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He feels the change in the air in an instant: A flutter of wings too close to be happenstance, the scrape of skin against craggy bark. Eyes on his back. Talon Du Couteau is so often the hunter, but he does not easily forget the feeling of being prey.
“You’re a long way from the border, Noxian,” a voice says, from somewhere in the trees behind. He sighs. “Not far enough to be alone, evidently.” His own voice is rough from hours of disuse, and the head of the crossbow pressed between his shoulder blades is rougher still. He freezes, blood flushing hot then cold then hot again. He hadn’t heard her approach, this time. Better .
“Are you armed?” the woman asks, perfunctory. As if she has asked the question a hundred times, and received the same answer just as many. Talon gives it to her again, despite. “I am. This is the Wilds.”
A beat of silence, and the crossbow drops. “It is,” Quinn says. “And you are late.”
The edges of her cloak swirl tiny eddies in the leaves as she sweeps past him, eyes fixed ahead. From the treeline a whirr of feathers signals Valor’s glide from his perch. Talon feels the breeze of claws as they skim the tip of his cowl, and resists the urge to duck. “Quickly,” Quinn calls back, without looking.”I don’t have much time.”
Talon follows.
The cave is one he knows well, hidden from view by moss and surrounding rock until one was nearly on top of the entrance. The crags are slick with morning dew but sturdy, a different beast altogether than the narrow rooftops and crumbling walls of Noxus. He follows her easily between rocks that slope down a small incline, and when she ducks her head under the cave’s yawning mouth Talon does the same, melting into the welcome shadow.
Quinn is on him in an instant, her short fingers diving into the mess of buckles spanning his gambeson. Talon sets to work on the other side, aided by practice; he hardly has to look, and so is free to watch her face instead, marking the deep crease between her brow, the wild look rimming her eyes. Another sleepless vigil, no doubt.
“Our scouts found traces of Noxian troops on the causeway to the West,” Quinn is saying, her voice echoing soft against the damp cave walls. “Do you know their position, now?”
“No,” Talon lies, toneless, as he lifts his arms to free himself of the garment. He reaches for her again, unclasping the sigil brooch from her neck with rough satisfaction. The cloak, and Demacia’s aegis, fall together. He nesles his hand into the small of her waist, digging his fingers in and smirking when she flinches at the cold.
“And Demacia’s? Their position?” It is as much a script for him, and Talon says his lines with dutiful care. Sharply, Quinn yanks his tunic free of the waistband of his breeches, not bothering with the lacing, and answers him with more echoes: “I do not know,”
She is lying, too-- Talon sees in her eyes that she knows he has caught her in it. Were he patriotic in any sense he would press her, or else take her to someone more skilled in the art.
Were he any true lover of Noxus at all, either or both of them would have been dead long before they became this .
Quinn pulls away and Talon loathes the loss of warmth almost as much as he hates the fact he misses it at all. She stoops, gathering her cloak to spread along the ground with her back to him and Talon busies himself too, stripping off buckles and blades under Valor’s watchful eye. The bird, massive and black-blue iridescent, cocks a huge gold eye at him from the shallow ledge along the far wall, its third eyelid clicking with unnatural intelligence. “Take one step with that knife in your hand,” the eyes say, “and your throat will be ribbons before the second.”
Some might call Talon a risk-taker-- most would, given his profession-- but a smart assassin learns the difference between healthy hazarding and stupidity, or else he dies.
Talon, famously, is not dead.
He slips the belt free slowly, holding it aloft until the eagle’s eye shifts to it, and only then lowers it to the floor. Satisfied, Valor turns to preening.
A heavy thunk recaptures his attention: Quinn’s second bracer falls with the same dull sound a moment later, joining her chestplate on the corner of her cloak. Talon steps around, circling in while his hand plucks idly at the lacing of his breeches as he watches her draw her shirt up and over her head, the fabric sticking to her skin in the places where sweat had dampened it. A hunters form, lithe and corded, arcs in the halflight. Faint lines, dusky pink, cross her body-- proof of just how long she’d spent in her armor. Talon follows where they span the back of Quinn’s ribcage, dipping with them as they meet the curve of a breast that is only just visible from where he stands.
“Do you want to feel a cunt today, or would you rather stand there with your mouth open?”
Talon closes it with a click. He forgets sometimes that she isn’t ever like what he expects Demacian women to be, that she’s crass and blunt and doesn’t bother with frippery. The fact that Quinn is the only Demacian woman he’s traded words with is of no concern. It certainly doesn’t stop Talon from placing her above them, anyway. His shirt is hastily foregone on his way to the makeshift bedroll, and he smirks as he goes to his knees on it, crawling to close the gap.
“Eager?” He asks, hoping for mocking despite the dryness in his mouth. Quinn scowls, pushing at his shoulders until he relents and settles on his back before she swings a leg over to straddle him, following the motion. “I told you: I don’t have all day.”
Her perch taken, she explodes into action. The lacings at his waist are torn at, the leather shoved aside, and Quinn leans forward on her knees to reach beneath it, her arm contorting briefly to wrestle him free. He’s barely halfway to hard but Quinn is in no way deterred-- she wraps her fingers around him roughly, pumping her fist with no preamble. Talon grunts, though it quickly sputters out into a strangled cough. “ Ngh, Easy, woman! ah--! ” he says, hands finding purchase on her thighs and gripping in some half baked attempt to mirror her assault on him but Quinn only snorts at the display, her bruising pace unrelenting. Talon’s head falls back against the cloak-covered stone in defeat, his hips twitching up to meet her fist as best they can after only a few more harsh strokes.
That she knows his body well enough to bend it to her will so easily is proof enough they’ve gone too far with this charade of a romance, that Talon has let her come too close. But rational thought is hard to muster when his dick is leaking, and harder still when a beautiful woman is looking at it like it’s water in the desert. Talon knows he isn’t anything special. She could get any cock she liked, from him or elsewhere.
It tickles the animal part of his brain regardless.
Quinn smears the liquid beading at the head with the pad of her thumb and makes a pleased sound when Talon groans through clenched teeth. She pitches forward, spitting perfunctorily into her palm. “Now who’s eager?” Her lips quirk up, smug. Talon screws his eyes shut, jaw jutted toward the ceiling, mouth twitching as the head of his cock brushes up against the entrance to her body. She extracts her hand, balancing him there.
A few grounding breaths through his nose. “Cruelty doesn’t suit you, Demacian.” Talon’s hands are slid higher, Quinn’s hipbones nestled snugly into the cup of his palm, but her thighs are like iron, unmoving. “Hah,” Quinn laughs, and drags his hands up higher still to graze her ribcage, arching her back so his thumbs slot against the staircase of bone. “Doesn’t it?”
She drops suddenly, taking him nearly to the hilt in one smooth slide. Talon isn’t quite quick enough to stop the gasp that spills from his mouth, eyes rolling at the tight heat enveloping him. “ Fuck, ” he growls. Quinn’s bottom lip is sucked between her teeth as she lifts herself up and then settles back down again, taking all of him this time.
Her pubic bone is hard and heavy against him, the thatch of dark hair there mixing with Talon’s own. Quinn rocks her hips gently, dragging herself against the root of his cock with a contented sigh. Distantly, Talon is aware of whatever glib retort he’d had planned melting from his brain, forgotten. He braces his feet against the blanket. Quinn’s hands splay out across his chest, and the light from the cave’s mouth filters through the curtain of her hair, escaped from behind her ear, to scatter patches over her cheek bones. The hollow below them seems deeper. Gaunt. Talon is surprised he hadn’t noticed before.
Her brows furrowed in concentration, she begins to ride him in earnest. Talon’s hands skip over her ribs, one sliding around to span her back and the other clutching at her breast. Quinn’s are small, the shape of them altered by the muscle underneath but a tit is a tit, and Talon enjoys these, how he can grip the whole of them in his palm and squeeze as hard as he wants. He does it now, because he can and because he likes the way Quinn’s rhythm stutters, her breathing pitched and shaky. She adds her own hand overtop, urging him to press harder.
“You had better last,“ she pants, leaning back on her heels to free her other hand.
“I will,” Talon promises, though it feels like a lie with how he’s sent careening all the way to close in the fractious span of time it takes for her fingers to reach the perfect, blazing apex of her thighs. Is it so bad that he’s abstained for weeks before this moment? It was necessity at first, as it always is-- a mission, reports, blood to wash from his blades and armor to maintain. Scouts to track. She has him right on the razors’ edge now, a dance of adrenaline he hates and loves in equal part. It would be a more egregious lie to pretend it wasn’t by his own design as much as hers.
Talon focuses on the fall of his breath, the littered scars that mar his arms and stomach, the sharp points of rock under his back-- anything to take his mind from the rocking of Quinn’s hips, her walls squeezing him and the purposeful circling of her fingers against soft, pink skin until finally when he is sure he cannot stave it off a moment longer Quinn freezes, buckling inward with a soft cry.
She hovers there a moment, reveling in the high, and then slumps bonelessly against his legs. Talon watches, willingly transfixed, as she runs a hand through her hair with a whooshing exhale and slides sideways in a shaky dismount, and by the time she is laid out on her back Talon is moving, rolling over to slot between the thighs she parts for him.
“Well?” He asks, because he’s scum and likes to revel in it, sometimes. “Good enough for you?”
“It took the edge off fine enough,’ Quinn answers evenly, shifting against the cloak. “Go ahead and have your fun.”
“And if I’ve changed my mind?” Talon counters, even as he presses his length against her folds with his thumb, “If I feel used?”
Quinn cocks a brow at him. “Aren’t you always, Noxian dog?” Her tone is light, not quite sing-song. Her heels dig into his backside, urging. Talon sneers, thrusting into her with a rough jerk of his hips and Quinn’s eyes go wide as she gasps, her lashes fluttering against her cheeks.
She is right, of course. He is nothing but a hand for a blade, useful only until his skill or his luck runs out. Even his name is stolen. A facade, the same as all the rest. The same as this.
Melancholia is less inclined to stay when he is moving, so Talon gives himself over to the act. Quinn is looser now, pliant from her dwindling release. It is less a vice and more welcoming warmth, bottomless velvet. He pitches forward, bracing on an elbow to steady his thrusts and his body quickly remembers how close he had been to bliss of his own before their brief interlude. Quinn’s hands are on his chest, skittering over scars, muscle, bone. Her fingers climb his neck, the tips of them carding through the curling hair at his nape, the strands grown long enough through neglect to be toyed with.
He looms over her, face slotted into the curve of her collarbone. Rhythm is already failing him, the tempo of his hips a juddering thing he has to fight against. Soft cries mix with his own harsh breath, the only thing keeping him afloat. If he bears down harder at the end of each thrust to crush himself against her then it is hardly selfless, no matter how the sounds falling from her lips pitch higher and more frantic in what he can only imagine in his twisted heart as gratitude.
It is here, always here on the precipice where he hates himself the most, where the emptiness claws at his throat with all the demand of withdrawl and each and every time he tries, with bruising force and teeth bared against the column of Quinn’s throat, to fuck the barren black thing in his breast into her, instead.
“Talon,” Quinn breathes against the corner of his mouth, reedy and urgent and pleading, “Talon, Talon-- ” and Talon snarls, his fingers twisting in the meat of her thighs. Quinn inhales, a sharp thing hissing through her teeth, and shudders soundlessly under him, her nails pressing dull crescents in his back that he barely feels over the rush of blood in his ears and the unrelenting heat of her body, every nerve and synapse screaming at him to spill inside her, claim her, ruin her.
He won’t, of course. The void can take biology-- he wouldn’t wish another bastard like himself upon the world.
He paints her belly instead, a near thing with how his limbs tremble with the force of it, white hot and searing across the underside of his eyelids. He sounds feral in the quiet cave, feels near enough to it, the rasp of his breath tearing at his windpipe. Quinn’s hands have softened on him, her palm slid around to cup the side of his face. It is terrifyingly close to tender. Talon takes her by the wrist and plucks it from him, convinced that if he opens his eyes to find her staring with anything like pity he will rethink his decision to spare her, but when he cracks his eyelids she is staring into the dip of his shoulder; a little vacant, a little sad.
Talon rolls off of her.
Their breathing is the only sound for a time, both wrestling to bring it back to normalcy. Quinn is the first to move, sitting upright, and Talon slings an arm over his face, clears his throat, scrubs a calloused palm against his eyes. When he glances back at Quinn he is just in time to watch her wipe herself off with his tunic, and Talon has the good sense not to comment on it. He allows himself a few more moments of rest, and then rises to join her in redressing.
Armor is donned-- slow and careful. Talon can feel the battle lines being recalculated, redrawn.
“I would ask something of you,” Quinn says with her back to him, before Talon can open his mouth to break the tenuous silence himself. Her voice has an edge to it-- he hears it sometimes, in the rare times they talk at all after these dalliances.
The first time he’d heard it, she had asked him how he saw Demacia, truly. He had scoffed, feeling cruel, and told her what he thought in no uncertain terms, no minced words or restraint. Why? He’d asked, when his tirade had been met with nothing but thoughtful silence. Perspective, I suppose, had been her answer. How will I know if there is wool over my eyes, if my countrymen wear it, too?
“Ask,” he grunts when she is not forthcoming, his voice still raw. Quinn fingers the final strap of her bracer, thumb dragging along the fraying leather as she stares through it, her face in profile. “If all this ended tomorrow, if the call came … could you do it?”
Her meaning lances him, true as one of her silver-tipped bolts. What a strange way to ask what she is to him. Silly girl, to shine a light onto the underside of it all. What they are doing. What it means. His throat is tight. He has an answer for her, but it frightens him, and so he dodges it as is his nature: “Could you?”
“Yes.” The steel is evident. A sharp tug, and her bracer is done up, her arm dropped to her side. Quinn faces him fully, the set of her jaw resolute and wholly undercut by the look in her eyes.
There are a hundred different things he could say. Talon settles, at last, on the truth.
“Then I would be glad it was you.”