by K.A. Rose
Blackadder the Third characters, et cetera, copyright © Richard Curtis, Ben Elton, and the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1987. Used without permission for non-profit fan appreciation. (Please don't sue. Suing will make your fans dislike you and call you bad names from the street. Really.)
This started out as almost a dare handed down from the inimitable Treneka, although it was sort of an accidental handing. Her memory had impressed upon her that the relationship between George and Blackadder was utterly platonic and I, newly setting out to experience the series, went into things with a pure and open mind and discovered how horribly, horribly wrong she was. So naturally I had to prove it by writing it as passingly well as I could.
Rated R:S (ages 17 and up for sexual content). Sex between minors briefly mentioned. Questionable content. Puns.
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The first time was when they were both young, or fairly so. They were both boys, a snotty child-prince and his snotty playmate-servant, with a rough liberty with each other in tone and manner, that one might almost mistake the two for friends.
It was thus in the wild play with each other in the servants' halls, in a dark gap between the kitchens and scullery, that the boy-prince George, a real unrouged flush to his skin, pushed his attendant against the wall and stated his terms. And after argument, and bickering, and an exchange of what seemed like much more money at the time than it really was, Edmund dropped to his knees and went to it.
They were about 11.
The next incident was some time later, on the more predictable side of puberty, and it occurred during the prince's bath. The self-sustaining sort, Edmund Blackadder had completely omitted the first encounter from his memory some years before, so the mortification this time came brand new. He didn't even remember to demand compensation afterwards. And fresh in the Regent's afterglow, he dimly reasoned that for all the numb horror of it, it wasn't much more trouble than washing the prince to begin with, never mind where hands ventured. He did as much in keeping to himself in the nights anyway.
He might have gone on to block the second incident out just as the first, too, if the prince's behavior toward him from then didn't force the memory.
"I expect you'll be wanting a raise."
He'd almost started to answer no. On principle, of all things. The horror of it kept him awake for the better part of a month.
Fortunately the Regent's bathing habits were irregular, or a habit might have formed. In its absence there were the odd arguments resolved in silence, the rough handlings from high tension, the breakdowns when push came to shove, where often Blackadder was the one shoved face-down on the bed.
He'd resisted loudly the first time, enough to rouse the maids down the hall. They tapped gingerly on his highness's bedchamber doors and asked, please, sir, is everything all right? while George sat on Edmund Blackadder's back and forced his face into the sheets to stop him answering.
"It won't do either of us good, you giving up the game," the prince said in an earnest whisper, when he'd bade the women off. "I don't see what's the matter with it anyway."
Blackadder said that he knew he was scum, but there were still some depths he wouldn't sink to yet.
"Oh, nonsense," said the Regent, and began to tug down Edmund's trousers. "You'll do anything if you get enough money thrown at you."
There was not enough money anywhere for that.
But there was. And it was paid. And nothing was ever said about it.
The boys aged into young men and then into older young men, and it was only seldom that the frame of the prince's bed would creak with Edmund Blackadder on it, sometimes on his back, most times on his hands and knees. He clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut, dug his nails into the sheets and tried to think about raises, of men bowing to him in the streets, of titles and prestige that should have been his birthright. And when that didn't work he thought of days off locked up in his chambers with nothing but his books to answer to, of scarlet-cheeked women in ripped bodices with their mallowy breasts pouring out in invitation, of anything except what was happening, because this was not him, he was a gentleman, he was descended from royalty far nobler than any of this half-kraut's stock and he was not enjoying this.
In the mornings Blackadder sat gingerly at the servants' table and turned the purse of coins over in his palm, wondering to himself why it never felt heavy enough.
One grew used --very used-- to interpreting things this way, to translating the little codependencies of life in monetary language. Edmund Blackadder had made an art of tangibly gauging his personal irritation. Inconveniences, insults, setbacks, putoffs, backhands and infuriating idiocy could be penalized down to the penny, if he really felt like getting the abacus out for it, but this wasn't that. As humiliating, degrading, and downright uncomfortable as it (surely, surely) was, the contention lay somewhere else entirely, in foreign lands far beyond any realm of sanity or civilization and probably near Bulgaria. Which was why he hadn't tread there.
Baldrick, not knowing anything of the situation, hypothesized on Blackadder's expression that he was having 'one of them moral dilemmas.'
Blackadder asked Baldrick if he knew what a dilemma was.
'Shore I do. I saw one at the zoo, once.'
His cousins put it best, being so dependably infrequent and absent-headed that Edmund could deign to even hint at the situation with them.
It seemed to them, they said, that little Eddikins wasn't sure whether to call the acts rapacious. And not knowing that, dear little Eddie didn't know whether to call himself a whore.
Surely there were worse things.
'That's right,' said his godawful cousins. 'You could be enjoying it.'
Of course not, he barked back. He'd have to be a far sight worse than a poofter to go around actually enjoying anything as virulant and degrading as getting down on all fours and holding onto a headboard for dear life while that foul brat of a prince rode him like an amorous boar in Lancashire springtime. Why, there was no pleasure to be had in that at all. It was ugly. It was rude. It was fascinatingly obscene.
...And in that way it was no different than any other task he performed for the Regent.
Oh, so it might differ a little in the details, but come right down to it, it was no more humiliating than wiping yolk dribble from his chin or massaging his feet. It was par the course. Part of the job description. It meant an extra shilling if the smell was particularly foul. And just because there was a uniquely rewarding sensation knowing that he was the prince's sole trusted foot masseusse, and there was an odd thrill of pleasure in hearing the little sounds from the prince's throat when he rubbed just the right spot under the toes, did not mean there was some underlying sentiment to it. And certainly didn't bring up any unwanted connotations. At all. Ever.
...For God's sake, Prince George was very nearly his friend. They'd been brought up together. Or more accurately, Edmund had been brought up to bring up the prince, by any means necessary and often employing a large hook, but the net (ha) effect of it was still the same. He'd seen every pasty square inch of the Regent's body so often there was no mystique to it anymore. And his habits, well-- Blackadder knew about those far more than he wished.
So for the exasperation, the disgust, the disdain and frustration, Edmund quantified it all with a pound sign and left it at that. And things were well, from the breakfast accidents to the unpleasant footrubs. But as soon as one entered bedroom dealings into the mess, Blackadder's neat little equations stopped working. And if his vulgar cousins were right, it was because the variables had suddenly changed on him and turned the whole damned thing into a different question.
The worst bit was the nature of it; that this was a question without clear, practical answers and bitingly realistic solutions. Something that plausibly involved how much younger George seemed to look out of his wig, with his uneven brown scruff and the ears that stuck out. Or how rewarding it was to see him sweat, to struggle for air just a little, to paw desperately for something to hold onto for that one moment when the safety handles were gone. To lose for a moment, in their unending struggle that had persisted since their boyhood.
Wait a minute there.
Wait. Hold on.
Oh.
Edmund looked up from between the prince's knees. He'd been in the middle of removing his socks, and looking up, encountered the prince's birdlike fascination, the wobbly, watery eyes that were among the prince's more obnoxious qualities, when they weren't busy being so damned blue. And it all, quite suddenly, made an awful, deep and probing kind of sense.
There and then, when it all slid into focus after a lifetime of stubbornly malprescribed bifocals, and one could mark the bloody second of it. The tenth of October, evening, past supper, in a still half-heartbeat in the sitting room with the Prince Regent leaning back docile and open on his French upholstered chaise. Not about to ask whether Blackadder would care for a bonus this month, because that question never slouched along until George's hand was halfway down his butler's trousers, but with a quiet sort of question in the look, that said he might not object, say, if one thing led to another and all that, just so it was clear.
Which in itself was no shocker, but was when Edmund's stomach tightened and he found himself climbing up onto the cushions.
It was, after all this time, exceedingly easy to know what to do. Only he went straight to the trousers and forgot the words.
Blackadder swore the look on the Regent's face would stay etched in his memory forever, but that vow was broken in relatively short order. There were a lot more interesting faces that followed. Struggling, gasping, the face powder streaming down and leaving hot ruddy streaks on his face, that real red flush to his lips, the way he squirmed and thrashed and cried out awful and humiliating things in his pleasure.
He arched off the seat and Blackadder forced him back down by the shoulders, pushed him hard against the cushions and thrust and bit his neck at the join of the collarbone, greedy and possessive in a way he'd never felt in his life.
They were not teenagers, so they lay still for a time afterwards, the prince making noises and Blackadder staring off in the general direction of the tea tray, knotting a fist in the prince's strewn waistcoat in a way unbecoming to him. He frowned at his hand, and at the unpleasant smells he was no longer too distracted to ignore, and a sticky sensation at his temple that suggested George had gotten some of his rouge on him.
He tried to think of the price he was supposed to name. It wasn't coming to him.
It hadn't come to him in the past ten minutes. In fact, the only thing that had come in any fashion was, well...
Yes, anyway. The point was that they were half-clothed and sticky on a French chaise and the Prince Regent was enjoying it. Afterglows and animalistic bonding and strange bite marks along the throat and all that, and that question still hadn't left, and it was a damned big problem now.
Edmund Blackadder decided there were some exams he was simply designed to fail.
He climbed off the couch and collected his clothes. He started to dress.
"Hoi, Bladder," the Regent piped up from the chaise, making a blanket out of his coat at the moment. "Where you off to?"
"I'm afraid I'm off the clock, sir," said Blackadder, fastening the neckcloth at his throat. "I was planning to return to my chambers, after summoning the maid to see to the accident you made of the sofa."
"Accident?"
"Certainly, sir," he said, keeping his gaze averted as he pulled on his jacket. He considered briefly how to best advise the prince to cover up those incriminating bites around his neck before the maid could wonder, but just the memory of the sight made his stomach turn and his gaze focus all the harder on the carpet pattern.
Probably the prince would think of an excuse on his own. Anyway, he had a solid reputation of foolishness working for him. People would wonder where Edmund had gotten himself infected.
"On another matter, sir," Edmund Blackadder continued smoothly: "as tomorrow is my day off, I believe you may find it prudent to furnish me with an advance on the bonus you were about to offer."
"Oh, yes. Yes, certainly; capital. Going into the town, are we?"
"Yes, sir," said the servant. "I have made it my intention to pay a
visit to the zoo, to see the dilemmas."
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finished at: 00:21, 6 March 2006.
No butlers' dignities were harmed in the making of this fanfic.