Written for Valentine's Day 2014
Prompt: Library smut *ahem* [thanks, i-really-heichou...]
Humble credit to Angela Carter for copious quotations from her short story, The Erl-King.
The wispy knot at the back of his head struggles to keep the remnants of his golden halo in place as Armin slumps against the far wall, nose buried deep in the spine of a flimsy paperback. It's a wonder that he still hasn't developed a permanent slouch after all these years, with the obscene amount of time he spends draped like a vine over the endless rows of books.
Padding quietly across the library floor, she manages to stick her chin three inches over his shoulder before he realizes he's being spied upon.
"Mikasa!?" he yelps, knuckles crashing into the steel shelving nearby.
She remains unperturbed at this entirely predictable response. "What are you reading?"
He rubs the back of his neck sheepishly with his free hand, kneading the knotted muscles. "Oh, it's just some… folktale…" But his face is turning redder by the moment, and her eyes narrow suspiciously at his marked lack of enthusiasm in showering her with random facts.
Her superior reflexes serve her well as she snatches the book away and holds it open just out of his reach, blocking access with a rigid palm to his chest.
"About what?" she asks, scanning the yellowed leaves.
His fingers swat at the empty air next to her wrist. "Nothing, it's just… some myth about a woodland spirit… Mikasa give it back…"
"…I always go to the Erl-King and he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I lie at the mercy of his huge hands," she narrates, syrupy words dripping from her lips as Armin stops to stare. "What kind of folktale is this?"
"Well uh… it's kind of a…different… interpretation of the traditional story," he says, pulling back gradually to regard her with an odd expression.
"Different? Like how?"
He carefully sidesteps her demanding query. "It's a little… obscure. Language-wise, I mean. I'm not sure you'd understand it, much less enjoy it..."
The insinuation that she could fail to comprehend a book as scrawny as the one dangling between her fingers set her competitive instincts surging forth. "Try me."
"Huh?"
She scowls. "Armin, my reading is not that bad."
"No, no it isn't…" he admits with that odd look again.
Mikasa bristles, determined to prove herself. "Pick any part. I'll show you."
"Are you su-"
She shoves the proscribed tome at him with fire blazing on her tongue. "Yes."
"Be careful, Mikasa," he murmurs. "There are some eyes can eat you."
"Huh?"
"Ah, nothing," he says; but there's no mistaking the curious glint in his eye.
He lifts the volume from her hands and flicks through surreptitiously, giving a vague smile as his eyes light upon a particular passage. Instead of handing the book back, though, he slinks behind and slips his arms under hers, trapping her between his heart and the guilty pages he holds up before her perplexed face.
"Alright then, try reading this section out loud."
Lifting her own hand to adjust the angle of the text, she takes a breath to calm her sudden nerves, and focuses her attention on the prose creeping out from beneath his fingernail.
"If I strung that old fiddle with your hair, we could waltz together to the music as the exhausted daylight founders among the trees; we should have better music than the shrill pro-… pro-"
"Prothalamions." The exotic syllables roll through the air like silk, and he grips the thin sheets a little more firmly.
"…prothalamions of the larks stacked in their pretty cages as the roof creaks with the freight of birds you've lured to it while we engage in your profane mysteries under the leaves..."
"Hmm…" he breathes against her ear. "Maybe that was too difficult. How about… this one?" The dog-eared corners simper under his thumb as he guides her to the next transgression. "Try it… a little slower."
"His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in..."
"Not bad," he says in a low voice, and she can feel the heat of him pressing firmly against her back and behind her melting thighs. "Go on. Slower."
"Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning…"
He releases one hand from the book to paint languorous strokes down her velvety ribbons of hair, as if petting an obedient child. "Nice. And… here," he whispers, dipping his insidious finger into the papery valley and dragging it indolently along the fold and across the page.
"And now – ach! I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses. The eq- equinoctial gales seize the bare elms and make them whizz and whirl like dervishes; you sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream…"
She barely registers the meaning of the words, shivering as he grazes appreciation up the side of her neck and under the curve of her breast.
"Very good, Mikasa," he mumbles against her jaw. "Your reading has gotten much, much better…"
Scholarly fingers impart forbidden knowledge as they trace glyphs over her heated skin; he pushes her up against the stacks of arcane codices, and she finally grasps the meaning of the luminous glow hiding in the shadows of the looming shelves as he swallows her next words whole.
His eyes are quite green, as if from too much looking at the wood,she recites in her head, as the book falls to the ground with a clatter.