Chapter Text
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The Rogue Trader's private quarters aboard the Von Valancius flagship had never felt so suffocating. Arthas stood by the viewport, stars streaming past in mocking infinity, while Yrliet sat rigid on the edge of his bed - their bed, he had thought, in the foolish hours before this confession.
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The Ranger's red hair fell across her face like a curtain she couldn't quite hide behind. Her emerald eyes, usually so fierce with Aeldari pride, kept finding the floor.
"You asked me once," she began, her voice that maddening blend of musical and remote, "why I flinched when you tried to touch my face."
Arthas said nothing. His hands gripped the viewport's frame until the metal groaned.
"That day on Grantis, he could have taken me to Commorragh in chains. Instead..." She laughed, hollow and strange. "Instead he spoke to me. He spoke and... I listened."
"Spoke of what?"
". . . You don’t remember? Of hunger." Her eyes finally lifted, meeting his with terrible honesty. "Of the lie that Asuryani dignity has become. Of sensation without shame." She stood, moving to the viewport's edge, close enough that he could smell her, the scent that had haunted his dreams through countless void-transits. "You want to know when it began. I will tell you. But you will not like how small you become in the telling."
Arthas turned to face her.
"I was shown a shard in visions. His gauntlets on your cheek. You were first surprised, then you complained they were cold. He removed them, caressed you again with his bare hand, and asked you - "Better?" - and that's when you shivered."
"Yes." Yrliet's hand rose to her own cheek, unconsciously tracing slowly where memory lived, entranced in the ghost of the sensation. "His fingers were cold through the armor. I told him so. Do you know what he did? He laughed, as if I had delighted him. He removed them, slowly, watching my face as the leather came free. His skin was warm then. Warmer than human warmth. Asuryani blood runs colder, Arthas. I had forgotten what heat felt like against my face."
"And that was all? The cheek?"
Her silence was it's own answer.
"Tell me."
"He moved to my jaw." Yrliet's voice had dropped to something almost dreamy, the confession becoming invocation. "He held it like a cup he meant to drink from. His thumb found the pulse beneath my ear. I could feel my own heartbeat against his skin and I hated that he could feel it too - how it raced for him. He asked if I was frightened. I said no. I was lying." She turned fully to face the viewport, presenting him her profile, the elegant line of her neck where - he saw it now, the phantom of another's mouth - "He knew I lied. He rejoiced in it."
Arthas' jaw ached from clenching. "The trenchcoat."
"Yes." One word. Then, relenting: "He unfastened it slowly. Each button deliberate. I could have stopped him. I had my knife and my rifle too. I had killed three of his kabalites that very night." Yrliet's shoulders rose and fell with remembered breath. "I did not reach for the knife. I reached for him."
"The bodysuit."
"Mesh-weave. Difficult to remove without tearing." A ghost of something crossed her face and it wasn't shame, worse. Fondness at her own undoing. "He was patient. I was not. I pulled at the seals myself. When my back was bare to the air, I shivered. Do you understand what I am telling you, Arthas? I wanted his hands on me before they touched me."
He understood. He wished he didn't.
"His palms were so scarred. He used them like he was playing an instrument he had studied for centuries." Yrliet's own hands rose to her ribs, demonstrating. "Here. The floating ribs. He traced them until I gasped. Then lower. Each vertebra, found and named in a whisper. His mouth followed his fingers. I felt his teeth against my spine and I arched into it. I, who would not let you kiss my hand in the Navigator's presence."
The comparison was deliberate. Cruel. He deserved it, perhaps, for demanding this confession.
"Did he..." Arthas's voice broke. He forced it steady. "That night. Did he take you completely?"
Yrliet's laugh was genuine this time, bright and terrible. "You mean did he penetrate me? Fuck me? Is that the boundary you need, Arthas? The technicality that might let you forgive or not?" She turned, and her emerald eyes were wet now, but not with sorrow. With the intensity of absolute recall. "I will tell you what he did. Then you decide where your 'completely' lives."
She stepped closer. Close enough that he could see the dilation of her pupils, the flush high on her cheekbones that speaking this memory had summoned.
"He whispered. Always whispering. In my ear, yes, but also..." she touched her temple, "...here. Intimate as a blade in the kidney. He told me what he would do. What he would make me feel. And I believed him. I believed him because he had already proven himself honest in his cruelty, while you..." She caught herself. Shook her head. "He bit my earlobe. Licked the shell of my ear until I made a sound I did not recognize as my own voice. Begging, Arthas. With my body. With the way I pressed backward against him when he gripped my hips."
Arthas closed his eyes. The image refused darkness: Yrliet on her knees, the elegant predator reduced to supplication, and Marazhai, pale Drukhari arrogance, turquoise eyes burning with satisfied hunger, behind her.
"He spoke again. He said: 'You have never been touched as you deserve to be touched. Your kind have forgotten how. I will remind you.'
"You want to know if I took him inside me." Yrliet's voice had gone clinical, precise, the Outcast's discipline reasserting over the confessor's abandon. "I will tell you exactly. He positioned himself. I felt him against me, where I was" she hesitated, then committed, "shamefully, gloriously wet. For a Drukhari. For my enemy. For someone who would have sold me to a haemonculi without a thought, had I not interested him more alive."
"And?"
"And he waited." The word came out almost wondering, as if she still couldn't comprehend it. "He could have taken. I was offering. I was presenting, Arthas, like an animal in heat, all my Asuryani dignity burned away by his hands and his mouth and his words. But he waited until I looked back at him. Until I saw him. And then he asked" her voice dropped to a whisper of a whisper, "Who do you belong to, little outcast?"
Arthas felt something tear in his chest. Not metaphorically. A physical sensation, as if muscle were separating from bone.
"I said his name." Yrliet's eyes were dry now, the tears evaporated by the heat of confession.
"I said 'Marazhai.' I said 'Yours.'
And only then did he enter me. Slowly. So slowly I wept from the wanting of it. He made me feel every increment of his possession. And when he was fully seated inside me, when I could feel nothing else in all the galaxy but him, he leaned forward and spoke one more word against my neck."
She paused. Let the silence stretch until Arthas thought he might scream.
"Mine. He said. All mine. Your pleasure. Your pain. Your shame. I collect them all, Yrliet Lanaevyss, and I will never give them back."
She closed her eyes. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped to something almost meditative, the cadence of Aeldari memory-song, each syllable weighted with sensory precision.
"I had never, Elantach, you must understand what I am telling you - I had never responded to any touch, any thought, any dream, with such... readiness. It was as if my body had been waiting specifically for his. As if all my restraint with you, all my delicacy, had been mere rehearsal for this abandonment."
The viewport's frame had bent beneath Arthas' grip. He did not care.
"How many times?" The question emerged strangled. "After that night. How many?"
"Does it matter?"
"How many?"
Yrliet's chin lifted. The old pride, reassembled from fragments. "Until I came to you. Until I chose to believe that your gentleness might be worth more than his certainty. But I will not lie, Arthas, not in this room where I have already given you everything true - I still dream of him. Of his hands. Of his voice in my mind, commanding responses my body cannot refuse." She stepped back, reclaiming distance. "You asked for the full confession. You have it. Now you must choose if you can love what remains, knowing what burned away."
Arthas looked at his hands. At the bent metal. At the stars beyond, indifferent to human grief.
"Leave," he said. "Please. I need..." to scream, to weep, to find Marazhai and his kabal and die in impossible, futile vengeance, "....time."
"And that is why you never got to touch me. He would have killed you, you know. If you had tried to touch me as he did. I only know that I am honest now, and that honesty is the only gift I have left to give you."
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