Welcome to Gaia! ::

Detraeus grimaced.

His shoulders hurt. His wings hurt. His back hurt. He pulled the already partly bloodied-through strap of gauze at his bicep around for another wind about his upper arm before fastening it off. Ara would want words with him when she returned almost surely. Sighing, he rolled his shoulders before reaching down to the bowl at his feet and whetted rag therein. After lifting and wringing it, he began dabbing at the larger gouge across his chest. Neither were particularly gruesome in the grand scheme of things. Inconveniences, really, but they’d been the result of his sloppiness, and that bothered him more.

He sat shirtless on the edge of the couch in their living room, cleaning the various scrapes adorning his body. Araceli was out for the moment, most likely on a last-minute night run to fetch something before it got fully dark, but — given the hour — Detraeus expected her home any minute. His present goal was to look as uninjured as possible by that time.

Detraeus glanced up when Ara entered, and grunted at her question, flushing slightly. “Teeth.” Setting aside the rag he’d been using to clean his chest, he reached back for what remained of the clean roll of bandage wrap at his side and moved to bind the wound. Though it wasn’t strictly in need of it, it would help keep it closed and clean. “Some double-dragon mixblood…aiskala-gaili…moved like a snake and covered in so many scales it took arrows like a rock.”

His tail, already having curled around her instinctively when she sat down, settled at her waist as he glanced to her. After letting his attention drift down her, taking her in, he leaned over, catching her lips in a chaste but lingering kiss.

“Shallow,” he said when he let the kiss break. “Like scratches. Nothing critical.” His lashes lowered for a moment, attention on her mouth again, but he sat back up instead of pursuing anything. “You spoke with Lithian.”

Detraeus grunted, faintly stiff at first but quick to relax into letting Ara take over. He listened passively until the last comment, at which point he glanced her way, eyebrows arching. “Has he,” he said, genuinely surprised.

Casseth hadn’t spoken to him about quitting, or having intentions to. Not that he considered it his business, precisely, it just seemed fairly sudden, particularly given his apparent drive, earlier, to seek revenge. In the present moment, though, her tone, in particular, kept his attention, and he tilted his head.

“He’ll bring less bruises home. I am sure…Lithian will be pleased. And it will fall on me to break the bird that poisoned him.”

Detraeus eyed her, curbing the urge to shiver at the ripple of sensation that went through him at the touch to his tail. It, in response, rose of its own accord, pressing up like the arched back of an eager cat into her hand.

“One day,” he said. “Yes. When I grow too slow, or am wounded gravely. It brings good coin. Better than the jobs I do that force me to travel…” His gaze flicked down over her again, contemplative. “And I do not have to leave you. Why?” he asked, suspecting he knew the answer already. “You wish for me to quit also?”

“Ara…” Detraeus hesitated, caught off guard by the strength of her reaction.

He had known, of course, that his engagement in the pit concerned her, but the topic had never come up with this degree of gravity before. It had always been passive worry. At the very first, she had even seemed enthusiastic in away, at least enough so to start coming to watch his matches.

Things had changed, he realized.

He was no longer a curiosity to her, she no longer a passing interest. He was not the boy she had stolen kisses from after a card game or in the desert, and she was no longer as terrifying as she was fascinating. He felt comfortable in her presence, but it was more than that, too. The more they became invested in each other, the more his business became her concern, and her happiness his priority.

This in mind, he hummed, reached out and coiled his tail around her waist to help him lift and deposit her in his lap. With her there, he lifted a hand, catching her cheek in his palm, thumbing over it, and guiding her into another, fuller kiss. He lingered, savoring the taste of her before breaking it.

“I wish to bring the thing that poisoned Casseth to justice,” he said. “After I do, I will quit. You have my word.”

Detraeus blinked, startled not so much by the change in direction of the topic — that, he had grown accustomed to — but the suggestion of something ‘different,’ which naturally piqued his curiosity. He followed after her, though, keeping close pace behind her, the sting of his bruises forgotten as he stepped into the bedroom, and he placed a hand at her waist, stilling her as he stepped up behind her and holding her back gently to him.

“Different…?” he asked, and touched his lips to her shoulder, thumbing over the swell of her hips. “How so…”