Chapter Text
Your wedding was, on paper, exactly how you’d dreamed it would be growing up. Your mother helped you into a gown that was shining with gold and silver embroidery and sewn-in gems. Your father whispered tearful prides as he led you down a richly decorated cathedral with grand vaulted ceilings and masterful stained glass. Eloquent vows were spoken, “I do”s said, and applause and showers of flower petals at your first kiss. The reception banquet was extravagant in food and revelry both, and you waltzed with your new court when you stood and greeted well-wishers when you were seated. Knights in armor polished to mirror gleam from both your home kingdom and the one you married into escorted you and your husband away to your honeymoon estate in the flower-perfumed countryside. Even the horses pulling the carriage were fairytale perfect.
The devil was in the details, and the details was your husband.
You were no little girl, naive to the world and how it worked. You met the man hardly a month before, at a meeting between him and your royal parents to discuss a preemptive treaty between your kingdoms. Your handmaids were loyal girls and women who would fill in the gaps for you whenever you were sent out of the room. Your new husband was a tyrant who bought you, and when your parents pass your kingdom, in exchange for staying the blades of his dark Underworld knights. Some of your handmaids are in courting with your father’s knights, and they would know. The knights chatter just as bad as the maids.
Tonight would be the first time you even saw his face.
Upon arrival at the estate, decorated as well for the occasion with no expense spared, you are led to a chamber by Sir Percival, an austere Round Table Knight who maintained an aloof and professional demeanor with you. She and some maids, though not your handmaids who you already miss dearly, help you out of your wedding gown and into something more fitting for an intimate night. It is still quite reasonably modest in cut, despite being just as opulent as everything else, and were you not so nervous for the night ahead you would be content to admire your reflection in the silver mirror. When Sir Percival deems you ready and leads you from the room, you have just enough time before the door closes behind you to glance back and spy the maids huddled together with whispered gossip. At least that would be the same.
The door to the marital chamber is watched by another Knight of the Round Table, Sir Lancelot. Just as aloof and cold as Sir Percival, perhaps even more so, he bows to you and nods a greeting to Sir Percival. Then, together, they open the double doors to the bedroom and announce you to your lord husband.
The doors shut behind you like the bars of a dungeon cell, leaving you alone in the dim candlelight with King Arthur. He is wearing no armor, instead clothed in a rich silk velvet doublet, but his face is too shadowed to truly make out any details. Your heart pounds in your chest as you approach him, lounging on a massive upholstered chaise with wine in his hand. You curtsey to him as per the ceremony you were schooled on once you were old enough to greet suitors. He holds out the flute of wine to you.
“It’s a big night, isn’t it, poppet? Steady your nerves. I have no intention to harm you tonight.” His voice rumbles in your bones and you wonder if you will ever acclimate to it. Accepting the wine, you take a sip, and at the sweet taste a little bit of tension leaves you. It’s a wine from your home, made at an orchard you enjoyed exploring when you were little, of pears and honey. The thoughtful selection makes you wonder if perhaps his tyranny was reserved for matters of state, if perhaps he was kinder in personal affairs. When you smile and compliment his choice, he laughs, rattling you again with his timbre. “Of course. It would do neither of us any good to go forward tense.” Then he shows you his own wine flute, empty and wet.
The night progresses as you talk to each other. He seems to take humor in flustering you, and you could swear that despite the darkness of the room he could see your growing blush. He reveals to you that this will not be his first time as it is yours, and you can’t help but be disappointed. Perhaps the fairytale wedding had gotten your hopes up too much. At least someone will know what they’re doing, you suppose. You’d figured he would be taking the lead anyway.
At three glasses of wine you have the courage to place your hand on his lap. King Arthur engulfs it with one of his own, then angles down to tilt your head and kiss you. It’s nothing like the chaste one you shared at the altar in front of the crowd. It’s wet, it’s humid, it takes you much longer than you would’ve liked to figure out what exactly was happening to be able to reciprocate. Just as you hit your stride he pauses for a moment, then wraps an arm around your back to deepen the kiss and in an instant you’re encompassed by him. The honeyed wine on his breath, the soap and cologne on his skin, the press of his body against yours, the tongue slipping into your mouth, heady and dark and so new to you that for several stuttered heartbeats you’re lost. Your hands flutter up to his shoulders, and when he parts from you and leaves you both panting you trail your fingers along the lacing over his front.
“You are ready? Because I am quite ready, bride.” He lifts you to straddle his lap and oh that’s not a pocket knife you feel pressing against your thighs through your clothes. His fingers are deft undoing the ribbons and laces that hold your dress together, unlike your hesitant and flighty ones. He matches your pace, though you can tell he is growing excited. Too soon he is left in naught but his undertunic and braies, and yet you still have a whole layer of pinnings and skirts left over your chemise. He slows down then, taking his sweet time unwrapping you while your hands have little to do. It’s agonizing. Eventually, blessedly, the last of your outerthings are stripped away and you sit together in your unders. Arthur presses a kiss to the top of your head, chuckling.
He leads you from the chaise to the massive four-poster bed, curtained in silk and dressed in many layers of bedding. With seemingly no effort at all he lifts you onto the thick fur pelt atop the sheets and blankets and pulls your chemise up over your head, trailing his rough fighter’s fingers along your body all the way. You shiver under his attention as he admires you there, bare naked and outlined in textile riches. A gasp leaves your throat as his hands brazenly gropes and squeezes you along your front.
Then the rest of his clothes are coming off and you’re nervous again.
He’s a massive man, that has never been a secret. But the tool now before your eyes is startling in its size, even in the dim candlelight. It isn’t your first time seeing a penis, you were bathed alongside cousins and courtiers’ children when you were very little, and you knew vaguely what to expect from your older handmaids who’d had more life experience. But only now do you understand the euphemisms they’d used. To your inexperienced eyes the thing seemed more like a bludgeoning weapon than a body part!
“Oh, don’t get all tense again, bride. I’ll make sure you’re nice and ready for me,” he purrs and the sound goes straight to your nethers. “You’re in good hands.”
And speaking of hands, his land on your upper thighs and you bite your lip as they caress and squeeze their way intimately higher. When he finally reaches your outer lips he brushes over them with tantalizing ghost touches and you tentatively raise your hips to him. His teeth flash as he smiles down at you. King Arthur kneels before your prone form like a penitent at the altar, pulls you forward until you are half dangling from the edge of the bed and-
And suddenly whatever dark magic he had woven when he kissed you was being cast upon your pussy and you can’t think anymore. He laps at you with broad strokes of his tongue, nuzzles your flesh with his nose and his lips, hones in on a bead of nerves you’d never given much thought to before and you cry out his title. You can feel his smirk against your netherlips and he attacks that nub again and again, and every time your voice hitches and your belly clenches he backs off and oh the things you wish to say at this teasing are downright uncharitable. By the third round of this electrifying cruelty he holds you down by your hips with one hand and he’s so strong! and his other prods at your opening and soon one of his fingers has slipped into your wet entrance, and then two, and he’s moving them and exploring your inner walls and the pleasure redoubles upon itself as his mouth has not stopped.
Your orgasm hits almost painfully when he finally lets you have it and it leaves you panting and shivering on the bed. He stops his attentions while you ride it out, then when you’ve calmed down he spreads his fingers inside you a few times before pulling them out.
Standing again, King Arthur uses his hand wet with your slick to massage his cock and the other to rearrange you, settle you more firmly on the bed and spread out your legs. “I think you’re ready for me now, poppet. But I warn you, there will be a stretch. I cannot guarantee you will not feel pain.”
You lick your lips and nod, hold your legs apart for him as he closes in on you. The first touch of his cockhead to your pussy jolts you, and when he enters mercifully slow a heavy whine escapes your throat. He wasn’t lying, accommodating his girth was uncomfortable and alien and you have to ask him to pause more than once, but he moves at your pace and you’re so incredibly grateful for it. Finally he bottoms out inside you and he places his hands on either side of your head. He leans down to whisper darkly in your ear.
“You may call me Arthur for tonight, if you so wish. Your voice is so pretty, I must hear it.” He jerks his hips and you gasp his name to his clear delight by the way his hands clench the sheets. “It’s my turn now, bride. I hope you’re ready because I cannot wait any longer. ”
With that, he slides back almost all the way before slamming his hips forward against yours. You cry out and squirm under him as he laughs at you and relents a little. Lightening his pace, King Arthur settles into a rhythm that has you moaning and him grunting before long. You adjust to his pressure as that coil starts to tighten in your gut again and at your assenting nod his pace picks up to a bruising rush that has you crying his name out to the night air.
Just when you think this part will be over with quickly, he suddenly stops, a devilish gleam in his eyes. You look up at him, confused, and ask if he finished. He just laughs at you again and restarts his thrusts slowly, gradually ramping up speed. The second time he stops you realize he’s toying with you again, except now he’s toying with himself as well, and he thinks this madness is great fun. You start to protest, to demand he stop fooling around and take you proper, but every time your mouth forms words that aren’t his name or his praises he shoves into you so rough you lose your breath.
Finally, finally, after what seems like an eternity of this back-and-forth edging, Arthur huffs a low moan and bends forward until his hot breath is tickling your ear. One hand grasps the back of your head and the other snakes down to your clit and then he’s pounding you into a mess. Every deep groan seeps into you as miasmic poetry. Words half-whispered and half-formed praising you curl around your very soul like incense smoke and honey wine and you’re drowning in him, in sensation, in the soft fur at your back and the unyielding crush of his chest at your front and the onslaught where you are joined.
“Good, so good, so beautiful, mine, mine, good poppet, let me hear you, mine!”
His skilled fingers rub your frayed nerves just right, right there, yes and you tumble headlong over the other side of ecstasy again, clutching at his back and shoulders and wrapping your legs around his waist to keep him there, keep him there, but he’s still moving as you clench and flutter around his cock until he roars his pleasure and shoves his mouth against your neck and you can feel something hot, hot inside you at last. You lay there panting together for a few sweaty moments and then his lips are on yours again and you fight to give just as good as you get.
It’s not until nearly half an hour later, when you’ve both cleaned yourselves up at the wash basin, and you’re both mostly clothed again and settling in to sleep on your marital bed that you finally, finally see his face clearly. You glimpse features once handsome, now bruise-purple and corrupted with the foul magics of the Underworld, as he blows out the candles and you promptly decide that further encounters will be happening in the dark as well.
It’s more romantic that way.