Work Text:
Aloy wakes up well before dawn, furs tickling her spine and Kotallo’s breath puffing against her jaw. There’s a solid, soothing heat pressed against her side, and when she reaches out to touch it her fingertips meet familiar skin. She traces a nail across Kotallo’s naked collarbone.
Her knuckles brushes against metal, fingers twisting around it and following the links downward until she’s cradling a pair of metal tags that are marked in blue and yellow. Aloy can barely make out the colors in the low light, but the smoothed edges are cool against her skin, and she can’t resist running the pad of her thumb along one rounded corner.
Kotallo’s eyes meet hers in the dark, making her pause. “Sorry,” she breathes, as she lets the tags drop against his bare pectoral. “I don’t often get to see them up close like this.”
He lets out a thoughtful little hum, slowly easing his arm out from behind her head so that he can run his own fingers along the chain. He lifts it from around his neck.
“Would you like a closer look?” he murmurs. His voice is rough with lingering sleep, but his gaze is sharp and alert. Aloy holds it for a long moment before she takes the chain and tags from him. She cradles them reverently in her palms.
“This doesn’t seem like something you’d let just anyone do,” she can’t help but comment.
Kotallo shoots her a gentle smile. “Not anyone, no.” He relaxes beside her, letting her recline back against his arm once more. “But I trust you with even more precious things.”
The words linger in her mind like smoke as she studies the tags. The paint has faded a bit with age, but when she squints, she can make out layers upon layers of paint added overtop of one another on the metal. Years of touching up when the pigment loses its vibrancy.
“How often do you touch up the colors?” she asks.
Kotallo almost looks impressed. “Whenever necessary.” He curls his arm around her, nudging one tag over to reveal a second, older one clipped to the chain below it. “My Marshal’s tag is far newer than the one that was given to me as a boy.”
Aloy moves the metal adorned with blue and yellow aside to study the one beneath it. It shows its age, the paint chipped and the colors faded to an unsaturated gradient of magenta, cyan and snowy white. But the symbol imprinted into the metal is still as sharp as it would have been the day it was stamped – a proud, jagged mountain range that seems to stand stubbornly against a pastel blizzard.
“From the Sky Clan,” she muses.
He nods with a quiet hum. “High Marshal Javveh once said that a Marshal is lucky to serve long enough that the colors of their home clan fade completely.” He shoots her an almost playful look, his eyebrow arching. “Though compared to the Desert and Lowland clan’s colors, I suppose those of us hailing from the Sky Clan need less luck than anyone else.”
She looks down at the metal in her palm, letting the more vibrant blue and yellow tag fall into place in front of its companion. She traces her finger along the symbol there, turning it and squinting until she can make it out more clearly.
“This is a fighter jet,” Aloy finally says with a smile. There it is, standing out more as her eyes adjust – an Old World flying machine with its nose pointed upward at the clip that fastens the tag to its chain.
“Like the one you nearly dropped on the Chief,” he quips.
Aloy resists the urge to grab a pillow and whack him with it, instead reaching up to smooth Kotallo’s hair back and drape the chain around his neck again. She leans in to press a kiss to the tags as they rest against his sternum, and when she meets his eye again—
Fire and spit, his eyes are blazing.
Before she knows it, his lips press hard against hers, his fingers curling over her ribs. He kisses along her jaw, her throat, her jugular, and holds her close as he buries his face in the crook of her neck. “I’d let you hold my very heart in your hands if I could, Aloy,” he breathes. His pulse is steady and soothing under her cheek.
She closes her eyes and savors the sound of his breath evening out beside her, the his metal tags cool against her skin where they rest gently clasped in her fingers.