OK guys, it's happened: I've finally written in a different fandom. (Shock!) So I've been watching "Merlin" every week since it came on in America this summer, and while it isn't exactly deep complicated material, it's entertaining enough to be good summer viewing. It is also, as one of my livejournal friends described it when she first started watching, "gay as Christmas." It should come as no surprise to anyone that this caused me to add to the already-overwhelming string of Merlin/Arthur fics that have gone up in the last year. Feel free to pass this over if you like, but since I went to all the trouble of writing and editing it, it seemed ridiculous not to post.
Title: Dangerous Liaisons
Fandom/Pairing: "Merlin", Merlin/Arthur
Rating: R for sexuality
Also posted at: Nowhere, yet. But in a few days I'll search Merlin communities and find someplace.
Summary: Arthur is fully aware of the risk he's taking, seeing Merlin.
Dangerous. The word filled the long, hushed moments of their encounter, as it had every similar tryst before it. Arthur heard dangerous whispered in the rustle of the sheets, dangerous hissed in the flickering of the candles on the table at the end of the room. The light from them cast a dim glow across the floor, but the bed’s canopy, half-open, obscured the minuscule amount of light that could reach so far. Just enough left to see the man spread before him, to recognize him despite shadows dancing across face and body, creating new shapes with each subsequent instant.
There was a danger in the forbiddenness of this, the indecorousness and the outright perversion, if you saw it that way. To be caught in the arms of a servant boy, or to have him be caught in yours- Arthur was beginning to think the difference between those two circumstances was not so distinct as he had initially supposed- was unspeakable. The risk of it pervaded these secret times, growing more and more insistent each time they occurred. Arthur could not ignore the phantom presence of it in the room. But Arthur had never been one to shy away, either from risk or from the thrill it sent through him.
He felt danger forming in the slick sweat on their bodies, a perspiration making easier the slide of skin; every drop falling to the sheets evidence, a faint and yet incriminating proof. He could smell danger, that sharp and thick smell of sex that the breeze from the window never seemed to carry away. It settled in his nose, a musky scent that he could recall even hours afterward, when Merlin passed by on his duties and memories seeped from his mind into his whole body, reminding him he was never free from this, never safe. The danger he felt in the throb of his dick only redoubled that message.
As their joining went on, passing from preliminary exploration to something much more significant, the danger became a different animal completely. Somewhere along the line, Arthur’s brain short-circuited under Merlin’s ministrations (the man was devoted in bed in a manner that the prince could never quite seem to inspire in the light of day). The real danger, he realized, was in the way his breath caught in his throat at Merlin’s gasps when he entered him. A strained sigh at the first thrust, and again, and again- three times, and on the fourth time accompanied by a short, choked moan. It was that sound, and so many others Merlin made, that was the threat- not the possibility of the noise being overheard and thus their activity discovered, but the spike of heat that passed through Arthur’s body at the hearing of it.
The real danger lay in the magic of Merlin’s hands on him. Arthur had grown familiar with the way fingers tightened on his upper arms as the young man braced him further in, the way he threw his head back so it pressed hard into the pillow, creating a perfect space at the collarbone for Arthur’s head to find a home at the top of every slow push.
Being caught in the act of sexual indiscretion was one possible danger. But it seemed the risk of actually acknowledging that this was more than just that- an indiscretion- was far greater. Every breath Arthur exhaled onto the angular juts of skin below him was a warning: Danger. Danger, Merlin. Continue this, and you might just do me in yet.
And when he felt warmth spread beneath him, his straining partner gone pliant and still, he himself began to hurtle toward a similar peak, seeking the surrender that was, in the end, his greatest danger of all.