A/N: My first complete attempt at writing so-called "smut." It's not really dirty, so it's probably not smut in the completest sense of the word. It's just highly sensual in an M-rated type way. Along with being almost mercilessly realistic and slightly humorous. And sad.

It didn't win any prizes, but it got some positive feedback. I've minorly revised a few sentences, so it's not quite as embarrassing as it used to be.

If you've read Kay's novel, you'll know what this is about. If you haven't, I highly suggest you do. And yes, by the way, that book really is as good as everyone says it is. I finally got my hands on it after two years of waiting and hearing endless praise about two months ago, which is why I was inspired to write this, compelled to do so by the heavy implication for but complete lack of any sort of sex scene. I felt...deflated. So I wrote part of this as a sort of artistic drabble, but then I expanded upon it for the Smutfest Challenge, thinking perhaps I could try my hand at actually writing a complete sex scene for the first time in my entire life. Usually if I try, they peter out and I get writer's block, but thankfully, this got carried to term.


It was interesting to note, thought Erik blandly whilst lying on his back in bed, how extraordinarily light he felt, as though his soul were floating a little above his body, held by threads. Poetic, no?

"Curse you, Nadir," he snapped wearily as the older olive-skinned man entered the room again. "I do wish that you would simply leave me to die peacefully."

"Ah, but you forget, Erik," the man said calmly, "such an act is not in my nature. I intend to look after you until your body expels its last breath, which," he glanced at him apologetically, "will not be very far into the future, I am afraid."

Erik coughed painfully, leaning his head back and gritting his teeth at the tightness in his chest, making his whole body as taut as a pulled string.

"Do you think you should eat?" Nadir asked. "I brought you an apple."

"After his encounter with an apple, Sir Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity," said Erik dizzily. "Will I discover a new law, do you think?"

"You're getting worse," said his Persian friend.

Erik sighed.

"I suppose," he muttered, "that you think yourself very noble, Daroga...not letting me die alone."

"On the contrary," began the former chief of Persian police, but stopped abruptly, his body tensing as a small clatter erupted from the outer room.

Erik's eyes flashed open and he attempted to sit up, but Nadir pushed him back down. "Don't dare to think of rising, Erik," he snapped. "I shan't let you kill yourself any sooner than your body intends. And now, be good enough to let me investigate the noise...no doubt it was that damnable cat of yours..."

Erik snarled, but fell back down on the bed in an exhausted heap. He gasped for breath, fighting back the urge to make sounds of pain. Interesting to note as well how daring someone could become in his presence when he was confined to bed, nearly helpless in his final throes.

Nadir was gone for what seemed an age. Mercifully, the tightness in Erik's chest was fading away, and he felt a bit giddy, lightheaded, as if he had gotten himself drunk on a whole bottle of fine wine, and then his ears heard something that made him wonder if he was experiencing pre-mortem hallucinations.

It was a voice. A female voice. Christine's voice. Sounding as though she felt on the verge of a breakdown.

He laughed, weakly. Surely not.

The voice grew louder, but he was slipping into a half-sleep, eyes slitted with pain at the dull ache that yet throbbed within his chest cavity...and good Lord, his stomach sporadically felt as though it were going to spew forth all the tea in Russia.

His vision went dark, and he slept without dreams.

The first thing he noticed, through bleary delirium, was lips.

Soft lips, he thought, how very soft they were, and how warm, how delightfully pliant against his thin, translucent skin. He even thought he felt a tongue flick out momentarily to arrest an errant tear, and the moist heat of that shocking pressure, however brief, sent a shiver of painful delight coursing through his veins.

His mouth parted a bit, blood rushing to his pasty cheeks, and before he had time to consider how weak he felt, how like a dying man, he turned his head to feebly capture that delicious, tight space with his own, and groan with bitterness but also with seething pleasure.

He heard a soft female voice saying unintelligible words through their kiss, and he realized that "Please" was the only word that would issue from his own lips as he moved them and gasped, over and over, a damnèd litany, but so, so sweet.

His hand twitched, feeling deadened by the last attack. He must move it. He must...

Oh, all right. The other hand, then.

Long white fingers found her dress, grasped the material with an intensity that he was surprised hadn't frightened her into bolting, and they began to dance within the dress's folds, searching for crevices, for warm places where they could hide.

They first came upon the smoothness of her belly beneath the soft fabric, and his eyes closed in ecstasy, even as his fingers trembled, saying No, no, you mustn't.

They brushed across the curve of her breast, and a gasp-moan elicited itself from his shuddering lips, while his breath quickened. She tried to shush him, calm him, but couldn't. His fingers had curled around the delectable roundness of that glorious work of art, firm yet yielding, and he wanted to put it in his mouth, to let his tongue wander around the pert rosebud that even now his fingertips delighted in touching.

He weakly pulled a bit so that she was closer, her warmth maddening and enveloping him like the cloying aphrodisiacal sweetness of ylang-ylang perfume.

He felt her shiver, and a vague instinctual memory that wasn't so much memory as a shadowy imprint upon his brain of another breast, similar to this, so very long ago, made him flinch, dreading being thrown upon the floor again.

It was déjà-vu, he decided, and valiantly attempted to think no more about the dreadful smoke-memory, which even now was fading away as his lips brushed the soft smoothness of the top of her swell, and trembling fingers fumbled with buttons and thrust clothing aside so that he could taste the seductive space between, bury his face into it as if he were a lover.

Wait, wait, his mind groggily deduced as a haze of pleasure descended upon him from such a simple, powerful, absolutely lovely activity as resting his head between his beloved's breasts, you are a lover, now, are you not?

He thought he might have giggled, drunkenly. He wasn't sure. The morphine had worn off an hour ago, so there was no question of his being under the influence of that.

It was a kind of drunkness that only he could feel, he was sure, dizzily in love, feeling as though he could fly, shout, scream, perhaps weep a bit from ecstasy.

He heard his name being tremulously murmured, and he mumbled something incomprehensible from his lovely nesting-spot. God, but this would be a perfectly spectacular place in which to die, all surrounded by her soft flesh, feeling it against his naked face. The intimacy of it, the near-perverseness that he felt from such blasphemy as this, almost made him die on the spot.

But he couldn't die yet. Not...not without...

No. He could, he thought hazily, allowing an intoxicated smile to creep upon his lips while his eyes stayed closed in dreamy delight. He could, for all intents and purposes, bear dying if only to have experienced this. All saints be damned, he could have borne dying if only to have experienced that first warm, wet kiss. Such a kiss!

Oh, she was cold. Warm was her flesh, but she was shivering. He could feel the cold all around him, as though his senses had been newly attuned to the difference between a woman's titillatingly warm body and the freezing underground air.

He giggled again, this time at the word titillating, mixed with the extraordinary heady feeling of being surrounded by her flesh, and felt her squirm a bit. Ah, she was still cold, the poor thing...

"Forgive me," he murmured mufflingly into her chest, and reached up his good hand to pull her down to him, gasping at her weight and her warmth. But she was not really heavy, she was just so...unexpected.

"Christine, Christine," he breathed, face still buried, quite unwilling to leave this wonderful, pressing flesh-cleft that he had discovered just minutes ago...had it only been minutes? It seemed like hours—

Oh. Oh. She had reached her hand down and...touched...

Had she really? Was he imagining things? Dreaming, perhaps, a lovely dream induced by the morphine and the effects of dying all alone with no one but Na...

Oh, dear. She had touched it again. Stroked it, in fact.

He gulped. His nervous laugh was high-pitched. Somehow in the ensuing seconds he had once again become prostrate on the bed, looking at the ceiling, and Her, with her lovely skin as white as a goddess, slick with a little sweat. Which was odd, because she had been shivering.

He closed his eyes, embarrassed. Besides...It was moving. Or rather, expanding.

She looked rather uncomfortable. Which was quite understandable given the circumstances, really.

Oh, dear sweet Heavens. How could her hand be so delightfully warm?

He wanted to strip her completely, to see what the Eastern religions commonly termed the moon-grotto, jade-palace, her delicate petals. But she was already doing it herself.

Cursing his useless hand, he stretched forth the good one, wanting to take some part in removing the lower half of her dress, but she shooed it away.

His fist clenched and unclenched, fingers quivering at her saucy impertinence in denying his hand the ecstasy of removing...

All right, perhaps it wasn't quite so unbelievable. What was (or should have been) less believable was the fact that she was, in fact, disrobing. Whilst her lovely legs were straddling him.

His eyes were hooded, shaking. Oh, thighs, what sweet muscle you have. And look, there, between them, at the lovely dark shadow.

Oh, how he longed to entwine his fingers in that tight, curly hair between her legs. Did he even dare to touch it?

His own member was throbbing, pulsating with demand, delight, delusion. Nothing mattered, did it, except that shadow...

His eyes travelled, sweeping for the first time upon her indescribable nakedness, impossible to put into words, glorious beyond imagining, delectable beyond reason.

"Come here," he muttered throatily, huskily, voice clouded with incessant male desire, overpowering.

Her eyelids fluttered, and her breath quickened even as his hand grasped her flesh, felt of her waist, swam up her side with adoring fingers, grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her down with surprising strength given his condition.

"And now," he whispered. "Now we see what love we can make, you and I."

She struggled a bit, gasping, but it was not out of unwillingness. Rather, a half-nervous, half-secret smile had begun to play upon her lips, and she writhed atop him, making him gasp.

"Damn the buttons," he said with clenched teeth, struggling between her form and his trousers to unloose the beast within. But with only one good hand and so much...er...pressure of the moment, it was proving to be quite an impossible task. If he hadn't been able to intellectually debunk such a ridiculous notion, he might have guessed that someone had secretly snuck bolts into his trousers instead of buttons.

She looked confused. Oh, damn the poor, lovely little thing, staring at him so helplessly. And damn—damn!—his irreversibly weak condition.

She looked nervously at his buttons. Erik squirmed a bit, for the bulge was becoming quite painful, really, especially since she was sitting on it.

He was becoming quite out of sorts, which wasn't at all good considering the state of his health.

He was dying, for God's sake!

With his luck, he would be cold and dead before these infernal buttons would come un...

There was a spasm in his chest, short, but painful. It was enough to frighten her, and to cause him to grimace in brief pain.

Thank heavens it had only been a small one.

"Undo them," he said, between clenched teeth. It was not a request. It was a command, rough and raw, and she obeyed without question, though he could have sworn she hesitated only a little.

Her fingers fumbled, but the body part that was to serve them both had already shrunk a bit in size and become slightly flaccid. Erik suppressed any sort of disappointment, anger, anything that might cause another burst of pain.

When her hands, warm and soft, slid up his chest to remove his shirt, he arched his back a bit, feeling like Ayesha when she was stroked, wanting to purr, just like his plush Siamese.

"Oh, Christine," he breathed. "Christine, Christine, why did you come, and why are you doing this for your Erik?"

Her mouth was at his ear, and he shivered, licking his lips.

"Because," she whispered, and her voice was sad and forceful all at once. "You are my Erik. And I will have you."

He gathered strength, rolled her over, so that they were both on their sides. The extraordinary urge to giggle was welling up again.

Nothing could have been quite so sweet as when the blood rushed to her cheeks at the swift invasion of his fingers, how her mouth opened, first in pain, and then in ecstasy, how her eyes rolled back into her head at his delighted, adoring ministrations.

"Oh, Erik," she gasped, making short, wonderful sounds in the back of her throat, sounds that made him writhe and caused his member to lengthen and harden once more. A delighted smile flitted across his face, not at all concerning the fact that he was now quite physically prepared to consummate what they had begun, but at the passion-induced blush upon her face, the color like swipes of rosy paint upon her pale flesh, spreading to the tops of her breasts.

And it was he that was causing this miracle to occur. He! Erik!

He who had been rejected by a harem girl, who had nonverbally expressed the wish to die rather than suffer the horror of being bedded by a living dead man!

He felt his love's little hands grabbing, pulling him closer, and he grimaced when his chest tightened once more.

"Dearest," he whispered. "I can't. You will have to do it. Do you understand?"

Christine looked nonplussed. "What do you mean?"

Wordlessly, he rolled her over again so that she was on top of him once more, and closed his eyes.

She sat atop him uncertainly. "Is it...even possible, this way?" she queried, sounding as though she would be quite embarrassed if the answer was yes, for it would prove her to be hopelessly naïve.

Erik wasn't quite sure whether to laugh or cry, but he did neither. "Oh, my darling," he sighed, "an eternal law of the Universe regarding this particular act is, quite frankly, that anything is possible."

"Indeed," she said nervously.

"...I do believe," Erik continued wryly, "from what I have read, that there are positions far stranger and unfamiliar to the inexperienced mind than this one."

"Oh," she said, the blush deepening.

"Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion..." he continued.

"What?" she blurted, eyes opening wide. "Erik..."

"Forgive me," he said. "My mind was wandering."

She cleared her throat, examining his form and her own, and then cautiously took his member between her hands, guiding it to her moist crevice.

He shuddered, and gasped. "Oh," he whispered. "Oh...oh."

Christine gritted her teeth, clenched her fists, and thrust herself down, crying out in pain as his length broke through the remainder of her barrier in that one swift movement.

Erik's body stiffened, and he muffled a scream. Such sensations as this were foreign, utterly unreal. To have his instrument be clasped by that tight, juicy embrace was surely a form of nirvana.

His good hand, trembling, crawled its way up her body to once again grasp her breast. He felt as though he were an adolescent, shivering with the very first threads of real pleasure, wanting to gasp and moan all at the same time.

"Dear heaven..." he whispered. "I never knew how..."

But then he noticed that she was shaking, and he realized that she was experiencing more pain than he had originally surmised.

"Oh, darling!" he gasped, and pulled her down to him, where she kissed him again, passionately. "It hurt you...it did..."

"It's all right," she said. "It's going away, now..."

Cautiously he made a gentle upward motion with his pelvis, and was rewarded by a burst of tight, cohesive sensation which made him moan. She moved against him, gently at first, exploratorily, and then when it seemed that the pain had lessened for good, a bit faster, harder, and his mouth opened, eyes rolling back into his head.

Could anything possibly be more delicious than this?

The bursts of sensation that were rippling through him reminded him slightly of when he used to conduct experiments in static electricity...the sparks of light that would flare in darkness, the shocking tingle if they touched his skin.

With a great, shuddering motion, he felt his release, which, had he been compelled to explain in bare and almost vulgar words, was rather like the experience (which, while similar, and exuding an odd sort of pleasure, was a hundred times less pleasurable than this) of answering to nature after holding back the flow for hours at a time.

He sighed, and after a few quiet, awkward moments, she seemed to realize a noticeable difference in the part of him which filled her cavity. She moved a bit, and it flopped out almost at once, too soft to stay inside.

She opened her mouth as if to say something, but closed it again, and wordlessly rolled so that she was lying beside him instead of atop him, his seed leaking a little from her dark nether-mouth onto her relaxed, stretching leg.

"Quoth the Raven, nevermore," he said deliriously, and she put her hand on his forehead. He knew what she felt beneath her palm—an unnatural heat, the fever of the damned.

"Oh, Erik," she whispered. "Erik, don't do this. Don't die."

"I'm afraid I must," he whispered. "But 'thank you' is hardly an expressive enough phrase, I must say, for what you have given me."

She buried her face in his neck. "I'm going to stay with you," she said, "until the end. Is that..."

"Christine," he said, "I can think of nothing better."

"Good," she whispered, and lay beside him, kissing his skin, until her eyelids drooped.

Sleep overtook her, and when she awoke, she inclined her head.

The body beside her was stiff, unmoving.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, no."

She shook him, called his name, screamed at him, but there was no pulse, no fluttering heartbeat, and worst of all, no breath.

Hours passed while she was curled on her knees beside him, quivering, wetting him with her tears.

In the end, all she could do was get up calmly, placidly. She took his clothes, and struggled to put him back into them, which took a long time, for the body had now become quite limp.

She clothed herself, then, slowly, layer by layer, feeling as though her soul had forsaken her body and she was nothing more than one of Erik's automatons that he had told her of, replicas of human bodies that had nothing but gadgetry to make them seem alive.

She opened the door, walking almost straight into her fiancé.

Ah, her sailor lad. She should have known he'd follow her here.

"Christine," he began, but she put her finger to his lips and shook her head, taking his hand.

"Take me back, Raoul," she said. "Now I'm ready."

Finis