The Center Cannot Hold
Backdated to early, early Thursday morning.
Damn her for being right - damn her for the smugness of it all. /Damn her/.
=NYC= Black King's Quarters - Second Floor - Hellfire Clubhouse
The remnants of dream fog hang thick and heavy still in the Black King's mind, obscuring the last glimpses of a chasm of loneliness so deep and intense that the yearnings it had produced are still felt in the speed of his heartbeat and the distress worming its way through his guts. Emma has since withdrawn the active direction of her powers, preferring to sit and watch as his own subconscious parades his secret fears and lusts before both their eyes.
It's hands grasping for something he wants and cannot have - and their physical counterparts reaching, twitching from where the Black King lies in sweat-soaked twisted sheets - that brings him awake, breathing heavily with anxious panting as his hands clench and then relax. He half-turns, questing for a glass of water, as yet not seeing Emma in his room.
She is difficult to see, sitting in a corner chair that is shrouded in shadows, the white of her satin robe glinting pearl with captured moonlight. His glass is missing, held in her hand. "Good evening, Sebastian," she murmurs lowly. "Were you having a bad dream?"
Shock, startlement like trumpets - loud and angry, buzzing, and Shaw shoots up straight in bed. "/Emma/," he says, and that shock is replaced almost immediately by confusion that tries the word once again. "Emma?"
Emma lifts from the chair effortlessly, a spectre with apparent substance. "Yes, darling?" she answers, approaching the bed and holding out the glass of water to him in one hand while the other tucks the gaps of her robe closed.
Shaw's eyes are following those gaps, and it's clear that he is not yet convinced that he has awoken. "I..." Words fail, and the Black King reaches out - not for the glass but for Emma, completing the grasping motion that woke him to catch at her wrist.
In the dark, Emma's eyes fail to glitter with the hard satisfaction that is there. The water splashes over their combined hands, and she sinks to perch on the edge of the bed and simply looks at him with as little expression as the statures that populate the Hellfire Gardens.
A little mental surge of frustration at wet hands in banished - Shaw keeps tugging, trying to draw Emma closer. "At last," he murmurs still sleepily, and then reality begins to set in about halfway through the tug as he freezes, realization dawning. "Wait."
Yet more water splashes as her wrist continues to be pulled upon. Emma's hair slips forward as her shoulders curve inward and she hovers above him, her arm still between them and starting to take some of her weight. "Why?"
"...why what?" Shaw tries, and then he takes a breath - his pulling paused for a moment - to just look at Emma, contemplating. His mind is an open book at present excitement and exhaustion - the old threads of his plan to stay away from Emma just tatters, brushed away by the blacker, inner Shaw that starts to tug on Emma's hand again.
"If you want to sleep with me, Sebastian, you might try letting me put the glass down," Emma points out dryly, settling her weight into the arm that both holds the glass and now lays against his chest between them.
"Ah," Shaw says simply to this. "You make an excellent point." He smiles at her, still a little befuddled by the surreality of the entire situation. "...why are you here?" comes the belated question, driven mostly by confused curiousity but with the prickly fires of paranoia around the edges.
Emma pulls away and twists to place the glass on his bedside table, then turns back to him and looks down, a perverse picture of maternal sentimentality. "You wanted me here."
More flickers of paranoia. "Yes..." Shaw draws out, reaching for Emma again, tugging her down into bed. "It's the..." A pause. "Why now?" he asks, even as his eyes are distracted by Emma's robe.
Emma leans against him, folding both arms on his chest and planting her chin atop them. She pulls a leg up for balance, hooking her foot behind her knee. The robe wrinkles and gapes over shadowed recesses. "I don't know. You tell me. You were the one begging for me."
"Sebastian Shaw doesn't beg," Sebastian Shaw says, but it's unconvincing - somewhere in his mind, in the way his hands move for Emma's back and begin to tug at her robe there is something distinctly pleading.
"Sebastian Shaw also doesn't want me." Emma pushes up on her knee and moves forward to force him to give lie to that statement with a deep, probing kiss.
Force is not required - no, Shaw's lie comes willingly, and the turn of familiar ferocity that digs fingers into Emma's robes makes plain that the lie is proved with certain joy and heady anticipation - reflected in the images that play like a kaleidoscope through the Black King's mind.
Emma slithers forward and across the Black King's chest, hands and lips and mouth deepening the contact and desire and pinning him beneath the sheets with a knee on either side. "Mmm... Tell me you want /me/. No games now, Sebastian."
Fingers tighten - almost rip, Shaw bunching Emma's robe in his hands in an effort to pull it from her, one stymied by the unfortunate truths of arms and ties. Still, his lips move against hers, and it is with only the most buried regret - the voice of reason, banished by lust and sleeplessness - that he breathes, "/Yes/," only to follow it up with a clearly spoken sentence: "Emma," he tells her. "I need you."
Fingers tighten - almost rip, Shaw bunching Emma's robe in his hands in an effort to pull it from her, one stymied by the unfortunate truths of arms and ties. Still, his lips move against hers, and it is with only the most buried regret - the voice of reason, banished by lust and sleeplessness - that he breathes, "/Yes/," only to follow it up with a clearly spoken sentence: "Emma," he tells her. "I need you."
Emma slides her arms around him and rolls, tangling sheets and clothing and arms and legs with his in the motion. Landing on her side with one leg wound over his hip, she silences that voice of reason with the touch of her finger on his lips and her mind on his. "Why do you need me? How do you need me?" she whispers.
"Why?" echoes Sebastian Shaw in some sort of throaty growl. "The why has never changed," he tells her, doubt so conveniently disappeared as he completes that roll, moving to push Emma onto her back. "You're Emma Frost." A beat, and then his lips captures her finger, biting just a little. << As for how, >> he thinks. << Let me count the ways. >> Indeed, he does, images of Shaw and Emma flickering in nickelodeon glory across his mind without any of the rancor or bitterness that usually accompanies them - just desire and some earnest anticipation. Delight, too, colors his thoughts - summoned from the confused ball that are Shaw's Emma-feelings, with anger, hatred and violence momentarily laid to rest.
Emma inhales a short sharp breath, then closes her eyes and squirms down, her free hand combing through chest hair as she scratches lower. "I'm Emma Frost, White Queen of the Hellfire Club. /Your/ Queen." Emphasis made, she rubs her knee up the inside of his leg and lifts a brow.
"My Queen," Shaw replies with growing pleasure, releasing Emma's finger to smile down at the blonde beneath him. The touch of her thigh is like a brief shock through Shaw's mind, cause to a reaction as he moves his mouth to hers, to her cheek and then the line of her jaw. A trail of tiny bites, and then words in Emma's ear, repeated: "My Queen," comes amusement. "Do command me."
The satin sleeves of the rumpled and mussed robe fall away from her arms as she lifts them to wrap over and under his shoulders--porcelain to coal, chill to fervor. "I intend to," she breathes as she snakes her fingers into his hair, and pulls his face lower.
Kisses, hot and hungry, and Shaw's /desire/ - the furnace of it, as present, more present than the bed, the robe, the sheets or anything from the intimate contact of skin to skin. << I await, >> comes the mumbled, mental response, the Black King's tongue being otherwise busy.
Emma arches up to meet him, her arms wrapping around his head and her elbows catching on his shoulders. Heat and desire--his own magnified by hers--are returned on a dizzying wave that sloughs off her like a second skin with every touch, every brush of fingers and lips and legs. "I command more than you," she whispers on a sex-roughened breath against his scalp. << Yield the Circle to me. >>
A sudden flare of mental warning that now starts to fight with need as Shaw's lips find Emma. << It's ours, >> he thinks emphatically, words only half there. << Yours and mine. >>
A shift of legs and hips--Emma slides out from under him and rolls with him to his back, then spreads her knees across his stomach. She braces herself, hands flat on his chest, weight on her knees, expression grim and focused as she leans over him. "The Circle will always need its monarchs, darling." She sinks and leans forward, crawling toward him as she approaches, all warm slink and wet satin. << But you and I know the arrangements. You don't have the skill now to command your own pieces, much less the Circle. >> Her lips dance lightly on his chest, nearing his collarbone. << Acknowledge my talents, darling. I will direct the Circle. The only question is will you be able to direct /me/? >>
"You've not always..." A flare of need, of /want/. << You've not always thought the Circle needs me, >> Shaw's mind continues in little gasps. << Ours, >> he thinks vehemently. << The Circle is ours. >> Hands find Emma's hips, buttocks, knead and move to draw her firmly atop him.
<< You've not always thought /you/ needed /me/, >> Emma counters smoothly as, instead of following his guidance, she moves off him and reaches to peel the sheets back.
That motion is accepted easily by Shaw, fingers beneath Emma's gown and tucked in waistband, peeling down. "I haven't," he acknowledges, breathes - exhalation with a ragged, desirous edge. "But then..." Eyes are black and hungry as they look up at Emma. << I am not the Pope. I am not infallible. >>
Emma wraps her fingers around his wrists and halts the motions of his hands, halts all motions except the heavy breathing that accompanies the racing of their hearts. "No, you're not." She presses into the back of his fingers. << Do you yield, Sebastian? >>
"You can't have the Circle, Emma," Shaw says with fierce eyes, and his hands move again, turning around so he grasps Emma's wrists just as she grasps his. A tug, sharply, to bring her back down towards him, eye to eye and mouth to mouth. "You can have me - and through me, the rest of your desire."
A startled half-choke escapes, and Emma falls easily, eyes flashing at his reply. "I could," she notes with practiced, languid movements--fitting her soft curves into his angles, the touch of her knee to his groin--and a luxurious purr of breath, "say the same to you. I'm going to have what I want, with or without your... /enjoyment/."
"You seem exceptionally confident," Shaw replies - his words and attitude far less languid and far more agitated. << And yet you are here. >> A pause, as the Black King's lips brush Emma's cheek and then his teeth graze her ear. "Do you doubt your skill in bending me to your will, O Queen?" Teeth turn to a bite - short and sharp, with a sudden spike of lust - to punctuate the question.
Emma's knee presses dangerous warning. << Confidence is the first key to seduction, Sebastian, >> she laughs into his mind as her face turns to his, answering lust with hungry need--for him, for control, for release. << I doubt nothing. What I reward, however... >>
Shaw's smile just grows, and he - at last - releases Emma's wrist to slide his hand down her body with very deliberate sensuality. He finds her knee, moves to push to the other side of his leg as his lips part to the turn of Emma's head. << This is as much reward for you as I, >> comes his thoughts, boiling with unrestrained heat. << I made you - wanting me is burned into your mind. >> Tongues touch. << But I will not trade the Circle for sex, >> comes false bravado, even as beneath the words it is plain he has been swayed to do just that.
<< You made me, I undo you, >> Emma murmurs in heated, sensual triumph, responding to his touch like a trained great cat. The edge of her resistance and control gives way to satisfaction both current and pending, and takes them both into dangerous and long-forbidden country.
Rated R for being racy.
Damn her for being right - damn her for the smugness of it all. /Damn her/.
=NYC= Black King's Quarters - Second Floor - Hellfire Clubhouse
The remnants of dream fog hang thick and heavy still in the Black King's mind, obscuring the last glimpses of a chasm of loneliness so deep and intense that the yearnings it had produced are still felt in the speed of his heartbeat and the distress worming its way through his guts. Emma has since withdrawn the active direction of her powers, preferring to sit and watch as his own subconscious parades his secret fears and lusts before both their eyes.
It's hands grasping for something he wants and cannot have - and their physical counterparts reaching, twitching from where the Black King lies in sweat-soaked twisted sheets - that brings him awake, breathing heavily with anxious panting as his hands clench and then relax. He half-turns, questing for a glass of water, as yet not seeing Emma in his room.
She is difficult to see, sitting in a corner chair that is shrouded in shadows, the white of her satin robe glinting pearl with captured moonlight. His glass is missing, held in her hand. "Good evening, Sebastian," she murmurs lowly. "Were you having a bad dream?"
Shock, startlement like trumpets - loud and angry, buzzing, and Shaw shoots up straight in bed. "/Emma/," he says, and that shock is replaced almost immediately by confusion that tries the word once again. "Emma?"
Emma lifts from the chair effortlessly, a spectre with apparent substance. "Yes, darling?" she answers, approaching the bed and holding out the glass of water to him in one hand while the other tucks the gaps of her robe closed.
Shaw's eyes are following those gaps, and it's clear that he is not yet convinced that he has awoken. "I..." Words fail, and the Black King reaches out - not for the glass but for Emma, completing the grasping motion that woke him to catch at her wrist.
In the dark, Emma's eyes fail to glitter with the hard satisfaction that is there. The water splashes over their combined hands, and she sinks to perch on the edge of the bed and simply looks at him with as little expression as the statures that populate the Hellfire Gardens.
A little mental surge of frustration at wet hands in banished - Shaw keeps tugging, trying to draw Emma closer. "At last," he murmurs still sleepily, and then reality begins to set in about halfway through the tug as he freezes, realization dawning. "Wait."
Yet more water splashes as her wrist continues to be pulled upon. Emma's hair slips forward as her shoulders curve inward and she hovers above him, her arm still between them and starting to take some of her weight. "Why?"
"...why what?" Shaw tries, and then he takes a breath - his pulling paused for a moment - to just look at Emma, contemplating. His mind is an open book at present excitement and exhaustion - the old threads of his plan to stay away from Emma just tatters, brushed away by the blacker, inner Shaw that starts to tug on Emma's hand again.
"If you want to sleep with me, Sebastian, you might try letting me put the glass down," Emma points out dryly, settling her weight into the arm that both holds the glass and now lays against his chest between them.
"Ah," Shaw says simply to this. "You make an excellent point." He smiles at her, still a little befuddled by the surreality of the entire situation. "...why are you here?" comes the belated question, driven mostly by confused curiousity but with the prickly fires of paranoia around the edges.
Emma pulls away and twists to place the glass on his bedside table, then turns back to him and looks down, a perverse picture of maternal sentimentality. "You wanted me here."
More flickers of paranoia. "Yes..." Shaw draws out, reaching for Emma again, tugging her down into bed. "It's the..." A pause. "Why now?" he asks, even as his eyes are distracted by Emma's robe.
Emma leans against him, folding both arms on his chest and planting her chin atop them. She pulls a leg up for balance, hooking her foot behind her knee. The robe wrinkles and gapes over shadowed recesses. "I don't know. You tell me. You were the one begging for me."
"Sebastian Shaw doesn't beg," Sebastian Shaw says, but it's unconvincing - somewhere in his mind, in the way his hands move for Emma's back and begin to tug at her robe there is something distinctly pleading.
"Sebastian Shaw also doesn't want me." Emma pushes up on her knee and moves forward to force him to give lie to that statement with a deep, probing kiss.
Force is not required - no, Shaw's lie comes willingly, and the turn of familiar ferocity that digs fingers into Emma's robes makes plain that the lie is proved with certain joy and heady anticipation - reflected in the images that play like a kaleidoscope through the Black King's mind.
Emma slithers forward and across the Black King's chest, hands and lips and mouth deepening the contact and desire and pinning him beneath the sheets with a knee on either side. "Mmm... Tell me you want /me/. No games now, Sebastian."
Fingers tighten - almost rip, Shaw bunching Emma's robe in his hands in an effort to pull it from her, one stymied by the unfortunate truths of arms and ties. Still, his lips move against hers, and it is with only the most buried regret - the voice of reason, banished by lust and sleeplessness - that he breathes, "/Yes/," only to follow it up with a clearly spoken sentence: "Emma," he tells her. "I need you."
Fingers tighten - almost rip, Shaw bunching Emma's robe in his hands in an effort to pull it from her, one stymied by the unfortunate truths of arms and ties. Still, his lips move against hers, and it is with only the most buried regret - the voice of reason, banished by lust and sleeplessness - that he breathes, "/Yes/," only to follow it up with a clearly spoken sentence: "Emma," he tells her. "I need you."
Emma slides her arms around him and rolls, tangling sheets and clothing and arms and legs with his in the motion. Landing on her side with one leg wound over his hip, she silences that voice of reason with the touch of her finger on his lips and her mind on his. "Why do you need me? How do you need me?" she whispers.
"Why?" echoes Sebastian Shaw in some sort of throaty growl. "The why has never changed," he tells her, doubt so conveniently disappeared as he completes that roll, moving to push Emma onto her back. "You're Emma Frost." A beat, and then his lips captures her finger, biting just a little. << As for how, >> he thinks. << Let me count the ways. >> Indeed, he does, images of Shaw and Emma flickering in nickelodeon glory across his mind without any of the rancor or bitterness that usually accompanies them - just desire and some earnest anticipation. Delight, too, colors his thoughts - summoned from the confused ball that are Shaw's Emma-feelings, with anger, hatred and violence momentarily laid to rest.
Emma inhales a short sharp breath, then closes her eyes and squirms down, her free hand combing through chest hair as she scratches lower. "I'm Emma Frost, White Queen of the Hellfire Club. /Your/ Queen." Emphasis made, she rubs her knee up the inside of his leg and lifts a brow.
"My Queen," Shaw replies with growing pleasure, releasing Emma's finger to smile down at the blonde beneath him. The touch of her thigh is like a brief shock through Shaw's mind, cause to a reaction as he moves his mouth to hers, to her cheek and then the line of her jaw. A trail of tiny bites, and then words in Emma's ear, repeated: "My Queen," comes amusement. "Do command me."
The satin sleeves of the rumpled and mussed robe fall away from her arms as she lifts them to wrap over and under his shoulders--porcelain to coal, chill to fervor. "I intend to," she breathes as she snakes her fingers into his hair, and pulls his face lower.
Kisses, hot and hungry, and Shaw's /desire/ - the furnace of it, as present, more present than the bed, the robe, the sheets or anything from the intimate contact of skin to skin. << I await, >> comes the mumbled, mental response, the Black King's tongue being otherwise busy.
Emma arches up to meet him, her arms wrapping around his head and her elbows catching on his shoulders. Heat and desire--his own magnified by hers--are returned on a dizzying wave that sloughs off her like a second skin with every touch, every brush of fingers and lips and legs. "I command more than you," she whispers on a sex-roughened breath against his scalp. << Yield the Circle to me. >>
A sudden flare of mental warning that now starts to fight with need as Shaw's lips find Emma. << It's ours, >> he thinks emphatically, words only half there. << Yours and mine. >>
A shift of legs and hips--Emma slides out from under him and rolls with him to his back, then spreads her knees across his stomach. She braces herself, hands flat on his chest, weight on her knees, expression grim and focused as she leans over him. "The Circle will always need its monarchs, darling." She sinks and leans forward, crawling toward him as she approaches, all warm slink and wet satin. << But you and I know the arrangements. You don't have the skill now to command your own pieces, much less the Circle. >> Her lips dance lightly on his chest, nearing his collarbone. << Acknowledge my talents, darling. I will direct the Circle. The only question is will you be able to direct /me/? >>
"You've not always..." A flare of need, of /want/. << You've not always thought the Circle needs me, >> Shaw's mind continues in little gasps. << Ours, >> he thinks vehemently. << The Circle is ours. >> Hands find Emma's hips, buttocks, knead and move to draw her firmly atop him.
<< You've not always thought /you/ needed /me/, >> Emma counters smoothly as, instead of following his guidance, she moves off him and reaches to peel the sheets back.
That motion is accepted easily by Shaw, fingers beneath Emma's gown and tucked in waistband, peeling down. "I haven't," he acknowledges, breathes - exhalation with a ragged, desirous edge. "But then..." Eyes are black and hungry as they look up at Emma. << I am not the Pope. I am not infallible. >>
Emma wraps her fingers around his wrists and halts the motions of his hands, halts all motions except the heavy breathing that accompanies the racing of their hearts. "No, you're not." She presses into the back of his fingers. << Do you yield, Sebastian? >>
"You can't have the Circle, Emma," Shaw says with fierce eyes, and his hands move again, turning around so he grasps Emma's wrists just as she grasps his. A tug, sharply, to bring her back down towards him, eye to eye and mouth to mouth. "You can have me - and through me, the rest of your desire."
A startled half-choke escapes, and Emma falls easily, eyes flashing at his reply. "I could," she notes with practiced, languid movements--fitting her soft curves into his angles, the touch of her knee to his groin--and a luxurious purr of breath, "say the same to you. I'm going to have what I want, with or without your... /enjoyment/."
"You seem exceptionally confident," Shaw replies - his words and attitude far less languid and far more agitated. << And yet you are here. >> A pause, as the Black King's lips brush Emma's cheek and then his teeth graze her ear. "Do you doubt your skill in bending me to your will, O Queen?" Teeth turn to a bite - short and sharp, with a sudden spike of lust - to punctuate the question.
Emma's knee presses dangerous warning. << Confidence is the first key to seduction, Sebastian, >> she laughs into his mind as her face turns to his, answering lust with hungry need--for him, for control, for release. << I doubt nothing. What I reward, however... >>
Shaw's smile just grows, and he - at last - releases Emma's wrist to slide his hand down her body with very deliberate sensuality. He finds her knee, moves to push to the other side of his leg as his lips part to the turn of Emma's head. << This is as much reward for you as I, >> comes his thoughts, boiling with unrestrained heat. << I made you - wanting me is burned into your mind. >> Tongues touch. << But I will not trade the Circle for sex, >> comes false bravado, even as beneath the words it is plain he has been swayed to do just that.
<< You made me, I undo you, >> Emma murmurs in heated, sensual triumph, responding to his touch like a trained great cat. The edge of her resistance and control gives way to satisfaction both current and pending, and takes them both into dangerous and long-forbidden country.
Rated R for being racy.