S

Sera says it into the dark, her mouth warm against the crown of Aria's head, and Aria feels the words land somewhere low in her chest before she has even finished counting. Sixty-nine hours since the yard. Sixty-nine hours since she stood over Peter and Colm and the Hound with her hands still smoking and Sera's voice in her ear telling her to breathe. Sera tilts her head back on the pillow until her throat is a pale line in the lamplight, and that small wicked smile arrives the way it always does — slow, like she's already won something. "We can do sixty-nine," she says, and the arithmetic of it is so stupid, so exactly Sera, that Aria laughs into her collarbone before she means to.

Sera rolls onto her back and pulls, a hand fisted in the front of Aria's shift, and Aria comes up over her — knees settling outside Sera's hips, the stolen wine still breathing from the nightstand, the cedar smell of the linen rising warm between them. Sera's thighs part under her, and the shift is worked up over Aria's hips and off, and then Sera is turning beneath her like water finding its level, hooking one leg and then the other over Aria's shoulders, her body folding into the shape it wants. Aria drops her mouth to the inside of Sera's thigh first, deliberately, because she wants the first sound — and gets it, a sharp inhale that Sera tries to swallow and can't. Then Sera's hand finds the back of Aria's neck and pulls her down into the slick heat of her, and in the same motion Sera's mouth is on Aria, tongue flat and certain, and the room goes very small and very loud at once.

There is no more thinking after that. Aria's mouth finds Sera and stays — slow at first, learning the shape of her, the salt of her, the way Sera's hips lift into her tongue like she's been waiting all day to be asked. Above her, Sera works with the same unhurried patience, her mouth hot and open and sure, and every long stroke of Sera's tongue drags a sound out of Aria that she can't keep behind her teeth. Sera's fingers are knotted in her hair, not steering, just holding, and Aria rocks into her mouth the way Sera rocks into hers, a rhythm that builds between them without either of them deciding it. The cedar and the wine and the wet sound of mouths — the room has shrunk to the length of a bed, to the two of them folded into each other like a knot that can only be pulled tighter.

Sera comes first. Aria feels it in the hand that tightens in her hair, in the thighs that clamp hard around her ears, in the long shudder that rolls up Sera's body and breaks against Aria's mouth. Sera doesn't stop — she moans against Aria's cunt with her whole mouth and keeps going, tongue and lips and the flat of her teeth, and the vibration of that moan is what tips Aria over. Aria comes with her face buried between Sera's legs, hips grinding down into Sera's mouth, one hand white-knuckled on the cedar post and the other splayed across Sera's stomach. For a moment neither of them moves. Then Sera's tongue drags lazily up the length of her, once, and Aria shudders and finally lifts her head.

She turns, careful of the leg still hooked over her shoulder, and settles down along Sera's side, her cheek on Sera's shoulder and her thigh thrown over Sera's thigh. Sera's mouth is wet and her own, and Aria can taste herself there, and Sera grins up at the ceiling like she's just been handed a prize. "Sixty-nine," Sera says, smug and breathless, "hours. That's what I meant."

Aria laughs into her skin. "It wasn't."

"It was always both." Sera's hand finds Aria's hair again, gentler now, combing the tangles out with her fingers. "You know what's tomorrow."

"The chamber." Aria says it into Sera's shoulder, and the word lands heavier than the joke did. "Ten o'clock."

"And if the ward eats you."

"Then I'm glad you ate me first," Aria says, and feels Sera's laugh move through her shoulder where her cheek is resting — one low, tired roll of it, more breath than sound. Aria turns her face into the skin there and stays. She can still taste her, salt and Sera and the wine underneath, and she doesn't wipe her mouth, doesn't want to. The lamp on the nightstand has burned down to a stub, and the cedar smell of the linen has gone warm and used, and somewhere past the black oak posts the hall is doing whatever a fifteen-hundred-year-old hall does at night — settling, ticking, keeping its minutes.

"Ten o'clock," Sera says, not a question this time. Her fingers keep moving through Aria's hair, unhurried, working out knots that have been there since the flight. "Mike goes first."

"He volunteered."

"He was drunk."

"He was still volunteering." Aria lifts her head enough to look at her — the auburn curls wrecked against the pillow, the wire-rims folded on the nightstand, the freckles that never quite faded even now. "If the ward strips him, we'll know in the first ten seconds. If it doesn't, we go in and I put my hand on the wall and we find out what the Order's been feeding for fifteen hundred years." She settles back down. "Either way, you're behind me. That's the order."

Sera's hand stops in her hair. "That's not an order."

"It's the one I'm giving."

Sera gives her a flat look, and it's the exact face she makes when a boss mechanic is wrong — patient, unimpressed, already three moves ahead. "Yes. Melodramatic Elf Princess SIR." She says it with the salute, two fingers off her temple, and the gesture is so absurd coming from a woman flat on her back with her hair wrecked against a pillow that Aria snorts into her shoulder.

Then Sera chuckles, low and tired and real, and her fingers go back to working a knot out of Aria's hair. "Ok. Aria, I'll go last." She tugs, once, to make sure it's heard. "But only because I love you."

Aria lies still against her for a moment and lets that sit where it lands — not the joke, the back half of it. The lamp stub gutters and gives up, and the room goes down to the last of the coals, and the hall keeps ticking around them in the dark.