ari's archive ♡

You wake up on a Tuesday morning and something feels out of place. Your limbs are all still attached to your body, you don't feel the edges of sickness coming in or a tug of a migraine at your temples. Your room remains unchanged, bathed in a golden light of the early morning. You've tossed and turned in your sleep, but that's not it.

Your fight with Daeron is still fresh in your mind. A missed date that's become a common occurance. Not that it being common should make you less frustrated. You have started explaining the way it had made you feel calmly and ultimately broke out into yelling because he had nothing to offer but excuses and groveling. As if feeling guilty would change the way he had acted and make everything okay again.

The fight eats away at you, as all fights with Daeron do. Leaves you aching for the moments you've secretly titled 'the good times'. Because when it's good, it's really good.

You resting your head against his lap while his cold, slightly trembling hands ran through your hair and he read to you in that dry, calm voice with sunlight streaming in through the windows and tea steaming on the coffee table in mismatched mugs.

Slow-dancing in the living room after cooking dinner - when he puts on some niche, underground vinyl you can't even pronounce the name of 'taste, angel girl, this is just me having taste, i'll teach you-' - and spins you around before pressing your temple against his heart and laying soft kisses onto the crown of your head like he's worshipping.

Getting takeaway at 3am and driving around town, someplace far away until the city that never sleeps turns to industrial buildings who beget the tall greenery as factories slowly bleed into suburbs. Him singing loudly and very off-key to the radio, feeding you fries and laughing when he smears ketchup on your face.

Him bending you over the kitchen counter in a bout of rare passion and need; cold marble digging into the bones of your hips. Panting into your neck, the syllables of your name raw, the little 'i need you", "let me in, let me in, please, angel-" broken and needy, hips stuttering when you clench around him, pulling his cock deeper inside, and hands holding on tightly - like he can't hold enough of you in them.

You don't know when the next 'good times' will come. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes it drags into long, gnawing weeks. Mostly they follow after him getting sober enough to sit with his actions for a longer time. It's what makes you hold out on him. Because Daeron's not some bad habit you can quit with iron will or hypno therapy. Daeron is Daeron and he is as kind and loving as he is sharp and cruel. He's both those things and you've learned you can't have one without the other following. A body and its shadow.

You do know that it will get better, though. That's not what's different about you today. You know the routine, the little wash and dry cycle you both follow. This fight was far from the worst one. So what's different?

What's different?

The question, insistent and demanding, follows you through your morning routine. It tugs at you in the shower and lingers when you brush your teeth. It pokes while you cook your breakfast and yanks while you get dressed.

You check your phone while sipping your coffee and frown. The plane tickets you have booked for a city break with your friends have been cancelled and refunded without further explanation. You text the groupchat, contact the booking agent and grow increasingly weary throghout the day when they don't text back.

Your friends tell you not to worry over it, chalk it up to a simple misunderstanding. They've already taken days off of work, so the tickets get re-booked. Each time you try to buy one, you get a 'transaction failed' notice, even if you know your account balance is sufficient. You check again just to make sure.

When you try to purchase the ticket again, the site crashes completely and your browser gives a helpful pointer that the session has expired.

You're pacing around Daeron's apartment and he's watching you move around in just his shirt with half-lidded eyes and a lazy half-smile. The 'good times' have made their way to you earlier than expected, just a couple of days after the fact. Partly because Daeron took you out on a date that was much better than the one he had cancelled - some place you mentioned earlier and completely forgot, partly because you were frustrated and frustrations needed an outlet that wasn't you smashing things into the wall like a grumpy teenage boy.

The sex didn't help. It was great, as it always was during the 'good times', and it drew your mind away from your thoughts for a moment. Only for them to smack you right back in the head as soon as the high of the orgasm faded.

"I'm cursed. I disrespected some higher being by accident and now I'm paying the price." You tell him, rounding the corner of his living room table for the hundreth time.

"No such thing as being cursed. Have you walked under any ladders lately? Did a cat happen to cross your road and its fur just so happened to be black?" Daeron teases, all but melting into the couch.

"Haha." You respond dryly, "I'm being serious."

"For real?"

"For real."

Daeron frowns a little, works over his words. You watch him back tens of biting little comments that surface in his head. Then, he sits up and lifts his arm, offering a perfect spot to settle into.

"Come here." Daeron hums, "Come here, I can't focus with you pacing like a rabbit high on coke. Come, we'll brainstorm against the curse that plagues you so."

You hesitate only for a moment before sitting down on the couch, laying your head onto his chest, hands settling at his waist. He's warm for once, and his heartbeat thrums steady underneath your temple. His long, lithe arm wraps around your frame and his body relaxes into yours.

"Tell me from the start." Daeron urges softly.

"What's the start?"

"Whatever feels like the start."

You swallow and work over your words. Everything that's been heavy on your mind feels hard to voice, almost silly. But Daeron has never judged you for your fears - the little edges of anxiety that make you, you. Once you start, it all but pours out of you.

"You know the trip me and my friends had planned? The city break? Yeah. Yeah, all the tickets were okay and only mine got cancelled. I tried to re-book multiple times. Then Jenna tried to re-book for me and it didn't work. And I couldn't get in touch with the booking agent, nor the airline. And the trip came and went and I- I thought, okay, surely this was just a one time thing. There'll be other trips."

Daeron hums, careful hand running over your hair, pressing you closer to him, assuring that he's listening.

"I have been missing my trains and buses by moments. My car fucking broke down in the middle of the road while I was driving out for that job interview in the next city over, and I couldn't make it. The job I did have lined up just went and cancelled. Said they selected another candidate and would alert me if another opportunity came up." Your hands move while you speak, as if that would make your frustration more logical.

Daeron notes that you don't even sound annoyed, or angry. Just tired. It's understandable. He presses a kiss against the crown of your head. Waits a while until he's sure you're done speaking. Squeezes your shoulders in a way that always makes your body settle easier against his.

"It sounds to me like you're just having an awful streak of bad luck, angel." Another kiss, this one to your temple, "The buses and trains are always late or early, that feeling's just amplified by you already being down. But I'm sorry to hear about the other stuff. I know you were looking forward to your trip and the job."

Daeron watches the way your nose scrunches in the way it does when you're trying not to cry. Just the slightest movement of it, like you're a small animal sensing danger. He's seen it often enough on you to recognize it. You do it when the world feels too heavy and when you've had a long week. You do it most often when you come over and find him already high or drunk, his words having gained that slight garbled or too-fast quality depending on the damage he's chosen to deal to his body that day that you immediately clock. Daeron squeezes you tighter to him.

"I'm sure that it will pass soon, yeah? Just a no-good week."

You burrow into his shirt and inhale deeply. Your voice is barely audible when you speak.

"Yeah."

You and Daeron take a trip to the seaside town a few hours away from the city. The 'good times' have stretched into days, which turned into weeks which followed into the territory where you have stopped counting and just leaned into the feeling of brittle comfort.

He's trying. You know he's always trying but this time it seems sharper/ He's sharper and he only drinks as much as you do. You share an occasional joint and that's the extent of his drug use. Somewhere deep in the cement jungle of the city, his dealer is cursing his own streak of bad luck.

Perhaps it's because you've been down and the feeling of being needed this desperately made him cling for once, perhaps it's a whole another reason that Daeron refuses to name and you don't push him to.

All you know right now is the warm, white sand beneath your feet, the wind running over your hair and the sun warming your skin. You watch Daeron over the rim of your sunglasses when he comes back from the sea. His pale skin is glitsening with little crystalline droplets and his hair clings to his face, made wilder by the saltwater. You rarely get to admire his body being out in the open, so exposed. The wide line of his shoulders, the tapering of his slightly defined waist, the long line of his arms where there's clusters of fine, golden hair. The muscular, lithe quality of his legs that would make models quake in their heels.

Your eyes stay the longest on the place beneath his belly button where the hair is darker, coarser and the patch of it widens slightly where it disappears beneath his dark swimming trunks.

"My eyes are up here, you know." Daeron teases with an easy lilt, "I feel very objectified, angel girl."

"You'll live." You retort, pushing your sunglasses back up the bridge of your nose, "Re-apply your sunscreen or your pale ass will burn to a crisp."

Daeron snorts and makes the path to your blanket, plopping down. You end up putting the sunscreen on him yourself, hands wandering. The day stretches and seems frozen in-time. You watch the beach empty as the sun dips lower in the sky and watch the sunset, which Daeron regards as 'extremely corny, really' and end up fucking beneath the stars once the beach becomes empty. Your skin; sweaty, salty and still lingering with traces of sunscreen, sticks together and Daeron's laughs and quips are swallowed by your lips.

The day, with all the moments remains tucked close to your heart, somewhere deep beneath the ribs; safe. Something you'd like to keep, somewhere you'd like to stay if given the choice. Daeron complains of sand clinging to places it shouldn't cling when you make the drive home.

The streak of bad luck keeps following. Each time you have a trip planned, a job offer on a table, a brief moment where you're finally relieved about something, it comes back to bite you.

A friend suddenly falling ill with nobody there to take care of them. Natural disasters delaying departure until it gets cancelled. The new apartment you were excited about getting leased to somebody else. The company that had offered a nice, cushy job going bankrupt despite years of outstanding performance. You lose your passport somewhere and the making of the new one takes ages and in the midst of it all, you feel like what you're really losing is your fucking mind.

The 'good times' come to a halting end. Daeron doesn't deal well with sadness or any emotion that is beyond his range of comfort. He withdraws - slowly, but surely. Hugs looser, dates rarer, pills back in his scheduled programing. Perhaps he's afraid of being in the vicinity of the ground zero your life has become or perhaps he's leaving because that's all he knows to do when things become more complicated than he can try handling. He becomes the second man - the sharp and the cruel - that you know him to be and for once, you don't feel like forcing him to reconsider.

The breakup comes on a Friday that's no different than the many Fridays that have come before it. The sun is dipping below the horizon and he turns on the TV to replace the space where a conversation should be. You shift in his loose side-hug and tell him that you don't think that things are working anymore. He stays silent a while, then agrees. You gather what little traces of your existence you have at his apartment - a chipped mug, a stray pair of shorts, a book half-read - and leave the next morning. The final step that your relationship had been burning down into is mutual and neither of you calls after.

A fresh start will do you good. That's what all the self-help books and mental health podcasts preach. Perhaps the bad luck was fate telling you to break from the stagnation your life had become. Neat little shelves of the 'good times' and the 'bad times' and centering your whole orbit around it.

The new apartment is nice. Bigger than your last one - spacious and with an open floor plan. The floor-to-ceiling windows offer a view of your new city bustling below and the bedroom is just small enough to not feel the abscence of another body that should occopy it.

Weeks pass and you settle. The new job is nice and the coworkers friendly. You make acquintances easily and grow comfortable with the routine of exploring the new space around you. You dip into coffee shops and order something that's completely different from what you usually have. You attend a jazz concert in some sensual, dimly-lit bar and allow a stranger to buy you a drink. You wander the park and finish the half-read book while stealing glances at the owner playing with his golden retriever.

There's comfort in being new to a place and nobody knowing your name or your past. Luggage is so much easier to carry when it's just the one you brought with you on the plane. Time passes slowly and then it seems to run away from you. Instead of the labeled times, you have days that are not inherintly good or inherintly bad - just regular human working through life with a few regular mishaps.

You start thinking that you really were being silly in the belief of some curse being cast on you. Grow cozy in the life you've carved out for yourself. Think about texting Daeron when the bedroom proves to be not small enough and ultimately decide against it.

There's no such things as curses and you are not cursed. You're a regular person with regular troubles and regular heartaches. You fail and you get up and you fail again.

And you watch the firemen extinguish the fire that had swallowed your apartment building until there's nothing but embers and ghosts of what could've been left on a completely regular Monday.

Daeron welcomess you back into his apartment. The scent of the airplane salon clings to your skin the same way sorrow clings to your face. You have not spoken in months and he does not know what to do with his hands.

The make-up sex is mediocre at best and embarassing on his end at worst. Too much tongue in his kisses, too little warmth at his fingertips. He's forgotten the ritual of loving your body and all the little places he had mapped out by heart.

He's glad you're back. He's missed you a little in the moments when he put on a vinyl he's been avoiding by accident and missed you a lot when he sat down at his kitchen table to eat dinner after work and there was no one there to chatter away about their day and drown out the thoughts plaguing his mind.

He's also sad. He loved you, of course he did - more than anything else in this god forsaken world, more than drugs, more than alcohol, more than self-pity. But he was hoping that you'd find something better. It brought him no pleasure to imagine you in somebody else's arms, but each night before bed he'd wish to some higher power above that that someone would be kind. That they'd listen, really listen, that they'd know how to hold you and what books you liked, how you took your coffee and how you needed to go to some large body of water - any would do - when you were feeling down. Mostly he hoped that they'd know how to read the little scrunch of your nose and would do anything to prevent it from happening at all.

But you're back in his bed, back to him and he's never claimed to not be a selfish man. If it's a curse you claim brought you back, then he must thank that curse for being his blessing.

Daeron watches the rise and fall of your chest, the way your face draws into relaxation when sleep pulls you under. His fingers play with yours reverently, still not believing that you're real; that you're back to him. He spends hours trying to read all the little changes your time apart had bid you and finds none on the surface.

Daeron sighs and climbs out of the bed, wanting to grab a glass of water. Something digs into his foot and he bites back an undignified yelp. A low curse follows and he bends down to pick up the offending object. The wishing willow branch glistens a dark brown under the low light streaming in through the curtains.

I wish she could never leave.

Daeron stands frozen in place. His blood seems to grow cold in his veins and the sound of your soft breathing gets drowned out by the ringing in his ears.

So he has kissed before. Says he enjoyed it, or supposes he has. You are thoroughly torn on the matter. On one hand, it is good that at least one of you might know what to do with hands and tongues and teeth. On the other, it ires you greatly that someone you have already marked as your man has rested his mouth on another—and more than one, you presume, from the way he speaks of it—and found pleasure there. You wonder if the women he kissed bore any likeness to you. If he would find it agreeable to kiss you. If all that blushing and hiding of his face comes from the abashment of wanting, or if he is plainly too polite to tell you to stop. If two remaining days are enough to charm him, or if the witch tricked you to get her fill of a soul.

Trying to rise finds you stiff all over. Sleep in water gives the body constant motion. It hones you into fluid, graceful softness, even in dreams. Sleep on land is a meaner thing. The ground holds you in one shape and punishes you for keeping it. Your wretched legs have forgotten everything they learned the day before and returned to being useless logs, long and dumb beneath you. The cut across your foot pulses with a dull little heart of its own.

You push yourself up on your arms. Try to bend one knee. Then the other. Nothing comes kindly. Your joints pull, thighs ache, feet sit at the end of you, inert and limp.

Duncan comes back from the stream with the waterskin filled and dark at the seams. The moment he sees you struggling, he hastens over, nearly sloshing water down his leg.

“Hallo, m’lady,” he says, breath touched with worry. He bends, and his hands hover a moment, large and useless in the air. You make the choice for him, seizing his forearms and grunting angrily as you haul yourself toward him.

“Are you in pain?” he asks.

“No, it is only—” You huff, because the lie is poor and the truth is stupid. “I have gone stiff in the night.”

His grip steadies. “Aye. It happens so to folk unused to sleeping on the ground.” He bows his head a little with plain and honest regret, as though the hardness of the earth were some failing of his hospitality. “Forgive me for not giving you better rest.”

“I enjoy the arrangement,” you say, and mean it more than he can know. “Just my legs seem to disagree.”

He helps you out of the bedroll and onto the grass. At once, your knees show their feeble loyalty. One gives, then the other threatens. Duncan catches each stumble before it can become a fall, swift and careful. His hands close round yours until you are held between him like something being taught to stand by force of kindness.

“Easy,” he says. His eyes are lowered to the ground between you, watching your feet as if they are creatures likely to calm under his gaze. “Hold to me.”

So you hold. He steps back. You step forward, or try. He faces you all the while, walking backwards with a patience that ought to shame the road. His palms stay firm around yours, drawing you neither too fast nor too far. “Put your weight here," he says. Corrects, "No, not so much," when you get that wrong too. "Heel first. Then let the rest follow. Aye, that’s better.”

“It feels worse,” you say.

“Aye, well. Better things often do,” Duncan replies, which sounds to you like another of those human miseries dressed up as wisdom.

After a few steps, his brow furrows. “Were you hurt, then? Is that why it comes so hard?”

You nod quickly, because it is easier than explaining the truth and close enough to keep from being a lie. You hope he will not prod at it, and he does not. He only adjusts his hold and lets you try again.

“I’d wager you are used to softer beds,” he says, likely meaning to ease whatever discomfort has grown between you.

You think of weed-beds and wet sand. Of tree roots stretching their long limbs down into the water, making cradles in the dark. Of sleeping where the current runs over your back and little fish nose curiously at your hair. None of it is soft in the way he means. All of it is gone from you.

“Not exactly,” you say.

Duncan looks at you for half a breath. Then, he mumbles, “Right.” He keeps safeguarding you across the grass, step after strenuous little step. After a while, he clears his throat. “So. Are you seeking to reunite with kin in Riverrun, or—?”

Your brows rise. For a moment you cannot tell what he is asking. Whether he has found some crack in you. Whether he is trying to pry loose the fib you have not quite told. Whether he only wishes to make talk because your hands are in his and silence has begun to notice.

Your folk come to mind with no gentleness at all. There is no coddling among them. No teaching of the young beyond what hunger teaches. You are spat into the world, and if the bodies that made you survive their coupling, they become only two more mouths in the same water. Two more foes over food, territory, warmth, the shadowed places where a creature might sleep without teeth finding her. “I am seeking a fuller life,” you say.

The sadness in your own voice surprises you.

Duncan’s hold changes. Softens at the edges. His thumbs brush over your sleeves, and one finds the bare skin at your wrist by accident. Instead of pulling away, he stays. For a heartbeat, he only stands with you held between his hands, looking down as though some answer might be written in the grass.

You are unaware that it indeed is. When your foot skids back a little, Duncan gasps quietly. “Oh, heavens,” he mutters. His whole frame dips, and he sets your palms on his shoulders so you do not stumble. You cling there, confused, while he lowers himself before you and looks at the grass.

“You’re bleeding,” he says, and there is a soft tsk in it. “M’lady, you’re bleeding still.”

“Oh?” You look down as if the foot belongs to someone else. “I thought—”

“Hold to me.” Then, he takes you by the ankle before you can ask why. Warm fingers, broad enough to meet round the bone. The touch startles more than the pain. He lifts your foot with such care that the rest of you must lean harder into his shoulders, then sets his palm flat to the sole. When he draws it back, red has smeared bright across the heel of it.

Duncan frowns up at you. “Why did you not tell me you were wounded?”

You stare at the blood on his skin. “I thought it would close.”

It should have. Your old body sealed itself quickly. Slashes, bites, the ragged marks left by shell or tooth—by morning they would be shut, tender at the seams perhaps, but no longer asking anything of you. Certainly not for a knight crouched in the grass with your ankle in his hand and alarm in his face. The witch has given you legs and human weakness with them. Flesh that opens and stays open. Flesh that must be begged back together.

“I thought it would just—”

“It needs tending,” Duncan says. His voice gentles, as if he has heard some of what you cannot say. “We’ll see to it. Aye?” He lets go of your ankle and rises with your hands still on his shoulders. “May I carry you?”

You nod and put your arms round his neck, ready for the old manner of being lifted. Instead, his hands come to your waist. The blush returns to him fierce and pink, but he endures it. He simply braces you there, lifts, and carries you back over the grass with your feet held clear of the ground.

His face is close. Too close for the shape of him to stay sensible. He looks you in the eye, searching for protest or hurt, but the looking itself becomes unbearable. You draw a larger breath into your lungs, and your chest expands against his. Duncan closes his eyes for a brief moment. His breath smells of crushed mint.

“There we are,” he mutters when he reaches the bedroll.

He sets you down as if the earth might bruise you further, then reaches for waterskin and turns to his sack. Begins pulling things from it: a strip of cloth and a little packet of something dried and green.

“I’ll clean it first,” he says. “Then bind it. It may smart.”

You give him your foot when he reaches for it. His thumb brushes your toes by accident, and the whole limb twitches under the tickle. There's a tiny squeal, and Duncan's face cracks into a smile that seems impossible to withhold. He looks dear with it.

He wets a clean cloth and wipes away the blood that has started seeping again under the pressure of walking. You watch him in silence. His head is bent, hair falling forward, mouth set in focus. “Thought it would close,” he murmurs once, almost to himself, and huffs through his nose as if the notion offends him.

When he presses harder, you hiss and jerk your leg. His grip holds firm enough that you only thrash a little. “Beg pardon,” he says. “Forgive me. I did not mean to hurt you. I’ll be gentler.”

You bite the inside of your lip. He is so lovely to you that it empties your head. There is no answer fit for it, so you close your eyes and let the touch happen. Cloth over sole. Fingers at ankle. Palm holding your calf when he forgets himself in the work. He handles pain as if it is something that can be negotiated with, made smaller by tender perseverance.

When he binds the foot, he sets your heel against his thigh to check the tightness. “Too hard?”

You shake your head.

He tears the remaining tongue of bandage with his teeth, then secures it with a bow. The bow only makes things worse in your heart. A man knowing how to tie one. That fact that his hands can hold sword and rein and still make this small, neat kindness at the end of your body.

“You’ll be glad,” he says, sitting back. “No shoe for this one.”

“How will I walk?”

“You won’t.” He gives the bandage one last look, then lifts his eyes to yours. “Let it seal. I’ll carry you to Chestnut and off her again, if you’ll let me.”

"I'll allow it," you tell him, and Duncan snorts through his nose.

“That is kind of you,” he says with his mouth pulled shyly at one corner.

He packs the camp with the care of someone used to owning very few things and losing none of them. Oilcloth rolled, wool shaken out, bowls wiped with grass, and fire killed under his boot until smoke gives up in sullen threads. He loads the horses, checks straps, checks them again, then comes back to you as if lifting a girl on and off beasts has become one more road-task his hands are meant to know.

When he sets you on Chestnut, your arms go round his neck and he bears it with the same amount of colour proximity always seems to paint him. “There ye are,” he says, and steps back once you are sat properly.

The day grows warmer than the one before. At first you think the heat is only the sun choosing to dislike you more openly. Then your new body begins casting out its own water. It gathers at your neck, under your arms, between your breasts, slicking you in a thin unpleasant film. Sweat, you remember. Humans leak themselves when the air grows heavy. Understandable why they are so fond of cloth. It gives the body somewhere to be ashamed.

Ahead, Duncan rides with his shoulders set beneath his shirt, and soon the linen darkens down the column of his spine. It clings there, marking the long line of him. His back is broad enough to resemble one of those softer beds he keeps apologising for failing to provide. You think it would be a better one than the ground, and likely kinder.

Chestnut begins blowing through her nose, impatient with the heat. Duncan turns in the saddle. “Aye,” he tells her. “We ought to cool off somewhere.” Then his eyes come to you, expectant now in a way that pleases you. “Any water near?”

You look around. Wait. Listen past the horse-breath and tack-creak and road dust. There. “A little further ahead,” you say, pointing. “There should be a stream.”

Duncan nods this time without that careful pity from yesterday. Soon enough the road bends and forks into a smaller path toward the trees you chose. Beneath the leaves, water susurrates over stone, plain as speech.

He stops in a green hollow where the stream runs slow and bright. First he helps you down from Chestnut, hands steady, then settles you in the shade on a soft bed of grass.

“Would you mind if I tend to the beasts first?” he asks.

It endears you that he calls them what you call them, and you nod with great solemnity. Duncan leads the horses into the water, murmuring to them as they drink.

You sit where he has placed you and watch him, only a little. He steps in barefoot, water up to his knees, breeches darkening where they drink the river. When he bends to wash his face the sound he makes is so relieved it nearly has shape. Then, his body shifts as if he might turn, so you lie back quickly and pretend great interest in the sun glittering through the crown of leaves overhead.

For a second, or maybe two, you are interested. Light breaks itself on leaf-edge and comes down green-gold and restless. But in the corner of your eye Duncan pulls the shirt over his head and tosses it onto the bank, inadvertently impoverishing your attention.

It shrinks to his back, shining with sweat and riverlight. Large shoulders become larger bare. The hard-working breadth of him slopes down into a waist that seems almost shy for belonging to such a man. Water skids from the back of his neck and runs between the moving shelves of muscle. His arms gleam where the hair on them catches sun, each strand lit briefly as mosquitoes are lit in evening air. Lower, the ridges at the base of his spine look softer than they ought to, plush little marks above the band of his breeches, a place made by the gods for the pressing of a mouth and then hidden from decent folk by linen.

Duncan forgets himself for one blessed moment. He lowers into the stream with a groan, then lies back where the water is deep enough to take some of his weight. His chest comes into view. No wonder it is so broad if it must hold the sort of heart he has.

His ribs expand slowly and crown the upper swell of his stomach. The whole front of him looks safe. Pliable. Opulent with flesh, with strength, with the dark scatter of hair that begins across him and gathers itself into a neater line below his navel, leading somewhere your thoughts visit, and you don't even care to leash them. The little cup of his belly looks tender enough for a cheek. For a kiss, perhaps. For asking forgiveness of whatever part of him you have offended by wanting so much.

You watch him through leaf-shadow and sun-break, hunger loosening warm in your mouth. It is the looks, yes. You are young enough and living enough for beauty to matter. But the beauty wounds because it is his. His shoulders that carried you. His hands that tied the bandage. His mouth that stammered around kindness. His generous body laid briefly open in the water, while the heart inside it has been nothing but careful with you.

Then you notice the dark brand of mortality spoiling what is dear and fair and supple. A wound at his side, ugly with bruise-bloom and old blood, the flesh round it gone a deep wine-dark colour that makes your teeth meet. That is what has made him wince and grunt whenever he has pretended effort is a stranger to him. Someone put that there. Someone opened your knight and left him to ride on with pain hidden under cloth and courtesy.

Whoever hurt your beloved becomes at once your beloathed.

You want to tend him. Cure him. Put your mouth to the slash and draw the pain from it. Lick it clean. Pack it with moss and bitter green things. Seal him with leaf and mud and charm and the old patience of riverbeds. Hide him somewhere cold and safe where no sword can find him and no lord can send him back out to be struck again. Then you remember that whatever powers lived in your old body have been taken from you with your gills and your tail. All that remains is knowledge. Root, herb, current, and small useful things land and water will still confess if you ask properly.

Heat climbs through you, anger and want together, so fierce the stream begins calling harder. To you, it is communal. Water is company, cleansing, and peace. A place where bodies are honest and the world knows how to hold them. You begin undressing before sense catches up, fingers already at the borrowed linen. Then Duncan’s red ears return to you. His stricken crouch over firewood. The way he begged you to spare him from some bare skin as if you had raised a blade.

Whether that was true misliking or liking too much, you still have no clear answer. Men have a great many words for lying softly.

So the shift stays on. This, you think, is decorum.

You rise with care and make your wobbly way to the bank, each step placed as though the earth may change its mind beneath you. Duncan lies with his ears under the stream, face turned to the sky, and does not stir. The first touch of water over your bandaged foot is bright enough to steal your breath. Cool. Familiar. Wrong only because your body receives it poorly now, through skin instead of gill, through ache instead of ease. Still, it welcomes you better than road and saddle ever did.

You step knee-deep. Then further. The stream dips there into a dark little hollow beneath the willow roots, and the water climbs your thighs, your hips, your waist. Your shift billows round you and then clings. Duncan floats an arm-length away, chest moving slow, the gash ugly at his side like an insult left unanswered.

“You are hurt,” you say.

He jerks so hard his head goes under. For one sharp instant his limbs thrash and water breaks. Then Duncan surges upright, coughing badly, droplets streaming from his hair into his eyes. Water reaches his waist. His mouth opens on a half-strangled oath.

“Seven bloody hells!” he bellows, making the horses lift their heads from drinking. Drags a hand down his face and finds you standing there in your soaked shift. The cloth has gone thin and faithful to every line beneath it. His gaze strikes you once, panics, and bolts upward to the trees. “M-m’lady,” he rasps, still coughing. “Gods. You near frightened the soul out of me.”

“Let me tend to you,” you say, reaching. Your fingers brush his ribs and—oh, gods. He flinches. Flinches as if you have burnt him, near stumbling back on the pebbles.

“N-no,” he stammers. “No, there’s—” Another step back. “There’s no need. I, uh—I’ll let you bathe. Forgive me, I—”

“Ser Duncan?” You only blink at him, stunned. He stays where he is, eyes down. “Ser Duncan, you mustn’t be so foolish," you say. "It is only tending.”

“Please,” he says, and the word comes out almost a whine.

You come closer despite it. Set your fingers to his side again, gentler this time, and find the flesh above the cut warmer than the rest of him. “You’re in pain.”

“It looks worse than it feels,” he says. “Hah—” His breath hitches when your thumb brushes the soft of his belly. “Please,” he says, lower now. “Don’t… don't touch me.”

The hurt of it lands before you can reason with it. Your hand retreats. Your jaw sets tight. “As you wish,” you say, and dip wholly underwater and let the current take you a little way from him.

Duncan starts the day perturbed and only grows more and more mortified during the course of it.

First, sleeping next to you proves shallow and restless, for you keep making soft sounds in the night and moving under the blanket. Your body seems to disregard the steel barrier entirely and every now and then one of your limbs brushes him. Fingers on the hem of his shift. Foot nudging his low on the bedroll. Duncan sleeps terribly.

Then he is shamed for the hurt on you, and rightly. He had been so fixed on keeping his eyes clean and his hands honourable, so addled by the bareness of you, that he had given your bad walking some name out of fear and pity and left the simplest answer underfoot.

A cut. A cruel slash across the sole. Even close, even with your hands in his, it takes the red smear on the grass to make him see it, and the sight puts a shudder of anger through him so sharp he nearly speaks too harshly. After that comes worse: your ankle warm in his hand, your heel on his thigh, the soft give of your calf under his palm while he cleans what he can. You trust him through it. Squeal when it stings, then bite yourself quiet and try to be brave for no reason he deserves. Your skin imperils him by seeming new-made, tender in a way ordinary skin is not, without the leathering of road or work or weather. Dunk binds the foot as gently as he knows how and keeps himself from lifting it to his mouth and kissing it better only because that would mean bringing your leg higher, opening you by accident or design, and he is certain as sunrise that he would not survive the sight.

He contemplates this predicament of knightly challenge while floating on his back, body idle where his mind is restless, and gets startled by your voice. Then haunted by the same fingers that brushed him in the night and the shape of you, plain and vulgar and hallowed all the same under the shift clinging to you. He mumbles his futile excuses, manages to offend you by trying to maintain his honour, and stumbles out of the stream burnt up to his ears and heavy between the legs. Gods have mercy on him, Duncan has a few more nights with you ahead of him and faith in himself near shredded to scraps.

For another hour or so, he is quiet as a dead man. Sets you onto Chestnut with his eyes barely open, and rides in suffocating silence. At camp his heart inevitably melts back to warmness, because you try to feed Sweetfoot an apple you have chewed yourself first, and for it the horse adores you so much that Duncan almost chars the bread he is trying to make less stone-like. You squat too close to the fire and near singe the hem, making him certain you are not road-wise at all, then gut a fish he has caught in tremendous efforts with such unnerving competence Dunk has to revise his whole sense of your shelteredness.

Once he loosens enough to laugh and make talk with you again, the questions return. Seven hells, they never end, and Duncan scowls at each and every one of them. Do 'married things' feel better once people are married? Is it always a man and a woman who do 'married things'? Do folk kiss only on the mouth? Where else can one kiss? At which point Dunk contemplates pouring boiling water from the pot over his palm just so he is spared.

You seem oblivious. Charmingly so, because every inquiry leaves your face adorned with child-like curiosity, and the things you speak of having nothing child-like about them makes you only that much purer and more disarming in his eyes.

“How do I know a man would like to kiss me?” you ask, blinking at him wide-eyed and hopeful.

He is thankful the bite he took has already gone down his throat before that one lands. Duncan considers it gravely, though not without a fresh wave of shame, because while he means to answer you truthfully and as best he can, he need not bare himself doing it.

“It depends on the man,” he says, vague as a coward, and is met with another blink. “He might, uh—” Duncan tries. “Some men would gape at you outright, mayhaps. Some would try to steal looks and turn away when you caught them at it. Some might go nervous round you. Blush some. Look at your mouth and then wish they hadn’t, because—” He exhales hard through his nose. “Gods. I don’t know. Forgive me, m’lady, I've no proper answer for that one.”

You sit across from him with your face set carefully, taking each word in as if it has been given for study. Only then does it dawn on Duncan that he may have given himself away after all.

At nightfall, he prepares the bedroll again and sets the sword down, doubting its use. What he named protection that first evening serves tonight as the restraint he needs so dearly, and there is something wholly unknightly in that.

As if for punishment, he wakes hot and clammy, half-rolled off the wool, his side aching badly. When he opens his eyes, you are perched on one elbow with your hand hovering over his forehead. “Ser Duncan,” you say. “You’re burning up. Let me clean your wound, or you’ll go stiff as a dead fish.”

His mouth is parched. He fights himself a moment, tries to move, and when he finds it painful beyond keeping his face straight, Duncan nods, wincing. “A-aye,” he rasps. “Aye, all right then.”

You get to work at once. Even through the blear in his eyes he sees that you limp less than yesterday. Slow, still, and careful with the foot he bound, but less at war with the earth. You move from the bedroll to the fringe of grass near the stream, bending over plants, touching leaves, bringing them to your nose. Some you take. Some you let fall again with a little dismissive flick of your fingers. Moss from the wet bank. Green things he cannot name. A strip of bark peeled from a low branch after you press your face close to it and seem to listen. You come back with all of it gathered in your skirt, along with clean water from the stream and the bandages pulled from his sack.

Then, you sit on your heels beside him and roll his shirt up. Duncan hisses. “Ah—”

“Ser Duncan, we should not travel today,” you say.

“I’m bound for… for Riverrun soon, ah—” His breath catches when you peel the linen from his side. The cloth gives with a mean little tug. “There is business there.”

“You’ll be more useful to them sound than fevered, Duncan.”

You say it while looking where he cannot see. He looks where he should not. The furrow between your brows, the fall of your hair, and your pretty mouth tightened in focus, and oh—your lips part round a twist of bark and bitter leaves, and thought leaves him in one shameful rush. You chew them all together with grave purpose.

Duncan watches, transfixed enough that the first spill of stream-cool water over his ribs catches him unprepared. His stomach jumps. You take the sound for pain and murmur something under your breath, sweet and wordless, as you pat the wound dry. He is grateful for the mistake. Grateful too that your eyes keep going to his face and the blanket lies over him from the waist down, because your hand is braced low on his stomach and his body has begun turning traitor in ways fever cannot excuse.

“Is this too much?” you ask.

He shakes his head for the lump in his throat makes speech a poor wager.

You pack the wound with moss and the green pulp you have made, careful as any septa laying cloth over the dead. Sphagnum, he knows dimly, from old hedge lessons and worse roads. The rest is beyond him. He must be looking at it strangely, because you pause with your fingers at his side.

“I vow to you, this is safe,” you say. “It is what my people know of healing. I would not harm you.”

“I… I know that,” Duncan says. The answer comes quickly, because it is true before he has time to dress it better. He covers the hand you have set on his stomach. Your skin is cooler than his, cool enough to make him ache toward it.

“I beg your pardon for my weakness, m’lady.”

“I’ll grant you no pardon for that, ser,” you say. “For it needs none.” Your mouth curves a little, thoughtful rather than cruel. “The foolishness, well. That one I might grant pardon for.”

Despite the pain, something near a laugh moves in his chest.

You reach for the clean bandage and begin to bind his waist. He has to raise himself for it. The doing hurts badly enough to sour his breath, but he does it all the same, one arm locked beneath him while you pass the cloth under his back and round again. Your hands move with surprising certainty. All the awkwardness with laces and shoes gone from you the moment flesh is the thing in need.

When it is done, you tie the bandage firm and check the edge with two fingers. “Too tight?”

“No.”

It is, a little. But he would sooner bite his tongue than make you fuss over him again.

You seem to know that somehow, or else you have learned his face too well already, because you loosen it by the smallest measure before he can protest. Then you lean in, set a wet cloth over his forehead, and smooth it once over his brow. The touch quiets him worse than sleep could.

“Rest, Ser Duncan,” you say. “Riverrun may wait a day.”

It is as though you have put a spell on the world, because Duncan’s eyes grow heavy and everything seems set on peeling the fever off him. The air cools during his sleep and billows with loud howling through the trees, making breath come easier into his lungs. By the time he wakes, the mean bite in his side has dulled to a steady ache, and the heat in him has lessened into something nearer the natural state of a body than the foul blaze of sickness.

For a moment he does nothing but lie there, listening. You are humming beside him. The sound is low and strange and threaded so gently through the wind that he almost thinks he has dreamt it. When he opens his eyes, he finds you curled near the fire in a small, careful shape, arms tucked round yourself as if trying to keep what warmth you have from fleeing. Your hair moves across your cheek. Your face has gone solemn in sleep or thought; he cannot tell which.

He clears his throat and pushes himself up. The movement hurts, but only in the way of a wound that means to remind him it exists, rather than one trying to split him open. “Are you cold, m’lady?” he asks.

You turn your head toward him. Duncan looks round before you can answer and sees at once that a great part of the day has been stolen from him. The shadows have shifted long across the ground. The light has taken on the thinned, slanting look of late afternoon.

“How long was I out?”

“A few hours,” you say. “Do you feel better?”

“Aye.” He presses one hand carefully near the bandage and finds it firm. “Aye, I do. You’ve got my thanks.” He makes himself stand, slower than he likes. “I’ll start the fire proper, so you can warm up.”

You only nod. That troubles him a little.

He works at the kindling with hands that feel almost his own again and urges the fire into steadier life. When it takes, he motions you closer to it. You come, but even with amber light painting your face and the flame catching in your eyes, you keep your arms around yourself. Duncan watches that a moment, then rises and goes to his things. He finds a spare shift that does not shame him too badly for smell, shakes it once, and brings it back to you.

You look up at him. “Do I need more layers for your comfort?” you ask, mild.

“N-no,” he blurts, and then wishes he had managed it better. “No. This is for you. To get warmer.”

You take it after a pause. “Thank you.” Then you pull it over your head.

It unmakes him some, seeing you in something that came from his back. The cloth sits loose on you, too large in the shoulder, the sleeves falling past your wrists, and for some reason that is worse than all your wet linen had been. Worse in a different way. Quieter. It puts a claim in his mind he has no right to make and no courage to name.

He passes you water. Food. What little there is. You take both, but without the bright delight of the nights before. The silence in you discontents him. It sits between the pair of you heavier than his sword does at nights.

You both wait through the sinking of the sun with no moon rising after it. The sky grows dark by degrees and stays that way, blind and deep.

Duncan’s mind, made foolish by fever and wanting, begins to search for crimes. Mayhaps he snored like a pig. Mayhaps he spoke in his sleep. Mayhaps some foulness of the body escaped him while he lay senseless, and you are too gentle or too strange to name it. Then worse thoughts come. Mayhaps you have remembered some home you do not wish to speak of. Mayhaps the road has frightened you. Mayhaps he has touched too much, or withheld too much, or made some fresh error in the long ledger of not knowing how to be with you.

At last he cannot stand it. “Is something wrong?” he asks. “Have I frightened you somehow?”

What he means is, Were you frightened for me? Did my sickness put fear in you? Did you sit here humming me back from fever while I slept like a lump and gave you no thanks worth the doing? He does not ask that, of course.

You look at him across the fire. “Is your fever gone?”

“Aye. I think so.”

Then, you reach out and set your hand to his forehead. Duncan decides to let you. After all his defending himself from your touch, the yielding feels almost humiliating. Your palm is cold. Cool enough that he leans a fraction into it. “It is a wonder, what you did,” he says. “Truly.”

You stay there a moment longer. Then slip, not away, but to the side of his face.

“Are you cold still?” he asks.

You nod.

There is something changed in you now. He cannot say what. You are quieter, but the quiet has gone sharp and watchful. Closed in a way your face has never much managed before. It leaves him with the queer sense that he has done wrong and is only waiting to learn the charge.

“We’ve another blanket,” he says. “You may have it.”

You shake your head. Your hand moves from his cheek to his neck. His breath forgets itself.

“Would you hold me?” you ask and the question leaves him with no ground beneath him.

He wants to. Gods, he wants to. Wants it with such simple force that for one foolish instant his arms open before honour can set a guard over them. To hold you and warm you and give back a little of what you gave him. To fit you against him and learn the shape of your weight with nothing between but cloth and breath. To stop being careful long enough to stop aching.

You come into him as if you had only been waiting for the smallest leave.

Your body moulds tight to his chest. One hand slides behind his neck and into the hair at his nape; the other settles carefully near his side, avoiding the wound with a tenderness that cuts him deeper than a careless touch would have. Your face turns against his throat. Scent comes up with the heat of you—river-cold still, and green, with a foreign worry underneath it that seems made to ruin him.

He sits rigid at first, then lowers his arms around you. He circles your back with great care, as though the wrong pressure might break whatever spell has allowed this. His palm moves once between your shoulders. Then again. A slow, broad pass, the way he soothed you by the bank, only now there is no panic in your breathing. Only the nearness of you. The trust of you. The soft press of your shirt against his chest.

He says nothing. He does not trust his voice. Instead, he closes his eyes.

“Ser Duncan?” you ask.

“Mm?”

“When people kiss—” you start, lancing him with relief so strangely he almost laughs outright. Another question. Another weird, killing little question, but a question all the same. Something with words on it. Something safer than the warm mouth of you near his throat and the hand at the back of his neck making a weak man of him.

“Where does the nose go?”

A huffed chuckle leaves him. He has never once thought on it, which seems impossible now that you have asked. His chin lowers by a little. The dark gives him no help at all. “Wherever it can go,” he answers.

You shift against him, and crane your head back to look at him. “Would you show me?” you ask. Duncan near stops breathing altogether.

If time were a pocket full of stones to be thrown into water, yours would be light now. Between startling him in the stream on the second day and the morning of the third, you are nearly out of pebbles, and nowhere near certainty that what sits so swollen in you has found its likeness in him.

You tend him because pain on Duncan seems an offence against the order of things. Your hands know more than the rest of your borrowed body does, because the old small wisdoms of healing remain when all your better gifts are gone.

Then he sleeps. If you had all the time in the world, it would be a blessed thing. To sit with him through the day and look your fill without having to steal it. To learn his face by light rather than glances: the slope of his nose, the soft fall of his mouth, the worried place between his brows that seems carved by use. But every hour that passes comes down with a weight in it. Doom pressing thumb by thumb upon the tender back of your neck. You have hardly thought of the other choice. You do not know yet if your heart has turned vicious. You do not know what would prove easier in the end: longing or death. You do not even know whom you love more—him, or yourself.

So you hum, for it comes from somewhere old in you. Habit before speech. A small line thrown back to the creature you were so eager to cast off the moment a knight knelt bloodied at your riverbank and broke your life in two by praying. The song is low and almost without shape, but Duncan’s face softens beneath it in unspeakable measure. Sleep takes the worry from him first. Then pain. Then the lines around his mouth ease as if the song has set careful fingers there and smoothed them flat.

When he wakes, your nerves stir again. You have spent hours with him, but he has not spent them with you. He returns from slumber healthier, clearer, less fever-taken, and a bitter thought slips through unbidden: you ought not to have helped so eagerly. A fevered man is easier. Easier to seduce. Easier to kill.

Both notions sadden you in equal measure. If you were willing to win a weak version of him, you may as well have lured him with song the first day and let the river take the rest. As for killing—well. You came hoping for something to begin. Not end.

You cannot decide whether the air has chosen to be ally or enemy. Yesterday, heat helped very little. Duncan took great offence at you bathing near him, though your shift had stayed on like a banner of hard-won virtue, and afterwards he rode ahead in his breeches still dripping, neck blazing red. You still have no clue whether the sun kissed him so passionately there or whether his own blood had run faster from mortification. If the latter, you might almost take comfort. It would mean skin alone does not imperil him, but the shape of what it is stretched over does too.

Now the day has turned cold. All the small ends of you stiffen with it: toes, fingers, nose, the delicate rims of ears you have only just begun to understand. When Duncan gives you his shift, it helps little and wounds much. You eat the food, and it is still good, but doom dulls even salt and fat. You sit by the fire, which burns hot and warms everything except the parts that matter.

The only improvement is his scent. It gathers in the cloth he gives you, in the space around him, in the place where days have drawn the truth of his body closer to the skin. Earth after rain, almost. Warm ground turned by a hand. The deep, honest rot of flesh worked hard and loved too little. It is inviting in the way banks are inviting after too long in flood-water. Safe. Pure in a manner nothing you have known as pure before, because it belongs to a creature who has had every chance to harm you and kept choosing not to.

It makes you want to try harder. So you ask to be held, plainly and bravely, because every subtler method has failed you.

And somehow, blessedly, that works. Duncan opens his arms as if forgetting himself for one breath, and you go into him before he remembers any reason to stop. He is warm. Broad and rigid at first, all restraint and alarm, then his arms lower around you with a care that makes your throat ache. One hand moves over your back. Slow. Heavy and kind. The other stays mindful of his wounded side, and you press yourself where you may without hurting him, cheek near his throat, hand at the back of his neck where his hair curls soft against your fingers.

His scent is stronger here. His breath too. His ribs lift against you once, held too long, and you feel the panic in him before he makes any sound of it.

Emboldened, foolish with nearness, you crane your head up to look at him. “Would you show me?” you ask.

At once, Duncan locks himself in his stringent state of lungs filled with fright. For one breath he only looks at you. Mouth parted, eyes dark and wide and wretched with wanting he seems determined to suffer through rather than obey. His hand moves from your back to your shoulder, then stills there, made smaller and shaking in some deep part of him.

“M’lady,” he says, and the title sounds scraped from him. “You do not know what you ask.”

“I ask for a kiss.”

“Aye,” he says, almost pained. “That is the trouble of it.”

Your fingers tighten in his hair. He swallows. You feel it against your wrist, that small motion of life going down through him, and it draws you closer without thought. Your mouth is near enough now that his breath moves over it. Warm. Uneven. Human.

“Please,” you say, because pride has begun to feel like a thing for creatures with more time.

Duncan shuts his eyes. When they open, there is something terrible in them. Kindness, of all things. “I mustn’t,” he says. “Not like this.” Then he peels you from him.

Gently. Carefully. As if your arms are brambles he means to free himself from without breaking a leaf. That gentleness finishes what the refusal began. His hands leave you with honour in every finger, and you hate the honour so sharply you feel it in your teeth.

“We should rest,” he says, voice low. “You’ve had a hard day. Both of us have.”

You sit back on your heels and look at him. “I will be right there,” you say.

Duncan nods once. He looks as though he wants to say more and knows better than to trust his mouth. Then he lets you go.

The dark receives you with no comfort. No moon has risen. The sky hangs black over the trees, and every small night-sound seems to have sharpened itself for your hearing. The fire cracks behind you. Water calls ahead. You walk toward it with your arms wrapped around yourself, feet wet already from the grass, the bandage gone cold and weighty against your sole.

Stream takes your ankles first. You stand there a while, letting it worry the hurt in your foot, and sing softly because there is nothing else in you large enough to hold the ache. The song comes out thin. Sadder than you mean it to. A thing for deep places and lost skins, for girls foolish enough to think love would explain itself before the third night came hunting.

He has no love for you. That is what the witch’s voice says inside the dark.

He is kind. He is tender. He looks at you as if looking pains him. He has warmed you, carried you, fed you, let you touch his fevered body. He has given you his shirt and his fire and his poor sleeping place. Everything in him leans toward you.

Still, he will not give the proof.

The contradiction scrapes through you until you could scream. He has chosen fear. Virtue. Whatever cold, shining thing men put between their bodies and the bodies that want them. He has chosen the sword.

Something knocks softly against your bad foot, so you look down.

The dagger lies in the shallows, dark blade nosing against the stone as if the river has carried it back in its mouth. Returned from the mud where you left it to rot.

You stare at it first, then bend and take it. The hilt fits your palm with malicious ease.

When you return, the camp is nearly spent. The fire has sunk to a red eye. Duncan sleeps on his back with his face turned toward the dark and the sword laid down between you, steel dull and matted in the thin light. It looks and feels, to you, like an insult.

You kneel beside him with the dagger in your fist and learn again how human bodies rid themselves of water. Your eyes cloud. Your throat swells shut around breath. Tears fall hot down your cheeks and onto his forearm, though he does not wake.

He is very large in sleep. Very warm. His side lies beneath the blanket, bandaged where your hands have worked mercy into him. You know where he is weakest. Where to put the blade. How to turn the hand so it goes under the rib and up. The thought of all that warmth spilling out of him sickens you so badly you nearly retch.

“Forgive me,” you choke, and turn the dagger toward yourself.

Your hand shakes. The blade catches clumsily in the cloth, then slips, and in your blind effort to right it you snag his forearm. Duncan's eyes open.

It must be raining, he thinks at first. Droplets hit his wrist, then his cheek. But when something stings his skin with its sharp tooth, Duncan is alert through knightly instinct, or the instinct that let him survive Flea Bottom as a lame boy, or it is merely the Warrior watching over him. Which one, he does not know.

He knows only enough to move fast when a blade is being turned near where he is weak. His body acts before his mind can give the order. He is battle-trained and large. To seize the perfidious wrist, to roll over a deceitful body and pin it, to bash the weapon from the hand that nursed him away from fever only to break faith with him now—it is all nothing. It is but a blink.

To look into your wet, frightened eyes is everything. Everything that destroys him.

Duncan wants to scream, yet what leaves him is a foolish little thing, near too small to live inside him without getting lost.

“Tell me why,” he breathes over you. The sorrow in it he despises. “Speak, girl!” he says, louder, trying not to sound so heartbroken.

Since now he is sinew and bone first and everything else later, he notices things in scraps. Wretchedly, your spread legs below him. Woefully, your fast-beating heart under his, distraught in the same measure. Lustfully, your mouth, for he is only a man who has yearned for a woman for three days that felt like three lifetimes. Then, dreadfully, the way the mouth cuts itself into a lopsided sickle and begins to wobble. He finds your eyes again, and they are overpouring.

“Why?” he cries. “I’ve nothing for you to rob me of, and I’ve tried to do right by you. To keep my promise, to keep you safe, to—”

His grip tightens as he drags through the miserable list of his own reasons, your wrists caught in both his hands. He feels the small bones under his fingers and catches himself in anger. Loosens. His face cannot decide what shape to take, anguish or ire, so it hangs between them in some ugly misery.

“Why would you betray me?” he whispers.

“It’s—” Your voice breaks before it begins. “It was not meant for you. The w-witch… the witch said a soul, she did not say whose—”

Duncan stares.

“She—she gave me three days,” you sob, words tumbling over themselves, half-choked and damp. “And it has been three days, and I—I would not— I would never, not you—”

Your chest hitches under him. You try to pull one hand free, fail, and only curl your fingers in the air as if reaching for words that keep slipping from you. “It was for me. I was going to—”

He understands naught of it. “Girl, what is this nonsense that you speak of?” he asks, desperate. “What witch? What soul?”

You blink at him through the tears. For a long moment you only gape, and the fear in your face goes strange, as if some part of you had expected him to know the tale already.

“You’ve no love for me,” you say, so quietly he almost misses it. Your fingers flex above the wrists. Duncan lets go.

The instant he does, you take his hands and set them at your throat. Your own close over his, pressing them there, begging with them. He feels how feeble that column is beneath his palms. The hard swallow of it. The frantic life inside. How easily his thumbs could end you. How surely it would end him too.

“You’ve no love for me,” you say, “and it means I cannot go back. I cannot go home, and I cannot take your life, so it has to be mine. Please, please—”

Duncan sees part of it plain, and another part not at all. Your palms squeeze round his, eyes leaking plea after plea. He is certain that if you could reach it, you would hand him the dagger and point its tip to your own neck. How this would ensure his sparing, he does not comprehend. What he recognises is the devotion of putting oneself at the edge of the blade if that means your beloved lives.

“M’lady—” he mouths, stunned by the discovery.

All of the teasing, all of the questions—none of it was malevolent. None of it was oblivious either, or meant to make him stray off his path, use him, seduce him for sport. It was you speaking I want you to him in a language he used to know and misplaced when he found folk scarcely so openly honest.

“Calm yourself. Calm yourself now,” he says, terrified at being the cause of your sorrow. “Oh, girl. Hush now, hush.” He removes his hands from your throat and brings them to your swollen cheeks. “Tell me plain,” he says. “Slowly. Don’t be afraid.”

Your sobbing eases. “I saw you on the bank lancing a man through and praying for him a minute later. You—” Your fingers come up to his cheeks, damp and trembling, and the touch strikes him so softly he can hardly bear it. “You bewitched me.”

Duncan sucks in a breath.

“So I went to a crone and struck a deal. To get legs. So you—” You swallow. “So you could love me.”

“Legs?” Duncan huffs. “Girl—”

His mind begins to move, slow and fearful, through every half-remembered tale old women or some Flea Bottom drunk or hedge septon ever muttered near a fire. Water-wives. River maids. Green-haired things who drowned men by kissing them. Old gods in stones and streams. Stories, he had thought. Ways for folk to dress up queer happenings so the world seemed less wide and hungry than it was.

Yet he thinks of you in the willow-shadow, floating as if the stream had been made to hold you. Of your strange wisdom with water and wound and herb. Of your dread of shoes. Your open face. Your body new to its own legs.

“Where’s your home?” he asks.

You look at him, and he holds his breath without meaning to. Then, you say, “The river.”

The way you looked hugged by water suddenly makes sense. “River-folk,” he mutters. “I was right, then. You’re no human girl.” Your face changes at that, guilt passing plain over it, and the sight only settles the truth harder in him.

“Gods,” he says, hushed. “You’re a river maid. Some old god’s daughter, mayhaps. Holy thing of the water.” It's all muttered half to himself, as if wagering with his own mind whether such a thing can be possible, but awe gets into him anyway. Awe and fear. Awe and the brutal knowledge that he has had a holy thing weeping under him with his hand at her throat.

Your eyes widen. Confused, mayhaps. Hopeful too, in some small wounded way. “What say you to me, knight?”

Duncan shifts. Sets himself firmer on one elbow, then bends one knee and hooks it carefully against your leg to keep you open beneath him. Closer now. More intimate than the pinning had been when his body only knew defence. His hands slide to the back of your head, thumbs settling where your jaw hinges, close beside your ears. He presses there gently.

“What did the witch tell you to do?” he asks.

Wariness moves over your face, but you answer. “She said to bring her a soul if you did not fall for me within three days.” Your eyes drop. “Otherwise I am cast out and trapped in this ugly body.”

The shape of it becomes clearer. Witch-craft with its fangs hidden until the mouth shuts. A sworn sword and a maid from the water. A bargain made to rot between them. How easy to mislead you. How easy to make failure look like virtue and restraint look like scorn.

His body understands some ruinous part of it before his mind is finished. The angle has him feeling you everywhere that matters: your breath hot over his face, the soft give of you under his weight, your fingers brushing shakily beneath his eyes and near his mouth as if you want to touch and are afraid. His groin fills out against sense, against decency, against every terrified plea he has made to the Seven in three days. Reprehensible, mayhaps. True all the same.

For desperate want of proof, he manages to ask, “And how were you to know if I had fallen or no?”

You move a little beneath him. It pains him terribly. “When you want between my legs,” you say. “That is why I needed them in the first place.”

Duncan laughs then. Breathless. Broken by it.

You frown. “What?”

“Wee thing,” he says. “Oh, Gods—” His eyes close.

“Duncan?”

He rubs at the base of your skull. “Hush, sweet thing. Only tell me if I wrong you.” Then he lowers his face slowly to yours.

“There ain’t nowhere for the nose to go,” he says.

First, he fits himself beneath you, clumsy with care. The tip of his nose fills the warm curve above your upper lip, where your mouth rises into that soft little bow. When he speaks, his mouth frames your lower lip so closely that the words seem to move against it. “It just goes here,” he murmurs.

Then he shifts higher, until your mouths face one another and his nose wedges beside yours, dipping into the slope where cheek begins. Nearer now. Close enough that, if your lips were not stunned and motionless beneath his, it would already be a kiss. “Or here.”

He presses in by the smallest measure. “Or flattens some,” he breathes, “when it’s more ardent.”

Duncan wants to kiss you ardently. He also wants to tell you this is not how love works, but he catches himself knowing naught of it. He's been charmed by women, by their voices and breasts and the napes of their necks, thought of them for days upon days, and inevitably, forgotten most of the maids for the sake of his pliant heart remaining whole. You, he's certain, he'd never forget. Despite his body being crude and primal around you, he thinks, innocently, that it is the heart that animates his blood to go where it goes. He presses down on you with ingenuity between the shoulders and lust between the hips, and the lust is pure too, for it comes from affection.

Your leg hitches higher on him and fingers find some valour in their groping. You take a clean hold of his face and trap him there, in the in-between kiss state, and look at him with the sort of plain youthful hope that keeps unearthing him.

"What are you saying?" you ask.

Duncan’s hands come up to answer first. Where you keep him, he cradles you back, careful thumbs, fingers spreading into your hair. There. There is the shape of it. Want met with want, fear met with shaking, your breath touching his and making no wound of it.

“I am saying,” he murmurs, moving the words against your mouth, “that the witch has been proven wrong already. You had my heart before you had legs steady under you.” Your eyes search his so closely he feels near flayed by the looking. “But if you need proof in the flesh,” he says, rougher, shame and hunger dragging at the same rope inside him, “I would be honoured to give it. Gods help me, I would. Only you should know I may be poor at it.” His breath hitches. “You would be my first.”

You consider him calmly. “I don’t need it,” you say, making his whole chest suck in on itself. Then, Duncan breathes again, when you add, “But I want it.”

Finally, the holding concludes. You kiss as if the thing has angered you by staying unknown so long. Your mouth opens wide and catches his lower lip between yours, soft first, then with teeth. Duncan makes a sound into you. He cannot tell whether the bite is artless or bold already, whether you have stumbled into hunger or known the road to it all along. This, at least, he can teach. When the cloth comes off, when bodies are bare and honest and frightening in the dark, both of you will be green as spring branches. But kissing—kissing he knows enough to begin.

So he shows you. Shows you how the nose can fit beneath yours, how it can slide along cheek and breathe there, hot and loud. Shows you how a mouth may press and soften and press again, how teeth need not wound to be felt, how the lips can ask twice before taking. Then his tongue finds the seam of you, and when you open, he slips inside.

He discovers that you must be finding that pleasurable because you moan softly and bend beneath him and fit yourself firmer to his cock, making him ache more. Your fingers climb to his hair and tug, and some helpless part of him near thanks you for it.

You learn fast, too—answer his tongue with yours, and they press each other and taste each other, and to Duncan you taste like blessed water and flesh made open. He kisses you deeper for it, ardent at last, enough that his nose flattens against your cheek, and the nonsense of it is so small and heartbreaking the clothes start itching him unbearably.

“I wanted you,” he whispers. “Gods, I wanted you.”

For a moment you stop kissing in favour of laughing sweetly, so he, in his ardour, pulls the shirt off his back, bearing himself to the night and your eyes. You stop laughing then and fix your pupils somewhere below his chin, and Duncan sees a glimpse of what he presumes lesser creatures see before you seize their throats and snap their spines. Lowering lids and lashes gone droopy over them, you breathe out, set your forefinger to the hollow of his throat, collect the dampness there, and bring it back to your mouth.

“And I wanted you,” you say.

Duncan leans in to kiss you some more. The dagger lies abandoned in the grass.

Your knight loves you. He is kissing you, and for a man who only supposes he likes it, he is incredibly fervent about it. Obedient too: he rises when you all but press your fingers to his bicep and lets you climb him a little. He sits on his heels and lowers his head for you to reach. His mouth tastes clean and cold of crushed mint. His hands on you are warm, warming up with every pass. They hold your neck first, then slide down your shoulders, pause briefly at your elbows, and continue lower. You are lost in it, learning how to do this thing called kissing and where the poking parts of the body go during, when desire emboldens him enough to stray beneath your skirt.

You catch his wrist unconsciously, mouth curbing. Before, his touch was medicinal. And rightfully so, since there was nothing else you'd rather have done to your legs than fix them. Heavy, graceless logs beneath you with one foot mangled, the mending of which, despite being mildly titillating for his gentleness, heralded no perfervid development and remained purely sanative. Now, there is intent in it. Now he's looking at your thighs, and regardless of him being a different kind of folk, a kind of folk who likely enjoys thighs, you wish, terribly, for your tail to be back in its rightful place. For the thing of poise and cordiality you could show him. For the thing that makes you beautiful in the water and in sunlight, smooth and shiny and worth seeing, instead of bruised knees and prodding ankles and dirty shins and the sole gone plump with its cut and blood dried round the cut's edges.

When your eyes meet he looks very concerned. His touch stalls. "Have I… have I wronged you?" Duncan asks. He lifts his hands a hairsbreadth off you and murmurs, "Do you want me to stop?"

"N-no, no," you tell him. "No, I don't, just—" Your eyes drop to where he's hovering. You cringe. "Just do not look at me so."

"How did I look?" His fingers curl, then retreat completely to rest on his knees. "Have I looked wrong?" Dunk asks.

"No, I just… don't like them."

Duncan sags a little. When you look up, he's blinking at you, baffled. His mouth moves while he's chewing his own tongue, and finally, he stammers, "Y-your legs?"

You nod. Sit back, pull the skirt over the knees for the lack of a better shield, and hug the whole bundle to hide it from being perceived. "They're ugly," you tell him.

At that, his face breaks open with fondness and ache. Duncan breathes around something that looks like exasperation, though gentler than any you have known. Plainly, he seems to not know what is meant to be said to a girl who tells him she hates a part of herself. So he says nothing at first. Only comes to you, slow on his knees, until he is close enough for the heat of him to reach through the miserable pile you have made of your limbs.

His hand finds your cheek. He turns you toward him by a little, thumb rubbing along your jaw as if coaxing the bone to unclench. “They brought you to me,” he mutters at your ear. The words go through you strangely.

“They bled and still carried you.” His fingers nose, tender and frightened, beneath the edge of your skirt, finding the place where your hip creases under cloth and the guard of your folded arm. He brushes there and goes no farther than you allow. “You’ve had them three days, and they’ve already learned the road so well.”

At that, something in you loosens. Your arms slacken by a measure. Enough for him to slide down to your knee, where the fabric bunches under his broad palm.

“I adore them,” Duncan says, simply enough to make mockery impossible. His eyes lift to yours, serious and shy both. “Would you let me show you?”

You are apprehensive still, but you look at him properly then, and his face is so genuine it gives you no clever place to hide. So trustworthy. So pure in its truth-telling. For a moment you think that perhaps love can be graceless. Perhaps here, with him, it may be youthful and ebullient and still be love. Perhaps the grace you were robbed of has no bearing on your worthiness of it. His hands are clumsy too, trembling and bashful, but eager in the way they touch you, forthright in their care. He seems to pay no mind to his own awkwardness. Only to you. To the careful unpeeling of you in a way that does not leave the parts beneath raw and aching.

“How?” you ask.

Duncan smiles as if something has just been answered for him. “Tell me no at any moment,” he says.

He goes to the lacing at your waistband and pulls at it slowly, eyes fixed on yours. Then his fingers hook between fabric and skin and he begins guiding the skirt down. You prop yourself on his shoulders and lift for him. The cloth passes your hips and drags down your thighs, and you close your eyes briefly so you do not have to see the hated shape of yourself being bared.

Chill kisses your ankles and calves, then deserts them once Duncan’s hands find you. He goes to sit farther away, facing you, and places your feet with their soles to his stomach. Your shift falls loose between your thighs and gathers there, covering you only to the middle of them. You lean back on your elbows and finally open your eyes.

He sits on his heels again, thighs flattened and filling his breeches until the side seams seem fit to complain, so abundant there his knees knock apart naturally. Between his legs he is curiously swollen. You want to touch there. To see him. To learn what it is that makes a man breathe faster and blush the way he does. He is pink up to the temples and sweating round there. Beneath your soles, his stomach ripples now and then. His fingers curl round either of your ankles, eyes fixed on the dorsums of your feet, thumbs brushing where your toes ladder into five thin, twig-like bones.

He unwraps the bandage gently. Checks you for wincing, and when he sees you only staring with your lids nearly disappearing into their sockets, the colour on him deepens.

Then, he lifts your foot to his face, and you learn where else people can be kissed.

He slots his mouth to the hollow where the cut had been. It is barely a brush of lips. A small thing. Soft enough that it should hardly matter. Yet he does it with such care that the warmth of it travels up your throat from the inside, humiliating and near hallowed. Duncan swallows as if bracing himself, then sets his tongue to the sealed line of it and licks across.

The wound has closed. Tender still, and puffed at the edges, but closed. It receives his affection with a strange little pulse that runs the whole length of you and lands low in your belly like kindling catching.

You go very still when he kisses it again. Then the arch, then the heel, then the place below your toes where the skin is softer than you expected it to be. His hand holds the whole weight of your leg as if it weighs nothing at all. You let it rest there, pliant and cradled, and he seems to like the trust of it. Seems to grow gentler and more intent for having it.

When his mouth reaches your toes, he hesitates. His eyes lift to yours. Deadly honest. Pinked still, mouth damp from you, breathing with the rough care of a man at the edge of his own courage.

Then he closes his lips around you, and the sound you make is pulled clean out of you.

He smiles. You feel the shape of it more than see it. The small wickedness of it startles you worse than the mouth does, because he has spent three days shy as a colt and now there is this on him too, some pleased knowledge that he has made you louder. His tongue moves over your toes in a slow pass. His lips draw, soft and firm together. The pressure is nothing like kissing. You cannot answer it except by breathing harder and letting your head tip back, by spreading your fingers on the wool and trying to understand why a useless little toe should have any road at all to where pleasure lives.

The angle opens you by a little, making you learn, once again, how human bodies lose moisture. This one is known to you and strange all the same. You have felt your slit weep at the sight of folk tumbling in the tall grass by your bank, but this is warmer. Thicker. It pearls at the centre of you and pulses there, as if bidding him to come closer.

Duncan releases your foot and turns to the other. “Should I stop?” he asks, voice low.

You shake your head.

He nods as if you have given him some important charge, then bends again. Kisses the second foot with equal devotion. Along the ankle, over the knob of bone, up the calf where his nose stirs the soft hair covering your skin. His breath follows after, hot in places the night had cooled. His lips travel slowly, learning you with more patience than skill, though the patience is its own skill, perhaps. You cannot decide. You only know that each place his mouth has been feels newly awake when he leaves it.

At your knee, he lowers himself. The breadth of his shoulders knocks your legs further apart without hurry and without force. As though both of you were made for this particular placement. He settles on his stomach between them, enormous and careful, and begins again above the knee. Mouth open now. Breath heavier. The kissing grows less neat. At the inner soft of your thigh his eyes cover themselves with the thick row of lashes, and for one moment he seems to forget the mild kind of gentleness in favour of a hungrier one. His jaw opens, then closes with teeth.

Your head lolls back with the force of the moan breaking out of you, and Duncan freezes.

The absence of him is immediate and cruel. You lift your head and find him staring up at you, stricken, his mouth still near the mark he made.

“Did I hurt you?”

“Do it again,” you breathe.

His face does a strange, blissed out thing. He nods, snakes one arm under your leg and sets his palm to your hip. Mouth returns to the same place. Teeth first, as asked. Then lips. Then a slow draw of suction that makes your spine change its mind about what shape it wants. His nose dents the skin beside the bite. Each puff of air from him lays heat there. You watch, fascinated and stunned, because this feels good and the witch never spoke of it. She spoke of being opened. Of men putting themselves where they wished to go. She spoke as though the act were a blade and a body only the place it entered.

She said nothing of this. Nothing of mouths on knees and thighs. Nothing of being marked with blunt, crooked fangs and of brands they leave being so pretty you wish for them to be permanent. Nothing of a large knight lying between your legs with zeal shaking through him and of pleasure arriving before proof.

Your hands move without your leave, rolling the shift up for the cloth to gather over your belly. The apex of your thighs is bared to the night. Duncan groans so loudly it startles you.

“Have I done wrong?” you ask.

He shakes his head at once, almost violently. His hand tightens at your hip, fingers pressing in. “N-no,” he says. “No, sweet thing. Gods, no. Only—”

His free hand comes up slowly. It stops at the curls there, hovers, then dips with two fingers as though he expects you to vanish if touched too boldly. “May I kiss you?” he asks. His voice has gone rough enough to catch. “Here?”

You look down and realise he is nervous. For some reason that steadies you. “Have you kissed there before?”

The colour deepens on him. “No.”

“Is that where folk kiss too?”

“Some,” Duncan says. He swallows. “If they are let.”

His fingers rest in you lightly, barely a touch at all, but your body answers with a soft wetness that reaches him anyway. You see when he feels it. The way his mouth parts. The way his brow draws tight, as if want has put its hand round the back of his neck.

He looks up at you. “Talk to me,” he says. “If I do wrong, tell me. If you want me stopped, tell me. If it is good—” His thumb moves, shy and uncertain, and you draw breath through your teeth. “Tell me that too.”

Then down he goes, and with it something in you drops so low it near shackles you to the ground. It is unimportant at first whether he lands aptly or not, for just the idea of being kissed like this, right there, has already begun to derange you. Another mouth-place, another gate and a room this body contains that can, and deserves to be treated with the same fervour he's given your lips. It makes you forget you own legs whatsoever.

It is but a blunder consecrated by pure intentions. He intends, purely, to show you how pieces of you that you've disregarded and treated as means to an end are also part of the beloved. A little over-eager when his mouth finds you too high and drifts as if listening with tongue instead of ears, but at least honest about his greenness. His nose presses into curls on your mound, and you watch him there, the low-hanging lashes, the blood-filled cheeks, and hair falling loose over his brow and this whole great body brought down to its knees by the smallest knot of nerves you possess. Something absurd lives within it, and something magnificent too, making you want to laugh, or seize him, or ask him if he understands he is doing something to you no one explained. Something outside the cruel little law you've been given, one that doesn't mention being searched by a mouth so loving the searching becomes more devastating than force.

Before he licks you, he hums. The sound buries itself in the flesh of his throat, and then his tongue follows, making the strangest disorder happen. Too much earnestness, broad and hard enough to make white light snap through you with benevolence, so you yelp and drag at his hair.

He stops. Lifts his face, and there he is with his mouth shining and eyes stricken, mumbling, "No?"

"Softer," you tell him, feeling weird for demanding around something that's been gifted.

Duncan only nods, swallowing. Grateful for the doctrine, he gets back to learning you with the same studiousness he's given to the walking lessons, all of it made dangerous by how badly he wishes to do it well.

You bend your knees to make the spread of his shoulders more agreeable, but it only makes you open wider like you're an awkward, frog-like thing with human joints. He takes the leave of it and slides his hands under your thighs as though this is too dear. Makes a cradle of his arms and lifts you into it, saving you from the labour of your own legs. The hated things go light. Your calves rest against his shoulders, heels find his back. The position splits you and steadies you both, and a hot, startled pride moves through you when his breath hitches at the sight.

“Here,” you say, gathering his hair into your fist. You guide him lower by little pressures. “Like you kissed my mouth.”

Obedient still, he tries again. Lets his breath soften you first. Then, a brush. A press and retreat of lips. Underneath it your body is trying to make sense of a feeling that has no mate in memory. It is a kiss, yes, but one that cannot be returned by the same road. You can only suffer the pleasure and be enlarged by it. The passivity maddens you. It makes a queen and a fool of you together. You lie there growing wetter, thinking, wildly, that this must be what land does to rivers when it forces them into beds and banks and makes them learn a new shape by pressure.

“There?” he asks against you. The word itself touches.

“There,” you say. "Please, again."

His tongue returns, gentler, and your mind begins to come apart in layers. First, the ordinary mind that knows cold air and sharp grass, then the clever one counting for proof, and the old water-mind too, with remembrance of lost fins and sealed gills and split tail. Beneath all of them lies this new thing, this land-flesh, this warm, weeping, treacherous little mouth of the body opening under another mouth.

Duncan hums once, and the vibration enters you. Your head falls back. The sky above has no moon, no witness, only a depth of blackness so complete it feels like the world has closed its eyes. You begin to grasp that he is teaching himself by the breaking of breath, the little disloyalties of your spine, and the way your thighs tremble when he loses the right place, and part when he comes near it. Warmth opens there. Thickens. Pearls for him and makes him groan as if the taste of you has struck some hidden bell in his chest. You give more and more of it until there is too much. Until it slicks and drips on your skin, and threatens to waste itself on wool, and Duncan, oh—

He slips his tongue inside. Ladles it cleverly to drink from you, and suddenly your body feels more yours. Alive and awake. "Oh—" you say, and he lifts his eyes without parting you. Tries to fit himself deeper, and in the trying his nose brushes the place that seems to have been waiting for him to discover it. You'd laugh at the sweet lesson of it. At the versatility of destinations bodies hold for noses, if only your muscles wouldn't tense like that, if only teeth weren't busy mauling your lower lip and your eyes weren't rolling back from the euphoria of this little accident.

And Duncan is no master of anything except attention, it would seem. He does it again, slower. Meaner, you'd think, if he were someone else. The arms under your thighs tighten while his tongue slips in with a firmer, deeper thrust. This time his nose finds you on purpose. Rubs you small and blunt, and all of you answers in a vicious little flood. Your hips buck into his face and he groans as though he has been granted something by it.

Again—more, bolder, stronger. Mouth open and breath loud, he makes the double sensation catch you so oddly you cannot tell whether you are being entered or kissed or spoken to. No matter the direction your body chooses, he loves it into splendour by the inch. A living thing throws itself against the inside of your skin, and when you look down you fingers make a mess of his hair and he's there, stubborn and panting, poor sweet creature driven half out of himself by the need to bring you fully past this threshold. You realise then, with a kind of rage, that this body has kept secrets from you.

The witch gave you legs and pain and a wound in the foot. She gave you shame, knees, ankles, the absurdity of toes. She gave you the fear of being split by love or killed by its absence. Yet here is a secret she either did not know or refused to tell: that the body can be opened without being invaded, that a man may go down rather than in, that wanting may have humility in it, that Duncan’s mouth can make a sanctuary of the very place she named as doom.

The thought breaks something, or something he does breaks it. "Yes," you breathe. "Oh, Duncan, yes—"

The pleasure keeps almost arriving. Almost, almost, until the almost becomes its own country and you are trapped there, flooded and furious, hearing yourself make sounds no trout, no eel, no seal-slick thing in the water ever taught you. Human sounds. Girl sounds. The foolish, broken music of having flesh that can beg without words.

He stops at no point, and somehow it works. Or perhaps works is too clean a word for it, for no grace is returned to you in triumph. The body simply takes command with the crude authority of something older than self, and you go with it because there is nowhere else to go. A bright, prickling tug gathers low in your groin, sharp as a hook caught in something living, and then it pulls. You choke on the first sound of it. Bend up so hard your belly creases and your mouth opens wide to the dark, all the while Duncan stays there, caught under you, grunting into the convulsion—pleased, most likely proud, very likely simply surprised that his mouth has become such a mighty tool. Your thighs try to close round his head and cannot, because he is too broad and too fixed and too willing to be crushed there. The bliss grows fangs, pointed and sharp, and when he keeps at it with the same obedience, you pull him off with actual force.

He comes away on the strength of your fist in his hair. For a moment you forget the feeling in yourself because of what has been done to him. He looks changed by it too. Made a man fully, if he had been hovering on the edge of it before, glassy-eyed and glossy-mouthed, lips plumped by labour. His lashes are damp. The skin of his cheeks has risen with blood so deeply it seems lit from underneath. Still large. Still tremendous. Shoulders filling the space between your knees, body hot and weighty against the earth. Yet he lets himself hang from your clenched fist as if he is a head severed clean and kept alive only by the mercy of your grip.

“Too much?” he rasps.

“Enough,” you say, though the word comes out wrecked and fond.

Duncan nods.

His hair slips from between your fingers, and he drops forward as if the cut strings of him have remembered gravity. Down onto your belly, where he turns his face into the soft, creased place below your ribs and lies there breathing hard with arms thrown around you. You listen to him dragging air in and out as if he has been the one carried to some violent height and dropped from it.

Then he asks, muffled, “Did I please you?”

The tenderness of it nearly undoes what the pleasure left standing. “Gods, yes,” you say.

He breathes again, deeper this time, and his cheek shifts against you. You feel the absurd bashfulness returning to him now that his mouth has finished its brave work. His hand moves on your thigh. “Do you still hate them?” he asks.

You look down. There is he, and there are your legs, still strange. Still graceless. Still jointed wrong for a creature born to move as one sleek muscle through water. But his hands have held them. His mouth has blessed them. His shoulders have borne their weight. Shame, you discover, cannot keep its shape where Duncan has put his devotion.

Your fingers slide back into his hair. “I don't think I can hate anything you’ve touched,” you say. His mouth quirks, boyish again.

Duncan thinks, dimly, that he has been allowed too much. He lies on the soft bed of your stomach with his cheeks full of your sweet sap and his scalp scratched by your fingernails, wondering when the gods mean to smite him for a fool like himself daring to touch a holy creature like you.

To think you forsook your home for him. To think you almost passed from the world because he was too much of an imbecile to swallow down the price, the inadequacy, the fear of being too much and too little and simply unworthy.

He looks at your thighs and loves them dearly. One bears the brand of his uneven teeth, a ring like the rings of boulders set into loose soil by men who believed in old gods. It is a place only for him. If anyone else strayed there and saw it, he would have to make them a head lighter.

That is the sort of thought he should turn away from, and quickly. Carnal things have been running him ragged for three days, and now his mind seems determined to drag him through every mire it can find. Nothing about where he is helps. Nothing below him helps. His cock had been hard before his mouth ever reached you, and only turned harder, meaner, more convinced of itself as you softened and opened and shook above him. The ground hides the worst of it well enough, but it pacifies poorly. Each small shift is deadly, especially for a man who has known mostly the mean kind of friction. Solid surfaces and his own hand now and then, when loneliness or some insistent memory of breasts, throats, legs—legs, precisely—made an animal of him in the dark.

And there he is back at the legs.

Yours, with what lies between them still fresh on him, warm and slick and living, a taste so strange and cleanly foul it seems to have made a new chamber in him. He relives the feel of you under his tongue. Of what your body did when he licked properly, when he hummed deep enough, and your fingers turned cruel in his hair. That pulling ought to have hurt more than it did, or shamed him into sense at least. Instead it had near humbled him completely. There seems, to his great peril, to be some direct and wicked road between the roots of his hair and his loins, for when you yanked him up from you with that fistful of him, Duncan had come so close to spending that his whole being narrowed to the crude effort of refusing it. He does not know if that is a thing in him entire, the general affinity for receiving some manhandling, or only another power you have over him. Girlhandling, perhaps, but performed by you.

All of it helps very little. The belly under his cheek and your scent smeared across his face and the hand in his hair, they all help naught. Duncan smacks his lips once, then stirs.

It takes a mean little grunt to rise. His side has drunk some cold from the earth, bandage stiffened where it wraps him, and when he pushes himself up onto his hands the wound pulls as though remembering it has been slighted by all this pleasure around it. Duncan sits back on his heels slowly. Has to set his knees wide as he does, for there is no seemly arrangement left in his breeches. His cock is stranded there, neglected, thick with complaint, as if some part of him expected reward for honest labour and cannot be made to understand that love is no tally of services. He looks at you instead. “Are you well?” he asks, voice rough.

You prop yourself on your elbows, knees knocking together after all that boldness, and nod. You look changed. A little hollowed, though sweetly, in the manner of a body given just enough nourishment to keep wanting and nowhere near enough to be sated by it. Your mouth is damp. Your eyes keep their dark, inward shine. “Yes,” you tell him.

Then, to his utter horror, you scramble up too. Your thighs twitch with the movement, and Duncan has to close one hand on his own knee to stop himself from reaching out and putting you back into decency. His gaze drops, shamelessly, shamefully, to where he has made you glossy. He drags his eyes higher in penance and finds no mercy there either, for you cross your arms, seize the hem of the shift, and pull it upward.

The cloth lifts first over the lower belly he has just lain upon, skin giving way to the shadow below your ribs. Then sternum, then the underside of your breasts, and his cock kicks so hard it seems to have taken a separate oath against him. Your face disappears behind linen for one blind second. All he sees is your torso stretched in the act of undressing, your breasts prickling against the cold, the lifted arms, the night making an open country of you. His mouth goes dry enough for prayer.

By the time the shift drops beside you, words have gone useless in him. Which leaves him wholly defenceless when you take his hands.

You guide them to your chest with solemn purpose, as if returning some misplaced thing to its rightful shrine. His palms meet warmth and weight. He sits petrified while your thighs part again, while you climb him with no more grace than you have had all along and no less power for the lack of it. You settle across him, bare, pressing your cunt to the length of him through wool, and Duncan has great trouble finding the road by which he arrived here. From a girl on the skirts of battle, a crying maid in his cloak to a water-spirit. A sacred thing. Now this same impossible creature sits naked on him, offering him her tits and seeking his mouth as if all of it follows plainly from the first mercy he ever thought to show you.

You kiss him slower this time. Deeper. With the new patience of someone who has discovered there are pleasures that improve by circling.

Duncan lets it happen for a beat because he is weak, because his hands are pleasantly full, because the weight of you has turned his thoughts into warm mud. You draw back by a little, tongue touching your own lip.

“You taste different,” you say.

“Mm.” It is a poor answer. It is the best one he has. Still, your brow furrows. “It’s yourself you taste,” he says then.

You blink at that, and grow delighted in a way so sudden and frank it frightens him. “Do you like it?”

“Mm,” he tries, or means to. Aye, of course. Aye, I like everything. His body answers instead with a hard, hungry throb under you and an involuntary squeeze of both hands round the fullness of your chest.

Your lashes lower. “You do like it.”

“M-m’lady,” Duncan strains.

You kiss him again before he can gather honour into a shield. He manages half a breath against you, then turns his head with some grim effort. “I—I—we needn’t,” he says. “We do not have to. I only wanted—”

You cradle his whole head in your arms and draw him in, mouth close to his ear. “I want to make you feel as you made me feel,” you whisper. “To see you in it too.”

That stills him. For three days he has been thinking in terms of rescue and ruin, sin and restraint, oath and breach. He has been trying to place his body somewhere outside the matter. But your heart is hammering and your hands are in his hair and your cunt is hot for him, and there is no bargain in the looking.

You want. He wants too. At last, even Dunk the Lunk can read a thing so plainly written.

He starts fumbling at the front of his breeches since this is likely what you want, then stops himself halfway through, red to the scalp, and checks anyway. “You wish to see?” he asks. Against his ear there is a breathy yes, so Duncan sets his mouth tight and pulls the waistband away from himself.

His cock comes out, barely half of it, with a weeping eye at the top and blood vessels girdling down the flesh like roots bulging out of the earth. He closes his eyes and seeks asylum in your neck, so the next thing that happens Duncan only feels.

A finger, curious and subtle, teases the meeting of nerves below the crown, then goes up towards the slit. Much like with his throat, you gather and take, and when his eyes open you've got that finger in your mouth and your tongue around it. You seem spellbound. Enchanted, if Duncan believed such thing could be felt about him. "Show me more," you tell him, and he only realises that what you mean is for him to stand and present himself when you slide off him and sit on the bedroll cross-legged. Shameless.

He's battling the opposite. Shame-full, he nods. Even manages to mutter a miserable, "Aye," and stands with one hand braced at his bandaged side, the other just holding the breeches up, uselessly so, for of all things his thighs need no shielding. He lets the linen drop and, with a sombre kind of horror, waits for judgement. Looks down only to not see your face, and that turns against him too.

Between the legs he sways heavy, standing up from himself with more confidence than his mind owns. He has disliked his size before because it made him clumsy, conspicuous and wrong for rooms, so he's made it useful in labour and steel. When he finally harbours the courage to find your eyes, you're wearing the most bizarre expression. All soft-edged and melting with wonder, you are looking as though excess is the blessing.

Your teeth reveal themselves in a sweet, beaming smile, and your hands come out to wrap round his wrists. You pull him back down, and he barely gets his knees under him before you are on him again, kissing, touching, arranging by instinct and no wisdom. So he has to become useful in a new kind of way.

Where friction lived there is now a slide of skin on skin, and Duncan nearly loses the whole of himself to the difference. Your belly moves against him, your breasts flatten to his chest and drag there. Between you, his cock is trapped upright in the soft of both your stomachs, rubbed by every wriggle you make by accident and purpose in turns, and every rub comes barbed. You are kissing him eagerly, messily, trying to find some road forward by moving, by grinding. He can feel how quickly this will become end. You will pant and twist and grow no nearer to what you asked for, while he spends himself like a green fool against your belly and leaves you with his shame cooling on you.

“Sweet thing, please—” he grits, catching your hips. “Slow. Let me be of use to you. I’m… I’m big, and—”

You still for him, though your breath keeps coming hard. Those aspectabund eyes fasten on his face, obvious enough to make hiding useless. “Will you hurt me?” you ask.

“No,” Duncan says, hurt by the very shape of the question. “No, never. I only mean—we go slow. Aye? Slow.”

Your face calms as if he has laid a hand over troubled water, and the trust of it harms him in some deep place. To have someone look at him and believe him so easily. To be taken as a safe thing by a creature who had teeth enough to open throats and the foolish courage to turn a dagger on herself rather than on him. He presses his forehead to yours and breathes there, rough through the nose. “Lift for me?” he asks. “Only a little.”

You brace your hands on his arms and rise. Duncan looks down to guide himself and is bludgeoned by what he finds there. Slick has slipped down your inner thigh in a shining track, catching the dark like some private river. He groans and closes a fist round the base of himself with more force than required and steadies there, feeling the whole of him jump in his hand.

“Do you want me?” he asks into your mouth, legible with the need to hear it. You nod, but that is not enough when his heart has become a greedy thing too. "Tell me," Duncan says. “Please, tell me.”

“Yes,” you say. Your mouth goes wandering over him. “Yes, I do. I want you in me.” Your hips sink once, eager but aimless. “Take me.”

A fierce, impossible belonging spreads through him. He aligns himself and slips twice for the jerking blood in him. You make a small impatient sound and he near smiles despite the terror. Then he gets it right enough for the first touch.

Only the head of him drags through you. A kiss of a different kind. His cock has known linen, callus, mean hurried pressure, and now this unbelievably soft, hot, living mouth of the body. He rubs through it, barely, and his hips lock with the effort of keeping still. Again, slower, collecting what both of you have made, spreading it over himself until the slide turns slick. The intimacy of it is nearly worse than being taken inside would be. This staying at the gate. This being allowed to touch the edge of you and feel you open by a fraction under him. This kiss below kissing, where neither mouth speaks and both bodies answer anyway.

Then it is you who grows greedy. Your weight comes down, and Duncan recognises the change before he can speak to it. He becomes held where he has only been sliding, then feels the first giving inch. Your face breaks into a wince, then a gasp, so he reaches round you hard enough to stop both of you where you are.

"Easy," he says. "Sweetheart, easy."

The tightness has him by the root. All the soft has turned gripping and small on him, shocking his spine so quickly he has to shut his eyes for a moment. Yours are wide and scared in front of him, and the pleasure becomes a rotten thing with guilt in it.

"Why does it hurt?" you ask, voice thin. "You said—"

"I know," Duncan says. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He presses one hand flat between your shoulders and holds you while his cock throbs like a wound. "Shh. Breathe with me. Breathe—"

You stare at him, doubtful and pained, but try. He draws breath in through his nose, slow enough to make an example of it, then lets it out against your cheek. You follow poorly at first, catching on the inhale, shuddering on the release. He keeps you still with both arms, though the stillness near murders him.

There is some mercy in it too. The worst of the first push hangs there between your bodies, neither taking nor retreating, and Duncan’s mind runs through every filthy scrap of knowledge folk have ever thrown into the air near him. It should ease. It should get good. Use spit. Women like this or that. Noise from those who made knowing sound like conquest and left him with nothing useful but the fear of damaging you.

“We can stop,” he says. “We can stop here, m’lady. I’ll not—”

Before he can make a noble mess of rising you away from himself, your breath changes.

Only a little. The next exhale leaves lower in your chest. Your hips soften by a measure, and the flesh around him gives its small, unwilling quarrel with his size. You notice it too. He sees the fright shift in your eyes and your body listening under the hurt, finding some other report beneath it. You breathe again, this time because you want the breath, and your fingers come to his shoulders.

“There,” he says, relieved. “Good, gods. Just so.”

Your brow stays pinched, but your mouth parts around a sound that has less grievance in it. Duncan does not move. He only holds you, forehead set to yours, the whole of him turned toward patience. Another breath. Another. Under him, inside you, the grip changes by degrees. Less like refusal. More like a fist slowly learning how to open without letting go.

“Oh,” you say, very quietly. It makes him put his teeth together.

“Aye?” he asks, and hates how much hope gets into it.

You nod once. Small. Fierce.

So he keeps holding. He has never been so deep in anything. He is barely in you at all, and already there is that terrible gladness in his sack, akin to one that comes when his cock starts threatening a scrape too raw. He does his best to throttle it, for despite you saying you wish to see him, he's convinced he wishes to see you harder.

You sink on him, stubborn-faced and quiet. Duncan feels each small victory in his muscles, while his mind remains oblivious to the thaumaturgy allowing it. Your brow is set hard at first, then anger at the pain cuts across it because ache has got between you and the thing you want. After, comes the stern listening. You go still around him, eyes lowered, as if this new flesh has answered in some difficult tongue and you mean to learn it properly. He lets you use him as you need, though the need itself is killing work. More of him goes into you. Inch by inch, all of them so alive and close his own breath begins to come wrong.

“Gods,” you say, and then, with a sort of insulted wonder, “You are large.”

Duncan goes hot to the roots of his hair. “I know,” he says, because there is no use pretending otherwise. Worried, he asks, “Does it trouble you?”

You huff through your nose and consider him, sitting there skewered on the question and on him both. “No.” Your hand comes up to his neck, fingers digging briefly as you deepen another little way. “I like that you are an effort.”

A sound gets out of him, small and strangled. He sets one palm to your cheek because he needs somewhere decent to put it and because your face has become dearer to him than life.

“It feels full,” you say. His cock gives a hard throb. “I can feel you—" You take his hand and guide it low to your underbelly.

There he is. Invasive and indeed, large enough to make himself known from the outside. It is foully private. Wonderful. So much so that Duncan whines, “Seven save me,” and hides in your throat.

You are on him, completely, and he stays frozen, stunned stupid by it. Your voice finds him, hushed. "What do I do?"

He near laughs. An odd sense of camaraderie spreads in him because, gods, he knows naught. He never thought getting this far possible at all. "I—" He swallows. Looks at you. "I dunno." Then, helplessly honest, “Whatever feels right.”

Your mouth curves. He knows then that he is in peril.

Flesh squeezes around him fiercely, and as if it is not humbling enough you tease, “This?"

The groan comes out of him as though struck from the gut. “Hah—oh, Seven, this—this feels right, aye.” He pants, staring at you as if you have found a latch in him and pulled it open. “Do that again.”

You do, smaller this time, watching his face as you learn him. Dunk puts his hands to your ribs and awaits another ripple when he remembers he's needed here too. “What… what do I do?” he asks lamely.

The pain has gone from your eyes. For a moment you merely observe him, sat, and he's struck by your beauty in it. Oh gods, he's managed this. Brought you through unease into this quiet wanting. Somehow, by some mercy, he is the man under you.

Then, you tell him: “Whatever you want.”

And for once, Duncan finds some selfish wickedness in himself.

He bows his head to your chest. Breathes out quietly, "This?" and before you can answer, his mouth closes over your nipple.

“Oh—” you moan. Loud. Arch some too, seven fucks. Gods, you arch for him, spine bending as you offer more of your tits. Your arms go behind you, hands brace on his knees. He takes the weight gladly, the shift round his cock graciously, because when your hips roll by accident or discovery the movement carries all the way down and wrings him near inside-out.

Duncan groans into your breast and sets his tongue to work. You grind on him in short, close strokes, hardly lifting, making a mill of your hips and his cock. Whole of him sits inside rubbed alive, worked into small cruel space until his thoughts blunt at the edges. He keeps his mouth on you, because he wants it, and because it gives him a task. In a useful order of things he sucks, breathes, then sucks again. Your nipple hardens under his tongue and he takes it in deeper, hollows his cheeks into a jaw that starts aching sweetly. His hands ride up your back to where spine bends for him. Skin wrinkles there under his fingers and he holds that kink, trying to retain exactly the places where pleasure seems to fold you.

This, he thinks, dazedly, must be being fucked. Men call it fucking. Men call everything fucking when there is ale in them and a chance of dying soon. They talk as if women are tavern benches with cunts, as if the doing is a matter of putting a thing where it goes and rutting till pride spills out. He has heard enough to last a lifetime. Women taking a cock to the root without a sound, as though maids are all built like sheaths and men all swords worth taking. Some girl against a stable door. Some widow with her skirts up in a ditch. Some camp follower who took three men and begged the fourth. A thousand lies told by mouths with grease in the beards.

This bears no kin to those stories. You are whispering his name as if it is helping you take him, and it rolls lovely off your tongue. You are trying to make yourself come on him, and Duncan has his mouth full of your tit, working at it with fixed devotion of someone given one good thing to do and determined to do it well. That, to him, seems closer to the truth. This awkward holy labour. This sweating. This being used sweetly and trusted through it. This is lovemaking, right here, with wanting you vivid under his hands more than he wants his own ending.

Your rhythm finds itself crookedly. Then loses itself. Then finds another way. Duncan follows what he can. Pants though his nose. Groans when you bear down. Grows bold enough once to nip you with his teeth, and you seem to adore it down to your tightening cunt. So he does it again, softer, and your body grows snugger, wetter, meaner around his cock. When he licks over it, you exhale the strangest little oh.

“Gods,” he mutters into you. “Gods, girl.”

The change starts plain. It's less orderly. Your body has its mind elsewhere now, and that mind has no use for manners. The strokes go crooked, breath starts jumping. The hands on his knees dig in until he feels the half-moons of your nails and hopes they stay. Pain would be proof come morning. A mark of where he was when you needed somewhere to put your strength.

Then you push off his legs and catch his head between your arms.

Duncan leaves your breast with a wet sound and lifts as far as you allow. Your forearms yoke him close. His nose fits beside yours almost by habit now. Your eyes are dark and open and half-wild.

“Tell me,” you whisper. “Tell me you love me. Tell me you love me—”

“I love you,” Duncan bursts, with no search needed for the answer. “Gods, I love you. I love you. I love you—”

Your mouth trembles near his. “I love you,” you say. “You’re mine and I love you. I was right about you, oh gods, I was right—”

In all your mumbling, you ride him hard enough that he feels the signal in it. More. Deeper. More room, more of him given up to you. His hands go to your arse and grip there, sudden and rude enough to make his ears burn, but you give a sharp glad sound and bear down again. That decides him. He braces, lifts you with him a little, and unfolds his knees from under himself. The shift wrenches both of you. He falls back flat with a grunt, side burning, cock dragged deeper by your weight.

The sky opens above him, black and moonless. And you.

That is all there is for a breath. You astride him, hair loose, thighs going badly and beautifully, hands on his chest as if he is ground and beast and lover together. Duncan catches your hips, then lets them go because you seem to know more when he does less. You lean down to kiss him and your face breaks in the middle of it. He feels it seize you.

Your hands find his cheeks. Nose knocks beside him. Your muscles grip him so hard his vision blanches, and then you are coming with his name caught in your teeth and love spilling out in pieces. I love you Duncan, I love you, and he just grips your shoulders and holds on, holds on and on, because if he moves wrong he will lose everything at once. The luck of being the thing inside you when it happens is unbearable.

“My girl,” he gets out. “My girl, my—”

Then, he's ripped in half. It starts low and pulls everything with it: thighs, sack, belly, chest, throat. It frightens him how good it is. How deep it seems to go from him. He has spilled before with his face hot from shame and hand slick round himself, but this is nothing like those past miseries. He's being drawn out and kept. He fills you in hard pulses and lets his body believe it has come home, foolish as that is, dangerous as that is, true as anything he has ever known. Lucky, he thinks, with what little mind remains. Lucky, lucky, lucky. To be wanted. To be held there. To spend in a creature who loves him and says so.

He keeps saying, "My girl, gods, my girl," because there is nothing else in him.

You take each spill with a gasp, and then a smile begins to sprout on your face. You're smiling while he's being torn asunder.

After, the world grows smaller. Deafer, as if great hands have closed over its ears. Duncan hears himself muttering things into the little space between you, broken stammers and poor scraps of prayer and slur. Gods, and Seven, and yes, still, still, as if he is trying to tell you you have done well and make certain he has done well too. You sag on him. Your arms wedge themselves beneath his neck, baring his throat, and your mouth comes there. It is hardly a kiss. More the arrival of a mouth too tired and too fond to do more than rest.

He turns to the side with you wrapped round him. You squeal some, as though you have forgotten his strength, or forgotten that he has been pliant beneath you because you asked him to be.

Something enormous has been done to him. Duncan comes out the other side of it a full man, and thinks, dimly, that full men do not brag about this sort of thing.

Then he notices you are trembling differently. When his cock shifts inside you, bathed in himself, he feels the scrape of soreness against it. It sobers him at once.

“Easy,” he murmurs. “Let me—”

He holds you close and draws back with as much care as he has left. Your body resists round him, tight and displeased, then gives him up with a low, unhappy sound that makes his stomach pull. “Did I hurt you?” he asks.

He looks down and sees the oddest medley of the body’s humours. Milk tainted red, gone pink where it oozes out of you. His cock smeared along the length with blood and spent. It all sobers him tenderly.

“Let me see,” Duncan says, and dips between your legs as if there is something his hands may yet fix.

He knows it is virgin blood. Something old and primal flickers in him, a brief possessive pride at being the proof of your first, and then it dies under the weight of your hands finding his cheeks. You guide him back up to your face, and he goes.

On the way, he thinks how unjust it is that women must bleed so boys can grow into men.

Then he sees your worry. At first he's certain it is pain troubling you, but your eyes move from his face to his groin and back again. “Have I damaged you?” you ask, with honest dread.

It hits him then that you understand as little as he does. Mayhaps less. You have done some violent inland magic with a body you barely know and come away afraid you have broken him by it.

“No, m’lady,” he breathes. “I ain’t so easily damaged.” Then he winces, because his side pulls when his arms try to hold you, and he ruins his case entirely.

You laugh, damp and small, and begin to fuss over him. “Oh, my sweet,” you murmur, touching his face, his shoulder, the binding. “Oh, my love.”

Duncan fusses back, trying to look you over while you try to look him over, until it becomes a strange little quarrel of hands and fret, each of you meaning to tend the other first.

When it's over, when wet cloth has been found and put to swollen parts, when hair has been brushed off slick foreheads and knuckles have been kissed, Duncan pulls you to him, cages you in him, and breathes so deep it feels like a first honest breath of his life. "I love you," he says to your temple. "Thank you. Thank you, my love."

You say it back. I love you into his throat. I love you against his jaw, and then I love you put to his cheek and preserved there. He keeps kissing you until his mouth goes tired and then his eyes grow heavy and then Duncan falls asleep with his beloved safe next to his heart and blades thrown away to lie useless in the grass.

Cold moves down your skin correctly. Your lungs feel heavy and full and familiar. When you open your eyes, the vision comes warped and magnified, and at once you understand you're floating in water.

It is hard at first to assess anything. You remember him under you. You remember his mouth, his hands, his flesh, warm and abundant, splitting you and filling you until body has torn itself to pleasure and blood.

But when you look at yourself, there are no legs he's ventured between. You're made whole again, with your old grace returned which feels like theft, somehow. Your tail glimmers in morning sunlight. Hands, panicked, come to your sides to find skin sliced back into gills and the palms themselves are scaled and fingers connected with thin, translucent webbing.

She tricked you. She gave you a quest and a man and told you all about what would happen if you failed, and naught of what comes of success. Now, you've regained yourself right after making peace with feeble knees, so it feels more like a loss. When you break the surface another loss lies still where you've left him, large and sleeping and oblivious.

Duncan looks peaceful. He's on his side on the bedroll, breathing calmly and his arms are thrown around a space where a body is missing. It seems that some lessons of humanity remain, for tears push themselves violent and hot into your eyes. They add to the river, salt into sweet water, and you're crying audibly, sobbing and hiccuping, because it all comes down on you, unkind and sad and miserable. He's right there and you cannot touch him. He's right there and you cannot hold him, because once again you've been made to belong somewhere where he doesn't.

"Duncan!" you call. It comes less as a call for him than a wail after something already lost.

He wakes badly. Jerks in the bedroll, one hand to the empty place under his arm. He looks there first, sleep-stupid and stricken, at the flattened hollow where your body ought to be.

Only then does his head turn. You see the first thing his face does: smile.

That wounds worse than anything. He cannot see you properly yet. He is still thick with slumber, hair mussed and mouth soft, looking at you as if this is only another of your oddities. Bathing at dawn. Calling for him from water. Waiting for him to come.

He rises slowly, muttering something you cannot hear. Finds his breeches. Pulls them on with one hand braced to his side, half awake and half fond, and comes barefoot over the bank with grass stuck to his soles.

The waiting lacerates. You are submerged to the waist, though waist is no honest word for you now. Beneath the surface the tail hangs in one long weight, scales catching and throwing the sun in broken pieces. You keep as still as you can, as if stillness might delay his seeing. It does not, of course.

His steps slow. Then stop. The colour drains from his face.

“M’lady—” he says, and the word fails. A breath goes into him sharply. He comes down to crouch at the bank, staring as if the world has put a second world inside it while he slept. “What has happened?”

“She tricked me,” you say, and once you begin the words come in scraps. “Wicked thing, wicked old thing, may she choke on peat and fishbones, may her teeth fall out, may the bog take her house and all her foul eggs—she tricked me, Duncan, she tricked me—”

You curse until the anger frays and leaves fear showing through, all the while he is staring.

It dawns on you then. He must be frightened. Repulsed. Cheated. A night ago he had a girl with legs, a girl who could sit astride him and bleed and laugh and walk badly into his hands. Now there is this creature before him, river-made and scaled, and made of different cloth from him.

You break into sobbing. Hide your face in your hands. “Forgive me,” you say. “Forgive me, I did not know. I did not know— I would never have, if I—”

“Gods be good,” Duncan breathes. His voice makes you freeze.

You lower your hands by a little. His eyes are wet. His mouth is parted. There is no disgust in him that you can find, only shock, and awe so plain it seems almost childish.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen,” he says.

A sob gets trapped in your throat. Mistrustful. “You said the same of the other body.”

“Aye,” he says.

“You needn’t make mercy of it.”

Realisation moves over his face. That you think this is the loss of him. That you think your shape has become a problem to solve or pardon. He softens entirely. “My sweet girl,” he says. “It is all true.”

Your tail twitches. His eyes go to it and you hate yourself for that too, for still wanting him to see and still wanting to hide from the seeing.

“Wilful girl,” he says under his breath. “Oh, sweetheart. Believe me. Please, believe me.”

Then, he steps into the water without bargaining or careful testing of whether the magic might stain him. Only comes, with his legs wide for balance, slipping once on the shallow stones, hissing when the cold gets him, and still coming. Water darkens his breeches and climbs his thighs. The bandage at his side drinks at once and is ruined, but he pays it no mind. His eyes stay fixed on you. Awed, devoted, and so full of purpose there is no spare room in his face for doubt.

His arms come for you. At first the holding is awkward. Your body is heavy in a different way now, long and slick with no knees to bend around him. His hand finds where your waist remains and the other comes to your cheek. He adjusts when you move toward him. Learns the weight of you without complaint, frowning only with the effort of keeping you close.

“It matters naught,” he tells you. “It matters not at all, my sweetheart.”

“How will we be?” you ask, disbelieving.

Duncan looks at you as if the question is large but the answer is simple. “I’m a hedge knight,” he says. “It is no great hardship to sleep under the stars. Rivers, then. Streams and lakes and ditches, if I must. I’ll find you.”

“Will you?”

“Aye,” he says. “Always.”

It strikes you that he offers no solution because he needs none. He does not speak of witches or bargains, of throttling the crone into giving the legs back, of fixing what has been returned to you. You cannot tell if he is so kind or simply stupid. Mayhaps both.

“I have no legs,” you insist.

Duncan laughs softly. “Aye, I see that.” You glare at him through tears, so his face comes close to yours. “You’ve a heart I adore, though,” he says. Softer, with the shyest wickedness tucked beneath it, “And you still have a mouth.”

He kisses you once. Small and careful. Then murmurs against you, “No matter the rest, this is where the nose goes. Always.”

And he shows you: his nose finds the side of yours. His mouth follows. The kiss is shy first, then surer when you clutch at him and kiss back. Around you, the river carries morning light over the lovers.

It is an old tale. A girl loves a boy, and a boy loves a girl. Big things, ancient things come between them, but youth pays no mind to the impossibility of worlds colliding. It regards naught the steel of propriety or the dull blades of daggers hungry for souls. With fear dressed as arrogance, youth traverses bridges invisible to the faithless, and so the mermaid falls for a hedge knight, and the hedge knight falls for her back.

He turns his head to the side and down where his bicep has gone half numb under you. “H-hi,” he says.

“Hi yourself,” you say.

He can make out only the blur of your face tipped up at him. The sound of you is morning-rough, gummy at the edges, and his whole body goes at it with something brazenly pleased before his brain gets a vote.

“Um,” you add. “So—”

Dunk palms at you gently because his eyes are useless and he has to solve the room by touch. He is sprawled on his back, you nuzzled to his side, your feet somewhere around his mid-calf and one hand spread small over his ribs. The shirt has ridden up on you in the night. He feels bare thigh against his hip and has to look at the ceiling he cannot see.

“How’re ye feelin’?” he asks.

“Good,” you say. Your fingers twitch. “You?”

“Grand, but,” Duncan says, “blind.”

“Oh, right.” You twist away from him, and he keeps his arm loose enough to let you go. When you come back, he tightens. “Sorry, I took them off you," you say. "Here—”

The glasses get pushed onto his nose and the world snaps itself back together in lines and colours the names of he's no longer certain. “There ye are,” he says.

Seeing you makes him worse. More nervous, because now there are sharp edges. Your mouth looks bitten by sleep, eyes crusted a little from last night’s tears. Your hair has gone all mussed and flattened on one side, and the T-shirt collar hangs too wide on you. His T-shirt. The sight should be ordinary, because shirts are ordinary things, except Dunk has the distinct sense of having been granted back a morning that had been stolen from him once before. The first one. The one where he woke up with a body full of you and no you in the room to prove it.

Now you are here, frowning faintly with worry gathering between your brows, and he feels so lucky it borders on daft.

“You sure you’re good?” he asks.

You nod, then seem to check the answer against yourself. Your hand shifts under the cover, thighs move by a cautious inch, and your face does a small grimace.

Dunk sinks a notch. “Sore?”

“A little.”

He winces. “Ah. Shite. Was I—” Stops, then starts again, worse. “Was I too much?”

Your eyes flick up.

“I mean—” His ears begin to burn. “Too rough. Or too eager. Or—”

“Dunk.”

“—too heavy with my hands. Or just… too much of me.”

You stare at him, then soften in a way that makes him want to hide. “No. You weren’t too rough.”

He studies your face, searching for the lie out of habit. “You’d tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“Yes.” A pause. “I’m sore in a nice way.”

That phrase grabs him low and stays there. His hips seem to hear it first and some lazy pull starts under the ache. He shifts one shoulder against the pillow and hopes the blanket is being merciful. “In a nice way,” Dunk repeats, because he is an idiot.

You look embarrassed now, which helps nobody. “You know what I mean.”

Duncan does. He knows too well. His own body has woken all used and tender, cock sore from work, holding back and coming hard enough that some part of him may still be missing. There is a dragged-open feeling in him, though nothing of his has been entered except by wanting. He understands being glad for the ache. He understands wanting proof that something happened and stayed happened. “Aye,” he says quietly. “I know.”

Silence arrives then, thin and awkward, and lies between you with its eyes open.

“Was I too much?” you ask.

Dunk’s head turns so sharply the pillow drags at his ear. “What?”

“Last night.” You look at his collarbone rather than his face. “I was a bit… I don’t know. Mad.”

He nearly laughs from pure disbelief, except your face is too serious for that. “No.”

“You can say.”

“I am sayin’.” He reaches, then stops before the touch lands at your cheek, as if the rules have changed in the night and nobody has handed him the new sheet. “You were—” His throat tightens around several answers, all of them too large or too plain. Lovely. Wild. Good to me. Mine, some awful part supplies, and he shuts that door hard. “You were grand,” he manages. “More than.”

Your mouth pulls into something small. “Grand.”

“I’m not very articulate in the mornin’.”

You nod thoughtfully. “That explains it.”

A breath of laughter leaves him, and you answer with your own, but the question remains where both of you can see it: What now. It sits on the bed with the clothes on the floor and the cold mugs from last night and the smell of sleep and sex and clementines.

You pull the cover higher over your chest. “We should probably talk.”

“Aye,” Dunk says, though every muscle in him files a complaint.

“Because I don’t want this to get… unclear.”

He gives a small nod. His hand lies open on the mattress beside you. “Right.”

“And I don’t want you thinking you have to.”

That brings his eyes back to yours. “Have to what?”

“This.” You gesture vaguely under the duvet, toward your bodies and the rest of the wreckage. “Me. Us. Whatever this is. Because I’m, you know. Pregnant.”

Duncan takes a second with that. He hears the sense in it, but hates the sound of it. “I don’t feel made to,” he says.

“You did a bit before.”

“With the ring?”

You wince. He hates that too. “Aye,” he says before you can soften it for him. “I know. I made a bollocks of that.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You laughed.”

“Dunk.”

“No, I know why.” He looks down at the blanket. There is a loose thread near his thumb and he worries it instead of your patience. “I think I do, anyway. I was tryin’ to put the house up before we’d even checked if the ground takes a nail.”

You go quiet.

“That sounded better in my head,” he adds.

“No,” you say. “I get it.”

He risks looking at you again. “I want to help. Want to be here. That part’s true.”

“I know.”

“And the other part—” His mouth goes dry. “I liked last night. I want it. I want… you. I’m sayin’ that plain enough, aye?”

Your face changes, then closes slightly, as if plainness has still found a way to hurt. “Aye,” you say. “That’s plain.”

“But I don’t want ye thinkin’ I’m only here for that either.”

“I don’t.”

“And I’d rather it be me than some stranger,” he says, then blushes so hard it nearly makes him dizzy. “Jesus. Sorry. That came out—”

“No.” Your voice has gone quieter. “No, I understand.”

“It’s safer,” he says, grabbing for the practical rope before he drowns in the other thing. “I mean, with the baby and all. If it helps you. If you need it. Or want it. I can—” His face burns worse. “I can be that. For you.”

Your eyes stay on him. “You can be that.”

“If you want.”

"I do," you tell him. “So um… if we’re being practical.” Your jaw works once. “Is kissing allowed?”

Dunk blinks. Looks at your mouth and immediately has no right to answer anything requiring thought. “I’d like it to be.”

“Touching?”

“Aye.” His voice lowers. “If you want me touchin’.”

“I do.”

He swallows.

“What kind?” you ask, then regret shows on you in a hot flash. “Sorry. That sounded like a form.”

“It’s all right.” His hand flexes against the sheet. “The kind where ye tell me if I’ve gone wrong.”

“That’s broad.”

“I’m a broad fella.”

You laugh, and the sound loosens something in him. Then your face shifts again. “Protection?”

“Aye,” he says, too fast. “I was thinkin’—maybe we should. Or could. If ye wanted. For mess.”

Your brows pull in. He sees the mistake arrive before he knows which mistake it is.

“For mess?” you repeat.

“Aye. Just—”

“If you’re planning to keep seeing other people,” you say carefully, already moving yourself away by an inch without seeming to notice, “then yes, obviously. That would be safe. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t. We talked about it, didn’t we? So if you—”

“No.” Dunk nearly sits up. “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” You only gape at him. “Jesus, lass, that’s not what I meant.” His hand reaches this time and lands on your wrist. “I meant the actual mess. Sheets. You. Cleanin’ up after. I thought maybe it’d be easier for you.”

“Oh.”

“I told ye I’m not seein’ anyone.”

“I know.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t want to.”

Your eyes lower to his hand around your wrist. “Okay.”

“Are you?”

“No.” Your answer comes quickly enough to calm some ugly thing in him. Then, quieter: “I’m obviously not seeing anyone either.”

“Good,” he says, then hears himself. “I mean—”

“It is good,” you say.

There is another silence. Different this time. Warmer and more dangerous.

“For what it’s worth,” you add, staring somewhere near his shoulder, “I don’t mind the mess.”

Dunk’s body takes the sentence disgracefully. He feels himself stir under the blanket with enough interest to make his soul sigh and leave him to it. You notice. Of course you notice. Your mouth parts by a fraction.

He shuts his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’m tryin’ to have a serious conversation.”

“You can be hard during it. Multitasking.”

He laughs, boyish and powerless. You smile properly then, and for one small stretch of morning the thing between you becomes almost simple. Almost.

Because you are still looking at him with that carefulness. Because he is still holding back half the sentence in his mouth. Because both of you are making a shape around the same missing word and pretending the shape itself will do.

“So,” you say. “We keep it… between us?”

“Aye.”

“When I need it.”

“When you want it,” he corrects, then looks startled by his own nerve.

Your face softens. “When I want it,” you say.

“And if you don’t, ye say.”

“Yes.”

“And if I do something wrong—”

“I’ll say.”

“And if I get too—”

“Dunk,” you say, then put your hand on his chest. “You’re allowed to want things too.”

He lies very still under that, because the sentence has teeth. After a moment, he covers your hand with his. “Right,” he says, though it comes out clipped.

You nod, as if that has settled anything. Then you look down at your own body under his shirt, at your knees under the cover, at his hand on yours. “So this is very mature of us.”

“Aye,” he says. “Terribly.”

“Awful.”

“Near bureaucratic.”

It gets you. You press your face into his arm to hide the laugh, and Duncan lets himself turn into it, nose brushing your hair. Biscuits. Sleep. Skin. A trace of him, too, caught in cotton and warmth. His chest goes very full.

“Tea?” he asks after a while, because he has to put the feeling somewhere.

“Tea,” you agree. Then, smaller, before he can move: “And maybe stay here for another minute.”

Dunk closes his eyes. “Aye,” he says. “One minute.”

One minute becomes two, then God knows how many, because Dunk shifts, huffs softly through his nose, and fishes your hand out from under the duvet. He starts cautiously. Thumb over your knuckles. A rub at the side of one nail. The rough pad of his finger traces the crease where yours bends, nervous enough to make the whole thing feel less like idling and more like inquiry. How much of this is he allowed, when it is neither useful nor filthy. How long until one of you names it and ruins the little shelter it has made.

Then he opens his own hand beside yours and rests you against it.

The comparison is so unfair you nearly laugh. Your fingertips only reach the middle knuckles of his, and his palm sits beneath yours with room left over, warm and scored with small lines that look deeper for belonging to someone who does practical things badly and often.

“You’ve such small hands, lass,” he says.

“No I don’t.” Your voice wobbles at the edges, which is horrible of it. “You’ve giant paws.”

He smiles, but only barely, as if too much face might startle the permission away. His thumb slips into the hollow of your palm and tickles there once, then again, slower. You curl a little round it. He watches that happen with a dazed, soft sort of attention that makes you feel discovered in the worst place.

You roll closer. His arm tightens under you, then stills. For a second he goes careful all over. “How d’ye get anything done with such tiny hands, hm?” he murmurs.

Instead of answering, your other hand creeps from under the duvet and lands on his thigh. The muscle under it jumps. “I think you know how much I can get done with such tiny hands,” you say.

Dunk hiccups. Then, to his obvious horror, giggles. He clears his throat so hard it becomes a cough. “You’re a wee menace.”

“Mhm.” You close his hand around yours, then let him have it. “Go make that tea.”

It all works. Sort of. His feet touch the floor, and Duncan realises he's got exactly one T-shirt in here that's currently occupied, and worse, that he's naked and half-hard.

He contemplates options but one where he asks you to hand that shirt over doesn't even make it to the waiting list. He decides that if you could climb into a bath in front of him he can show some courage too.

So. Dunk mans up, or tries to. His feet touch the floor and he pushes himself upright to stand. He keeps his back to you and crosses to where his boxers have been abandoned on the floor. Crouching for them is a mistake in several directions, but he gets them hooked in his fingers, steps in and drags them up minding to sort his dick in there so that it doesn't look like it's screaming I'm needy first thing in the morning.

When he turns back, you have your face aimed very carefully at the window. Your mouth has gone into a put-upon, thoughtful pout, as if the curtains have presented you with some riveting theory. Dunk looks at you for half a second, then smiles. “Aye,” he says. “Very respectful.”

Your eyes flick to him and away again. “I’m looking at the light.”

“Course ye are.”

A grin. “What?”

“Mm.” He pushes the glasses up his nose with one finger, and lets himself enjoy the fact that you have to hide your face under the blanket. “I’ll be right back.”

You only hum to that. Wait for his footsteps to hush once he reaches the kitchen and allow yourself a little squeal into the pillow.

The girlishness he manages to drag out of you by existing near a kettle is ignominious. You are not sure he knows he spent half the night with his face pressed into the bend of your neck, humming and purring sweet little unconscious things like stay and smell nice whenever you shifted too far from the furnace of his chest. Then morning comes and he stands there abashed over a perfectly ordinary tent under the covers, as though your own body would not have betrayed you just as plainly if God had granted women the same crude signage.

All of it lays another brick in the awful construction of Duncan’s sexiness, which is strong and, frankly, a little lethal because he has no earthly notion of it. He is shy until pining gets the better of him. Needy enough that the shyness cannot survive long. Once something is given, he handles it with care. Listens. Anticipates. Looks for the place where your body has begun to ask once your mouth starts failing. It should make him less dangerous, that kindness. Somehow it makes him worse.

When he got up, you had taken to ogling his gorgeous round arse with such immediate appetite you forgot, for half a second, that both of you are here through necessity, accident, and one long chain of poor judgement. The rules are useful. Emotionally fraudulent, maybe, but useful all the same. They let you believe you are protecting the two of you from the version of intimacy that grows thorns later and cuts as resentment. They let you take what mirrors the thing you want while keeping a cloth over the contaminated parts.

Still, Dunk is right. This is better than strangers. If it stays inside this out-of-time pocket pregnancy has made for you, perhaps it is survivable. Perhaps it is even sensible. You remain close. You have somebody to lean on. Dunk misses less, you explain to yourself, staring at the pale scratch of sunlight on the floorboards. The two of you can practise easing into the strange family-shaped arrangement that will be waiting once your body finishes one labour and the rest of your life begins another.

You sit up in the bed and look towards the window. A husk hangs from the sill on a translucent thread, gutted clean by whatever abandoned it. It's split down the back, papery and crumbling, and the thing that has rearranged itself in it has cut its way out and flown off without your eyes on it.

Duncan comes back with two steaming cups and a mean reminder of how broad his chest is. He sits at the foot of the bed and turns the cup in his hand so that you can take it by the ear. "I've put toasts on, too," he says.

You nod with your mouth hidden into the rim. "I'll give you your shirt back in a minute," you say, seeing how he curls into himself. It's a large pity, large enough to rival him, for you'd love to just keep him around like this. "I have uh… spare towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom. If you want to, I mean—"

"I thought," Dunk starts. "It's Saturday. I thought we could still sort out the nursery. If you want."

"Really?" you say. "That'd be great. Yeah, I would love that. The room's ready, we just need to put things in it."

"Grand." His cup finds yours and they clink.

You smile into your tea. Get up. At the wardrobe you open one door and disappear half behind it, bare legs visible below the wood. “We could probably do the same thing at yours,” you say from in there. “Sometime later. When you feel like it. A nursery, I mean, or a corner?”

Dunk nods before he remembers you cannot see him. The thought lands strangely. It reminds him painfully that the arrangement will be divided into two households. That, inevitably, you will come to his flat and set your feet on the floor and, to Duncan, symbolically, it means things getting crossed off. Your voice reaches him. “Dunk?”

He blinks. “A-aye. Yeah. We ought to do that.”

You come out in cotton shorts and a T-shirt still large on you, though much smaller than his, and kneel beside him on the mattress. “Here,” you say, passing him back his one. Then, after a beat, softer: “You can stay over here as much as you want when the baby is born, you know that, right? I just thought it’d be good for you to have things at your place too.”

Dunk takes the shirt from you. “I know,” he says, though his throat has gone a bit narrow with it. He hands you his cup and ducks into the cotton to get sucker-punched by his private version of tangerine dream. The whole thing is warm from you. Smells of sleep and your skin and the sweet rot of whatever lotion has survived the night. It settles over his shoulders as if it has learned him from inside your body and came back altered. He has to sit still for a second with his head only half through the neck-hole, sightless and enormous, before he can finish pulling it down.

When his face reappears, you are looking at him with your mouth tucked in. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not a nothin' face.”

“It is.” You reach over and tug the hem straight for him, fingers brushing his stomach through cotton. “You looked very heroic, fighting your own shirt.”

“Mm, a hard battle,” he says, grave as he can manage.

He listens to your laughter with focus meant for the speech of people wiser than him. Finishes his tea and waits for you to finish yours. Then, you show him around the bathroom while Duncan pretends he doesn't know where things are and nods thoughtfully at every stop of the tour. Once it's wrapped, he quells an urge to kiss your forehead and maybe slap your ass lightly. He showers with the soap he's used that one time before, then joins you in the kitchen for breakfast.

First, Dunk snorts at the disparity of plates. Yours holds one sad toast while his overflows with bread, eggs and sausages. When he shots you a questioning look you only shrug and send a don't judge me face in his direction. So Duncan sits. Eats. Tries to not think much about hands that made it for him.

In this mundane moment, Dunk’s memory manages to dim all the girls he has ever smothered into hurting him. Compared to what he feels now, those loves seem skinny. Starved at the ribs. This one is embryonic but ever-growing, blind and hungry and insisting on itself without any shame.

He watches you nibble at the bread’s crust and chase every bite with a sip of tea. One leg perched on the seat of the chair, you do not look at him, only scroll through emails on your phone with your mouth set flatter by the second. He sees how it fleeces the morning bliss off you, bit by bit. Then decides to take the role you keep offering. Someone who has a say in it. Someone who can want things.

“Have ye thought about takin’ leave already?” he asks.

“Hm?” You lift your head. “Oh, yeah, I just…” Your gaze drops back to the phone, then away from it. “I don’t know what I’d be doing with the time, you know?”

Dunk considers that a minute. Wipes his greasy mouth, cringes a little, then rests an arm across the table, ruling halfway through the movement to leave you untouched after all. His fist closes instead.

“We could… I dunno.” He takes a sip of coffee. “We could figure that out. Together, I mean. I’ll have more time soon.”

“Oh?” you say. “Right. School’s ending.”

“Mhm. Few weeks.” Dunk nods. “I’ll still have summer coaching and the activity programme with the kids, but it’s not full-time. We could prepare a bit better. Meet Ray and Red. Maybe you could…”

“What?”

“Come to a game,” he says, quieter. “Meet Egg. If ye want.”

You go still for long enough that Dunk regrets it. Then, you put your phone face down and rest your palm over his fist. It loosens under you. His fingers thread through yours.

“That sounds good,” you tell him. “I probably could use some time off.”

Dunk nods.

You look down at your joined hands, then back at him. “You ready for the nursery?”

Dunk sweeps the room with vacant eyes. “Aye,” he says. “Think so.”

The nursery has been waiting with its door closed. He doesn't know when the painting was done, nor does he ask by whom, because each possible version delivers a small resentment. Had it been you alone, Dunk would scold you for not seeking help. Had it been anyone else, he'd be wounded about not being the first choice. When the door opens, both of you lean on the frame as if bare walls might turn and ask what exactly you think you are doing here. There are boxes stacked by the skirting board, a rolled rug, cot in the exact middle, a changing table flat-packed in a carton with arrows pointing which side is up for some reason. A lamp shaped like a moon. Three soft baskets that smell of new rope and shop dust.

You tell him the changing table should go under the shelf. Dunk measures the wall again though it's been measured twice already, then lifts the table as if it has no weight and puts it exactly where you point. “There?” he asks.

“A little left.”

He shifts it a little left.

“No, your left.”

Dunk's mouth quirks. “That was my left.”

“Your other left, then.”

He gives you a look over his shoulder, wounded by female sense of directions, and you laugh hard enough that he smiles fully. The room eases by one small notch.

After that, the two of you become very serious about things that are very serious only to new parents. Which drawer gets the vests. Whether nappies should live closer to the wipes or closer to the little bin with its impressive system of odour containment. Dunk folds three tiny sleepsuits. You unfold one, refold it worse, and he says nothing, only fixes it when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.

“I saw that,” you say.

“I didn’t do anythin’.”

“You think I can’t fold baby clothes.”

“I think,” Dunk says, eyes on the drawer, “there’s a chance the baby will want its legs in the leg bits.”

You stare at him.

His mouth twitches. “That’s all.”

A muslin hits his head. He catches it without looking, which is so irritatingly impressive you have to turn away and busy yourself with the baskets.

Slowly, the space stops looking like storage and begins to acquire intent. Sheet goes on round the mattress. The little blanket folds over the rail. The lamp finds the corner. Books line up on the low shelf, bright spines and silly animals and one about a tractor Dunk claims is important because children ought to have options. You put the first packet of nappies in place, then stand there with your hand still on it. “Yeah,” you say, to no one.

Dunk looks up from where he is kneeling by a drawer. “What?”

“No, just. Yes. This looks… fine.”

“Aye.” He follows your gaze, then nods too hard. “Yeah. It does. Looks nice.”

There's a hollow, mouth-biting silence after that. Nice is a stupid little word for a room that now contains future. It's too small to express the enormity of the folded clothes that wait for a body neither of you has held yet. Nice is what's said because the real thing is a cutthroat.

Dunk gets up. You both stand in the middle of it with your foreheads set into brave shapes. “This is nice,” you say again, worse this time.

“Aye,” Dunk says. “I like it.”

You glance at him, and his face destroys you. His eyes are red-rimmed behind the lenses, magnified into bareness. Nothing held back on him. Duncan is a pretty crier because nearly none of him frowns. He just sweats tears out of those baby-blues until they adorn his lashes and drop onto cheeks. There's no attempt at hiding, only a fist at the ready to wipe the excess had it blurred his vision.

A complete opposite of you. Mouth slicing itself into a lopsided crescent from the force of trying to keep it inside, then plain ugly sobbing. It erupts from bawling eyes to a painful choke on the back of a mouth. Then snot comes thick and unstoppable, smears the upper lip with salt, and all of you becomes shiny in a way that would cake up any powder.

“Why are you crying?” he asks, voice breaking.

“I’m not crying,” you say, immediately crying. “You’re crying.”

His mouth twitches, then fails. “Am I?”

"Yes, Duncan," you wail. "Visibly."

Duncan steps in as if called by it. The room does a strange thing to a private wound in him. Bursts open the scar tissue that's grown round abandonment. Tends it, cleans it, stitches the evened edges and kisses it better. Small things do that to people. He feels welcome to walk barefoot on the fluffy rug and flick the carousel of geese into a stroll. There's a family for him somewhere in here, and you are a third of it. He doesn't know what kind of wrong has its fingers around your throat, but steps in all the same, because it doesn't really matter.

He gathers you against his chest and the two of you stand there leaking stupidly into each other. “Lass,” he murmurs, palm at the back of your head. “Hey. C’mere.”

“I’m here,” you say into his shirt, which now carries an imprint of your face like it's a fucking Veil of Veronica. “I’m very clearly here.”

“I know.”

“Why’re you crying?” you ask again.

His hand stills, then moves again. "Happy," he lies. “Jus' happy."

You pull back. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Lie badly.”

Dunk's face works. For one flicker you think he might tell you something. Something old. Then he only cups your face in both hands and wipes beneath your eyes with his thumbs. His own are worse. Damn tender and unfair in their size. “And you?” he asks. “Why’re you cryin’?”

You try to answer like a normal woman with control over her organs. The effect is half-strangled, half-mangled through teeth and comes out jittery. “I’m—" you hiccup, "scared I… I won’t be… a good mum.”

He stares at you, genuinely baffled. "Sweetheart," he says, as if it's all dead simple. "You'll be an incredible mam."

Laughter comes abrupt and deranged, hitting the surface of his lenses in wet little spots. Duncan says it like the matter has been already inspected and passed. It makes the idea briefly possible. "You don't know that," you tell him.

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“I do,” he says again, with the same conviction he's used to persuade you municipal swamp is green. He brings your hand to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. Then knuckles of the other one. Then the hollow of it while your fingers brush his nose. Then your wrist, where the pulse knocks and knocks. "I do know."

“Dunk—”

A kiss on the forehead cuts you off. Long and determined. It makes you gasp and you hope that Dunk will read the gasping as one of the necessary phases for calming down. You clutch the shirt on his stomach, then, with no better plan than needing less fabric between you, you push your palms underneath it. Touch the life of his ribs. His muscles jerk.

“I only trust you,” you say, staring at the damp hollow at the base of his throat, “because you’ll be a great dad.”

He does that thing in the face that heralds the slackening of the whole body. Galvanised within himself to push past the layers of fear, Duncan bends and kisses you deep enough to make the both of you stumble. His hands frame your face, then neck, then shoulders, undecided. "Girl, what are you doin'—" he mutters into it. "What're you doin' to me?"

Loving you, you think, unbidden. You mumble a thing that has a shape of his name but doesn't survive the journey from throat to mouth. Set your fingers on his back and try to pull him closer.

He hums and starts walking. Stops kissing, but stays mouth to mouth. His thumbs and forefingers cuff round your elbows, twitching. There are heavy nasal breaths and working throats and between one swallow and the next Duncan stares at you through those damp, heifer-like lashes as if the answer might be printed somewhere on your face.

"Where's this goin'?" he asks.

"To the—" you stammer. "To bed. If you want."

His whole chest sinks on the exhale. "Thank God," puffs out of him.

Then—arms. A strongman’s foreplay begins with Duncan’s palms finding your arse like it’s signposted. He gets you up with a grunt that nurtures relief where effort should be, and your body remembers the route with alarming ease. It's the third time now. Three times out of three, you have failed to get yourself to bed under your own power where Duncan is concerned. The thought brings another one behind it, bad and quick-footed: perhaps this is simply what he does with women. Perhaps all that size has made a habit of carrying girls through doorways and making them feel singular for the length of one corridor.

You shut that down with both legs round his waist and both hands at his neck, because thinking has done very little for you lately besides invent pain. This belongs to me, you tell yourself, with no court of appeal available. The lift, the hands, the breath punched out of him when you settle against his stomach. Him. All of it yours for as long as he keeps walking.

He kisses you through it. The shape of him between your thighs, already interested, makes a hard bid against you. In the bedroom he lowers you to the mattress with care so anxious it turns clumsy at the last inch. Your back bounces, and he follows you down halfway before catching himself on both arms. There, he hovers, huge, open-mouthed, and trembles for it, and you know damn well it is not from the weight on his shoulders because you tremble too while holding nothing.

Your fingers hook in the hem of his shirt and lift. Dunk straightens enough to help you; yields his arms and head so you can drag it off him. On the other side of cotton he's a mess with his glasses endearingly askew. "There," you say, placing a palm on his cheek.

He huffs, embarassed, scrunches his eyes and smiles with a tongue pushed against the backs of his teeth. Then his hands find your shorts. He searches first, gets your nod, and that is all it takes. The waistband drags down your hips by the work of patient fingers, resists where you're sunken into the bed so you lift, and you could swear he breathes out a little yes.

Around nudity, you tense. Duncan sees it. "There," he says and bends to press his mouth to your stomach.

In current circumstances it is such a strange place to be kissed right before sex that you laugh like an idiot, and ugly too—phlegmy and cracked and wet in a way that you're certain is not attractive. But Duncan looks up with his eyes gone red for entirely different reasons than five minutes ago. "You said kissin's alright," he says.

"I did."

“So—” His palm smooths down your thigh to the knee, broad and calloused like low-grain sandpaper. He gets under the joint and makes it bend, lifts until the leg opens from the hip and leaves you spread in a way that has both of you breathing through the nose. Mouth set judiciously where your belly swells from the pubic bone, he mutters, “—I’m kissin’.”

His body starts moving like communicating vessels: one crawling thing follows another. Crawling palm kickstarts lips. “Still kissin’,” Duncan says, and lies, because now he’s licking. He has his tongue set broad across your navel, travelling upwards until it meets the border of your shirt’s hem.

That invites his other hand to lift it. He bunches the cotton above your tits and continues the kissin’ between your breasts. His hips creep up too, first to your mid-thighs, then level with yours, and the weight of him releases some tension from your loins. He’s wide enough to keep you open by his presence alone, so the hand at the hinge of your knee remains soft. Thumb brushing the side of it. Small. Careful. Damning.

Your palm and finds his hair. Fingers apart, you comb through the roots, then become meaner with the pulling once his stubble brushes your nipple. “Dunk,” you say. “Come here.”

He does, badly. Too much of him for grace, he comes there fast and heavy. Hooks your leg around his hip and presses his clothed, warm cock to your cunt. “Shite,” he hisses when you tug the hairs at his nape. He looks at you, and when you think there will be more kissin’, he stays frozen, just gaping.

“Don’t look like that,” you say.

“Like what?”

“Like I’ve done something to you.”

His eyes drop, then lift. “Haven’t ye?”

He seems a bit shocked by his own answer, so to save him from it you reach for his face and pull him down. Allow yourself the wet and neatless pass of tongue through his mouth. Your leg tightens round him because your body is quick to throw invitation now the brain is ridden with persistent fuck it. Fuck me instead.

Duncan’s hand goes down between you and gets stupid with the practicalities. He could have thought this through better. Could have undressed properly, could have come to bed with some sort of sequence in mind, but details of lovemaking keep leaving him the second your mouth opens under his. He only wants to be close. The rest is laces, waistbands, cloth, mortal hindrance. He shoves at his boxers one-handed, gets them low enough to make use of himself, and winces when the cotton scrapes the head of his cock.

Then, skin meets skin and a sigh falls out of him in one long, shattered piece.

He fits his fist round the base to guide himself. Thumb pressed just under the head, he squeezes until the dew pearls out, slick and clear, then drags it through you. Slow first, because he deludes himself that slow might save him. The crown parts the wet seam of you bluntly, slides up, catches over your clit, and comes back down to nudge at the entrance with no entering done. Your whole body gives a small, greedy twitch to that. His does worse.

“Christ,” he says into your mouth.

Again. A little firmer. His cock learns the route by the fractions: clit, slit, soft clutch of the opening, back up through the mess he has made wetter by being in it. He mixes himself with your sweet sap until the slide acquires sound. The tender parts of you speak through glimmer and greed, while his answer is held in the wrist, in the rippling stomach, and the balls drawn tight enough to feel like someone's holding them.

You bite his lower lip because you cannot think of a sentence worth the effort. He groans, and that makes more of him leak into his own hand. It gets spread back through you on the next pass. There is something near argumentative in it, the way he keeps refusing to give you the thing both of you are braced for. Your hips keep lifting to steal it from him. His knuckles brush your pussy lips each time he works himself down. The heel of his palm grazes the damp hair. He shudders as if the contact keeps running up his spine and knocking something loose behind the eyes.

“Duncan,” you breathe.

“Aye,” he says, uselessly. “Aye, I know.”

He does know. Knows, because your fingers seem dead set on claiming some of his hair for themselves with how viscously you tug. There's a flex to your thigh, hips canting restlessly once the tip of his cock presses where it ought to go but slides away. The tenderest parts of the both of you keep quarrelling, negotiating, resolving, while the faces are busy enduring the wait. Duncan watches yours as if watching a match held to paper.

"Come on," you say, looping both arms round his neck. "Dunk, please."

"But, luv—" he strains, resting his forehead to your mouth. But you're so tight, Dunk wants to say. He laughs, and thank God, you read it as I'm on it. While what Duncan means is I'm sorry for this. Sorry for putting you here. Sorry for liking you so much I forgot to pull out. Sorry for every inch of me and the exact opposite too. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

His hips adjust to stop lying about themselves, and he breaches you slowly. You take him in laborious, exerting shards that make his spine empty of sense. Warmth closes around his length stern as a stubborn mouth and his own puffs out air so suddenly his cheeks swell with it.

He's halfway through when you whine from the bottom of your furious body and cant up for more. "Aye," he says. "Aye, I'm here."

Another inch. The grip is so snug and living the whole of his chest becomes devoted to the passage. His brain too, and his hands, and skin that reddens under your touch and Duncan wonders if scalps can bruise from hair being gripped too ardently. He sinks the last of himself, and when his lower belly meet you, Duncan stops breathing. His body arrives late to the place his heart has been making a fool of itself over for weeks. "There," he says. "There ye are."

You relax around the fullness. Yes, this is right. Your eyes scan him, and find that the lens nearest you is fogged at the edge. And suddenly, you want him bearer, just to see him plain. So you reach for the glasses, and ask, "Can I take those off?"

Dunk huffs a breath. The movement shifts him inside you by some wicked measure and both of you pretend to endure it normally.

"I won't see a thing," he says.

"I know." You slide the glasses off and set them somewhere safe by your pillow. Without them, his face changes. Equally handsome, but transmuted into another kind of comeliness. He's less goofy, more exposed. Somehow more mature and vulnerable. His eyes lose their hard outline, start searching badly and wrinkling where he tries to squint. You cup his jaw and bring him down until his ear is at your mouth. "How about you just listen to me?" you whisper.

The twitch inside you is immediate. "Oh?" you say. Duncan only breathes out a fragmented chuckle. You stroke his cheek with your thumb. "You like that?"

His throat works, excruciatingly thorough, to swallow that gulp down. His hips slip again, then stop, as if there is someone outside of him scolding the misbehaving parts. "Girl," he pleads.

"You do." Your mouth brushes the shell of his ear and his whole back sets until some hard-working vertebrae clicks. "That's good to know."

He pulls back enough to sweep your face and finds, possibly, the shape of your smile. His eyes narrow, poor useless things, and he looks set up by the natural order of things. “You’re very pleased with yourself,” he says.

"A bit."

"Aye, well." He swallows again. His voice has gone thick where he's meant for it to be firm. "Mind yourself then."

You bring him back down. Dunk comes willingly, like he always does when something's been asked of him. His mouth opens against your neck as if that's a grounding thing to do, and he thrusts carefully, deep enough to make your leg flex against his side. The pressure against his ribs is warm, the hand at his nape warmer, and the lips next to his ear border torrid.

"You feel so good," you tell him.

He groans, surrendering the baritone to a higher pitch. "Jesus—"

"So good, Dunk."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"As if—" He takes another breath and moves through it. Cock drags slow and proper, particular enough for you to feel the whole thick length of him leaving and coming back. "As if you know."

"I do know."

You might not be an expert on how to execute the part after winning men that makes them brave enough to tell you all the things you yearn to hear (I love you, I love you, I love you), but this—this, you know. You know where they are softhearted. You know how to find this part. Despite what your mother said, it is not wicked. It's listening for key words that quieten their voices, and looking where eyes ought to be set. Dunk seems to be good at this too, because he reads the cues with surprising proficiency. Whether by guess or wisdom, it eludes you, but he manages to be there when you need a hug, a good word, a joke, a shoulder, or now, a fuck. What kind of fuck, he understands quickly too. You don’t yet pass judgement on the intention behind it: if he means to stay for long, or if he has simply recognised the means to an end. The version in which this is just the way he has sex, unperformed and therefore wholly aligned with you, doesn’t even make it to your head.

And Dunk is softhearted in many places. He’s unbearably tender when it comes to tending bodies, as if each part of you deserves kindness. It’s only natural to conclude he’d like that back, in one form or another. He reacts to praise as though it puts ground under his feet. Keeps finding ways to be useful, offering himself in small practical pieces, as if saying notice me, notice me, I am here, without understanding at all that it is impossible to not notice him. If someone in his past failed to see the easiness to love him that he comes with, they were either dumb or cruel in the throat. The only thing in him that halts the loving is the fearful nature of frail hearts. You recognise that like you are both made of similar clay, even if you cannot put a finger on the exact place where it hurts. In cases such as Duncan and yourself, bravery arrives in steps. Valour blooms rather than surges, so you give him a small brick for the lifeblood to keep building. Praise him for the way he is. Just this.

"I do know," you tell him. "You're so patient with me. So careful. I like that."

It costs him some. The hand under your knee pulses, fingers pressing, loosening, pressing again. His stomach jumps against yours, fills with a deep breath, then corrects itself to not flatten you.

"See?" you coo. Pour the sweetness straight into his ear canal so the only thing received by cochlea is that he is being good. "I love how heavy you are. How well you fill me. Fuck, Duncan—" He hits you just right, on the right there. You tighten, and keep muttering, "You're so good to me. So fucking good to me, my good boy."

"Ah—f-fuck—" he snaps, shocked and half-pained.

"Duncan."

He makes the mistake of lifting his head when you say his name. Blind as he is, he still finds your mouth. Kisses you hard, then badly, then breaks to inhale. His hair has fallen over his forehead. Without the glasses he looks dismantled in a more private way, as if you have caught him between skins. "Say it again," he mumbles.

You blink. "What?"

His ears turn crimson. He keeps thrusting. Stays deep, because that's when your body keeps rewarding his with blissful little clenches. Discipline fleets him, and Duncan forgets altogether how to keep himself in reins. It feels too good. Brushes the cords too accurately. "What you said," he rasps.

"That you're good to me?"

He shuts his eyes.

Oh. So that is where it lives.

You pull him closer with the heel of your foot and start speaking into his lips. "You're good to me," you say, slower. "You're good at this. Perfect at this. You make me feel—oh—" You have to stop there, because the next stroke takes the end of the sentence and folds it under your tongue.

Dunk hears enough. Perhaps more than enough. His face comes down beside yours and he starts fucking you with his mouth at your cheek, breathing there, taking the praise like punches he intends to keep as bruises.

"You're beautiful," you whisper. "You know that?"

"N-no." He shakes his head.

"Yes." Your fingers push into his hair. "You are. So handsome. You're so pretty like this."

"Girl," he wheezes. "Girl, I can't—"

"You can." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "You can take it."

You break some working piece in him. He gives one fuller push, then another, and a sound, too open, too surprised, leaves him. His whole body locks above you. "Shite, I—" he gasps. "Shite, wait—"

It takes him too early. You afflict him, his ears and nose and neck with those delicate touches that make the roots of Dunk's hair buzz. With your voice, so fucking loving, it makes his brain melt and threaten to leak. It's all too much. He comes, hideous for trying to withhold it, strong for you being the cause of it, and shivers violently through his every giant muscle. His cock kicks deep with each wrung out spill, face drops to your shoulder, then whole of him follows the drowning to fold around you. The noise he makes there is loud enough to shame him later, if you let it.

You do nothing except hold him. For several seconds Duncan doesn't speak. He focuses on breathing instead and maybe not turning to ash under the blaze of shame. Not one, but a title of few-pumps-chump has finally been handed to him with a shitty confetti and a stale flute of cheap champagne. He stays seated inside you and trembling through the last of it. When he tries to lift himself, his arms disagree.

"I'm sorry," he says, hoarse. “I didn’t mean to—” His pelvis shifts by accident and he winces, oversensitive and still hard enough to make the smallest movement count. “Fuck.”

"Dunk." You press your mouth to his temple. Smooth the hair off his forehead. "Don't be. There's nothing to be sorry for, hm?"

"But you didn't—" he huffs, sounding furious with himself and deeply far away.

A smile, or so he thinks. "I'm okay," you say.

"You didn't finish."

"No," you say. His brows knit. It makes him look so abysmally disappointed that for a beat you consider scraping that and lying.

He lies back down, nuzzling his face to your neck. "Then talk to me," he says.

Your stomach does an unbecoming, joyous little flip. "What?"

“Talk to me,” he says again, quieter. His voice has rawed its own edges, embarrassed and determined both. “Please. I can stay. Jus'—tell me things.”

You smirk. “What things?”

Duncan scowls. “Cruel woman.”

Your hand starts playing with his hair again. Scratching at the scalp, pulling gently. “You want me to praise you back into fucking me?”

Dunk’s eyes close. “Aye,” he says. “If you’re offerin’.”

What moves through you borders unkind. You hook both legs along his sides, cross them on his arse and turn your face to his ear. "So listen," you say.

He's so obedient his entire body slackens as if hearing is achieved through epidermis. For a while, he does just that. Listens with his lashes lowered since sight has become a luxury, and useless to him anyway. He's just touch and sound.

"You're so hot like this," you whisper. His fingers twitch on your shoulder. "You are. All fucked out and sorry for yourself." Against your neck his lips move and draw the shape of Christ. You brush the sweaty curl at his temple. "Your cock feels so good inside me," you say, softer, because it's a less generic truth. "See? You came and I'm still full of you."

Dunk makes a sound rid of consonants. His face turns an inch, mouth opening at your throat because it needs to be put somewhere to not grow loud. You feel him pulse once, tired and sore, and then another thing starts under it. A tiny return. Thickening that makes you rethink your approach on I can take you once again.

“I like it,” you tell him. “The mess you make. I like knowing it’s there.”

“Lass—”

“Makes me feel special.”

That one hurts him. Pleases him too, which may be the hurt of it. He gives the smallest aborted press, an insidious tremor of a body that wants to eat more than it can hold, but it drags through you slickly enough that both of you go quiet. He hisses through his teeth. The overburden of senses has him by the nerves. You can feel it as an argument within the muscles. Pleasure with a hot little blade tucked inside it.

You slide your palm down his back. Sweat has pooled at the dip of his spine and over his shoulders. “I like how big you are,” you say. “How you spread me open just by being there.”

Duncan shudders. His cock gives another slow, disbelieving throb.

“Oh,” you coo. “There he is.”

“Mean,” he mutters, but stays exactly where he is with his ear offered. He wants the cruelty by handful. Wants it ladled warm into the hollow places. Wants to be destroyed by kindness because kindness is the thing he has least defence against.

“You like it?” you ask. He nods once. “Can you tell me with words?”

A pause. His throat works against your skin. “A-aye.”

“Good.”

His whole body rises to that, a rough tightening from shoulders to arse. He moves by mistake, a shallow slip in and out, and the noise bursts from him with such pained sweetness your fingers tense in his hair.

“Careful,” you murmur, though care has begun to look like a strange medicine.

There's a laugh, short and bitten. “Tryin’,” Dunk says.

He always does, which might be a thing that turns you more sombre. “I know you are,” you say and get taken off-guard by how lovesick you sound. You plant a kiss at the place behind his ear. “That’s what I like.”

Duncan goes still again. Listening so hard his body seems to have turned all its chambers towards you. “I like your shoulders,” you say, and let your hand prove it. Sweep over one broad slope, then the other. “I like your sweet face. Especially when you’re inside me.” At that, his breath leaves him in pieces.

There is more. There is a daft, impossible amount more. It crowds up on your tongue in unsayable particulars. I like that your front teeth face inward a little and seem slightly too large for the civil architecture of your mouth. I like the freckle on your left cheek. I like that your left eye crinkles more than the right when you laugh. I like your feet. I like the soft of your stomach. I like your voice in the morning and what you feel like in bed beside me. I like. I like, I like, I like—

You spare him and do not spare him at all. “You’re so pretty, Duncan.”

His hips jerk again. There. No use pretending that one missed. Inside his head the answers to each of your praises start piling up. I like your sweet face too. He bites the thought down and tastes your skin instead. I like your shoulders too. I like your hands. I like them in my hair. I like your laugh when it turns to cackle. I like when you cook and get cross at the pan. I like when you go snotty while crying. I like your tits. I like your arse. I like your thighs. I like the weight of you. I like waking up with one of your hairs stuck to my mouth. I—

“F-fuck,” Duncan hisses through an involuntary back-stabbing twitch.

It's slippery. Lovely. He moves through his own spent and feels the sting prickle from the tip of his cock to the base of his spine like thousands of insects' wings fluttering between layers of skin. His mouth goes so wide the jaw clicks, hand finds your hip, grips, releases, then grips again with a gentleness that comes out more desperate than on purpose.

“Too much?” you ask.

He shakes his head. “N-no.”

In a quick assessment Duncan realises he is fully hard again. Worse than before, somehow. His cock feels harder than it has any right to, bigger too for the swell of deliciously tormented tissue. Blood fills him so utterly he gets light-headed with it and has one fleeting, cowardly thought that maybe men go soft after disgracing themselves for a reason and ought to leave their luck alone. Because this feels stolen. Forbidden in how sweetly it spreads through him. He is bathed in himself and your slick, trembling with it, and still some jurisdiction of the hips returns to him. Enough to roll them into you heavily and whisper, "Keep talkin'. Keep talkin' to me, sweetheart. Please."

It arrives so raw you nearly lose your nerve. Nearly. With the shift inside, your body, faithless and bright, remembers what it was promised. "You're doing so well, Duncan. You're so good. Look at me, darling."

He goes where your palm orders his chin and looks vaguely at where your face should be. It's blurry and he's not certain a case would be different if he had his glasses on. "I want ye to feel good, lassie. I want to be good for you. Oh, fuck—"

Your chest tightens like a hand closing round glass. You smooth your thumb under his eye, where he is hot and damp. “You are,” you tell him. "Kiss me."

He lowers his mouth to yours and lets them meet with too much gratitude, open lips driven by poor coordination. The kiss makes him move into a shallow glide. He is filling out properly, impossible and worried inside you, honed through the overbright ache because praise stomps on every other version of comfort and laughs at it.

"There you are," you say. "Oh fuck, there you are. Right there—"

"Yeah?" Dunk says. Starts pulling back farther, enough to make you protest the loss. When he slides in again both of you feel the second life of him. He brushes the rawest depths. The mess you claim to like so much gets pumped back in with a sound so wet and filthy the burn in Duncan's ears begins to feel cold.

"Yes—" you moan. Clench around him as if welcoming the insult. "God, you're so good—"

He whimpers. Quiet and punched out. Buries his face into your shoulder immediately after as if a noise so vulnerable doesn't have the right to exist in his body.

The sound spills across your chest and bleeds into your fingers. “Oh, Dunk.”

“Don’t make a thing of it.”

“I’m making several things of it.”

“Lass.”

“You sound beautiful,” you tell him, with a face so soft it could kill him.

His whole body flinches. “Jesus, woman.”

“You do.” You pull at his hair until his face comes back where you want it. “You sound beautiful when you want me.”

Duncan stares in your general direction, eyes narrowed and wet, lips parted around breaths he has forgotten to ration. Then his hips move again, and again, each stroke careful out of necessity, each one less careful because you keep rewarding him for it.

I like when you want me too, he thinks, frantic with it. I like when you need me. I love—

He squeezes his lids shut. Whole cliff edge waits under one syllable.

You kiss him before he can fall off it and murmur, “Good boy,” against his mouth.

The last of the strategy leaks off with the sweat at Dunk's temple. He thrusts deeper, shakes harder with the cost of it, and your back arches clean off the bed. Pleasure opens low and hot, fed by the weight of him, the broken sounds, the knowledge that you have put your mouth to some hidden hinge in him and made it swing wide.

“Again,” he says, barely there.

You smile against his lips. “My good boy.”

His cock jumps inside you so hard you gasp. He hears that too. Even without sight, he is learning you by damage and reward. He finds the rhythm by your sounds and keeps his face so close your words have nowhere to go except to him.

“Perfect,” you whisper. “I'm so close, Dunk. Keep fucking me like this. God, you're lovely—” A groan, then another careful stroke. Your thumbs brush under his lower lashes in a sweet little I'm here, I'm here with you. It's not really fair to be able to see his face opened so cleanly while he can't see yours, but the partial anonymity pours some courage down your throat. "I don't know who taught you to be ashamed of wanting," you say, "but they were wrong."

Duncan whines out your name. Torn and bruised by his teeth. The sound of it said like that tips you. You cradle his head to your neck and come with your mouth full of his hair. It seizes you crude and complete, legs and arms locking so hard he has nothing left to do but stay buried and take what your body milks out of him. “My good boy,” you whisper through it. “Duncan, my good boy—”

Good boy. Good boy is what Dunk has always wanted to be, and has tried to be, and still nobody has told him so. Good boy said with conviction by both your mouth and body is what lures him into following you into his second orgasm. He comes again, and worse for it. Loud this time, and costly. His whole body fights itself over where to put the force of it, lower stomach clenching, calf near mangled from the effort of keeping his weight off you. His voice breaks somewhere above his own size. “Ah—Christ, girl—ah, fuck—” Then he spends another load inside you, bathing his cock hot, while your cunt keeps pulling at him in ruthless aftershocks as if it has claimed him now and wants payment.

You keep him trapped by every limb you have. Keep him there while he shudders, while his hips give their last helpless stammers into yours, while his breath falls apart against your throat. It feels brutal for how close it is. For how much of yourselves you have both put into the other without saying the sensible things first.

When it passes, Duncan stays braced over you, trembling. His mouth works near your skin. “Y-you—you—” he stammers. “You make such a mess of me.” He blinks, then palms the mattress for his glasses. Finds them and manages to slide them on one-handed, though not entirely well for they sit on his nose crooked. But at least he can see you again. And Jesus fucking Christ—

The love is no longer embryonic. It has managed to gestate into some sort of Leviathan in the span of one fuck. He looks at what he's done to you and cannot believe his eyes. All of you looks warm. Face melted of every wrinkle it could produce, you lay below him blissed and gorgeous and Dunk feels as if he's going to need to step out from his own skin if he doesn't thank you. For this. For listening. For seeing him and guiding him when he's blind.

"God, girl, what was that?" he says. "What've you done to me?"

You regain the ability to frown. Your brows knit, worried, and you perch yourself higher on one elbow. "Are you not well?" you ask, brushing his cheek. "Have I—"

"No." Then, Duncan laughs. Not because he's happy, though he is, and not because anything is being particularly funny. His body chooses laughter for him. He puts his palm to your jaw and touches your lower lip. Presses on it, stretches it, and it's so glossy it slips away. "Yer not real," he says. "Yer an impossible girl."

A smile splits you, weird and uncanny. It lacks the eyes. Confused, you whisper, "Duncan?"

He answers the sound of his name with his mouth. Poorly at first. A little startled, a little overbrave, a kiss dragged from some place in him still smoking. He catches your lower lip, lets it go, comes back for the corner, then the whole of you, and the further he gets from the post-nut clarity, the more careful he becomes. His hand settles at your neck with a tenderness that feels borrowed from later life.

You let him. Let the kiss calm into something with breathing in it. When he pulls back, his forehead stays close to yours. “How d’you know me so well?” he asks, almost accusing.

Your eyes soften. “I could ask you the same,” you say.

If you did, you'd hear that I love ye, and it cannot be right of you. Duncan goes still above you. “Aye,” he says, though it barely counts as speech.

You brush your thumb over the corner of his mouth. “What?”

“I’ve never had it like that in my life,” he says, blushing fiercely. “I don’t know what it means, or if it has to mean anythin’, but I just—shite, I’m sorry, I jus'—”

“Me too,” you say. He blinks. You nod, because he looks like he needs the second strike of it. “Me too. I wasn’t lying about anything.”

“Thank you,” Dunk says. It is the first thing he can find that is small enough to fit his mouth. Then he shifts, and the small thing gets ruined. “Ah—shite.”

He tries to pull out carefully. Careful does not save either of you. The slip of him leaving is uncomfortable and cold. He hisses. You hiss too, then both sounds turn into sheepish laughter. Dunk sits back on his heels with hands hovering over you as if there is still a correct place to put them and he has not found it yet. "S-sorry," he says.

“Stop apologising for having a dick, okay?”

That makes him look at you in scandalised silence, which is worth the ache. He groans, and looks down since your face is a bit too much. His hands find your knees. He closes your legs gently and rocks them once as if settling something very important and badly made.

You sigh, loose and thready, and your whole lower body goes into a tired little tremor.

“There,” he says. His gaze catches lower. Sticks. “Shite,” he says. “I’ve, uh—”

“What?”

Instead of answering, Duncan leans in and, with the same care, straightens your legs leaving them slightly parted. The air finds you. You make a protesting noise, but he is already lowering himself between your thighs, ungainly and tender about it, until his cheek settles in the crook of one leg and one huge hand smooths over your navel.

“Don’t get any ideas,” you warn him. “I’m still very much untouchable.”

“I—I know.” His voice grows rougher, muffled near your skin. “Me too. I jus’—”

He moves his mouth close and kisses you. There. Low, over skin, without asking anything more from your nerves. His cum is seeping out. Your slit is filled white and wet enough that his spent drips lower, down the swell of buttock and onto the sheet. The sight ought to shame him, probably. Instead, it quiets something in his bones and wakes something worse.

“Relax,” he murmurs. “Just a kiss, lass.”

You try, though relaxation has become a complicated act. His breath warms where everything is swollen and used. He only rests his mouth in small presses, nose close enough to take in the scents bleeding over each other. The newness of it makes him oddly proud. Animal-proud. Kind of proud that probably only another beast would understand.

Duncan ought to leave it there. He knows this from the very recent, first-hand education in what happens when a body is pushed past what it can politely take, and he has no wish to be cruel with you. Still, curiosity implores him. He lets his tongue out only a little and touches you near the entrance, where the trickle has thinned enough to seem less like a dare. Just the tip of it. Just once.

The concoction meets him badly alloyed, both of you discoverable in it. He is salt and water, almost insipid were he to perform alone. You are richer. Sharper. Creamy in the way he remembers from the drunken night that got the two of you here, with that same wild edge underneath. Together it is stranger than either of you apart. Overwhelming, but with a door in it.

He licks again. Small and careful. More reverential than useful, though he would sooner bite off his own tongue than call it that. If romance is a place, Duncan thinks, it is here. Then, he stops thinking much at all. Your fingers find his hair after a moment. You comb once through it and leave your hand there, too tired to do anything finer. When your thigh starts twitching from the weight of his head, he lifts it and looks up at you. “Go shower?” he offers, hoarse. “I’ll change the sheets.”

You stare at him, a little stricken, than let him embrace the weirdness with dignity. Nod. His hands are there to help you when you try to rise and get off the bed. He pulls his T-shirt over you, though only the head, forgetting to put arms into their respectable holes.

"The sheets are—" You start pointing and it's only a finger vaguely poking under cotton.

"I know," Dunk says. "Go, go."

While you're gone, he does things automatically and with his head elsewhere. A man who is a friend and a co-parent and a willing, but ultimately rejected fiance, can only extend his stay this long. Even though for a moment Duncan has felt like an actual lover, there is no argument in him that would sound appropriate aloud. He looks at the dirty sheet in his palms and here he can no longer tell which part of the stain belongs to him, and which to you.

He's stood with a pillowcase half-fixed when you return. Sleepy-looking and warm from the shower, you come closer. Help him with one decisive shake and throw the pillow onto the bed. Then, you crane your head up, and tell him, "Stay? If you want."

Duncan sighs. Bends to kiss your forehead, and says, "Aye." You breathe out too, and the air dilutes int something more chewable. "I'll be right back," he says.

It feels natural to the point of danger. Cuddling in the morning, breakfast together. Setting up a room. Having a mild breakdown over it, which reforges itself into emotions too messy to be talked over so they lead to sex instead. The sex is mind-blowing and leaves Duncan both full and hollow. You take shower first, he goes second. He knows where the sheets are and where the towels are. He knows to wipe his feet before stepping onto the tiles, otherwise you huff so loudly he can hear you across the flat. You gave him a toothbrush. His cock feels a bit scraped, balls empty, but both things are pleasant and sit agreeably on the hips. He walks down the corridor to the bedroom and hears the telly muttering. He can tell exactly which episode of Sapphire & Steel is playing, because he's seen it many times. He cannot remember the plot of it properly, but it's the one with people disappearing into the photographs. In the bedroom you've passed out on your side of the bed, curled, with one arm invading beyond the middle, and the other wedged under your chin. He has his side of the bed. He sits, puts your hand on his thigh, watches the episode and remembers one afternoon when he watched it with Rafe. When the show ends, he turns the telly down and lowers himself so his face is level with your belly.

He's nervous. There's a human inside the size of an avocado, and when Duncan thinks of an avocado in his palm it all seems improbable to him. He's got no idea if the baby can hear him, but feels it is seemly to introduce oneself. "Hello in there," he whispers, quiet to not wake you. "I am your da. We'll meet in uh—" He takes out his hand and counts the remaining time. "In five months," Dunk says.

It all feels very silly but very necessary. He pulls air in through his nose and continues, softer, as if low volume is the thing that might make it less strange. “I, uh… I’ve read babies like when ye sing to them. So I’m gonna—jus' quiet. We won’t wake your mam. She’s asleep.”

There is no answer from above. Only your thick breathing and the small shift of your knee. Dunk takes that as permission. He adjusts himself with one arm folded under his head and legs hanging off the mattress from the knees down. His eyes rest on a place where the child is doing its secret dark work. Then, he clears his throat, feels foolish, and starts with a hum so low it near stays in his chest entirely.

"I wish I was on yonder hill," Duncan croons, half-swallowed for shyness. “‘Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill, until every tear would turn a mill.” He shuts his lids. It's not really a lullaby, but it's the first thing that comes to his mind. The old language feels borrowed and worn smooth enough by other mouths for him to express something Dunk doesn't understand yet.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán… Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin… Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…"

And may you go, my darling safely. Walk, walk, walk on, oh love. Walk steadily and walk softly.

His voice deepens where it warms. It starts coming quieter, and somehow fuller, and your eyes open somewhere inside the dark of sleep. Unmoving. The room has gone that thin afternoon hush where a body can pretend it is still dreaming if it keeps still enough. Dunk does not know you are listening. That makes it worse. Better. One of those.

There's a hand resting near you, shy of touching until he forgets himself and lets two fingers settle on the cotton. The pressure is almost nothing, but you feel it.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,” he sings. The line makes a door appear in your head. An escape. Come away with me. Elope with me, without him having to say anything modern enough to frighten either of you.

When he sings that part he misremembers Gaeilge briefly and lets the thing be just sound, for the true matter and its recipient are, for now, only wishful thinking.

The last blessing comes. “Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

You keep your eyes half shut. Watch him through the blur of your lashes.

“I’ll sell my rock, I’ll sell my reel,” he goes on. “I’ll sell my only spinning wheel to buy my love a sword of steel.” His thumb moves against your shirt. You doubt he notices, or that he understands what his own voice is doing. Making vows out of other people’s grief, putting shape round something he has no courage to hold up in daylight yet. Love, maybe, dressed as a folk song so it can walk past both of you unsearched.

Your throat tightens. Stupidly, completely.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

He hums the chorus this time more than sings it. The Irish turns soft in his mouth, almost sleepy.

“Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin…”

You let your eyes close before he can catch them open. Let him have the kindness of being unseen. Let yourself have the worse kindness of hearing him.

“Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…”

His fingers spread a little wider over your shirt.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom…”

By the last line, his voice has thinned to nothing much. A murmur. A breath laid carefully where his hand is.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

For a while after, he only hums. Then even that fades. His hand grows heavy on you, and you know he's fallen asleep. You let out the long-trapped gasp, and with it, a tear falls down your cheek.

you lay her down carefully and tucked her blanket over her—a battlefield for mothers—and suddenly, she started stirring like she was about to cry again. you started rocking her crib and cooed 'mommy's here, it's okay' all over her, and finally, after a few grumbles, she settled down.

you stared at her anxiously for a moment, ready to cradle her back in your arms if she started looking for you again, but thankfully, she remained asleep in her crib. you heaved a sigh of relief for the umpteenth time now. hopefully, that would be the last attempt.

slowly, you backed away from the crib and walked towards your bed—a sight that never failed to make you happy—and gracefully, flopped down. you stared at the ceiling for a moment before closing your eyes and praying to the heavens to let you finally sleep. but you knew by the next hour, you would hear the wails of your daughter.

a beat passes. you're slowly drifting off to dreamland when you hear the door creak a bit too loudly for your liking. you chose to ignore it.

you could hear heavy thuds of footsteps; your eyebrow twitched, but still chose not to get up.

then a loud thump followed by an 'ow!' echoed, and your eyes snapped open.

"dear, could you please be quiet?!" you whisper-shouted.

lo and behold, it was your ever-so-graceful husband, zuko, who quickly apologized with a pained look. you closed your eyes back again, while you could hear some rustling of clothes before feeling a dip in the bed beside you. warm, toned arms pulled you into an embrace and a kiss landed on your forehead.

"how's izumi?" he whispered, tracing the noticeable swell under your eyes. "asleep" you murmured. he hummed in response and just started peppering you with kisses. normally, it would make you feel all giddy and excited, but the loud smack of his kisses makes you feel wary of the sound waking izumi up.

"could you please kiss me quietly?"

"is that even possible?"

"then, stop kissing me."

if you had your eyes open, you would see how he looked offended right now. "so now it's a crime to show my love to my wife?"

"it's a crime to be this loud."

after a few hushed bickering, both of you just stopped to sleep.

a minute passes…then a few…until it was almost an hour for the scheduled cry.

as if your body knew when your daughter would cry, you woke up and just right on time, you could hear the loud cries of your daughter.

you groaned and zuko seemed to stir awake from your daughter as well. when will you ever get to have a proper sleep?

"i'll go take care of her." you moved to get off the bed, but zuko's arms around you tightened. "no, you can go back to sleep. i'll take care of her." noting how his tired eyes mirror yours, you insisted. "no, i'll take care of her".

leaving no room for argument, you quickly got up and picked izumi up from her crib.

"it's okay now…" you rocked her in your arms, mindlessly humming a melody while your eyes grew tired by the minute. time has passed and you've been rocking her for a while now, but she still wouldn't stop crying. "izumi, mommy's here…" you heaved a frustrated sigh. she continued to wail louder and louder, and even started squirming and you've grown irritated at this point that you hadn't noticed your voice grew louder too. "izumi, why won't you li—"

a hand came up behind you, startling you. it was zuko. you hadn't noticed he got up from the bed.

"hey, you alright?" he had a worried look.

you sighed, rubbing your eyes. "i'm fine." he looked at you for a moment; it's obvious he doesn't believe you.

he soothed your back in silence, watching izumi squirm and cry. his gaze settled to yours, noting your irritated yet tired look. "here, let me." you shook your head, "it's okay, I can do it. you have a lot of things to do tomorrow." izumi seemed to disagree as she started thrashing and wailing as if she didn't want to be in your arms. "izumi—" zuko could feel that you were about to explode.

he called your name. "she' can feel you, you know." you turned to look at him, eyebrows furrowed. "she's scared of you." zuko extended his arms out in silent invitation. you were reluctant for a moment, but you were tired of trying to figure her out, so you handed her over to him. he started slowly swaying her in his arms, littering her little face with kisses. "hush now, izumi, let your mother sleep now."

you watched them, noticing how her loud cries died down to sobs. zuko smiled down at her, wiping the tears streaming down her cheeks. your heart felt heavy yet lifted at the sight, the feeling of blue starting to creep up to you. now you can't believe you almost lashed out on her.

are you really a good mother for izumi?

zuko noticed the doubtful look you had, and as if he knew what you were thinking, he kissed your forehead like he was silencing your thoughts. "hey, you're a great mother." you looked at him, your eyes felt prickly. his other arm pulled you in for an embrace while the other was holding your daughter, "and a loving wife I could ever ask for."

his words made you feel even more emotional as you felt your mouth quivering, tears building up in your eyes. your daughter looked at you curiously with those amber eyes that resembled zuko's while you sniffled on your husband's chest, her stubby arms reaching out and tapping your shoulders.

you noticed and leaned in to kiss her arms softly making izumi giggle with her gummy smile out. zuko grabbed her chubby hand and patted them on your cheek, while speaking with an obnoxious high-pitched voice, "sorry for waking you up, mama." you smiled at him in humor.

feeling that you seemed to calm down, he gently held your hand and lead you back to your shared bed. he laid izumi down between the two of you, tucking her with her blanket. you watched him hum her to sleep, his hand caressing her dark baby hairs.

is it possible to fall in love with him all over again?

both of you watched her go to sleep as you properly tucked her sprawled limbs underneath the blanket. zuko looked at you for a moment and whispered, "are you alright now?" you hummed in response, whispering a thanks to you. afraid to wake izumi up, you felt that you hadn't expressed your gratitude enough so you smothered every part of his face with your kisses, to which he wholeheartedly accepted. once again, you're remined yourself how much of a blessing it was to marry zuko as you continued to pepper kisses on his face.

…

"......could you please kiss me quietly?"

"oh, shut up."

and for what felt so long, you finally get to sleep feeling loved by your own family.

author's note: bye i just reread it im so sorry the pacing is ass, i literally just wrote this in a rush for mother's day which btw, happy mother's day everyone !! i wanted to highlight mothers' struggles n appreciate their strength but i captured it horribly gosh i suck writing angst cuz wdym it was suddenly okay??? time to suffer in uni before i get to even post my zuko songfic credits: @uzmacchiato for the lovely gold divider

so before you can do anything, before you even open your mouth when he steps towards you, he raises a warning finger at you and points it firmly, making you frown and pause in place.

“don’t you dare,” he squints his eyes at you, expression serious, though there’s a hint of tension in his shoulders.

you raise your hands in defense immediately.

“what have i done?”

“it’s not about what you’ve done, it’s about what you were about to do,” he explains, pointing at you again, and you groan softly, rolling your eyes.

“you sound like iroh right now,” you reply amused.

“what is that supposed to mean?” he asks instantly, narrowing his eyes further, stepping half a pace closer without realizing it.

“that i don’t even understand what is happening,” you reply, tilting your head, still watching him carefully.

“so you haven’t heard?” he asks, voice lowering slightly, suspicion and curiosity mixing in his expression.

you blink at him, confused, hands now resting on your hips.

“hear what?” you ask again. “you are acting weird.”

he lowers his hand slowly, blinking a few times, studying your face like he is trying to figure out if you’re lying or not.

maybe you really didn’t know what happened in the throne room…

which… oddly enough, was a relief.

“nothing,” he says at last, shaking his head, trying to dismiss it. “it’s not that important anyway.”

he starts walking past you, moving towards the bed, trying to act like the conversation is over.

you follow him with your eyes for a moment, then lean slightly to the side, voice casual, teasing slipping in anyway.

“whatever you say… flameo hotman…”

there’s a second of silence.

he freezes mid-step.

slowly, his head turns back towards you.

his eyes widen just slightly in disbelief before his face twists in frustration.

“It’s alright.” Once she settled again, he lifted his eyes back toward the minister.

“…Continue.”

You sat beside him quietly, watching him from the corner of your eye while pretending to listen to the meeting. Truthfully, you were exhausted. Motherhood has changed a lot. Your body still aches some days, sleep came in fragments now and you couldn’t remember the last time you’d eaten a meal without interruption.

But then moments where Zuko looked at your daughter like she hung the moon itself in the sky happened and it was all worth it. The meeting dragged on another hour before the final advisor finally bowed.

“That concludes today’s reports, Fire Lord.” Zuko nodded once dismissing them.

The room emptied out and you were met with silence finally. Zuko leaned back heavily in his chair with a long exhale.

“She survived her first council meeting,” he murmured quietly to the baby.

“I think she handled it better than some of the ministers.” You laughed softly, stretching your arms above your head as tension left your shoulders.

“Hm.” he looked down at her with ridiculous seriousness.

“She has better judgment.” You leaned toward him slowly, unable to stop smiling. The candlelight painted gold across his scarred face and his hair had come loose during the meeting, dark strands falling over tired amber eyes.

He looked exhausted but peaceful. You brushed your fingers lightly over the baby’s soft hair.

“She slept almost the entire time.” you cooed at her

“She likes being near me.” he responded

“She likes warmth.” you snorted.

At first, after she’d been born, he’d been terrified to hold her. You still remembered the way his hands shook the first time the midwives placed her in his arms.

“What if I hurt her?” he asked quietly.

You had almost cried hearing it.

Because he held her as if she was too precious to touch. And sometimes you caught him pacing the nursery in the middle of the night whispering little stories to her when he thought you were asleep. Your heart ached just thinking about it. He looks at you with a softened look in his eye. 

“What?” you asked carefully.

His thumb brushed across the baby’s back once.

“We should have another one.”

You stared at him in disbelief.

“…Another what?” 

“Baby.” 

“You are currently holding a baby.” you blinked slowly.

“Yes.” he nodded

“And you want another one.”

“Yes.”

“Zuko.”

“I’m serious.” His lips twitched slightly at your tone.

You laughed in disbelief, “I just carried this one for nine months.”

“And you did beautifully.”

“That is not the point.”

“You’re a wonderful mother.” 

Your face warmed. “That’s still not the point.”

“I didn’t know I could feel like this,” he admitted quietly.

You leaned your head against his shoulder gently, exhaustion melting into warmth, your daughter sleeping peacefully between you both. Zuko turned his head slightly, pressing a lingering kiss against your temple.

“One more,” he murmured again.

You groaned and rolled your eyes.

“Oh my spirits, you are unbelievable.”

“I think she needs a sibling.”

“She can barely hold her own head up.”

“She’ll learn,” he said, raising his brow. 

“That is not how this works.” you breathe out. 

Zuko’s shoulders shook slightly with quiet laughter before he looked at you again with a more serious expression

“You know,” he said softly, “seeing you hold her for the first time… I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone the way I loved you at that moment.”

Your breath caught in your throat and your eyes burned with tears. 

“You cannot say things like that after asking me for another baby.” 

“Why not?” he asks while giving your daughter a kiss on the crown of her head.

“Because then I can’t argue properly.”

A grin tugged at his mouth. “Good."

Disclaimer: I don't own Rights to any Characters mentioned nor do I consent to plagiarism of any kind. Thankyou ;) Tags: @strangeprincessblog @cinnamongirlkisses @amethyst09 @skyavyel @butterflygirlblogg @ayannasinterlude @uchihabbynic @annichka Line Divider: @cursed-carmine