"...Ciaran, where did you even get that many jewels...?" mutters Artorias, as though trying to distract himself from the fact she's wearing nothing bloody else.
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"...Ciaran, where did you even get that many jewels...?" mutters Artorias, as though trying to distract himself from the fact she's wearing nothing bloody else.
[ DISPLAY ] sender touches themselves knowing receiver is watching. - for Artorias, from @apifacture
He watches her from his desk chair; work - his front of a day job, running through security checklists and rosters for Gwyn - lies scattered across his desk, now ignored for the sight on his bed.
There lay Ciaran, propped partially up on his pillows, grinning at him as she spread her legs to reveal that, somewhere between her car and his bedroom, she'd discarded her underwear, leaving her bare under her now hiked up skirt. The glisten of her heat in the warm light of his bedroom was more than enough to finally pull him away from his work.
They'd fallen into each other quickly, this last week or so. He'd known her growing up, of course - they'd both scrapped and scrabbled their way through the same neighborhood, and eventually into Gwyn's employ amid his meteoric ascent into the city's underworld. But it had barely taken a week of working closely with one another for mutual attraction to blossom into something hot, and eager, and affectionate in a way he hadn't been prepared for.
Artorias turns to watch as one slender hand teases over a bared thigh, toward the core of her, past the patch of blond hair and down to her center. A finger trails slowly over her entrance, and a little moan escapes her. He's not sure he's ever heard a sound he loves as much.
"Thinking about me, love?" he murmurs, watching fixedly as she strokes again.
"Perhaps," she returns, grinning breathlessly. "Why don't you come over here and find out?"
"Oh, I don't know, I'm rather enjoying the show," he says.
"Mm, are you? Then perhaps I'd best continue all on my lonesome," she says, feigning disappointment. "A shame, really, I'd hoped to discover more of what those lovely hands could do..."
"Ah - a proper tease, is it?" he says. He rises slow from his chair, approaches the bed, looms over her, leaning forward so that she lies back - but then plants his hands on either side of her. "I didn't say stop, love - let me hear you..."
we could eat spaghetti together doesn't it sound so lovely? and play vampires until the sun comes up if you're comfortable being the dessert you can be mine and i can be yours i can be your leftovers
--"vampires in love", a great big pile of leaves
The hotel was a nothing place – all sand-coloured laminate and halogen light, a coffin dressed in bridal satin. It stank faintly of antiseptic, of scrubbed sins and laundering done too late. For now, it was theirs. The sheets, still warm from the sun, clung faintly with the perfume of industrial bleach and the shadow of strangers. Ciaran liked that. She liked pretending she was one of many women, all hollowed out in the same pose beneath the same flickering lamplight. It made her feel eternal.
The television blared dumbly in the background, a crown of static noise and soft moans, absurd in its theatrics. One thumb-press and it had sprung to life, offering her an anaemic procession of flesh and silicone. She left it running. Not out of curiosity, but to laugh, or to sneer, or perhaps to stage herself in opposition. What could those women know of this work? Their pleasure was painted on like frost on a mirror, gone at a breath.
She was not one of them.
She was not faking.
He lay beneath her, that man of noble ruin, half-saint and all animal now. There was nothing of chivalry in the way his hands lay slack by his sides, trembling only when she shifted her weight, his face her seat. Thighs, sun-kissed and toned, tensed faintly around his head. A little cruelly, she rolled her hips. A flicker of protest, muffled and dear, but she knew he could breathe. She could feel it – the rhythm of his life, hot against her skin, laboured and adoring. He would die for her, yes, but she would never let him.
The air conditioning clicked and rattled, struggling to cool the heat they were making. Her long braid lay down the curve of her back like a noose, catching at her ribs. Her phone was discarded on the windowsill, reflecting the city lights like a sliver of moon in a wine-dark sky. Ciaran sighed. Deep, contented, unhurried. Her voice, when it came, was velvet crushed and smoking:
“Mm… I should leave you there, Artorias. Set a crown on your brow and keep you like this forever. My sweet martyr. My ruined king.”
The blue light of the screen cast a pale, flickering halo over the room, over her bared chest and freckled belly, over the fine gleam of sweat at her throat. She dragged one hand down over her ribs, over the flat plane of her stomach, over the notch of her hipbone. She touched herself lazily – not for climax, but out of idleness. A little gesture of dominion. Of luxury.
Her pleasure was not violent. It was not fast. It was a feast that came in waves. Long, slow-dragging breakers that built behind her eyes and pulsed out through her limbs. She did not moan like the women on the screen. Instead, she smiled. Thin-lipped. Glorious. Eternal.
— from @apifacture
There is only her, all around him: the warmth of her sex, inches from his mouth, the rise of her stomach ascending to the gentle curve of her chest, and the press of her thighs to his cheeks. Her king, she murmurs - and she, his kingdom, his home, here beneath her, where has always, always belonged. He watches her hand dip between her legs, spread herself wider, a thumb languidly passing over her clit. His tongue feels thick in his mouth.
He has never wanted anything more than her, and the ache - the delicious ache - sat low in his stomach, thudding through him, is enough to drag his eyes upward, traveling the expanse of her, to meet her gaze with his own naked need.
Before he met Ciaran, he never submitted to anyone, not properly. He took on jobs, and paid due respect to his employers, and made a point of being kind and helpful to anyone and everyone he could - but it was never submission. He never gave up control, just deference. Now: now he is hers, wholly, and he revels in the sensation of it - of being so loved, so desired.
The idea had once terrified him. Now, it thrilled him. She thrills him.
His hands ache, too, to touch her; she has forbidden it for now. If she were to glance back, she'd know the proud of arch of him stands thick and hard with need - he doesn't touch that either, as desperately as he wants to. He can see the television glow paint her in snowy florescence; he can see shadows dancing on her skin. A goddess, wrought immortal in the memory of his moment. He's sure of it. He's sure he'll remember the sight of her, watching him imperiously, awash in snowlight, for the rest of his living days.
The proximity between need and release sings in his chest, in his throat, a taut line throughout his body that feels so, so close to snapping. The tension is incredible, intimate. He's not sure he's ever felt so alive.
In a moment, his tongue will seek out the pleasure in her depths, swipe and caress the hollow of her until her dominion is complete. In a moment more, he will surge upward until she is on her back, and he will rail her into the mattress as they exchange control, and trust, and love. And in the moment after that, they'll tangle up in one another in the sweatslick cool of their hotel room, and neither one of them will have ever better understood what home feels like.
But for now, he watches the way she pleases herself, teases him with those wandering fingers, those breathy little explorations of her heat, and he gives her a helpless, loving smile.
"Keep me here, then," he breathes. "I am yours, Ciaran - to keep wherever you please."
When I go Into that ground I won't go quietly I'm bringing my crown And when I go Into that ground They gotta bury me Bury me face down
--"bury me face down," grandson
The city breathed around them in damp exhalations – gutters choked with last week’s rain, the sour tang of spilt spirits, the faint iron-thread of blood. Neon trembled above like a dying halo, its light breaking on puddled pockmarks in the tarmac.
Ciaran was immaculate. Not merely well-dressed but curated, every line of her silhouette deliberate. The dark cut of her coat traced her elegant form. Her brassy-blonde hair, bound and disciplined, refused the vulgar humidity of the streets. Even her heels – sharp, red-bellied things – struck the pavement defiantly, making a fashion runway of filth.
Still, she breathed it in.
Not the metropolitan stench, but the tension.
It had been building all day. Not a spark but a slow, relentless tightening, as though the world itself were drawing a noose about them both. She had felt it in the silences, in the near-brush of his hand against hers, in the weight of his presence.
Desire, yes, but not the kind that begged.
The kind that is already decided.
She did not look at him when she finally spoke:
“This will do.”
Her voice was low, almost conversational, as though she were selecting a table in some fine restaurant rather than a narrow slit of an alleyway, hemmed in by damp brick and the detritus of the city’s neglect. A place where refuse gathered, where the light did not linger.
Perfect.
Ciaran turned then, her gaze lifting to him at last, already certain of the shape this moment would take. There was no hesitation in her, no coyness. Only a quiet authority, as though this, too, were part of her work. As though he were something to be handled with care and with purpose.
Her hands rose to his shoulders.
She slipped his jacket from him with precision, fingers smoothing the fabric as it fell away, her touch lingering just long enough to suggest that she knew exactly what she deprived him of in its absence. The weight of it, the armour of it. For a fleeting instant, it might have seemed an act of tenderness – until she let it fall. Unapologetically, the tailored cloth lay upon the sullied ground.
Ciaran’s amber eyes did not waver from his as she stepped back, as she lowered herself to her knees. A descent chosen, not compelled. The red soles of her heels flashed briefly in the half-light, a sudden, vivid wound of colour against the grey decay.
Ciaran knelt before him, her posture composed, her spine straight as a blade.
For a moment, she simply studied him. There was something almost devotional in it, although no god would have recognised the rite. Her lips parted slightly, not in need, but in thought, as though she were considering the precise manner in which she might ruin him.
“You see,” she murmured at last, her husky voice softer now, touched with something that might have been amusement, might have been hunger. “How easily the world is set aside.”
Her gloved hand brushed, almost idly, against his wrist.
“Everything you wear,” she continued, her gaze flicking momentarily to the discarded jacket beneath them, already darkening where the damp crept in. “Everything you are out there…”
A faint tilt of her head, a shadow of a sly smile.
“It need not follow you here. It need not see what I am about to do to you.”
( from Ciaran, @apifacture )
His breath catches. It always does, around her: the trapped sound of prey, long loving the hunter, and not for the first time he marvels at the thought that anyone could make him feel like pray prey, and then marvels further at how much he relishes the sensation. He can feel her breath, as close as she kneels, the way a promise settles across a mind, washing over the growing need behind his slacks.
"Everything I am is right in front of me," he manages, that trapped breath giving way, dissolving into soft and affectionate sentiment as one hand twines his fingers among the brass-blond of her hair. He doesn't pull, or guide. He would not presume.
The city hums on beyond them. She has chosen the spot well - even the wintry gleam of a passing car's brights, hewing cold light down the alleyway, fails to catch them in its glow. There's something poetic in that, his mind supplies amid the haze of arousal and love. Too deep in the dark to be found. Too deep in one another to care.
He has always been a gentle man, to a point. But it speaks volumes that she is able to discard his coat, to still him this way just with the promise of pleasure. Anyone else who tossed that coat on the ground - bloody expensive, too, and half-as-like to be expensive again when the cleaners get ahold of it - would have found themselves subject to a sudden demonstration of gravity, at the very least.
But not Ciaran, says the prey-who-loves-the-hunter, the wolf caught firmly by the scruff of his proverbial neck and staring right at his supposed captor with the kind of affection one would usually assume required several generations of domesticating to achieve.
Ciaran - half his size and the whole of his heart - can have whatever she wants from him.
"And what are you going to do to me, then, love?" he murmurs, thick and warm.
I'll be there when your heart stops beating/I'll be there when your last breath's taken away/In the dark when there's no one listening/in the times we both get carried away
--(when your heart stops beating, +44)
In the night where I live, There's strange force in your kiss, oh All's divine in desire With an ire of philosophy Burning scrolls in the naked heat Oh how coy is your little boy Cause I know it don't Read that well, yeah I got (I got) buried (buried) But it won't be long, before I rise in I got (I got) buried (buried) But it won't be long, before I rise In song
--"I Got," Young the Giant