Fic:"To Bind Persia"
Fandom: Arthurian Legend
Pairing: Gawain/Mordred
Rating: NC-17.
“By the Rood, Mordred,” sighed Gawain. He was staring out the window at nothing in particular. There was no sun anywhere, just lingering grey clouds. “We’ve been in for three days. The stallions are kicking their stalls to bits for temper, and the men are scarce better.”
“It will pass tomorrow,” Mordred said, taking out his dagger and leisurely paring his nails. He was sitting with his feet up on the table, and the light from the fire behind him lit red glints into his dark hair. He looked up and quirked a grin at Gawain.
“And you’re bating, too, aren’t you, bright hawk?”
Gawain grinned slightly, the image of the hawk restless on its perch a little too accurate.
“Did the ringing of the hawkbells tell you?” he said. He thought briefly of the darkness of the mews, filled with soft melodious chiming as the hawks and falcons shifted in the dark, waiting.
Mordred sheathed the dagger and stood, pacing softfooted over to where Gawain stood. “Nay, I know it, the way I know my own breath, Hephastion,” he said softly. “You wear no jesses nor hood.”
Gawain shut his eyes as a wave of heat rolled over him despite the chill dampness breathing in from the window. Mordred stood close enough he could feel the heat off his body. He never called him Hephastion save when they lay together. He remembered the day when they’d sat, Mordred admitting his parentage, speaking of his dreams. Gawain had laughingly compared him to Alexander the Great. After all, he too had been a lover of men, marrying only for power and advantage, in the end, and he had dreamed, as Mordred did, of rule over the world. Ever after Gawain was “Hephastion” in these moments alone.
He exhaled, closed the shutters, turned to Mordred. Mordred had seen his reaction, was pleased by it, was heated himself by it. It was evident in the widening of his blue eyes, the color that rose under his skin. Gawain could watch him heat, and find satisfaction in that alone. Dark hair and bright blue eyes, he was beautiful in Gawain’s eyes.
“A cold day,” he said.
“Then we should seek heat,” Mordred said. He took two more steps, reached for the lacings of Gawain’s tunic, sliding each point through the holes slowly, as though tickling a fish out of the river. Each light touch became a point of fire, and when Mordred reached up to push the tunic off his shoulders, Gawain groaned, took his mouth and plundered it with his own before he could return the favor. He knelt to unlace the hosen from the pourpoint that held them up, and delighted in the small shivers and groans he could startle from Mordred. He laid his mouth close, breathed hot breath upon Mordred’s cock through the linen of his braes just to startle an oath out of him. That raised the pace.
Soon enough they were naked, not caring about the chill of the room away from the fire, Mordred kissing like mulled wine, hot, almost too intense to be borne. Gawain shivered, tensed, flipped them so he was on top, and now he could do what he wanted, run his tongue along the edge of his ear, catch the lobe in his teeth, whisper “Alexander” into the ear, and feel Mordred shiver beneath him with the power of the word and the dream and the emotion behind it. Gawain traced the scar on his shoulder where a spear had glanced three years back, the one on his chest from a glancing sword blow in practice...and ran his palms over Mordred’s nipples along the way to hear his breath hiss out on what might have been an oath.
He knew to avoid the spot on Mordred’s side where the skin had healed strange from a wound and now felt pain from a gentle touch, burning from a hard caress. Unhurriedly, he settled himself down between Mordred’s legs, inhaling the scent of him, sweat and the unmistakeable maleness of him. The breath across Mordred’s cock drew a groan and Gawain’s fingers skating downward to roll his balls in his fingers made Mordred shiver and beg. He looked up for a moment, and locked eyes with Mordred before he bent his head and took him in his mouth.
It was only a few minutes before fingers wound into his hair, tugging him up. “Turn round,” said Mordred, and Gawain consented, knowing what Mordred wanted. He felt Mordred’s mouth descend on his cock, mindnumbingly good, as he reached out to take Mordred’s cock into his mouth again. Back and forth, swaying in rhythm like the movements of a dance, til pleasure broke over them both, and left them languid and sweaty on the bed as its tide went out.
Mordred sat up, looked over towards the fire, and said, “Wine for us both, Harald, and something to eat. I’m not disposed to get out of bed.”
There was a soft affirmative murmur, the door opened and shut, and Gawain flushed bright red. He could see Mordred’s half amused grin at it.
“Gawain, you blush like a virgin seeing a man for the first time.I didn’t know it went that far down, though. ”
“I...” He had been unaware of Harald coming into the room. Or anything else in the room, for that matter.
Mordred laughed, stretching like a cat. “It’s only Harald, Gawain. He’s held both our heads when we were wine-sick and he tended you when you had the flux last summer.”
“This...” Abruptly embarassment descended. Mordred caught it quickly.
“Remembering the priests call this a mortal sin?” he demanded. “And my mother’s people call it the way of warriors and shrug. It harms neither of us.”
Gawain exhaled, and flopped back onto the bed. Feeling cold, he crawled between the covers, and was soon joined by Mordred. Their bodies soon warmed the cool blankets, and Gawain relaxed into the warmth.
“Besides,” Mordred said. “If he hadn’t come in, I’d have had to get out of bed and dressed to call for a meal.”
Gawain laughed softly. “Oh, now there's a mortal sin.”
Mordred looked at him again, with that serious, wondering brilliance to his gaze. “Hephastion,” he said again.
“Alexander,” said Gawain, knowing what the words meant, especially when Mordred pulled him close, burying his face in his shoulder and simply breathing him in.
Gawain was there in the crowd of witnesses when Mordred stood at the church door three days later and took the Lady Amite to wife. She was well born, indeed. Nentres of Gorlot was her father, and she the only child. And she was lovely, hair like polished oak with golden glints flowing down her back tokening her maidenhood, a tall, slender figure, well grown at fifteen, ripe and lovely.
Mordred feasted that night, Amite beside him, hair newly veiled as befitted a married woman. He gave her every courtesy, whispered sweet words into her ear that made her cheeks blush, made her look down and away in confusion. Any watcher would have concluded that he was smitten. The women rose, descended like rainbow-winged birds to carry her away and make ready for her bedding, and Mordred smiled across the empty place to Gawain.
“Drink with me, my dear friend,” he said, more sober than Gawain had thought he’d be. “Drink to my wife.”
“I’ll drink to your dreams,” Gawain said. He drank, deeply, so he could say nothing more. She was a good match, practically speaking, but he couldn’t look at Mordred’s face as he looked at her and believe that was all. It was not for a man to cry like a cup-pledged peasant girl. The damnable thing was, little else came to mind. And not here. Not before everyone. He felt it naked on his face before him.
Mordred looked at him, and Gawain turned, calling the servants for more wine here. When he looked back, Mordred had turned, drinking from his own glass, then standing and leading the noisy exodus from the hall of the bridegroom and his friends, taking the bridegroom to bed his bride, all rather drunk.
It was a good thing, Gawain thought. It made it possible to stay at the back of the pack, made it possible not to join in the goodnatured stripping of his robe and his tunic and his hosen before he was picked up and tossed onto the bed beside his bride.
“Well, you know how to get on from here, don’ t you?” called Yvain, face flushed with the wine he’d taken. “Tis much the same, isn’t it?”
Yvain was grabbed and pushed out of the room before he could say more by one of the more sober members of the company, and at length the door slammed behind them. Someone started up a carol, and, singing drunkenly, they trooped back downstairs to the waiting tables and free wine. There’d be no peace tonight within the keep as they celebrated their lord’s wedding.
Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned. Harald, the body servant who’d cared for Mordred’s gear and stitched his wounds since...always...stood there. “I think you’d rather have this, my lord,” he said, and showed him a large pitcher. By its smell it was the fortified wine Mordred had brought from Gascony.
“Aye,” Gawain said, voice suddenly tight. “Let’s drink, Harald, together.”
Harald nodded, and turned them toward Gawain’s room. He shut the door behind them.
Gawain woke the following day, without a headache, but nauseated and miserable. The sun beat in at the arrowslit and hammered him unmercifully. Harald was there. “Drink this, my lord.”
The posset tasted foul, but did clear his head and settle his stomach. Harald made him follow it with several glasses of spring water before he’d bring him bacon and bread and ale.By then, Gawain had an appetite. “They all rise late after the bridal.” He grinned sardonically. “Yvain went to ask a girl to bed him and up came all the wine he’d swilled when he opened his mouth.”
Gawain laughed. “The damn churl deserved it.”
Harald looked at him searchingly a moment. “You’ll be all right, then, lad?”
The reason why he would not be slammed in on him after a moment, and he went rigid for a moment with pain. He took a deep breath.
“Aye. I will be,” he said. It was only pain. He was a warrior.
“I don’t know if this helps you, lad, but he was drunk still this morning, and I put the posset down him afore I came to you. She’s fair, I’ll grant, but have you ever known a fair face to move him?”
Yet when he came down not for dinner, nor for supper, and trays of honeyed sweets and jugs of mead went up to the solar, Gawain grew pensive. He remembered, and the memories hurt like a fresh wound.
* * *
It was late that third night when Mordred came to him, slipping inside the door so silently Gawain was sure that it was Harald, moving to his own pallet now that his duties were done. He was so surprised that he said the first thing that came out of his mouth. “What of your wife?”
Mordred’s mouth tightened with either disgust or pain. “She’s glad to see the back of me for now,” he said. “I left her with her nurse clucking over her and poulticing her most tender flesh. But I’ll give them this, she was indeed a virgin.” He reached over and grabbed the pitcher of wine, taking a swig from it. “Killing pain, Gawain?” he said, raising a brow at the taste of the fortified wine.
“I’m not used to sleeping alone,” he said, and clamped his mouth on more. If it had been painful to think on him, it was more painful to see him there, the same but somehow savagely, painfully, different.
“You won’t be, from now on,” Mordred said. “I...cannot sleep with her. Oh, not fuck,” he said, holding up a hand when Gawain began to protest. “It’s my desperate duty to make an heir, and she’s warm and tight about me, and I did make sure she knew pleasure out of it. I’m no Yvain,” he added. “But...she can’t seem to find a position that doesn’t put an elbow in my back or touches that spot on my side. And she snores, Gawain. Like old Bors after wine.”
Gawain laughed. He couldn’t help himself, not with that aggrieved tone. Mordred looked over at him, and grinned too. “I’ve missed you, Gawain,” he said. “I didn’t realize...you didn’t understand.”
“Understand?”
“She’s heir to all of Gorlot, niece of Arthur, and I’ll inherit Lot’s lands, since he has no heirs but me. My mother’s lands, up at the border, are mine as well,” he said simply. Gawain drew in his breath. This marriage put close to half the lands that did homage to Arthur under the lordship of Mordred. Gawain nodded. He understood.
“Alexander,” he said.
Mordred nodded slowly. “Hephastion,” he said.
Their hands reached out and clasped over the table.
Pairing: Gawain/Mordred
Rating: NC-17.
“By the Rood, Mordred,” sighed Gawain. He was staring out the window at nothing in particular. There was no sun anywhere, just lingering grey clouds. “We’ve been in for three days. The stallions are kicking their stalls to bits for temper, and the men are scarce better.”
“It will pass tomorrow,” Mordred said, taking out his dagger and leisurely paring his nails. He was sitting with his feet up on the table, and the light from the fire behind him lit red glints into his dark hair. He looked up and quirked a grin at Gawain.
“And you’re bating, too, aren’t you, bright hawk?”
Gawain grinned slightly, the image of the hawk restless on its perch a little too accurate.
“Did the ringing of the hawkbells tell you?” he said. He thought briefly of the darkness of the mews, filled with soft melodious chiming as the hawks and falcons shifted in the dark, waiting.
Mordred sheathed the dagger and stood, pacing softfooted over to where Gawain stood. “Nay, I know it, the way I know my own breath, Hephastion,” he said softly. “You wear no jesses nor hood.”
Gawain shut his eyes as a wave of heat rolled over him despite the chill dampness breathing in from the window. Mordred stood close enough he could feel the heat off his body. He never called him Hephastion save when they lay together. He remembered the day when they’d sat, Mordred admitting his parentage, speaking of his dreams. Gawain had laughingly compared him to Alexander the Great. After all, he too had been a lover of men, marrying only for power and advantage, in the end, and he had dreamed, as Mordred did, of rule over the world. Ever after Gawain was “Hephastion” in these moments alone.
He exhaled, closed the shutters, turned to Mordred. Mordred had seen his reaction, was pleased by it, was heated himself by it. It was evident in the widening of his blue eyes, the color that rose under his skin. Gawain could watch him heat, and find satisfaction in that alone. Dark hair and bright blue eyes, he was beautiful in Gawain’s eyes.
“A cold day,” he said.
“Then we should seek heat,” Mordred said. He took two more steps, reached for the lacings of Gawain’s tunic, sliding each point through the holes slowly, as though tickling a fish out of the river. Each light touch became a point of fire, and when Mordred reached up to push the tunic off his shoulders, Gawain groaned, took his mouth and plundered it with his own before he could return the favor. He knelt to unlace the hosen from the pourpoint that held them up, and delighted in the small shivers and groans he could startle from Mordred. He laid his mouth close, breathed hot breath upon Mordred’s cock through the linen of his braes just to startle an oath out of him. That raised the pace.
Soon enough they were naked, not caring about the chill of the room away from the fire, Mordred kissing like mulled wine, hot, almost too intense to be borne. Gawain shivered, tensed, flipped them so he was on top, and now he could do what he wanted, run his tongue along the edge of his ear, catch the lobe in his teeth, whisper “Alexander” into the ear, and feel Mordred shiver beneath him with the power of the word and the dream and the emotion behind it. Gawain traced the scar on his shoulder where a spear had glanced three years back, the one on his chest from a glancing sword blow in practice...and ran his palms over Mordred’s nipples along the way to hear his breath hiss out on what might have been an oath.
He knew to avoid the spot on Mordred’s side where the skin had healed strange from a wound and now felt pain from a gentle touch, burning from a hard caress. Unhurriedly, he settled himself down between Mordred’s legs, inhaling the scent of him, sweat and the unmistakeable maleness of him. The breath across Mordred’s cock drew a groan and Gawain’s fingers skating downward to roll his balls in his fingers made Mordred shiver and beg. He looked up for a moment, and locked eyes with Mordred before he bent his head and took him in his mouth.
It was only a few minutes before fingers wound into his hair, tugging him up. “Turn round,” said Mordred, and Gawain consented, knowing what Mordred wanted. He felt Mordred’s mouth descend on his cock, mindnumbingly good, as he reached out to take Mordred’s cock into his mouth again. Back and forth, swaying in rhythm like the movements of a dance, til pleasure broke over them both, and left them languid and sweaty on the bed as its tide went out.
Mordred sat up, looked over towards the fire, and said, “Wine for us both, Harald, and something to eat. I’m not disposed to get out of bed.”
There was a soft affirmative murmur, the door opened and shut, and Gawain flushed bright red. He could see Mordred’s half amused grin at it.
“Gawain, you blush like a virgin seeing a man for the first time.I didn’t know it went that far down, though. ”
“I...” He had been unaware of Harald coming into the room. Or anything else in the room, for that matter.
Mordred laughed, stretching like a cat. “It’s only Harald, Gawain. He’s held both our heads when we were wine-sick and he tended you when you had the flux last summer.”
“This...” Abruptly embarassment descended. Mordred caught it quickly.
“Remembering the priests call this a mortal sin?” he demanded. “And my mother’s people call it the way of warriors and shrug. It harms neither of us.”
Gawain exhaled, and flopped back onto the bed. Feeling cold, he crawled between the covers, and was soon joined by Mordred. Their bodies soon warmed the cool blankets, and Gawain relaxed into the warmth.
“Besides,” Mordred said. “If he hadn’t come in, I’d have had to get out of bed and dressed to call for a meal.”
Gawain laughed softly. “Oh, now there's a mortal sin.”
Mordred looked at him again, with that serious, wondering brilliance to his gaze. “Hephastion,” he said again.
“Alexander,” said Gawain, knowing what the words meant, especially when Mordred pulled him close, burying his face in his shoulder and simply breathing him in.
Gawain was there in the crowd of witnesses when Mordred stood at the church door three days later and took the Lady Amite to wife. She was well born, indeed. Nentres of Gorlot was her father, and she the only child. And she was lovely, hair like polished oak with golden glints flowing down her back tokening her maidenhood, a tall, slender figure, well grown at fifteen, ripe and lovely.
Mordred feasted that night, Amite beside him, hair newly veiled as befitted a married woman. He gave her every courtesy, whispered sweet words into her ear that made her cheeks blush, made her look down and away in confusion. Any watcher would have concluded that he was smitten. The women rose, descended like rainbow-winged birds to carry her away and make ready for her bedding, and Mordred smiled across the empty place to Gawain.
“Drink with me, my dear friend,” he said, more sober than Gawain had thought he’d be. “Drink to my wife.”
“I’ll drink to your dreams,” Gawain said. He drank, deeply, so he could say nothing more. She was a good match, practically speaking, but he couldn’t look at Mordred’s face as he looked at her and believe that was all. It was not for a man to cry like a cup-pledged peasant girl. The damnable thing was, little else came to mind. And not here. Not before everyone. He felt it naked on his face before him.
Mordred looked at him, and Gawain turned, calling the servants for more wine here. When he looked back, Mordred had turned, drinking from his own glass, then standing and leading the noisy exodus from the hall of the bridegroom and his friends, taking the bridegroom to bed his bride, all rather drunk.
It was a good thing, Gawain thought. It made it possible to stay at the back of the pack, made it possible not to join in the goodnatured stripping of his robe and his tunic and his hosen before he was picked up and tossed onto the bed beside his bride.
“Well, you know how to get on from here, don’ t you?” called Yvain, face flushed with the wine he’d taken. “Tis much the same, isn’t it?”
Yvain was grabbed and pushed out of the room before he could say more by one of the more sober members of the company, and at length the door slammed behind them. Someone started up a carol, and, singing drunkenly, they trooped back downstairs to the waiting tables and free wine. There’d be no peace tonight within the keep as they celebrated their lord’s wedding.
Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned. Harald, the body servant who’d cared for Mordred’s gear and stitched his wounds since...always...stood there. “I think you’d rather have this, my lord,” he said, and showed him a large pitcher. By its smell it was the fortified wine Mordred had brought from Gascony.
“Aye,” Gawain said, voice suddenly tight. “Let’s drink, Harald, together.”
Harald nodded, and turned them toward Gawain’s room. He shut the door behind them.
Gawain woke the following day, without a headache, but nauseated and miserable. The sun beat in at the arrowslit and hammered him unmercifully. Harald was there. “Drink this, my lord.”
The posset tasted foul, but did clear his head and settle his stomach. Harald made him follow it with several glasses of spring water before he’d bring him bacon and bread and ale.By then, Gawain had an appetite. “They all rise late after the bridal.” He grinned sardonically. “Yvain went to ask a girl to bed him and up came all the wine he’d swilled when he opened his mouth.”
Gawain laughed. “The damn churl deserved it.”
Harald looked at him searchingly a moment. “You’ll be all right, then, lad?”
The reason why he would not be slammed in on him after a moment, and he went rigid for a moment with pain. He took a deep breath.
“Aye. I will be,” he said. It was only pain. He was a warrior.
“I don’t know if this helps you, lad, but he was drunk still this morning, and I put the posset down him afore I came to you. She’s fair, I’ll grant, but have you ever known a fair face to move him?”
Yet when he came down not for dinner, nor for supper, and trays of honeyed sweets and jugs of mead went up to the solar, Gawain grew pensive. He remembered, and the memories hurt like a fresh wound.
* * *
It was late that third night when Mordred came to him, slipping inside the door so silently Gawain was sure that it was Harald, moving to his own pallet now that his duties were done. He was so surprised that he said the first thing that came out of his mouth. “What of your wife?”
Mordred’s mouth tightened with either disgust or pain. “She’s glad to see the back of me for now,” he said. “I left her with her nurse clucking over her and poulticing her most tender flesh. But I’ll give them this, she was indeed a virgin.” He reached over and grabbed the pitcher of wine, taking a swig from it. “Killing pain, Gawain?” he said, raising a brow at the taste of the fortified wine.
“I’m not used to sleeping alone,” he said, and clamped his mouth on more. If it had been painful to think on him, it was more painful to see him there, the same but somehow savagely, painfully, different.
“You won’t be, from now on,” Mordred said. “I...cannot sleep with her. Oh, not fuck,” he said, holding up a hand when Gawain began to protest. “It’s my desperate duty to make an heir, and she’s warm and tight about me, and I did make sure she knew pleasure out of it. I’m no Yvain,” he added. “But...she can’t seem to find a position that doesn’t put an elbow in my back or touches that spot on my side. And she snores, Gawain. Like old Bors after wine.”
Gawain laughed. He couldn’t help himself, not with that aggrieved tone. Mordred looked over at him, and grinned too. “I’ve missed you, Gawain,” he said. “I didn’t realize...you didn’t understand.”
“Understand?”
“She’s heir to all of Gorlot, niece of Arthur, and I’ll inherit Lot’s lands, since he has no heirs but me. My mother’s lands, up at the border, are mine as well,” he said simply. Gawain drew in his breath. This marriage put close to half the lands that did homage to Arthur under the lordship of Mordred. Gawain nodded. He understood.
“Alexander,” he said.
Mordred nodded slowly. “Hephastion,” he said.
Their hands reached out and clasped over the table.