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The moon shines a dim light through the stained glass of the cathedral, casting all sorts of colors onto the stone below. The boar prince himself stands in front of the rubble, the light from the hole in the roof shining directly above him. Where a preacher may have stood to deliver sermons and guide the Church of Seiros followers in prayer, there is now a pile of rocks that used to belong to the ceiling. Whether the statue of the goddess Sothis remains under it, one can’t say. He is silent, contemplative. He is alone.
… At least, theoretically. A silent intruder approaches, though one non-hostile and entirely familiar. An old friend, though they are much like strangers now. His thick, leather gloves touch the pillars within the church, walking slowly so his boots don’t make any noise against the floor. Despite the care he takes — and, yes, he was being careful — there isn’t much to be done when the wild king-to-be turns his head, a wild look in his eye.
“You,” he mutters, accusingly. “You shouldn’t be here.”
The prince’s company freezes mid-step. He feels, vaguely, like a rodent in the tall grass. Hidden, but the way the blades of grass move give him away. He smiles, raising his hands into the air as if in surrender. “ You? Come on, Dimitri. Don’t tell me you forgot my name! Even after all these years, I thought we knew each other well enough to—”
“ Claude, ” Dimitri hisses through his teeth to cut him off. Perhaps he meant for it to sound intimidating, or even dangerous. When Claude doesn’t budge or even flinch, he turns back toward the rubble pile, eyes narrowing a bit. “... Temporary alliance aside, I would not think you would seek me out. The rest of your lot seem to be keeping their distance.”
Claude slowly lowers his hands and, rather boldly, dares to approach. Throwing all sense of self-preservation to the proverbial wind, he compels himself forward. Of course, if Dimitri really did try to attack him here, he might truly be out of luck. After all, he came unarmed, and the prince has the strength to snap swords in half, let alone a person. Yet he remembers that in the face of adversity, one must not act as prey, or else they’ll fall victim to actually being prey. Once he finds himself at Dimitri’s side, he speaks again.
“Yeah, well, I like to think I’m not like the rest of my ‘lot.’”
He feels almost like he should accentuate his jest by bumping his shoulder against Dimitri’s, but he figures he might lose his whole arm if he does that. Dimitri, on the other hand, merely scoffs and crosses his arms. He doesn’t say much else for a few minutes, and the two of them stand there in very awkward silence. Claude takes this moment to look around, assessing the differences from what he knew of this place. He was never a particularly religious person, to be sure, but somehow, seeing this place in shambles is soul-crushingly depressing. As he looks around, he recalls the last time he met Dimitri here at around this time of night.
It was after the identity of the Flame Emperor had been discovered. Though this wasn’t exactly common knowledge, nothing could ever really get past Claude. Dimitri had slowly begun to change from that point on, as if something within him had snapped. Claude started to see less and less of him, which was concerning in itself. It wasn’t that the prince was necessarily a social butterfly, but it was almost as if some kind of darkness surrounded his heart, and he was closed off from most people — except those who were exceptionally close. It was for that reason that on that night, a few days less than five years ago, Claude had followed Dimitri while he was out late at night to this very spot. The words Dimitri had uttered next stuck with Claude for a while after that, even if he never recalled the exact wording. It was something exceptionally violent, and extraordinarily vengeful. It terrified Claude, a bit — shook him right down to the bone — but there was also a sort of… morbid fascination with Dimitri like this. Something he’d be entirely too ashamed to admit to.
Claude’s idle reminiscing comes to an end when he hears a sort of growl being emitted from the other. He snaps his head back toward Dimitri, who is now looking at him fully. “If you have business here with me, then you ought to come out with it. I’m sure that you’re very busy being a diplomat and all, and I’m tired of standing here with you.”
Claude blinks, not quite shocked, but a little confused. He had barely realized he was all but daydreaming next to someone so many people have been comparing to a wild beast. He reaches up to rub the back of his neck. “It’s not really business at all, actually. More than anything, I just wanted to see what you were up to.” He presses his hands together apologetically, a lopsided smile on his face. He closes one of his eyes playfully, if only to chase away this horrifically tense aura he’s getting from the other. “ You’re my business, so to speak.”
“Then you’re surely wasting your time. I haven’t forgotten these games of yours over the years.” And with that, Dimitri turns on his heel and begins to make his way toward the entrance of the cathedral. “To make a corpse your business is futile. Your crafty flirtations won’t work on a corpse, anyways.”
As Dimitri delivers that line, Claude exhales. He presses his fingers, still held together, to his forehead and counts to three before he starts to follow the other. “Whoa, there. What makes you think it’s an act? I just want to talk to you, Dimitri. Is that so wrong?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Not the answer I was hoping for, but definitely the answer I was expecting.”
Dimitri doesn’t respond. He only continues to walk. Claude, of course, does not relent or let up even a little bit. Frustratingly stubborn, that one is — at least, that’s what Dimitri finds himself thinking as they continue to walk forward. Claude keeps pleading with him to just stay and chat, but Dimitri doesn’t remember or even really hear what he’s saying. All he does know is that, eventually, he gets too fed up with Claude’s incessant yapping, whips around, and lashes out.
With a hand at the base of Claude’s neck, his thumb pressed into the divot near his windpipe, Dimitri hisses. Claude freezes. He can only watch in apparent awe, swallowing the shock in his throat. His Adam’s Apple bobs up, and then down, so Dimitri can feel the movement in the pad of his thumb. Claude is quite aware of how easily Dimitri could crush his windpipe or snap his neck in that moment. He feels a similar shiver of what he felt so long ago. Very eloquently, he musters the only thing he can think to say, hushed, breathless:
“Wow…”
Dimitri pauses to look at him. The way his lips are parted and his eyes look on unfocused, the way his hair is slightly tousled from being jerked around a little bit, and finally, the way he can feel the rise and fall of Claude’s breathing against his thyroid… raises a peculiar feeling within him. He recalls his days back at the academy a little reluctantly, but he sees himself as a teenage boy in his mind’s eye. He sees himself unable to take his eyes off of the Riegan heir that always felt a little too familiar and a little too distant all at once. The one who was always the outsider, and yet seemed like he was perfectly at home among crowds of people both like and unlike him. Beautiful, charming Claude, always energetic, always welcoming — and yet he seemed so alone. He remembers… he was always drawn to that, wasn’t he? He wanted to see the man underneath, to unravel him.
Though now, he intends to unravel him in more ways than one. His finger presses harder into the divot, teeth gnashing together yet still smiling harshly all the same. Claude likes this — even a beast like him can tell that, even in the darkness, there’s a redness on his cheeks. Dimitri lets his gaze fall to the hand halfway around the other’s neck. He can see how Claude has a bit of difficulty breathing around the thumb pressed into it. His gaze moves lower, and lower, until he notices something. Something he perhaps wasn’t expecting.
“Is that…?”
Claude laughs, eyes shifting away from Dimitri’s face. “It—yep. It sure is.”
Dimitri stares downward, whether in shock or disgust it’s hard to tell… but all of Claude’s anxiety regarding it being the latter fades when he sees Dimitri actually grin like an animal that’s hunting something.
Claude thinks of something witty to respond with. Maybe “Like what you see?” or some other horrible cliche. He can think of a million things to say that would be frustratingly charming and endearing. Claude’s specialty, after all, is thinking on his feet and keeping his lackadaisical air even under pressure. It should be easy, right? He’s been doing it for years, and yet in the face of a ruggedly handsome man who could easily snap him like a toothpick with a hand around his neck makes it way harder. In the end, he can’t think of anything but the very phrase he thought of first. He smiles, and then…
“Did something… catch your eye?”
Dimitri tightens his grip on Claude’s neck, his thumb sliding around to fully grasp it now. Claude now fully presses himself to the pillar behind him, a gasp entering his lungs. He presses his hands to the stone, curling his fingers toward his palm. His eyelids lower a bit as he wriggles. Dimitri, on the other hand, seems to revel in the sight — Claude, who always seems so haughty and put together, a wriggling mess against a cathedral pillar. Very soon, he realizes, he might be feeling that way , too. He lets up a little bit to let Claude catch his breath, but his gaze is very hard on Claude’s face.
“I’ll crush you,” the boar whispers harshly, head tilted, eye trained on his company. “I will.”
Claude huffs out a laugh, raising a hand toward Dimitri’s wrist. They curl around it and urge his hand forward. His voice is raspy as he gives his reply: “I know. And, Gods, I wish you would.”
All of Dimitri’s impulse control breaks away from him like a herd of wild boars. He crushes his lips into Claude’s hungrily, clumsily. He is in no way very good at this, nor has he ever done something like this before. He only ever dreamed long ago of giving Claude even a quick peck on the lips, let alone giving him a lip-bruising, bite-filled kiss up against the stone pillars in the cathedral. He squeezes his fingers into Claude’s neck with bruising strength, feeling the way he struggles to acclimate to not breathing underneath the palm of his hand. How tragically fragile he is in this moment, though instead of what should be fear, Claude is excited. He fumbles with his hands, searching for something, anything he could get a hold of, but all he ends up touching is the hard material of his breastplate. His fingers curl into the gap at the top, as though somehow, his oxygen-deprived brain thought he could take it off that way. Dimitri only barely notices this as he moves his sloppy kisses from Claude’s now-swollen lips to his jaw, teeth sinking into the skin there. The prince’s leg slips between Claude’s legs to rub his thigh against the other’s growing erection. Claude tries to gasp, but the hand around his throat won’t let any air in. It’s dizzying. The sensation of getting rubbed on while being deprived of breath is simply intoxicating, and if Claude is to die here and now, if Dimitri were to snap his neck, he wouldn’t mind at all.
“Aghkk… ple… let me…” Claude tugs at Dimitri’s breastplate uselessly, drool dripping from the side of his mouth. He rolls his hips against Dimitri’s thigh for more stimulation while he tries to formulate sentences. “...ake… it off…”
Dimitri pulls away from his jaw with some hesitancy, a trail of his own spit connecting his lips to the skin he was attached to just moments ago. His breath is heavy and hard as his attention is trained on Claude. He tilts his head, a short smile spreading across his lips. “What? What do you want, Claude? Use your words.”
Claude thinks that might be the sexiest thing he’s ever heard. He opens his mouth to do just that, to respond, to use his words like he was told, but all that comes out is a gasping whine. Gods , it’s just that good. He feels dirty and good when Dimitri ogles him like that, while he’s reducing him to a puddle of shivering and hot breaths. When Dimitri slowly grinds his thigh up against Claude’s crotch, he realizes it’s the only sensation he’s really feeling right now. His throat doesn’t hurt anymore, but he does feel very light-headed. Everything else is a very numb feeling, but the tingling and aching down below he can feel acutely. He feels his eyelids getting heavier and heavier with each squeeze of Dimitri’s fingers, and then—
And then—
He stops. Claude almost collapses onto his knees, breathing in gasping breaths. Dimitri catches him by his shoulders effortlessly and lets him catch his breath, starting to walk them both backwards toward one of the pews. Claude can’t see his face from where he is, as his cheek is buried into the chest of Dimitri’s cold armor, but he does feel the intensity radiating off of Dimitri. He hopes to himself as he coughs and splutters a little messily that the intensity is the same as he feels, and just as he wonders that, he feels a hand at his chest, pushing him backwards. He gasps again, moving to grab onto Dimitri so he doesn’t fall over, but Dimitri is faster and far stronger. He keeps his hand pressed to Claude’s chest and shoves him against the seat of the pew. Now, Claude can see his face clearly, see his eye shining under his messy hair. There’s an odd kind of unfocused haze in that watery blue eye. It seems like the two are mesmerized with each other — Dimitri with Claude’s deliciously vulnerable appearance at the moment, and Claude with the hungry, longing look in Dimitri’s eye. It’s been long — too long. The hesitation between them is silent, aside from the ragged breathing coming from them, until Claude breaks it with a raspy, sore voice.
“Come on, Your Princeliness. Haven’t… I been waiting long enough?”
That was enough. The dam breaks open, and Dimitri begins to remove layers of armor. Where Claude would expect deft effortlessness, Dimitri replaces it with clumsy eagerness. In the meantime, he decides to undress himself, even if he’d much rather Dimitri do it for him. It could take a while for the both of them. While he takes off the layers of his clothes, and Dimitri removes his armor, the two of them realize how much their bodies miss each other. Claude can feel the ghosts of Dimitri’s fingers still pressing into his neck. As he continues to remove his layers, Dimitri stops him by reaching out to grab his wrist. Claude looks at him curiously.
“Just the pants. If someone comes in, then—”
“—We’ll need a quick get away, right?” Claude laughs, raising his hands up. “Okay, okay. I got it. As much as I’d relish the memory of your naked body, I get it.”
That… embarrasses Dimitri, and he’s glad that it’s dark in the cathedral as he feels his face heating up. As Claude works at getting his own pants undone, Dimitri reaches out and grips Claude’s jaw, hard, as he clenches his teeth together. Claude only laughs, glancing up at him through his lashes.
“Hit a nerve, did I?”
The next thing Claude registers is his back hitting the bench of the pew again and Dimitri’s fingers at his throat again. He grunts shortly before Dimitri squeezes his fingers against his neck, using his other hand to loosen his zipper. He’s impatient and sloppy, only doing it with one hand while the other hand forces Claude’s chin upward to give him more room. He presses his palm into Claude’s jugular, and the other’s breathing cuts off. Dimitri is sure he doesn’t know it, but Claude starts to smile in a way that the prince has never seen before; eyes slitted and rolling back, drool pooling and spilling over from the corner of his mouth. The sight is addicting, to be sure — Dimitri finds himself growling out loud and all but ripping Claude’s pants off of him. He folds his knee and kneels it on the bench next to Claude’s hip, breathing growing more ragged and wild. Fingers flexing and squeezing, breath stopping and struggling to start again, Claude’s face contorted into an expression of euphoric bliss — a masterpiece in a canvas, etched into Dimitri’s mind. He looks good, like this.
Dimitri takes care, at least, not to rip Claude’s undergarments off, but only barely. He slides them off quickly to expose Claude’s swelling cock to the cold air of the cathedral. He feels Claude shiver a bit underneath his hand, giving a small, gurgling whimper in approval. Dimitri feels a chill wash over his spine at the sound and moves to take out his own cock before he catches sight of something in the corner of his eye. He looks — and it’s only Claude’s hand, waving a small bottle of something. Dimitri stares at it before he realizes what it is before glancing back to Claude’s messy face, snatching the bottle from him.
“It was in the back of my mind, that,” he mutters.
No it wasn’t, Claude finds himself thinking in response, but he wouldn’t be able to vocalize such a thing now. He starts to feel that familiar dizziness, the familiar lightheadedness, from before. His head starts to roll a little and his jaw starts to slacken. He wonders if he should tell Dimitri, somehow, that he might pass out at any second, but the hand that found its way around his cock and the fingers that move in and out of him feel so good. The haziness in his head spreads slow, like pouring honey from a jar. His eyelids start to get heavy again before—
The air rushes back into his lungs and caused him to jolt a little bit, eyes popping open and staring up at the moon above. There’s tears at the corner of his eyes, the feeling of being able to breathe and the pumping of Dimitri’s hand around his cock is almost overwhelming. He moans out loud and, startled by the echoing that greets him, he claps his hand over his mouth. Gods, that was embarrassing. He lets out another low moan against his hand as he watches what Dimitri is doing. He seems to have figured out well enough what to do with the lubricant and his fingers, even if Claude figures this is likely the first time he’s done something like this. Claude sits himself upward a bit and runs his index finger up under Dimitri’s jaw to bring his gaze to his face. Dimitri looks at him, eye glossy, and waits for him to speak.
“You said you were gonna crush me, right?”
An unfocused nod. Claude returns the gesture with a smile.
“Then do it.”
Dimitri’s fingers suddenly find the back of Claude’s hair to yank his head backwards. Claude yelps in surprise, and it’s like music to Dimitri’s ears. He growls as he eyes the bruises on Claude’s neck. He thinks of how Claude will feel that every time he moves his neck, how every time he looks at himself in the mirror, he’ll see those. How he’ll have to hide those from people from here until they heal. He shoves Claude back against the bench again and grabs his thighs, pulling his rear onto his lap. Without much further ado, he angles his dick against Claude and finally pushes into him. Claude arches his back a bit, drawing out a moan against his own fingers. He’s smiling. It’s… a cocky smile, for sure. One that fills Dimitri with a kind of fond embarrassment. He knows this — and surely he missed it. This game Claude plays with everyone, testing them, teasing them, pushing their buttons. Usually, Dimitri wouldn’t indulge him. In fact, he often tries to keep his cool whenever he gets like this. In the current circumstances, though, he wants nothing more than to wipe that smile off of his face and turn him into a heaving, writhing mess.
He wants to break him. Not like the others, not like the ones he hunts for revenge, but break him nonetheless. He smiles a gritted, toothy grin and hooks his hand underneath Claude’s knee. He pulls his hips back and then slams them forward, making sure he catches every inch of Claude. It isn’t calculated, and it sure as hell is sloppy, but it makes Claude shout all the same. The smile is knocked clean off Claude’s face as he rolls his head back and presses it against the bench.
“Ohh, Gods! ”
Dimitri feels like he might go crazy. He continues to find a rhythm, first acclimating Claude to the feeling, watching him slowly unravel. Claude’s voice is sugary sweet like this, as if it were made of melted chocolate. It’s hard to hold himself back when he hears it, and he figures Claude wouldn’t want him to. He hooks Claude’s leg over the back of the pew and grabs onto it for leverage. His other free hand slides from Claude’s hip, up his side, to his chest, and then finally rests over his neck again. He watches Claude twitch slightly when the fingers brush his thyroid. Dimitri’s lips curl into a smile. He gives Claude a particularly hard thrust as his hand moves upwards to grab his jaw, palm pressed into his jugular. He squeezes and holds Claude’s head back.
Claude’s entire body tenses around Dimitri so suddenly that the prince gasps, followed by a drawn-out groan. He starts to move himself in and out of Claude faster, fucking him — really fucking him — squeezing his fingers into the other’s throat. Sweat beads at his forehead and trickles down. Their bodies separate and connect over and over again under the moonlight, two perceived “outsiders” becoming one. One of Claude’s hands wrap around Dimitri’s wrist while the other touches himself, timing his strokes to each thrust inside of him. Dimitri’s breaths start to lace with his voice. He’s overly conscious of it, especially with the echo, so he leans down to kiss Claude to stifle them. Their lips crash and slip and slide against each other clumsily as Dimitri’s hips, equally as clumsily, continue to move against Claude’s ass. After a while, he notices the pitch of Claude’s voice in his throat is different — higher, even while he’s being choked. He must be doing something right, so he angles himself to hit that spot over and over again. Dimitri finds he has trouble kissing Claude and fucking him at the same time with the intensity he has, so he pulls back, if only a bit, to watch the expression on Claude’s face.
It’s one of unadulterated bliss. His eyelids are heavy and his mouth is agape, drool spilling from his mouth again. Dimitri can feel Claude’s warm body tighten and twitch around his cock deliciously with every flex of his fingers. He’s so mesmerized by the sight of Claude’s face, the color of his cheeks, the unfocused look in his eyes, that he doesn’t notice the sound of wood straining from where his hand rests on the back of the pew.
“...D..mitri…” Claude splutters out, the movement of his hand and the jerking of his hips becoming more sporadic. “I—”
“I know,” Dimitri breathes back, flexing his fingers against both his throat and the backing of the bench. “Want me to finish you off?”
Claude’s consciousness is starting to fade again, and Dimitri can tell. He’s smiling dumbly and reaching up to slide a hand into Dimitri’s hair. “Kil...ling me?”
Dimitri scoffs and gives Claude’s neck another hard squeeze before he releases him abruptly, swatting Claude’s hand away from his cock and replacing it with his own. He times his strokes with the rhythm of his hips, just like Claude was doing before. He leans closer, toward Claude’s ear. His voice is a low growl. “Maybe next time…”
Claude finds it in himself to laugh in between his pathetic gasping for air. He slides his fingers into Dimitri’s hair, shaking in pleasure. “The… ‘little death,’ then.”
Claude finishes first. He spills, tragically, all over himself and Dimitri’s hand. The sweet sound of his voice when he does is like the Heaven Dimitri figures he’ll never get to taste. He moves his hand away from Claude’s cock, grabs onto his hip, and starts to momve within him with reckless abandon until — until — until he feels himself about to explode. He bites into the flesh of Claude’s soft neck as he spills over inside of him, the both of them twitching. There’s the peculiar sound of wood snapping in half, too, before they both find themselves back on the floor, a pile of wood that used to be the pew underneath them. The both of them just catch their breaths in silence, pressed up against each other, before Dimitri speaks:
“... Shit.”
“No, that—that was good. I really… couldn’t have thought of a better end to that than what happened just now.”
“Shut up. Just—be quiet. None of your games.”
Claude laughs, letting his hands rub circles lazily in Dimitri’s hair. “No games. I’m serious. You could have snapped my neck like you did ol’ Pile of Wood here, but you broke the pew instead.” He pauses, a coy smile only barely suppressing itself. “You showed a lot of restraint, even if you lacked it in several other places.”
Dimitri promptly pulls himself out of Claude and starts to zip his pants up. Claude shoots upwards — and flinches a bit, since Dimitri isn’t exactly the smallest in the dick department — and holds out his hands. “Wait, wait, wait. Don’t go anywhere yet.” He shimmies himself over and sits in Dimitri’s lap, rendering Dimitri unable to move.
The prince sighs when Claude wraps his arms around his neck. He opens his mouth to speak, but Claude cuts him off with a kiss. It isn’t particularly steamy, nor is it long, but it’s enough. When he pulls back, Dimitri is a bit dumbfounded. Claude simply smiles.
Dimitri reaches up — very carefully, possibly as gently as he’s been all evening — and holds Claude’s face. He looks him all over — really looks at him — and says, on impulse: “I want to do it again.”
Claude laughs, turning his head away and covering his mouth with his hand. “What? No way. I’m gonna have to sleep for three days just to recover from that.” A pause. A miserable glance toward the ruined pair of pants on the stone cathedral floor. A sigh. “... Tell you what. Bring me back to your room so I can figure out how I’m going to be on my way without a pair of pants, and I’ll think about it.”
Dimitri follows Claude’s gaze to the ripped pants. Then, he looks back to Claude. He wraps his arms around the other and pulls him closer, burying his face into his shoulder. There’s something a little sad about the innocent gesture, so Claude makes no movement to pull away. He just pets Dimitri’s hair a little bit before the prince finds it in himself to agree to the terms. He picks the both of them up, wraps Claude in his cape, and takes the Leicster leader back to his quarters.
The two leaders learned things about each other that night. Dimitri learned that Claude is really into choking… and Claude learned that Dimitri is a cuddler.