Title: Pack Leader
Author: sister_coyote
Rating: R
Word count: 500
Summary: There are a lot of things in the world that aren't important.
Prompt: Final Fantasy VIII, Seifer/Fujin: Loyalty - "Tell me that's not your blood."



Fujin doesn't really notice the blood afterward. It's not important.  There are a lot of things in the world that aren't important.  Lack of peripheral vision is one of them; sympathy is one of them; blood is one of them.  It sticks her hair to her cheek and slicks her shirt and that is an inconvenience, but not one that merits much attention.

It makes her palms slippery, though, which won't do, because grip is so important with chakrams.  Lose your grip and you could gut an ally and not an enemy -- and she won't have with that, hurting an ally by accident.  It's not right.  She rubs her hand off on the cinderblock wall, and it makes a long five-finger smear of red against the grey.

"It's not your blood," says a voice behind her -- a voice, the voice, the voice she would know anywhere.  There's almost a question in it.

"No," she says.  She was not cut.  She bleeds sometimes, she has the scars to prove it, but not today.

"Good," Seifer says, growls, and then he moves in close.  He's well into her space, and she thinks he's smelling the scent of another man's blood on her, the copper-and-earth smell.  "And it went -- "

"Easy," she says, because she knows he'll like that, and his pupils dilate.  She smiles.

"Did you kill him?" Seifer asks.  She shakes her head.  It was not necessary, and she is ruthless but not cruel.  "You left him alive?  So he'd know he'd been beaten?"

"Yes," she says.

Seifer gives the one-beat chuckle that means that he likes what he hears.

Most things in life are trivial, and words are wasted on them.  Some things are very important, and for them, words are insufficient.  The latter is why she doesn't have even a single word for him when Seifer catches her wrist and brings her bloody fingers to his mouth.  His tongue is quick and wet, licking the blood off of her hand.  She does not tremble, but she is hot in the pit of her stomach.  He moves from her hand to her cheek, lifting the hair away, licking blood from her skin.

From another man this might be a submissive gesture; not from Seifer.  Anything but.  This is the pack leader taking first blood from the kill.  Another man she would kill for those implications; Seifer has earned it.

Nonetheless she's the one to change things.  She turns her head, catching his mouth with her own, tasting second blood directly from his lips.  He presses his tongue into her mouth, and she moans, short and sharp.  When he draws back she catches his lip between her teeth and tugs at it.

"You would do it again," he says.

"Instantly."

"For me."  This close, he fills the entirety of her limited vision.  She sees darkness on one side, and Seifer on the other.

"Always," she says.