Siriels player wrote this its fucking awesome
Synopsis: It turns out Razor isn’t bothered by Tiefling orgies, only by the fact that Siriel was in one.
The sky is sprinkled with stars, the moon is yawning wide overhead. Razor must’ve loitered in the Ruby Promenade for at least an hour now, kicking stones as he watches the streets drain slowly of glittering, robbable noblemen. He blends in with them now, thanks to his new mentor’s advice; his hair is glossier, longer; his comportment molds to his silk-adorned suit. The hidden pockets stitched beneath his coat hang heavy with pilfered jewelry.
Siriel would be very, very proud.
He jams his fists into his real pockets and fights the urge to stomp down the cobblestone streets. He doesn’t want to think about Siriel. Not Siriel Saladin, the thief who had plucked him right out of a job and turned him into fresh meat. Who had tormented him with demonic gibberish for a week before sweet-talking her way into his head and agreeing to duel him for his freedom. Who had sucker-punched him not once, but three times in the span of a minute.
Siriel, who was currently knee-deep in the throes of several scintillating rumours regarding a certain demonic household. He’s become accustomed to parsing nobleman jargon, and word on the glittering-gilded streets is that House Damanti has adopted a new Tiefling whore. And he has not been graced by Siriel’s wicked presence for at least a week.
Despite his new demeanor, the guards of House Damanti stand planted at the foot of their gates, their silver plate flickering even in the shade of night. There are two instances during the day, Razor recounts, when the gates actually open, and he has not spotted Siriel at either of them. Not that he should care, of course.
What he should be caring about is the fact that Siriel has yet to teach him about sucker-punching at all. He’d have sucker-punched these knights already, made their helmets clang against one another before letting their bodies clatter like dropped cutlery against the ground.
His eyes glaze over as he watches the guards watch him with equal interest. Then he turns, slips between a giggling couple, and loops around the Promenade’s refreshment alley and pockets another fistful of gold.
As he stops to meander at a wine-and-cheese tasting stall, he hears someone cough behind him.
He jolts. For a moment, his grace sloughs away; he’s a no-name urchin again, scrounging for scraps in neglected coin purses and sleeping tucked in the crook of a gutter. He turns and expects to see the glimmer of armor and his reflection in an unsheathed blade.
He sees horns and wispy, white hair instead.
Razor excuses himself from the stand and drags Siriel into what he hopes is a secluded alleyway—everything in the Ruby Promenade is always so damn well-lit, and he can’t tell what’s abandoned anymore.
“Where in the hells have you been?” he hisses, pinning her by the shoulders. “You indenture me into servitude then disappear to do god-knows-what. What am I supposed to do? Fraternise with your batshit friends?”
Siriel stops, as though she is choosing her next move carefully. Razor hates this part of her, but he can’t pinpoint exactly why.
She smiles easily. “Good evening, Razor. Fancy meeting you here—”
“You insisted that I hone my craft here,” he grumbles, “but yes, go on.”
“…What’s wrong with the Friends of Orthos?” she finishes, folding her arms.
“The Ajerani refuses to leave me alone; he insists that I’m psionically talented, and I can’t seem to convince him otherwise. The man clad in armor glares at me too often, and he reeks of pig. Your other two friends are a divine being and a millenia-old elf, so forgive me if I’m not particularly partial to anyone other than you.”
“Well of course they seem daunting, you haven’t made any effort to befriend them.”
Razor briefly thinks about wrapping his hands around Siriel’s throat before his mind conceptualizes a million different ways she could kill him. He pushes away from her and turns.
“Where have you been?” he asks again.
“If you’ve been listening to the streets, you’d already know,” says Siriel.
So the rumours are true. “In that house?” he asks anyway. He feels his arms grow numb; he hugs them for warmth. “With those…”
He falters. Once, he had thought of Siriel as a Damanti escort, but he knows better than to assume now. He thinks of their horns, their blackened scleras and flame-bright pupils; their tongues, likely forked and roaming over pale skin, pale curves, Siriel trapped between their bodies like a nested egg.1
He drags his fingers down his face. It’s not a pretty image. It’s pretty horrific, actually. It makes his stomach clench into a raw, frayed knot.
Unsurprisingly, Siriel has the gall to respond with, “You sound interested.”
“I want to hurl,” he says.
“I thought I taught you to be more tolerant than that.”
Something clicks inside of Razor like a trap locking into place. He spins, his cheeks flushed with anger. “Tolerant? I’ve been plenty tolerant for the past week, Siriel. I’ve been tolerating all sorts of nonsense in the Ruby Promenade, and honestly? I’m ready to move on. I’m rich, and filthy, and I’d much rather leave before these noblemen and their etiquettes start rubbing off on me.”
She stops again. Something flashes in her eyes. “Okay. And?”
This catches him off guard. “A…and?”
Siriel shrugs. “You’ve no good reason to be mad at me, which means you’re not being wholly truthful. So I’ll ask again; what are you actually trying to say?”
He groans. “Now you want me to be truthful.”
“Can’t be that hard. You learn fast.”
Nevermind the fact that thieves live and die for lies. Razor claws a hand through his hair as he finds himself well and truly considering what it is he’s mad about. He considers everything; the way Balthazar had glared at him the way boys with magnifying glasses glared at ants; the way the man clad in armour brushed a hand against the hilt of his sword every time Razor deigned to pass him. But no, these are isolated events, things that Razor knows the Friends will grow out of with time.2 Between each lucid thought is a flicker of brilliant, lilac eyes, their edges creased against the pressure of the prettiest smile that he has come to abhor.
“Fine,” he says. “You want to hear the truth that badly? What I’m really mad about? It’s you.”
Siriel’s eyebrows rise.
“There! I said it.” He raises his hands in mock defeat. “I can’t stand the way you treat me. I’m like—like a toy to you. First you dangle freedom in my face, then you disarm yourself during our duel, and then you offer to take me under your wing. I hate how I can’t understand you at all—we were both raised from dirt and sticks but you’re still the least comprehensible person in this city!”
He’s heaving now, towering over Siriel like an overcast shadow. He isn’t done yet. “And you want to know the worst part? It’s that I’ve been practically obsessing over your absence to the point that I’ve had the displeasure of thinking about you multiple times an hour, while you probably haven’t thought of me once since you discovered the existence of Damanti tits.”
Immediately, he covers his mouth and turns away. He opens his mouth in an attempt to stutter out a sly or somewhat witty recovery.
His voice comes out thin and hushed instead; “I don’t like thinking about what you do with those demons in that House, Siriel. It’s starting to ruin me. Some days, it’s all I can think about.”
And on some days, he does more than just think about her and those demons.
He looks away again, suddenly keenly aware of all the ways everything could come crashing down.
Siriel goes still, as still the day she’d held her cutlass before Razor while the city of Solemnity moved like molasses underfoot. Her arms are neatly folded.
She asks slowly, “And if it was you in place of those hypothetical “demons?””
His eyes move across her body to rest on the tilt of her jawline, where a hand, his hand, could easily rest upon, could easily slip lower to reach beneath her fur-lined cape.
This is wrong. This is very wrong. He needs to hate her, because the alternative is much, much worse.3
He asks anyway, “If it were me?”
Her eyes: dark, purple, delicious. “Would you be happier? Would you be satisfied?”
He swallows. The timbre of his voice goes as quiet as snow. “I’d be doing the things they did to you a lot more differently,” he mumbles, stepping close.
“Why don’t you,” says Siriel, her tone unsteady for once, “give me a demonstration then?”
A heady rush of power pools in his head as he leans in to catch her lips with his own. They are warm. Warmer than your average human lips. He feels as though he’s kissing sun-warmed skin. Like he’s standing over a campfire.
He presses his body into hers until he thinks he might just melt, grasps at her cheeks like he’s the coldest man in Solemnity. He only separates from her to glimpse at her features—flushed and perfectly flustered, her eyes shut tight—through his half-lidded eyes before kissing her again. He thinks about all the Tieflings who have kissed Siriel before and all the Tieflings who will kiss her tomorrow and he thinks he might go insane from the thought alone.
They stay like that for a bit. Razor can’t help but huff out her name between kisses. It’s intoxicating the way her name seems to settle on his breath, the rightness of it all, like she’s shaped the way he breathes just by existing in front of him. Razor moves to her neck afterwards, his fingers skimming over near-boiling, unmarked skin. He kisses her there too, relishes in the way she flinches. His hands come to rest at the hem of her coat.
“Razor,” she mumbles, her hand buried in the fluff of his hair. “Whatever we’re doing… someone might see—”
He grazes his teeth over her skin. It’s not enough. None of this is enough.
His voice is as rough as gravel as he brings her closer and says, “Then they’d better look close.”
1This did not actually happen. Razor made some shit up and believed it for fun
2Not necessarily true
3 No panache rolls were made. He really thought of this himself