Work Text:
There came a time every few seasons where not everything was on schedule and everything felt like it was going to tumble into chaos the way it did when Tinker Bell had first arrived. Paperwork was often endless, and there wasn’t time to sleep. Not with panicking seasonal ministers and fairies needing her at all times, as though their talent leads and colleagues didn’t exist.
This was one of those times.
Clarion had been up for twenty hours for the second time that week. During those twenty hours, she had overseen preparations for Summer with a very panicked Sunflower; debriefed a frazzled Snowflake after her return from the Mainland; and welcomed twelve new arrivals. All of that had been in addition to her usual duties as Queen. By the end of the day, those twenty hours awake with little time to rest were, regrettably, beginning to show. She needed—and was provided with—an escape.
In the quiet of Lord Milori’s study, within his apartment in the Winter Palace, Clarion had read the same sentence six times before making proper sense of it. On her way to his study, she had had several near misses with what little furniture she had encountered in the hallways. Thankfully, Milori had been too preoccupied with the arrival of evening reports from across the Woods after dinner to gently scold her for putting her health second to her work.
Currently, it was too early to retire for bed, but not late enough to put her quill down and decide that the draft of her summer speech was tomorrow’s problem. She had thought that completing her work in Milori’s study would help her remain alert, but the hot bath that she had had—at Milori’s insistence—before she had settled down to work had only made her drowsier. His apartment in the Winter Palace had always mirrored the cooler end of autumn’s climate more than winter’s so there was no danger of broken wings for anyone. But that, combined with her recent bath, resulted in her plan not working out as well as she had hoped it would. She was awake and alert one moment, then barely comprehending the words on the page before her and struggling to maintain her posture the next.
“Come to bed, Ree,” Milori called gently from the doorway.
He was meddling, she realised, lifting the back of her hand to quickly rub the gritty feeling in her eyes away.
She just had one paragraph to rewrite, and now he was here to meddle some more. Half of her was inclined to allow him to meddle; inclined to allow him to drag her to bed and to sleep. The other half—the half that always told her that leaving things for tomorrow would only worsen her workload—was inclined to tell him to leave immediately.
“I’m not tired.” a lie. “I’ll be fine.” her nose was cold, her hands were cold, and she felt as though one long blink would send her straight to sleep.
She crossed out a sentence she didn’t like, vaguely aware of Milori having shifted to stand in front of the desk. She did not look up.
“Ree,” Milori said, a hint of impatience to his tone. “It will be there tomorrow.”
It would be there tomorrow. It, and everything else that she still had to do.
“You’ve finished everything else,” he said. “You can leave this.”
“No, I haven’t finished everything else. There’s still-”
“Clarion,” he cut in firmly. “Viola sent me your schedule. This is the last thing on it. Tomorrow morning is free.”
She looked up at him, a brow raised skeptically. The last time she had checked her to do list, it was barely half finished.
Milori raised his brows in return, somewhat unimpressed.
“Last sentence,” she promised shortly, already beginning the rewrite.
When she finished, she flipped the page to the beginning and read her speech from the start once more, only partly aware that Milori had rounded the desk to stand behind her. Knowing what he was about to do, Clarion folded her wings against her back to let him hug her from behind, and was surprised when he did not do that. Instead, he extinguished the faelights, then reached down and plucked her quill and draft from her grasp. A series of kisses pressed insistently from her cheekbone to the corner of her jaw took most of the bite out of her reaction. He had reduced whatever she had planned to say to a strangled sound in the back of her throat and a shallow gasp. Her mind wiped itself blank with each new kiss; gooseflesh rising along her skin.
Lips near her ear, voice pleasantly low, Milori said: “Darling, I’m so lonely in our bed. Won’t you come lay in my arms?”
he rested his forehead to her temple, eyelashes tickling her skin as his eyes fluttered closed with a gentle sigh.
She closed her eyes, briefly, and that was enough. Anything she’d been about to say in favour of working longer melted away like ice in hot water. She just wanted to lay down somewhere warm and rest for a moment.
“Are you trying to seduce me into coming to bed early?” she asked faintly—uselessly, because that had been his angle from the start—lifting a hand to trail the tip of her index finger along the side of his face.
Sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw rose and fell beneath her fingertip. She had mapped that path one thousand times already, and she would do it thousands more. It was an easy, mindless thing to do.
Milori took that same hand and kissed the pulse point at her wrist just beneath the sleeve of her robe, lips warm against her cold skin.
“Is it working?” he asked as Clarion gave an unsure hum, then turned her head to look at him. He drew her into a kiss that made up her mind. “Come on, Ree,” Milori whispered, helping her to her feet.
“Very well.” she leaned into his warmth, not bothering to hide the yawn that was big enough to make her jaw crack.
“Ah yes, you’re wide awake and definitely not on the precipice of sleep, my love,” Milori teased, setting her quill and speech down on the desk before guiding her out of the study and into the hallway.
“I could have gone for twenty minutes longer if you hadn’t interrupted.” she clenched her jaw against the chill in the air and pressed herself to his side as much as she was practically able to.
“No,” he disagreed lightly, letting go of her hand and drawing her closer with an arm over her quivering shoulders. “You looked ready to fall asleep at my desk.”
She hummed—no specific tone to it, just to acknowledge he’d spoken—and allowed him to steer her toward his room through the cold stone halls within the mountain.
“That is a fair assumption,” she said, moments later than she had intended.
What a delayed response, she thought.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to get rid of the gritty feeling that hadn’t left. She walked beside him on autopilot, barely stopping when he did, barely registering that a door had shut behind them or that there were gentle fingers in her hair.
When she opened her eyes again, she was in the dark of Milori’s room and her hair had been carefully let down from its bun. The pins holding it in place had been put with her crown, which she had left on the bedside table earlier. Milori pulled the bedclothes back down, then undid the seal at the back of her robe that would allow her to take it off without forcing her wings into a crumpled fold. He was first beneath the covers while she darted—stumbled, was more accurate—over to the rail that his cape was hung over, and added her robe to the pile.
“Get in,” Milori ushered, chuckling at the hiss she let out when the chill fully hit her bare arms. “Why don’t you wear something with longer sleeves?”
She slid into bed as quickly as she could, slightly more alert than she had been before. She flattened her wings against her back again as she shimmied closer to him with gritted teeth.
“Sleeping with you is enough,” she answered, sticking her cold nose into the crook of his neck and sighing as he tucked them both in tightly. “You’re the heat pack in this relationship.”
He hummed and wrapped his arms around her. The warmth that came from that action alone was enough to banish her shivering. Slowly, she relaxed enough to unclench her teeth.
“As well as the mattress, I suppose,” he whispered, dropping a kiss to her hair.
“You’re the one pulling me over the top of you in the middle of the night when your arms go numb.” Clarion laughed quietly, moving to place her hands and feet somewhere warmer.
“Yes, well-” he yelped as her hands slid up his nightshirt and the tops of her feet settled against his shins. “Ree!” he scolded, arching his stomach away from her hands with a strangled noise.
“Heat pack,” she reminded him, laughing.
“Oh, no, no. You’re supposed to be the warm fairy,” he groaned, relaxing again as Clarion’s hands warmed.
Clarion kissed the underside of his jaw, a smile on her lips as sleep tugged harder and more insistently at her mind. She counted seven of Milori’s breath cycles, her eyes drifting half shut before he spoke again.
“Love you,” he whispered, chin settling atop her head.
She couldn’t manage more than a half-asleep, “You too.”
But she felt his arms tighten around her, and she felt the contented sigh that left him as he slipped into sleep with her.