♦️ and Perc’ahlia ?

notaficwriter:

♦️: slow dancing.

when they forced them through ballroom dancing lessons in finishing school, vex’ahlia doesn’t imagine that they intend she put them to use like this: swaying in her newly-renovated house, avoiding the last of the furniture they’d finally managed to drag into place, pressed far too close to be proper to the man she intended to marry, but not yet, at an hour in the evening pushing damn close to three in the morning. it’s almost certainly not what her instructor, upper lip so stiff you could bounce a copper off of it, had in plan when he made her and vax spend countless courses trying to find a partner who wouldn’t blanch at the idea of dancing with the resident half-elven bastards, but this wouldn’t be the first lesson she’s appropriated for own devices, and it wouldn’t be the last.

percy’s a talented dancer, even after stubbing his toes on every sofa they dragged into place, and even at nearing three in the morning. vex prefers to lead more often than not, and he’s normally more than happy to follow, but when she practically spills onto him, bone-tired, he admirably takes both her weight and the lead for a change, moving them in circles from the kitchen to the sitting room, and through the doorway to the downstairs bedroom without showing strain or hesitation. he’s good at this, and vex thinks she’d like to do this for a very long time.

it’s that that makes her think of asking him to stay with her, here. not that they’ve spent the week before broken up for some stupid reason before remembering why they got together in the first place. not that when she saw him arrange all the blankets on her bed upstairs made something warm and nesting wake up in her chest. not even that he offered her a home in his home in the first place, lent her a corner of whitestone for her to keep. it’s that when he’s dancing her around the corner of the end table in the library, it brings her close enough to hear the waltz he’s humming reverberating in his chest, and that makes something small in her decide that this is as good a place as any to put down roots, just this once.

vex doesn’t ask him to move in. she is used to needing to flit from one place to another, unused to having this much weight in a question. instead, she hedges her bets, and asks, “will you stay the night, darling?”

percy’s waltz cuts off long enough for him to mumble, sounding just as sleepy as she feels right now, “if you’ll have me, of course.”

“and the night after that?”

“that too.” he laughs, then, without an ounce of cruelty. “and the night after that one.”

and he does.