Fanfiction Archive

er. the indefinite POV is intentional. right then.

2009-09-29T04:23:50Z

part 1

It's 4.13 in the morning and I can't sleep. I miss you. And before you ask, no, it's not because of that that I'm up writing longhand in a bleedin' bit of serviette at 4 in the bleeding morning. I just thought I should bring that up.

I say you mean a great deal to me and I do mean it; it's at times like this where I need to make that abundantly clear. It's distance that softens the obsessiveness of love into longing at once more understandable and still more pathetic. (There I go again, getting the point all muddled in poetry.)

The thing is, it's always about you. Every personality I step into when I write, it's always you on the other side, your incarnations I address, I lament, I serenade. Here, now, 4am in the morning and I don't know where I am, whose head I'm in - yours, mine, someone else's entirely.

I miss you. I need to make that clear.

Because the alternative confession I could be (should be) making is just too trite, too hackneyed and insincere to be ever directed towards you. I need to make that clear.

I wish you were here, but longing makes angels of us all. You're no angel. Nor demon neither. You don't haunt my sleep. You're you and you're home and I'm some place else, wishing for my feet to start moving again in the direction towards you. Towards home. And maybe then I'll be able to sleep.

losing touch

when you're in the heart of your hearts,
staring into nothing, leaning into white noise,
and still you find yourself wishing
'i want to go home.'
and you know you're in trouble
when 'home' ceases to be any physical thing,
any place to scrape your shoes and rest your feet
when it becomes instead a state of mind,
something yellow and irretractile,
a vague butterfly of temperature and air --
it is gone,
the sense of 'here' or 'then',
the rest for the weary and then some,
a measure of godlessness
without the certainty of 'there' and 'this',
without an antidote to your reckless want,
it is gone,
that 'home'
and your only comfort will be that
you can't ever go 'home' again

part 3

the horrorshow one

2009-09-29T04:07:54Z

like i remember

Some people have picture albums in their minds to keep them company before they fall asleep - Carl's got a horrorshow. It curves around the inside of his skull like a fucking IMAX screen, flickering static from violence to cruelty to endless blinking yours, yours, yours in loops that threaten to bleed from his eyes like salt.

He'd prefer the pictures, a less familiar form of celluloid than his film-footage life. But that's not how things work.

The most important parts of him aren't the most serviceable, what photographs and music and publishable self-expression can leech from under his skin. The defining parts are those even he can't quite grasp or find a way to ensnare and mutilate and sell away -

(elusive wild beasts whose shadows are only legendary and whose pelts would be a devastation)

- they're the momentary clench of fingers to wire just before a surge of adrenaline, the fleeting whispering words that fight at his tongue but never make it past his lips, the dull tipped bruises in the curl of his palm where Carl shoves his fingers in to keep them from reaching out, remembering, forgiving.

Because it's the middle of the nights, when he's alone, when it's silent that Carl has the hardest time keeping himself alive.

His bed becomes a trap of reproduced sensation: the sheets (his hands) wrap around his arms too tightly but when he shoves (battles) them back, he misses their constriction

(because they'd held him into place at least, kept him still and looking forward so he'd never catch the bogeyman's eye looking into himself)

A pillow to his face would stop his breathing, stop his thinking, but then he'd have to go with the smell of stale sweat and laundry in his nostrils

(like a euphemism - he wants to die but would rather not have it done with the imagined scent of his executor still caught as a last breath in his lungs)

What Carl fights against every second of every minute isn't oblivion, it's memory; blurred colours and murmured words of his day distorted into mirrored knives and possibilities, contingencies, shouting fault and blame and angry accusations that quicken his imagination, make it difficult for the him at tomorrow's buzzer to figure dream or delusion or past.

The drink had helped, when he was able, but that crutch has finally snapped under years of abuse a0nd sobriety makes him sharper in the daylight, sparkle in the daytime but keeps him on the edge of sleep at night where he wants nothing more than forgetfulness or, barring that, eternity. There is static in his head so consuming it's not unlike the insides of a womb, giving birth to impure demons and twisted angels and the want for ceasefire; because in the dark, in the silence, loathing becomes an active verb and there are no such things as nouns any more, only ways in which they can hurt him if he stops hurting himself.

He hates this almost more than he hates himself, hates the fighting because it means that of the two things in the world that can make everything else disappear, one of them won't have a thing to do with him.

And he's only got that one thing right now.

Of the many things that do not disappear when the lights go out, Carl's unforgiving and inexorable pride is one of them, though between it and his life, he'd side with destruction any day.

(I miss you most in the dark)

part 2
part 3

it's just some song we used to sing

2009-09-29T03:41:28Z

part 1
part 2

claustrophilia

It's times like this that make Peter feel (invincible) like they could go on forever. Late afternoon catnaps, waking up without a clue as to the time or day or anything but the two of them, folded together on their narrow bed, spines twisted into the imperfect indents made by bodies other than theirs. Carl, fever-hot, dressed only in old, worn bedclothes, heavy and pliant under his arm, snuffling into his shoulder without show or self-consciousness or even awareness, just a curl of softened limbs and charcoal hair that wants to be smudged away.

He could do anything he likes, Peter feels; pull Carl closer, touch back his hair, trace his fingers along the cut-glass edges of his features until his hands hurt and scar and learn them forever. He doesn't though, doesn't even move, like a statue of himself, waiting for the Carl-ivy to wrap around him on his own until they become unrecognisable, incomplete without one another. Peter closes his eyes so he can see the afterimage of Carl's face etched into the black underside of his lids - wants to keep it there, permanent company in the dark - but curiosity begins to tickle as it fades (What if Carl's changed since he's been alone? Become something different, something more?) and he has to open them again.

He loves them best like this, warm, alone, silent in the half grey-light - he loves Carl so much sometimes he aches, like in grief (which it's like, sometimes, forgetting yourself to the swollen tides of emotion) so much feeling and want and need-more-now, that he might crack along the edges of himself and burst.

A breath escapes from behind the wet cage of his throat, an accidental overflow of emotion, perhaps, but it stumbles across the skin of Carl's face and breaks the moment, stirs the sleeping beauty as effectively as any charmed kiss.

Carl's eyelids open, dream-bruised and sleep-slow, flicker back and forth like a peepshow while Peter holds his breath back, waits for the blue to reveal itself from behind gummy lashes. Carl begins to shift.

'What time is it?' he mumbles - not to Peter though, because Peter never knows - pushing at Pete's arm as he moves to prop himself onto his elbow; squints across the room, trying to divine some truth from the clock's dusty face that he can't find in Peter's. His movements are imprecise though, uninspired and half-hearted and all it takes is two of Peter's fingers hooked into the collar of Carl's hoodie to bring him back down, heavy and sighing against the pillow.

'Hn,' Carl says, letting Peter draw him closer, pet his hair from his eyes and press hushing fingertips into his lips. Carl's eyes shiver close, and his hand stirs to curl beneath the slope of Peter's ribcage, but otherwise he keeps still as Peter's touch rearranges him, remakes him into art, Carl-shaped and resplendent for his eyes only.

Carl has rhymes hidden in the whorls of his hair, poetry tucked in the unobtrusive fold of skin behind his knees, verse in the shadow of his voice and the downwards sweep of his fingers and sometimes Peter thinks, this is too easy, he doesn't deserve praise for this trick, shouldn't get to make a living off of licking salt and song from the skin of Carl's belly when all he does is collect the words already there, like Carl'd sweat them just for him to find.

'Peter.' Carl's eyes have grown soft, dove grey-blue, yielding like clouds parting against the sky. Peter shakes his head again. 'What is it--?' Carl almost says, but Peter exhales against his lips and steals his next breath from Carl's lungs. Their lips are dry from sleep, tongues clumsy from disuse.

When Carl pulls back his lips are kiss-swollen and when Peter opens his mouth, his words are kiss-bruised: 'I'm going to write a song for you,' Peter says, whistling through his Ts, 'and you're going to live forever. I'm going to write all my songs for you, so every time I sing them you'll know why, and every time you sing them, you'll remember.'

Carl sighs and looks away. 'Don't give me that,' he snaps, sudden and incongruous. 'You're putting it all on me again, you know, and I don't want it.'

'Putting what on you?' Peter asks, gazing up through the grey twilight-nether.

'This...' Carl says in a voice so vague he might as well have gestured it with his hands. 'You making me into your... I don't know, muse, Pete and -- don't laugh! -- I don't want that responsibility, okay?'

Peter moves to hide the absurdity of this accusation into Carl's neck and this time, Carl's hands hook behind his shoulders and bully him to where he wants him. 'I won't make you dress the part, Biggles,' he tells him, voice muffled against soft cloth and warm skin.

Carl huffs again, but locks his arms around Peter's so that they're curled together like fingers in a fist. 'I don't mean that. It's just... Musehood is for dead people you'll never meet, or blonde birds who won't look twice at you. You can't... It's not the same, Pete, if you can touch it.'

Peter laughs this time, open and undisguised, and he can feel his own vibrations in Carl's chest against his. 'But Carlos, how could we ever be the same as anyone?' Peter can't see his eyes, but he can feel the question tense in the vertebrae of Carl's spine.

He rolls his head on the pivot of his neck until his face is tilted up towards Carl's, his eyes languid slits of gentle humour. 'We're Biggles and Bilo, Carlos and The Pigman, fuckin' Peter and Carl. We're going to be fuckin' forever,' and this time, it's Carl who crushes his mouth to Peter's, fills it with all those dirty rhymes and pretty melodies he keeps tucked under his tongue.

'Sing me something, yeah?' Peter murmurs when he gathers himself into Carl's chest, closing his eyes. Carl's voice bone deep in his ear, eyes squeezed closed against the last crooked shred of today, Peter falls back into darkness and dreams of tomorrow.

--

Pete falls asleep again, easy as waking, as dreaming, and Carl falters into silence. His last mumbling hum is more speculative than musical as he ruffles his fingers through the mess of Pete's hair and lets the warmth tug him slowly back into sleep.

'You silly giffer,' Carl tells him finally, affectionately, before closing his eyes one last time. 'They're just songs.'

Question: how AU can a fic be and still be posted on albion_fic?

I'm stuck on pre-fame libs and I don't know why.......

2009-09-21T21:30:54Z

This thing we have - these best years of our life - are born out of secret desperation and misery, and can't possibly, ever last. The struggle grows stale, the discomfort grows old, and the suffering becomes less than noble when it loses its novelty and failure steps in, colder than a shit bedsit with a fucked space heater ever could.

So I'm going to take everything I can now, Biggles; please don't think me selfish. Isn't it natural to want to be happy for as long, as intensely as possible? Isn't that why we blow our wages on fags and 7 inches and whiskey when we could be having three squares? Isn't this why we spend our weekends passing around a bottle and a three stringed guitar when we could both be working proper jobs?

Are you happy, Carlos? Between your haunted days and stone frozen expressions and your manic frenzies on the rooftop, do you feel yourself at ease, of present, in love? I've never paid enough attention to you, I know; always caught up in the vines and roses and weeds of my own mind, though you've never blamed me of it, of anything, inattentive or otherwise. But I'm sorry for it anyway, Carl, that I encourage your unhappinesses by being simply too far away at the time to notice.

Do you remember how you once accused me of being like I'm everywhere at once? The entirety of the world, stretched across it like a hovering, boy-shaped blanket you can see even when you turn your face away, through the cracks of your fingers; like the sky, a broad and endlessly fertile blue that seems to swallow anything released into it.

I never told you, but if I'm the sky, Biggles, you're more like water, an abiding and glowering sea, tumultuous and opaque, but steady like clockwork, like the tide. And when you rage you are enormous, strength from beneath bitter depths; but when you calm you're almost languid, docile, like you might even let the odd beachcomber soak himself in your salty gentleness, when hours ago those smooth limbs had battered seasoned navigators, rent them into pieces in fierce and careless joy.

Being happy like we are, though, is like pulling the perfect pint of beer every minute of every day. Fill it too shallow or too slow and the unhappy throat goes thirsty; over the top and it's just a mess. We can't last like this, on my tarnished romance and your reluctant idealism alone; music and poetry can fill lives, but it can't fill stomachs, nor hearts, at least not for very long.

So please don't mind me when I crowd into you under the sheets; don't punish me when I laugh a little too gently, touch you a little too lingeringly for brotherhood or boyhood or friendship. We are of secret desperation, after all, though I'm no longer sure why mine is as much as it seems to be. You must be very blind, Biggles, to be unable to see this crowning jewel of all of my affections, or I must be very cloudy. Or perhaps my love shines not so brightly as I'd like to think, and perhaps you'll never know what words I hide into your hair when you're too exhausted to press yourself away.

But, Carl, you have made me happy; even if you aren't; even if all my songs for you never make a penny of the money we put into them in effort; even if you never notice.

I am happy, and I'll never stop hoping that you are too.

I've been trying to read light_fingers's stuff, but her journal's locked. Does anyone have anything to share?

Peter's other brain agrees that the upstairs neighbours need to shove the fuck off.

2009-09-10T07:14:10Z

This is the thing: Carlos's hair is too fucking long, they haven't the money to get it cut, and quite frankly, it's pissing Peter off. Of course, Carl's hair has always been on the longish side and it was his idea to spend their last tenner this month on fags and food so yeah, Pete hasn't really a leg to stand on about the subject – it's not like he hasn't been looking shaggy lately too, probably hedging more towards "highland cow" at this point than "eccentric artist type who can't be arsed."

But Pete's hair too long and Carlos's are two very different problems. All Peter's does is take years off his face: too big eyes and round cheeks and street urchin scruff – when he goes out, the birds flock around him and coo like he's a six-foot-something fuckin' baby; give him a sturdy stick of moderate length he can use to beat them off and he's set (not that he doesn't like the girls, mind, but some of the, well, heftier ones get a wee bit too enthusiastic sometimes). But Carl – Carl just, well, he gets pretty, and then the slats of hair that fall over his cheek and the angle at which he holds his chin stop looking like "defiance" and start creeping into "coy," like he's hiding behind a reason to avert his eyes; softer around his face and feathering like frayed silk under his jaw. And when he goes out, people stare, follow the curling tumble past his collar and, all right, call him a jealous, possessive twat, but Pete doesn't fucking like that.

So really, he can't be blamed when Carl steps out of the shower that day (wet and spilling heat, his hair dripping thick like ink down his neck) and Pete calls clumsily from over behind the couch, "Oi, cut your bleeding hair, you look like a girl," because, come on, he's been provoked for long enough.

Carl freezes where he's standing, towel loose and low and way too sodding short around his hips, and frowns. "It's not that bad," he says, scrubbing it self-consciously back from his face. Peter rolls his eyes long and hard, because Carlos is good looking and he knows it (sometimes), but he's also got no idea.

"Yes, you do," Peter persists. "Christ, I've dated proper girls with less hair than you. You're starting to look like a right Goldilocks."

"Rapunzel," Carl mutters, shifting uncomfortably under ambush. "Anyway, we're skint, yeah?"

"I can do it."

Pete's brain does a double take on itself. "Hang on, that's not what we agreed to say," it protests. "You're supposed to offer him that twenty you've got stuffed under your socks. What are you doing?"

Carl looks unconvinced. "When's the last time you've even held a pair of scissors?" he says. "Not that we've even got any, what since what's-his-face nicked our last pair—"

"I got them back and I used to work in a shop. Back home," Pete blurts. Carl blinks at him, bewildered.

"You what?"

Pete's brain whirrs furiously on overdrive, wailing, "What? Wait, what?!" at him, but Carl's got an eyebrow arched in his direction, lips pressed together and his hip jutted out from under his towel like a cock on a hilltop.*

Let it never be said that Pete Doherty has ever been at a loss for words in a moment of crisis: "I," he says. "Er. Yeah."

So now he's got Carlos bent head first over the bathroom sink, hands braced to either side and feet spread, looking doubtful. "You're sure about this," he says from beneath his dark, dripping curtain and Pete makes a vague "Hnng" noise that apparently sounds enough like an affirmation that it gets Carl to shut his pie-hole so that Pete can more completely keep his attention on the shift and slink of muscle under the moist damp that still clings like heat to his skin.

Peter may be a miserable, filthy liar but he is careful and can keep his hands remarkably steady when he really needs to (which he really, really needs to).

Slowly, carefully, he peels back the layers of Carl's hair (which fall in strangely ragged lines, now that Pete's noticing it; like Carl had tried to reach around the back of his own head the last time and had hacked at it until it stayed down.) He tries to do that thing he's seen the professionals do, pulling strands taut between his fingers and cutting straight along the line, but it comes out jagged and looking frayed, so he settles with just bunching pieces of it together and lopping the ends off.

Carl shifts. "What are you doing back there, waiting for proper licensing? You done yet?"

"Hang on a minute," Pete says just a little indistinctly but Carl squirms out from under his hands with an agitated, "Let us up," and raises his head.

"Oi, you haven't even started on the front yet," he says, tilting his face left, then right, and scrunching a hand roughly through the back. "Look, it's plenty short enough; just get on with it, yeah?" He doesn't wait for Pete to reply, just bows his head back down again and this time, well, his hair is dryer now after Peter's fussing and Carl's ruffling, and it slips, catching damp at his shoulders and parts in waves over the smooth, round bone at the top of his spine, the long, white arch of his neck -- and Peter wants only just to swoop in and let their ancient, sticky scissors clatter into the sink alongside the tattered bits of hair and the last of Pete's noble fucking restraint; mark that skin, worry it with teeth and tongue and kisses until Carl moans – melts back into his arms like a burst string of imagined promises and lets Pete have him, remake him with pressing, pushing fingers 'til his blood and bone and the whole world knows that this is his, yeah, fuck anyone who thinks they can have a look, scrub a pull, or cop a feel because Carl's got Peter's fingerprints bruised into his hips, Peter's name roughed like cursing into his voice.

"There," Pete says airlessly, stepping back. "All done."

Carl lifts his head from the sink and peers into the stained yellow mirror. "About time," he grumbles, distractedly rooting his fingers through his fringe to find the part, examining his face as he does so, as if a couple inches of hair is going to make or break his dashing good looks, Peter thinks exasperatedly, batting at the stray pieces that stick to the back of Carl's neck.

"Yeah, all right," Carl concludes, crumpling a hand through the back of it again as he pads his way across the bathroom floor. "Might even let you have a go at it next time."

He's making to leave when Peter suddenly mutters, "Hang on," and his fingers reach out, sweep away an errant strand clinging to the flat of Carl's cheekbone. Carl's expression is puzzled but indulgent as he lets Pete move across his face, curl a piece of his fringe around a knuckle and tuck it back behind his ear. Recklessly, impetuously, Peter ducks in and smudges his lips across Carl's forehead.

He's there half a second when Carl shoves at him, laughing, "Piss off," and goes to get dressed.

Pete watches him disappear into the bedroom from in the mirror's reflection, left with the bits of him Carl will let him have and the lingering taste of soap on his lips.

*Er, I apologise for this metaphor, but I couldn't get the phrase out of my head, so here it is, in all its nonsensical glory

Once again, concrit and legitimate British-isation is love.

kinnoth @ 2009-09-06T23:00:00

2009-09-07T04:39:26Z

circa '97…

He wouldn't feel quite so silly for wanting this, he thinks, if just he'd had a poet's hands. Because Peter's never felt proportioned, always a bit ugly, his needle neck and moon face, heavy wrists and spine curved like a perpetual question. His hands though -- thick, blunt, widely knuckled -- likely take the cake. His hands swallow pens, defy paper: soft skin too porous to hold ink when he writes on them in that still-child's scrawl; collect dirt in shallow half-crescent arches, even when he makes the effort to pick them clean. He has labourer's hands, he thinks, especially when he's sitting there, slack-jawed in concentrated awe, having finally cajoled Amy's friend/flatmate/not-shaggin'-him-so-will-you-just-piss-off? into picking up his guitar and playing something for him.

Carl's hands are a series of long, fine bones held together by milk-fat skin and distinctly un-feminine calluses, and even with his striking looks (which Peter can appreciate, you know, 'cos he's not some insecure tosser who goes around knocking on what's patently true) it's his hands that draw the eye to the inevitable conclusion that, this bloke, right, he's meant to be a musician, meant to cradle that guitar, 'cos you can't just put off God's designs like that, yeah?

Peter could fit both of Carl's hands in the palm of one of his, but knows that if he'd ever tried to, all those little white scars criss-crossing Carl's knuckles would make known how they'd got there. It's safer like this, with Carl's entire body curled into the curves a beaten old acoustic like they're the curves of a woman. His fingers flit idly across the wires, coaxing sound from the stillness like pebbles skipping across a pond.

'So what do you want to hear?' Carl mutters, distracted but grudgingly accommodating.

Anything, Peter wants to say, but substitutes it with, 'Whatever you want,' because open-minded as he is, boys don't say that kind of thing to one another, the kind of thing that implies the sort of eager desperation he feels whenever Carl is on that precipice of doing something.

Carl scoffs and stills and then, in a sudden decisive upstroke, launches into something strident and deliberately irritating, all mocking harmonies and aggressive chords. His fingers dig perhaps a little too firmly into the strings, Peter thinks, because they blanch under the nail in a way that looks unnatural and painful. The tune is short and fast, and Carl finishes it in the same terse impatience he'd begun.

'Another one?' he asks but hasn't looked up to see Pete's vigorous nods when he starts up again, something lower, slower, faintly familiar. Peter sways a bit - the melody is soothing and lullaby-sweet. He feels his eyelids drooping, wants to let them drop so that he can close out the lights and clutter and mess of the flat around him and just let the music flutter through him like a butterfly in his veins.

But this is Carl, prickly Carl, solemn Carl who he's only just met a week ago, and Peter doesn't know if he could find words to explain how much he enjoys him that wouldn't send Carl out of this room and quite possibly out of his life forever. Peter concedes he doesn't even really know the bloke yet, but he has the feeling it would be a loss he wouldn't be able to brush off with a drink or a post-coital fag. So he settles instead for lowering his eyes, fixing them on the strumming crawl of Carl's right hand across the strings, when halfway through the second reprise, Carl begins to sing. Mumbled, jumbled words, self-conscious while probably half-unaware, Carl's voice is the reluctant sort of gruff, honeyed, completely divorced from his muffled speaking voice, and Pete wonders, incredulously, how it is that Carl's decided to go into acting of all things, with a voice like that.

'Think about that, why don't you,' Carl mumble-sings, and it's then that Peter remembers where he'd heard this song, two years ago in a pub with some shite little band –

'Eyes wide open, you thinking man,' he replies and Carl glances at him, surprised, but not unpleasantly.

'You know this?' he asks, hands continuing on their ministrations. If anything were capable of making a guitar weep sound, Pete thinks, it would be those hands.

'Heard it once,' Peter says, smiling serenely. 'You were supporting the what's-it...'

'Fuckin' terrible, these lyrics,' Carl admits, trailing notes into a quavering riff. 'But our mate, Evan - he was our frontman - kept going on about the "repetition in the theme" or some-shit. Wouldn't let us touch anything.'

The song slows into a coda and Carl draws it softly to a close. Terrible song or not, there is reverence there for the act, and Peter can't take his eyes away. These are the hands of experience, accomplishment, someone who's done something with his life, never mind that he's nineteen - one year older than Peter just proves he's that much more alive.

'I can fix this,' Peter says, slightly breathless, 'if you'll show me how to do that.' Carl looks up, follows his gesture to the instrument in his lap, and Peter watches as a thaw takes hold of his expression of faintly chilly disinterest and begins rearranging his features until his lips (red, rose pink, Peter notices) curl into themselves and the corners of his eyes fold into a cautious smile.

'You figure yourself to be some kinda artist, Pete?' he says and before Peter can protest that atrocious generalization, it occurs to him he's being teased, that if he meets Carl's eyes now (blue, like pieces of sky, but with the heat of the sun behind them) he'd recognize fondness there, guarded but proffering. It is at this point Peter knows that he gets to take direct claim to Carl, no more of that second degree relation rubbish; Carl is his now, his friend, and Peter can't help but feel a little giddy at this theft as he smiles back, beatific. His sister probably won't be too pleased.

Same rules appy: anything you'd like to contribute to make me less awkward (concrit is love!) is greatly welcomed :)

heavy on the meta, sticky on the metaphor, more or less untitled

2009-09-03T07:00:02Z

this should have a bibliography...

ghostboy

The first time after a long time that they meet, Peter is smiling without his upper lip, and Carl, blinded by his hair, from across the nicotine fog can almost imagine that this is real – without camera flashes, unsurreptitious scratching of shorthand on paper – that they're actually here and not just pretending this is coincidence. The music bridging static between them crackles like a foil report as Peter holds his arms up too high, like he is expecting someone taller than Carl to fit under them; but Carl's normal-sized, not some towering straw and wicker man, and he's forgotten something of leaning forward on his toes when he hugs Pete, so his nose ends up smashing into the side of his shoulder. Peter smells of unwashedness and fresh dry cleaning, familiar, yeah, human; nothing romantic or nostalgic to it.

"How've you been, mate?" Carl mumbles. They hold each other for a moment longer than strictly necessary -- give the slow ones a chance to catch up and the sentimental ones a moment to wax glittery-poetic -- then break apart without lingering, as if they're afraid they'll stick, or as if they can't, that their jigsaw body parts have lost their shapes.

They turn and one of the flickering strobe lights catches Peter straight in the face and parts it from its colors like a photograph shock-bleached by the sun; his face loses its creases and edges. Carl feels like he's seeing an animal in its natural habitat, morphing from under camouflage.

Peter's always been that way, if Carl lets himself admit it, has always cultivated an effortless sense of belonging wherever he goes, whoever he's with. No different than when Pete was with him then, for sure, but Carl's not like that, can't help but feel as if he's walked out the door without socks under his shoes, strangely naked, weirdly gauche. What was it once like to have had this other at one point an extension of himself? He knows the case to be true but, like an amnesiac, cannot recollect the sensation past a vague sense of empathy for a self that had surely once been him, but has become lost sometime in the interim. He'd hoped this reunion to be easier, something innate, to fall back into stride as if their separation had never really been, and one of them had simply up and left the room for sixteen sodding months.

He times his stride valiantly quick to keep pace while Pete hunches over, gargantuan and guiltily gangly. He can't imagine how they once were, how the photographic evidence once showed them to be: arms around each others' shoulders loping, lounging, laughing, like they shared a leg and half a lung -- natural, not just this, like some amateur's photoshopped thrill, cut and pasted together from two entirely separate worlds.

Peter is a linen and pin-stripe spider crammed into the corner booth he's chosen, as if this is some pathetic bid for privacy when really all it does is make them more like cornered animals. Carl climbs in after him and there's an elbow in his face as Pete tries to settle around him, touching too deliberately, knees knocking against each other with so much force it hurts. Pete laughs, "Been too fuckin' long, eh, Biggles?" and Carl smiles, reaches gingerly across the way to tilt the trilby hat from out of Peter's eyes.

He has a half pint of bitter left in a glass, and he wishes dearly that he had had the presence of mind to down it all half and hour ago, so that it would have been lining the insides of his veins by now, and he could be moving on to something stronger. He takes a moment of distraction to knock it back anyway, feels his tongue tingle then numb as Peter chats politely with the steady trickle of well-wishers who wink surprised eyelids at Carl as they pass, because tweedle-dee no longer implies tweedle-dum, and that it does right now is an anomaly. (Oh, pardon me, I didn't see you under there, hello)

Starfish, Carl thinks cautiously, torn apart; they grow their own bodies back to make up for where they used to have each other, and now there are too many limbs, no worn places, no way to exchange a joint for an elbow or a lyric for a line.

They don't know how to stand together anymore because they've had to stand alone, just like how you can't grow into a skin you used to wear, and you can't go back to leaning on a shoulder after you've finally learned to hobble on your own. When Peter turns to him again, dark liquid eyes on a face like death, Carl stumbles for something to say, manages inanely, "'Sa right naff jacket you got there. Where'd you pick it up?"

"Debenhams."

"Really? Us too."

"Nah, haven't got your own line of Barat leather jackets then?"

"Says the one shagging the supermodel. Here, prove it to you."

In every interview he's ever given on his own, they make him talk about Pete, accusatorily, like he's only half shown up.

(So where's the rest of you gone, Barat? Off and left it at home, have you?)

A man only has so many emotions, so many words he's able to give away before he's left with empty hands and no trousers. Carl on Pete – he hasn't even got his pants left, in that. Early on, in its darkest, it'd been as if that continuous series of whirring tape recorders and anonymous hands had been his only confessors, the only way he could make Pete able to ever hear him from underneath his fucking rock. Nothing about the drugs, nothing about the band. Just to have a talk, he'd said. I don't want anything from him. Never have.

I just want my friend back.

But then there'd been the bands, Peter wailing at him in abstract melodies and Carl mumbling back in music so deliberate it bordered on pop. It'd been cathartic, in a way – a bit like banging your face into a mirror and expecting it to talk back to you; quick to grow old in repeatedly denying any relation or retaliation between the lines (Just feelings, yeah, no, not about him, just life, you know); and between the music and the press and the serendipitous glances across vast and insincere rooms, it was almost as if it were just them again, bound together in an endless game of rhyming Chinese whispers.

They've screamed themselves dry while avoiding each others' eyes, bled their frustrations and their feelings away in ink and cellulose and the eardrums of a thousand shrieking audiences. And now, Peter's fingers are curled around his collar like white goose-necks breaking thick and sluggish at the joints while Carl twists for him, sucking on a cigarette like he's sucking the marrow out of life, because it gives his mouth something to do while he realizes that they're talking about nothing because nothing is all they have left to talk about.

"Carl," Peter says, releasing him. All huge eyes, needle veins, and rotting cocaine-skin; mouth like a ragged wound and still, Carl meets his eyes when he calls, because the alternative is not answering at all, which would be too much like apathy, defeat, and admitting that he has nothing else to say. "It's really great to see you again, mate. I've really missed you."

He holds his arms out again, lower, narrower, a better fit, and Carl leans into him, remembers to hook his chin over his shoulder this time, the catch in the lock that bolts them into place. Peter rocks into him, bone on bone and probably closes his eyes; because Peter is like a boy-ghost sometimes, and can't let go and can't grow up and can't understand that he's already been mourned, and that Carl can't do this again, any of it, not even with his hands heavy across Carl's spine and the warmth on his skin that isn't quite anything like home.

A/N: As you can see, I am painfully, awkwardly *not British*, so any wonderful suggestions you can make to make me sound less not-British (or any improvements you'd like to make to my obvious bullshit) are SO FREAKIN' WELCOME IT'S SORT OF NOT EVEN FUNNY. Like. I'd love you forever. That sort of thing.

Oh, and here. Have some really bad tie-in poetry:

he comes he goes like a whisper 'remember'
the only thing soft about him
his hair his skin like hooks to your lips;
bone-eyes that he stares you through in.
so he tears you asunder as he disappears under
a blanket of gin
his cowardice and sins;
as your next breaths begin in
'can't you hear me's and
'won't you listen's
then when he's returning on your edge of yearning
sodden and sure
wailing and galing
murmurs and pleads for 'remember me please'
but you can't understand
no you can't reprimand
so you blink and you sigh
and it's alright again

the summer king

2009-06-21T21:09:23Z

Arthur says, slurring, "I would have sent for you sooner, had I known. God knows we need more good men. Goddess."

My high king – my lord father – is drunk. He had called for festivities, to celebrate his newest knight, his sister's son; laughed and brawled and made merry all night long, but he cannot hold his liquor. I am little better, and together, we can barely stand. His weight bears dead upon my shoulder, and he says, "But she never spoke of you, nephew. Not even when she came back, after all those years. She never said a thing." His voice tapers into something small, unguarded, and I wonder – there, with his head lolling against my ear and his hand gripping above my hip – how so sentimental a soldier, so simple a man could have earned this right of fatherhood over me. How my mother could have so loved this man against nature to let him lay with her.

"She spoke nothing of you either, sire," I tell him, strained, as we, so embraced, stumble together like a three-legged cat, away from the comfort and company and into the cold inhospitality of an unfamiliar dark. "In fact she said little at all, of what I can remember."

"That's right," Arthur says. His feet catch suddenly upon an uneven cobble and I am forced to take his weight upon mine and then mine against the stones. I am ill suited to be my high king's custodian for the night. I am not much bigger than he – smaller, in fact; his bone structure without his accumulated girth. We are still several corridors' bends from his rooms and I am already out of breath.

His weight on me and I am pinned, his precarious balance against me keeping us both from falling. Crapulence in me makes me slower than I am wont to be, makes my eyes drag through my surroundings as if my world were thick with warm sugar. I see more, even if I move less. And now I am taken with the blue of my lord father's eyes, their slow, hungry rake over my features and the torchlight that draws the shadow from within the angles and hollows of his face. He is, undoubtedly, looking for something, some answer to his fascination with me that he cannot place. For a man of so much power, he knows surprisingly little of what he wants.

I think, then, of how Gawain would have been a better candidate for this. He is a bear, a brute; his mind is impenetrable to insight or imagination. By now he could have dumped the king in his chambers, been back at the table with a scullery maid in his lap. He could have laughed in good nature when the king tripped over his feet, hefted him bodily over his arm, dismissed his forlorn ramblings as the gibberish of a morose drunk.

Gawain would be here, or Galahad, or perhaps Lancelot. But Arthur had insisted. His sister's son, he'd grandly proclaimed. He could not be anything but – look at how he takes care of me. His sister's son. He could not be anything but.

"How old are you?" Arthur asks. There is sweat upon his brow, darkening the hair that curls below his hairline into loops of burnished gold. My mother must have seen him as such on that night of Beltane's feast, those seventeen years ago. "She would have been very young when she had you, then," Arthur replies.

"We could be brothers," I say, with an irony too subtle for his inebriation.

I laugh, and he smiles, beatific, though he does not understand. "You are hardly more than a dozen years my junior," he agrees. He puts his fingertips to the pagan markings by my eye and murmurs, "And there is something about you, nephew."

My heart, for a moment, startles in my chest and catches with my breath. Has he found me out? I wonder. Has he come to recognize my rightful relation to him on his own? Is he not, in fact, the blind, brainless, faithless tragedy my Aunt has always had me believe?

His fingers begin to trace and my eyelids shudder close to meet them. This must be his fey power, I think – willing my heart to still lest he feel it jumping against his chest – to inspire such doubt in men.

But the moment passes and the reality of it – that I am here, pressed against a castle wall with an armful and face full of drunken, indolent king. "The wind has returned to my lungs, sire," I say. I push my palms against him, ready to catch and steady, but Arthur pushes back, much more forceful than I had been. My arms are held in a grip I can easily break, but Arthur has his face pressed into my collar, and I cannot, for the first time tonight, see his eyes – and this entices me to stillness, to waiting.

"She would have been very young when she had you," he repeats, his left hand leaving my wrists and following the line of my arm to where my shoulder joins my neck. "The man who had had her then, your father – he would have been her first." His fingers unfurl flat against the swell of my windpipe, and for a moment, I am certain he knows. I am certain with all conviction that he knows his guilt and my mother's and of the abomination of blood that is me and that I am to die for it. I would tell him – I want to tell him, but for my suddenly cottoned mouth; how the thought of it fills me with a rapturous sense of glee: the thought of dying by his hand here, in this corridor, in the bastion of the greatest kingdom of the greatest king Britannia will ever know. The son of a king is to die and what a glorious pleasure it will be to be him.

"Your heart is racing," he informs me in a burst of hot breath that brings the gooseflesh to my skin. "I know so little about you. I want to know – will you tell me why your heart is racing?"

I lower my eyes, waiting. "My lord," I begin, but Arthur's grip remains light, cradling. He has lifted his head and his expression is terrible, his eyes like bright jewels in a face carved of stone. He is judge and jury before my death and, surely, I think – his breath damp against my tongue as I wet my upper lip – surely Death himself can be no more magnificent. "Indeed, you must have suspected –" but he lunges forwards before I can say, swallowing my words into his mouth before they ever leave mine.

A surge of urgency rushes in my chest and a wave of disgust swells up to beat against it. Something has gone terribly wrong. The disgust hits me first: my father is kissing me. The calculation rises quenchingly behind it: the High King of Britannia is kissing me. Then again still: the man I am going to kill is kissing me.

My father – Arthur – draws back a measure, rests his brow against my temple, his nose pushed against my cheek, as if exhausted. He breathes, "You must not be sorry, nephew, you must not let yourself think that this is your fault, this isn't—"

"My lord," I say. My voice shakes. "You must have known it would be my greatest delight that you would have me such." It is my brain that drowns the protestations and the horror, but it is something else entirely that guides my hand to rest over his, pulls it to the loosened collar of my shirt, and presses it under.

Arthur swallows, makes a noise like dying and moves. He pushes my shirt over the line of my shoulder and scrapes the coarse pads of his fingertips over the unmarked skin of my chest and back. "You are exquisite," he says, digging his fingers into the ties in my braid and tugging until my hair releases loose and dark around me. "You must let me," pulling my head back and licking into my mouth, wet and wanton as any whore. "You must let me."

Such ardor in his entreaties, I think, when I am but another knight, 'his sister's son' in the daylight. I laugh, low and abrupt, close my lips around his tongue and suckle before pushing him back. "Everything, my lord," I say.

His hands are busy rucking up the tails of my shirt. "Arthur," he says, around his teeth worrying at my earlobe. I grunt, put my hands around his pressing hips. "If I am to be yours tonight, you must call me Arthur," he says and clamps. A moan pushes its way from out of my throat before I can close my teeth around it. The empty echoes of my voice reverberate against the walls, and I am reminded of our exposed position, our indiscretion.

"Arthur," I say, a hollow endeavor for urgency behind my voice. He hums in response, fingers gliding along the ridges of my stomach, drifting lightly towards the waistband of my trousers. "Arthur," I say again, and this time the fingers dip, just as he spills forwards, mouth hot and slick and opening obediently beneath mine.

He who is innocent to the knowledge of his sins; he who can, regardless, barely suffer to look me in the face; he from whom my mother hid me in shame, left me to rot in the barbarism of the windswept wilds – he dares to derive such pleasure from this knowledge of my flesh. My tongue lapping at the texture of his palate, his fingers pawing clumsily at the knots of my flies, and I watch Arthur close his eyes, feel him fold pliantly under the pressure of my lips and arms and hands, let him imagine that my revulsion is fondness, that my resentment is archness, that my anger is love.

I compel my disquiet to untwist itself. I will let him have me, I resolve. I will let him do his worst and when that day comes where I am to kill him, I will let him know of his perversion. I will break him that day with this knowledge he craves right now, and on that day the memory of this warmth will cut him down faster than a thousand Saxon blades.

But then I feel his fingertips, suddenly, brushing against my prick; he has given up on the tiny knots of banded leather and twined his fingers in between them in his impatience. A flash of panic, and I shove him, nearly blind. Fingers laced into my flies, legs tangled between my feet, he tumbles backwards and pulls me down on top of him. My hair, unfettered from their braids, spills forwards from behind my shoulder in a curtain of ink and dull silk. Arthur looks at me, transfixed, enraptured, unseeing behind glazed, slitted eyes, and the name he forms while he twists up to kiss me is not my own.

"We are exposed here," I tell him, steadily. Mother Goddess, Lady of the Earth: prevail upon me so that he does not hear me shake. Take this dread and rage from me, and grant me peace. But Arthur merely inclines his head as if in agreement; he makes no indication of movement other than to card his fingers against my scalp, again and again. I feel my eyes begin to drift shut, allowing him to carry me with the motion, allowing my mind to settle and harden once more.

Arthur pulls my ear down towards his lips and murmurs, "You are trembling." His forearm against my shoulder blades, cradling, and he tells me, "Shh," as though I were some startled beast to be gentled, one of his horses, or one of his women.

I realize then: of all the things he sees in me, I should never have dared to dream that he would ever see me as the one thing I am. I bid my heart accept this knowledge; shoulder this blow as it has the many before, because it is unimportant, inconsequential, nothing at all.

But the seat to my soul has never been so obedient as the seat to my intellect; it is rent not by careless passion or malice, but by a devastation that deadens like opium through my veins. And it is this that incenses me, razes within me my last stubborn stronghold of uncertainty and sends a surge of helpless fury to my gut. I twist from his grip and slam his shoulders into the cobbled floor. His head knocks sharply against the ground and he moans, hands scrabbling for skin but finding purchase only on stone as I pin his arms beneath my knees. My hands fisted in the cloth covering the straining muscles of his stomach, I pull myself up from his lap until I am splayed across his hips.

"I was merely concerned for your modesty, uncle," I hiss, bowing my spine so that although my face hovers above his, he can not close those last few breaths of space between our lips. "Am I still trembling now, dear Arthur?" I press my teeth into the shallow contour of his bottom lip, and pull back before he has the chance to kiss. "Because you are."

He's hooked the heels of his boots into the cracks between the cobblestones and lifts. I am momentarily caught off guard as I clamber for balance, and he takes advantage of my inattention and pulls his hands from beneath my ankles. Instinctively, I catalogue the strength and flexibility of his muscles while, silently, I curse myself for my squandered advantage. If we were in battle, I'd have lost, awaiting a knife in the belly or a strike across the throat. Thankfully, tonight is not yet about bloodshed, just sex; so when Arthur reaches up to put his hands around my waist, it is to steady me, and nothing more.

"And what does that tell you?" Arthur rasps, hands slipping around from my hips to the disaster of knots constraining my constricted prick. His fingers fumble with mine until finally I am released, hard and throbbing against my belly. He takes my cock into his hand and strokes – with no pressure or form, just the dry graze of his palm against me – and I nearly express the sharp, indecent noises that choke in my throat. "Nephew," he says, and I lift to my knees for him, let him tug my trousers down past my thighs.

"It tells me that you want this, my lord." I let him arrange me as he pleases, into his lap as he pushes himself up to sit against the wall. I twine my arms around his neck and pull him towards me until our faces nearly touch. "That you want me." My hand braced against the wall, the other securely tangled in his hair, and he cannot touch me though I breathe against his lips, golden Narcissus straining to kiss his dark reflection. His pupils are wide, glassy, blue lost in the black. Arthur reaches around again, knuckles grazing against the underside of my cock as he lifts my shirt over my head and for a moment my breath stops short as I struggle to keep my stratagems about me. The trapped winter air is chill upon my exposed skin, Arthur's arms around me hot as summer's breath.

He leans forwards and hooks his chin into the curve of my neck, traps my cock between our bodies. He mouths and whispers and I can not comprehend as I am consumed by the sound of my own blood rushing, my urgent need to press into him, his warmth. "Would you like to undress properly?" he asks as he pulls his own shirt over his head. He is sunlit, he is, my nepotistic lord – vast expanses of gold hued skin cut white with old scars. He shifts back against me again, and strained whimper escapes me. He smiles, cheshire languid, and I help him as he tugs free my boots first, my hose, then my breeches slide over my feet and I am there, naked as the day I was born, stripped by my own consent of all illusions and cunning and make-believe hate. I am suddenly very young, and very unsure.

"What would you like me to use, my lord?" I ask. Perhaps he thinks still of my shyness as prurience, as he thought the uncertainty of his Virgin Huntress's the coyness of a dark seductress. I pray that he does, that he thinks me some untamed creature of the old religion, a member of the incubi of Christian myth. That he will not use me gently, like a rotted cloth – that his encounter with me will bear no proof or reminder come morning. I do not have the biology to carry from this the king's bastard, to hope that the child grows to be the king's spitting image, the innate privilege of Christian princesses and Pagan priestesses alike: I have this night to make an indelible memory of myself; I have this night to make him mine.

Arthur laughs, a strangled sound. "By the Lady, what a question to ask! You've hardly needed direction so far, I shouldn't see why you would –" His eyes widen, and it is not in pleasure which settles on his face, but surprise. Concern. Even as my resentful humiliation blooms livid across my face, I can not help but love him for that. For his sincerity. As all men do. "Of course," he says hastily. "I should have realized. I don't want you to be uncomfortable – here."

He captures my hands between his and raises them to his face where his tongue swipes broadly across my palm. I start slightly at the heat and wet of it on my cool skin, a bare jerk of the fingers, but there is no way to mask my reaction in this position, so encircled. Arthur takes one of my fingers into his mouth and gently gnaws at it while he rubs circles into the muscles knotting my shoulder. I feel at loss, a strangely subdued sort of desperate as part of me bellows that I must make him bite while another whispers to let him lead me, to let him command me.

The war erupts into a hiccup that catches in my throat as he wraps his hand around mine once more and brings my hand around his prick. The anatomy is not unfamiliar to me; I am not inexperienced, but my previous conquests are suddenly revealed for what they were: awkward fumblings in the dark, half-shy tumbles with the curious and inexpert; nothing to prepare me for Arthur's intensity, his insistence. His phallus is hot and smooth, like a riverstone pulled from the fire. He moves me to a rhythm and tempo he finds most pleasing, and I can feel the slickness of his spit slipping against my palm as he leans into me and moans. He releases my hand to pull me in closer to him, our spines arched back so that our faces touch, so that the backs of my fingers brush against my own dick with every motion upon his. This is not enough.

"Arthur –" I ask him, thickly. But I choke when he acquiesces, when all he does is skate the coarse pads of his fingers through the dark hair that curls at my groin. I feel my breaths growing more irregular as he does it again, this time circling the edge of a blunt nail around the base of my cock. My mouth falls open while I try to fill my burning lungs. I am unprepared when Arthur's other hand ends its aimless meander across my skin at the edge of my bottom lip, pressing in with two fingers while the others form a cradle around my chin. I close my teeth around them as he spread the salt of his skin across my tongue.

"Lick," he tells me and rewards me with a long, slow stroke along the full length of me as I push and swallow until he tastes the same as the rest of my mouth, bitter and wanting. Distracted, it does not occur why he has asked me to do this until he very gently begins to breach me, so willingly spread for him I have been, straddled over the V of his bent legs. My hands still and I hear rather than feel my breath drag raggedly from my panting mouth, my fingers clawing their ascent towards Arthur's shoulders until I grip them white, bruising into green. "Are you alright?" he asks me, in two knuckles deep and scissoring gingerly. He tries to turn his face towards mine, to meet my eyes to assess the honesty of my answer, no doubt, but I curve into him, fit my face into the turn of his neck.

"Hurry, please." I hardly recognize my voice, nor the way I cant my hips for him, help him to slide another fraction of an inch into me, as if he belongs there. Arthur nuzzles his face into my collarbone, presses open-mouthed kisses into the skin there and wraps his other arm around me just as my thighs begin to quake.

He murmurs, "Please, relax," and slides in the rest of the way. His fingers stoke searchingly inside of me as I pant unintelligibly at his ear.

Then, the searching strikes home and my nonsense mutterings become a very intelligible, "Goddess!" Almost as if he knows, he waits until the bright lights spotting my eyelids fade until he presses again. Arthur chuckles, slightly breathless; opens his mouth against my jaw but begins to draw back. "No –" I chase him, but he rubs a teasing circle around my orifice and draws back completely. The fury I realize he had so effectively milked from me, like a serpent of its venom, returns – relentlessly, twice spurned. I attack him, tooth and claw, the hard bones of my knees and elbows forcing him back, striking the soft of his side and stomach, stunning him.

"What –" he manages before all at once I heave myself up by his shoulders and impale myself upon him, his gasping inaudible beneath my hisses as I work myself down, brutal and without finesse. "God," he blasphemes, enveloped. "Wait, you're not ready –"

I push harder, vindictive, determined to spite both him and my uncooperative muscles. Who is he to advise me my readiness for anything? Who is he to deny me anything I demand of him? Who is he, this man who made whores of his own sister, his cousin, and now his nephew? His son?

But the strain is, at last, unbearable, and the pain and the anger make me weak. My thighs scream to collapse from under me, and the last of my exhausted will is begging me to let them. I am still but halfway down; the base of his cock is broad and thick and for the life of me I do not think I take it. Arthur moves to assist me, but I shove his hands away, lifting myself up to the narrower part of him and sheathing myself back down, trying to open up. I do this several times, but to minimal effect; Arthur's breaths come a little more raggedly, but my leverage and precision is awkward in this position and so I have gained little more than a fraction of an unpleasurable inch.

The pitched sob that escapes me is that of utter frustration and self-loathing. In the end, artifices and pretensions stripped away, this is me, resplendent: a piteous and petulant boy who has spurned all recourses in his attempt to prove this power, that he can have rule over his contemptuous father. Instead, he proves that he knows nothing; that his inexperience and naiveté extend as far as his own limitations, his own inability and unmerited pride.

I am every bit as contemptible as I have sought to prove myself not to be.

Arthur moves again, more cautiously this time – he fears me now, I realize, though for all the wrong reasons – and lifts me from him by his hands around my waist. "You'll bring yourself to harm," he murmurs, and he eases me back – and I let him, because I am pathetic, because I am weak – folding my knees up and over my chest as he settles me against the floor. His fingers again, between my legs, pressing and prodding, easy and slow. My back arches from the ground for a strangled inhale as he pushes in a third finger and spreads them apart, and I feel my unwilling muscles move with them, slowly enough that they burn with the strain, but not wholly uncomfortably. When he takes his fingers back, this time, I do not follow. He hooks one of my legs over his shoulder, takes the other over his forearm, presses his lips to the soft skin of my inner thigh. "Be patient," he mutters, almost as if to himself, and pushes in.

The way is slicker now then when I tried, eased by spit and sweat and pre-ejaculate. Arthur moves unbearably slowly, persistently – he is gentle, but he never eases up, never lets me breathe until I am completely filled. It is overwhelming, awkward, unnatural; my legs voluntarily butterflied outwards to accommodate his intrusion, his arms braced besides me, caging me to his body. It is as if I am to forget illicitness of this situation; to lay back and receive what gift my Great King bestows. Then he shifts, leaves me an inch of space then pushes back into me again, angling up. My entire body tenses as the shock of pleasure rolls through me, and my breathing stills. He pulls back again, further this time, thrusts back in, quicker, harder. My heels dig into the shifting muscles in his back and his rocks into me, rougher now, with more intensity and less precision. It is no better. It has been minutes, and not a finger has touched my prick, and yet already I am battling climax. There is a near silent keening that undercuts the steady slap of flesh on flesh and I pretend it isn't me, just as I pretend I do not roll my hips up to meet his every movement, that despite my disgust and contempt and surrender that this is the most perfect I have ever felt, the most complete. Arthur dips his head down and kisses me, and I dig my fingers into his hair, clinging to him.

"Please," I gasp, breaking from his lips, and he laughs, distracted, open, lets me nudge him with my knee and takes his time granting me my request.

"No hitting this time," he chides me breathlessly, as he pulls out and lets me flip him on his back again, me straddling heavy on his lap and his cock livid and straining between my legs. I nudge up against it curiously with mine, but pull back quickly before he tries to reciprocate, not for any assertion of dominance or control this time, but simply because I cannot endure any more stimulation. "Don't tease," he groans – his hands wrapping around my hips now, hefting me up so that I am positioned right above him, the sticky tip of his cock kissing wetly at my anus.

"I wouldn't dare, sire," I breathe and sit back, suddenly releasing all my weight into his hands. This catches Arthur unexpected, and his palms skid slick across my skin to around my ribcage, but it is the lack of resistance that startles us both, the lack of friction in the slippery penetration that slides me like an oiled sleeve onto his phallus and elicits surprised moans as I begin to move.

It is much easier now to find the pleasure within me, as if a new geography as been mapped for me, and now revealed. But I hold off on it, purposely aiming the head of his prick away, a mulishly competitive impulse refusing to let me finish before he does.

Incompletely and indistinctly, I think: this is what it takes to rule a king. Drunken on wine and desire and fulfillment, his flesh hot and pulsing against mine, I bend forwards at the waist with half the idea to taunt him about my discovery. But his half-lidded gaze flickers from unfocussed and inattentive to startlingly clarion and blue. His hands twine themselves around my neck and he pulls my face down to his, pushing his tongue roughly into my slack mouth and devouring my surprised whimper whole. I pull back but he chases me, pulling himself up with an arm braced behind my shoulders and the other guiding insistently along my jaw. I let out a noise of protest as I am forced to wrap my legs around him and cross them at the ankles to keep our balance.

"I can't move like this, Arthur," I say, and indeed I can not – he has locked me to him, buried deep to the root within me, and seems to have no intention of moving. He laughs, jerking slightly to better sit up. He brings his fingers to my face and brushes away the damp tendrils of hair that cling to the corner of my mouth, traces his fingertips over my cheek and smoothes back the harassing strands at my temple. He bites his way from my mouth to my ear.

"You are so like her," he sighs, and without a sound, that is how my heart shatters.

I kiss him, eyes closed, like his. His hand around my hip and another sliding through my hair, legs twined with torsos, every possible point of contact pressing and sliding.

Still he does not see me; still he does not know who I am.

He begins to thrust again, tiny movements of complete efficiency. After a few moments, I feel his concentration begin to waver again as he loses himself in sensation while I hold on, watching him. Bending to his ear, I tell him, "You will give me what I want when I ask for it," and he promises, "Yes, yes, everything," without understanding a word of it. I cling to him tightly, distantly aware that he is bringing me to orgasm, that I will finish within seconds. My cheek against the pulse at his throat, my eyes shut against his shoulder, and I ask him, "What is my name?"

He answers, and I refuse to listen.

kinnoth @ 2006-01-06T19:29:00

2006-01-07T01:29:45Z

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