promptfic: s/d, lace

[sword_logic]

Shin makes sure his footsteps make no noise on the frost that carpets the Derelict. It’s colder than usual.

It’s not often that he’s caught Drifter asleep like this. Drifter is, generally, far too paranoid to not be instantly woken if someone moves within half a mile of him, though a small part of Shin’s traitorous mind notes that Drifter doesn’t seem to mind falling asleep with Shin around.

The culprit of the colder-than-usual environment is laid out on a workbench splattered with grease and radiolarian acid burns: one of Drifter's containment units. He'd been grumbling about some malfunction last Shin had seen him.

Frost lies softly over his robes, inching up his neck, settling like fine lace over his beard, his slightly parted lips. His robes have fallen open, just slightly, even though his arms are crossed and he’s hunched between the wall and the back of his chair. The ice creeps down his chest, too, in hard-edged fractals threaded over skin and dark hair.

Shin strips a glove off. He can feel the chill, more than just what his HUD tells him. Indulgence or foolishness, he doesn’t know which prompts him to do it, but he presses his palm against Drifter's chest. The ice melts into dew, pearling against his skin, glittering in strands of coarse hair.

"Hot," Drifter murmurs.

Only thanks to years of forced composure does Shin refrain from jumping. He hadn’t noticed a change in pulse, in breath, in anything. Either Drifter’d been faking his sleep, or he’d slid from asleep to awake more smoothly than Shin’s ever seen anyone do. Frankly, no telling which is more likely.

Drifter’s skin is going from pink to red under Shin's hand, and he lifts it away.

The water Shin had melted out is starting to freeze again in a steady, frenzied creep blooming from the outside in, converging on the dip of Drifter's sternum and climbing up his chest, weaving infinitely variable patterns that seamstresses and engineers alike have sought to imitate for thousands of years.

“Cold,” Shin replies, tipping his head towards the containment unit.

Drifter hooks two fingers into his waistband and pulls so that Shin’s standing against the edge of the chair, between the careless sprawl of his legs, and says, “So warm me up, hotshot.”