Chapter Text
ashe/dedue, blindfolds, gentle sex, handjobs.
ashe wants dedue to be able to let go the way he does when they make love.
It should have been unsettling. It should have felt like nakedness, like ambush, like a hand without an axe.
And it did, at first, a little. Ashe’s scarf was soft over his eyes, tied only gently, but the sensation—and the lack of sense—was unfamiliar.
But Ashe had cooed at him, had soothed him with kisses all over his face, delicate hands running slipping soft over his arms, his sides, his chest. And Dedue had shuddered under his fingers, each touch light and gentling but so--new. It was strange. It wasn’t as if Ashe hadn’t touched him scores of times before.
“How does it feel?” Ashe asked, and he was suddenly so close, warmth radiating on Dedue’s face, breath hot on his ear.
It took a moment for him to gather a response, preoccupied with Ashe’s fingertips brushing idly at his nipple. “It is… strange,” he murmured, “but not unpleasant.”
And he could just feel Ashe brightening. “Do you want to keep going?”
Ashe hummed with pride and pleasure at Dedue’s yes, hands trailing over his body with new purpose, stopping to pet at the dip of his waist, the ridge of his hip. Dedue could feel the muscles in his thighs twitch, swallowed the urge to ask for more.
“Do you know why I asked for this, Dedue?” Ashe punctuated the question with a long lick up Dedue’s throat, little kisses at the angle of his jaw.
It occurred to Dedue, seconds later, that he ought to shake his head.
“Because,” Ashe said, pausing to scrape his teeth over Dedue’s pulse point. Dedue could not contain a gasp. “You’re always taking care of me.”
“Is that— is that a complaint?” Dedue’s brow furrowed underneath the scarf—partially out of confusion, partially because Ashe’s fingers had curled around the waistband of his smalls, inching them downward, teasing. Oh, if Dedue had been told before they first made love how his sweet Ashe loved to tease, he’d never have believed it.
He could hear Ashe half-laughing. “Goddess, no! Of course not! You are—” and here his voice slipped, from its sweet bedroom timbre into a place of bare emotion. “You are the greatest knight I’ve ever known, and you’re so vigilant and noble! Especially when you’re… in bed with me. I just—I just want you to feel the way I feel, without having to worry about anything else.”
Dedue raised his arms, shakily, as if they were not quite his own, and searched for Ashe’s body. He found him, warm and bare and soft, and pulled him close to his chest.
“Ashe,” he whispered, “I’ve no idea what I did to deserve you.”
Ashe kissed him, then, laughing against his mouth. He shifted, and Dedue could feel him hard against his thigh. A sweet twinge went through him— even if he was supposed to be getting all the pleasure, it was… gratifying to know that Ashe enjoyed this too.
“Will you let me take care of you?”
“Yes,” Dedue breathed, and suddenly Ashe was over him, straddling his thighs, guiding Dedue’s hands to the slenderest part of his waist. Ashe struggled for a moment with his smallclothes, settling for just pulling them aside, and it was just the amount of breathing room that Dedue needed, because suddenly Ashe’s soft hands were on his cock, stroking, and Dedue could not hold back a long, moaning breath.
“That’s it!” Ashe praised him, tone bordering on giddiness. “You don’t have to hold back, just let yourself feel good.”
He kept at it—and Dedue just knew that if he took off the blindfold, he’d see the tip of Ashe’s tongue between his soft lips. Something in him reminded him not to put his sweet love to this kind of effort, not without reciprocity, but he found himself able to wave it away. Wanting to, even, with the slow drag of Ashe’s skin on his.
Ashe kept humming at him, tuneless, gentle, and sped his hands, twisting wrists, brushing fingertips over the crown of Dedue’s cock. And Dedue couldn’t help the shifting of his hips, couldn’t help the ragged gasps that spilled from his mouth.
“Ashe… Ashe, I—”
“Am I getting you close?”
Dedue nodded, head listing to the side. It wouldn’t have mattered if he wore the blindfold at this point—Ashe’s words, Ashe’s hands, had brought him somewhere he’d never quite let himself go before, and his eyes squinted shut with the thrill of it. It was like—it was like—well. Dedue had never been a poet, but he could describe it as nothing less than rapturous, so exhilarating and yet so completely safe.
“You can let go, Dedue,” Ashe murmured, impossibly fond. “Whenever you’re ready.”
And on the next twist of Ashe’s fingers, Dedue shuddered and whimpered and spilled himself over Ashe’s hands, ecstatic, almost outside of himself. Ashe did not stay his hand, stroking him slow with loose fingers until he was spent, going limp against the bedclothes.
Ashe clambered off of him, then, lying along his side with his starlight hair brushing his chest, kissing his cheeks and his neck and his shoulders.
And when the blindfold came away, when Dedue’s eyes adjusted once more to the low firelight, the look of love, of unadulterated pride on Ashe’s face nearly outshone all that had come before.