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The round of Irelia’s nose heralds her tongue, which heralds her lips, which heralds her teeth, and Riven will be marked like a banner-staked battlefield for days. She won’t hide any of it- Riven has never been ashamed of her allegiances, even when she should be.
“Is this what you dogs do to the sons and daughters of Ionia?” hisses steel-cold, frigid as the blades levied into each wrist pinned to the dew-stained grass above Riven’s head. Irelia drags the flat of her tongue up Riven’s throat, rolling something small and breathy from her chords like an air pocket rolled from parchment, and Riven shudders and bleeds for it when the blades held by air do not budge. Her own body has been made her enemy.
No, but yes.
Riven never stood for that shit in her own company, but she knew it happened in others. Probably happened in her own anyway, out of her view. And it isn’t strictly a Noxian thing, or even particularly, but it is yet another ugly truth of war that Riven refused to recognize as inherent simply because she herself rejected it- compartmentalized when she should have analyzed. (And ugly is the wrong term, as if the act can be downplayed or prettied up to be anything but the violation that it is. As if only this specific flavor of exerting one’s will on the unwilling is reproachful, but all other avenues are somehow excusable. Oh, how Riven mourns not knowing that ignorance, unwilling or otherwise, is not, and will never be, a pardon for the suffering she inflicts.)
She doesn’t say that. The Captain of the Guard doesn’t seem like she’s in the mood to debate the ethics and doctrine of the long-gone Noxian front. Seems she’d rather fuck Riven into the dirt.
Or kill her. Kind of hard to tell with all the knives.
Irelia kisses her and seals the deal, and Riven moans her thanks.
Irelia kisses her harder and Riven would jump the Guardian and singlehandedly fell Swain’s empire for less. Lips’re warm when her hair is cool and silky, tongue’s slippery and soft and ladling into Riven like the weight of her dancer’s body above, and with the bite of teeth, Irelia takes and takes. Takes like she probably thinks Riven, the big, bad Noxian, takes, but Riven hasn’t ever literally crucified someone to get some action, so Irelia would be wrong on that count.
Then Irelia sits up and away from her clit, which is dreadful because the pressure of the grind has been fucking killer, and rucks Riven’s skirt past her waist like the worthless scrap of cloth it is, which is far more welcome.
Until Riven’s clit plunges into the chill of night and the pace dies gurgling for its lover. An old exasperation sighs through her from toes to chest and out her mouth.
“Just- just rub it like it’s a clit.” Riven winces. “No, don’t pull at it, it hasn’t been hard in years- put your fingers on the underside below the head and just rub. Like it’s a clit- yes. There. Good-.”
A blade flutters in from nowhere at all and sidles up against Riven’s throat, fingers stilling on her cock.
Irelia leans down, fire of so many incinerated villages threatening to spill from her eyes in molten columns, and seethes, “Do not speak to me in that tone again.”
“Quit fucking around and I won’t have to.”
That’s that. Irelia is going to kill her. A blade flickers into existence, peeling from another like a playing card with a sapphire flash-
And slides, slow and insidious, across the flesh atop Riven’s breast. The wound stings in a shallow, singing way, and Riven drops her head against the grass and moans like she hasn’t in what must be years, nipples close to punching through her bindings.
Irelia’s face twists. “Freak.”
“Fuck me already.”
She cuts her again for that, a small length that doesn’t pierce clear through the dermis- Riven has had countless blades against her skin in a variety of contexts, cut in so many ways that she can, without looking, gauge the depth with an accuracy that used to spook the field medics- and Riven bucks against Irelia’s touch that starts into something painfully harsh.
“Watch it-,” Riven snarls.
“Quiet.” Another lashing.
“Make me.”
And another.
“Fuck.”
And another.
Riven is already so much closer than she expects to be. Harsh or not, it’s good, and it’s quick, and it’s swelling in her thighs like sentiments of rebellion through the heartland, crimson and unignorable and all-consuming. Irelia razes Riven’s skin with the flames of her tongue, lapping at the weeping of her wounded chest until her saliva no longer stings but soothes and air becomes smoke-heavy, and Riven looks down and sees Irelia looking back, wine-red rose on her chin, blood in her black gaze.
Riven comes.
There’s the eruption rolling from deep in her core to deep through each limb and finger and toe and tingling in each nipple and seizing the muscles of her neck and thighs. There’s the patchwork throb slicing across the tops of her tits and the level screaming of her wrists bleeding high. Pain and ecstasy aren’t so different; Riven can’t distinguish them in the throes of it all.
Riven drifts back to ground in the same way she left it: staring Irelia down. Her eyes are grey as weathered stone, but bluer than water. Faded into her skull, but sharp enough to sunder with a glance. Older than the forests, and yet…
“Damn, you’re young.”
The furrow of her brow counts among the only creases chiseling through Irelia’s face, and remains only as long as Riven takes to answer her wary, “What?”
Riven swallows. The blade shoots against her throat again like reflex mistaking twitch for action; when it doesn’t relax, Riven wonders which breath it will be that swells her esophagus too far so that the razor’s edge finally crests through skin, ushering forth the rest of her throat flesh to cut itself open upon and secure a grim, laboring fate.
“I said,” Riven repeats, and it’s a bit like trying to talk through strangulation, “you’re young. And it’s been years since our paths last crossed. I can’t help but think: how old must you have been when I slew you?”
Irelia spits squarely in her face, and then.
Then Irelia stops. Stands with her fists clenched around her fury and simply saunters out of view, ripping away like a knife from a wound, leaving Riven to die in the grass under a fleet of stars and the weight of disappointment more agonizing than what any of Irelia’s bluesteel soul fragments could inflict. The pounding ache of her heart in her frigid, empty ribcage is the closest thing to love Riven’s ever mourned.
But Riven knows Irelia will return; twice, now, they’ve fought, and while the victors were indisputable as night and day, they weren’t final- weren’t final enough.
Riven doesn’t know if she’ll survive the third.
She’ll await eagerly, either way.