Work Text:
“Would you like me to wash your back?”
Loid looks up from the collection of toiletries that he’s laid out beside the porcelain sink of their apartment bathroom. A bottle of shaving cream sits next to his disposable razor and a tube of body wash with the particular combination of spices that Yor appreciates. Each night, when they turn out the lights and slip under freshly laundered sheets, she presses her nose to the crux of his shoulder and breathes, her eyes drifting shut.
They should have started sharing a bed years ago. It’s so much easier to fall asleep.
She stands there, her flowing hair that reaches the small of her back having been bound up by some strange alchemy so that it’s confined to a sloppy bun. A flat beige towel wraps around her torso and strains across her bosom. The edge barely reaches mid-thigh, exposing flesh that’s so pale it’s almost alabaster, dotted with pock-marks and slivers of scar tissue that are all the more beautiful because Yor has ceased to care that he sees them. Once, she fretted when nude. He’d even caught her in the midst of applying a low-quality concealing cream to the ones on the inside of her thighs, knowing that he’d see.
A few torpid minutes with a damp face cloth cleaned her up.
Maybe, for them, that’s what marriage is: a comparison of scars without active pity, but passive acceptance.
“Are you certain?” he asks as he returns to the task of gathering his paraphernalia, just so he has something to distract himself and the inevitable stirring that becomes obvious since he’s complete bare to her, save for skin-tight gray boxers. She can see everything, just as much as the Thorn Princess if she flayed him down to the muscle to map the tendons and creases.
“Oh, yes,” she hums, and it’s chipper, eager. She’s staring, and that only makes it worse and better.
He shaves first, the pair of them climbing into the shower with him first to test and adjust, being certain to avoid the initial frigid spray as the hot water works its way up to their apartment. Eyes are locked above waist level even now as he lathers up mechanically, feeling her body behind him, the way she bends over and exposes herself, as if asking him to look. There’s always a force to Yor’s motion. She does nothing by half measures. Direct where he’s mercurial.
He cleans himself with perfunctory efficiency, the temperature leaving his skin just on the verge of scalded, but he bites back the hiss of displeasure and endures. .
They swap positions, slipping by one another so that she can enter the stream of water, and as her breasts slide across his chest, slick with the soap that he’s used to scrub at his pectorals and under his arms, he’s reminded again of just how soft she is, begging to be cradled and crushed to him.
When under the showerhead, she takes to the water like a Naiad, sighing almost obscenely. Rivlets pour down her curves, collecting in the shallows of her collarbone, rolling in lazy streams down her breasts, and tinting her already flushed skin an even deeper shade of pink.
While she finishes, he lathers up his chin, throat, and cheeks using the can of shaving cream, reaching by her body to moisten his hand and dilute the film he’s applied slightly. Keeping his hands busy and off her is only wise.
He doesn’t need to distract himself, though, as the rough scraping of his fingertips on his cheeks conjures the memory of an older boy, faceless because he’s been forgotten, who taught him how to shave. It was only a few months before the lanky teen died, enlisting at seventeen under a fake ID.
A crook in his knees gives her the angle that she needs to take his chin in hand and examine his work, testing the smooth skin with a nuzzle of her nose. Even as water beats down on them, her breath is warm. His Adam’s apple bobs at the way her even breathing causes her breasts to roll against his chest.
“Turn around,” she says, pulling away suddenly, and she looks at him in a way that no one else ever has, like she’s melting for him. It baffles him how the Thorn Princess stares down her targets with cool, fine-cut ruby eyes.
A shuffle sets him under the water again, and he obeys, turning his back to her.
Her hands are gentle now, rising up behind his ears.
Each slow roll of her clinched fingers, almost talon-like so they provide firm and constant pressure, scrapes her nails against his scalp. The motions dig deep – deeper than his hands or his fingers could go, and her soap-slick chest is against his back. Yor is soft and sharp, and tingles cascade up and down his clenching throat and neck, pouring down from the crown of his skull with each scritch and scratch that send his eyes fluttering shut. She has him lolling and quivering, liquid bliss dripping from her fingers and soaking into his skin.
Even under the stream of water, the grind of her nails against clean, wet flesh is still audible and even, rhythmic like the breathing that has slowed. Mist and spicy- floral steam from their mingled body wash fill his nose, the air muggy but not hard to breathe as her chest rises and falls with his back.
No. It’s not hard to breathe. It never is.
Yor makes it easy, lets him breathe as if for the first time.
As in everything, they set time for each other. Every return to the little sliver of feigned normalcy in their apartment – a lie that they, through force of will and delusion and stubbornness, can make real each day because hard work is the only thing that ever makes lies real – is like a groundwire. They live in clamor and confusion, stuck to the wetwork underbelly of international politics, and the only regular note is coming home each day, bloodied, for dinner, a walk with Bond, storytime with Anya, a shower, reading in bed.
He's had women in the shower with him before, legs hooked around his waist, hands to his back, warm and wet all around him.
When on mission, a spy can be a whore or an assassin. He's run the gamut.
He's even experienced this, in a way. The grind and squeal of feet on the anti-slip coating of their shower; she can surprise him, catch him off guard anywhere in the house, but there’s no need to be quiet. The hands that break away now that his hair is sopping wet. A comedic squelching when she squirts shampoo into her palm and lathers her hands before leaning back into him, placing her hands to the base of his skull and pressing forward. Shivers cause his shoulders and arms to jerk as he hisses something that has her chuckling.
And just like that, with one sudsy pass of her hands, he’s floating in pure being, every sense alive and flooded. Hair parts slickly between her fingers, and he remembers other hands that once cradled him.
It's been so, so… long.
She's humming, he realizes, just a little melody that rises and falls in unpredictable waves. It's a scrap of nothing that he can't place, but there's a lyricism to it, and though it has no consonance with anything in his experience, somehow, it has the cadence of childhood lullabies.
The tile walls blur with steam that he can’t blink away even though he tries, has tried, so hard. Suddenly, there is a moment of hyper-awareness; the gritty nodules on the bath-chair are sharp and rough like sandpaper against his toes that curl; the hum, accompanied by white noise from the shower, drown out thought and because Twilight is pure thought, always planning, always suck in the mire of possibilities, he's smothered, eyes fluttering closed as he abandons the struggle and is submerged.
His wife’s gentle hands.
Loid's mouth grows dry in the stream when he braces a hand to sharp, cool tile at his side.
Those “birthmarks” that dot Yor's skin are found everywhere, when he knows how to look, all in places that can't be seen. He's been far more careful in the execution of his missions, and has only a few blemishes to conceal when they go on their family vacation to the beach each summer, but still he feels scar tissue shift.
Something dislodges.
It was so old and well-rooted in the abysses of himself, he hadn't even fathomed the depths needed to search for it. Hadn't even known that it was there to be found.
Like so many things, he hadn't known.
How could that little boy who never left the rubble of a bombed-out city ever have known?
The air is thick and he can no longer breathe through his nose. He sniffs.
When did Yor truly learn how to be gentle?
Gentle as those hands that are now cupping water from the stream that pitter-patters on his chest and rolls down his thighs? Gentle as the – not force, but ... question of her body leaning forward into him, asking him if he'll bed forward into the shower spray. Instinct older than his training sends his head lolling forward, and water cascades through his hair, soap suds pouring down his cheeks. When he wipes away remnants of foam, some must get into his eyes.
Showers are always such an indulgence, just letting himself be consumed by the steady pounding of water that trails through the recesses of his body, following curves of muscle that bunch up in his shoulders and abs as she pulls him back.
“Loid?” Her tone is anxious as it is when they receive an unexpected phone call from Eden and they both know , thoughts twisting down forever opaque paths that stretch from infancy to the oblivion that’s only a few inches away, that Anya is hurt, or dead, or gone.
Just gone.
Those pockets of absence, nonentity made tangible holes, a lack with weight and heft and measure, surround them like landmines in the old battlefields of Ostania and Westalis.
Imagine loss, allowing a piece of yourself to be scrubbed away, not being a horror.
Her hands come to rest on his abdomen. The convulsions that he can't hide race through her breasts, firm and soft curves, the nipples just discernible under his shoulder blades.
“Are you alright?” she asks, her cheek pressed to his upped back, rolling slowly, as she hugs him tightly from behind.
Twilight thinks as only he can. Dispassionate. Objective. Unattached. He tilts his head upwards into the stream, and there are no tears, just warm water pouring over his cheeks, washing clean the last of the soap in his hair that plasters to his ears and neck.
His fingers rub at his eyes to wipe clear the remnants of soap.
She pulls back and then relaxes when he smiles at her over his shoulder, only causing his grin to grow.
“Yes.” His voice is unnaturally hoarse, so he clears his throat. Once. Twice.
A flush ruddies her complexion, running from her cheeks all the way down her throat and just kisses the swell of her breasts, half crushed against his side and chest when he turns to enfold her in a half-hug with one arm. Ringlets of dark black hair have spilled out of her sloppy bun, and a few plaster to her forehead and cheeks. Because he wants to see her, he slicks them back into place, his palm cupping the apple of her cheek, thumb brushing the elegant bridge of her nose and seeping under her eye. Gooseflesh prickles over her finely muscled arms. She’s cold from standing outside the spray, so he invites her back in.
A slow turn, her eyes locked with his, lets her press her lips to his palm, right above his lifeline, and it's soft, smooth, and evocative, though he doesn't know of what.
“I am.” The assurance comes as he leans into her, quenching the flames in his throat with a slow, simple kiss to those plump lips, eliciting a gasp as, gentleness forgotten, the clasp of her fingers becomes a vise, a desperate lock.
But she lets him go so he can turn, licking the taste of her from his lips and tilting his head back again.
She spoons against him again immediately, feet planted firmly on either side of his.
“You can keep going.”
Hesitation on untrodden ground forces him to act, though his voice cracks again.
“Please.”
And she does.