Write a fanfic of the Benophie sex scene in season 5 based on the image Yerin posted in her story
The image is of two people having sex in the forest
There are a couple of things I have to apologise for with regard to this request: 1) I didn't write this with season 5 in mind (oops! sorry! I read this prompt, started drafting it and then by the time I came back to my inbox, I realised I totally forgot to set it in s5), 2) Someone shared this painting once when I asked about it, but I can't seem to find it anymore. Anyway, with the vague memory I have of it, here's the one-shot I wrote inspired by it. Nevermind! Just asked the lovely erikista (the supplier of many of our favourite benophie gifs and edits) and she had it saved. So here it is for context:
And here's my one-shot inspired by it:
Bluebell
The basket was half full of chanterelles when the hoofbeats broke the morning open.
Sophie knelt in the damp mulch between two oaks, her fingers stained amber from the gills, her dress dewed to the knees. The forest smelled of wet bark and the green sweetness of late May, the canopy filtering early sun into long, fractured columns that struck the bracken like light through cathedral glass. She knew the horse before she knew the rider — the heavy, uneven canter of Benedict Bridgerton's bay gelding, the one that pulled left and resented being corrected.
He dismounted badly. The gelding sidestepped and Benedict caught himself on the stirrup leather, his boots sinking into the soft ground, his coat unbuttoned, his cravat already half-undone at seven in the morning because he treated neckwear as a philosophical imposition.
"You are exceptionally difficult to find," he said.
"I was not hiding."
"You were foraging in a forest at dawn. That is hiding with a practical alibi."
Sophie sat back on her heels and looked up at him. He was breathing harder than the ride warranted.
"Sophie." He said her name slowly, as though tasting the syllables. He rubbed the graphite stains on his fingers, the old nervous habit she had catalogued early on and never mentioned. "I have been composing this speech since four o'clock this morning. I have discarded nine versions. The tenth is also inadequate, but I find I cannot improve upon it, so I shall deliver it badly and trust you to hear what I mean rather than what I say."
"That is a great deal of preamble."
"I am aware." He stepped closer. His boot crushed a cluster of wood violets. "I love you. That is the substance of it. I love you in a manner that is profoundly inconvenient for us both, and I have attempted to reason myself out of it with all the intellectual resources at my disposal and failed comprehensively, which suggests either that my intellect is deficient or that the feeling is structurally sound, and I am vain enough to prefer the latter interpretation."
The basket of chanterelles sat between them. A blackbird called from the upper canopy. Her hands were still stained amber and her knees were damp and her pulse was doing something she could not control.
"You do not know who I am," she said, low and measured.
"I know who you are in this place. I know the way you prune the roses and argue with Mrs. Crabtree about the herb garden and laugh at my drawings when you think I am not looking. I know you read Latin and will not say where you learnt it. I know you are running from something you will not name, and I am not asking you to name it." He was close enough now that she could smell him: linseed oil and the green tang of crushed bracken beneath his boots. "I am asking you to stay."
She stood. The basket tipped. Chanterelles spilled across the mulch in a scatter of gold, and she did not look at them because she was looking at him, and the expression on his face was stripped of every evasion she had spent six weeks mapping, leaving only the raw, unfinished skeleton beneath.
She kissed him.
Her hands gripped the open front of his coat, pulling him down to meet her, and his mouth was warm and tasted of the strong black tea Mrs. Crabtree brewed at dawn. His arms came around her immediately, one at the small of her back, one cradling the base of her skull. The kiss was unhurried; she could feel his restraint in the tension of his forearms, the deliberate gentleness of his grip, and she bit his lower lip softly to break it.
He made a low, gratifying sound against her mouth.
"I have wanted to do that," she said, "since the afternoon you fell in the stream."
"I did not fall. I was conducting a survey of the riverbed."
"You fell."
He laughed against her temple. Then he unlaced her slowly, and the cool forest air met her heated skin, and his coat and waistcoat and cravat fell onto the bracken until the composition of him was reduced to open collar, bare throat, the rapid pulse visible at his neck.
He retrieved his coat from where it had fallen and carried her — his arms hooked beneath her knees and shoulders, her chemise rucked and her hair unwound — through the bracken to the clearing where the late-spring bluebells had carpeted the ground in a dense, impossible violet. He spread the coat across the flowers. The dark wool settled over the blooms, and he set her down on it, and knelt over her in the dappled light.
"I have heard," she said, "that the first time can hurt."
"It can." He kissed her forehead, the bridge of her nose, each closed eyelid. "We go slow. And you tell me. Every second, you tell me."
He was careful. Achingly so. Every movement measured against her exhale, every pause held until she said there or yes or pressed her hips against his to answer for her. The bluebell stems crushed beneath his coat released a faint, sweet fragrance that mixed with earth. At some point they turned onto their sides in the flowers, face to face, his forehead pressed to hers, and the intimacy of that geometry at that distance was almost harder to bear than anything else, his pupils blown wide, his expression dissolved entirely into something open and unguarded and desperately sincere.
His hand found hers in the flowers. Their fingers laced together, crushing petals, violet staining their knuckles.
"I love you," he said. Raw and unornamented; no preamble, no philosophical scaffolding. Just the three words, delivered against her mouth.
Sophie came undone.
Afterward, they lay in the flowers — his coat beneath her, the bluebells crushed and fragrant around them, the canopy light shifting slowly across their tangled limbs. His thumb traced the line of her jaw.
"You still do not know who I am," she said quietly. The morning was already reasserting its practical demands.
"I know exactly who you are." He kissed her forehead. "The rest is details."
She pressed her face into the hollow of his throat and held on, the bluebell stain violet on both their hands, the blackbird singing somewhere above them in the shifting light.
pixelskylines
gummygunk
amandla
