I’m in love with Croik’s Entangledverse AU, and so I fucked around in it a little.
This is about four pages long but it was so hard to finish, omg. Arthur/KIY (John). Basically eldritch PWP. External POV, tentacle sex, things that aren’t sex as sex.
Read more: Malevolent Fic: Music Under His SkinThe dancer and her sisters dance for their Lord to the music Arthur plays for them.
She is neither the boldest nor the shyest, the bravest nor the meekest, nor the kindest nor the cruelest. She cares only to dance. To worship with her art their great Lord Who is the horror of absolute beauty, Who is the terror in total surrender, Who is the perfect agony that is the knife of one’s mind turned upon itself. With her body she speaks her love, her fear, her submission, her one will which is to enact His will.
But the steps come hard, for their musician resists offering up his own worship.
The stubborn creature denies his submission to their all-consuming God, playing them instead the music of his native Earth. Its styles are as homely as its creator: plain, nearly simplistic, and orderly, designed for mortal love and loss, children’s laughter and lovers’ tears. The ruthless structures of it are mystifying. Humans must be a mad species, to so enjoy putting their art into straitjackets.
It does, at least, explain a great deal about Arthur, based on what she’s seen of him.
He’s a creature of violent passions. How many times now has she witnessed it, sitting at the foot of their King’s throne? Their ruinous King Himself baptized him and washed away the tatters of his old life, first in blood and suffering and then in ecstasy and desire.
But he smothers that animal beauty, chaining his nature down deep in the pit of him, and pretends he can leash the cataclysms of passion their King wreaks within him—delusional, as well as blasphemous—and here they are, bodies throbbing with the effort of balancing on the savage silences of his denial, their feet stinging from the cutting fineness where despite himself, his memories whisper of their Master’s hold on him.
Does it please their sybaritic King to watch his dancers struggle for love of Him? She drops from one note to flip to another, higher above, her body straining to catch the shining strand of it before gravity drags her down. Perhaps it’s a test. Who is she to resent a challenge in their King’s name? To suffer in her art is also her offering, is it not? To hook her fingertips into the glittering shards of Arthur’s songs, to dig her soft toes in till they bleed from the sharp edges of the frequencies. To show her Lord her worshipful love through both her grace and her pain.
Their most adored Master, who reclines, basking in the beauty of the art they all weave as offering to Him. His eyes glitter within the darkness of his hood at the sight of their struggles, their sufferings, their imperfection.
She couldn’t be more shocked when He takes pity on them, and rises to go to the musician.
Long pale fingers capable of a thousand years of pain curl over his small human shoulders, engulfing them, as the King of Nightmare bends low to pour His voice directly in his ear. “You’re still holding back, Arthur.”
Arthur. His name suits him. A breath and a hiss, sound stripped to its feral bones.
Even tamed to their beautiful Lord’s hand, he hesitates to come to it. He doesn’t falter in his playing nor turn away from his music, but his voice is sharp as he says, “Perhaps I want to hold back, have you considered that?”
Her mind recoils at that blasphemy. But it isn’t hers to question when their dread King simply laughs. “What a liar you are, Arthur.” Those divine hands lift away to bracket his form. Under no touch, the fastenings of Arthur’s robe come open over his chest and down his arms and the cloth falls away, sliding down from his shoulders to bare his scarred body to the waist.
“You still fear to release yourself,” their sublime Master says with a gentleness that normally heralds his deepest cruelties.
Instead, his seductive embrace rises about Arthur’s body. She shudders in her dance, caught between jealousy and pleasure at its brushes over his skin. Humans are emphatically creatures of the flesh, and Arthur can’t help the carnality that infuses his music. Her steps come easier, turning sultry and swaggering in time to the tendrils that wriggle lasciviously deeper beneath the cloth.
He tells them when the King enters him. His body hides nothing from a dancer, whose first language is movement. His back pulls taut. His soft breaths keep the rhythm as their King claims His pleasure. They dance now with the subtle shifts of his muscles as their all-consuming Lord moves in and out of him.
When the first moan escapes him, his voice is lovely, rising startled and light as a bird’s morning call. From the sturdy stability of that note, she leaps into the air with all her sisters to become those birds, shy and ready to be coaxed to their Master’s hand.
He tosses his head back, breath huffing through his parted lips. The notes of his song ring tense, almost discordant. He would pull away from the piano, she can sense, but their Lord wraps two tendrils tight around his wrists and forearms to trap his hands at the keys.
“Play,” the King commands. His voice is both threat and promise.
Arthur draws in a gasping breath. “Hastur,” he breathes.
The sacred name is a blow upon the air. It swallows all other sound. For a long, suspended moment, they float upon it, cut loose from all baser laws of nature.
Arthur’s whimper is the first sound that returns after the fading of their God’s holy name. The second is the delicate simmer of music welling through his flesh at the King’s sinuous movements inside him.
They who dance on the waveforms that lap against the walls of the world and make them ring can hear it, the first faint calls of that seething heart he’s kept chained and gagged as their bewitching Lord finds His way to the place where Arthur’s art lies locked within him. At those furled tender gates to his most intimate self, their King lays siege.
She reaches out to a sister and they twine their fingers, roll their bodies against one another to the faint echoes of that inner song. They dance its yearning—their own yearning—for union with the one who gave it rebirth.
He fights to hold himself closed, this fool untrusting creature. But there is no separation from their King, their God who is all. “Please,” he gasps, but he is not released.
“Open, Arthur,” their King murmurs. His words are ruthless, and more intimate than a touch, coaxing at the wet secret folds of Arthur’s self. “Yield to it. You can feel how it wants out.”
Penetrated to the doors of his innermost self, deeper than his body, those alluring tendrils lick and kiss at his interlapped folds, sealed tight over that storm-tossed heart he keeps chained and gagged. At their ministrations, it quivers for them, and they take advantage, catching at his softening edges to pluck and pry him open.
His head drops forward with a moan; no longer able to hold it up, sweat dripping from his temple.
Wound with him into the laces of his song, they tremble with him as, body shaking, he bends panting over the keys, hair tumbled and and curled with sweat in the seething embrace of their God who claims them all.
“It’s ached within you for so long, straining to be free. Release the knot within you and unbind yourself.”
Arthur can bear the full force of the King’s will as no other mortal can. Their rapacious Lord takes a dark joy in the lack of need to be careful with him. He drapes like a cloak over Arthur’s body, half swallowing him into His divine darkness—the realms of hallowed madness beneath His outer layers, those which He keeps shrouded from all whom He does not intend to destroy or to bless with final ecstasy.
The King Himself, His very own soul, pressed to Arthur’s skin, and deeper yet. Their Lord’s long fingers encircle his throat to the nape of his neck and pull him back into it.
“Good, Arthur,” He whispers, in a voice that nonetheless carries to them all. “Let it out.”
Arthur gives a single sob of surrender, of longing, and their Master’s madness envelops him and tears him open all the way to the dreaming core of him.
That sound. That one sob that is his last protest, and all his desire for what he resists.
The dancer lets that single, all-encompassing note flow through her body, curving her into an arabesque. Suspended upon the perfect grace of it, she hangs, jealous and grateful in equal measure, and wonders—is it that only he can survive this gift? Or simply that only he dares to try?
His music is fractal. All his love and hate. All his need and his exquisite, improbable love, they unfold from that single note, blooming ever outward through his flesh from that single fear, that single consuming need. It uncurls in ever-developing, ever-refining forms through his body and mind into all its movements. Oh. Oh, this is worship.
Unfettered, they dance. Arthur plays for them wantonly, his music a wild fountain now pouring from the center of him. She sees, hears, feels him try to stop, appalled at himself, but the torrent is relentless. They who live in music can hear his body sing in its very substance, its vibrations humming against the air and winding together with the piano.
As he approaches the crescendo, she spins in a glorious pas de deux with her sisters, limbs stretched long and sensuous to tremble in the frenzied ecstasy that threatens to drown him. At its peak, the flowing notes of the piano break as he cries out. His voice is high and loud, echoing up into the vaults of the room.
In its wake, silence falls, except for Arthur’s harsh breathing and the trembling of his body as his music ransacks him with no outlet.
The last ripples of music dissolve beneath her feet. The dancer falls from the air to collapse in a pile with her sisters on the floor beneath, their own flights of ecstasy breaking to leave them shaking from exertion and joy.
Thick, inviting golden limbs slither across the floor to His dancers. When she reaches out to take one, to let it pull her into its warm, possessive hold, she looks up to their King to find Him cradling Arthur in His many-armed grasp.
Arthur lays draped in that divine embrace, heavy-lidded and panting. Glinting amber-gold claw tips run delicately through the sweat-damp hair fallen over Arthur’s forehead. Under their great God’s touch, he shivers in the grip of the music that rises up to hum beneath his skin.
Her King glances up from him to meet her gaze, radiating satisfaction.
She meets her God’s transcendent gaze and contemplates mortal daring.