AN: Written for the porn battle prompt "kindness or cruelty".
Disclaimer: I do not own Sanctuary.
Character/Pairing: Helen Magnus/James Watson
Spoilers: Nothing, really, as that would require a plot.
Rating: M
Summary: It's a cruelty, but it's one he can't resist.
Sometimes A Cruelty
It's a cruelty, but it's one he can't resist.
She wants him to be thoughtless, rushed, mindful only of his own pleasure, but he cannot. Instead he lingers, mouth on her skin and fingers gently coaxing passion from her until neither of them could think of England if they tried.
It begins as it always does, in their shared workroom when she's spent too much time analyzing an abnormality she cannot treat or render harmless with her medicine. Left with the choice between imprisonment and murder, she turns to him, and as always, he finds himself swept along in her wake.
It's never her room, for all that it is closer to the workroom than his is. He wonders what memories she has of that bed, and why she does not wish him in it when he lost nearly as much as she.
Instead it's his bed they tumble into, hastily stripped of whatever clothing they had been wearing by fingers too desperate to dwell on the gracelessness of it. She pulls him on top of her, and he does not hold back from bringing his weight fully to bear over her. If he does not catch her hands, he will find them between his legs, goading the gentlemanliness out of him until he pushes inside of her.
That is the moment when he finds himself back in control. No matter how she cants her hips or digs her nails into his back to provoke him towards abandon, he withholds some sense of awareness, some grasp on who he, who she is.
His kisses turn soft against her mouth, slowing encouraging what just moments before they had been set to extract at whatever cost. He moves down her throat, rediscovering all the places that make her shift with want beneath him, and only when she says his name does he begin to move.
He keeps his strokes measured for as long as he can. When he can restrain himself no longer, he slips a hand between them, splaying his fingers down across her stomach to her core. The sounds she makes as he teases her towards the edge drive him on as well, until at last he is thrusting into her with all the force she wished for in the first place, but with none of the recklessness.
When he collapses on top of her, spent and breathing hard, she doesn't push him off but waits until he rolls away on his own accord. He knows she expects to be put out of his bed, then, sent on her way as though her job were done. Instead he pulls her into his arms and pretends not to notice that she stops resisting him after only a moment.
In the morning, she'll thank him in her coldest voice. She'll pull on her stockings sitting on the edge of his bed, and turn away his hands if he tries to aid her with any of the buttons and laces that must be tied or fastened for her to be properly dressed.
They'll never be lovers, not in the traditional sense, but they will be this, whatever this is. They've done it enough times before to know one another's moves in the game, and even without that pretense, they know each other to the soul.
He is not the only one who can be cruel.
fin
Gravity_Not_Included, January 23, 2011