(the mists of avalon/king arthur legends) the summer king

[kinnoth]

the summer king

Arthur says, slurring, "I would have sent for you sooner, had I known. God knows we need more good men. Goddess."

My high king - my lord father - is drunk. He had called for festivities, to celebrate his newest knight, his sister's son; laughed and brawled and made merry all night long, but he cannot hold his drink. I am little better, and together, we can barely stand. His weight bears dead upon my shoulder, and he says, "But she never spoke of you, nephew. Not even when she came back, after all those years. She never said a thing." His voice tapers into something small, unguarded, and I wonder - there, with his head lolling against my ear and his hand gripping above my hip - how so sentimental a soldier, so simple a man could have earned this right of fatherhood over me. How my mother could have so loved such a man against nature to let him lay with her.

"She spoke nothing of you either, sire," I tell him, strained, as we, so embraced, stumble together like a three-legged cat, away from the comfort and company and into the cold inhospitality of an unfamiliar dark. "In fact she said little at all, of what I can remember."

"That's right," Arthur says. His feet catch suddenly upon an uneven cobble and I am forced to take his weight upon mine and then mine against the wall. I am ill suited to be my high king's custodian for the night. I am not much bigger than he - smaller, in fact; his bone structure without his accumulated girth. We are still several corridors' bends from his rooms and I am already out of breath.

His weight on me and I am pinned, and it is only his precarious balance against me that keeps us both from falling. Crapulence in me makes me slower than I am wont to be, makes my eyes drag through my surroundings as if my world were thick with warm sugar. I see more, even if I move less. And now I am taken with the blue of my lord father's eyes, their slow, hungry rake over my features and the torchlight that draws the shadow from within the angles and hollows of his face. He is, undoubtedly, looking for something, some answer to his fascination with me that he cannot place. For a man of so much power, he knows surprisingly little of what he wants.

I think, then, of how Gawain would have been a better candidate for this. He is a bear, a brute: his mind impenetrable to either insight or imagination. By now he would have had the king dumped in his chambers, been back at the table with a scullery maid in his lap. He would have laughed in good nature when the king tripped over his feet, hefted him bodily over his arm, dismissed his forlorn ramblings as the gibberish of a morose drunk.

Gawain would be here, or Galahad, or perhaps Lancelot. But Arthur had insisted. His sister's son, he'd proclaimed. He could not be anything but - look at how he takes care of me. His sister's son. He could not be anything but.

"How old are you?" Arthur asks. There is sweat upon his brow, darkening the hair that curls below his hairline into loops of burnished gold. My mother must have seen him as such on that night of Beltane's feast, those seventeen years ago. "She would have been very young when she had you, then," Arthur replies.

"We could be brothers," I say, with a meaning too subtle for his inebriation.

I laugh, and he smiles, beatific, though he does not understand. "You are hardly more than a dozen years my junior," he agrees. He puts his fingertips to the pagan markings by my eye and murmurs, "And there is something about you, nephew."

My heart, for a moment, startles in my chest and catches with my breath. Has he found me out? I wonder. Has he come to recognize my rightful relation to him on his own? Is he not, in fact, the mindless, brainless, faithless tragedy my aunt has always had me believe?

His fingers begin to trace and my eyelids shudder close to meet them. This must be his fey power, I think - willing my heart to still lest he feel it jumping against his chest - to inspire such doubt in men.

But the moment passes and the reality of it - that I am here, pressed against a castle wall with an armful and face full of drunken, fatuous king. "The wind has returned to my lungs, sire," I say. I push my palms against him, ready to catch and steady, but Arthur pushes back, much more forceful than I had been. My arms are held in a grip I can break easily enough, but Arthur has his face pressed into my collar, and I cannot, for the first time tonight, see his eyes - and this entices me to stillness, to waiting.

"She would have been very young when she had you," he repeats, his left hand leaving my wrists and following the line of my arm to where my shoulder joins my neck. "The man who had had her then, your father - he would have been her first." His fingers unfurl flat against the swell of my windpipe, and for a moment, I am certain he knows. I am certain beyond all certitude that he knows of his guilt and of my mother's and of the abomination of blood that is me and that I am to die for it.

I would tell him - I want to tell him, but for my suddenly cottoned mouth - of how this thought fills me with an unspeakable rapture: the thought of dying, here, by his hand, in this corridor, in the bastion of the greatest kingdom of the greatest king Britannia will ever know. The unnatural son of a king is to die and what a glorious pleasure it will be to be him.

"Your heart is racing," he informs me in a burst of hot breath that brings the gooseflesh to my skin. "I know so little about you. I want to know - will you tell me why your heart is racing?"

I lower my eyes, waiting. "My lord," I begin, but Arthur's grip remains light, cradling. He has lifted his head and his expression is terrible, his eyes like bright jewels in a face carved of stone. He is judge and jury before my death and, surely, I think - his breath damp against my tongue as I wet my upper lip - surely Death himself can be no more magnificent. "Indeed, you must have suspected -" but he lunges forwards before I can say, swallowing my words into his mouth before they ever leave mine.

A surge of urgency rushes in my chest and a wave of disgust swells up to beat against it. Something has gone terribly wrong. The disgust hits me first: my father is kissing me. The calculation rises quenchingly behind it: the High King of Britannia is kissing me. Then again still: the man I am going to kill is kissing me.

My father - Arthur - draws back a measure, rests his brow against my temple, his nose pushed against my cheek, as if exhausted. He breathes, "You must not be sorry, nephew, you must not let yourself think that this is your fault, this isn't-"

"My lord," I say. My voice shakes. "You must have known it would be my greatest delight that you would have me such." It is my brain that drowns the protestations and the horror, but it is something else entirely that guides my hand to rest over his, pulls it to the loosened collar of my shirt, and presses it under.

Arthur swallows, makes a noise like dying and moves. He pushes my shirt over the line of my shoulder and scrapes the coarse pads of his fingertips over the unmarked skin of my chest and back. "You are exquisite," he says, digging his fingers into the ties in my braid and tugging until my hair releases loose and dark around me. "You must let me," pulling my head back and licking into my mouth, wet and wanton as any whore. "You must let me."

Such ardour in his entreaties, I think, when I am but another knight, 'his sister's son' in the daylight. I laugh, low and abrupt, close my lips around his tongue and suckle before pushing him back. "Everything, my lord," I say.

His hands are busy rucking up the tails of my shirt. "Arthur," he says, around his teeth worrying at my earlobe. I grunt, put my hands around his pressing hips. "If I am to be yours tonight, you must call me Arthur," he says and clamps. A moan pushes its way from out of my throat before I can close my teeth around it. The empty echoes of my voice reverberate against the walls, and I am reminded of our exposed position, our indiscretion.

"Arthur," I say, a hollow endeavour for urgency behind my voice. He hums in response, fingers gliding along the ridges of my stomach, drifting lightly towards the waistband of my trousers. "Arthur," I say again, and this time the fingers dip, just as he spills forwards, mouth hot and slick and opening obediently beneath mine.

He who is innocent to the knowledge of his sins; he who can, regardless, barely suffer to look me in the face; he from whom my mother hid me in shame, left me to rot in the barbarism of the windswept wilds - he dares to derive such pleasure from this knowledge of my flesh. My tongue lapping at the texture of his palate, his fingers pawing clumsily at the knots of my flies, and I watch Arthur close his eyes, feel him fold pliantly under the pressure of my lips and hands and breath, let him imagine that my revulsion is fondness, that my resentment is archness, that my anger is love.

I compel my disquiet to untwist itself. I will let him have me, I resolve. I will let him do as he will, and when that day comes where I am to kill him, I will let him know of his perversion. I will break him that day with this knowledge he craves right now, and on that day, the memory of this warmth will cut him down faster than a thousand Saxon blades.

But then I feel his fingertips, suddenly, brushing against my prick; he has given up on the tiny knots of banded leather and twined his fingers in between them in his impatience. A flash of panic, and I shove him, nearly blind. Fingers laced into my flies, legs tangled between my feet, he tumbles backwards and pulls me down on top of him. My hair, unfettered from their braids, spills forwards from behind my shoulder in a curtain of ink and dull silk. Arthur looks at me, transfixed, enraptured, unseeing behind glazed, slitted eyes, and the name he forms while he twists up to kiss me is not my own.

"We are exposed here," I tell him, steadily. Mother Goddess, Lady of the Earth: prevail upon me so that he does not hear me shake. Take this dread rage from me, and grant me peace. But Arthur merely inclines his head as if in agreement; he makes no indication of movement other than to card his fingers against my scalp, again and again. I feel my eyes begin to drift shut, allowing him to carry me with the motion, allowing my mind to settle and harden once more.

Arthur pulls my ear down towards his lips and murmurs, "You are trembling." His forearm against my shoulder blades, cradling, and he tells me, "Shh," as though I were some startled creature to be gentled, one of his horses, or one of his women.

I realize then: of all the things he sees in me, I should never have dared to dream that he would ever see me as the one thing I am. I bid my heart accept this knowledge; shoulder this blow as it has the many before, because it is unimportant, inconsequential, nothing at all.

But the seat to my soul has never been so obedient as the seat to my intellect; it is rent not by careless passion or malice, but by a devastation that deadens like opium through my veins. And it is this that incenses me, razes within me my last stubborn stronghold of uncertainty and sends a surge of helpless fury to my gut. I twist from his grip and slam his shoulders into the cobbled floor. His head knocks sharply against the ground and he moans, hands scrabbling for skin but finding purchase only on stone as I pin his arms beneath my knees. My hands fisted in the cloth covering the straining muscles of his stomach, I pull myself up from his lap until I am splayed across his hips.

"I was merely concerned for your modesty, uncle," I hiss, bowing my spine so that although my face hovers above his, he can not close those last few breaths of space between our lips. "Am I still trembling now, dear Arthur?" I press my teeth into the shallow contour of his bottom lip, and pull back before he has the chance to kiss. "Because you are."

But he's hooked the heels of his boots into the cracks between the cobblestones and lifts. I am momentarily caught off guard as I clamber for balance, and he takes advantage of my inattention and pulls his hands from beneath my ankles. Instinctively, I catalogue the strength and flexibility of his limbs while, silently, I curse myself for my squandered advantage. If we were in battle, I'd have lost, awaiting a knife in the belly or a strike across the throat. Thankfully, tonight is not yet about bloodshed, just sex; so when Arthur reaches up to put his hands around my waist, it is to steady me, and nothing more.

"And what does that tell you?" Arthur rasps, hands slipping around from my hips to the disaster of knots constricting my prick. His fingers fumble with mine until finally I am released, hard and urgent against my belly. He takes my cock into his hand and strokes - with no pressure or form, just the dry graze of his palm against me - and I nearly express the sharp, indecent noises that choke in my throat. "Nephew," he says, and I lift to my knees for him, let him tug my trousers down past my thighs.

"It tells me that you want this, my lord." I let him arrange me as he pleases, into his lap as he pushes himself up to sit against the wall. I twine my arms around his neck and pull him towards me until our faces nearly touch. "That you want me." My hand braced against the wall, the other securely tangled in his hair, and he cannot touch me though I breathe against his lips, golden Narcissus straining to kiss his dark reflection. His pupils are wide, glassy, blue lost in the black. Arthur reaches around again, knuckles grazing against the underside of my cock as he lifts my shirt over my head and for a moment my breath stops short as I struggle to keep my stratagems about me. The trapped winter air is chill upon my exposed skin, Arthur's arms around me hot as summer's breath.

He leans forwards and hooks his chin into the curve of my neck, traps my cock between our bodies. He mouths and whispers and I can not comprehend as I am consumed by the sound of my own blood rushing, my urgent need to press into him, his warmth. "Would you like to undress properly?" he asks as he pulls his own shirt over his head. He is sunlit, he is, my nepotistic lord - vast expanses of gold hued skin cut white with old scars. He shifts back against me again, and strained whimper escapes me. He smiles, feline languid, and I help him as he tugs free my boots first, my hose, then my breeches slide over my feet and I am there, naked as the day I was born, stripped by my own consent of all illusions and cunning and make-believe hate. I am suddenly very young, and very unsure.

"What would you like me to use, my lord?" I ask. Perhaps he thinks still of my shyness as prurience, as he thought the uncertainty of his Virgin Huntress's the coyness of a dark seductress. I pray that he does, that he thinks me some untamed creature of the old religion, a member of the incubi of Christian myth. That he will not use me gently, like a rotted cloth - that his encounter with me will bear proof or reminder come morning. I do not have the biology to carry from this the king's bastard, to hope that the child grows to be the king's spitting image, the innate privilege of Christian princesses and Pagan priestesses alike: I have this night to make an indelible memory of myself; I have this night to make him mine.

Arthur laughs, a strangled sound. "By the Lady, what a question to ask! You've hardly needed direction so far, I shouldn't see why you would -" His eyes widen, and it is not in pleasure which settles on his face, but surprise. Concern. Even as my resentful humiliation blooms livid across my face, I can not help but love him for that. For his sincerity. As all men do. "Of course," he says hastily. "I should have realized. I don't want you to be uncomfortable - here."

He captures my hands between his and raises them to his face where his tongue swipes broadly across my palm. I start slightly at the heat and wet of it on my cool skin, a bare jerk of the fingers, but there is no way to mask my reaction in this position, so encircled. Arthur takes one of my fingers into his mouth and gently gnaws at it while he rubs circles into the muscles knotting my shoulder. I feel at loss, a strangely subdued sort of desperate as part of me bellows that I must make him bite while another whispers to let him lead me, to let him command me.

The war erupts into a hiccup that catches in my throat as he wraps his hand around mine once more and brings my hand around his prick. The anatomy is not unfamiliar to me; I am not inexperienced, but my previous conquests are suddenly revealed for what they were: awkward fumblings in the dark, half-shy tumbles with the curious and inexpert; nothing to prepare me for Arthur's intensity, his insistence. His phallus is hot and smooth, like a riverstone pulled from the fire. He moves me to a rhythm and tempo he finds most pleasing, and I can feel the slickness of his spit slipping against my palm as he leans into me and moans. He releases my hand to pull me in closer to him, our spines arched back so that our faces touch, so that the backs of my fingers brush against my own dick with every motion upon his. This is not enough.

"Arthur -" I ask him, thickly. But I choke when he acquiesces, when all he does is skate the coarse pads of his fingers through the dark hair that curls at my groin. I feel my breaths growing more irregular as he does it again, this time circling the edge of a blunt nail around the base of my cock. My mouth falls open while I try to fill my burning lungs. I am unprepared when Arthur's other hand ends its aimless meander across my skin at the edge of my bottom lip, pressing in with two fingers while the others form a cradle around my chin. I close my teeth around them as he spreads the salt of his skin across my tongue.

"Lick," he tells me and rewards me with a long, slow stroke along the full length of me as I push and swallow until he tastes the same as the rest of my mouth, bitter and wanting. Distracted, it does not occur why he has asked me to do this until he very gently begins to breach me, so willingly spread for him I have been, straddled over the V of his bent legs. My hands still and I hear rather than feel my breath drag raggedly from my panting mouth, my fingers clawing their ascent towards Arthur's shoulders until I grip them white, bruising into green. "Are you all right?" he asks me, in two knuckles deep and scissoring gingerly. He tries to turn his face towards mine, to meet my eyes to assess the honesty of my answer, no doubt, but I curve into him, fit my face into the turn of his neck.

"Please." I hardly recognize my voice, nor the way I cant my hips for him, help him to slide another fraction of an inch into me, as if he belongs there. Arthur nuzzles his face into my collarbone, presses open-mouthed kisses into the skin there and wraps his other arm around me just as my thighs begin to quake.

He murmurs, "Hush, relax," and slides in the rest of the way. His fingers stoke searchingly inside of me as I pant unintelligibly at his ear.

Then, the searching strikes home and my nonsense mutterings become a very intelligible, "Mother of--" Almost as if he knows, he waits until the bright lights spotting my eyelids fade until he presses again. Arthur chuckles, slightly breathless; opens his mouth against my jaw but begins to draw back. "No -" I chase him, but he rubs a teasing circle around my orifice and draws back completely. The fury I realize he had so effectively milked from me, like a serpent of its venom, returns - relentlessly, twice spurned. I attack him, tooth and claw, the hard bones of my knees and elbows forcing him back, striking the soft of his side and stomach, stunning him.

"What -" he manages before all at once I heave myself up by his shoulders and impale myself upon him, his gasping inaudible beneath my hisses as I work myself down, brutal and without finesse. "God," he blasphemes, enveloped. "Wait, you're not ready -"

I push harder, vindictive, determined to spite both him and my uncooperative muscles. Who is he to advise me my readiness for anything? Who is he to deny me anything I demand of him? Who is he, this man who made whores of his own sister, his cousin, and now his nephew? His son?

But the strain is, at last, unbearable, and the pain and the anger make me weak. My thighs scream to collapse from under me, and the last of my exhausted will is begging me to let them. I am still but halfway down; the base of his cock is broad and thick and for the life of me I do not think I take it. Arthur moves to assist me, but I shove his hands away, lifting myself up to the narrower part of him and sheathing myself back down, trying to open up. I do this several times, but to minimal effect; Arthur's breaths come a little more raggedly, but my leverage and precision is awkward in this position and so I have gained little more than a fraction of an unpleasurable inch.

The pitched sob that escapes me is that of utter frustration and self-loathing. In the end, artifices and pretensions stripped away, this is me, resplendent: a piteous and petulant boy who has spurned all recourses in his attempt to prove his power, that he can have rule over his contemptuous father. Instead, he proves that he knows nothing; that his inexperience and naiveté extend as far as his own limitations, his own inability and unmerited pride.

I am every bit as contemptible as I have sought to prove myself not to be.

Arthur moves again, more cautiously this time - he fears me now, I realise, though for all the wrong reasons - and lifts me from him by his hands around my waist. "You'll bring yourself to harm," he murmurs, and he eases me back - and I let him, because I am pathetic, because I am weak - folding my knees up and over my chest as he settles me against the floor. His fingers again, between my legs, pressing and prodding, easy and slow. My back arches from the ground for a strangled inhale as he pushes in a third finger and spreads them apart, and I feel my unwilling muscles move with them, slowly enough that they burn with the strain, but not wholly uncomfortably. When he takes his fingers back, this time, I do not follow. He hooks one of my legs over his shoulder, takes the other over his forearm, presses his lips to the soft skin of my inner thigh. "Be patient," he mutters, almost as if to himself, and pushes in.

The way is slicker now then when I tried, eased by spit and sweat and pre-ejaculate. Arthur moves unbearably slowly, persistently - he is gentle, but he never eases up, never lets me breathe until I am completely filled. It is overwhelming, awkward, unnatural; my legs voluntarily butterflied outwards to accommodate his intrusion, his arms braced besides me, caging me to his body. It is as if I am to forget illicitness of this situation; to lay back and receive what gift my Great King bestows. Then he shifts, leaves me an inch of space then pushes back into me again, angling up. My entire body tenses as the shock of pleasure rolls through me, and my breathing stills. He pulls back again, further this time, thrusts back in, quicker, harder. My heels dig into the shifting muscles in his back and his rocks into me, rougher now, with more intensity and less precision. It is no better. It has been minutes, and not a finger has touched my prick, and yet already I am battling climax. There is a near silent keening that undercuts the steady slap of flesh on flesh and I pretend it isn't me, just as I pretend I do not roll my hips up to meet his every movement, that despite my disgust and contempt and surrender that this is the most perfect I have ever felt, the most complete. Arthur dips his head down and kisses me, and I dig my fingers into his hair, clinging to him.

"Please," I gasp, breaking from his lips, and he laughs, distracted, open, lets me nudge him with my knee and takes his time granting me my request.

"No hitting this time," he chides me breathlessly, as he pulls out and lets me flip him on his back again, me straddling heavy on his lap and his cock livid and straining between my legs. I nudge up against it curiously with mine, but pull back quickly before he tries to reciprocate, not for any assertion of dominance or control this time, but simply because I cannot endure any more stimulation. "Don't tease," he groans - his hands wrapping around my hips now, hefting me up so that I am positioned right above him, the sticky tip of his cock kissing wetly at my anus.

"I wouldn't dare, sire," I breathe and sit back, suddenly releasing all my weight into his hands. This catches Arthur unexpected, and his palms skid slick across my skin to around my ribcage, but it is the lack of resistance that startles us both, the lack of friction in the slippery penetration that slides me like an oiled sleeve onto his phallus and elicits surprised moans as I begin to move.

It is much easier now to find the pleasure within me, as if a new geography as been mapped for me, and now revealed. But I hold off on it, purposely aiming the head of his prick away, a mulishly competitive impulse refusing to let me finish before he does.

Incompletely and indistinctly, I think: this is what it takes to rule a king. Drunken on wine and desire and fulfilment, his flesh hot and pulsing against mine, I bend forwards at the waist with half the idea to taunt him about my discovery. But his half-lidded gaze flickers from unfocussed and inattentive to startlingly clarion and blue. His hands twine themselves around my neck and he pulls my face down to his, pushing his tongue roughly into my slack mouth and devouring my surprised whimper whole. I pull back but he chases me, pulling himself up with an arm braced behind my shoulders and the other guiding insistently along my jaw. I let out a noise of protest as I am forced to wrap my legs around him and cross them at the ankles to keep our balance.

"I can't move like this, Arthur," I say, and indeed I can not - he has locked me to him, buried deep to the root within me, and seems to have no intention of moving. He laughs, jerking slightly to better sit up. He brings his fingers to my face and brushes away the damp tendrils of hair that cling to the corner of my mouth, traces his fingertips over my cheek and smooths back the harassing strands at my temple. He bites his way from my mouth to my ear.

"You are so like her," he sighs, and without a sound, that is how my heart shatters.

I kiss him, eyes closed, like his. His hand around my hip and another sliding through my hair, legs twined with torsos, every possible point of contact pressing and sliding.

Still he does not see me; still he does not know who I am.

He begins to thrust again, tiny movements of complete efficiency. After a few moments, I feel his concentration begin to waver again as he loses himself in sensation while I hold on, watching him. Bending to his ear, I tell him, "You will give me what I want when I ask for it," and he promises, "Yes, yes, everything," without understanding a word of it. I cling to him tightly, distantly aware that he is bringing me to orgasm, that I will finish within seconds. My cheek against the pulse at his throat, my eyes shut against his shoulder, and I ask him, "What is my name?"

He answers, and I refuse to listen.

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