Chapter Text
I sit at one side of a latrones board, my pieces all captured by a red demon hand. Across from me sits Jericho Swain, the man to whom I owe this life I'm living. If I'm still living. When the letters stopped coming I started holding my breath. No matter how few and far between, they had always been answered before as soon as they would arrive. Now, nearly suffocated in the silence lacking response, I've come to Noxus Prime. To the Triffarix. No. To him. Two years after his takeover. Everything, always in twos.
“Was that you I was playing?” I ask casually. “Or Raum?”
The old man’s eyes crinkle at the corners. He doesn't like it when I address that demon directly. The one who, once a thriving keeper of secrets, has been forced into servitude to him by ways I never pretend to understand. I just know that when Raum came, the glowing red hand came too to replace his missing arm. Then there were the crows. Ravens. Whatever they are. Each with three glowing red eyes on either side of their heads. Little watch dogs. Perfect for gathering the information I require.
“You didn't come all the way here just to lose a game of latrones, general,” Swain says slowly. His voice is deep, calculating, and Noble as always. But the years have brought a disillusioned gravel to it as well. “Not so easily. What's distracting you?”
“You know why I'm here.”
“How would I? You have yet to enlighten me.”
“Kino Medarda.” Not a muscle I have twitches.
“What about him?”
“He hasn't answered my letters.”
“You send letters?”
As if he doesn't know everything in Noxus.
“Occasionally,” I say. “Your spies don't tell you?” I nod to one of the crows.
Swain smiles, rising from his chair to sprinkle birdseed along the windowsill.
“I have this bad feeling that something has happened to him,” I say. “I want to know what.”
“Why?”
“I'm asking as a friend. Not a general. C’mon, Jerry, you know you owe me for letting you win our last game.”
With a heavy sigh, Mr. Vision closes his eyes. His human hand goes to his temples to rub out a headache. I wait. Patiently.
He moves to a bottle and pours me a glass of wine, getting one for himself as well. Then he sits back down at the latrones board and sets up for another match. I set my side of the board as well.
He takes a sip, ponders, then makes his opening move.
“Kino Medarda is dead,” he says.
I move my first piece. I'm not surprised. I figured as much when he didn't respond. Still, my heart sinks a little. Such a bright light -- now gone to this world. “Who?”
His turn. “Not how?”
“Your pale faced woman?”
“What makes you suspect her?”
“She’s usually the one killing off the nobles. He was a political leader here. One of our best. Can't imagine the Triffarix isn’t hobbling with him gone.”
“One bad knee doesn't stop a man from walking.”
“No.” I smile knowingly. “It does not.”
“Ask your next question.”
“Make your next move. It's been your turn for minutes now.”
He examines the board like a student doing a study. When he finally moves a piece, I take it.
Continuing our chat, I say, “Ambessa?”
“Is that a question?”
“Sorry. Could you not hear the hitch of my voice at the end?” I repeat her name, the question in it emphasized.
“You're here with me. Your hands move steadily. So you've already exhausted all other avenues of locating her and you already knew the wolf pup of the Medarda clan was dead. Where do you think she'd go to lick her wounds?”
“If I knew, I wouldn't be playing latrones with you right now.”
“Wouldn't you?”
“She isn't in Piltover.”
“No.”
“She will be eventually. Right now, she's too scared to face her daughter. I'm betting she's doing some tracking. Sniffing down a blood trail.”
“So why are we playing then?”
“Quit being cryptic, Jerry.”
I scold him with a glare. He greets it with a low chuckle. He takes my piece. Damn. I always fall for that one.
“Okay Rabbit, how about a deal then? As old friends.”
“I'm not letting you win again,” I tease.
“I've just won.”
What? I glance down at the board, my mind a flurry of possible next moves. Left. Right. Up. Down. Shit. He really has got me. In about twenty moves.
I pout like a child, pulling a foot up onto the chair and crossing my arms. A piece of white hair falls over my eyes from my buns and I blow it back out of my face. Stubbornly, it stays. I just can't win today.
Swain smiles, fingers folded together nearly. Like he's holding the secret keeper’s hand.
“I’ll see what I can do about locating Ambessa Medarda,” he says. As if he doesn't already have tabs on her. “Though only if you tell me why you're interested in finding her.”
“Her son is dead.”
He gives me a look. A grin.
“Shut up.”
From the beak of a landing crow comes an envelope. A letter sealed with orange wax stamped by a standing bunny bearing a simplistic heart in the very center of its chest.
If losing latrones felt awful. This feels worse. I'm beginning to believe this sinking feeling I've got isn't from Kino’s death at all.
“Return to sender,” he says, holding it out to be between two pale fingers. “Without being opened?”
“Shut up!” I snatch the letter away.
Alright, so maybe I’d reached out to Ambessa already. Maybe I'd offered my sympathies. Maybe even twice. Or, you know, four times. She kept sending them back the same way. When this final one didn't return to me, I knew she had left the city.
Swain just laughs. Not a plotting Triffarix laugh. No. Just the simple at my expense chuckle of a goading friend. A very bad friend, I'm starting to believe.
“Mors,” the bastard raven squakes. “You should go. The assassins are due any minute. It's how I know the Faceless cares.”
Rising, I tuck that bit of hair behind my ear and the letter away in the trash can. No further secrets to be gained from an aggressive where are you?
“Send her my regards,” I wave on my way out.
Mors. Quite the city from what I've heard.
***
“Or you could choose not to tell me,” a cocky voice growls as articulate as ever. “The choice is yours alone, colonel .”
Always the theatrics with her. Gods.
I march right into the room without a care for the show I'm interrupting. Yeah, yeah, colonel that's got ties to someone or another all intimidated despite being surrounded by an entire legion he commands. A single wolf, toying with the body he doesn't realize is already a bone for her to chew on. The illusion of choice. The choice of illusions. Get a new routine.
There's never not thought in her eyes and that doesn't change as she sees me. She does quick math in her head not just finding out where I came from but trying to add me into this current equation while keeping the same sum. That only works if I'm a zero. She knows I'm not.
Those thoughts change, those eyes wide, when I slap her across the face with an open hand.
“That's for making me track you down,” I scold.
I grab a fistful of her furry collar and yank her lips into mine. I can't tell if this is the squirming feeling of having missed her inside of my chest or simply a blade being twisted.
“That's,” I say, “for being in one piece.”
I release her. Before she can say a word -- before she can retake control here -- question why now of all these years I've chosen to hop back into her life -- I turn and address the crowd. Not a bad group. Strong. Resilient. They've got scars and muscles. Even the colonel she's been batting around between her paws. She must have worked a long while to get him to the point he's at now. He's almost broken. Almost. How rude of me to interrupt such a sensitive moment.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I say, not at all sorry.
I turn back to the woman I came here for. My index finger pushes against her leather breastplate the same as my scowl does.
“Ten minutes,” I tell her. “Finish up here and then join me on my ship. You have some explaining to do, general.”
I flick my finger up as I pull it off of her. My nail just slightly cuts beneath her square chin. Mm. I have to admit she wears these years apart well. Almost beautifully. Almost.
I leave, slamming the doors behind me. I hope she returns to her coercion thinking of me. I deserve a thought or two in her head. I'm worth at least that much, if apparently not a return letter.
***
As soon as she enters the room my arms are around her. Half hug, half strangulation, I can hardly wrap my arms together around her vast muscle. Has she gotten even stronger? Is that possible?
I pull away, my eyes only flitting to the burly mage man she's brought with her for a second. You needed backup to speak to me, Ambessa? Really?
“I worried about you,” I hiss it like an insult. Then my face softens. “I'm so sorry about Kino.” Back to a glare. My emotions fluctuating by the second. “You should have told me! Why didn't you open my letters? I had to go to Swain to track you down. Swain!”
Where I've been a shifting wind of blabber, Ambessa has been steady and still. Shoulders square, she growls angrily. She pushes my arms away with little effort, passing me to head straight for the teapot I've been heating.
Sure. Help yourself. Ungrateful jerk.
“Why are you here, Rabbit?” She asks, somehow addressing me whilst completely ignoring me.
“Oh I'm sorry.” The mage man follows me into the room, subtly thumbing glowing runes. Please. As if we're going to fight. “Thought I might find solidarity in you since we're both grieving your dead son. No. You're too busy on this little suicide mission of yours.”
The teacup she poured shatters in her closing fist. She turns to me, her eyes wide and howling. Boiled water must burn her hand but she doesn't show an ounce of caring.
“My son is not dead!” She snaps. “He is missing. Taken.”
“Oh, we're on that stage of grief then. Good. Anger comes after denial; you've always excelled at that bit.”
A cast iron teapot whizzes towards my head. I dodge it but as it hits the ship’s iron wall behind me, hot water splashes out onto the back of my neck.
“Watch it,” I warn.
“After a decade of staying wisely out of my life,” she marches towards me, teeth grating and fists curled, “why did you chose now to reenter? Were you trying to ruin everything? That colonel is my best lead on finding Kino.”
“I've got a better lead. One on a good priced gravestone.”
“Take your ships and leave here, general.”
“Come home, Ambessa.”
That man -- her little shadow bodyguard (talk about paranoid) -- grips his runes even tighter. He looks at her the way I used to. The way that asks for her permission. She contemplates telling him to chop my head off but stops herself. Instead, she waves him away. “Go, Rictus. I can handle this one.”
He leaves with a loyal bow of his head. Good dog. Close the door behind you. He doesn't, so I'm left in an open cage with Ambessa. Makes it all the worse then that I don't chose to leave also.
“You didn't answer my letters,” I say.
“You didn't take that as a hint? I thought you were done with me.”
My face falls. A part of me wants to reach for her hand. To hug her again and to tell her about why I had started writing the pup in the first place. To tell her it was because I missed her. In a sick sick way, I missed her. I could never be done with her. Not truly.
All of the years of unsent, burned, letters stuff themselves in the front of my mouth. Like a mailbox, overstuffed with useless paper. Every weak moment over wine. Every time I convinced myself I only needed her advice not her. No. Not her . Just what she could offer. An ally. A contact. We could be equals now, I told myself, generals facing the same war. The same battles.
I knew it wasn't true. It's why these words have waited so long. It's why they wait again now.
The truth is, I'm absolutely fine without her. Yet, while need no longer draws me in, there's want to replace it. I don't need her. I'll never need her again. I want her. I want her in my life but I'm not sure she'll fit. So until this catalyst -- this loss -- I've continued to ignore her. Only now she's ignoring me and that just pisses me off.
“You need to hit something,” I say.
“I need to break something,” she seethes.
“Then break me.”
No protest as a fist connects with my jaw. It's enough force to send me to the side. A fistful of hair. A shove towards hot coals where the tea was warming earlier. My body becomes a speed bag for her anger. My ribs cracking and belly bruising to help her heal. To help her think straight.
“Do you feel better now?” I spit onto the floor, rubbing a tender side.
“No.” Not even close.
“Then hit me again.”
A firm leg to the side of my neck, kicking me over to a left hook.
“Harder!” I order.
Fists on my expensive collar. The headbutt of a ram. Then a good old fashioned punch to the face.
“C’mon! This is how you're planning to fix things, right?!”
Forward kicked into a wall. Flipped so my face is crushed against metal with one hand while my arm is pulled out of place behind me. My shoulder whines as it trembles just short of falling out of the socket.
“No mercy! Kino’s dead! If fighting is going to bring him back then--!”
Wham !
The puissant slam of her fist against the wall sounds like thunder when it's so close to my ear. She still holds my arm bent behind me. Her grip is strong. But she doesn't pull my forearm up to finish the move. To dislocate my limb. No, she tries to strangle me instead with a vice around my wrist so tight it's shaking.
Wet heavy stones of sorrow fall from her eyes onto my bare shoulders.
I let her cry for a moment. Pinned but present. Before I take advantage of her distraction to twist my arm free. I turn around to face her -- this broken whimpering wolf who still holds hate, for the world, for me, behind her misty eyes -- and I put a hand to either side of her head. I touch our noses together, having to pull her head down. I close my eyes. Her hands hang like meat hooks off my sculpted forearms.
When a sob, an actual audible sob, escapes her, her knees shatter. I follow her to the ground, shushing gently. My thumbs rock back and forth along zygoma. On one side, I brush a scar. Poor wolf. Still limping around with a throne in its paw as though it's not something I can so easily help to remove.
Her tears stop as soon as they came. Muscled back by practiced eyes.
“I miss him too,” I say, without opening mine. “You are going to be okay. You already know that but they don't. So show everyone what you and I already are aware of: you are stronger than death, Ambessa Medarda.”
***
We eat our dinner silently. Her battleship, not mine. It's almost intimate. Romantic. The candles on the table. The carrot soup and sourdough bread with little bunny ears curling out the top of it. Just me, Ambessa, and the brick wall of a body guard that sits between us. How comforting. How cozy.
“More wine?” Ambessa offers.
I lift my glass and she, chivalrous as the noble she is, pours. Coming straight from the bottle I watched her open earlier, I take comfort in the lack of poison.
I lean back and sip the posca. I can never seem to sit regular in chairs. Always one foot up or an arm around the back. Sometimes even sideways. But her, she sits like it's a throne. Lounging and deserving of the respect and space she takes in equal value.
“How did you hear about Kino?” She asks me.
“He stopped responding to my letters,” I say.
“You wrote letters?”
“Sometimes. When I saw something that made me think of him. We were friends, despite you.”
Her demeanor shifts just slightly at my words. Were. We were friends. Because nothing with Kino can now include words like are or is. Present tense is reserved only for the present, and death has rendered him the past.
We continue on in silence but I wouldn't call it awkward. It's strange, seeing her now. Like no time has passed and yet everything has changed. She's no stranger to me. Not even close. I can still hear her moaning from the ghost of my eyes alone over her most sensitive spots. I still have a map of her body embedded in my muscle memory. I can tell you how many scars lie under that leather on her shoulder, barring any new ones. I can tell you how sensitive they are. Where she got them. Who's to blame.
I can imagine her voice in a million different lines. I can hear what she says before she says it. I can feel her mannerisms before she makes them. I am hyper aware of her and yet I am more disconnected from her than ever.
I couldn't tell you where she was last week. Last month. Last year. I can't tell you her favourite flower but I know her favourite tea.
She's a reflection of somebody I used to know better than my own face. An older, sexier, reflection with whom I only share one piece of history.
Kino Medarda.
That little pup whose broken both of our calloused hearts.
“Do you,” I start, spooning the orange cream in my bowl, “remember Kino’s birthday party? When he was eighteen?”
“I will drown you in that soup.” She slurps her own loudly.
I smile anyways. It's a good memory. One of the few I still recall from that lifetime.
“So what's the colonel made your hit list for?” I ask.
“I don't plan to kill him. I plan to use him to get closer to an organization he's a part of.”
“Mm. Black Rose, huh?”
She grips her knife, moving almost entirely past the bread to my side of the table with it. Then Rictus puts a firm but gentle hand on her arm and she pulls back and cuts a slice. I keep my eyes up, unblinking, head tilted into my spoon. I slurp my soup. Damned if I don't flutter my eyelids.
She glowers at me. Every torn chunk of that sourdough a bite into rabbit au vin.
I toss my spoon aside with a clang, lifting my bowl to my lips. I chug down the entire sweet brown-sugar of the carrots in one long glug. With a satisfied hiss of release, I toss the orange stained dinner wear to the table again and place the spoon back inside.
My gaze again finds Ambessa. She's stopped chewing.
A beat.
Then two.
I'm not sure what we're saying and I don't think she knows either, but our eyes hold a council nonetheless.
“Leave us,” Ambessa orders her mage.
He raises a brow and she confirms her dismissal of him without blinking, without looking away from me.
“And tell Florian to go home. I won't be needing him tonight.”
That comment has Rictus here giving me pause. Then he just seems to accept it. Not his problem, I guess. The man leaves. I cock a brow, shrugging nonchalant.
“Florian?” I say. “A new play thing, I imagine? Flamboyant? Skinny? Possibly gay?”
She growls. She darkens. She lunges over the table.
Good.
I was just about to do the same.
We meet in the middle atop a red tablecloth, spilled serving bowls, and cutlery.
Our teeth clink together as we both have the wise idea to mash together open mouths. Feral as rabid dogs, we attack each other. Jaws on jaws, paws on shoulders.
I rip off that stupid looking fur half cloak she's always wearing and send it into a serving bowl of soup. I replace it with my hand, her shoulder fitting into the curve of my palm like a key into a lock. What she unlocks in me? A burning caught between fury and passion that rages from my chest into my groin.
I don't like to wear my armor inside a ship. I don't wear it much at all unless I'm on a battlefield. A separate person -- a monster -- lives there on Noxian drawn war lines. Here, I am just Rabbit. Here, I am softer. A woman. So I wear womanly things. Silk blouses. Brocade gowns. Cloaks and shawls of wool and lace. My current lace shawl joins Ambessa’s accessory in the soup. My expensive bodice ripped cleanly down the back seam -- the skin of a poor fluffy bunny -- revealing the muscles of the monster -- the soldier -- that lurks beneath the fabric. That is who she truly wants to touch.
I'd snap at her for ruining such a pretty thing, but the only words for this conversation are growls, barks, and howls. I bite harshly into her neck then roll my tongue along the bruise. She groans and it falls from her lips down past our bodies to the core of my desire.
I pull myself up slightly. Reading my mind, her muscled thigh is between my legs when I settle back down. I grind my hips, riding her as she ravages my skin with kisses and sucks and nips. All the while I unlace her armor, something my fingers are very well practiced at.
As I pull off her breastplate, she shoves me down into the table, onto my back. My hand falls into the squishy center of a half-cut loaf of bread. With a drag, I wash it and everything else above me aside. I lift my torso into her lapping tongue to do the same clearing of the space beneath me. Then I lay back down. My fingers curl into the tablecloth. She ventures lower. Lower. My stomach.
Rip .
The newly exposed skin of my hip bones.
Oh wolf, you've got to stop being so aggressive with my clothing. It's designer and imported!
When her lips press into my clit I let out a girlish sound.
No.
This is for her tonight. And I know she's a true bottom.
I grab her hair and bring those perfect plush pillow lips up to my own. She allows me and we kiss something wild and passionate as one of my hands trails down the front of her pants. Circling her bundle of nerves earns me a whimper. Pressing down harsher than most would prefer earns me a moan and a slam of her fist into the table. As touchy as I remember, I see.
I sit up, my hand still working furiously against slick wet folds, curling up and down along the outside of her core. She sits with me and when we reach the vertex of our position, she starts to lean back and I crawl forward into her. This time it's she who does the table clearing.
I kiss down her panting chest, listening to the deep growl within it. My touch turns light but still pressured enough for her to feel it though the armor she wears even when naked. Spend time with a nipple. Then the other. The predator becomes a writhing manic desperate mess beneath me. I grin, smiling into a bite of her nipple, and push my finger gently inside of her.
She holds me with those strong scarred arms of hers. She pulls me down. Onto her. Into her. I trust rough and deep as I can, my fingers a wave that scrapes along inside her everytime I pull back out.
I continue until she breaks. Then I remove her pants -- in one piece for I know the value in even this cotton -- and I make her cum again. Everything I try to move my tongue down to get a taste of her, desperate claws hold me firmly up by her face. She wants to kiss my lips. She wants to bite them. She wants me here. With her. She doesn't want to be alone. So I don't leave her. Not for a second.
When I know I can't take anymore (for she would and has gone all night before) I collapse onto her chest. My fingers rise over my head limply where she sucks them clean. Then they fall beside our bodies into a puddle of spilled posca. She holds me, hands on either side of my ass, firmly there but not squeezing.
For some time, we just breathe together. I twirl circles in that wine. She finds constellations in the soup splattered ceiling. Then, when the moment begins to feel more intimate than primal, I ask, “How about a bath?”
We wash up and head to bed. Her bed.
I trace over her scars, she traces over my own, both of us in bright burgundy robes that do little to actually cover our naked bodies. I tell her of the shadows I see. Of the smokey wolf and the lamb always stalking in the traces of my vision. They showed up one day together and they've never left.
I tell her about the chimera of bodies that make up my own. The tapestry of woven souls puppeteering me around. I talk to her of death and rebirth and all the battles I've faced that she's missed. And of all the battles I've read about that she's claimed victory in.
“This version of me now,” I say, the trail end of some lost thought or story, “let me say it so that in the morning when this version of me is dead and I wish to kill you again you, at least, remember: I love you. Desperately, I love you, Ambessa Medarda. The wolf to my lamb.” I kiss a scar and one of her tender thumbs warms one of my bruises. My eyes absentmindedly trace the swirling dark corners of the room. The blue and white and black within them. “Those figures,” I say, almost whispering, “They're here now. Tell me you can see them.”
She turns a mighty head to the lamb -- to the smoke wolf that like a shawl wraps it in safety.
“Yes,” she says. “I always can.”
The lamb tilts its head, seeing the weakness in me as much as I see it in myself at this moment. It offers the kind mercy of its hand. With a sideways kiss to Ambessa’s skin -- whatever part may be near my lips -- I reach out and take the fleece. The trepidation within me sighs. Releases. I breathe. I close my eyes. I am stronger than my love for her and her danger.
What a grand thing it is, to be alive again.
Smiling, I roll off of her, my face to the opposite wall of the Kindred. I pull up the red covers and tuck my chin beneath them. To my back there is warm air, radiated with her heat but not her touch. I close my eyes, more ready for sleep then I have been in years.
“I'm going to kill you one day,” I muse wistfully.
“You can try, little rabbit,” she sighs. She shifts on the mattress. “You can certainly try.”
She moves to hold me but I shrug her off.
“Leave me alone, Ambessa,” I say, still smiling blissfully. “I'm trying to enjoy my new life.”
“This is my bed we're in.”
“Ah, so that's why it's so warm.”
***
The next few days we hunt together. She tracks the Black Rose cult and I shield her from its prickliest thorns. In the evenings we reminisce about Kino, the wolf pup that held a far greater part of her life than mine but who held a part of both of us much the same. Her heart is broken without him. The missing piece leaving shattered cutting edges. Over time, her blood will erode them and those edges will smooth. For now, I tend to the wounds every time she knicks herself on a corner.
At night, I love her. By the morning, I'm strong enough to remember who she is. She doesn't dare burden me with questions of why I spend my time here -- by her side. It's as if no time has passed between us at all in these years and yet as if we've spent the last decade lying just like this, arms around arms, soft kisses for hot calloused lips.
When it's time for her to continue her hunt, she takes only her pack. I don't know where's going next but I know it will be a long journey. Years before she braves Mel in Piltover. Months before she gets a new lead on what happened to Kino in Noxus. So for now, she is deployed one way and I am deployed another. Back to our separate battlefields. Our time for otium, our leisure, is over. As generals, bellum calls. It's back to fighting our war. To ignoring each other. To hating her. To tolerating her.
For the glory of Noxus!