DVD Meme: Warmth (LOTR, NC-17)
Apr. 22nd, 2009 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
browngirlSo, I recently did a foolish thing. Reminded by a discussion I read elsewhere, I found myself looking in a fandom hate community for my name, and found it. For about thirty seconds, I remembered how horrified I had been by that discussion when I first read it, how hurt, how mortified, how I wondered if I should delete my journal because some anonymous twit hated me.
Then I looked at my five years of fic, and all the friends I've made, all the stories I've read, all the things I've learned, and I went back to working on this, for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rabidsamfan, whose birthday it is today.
"Warmth" Frodo/Sam, Bilbo/Sam, NC-17
It's interesting, remembering across several years why I wrote this story and what I wrote into it. I wrote it because I was thinking about class issues in Middle Earth, the corrupting influence of the Ring, the inevietable advantage the powerful take of the less powerful, and how, though the stories I read seemed not to include this fact, Frodo was over a decade older than Sam.
I am old. I know I don't look it, everyone comments upon my youthful face, but I am old, far too old to lay my eyes on you, and chilled to the bone. And here you are, grown to eighteen, my beautiful solid broad-shouldered boy, warm with sunshine, who works in my garden, smiling at me. I smile back, and I watch you work, and I think of warming myself on you.
Like most writers, I can be very cruel to characters I love, as a way of exploring their strengths. I later returned to the winsome appeal of a cheerful hobbit, and how such hobbits could be squished but also be resilient, in stories such as "A Wizard's Pupil" and "Pocket Money".
He does too, my kinsman and fellow scholar. He watches and he wishes and he longs. Sometimes I glance up from my work to see him looking out the window at a broad, bare back. Sometimes he catches me stroking golden hair with my eyes, and our gazes meet. We never speak of it, but we both look.
This story was an experiment in several ways. One was in misdirecting the reader as to the narrator's identity.
This cold fire burns me, and I long to soothe my trembling hands with the feel of that golden hair, those broad shoulders, strong thighs….and the day is hot, and my kinsman is out, and you are stripped to the waist again, digging at something. You stop and wipe your brow, and the fire in my blood hisses in my ear, and I put down my pen and go to the window.
Remember the Ring's hiss from the movie?
"Come here, my dear", I say, and you come to me as trusting as a puppy, with a puppy's wide brown eyes. "You look hot."
If I had to write this again I might dial it back a bit.
"'Tis a warm day, sir," you respond and smile so that I want to press my lips to the corner of your mouth. "I'd thought of sluicing off by the well afore luncheon."
I might have placed less emphasis on Sam's dialect, too. I don't write horrible fake-phonetic dialects, at least.
"Nonsense. Come in, use my bath room. That's what it's there for." You blink, and blush, and duck your head in bashful gratitude as you come around to the back door. I listen to you walk lightly through the smial, your footsteps a counter-rhythm to the pounding of my heart. I feel like the spider, whispering sibilantly to the fly. I feel powerful and predatory and light-headed with arousal. I feel warm, so warm that I strip off my clothes with trembling hands, popping buttons carelessly.
I let myself into the bathroom, locking the door behind me with trembling hands. You look up at me, eyes wide, standing in the tub pouring water over yourself. "Come out of there," I say gently, giving you a hand to assist you, and because you are well-trained, and those who are well-trained act out of reflex when startled, you obey me without thinking until you stand before me, bare as the day you were born. I suck in my breath at the sight of you, and you blush, looking at me with confusion, waiting for me to tell you what to do.
In here is a small lump of Kushiel's Dart. If you've read the book, can you spot it?
I do. I am the master, after all. "Come here," I say gently, and when you do I put my hands on those shoulders and I kiss you.
That is the last time I am going to be gentle, for quite a while.
I admit, I really do like this sentence.
You stand in my arms, lips parted with surprise beneath mine but otherwise still, but you are young, so very young, and I know how to rouse you to my fire, as I run my inkstained fingers across your shoulders and collarbone and chest, and your trembling arms slowly rise, as if not under your control. I slide one hand back around your neck, into your golden wavy wet hair, and slide the other over your nipple, and you gasp, warming under my hands. My hand traces lower, over the firm, generous young flesh and you tremble, those strong arms shaking in midair; when my hand lightly skims its goal, your whole body jerks as you moan into my mouth, and I kiss you all the harder, sliding my tongue up over your lip.
I am not the only survivor of sexual assault who has been told, "look, you're [displaying sign of physical arousal], you obviously like it." But I actually wasn't writing about myself here: there are male survivors too.
And then you harden in my hand, and those strong arms clench around me, and if I could open my eyes I'm sure I'd see the bathwater steaming up off you. I kiss you and stroke you and run my free hand all over your sun-hot body, and you tremble in my arms and suck on my tongue and warm me, all over. I may be chilled and stretched and old, but right now I feel warm all through, now that I have you, my beautiful gardener boy.
"Sir?" A little blood escapes to your head; you start to pull back, gently and respectfully, your question is muffled against my lips. "Sir, should---?"
"Uh, this isn't exactly in my job description..."
"Shhh," I murmur, trying to devour your mouth, but you pull back again. "Sir, what if Mr---"
"He's out, all day. Now come here." My tone brooks no argument; my thumb slides over your lower head, catching in the ridge, and my other hand curves firmly around your buttock to pull your hips forward, and you gasp again, your knees starting to give way.
"A towel," I murmur, releasing you, and you obediently fetch one and spread it on the floor, turning to look at me with heat and puzzlement warring in those wide brown eyes. I know my smile must be predatory; the heat in my blood certainly is, as I take you by the shoulders and push you down on your back. My mouth certainly is, as my kisses turn to bites and you cry out beneath me, as I suck on your nipples and stroke you with hard thrusts. I bite your ear and neck and lower lip, and you whimper and cry out "Sir!" and spurt into my hand. "Yes, Samwise," I hiss, and your eyes flutter open at the sound of your name. I smile to show my pleasure and kiss you again, my hand never leaving you until I've stroked you back to hardness. Such a beautiful young hobbit you are, moaning into my mouth, large brown eyes unfocused with arousal.
This is the first of a bunch of bits of Fennelseed in this story; when I wrote this I was devouring her stories as fast as I could, and this whole sex scene is my version of / reaction to one of hers.
Then I get up, and you make a small sound of protest. I smile, my most mysterious smile, and cross the bathroom in two strides, back in two more, the bottle of bath oil cool in my hand. You rise on your elbows, the questions back in your eyes. "Sir, what's that for?"
With a bit of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins' writingand I have rarely seen a more accurately self-chosen nickname.
"Ah, my dear boy, I think you know." I kneel over you, and the wide brown eyes grow round with curiosity and heat and fear, and I don't know which heats my blood more. "Have you ever done this before?", I ask to hear myself say it, already knowing the answer from your trembling; you shake your head no, and open those kiss-bruised lips, perhaps to plead with me to stop, perhaps to beg me to hurry. Then you shut them again, and I nod and lean forward to kiss your brow. "Good boy," I whisper, one oily finger making small circles, my other hand resuming its grip, and you slump back down, trembling as you surrender yourself to my touch.
There are a lot of ways besides force to compel; I was thinking of every manipulative trick I could, here.
You tense again, gasping, when that finger goes in. "How does that feel?"I ask, and watch your mouth work soundlessly for a moment as your hands clutch the towel, before you finally manage, "strange, sir,"in a small shaking voice. "Never felt the like."
Like the narrator cares.
"But good, isn't it?" I press the finger deeper, and your hips arch off the towel as you moan, and I can feel you grow even harder in my hand. Yes, good. I have a brief flash of memory, of my first lover telling me this is the reason hobbits have two hands, and I smile as I watch you turn your head from side to side and moan. I add another finger, and your moans shade up into wails. "Sir," you sob. "Oh, sir. Sir."
"Yes, my dear boy," I respond, as I kneel between your legs, my stroking hand keeping its pace, so that you hardly notice at first as my fingers slip out just as something else slides in.
Then you realize. Oh, what a moment that is! You clench, and look up, and gasp, "Si--!" I don't let you finish; I drive myself in to the hilt, and you scream, my beautiful boy, as you arch your back and peak like a fountain, spattering both our bellies. I drop my hand to the towel, wiping it, before I run it up over your side, followed by the other, up to stroke your face as you pant like you've run all the way from Bywater, until you settle down and loosen just a bit around me and those deep brown eyes flutter open again, tears running out of them.
It's amusing, rereading this and realizing all these bits of other fanfic writers' ideas I embroidered into my stories back then, trying to fit my works into a continnum and a fannish subculture. The tears are frombillthepony's Foursome of Group Sex Is Always Bad For You, I forget what the title was. But in it Pippin cries because he's Doing This Too Young, and back then I thought that was a niftily telling symbolic touch.
"Shhh," I whisper soothingly, running my hands back down to your shoulders, down your splayed arms, to get a firm grip on your wrists. It's my turn now. I pull my hips back and slam them forward, and you buck against me, your head rolling back, your eyes clamping shut, as you cry out again. "Yes, my dear, yes," I whisper sibilantly, as I start to thrust in earnest, holding you down by your wrists, feeling your strength against me, feeling myself within your warmth. And you sob in time with my thrusts, tears running from your closed eyes, growing hard again against my stomach, and it is your peak, hot against my stomach, rippling through your body around me, which brings me to mine, as I hear myself cry out and arch and slump onto you, my forehead against your shoulder.
By now I kind of hope the reader is speechless with some mixture of arousal and horror. Also, I used "sibilantly" ON PURPOSE, because I am just that subtle and clever. *laugh at myself*
When I come back to myself you are still shaking, and when I roll off you sit up and turn away and bury your face in your hands, weeping as if I've broken your heart. Every time I think on this that is how it ends, I suppose because my heart knows it to be true.
And that is why I have never and will never lay a finger on you.
Breathe a sigh of relief! This was before I let my characters really do and suffer awful things; I wrote "Sweet Apple" at around the same time, in which Boromir takes the Ring and makes Pippin his sex slave, andserai1 told me that making it all a dream was a cop-out. She may not have been right about race relations but she was right about that story. However, in this one I think in the end I like the idea of a Ring-amplified, classist sexual fantasy that doesn't actually come to pass. Bilbo is a decent guy after all.
So I watch my young cousin watch you, and I watch your smiles at him, more open, more warm than your smiles at me. I watch you bring him little things, early fruits and birds' feathers, and I watch him give gifts in return, stories and songs. He may be twelve years your elder, but he is young yet, and beautiful as the Moon to your Sun, and when he finally lays his fingers on you I know that if you weep it will be for joy.
It would be excessively snide and also inaccurate to say "I was still drinking the Frodo/Sam Kool-Aid then." I did believe in the pairing -- I still do, just in my own particular nonmonogamous way.
Still, if he comes to me to ask my advice, and he may, for he foolishly thinks me wise, I will tell him to be careful with you. Careful, as I know I cannot be.
And here I am, at the far side of all my hopes and anticipations for my time in LOTR hobbitfic fandom, rereading a story I wrote right at the start. I'm probablyway too a little bitter about how some things ended up happening; I reread my early stories and wonder if, if I'd known what was coming (being called a tinhat for writing Frodo/Merry, a pedophile for writing Hobbit/Man, a Mary Sue writer for not vilifying Rosie Cotton, disruptive and a bad fan for discussing class and race and gender, and so on) if I might not have fled years earlier. And yet I still love LOTR, I still love hobbits, and I'm so very glad of the friends I've made in fandom, not least the one who asked me to write this. *beaming smile at RSF*
Then I looked at my five years of fic, and all the friends I've made, all the stories I've read, all the things I've learned, and I went back to working on this, for
rabidsamfan, whose birthday it is today. "Warmth" Frodo/Sam, Bilbo/Sam, NC-17
It's interesting, remembering across several years why I wrote this story and what I wrote into it. I wrote it because I was thinking about class issues in Middle Earth, the corrupting influence of the Ring, the inevietable advantage the powerful take of the less powerful, and how, though the stories I read seemed not to include this fact, Frodo was over a decade older than Sam.
I am old. I know I don't look it, everyone comments upon my youthful face, but I am old, far too old to lay my eyes on you, and chilled to the bone. And here you are, grown to eighteen, my beautiful solid broad-shouldered boy, warm with sunshine, who works in my garden, smiling at me. I smile back, and I watch you work, and I think of warming myself on you.
Like most writers, I can be very cruel to characters I love, as a way of exploring their strengths. I later returned to the winsome appeal of a cheerful hobbit, and how such hobbits could be squished but also be resilient, in stories such as "A Wizard's Pupil" and "Pocket Money".
He does too, my kinsman and fellow scholar. He watches and he wishes and he longs. Sometimes I glance up from my work to see him looking out the window at a broad, bare back. Sometimes he catches me stroking golden hair with my eyes, and our gazes meet. We never speak of it, but we both look.
This story was an experiment in several ways. One was in misdirecting the reader as to the narrator's identity.
This cold fire burns me, and I long to soothe my trembling hands with the feel of that golden hair, those broad shoulders, strong thighs….and the day is hot, and my kinsman is out, and you are stripped to the waist again, digging at something. You stop and wipe your brow, and the fire in my blood hisses in my ear, and I put down my pen and go to the window.
Remember the Ring's hiss from the movie?
"Come here, my dear", I say, and you come to me as trusting as a puppy, with a puppy's wide brown eyes. "You look hot."
If I had to write this again I might dial it back a bit.
"'Tis a warm day, sir," you respond and smile so that I want to press my lips to the corner of your mouth. "I'd thought of sluicing off by the well afore luncheon."
I might have placed less emphasis on Sam's dialect, too. I don't write horrible fake-phonetic dialects, at least.
"Nonsense. Come in, use my bath room. That's what it's there for." You blink, and blush, and duck your head in bashful gratitude as you come around to the back door. I listen to you walk lightly through the smial, your footsteps a counter-rhythm to the pounding of my heart. I feel like the spider, whispering sibilantly to the fly. I feel powerful and predatory and light-headed with arousal. I feel warm, so warm that I strip off my clothes with trembling hands, popping buttons carelessly.
I let myself into the bathroom, locking the door behind me with trembling hands. You look up at me, eyes wide, standing in the tub pouring water over yourself. "Come out of there," I say gently, giving you a hand to assist you, and because you are well-trained, and those who are well-trained act out of reflex when startled, you obey me without thinking until you stand before me, bare as the day you were born. I suck in my breath at the sight of you, and you blush, looking at me with confusion, waiting for me to tell you what to do.
In here is a small lump of Kushiel's Dart. If you've read the book, can you spot it?
I do. I am the master, after all. "Come here," I say gently, and when you do I put my hands on those shoulders and I kiss you.
That is the last time I am going to be gentle, for quite a while.
I admit, I really do like this sentence.
You stand in my arms, lips parted with surprise beneath mine but otherwise still, but you are young, so very young, and I know how to rouse you to my fire, as I run my inkstained fingers across your shoulders and collarbone and chest, and your trembling arms slowly rise, as if not under your control. I slide one hand back around your neck, into your golden wavy wet hair, and slide the other over your nipple, and you gasp, warming under my hands. My hand traces lower, over the firm, generous young flesh and you tremble, those strong arms shaking in midair; when my hand lightly skims its goal, your whole body jerks as you moan into my mouth, and I kiss you all the harder, sliding my tongue up over your lip.
I am not the only survivor of sexual assault who has been told, "look, you're [displaying sign of physical arousal], you obviously like it." But I actually wasn't writing about myself here: there are male survivors too.
And then you harden in my hand, and those strong arms clench around me, and if I could open my eyes I'm sure I'd see the bathwater steaming up off you. I kiss you and stroke you and run my free hand all over your sun-hot body, and you tremble in my arms and suck on my tongue and warm me, all over. I may be chilled and stretched and old, but right now I feel warm all through, now that I have you, my beautiful gardener boy.
"Sir?" A little blood escapes to your head; you start to pull back, gently and respectfully, your question is muffled against my lips. "Sir, should---?"
"Uh, this isn't exactly in my job description..."
"Shhh," I murmur, trying to devour your mouth, but you pull back again. "Sir, what if Mr---"
"He's out, all day. Now come here." My tone brooks no argument; my thumb slides over your lower head, catching in the ridge, and my other hand curves firmly around your buttock to pull your hips forward, and you gasp again, your knees starting to give way.
"A towel," I murmur, releasing you, and you obediently fetch one and spread it on the floor, turning to look at me with heat and puzzlement warring in those wide brown eyes. I know my smile must be predatory; the heat in my blood certainly is, as I take you by the shoulders and push you down on your back. My mouth certainly is, as my kisses turn to bites and you cry out beneath me, as I suck on your nipples and stroke you with hard thrusts. I bite your ear and neck and lower lip, and you whimper and cry out "Sir!" and spurt into my hand. "Yes, Samwise," I hiss, and your eyes flutter open at the sound of your name. I smile to show my pleasure and kiss you again, my hand never leaving you until I've stroked you back to hardness. Such a beautiful young hobbit you are, moaning into my mouth, large brown eyes unfocused with arousal.
This is the first of a bunch of bits of Fennelseed in this story; when I wrote this I was devouring her stories as fast as I could, and this whole sex scene is my version of / reaction to one of hers.
Then I get up, and you make a small sound of protest. I smile, my most mysterious smile, and cross the bathroom in two strides, back in two more, the bottle of bath oil cool in my hand. You rise on your elbows, the questions back in your eyes. "Sir, what's that for?"
With a bit of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins' writing
"Ah, my dear boy, I think you know." I kneel over you, and the wide brown eyes grow round with curiosity and heat and fear, and I don't know which heats my blood more. "Have you ever done this before?", I ask to hear myself say it, already knowing the answer from your trembling; you shake your head no, and open those kiss-bruised lips, perhaps to plead with me to stop, perhaps to beg me to hurry. Then you shut them again, and I nod and lean forward to kiss your brow. "Good boy," I whisper, one oily finger making small circles, my other hand resuming its grip, and you slump back down, trembling as you surrender yourself to my touch.
There are a lot of ways besides force to compel; I was thinking of every manipulative trick I could, here.
You tense again, gasping, when that finger goes in. "How does that feel?"I ask, and watch your mouth work soundlessly for a moment as your hands clutch the towel, before you finally manage, "strange, sir,"in a small shaking voice. "Never felt the like."
Like the narrator cares.
"But good, isn't it?" I press the finger deeper, and your hips arch off the towel as you moan, and I can feel you grow even harder in my hand. Yes, good. I have a brief flash of memory, of my first lover telling me this is the reason hobbits have two hands, and I smile as I watch you turn your head from side to side and moan. I add another finger, and your moans shade up into wails. "Sir," you sob. "Oh, sir. Sir."
"Yes, my dear boy," I respond, as I kneel between your legs, my stroking hand keeping its pace, so that you hardly notice at first as my fingers slip out just as something else slides in.
Then you realize. Oh, what a moment that is! You clench, and look up, and gasp, "Si--!" I don't let you finish; I drive myself in to the hilt, and you scream, my beautiful boy, as you arch your back and peak like a fountain, spattering both our bellies. I drop my hand to the towel, wiping it, before I run it up over your side, followed by the other, up to stroke your face as you pant like you've run all the way from Bywater, until you settle down and loosen just a bit around me and those deep brown eyes flutter open again, tears running out of them.
It's amusing, rereading this and realizing all these bits of other fanfic writers' ideas I embroidered into my stories back then, trying to fit my works into a continnum and a fannish subculture. The tears are from
billthepony's Foursome of Group Sex Is Always Bad For You, I forget what the title was. But in it Pippin cries because he's Doing This Too Young, and back then I thought that was a niftily telling symbolic touch."Shhh," I whisper soothingly, running my hands back down to your shoulders, down your splayed arms, to get a firm grip on your wrists. It's my turn now. I pull my hips back and slam them forward, and you buck against me, your head rolling back, your eyes clamping shut, as you cry out again. "Yes, my dear, yes," I whisper sibilantly, as I start to thrust in earnest, holding you down by your wrists, feeling your strength against me, feeling myself within your warmth. And you sob in time with my thrusts, tears running from your closed eyes, growing hard again against my stomach, and it is your peak, hot against my stomach, rippling through your body around me, which brings me to mine, as I hear myself cry out and arch and slump onto you, my forehead against your shoulder.
By now I kind of hope the reader is speechless with some mixture of arousal and horror. Also, I used "sibilantly" ON PURPOSE, because I am just that subtle and clever. *laugh at myself*
When I come back to myself you are still shaking, and when I roll off you sit up and turn away and bury your face in your hands, weeping as if I've broken your heart. Every time I think on this that is how it ends, I suppose because my heart knows it to be true.
And that is why I have never and will never lay a finger on you.
Breathe a sigh of relief! This was before I let my characters really do and suffer awful things; I wrote "Sweet Apple" at around the same time, in which Boromir takes the Ring and makes Pippin his sex slave, and
serai1 told me that making it all a dream was a cop-out. She may not have been right about race relations but she was right about that story. However, in this one I think in the end I like the idea of a Ring-amplified, classist sexual fantasy that doesn't actually come to pass. Bilbo is a decent guy after all.So I watch my young cousin watch you, and I watch your smiles at him, more open, more warm than your smiles at me. I watch you bring him little things, early fruits and birds' feathers, and I watch him give gifts in return, stories and songs. He may be twelve years your elder, but he is young yet, and beautiful as the Moon to your Sun, and when he finally lays his fingers on you I know that if you weep it will be for joy.
It would be excessively snide and also inaccurate to say "I was still drinking the Frodo/Sam Kool-Aid then." I did believe in the pairing -- I still do, just in my own particular nonmonogamous way.
Still, if he comes to me to ask my advice, and he may, for he foolishly thinks me wise, I will tell him to be careful with you. Careful, as I know I cannot be.
And here I am, at the far side of all my hopes and anticipations for my time in LOTR hobbitfic fandom, rereading a story I wrote right at the start. I'm probably
