（ he is long removed and far away from the boy (the child) who could be strong-armed into anything against his will. he wants to be up, to be moving, so he is. there is a cool steel laid beneath his tone like damascus, but it's barely even a rebuff. just a warning.
the sword is removed from the desk and returned to its sheath, and then hung unceremoniously from the hooks set into his bedroom wall. on turning, he hikes up his shirt. perhaps it's a bold demonstration, born more out of his annoyance at being fussed at or over (she's not the first to have come to his door, simply the first to be given entry) than anything else, but it reveals that the worst of the clawmarks are fading to the tender pink of new scar tissue against his lean left flank. mccoy's medical regenerators and his own medical ninjutsu at work. even the bruises blooming across broken ribs has faded to the sickly off-yellow of an injury many weeks older than the few days they've had since their return to the station. the internal injuries will take longer by their complexity — but he estimates another week before he's able to resume his customary regimen without issue.
he takes the cup as he sits, giving her an acknowledging nod. then, softer: ）
Thank you for returning my sword. It is （ there is a twist in his expression. a product of his solitude — his mastery over his microexpressions is somewhat lessened. ） important to me.
[ It’s all the proof Yennefer requires — that emergence of steel, evidence of what’s still strong beneath — to not press further along that line of conversation. She would have dismissed any concerned inquiries in much the same manner, and she’s not so distracted by her own weariness that she mistakes Itachi’s tone for anything than how it was initially intended.
In the wake of him drawing his shirt up, she examines the marks as calmly as she would anything else — fresh and pinkened scar tissue, yellowing bruises — and has the sudden thought of pressing her own hand to the exposure of his side, only to feel the remnants of injury beneath her touch, the warmth of skin, the rise and fall of his side with every breath — but the healing wounds disappear from her sight and the instinct goes with it, as she elects to take a measured sip of her own cup’s contents with a grimacing expression. It’s something left over from when Billy had shared her room, and there’d often been no accounting for taste with the bottles he’d stashed around the space. ]
Most blades bear some sort of significance to those who wield them.
[ She breathes out a sigh upon dropping down to sit beside him, legs stretched out before her, and shifts her cup to balance it between most of her fingertips. ] I’d suspected you would be somewhat put out to lose yours.
（ her grimace informs how braced he is for the taste when he raises his own cup. it is quite disgusting — he too wonders at billy's hands in this, half-certain he'd smelled this very thing on the man's breath during a sparring match once upon a time, but thusly forewarned, his expression remains stoic as he swallows a mouthful down. ）
Mm. For most shinobi, a blade is simply a tool. Tools can be broken, discarded, taken... it is very rare that one treats a single weapon as significant. Truthfully, I once left this one to rust.
（ he had not cleaned it. it was wet and slick with the blood of his kinsmen when he drove it into the shade of an ancient tree, tears blurring his eyes so badly he could barely see but for the sharingan. it was bare months ago, that he asked viveca to retrieve it for him. he had not intimated and she had not asked — but he is glad that she retrieved it from the ground, and not an earlier canonpoint where it was pristine and hale. the blood it has been glutted on, the bones it has stuttered against... he may have cleaned it, sharpened it, ground away the chips and the rust, but it is still the sword he used that awful night, and he is still the man that raised it. ）
[ At this particular stage of things, Yennefer is settling for just about whatever's within easy reach — not bothering to go and rummage around the kitchen or position herself in any common area shared by the others on the station, until the odds are that everyone else is fast asleep in their rooms and won't discover her.
There's a line she can't quite think of about beggars, but she doesn't try to reach for it, to remember it, not when her gaze unconsciously roams across the space to make note of Itachi's expression as he follows her sip with his own. ]
Yet it came to mean something to you. While you were without it?
[ She isn't asking for the entire story behind it, necessarily, not unless he chooses to share it with her of his own volition — but there are some details she can intuit, from what he's already admitted to. The next drink goes down more smoothly for her — or at least she doesn't make nearly as much of a face afterward, more contemplative in how she briefly swipes a lick between lips in the interim between her question and his answer. ]
（ perhaps she can sense the moment, when lies and honesty war in him. the tip of the scales is not obvious, precipitated by nothing more than a nonchalant lift of his shoulders, but it seems — for once — that the latter has won out. he takes another slow sip, fingers curled around the fired clay cup. there is a drawn, measured moment before he chooses to speak, and his attention is briefly focused on the glitter of her lips so as to avoid her eyes when he does. ）
No. I apologize if my statement was misleading. The blade is called 'Murakumo'. It means 'Gathering Clouds' in my native tongue. It was given to me by my father when I entered ANBU, that is the Special Assassination and Tactical Squad, black ops division in the shinobi force of my village.
（ they have known each other now nearly a year, and he has not spoken much on these matters. yennefer, he thinks, will understand the gravity of alighting on it now. ）
I left it behind when I became a missing-nin — a criminal and terrorist to my nation.
[ If she were in search of answers for her own selfish motivations, there might be more of a discernment on what she's earned from him — she's approached him with those intentions in the past, but here, she won't pretend she's looking for anything other than something to distract her mind from the thoughts she has when she only has herself for company. Even the silence between them is preferable to the quiet she faces in her room alone. ]
Did you choose to?
[ Leave the sword, pursue that path, any of it — or was it a role that he adopted for reasons that are not quite so simple? Decisions can be easily judged on the surface, but he has never given her the impression of being that straightforward and she has no intention of believing that to have changed in any part of his past.
What's more is that she finds herself asking because she wants to understand, not because she wants to have the information to hold over him — telling in and of itself, after all this time. ]
（ the question does not catch him off guard — he knows too well how to direct conversations in a direction of his choosing — but there is a moment where his brow pinches and furrows where the vulnerability is all laid naked at her feet. it does not make him look young. on the contrary, he appears now older than his age, haggard and worn not only with injury, but with guilt that has been far more part and province of his life than nearly anything else. ）
You may need to ply me with more liquor before I will be of a mind to discuss that, Yennefer.
（ it's not a no. but the conversation is still so damningly fresh after what occurred with mccoy on the banks of that river in alydhion, scraped raw like a wound and worse by far than the one mending along his side. there is very little in him that wishes to revisit it again so soon — in part because the recognition that every time he is forced to confront the fact that, as blue had put it a year ago, it was not only your hands is almost more unpleasant than his memory of the act itself.
his fingers twitch on the cup, and he is so terribly cognizant of the absence of his ring that he transfers the cup to his left hand, and drops the right away. then, without preamble he tosses back the rest of the cup's contents, and holds it out wordless for another. ）
[ If he expected that giving her more of a non-answer would put her off the subject, he might not be surprised to learn that it doesn't succeed — but she's of less of a mind to pry, even if it only leaves her more curious about him than ever. Still, she also might look older than her years, every single one of them etched within her gaze rather than the rest of her features that don't bear even the slightest wrinkle, the enchanter's brutal spell ensuring that she will never wear any signs of aging. ]
The whole point of liquor is that it leaves you little mind to do anything at all, Itachi.
[ This, she says with more intended humor, trying to draw them away from subjects that may be too painful to address, like wounds that could reopen anew — especially when he is nursing fresher ones in another sense — and she briefly inclines herself into his space before retreating, collecting the bottle and pouring more into his cup before her own. ]
（ she leans into his space and for a vivid moment, he wonders what it would be like to sweep her hair back from the graceful lines of her neck — a vivid impression left on him by long nights spent in taverns and gambling halls when he was a much younger man. kisame had little care for women or men — too conscious of his own appearance, perhaps, but jūzō had almost leaned into it, liking the way people looked at his sharpened teeth and myriad tattoos as if daring them to get close regardless.
itachi had watched that dance more than once, and excused himself to retire alone more than once in their brief years of partnership. but he wonders now if that had been a distraction like the liquor, meant to offer solace from the horrors of shinobi life if only briefly.
she smells like lilac, a sharp underpinning of sweetness that lingers long after she moves away. ）
Is that your aim, then? Having little enough mind to do anything?
[ She's spoken too close to her true intentions without realizing it — at least, not until he turns the question back around on her — and then it's her turn for shoulders to drop slightly beneath the weight of recalling everything she has fought to shove aside these last lingering days. ]
Tonight, yes.
[ As for what future days might hold, she isn't even letting them remain in her awareness — she simply pauses to regard him, tilted in that study for a moment longer than would be considered necessary, the spill of her unbound hair almost reaching the backs of her hands with their maintained clutch on her cup. ]
Do I need to drink more for that? [ Her gaze still hasn't slid away — there might be an unspoken question in it, one that sits alongside the one she reaches for instead, the one less likely to expose further vulnerabilities — but she draws in a short breath as if she's fighting the battle to keep guarding herself and losing somewhat. ]
（ there's a charge to the air. it isn't wholly unfamiliar to him, exactly — it was not as if those sixty years spent with izumi in tsukuyomi were unlived, after all — he was a father there, to three children that could never exist but that looked so much more like her than like him — and he is a keen student of human nature. a lack of natural experience aside, he does not think he is wrong in gaining a sense that there is an invitation to the cant of her head, to the steadiness of her gaze, to the way it slides along her voice like a blade in parry.
he only has to accept it.
and perhaps it would not be so terrible a thing for both of them to indulge in. she is beautiful and clever and sharp, and if she minded he were a criminal or a killer she surely would have excused herself by now. swords with whisper-keen edges and well-worn tsuka have only one purpose, after all, and she returned his to him unquestioning.
his own perpetually self-directed revulsion, his long-standing difficulty in accepting kindness or camaraderie or affection has always been an obstacle to his pursuit of any sort of meaningful physical relationship with others. but yennefer, he thinks, will not expect anlything he cannot offer. she is too like him. she is too different from him.
his right hand lifts, and follows the line of her left collarbone — not touching her, but close — and he pushes her hair aside like a curtain, neatly tucking it back over her shoulder. there's a curious intimacy to the gesture alone, a permissive echo of the way she had leaned so easily into his space bare minutes before.
but it is an answer. ）
I suppose that depends on where your tolerances lay.
（ he would hardly begrudge her needing to layer indulgence over the act. he is not an easy man to touch. ）
[ There is a selfishness to her question — it wouldn’t be her if she was truly asking from a sense of altruism, but this hadn’t been the reason she’d sought his company or even the motivation behind her bringing the bottle along with the blade to his room. Yet now that she’s here, confronted with the tangible proof of his existence — that, in spite of all who have disappeared, he is one of the few who remains — she finds herself oddly compelled to hold onto it by whatever means possible.
That, and she finds that if she gives herself something else to pursue, she won’t fall prey to thinking about the absences in question, and one less hour spent dwelling on those faces is better than wallowing.
She doesn’t move at first — careful, as he does, to let his touch slip beneath the curtain of her hair and lift it back to expose the curve of her shoulder — but when she inclines herself forward, it has the consequence of driving his hand further into the strands, closer to the nape of her neck, and her breath hitches as she stops just shy of bringing their mouths together.
There’s not enough liquor heating her blood to make her overly reckless, but an amount sufficient to obscure the part of her judgment that would prompt her to think twice about this — not because it’s him, but because it’s her. Yet she doesn’t want to wake up and not have any memories attached to it, either, taste little but the bitter pang of regret. ]
Where are yours? [ She may as well be kissing him with how close she’s drawn herself in, gaze heavy-lidded and voice hushed. ]
（ perhaps he is surprised she asks. he is not used to others making such considerations for him — people push him, and that is that. not about this specific thing, perhaps, but no one ever troubled themselves in considering his tolerance for killing, for anger so bleak it could have burned the world to black ash, for carrying what he was asked to carry too young to do anything but survive it.
for love, and the awful mark loss has left on him.
the surprise is brief, a lift of his brows there and gone like a late spring frost, and then his fingers curl in her hair, so similar a colour to his own that the way the strands are woven through his fingers almost sparks a sense of déjà vu from the times he has used a clone to cut his. it makes it easier, in a way, and there is no hesitance when he rests the edge of his palm against her shoulder. his touch is light and careful against the column of her throat, and then it skirts upwards to her jaw. she is so close their breath mingles as he draws his own to speak, but perhaps he is still just shy enough he does not make the first obvious move. ）
[ She has the smallest wisp of a guess that he is withholding out of consideration for her — and then buries it down again with all the other instincts that could distract her from the immediate present. But she is not consumed enough by his proximity yet to overlook that this is the first time they’ve touched in any significant way, anything that could be termed as lingering, and that she likes the feeling of his fingers in her hair more than she’ll ever let herself admit.
She rarely does anything with hesitancy anymore — including this, what could never be described as a surge forward when they’re already inclining in each other’s direction but pressing her mouth to his, undeniably, just the same.
It is achingly slow, and unhurried, as if she wants to give him opportunity to respond before introducing the potential for deeper. Her eyes fall shut regardless, lashes fluttering against her cheeks; the drink tastes less offensive on his lips, weakened by heat, and every other thought begins to dissolve from her awareness. ]
（ the first life he took was almost effortless. the motion of a cut he'd performed in kata by then a thousand times by rote. it was simple. automatic. the horror came afterwards, with the gush of blood that no training dummy could emulate.
(he had known it would be like that.)
(he had not known it would be like that.)
it was awful, how easy it was.
as firsts go, this is wholly the opposite. there is no sense of wrongness that crashes into his awareness and presses him down like gravity. the only thing he is hyperaware of is the heat of her body and the soft fall of her hair, and the way his thumb has somehow come to rest against the suprasternal notch of her throat, fingers fanned out against the crook of her neck.
he is unpracticed — but not clumsy. his mouth against hers is careful and deliberate, responsive the way one is when they are accustomed to paying mind to the language of someone's body and being unafraid to act in response. he lets her lead, but not passively — when she draws back like a dance, he shifts forward to follow.
his other hand reaches out and sets the cup very carefully on his desk, with only the faintest clink to mark its abandonment. ）
[ She has given countless kisses before — to distract, to obscure, to placate, to satisfy her own inward yearnings, to pass the time. Yet there may not be anything that is more memorable than the first she shares with anyone, when she is learning how they best fit together (or not), deciding whether they’re worth kissing again (or not), or counting the seconds until she can be finished. His hand settles across her throat with his thumb notched above her clavicle and she’s certain he’ll feel the flutter of her pulse beneath her fingers, slowed from the drink but beating strong.
She has no objection to steering this, to being experimental — to learning just what response she might earn if she gently nibbles at a lower lip, or teases teeth against an upper, changes sensation that make all the difference for her but here are done with the sole pursuit of seeing what he might do in counter to her.
The first signal she has, though, is the clink of his cup being set aside; she’s much less precise in how she discards hers, perhaps even nearly knocking it over in her effort to place it somewhere behind her, and then it’s that same hand that rises to cup his cheek, the kiss itself deepening as a consequence of her slight head tilt and the fact that he hasn’t pulled away. ]
（ she plies her teeth against him, and he permits it — his fingers tighten faintly in her hair — interest, not protest — at the tiny sunlit spark of something that does not approach actual pain but courts it gently when she bites at his bottom lip. he leans into the sensation, pushing back against her. the deepening kiss is tentative, someone speaking a foreign tongue for the very first time to one known to be a native — and his free hand falls against her knee as he does, fingers pressing bruises into her skin just there.
the cup being knocked askew and sloshing on his desk does give him faint pause — he is a fastidious person who despises little else so much as mess in his personal space — but manners override the instinctive urge to set her aside and fix it. very likely she would be offended to have commanded so little of his attention than that.
but he does break the kiss briefly, and turn to nip at her fingers where she had come to cradle his cheek. ）
You're cleaning that up, after.
（ it's a tease, faint and amused, and his eyes are a luminous red in the dark. ）
[ She never does anything by half-measures once she decides to do it, and she never does anything gently, either — evidenced by the way in which she takes his lip between her teeth, not with the intention of breaking skin or even so much as bruising, but offering more sensations than just the soft melding of mouths. Still, his grip settling against her leg prompts a slight hiss from her end when he clutches at her more firmly, bruises that no one else will likely be in a position to see before she heals them away.
He withdraws from her and for a moment it's unclear what's prompted him to do so — the teasing bite to her fingertips is a sign that the moment hasn't completely passed, but then she realizes, mouth splitting into a broader grin before her eyes narrow more playfully. ]
... make me.
[ And then she doesn't wait for a response before swerving into him — it's not careful but a collision, this time, as their mouths meet, as she rears up over him on her knees, her hair briefly tumbling down to shroud both of their faces. There's more aggression in it, because this is what she can pour herself into rather than thinking — and because she doesn't think he minds that from her, when all is said and done. ]
（ dangerous words to a man accustomed to making people do exactly what he wishes them to at any given moment. he learned how to manipulate and bend men bloodied and young, and in many ways it was what kept him alive long enough to die how he'd envisioned all those years ago. his fingers curl in against the curve of her shoulder, well-manicured nails digging into her skin briefly and then released.
(he's painted them, most recently, a dark navy blue. it's the first time he's strayed from the colour he wore in akatsuki.)
make me, she says, and he has to remind himself it's a game, not a gauntlet flung as she shifts her position and eclipses him. he has wondered how genjutsu would stack up alongside chaos, but he puts that thought from his mind as her hair tumbles around him.
want is strange, unusual and messy. he certainly wants her to clean his desk, but not half so much as he wants her to continue doing what she's doing, and for a moment he's caught between desire and the charming lack of knowledge that comes from inexperience. he has had the sharingan active around her before — every feature memorized and tucked away in the endless vault of perfect recall, but he finds himself reassessing her for the minutiae of microexpression. time hangs in a suspended moment like a viscous fluid as he charts her eyes like a map of constellations, and then he reaches up and pulls her down. it is and does not feel natural to him, though it is as easy and graceful as everything else he does. it's a learned gesture, picked up from someone else in a gambling hall when he was much younger — something copied and remembered and now perfectly mimicked. he was not blind to the uses of seduction, it was only that he never needed it when he could acquire the same information in other ways. but he had found value in having the knowledge, just in case.
he does not offer to move to a more comfortable location than the precarious balance on chairs. no doubt if she wants it, she will drive the shift. instead, he kisses her again, exploratory.
[ Rather than the tension in her chest, warring constant on her heart, she feels something almost akin to lightness at issuing that challenge — not that she suspects he’ll take her up on it, not when it will mean abandoning their present course solely for the sake of mopping up a few drops of stray liquor. They’ll likely be dried away on their own eventually, not that she makes mention of it when she’s practically being drawn down into his lap, briefly fighting with her skirts before she abandons the struggle in pursuit of simply sitting across his thighs instead.
And then, his bite makes her shiver — almost involuntary, the desire that runs along her spine to prompt a deep vibration that resonates from somewhere within until she realizes he’s earned a moan from her too, without her ability to stifle it first.
It must be the drink, she thinks — it’s gone to her head, left her less in control, and that means her first move should be to try and regain it by any means necessary, scrape and claw for what she always wants to possess.
She has more of a desire to be retaliatory, then, to provoke a similar response or something altogether new — and it drives her to be the one to break the kiss next for the purpose of letting her mouth trail along his jaw, over the curvature toward the side of his neck — light presses to start at his pulse point, where she breathes him in quietly, eyes still fallen shut. ] Tell me I won’t hurt you.
（ that moan does something to him the kisses had not — a stir of heat that makes him immediately tamp down on his own physiological reaction, misliking and mistrusting his body's own response at once. it is not shame, it is — accustomedness to control. involuntary response is not something to be tolerated, and he sucks in a sharp breath between his teeth.
he is almost glad for the distraction that follows.
again, the consideration. yennefer has always struck him as a hard woman, one who does not balk at causing discomfort or otherwise to get her way. someone who has had to make difficult choices in a difficult life. so the fact that she is asking him these questions, making these allowances is continually catching him off his guard. he would rather she not mind — that she dismiss all thoughts of his recent injury and simply treat him as she would any other in this dance.
there are precious few people he would even accept that level of attentiveness from without railing against it, tasting pity on his tongue. yennefer, it seems, is one of them.
he tips his head to one side, granting her unspoken access. one hand drops to steady her thighs, and there is a dizzying moment where he is not entirely certain how it came to be that she was sitting astride his own. then: ）
You'll find me rather difficult to hurt.
（ he isn't sure why he phrases it like that. it is not, at its core, a direct reassurance she can't, or won't. it's just a statement of truth. his tolerances, as it happens, are higher than most. hurt to him is something borne out in a fight. unless she plans to draw a blade and slip it beneath his skin he is quite reasonably assured that nothing she could do would cause him lasting, lingering pain. ）
[ The truth of it is that she'd posed the question solely as a last resort — or a chance, perhaps, to give him the opportunity to retreat if there is only so far that his interest in this extends — because once she really pursues this, there might be little that can distract her otherwise. The possibility that she's pursuing this because she doesn't want to embrace the alternative, merely sitting here in comfortable silence while the more invasive thoughts sneak back into her consciousness, is also something she internally dismisses so she doesn't need to dwell on it any longer.
So if she utters the words more breathlessly, more carefully than she intended to, it's far from her intention — she barely even opens her eyes when she speaks them, her gaze hovering somewhere in the vicinity of his mouth while she sways forward, tempted simply to kiss him again so they can dispense with the need for talking altogether —
With all of that stated, though, she finds that she's not opposed to doing things that would categorically hurt, or him touching her, gripping, digging a clutch of fingers into her body solely to trigger the synapses that register pain; she might want it, crave it a bit more than if he were simply to touch her too gently, reverently.
There is less hesitation from her, in the end, when she shifts atop his lap, and when she slips her hand underneath the hem of his shirt, palm and fingers pressing over slight muscle, and when she finally seizes his mouth with her own again, taking any sounds he might make as she presses against those healing areas, dulled and warm over yellowing bruises. ]
（ there is a faint exhalation of breath at the nearness and the touch, the electric warmth of her hand and the press of her mouth. he is not, strictly speaking, pliant. there is no yield to him — when and where she pushes, she will find he meets her like the parry of a blade.
there is no gentle reverence to be found. his only frame of reference for physical nearness has been sparring, and so his grip is not kindly, contusions patterned in the shape of his hand already pressed into her skin, halfly over her skirt and then higher, against the jut of one hip. the exploration is a slow and gradual thing, but presumably if she didn't wish to proceed she would do something about it, so he leaves unselfconscious shyness behind.
the kiss breaks for air, and he shifts attention to her throat, dragging his mouth across the place where a knife would open a vein. he can feel her pulse, the strong thrum of it as his free hand captures her hair in the tangle of his fingers. he tugs the bulk of it to the other shoulder, letting it spill between them unobstructed there like so much ink.
hickeys are a thing a little more difficult to copy outright, given the broken sightline — so here he is perhaps a little too much teeth and not enough tongue, deliberating the action as he goes.
he has no wish to talk, so he doesn't try. instead: Direct me. I will adapt. ）
[ He's not gentle about this, and she doesn't need him to be — doesn't want him to be. If anything, she'd rather it be rougher — these past few days have left her numbed to too much, and she wants the sort of thing that reawakens her and allows her to return to some semblance of her previous self, the version that wouldn't be so foolish as to let anyone too near to what she's fought to keep enclosed.
It certainly leaves her gasping, though not in protest, as his hands grip down against her, clutching, grasping, but in want, and she'll respond in kind, then, her fingers shifting up from their place spanned across his back to establish their own clench on his hair, urging him against the column of her throat as he moves his attentions there. The proof that she can still feel as much is evidenced in how she shifts over him — restless, but also seeking, dropping her weight in a manner that would allow for something else were there much fewer layers between them.
She does hiss, though, through gritted teeth, as his catch on her skin, bluntly biting and sure to leave a bruise; she has enough chaos within her on the station to heal even the smallest marks of this nature, but perhaps she won't. She could press her fingers into it later, let the reminder awaken her all over again, but for now she tilts her head back into the tugging slide of his fingers as his words form across her mind. Her own are there, shortly after, and she brings a hand to her own bodice, nearly breaking buttons in her haste to start undoing it. Keep going. Lower. ]
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（ he is long removed and far away from the boy (the child) who could be strong-armed into anything against his will. he wants to be up, to be moving, so he is. there is a cool steel laid beneath his tone like damascus, but it's barely even a rebuff. just a warning.
the sword is removed from the desk and returned to its sheath, and then hung unceremoniously from the hooks set into his bedroom wall. on turning, he hikes up his shirt. perhaps it's a bold demonstration, born more out of his annoyance at being fussed at or over (she's not the first to have come to his door, simply the first to be given entry) than anything else, but it reveals that the worst of the clawmarks are fading to the tender pink of new scar tissue against his lean left flank. mccoy's medical regenerators and his own medical ninjutsu at work. even the bruises blooming across broken ribs has faded to the sickly off-yellow of an injury many weeks older than the few days they've had since their return to the station. the internal injuries will take longer by their complexity — but he estimates another week before he's able to resume his customary regimen without issue.
he takes the cup as he sits, giving her an acknowledging nod. then, softer: ）
Thank you for returning my sword. It is （ there is a twist in his expression. a product of his solitude — his mastery over his microexpressions is somewhat lessened. ） important to me.
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In the wake of him drawing his shirt up, she examines the marks as calmly as she would anything else — fresh and pinkened scar tissue, yellowing bruises — and has the sudden thought of pressing her own hand to the exposure of his side, only to feel the remnants of injury beneath her touch, the warmth of skin, the rise and fall of his side with every breath — but the healing wounds disappear from her sight and the instinct goes with it, as she elects to take a measured sip of her own cup’s contents with a grimacing expression. It’s something left over from when Billy had shared her room, and there’d often been no accounting for taste with the bottles he’d stashed around the space. ]
Most blades bear some sort of significance to those who wield them.
[ She breathes out a sigh upon dropping down to sit beside him, legs stretched out before her, and shifts her cup to balance it between most of her fingertips. ] I’d suspected you would be somewhat put out to lose yours.
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Mm. For most shinobi, a blade is simply a tool. Tools can be broken, discarded, taken... it is very rare that one treats a single weapon as significant. Truthfully, I once left this one to rust.
（ he had not cleaned it. it was wet and slick with the blood of his kinsmen when he drove it into the shade of an ancient tree, tears blurring his eyes so badly he could barely see but for the sharingan. it was bare months ago, that he asked viveca to retrieve it for him. he had not intimated and she had not asked — but he is glad that she retrieved it from the ground, and not an earlier canonpoint where it was pristine and hale. the blood it has been glutted on, the bones it has stuttered against... he may have cleaned it, sharpened it, ground away the chips and the rust, but it is still the sword he used that awful night, and he is still the man that raised it. ）
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There's a line she can't quite think of about beggars, but she doesn't try to reach for it, to remember it, not when her gaze unconsciously roams across the space to make note of Itachi's expression as he follows her sip with his own. ]
Yet it came to mean something to you. While you were without it?
[ She isn't asking for the entire story behind it, necessarily, not unless he chooses to share it with her of his own volition — but there are some details she can intuit, from what he's already admitted to. The next drink goes down more smoothly for her — or at least she doesn't make nearly as much of a face afterward, more contemplative in how she briefly swipes a lick between lips in the interim between her question and his answer. ]
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No. I apologize if my statement was misleading. The blade is called 'Murakumo'. It means 'Gathering Clouds' in my native tongue. It was given to me by my father when I entered ANBU, that is the Special Assassination and Tactical Squad, black ops division in the shinobi force of my village.
（ they have known each other now nearly a year, and he has not spoken much on these matters. yennefer, he thinks, will understand the gravity of alighting on it now. ）
I left it behind when I became a missing-nin — a criminal and terrorist to my nation.
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Did you choose to?
[ Leave the sword, pursue that path, any of it — or was it a role that he adopted for reasons that are not quite so simple? Decisions can be easily judged on the surface, but he has never given her the impression of being that straightforward and she has no intention of believing that to have changed in any part of his past.
What's more is that she finds herself asking because she wants to understand, not because she wants to have the information to hold over him — telling in and of itself, after all this time. ]
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You may need to ply me with more liquor before I will be of a mind to discuss that, Yennefer.
（ it's not a no. but the conversation is still so damningly fresh after what occurred with mccoy on the banks of that river in alydhion, scraped raw like a wound and worse by far than the one mending along his side. there is very little in him that wishes to revisit it again so soon — in part because the recognition that every time he is forced to confront the fact that, as blue had put it a year ago, it was not only your hands is almost more unpleasant than his memory of the act itself.
his fingers twitch on the cup, and he is so terribly cognizant of the absence of his ring that he transfers the cup to his left hand, and drops the right away. then, without preamble he tosses back the rest of the cup's contents, and holds it out wordless for another. ）
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The whole point of liquor is that it leaves you little mind to do anything at all, Itachi.
[ This, she says with more intended humor, trying to draw them away from subjects that may be too painful to address, like wounds that could reopen anew — especially when he is nursing fresher ones in another sense — and she briefly inclines herself into his space before retreating, collecting the bottle and pouring more into his cup before her own. ]
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itachi had watched that dance more than once, and excused himself to retire alone more than once in their brief years of partnership. but he wonders now if that had been a distraction like the liquor, meant to offer solace from the horrors of shinobi life if only briefly.
she smells like lilac, a sharp underpinning of sweetness that lingers long after she moves away. ）
Is that your aim, then? Having little enough mind to do anything?
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Tonight, yes.
[ As for what future days might hold, she isn't even letting them remain in her awareness — she simply pauses to regard him, tilted in that study for a moment longer than would be considered necessary, the spill of her unbound hair almost reaching the backs of her hands with their maintained clutch on her cup. ]
Do I need to drink more for that? [ Her gaze still hasn't slid away — there might be an unspoken question in it, one that sits alongside the one she reaches for instead, the one less likely to expose further vulnerabilities — but she draws in a short breath as if she's fighting the battle to keep guarding herself and losing somewhat. ]
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he only has to accept it.
and perhaps it would not be so terrible a thing for both of them to indulge in. she is beautiful and clever and sharp, and if she minded he were a criminal or a killer she surely would have excused herself by now. swords with whisper-keen edges and well-worn tsuka have only one purpose, after all, and she returned his to him unquestioning.
his own perpetually self-directed revulsion, his long-standing difficulty in accepting kindness or camaraderie or affection has always been an obstacle to his pursuit of any sort of meaningful physical relationship with others. but yennefer, he thinks, will not expect anlything he cannot offer. she is too like him. she is too different from him.
his right hand lifts, and follows the line of her left collarbone — not touching her, but close — and he pushes her hair aside like a curtain, neatly tucking it back over her shoulder. there's a curious intimacy to the gesture alone, a permissive echo of the way she had leaned so easily into his space bare minutes before.
but it is an answer. ）
I suppose that depends on where your tolerances lay.
（ he would hardly begrudge her needing to layer indulgence over the act. he is not an easy man to touch. ）
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That, and she finds that if she gives herself something else to pursue, she won’t fall prey to thinking about the absences in question, and one less hour spent dwelling on those faces is better than wallowing.
She doesn’t move at first — careful, as he does, to let his touch slip beneath the curtain of her hair and lift it back to expose the curve of her shoulder — but when she inclines herself forward, it has the consequence of driving his hand further into the strands, closer to the nape of her neck, and her breath hitches as she stops just shy of bringing their mouths together.
There’s not enough liquor heating her blood to make her overly reckless, but an amount sufficient to obscure the part of her judgment that would prompt her to think twice about this — not because it’s him, but because it’s her. Yet she doesn’t want to wake up and not have any memories attached to it, either, taste little but the bitter pang of regret. ]
Where are yours? [ She may as well be kissing him with how close she’s drawn herself in, gaze heavy-lidded and voice hushed. ]
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for love, and the awful mark loss has left on him.
the surprise is brief, a lift of his brows there and gone like a late spring frost, and then his fingers curl in her hair, so similar a colour to his own that the way the strands are woven through his fingers almost sparks a sense of déjà vu from the times he has used a clone to cut his. it makes it easier, in a way, and there is no hesitance when he rests the edge of his palm against her shoulder. his touch is light and careful against the column of her throat, and then it skirts upwards to her jaw. she is so close their breath mingles as he draws his own to speak, but perhaps he is still just shy enough he does not make the first obvious move. ）
You could do nothing to touch them.
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She rarely does anything with hesitancy anymore — including this, what could never be described as a surge forward when they’re already inclining in each other’s direction but pressing her mouth to his, undeniably, just the same.
It is achingly slow, and unhurried, as if she wants to give him opportunity to respond before introducing the potential for deeper. Her eyes fall shut regardless, lashes fluttering against her cheeks; the drink tastes less offensive on his lips, weakened by heat, and every other thought begins to dissolve from her awareness. ]
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(he had known it would be like that.)
(he had not known it would be like that.)
it was awful, how easy it was.
as firsts go, this is wholly the opposite. there is no sense of wrongness that crashes into his awareness and presses him down like gravity. the only thing he is hyperaware of is the heat of her body and the soft fall of her hair, and the way his thumb has somehow come to rest against the suprasternal notch of her throat, fingers fanned out against the crook of her neck.
he is unpracticed — but not clumsy. his mouth against hers is careful and deliberate, responsive the way one is when they are accustomed to paying mind to the language of someone's body and being unafraid to act in response. he lets her lead, but not passively — when she draws back like a dance, he shifts forward to follow.
his other hand reaches out and sets the cup very carefully on his desk, with only the faintest clink to mark its abandonment. ）
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She has no objection to steering this, to being experimental — to learning just what response she might earn if she gently nibbles at a lower lip, or teases teeth against an upper, changes sensation that make all the difference for her but here are done with the sole pursuit of seeing what he might do in counter to her.
The first signal she has, though, is the clink of his cup being set aside; she’s much less precise in how she discards hers, perhaps even nearly knocking it over in her effort to place it somewhere behind her, and then it’s that same hand that rises to cup his cheek, the kiss itself deepening as a consequence of her slight head tilt and the fact that he hasn’t pulled away. ]
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the cup being knocked askew and sloshing on his desk does give him faint pause — he is a fastidious person who despises little else so much as mess in his personal space — but manners override the instinctive urge to set her aside and fix it. very likely she would be offended to have commanded so little of his attention than that.
but he does break the kiss briefly, and turn to nip at her fingers where she had come to cradle his cheek. ）
You're cleaning that up, after.
（ it's a tease, faint and amused, and his eyes are a luminous red in the dark. ）
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He withdraws from her and for a moment it's unclear what's prompted him to do so — the teasing bite to her fingertips is a sign that the moment hasn't completely passed, but then she realizes, mouth splitting into a broader grin before her eyes narrow more playfully. ]
... make me.
[ And then she doesn't wait for a response before swerving into him — it's not careful but a collision, this time, as their mouths meet, as she rears up over him on her knees, her hair briefly tumbling down to shroud both of their faces. There's more aggression in it, because this is what she can pour herself into rather than thinking — and because she doesn't think he minds that from her, when all is said and done. ]
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(he's painted them, most recently, a dark navy blue. it's the first time he's strayed from the colour he wore in akatsuki.)
make me, she says, and he has to remind himself it's a game, not a gauntlet flung as she shifts her position and eclipses him. he has wondered how genjutsu would stack up alongside chaos, but he puts that thought from his mind as her hair tumbles around him.
want is strange, unusual and messy. he certainly wants her to clean his desk, but not half so much as he wants her to continue doing what she's doing, and for a moment he's caught between desire and the charming lack of knowledge that comes from inexperience. he has had the sharingan active around her before — every feature memorized and tucked away in the endless vault of perfect recall, but he finds himself reassessing her for the minutiae of microexpression. time hangs in a suspended moment like a viscous fluid as he charts her eyes like a map of constellations, and then he reaches up and pulls her down. it is and does not feel natural to him, though it is as easy and graceful as everything else he does. it's a learned gesture, picked up from someone else in a gambling hall when he was much younger — something copied and remembered and now perfectly mimicked. he was not blind to the uses of seduction, it was only that he never needed it when he could acquire the same information in other ways. but he had found value in having the knowledge, just in case.
he does not offer to move to a more comfortable location than the precarious balance on chairs. no doubt if she wants it, she will drive the shift. instead, he kisses her again, exploratory.
this time, he's the one to bite. ）
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And then, his bite makes her shiver — almost involuntary, the desire that runs along her spine to prompt a deep vibration that resonates from somewhere within until she realizes he’s earned a moan from her too, without her ability to stifle it first.
It must be the drink, she thinks — it’s gone to her head, left her less in control, and that means her first move should be to try and regain it by any means necessary, scrape and claw for what she always wants to possess.
She has more of a desire to be retaliatory, then, to provoke a similar response or something altogether new — and it drives her to be the one to break the kiss next for the purpose of letting her mouth trail along his jaw, over the curvature toward the side of his neck — light presses to start at his pulse point, where she breathes him in quietly, eyes still fallen shut. ] Tell me I won’t hurt you.
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he is almost glad for the distraction that follows.
again, the consideration. yennefer has always struck him as a hard woman, one who does not balk at causing discomfort or otherwise to get her way. someone who has had to make difficult choices in a difficult life. so the fact that she is asking him these questions, making these allowances is continually catching him off his guard. he would rather she not mind — that she dismiss all thoughts of his recent injury and simply treat him as she would any other in this dance.
there are precious few people he would even accept that level of attentiveness from without railing against it, tasting pity on his tongue. yennefer, it seems, is one of them.
he tips his head to one side, granting her unspoken access. one hand drops to steady her thighs, and there is a dizzying moment where he is not entirely certain how it came to be that she was sitting astride his own. then: ）
You'll find me rather difficult to hurt.
（ he isn't sure why he phrases it like that. it is not, at its core, a direct reassurance she can't, or won't. it's just a statement of truth. his tolerances, as it happens, are higher than most. hurt to him is something borne out in a fight. unless she plans to draw a blade and slip it beneath his skin he is quite reasonably assured that nothing she could do would cause him lasting, lingering pain. ）
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So if she utters the words more breathlessly, more carefully than she intended to, it's far from her intention — she barely even opens her eyes when she speaks them, her gaze hovering somewhere in the vicinity of his mouth while she sways forward, tempted simply to kiss him again so they can dispense with the need for talking altogether —
With all of that stated, though, she finds that she's not opposed to doing things that would categorically hurt, or him touching her, gripping, digging a clutch of fingers into her body solely to trigger the synapses that register pain; she might want it, crave it a bit more than if he were simply to touch her too gently, reverently.
There is less hesitation from her, in the end, when she shifts atop his lap, and when she slips her hand underneath the hem of his shirt, palm and fingers pressing over slight muscle, and when she finally seizes his mouth with her own again, taking any sounds he might make as she presses against those healing areas, dulled and warm over yellowing bruises. ]
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there is no gentle reverence to be found. his only frame of reference for physical nearness has been sparring, and so his grip is not kindly, contusions patterned in the shape of his hand already pressed into her skin, halfly over her skirt and then higher, against the jut of one hip. the exploration is a slow and gradual thing, but presumably if she didn't wish to proceed she would do something about it, so he leaves unselfconscious shyness behind.
the kiss breaks for air, and he shifts attention to her throat, dragging his mouth across the place where a knife would open a vein. he can feel her pulse, the strong thrum of it as his free hand captures her hair in the tangle of his fingers. he tugs the bulk of it to the other shoulder, letting it spill between them unobstructed there like so much ink.
hickeys are a thing a little more difficult to copy outright, given the broken sightline — so here he is perhaps a little too much teeth and not enough tongue, deliberating the action as he goes.
he has no wish to talk, so he doesn't try. instead: Direct me. I will adapt. ）
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It certainly leaves her gasping, though not in protest, as his hands grip down against her, clutching, grasping, but in want, and she'll respond in kind, then, her fingers shifting up from their place spanned across his back to establish their own clench on his hair, urging him against the column of her throat as he moves his attentions there. The proof that she can still feel as much is evidenced in how she shifts over him — restless, but also seeking, dropping her weight in a manner that would allow for something else were there much fewer layers between them.
She does hiss, though, through gritted teeth, as his catch on her skin, bluntly biting and sure to leave a bruise; she has enough chaos within her on the station to heal even the smallest marks of this nature, but perhaps she won't. She could press her fingers into it later, let the reminder awaken her all over again, but for now she tilts her head back into the tugging slide of his fingers as his words form across her mind. Her own are there, shortly after, and she brings a hand to her own bodice, nearly breaking buttons in her haste to start undoing it. Keep going. Lower. ]