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— She works intensely at his side.
The fire burns to embers in the grate that evening, whatever lapping flames remain temporal, weak little things, and Hubert’s attentions wane. It is long beyond sundown, and late scent of the Horsebow Moon’s chill-infested rains wafts in through the open window. Hubert’s fingers feather along the brittle edge of parchment.
They work long into the night like this more times than can be healthy; certainly more times than he would have Edelgard work if she ever did him the nicety of abiding by his recommendations. But as always she pays his direction little mind, and so she is here too, quill scratching away upon her own diagram laid upon the polished table in front of her. For hours now, a silence has stretched between them both.
It is a comfortable one. It usually is. Once the war advisers return to their chambers and the silly little distractions unworthy of Empress Edelgard’s attentions wane, they can sit and work in a manner reminiscent of their old academy days. Hubert leans more heavily upon an elbow to watch her further. He knows intimately that gentle huff of air from her nose as she is thinking; the unconscious way Edelgard’s training-thickened fingers still so gently tuck a lock of silver behind her ear.
As he watches, Edelgard makes a small noise—she has recalled something, perhaps, or worked through a particularly rigorous battle strategy. Her quill marks succinct details upon the page. The dying fire light illuminates her silver lashes until she looks to be some creature out of a child's storybook. Otherworldly. Ethereal.
“Are you not working, Hubert?”
He gives a start, quill loose and shameful in his hand. “The muse for it comes and goes so late into the night.”
“Won’t you see yourself to bed? You'll work more efficiently in the morning.”
Hubert's back straightens. He scoffs, put-out. “And leave you unmonitored and unguarded? I think not.”
The look that she casts him is weighted enough, certainly, and for good reason—here in Enbarr and within the impregnable walls of the Imperial Palace, it should be unlikely that the Empress be exposed to any such dangers. But where the more complacent of Edelgard’s advisers see towers and turrets, Hubert sees easily broken windows and a shower of arrows lit green with magical fire. Where they see the Imperial Palace and the boisterous town surrounding the grand building, Hubert plucks apart their arguments with the labyrinthine tunnels within the palace’s ancient sewers and how easily assassins might blend with the crowds. To pay any mind to one of those asinine fools would be to perform his duties halfheartedly; Hubert holds himself above the rest.
Still, it is with a self-conscious shuffling of his papers that he begins again upon his work, narrowing eyes prized and valued for their sharpness to scour a note from an ally taken up hold deep within Leicester territory. As the consuming crackling of fire in the hearth casts them into even further darkness and he must realign his chair just so to be able to continue with his reading. As Hubert von Vestra does his very best not to look towards the Empress again, lest he lose his thoughts into something wilder. Uglier.
Oh, those ugly thoughts. Through starched white gloves, Hubert’s nails press a firm reprimand into the flesh of his palm before he adjusts his grip on his quill and continues at this work, hoping Edelgard’s keen eyes have not caught the contortion in his features. That he worship her Majesty for her keen intellect and honed manners is common. That he finds his thoughts dwelling more on the delicate cleft at her jaw and the fullness of her lips and the porcelain flesh down the line of her neck, new indeed.
He shifts in his seat. He puts quill to paper and begins to work once more. Later, Hubert will think of a suitable punishment for these indiscretions of thought. For now, he will force it away. Stifle it out, cut off the fat until he is a lean tool for her Majesty’s use, however she see fit.
I’ve been thinking about the war, how it swallows futures whole—
An owl calls in the distance, and Edelgard snaps shut the tome she has been perusing. There is a certain finality to the sound of her quill hitting the bottom of her inkwell.
“That’s it for me tonight I’m afraid,” she tells him, and stands without further ado. Hubert scrambles to right himself alongside her. “Any more work and my eyes might just turn to sawdust and fall from my head, and what a horror that would be—“
“Can’t have that now,” Hubert agrees, lips set. “A terrible look for an Empress.”
“I quite agree.” From the ebbing glow of the hearth, the Empress in question can be seen smiling, and Hubert's stomach turns in knots at the sheer impact of it. A smile that could drive nations to war; to poverty; to greatness. A smile that could charm the most repulsive beast.
But Hubert merely nods.
They stand there for a moment; Edelgard straightening her skirts, Hubert’s fingertips trailing through proud white gloves upon the table’s neat grain.
“I’ll need accompaniment to my chambers, lest an assassin await me behind my pillows.”
“Ah—“ Hubert blinks. "Certainly, my Lady.”
A rather critical look. “You’re slacking on your duties, Hubert. I won’t have it.”
He smirks, and bites back a retort unbefitting the Empress' ears. “No, my Lady."
— She invites him into her bed.
Their walk to her chambers is accompanied by the distinguished rap of Edelgard’s fine heels and Hubert’s fingers coiling ceaselessly where they’re held behind his back, and he wonders as they proceed down the candlelit hallways if it is on both of their minds. The threshold of her quarters that he has passed over before, at her behest—that he has breached some number of times now. The thought of it thickens the air between them, casts Hubert deeper into his own morose thoughts. The word unworthy comes to mind, sharp and grating.
That he is so eager to see if she will do it again is shameful. That he has allowed this indiscretion as her most devoted Minister, her very right hand, even more so. But he is a weapon intended to be used as she sees fit. That she invites him into her bed on the odd night is her discretion as this land’s Empress. As his.
Hubert lingers in the center of the hallway while Edelgard fiddles at the latches of her door. He only looks around at her silence. Their gazes collide, and for a moment they stand in contention: Edelgard clad in her reds and golds as though some metaphorical embodiment of flame itself, and Hubert, as always, dressed to not be noticed. Sallow and lanky and in various states of ruin despite his undeniable youth. Burned, blackened fingers. A heart trained so that it does not feel. Putrid and utterly undeserving of the intensity of those lilac eyes. And yet, rendered helpless in her presence; a creature of the dark that squirms beneath the honest light of the sun.
“Won’t you come in?” She asks of him, and his stomach tightens in an eager satisfaction.
Hubert gives a cursory bow. “If my Lady requests it.”
She angles a particularly irritated glance in his direction before vanishing inside.
— She twines around him, desperate and pleading and so very hot. His tongue paints hymns of worship across her flesh.
The first time Hubert had been given the divine pleasure of disrobing her, it had been an awkward, scrabbling affair. An imperial gala had waged on floors underneath them, and the piquant influence of Enbarr’s fine wines had turned both their cheeks rosy. She had clung to him that night as they’d navigated the masses, her nails biting into the flesh of his hand, her warmth intoxicating in its closeness. Perhaps she'd had a reason. Perhaps she’d had a slew of particularly irritating suitors that evening. Perhaps she had merely been feeling lonesome.
But when he had deposited her at her door that evening, she had extended the invitation then, too. To come in. To help her of her intricate headdress and unlace her bodice. To press his lips along her collarbone and down the length of her spine. To have her. To have her so passionately that the marks left upon the ivory flesh of his nape and shoulders took weeks to disappear.
Those marks, a testament to his failure as Minister. Those marks a lingering testament to an act that encroached so frequently upon his still thoughts after that day, Hubert wondered if he was devolving into madness.
And yet, invite him back into her bedchambers she has. Time and time again. And Hubert is a mere mortal, blinded in devoted worship to his sun. He cannot refuse.
The door clicks behind him, and the tension in the air tastes raw. Hubert draws the latch. He turns to find her watching him.
I’ve been thinking about the war, how it swallows futures whole—
His all, for Lady Edelgard. His mind, his years. His heart and fingers and cock too if she wants it.
“Hubert.” There’s no more tease in the way his name graces her lips (much as he would prefer she not say it even once lest it sully them irreparably). “Approach me, wouldn’t you? Before you leave me thinking you’re less than interested.”
“Anything for you.” And his tone is rawed with want.
The heavy golden plate in her hair is secured by a series of combs and clips at her nape. He begins on those first. His gloved fingertips pluck at the leathers until the cord comes away in his hand. As the horns loosen, so does her hair. An argent wave tumbles down her back, and tangles in his fingers.
He shudders.
Where they stand beneath the spilling moonlight from the slat between the drawn curtains of her quarters, a stripe falls across her. Hubert fingers it just so before she moves out of the way. She doesn’t like the lights to be on for this act. She doesn’t like to be seen like this.
From a perspective of practicality, Hubert can empathize with Edelgard’s self-conscious worry about her scars. They are not trivial things but painterly strokes; bold accusations of worthlessness across her flesh. He, too, doesn’t believe a female leader to be befitting such marks showing that she too can be mortal. That she too can be harmed.
From the perspective of a lover, however, it is different. Her layers come away easily in his hands and drop to the floor. He can feel the way they cross about her body. They nestle about her torso. One winds a crescent around her thigh. Hubert has, curiously, made habit of tracing them when his Empress has him in her bed. He thinks he might remember each one. He touches one now; a line along the round curve of her breast.
She bids him stop, and he does. Rather, his hands turn on himself. That he thinks her beautiful is none of her concern. She asks for a companion, and Hubert provides. She has not asked for love.
He has arranged her far superior suitors for when that time comes.
His own dark layers tumble. Beneath that same strip of moonlight he is laid bare.
Ah, he cannot look at her. He is a foul, loathsome thing. He presents his lithe muscles and the jutting bone at his hips and collarbone and the dark patchwork of hair from his sternum to his cock for approval as some animal might. He swallows and prepares to break the silence.
“You’ve taken your herbs, I take it.”
She’s poised delicately upon then bed, a mere shadow. But when she speaks, he hears amusement. “You forfeited your right to monitor me as Minister when you stepped into my quarters tonight.”
“And as a lover?” He asks, and steps forward. The usual argument. “And as a man intent upon not giving House Vestra any further heirs?”
She smiles. “You need to touch me to be considered my lover, Hubert."
I’ve been thinking about the war, how it swallows futures whole—
And then, Edelgard’s hands. They work away the gloves he has kept on and expose his blackened fingers. The encroaching creep of ruin from the magic that has saved her, countlessly. She takes his jaw, and leans it towards her. Hubert stoops as their mouths meet. A greedy thumb runs its way down the length of her neck.
This time, it is her turn to shudder.
— She comes apart in his hands.
Hubert knows naught the intensity of lovemaking elsewhere; when he has slept with a partner, he has slept with whores for an easy release and that brief shudder of pleasure. He did not imagine himself capable of any more before that very first night, at her invitation for him to follow her into the privacy of her quarters. As she had pulled him in close. As the wine on their tongues had been particularly pungent as they had slid together.
The bedsprings creak as he lays her down and prepares to service her. Their foreplay is nigh nonexistent with the incessant way her fingers curl about him and pull him in. When Hubert enters her, he groans, a beast laid atop a maiden.
But then, her fingers line his sharp jaw. She nudges him forward. closer. She presses her palm against his face, and he presses it back, hungry for that comfort. For the first time since he has stepped over her hearth this evening, their eyes meet.
He does not look away.
Hubert is no mere acquaintance to the thrill of power. He knows well how it feels to watch the necks of his enemies snap underneath his own magic; to look his repulsive, dying father in the eye and to know he is to be the end of this accursed bloodline. But the way she presses up to him greedily as he begins to move, carefully and in precisely the way he knows well she likes, that is the most thrilling sensation of all.
His Edelgard. He groans, and buries his head in his chest as he makes love to her in languid strokes. He is nothing if not unworthy of the honor to be inside her like this. Certainly she knows that. Oh, but how this monstrous being, this wreck of a man, would do anything for her. His life, hers. His body. His thoughts. He would gladly present the nape his neck to her axe beneath a blood red sun if it would further her cause.
Would that he could, he would wage war with the Goddess herself so that Edelgard could assume her rightful place.
She doesn’t speak as he fucks her. She needn’t. If she can detect the tumult in his thoughts, her fingernails tight in his hair are argument enough. And Hubert grips at her wrists; her hip; her legs in turn. He paints her black with his touch of ruin.
I’ve been thinking about the war, how it swallows futures whole—
Perhaps it was the intent behind those words that had driven her towards him in the first place; that gala, hosted upon the precipice of war, and the Empress distinctly quiet and clingy through it all. No, they’ve never been strangers to death. Not them. Not children raised in a contentious world with the power to kill sewn into their bones and pumped deep into their maturing muscles. But death at this scale is novel for a compassionate woman like Edelgard. The very concept that they may not come back, at odds with the indestructible delusion of youth. When she had reached for him that day just outside her quarters, it had felt desperate. Irrefutable. His all for Lady Edelgard. His body. His heart.
“I’ve been thinking about the war, how its swallows futures whole,” she had told him that day. Not teary. Never teary. Determined if not a little drunk, her fingers tight in his lapel. And Hubert’s cold heart had hammered so ferociously as she had drawn him close and their breaths had blasted one another in the face. “There are some things I can no longer put off lest I am killed in the next battle and lose my chance."
“You will not die.”
“You’ve no way of knowing that.” Her tone, rich with bemusement. “Now kiss me, Hubert. Before I lose my nerve."
He has learned to chase those breathy moans of hers since then, and just how to drag his cock within her and the sensitive places to probe on her body until her climax. And as she trembles and catches her breath, he takes his own. Greedy. Desperate. One precious moment where he might bury his face into her sweet-smelling silver hair and give in to the greed of it.
It strikes him in a blunt blow, and Hubert is left in tatters.
He stays in her bed for twenty minutes further, and pretends it is at her behest and not his own ugly, selfish desires that make it so difficult to leave. Would that he could fit into the nooks of Edelgard and chase sleep; trace the crescent of her lower lip rawed with their kissing and delude himself into thinking her his.
And when he finally makes to stand, Edelgard shifts in the bed but does not bid him stay, and Hubert is grateful. The act of leaving gets more unpleasant each time.
“To your own bed?” She asks instead, and he makes the mistake of glancing her way. Coiled amongst her silken bedsheets she is an argentine, etherial being. Where his touch has turned her black doesn’t show in this light; only the curves of her hips and the line of her muscle. The sprawl of her silver hair.
Ah, how foolish of him. Next time, he won’t look.
“To work,” he gives her instead.
“Even the weary need their rest sometimes.”
“What I do this evening, you won’t need to do tomorrow.”
She sighs a quick note, but doesn’t object as Hubert pulls on his things; arranges his hair; straightens his cravat.
“And you see this too as work, I take it?” Edelgard asks, finally.
He is rendered immobile in the doorway, rawed by guilt, struck by his own confusion.
“Isn’t it?”
She huffs. “If that’s how you see my asking you into my bed—“
“I’m your servant. I do as you command.”
“When you say it like that, Hubert, it makes me feel as though I’m—“
Edelgard trails away, and he steps towards her, and once more, scrabbling for stable ground. This sort of post-coital conversation they haven’t had before; know her as intimately as he does, he’s unsure of how to proceed. How irritatingly like his Lady to keep him on his toes.
He settles at her bedside, ruined from their act. His gloved thumb traces her cheek.
“You don’t want to hear the ways that I would gladly give myself for you.”
“And if I do?” Her eyes are a lilac storm.
“Then you’re a fool.”
She eases into his touch, just enough. The blankets are kept tight about her body as she moves. “Fool I may be, but title of Empress I bear. You will tell me how you feel, or you will be dismissed.”
“Manipulative. Just where did you learn that, I wonder?” Hubert smiles.
“Hubert.”
His mirth rumbles in his chest. “I care, sweet thing."
He watches his words land in the warm tint upon the cheeks he knows so intimately. Then her lashes flutter, and her gaze is lost. His fingers tighten within their confining gloves; he wants to chase it. A silly little desire. A weakness.
“Good. You’re dismissed,” the Empress tells him. And Hubert takes his leave.
Through the quiet hallways of the palace warming with the new day’s sunlight, the Minister adjusts the starch fabric of his collar and prepares for another day.