fiachairecht: (Default)
kimaracretak ([personal profile] fiachairecht) wrote in [community profile] femslashficlets2018-11-27 09:34 pm

"your mouth was never one to trust" (Critical Role, language of flowers: delphinium)

Title: your mouth was never one to trust
Fandom: Critical Role
Pairing: Keyleth/Raishan
Rating: T
Prompt: Language of Flowers #9 - Delphinium
Word Count: 674
Summary: Reconciliation is not always a positive thing. (This may not even be a reconciliation.)

It's another fight that gets them talking again, and Keyleth thinks ruefully that she ought to have expected it. The road had been too safe for too long, Raishan too demure in her sulking to not be plotting something.

Still, the ... carnage Raishan leaves behind them is one of the most viscerally unsettling things Keyleth's seen in her life, beyond even what she had expected from Raishan's vague talk of accidents and liches. The bodies are in pieces, some of them so small Keyleth doesn't want to know what they used to be.

"What," Keyleth says slowly, trying very hard not to look at the corpses strewn across the road, "did you do?"

"Solved a problem," Raishan says, as easily as she's ordered wine at a tavern. "You're one to talk. You held them down for me quite nicely."

"I -" Keyleth falters, not sure how to say that her thorn whip was nearly instinctive by now, nothing to do with Raishan or her plans or fighting as a team or -

Not sure, blood still pounding in her ears from the adrenaline of the fight, that any of that is true.

Raishan sways closer, and her hands, Keyleth can't help but notice, are entirely clean. "You?" she asks. "You were beautiful."

She reaches up to Keyleth with a careless hand, tucking a stray lock of hair back into place under her circlet and behind her ear. Keyleth doesn't flinch away, even though every rational sense she has is screaming at her to.

(Later, she'll look back and think that this is where she was lost.)

"Absolutely beautiful when you fight," Raishan repeats, even though Keyleth hadn't protested.

"I don't like to," Keyleth says quickly. "If I am to lead my people I must be able to find diplomatic solutions." She can feel herself blushing at the words: Raishan has seen for herself how well at least this most recent attempt at diplomacy went.

"And when diplomacy fails?" Raishan's hand trails downwards to cup her cheek, the sharp edges of her nails almost pleasurable. "Will you not fight for them like you've fought with me?"

I didn't fight with you, Keyleth thinks, but she's not that good of a liar yet. She hopes she never will be, but she can't shake the feeling that the longer she stays with Raishan, the better she'll get, at least at lies of omission.

But she doesn't want to leave.

She wants to kiss Raishan, has wanted to since they met and now, standing amongst the ruins of a would-be raiding party, blood hot and skin prickling with residual magic, it seems like the only thing she can do.

So she does.

Raishan's teeth are sharp like her nails and she kisses back almost too eagerly, pressing herself against Keyleth so hard Keyleth can feel every ridge and buckle of her armour and the lingering chill of her skin underneath it. Her mouth, though, is hot, burning like something that could eat Keyleth alive, and Keyleth shivers as Raishan's teeth drag against her lower lip.

She retaliates by sinking her hands into Raishan's hair, the luscious fall of green-black curls that had been like a battle flag in the middle of the melee, and pulls. She's rewarded with a moan of pleasure from Raishan, and at that moment, she can't decide which of them she hates more.

Both, Keyleth thinks, as Raishan's free hand works its way under her leathers to rest against her back, fingertips cold and yet just as insistent as her tongue. She hates them both: herself for standing in the middle of a killing field kissing a woman she now thinks might be the most dangerous person she's ever met, and Raishan for making her want this in the first place.

And yet, as her thigh presses between Raishan's leg to find that there is, after all, part of her besides her mouth that is warm, she knows she wouldn't have it any other way.

What to do with that, well, it's a problem for later.