"Bar is buried," Seifer corrects. He had been hunting. Not all monster class animals made for tasty eating, even if they were nutritious at times. "Made me thankful for wilderness survival courses."
Being forced to memorize what things could be eaten had been... important. It kept him alive this long.
As for Seifer, well, his eyes are drawn to motion. To the motion of Squall partially stripping down. He sees the scars, some of which he knows were left by his own blade. It makes him feel guilty. How could it do anything less? Honestly he wants to run away. To flee. Because Squall should surely remember in this moment why he should want Seifer dead.
Instead he steps forward and takes the offered wash cloth.
"Sorry I didn't get a loofah on a stick for his highness," he says as he wrings the water out of the washcloth a bit before reaching out to clean the guy's back.
Scarred, but still so beautiful. A temptation under his hands.
It's hard to imagine what their lives could have been if Squall had never planted the idea of Garden or SeeD in Edea's mind. Neither would need to know how to identify edible flora or what coloring signifies a poisonous hide in local monsters for starters. It pains him to know Seifer has had to utilize that knowledge. If he could wring the past from them like a wet rag, he would. Give them both fresh starts.
...That's not how time works.
It ticks ever onward. Like the strikes of their hammers into the roof, like the roaring of the fire in the hearth, like the beating of his heart as Seifer approaches. Squall gets a startling flash of deja vu as Seifer twists the washcloth, resulting in a splash of water into the basin, but it's only in Squall's mind that he's imagined the sight. He's seeing it for the first time and it takes him a moment to acknowledge the words.
"Buried with the bar, I take it?" It's wry. A joke in the furthest stretch of the word because the words seem distant, even to Squall's own ears, as he feels the wet touch of the rag. The breath he lets out is slow, deliberate. This is all real.
"I'm not," he says of the scars. "They tell me where I am." When he is, more precisely. He doesn't expect Seifer to understand but maybe he does. After seeing the state of Seifer's back, maybe Ultimecia tortured him beyond the physical limitations of his body. Squall wants to ask but knows it will only pave the way to having to talk about his own experiences.
It's easier to reach over his scarred shoulder and stop Seifer's hand, to pull his arm around his chest for a brief embrace before loosing the rag from his fingers, freeing it. He rinses it with methodical precision, field experience from a time when he too had to survive off the bare minimum, before turning to reach for the hem of Seifer's shirt.
The gesture harkens back to a simpler time. When their bodies were freely given for inspection after a spar or monster hunt. As if they didn't have an entire war's worth of experience hurting each other. Squall half expects Seifer to stop him but still he reaches.
Seifer does chuckle at the attempt at the joke. IT's more than he's used to from Squall, so he's taking it in the spirit it is given. which he thinks is a white flag. Yet another one to their strange day and reconnection.
"The scars tell you that you're in a broken ass cabin in the middle of the woods?"
If he heard when, he'd get it better. But that wasn't something Squall was sharing. Not like he was sharing his skin for Seifer to run the wash cloth over. Slowly. Deliberately. Thoughtfully. Only, of course, to be stopped by Squall's hand. To be pulled into what can only be termed a proper embrace. One he would hold forever if he had a chance.
But the wash cloth is gone and he expects the moment is too.
Or was it? Because the way Squall was turning under his arm, pulling at his shirt... There was nothing simpler about this for Seifer. Not after already having his skin under Squall's eyes. Not after letting the man see how bad it was from one side. Though he supposed, in for a bit, in for a gil. With a sigh he reaches down, pulls his shirt off and over his head.
Turns out his front was nearly as bad as his back. Here the wounds were clearly more cuts and burns. But in some places it looks like claws raked down his skin.
"You should see the other guy," he deadpans, even though they can both put together that the people who did this to him, Ultimecia included, are ultimately dead.
The laugh is nice. It feels like progress and allows Squall to be good natured when Seifer obfuscates his words. "They tell me I'm here in a broken ass cabin in the woods and not...lost in time somewhere imagining it." He takes a beat to consider the fact that Seifer doesn't know about his experiences in Time Compression. That the only ones who know he'd been lost to it are the friends who were there with him at the end. And even then, he's never told them everything that entailed.
A frown pulls at his mouth and he's grateful Seifer can't see it while he wars with how much to divulge. Even now he feels a faint undercurrent of distress thinking about it, ebbed only by the hand that tethers him to the moment as it wipes the sweat from a hard day's work off his back. "I still feel like that sometimes. Like I'm drifting through the current, experiencing things through a pane of glass while someone else lives out the present in my skin." Who else was looking through his eyes at any given moment? These weren't fears exclusively caused by Ultimecia but his own sister too.
"This helps," he says quietly while reaching to brush his fingers over the scar at his shoulder where the ice had penetrated. When Squall reaches further to cover Seifer's hand, he adds, "So does this." And then he's turning so they can look at each other, so he can return the favor of cementing this into reality through careful touches.
The scars are agonizing to look upon but Squall does not divert his eyes or flinch. If Seifer can bear them, so can he. But it doesn't make the ache that it was done to him lessen. A raw, primal fury vibrates through him as his fingers skate over the claw marks. Some part of him intuitively knows it must have been Griever even if he hopes it wasn't. "I would do worse if I did," he says flatly. Killing has never been personal before but it would be if he ever found the monsters responsible for what's been done to Seifer's body.
He cleans it reverently, slow and mindful of the marks before offering Seifer the other rag so that he isn't trapped under the microscope of Squall's gaze. So he too can have something to do with his hands. "I thought I hated you after you tortured me," Squall confesses as the rag follows one of the jagged claw marks, knowing that it will still be there no matter how many washes.
"Not because you did it but because the way you did it was so impersonal. I thought, surely, I had to be worth more than someone else pulling the lever. Garden taught us all the gruesomely efficient ways to break someone but you didn't use any of them on me...And that hurt in its own way until I realized you weren't entirely there. That eventually lessened the sting, but I think She knew if you had done this to me...If She compelled you to hurt me like She hurt you...It would have broken whatever spell or hold She had. I think that's why Fujin and Raijin made it out unscathed. I think somewhere deep inside She knew She could never make you a monster no matter how monstrously you were treated."
"Hate's a passionate words. There's always two sides to those, and one is easily corrupted to the other and back."
His pride in Squall's success became jealousy. His frustration with Squall's compliance into anger. It had all been so hard, and he'd barely seen straight in those days. But... he likes to think maybe Squall was right about the other stuff.
"Thing is, I'm not sure you're right," he says softly as he lets the rag run over his skin. "Because I still hurt you. I could still hurt you so many ways."
The opposite of the hatred he thought he'd felt was something Squall didn't know how to articulate. He'd already tried in his own way to talk about all the ways Seifer's actions before the war had affected him but it had just come out lacking in all the ways that mattered. He purses his lips, furrows his brows, and listens instead.
How they've hurt each other, how they could hurt each other, is something that has Squall setting the wash rag back in the basin. They know each other's weakest parts. If they wanted to, either of them could neutralize the other in an instant. However when he looks at Seifer's eyes, he doesn't see the same frenetic bloodlust that had been there during the war. He doesn't see the mania or the frenzy, just a bone deep exhaustion from a man who has seen too much.
His touch trails its way down to Seifer's wrists before urging his hands up. Up and around the pale, elegant column of his throaf. They have never offered this to each other. Duels are forfeited with an incline of a chin. To bare one's neck was to trust without reservation.
Seifer could end him right here in Nida's rundown cabin. But he won't. Squall's eyes stay locked with the other man's, unflinching in his faith. "Both of us could. Both of us might." His breath has picked up from the sheer intimacy of the act. The gesture wholly surreal if only because it wasn't preempted by violence. "Like this or in other ways that can't be seen. But we know this dance. We've been practicing it our whole lives."
Hands. Around a delicate column of skin. Months ago he would have throttled Squall in this position. NOw his hands just run back into Squall's hair and pull him forward into a kiss.
Because how else do you express the emotions and want that built up with such a trusting gesture? How do you put into words that you're scared and this isn't the dance you were prepared for? How did you explain just how much you wanted without the vulnerability of saying it out loud?
All Seifer has, in this moment, is a kiss. To say the words neither of them really know how to get out.
Theirs is an understanding that has rarely ever needed words. In fact, Squall has always felt on his back foot when trying to use them around Seifer's aggrandized eloquence. Even now, a commander of considerable rank meant to inspire others, he feels the lack. Every ounce of leadership in him something he's cobbled together from Seifer's speeches and all the ideals he used to espouse.
The kiss is permission to abandon words. They are forgotten wholesale against the surety of Seifer's mouth, still mapping the feel of it against his own and the knowledge of all the time they lost to their own trepidation. Their unwillingness to risk the rivalry that made them both better.
Would this make them better too? Squall knows it will come with hardships but will any of them compare to the feeling of coming home that exists solely on Seifer's lips? He sighs contentedly into the fit of their mouths and meets Seifer's own with a bit of weight that encourages him closer.
His hands curve over the scarred flesh of his sides, scale the length of his ribs, before seeking out any unmarred flesh that might disrupt the brutality written across his back where Squall flattens his hand to guide Seifer against the protection of his own body.
He kisses him the way they would sometimes test new footing on training grounds. Slow, cautious motions to better map the terrain. Seifer's body might bear the horrors of the war and Ultimecia's cruelty, but Squall is willing to put in the work to rewrite what it means for someone to touch Seifer and his touch is its own silent promise matched by the gradual intensity of their kiss: no one else was ever going to hurt him again.
Slow, cautious, beautiful. That had always been Squall's way of approaching the world. And at least when trying new things Seifer was like that too. In most cases at least.
This is not most cases. This feels right back in the realm of dreams, even though he knows it's real. Because in his dreams Seifer doesn't give himself the scars. And Squall is never so sweet. So Seifer just...
He tests the limits. That's what he was always there for in Squall's case. He pushes the other man back, pins him against the edge of the sink, and meets him with fire. Fire to ice, always their way of working. He doesn't let things linger in slowness. Doesn't give them a chance to map. No, thinking would be too far. They need to act. To react.
To forget, for a moment, what hangs between them. What will haunt them in the future and from the past. Better to make the kiss rougher, more challenging, more demanding. Better to lose themselves in a more pleasant sort of battle for dominance. Or so Seifer believes.
It's impossible for them to exist without being diametrically opposed in some way. Seifer has always been there to push against Squall's passivity and likewise, for all the ways Squall made sure he was the one to walk away from their encounters, Squall was also there to pull Seifer back in; a steadfast lighthouse in the storm of their rivalry which no one else seemed to understand but the two of them. They are fire and ice, yes, but not in the way people would suspect. Neither is trying to put the other out. Theirs is a smoldering meant to temper the worst parts of them until they can coexist.
So when Seifer inevitably escalates them away from the slow, cautious mapping of Squall's mouth and fingers, he's there to meet the blaze with a fierce gust of his own. His grunt of encouragement is bitten into Seifer's bottom lip as a counterpoint to the weight that pins him. Strike and parry. It is second nature, a return to form, and Squall relishes the sensation of coming back to life. Nothing has ever made him feel more alive than Seifer. If he thought he'd known desire before, it was a matchstick against the roaring blaze that Seifer ignites in him now.
It's a thrill paralleled only by their duels. A challenge that Squall rises to, as he has always risen to, because Seifer is the one to set it. The spark that it inspires has him pressing up against the shape keeping him in place, not to escape it but to counter Seifer in this moment the way he has all moments before this. He doesn't do Seifer the discourtesy of treating him like glass despite the scars beneath his palms. Even with the war behind them, it's clear Seifer is still competent, still deadly. It's an edge that has always existed between them and Squall rises to meet it without fail.
He angles Seifer's face down into his own, pulls him in like a boat to shore, and promises neither safe harbor nor a dashing upon the rocks as his teeth scrape their insistence into Seifer's lips, but there is the promise of something in the way they kiss. In how Squall guides the driving persistence of Seifer's tongue deeper into his mouth to suck ardently on in return. Until there's no clear way to tell which of them is in charge of the way they try to devour each other.
Definitely no way to be certain. But hell, Squall's far more confident and capable in this area than Seifer had ever expected. He'd been through this song and dance over the years with others. But Squall?
Guy must be a natural or something. He groans as Squall meets him force for force, and his hips roll as he moans over the way his tongue gets sucked. The guy really was doing more than expected.
And of course, it has the expected effect on Seifer's body. An effect he has no problem grinding against Squall's body to get himself some of that wonderful and sweet friction.
There's nothing in Squall's limited experience with desire that could have prepared him for this. For the visceral way hunger unspools in his gut as he drives Seifer to the kind of noises that make him want to devour the man. Everything about this is carnal instinct, a desperate clawing of all the things he never got to do before they were separated by war.
The feel of Seifer as he grinds into him amplifies the violent pulse of need that thrums under Squall's skin. They've escalated this to the point where he wants to rewrite the marks on Seifer with his teeth and nails. He feels savage in his desire. Like a lion on the hunt.
It's the same ferocity that Seifer draws out of him in a fight. A tenacity to match the fervor of the body bearing down on him with the arch of his own. When he twists his mouth away, a sharp airy gasp accompanies the brief departure from their kissing so Squall can try and steady himself against the ache of arousal. Not trying to slow them but instead trying to more purposefully direct his focus so he isn't grasping with blind need even as his cock throbs with heady urgency.
He latches his mouth to Seifer's jaw and bites at the skin there in an effort to smother all of the noises he might otherwise make as they rock against each other.
Has any battle between them ever been so important? So changing? Seifer groans again and his hands move down Squall's body. Grope his ass to pull him close for just a moment before he's leaning down just a little. Moving down and getting his hands around Squall's thighs. He grips them strongly and lifts Squall a bit.
"Bed," he explains, and his voice rolls out low and rough with his desire.
Just like having steel between them, they find a way to clash with rhythm. Each move and countermove matched with growing intensity until Squall is certain neither of them is truly controlling the pace with which they escalate this. When Seifer's hands slide down his body with proprietary urging, Squall catches him by the throat with his teeth, biting both encouragement and challenge into the skin as he moans.
His body follows the cues as his thighs are urged up. It's not natural but it's just close enough to the grappling they practiced in hand to hand combat that Squall is able to hoist himself up until his legs are secured around Seifer's waist.
Bed feels like the dirtiest promise and it floods Squall with a heightened awareness of where this is going. What they'll do. Heat courses through him, makes him blush, and drives him to take control of this new vantage as he cranes Seifer's head back by his hair so he can tip his face up to his own.
"Can you get us there?" It's not a question as much as it's a challenge as Squall brings their mouths together for another eager kiss. Because of course no journey of theirs has ever been a simple one.
Oh, it's very much a challenge. One that has Seifer almost snarling at Squall because how dare he question that. The blonde adjusts his grip and prepares to move them only... Fuck, when had Squall learned such good distraction tactics? A kiss like that, just on the edge of too dirty to think about, is enough to get past his initial guard.
So he retaliates in the only way he can think to do. Which is to shift them so part of Squall's weight rests on the counter. That frees up his hand just enough to pull back for a light slap to Squall's thigh.
None of his retaliatory affection is born from previous experience. There is only carnal instinct and the need to give as good as he gets that drives Squall to bite at Seifer's lips and pull at his hair. Everything about this feels years in the making; an unrealized epilogue to every one of their duels.
Even the unexpected smack against his thigh harkens to a time when the flat of their blades might be used for a taunt. Squall gasps open mouthed against Seifer's kiss-bitten lips and relishes the heady thrill of their on-going battle for dominance.
"This," a pointed nip to Seifer's jawline, "isn't," a scrape of teeth against his throat, "the bed," and then a firm latching of his mouth to Seifer's neck muffles his groan as Squall sucks a deliberate mark into his skin. He's made up entirely of urgent desire and hunger, the entirety of it something he presses against Seifer as he arches up from the counter to better make contact with the body trapping his own.
What epilogues they could have written, had they only had the courage to put fingers to flesh, to let lips write passionate odes on feverishly hot skin. But no, they were both too stubborn, or perhaps even too scared, to accept the risk. A risk that might have grounded them both and perhaps made things easier for the rest of the world. But no, that had never been their path. They were always doomed. Libreri Fatali. Children of fate, ever beholden to the paths they had tread before in cycle after cycle that was also a singular path through time.
A path that, somehow, had led them here. To this moment. To this battle that would leave different, lasting marks on them both, both flesh and soul.
"Yeah," Seifer growled as he regained his grip under Squall's legs, "and I also need a clear line of sight. I'm not tripping over a stray boot and dumping us both, Princess."
So yes, he's going to get them to the damn bed, but stop blocking his vision. Distract him, yes. By all means. He will take that challenge. But he's far more fragile physically than he seems, and he doesn't want to tumble. Not for either of them. With his luck they'd fall on something, Squall would be deeply wounded, and Seifer WOULD be handed over to some hostile nation to suffer for it.
The urge to be contrarian lives within Squall but it's tempered by the very real fact that the cabin is in a state of disrepair. Their luck, if they'd ever had any at all, is such that it would spell disaster to collapse in a heap and so Squall acquiesces. But not without a low rumble that sounds suspiciously like a laugh. It's hard not to be amused by the possibility, after all. To have come all this way, to have learned all that they'd been pining after and longing for was actually reciprocated, only to be met with catastrophic injury felt tragically on point for them.
"Then don't trip," Squall murmurs, unhelpful even as he urges Seifer forward with a squeeze of his thighs. His head has since ducked to kiss and bite along the length of Seifer's throat, giving him a better view of any obstacles they might meet. He nipped a little harder at the nickname but the subsequent graze of teeth have all been exploratory, mapping the angle of Seifer's jaw and the column of his neck.
The desire is no less palpable but it has slowed to something painfully close to affection. A reverent skating of his lips across the lifeline that thuds Seifer's pulse against his mouth. Squall could write a bloody ballad scored in their fervent need for each other, but this sonnet is something a little more tender. A brief glimpse into the narrow spaces of his frozen heart. The scars that spiderweb their way up and over Seifer's shoulder are given the same treatment, kissed and mapped but this time with the hot trail of his tongue. Squall will find every place She didn't mar him and make it his own.
What a cocky asshole. 'Then don't trip'. Seifer would laugh if he wasn't busy taking very focused, very measured breaths to keep his head on straight. To keep himself moving constantly, carefully forward to the room he had been making use of since he got to this place.
It takes so much of himself to ignore what Squall was doing. No small part of him wanted to slam Squall against the nearest wall, or down on a table, and get back to their new form of battle. But no, the bed was needed. The darkness and shelter of the room. The space where Squall could not see him so clearly, know him so deeply. Where maybe he can pretend this is just another dream. Or that it wasn't.
Step by careful step he carries Squall into the bedroom with the bed he had replaced the mattress of with leaves and sleeping bags. It worked for him, and it would have to work now as well.
"If you let go, I can put you down," he suggests, his voice still rough with his controlled desire.
Verbal sparring had never been Squall's strong suit but their messages to each other had often held edges of jest that he would have never been confident enough to engage in before this. Now, with the air crackling with all of the unspoken potential of their youth, the teasing barbs were effortless. This was effortless. In fact, the only restraint was in the way he slowed his explorations just long enough for Seifer to navigate the dusty halls of the cabin.
The darkness of the room is impossible not to drown in. It turns the body beneath his own into shadows that need to be remapped. His hands skate over broad shoulders, feeling out the ribbons of scars beneath his palms, just to reaffirm that it's Seifer. That they're someplace real and not in a loop of someone else's design.
He understands this is the next step. That letting go is the logical thing to do. But Squall's legs tighten their hold on waist they're wound around, clinging just as fiercely as the hands that angle Seifer's face back up to his own. "No. I'm never letting you go again." He says it against the twilight features that can be barely picked out in the blackness of the room. Too similar to the blackness that he's seen open up around Seifer's features. A void that has been known to eat away any trace of familiarity.
Squall chases the words with his mouth, reaffirming them with a fierce kiss. As if the joining of their lips means he'll never lose sight of Seifer again. "I hate that I can't see you," he gusts out hurriedly, the words edged once more in impatient desire.
There are words, and there are words. 'Never letting you go again' were definitely the latter. The sort of words that carried more weight with them, that weren't thrown around lightly. Many people might not know the difference when it came to Squall. Seifer does.
It comes with the tone. With the look on his face. With the touch. Squall didn't touch needlessly after all.
"Fuck," he whispers when the words are out there, the second set, after the kiss that stole all the strength from him. He felt like dandelion fluff flung out before the force of the other man's winds. "I... If I can't see you, I can't open my eyes and find you aren't there anymore. It's... better."
The way they've both been wrecked with wanting is such that Squall can sympathize with Seifer's fears. They've been his own more times than he can count. Until memory and reality warp in on themselves and eat away the things he used to take for granted. Like what Seifer looked like. How his chin would incline with a smile as if it were both taunt and invitation. The saunter in the way he walked. What his voice sounded like.
Squall knows intimately what it's like to have those things robbed from him. He's not one for words but he presses a kiss to Seifer's forehead. "I'm here." An affirmation. A reminder. Another kiss to Seifer's cheek. Squall tells himself it's not tenderness, but assurance. They feel the same as he says again, "I'm here."
The pieces of another vow threaten to haunt him and echo in his mind but they're forced back. With Seifer, it's easier to think clearly. To remember who himself, what he wants, and where he is. When he is.
"I'm here," he breathes raggedly against as if to assert it to himself with a kiss that's more forceful. Pressure and teeth and a need for them both to be covered in the truth of these words. Marked in a way only they could possibly pick out and recognize beneath a shirt collar or jacket.
"I'm here." He bites it into Seifer's shoulder like the lion he's always wanted to be. Squall understands what it is to be a pride now. What it means to have others making you stronger. He's never felt more powerful, more safe, than when at Seifer's side.
"I'm here, Seifer." He'll say it until they find other words to replace them because they're words he should have said a lifetime ago.
The words come. A promise that he wasn't dreaming, that he finds hard to believe. And it comes again. Repeated over and over. Words whispered in a way that makes him feel desperate. That might in another situation work him up. Instead...
Instead the words cut deep into a heart that had been turned to stone. Break through the shields and fears and pain. It makes him ache. Not with longing, but with a different sort of pain. Because no one had said that to him and meant it to mean something different from what Fujin and Raijin had. And it was true. Squall was there. He'd been there nearly every day (save for the war) for the whole of Seifer's life.
He should be using his hands and his mouth to ravage Squall like he always wanted to. Instead he moves to bury his face in Squall's shoulder, so he can bit his lip to try and not let the tears stinging in his eyes to fall.
Someone cared. Someone wanted him for him. Someone who had every reason to hate him, wanted him safe. Would be here for him.
The wanting doesn't stop at desire. It isn't limited to all the ways they can learn each other's bodies or how they fit together. There's this too: the need for security. For something sure and true and entirely theirs without the strings of obedience attached. For a home that's been denied to them for as long as they've been orphans.
Squall builds the walls of it with his arms, closing them around Seifer as he feels the man tuck into him. His fingers skate through too-long hair and cradle the back of his head. He presses a kiss to it, leaves his face buried in golden locks, and vows, "You'll never be alone again." It's the kind of promise he feels in his bones. The kind that he would commit atrocities for. He'd once made a promise of a similar nature under the lure of a sorceress' spell, even if he hadn't known he was bewitched at the time.
There's no magic to influence him now. There's only the shield of his body as he tries to keep Seifer protected from the weighty memory of isolation and pain. How does a man deal with the promise of having all of that taken away? Of having someone to finally lean on?
Nevermind. The battle against the tears is lost at that promise. AS much because it was offered as because of the knowledge he had of how futile it is.
"You're a Sorceress's Knight. You'll go when she calls. I'll be alone."
And Squall would be as unreachable, as untouchable as ever. Taken away when there was finally hope. What a blow that would deal to him. What a way to destroy Seifer.
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Being forced to memorize what things could be eaten had been... important. It kept him alive this long.
As for Seifer, well, his eyes are drawn to motion. To the motion of Squall partially stripping down. He sees the scars, some of which he knows were left by his own blade. It makes him feel guilty. How could it do anything less? Honestly he wants to run away. To flee. Because Squall should surely remember in this moment why he should want Seifer dead.
Instead he steps forward and takes the offered wash cloth.
"Sorry I didn't get a loofah on a stick for his highness," he says as he wrings the water out of the washcloth a bit before reaching out to clean the guy's back.
Scarred, but still so beautiful. A temptation under his hands.
"I'm sorry you have to wear these marks."
no subject
...That's not how time works.
It ticks ever onward. Like the strikes of their hammers into the roof, like the roaring of the fire in the hearth, like the beating of his heart as Seifer approaches. Squall gets a startling flash of deja vu as Seifer twists the washcloth, resulting in a splash of water into the basin, but it's only in Squall's mind that he's imagined the sight. He's seeing it for the first time and it takes him a moment to acknowledge the words.
"Buried with the bar, I take it?" It's wry. A joke in the furthest stretch of the word because the words seem distant, even to Squall's own ears, as he feels the wet touch of the rag. The breath he lets out is slow, deliberate. This is all real.
"I'm not," he says of the scars. "They tell me where I am." When he is, more precisely. He doesn't expect Seifer to understand but maybe he does. After seeing the state of Seifer's back, maybe Ultimecia tortured him beyond the physical limitations of his body. Squall wants to ask but knows it will only pave the way to having to talk about his own experiences.
It's easier to reach over his scarred shoulder and stop Seifer's hand, to pull his arm around his chest for a brief embrace before loosing the rag from his fingers, freeing it. He rinses it with methodical precision, field experience from a time when he too had to survive off the bare minimum, before turning to reach for the hem of Seifer's shirt.
The gesture harkens back to a simpler time. When their bodies were freely given for inspection after a spar or monster hunt. As if they didn't have an entire war's worth of experience hurting each other. Squall half expects Seifer to stop him but still he reaches.
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"The scars tell you that you're in a broken ass cabin in the middle of the woods?"
If he heard when, he'd get it better. But that wasn't something Squall was sharing. Not like he was sharing his skin for Seifer to run the wash cloth over. Slowly. Deliberately. Thoughtfully. Only, of course, to be stopped by Squall's hand. To be pulled into what can only be termed a proper embrace. One he would hold forever if he had a chance.
But the wash cloth is gone and he expects the moment is too.
Or was it? Because the way Squall was turning under his arm, pulling at his shirt... There was nothing simpler about this for Seifer. Not after already having his skin under Squall's eyes. Not after letting the man see how bad it was from one side. Though he supposed, in for a bit, in for a gil. With a sigh he reaches down, pulls his shirt off and over his head.
Turns out his front was nearly as bad as his back. Here the wounds were clearly more cuts and burns. But in some places it looks like claws raked down his skin.
"You should see the other guy," he deadpans, even though they can both put together that the people who did this to him, Ultimecia included, are ultimately dead.
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A frown pulls at his mouth and he's grateful Seifer can't see it while he wars with how much to divulge. Even now he feels a faint undercurrent of distress thinking about it, ebbed only by the hand that tethers him to the moment as it wipes the sweat from a hard day's work off his back. "I still feel like that sometimes. Like I'm drifting through the current, experiencing things through a pane of glass while someone else lives out the present in my skin." Who else was looking through his eyes at any given moment? These weren't fears exclusively caused by Ultimecia but his own sister too.
"This helps," he says quietly while reaching to brush his fingers over the scar at his shoulder where the ice had penetrated. When Squall reaches further to cover Seifer's hand, he adds, "So does this." And then he's turning so they can look at each other, so he can return the favor of cementing this into reality through careful touches.
The scars are agonizing to look upon but Squall does not divert his eyes or flinch. If Seifer can bear them, so can he. But it doesn't make the ache that it was done to him lessen. A raw, primal fury vibrates through him as his fingers skate over the claw marks. Some part of him intuitively knows it must have been Griever even if he hopes it wasn't. "I would do worse if I did," he says flatly. Killing has never been personal before but it would be if he ever found the monsters responsible for what's been done to Seifer's body.
He cleans it reverently, slow and mindful of the marks before offering Seifer the other rag so that he isn't trapped under the microscope of Squall's gaze. So he too can have something to do with his hands. "I thought I hated you after you tortured me," Squall confesses as the rag follows one of the jagged claw marks, knowing that it will still be there no matter how many washes.
"Not because you did it but because the way you did it was so impersonal. I thought, surely, I had to be worth more than someone else pulling the lever. Garden taught us all the gruesomely efficient ways to break someone but you didn't use any of them on me...And that hurt in its own way until I realized you weren't entirely there. That eventually lessened the sting, but I think She knew if you had done this to me...If She compelled you to hurt me like She hurt you...It would have broken whatever spell or hold She had. I think that's why Fujin and Raijin made it out unscathed. I think somewhere deep inside She knew She could never make you a monster no matter how monstrously you were treated."
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His pride in Squall's success became jealousy. His frustration with Squall's compliance into anger. It had all been so hard, and he'd barely seen straight in those days. But... he likes to think maybe Squall was right about the other stuff.
"Thing is, I'm not sure you're right," he says softly as he lets the rag run over his skin. "Because I still hurt you. I could still hurt you so many ways."
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How they've hurt each other, how they could hurt each other, is something that has Squall setting the wash rag back in the basin. They know each other's weakest parts. If they wanted to, either of them could neutralize the other in an instant. However when he looks at Seifer's eyes, he doesn't see the same frenetic bloodlust that had been there during the war. He doesn't see the mania or the frenzy, just a bone deep exhaustion from a man who has seen too much.
His touch trails its way down to Seifer's wrists before urging his hands up. Up and around the pale, elegant column of his throaf. They have never offered this to each other. Duels are forfeited with an incline of a chin. To bare one's neck was to trust without reservation.
Seifer could end him right here in Nida's rundown cabin. But he won't. Squall's eyes stay locked with the other man's, unflinching in his faith. "Both of us could. Both of us might." His breath has picked up from the sheer intimacy of the act. The gesture wholly surreal if only because it wasn't preempted by violence. "Like this or in other ways that can't be seen. But we know this dance. We've been practicing it our whole lives."
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Because how else do you express the emotions and want that built up with such a trusting gesture? How do you put into words that you're scared and this isn't the dance you were prepared for? How did you explain just how much you wanted without the vulnerability of saying it out loud?
All Seifer has, in this moment, is a kiss. To say the words neither of them really know how to get out.
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The kiss is permission to abandon words. They are forgotten wholesale against the surety of Seifer's mouth, still mapping the feel of it against his own and the knowledge of all the time they lost to their own trepidation. Their unwillingness to risk the rivalry that made them both better.
Would this make them better too? Squall knows it will come with hardships but will any of them compare to the feeling of coming home that exists solely on Seifer's lips? He sighs contentedly into the fit of their mouths and meets Seifer's own with a bit of weight that encourages him closer.
His hands curve over the scarred flesh of his sides, scale the length of his ribs, before seeking out any unmarred flesh that might disrupt the brutality written across his back where Squall flattens his hand to guide Seifer against the protection of his own body.
He kisses him the way they would sometimes test new footing on training grounds. Slow, cautious motions to better map the terrain. Seifer's body might bear the horrors of the war and Ultimecia's cruelty, but Squall is willing to put in the work to rewrite what it means for someone to touch Seifer and his touch is its own silent promise matched by the gradual intensity of their kiss: no one else was ever going to hurt him again.
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This is not most cases. This feels right back in the realm of dreams, even though he knows it's real. Because in his dreams Seifer doesn't give himself the scars. And Squall is never so sweet. So Seifer just...
He tests the limits. That's what he was always there for in Squall's case. He pushes the other man back, pins him against the edge of the sink, and meets him with fire. Fire to ice, always their way of working. He doesn't let things linger in slowness. Doesn't give them a chance to map. No, thinking would be too far. They need to act. To react.
To forget, for a moment, what hangs between them. What will haunt them in the future and from the past. Better to make the kiss rougher, more challenging, more demanding. Better to lose themselves in a more pleasant sort of battle for dominance. Or so Seifer believes.
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So when Seifer inevitably escalates them away from the slow, cautious mapping of Squall's mouth and fingers, he's there to meet the blaze with a fierce gust of his own. His grunt of encouragement is bitten into Seifer's bottom lip as a counterpoint to the weight that pins him. Strike and parry. It is second nature, a return to form, and Squall relishes the sensation of coming back to life. Nothing has ever made him feel more alive than Seifer. If he thought he'd known desire before, it was a matchstick against the roaring blaze that Seifer ignites in him now.
It's a thrill paralleled only by their duels. A challenge that Squall rises to, as he has always risen to, because Seifer is the one to set it. The spark that it inspires has him pressing up against the shape keeping him in place, not to escape it but to counter Seifer in this moment the way he has all moments before this. He doesn't do Seifer the discourtesy of treating him like glass despite the scars beneath his palms. Even with the war behind them, it's clear Seifer is still competent, still deadly. It's an edge that has always existed between them and Squall rises to meet it without fail.
He angles Seifer's face down into his own, pulls him in like a boat to shore, and promises neither safe harbor nor a dashing upon the rocks as his teeth scrape their insistence into Seifer's lips, but there is the promise of something in the way they kiss. In how Squall guides the driving persistence of Seifer's tongue deeper into his mouth to suck ardently on in return. Until there's no clear way to tell which of them is in charge of the way they try to devour each other.
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Guy must be a natural or something. He groans as Squall meets him force for force, and his hips roll as he moans over the way his tongue gets sucked. The guy really was doing more than expected.
And of course, it has the expected effect on Seifer's body. An effect he has no problem grinding against Squall's body to get himself some of that wonderful and sweet friction.
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The feel of Seifer as he grinds into him amplifies the violent pulse of need that thrums under Squall's skin. They've escalated this to the point where he wants to rewrite the marks on Seifer with his teeth and nails. He feels savage in his desire. Like a lion on the hunt.
It's the same ferocity that Seifer draws out of him in a fight. A tenacity to match the fervor of the body bearing down on him with the arch of his own. When he twists his mouth away, a sharp airy gasp accompanies the brief departure from their kissing so Squall can try and steady himself against the ache of arousal. Not trying to slow them but instead trying to more purposefully direct his focus so he isn't grasping with blind need even as his cock throbs with heady urgency.
He latches his mouth to Seifer's jaw and bites at the skin there in an effort to smother all of the noises he might otherwise make as they rock against each other.
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"Bed," he explains, and his voice rolls out low and rough with his desire.
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His body follows the cues as his thighs are urged up. It's not natural but it's just close enough to the grappling they practiced in hand to hand combat that Squall is able to hoist himself up until his legs are secured around Seifer's waist.
Bed feels like the dirtiest promise and it floods Squall with a heightened awareness of where this is going. What they'll do. Heat courses through him, makes him blush, and drives him to take control of this new vantage as he cranes Seifer's head back by his hair so he can tip his face up to his own.
"Can you get us there?" It's not a question as much as it's a challenge as Squall brings their mouths together for another eager kiss. Because of course no journey of theirs has ever been a simple one.
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So he retaliates in the only way he can think to do. Which is to shift them so part of Squall's weight rests on the counter. That frees up his hand just enough to pull back for a light slap to Squall's thigh.
An unspoken way of saying 'behave'.
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Even the unexpected smack against his thigh harkens to a time when the flat of their blades might be used for a taunt. Squall gasps open mouthed against Seifer's kiss-bitten lips and relishes the heady thrill of their on-going battle for dominance.
"This," a pointed nip to Seifer's jawline, "isn't," a scrape of teeth against his throat, "the bed," and then a firm latching of his mouth to Seifer's neck muffles his groan as Squall sucks a deliberate mark into his skin. He's made up entirely of urgent desire and hunger, the entirety of it something he presses against Seifer as he arches up from the counter to better make contact with the body trapping his own.
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A path that, somehow, had led them here. To this moment. To this battle that would leave different, lasting marks on them both, both flesh and soul.
"Yeah," Seifer growled as he regained his grip under Squall's legs, "and I also need a clear line of sight. I'm not tripping over a stray boot and dumping us both, Princess."
So yes, he's going to get them to the damn bed, but stop blocking his vision. Distract him, yes. By all means. He will take that challenge. But he's far more fragile physically than he seems, and he doesn't want to tumble. Not for either of them. With his luck they'd fall on something, Squall would be deeply wounded, and Seifer WOULD be handed over to some hostile nation to suffer for it.
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"Then don't trip," Squall murmurs, unhelpful even as he urges Seifer forward with a squeeze of his thighs. His head has since ducked to kiss and bite along the length of Seifer's throat, giving him a better view of any obstacles they might meet. He nipped a little harder at the nickname but the subsequent graze of teeth have all been exploratory, mapping the angle of Seifer's jaw and the column of his neck.
The desire is no less palpable but it has slowed to something painfully close to affection. A reverent skating of his lips across the lifeline that thuds Seifer's pulse against his mouth. Squall could write a bloody ballad scored in their fervent need for each other, but this sonnet is something a little more tender. A brief glimpse into the narrow spaces of his frozen heart. The scars that spiderweb their way up and over Seifer's shoulder are given the same treatment, kissed and mapped but this time with the hot trail of his tongue. Squall will find every place She didn't mar him and make it his own.
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It takes so much of himself to ignore what Squall was doing. No small part of him wanted to slam Squall against the nearest wall, or down on a table, and get back to their new form of battle. But no, the bed was needed. The darkness and shelter of the room. The space where Squall could not see him so clearly, know him so deeply. Where maybe he can pretend this is just another dream. Or that it wasn't.
Step by careful step he carries Squall into the bedroom with the bed he had replaced the mattress of with leaves and sleeping bags. It worked for him, and it would have to work now as well.
"If you let go, I can put you down," he suggests, his voice still rough with his controlled desire.
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The darkness of the room is impossible not to drown in. It turns the body beneath his own into shadows that need to be remapped. His hands skate over broad shoulders, feeling out the ribbons of scars beneath his palms, just to reaffirm that it's Seifer. That they're someplace real and not in a loop of someone else's design.
He understands this is the next step. That letting go is the logical thing to do. But Squall's legs tighten their hold on waist they're wound around, clinging just as fiercely as the hands that angle Seifer's face back up to his own. "No. I'm never letting you go again." He says it against the twilight features that can be barely picked out in the blackness of the room. Too similar to the blackness that he's seen open up around Seifer's features. A void that has been known to eat away any trace of familiarity.
Squall chases the words with his mouth, reaffirming them with a fierce kiss. As if the joining of their lips means he'll never lose sight of Seifer again. "I hate that I can't see you," he gusts out hurriedly, the words edged once more in impatient desire.
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It comes with the tone. With the look on his face. With the touch. Squall didn't touch needlessly after all.
"Fuck," he whispers when the words are out there, the second set, after the kiss that stole all the strength from him. He felt like dandelion fluff flung out before the force of the other man's winds. "I... If I can't see you, I can't open my eyes and find you aren't there anymore. It's... better."
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Squall knows intimately what it's like to have those things robbed from him. He's not one for words but he presses a kiss to Seifer's forehead. "I'm here." An affirmation. A reminder. Another kiss to Seifer's cheek. Squall tells himself it's not tenderness, but assurance. They feel the same as he says again, "I'm here."
The pieces of another vow threaten to haunt him and echo in his mind but they're forced back. With Seifer, it's easier to think clearly. To remember who himself, what he wants, and where he is. When he is.
"I'm here," he breathes raggedly against as if to assert it to himself with a kiss that's more forceful. Pressure and teeth and a need for them both to be covered in the truth of these words. Marked in a way only they could possibly pick out and recognize beneath a shirt collar or jacket.
"I'm here." He bites it into Seifer's shoulder like the lion he's always wanted to be. Squall understands what it is to be a pride now. What it means to have others making you stronger. He's never felt more powerful, more safe, than when at Seifer's side.
"I'm here, Seifer." He'll say it until they find other words to replace them because they're words he should have said a lifetime ago.
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Instead the words cut deep into a heart that had been turned to stone. Break through the shields and fears and pain. It makes him ache. Not with longing, but with a different sort of pain. Because no one had said that to him and meant it to mean something different from what Fujin and Raijin had. And it was true. Squall was there. He'd been there nearly every day (save for the war) for the whole of Seifer's life.
He should be using his hands and his mouth to ravage Squall like he always wanted to. Instead he moves to bury his face in Squall's shoulder, so he can bit his lip to try and not let the tears stinging in his eyes to fall.
Someone cared. Someone wanted him for him. Someone who had every reason to hate him, wanted him safe. Would be here for him.
How does a man deal with that?
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Squall builds the walls of it with his arms, closing them around Seifer as he feels the man tuck into him. His fingers skate through too-long hair and cradle the back of his head. He presses a kiss to it, leaves his face buried in golden locks, and vows, "You'll never be alone again." It's the kind of promise he feels in his bones. The kind that he would commit atrocities for. He'd once made a promise of a similar nature under the lure of a sorceress' spell, even if he hadn't known he was bewitched at the time.
There's no magic to influence him now. There's only the shield of his body as he tries to keep Seifer protected from the weighty memory of isolation and pain. How does a man deal with the promise of having all of that taken away? Of having someone to finally lean on?
They'll learn together.
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"You're a Sorceress's Knight. You'll go when she calls. I'll be alone."
And Squall would be as unreachable, as untouchable as ever. Taken away when there was finally hope. What a blow that would deal to him. What a way to destroy Seifer.
No one had ever tried it with hope before.
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