Chapter Text
Despite being a fae, his very being a never extinguished flame, Flins was not too aware of his own fire. He could call it forth with a mere thought, incinerate his surroundings or will the flames to dance on a tune long gone, the dulcet notes of the song buried under rubble and ice, the tomb used as the foundation of a new empire. Perhaps exactly because his fire was him, made it so that he wouldn’t bother thinking too much about it.
“You’re warm.”
Rerir did not speak much, not anymore, his words sparse and dry, voice a low rumble, so slow it made you wonder if he were forcing himself to articulate each and every word, as if the task itself was monumental in its mere existence. It infuriated some, Nefer mainly, while Flins was mostly impartial to it.
That Rerir spoke to him more than he did to the others was a mutually unaddressed fact, his friends merely opting to simply give him a look whenever the subject of Rerir came up. Except for Miss Ineffa, she always asked questions, but Flins knew how to deter her well enough.
Bribing Miss Aino with sweets so she could stop Miss Ineffa from her endless inquiring was a legitimate self defense tactic, no matter what Lumine and Varka said.
So, Rerir spoke to Flins quite a lot, his voice still slow even when he was doing his best to, in modern terms, drive Flins up the walls. He also brought up the matter of Flins’ fire.
He couldn’t remember how Rerir ended up playing with his hand, the Sinner sprawled on the floor, body heavy against the armchair before the fireplace, more or less curled around Flins’ right leg. He could remember tensing at the contact, almost telling Rerir to pull back, but something about that hulking monster pressing his forehead against Flins’ thigh made him pause.
Was Flins the first to reach out to run his fingers through Rerir’s hair, or was Rerir the first to reach out and grab Flins’ hand?
Did it matter?
“And? Is that surprising to you?”
Rerir did not answer, not right away. Instead, he turned Flins’ hand this way and the other, fingers rubbing all over the leather, nails catching in the opening at the wrist a couple of times before his fingers stopped there. When he looked up at Flins, it was with an intensity that almost knocked the air out of his lungs.
Allowing Rerir to take off his glove wasn’t something worth overthinking, right? It just happened, and Flins had no reason to be against it.
It was just a glove.
“You were cold as ice,” Rerir murmured, head bowed down over Flins’ hand once more, his thumb pressing down on the middle of his palm. “Whenever we fought, except that one time, when you…when my heart…”
Ah.
“My fire can go both ways.”
He doubted that Rerir would care about the intricacies of Flins’ nature, and to be honest with himself, Flins did not want to explain them to him.
Rerir only hummed, dragging his thumb along Flins’ palm, down his index finger until he ended up cupping the back of Flins’ hand with his own.
“Show me.”
Well, he couldn’t say that he was too surprised by the request. Rerir loved to test Flins’ limits, in patience and tolerance both
“Lean back,” he instructed, and Rerir put some space between his face and Flins’ hand. He followed Flins’ orders so easily; when he wanted to, that was.
Slowly, as if willing a bud to unfurl into a blooming flower, Flins called forth a flame in the palm of his hand, warm enough for a human to withstand its heat, if the human were to stick his hand into the fire, exactly as Rerir did. Honestly now, it was getting ridiculous, how easily Flins could predict his actions.
“Make it cold.”
And so he did.
In the end, he switched his flame’s temperature back and forth for what must have been a whole hour, Rerir’s fascination with the fire turning into something almost obsessive. Flins decided to accept it, for he was too late to stop it anyway.
It became something to add to their routine.
Flins would snap his fingers to light up the candles, and Rerir would stick his hand into the flame to test its temperature. Or worse, do it after Flins started the fire in the fireplace.
Once, he did it while Varka was there too, and the man almost shouted for him to stop, then startled himself by his eagerness to stop the Sinner from harming himself, then blinked in confusion as Rerir simply played with the flames as if they were smoke streaming through his fingers. Flins simply shrugged when Varka threw him a worried, questioning look.
“It’s cold,” was his explanation, and Varka seemed ready to throw something at him.
Anyway.
That inevitably altered the relationship between him and Rerir.
The Sinner’s body ran cold, which reminded Flins of a corpse most of the time — Rerir was not amused by Flins’ jokes on the matter even if Flins found them hilarious — and sought warmth with a single minded devotion that was quite admirable. At first, kind Miss Lauma had brought him a couple of woolen blankets, offering them up with a wry smile on her lips and a clear hope in her eyes that she wouldn’t regret the gesture. Then, it was clever Miss Aino’s turn to design a mechanism that would keep the Sinner warm, which was rejected by everyone involved, the Sinner included.
It was Lumine who came with the very sensible, and obvious, suggestion for them to stock up on some wood and use the fireplace.
It was Rerir who found a better way.
“You’re cold.”
Flins raised an eyebrow at him and allowed Rerir to cup his face, his thumb rubbing gentle circles against Flins’ cheekbone.
“Your body, it is cold.”
“Astute observation.”
With a click of his tongue, Rerir pulled back, clearly annoyed. Good, Flins would hate for the man to lose his spark. Not that he was in danger of doing so, for he almost always snapped and snarled like a rabid animal at the others, the only exception being Miss Aino, for very obvious reasons. With Flins? It was a push and pull, a never ending flow of obedience and dangerous retaliation.
Why, just the last time Flins had visited, Rerir had left the imprints of his five fingers around Flins’ neck.
“Make it warm. Like your fire.”
Oh.
“Being greedy now, aren’t we?”
Rerir ignored his jab, and merely waited.
“Do you want to feel me up?”
To say that the exchange ended up in Rerir snarling at him, his foot merely missing Flins’ side as he tried to kick him away, was an understatement.
Still, the next time Flins visited, he took off his gloves as soon as he stepped through the door, and cupped Rerir’s face before the man could even begin to pull himself out of that faraway state of his.
“Oh,” Rerir whispered, the sound punched out of him as he closed his eye, leaning into Flins’ warm touch.
Flins did not expect to end up with a lap full of sleepy Sinner, but the experience was worth analysing, and new possibilities were worth exploring.
At times, Rerir would sit on the floor by the armchair, dozing off against Flins’ leg as he ran his warm hand through moonlight white hair, cupping the back of Rerir’s neck to knead the flesh until the Sinner would sigh in satisfaction. On rainy days, Flins would cover the top of Rerir’s hands with his, sitting together at the table by the window to watch the raindrops slide down the glass.
One day, Miss Aino insisted on accompanying him and Rerir ended up back to back with Flins, both on the floor in front of the fireplace, as Flins had Aino in front of himself, her own back to his front as he braided her hair while telling her stories of bygone days. If both Aino and Rerir teamed up to ask him countless questions until Flins ended up talking about the most nonsensical matters while a tiny girl slept in his lap, and a hulking Sinner dozed off against his back, oh well. He couldn’t simply disturb her, and thus Rerir too, now could he?
It became natural, for Rerir to seek his warmth, and for Flins to offer it without a second thought. Were it to help Rerir to fall asleep, or to loosen his stiff muscles, the vestiges of the abyss infestation turning his body rigid and making it ache, it was all just so natural for him.
Flins couldn’t even admit to being surprised that he ended up with a shirtless Rerir sprawled on the rug in front of the fireplace, his face obscured by strands of white hair — they shone as bright as the moon in the light of the fire — as Flins straddled the back of his thighs. His hands were warm, running hotter than any human would have found bearable, but Rerir seemed to consider their heat as just perfect.
“You’re a very spoiled creature, you know that?”
Rerir did not answer, his breathing deep and shadowed by a faint sound of pleasure, of contentment, so Flins decided to go on for some more.
It was rather pleasant for himself too, running his hands up and down Rerir’s back, the oil he had coated them in aiding the movement. He pushed with the heel of his palms as he went up, and dragged the tips of his fingers down the skin as he went down.
He followed the patterns of the red marks around Rerir’s shoulders and upper back, the pinkish abyssal scars of his torso, pushed his thumbs in the two dips at the low of Rerir’s back, then followed his vertebrae up to his neck, to knead the muscles there.
“You like it,” the Sinner murmured, sounding drunk, as he tilted his head just so, hair shifting away to reveal a shadow of a magenta eye. “To have me so…”
Flins rubbed his fingers at the base of Rerir’s nape, and the man let out a deep sigh.
“So what?”
Slowly, carefully, heating his hands just a little more, Flins dragged them down, his thumbs following the shape of Rerir’s spine.
“At your mercy.”
Flins leaned on his arms, pushing them back up.
“Mhm,” he hummed, kneading Rerir’s flesh some more. “It is quite exhilarating."
The man under him huffed a laugh.
“I could throw you off me right now, kick at you, claw your face open, little fae.”
That he could do, Flins knew, and was very much aware of.
“Would you really find that more enjoyable than this?” he asked, leaning down over Rerir’s back, his hair spilling past his shoulders to brush over Rerir’s skin as his hand slid down Rerir’s side, gliding over his ribs. “Would you give up the warmth, the peacefulness of this, for a moment of violence?”
The man under him went silent for a very, very long time. Flins was in no rush, so he remained as he was, his hand rubbing up and down Rerir’s side.
With a sigh, and a tremble of his body as he laughed, Rerir finally answered him. “I gave that up so many times already, what would be one last time?”
“When is the last of something considered truly the last of it then?”
Rerir went silent again, so Flins pulled back, continued to massage the man’s back. Slowly, carefully, he lost himself in the touch, in the repetitive movements, as he often did whenever he touched Rerir. Not lost enough to miss the way the Sinner’s body tensed under him, nor how it started to move.
Yet Rerir did it so slowly, Flins had all the time in the world to pull away, which is exactly why he did not. Curiosity would be the death of him one day.
The front of Rerir’s thighs was just as solid as the back of them. His chest was definitely more muscular than his back, but that was of course anatomy’s fault. The biggest of differences was the fact that he could see Rerir’s face like that, pale and gaunt, his lips parted as his eye pinned Flins in place.
“I don’t know.”
There was not enough oil left on Flins’ hands to make the glide of them as smooth as before, but Rerir didn’t seem to mind as he simply lay there, arms sprawled on the rug, watching Flins.
“Perhaps,” he started, dragging his hands down Rerir’s chest, down down down to lay them flat on the muscular planes of his abdomen. “You have to partake in something new, for the old to be considered truly over.”
Despite his face being forever scarred by the abyss, his left socket empty, and his eye always holding a hint of insanity in it, Rerir’s smile was unfairly charming. He had certainly been a handsome man, back then, but Flins couldn’t bring himself to even think of it.
He himself found the Rerir under him quite appealing, his imperfections and his ugliness the testimony of his dreadful existence. It was a personal admission, and a little bit of a secret perhaps, that Flins wouldn’t have been so interested, were Rerir simply what he could have been, back then.
“Is this not new enough?”
Flins slid his hands back up, feeling each and every dip of skin, ridge of a scar, the peebled nipples, until his fingers curled around Rerir’s shoulders.
“The massage?” he asked, tilting his head, suspended over Rerir’s body.
The man snorted.
“You.”
Ah, such a dangerous game.
“You think so?”
Rerir studied his face for a moment longer, before he finally moved his arms, placing his own hands on top of Flins’, stopping them just below his pectorals.
“Tell me, little fae,” the man whispered, a wicked grin on his lips. “How did you like me better? On my front, or on my back?”
Now that was a question.
“It matters not to me,” he admitted, rubbing his thumbs into Rerir’s skin. “You’d let me do as I please either way.”
“You are so very sure of yourself,” Rerir mused out loud, his gaze clouding over for a moment as if he remembered something. “Always been, from the moment you found my heart.”
“You’re not denying it.”
“I think I’ll let you find out, if you’re right or not.”
So Flins leaned down, so so low that his hair curtained their faces on both sides, so so close that he could tell that Rerir’s eye was a careful blend of magenta and red, the two colours swirling together into something quite unique.
“On your back,” he whispered, his breath ghosting over Rerir’s open mouth. “I can put you in whatever position I want later.”
Rerir’s lips twitched into a smile, yet not quite. There was an ugly twist to it, bitter resentment and a shadow of self loathing as his hands dragged Flins’ down his chest, so dangerously low that Flins’ balance was on the point of sending him face first into the Sinner’s body.
“Do as you wish then.”
Without saying anything further, Rerir took his hands away and closed his eye.
Flins remained still for a long moment, the back of his mouth dry as he started pushing himself up, using his hands on Rerir’s stomach to support himself. It was only inevitable that his constant moving would send him sliding up Rerir’s thighs.
He half expected it, the edge of the hardness pressing in between his legs, yet what surprised him was the way Rerir showed no reaction to the sudden press against his hard cock. He did not reach out to touch Flins again, and merely sighed and melted into the rug the more Flins ran his hands up and down his body, so he decided to ignore his discovery.
What had started as a massage soon turned into something else, a farce, an excuse to touch and explore and test, walk a tight line without trying to cross it on either sides.
Flins dragged his warm finger down Rerir’s jaw, following its sharp line, sliding over the jagged skin and down, down the arch of his neck, down into the dip of his collarbones, down his chest where he pressed his entire palm flat into the valley between plush flesh. He pushed his hand back up, spread his fingers and cupped Rerir’s neck in between his thumb and index finger, then squeezed, coating his entire hand in phantom flames, a whisper of a fire caressing the sensitive flesh.
His azure flames made the pink scars shine, just as they often did whenever Rerir used his powers.
The man made no move to throw Flins off, or to show that he was in any kind of discomfort, so Flins went on. Each and every touch was slow and calculated, until his hands and mind could remember each and every inch of Rerir’s skin, then some more.
“Is it that good?” he asked, unable to keep his curiosity in check anymore.
Rerir smiled, his eyelashes fluttering as he opened his eye, a lazy gesture for he barely raised his eyelid, watching Flins with the sluggishness of a man oversaturated with warmth and pleasure, content to merely exist. “Can't you tell?”
Perhaps that was exactly why Flins did not understand it.
With him running his hands up and down Rerir’s body, leaning over to glide his fingers along his cheek and cup his face, with his body suspended over the Sinner’s, his crotch pressing against Rerir’s straining cock, it seemed impossible for Rerir not to react, to do anything. Even as Flins was rubbing his heated thumb against Rerir’s nipple, the pressure and motion making his cock twitch in the confinements of his pants, Rerir still simply gazed at him, his hands palms up on the rug, his body soft and mellow under Flins’ ministrations.
Would it be possible for Flins to prematurely accuse the Sinner of something the man was not even interested in? To expect something that was not going to happen?
“So you are aware that you’ve been hard for the past hour. I thought you couldn’t tell.”
The way Rerir’s mouth opened, his brow furrowing, before his lips closed, and parted again with no words coming out made him look quite funny. Like a fish!
“Was I aware…what is wrong with you, little fae?”
Flins rubbed his thumb against Rerir’s cheek, peering down into that magenta eye to find it almost as clear as the summer sky.
“Do you need help?”
That too seemed to surprise the Sinner.
“Are you offering?”
Was he?
“Depends on what you need.”
Now, Flins was not perfect, there wouldn’t be a being in existence to reach such heights, and he was well aware of his own flaws, of how he probed and nudged things that should be left untouched. He did not expect the answer that he received, yet he couldn’t fault anyone but himself for being so shocked by it.
He’s been digging his own grave for some time already, anyway.
Rerir’s hands finally moved, slowly and carefully, until his fingers pressed against Flins’ knees, not restraining him but merely touching. “Nothing, nothing much,” the man murmured, his eyelid heavy as it started sliding down again, his chest heaving with a deep breath. “Just you. Just…”
Flins leaned over, Rerir’s voice so quiet he could barely hear it. It was an excuse, but Rerir turned his head just so, enough for his mouth to brush Flins’ ear.
“...your warmth.”
Honey thick and sticky, catching him in a trap as if he were a mere fly, stupid enough to get too close to the shimmering gold.
Would it be that simple?
Perhaps it was.
It felt like it.
His body burned, the heat of it bleeding out of his form as he slowly, oh so carefully, lowered himself down on top of Rerir.
“Alright.”
A moment of silence only broken by the cracking of the flames dancing both in the fireplace and along Flins’ body.
“It’s all yours.”
Rerir moved as if it pained him to do so, both in body and mind, yet he did it anyway. Twisted his legs just so until Flins ended up kneeling in between them, instead of on top of them, Rerir’s thighs bracketing his body, rubbing against Flins’ waist, pressing into it as if wishing to melt into his flames until they consumed his flesh and bones.
His hands, piercing claws curled inwards, dragged up Flins’s sides, his fingers gliding carefully around Flins’ ribcage for his palms to press up against his back; exactly on top of where his wings would be if he were to let them out. Caging him so, Rerir pulled him closer still until Flins had nowhere to go, no other option than to simply melt into the Sinner’s embrace.
“You burn,” Rerir whispered, his voice oh so very raspy, as if he had been inhaling smoke. Or worse… “Yet you smell like frost.”
Even if he wanted to, Flins wouldn’t be able to turn his head enough to check if the Sinner was truly crying or not.
“Not to your liking?”
As if he cared.
“It’s…nice,” Rerir’s slurred words almost blended in with the sounds of the fire. “Never had snow, back then.”
Flins did not know what to say about that, especially when the subject of back then was strictly forbidden, a sure way to trigger Rerir into a spectacular breakdown each and every time it was mentioned. Yet, it was Rerir himself who brought it up this time, but the way his nose was rubbing against the crown of Flins’ head, his breathing turning softer by the moment, was a sign enough that the Sinner wasn’t too aware of what he was saying.
Which seemed to be the case as Rerir fell asleep soon after.
Flins let him be, hoping that Rerir’s hold would turn lighter the deeper the Sinner descended into his slumber, only to be proven wrong. He had no idea if Rerir did sleep or not for whenever Flins, or the others, visited, the Sinner was wide awake, if not present in mind, at least his eyes were open. He was inclined to believe that, for whatever reason, Rerir couldn’t or chose not to sleep.
Still…
His hold on Flins wasn’t necessarily restrictive, more the clinging of a desperate man wishing to hold onto the only piece of warmth and security he could find. It was both disturbing and devastatingly endearing; the way the beast cuddled Flins as if he needed it to gain enough peace of mind for his body to shut down.
At first, Flins thought he could indulge Rerir a little.
Then, as time passed by and darkness started creeping into the room through the window, he had to will the flames into the fireplace to burn without aid.
Then, when Rerir moved one of his hands down Flins’ spine, pressing it slowly into the small of his back, Flins realised that Rerir’s cock was no longer hard.
Then, when he thought about finally pulling himself away from the Sinner’s embrace, his body simply rolled to the side, and Rerir followed.
Then, when he found himself still entangled with the Sinner, his own face pressed into Rerir’s neck, he simply gave up.
Caught between Flins’ flickering form, his flames still licking up his body, and the burning blaze coming from the fireplace, Rerir was finally warm. He smelled of the soaps Lauma provided for him, of herbs and cleanliness. Of warmth.
Of fire.
Of…Flins himself.
“When…ah, forget it.”
He did not need the sleep, but he could indulge in some idleness, right?
And if, some time between running his hand up and down Rerir’s back and the hulking mass of the Sinner pressing him down on his back as Rerir cuddled against his chest, Flins did fall asleep, well…
He blamed the bewitching warmth of the fire, of course.