Rheged Part 7
“Is that it?” Arthur asked calmly.
Slowly, Merlin nodded his head, eyes bleak with moisture, still gazing blindly down at the rich red cover, feeling the beauty of Arthur’s prick wedged, heavy and solid, inside him as if it belonged.
“Now you…” Arthur murmured softly, then, quietly, “Merlin.”
Merlin took a shaky, tear-filled breath.
He could do this part at least, he thought; not reject him here, openly. Not yet. And maybe, he wanted to say it.
“I…Merlin… son of …Balinor, dragonlord…” Arthur heaved a tiny, sharp breath on top of him and Merlin thought with a flash of fierce pride, Maybe he forgets… I’m not so unworthy of him after all. “Accept your claim… Arthur Pendragon. I… recognise you. I will take your seed …and seal our union.”
They were both still, both silent, then Arthur leant down still braced impressively on strong arms, and brushed his lips against the back of Merlin’s neck. Merlin’s breath caught on a sob.
“Its not too late, Arthur...” he babbled. “It’s really not. If we stop now, if you don’t spend in me… We can… You can…”
Arthur pulled his erection back an inch or two, shoved forward savagely and Merlin sobbed again, silenced. He was terrified.
There was a long pause, broken only by the sound of their shaky breathing but suddenly, instead of speeding up his movement, beginning to pump his cock, Arthur pulled back, all the way back, his prick sliding slickly and smoothly out of Merlin’s arse as his weight lifted off Merlin’s body until the head of the shaft popped free.
It was a stunning shock.
To be given, so abruptly, what he’d been struggling for against Arthur’s formidable will...
It took Merlin long seconds to accept that it had actually happened; to understand why he felt so gapingly empty, physically and emotionally.
And in that second of realisation, that Arthur had listened to him, or thought better of it at this last moment... stopped it, before it could happen …. what he felt wasn’t relief as he decently should, but blind panic that it was lost to him now.
Grief.
He lay frozen there, head still turned to the side on the covers, eyes wide and staring, seeing nothing, because he knew something right had been ripped from him; something he had never admitted he’d wanted so very badly, but couldn’t, shouldn’t have. He drew a glass-sharp breath.
“Arthur…” He began, half sobbed.
Hard hands grabbed his shoulder and his hip and before he could really grasp what was happening, a smooth, ruthless movement flipped him onto his back. He looked up, dazed, into Arthur’s sweat-damp, determined face.
He was kneeling astride Merlin’s shins; wide, muscular chest glowing with sweat, erection huge and swollen and dark with blood, the foreskin forced back and the head glistening with moisture Merlin didn’t want to guess at.
He stared at the picture Arthur made, and gaped.
Arthur didn’t look like a man who had given up.
“I want to see you,” Arthur said levelly, accusingly. And Merlin realised he meant, ‘I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you not to hide and stop this without meeting my eyes.’
Merlin swallowed hard against the lump of fear and loss, still huge in his throat, and allowed himself to feel what he shouldn’t feel.
Relief. Huge, huge, soaring and terrible.
“You don’t need to say the words,” Arthur continued harshly. “The magic. It’s in your blood, in your heart. You told me that once. If its right, your magic will make it happen.”
Their eyes locked, Arthur’s hard and focussed; Merlin’s wide and shocked with exhilaration and despair. Because Arthur knew him; better, it seemed, than he knew himself. And he was right.
His own reaction now told him; that damning, damning relief told him. The thought humiliated him but he had to look at it: maybe Arthur had always guessed how much Merlin wanted him, deep down in the core of his being.
‘No man is worth your tears....’
He shook his head helplessly and looked up at Arthur, taking him in... how ridiculously glorious he was. His hair was damp and tousled, a golden mess on his head; eyes big, blue; lips full and wide, the most beautiful, sensual mouth Merlin had ever seen on a man. And yet there was nothing feminine about him; his body was broad and manly and graceful. Nothing else, no one else compared.
Merlin had hidden it from everyone, most especially from himself, but he knew that Arthur had been, for far too many years, the sum of his desires, and for this one moment, he was allowed to have him.
And Merlin had always, always belonged to him.
He didn’t even try to protest when Arthur reached to grasp his knees and push them back, exposing him brutally. He watched with a kind of stupified passivity as Arthur shuffled forward on his knees, looked down to take his cock in his hand and positioned the head of it against Merlin’s hole again. He was still looking down there when he pushed the first inches in, again an easy, delicious slide, then he looked up again, eyes seething with heat, and held Merlin’s gaze as he slid his whole length home again to the base in a long push, until his big, firm balls rested against the skin of Merlin’s arse.
They both made desperate sounds.
Merlin was well beyond speech; whining shamelessly as the emotional and physical pleasure of having Arthur's sex inside him again at this new angle, became overwhelming.
He thought he’d lost whatever purpose he had in the perfect intensity of it, but he tried; still tried to regain his feeling that this was wrong. Yet it felt beyond right.
Arthur pushed himself over him, arms braced again by Merlin’s head and Merlin couldn’t help but reach up and grasp his shoulders, the skin smooth as a young boy’s over iron muscle, and his legs wrapped round Arthur’s strong hips, and he clung, writhing on his cock, offering himself completely because he couldn’t help it.
And then Arthur began to move, to fuck, and Merlin was truly lost. The feeling of it again, the intensity of it was like nothing he had ever experienced; that amazing cock touching him in all the places that delighted him inside, looking into that face, the one face in the whole world that he lived to see.
It felt like destiny. Like the crown of Camelot on Arthur’s head; Excalibur in Arthur’s hand. Arthur had chosen to embrace this, and Merlin felt the inevitability of it with every stroke of Arthur’s sex inside him, with every second of melting ecstasy that took them closer and weakened his will. He could see the dazed pleasure on Arthur’s face, as Merlin moved with him, surrendering absolutely; the amazement, Merlin thought perhaps, with desperate, unworthy hope, that coupling with a man could feel so good.
The pace was quickening, Arthur’s thrusts shorter, faster, harder. His head dropped down, hanging between his shoulders and he was really screwing in earnest now, hips pumping out of control. Merlin had never been fucked like it before; he could hear himself whimpering and moaning like a bitch in heat, begging for more, shameless, for Arthur to hold nothing back, fuck him until he broke apart.
But, in the final moments he still somehow found something in him; something that whispered, gasping, desperate, urging, offering, warning, “Arthur. You can… still…”
Even in the throes of near orgasm, Arthur understood. He pulled his head up and stared into Merlin’s eyes, accusing, almost angry, but also somehow, accepting. Then he gritted his teeth, and shoved his cock in deep, once, twice, three times in answer, burying it as deep as he could. He whispered, “Merlin!” and he came hard, head thrown back in ecstasy, seed spurting in deep, long gushes, soaking into Merlin’s body, rooting there. Possessing.
It happened just as Merlin had desperately denied, yet known in the depths of his soul, that it would, once the choice was given to his heart and his magic and his instinct, and not his head. Once Arthur began it, there had never truly been a chance that Merlin could stop it, because Merlin was so instinctively Arthur’s. He hadn’t fought him genuinely, he acknowledged with writhing shame; he’d helped him.
He could see the golden tendrils of light twining around their bodies, feel the strange jolt inside him as if his being was locking into place, locking them into place, and words spewed from him, out of his control, words he shouldn’t know really, even though he understood somehow that Arthur had been right and they weren’t needed.
“Twam healf geanlaecan.” Arthur’s head lowered at once and he looked at Merlin, panting, mouth half open, eyes agonised and avid, and Merlin’s body arched and his semen spewed too as if it were happening to someone else. “Feorh geanlaecan begeondan deab. On lif-e ge on ligere ” He was gasping the words, and he knew his eyes were glowing gold, unearthly, but he held Arthur’s awed and pleasure-shocked gaze, and came and came and came, milking the last of Arthur's seed, inside him, face twisted, panting the final words of the spell to complete them. “Fore …ecnes. Wit beon an. Wit …beon hal.”
And it was done. And, it seemed, could not be undone.
They froze in position for whole seconds, gazes locked, stunned with ecstasy, lungs heaving for breath, and then slowly Arthur sank down onto Merlin’s limp body, head tucked into his shoulder and he lay there, muscles limp, feeling increasingly and oppressively heavy, though Merlin had no wish for him ever to move.
He felt numb, hollowed out, and he didn’t want to think, not about anything, just to lie there with Arthur on him and in him.
Finally though, the slow, embarrassing slither of Arthur’s spent sex leaving Merlin’s hole seemed to wake him from his daze, the trickle of Pendragon seed following it, underlining the immensity of what they’d done. Merlin felt…owned in a way he never had before, and he wished …he wished so much that he could revel in it, this moment. But Arthur rolled off him, and they lay side by side, looking up in shock at the canopy of Arthur’s bed.
He didn’t know what to say. And neither, it seemed, did the man who’d just fucked him.
Finally though it was Arthur, still winded, horribly strained, but desperately searching for humour. “So… that’s what a legendary orgasm feels like.” Or normality. Or something.
Merlin knew he should take his cue; say something offensive or idiotic or cutting back. But in the cold shock of reality he couldn’t. He was torn between shrivelling embarrassment at all Arthur had seen of him and knew about him, and stunned disbelief at what they’d done; the union they’d sealed and how they’d sealed it. What those words, that instinctive spell had meant.
They had to salvage what they could. Oh God... make this as harmless as they could.
“No one has to know.” He turned his head desperately, urgently toward Arthur and only then, realised what that had sounded like. A denial.
Arthur stared at the canopy a moment longer, then turned his own head on the pillow to meet his gaze. His expression was indecipherable.
“Yes. You’re good at secrets, aren’t you, Merlin? How could I forget?”
Merlin held his eyes, agonised. He knew that Arthur couldn’t forgive his lies, his many, many lies and manipulations over the years and that he’d come to hate secrets, to view them as the opposite of nobility, which in his eyes, was truth. And he had cause; all the carnage and havoc that had followed his own birth, the secrets kept from him by his own father. And then, the man Arthur had trusted with his vulnerabilities, his faith for years, had been unveiled as a liar and a sorceror at the heart of his own inner circle. A puppetmaster, he’d very clearly feared for a time.
“You know now though, Arthur,” Merlin said urgently, his purpose forgotten. “You know you can trust me.”
And it struck him just then, with a blinding clarity, why Arthur had pushed for this.
Emrys. The supposed greatest warlock of all time, bound to the king, and no room for doubts now.
Merlin’s gaze blanked and held, and the pain of that realisation skewered his heart.
‘Merlin? What is it?” Arthur asked sharply.
Merlin refocused to meet Arthur’s narrow-eyed stare; he could read Merlin so frighteningly well sometimes. But Merlin was accustomed to hiding with him, hiding his power first, then hiding his adoration, even from himself.
“Nothing. Nothing.” It seemed though, that his smokescreen no longer worked.
“What’s going through that pea brain of yours now? I can see you think you’ve figured something out.” Merlin blinked. “You’ll have got it wrong, whatever it is,” Arthur sighed wearily.
A knock sounded at the door, sharp and shocking .
Merlin jolted and stared at Arthur, wide-eyed with panic. Even Arthur seemed shaken for a second, then he shouted calmly, “Yes?’
Merlin’s eyes widened even more with disbelieving horror.
“I wondered if you required my services to dress, your Majesty,” a voice shouted through the heavy door. William, the King’s manservant. “And I am bade tell you that the queen is ready to go down to the banquet, Sire.”
“Right,” Arthur called, “Give me ten minutes, then return.”
Merlin let out a shaky sigh of relief, unable to believe their luck that the man hadn’t just walked in. “That was…”
“That was how a proper manservant behaves, Merlin. Stunning, isn’t it?”
Merlin glared at him for a few satisfying seconds before reality came crashing back, but he’d enjoyed them while they lasted.
He had ten minutes to dress and flee.
To Part 8