Hi!! could I request headcanons about what Russia/Ivan would be like in the 16th century and him having a romantic relationship with a traveler!reader (maybe they go to different places to study other cultures via art!) I’ve been fixated on art history since I took courses on it, but we didn’t cover much on Russia! I’d love to see your take on it, thank you! :)
𝟭𝟲𝘁𝗵 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝘆 | 𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗸𝗶 𝘅 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗼𝗻𝘀
literally crying i got my first ask!! i am so happy to write this for you. the wikipedia scouring i did for this was really nice with my morning coffee <33 i've been meaning to do more research on this part of history, so thank you so much for the ask and for giving my brain something to chew on. i hope you enjoy, feel free to point out any historical inaccuracies.
headcanons under the cut!
he finds you in a forest, not far from the smolensk road. you are sketching the twisted, ancient roots of a tree on parchment with charcoal. he is hunting, moving silently through the birch woods, but he stops to watch you work. he is fascinated by your focus, the way your hand moves with purpose. when he finally approaches, he is not a looming threat, but a tall, quiet figure in a long kaftan, his eyes pale and curious. "you draw the truth of it," he says, his voice low. "not just the shape."
his courtship is practical, heavy with substance. he does not bring flowers. he brings gifts you can use: a pouch of fine, raw azurite pigment from the far north, a block of beeswax for mixing paints, a roll of precious linen canvas traded from novgorod. each offering is an acknowledgment of your craft, a silent investment in your seeing.
he builds you a svetlitsa—a "light room"—in his wooden terem. it is a small chamber with a single, high window facing south, designed to capture the long hours of daylight. the walls are bare, whitewashed lime, a perfect blank space for you to work. he fills it with simple, sturdy furniture: a table of solid oak, shelves for your materials. it is his version of a love poem: a space dedicated entirely to light and your art.
he lives in the shadow of ivan the terrible. not as the tsar himself, but as the living embodiment of the land the tsar is trying to forge into an empire. there is a constant, low-grade tension in him—the spiritual, sprawling russia of the forests and the mir (peasant commune) versus the centralized, autocratic state moscow is becoming. you see it in the way he sometimes clenches his fist when a messenger brings news of another execution, another purged boyar family. he feels the land convulse.
he is not the artist; he is the muse, the subject, the keeper. he sits for hours in silence as you sketch him, his broad shoulders and quiet face rendered in ink or paint. he seems to understand that by letting you capture him, he is giving you a piece of his vast, often unspoken self. these portraits are never shown to others; they are a secret between you, more intimate than any touch.
when you travel—to novgorod to study the bold, simple lines of their frescoes, to pskov to see the stark iconography—he accompanies you not as a guide, but as a guardian. he arranges the kibitka (the covered wagon), he speaks with the local boyars for safe passage, he ensures you have warm valenki (felt boots) for the cold. his protection is a silent, constant fact, like the snow on the ground.
he learns from you. he asks careful questions about the flemish masters you mention, about the use of perspective, about why you mix egg with your pigments for tempera. his own world is one of symbols and spirits—the lubok folk prints, the severe beauty of icons—and your foreign knowledge is a strange, bright light he wants to hold in his hands.
he is deeply, authentically orthodox in a way that is visceral, not intellectual. he crosses himself slowly, with his thumb and first two fingers pressed together (the old way, before nikon's reforms). he observes the fasts strictly, his meals during lent consisting of kasha (porridge), mushrooms, and pickled cabbage. his faith is a layer of his skin, as natural and necessary as breathing the cold air.
his jealousy is cold, factual, and utterly russian. if another man—perhaps a polish scholar or a swedish merchant—looks at your work with too much interest, he does not get angry. he simply appears, standing behind you like a shadow, and begins to recite, in a flat monotone, every historical fact about that man's nation's failures in trade, war, or diplomacy. (this one is my favorite)
he has a complicated relationship with the oprichniki, ivan's personal guard and secret police. he does not speak of them. if their black-clad riders pass by on the road, he simply turns your head away gently, his hand on your cheek, and directs your gaze to a stand of birch trees until the sound of their bells fades. their existence is a sickness in the body politic he carries, a cold spot he cannot warm.
he takes you to see the streltsy (the musketeers) in their colorful coats, not for the spectacle, but because he thinks you would find the patterns of their embroidery worth drawing. he points out the carvings on a sleigh, the intricate metalwork on a samovar. his love is expressed in directing your gaze towards the hidden artistry of his world.
when you fall ill from the cold—a deep, chesty cough that shakes your frame—he does not panic. he sends for a znakhar (a folk healer), a old woman with hands like roots who prepares bitter teas from forest herbs. he sits by your bed in the svetlitsa, carving a small wooden bird for you with a slow, patient knife, his massive hands gentle on the tiny form. the gift, when you recover, is not the bird itself, but the evidence of his vigil.
he will never say he loves you with words borrowed from poetry. he will say it by filling your inkwell before it runs dry, by heating the svetlitsa with bricks from the stove before you wake, by bringing you a chunk of fresh, dark rye bread when you forget to eat. his love is in the sustenance of your art, in the silent maintenance of the conditions that allow you to create. he loves your mind, and so he feeds it, shelters it, protects it.
he believes, in his marrow-deep paranoia, that the world outside is a corrupting, stealing place. the poles with their catholic tricks. the swedes with their protestant arrogance. the ottomans with their splendor. they would take your talent and twist it, use it for their own glory, or worse, simply fail to understand it. he is the only one who truly sees what you do. to let you go is to surrender you to blindness.
he is afraid you will see him as others see him. out there, beyond the border, they tell stories. the russian bear. the schismatic monster. the tyrant's shadow. here, with you, he is just ivan. the quiet man who brings you pigments, who sits patiently for portraits. if you leave, you take that version of him with you, and he is terrified it will not survive the journey. you will remember the stories, not the man.
when you leave, you take half of him with you. his heart returns to the cold, what he’s always known.
hii lovely could i ask/request a hetalia fic? if so, then could it be some romano x reader hcs during the renaissance? (im very confused with centuries so im not gonna say which but😭😭)
hi darling! thank you for the ask, i am sorry this took me so long to finish <3 i've been terribly sick and busy and i finally got around to this. wanted to make it special because romano has a big place in my heart and so does this time period. i hope i did it justice!
𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗼 𝘅 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗼𝗻𝘀 | 𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲
nsfw below the cut!
the kingdom of naples in the late 15th century is a spanish holding, a jewel in the crown of aragon, and romano—as its personification—chafes under the weight of it. he is not free; he has not been free since the normans took him from the byzantines, since the hohenstaufens lost him to the angevins, since the angevins lost him to the spanish. he is a prize passed from conqueror to conqueror, and the bitterness of it has calcified in his chest like coral, sharp and immovable. when he speaks of spain—of antonio, his ostensible guardian—his voice drips with a venom that is half exhaustion: they own me, capisci? they own the land, they own the ports, they own the grain and the wine and the bloody fish in the sea, and i smile and i bow because what else am i supposed to do, start another war? i've lost every war i've ever fought.
his capital, naples, is one of the largest cities in europe—over 150,000 souls crammed into a labyrinth of alleys and palazzi and churches, a city of staggering wealth and grinding poverty, where the stench of the streets mingles with the perfume of the nobility and the salt breeze off the bay. he knows every inch of it: the greek grid of the old city, the medieval sprawl around the duomo, the spanish quarter where castilian soldiers swagger and spit and call him el reino de nápoles like he's not standing right there. he guides you through the markets with a proprietary air, pointing out which vendors cheat on their weights and which widows need the business, and when you ask how he knows so much he shrugs and mutters i've been here since before there was a here. i remember when this street was a goat path and that church was a temple to neptune. don't look at me like that, it's not impressive, it's just—it's just time.
the renaissance is in full bloom to his north, but he is south, always south, and the light reaches him differently—filtered through a lens of byzantine influence and norman severity and arab geometry. his greatest artistic treasures are not the humanist masterpieces of florence but the mosaics of monreale, the palatine chapel in palermo, the bronze doors of the cathedrals, art that fuses christ with geometric patterns, latin with greek with arabic, a palimpsest of conquests that he carries in his very bones. he takes you to see the cappella palatina once, and as you stand beneath the golden mosaics—christ pantocrator looming in the apse, the walls alive with saints and angels and intricate arabesques—he is uncharacteristically quiet, then says, so softly you barely catch it: this is what i used to be. before the normans, before the spanish, before everyone decided i was just the poor part of italy. i made this. i made beauty once, too.
his dialect is not the tuscan italian that boccaccio and petrarch are busy elevating to literary glory—it is neapolitan, a language the northerners call volgare, vulgar, unrefined, the tongue of peasants and fishermen. he speaks it with you when he's tired, when he's drunk, when he forgets himself, and it is a language of compressed passion, of vowels stretched like taffy, of endearments that sound like insults and insults that sound like poetry: core mio, vita mia, sciacquame 'a faccia—my heart, my life, go wash your face. when you try to learn it, halting and clumsy, he laughs at you with genuine delight, a rare and beautiful sound, and then spends hours teaching you the proper way to curse out a spanish tax collector.
the renaissance is an era of feasts and pageantry, and the aragonese court knows how to put on a spectacle—triumphal arches erected for royal visits, masques and balls that last until dawn, banquets where sugar sculptures depict scenes from ovid and the wine flows like the tiber. you attend one such event with him, and he is miserable the entire time, stuffed into velvet and gold brocade that cost more than a fisherman makes in a year, his hair tamed into something approaching courtly fashion, his expression one of barely contained disgust. look at them, he hisses, nodding toward the spanish nobles. they're eating my food, drinking my wine, dancing in my palace, and i have to stand here and pretend i'm grateful for their protection. when he dances with you, though, his hand on your waist, his steps surprisingly graceful despite his complaints—he softens, just slightly, and murmurs at least you're here. at least i don't have to do this alone.
the economy of the kingdom of naples is an extractive nightmare—spanish viceroys squeeze the land for revenue, taxes rise annually, and the peasantry groans under the weight of it. he feels their hunger in his own gut, their exhaustion in his own bones; he is the land and the people, and when they suffer, he suffers. there are days when he can barely drag himself out of bed, gray-faced and hollow-eyed, muttering about failed harvests in apulia, about grain shortages in calabria, about yet another levy imposed to fund spain's endless wars. you learn to read his moods by the weather: when he's angry, the bay of naples churns and the sky bruises purple; when he's sad, a fine, persistent rain settles over the city and doesn't lift for days. don't read into it, he snaps when you point this out. i'm not some—some fairy tale. it's a coincidence. it's just weather.
the humanist movement that is revolutionizing the north reaches him in fragments—he reads the ancients, knows his ovid and his virgil and his cicero inside and out, but he consumes them with a defensive chip on his shoulder, always ready for someone to accuse him of being provincial, of not understanding, of being too southern to grasp the subtleties of classical thought. in reality, he understands them better than most—he knew virgil, walked with him through the streets of naples when the poet was old and writing the aeneid and muttering about augustus—but he will never tell anyone that, because it sounds like bragging, and also because remembering hurts. all the poets are dead, he says once, abruptly, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely. everybody i knew when i was young is dead. don't—don't make me talk about it.
his relationship with the church is complicated. the pope is his neighbor, technically, and a constant political chess opponent; naples is a papal fief in theory, though spain ignores that when convenient. he goes to mass because it's expected—carved into the rhythms of his life like the seasons—but his faith is an old, syncretic thing, layered with pre-christian superstitions that the priests would call heresy if they knew. he crosses himself when passing a cemetery, mutters charms against the evil eye, leaves offerings at roadside shrines to saints who might once have been pagan gods with the serial numbers filed off, and when you ask him about it he just shrugs and says better safe than sorry, no?
he is terrified of the ottoman empire—not personally, but existentially. the turks took constantinople in 1453, and the tremors of that conquest are still shaking the whole mediterranean world; they raid his coasts, threaten his shipping, and in 1480 they actually seize otranto, a city on his apulian heel, and hold it for over a year, massacring hundreds. he feels every death like a hot knife between his ribs, and for months after the city is retaken he is a wreck, jumping at shadows, waking from nightmares in a cold sweat, clutching at you in the dark and gasping i heard them, i heard their voices all the way across the sea, they were in my head, they were inside me, i couldn't breathe—
the physical geography of his land shapes his moods in ways that are almost embarrassingly literal. mount vesuvius looms over the bay of naples like a threat made visible, and when it rumbles—as it does, periodically, throughout the renaissance—he feels it in his chest, a pressure and a heat that makes him irritable and restless. the sulfurous vents of the campi flegrei, the phlegraean fields, smoke and hiss and stink of brimstone, and on bad days he jokes—darkly, without much humor—that hell is just beneath his feet and maybe that explains everything. the greeks thought this was the entrance to the underworld, he tells you once, standing at the edge of lake avernus, his silhouette black against the steam. orpheus came down here to fetch his wife. i always thought that was stupid. once someone's dead, they're dead. no amount of singing brings them back. he doesn't look at you when he says it.
he is, despite everything, capable of joy—a fierce, sudden, almost aggressive joy that takes you by surprise when it surfaces. at a village festival on the feast of san gennaro, his patron saint, he is transformed: wine-flushed and laughing, dragging you into a tarantella so fast your feet barely touch the ground, shouting the steps in neapolitan over the music, his eyes bright and his curls wild and his usual scowl nowhere to be found. later, breathless and leaning against an ancient stone wall with the festival whirling on without him, he grins at you—actually grins, wide and unguarded—and says this is what i'm for, you know. not the wars, not the politics, not the spanish bastards. this. dancing. eating. loving. this is what i was made for. and then he kisses you, tasting of wine and honey and the salt of his own sweat.
he does not believe, deep down, that he deserves you. this is the rot at the core of him, the splinter he can never dig out, planted in the soil of his soul by centuries of being the lesser brother, the conquered kingdom, the mezzogiorno that the renaissance forgot. when you tell him you love him, he deflects—you're drunk, you're lying, you're confused, you must be thinking of my brother—and when you insist, when you hold his face in your hands and make him look at you and say it again, slowly and clearly, he shatters. just... crumbles. all the defenses, all the sharp words and sharper silences, giving way to the frightened, desperate, centuries-old creature underneath, who has been alone for so long he forgot what it felt like not to be. then stay, he whispers, clutching the front of your gown or doublet like a child clutching a blanket. stay, please, i'll be better, i'll be less angry, i'll be—i don't know, i'll be whatever you want, just—don't leave me. everyone leaves me. don't be like everyone.
NSFW BELOW THE CUT - 18+ READERS ONLY
one night—late, the bay silvered by a moon so bright it looks forged—you don't just stay. you reach for him. you find him in the stanza della luce, standing by the window with his back to the door, his shoulders rigid beneath the linen of his untucked shirt. he's been there for hours, you can tell—the candles have burned down to stubs, the air is thick with the silence of a man who has been arguing with himself and losing. he doesn't turn when you enter. his voice is a low rasp, scraped raw: i told you not to wait up. the viceroy's messenger brought another tax demand. another levy. i can feel them bleeding me dry, and i can't—
you don't let him finish. you cross the room and you press your palm flat against the center of his back, right where the tension lives, right where the centuries of conquest have coiled themselves into a knot he cannot unmake. he goes still. utterly, breathlessly still, like a wild thing caught in a shaft of light, unsure if it's about to be struck or saved.
touch me, he whispers, and his voice cracks on it, cracks like old plaster, like the façade of everything he pretends to be. please, i don't—i don't know how to ask for things, i don't know how to be soft, but i want—i want you to—
so you do. you turn him around, slowly, giving him every chance to flee, to deflect, to make some sharp-edged joke and ruin the moment before it can ruin him first. he doesn't. he just looks at you, his eyes dark and wet and terrified, and he lets you see him—all of him, the bitterness and the hunger and the desperate, aching need to be touched by someone who isn't trying to take something from him. your hands find the hem of his shirt, and he lifts his arms like a man surrendering, like a man who has fought for so long he's forgotten there's another way to be.
his skin is warm, warmer than a mortal's should be, as if the volcanic blood of vesuvius runs just beneath the surface. there are scars—old ones, faded, the map of a thousand years of violence written in silver lines across his ribs, his shoulders, the soft curve of his belly. you trace them with your fingertips, and he shudders, exhales, drops his forehead to your shoulder with a sound that is half sigh and half sob. no one's ever— he starts, and then he stops, because he doesn't have the words for it, doesn't have the language for gentleness, for reverence, for being handled like something precious instead of something conquered.
you teach him. slowly. patiently. with your mouth on his throat and your hands on his hips and your body pressed against his until he's backed up against the table, the table he built for you with his own hands, and he's gripping the edge of it so hard his knuckles go white. his head falls back, exposing the long, brown column of his neck, and the sound he makes when you kiss him there—when you bite, gently, just enough to make him feel it—is not a word. it's a moan, low and ragged and utterly involuntary, ripped from somewhere deep in his chest, and it is the most honest thing he's ever given you.
i want to be good for you, he gasps, and he's babbling now, the floodgates open, all his carefully guarded eloquence reduced to broken phrases and neapolitan endearments and your name, your name, your name like a prayer. i want to be whatever you need, i want—tell me what to do, tell me what you want, i'll do it, i'll do anything, just don't stop touching me, please, please, per l'amor di dio, non fermarti—
you guide him to the floor. the stone is cool beneath your knees, but he is warm, so warm, and when you settle over him—when you take him in hand, in mouth, in whatever way you've been aching to for months—he arches up into you like a man touched by lightning, like a man who has spent centuries in the dark and has finally, finally seen the sun.
he is not quiet. he tries to be, bites his lip until it bleeds, but the sounds escape him anyway—broken, desperate, reverent—and his hands are everywhere, in your hair, on your shoulders, gripping your hips with a possessiveness that would be bruising if it weren't so tender. mine, he chokes out, and then, immediately, as if correcting himself, as if afraid of his own hunger: yours. i'm—i'm yours. i've been yours since you looked at me like i wasn't a disappointment. since you stayed. since you didn't leave. oh, dio, oh, don't stop, i'm—
when he unravels, it is not quiet, and it is not graceful, and it is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen: his back bowing off the stone floor, his mouth open on a silent cry, his eyes squeezed shut like he's afraid to look at you, afraid of what you'll see. but you see. you see all of it—the fear, the longing, the centuries of loneliness cracking open inside him like a pomegranate split against the ground, spilling seeds everywhere, promising something new, something green, something that might one day bear fruit.
afterward, he cannot stop touching you. he pulls you down against his chest, wraps himself around you like ivy on an ancient wall, presses his face into your hair and breathes you in like you're the first clean air he's tasted in a thousand years. his voice, when it comes, is wrecked and small and wonderstruck: you're still here. you're still—after that, after seeing me like—you're still here. of course i am, you say, and you kiss the hinge of his jaw, the salt of his sweat, the corner of his mouth.
he doesn't cry. romano doesn't cry. but his eyes are wet when he pulls back to look at you, and his hand is trembling when he cups your face, and his voice, when he speaks, is the truest thing he has ever said: ti amo. i love you. i don't say that. i've never—i don't say that. but i love you. i love you. i love you.
and outside the high, south-facing window, the bay of naples glitters like scattered coin, and vesuvius sleeps, and somewhere in the spanish quarter a guitar plays a slow, aching melody, and the kingdom—his kingdom, his bones, his blood—holds its breath, as if even the land itself knows something sacred has just taken root in its soil and begun, impossibly, to bloom.
Not gonna lie, I just got around to reading 'a wartime truce' last weekend and it had me feeling some kind of way (including but not limited to envy of Ophelia lol,) so your headcanon post here shoved me off the deck to gratefully drown in those particular depths. (The line about Arthur moving with the precision of a general retaking ground has been in my head all week.)
I humbly request some NSFW UK x Reader headcanons in the same vein, pretty please. At the end of the day I am too selfish to share or be shared and would love that delicious mix of his possessiveness and reverence all to myself. I'm sure other people would, too. 😅
thank you for the ask darling! coming right up. i love this silly little guy so much. i hope you enjoy my interpretation of him, end the tumblr sexy man arthur agenda. this man is so repressed.
𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵𝘂𝗿 𝗸𝗶𝗿𝗸𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗱 (𝗨𝗞) 𝘅 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗡𝗦𝗙𝗪 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗼𝗻𝘀
!!NSFW UNDER THE CUT!!
let's address the elephant in the room: arthur kirkland, thousand-year-old personification of england, has had shockingly little sex. not for lack of wanting—he's wanted, he's yearned, he's written truly mortifying poetry about it—but he's so rigid, so awkward, so terrified of vulnerability that he's simply... not. a handful of encounters across centuries, most of them brief and unsatisfying and steeped in victorian shame. which means that when he finally has you, when he finally allows himself to touch and be touched, it's like a dam breaking—all that pent-up longing, all those centuries of repression, flooding out at once.
bless his heart, arthur’s hands shake—not from nerves alone but from the weight of the somme still living in his bones, the trenches carved into his marrow, and when he touches you his fingers are all knobby knuckles and old fractures that ache when it rains, and he’s so terribly clumsy about it, petting you like you might shatter, like he’s never held anything precious before and is terrified of his own hands, and yet his grip still manages to be just a little too tight, possessive in that desperate, fumbling way of a man who never learned how to be gentle with the things he loves because no one ever taught him tenderness and war taught him everything else.
he's a noisy thing when you get him going, and it embarrasses him to no end—he tries so hard to be dignified, biting his lip, muffling himself in your shoulder, but the sounds escape anyway, raw and desperate and utterly involuntary: broken moans, sharp gasps, a whimpering sort of whine when you touch him just right that he'll deny to his grave. he's the nation that conquered half the world and he mewls when you lick his throat, and the cognitive dissonance of it makes him blush down to his collarbones.
he talks. he talks so much during sex that it's a miracle he doesn't pass out from oxygen deprivation—a running stream of filth and devotion and nervous rambling that shifts between registers without warning: ah—yes—like that, please, please don't stop, I'll die if you stop, do you know I'd die for you? I would, I'd die for you, I've lived so long and I'd trade it all for one more moment of your mouth right—there, there, oh god, oh love, you're so good, you're so perfect, how do you put up with me, I'm a wreck, I'm a ruin, I'm yours—
he has a whole catalogue of pet names he cycles through depending on his mood, and they range from saccharine to faintly archaic to quietly filthy: darling, sweetheart, my treasure, my heart, my dove, my precious thing, my little love, my soul, my dearest, my—christ, I don't know, my everything, my reason for breathing, my—oh, bugger, I can't think when you do that…
contrary to his prim public persona, he loves when you're loud—needs it, craves it, gets off on it. the sound of you crying out for him, moaning his name, sobbing it, screaming it, it hits him somewhere primal and possessive, and he'll fuck you harder just to drag more noise out of your throat, growling let them hear, love, let the whole bloody world hear who makes you sound like that, I want them to know, I want them all to know...
he's deeply, almost pathologically into praise—tell him he's good, tell him he's doing well, tell him he's making you feel wonderful and he'll absolutely shatter, eyes going glassy, rhythm faltering, a sob catching in his chest. but he's just as into giving it, murmuring against your skin how beautiful you are, how perfect, how you were made for him, how he's never felt anything so good in all his centuries, how you're the only thing that's ever made him feel alive, truly alive, not just enduring but living.
his inexperience means he's eager to learn, almost academically so—he approaches sex with the same obsessive diligence he once applied to empire-building, cataloging every sound you make, every twitch, every gasped-out there, right there, and he commits it all to memory with a sort of terrifying focus, adjusting his technique with ruthless precision until he can play you like an instrument, and the first time he makes you come with nothing but his fingers and a whispered litany of filth against your ear he looks so proud, so quietly, fiercely satisfied, like he's just won a war.
oral fixation—not the clinical term, just the fact that he loves having his mouth on you, can lose hours between your thighs with no expectation of reciprocation, gets drunk on the taste and the scent and the sounds you make, looks up at you with those green eyes blown dark and says things like I could stay here forever, I'd abdicate my nationhood to live between your legs, I'd let the empire crumble just to hear you make that sound one more time—
he's got a thing for his own uniform—not in a narcissistic way, but in a you touching him while he's still in it way. the first time you unbutton his dress uniform with your teeth he short-circuits entirely, just stands there trembling with his hands fisted at his sides, and when you push the jacket off his shoulders he makes a sound like a dying man seeing heaven. there's something about being unmade, being stripped of his nationhood by your hands, that undoes him completely.
conversely, he loves you in his clothes—his shirt hanging off your shoulders, his jacket draped around you, his scarf tangled around your neck. seeing you wrapped in something that's his, something that smells like him, triggers a possessiveness that borders on feral, and he'll cross a room in three strides to pin you against the wall with his face buried in your hair, muttering mine, you're mine, you smell like mine, you're wearing my colors, you're my territory, my home, my—please, let me, I need—
he's got surprisingly filthy fantasies for such a repressed creature—things he's read about in those books he definitely doesn't keep hidden under his mattress, things he's imagined late at night with his hand over his mouth and his cock in his fist and your name on a loop in his head—but he's sheepish about voicing them, goes red to the tips of his ears and stammers through half-finished sentences until you coax it out of him with patience and kisses, and then he blurts it out all at once, something debauched and delightful, and immediately hides his face in his hands.
his magical nature leaks through when he's close—the air goes thick and green-smelling, the shadows move, sometimes the furniture rattles, and once, memorably, he made every flower in the house bloom simultaneously and then came so hard he passed out for a solid thirty seconds and woke up crying with his face buried in your chest, apologizing incoherently while you stroked his hair and tried not to laugh.
aftercare is sacred to him—he transforms from beast to nursemaid in the space of a breath, fetching warm flannels and cool water and whatever snack you want (if you'll let him attempt the kitchen, which you usually won't), fretting over the marks he left, massaging your thighs with his creaky, careful hands, murmuring was that alright? was I too rough? are you sore? I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, let me take care of you, let me be good to you, you were so perfect, you're always so perfect—
the first time you lie together he’s so stiff with terror and yearning that his grandpa bones creak audibly when he lowers himself over you, and he has to stop twice because his hip seizes up—old injury from the shelling, he mutters, face flaming crimson with shame—but then he looks down at you, patient and warm beneath him, and something in his chest cracks open like rusted armor, and he buries his face in the hollow of your throat and just breathes there, trembling, whispering I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m not—I don’t know how to—you deserve so much better than a broken old fool who can barely get his trousers off without his back twinging, and when you card your fingers through his hair and tell him there’s no rush, that you’re his, he makes a sound like a wounded animal and loves you with his mouth pressed to your pulse for the next hour, barely moving, just shaking apart in your arms.
he’s not good at this, not skilled, not smooth—darcy at the netherfield ball, all stiff bows and awkward silences and accidentally insulting you when he means to compliment—and when he tries to use his fingers he’s so in his own head about doing it right that his wrist cramps and he has to stop and shake it out, face buried in your stomach, groaning good lord, I’m making a hash of this, aren’t I, but the thing is, the thing that undoes you completely, is the way he looks up at you with those sea-glass eyes wet and desperate and says tell me what you like, please, I want to learn every inch of you, I want to be the only one who knows how to make you feel like this, I want to be yours in the knowing of you, and it’s so earnest and so painfully him that you’d wait a hundred years for his fumbling fingers to find their rhythm.
there’s a particular sort of reverence in his inexperience—he treats your body like a sonnet he’s memorizing in a language he doesn’t speak yet, halting and careful, his bony hips pressing into you with a rhythm that falters and stutters because he keeps getting distracted by the way you look beneath him, the way you sound, the sheer miracle of you letting him close, and he’ll stop mid-thrust just to cup your face and stare at you like you’re the first sunrise he’s seen since the wars ended, his thumb tracing your cheekbone while his cock throbs forgotten inside you and all he can manage is a cracked my darling, my dearest, how on earth did I—how did I ever— before his voice gives out entirely and he just shakes his head and presses his forehead to yours, breathing you in like you’re the only air he’s ever needed.
there is a quiet, simmering arthur everyone sees—stooped shoulders, apologetic teacup rattling on its saucer, hands that tremble from the somme and a spine that twinges when the weather turns damp—but sweetheart, when his blood runs hot, when you look up at him through your lashes and whisper please, arthur, I need you, something in him cracks open like a lightning-struck oak and the stoop is gone, the tremor is gone, he just looms, all imperial height and burning green eyes, and suddenly you’re being lifted, actually lifted, his wiry arms remembering old soldier’s strength, and he’s growling say it again, say you need me, say I’m the only one as he carries you to the nearest surface like you weigh nothing at all.
the switch is terrifying and hot—one moment he’s fretting over whether the tea is too hot, the next he’s got you bent over the settee with his hand tangled in your hair and his mouth at your ear, voice dropped to a register that rumbles through your ribs like distant thunder, and he’s not asking anymore, he’s telling, telling you how many times you’re going to come for him, how loud you’re going to scream his name, how he doesn’t care if the whole bloody street hears because they should know, they should all know who you belong to, and the shaking in his hands is from want now, pure and overwhelming, nothing to do with nerves or war or age.
he fucks like a beast unchained when the need takes him—no fumbling, no stammering apologies, just raw, driving rhythm and teeth scraping down your throat and his bony hips slamming into you with a force that should shatter those grandpa bones but doesn’t, can’t, because he’s beyond his body entirely, he’s just a vessel for how much he loves you and god, he loves you, he loves you, he snarls it into your skin like a confession torn out of him at knifepoint, I love you I love you I’d die for you I’d kill for you don’t you dare ever leave me—
his reverence doesn’t disappear when the beast comes out—it intensifies, goes feral, becomes something almost frightening in its devotion; he’ll pin your wrists above your head with one hand and stroke your cheek with the other, so gently, so absurdly gently for a man who’s currently rearranging your insides, and he’ll choke out you’re so beautiful, you’re so perfect, I’m not worthy to touch you but I’ll be damned if I let anyone else, you’re mine, my treasure, my whole heart beating outside my body— and then the beast takes over again and he’s driving into you so hard the furniture scrapes across the floor and all he can manage is broken, desperate sounds against your mouth.
even in the aftermath, curled around you in his massive, ancient bed (the bed that’s seen plagues and fires and the death of kings), his possessiveness lingers like the scent of rain—he traces the marks he left on your skin with trembling, reverent fingers and murmurs I’m sorry if I was… too much. I get so carried away, I forget my own strength, I forget I’m not just—not just a man, but a nation, a beast, a thing of storms and soil— and then he stops, because you’ve taken his face in your hands and you’re kissing him quiet, and he melts, the great personification of england, into a puddle of need and gratitude, whispering yours, yours, forever yours, my heart, my home, my only peace.
THANK YOU for writing my request!!!! Your descriptions are so beautiful and I LOOOVE your approach to Ivan’s expressions of care 🥹🥹🥹 I can’t wait to read into the things mentioned in the post!
of course!! <33 thank you for your request, i loved writing it!
