Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Maybe it’s nerves… maybe it’s because you haven’t felt the same way about sex since becoming a sex worker, it just changed for you. Nothing good or bad, just different. You’ve always wondered if musicians feel differently about music. Sometimes it’s in you, sometimes you are briming with it, other days you have pull out of yourself from deep within. Pulling your energy form the deepest reserves. Maybe if you knew musicians, you’d ask.

Some clients leave you cold and you’d have to play pretend to make it. Others are fine, company often pleasant, an adequate way to make money.

Something about her, though, she makes you warm, coming up from your core. Something simmering in you. It’s probably just attraction, but you don’t really bother with that as much anymore, either.

You went out with the evening showing as usual: a tradition at the Gardens where the available workers will mill about while clients can stream in, striking up conversations or picking out someone for the evening. You’ve been working at there for a few weeks now, not the profession you trained in but gives you enough to send back to your family since the clinic you had traveled to Piltover to run was shut down. Well, shut down is a generous word, it was burned to the ground.

You had been playing cards with two fellow workers - Blue and Casper - chatting up a well-dressed Piltovenian in a dark mask covered in feathers, when Babette glides over and taps you on your shoulder, “You’ve been requested.”

You throw a winning smile at your companions and rise to follow her into the hallway, downing your drink along the way to the end of the hall. You wait to be pull into one of the smaller rooms, but Babette brings you to the Blue Room at the end and pauses.

“Big ticket honey.” She reaches up and fixes your dress over your hips as she smiles up at you. “Go get ‘em.” You’ve never had a client in the big room. You know this means something, someone important or rich, or both.

She pushes you towards the door and you take a steadying breath. All the rooms have wooden doors to help keep the sounds in, peep holes for Miguel to check on all of you, and the walls are dressed in lavish, heavy curtains. After your first few weeks you’ve realized how handy these curtains can be. You like to slip in and take a moment to observe your client before you start.

The figure standing in the middle of the room cuts an intimidating form. Broad shoulders, trim waist, well what you can see through the dark red poncho they are wearing, and a crop of dark hair. Their back faces you as you move from behind the drapery.

“Good evening,” you greet them, trying to keep you voice level. There is a trill of nerves you get, you’ve only been in the business for a few weeks, and it still gets the best of you.

She turns, and oh my… you are struck for a moment. Her profile is beautiful, something you might have seen etched in a marble garden back in Demacia. Her eyes are clear and calculating and you feel a bit like a pined animal – like something caught in a snare. You’ve become very good at this job very quickly. Reading people is a skill you’ve inherited but also learned. Within a few moments you usually can pinpoint what a client wants.

She is controlled power: strong, lethal, smart, deliberate. Something soft around the edges, but that for later, for after. She strikes you as the kind of person who would want to fuck you into high heaven then want to snuggle into you after, stroking fingers down your sides in the afterglow.

At least that is your first impression.

You move closer it strikes you maybe you should offer some sort of greeting. It’s customary, where you are from in Demacia, to clasp hands, but that feels too formal. She looks like a trader or undercity businessowner. Someone no nonsense, all business, getting through the day with an evening visit to the neighborhood brothel is an easy and convenient way to blow of steam.

Your breath must catch in your throat, her eyes lift to yours and you are stunned for a moment. What color are her eyes? Grey or the color of decorative glass?

“Evening.” She greets you.

You offer your name to her and gives her in return.

Sevika.

And… shit... you’ve only ever heard her name, never met her in person. Silco’s notorious right-hand women. You remember what she is famous for; her fierceness and how lethal you’ve heard her to be. You can’t help your eyes darting to her shoulder draped in red cloth. The rustling nerves inside of you - trapped butterflies rattling around in your ribcage – stealing your breath.

Liquor, always a good way to get things started. You move over to the sideboard.

“Would you like a drink?” You gesture to the glasses and bottle next to you. Moving towards you, Sevika takes the glass and smoothly slips the stopper out, pouring the amber liquid out into two glasses.

“That’s supposed to be my job.” You remark as Sevika hands a drink to you.

She smirks at you and leans a little closer. She smells quite pleasant; you aren’t expecting it. Something dark and smokey, probably actual smoke, but something else too, something almost sweet and warm. Why are you thinking about this right now? You are alone with one of deadliest people in Zaun and you are thinking about how good she smells?

She raises her glass to you. “I though your job was doing whatever I want.”

You are aware of all your skin as, suddenly, it all feels too tight and too small. “True.” You clink your glass to hers downing your drink in one gulp. Hopefully this will help calm you.

This hasn’t happened before. Is this because she is the most important client you’ve had? You try to smile ruefully over the glass at her. Still, she smells good, a part of your brain provides, and you shove it down violently.

She downs her glass and twirls the crystal slightly in between her fingers. You have a moment to consider that you and the glass are the same her; pretty, sparkly, and in her control.

Your nerves get the better of you and you can’t help the question that flies out of your mouth.

“What do you want?” You ask, setting the glass down on the sideboard by your hip and try to get your head back on straight, tossing your hair over your shoulder as Blue told you would be an alluring way. You can tell she won’t like a big show or nothing to sweet or cloying.

She is regarding you with a look that you can’t quite place and then she is moving, sliding into your space, using her body to push towards you.

A glass clatters to the ground and your eyes lock on her face. You feel your back in hit the wall and she is pinning you there with her left hand on your waist and right hand flat against the top of your chest, just above where your breath starts heaving in and out you. Her fingers spread out, warming the bare skin she finds there with the warmth of her palm.

She leans into you, and you can feel the heat radiating off the rest of her. She is hot as the trenches and its burning through the thin material of your dress. The shiver that rocks over you doesn’t go unnoticed.

An easy grin spreads over her face, her breath leaving in a huff, fanning over your cheek and you barely have a moment to think, oh yes, I am prey, before she kisses you.

It’s a good kiss, just the way you thought she would: sweeping in, stealing your breath, personal space, peace of mind in one fell swoop.

Her hand on your chest slides up, firmly grasping at base of your neck to then slide into the hair at the nape as her thumb strokes lazily around, dragging from your clavicle to side of your throat, pressing in and stalling your breath.

You can’t help your reaction, one hand coming up to the crook of her elbow, grasping at the material over her bicep. The other clutching at her hand on your waist, your fingers sliding on the cool metal. A weapon for hire, trained killer, along with other names and accusations you’ve heard about her all register with a distant part of your head, but the slurpy softness of arousal is starting to coat your brain.

She slides the hand at your waist up to your ribs and just under your breasts, holding against the bodice of your dress, seemingly to catch the source of your labored breaths. You are starting to ache, centering on your apex of your legs. Your face feels hot, and your skin is crawling nicely, nerves skittering with desire, causing your arms and legs to tremble.

Her mouth is still on yours; she makes a pleased sound as she slides her warm palm down your body, pulling at the neckline of your dress, teasing the skin there, gliding over your breast, stopping to tease your nipple through the material. A helpless moan tears from you as she breaks the kiss and moves down to the skin of your neck, her mouth open and breathing you in.

You take a few heaving breaths, and you can feel the sharp fingers of her other hand clutch at the skin over your ribs.

“Can I touch you?” You ask, well, plea. You can’t help it.

She scrapes her teeth over the tendons on your neck. “Not more then you already are.”

God, but you want too. She will feel amazing under your hands. A disappointed whine draws out of you, and you feel her smile against the thin skin of your neck.

She rewards you with another malicious twist of your nipple and then her hand is drawing down further, over your stomach, down to the curve of your hip, waylaying her downward path to trace over its fullness. Sliding down the fullest part of your thigh and pulling her head back from its ministrations against you neck, smiling down at you. You understand that she wants to watch what she is doing to you. Control, but more, she likes to know she can elicit a reaction.

She traces around the full arch of your thigh, almost brushing at the apex of your legs, but she slips down, moving to trace the inseam of your legs, leaning in, she grabs at the length of your skirt and draws it up to your waist.

All the while her eyes never leave your face.

“Hold it.” She commands and the hand that was hanging limply at your side is lightening quick to answer her order.

You remind yourself you are good at reading people. She might be better than you.

That easy smile is back as she brushes over the fine skin at the top of your thighs, the skin right near where you are neediest, where you are sure you are wet though your undergarments, where you are pulsing and dying to be touched. You shiver and shake, earning a soft laugh from her which you can feel when her chest brushes against yours.

Her hand moves between your legs, barely brushes over you and moan in response. Your eyes sliding closed, and she shoves your underwear aside and slides two deft fingers against your wetness, from your clit to where are open and wanting - and doesn’t stop - sliding her fingers into you until the knuckle.

The last part of your rational brain realizes she teasing out the edges of your control, figuring out what it takes to make you break.

And that’s the last thing your rational brain provides, all you have is the melt that comes with pleasure.

Her thumb on your clit, she pumps two fingers deeper and deeper into you. You rock helplessly against her, holding your skirt up and out of her way with one hand the other still grasping the fine machinery of her wrist. She is leaning into you, her forehead resting on yours. You don’t move to kiss her, you’ve figured out she wants to be in control, completely, of whatever  happens between you.

She must tell you are growing close, gods, so damn quickly. You are sweating in your clothes, your thighs trembling with effort to keep still and upright, your voice coming in desperate, mewling whines, and you want it so badly that you are dizzy with it.

And suddenly your orgasm draws up, almost furious with its intent, stealing your breath and rattling your bones. You feel a huff of her breath across your cheek as you tremble around her fingers, your thighs clenching around her hand, begging, and whining nonsense as you spin out of control.

You come back to yourself just in time for her to dip her head and kiss the breath out of your lungs again, you can feel yourself dripping down her fingers as she eases them out of you. Wiping them on your thigh as she does.

You are still panting as she draws back slightly, making sure to catch your eyes as she slides her fingers into your mouth. You accept them, sucking the remainder of your arousal from her. The flicker of a look, almost pain, crosses her face and just as quickly she draws her fingers out and kisses your fiercely, her tongue sweeping in to chase the taste. She seems content to kiss you for a few moments, pressing her body against you. Her hardness into your softness. Her hand ends up tangled in your hair and you are just becoming aware of the barely there rocking of her hips into yours and to soon, she draws back again.

Her smile is small, but curls long her lips, like you are a sip of fine wine, or she just had a winning hand of cards, something delicious yet victorious. Running her palm up along the curve of your neck to the side of your face, her thumb brushes your cheek.

“Good girl.” Are the words she rewards you with.

Your knees knock together and your hands come to your sides, trying to hold yourself up as she steps away, leaving you trembling against the wall.

Giving you one last glance, her smile deepens to a smirk. Picking up the glass half full and downing the last bit of liquor, turns, parts the curtains, and leaves.

You slide down the wall, puddling into the fine silk curtains.

You know all things end.

In hindsight, looking back on this moment, you should have known this was going to end badly.

You slip into the softness of Babette’s pink office, neat and tidy as the business she runs. Babette herself is sitting behind her ordinate desk, scribbling in her ledger book. A stack of coins and credit slips arranged neatly next to her.

“Hello, my dear, how are you fairing?” Her smile is warm as the ember glow that flickers from the lighting fixtures.

“Just fine.” Try to match her smile in kind. You are both practiced- both professionals- schooled at making others feel at ease, pull secrets out of them, making others feel valuable and valued. Perching one of the sofas you angle yourself to lay comfortably and roll out your sore muscles.

“You starting to make a name for yourself. You’ve even had two requests for regular appointments.” She shares marking up the appointment book as well. “A monied gentlemen, the old man, he is quite taken with you.”

You hum in agreement under your breath and roll your neck back.

“And Sevika.” You stop as your eyes snap open and slide over to Babette and she pays you no mind. A regular. Sevika is now your regular.

“Do you care what times I give them?” Babette askes thoughtfully as she brushes past pages in the appointment book.

“Oh no, not at all.”

You have a moment where you think you can smell her still, Sevika. On your skin maybe? The burnt sugar smell mixed with worn leather, faint trace of cigar smoke.

You lose yourself for a few moments taking in the objects in the room. A few flashy oddities, one nice painting, several bird-shaped masks, a set of crystal glasses and a decanter.

“She asked to keep tabs on you.” You blink out of your focus and peer over at Babette as she pushes on. “She asked Dot to let her know if anything happened to you. I let her agree, didn’t think you mind. She offered her some good coin for it.”

“Is that going to be a problem?” You ask, lounging back on the overly tufted couch.

Babette raises her face from her account book with a curious expression on her face, quickly sliding into casual look. “I am not that well equated with her,” pausing, “It wasn't … possessive.” pauses again. With a slight tilt to her head, she continues, “Seemed protective.”

“In my experience that’s always how it starts. Usually ends up turning into the other.”

Babette’s smile is rueful as she starts to count your take.

Chapter Text

“Hands.” She orders and fuck, your pussy throbs at the sound. You rake your hands down her body and place them back on her knees.

You’ve only seen her a few times, but you can tell she must have had a bad day (or week) because she is in a mood. Rough from the start, she walked in with a small case, pulling out an impressive looking strap on with a sleek leather harness and a formidable silicone dildo in a swirl of dark colors.

“I’m fucking you with this.” She tells you, pulling it out and placing it on the low table in the center of the room.

“You’re fucking me? What a treat.” You know she likes when you are a smart ass. You’ve figured that out over the last few visits. Specifically, she likes when you are brat to her, testing, trying to call her on her bluff.  But she wins, always does. The she rewards the both of you while she fucks it out of you.

You’d like it either way, the fact that she is paying you is a bonus and just because you enjoy it doesn’t mean anything. It makes her appointments enjoyable, rather than just something to grin and bear.

She hasn’t let you touch her much in return, you wonder if this will be the day that she does.

So, this is how you ended up in this position, in the middle of the blue room. She is only half undressed, her shirt and vest pushed to the side, her pants barely shoved down and the strap positioned on her full hips. You are perched on her lap, with the thick width buried so deep within you. And you just fucking take it.

You squirm backwards, her hand in your hair tugging sharply, forcing your back to arch at a truly obscene angle. You can’t help the noises you are making now as you fuck your hips downwards. You are desperate for something, anything. You hear her chuckle, that dark, rich sound that washes over you as you try to blink your eyes open, or maybe your eyelids are just flittering? Your vision is blurry and swimming either way.

You feel her lips along your neck, a smile as she drags her lipstick over your skin, and the lipstick- you get it now- the lipstick is her way of marking you that can just as easily be washed away. But while she is here with you, she can stain you. The deep berry red washed over your neck, dotted along your throat, smeared around your nipples and sucked into the skin of your sternum.

You are writhing now, fucking yourself down onto the strap, frantic for anything. You thought you had been pleading before, no, you are well past that now. You are torn between whining and screaming- so strung out and well past the edges of your control. Your pussy keeps clenching down onto the strap inside of you, but nothing will get you off except for something on your clit. God, just even a brush of her fingers will get you going. Your so close…. So fucking close…

Shaking, begging mess and you might be saying all of this out loud and you aren’t even sure. You blink your eyes open again and your vision swims. You need to take a breath, your brain supplies. You try to drag one out.

“Please,” you whine out, buried in the back of your throat, and you feel the teeth on your neck as she catches herself. Grazing, not biting, just holding your skin in between her teeth you can’t stop yourself now. “Please…. let me come, please…” You rut down harder as her hand tightens in your hair. You feel the laugh against your skin more then you hear it.

“Keep begging.” She commands as she yanks your head back even further, one hand tightening in your hair and the other, sliding down warm the curve of your spine, tucking your hips towards hers.

“Please...please, please let me come, gods, fuck…. please” comes wedeling out of you, on a broken wine that tapers off into babbling. Gods, you are a mess. It’s the edge, right up to it. Your chest is heaving, and your hips are bouncing wildly and you just can’t...

“Sevika… please.” And that must do it, her name scraping out of your mouth. Earning her approval, you feel her shift, her arm wrapped on your hip slides down, pressing a deft hand against your throbbing clit and yes, oh, yes, that is….

Sparkling electricity, sweet tension, fresh air, white out.

Afterwards when you are cleaning her toy you ask, “Feeling better?”

She pauses while she rolls a cigar for later- smirking over her shoulder- you get a small laugh of out of her. You are inordinately proud of it.

One of your other regular’s is a sweet man. An older Piltover gentlemen, named Geoffroy, that prefers to sit with you and read. Towards the end of his time, he will want to touch you, fondling your body and usually asks for you to finish him with your hands. Over the weeks you gather that his wife has recently died and he craves company. Why pay more for company, you wonder to yourself. Maybe he doesn’t trust those around him to give it freely.

“I saw you reading the first time I came in. I believe you thought you had tucked yourself away, but I saw you behind a curtain, reading a book.” He tells you one visit.

He always greats you when he arrives, tips generously, calls you by your name, and often brings you a new book.

It’s feels safe, oddly. You know you aren’t more or less safe with him, but it’s calm and quiet as you sit together, sipping on the tea Dot sets out for you.

You are always so good about sending money back to your family. You barely spend on yourself except for the odd book or record. So once and a while you allow yourself to unwind.

There are a several places to go in the Lanes to drown in drink, shimmer, music, or another warm body, but the other workers have a favorite spot they frequent to drum up business or unwind. You’ve only been a few times before.

You dress down, dark colors, hood over your head, trying not to catch anyone’s eyes. You just want to go and drink, loose yourself in something else.

You know the bartender and their eyes crinkle with a smile when they spot you.  A glass is poured and the bottle left. Perfect. You do appreciate how people in the business look out for each other.

You are enjoying the people watching, tucked against a pillar of the bar. You can see others putting on their shows and indulge while your consciences swims. Some trying to seduce and succeeding- others not. Friends sharing laughs, others sharing grief. It makes you miss-- just what you are already too bleary to pinpoint.

Maybe it’s your siblings. Your elder brother was your partner in mischief, always in on the joke with you. You both got that from your mother… her last letter made you miss her more than most. Your family, all the little ones must growing like weeds…

You steal yourself, it’s not the reason you came out tonight. You will return with enough money for you all. You slosh another drink for yourself and bury the thought. You are making money now hand over fist. Much more than what you had been promised to come and work for the healing clinic in Piltover. You nieces and nephews will never know the hunger you and your siblings endured. You will return, and with you will have the life you’d worked for.

Your ministrations are broken by the hind-brain intuition you’re being watched. You break your single-minded focus on the bottle to your side and scan your soundings.

Your vision is a little blurry, but it focuses in on her.

Damn.

A small part of you hates how Sevika always steals your breath. Maybe is the liquor, or the too loud music, or but you are bad at pretending - she is a person you’d always want, and you do want her.

She nods her head in greeting and you raise you glass to her. A wry smile rolls over her full mouth and gods, just….

Sevika moves around the bar to you. Sliding into the stool next to you you motion to have the bartender bring her a glass.

“Evening.” She offers in greeting and you are just irrational now, you hate you can’t separate anything anymore.

“I think I am supposed to say something about what is a woman like you doing in place like this?” You remark as you finish the pour you’ve made for yourself.

You get a genuine laugh out of her, and it warms your blood and with it you threaten to pool all over the floor.

Falling into easy conversation with her should feel unusual, but it doesn’t. You trade stories. She gets you laughing with a story about a trader who tried to renege on a deal, and you make her smile about a fancy Piltover women who had no idea what to do with herself, alone with a whore, she had paid money for.

The easiness of the conversation fills you up with a feeling of floating satisfaction, given the circumstances, bubbling up under the fuzzing static of how much you’ve had to drink.

“I can leave you alone to drum up business.” She eventually says, sliding the last drink over to you, the once full bottle empty at her elbow.

“I could say the same for you.” You pause taking what was offered. “Wait, you think I’d be drinking here, dressed like this if I was trying to drum up business?” You laugh at her over the shot glass.

She shrugs and downs hers, her eyes raking over your body. “It would work for me.”

You laugh leaning on the edge of the bar, leaning in her space and you are thrilled by the small smile on her face. “You know I am sure thing, right? I mean you have an standing appointment with me.”

Her smile in the light of the club (and filtered through your liquor-soaked mind) could almost be sheepish. Which is ironic, since she is closest thing to a wolf you’ve seen since leaving the woods you grew up playing in.

The world rewrites for moment. What if you had just met her like this? What if she had just come up to you with a drink in a busy club, like anyone else?

Juvenile. You chide yourself. You can’t indulge in thinking like that. It’s a dangerous, not just for your life and livelihood, but your heart and your sanity. She takes her drink, and you need to make yourself leave, the longer you linger the worse your judgement gets. You almost let your hand raise to her shoulder, inviting her in.

When you started working at the Gardens, Babette, she warned you of this, not to get ‘emotionally entangled’ (her words not yours). And you had been so sure, how would you let that happen? You couldn’t have seen yourself being tempted.

You slide your money over the bar and move off your chair, a seconds miscalculation and your boot catches on a rung of the barstool and you lurch forward onto’s Sevika’s lap. Maybe she isn’t as drunk as she catches you smoothly, both hands on your waist.

“I’ve got it.” You try to grab for your jacket, and oh, yes, you are much drunker than you thought.

“I don’t think you do.” She moves with you now, raising from her chair and bringing you the rest of the way. She catches the bartender’s eye, “I’ll be back in a bit,” she tells them.

“Where are you going?” You ask, finally catching the edge of your jacket and pulling your hood up.

“Making sure you get back.” She tells you as she steers you towards the back of the bar, guiding your stumbling feet through the back door and out into the adjoining alley.

“I’ve got it…” you say, struggling with the sentence and your arms into your sleeves, close to tossing the thing onto the ground.

“Let me.” Sevika takes your jacket from you, pulling it on efficiently and you get to sneak a look at her while she does.

“Gods, the color of her eyes…”

“What about them?” She asks you as she pulls your sleeves even and tucks your neckline in around your face.

“Hmmmm….” You inquire and gods, yes, you are drunk. It’s her fault, you split that bottle between the both of you – but you had a head start. Wait… did you say the part about her eyes out loud?

She raises a wary eyebrow at you, and she is moving you again, a hand on your waist as she turns you towards the mouth of the alleyway.

“You don’t have too… I’ve got this.” You start to shove her hand away and it’s so petulant.

Her grip on you is like iron, both hands around your waist now, her body a warm wall behind your back and her warm breath seeping through material of your hood.

“I’m taking you back. You can walk or I can carry you. Which would you prefer?” Her voice is burning though you like a firelighter. Your inhibition is already down, and you can’t forget that she is entirely the type of women you shouldn’t be in a dark alley with - and you couldn’t give a fuck less.

Your hands act of their own accord as you come to brace your fingers across her wrists, rocking your body back into hers. Turning your head, still cloaked in your hood, you can feel her breath huff out as it warms your check.

“I know something else I’d prefer all together,” you breathe out.

Sevika grits out a surprised noise, you feel it more then you hear it. Her chest heaves out with the sound, her breasts brushing up against you and you stagger back.

She uses your momentum to push you against the dingy brick wall of the alley. Your vision is spinning slightly but she materializes in front of you. Your hands fly to her neck, one hand starting to wind into her hair, and the other bracing against her jaw.

She has a wrinkle between her eyebrows, her gaze hard on you, and you move into kiss her she shoves you back against the wall and tells you, “No.”

The wounded noise that leaves you, quiet and deadly, surprises even you. You are furious, why are you this angry? Is it because you had wanted something for yourself, and you aren’t getting it?

You stare up at her and you have a quick moment of clarity. Your chest is heaving as she is looming over you, but you don’t find her as intimidating as you did. You might never again.

“Fine.” You say as you pull your hands and body away, slipping sideways out from the cage of her legs. “A rare chance to get it for free but if you insist. I will  –“

Her grip is like iron on your forearm, whipping you around to face her, and -oh- you thought she was being rough before. That was for play, practically gentle, a bit of romancing the whore. This is what the poor idiots on the wrong side of her business get. She punctuates whatever point she is trying to make by drawing up slightly, wrenching your arm into your side and one of your boots starts to lose purchase on the dirt as you are lifted off your feet.

You’ve never seen her look furious, but this it, to mad to speak and the childish part of you is preening at the reaction. You try to fix your glaze as best as you can.

Leaning in, you study her face. “Are we done?” You give your arm a jerk in her grasp, and this seems to dislodge something. Her face flickers with a hundred looks, all too fast for your inebriated brain to catch, and her grip loosens.

You pull your arm away as she closes her eyes for a second, shaking her head from side to side. You take the moment to smooth down your jacket and check your hood.

By the time she blinks her eyes back open, Sevika has straightened herself up to her powerful height and rolls her shoulders back. Thoughts fill your head like paper kites, and you ignore them all.

Turning on your heal, you stalk away down the street back to the Garden’s.

You don’t look back to see if she is following you, not even when you bring your key out to unlock the back door, but you hear the crunch of gravel under her boots with yours.

Chapter Text

Flora, with her bright eyes and curly hair, helps with scheduling and buys whatever you request, usually comes to let you know your appointment has arrived. She will lead you down to your appointed room, introduce you, and set up anything you or your client has requested.

So, it understandably startles as you’ve just woken up, knowing you won’t have any appointments until the evening, that you hear commotion outside your door. Normally this is a few of the workers engaged in lively conversation but you can hear Miguel in a warning tone and then the door to your bedroom is tossed open.

Sevika walks briskly in your room, her eyes chasing around until they land on you. “She is awake.” She turns to remark at Miguel, who is trying his best not to look murderous.

He quickly tosses a look at you, and you nod in agreement behind Sevika’s back. You can deal with this - whatever this is. She hadn’t shown for her last appointment but had sent someone with payment, confirming her next week.

You haven’t seen her since the alleyway and your body is buzzing with her being close, in your room, with no explanation.

“It’s fine Miguel.” You say trying to keep the weary edge out of your voice. “Can you have Dot bring some extra tea?”

Giving you a reluctant look, he leaves the room, closing the door behind him. You know that several of the workers entertain their clients in their private rooms. Wither it’s for privacy of the back door entrance or that they like the cozier accommodations, reasons vary. But you’ve never had her in your own room, or anyone else for that matter. You’re guessing it’s because you’ve just woken up, but you just feel weary. You want to feel in control of something, around someone you usually don’t, before your emotions start to spin out of your control.

You finally take a look at her and you realize she is bloodied and a protective edge in you draws up. “You are bleeding.” You remark setting down your hairbrush.

She doesn’t answer you but removes her poncho and pulls off her harness. She is visibly agitated, so you wait, you wait for her make up her mind. Looking anywhere but where you are she finally moves to the pitcher of water near your bed and pours herself a glass.

You feel like you could wait a lifetime to get her to say something out loud that she is not ready to say so you make up your mind. Standing, you grab your medical kit out from under your bed.

“Come over here please.” You say moving items aside to make room on the low table near your small sofa.

“I’m fine.” She slugs back another gulp of water and goes to poor more into her glass.

“Well, that’s apparent but I won’t have you stain my bedclothes with blood.” You get up, moving to your small side table and grab your sewing kit then pause to pour her slug of liquor. Walking over to her offering the glass, she trades you, allowing you push gently at her shoulder towards the couch. She wrinkles her nose at you and the expression on her face threatens to knock the air out of your lungs. It’s something you haven’t seen her do before. You wonder if anyone else would take it as snarl, but towards you it’s like a little girl fussing.

She allows you to prod her back onto the couch and you organize your medical supplies. Cleaning liquid, bandages, scissors; She might need a stitch or two, but she probably won’t let you do that.

You pull out an herbal vile and start to work.

Sevika is eyeing you, curiosity written on her face. “What is all of this? How do you have it?”

“I was a healer before I came to Piltover.” You say as pull a length of bandage and prepare it, Peering over at her you assess the cut over her eye, the gash on her arm and nick above her heart. “You will need to take off your jacket for me, and your vest. It will make it easier.”

She pulls of her layers, leaving them as a pile next to her. Her clothes with a few errant knives and other weapons scattered in. Leaning back, she places her metal arm over the back of the couch, leaving you a space to slot into.

You get on your knees next to her, leaning in and set to work, all the while feeling her eyes on you. You clean her cuts and place some mending tape on the gash on her head. She allows to you wrap bandage along her arm and finally you are cleaning the scrape over her heart. You open her shirt a bit more and your fingers drag down. Applying a cleaning salve, you hear a hiss through her teeth.

“Almost done.” You tell her, your eyes venturing up to meet hers and her expression is soft, open, just taking you in. “Do you normally clean your own cuts?”

“Usually.” She divulges to you and your eyes follow her gaze down near your knees. She has been playing with the edge of your nightgown as you’ve been working, her fingers twisted in the lace.

“Well, you’ve done a pretty good job. Most have healed well.” You keep cleaning the wound, using a bandage to help the salve dry then applying the mending tape and covering it up.

You place stopper in the bottle of solution, placing it back on the table and move to start packing up but she stops, and you're surprised her control lasted this long.

She reaches out and threads her warm hand into your hair, pulling you onto her lap. Smiling into the kiss she gives you - trying to be gentle - you lay your palms gently along her shoulders. What ever happened, you know it was more than just cuts and bruises. She might have a cracked rib or worse.

“I’m fine.” She tells you, her mouth murmuring the words along your neck as she tilts your head back. You grasp harder at her shoulders, balancing yourself as she bends you back, making more room for herself in your space, more room for herself everywhere. You can’t help harsh breath you take when she reaches to slide her fingertips over your underwear, wasting no time. She finds you wet and wanting. You can’t stop the whimper that tumbles out of your mouth as your knees tighten around her hips.

The next thing you know she has you by your thighs, practically tossing you in the air as she stands with you, wrapping your legs around her and she moves towards the bed. You wrap your arms around her shoulders and while you are impressed as this display of her physicality you are worried about how your thighs might be dislodging a broken bit of bone.

She tosses you down onto your bed and leaves you there, looming over, taking you in. You move to reach up for her and she responds by pushing your shoulders back to the bedclothes.

“I want this.” She lets you know as she kneels on the floor at the edge of the bed. Taking in the view from between your legs, eyes raking down your body, she reaches up and slides both hands up the inside of your thighs.

You are so ready for her. Were you this turned on the whole time, but you are just realizing it? Or is the feeling you have just reeling from how hot you’ve gotten this fast? Your body rattles with the sensation of her hands on you. You moan out something unintelligent and you really couldn’t care.

The contrast between her hands feels exquisite, the fine coolness of metal and the scorching heat of her open palm as she grasps the softness of your legs near the apex of your thighs. You are more than ready for her, and it takes a moment for you to realize you’ve said this all out loud.

You beg for her to touch you. Looking down to see her push your nightgown up around your waist and tug your underwear down and off, tossing them somewhere over her shoulder. She doesn’t give you a minute to adjust, just leaning in, her nose barely brushing your sopping wet cunt, her hot breath fanning out over all of you. So exposed, you can feel yourself pushing out the slurpy wetness, dripping down the back of your thighs.

Making an obscene moaning noise as Sevika dives into you, her mouth over your scorching heat and you can’t help your hands flying down to tangle into her hair. Her matching moan against you makes your hips stutter up to meet her mouth.

She is good at this - very, very good. Her mouth laps at you like she is starving, coming up and around to circle your clit then back down to where you are the messiest and sliding her tongue into you. You make an indecent noise, your body shuddering with the sensation.

It’s ruthless. She isn’t pulling any punches. For several long moments you are completely helpless, just under her mouth and the burning wildfire that’s scalding your limbs.

You chance a look down between your legs and find her eyes fixed on you, burning into your skin, and you melt back under her gaze. Fuck, she fits a finger into you, quickly with another and damn, it’s going to be over way sooner than you would like.

“I’m close…” you manage to get out, hoping she will be merciful and let you linger a little longer. The bite of her metal fingers against your hip tells you, no, she is not inclined to be generous with you.

You only retribution you have is to let your thighs snap closed over her head as you come.

As you wind down, she pulls her fingers out of you, cleaning them off in her mouth. You moan in response.

“Can I…” you start to ask, and she is crawling over your body, a strong arm under you. Pulling you up the bed with ease and you only get a second to enjoy being handled when she slides down on her back next to you.

Tucking you under her left arm, she wraps your thigh around hers. You shiver at the contact of the metal along your back, and she shifts to wrap her fingers around your wrist.

“This,’ then she is grabbing your hand and sliding your fingertips under her waist band, as she moves to undo her pants.

You haven’t touched her, not like this. You had your hands over her shoulders, fingers on the skin of her waist, kissed her while she has touched herself, and played her with breasts over and under her clothes.

You can’t help but gasp as your hand travels down and you find the thin edge of her undergarments. She makes a frustrated nose, trying to shove down her pants, but you can’t wait. You feel like you are getting a present and you can barely wait to unwrap it.

Fingertips dipping lower, you brush against the course curls and then slide over her and - fuck.

Her groan reverberates along your side as your blood melts fire into your skin. Her arm tightens around your back and her other still tries to push her pants down to give you room, but you can’t be bothered. You want her to forget everything else.

Your kiss swallows the sound she makes as your fingers dip deeper – finding where she is wettest, aching, pulsing for you and you can’t help the surge of power that threatens to overwhelm you.

You lose yourself in the feeling of her: the harsh breath along your cheek or moaning into your mouth, her hands either grabbing at your face, curling around your jaw or grasping onto your wrist, her hips rolling up to meet your hand, and her aching, arching, softness under fingertips…

She unravels beneath you, under your gaze, your care, and the breath of it threatens to overpower you. She is lost in the sensation for several moments and you wonder how many people have seen her like this…ever.

When she finishes, she removes her hand from her pants and cleans your fingertips, one by one.

Afterwards, she lays with you, pulling your body so it’s tucked into her side. You watch her eyes start to drop closed with sleep threatening to take her. Finally, she catches herself and gives you one last, deep kiss before rising and straightens up her clothing, moving the couch to dress herself.

You get up to see her out, wrapping your robe around yourself. She is moving to leave the room, she gently grabs you by the side of you neck and brings you close, giving a soft kiss to the skin of your cheek. Leaving her usual tip on your table by the door she out the door… and it’s the first time you hate it. This feels different, this didn’t feel like her coming to visit her favorite whore… it felt like….

Dangerous… that’s what it is - dangerous thinking, emotional entanglement…

It’s another moment, in hindsight, you’ll remember, and think, yeah, I should have known.

“What’s this one?” Sevika asks pointing with her metal arm to a muscle along her bicep.

You come up along the headboard she is reclining against, sitting on the bed she had just fucked you into with her strap, after you'd come begging and whining underneath her. Running your fingers delicately over her skin you give her the medical name of the muscle.

She smiles at you, grabbing your fingers and bringing them up to her lips, brushing your fingertips over the softness. The tenderness of this bursts something in your chest, something you weren’t aware you had been guarding.

If are guarding it, you are doing a terrible job. The malicious voice in your head provides.

It’s too big, too whole, a large bubble welling up inside of you, sliding up your spine and settling in under your ribs, threatening to push the air out of your lungs.

You drag your fingers down her neck to her chest, naming the muscles as you go. She really is an impressive sight. Her physique so built up, strong and toned, the muscles twitch and flex under your touch. You slide down the flat pane of her stomach, taking in the bumps of her abdomen, feeling a small serge of power as you feel her breath hitch. You press in slightly and name her diaphragm, it is a muscle after all.

Your body slides over her. Thighs bracketing hers, ending up in her lap, your fingers playing with the top edge of her pants. She has slipped them back but not done them up. You brush the edge of her undergarments and lean in, sliding your fingers down underneath.

Shifting your bodyweight forward you get close her, as she still leans back on the headboard but now with your fingers gently brushing down the patch of tight curls above her heat.

“What’s that one called?” She asks, her gaze hot on you, and you're melting, like warm oil, in a hot pan

“This one?” You ask, trying to infuse as much innocence into your voice as you slide into her slickness, and - oh, is she slick. You had gotten her off before she fucked you, but she must have liked that show, or this one.

You make her come while your palm flattened against her swollen clit, fingers buried deep in her cunt, your other hand tangled in her hair, mouth pressed into her cheek, and you drink in the sounds she makes as she comes down.

Chapter Text

“You have to be one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.” Sevika says, dragging her fingertips down your spine.

Your face is tucked into her shoulder as she does this, your body still weak and trembling from the orgasm she wrenched out of you. Seems like another tough week, preferring to fuck you with the strap when she is not feeling in control. You wonder if she has noticed this, but you covet it, that you might be the only one that knows this about her.

Part of it should scare you, that you don’t mind, you aren’t even that concerned on giving her a show anymore. You are more of yourself with her then you are with anyone on the outside.

In all the lanes, everyone at the Gardens and her.

“You say that to all of the girls…” you trail off as she laughs. It’s a wonderful sound you think in your fucked out haze.

It strikes you one afternoon while you sit with Geoffroy that he an Sevika aren’t that dissimilar but their visits could not be more opposite. Both more reserved, preferring to let silence linger and wait out their company, listening, observing, collecting. You fight against your urge to fill the quiet with conversation: Sevika usually fills her with action, Geoffroy with peaceful rumination.

The steaming tea sits on a low table, perfuming the room with soft, delicious smell. Both you and Geoffrey are tucked into the same small sofa, your legs placed in his lap as you lean back, reading though the new book he brought you, an exciting tale of pirate adventure. Geoffrey enjoys bringing you a new book each time and delights in your reviews.

A few visits ago he asked to sit together like you are now, curled in amongst the pillows, creating quite the domestic scene.

What is different this afternoon is his quick glances at you while you read.

“You’ve not told me about where you are from.” Geoffroy cuts through the quiet of your afternoon together.

“I’m from the here,” you tell him, turning the page in your book. Out of the corner of your eye, you see him close his book and gently set it down to his side.

“My dear, I think we can be honest with each other now.” He levels his gaze to meet yours. “You are good about it, but you let your accent slip from time to time. You are from somewhere north, aren’t you?”

Your heart stills for a moment and you lower you book, carefully slipping your marker to keep your page.

“You are quite sharp, aren’t you?” You ask, trying to fight grin that threatens to overtake your face. Geoffroy looks incredibly pleased with himself.

“I didn’t get this far in life without being able to pay attention. Helps with business.” He reaches to take a sip of tea and gestures to you, “so, where were you born?”

“I think I’d like to see you guess,” you tease him.

He’s face lights up with the challenge. He levels his eyes as if the answer will be written along the curve of your cheek. “Noxus?”

“No,” you lean down taking a sip of tea for yourself.

“Demacia,” his eyes light up with his second guess.

“Correct,” you answer, and you can’t help the small laugh at his delighted cheer.

“How long have you been away?” He asks, shifting towards you suddenly feel a little uneasy. A few others know that you are from Demacia, but you haven’t told anyone of your life before.

“Too long,” you reply, and his face creases at the simple reply. Tucking your cup back into its saucer you think to yourself, what would be the harm? The story you usually give anyone who asks - another child lost to a mining accident, growing up in the lanes - feels sour on your tongue. It might be nice to tell someone the truth. Your heart tightens in response, and you realize he isn’t the person you’d imagined you share your real story with.

You smother that urge by answering, tilting your body towards Geoffroy in reply.

“Only a few years. I came to find work and I ended up finding this.” You gesture to the room around. It ends up being a half truth, feeling as if you are pulling at a shred of yourself and tearing carefully at the edge.

“What do you miss most about it?” He asks and the question leaves your raw, open, like an exposed nerve. You know he must be craving this, taking weeks to ask you something and you know the job he pays you to do, the intimacy he craves. So, you find another thread trapped in the seams of your careful construction.

“The trees..” You close your eyes and picture it. “We have these tall trees, reaching up to the sky, well it always feels like it when you are young.” You chuckle and he smiles warmly at you. “The forests are so dense you can jump from tree top to treetop. I would love to take a walk in the forest.”

“It sounds beautiful.” He answers.

“It is. One day, you should go and see it.” You tell him.

“Maybe one day I will.” He replies.

As Flora introduced you to your newest client, something seemed off. Something about this man seemed a bit cagy, angry, prickly.

You offered to pour him a drink and moved to sit next to him and he jumped up, startled, choosing to make conversation while moving around the room. You are used to people feeling nervous or reserved; sexual repression seems to run rampant topside. Folks come down to the lanes trying to unleash something they can’t every day.

“Would you like to tell me what you’d like us to do together?” You try a direct approach, sometimes this can startle something into quiet reflection or others will fall over themselves to tell you their deepest fantasies.

The man on the other side of the room stills and the hair on the back of your neck raises.

He turns to look at you and moves suddenly. Gathering your hair at your nape and pulling your head back, he looms over you settled on the couch. He knows the rules, he knows what agreed to, but that doesn’t mean that folks haven’t tried to push limits to far.

His cologne smells sour on his skin and his suit is cheap, brushing along your bare arms – just like him, prickly and unpleasant.

“Remember, be gentle with me.” You try for coy and sweet. “I bruise easily.”

With flashing of his eyes, you are tossed down onto the table in the center of the room.

“l’ll be as rough with you as I’d like. You’re my whore for the next hour.” He spits out.

Your head spins from the shift in your position and as the burning along your cheek registers. You realize you’ve landed face first onto of the glasses, tossed over the table your're half laying over. You know Miguel will be checking the room soon, so you just need to wait. You’d bet you’ll both be able to get him out of here but you aren’t sure if you can do alone. He looks too big for you to handle.

One glass has been tossed across the room and the other sits sideways, a small amount still left in it. You feel under the table edge for small vile you tucked under the edge weeks ago, just in case. You make quick work to pull it and pour a few drops into the remaining liquid, tucking it away into your bodice.

He grabs your arm and wrenches you sideways and you know you will have a deep bruise from that.

“How about I-“ you try to divert.

“No – no –“ he huffs out and you offer the glass of liquor up to him, silently. He snatches it from your hand and gulps down the reminder as you fell a small rush of vindictive joy.

A small knock on the door registers to you and you call out to Miguel who rushes in. Then it’s all a flurry of Miguel removing your enraged guest and you slump on back on the couch as Blu rushes in next to you.

“Honey, you are bleeding.” Blu tells you as they brush the hair back from your face.

Babette follows, flanked by Miguel. “Oh dear," Her eyes crinkle with worry. Your own eyes blur with the wet edges of tears.

“I’m fine, Miguel got me just after.” Blu pulls you into a warm hug, tucked against their side.

“Let’s get you upstairs and cleaned up.” Babette pulls gently on your elbow as you stand and steers you towards the door. “Blu, dear, can you help get this cleaned up?”

“Come check on me later, Blu, please?” You ask and they nod solemnly. You’ve heard about attacks happening at the Gardens, but nothing since you’ve arrived. A dark part of you assumes that it was about time.

Miguel reaches out to gently squeeze your shoulder as you pass, and you try to give him a reassuring smile. “It could have been so much worse. I know you keep an eye on us. I knew you’d come.”

As you walk into the small sanctuary your room proviees, a few small tears threaten to overwhelm you.

“Well, that was a mess. Good to know you can keep your thoughts about yourself.” Babette pouring you a glass of deep amber liquid. You take it gratefully leaning back on your sofa, your head back with a deep gulp and enjoy the burn down your throat. Your bones ache and not in the pleasant way you’ve been used too lately. A thought sweeps thought you mind, you haven’t been as on guard the last few months. You might also have to admit, you almost feel safe here. As safe as you’ve felt since you’d came to Piltover. What a fallacy you’ve built there, a bitter sounding voice in your brain remarks.

You and Babette sit in a comfortable silence as you nurse your drinks. You can feel her start to say something to you a few times, but she stops. Music floating up from downstairs reminders you it’s the busy part of the evening. You mull over your thoughts, thinking of pompous asshole being dragged down the hallway by Miguel and you smile to yourself.

After a few moments, Babette’s voice cuts through the silence.

“Change my, dear.” She rises and pulls the empty glass from you hand, pushing you towards your privacy screen in the corner of your room. “I can help fix you up.”

You change into your dressing gown and nightgown and as your start to pull out your medical kit and herbal remedies you hear raised voices in the hallway. You cast a look at Babette as she rises to her feet, and you just make out Miguel’s voice as you hear your bedroom door wrench open.

You grab the scissors from your kit to defend yourself with.

“Where the fuck is she?!” The drapes around your doorway are pushed violently aside and suddenly Sevika is standing in the middle of your bedroom with Dot and Miguel scrambling in after her.

Sevika’s chest heaving, and you have a wild moment thinking that she looks so angry you could see it coming off her. The first thing that strikes you is that she isn’t wearing her usual red cover, just her vest showing off her harness that holds an impressive selection of knives. She is also holding a rifle.

Her eyes rake over you and distantly remember that Babette, Miguel, and Dot are in the room with you both. Sevika doesn’t seem to notice.

She huffs out another angry breath and stalks towards you. Her grip on your chin is unyielding but gentle. She angles your head towards the lamp hanging in the center of the room taking in the purpling bruise under your eye.

“Who?” Her voice is steel as she drops her hand, and you hear the grip on the rifle in the other tighten causing something on the gun to creak.

“It’s nothing for you.” You are suddenly furious, and you know its misplaced. But her, in this room, acting this way, it the is the last thing you need today.

Her eyes flash with hurt and then with anger this time boring into you. Stepping closer to you know she is about to snarl out something, but you cut her off.

“Some Piltover official. You will only be inviting trouble.” You sway into her space; you know you can’t intimate but only soothe her. “No one here needs that. Miguel delt with him. Right, Miguel?” You lean sideways making eye contact with him.

Miguel takes a small step forward from the doorway. He nods in agreement. “Yes.”

“And he won’t be invited back.” Babette adds, “and who recommended him.” She says with a shake of her head.

Babette casts a glance between you and Sevika (who’s gaze hasn’t left you) and she gives a small nod to her head, as if making up her mind about something.

Moving to step out of the room, Babette rises her hands to usher out Dot and Miguel. “We will let you rest, my dear. And I will have Dot bring you some tea, right, Dot? Some tea…” she trails off as she closes the door behind you and Sevika.

You sigh as your eyes rake back over to her. Sevika breath has evened out but her mouth is still set in a hard line.

“You can help me patch up?” You say as you sit down on the couch in the middle of the room, setting down the scissors and taking out a few bottles and bandages.

Sevika seems to shake herself out of her head and sit down next to you, placing the rifle down and shrugging off her harness.

“If the number of times I’ve done this to you, you could be a healer yourself.” You say, trying to keep the mood light. You feel Sevika shift closer to you on the cushion.

You’ve got to keep the mood light, or you might break… you might break and who would that help?

Pulling out the bottle cleaning solution you realize it shaking in your hand. You try to set it down on the low table, but you can’t. You’re trembling.

Breath catches in your throat as you suck in a quivering inhale. And all at once, Sevika is there.

She takes the bottle from your unsteady hands, places it gingerly down on the table, then you are lifted into her arms. Pulling you into her lap, you are pretty sure you are trying to say something, or she is, but you can’t make any words or hear over the blood rushing in your ears. Your body is quaking so hard you are rattling you both.

You aren’t sure what happens but the next moment you are aware of anything you know you are warm, and her voice fills your ears, whispering against your temple, “you are safe… you are safe... you are safe”

You take another trembling inhale, breath rattling into your lungs. Clutching at the blanket you are wrapped in. Sevika is holding you tight to her in the circle of her arms, your head tucked into her neck and your body draped over her lap.

She is rocking you gently and you really can’t comprehend how this is happening.

Searching your feelings, if you wanted protection and comfort, you’d want to see her. You’d want her.

As your body comes back from its frightened state, you think that this is only going to end badly. The biggest crime lord in the Undercity’s right-hand women and a whore (one of the premier escorts in the undercity - a Babette’s voice supplies).

You choose to ignore that thought and drift along, wading in your own mind.

Finally, you can take a deep breath without your body shaking. After that, you can clear your voice without choking. You blink the tears out of your eyes and dry them on the edge of the blanket.

You think about telling her it wasn’t necessary, but that will insult her. It’s also a lie.

You think about just getting up and walking out of the room. The brothel. The undercity. Taking the money, you have right now and finding someone to trek over the mountains and take you back to Demacia. To your family.

But can’t go back empty handed. What you have saved now will get you back home, but it’s not enough to help.

Not the moment for this. Not right now. You scold yourself.

She isn’t whispering anything into your skin anymore, but her lips are still resting against your temple.

Your voice comes out very rusty and small when you finally use it. “Thank you.”

Her arms tighten reflexively around you and she huffs out a breath. To save you both, you lean back unfolding yourself from her. She tilts her eyes down to meet yours… and the look on her face is the most open and venerable you’ve even seen on her. You can’t help your hand coming up and cupping her cheek. After this comfort she’s given you, you can give her a little in return.

“I’m safe.” You tell her. Her face crumples as she leans to press your foreheads together. Shuttering out a breath you wait to see if she is going to say anything. The moment ticks on and you decide for her. Brushing gentle kiss to her lips you gently try to gently remove yourself from her arms.

She must be sore form holding you for so long because she unfolds from you slowly, almost unwillingly, her body to use to the position.

You pull yourself up and drag the blanket off the both of you and drape it over the back of the sofa. You chance a look at her, and she looks lost, not sure what to do with herself. As if during the time she was holding you, she had rearranged to only know that, as if that’s all she would know how to do.

“I need a drink first.” You move to pour some whiskey into two glasses. As soon as you move back to the couch you realize she has already prepared a few pieces of cleaning cloth and solution and barely lets you sit down before she starts dabbing at the cut on your forehead.

You sit in a companionable silence while she works on fixing you up. One on your forehead, another long your chin, the scrape on your arm. They will heal well; she is doing a good job and you tell her.

She scoffs at you, dipping another bandage in the medicine.

“When have I ever given you a false complement?” You smile into the glass as you take another sip of liquor.

There is a small smile on the corners of her lips as she works. Smearing the liquid over your cut, you hiss in pain. Her eyes fly up to yours.

“Stings and scrapes are always the worst. You know that.” You reach out and brush your fingers over opening of her shirt, where you had once cleaned a similar injury for her, high on her chest over her heart. Her expression softens again, blinking hard as she applies mending tape to the gash along your forehead.

“All done?” Starting to tuck things away, cleaning up the bits of bandage, tucking away the small bottles of medicine, your pins, ties, and scissors. You can feel your eyes on you, but you can’t meet them.

The air feels heavy with a question Sevika might ask and one you can’t answer. She isn’t as good at hiding her emotions as she once was. Or, maybe, like you, she doesn’t want too.

You can’t have this with her. You can’t have a reason to stay, and she will never leave.

Unzipping your bag full of potions and remedies, slipping the cleaning liquid inside, you reach into you bodice, pulling out the small bottle. Before she says anything either of you are going to regret, you cut the silence.

“He didn’t leave here unharmed. Miguel ran him back up. And…” you pick up the small vile. “I managed to slip this his drink before he left.”

Sevika eyes dart between you and the glinting liquid. “Poison?”

“Is it poison if he doesn’t die?” You ask, the vile of yellow liquid glinting in the lamplight. You tuck in with your others.

She laughs, something rueful, turning the tumbler in her hand, watching the amber liquid turn around. “Not to me.”

Chapter Text

The next time you see her, you know you need to right something. Everything feels a little of balance. Babette and Miguel know not to treat you like glass, but the others give you soft gazes and while you know it’s well meaning it drives you crazy.

You want something that will remind you aren’t brittle. You want her.

By the time her appointment day rolls around you are vibrating with it. Your fuse has been short for days, temper flaring for anything, trying desperately not to lash out at anyone.

You almost snap at sweet Dot as she brings your afternoon tea. You make yourself take a walk around the streets, leading up to the edge of the lanes, scraping along the dirt under your feet. Ambling back to the Gardens as you see the sky above starting to glint with the candy colors of sunset.

You feel dusty with city grime, so you start a shower for yourself. As you undress, Flora pokes her head in to remind you of your appointment and asks if you’d like anything for this evening except for the usual set up. You tell her that after leading her up, you’d like to be left alone.

You take your time washing yourself. Luxuriating in washing your hair and moisturizing your skin. You leave your bathroom and drink in the soft light that Flora had set when she delivered your refreshments. You make yourself a drink, one in anticipation for you guest, turn on a record, and start to slowly mill around the room. It’s a soft tune, full of strumming guitar, horns and voices signing in matching melodies.

There is always a knock at the door, but you don’t hear it - she is just in the room with you.

Sevika stands in the parted curtains at the entrance, taking in the scene you’ve created.

You turn around to face her, your robe open, bare skin on display to her. You get one eyebrow raised in return and you stare at each other in response. She is still fully dressed, her red drape and all, as her gaze rakes over you.

It feels like a spark under wet leaves - feeling her of eyes on you. Raking down over your face, neck, breasts, the soft swell of your stomach, the patch of hair at the peak of your legs, thighs, legs, down to your feet. And you wait, you wait for her to cross the path you’d laid out for. Leaning back against the record table and take a sip of your drink, your robe falling open around your hips and sliding down one shoulder, eyeing her over the edge of the glass.

She takes a moment, eyes darting around, then takes a slow step forward.

Moving to the couch she pulls off her drape and harness. The small table nearby has her drink. She downs it.

Taking a step up to where you are she drops her glass on the other end of the table.

Standing toe to toe with you she pears down, while you have lean back to accommodate her stature. Reaching to take the glass from you, she places it next to the record player.

Before she can move back towards you, the record ends, skipping to its last rung and clicking off. Deftly resetting it, the crooning melody again fills the air as she stands between your legs.

She isn’t touching you, just hovering in your space, close enough to you that you can feel the warmth of her along your skin. Eyes darting around, you watch her catalogue your injuries, almost a week healed. You lean back on your palms, you let the last shoulder of your robe drop down and puddle behind you, your hair brushing along your skin, her eyes following.

The waiting is delicious, simmering under your skin, pooling along your most sensitive parts, blushing up under your cheeks, the tips of your breasts, along your chest, soaking into your pussy.

Goose bumps break out along your skin and Sevika finally brings her hands up towards you. Her fingers come out as if she is going to brush her fingertips along the skin of your stomach, but just ghost over, barely touching. Hands skim up over your breasts, along your chest and push your hair back over your shoulders, finally sliding along your neck, both gently settling in, palms resting along your collarbones. One side of your body shivers with the contact of the fine machinery of her one hand, cool and smooth, the other burns along with the warmth. You let out a slow breath as she leans in as if she can deliver you the oxygen she sucked out of the room.

Her kiss is the same wildfire- it’s what you’ve wanted all week- and it burns into you, like you are made of nothing but paper. You moan gratefully as she claims you with her tongue, her hands growing tight around your throat and yours come to brace against her hips. You lose yourself in this, kissing her, drinking in the slow arousal, the warming of your skin from the heat radiating off her.

She uses her grip to tilt your head back, her mouth sliding down your cheek, teeth grazing along your skin.

“What do you want?” She asks and you aren’t far enough gone to miss the request.

“That’s… oh fuck…that’s my question.” You bite off a moan as she sucks your earlobe into her mouth.

Her chuckle tickles along your skin, stirring edges of your hairline and turning the fire that’s burning under your skin up to a blasting heat.

“You’ve had a hard week.” Moving her hands down as she asks you again, teasing your nipples with her warm fingertips, scratching lightly at the skin of your stomach with cool her ones. “What do you want?” The tops of your thighs are teased with light brushes, her mouth dragging to your collarbone as she leans in and catches your legs under your knees, lifting your hips back onto the record table and forcing your legs apart. Moving quickly into your space she bumps into the table. The record skips as she crashes your mouths together.

Your hands tangle into her hair, legs wrapping around her waist. Kissing your breath away, she pulls flush to her body, hands possessively around your waist. You are greedy, you are selfish, you are weak, looking into the face of this, knowing you shouldn’t feed this feeling, but you choose to do so anyway.

“Touch me.” You answer, scraping your nails into her scalp and she grunts through clenched teeth. “I want your hands in me, on me, how I –“ and mercifully she cuts you off with a kiss as she slides you backwards on the silk of your robe. In a moment she has you held with one hand against the side of your neck, the cool metal causing you to shiver, and the other sliding down your stomach, again teasing the skin of your thighs. She keeps you like this, holding you away, pushed back against the wall, on top of the record table. Her fingers tracing idle patterns into the skin, just out of reach of where you want her the most. It reminds you of how she first took you, the first time you saw her, the first time you met.

You break under her gaze, burning into you. “Please, gods, don’t tease me… you wanted to give me what I wanted, please touch me. Get me off.” You whine, just like you know she likes. “I’ll beg all you want, what can I say? What do you want-“

“Stop.” She orders, pausing her hand just above your curls, pressing in her fingertips, watching the shift of your skin under her touch.

Her fingertips slide down, circling over your clit and you moan on contact, rocking your hips forward you can’t help the hand that comes down to circle over her wrist as she touches you.

“Gods,” she breaths out, looking down at her fingertips moving against you. “You always feel amazing.” She grits out, almost reverently. You moan at her words.

She keeps going, her skilled fingers driving you higher. “You always get so wet. Do you always–“ she cuts herself off, increasing her pace, drawing another whine out of you and your fingernails dig into the skin of her wrist.

“So good for me, so fucking pretty.” You feel her eyes on your face and you turn yours up to meet hers. She keeps her dialogue going, “Your mouth, I think about your mouth on me all the time.”

You think you might pass out; she uses her words to sparingly and now they are flowing out of her mouth, melting into fucking filth as she is fingering you. You struggle to breathe as she drives you to madness. Bringing you free hand to your breast you tease your nipple and her eyes dart down, letting out a soft whine as she watches you.

“Fuck, how are you… sometimes you can’t be…” She breathes out, moving towards you, her thighs bumping into the table edge. The record skips again.

You rock your hips down into her, griding against the pleasure radiating from your pussy. “I’m… please…” you try to grit out.

“Tilt your hips back,” She orders, and you comply, shifting your body to accommodate her fingers sliding down to you core, one then the other when she finds you ready, curling in.

“Fuck, please, god, let me come.” You whimper out.

“Touch yourself.” Sevika grits out and your hand that had been playing with your nipple moves down to brush over you clit.

Between her eyes on your face and the sympathetic whine you draw out of her as soon as you arch your hips, your cumming around her fingers. Your legs try to snap closed, but her hips stop them. She keeps driving into you and just as it draws up on the edge of being too much, your eyes starting to brim with unshed tears, you come again, drawing a scream out of you.

Finally, you slump back and through your blurry vision you see her draw her fingers out and wipe them clean on your thigh. Moaning you reach out for her, drawing her in over your body, and your hand slides down to unbuckle her pants.

“I want this.” You tell her, sliding down her zipper and your fingers dip under the edge of her underwear. You find her drenched, soaked into the cloth. She shivers as you find her clit.

“I want this.” You tell her as your hand threads into her hair, drawing her to your mouth and taking a kiss. She braces her hands on either side of your hips, tilting to accommodate the position you are both in, her body rocking forward into the table, angling over you. The record skips again.

The sounds of you fingering her are barely addable over the music, but the fact you can hear them at all, over the chorus and though her pants…. The fact she is that wet for you.

“I want this.” You swallow her moan, holding her hair to tight as she starts to tremble under your fingers and then breaks.

“This.” You kiss her as she comes back, slumping forwards into your space.

She answers you with her fingers sliding up the skin of your sternum, over your slowing heartbeat, into your hair and answers your next kiss.

She allows you to strip off her clothing, so you can be skin to skin. Moving to the bed you hope to have her again, but you end up curled along her side watching her eyes flutter while fighting sleep. You keep meaning to tell her to get back up, her time must be up soon, something.

But she is so warm, soft with the days fatigue, exertion and the contentment that comes with mutual orgasms. With your head resting on her chest, you tell yourself you’ll doze for a few moments and then…

“Morning!” Your sleep is broken with a knock at the door.

It might be comical how you jolt awake, trying to sit upright, stopped only by something heavy, pinning you down.

“Shit,” you strangle a whisper, looking down at Sevika. Some point during the night she must have moved, pushing you on your back to rolling on top, wrapping her arm around your torso with her head pillowed on your breasts.

During your waking, she hasn’t moved at all. How can she sleep like the dead?

It’s a good deal of effort to move her off and only once you slip out of your bedclothes does she barely stir from sleep. Grabbing your robe, you pad over to your door and catch the opening edge.

“I’ve got it Dot,” you tell her, gently pulling the tray from her grasp while placing your foot behind the door, blocking it from opening further.

Dot’s face wrinkles with a knowing smile. “You sure?” she asks, slyly.

“No worries.” You start to pull back and move to shut the door. “Thank you!” you tell her as the door creeks closed.

You place the try down on the table and you eye the two cups. They know Sevika stayed the night. She didn’t go down to pay, your brain supplies.

The women herself finally raises her head and blinks around, confused. Seeming to realize she isn’t where she usually sleeps, she turns just in time to see you walk over to the bed, sliding your robe to the floor and moving to lay next to her.

“We both fell sleep,” you remind her, and she looks blearily up at you. It strikes you as something funny know she is not a morning person. Pulling her back into the same position you had woken up in, her arms wrap around you in return, you shiver at the cold contrast along the small of your back. Her contented sigh against the curve of your neck warms your skin.

You lay with her for a few minutes, watching the soft light filter through the drawn curtains. There isn’t a sunrise in the lanes, but the light does change, filtering with a warm glow in the day and an inky blue in the evenings.

Just when you wonder if she’s fallen sleep again, she breaks the silence with her lips dragging along the skin of your neck. “I should get going.” You want to protest, you’d slept better then you had in ages, through the night without waking. You answer her by softly raking your fingertips up her back, along her neck and into her hair - its mussed spectacularly with sleep, the sharp edges sticking out in odd directions.

Her moan creaks along the edges of her voice, her hips rolling down along yours. You chuckle in response, her reactions so unguarded in the morning before she is fully awake.

“What would you like?” Your voice still sore with sleep. “You can leave… or…” you slide your other hand down along her spine, teasing the skin at the base of it with a swirl of your fingertips, knowing her hips will rut up against yours.

Sevika lifts her head, eyes meeting yours, shifting her hips slightly as she does, one strong leg flexing with the motion and slotting both of yours together. You each of you have a thigh to rock against. Rolling her hips, she uses the pressure and friction to suck a harsh breath out of you.

Leaning in she brings your mouths together and you reach up to her shoulders to pull her body down over yours. You want to feel her, you want her warm weight pinning you into the mattress, to imprint all of her against your skin.

It’s starts out sleep slow, hips rolling in time with the gentle kisses. Then starts to escalate with her hands roaming, teasing your nipples, and brushing over your hips. Your hands are just as restless, you’ve never had this much of her skin exposed, never been allowed to bask in it. Your fingertips find every bulge of her muscles, torn and smooth edges of scars, the dips of her neck and collarbones, the softness of the curve of her cheek.

You can feel how wet you both are. You are leaking down her thigh and the flex of her muscles against your swollen clit has your desire driving higher and higher. She is just as needy, her core melting down against the softness of yours. You can feel the path of her arousal along your skin as she takes her pleasure from you.

In the middle of a drag of your nails down her back, she starts to whimper under your hands, rocking of her hips growing frantic over yours. The added friction makes the throbbing between your legs reach a new high. She starts to whine, reluctant to break the kiss, and comes with her tongue still in your mouth and you follow soon after, moaning into the scrape of her teeth along your bottom lip.

She keeps kissing you, drawing leisurely patterns onto the roof of your mouth.

If feels luxurious, decadent, peaceful. It feels like…

Oh, you must crush that thought, burry it deep, smother the fire that’s fueling it. You’ve been reckless, stupid. Why, did you let any of this get this far? Absolutely –

Sevika shifts back and pushes your hair off your face, smoothing her fingertips down your cheek and every thought in your head stutters to a halt. Her face brakes into a stunning grin, not a smirk, but a true smile. Your heart restarts in your chest, with a thundering rattling, now pumping away furiously. “I guess I can go now,” she utters.

The blush that blooms over your face is completely out of your control. You giggle, a real giggle, high and clear. You feel young, foolish, and floating.

You push at her shoulder, playfully. Rolling off you, picking up her errant clothes, she starts to redress. You grab a night gown and dressing gown and find a pair of slippers, trying to busy yourself to trap the panic that is threatening to burst out of your mouth.

You help her get her harness and drape on, arranging it over her shoulders. “I’ll come down with you. Let me talk to Miguel so he knows what to do.” It feels a bit off to talk business after spending the night safely tucked under her and your mood must match, as her nod of agreement seems tight and formal.

You both exit and walk down to Miguel’s small office, tucked near the front door. You knock and slip in first. He greets you with a raised eyebrow and you cut to the needed conversation before he can tease you about your company on the other side of the door.

“We feel asleep.” You explain, “Otherwise, I guess, just charge what you would normally.”

Miguel peers at you. His quiet demeanor used to set you on edge, maybe its spending so much time with similar company, him and Sevika, quiet and silence doesn’t affect you the same way.

He nods, quick to mark something down in a ledger, “And I won’t charge her for the morning tea?” He favors you with a wry smile, and you roll your eyes at him, at the innuendo. He always surprises you with his humor. You give him a smile in return as you as you slip out of the door.

Sevika is leaning against the opposite wall, shadowed by the archway she is sheltered in.

You aren’t sure what to do with yourself. You feel exposed, bare to cold and the panic from before still rattles around in your chest. You summon your courage from the depths of your chest. Leaning in, you run the backs of your fingertips over Sevika’s cheek, giving her a parting kiss.

Pulling back, you chance a glance as her closed eyes and your feelings rattle like a caged animal against your heart. “I’ll see you.”

You move quickly down the hall and back to you room, fearful to let her look into your eyes as your emotions are too close to the surface.

Until you reach the stairs at the end, you feel her eyes burning a hole on your back, her stillness in the unusual quiet of the Gardens, tranquil with the early morning.

You make it to the stairs, and up, slipping into your room.

Only in the safe harbor does it overtake you: the panic, the fear, the breath, and width of it.

Your knees give and you fold over onto the soft rug, your hands coming down to brace you. The panic rolls over your body, eyes welling with tears, your breath choking out of your throat, caught on the feelings that rise with the bile of your stomach.

After you’ve panted, writhed, gasp on your emotions, you twist to lay on your back, staring at the ceiling of your room, looking at the cracks that litter the ceiling, the same ones you’ve gone to sleep for months staring at. You could have laid like that for moments or hours, you aren’t sure. Your thoughts shuffle like cards in a deck and after a time, a clear one enters your head.

You’re in love.

And there is nothing you can do about it now.

Chapter Text

You’ve done a terrible job… just awful. You had one thing to protect yourself from, one thing to prevent, and what did you do?

Gods, your heart. You’ve been so good a protecting it your whole life and now? Too fall in love now? Of all places? With her…

You toss the book you aren’t really reading onto your table and scowl down at it. Geoffrey will arrive soon (always right on time) for his appointment. You are waiting for him, just as he asks, perched on ‘your’ side of the sofa.

Playing house with him hadn’t grated on your nerves until today. In fairness, you think anything -everything – would. Maybe you should do something to get out the relentless in your bones…

Just as this thought occurs to you, a knock comes from the door and you call out an answer, Geoffrey’s smiling face greets you and you can’t help how your heart softens a little, at the sight to him. The friendly fondness you have for him despite of... gods, what’s wrong with you. You can’t be doing this with everyone. You need to start to untangle your feelings.

“Good afternoon,” you great him, stretching yourself out, making a show to sweeping yourself off the couch to embrace him.

“Have you been reading long?” he asks, shrugging off his over coat. You poor him some tea and add a slice of lemon, just as you know he likes.

He leans in, catching you under you bent elbow and gives you a soft kiss to the fullest part of your check. Sweet, familiar, warm.

“For a little while,” you admit. “I’ve had the worst time concentrating on anything today.” Honesty, it has become a bit easier, even if it’s the littlest bits of you.“Any reason why?” He asks, brow furrowing, sitting down next to you. He takes a moment to admire the smell of his warm tea before he takes a sip.

“Not sure,” you answer, trying to sidestep the truth, you worry he will be able to read it on your face. I realized I’m in love with another one of my regulars, you know her, maybe? 6 ft tall? Stunning grey eyes? Could be seen as terrifying (but don’t let her fool you)? Oh yes, the muscle for the biggest drug dealer in the under city?

You shake your head to try and clear your thoughts. “Just restless, I guess. A bit in my own head.”

Geoffrey regards you seriously for a few moments. “You miss your family?”

It’s a good excuse so you lean into it. “Oh yes, I know I can’t hide from you.” You slouch back onto the sofa curling up. He follows you down, sliding in next to you, close and warm. You search for a speck of truth to make a convincing lie. “My niece, it will be her birthday soon. Another I’ve missed. She must be so tall now.” The tears that start to fill your eyes even start to convince you.

They are real, the tears. She will be so big, and you are missing it.

Geoffrey swipes a handkerchief over your cheek, catching a few stray tears then handing it to you. You stare down at the delicately embroidered edge and chastise yourself. Gather, yourself, together.

“I’m sorry my dear, but I can’t lie, this plays into what I’d wanted to talk about with you today.” He turns as much as he can to face you. “I’d like to make you an offer.”

“An offer?” You echo, not sure you’d heard the word correctly. Your gaze shifts up to Geoffrey’s face.

“I know you’d like to return to Demacia and I know while you might be making a fine living here, but I can offer you more, and I can offer it quickly. Come and live with me and be my companion.” His face belies the casual tone of the offer, there is a light tremor of nervousness. The famous businessman isn’t sure if his proposal will be accepted, maybe growing brash in his old age. It seems a big gamble for him and in a way, that impresses you.

“Your companion?” You echo again. Where have your words gone?

He straightens up a bit, rolling into his explanation. “I’d like you to come and stay with me. Well, not with me. I have a comfortable apartment near my house in Piltover, with a view of the bay -lovely sunset - that you’d have all to yourself. You’d have whatever you’d need: new clothes, food, new books, whatever you can imagine. You’d be able to spend most of your time the way you’d like, but a few times a week, I’d like company. And once and while I’d need you to accompany me to an event, dinner, party, what have you. I’m wrapping up my business affairs and then I intend to retire, travel and see the world.”

You struggle to grasp the scope of it, what a large offer he is making, how this will solve so many of things that plague you.

Geoffrey contintes, “It would be a year. One year. And then you can go. I’ll even arrange the travel for you, back to Demacia.”

You just stare at him, mind reeling. It’s the ideal offer. It’s what you’d hoped would happen, all those months ago. When you started at the Gardens, after your first client, fumbling in the dark, harsh breath on your neck and then you’d gotten more money than you’d ever had before. The sting of it wore off, you’d found joy with the others, support, and love of friends, even enjoyment with clients. The whispers you’d heard of workers before you, finding people who took them away, lavish lives, money, society, security. You’d wondered if you’d see anything like that for yourself, allowing you to leave sooner and back with your family.

“How much?” You hear yourself ask.

His face breaks into an easy grin. “How much would you need?”

You give him a number, in your haste, exaggerating, but not by much. It feels like an exorbitant sum, so much money, more than you’d ever known in your life. You’d be able to buy the farmland for you family, medicine for you mother, help with the school, be able to…

His grin is wide, offering you double the amount. You must look shocked because you are.

Geoffrey rises to his feet. “My dear, happiness can’t be bought or paid for. Security can be.” He comes to stand in front of you, grabbing both of your hands and pulling you to your feet. He is quite handsome for an older man, you think, men aren’t usually your preference, but he is nice to look at.

“My only ask is that you have discretion with your affairs. I don’t care with the other company you keep, or what you do with your time, I will just ask you keep it to yourself.” He sweeps another soft kiss over your cheek.

“I’ll let you think about it. If you decide to accept, I will have to have you sign some formal papers. I will send those over to Babette.” He grabs his over coat, shrugging it back on.

“You don’t have to leave,” you look around the room confused, still processing what’s happened.

“No, I am alright. I think we’ve both had enough for today.” One last squeeze to your hand and he is sweeping out of the door.

You stand in the middle of the room in a daze. Your eyes tracking over the steaming tea, your book still on the sofa, the curtains around the door still gently waving, a ghost of what he left.

Havok. Earthquake. Destruction… following in his path.

You can’t take it; you can’t except it.

Why not?

You know why not; you just can’t admit it. What a fucking stupid...

You need too, you need to take it. There is no good reason not, only one big, bad one.

You kick your boot over the edge of the roof you’re perched on. You’ve been here for a few hours taking in the afternoon - now early evening – sun, shining along the edge over the taller buildings in lower Piltover.

From this vantage point, you can see across the bridges, sweeping up into the grand, tall buildings of the north city. You’ve never been to that side of town, never had a reason. You can see the neat rows of buildings along the bay, nestled next to the nest of large ships, glinting blueness of the water. Over, there, somewhere is where you might live.

You’ve been trying to shape your mind into the life, this new version of you. She would only need to exist for a year: a dutiful companion, a prize to be shown off. You wonder if Geoffrey had this in mind all along.

Smart businessman, he learned enough about you to find a way to make an offer you wouldn’t be able to refuse.

You’ve been so many versions of yourself since arriving in Piltover, one you expected a few you hadn’t.

It’s the newest version of yourself that holding your discission hostage. She has a great reason not to go, she has someone she loves, someone she wants desperately to care for. She is allowing better judgment to take a holiday.

She is forgetting the reality of your situation. Sevika doesn’t return those feelings. And even if she did, even if there was a world, she did… you can’t stay to be with her.

If that’s even what she’d want.

You ease yourself into your back, legs dangling over the edge. The sky is starting to take on the soft blue-grey color just before sunset, dotted with fluffy streaks of clouds.

You’ll take it, and within a year you’ll be home, in time for the snow, for the winter festival.

Now, you wonder if you should tell her, or just slip away into the gleaming streets of Piltover.

You had laid in bed that night, mulling over and over how you’d tell Sevika, or not tell her at all.

Barely getting any sleep, you finally got out of bed late into the morning. You know of an appointment in the early afternoon, and you’d promised you show Blu how to do their hair up in a new style. Early in the evening you came back to your room to get yourself ready. Sevika would arrive in a few hours.

Warm from your bath and the herbal tea you’d made yourself, you curled up on the sofa to read until she’d arrive.

You’d been wide awake when you sat down, as you’d laid there, absorbed in the sweeping tale of love and war, your tiredness overtook you to quickly to realize.

A hindbrain instinct makes you jerk out of sleep. The cushion under you shifts as your eyes blink open. You must move or reach out and you feel a gentle hand glide over your shoulder.

“It’s alright,” Sevika’s voice is soft and close as you blink your eyes open.

You try to talk but your voice is stiff with sleep. You’re not sure how long she has been in the room with you, but you notice her drape is off, tossed over the chair near the door. You watch as she places your book on the low table next to you.

Pushing your hair back from you face, she lets her warm fingertips linger along your cheek. “How long have you been asleep?” She moves to grab your tea, cold now, and helps you take a sip.

It coats your throat enough for you to creek out an answer. “I think, only an hour or so.” You shift to sit up as she places the cup back down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to– “She reaches and cuts you off, treading a hand into your hair, tilting towards you, bringing her forehead to touch yours.

“You looked peaceful. I didn’t want to wake you.” She whispers into the space between you.

You’re still wrapped in the blanket you’d curled up in. Warm over you, fingertips sure on the back of your neck and the burning heat from her, lights you up as your heart wrenches in your chest.

Maybe it’s good your leaving, maybe it’s good you won’t have to be around her, twisted up with your feelings and knowing she doesn’t…

Shifting she brings your mouths together and you gasp into the kiss. Her body rocks forwards, pushing you back into the soft cushions. You stretch out, hands sliding over her shoulders, allowing yourself to be pulled into the fire burning in you, raiding down to your fingertips.

You kiss like that, feeding the warmth between you. Your fingertips lingering on the cut of her jawline, hers twisting into your hair. Its soft and decadent, like sweet warm tea.

Maybe she is soft with you. Maybe she is caring to you. Maybe she is kind, close, maybe you’ve seen her in a way no one else has. But now, you can’t even ask, its to precarious. If she does care about you and you walk away -which you have too- the roots will be too large. All of you will crumble.

But you want. You want her. You want her to remember you. Not just another worker from the Garden’s - you want her to remember you. To haunt her, see your face in corners, reflected in others.

The surge of strength you have, raising yourself, taking her with you, knowing she could easily overpower, but you brim with pride that she allows you…

You grasp her by her jaw, one hand steady, titling her face back so you can look into her eyes. The other hand trails down to tease her shirt down between her breasts.

“What do you want?” You ask, you always ask. “Cause I know something I’d like.”

Her eyes flash curiously at you, a bit blurry and you feel a rush knowing you’ve done this to her with lingering kisses and soft touches.

“You can have whatever you want from me.” her voice catches, rough with desire, stalling on her breath.

She can’t mean it, not the way you want, but you let out a pleased moan at the statement, the jolt of arousal answering in your body.

You want to her cum against your mouth, like she had done for you months ago. You’ve thought of it, alone in your bed, late at night. Now might be your one chance to have her.

Your body is shaking with restraint, so you move slowly, her eyes on yours. Pushing her back as you stand, you nudge her in direction of your bed. You’ve envisioned this so many times, you know just how you want it.

Pulling of her vest as you move and her belt from its loops, sliding your fingers in her shirt opening the front, revealing her chest, you try to calm your nerves. Skittering with excitement starting to make your limbs tremble.

Her hands are at her sides, clenching her fists. Your eyes keep traveling from her body back to watch her eyes burn. The grey so intense it shines in the dim light as you busy yourself with pushing the shirt over and off her shoulders.

She is bare from the waist up and you’re going to let yourself enjoy it. You’ve backed her up to the edge of your bed as you run your hands over her shoulders, down her chest, over her muscles and her breasts, your fingers catching on their fullness. Teasing her nipples and you jump at her answering hiss of pleasure. She finally brings a hand to your waist and one along your shoulder, not getting in your way but seemingly trying to steady herself.

“You are so beautiful.” You can’t keep the complement in as you look up into her eyes. The furrow of her brow answers your suspicion.

“You are…” trailing off as your fingertips play with her, “so beautiful,” you continue, distracted.

“I’m-“ she starts and you cut her off.

“I’m not in the habit of lying.” You remind her, dragging a hand down her stomach, along the ridges of her abdomen and tracing the cut of her hip bones. Finally, you tease the edge of her waist band, rubbing the backs of fingertips along the skin there, sliding a few under the edge.

Looking up into her eyes you tell her, “I want to use my mouth.” Her answering gasp, the hands on you tightening in surprise, make your pussy throb in response, but you’ll have to deal with that later. She looks down at you, fraught, almost tortured, so you push her back onto the bed.

Getting down onto your knees at her feet, you reach up and unbutton her pants, sliding down the zipper. She rolls up on her elbows, her mouth hanging open as she pants. She looks undone and unguarded, yes, just like you wanted, like you imagined.

You pull down her pants and her underwear, she helps by raising her hips, stopping only to unzip her boots and tug everything off. You can hear her huff out a sound, to quiet for you to catch the word, and you see her head hang back.

Gods, you are dripping down between your own legs as you gently push hers farther apart by her knees and you finally let yourself look. Sevika glistens, wanting, waiting for you. Your mouth waters in return. Trailing your hands up the insides of her thighs, you feel the muscles twitching with restraint.

You lean in and run your mouth along the inside of her thigh, dragging your lips long the skin, soft and unmarred. Her answering moan above you makes your eyes snap open and her eyes lock with yours.

Undone, she looks on the edge of control. You tease the skin until the crease of her hip and then slide your wet tongue up along the cut, placing a soft kiss to the neatly trimmed patch of hair above the apex of her thighs. Her hips rock up, then still, and you hear her groan again above you.

“Please…” its barely audible, choaked out and you can’t say no to one of the most powerful women in the undercity, begging you. Moving your mouth right over her, right where she wants it, right where do too, teasing her for only a few more seconds, letting your breath fan out. Finally, you lower your mouth licking to catch her clit and you both moan on contact. Swaying forward you push your mouth firmly over her as her taste explodes over your tongue.

You dive in, coaxing her lips apart with yours and she is soaked, dripping down your chin, coating your mouth as you lick over her folds, taking in where she is slick and messy up to where you suck on her clit making her shake above you, another moan tearing out of her.

“Gods… fuck…” she grits out, rocking her hips into your face. Her hands are curled into fists into the bed sheets. You’re determined to make this last, to draw out every bit because it will be what you can take with you, the memory of all of this.

She shifts under you, trying to grind her pussy into your face and you can’t help the grin that tugs at your lips. You aren’t as strong as she is, not by a long shot, but gravity and leverage are on your side. Wrapping your arms around her thighs, you use your shoulders to press her hips down onto the bed, pinning her down, helpless under your mouth - under your control.

“Fuck…” she tries to grit out and you distract her with a particularly viscous stuck to her clit. “Gods… you look… stop… teasing.”

You laugh softly against her, and her body rolls back against the vibrations of your mouth. Seeing her from this angle is impressive, and she is impressive enough already. You watch the shift of her muscles, her stomach rolling with her hips, her arms flexing, coming up to grip at the pillow under her head, her abdominals flickering with each breath, twitch, surge of pleasure.

She starts to get close, her hips rocking incessantly now, and your struggle to keep your mouth on her. You are determined, you want this, you need it.

Digging in, you steal yourself, wrapping your hands down and around her hips, anchoring yourself into her lap, your mouth firmly over her center, as it builds.

Her words devolve into broken moans, then moans turn into gasps. She keeps trying to lift her head to look down at you and keeps falling back on a roll of her body, her eyes fluttering shut again.

When she comes, she nearly bucks you off her lap, but you hold her in place with all of strength. Your mouth works furiously, keeping up with the hot pulse of her clit under your tongue.

As her hips slowly stop, you place one last soft kiss to her mound. Looking up, you catch her just in time to watch her body roll up, grabbing you under your arms, lifting you off your knees and dragging you into her lap.

She makes space for both of you on the bed, drawing you in along your waist and kissing you fiercely. Her wetness coats your mouth making the kiss sloppy and her post orgasm haze makes it bite, her teeth catching on your lower lip.

Sevika reaches down between your bodies and you take the space to reach down and tease her nipples again. She bites off a moan against your mouth.

“Stop,” she grits out, reaching under your skirt and between, “distracting me.”

Her fingers are smart, easily finding her way and then realizing she has nothing obstructing her path, fingertips gliding over your wet, waiting folds.

The moan you make is obscene, you are so worked up you are surprised you don’t come immediately. She gasps, her fingers having no resistance against your sopping wet pussy, almost too much, too slick, sliding down your slit, easily dipping into your entrance, “You’re so wet…” she breathes out, almost reverently. “Did eating me out make you this hot?”

You shiver so violently you’d might worry you might fall off her lap, but her iron grip around your waist reminds, with its biting possession, you aren’t going anywhere. You are drawn into the sensation, sitting in her lap, her palm rocking against your clit as she fills you. Starting with one finger, your so slick, it’s easy. Then another, two feeing fantastic and gods, you’re dripping down her wrist. And three, the stretch delicious and you are borderline delirious. At some point your head has lulled forward onto her shoulder, your hands are gripping her forearms like a lifeline, feeling her bicep flex with how she fucks you, her other holding tight to you as you ride it out.

She pitches her head forward, bringing her mouth close to the shell of your ear, her warm breath stirring the fine hairs. “If I’d know that eating pussy would get you like this, I’d have let you do it a long time ago.”

You clench so hard around her fingers you think you are going to cum, but you don’t somehow, just barely on the that edge. You try to beg but you can’t form words. You can do anything but take her fingers as she fucks you and try to drag air into your lungs in erratic gasps.

She adjusts her fingers once more, sliding a fourth finger in and picks up her pace, fucking you in earnest, her arm flexing under your grasp with the effort. You’re teetering on the edge of subspace, so you just catch her grit out into your ear…

“Be a good girl for me and cum.” And you do.

You’re lost to it, for several seconds, whiting out. Nothing else exists but the haze of pleasure, your body locking down and you come back, the white fizzling out, and she gently fucks you down from your high.

She must hear it in your soft moans that it’s boarding on overstimulation, so she slows. Gently withdrawing her fingers, she uses gravity and her strength to bring you both down onto the bed. Wrapping you along her side, tucking you into the warm crook of her arm, your head pillowed on her shoulder she turns her body towards you. Now are wrapped in the circle of her arms.

After a few moments you find yourself fighting sleep, trying to blink our eyes open. Her smile is small as it pulls at the soft corners of her mouth. It’s so fond looking and you have to convince yourself it’s all in your head.

“You better be careful, unless you want to sleep here again.” You warn her, reaching out a hand and tapping it along her sternum, which she catches, drawing her fingers around yours, and resting it along the warmth of her skin.

“Maybe I’d like too,” Her voice so soft and teasing that you barely catch it, but the pull of your dreams is too strong. Before you can make a teasing comment back, you sink into the rising tide of sleep.

Chapter Text

You haven’t woken up like this in ages. Maybe since you were young? Rising slowly from the inky darkness of your dreams, floating up to the living world. Coming to, you feel warm and safe, skin against your cheek and your head pillowed on a muscular arm, you slowly blink your eyes open.

You’ve turned into her neck as you’ve slept, your lips open and resting along a pulse point.

Sevika is still asleep, peacefully, on her back, with her fingertips still holding your wrist, resting along your skin. Her face is tilted towards the ceiling, allowing you to have the perfect view of her profile.

This moment will be all for you, no one else will get to have her like this, holding her in the soft morning. Her eyelashes resting on the curve of her cheek and… you’re so in love with her; it hurts, aches, twists, burns.

You indulge, watching her sleep, knowing this is your goodbye. Your entwined fingers rising with her breath as they lay together over her heart.

However she my feel about you, it almost doesn’t matter, this moment, this will always be just for you.

When she wakes you greet her with a soft kiss, and when she pulls you in tightly, you go willingly, joyfully, gratefully.

Kissing goodbye near the door you know it will be your last, but she doesn’t. Stealing a look into her eyes as your fingertips warm her cheeks, you smile up at her.

When she walks through the door you say a goodbye that only you can hear.

Dot, while bringing your morning tea, lets you know Babette needs to talk to you.

It must have arrived, Geoffrey’s offer.

You still wait, drawing out the day with nonsense, until a look out the window tells you it’s close to sundown. Then, finally, the need to go and talk with Babette before your evening appointments wins out.

Slipping into Babette’s office, you steal yourself for this conversation. Her face breaks into an easy grin when she looks up from whatever ledger she is working. You try to keep your body language causal as you walk to the other side, pausing behind one of the plush, pink chairs, trying to cover your nerves.

“You wanted to see me?” You ask, trying to keep your voice light.

“Yes, dear.” She set down her pen and closes the large ledger. “Sit, please.” She motions you to do so. A moment of silence beats out and when you peer over, and Babette is smiling at you softly, fondly.

“My dear, you’ve had an offer.” She says, reaching to a drawer at her desk and pulling out a large envelope. “Geoffrey let me know he’s discussed it with you, but he was trying to respectful to send it thought me. It’s a bit old fashioned, but given it’s from, it makes sense.”

Babette levers herself over the desk and hands you the envelope. On the front it’s marked to be delivered to her. “It’s an older practice, not how I run my business. Before most brothels operated to have workers repay debts or work for a contract. If someone wanted to have the worker for themselves, they would need to buy the debt out. It’s why he still sent it to me. I’d like to take it as a good sign, on how your partnership might go, that he asked you first.”

Hopping off her chair she moves around to stand next to you, her head barely reaching your shoulder. Taking one of your hands from the envelope, she holds it between two of hers. It’s a reminder of how much she fights, how much she protects, everyone and everything she has made.

“I sent him a reply that I would give this to you, and it will be your decision.” She pats the back of your hand, looking warmly up at you. “As it should be.”

Your thoughts are misty and muffled. You open your mouth to reply as Babette squeezes your hand between hers in a comforting gesture. “No rush in your reply, take your time. Or never respond, it’s all up to you.”

You aren’t sure what you should be doing with yourself, you just stare are your hands as they clutch as the oversized envelope. Trying to force a smile, you drag yourself upwards, blearily making your way towards the doorway. Babette’s forehead wrinkles in concern.

“Oh,” Babette stops you with your hand on her door. “If you want to talk about any of this, I am always around to lend an ear.”

“Sure,” you answer in your haze. “Thank you…” you reply as you step through the doorway into the cool blue light of the main hallway. Distantly you can hear a couple laughing while one of the pool rooms bubbles away. Music filters through from the main room, voices, and glasses tinkling, twining together.

It’s real now, the offer, sure at it is on paper. Like a book Geoffrey would bring you, just short of being bound. You wish it was a book, one you could flip open to the last few pages and see how it ends.

You’ve already made your decision and you want to read the heartbreak before it happens.

Babette helps you draft your response to Geoffrey, asking a few days to get everything in order before you leave. You spend an afternoon pouring over the agreement he sent you as you only understand half of it, asking Miguel and Babette for help.

In the end you send the reply with your note and signature, barely dry on the paper. He replies with an additional offer, to send half of the money in advance to Demacia, as a gesture of good faith. Babette and Miguel appreciate this, and as they are the closest thing you have to family in the Lanes, you agree. Geoffroy offers to send workers to collect your things and you can follow. Your new address is included, and the deal is set.

You tell your closest friend first, watching Blu’s eyes well with tears as you hug them close.

Babette waits to announce to the rest of the workers until a day before you leave, your last evening to be spent packing up you room.

Before the evening showing, Miguel and Babette will often have the workers meet. Babette makes the announcement for you, at your request, choosing to take everyone congratulations from the sidelines. You all have a toast together, it’s sweet and warm and wrapped in the sparkling bubbles of champagne.

You realize later, as you are going around the room and collecting well wishes, that Dot is missing, but you don’t think much of it, she was here at the toast, she must be getting something important together, you’ll be sure to say goodbye to her before you leave, she’ll most likely bring you breakfast.

Afterwards, you go up to finish packing, your schedule clear before you leave the next morning.

You start with your most important items, your medical kit and herbal remedies, tucking them in with your few pieces of precious jewelry and the embroidered shawl your mother had sent you with when you let for Piltover. It was a favorite of hers, warm, soft, with a traditional embroidery dotted along the edge. You wrap the small trinkets you niece and nephew had given you, two of their favorite small toys to keep you company.

Your door is open propped open while you pack, and few other workers stuck their heads in with good luck wishes or to say their goodbyes. Flora brings you some dinner, admonishing you for not feeding yourself properly, asking you to be better when you leave, when she can’t bother you about it.

While folding your clothes, the dresses you’ve gotten since working at the Gardens and the few pairs of pants you’d brought with you from Demacia, you feel something in the air shift, causing the hair on the back of your neck to stand on end.

You are aware of someone watching you.

Heart hammering in your chest, you feel the dress you’d been folding drop from your hands. Turning, slowly, you face the doorway.

Sevika stands there, looking around your room as if it’s going to provide her an answer to a great mystery. You are frozen in return. You’d said your goodbyes, you’d-

She takes a step towards you, into the room, past the door’s threshold. Looking only at you now, her eyes keep flickering between a look of pain and a firm frown, the line of her mouth ridged.

“You know,” she says moving into the room, “I paid to get information about you.”

She keeps moving, taking another careful step towards you, where you are frozen, hand hovering over the clothes on your bed.

“I paid Dot to let me know if anything happened to you. It’s how I knew you’d been attacked. And today…” She trails off, her attention shifting, running her fingers over a pile of books in a box.

You are still frozen on the spot, pinned, like an animal in a trap, just like you’d been the first time you’d meet her.

“She came running today, to tell me you’re leaving. That was all she said.” Her eyes drag from a pile of your belongings up to your face, now only a few steps away. “That you’re leaving in the morning. Where are you going?”

It doesn’t sound like the question she wants to ask, the words to unsure of themselves.

“I’m…” you start to explain, and words fail you...the look on her face makes you feel like you’re breaking apart.

Turning, you need to distract yourself, you pick a piece of clothing and start to fold it into a neat package. You’d never planned on having this conversation, so you’d never prepared yourself for it.

“I’m going to go with another client of mine. He offered me the money I need for a year with him. I am going to move into an apartment he has in Piltover.”

“What money to you need?” You can hear you step closer, boots causing the floorboards to creak.

“The money I need to back home, to Demacia.” You say, folding a shirt into a neat package, shoving it down into your bag.

“Demacia…” she trails off, and you know you’ve never told her, never even volunteered it to her, too much of yourself to give to someone that already has so much of it. She already has your heart; you can’t give her your whole story.

“He’s never treated me badly and Babette and Miguel thought the way he made his offer to me was a good sign.” You reply and Sevika makes a soft, barely audible, frustrated noise behind you. “I am not naive; I might not have grown up here, but I understand this world. He is offering me the money I wanted to leave within a 5th of the time.” You furiously toss garments into your bag, feeling her move behind you.

You press on. “I’m not making this decision lightly.”

She scoffs and there is a pause while you can hear her shift on her feet. “You will have no protection,” she replies, you can hear her start pacing, again.

“It’s too good an offer to refuse.” You tell her.

She huffs out an angry breath.

“I can watch over myself.” You supply. “I’m not completely without –“

“I know you can.” She cuts you off, sounding frustrated. “That’s not what this is about.”

“There are many others here that you will enjoy - I’ll introduce you.” The words sour on your tongue, but you must redirect this conversation before more spills out. “I think you’ll like…” you’re cut off by her grip along your arm, gentle and unwavering. Pressed close along you back, she pulls you gently towards her body.

“You can’t leave.” She is close along your back, the edge of her voice so ready to break. She breathes out an exasperated noise. “You were just going to leave, and not tell me?

“We don’t owe anything to each other.” As soon as the words fly form your mouth you know they sting, that they lie, that they will draw blood like knives. You said that out of hurt, hurt that she didn’t cause.

It isn’t her fault that she just the salt in the wound.

Whipping around to face her and Sevika’s open expression stabs at your heart; distraught, then angry, her expressions shifting. Finally, she shakes her head and starts towards the door.

“Wait!” You start to chase after and its only her moment to stop and grab her red drape off the of the chair that you can catch her, clutching onto her forearm, knowing that while you did injure her, she would never do the same to you.

“Let go,” She grits out, trying to pry you off but you swing in front of her, getting between her and the door. She pushes forward and by some miracle you have the thought to catch the door’s edge, pushing it closed as she moves you towards it, closing it with the same motion she crowds you against it.

“I-“ You stop at the shock of tears spilling down your face. “I didn’t mean it, I was -fuck” Your head lulls back as you fight the urge to sob.

Sevika brushes a few tears away, her hand cupping your cheek. After a few moments you blink your eyes slip back open.

“I couldn’t do this. It was the coward’s way out and I took it. I couldn’t look at you and tell you it was done.” You end on a defeated sound that seeps out of you, faster than you can stop it. You start to shake as she pulls you to her chest, so you flatten into her, tucking your head into her shoulder. Her hands answer your distress, treading into your hair, tucking you close. You can feel her frantic heartbeat against your lips as you fight sobbing into her skin.

If this is a goodbye, it’s not the one you want to have with her. You can’t be a crying mess, if anything, it’s not the image you want to leave her with.

Pulling back, you run a hand up her chest, over her shoulder up into her hair, threading it though your fingers, appreciating, then tightening into a fist. Drawing her in, you focus on her mouth, as you can’t trust what’s shining in your eyes. Kissing her, you bury it down, push it aside. The shift of this, what you want, your drive to gain control of this situation and your emotions, feels precarious, makes you dizzy.

“You can have me, one more time.” Whispering against her lips, you curl your fingers around the sharp edge of her jaw, reaching behind to throw the lock on your door. When she doesn’t move, your nerves start to get the best of you. “Don’t you want me?”

So desperate, so…

You let your eyes meet hers and it was a bad idea. Her mouth twists downwards in a frown, brows furrowed to a crease, and she is nothing but gentle in return to you. Hands soft on your neck.

“Please…” it slips out of your mouth, soft and pleading, ready to beg as you take another breath, and she pulls instead.

She moves quick, pulling you along with confident strides, pushing you back you back on the bed, sweeping your clothes and errant items to the floor, sending clattering, rolling objects and a few books falling off and open.

You quickly undo your robe and pull your nightgown up and off.

She is much slower to undress, so you join her to pull off her vest, shirt. During the struggle to push down her pants is when she moves you back and you wait, on the edge of your bed, watching as she finishes.

There is a pause when she turns, looking between you, eyes raking up your body and you do the same.

Please, get your fill, you think. Etch me into the corners of your mind where I am hardest to get out.

Then she moves.

You’ve rarely been like this, on your back with her between your legs, her thighs spread wide and under yours, your hips angled up to give her access. Rocking forward she uses her hips to push her fingers deeper, curling just so, causing your thighs to shake and whine to slip past your lips.

Reaching up as she lowers herself down, you wrap your hand around her neck and draw her close. Your body keeps rolling up, caught in the drag of her fingers as you trying to draw her in by her mouth, close enough to kiss, but your body will get caught in a wave of pleasure, back arching in response.

Dragging her cool fingertips down your body, catching on your nipples, pressing in on the softness of your stomach, brushing over the sensitive skin of your neck, you feel like you are being torn apart, bit by bit. Overheated skin, slick with sweat as you keep rocking your body towards your pleasure, each drag pulls something out of you, a whine, gasp, or shiver.

Sevika looks down at you, brow furrowed, close in concentration, calculating, assessing you. You keep trying to hold onto the thread in your mind, but your attention slips, mind clouding, being pulled into the pleasure that surrounds you.

You’re desperate to stay like this. Having it again, having her close, you can’t loose it. You can’t.. you can’t…

Your orgasm surprises, sweeping over you, like a strong breeze, knocking you clean off your axes, dragging you down.

Coming back to yourself, she still looms over. Blinking your overstimulated tears from your eyes you realize she is gently dragging her hands down your body, as if cataloging your parts.

Reaching out, your fingertips search for her cheek, the curve of her neck, something. She meets you halfway, curling down over you, shifting her weight as she does, slotting her thigh between yours.

Rocking her hips, she starts to take her pleasure from you, moaning into your mouth or neck.

After a slew of eager kisses, you can feel her fighting it, the climax you know she must be near.

“Give it to me…” slips out of you, treaded into a whine. “I want to make you cum.” Your hands wind into her hair as she jolts in your arms, pulling her head back to look into your eyes as it overtakes her, dying by fractions.

You nurse her thought it, brushing fingers down her back, murmuring to her, finally she breaks your gaze and tucks her head back into your neck, mouth dragging over a pulse point.

She seems to settle in, tucking herself into your body, head on your chest, arms wrapped around you.

You should say something, but you can’t think of what, so you keep running your hands over her skin, up and down her back and it seems, after a while of breathing in the stillness together, you feel her relax with sleep.

Just a few minutes you think, just a few then you need to get up and, what… ask her to leave?

You should, you know what’s going to happen - it’s what happened the last few times you’ve done this. Your sleepy post orgasm haze, the warmth of her around you… you might…

You’re asleep you before you can finish the thought.

You wake up alone, bedclothes cold next to you, curled as if she was still with you.

It fits, you think. After everything, she still leaves.

You’ll have a whole year to be sad about it. Now you must finish packing. The voice, cold, calm, in your head reminds.

A year, you think. A whole year and then you’ll be gone.

Getting up, you switch the light on your nightstand back on, grab your bag and pick up where you left off.

You take a moment at the doorway. It doesn’t look that different with all the bits of you removed. You didn’t come to Piltover with much, but you’ve been here for months, in this room, living and building a little life for yourself.

This version of you leaves now, she won’t ever exist again.

You grab your last bag and hand it to the mover Geoffroy hired to take you things to your apartment. He’d sent a note that he would meet you when you arrived.

Moving down the back staircase, Miguel, Babette, Dot, Blue and few others have gathered to say goodbye.

Blu wraps you in a hug and you tuck your head on their shoulder. You can feel their tears along your cheeks, where you’re press together. “Don’t worry,” You tell them, “I’ll see you soon.”

“You owe me that one book, you haven’t finished it yet.” Their eyes sparkle with tears and you heart thuds away in your chest. “The one about the war-“

“Yes, I will finish and bring it with me.” You move back from the hug and smile up at them. “And the pirate one? You wanted that one as well.”

“Be safe and come visit when you’d like.” Babette says, pulling your attention towards her. Reaching up for your hands, slipping yours into hers. “We will all miss you.”

Tears well in your eyes; you hate goodbyes. “Of course.”

“Miguel will make sure you get there.” And she motions towards the back door where he stands with Dot.

You take a moment and look out over at your friends. You favor all with a smile, taking in the shining eyes, and sad, but smiling faces.

“I will miss you all.” You tell them. Looking down at your remaining hand, clasped with Babette’s. “Thank you.”

Releasing her hands, you move towards the door. Miguel gives you a small smile, sad around his eyes and you both through the doorway.

You will walk with him to the bathysphere and then across Piltover to your new life, the newest version of you.

Dot walks out into the grey afternoon light with you and hands the case over to Miguel.

“Thank you, Dot.” She all but throws herself into your hug. “Try to stay out of trouble.”

“Oh, that’s no fun,” her voice is rough, she is fighting tears, you can tell. You remember what you’d wanted to ask her while you are wrapped together.

“Dot,” You lean back to match her eyes, “I’ve got a job for you. If something happens to Sevika, there will be coin in for you to tell me.” Her eyes glint at you.

Stepping back, you offer you hand to shake. “Deal?” you ask.

The old women’s eye crinkle with her smile. “Deal.”

Chapter Text

Memory works in odd ways.

When you arrive at your new apartment, you think it will all feel so strange, a new place to learn, customs to observe, traditions to absorb.

But it isn’t, you slip in seamlessly.

The first week Geoffrey’s assistant comes to take you to buy new- well - almost everything. From new dresses in the Piltover style, shoes that gleam in the sun, gloves, hats, perfume that’s smells of some sort of flower you can’t quite remember. Geoffrey gives you a bracelet on one of your first outings, made of delicate chain with a small, star shaped charm, and he makes a show of placing on your wrist.

Twice a week someone comes with your allowance (something Geoffrey had to explain to you) so you can buy whatever you need.

With your new clothes and fresh haircut, something you’d barely thought off since arriving, you end up looking slightly more polished, pristine, but you can’t shake the feeling as if you’re wearing a costume. But if you are honest, you haven’t often felt like yourself since you arrived in Piltover, so perhaps this is just a new one. Some part of you should worry how good you’ve become at playing parts.

Geoffrey is a good distraction. He delights in showing you Piltover, the city of progress.

On his arm you’ve been lead around every gleaming corner. He takes you into museums, art galleries, restaurants, and musical halls. Your favorite is the bookstore, only a few blocks from your apartment, that he is almost giddy with excitement to show you around. Tucked in a corner street, the shelves reach up to ceilings and the owner, an old friend of his, loves to question you until they can find the best recommendation.

For version of you, this could be a paradise.

The version of you that lives and breathes in the moment, battles with her lovesick heart.

The first month living in Piltover had been dotted with trips to see your friends in the undercity. Just as Geoffrey has requested, you are discrete, always tucking yourself away in your old clothes, often choosing to wind down the storefronts into the lanes and riding the bathysphere at the end of your visit, when you are both emotionally and physically tired.

Being in Blu’s presence warms you, hearting melting in a way you hadn’t realized you’d missed. You thought you’d miss it, the easy friendship you had with them, but being together, their warmth folds over you like cozy blanket on a cold night.

You’ve been sitting together for some time, enjoying your conversation and the box of treats you’d brought with you from the bakery near your apartment. Blu is the constant, but as you’ve sat together for most of the afternoon others have filtered in. Babette herself sits with you for a cup of tea, while Miguel, always busy, bustles in to give you a hug and then he is out the door again.

“Well honey, you’d better get going. I’ve got to get ready for tonight.” Blu moves to gather up the few cups and plates and you join them, pulling on you coat, putting the room back together just as you had so many times before. It’s quick work with two people.

Blu meets you at the door, their soft face shining down at you. Reaching out and tucking you into their chest, you take a moment to sink into the hug. You haven’t been hugged in weeks you realize with a jolt, not by them, not by someone who’d just do it to show you love.

“Do you miss it?” Blu asks softly, their chin resting on you head.

“I miss you.” You pull back as tears threaten to spill. “I miss all of you.” Blu gives you a gentle cuff under your chin.

“Give Flora a hug for me? Hopefully I will see her next time.” You tell them, then you duck out into the main hallway.

You move swiftly back to the stairs to slip out the rear entrance when a voice halts you in your tracks, body rocking forward as your feet stick like they are glued to the stairs.

Her voice seems to reverberate long the floorboards, up the rise and run of the stairs, though the soles of your shoes, and shatter up along every nerve in your body. Your hands come out to steady yourself on the banister. What are the odds she would be here at the same time? You wonder, but you can’t help your curiosity. If you leave without checking the ghost of her will haunt you, even more than it already has.

Careful to find the dark side of the railing, you lean over where the steps double back, tucking your face into the shadows.

Sevika chats easily with one of the workers, Cora you just remember, she was newer when you left. Very pretty in an emerald-colored gown, Cora smiles up at Sevika, reaching to run her fingers over the bare skin of her stomach. Sevika, in turn, reaches out to run her fingertips along Cora’s bare shoulder.

You manage to catch yourself in time to bite your lip, stifling any noises that threaten to slip out. Wrenching yourself away, you try your best to keep quiet as you finish you journey up and out of the building.

Vision blurry, you stumble along the lanes, pulling your hood close around your face, tucking yourself out of sight.

By the time you get to the bathysphere to make the journey up, your body feels numb. You can’t really remember purchasing the ticket or sliding into the almost empty car.

As the phosphorescent glow of the undercity disappears below you, rising into the golden light of Piltover’s sunset, you lean back, letting the hot tears slip down your face.

You have no right to be upset, you chide yourself.

One evening, a week or so after, you’re enjoying your alone time, with a tea pot simmering on the stove while a book balances in your hands.

At first the noise startles you, a resounding boom, and you can’t place where and what causes it.

A second later the rattling starts, the wave of sound rolling over the city.

Lights flicker for a second, only to snap back on a moment later. You can’t remember what compels you to look down into the city streets below, maybe the sound of people shrieking, rattling glass, and you see people running in every direction.

You hear someone scream “Look! The council building!”

Stumbling out towards your terrace doorway you lean out along the railing, where if you crane your neck, just visible over the surrounding buildings, you can see the city center.

Glinting in the night sky, the Council building smolders, blocking out the stairs that lay beyond.

After the attack, you can’t travel across as officials have closed both bridges, blocking the only way you know to cross.

Not a word from your friends for weeks. It seems even Dot, with her never-ending cleverness, can even make it across.

You are cut off from the only tether you have in Piltover, not a word from your friends, and no way to get news that you are safe.

One afternoon, while you are twisted up in your nerves, returning from a walk, you spot a small girl waiting near your building’s entrance.

She’s a bedraggled little thing, torn clothes, gaunt, skin ashen with lack of sun, a child of Zaun.

“Hello!” She calls out to you. “I’ve got a letter! Do you know…” and she trails off shoving the creased envelope towards you. It’s addressed to you.

Tears fill your eyes, grateful and tumultuous.

Turning towards the little girl, you try to choke down your gratitude. “Do you want something to eat? Or take with you?”

You load up a bag for them, packets of food, small bottles of herbal remedies you give her coin to bring to Babette, you know she will get them to who is in need, a note for everyone at the Gardens so they know that you are safe.

Tucking the little girl into an oversized jacket, you stuff her pockets to the brim as well.

“You’ll be able to get back, alright?” You ask.

“I should be fine.” She flashes you a smile and scampers away, tucking herself along the street edges, already good at blending in.

You wait until you get up into your apartment to look at the letter Dot sent to you.

Her neat scrawl lines the pages, letting you know of what’s happened in the undercity. Your mind reels, eyes flying over each neat line. You pick out your friend’s names, everyone is fine, everyone is safe, as they can be, as they’ve ever been.

Down at the bottom you finally catch the name you’ve been waiting for; you realize with a bitter twist.

Sevika was beat to a pulp, tossed into the jukebox at the Last Drop, left for dead. Your heart starts to beat wildly, head dizzying. Before you realize, you’ve dropped to the floor, knees digging into the plush rug.

Vision blurring with tears, and nerves, you fight though, eyes focusing back on the page. Searching wildly, you read at a furious pace, until you find a line that lets you know she is alive. You choke on a happy laugh, giddy with the shift in your emotions.

Examining further, you catch on the last and most important details. A cool, calm washes over you.

Silco is dead.

Sevika is the boss now.

The day after the bridges open, you join the trickle of people and head down to the Garden’s. Blu’s tears run into your hair as you hug them, Flora tucks herself into your embrace, and Dot gently holds your face between her hands. You knew they were all safe but the relief of seeing it for yourself makes you almost dizzy. Miguel and Babette are as steadfast as ever, both happy see you are unharmed.

“I live on the other side of the city, I was fine.” You tell them as they release you from a hug, Babette’s arms lingering on your skirts, straightening you up.

You’ve brought them more herbal remedies, from the plants you’ve grown on your balcony, bandages, books, small treats.

A sense of relief washes over you, seated in one of the small rooms of the Gardens, one the that brims with plants.

The people you care about, safe, you warm the thought in the soft glow of the afternoon.

There is a house you visit often with Geoffrey, mostly for lavish parties. It’s one of his business partners, someone he has known for years. He always introduces you as his ‘companion’ for the evening, something that always makes the corners of your lips turn up in a faintly vailed smile. You’ve seen several customers of the Gardens while at these events, nodding in return when they greet you or avoid their gazes in kind.

Out of all of houses you visit, of all his business contacts, you like this couple the best. They are the most eccentric, with interesting friends, they themselves who love to travel. You’ve meet people from all over in this house. Bankers, people that probably should be called pirates, politicians, artists, everything in between. You don’t come very often, but you genuinely enjoy when you do.

What you do like best is their terrace that overlooks the city gardens with the bay in the distance. Lower Piltover, the lanes, glints past where the bridges break the land in two.

After you’d made polite conversation with several of Geoffrey’s friends, you always offer to get him a fresh drink, sweeping back as you drop it into his hands, then slip outside. You’ll bask out there as long as you can stand it, or until Geoffrey comes to collect you.

During one such party, a month or so after the bridges reopen, travel between upper and lower Piltover trickling back towards normal, you stand enjoying the warming evening. Soaking in the light, the colors of sunset bouncing off the waterline and splashing against the clouds, you turn your drink over in your hands, until the light breeze sliding off the ocean makes you shiver. Thinking about turning back in, Geoffrey beats you to it. Coming out with your wrap, pulling it around your shoulders, handing you another drink.

“Thank you,” you say as he pulls the soft velvet around your shoulders. “I was about to come and look for you.”

He smiles at you, the corners of his eyes crinkling handsomely. “I know you like the view here.”

“It’s a good one.” You move to enter the room and he stops you.

“You always slip away when we come here on this terrace. Take your time, enjoy it. Come in when you’ve had your fill.” He clinks his glass to yours, slides kiss along your cheek, and he slips back inside.

Geoffrey surprises you with his thoughtfulness. He shouldn’t because he proves it constantly, but it still always surprises.

So, you enjoy, nursing your drink until little remains, the sky is streaked with candy pink colors, and you’ve had your fill of imagining what everyone you know is going in the lanes; the bustle in the Gardens as business picks up for the evening. And you start to wonder what she would be up to now.

You haven’t had the nerve to contact her. Each time you visit the lanes, you head straight for the Gardens, stopping only the pickup something you crave from a food stall or from a vendor along the way.

The mere idea of seeing Sevika paralyzes you. You’d have no idea what to do with yourself, or what to say. You already feel like you are playing a dangerous game. Dot asked you a few days ago, while you had been sitting with her and Blu, if you wanted to know if Sevika had been to see anyone at the Gardens, she would have no idea you’d seen her there with Cora all those weeks ago.

You tried to play it cool, but you know you’d failed.

“No, not all, why would I…” and Dot had stopped you with a cool hand over yours. When you dared to look up at her, nothing but softness in her eyes. It hardened your heart for a moment, you didn’t need pity, you didn’t need…

“Dear,” she leaned in, pushing your hair out of your face, “it’s alright. I won’t say a thing.” And you are, always have been, grateful for her.

You guess it will be a matter of time until you do run into her. You’ll need to steal yourself for it when you do.

One cue, pulling from this self-pitying thought, the door creaks open behind you.

“I know, it’s getting cold, I’ll come in.” You turn expecting Geoffrey to be there, coming to collect you.

You almost drop your glass, only some hind-brain instinct managing to catch it before it slips from your fingertips.

Sevika is there, closing the door slowly behind her.

You are frozen, rooted to the spot, barely breathing, as if she is an apparition that you might scare off, as if you’d summoned her with your tortured pinning.

She is a ghost, one of your own making.

Nerves turning you as cold as ice, your eyes skate over her frame. Taking in her new clothes, a sharp suit, something you’d never seen her in, nicer shoes then her boots you’d been used too, but her hair, a constant, just a short and neat as it had always been.

You aren’t close enough to see if she has any new scars.

Her expression is natural, placid, except for her eyes, as she is studies you in turn, taking in your dress and shorter hair. Finally, her eyes come up to meet yours and you finally find a voice.

“What…what are you doing here?” You ask, and the bewildered tone slips past.

“I was invited.” She responds, slipping a causal hand into her pants pocket, the other holding a tumbler, amber liquid glinting in the fading light.

You can’t trust yourself to say or do anything.

If you speak, everything might just pour out of you. You might tell her you love her and being away from her has been the worst part. How you’ve laid in your bed at night and wanted nothing more than to get up and walk across the bridge to her. That when the tower exploded, she was first person you thought about. When you heard she almost died, how it crushed you, drawing your very breath out. Then you found out she was alive…

When you found out she is new boss, the head of the undercity…

If you move, you will just crawl into her arms and never leave, and the worst part is that you aren’t sure if she’d want you there. Breathing her in, running your hands over her, soothingly, then decidedly not. You want to take from her, pleasure, pain, everything in-between, everything you could call it.

She might be fond of you, but you’ve never thought of her to love you back.

All of this is waging in you as you stare at her, across the narrow width of the terrace, wanting, waiting, dying with the space between you.

Of all the ways you thought you’d might see her again, after everything that happened; this never came to mind.

You try to find something to say so you aren’t filling the tortured silence with your own, internal madness.

Your whit finally finds you as you respond, “I’d gathered that.” You fight the shiver that her stare gives, pulling your wrap over your bare shoulders. Needing to keep your mind on something else besides of how fucking badly you want to mess up her fine suit with your hands, so you keep on talking.

“Do you know the hosts? Are they…” you aren’t sure of the words to use, “business partners of yours?”

Her cool stare asses, for a moment causing your nerves to scatter and then you remember - you know her. While she might have her impressive form, her formidable persona, you’ve seen her stripped bare, raw, aching, and open. You know how much of that is just a front.

Her shrug bellies her words. “You could say that.” She responds, taking a causal sip from her glass, a corner of her mouth turning up for a moment.

You want to grab her by her tie; wrapping it around your fist, drag her in, down to her knees. Make her…

Gods, you need to get ahold of yourself.

You’re dying to know more, as much as everything in your body is screaming to flee, you want to know.

If you stay, you’ll just make a fool out of yourself. Leave now, go…

“How are you?” It comes out small, the question unsure of itself, of you asking it, of it even existing the few feet of space between you.

Her brow creases in the way that you’ve always interpreted as a look of complete confusion, one where you are being ridiculous. She eyes you, shifting her stance, and you witness her drawing herself back together, back to being as cool and calm as ever.

You need to leave, the voice in your head sternly reminds. The small space suddenly feeling stifling, filling up with her silence.

“Well, it seems as if you’re fine…” you trail off, pulling your wrap tight around you as you head towards the doorway, a path you know will bring you towards her.

Eyes on the handle, before you reach it, one of her hands comes out and stills you, wrapping around your waist.

Every nerve in your body explodes at once. Frozen with every possible emotion, want to fear, you feel her shift towards you. From the outside, you peer into the bustling party and you have a second to wonder what this might look like from the inside. It’s dim, busy inside, and you think with amount you know everyone has had to drink, no one would think to look out here.

As she leans in, her breath ghosts over your neck, lighting up your nerves. She is so close now, to close, close enough that you might forget everything you agreed too about discretion, about...

Breathing you in, her nose brushes along your hairline. You feel your body start to tremble with desire, you can’t fight it… it’s to engrained in you especially with her hand wrapped along your waist.

She leans impossibly closer, the skin of her check warming along yours.

“I’ve had trouble sleeping,” she exhales into the space between you.

Your eyes fly open, when did they slip closed?

Turning your face by fractions, your draw your mouth close to hers. Looking up, you meet her gaze as she pears down at you.

You see it then, the creases in the corners of her grey eyes. Your body flashes with and aching desire to comfort her, to hold her, to make her laugh, to feel her weight laying over you, her mouth on yours, her hands on your body, over you, in you…

You watch, helpless to move as she licks her lower lip and your body throbs in response. The worst part is, she didn’t seem to do it to entice or intimate. She seemed to do it without realizing.

You must remove yourself from this situation. Wrenching her hand off your waist you push past her, grabbing the doorhandle. Pulling it open, you hear her in a quiet voice that stills you. “I’d always sleep best when I was with you.”

Your heart is trying to fight its way of out of your chest, insistent that it belongs to her, that is stays with her.

In the doorway, you struggle. Your back to her, logic tells you not to move, not to turn, not to head back to her. Your illogical side wants to dive into her arms and never leave.

Taking a heaving breath, you give yourself a moment to steady. Glancing back over your shoulder, you see her back is still turned towards you, facing out to the bay.

You want to say something about enjoy the view, but the words don’t seem right, to glib, to short. So, instead, you continue through the door, moving into bustling throng inside.

Chapter Text

The bed in your apartment is the softest you’ve ever slept in. Piled with pillows and blankets, it was quickly becoming an oasis for you. You’d read for hours after waking up, enjoying your tea into the late morning. Or, after a long day (or evening) playing the part of the dutiful companion to Geoffrey, you’d sink back down in the softness, laying there until your eyes drift closed.

Tonight, you’ve been trying to sleep but just as your eyes start to close…

I’d always sleep best when I was with you.

Why…. Why would she fucking say that… what does she expect of you?

After hours of tossing and turning, you pull yourself out of bed. Looking out of the window you see the sky starting to warm with the colors of sunrise. One thing you do love about Piltover is that you feel safe, as you ever are, to walk about at all hours of the day.

The early morning is calm and quiet. The baker down the street works away in his front window, rolling loves with ease, you wave at him as you pass. Walking down to the water’s edge, you stand on the pier, watching the fishing boats head out to bay, workers laughing, singing, warming their spirits in the salty ocean spray.

Moving to walk back, your arm snags on the railing, the bracelet Geoffrey gave you catching on the metal edge. You manage to stop yourself just in time to prevent it breaking clean in two. Your heart is suddenly thudding in your chest, watching the fine chain dangle, caught in its own motion.

The tether that is it… the brand…that you owe… he’s never made you feel that way, but it still…

Of what you owe to your family… of why you came here…to help to…

You’ve given so much of yourself to others, for others, in service of others…

You’d come all this way, a promise to work at as healer, make a better wage then you would in Demacia, save it, and come back with the earnings. You’d done all of this for your family, so they would have the security, for your community, so they would have the support.

You take so little for yourself. Saving up little indulgences until it’s something to satiate you.

The thought crystalizes in your mind. After weeks, months… years…of starving…

You want something for yourself.

And you know, exactly, what that is.

You’d never been to The Last Drop, never had a reason. You didn’t use shimmer, gamble, or need to hire muscle, so there would be no reason for you enter the doors.

Two guards flank the front entrance. Eyeing this from across the street, you steal yourself as you aren’t sure what you are even going to ask for. Rallying your courage, and pulling yourself up to your full height, you walk confidently towards the door. Both guards eye you, until you draw near, and recognition dawns one the taller guard’s face. Looking frantically over at his partner, who’s stern expression stares you down.

“No visitors. You’ve got-“ he is cut off by his buddy, who almost pulls him sideways, frantically whispering in his ear. After a stricken look passes over his face, he moves to flank the door, shoving the other guard to do the same. In your confusion, you can’t even think to wonder why they would know who you are on sight.

“Head right in.” He says to you, wrenching open the door and sticking his head in. “Tom, TOM!” He bellows and a young boy appears from the darkness.

“There you are! Bring her up to the boss.” He tells him and Tom nods solemnly and motions you to follow.

Making your way through the bar, you can feel several faces turn and regard you, some soft conversation making its way over the music from the jukebox in the corner. You wonder if that’s a new one, or if they had been able to fix the old one with a Sevika sized hole in it.

Up the winding staircase and into the quiet of the backrooms, you remember a fable your mother used to tell you and your siblings. The story of a little girl who gets lost in the woods, where the trees become too dense, and she can’t find the edge of the forest.

As you ascend the stairs, all you can think is that you’d found the middle of the forest, and the edge has disappeared.

The doorway at the end is the nicest of any of in the hallway. Surprisingly simplistic to you, but you never even met Silco, so you aren’t sure what you expected.

Tom gestures towards the entrance then heads back the way he came, leaving you in the hallway with your own nerves.

Well, you’ve come too far not knock, so you do.

After a few wraps of your knuckles a voice answers, “Come in.”

The room is framed by a high window, the blue light of the undercity filtering though. A desk sits in the center. Behind it is Sevika, bent over a ledger, her face wrinkled up with concentration.

She doesn’t seem to notice you for a few moments. You wonder if her workers will usually rush in with some sort of news, but you stand frozen, near the door, being able to offer her nothing. The only thing you can think to do is lower your hood and shake your hair loose.

It takes her a few moments to notice your lingering silence and look up at the doorway.

Her expression opens, falling into shock, then hardening into something else.

“Close the door.” She says, sort and gruff, closing the ledger he has been working over.

“They let me in.” You supply, stepping over the threshold, pushing the door shut behind you.

“They all know who you are.” She says, by way of explanation, which -really- offers you none.

You don’t know how to respond so you continue to take her in. Still so striking, today in a vest, the jacket over the chair behind her, dress shirt undone and sadly, no trace of the tie you’d seen her in the other day. Gods, still she is still just…

“Why do they-“ you start to ask and she cuts you off.

“And you are here now, why?” She says, tossing a pencil onto the desk and standing up, the chair tilting away in an abject manor.

Her roughness – no, that’s not the right word. You’ve known who she was. Not using 10 words when 3 would do. You challenge yourself to respond in kind.

No, that’s the wrong idea, a voice in your head challenges.

You need to be brave. You must be brave. You came all this way, after all this time, only for her. She needs to know how you feel, at least by a half, about the part of you that burns with it.

“I heard you got your ass handed to you - tossed into a juke box? Is that right?” You inquire.

She shifts on her feet, eyes narrowing at you, stuffing a hand in a pocket of her pants.

“A few times actually?” You add, and Sevika her expression barely shifts, still assessing you.

You keep on. “I also heard that Silco was killed, and now you are running things. The big boss, now.” You remark, taking a step towards her, barely into the center of the room.

Her brow furrows in response.

“You’re not the only one who’s paid money for information about someone else.” You say.

You watch her process this information and then her eyes widen in recognition.

In a moment, she is moving, from behind the desk, across the room, into your space. Catching you around your waist and reaching behind you to click the lock on the door.

Your hands come up to trace the new spider web of scars across her cheek, threaded with the color of shimmer. Finally having her close you can see how she is weathered, new marks across her skin, making your heart throb.

Both arms wrap around you now as she draws you close. One around your waist, the other tangling into your hair. She pulls you flush to her as your thumbs warm across her cheeks.

You start to shiver, the sensation rocking over your body, and she grips you impossibly tighter. One of your thumbs grows bold, dropping down her lip, pulling at the fullness there. You’re dying to kiss her, but you need her to kiss you.

You’ve taken to much from her today, showing up unannounced. You can’t take it from her, she needs to give it to you.

Leaning in, running her nose along the curve of your jaw, you feel her pull in a lungful of air, her chest expanding against yours. Drawing her nose along your cheek, she seems to drink in the closeness between you.

“What do you want?” She asks, soft quiet, whispered along the edge of your jaw.

And it’s if the world stops on an axis. Your mind reeling, thinking back on all your moments together. All the moments where she took you and you took her. Every moment your lovesick heartbeat away, thinking it was just you… only you… feeling all of this.

Was she waiting on you, the whole time? Every moment?

She was.

“I’ve always, only, ever, wanted you.” You reply, you heart swelling in your chest, the bubble that filled ages ago, bursts again, warming you, from the crown of your head to the bottoms of your toes. Spreading down your fingers that warm her cheeks.

You draw a breath to keep going, but she takes you instead.

Sevika’s mouth is possessive, determined. Her grip ironclad along your waist and treading into your hair, so tight you can barely draw breath, but you don’t need it. She breathes into you, her mouth tight and greedy against yours, her tongue dipping to claim you, leaving no room for anything else.

Your hands act on their own accord, treading into her hair, answering your desire from days ago, to make her messy, to blur the carefully constructed lines of her newest artifice.

She pulls you along, towards her desk, pushing you against the bulk, manhandling you until your legs give and you perch on top of it.

Her touch is sure, the hands that fan out along your body know yours, know what makes you moan, makes your heartbeat quicken, what makes you come apart.

Pulling at her clothes, weaving impatient fingers under the buttons of her vest and shirt, pulling at the waist, dying to get her skin under your fingertips. Your palms meet the hot skin of her stomach, and she moans into your mouth as she gathers your hair into her hands, using it to draw your head back.

Your back arches, fingers tangled into her shirt, playing with the edge of her underwear, trying to sneak into to tease at a nipple. Her grin as she pears down at you could only be described as predatory.

“It’s just you and me now.” Her voice is so low, throaty, almost a purr. Your body responds, the ache between your thighs twisting into a throb, goose bumps breaking out where she has pulled your shirt open, and a tingling, pleasant sensation starting where she is gripping your hair in her hands.

You aren’t sure what she is insinuating, mind cloudy with having just what you want under your hands, you prattle out a reply. “It always was. You always had-“ and she cuts you off with another tug to your hair.

Moaning in response you feel her lean in, drawing her mouth along the shell of your ear.

“I always got what I wanted.” She punctuated her point with another twist in your hair, the pain ratcheting down your spine, then slicing into pleasure as your body interprets the sensation for itself. “And much of the time you liked that too.”

Your gasp in response, fingers tightening along the edge of her shirt and vest, hanging on for dear life as she pulls you apart.

“So, what do you want now?” She asks, sliding her other hand along your hip, hold possessive and biting, as she wraps her fingers around the curve and draws you along the desk towards her, pulling you tight against her hips.

You aren’t aware of what noise you make, the pressure of your sopping wet cunt, still in your pants, pressing against her, is enough to make your eyes flutter shut, pleasure rolling over you.

“I told you before,” her mouth skates over your neck, lighting up your skin with goosebumps, “you can have whatever you want from me.”

Gods…whatever you want?

Whatever you want?

You mind flits between memories of the two of you together. Quite the extensive library if you had the wherewithal, in the current moment, to be nostalgic.

You just want, so badly, so tightly wound, spiraling into knots along the very center of you. You want to know how she missed you. All these weeks, months apart… what she wanted from you.

Hands tightening into in her clothes, you pull yourself back from her mouth its delicious drag along the skin of your collar bones. Her face looks intrigued as her eyes meet yours.

“What did you miss most of me?” You ask her, leaning in to draw your mouth along sharp cut of her jaw. “What did you think about when you were alone?”

Her hands tighten greedily along your body, and you can just barely stop your delighted squirming against her.

“What did I do in your head when you could do anything with me?” The words are whispered along the soft skin below her ear.

Both her restraint and her patience seem to snap.

Grabbing both of your legs under your knees, you expect her to draw you close, but she pulls you almost to the edge of desk, using the surprise and leverage, forcing you onto your back, then pushing both legs up, pinning your knees towards your ears. She follows you down, slipping between your open legs with her mouth on yours, pressing you into the solid wood under you.

You barely register the fact that she swiped the desk clean, the ledger you’d seen her working on now tumbling to the floor, her pencil whatever else might have had the misfortune to have been on her desk, sent tumbling to the floor.

As she releases your knees, you wrap your legs around her hips to keep your balance, hips tilting on the edge of the desk, hands playing along the edge of her undergarments. Finding the pebbled peak of her nipples, playing with them though the thin fabric.

She seems to keep losing track of her objective, getting distracted by you and your touch, and you smile, delightedly. Seeming to sense this, she leans back, pulling at the front of your coat and all but ripping up and off your shoulders. Your top and undergarments follow in a flurry, as you keep trying to get your hands back on in search of skin, opening the buttons of her vest and dress shirt with ease, moaning with gratitude when your palms find the soft, hot skin of her sides. Sevika shudders at the touch.

With an ease and quickness, Sevika captures both of your inquisitive hands and pins them above your head.

Laid out and held under her gaze, again, you fight the urge to squirm, tilting your head up to meet her icy, gray eyes.

The hand that has captured both of your wrists leans in, putting pressure on you point of restraint, while her other, presses in on its hold along your hip and your body thrums, singing with the contact. Trying to pull your shoulders up, you are pinned, and you’re thriving in it. As she leans down, taking one nipple into the blazing heat of her mouth, you let your body do whatever it wants, shivering under the touch, bucking into the iron grip, moaning with the sensation.

Teasing, she takes her time with you, mouth slick along your sensitive peaks, drinking in the sounds you make, that devolve into begging and then pleading as you’re tormented. You’re most likely bruising around your wrists, and you can be bothered to care. Her hold only tightens, keeping you squirming, voice finally growing horse. Her hand slides down your stomach, teasing the skin around your navel and then, finally, down the center of your pants, pressing in along where she knows your wet and wanting. Jolting against her hold, you can hear her chuckle against your tender nipple, swollen with her attention, red with the blissful sting of teeth.

You wonder if she can feel wet you are, pussy throbbing as she plays with you. Her mouth trading bites, licks and sucks at your now tender skin, her fingers playing with you idly though your pants, petting where she knows your clit is aching, sliding down to put pressure on your opening.

Staring deep within you, can feel an orgasm building, aching, slow, tortuous…and while you are desperate to cum, not without her hands on you, skin to skin. You draw a deep breath, trying to find your voice but she acts first.

A bite, deep and purposeful under one of your breasts, teeth digging in that sends you shuddering in her hold, the paining sizzling into pleasure in your blood. The mark from that will be impressive.

“Gods…” you moan out along the edge of a ragged breath. “Please…. Please...” You try to roll your hips up into her as if to entice, but her iron grip bites back into the softness, and your so wet its almost uncomfortable, still trapped in your pants, under her touch.

She pulls back, mouth wet as she takes you in. As her eyes get her fill, she then flicks her gaze back up to yours. “I like when you beg.” She utters, switching her grip on you, and you moan at the words.

“I’d always think about you begging.” Sevika drags her hand along your waist as she speaks, the cool metal slick as it slides, and you only just notice that its different, a finer build, a more sophisticated construction then when you’d seen her last. Metal still glinting with the poisonous violet color of shimmer, but now its smoother, shinier, decidedly more modern in its design.

“Under me, begging for me to fuck you…” she muses.

“In my lap with my strap in you… fuck,” She drags her fingers down your sides, tickling. Along your skin her metal fingers feel warmer, sleeker then before. “On all fours in front of me…so full…wet…wanting….”

She seems to be lost in thought for a moment and then-

“You against my face, dripping down my chin, moaning with your hands in my hair…” she drags her fingers back down, over your pants, pressing in along your inseam. Your hips buck in response, desperate for her attention where you need it most, your muscles fluttering under the meager stimulation, eager for release.

“You have me…. I’m here… I’m yours” You manage to grit out, completely mindless babbling, sure of the confession but not of the moment you’re giving it in, lost in pleasure and so eager to please so you can find your relief. Your breath scrapes out of your lungs. “Yours… please…”

Gods you are absolutely fucked.

Her smile makes your nerves scatter in a delicous way. Reaching down, she deftly undoes your pants, and you help by lifting your hips. In a few seconds you are completely bare, laid out in front of her. Hips tittering on the edge of the desk, so you roll your legs up and open and watch as the corner of her mouth ticks up in a smile, as if you’ve done just what you’re supposed to do.

Gently, she hooks a hand under each knee, rolling your legs up, and open, pushing towards your shoulders, tucking you into the narrowest space possible. Your hands come down and grip the edge near your hips, giving her the leverage to flex you further. Hunger passes over her face as you do this, helping her open you up as much as you can, as much as you’ll take.

“Always so good for me.” She punctuates her point by giving you a fierce kiss, then dropping to her knees while keeping you pinned down.

Admiring you from this angle, she gently pulls your left hand away from the desk, tucking it under your knee, mirroring her hold on you. “Keep it there,” she orders, making herself comfortable near the apex of your legs.

Brushing along where your thigh meets your folds, she teases along your skin, lighting up your nerves even more. Shivering with the cool of the room, her breath warming along where you are slick, you have an odd moment of clarity, thinking about how criminal king pin of the undercity, is currently, reverently, waiting to go on you from between your thighs.

Sliding her fingers along your wetness, you jolt under the hold, body starting to sing with the sensations.

“Beg,” she says, her mouth curving at the edges with a smile. Moving her fingers up your slit, from you entrance to your clit, indulging in how wet she’s got you; her eyes flick up to meet yours again.

“And keep begging,” she adds, gliding two fingers into your cunt, now wet and glistening with your arousal, and dives in.

You’ve never forgotten how good her mouth was, but this… this is something else. This feels like she is waging a war and you aren’t sure if you’re both on the same side, proving a point in a debate and you haven’t a clue what the topic is, that she has made a life or death bet and she must win or you’ll both loose.

She draws this out, finger fucking you, the wet sounds obscene in the relative quiet of the room. Her mouth slick as it slides but sure in her intent. Driving you to the edge then stalling time after time, until your skins slick with sweat, sticking to the fine wood of the desk under you, dizzy from the sensations, and body on fire from the overstimulation.

After what seems like ages of your begging, voice horse, back aching with your squirming, she finally lets you cum. Head knocking into the wood below you, fingernails of one hand digging groves into the edge, the other, biting crescent moon indents into the flesh of your own thigh.

For several moments, your mind is just awash in pleasure. By the time you come back, you hear her boots creaking on the floor.

Your cunt is still going as she gets rises, holding one of your legs tucked to your side. Her other hand comes up to wipe your slick off her face as she stares at your wet, twitching pussy.

Limbs still shaking, your mind still bleary, you can’t even imagine moving, you just lay back and take her in as she seems to be extraordinarily pleased with herself.

Taking the hand she sipped over her mouth, she looks down and drags it though your messy folds, making your frayed overstimulated nerves, scatter with pleasure again.

The corner of her mouth ticks up with the barest hint of a smile as you gasp in response.

“I could fill one your books with all the things I thought about you.” She says eyes still on your sopping wet pussy as she plays with you. And then, to punctuate the point, she slides two fingers back into your overstimulated cannel, making your muscles contract, your body shudder, and another orgasm to roll though you, trembling out from the very core of you, rolling up and over everything in its path, slow fucking you though it.

When you come back, your body is overheated, your head hanging back, chest heaving, and she is still idlily playing with you, as if’s a lovely way to spend her spare time.

Her pleased smile is still on her face.

“Ahhh…” you gasp out, suddenly, drying to prove to her how desperate you are for her.

“Take your time.” She says, brushing touches over the skin of your thighs and you melt back against the desk.

Once you are relatively sure you can form words again, you try.

“What.. what do you want?” You stammer out, still fighting the licking pleasure up your spine, trying to summon your brain to coordinate your limbs. “My body’s pretty tired, but my mouth is still good.”

She smirks at that. Fingers brushing over your skin now, playing with valley between your breasts, the other still wrapped around your thigh.

“You could ride my face?” You offer and Sevika’s hand tightens on you, almost to the point of bruising.

Eyes burning, intense, as she leans towards you and a trill runs through your whole being, wishing, hoping that she will just crawl on top of you, on this desk, in the middle of this office and…

There is knock at the door and Sevika’s head whips towards the sound.

“Boss…” a muffled voice barely makes it though, “you said only to interrupt if it was something urgent…”

“Is someone dead?” She asks, voice like iron, but her touch along your skin is gentle, her grip loosening.

There is a beat of silence and the soft sound of shuffling feet. “Uh… yes?”

Sevika huffs out a frustrated breath. Turning back towards you, your hands act of their own accord, coming up to frame her face, drawing your body up sit on the desk in front of her.

“I’ll be right out.” She says towards the doorway, with your fingertips framing her jawline, eyes glassy and soft on you. You hear footsteps retreating.

“I need to go.” She says, her hand coming up to mirror your hold with her thumb catching on the fullness of your lower lip.

Leaning over, she easily collects your errant clothing items she’d strewn about the floor. Guiding your arms into your undergarments, your top smoothed down over you, pants zipped up, until you are, almost, as put together as you arrived.

“Shame,” you say, smoothing the edges of her hair back so they resemble her usual put together persona. “I thought I was going to finally get something I’ve wanted.”

Pulling her close again, she slides into your arms willingly, allowing you to draw her into a kiss that lingers.

As she pulls back, unwrapping from your arms, she says, “I told you before and I’ll keep telling you; you can have whatever you want from me.”

You can’t help the smile that beams, warm and happy. “Then I’ll have to come and collect.”

She smiles back, small, and slightly lopsided, making room for you to hop off the desk. Pulling on her jacket, she moves with you to leave.

Opening the door, she guides by the small for your back through the halls, down and out another entrance (tucked behind the Last Drop), that leads into the square along the alleyway.

There are a few guards waiting for her as you exit, snaping to attention at the sight of her.

Turning towards you, she draws you in by your elbow, then reaches to pull your hood over your head, tucking it in along your neckline.

You want to kiss her goodbye, you always do, but there are too many eyes on you now. So instead, you look up at her, sheltering you between her body and the guards lining the alley, face half in shadow from the lights overhead.

Bringing a hand up, she gently, quickly, brushes her thumb over the swell of your lower lip, just enough pressure to feel it along your jaw, enough to make you know she meant it.

You threaten to puddle into the grime of the undercity streets, never to be seen again. Favoring her with a small smile, you slip out from behind, pulling your coat tighter around yourself, as you walk quickly past the guards and into the bustling throng of the undercity.

As you stride, feet fast as if the more space you put between you will clear you head, floating, giddy, shimmering with all your thoughts.

Heading towards the bathysphere, weaving in out of the booths, and food stalls, tucking yourself into the crowd, you remember how the story from your childhood ends.

A wolf appears in the forest. At first you think it might try to eat you; fearsome fangs bared, but you realize the wolf is curious about you. After circling you, it comes near, allowing you to scratch behind its ears.

The wolf leads you to edge of the forest, to safety, keeping you away from the other dangers along the way.

The wolf saves you and you save the wolf.

Good thing the nuances of the story aren’t lost on you now.

Chapter Text

You can’t really remember crossing the bridge back to upper Piltover, you float, mind reeling.

Rushing back to your apartment, nothing will quell your rustling nerves. Fidgeting around you clean up your teacup from earlier, start to sit down and read but you find yourself on your feet again.

Maybe a trip to the market, yes, that’s a good idea.

Moving to grab your bag to head out our door, catching your reflection in a mirror, you realize you are still in your clothes from Demacia. Maybe you should clean yourself up a bit first.

Stripping off your jacket, hood, and pants, you stuff them into laundry while turning on the hot water in the shower, allowing the steam bellow out and warm the room.

Turning to remove your underwear, the band of your bra twists against the fresh bruise below your left breast. Pulling the last of your clothes off, you let them drop to the floor as you approach the mirror.

The bite is still red, raised along the surface, pinking up along the edges. Running two of your fingers over the dark center, the small flicker of pain registers.

Her face flashes into your mind, right after she had bit you, how triumphant she looked, bordering almost on possessive.

This…this feels possessive. Just like the jewelry around your wrist that Geoffrey gave you, this is hers.

And you want more.

“You’re in a good mood.” Geoffrey remarks to you, late in the evening a few days later, as you dine in an ordinately decorated restaurant window, light streaking in on your plates, eating some sort of delicacy you can’t pronounce.

“Hmmmm,” you mumble around the bite you’ve just taken, a little surprised by this comment. You’d been trying to listen to his story, but your mind had wondered out the window and across the river, consumed by her.

“Today, you are in a good mood.” He reiterates, smiling at you, warmth in his eyes, as he regards you.

You know what comes next, he’s going to dissect you, always trying to figure out what’s going on around him, what’s in heads of others.

“I am, I guess.” You make a show of tipping your spoon in your mouth, thinking contemplatively around it. “Not sure why…” which is true. You can’t pinpoint the reason. Was it just seeing her? Knowing she thought of you? Missed you?

You want more. Most of the morning has been filled with plans to see her again, if now is to soon or-

“Well, I am glad,” Geoffrey remarks, cutting through your thoughts. “I know it was an adjustment, coming here, leaving the familiarity you had. I would hope you feel settled.”

You heart twists, turning to moment here with him, which part of you hates, but the other part…

“I am.” You set your spoon down, sifting all your attention over the table to him. “To be honest, I like it much more than I thought I would. I like the apartment. I like something of my own.”

You feel the truth start to roll out of you, flowing like a warm bath over the edge of the tub.

“I’ve never had anything like it, always little rooms, this is the only space that’s only mine.” You pause, gathering your thoughts. “I’ve liked seeing all the sights, meeting the people you’ve introduced me too. More than- really, I’ve enjoyed it.”

The truth warms you, Geoffrey glows with it.

“I’m glad my dear,” he says, grabbing his wine glass, raising it in the toast. “Good thing we still have so much time together.”

You grab yours and clink in agreement.

You’ll also have more time with her.

Going to the Last Drop doesn’t feel as foreign as it should. Walking from the bathysphere, it occurs to you that maybe you should have sent a note beforehand, but you aren’t sure how you would have done it. Before, at the Gardens, there where messengers you could send, most often with Dot. You might have been able to ask her, but you didn’t think of it until you turn into the square.

The Last Drop seems to loom in the haze of the lanes. You pause at the corner, like you did days before. People mill around in the square, it’s still very early for most folks to be awake, many staying up until a few hours ago, into small hours of the morning. The soft light now, filtering down through the jagged crack in the earth, illuminates the square with the golden, grey light of the early afternoon.

You know you are infringing on her time, again, but you can’t stop yourself.

Moving to cross, you see a teenager, gangly in the limbs, run along the other side, slipping into the front door of the bar. Gathering your courage, just as you had before, you march across towards the front doors.

The guards catch you earlier this time, moving to accommodate you, one opening the door and calling for someone to bring you up and the same young adult you’d seen running a few moments ago appears, still breathless, nods at you then turns to guide you into the inky darkness.

There are fewer people inside this time. Only one bartender behind the bar, stocking clean glasses, one table occupied by a card game, another with a couple, cloaked in the corner by the dim lighting, close in conversation.

Up the stairs again, and with another gesture towards the door, you are left alone the hallway. You give yourself a second to settle before you knock, lowering your hood, shaking your hair loose, smoothing your clothes down over your body.

Turning towards the door, you raise your knuckles to knock and before you can do so, it opens.

Sevika’s face is creased with sleep, drowsy around the edges, soft eyes as she regards you. Seeing let this, seemly unguarded throws you and every thought leaves your head, even though you are one (of the rare few you’d guess) who’d ever seen her this way.

Shock still, you stare, like a deer caught in a moment of panic. Sevika’s eyes take you in, finally bobbling her head in an almost uncertain gesture, and moves to open the door further, inviting you in. Slipping in the narrow space, she closes the door behind you.

Sevika swipes a hand over her eyes, sharpening with each passing moment. You turn to face her, suddenly stricken with uncertainty of what to do with yourself. It dawns on you, now, that you aren’t sure if she’d want you there, in her space. That maybe before, she’d just been nostalgic, that she’d….

Realizing you haven’t heard a sound from her the whole while, you raise your eyes to meet hers.

“I thought about giving you warning that I was coming, or to see if you’d want me…” You’re so nervous, why are you so nervous? You wind your arms around yourself, worried that your fidgeting will give you away. “I wasn’t sure how to.”

She still stands near the doorway, regarding you in that she always did she we would first wake up, like she didn’t quite understand if you are real or not.

“I can… I can go if you’re…” you start to offer, so unsure, gods, why did you even….

She moves, confident strides across the floor and pulls you in close, arms bringing you into her chest, tucking you under her chin.

You can’t help the relieved noise you make into the soft shirt she is wearing, hands coming up to clutch at her back, tucking yourself as tightly as you can manage against her. Her skin is warm with sleep, smelling like she has just woken up, you know that smell, you relish it.

“Did I wake you?” You ask, after several long moments standing together.

Her voice is still thick with sleep, warm along the crown of you head as she answers. “Yes, but I’d rather be woken up by you then anyone else.”

You can’t help pleased noise that escapes you, as her words drift over you, one of her arm sliding down the curve of your back, tucking you closer to her, not a breath between you.

You stand in silence for a few moments, drinking in the closeness between you.

Her arms start to unwind from your body, so you do the same, hands coming to rest along her waist. Sliding one hand up along your jaw, she catches you under your chin, moving your eyes up to meet hers. The arm around you slides along your waist, pushing you a half step back as her hand slides up along your middle, as she’d done so many times before, she brushes along the bruise.

It’s still sore, days later, and you can’t stop the hiss of pain as she touches it.

You both still. The grin that slides along her lips, thrills you, curling along the edges, lifting her eyes, and she looks delighted, just so pleased, that her mark on you has lasted.

“You’re still…” she trails off then moves her other hand, yanking your shirt out of your pants, pulling it out of her way as satisfied noise leaves her at the sight of it. Trailing her fingers over the yellowed bruise, she presses in, slowly, eyes flicking up to yours, watching your breath catch. “I got carried away...."

A crease appears between her brows, eyes serious as she asks. “He didn’t notice?”

You aren’t surprised that she’s knows Geoffroy, that she might even know his name, what his business is, where you lived in Piltover. Information is a commodity in the undercity just like anywhere else.

It’s the idea that she is coyly pretending as if she didn’t expect him to find it is what surprises you.

Her hand is now resting along your ribs, thumb drawing over the mark, back and forth, flickering sparks of pain lighting you up. Almost, innocent, almost protective, as if she wasn’t aware of what it does to you.

“You trying to get me into trouble?” You ask, trying to keep your tone light and playful but your breath catches with each drag of her thumb, your body igniting with slow arousal.

“No,” and she looks genuinely concerned for a moment, her thumb stalling its torturous sweep over your skin, “I’d never put you in danger.”

Your teasing gone array; you need to comfort her. Reaching down, you slide your hand over hers, still possessively along your ribs. You need her to know you are safe with Geoffrey.

“I told you, he is good to me. Anyways, he never…” you can’t find the words to use, “he doesn’t take me in the same way. I always have my clothes on.” As you speak, her warm hand glides over you exposed skin.

When you glance up at her eyes, her expression is voracious, yet again.

In a flash, she has you by the hips, your legs wrapping around her waist, moving towards the wall opposite from the rooms entrance. You’ve seen this display of her strength before, but it always impresses. A delighted laugh falls from your mouth as your arms wrap around her.

Moving towards the wall, she pushes in on a board and the door creaks open. With you in her arms, she slides into the bedroom, surprisingly cozy, with a large bed that takes up most of the space, nestled in the angled walls of the building.

She deposits you on the bed, on your back, pausing between your legs, enjoying the view of you on her sheets, and you tilt you head back to observe her.

Leaning up, you reach to her waistband, tucking your fingers in the edge, drawing the backs along the soft skin there.

“I wanted to make you cum. I didn’t get to last time.” You say, under the edge of your breath, nerves filling the sound. “What do you want?”

“What do I want...” she says, leaning down to drag her warm palm along your skin, the next thing you know, she is over you, body blanketing you, mouth sure along yours, legs tangling with yours.

Your hands are greedy, roaming her body, slipping under the hem of her shirt to run up the warm skin of her back. Wrapping your legs again around her waist, threading a hand into her hair, rocking your hips up on instinct. She answers your touch with a hand trailing down the front of you, teasing your breasts though your jacket, wasting no time to dipping into the hem for your pants and loosening your clothes.

Getting impatient, you pull her shirt up and off and bask in the newly exposed skin, reaching up to tease a nipple and shoving your other hand down the back of her pants, squeezing at her ass, pulling her down on top of your harder.

An impatient growl is the only warning you get before your jacket and top are all but ripped over your head, forcing your arms away from her as she dives back down, capturing you mouth in another fierce kiss while she pulls at the front of your pants. Your patience snaps and you do the same, sliding a hand back into her loose sleep clothes, pulling the waistband easily down, and a delighted sound leaves you when you realize she isn’t wearing any underwear. Fingertips dipping down you tease at curls as you tilt your mouth away from hers. Slipping into her folds, you find her soaked, and you make a grateful noise into the kiss she gives you.

Along a moan she rocks into your touch and you’ll never get used to this powerful feeling that always surges in you while you touch her. Squeezing her hips between your legs, you slide further down, collecting her slick and starting to circle her clit, just the way you’ve done before, on your way to make her fall apart.

Moving your mouth down to her neck, you keep up your ministrations, teeth sliding down the tendon on the side, making her body shudder in your grasp. As her hips starts to rock insentiently under your touch, you finally get your mouth over the skin of her collar bones, just where you’d thought about leaving a matching mark of your own. Hidden easily under the collar of a shirt, you’ve imagined it, the shape of your mouth branded into her skin.

Licking over the delicate bone, you gently pluck at the skin with your teeth, drawing a gasp from her while she leans her head against yours. Pulling at the skin with your lips and teeth you finally bite down and her hips immediately jolt under you hold, so you tighten under legs around her, holding onto her as best as you can, given her strength and her position over you. You sink your teeth in, relishing the moan that devolves into a whimper as she huffs open mouthed against the skin of your shoulder, and then you feel her start to pulse under your fingertips, her orgasm seeming to roll over her slowly, and her body drawing tight in your hold, then snapping as she shivers over you. You keep up your gentling brushes over her swollen clit, waiting until her hips stop their rocking to draw your fingers down and slip into her sopping wet core.

She pulls her face back from your shoulder, eyes blinking open, not dissimilar to how she wakes up, focusing in on you as a lazy smile paints her face. Propping herself over you, she huffs out a breath, trying to even her breathing. You draw your fingers out of her, and she moans, softly under her breath, as you wipe your hand on the inside of her pants.

Your hand that had been in her hair, trails down to brush over your handywork, a grin coming over your face.

"Proud of yourself?” She asks, suggestively as she leans in to kiss you.

"Mmmm, yes, very.” You answer, diving in for another kiss, running your hands over her hot skin, still flushed with her orgasm.

“I want to fuck you.” She murmurs against your mouth, and your hands tighten their hold along her back.

“Yes, please,” you muse. Sevika is off the bed in the next moment, reaching to pull something from underneath, to then toss the strap and harness (you are very well acquainted with) on the bed next to you. You try to be helpful by removing your own pants, but you forget you still have your boots on so there is a few second laughing fit, from both of you, while you struggle to get them off.

“How do you want me?” You ask, leaning back on your elbows, enjoying the view as she removes her pants, placing a knee on the edge of the bed while she slips the harness on and tightens it. Leaning back to collect a small bottle of lube from the small table next to her bed, she quickly slips it over the dildo.

Turning her attention back, you can’t help biting down on your lip at the sight of her. Another image you’d conjure for yourself when you’d been lonely, her just like this. But this version is infinitely better, the small light on the bedside table casting her in a soft shadow, highlighting the dips of her muscles, the curves of her face.

Her eyes rake over you, taking in your bare skin, and she finally moves, turning you on your stomach, another show of her strength, moving you as if you weighed nothing. Crawling over you, her warmth seems to seep into you down to the bones. Arranging you the way she wants, drawing you up on your knees, bringing your hands to brace yourself on the edge of the bed, and tucking her body close along your back.

The strap slides into you with a slick, wet sound, and your arms give out, falling onto your elbows, tucking your head in to the cradle they form. “Fuck…” you wheeze out, completely leaving any semblance of trying to perform for her, and just trying to survive.

With a brutal thrust, she bottoms out, pressing her hips into you to punctuate the point. Arm gliding down your spine, warm in the cool of the room, making your overheated skin flare with nerves and you rock your hips back on instinct. Her hiss of pleasure behind you makes you try harder, finding leverage, twisting your hips back onto the strap and you feel her grip along your shoulder tighten.

“Gods,” Sevika lets out along a breath. “… you’re so good.”

Her words only fuel you higher. Rocking your hips insistently, rolling them back with each movement, trying to force as much as you have into each snap at the end. Gods, you’ve missed this. You missed being filled, with her voice in your ears, her strap so deep in you that you swear you can feel it in your teeth, straining along every edge of you.

“I... need something on my clit…” you gasp out along a breath, and she responds with a low grunt behind you.

Suddenly you are moving again, her left arm wrapping up and around your body, hand resting at the base of your throat, the other along your hip, pulling your back flush against her front, moving you with ease up to the headboard as your hands come out to brace yourself.

“Good girl,” she says, breath hot along the back of your neck. Her arm pins you against her, the other on your hip sliding down between your legs and into your wet folds, grazing your clit as a tease. Shifting her hold, her fingers grasp your neck, holding you tight as she rolls her hips into yours again.

“Gods..” you moan out, shuddering in her arms, it’s so much. You are so full at this angle, now with her fingers lazy playing with your clit, her teeth dragging along the overstimulated skin of your neck, and the other hand, with its purple glow gliting out of the corner of you eye, gently putting pressure along your throat. The pleased sound she makes, reverberating along your back, makes your spine arch and your body tremble.

“I want to mark you again.” She huffs out along the skin of your neck and, gods, your nerves feel completely over-loaded. Your mind is just as gone because you’re dying for her too.

“I want it,” You moan, shuddering with her teeth along the skin of your neck, wanting the pain to sizzle through you. You are surprised that your rational brain is even working in the given moment because you hear yourself say, “just not anywhere…”

“No, no…” she breaths out again, along the skin of your shoulder, teeth catching a little and you moan at the sensation. “But you know where I would put it if I could…” she draws her mouth along the curve of your neck, up to where you jaw meets your neck, tiling your head to the side with the motion and drawing her teeth up, the soft spot of skin singing with attention.

“I’d want everyone to see,” she breaths into your skin, damp now with her breath and her mouth. “I’d want it always, right here…”

“Gods, fuck….” You moan out, shuddering against her hold on you. “Fuck, I’m so fucking close.”

“I want you to cum on my strap,” she says into the soft skin as she presses her teeth in, not enough for even a bite mark, just enough to pink up the skin for a moment. “Be a good girl for me.”

And fucking, hell, you do. It’s messy, you’re loud with it, screaming as you clamp down and you can feel though the haze, her teeth catch your neck.

Afterwards, as the gold afternoon light filters through the window above her bed, you both lay together. You are on your stomach, in the same position you flopped in after your orgasm. She is on her side, one arm under her head, leaning back on the pillows since she had come back from washing the strap in the sink of the adjoining bathroom.

“I’ve known every time you’ve come down.” She says, while twirling a strand of your hair around her fingers. A look of surprise must be on your face. “I knew you’d come down today. Someone warned me right before you arrived, only reason I was awake.”

Turning your face slightly from the pillow you’d been snuggled into, breathing in the smell of her shampoo from the fabric, you meet her eyes as she continues, face soft and open as she does. “I bribe the bathysphere driver to keep track of a few things.”

“Things?” You tease, bringing your fingers out to brush along her bicep, the one playing with your hair.

“People.” Moving closer, she is mindlessly touching you now, her other hand coming to brush along your skin as you lay with her on the surprisingly soft sheets of her bed. “You came to the top of the list.”

You want her to keep talking, to know she felt the same way the whole time and you’d been torturing yourself thinking she didn’t. Sliding yourself a little closer, almost into the circle of her arms, you tilt your face up to meet hers.

Trailing touches down your side, she continues. “I kept…I was hoping you’d stop here.”

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me.” You whisper, the omission feeling like wildfire from your lips. “I wasn’t sure if you’d ever…”

Her brow creases, eyes following the causal touch along your side. “How did you…” She trails off, a look of hurt flickering over her face. “How could you think that I didn’t?”

She reaches up, threading a hand into your hair, thumb warm over the curve of your jaw then your cheek. “How could you possibly…”

“I kept convincing myself it was just me.” You tell her, out in a rush and as she opens her mouth to respond and you push on. “It was partly a defense, but also, I mean…” bringing you hand up to mirror her hold, hand on her jaw, tracing over the sharp angle of it.

“I mean…look at you,” you muse, drawing over her skin.

She huffs out a laugh, soft against the pad of your thumb, now along the plush curve of her lower lip. Her smile slides into place, flexing under your finger, and she takes the moment to pull you in, close. “I’d say the same for you.”

Her eyes trace along the planes of your face as her gaze sharpens. “I’d always thought ‘cause I paid, that you were just doing what you needed too. That everything- it was all in my head, I was just job.” As she speaks, her eyes drift down your face, brows creased, a look almost of nostalgia lurking behind the silver irises.

“I thought I was just your favorite for the moment, but it changed for me.” Your voice is whisper quiet, trying to keep this secret between you, grateful for the intimacy that you were sharing. “I started to count my weeks by you. You were a bright spot, something I looked forward too.”

Drawing yourself along her body, you slide an arm around her side, fingers finding an easy rhythm tracing along her spine. Her thumb quickly finding the bundle of nerves along where your spine meets your hips, causing shivers to break out all over your skin, a pleasant tingling starting to radiate, your limbs trembling with it, brain sliding into pleasure.

“I would think about you, when I was in Piltover, when I left.” Gasping when she slides her finger upwards, along the bare edge of your backbone, knowing the fire it would light. “I wanted, so badly to leave, to just walk back over the bridge-“

“I wanted you here.” She cuts you off, drawing you in, flush to her.

"I’m here now,” you trail off, sliding your fingers into her hair and your leg over her hip.

“Mmmm,” her breath warms along your skin. “Yes, you are.”

Chapter Text

The first few weeks you are insatiable.

Well, the first few days are the worst. Every time you move to leave her bed, she pulls you back in, mouth along your skin, arms around your waist, murmuring the sweetest things…

You can’t make yourself leave, and she won’t ask you to go, so, you stay.

Almost a day and half later, you pull yourself out of the comfort of her bed. Skin littered with bite marks, bruises, and one, very faint handprint, you begrudgingly make yourself leave, knowing you have an appointment with Geoffrey. You find your clothes and slink back up to Piltover, limping slightly, body used in the best way possible.

On its way to becoming hers.

You promise her before you leave that you will return. To help with this she promises you a messenger, someone who will come once a day just for her, at the peak of the afternoon.

Heading back to your apartment, when you open the door, something feels different, as if the alchemy of the space has changed. The light filters different though windows, the afternoon sun glinting off every shiny surface. The perfume you use smells better, the soap you wash with, sweeter.

You think of when you sister met her partner how she used to talk about him. How everything was better, livelier, kinder. For her it was love, but more than that, it was love reciprocated. She was in love, and she was loved.

The thought stalls you, chills you, warms you back, rocks your nerves and fries your brain.

You’re in love, but you’ve known that’s for ages. But what you know now, and more importantly in this moment, is that you are cared for, you’ve been missed, you’ve been wished for and desired, wanted and searched for.

It’s the closest thing you’ve ever felt to it, so you let yourself revel in it as it’s the closest thing you think you’ll ever have.

You are the in the middle of the memory… your fingers deep within her, the slick wet sound in tandem with her moaning, she was so loud that time. The wet sound of your fingers fucking her, balanced on top of her thighs, your other hand braced against hers, folded over her chest. She had twined your hands together when you started to fuck her in earnest.

Her head thrashes back, tendons of her neck standing out in relief, her voice straining, her breath short…

The thunderous applause draws you out of the memory, you mind still swimming, surfacing as your senses seem to bob underwater. Quickly trying to recover you rise your hands to clap along with the masses.

Geoffrey smiles over at you, pleased. You are glad for the dim lighting hiding the blush that paints your cheeks. You had suggested seeing this opera weeks ago, having never seen one in person. Now it seemed to be an excuse to slip into your memories, a filthy as they are.

A week after seeing her, Sevika had sent a message for you, asking you to come the next afternoon. Stopping along the way to the Gardens you stop in to see your friends, guilt riding high on your heart as you’d visited the lanes but you’d hadn’t been to see them.

Slipping into the back entrance, Miguel gives you a quick peck on the cheek as he passes you on your way down the stairs to join Blu in the red room.

Blu smiles and stands with a flourish, as always, their warm, sparkling personality always reminds you of the sweet bubbles of champaign.

“Hey darling,” they greet you, wrapping you in a hug and as start to move apart, Dot comes bustling in, ducking under your joined arms, joining the both of you. You laugh under your breath as Dot tucks herself in the hug, Blu smiling down at the both of you.

Sitting, you move to pour tea for the three of you, placing a cup for Dot onto the tray.

Humming lowly to yourself as you listen to Blu and Dot chat, you don’t even realize they’ve both stopped to stare at you.

Dot, her gaze sharp as she flicks her eyes back to Blu, sharing a quick look with each other, then back, finally having your attention.

“What?” You ask, a little bewildered by their behavior.

Dot’s eyebrow ticks up as she leans over towards you. You still with your hand on the teapot, while she reaches over and pulls down the edge of your collar, revealing the yellowing bruise caused by Sevika’s mouth. You thought you’d done a good job of hiding it with your clothing, hoping that the light would be dark enough in the Gardens for anyone to notice.

“Uh,” you stall, no idea how to play this off. You hadn’t planned on telling them you’d seen Sevika, but not ashamed of it, just protective, only for you right now.

“Interesting.” Blu remarks, smiling cheekily over the cup of tea.

“Yes,” Dot continues, picking up her cup to take a sip, “she never was marked by… oh what was his name?” She gestures to Blu.

“Geoffrey,” Blu supplies, and you have a feeling that you are being questioned by enforcers, feeling your skin draw hot under their scrutiny, but you know it’s teasing, their tones light and playful.

“Yes…Geoffrey,” Dot echoes, “he never did that before.”

“Hmmm…” Blu takes a deep sip of their tea.

Dot glances over at Blu as you take a big gulp, trying to parch your dry mouth, getting ready to explain yourself.

“You know who we haven’t seen in a while? Sevika. She hasn’t visited in weeks.” Dot mentions, causally, and you can’t help as you choke on your sip.

Sputtering, Blu finally releases a laugh, Dot giggling along with him, and as you finally find your breath, you are laughing with them both.

As you all still, whipping tears of laughter out of your face, your eyes slide up to meet theirs as a moment passes between the three of you, of understanding but not a word said. Dot changes the subject as she starts to share a story of an unusual customer from a few days before.

It’s the height of the afternoon when you finally make it over to the Last Drop. The guards at the front door call for the bartender, who beckons you in.

“Boss is out, she should be back soon. Said you can head up.” She shouts across the empty bar at you.

You nod in understanding and slip back into the stairwell.

Slipping into the space, you see a ledger, closed on the desk with a cup of coffee next to it. An early morning of her, must be important business.

You pull down your hood and loosen your collar, moving over to the small sofa in the room and drape yourself over it. You look around for something to occupy your time, but you come up with nothing. You might need to keep something on you in the future, just in case.

Leaning back the leather squeaks under your weight, so you sink back further, admiring the vaulted ceilings.

Your eyes start to flutter shut and you try to fight the pull of sleep, having nothing to keep you awake while you wait, which you don’t for long, hearing footsteps down the hallway after a few minutes.

Sevika opens the door, dressed in a sharp looking overcoat. Her eyes find you immediately, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth as she closes the door behind her.

You move off the sofa, legs slightly unsteady and she meets you in the middle of room, arms wrapping around you, as you dive into her embrace, arms snaking under the overcoat, smoothing over the fine fabric of her suit. Your hands come up to rest under her shoulder blades as you head finds its place tucked under her chin.

“Did you go somewhere cold?” You ask, her coat heavy along your arms as they move in soothing circles over her back.

“Up to the northern border.” She tells you, tucking herself in, mouth moving along your hairline. “It was cooler up there; the cold months haven’t left yet.”

“Have you ever seen snow?” It’s something that startled you when you came from Demacia, that there are people who’d never seen snow, never felt a winter.

“No,” simple answer, murmured into your hair.

“We always get it in the cold months in Demacia, my family lives near the mountains.” Your mind fills with images of playing with your siblings in the blanketed trees, hurling snowballs and making patterns in the snow, spelling out secrets.

“You never mentioned Demacia until you told me you were leaving.” Sevika notes, her mouth sliding along your cheek now, breath warm over the shell of your ear. Shivering into the touch, you let your arms unwind from around her, not sure if you will be able to share this while wrapped in her arms. As you talk, she shrugs off the coat and tosses it onto the sofa.

“I came to work at a healing clinic in lower Piltover, but it was burned down shortly after I arrived.” You move to look out the window next to her desk. “I didn’t have enough money to make it back home, so I tried to find other ways to cover the difference for trip back, that’s how I found the Gardens. Someone told me they needed a healer to check on the workers. After I went in, Babette offered me a job.”

“It was a better wage then I would have made at the clinic, so I thought I’d stay, as long as I could take it.” Your mind flashes over a few of your first customers and then to Blu, sitting with you after, Babette giving you advice, Miguel and his watchful eyes. “It was different then I thought it would be. I’d struggled to tell my family about it. About everything that happened. I didn’t want to ask them for the money to come back, especially if I would return empty handed.”

“Would they have objected?” She asks, voice low from behind you.

“Some people feel differently about sex, same as they do here. My parents- my whole family- won’t care how I got the money. But others might. I would never do anything to…compromise them. I’ve done all of this for them. I’d come all this way; I’d done all this work for them. The last thing I’d want-“

She cuts you off with her arms wrapping around you from behind, tucking you against her, head bowing down to tuck against yours.

“You can keep going,” she murmurs into your hair. “I didn’t mean to make you stop… I just thought you’d want…”

Your hands stall, your whole body bucking under the attention. It dawns on you, with this gesture, that she is giving you comfort. She reaches for you, always has, offering her comfort in the only way she seems to know, by touching you, offer her sure warmth against your skin, her mouth along yours, her arms circling you.

Winding your arms around hers, you lean back into the touch, her head coming to rest, low on your shoulder.

“I’ve done all of this for them, so they can have something better.” You tell her, gazing out into the street below.

“I am sure they know.” She tells you and the warmth that floods your heart is almost enough to make your legs buckle.

You stand in the safety of her arms for several long moments, enjoying the comfort, the warmth of her. Finally, as you turn, you slide your hands up to cradle her face. After enjoying the intimacy, you just want more of her.

Biting your lip, her eyes dart down to your mouth, and you take it as your cue to draw hers down to yours.

The weeks that pass follow a similar pattern.

Before, you’d spent most of your time to yourself. Your days would be spent reading, walking around Piltover, and then every other day or so you’d have an appointment with Geoffrey. Some were scheduled weeks in advanced, put on a small calendar one of his assistants would update when they arrived with your allowance. Or he would want to take you out to dinner or an event, he would still give you a day’s notice, message sent with someone who worked for him. He never just dropped by, his life scheduled and balanced.

Now, you sneak over the bridge as much as you can. You are trying not to smother the feeling growing, of loving and attachment, but as often as she calls for you, you always return.

You try to be careful to always be back in your apartment by noon if you spend the night, and you promise to yourself that you won’t spend more than two nights with her in a row. It’s an arbitrary rule of your own creation, but you can’t let yourself even start to think you can keep her.

After you leave her one morning, your next few days are busy, filled with several appointments with Geoffrey. You’d sent a note a day before that you should be able to see her by the end of the week. After the fifth day, in contrast to the last few weeks of spending many of your afternoons in her arms, you collapse into your soft bed, eyes barely keeping open as you try to read the letter that was left for you by the messenger.

You fall asleep holding it, admiring her sharp scrawl littering the page. You haven’t ever gotten a letter from her before, more torn bits of paper with quick notes. Even in your drowsy haze, you’re desperate to read it, curling up in your pillows and blankets.

A week of being apart and she shows up at your apartment door.

As you returned from a walk, arm full of food from the market, bouquet of flowers in hand, rounding the corner to spot her immediately in the distance.

You’ve never seen her in this context but she fits in, her sleek suit against the sharp architecture of Piltover. You have a moment to think maybe you are imagining her. You’re barely awake, trying to run errands before the messenger shows up, when you planned to let her know you’d come down to see her that evening.

She isn’t some sort of illusion created by your lovesick mind, she stands, partly in shadow by the large awning of your building.

As you approach, she has the audacity to look sheepish, as if she didn’t make herself wait there for you, as if she hadn’t walked half of Piltover to stand there.

Walking up to great her, it’s the most unusual thing and most usual feeling.

“Hello,” You greet her with. “You want to come up?” It’s the only thing you can think to ask, feeling like every eye is watching, even though the late afternoon street provides not a soul in sight.

You turn, unlocking the front door and lead her to the lift. After entering your apartment, you start to busy yourself with tucking away your food, finding a vase for the flowers you’d gotten yourself.

“I come across the river for very few reasons.” She says, stopping to study the art that lines your wall.

You drop the flowers into the vase, arranging them only to quell your nerves. “Oh, well, what reason did you have today?”

Turning towards her, you dust your hands off on your skirt. Turning her body to regard you, one day, you think the fluttering of nerves you get being the center of her attention will recede. You can never seem to process how she is always stunning, striking, so much and so beautiful all at once. A small part of you is frustrated that after all this time, as many times as she’s kissed you, taken you, you are always weak in in the knees for her.

She narrows her eyes at you, but in this moment, you are aware of how playful it is. The thought thrills you.

Breathing out, she shoves her hands into her pockets. “I would have thought that was obvious.”

The playful language, so light- so- flirtatious, catches you off guard, as its not her usual style. She is power, direct, assertive. But out of her element, she is, almost, coy? You can’t find the proper words, but they don’t really matter.

You lean against the counter, making a show of biting your lip in thought. “Taking in the local sights?” You inquire.

The smile that curves over her lips is the same one you’ve seen so many times. The same as when she wins at cards, or when she takes the first hit of her cigar.

“Yes, local sights…” she trails off, moving towards you.

“Interesting,” you reply as she wraps an arm around your waist, her other treading into your hair. “Need a tour guide?”

She leans in, dragging her lips along your neck, just as she’d done when you had been perched along the edge of her desk days before. “Yes, that would be…”

You break first as you can’t take the game anymore. Drawing her mouth to yours, leaning into her, winding a hand into her hair, you wonder if you’ll even make it to a bed this time. You take great joy in fisting her tie, using it to pull her down to your level. Her broken gasp against your mouth makes you pussy throb.

“You show up, looking like this…” you whisper, hot against her lips and she fights the shiver that passes over her.

“Looking like what?” She teases back and you can’t let that slide.

You know whenever she lets you handle her, that she allows you to do it. The power of that is the most thrilling part of all.

“You know exactually what-” you start when she cuts you off with another kiss, pulling at your clothes, your shirt out of the waistband, then rucking your skirt up, hands sliding easily into your underwear, shoving it down your hips as you walk her backwards.

Pushing in the direction of the bedroom, your hand still sure around the tie around her neck, you summon something deep within you. Pausing at the edge of the decorative rug you pull down on the black silk, forcing her to her knees.

Her eyes never leave your face as she slowly sinks. Her legs tucked under her, she slowly lets her hands slide down your thighs, taking your underwear with her, stopping right under your knees, her fingers tangled with the fabric and against your heated skin.

Your breath is heaving out of you, control surging over you. It never escapes you how powerful she is, and how she can be like this with you, allowing you to tell her what you want, what you want from her.

“Your mouth.” You instruct and she gently leans forward, her hands closing on the backs of your knees, and they threaten to buckle already. Looking up at you, you feel her warm breath tickle over your hair, your cunt dripping wet as it peaks out from your folds.

Tightening your hold on the tie, you have a moment of being impressed with yourself. This isn’t how you usually are, but you’ve never been with her in a space that was purely yours, knowing she has come all this way just because she missed you, that she couldn’t wait.

Her tongue is sinfully warm against your folds, and you moan out into the empty quiet of your living room, swaying forward, your other hand coming out to brace yourself on her shoulder. She starts to work, tucking herself closer to you, your hands making room for her to pull you closer, stepping against her bent knees as she keeps lapping at your cunt.

She eats you out like she is starving, mouth sure against you as she goes.

“Fuck,” your head falls back on your shoulders, and you feel yourself clench, pussy throbbing as your orgasm creeps nearer. As she brings you closer, you are less steady on your feet, rocking back and forth, with your knees threatening to buckle at any moment.

As you feel it draw near you try to warn her, mostly as you think you might just collapse on top of her when you do. Hands braced on her shoulders, one still wrapped in the tie, you glance down at her, and her eyes, silver glinting in the afternoon light, sends you over. Coming against her tongue, moaning your release, legs trembling, you feel her hands fly up your thighs, clutching you under your ass, holding you upright and against her mouth.

Your moaning nonsense fills the room until your begging from overstimulation makes her loosen her grip, letting you sink down her body, collapsing into her spread thighs.

“Gods…” you gasp out, as she runs her hands up your body, pulling you into her, on hand coming up around the back of your neck. Your head lulls onto her shoulder.

A giggle escapes your mouth as you’ve had a moment to breathe, you lean back and you’re dying to kiss her, chasing your taste on her lips. Her moan along your tongue makes you clench your fists, making the one still wrapped in the tie, catch her breath.

The next thing you know, you’re being maneuvered to the floor, laid softly against the push rug. She is efficient, but you help strip your clothes, leaving a haphazard ring around you. There is a wild look to her eyes as she struggles to pull her pants down, leaning in to kiss you, your naked body under hers.

“Come on,” you taunt, dragging a hand into her hair, dislodging the tie that keeps her looking so neat, running your hands through to muss the sharp edges.

A disgruntled huff flows, forcing herself forward, using leverage and friction to remove her pants, shoving you along the carpet along with her knees. You hiss at the rugburn and her smug look above you doesn’t surprise. Grabbing your legs, she lifts one of hers, slotting your leg under and between hers, your hips tucked over one of her bent knees. Angling herself to line you both up at the apex of your thighs, she moves your other leg up and along her body, placing your calf over her shoulder.

Rocking forward her sopping wet pussy grinds against yours and you gasp at the sensation. Your hands scrambling to find purchase, but the rug offers you nothing. She huffs out an amused sound and you look up to see her looking so smug, the same expression as before, victorious. Narrowing your eyes, you wrap one hand along her hip, the other you tuck against her knee that’s under yours.

Your grip offers her leverage as she rocks into you, her deep groan above you twines with your low whine.

Her rocking devolves into a frantic rut as you try to find the leverage below her to help, to rock your hips up, but she is too powerful. All you can do is hold on for dear life as she fucks you through it.

You are both so slick you are surprised you are even getting any sensation, the mix of your slick dripping down your ass, you trash around on the carpet below her as you feel the orgasm, slow as a second, start to creep up.

Her eyes are only on you, open and wondering over your body, your face, down to where you are joined. Her bicep flexes with her hold on you, her abs flicking with the rocking motion of her hips. You moan out at the sight of her, and her other hand that had been pinned around your waist, slides to the floor as she leans down, stretching your leg towards your body, her face starting to contort with ecstasy.

Her cursing along your neck, culminating into a shout, metal arm digging through the rug and into polished wood floors of your living room, is truly the last thing you’d expected when you’d been walking home this afternoon, but you’ll take it. You watch her face as her orgasm consumes her.

Rolling her hips into yours, she drops your leg from her shoulder, moaning as she slides your hips apart. Your so close to the edge, orgasm right out of reach, your hand flies down to your clit as her blurry eyes focus on your movements.

“Fuck” she says as she braces herself over you, drawing herself up close. “Keep going.”

Your fingers fly against the slick that paints your cunt, a mix of both of you, of where she has just taken her pleasure from the rocking between your bodies.

“Come on,” she directs, and you feel yourself clench down around nothing, head thrown back, eyes slamming shut. She brings her hand up to your face, thumb dragging along the swell of your bottom lip. Her gaze on you, watching your face flicker with pleasure, her mouth open and her eyes furrowed are all you can focus on as you chase it.

“Gods…” you moan out, gasping as her thumb slides into your mouth, closing your lips around it on instinct.

Smirking down at you, on the edge of your orgasm, your fingers working against your clit, chasing, she slowly starts to fuck her thumb into your wet lips. As you cum, the callused digit slows and slips out of your mouth, trailing a hot stripe of spit over you cheek as your blurry eyes try to focus on her.

After you come down, you feel her rise then draw you into her arms. Moving to stand, she carries you towards your bedroom. You make a reaching gesture, wanting to pick up after you both, your clothes strewn all over the floor of your living room.

She tucks you in closer, navigating the door. “We’ll get it later,” she says, leaning down to move the bedclothes back, laying you down gently. You curl in, expecting her body to blanket yours, but she pulls the covers over you.

Disappointed whine ignored, you hear a soft, “hold on,” before she moves around the other side of the bed and crawls in with you.

You sigh happily as she draws you in, close along her side, tucking you in, just as you’ve slept with her before.

“Better?” She asks, carding her fingers through your hair.

“Better,” you answer.

Chapter Text

The warm months come and settle in. Out for a special dinner, Geoffrey celebrating wrapping up a few of his most important business deals before he retires, you drift along the harbor dining on boat, which he tells you, is only available for special occasions and special people. Bathed in the soft light of the early evening, picking on a feast fit for two, sipping on fine wine, you and Geoffrey have easy conversation. As you clink glasses, you echo his delight in the past months and your continued time together.

“We are much closer to the end then the beginning. One of my assistants pointed that out to me the other day.” Geoffrey remarks as he digs into the decadent dessert that had been placed before you both.

Your hand pauses over your teacup, mind processing the information. Once you can grab onto a thought, this hadn’t occurred to you. Time had felt different the last few months. Caught in up in the routines you’d developed, sneaking down to see Sevika, parties and dinners with Geoffrey, games of cards and vising at the Gardens. You’d done a terrible job realizing how much time had passed.

“We should have celebrated our halfway point.” He remarks, smiling over at you.

“We will have to celebrate something else then.” You smile back.

You wonder, as Geoffrey recounts a story about a fishing trip he took as a young man, if you can slip away tonight to see Sevika, not sure how long Geoffrey might keep you. You drift on the boat around the harbor, enjoying the sunset fading into the evening hours, he finally lets you know you’ll be heading back to land.

Geoffrey takes you back to your apartment and after he’s come up and you’d had your usual evening end, he leaves, just as he always does. With a kiss on your cheek he slips out of the door.

It takes you about 3 minutes of internal debate before you’re showering, pulling on your clothes, heading towards the bridge and down to the lanes.

On your way, it occurs to you maybe you should have sent a note ahead of yourself, but as you’d missed your chance with Sevika’s messenger that morning, you’ll just have to be a surprise and hopefully a good one.

You haven’t been in the Last Drop during the height of the evening, when the walls shake with music, bodies tumble and writhe together, where liquor flows and voices are loud. One of the guards out front recognizes you as you approach, flagging over a young man seated in the alcove near the entryway. As you approach you hear the end of their conversation.

“….she is still meeting with them.” The young man whispers.

“Then have her sit at the bar.” The guard answers as their eyes flick back over to you, nodding his head in a greeting.

The younger man eyes you cautiously, “She is still in a meeting,” he tells you. “I will get you a seat at the bar to wait.”

Moving into the busting, humming din inside, you follow him to the illuminated bar top and slide into empty seat on the end, tucked near the wall. The young man slips behind the bar, whispering into the bartender’s ear, who then pours you a slug of amber liquor into a short glass. Surprised they know your favorite; you introduce yourself and they give their name in return, Boone. Falling into causal conversation, he keeps coming back to chat with you between tending, it’s busy, but as the minutes tick on, you realize how late it is as even the nightlife in the lanes is starting to trickle to a close.

Enjoying the people watching the relaxed conversation with the bartender, who makes sure your glass remains full, so you aren’t sure how much you’ve had, or how long you’ve waited. The wine mixing with the liquor, the thrum of the music and the apprehension of getting to see her all sing in your body, not quite drunk, but pleasant, floating feeling filling you. It reminds you of the time you ran into Sevika in a similar state, after you’d got to talk with her, when she pushed you against the alleyway and told you ‘no’, when you taunted her, and stalked away.

Smiling into the memory you miss the figure approaching you.

“Hello,” a man, tall, thin, with a reedy smile to match, and disheveled hair, glances down at you, leaning in and sliding along the bar’s edge towards you.

“Hi,” you greet him, drunk enough to be polite but not enough to be familiar.

“I haven’t seen you here before.” His voice is syrup slow, almost a slur. Looking up at him you wonder how many words it might take to get him to leave you alone.

“Hmmmm, maybe that’s on purpose.” You reply, taking another slug of your drink and as you set it down, the bartender quickly fills it.

“Don’t you have somewhere to-“ Boone starts towards your unwanted guest but the man cuts him off.

“I’m making a friend.” He replies, tilting his body closer to you.

“I have enough friends.” You reply, knowing this will either go over his head or possibly flare up anger and you ready yourself either way.

It proves to be all for nothing as the words leave your mouth a hand claps down on the reedy man’s shoulder.

“I think you’ve had enough,” Sevika’s voice is low, dangerous as she swings him around. You watch the color leave the man’s face as he’s turned, his grip on his beer bottle, white knuckled as he goes.

“-I - didn’t -“ He stammers out as Sevika pushes him towards the door and gestures to the doorman, who is already hustling halfway to meet her.

Turning back towards the bar, her eyes finally meet yours and you can’t help the hot flush that spreads over your skin at the sight of her, rising to your cheeks, and you hope it’s not visible in the glow from the lights overhead. Her mouth ticks up on one corner, the smile you know well, small, perfect, just for you.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see another glass slide across the bar’s surface towards her, Boone leaves the bottle and moves to attend to other customers. Sevika steps closer, arm grasping the glass resting on the bar, starting to eclipse you, leaving very little space between your bodies.

“Sorry to make you wait.” She says, taking a swig.

“It’s nothing. Boone took care of me.” You gesture to the bartenders back. “I’m sorry I surprised you.” You’re dying to touch her, to run your fingers over the back of her hand as it rests on the bar.

She shifts closer still, her feet almost under your chair, her other hand coming to rest on the low back. “Never apologize for that.”

Her eyes are dark as she peers down and you can’t ignore the thrumming need pulsing in you, your mouth starts to water, tongue darting out to lick your lips without thought. Watching her eyes dart down to watch, then over to where your hands both rest on the polished wood surface, inches away from each other, and you decide you’ve waited long enough.

“Now,” you lean up to whisper into her ear, suddenly the bantering too much, “I need you now.”

Turning your body, you reach out to brush your fingers over the front of her shirt and then she pulls you forward with a hand around your wrist, tugging you off the stool.

Glasses forgotten she tugs you along in front, towards where you know the door upstairs is. “Boone, I’m-”

“Got it, boss,” Boone replies, smirk on his face as Sevika maneuvers you out of the bar, using her body to push you towards the entrance, up the stairs, down the hall as she barely restrains herself from pulling at your clothes as she does.

Finally getting the door open to her office you stumble in as she shuts it behind her. Turning to face Sevika, while you slowly back towards her bedroom, you are aware that the door was left open and the small space glows behind you. Rotating the lock behind her, she reaches up to tug at her tie as you pull of you coat. Walking backwards you watch her, and she watches you.

Your top follows to the floor as she pulls at her vest, getting annoyed at the end and pulling on the last few buttons. Starting to undo your pants and she huffs out an exasperated noise, boarding on frustrated, pulling her own shirt free as she takes several wide steps, meeting you at the doorway as you both stumble backwards, her arms winding around you. Shoving your pants down she swipes her hands over the front of your underwear, finding you wet as you quiver at the touch.

Hands pulling at the front of her shirt, you manage enough to get it up and off, then start working on her fly, trying to your best to ignore her attempts to distract you. Her hands tease along your nipples, pinching through your underwear, pushing your pants down to your knees. She uses the motion to push you down on the bed, her bottoms finally hanging open as she gets down on her knees to pulls your pants and boots off.

Reaching down, you run your fingers over the swell of her lip and as she finally frees you, she stills, quiet before you, her breath heaving in and out, lips kiss swollen and spit shined, the barest blush under her cheeks. You can’t help yourself but slide off the bed’s edge, not sure what you are doing but trying, it would seem, to crawl in her lap.

She huffs out a laugh into your kiss, as your leg tangle with hers, she helps you onto the ground in the narrow space. Laid out on your back on the hardwood, you see the box that holds her harness, your hand flies out, grabbing the edge of the strap and pull it towards you.

“Fuck me.” You plead, turning back to face her as she leans up on her knees, pushing her pants down, looking at you with a hard expression. Not angry, but stormy, dark, the silver of her eyes barely visible around her pupils. “Please.” You add, only to be teasing.

Sevika leans down, her left hand coming down to swipe the strap out of your fingers, kissing your fiercely as she does. After this is a scrabble to get her into the harness, which you keep trying to distract her from, teasing along her nipples and biting along her jaw. She finally resorts to pinning you to the floor, metal arm encircling your wrists as she lines the dildo up and slides in.

The alcohol in your blood is making everything this swim a little more than usual, mind a little giddy, your skin hotter, burning under her. After sliding in, she levers herself down on her elbows, arms braced on either side of your head as she starts to fuck you, slow roll of her hips pushing you into the floor below. Her skin under your hands, the softness in contrast with her muscles, the shift and the power behind her, a thought creeps into your head. How many more times will you have this, have her? How many times will you get to kiss her? Spend the night in her arms?

Mind starts to whirl…you’d been avoiding it, thinking that time wasn’t passing, that there would be more. But what might happen, what might not, what might you miss…

“Get out of your head.” Her voice cutting through your thoughts startles you. Gasping as you arch up, head thrown back into the flurry of sensations.

Lifting herself off you, Sevika slides out, causing you too keen at the loss. Reaching out to her, you try to intreat her back, only to have her grab you by your hips, turning you easily over onto your knees.

“What were you thinking about?” She asks, hand fisting roughly in your hair, using it as leverage as she dives the strap back into your wet cunt.

As her hips press into yours, you think that she is so controlled with her strength most of the time, especially with you. That now, the powerful drive of her hips, the biting of her fingertips, you remember (like the time in the alleyway) that she has only ever shown a fraction. She is with you, gentle, but not right now. Now she is fucking you with raw power- hard, fast, shaking the floorboards beneath you.

Reaching down and around, she pulls her right arm low around your waist, the other leaning forward, the glow of shimmer appearing out of the corner of your eye to hold her weight up. Pulling you back on the strap with a flex of her bicep, meeting your hips with a thrust of hers, power driving into you from both directions and you are just melting under it. Vaguely, you’re very aware of how bruised your knees are going to be, possibly your elbows too. The determination of her hips into yours, the slick, wet sound the strap makes every time she slides in. You can barely breathe, let alone moan, scream, or whimper. You try to gasp out a reply to her question, but it’s all so much. Your knees digging into the hardwood, hands scrambling to keep yourself upright, all of you rocking forward and back with each powerful snap of her hips or pull of her arm.

There isn’t much stimulation on your clit, but it must be enough as the next thing coherent though you have- you’re coming.

Not just coming- spraying, screaming, shaking, moaning, heaving breath in and out, knees rattling against the floor, and all while she keeps her brutal pace, her strap echoing a lewd squelching sound audible over the music from the bar below.

You need her to know, as you surface, you only ever think about her. She has fucked you though your orgasm, her hips now going in a deep, grinding motion, as she holds you tight in her grip. It feels just like drowning. It’s so much, not like suffocating, it’s not the lack, it’s excess, overflowing. With her it’s always almost too much, but just enough, just a step before the breaking point.

“You,” breathing this out along a particularly forceful roll of her hips, you lock your elbows to try to keep yourself from sliding down to the floor. “You- I always-only- you…”

The rumbling response from behind you, her voice reverberating against your skin sends you in shivers, you need her to know your serious.

“You, I was thinking of you,” you crane your head back, trying to meet her eyes so she can see the sincerity behind yours. You rock with each ruthless trust and as you volley back and forth on your knees you keep going, thighs shaking with the effort. “You, when I am alone, I think of you. When I need to get myself off I think of you fucking me, like this, or your mouth between my legs or when-“

You can’t continue as she flattens you with a particularly forceful push, that devolves into some animalistic grinding as she groans out her release into the skin between your shoulders.

Stilling against the floor, your finally let the ache of your body register, her weight, while welcome, is unrelenting when you are sandwiched between the floor and her bulk. Trying to raise yourself up to move out from under her, you grunt, falling back down onto your stomach.

You feel her rumble of laughter against your back. The giggle the bubbles up from you is unbidden but welcome in return. You both end up shaking with laughter as she slowly rolls off your back and slips out of you.

Angling both of your bodies, you lay in the narrow space, against her side as she lays on her back, eyes tilted towards the ceiling as you study her profile.

Your fingertips come up to trace from her brow down the arch of her nose, skating down the soft slope above her lips and over their fullness, finally coming to rest on the jut of her chin.

Turning her head towards you, here icy grey eyes shine with something, something you can’t place, but you desperately want too, something moving, brewing behind. Grabbing your fingers in hers, she starts to roll her body over towards you then moves to stand.

“I’m not done with you.” She warns, drawing you off the ground by the tangle of your hair, supporting you with an arm under your chest.

“Yes,” you gasp out in response, unable to let the words pushing against your lips, that you aren’t done with her either, you still have the time, you still have time.

Her hands are gentle on you as she moves you towards her bed. Less so when she pushes you down under her.

Later, as you are tucking yourself along her side, her voice is soft into the nighttime darkness. “Was that too much?” She asks, fingers dusting over your arm as it wraps around her.

“No,” you reply, tucking your head along her shoulder. “Just perfect.”

Weeks later, another afternoon spent with her, walking back in from cleaning yourself in her bathroom, you stop in the doorway to admire the view. Sevika laid back on the pillows, arm behind her head, sheet barely covering her waist, her other laid casually over her ribs. Her eyes study you from the moment you open the door, hot on your skin as you stare back.

“Yes?” you ask, moving slowing towards the edge of the bed, waiting to see if she was in the mood for something else.

“Hmm,” she answers, sliding her fingers over the skin of her waist, and your eyes immediately follow the movement.

Tucking yourself next to her, sitting on your calves, stretching your arms up and out, rolling your body into the sore, used, satisfactory feeling being fucked by her always produces, you turn your eyes to meet hers.

She reaches out, drawing her fingers along the soft skin on of your thighs, a favorite pastime of hers during the afterglow. You watch her face, and you can tell she is working herself up to ask you something.

Finally, she cuts into the companiable silence. “Does he know?”

Generally, truly, you are confused, “Does who know?” you ask, rolling your shoulders back.

The expression on her face you realize isn’t often pointed towards you, that you are being dense, her blank expression mirrored in return.

“Geoffrey?” You ask, suddenly aware of what she is asking about.

Her voice is tight as she responds. “Yes.” Her eyes break your gaze, moving to study the wall over your shoulder.

You aren’t sure why she is asking, why now of all the times, so many thoughts start to flit about your head you think it’s best to answer her with the easiest, the quickest, before everything starts to jumble.

“He told me,” You remember mid-thought, “and it’s in the agreement I signed with him, that I can do whatever I want with my free time as long as I am discreet.” You lean into the last word, filling it with Geoffrey accent which, you realize after the words leave you that Sevika would have no idea of.

Continuing, just to iron out the point. “He never asks, so I never tell him. He doesn’t tell me when he sees his family, or what he does with this business.” You amend the point with one final fact. “He didn’t ask before I started to see you, he hasn’t since.”

She seems to mull this over, her thoughts churning behind her stormy eyes.

Your curiosity gets the better of you, so you enquire, “Is there a reason you are asking?” Leaning forwards, brushing a lock of her hair out of her face, drawing her out of her inner thoughts.

“He knows some people I know.” She tells you, reaching out to draw her thumb over the swell for your hip, and while you appreciate her honesty, you wonder if you have all of it. Either way, it makes your nerves skitter in a way you’d never even thought of, that worlds could collide in this way. “It’s how I saw you at that party.”

You remember, now months ago, when you’d seen her on that terrace, for the first time after leaving the Gardens.

“Well, in that way,” you say, leaning down to capture her chin in your hand, “I guess I’m lucky.”

Her soft laugh echoes against your lips before you kiss her.

“Happy Progress Day!” Blue greets you as they throw a handful of confetti into your direction and wave around a small nose maker.

You aren’t sure how to respond so you smile at them, slightly bemused.

“Oh yes, I always forget, you aren’t from here, love.” They pull you into a hug and try to dust the stray bits of paper off, doing a terrible job. “You here for the celebration?”

“What is Progress Day, again?” You ask, as you walk arm and arm back into The Gardens.

Blu explains the holiday, something about founders, you always love to hear them tell a story, as they are so natural at it.

“I’ll stay for a bit, to be honest, I had forgotten.” You’re a little put out, not thinking that Geoffrey had put on your calendar for a formal event the next evening, you’d been dying to spend time with your friends.

After grabbing a drink for you both, you walk back out into the main street and the lights, sounds and merriment hits you. You’d come down the lanes and slipped in the back entrance to the Gardens, as you usually did, but you remembered what this celebration was like the year before when you’d worked there. Only a few months before you’d left, near the end of the hot season, it’s one of the only times you remember the workers milling about in the streets. With Blu, you intermingle with the crowd, visiting with a few other workers, sneaking a hug from Dot as she flitted past. You get caught up in the merriment, ending up spending a few hours talking, laughing with the others.

Finally, the evening culminated in a electrics display, like the fireworks you are guessing Geoffrey would take you to the next evening, but only as the Lanes could create, a rich bath of sparks and explosions that shimmered down from the scaffolding above. You sit on the top edge of the building with Blu and a few others, laid flat on your back, watching the cascade of color shine down.

One by one the others leave, going to their evening appointments, Blu’s eyes sad as they joined. It’s the longest you’d gotten to spend with them in ages and you brim with love as they leave.

You stay on the patched roof, laid back, enjoying the sparking display for a while on your own. As you think to rise and head back for the night a shadow draws over you.

At first you prepare yourself for a fight, but then the familiar smell wafts over; cigar smoke and her. As your eyes adjust you see her smirking down at you.

“You almost frightened me.” You tell her, rising to your elbows as she moves to stand beside you.

“I saw you up here, saw you were alone.” She supplies. Sevika is dressed more informal, as you come to think of it, in her clothes from before she was the boss.

“Thought you could come and scare me?” You tease.

She does surprise you, by sitting down the roof next to you, then leaning back on her elbows to mirror you.

“Something like that.” She ways and then leans back, folding her arms over her middle to enjoy the show.

You both lay there on your backs, for several long minutes, in a comfortable silence. As the lights fizzle out, you draw yourself up on your legs, crossing them and stretching your body out. Sitting up beside you, she pulls a flask out, unscrewing the top and offering you a swig.

The liquid burns down but you are thankful for it, handing it back as you look down into the street below.

The fires twinkle as little kids dance around to music. Families, friends, all gather with drinks, it’s the sweet, soft and revelatory, something you’d not often seen in this part of town. As you take it all in, you feel fingertips ghost over the back of your neck and when you turn, Sevika’s eyes are on you.

“What?” You ask, smiling back at her.

“You miss them?” She asks then flinches slightly. “I’m sure you do. I mean…”

You know what she is trying to ask, not always sure of the words but of their intention. “I think they would enjoy this. We celebrate something similar in Demacia,” you answer her unasked question.

Leaning back on your hands you tell her a few stories of your family. Of once during the summer festival when your brother had toppled in a large cake while running after you, or when all three of you can snuck away to sip on the mead you’d swiped from your parent’s cellar, and, finally, the time you’d all caught fish in the river and ate the fest in the dying light of the fire it was cooked in. In return she tells you of her father, a little of her childhood, a story of a cherished toy she got during this same festival, years ago, from her grandparents.

You think, if you loved her less, this moment might seem trivial, but in all the time you’ve spent together, it’s the closest you’d ever felt to her. Passing the flask back and forth until your blood hums with the liquor and her, the closeness, the intimacy, the love that burns hot in your veins.

You think of the halfway points you’ve missed, precipice of half of your time with her you toppled over without a thought. You wonder how many things have already been your last, ones you won’t know until you’re back home, reminiscing on all of this, like something suspended in a snow globe, preserved for later reflection.

The last swig from the flask she offers you, so you toast back, a smile breaking on her face as you do.

It burns on its way down, just like everything else.

Chapter Text

Time is only a commodity to those to track it. You had all the time in the world when you hadn’t counted. Now that you are aware of the mere weeks you have left in Piltover, the quicker seconds seem, the precious currency that it’s become.

You would think that after all of that, all your inner turmoil, all your fretting, living in your moment of panic about the time you had left, you’d be more mindful of it.

So, you start to trade in minutes, balancing time between the point and where you’re pulled. Some with Geoffrey, cutting every second close. More with Sevika and you want, no, you need time with your friends. Blu most of all, you will miss them so dearly it stabs you in the heart every time you think of not being a walk away from a story told in the manner to make you laugh.

One Month and One Day:

One evening, while you stand on Geoffrey’s arm, in the same house you’d seen Sevika all those months ago, you chat easily with his business partners. The same sentiment is echoed, that you must be so happy he is retiring, after the life he’s lead. You nod along in agreement as you count the seconds until you can slip onto your favorite terrace to get some solitude.

After returning with a fresh drink for yourself and Geoffrey, you tuck yourself along Geoffrey arm, and after he squeezes back, his eyes darting, you wonder, after as many times as you’d visited with him, if your absence is a good for his business as it is for your solicitude.

The hosts for the evening draw near. As you greet them, you become aware of another figure in the shadows behind them.

Sevika walks up to the group, her eyes passing over you and aligning with Geoffrey. The shock that slips over almost takes, but your brain fights to keep right side up.

She’s here, with you, in conversation with…

It’s like watching a story about yourself, you watch Geoffrey extend his hand to greet her, Sevika takes it, shaking it in a business-like manner. The soft filter extends as you become aware Geoffrey introducing you to Sevika, who you can barely nod in greeting as you completely start to disassociate.

Like surfacing from water, your consciousness bobs upwards, mind reeling, but finally joining the conversation.

You need to pull yourself way, the rational part of your brain suggests, to calm for its own good.

Leaning in, you whisper over Geoffrey’s ear, “I’m going to slip out,” and he nods in agreement, giving you the same cheeky smile as always. Escaping to the quiet of your favorite outlook, you finally find a moment of blissful peace.

As soon as you have it, it grates, thoughts pulled in too many directions. Your heart hammers the whole time as try to get yourself to enjoy the fluffy clouds that skate over the water.

As the sun sets, someone comes to disturb you. Hearing the door open behind, you can’t even call yourself to move, tired by this point, so done with this to care beyond how you will react.

The tumbler appears out of the corner of your eye, rocks glass shining in the dim light as its set down on the pillar beside you. Sevika’s fingers linger on the edge as she steps up next to you.

You’re silent both together, breathing in the cooler air as it wafts in.

After several, long fraught moments, in your mind you can’t help remember the last time you’d been on the terrace with her. Sevika is first to cut the silence. “Nice view.”

And you aren’t sure what it is, the statement trying to break the ice, the tension that lines every part of your body, her trying to get you to warm to her, to break the formality of this, the sheer absurdity of it all, but it the laugh that forces up from you is powerful, almost taking you down to the ground. Vaguely, after a moment, you realize she is laughing with you, and after a few seconds of clutching your sides, hands out to keep your balance on the railing, tears slipping from your eyes, you can finally taper off, small giggle still bleeding out as you calm, straightening yourself.

“It is a nice view,” you say, trying to swipe the tears from your eyes and looking over you see her pull a red swatch of fabric from her pocket that she uses to dust her tears away. Once she finishes, she offers it to you. Taking the fabric, you can tell it’s, soft, worn, well used, against your fingers as you do the same, wiping off your tears.

You both stand in silence again, but the piece, this time is a little less tense.

The fact that occurred to you earlier pushes its away against your mouth. That morning, as Geoffrey’s assistant brought you a few different options for traveling back to Demicia, he noticed the look of confusion on your face. You only have a month and a day left he told you. This fact, has boiled in your brain all day, tries to get out, and it wins.

“I only have a month left.” You’ve felt it building, the last few weeks. You have a name for it now, resentment. Resentment simmers in your veins, sits under your eyelids, lines your mouth and curls around your fingertips.

Sevika is still beside you, and now you hate that your little quiet alcove, your peaceful spot in the bustle of Piltover is often so fucking quiet. Filled with deafening, unwanted, silence.

“I know.” She states.

The resentment flares and like the time she came storming into your room after you’d been attacked, you know your anger is not at her, not for her, so you are trying desperately, not to aim yours back.

Tears threaten to spill, not happy ones this time. You choke a little on our breath as you try to take it, swaying on your feet, turning to brace yourself against the railing.

She reaches for you, and you can’t stop yourself before you issue the warning, “No, don’t. Not here.”

You'd been inappropriate on this very balcony months ago. That fact is lost to you now as you almost miss the flash of hurt on her face, then the hardening after. Her mouth turning down at the corners and pulling her body away.

Righting yourself, you take a deep gulp of your offered drink and cradle it against your warm skin, the ice doing little cool you off.

Sevika moves away from you, making visible space between. Your heart coils in your chest and as you try to think of something to say, the space keeps feeling up with more and more unsaid things.

You turn to make you way back inside, to check on Geoffrey, to make the excuse you have a headache, that you’d like to head home.

Moving towards the door, she takes a step to block your exit, her gaze hard against your own. It feels like a race, no, like a standoff. Someone waiting to draw a gun but you both feel unarmed. A knife fight where you both just have fists.

She takes a breath, studying herself and before she can get speak, the door opens next to you.

You both take a step apart as Geoffrey makes his way out onto the terrace, still in conversation with someone inside. As you take a quick look around you notice you are still holding the red handkerchief, you tuck it in your bodice as Sevika’s eyes flash to Geoffrey. His goodbye is cut off by the door closing as he turns to hand you a drink.

“Here you go my dear,” he says handing you the rocks glass that you take with your free hand. He turns to regard the view, and then notices Sevika standing in the part of the terrace obscured by the line of large plants.

“Oh, hello,” he perks up, extending his hand again to her, which she takes and shakes. “Enjoying the view?” His voice is level as always, he could be dissecting you, asking you about your day, accusing you of murder and his voice would never betray him.

He could be asking her about the you or the skyline, you wouldn’t even know.

“Yes.” Taking a sip from her own tumbler, as cool as ever, not even a flicker behind her eyes. “The owners suggested I take a look.” Her eyes dark out to the horizon then back at you, and you know your eyes always give you away. So you tuck you look into your glass, finishing the one she brought you in a swig.

Standing between them, you realize they could both play this game, and you are truly not sure who might win.

You all wait a beat together, the only noise the soft sound of music and laughter from the party within.

“Geoffrey,” you finally break the silence, “I’m starting to get tried. Do you mind if we leave? Do have any more business to attend too?” Running your hand over his arm as you know he is accustomed, a familiar gesture between you both, his eyes keep tracking back to Sevika as hers fight between you both, her eyes catching on your hand.

He waits out a beat, then responds. “Of course, my dear.” He draws your hand into the crook of his arm. “It was nice to meet you, Sevika.” He nods with a smile as he moves with you, pulling open the door.

Geoffrey’s version of you, she wins out right now. Polite as ever, she offers she a small smile to Sevika as she slips out the door.

One Month:

After many visits, Sevika gave you a key to her office, of which two exist. One for and one for her use.

For the last few months, you’d arrive at the Last Drop, passing the guards with a nod of your head. Head into the bar, greeting whatever bartender was on duty, make you way up the back stairs, unlock the door to her office and slip in, bolting it back behind you.

She was often asleep, the late afternoon was well into her resting hours, laying across her bed, one leg hanging off, sheets barely over her, her body like a furnace, face down, snoring softly into her pillow.

This afternoon feels a bit heaver, you’d barely slept, tossing, and turning all night, wanting to seek her out, to hold her close, not waist a second of the meager time you had left.

But you didn’t, you waited. Now, you sneak into her bedroom and you’re dying to wake her up, gather her close, and apologize.

This is probably your favorite version of her, out of all the ones you’ve seen. Sleep soft, eyes only on you, groggy but as soon as she realizes you’re with her, the look on her face almost seems to make herself sure that you aren’t a dream, reaching out, pulling you in.

No one else gets this Sevika. Someone else might get her later, someone else might have had her before. But right now, she is just yours.

Pulling your boots off at her doorway, you pause for a moment. After how you left her the night before, you aren’t sure if she’s going to want you in her bed. She’s never denied you before, but this felt harder, more poisonous. But you’ve also been awake for hours over thinking all of this, so your opinion might be a little jaded. All this time together and you’d both kept it so close to the chest. Rarely out in public, usually tucked away in bedroom together. Sitting down on the bed next to her to lean in, tucking a stray piece of her hair behind her ear.

“Sevika,” you say her name softly. Very rarely, you’ve spooked her, her hindbrain seeing someone in her room right when she wakes up as an attacker. So, you try to be a gentle as you can, soothing softly until she realizes you are with her, and that no harm will come to her.

Trying again, you run your fingertips softly over the shell of her ear, “Sev,” and she barely stirs, muscles twitching slightly, not yet ready to wake.

Leaning down, bracing yourself, your lips side softly, purposely along her cheek. “Sevika,” you try one last time, and if it doesn’t work, you’ll just lay down with her until she stirs on her own.

As your lips leave her skin, she finally blinks her eyes open, rumbling something deep in her chest, eyes fluttering open and slowly training on you.

Looking down at her, you are torn, you want to pretend you hadn’t left things the way you did last night, but you know you need to soothe, or, at least, you want too.

“Do you mind if I talk to you while you wake up?” You ask, knowing that sometimes she is too groggy when she first wakes up to have a conversation, but she will always listen.

Nodding minutely, she draws her arms up under her pillow, her bicep flexing with the motion, and you try to not get distracted.

“I’m sorry about the way I acted. It wasn’t you. It hasn’t been you.” You say and that rational voice urges you on, be brave.

“You’ve asked for so little, this whole time, and I’ve asked for so much.” You twist the short lock of her hair around your finger. “I did keep you like a secret, but I had too, I signed an agreement that I would keep my affairs to myself, but how would it have worked otherwise? You aren’t a person who can…”

The words fight in your brain, all volleying to be chosen, none of them fit well enough. Sighing, you run your fingers over the sheets next to you. “I try to not imagine a life that isn’t this. That.. maybe… we’d just meet another way.” You can’t look up to meet her eyes, yours starting to feel wet in the corners. It’s feels embarrassing to admit this, but you’ve opened the spigot now and months of emotions are starting to stream out. “It’s a foolish thought but I can’t see how we could have had this much time with each other, and it not be a secret. For it…”

Wrapping and arm around yourself, tucking yourself into the smallest space, wanting now to be swallowed up by the bed or the floor. A tear slips down along your cheek. “A what if, something that-“

“Those can kill you.” Her voice is soft next to you, now her eyes open, awake, staring up at you.

A defeated laugh falls from your lips, allowing your eyes to drift over to hers.

Her stare is long and hard, assessing you, holding you hostage, yet again, with stillness.

Finally, she reaches out for you, rolling onto her back as you fall into her arms like you always have. Like you aways would, if you’d been given enough time to do so. She pulls you close, sleep warm and soft, still your favorite, always your favorite.

You head ends up resting on her chest, jacket shed as you get to warm next to her. Both lost in your own thoughts, you start to fight sleep, so comfortable next to her.

She breaks the silence after a stretch.

“Why him? Why did you go with him?” Sevika’s voice cuts into your drowsy haze.

“He offered me the money I needed.” You say, simply, as the answer is simple, but you have a feeling it won’t be enough explanation.

“What if I could have offered you the same. What if I can now.” And this reply, is honestly the last thing you thought she’d say.

“I wouldn’t have wanted that with you.” You know this won’t be the answer she wants, and it’s confirmed when she stills beside you feel her tense. Before she can roll away, you keep going. “I’d want to be with you. I’d want to a fall asleep next to you each night and wake up with you. And that is a fantasy, one we both know won’t exist. You can’t go and I can’t stay.”

Moving quickly, you tuck yourself under the curve of her arm, pinning her to the mattress, trying to bribe her to stay put with the softness of your body.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever loved.” It flies out, in the mood now to be truthful. But it feels as if you’re releasing a weight pinning you down. Unburdened by it you feel a little lightheaded, keeping this emotion in got easier and easier as time went on, but with it lifted, you remembered how hard it had been to keep it in.

You both still after your confession as your fingers continue to trace down the curve of her arm. After a moment, hers wrap around you, slowly, drawing you over her body, tucking you into the curve of her neck, leg slotting between hers. Her breath is quick under your ear, heart hammering softly, but you wait… you try… as you are dying to cut into the silence. But some many times with her, as she taught you, letting silences linger can be good.

The truth can cut to bleed, it can release, it can lie just as well.

“I’ll never need to hear you say it back.” As you say the words, you know they’re the truth. You’re old enough to know it’s not how love works. It can be given but it shouldn’t be bartered for. Not part of an exchange but always a gift.

Drawing your hands up her chest, leaning up on your elbows, you study her face while trying to ground yourself. Her eyes flit around your face as her brow furrows. You add, just for posterity, “I’ve loved you since I was at the Gardens.”

Her grip on your hips tightens, fingertips digging into the softness. You continue, “I know we can’t have something past this, we can’t have….” You choke on the words, feeling like your bleeding emotions now, but what would the point in waiting for later, there won’t be one. “We can’t have something that lasts. It’s what- it’s what I’d want with you, but we can’t have that.”

“I understand why you need to stay. I see what you are working towards, what Zaun means to you, to all your workers. I understand why.” Your fingertips glide over the curve of her jaw as you go. “It’s the same reason I need to go back. Demacia has been ravaged. I can bring something back, something hopeful and helpful.”

She winds her fingers around the tips of your hair as you talk, eyes skating over your face. You watch her reactions, her brow crinkling at the end.

“What about something for you?” She asks and you feel the smile spread over your face in response. Looking at you a curious look slides over her features. “What?” She asks.

“Something for me? I thought that would have been obvious.” Your fingers brush over the apple of her cheeks. “It’s you, my time with you. It was just for me.”

One Week:

You’d spent several long days with Geoffrey, accompanying him on a few trips and events to tie up his business affairs. As you walk home, you are so grateful to have the next day all to yourself. When Sevika’s messenger had arrived the day before, you’d sent a note explaining you’d be free to see her in the morning or the evening before if she didn’t have business to take care of.

Arriving back to your apartment that evening, you find Sevika waiting, folded in the shadows of your doorway, like she had so many times before.  The low light from the streetlamps glowing in the color of her eyes as you draw near.

You’re wearing one of your more extravagant gowns, having just returned from some stupidly fancy party with Geoffrey, and you’re dying to take of your shoes as they pinch.

“Couldn’t wait?” You tease, drawing your key out of your bag, moving to unlock the front door. As you hold the door open for her, you release she hasn’t moved, her eyes hard on you, as they rake over your body. You tilt your head to the side, placing a hand on your hip. “Want to come up and help me take it off?”

Your bantering gets the response you want, her sharp look on your face now, acknowledging the challenge, ready to make you beg for issuing it.

It’s the best debt you’ve ever had to pay.

Moving up the lift she keeps a respectable distance but as soon as the doors open onto your floor, her hand comes to the small of your back, pushing you along as you pull out your key, pressing her body against as you struggle to open the lock.

Her mouth drags over the skin of your neck, the other hand coming up to drag over the soft satin of the dress, bunching at your hips. Her other hand brushes down your bare skin, pushing down the strap of your dress over your forearm, then around your wrist and hand, helping you turn the key and push the door open.

She pushes you inside while never separating your bodies, deftly pulling the key out, closing the door behind her, latching it, then tossing the key somewhere onto the floor as she moves you towards your bedroom.

Just to feed into the frensy between you, because you can, your hands come up to brace against the doorway to your bedroom, stopping your forward progress. The barely startled noise against your back almost makes you laugh as she bumps into you, her hands against your waist, her face buried in your hair.

“What-“ She starts to ask.

“Take it off.” You want her to see what you are wearing under it; you want to be unwrapped. You wore this just for her, hoping she would be there to take if off you when you got back.

Pulling away, she runs her hands over your body, pulling and pushing at the fabric barely covering you. “What if I want to fuck you in it?”

Oh, oh.. you like that idea, too. But you fight the urge to agree.

“I wore it just for you.” You tell her and she is quick to tug the zipper down.

You hear her exhale as she reveals the dark, lacy set of underwear, her breath brushing along the skin of your spine. The dress is pushed easily down your hips, falling to the floor.

Both of you still, then she reaches up, running her hands over the fullness of your hips, over your waist, up under your arms around to your breasts, gently cupping the lace that covers you, pulling you back against her. Her head coming around your shoulder, looking down your body, her voice is soft, brushing over your skin. “For me?”

“Yes,” you answer, bring a hand up to tangle in her hair, stepping out the of the dress and she pushes you towards your bed.

Turning in her arms, you reach up to push her jacket off, resisting her gentle push as she tries to push you onto the bed.

“Let me,” you ask, as it comes out far more like a whine then you’d like. “I want-“

“What do you want?” She asks, tone, playful, more and more the longer you know her, the carefully constructed armor slowly being rebuilt day by day. Imagine what you could do if you had a lifetime?

You’re answer stalls as her hands skate over your ribs, tickling the skin there, pulling the only thought in your head right out. Funny, as it was after all, only of her.

“You did this,” say whispers, dragging her hands over the lace that covers the hard peaks of your nipples, “just for me?”

“Yes,” is breathed between you both, as you shamelessly lean into the touch. “Just for you…”

Suddenly, your positions are reversed, Sevika leaning back on the soft bed, pulling you down on top of her. Grabbing you at the last second, and you can never be annoyed at how cat-like her reflexes are as you always benfit, pulling your knees up onto her lap as she does.

Another tug and you’re straddling her waist.

Another and your low on her chest.

Gasping, you balance yourself on her shoulders, her eyes hard up at you, as you figure out where she is moving you. Reaching up, you settle your hands right below her breasts, taking the time to tease her shirt open, pulling down her underwear, sweeping over her nipples.

She runs her hands over the skin of your thighs as they bracket her body, enjoying the reaction she gets. Another look, hard between your legs, and you are being yanked upwards on her body again, the juncture of your legs now hovering over her collar bones as she looks so smugly up at you. Smug enough you want to just push your hips over her mouth and take what you want from her.

Fingers brushing over your skin, toying with the edge of your underwear, she smiles up at you, almost insufferably.

“You’re so wet for me.” She says, pulling the lace edge of your panties over your mound, settling them on the crease of your hip, baring you to her.

“Sevika-“ and her name dies on your lips as she pulls you down, hands along your knees, now her mouth unbearably hot and wet sliding against your clit.

“oh…..Oh… fuck…” you breathe out swaying forwards, threatening to crash foward but her mouth leaving your wet lips makes you still, her voice hoarse from between your legs.

“Keep yourself up.” She says, voice and eyes hard on you. “I want to watch you.”

You can help the shiver that stuns you, settling back on your legs as her hands wrap around your thighs, pulling you tight against her mouth.

There is no place to hide like this, nowhere to go. Squirming against the unrelenting force of her mouth, balance shifting as your body twitches and writhes on its own. Not sure where to put your hands, you finally start to run them over your hot skin just as you know she would if she wasn’t under you. Down the curve of your neck, over your breasts, teasing at your nipples through the lace, down over the skin of your hips and, fuck…

Her eyes glowing in the light from between your legs, determined tilt to your brow as she watches you.

You haven’t been like this in ages, feeling like a hair-trigger, so close with only a few moments of her skilled mouth.

Rocking your hips down she must be able to tell you’re already so close to the edge, gentling her touches until you whine out pathetically above her. It’s a cat and mouse game, hers with you. She keeps bringing you right up the edge, her eyes set in a hard gaze from between your legs, you pant, fight, squirm towards your orgasm, feeing completely out of control.

She finally finishes you with a tug down on your thighs, pulling you close and hot down onto her mouth as your orgasm takes you.

You come back to your senses as you pant into soft light of your bedroom. Her gentle touches over your skin bring you back to reality.

“Gods…” you breath out, and her soft chuckle from under you is almost enough to get you going again but you’re impatient to touch her. Swinging your leg around, you angle your body to lie next to her. Giving her a kiss, tasting yourself on her lips, you tug at her pants, pulling the zip down. Fingers gently playing with the edge of her underwear, your intent clear; she is next.

“I want to do that to you.” You pant between breaths, shoving her pants down her thighs, whining when they get stuck.

“Later,” she gasps, lifting her hips to help you then reaching out to pull you up along your arms. “I’m too close. Just-“

And you get the feeling. So, you lean down over her, side your fingers over her underwear, feeling her wetness sink through the cloth. Her answering hiss of pleasure is followed by her skimming one hand down your arm to grab your wrist.

“Fuck, just touch me.” She orders and you are quick to obey her.

Shoving her underwear to the side, just as she did to you, your fingertips are greeted with her sopping wet cunt. Rocking up into your touch, you quickly fall into the familiar rhythm to make her fall apart.

Afterwards, she holds you tucked against her chest. Her breath comes in soft, hot huffs against the skin of your neck making you fight the urge to squirm against her. One of her hands is wrapped under and around you, laying up and over your shoulders, as her other rests along your hip, fingers playing with the edge of your underwear.

“I only have a week left with you.” You say.

“I know,” comes the reply as she dips her fingers under the lace and journeys lower.

Chapter Text

One Day:

You feel Blu’s tears soak into your hair and yours bleed into their dress.

“I’ll miss you so much honey.” They squeeze you tight again. “I’ll write you…” trailing off into a sob.

“Just come with me!” You tug them impossibly closer. You knew this goodbye would be one of the worst. It cuts you of at the knees, stabs at your heart, pulls at your breath. “My family with love you! You can…” you stall. You know what Zaun means to them. Leaving your home, it’s what you did, years ago now, you know the kind of hole that it will leave. That wound for you will soon be healed in the soft shadow of the mountains.

You’re both quiet for a moment, holding each other close.

“Please write me...” Your voice is so small.

“Of course,” they reply.

Coming back from the lanes you are so tried. Waiting to say goodbye to everyone at the Gardens until the last moment took so much out of you. Babette eyes shined with tears and Miguel’s hug cracked your ribs. Flora and Dot, you’ll miss them all, your little family. Only a few years old but what a life you’d lead with them and the haven they provided.

You’d left a pile of money with Babette for a healer, just as you’d been hired, for all the workers at the Gardens and for anyone else in the lanes that needed it. Just as the reason you’d came all this way, to help. You can leave some of Geoffrey’s money for that.

As you walk along the river’s edge towards your apartment, you know it will be your last. Soaking in the view of the harbor, the light glinting of the fancy buildings, water rustling peacefully under you, you drag your fingertips over the polished metal of the railings. You will miss this place; a place you never belonged to, but you did live, for years. You’d loved, you’d grown, you’d become yourself here.

You are nostalgic for a place you haven’t even left yet.

Coming up to your street, you linger along the waters edge. Sitting on a bench that overlooks the harbor you’ve dawdled for longer than you realize, lost in the rhythmic sounds of the ocean, staring out at the distant waves.

You’d dinned with Geoffrey the night before, sharing a final dinner with him at one of your favorite restaurants in Piltover. Reminiscing on your time together, you will miss him as well. As you say goodnight to him, given everything that could have happened between, you are glad it almost felt like saying goodbye to a friend.

You think in the future, when you tell this story, it’s what you’ll call him.

While walking you back to your apartment, he surprised you, drawing your hands into his, voice persistent as he spoke. “I told you once that happiness can’t be bought or paid for, but security can be.”

You nod in agreement, this dialogue a bit intense, his eyes strangely open and shimmering as he speaks.

“My dear wife, she was….” He stalls, his eyes un-focusing for a few moments. “She was my whole world. I’d know her since we were young. She was strong willed, so smart, so kind...” he trails off as his eyes adjust back to you.

“She taught me that our time is only as important as the company we keep.” He stops, breath almost catching on the words. “Happiness, that can only be made, and it must be made between people.”

“If you have happiness, you should chase it.” He tells you, drawing a thumb over your cheek, his eyes soft on yours, but not entirely for you. You can see he is still half in his memory.

He slowly lowers his hands, shaking himself out and back into the moment. Moving gently away he tells you, “I’ll come gather you before your boat.” He gives you a gentle kiss to your cheek. “Not a moment before.”

And then he’s gone.

You’d had the whole day for you pack and collect yourself. Now that you’d said your teary goodbyes to everyone at the Gardens you only have one person left, and you’d planned to meet with Sevika that night.

Remembering Geoffrey’s words, you are deep in your own head as you sit along the river, the bench stiff and uncomfortable underneath you, but the soft breeze soothes. Did he know about Sevika? It felt a little to close, a little too sure….

You sit like this until you feel the wood shift next to you. Sevika leans back, blending in and sticking out in both forms. Sharing a companionable silence, you watch people walk by as a few boats float down the river, children running up and down the causeway.

You hear her breath catch, starting to speak as you turn to look at her.

She looks like she is hanging from a thread when she says, “I came here once, right after you left.”

You’re confused, it must show on you face as she contintues. “I sat right over there,” gesturing to one of the benches that line the causeway in front of your building. “I’d found your new address and I came. And I sat there. And waited to see you.”

Unsure what do with this information, you sit next to her, a little stunned and uncertain.

“I felt so….” Her face creases in pain, her fingers resting over her knee dragging along the fabric while she speaks, not looking at you, but everywhere around. “Stupid,” she continues.

You can’t allow her to think this way. Pulling yourself next to her, you brush your fingers over her cheek, thumb coming under her chin as her eyes squeeze shut.

“You sat out here while I was dreaming of walking back over the bridge to you?” You ask, and it strikes you that it might be a minor miracle that you managed to somehow meet in the middle.

Another pained expression and her eyes open, dark and stormy, tears shinning at the edges, making the soft silver glow in the early evening sun.

Her expression sifts, melting with each drag of your fingertips over her skin, soft as she looks at you.

“Let’s go inside,” you suggest.

Rising together she pulls you along next to her, wrapping your arm around hers. Walking into your building it feels so soft, so familiar, the way a couple would walk together.

You lean your head on her shoulder in the lift, and she takes your key from you to open your door.

Getting through your door, you pull of your jacket and survey your apartment, mostly packed, a few large trunks scattered around, you’d mostly just what you’d need in the morning still left out.

Sevika stands looking out onto the balcony, staring into the distance.

Coming up alongside her you reach out, a hand along her shoulder and she turns into your embrace, pulling you close. Arms around each other, your head along her shoulder, her body craned down to tuck hers into your neck, you stand together in the soft silence.

You feel her mouth open, her breath scattering along your skin as she speaks.

“I love you.” She says, in a hot huff, seemingly to force the words out, trying to get them free while she has the chance.

As many times as you’ve dreamed of this moment, it doesn’t compare. You feel a little like floating, a flash of hot, swimming underwater, just….

“I’ve loved you…since…” she trails off, tucking her head harder into the curve of your neck, mouth drawing along your skin as her breath catches. You’re trying to keep your knees from buckling, soft like putty in her hold.

Pulling back, she reaches up to cradle your face in her hands, yours coming to rest on the crooks or her elbows. Her eyes shine with unshed tears, the grey sparkling. “I should have said it before-“

“I don’t care,” you tell her, winding your hands around her neck, your brain and limbs working again, pulling her in for a kiss. “I don’t care,” another against her lips, “I love you,” another, “I love you so much”

She pulls back in, tangling your bodies together, gripping you so tight your breath leaves for second, and death by asphyxiation, from this moment, seems like a great way to go. Releasing you, slightly, but not letting you leave, she pulls your face up to meet hers. “I was fighting saying it.”

“I know, I know…”

“For so long, I’ve loved you for so long…”

“You don’t have too-“

“Since you’d been at the Gardens but didn’t know what it was until-” she grips at you, her hands hard along your body.

“It’s fine, I doens’t matter,” and you don’t, you couldn’t give a fuck, cause you’ve known, you’ve hoped, you dreamed of this, you don’t care how it’s being delivered or how long it’s taken her to say. It’s finally being said.

She means it, you can tell, along her touch, it’s always been there.

It’s always been there.

She’s loved you.

You.

“Stay with me?” You ask, and you want it to mean forever, until your old, until you’ve been buried in the earth after your last breath. But it’s only until the morning, until Geoffrey will come to get you.

“Yes,” she answers, twisting her arms around you.

You’d fallen asleep together, tucked into her arms, like you’ve done so many times before. Head along her shoulder, hands twined together over her waist.

Feeling the bed shift, you are shaken out of your dreams, while you feel her arms move around you. Pulling at the blankets, her body furnace warm next to you as one arm reaches out for your waist, while she turns to face you on your side. She’s done this before, shifting you while she’s woken up during the night, telling you that her shoulder aches, body needing a new position.

You’d settle back in together but as you start to sink back into sleep, she pulls you closer until you feel her breath hot across your mouth. “Are you awake?” She asks.

Eyelids flutter, as your sleep soft voice answers. “Yes.”

The hand along your waist comes up, the metal cool and slick as it slides along your jaw. Her thumb coming up to brush over you lip, she asks. “Can I touch you?”

“Yes,” you answer along a gasp as your hands reach out to her and the next thing you know she draws you in, up and over her, switching you to her other side, her metal arm along you back, the cold making your skin break out in shivers, goosebumps rising.

She settles you back in, drawing your nightgown up with both hands. The one under you settles underneath your shoulders while her other brushes over your hip, slipping under where your nightgown has been rucked up, warm fingertips playing with the edge of your underwear, making the whine that your draw out in response to her touch, thin and needy.

“Can I touch you?” You ask in return, as you can’t imagine not touching her. She’s so warm, so close, her breath dusting over your cheeks as she leans closer. You wrap one leg over her thigh, and she slips hers between yours, making room for both of you. “I want too.”

She nods, her fingers sliding down, over the cloth of your underwear, that is quickly becoming soaked, teasing you though it. Distracted, you make an exasperated noise as you slide your fingers down her stomach, where her shirt has rucked up with the movement, her underwear riding low along her hips.

You slip your fingertips under the thin edge of her underwear and brush along the cut of her hip, feeling her body shift and twitch with the sensation. Leaning forward you realize that you haven’t kissed her, so you do, relishing the huff against your lips as you tease the soft patch of hair above where you know she wants you to be.

The soft, impatient noise is the warning you get as she slides her fingers into your underwear, dipping right down, no longer teasing but gliding over your wet folds and finding your clit. Circling, precise, determined, she still sets her pace to a leisurely one, soft and comfortable like the small hours of the morning you’re in, the sky not even glinting with the far-off promise of the rising sun.

You lay together, entwined, breath huffing over each other cheeks, kisses traded between gasps and moans, in the circle of her arms, and she in yours.

Your orgasm builds so slowly as she pulls you in closer, her face tucked against yours now. Her breath, you realize, is nothing but murmurs of soft praise, settling over you.

That you’re so beautiful, so precious. That she will miss you, that she loves you.

You can’t take too much of this and not….

“I love you,” is all you can hear from her as you spin out of control, pleasure drawing you tight and releasing you.

Coming back, shivering in her hold, you realize your fingers have stilled against her. You pull your face back to look at the soft smile you can feel against your cheek, still smug around the edges.

Leaning into to steal a kiss, you resume, sliding into her slickness, enjoying the answering gasp you get while you dip into her entrance to gather her slick and she is so unbelievably, hot, under your fingertips.

“I love you,” exhaled against her lips has her faltering, her own breath catching on a moan as her eyes flutter. “I love you, Sevika.” You say again, if anything to see the way it washes over her, her hips stuttering under your fingertips.

She tightens her arm around your shoulder, sliding you closer to her on the bedclothes, while her own hand still resting against you, wrist still caught under the edge of your underwear, twitches, distracted. You squeeze your legs together, trying to trap her thigh as you know what’s coming.

You watch the orgasm roll over her, her mouth straining, blush barely visible on her skin, eyes fluttering, trying to stay open, trying to stay on you. Her soft, almost, wounded sounding moan tapers off into indulgent, staccato breaths.

After, her contented sigh rolls off your cheek, from where she pulled you close right after, your hand is still trapped in her underwear.

“My arm is falling asleep,” you tell her along a chuckle.

Unwinding, she lets you get up, and you pull her along with you. Cleaning yourselves you both return to your bed, sliding back to sleep just as you were before.

Your eyes drift shut just as they had so many times before, her profile the last thing you see as you drift off into your dreams.

That Morning:

Geoffrey is always prompt, so prompt you could set watch to him. You’d taken several transports over the flat grasslands and one through the mountains to get to Piltover, but he assured you, at the end of the warm season that a boat back was the fastest and safest way to travel.

Tucking your last few items into your trunk, you turn to Sevika who is sitting on the edge of your bed, arms resting on her thighs as her bowed head hides her face.

Holding the worn, soft handkerchief in your hand, you move to sit next to her.

Grabbing her hand, you slide the red cloth across her palm, red like a splash of hot blood.

“You kept it?” Her voice is soft as she asks.

“I panicked. Geoffrey had come out and I just tucked it away.” You don’t mention how you’d kept it hidden in your jewelry box for weeks now, ready to keep it as a prized treasure. As you packed the other day and found it, you thought maybe giving it back, could be a memento for both of you.

She wraps the cloth around your palm, then cradles it gently within her own. Her fingers glide over your covered palm as if she can read the lines there.

“I’d much rather have lost this then never had it.” Sevika tells you, brushing your hair off your face, her thumb coming around to brush off your hot tears. “I wanted it, to spend the time with you.”

“I know. I would always choose to have this with you.” You admit in return, clutching at the handkerchief, winding your fingers together and then she draws your fingers up to her lips, pressing an indulgent kiss to the skin, letting them rest on the plush softness for several moments.

Gods, you’d give anything to grow old with her, you think, and the thought itself threatens to rip you limb from limb.

She brings your joined hands back down to rest on your lap, her fingers brushing over yours, refusing to let you go until she has too.

“If you need a place to go, or want some fresh air, we have plenty of it.” You offer, just so you can always tell yourself you did.

The small clock on your wall strikes, telling you it’s time to go. Geoffrey will be here any moment. You both rise, standing together near your door.

Panic threatens to take you, sadness as well. Part of you cannot image why you are allowing yourself to walk away, from her, from all of this. Tears well in your eyes as you tilt you face up to hers.

Her hands come up to brace over your jaw, holding you in her grasp like you’re something precious, something to be protected, loved, cherished. Your hands come up to slide over her chest, brush up her neck and thread into her hair.

“I love you.” You tell her, knowing it will be the last time you ever say it to her.

“I love you.” Her thumb strokes over your cheek and you blink away the flurry of tears that threaten to fall.

Leaning in, she steals a kiss, mouth hard, but indulgent against yours.

She slips out of your grasp, face flinching in pain for a moment, as she moves out of the doorway and pauses for a moment in the soft light of the hallway, looking back at you. You both stare, memorizing the lines of each other’s faces. Finally, with a deep, steadying breath, she turns.

You hear her footsteps retreat and then the stairway door close behind her.

The breath you draw is on the edge of a sob, the next is in it.

Days After:

The Cold stings your face.

But the fact that it does. That your here.

You’re home.

Tears are even colder here, in the chill of the mountains, causing your eyelashes to catch in the corners. The best part about reunions, they say, always have happy tears, so no one is the wiser.

You see the new house they built, the vast swath of fields, the large storage barn for food to help others during the winter.

They even built a small house just for you. Along the edge of one of the small hills, tucked into the edge of the forest, a little cottage with a comfortable kitchen and a porch that overlooks the valley, your families’ houses, the farm, and the river down below.

Your brother builds a fire on the first night and you all sit together. It’s a tradition in Demacia for a traveler to tell their hosts of their adventures. That’s what you are now. Something slightly separate from your family, someone who’d left and come back, a badge of honor you choose to wear.

It’s amazing how much can exist in a heart at the same time. While you had been in Piltover, you’d missed Demacia so dearly, almost rotting your heart out at the core.

Now that you are back you miss the gleaming streets of Piltover and the hard shuffling, bustle of the lanes.

Truly, really, you miss her, but you try to bury it. It’s the only way you’ll survive.

The first person to figure it out is your sister. One day as you’re cooking together, she is asking about Geoffrey while clutching a letter you’d received from Blu, endlessly inquisitive about the life you’d lead. She asks about your friends, all the others at the Gardens, and you pause, thinking of her holding the letter written by Blu, and how they would get along so well, similar in many ways. Part of you can imagine them together in this kitchen, chatting as they cooked, giggling together.

It stabs into your heart, as so many things do these days. So, you keep up mixing ingredients into the pot as she keeps peppering you with questions. Your father plays his guitar out on the porch, your mother rocking in her chair beside him, your nieces in nephews playing in the grass, whacking each other with sticks and calling it a great battle.

Your mind wonders to her.

You aren’t sure how it shows on your face, or maybe, it’s the way that anyone who’s known you for so much of your life could always read your expressions.

“What was her name?” She asks you.

A lie will rip you apart, tear at your memory of her, of Sevika. It feels like something traced on thin paper, so delicate, to be handled gently, preserved for later, for you, for when you a need a balm to calm your sentimental heart.

So, you tell her.

You tell your sister everything.

“Geoffrey?” You’re completely puzzled… you almost can’t recognize him in this context. Traveling clothes, bag strapped to his back, standing in the melting snow near your cottage. You’ve been gone for over half a year now, but you’d always remember his face.

He looks just as jovial and handsome as ever and your eyes start to well with tears as his smile dawns on you.

“You told me I should see Demacia one day.” He turns, regarding the view across the valley, the bright sun glinting off the melting ice of the lake, the snow starting to thaw with bits of green peeking through.

“I did.” You say wiping your hands dry as you walk out on your porch to greet him.

“It’s just as beautiful as you described.”

You meet in a hug that feels more like friendship than anything else.

He sits with you as you share tea, just like you’d done hundreds of times before. He tells you of his adventures, how much of the worlds he seen. He’d brought you a necklace from Piltover, one that matches the bracklet he’d given you before, spices and several books, a few in languages you can’t read but the illustrations are amazing to look at.

“I haven’t been back to Piltover since,” he tells you, pointing out the last leg of his journey on his map, spread over your table. “It’s been good to get some time away. I’d never left for such a long stretch before.”

“I’m sure you family misses you, but I would imagine they are happy you are doing what you’d like.” You reply and he smiles, down into his cup of tea.

“It looks like you are doing well. This farm is quite impressive. I met your brother; he took me up here.” He says with a glance around and then out the window. “I like this cabin of yours, it suits you.”

You sit together in a companionable silence for a few moments, enjoying being together has you had so many times before. Just are you are going to ask him to say for dinner, when he turns to you.

“I am surprised…” he states, with a sly look on his face, “that you are here…. alone.” Setting his teacup on the table in front of him, he while businesses himself with folding the map and tucking back into his bag.

You know what he means, you know who he is talking about, but you aren’t sure how he does.

You try to lie, just for old time’s sake, just so he can call you on your bluff. “I am not sure what you mean?” Pretending to hide your smile behind your teacup, he smiles ruefully at you, and both break into soft laughter.

“I’m not sure how long it went on for, and I didn’t care, just to be sure you know that.” He says, eyes leveling with yours. “But I could tell something happened when I saw the both of you on the terrace.”

“I am terrible at hiding my emotions.” You laugh, and Geoffrey smiles in response.

“She was worse at it, only around you.” He remarks his comment washes over you as he continues. “I’d done some business with her before, mostly moving supplies or goods. She was always so cool, collected, very impressive. I’d watched her break up a tense deal we all thought might go south.”

He taps his fingertips along his crossed knee, his eyes flashing back into his memories. “She was less composed out there with you. Her eyes could only leave you for a second. She was looking at you when you weren’t paying attention.”

You stare at Geoffrey for a few moments, trying to pick out a single thought when so many fight their way around you head.

“I hoped you were happy.” He breaks you out of your trance, laying a hand softly over yours.

“I was.” You tell him and eyes crinkling handsomely at the corners. “I am.” And you know it mostly true.

After a moment you ask, “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“That would be delightful.” He answers.

The first letter comes almost a year later. Her scrawl, just a sharp as you remember, just as sharp as her. It’s not what some might consider a love letter, not honeyed words or some sort of romance filled verse. It’s filled with her, she tells you she misses you, that she dreams of you, that she loves you.

It tears you apart, your brother finding you in a heap on your cabin floor, sobbing quietly to yourself.

You tell him then, you tell him of Sevika, you tell him of the love you lost.

It’s the anniversary of when you left, you realize, when she’d sent you this. You tuck yourself into your bed to read it again, fire in your stove warming your cabin.

You write her back, feeling it tear at every part of you, pulling at a barely healed wound.

But it never healed, had it… it never even started.

It dawns on you then, your pen pausing over the paper, that she will never leave you. Her ghost, her love, yours for her, it will sit with you forever.

You send your letter back when you are ready to wait for her response as you know this will torment you.

The spring dawns as your nephew, out of breath from running, excitedly presents you with the newest letter.

And so it goes, back and forth, for years.

She tells you of the battle for Zaun, for independence, the lives lost and the cost, the cost, of everything.

You tell her how you’d started the school you’d always envisioned, the farm that feeds those who need it, how you’ve taught the next generation how to create healing tonics and grow medicinal herbs.

She tells you how she is building an army, how she is preparing, for the best and for the worst.

You tell her again and again, at the end of each one, dotted with your ‘I love you’s capping the end of each letter, that if she ever wants to come, she can, she will be welcomed.

And then the letters stop. Almost three and a half years later, they stop. You send a few unanswered, then a few more. Waiting… hoping for something, anything, any news at all, at least for closure-

You even ask Dot, Babette, Blu and Miguel, and not even Geoffrey, with his endless web of connections knows what’s happened to her.

After your 10^th letter is sent, your sister sits with you while you stare out at the valley.

“Maybe it’s just-“ she tries to sooth you and you stop her with a hand in hers, lacing your fingers together.

“It’s alright, let’s just, sit together.” You say and you rest in the stillness.

You’ve learned to let the silence linger.

You are down on your knees one afternoon, tending to the flowers that grow long in boxes along the edges of the house. Keeping an eye on the children playing in the grass you plant more medicinal herbs. Your heart still aches, missing so much from the lanes, from Zaun. Your friends, the little family you found there, that stall that sold those spicy rice cakes, the band that would sit on the corner near the Gardens and play into the small hours of the night.

You miss her.

The longer you’ve been gone you realize that that ache, her ache, will always be with you. You carried it while you had been in Piltover and it clings to you now. Even being in Demacia now for all this time, all these years.

You can see now how love can be in so many forms. Your mother and father in their cozy life, living in this cottage, raising a family where love was the food that filled your bodies, when you were young, when food was rare. That family, of any kind of makeup, can mean everything, how they can sustain you, educate you, love you.

You’d wanted to be in love and be loved when you were young, before you understood what the world meant, what it meant to live. How heavy the burdens to carry, just to alive can be. How much living, every day, can just be a fight.

You loved her then, you might still love her now. But love like anything needs to be fed to live. It dies a half-life now, as you are the only one there to feed it, but it can’t completely be removed. The roots that grew are too deep. If you try to remove her, you will disturb to much of your foundation. Her tenacity, her belief that her world could be better, her quiet love, her affection shown to you, it changed you.

You think now, you might have shared a rare thing, a great love. Something sweeping and grand, but as you couldn’t stay, it couldn’t grow any farther. It will always be something that could have been, a beautiful wish.

While it’s a rare gift to find a love like that, it’s an even greater gift to be given the time to let it prosper.

You are grateful for you had, when you got to live in it, let that love grow, let it thrive.

But much like every time she entered your room, waking in the soft sunlight, stealing your air, fingertips stroking over your skin, light, waiting, wanting. It felt too good, to close to something extraordinary.

It felt like magic, as silly as it seems.

And like magic, she was there.

Chapter Text

Cool winds have been whipping at the cabin all day, with dark clouds building on the horizon. It feels like a snowstorm is coming. The first snow was always one of your favorite things as a child. Now that you’ll get to share a first with her - it promises to be even better. 

As the sun starts to dip low on the horizon, you pull the windows shut to trap the remaining heat and start the kettle on the stove. Adding another blanket to the pile on the bed, you pause to think about how much has led up to this, since being back in Demacia. 

You’d all but lost hope. She’d been lost to you for so long.

You hear your brother’s laughter coming from the tree line along with the tell-tail sound of the wagon, heavy with firewood, rolling down the path. You peek out the back window to see both of their profiles stacking logs together, sharing friendly conversation. She says something, a joke between them given the body language, and he laughs with his head thrown back. You aren’t surprised at their friendship, just at how fast it's grown, as if they’d been friends since childhood. You love it, two of your favorite people becoming each other’s.

The kettle starts to whistle and you busy yourself with making two cups of hot tea. Humming to yourself, you miss your brother peeking his head in the front window, “Nothing for me?” he teases. Making a face at him in return, you pretend to toss the top of the teapot at him. Laughing, he moves down the path towards his cottage, a small building nearer to the big house your family shares.

The door opens next and Sevika makes her way inside, smiling at you softly as she moves through, quickly pulling it shut behind her and bracing it closed. Pulling off her heavy overcoat she hangs it up on the rung near the door and makes her way over to you.

All the times you’d thought about her being here, all the offers you made, all the dreams you had, you never got it quite right. It was never this good.

Reaching over, she pulls you in for a kiss, holding your face in her cold hands while she presses her lips firmly to yours.

You shiver and laugh, pulling out of her chilly grasp as you move the steaming mug towards her. You’d done this to her a few weeks ago, coming into the cozy heat of the cabin after being caught in the first cool rainstorm that came over the mountains. You’d slid into her lap as she sat on the bed and warmed your hands on her skin. Then she helped you out of the rain-soaked clothing and warmed your body with hers.

Now, she smirks at you, grabbing her mug and clutching her hands around it, breathing in the steam and then crowding nearer to you as she does.

Sliding a hand along her side feeling the soft cold that clings to her clothes. “I taught you a terrible habit.” You joke, taking a sip of your tea as you do.

“There are worse ones.” She responds.

The gray at her temples catches the fading light. The lines that once glowed with shimmer shine a soft pale pink now. Setting her mug down, she moves to crowd against you, pushing you gently against the counter as your mug joins hers. Hands coming up along her cheeks, you finally feel how cool her skin is. In response, you let hands warm over her skin, thumbs tracing the faint lines on one cheek and over the curve of her cheekbone on the other. Watching her eyes slip closed, arms coming around your waist and tucking under your sweater, her hands spread out to catch the heat your body offers.

She stills like this, leaning some of her weight into you, allowing you to take some of the burden. Moment by moment, the tension leaves her. Melting with the warmth of the cabin, the warmth from you, the quiet, restful still of the kitchen. She slowly allows her head to drop to your shoulder.

“It must have been colder in the forest.” You note.

“We walked back to find a few trees that had fallen for firewood.” She replies as her hands that had been softly resting on your waist, slide around your back and venture further up. 

Rocking into you in a soft, comfortable way, Sevika tucks her head further in, moving into the curve of your neck. Treading your hand into her hair, you pull her closer, trying to give to her what she always gives to you, warmth, protection, comfort.

Feeling her lips along the skin of your collarbones tells you what she is angling for. 

“Are you hungry?” You ask, your voice playful with the question. 

Her response forms as a rumbling along your skin, lighting you up from the inside out, starting to feel the familiar need thump within you. Tongue dragging against the skin of your neck, you gasp in response and tug on her hair to bring her mouth to yours. Kissing her soundly, her hands slide, one grabbing at the swell of your breast and the other finding the nipple and playing with it.

“Very hungry….it would seem...” you manage to reply as your breath hitches on the words while she pulls you flush against her body.

Dragging you towards your bed, she pulls you along to then toss you down onto the blankets. You have a moment to appreciate her pulling her suspenders down and her shirt out of her pants.

“That’s my job,” you protest, leaning up to grab at the loose fabric.

She eclipses your body as she leans in, while your fingers find the opening of her pants.

“You’ll live.” She smirks as you as she dives in for another kiss.

Your pants are pulled down with a quickness you always find dizzying when her fingers brush up and under the edge of your undergarments, Sevika quietly moans out. “Fuck, you’re so warm,” she states reverently, sliding two fingers against you.

Grabbing at her clothes, you try to remove her shirt, but your hands start to tremble while she expertly starts to move her fingers against you. She is too proficient, too practiced, too dedicated, to not be efficient. Quickly your hips are rocking down into her touch, hands tangled, your mouth pressed against her throat. Riding the edge of sanity or slipping into the glimmering void of pleasure.

“I want… I want to feel you.” You gasp out, wanting heat, wanting her skin, her warmth burning against you as you come apart. 

Sevika leans in, picking you up with one arm under your hips. Pulling the bedclothes back, she pauses only to lay you down gently. Shucking her pants, her eyes never leave you and you can’t help but watch her strong thighs shift as she moves to straddle your body. By the time you register she is pulling her shirt up and off you realize you've been distracted by her nakedness. Rushing to follow, you hear her chuckle as you pull your sweater and undershirt off. Falling back you try to push your pants and she finally moves to help you.

Tugging at her arm, you pull her down onto her back, moving to straddle her hips before you reach back and pull the covers up and over your shoulders. Leaning down, you relish the contact between your bodies, skin against skin, finally. 

Taking in the sight of her underneath you, you watch as her hands come up to brace against your hips, her one warm palm sliding against your skin, her slick metal hand still slightly cold from outside. You can feel your wetness pressed against her lower abdomen as you settle.

Your fingers reach out, finding the worst edge of the scar, the one that runs across from her ribs to her hip, the one that threatened to take the life from her.Dragging upwards, you find the edge where nerves work again, where she can feel your touch, fingers fanning out and catching the curve of her breast. Her gaze is hot on your face, the weight of it pulls your eyes meet hers and you immediately melt at the softness you find. Her fingers wrap around your wrist, pulling your hand towards her mouth. Pressing a kiss to your open palm, letting your skin rest on the softness of her mouth, her eyes drift and meet yours, gray warming while her mouth melts into a soft smile. She gently pulls your hand to rest on the bed next to her head. 

“I’m here. I’m safe.” She assures you, as she always does when you start to get in your head. Reminding  you of those years ago, after you’d been attacked, when she held you tight as you trembled against her. “I’m with you.”

“I know.” You affirm, thumb coming out to brush over her cheek. “I know. You’re with me.”

This is a common affirmation between you both. When she walked up to you in your family's garden in Demacia those months ago, you’d almost forgotten that she could exist outside of your imagination. For a moment, you’d worried your years of love sick pinning could possibly have manifested her. 

But she was real, as real as she ever was. In truth, she was always a little too phantastic for you to wrap your head around.

Sevika had been injured badly, betrayed in the end by a trusted advisor after the battle for Zaun. She’d fleed underground hiding for months, regaining her health enough to return and help secure Zahn’s place in tandem with Piltover, having a place within the balance of power.

Another hard fought battle and then she left. She’d left the lanes and all of Piltover.

Taking her time, she’d taken her time trekking over the mountains. As she traveled, she’d always worried that she wasn’t followed, somewhere in the back of her brain, that someone might use you to get to her. She didn’t want to risk anything.

Careful, she’d drawn her journey out, arriving in Demacia for the summer months. It gives you great joy to picture Sevika, just as rugged, beautiful and handsome as ever, windswept from her journey, asking for directions to your homestead. Most Demacia’s knew your family, so you wonder what they might have thought when they saw her. 

You relish in it.

But, just, not right now.

Right now your leaning in, down, pressing your body to her’s and, yes, fuck yes. Bracing your hands together next to her cheek, you get a few moments of holding her under your gaze, your care, warmth, feeling her shift her weight under your hips.

As you’d expected, you are turned over. You’d never think that she’d give you control for too long.

Giggling as she presses you down to the bedclothes, her mouth claims as kiss and yes, this is perfect. Legs slotting together, warm bodies pressing in, mouths sliding, hands tangling.

Her mouth is on yours, one hand on your hip, guiding the roll of your hips into hers while her other cradles the back of your neck. She always seems to hold you close now. You know why. She holds you close as if she’d lost you once, because she did .

She does this while you sleep, same as before. Pressed against your back, arms wrapped around you, often in a possessive grasp around your middle. Or tucked under her arm, curled into her side, arms wrapped around her. Rarely, if you’d fall asleep in a different position, at some point in the night she’d move you, always safe in her arms by the time the sun rises. You take it as a result of walking halfway across the continent to be with you. 

Now, in the heat of the moment, her hands are rustless, always skating over your skin as if it will be the last time. 

Pushing her hips down into yours, you draw a soft whine from her lips and you know she is close.

“Sev…Sev,” you try to grab her attention, her eyes soft and half lidded as she rolls down into you. “Love...” the word tumbles out onto a moan manifested by the powerful drive of her body.

Sevika’s grip along your skin flexs, her warm palm pushing you in time with the force of her thigh. You can’t help the soft hiss of pain that melts into a noise of pure pleasure as her grip turns into just too much, bruises forming under her fingers. They join all the others, the soft mottling of bruises, love bites, and scratches that litter your skin under your clothes.

She still loves to mark you. That never changed.

“Fuck,” her mouth comes down for another kiss. “You’re so fucking good, so soft, sweet…” and she tapers off into the edge of a moan.

Drawn over into the shimming abyss, you hold her close as she breaks. Breath hot and tangling with yours, you melt like you always do in response. Flimsy as paper over a hot fire, you follow soon after.

In the afterglow, you find your voice. “I bet the snow is better now.” You tell her as you lay in a tangled pile on your bed. As soon as the words leave your mouth, you leap up, regretting it instantly as the cold wraps around you. Driving to pick up Sevika’s shirt, you hear her laugh behind you.

“What are you doing?” She pulls the blankets back around herself as a smile creases her face.

Being careful to step from one edge of the rug to the next, you move to the back window, pulling the heavy winter curtains open. The soft winter breeze slips through the edges - but the view - the view is worth it. Fluffy white puffs of snow are coming down now, collecting on the trees at the edge of the woods. From the dim light from your cabin makes each snowflake glint and glisten.

Turning back towards her, your heart does the thing it likes to do, when you feel so in love with her it feels as if it will burst out. Aching, it reminds you that while it beats in your chest, it belongs to her.

Only and forever, hers.

Sevika’s eyes are darting around the view, taking it in, a soft look of reverence, disbelief, close to wonder, graces her features.

Tip-toeing back to the bed, you perch on top of it, still watching her, angling yourself to be able to peek out of the window as well. Her hand comes out to wrap around your waist as you sit together, enjoying the silence of the woods, the stillness that comes with the snow.

“It’s so quiet.” She whispers.

“Snow deadens the sounds.” You pull her shirt tighter around your body as you can’t help but shiver from the cold. “Animals will wait to come out until after it’s over.”

You feel her hand tug on your waist as she pulls you back down onto the covers. Pulling the other side of the bedding up, the side between her and the wall, your side, the warmest spot in the cabin. Tucking yourself back along her body, you press a kiss to her cheek, then drop your head to rest on her chest, wrapping your arm around her waist in return.

Laying together, you watch the snowfall, long enough that the log on the fire starts to die down. After a while, her voice breaks the comfortable silence.

“It’s beautiful.” She tells you.

After all of it; after the war, the fighting, the pain, the struggling, hurting, waiting. There is just warmth, love, softness, and crystal clear soft snow.

“I’m glad you get to see it.” You respond, feeling her heartbeat against your cheek.