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“You can fall asleep there, boy, but I don’t think you’ll be too happy about it in the morning.”
At the sound of Rider’s voice, Waver stirred from his doze, blearily blinking the pages of his book back into focus. He didn’t remember nodding off, but dusk had darkened to night outside, leaving the room dimly lit by the bedside lamp and the glow of the TV screen.
“The bed’s cold, though,” he grumbled, rubbing his eyes. Rider, on the other hand, was like a walking furnace, which was why Waver had taken to curling up in his lap in their downtime, nestled neatly in the space between Rider’s crossed legs, with his back to his Servant’s chest. Despite some initial awkwardness—Rider had all but dragged Waver into his lap a few days ago, when he got sick of Waver whining that the Mackenzie’s kept their thermostat too low, and the sudden proximity had left Waver too stunned to move for a solid minute—the arrangement had become almost startlingly routine, startlingly quickly.
It was only fair, though, if his Servant insisted on remaining in material form all the time, that he consent to being used as a piece of furniture when he took up half the room anyway. Not to mention the undoubtedly inefficient conversion of magical energy to body heat. If Rider was going to be warm for no good reason, someone might as well take advantage of it.
Rider chuckled, and before Waver could get to his feet, he scooped him into his arms as effortlessly as a normal person might pick up a kitten and stood. Waver made a small noise of protest, but there wasn’t much else he could do when he was suddenly four feet off the ground, so he settled for scowling darkly as Rider toted him towards the bed.
“You would not have survived a single night out in the desert during my campaigns,” Rider remarked as he crossed the room. “It was far colder than this.”
Waver pursed his lips. “I would have been fine. That’s what I have you for.”
Rider was quiet, and surprised by his silence, Waver glanced up at him. He must have been really tired, though, because it took him several seconds of staring at Rider’s raised eyebrows before he thought over what he had just said.
Maybe they didn’t have the most formal Master-Servant relationship, but it was another thing entirely to tell Alexander III, Conqueror of Asia, that he amounted to little more than a space heater.
Rider set him down on the bed with somewhat less gentleness than he might have otherwise and settled on the edge of the mattress, bracing himself against the bed with one arm to loom over him.
“Oh? Is it now?”
The threat in his tone was playful, but it made a weird little spark shiver its way down the length of Waver’s spine. Doing his best to will the color out of his face, Waver clicked his tongue.
“I wouldn’t have been in your army anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Certainly not as a warrior,” Rider agreed—a little too quickly, Waver thought. “But armies require more than just warriors. There would have been a place for a little mage like you.”
“Only if I joined in the first place,” Waver countered, with a contrary pout.
Rider blinked down at him with the same baffled expression he had worn when Lancer and Saber had turned him down. “Oh? You wouldn’t, then?”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Waver turned up his chin. “Walking all day in the hot desert to fight pointless battles, and then almost freezing to death in a tent every night? No, thanks.”
If Waver hadn’t known better, he would have almost said Rider looked hurt, but he quickly dismissed that impression. It was ridiculous to think that anything he said could have any more effect on his Servant than hitting him did—which was to say, exactly none at all.
“Hmmm…” Rider scratched his beard with a ruminative air. “I cannot deny that there was a great deal of walking, and a great many battles. But as for the cold…well, as you said, maybe I would have been the one to warm your bedroll at night.”
Waver choked on nothing as he felt a blush prickle up his neck. He hadn’t meant it like that—he hadn’t! He just meant the easy closeness of the last few days, with him bracketed neatly between Rider’s arms, safe from the winter chill and enemy attacks alike. Obviously, he would want the same thing if they were in a different war. It was utility. What Rider was implying, with his voice dropping into a suggestively low register that made Waver’s skin tingle, that was—
With the last few days as a reference, though, it was a little too easy to imagine: Rider pulling Waver flush against his chest amidst a pile of blankets and furs, enclosing him in an embrace that smelled of clean sweat and warm leather, calloused hands tracing paths across Waver’s back and—
It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought about it.
Less than a week ago, when Rider had first appeared before him, huge and fierce and…huge…a lot of thoughts had crossed Waver’s mind. The less relevant ones had been hastily stuffed into a back corner of his brain, where he was determined that they would remain for the rest of the war. He was pretty good at compartmentalizing like that, if he set his mind to it; in fact, he could shelve the thought again right now, easily. If he shoved at Rider’s chest and grumbled at him to stop teasing, he knew Rider would just chuckle and obligingly leave him alone. Waver might have to avoid being quite so close to him for a while for the sake of his sanity, but surely that was better than admitting—
—better than admitting that he wanted Rider to show him, so badly that he ached for it, exactly how he would keep Waver warm at night.
“Didn’t you have others for that?” Waver finally managed to retort.
He knew Rider had, from what he had managed to read of that biography he’d found. There had been wives, not to mention Hephaestion—and he did not want to mention Hephaestion, because he thought that if he ever had to speak to Rider about the concept of loving another man, in ancient or modern terms, he wouldn’t be able to bear the vulnerability of it. It wasn’t as though he had anyone at the Clock Tower for that kind of conversation—and he didn’t need anyone. Mages were monsters for whom love and even lust were rarely more than a means to an end, and Waver had understood that even before coming to London. While it was nice that some of the things that he had been relentlessly bullied for all throughout secondary school were mostly written off as eccentricities now, he didn’t mind that his current classmates had other reasons to avoid associating with him.
Friends, lovers, all of it was irrelevant to his journey as a mage. Mages recognized power. Once he proved his ability, it wouldn’t matter where his attractions lay—nor would it matter that the world might never recognize him as a man in the first place. They wouldn’t be able to deny him as a mage, and that was enough.
(It was enough, but it still filled him with a traitorous sort of giddiness that Rider had never questioned him in that regard. The man who had been flummoxed by the concept of modern trousers had never once raised an eyebrow at Waver’s stated gender—and there was no way that he hadn’t realized by now, if he hadn’t known right away. Waver could bear the disrespect, and could suffer to be called weak, scrawny, and even immature, as long as he was still “boy” at the end of the day.)
“I did,” Rider agreed, and it took Waver a second to even remember what he had said before his thoughts had started spiraling. Alexander’s lovers. Right. “In the past.”
He was being uncharacteristically circumspect, and Waver realized—with the same mixture of surprise and indignation that always accompanied this realization—that it was because he cared about Waver. Sure, he trampled all over Waver’s boundaries in other ways, but never in ways that would truly hurt. In the ways that mattered, he was almost too considerate—like with the draw on Waver’s magical energy, or lack thereof, that Waver had noticed. Some King of Conquerors, to boast so much of plundering and then refuse to use any of his Master’s willingly supplied mana…
Waver was aware that he was mentally berating his Servant just to stall. It was a miracle Rider hadn’t already given up on this pretense for flirting—wait, was this flirting? Could Waver even assume that much? It was more likely that Rider was just making fun of him, and Waver was the one letting his thoughts wander to Alexander’s affection for men—or his alleged affection, because Waver had never had the courage to ask about those parts of the history books. For all he knew, those stories were as apocryphal as the accountings of Alexander’s height and eye color.
“This…isn’t the desert,” Waver pointed out. More stalling. He wished he had enough of a backbone to either claim haughtily that as a true mage, he desired nothing but the Root, and that it was beneath him to consort with a familiar like this…or to just accept that he wanted what Rider was offering him. Wasn’t Waver a man who went after what he wanted? He had given everything to make it to the Clock Tower, stolen his way into this war—but those were easy things to want, acceptable things. He was allowed to be ambitious. Wanting something like this…that was different.
“No, it isn’t,” Rider conceded. He bent the arm that he was using to brace himself against the bed, leaning a little closer. “But you are cold, aren’t you?”
Truthfully, Waver was on fire, to the point where he thought that if Rider touched him now, he might just crumble to ash. But it was a heat ignited from the man above him, and if Rider left him here…
“I’m fine,” he said in his head, imagining rolling to the side with a hmph of disdain. “Does this sort of unoriginal seduction usually work for you? Honestly.”
And that would be that. Right?
“I’m…” he started, but “fine” died in his throat. He drew a breath, casting his eyes off to the side to avoid Rider’s infuriatingly patient gaze. Maybe conquerors were patient, paradoxically—it had taken him ten years just to get partway across Asia, after all. Ten years of deserts and mountains and cold nights, all to reach a distant sea that might not even exist.
What warranted such patience now, Waver had no idea. He should probably just chalk it up to Rider being an idiot, wasting his time on this the same way he wasted time on video games and war movies. A diversion. As his Master, Waver should probably put his foot down, especially with the games, but he knew Rider wouldn’t listen. He never listened, except—
Except for now, and that was almost worse. It would have been so much easier if he just steamrolled forward like he always did, saving Waver the humiliation of voicing his answer to Rider’s question out loud.
There would be no such mercy forthcoming, though, so he kept his eyes fixed on a fold in the bedspread when he mumbled, “It’s…a little cold.”
Rider hummed. Entirely without him meaning for it to happen, Waver’s body had become tuned to that sound, and he resonated with it even now, when Rider still wasn’t touching him.
“Still?” Am I that impatient?
Apparently he was, because he thought Rider was moving impossibly slowly as he lifted his free arm and drew his finger up the line of Waver’s jaw, brushing a lock of hair to the side before catching Waver’s eyes.
Waver hadn’t meant to look at him, but now he couldn’t look away. According to legend, Alexander’s eyes should have been different colors, one dark and one light, but it was hard for Waver to imagine anything more striking than the dark burning crimson that he was so used to. Had anyone ever looked at him the way Rider did? It was frustrating sometimes, how he seemed to see through Waver so easily, but that meant he was actually looking, when so many other people just dismissed Waver at a glance.
Waver couldn’t feign indifference to that gaze. Everything he wanted was laid excruciatingly bare, from his petty ambitions and his desperation for recognition, to the desire he had told himself had no place in the heart of a mage—Waver could hardly stand it, but at the same time…Rider was still looking, wasn’t he? Not with disgust, not with scorn…despite their disastrous first encounter, Alexander the Great was still looking at Waver Velvet with undeniable interest, as though he saw something of value where nobody else had, value that even Waver sometimes doubted was there.
“Breathe, Waver,” Rider told him, and Waver realized that he wasn’t, and sucked in a gulp of air all at once, which made him feel like a dying fish and convinced him at last that Rider was absolutely going to give up on this farce, because what on earth could he possibly see in Waver Velvet, Waver the Failure, Waver who longed for things he had no right to even reach for—
Rider’s lips were warm, and a little wet, and they covered Waver’s own with a sensation he couldn’t have properly imagined, because of course he had nothing in the way of reference. And he was gone so quickly—Waver was dimly aware of tilting his chin up to chase him, and barely registered his own embarrassment when Rider gave a low chuckle and obliged him, threading his fingers into Waver’s hair to cradle the back of his head and subtly coax him to the right angle.
It was still just a press of closed lips against Waver’s slightly parted ones, and a distant, pointlessly vindictive part of Waver observed that the whole activity really wasn’t that groundbreaking, after all. The warm pressure of Rider’s lips was pleasant, and the slight scrape of his beard against Waver’s chin was a foreign sensation that made Waver feel a little dizzy if he focused on it too much, and the hand supporting Waver’s head, clasped at the back of his neck, was a quiet reminder of Rider’s effortless strength, but aside from that—
“Breathe,” Rider repeated when he pulled away, and Waver intended to snap that he hardly needed to be reminded, but what came out was more of a pathetic sigh as he exhaled what was left in his lungs. Self-consciousness jolted him to awareness, and he opened his eyes to find that he was gripping Rider’s Grand Tactics t-shirt with one hand—crushing Russia into an unrecognizable mass—and to see Rider looking back at him with a mixture of amusement and concern.
“Doing alright?”
Color flared afresh in Waver’s cheeks. “I’m fine, you stupid—”
And that was Rider’s tongue, pressing irresistibly between Waver’s lips—as though Waver would have dreamed of resisting him—delving into his mouth, sliding hot against his tongue.
The rest of Waver’s intended insult petered off into a muffled hum, and whatever dismissive observations he had been making to himself a moment ago promptly evaporated. Rider licked into his mouth like he was something to devour, and even the most stubborn part of Waver couldn’t deny that it felt good. It was a little strange, the foreign wetness between his lips, the taste of another person—but even the sourness of the beer Rider had been drinking earlier didn’t bother Waver that much when behind it was the richer taste of Rider’s tongue. And just as he got used to the new sensations enough to remember that he had no idea what he was doing, Rider tilted his head to kiss him even more deeply, retreating only to trace the edge of Waver’s lips before pressing back to claim them, and Waver gave himself up to the feeling of it again.
But despite Rider’s initial insistence, his movements soon became almost stubbornly lazy, and after a moment of trying to compensate with his own efforts, Waver was forced to simply acquiesce to his pace. Eventually, his heartbeat stopped pounding quite so deafeningly in his ears, and he started to remember the existence of his body and limbs again, which until this moment had faded into a staticky haze.
Loosening his death grip on Rider’s shirt, he slid his hand to Rider’s shoulder instead, which gave him a little more leverage to pull him closer. Rider was still sitting on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor and leaning sideways to reach Waver, and that felt altogether too far away. Isn’t he supposed to be keeping me warm?
Rider seemed to understand his complaint, and the bed creaked as he pulled away to reposition himself, looming over Waver for a moment before dropping to support himself on his forearm. Waver tugged him closer as soon as he was back within reach, only capable of distant embarrassment at his own enthusiasm as he crushed their lips together again.
He could feel Rider’s smile against his lips, and forcibly quelled his instinctive rush of indignation—don’t laugh at me—by doing his best to reciprocate whatever Rider had been doing before. He was a quick study, if nothing else, and Rider seemed content to let him explore for a few languid minutes, allowing him to taste his mouth and suck at his tongue, and even drawing a quick breath when Waver experimentally scraped at his lips with his teeth, which made Waver feel inordinately proud of himself.
Waver wanted to touch him, too. He wanted that stupid shirt gone, so he could trace the flex of his muscles, taste the warmth of his skin. And he wanted Rider’s hands on him, wanted to feel those calloused fingers against the sensitive skin of his ribs and his stomach and—
Capitalizing on Waver’s distraction, Rider took charge of their kiss again, kissing him deeply enough this time that Waver couldn’t help but moan into his mouth. This kiss was a conquest—with his defenses long since overcome, Waver succumbed to it willingly. There was little point in pretending he didn’t want to, not when every drag of Rider’s tongue was evidence enough that Rider wanted him, too—maybe not with the same fervent desperation buzzing in Waver’s veins, but enough that he met the needy arching of Waver’s body with a firm press of his hips, enough that every time they parted, it was only the space of a breath before Rider returned to catch the sighs dropping from Waver’s lips.
But then Rider drew back for a beat longer, and when Waver moved to follow him, he responded with only a soft kiss to Waver’s lower lip, one that was surprising enough in its gentleness that Waver finally cracked open his eyes to look at him.
He wasn’t sure what he had expected to see on Rider’s face, but the fond half-smile caught him off guard. He was suddenly too aware of the moistness on his lips and heat pooling between his legs, and he leaned up to pull Rider back into another kiss, eager to go back to being too occupied to think much about either of those things.
But Rider inched just out of reach, his smile widening when Waver grumbled a protest and fell back to the pillow. Stymied in one direction, Waver tugged at Rider’s shirt instead, but Rider only chuckled and remained disappointingly clothed.
“You were falling asleep just a little while ago,” Rider observed, as if that was supposed to be a satisfactory explanation. Waver blinked up at him.
“…so?” He was still a little dazed, and it seemed to take a special degree of focus just to form that one word, so it came out with a little less force than he had intended.
“Your rest is important for the both of us.” Rider exhaled slowly, then shifted onto his side next to Waver before pulling him against his chest. “You should sleep while you can.”
“But—”
Waver wasn’t falling asleep now—far from it. His body felt like a live wire, and he squirmed a little in Rider’s arms, desperate for friction, and heat, and those hands and lips in places they hadn’t yet touched.
But Rider was immovable. “Relax, boy,” he said, smoothing a hand soothingly down Waver’s back. “I have not yet had my fill of you, either.”
Was knowing that supposed to help? A fresh surge of arousal washed down the length of Waver’s body. “Then—”
“But you should sleep, nonetheless. Our war is far from over.”
It sounded like an excuse, didn’t it? A convenient escape from something he’d only done as a favor in the first place, maybe. And Waver might have thought so, if not for the distinct hardness he felt pressed against his thigh.
He thought about moving around a little more, since Rider’s self-restraint was minimal at the best of times, but to his surprise, Rider beat him to it, sliding a hand to his ass, then grinding against him in one slow motion that effectively zeroed out every thought in Waver’s head.
He could hardly bear to think that that had been enough to push him over the edge, but nonetheless it was a moment before he felt like he was settled in his body again.
“You’re greedier than you let on,” Rider said, and Waver could hear the smirk in his voice. “Will that content you for now?”
Waver scowled wordlessly at the logo stretched across Rider’s chest, not quite sure how to articulate his annoyance without thoroughly embarrassing himself, and Rider chuckled.
“Don’t get all cross with me,” he chided. “Perhaps you should learn to better time these fits of willfulness of yours. We had all evening, after all.”
Despite his intention to sulk, at that, Waver had to pull back to glare at him. “Huh?! It’s not like I planned this! You’re the one who misinterpreted me in the first place!”
Rider wasn’t quite smiling, but his eyes were bright in a way that made Waver want to punch him, as useless as that would be. “Hmm, did I? So this was an undesirable result, then?”
“That’s…nrgh.” He clamped his mouth shut again, feeling distinctly like anything he said would only dig him into a deeper hole. And he was tired now, even if he was far from satisfied.
“Haha. Rest, Waver. I will wake you later, if you should like to accompany me.”
“Yes. Do.” He didn’t really need to go along on a simple patrol, but he was feeling stubborn, and there were few other ways for him to assert his authority at the moment. “Don’t…go anywhere.”
He regretted it almost as soon as he said it, but when Rider chuckled and hugged him more tightly, he decided it was fine, maybe.
“Of course not, my Master,” he replied, and Waver pouted a little at the hint of irony in his voice, but it had long since become clear that he couldn’t truly expect Rider to consider himself Waver’s subordinate, no matter what his Command Spells could do. “The cold is our enemy now, is it not? I could hardly leave you alone at a time like this.”
“Shut up,” Waver wanted to tell him, but he wasn’t sure if the words ever left his mouth, because in the comfortable enclosure of Rider’s arms, he was safe from the winter chill, but sleep caught up to him easily.
~ ~ ~ ~
A week later, Waver crested the dark stairs to his bedroom alone.
That damn draft, he thought, rubbing his arms once he closed the door quietly behind him.
Right about now, Rider should have been materializing, his armor vanishing as he exchanged it for his t-shirt and dropped to the rug with enough force to shake the house, holding out an arm to pull Waver into his lap before Waver even had time to notice the chill…but of course that was something that Waver would never experience again.
His tears were spent, but his throat itched with the impulse to cry anyway. What was that about not leaving me alone, again?
He rubbed his eyes forcefully with the back of his sleeve. There were a few hours left until sunrise, when he would have to face the Mackenzies, but until then, there was no need for him to be anything but a lump under his blankets, so he loosened his tie and crawled into bed without even taking his sweater off.
If he closed his eyes and ducked his head under the covers, he could almost pretend. If he breathed in deeply enough, a hint of Rider’s scent lingered, but hugging his arms around himself was a poor substitute for Rider’s embrace.
When morning came, he would have to think about how to move forward, how to live up to the honor his king had bestowed upon him. But for now, Rider would have to forgive him for a few hours of pretending the world that he wanted to conquer didn’t exist. He curled in on himself as a few stray tears welled in his eyes, hoping dearly that if he managed to sleep, his dreams would offer a shadow of the warmth he could only find now in his memory.