You couldn't help but to giggle as the hair tickled at your thigh, the scruff itching at your skin. Squeezing your thighs together, Harry's face is squished between them, his laugh rippling up your leg. "Try to relax," he murmured into your skin, coaxing your legs open with his hands. But your nerves are restless as his head leans down, little bubbles of laughter cresting out of you as he neared your pussy. When his tongue dipped out, swiping across your clit, a gasp interrupted your laugh before his facial hair caused you to devolve into a snickering mess. You tried to even your breaths, following some yoga technique Harry tried to teach you, but titters of laughter still escape you, mingled in with whines of pleasure.
"I-i-it feels goOOod," you moaned before you started giggling again, your body flip-flopping between the extremes of sexual pleasure and feverish laughter. Scratching at his scalp, you keep his head pinned down, pushing him deeper into your cunt. When he twists his head, his chin hairs tickling around your labia, your body tightens before his tongue soothes the tension.
Been working on this all week just for something to patter away on. A little more Tudors AU.
It was almost strange, seeing the children playing on the lawn.
Cord knew that she must have done so, once, and other children, too, but it was one thing to see it in your memory and another to see it in life, a pair of golden-haired imps laughing and running too and fro while they played. The thought of children visiting had frightened her, a little, and she hadn't known how they would manage. But John had told her after he'd already made the invitation, and by then it was too late to argue.
She hadn't known what would they be like - John's friends. She'd met some of them at the wedding - if you could use the word 'met' to mean 'saw across the room at dinner, and seen turned out of the house drunk the next morning'. They'd been a wild, riotous lot then, and she wasn't sure she quite had the patience for that again.
But Gale and Marjorie were different - so different, in fact, that Cord found herself wondering how he and John had ever become friends at all.
It was a story she would have to extract from Gale alone - but not this morning. Today he and John were out hunting, and she and Marjorie had taken the children outside to the gardens to play, watching from a pair of chairs that the servants had brought outside. The birds were singing, and Gale's wife was working on piecing a tiny shirt for her next blessed arrival, her belly great and round under her gown. Motherhood sits well on her - I do not think it would sit so well on me.
"It was kind of you to come and visit. I know with two little ones and another coming it must have been difficult."
"We were glad to do it," Marjorie said with a smile. "John is Gale's oldest friend - and Ralph's godfather, too, I think you know."
Cordelia nodded. She'd been a little surprised, when they'd gone out to greet the carriage, and John had magically produced new toys for both Ralph and little Cecily, stooping down to their level to gift them and accepting their wet, sticky kisses with good grace, and listening with pointed attention to Ralph's long and many-sided recapturing of the carriage ride. "He's very good with children. I…I hadn't thought he would be."
"He is a gentle soul, behind his armor," Marjorie observed. "I see that more here than I ever have before. He is changed, here. Your marriage has been good for him, I think."
Good! Good, with an empty marriage bed, and the couch in his closet that he also never sleeps in? Good with courteous greetings over breakfast and not much else? "Has it? He…he is still much a stranger to me." I only met him the day we wed.
Marjorie nodded, serene. "When we first met, he and my husband were young pups of twenty with scarcely blooded swords. They drank much and laughed hard and scarcely knew what fear meant."
Cord thought of the late nights and the steward's remarks about the cellar, the laughter in the hall and the way the maids whispered in the morning. "John is still so."
Marjorie chuckled quietly, her hand resting peacefully on the large swell of her stomach. "Ah, no, but he is changed. And for the better. War taught him to be wise. He is not so foolhardy as he was when we first met - he thinks more, speaks less. Even if it seems he never stops. And he was always a fool for a pair of fine eyes."
"He is that, still, too."
Marjorie glanced at her. "He spoke of none but you at dinner, when he came to visit us. And there were pretty girls aplenty in the hall."
Ralph ran up to tug at his mother's sleeve, his sister tumbling behind him. "Mama, mama, will you not look at the castle we built?"
Marjorie carefully found herself in her chair and laid aside her needlework, rising slowly. "Indeed I will, and Auntie Cordelia will come with me and look too."
Cord felt a twinge at being called 'Auntie' - but John was Uncle, so it followed she was now an Aunt. The castle was a little thing, firewood and fallen limbs dragged around to have a little keep, with an opening for the door, but Marjorie oohed and ahhed as if it were a palace as her son went on and on describing the tower and the eagle on the roof and the stairs and the kitchens.
He was still in the middle of an antic description of the herd of goats in the castle keep when there was a shout from the garden gate - John coming back from the hunt.
Immediately Ralph's attention turned. "Uncle John, Uncle John! Look at my castle!"
John was smiling, pulling off his gloves as he came. Gale must have still been in the stables. "Your castle? But it is on my land! Now that may do at your father's house but it won't do here! I shall have to knock it all down!
"Uncle John!" Ralphie was giggling, knowing full well that his uncle was joking.
"No, no, I can't have it," John said, planting his feet firmly in the grass. "I will attack with full force unless someone rides out to meet me!"
"Get him!" Ralph shouted, and he and his sister ran shrieking for their much taller uncle, wrapping themselves around his legs and hitting him over and over with their small fists until finally he toppled to his knees and laid himself out on the grass like a tragedian in some play.
"Oh, oh, me! I am slain. If only someone could fetch my wife."
"C'mon Auntie Cordelia, you have to come," Ralph said, dragging at her sleeve.
"Come on!" Cecily repeated, giggling with her brother.
"Oh, all right," Cord said, following dutifully along as Ralph dragged her back to where they'd been playing and John lay sprawled on the ground, making the most ridiculous face of pain with one eye half open, like he really was dead. "What must I do?"
"You have to get on your knees and take his hand and say prayers with him," Ralph commanded. "That's what people do when they're dying."
"Oh," Cord said, taken aback by how much a five year old knew about these things, and quickly followed, kneeling next to John while he tried to look appropriately at death's door. Ralph knelt too, and quickly pressed his hands together and screwed his eyes shut and began reciting the Lord's Prayer in rapid fire Paternosterqueesincaelis while his sister mumbled along, her hands aping his, both eyes open so she could take her cues. Reluctantly Cord picked up John's hand where it was resting on his chest, and began reciting along with Ralph, quieter and slower than him. His hand was hardly dead at all, still very much warm and with a beating heart still beneath it. She was so fixed on the play and the prayer that she didn't notice that John's eyes were open now, and he was smiling a little.
"What is all this shouting?" That was Gale.
"Ralphie has just killed Uncle John for storming the castle, and now they have called Auntie Cordelia because he is dying," Marjorie explained, as though all of this were the most normal thing in the world.
"Oh," Gale said, trying hard to keep up. "Is that all?"
"Auntie Cord, you have to help me build the castle again," Ralph said, tugging at her sleeve again, his paternoster clearly over.
But she found she wasn't finished with this yet. "It is very sad, Ralph. I am a widow now. I might like to be alone for a little while." I was a prize of battle once. I do not wish to be again. And she found, when it came to it, that she did not mind the feeling of his hand in hers, the way his chest was rising and falling against it.
"Maybe true love's kiss can bring Uncle John back," Marjorie suggested, only very lightly teasing, and Cord looked down at John, his eyes still shut. Was that a smile tugging at his mouth?
But why shouldn't she? She leaned over, hand still holding his, and pressed her lips to his. He smelled of earth, and sweat, and leather, and his lips opened, just slightly, as she kissed them, his hand tightening on hers. She opened her eyes and found he was awake again. "Hello, wife. Thank you for saving me."
She felt the old prickliness return, the urge to riposte and hit back. "If I did not, I should have to marry again."
"Would that be so bad? I'm sure Ralph would be a kind husband." Somehow the words stung her as he said them. As I am not, perhaps?
What could she say to such a thing? She did not want to give him ground. "But very young." And not capable of such kisses.
So enjoy my poorly drawn Helen Distortion(who I should give another try in the future) and the fourteen fears + the Extinction , both are like three months old.
can’t sleep thought: do Ligeia’s powers work on a mandalorian (or equivalent) with their helmet on? like, some of them do--the power of prophecy to drive you mad is in the prophecy, not in the sound waves....but singing?
they seem pretty damn soundproof, and I definitely don’t think recordings of Li’s voice can have the same level of effect. but are they airtight? how much of the raw sound do you need to hear to be affected? consciously or unconsciously? what if she’s really loud?
“You know what I was thinking earlier, when the train I was waiting for was delayed due to ‘maintenance’ --- I was late as fuck today, I swear I thought I was getting fired --- I was thinking, ‘I really hope The Beach Boys are doing alright.’ Seriously, what happened to them after they were on Full House? I want good things for them like I wanted better things for Rick Astley.”
