
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/9424.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Final_Fantasy_XII
  Relationship:
      Vayne/Bergan
  Character:
      Bergan, Vayne_Carudas_Solidor
  Additional Tags:
      Pre-Canon, Topping_from_the_Bottom
  Stats:
      Published: 2009-11-14 Words: 2275
****** Ten Moves Ahead ******
by Laylah
Summary
     "The lessons I would most value now would not come from withered old
     men with their heads buried in dusty tomes." He takes Bergan's bishop
     with his knight, the pieces clicking lightly together.
Bergan is not the most accomplished chess player of Vayne's cortege -- Vayne is
only this winter man enough to no longer wear tights and short pants, and can
already sometimes defeat him, though he is twelve years Vayne's senior -- but
there is something instructive about the very shortcomings of his game. He
plays so aggressively it seems exuberant, the bold sallies of his rooks, the
slashing advances of his queen. He sacrifices his pawns easily, and neglects
the oblique possibilities of his knights. If Vayne can play subtly enough to
evade the full force of his onslaught, the victory can be wrested from him.
It's comforting, Vayne thinks, hesitating over the pieces. Archades, and doubly
so House Solidor, seethes with plots and counter-plots, driven by men -- like
his brothers -- who think ten moves ahead. They are none of them trustworthy.
But Bergan is not of that mold, for all that the Akademy must have tried to
make him so. He is fierce and direct, a sword, a mace to be wielded by the man
who can win his loyalty.
"It is not like you, to brood so long over your move," Bergan says.
Vayne smiles. "My apologies, he says. "I fear my mind is not wholly on the
game." He slides a pawn forward, a temptation: Bergan will likely take it,
though he risks losing a bishop in return.
"Your tutors would scold you," Bergan says. He reaches for his bishop, as Vayne
expected. "You should think always of the battle before you." He moves,
captures Vayne's pawn, plucks it from the board. His hands are broad, raw-
boned, his knuckles scarred from bare-handed brawling. Zecht says he was the
terror of their class.
"I grow too old for my tutors," Vayne says. That makes Bergan smile, but it
also makes something less genteel flare in his eyes before he can hide it
again. That quickly, the next ten moves unfold in Vayne's mind with perfect
clarity: trust and ferocity, loyalty and pleasure. "The lessons I would most
value now would not come from withered old men with their heads buried in dusty
tomes." He takes Bergan's bishop with his knight, the pieces clicking lightly
together.
Bergan reaches for a rook, but he is watching Vayne's face. "And what lessons
are those?"
"You know them, do you not?" Vayne asks. He reaches out, brushes his fingertips
over the back of Bergan's hand. "The men say, when they think me out of
earshot, that the Akademy makes one a man in several ways."
"And you would learn of that from me?" Bergan asks. He conceals his hunger
poorly.
Vayne watches him steadily, tracing meaningless patterns across the back of his
hand, following the large veins there. "I would ask this only of a man I can
trust," he says. "You have shown yourself to be that."
A more canny man would still hesitate, would still have questions. Would put
him off. Would not, most likely, accept the advances of the emperor's youngest
son at all.
Bergan turns his hand, catches Vayne by the wrist. His skin is warm, dry, rough
with calluses. Something near alarm -- and yet markedly not alarm -- jolts down
Vayne's spine, and Bergan pulls, sharply enough that Vayne starts out of his
chair, catching his weight on his free hand and knocking pieces from the board.
"You will find," Bergan purrs, "that this has little in common with tupping the
scullery maids."
Vayne can hear the challenge in it. "I am not afraid," he says -- and Bergan
leans forward to take his mouth.
If what he shared with his dancing-partner at the winter ball was a kiss, then
this is something else; if this is a kiss, then he has never been kissed
before. Bergan's mouth is hard, unyielding; stubble prickles against Vayne's
lips and his mouth is filled with the lewd press of Bergan's tongue. He was
right to ask this of Bergan, and he thinks that Bergan was right but also wrong
about how this compares: lifting the skirts of the serving girls the way his
brothers do is an exercise of power, and this -- when Bergan still holds his
wrist, and plunders his mouth, how could this be anything else?
"The flush looks fetching on your cheeks," Bergan says. "You should spend more
time in the training salles." His thumb brushes Vayne's lip. "Exerting
yourself." He lets go Vayne's wrist, and Vayne moves to rise, but Bergan stays
him. "Don't move," he says. "I would have you there."
Vayne's cheeks flush hotter, but he does not rise. The remains of their game
still litter the table, tiny carven soldiers with their positions all askew,
the orderly pattern of their war disrupted. A pawn rolls away as Bergan rises
from the table; Vayne hears it clatter to the floor and clutches at a rook that
threatens to follow suit.
Bergan's hands are confident on the fastenings of Vayne's clothes -- his over-
robe parted to spill over his sides, his tunic rucked up in a crush of silk
under his arms, his fine new trousers unlaced and pushed down past his knees.
The air of the salon is cool against his skin, and Bergan's hands are hot, hot
and rough. "Still not afraid?" Bergan says, and his sword-calluses catch and
drag against the tender skin of Vayne's inner thighs.
"I am not," Vayne says, though his voice shakes, and he grips his rook tightly.
"You will not be careless with me, if you value your position and your future."
Bergan laughs, and for just that one instant -- he does not play with an eye to
the next ten movies, but only the immediate -- Vayne is afraid. "It's not my
position I value so much as yours, at the moment," he says, his broad hands
spreading Vayne wide. "But if you want to be coddled, I can give you that."
Vayne looks back, glaring, ready to protest the slight in those words -- but he
meets Bergan's eyes then, as the man goes down on armored knee behind him, and
the feral hunger in that expression kills the words in his throat. Not for
anyone would Bergan concede even this much. It's an offer and a challenge and a
promise, all at once if he can make it so, in hot breath on skin no man has
touched before this.
There must be a name for what Bergan does then; it would be too grotesque to
call this also a kiss, when Bergan's tongue enters him. Vayne closes his eyes,
his breath hitching in silent gasps at the decadence of the caress. He's
hardening for this, desire inflamed even as his curiosity is sated, and the
gooseflesh that prickles over his skin has little to do with the winter air. He
thinks of Bergan taking him, filling him more deeply than tongue alone can
allow, and must bite his lip to stay silent: he will not moan for it before
their tryst is even consummated. He will make Bergan do more for him than this.
It isn't easy to hold to his resolve, and less so when the rasp of metal behind
him warns him that Bergan is unfastening his trousers. "You're ready to learn
this lesson, are you, Lord Vayne?" Bergan asks, steadying himself against
Vayne's hip as he rises. There's a growl in his voice that's almost aggression,
save that Vayne knows better: he's a mastiff, Bergan, powerful and fierce, and
devoted in no less measure.
Vayne looks back. "From you and no other," he says. He glances down, and feels
himself both thrilled and taken aback by Bergan's sheer size -- but he should
have expected that, when Bergan still towers over him in stature.
"Such a sweet tongue," Bergan says. "You'll be charming the Senate yourself
soon, won't you?" He spits in his hand, the sound raw and brutal, and Vayne
abruptly wants to see him without his armor, with all his raw spots and scars
and torn edges bare. He will ask, next time, when he has satisfied Bergan once
and is offering more --
And he takes a sharp breath when he feels Bergan press against him -- both of
them slicked with spit now, and yes, he is a mace, a bludgeon, thick and hard
and unyielding and -- Vayne cannot help the sound when he's taken thus, the
faint lost cry of a prey animal. He is no such, will not be, but the sensation
threatens to unmake him all the same: flesh drawn too taut, spread too far,
filled with the conqueror's heat.
Bergan's arm encircles his waist, pulls him back to impale him deeper, until he
knows not how he can bear so much. And yet -- "Would you stop me?" Bergan asks,
as he reaches down to take Vayne in hand. "Is it yet too much for you after
all?"
"I am no mere boy," Vayne retorts, and damn the tremor in his voice. "I will be
satisfied, before we finish here."
"Of course, my lord," Bergan says, and Vayne can hear the laughter in his voice
but not whether it is mocking or fond. "I would be failing in my duties were
you not." He strokes Vayne confidently, his own thrusts for the moment subdued,
and yet still this is nearly more than Vayne can stand.
The very coarseness of it, he thinks as Bergan's weight bears him down across
the marble of the gaming table, is where the luxury lies: House Solidor will
give him all the refinements he could desire, silk and fur and marble, but
nothing so crude as this -- the raw scent on the air, the harsh rasp of
Bergan's breath, even the discomfort itself seems an illicit indulgence. It
will temper him, Vayne thinks, and impart some of a soldier's mettle in limbs
he's nearly growing into.
Had he less pride he might be pleading, uncomfortable like this -- too full to
concentrate on his own climax, too aroused to think of Bergan's, and when he
considered this alone he doesn't think he ever expected it to be so frustrating
-- and eventually, pride or no, he finds curses rising to his lips; his left
hand is clenched so tight around the wayward rook that it aches, and now with
his right he scrabbles for purchase against the edge of the table -- if he can
get some leverage, can demand the tempo be his -- but Bergan is implacable,
merciless, until Vayne thinks that his is after all the lesson: to seize the
ragged threads of pleasure available to him here and wrest his satisfaction
from them, to demand that as his right -- to draw taut in Bergan's grip like a
winched crossbow and release, wracked with the savage thrill of triumph.
Bergan swears by gods Vayne does not know, grasps his hips and takes him
without reserve. The violence of it makes his prior restraint clear, and Vayne
feels sounds of protest torn from him now, by the barbarity of the act -- and
yet he cannot bring himself to protest. There is power even in this, in the
focus Bergan turns on him now, the need --
"Finish," Vayne demands, looking back to meet the bestial hunger in Bergan's
eyes. "I would have you give me that."
"You'd have me come in this tight little arse, my lord?" Bergan says, and
there's no respect at all in the address but -- but that's because he's traded
it for camaraderie, Vayne thinks, the weight of House Solidor something they
can both slip free of when they've turned its decorum on end like this.
"I would," Vayne says. He thinks he sounds as though he wants it. He tries to
make that more plain in his tone. "I want you to."
Bergan laughs harshly, with what breath he has left, and shifts in a tight,
steady rhythm that makes Vayne ache, too sensitive and too deeply filled -- but
the sound, oh, the low snarl that Bergan makes when he shudders still -- it's a
noise of surrender, of a dog mastered, and Vayne counts it instantly among the
most dear things he has been given.
"Release me," he says, when he is sure Bergan is through. Despite the winter
chill, his skin is damp beneath the ruin of his robes. He thinks, if he would
allow himself to, he might be trembling now.
"You have need of a potion?" Bergan asks, his hand across the small of Vayne's
back -- and Vayne would say no without a second thought, but then Bergan
withdraws and the pain spikes sharp, and his breath stutters.
But no -- he will not admit such weakness. "For all your reputation," Vayne
says, "you are not so savage as that." The pain is nothing he cannot bear.
It is the right answer; Bergan hums with pleasure, hands still stroking Vayne's
bared skin. "And you are less delicate than a boy prince is expected to be.
It'll serve you well."
Vayne draws himself upright, unfolds his hand from around the chess piece, and
winces at the indentation it's left in his skin. He sets it down in the center
of the board; it is the only piece standing. "As will all of Archadia, one
day," he says.
Bergan laughs. "I've no doubt of it," he says. He doesn't seem to want to let
go.
Let him not, then. "I need to bathe," Vayne says. He smiles; the way Bergan
watches him is more than worth the discomfort. "You may attend me, if you would
like."
A more canny man might hesitate, might think on the complications this could
cause. Bergan will not -- and he will be Vayne's entirely, before long.
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