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There was a crash in the library.
Ratio startled from his studies, the words on the page blurring as his eyes focused on the area around him. The room was dim– only the glow of the small oil lamp he’d been using for his work kept the library from being completely without light. Ratio’s frown deepened when the source of the crash became no clearer with a simple glance about the library. A huff of annoyance slipped from his lips as he stood, a small orb of light summoned into the curve of his palm to illuminate his path forward.
No one else was around to investigate; he may as well ensure himself that it had been a mere mishap of nature. Otherwise, it would be a nuisance in the back of his mind until the morning arrived. The wind had probably just blown a window open, Ratio’s mind supplied. After all, it had been storming since before the sun had properly set. That was the logical conclusion, Ratio decided as he walked carefully through the stacks towards the source of the crash.
He did indeed find a window blown open, clanging lightly against the wall from the wind every few seconds. Ratio forced the window back shut, the soft click of it locking into place settled something in his gut, if only for a brief moment. It was only another moment or two before he discovered the disturbance in the carpet leading away from the window.
If it had been someone else attending the library at this hour, perhaps someone less observant, it might have been missed entirely. But it hadn’t been someone else. It had been Ratio. So, of course, he had noticed the way the carpet was just slightly damp, just the faintest trace of footfalls left behind, when he glanced in the direction of the artefacts storage.
A deeper sigh clawed its way from Ratio’s throat. He wanted nothing to do with what was assuredly some petty thief trying to abscond away with some magical artefact or another, the purpose of which was surely a mystery to them. The thief in question would surely trip the defense spells before they got halfway through to whatever they were attempting to obtain. They’d blast themself into a coma, or they’d end up blind or deaf or both. Potentially even worse, if only for the paperwork he would have to file later, they could end up dead.
Veritas Ratio really had no interest in cleaning up a body at what was surely an ungodly hour of the night. Helike and Eirene both shone high above by now, dancing along the spread of stars, humming the songs of sleep to their people below. He should have been sleeping. Then he wouldn’t have been dealing with this.
When he found the blonde working his way through the magical locks to the stores, as expected, Ratio found himself only slightly impressed with how the thief hadn’t yet shredded his memory with a fumbled break attempt. He found himself just slightly more impressed with the clearly enhanced lockpicks in the blonde’s hands, the telltale shimmer of golden magic giving away their nature immediately.
Ratio brightened the orb in his palm just enough to be noticed. The blonde let slip half a thank you before realizing he’d come here alone. He shut up immediately after, a flush showing faintly on his cheeks at his mistake. Ratio’s brow perked up in response, previous impression of awe fading as quickly as it had arrived.
The room went quiet around them, the air falling still while they kept their gazes locked, neither willing to move first lest the other make a false move. Ratio wasn’t exactly sure what this thief was capable of, even if they had failed in the act of thievery itself, nor the lengths they would go to in order to finish the job.
“Aren’t thieves supposed to be… good at their jobs?” Ratio found himself unable to keep his mouth shut. The audacity of the tiny blonde in his library, surely eager to peruse his artefacts, hoping for gods knew what.
“Excuse you!” Ratio almost doesn’t see the little thief stash away those lockpicks. Unfortunately for him, the librarykeeper has far too much experience catching idle students in the act of trying to avoid their work. “I’m the best at my job!”
“So then how did I hear you…?” The implication was almost lost between them for a moment, the thief blinking up at Veritas Ratio in a way that might have been coy, if there had been any familiarity between them.
And then it clicked. “Oh!” The thief laughed, brushing their golden tresses behind their ear. It should not have distracted the librarian half as much as it did. “Oh,” they cut themself off with another chuckle, softer this time, “I’m not giving away my name that easily, Dr. Veritas Ratio.”
The line of Ratio’s mouth thinned almost imperceptibly. “That hardly seems fair. And I doubt you’d like me to keep calling you ‘poorly trained thief’ in the records of this account.”
“Oh, so you want to take account of our first meeting, Doctor?”
That smile was infuriating. Or it should have been. Veritas Ratio tried not to think too deeply about what that smile instinctively did to him. “Yes,” the magic in the librarian’s palm sparked dangerously, “For when I inevitably report this incident to the authorities.”
“Ohh… What if…” The little thief twiddled with something in their palms, attention turned away from the magical locks and towards Ratio himself. “...we didn’t do that, actually? No harm, no foul. There’s nothing missing as of right now and I could just… see my merry way out instead of all that dreadful paperwork. Doesn’t that sound nice, Doctor?”
“I’m afraid that doesn’t sound quite like what I had planned,” Ratio countered easily, eyes focused on whatever was happening in the thief’s palms.
Needless to say, when the bang went off, Ratio had been expecting it. He threw up a shield spell easily, the explosion of fire and light slipping off the hard magic shell of it, but there was little avoiding the glare that had assaulted his eyes. Unfortunately for the thief, it hadn’t lasted quite as long on the librarian as they had expected. Ratio sighted them scrambling towards the same window they’d slipped in through, but the flash hadn’t afforded them enough time to reopen the route before Ratio had recovered. It was only a few long strides to catch up to them, and when the librarian’s hand wrapped around the little thief’s neck, yanking them back and away from their potential escape, they let out a helpless yelp, going limp in Ratio’s hold.
“This also,” Ratio hummed as he dragged the thief closer to him, their heels dragging heavily on the floor of the library as he went, “does not sound quite like what I had in mind, Poorly Trained Thief.”
“Hey!” The offense on their face almost made Ratio laugh out loud. He held back the urge, though, for the sake of this being a somewhat serious matter. “You can’t just call me that.”
“Give me a name then, Thief of Little Success.”
“I–” Their breath caught in their throat as Ratio squeezed near imperceptibly against their neck, but the attempted thief recovered a moment later, “—am a thief of much success! I’ve got an insanely successful history, actually, and that is why I was hired in the first place.”
The thief bit down on their own lip when they realized they’d let too much slip already. “I see," Ratio answered with a thoughtful hum. "So this is hired work. I’m still not seeing how such a successful thief was caught by a mere librarian, though, a lowly wizard such as myself.”
"You sell yourself short, Handsome," the thief teased, a hint of flirtatiousness seeping into the eye contact he was keeping— and moons above, those were truly some eyes locked onto Ratio's own. Ratio almost forgot himself in the crashing abyss of violet waves and azure storms. "I've heard all sorts of tales about your accomplishments in all kinds of circles. Writing a dozen and a half tomes on spells new and old alike, your dissertation on the use and misuse of lightwaves in teleportation magics was particularly riveting, and to assume someone could write all that but not perform? Ah, that would be a real amateur's mistake, wouldn't it, Veritas, Darling?"
Ratio knew the tactic for what it was, a distraction from his mind at work on who the little thief before him actually was. Not so little, considering that in that moment the thief had slipped from his grip. It mattered little now that he had pinpointed the hair, the eyes, the flirtatious nature, and the ego that the doctor himself had bruised. It all added up neatly now that he'd let himself think about more than just the little nymph in front of him. "The infamous Aventurine himself is targeting my library? No wonder you're not dead yet."
Aventurine's coy smile dipped for a moment, or maybe only half of one, before a hand trailed up Ratio's abdomen, fingers trailing light enough almost to be missed, if the doctor wasn't so acutely aware of the thief's every little movement. "Well, there goes my cover. I suppose I should make a real effort to kill you now."
Even that was a flirt, Ratio heard it loud and clear. He wasn't quite sure when death threats had become flirtatious, but this was his first encounter with Aventurine themself. Perhaps this was par for the course for him. "I'm sure that if you were fully confident in your capacity to do so," Ratio's voice lingered in the air between them as his eyes trailed after the thief circling him, their fingers never quite leaving his skin, "I would already be cold on the ground."
That deliberate hand trailed low as Aventurine stopped short in front of him, fingers tugging at the waist of his trousers, and Ratio perked a brow high in answer. "Maybe you're not there because I think it would be a shame to deny myself the opportunity to see such a pretty face again. Or, maybe," Aventurine giggled, and the sound dripped down over Ratio like thick honey, "you're already there, catatonic, and this is your final hallucination before the grave takes you. How does it feel? Flirting like this in the face of death? Maybe you didn't do enough of this in life, and that's why it consumes your last thoughts, your final fantasy."
"Since you seem to know me so well, you should also know this, historically, won't work on me." Even as he said it, pushing his confidence behind his words, Ratio was unconvinced himself.
"There's nothing like me in your history, Doctor," Aventurine emphasized prettily, fingers tracing themselves dangerously lower, and a word Ratio heard from nearly every single person he interacted with on the daily should not have such an effect on him.
But clearly, Aventurine was right in this. In Ratio's experience, there had been nothing or no one like him. His brows furrowed as the mischievous little thief's palm worked over him through his clothes. The doctor's every attempt to school his reaction failed, obviously and painfully. That grin spread on Aventurine's lips a little too wide for Ratio's liking.
"I think that's as far as this plot goes for you, little Minx." The thief found his wrist subsequently bound tight in Ratio's grip, and the little pout that replaced that grin was also a ploy, the doctor knew.
"Now, now, Doctor," Aventurine's pleading fell on nearly deaf ears, "There must be some arrangement we can come to here."
The nearly part was the problem. The logical part of his mind, which was nearly all of it, if Ratio's colleagues had anything to say about it, was quickly fleeing him. "I'm certain there isn't. I'll really, truly have to report this incident come daybreak."
"You sound more like you're trying to convince yourself than you are me, Doc." Aventurine's uncaptured hand wandered slowly up Ratio's chest to caress his neck, and the doctor couldn't quite stop himself from leaning into the contact. His eyes fluttered closed for half a second too long, and even behind closed eyelids, there was no denying the heat bouncing back and forth between them. There was no denying the way the thief was closing the distance between them.
Maybe closing his eyes had been his last wrong decision, because when Aventurine's lips met his own, Ratio didn't bother to stop it. He let his lips meld together with the blonde's, his fingers tightening nearly imperceivably around Aventurine's wrist, and suddenly the thief's lips fell open just enough for Ratio to taste their tongues, feel the faintest ghost of them pressed together, and all his famed reason fled entirely from his mind.
His hands moved quickly after that, eyes snapping open, both the little thief's wrists captured in the doctor's one larger, pushing the blonde back against the bookshelf behind him with only a few stumbling, short steps. Another kiss followed the first, bruising in its force, a noise Ratio didn't realize was his own reverberated through his throat. Something low and primal, and distantly, the professor wondered if there was some kind of science to this response too, some kind of explanation for his own uncharacteristic behavior.
That bright, bubbling laugh washed over Ratio again, and his breath stuttered in his throat, utterly affected by the leg looping over his hip. "See, Doc?" The words floated somewhere in the space between Ratio's ears, "I knew you were a man of reason. I knew we could reach an arrangement."
Except that nothing about this shared contact was reasonable. Veritas tried to grasp his former reason between breaths, between the faint brush of soft lips against his skin, between his hand and the skin of Aventurine's wrists, and found himself utterly lost without it. His words felt heavy in his mind, trailing behind at a snail's pace while his body demanded its own kind of fulfillment. "This hardly changes what I have to do in the morning, Aventurine."
It was a miracle he'd managed to say even that much, but Aventurine's lips somehow found his again, and the way the smaller rolled his hips against Ratio's own blurred his mind even further. He's only lucky that the thief hadn't commented on the sudden sloth of his responses. "Worry about it in the morning, Handsome, we've got bigger issues to deal with right now."
Veritas would have had to be deaf to miss the double entendre there, and when Aventurine slipped in his grip to his knees… Ratio couldn't help but let it happen. The smaller's hands freed from his grip slid down his torso and then up again, under his loose tunic, thumbs trailing over the thick hairs just under his navel, and then lower to where they curled just above his base. Oh. Ratio should not have been surprised at the hands shoving his trousers out of the way and the way his cock sprang free of its restriction, but all the same, he was.
A gasp shuddered through him at the feeling of soft fingers trailing the length of him, and faintly Ratio registered what might have been a sigh of appreciation from the blonde below him. "I didn't know it would be this big an issue when I said it was a bigger issue, Stud."
Ratio's mind came into sharp focus, but only for a moment as the little minx's hands pushed the doctor back against one of the shelves, books jostling loudly behind him, and then he was lost again. Aventurine's soft lips kissed the vein just under the head of his cock, eyes surely giving away how much he had enjoyed the brief contact. "Is it going to be too big of an issue?" He heard himself ask, and Ratio would wonder later how he had managed to think that so clearly when the morality and rationale of the whole scenario had escaped him entirely in the moments leading up to it.
Aventurine smirked up at him like he was a particularly delicious-looking piece of meat, tongue darting out to tease the slit of his head. "Don't doubt me now, Handsome."
Ratio gulped as those sinful lips parted to take him in. It was a sight unlike anything he'd imagined, those eyes flicking up to meet his, those cheeks hollowed, the way the thief swallowed before he'd even hit the back of their throat. Veritas couldn't stop himself from tangling his hands in those fine golden strands, nothing keeping those eyes from his own.
Aventurine pulled back, soft hands braced on Veritas' hips, nails digging in momentarily, a lewd string of spit connecting the thief to his cock, and Ratio was hypnotized. That tongue traced him oh so lewdly, and then those lips took him all over again, eyes closed against the pressure as Aventurine took his cock even deeper. The feeling of them swallowing around him properly made his hips buck forward, an involuntary instinct Veritas might have disapproved of, if only he weren't so stupid in the moment. A low growl fell from his lips as he thrust forward into that velvet mouth, his head thrown back as his cock strained, pre lining the pretty minx's mouth as he pulled back to force them fuller again.
His breath shook with every stroke, his grip forcing Aventurine to keep themself open for him, throaty moans and choked sobs slipping out around the girth of him, and a distant part of the doctor might have wondered at why he had let himself fall to such depravity. It was a very distant part of himself, though.
The more present part of himself was transfixed at the sight of tears gathering at the corners of Aventurine's eyes, his body rolling forward, hands dragging through those blonde strands to brace himself against the thief's back. He realized he was babbling insanities. He hadn't been aware, but every "pretty whore", every "needy slut", every chant of "precious lips" was met with a lewd moan that only made him fuck into that wet hole deeper, harder, like some kind of feral beast transfixed on the perfect prey to satiate his hunger.
Moon and Sun forgive him, Veritas Ratio was starved.
His hands dug in over the soft skin of Aventurine's shoulders, and then back around that vulnerable neck, and the sobs grew all the louder, filthier, wetter. Wave after wave of pleasure coursed through him, his skin sparked at every point of contact, at the hands hot on the small of his back, keeping him from going too far, encouraging the ruthless cant of his hips, until all too soon he was seeing white, a shout lost in the overpowering torrent of sensation.
He watched himself slip from those swollen lips in slow motion, and his own throat bobbed as he took in the sight he'd made of the blonde. Gods, he'd done that? Bruises on their neck, on their shoulders, hair tangled beyond hope of fixing without a brush, lips bright red and slick with spit and spend alike, eyes glistening as Aventurine cracked a smile up at him. Gods, he had done all that himself…
"Next time…" Aventurine giggled softly as he pulled back, thumb swiping their bottom lip clean, and then he took the gesture a step further, lips wrapping around his digit to swallow down every drop that had been nearly lost. His eyes darted up to linger over Ratio's face— surely flushed with effort and arousal alike— and then Aventurine pressed a kiss, nearly chaste, to his tip. "…get a girl flowers first, Stud."
Ratio's hands dragged the smaller up as if by a will of their own, pressing the two of them chest to chest, and his lips kissed again, communicating what he could where his words could not. Truly, it would be a record for the books, except Ratio couldn't think about the idea of recording these records now. Not like this.
Distantly, Veritas registered the storm still raging outside, and his teeth bit into the plump bottom lip he'd just been kissing. "Stay," he demanded, voice unwavering. He'd never been surer of his own wants before this night, and he would make them known. At least… as much as he could.
His mind felt suddenly slow.
"Not tonight, Handsome…" Aventurine was teasing a hand between them over his chest and the doctor's mind blurred at the feeling of it. "I have appointments to keep, as tempting as you are."
"No," Ratio protested, "I'm not done with you." He'd never known want like this before. His mind was scrambled, out of sorts, but he was sure. So sure. He needed Aventurine to stay.
"Insatiable," Aventurine purred, a barely there kiss pressed to the corner of Veritas' lips, "I like that in a man, normally. But as I said…"
The wizard was sorely disappointed in his limbs' sluggish response time. The little minx had already slipped out of his hold with a simple twirl and Ratio's hands were grasping at empty air. His frown only deepened when Aventurine turned from the window to send him a wink and disappear from his sight entirely.
By the time the doctor had gotten to the window, eyes searching for Aventurine the dark of the storm, it was too late. They were long gone. "Next time," Ratio murmured to himself, "there'd better be a next time."
He locked the window again, resetting the locks both magical and mundane throughout the library, frustration following his every step. Eventually, Veritas did find his way to bed and a restless sleep, if only for a few hours.
It wasn't until the next day, during a cursory check of the archives, that he found he had been wrong to take a thief at their word. Aventurine had not been sneaking their way in, but making their way out. Leaving it all as if he had never been there at all, for one artefact in particular was missing from the library's collection. Specifically, the Rain Bringer's Bangles.
That would explain several things, least of all the storm. Of course, everyone knew that the bangles could summon and settle storms when used correctly— it was spelled out clearly in the name— but a lesser-known effect that came with the blessing of Sogol was the… amplified libido. Sogol, Lady of the Oasis, and her capacity to quench thirsts of all measure, was a little less documented.
Ratio sat himself down in one of his desks and huffed his annoyance. It seemed he would have to document… some of the incident from the night before after all. His chin settled into his palm as he contemplated how much he could get away with omitting for his own privacy. Did it matter? Had he wanted for his own sake or had it all been the touch of a goddess' blessing that had affected him? Did he still want now in this untouched state? Could he be calculated and disconnected from such a recollection?
The answer came in a glaring no as he sifted through his memories of the night before. He could not remain fully impartial. He still wanted to tend the flame that little fiend had lit within him, and his body made him acutely aware of the fact. So yes, there had better be a next time. Preferably, a next time wherein Aventurine wasn't targeting his library and risking his job.
Until such a time, though, the famed Dr. Veritas Ratio would have to keep face. He would have to push through such a hunger now that he knew it. He groaned quietly into his palm, knuckles turning white around the grip of his pen, annoyance showing between his brows. It seemed it would be up to the thief himself as to whether or not Ratio's reunion would be long-awaited or a pleasant surprise.
"Are you alright, Professor?" A student's voice caught him off guard and Ratio only just stopped himself from shouting at the student.
"Yes," he grumbled, forcing his hand to relax as he spoke, "Just making an unsavory report. Carry on."
Thankfully, the student didn't hover long.
Ratio scribbled out a few more nearly unintelligible words before giving up entirely. It could be handled later. What was done could not be undone. He needed relief, and he hoped it would not be a long wait for it.