He imagines what he might do if Quinn bid him control himself. He thinks of the ramrod discipline he applied to his magical training, and allows optimism to flourish.

He'll start with just one finger—one thick, careful finger, snaking up the inside of Quinn's white wrists, tracing along the faint, beautiful blue of his veins. Then he'd reach the shoulder, and his whole hand would come into play, flexing strong on warm, bare skin while he descends to dip his tongue in the hollow of Quinn's throat, right where his breath catches.

He can imagine this much, and only this much, as the elf in his head yanks his beard or wrenches his topknot or digs with fingernails, hissing in his ear, “Now. Now.”

And even if the Quinn of his fantasies could be silent, more silent than he ever would be, the throbbing part of Daimd knows that his discipline has no hold on this magic, and never will.

They fucked whenever the need took them, to hell and back with anyone who observed or thought they might protest. Daliquinn's acid tongue and Daimd's careless shows of teeth kept the world at bay, and they lost themselves in one another time and time again. The language of the body was strong and fierce and rough, but full of an honesty that neither of them could achieve with the spoken word.

They once fucked in the blood of a priest they'd slaughtered and beheaded, on the steps of a great ancient church full up with terrified worshippers; it was beautiful, and it was wrong, and it was perfect. They spattered red on bare white and yellow skin and laughed, drunk on the glory of kill and fuck and live and breathe. The bites said “I love you”, and the scratches said “Always you”, and the fucking said, “Only you”, and they knew, wordless.

Daimd might claim to know, to have known from the moment Quinn raised steel in his defense, that the elf was always going to mean something to him, but he could never have predicted how much Quinn would prove to be worth. More than all the world, more than the tribe he counted as family, more than the Horde in its entirety, more even than his own damn life.

And, fascinating, here was a creature who seemed to need him just as much as he needed in turn. Never before had he felt reciprocated, level requirement. Only ever had the world wanted more of him than he could give; only ever had he wanted the urgency of lust answered in kind by a warm body willing to welcome his touch.

Here was the creature who completed him, who felt safe even through his unpredictable danger of mood, who tasted sweeter than the sweetest water to a parched throat. He drowned himself in Daliquinn and ever breathed easier for it, feeling oneness and a sureness and hot, severe love.