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At twenty-six, Felix is still unknighted.
Ingrid, Ashe, even Sylvain has knelt before Dimitri. No matter the many times he has worn the holy regalia of House Blaiddyd, he still feels the impossible weight carried in the fine-speckled fur on his shoulder and ancient silver perched on his brow. And yet in this, without hesitation, his dear friends have all pressed their lips to his hand and accepted the tender touch of his sword while he wept from his love for them. A king unafraid in deed but also in every feeling—if the songs being sung in the taverns are to be believed, as much as Felix had once spent the better part of a week in battle with the bards every time they loudly and joyfully crossed the old town square.
Felix had lost to every one of them. It’s ridiculous. He’s their King!
Isn’t the Shield of Faerghus an honourary title? Does the Shield of Faerghus also serve to protect His Majesty’s virtues? Actually, I heard a new one being sung in that tavern by the north road that His Majesty has a few noteworthy virtues. One could say some that are quite majestic in—Sylvain had started to say before Felix, red in the face, had turned and stomped off.
Dimitri had felt his face go red then, too. He was truly unworthy of his people who still thought so highly of the man who had taken five long years to return to them.
But that day: Ingrid’s proud smile had been unmatched by any brilliant steel, Ashe unshy in his joy. Sylvain after had been the most solemn of all his friends. Even later, in Dimitri’s study as they drank birch tea over the newly drawn maps of Fódlan, in the quiet voice Sylvain has that comes up from a place buried deep: Still doesn’t feel real, does it, that we lived to see this day. I’m still not sure we were meant to survive.
But no, not Felix. Felix will not kneel for him. Felix has never known the touch of Dimitri’s silver sword and no matter how much he thinks of it, Felix on his knees for Dimitri with the morning sun in his dark hair and the flat of Dimitri’s blade gentle on him, he would never ask this of him. He has asked more than enough of Felix during the war already. Has commanded Felix toward battalions of their enemies when his mind had been clear, let an endless number of Imperial swords break upon Felix’s body when his mind had been not.
But in the full summer of his twenty-sixth year, Felix rides to Fraldarius a general and rides back to Fhirdiad a duke.
White roses litter the hem of his teal cloak, still bruised fresh from the Garland Moon storms. It puts an ache in Dimitri’s heart, to smell them so strongly on him. Once they had woven the Saint-Cethleann love garlands for each other. Crooked, ungraceful things made by young clumsy hands still unruined by the violence that would be taught to them that winter. Dimitri had pressed the petals between a book once the blooms had wilted, as his stepmother once did, but both flower and book and the sweet memory of his stepmother are now long gone, burned when Cornelia had stripped Fhirdiad bare.
Dimitri rubs at one of his knuckles. They hurt in all weather, cracked open and ravaged by frost, poorly pieced back together by five years spent wild. Hands that have made little that is gentle or delicate since.
But he could—
“Felix.” The door is ajar and Felix is standing alone without maid or squire. He should be presently fully attended for the knighting ceremony tomorrow morning, and yet. Perhaps in this, Dimitri truly still could: “You rode so hard from Fraldarius, please let me. A king serves his people, and even a duke of your standing is counted among them. Moreso, I would say. But I would serve you in this way, Felix, if you let me.”
Felix does not even turn his way as he strips gloves, gaiters, boots and belts to a pile on the floor. His movements are quick and efficient, as if preparing himself for battle rather than unarming himself wholly. “I have been travelling for three days and I smell like horse. Is this behaviour that befits a king?”
“Horses are good creatures,” Dimitri chooses to say, because they are and it is true. He closes the door behind him. The fever heat of the room made by Felix alone—the sweet sting of Felix’s words has always made him bold. Has always sharply reminded him that he could want.
Rainwater drips from Felix’s sleeves onto the floor of his rooms. They are sparsely furnished, no more than a desk and divan in the front sitting area. The shelves are filled with his father’s books, the walls with his mother’s hunting bows. A bath provided by the maids is the only luxury, a large copper tub and washing stool of smooth larch with an accompaniment of oils and the personal refinements for a royal knight’s ceremony.
“What use is there in arguing with a wild boar,” Felix snorts, but he is already shedding his overcoat, because what is good and true has never stopped them.
Felix ignores both bath and stool and settles at his desk chair instead, stretching his legs out in front of him. Without the added bulk of any of his leathers, he looks completely unguarded in his fine wool leggings and tunic. It is a sight that always undoes something tightly held and dangerous in Dimitri, for Felix to show him something so vulnerable as himself unarmed.
There are so many things he wishes to ask Felix, unarmed. How often the world could change in just a ride from Fhirdiad to Fraldarius.
And yet.
“Well? My shameless king?” Felix says. His mouth is tilted just so—Felix is as eager as he is, and blood rushes hot to his face, knowing this.
The rug is soft and plush where it gives under Dimitri’s knees, but he shivers anyway, saliva already thick on his tongue—Felix is staring down at him, amber eyes slit almost closed. Even so, they catch the gold of the firelight as he remains unmoving, as if a wolf eyeing the movements of a particularly troublesome hare. Dimitri thinks of Felix’s teeth that would close around the wet pulse in his throat and he feels his cock press already hard against the line of his trousers, painful-sweet.
“Please, my shield,” Dimitri breathes.
Felix leans back and spreads his legs wide.
Dimitri knows he is not a man made for patience or delicate work. There is no art or ritual in him. But he carefully rolls down the teal leggings and folds them neatly, as if they are holy vestments that require great care. Takes time to slowly untie Felix’s smallclothes, breath held in his mouth and sweat damp at the back of his neck where he knows Felix has laid his heavy gaze. Dimitri would make no mistakes here, though the strict, scolding line of Felix’s mouth is tempting. The thin cotton looks so small in Dimitri’s hands, a thing that barely covered the wild thatch of dark hair, but he does not tear it. He folds this, too.
Dimitri has seen Felix’s cunt before. War quickly strips a soldier of both shame and dignity, but this: for him to be kneeling in front of Felix’s spread legs and be given way to Felix’s cunt, already slick, the folds flushed dark. Dimitri eagerly noses as close as he dares, knowing that it is not only sweat that wets the dark hair that covers Felix’s mound. Salt, warm skin, earth—the strong scents coats his tongue, though he cannot taste them, and this will have to be enough. A man cannot know or let another know his most tender and sensitive insides if he wants to appear before the figure of the Goddess and take the sacred vow in service to her Holy Kingdom, and though Dimitri does not believe in a Goddess who will descend from her distant star to examine them in detail for any physical transgress, he will not lie or let Felix lie to their people gathered to celebrate him.
And a royal knight, whether of the rank and file or a duke second only to the crown, must make themselves clean before presenting themselves before the Goddess and her people.
Felix’s gaze is a hot brand on the back of Dimitri’s neck as he uses the oils provided to make a fragrant lather in the basin at Felix’s feet. There is little hair that darkens Felix’s legs, the once sparse growth there made only more sparse by years wrapped tight in leather gaiters. Instead it seems all of it now grows luxuriant not only in the hair that sweeps silky and loose to the small of Felix’s back over the chair, but thickly covering his cunt, a decadent trail tracking down from his navel—and it will take great care for Felix to be made bare before the morning to take his knightly vows.
There is a special blade to be used, as Faerghus does. It is usually an honour given to carefully chosen squires—one to sharpen the blade, another to care for the knight, yet another to clean the blade again. For a duke of Felix’s standing, the ceremony would go to the young sons or daughters of powerful lords who has earned great favour with the crown. Felix has never been one to play at the petty politics of the nobility or the traditions that come of, but that he found Felix alone here and his door open to Dimitri—
Oil now thickened and warmed up, he palms Felix’s whole cunt with a single hand.
“Is this what will mark your reign?” Felix says, voice tight. Dimitri can hear his teeth grit in it without even looking. “Perversion of every sort of Faerghus’s traditions?”
There is a world beyond the hold of Felix’s strong thighs, but it is muted and distant. On his knees like this, Dimitri for the first time feels holy in his body, the heartbeat of Felix’s cunt hot in the palm of his hand. But Felix is a swordsman born from the oldest traditions of the Holy Kingdom, made with great discipline to have survived this long—he does not mewl like a lesser knight into Dimitri’s touch or even tremble at all, muscles flexed to hold him still in the chair even as his cunt drools even wetter in Dimitri’s hand. Some of it trails down his wrist. His resistance to lap at it weakens ever by the minute.
But Dimitri will not see their vows unmade even before making them. And yet: “Would you see us make the same mistakes as our fathers?”
“Boar, I swear on Seiros’s sword and shield, if you mention our fathers again while your fingers are in my—ah!”
Dimitri drags the oil thick and dripping into Felix’s folds and into the hair above just to hear Felix’s voice go even tighter, feels Felix’s thighs tense to steel about his ears as Felix roots his feet firm to the ground.
“No one would think it strange if you did not kneel in the great hall as my sworn knight. You have already given your sword to me a thousand times,” Dimitri says and smiles, understanding even as he speaks. “Anything else would be only show.”
“Just get on with it,” Felix snaps. He does not meet Dimitri’s eye, but his legs are winter pale save the inside of his thighs: splotchy and red, to match the blush at his throat and chest where his remaining tunic does not hide him. A true Faerghus spring child: first to freeze, but also too the first to melt, to show where colour blooms under snow.
Dimitri adores him. “And what would you have me swear to you, Felix, as I kneel here in your stead, then? I have broken so many of my promises, that I made to you as a boy.”
“Those were the foolish daydreams of children. Keep the promises you made as a man.” A huff. “And you promised to be true. That one you’ve kept, fool king.”
More oil on Felix, to ensure the blade is true. “Do you remember when we played at knights, and I would swear to you—”
“Quiet!”
But he would. He would swear again. Felix is now so slick in his hand, his cunt gapes open, plump and eager. Blood pounds like a fever in his brain as Dimitri thinks even his scarred, thick fingers could slip easily inside like this, to claim what the Goddess has called holy, though even a single of his finger looks monstrous and huge next to Felix’s small, untouched hole. How easily would it spread for two fingers, three, could Felix take even the girth of Dimitri’s fist? How more wet would Felix get if he truly touched him? Dimitri tries to draw breath, but it fills his lungs with nothing but Felix’s heavy scent, grown only stronger as his slick drips and coats the inside of his thighs, and Dimitri feels himself go lightheaded, a man drowning. He would put his mouth and tongue to Felix’s cunt and lap his fill until he could no longer draw breath, if he could.
Instead he draws the razor and sets it against the thick dark hair covering Felix’s mound. “Do not move,” Dimitri says.
Felix, his perfect swordsman, does not jolt at the sharp blade against sensitive skin, but his eyes widen.
There are no words between them for this.
It is dangerous and careful work even for someone without Dimitri’s crest, but he has shaved the beard at his throat every morning without slitting it yet. There is only Felix’s harsh breathing as Dimitri runs the sharp edge over Felix’s mound, and it glides well against the oil, shaves off a dusting of dark hairs. He gently brushes at them so they do not fall into the wetness of Felix’s folds and his rough fingertips catch instead, dragging a line down Felix’s cunt. The sharp inhale of breath from over his head is a clean strike through him. His cock against the linen of his trousers is a sweet pain that will unmake him. Dimitri will die here and Felix will not even have been made ready as he needs to be by daybreak.
No. Dimitri will serve, and he means to serve well.
Dimitri uses his other hand to pull taut the skin and Felix’s deep moan at just this touch unspools him even further. He is the one pulling apart Felix’s swordsman’s discipline and pride as he always tries to do in the training grounds, and he does not know what to make of this victory yet, digs in harder than he means each time he wipes the razor clean on the cloth. Crescent bruises are already marking the sensitive skin on the inside of Felix’s thighs, oil shining at the hollow where thigh meets groin as Dimitri rubs it in, and Felix finally, finally trembles sweetly under his hand spread firm and steadying at Felix’s hip.
“Your work is shoddy, boar.” Felix rasps. He is staring down at Dimitri, eyes dark and manic. Sweat sticks to his temples, that tempting hollow of his throat, but he still sits straight-backed, collar of his tunic only a little rumpled and long hair still hanging neatly. “Should I have called for a courtly attendant to ready my cunt instead of you?”
Dimitri grips tighter. He wants to bare Felix until his entire body glistens with the prize jewel of his shining sweat. “If the Goddess wants to check my work, she is certainly welcome to. I’ll gladly spread your legs for her if ever deigns to appear before me and wills it, Felix.”
“Dimi—”
He pushes Felix’s legs wider.
Another pass with the razor shaves Felix’s hair down so neatly this time, he can now see the flushed pebbled skin of Felix’s mound, revealing the peak of Felix’s cock large and sensitive as it stands stiff from its hood. Dimitri presses two fingers down to shield it and Felix cries out, slick gushing from his cunt and into Dimitri’s lap as he scrapes the remaining hairs from around Felix’s folds. His hand is tight on Felix’s hip, holding him unmoving against the chair even as faint shudders shake his thighs, spilling more wetness down his leg. Felix will need to be wiped down from hip to toe and Dimitri will also attend to him in this. He will dress Felix, too, pulling the thin cotton back over his cunt, fingers chaste against the now velvet soft skin between his legs. Roll the fine wool leggings back up his legs and buckle Felix’s leathers on once more. Exit from this room the King and his Duke, soon to be fully sworn into his royal service. Their vows the ones spoken a hundred thousand times by all through their history, and their vows made as the wind shook the white roses from the young trees of their childhood.
“Are you done yet, boar?” Felix pants.
His fingers smell like Felix and he long to suck them into his mouth. Felix sits soft and loose, legs still spread and making no indication to close them. Only his eyes remain sharp, gaze cutting right through Dimitri to pin him to the floor where he still kneels. And Dimitri finds that he likes to kneel, he likes it quite a lot. But:
“I would like to swear many more things to you like this, Felix,” Dimitri says, pressing a finger to Felix’s wet cunt, curling the tip into that tight, easy heat. In this, Dimitri knows he is true. Felix gasps, proud thighs finally, finally giving way to clamp about Dimitri’s head.
Dimitri has always rued that he could not hold himself to eating neatly, but he cleans up Felix quite well all the same.