jsmn_kinkmeme | ☆ Round One!

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☆ Round One!

Welcome to the first round of the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Kink Meme at

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Grant followed Strange back to the little garret where he was lodging. Merlin had put enough of a head start between himself and Grant that he was always just out of sight, though Grant presumed he could only be a little way ahead. Grant marched across Venice's little picturesque bridges and through its atmospherically gothic alleyways with the same wonder and reverence he had travelled through most of Europe, that is, only paying them attention if they proved themselves an obstacle.

Damn Merlin! And damn himself for chusing to care about his fate to such a degree. It was a very bad thing for a soldier to let himself be so terribly invested in the continuing survival of another. As much as the Ancient Greeks bought into that sort of thing, he thought, it was not - here he was obliged to push a rather florid-faced reveller out of his path and increase his pace - it was not the way of the British Army.

It was impossible to tell how many minutes he had been behind Merlin in the end, because it was impossible to tell how long Merlin had been standing there, head bowed, arms braced against his desk, looking at the little dead mouse in a glass bottle sitting upon the wooden surface. He had his back to Grant, and did not move or show any sign that he had heard anyone approach until he spoke, rather quietly.

"Do you know I was never, while serving under the Duke of Wellington, asked if what I was doing was right?" Here he paused. "It was a means to an end, and the end was a good one, and we were all satisfied by that, weren't we. Or rather we did not say anything out loud. Even when my hands began to shake."

Merlin spoke this while still bowed over the desk, rather than to Grant, who was stood behind him. He lifted a hand, which trembled. "Like they were outraged at me."

Grant walked to the desk and leant lightly against it, so he could look Merlin in the face. He looked more lucid at this moment that he had in the last few hours which Grant had been in his company. Grant crossed his arms, and shrugged. "Many soldiers develop that trembling...It is usually the ones who think too much." Here he looked pointedly at Merlin.

Merlin shot him a sharp look. "I am a magician, I must think of magic."

"And I am a soldier. I do not think of killing."

Merlin leant heavier against the desk, his fingers curling into his palms until he was resting on his knuckles, his hands tight fists. "How?"

"One - simply puts it away. Regrettable, but..."

"A means to an end." Merlin was looking at him with a curious hard glint in his eye. "And nobody asks you if it is right."

"You cannot make me out to be a hypocrite that easily."

"I think I just did." Merlin was now preoccupied with arguing with Grant. He was always the most easy to lead astray when he was aiming to win an argument. "Sir, do you dislike that this is morally wrong, or are you merely uncomfortable that it is not natural?"

"It is one of the things I am uncomfortable about." He could not lie about this. Death was a natural and inevitable part of existence. War, unfortunately, was as well. Resurrection was not. "You could do what you pleased to Napoleon's armies, I had no great affection for them, you may have noticed. But it is not hoards of French intent on conquering Europe that we're speaking of, it is your wife." Here Grant, rather haltingly, placed his hand on Merlin's shoulder. "And - it's also your mind."

"A necessary loss." A phrase taken directly from Wellington. He shrugged his shoulder away from Grant's grip.

Grant withdrew his hand as if where it had been resting was hot to the touch, and cursed his own awkwardness. "Would Arabella think so?" This landed a blow, Merlin flinched at the words, and he would have regretted them if the situation had not been so grave.

Merlin pushed away from the desk with a violent shove and turned about. "Do not dare presume to tell me what my wife would think! Currently she thinks nothing. She is dead. At least she would be alive to have an opinion on it."

"Pulled out of heaven, to watch you reduced to such a state. It hardly seems kind." Merlin was very much agitated now, and Grant wondered if he had played his gambit too far - instead of shocking him back to reason he had distressed him towards another fit of madness.

Merlin grabbed at his hair, his eyes were wild, desperate even, but without that glassy fixity they had. They now seemed to be looking directly at Grant, rather than somewhere beyond him. "What would you have me do?"

"Delay." Grant held a hand out, as if he were approaching a startled horse, he realised. "Return to England with me. Consult another magician, if you must. I know it feels as if this is you have only one choice but it is the grief. You may chuse differently. I would have you chuse differently."

Merlin shook his head. "No." He went for the desk, for the little bottle containing the mouse suspended in a yellowish liquid. He had stepped away though, and Grant had stayed leant against the desk, so it was an easy matter to swipe the bottle out of Merlin's reach and hold it poised at his own lips.

It was Merlin's turn to hold his hands aloft as if Grant were a horse bucking and liable to do damage. "No. Please." He had an expression of panic but his words were soft.

"And why not?" Grand asked, the bottle still held in front of him. "If it is good enough for you, why not I?"

"I would not have you do this." Merlin attempted to take a shuffling step forwards, but Grant twitched the bottle towards his mouth and brought Merlin quite short. They held these poses for a few moments. Merlin reaching his arms out, palms faced towards Grant, imploring; Grant looking at Merlin over the top of the foul-smelling bottle.

"Not a terribly nice feeling, is it?" Said Grant. Merlin had the good grace to wince. "I told you before that if you are so set upon this the I would not let you do it alone. Now you may have this. I will give it you. But only after I have taken my own half."

Merlin shook his head.

"Alternatively I can throw it out the window and into the canal. Hopefully it isn't so potent as to send all of Venice mad, but in all honesty I doubt that anybody would notice." His mouth twisted in a grim smile. "They are Italians."

He glanced at the bottle. He privately asked himself if, in reality, this was something he was willing to do. It seemed an empty threat when it first occurred to him, but now, looking between Merlin and the bottle he found, surprizingly, that he had the very real intent to carry it through, if necessary. He wondered at that. Merlin must have seen that it was not merely his bluff being called, he looked quite grey.

"Leave."

"No."

Merlin lunged for him. He was taller than Grant, certainly lankier in limb, but Grant wrapped an arm about Merlin as he crashed into him and endeavoured to keep the bottle out of reach, at arm's length. From this proximity he could smell the mustiness and sweat, and a smell he had always thought of to himself as desperation, the smell of a man many days out in the field and fighting for his survival. This close he took the opportunity to take his free hand and grip the hair at the back of Merlin's head, and stare at him directly in the face, mere inches apart. "You loved your wife. You love her still. But she is dead, and you must let her go."

Merlin shook his head. "I cannot."

"And why? Because you miss her?"

"It is." And with this Grant could feel Merlin drop in his arms, the tension releasing from his limbs. He shook his head, and looked at Grant, very close. His eyes were wet and Grant realized with a start that Merlin was crying. At the same time his mouth twisted into a grim sort of apologetic smile. "I am responsible."

Grant did not immediately answer him, and they stayed in that odd tableau for a few moments. Merlin held in Grant's grip, half supported by it, the bottle in Grant's hand, held away with an extended arm; their faces close enough that Grant could feel Merlin's hot, somewhat garlicky breath upon his face. Once he spoke, it was both as if at the end of a long deliberation and all at once. "Yes. Yes I think I understand that." He swallowed, and was very aware of the clicking noise of it in his throat. He breathed in sharply through his nose. "But you should not be alone."

Merlin's head dropped forward, til they found their foreheads rested against one another. The hand Grant had holding the back of Merlin's head had no tension in it, and was now merely resting against Merlin, holding him there. There was, however, a tension very high in his chest, almost a buzzing sensation below his throat. His stomach felt very tight. For a moment, he wondered if Merlin was doing magic upon him, until he realised, remembered what this was.

"Please." Grant wondered what Merlin was pleading for, whether he was asking for Grant or for the bottle, but Merlin leant in past the imperceptible distance between them and kissed him. At first quite softly, so that Grant could feel the dry chafing of his lips, but once he felt Grant's own hand once again, quite against his will or reasoning, tighten in Merlin's hair and pull him in closer, Merlin pushed against him with more ferocity, indeed pushing him backwards into the desk, where they collided, sending bottles jingling and rolling to the floor.

Grant reached out behind him and put the bottle he was holding onto the table, unwilling to break away from Merlin at this exact moment to throw it from the window. With his hand now free he was at liberty to wrap it about Merlin, hand at the bottom of his back. Merlin shivered, as he had done before. Grant found him an odd mix of yielding and tense, undecided if he wanted to push against Grant or pull him in, and thus trying to do both. He felt a fluttering against his neck, then there was the trembling hand against the side of his jaw, which cupped it and pulled him in, their lips and teeth pushed together, the discomfiting feeling of Merlin's tears rubbing off onto his own face.

Merlin pulled away for a moment, ripping an up gentlemanly noise from Grant at the lack of him, but Merlin returned with a deliberate focus, pressing his lips against Grant's, slightly parted, and resting his tongue against Grant's lips. He could feel the insistent pressure of it, and parted his lips, welcoming it in, feeling it slide against his own, an entirely alien sensation but almost instinctive as well. It was intoxicating and it was not enough. He pulled his hand round to rest on Merlin's side, pushed him forwards and then span him about, pushing him roughly against the desk, so that Merlin was now pinned there, the desk at the back of his legs, and the length of Grant pushed against his front.

For a dizzying moment, Grant wondered if this was Merlin's madness, if he had somehow stumbled within its orbit, and it now had a hold on him. If it had, he concluded, then Merlin had an exceptionally wide orbit, it having pulled him here all the way from England. Still, he certainly felt not entirely in control of his actions, somewhere outside of himself. But there were forces other than magic or madness that were capable of that, he thought with a small surge of terror, and as if spurred on by this he leant to get a hand behind the crook of Merlin's knee, raised it, and shoved Merlin back onto the desk with a certain amount of force, so he was sat upon it, his inner thigh pressed against Grant's hip. Grant's hand was still in the crook of Merlin's knee, both trapped there and holding him in place.

Merlin murmured something, though it came out as more of a groan, and could have been 'should not have come'.

"You should not be alone." Grant answered him, as he did not know what else to say. He was beyond much higher thinking, certainly beyond deception, and this phrase seemed to be at the very root of his thinking. It was the only thing that sprang clearly and readily to his mind.

Merlin put his hands either side of Grant's head, and then pulled away to look at him. Grant himself was much too dazed to think of much witty to say, though he was sure at this point it was usually his wont to do so. Merlin looked at him with such a curious expression though, and let out a short, noiseless breath of laughter, though there was no delight in it. Indeed he almost looked as if he were beseeching forgiveness. He placed a hand on Grant's chest.

The blow felt not like a tactile object, but like a concentrated punch of gale-force wind that struck him where Merlin's hand had been rested. For what could only have been a fraction of a moment his feet parted with the ground before he fell, skittering and rolling across the room.

He came to a halt quite dizzy, quite unsure of anything, merely from the shock of it. He looked up to see Merlin sat on the desk, bottom lip red and swollen, staring back at him. He looked sorry for it, but there was a tightness about the jaw that Grant had come to associate with Merlin steeling himself to do something. Grant went to rise, but found his limbs quite unwilling. He was all over pins and needles, and could not move, and come to think of it could not remember how one were to move if one had set to it. This, he realised, was magic. This is what it was to have magic done to you. He did not care for it.

"You said," Merlin started, softly, "that I may chuse differently"

Although Grant's limbs were stubbornly unwilling to move, he found he could speak. "If you want it."

"I cannot want it. I am sorry." He reached for the bottle that Grant had placed back on the desk, lifted it to his lips and had almost drained its contents by the time Grant overcame his surprize and cried for him to stop. Merlin threw the bottle with the remainder of the tincture, and the sad, grey little mouse now slumped unsuspended, against the wall where it shattered.

This is beautiful. Painful, but absolutely beautiful.

Thank you!

Why have you done this thing to me.

YOU LOVE IT

Ohh, ouch. Always nice to see more of these two, even though their story has little chance of a happy ending.

this is so, so good--sharp and clear and really true to the dynamic

That was glorious.

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☆ Round One!

FILL: Strange/Grant - Venice (3/3)

Re: FILL: Strange/Grant - Venice (3/3)

Re: FILL: Strange/Grant - Venice (3/3)

Re: FILL: Strange/Grant - Venice (3/3)

Re: FILL: Strange/Grant - Venice (3/3)

Re: FILL: Strange/Grant - Venice (3/3)

Re: FILL: Strange/Grant - Venice (3/3)

Re: FILL: Strange/Grant - Venice (3/3)