Faramir Fiction Archive

In the Dusk (R)

08 October 2023 | 866 words

They do their lovemaking in the dusk.

How very fitting. That ephemeral, elusive space. The inbetween, the neither here nor there. A waiting room between two incompatible worlds. The granite archway through which light glints upon the eternal darkness and night magic seeps back into the daytime realm.

A sliver of time that stands still – and yet cannot be stopped from slipping away. There is no holding on, but there is no stopping them from trying, either.

To love a king. He has never known anything like this. A doomed, impossible dance of staggering beauty.

The pitiless sweetness of it cuts his heart with knives, every single time.

It is greater than desire, it is an existential hunger. An all-consuming, all-encompassing imperative that to survive, they must collide. Grind and mash body and limb together until the desperate spirits within can touch and become one.

Kisses that go as deep as the make of the mouth permits. Messy, greedy kisses that taste like dreams come true, like iron and salt, almost violent, never sated. Delighting in their own intoxicated crudeness, like a dragon rolling with abandon in newly pillaged gold.

Ancient lore spoke of love like this, a driving force so brutal it was equal part blessing and burden. He had assumed it literary exaggeration, artistic license to embellish the story for the reader’s enjoyment – although a naive, innocent part of him had harboured the fantasy of finding something like that for himself. One day he will reflect on the irony.

It is a strange kind of urgency that takes over them, hypnotic like storm clouds and syropy like treacle. The tension mounts and rolls through them with devastating, euphoric slowness. To fully live out the rough, bruising physicality, to take in the beauty of each other’s strength, the King and his steward must surrender to a grinding, spellbinding pace.

He does things with his King, for his King. Things that he had not only never done, but had not even thought that someone, anyone could do. In bed with the King naked as the day they came into the world, there is no fear, no shame, no rule or law other than that which brings joy. There is no service too great. There is only pleasure so extreme it almost turns to pain, and pain so exquisite it blossoms into ecstasy.

The dusk means he cannot see with full sharpness, that his imagination must finish the picture as he worships the dreamscape of the King’s body. Overwhelmed, his senses sing with gratitude as he presses his cheek against the toned, flat firmness of the older warrior’s lower abdomen. Its faint rise and fall in rhythm with the King’s strained breath, the heat of the King’s skin beneath a cool sheen of sweat. The coarse, coiled scratch of his intimate hair. The musky, ocean flavour of his manhood. The burning steel, cased in the finest velvet, pulsing, throbbing silk, curving over so unbearably smooth, a viscous teardrop of moisture, bittersweet upon his tongue just like the sound that flies from the King’s lips.

He has wondered that things should be so – with a detached, removed sort of wonder.

That he should love his King is self-evident like the sunrise in the East, like the pink kiss of the morning Sun on the white walls of Minas-Tirith. That the King should love him in return is a mystery he has cautiously learned to accept, like a divine benediction beyond his mortal comprehension.

The King in his great wisdom has taught him many lessons. That he loves the sharpness of the King’s teeth upon his lower lip, his earlobe, and other softer, unprotected places. That the danger of the King’s warm, loving hand firm upon his throat sends him to a whole another place. That there is nothing quite like a harsh slap across the buttocks, and to have his knees kicked apart and then a finger, sometimes two at once…

The King has taught him that love is freely given and does not have to be earned, bought, or bargained for. That love is naked and cares not who plays which role. That he cannot desecrate his loyalty to his lord no matter which way he loves him, even with the King flat on his front in a state of full surrender, all the more powerful in not caring to clutch on to what power is supposed to mean.

The King has taught him, for the first time in his life, to love the sound of his own name.

They do not speak in the dusk, for that which they yearn to say is unspeakable, impossible, in this world or any other. And if those sacred words cannot be, there is no point in saying anything else. Except when the King whispers into his hair, in blissful exhaustion, with uttermost tenderness. Faramir.

He would die, a thousand times over, for his King, the love of his life. The glory, the brilliant clarity of it.

He never says anything back. What could he say. What would he even call him? It cannot, should not be my King. But even more so it cannot be Aragorn.

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