Post by figgsthepirate on Sept 16, 2011 5:40:23 GMT 10
Title: Su Prabhat
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,464
Card: Autumn
Bingo: wind + orange + autumn + red + harvest
Summary: Suprabhatam: an early-morning Hindu prayer. For Wyldon and Kel, early morning is sacred. Warning: implied threesome.
AN: It's not very polished, but I wanted to post something this week. College is crazy busy, but I still intend to post five stories for every season (I hope!). Also, got a postcard from someone (Fate or clevertricks, not sure which) in the Netherlands! Yay!
Kel’s eyes opened onto silver. She blinked a few times, thickly, feeling warm and safe, cocooned in thick layers of arms and blankets. As her eyes adjusted, she realized the silver was the barest tinge of light entering the room from the enormous glass-paned windows. It streamed in unobtrusively, falling over the floor in layers of pale gold, then streaming up in a reverse waterfall to lay smoothly over the skin of the broad shoulders and thickly muscled neck of Raoul of Goldenlake and Malorie’s Peak. With effort, she pushed herself away from his furnace-like warmth, letting the blankets fall to her waist as she surveyed the barely-lit room. False dawn.
She stifled a yawn against her wrist, looking around. Something wasn’t quite right.
The bed beside her creaked, and Raoul rolled over to face away from her, taking the blankets with him. “’S out,” he mumbled, burying his face into the pillow.
“What?” Kel said, trying to snuggle closer. The manor house – castle, really, or even fortress – was very old, and the stone walls kept in the cold very effectively, especially in these short autumn days.
“Wyldon. He goes out, every bloody morning.”
Kel rubbed her cold nose against his shoulder blade, and understood. She still wasn’t used to this: sharing her bed with two other people instead of just one. “What for?”
“Running. Meditating. Something.” Her jerked away from her clammy touch, his voice an irritable growl low in his chest. “If you’re going to grope me with icicles, can you at least wait until I’ve woken up properly?”
Kel bit back a smile and moved away. Raoul was a terrible grouch in the mornings. “All right.” She pressed a kiss to his sleep-mussed curls and slid out of bed. “We’re dragging you out of bed for breakfast today. You’ve been warned.”
Another half-awake growl, and then silence. Kel waited a few beats until she heard his slow, soft snores begin to kick in, and moved stealthily across the floor in search of her clothes.
>>
Outside, Kel blinked watering eyes against the cold and set a brisk pace for the outer wall. The grounds were deserted this early in the morning. In the pre-dawn dark the frost crunched under her boots in companionable counterpoint to the frosty breaths puffing from her nose and mouth. Behind, the castle lay in mist-wreathed stillness; ahead, the wall rose high and ancient in the half-light. It had probably been forbidding, once, with its brutal crenellations and smoke-stained stone. But now, with the notches smoothed by time and the stones soft and beginning to crumble, it gave the appearance of a venerable old family member, proven in battle but now retired, loved and respected, but still proud and all-encompassing in its protection.
The steps curving up the side of the wall were so old and weather-worn that they seemed almost carved from solid rock; but here and there a telltale crack appeared, a reminder than someone, ages and ages ago, had built this keep from the ground up. Keeping her eyes affixed to the wall, and firmly away from the empty space at her left, Kel trotted up the steps with her hands dug deeply into her coat pockets. Chills from the early morning cold ran down her spine already; she had no desire to add the chills occasionally sparked by vertigo.
At the top, Kel leaned against the battlements and caught her breath, drawing the cold air slowly into her lungs. The view was magnificent. Goldenlake Keep was situated right on the outermost edge of a rocky peninsula that jutted into the mirror-still surface of the lake for which the fief was named. This early in the morning, the lake was black and smooth as glass, with the barest reflections of red and gold in the ripples scared up by birds and leaping fish. Looking farther, it seemed to Kel as if the lake simply stopped, and the world dropped off into an eternity of mist and fog-shrouded mountains; but she knew that if she were to walk around the rim of the lake, she would be able to walk the low ring of stones that sheared off into tumbled cliffs that marked the boundary of the water.
Beyond the lake, the sun’s weak rays touched the rolling hills and crags of Tortall’s midlands. The barest smudges of orange broke among the green of the wooded mountains like muted fire, and Kel closed her eyes, momentarily overwhelmed by the natural beauty of this place.
The slightest scrape of leather on stone, and Kel reopened her eyes as she turned to face the man approaching her. He’d clearly just finished his habitual morning run. His tanned cheeks were slightly flushed, a faint sheen of sweat rapidly cooling on his brow, and his chest rose and fell with an increased, regular rhythm. He was dressed simply in boots and breeches, his tucked-in linen shirt lying open at the throat. Kel’s eyes were drawn to the leap of his pulse under his skin, and a slight smirk deepened the crow’s feet at the corners of his dark brown eyes.
“Good morning.”
Kel’s mouth twitched against her will. “Good morning. How was your run?”
“Satisfactory.”
Typical Wyldon response, she thought to herself, but kept her face perfectly bland. “Raoul thinks you’re crazy for wanting to be up this early when you don’t have to be.”
Wyldon chuckled, a sound that still surprised her on occasion. “I know very well what Raoul thinks. But he doesn’t pester me about it, and I don’t demand that he push himself in the same manner, and so we get on.” He turned to face the view, one hand slipping into his pocket. The other moved with unobtrusive precision to rest on the small of her back. Even through her woolen layers, Kel could feel the heat of his hand, and she took one small step to the side so that she was nestled in the hollow between his arm and his body.
“Why are you up so early?” he asked, his voice a low murmur in her hair.
“I was cold. It’s only half as warm in bed without you there.” Kel kept her eyes fixed rigidly on the distant horizon as it lightening hair by hair, embarrassed by the sentimentality that had slipped out. But his arm fit around her more snugly, and a gentle kiss was pressed to her brow.
“You could always get up with me and run.”
“I could. If I wasn’t kept up so late by certain unnamed parties wih certain unnamed activities,” Kel observed dryly, earning another laugh from him.
“True. But we have to keep warm somehow.” He squeezed her fingers gently before letting his hand fall back against her hip. It was the same exact place he’d gripped her so firmly last night, though with considerably less layers, and she burrowed more readily against him. Sometimes he could be a bit standoffish when it came to casual contact, and so she was determined to savor his current mood.
“It would be easier to keep warm if the wind didn’t whistle through the cracks in the walls,” she mumbled into his shirt, warm from the considerable heat of his body. “I should tell Raoul to repair his manor, it’s falling to pieces.”
“Yesterday you said it was charming.”
“Yesterday it wasn’t so damn cold,” Kel muttered rebelliously. Her grumbling was rewarded, however, as he angled to face her more fully and wrapped his arms around her. She tipped her face up slightly, hopeful, and he kissed her slow and sweet. “Are you done running?” she murmured against his mouth.
“Yes.” One calloused finger traced the unlined curve of her cheek, followed by the ghosting pressure of his lips. “Would you like to go inside?”
“Please.” But she didn’t move. Instead she wound her fingers in the voluminous fabric of his shirt and kissed him again. She loved the taste of him, dark and spicy and earthy, and the warm wetness of his mouth contrasting with his weathered lips. But, to her disappointment, he broke the kiss and stepped away.
“Come.” He tugged her hands, pulling her towards him even as he stepped back again. “Inside, sweet. Before we both catch our death.”
Kel sighed, but acquiesced, following his lithe, sturdy form back down to the ground. “I daresay Raoul would never forgive us if we were ill for our entire leave.”
“No, he would not.”
Kel grinned at the thought of a scowling, irritated Raoul feeding them soup and tea in bed, and trotted to catch up with Wyldon, slipping her hand into his. “When you get up tomorrow morning, will you wake me?”
“Of course,” came the serene reply. Glancing over at him, Kel noted the slight crease at one corner of his mouth – Wyldon’s private smile – and squeezed his hand as they climbed the steps up to the main door, leaving the early morning sacred and preserved behind them.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,464
Card: Autumn
Bingo: wind + orange + autumn + red + harvest
Summary: Suprabhatam: an early-morning Hindu prayer. For Wyldon and Kel, early morning is sacred. Warning: implied threesome.
AN: It's not very polished, but I wanted to post something this week. College is crazy busy, but I still intend to post five stories for every season (I hope!). Also, got a postcard from someone (Fate or clevertricks, not sure which) in the Netherlands! Yay!
Kel’s eyes opened onto silver. She blinked a few times, thickly, feeling warm and safe, cocooned in thick layers of arms and blankets. As her eyes adjusted, she realized the silver was the barest tinge of light entering the room from the enormous glass-paned windows. It streamed in unobtrusively, falling over the floor in layers of pale gold, then streaming up in a reverse waterfall to lay smoothly over the skin of the broad shoulders and thickly muscled neck of Raoul of Goldenlake and Malorie’s Peak. With effort, she pushed herself away from his furnace-like warmth, letting the blankets fall to her waist as she surveyed the barely-lit room. False dawn.
She stifled a yawn against her wrist, looking around. Something wasn’t quite right.
The bed beside her creaked, and Raoul rolled over to face away from her, taking the blankets with him. “’S out,” he mumbled, burying his face into the pillow.
“What?” Kel said, trying to snuggle closer. The manor house – castle, really, or even fortress – was very old, and the stone walls kept in the cold very effectively, especially in these short autumn days.
“Wyldon. He goes out, every bloody morning.”
Kel rubbed her cold nose against his shoulder blade, and understood. She still wasn’t used to this: sharing her bed with two other people instead of just one. “What for?”
“Running. Meditating. Something.” Her jerked away from her clammy touch, his voice an irritable growl low in his chest. “If you’re going to grope me with icicles, can you at least wait until I’ve woken up properly?”
Kel bit back a smile and moved away. Raoul was a terrible grouch in the mornings. “All right.” She pressed a kiss to his sleep-mussed curls and slid out of bed. “We’re dragging you out of bed for breakfast today. You’ve been warned.”
Another half-awake growl, and then silence. Kel waited a few beats until she heard his slow, soft snores begin to kick in, and moved stealthily across the floor in search of her clothes.
>>
Outside, Kel blinked watering eyes against the cold and set a brisk pace for the outer wall. The grounds were deserted this early in the morning. In the pre-dawn dark the frost crunched under her boots in companionable counterpoint to the frosty breaths puffing from her nose and mouth. Behind, the castle lay in mist-wreathed stillness; ahead, the wall rose high and ancient in the half-light. It had probably been forbidding, once, with its brutal crenellations and smoke-stained stone. But now, with the notches smoothed by time and the stones soft and beginning to crumble, it gave the appearance of a venerable old family member, proven in battle but now retired, loved and respected, but still proud and all-encompassing in its protection.
The steps curving up the side of the wall were so old and weather-worn that they seemed almost carved from solid rock; but here and there a telltale crack appeared, a reminder than someone, ages and ages ago, had built this keep from the ground up. Keeping her eyes affixed to the wall, and firmly away from the empty space at her left, Kel trotted up the steps with her hands dug deeply into her coat pockets. Chills from the early morning cold ran down her spine already; she had no desire to add the chills occasionally sparked by vertigo.
At the top, Kel leaned against the battlements and caught her breath, drawing the cold air slowly into her lungs. The view was magnificent. Goldenlake Keep was situated right on the outermost edge of a rocky peninsula that jutted into the mirror-still surface of the lake for which the fief was named. This early in the morning, the lake was black and smooth as glass, with the barest reflections of red and gold in the ripples scared up by birds and leaping fish. Looking farther, it seemed to Kel as if the lake simply stopped, and the world dropped off into an eternity of mist and fog-shrouded mountains; but she knew that if she were to walk around the rim of the lake, she would be able to walk the low ring of stones that sheared off into tumbled cliffs that marked the boundary of the water.
Beyond the lake, the sun’s weak rays touched the rolling hills and crags of Tortall’s midlands. The barest smudges of orange broke among the green of the wooded mountains like muted fire, and Kel closed her eyes, momentarily overwhelmed by the natural beauty of this place.
The slightest scrape of leather on stone, and Kel reopened her eyes as she turned to face the man approaching her. He’d clearly just finished his habitual morning run. His tanned cheeks were slightly flushed, a faint sheen of sweat rapidly cooling on his brow, and his chest rose and fell with an increased, regular rhythm. He was dressed simply in boots and breeches, his tucked-in linen shirt lying open at the throat. Kel’s eyes were drawn to the leap of his pulse under his skin, and a slight smirk deepened the crow’s feet at the corners of his dark brown eyes.
“Good morning.”
Kel’s mouth twitched against her will. “Good morning. How was your run?”
“Satisfactory.”
Typical Wyldon response, she thought to herself, but kept her face perfectly bland. “Raoul thinks you’re crazy for wanting to be up this early when you don’t have to be.”
Wyldon chuckled, a sound that still surprised her on occasion. “I know very well what Raoul thinks. But he doesn’t pester me about it, and I don’t demand that he push himself in the same manner, and so we get on.” He turned to face the view, one hand slipping into his pocket. The other moved with unobtrusive precision to rest on the small of her back. Even through her woolen layers, Kel could feel the heat of his hand, and she took one small step to the side so that she was nestled in the hollow between his arm and his body.
“Why are you up so early?” he asked, his voice a low murmur in her hair.
“I was cold. It’s only half as warm in bed without you there.” Kel kept her eyes fixed rigidly on the distant horizon as it lightening hair by hair, embarrassed by the sentimentality that had slipped out. But his arm fit around her more snugly, and a gentle kiss was pressed to her brow.
“You could always get up with me and run.”
“I could. If I wasn’t kept up so late by certain unnamed parties wih certain unnamed activities,” Kel observed dryly, earning another laugh from him.
“True. But we have to keep warm somehow.” He squeezed her fingers gently before letting his hand fall back against her hip. It was the same exact place he’d gripped her so firmly last night, though with considerably less layers, and she burrowed more readily against him. Sometimes he could be a bit standoffish when it came to casual contact, and so she was determined to savor his current mood.
“It would be easier to keep warm if the wind didn’t whistle through the cracks in the walls,” she mumbled into his shirt, warm from the considerable heat of his body. “I should tell Raoul to repair his manor, it’s falling to pieces.”
“Yesterday you said it was charming.”
“Yesterday it wasn’t so damn cold,” Kel muttered rebelliously. Her grumbling was rewarded, however, as he angled to face her more fully and wrapped his arms around her. She tipped her face up slightly, hopeful, and he kissed her slow and sweet. “Are you done running?” she murmured against his mouth.
“Yes.” One calloused finger traced the unlined curve of her cheek, followed by the ghosting pressure of his lips. “Would you like to go inside?”
“Please.” But she didn’t move. Instead she wound her fingers in the voluminous fabric of his shirt and kissed him again. She loved the taste of him, dark and spicy and earthy, and the warm wetness of his mouth contrasting with his weathered lips. But, to her disappointment, he broke the kiss and stepped away.
“Come.” He tugged her hands, pulling her towards him even as he stepped back again. “Inside, sweet. Before we both catch our death.”
Kel sighed, but acquiesced, following his lithe, sturdy form back down to the ground. “I daresay Raoul would never forgive us if we were ill for our entire leave.”
“No, he would not.”
Kel grinned at the thought of a scowling, irritated Raoul feeding them soup and tea in bed, and trotted to catch up with Wyldon, slipping her hand into his. “When you get up tomorrow morning, will you wake me?”
“Of course,” came the serene reply. Glancing over at him, Kel noted the slight crease at one corner of his mouth – Wyldon’s private smile – and squeezed his hand as they climbed the steps up to the main door, leaving the early morning sacred and preserved behind them.