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He doesn’t understand how they can’t see it.
Maybe they’re all willfully ignorant to her faults and flaws… but Estinien suffers no such blinders.
Tataru Taru is small and pink, adorable and friendly to a fault. She reminds him of a rabbit: all fluffy, twitching nose, feet stamping in her frustration. “Oh dear,” she says, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Whatever shall we do?”
Another man, a stupider one, would try to tell her something soothing or wipe the tears from her eyes. Estinien is not that man. He knows better than that, for all that the twins mock him for being too taciturn or lacking in social skills. They are all being fooled by the soft pink exterior and do not see the beast beneath.
Tataru Taru is a monster wrapped in pretty pink, and Estinien knows monsters better than any man should.
He kisses the top of her head because he is not a stupid man.
She stops crying, stammers against his mouth, flushes a bright shade that rouses some part of him that he had long since thought buried by bloodshed and Nidhogg’s rage, and he smiles.
Estinien will not be fooled by the lies she tells the rest.
Tataru Taru is a being worthy of his attentions.
She does not shy away from him. Instead, she gives him a long look from behind her wet lashes and drums her little fists against his knees. “Don’t change the subject!”
“Perish the thought,” he shakes his head. “Far be it for a man such as myself to tell you what to do.”
But she is focused now, shocked from her distress into a flurry of motion. She is a study in chaos, a whirlwind broken up in the most efficient parts. He bends to her whims and desires because how could he do anything but heed her every command.
Something in him rumbles and settles in place, content at last that she holds the reins to his destruction.
His mistress bids him to work.
Something in their course must change. For he is dragon-blooded, a creature of power that hoards that which he desires, and he will not be strapped to her rudder for erelong. Tataru takes and takes everything that he is and could ever give. At some point, he will demand his due and she will bend to his whims.
Someone, some foolish being, has stolen Tataru. The Scions are a financially destitute bunch without her guiding hand and the business affairs she manages for them. He gives them credit for stealing her away while the Warrior of Light is clear on the other side of Eorzea. Whoever they are, they bided their time quite neatly for when the least amount of Scions were in Mor Dhona.
But the trail is still warm when he finds it. Her shoe is cast to the side, then its match. Scraps of pink fabric were left in inconspicuous places only a Lalafel could reach. Footprints in the path that break the grass. Tataru might as well have drawn him a map.
A dragoon has no need for such things.
He takes to the air in desperate leaps, trains his eyes on the path she has blazed for him with an ever maddening fury simmering in his veins. Estinien takes a large amount of joy in the hunt, his clever mistress a veritable prize on the horizon. The thrill sings in him and he forgets that her flight was not of her choosing.
Estinien will not deny that some part of him wanted this. Wanted her to flee so that he might give chase, pay his respects to his mistress’s guile and the monster she hides behind her smiles. In her own way, Tataru is brilliant. Her fangs may not be made for war, but he has both seen others eviscerated and fallen victim himself to them nonetheless. But oh, oh how he longs to see her lay these fools bare.
There is blood on the path. He can smell it as he leaps, taste traces of it in the air as he tracks them across the wilds. The dragon in him recognizes its source and the man in him rejects the possibility of it being true. It cannot be. He will not stand for it.
Her blood-stained hat, half-covered in dirt like someone tried to hide it and then changed their mind. Estinien lands in a clatter of armor and a snarl that rips from his throat and past bared teeth. No. No. No.
Not Tataru.
Not his Tataru.
Nidhogg’s echo whispers a sweet promise of violence and Estinien cannot help but agree.
The Azure Dragoon hunts.
He holds her unconscious form in arms turned unspeakably tender. The blood on her forehead fills him with a rage Estinien had previously only attributed to Nidhogg. He craves violence, throws his head back and roars with his need. She’s still, so impossibly still, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.
Tataru Taru is a woman in constant motion that laughs as hard as she lives. Seeing her, holding her in his arms, while she is laid so low feels like the foulest kind of violation. She’s safe now.
But Estinien has never promised her safety.
His mistress has always asked him for violence in the name of a greater good.
So violence she shall receive.
Estinien presses a kiss to her brow and tastes the bitter bite of Tataru’s blood when he licks his lips.
He has never been a man prone to affection, has spent too much of his life dedicated to hunting down Nidhogg to know how to truly connect with others, but the taste of her blood on the back of his throat fills him with something that could be close. In this, Estinien and Nidhogg agree.
He cradles her to his chest with one arm like a treasure, croons a sweet song whose words only the First Brood know. It is in this moment that he understands how the Bull of Ala Mhigo must have felt when his Sultana was laid low, feels a kinship with a man he has barely met yet still fought at the same side of. He knows now what devotion made his oldest friend move to block an impossible blow.
Estinien Wyrmblood cannot give his mistress anything but vengeance.
She stirs in his arms and he spares a moment to rub his chin against the crown of her head, careful to avoid the blood on her brow that has just begun to clot. All he knows is the smell of it, one eye ever watchful of the sluggish drip that paints his armor crimson, the rage in him seething and boiling. She makes some small sound in her stupor and it is enough to stall the carnage long enough for him to soothe her back to a fitful slumber.
The carnage he leaves in his wake is nothing she should ever see.
But not even the wholesale destruction of those foolish enough to steal her away is enough to soothe his temper.
A part of Estinien recognizes that he has some form of competition in the form of the diminutive and shy Lalafelin engineer, the one who stammers and cannot work up the courage to tell Tataru his feelings. That same part of him wants to throw his head back and howl with laughter because the bumbling fool will never come close to the level of mad devotion that runs in Estinien’s veins. He proves his obsession in the worst kinds of ways, all rough edges and shoddily wrapped gifts, but this slaughter cannot be confused for anything but the most steadfast dedication to the perfection that is Tataru Taru.
“Estinien. Take me home.”
Her voice is but a whisper on the wind but it’s enough to shock him into motion. He moves before he thinks, cradles her to his chest while he leaps.
She laughs as they leave the dead and dying behind, the wind pressing her lilac hair to her bloodstained forehead, and Estinien feels something close to joy. Tataru fits in his arms like a long-lost puzzle piece that he never knew he was missing.
They don’t talk about what he did and would do again in her name.
He returns her to the Scions and everything will be as it was.
But not for Estinien.
A dragon mates for life, and he is no different.
Every moment spent from her side is a test of his patience. He knows now what it’s like to be near her, hold her, taste her, and the loss is a kind of cruelty he never expected to know. If this is what drives men to poetry, that passion that makes lovers of the meekest men, Estinien wants no part in it.
But still, that beast in his blood has come to its own independent conclusion.
So he spends his night atop the roof, the tip of his spear digging into the tiles above her window.
“Oh, you great big lummox. Come down from there.”
He moves before he can think about it, slave again to her whims, slips into her room in the space of a breath and cannot remember how to breathe as he looks down at her. The bandage on her forehead is lopsided, the bruises on her skin stark and vexing in their existence. Her eyes are tired, lilac locks dull. But she is alive and he cannot help the soft croon he gives at the sight of her. “Tataru,” he breathes, her name a precious treasure that slips past teeth gone sharp with bestial wants.
His hands clench and unclench, gauntlets grinding against leather, the length of his spear still even for all of his fidgeting.
She rolls her eyes at him with a sigh. “Really? All of that, and you’ve not even a word to say for yourself?”
Estinien inclines his head. “What would you have me say?”
“Anything. Something. Don’t just look at me like—”
“Like what?” He cuts her off with a barked laugh. “Like a beast?”
Tataru’s cheeks puff, color with her rage in the most fetching red. “No! Like… Like you want to yell at me.”
Estinien smiles then, a thin-lipped thing that betrays none of what he feels. “I can assure you, Tataru, that yelling at you is the last thing I desire.”
“Well, you can’t.”
“I can’t?”
“Whatever it is. You can’t. You’re too far away for it.”
He does laugh at that, laughs even harder at her mulish frown. That is his Tataru, not some weak-willed woman who faints in the presence of blood. No, Tataru orders him about like she is a queen and he is some unfit knave who has dared to trespass in her domain. “What would you have me do?”
A suggestion from her lips is as good as an order, and there is an itch in him that cannot be ignored. Something in what they have must give. His patience wears thin, and he craves the satisfaction of seeing her so flummoxed. She doesn’t know what to do with him and he knows, in great amounts of dragon gifted details, what he would much prefer to do with his evening.
She’s too small for half of it and he is too much a knight to allow himself the rest.
“I… I don’t know.”
He turns to leave the same way he came, braces his spear against his shoulder in preparation for the leap. The echoes of Nidhogg rumble in discontent. He has chased her, killed for her, proven his worth in all the ways that matter, and still she will not look at him. His heart feels like it could drum its way out of his chest, his skin too tight beneath his armor, his blood boiling with primal want and fury. “Then I have nothing more to say.”
“Wait! I… stay?” Tataru’s little feet stamp against the floor and his heart skips a beat. “I just… I want you to stay.”
Estinien has only ever known joy like this when he marked the important things in his life: his first jump, the way Haurchefant laughed and called him his friend for the first time, finally sending Nidhogg to his doom, the rush of his first battle. “If I stay, there will be no going back. Not from this. I will not pretend it did not happen come morning light.”
She is quiet for a long moment. “I… I still want you to stay.”
His mistress has courage enough to not balk in the face of danger. He is man enough to know that once he has sampled even the smallest bit of her kindness, he will not be able to let her go. For he is dragon-blooded, the echoes of Nidhogg still roaring in his veins. Her courage feeds his appetites, and he is in danger of falling headlong into the surge. “What I want is no small thing.”
Once last chance, even as he rests his spear against the wall and begins unbuckling his armor. He turns to her, clad in nothing more than leather breeches and a sweat-dampened shirt, and feels her watching his every move. Estinien, contrary to his usual gruffness, allows himself but one moment of satisfaction as her eyes grow wide. Yes, rumbles Nidhogg, Look upon us in our splendor.
Tataru turns on her heel, intent on something that Estinien cannot abide by.
“Look at me, Tataru. Look at me and tell me to go. If you don’t, I will not give you another chance.”
She sniffs and crawls into her bed. “You don’t scare me.”
Estinien takes the lifted blankets as an invitation, long legs crossing the room in as much time as it takes her to twist around to look at him. There is no fear in her eyes, just a quiet determination and resignation. Her bed wasn’t made for a Lalafel, a fact that he will be grateful for come morning, but it is still too short for an Elezen to comfortably sprawl out on. Curling around her is a matter of necessity and that very impossible thing that makes his heart beat and breath tremble with anticipation.
He presses his nose to the crook of her neck, smells the sharp tang of antiseptic and the floral soap she loves so much. She’s soft in his arms, her tiny fingers clutching at his shirt as he crowds her across the bed and into the wall. Estinien hates the scratch of linen against his face, the way it catches his hair and tugs it out of place. He hates that he was too slow to keep her from harm.
But, most of all, Estinien cannot stand how she bears the marks of some other man on her flesh.
“Estinien?”
“Hush,” he growls against her ear, pants out the words past boiling rage. “I beg of you. A moment, lest I do something we both will regret.”
Tataru takes orders from no man alive. “Estinien. Tell me what’s wrong.”
An order. His mistress has given him an order and he is powerless against her will. He hisses, rubs his cheek against the linen, and feels his teeth ache with need. “I can’t tolerate it.”
She reaches up tender hands and holds his cheeks in her palms only for him to snarl in his frustration. He turns his face, eyes fluttering closed as he presses his lips in a mockery of a kiss to the sickening bruise blooming at her wrist from too tight ropes. The words will not come, no matter how much she bids them. Estinien growls, the need in him rising to a crescendo that overwhelms what rationality he has left.
He is a dragon, and some other male has made claim upon what is his. His by right, by conquest, by a tradition older than both of them.
He opens his mouth to speak and scrapes his teeth against her veins instead.
Estinien knows what he wants.
She shivers in his arms, and he tightens his grip on the back of her nightgown. The white cotton threatens to tear in his haste to hold her wrist to his mouth as he laves the flat of his tongue against that sweet heat. Her trembling feels right and he closes his mouth against her pulse. He’ll erase every mark on her and replace them with his own.
“Oh,” she whispers.
Estinien is not a stupid man. He knows what a woman sounds like when she wants more from a midnight rendezvous. And, for once, he is the one with the power. Something in him gives, and he looks up at her through his lashes to see her blushing. Her chest heaves like she’s forgotten how to breathe and Estinien takes advantage of her confusion to mark her other wrist the same as the other.
“Estinien?”
He pauses and props himself up on his elbows, cages her in with his body, and has her flat on her back beneath him. “Don’t. Tell me you don’t want me,” he all but begs with the shreds of rationality that he can barely hold together. He licks his lips, tastes the lingering traces of her skin and her soap, and something in him thrills at how close he is to what he desires. “Tell me you don’t want me and this will be the last of it.”
She gulps, her tiny hands held in just one of his, but there is finally life in her eyes and Estinien feels a flash of pride for having put it there. “I… I can’t.”
When he kisses her, it isn’t like those dreadful novels Haurchefant giggled over and Estinien will never admit he’s read. He steals her words, bites at her lip until she gasps, licks his way into her mouth to taste her breath. But oh, oh how she trembles like everything is new and exciting. She all but vibrates when he hums with delight.
It isn’t enough.
He kisses his way down her jaw, scrapes his teeth down her soft skin, and chases the edge of the bruise on the side of her face with the lightest of pecks. His nose settles in the crook of her neck and he spares just a moment to breathe in the scent of her as Tataru all but clings to him.
Estinien does not know why he bites her neck, why he laces his fingers in her hair and pulls her head so he can fit his mouth over the pale expanse of her throat. But her shuddering moan and the arch of her back towards him is enough for him to know he is at least doing something right.
He has never done this before. Never had cause or desire to. But now? Now the steady tattoo of her heartbeat is engraved in his soul and he wants nothing more than to wrest every sound possible from her lips. The last Azure Dragoon did not gain his skills from being lazy, and with Nidhogg defeated Estinien lacks a project. Figuring out how to please his mistress and what she looks like in the throes of passion seems to be a truly excellent use of his time.
A part of him spares a moment to commiserate with the Bull of Ala Mhigo and finally understands what Haurchefant was talking about. That part of him is absolutely delighted to hear her moan in his ear and feel her legs squirming against him.
But the part of him that agrees with Nidhogg? That part has taken control and Estinien doesn’t mind. After all, all it wants is to erase every mark left on her, to wipe her memory of things she should never have seen and replace it with him, to touch and taste every inch of her until the only thing she can do is beg him for more. He wants her so enthralled with the pleasure he gives her that she can’t walk. Wants her to scream his name so loud that even that bumbling fool in the workshop across the street knows who she belongs to.
Estinien didn’t mean to rip her nightgown. Honestly, he didn’t even realize that he had lost control of himself to the point that his nails had nearly become claws. But he couldn’t deny that his mouth didn’t… water at the prospect of marking the creamy stretch of skin left exposed in the lingering bits of moonlight that filter through the still open window.
Tataru yelps and squirms, tries her best to pull her hands out of his so that she can cover herself with the tattered bits of her nightgown or the sheets that Estinien has shoved off the bed. It’s a pity that a spitfire like Tataru has never actually (and by the Twelve, he’s checked) held a weapon before or trained her body to resist him.
He growls against her stomach. “I’m not finished.” Estinien cannot recognize the bestial timbre to his voice, the snarling echo of draconic power lingering in his throat, even as he bares his teeth up at her.
Her eyes go wide and her lip quivers. Tataru’s breath comes heavy and her eyes take on just the tiniest glazed tint.
Estinien rumbles in approval, blinks slow and steady, and tries his best to ignore the surging heat in his belly that accompanies an uncomfortable tightness in his pants.
He takes his time taking her apart.
Estinien finally settles between her legs, balanced neatly on a single elbow as he plays with a lock of her hair. He smirks down at her with a kind of self-satisfaction that he has never experienced in his life. He is the cat who has gotten the cream and the canary both.
Tataru is a wreck. Her hair is disheveled, slicked to her forehead with sweat. She can’t seem to catch her breath and whimpers as he stares down at her. “Please,” she breathes.
Estinien merely hums at her and trails the tips of his claws down the soft stretch of skin that he has spent an impressively long time peppering with love bites. The beast in him has settled nicely, all but purring in satisfaction, now that he has removed all signs of her abduction. He’s generous, really, when he presses another kiss to the top of her knee. “Beg, Tataru.” Estinien is a kind man, truly. “Beg and it’s yours. Whatever your heart desires.”
She’s all but crying, one hand biting at her knuckle while the other fists in the ruined bottom sheet. He’s clawed the fabric to shreds and part of the mattress besides, but he likes the way she looks in a nest of his making. “I don’t know!” The tears trickle down her face and he leans over her to lap them up like fine wine. “I… I need— Please?”
He shushes her with the tenderest kiss he can manage, careful to keep the tips of his claws and fangs from ripping her delicate skin to ribbons. “Hush, love,” he croons. “I’ll make it better.”
Estinien Wyrmblood may not have had the time or proper social skills needed to bed a woman, but he sure as the Void has spent enough time encamped with Haurchefant Greystone and Aymeric de Borel to understand the bare bones of what one is supposed to do with a begging woman in their bed. Especially when that woman begs because of the man or woman who put her in that position in the first place.
He undoes the laces on his breeches and frees himself. And oh, the desire in her eyes is enough to make him need to grasp himself quite firmly in hand lest the evening be ruined.
Estinien isn’t going to fit.
Many hours with Ysayle trying to get a rise out of the notoriously stoic dragoon has informed him that, yes, logically he could fit. However, he lacks the lubrication necessary to make such an endeavor pleasurable for his mistress. Her underthings are soaked from her want, but Ysayle had informed him at length and in great detail that many a man had fallen victim to their own pride and left their lovers in tears and bereft so that they could reach their own climax.
Estinien is many things, but a stupid and prideful lover will not be one of them.
The first tentative lick through her small-clothes has her stifling her scream into her knuckles.
She tastes like the finest wine, her knees locking around his head, and Estinien decides on the spot that he could die happily between her legs.
He shreds the fabric from her with careful claws and sets to work with a dragoon’s dedication to the art. Each broken sob and moan from her lips is a symphony to which he will be the sole conductor and audience. He purrs into her folds, flattens his tongue against the wetness, and delights in every moment of her passion. She is wild beneath him and he holds her in place with the palm of one hand upon her chest and a careful grasp of one milky thigh in the other.
Slowly, methodically, he memorizes the sounds of her pleasure.
When she begins to hiccup, her back arching up and her hips moving in that most base of motions, he relents on his grip. Tataru fists her hands in his hair and pulls. He finds the pain keeps him steady and grounded, holds him against her so that he can scrape his teeth over that tiny little nub he found with the tip of his tongue.
He writes his name in flicks and slow passes, speeds up when she begs him not to stop.
When she reaches her end, pulsing around his tongue and wetting the fabric beneath them, Estinien cannot help himself.
He all but swears as he fumbles the length of himself in hand, spits on his palm once so as not to chafe. He pumps at himself, frantic for the kind of release he has given her and brushing up against the edge of a pleasure so bright it threatens to consume and blind him all at once.
Tataru sighs in content, sated and still. “Estinien,” she whispers as he hunches over her, desperate and frantic with his desire.
And that is enough to send him spilling over his hand, one stroke and then two, smothering his roar into her mouth by the swift expedient of a rough kiss.
He collapses to the side and drags her to him with one hand while the other pulls up the long-discarded blankets. They are both sticky, breathing heavily as if they have fought a war and come out the other side relatively unscathed. Her eyes flutter shut even as she wiggles into a more comfortable position in his arms.
Content at last, Estinien curls himself around her and watches her sleep.
He doesn’t understand how they can’t see it.
Maybe they’re all willfully ignorant to her faults and flaws… but Estinien suffers no such blinders.
Tataru Taru belongs to him. Every hair on her head and smile that graces her lips. He’s laid claim to her, marked her, taken her as his.
But Estinien belongs to her just as much. She’s carved a hole for herself in his heart and he finds that he doesn’t mind.
She is his treasure and he dares anyone try and take her.