#that ive neglected for months
(Freestyling for this week’s #smuturday. I’ve been in a Gladnis mood all week! And this is, again, for dear @wildixia and her magnificent IgnisandGladio. I wrote this because 1 – I hadn’t written anything NSFW for these particular guys and 2 – I hadn’t written an Ignis POV of these two. So this is me being very self-indulgent!)
(Tag for this ’verse is colors of us AU, if you want to find the rest of the ficlets.)
Quick Fic Pick 54: passionate hues
When he moves, when he can bring himself to move again, it’s for no more than a breath – a needed breath, too bright and too fierce and nothing at all that could calm the mad tripped-wire beat of his heart.
His heart, wound around and sweetly pierced in thorns, in vines, like the ones he wears so proudly on his skin: their sharp edges piercing him through to his very soul.
And with a pain that almost tears him in two, he wrenches himself away from that sight, that unexpected gift: that man in the cast-off pieces of a suit, laid out flat on a bed that creaks, a bed that’s too narrow even for himself when he’s sleeping curled up and worn out.
Into the shower, and the cool water doesn’t scour away the sight of Gladiolus, just him, simply him, despite the skewed tie and the crumpled trousers. The boots thrown into the corner, the suit jacket left slumped and disconsolate over a rickety chair, the scatter of sleek black devices on the cracked table next to the bed.
The monument of him, lovingly chiseled musculature and the breadth of his form; the way he sleeps, heavy, needful, that too is branded into Ignis’s mind: on his stomach, heedless of the world that churns on outside the windows, inside the temporarily dark screens of his phones and his tablet. The way he seems to have turned away from those constant tugging reminders, and the way he occupies the scant real estate of the bed, as though Ignis’s cramped top-floor flat is his refuge from everything and everyone else, from his breakneck cutthroat world, that seems to always be demanding his full attention.
Hurrying through the end of one day, even as the clock in the corridor chimes reluctantly to signal midnight, and Ignis curses the dripping water that chills the back of his neck, and he throws off his towel as soon as he can decently lock the door behind him and now he only has to cross to the bed, and he almost hesitates to touch Gladiolus, to interrupt his sleep.
But his hand, still shadowed in the inkstains of his day, the inkstains of his chosen art, drifts as if magnetically drawn to that elegant shoulder, those curling lengths of dark hair – and he knows how to touch, he knows he’s keeping his fingertips from making full contact with the man sleeping in his bed – he doesn’t want to wake him –
“Ignis.”
A breath, a gentle soft sound, and Ignis can’t hide the hitch in his breath – so he takes off his eyeglasses and leans in to kiss the nearest bit of Gladiolus he can reach, which is the back of his hand. Old scars crisscrossing the knuckles. “So you weren’t sleeping, after all. You could have fooled me.”
“Iwas sleeping, I just heard you.”
He laughs, softly, watching as Gladiolus skins out of the rest of his clothes. “You’re joking, right? I was being quiet.”
“You’re stealthy, yeah, but – I guess I just woke up. And then I heard you.” Smile, that curves that lovely mouth and its frame of immaculately trimmed mustache and beard.
“My apologies for interrupting your rest, then. Heaven knows you need it. Your days are long and unkind.” He gives in to temptation, then, and he gets into the bed and hauls Gladiolus close. He carefully spans the breadth of those shoulders, carefully runs his fingers over his own handiwork: the great hunting cat in its spots and in its long lash of a tail.
The tattoo is almost done, he thinks: if Gladiolus can set aside one day for the work itself and another to rest in, it’ll be enough to finish off the bared fangs and the watchful eyes and the massive paws.
“If it’s you waking me up, I don’t mind.”
And Gladiolus is turning around in his arms: and the smile, sweet and fierce, is all the warning he gets, before the kiss, before the overwhelming smash and the welcome overpowering presence of him, and Ignis keens and presses closer, closer somehow, as if to find all the nearly nonexistent gaps between them and then to bridge them. To fill himself up with Gladiolus, to willingly disappear into him, just for this moment, this stolen midnight –
He feels himself being pressed back into his smashed-flat pillows, and he blinks and then cries out, shocked again, as Gladiolus kisses a blazing trail down his throat, down to his shoulder – sharp bright pain of teeth closing in his flesh and Ignis all but falls to pieces just on that one sensation alone – and he growls, “Don’t you stop.”
“Wasn’t planning to,” he thinks he hears, between fresh bites: and he cries out every time, shameless encouraging, till he knows, till he feels, that he wears a garden of roses on his skin but Gladiolus seems intent on turning him into a garden of wanton bruises, the sucking heavy pressure of mouth and tongue, every mark, every trace of pleasure, laid out plainly to his – their – eyes.
Gladiolus, whispering: “Good, good, don’t hold back, I want to hear you, I need to hear you, tell me what you want – ”
“Have me, do whatever you want with me,” is all he can say, all he can ask for – he’s nothing but the burn, lit up by Gladiolus and his marauding mouth, his wandering hands: his lover playing him so well and so thoroughly. The shiver in his skin is the only possible response to someone who knows him so profoundly, like they’ve been loving each other all these years, like they’ve been wanting each other all their lives –
Lives of this, lifetimes upon lifetimes, he thinks, and he cries out, “Gladiolus!”
“Wait for it,” is the response, sharp bright rash promise. “Want to make it good for you.”
And Ignis’s eyes fly open, and he looks down: catches him in that last waiting precipice of an instant, the careful knowing smile that is the prelude to Gladiolus going down on him, all the lines in his face drawn together in deep ecstasy, deep concentration, and then he feels the flick of that wicked talented tongue against him and he all but collapses, all but flies apart, and there’s nothing to do but hold on: one hand in dark hair, and the other to the inked lines wandering across one broad shoulder. Hold on, and try to hold out, try to make this last –
And it gets to the point where he tugs on Gladiolus’s hair, too harsh, too rough, surprised grunt against his skin and he opens his mouth to apologize, to try and make things better –
Gladiolus’s voice, nothing more than a needy rasp, stops him: “Fuck, that was good.”
“Oh,” is all Ignis can say, then.
“Do it again if you like.”
So he laughs, breathless still, unsteady still, and he says, “I would rather do something else.“
"Not done yet,” he hears Gladiolus say. “Not planning to be done. Not for a while.”
He groans, then, he actually groans, torn between anticipation and pure need. “If your plan is – for me not to survive this night,” he begins.
The kiss is a beautiful interruption, knowing exactly where that mouth has just been – the thrill shakes through him, beautiful violent filthy –
“That’s the start of it,” he hears Gladiolus say.
He laughs and laughs and gives in. Gives himself over.
“The shiver in his skin is the only possible response to someone who knows him so profoundly, like they’ve been loving each other all these years, like they’ve been wanting each other all their lives –”
*sobs eternally*
