[NSFW / 18+] Read it on AO3.
Tags: Musketeer / Abomination, casual sex, camping, sex outdoors, stress relief, blowjob, masturbation, edging, playing “Don’t Wake Daddy” but fucky
With stress and fear mounting as the party pushes further and deeper into the Weald than they ever have before, they decide to make camp for the night. When the musketeer notices her compatriot beginning to buckle under the strain, she generously offers him a much-needed respite.
Fun fact: I read all of the non-dialogue text in this fic in the "Disco Elysium" narrator voice in my head. Accurate or not, I used it to maintain consistency in the tone.
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“So, you go to the brothel often?”
The musketeer’s unprompted and invasive question tore him violently from the solitude of his forlorn reverie. Even his worst nightmares paled in comparison to being left alone with a social butterfly like their current markswoman. Yet here they were.
Just at the edge of the campfire’s light, the hellion’s haunting battle hymn reverberated eerily throughout the clearing. Over her guttural chants, the occasional tinkle of a bell assured that the highwayman was still busily erecting alarmed tripwires and hadn’t been dragged off into the abyss by unseen monstrosities. And so the two of them had been left to sit idly by the fire. The silence had agreed with him; this intrusion less so.
The musketeer was smiling at him with concerningly pre-emptive self-satisfaction. You’d never know from her tone that they were fighting for their lives in the midst of this poisoned wilderness. He half-suspected he was having another episode. He’d blink, the glade would dissolve away around them, and he would find them sitting in the tavern, his lonesome, shadowed corner having been violated by this unwelcome visitor. Yet, even after scrubbing at his eyes, the thickets remained, its branches framing her grinning visage like a halo of umbral thorns. He pulled his shroud tighter about his shoulders instinctively.
“We aren’t all like you,” he muttered, refusing the bait. Or so he thought. No sooner had the words left his lips, then a spark leapt across the woman’s eyes like a muzzleflash in the dark. In his haste to sidestep the conversation completely, he had given up the decoy and instead sprung her well-hidden trap.
“Oh, but you are. Aren’t you?” Setting her tin cup aside, she leaned in close to the fire, its flames filling the crevices of her sharp, handsome features with inky voids. “You see, last we were in town, I went there to visit my number-one bird. But she had a prior engagement! Pity that.”
His heart froze in his chest. He’d been as careful as ever: paying the professional extra for her discretion, going in the dead of night, ensuring he hadn’t been followed. Not that there was any prejudice against such pastimes in the hamlet; folks were too desperate to make something liveable of their meager survival to care. But there was something mortifyingly shameful in a monster that couldn’t accept his natural isolation from the comforts of humanity.
And what did it matter to the huntress anyway? Was tearing out the seams of his wounds revenge for the accidental slight of denying her, her preferred company? He held his tongue so as not to damn himself further.
However, it seemed the musketeer needed no encouragement.
“Well then, I figured, could help myself just as well. Took a shortcut through the alley on my way home, and what did I see through the indecent peep slit between the curtains of her window, but her flawless, mahogany ass perched upon your hips.”
He sneered back at her mocking grin, worrying link after link of chain through his fingers to steady himself. So, she did mean to hold this over him. And yet, having worked several such expeditions together, she would have known he had very little worth extorting. Waiting for her to name her price was like waiting for the wheel to fall.
“So, I’ll ask again: go to the brothel often?”
“No,” he growled through gritted teeth. “The humiliation of unspoken judgments written in their eyes, coupled with the upcharge at the counter, make it a last resort for when drink fails me.”
The woman’s smug grin faltered. Leaning back from the fire, she tilted her head curiously, loose bangs spilling from her coiffure and swaying across her face. She was suddenly very quiet.
He studied her face in the silence, wary of being lured into another trap. However, she simply stared back at him, lost to some great, personal quandary. With a sigh, he willed his muscles to relax, one by one. His answer had taken her by complete surprise. She wasn’t blackmailing him; just a nymphomaniac who thought she’d found a kindred spirit.
“Sorry to disappoint. But as I said, we aren’t all like you: pretty and well-liked. Some of us face additional hurdles to even considering such things.”
The corner of her lip twitched back into a smile.
“‘Pretty’ is an opinion. As is ‘handsome’. And they say opinions are like assholes: wasted if kept all to oneself.”
“I don’t think that is what they say.”
“And I happen to find you quite handsome.”
He’d heard her clearly enough - with her bright, vivacious tone and lilting cadence - yet found himself unable to parse her meaning. It could be nothing more than blatantly insincere flattery, but to what purpose? How had they gotten here? He tried retracing the path of their conversation.
’What he said really got to you, eh?’ They had been discussing the tribulations of the expedition thus far. Or, more accurately, she had been speaking at him as his mind had wandered the tombs of regrets long passed. He hadn’t been paying her the slightest attention.
’Don’t let them under your skin, even a sliver. That’s how it roots.’ He’d brushed off her concern as purely practical. After all, as a backliner, she relied on the rest of them to keep their enemies at a safe distance. Their mental fitness was her direct concern.
’So, you go to the brothel often?’
There was the hitch, a snag in the thread where it no longer followed. Had she grown bored of his unresponsiveness and sought to get a rise out of him? No, his following consternation should have satisfied her then.
Slowly, as theory after theory fell, a most impossible explanation wormed its way to the surface.
“You can’t mean that.”
“Oh, but I do.”
“You’ve no idea the horrors my flesh harbors. You’ve yet to see even a fraction of it.”
The campfire between them trembled as a breeze passed through the clearing. A flicker of the fire’s light flashed across the woman’s toothy smirk, and in her eyes swam something too deep and too black to fathom. It felt all at once as alien as it did familiar.
“You’ve no idea the shape of things I’ve seen. Things lurking in shadowed brushes or just beyond your periphery. You’re no demon to me, Friend. Just another working companion. Although, companions of another sort we could be yet, if only you’d say the word.”
Her proposition, its purr, and the respite it promised from the nightmarish realm whose bowels they were mapping whipped his heart into a gallop. Doubly so, having realized its sincerity. The yearning for intimacy free of judgment, to embrace companionship without having to endure a partner’s thinly-veiled disgust at his naked form bubbled forth from the depths of his soul like an untended cauldron boiling over.
He wound one of his many chains around his hand and gripped it tightly to ground himself before answering.
“Perhaps. Should the stars align.” Glancing over his shoulder, he caught the highwayman returning from his task. The man perfectly ducked a fist from the hellion as he passed by, which she was pumping rhythmically into the air with her chanting. “Should the shroud of slumber see fit to serve as a surer curtain than the one you glimpsed me through that night.”
***
He bit down on his lip to stifle a groan as her lips slid further down the length of his cock. The further she went, the harder he had to dig his teeth into the flesh to keep quiet, until he swore he tasted blood. But he had no choice. Chance had given them their opportunity that night, but the highwayman had proven a predictably light sleeper on past expeditions. Even knowing that, the musketeer seemed hellbent on exercising the limits of his control with her relentlessly eager thoroughness. Compared to this, keeping the beast within him contained was duck soup.
He gripped his shroud in one hand - spread out beneath him since he’d initially bedded down alone - and in the other, a fistful of her hair. She purred as he lightly raked his nails across her scalp. Obscenities crowded his throat as she ran a palm over his stomach in reply. The friction each time one of her callouses caught a scab or scar was like the spark of flint against steel in his loins. Her off-hand was kept busy expertly working his shaft in tandem with her mouth and tongue.
Her technique - though ravenous in its intensity - kept a steady pace, holding him precariously balanced in a trance-like sweetspot that even the professionals of the brothel had never offered him. The musketeer’s rigorous sucking, stroking, and petting with her tongue bled into him an unfettered, raging want. He could sense she wasn’t racing to any finish line, but mercilessly hounding bliss, threatening to drive him careening over the cliffs like a horse whipped into a blind frenzy in her pursuit. Yet her grip on the reins kept him from tumbling over just yet.
How long had it been? He pushed the question aside, unwilling to allow his sorrows to taint this rare fruit he had been gifted. But a voice deep within him - hollow and numb - forced it upon him once more: ’How long has it been?’
’Two weeks,’ he told himself in haste, as though that could quell the resentment clawing its way up the back of his mind.
’No.’
He gritted his teeth against the impulse to lash out at himself in anger as pleasure sublimated into paranoia. He had to remain in control of this as well, he knew. One more beast to lash down in chains.
’Years,’ he finally admitted to the implied distinction. As he did, an odd sense of peace replaced the building rage. ’Countless years. A lifetime. Two, three, by the Light, I don’t know anymore! So be still a piece and let me have this - here and now - whatever it may be, that I might have a more precise answer to give.’
And so it did. With his silent confession, the bile rising in his throat began to ebb. Frustration gave way to clarity of sensation, and the abomination suddenly found himself drowning in the force of passion building to a crescendo inside of him. In the heady rush that swept over him, a quiet, strained moan escaped his lips before he could catch it.
As if she had been awaiting his signal, the musketeer whined around his dick, sending a tremulous vibration into every nerve. Releasing her grip and removing her hand, she plunged fully to the base of his cock, her lips brushing the skin of his groin as the last centimeter of his shaft disappeared into her mouth, and he lost himself completely to the light. Such an unrepentant hedonist was she, so overflowing with shamelessness to spare, that for a brief and glimmering moment the ecstasy they shared absolved him of all conscious sense.
***
Swallowing to clear her mouth, the musketeer threw back her head, enraptured. She gulped down lungfuls of the clear, midnight air as a well-deserved chaser. Pulling her hand out of her britches, she smirked in delight at the warm, musky scent. Tasting the slick that coated her middle two fingers, she then stuck the full length of both into her mouth to suck them clean. Her own, familiar flavor mingled on her nose and tongue with his in an intoxicating bouquet.
“Ah, nothing like the height of all existence to remind you what life’s worth, eh?” When she got no reply, she crawled up next to the man and loomed playfully over his limp and heaving form. “Do we have need of a necromancer? Has la petite mort claimed you?”
He scowled up at her through the shadows. At least, she imagined it was meant as a scowl: from her perspective, he was pouting awfully cutely. It was a feeble and adorable attempt at chastisement.
“I thought to leave our compatriots to their dreams,” he whispered hoarsely, “rather than alert them to ours.”
She smiled down at him.
“Ooh, a selfish streak? Well, I don’t mind. I’m yours for the remainder as well. If you’ll have me.”
For a moment, he studied her, searching her eyes for even a hint of disingenuousness. She allowed the seconds to stretch on, at home in his gaze, for there was nothing there for him to unearth.
Brushing her thorn-scratched, calloused fingers over the rough stubble along his jaw, she kissed him. With a shaking hand, he caressed the bare skin of her forearm in reply.
“Madness reigns in these lands,” he said. “So perhaps there’s little harm in giving into such foolish want. It is a trifling madness.”
Tucking herself into the nook of his shoulder, she sighed in contentment as he hesitantly wrapped his arms around her.
“And worse things to be than fools.”