1. Concilliabule – A secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot: Klaus x Character of your choice. ; )
2. Mamihlapinatapei: Cameron x Yancy
3. Cataglottism – Kissing with tongue: Sam x Theodore
4. Basorexia – An overwhelming desire to kiss: Gabrielle x Natalie
5, Grapholagnia – The urge to stare at obscene pictures: Daniel x Sam
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1. Concilliabule – A secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot, based on this prompt list. (Canon)
—
“This isn’t going to work.”
Klaus nodded, ignoring the chair in front of him just as both his companions were. Perhaps sitting at the table made everything seem too formal. Like this was a meeting. Formal meetings left records and trails.
Klaus preferred not to have those behind him whenever possible.
“Don’t just nod and then ignore me,” his companion said sharply. “This is not going to work, Klaus.”
“Of course it is, and you ought not to call me that where people could be listening.” Not using his given name had become habit to Klaus recently. Sometimes he wondered, if it became habit to everyone else as well, would he still be Klaus?
A roll of the eyes from his friend. “It’s not. Prophecies don’t work this way. You can’t just appoint someone to fill the narrative and call the prophecy fulfilled.”
“I fail to see why not,” Klaus countered, clasping his hands behind his back. “Nowhere does it say that external action cannot influence the future.”
An elaborate sigh. “Tell him,” Klaus’s friend said to their third. “Please explain to him that this is not how this works.”
“It’s not,” the third said, giving a shrug. “But at the same time…”
“Please don’t agree with him.”
“Waiting hasn’t helped. I don’t see that taking action can hurt. I mean, it can, fucking with prophecy is dangerous. But in this case I think it’s okay.”
Klaus agreed, and he smiled. “We have the means, thanks to poor Darla. There’s no harm in giving it a try.”
It wasn’t just a try, and Klaus suspected they both realized that. He did, at least. Klaus wasn’t in the habit of failing.
“Except for the harm to all those dead babies,” Klaus’s friend muttered, arms crossed now.
“It’s not like you to be so sentimental.”
“I don’t care about the babies. I care about us getting caught because you’re losing your patience, Klaus.”
Klaus gave another smile. The one thing he hadn’t lost all through this was his patience. “We won’t be caught. Please stop worrying.”
“He’s right,” the third said, watching Klaus carefully. “There’s no point in worrying, or in trying to dissuade him. He’s already done it, after all.”
Klaus hadn’t told them that part yet.
Another eye roll. “Of course he’s already done it. Because he knows we wouldn’t have let him if he was waiting for our approval.”
“It’s true.”
Klaus couldn‘t argue with that. “The time is right. The prophecy will soon be fulfilled.”
“More than one,” the third added, looking at something else now. “Two, three of them. There are a few that are going to…collide.”
“Oh, good,” Klaus’s friend drawled. “Good things always come from collisions.”
“The trick is to be driving as many of the carts as possible to control where the pieces fall,” Klaus told them both.
“That doesn’t even make sense, Klaus.” But that was said with a sigh, a resigned one. “Fine. It’s not like we didn’t always know we were eventually on a collision course.”
“We’ve always been on one,” the third agreed. “From the start.”
“That’s what war is,” Klaus said, nodding. “We will come out victorious, don’t worry.”
“Of course we will, you arrogant bastard,” his friend said, scornful. “That’s not in question. It’s whether the victory will mean any damned thing.”
Klaus nodded, because that was the question. But it would, it had to. Klaus would make sure it did.
—
2. Mamihlapinatapei – The look between two people in which each loves the other but is too afraid to make the first move. (Canon)
—
At first, Yancy hardly took notice of her, the witch who barged into the academy one day and inserted herself into the archmage’s office and insisted on being kept in the circle regarding the chosen one situation. He wasn’t surprised that the Grand Coven would send someone, though how they’d found out so quickly was somewhat vexing a question to ask.
It was at the meeting in the archmage’s office after Christopher’s attack that he first really paid attention to Cameron. She spoke with authority and power, and he was unsure if it was that that allowed her to be so scornful with such a figure as the archmage himself, or her prior friendship with him that caused him to give her such leeway. Everything about her bespoke a confidence that Yancy had no way of matching, especially in a foreign environment.
Their few encounters after that had cemented a certain…fascination for him. He was unsure whence it came, but come it did, and soon Yancy found himself wondering what Cameron would think of a given topic without her presence. He could hear her voice in his head, making pointed comments about whatever he was studying that day, correcting the texts when they were wrong as if she herself had written them.
It had been during one such moment that Yancy had started to think more about her as a person, about where she was from and what she had lived through, how she wasn’t so much older than him as it first appeared. How he would like to see her again.
Then Yancy realized he was being unduly influenced by Isaac, and tried to behave like the respectable adult he was rather than the teenager he’d been, now lost to the mists of time and age.
The problem was, the more Yancy thought about Cameron and tried not to think about her, the more he noticed that she seemed to be paying more attention to him that she did to most people. Which was to say that she knew he existed, evidenced by her looking in his direction while speaking to him, glancing at him while saying something that he was obviously going to proffer an opinion on, not immediately dismissing everything he said as if he hadn’t said it. Perhaps the strange fascination that held Yancy was also gripping Cameron, and Yancy couldn’t deny that the possibility intrigued, even excited him.
But he would do nothing. He had not the luxury of youth that Isaac had, making his intentions for people clear not only to them, but to everyone who paid the remotest of attentions to him. It was perfectly right and respectable that the lad express his sexuality in such a way as he see fit, and Yancy had no quarrel with that, especially not now that he’d the time to get used to it. But as much as that suited Isaac, it did not suit Yancy. He had always preferred a more reserved approach, even as a youngster. And it had always worked for him, so there was no call to change that.
Granted, Yancy was currently without a partner, but that was because his work took up all his time and he hardly had any to spare for a significant other.
He was walking through the halls of the tower, on his way upstairs to his study after his seminar, when he ran into Cameron, on the fifth floor, far from where he usually saw her. “Good day,” Yancy said, getting her attention.
Cameron turned her eyes on him, and for a moment their gazes locked. All movement in the hallway seemed to cease. He was struck with the feeling that they were communicating something, something neither of them could say aloud, something deep and important. That Cameron knew something important about him, and that he knew something important about her. And Yancy was certain that his fascination with Cameron was not one-sided at all.
Then the moment past, and Cameron nodded. “And to you as well,” she said, passing by him.
Yancy waited until she was out of sight before pausing in his step, glancing futility over a shoulder. That had been…most odd.
He really was far too influenced by Isaac.
—
3. Cataglottism – Kissing with tongue (Non-Canon)
—
“Why would I do that?” Sam asked, face contorting into a frown.
“Because your partner would like it, perhaps?” Theodore said, and Sam heard him set down his cup.
“Why? It sounds disgusting.” Having someone else’s tongue in his mouth was possibly the least appealing idea Sam had heard lately.
Rumour was that this man here in Merket knew about the stones that Sam was supposed to be after. Sam had let Henry talk him into diplomacy—again—and it was a fucking mistake. Henry’s ideas were always mistakes, because now he was stuck in this room with this strange man, and somehow the conversation had turned from stones to magic and the nature of power, to different types of power, to ways to influence people, to the efficacy of kissing and frankly Sam had no idea why or how and he didn’t like it.
“It is less so in practice than it sounds, I have heard,” Theodore said. He had a smooth voice, one that reminded Sam of honey, and voices weren’t supposed to sound like that. It was clearly practiced, and Sam wondered who the fuck practiced talking a certain way.
“You’ve heard?” Sam sneered.
“And experienced. I assure you, it is a most effective way of…indicating to your partner that you are interested in certain ways.”
“You could just tell him you want to fuck him,” Sam said, sighing. According to Henry, Theodore had a bunch of barely dressed little slaves running around, so he was hardly in a position to need to be circumspect in his desires. And neither was Sam.
“Yes,” Theodore agreed, sounding amused. “But this carries more…class, perhaps.”
“Sticking your tongue down someone’s throat has class?” This was stupid. Sam didn’t know why he was still having this conversation. Theodore didn’t answer, and Sam thought about it. This was so stupid, it was the kind of thing Henry might like. “Demonstrate.”
“Show you?”
“Yes,” Sam demanded. “I don’t believe you.”
“Very well.” Theodore’s voice had a smirk in it, but Sam chose to ignore that as he listened to Theodore stand, choosing to remain sitting. Theodore came over, leaned down until his breath was on Sam’s face. “Are you certain?”
“It’s just a fucking kiss, just do it.” Honestly, why were people so useless? Sam wished he weren’t so interested in this. And he was glad Henry was outside the door.
“As you wish,” Theodore said, and he leaned down and kissed Sam, his mouth covering Sam’s, his body covering Sam’s even as they didn’t touch beyond their lips, and Sam wished he’d stood as well.
When Theodore’s tongue probed at Sam’s lips, Sam recoiled a little, but that was the whole point of this exercise, so with an internal sigh, he parted them, let Theodore in.
It was strange, having his mouth invaded like that, and Sam immediately disliked it, a dislike that grew stronger the more he experienced it. His reaction, therefore, was to use his own tongue to push back, to push into Theodore’s mouth and try to wrestle him down, making a little noise of agitation as he tried.
It didn’t work, but the wrestle went on for a good minute before Theodore broke away, pulling back slightly. Sam only realized he’d tried to follow when he came to his senses and found himself halfway out of his chair.
Sam pushed him away, snapping his mouth shut and wiping his lips on the back of his sleeve.
“You didn’t like it?”
“It was…” Sam wasn’t sure. “I guess it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever felt. But no, I didn’t like it.”
“Well, my apologies, then,” Theodore said, sitting back down. “But now you can say you tried it, at least.”
Sam was hot in the face for no good reason and it was pissing him off. He wiped his mouth again. “Telling someone what you want is faster,” was all he said. Even as he did, though, he wondered what would happen if he did that to Henry. He’d been right, it was the sort of thing that Henry would probably like.
He’d try it on Henry tonight, just to find out.
“I suppose,” Theodore agreed. “Now, I think we were talking about power?”
—
4. Basorexia – An overwhelming desire to kiss (Non-Canon)
—
Gabrielle didn’t need this in her life.
She had enough problems without having to come all the way to the coast to deal with some piracy issue, and someone else really should be having this meeting with some local ship captains to strategize how to deal with it, and the ship captains really shouldn’t have so much say over what the battle plan was going to be, just because they were their ships.
Okay, maybe that last thing was fair. But Gabrielle would replace it with something else.
The woman who was speaking for all the ship captains had no right to be so attractive.
How did someone who spent all their time in ocean air keep her hair so shiny and nice looking? How did she have such soft skin? How did she run a ship with bedroom eyes like that? How did her boobs not fall out of that shirt?
Maybe she was magic. The boob thing gave it away. Gabrielle liked armour and heavy shirts, and when she wasn’t wearing those, dresses with structured bosoms to keep hers where they were supposed to be. Captain Natalie didn’t seem to have anything to keep hers in place, but they just sort of stayed there, in her half-laced shirt. It was unnerving.
Not that Gabrielle was staring or anything. She was paying total attention to the meeting.
“I don’t think five ships will be sufficient,” Natalie was saying, giving a slight shake of her head that had her hair rippling. Rippling. “I’d prefer seven, or ten if we can swing it.”
“You five are the only ships we have at the moment, Captain, and we can’t count on the pirates staying still until we have more,” Gabrielle reasoned. “With the fighting force we have, we can probably do it.”
“See, that probably worries me,” Natalie said back, leaning forward a little bit. In order not to look down, Gabrielle kept eyes firmly locked on her face. The problem was, her face was really nice too. Her lips were moving as they talked, which obviously they were, that was what lips did, but they were nice lips, and Gabrielle wished she hadn’t noticed that. “Given that if a ship sinks, everyone on it is likely to die, I’d really rather wait a few days until we can be assured more numbers.”
Gabrielle had taken this mission to get away from the capital and all her problems there. At least here she didn’t have to put up with Franz and Boey, or Owen and Gavin or half the knights, though Ashton and Warren had come, but she just found things for them to do, aside from each other, to keep them apart. But sex had followed her here too, and now it was affecting her.
Maybe the problem was actually that Gabrielle needed to get laid.
She’d never had sex with a woman before, except Olivia when they’d been younger. But never as an adult.
She wondered if Natalie liked women. She wondered what it would be like to kiss those lips. They looked very nice to kiss. Natalie’s first mate was her son, but just because she’d had sex with a man once didn’t mean she didn’t also like women. Maybe she should ask.
Now that she was thinking about kissing Natalie, it was all that was in her mind and for a moment, Gabrielle forgot what she was doing.
“Your Majesty?”
Gabrielle blinked, shaking her head a bit. “Right. You’re right, Captain. I think we’d all feel better going into this with as much force as we can. We can afford to wait two more days—if more ships arrive in that time, we’ll use them as well. If not, we have no choice but to attack with what we have.”
Natalie gave a nod, smiling a little. “That sounds good to me. Thank you for being so reasonable.”
“This is your domain, I’m just visiting,” Gabrielle said, smiling back and trying to look like she wasn’t looking at Natalie’s lips.
Natalie laughed. “Speaking of which, I’d like to invite you to dinner on my ship tonight. I’m sure you’ll want to see the ship you’ll be riding into battle, no?”
“I…” Gabrielle swallowed a little, trying not to let her mind be filled with a lot of dirty thoughts. God, she was just as bad as Gavin. “I am honoured by your invitation, Captain. I accept.”
“Excellent. I’ll see you this evening, then.”
“Yes,” Gabrielle agreed. “I’ll see you then.”
Gabrielle would also see Natalie a lot before then, in her imagination while she wondered what it would be like to kiss the captain.
—
5. Grapholagnia – The urge to stare at obscene pictures (Non-Canon)
—
“It’s in here somewhere.”
“Okay.” Daniel looked around. “But it’s a really big library. Here somewhere is a lot of books to look in.”
“Then get looking,” Sam told him, irritable. Sam was always irritable, except when he was killing people. Daniel still wasn’t sure what to make of him. He was powerful in a blustery way that Daniel had learned to recognize as being a front, even if he did have the power to back it up. It was very strange.
“Do you have any idea what part of the library it might be in?” Daniel asked. The specific book Sam wanted seemed very broad to Daniel, so he wasn’t sure where to even look.
“Do I give the impression of being someone who reads a lot?” Sam snapped.
Daniel looked at him, looked Sam up and down, glancing at his eyes, unfocused. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Just find the damned thing.”
“Okay, okay.” Daniel sighed, went to the closest shelf. Apparently he was Sam’s librarian now.
Well, Daniel liked books, so that wasn’t so bad. Sam went and sat in one of the chairs, obviously intending to just sit there until Daniel found what he wanted.
He really had no idea how big this place was. It went on for quite a while, and there was a second level.
Daniel read the titles on the spines of the books, carefully searching for the one Sam wanted. It wasn’t too arduous, though every so often there would be a book with no title and he’d have to get it off the shelf and check inside to see what it was, which took longer.
“Why do you even have all these books?” Daniel asked as he looked, to fill the silence that was made strange by Sam just sitting there.
“They belonged to Solomon,” Sam said, tilting his head over to where Daniel was. “I don’t imagine he’d read most of them. He just liked to have things.”
“He must have read some of them,” Daniel muttered, taking another titleless book off the shelf and looking through it. It was a description of plants. He put it back. “There’s no point in having this many books if you aren’t going to read any of them.”
“I didn’t ask him before he died,” Sam grumbled. “Read them yourself if you’re that worried about it.”
Daniel smiled. “I will.”
Sam made a noise and Daniel went back to looking. He wished he knew what to make of Sam. Were they friends? Did he like Sam? Did Sam like him? Was he here for a reason or had Sam just been bored the day he’d taken Daniel here? According to everyone, Sam killed people who bored him, so it wasn’t clear why Daniel was still alive, since Sam hardly seemed to be interested in him most of the time.
Everyone was afraid of Sam, but Daniel mostly felt bad for him. He hadn’t asked to be born in the situation he had and be raised the way he had been. It didn’t excuse what he’d chosen to do with his life, but maybe because Daniel had also done a lot of things that people would call bad, he sympathized a little bit.
On the other hand, he had a feeling there was a whole side of Sam that he hadn’t seen beyond the grumpy, kind of sharp boy sitting here. Maybe he was scarier at other times than Daniel had seen him so far.
Another book without a title. Daniel sighed.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Daniel said, taking it off the shelf. “Some of the books don’t have anything written on them, so I keep having to…”
Well, that wasn’t what he’d expected.
“Having to what?” Sam demanded.
“Having to take them off the shelves and look in them,” Daniel muttered, looking down at the picture he’d opened to in this book. It was…very detailed. A very detailed picture of two people having sex.
Flipping the page proved that there was another picture on the next page, and then another. It was a whole book of very graphic illustrations of different kinds of sex.
Face burning red and glad that Sam couldn’t see him, Daniel kept looking down at the pages, not able to tear his eyes away.
“Did you find it?”
“No,” Daniel said, shaking his head, tearing his eyes away from the book, intending to put it back on the shelf. And remember where it was so he could look at it later.
“Then why are you all quiet all of the sudden?”
Oops. “No reason.”
“You’re a liar.”
That was true, and Daniel sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“If there’s one thing that’s going to piss me off, it’s keeping secrets from me for no reason, Daniel,” Sam warned, half-rising from his chair. “Especially about something stupid.”
Daniel watched him, wondering if Sam would really get violent over a book. He kind of reminded Daniel of Marcus, albeit a much more intense and violent version. “It’s got pictures in it, that’s all.”
“Pictures.”
“Of people. Um. having sex. And stuff.”
“Oh.” Sam paused, a strange expression crossing his face. Then he sat down again, with a sigh. “And now you’re distracted by it.”
“Maybe…a little,” Daniel admitted, glancing down at the image in front of him, in which three people were contorted.
Sam huffed. “Look at it, then. My book can wait.” He smirked a little bit. “Wouldn’t want your hormones to go unanswered.”
Beet red, Daniel considered refusing, but the lure was too great. “Okay.”
Sam snickered. “Should I give you some privacy?” he teased.
“No, that’s okay!”
“So you’ll just touch yourself right here in front of me? Didn’t figure you for the type.”
“I…” Daniel didn’t see much of a way out of this that wasn’t going to embarrass him. “I wasn’t going to…”
“If you say so,” Sam said, still smiling. “Come sit down, then.”
Feeling like he might combust, Daniel did as he was told, sitting in the chair beside Sam’s and opening the book on his lap, which wasn’t as flat as it normally was.
“See anything you like?” Sam asked after a second.
Daniel looked over at him, biting his lip. And he paused, realizing something. Sam was flushed in the face too. He was teasing Daniel because he was interested in the book too.
Oh, well that changed a few things. Daniel looked down at the picture in his lap. “Yeah. This one’s of two men, one of them has the other pressed against the wall, and he’s…fucking him from behind,” Daniel said, trying not to stumble over the words he didn’t often string together aloud. “And biting his neck.”
Sam smiled. “Bet that hurts.”
“The other man seems to like it. He’s hard too, you can see in the picture,” Daniel said, mostly watching Sam. He’d been right, Sam was interested. He flipped the page. “This one’s got three men, one of them is on his hands and knees…”
Sam listened attentively as Daniel went on describing the pictures for him, not hiding that he was as hard as Daniel. They never did go back to looking for that other book.
—
How Best to Use a Sword 