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This story is rated «NC-17», and carries the warnings «Slash, sexual scenes and my attempts at humour».
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The Strangest of Dances (NC-17) 
Written by Eora17 March 2013 | 19768 words
Author’s Note: This chapter’s a little on the short side, but fret not, there is one later on that makes up for it in length. Fans of unwieldy paragraphs will be pleased to know that there is a particularly endless one coming up shortly below. Also, the NC-17(ish) rating comes into effect in this chapter, but only for a short while. I’m afraid it’s only a teaser of what may or may not yet come…
Chapter 2.
“This is probably going to come across as a bit sudden but I think I’ve fallen in love with you.”
Thankfully, we were in the stables when I came out with it and I came out with it at the same moment Roheryn came out with an obnoxiously loud whinny (professing his love for Faramir also or telling me I was an idiot) and because I’d said it too quietly for Faramir to hear in the hopes that he wouldn’t actually hear it, thankfully as it turned out, he didn’t.
“What?” he said, looking over the dividing wall between our mounts‘ stalls.
“Nothing,” I said, burying my face in the spiky musk of my horse’s withers. We rode out, we had a lovely day, I tried not to look at Faramir’s long fingers on the reins or the way his thigh muscles tensed and relaxed as he guided Marin alongside me. It wasn’t just his body, you know, he was rather frightfully clever, honourable in the sort of way that doesn’t make you wince and he managed to make his unyielding stoicism and his innate gentleness blend together as if it were impossible to ever have one without the other in a man.
I wanted him. The level of my desire rose like floodwater; unstoppable, inevitable, poised to cause no end of damage. I stayed away from him which only served to drive my need of him to unforeseen heights. I dreamt of him. I woke, damp with sweat expecting to find him lying beside me, but he never was. I suppose I could have commanded him to sleep with me; it was my right as king to command, but I didn’t and I shouldn’t have to explain why. The worst part was those dreams weren’t romanticised fantasies where we made wild love on a moonlit night, crying out each others’ names as our bodies arched against one another in the throes of unquenchable passion, no. These dreams were alarmingly realistic; messy, occasionally ungainly lovemaking, off-balance thrusting, mis-timed kisses and elbows in ribs and teeth that bit too hard and a moan that might have been of discomfort but no-one wanted to ask or clarify. Those awful necessary things you have to say; ‘can you move your leg?‘ and ‘Sorry, that’s not, no wait, wait-… actually slower.’ and ‘Shift over before I fall off the bed.‘ I could smell him, I could smell us, that muggy mingling aroma of sex and salt and sweat and absolute maleness. His beard scraped my lips and cheek raw and yet I could not help but kiss him as deeply as our jaws would allow. He was heavier than he looked too, so my subconscious had ascertained; I’d wake in the dream to find him sprawled across me, my arm or leg gone cold and useless beneath him until I tried to shove him off and woke myself up for real to find my arm or leg tingling from my bizarre sleeping habits. More than once I had to wait for the sensation to return to my lower leg in order to rise and, shamefacedly avoiding the looking-glass, wash myself off in the bath chamber. The very first time it happened I actually put my head down the latrine and was ill. I’d just had a ridiculously erotic dream about another man! Where on earth had all of this come from? I’d have had less trouble accepting it if somehow I’d conjured up a dream of Faramir as a woman, something encroaching on nightmare territory, I realise. But when the dreams continued I managed to control my reaction somewhat, even so far as to enjoy them. If no-one found out, if Faramir didn’t find out, then there was no harm, surely?
Except he was going to find out because I was going to tell him, really, properly, the very next time I saw him, that I loved him. (While ‘that I’d been having ridiculously graphic sex dreams about him where I may have tried to imagine him as a woman‘ rolls off the tongue rather nicely, I’m not that stupid.)
“I had a dream about you last night, Faramir.”
We were in my study; Faramir was hunting through my bookshelves for a particular pamphlet while I helped by sitting on the edge of the desk and watching him.
“Oh? And what happened?”
How was I going to phrase it, now that I’d moronically opened with the very thing I’d not wanted to reveal to him? I think somewhere during the council meeting that immediately preceded our seclusion in the study I’d decided that professing my undying and inexplicable love was maybe a bit too heavy-handed. Sex dreams though, were fair game. Oh gods.
“Well,” I couldn’t look at him. Fortunately Faramir’s gaze was tome-bound and so neither of us were privy to the other’s exact reaction to the words I said next. “We were…lying together.” Ah, what sweet poetry falls from the tongues of kings! Faramir seemed only to be half-listening; I still wasn’t looking at him but the process of working out what I’d meant in his mind was practically audible.
“We were…” He selected a book and straightened, opening it. “Do you mean like-…oh, wait, fucking?” He looked at me, though I couldn’t meet his gaze. There was a smile in his voice when he exclaimed loudly, covering his uncertainty over what would be the appropriate reaction: “Good grief! Was I any good?”
I wanted to die. I glanced at the window, as if to find it open would be invitation enough to throw myself from it and dash the hopes of men forever. But all I had to do was play along. “You proved yourself quite knowledgeable.”
Faramir snorted and opened his book. For some reason the question as to why exactly his king was having erotic imaginings concerning his-self wasn’t leaping from his mouth. “I’ve long wondered whether the person you dream about is dreaming about you at that same instant. I can now confirm my theory debunked.”
I grinned a this-isn’t-torture sort of grin. “No nocturnal thoughts about me then?”
“Regrettably, no.”
I tried not to pick up on this small shred of impossible hope. Regrettably. “Regrettably?”
Faramir closed the book again and ran his palm over the cover, composing a sentence that I would never had had the courage to utter if our roles had reversed themselves.
“Regrettable indeed, for had I had illicit dreams about you sire, I might pass them off as mere flights of my subconscious and therefore untameable; it is to my sorrow that the private thoughts I have of you are entirely the conjuring of my conscious, controllable mind.” He looked at me levelly. “And therefore must come under scrutiny and judgement; surely you must know now that I can’t not be biased in your favour in all matters.”
And then, just as I had had my mouth open in a semblance of reply for long enough to show, to an astute observer though Faramir was not such as will become apparent, my disbelief at something I heartily wished to be true actually being so, I saw at the corner of Faramir’s lips the most poorly repressed twitch and I knew I had been had. (Faramir, of course, being too wrapped up in his jest to notice I had fallen for both it and him in one fell swoop.)
“Clever,” I said, and attempted a smirk which mostly fell flat. I hoped my disappointment and mortification could be shrugged off as impatience at Faramir’s poor attempt at humour. Now, apprising him of the deeper nature of my feelings for him suddenly seemed like a very bad idea.
Faramir, softening after laughing to himself gleefully for moment, said; “Forgive me. It was an irresistible opportunity.”
I went into a bit of a huff after that, and Faramir was evidently aware of this and spent most of the day trying to ingratiate himself again, though truly there was little he could ever do to really lose favour with his king. Does that make me a fool? There are some sayings about fools and love but I will leave them for you to appropriate.
It was now two weeks to the day since the map sorting in the library. The erotic dreams had faded, replaced with something all the more cumbersome to ignore. I dreamt, instead, of the future.
In these night visions, the sex was off. No longer did I experience rampant hallucinations of our naked bodies entwining beneath tangled, sweat-drenched linen, though that’s not to say that in the context of these dreams our ‘relationship’ had become platonic. It was rather that it had developed; the physical aspect lurked in the background, a known factor, but now my subconscious was constructing scenarios even more improbable than coitus with my second man. Mad dreams, dreams of a house in Emyn Arnen, of walking in the woods with fingers interlocked. Of marriage. Yes, marriage. I was going insane.
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Oooh! Very good! Magical: so many words and you caught me in a wave of excitement. I like this Aragorn, and the explanation of Faramir. Ahh, sunshine and fun!
— Laivindur Thursday 15 November 2012, 16:52 #