#celus sex pollen CW

[piceuscelus]

do it right (monday) by piceuscelus

Chapters: 1/1 (7,726 words) Fandom: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types Rating: Explicit Warnings: Underage Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon/Dara Characters: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Dara (The Witcher), Minor Original Characters - Character Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Age Difference, Sex Pollen, Fuck Or Die, Magic, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Multiple Orgasms, POV Multiple, Knotting, elves have different anatomy, Kissing, Hen Llinge | Elder Speech (The Witcher), Discussion of Pregnancy, Discussion of Abortion Series: Part 1 of ciri week 2022 Summary:

“Now, are you still willing?”

He gapes for a moment. “Willing?” he asks, and then he catches up. Can we help her? We can, if there is anyone willing.

 Sweet fucking Melitele.

 “Yes,” he answers.

An elvish ritual has an unintended effect on Ciri, and it falls to Dara to help her.

full fic also below the cut! (the italics didn’t copy over, though, as usual, so it’ll probably read a bit more smoothly on ao3)

Ciri is…a little uncomfortable amongst the elves. 

Of course, she’s grateful that they’re letting her stay – sheltering her alongside Dara, keeping her hidden from the Nilfgaardian forces combing the countryside. After everything with the doppler, it’s a relief to know that at the very least they’ll have some warning from the camp scouts before any further chaos.

She knows that at least part of the discomfort is just the background human-elf tension, that no matter how long they stay most of the group will always keep her at arm’s length and out of circles. And that – it’s fine, really. Mostly, at least. It leaves her feeling unmoored and unsteady, if she thinks too hard on it, but it’s not…it really can’t be fixed, least of all by her alone. Add in that the elves know who she is – because she and Dara had been found bickering while burying the body of a doppler, and the camp had, rightfully, had some fucking questions – and she knows that the basic level of civility she’s treated with is more than a gift.

Still, though, it’s…awkward, is probably the best way to describe it. And it’s particularly noticeable on nights like this, when she’s left alone in the tent she and Dara share with a few other strays this camp has taken in. She’s the only human in the camp – or at least, the only full human in the camp, and tonight the elves are out in the woods doing…something. A ritual, is all Dara had said, and it had been clear that the vagueness was on purpose, so she hadn’t pressed.

And it’s not really that she feels left out so much as she’s not really sure what to do with herself. Earlier in the day, while most of the camp was still preparing, she’d kept to herself and done laundry, and then helped gather water with some of the other refugees. But by now, dark has fallen, and unlike during the day, the loneliness feels…more real, now.

There’s an irrational part of her that thinks they might have abandoned her, but she knows full well it’s irrational; if they were going to abandon her they’d send her out to forage and be gone when she got back, or they never would have let her stay. They wouldn’t plan for a ritual, let Dara tell her that it was happening, and let her help gather water for it. It’s just not practical.

All the same, she feels unsettled in her skin, and the longer she stares out into the darkness of the empty camp, the worse it gets. Finally, she can’t stand the feeling anymore and stands, intending to…well, she doesn’t know – she’s intending to do something about it, but standing outside the tent and listening to the moths buzz around the last sputtering candle lanterns isn’t terribly inspiring.

And then she hears singing.

It’s faint, at first, and then louder, and she realizes that it must be coming from the elves, deeper in the woods – wherever they’ve gone to do their ritual, whatever it is. For a split second she considers going back into the tent and maybe trying to sleep, but that thought it gone nearly the moment it comes, and she realizes that she’s…moving toward it. The sound, the elves.

She shouldn’t, she knows. She should stay at the camp, should leave them to whatever they’re doing, because if they wanted to include her, Dara would have told her that. She’d be there, if she was welcome – but she’s not, so she isn’t.

All the same, her feet keep moving without her permission, and soon enough she’s seeing the light in between the trees, soft and golden and flickering but bright, and large – a bonfire, maybe, she isn’t certain. All she can see right now is the light, and the trees, and when she steps a little further, the silhouettes of the elves. 

Finally, she’s able to force herself to stop moving, to not go any further and actually interrupt, crash their – whatever this is. Party feels…disrespectful.

This – it’s magic. She can feel it in the air, the faint buzz and crackle; Mousesack’s magic was different, but similar enough. The longer they all sing, the louder they get, and the stronger the charge in the air. She knows some of the words, but she can’t piece them together, and as she watches the light gets somehow brighter, and her head starts to spin. 

She squeezes her eyes shut against the glow, but finds she can’t escape it; the brightness glares through her eyelids, and bringing her hands to her face barely helps, either. She stumbles back, then, turning until she can face away, but it’s like the light follows her, and the singing is even louder now, as if the elves are shouting. She scrapes her hand on bark as she stumbles again, but she doesn’t stop moving, just keeps trying to stumble away, the light and the noise following along, as if it’s chasing her. 

Soon enough it’s not just the light and sound, either, it’s heat, and she collapses to her knees, moss and rotting leaves under her hands. She can just see the outline of her fingers, splayed on the ground, but barely, and soon enough she’s squeezing her eyes shut again as if it could help her escape the burn. 

It’s like a fever and a sunburn and standing too close to a hearth all at once, sharp, prickling heat with no sweat to cool her and no cover to protect, and soon she’s shuddering, even the veined red shadow of her eyelids starting to spot and swim.

She faints.

– – – – –

Dara can’t say what leads him away from the ritual, why when the priestess stops their singing he turns and stumbles into the woods, but he knows it’s important. It’s like there’s a hook in his gut, and the line attached has started to pull, and then, when he’s far enough he can only barely hear the priestess speaking, it yanks.

Of all the things he expects to find in the woods, Ciri is not one of them.

At first, he’s angry – it had been clearly implied, he thought, that she was not to follow them, that she was not welcome. That this was theirs. That he and his people have already given her so much, she ought to let them have at least something to themselves. 

But then he actually sees her – how she’s collapsed into the undergrowth, fingers pressed into furrows they must have dug there, cheeks scarlet while the rest of her skin is near translucently pale, and his anger is immediately dashed away by fear, bloodcurdling and cold.

“Ciri,” he calls, but she doesn’t so much as twitch. Her chest is barely moving. His heart skips. “Ciri.”

Still nothing, and when he goes to his knees beside her prone form, he can feel the heat pouring off of her, hotter even than the fire the priestess had been feeding. Touching her almost hurts, but he has no choice; she’s as limp as a corpse as he gets his arms around her shoulders and under her legs and lifts.

It’s not the first time he’s carried her, but it is the first he’s realized just how small she really is. His heart skips painfully again, and he turns back toward the faint light of where his fellows are finishing up the ceremony. 

They’ve broken apart and are gathering things, when he stumbles back into their midst, and he feels how the air seems to freeze along with them.

“I found her,” he says, and doesn’t bother trying to explain how or why, “something’s wrong.”

“She’s just dh’oine,” someone scoffs, and Dara’s panicked enough he can’t even pin their voice, “she’s probably fallen ill. Take her back to camp.”

“This isn’t sickness,” he insists. “I’ve seen her and other humans sick – this is different.” 

He pushes through their loose gathering to reach the priestess. Farryn, is her name, and he already knows that she’s the sole reason he and Ciri had been allowed to stay with the camp; he’d have been allowed, possibly, but without her say, Ciri would have been shunned. He doesn’t know what reasons she had for convincing the others to let Ciri stay, but he hopes that whatever they were, she’ll help her now, too.

Farryn’s eyes sharpen when he’s near enough that she can see Ciri properly. “Where?” she asks, and then steps back, gesturing to the stone dais they had used for their offerings. It’s still wet with wine, but he doesn’t hesitate to place her on it, cradling her head against the rough surface. 

“Between here and the camp,” he answers, finally, tearing his eyes away from Ciri’s deathly pale face to look at Farryn. “I just – I left, something called me, and I found her lying there. Is this a fever?”

Farryn steps closer and passes her hand over Ciri’s face, then down her throat and to her sternum. She’s frowning in concentration, and Dara holds his breath as if he might shatter her focus. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the others forming a bubble around the dais, slowly inching forward to stare. 

“It is,” Farryn says, softly. “But not one I’ve ever seen myself.”

“Can we help her?” Already, Dara is wondering how close Nilfgaard is, or if maybe they’ve moved on from the area by now – he knows there are healers in nearby towns, and if he has to carry Ciri to each one individually, so be it. 

As far as anyone gathered here is concerned, he and Ciri are the same age; his years count barely thirty, and while hers are less than half that, his kind live for so much longer. When they met, he hadn’t stopped to consider that she may consider it differently, and now that he thinks about it, he’s not even certain she knows. If he covers his ears, he looks very much like a human teenager.

But he’s not that, and as he cradles Ciri’s head and feels the heat rolling off of her, heart rabbiting, he feels…responsible. Whatever has happened to her, whatever this fever is – the others have no obligation to help her, but he does. He brought her here, and as much as he’s always considered himself at her same level, he’s lived many more years, and more of them in the shadows and mud; between them, he’s the one with any kind of experience.

Farryn hasn’t answered his question, though.

“Can we help her?” he asks again, and Farryn looks up at him. Her expression is sad, and her eyes are a little haunted.

“We can,” she says. “If there is anyone willing.”

Dara frowns. “Me,” he says, because he’d thought that would be obvious. “Of course, me.”

Farryn’s frown deepens. “We’ll see,” she says, softly, and then she’s turning away and barking orders at the others. They all startle and scramble, some heading back to camp, some deeper into the woods, and others begin unpacking the things they’d begun packing up. 

Dara can barely make himself listen or watch, he’s so focused on Ciri. Her breathing is still quick and shallow, her chest barely rising, and it feels like the fever is worsening, though he’s not certain if it actually is or it’s just the contrast of the cold stone against them. 

Farryn returns to them after a moment, carrying a curved blade. “Het ichaer,” she’s muttering, “I never should have done it with her here.”

“What?” Dara asks. “What about blood?”

Farryn barely glances at him as she sets a bowl next to Ciri’s limp arm. “Hers,” she answers, as if that explains anything at all. He watches with his heart in his throat as she picks up Ciri’s hand and uses the blade to draw blood from a fingertip.

“Her blood?” he asks, once he snaps his attention from watching the bright red drip into the bowl. “Never should have done this? Farryn, what’s going on?”

“She’s – different,” Farryn murmurs, and turns to grab something that one of the others has brought from the woods. It goes into the bowl with Ciri’s blood. “I’m not certain what it is. Or, well, I have a hunch, but it’s so far-fetched I won’t say it to you.”

“Would you speak plainly, please?”

Farryn finishes doing – something, Dara doesn’t know what, with the mixture she’s got in the bowl, and then she looks up at him. “The ritual,” she says. “The blessing. It was just meant to be a call for fertility, to help us when we struggle so much to conceive.”

“I know that.”

Farryn shakes her head. “You think you do,” she mutters, but before he can ask about that, she’s continuing. “She’s…something else, though, and I think it’s had the same kind of reaction a curse might.”

“Something else? A curse – what kind of curse?!” Dara tries not to panic audibly, but all the same his voice raises and cracks, just slightly, on the inflection. 

“She’s human,” Farryn says, “at least mostly. It’s her blood that’s different, her lineage. As far as the curse, well – you’ve heard of the foilé minne geas haven’t you?”

Dara blinks, and if he weren’t so highly strung and shocked all at once he’s certain he’d be flushing with embarrassment. “It’s – a…sex curse.”

“Except that a curse implies intention, and there was no intent behind this, yes.”

“...except there was!” He doesn’t really mean to shout, but he can’t help it. “Tonight, the ceremony, the offerings – the intent was fertility, conception. So you – ”

“Do you think I would have actually done it if I knew she would end up like this?” Farryn asks, cold, and Dara’s teeth click painfully as his mouth snaps shut. “I thought it might have an effect on her, too, like it hopefully will the rest of us. I thought it might even be a little stronger. But if I had thought, even for a moment, that she would end up dying from foilé minne, I wouldn’t have done it. Not without sending the two of you away first. Humans have nothing but my contempt, but she’s barely more than a child, Dara.”

Dara swallows the lump in his throat and nods. Ferryn nods back, a sharp, decisive thing. 

“Now, are you still willing?”

He gapes for a moment. “Willing?” he asks, and then he catches up. Can we help her? We can, if there is anyone willing.

Sweet fucking Melitele.

“Yes,” he answers, as steady as he can get it, because what else can he say? 

This was never Farryn’s fault. It’s because of him that Ciri is here.

“Good. Now, sit her up. She’ll only be lucid for a few minutes – you’re going to have to explain quickly.”

“Why not – ”

As if reading his mind, Farryn cuts him off with a, “Because if the both of you make it out of this, it’s not me who is going to have a half-elf bastard out of it.”

Sweet fucking Melitele.

– – – – –

The first thing Ciri registers is that something thick and gritty is sliding down her throat, and that her mouth is filled with the taste of blood and crushed herbs. She chokes, coughing, but there’s a hand on her mouth as soon as she does.

“Swallow, girl, you need it,” a voice says, and she pries her eyes open to find her vision swimming. Slowly, it stills out into still-blurry focus, though, and she recognizes – 

“Farryn?” The name is muffled beneath the priestess’ hand, but when it doesn’t move, she swallows pointedly. The elf squints at her for a moment, then removes her hand. “Wha’s….”

She’s suddenly shifting, and she lets out a yelp. 

“Sorry,” Dara says, suddenly in front of her. It’s him holding her up, she realizes, though she can’t really parse how. She just recognizes the feeling of his hands on her. He looks…scared.

“Dara?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, softly.

Ciri frowns, because what could he be sorry for? She…doesn’t know where she is, or what’s happening, but she remembers following the sound of singing and then heat, and…. Dara wasn’t there. Not with her, at least. She…must have fainted. Yes, she fainted, she sort of remembers her vision swimming, but….

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” Dara repeats, but she doesn’t think it’s because he thinks she didn’t hear. “Look, I don’t – there’s not a gentle way to tell you this. The ritual we were holding, the ceremony – it was a fertility blessing, and it…. Something happened to you. Is happening.”

Ciri frowns harder. “What?” she repeats. Her skin is starting to crawl with heat again, but at least this time there’s sweat, too, though the adding tingling in…uh. That’s…unexpected and a little uncomfortable. 

“It’s a sex curse,” he finally says, sounding a little pained. “At least, more or less. You – we. We have to have sex.”

“...what.”

Dara’s laugh is even more pained. “You’re dying,” he says. “The ritual, it – something reacted, in you, your blood.”

Suddenly, violently, Ciri is thrown back to an open field and mangled bodies – the Time of Madness and the Time of Contempt: Tedd Deireádh, the Time of End. The world will die amidst frost and be reborn with the new sun. It will be reborn of Elder Blood, of Hen Ichaer, of the seed that has been sown.

A seed which will not sprout but burst into flame.

“Dying?” Ciri whispers, vision swimming again.

“I won’t let you,” Dara says, sharp and firm. “I won’t, Ciri, I just – I have to, we have to – to save you.”

He’s asking, she realizes, in a sort of distant way as heat and tingling continue to crawl up her spine, through her body, til her head is spinning again. He’s asking, and she thinks if she says no, he’ll…let her.

Let her die.

Her breathing is labored, and she finds the only thing she can really focus on is Dara’s hands; they’re cold against her overheated skin, and his palms are smooth but his fingertips are callused. Like a string player. For a split second she’s distracted, wondering if he plays an instrument, but his voice calls her back.

“Ciri, please.”

She trusts him. Despite all of their bickering, the horrible things he said about her and her grandmother, she trusts him, because – because he’s earned it. He came back, after the doppler, and saved her where she was helpless and tied up. He helped her kill that monster masquerading as Mousesack. He helped her chip into the frozen ground deep enough to bury the corpse, even as he spewed vitriol the whole time.

He said he wouldn’t leave even if the elf camp turned her out. That he’d stay with her, like he did when she left Brokilon. 

“Okay,” she says. “Yes.”

“Thank you.” And then he’s – kissing her.

It feels – incredible. And it’s not just pleasure, the illicit thrill of it, though it’s that, too, it’s…she’s so hot, skin crawling with the fever, and his hands on her back and her face and his mouth on hers is like being dunked in cold water. Like the time in Skellige that she jumped into the sea along with the rest of the clan, sharp-stinging cold that jolted her into a new kind of awareness.

There’s no jolt into awareness, here, but she feels like she might be swimming toward it, finally. 

She’s clumsy, as she tries to kiss Dara back, but he doesn’t seem concerned. She vaguely notes that he seems – confident. Smooth, like he knows what he’s doing, and for the first time she wonders how old is he really? but then Dara drags his mouth from hers and to her ear and she’s distracted from considering it.

“I think – I think I can feel it, too,” he murmurs. “It’s – not the same, not what happened to you, but….” 

If he has anything more to say, he doesn’t continue with it; instead, he drags his mouth down her throat. She gasps at the zing of pleasure that strikes her core, and he seems to notice, kissing back up the stretch of her neck and then back down, letting his teeth scrape across the sensitive skin. 

Now she’s whining. It’s an embarrassing sound, but she can’t stop; she barely has any control of herself, really only enough to cling to the stone she’s sitting on and Dara’s thigh. She can’t seem to figure out what they’re sitting on, or how he’s positioned in relation to her, but he distracts her once again by dropping kisses further down, along her collarbone and even further.

She remembers, suddenly, that she’s only in her nightclothes. She wonders, distantly and vaguely, why that hadn’t occurred to her when she left the camp, that she was hardly dressed, but it doesn’t matter now. 

Mostly, it’s lucky, because it means Dara only has to shift a little and tug at the large, scooped neck to bare her breasts, and his mouth is following along quickly. 

The pleasure of all of it has been shocking, really – his mouth and his hands and how well her body responds to him, how slick she is between her thighs – but this is something else entirely. The noise she makes is broken, caught in her throat as she tries to writhe, nails scraping rough and painful against the stone. 

Dara shifts again, and this time when her nightgown moves it’s because he’s pulling it up, uncovering her thighs and belly and then her breasts again. She struggles to help, letting go of his leg when he tugs at the sleeve on that arm, and then lifting the hand she has braced on the stone to let him pull the whole thing off, finally. Her hair is in her face, but that hardly matters when he kisses her again, still moving but in a way she still can’t seem to figure out. 

Until, of course, she’s suddenly being lifted. She yells, heart jumping to her throat, but Dara’s grip is sure and he’s murmuring soothingly as they move. Her vision is still too blurry to make anything out, never mind the fact that it’s dark and she doesn’t know where she is, but she thinks he turns them. She can tell he only takes about a dozen steps before he’s lowering her again.

It’s…a fur, she realizes. A smaller one, as her legs rest on moss and undergrowth, but a fur all the same, soft even where it sticks to her tacky skin. As soon as she’s laid out on it, Dara is laying over her, his hips pressed between her thighs and his elbows on either side of her face.

She…expects to feel his cock, expects him to tip her hips up and just – get on with it, really, but that doesn’t happen. His cock does press against her hip, blood-hot and hard and…a little oddly shaped for what she expects, actually, but she can’t really focus on that when he’s kissing down her throat and murmuring.

“So beautiful,” he breathes, “wish it wasn’t like this, that I could do it right.”

“Right?” she asks, feeling marginally clearer with so much of his skin pressed to hers. He responds to the way she rolls her body up against him by dropping a little more of his weight onto her, pressing her further into the fur and the soft ground beneath. 

He chuckles against her throat, but it’s strained. “I – you’re a princess, Ciri,” he says, and she…kind of gets what he’s saying, there, but also….

“Not anymore,” she reminds him, pretending it doesn’t make her chest go tight, and he shakes his head, though he doesn’t actually disagree.

“Even so,” is all he says, and then, after a momentary detour to mouth at her shoulder, “This is – something like this is…a gift, at the least. Sacred, at best. Having to do it like this…you deserve better.”

And she’s still hazy, still sort of trailing behind him, but that – it hits her and she snorts.

Dara leans up to give her an incredulous look.

“It’s a chore,” she counters, echoes of a dozen maids in her childhood echoing in her head. “Not – not always, but….”

He just sort of blinks at her, and then shakes his head. “Not for us,” he says, finally, and then he’s ducking back down to kiss her again, and this one feels…different. Softer, hotter. She whines into his mouth, and he sucks gently at her swelling bottom lip before he pulls back and puts his mouth back on her chest. She almost doesn’t catch how he murmurs, “Not to me.”

Something about that is….

Too much, she decides, unsure what to do with the myriad of emotions swirling in her gut and her chest, on top of the way her body is screaming a new, unfamiliar need at her. 

“Please,” she murmurs, entirely unsure what she’s even asking for. She knows the fundamentals of bodies and the basic mechanics of sex – her grandmother was protective, but not shy – but that’s all, really. It seems clear to her that Dara at least knows those and a bit more, so she ignores the way her stomach is twisting with uncertainty and gods know what else and just…trusts him.

He nuzzles against her breast and hums, the same sort of soothing as when he lifted her, and then he’s shifting his weight to balance on one arm instead of two. It pulls his weight off of her, mostly, and she whines, but he just kisses at her sternum and hums again. His freed hand trails down, over her shoulder and across one breast, pausing for just a moment to circle a fingertip around her nipple as she shudders helplessly, and then over her ribs and to her hip. Once there, he circles the touch in with gentle strokes, until he’s resting his palm over her mound, fingers held lightly against her folds.

Just as helplessly as the shudder, her hips buck, and that movement seems to be what he was waiting for. His mouth finds her nipple, and then his fingers are spreading her gently before just sort of stroking over the slick flesh there.

The sound she makes is close to a wail, loud and sudden and then choked, when he just sucks at her nipple and that stroking touch turns into his fingertips gently circling her entrance. Her hips buck again, and his fingers move back up, until that gentle circling is at her clit. 

Her skin feels electrified, and the heat is worsening but it’s good, now, it feels right. Dara’s mouth moves to her other breast, and he presses his fingers just a little harder against her, sending a shock of pleasure through her so intense that she jerks, the leg she has bent around Dara’s tensing and forcing him a little closer. 

With the way he shifted to touch her, his cock is pressed between his belly and her thigh, and he grunts when her leg forces him tighter to her, his own hips rolling and grinding his erection against her. This time, she can sort of pin what seemed odd about it – it’s more tapered at the top than she’d expected, and she can’t really tell if it’s just that feeling is different than seeing, or if his cock is actually oddly tapered.

…or maybe that elves have slightly different anatomy than humans, because now that she’s thinking about it, she’s fairly certain none of the scholarly writings and sketches she’d seen ever talked about elves at all. 

The movement of his hips doesn’t stop, either, and she can tell there’s – texture, almost, though that’s…not quite right. His skin feels just like any human’s, but it’s underneath the smoothness of skin. Soon enough, though, he’s shifting his fingers and thoroughly distracting her by holding her spread open with two while a third strokes directly over her swollen clit. 

She loses her breath, and then her vision goes, too, everything spinning and black-white-starry. She’s trembling, but Dara isn’t stopping, isn’t moving away; instead, he’s just firming the touch against her clit, moving faster, starting to bite messily at her breasts in between panted encouragements.

“Like this, just one, I promise I’ll give you what you need, but this first – ” he rasps, still grinding his cock against her thigh, the movement growing slicker with sweat or maybe precum, she doesn’t know which. He keeps murmuring, some of it choked, but she loses track quickly, the trembling turning into quivering into shaking, until the jittery tension finally snaps and she’s coming.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, the small part of it that isn’t drowning in heat and pleasure and somehow worsened need, she realizes oh, so this really is why people do this so much.

There’s knowing, objectively, that orgasms are enjoyable and that people like them, and then there’s feeling it – the spiraling heat and seeping tension, how her heart hammers and then settles alongside a sudden lassitude in her limbs. She lets out a sigh she’s almost embarrassed of, it’s so – wanton.

“Gorgeous,” Dara is whispering, forehead pressed to her collar as he rocks his hips against her. “Gods above, look at you, want to do this again, later, when I can take my time and give you everything – “

Her stomach twists again, much more pleasantly this time, but already the heat is coming back with a vengeance to steal the afterglow, her hips cramping as they jerk up against his stilled hand. 

“Please,” she breathes, and her voice is startlingly raspy – she wonders if she was screaming, and pretends that the heat flooding her face is just more of the effect the ceremony had on her and not a blush. “I think it’s – I need….”

She knows what she needs, now; she needs him to fuck her, properly, but the words stick in her throat. She swallows against them, opens her mouth to try again, but still nothing comes out.

Dara says something she doesn’t catch, Elder Speech, she thinks, but his hand is moving then. “Okay,” he says. “Just, first – ”

His fingertips circle her entrance again, but this time instead of just being an electrifying tease, one of them is sinking slowly inside her. She makes another incredibly wanton noise, but can’t even bring herself to care about it, angling her hips up as if she could force that single digit any deeper. 

“Please,” she gasps again. 

“I know,” he murmurs back, kissing from her sternum to her mouth. “I know, I have you, just – let me, just for a second.”

She makes a vaguely assenting noise against his mouth, clenching down on the finger he’s rocking in and out of her. He grunts, and then there’s a second finger singing into her, and it’s – a stretch, one she can feel, like when she reaches above her head too far, but there’s no pain. She moans. 

“Fuck.” Dara sounds almost pained, but he kisses her again before she can try to ask, and his fingers are moving faster now, pulling almost all the way out before he sinks them back in, and it’s – good, it’s so fucking good, better than she ever though possible, but it’s not enough.

“Dara,” she pleads, voice pitchy, “Dara, please.”

He curses again, in Elder this time. His fingers slip out of her with an obscenely wet noise, and she whines in loss even as she realizes he’s moving to give her what she needs. It takes more effort than it rightly should, but she manages to lever herself somewhat up on her elbows as he settles on his knees between her thighs, wanting to actually see him now, at least as much as she can in the blurry dark as clouds pass over the moon.

She loses the thread of her thoughts, though, when she does look. He’s – handsome, even pretty, she knows that. She’s known that since the first time  she saw him anything resembling cleaned up, the first time they had to bathe together in a freezing river after the Cintran refugee camp had been attacked. But she realizes now that it had been purely objective, then, seeing his chest and the cut of his hips and his fine bone structure and knowing that he was conventionally attractive. 

What she’s experiencing now, watching him breathing hard where he’s poised between her legs, his cock in his hand, is anything but objective. Especially once her eyes land on his cock. 

With everything so shadowed, only the occasional beam of moonlight to highlight edges and base colors, it’s hard to really see, but she can get an idea – and she was right, earlier, with the assumption that maybe elves’ anatomy is different than humans.

It’s not unrecognizably different, the same basic shaft and head shape, but his cock is much thinner at the top than the sketches she’s seen of human men, and the whole shape is more tapered. Also, along the sides and bottom, thrown into more relief as he strokes himself and his fingers shift, are some sort of – ridges. The texture she’d felt, earlier. 

She swallows, and even if she feels a little unsure, the longer they sit in this sort of tableau the harder it gets to breathe and think so – she shoves it aside. 

“Dara,” she says, again, less of a plea but still very much a request.

His eyes drift up from where he’d been staring between them, and at least he looks as off-kilter as she feels.

“Yeah,” he says, as if his name had been a proper question, and then he’s shuffling closer and leaning over her again, their hips still separated but only just. Ciri gasps at the feeling of his cock twitching against her belly and lets him steal the breath right out of her with a kiss, the most desperate of them so far. 

“Please.”

– – – – –

He really doesn’t know what to do with how hearing Ciri plead makes him feel, so he shoves it pointedly aside and instead focuses on the here and now, the fact that no matter what trepidation he feels he cannot back out and risk her life.

Especially since he’d really rather like to give this a shot when it’s not life-or-death, if she’ll have him.

It’s easy, really, to slot their hips together, feeling the heat radiating from her cunt. She pants into his mouth when he kisses her again, and then whimpers when he shifts and drags the head of his cock over her folds. She’s so slick he has to keep a grip on himself to control the movement, and his heart hammers in his chest, wondering how much of that is the ritual, the effect on her, and how much of it is just her natural response. 

“Please,” she whispers again, lips still against his, and he kisses her again, shuddering at the sensation as he rubs his cock over her hole. 

“I have you,” he murmurs back, when he has to pull back to breathe. 

She just whines and hooks her legs around his waist properly, knees at his sides and feet crossed against his lower back. The movement rocks him forward, pushes just the tip of his cock inside her cunt, and they both freeze for the space of one rapid heartbeat.

“Dara,” she moans, outright moans, like the neediest whore, and any real control he was trying to exert is gone.

“Ciri,” he murmurs back, biting at her jaw as he sinks inside her with one smooth thrust. The searing heat and pleasure must scramble his brain, too, because the next thing he whispers is, “En'ca minne, yeá elaine.”

He has no idea if she even knows enough Hen Llinge to understand that, and he also doesn’t know if yes or no is the worse answer, so he bites his tongue and focuses on moving. Slowly, at first, at least as slowly as he can manage with his instincts beating at his chest to just take, to move faster and rougher. 

Needing to do something with that urge, he leans his weight to one side and drags his opposite hand between them, plucking at her nipples for a moment before he moves down, until he can get his fingers on her clit. She jolts and clenches so tight around him he’s afraid for a split second that he’s going to flare at just that, but the moment passes and he’s able to concentrate on moving his fingers and his hips in tandem. 

Beneath him, Ciri falls apart beautifully, seeming to melt everywhere except where she’s gripping onto him, hips tilting so he can shove just a little deeper. He hisses and bites at her throat, knows he’s leaving livid purple marks on the fair skin, and resists the urge to bite harder. 

Encouraged by the way she’s rocking her hips in tandem with his rhythm, how she’s gasping his name and please and arching into him, he moves faster. When she just whimpers and asks for more, he finally lets go, stops worrying so much about the pace and instead fixates on making her come on his cock. 

She’s so responsive it’s almost easy, and each new pleasure seems to overwhelm her in the best way, so he sets to it; rubbing consistent, tight circles on her clit, tilting his hips so his cock grinds against the sensitive front wall of her cunt, and when he can get his back bent the right way, sucking at her nipples until she wails. It only takes a few minutes of that dedicated attention for her to shatter, her wails turning into breathless screeching as she clenches down so hard he’s forced to stop thrusting.

Instead, he just grinds against her, struggling to breathe as his knot starts to swell – not to the point of a flare, not yet, but so close, and he doesn’t want it to happen yet, wants to make her come again first, really let her wring all of the pleasure out of this possible.

It takes several minutes of deep breathing as she comes down to get a grip on himself, but he manages, and soon she’s rolling her hips against his in a wordless demand. It makes him laugh, as strained as it is, but he moves.

“You’ll be the death of me,” he murmurs, and Ciri makes a noise in response, but he couldn’t say what it means. He doesn’t worry about it, instead just rolling his hips a little faster again, until he’s fucking her properly once more. 

He knows that even if he wants to he won’t be able to control himself this time; he’s going to come right with her. He shifts carefully, until their hips are more properly aligned and he can get his arm under her shoulders; she helps, unintentionally or not, by throwing her arms around his shoulders and pulling herself up to cling. 

“One more like this,” he murmurs, lips pressed to her ear since she’s buried her face in his throat. He can feel more than hear the way she’s still whining, clearly overstimulated but still needing. “One more for me, en'ca minne, just like this.”

“Dara,” she mewls, and just like that she’s coming again, barely anything more needed than the steady roll of his hips and a little gentle pressure against her clit. He bites down on her shoulder to keep in a vicious noise, sliding his hand up her belly and then to the side, til he can curl his fingers around the space between her waist and her hip and steady her frantic movement as she trembles through it. 

“Fuck, Ciri,” he practically growls it against her throat as his knot finally flares, and he grinds as deep into her cunt as he can get, entire body jolting and head starting to spin when he feels how she squeezes around the intrusion.

Human women don’t lock properly, not like elves, but it’s as if their bodies know to try anyhow. All the same, bodily instinct or not, the sensation is clearly enough of a shock that Ciri’s mind objects.

Luckily, the grip he has on her is enough to keep her from jerking away and hurting either of them. 

“Shh,” he soothes, “it’s okay, minne, it’s alright, shhh.”

“What is – fuck,” Ciri whines, voice cracking, and seemingly without her input her hips are rolling against his, cunt clenching even tighter around his knot. The sensation of her squeezing like that, and the way she’s trembling as she grinds his cock deeper inside herself, has him shivering and whining himself, fingertips pressing little point bruises into her soft skin.

“Knot,” he says, shorter and sharper than intended as she squeezes again. “Just – don’t try to pull away.”

“I – fuck, yeah, okay,” she mutters, clearly distracted. He can sympathize. 

It takes a bit of effort, but he’s able to sort of scoot his knee higher on the little fur Farryn had laid out for them and then twist, lifting Ciri off of it so he can continue to turn and drop back on it. Unfortunately, the movement means that his knot just presses deeper, almost to the point that he knows he would be locked because of the shape of her pelvis.

She gasps and then mewls, and with a mind-bending little movement of her hips, comes on his knot.

He loses his breath, hips jerking as if he could ever get any deeper than this, with all of her weight pulling her to the very base of his cock. She just makes a cut off little noise, almost a sob, and sort of collapses down onto his chest, still shaking through the aftershocks. 

It takes a long moment for him to regain any of his thoughts, but when he does, he notices that she’s cooled off considerably – in fact, she’s shivering now, the sweat they’re both covered in probably chilling her something fierce. He tugs her down, grunting at the shift, and wraps his arms around her. He can’t do much else, pseudo-locked and out in the woods. He’s sure Farryn probably left more than just a single fur for them before she started herding the others back to camp, but he would have to look for that, and that just circles right back to the fact that Ciri is still caught on his knot. 

At least the fever is gone, and as her breathing settles, he can practically feel her overactive thinking returning.

“Shh,” he hushes, preemptively, but she isn’t deterred.

“Dara,” she says, softly, and her voice is serious enough that he surrenders and lets her sit up a little. He hisses at the movement, cock twitching inside her, but they both ignore that. 

“Mm?”

“...you said fertility ritual. Before.”

“Mm.”

“Dara, I – I have a cycle. I can – this is….”

His stomach drops out. Because if the both of you make it out of this, it’s not me who is going to have a half-elf bastard out of it.

He had known, of course, that it was the risk he was taking in saving Ciri’s life. But she hadn’t, not really.

“Elvish fertility isn’t great,” he offers, and it must sound as weak as it feels, because Ciri whacks his chest.

“With other elves,” she says, and she’s unfortunately right. Human-elf pairings are so much more likely to create offspring, and everyone knows it.

“It’s still possible you won’t take,” he says, and catches her hand before she can hit him again. He can’t resist the urge to kiss her fingertips, though, and he watches as her frown softens. 

“But if I do?”

He swallows. “If you don’t want to carry my child,” he says, carefully, refusing to acknowledge the emotional reaction to that that rises in his chest, “then we’ll go to the temple, or one of the healers in the cities. As long as we go early, they can get rid of it.”

Her eyes go wide, at that. 

“You would – ” she starts, and then cuts off, looking away. “I know half-elves are frowned upon, but – ”

“Children are…revered,” he interrupts. “And mothers the same. I told you, this, this act itself –  it’s a gift, a sacred one, and….”

“...and?”

“And I wouldn’t make you carry a child you didn’t want.”

No matter how desperately I want it, how much my people need children and hope.

She pulls her hand from his, just to turn it and cup his face. Her palm is small and smooth, her skin the kind of soft that tells of her origin. Her thumb strokes over his cheek while she looks at him. After a moment, he can’t take the intensity of the stare, and she doesn’t say anything when he closes his eyes and turns his face into her hand. 

Finally, though, she moves, and first he feels her lips at his temple, and then on the bridge of his nose, before her mouth finds his. The kiss is chaste and soft and sweet and his chest aches over it.

“Look at me,” she whispers, against his lips, and he goes cross eyed at first when he obeys, but she just leans a little back and smiles. 

“What?” he asks, after another moment of silence where she just smiles softly at him.

“No temple or healers,” she murmurs. “...at least, not for several months.”

Her meaning takes a long moment to sink in, and then he feels like he’s been punched in the sternum. 

“You – Cirilla.”

“That’s my name, yes.”

He laughs, then, even as tears gather in his eyes. “Ciri,” he breathes, and tugs her back down into another sweet kiss. “Really? Even if it means that a half-elf has a right to the throne of Xin’trea?”

Her smile widens into a grin. “Better than Nilfgaard, isn't it?”

The tears are spilling over, then, as well as the laughter again, and she shakes a little as she starts to giggle, and he can’t possibly do anything except roll them back over, her back in the undergrowth, and kiss her until the sun comes up.