Chapter Text
“You are heartless, Hubert.”
“Better heartless, Ferdinand, than headless.”
“Enough.” Edelgard’s hands slam against the council table. Linhardt flinches awake. “This bickering has gone on for longer than I care to hear today. If you must continue, then take it elsewhere.”
Ferdinand glowers. “Or you could bring your dog to heel, Edelgard. Where he belongs.”
So this is the path he’s chosen today. Hubert’s blood rises. “Speak that way to Her Majesty again,” he warns, “and I have no qualms about cutting—”
“Both of you!” This time it’s Lady Edelgard’s fist that hits the tabletop. “Out. Now.”
Hubert’s eyes meet Ferdinand’s across the table. Ferdinand breaks away first, his jaw twitching with unbridled rage; his lack of sleep is clearly contributing to a piss-poor sense of stress control. If he were more put-together, he’d take stock of their surroundings, of the fact that they aren’t the only two people in this room. Instead, Ferdinand can hardly see through the furious scarlet on his cheeks.
The war room is loud with the cacophony of chair legs scraping across the flagstone in near-but-uncomfortably-not-quite unison. The rest of the council remains silent. Ferdinand shoves his chair at the table so hard it topples onto its side as he storms out of the chamber.
Hubert’s upper lip twitches with distaste. Rageful, petulant shitling.
He stalks out silently in Ferdinand’s wake, anger just as palpable. It lingers sour on his tongue, loud as any scream locked in his chest.
“Wonderful, Ferdinand,” Hubert sighs, trailing two paces behind Ferdinand. “Thanks to you, yet again we are naught but unruly schoolchildren in need of discipline from the headmistress herself.”
Ferdinand stomps faster, spurs jangling like coin in a mercenary’s grateful hand, but Hubert’s stride is longer; it is all too easy to keep in step with him.
“I have done nothing wrong,” Ferdinand insists. “Perhaps you should get over yourself for a change.”
Hubert scoffs. “Rich, indeed, coming from a noble so determined to make love to his own inflated sense of status he thinks his ignorant—”
“Oh, go to hell.”
“—and, quite frankly, stupid opinions are worthy of offering to the emperor in form of insipid debate.”
That earns Hubert a fiery turn of Ferdinand’s head and eyes as wild as a mustang running free. Whatever he has to say he prudently bites down on, and continues on his way. He takes a turn into an empty chamber in the ruined fort. Hubert follows him in, not so easily shaken off.
They’ve argued here before; it is a good choice for the purpose, a short tantrum away from the war room and relatively isolated from the rest of the fort. No soldiers loitering about to listen in and make the pair the trash talk of the camp tonight. Then again, their asinine, half-hour argument in the war council room was so loud that such a fate is probably already inescapable.
If Ferdinand is in such dire need of a spanking, then it’s just as well to do it in private.
Exasperated, Hubert rakes the hair away from his face, leaving both his eyes sharply fixed on Ferdinand. There is no point continuing like this.
“What are we but vipers held in each of Edelgard’s hands, constantly biting into each other? What shameful conduct.”
“Hah!” It is not Ferdinand’s usual, sweet-natured laugh, but an ugly, mordant thing more suited to Hubert’s throat. “And I am the one prone to dramatics?”
“If only you could learn to behave in Her Majesty’s presence,” Hubert sneers, “and save your senseless drivel for the privacy of your tent.”
“Behave in her presence? Am I a maid, or an advisor?” Ferdinand scoffs. “At least my head is not rooted so firmly up her ass that I cannot see the wider matter at hand.”
Hubert’s head twitches near-imperceptibly to the right.
No. That manner of talk will not be borne.
He snatches Ferdinand’s bicep in one bruising hand and digs his fingers into the thick padding of his greatcoat.
“Unhand me,” Ferdinand snarls.
Hubert leans in and jerks Ferdinand closer. Ferdinand stares up at him, unfazed, lips drawn into an intense frown.
“I will excuse your occasional mouthing off to me,” Hubert growls, “but your flippant tone toward Her Majesty is not to be endured.”
“Let go!” Ferdinand shakes Hubert’s hold off with so much force that he stumbles back a step.
They do not look at one another. Ferdinand holds his arm protectively. The tip of Hubert’s tongue emerges as he wets his lips.
“Fine.” Hubert curls his fingers into a solid fist. “As it is, I believe I have had enough of your petulant shit for one day.”
“Cry me a river, Hubert.” Ferdinand’s laugh rings hollow. “Perhaps Edelgard will grant you leave to drown yourself in it.”
Hubert’s next breath is a sharp intake of air between dissatisfied lips. He stops his tight, circled paces and turns his head in Ferdinand’s direction.
The cheek on him. Were Hubert more like his father, he might give that cheek exactly what Ferdinand so clearly begs for: a hard crack of his hand.
Instead, Hubert lets out a lengthy sigh between gritted teeth.
“Proving my point,” he says, his hushed disappointment thick as black oil in every word. “Incredibly mature, Ferdinand.”
Birds sing far too brightly in the trees that twine their boughs in through the broken rafters. A lance of sunlight warms Ferdinand’s cheek and shines like copper on his lashes. He swallows, then breathes out.
“Yes, well. I…”
The firm line of Hubert’s jaw relaxes; his shoulders drop subtly. He recognizes this point well enough by now: Ferdinand has had his flare of temper.
“Is that all, then?” Hubert asks, gently but firmly—the threat of a whip in an experienced hand. The wildness in Ferdinand calms, a lion into a lamb.
“You have my apologies, Hubert,” Ferdinand says, voice soft. He meets Hubert’s eyes with shame in his own. “There is no excuse for my behavior at council today. For my behavior just now. Even if we disagree on such a matter, I should not have comported myself in such a manner. It is unbefitting of a noble.”
“Indeed.”
The rusted steel door slams shut behind Hubert. Ferdinand startles. Hubert makes a vague gesture at the door, as if turning an invisible key in midair, and it glows stunningly violet for a second before fading back into mottled rust and splotches of persistent moss.
“Entirely unbefitting,” Hubert agrees. Something has shifted in his demeanor—a haughty tilt of his chin, an upwards tip of his high nose, a dangerous light in his olivine eyes.
Ferdinand’s lids droop. Color blooms in his cheeks. “I have been uncouth. Impulsive.”
Also uncouth, also impulsive, Hubert advances on Ferdinand. His fists wrap into Ferdinand’s gilded lapels, and he shoves. Ferdinand’s back hits the wall, pushing the air in his lungs out as a pained and pretty gasp. There is a shuffle of heavy cloth, of leather and metal fastenings, as their bodies meet. Hubert looms over Ferdinand, staring down at him at a sharp angle, close as he is.
Ferdinand’s breath releases, shaking like a leaf in the wind.
His hand moves before his brain does, cupping instinctively around Hubert’s groin. His fingers caress the pleasurable shape of what lies beneath the thick fabric, already twitching to stiff life. Ferdinand sighs, his mouth dropping open in unguarded hunger—as if his mouth can feel exactly what it is his fingers can.
The corners of Hubert’s pale lips rise.
He lunges forth, nuzzling against Ferdinand’s collar. He noses between the folds of his jacket and shirt until he meets fragrant, overwarm skin, flushed with adrenaline and heightened emotion. Ferdinand tips his head back in offering—a choreographed dance he’s practiced with Hubert countless times—revealing more skin to Hubert’s fevered kisses.
Hubert grinds his clothed cock against Ferdinand’s squirming hips. He nips at Ferdinand’s neck, eliciting a hiss that stirs the dark hair at the crown of his head. Hubert smirks against the red mark, sucking sweetly at it in apology, a little sugar to ease the ache. Ferdinand brings his hand to Hubert’s hair, the thick strands catching on the steel casing his knuckles. His other hand curls greedily around Hubert’s hip.
“Harder,” Ferdinand whispers.
Hubert bucks his hips forward as encouraged, his cock pressing pleasurably against Ferdinand’s, just as quick and eager to stand at attention beneath the constraining prison of his trousers—perhaps because he was already well on his way before now.
“Did you think I didn’t notice?” Hubert teases, his breaths quickening against Ferdinand’s neck.
Ferdinand merely shakes his head in mild confusion.
“How hard you were,” Hubert clarifies, “in the council chamber?”
Ferdinand’s cheeks deepen in color and his cock twitches heavily against Hubert’s slow thrusts.
“You get off on it.”
“Be quiet.”
“You get off on fighting with me.”
“It is… an involuntary response—ngh!”
Hubert furrows his teeth into Ferdinand’s neck, drawing a quick, red bruise into his skin. Ferdinand’s fingers clutch at Hubert’s cloak and at the soft, black waves that tickle pleasantly against his exposed skin. His thighs creep apart even as they shiver; Ferdinand melts into Hubert’s insistent fucking, the layers of their clothes only adding to the mind-numbing friction to the point that he feels his cock dripping dangerously.
Hubert mouths his way up the curves and angles of Ferdinand’s throat above his cravat, to his chin, to his cheek, to his lips—
Ferdinand turns sharply away.
“Ah, right.” Hubert laughs, low and bitter. “Saving your first kiss for your eventual bride.”
The thought of it turns Hubert’s stomach. Ferdinand taking his abhorrent father’s place, noble and fierce and brightly handsome. Ferdinand with a blurry her at his side, a pretty little wife befitting his romantic dreams of fairy-tale courtship. Ferdinand serving as the emperor’s prime minister, eager to finish work in order to make it home to her, to make tender, boring love to her.
To kiss her.
“How sentimental,” Hubert finishes, voice dripping with vinegar.
“Stop talking,” Ferdinand mutters. “Just fuck me.”
Hubert’s eye twitches with amusement. He raises his hand to Ferdinand’s ear; white leather slides into strawberry blond locks, gentle as baby’s breath. Ferdinand searches Hubert’s eyes for an explanation for the touch, almost fond—
“Do not mistake me, Hubert,” Ferdinand said, lit by the coming dawn, the curve of his naked back elegant as he lay prone in Hubert’s bed. “This is a purely practical arrangement. For our shared convenience.”
Hubert squinted through the spiced smoke of his cigarette. From the pillow created by his curled arms, Ferdinand lifted his gaze, staring up at Hubert with those heart-crushingly seraphic eyes. Tempting with those supple, peach-pouted lips.
“Do not try and kiss me again.”
The cruelest, sweetest devil of them all, in the guise of an angel.
—and then Hubert’s fingers tighten in the gossamer strands, squeezing until Ferdinand’s scalp screams and so does he.
“Agh! Hubert!”
Hubert tugs Ferdinand’s head to the left, going in for even more brutal kisses to Ferdinand’s neck, as yet unmarked on this side. As he attacks the creamy, citrus-flower-fragrant skin just above Ferdinand’s racing pulse, Hubert unfastens Ferdinand’s belt and the buttons of his trousers. They make brassy noises in their undone state, siren chimes to invite a lover close. Ferdinand whimpers at a particularly vicious bite to his neck; even so, he tilts his hips forward with need, undone in more than one way.
“Touch me,” he demands, barely above a breath.
Hubert takes Ferdinand by the shoulders and shoves him face-first into the wall.
Ferdinand’s cheek presses against the stone; cold and damp with shade, it might be welcome against his burning blush, if not for the roughness. His fine hair catches on the uneven masonry. Steel grinds along sandstone.
Ignoring Ferdinand’s wordless protests, Hubert slides his hands down Ferdinand’s waist, shamefully hidden beneath his shapeless jacket, and to his hips. He yanks back on them, pulling Ferdinand’s ass away from the wall. Ferdinand shakes, his hands scrabbling for some purchase on the stone.
With a flip of his coattails and a downwards tug, cool air hits his skin, the rounds of his ass exposed to Hubert’s touch. His pants fall uselessly down his thighs, halting around the steel of his greaves; he struggles to keep his balance, his knees quaking as he shifts his weight and parts his legs wider. Hubert’s gloved hands are at his hips, fingers sliding indulgently into the crease of flesh between the fullness of his thighs and the firmer lines of his hip bones. Ferdinand shudders. As if conditioned, he arches his back, perking his ass up. Hubert rewards the behavior with a stroke and a spank. Ferdinand gasps.
“This is what you want, then,” Hubert says.
“I said it,” Ferdinand mutters, “and I meant it. Fuck me.”
“You’re hardly ready.”
“Do you insist on arguing even now?”
Hubert lets out a low laugh that skims up the hairs on Ferdinand’s nape and releases like firework trails of shivering pleasure across his back.
“We both know how you like to,” Hubert whispers, sliding his fingers boldly forward, squeezing around Ferdinand’s embarrassingly erect cock.
Ferdinand glares back over his shoulder. There’s fire in him, tempered sweetly with the frightened mien of a tender rabbit in a jackal’s shadow.
The green of Hubert’s eyes is clear and yet so deep, like expanses of Lake Teutates when the sediment settles at the bottom and leaves the water crystalline. That gaze, paired with the bite of sharp teeth around the fingertip of his glove, force Ferdinand to clutch harder at the wall—but he can’t look away. He watches with shameless hunger as Hubert tugs his glove off with his teeth—excruciatingly slowly, lewdly.
“Hubert…”
The glove hits the ground. Ferdinand breaks his gaze at last as he follows it to the floor. Pristine white leather against ugly flagstone, stained and worn by nature.
Ferdinand’s lashes flutter and a gasp blossoms in his throat. Hubert’s bare fingers, slippery with conjured lubrication, slide between Ferdinand’s ass cheeks. He’s ever so fond of that trick, something he forced into being out of sheer, practical necessity one night while the army camped in the woods.
What a muse you are, he’d told Ferdinand, before fucking him with such renewed (and slick) excitement their tent nearly collapsed.
Ferdinand licks his lips. Closes his eyes. Eagerly, Hubert guides his cock forward, pushing its insistent heat against Ferdinand’s ass. He teases the tip of it around, circling wet and firm, before putting on the pressure. Ferdinand’s breath hitches. Slowly, Ferdinand stretches open around him—the stretch, that sweet, aching stretch… Hubert’s lips part at the delicious sight of Ferdinand’s tight, pink hole pulling the head of his cock in with a pleasurable squeeze.
“Ohh…” Ferdinand swallows. “That… ah…”
Hubert responds with a grunt and a hard movement of his hips, forcing himself in a few more intense inches. Ferdinand winces.
“Not so fast,” Ferdinand hisses.
“Do you want me to fuck you or not?” Hubert grips Ferdinand’s hip and pulls him into the next thrust, drawing a heavy moan from him.
“Ease into it,” Ferdinand complains.
“My,” Hubert purrs next to Ferdinand’s ear, “you’re bossy when you’re upset.”
Whatever Ferdinand has to retort is lost in a choked-off moan as Hubert slides in deeper, prying him open inside and demanding space within his fever-hot body. His thrusts are rough, sparing no effort on any semblance of tenderness or affection.
Neither of those things have room in this relationship. It is a purely practical arrangement, after all, for their shared convenience.
Hubert bites Ferdinand’s earlobe. Ferdinand curls his fingers into fists against the stone.
He breathes out, clearly willing himself to relax, to accept. He asked for this, demanded it, even, so he will take it. The discomfort of Hubert’s rough fuck gives way to a wet pleasure, plunging in deep over and over. Ferdinand’s breaths quicken to keep up. Hubert’s gloved hand creeps around Ferdinand’s neck, his face, and onto his chin; he tilts Ferdinand’s head to one side and kisses the tender spot just under his ear, fragrant and warm.
Ferdinand melts against the wall, his shoulders dropping with each suck of Hubert’s lips against his pounding pulse. Hubert steps in closer, shoving Ferdinand flush against the wall with the entire length of his taller body. He’s heavier than he looks, with the entire weight of his body leaned in onto Ferdinand’s back.
Shimmying back as much as Hubert’s forceful thrusts will allow, Ferdinand tips his ass outward. Hubert’s cock drives in at a fresh angle, forcing a gasping scream from Ferdinand.
“Th-that hurts,” he moans. “Not so rough.” Ferdinand bites desperately at his own fingers.
“Loosen up. You’re too tight.” Hubert is relentless; his hips smack loudly against Ferdinand’s waiting cheeks, cherry blossom pink with the repeated impacts.
“I’m too tight?” Ferdinand gripes. “Maybe you’re just too ridiculously big.”
Hubert laughs. “Flattery will not sway me to go easier on you.” He delivers a punishing thrust, pushing Ferdinand into a half-stumble down the wall.
“Ow!”
“Suck it up,” Hubert says, dragging Ferdinand properly back to his feet. “That’s what you’re good at.”
Ferdinand whips his head to one side, only for Hubert to wrap his fingers around his throat in a frighteningly dangerous grip, harder than Ferdinand is used to.
“Hu… bert!” he manages, before his windpipe closes.
Ferdinand’s neck is slender in his grip. His throat bobs beneath Hubert’s fingers, not quite tight enough to cut off airflow, but just tight enough to remind Ferdinand of his place in this camp:
Right here, fucked into a wall by the emperor’s second-in-command.
Hubert groans with the spiced pleasure of possessing Ferdinand in this simple, oh-so-base way. Perhaps in another set of circumstances, if Fódlan were different—
But no. He possesses Ferdinand in body, and that is enough.
His fingers wrap snakelike, tightening around Ferdinand’s gasping neck. He drives in harder, forcing Ferdinand against the wall with merciless thrusts, each one loud and deep. Ferdinand’s thighs drip with conjured slick, glistening and warm. Hasty as he was for a pounding, Ferdinand takes Hubert’s fucking rather admirably, biting back on his louder moans to avoid alerting the rest of the camp.
“Nnh… ah, I’m gonna c—”
Hubert’s grip bites into Ferdinand’s throat; he chokes him well, properly, the way he does with less cooperative interrogation subjects. Dizzy with dangerous delight, Ferdinand squeezes out an agonizingly pleasured moan, face tipped toward the ruined rafters, body flush against the wall as Hubert plunges fast and deep into his convulsing ass.
Ferdinand crumples in Hubert’s crushing hold as he climaxes, his entire body quaking violently. Hubert lets up on his grip, letting sweet oxygen rush back into Ferdinand’s lungs as he rides out the jagged jolts of his orgasm. The deep-bodied moan that rises from somewhere primal in Ferdinand is entirely worth every headache he’s ever caused Hubert. Viscous white drips down the wall, sliding between the masonry like lewd graffiti: Ferdinand was here, fucked hard and well.
The sweet suck of Ferdinand’s slick heat against his cock sends Hubert over the edge, too. He pistons hard and fast into Ferdinand, racing toward his own end. A cry of pleasure bubbles up, deep and rasping, from his throat; he bites into Ferdinand’s neck where it meets his shoulder—sharp teeth into tender, pretty flesh—and comes deep inside him.
Ferdinand whimpers with the blossom of fresh pain in his shoulder. With the bruises around his neck. With the ache in his lower half. And when Hubert pulls out, Ferdinand whimpers at that sensation, too, lamenting the thick spend that rolls down his inner thighs and further ruins his rumpled underclothes.
Hubert hardly even remembers what they argued about. But the stress of it washes away with the last throbs of his waning climax, replaced with an emptiness, a hunger not quite sated.
Ferdinand pulls up his trousers with an unpleasant wince. Hubert tucks himself away, similarly uncomfortable, though he is better about hiding it than Ferdinand, whose every emotion flies across his flushed face like a flock of mismatched birds.
Hubert’s fingers twitch against his hip. If he could just reach out, just brush the stray hair from Ferdinand’s downturned eyes, just press his fingers to those lips—
“Ferdinand.”
“I need a drink,” Ferdinand says.
“And a bath,” Hubert adds. “Shall I—?”
“No.” Ferdinand straightens out his cravat, pulling his collar stiffly upright to hide the bruising on his throat. His eyes are clear, reflective—holding light and giving none of it back. “Go back to Edelgard. That is what you are, is it not? Her shadow?”
Hubert narrows his eyes. Kneeling, he snaps his gloves up from the ground. Above him, Ferdinand looks the part of the severe prime minister he’s worked his entire life to be. Hubert stares at the gloves in his bare hands, at the subtle buff of dirt along the palms, at the specks of moss stuck to the seam.
Ferdinand smooths his coat out and walks toward the door, pausing just before it. He looks back at Hubert, waiting. Surely impatient. Eager to be as far away from him as humanly possible.
Hubert pulls upright and twists his fingers. The spell breaks, and the door creaks open.
With a hollow clunk, Ferdinand shoves it open the rest of the way, and walks out. His footfalls rattle down the hall; for as even as they sound, Hubert can hear the irregularity in Ferdinand’s steps. The irregularity he fucked into them.
He goes to the doorway. No one is there. Not even an echo remains of Ferdinand—only the faintest waft of him, springtime and bright, with Hubert’s own spiced scent tainting him like autumn chill creeping onto petals before dawn.
Hubert’s fingers curl into a fist. He purses his lips, wets them with his tongue, and sighs.