you're too young & eager to love

This isn't as "pretty" as I would like, but I'm oh so tired and I wrote this in 90 minutes, so whatevs.

I reeaaallllyyy like these two. It's a different dynamic from any other characters I have, I think?

-

When she is younger, her education becomes an exercise in manipulation. She watches her tutor watching her, and she learns the meaning of a well-timed sigh, when best to shift her thighs beneath her simple dress, how to ask a question in the form of a statement. She is learning how the world burned and was reborn. She is learning the history of the beasts, of man, and the battles that became wars. Many books have been lost or destroyed - necessary purges - and she is thankful for the opportunity to learn from such a distinguished scholar. Most girls receive a different training altogether - one focused on womanly duty and obligation – but not she. Augusta schemed her way into private afternoon sessions and thought about what to make of the world and her place in it.

Like all complicated plans, hers begins small. She is fourteen when she first starts practicing her Portuguese (a language she never fully acquired) and sixteen by the time the plot thickens and reaches fruition. It is at sixteen that her tutor places his hands in her dark hair and presses his thin mouth to hers; he takes liberties that she does not mind losing.

She plays for two years, twisting visceral spider webs and plucking heart chords.

The tutor has an assistant that he trusts – as much as any man can trust an unguarded beast. By the end of their first year together, this is what she knows: he kneels for hours without complaint. He rounds his shoulders and curls inward into himself - a wolf in sheep's clothing (she does not understand this, for she is envious of those whose bodies are strong). He has a mouth that shapes words with surprising efficiency and purpose, for all the quietness of his rumbling voice, as though he does not wish to lose the chance to speak with intent. His name starts with an R and he is larger than any other at the boarding house.

She speaks to him when she slips from her rooms at night, barefoot, wrapped in thick shawls to ward off the darkness’ chill.

-

When they open the gates for him, when the sun burns in his eyes after so many years of artificial night, she is taller than he remembers. Half-lit by the entrance, her hair runs past her shoulder blades, loose and free. She’s wearing white, a symbol of the bride she is about to become, and her legs are golden from the hot days without him. Days of freedom, spent roaming the grounds, scratching her skin on field grass and gathering damp earth to send to him in hand-folded notes.

He has a muzzle of iron across his mouth (for biting the ear off a guard who tried removing the letters from his wall), and he can taste copper. She extends her hand anyway, her fingers curling in and beckoning - unperturbed. But she does not touch him.

Not yet.

That will come later, after she has taught him to wait for her approval.

-

Sweating and shuddering and his skin is such a bright shade of red – too bright to be from shame alone – and there’s a noise he makes, in the back of his throat, a strangled, tortuous groan that he struggles to keep behind his mouth. There’s glass beneath his knees from a vase he overturned in his attempt to avoid her, and it’s digging into his skin, but he can’t feel it half as well as he can feel her hand slapping across his face. His skin gets caught beneath her nails and his blurred mind can only imagine what such closeness would feel like – to be trapped beneath her, ground close to her. She calls him disgusting and filthy and a useless mongrel that isn’t worth the energy she spent in retrieving him. She threatens him with returning to the pits and she rips the pages from the book he had brought her in front of his eyes, throws it with a sudden ferocity and it makes contact, sharply, against his right ribs.

She speaks the words of her father, her husband, words of the propaganda. She hurls them at him, merciless in the assault, until even she is breathless and the tension in her arms makes her quiver.

He had shed his clothes at her request, cautious, uncertain. But hungry.

And she had touched him, running her fingertips gently from the tip of his spine to the final knot in the base of his back. A shiver of a sensation. It was the smell of her though, she had known, that would undue him. Her heat and closeness. The metallic blood between her thighs. Pitched forward on the tips of her toes, she had pressed a kiss to his neck, her lips cold against the thrumming, pulsing warmth of his jugular, and felt, rather than saw, the source of his shame rise against her leg.

He’s still hard when she has finished hitting him.

She flicks her hair from her face and is proud when he refuses to meet the weight of her gaze. “Did you enjoy that?”

Radomir tells her yes so quickly that she laughs in response, girlish still, and doesn’t even mind when he presses a kiss to the center of her palm.

-

She is tired from the trip across the desert; the sand has irritated her skin, clinging to even her eyelashes and dark tresses that she tried in vain to keep beneath muslin scarves, but she can sense his hatred of Harrow the minute they step into the Albtraum compound. His ever-wide gait somehow takes up even more space than usual as they navigate the narrow corridors. She places a hand on his wrist, quickly, and it is enough to pacify him for the moment.

He helps her change for dinner, silent, but he stands too closely behind her chair when she eats, discussing the state of affairs with her younger brother.
Harrow’s eyes flick judgingly between her and him. Knowingly, she thinks, but then he often miscalculates so much. “You have known Radomir for some time, Harrow. What is it? Is he bigger than you remembered?”

“There are … rumors. You keep your pets too close.”

Augusta lets her fork clatter to her plate, laughing. It sounds like glass breaking. “And yet you, apparently, did not keep yours close enough. I heard you are allowing Ita to everyone now, since she has disgraced you. Death is a more appropriate sentence, if you ask me, but then you do treasure sentimentality more than I.”

“Ita is accepting of her situation. She is aware of what she has done. She will repent in time. A swan is still a precious thing.”

“Ah, well, I’ve never cared for birds,” she settles back into her seat, stomach only half-full; her hunger has been satiated by her love of competition and an idea that brews quickly inside of her.

She tells Radomir afterwards that she wants him to fight in the next battle. She talks while she, in a rare display of attention, removes his tie and slides his jacket from his shoulders herself. She hates him dressed formally, polished up like a ridiculous butler, like the guards Arletta and Harrow favor. He is not fit for the refinement of Harrow’s compound. She likes him best on the road, in the desert, turned rugged from the scorching sun and the cold nights, when his mouth is like sandpaper and his hands are cracked from the heat. He seems like a fraud in a suit – like an imposter of a beast rather than the thing itself.

Even with the precariously thin heels strapped to her ankles, he is still taller than her. But he looks down fully, keeping her gaze, and shows his teeth in a grin when she snaps his belt open in one fluid twist of her wrist. “So you will fight, and you will win, and then you will fuck Harrow’s swan until she is bloody.”

She slides the leather from his hips slowly, smiling, lifting her hands to hook the belt around his neck and pull him forward till he can feel and taste her breath against his mouth. Augusta shapes the words against his lips with her own, “You can pretend she’s me if you want.”
He growls in response, and she wonders if it’s the idea or the promise of blood that excites him more.

-

He wins.

He wins with blood and brain on his hands, and he does not let the attendants wash him before he is delivered to the champion’s room where he can smell the swan from ten feet away.

He saves the washing for later when Augusta has prepared him a reward – a bath so hot that it threatens to blister – a bath that is purgative. She lets him enjoy the heat and the steam. The silence of the moment, rubbing her wet fingers into the crooks of his shoulders, feeling the muscles beneath her nails. When his eyes begin to grow heavy, she strips and steps into the water. His massive shape crowds the bath, but Augusta settles on the opposite end; he moves to accommodate her wordlessly, her legs touching his beneath the water, her arms resting on the curved linoleum of the bath.

“Did she enjoy it?”

“It pained her.”

“Good. But I imagine you hurt all women … many illustrious ones have wanted to pay for your company, you know.”

Rad quirks the corner of his mouth in a smirk. Bravado or not, he is tired – she can tell by the way he has relaxed into the water, by the wandering cut of his gaze, how his voice is lower than usual. “No,” he says at last, “it pained her because she has bonded.”

Augusta curls her toes, bends her knee, runs the arch of her foot against his calf. “Oh, I see. Even better. Harrow had been waiting for that. I hadn’t realized it had already happened. He never said, although, why would he?”

“No, not with Harrow. The smell was different.”

“The shifter, then. The one she ran away with.”

He nods, the slightest dip of his head, and closes his eyes. He wants to fold his arms behind his head and rest. There is a drumming in his head that will not stop.

“Radomir.”

The water rises and falls with the shift of her body. Augusta moves to her knees, unabashed in her nakedness, and catches him by the chin. He opens his eyes immediately. He has lovely eyes when he is like this – when he has been made vulnerable. He has trouble keeping out his emotions, and she does not think he would be foolish enough to ever lie. But she does not need to even ask the question.

What bothers you?

She stares a moment longer, her fingers pinching his skin, before tsking at last. Her words are a sigh, but they manage to sting when she says, “…You disappoint me.” Augusta pushes her hand into his face before standing, the water streaming from her as from a bird’s feathers.