and when he wept and begged to be a “real boy” the great Forge stretched out a spindly arm to implant a piece of itself inside him that let him grow more like his father when he should have been the mirror image of his mother.
There’s never been a next time for Erend before, and he’s just fine with that.
/~/
Except he hadn’t thought it through before promising something like that to someone like Kotallo, which is how Erend finds himself on the wrong end of the proposal, “Next time tonight?”
His hand freezes over the carved glinthawk piece perched on the Strike board between their knees. He tries to disguise it in a decision to reach for a scrapper instead. Really ought to move that glinthawk. The scrapper is planted on the front line. “How’s that now?”
“You said so the other night.” Kotallo’s scorcher advances. It takes out the scrapper. “‘Next time’.”
Erend frowns at the board. He’s glad for an empty common room. “I did say that.”
“Or,” Kotallo continues, “winner decides our next?”
“If you want.”
“I do.”
The statement, spoken quietly, draws Erend’s full attention. He finds the same oddly compelling gentleness in Kotallo that got him into this mess to begin with, the one that made Erend hurt something delicate. He still hurts. He can’t look away.
Erend regrets the words before he speaks them. “Works for me.”
“Your glinthawk is too open,” Kotallo points out.
Erend waves him off, and moves his lancehorn up. “I know what I’m doing.”
And he does — right up until Kotallo’s scorcher demolishes him.
Kotallo sits back, too pleased with himself. He gestures to their quarters. “After you.”
Lightheaded, short of breath, Erend’s knees rattle as he trudges towards the bunks. Think. He needs to think. He can’t think. A shove against his back sends him stumbling across the threshold. He regains his footing and turns to see Kotallo palming the door control. The doors shudder closed.
Kotallo, delighted in that muted way of his, closes in on Erend. He hangs his arm around Erend’s neck. “You practically handed me that victory.”
“Hah! That’s a load of hot slag.” Even through the haze of his panic, Erend’s hands find the small of Kotallo’s back. It stings, the way they fit together. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Marshal.”
“Your glinthawk was too open,” Kotallo murmurs, grinning as he pulls Erend in for a solid kiss.
He tastes warm, like belonging. Guilt bubbles through Erend, inseparable from his reckless desire. Kotallo’s hand covers his heart. He brushes his thumb over the spot, the touch grating through Erend’s layers— but Erend can use this.
He kisses Kotallo hard and peels that hand away to twist that arm behind Kotallo’s back. Kotallo hisses; then smiles sharp and mischievous along Erend’s mouth. He scrapes teeth against Erend’s lip as he turns to free himself, but Erend grabs Kotallo’s other shoulder and pushes down as he wedges a boot into Kotallo’s knee. They tumble. Erend lands hard on his elbow. Wheezing, he scrambles to keep Kotallo on his belly, again twisting Kotallo’s arm behind his back and sitting across his calves. Under him, Kotallo struggles half-heartedly.
“This isn’t what I imagined,” he says. His voice tumbles like river rock. He fights to keep his breathing steady.
“I figured,” Erend replies, “but you did beat me. You deserve something a little better than getting me off, don’t you think?”
Kotallo half-glares at the wall, but gasps prettily as Erend pushes aside his faulds and smallclothes. Hand cupping the back of a thigh, Erend encourages Kotallo up onto his knees. For a second Erend worries something’s wrong for how easily Kotallo has given himself over, until he spies Kotallo’s stiff interest. Erend loosens up on Kotallo’s arm; he figures Kotallo would want to rest his head on it instead of cold tile, so it scares him when Kotallo wraps his hand around Erend’s wrist to keep him.
But Erend has a job to do — he stuffs his fear back down so he can spit in his free palm to ease his touch. Takes hardly anything to coax Kotallo to full, firm arousal. Kotallo’s breathing turns harsh, his grip bruising. He attempts to thrust into Erend’s fist but all that does is put him on full display, and Erend being a simple man can only dip down to lick wet and filthy along the seam between Kotallo’s balls and up and up and in. Kotallo gnarls out a swear, angling for more.
From there, it’s easy.
Fully spent, Kotallo rolls away from his mess and flops onto his back. He swipes one corner of his mouth and noticeably smears his paint, the skin underneath proving soft and enticing. He eyes Erend, wary.
“You still won’t let me, will you,” he pants.
Erend grimaces; shrugs, in flagrant opposition to the howling wetness between his legs.
Kotallo nods. He shuts his eyes. “Stay, for a moment.”
Not too bad of a compromise, all told. Erend scoots to sit on Kotallo’s right, and doesn’t even shy away when Kotallo reaches for his knee.
/~/
A summons to the Grove, Kotallo says — and Erend can breathe again.
More importantly: Erend can get his rocks off.
It’s all this in-between time that’s getting to him, he decides, and the quiet. Alva hasn’t put a toe outside the Quen camp in weeks, Zo’s back home in Plainsong for now, Beta is ostensibly on base (not that Erend’s seen her), Aloy’s… somewhere. Too much waiting. Maybe that’s why Erend let Kotallo take him to bed to begin with: something to do besides waiting.
He’s confident that’s it when he awakes his first morning alone and promptly whips himself into a frothy peak. He’s had better, but his head is clearer than it’s been in some time. Erend stretches his sated limbs, groaning at every pop and crack and breathing fully down to his groin. It was the waiting, then the stifle of Kotallo’s presence. Erend might not be the sharpest knife on base but even he noticed Kotallo hanging around more, so of course he feels free now that he’s alone again. Once more Erend is un-weighted, un-tethered. The natural order, restored.
He spends a day reading. He sets his hammer to the sunwings, which just feels mean after the third day. He doesn’t think about Kotallo, not at all. He fingers himself (a lot). He blasts riot grrrl grunge metal until his ears ring. He drinks Kotallo’s favorite brew with supper. He polishes his hammer (literally). He bathes with Kotallo’s soap. He waits. He’s not sure what for. He has trouble sleeping; he figures it’s the angle of his neck, so he steals the pillow from Kotallo’s bunk to add to his own and slides into sleep to the faint tune of clay.
He’s great.
/~/
Erend jumps clear out of his own skin at the arm clamping decisively across his chest from behind. He drops the gear he’d been tending, slapping his Focus to shut off his tunes. The whole of his right ear buzzes. He looks down; he knows those tattoos.
“I called out to you.” Kotallo hooks his chin over Erend’s shoulder. From the feel of him he’s already stripped of his armor for the night.
Erend begs his quickened pulse to steady even as Kotallo’s sturdy familiarity beckons him closer. He balls his hands into fists at his sides. “Sorry. How was the Grove?”
Exhaling against Erend’s neck, Kotallo presses a soft, open kiss there. “You should ask me what I thought of while I was away.”
“Which was?”
“You.” The very edge of Kotallo’s teeth rests comfortably against a tendon— unhurried; assertive. “What you look like when you come.”
A noise slips through Erend’s teeth that pleases Kotallo enough to murmur that’s a good start, great and terrible as the rolling thunder in the plains. Erend shivers down to his foundation. Slipping past him, Kotallo parks himself on Erend’s bunk, motioning for Erend to sit astride his left thigh.
Erend hesitates.
Disappointment flashes across Kotallo’s face, but only just. Leave it to him to improvise: he stacks a cushion on his leg. Tentative, he extends his hand.
If only he weren’t so damned gentle.
Sick with nerves, Erend takes Kotallo’s hand and is pulled up to kneel across his leg. His worry about Kotallo feeling through clothes what Erend lacks is quickly buried under a sticky-sweet kiss. Kotallo’s in a mood Erend can’t read, all soft touch and time-taking. Their positioning is good, at least; in this moment it might be the best thing about Kotallo, actually, that he’s missing his left arm. Can’t reach Erend’s right bicep without some effort. He’ll take his luck where he can.
In time Kotallo’s hand drifts down to Erend’s hip, and squeezes. He tugs, rocking a little until he coaxes Erend into a grinding rhythm— unhurried; assertive.
Erend, embarrassingly wet, feels an easy pleasure bloom. He has to laugh at himself, just a little. “Haven’t exactly done this before.”
Kotallo tenders a stinging caress along Erend’s cheek. “They’d remember me next to the Ten if they could see how I have you.”
“Aren’t those your gods?”
“No.”
One syllable, mercilessly swift. Erend buckles under the pressure of it, lust spiking jaggedly. Feverish, he hunches around Kotallo’s left to plant a steadying hand as he works himself over. He hides in plain sight, plastering his temple to Kotallo’s.
“The Ten were human,” Kotallo says, a telltale rustle betraying his movements. He brushes along Erend’s leg with every stroke. “Like me, and you. They ate. Slept. I have to assume they fucked.”
Blasphemer. The word sits on Erend’s tongue like a damned fussy Carja even as the pressure within him steams kettle-hot.
“Would you, Erend? If I asked?”
He tries to ask what; it’s little more than a garbled turned-up note.
Kotallo nuzzles his cheek, slow and sweet. “Would you fuck me?”
“...I—” The air is snatched from Erend when he needs it most, stolen as fuel for his pleasure simmering over. He’ll live with this ending.
“Next time,” Kotallo breathes, “please?”
“Yes,” Erend returns, “yes—!”
He was wrong. Erend’s stomach leaps to his throat. Kotallo, fully alight, smears a heavy kiss across Erend’s cheek before knocking their foreheads together; he hits his final desperate strokes, and Erend’s eyes prick as his true end — a violent shattering — overtakes him.
Then Kotallo is kissing him again, lax, mumbling his happiness. He gives Erend no quarter; pets him everywhere he can reach.
Erend fucked up.
He can stand it only for two hours, maybe, or however much time has passed between Kotallo finally releasing him and now hearing deep breathing in even measures from Kotallo’s bunk. Clammy to the bone, Erend slides into his boots and shoulders his quick escape travel pack. He treads as lightly as he dares to the door controls.
He pauses.
Total, shuddering silence.
“Really?”
Erend ignores the weary question, and leaves.