Title: Place your head on my beating heart
Fandom: High Rollers - Aerois campaign
Rating: G
Length: 1357 words
Content notes: Established Quill/Lucius relationship. Spoilers through Episode 88. Also fills one of my prompts from thisbluespirit 's Prompts for 2021: "stolen moments (Quill / Lucius - Window & Morning)". Title comes from Ed Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud".
Author notes: Quill and Lucius are currently keeping their relationship secret (except from Fayeth - it's not said in the fic itself, but Lucius told her because he's not a dick, and she is delighted by it). Obviously, Lucius being Lucius, "secret" probably means "half the skyship knows and is betting with each other on who the next person to find out will be"! 
Summary: After a nightmare, Quill turns to Lucius for comfort.

Lucius had been slowly coming out of his trance, not thinking of anything much but the enjoyable warmth of his bed, when a soft knocking sounded on his door. He leapt up at once; he knew that knock, familiar as the heartbeat of the one behind it. It was faster than usual, though - was something wrong? He unlocked the door, and as he had expected, Quill was waiting on the other side. The aarakocra bolted through as soon as the door opened, pushing it shut behind him and pulling Lucius into a tight hug, face buried in his chest.

“What’s wrong, Quill?” Lucius asked in concern, even as he returned the hug. He could feel Quill trembling, his feathers quivering - something must have frightened or upset him. He hadn’t even donned his tunic as he usually did in case someone saw him on his way to Lucius’s room, he was just wrapped in his cloak… Something was definitely wrong.

“Can’t I just want to hug my boyfriend?” Quill’s muffled voice replied.

“Of course you can, but is that all?” Lucius asked with a shiver. He hadn’t put on his slippers or his dressing gown in his haste to let Quill in, and the chill night air was beginning to cut through his pyjamas.

Quill noticed at once, of course, as he noticed everything. “You’re cold!” he scolded, pulling Lucius back towards his bed. “Come on, let’s get you warmed up.”

Lucius knew Quill was doing it to avoid answering his questions, but he was cold, and getting rapidly colder. It would be easier to focus on Quill when he wasn’t freezing! With a flick of his fingers, he summoned his blue and orange dancing lights so Quill could see properly, then followed Quill’s lead and scrambled onto the bed next to him, plumping up his many pillows against the headboard so they could lean against them comfortably. Meanwhile, Quill discarded his cloak, tugged a fluffy blanket over their legs, and wrapped his wings around Lucius, rubbing his shoulders to warm him up faster. Lucius smiled as he cuddled closer to his Birdie, the enjoyment of this familiar warmth overtaking his worries for a moment. They’d sat and cuddled like this through so many early mornings, in these stolen moments while the ship slept. He liked seeing how much more at ease Quill was with his magitech wing these days, too - when Nova first gave it to him, he'd been awkward and hesitant, keeping it folded at his side most of the time; now he enveloped Lucius in it as naturally as he did with his other wing.

“Better?” Quill asked.

Lucius nodded. “I’m fine, don’t worry. What’s the matter? Why are you here so early? You need your sleep, Birdie.”

“I… I had a nightmare,” Quill replied, looking a little embarrassed. “It's silly, I know, but it - it really scared me, and I… I wanted you.”

“What was it about?” Lucius asked. “It wasn’t one of your dreamies from H’Esper, was it?”

“It was about the Tassadar… and no, it wasn’t from H’Esper, don’t worry!”

“You’re sure?” Lucius asked nervously. If it was one of the prophetic dreams H’Esper sent, and it showed the Tassadar mission going horribly wrong, what would they do?

“Well, I very much doubt Starbane has the exact same living room as Brookstone, and I really hope we won’t be fighting him in pyjamas!” Quill said, with a shaky laugh. “I’m sure, it was just a nightmare. H’Esper’s dreams feel different, I remember them perfectly, not like other dreams, and they make sense. I just… it scared me, that’s all.”

“What scared you so much?” Lucius pressed. He knew Quill wasn’t telling him everything.

“It - it’s nothing, I’m fine now.”

“Are you? Really? Your heart’s still racing,” Lucius said, placing a gentle hand on Quill’s chest. Quill's heart was always fast compared to his own, as he'd discovered (and panicked about for a moment) the first time Quill had held him this close; but now the heartbeats seemed to blur together from their speed.

“It - I - he turned Valla against us,” Quill said reluctantly. “He - he made her hurt us. Hurt you. I - I needed to see you were okay.”

“Oh, Quilly.” Lucius pulled him into a tight hug. He could feel Quill trembling again; whatever Valla had done in his nightmare, it must have been horrifying. “I’m so sorry. It was just a bad dream. I'm fine, and Valla would never hurt any of us!”

“I know she wouldn’t… but… I do worry he might win her over to his side. You remember what she said last time she spoke to me…”

“I do…” Lucius sighed. That had worried him ever since Quill told them about it, but Quill needed reassuring right now, not for him to start worrying too. “She’s got a good heart, and Aerois is her home. She wouldn’t side with him, not on hurting us or hurting Aerois.”

Quill nodded slowly, then smiled up at him. “Thank you,” he said softly, nuzzling his feathered head into the crook of Lucius’s neck.

Lucius bent down and kissed his cheek, still holding him close, feeling him slowly relax. “Do you want to try and get some sleep? It must be really early, you can’t have slept enough,” he said at last, looking over at his window and the dark sky outside, at the shimmering Cradle, so bright that dawn must still be far off. Lucius tended to trance longer than most elves, and Quill seemed to get up earlier than the rest of the non-elves on the ship (Lucius wasn’t quite sure if that was an aarakocra thing, or just a Quill thing), but Lucius had still usually been lying awake for a while before Quill came knocking on his door to steal a little time together before dawn.

Quill shook his head. “I’m too awake now to go back to sleep… And I don’t want to waste time with you.”

Lucius felt like maybe he should insist on Quill getting the sleep he needed, but how could he resist that? “Well, if you do start getting sleepy, don’t fight it,” he compromised.

“Sure,” Quill answered, looking up at him with twinkling eyes that said he wasn’t really promising anything.

Lucius shook his head fondly, then asked, “Do you want to talk more about your nightmare, then, or the Tassadar mission?” They did that some mornings, talked about their worries and fears, tried to reassure and comfort each other. On other days they talked of lighter things, traded childhood stories, reminisced about everything they'd been through together… On others there was very little talking beyond murmured praise and moaned names.

“No, I want to try to forget it,” Quill said. “Can… can we just… cuddle for a bit? We have some time…”

“Some time? I’m not sure this even qualifies as morning yet, it might still be the middle of the night! We have lots of time, of course we can cuddle,” Lucius replied, with another glance at his window. He bent down to kiss Quill once more, then shifted position so his boyfriend could lean on his shoulder, caressing the tufted feathers at the back of his head.

Quill nestled against him with a soft, contented chirp, reaching up to run his fingers gently through Lucius’s long hair. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said in Elvish. “I love you.”

“I love you,” Lucius replied in stumbling Aarakocran, then switched back to Common to ask, “How do I say ‘you’re welcome?’”

Quill told him, and Lucius tried to repeat it, leaving Quill trying and failing to hide his giggles as he completely failed to reproduce the ending trill. Undeterred, and if anything pleased with himself for having made Quill laugh, Lucius began to go through the endearments that made up almost all his Aarakocran vocabulary. Sometimes he thought these might be the mornings he loved the most, these hours of warm hugs and sweet nothings. But really, he thought the same of every one of these stolen mornings, no matter what they did, so long as Quill was there with him.