Warning: Some mature content...and the beginning of an mpreg arc 🔞
~~
By the time first snowdrops heralded nature's hopeful horizon between winter and spring, sprouting from bulb through frozen, solid black earth to bloom beneath the tears of melting icicles, housekeeper Mai had learnt the hard way to knock and wait before entering royal bed chambers.
First happening upon the King with his face dipping deep between the Queen's thighs at supper time. Next, a bathtub scene, tiles soaked slippy with sloshing water as gasps of "Harder alpha, yesss!" scribed themselves in panted breaths of condensation across steamy air. And finally, the palace employee abandoning a pile of freshly folded bed linen to the dusty floors, as she turned on her sensible heel to run with hands over eyes, after stumbling into the pair mid-fuck, feral and frenzied upon the King's creaking desk, Ciel's toes curling with ankles wrapped about his husband's strong, flushed neck.
It had been a month of much mutual bodily obsession. A proper, belated, physical consummation of marriage vows from icy cold to scorching hot - enough to make even the official parchment certificate of ceremony itself blush away in its guarded drawer.
Mew had unlocked his wife's bliss in being kissed. Cherished, in lusciously languid, eye-fluttering, sensuous tasting. Lips bitten to blood in crashes of passion. And kissed behind below as he trembled to orgasm upon the alpha's tongue.
Whilst for the omega, it was the dawning realisation that alongside raw sex every which way, above all else what his husband loved was to touch his tummy. Stroke it, squish it, pet it, pinch it or lick it - anything at all, it was his greatest soother.
And the younger wasn't so naive as to not understand the reasons why. Just as he faced the fact that when they made love, he wanted Mew's knot.
So it was that one clear-skied, crisp and frosty morning - after knocking thrice, loudly, and waiting extra seconds just to be extra, extra certain of safety - Mai entered the Queen's chamber to find him sat cross-legged on the bathroom floor, staring at a brass jug.
His reflection peered back from the polished surface, yet glassy eyes didn't see. They were far away, looking inwards and backwards, to a Ciel - almost one year ago...
Inhaling, exhaling deeply, then unfurling from foetal hug to go about his own very private, midnight ritual - filling jugs with water and kneeling to clean himself out as best he could - ridding his channel of Mew's dripping semen. He didn't want to bear that man's child any more than the King himself wished to see his Queen's belly swell.
Heart smarting, bee stung in present day, by memory's walk down country lanes of his loneliest diversion routes of treason.
It...pained.
"Do you want to be a mother?", Gulf spoke to the waiting ear at last, head still fixed straight ahead.
Mai lowering herself to join him on the bathroom tiles, considering her answer before offering:
"Perhaps I did once. But my days have belonged to the crown since I was fourteen. Half a lifetime in this palace - such dreams have long since withered"
"Can you really let go?"
"Housekeepers do not marry, my Queen. We do not create a family but serve one instead. It's not a suggestion of 'can' but 'must'. Just as, for you, it works in quite the opposite sense..."
"So either way, our bodies are not our own. Duty bound", bitter as abandoned breakfast tray's ruby grapefruit's afterbite.
And when the servant confidante glanced gaze leftways at Gulf, she could see, clearly defined, the young boy still in him. No match to his 21 years in that moment of open-hearted vulnerability.
"I don't know what's right any more" - he said simply, as a single tear spilled silently over cheek.
"Because you don't want to have a baby?", Mai's arm circling his shoulders on instinct. Gentle, sisterly.
But-
-"No..." - omega lifting emotive eyes to face her - "Because I do".
Stun of surprise flitting across the elder's ever-calm features, before gathering herself, with a spreading smile, to wipe away chasing tears with the hem of a neat apron.
Quietly:
"Then why are you crying?"
And why? why was it, exactly? Gulf tried to rationalise, tried to override such sentimentality and box his thoughts precisely, concisely. But promptly failed and ended, instead, by blurting out messy, sniffling, snotty soliloquy without pause even for breath between.
"Is it just simple, base omega biology or am I blind-minded by tuoksut? If I didn't want it then, why now? And Solaris too, nuzzling my stomach, making me ache to carry his child. Are we mere chess pieces played on fate's chequered board by grand puppet masters? Then...which thoughts are my own? What love is mine?"
Mai massaging with fond familiarity at the narrow shoulders opposite - thoughtful, until:
"I can't pretend to understand everything you speak of, Ciel, but may I ask...?"
"Go on"
"Was it your wish to have children before you married?"
Gulf's head bowing shy and low, fiddling with a stray thread of cotton between slender fingers, as he told...
"I've no true memories of my mother and had little real bond with the wet nurse the palace sent me away with. It's natural, is it not, that privately I should want a child to call my own, a baby that is mine to nurture and protect. To love in a way I wasn't", repeatedly tying and untying the black yarn about his slight wrist - tightly, too tightly, so that it chafed delicate skin...
"But when we were forced together, Solaris and I, all that became unthinkable. The man detested the very bones of me. I'm omega, yes, but still have my pride - never just a walking, thoughtless womb. How could I submit to him fathering an heir through my body when the man wouldn't even meet my eyes as he stood beside me at our marriage blessing? No child should be born out of mere contract, however royal their blood. Let the people hate me, hang me, call me barren or broken or jinxed Jezebel, if they will"
"Shhh, hush Majesty, don't say such things out loud", Mai tearing the thread to grasp both hands within her tranquil touch, whispering on, "It was hard in the beginning, both mysteries to one another. You were so young and he so set in spartan, solitary ways. But now? I've watched the King grow since he was but sixteen and skinny, to become the leader and man he is today. And in all those years I never saw him adore another soul as he does you, Ciel. None other could even get near him to light up his eyes as you have. Why do you think he waits? Puts his kingdom's future and own alpha urges at stake to honour your free will alone?"
"You're saying...he waits for my word...the choice is mine..."
"I'm saying, my Queen, that his heart has already chosen you as the only mother to his children, come what may. So all that's left to ponder is whether he is the father to yours..."
Not a question of Kings and their kingdoms, Queens and their duties, or palaces and peoples and their heirs.
But rather, of the dreams of two sweethearts writing their own story anew.
And when Gulf closed his eyes - morning sunlight dappling gently through the voile-veiled doorway to warm bare feet and hands, gleaming the curve of the old brass jug - he saw it, his heart's desire.
Mew bending to kiss his navel, large hands stroking softly, as with the rise and fall of the omega's breaths, his belly swelled with their baby.
//
A day's flight away on an albatross's wingspan, to a kingdom south, where a very different Jongcheveevat and Traipipattanapong duo shared a bed - tangle of muscles golden and ivory, as Esen and Orion stretched out like apple munching Gods of some Renaissance-painted landscape, basking in the rose tinted, Elysian glow of their own unique beauty and sex.
Alpha King feeding his alpha lover grapes direct from leafen vine branch, then crawling into his lap to sit astride and ride his cock - still loosened up behind from earlier escapades - as he sucked back the stickily-dribbling, sun-sweetened purple elixir, mouth to mouth, like vampyr's bloody life source.
Flipped onto his taut stomach and fucked hard into the bed, squashed fruit's juice stains soon joined by the milky essence of men, as each came loudly, with whatever was left in tired testes.
"When will...you let me...come inside you 'Po?", Mile huffing cheeks to steady stray breaths.
King rolling onto his back atop messy sheets to stare him down with unblinking, unflinching, hard-faced retort:
"The same day you let me fuck you back, Miley"
Rare butterflies stirred from slumber by an unexpected rooftop union that winter, never yet settling back to sleep, as the King and Lord's thirst for each other's touch flew only higher, up and away from society's restrictive nets.
Still calling it lust, then, emerged from chrysalises of ceaseless teenage teasing - but in fateful seconds would come a twist of a moment, when both might begin to know that it was more...
An insistent rapping at the chamber door. Esen answering draped in robe. Then turning, pale-faced, towards the man who rose to encircle his waist from behind.
"An anonymous note, meant for you, not I, Orion"
Scrap of hurriedly-penned paper passed from one hand to another, and read aloud:
'Go home, give warning to your brother without delay, attack on Mongkul is imminent from the North Sea. Make haste - you have but three days at most before war's dawn breaks'.