A pregnant nobleman has an unexpected tryst after a long day at the tournament. Or, Urien and Lucy fuck. (Still no new chapter of First Blood, because god hates me, but here's a little bonus instead.)
Features/Content Warnings: sadism/masochism, probably unsafe sadism, weirdass dynamics, dubious consent (given under the influence)
(Read here on AO3 if u prefer)
Any time a large gathering of people comes together for any extended period of time, several kinds of magic grow spontaneously out of the crowd: a sense of acute and beautiful happenstance, thrown together with so many strangers; a fundamental change in our own nature, thrust into close proximity, our privacy snatched from us and dangled over our heads; a sense of love, of community, of deep and tear-jerking kinship with our fellow man; and ungodly levels of horniness.
This last one Urien Lowe knew well. It was at a tournament, staying in tents all gathered in the sprawling shadow of a castle half the country away, that he had first learned he was attracted to men, and on a similar visit to the capital city when he’d had his first attempt at a tryst with a boy (who, tragically, abruptly remembered he was otherwise occupied when he learned that Urien was in fact the son of the most infamously deadly warlord on the continent). There was something about having hundreds of excited spectators all reared up for a violent spectacle all shoved into each other that left you more or less guaranteed to find some tents shaking rhythmically in the night. Or, maybe more often, in the day, when some spouse or another was distracted by the actual show.
Typically, Urien would have no qualms taking advantage of the overall atmosphere. There were only so many times he could watch the victor of a bloody fight take off their helmet and reveal a grizzled, battle-scarred man twice his age waving their sword about before he would be filled with the desperate need to ravish one or two of them. Or all of them.
Or, even better, jump into the fray, grapple them himself, beat them into a pulp, and then fuck them on the field in front of everyone.
There were two obstacles to this otherwise very healthy and realistic goal: one, he was hosting this particular tournament, which made sneaking off rather difficult, and two, he was currently trying very hard not to reveal that he was very pregnant.
Very pregnant was, possibly, an exaggeration. He’d been more pregnant. He wasn’t even five months along yet. But being pregnant at all as an extremely public-facing figure conducting an event with hundreds of guests already set on ogling you was more than enough to feel like tacking that “very” on, and Urien’s body also apparently had a fun quirk of deciding to add a little pep in the tiny fucker’s growing step and round him out nicely right before the most eyes would be on him.
So after spending a whole day with his stomach bound as tightly as he could safely get it, squishing hthe organs of his abdomen even more than the baby was already managing, while watching the hottest men on the planet smash each other with swords, resisting the urge to kill people both for sexual and anger-management related reasons, and bravely not attempting to ruin some marriages and give away his secret at the same time, Urien was finally left alone with levels of horniness that only a pregnant nineteen-year-old could achieve.
Alone, that is, for all of two minutes. He had mere moments to air out his lungs after unwrapping his poor belly before a knock came on his bedroom door. He swore.
“One moment,” he called, “I’m dressing.” It occurred to him that he could have not answered, and then would have possibly avoided having to immediately bind his stomach again, and he swore again.
“It’s me,” came the reply.
“Oh, thank fuck.” Urien walked over and, careful to let no one see him through the crack, let Lucy slip in.
“He—whoa.” The magician’s eyebrows raised. “Damn, huh, I forgot how big you got already.” Lucy poked his shirtless bump. “Haven’t seen this thing out in a minute—ow. Ow. OW. Sorry! Sorry.”
They shook out their hand, released from Urien’s iron grip, and grimaced. Urien stepped away and leaned against a bed post, glowering. “Sorry,” Lucy muttered again. “Shit. You’re sure in a mood today, huh. Still pissed you can’t fight, I bet.”
A flare of hot rage sparked up in Urien, but it did occur to him that, as annoying as Lucy could be, they weren’t usually this eager to push buttons. “Have you been drinking?”
“Ehh.” Lucy flapped a hand loosely, their attention elsewhere. “It’s a fuckin… bigass party thing. You want me to deal with it, what, stone cold sober? Hard-hearted, man.” Urien pursed his lips, but Lucy went on unphased. “Anyway. How are you doin, big boy? Big man in charge?”
“Alright, call me that again and I’m having the doctor wire your jaw shut permanently.”
“Hot.”
“That’s—what? Shut up. I’m… god, I’m so goddamn tired, and I…” Urien rubbed his forehead. Whatever, they were drunk, and it was Lucy anyway. “…And honestly if you don’t have anything important to say to me then please leave so I can jerk off and pass out in peace.”
Lucy snorted. “Heh, all those ripped men stabbing each other to death got you riled up, huh?”
“Oh, come on, no one’s actually died yet—” He blinked. Since when was Lucy standing that close?
“I could help you with that.”
Their tone was almost joking, but they… really were standing very close. “Lucy,” he said, “you’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk.” They rolled their eyes. “I just have drunk. Some alcohol. I’m tipsy at worst.”
“Sure, and exactly how much alcohol was th—Lucy.” Their hand was on his belly again, full flat palm. His eye twitched. “Lucy, I am not going to—”
He stopped, because Lucy moved their hand down, smoothly, down under his belly button, and he forgot to breathe for a second.
“Heh,” Lucy said again. “Heheh.”
“Lucy,” Urien tried again, but now their fingers were loose, rubbing little circles around his underbelly, and the name came out significantly breathier than he intended. This was not a sensation he knew about. Rubbing bellies was something sappy idiots did while cooing at their unborn children, but, wow, it… really was making it hard to focus… “Lucy, I’m not going to… hook up with y—mph.”
He would possibly be embarrassed, later, by just how immediately he gave in when he discovered Lucy’s gin-flavored mouth landing sloppily on his. But he’d been itching all day and now whatever witchcraft Lucy’s hands were working was sending waves of desperate heat downward and he couldn’t help himself. He grabbed at them, gripping their loose robe from behind while they massaged his belly with both hands until he was pressed against the bedframe and they were taking turns gulping in air between kisses.
Until finally Urien’s nether regions were screaming at him so loudly he pulled away, panting, and grabbed Lucy by the back of the neck.
“Fine,” he said. “But I’m not in the mood to be gentle.”
“Works for me,” Lucy said, and then gave out a yelp as Urien slammed them down, face first into the bed.
In his rush to relieve his middle from its tight wrappings, Urien had neglected to remove his shoes, which added a nice hard edge to his heel as he jammed it into Lucy’s back. Lucy let out a sound somewhere between a yelp and a laugh, and Urien knelt over them, leaning as close to their ear as his limited mobility would allow.
“What are you laughing at?” he asked, sharp as steel.
Their yelp decrescendoed into a drunken sort of chuckle. Urien’s mouth twitched. He flipped them around, grabbed them by the throat, and hissed. “I said, what are you laughing at?”
They only laughed harder, jamming their cheek into the bed to crane their neck around, and covered their mouth lazily. “Nothing, nothing!” Urien glared until they caught their breath, finally, and grinned up at him. “You’re… fuck, you’re… really big… How are you already so—”
“Shut up.”Urien shoved hard, crushing their neck into the bed. They let out a choked cry and a gasp when he let go, and then went right back to laughing. Until he did it again. “I said, shut. Up. One more fucking word about it and I break a finger.”
“Ohh, aren’t you scary…” Lucy coughed, clearing their bruised throat. “Big fancy lord, what are you gonna do, fuck me up, big g—”
He went for a different approach, this time, and stuck his thumb in their mouth.
They moaned, easily, his thumb trailing across their gums, under their lip, along their tongue, until he hooked their jaw and yanked them up off the bed and onto the ground, where they staggered into a kneel.
“Fuck—ow—don’t actually pull my fucking teeth out—”
“I could,” he said, “if I wanted to. I could pull them all out one by one and make you swallow them. I could pin you down and make you squirm like a drying fish and then let’s see how much you like how big I am.”
As he spoke, he moved his hand upward, until his thumb rested on their false eye. Right on the tear duct, right where one good jab would push it out of their skull.
“I have to say.” They swallowed audibly. “I think I’d still like it quite a lot.”
“Shut,” Urien said, “the fuck up.” And he shoved their face between his legs.
His weight against the bedpost, he wrapped a leg around Lucy’s back, locking their head between his thighs, and they obeyed. Their tongue found his clitoris, and the shudders of pink pleasure made his muscles contract, jamming their locked bodies tighter. Urien made a sound more like a growl than a pant.
Before he was blinded by it, he grabbed Lucy by the hair, and pulled them away. “Are you a fucking animal?”
“Uh—what?” They blinked, delirious.
“Use your goddamn hands when you eat.” He grabbed their right forearm, and shoved their fingers into his cunt.
Lucy looked up, seeing the trail of pale hair lead up to the belly already round enough to block their view of Urien’s face, clenched their fingers, and let Urien lead their mouth back between his thighs.
It turned out that the sound Urien made when experiencing a bone-shaking orgasm was almost identical to a hiss of pain.
His muscles slackened, and Lucy, who had been increasingly concerned that Urien was about to actually crush their skull, pulled away, and immediately found his fingers tilting back their head, his eyes still fixed in a stone glare.
“Good,” he said. “Now. Get out.”
Lucy swayed, vision blurry, but thoughts perfectly clear. There was still so much cruelty left in that glare. He’d hardly even hurt them, honestly. He’d barely even left a mark. And there was still so much of the night left before dawn. They smiled, loosely.
Urien makes an alarming discovery. A little snippet from a modern AU of First Blood.
Horniness rating: 1/10, this is pure mush, giving it one point because I said the word "belly" a few times
Read on AO3 here: Modern Movement - redpepperbot - Original Work [Archive of Our Own]
In the living room, Ruta sits dreaming.
Daydreaming may be a more accurate term, but it always feels deeper than that. She’s supposed to be working on a commission—a big one, for a client and on a timeline she wouldn’t normally work with, but they’ll need the money soon—and an essential part of her creative process is closing her eyes and silencing every thought to come by until they stop feeling like her own. I.e., wait until her brain starts blasting her with a bunch of weird shit.
This project has been a challenge. She needs to send a concept in soon, finish a mockup, and, you know, actually make the mural, but she doesn’t know what the hell she’s going to paint. It’s not that he has a lack of ideas. No, there are plenty of those, lapping at his mind and threatening a wave, it’s that this mural requires some business-friendly mix of his “inclusive” figures the client loves so much and his trademark grab-bag religious imagery stripped down enough so no one can possibly get offended, all watered down to make some banal but hopefully pretty message matching the list of generic keywords he’s been handed.
Which is annoying, but he’s done it before. Except that this time every vision that enters his mind is on one particular theme.
Symbols of birth sneak behind his eyes over and over, ancient fertility idols and medicinal herbs for a healthy delivery, the annunciation, images of a child in a womb, and, of course, of him. Of Urien. Every composition she tries to imagine ends up like a shrine, every line and angle leading back to him, and to the round, heavy belly he carries, and what it holds inside.
And a private college’s new administrative building probably doesn’t want a mural of a pregnant man on the wall.
Ruta opens her eyes. Her sketchbook sits open in her lap, a fresh page waiting empty for a flow of ideas. She flips through a couple pages, hoping for something to grab at, but that is really not helping. All her sketchbooks are filled with snatches of anything, a shadow, a building, studies, sketches of hands moving, but this, her most recent one, has just… just a lot of drawings of Urien. Him, leaning over the counter, a smudge of gray to capture the way the light frames his middle. Him, looking in the hallway mirror, frowning at how his jacket clings too tight. Him, just… standing there, with snatches of journal entries all amounting to “oh god oh god I’m having a baby with my friend and I am having feelings about it” scribbled in the corners of random pages around him. There are about a dozen copies of the sketch she made when she managed to catch him with a hand around his bump, a sight even rarer than finding him in a slouch.
If this is any indication, this is going to be the most-drawn baby in the world. It’s honestly extremely embarrassing. Ruta hopes, for the one millionth time, that no one ever looks through this thing, and as that thought crosses her mind, she hears a yell.
Just a short, sharp yelp, followed by a scrambling. Coming from upstairs. Urien. Her heart beats, and she runs up the stairs.
She hates knocking on doors—it’s stupid, she knows, but it feels like an invasion—but it only takes her a second to make her fist rap against his. A second passes, and her heart beats faster. She knocks again.
“Was that normal yelling?”
Lucy leans out of their doorway, the wheels of their office chair poking out into the hall. Ruta turns, then turns back, wondering if enough seconds have passed to warrant knocking again. Or breaking down the door. Or calling an ambulance.
“HEY!” Lucy yells, making Ruta jump. “URIEN! You good in there?”
Another second goes by. Ruta is on the verge of swinging the door open and bolting in, but a voice comes first, finally, shakily, from behind the door. “Um. Uh… I-I don’t know…”
“Yeeeah that’s concerning enough.” Lucy stands, crossing the hall to swing the door open. Behind it, Ruta sees Urien, leaning against a hanger rack of clothes like he’s fallen into them, hand gripping the post, staring down wide-eyed at his middle.
“What happened?” Lucy asks, moving quickly to take him up by the shoulders. But he doesn’t budge. His face is white.
“It… it moved.”
“What, the… baby?” Lucy raises an eyebrow. That’s old news. She’s been squirming around in there for a while. Long enough that Ruta can feel it sometimes under Urien’s skin. Long enough that Ruta has stopped crying every single time she has felt it under Urien’s skin.
“No, it—I could see it. I saw it moving,” Urien says. “From the outside.”
“Oh!” Ruta gasps, his hands clapping over his mouth. “Really?”
“Sick.” Lucy pokes Urien’s bump, making him jolt. “Aw, come on, I want to see her do it.”
“What? I saw my stomach move. I saw it—why are you both—what the fuck is happening?”
A tense moment passes. Lucy’s eyebrows are slowly moving upwards. “Uh.”
“Wait, hold on, is this… is this just…” Urien looks between them, eyes flashing, alarm taking on an accusatory tinge. “Is this normal? Is this supposed to happen?”
“Did you…” Ruta stares at him. “...not know that?”
“Wh—no! It looked like the fucking chestburtser scene!” He turns to Lucy, who is doing an admirable job of trying not to laugh. “Shut up!”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Did you really not know about this?” There’s real concern in Ruta’s voice.
Urien, who is turning increasingly red, avoids her gaze. “No—it’s—how would I know about that?”
“This is like common knowledge?” Lucy ignores his murder stare. “What the hell did I get you that What to Expect book for?”
“I read tha—oh god.” He tenses again, and Ruta sees it.
It’s subtle, and the magic of the moment is rather dimmed by the fact that Urien is clinging to the post like he’s watching a live vivisection, but she sees it. Just a faint ripple of the skin, visible under the thin fabric of the undershirt they caught him in. Her baby, moving in him. She can see her baby.
“Ruta,” Urien says through clenched teeth, “stop crying. I am experiencing body horror.”
“Sorry…”
“That’s actually kind of fucked-up looking, yeah,” Lucy says, looking at the movement. “Like there’s bugs under your skin or something.”
“Sssshut up shut up shut up shut up.”
“Oookay.” Lucy claps him on the shoulder. “You look like you’re gonna pass out. Ruta, go get him some water or some shit. I gotta go because I am literally on a work call right now.”
Ruta nods, wiping her eyes. “Come with, okay?” she says to Urien. “To help the baby resettle?”
“Right. Sure.” He follows her out of the room, a bit slow, still shaking off his shock.
She leads him down the stairs, and fills a glass of water in the kitchen sink. Turning, she sees him standing in the living room, looking down. It’s weird to see him half-dressed like this. They’ve lived together for years, but Ruta’s hardly even seen him in his pajamas, and even those leave him covered. She can’t remember the last time she could see the thin line of scar on the stump of his arm, or the roughed-up skin around it. The urge to draw him strikes again, and—oh fuck.
He’s standing there. Looking down. At where she left her sketchbook.
Careful not to spill the water, she walks over quickly, hoping maybe she managed to close it—nope, fuck, it’s lying open on the couch. Displaying the page filled with him, repeated, his head turned, his hand cradling gently around his rounding bump.
“I got you water,” she says, at what is definitely the normal speed and volume.
He doesn’t look up. “Is that me?”
This must be, Ruta reasons, one of those questions people ask as a conversational point, because if there are any other blond pregnant men with one arm, she is not aware of them. “…um. Yes.”
He doesn’t take his eyes off the page. And then—oh god—before she can stop him, he reaches down and turns the page. To another spread filled with him. Him sitting on the couch, him at the sewing machine, and one close up of just his belly, resting on his lap as he bent over the fabric… Ruta gulps. “Um. That’s.”
He reaches to turn another page, and then quickly retracts his hand. “Oh, sorry, is this private?”
“Um. Yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to leave it—mmng.” Ruta’s words disintegrate as she realizes what likely tipped him off. There are words scribbled on there, between the drawings.
“I don’t know how to repay him. I can’t look at him without knowing the immensity of what he’s giving me. I can’t look at him without feeling like the light will burn me up.”
Urien closes the book while Ruta attempts to melt herself with her mind.
He coughs. “I don’t, uh. I don’t think I noticed you drawing those ones.”
“I. Um. Sometimes I do them after.”
“I assume the whole book isn’t drawings of me pregnant,” he jokes. Then, seeing Ruta’s expression, he frowns. “Wait. It’s not, right.”
“No, it’s just, my sketchbook, but, it’s, well, you know, you just sort of draw what’s on your mind, and, um, it’s, I mean it’s mostly other—well a lot of it is other stuff at least.”
“Uh. Oh. Okay.” He blinks.
“Just, uh.” Ruta squeezes her eyes closed. She takes the sketchbook and flips to a page and hands it to him. “It’s, uh. Wait, no, I don’t know why I’m showing you this. Oh god.”
He ignores her feeble attempt to snatch the sketchbook away, and stares. It’s a gouache sketch, a full page, a variant of the vision that’s been plagueing her. Urien, pregnant, seated on a throne, angels around him, a halo above his head. He says nothing for a moment.
“This looks like a sketch for a full painting,” he says, finally.
“Um—it, yes, it, that was what I was thinking but, I won’t, um, I wasn’t going to actually make it. I know it’s. I know you feel weird about this. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I showed you this. Sorry. It’s really just, you know, it’s sort of like a diary more than anything—”
“You… can, if you want to.”
She blinks. “I can what?”
“Paint this. You know. If you want.”
“But—” She stops. Her paintings have long featured the people in her life, strewn onto vast canvases of rich allegory and theology, and she knows to be careful with him. She’s always asked before including him, even in a background, and he’s often said no. Only a few simple portraits for small shows, or a role in something lacking narrative. “But you don’t like seeing yourself like this.”
Pregnant, she means. He doesn’t like seeing himself pregnant.
“Yeah, but.” Suddenly, he tears his eyes off the drawing, his expression changing. “Hold on, you haven’t fallen in love with me or anything, right?”
“No.” Ruta shakes her head vehemently. “I promise I am still extremely aromantic.”
“Thank god. We’d have to kick you out of the house.” Urien looks one more time at the page. “You should… you can paint me. If you want to.”
He snaps the sketchbook shut and hands it to Ruta, who exchanges it for the glass. “Are you sure?”
“Ruta, I am still not fully decided I’m okay with getting pregnant,” he says. “Actually, after what just happened upstairs, I’m leaning pretty heavily toward calling the whole thing off.”
Ruta leans toward him, bending to place her head on his shoulder, looking down at his bump. It’ll be so long still until she gets to meet her, to really hold her. She still has so much growing to do.
“Thank you for doing this,” she says, quiet.
“You’re gonna owe me big, you know,” he says. “I get to take off the first nine months of parenting. Only fair.” He glances at Ruta, her hair obscuring her face, but he knows her well enough anyway. His voice turns gentle. “Ruta…how many times do I have to tell you I’m not just doing this—”
“I know,” she says. “I know.”
After a moment, he turns his head back down, placing his hand oh so lightly on his middle. Carefully, like it might react, might swat him away. And Ruta, though he longs to join him, to feel that life inside him at every opportunity, only watches, listening to him softly breathe.
“If she grows up,” Ruta says, after a long moment, “and she’s not aro, do we have to kick her out of the house?”
“Absolutely,” Urien says. “Full disowning. I will have no romance polluting my bloodline.”
Ruta laughs, lifting her head to look at him, and thinks, for the thousandth time, that in a million years she still would not know how to thank him enough.
😔I hope I can make it up to Urien for internally pronouncing his name incorrectly as "Yurr-ee-in". If not, honestly whatever punishment he dreams up for me is probably fair.
