you know you're my happy clouds, & i'm bob ross

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

The grit in Kaisel’s voice sends a full-body tremble through Flora, the force of it rolling out from her core and sinking bone-deep as she exhales sharply, lips parting around a breath that is already too thin for the amount of want being poured into it. Good, she almost says, or maybe only thinks, because the difference barely matters now, not when his desire is burning through the bond and turning every already-sensitive part of her molten again, her body answering his before she can pretend to have any composure left. The fact that he has enough sense to get rid of the last layer between them now, instead of forcing them to fumble it off later earns a hot little flare of greedy appreciation from her, bright and immediate, and when she feels the hard press of him against her leg her thighs spread without hesitation.

She looks up at him with flushed cheeks and aqua eyes gone dark, and nothing—nothing—feels as good or as right as the weight of him over her, the warmth of his body covering hers, the breathless relief of being pressed into the bed by the one person she wants with this much ridiculous, inconvenient, soul-deep certainty. Her hands move to him immediately, one arm curling around his shoulders so her palm can flatten against the Lichtenberg scarring there, fingers spreading across the marked skin like she can hold the storm of him in place, while the other dives into his hair, gripping hard enough to make her own need obvious even without the bond betraying every last flicker of it. She should be spent, honestly, should be dramatically asking for water or a medal or maybe a priest, and yet the heat in her is already rising again, stoked by the raw ache of his arousal flooding into her until wanting him feels less like a choice than a tide she has absolutely no interest in surviving.

Not quite, she thinks back, the words threaded with breathless mischief and unmistakable need, her hips shifting beneath the firm hold of his arm even though the way he has her caught makes it almost impossible to move, almost impossible to breathe, almost impossible to do anything except feel him everywhere. Flora manages anyway, angling herself with small, impatient movements until the pressure between her thighs is exactly where she wants it, and as his mouth comes down to hers she wraps her legs around his waist, drawing him closer with a slow, deliberate pull that turns the next breath into something shattered.

She tries to keep kissing him through it, but the first deep press of him into her tears a ragged moan from her mouth and forces her lips to part against his, her head tipping back as the stretch and fullness steal whatever was left of her ability to form thoughts into words. It feels exquisite from inside her own body, hot and overwhelming and so intensely right that her fingers clamp harder against him, but feeling it from him too—feeling the heat, the pressure, the way his own pleasure answers hers through the bond—scatters her thoughts so completely that for a few seconds there is no room for language at all. Her fingertips press hungrily into his scarred shoulder, her grip in his hair tightening as her hips lift from the bed with a shaky effort from her core, chasing the contact, taking him in with a breathless, trembling greed that pours through the bond in waves of yes and more and gods, Kai, all of it too bright and too hot and too much to keep contained.

Let me paint a picture for you, I'm feeling like Bob Ross

The sound she makes tears straight through him. Not just because he hears it, but because he feels the way it blooms through her at the same time, hot and staggering and impossibly consuming through the bond. Her want flaring high, the deep-seated relief, the desperate greed, they all wrap around his own versions of them until there’s no clean line left between giving and taking.

His forehead drops briefly against hers, a wrecked laugh—euphoria instead of humor—escaping him in between the ragged breath he fights for. The touch where her fingers tighten against the scarring on his shoulder and down his back sends something deeper through him than arousal alone. It's something sharp with memory and devotion, already known, but breaking against the surface of his awareness like a fin in the surf before retreating, little more than a reminder of depth. It's the simple fact that she holds every piece of him, even the ruined ones, and that he'd give up even more if he had to in order to keep it that way.

With a new and entirely different depth at hand, the lightning she's put into him now cuts through anything more than the immediate storm of sensation. There you are, the thought reaches out to her, lazy and infinitely pleased. The delayed gratification of feeling her rolls over him with a slowness so at odds with the frantic pulse and hunger hammering through him. He lets himself sink fully into the shape of her beneath him, around him, against him. Every shift of her body pulls another consuming wash of heat through the bond. Every breath she looses is answered immediately by the tightening ache inside his own chest and stomach, the shudder of appreciation winding up his spine and clipping his teeth together as he rolls against her with a steady, climbing pace. His necklace sways back and forth, a streak of cold metal between the blaze of their bodies.

One hand slips up to cradle the side of her face, thumb curling against the edge of her mouth where the soft, urging sounds escape. His other hand keeps her anchored close against him, head bowing across her shoulder to the thread of her fingers. Through the bond, there is no hiding what slips from him then. Not just the wild want of her, but that same impossible certainty that has been with him since the beginning, resolved to love her because there is nothing else in him that exists for her besides that.

"C'mere," his voice tumbles out into her hair, possessive and unrelenting in its expectation of obedience. He pulls back only long enough to reposition her the way he wants, impatient hands guiding and gathering until she’s exactly where he means to keep her, hips tilted higher against his, legs tossed over his shoulders, and pulling a pillow beneath her lower back with rough efficiency. The new angle nearly wrecks him outright, deeper and fuller than just before, and he's already close to being undone after barely surviving her release.

A broken groan tears from him as he folds back over her, forehead dropping briefly against her shoulder while he fights to keep from losing himself too quickly to the overwhelming heat of her. One hand keeps her firmly rooted to take every snap of his hips, pressure placed just near her clit with the shape of his palm. His other reaches back out for her, fitting around her throat with far more care than the possessive shape of it initially suggests. He figures, if it's her birthday, she should have everything she wants. With the link between them now, he's got more trust in walking that edge, and genuinely, he's curious. Less new to it, more attuned to it, he waits just the breath to confirm with her before he'll fold his fingers in on the flutter of her pulse.

Kaisel

They don't gotta ask 'cause they know I'm him

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

It shouldn’t work this way, Flora thinks distantly, or maybe doesn’t think so much as has the awareness flash somewhere behind her eyes in a bright, useless burst, because pleasure is supposed to spend itself as it moves; it's supposed to lose heat somewhere along the line like a drink going lukewarm or sunlight fading off skin, but whatever this is between them has apparently taken one look at the laws of thermodynamics and decided they were written by virgins and cowards. Every sensation ricochets back and forth through the bond and comes back stronger, his pleasure striking hers, hers answering his, his need pouring into the places where she’s already open and molten until the whole thing builds on itself with no mercy and no ceiling, turning each roll of his hips, each broken breath, each hard pulse of want into something doubled, tripled, made new before she can survive the last wave of it.

When he gathers her the way he wants her, impatient and certain and rough with need, Flora gives herself over to it instantly, not because she has no choice but because every part of her loves that this is what she does to him, that the goofy, ridiculous, golden-hearted man who made her a memory-globe full of everyone’s love and wore boxers with her name on them is also the man who can lose patience like this because he wants her too badly to be neat about it. The heat of that thought detonates low in her belly, dragging a moan from her lips and she lets herself be arranged, lets her body answer the demand of his with immediate, shameless trust, her legs lifting where he puts them, her hips tilting higher, her fingers clawing at whatever part of him she can reach.

The first thrust at the new angle punches the breath clean out of her, and the moan that follows is loud, reckless, and absolutely not designed with anyone else sleeping under this roof in mind. Her toes curl hard with the force of it, thighs tensing, back arching as the deeper press of him lights her up from the inside in one brutal, exquisite sweep, her whole body tightening around the feeling as if she can hold it in place and still somehow demand more. "Fuck—Kai," she gasps, the syllables breaking unevenly as her cheek turns against him where he’s close, her breath coming fast and hot, her thoughts spilling through the bond in a tangled rush; none of it polished, none of it coy, all of it bright with the helpless greed of how good it feels to be taken apart by the person who knows exactly how to put her back together after.

His hand at her throat makes her pulse stutter beneath his palm, the reaction immediate and visible in the lift of her chin and the sharp catch of her breath, but there’s no fear in it, no retreat, only the sudden concentrated intensity of being held somewhere tender and dangerous by someone she trusts implicitly. Even through the scattered heat of her thoughts she remembers the uncertainty from before, the careful edge of it, and she sends reassurance through the bond before words can get tangled in her mouth, a warm, certain pulse of I want this, I trust you wrapped around the flutter of her heartbeat beneath his fingers. Her hand slides up to cover his for a moment, not to pull it away, not to stop him, but to press there lightly, to make sure he feels the shape of her permission as clearly as he feels everything else, her aqua eyes dark and glazed as she looks up at him with flushed cheeks and parted lips, ruined and radiant and entirely his in a way that makes her body tremble again before the next wave even reaches her.

Let me paint a picture for you, I'm feeling like Bob Ross

The reassurance slides through him warm and immediate, wrapping itself around the last lingering hesitation. The sound that leaves him next is one born from complete surrender to her and everything she's done to him. It's a low, rumbling thing, deeply set and satisfied at the sight of her beneath him. Beneath her hand, his fingers tighten faintly, the shape of his control still there beneath all the feral want threatening to consume him outright. He can feel the way her pulse flutters beneath his grip. Feel the answering tremble running through her body each time he moves against her. Feel the greedy, brilliant heat of her wanting him still.

It nearly destroys him. His forehead drops against hers again, breath shuddering out between clenched teeth as her trembling echoes through him hard enough to make his own rhythm falter for half a second before he catches it again. Every roll of his body against hers grows rougher around the edges after that, restraint fraying too obviously now. Feeling it all from both sides at once, the doubled sensation drives straight into the pressure already wound tight inside him with devastating force.

You are ju— The thought breaks apart halfway to language, overwhelmed by sensation before it fully forms, leaving little more than a panted growl of her name. Breath comes harder now, strangled back by his own hand, her experience bleeding into his until he may as well be choking himself. His pulse kicks wildly for it, his arousal climbing rapid and reckless. It's fed on one end by the slick pour of her desire, ruinous in its own right, welling around him as he sinks into with every relentless thrust. On the other end, it leans into the seat of his palm, the sensation prickling new and demanding.

Flora, slips through the bond ragged and reverent alike, followed immediately by another staggering sweep of pressure mounting tighter and insistent. He's nearing the brink hard enough that it feels like it'll be less than relief and more pure mercy at this point.

Kaisel

They don't gotta ask 'cause they know I'm him

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

Flora can’t keep track of which pleasure belongs to whom anymore, and the sheer absurdity of that should probably make her laugh if there were room in her body for anything but heat. Hers is internal, low and expanding, a band of pressure blooming deep in her belly like hands made of fire have closed around her hips from the inside and begun to spread, each thrust feeding that blaze until it climbs through her ribs, down her thighs, into the curled tension of her toes. His is different, sharper-edged and almost external where it crashes through the bond, bound up in the ability to take and drive and thrust in a way her body can’t mirror except by receiving him, clenching around him, dragging him deeper with every helpless lift of her hips. The two sensations tangle behind her aqua eyes in bright, competing flares, pleasure fighting pleasure for space until thought itself starts coming apart in useless little sparks of Kai and please and more, all of it too tangled to sort into anything elegant.

Her lips part around a shaky moan, but the sound breaks against his palm as little more than a rasp, her breath vibrating faintly beneath his hand where it curls around her throat, and that restraint makes everything worse in the most devastating way. She feels like a bottle of something fizzy shaken hard enough to burst, all glittering pressure and frantic sweetness trapped beneath a cap that hasn’t quite been released, her body winding tighter and tighter beneath him while her pulse flutters against his fingers like it’s trying to tell on her. She tries to inhale and can’t get enough, can’t pull a breath deep enough to match what’s building, and the lack of it turns the pleasure brighter, more concentrated, unbearable in the way sunlight on water can be unbearable when it’s everywhere at once and begins to blind.

There’s no room for words now, and thank gods for the bond because her mouth has been rendered decorative at best, parted and useless while the rest of her speaks for her: the tightening of her thighs, the frantic curl of her hands, the way her body clenches around him with each rising wave as if it can hold him there through sheer, greedy will. Kai—she sends, or maybe it’s only the shape of his name wrapped in heat and warning, because her orgasm is building too quickly now, swelling higher than the last one, sharper because of his pleasure braided into hers and the dark, dizzying pressure of his hand at her throat. She can only hope he feels it clearly enough—the way she’s right there, right on the edge, wound so tight she’s nearly shaking apart—that he’ll know when to release her, when to let the breath back in so the detonation can finally tear through her properly.

Let me paint a picture for you, I'm feeling like Bob Ross

The tell reaches him clearly enough. Not through words anymore, not even thought, both of which are as scattered and impossible to catch as motes of light. It's through the tightening of everything beneath him, around him, near violent with the force. The pressure is mounting so high, stacking rapidly hand over fist between them through the bond, that it feels less like sensation and more like standing inside the center of a lightning strike, waiting for it to finally hit ground.

He can feel her right there, a presence that's pushing in on him like a storm rolling in, but equally it feels like it's trying to get out from within, as if he is as much the storm and the sky as the one caught in it below. It's all there. The frantic flutter of her pulse beneath his hand, echoing his own. The desperate struggle for breath vibrating against his palm, the very same in his lungs. The way her body keeps pulling taut around him, each helpless wave dragging another wrecked sound from his throat every time they hit, the drag of the current beckoned on with every pummel of his hips. It all drives straight into the insurmountable creation that this pleasure has become, so colossal he feels he cannot survive it, much less hope to contain it. He's held together by little more than a single, remaining thread. It's frayed so far it might as well be transparent. It'd give in an instant, save for the desperate need to scale this monstrous euphoria with her, unwilling to change a thing until he knows she's there with him.

He doesn't have the means to speak, teeth clenched around a constant pant, breath a rare commodity now. Thoughts have been reduced to such a basic nature, that through the bond he can only answer with a flare of encouragement, as if mentally grabbing hold of her hand and linking it with his right before they leap from the top of what they've made, because he can feel it in her. He bows over her suddenly, weight pressing in as his forehead rolls against hers. He gives one, deep and final kick inside her, and then he lets go.

His hand slips from her throat at the exact moment the last strand of control breaks. The rush of her full breath returning hits him almost as violently as the release that bursts between them. Air tears in with a vengeance, her gasp and his groan colliding in the narrow space between their mouths as the pressure finally drops. Bliss crashes into every part of him like it means to bruise his bones, and behind it hers follows hard like a shadow, staggering and relentless until every nerve in his body feels white-hot, the heat impossibly fed from both ends, from all around.

He's completely ruined by it. There are no words, not even her name, not even close. Just a sound, nearly ghoulish with the threat of his demise so close at hand. He collapses against her, raw and devoted and overwhelmed in all the best ways. All sensation breaks apart at once as he buries himself against her, one arm locking around her waist, the other abandoning all tension entirely to cradle weakly against her jaw and throat again, no pressure left in it now beyond trembling touch. Through the bond, there's still nothing pretty or polite. It's just the enormous, staggering flood of relief and want and affection, trickling freely through every broken piece of him as he clings to her through the aftershocks, liable to simply dissolve if he doesn't keep hold of her.

Kaisel

They don't gotta ask 'cause they know I'm him

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

The instant the pressure leaves Flora’s throat and breath rushes back into her, everything inside her flares as if the air itself is tinder, oxygen pouring into the blaze Kaisel has built until the fire doesn’t simply burn brighter, it consumes whatever fragile structure of thought she had left. Her lungs drag in one full, ragged breath and the orgasm detonates through her with it, violent and luminous and so much larger than her body that for a few suspended seconds she loses all awareness of where her limbs are, where the bed begins, where Kaisel’s heat ends and hers answers back. Her legs clench around him, fingernails digging hard into his shoulder, her body locking around the force of it as if holding on is the only way to survive the thing they’ve made together.

There is no clean edge to her anymore, no neat division between her pleasure and his, only them, tangled and alight and spilling through the bond in a way that feels too intimate for language and too physical to be anything as flimsy as thought. The release rolls through her in hard, shattering pulses, each one dragging another broken sound from her lips now that she has breath enough to make them, little whimpers and gasps spilling out between hurried inhales as her body trembles beneath the enormity of it. Her head turns slackly into his hair, mouth parted, breath hot and uneven as she pants there, utterly undone, every aftershock making her flinch and shiver while the bond keeps carrying the impossible excess of sensation back and forth until even the fading edges feel sharp enough to make her toes curl again.

By degrees, her hands loosen from the desperate grip she has on him, her fingers uncurling just enough that she’s no longer holding on like she’s being pulled under, though she doesn’t move away, doesn’t give up even an inch of contact. She stays wrapped around him, shaken and emptied out by the force of what’s just torn through her, and yet somehow filled to the point of overflowing by the love that rushes in behind it, huge and warm and almost unbearable in its sweetness. A tear slips from the corner of one eye, then another, not from hurt, not from sadness, but because there’s nowhere else for all of it to go, because her body has already spent itself and her heart apparently still has the energy to keep spilling over.

"I love you so much," she says, though the words don’t come out entirely one way or the other; half of them tremble from her mouth into his hair, rough and breathless and wrecked, while the rest pour through the bond in a bright, unguarded rush, carrying everything her voice can’t manage, every shattered piece of want and gratitude and devotion still ringing through her.

Let me paint a picture for you, I'm feeling like Bob Ross

Pleasure and love move through him with a relentless force, both enormous enough to leave him shaking. He stays collapsed over her, breath still coming rough and uneven into the curve of her neck while the last trembling pulses wring through them both, his body unwilling to surrender even an inch of contact now that it has learned what it means to feel her this completely. Not just the pieces of her scattered by coming apart, but the impossible tenderness unspooling around it all as if the very fabric of her being had been unthreaded and all he's left with is a tangled heap of something golden and shimmering.

The tears that begin, an ordinarily very worrying post orgasm, development only draw a brief and weary glance as his head rolls against her breath and onto her shoulder. All the proof of what they mean is already there, ebbing back and forth between them. In response, his grip around her waist tightens. It's not possessive, not entirely, not like before. Now it's just something stabilizing, needing the reassurance that she’s real and still here beneath him after the sheer force of what they’ve just done to each other. He lifts his head with all the small bits of strength that have eked back and presses clumsy, reverent kisses wherever he can reach, lacking enough coordination to choose properly. Her cheek, her temple, the corner of her mouth, all of them serving to mark her with his answer. A faint laugh bubbles up behind each one, the breathless need to let the excess of everything out existing just as equally in him.

"Hey," he manages at last, though the word almost sounds like it belongs to a different voice, his so wrecked by emotion. Copper eyes finally lift enough to find her fully, his pendant swinging loosely from his neck with the motion, threatening to tap her chin. The edges of the world are wonderfully blurred away by the dark flop of hair hanging down around him, and all he can see is her perfectly framed and flushed and broken open in the best way beneath him.

His smile is as messy as his words, the latter of which has left him as he becomes captivated all over again by the image of her. Through the bond, there’s no hiding it anyway. It's a staggering amount of love that swells inside him. It presses against every thought, every breath, every tireless beat of his heart until he can barely contain it in the shape of himself. That's my line, he complains, and ditto is right there between it all. He leans down to nudge her nose with his before flopping in exhaustion onto the side of the bed nearest her, arm and leg still tangled across her.

Tilted down, but still snuggled close, he can see the slope of her beside him, lit just by what remains on in her room and what floods in from outside. He pulls her hand onto his chest, his own wrapping around it until his fingers can slide up her palm and fit against hers. "I love you more than I know what to do with," he sighs softly, perfectly content with this being his main problem. He has never felt so thoroughly seen, so completely supported, so unwaveringly trusted as to be granted something as open as this, not until now, not until her. It has not just filled the cracks inside him he never knew existed, but it has dismantled and rebuilt portions of him, better than ever before, because of her. "I think this is a good place to start." Wrapped up at her side, basking in the afterglow.

Kaisel

They don't gotta ask 'cause they know I'm him

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

Kai's kisses land against her skin and scatter through the bond in delicate, overbright fragments, each clumsy press of his mouth refracted back toward him like rainbows caught inside a prism, all colour and warmth and shimmer against nerves still so oversensitive that even tenderness feels almost too vivid to bear. Flora huffs a laugh that is barely more than air over her lips, too wrecked to make it pretty, too happy to care, and though she wants to wrap both arms around him and pull him down until there is no possible argument about where he belongs, her limbs have apparently submitted a formal resignation from duty, leaving her only able to gaze up at him with the kind of adoration that makes her smile turn crooked and helpless at the edges.

When his nose brushes hers, the laugh that slips out of her is softer this time, warmer, and as he flops beside her, her eyes follow him like the rest of the room has lost all relevance. Exhaustion sits heavy in her bones, but beneath it she feels blissfully, stupidly full, like she’s been hollowed out and poured back into herself with sunlight and champagne and whatever ridiculous substance makes people write bad poetry and mean every word of it. She scooches just enough to stay tangled with him, because if she is going to be left boneless and unhelpful then she is at least going to be boneless in the correct direction, allowing him to take her hand and threading her fingers through his. "That’s a very good way of putting it," she murmurs, her thumb brushing lazily against his hand, the words slow and sleepy and soaked in affection.

Her other arm stretches above her head before falling there, loose and useless in the best possible way, and she lets herself sink properly into the bed at last, her gaze sliding over the slices of him carved out by the room’s low light and the moonlight beyond, lingering on the familiar places that feel somehow newly named now. "I guess it goes without saying," she says after a moment, voice quiet but not careful, because careful feels almost impossible with her fingers still threaded through his and the bond between them still humming with the last warm remnants of what they’d just done to each other, "but I’ve never felt like that before." Her hand tightens slightly in his, but not enough to pull or ask for anything. It isn’t only the pleasure she means, though gods, that alone had been enough to leave her body feeling poured out and remade; it’s the way there had been no distance left between giving and receiving, no lonely part of herself that was seen but not understood, nothing one-sided or taken in secret or a distance she couldn't possibly understand. Instead, everything had gone both ways; his hunger rushing into hers, her release breaking through him, their love caught between them and thrown back brighter each time until it hadn’t felt like being watched or known or wanted from the outside, but like being held from within the same impossible tide.

Her lashes lower for a second as she breathes out, still a little shaky with it, still tender in places she doesn’t have names for, and when she looks back at him her smile is small and soft and entirely without armour. "It felt like...really being whole," Flora murmurs, the confession slipping out quiet and plain because dressing it up would only make it smaller, and after a moment, her thumb brushes over his hand again, slow and affectionate. "I didn’t know it would be like that." Didn't know it could be like that. She'd thought it would make the sex good, yes, but she had not expected the quiet devastation that came after it, the feeling of some hidden absence inside her finally being answered.