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He arrives at the edge of your realm unannounced, appearing in the field of your omniscience so suddenly that your intrigue is instantaneous.
Few dare journey up your mountain in search of you for the path is long and perilous, and those that survive the summit are guaranteed no audience with you for their efforts. You’re known in the village nestled in the foothills of your mountain as a capricious god and that reputation is not undeserved. Your moods change with the seasons, with the weather, and though you never set out to harm those in the village below, you don’t bother yourself unduly with helping them either.
The voyage from the village to your realm takes the few who make it weeks which allows you to sense them coming from far off. The trail is narrow and steep, challenging, by your design. It allows you to avoid surprise. To have a thorough sense of them before they reach the perimeter of your world. To decide, long before they approach your home, whether you’ll draw back the veil and reveal the entrance to your realm to them, or whether you keep hidden and let the end of the trail appear to end abruptly at a steep, granite cliff.
This one, though. You’d blinked and he’d been there, standing before the end of the path with his hands propped up on his hips, breathing heavy, like he’d traveled at a great speed to get there. And he must have, to have slipped past your attention.
It has you striding forward at once, waving your hand past your chest to dissolve the veil, and then you’re standing before him. Just like that. Only feet away, unable to stop the soft cock of your head and the intrigue that must be painted plainly on your face.
You can count the number of humans who have made it this far in the last 50 years on one hand. This one is different, still, from the rest.
If he’s surprised to see the veneer of granite, the solid, sky-high side of the mountain dissolve into nothingness, the wide, open, wild spaces of your realm appearing in a heavenly sprawl behind you, he doesn’t show it. His expression remains as it was when you first sensed him - a certain stubbornness in the set of his jaw, and it has your brows lifting on your face as you step out before him. Revealing yourself to the first mortal in a decade, letting yourself look him up and down. Appraisingly.
He looks of age, though he is not a particularly large man. He stands barely taller than you when his eyes meet yours, brown and catching the light. There is a youth to his face, a roundess to his cheeks that comes to the sharp point of his chin, that is a strange companion to his frame, where you see well-muscled shoulders beneath his linen tunic and thick thighs beneath his hips. His skin glistens with sweat from the journey.
It occurs to you faintly, like a distant glimmer in your blood, that you find him attractive. Appealing to your eye. A sensation you’d nearly forgotten in the lonely expanse of your realm.
His hair is the color of a fox pelt in early spring, silken and bright, and the edge in the expression on his face softens finally, as he gets a good look at you. Surprise then, maybe, touches around his eyes, and you wonder what form he expected you to take. What stories are passed around fires in the village, for him to be blinking softly at the sight of you in a mostly human, distinctly female form.
You stand there, your weight tilted on your hip and wait for him to speak.
The expression on his face goes a little slack and you cannot suppress a flicker of mirth as you realize you are seeing his thoughts trip through his mind, passing plainly over his face as he clearly struggles with what to do next.
He dips down, beginning what looks to be a bow before aborting it and jerking back to full height. His mouth opens but no sound comes, his mind clearly whirling, sticking, and you don’t bother to hide the crook of your mouth as he stares at you stupidly. Like he made the arduous journey up the side of a treacherous mountain to the edge of your realm but never stopped to consider what he would do once he arrived.
He finally manages to speak, and his voice is deeper than you expected. “It’s - an honor - ”
You wave your hand in front of your face at one. Dismissive. Growing instantaneously bored when you see he’s about to launch into some deferential appeasement to your divinity.
“Enough,” you say, when he looks poised to continue through your dissuasion, and that makes his mouth shut with a quiet click of his teeth.
Something lights in his eyes, a glimmer of fire, and there, that’s more interesting, you think.
“What brings you here?” you ask. Speaking with deliberation, more to steady your shifting mood than anything else. To keep impatience, grating and rough, from rising in you.
He watches you for a moment, clearly weighing his words, and you let out a sigh, shifting your weight as if to leave, when he speaks again. His voice coming out in a rush, like he means to keep you there.
“The drought,” he says, and you sigh again. Barely stopping your eyes from rolling back into your head.
Boring.
The village he came from has struggled in recent years. This you do know. Rain has been scarce and crop yields have suffered. Not terribly so, not enough for anyone to starve, but surely enough to limit any ability to trade. To do more than survive on dusty portions of grain ground and baked into dry, flavorless breads. The village has remained stagnant, maintaining but not growing. Scrounging together what it can and protecting its own, waiting, desperately, for the drought to break. For rain to come and bless the land.
You wave your hand again, because it’s not your concern. “I don’t control the weather,” you tell him, and it’s a half truth. You can, but you don’t. It’s not your role.
Something sparks in his eyes again, something you feel beneath your skin, that you recognize as spirit. The weak attempt at deference and fealty dropped at the clear tone of your dismissal, and you realize, looking at him, that he doesn’t believe you.
“You can,” he insists, his brows drawing, and it has your brows inching up your face. A little surprised, perhaps a touch delighted, at this turn. At a mortal, small and delicate and utterly without hope of success, facing off against a deity.
You assume he’s bluffing, for there’s no reason for him to know that he’s right. Control of the weather, of the seasons as they shift across the human realm, belongs to a whole host of other gods. Decisions and actions set into motion far from your realm. Beyond your control or interest.
You can affect it. The weather. Can bring rain or storm or wind, but you’d stumbled upon that facet of your power unintentionally and long ago and never sought to develop it past the faint trickle of it in the grand scheme of your whole abilities. You could likely bring rain to the village a handful of times before you’d be spent. Exhausted from drawing at such a flimsy tenant of your power with such force, and any benefit it would yield to the village below your mountain would pale in comparison to the hellfire that would rain upon you and your realm for meddling in the sky god’s affairs.
It’s a non-starter. There’s very little that would make that inevitable backlash worth the effort it would take to bring rain to help villagers who aren’t even dying yet from the lack of rain. Certainly nothing he can offer you would do it.
You let out a sigh and examine the nails at the ends of your fingers. A little disappointed, maybe, that he had not come to you with a more interesting request.
“Your people survive,” you say, flicking your eyes to him. “Do they not?”
His jaw sets. “They survive but they do not thrive.”
Your mouth curves up in a grin. Sharp. To survive is more than most humans receive in this life. The audacity to demand to thrive above that is…
“Greedy,” you purr, unable to help yourself. Approaching him then. Gliding over the rocky path until you’re stood before him and feel a faint tremor at the realization that the form you took stands just below his. That you have to look up slightly to meet his eye.
You reach for him and he holds steady. With some effort it seems, his eyes hard with his resolve as your hand brushes at the line of his jaw. It is smooth beneath your fingertips and your tongue touches your lips. “What would you offer me?” you ask, voice going faint with a touch of sincere interest. “To ask such a thing, what would you barter?”
His gaze stays steady on yours and when his mouth remains a firm, tilted frown, you know that he’s brought nothing with him. That he has no pouch of coin or offering of gems or other fineries to beg your indulgence.
It pleases you, makes something warm trickle down your spine, as you realize that he knew. Knew that there was nothing he could offer you that you could not conjure yourself. No limit to your power of creation except for the one thing you cannot summon.
Human life.
Your palm curls around his cheek as your head tilts softly. Voice going quiet between you as you feel a quiet shiver quake through him, almost imperceptible, when you ask, “Would you offer me yourself?” Your thumb touches at the bow of his lips, pink and warm and human beneath your touch.
He breathes out through his nose and you feel it on your face, from the little space between you, and you know his answer before he speaks from the look in his eyes. Resolute. Sure.
“Yes,” he says, and then your mouth is curving up again into something wicked.
You hold him there for a moment. Sense the beating of his heart in his chest, strong and fast, and then your shoulder lifts in a delicate shrug. “Hmm,” you say.
Then you turn and walk away from him. Back towards the shimmering veil of your realm, the boundary where it meets the human world, and you hear him suck in a tight breath behind you.
“Will you do it?” he asks, voice thick with bewilderment and maybe something else, and you can’t help the look you toss over your shoulder to him. Pausing, just at the threshold of the veil.
“That depends,” you say, voice gone smooth like glass. Pleased, greatly, by this turn of events.
He looks upon you like prey upon a predator. Blinking and frozen in place. “On what?” he asks.
Your mouth curves up once more and your teeth gleam before you turn and take a step through the veil and into your realm, but not before words fall from your lips and hang in the air between you like the crackling static of a storm cloud.
“On what you’re worth.”
The veil between the human realm and yours is a thin, shimmering thing. It swallows you when you pass through it, fits itself around you like a silken curtain as you step through, and into a space that you shift with a soft motion of your palm and wrist until your bedchamber at the center of your temple materializes between your feet. Marble walls manifest, the great expanse of your bed, covered in furs and pools of soft fabric, appearing before you as you turn back to face where you came from. To face the veil, to watch one of your most cherished traditions - watching a human slowly, painfully gather the courage to step through the plane between dimensions. They find it terrifying, stepping into that unknown. You’ve seen them take hours to come through it.
You barely make the turn around, pivoting slowly on the ball of your foot, relishing in the promise of a sporting scene, and very nearly yelp when he’s there. Striding through the veil without pause, so quickly that he nearly slams into you. Determined not to lose you into the swirling mist of your god world, after you’d made some half-formed lack of assurance that you might be inclined to help him.
He makes a startled sound, at your closeness or the fact that he stepped from the side of a mountain and suddenly, mystically, into your dark, flickering candlelight of your bedchamber, you’re not sure, but his hands come out to steady you before he can seem to think better of it. His palms are dry and strong on your arms, keeping you from tipping back and off balance, and you simply allow it, because in that moment, a decision is rendered in your mind. One that is sure and syrupy dark, as you look up into the openness of his face. The sharp light in his eyes, the pink pout of his parted lips.
It takes him a moment to realize what he’s done and his hands drop from your shoulders after a lingering moment. Quickly, like you’d burned him, though you’d summoned no heat to your form. His hands leave prints of dust from his journey in near-perfect palm prints on each of your arms, chalky and light against your skin, and you watch his eyes track yours as you look them over.
He opens his mouth to speak, so before he can ruin the strange hold of fascination he has over you, you summon a large, wooden basin of water. So suddenly that it splashes over the rim and onto the stone floor, wetting his feet and the worn sandals strapped there.
“Wash,” you tell him, holding out your palm and letting a cloth materialize there. Showing off a little, because his eyes widen a little in a gratifying way when you do.
He looks to you, then to the cloth in your outstretched hand. Then back to you. Something shifts in his expression, visible in the little lines between his eyes as his mouth sets, and it has you grinning again.
“Will you help me?” he asks, seeming to sense the situation has begun to slip from him, which of course it long has. Trying to keep you on track of your non-promise, but he caves after just a moment and takes the cloth from your hand. Bending down to dunk it into the water before standing upright and beginning to scrub it down his arms.
You watch him, pleased, as the cloth comes away from the width of his forearms dark with filth.
“Hinata Shoyo,” you say, because you can, and because it makes the hairs on his arms stand on end. Glittering nearly gold in the faint light of your bedchamber. “Have you ever made a deal with a god?”
The wary look he gives you tells you what you already know. That he has not, but that he knows. He understands what you’re about to say next.
“The gods are not moved to heavenly action on the words of lowly men. If you’ve come to appeal to my mercy, you’ve made an arduous journey for no purpose. If you’ve come to bargain, perhaps we can reach an accord.”
He pauses for a moment, both his arms scrubbed clean, frozen in time and looking to you clearly for guidance until you give his waist a significant look, and he takes one obvious, slow moment to think, before his fingers curl around the hem of his tunic and he pulls it over his head.
“Perhaps,” he echoes your word back to you, and you shrug. Grinning at him as the candle light glows golden on the skin of his cheeks.
“Perhaps,” you agree.
The skin revealed as the dusty tunic whispers to the floor is a creamy pale. Lighter by shades than the skin on his arms, evidence of his life spent in the fields, and it makes your tongue wet your lips.
“What have you to give me?” you ask, blinking slowly at him. Letting your eyes trail up and down his form in the light of the burning candles as you begin to circle him. “What can you offer, to save your village?”
His eyes track you as you move around him. Standing motionless, his fingers twitching against his thighs. Nerves, perhaps, or something deeper. More primal. “I said I would give myself to you,” he says. “You have me.”
Your expression tilts a little, the corner of your mouth lifting. “You value yourself so highly? That the offering of your simple flesh would be worth the efforts of a god?”
You hear him breathe through his nose. Stilted, a little shaky, even as he holds his ground. He thinks, loudly, for a moment, weighing his words, before he speaks again. “If my offering was not of sufficient interest, you would not have let me into your realm. You must have some use for a human.”
You pause before him, head cocked lightly. He’s bluffing again, you think. Acting at confidence he does not actually possess, but a small part admires it all the same as your eyes drift slowly over the curve of his throat. Over the pulse you see beating there, thumping beneath the skin.
“What can you offer me, Hinata Shoyo?” you ask again, shifting your weight onto your hip. The blood in your veins beginning to heat at the game of this. The toying tease of it all, as you drag him, unassuming and unaware, to your inevitable conclusion.
He watches you. Clearly attempting to sort you out and struggling. Feeling himself snared in some invisible trap and unsure of how to free himself.
“I’m...fast. I can jump - ”
But you shake your head and his voice trails.
“That’s of no use to me,” you tell him, though not unkindly. You decide to take pity on him then, wading in the uncertainty you see in his eyes and stepping until your chest nearly brushes his. “You were right. I do have use for a human.”
He very visibly stills himself to keep from lurching back when your hand lifts to touch your palm to his cheek. He’s more uncertain now, than before. His skin warmer to the touch than when you’d touched it outside your realm not a few minutes before, his lips parting as the pad of your thumb strokes at the shell of his ear. His hot breath falling in quiet little puffs against the thin skin of your inner wrist.
You can hear the beat of his heart, this close. Can feel it against where you’re pressed lightly to the skin of his chest, hammering just beneath the surface, and it has your head cocking lightly as you look up at him. The edge of your fingernail curves around the back of his ear, follows the curve of it, and he shivers nakedly in your grasp.
“Tell me, Hinata Shoyo. Are you afraid?” Your voice comes out a husk. It makes his eyes drop to your mouth, then back up.
He swallows and you watch the bob of his throat. Masculine and thick, like the rest of him. You allow yourself a slow, indulgent breath as he finds his words.
“No,” he says, at last, and though you can feel the faint tremor through his body as he stands before you, you know he speaks truth.
You move slowly. Lifting onto the tips of your toes until your chest bumps gently to his. Your hand slides over his ear, up and farther back, until your fingers slip into the gentle curl of his hair, and he lets out a soft, stuttery sigh that you catch with your mouth as you lift your chin and press your lips to his.
He ceases to breathe. Body going rigid beneath yours, and you allow yourself a moment to draw back, to catalogue the flare of something in his eyes, confusion but something else, something more visceral, and then your hand is gripping at his hair and tugging him down to you once more.
His entire body lurches softly when your other hand comes up to hold the other side of his face. Framing it between your palms as your lips caress his, finding them warm and full and stunned into stillness beneath yours. Your tongue flickers at the seam of his, a teasing little flick, and he shivers again, his hands coming up at your sides like he means to hold your hips before he thinks better of it and they drop back down to his sides.
When you draw back, your head has started to go a little molten. Syrupy warm as something sinful begins to pool behind your navel. A promise of something you haven’t had opportunity to indulge in in a century.
In the soft candlelight of your bedchamber, his cheeks are flushed between your hands. His mouth dropped open softly, his lips shiny and drawing your eye, to where you can’t resist tipping back up on your toes and taking his lower lip between your teeth. Pinching lightly, feeling the supple plush of it against your tongue and feeling it in your bones when it makes him groan softly against you.
“Hinata,” you murmur, drawing back once more. Staying close, your palm petting soothingly at his cheek.
His eyes have fallen shut as he breathes shakily, like he’s only just now begun to understand. He makes no move to answer you, body trembling.
You try again, your voice tilting gently as you take pity on him. “Hinata,” you say. Touching your thumb to his lower lip, then pressing it there. Moving it against his teeth until his mouth drops open and you slip your thumb inside to press against the velvet heat of his tongue. “Have you ever kissed a woman?” you ask.
His eyelashes flutter but his eyes remain closed. He moves to speak which only closes his mouth around your thumb, where you stroke the pad gently against his tongue. He nods, after a moment. His cheeks are flushed like he’s had too much wine.
You hmm to yourself quietly, slowly drawing your thumb from his mouth. Having to drag it past his teeth, feeling something in you glisten at the wet sound it makes when you pull it free.
“Do you like to kiss?” you ask, and after a hazy moment, his eyes flutter open. Like the question was enough to pull him from the cloud he’d fallen under, though the amber of his eyes glows dark still in the candlelight.
It takes him a moment and you feel him sway a touch against you. Like he’s grown tenderly unsteady on his feet just from this, his eyes blinking heavy and slow as he looks down upon you. He nods again, a shy admission, and you sigh. Pleased, as your fingers curl around his ears and you draw him down again.
He shudders when your mouths meet and you feel his lashes against your cheek as his eyes fall shut again. This time when you taste at him, he opens to you. Breathing out a shaky breath and parting his lips beneath yours. Touching his tongue against yours in a shy little brush that has him groaning softly again, his hands finding your hips suddenly and gripping on.
“Good,” you murmur, and that draws a moan from him. Soft and broken sounding, his big hands curling around the soft edges of your hips and tugging you against him as your teeth nip at his lips and you suck gently on his tongue.
You allow yourself to sink into the feeling of it. Breathing in deeply, settling into the rhythm of you trading kisses back and forth. Warm and wet, in no hurry as you taste him. Reveling in the feeling of him beginning to slip to it too. His breathing going steadier as it puffs through his nose, his fingers thick and strong over the dress draped over your hips. Leaning into you, then. Seeking you more, moving his mouth against yours in a wet slide that has your core gripping down.
You find yourself drawing back between kisses. Wanting to see, already growing headily attuned to openness of his expression, his inability to hide his thoughts. His emotions, as his teeth click softly against yours and you grip at his hair, pulling him away. Holding him there steady as he breathes heavy, lips swollen and shining and calling to you like a siren. He leans into your hold, though it’s slight, like he doesn’t know he’s doing it. Like his mind doesn’t yet know what his body knows as he silently seeks the press of your mouth to his.
There’s fear there, surely, in his eyes, woven in with the weight of arousal, as he blinks down at you. His palms broadening around your hips, as if to ground himself from the sway of this. He knows not yet what you seek, and his mind is surely running wild with vivid imagination of the worst.
You’d heard rumbles of the stories they tell, down in the village. Of human sacrifices, split open, down the middle, draped lifelessly over a towering stone, and though those stories have no merit, you’d never cared to correct them. Relishing a little in the healthy amount of respect such tales gave your name, whispered on their lips like a sacrament.
In spite of that edge in his eyes, that lingering tendril of fear that has his shoulders rigid, all it takes is a softening of your hold on him before he returns to you like he’s drawn by gravity. Nudging his nose to yours as your mouths meet once more. Slick, deep. Breathing together and taking, reaching, into the other.
A cool breeze drifts through your bedchamber, an unconscious conjuring, you think, in response to the sweat that’s begun to bead at your temple, darkening the hair there. It makes goosebumps prickle down your arms and has you drawing back once more, your fingers carding through the sweat-damp hair at the nape of his neck.
“Do you know what I want from you, Hinata Shoyo?” you ask, voice gone a deep, rumbling purr. You’re starting to lose control, starting to slip over to the pull of your want, of your desire, but this dance is too delicious for you to give it up.
His hands flex again where they’re gripping at your hips, an unconscious thing at the sound of your voice, and he looks drunk when he draws back to look down at you. He blinks as he hears your question, his mind turning like molasses as clear to you as anything, and you allow yourself to take it in. The sight of him like this, swimming in the depths of something so strange to him, so unknown.
His tongue wets his lips before he speaks, and his voice comes out a rasp. “Will you eat me?”
Your teeth bare in a slow grin that you force back down when you feel the beat of his heart seize at the sight of it. “In a way,” you tell him, your thumb tracing over the heated skin of his cheek. Doing nothing to assuage the fear that’s tangled up tight with desire in his face. “You gave yourself to me, did you not?”
He chokes softly and nods, his chin nudging against your palm. His eyes drop closed at the admission, in a quiet sort of acceptance. As if he feels you have finally sprung the trap you laid. Lured him here, then seduced him. So he would be a willing, pliant offering to your ravenous tastes.
He misunderstands your appetites, thinks he is not long for his mortal realm, and you finally take pity on him.
“I want your mouth, Hinata,” you say. Touching your fingertips to the heated, wet plush of his lips. His eyes open, brows drawing delicately. Your other hand drifts lower. Finds where he’s gone hard and cups him surely. “I want your cock.”
A sound rips from him. Wounded, aching and raw, as his entire body shudders. His eyes squeeze shut, tight, and his breath quickens into a hot, puffing gasp.
“Will you give me those, Hinata?” you ask. Pressed up tight against him, feeling the proof of your desire slick at your core. Wanting wanting wanting. Knowing his answer from the way his cock lurches in your palm, but wanting to hear it all the same. “Will you give me what I want? What I am owed?”
“Yes,” he breathes, his lips catching wetly on the skin of your palm, and you allow yourself a smile, then.
Now, finally. Now you can begin.
You end up pressed against the wall of your bedchamber, the dark slab of marble cool between your shoulder blades as he grips at your body like a starved man that’s just been released to a feast. Desperate and overwhelmed, unsure of where to begin as his face presses between your breasts, his hands roaming low and curling around the curve of your rear. Groaning softly when he allows himself to grip you there, to feel the weight of you moving for him.
His head turns to the side, his nose gliding over the silk of your shift, and you don’t bother to suppress a shiver when his hot breath makes your nipple pebble up beneath the fabric. Pulling tight and rippled as he make a soft sound with his mouth, his brows drawing down with what looks to be a tight grip of desire, before your hand finds the back of his head and guides him there.
His mouth nudges over the ridge of it, a hot exhale puffing from him, and then he closes down. Taking your nipple between his lips, between his teeth, his heart hammering against your chest as he tilts his head and begins to suckle. Wetting the silk, making your back arch gently against him as you breathe out long and low. Satisfied, your hands petting through his hair in approval as his eyes fall closed and he submits to the instinct of the motion.
He keeps you there for some time. Pressed against the wall, his cock a hard press against your hip as he nurses at you until the fabric of your slip has gone slippery and cool with his saliva. Content, it seems, as his arm around your waist keeps you snugged close to him.
Pleasure comes back to you in a twisting, twirling tendril, as you let your head tip back against the wall on a warm sigh. A sensation long forgotten to the years, one of the few things you cannot conjure, something you must experience organically and rarely have opportunity to, and it heats you to the core to feel it touching along your bones once more. Prickling and tense, the promise of something greater, fuller, as the first pulses of it gather and swell and burst low in your belly from the hard pulse of his mouth at your breast.
You shift your leg when you begin to grow impatient, the empty ache at your center beginning to throb, and his forehead thumps softly against your sternum when you press the thick of your thigh deliberately to the swell of his cock. Cool air rushes in in the absence of his mouth, catching on the soaked fabric of your slip, and it makes your fingernails scratch at his scalp on another indulgent breath out.
“Hinata,” you murmur, and his eyes lift to yours. Your chest dipping at how gone he is, as he looks up at you. Drifting lost in the haze of his arousal, his tight grip on your body the only thing keeping him from floating away entirely. You touch at his mouth again, the pad of your thumb pressing at that rich, plush swell, and tell him, “Kneel.”
He groans, soft and raw, but he goes. Slumping to the floor like you cut his strings, his hands drifting down your form as he goes. Slipping from your rear, down the backs of your thighs, rucking at the fabric of your dress as his face presses against the valley between your legs.
The sight of it feels hot, searing through you as you look down and see him on his knees at your feet. His hands broad on the thick curve of your thighs as he nuzzles his face against where your hip turns to thigh. Eyes closed, breathing through parted lips. Reverent and overwhelmed, his brows bunching like he’s in agony from the weight of his want.
One of your hands slips from his hair and curves around his cheek. Lifting his face, drawing his eyes open, and he blinks up at you like he’s staring into the sun. Lost, entirely.
“Hinata,” you say, and you feel his face drift into the curl of your palm in response. “Have you ever put your mouth on a woman?”
If his thoughts played over his face before, they all but scream through his expression now. As understandable to you as if he’d spoken them aloud, his gaze lingering on yours for a moment of stupid, slow confusion, before dropping down, lingering on the considerable wet spot he sucked into your dress over your breast, before settling down in front of his face. Where his chin is pressed against soft curls, hidden beneath satin.
Understanding your meaning, he looks back up to you. Moving like his bones are leaden, slow and deliberate. He tells you what you already know when he shakes his head, another tender, silent admission. You touch his mouth again, your head tipping lazily to the side as you feel your entire body singe with the prospect of what is to come.
“Would you like to?” you ask. The illusion of choice, when you know, with every fiber of your god powers, that he will. Still, it’s gratifying, sets something warm unfurling in your gut when he lets out a breathy, wanting sound and nods into your palm.
You are slow as you draw your slip up over yourself. Wanting to savor this, these last moments of suffocating, intoxicating anticipation as you tug the material beneath the tight grip of his hands on your legs, thinking for a moment of disposing of the fabric with a dissolving wave of your hand before deciding instead to pull it up over your head. Letting it catch on every curve of your form, because he’s watching it happen. Entirely enraptured as he kneels at your feet.
His eyes go to your breasts first, bare and perked up in the cool air, and your hand in his hair is the only thing that stops him from rising once more to go to them. His mouth opening and closing in a silent, wet moment of desire, his eyes going a little distant as his mind’s eye clearly roves over the thought of you on his tongue, with no fabric separating you.
You shift against the wall and lift a leg. Slipping it around his shoulder and tugging. Drawing him closer, making him breathe out in a soft little startle as his eyes dart up to yours, then fall down to where you’re guiding him.
Even in the faint candlelight, you see the way his eyes blow out dark. His mouth dropping open wordlessly, wetting his lips as his hands grip once more at the backs of your thighs. His eyes fall closed on a flutter of lashes, and you feel it in the very core of yourself when he nuzzles close. Nudging his nose into the soft bed of curls there where your legs meet and breathes in, deep. Deep down into his lungs, drinking in the scent of you, where you’ve gone slick from arousal, and it takes just another nudge of your calf against his shoulder blade to have him leaning in. Nose nestling into the soft hair there then dipping lower when you tilt your hips towards him. Your hand on the back of his head guides him, fingers tangling in the waves there, until he meets you.
The first touch of his mouth to your sex has you both jolting softly. Lurching against the other, charged like a static shock, and when you press against his head greedily, he goes. Groaning quietly as he dips low and presses his mouth against the heated, slick mess of your cunt.
Pleasure spikes, hot and sharp, lancing through your blood as you grip him tight and grit your teeth against it. Pressing into the soft, wet of his mouth with a roll of your hips, your head thudding back against the wall behind you as you feel the part of his lips. The first shy touch of his tongue to the throbbing pulse of need at the crest of your sex.
You mean to take your time. To dwell in the syrupy pleasure of his mouth against you, but that first shot of pleasure hooks into your flesh. Darkly, like a riptide, and it’s not a minute before it swells in your chest, puffing up like a storm cloud, like the detonation of something volatile, and you end up snarling silently and shoving his face against you.
That flint spark goes molten in your blood and you chase it. The air of impassivity you’d retained evaporating in an instant at that first flickering taste, promise, of a release you’ve been denied for decades. Longer, even, farther back than your memory goes.
You are rough with him. More than you mean to be. You clench him close with your leg hooked over his shoulder and keep his face where you need it, one hand gripped painfully tight in his hair while the other grips weakly at his shoulder to keep your balance as you grind your sex against his mouth as hard as you can manage. Tight, delicious pressure that you feel fissuring out through your pelvis with every roll of your hips. With every hard press of his lips and mouth and tongue against your pulsing, aching bundle of nerves, flashing through you like a flame, leaving you scorched and panting in its wake.
His hands tighten on your thighs, his face hidden from you, mashed between your legs, and a distant part of you pings, a reminder that he’s human and humans need to breathe, but the thought is swept away as soon as it realizes, because your muscles begin to go rigid as the pleasure in your belly begins to coil and twist up tight.
You ride him hard. Hips bunching and grinding your sex against the open plush of his mouth, against that velvet, slick heat, your head tipping forward til your chin thumps against your chest. Your face screwing up in something like pain as your release gathers in your core like a violent rip, spiralling up, filling you, pushing all the air from your lungs, until it crests, suddenly, blindingly, and you make a sound like a wounded animal when it wrenches free from you.
A part of you dies with it. Flares bright, searing, singeing into your bones, before it leaves you in a rush and leaves you slumped over his body on a ragged exhale. Your grip on him loosens as you pull in deep, desperate breaths, your body shaking like a fawn as reverberating pleasure ripples down the frayed ends of your nerves. He doesn’t pull back, stays where you put him, where you shoved him deep against your center, and it takes a moment for your mind return to you to prompt you into movement.
Your hand curls around the side of his face and you pull him back, tilting his face up towards you, exposing his nose and mouth to air for the first time in too long.
His face is messed with you. Glistening from cheek to chin, shiny with the wet of your release, and he sucks in a shaky breath as his eyes flutter heavily open and his gaze meets yours. He’s shaking too, you realize. Trembling faintly between your hands, and you don’t realize until you look down past his arms and see a dark, wet patch on the front of his breeches. The distant ripple of the fabric as his spent cock gives one last twitch.
“Did you - ” you ask, nearly wheezing, your eyes slamming shut as a flare of arousal grips at you. So soon after your peak, your insides aching and overexposed still, and your sex pulses down around nothing, aching like a wound.
He gives you no answer. Blinking up at you blearily, drunkenly, but you know it to be true. You know that he found his pleasure untouched, from the taste of you on his tongue and the rough grip of your hands on his face.
You curse lowly, petting at his cheek. Smearing your slick across his heated skin, pressing it in, unmoored entirely by this human at your feet who is so much more than you could have ever anticipated.
You have half a mind to take him into your mouth. To lay him back on the cool marble floor and to taste him. To nurse him back to hardness so you can have further use of him, your mouth flushing wet at the thought, but when you lean back in the grip of his hands, he whines. The sound doesn’t seem conscious, doesn’t seem intentional, but it falls from his lips all the same. His brows bunching down on his face in a soft pull of distress, and it takes his hands pulling at your thighs for you to understand.
You shake your head at him, stunned, stupid with the echoes of your release still coursing through you, but he simply nudges his face forward and helps himself to you once more. Pressing his mouth back to your cunt, making your legs flinch as his tongue presses to the over sensitive flesh.
You curse again, through your teeth, then acquiesce. Nodding to him, soothing your palm over his cheek in some attempt at comfort, his brows still pinched in concern like he thinks you’ll leave him.
“Gentle,” you breathe, your hips jerking back when his tongue laves over you, your nerves sparking fire hot down your limbs from the touch.
You end up slouching down the wall. Gone a little boneless in the wake of your pleasure, but he takes your weight like it’s nothing at all. He shifts closer to you, breathing you in, lapping slowly, contentedly, at the slick mess of your folds, nudging closer until you groan softly and sling your other thigh over his shoulders, too. Your thighs framing his face, pressing against the red tips of his ears. His hands sturdy and sure supporting your rear, keeping you suspended, pressed tight against the wall, as he lowers his mouth to your sex and worships.
He does as you say. Keeps his mouth and tongue soft against you, his eyes fluttering closed and then drifting back open as he draws his tongue over the puffy, sensitive petals of your cunt, again and again and again. Devout in the motion of it, breathing through his nose to keep his mouth on you. Reveling in the taste of you, the feel of you, sparking kindling deep in your core. Stoking those embers back to life with every pass of his tongue.
This time is slower. More measured, and it allows you to remain conscious. To stay within yourself, present and aware, looking down your body to where he’s buried himself into your center. Your fingers end up carding through the sweaty waves of fox red hair over his forehead, pushing them back, resting your hand against his head in a gentle support. Stroking your thumb over his brow, your breath coming in deep, heaving breaths as you feel him pulling you, tugging you, gently, towards another high.
His eyes remain on yours. Heavy-lidded and dark, looking like a man possessed but pleased as he kisses against your cunt over and over in a steady, deliberate rhythm that has the first warning flickers of pleasure warming your belly within minutes. Before you’ve even fully recovered from the first.
You murmur his name, fingers tightening against his scalp, as the heated pool behind your navel begins to trickle upwards, and he hums against you in response. Looking out of his mind, out of his body as he feasts upon you. Sliding his mouth up and sealing it gently over the crest of your sex. Pressing close, gripping your rear tight with strong hands, and applying a steady, warm pressure that has your head tipping languidly back on a guttural groan. Teasing you towards a gentle peak, a shuddering, soothing release, and something about it has your hackles raising. Wanting more. Greedy.
You reach down with your free hand beneath you, hand weakly searching until your hand bumps against his wrist and finds his palm supporting the weight of you, spread wide around the curve of your rear. You nudge at his hand there, pressing at it as best you can at the odd angle, and you feel a puff of an exhale against your core as his eyes lift to yours, heavy brows lifting a touch.
You push at him until he shifts your weight to his other hand, centering it beneath your rear to hold all of your weight, and then you’re able to guide his free hand to where you need him. Where you want more.
His fingers are thick, coarse when they bump accidentally into the slick mess of your sex, and it knocks a moan from the both of you. His eyes lift to yours, gone, swimming in delirium, and you nod to him when his hand moves. Feels at you there, fingertips gliding through your folds, inelegantly. Moving on instinct, your hips moving against him. Rutting gently between the pressure of his fingers and the hot, wet heat of his mouth, and then his fingers find you. Finds where you’re empty and aching, and he lets out a whimper, his eyes fluttering shut, and then he’s pressing two fingers together and in.
The pressure is thick, a bright spark of too much, and then the blunt press of his fingers turns to a glide and you moan, head dropping weakly forward, as he fills you up tight. A shudder rolls over your body like an ocean wave, pleasure lighting, spiking through your consciousness as he crooks those fingers in you, as if he’s trying to adjust his grip on you, but it presses into something deep and tender and blazing, and you barely manage a rasped warning of his name before you’re lurching against his mouth and peaking once more.
Moisture pushes from you, squelching around the thick fill of his fingers in you, flooding his face, and he moans weakly. You feel him, feel him shift below you as if to get closer, his mouth opening to drink you in. His cheeks gone deep ruddy in the low glimmering candle light as you pulse around his fingers, your cunt clenching down, soothing itself in rapid, fluttering aches around the intrusion.
You end up having to pull him back with fingers knotted in his hair. Breathing heavy, sweat breaking out on your sternum as your eyes roll forward in your skull and your mind slowly slurs its way back to you.
He is pliant beneath you. Completely and utterly gone, eyes dark like embers, his mouth swollen and shining with your slick, his tongue heavy and visible in his mouth between parted lips and puffing breaths.
He would go back again, you think, watching his hazy eyes drift from your face back down to where the curls between your legs have gone messy and slicked from his care, and you groan brokenly. Shaking your head and shifting, getting one of your feet onto the ground and then pushing at his shoulders until he begins to tip obediently backwards.
What little plan had time to formulate in your mind before this all began had surely involved the tryst taking place on your bed, lined with soft pelts and silken linens, but you can’t bring yourself to care as he lowers himself down to the marble floor. His chest rising and falling, dewy with sweat and dappled with a flush that starts at his throat and creeps lower down on pale skin.
You end up over his waist, your arms shaking pathetically as you brace yourself against his shoulders. Reaching behind you to where his thighs are propped up and supporting your weight, gripping your hand into a fist and flicking your wrist. Dissolving his breeches into nothing with hardly a thought, configuring them away until they float a fine dust on the cool air, carrying on the breeze that trickles through the room.
You breathe out, then. Relieved, your mind swirling slow and blissed, as you let your weight settle down across his hips and you feel him there. Hard and thick, cock resting in the crease of his thigh and drooling hot spits of prespend into that heated skin.
The need that comes over you then is instinctive and rushing. Consuming. Bone-deep in a way you don’t remember experiencing before, some innate imperative that has you reaching back and taking his cock in your hand. Gripping it tight, drawing a quiet, strangled sound from him, before tilting your hips to meet it.
His hands come up to rest weakly on your thighs, palms slick with sweat and your slick, and all he can do is watch, looking up at your through heavy eyelids, chest rising and falling and flushed, as you shift yourself over him and align yourself. Guide his cock until it glides against the slick folds of your cunt, making you both groan, and you barely feel the fat head of it snag against your entrance before you slot yourself down. Greedy. Needing. Taking.
His body jolts against the marble floor like he’s been dealt a fatal blow, his back arching painfully sharp, head tilting back against the cool surface as a gutted sound falls from his lips. His hands, loosely palmed before, grip down on your thighs. Drawing you down further, pulling you closer, as you sink down on him fully. Taking him, your eyes rolling back in your skull at the intoxicating, suffocating fill of his cock in you.
You take a moment, once he’s fully rooted. Once your weight comes to rest on the plane of his hips, his cock buried deep inside. Pushing all of the breath from your lungs, making sinful sparks flash behind your eyes as you breathe and let your eyes close to bask in the feeling of it.
Your palms brace on his chest, on the swell of muscle beneath flesh, as much to keep him down as to keep yourself upright. Something is happening within you, something unknowable and overpowering that you have to force yourself to breathe through, your cunt clenching desperately around his cock. Greedy, relishing in the thick, heavy fill of him.
Time moves differently for you than it does for mortals. Your life spans the lives of thousands of them, a god of primeval origin, a millennia old, and yet, in that moment, you feel your existence, the thousands of years of memory and action and inaction - the loss and pain and joy and hunger - narrow down to a frantic, burrowing, point somewhere near the center of your chest.
You gasp, loud in the quiet of the room, lungs aching, shaking your head in an attempt to clear it. Your form’s eyes pricking with something that feels wet, that you bare your teeth against and shove back, and then the feeling begins to recede. Swirling in tectonic color as you return to yourself and find yourself perched over top a mortal who is looking up at you like you’ve everything. The Creator. The beginning and end of everything.
“Hinata,” you whisper, unable to control the tremor in your voice, weak and soft sounding, but he simply nods. Heavy, hot eyes staying on yours, his palms spanning the width of your thighs, as if he understands, even though he can’t. He can’t.
It’s what you need, though, to move. Permission you hadn’t asked for, permission you hadn’t needed granted with that singular, grounding nod. You rest your weight in your knees and push. Resting your weight on your hands braced on his chest, rising up. Feeling the fat thick of his cock as you lift yourself, before slotting back down. Dropping back down onto him. Filling you up once more, pressing into parts of you you had forgotten existed, making your fingernails scratch at the slick skin of his chest.
You move in tandem, then. Some strange, unspoken cooperation building between you as you lift yourself and then meet him as he moves up. As his hips lift from the marble floor and he drives his cock deep, on a hard, echoing slap of skin. You nod, desperate, and then you go. Moving together in a hard, desperate coupling. Sweat-slicked skin slipping, grunts falling from the both of you with every crash of your hips, every hard thrust of his cock into you, making you whole with every rut.
It draws you inside yourself in a way you can’t quite grasp. Feeling yourself curling in, your senses pulling close until your skin is nearly vibrating with them, sight and sound and touch all coalescing in a deafening blur, that has you feeling celestial. Otherworldly, as you move over him. Lifting and plunging, up and down, filling deep with him again and again, your head bobbing with every rise and fall over top him.
That feeling from before begins to touch at the edges of you. That greedy feeling, the wanting, the needing feeling, and even as your eyes flutter closed at the feel of him moving inside of you, as your breath pants out in loud gasps, something feels unsettled within you. Something not quite right, the edges not smoothed over as they should be. Some part of you wanting, still, for an inch not scratched. A trigger not pressed, an ache not soothed.
It’s only after a few minutes of this dance, your hips driving together with his, his amber eyes molten on yours, that you realize. That you recognize the strange push inside of you, telling you to move. To change. To shift into something that will feel even better. Even deeper, even harder.
You know, then, that whatever has come over him, whatever has dragged him so deep into the cloud of lust and arousal and want that has him beyond words and heavy-lidded, has you too. That you’re just as lost to it, out of your mind, your insides roiling and writhing with barely contained instinct, because you feel yourself moving from him. Stilling him with a press of your palms against his pectorals, your weight settling there, before you dismount. Taking his hand from your thigh and tugging at it. Whimpering, delirious and gone, as you slip to your hands and knees and then down lower. Gasping weakly when cold marble presses against your breasts, when it makes a shiver trip through your entire body.
You know it has you, whatever has him, because you pull at him until he rises up onto his knees behind you, and then you, the proud, infinite, indomitable god, present yourself to him. Raising your hips on a quiet whine, your head pillowed in your forearms on the floor. Your thighs spreading when he comes between them, his hands hot and strong as they curl around the fatty curve of your hips.
There’s a moment where you remain like that, breathing heavily into the cage of your arms, feeling him move behind you, and then his thighs bump against the back of yours and you bite back a shuddering cry at the relief that surges through you, like bursting through the surface of a lake, when you feel him guide his cock to you and spear you deep.
You moan. Too loud, shameful, echoing off the floor and back into your own ears, and you can hear him behind you. Breathing hard, sounding winded, desperate wimpers sounding at the ends of each exhale, overwhelmed, and then he thrusts against you. Skin claps, wet and lewd, and then Hinata makes a sound like he’s crying, and he begins to fuck you.
It’s different, this way. The firm grip of his hands around the crease of your hips, the bruises he’s pressing into that soft skin, the way he jerks you back onto his cock again and again has you sinking deep. Resting your forehead on your forearms and panting, eyes screwed shut as you body submits. As you feel yourself opening to him, accepting him, taking him, every hard plunge of his cock that lights sparks in the back of your skull.
You’re making sounds. Mortifying, shameful sounds, knocked loose with every collision of your hips, every slick, wet shove of his cock into you, sounding wounded and raw, but so he is. He’s shaking, you can feel in the trembling grip of his hands on you, and it just makes you press back against him harder. Grounding yourself in the punishing hit of his hips to yours, finding yourself nearly drooling onto the marble floor beneath you as you let him move you where he wants you. As you let him work you over his cock, chasing his release desperately in the hot, tight clutch of you.
He begins to babble before long, strings of nonsensical words, slurred and sounding almost fearful, overwhelmed, and you take it as some warning, a feeling of warmth blooming behind your ribs. Your thighs spread further, head lolling weakly on your arms, and nod, though he can’t see it. Telling him he can. He must.
His hands vice tight on around your hips, painful and sharp, and you groan, loud and wanton, when he stills behind you. Goes rigid, pressed up tight against you on a strangled sound, and his cock begins to kick within you. Swelling and bursting, plugging you up tight as it spits hot lashes of spend deep inside you. Painting you with scalding seed, making you pant openly, your cunt clutching weakly at the bulk of him inside of you. Chasing the last of your pleasure, greedily, wanting every last bit of it.
You realize distantly, like an afterthought, that your power is glowing inside of you. Triggered, somehow, by this carnal act. Glowing and thrumming, as if you’d activated it. As if you’d drawn on your power for some great task, when all you did was submit and take and take and take. Every hair on your arm is standing, goosebumps prickling down your sweat-slicked skin, and you shiver from the feeling of it when he drapes himself over you. Collapsing heavily onto your back, his chest pressed to your shoulder blades. His nose nudging behind the shell of your ear as he moans softly, spent, shaking quietly, and you shiver at that too. Rolling onto your side and taking him with you as the cool of the marble floor spreads out beneath your hot bodies.
You lay like that for some time. Winded and together, bodies radiating heat and energy, thickening up the air in your bedchamber, making the candles set around flicker as if tickled by a passing breeze.
You lay there, feeling the hammer of his heart against your spine, and look inwardly. Exhausted, wrung dry, and utterly perplexed by the happy, thrumming glow of your divine power. Rippling and twirling like a happy thing, warm and alive and entirely, strangely, unsummoned by you.
You return to yourself much before he does, aided perhaps by your divinity as you gather yourself to your feet and conjure clothes onto your body with a vague wave of your hand.
You can feel it as it leaves, though. The fog. The hazy mist of whatever came over the both of you, and you find yourself eyeing him critically. Curiously, if a little suspicious, even as he lays back on the floor of your bedchamber. Spreadeagle and nude, heavy, slow blinking eyes staring distantly up at the ceiling. His cock spent and glistening soft and resting against his hip. Alive, if utterly not deconstructed by the events that just unfolded.
You wonder if it was something he did, some potion or magic you couldn’t sense in him, and decide that foolish when you have to physically help him into a seated position. His body sweat-slick and loose-limbed against you. Apologizing with clumsy lips, the first coherent words he’s said since the thing began. Plainly dazed as he leans against the side of your bed, watching you with an expression that hides nothing as you busy yourself moving around the bedchamber.
You’re not known for being a particularly generous god, but you possess enough humanity to not simply dump him out of your realm, nude and stripped raw and trembling still with the aftershocks of it.
You think, as you bring him a goblet of cool water that he drinks in deep gulps, his throat working as he swallows, that you simply must not let so much time pass before allowing yourself this particular kind of indulgence. That that must be the reason you were so affected, so thoroughly dragged under with him, with this small mortal of bright hair and wide, blinking eyes that watch you with ever-mounting clarity as the minutes pass.
When he finally gathers his strength and manages to stand on shaky legs, you conjure a pair of breeches on him, then a tunic. Weaving both of materials finer than he came with without much thought, keeping an eye to be sure the fit is correct as the fabric materializes over his form.
He takes another drink when you offer it, and as his head tips back, you find yourself feeling. Unsettled. Chewing on your lower lip and letting your eyes rove over him, driven by some unnameable desire to commit the sight of him to memory.
He hands the goblet back to you, empty, and touches at his mouth with his palm. Flushing anew when he finds his lips still swollen from use, puffy and hot and smelling no doubt of you, and something flares in your gut. Something sudden and strange, that you grit your teeth against. Something that feels fond, and you throw your arm out in response. Flicking your wrist and conjuring the veil along the far side of your bedchamber and motioning for him to head towards it when he simply stares at you in response.
He moves as if his entire body aches, limbs stiff as he steps towards the veil and then, after a long, lingering glance back at you, through it. Disappearing through the crystalline ripple of it , and you force yourself to wait a moment or two. Breathing deeply, deliberately, chewing on your lower lip as that heated twist of want flickers again. Only stepping through the veil after him once you’ve quelled it and shoved it down deep.
He’s there, when you cross over. Standing there and watching the veil like he was waiting for you and you don’t imagine the look that crosses his face at the sight of you stepping through and into his mortal realm. Relief, naked and open across his soft, youthful features.
Your arms fold over your chest, then you force them down to your sides. You can scarcely remember before, when you’d been here with him last. When you’d circled him like a predator, lured him in with a half of a promise, and chosen that you would devour him.
It feels like a lifetime ago and the strange distance of it has you feeling rankled. Annoyed, as he stares wordlessly at you, when all there is for him to do is to turn and return the way he came.
You suppose he is wondering whether you will fulfil your non-promise. Whether his offering of his body was sufficient to move you to action, to draw upon the heavens and bring rain, but you think, as your eyes scour his face, his expression, that he doesn’t look as if that is his concern.
The stubborn set of his jaw from before is gone. The stiff set of his shoulders, determined and grim, replaced by a softness you see plain as day. A vulnerability in his eyes now that you have to look away from, choosing to look past him down the path he will take back to his home.
You stand there in a silent opposition for what feels like quite some time. His eyes searching yours, looking for something that you’re not willing to give, before he finally acquiesces. Letting out a soft exhale, his brows knitting and then smoothing, and then turning to go.
A weight lifts from you when his eyes go, when he turns and begins down the path, and you feel yourself able to draw in a full breath for the first time since perhaps you first saw him. First felt him, sudden and startling, on the edge of your consciousness and your realm.
Your body begins to move of its own accord then. Your eyes staying firmly fixed on his retreating form, walking slow, more slowly than he ascended the mountain surely, as your hands come up in front of your face, and you scour your memory. Cycling through tomes of memory, flooding and fluttering behind your eyes, until something snags at you. The feeling, of the last time you did this. What you had to do, the energy you had to channel.
You draw in a deep breath, your feet widening on the dusty path, and draw. Extending your divinity out and up, into the heavens overhead, vast and untameable. It takes a moment or two, a grit of your teeth, a slight adjustment of your power, a nudge, and then the clouds in the sky begin to shift. Darkening, beginning to roll and gather, and you feel the muscles in your arm begin to tremble as you brace yourself and draw even further. A hard, seizing pull of your power from on high.
Thunder cracks, booming over the mountain, echoing off the granite walls, deafening, and you nearly stagger to your knees when you feel the heavens quiver and quake, before submitting in a slippery, heated rush to the pull of your power. The wind picks up, too sudden to be natural, and when you feel the first tickle of rain drops on your upturned face, you allow yourself to breathe.
Near the end of the path, just before it switches back and down the face of the mountain, you find him stopped. Frozen in place, one foot in front of the other. His head lifts, tilting back, stuck suspended in time until another crack of thunder booms, and the heavens open. Rain pours down, a sprinkle to a deluge in a breath, and he stands in it. His face lifted against it, eyes closed but mouth dropped open as the rainwater rushes over him.
You feel it like a physical thing, a force against your ribs, when he looks over his shoulder to you, because his expression is bright. Glowing, like the sun, a grin stretched wide across his cheeks, and you know, somehow, that the hand you hold up in warning is the only thing that keeps him from returning to you in a rush. From sprinting back to you, splashing through the puddles instantly forming in the path from the downpour.
You nod to him, breath tight in your lungs, all but pleading for him to go, but he takes his time. Standing there, letting himself soak to the bone as he watches you over his shoulder like this is something he wants to remember. A memory he wishes to keep, as his eyes rove over you, even at his distance.
He does go, at last. Turns back forward, then glances back to you once more, before he steps forward and down, and disappears around the bend.
You stand there and stare at his absence. At the place where he disappeared from view, swimming in some feeling you don’t understand and stubbornly choose not to give name to. You could conjure some protection, something to keep the rain from washing over you in the way that it is, but you can’t bring yourself to. Letting your eyes drift down the mountain to the little smudge in the distance, in the foothills, that you know is the village where he is returning.
You examine the glow of your power in your chest, testing the strength of it and finding it thrumming and strong. You can keep this up for another hour or two, and can likely fit a few more in without flooding the village out, before the sky gods come calling in a rain of storm and hellfire. Fueled by rage at the impropriety of another god stepping into their realm, their role. Using a power that was not that god’s to use.
You don’t know if it will be enough, to turn the fortunes of the village around, but it is more than they had. And it was earned, by a small mortal with fiery hair and thickly muscled limbs, who was ready to die for just this blessing.
You stay there, standing on the flickering edge of where your realm meets the mortal plane, to ensure the rain keeps falling, and you can’t stop your mind from turning. Over and over, body tingling, and you sift through your memories. Trying to remember if any mortal who had made the journey up the mountain and to your realm had ever returned. Ever gone back down to the village and come back. Made that arduous journey once more, summiting your great mountain again.
None had, you realize, though, perhaps, you’d given none a reason to. As the warm rain soaks you, as your lungs fill with clean, damp air and you hear what sounds like a distant rumbling from the village below - the sounds of joy, perhaps, so fervent they managed to make it through the air and up to you on your peak - you find yourself wondering if Hinata Shoyo will be the exception. If he will return to you, now that he received what he had so dearly bargained for.
As your eyes remain fixed on where he last was, the corner of the trail where it turns and slips from view, you decide that it would be acceptable if he did. You do not know what you would do, if he appeared again on the edge of your realm, but you know, as something foreign and strange blooms warmly in your chest, that you would not turn him away.
Overhead, another crack of thunder sounds, echoing all around you, and you allow yourself to turn your face into the rain and the wind. Closing your eyes and letting it wash over you, feeling a distant, surging feeling of something like new life rooting itself deep. Flowering bright and warm in the space behind your ribs, the color of a setting sun. Of a fresh spring fox pelt, glittering in the sun.