Bookish Bee’s Fanfic blog

Made love , he would sneer at the idea if he were cruel, but Valarr Targaryen is not cruel—never had been. He is a varnished, twisted, calcified shell of a man—something that bears all the marks of past and present and shallow dents what he thinks his future is ought to be. He is cynical and proud and hates himself with a vengeance.

But cruelty is something he’d never let grow inside himself. Instead he feels shame, and the defense mechanism has clawed under his skin and made a home. After the death of his father, cruelty wanted to latch onto him like a second skin, a thin membrane forged by years and years of habitude, pale and white and so like him. And he understands the terrible creature—because what is he left with when he lets go of it? A bitter boy—a bitter, rich boy—too scared to do the right thing, too scared to do anything else? Guilt at least makes sure he’s taking the rot inward, that he’s trying his best to at least hurt as little number of people as possible.

But, oh, dear gods, he hurt you. The only woman he’s ever loved. He took your heart and crushed it bare-hands alongside his own.

They do not make love, he and his wife. They make duty, they make resolutions to give this relationship another go. The bed frame is made of mahogany, it doesn’t creak with his heated, rhythmic thrusts. But Kiera moans as they continue this ritual every other night and Valarr remembers to make the distinction between love and duty because they do not make love. They make mistakes. He should never have married Kiera. He still remembers the faint curl of your disbelieving smile when he told you that he was going to get married to Kiera of Tyrosh. He remembers how that smile fell, in an instant, like the momentary fluttering of a butterfly when you realized he wasn’t joking.

You stood in your blue sundress and a bottle of merlot in your hand and your face flickered. Your eyes widened and your lips twisted and for a moment he almost got on his knees and begged your forgiveness. Then the moment passed and you let go of the wine and rushed to your bedroom. The sound of the breaking bottle reverberated inside your apartment forever and ever and when Valarr finally ran after you, he found you hurled against the basin. Vomiting.

His knees shook. He realised, not for the first time, but perhaps for the last—that you loved him too.

Valarr held your hair back, he turned on the faucet and helped you clean your face. He tried desperately to make his hands stop shaking because this final act of service might be the last he gets. That moment in your bathroom might just be the last time he touched you.

You shoved him away, after your head stopped spinning. And your voice shook when you asked him to repeat what he said. He did, with shame clogging his throat. He repeated the news.

“Kiera?” You sounded indignant, as if it was an insult. Or a cruel joke. Valarr hadn’t meant to be cruel.

“Kiera,” he replied, his voice falling and falling and somehow, with pinchers and a clawed grasp, he pulled it up and answered in the uppity tone he gets when he’s ashamed. “Kiera of Tyrosh.”

“Gods. Really, you bastard.” The curse felt strange from your lips. He kept staring at the flush on your cheeks. “When?”

“Today… my uncle arranged everything today.”

Your lips curled. “You really had to save that account, then?” 

He doesn’t answer. He can’t answer. All he knows is that his family was looking at him to step up, be the man he father had been. He knows that stumbling upon you in Paris and falling in love with you was the best and worst thing that has ever happened to him and now he doesn’t remember a version that didn’t love you, or a version that wasn’t waiting to find you and love you. 

“Do you love her?”

“No.” Perhaps it was cruel, the way he dished that out. But he was still learning. Is still learning. “You know I don’t.”

“Do you love…” Your lips trembled, the tremor reached through her lips and suspended the air between you. “Me? Did you ever love me?”

“I do.” He took a step and you flinched. Valarr wanted to die. “I do.”

“Then look me in the eyes and tell me why you have to marry her. You owe me this, you bastard.”

You looked at the verge of bursting out. Valarr had learned to read your face like his favorite book. You on Sunday mornings, the shine in your eyes when you’d wake up at seven instinctively and then realised you didn’t have to go to work that day. The surprised breath that left your mouth when Valarr would show up unannounced in the middle of the night, sober. Your tired moan when you got back from work and the lines of your forehead would tell him just how bad it had been. Valarr had to remind himself why indulging in the hollowness of your eyes right then was not a good idea for either of them— especially you.

“Because we are a perfectly suitable match, same background and same… connections.”

“Congratulations,” you snapped crudely. “You’re going to be so successful, Valarr. You are going to be the best of the whole Targaryen lot.”

“I love you. I will love you until the day I die and I am sorry I can’t do it better.”

This was the last time he spoke to you for a long, long time. He married a month later, in a perfectly intimate gathering, with a handful of both his and Kiera’s friends. Some people from their shared social circle. All influential. All vapid. The papers and the socialites and the upper crust of Westerosi nobility talked about the wedding for months. They called it the wedding of the century.

Valarr vomited just before he had to get up to the aisle. And as he said the vows, his visions sharp but distant, he couldn’t help tasting his love for you in the back of his throat, bitter like bile.

ahh what can i say? angst angst angst is my toxic cup of tea people!! it's going to be 2/3 parts long so let me know if you want to be tagged :)

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The trees begin to thin by such small degrees he does not mark it at first. Trunks stand farther and farther apart, the undergrowth giving way under his boots to softer ground. Above, the sun has gone to a pale smear behind steel-coloured cloud, drained of all warmth and shape. He keeps on a little farther by stubbornness alone, one step and then another, until the wood opens sudden and wide before him. His knees fold. His sword slips from his hand. He goes down full-length upon a patch of yielding grass, too spent to break the fall, cheek turned into the damp. Somewhere close by, the world gathers itself into a single sound: the low hum of water. A bank, then. A shore of sorts. His last crossing, he thinks dimly. When he shuts his eyes, the red at last gives way to black.

He had wanted knighthood so long it seemed, once, the whole shape of a life. In younger years, trailing after his old master, watching and learning, he had thought of knights as men made for roads and vows and hard duty borne plain. He had not thought on how they died. Or rather, he had thought it would be as his master died: after long service, after years spent in defence of those weaker, with witnesses near at hand to mark the passing of a good man. Age upon him, and peace of a sort. Duncan had carried that picture without knowing it, as boys carry many foolish certainties. Never had he reckoned with ending this way—alone in a red wood, blood soaking into strange ground, unable even to say whether the last fight had been won or lost.

His fingers have gone cold. So have his feet, his arms, the long hefty span of him. The chill is working inward, creeping from the edges, and the rest of his body feels heavy in some queer and dreadful way, as if the earth has begun to claim him piece by piece. It is a weight alien to him. Duncan has known weariness, hunger, what it is to ache clean through after a day in the saddle or a hard bout in the yard, but this is different. This is heaviness without labour and cause. One that drags a man down and means to keep him.

Suddenly, warmth spills over the back of his neck.

He comes to in a jerk of breath, half-lucid. A face hangs over him, close enough that he sees the beads of water trembling on skin, the startled wideness of her eyes. Her mouth is parted. It is full of teeth, small and shining and far too many, and she watches him with the still intent look of something wondering whether he will go peaceably.

Duncan swallows. Even that hurts.

“Have you come to carry me over?” he asks, and his voice shakes like an old man’s.

She says nothing. Only cocks her head, studying him.

He tries to wet his lips and cannot. “Beg pardon,” he murmurs, for courtesy’s sake if nothing else. “I never thought death would have so fair a face.”

Her gaze shifts at that, though whether in surprise or hunger he cannot tell. Then, the dark takes him again.

A noise comes from within the trees. At first it reaches you through the water as blunt disturbance only—stamping passed down through mud and root, a dull knocking felt more than heard. Then come the sounds above it: groans and wails like some wounded thing, and the shrill scrape of metal grinding on metal. When your head breaks the skin of the pond and your ears clear the water, the truth of it comes plain: no beast; a man. His shape flickers between the trunks, hunched and monstrous in the dim.

You keep low beneath the spread of frogbit and white water-lily. The pond has taught you patience. Through the torn green of it, you watch him blunder nearer.

He is vast. Not merely tall, but made on a scale that puts him wrong against the wood. The trees themselves seem to crowd back from him. Iron drags at every step he takes. What serves him for a second skin has gone red in places where the blood has soaked through and dried and soaked through again. He has no helm. His head hangs bare. Whatever face he was born with is all but lost under blood, mud, and the blackening swell of bruises. He comes on bent at the middle, one hand clamped to his side, the other still wrapped stubborn round a sword that appears to grow heavier with each stagger.

Men do this. They go out under bits of cloth and beasts sewn on shields, under one lord’s temper and another lord’s hunger, and tear one another to ruin over slights, borders, pride, inheritance, the old dead grievances of old dead men. They fight their fickle battles over fickle things and pay the dear price with their fickle lives. You do not know what quarrel has opened this one from rib to hip. You do not know whether he earned such an end entire. Yet if he is witless enough to wear steel and bleed for some lord’s cause, then it is grace enough from any god that he should die in a place as fair as yours.

It makes your work easier. There is no need to sing for him. No need to show him a glimmering shoulder through the reeds, no need to sweeten your mouth and set a trap in your voice. Someone else has done all the hard part already. They have wearied him, broken him open, driven him half-blind right here. All he must do now is come near enough.

And the fool does. You see the moment the trees begin to fail him. The ground changes first. Leaf mould gives way to blacker, softer earth. Moss fattens green around the roots. Sphagnum swells at the water’s edge in thick, wet hummocks, bright as something lit from within. He stumbles into the clearing as if he has reached the last place appointed him and knows it.

One more step. Another. Then his knees give way.

The sword drops from his hand and vanishes into the moss with hardly a sound. He falls face-first onto the bank, onto soft bright spread of grass, all that huge bloodied length of him striking the earth. He does not even throw out a hand to save himself. For a breath he lies still.

Then the pond gathers itself around him and gives him one last sound: its low hum against the shore.

Near enough.

You draw yourself from the water slow as a reptile, hands first, then shoulders, then the long drag of the rest of you through weed and black silk mud. Pondweed clings between your fingers. Duckweed pearls green along your wrists. The smell of his blood hangs so thick in the damp that it touches the back edges of your tongue. Fresh. Salt-rich. Strong. Flesh like that would feed you well. Might make you stronger too.

Without the trees to diminish him, and laid flat upon the bank, he looks no smaller. He is still an enormity. A felled thing, all sprawled in a ruinous heap. Breath yet labours out of him in thin, rattling bursts. So he lives. Barely.

You sink nearer, careful with your hands, with your weight, your mouth already parting over the place where neck meets shoulder, where the flesh would be hottest and the taking quickest, when—

He jerks. You go still at once and wait.

His lids drag open.

Blue. A strange clear hue infants keep before the world has time to weather it into something harder. His have stayed. Though pain has driven the sense from his face and left his gaze loose with it, the colour remains clean. A row of copper lashes rims it. Tells you what the blood and mud had hidden: that the hair under all that filth must run copper too.

He swallows. Winces for it. Looks at you straight on, with no flinching, no scramble to crawl back, no fumbling for the sword gulped by the moss.

He asks his question, and for a beat you only stare. Then it comes plain: he thinks you are the thing at the edge of life come to fetch him. A ferrier. A final guide. Death with a wet face and a patient mouth. The more he speaks, the less appetite you retain.

I never thought death would have so fair a face.

And there it is. It is not the praise that stays your teeth. Men have wanted beautiful things before. Men have called you fair with their hands already reaching. Men have named your mouth sweet and your body finer than any liquor, and meant only hunger by it. This is another thing. Stripped of wits by blood-loss, emptied near to death, believing you his last companion, this knight speaks to you as though you are owed gentleness. He thinks he has met the end of his life and chooses, in that meeting, to be kind.

You have never seen the like.

For a moment longer you remain above him, bent close enough to feel the heat leaking from his body into the chill air, your own hunger held open and waiting. Then his eyes slip shut again. The weight of him settles back into the earth. The bank goes quiet save for that poor, thin rattle in his chest.

Your mouth closes.

In your world, the choices are plain: eat or spare, whether it is your own kind or any other. Each is a way of keeping, in the strictest sense of the word. Who is kept in the belly and who in the groin depends on the keeper’s strength, or mercy. Just now, both are at war within you. You are stronger than the dying knight, for the moment. Yet you can see exactly how much the ugly world of men would lose if he were gone. And how much you might gain if you chose to keep him, the way a maiden keeps a man.

“Stócach amaideach,” you groan. A foolish lad indeed.

Both hands go to him first at the shoulder, to test the matter. Give him a shove—nothing. A second, harder. His body shifts no more than the grass does under him. The iron makes a carcass of him. Nearly seven feet of man, all breadth and bone, dressed up in rings and plates enough to drown an even bigger creature outright. You bare your teeth at him though he does not see it.

There is no hauling him anywhere like this. Not up the bank, not into the reeds, not to the shelf of drier ground beneath the alders. You might drag a stag. You might drag two men grown soft on bread and ale. This one is another matter. The blood has not emptied him of his size.

With a sound low in your throat, you drop flat upon your belly beside him, tail lashing once against the water and sending a fan of duckweed spinning. Mud cools your ribs, slickens the gills there. Annoyance goes hot through you all the same. For a little while you lie there glaring at the side of his ruined head, as though the knight has done this on purpose purely to spite you.

Then your eyes go to the armour. That, at least, can be mended.

You push yourself up and set to work. His belt first, stiff with wet and caked dark. The buckle fights you, so you wrench it free. Then the straps at his shoulders. His surcoat clings where the fabric has dried to him. Under it the mail hangs heavy as river chain. You plant one hand in the moss, coil your tail hard beneath you for leverage, and tug until the weight of it gives with a dull wet drag. Piece by piece, you unmake him from what men have put on him. A pauldron slick with mud. A vambrace. The quilted jack beneath, sodden through. Rings of mail whisper and clink against one another as you peel them back from his chest.

He grunts once when you shift him. Still alive enough to object. “Be still,” you mutter, though he has no say in it now—more of him comes free.

The body under all that iron is much as the rest promised: broad, hard, made thick with labour rather than vanity. His chest is furred copper-gold where it is not slicked flat with sweat. Old scars lie pale across his skin, each one laid down by some earlier foolishness survived. New hurts crowd among them. One brow is split deep enough to mat blood right through his lashes and into his hair. Purple has risen ugly under one eye and along the hinge of his jaw. His shoulder is swelling wrong beneath your hand, whether wrenched or bruised hard enough to half-dislocate. The worst lies at his side: a long slash below the ribs where flesh has opened and opened again with every step he took through the wood. Blood still wells there in slow thick gleams.

You draw back and look at it. A man should have dropped sooner from such a wound. This one had walked. Again you click your tongue at him, softer this time.

The bog gives you what you need, as it always has. You know where the thick green pillows of sphagnum swell brightest above the black water, where soft rush grows in clumps fit for binding, where yarrow lifts its ragged leaves higher up the bank, spared the deepest wet. You move quick, gathering with both hands. Sphagnum in great dripping handfuls. Yarrow torn bitter at the stem. A strip of bark from the willow bent low over the far edge of the pool. When you return, you rinse the moss in clear seep-water where it runs cold from the stones, then squeeze it once between your palms.

He does not wake when you clean the cut. His body only flinches under yours. Blood loosens and runs anew beneath the water. Mud comes with it. You work your fingers carefully through the parted flesh, clearing grit, clearing leaf-rot, clearing whatever would fester if left in. When the wound is clean enough to judge, you bend close and press your mouth to the torn edge of him.

Your saliva floods warm.

It tastes of iron and rain and man. Under your tongue the flesh stirs, not closing whole and clean—that would be a greater gift than he has earned—but quickening. The bleeding slows. The raw edges draw tighter. Heat gathers where your mouth has been, the body taking instruction from yours. You do it again, lower, then once more along the deepest part of the gash until your jaw aches and the blood comes less freely.

Curiosity keeps your hands on him after the bleeding eases. You set them at his hips, thumbs fitting into the hollows where hard muscle sheathes over bone, and wonder how such a frame would feel beside yours, under yours, pinned between your tail and the bank. For a moment you lower your cheek to the warm plane of his belly, where coarse hairs narrow and point the way down. Then, before sense can catch up, you slip a finger under the damp edge of his braies and lift. There the weight of him rests, soft with unconsciousness and still imposing.

“My, my,” you murmur, mouth wetting at the sight. No smaller than the males of your own kind, only stranger made—smooth where they are barbed, blunt where they are built for tearing. Pretty. To unwrap him and coax him up in your hand would not be difficult. But you want him back at full strength. Better to let the blood replenish before it is asked to labour elsewhere.

After, you pack the cut with sphagnum, dense and cool, pressing the moss into the cut place until it drinks what still seeps out. You bind him round with rush and the torn strips of his own undershirt, winding them firm beneath his back and over the waist. For the brow, more moss. For the swelling shoulder, willow bark chewed soft between your teeth and laid in a mash against the worst of it. You wipe your wrists across your mouth and sit back to inspect your work.

He looks only a little less like carrion, but it will have to do.

For a while you remain beside him as dusk thickens in the reeds, one hand spread on the broad plane of his chest to feel the rise and fall. It still rattles. It still rises. Great fool that he is, he keeps choosing life even senseless.

With the worst of the grime rinsed from him, the other kind of pretty emerges from under the wreck. His hair, where it dries in the last of the light, indeed burns a dark copper, made richer still by the sinking sun. Fair skin lies under it, though hard-used, and across the breadth of his cheeks there runs a scattering of freckles so pale they only show when the blood is gone from them. Strange, that a face built on such a scale should keep anything of boyhood about it. Stranger still that it does not make him look foolish. Only unguarded.

A giant sleeps at your shore, broken open, and he is gentle.

“Fathach caoin,” you murmur, as though naming him might make the task lighter. Then, with a weary glance at the bank and the darkening pond beyond: “You had best prove worth the trouble.”

He’s seeing orange. Warmth bakes him into the ground and paints the inside of his lids. Dunk feels significantly alive for someone who’s welcomed death with tranquil acceptance. Something binds his ribs quite tightly and the morning chill lakes his chest with gooseflesh.

He frowns before his eyes are even open. The hurt is there, yes, but dulled to something he knows how to bear. Instead of the white-red tearing he remembers and the feeling of his side coming apart each time he drew breath comes soreness. Pull. Throb. The pain a living man may yet complain of.

Slowly, as if he half expects the effort to prove too much for him, he pries his lids apart.

Sunlight drives in, bright and merciless. Duncan winces and shuts them again, turning his face away. For a little while he lies still with his teeth gritted, waiting for the hot dazzle behind them to settle. Then he tries anew, more careful, peering through his lashes first.

Sky. Reeds. The hard gold of morning laid over black water. No seven hells. No pale halls. No ferryman either.

He pushes himself up on one elbow. At once the world tells him several impossible things. His chest is bare to the air. Something coarse and damp is wound round his middle and under one arm, binding him up with more ingenuity than neatness. Looking down, he finds his side packed thick with green-brown moss where blood should have been. Another clot of it has been pressed to his brow. When he touches the binding with cautious fingers, he feels the pull of torn skin made tighter, cleaner, less ruinous than he remembers.

Dunk stares. “Well,” he mutters hoarsely to no one. “That is queer.”

A pile lies beside him on the bank, close enough that he might have reached it in the night had he been able. His surcoat, his mail, his sword belt, the quilted jack beneath—everything dark and stiff with dried blood. His sword has been laid atop the heap as if set there by a hand that understood what it was. The sight of it turns his stomach strangely. So he had not dreamt the fight, nor the wound, nor the red wood or the black water at the edge of it.

He looks again at the moss stuffed into his side. His hand goes once to his chest, as if to make certain the heart is still there and working—it is. A touch too fast, perhaps, but stout enough. He draws a deeper breath to test himself and finds the pain sharp but bearable.

Someone has saved him. The notion is so unlikely that it holds him for another moment, blinking in the sun, bare as a babe from the waist up and swaddled in reeds like some marsh-born fool. He is still trying to make sense of it when the pond beside him breaks with a sudden heavy splash. Something larger than a fish. Considerably larger.

He turns toward the sound and finds you already looking at him.

You lie stretched along a flat rock at the water’s edge, belly to the stone, chin propped in your hands as though you have been there some while, waiting for him to wake. There is nothing shy in the stare you give him. It is the stare of a creature keeping watch over what it has caught. Your claws rest plain against your cheek, curved and dark at the tips. Behind you, the long reach of your tail trails down into the pond and moves through it in an idle sweep that sends rings over the black water.

It is a tail fit to shame his legs. Longer by far than any fish’s ought to be, thick where it begins, made with a strength that shows even in stillness, it narrows and lengthens until the water takes it from him. Where it passes below the surface, it almost disappears. The pond seems to claim it for its own. Under the water it turns rich moss-green, flickering pale now and then like the quick side of a fish. Above the water, the scales catch the morning sun and answer it back in shifting colours—green first, then blue, then a coppery rose, then something gold at the very edge of each movement, bright and hard as the back of a rose chafer.

Dunk’s gaze follows the whole splendid length of it before he has the wit to stop. By the time he reaches the place where human’s buttocks should be, heat is already climbing his neck. He jerks his eyes aside and only worsens the matter for himself. Your body broadens there in a way that leaves him shamefully aware of himself, aware too that he is gaping and that you have likely caught him at it. He goes higher in haste, seeking some safer sight, and finds none waiting.

The scales climb and thin along your shape, framing the inward draw of your waist and the line of your spine before scattering into singular bright points that glitter in the sun like freckles thrown there by a careless hand. Along your ribs, slits open and close in a steady rhythm. Your forearms are drawn carefully over your chest, though what catches him hardest is your face.

He had seen it once before through blood-loss and darkness, and thought it the face of death. Morning does nothing to disprove him.

Your mouth is wet and soft-looking despite the sharpness of your teeth. Your lashes cast faint shadows. Your brows pull together in what seems meant for sternness, though something in the set of them goes sweeter than severe. You watch him with an intensity that strips him bare quicker than the lack of shirt ever could. Duncan swallows and feels the movement all down his bruised throat. Intimidated hardly begins to cover it.

He wets his lips once, then reaches blindly for the nearest bit of cloth from the heap beside him and drags it awkwardly across his chest, as though that might restore some part of his dignity. It does very little. Still, he gathers what remains and bows his head as best he can from where he sits.

“M-m’lady,” he says.

The word leaves him before he can better it. He has no notion whether you are a lady, some water-spirit, or a peril he ought to fear a deal more than he does. Courtesy is what he has, so courtesy is what he gives you.

His eyes lift again, wary and earnest both. “I would thank you,” he says, a touch hoarse, “if thanks is what’s due. Though I confess, I do not rightly know to whom I owe my life.”

“Dúisithe faoi dheireadh.”

Awake at long last.

You roll from the rock with scarcely a sound but for the slick slap of your body leaving stone. A moment later your tail hauls a great sheet of water in his direction. It strikes his shoulder and chest and darkens the shirt bunched there in his fists.

“You must wash,” you tell him. “You may no longer be dying, but other people’s death still clings to you. It disturbs me.”

“Beg pardon, I—” he stammers, blinking water from his lashes. “I’ve bled on your shore.”

That wins from you a laugh, full-chested and bright. You drift onto your back with the ease of something born to water, and the movement sends your hair sliding from your front. The glimpse of side-breast that follows is enough to set Duncan’s head swimming worse than the blood loss did.

“That you have,” you say. “Nothing cold water will not clean. Come—” You pause, eyeing him. “What kind of knight are you?”

“A hedge knight. Ser Duncan the Tall,” he says, eyes down.

At that, Dunk climbs to his feet, clutching the shirt. Then, as if seized all at once by the knowledge that standing half-naked before a water spirit may call for some greater decency, he drags it hastily over his head and very nearly tangles himself in it besides. When he straightens, he finds the cloth has shrunk by half a war. The hem catches well above where it ought to, leaving a broad strip of his stomach bare. Duncan could swear your mouth parts a little at the sight.

“Ser Duncan the Tall,” you repeat. Your hand spreads over the skin of the pond, fingers trailing. “Come. I’ll show you where the water runs clear.”

He goes as bid, though each step he takes toward the pond has a measure of caution in it, as if the water might change its mind and bite. The bank gives under his weight. Mud takes his feet to the ankle and holds them there a moment before letting go with a soft obscenity. He comes on anyway, the chill already rising from the water before he has set so much as a toe into it.

When he does, it is cold enough to strike a sound from him. He sucks breath through his teeth. The next step brings it to his shins, the next to his thighs. By the time it has him to the waist, the whole of him has gone tight with it. His wounds wake afresh under the shock. Cloth blooms and tugs round him under the surface, braies and shirt both dragging with the pull of the current. You move ahead with idle ease, and he follows as far as his long legs will allow. Half because you bade him, half because there is little else to do now but trust the creature who has already had him helpless and left him living.

The pond proves stranger the farther in he goes. The black stillness near the bank gives way to movement. Water threads colder and quicker round his knees, then his thighs, shouldering itself through narrow places between stone and reed. Ahead, it clears to glass over a bed of rock and pale sand. A basin, he thinks dimly. A widening in the course of some hidden run, where stream feeds pond and pond feeds stream in turn. He has just enough time to marvel at it before his next step finds nothing.

The ground drops clean away.

He pitches forward with all his size behind him and vanishes in a single great plunge. Water slams into his ears, nose, his open mouth. Something hard clips him on the face as he goes down—stone, sharp-edged enough to split the lower lip—and the taste of blood bursts quick over his tongue. For a flurried instant all he feels is cold. He flings out an arm and finds no purchase. Then, hands seize him under the pits.

Even now, with his clothes heavy, the water takes enough of his weight that you can haul him. He comes up hard, breaking the surface with a ragged gasp that tears at his side. Blood slips bright from his mouth and strings briefly from his chin before the current steals it.

“Forgive me,” he coughs, wiping at his lip with the back of his wrist.

Your eyes go to heaven, or whatever part of the sky may serve in its place.

By the time you guide him to firmer footing, the bottom has steadied under his soles, though the river still holds him high—up beneath the arms, cold at the ribs, tugging at his clothes. He stands there dripping and raw-lipped while you watch him as one might watch an ox brought in mud-caked from the field.

“You must undress.”

The words strike him near as sharply as the stone did.

Dunk blinks. “That would not be decent.”

“It would be fouler still to put those rags back over clean wounds.” Your gaze flicks once to his side, to the bindings gone dark in patches where the water has touched them. “You would ruin my work.”

That shuts him up more thoroughly than any modest protest might have done. “Aye,” he says after a moment, head bowing of its own accord.

His fingers fumble at the hem of the shirt. He peels it away in stages, the cloth reluctant to leave him. Across from him you have sunk almost wholly beneath the surface, all save the upper plane of your face and the shine of your hair fanned around it. The water holds your shoulders, your belly, the long hidden strength of your tail. Only your eyes remain fully above water, fixed upon him without so much as a blink, and something about that unwavering regard makes his hands clumsier still. He feels all at once too large for his own body, too visible in it, as though every inch he uncovered made his size, his awkwardness, his youth plain.

He gets the shirt off at last and stands with it bunched stupidly in one hand. You come nearer.

There is scarcely a sound to mark it. One moment you are several feet away, the next the water has shut and opened round you again at his side. You dip below the surface to inspect the wound, and Dunk, who has faced armed men before with steadier nerves than this, goes rigid all through. Cool fingers find the knot at his ribs. They work it loose with an efficiency that leaves no room for fantasy, yet fantasy arrives all the same, unbidden and hot. The reeds slacken. The binding eases. He lifts his arms because it seems prudent to put them somewhere, and winds up standing with them out from his sides in a posture so awkward he would laugh at it himself were he not busy dying of shame.

The moss comes free in blood-dark clumps. They spin away upon the water and catch in eddies near his hip. Your hands return. This is the first time he truly feels them: not the fact of being tended, but the touch itself. Your fingers are cool, though warmer than the current. Slender and firm. Certain in what they mean to do. They pass over the torn place at his side, then farther across him as you steady him with a palm spread low on his belly.

Every part of Dunk seems to wake.

Heat pours through him so fast it is near alarming. It starts where you touch him and goes everywhere else with indecent speed—up his throat, across his chest, down into the water where he would rather remain altogether unreadable. He fixes his eyes on the far bank. On a stand of reeds. On anything. The hand on his stomach holds him with easy confidence, keeping him from swaying while you clear the wound, and he throws all his strength into stillness. He holds himself rigid. Even the smallest movement seems perilous to him now. His breath goes thin and careful. His body, treacherous great thing, feels poised to answer even that much.

Water laps softly at his waist. Your hair moves against his skin once, a drifting brush, and he nearly groans from so little. He swallows and keeps his gaze pinned ahead.

The effort of seeming untroubled occupies him so completely he is half convinced he manages it. Then he hears himself breathe—thin, careful, wholly unlike a man at ease—and knows the game is lost.

When Duncan stands, you realise he has not borne the name The Tall in vain. He rises and rises, broad as a gate, sun-struck and awkward and shamefully magnificent. Your mouth parts, caught between awe and a hunger that sits perilously close to longing.

You lead him through the water towards the clearer part of the basin, and your fingers itch to lay hands on him again. The fool manages to stumble, worsen his hurts, and apologise for it besides, which makes your heart swell in a way that sits badly in your chest. His reddened lip distracts you so thoroughly that you duck beneath the surface to wash him.

While you work, it becomes noticeable.

Above the waist, Duncan holds himself as if discipline alone might carry him through it. He stands in the basin like some half-ruined statue planted there by an older people, chin up, mouth set hard when you peer at him through the wavering skin of the water, eyes fixed stubbornly on the trees beyond your head. His hands stay spread from his sides, fingers splayed, as though touching you by accident would be the greater impropriety.

Silly man.

Below the waist, his body keeps no such vows. It knows you and answers. Your hair drifts with the current and combs across the taut plane of his belly. At that, his pelvis gives the smallest, betraying hitch. Lower still, the thick shape under his braies stirs and knocks against the damp cloth, a blunt, eager motion that sends a small heat through you sharper than any craving. He goes all the stiller for it, as though he might shame the flesh back into obedience by refusing to move another inch.

When the work is done, you decide to be cruel enough to enjoy it.

You rise slowly, fingers following the plane of his stomach, and break the surface so close to him that he starts. Water spills from your lashes and straight across your open eyes, and still you do not blink. “It heals well,” you tell him.

“H-how?”

“All the tricks the hedge-witches know too. Plants, mostly. And then some wound-licking, like all beasts do.”

You watch the meaning strike. First confusion, then comprehension, then a flush that begins high on his cheeks and runs everywhere: down his throat, up to the tips of his ears, even into the split and swollen shape of his mouth. His gaze jerks away and comes back again, poorer for somewhere to rest. It is a lovely thing to do to him.

His hands drop beneath the water, too late to hide what has already announced itself. When he looks at you again, the blue of his eyes has gone grave enough to pin. “You’re no beast to me,” he says, and says it like an oath.

The words catch you wrong-footed. Before you can think better of it, you lunge and wind your arms round his neck, bringing your mouth near enough his bruised lip that he must feel your breath there. “I am a beast,” you hiss. “You live because I chose not to feed. Because I chose to keep you.”

His answer is stranger still. Instead of putting you off, he catches you. His hands come to your waist on instinct, spanning so broad they nearly cover the gills laid along your ribs, steadying you where the water shifts under your weight. “Keep me?” he asks, and the words come rough, thinned by the effort it costs him not to notice how your breasts have pressed to his chest.

You nod. “Even if you run from me, it is no great loss. The world has too few men who can look death in the face and mind their manners. Too few who, once made prey, speak kindly to what means to devour them.”

“Are you,” Dunk asks, voice gone low and uneven, “meaning to devour me?”

You smile at that, slow and mean. Your tail coils round one of his legs, the fin dragging light along the inner seam of his thigh. “Would you have me?”

He jerks at the touch and clutches you tighter before sense returns and he tries, clumsily, to loose his hold. You do not let him. “I—” he begins, and fails. His throat works. “I oughtn’t—I mean—”

“Do you fear me?” you ask. “I gave you the force your body needs to mend itself. If I had wanted you dead, I had better chances of it when the bank was drinking your blood.”

“No,” he says, and then, because truth seems to drive him even where he would rather hedge, “No, only—I swore vows. To defend the innocent. To do no dishonour where I can help it. I’d serve you gladly for what you’ve done, but—”

Understanding comes over you whole. It is there in the way he cannot meet your eyes for long, in the care with which he holds even the body he wants, in the shame that seizes him over wanting at all. This vast creature of iron, oath, and sinew; this man all through in his shoulders, his scars, the weight between his legs, the old-fashioned decency that dogs him like a second shadow—and here, hidden in plain sight, the untouched part of him. The boy still tucked inside the knight.

“You’ve never had a woman,” you say softly.

Dunk shakes his head once. Abashment settles red along his skin again, deeper this time, and something like fear goes with it.

It makes you ease. Your grip slackens, though you do not yet slip from where you hang at his neck. “Does it pain you?” you ask, and bring a hand to his mouth. Your thumb passes over the split in his lip, smearing what blood has dried there. He flinches hard enough for the water to stir round you both, then gives a small, unwilling nod.

“Would you like me to mend that too?”

“Please,” Duncan says, and his lids lower as if in surrender.

You lean in and lick the cut clean. His eyes shut fully; yours stare. Your  mouth closes over his lip and draws at it, then worries it with the gentlest edge of your teeth, careful of the torn place. His arms gather you closer. Strong. Enormous. Built for hauling men from saddles, for splitting shields, for holding fast—and now holding you with such caution that the thought of what else those arms might do goes through you like fire.

His mouth parts under yours. The sound he makes is so slight you nearly miss it, a breath more than a voice, and you take it in greedily. He breathes through his nose, hard and unsteady, one broad palm spread between your shoulder blades as though to keep himself from crushing you nearer.

So you deepen it. Your tongue goes into his mouth with all the boldness he lacks, while his answers with a care that undoes you more thoroughly than hunger ever has. He tastes of river water, blood, and the plain, clean want. A hand leaves your back and comes up to your face, awkward in its tenderness, pushing the wet fall of your hair behind your shoulder. From a single kiss you know enough: he would be fervent and quiet both, and all the fiercer for how he tries to govern himself. But the fear in him stays your hand. He is not yours for the taking.

You draw back by degrees. “There,” you murmur, close enough that your mouths nearly brush again. “It should trouble you less by morning.”

Then, you force yourself to loosen from him altogether and turn half away, though it does nothing to cool the ache low in your body. “You may remain here until you are mended. A day or two, I think. I’ll bring fish. You may make a fire on my bank if you like. And after that, you may go—if going is what you want.”

When you look back, he is standing just as you left him: dazed, eyes gone bright as wet glass, his bruised mouth drawn into a frown as though he does not trust the ground under him. He swallows once. “I thank you for your kindness, m’lady,” is all he says.

He is grateful. For the food. For the fire you let him light. For the mercy of being allowed to remain what he is at heart, though Dunk has the growing sense that it is you who preserve his virtue, not he yours. That first night he sleeps with his belly full, his side held in a band of warmth, his body laid in the soft cradle of the grass. The fire cracks and settles beside him. Beyond that comes the lazy wash of water and the faint shifting drag of your tail through it.

He dreams.

Of your mouth first, cool and clever on his split lip. Then of it lower. Of his own full of your breast, drinking at you like a starving babe made monstrous. Of his hands running up the long strength of your tail until they find your hips and hold them down. Scales scatter over your back in his dream like coins on a saint’s cloth, and he counts them with his tongue. Your hair winds round his throat like a ribbon and pulls when you want him closer. Your hands go to his backside and drag him hard against you, and the force of it jars through his whole body until he wakes with a gasp, hot through, his cock throbbing so fiercely under his braies it near doubles him.

For one sick instant he thinks you must have seen it. Then shame takes him by the nape and he turns hard onto his belly, as though the earth might swallow what his body has done. By the time the dawn has thinned the mist, the linen between his legs is damp and cooling and he can scarcely bear to think of himself at all.

You spare him the privacy of not noticing, or else you are kind enough to pretend. Dunk does not know which. He only knows he would split his lip anew for the chance to taste your tongue again, and the knowledge sits in him like a brand.

Until now he has always known his body in one fashion only. As weight, reach, hunger, ache. As a thing for fighting in and sleeping hard upon. As something too large for most benches, most doorways, most rooms, most companies of men. It serves him well enough with a sword in hand and badly enough when there is no sword to hide behind. His business has always been to master it, to make it useful, to keep it from frightening decent folk more than can be helped.

Around you another kind of knowing steals over him. He feels your eyes on him and they do not hold the flinch he is used to. Sometimes there is curiosity in them. Sometimes amusement. Once or twice a look that smoulders so plain it puts heat into his face and lower. At moments there is even fondness, which disarms him worst of all. He is certain he looks at you much the same and wonders if you know it. Wonders if a creature such as you can smell want on a man the way a hound scents blood.

Decency remains dear to him. Dear as his vows, dear as any lesson Ser Arlan ever gave him. Yet for the first time in his life the thought of something softer and stranger than his own calloused fist closing round him keeps him restless at night and tight-strung through the day.

That day passes in your company. He tells you of his old master, and you listen with your head tilted and your hair afloat round you in the shallows like weed in a current. In return you show him the marsh as though it were a keep under your charge. You tell him of your kind in scraps, never enough to satisfy him. You show him where the yarrow grows white at the edges of the reeds, how to gather sphagnum from the wetter ground without taking rot with it, how willow bark must be chewed soft before it will give up its bitterness proper. He watches your mouth while you work and has to look away when the thought comes of what else he might lay between those teeth for gentle use.

He mends quickly. Quicker than he ought, perhaps. By the second evening he can stand without feeling the world slide off its hinges beneath him, and that ought to please him. Instead it leaves him sore in some place no salve will reach. For you have not only spared him and kept him, but released him besides, and Dunk has seen so little mercy in the world of late that he scarcely knows what to do with this kind. It does not feel like mercy at all. It feels like a hole opening in his chest as the light goes out, broad and clean and incurable.

He lies wakeful by the bank while the last of the fire gnaws itself into red. After a time he rolls to his side and watches you drift in the water, half-lost in reeds and moon-glimmer. You hum into the night, low and strange, the tune turning back on itself like current in a narrow place. It puts him in mind of no song he knows. A marsh spirit’s song, perhaps. Or a prayer said by something older than men.

He thinks, not for the first time, how beautiful you are. Not in the dainty fashion of courtly tales, all ribbons and rose-leaf mouths, but in some harsher, truer way. Beautiful as deep water, as polished stone, as the flash of a fish’s belly before it is gone. He thinks too how lucky he is that it was you who found him and not some greediest thing the bog had hidden. Any fiercer creature might have taken the copper from his purse, the sword from his hand, the flesh from his bones. You took only the blood he could spare and then gave him back the rest. It feels almost as if some god bent close to him in the dark and chose, for reasons of its own, to be gentle.

The thought leaves him raw. Absently, he says into the reeds, “I shall be in your debt all my days.”

You start as though struck. Your head comes up sharp from the water. The humming breaks. For an instant he thinks it was the words alone, but then you turn too quickly and the long of your hair snags in the split crotch of a root thrust out over the bank. At once you jerk the wrong way. The strands draw tighter. Water slaps. You hiss—a quick, furious sound more like an otter’s than any lady’s.

Dunk is on his feet before his side has time to object.

“M’lady—hold still.” He stumbles the last step and drops to one knee at the bank. You bare your teeth at him, half in pain, half in temper, one hand tangled in the caught mass while the other braces on the root. The more you pull, the worse it winds.

“Do not tell me to hold still.”

“I only meant—” He stops himself, for this is plainly no hour to explain. “Only let me help.”

You glare at him through the dark shine of your wet hair. Then, with a muttered Mo chreach in a tongue he does not know, you cease fighting it. It sounds like it means Curse it.

The caught strands are wrapped tight round a knob of bark and threaded through a split in the wood where floodwater must have worried it open. Dunk sets both hands to it with more care than he has ever given a blade-edge. Your hair is slick as river weed and finer than any silk he has touched, and every time his knuckles brush the side of your neck your breath goes short. That does not help him any.

“There,” he murmurs, though there is not yet any there to it. “I have it. Near enough.”

“You do not.”

“Ah,” he admits. “Not yet.”

A laugh catches you by surprise then, small and unwilling. It startles him worse than your teeth did. He glances up. You are watching him with your mouth parted a little, all that fierce, uncanny beauty drawn close and strange in the moonlight.

So he bends back to the work, patient as any septa with a snarl of thread, prising one lock free after another while the bank smells of mud and willow and the water keeps kissing softly at your ribs. By the time the worst of it loosens, he is breathing hard, and not only from the ache in his side.

What comes over him then Dunk could not have said, not for all the gold in Casterly Rock. Perhaps it is the sight of you bent fierce and helpless over your own caught hair. Perhaps the feel of it still sliding over his hands. Perhaps only the thought of leaving at dawn and going from this place with nothing of you but the memory of your mouth. Whatever it is, it has him speaking before sense can catch up.

“Would you like me to braid it?”

You stare at him. In the moonlight your eyes look blacker than the bog. “Can you?” you ask at last. Then, with that sharpness that never quite leaves you: “And will my bare chest not shame you?”

A breath of laughter from him. “It surely will,” he says, honest as ever. Then some small, stubborn courage rises in him from parts lower than his vows and lodges square in the chest. “But I’d count it an honour besides.”

“Yes,” you say, quick and certain, as though you had only been waiting for him to prove worthy of the task. “Braid my hair.”

So you turn your back to him and come nearer the bank, sitting, while Dunk settles awkwardly behind you. He is no great hand at it. Once, long ago in Flea Bottom, he watched women plait one another’s hair on stoops in the evening light, fingers flying while they gossiped and laughed and cuffed any boy who stared too long. He remembers only the principle: divide, cross, gather, keep even. His hands are built for reins and sword-hilts, not this. Still, he tries.

The first pull earns him a flick of your tail and a hiss through your teeth.

“Beg pardon,” he mutters.

“Do not beg. Learn.”

So he learns. A little. Enough to draw the mass together and work it down into something serviceable, if not handsome. It lies thick as a rope by the time he reaches the end, damp and heavy in his hands. All the while you sit strangely still for a creature of current and appetite, save for the occasional impatient twitch when he tugs too hard. Dunk does his best not to notice the whole smooth span of your back before him, bare where moonlight finds it, narrowing to the wet dark of your waist. He notices it all the same. By the end of it his mouth has gone dry.

“Done,” he says, and hears how weak it comes out.

Then, gods above and all the stranger gods below, you turn.

Moonlight has you whole this time. No reeds in the way. No water to break you into pieces. You come between his spread knees with the slow certainty of something that has already decided the matter, and settle there close enough that the cool of your skin reaches through his clothes. “Thank you, ser,” you say, and sweetness in your mouth is a far more dangerous thing than any hiss.

His heart turns over so hard it near stuns him. Before he can think what he is about, he takes your hand and bows his head to it, pressing his mouth to the back of it in a gentlemanly way, as though you were some great lady and he a proper knight with a proper title to his name.

Your fingers curl against his. Still holding, Dunk takes your palm and turns it over in both of his. He brings one claw to the split in his lip and presses until the cut opens fresh. Pain bites, quick and clean. He keeps your finger there while the blood wells dark along his mouth and watches what comes over your face when you see it.

“Would you mend it once more?” he asks.

Your answer is to catch the end of the braid in one hand, wind it once round the back of his neck, and draw him in.

This time there is nothing medicinal in it. You drink from the torn place with open greed, tongue hot and searching where before it had been careful. Dunk makes a rough sound into your mouth and grips at your waist, all thought burning off him in a rush. The blood is hardly there before you have taken it. What remains is the kiss itself, deep and wet and ruinous, until his head swims worse than it did from the blow that felled him.

“I thought,” you breathe, the words broken by another hungry press, “you meant to leave me without letting me have you.”

His eyes roll back with the force of wanting. He gathers you closer without meaning to, one arm under you, the other firm at your back, and rises in a single clumsy surge to his feet. The movement tears at his side and he barely feels it.

“Have me,” Dunk says, and there is only naked truth to it. “Gladly. I do not know what you see in me, m’lady, nor why a wonder such as you should want aught of mine—but if you do, I’d be the world’s greatest fool to deny you.”

You look at him then as if he has said something finer than he knows how to say, and for once you do not mock him for it.

So he carries you.

He carries you as though he was built for nothing else, down from the bank and over the water to the flat stone where first he saw you rise, pale now under the moon and waiting like an altar. Your arms stay looped round his neck. Your braid drips cold against his shoulder. His pulse beats wild where your breast is pressed to him, and by the time he sets you down, his hands are shaking with the effort of holding back all the things he means to give you if only you will show him how.

For one wavering instant he only looks at you, chest labouring. You give him but a moment to stand there in it.

One of your hands goes to him, greedy and unashamed, and the touch of it through the cloth strikes through him so hard he bows like a man hit low with a poleaxe. Breath leaves him. His fingers claw at the air beside him before finding the rock. Heat tears through his middle, bright and ruinous, and with it a helpless sound he has not the dignity to swallow back.

“Mercy,” he says, though there is no true wish for it in him. “Slow—pray, slow a little.”

Your eyes flash up at him, bright with appetite and amusement both. He feels warm to the throat, near trembling, and still he tries for courtesy, for order, for some scrap of knightly manner in a place that has stripped him of all armour worth the name.

“I’ll do as you tell me,” he says, voice roughened nearly past bearing. “Only—show me. I would not wrong you for want of knowing.”

That stills you. The greed stays in your face, but it settles into something more intent. You ease back against the stone and let your body lengthen there, all bold invitation and perverse ease, your hands opening toward him as though calling a beast from the dark. Moonlight gathers along the line of you. Your tail glimmers where it falls away into shadow. Your breast spills softly with the movement, and Dunk, poor soul, is half-struck through by the sight of it.

He comes when beckoned. With obedience and without confidence. With awe, almost. He lowers himself to his knees over you, great and awkward and trying so hard to be careful that you give him a charmed look. The rock receives his weight with a dull scrape. His breath comes hard through his nose. He does not know where to put his hands until you take one of them and place it high, against the soft warm weight of your tit. The other you guide lower.

He shudders. Squeezes your chest and takes note of how neatly the heft of your breast fits his palm. The rest he lets you guide, because the threat of shattering from the sight alone is far too great.

You draw his fingers over the scales until skin finds a hidden place where they part. There lies a slit, smooth and silky and made to unman him. Duncan breathes, “Oh, by the gods.”

“This is where you fill me,” you tell him, eyes rapt. “This is where I want you.” Then, your lips find his once more. He tastes the same tongue that healed him, the same teeth that could end him and did not. Never in his life had Duncan thought he would find anything to swell so sweetly in his mouth as food or ale, yet here it is. How he came all this way with no more than grateful pecks to the cheek and otherwise wholly unkissed feels, all at once, beyond belief. 

All the while, you keep guiding his hand until your body answers him open. And Duncan is made painfully aware that up until now, the body has only ever seemed to him a thing for work. Whenever he had been troubled by primal urges, he tried to throttle the feeling by haste and harshness, or else by the sheer force of his will. Now, as he slides one finger inside you, he’s being shown plainly that bodies exist not only for work. Gods have given them the ability to feel pleasure and it is evident on your face and in the way your shape flutters and arches and pushes itself onto him.

“You’re the softest thing I’ve ever touched,” he whispers, bewildered by himself. By the way his blood shifts places and fills him below the loins until he’s hard. By the way he answers your wetness with his own—pearling at the tip, soaking through the cloth and making the crown of his cock feel cold when he shifts on his knees.

“More,” you rasp, wriggling. “Give me one more.” At that, your hand finds the braid. You draw it over your shoulder and wind it twice round his neck, slow as a tether being laid. Not hard enough to hurt. Hardly hard enough to hold at all. Just enough that he feels the claim of it. Just enough that he understands.

He brings his forehead to yours and the second finger inside, feeling you stretch and swallow him down to the last knuckle. Mere thought of the same sensation enveloping his cock sends Duncan’s head spinning.

When he thrusts gently, the loveliest purr spills out of your mouth. Your face rises and rubs itself on his, lips pulling on his chin and cheek rasping on cheek. “Is liomsa thú,” you murmur.

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re mine,” you tell him. “No soul will know but you and I. But you are.”

“Aye,” he breathes. “That I am.”

“Then give me the rest of you,” you say. “Fill me properly.”

The words slice through him like strong drink on an empty stomach. For half a beat Duncan can only stare, as if he has misheard you and the night will kindly correct itself if he waits.

It does not. You mean it. Worse—better—you mean it without shame, as though wanting him were the simplest thing in the world. No woman has ever spoken to him so. No woman has ever looked at him as though his body were something desired for its own sake and not borne because it must be. Heat surges through him so hard it leaves his thoughts in disarray. He has dreamed, in the clumsy miserable way of lonely men, but dreams had never prepared him for the sound of such words in a living voice, said with your mouth still swollen from his kisses.

When he pulls his hands out of you, they come covered in clear brine. He fumbles at the ties of his braies with fingers that no longer seem wholly his own, and your palm comes over his—cool, assured, impatient with trembling. Your fingers tangle with his and for a moment he can do nothing but hang his head down and watch the two of you joined there. The way you help him find his girth and stroke it. The way your slick coats him. His hand, obeying, as though it has always belonged under your instruction.

“Gods help me,” Duncan mutters. “If you keep on so, I shall shame myself.”

By the time you draw him nearer, he is beyond any rescue. Your hands go elsewhere then—up under the hem of his shirt, stripping the last hindrance from him, then down again with fresh purpose. They travel the width of his sides and settle hard at his buttocks, claiming, directing. Duncan bows over you on a shuddering breath, feeling himself handled like something wanted, something chosen, and scarcely knows how to bear it.

“Have no fear,” you say. “I want you.”

He nods, more to himself than you. “If I hurt you—”

“You won’t.” Your fingers stroke his cheek. “I know your size and I will take it. Courage, my Fathach Caoin. My gentle giant.”

His eyes mist up. He’s there, on the precipice, with your warmth calling him on. Gaze steadfast on yours, Duncan lets himself breach you. And you welcome him like the bravest thing he’s ever seen. Crown already swallowed by your body, yet your face is still clear. There’s an eager stretch around him and a twitch of a tail below him. It coils round his thigh, his knee and ankle, while one of your fists finds the braid once more and pulls, collaring his neck tighter. It’s all the signals he needs to persevere.

The more of him you take, the greedier your answer grows. Claws in his arse, muscles working on his cock in vicious spasms, he manages to fill you with everything some trickster god has given him, and he finds it accepted.

Your mouth is agape. Breath comes through it loud and ragged. “Yes,” you grit, eyes rolling and all of you twitching. “Gods, fuck me. Make me yours.”

“Sweet mercy,” Duncan says, voice gone rough. “You ask it as though I could deny you aught.” His brow drops to yours, air shaking out of him on its leave. “If I am yours, then have all of me.”

At first, he scarcely thrusts. Ruts, more like. Feels the shape of you inside, plastered snugly to him. When he discovers he’s being received fully and without reluctance, his movement boldens. His hips rise and fall, and instinct guides him. Pleasure guides him too, for beyond being permitted, Duncan is being answered as well. With tightness. With the press of your belly into his. With your neck baring and gills there quivering around air whenever he sheathes himself up to the brim.

That is the miracle he never thought possible. With a lifetime of too much ringing around him, awkward and large, he was convinced romance was not written for him. Yet here you are, with hunger gathered on your features and no shadow of hurt visible. It shakes him, that. Here, in your hold, that old wrongness turns. Here what he is suits and is welcome.

“You were made for this as much as for war,” you say, as if reading through his thoughts. “More. I like what you do to me.”

It makes him release his own little stuttered moan. “M’lady—”

Your arms circle his shoulders and hold. “You sound so pretty. All of you is so beautiful, Duncan.”

He searches your face for foulery and finds none. Only bliss and appetite. Only round, wet mouth and dark eyes. Duncan has been commended for strength before, for endurance, for taking a blow and giving one back. None of that has prepared him for the shock of finding that his hands, his mouth, his earnest body can bring a creature like you to such clear delight. With each look, his courage grows.

That growth proves dangerous soon enough. Wonder gives way to urgency. Urgency mounts toward something steeper. Duncan feels it gathering in him with an inevitability that borders on terror. He has been admitted to a marvel and already fears the speed with which he may be cast out of it. The thought makes him cling harder to what steadiness he can muster. He tries to linger, tries to learn the pace of your pleasure and keep himself to it, but his body has begun to outrun obedience.

“Look at me,” you say. “Keep on, you needn’t worry. You please me—ah—” There’s a twitch inside you that nearly ends him. “You fit me. Gods, you please me—”

What happens after, he cannot rightly say. First, your neck wrenches, then delivers your face close so that you can kiss him. Little mumbles of yes and oh and ones that call on various gods in various tongues flood his mouth. His throat gets cinched by your hair and your arms, and tail wraps round him so fiercely it makes his leg go numb and cold at the toes. Chest flattened against his you moan out his name into the night and then—

He’s seeing white. It overtakes his vision entirely when your body does an unimaginable thing. Traps him in that narrow edge of flesh and milks him for seed. Ferocious and wild, it takes and takes, and Duncan’s understanding of himself alters. He is not taking. He is giving and being wanted in the giving.

“My sweet Lass,” he rasps, manners abandoned. “I never knew—Gods, I never knew.”

Dunk never knew something could feel like this. He’s never been shown that things could live where brutality and tenderness meet. That bodies can do all this: bleed, bruise, fill and empty, hurt and please, all while remaining gentle. His gentleness drives him to a point where he feels sensations folding in on themselves. His toes curl against the stone so much that his foot almost cramps. Thighs harden. Lungs burn, yet he feels the most alive he’s ever felt. His belly tugs so violently it is as though someone has delivered a blow with an iron fist. Amidst all this ruthless undoing, Duncan senses his soul coursing through his blood vessels, pushing through his pores in its rise to meet you.

Warmth becomes warmer. Wetness grows wetter. All of his joins all of yours. The pull empties him of everything he carries right into the snug nook of your body. “Yes,” he mutters. “Yes, gods help me.”

With that, he forgets the weight of himself and falls on top of you off his trembling arms. His face lands right into the curve of your neck and the breath that comes through slits there cools the slickened skin of his forehead.

For a little while you do nothing but hold him through the ruin of it.

Your hand moves slow between his shoulders, then lower, smoothing the hard jump of muscle as if gentling some great spent beast after battle. Praise comes from you under your breath in scraps and murmurs, half words, half wonder, and Duncan, who had thought himself beyond surprise for one night, finds that too much for him as well.

A laugh bursts out of him sudden and helpless, honest as the rest has been. It shakes once through his chest against you. He lifts himself just enough to look down, dazed and shining with it still, then bends and presses his mouth to your forehead with a care that seems almost too tender for the body that has just spent itself so violently.

“There are no words for it,” he says. “None I know, leastways. For making me feel—” He stops there, smiling crooked at his own uselessness. “For this.”

You look at him as if his gratitude is a stranger thing than all that passed between you on the stone. Your fingers stroke through the damp at the nape of his neck, over the braid still looped there like some token of your claim.

“You deserve it more than any man I’ve met.”

The laughter leaves his face by slow degrees. In its place comes something quieter, heavier. He studies you and the dread arrives plain enough then, settling under his ribs where pleasure had just torn through him. Because a man cannot be given such a thing and fail to understand that it may yet be taken away.

“How am I to part from you now?” he asks.

You answer him honestly, as you have answered him in all things. “You are strong for it.”

Then you kiss him and gather him down again, one arm curved round the breadth of his shoulders, the other tracing idle paths along his back until the last fierce throbs ease out of him. Great body that he is, he grows heavier by the moment. Sleep comes on him without dreams. His head finds its rest upon your chest. The braid bejewels his throat and there he lies pillowed on you like something claimed and cherished both.

By morning the chill has found him first.

It wakes in his body and deeper than the body too, in the place where certainty ought to sit and does not. The stone has cooled under him. Mist lies low over the black water. Reeds stand pale with dawn.

Duncan opens his eyes and knows at once what the day requires of him. Whatever quarrel spilled him into your bog has not vanished. Roads still run outward from this place. Men still wait at the end of them with their needs, their vows, their battles. He knows he must rise. Knows too that seeing you again would be another miracle, and that miracles are not things a sensible man counts upon.

When at last he stands on the bank, iron on his body and sword at his hip, you drift below in the water and watch him. “Will you be here,” he asks, “if I come again?”

“I don’t know,” you tell him. “Come and see.”

The words might have been cruel in another mouth. In yours they fall as simple truth.

“But—” You lift a hand and beckon. “Give me your sword.”

He does not hesitate. That, perhaps, startles him more than anything. Dunk reaches for the blade and lays it across his palms before offering it over. You take it with both hands, testing the weight of it, your mouth tightening faintly at the smell of old blood still left in the metal. Then your other hand goes to the end of your braid. For a heartbeat he only watches, uncomprehending, until the edge comes up bright in the morning and he realizes what you mean to do.

“Wait,” he says, too late, and only because the thought of any part of you severed from the rest hits him oddly in the chest.

You cut through it clean. The shorn length lies across your palm, heavy as wet rope. You hand the sword back hilt-first. Then, with more care than men give holy relics, you place the braid in his hand.

“You have earned it,” you say. “Keep it, and remember me.”

Duncan looks down at what you have given him as though it were a king’s ransom or a saint’s finger-bone wrapped in silk. The braid spills over his callused palm and nearly to his knees, gleaming and impossible. He closes his hand round it slowly.

“I should remember you without help.”

“Yes,” you say. “But take it all the same.” Your gaze lifts to his, clear as cold water. “Remain gentle. Do not let the world temper you into something you are not. It has enough hard men already. I will not forget you, Ser Duncan The Tall.”

He comes to the shore in all his bulky magnitude, iron making a burden of him once more. Yet the burden sits differently now. He drops to one knee at the water’s edge, heedless of mud. His free hand comes to your face. Cups it. The skin beneath his thumb is cool and smooth and utterly dear to him. Then he kisses you with all the force left in him, with gratitude and hunger and the grief of leaving all tangled together.

“I’ve a love for you I’ll carry always,” he says against your mouth when at last he parts from it. “You made me a man, Lass.”

Something shifts in your face at that—fondness, perhaps, or pity, or the knowledge that men will always name themselves too small.

“You are more than merely a man, Duncan,” you tell him. “You are a giant. And wherever you go, I will keep you.”

He stays there one heartbeat longer, kneeling in the mud like a man before a shrine, looking at you as if he would learn the whole of your face by force and carry it clear to the grave. Then he rises, slow under the weight of steel and parting, and turns at last toward the trees.

Behind him the water goes on breathing.

Your father had never stopped going. Even in his last years, when his knees complained and the walk to the church had become a small daily negotiation with his own body, he still went every Sunday and some weekdays besides, because — he told you, more than once, in the tone he reserved for things he considered simple fact — a person owed God the courtesy of showing up.

Whatever capacity you had once had for faith, you had inherited from him, before you let it go the way you let most things go that required upkeep you didn't feel you had hours to spare for. He'd mentioned the new priest to you once, years back, over dinner: a Father Baelor, transferred in from another diocese, young yet by his account, and by all reports a fine homilist. You made a noise of polite interest and never once, in all the years your father had left, went to see for yourself.

Then your father died — quickly, in the way that manages to feel both sudden and, in hindsight, inevitable for months beforehand — and it was only you and your mother left in a house that had never before had to hold just two people's worth of grief and now had far too much room for it.

Your mother wept in the kitchen at strange hours over recipes she had made a thousand times before and now, apparently, understood she was making for one person fewer. You held her. You made the calls. You signed what needed signing and discovered you could go entire days without anyone asking how you, specifically, were managing — because it had not occurred to anyone, least of all to you, that you might need managing too. You had not known, until that year, that loneliness could exist inside a house that still held another person in it.

On a Wednesday in the flat middle of an otherwise unremarkable week, for reasons you could not have fully explained under interrogation, you put on real clothes instead of the ones you had been sleeping and grieving in, and walked to the parish you had not entered in the better part of a decade.

The building had not changed, which felt like its own small insult. The same water stain crossing the ceiling beam over the side aisle. The same brass rack of votive candles, most of them lit by hands you would never know, guttering low in their red glass cups. You dipped two fingers into the stone font at the door out of a muscle memory old enough to embarrass you — you hadn't decided to do it, your hand had simply done it — and the water was cold enough to register up to your wrist. You took a pew near the back, out of an instinct you didn't examine too closely, and sat with your hands loose in your lap, turning your father's old verdict over in your mind. A fine homilist. You supposed you would judge that for yourself, if you managed to stay through the whole of it.

You laced and unlaced your fingers, conscious of how conspicuous your own restlessness must have looked beside the handful of elderly women scattered through the front pews, each of them still in the settled way of people who had done this ten thousand times before and expected to do it ten thousand times again. A small bell sounded once from somewhere near the sacristy — a clean, single note, felt more in the sternum than heard — and the women rose as one, the movement automatic, requiring no more thought from them than breathing did. You stood a half-beat behind them and turned toward the side door as he came through it.

He was not what you had pictured, though you couldn't have said what you had pictured instead. He was tall enough to duck fractionally beneath the door frame, an old habit worn smooth by however many years of practice, and built with a breadth through the shoulders and chest that the green vestments of Ordinary Time did nothing to disguise, and seemed, if anything, cut to accommodate. He crossed to the centre of the sanctuary, made his reverence to the altar, and for a moment before the Mass properly began you simply looked at him the way you might look at any large, unfamiliar object set without warning into a room you thought you knew by heart.

This, you supposed, had to be the Father Baelor your father had mentioned all those years ago, at a dinner you otherwise barely remembered. He looked, on the strength of nothing more than how he carried himself at the altar, like precisely the sort of man your father would have approved of.

The opening rites passed you in fragments — the cross traced automatically over your own chest, the responses arriving on your tongue half a second before you'd consciously recalled them, evidence that some part of you had never actually released any of this, whatever you had spent the last decade telling yourself. It was the Gospel that undid whatever fragile composure you had managed to assemble since walking in.

Father Baelor stepped to the ambo, made the small triple sign of the cross — forehead, lips, heart — that you copied without deciding to, and read from the Gospel of John: Christ's promise to his disciples, the night before he died, that he would not abandon them. I will not leave you orphaned; I will come to you.

It was a passage your father had read aloud to you more than once, in years you would rather not audit too closely, on nights neither of you could sleep for reasons you never named to each other directly. You had not thought of those nights in years. You thought of nothing else for the length of the Gospel, sitting with your spine very straight and your face arranged into the specific blankness you had perfected these last months for use at funerals, hospital corridors, and now, it seemed, church pews.

The homily was not what the voice had led you to expect. You weren't sure what you had exactly expected, to be honest, but it certainly fell somewhere more instructive, maybe, closer to a lecture. Instead, he spoke low and unforced, pitched to carry to the back pews without ever seeming to labour at it, and what he spoke of was loneliness: not as a sin requiring confession or a weakness requiring correction, but as a country nearly everyone in the room had crossed at some point, a good number of them more than once.

He told the story of the prophet Elijah, fled into the wilderness and certain he was the last faithful man left alive, so worn through by his own isolation that he begged God to let him die under a solitary broom tree — and how God had answered him finally not in the earthquake, nor the fire, nor the great wind tearing the mountain apart, but in what the old translations called a still, small voice, so quiet the prophet had to go silent himself and strain to catch it.

Presence, Father Baelor said, was rarely loud. It came, more often than not, in the smallest and least dramatic of forms — a hand set on a shoulder, a voice through a doorway, someone choosing, again and again, simply to remain. You are not abandoned, he said, near the close, his voice dropping lower still, and for one unreasonable, indefensible moment it felt aimed directly at the back pew where you sat with your hands gone white-knuckled in your lap. You are not orphaned. Even when it feels that way. Even now.

You heard little of what followed. You were aware, distantly, of standing and sitting in their correct places, of the practiced choreography of the Eucharist proceeding at the front of the church, but your attention had narrowed to the low cadence of his voice and stayed there, snagged, useless for much else, for the remainder of the hour. You did not go up for Communion. It did not feel earned yet — whatever grace required of a person who had spent ten years deciding this building had nothing left to offer her, you weren't ready to test in front of witnesses whether you'd been wrong.

When Mass ended and the small congregation filtered out into the ordinary Wednesday afternoon waiting for them, you stayed behind. You told yourself it was to pray, though when you tried to assemble the actual shape of a prayer in your head, you found you had lost the grammar of it somewhere in the years between. You could recall the posture without the words, kneeling with your forehead nearly against your folded hands, the old formulas half-remembered and abandoned partway through.

You were still sitting there, in the hush a church holds once everyone else has gone, when you became aware of a presence behind you, waiting with the patience of someone who had nowhere else in particular to be.

You turned. He had shed the outer vestments somewhere between the sanctuary and here, down now to the plain black cassock, and without the ceremonial weight of the chasuble he looked, if anything, larger rather than smaller — less an office now and more simply a man, broad through the shoulders and faintly stooped in the way tall men sometimes learn to stand, in rooms built at a scale for other people. He was smiling at you, and it was not the composed, public smile he had worn at the altar. This one sat a little crooked, tucked at one corner, like something he had not entirely decided to let you see. In the low light through the side windows his eyes read as two different shades entirely, and you couldn't have said with any confidence which one was closer to true.

You got to your feet too fast, some old reflex about remaining seated in front of a priest reasserting itself before you thought to question it.

"I'm afraid I haven't seen you before today." He offered his hand, and you registered, absurdly, how much larger it looked before you'd even taken it. "Are you new to the parish?"

"Not new." His palm was warm and dry, the handshake brief but not perfunctory. "Estranged is probably closer to it. I used to come here with my father, when Father Arlan had the parish."

Something shifted across his face — recognition, maybe, or just the private realization of years passing. "That was quite a while ago, then. I've had this parish almost ten years now."

"I stopped coming altogether, somewhere in there." You gave him a lopsided smile you didn't entirely feel behind.

He tilted his head slightly, looking at you from his considerable height in a way that felt like being properly seen rather than assessed, and when he spoke again there was no trace of the judgment you had braced yourself for out of old habit.

"It's a wonderful thing, coming back to Him."

"I'm not sure I'd say I've come back. Not yet." The admission left you before you'd quite decided to make it. You hadn't planned on honesty with a stranger, least of all one in a collar.

If the words troubled him at all, he didn't show it. "That's no trouble whatsoever." The corner of his mouth deepened. "Would you like me to hear your confession? I promise I won't make you feel judged. Friendly priest's oath."

You laughed, a small, surprised sound you hadn't produced in longer than you could easily place. "Maybe another time. I don't think I'm up for it today."

He nodded, unbothered, and the quiet that followed felt like permission rather than dismissal, so you turned and started toward the door, your footsteps loud against the stone in the emptied church.

You were nearly at the threshold when you heard him behind you again, his stride longer than yours, closing the distance without seeming to hurry at all.

"I'm Father Baelor, by the way." He held out his hand a second time, as though the first exchange hadn't quite counted, or this one meant something slightly different. "Though most everyone here just calls me Baelor."

You took his hand again and gave him your name. His closed fully around yours — warm, a little rough at the knuckles, engulfing rather than simply holding.

"It's been a pleasure, having you back."

You managed something close to a smile before you turned and let yourself out into the ordinary daylight, the door falling shut behind you with a weight that, for the first time in longer than you could say, did not feel entirely like an ending.

You had told yourself you wouldn't come back so soon — one visit had been forgivable, permitted on the strength of grief alone, and you had meant to leave it there. And yet here you were again, five days later, on your knees at the same back pew, arguing with a God you'd spent the better part of a decade insisting you didn't especially believe in.

"I really don't know why I'm back here," you said, low, to the wooden cross above the altar, the words barely clearing a whisper.

You'd meant it as prayer when you'd knelt. What came out instead was closer to an indictment: anger at your father for dying, resentment at your mother for being so thoroughly undone by it that there'd been no room left over for you to be undone too, something smaller and uglier aimed at yourself, for how little of what you were meant to feel you actually managed to feel most days. And underneath all of it, aimed at the cross itself like it might actually answer back — fury at God, plain and entirely unmanaged, for allowing any of it to happen in the first place. You knew exactly how this looked from the outside: a grown woman muttering to an empty chancel. You wouldn't have blamed anyone for thinking you mad. Fuck, you thought yourself mad half the time.

"I don't even know why I'm trying to talk to you," you went on anyway, some perverse momentum carrying you now that you'd started. "You've only proved yourself real by fucking up my entire family." You let out something between a laugh and a scoff, some small vicious part of you almost proud of the defiance. Your father would have killed you for saying it aloud. Father Arlan would have lectured you into an early grave, out of sheer patient disappointment.

You were still smiling faintly at your own blasphemy when a low chuckle sounded from somewhere behind you, and it startled a small, undignified sound out of you — something between a gasp and a curse.

"You really shouldn’t say things like that." Father Baelor's voice reached you before he did, warm and unbothered, that same lulling register from the pulpit put to entirely domestic use. "I hear there's a priest about."

You twisted around on the kneeler to find him a few pews back, tall even sitting, dressed only in the black of the cassock rather than anything more ceremonial. You recovered enough to manage a lopsided smile of your own. "I think the old ladies who come every single day are the ones I should actually be afraid of."

"There's one in particular who's appointed herself unofficial sacristan." He came forward and lowered himself into the pew beside you, his knees drawn up higher than the pew in front of him had been built to accommodate. "I'd be careful there, if I were you."

"Are you mocking your own flock, Father Baelor?" You'd turned fully around by now, still on your knees, to look at him properly.

He laced his hands over the back of the pew ahead and looked toward the altar rather than at you. "Merely observing." A trace of mirth touched the words. "Purely so I know what to brace for, come Sunday confessions."

You studied his profile while his attention stayed elsewhere, something you allowed yourself only because he wasn't looking. He was, you decided with a clinical honesty you rarely extended to strangers, a good-looking man. The beard did something generous for his jaw, and the collar, stark white against the black, framed the whole arrangement in a way that felt almost unfair — engineered for maximum effect on a face that presumably hadn't needed the help to begin with. You found yourself wondering, in a thought you filed away immediately as unhelpful, whether he'd have been just as striking without either — beard gone, collar gone, nothing left to signal what he was and wasn't allowed to be to you.

"I believe I heard you telling Him off, a few minutes ago." He turned his head and caught you looking, though he didn't seem to register it as anything worth remarking on. "Would you like to talk about it?"

"What is it with priests and confession?" You shook your head, grateful for the change of subject. "You're all just gossips with better outfits."

He laughed low in his chest. "This needn't be a confession. Mondays run quiet, around here. We could simply talk, if you'd rather."

"Free information, and you won't even absolve me for it?" You aimed a teasing frown his way. "Now I really know you're a gossip."

His smile deepened enough to finally reach his eyes, and you were certain, seeing it properly this close, that they weren't quite the same colour, though you couldn't have said in what way exactly they differed. Maybe one bluer than the other. "It would do you good. I promise."

You considered that for a few seconds, weighing something you couldn't entirely name. "If I'm doing this," you said finally, "I think I'd rather do it properly. In the confessional, I mean."

He only nodded and rose, offering a hand down that you took before you'd quite decided to, and led you toward the confessional set into the side wall — dark wood, a heavy curtain standing in for a door.

The interior smelled of old varnish and years of incense worked into the grain, close and dim enough that the mesh screen resolved him into little more than a suggestion: a dark shape, the pale smudge of his collar, one hand loose at rest against his knee. You settled onto the narrow kneeler, your knees complaining faintly at the thinness of the cushion.

"I don't actually remember how this starts," you admitted into the dark, feeling foolish for it. "It's been a while."

"Then we'll do it simply." His voice came low through the screen, closer somehow than it had been out in the pew, stripped of whatever distance the space was meant to enforce. "You needn't recite anything. Just tell me what's sitting on you. That's the whole of it."

You gathered what you could of your thoughts, which had scattered the moment you knelt, and started with the easiest one, because you didn't trust yourself yet to start with anything harder.

You told him about the anger — at God first, for allowing any of it, and then at your father, for the particular unfairness of an ordinary Tuesday becoming the day everything else stopped making sense. You told him about your mother, and the resentment you were ashamed even to name, at how completely her grief had swallowed the whole house, leaving you to manage the funeral home and the paperwork and her, on top of whatever you were supposedly still allowed to feel yourself. You told him, last and quietest, about the funeral itself — how you had stood dry-eyed at the graveside while cousins who'd seen your father twice a year wept without restraint, how at the reception after you'd caught yourself counting the sandwiches left on a tray instead of thinking about him at all, and had hated yourself for it in almost the same breath you'd been grateful for the distraction.

He was quiet for a moment once you'd finished, long enough that you nearly asked if he was still there. When he spoke, something in his voice had changed — pulled tighter, quieter, though no less warm.

"None of that needs absolving." A pause, brief, before he went on. "Grief isn't a sin. Neither is anger, however much it frightens you to feel it. God can bear a great deal more fury than you're capable of giving Him, I promise you that." Another pause, and when he continued, the words seemed to be reaching somewhere past the space between you, as though he were, in some way you had no means yet of naming, telling himself the same thing. "Loneliness convinces you that you're the only one who's ever stood where you're standing. You're not. You won't be, either, if you let anyone stand there with you."

You closed your eyes without deciding to, letting the voice move through you unbroken by the sight of him, and found you could feel each word land somewhere just beneath your sternum, distinct as a hand pressed flat there.

When you had said what there was to say, he walked you through a short Act of Contrition, feeding you the words a line at a time since you had lost the shape of them years ago, and then his voice dropped into the older cadence of formula — mercy and reconciliation folded into a rhythm that didn't belong to him alone, ending the way it always ended, your sins spoken loose from you and a cross traced in the air with steady hands somewhere on the other side of the screen. You said Amen because you remembered, at least, that much.

You heard him rise and draw back the curtain on his side before you trusted your own legs enough to do the same. It took you a few extra seconds — you told yourself it was your knees, stiff from the kneeler, and mostly believed it — to gather up whatever had come loose in you, listening to that voice low and unbroken by any obstruction, aimed entirely and only at you in the dark. You were fairly sure that wasn't the reaction the sacrament was designed to produce. You filed it away regardless, somewhere you didn't intend to examine too closely, and finally pushed back your own curtain.

He was waiting near the confessional, hands loose at his sides, and the smile he gave you this time didn't climb all the way to his eyes the way it had out in the pew. You couldn't have said what the difference was, exactly — something in the set of it, something you didn't yet have the information to name.

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

"I feel different." You wrapped your arms around yourself, an old habit you hadn't consciously chosen.

"Different bad, or different good?" Something in the way he held himself shifted, almost imperceptibly, closer — as though some string you couldn't see had drawn taut between you.

"Just different." You breathed the word more than said it. "Which is better than nothing. It's a start."

You started toward the main doors, and he fell into step half a pace behind you, quiet in a way that didn't feel like absence so much as consideration. Near the threshold, you turned back to him.

"Thank you. For listening."

He shook his head, easy, deflecting the weight of it. "It's nothing. It's the job."

He hesitated, though — long enough that you noticed, long enough that whatever came next had clearly needed the extra half-second to arrive at. "You know these doors are open to you. Whenever you need them. Not only on Sundays or odd Mondays."

You looked up at him, at the mismatched eyes, and something in how he'd phrased it — whenever you need them, not whenever you need Him — struck you as slightly too warm for something owed to any parishioner off the street. Or maybe that was only your own starved and unreliable judgment, filling gaps that weren't there with whatever it currently wanted to find.

"I know," you said simply.

"Good." He nodded, more to himself than to you, it seemed, some private thought being settled. "Good. Sunday, then? I'll see you at Mass?"

You let a smile pull at one corner of your mouth as you turned on your heel toward the door, already walking backward into the beginning of an answer he wasn't going to get easily. "Don't push it, Father."

Hypocrite.

The word arrived most mornings before his feet had properly found the floor, uninvited and precise, phrased the same way it had been phrased for longer than he cared to count. 

Bloody hypocrite. How dare you counsel anyone toward righteousness when you cannot walk two steps down that road yourself? How dare you comfort a soul in despair when despair is the country you've been living in for years?

It was not so much a thought as a visitor who had long since stopped waiting to be let in. It simply arrived, sat on his chest, and stayed there until he had wrestled himself upright and into the black. He had come to think of it, with the only kind of humour he still had reliable access to, as his cross. Not poverty. Not chastity, not obedience, though God knew those extracted their own toll daily. Hypocrisy. A priest who no longer entirely believed the thing he had given his whole life to proclaiming.

He told himself, most days, that this was temporary, a crisis of faith, the kind nearly every priest he'd trained alongside admitted to somewhere in the confidence of a rectory kitchen, late, after the wine had loosened something. Faith was a theological virtue, after all. A gift, not an achievement. He'd had it once, freely given, and a gift once given could presumably be asked for again.

The problem, as Baelor saw it, was that he had been asking for four years.

His faith had gone dry as a wadi in August, and no amount of kneeling had managed to run water through it since. He kept the form of the thing scrupulously — the Office, the daily Mass, the rosary some nights when sleep wouldn't come and there was nothing else worth doing with his hands — because he had learned, early in seminary, that discipline outlasted feeling, that a man didn't stop rowing simply because he could no longer see the shore.

He had read enough John of the Cross in seminary to recognize the shape of what he was in — a dark night, technically, textbook enough that he could have lectured on it — which didn't make the nights any shorter, or any less dark. Recognizing the disease in a book had never once, in his experience, cured a man of it. He knew, with the specific and humiliating clarity of a man who had studied theology long enough to diagnose his own condition and still be unable to treat it, that there was a difference between fidelity and faith, and that he had been running almost entirely on the former.

Loneliness was the part he told no one, not even in his own confession, which he supposed was its own failure of the sacrament if nothing else.

It wasn't for lack of company. There were the parishioners — the same handful of devoted, elderly women who left casseroles at the rectory door like offerings and asked after his health with more attention than his own mother sometimes managed. There were the other priests, the ones he saw at diocesan meetings and ordination anniversaries, men who clapped his shoulder and asked how the parish was doing and never once, in fifteen years, asked how he was doing, because none of them had been trained to ask that question of each other and neither had he. There was his family — brothers, more nephews than he could always keep straight at a glance, a standing invitation to Sunday dinner he took up perhaps twice a month, sitting at the end of a table crowded with other men's children, uncle to all of them and father to none, which had once felt like a clean and holy kind of sacrifice and now, some nights, simply felt like a room he was allowed to visit but never quite live in.

None of it touched the actual thing. He was lonely. So fucking lonely, if he let himself reach for the one word he'd never once used from the pulpit, in the one register no parishioner would ever hear, in the privacy of his own skull, where apparently no vow of composure held any jurisdiction at all.

He knew, in the part of his mind that still functioned as a theologian even when the rest of him had stopped functioning as a believer, exactly what was supposed to go in that hollow he felt in his chest. It had gone there before. He could remember — not abstractly, but with the kind of sense-memory that ambushed him at inconvenient moments — what it had felt like in his first years ordained, kneeling before the tabernacle at two in the morning because he simply wanted to, not because the breviary demanded it, and feeling something answer him that was not merely his own voice bouncing back. He hadn't imagined that. He was nearly certain he hadn't imagined that. But it had been a long time since anything had answered, and he had run out of new ways to ask.

Which was, he suspected, why he had not been able to stop thinking about her.

She had come to him unannounced, not quite a fortnight ago now, and confessed in the dark, through the screen, in a voice trying very hard to sound steadier than it was, to a loneliness so exact in its shape that he had sat on his side of that screen and felt, for one disorienting moment, as though he were somehow listening to himself. Grief for a father. Resentment she was ashamed of. The exact exhaustion of being the person everyone assumed was managing, because she had gotten so good at performing it that no one thought to check. He knew that exhaustion. He had built a fifteen-year vocation on top of it.

He'd told her, because it was true and because it was his job to say true things in that room: loneliness convinces you that you're the only one who's ever stood where you're standing. You're not. You won't be, either, if you let anyone stand there with you.

He had believed it, saying it. He still believed it, as doctrine. And walking back to the rectory afterward, hands cold in his pockets, he had been visited by the obvious, unavoidable question, arriving with all the cruelty of a thought that shows up exactly when a man is feeling pleased with himself: had he ever once let anyone stand there with him?

He hadn't. He knew that the moment the question landed. Not his brothers, who would have tried, who had tried — one of them, Maekar, had cornered him once after a dinner, quiet, asking if he was alright, really alright, and Baelor had said yes, of course, only tired, and watched the offer close itself back up like a door he had chosen, deliberately, not to walk through. Not the other priests. Not even, if he was honest, God — not really, not with the thing that was actually wrong, because admitting the actual thing out loud, even to Him, even in the dark, even where it was supposedly safe to admit anything, felt like the one betrayal he wasn't sure he'd survive committing.

He recognized something else in her, too, underneath the grief. That same instinct to manage her own drowning quietly rather than let anyone watch her go under, the same reflex against being a burden. He knew that instinct from the inside. He'd built a career on it.

It frightened him a little, watching it in someone twenty years his junior, because he knew exactly where that road went if nothing interrupted it early enough. He wanted, with an urgency that surprised him in its intensity, to reach her before she arrived wherever he currently was. Before the loneliness calcified in her the way his had done.

He simply didn't know how to do it without frightening her off entirely, without becoming one more authority figure informing her what she needed, which was, he suspected, exactly the kind of attention she'd spent her whole adult life quietly avoiding.

He was still turning the problem over, unsolved, on the Sunday morning he stood in the sacristy working his arms into the alb, the young deacon's voice carrying faintly from the sanctuary as the boy tested the bell.

The vestments went on in their fixed order, the way they had for fifteen years — the alb first, white and formless, the cincture cinched at the waist, the stole crossed over his chest the way it was worn by priests rather than draped straight the way a deacon wore it, and finally the chasuble, green for the long ordinary stretch of the year.

He murmured the old vesting prayers as he went, mostly from habit rather than intention, half in the Latin an elderly priest had taught him as a seminarian, before he'd properly learned to shave. He caught his own reflection, briefly, in the sacristy's dark window as he settled the chasuble across his shoulders — a tall man, greying now at the temples, dressed for a role he had once wanted with his whole undivided self and now simply performed, competently, the way a man performs any task he has done long enough to stop feeling much of anything while doing it.

Get it together, he told himself, in the tone he might have used on a nephew who'd skinned a knee and was making more of it than the injury strictly warranted. It's an hour. You've done this ten thousand times before.

The bell sounded, thin and clear, and Baelor walked out into the nave doing the practical arithmetic he always did on the way to the altar; a rough count of heads translated automatically into a rough count of hosts, a habit worn so smooth by repetition it required almost no conscious thought at all.

Except that his eyes, running the width of the church, caught on the back pew and simply stopped there, sum completely abandoned.

She was there. Sitting exactly where she'd sat the last two times, in the pew closest to the door, as though she wanted a clean line of retreat available at all moments, as though some part of her still hadn't decided whether she was staying. She looked, from across the church, like she'd apologize for existing in the space if anyone asked her to.

Baelor thought, with a conviction that arrived whole and immediate and slightly too fierce for a passing observation, that she could not have been more wrong about that if she'd tried.

The midday light was coming through the east windows at the low, slanting angle it only managed for a few hours that time of the year, falling directly across the back pews in long panels of colour, and it happened to be resting on her the moment he looked — gold and red and a deep, churchy blue laid over her like something intentional, though he knew perfectly well it was only the accident of architecture and the hour.

He thought, with the part of his brain that had apparently decided today was the day to stop cooperating with the rest of him, that he had never, in all his years at this altar, seen anything as purely, uselessly beautiful as her sitting alone in stained-glass light when she had no idea anyone was looking at her, and no idea, either, how much sorrow she carried visibly enough that a stranger could read it from forty feet away.

He lost, he would later admit to no one, a genuine portion of his own homily to the fact of her. He knew the passage well enough to preach it on autopilot — he'd written the thing himself three days earlier, in a version of himself that had apparently not accounted for this — but somewhere in the second point he caught himself having skipped an entire line of his own argument, recovered only by long practice and the mercy of a congregation too polite to notice a priest losing his thread. He watched her instead, in the gaps his voice could apparently manage without him. Watched her bite the inside of her cheek when something he said caught on some private snag of hers. Watched her brow pull together, briefly, at a line about mercy, as though mercy were a concept she was still deciding whether to trust.

Time did the thing it did during Mass, folding oddly, and he surfaced properly only at the Communion, distributing the host down the line with the automatic grace of long practice, until he registered, with a small, precise jolt, that she had risen from the back pew and joined the queue.

She had not, he remembered clearly, gone up the first time she'd come. He had noticed that too, at the time, and filed it away as simply information: she wasn't ready, and a priest who pushed a person toward the altar before they were ready did more harm than the waiting ever could. That she was standing now, moving forward a few careful people at a time, felt disproportionately significant for something so small — a woman joining a line — and he was aware, distantly, of being moved by it in a way that had very little to do with sacramental theology and a great deal to do with simply being glad, in some entirely personal register, that whatever had been keeping her back had loosened its grip a little.

She reached him a few communicants later, and knelt.

He hadn't expected the kneeling. Most of the parish took the host standing these days, the old rail rarely used except by the handful who'd never adjusted to the newer practice, but she went down onto the worn kneeler like it was a thing she'd done a thousand times before she'd ever stopped, muscle memory outrunning whatever else she might have decided about the morning, and he found himself praying, hard and specific and entirely impious in its motivation, that his hands would hold steady.

They did not, quite. Not enough that he thought anyone else would have caught it — fifteen years gave a man excellent control over the visible parts of himself — but he felt the small tremor in his own fingers as he lifted the host, and knew precisely why it was there, and hated himself for it with an efficiency that would have been almost funny had it not been happening to him specifically, in front of her, at the altar, during the single most sacred moment the day contained.

"The body of Christ," he said, and his voice, at least, held.

She opened for it the way most of the older parishioners still did, tongue offered rather than hands, and he registered the fact of it with a clarity he immediately, furiously, wished he hadn't. The pink, slight wetness of it, the plain vulnerability of the gesture, a woman kneeling in front of him with her mouth open and her eyes lifted to his through her lashes, trusting him with something that had nothing at all to do with what his body had apparently decided to make of the moment.

"Amen," she said, quiet, and he set the host down against her tongue, and for perhaps a quarter of a second, no more, the pad of his thumb grazed the wet warmth of it.

He felt the reaction low and immediate and entirely outside his own permission — his cock twitching hard against the front of the alb, an animal response to a moment he had spent his entire adult life training himself out of having at all, arriving anyway, uninvited, in the one setting on earth where it had absolutely no right to.

She rose. Crossed herself. Returned to her pew without a backward glance, entirely unaware, he was fairly sure, of anything beyond having received Communion for the first time in over a decade, which should have been the thing occupying the whole of his attention, and which he found he could not currently locate among the noise of his own reaction.

He had, God help him, an entire line of communicants still waiting.

He served the next in line, an elderly man who had been kneeling at that rail longer than Baelor had been standing behind it, with the effortful concentration of someone performing a familiar task while a separate part of his mind stood off to one side, arms crossed, informing him in no uncertain terms exactly what he was.

Hypocrite, the voice supplied, obligingly, and for once he couldn't argue with it.

He had spent the walk back to the rectory that first week convinced the problem in front of him was pastoral: a lonely, grieving young woman who needed someone steady to reach for, and a priest well-placed, by training if nothing else, to be that steady thing. He understood now, standing at his own altar with his body still humming with something it had no business feeling anywhere, let alone here, that he had gotten the shape of the danger badly, embarrassingly wrong.

The problem was never going to be knowing how to help her.

The problem was going to be whether he could stand this close to her at all without eventually wanting something from her that had nothing to do with helping, and everything to do with the plain, damning sin he had promised, fifteen years ago, in front of a bishop and his own weeping mother, that he would never again allow himself to want.

Something close to a week had passed since the confessional, and you had, despite every intention to the contrary, kept coming back. You told yourself it was for different reasons each time — the quiet, mostly, a kind of nothing that a weekday Mass demanded of you, ten minutes where nobody needed managing and your mother's grief could exist without an audience for once. In all four of those weeks, you had not planned to receive Communion. The plan, such as it existed, was to sit in the pew and let the ritual move around you, spectator rather than participant, the way you'd done as a child through the parts of Mass you were still too young to properly understand.

This Sunday was different, though you couldn't have said exactly when the decision got made. Somewhere between the Gospel and the final blessing, some quiet negotiation appeared to have concluded itself without consulting you, and by the time Father Baelor descended from the presbytery, distributing the host himself, your body had already decided the matter on your behalf.

You didn't remember deciding to stand. One moment you were sitting with your hands folded loosely in your lap, and the next your feet had committed you to the aisle, already three steps into the queue before the rest of you had caught up to ask what, precisely, it thought it was doing.

You told yourself the nerves climbing your spine were simply the ordinary nerves of the thing itself — ten years since you'd last done this, and your body apparently hadn't forgotten how much weight the act was meant to carry, even if the rest of you had spent a decade pretending otherwise. That explanation held for approximately four pews. By the fifth you were close enough to watch him working down the line, steady, unbothered, that same soft cadence repeating itself to each person in turn, and the nerves sharpened into something with a considerably more specific target.

You watched the woman two ahead of you receive the host into her open palm, easy, practiced, already turning away before she'd finished her Amen. That was how you'd meant to do it too — you'd decided as much, sitting in the pew, some sensible, unbothered part of you resolving to take the host in hand like a normal person having a normal religious experience.

The line moved with the same unbroken rhythm every queue like it seemed to share, and ahead of you his words repeated themselves at even intervals — the body of Christ, the body of Christ — until they nearly lost their shape entirely and became simply sound, a current pulling you forward rather than a sentence you were choosing to walk toward. And then it was your turn, and you were on your knees on the worn kneeler before you'd consciously authorized the movement, spine bent, chin lifted, and your tongue, God, your tongue was already out, waiting, and you were looking up at him through your lashes in a way that had nothing to do with piety and everything to do with something you didn't have a clean word for yet.

You had spent a great deal of your adolescence being taught, carefully and thoroughly, the difference between reverence and its imitations. You could probably still recite, if pressed, the specific ways a person's posture and intention were meant to align during the sacraments, the whole careful presence of a well-formed conscience. Nobody had prepared you for how completely that presence could collapse the moment desire decided to borrow its vocabulary. Kneeling had always meant one thing. It appeared to now mean several things simultaneously, and you had no reliable way of establishing which one currently governed your body.

You wondered, distantly, mortified, whether any of it read on your face the way it felt from the inside. Whether a man could look down at a woman kneeling in front of him with her mouth open and simply know.

"The body of Christ." His voice reached you barely above its usual register, quieter than you'd heard him use even in the confessional, and you had exactly long enough to wonder whether that meant anything before you ran out of time to wonder it.

You could have sworn — though you dismissed it in the same half-second you thought it, because surely you were simply looking for things now, seeing significance in whatever your own hunger handed you — that something moved behind his eyes as he looked down at you. Some fraction of dilation, dark spreading further than the low church light could account for. You told yourself you'd imagined it. A composed man, too many years a priest, did not come undone over a woman kneeling at an altar rail. You were, you reminded yourself, spectacularly good at inventing evidence for whatever you already wanted to be true.

"Amen," you managed, in a register you didn't entirely recognize as your own, and took the host onto your tongue. It tasted the way it always had — of nothing, faintly of paper, a blankness you'd forgotten could hold so much weight — and you drew the wet weight of it back into your mouth, uncomfortably aware, for the first time in your entire pious childhood, of every part of a gesture you had never once thought to be self-conscious about.

You crossed yourself, rose, and turned back toward your pew on legs you were no longer entirely confident belonged to you. By the time you reached it you had abandoned any pretence of composure and simply knelt again, forehead dropping toward your folded hands in a posture any observer would have read as devotion, and which was, if you were honest with yourself, mostly a structural decision. You did not trust your knees with your weight. Kneeling, at least, put the failure somewhere expected.

For however long remained of the Mass — ten minutes, perhaps, though it passed with the strange, syrupy slowness of time that refuses to behave when you most need it to — you were aware of a pair of mismatched eyes finding you, again and again, across the width of the nave.

You did not look back. You told yourself it was decorum. The truer answer was that you did not trust yourself either to survive whatever expression you found waiting for you there, and some cowardly, self-protective part of you had already decided, without evidence, what that expression would be. Disappointment, probably. A priest, watching a woman make a spectacle of an ancient, most-sacred rite because some starved, undisciplined part of her had wanted an excuse to kneel in front of him. You could not have named a single thing Baelor had actually done to earn that verdict. You handed it to him anyway, because it was easier to believe yourself pathetic than to consider the alternative: that he had looked, and kept looking, for reasons that had nothing to do with judgment at all.

It was, you supposed, a very on-brand mistake for you specifically to make: assuming the worst interpretation of yourself before anyone else had the chance to offer one, a habit you'd perfected over exactly the kind of year you'd just had.

When Mass finally released you, you gathered your things and made for the doors, only to find your escape blocked by the usual congregation of elderly women, several of whom had apparently decided the threshold was an ideal location for a leisurely post-Mass conference. Blasted old mules, you thought, uncharitably, easing your way through the knot of cardigans and hairspray with what you hoped read as patience rather than the quiet panic actually driving you.

The churchyard held its usual after-Mass scattering, knots of parishioners trading the same three pleasantries they traded every week, a couple of children weaving between legs, the sharp, cold smell of stone and cut grass that November insisted on despite the season otherwise doing its best to die.

You had almost recovered something like your normal footing when you spotted him, already outside, a few yards off, saying his farewells to a cluster of departing parishioners. You watched him for a moment before he saw you. Safe, for once, in the anonymity of simply being one more parishioner in a scattering crowd. He had a hand braced warm on some old man's shoulder, head inclined to catch whatever the man was telling him, nodding along at exactly the right intervals with the practiced attentiveness of someone who had spent years convincing an entire parish that each of them, individually, had his whole and undivided attention.

It was, you thought, uncomfortably close to the same trick you performed for your mother most days: competent kindness worn like a coat, covering whatever was actually happening underneath it. You wondered, watching him, whether he ever got tired of wearing his.

He must have slipped out through the sacristy door while you were fighting your way past the old guard. You prayed, with a fervency that would have embarrassed you an hour ago, that he hadn't clocked you yet, that you might simply slide past unseen and process the entire morning in the privacy of your own head, where it belonged.

God, apparently, was not in a forgiving mood.

"Wait—" His voice found you before you'd made it three steps past him.

This must be penance, you thought, aiming the complaint at God directly, for telling You off the other week. You turned anyway, because ignoring a priest calling your name across a churchyard felt like a significantly worse option than facing him.

He was still in the green chasuble, and you decided, with the kind of petty, deflecting focus you reached for whenever you needed somewhere safer to put your attention, that green wasn't his colour. Black suited him better — sharper, somehow, unfairly so, as though the absence of colour did something the vestments simply couldn't.

The two of you had drifted, without either of you seeming to choose it, a little apart from the general flow of departing parishioners, into a pocket of relative quiet near the low stone wall bordering the churchyard.

"You received Communion." He was smiling as he said it, easy, a little pleased, as though the fact of it were a small gift someone had handed him unexpectedly.

You nodded once, feeling suddenly, absurdly, like a student called on for an answer she wasn't sure was correct. "I thought it seemed appropriate. Sorry if I — I don't know, did something wrong."

His smile only deepened at that, wide enough to show teeth that weren't quite perfect. One canine set very slightly forward of the other, both slightly longer than the average, a small imperfection that somehow sharpened the effect rather than softening it. You found yourself thinking, with a specificity that alarmed you, exactly what those particular teeth would feel like against skin, and then you thought about the fact that you'd thought that, and wanted, briefly and sincerely, to walk directly into oncoming traffic.

This was, you reflected grimly, an extraordinarily inconvenient time to discover a specific interest in a man's teeth. You filed the discovery away next to the growing pile of other discoveries you'd made about yourself these last four weeks; a pile you were doing an increasingly poor job of pretending not to notice.

"You did nothing wrong." His voice gentled further, if that was even possible. "In fact, I'm rather proud of you."

Proud of you.

You blinked at him and felt the words land somewhere considerably lower than your chest, spreading out into a warmth that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Holy Spirit. You were, in that moment, sincerely and profoundly grateful for whatever biological quirk kept the more obvious evidence of arousal confined to men, because you would otherwise have been standing in a churchyard in a state no amount of decorum could have disguised.

You noted, somewhere beneath the more immediate crisis, that it wasn't only your body responding to the words. Nobody had told you they were proud of you in longer than you wanted to calculate. Your father had said it constantly, casually, about report cards and parallel parking and nothing in particular, and you hadn't realized, until a priest said it in a mostly unrelated context outside a church, exactly how much you'd been missing hearing it from anyone at all.

You must have taken too long to respond, because something crossed his face, a flicker of doubt, quickly papered over. "Sorry. That came out a bit strange, didn't it." He laughed, short, and for a moment looked almost boyish about it, which did nothing at all to help your current situation.

You laughed too, mostly to have somewhere to put the air currently trapped in your chest, and mostly to keep from examining the warm, insistent ache that had settled low in you and did not seem inclined to leave anytime soon. "Don't worry about it," you said, and then, because the silence that followed felt like it needed something in it, "it was nice seeing you."

"Nice indeed." He said it slowly, turning the phrase over like he was testing its weight, and you had the distinct, mortifying sense that you'd just stumbled into the kind of conversation you'd have mocked mercilessly in anyone else: two people standing a foot apart in a churchyard, trading pleasantries like teenagers who'd forgotten how words worked.

You were already half-turned to go when he spoke again. "We'll be getting the church ready for Christmas soon — decorations, the nativity, that sort of thing. We could always use another set of hands, if you were interested."

You hadn't expected that. Some vague, formless plan on your part had involved politely declining further entanglement with this parish beyond whatever your body had apparently already committed you to this morning, and here he was, casually assuming a future in which you'd be back, repeatedly, with a staple gun and a box of ornaments.

"Sure." You turned fully back to him, caught slightly off guard. "I mean — yes. I'll see what I can do."

He looked, for just a moment, more hopeful about that than the offer strictly warranted, though he recovered fast enough that you might have imagined it too, the way you'd apparently decided to imagine everything else about him today.

He looked as though he meant to say something further, but an elderly woman intercepted him first — the sacristan-adjacent one, you suspected, from the sheer righteousness of her posture — and launched into what appeared to be less a conversation than a fully prepared monologue on the subject of the Advent wreath.

Baelor towered over her, patient, nodding along to whatever she was saying while his eyes found yours over the top of her head, faintly, helplessly amused.

You mouthed good luck at him and turned to leave, and caught, in the last half-second before you did, the flash of one more toothy, uneven, entirely unpriestly grin aimed directly at you.

You walked home with absolutely no memory of the walk itself.

It was only much later, sitting at your own kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold in front of you, that you let yourself think properly about any of it. The kneeling, the eyes, every feeling that came onto you without your permission.

You thought about the fact that you'd gone looking, four weeks ago, for the specific comfort of being comprehended without judgment, the thing you remembered feeling as a child and had wanted back badly enough to sit through your own grief to get it.

You had not, at any point in that search, accounted for the possibility that the comprehension might arrive wearing a Roman collar, or that wanting it might eventually stop feeling like faith and start feeling like something considerably harder to confess.

You thought, too, about the Christmas decorations, about staple guns and small nativity figures and days of proximity you had apparently just volunteered yourself into, without any of the caution the last hour should reasonably have taught you. You told yourself you'd think more carefully about that later. But you did not, in fact, do it.

You simply marked the date in the calendar on your phone, and found, when you looked at it sitting there among your mother's doctor's appointments and your own overdue dentist visit, that some small, traitorous part of you was already looking forward to it.

Christmas had a way of crawling under your skin, the way old songs do. You could go months without thinking of it at all, and then a single carol drifting out of a shop doorway would drop you straight back into a kitchen you hadn't properly stood in for over a decade. You remembered good Christmases, the kind that still arrived intact in memory without needing much reconstruction: the house loud with cousins, someone's dog underfoot, your grandmother's insistence on a specific brand of nougat nobody but her actually liked, the whole extended chaos of a family that hadn't yet learned how to lose people. Those years had been good in the uncomplicated way only childhood afforded. You hadn't yet understood that a table could shrink, that the chairs pulled out each year could simply, one by one, stop being needed.

You thought, unbidden, of the last Christmas Eve you'd spent with your father whole and healthy and utterly unaware of what the coming year held for him — the two of you assembling a jigsaw puzzle at the kitchen table past midnight because neither of you could sleep and neither of you wanted to admit it, some ridiculous thousand-piece rendering of a lighthouse he'd bought on a whim and insisted on finishing before morning, as though the deadline mattered to anyone but him. You'd found the last piece around two, and he'd made you both cocoa to celebrate, badly, too much sugar and not nearly enough milk, and you had not known, sitting there in your pyjamas laughing at his terrible cocoa, that you were spending the last ordinary, uncomplicated Christmas you'd ever get with him.

You would have paid considerably more attention, you liked to tell yourself, if you'd known. You weren't entirely sure that was true. You suspected you'd have taken it for granted regardless, the way you seemed to have been built to take most good things for granted right up until they were gone.

They had started thinning sometime in your teens, the guest list first, then the feeling itself, until Christmas became something you observed rather than inhabited — a season that happened around you while some quieter, more adult part of you took inventory of who was missing. You supposed that was simply what growing up did to a holiday built entirely on presence. This year the table would seat two, and one chair would stay pushed in on principle rather than practicality, because neither you nor your mother had yet found the courage to actually put it away.

Which was perhaps part of why you found yourself, on a Tuesday evening in the beginning of December, standing on a folding chair in the nave of a church that wasn't strictly yours, marvelling at the old women who'd spent the better part of the afternoon transforming the place into something out of a Christmas card. They'd draped garland along every available surface with a fervent, uncomplicated joy you found yourself envying more than you were entirely comfortable admitting.

You glanced toward the altar, toward the plain wooden cross presiding over all of it. You could spare me a little of whatever they've got, you thought, directing the request at Him with the blend of irony and genuine hope you'd become fluent in these past almost-two months. He didn't answer, which by now you'd come to expect. Silence, you'd decided, was simply His preferred register of correspondence with you.

You supposed you owed whatever had brought you back to this parish in October a debt you hadn't properly paid yet. Somewhere in the weeks since, without your quite noticing the transition, the building had become something closer to a bunker than a place of worship; somewhere you could exist without the performance the rest of your life currently demanded of you. You didn't have to be the strong one here. Not because you necessarily were the strong one everywhere else, but because here, specifically, nobody was paying close enough attention to require it of you.

The old women, you were fairly certain, didn't particularly care for you. You'd become something of a fixture over the autumn — reliably present, reliably unwilling to stay for the rosary, reliably uninterested in the small, warm currency of parish gossip they traded so easily among themselves — and you supposed that reticence read, correctly, as a kind of standoffishness.

You couldn't entirely blame them for the verdict. In the interest of honesty, which spoke poorly of whatever devout young woman a stranger might have glimpsed in you at first glance, you found you didn't much care for them either. It wasn't unkindness, exactly. You simply had nothing left over, most days, for the effort community required, and the women had sensed that absence the way people always seemed to sense exactly the thing you were trying hardest not to show.

You'd lost track of the hour somewhere in the effort of getting the wreath symmetrical — a task that had absorbed you far more completely than its actual importance warranted, the satisfying tyranny of a problem with a correct answer, unlike most of what currently occupied your days.

By the time you next surfaced enough to notice your surroundings, full dark had settled outside the tall windows, and the women who'd spent the afternoon polishing candlesticks and dusting the reredos had long since collected their coats and gone home to their own, presumably fuller houses. There was one stubborn corner of the wreath that refused to sit flush against the beam, and you stapled it into submission with more force than the task strictly required.

"You know, every single one of those will need to come out again come January." The familiar, lulling voice found you from somewhere near the floor.

You looked down from your perch — you'd had to stand on the chair to reach the beam over the door — and found him below you, his face arriving at roughly the level of your waist even accounting for the height the chair gave you. Why was he so fucking tall, you thought, not for the first time since October.

"I'm sure you'll find some other charitable soul to deal with it," you said, aiming for breezy and mostly landing there.

He laughed, low, and the sound did something to the base of your spine you'd rather not have examined closely.

You fixed the last staple and pivoted on the chair to face him properly. "Besides," you added, smirking, "I think some of these staples are older than I am."

His own smirk answered yours, quick and easy. Over the weeks you'd known him, you had arrived at the settled, private conclusion that Baelor was, against every expectation you'd walked in with that first Wednesday, a genuinely good priest to know.

Nothing like Father Arlan's gentle, uncomplicated warmth. Baelor's register was drier, more grounded, quick, despite it, to turn a homily's more solemn point into something almost funny, or at least as funny as a man in his position could reasonably manage without causing a diocesan incident. He'd once, memorably, described a visiting bishop's homily as spiritually correct but tragically overlong, pitched just quietly enough for only you to catch during the coffee hour afterward, and you'd had to disguise your laugh as a coughing fit for the better part of a minute.

But there was something else, too, something you'd started cataloguing without quite meaning to.

You'd caught it first during a November homily on the Prodigal Son, of all things. A pause where his voice simply stopped, a beat too long even for effect, his gaze gone somewhere past the back pews entirely before he recovered himself and finished the line. You remembered, too, a Tuesday afternoon that same month when you'd found him alone in the sacristy long after any practical reason for him to still be there, hands loosely folded, eyes fixed on nothing in particular, so thoroughly somewhere else that he hadn't heard you knock. It had taken him a full three seconds to resurface enough to greet you; three seconds in which his face had held an expression so nakedly exhausted you'd nearly turned around and left rather than intrude on it. By the time he'd properly noticed you, the mask was back in place, warm and unbothered, and you'd both pretended, with the same silent, mutual courtesy, that you hadn't seen anything at all.

There was a darkness sitting behind those mismatched eyes that had nothing to do with the warm, careful light he'd clearly spent years learning to project for public consumption. Something you recognized, with an unsettling flash of kinship, because you'd been living behind a similar performance yourself for the better part of a year. Even now, watching him smile at your staple joke, you could see it there underneath, patient and entirely unmoved by whatever surface amusement was currently crossing his face.

You had, on more than one uncharitable evening alone in your room, caught yourself wanting to reach up and kiss that darkness straight off him; an urge that arrived, inconveniently, with startling specificity, and that you suppressed each time by picturing, with deliberate cruelty toward yourself, the exact white of his collar glowing that much brighter in your mind's eye. A small and effective penance you'd invented all on your own.

"Here." You held the staple gun out to him, resigned. "Take this and help me down."

He reached for it with a half-smile still playing at his mouth, but instead of taking your hand, he simply set the staple gun down on the nearest pew and stayed exactly where he was, making no move whatsoever toward a helping distance.

"You got yourself up there," he said. "I'm reasonably confident you can manage the trip back down unassisted."

"And you can manage the very interesting phone call to the coroner," you shot back, "when I crack my skull open on these charming marble floors."

He shook his head, something between exasperation and fond disbelief crossing his face, but he came to help you regardless.

You'd expected a hand; his palm extended for you to brace against as you stepped down, the same practical courtesy any decent person would offer someone perched too high on unstable furniture. What he did instead rewired something in your chest before you'd fully registered it was happening. His hands came to your waist, both of them, spanning nearly the whole width of you with room to spare, and closed there with an easy, certain strength that lifted rather than merely assisted.

You came down off the chair already caught. His hands didn't release you once your feet found the floor, they stayed exactly where they'd landed, warm even through the fabric of your sweater, and the momentum of the drop left you standing closer to him than either of you had ever managed before, the backs of your knees still grazing the chair's edge, your front nearly flush against the solid wall of him. You had to tip your head back to find his face at all, the angle sudden and unfamiliar even after two months of knowing exactly how tall he was in the abstract.

And when you found it, his expression wasn't one you had a name filed away for. Not the easy mirth from a minute ago. Not the quiet darkness you'd just spent an entire private paragraph of your own thoughts cataloguing. Not even the careful, generic kindness he handed out to every stranger who walked through the doors. This was something else, something focused entirely on you with an intensity that made you feel, absurdly, like the only thing left standing in the building.

The church itself had gone very quiet around you both — no children running, no old women's chatter, nothing but the two of you and the faint, resinous smell of fresh pine garland strung along every surface that afternoon, incongruously festive against whatever was actually unfolding here.

"We wouldn't want to have to explain to our self-appointed sacristan why she'd need to clean blood off her floors, would we?"

His voice, when it finally arrived, had dropped somewhere you hadn't heard it go before. Low, rough at the edges, scraped clean of the careful, cultivated softness he used from the pulpit and in the confessional alike. Fuck, you thought, with the kind of clarity reserved for genuine emergencies, and had to physically bite the inside of your cheek to keep something considerably less dignified than a word from escaping you.

Your brain, which had apparently decided this was the correct moment to abandon you entirely, produced a single unhelpful thought at top volume: that whatever you were currently feeling qualified, by any reasonable Catholic accounting, as a sin already fully committed, whether or not your body ever got around to acting on it. His hands were still at your waist. He had not moved them, and you found you had absolutely no intention of pointing that out to him.

"I can only imagine the headlines," you managed, aiming for something like your usual register and landing somewhere considerably shakier. "Beloved cool local priest murders parishioner over minor stapling dispute."

He laughed at that — a low, private sound you felt as much as heard, given how little distance currently separated the two of you — and in the same motion your own hands found his wrists, not to push him away, you noted with some private alarm, but simply to have somewhere to put your hands that wasn't the fabric of the cassock that covered his chest.

"Finally," he said, something almost boyish slipping into his voice despite its lower register, "you admit I'm a cool priest."

"Never said the opposite," you managed, and were fairly certain your heartbeat had become audible at this point, some frantic percussion filling your own ears loudly enough that you half expected him to hear it too, if he simply stopped talking long enough to listen for it.

He didn't stop talking. He also didn't step back.

What you noticed, in the strange, suspended quiet that followed, wasn't the words at all: it was the small, controlled way the distance between your faces kept shrinking, inch by inch, so gradual you might have missed it entirely if every nerve in your body hadn't been standing at full and humiliating attention.

His eyes had dropped, briefly, to somewhere south of your own eyes, and you felt the weight of that gaze land on your mouth like a physical touch you hadn't known a look alone could carry. You didn't move away. You were fairly sure, standing there with his hands still warm at your waist and the whole of him leaning steadily closer, that moving away had stopped being something your body currently had access to as an option.

Then thunder cracked somewhere close enough to rattle the stained glass in its leading, and the spell broke apart all at once.

Baelor recoiled like he'd been struck, stumbling half a step backward and nearly catching his heel against the kneeler of the pew at his back. His hands left your waist so abruptly the absence of them registered as its own small shock, cold rushing in where his palms had been. He put several feet of distance between you with the swift, overcorrected urgency of a man putting out a fire he'd only just noticed was burning him, and you stood exactly where he'd left you, rooted to the same patch of marble floor, arms hanging uselessly at your sides because you couldn't immediately think what else to do with them.

He turned toward the nearest window, ostensibly checking the weather, though you suspected the actual view held considerably less of his attention than whatever was currently happening behind his own eyes. You watched his shoulders rise and fall once, twice, some private negotiation being conducted entirely without your input.

"I should be going," you said, into the silence neither of you seemed inclined to fill, wrapping your arms around yourself in a gesture you recognized, distantly, as purely defensive, though you couldn't have said exactly what you thought you were defending against at this point.

He looked back at you then, and you caught the specific effort it took him to swallow whatever he'd been about to say instead of the thing he actually said, which was, "Right." A short, laboured breath followed the word, like it had cost him something to produce. "Have you got an umbrella?"

You nodded, not trusting your voice with anything more elaborate, and busied yourself gathering your coat and bag from the pew where you'd left them, grateful for the excuse to look at literally anything besides him.

"I'll come back tomorrow," you said, to the buttons of your coat rather than to his face, "to finish whatever's left."

He said nothing to that. When you finally made yourself look up, he was watching you with an expression you didn't have the emotional bandwidth left to interpret, and you decided, with the last reserves of self-preservation currently available to you, that you didn't especially want to try.

"Good night, Baelor."

You hadn't called him that before — not to his face, not without the Father in front of it — and you felt the shape of his name leave your mouth like something you'd been keeping in a drawer you'd forgotten you owned. You didn't wait to see what it did to his expression. You turned and walked to the doors, footsteps too loud against the marble in the church's electric hush, and did not look back once — not through the doors, not into the wet dark of the churchyard, not all the way to your bicycle.

You weren't sure, if you had, that you would have found the will left in you to actually leave.

What exactly are you doing?

Baelor asked himself the question kneeling at the side of his bed, in the small, plain bedroom of the parish quarters that had been the whole of his home for ten years now. Narrow bed, a crucifix above the headboard he'd hung there himself his first week, a desk crowded with breviaries he increasingly opened out of habit rather than hunger.

Are you out of your mind entirely?

For the first time in longer than he wanted to calculate, he knelt not performing the posture but actually reaching for what it was meant to produce — comfort, or something adjacent to it, anything at all that might quiet the chaos currently occupying his skull.

"Our Father, who art in Heaven—"

His voice wavered on the fourth word and gave out entirely somewhere in the fifth.

"Our Father—"

Her laugh arrived instead. Not summoned, simply there, whole and uninvited. The exact pitch of it from an hour ago when she'd made the joke about the coroner, and behind the laugh, inevitably, her face: chin tipped back to find his, mouth still curved with the last of the humour, eyes doing something he hadn't yet found a word brave enough to use.

He lowered his head further, forehead nearly meeting his own clasped hands. He had heard that laugh perhaps a hundred times over these past two months. He could not account for why it should return to him now, tonight, with such insistence, refusing to be filed away with the evening's other ordinary noise.

He knew the shape of temptation well enough by now to recognize its usual visitors. Fifteen years he'd been fighting it in one form or another, and for most of that decade and a half it had arrived the way temptation was supposed to — faceless, fleeting, a passing current easily broken by discipline and the plain stubbornness of prayer. This was different. This had roots. And prayer, tonight, was not coming to him with anything like its old ease.

When, he wondered, had those roots first taken hold? He turned the question over the way a man probes a bruise to test how deep it goes, expecting each interaction between them to yield the same comfortable diagnosis he'd been offering himself for weeks: compassion, simply. A priest's ordinary, sanctioned care for a grieving soul.

How readily the heart baptized its own sins, dressing them in vestments respectable enough to walk past its own conscience unchallenged.

He knew, kneeling there with the evidence assembling itself against him one memory at a time, that this had never been only compassion. Compassion had not made him remember, with the specific clarity of a man cataloguing evidence, the warmth of her palm the very first time they'd shaken hands beneath the vestibule light, both of them strangers still. Compassion had not made him look at her, weeks later, sitting alone in stained-glass light, and think she resembled something closer to a miracle than to a parishioner. Compassion, God knew, had nothing whatsoever to do with the way his own cock had throbbed, mortifyingly, at the memory of her kneeling before him at the altar rail, tongue offered, so entirely disposed toward receiving him — not the capital-H Him she'd knelt for, but him.

No. This was not compassion. This was desire.

Baelor wanted her.

The realization did not arrive first as language. It existed, before he dared give it words, as a certainty his soul appeared to have recognized considerably ahead of his conscious mind's permission. When he finally did put language to it — silently, without moving his lips, though it felt no less spoken for the silence — the shape of the thought landed like blasphemy against his own teeth.

I want her.

Not merely the light she brought into a parish that had grown grey and administrative around him. Not merely the sharp, unpredictable wit she threw at him like a dare. Every part of her. Even, and especially that, the darkness she carried behind her own carefully practiced eyes, the same darkness he had recognized, the very first time he'd glimpsed it, as an exact echo of his own.

He wanted her wholly. Wanted, with a specificity that frightened him, to imagine some entirely different future, one in which she crossed a room not toward the confessional but toward him. Wanted to wonder, with a tenderness that felt more dangerous than any simple hunger could have, what it might be to hear her say his name in some context that had nothing whatsoever to do with prayer. And, God help him, wanted to hear her moan it.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

"No." The word left him barely above a whisper.

But no to what, exactly? To himself? To God, wherever He currently was? To the relentless, unwelcome honesty currently dismantling him from the inside out? To the hardening evidence, even now, of exactly how little his own body cared for the word he'd just spoken?

His vows had once felt like architecture: stone, load-bearing, built up patiently over years until they no longer required conscious thought to remain standing, because conviction itself had become the mortar holding every course of them in place. Tonight they felt like glass instead. Transparent enough that he could see straight through to an entire unlived life on the other side of them. Fragile enough that he feared one careless touch of longing might be all it took to shatter the whole structure at once.

He searched, kneeling there, for disgust. Certain, if only he could locate it, that it would be enough to save him. He tried to name what he was feeling as corruption. As weakness. As the plain, ordinary failure of a man who had simply stopped being strong enough to want what he'd promised to want instead.

What he found, reaching for disgust, was grief.

Because beneath the desire there was love. He could see it now that he'd stopped looking away from it: the faint, unbearable outline of an entirely different life. One with someone actually beside him rather than merely near him. Unwavering loyalty, offered and received both. Being loved, and — this was the part that undid him most completely — being able to see it happening, to actually feel it landing, rather than simply trusting it existed somewhere beyond his ability to perceive it, the way he'd spent fifteen years trusting God's love existed without ever quite managing to feel its weight.

It had accumulated so quietly he'd missed the accumulation entirely. In conversations that ran twenty minutes longer than either of them had any real reason to justify. In the uncomplicated comfort of simply being near her, which asked nothing of him and somehow still gave him more than most of his days currently offered. In the way his own schedule had begun rearranging itself, without his conscious permission, around the mere possibility of crossing paths with her — a Tuesday errand that could easily have waited until Thursday, suddenly urgent, suddenly today. In the strange emptiness that settled over the whole parish on the days she didn't come.

He understood, kneeling there, that he was thoroughly and completely finished.

Because lust, at least, could be confessed. Named, absolved, resisted with enough discipline and enough distance. But what was a man supposed to do with affection that had stopped being distinguishable, at some point he couldn't pinpoint, from prayer itself?

His lips trembled around the next attempt.

"Lord—"

The word broke apart before it finished forming.

He had spent years — his whole vocation, really — teaching other people that grace was never withheld from anyone who sought it honestly, that God did not turn away an honest accounting of a struggling heart. And yet honesty, tonight, felt like the single most impossible thing currently available to him. Because if God were to search his heart in this exact moment, He would find no noble struggle waiting there to reward. Baelor already knew that much. He was already lost, and some new, terrible clarity in him suspected God knew it too, and had simply chosen, as He had for four long years now, to say nothing about it either way.

Perhaps that was what finally pushed him across whatever threshold remained between kneeling there in honest, wretched prayer and what he did next. Perhaps it was simply exhaustion, years of dryness and denial collapsing all at once under the sheer weight of wanting one particular, unrepeatable woman rather than some abstract, manageable temptation. Whatever the mechanism, his hands moved before the rest of him had finished deciding to let them. He undid the drawstring of his pyjama trousers with clumsy, hurried fingers, wrapped his hand around his own cock — already full, already aching — and began, without further ceremony, to work himself with long, rough strokes.

He turned his face into the mattress at the last second, some final scrap of habit or shame driving him to muffle the sound rather than let it fill the small room the way everything else about tonight already had.

In the dark behind his own closed eyes, only one image held. Her face. Not exactly as she'd looked tonight, though the memory of tonight fed everything that followed. Her eyes, specifically, the way they'd caught his after she'd teased him, some light living in them that he had spent two months telling himself he was imagining, a light that might, if he let himself believe it even for the length of this single traitorous hour, have meant she wanted this too. He held to that possibility the way a drowning man holds to whatever debris happens to be floating nearest.

He held, too, to the image his own imagination built for him next, unbidden and merciless in its detail: her, entirely undone beneath him, her spine arched at some impossible, desperate angle, her mouth open around sounds that had nothing left of teasing in them. He imagined the give of her, imagined thrusting into her again and again, deep and unhurried and then not unhurried at all, imagined that every stroke of it might somehow reach past her grief and turn it, briefly, into something closer to pleasure — as if he alone might be capable of giving her that, as if wanting it badly enough might make it true. He imagined her nails finding his back, dragging half-moons into skin that had not been touched with anything like hunger in longer than he could accurately remember. He imagined her voice breaking around his name, over and over, in a register that had nothing whatsoever to do with confession.

What finally undid him — what tore the last of his composure loose entirely — was not any of it. It was the imagined shape of her mouth releasing three specific words in his direction, words he had no right whatsoever to imagine anyone giving him, let alone her, and yet there they were anyway, vivid and unbearable and entirely his own invention: I love you.

He came hard around his own fist, a broken, guttural sound tearing loose from somewhere low in his chest before he could catch it against the mattress, his whole body drawing tight and then breaking apart at once, the mess of it spilling hot over his knuckles.

He stayed exactly where he'd fallen, face pressed into the bedding, and breathed. Once. Twice. A third time before anything like steadiness returned to him.

He raised his face eventually, feeling the cool, unmistakable patch where his own breath had dampened the sheet beneath him, and stared up at the ceiling instead, at the water stain shaped vaguely like a rowboat he'd been meaning to have looked at for the better part of a year.

A thought arrived, quiet enough that he nearly missed the size of the blasphemy folded inside it: if loving her brings me closer to creation than years of praying ever brought me to the Creator, what exactly am I meant to do with that.

He covered his face with his free, cleaner hand.

Perhaps that, he thought, was the actual sin waiting underneath all the others he'd been so carefully cataloguing tonight. Not the desire, or not only the desire. The realization — arriving now, with nowhere left to hide from it — that somewhere along the long road toward this particular altar, he had gone looking for God, over and over, for years, and found only silence waiting at the end of every attempt.

And that tonight, for the first time in longer than he dared admit even to himself, some other voice — hers, or the idea of her, or whatever she had quietly become to him in the space where God's silence used to sit — had finally, unmistakably, answered.

You hadn't slept well. You'd known it the moment you opened your eyes, before your body had even finished the transition out of whatever half-formed dreams had kept you turning most of the night. You had the unmistakable heaviness behind the eyes that came from too little rest rather than too much of it. You'd drifted in and out of something that wasn't quite sleep for hours, catching yourself somewhere between waking and dreaming with your own pulse doing something inconvenient, replaying, on an unwelcome loop, the weight of his hands at your waist and the taut, terrifying stillness of the half-second before the thunder broke whatever had been about to happen between you.

What had kept you awake, if you were being honest with the version of yourself still too groggy to construct a better lie, was a pair of eyes. Blue, though not quite matching, one shade lighter than the other even in memory. And a proximity you still hadn't fully accounted for.

Or that's what you told yourself, dressing for the day, that it was simply eyes and proximity keeping you up, nothing more specific than that, nothing requiring further examination before coffee.

Your mother had been lighter that morning than you'd seen her in longer than you wanted to count — humming something tuneless over the stove, actually eating the toast she made rather than simply making it and leaving it to go cold on the counter. She'd even mentioned, unprompted, something about clearing out your father's side of the closet before spring — not today, not this week, but someday, spoken aloud for the first time since the funeral, which felt like its own small, cautious miracle. You knew better than to expect it to last.

Grief, in your admittedly limited experience of managing hers alongside your own, didn't improve in a straight line; it simply had good days scattered unpredictably among the difficult ones, and you'd learned not to read too much promise into any single morning. Still, you let yourself enjoy it while it lasted.

December seemed to have settled properly over the town by now — breath visible in the cold, the last of the leaves finally surrendered from the trees lining the route you'd walked perhaps thirty times since October, familiar enough now that your feet found the way without requiring much input from the rest of you.

You held the memory of your mother's laugh at something on the radio the whole walk to the parish, turning it over like a stone in your pocket, and told yourself, with the kind of deliberate optimism you rarely trusted yourself with anymore, that today was going to be a good day.

You repeated the thought enough times that it started to feel less like a hope and more like a small, private incantation — as if enough repetition alone might be sufficient to summon the thing into being.

That confidence lasted exactly as long as it took you to push through the church's side door and see two teenage boys — the Dustin brothers, you'd learn shortly, though you didn't yet have names to put to their faces — already up on a stepladder, stapling ornaments to the exact beam you'd left unfinished the night before, their staples crooked and their banter loud and entirely unbothered by the fact that this had been, as far as you understood things, your job.

Something twisted low in your stomach, sharp and disproportionate to the actual size of the slight. You told yourself it didn't matter who finished the ornaments. You did not, in fact, manage to believe yourself.

You shrugged out of your coat in silence, watching the boys' cheerful, careless work a moment longer than necessary, and made your way toward the sacristy, brow already furrowed before you'd even reached the door. The room smelled, as it always did, of candle wax and old wood polish, vestments hanging in their orderly rows along one wall like a wardrobe built for a much stranger kind of theatre.

Baelor was there, alone, occupied with something at the shoulder seam of a violet alb, the colour of Advent, penance and waiting both folded into a single shade of cloth.

"Good morning." You kept your voice light. "What needs doing?"

He turned to look at you, and what met you in his eyes was so entirely unlike what had been there mere hours ago that you nearly took a physical step back from it.

Where warmth had stood the night before — warmth you'd felt with your whole body, warmth that still had your pulse doing something complicated whenever you let yourself think about it — there was now only a careful, deliberate distance, the kind a man constructs on purpose rather than simply falls into.

"Garrick and Harlan are already tending to it. Don't trouble yourself." The smile that came with it didn't make it anywhere near his eyes.

You tried to swallow around whatever his voice had just done to your chest and forced something like a smile of your own. "I brought climbing equipment today. In case it was needed."

"They're handy boys. I'm sure they'll manage." He turned his attention back to the alb, the conversation apparently concluded from his end.

You stood there a moment, fidgeting with your own fingers, looking down at them rather than at him. "Right," you said, mostly to fill the silence. "Well — there must be something else I could do."

"There always is." He offered nothing further, and you waited, foolishly, for an elaboration that simply never arrived.

You tried once more for something like the warmth that had, or so you'd let yourself believe, been growing steadily between the two of you these last weeks. "You look tired," you said, arms coming up to wrap around yourself, the gesture more defensive than you'd intended it to read.

His hands paused over the fabric for the barest fraction of a second. "Do I?"

"A little," you admitted, the faintest smile tugging at your mouth despite everything.

"Occupational hazard." He laughed, politely, and it landed less like genuine amusement and more like something he believed himself obligated to produce. A pause followed, longer than the joke warranted. "Would you mind helping Mrs. Reed in the parish hall? They're sorting donations for the Christmas drive."

You agreed, because there was nothing else on offer, and turned to leave.

The afternoon passed in an accumulation of small, catalogable evidence. The way he found reasons to be in whichever room you currently weren't. The exact, careful politeness he extended to you precisely as he extended it to every other volunteer that afternoon, nothing more, nothing that marked you as separate from Mrs. Reed or the Dustin brothers or anyone else currently sorting canned goods into cardboard boxes. At one point you both reached for the same box of ornaments at the same moment, and he withdrew his hand so quickly, so completely, that you nearly dropped the box entirely, fumbling to catch weight he would ordinarily have simply helped you carry.

You thought, sorting through a crate of secondhand ornaments while Mrs. Reed chattered pleasantly beside you about the parish's fundraising goals, of the specific way his voice had dropped the night before — rough-edged, stripped of its careful public register — and wondered whether you'd imagined the whole of it after all. Wondered whether desire had simply invented a version of events flattering enough to suit itself, the way desire apparently could, given half a chance and a dimly lit church.

By mid-afternoon you had started, despite your own best efforts not to, hunting for a cause. You ran through the obvious candidates and discarded most of them quickly enough — nothing you could point to, no specific offense, no moment you could identify as the hinge everything had swung on. And then, unbidden, unwelcome, one possibility surfaced and refused to submerge again: maybe I made him uncomfortable yesterday.

The thought should have landed like something manageable. Instead, it landed like a stone dropped into still water, and once it had broken the surface, every ripple that followed reshaped how you read the entire day. His hands at your waist, longer than strictly necessary. The way he'd looked at you before the thunder cracked. The whole suspended, tortuous length of that almost-moment you'd spent half the night convincing yourself you hadn't misread. Perhaps you had misread it after all. Perhaps you'd made a decent, well-intentioned man deeply, understandably uncomfortable, and this — the distance, the exact politeness, the careful redirection to donation boxes — was simply the kind, considerate way he'd chosen to handle your mistake without ever having to name it aloud.

By the time the afternoon's volunteers had gathered their coats and gone, dusk pressing early and blue against the windows the way it did this time of the year, you found him sitting alone in one of the front pews of the small side chapel, facing the tabernacle. Not praying, as far as you could tell. Simply sitting, spine slightly bowed, hands loose in his lap.

It occurred to you, watching him from several pews back, that you had never once actually seen him pray. Not properly, not in all the days you'd come here, though you'd certainly seen him perform every other visible function of his office with total competence. The votive candles nearest the tabernacle had mostly burned down to stubs by now, small orange points holding on against the gathering dark, and you found yourself wondering whether any of them had been lit by him.

You stood there a few moments longer than was probably polite, looking at the width of his back, the black cassock making him seem larger somehow in stillness than he ever did in motion. From this angle the collar was entirely invisible, hidden beneath the fall of black fabric at his throat, and for one strange, guilty moment you were glad of it; glad, however briefly, of the illusion that the man sitting in front of you belonged to no one and nothing beyond himself.

"Everything's finished," you said, quiet, from where you stood. "I think everyone's gone."

He didn't turn. You noticed, though, the small, almost imperceptible way his head dropped a fraction further. "So it seems," was all he offered.

You took a few steps closer and sat yourself in the pew directly behind his, close enough now that you could have reached out and touched his shoulder if you'd had any idea what you would have done with that kind of contact.

You fought, for several long seconds, the pressure building behind your teeth and the humiliating need to simply ask, to stop guessing and hunting through the day's evidence and just ask. You eventually lost.

"Did I do something wrong?"

Your own voice arrived in the same register a child might use bracing for a parent's disappointment, and you hated yourself for it even as the words left your mouth, already too late to call them back.

He turned then — properly turned, for the first time all day giving you the whole of his attention rather than some careful, rationed fraction of it — and his expression shifted through several things in quick succession: confusion first, and then something that looked, unmistakably, like guilt. Real guilt. Immediate and undisguised.

"What?" The word came out on an unsteady breath.

"Yesterday—" You laughed, quiet and humourless, more embarrassment than amusement, and didn't finish the sentence. You tried again, choosing your words more carefully this time, leaving him room to answer honestly rather than simply defensively. "I don't know. You've hardly looked at me all day."

It worked better than a direct accusation would have. You watched him understand that too; watched him recognize the door you'd left open for him to walk through without having to admit to anything more than he was ready to admit.

"I'm sorry." Not defensive. Not brushing past it. Simply, plainly sorry, and something about the sincerity of it hurt considerably worse than deflection would have.

You searched his face for something you didn't have a name for yet. "You don't have to apologize, Baelor."

Something moved across his face at the sound of his own name in your mouth, something you couldn't have fully described if pressed, though you filed the reaction away regardless, another entry in a ledger that was growing longer than you knew what to do with.

He opened his mouth. Closed it again without producing anything. His eyes dropped to his own clasped hands, and you watched, with a strange, suspended clarity, his thumb begin moving absently over the opposite knuckle, back and forth, some private and wordless working-through of a thing he couldn't say aloud. A breath came and caught somewhere in the middle of itself before he managed to release the rest of it. His shoulders sagged, incrementally, as though something he'd been carrying alone for years had finally, briefly, allowed itself to be felt as weight rather than simply as habit.

For one long, suspended moment, it genuinely felt as though he was about to tell you something enormous.

"I'm just tired," he said instead, very quietly.

You studied him for a long moment before you answered. "That isn't the whole truth, is it?"

Another silence, longer than the first. When he finally exhaled, it sounded less like an ordinary breath than something closer to surrender.

"No."

Your heart skipped, actually skipped, one single missed beat, because for the length of that one heartbeat you were entirely certain he was about to tell you. That whatever enormous thing had been sitting behind his eyes all day was finally going to be given words, right here, in the blue dark of a side chapel neither of you had bothered to light.

Instead, he smiled. Weary. Apologetic, in a way that felt like its own small, insufficient penance.

"But it's the only answer I can allow myself right now."

You let the silence sit between you after that, unwilling to push further into a door he'd just as good as told you he wasn't ready to open. You weren’t satisfied with that answer, not at all, but you understood, watching the tension still sitting in his shoulders, that pressing further tonight would cost more than either of you currently had to spend.

You said good night instead, quieter than you'd meant to, and left him there in the blue dark with whatever he wasn't yet willing to hand you, telling yourself, without much confidence, that there would be another evening for it.

There always is, he'd said, hours ago, about something else entirely.

You hoped, walking home through the cold, that it was still true and applicable to the space that seemed to separate you all of a sudden.

The Vigil Mass had let out a little after eight, though the building did not empty of people so much as slowly leak them, handshake by handshake, through the side door into a churchyard gone silver with frost.

Baelor had stood at the threshold the better part of an hour receiving the currency of Christmas Eve and had absorbed all of it with the same trained warmth he produced every December, until the last car pulled out of the gravel lot and left him alone with a stack of foil-covered dishes he had no real intention of eating and several hours yet before Midnight Mass would require anything further of him.

He did not go to the rectory. He told himself, locking the front door rather than the side, that the walk back through the nave would do him good — some vague and unexamined instinct toward penance, though he was long past pretending he still knew the difference between penance and simple avoidance.

He crossed the dark church lit only by the sanctuary lamp and the ranks of votives still guttering red beside the Nativity scene the altar guild had finished dressing that afternoon: the manger no longer empty, the way it had sat through the whole of Advent, waiting. Mrs. Reed had processed the Infant in sometime during the Vigil — she claimed the honour every year, and no one had yet found the courage to contest her for it — and laid Him at last in the straw, small and plaster-pink, catching what little light remained in the building.

Baelor did not know why the sight of it undid something in his chest tonight of all nights, when it had failed to manage the same in ten Christmases prior at this altar. He suspected he knew precisely why, and declined, as he had declined nearly everything else worth confessing this month, to look at it directly.

He took the back pew. Her pew, though he would not have said so aloud to anyone, and had in fact spent three weeks pretending the association had never lodged itself in him at all. Baelor has tried to convince himself of the fact that any pew, chosen at random, might have served just as well for a man wanting a few hours alone with a God who had gone conspicuously silent on him for longer than he currently had the patience to calculate. He, almost always, failed spectacularly.

It had been three weeks, now, since he had watched her walk out that same side door and told himself, with the conviction of a man constructing an alibi, that he had done the decent thing. A priest who could offer a woman nothing but scandal owed her, at minimum, the mercy of not letting her get any closer to a life that would cost her considerably more than it ever gave back.

He had told himself, that last afternoon in the sacristy, that the coldness had been a kindness; a controlled withdrawal engineered for her benefit rather than his own. The responsible action of a man who understood, better than she currently could, exactly how much damage he was capable of doing to a young woman who had already lost enough. He had held onto that story for the better part of a week, turning it over each night like a stone worn smooth from handling, comforted by how reasonable it sounded, how selfless.

He had built that justification brick upon carefully mortared brick, reinforced with enough real theology that it had held, more or less, clean through the third week of Advent. It took him nearly ten days to notice the story had a hole in it large enough to walk through and that the architecture he had thought as precise was clearly not holding tonight.

He braced his forearms against his knees, the cassock pulling taut across his shoulders, and made himself do what he had been circling for three weeks without ever quite landing on: the full accounting. Not the version he preached — love that costs nothing was never love, only convenience wearing love's vestments — but the version underneath it, the one he had apparently reserved for no one at all, not even himself, until an empty church at this particular hour finally cornered him into it.

He had not gone cold to protect her.

He had gone cold because for one suspended half-second three weeks ago, with her spine curved back against his own hands and thunder cracking the stained glass loose in its leading, he had wanted. Wholly, specifically, with an intensity that bore no resemblance to the manageable, textbook temptation he'd spent fifteen years training himself to weather. And the wanting had frightened him more than any sin he had ever been taught to guard against from that pulpit.

Lust, Baelor had been telling himself at the moments he felt more vulnerable, he could have managed easy enough. Lust had its own liturgy: name it, confess it, do the penance, watch it pass the way weather passes. He knew the path.

What had actually moved through him in that sacristy would not pass, though, because it was not lust. He had known that even as he fled it, his own hands leaving her waist so fast the absence carried its own small violence, and the knowing had done considerably more to terrify him than any fear of scandal ever had.

He had told himself he was protecting her. What he had actually done was protect himself and dressed the cowardice in a cassock respectable enough that even he had been fooled by it for most of a month.

A man protecting her would have found some way to remain honest with her. Distant, yes, but certainly careful and honest. He had rather manufactured a performance of indifference precise enough to convince a perceptive young woman that she had imagined two months of something. He had watched her work it out in real time, that terrible afternoon in the parish hall — watched her hunt for the offense she must have given him, watched her land, wrongly and with visible pain, on herself as the cause — and he had let her sit inside that wrong conclusion for three weeks rather than correct it, because correcting it would have required naming what was actually true, and naming it was the one thing he had not yet found the courage to survive.

How readily the heart baptizes its own sins, he thought now, recognizing the shape of it — recognizing, too, that he had thought nearly the identical sentence three weeks prior, kneeling at the side of his own bed, and had apparently learned nothing from the thought except how to think it a second time with a fresh coat of shame applied.

None of this recognition had made the following days any easier to survive. If anything, the clarity made it worse: he no longer had the comfort of believing himself noble about it, only lonely, and specifically, deliberately lonely this time, having manufactured the loneliness himself with his own two hands and then had nowhere honest left to put the blame for it.

He had not known misery like the misery of the past twenty days. Not in fifteen years of vocation, not in four years of dry, wordless prayer. He had simply not accounted for the weight of an absence that was entirely his own doing, a door he had closed with his own hand and then had to walk past, every day, in his own church, knowing exactly whose fault it was that it stayed shut.

Now it was the twenty-fourth of December, and he had not seen her since the day he'd given her nothing but a cold shoulder dressed up as tiredness.

The church clock ticked over its quarter-hour somewhere above the belfry. Soon, he thought. Midnight, the bells, the whole parish arriving half-frozen and candlelit for the one Mass of the year that still filled every pew he owned. He had perhaps two hours left of whatever this currently was — solitude, penance, cowardice examining itself in the dark — before duty required him upright and vested, singing the old proclamations over a congregation with no notion that their priest had spent three weeks failing every single thing he had ever told them love was supposed to look like.

He sat in the back pew — her pew, he admitted again to himself — facing the tabernacle, alone in every sense of the word he currently had access to. He was not praying, not exactly. He had stopped pretending, these past weeks, that sitting in front of the tabernacle and praying were reliably the same activity.

He heard the side door before he heard anything else. It had a particular three-note complaint at the old hinge before it settled that Baelor registered and did not turn. Parishioners came and went from the church at every hour on Christmas Eve; some private, unshakeable devotion drew the lonelier half of his flock back through those doors long after the Vigil crowd had gone home to their families, chasing whatever the empty nave offered that the full one hadn't. He assumed, hearing the door, that this was simply one more of them, and kept his eyes on the tabernacle, and did not turn.

Footsteps crossed the stone toward his end of the church, measured and quiet against the marble, and stopped at the pew he currently occupied. He felt, before he processed it as thought, the small shift of weight as someone settled onto the bench beside him.

He smelled her before he saw her.

Jasmine. Not perfume exactly, or not only. Something warmer than that, something that seemed to rise off her skin rather than sit on top of it the way scent from a bottle usually did, faint and green and just short of sweet, the note he had spent three weeks failing to name in memory whenever he tried and failed to recall precisely what it was about being near her that had always, since the very first handshake in the vestibule, made something in his chest go quiet in a way incense never once managed.

Baelor had never told her he loved that smell. He had never told her anything close to the truth of what moved through him when it reached him, and it reached him now, sudden and total, a full second before she rounded the end of the pew, and by the time she sat down beside him — close, in the way of someone who had chosen him rather than simply taken the nearest available seat — whatever composure an hour of brutal honesty had cost him to assemble had already abandoned him entirely.

He turned.

She was watching him already, had been, he suspected, for the length of those footsteps, and the smile she offered did not come anywhere near her eyes. It sat crooked at one corner instead, apologetic and uncertain in a way that made his chest contract sharply enough that he nearly reached for her before he'd decided to do anything of the kind.

He knew that smile. It was an expression he recognized immediately because he'd been wearing some close cousin of it himself for nearly three weeks.

He said nothing. He had spent twenty days rehearsing, in odd, unguarded moments, some version of what he might say if he ever got to see her again, and found now, faced with the actual reality of her sitting an arm's length away, that every rehearsed line had evaporated completely, leaving him with nothing but the plain, humiliating fact of having hurt her and no adequate words assembled anywhere in him to address it.

They simply existed there together for a while, in a silence that should have been unbearable and somehow wasn't. He could feel the warmth of her radiating against the side of his cassock where her shoulder nearly, not quite, met his. A sweet, ordinary heat that stood in stark and almost startling contrast to the last time they'd been this close, weeks ago, with thunder cracking overhead and his own hands still burning at her waist. There was nothing carnal in it now, or nothing only carnal. It read instead as something closer to relief given a temperature, comfort with a pulse behind it.

Three weeks ago, in this same building, a comparable warmth and a comparable proximity had ended with his own hand around his own cock and a confession he could not bring himself to make even in the dark, even to God directly. What moved through him now bore almost no resemblance to that night's hunger. It was not smaller. If anything it occupied more room in him, sat heavier. It simply was not, tonight, primarily a thing his body wanted. It was something considerably more dangerous.

He looked at the plain wooden cross above the altar and let himself think, for the first time without immediately flinching from the thought, that he still wanted her. He thought, with a clarity that would have frightened him a month ago and now simply arrived, quiet and total, that he could have gone to his knees right there on the cold marble and prayed at the altar of her. He could ask, again and again, for an absolution only she was positioned to grant him; plead, in whatever language a man used for a thing this far past reasonable, that she never left again the way these twenty days had made him believe she might.

He did none of it. He sat, frozen by the sheer size of what he'd just allowed himself to think and let the silence continue instead.

"I hope there weren't too many entitled women today," she said finally, her voice landing somewhere between uncertain and hopeful, testing the ground before committing her full weight to it.

He huffed something close to a laugh and turned to look at her properly. "Let's just say I won't need to cook for myself for at least a week." The joke came easier than he'd expected, some old, grateful muscle memory taking over where his more careful faculties had failed him entirely. "I could see myself through to Epiphany on goodwill alone."

She smiled at that — a real smile, however small, climbing further up her face than the one she'd walked in with — and he could have sworn, absurdly, that his own heart actually moved in his chest at the sight of it, some physical lurch he had no theological vocabulary adequate to explain.

They held each other's eyes a moment longer than the joke strictly required, and the silence that followed felt entirely unlike the one that had come before it — warmer, though not yet safe.

"I actually wasn't sure about coming." Her eyes stayed on her own hands, folded in her lap. "After the other day, I thought — I don't know. I didn't want to be the sort of person who doesn't take a hint. I thought that maybe I needed to give you some space. In case I was becoming a bit too much."

"Don't be silly." The answer left him faster than he'd intended, almost tripping over itself in its hurry to correct her. "It's me who owes you an apology. My behaviour that day was—" he searched for a word that wouldn't require explaining the whole of what actually lay beneath it and settled for an inadequate one. "Poor. It was poor, and it was unfair to you, and I am sorry for it."

She nodded, faint, more to herself than to him, and something in the set of her shoulders told him she wasn't finished. "You had me believing I was unwanted here." Her voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, and he felt the crack land somewhere in his own chest like a physical blow. "Which is stupid, I know — you don't owe me anything, you never did — but I'd started thinking of this place as somewhere that was actually mine. Somewhere I got to just exist, without anyone needing managing from me, for once. And then you—"

She didn't finish it. She didn't have to. He watched the first tear break loose and travel the length of her cheek before either of them had acknowledged what was happening, and something in his own chest gave way at the sight of it more completely than three weeks of solitary, brutal honesty had managed on its own.

He turned fully toward her then, his whole body pivoting on the pew, and his hands found hers where they sat clenched in her lap, covering them before he'd consciously decided to. Her warmth beneath his palms did something complicated and inconvenient to the rest of him, some low, insistent pull he chose, deliberately, to ignore in favour of the considerably more urgent thing happening in front of him.

"You will always have a place here." He got the words out before she could continue, though it turned out not to matter, because she spoke straight over him anyway, the sentence already building too much momentum to be stopped by anything as small as his interruption. "That was never in question. It will never be in question."

"I thought that I understood you." Her breath was coming faster now, catching unevenly between words. "Your loneliness — that sadness you keep locked up behind everything else, that feeling like you have to carry the whole weight of everyone alone — I thought I understood that, in you, because I recognized it. And I thought you understood me too, and I — I—"

Her breathing had gone properly ragged now, words fracturing apart faster than she could assemble them, and he stopped her the only way he could think to in the moment: lifting both hands from hers to her face instead, thumbs coming to rest against the wet tracks already cutting down her cheeks.

Her name left his lips — the only solid thing he had left to offer her, thrown out as deliberately as a lifeline to a drowning woman — and it worked exactly as he'd hoped. Her eyes found his again, properly, holding there instead of skittering away.

"I understand you," he said, quiet and entirely certain, the first fully honest sentence he'd managed to give anyone in longer than he wanted to calculate. "And you understand me. And I am so ashamed — so genuinely ashamed — of having caused you even a fraction of this pain. I—"

He didn't finish. She closed the remaining distance between them in a single motion, the whole of her colliding into his chest, her face burying itself in the black fabric over his heart, and whatever he'd been about to say dissolved, unimportant now, into the more urgent business of simply holding her.

He wondered, distantly, whether she could feel how hard his heart was currently working against her ear, pressed as she was directly over it. He was fairly certain she could, because Baelor didn’t bother trying to still it.

His arms came around her without any further input required from the rest of him, holding her shaking frame together while her sobs worked themselves out against the fabric already growing damp beneath her face, and he stayed exactly like that — steady, present, entirely hers for as long as she needed him to be — for considerably longer than he bothered counting.

Her sobs thinned eventually, then stopped, and she drew back from him at her own pace, wiping at her face with the back of one hand in a gesture that struck him as almost childlike in its simplicity. "Sorry," she managed, on a breath still not quite steady.

"Don't be. Please." He shook his head, meaning it entirely.

She nodded, more to herself than to him, some private decision apparently being finalized. "How about we just — forget this happened. All of it." Her eyes found his again, searching. "Stop apologizing to each other and go back to where we left off. I promise I'll still believe you're a cool priest."

The laugh that pulled out of him was real, surprised out of him despite everything the evening had already asked of him. "I'm holding you to that." His hand found the back of her neck, gentle, tilting her face back up to his when it had started to drop. "I’ll remove you from wreath-duty until next year."

"What?"

"The wreath. You're off the hook until next Advent."

She laughed at that too — a real laugh this time, breaking through whatever was left of the tears — and the sound of it did something to the whole of him that fifteen years of careful discipline had absolutely no defence prepared against.

He turned back toward the altar eventually, leaning into the worn wood of the pew behind him, and she shifted beside him a moment later, settling her weight against his side with an ease that suggested she'd stopped questioning whether she was allowed to. His arm found its way around her shoulders without any real deliberation on his part, and her head came to rest in the crook of it, cheek against the side of his chest, close enough that every breath she took registered against him.

He breathed her in. Jasmine, warm and close and entirely real this time, no phantom trace left to chase down a stranger's collar or a shop aisle.

He fucking loved jasmine.

A.N.: sooooo, what do we think? i warned it would be a slow burn, but they're getting there... i will work on the next parts along the weeks, they will be shorter (or at least i'll try) because proofreading this behemoth was a workout in itself lol. as always, comments and feedback is very much appreciated. i love you all <3

TAGLIST: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd @caitlynluna @sacha1slytherin @alternarabuda @jjubilee-fluff @a-sunflower-in-bloom @heieufh @karakatitsa-sonya @eleventhboi @celestialsonglines @xglittergoddess @warpedlilium @themoonseroticoracle @hrh007 @fraaiefreule91 @hannisreading @samthegreenapologist @dont-try-pesticide @thorins-queen-of-erebor @outpostsworld @sotragedynut @nicoall12 @escapic-mezzanine @m0th-g0th @noble-17 @bbjkfnmc @sol-in-wonderland @sem-ra @mitth-eli-vanto @justmasblack @coff33mug

In many ways, Maekar reminded you of your childhood pet: Salem.

A white Persian cat who hissed and clawed at anyone foolish enough to go near him. Except you, whom he simply chose to ignore, walking away as soon as you entered his space. That didn't stop you from cooing at him and buying his affection with food and catnip. It eventually worked, for you were the only person in your household who could hold and kiss the little devil and live to tell the tale.

Your husband was, in many ways, like your cat.

He cursed as much as Salem hissed. No one was spared from his sharp tongue. Maekar cussed at his brothers (especially Aerys), at any lord foolish enough to speak to him, and at the ladies who glared at him after he cussed at their lord husbands. His mother, Queen Myriah, once told you his first word had been a swear word. Even though you suspected the Queen was teasing, it wouldn't have surprised you in the slightest. You could perfectly imagine an infant Maekar, his white hair cut into a bowl, cussing at his governess.

Instead of claws, Maekar had swords. Your prince especially enjoyed blowing off steam in the training yard, sometimes battering his opponent if he was in a sour mood. Though his weapon of choice remained the mace, which he loved to use against his eldest brother.

Finally, like Salem, Maekar left his white hair absolutely everywhere...

However, unlike the little pest, you weren't Maekar's favorite person. That spot belonged to Prince Baelor, with whom your husband spent most of his time.

At first, you found the love the brothers bore each other endearing. It was rare for siblings to get along within the nobility, and especially within the House of the Dragon. The Blackfyre Rebellion was the perfect example.

However, you thought Maekar would come back to you whenever Prince Baelor had to attend to his duties. On the contrary, your lord husband preferred to spend his time either in the training yard or in his solar. You only saw him during meals and before bed.

His behavior was vexing, to say the least. You had been married for almost a year now, too long to qualify as newlyweds, yet he still treated you like a stranger. No one would know you were his wife if it weren't for the softening of his cursing whenever you were around.

Something had to be done.

Since Maekar wouldn't come to you, you would go to him.

Therefore, on an unassuming afternoon, you stepped into the courtyard wearing training attire. The stitch was much heavier than you would have expected beneath your clothes, but the simple tunic and trousers allowed you to move freely. It pleased you to be able to move your legs however you liked, without the fear of ripping expensive fabric constantly plaguing your mind. As pretty as your gowns were, they were too elaborate for a simple stroll through the gardens.

Or training with a sword in the courtyard.

Once you spotted Maekar's clump of white hair from across the yard, you walked straight toward him. One of the soldiers training there stopped mid-movement to gawk at you in shock, and his opponent took advantage of the distraction to knock him into the dirt. To be fair, ladies in trousers were a rare sight.

If only you could have such an effect on your own husband. The latter seemed determined to win his bout against his opponent, his sword strikes falling like rain upon the poor fellow. Maekar truly was glorious in battle, and the fact that he remained shirtless while training only added to his appeal.

His opponent saw you before he did and barely managed to block Maekar's deadly sword.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" the Anvil growled. "A squire could have seen this from a mile away!"

"Your lady wife is here, my lord."

Maekar frowned at him suspiciously but turned around nonetheless, his sword steady in his hands.

There you were, smiling right in front of him. If your clothes disturbed him, he didn't show it in the slightest.

"Husband," you greeted him happily.

"Wife," he replied grumpily. "What are you doing here?"

"I've come to see you, of course! Your prowess as a knight is sung all across the realm, yet I realized I'd never seen it for myself."

A lie. You had been observing the prince from the window long before you were even married.

"Prince Maekar truly is remarkable, my lady," the knight your husband had been training with chirped teasingly.

"Shut it," the Anvil growled before taking your wrist and guiding you well away from the clashing of swords and shields.

A scowl adorned his face, yet his grip was gentle. He released you once you were out of earshot.

"This isn't a place for a woman," he grunted, staring at you as though you were a willful child. "You could get hurt."

"So you do care about me," you teased.

His eyes widened as if surprised by your statement. He opened and closed his mouth, gaping like a fish, unable to decide what to say. His confusion, as well as the blush creeping onto his cheeks, only made him even more endearing to you. It was certainly a welcome change.

Maekar must have noticed your amusement, for his shyness instantly disappeared, replaced by his usual grumpiness.

"Don't flatter yourself," he grumbled. "Baelor wouldn't let me hear the end of it if you got yourself unnecessarily hurt. I don't have the time for this kind of nonsense."

"I wouldn't get hurt if you were the one training me," you suggested, even though that had been your goal from the very beginning.

Maekar looked at you as though a horn had suddenly sprouted from your forehead.

"Absolutely not. That idea is even madder than the last. I've seen the way you turn your head away during tourneys. You don't even care about training."

"Mayhaps, but I care about spending time with my husband."

His blush deepened at the word husband.

Interesting...

"Still, there's no way in the Seven Hells I'm training you," he argued, stubborn as ever.

"Would you rather I find another man to train me? There are plenty of skilled warriors around. I'm sure I can find a suitable teacher on my own."

For the first time, Maekar truly noticed the way you were dressed, and how well your clothes suited you. He frowned, clearly displeased by the thought.

Finally, the Anvil let out a sigh of resignation.

"You're going to be the death of me, woman."

"I certainly hope so, husband."

The word definitely flustered him. He coughed to regain his composure, but it was too late. Maekar lent you his own sword and positioned himself behind you, using his hands to correct your stance.

You didn't mind having his hands on your hips, and you certainly didn't mind making him stammer by pressing a kiss beneath his jaw.

"Gods be good," he grumbled.

You smiled, victorious.

Angering Lyonel Baratheon was certainly a difficult task, yet you had managed it with quiet certainty by in his words behaving like a little brat.

Tourney’s were exceptionally boring, you had never met another woman who gave any amount of care to two grown men poking and prodding each other with glorified sticks. It was futile, and petty and boring. Your role throughout was to maintain appearances, not get visibly intoxicated and socialise with the other ladies. There was nothing wrong with the other ladies, but to put it kindly; you were all sick of one another. Your husbands and fathers all thrust you together to gossip and have cake, because they presumed that was all you were good for, if they got on drinking together then their women would get along suitably. You all had your own interests, your own minds, desires and cares. Your only common clause was being women, you would fiercely defend one another - that had no doubt, but you did not necessarily like one another or enjoy the total company. Yet your father seemed to lack this understanding, providing you at the entrance of Lady Ashford’s pavilion each morning so that you would mingle and socialise.

To put it plainly, you were incredibly bored, hence why you had opted to depart from the back exit of the pavilion, a wink to Lady Ashford and her daughter Gwin, who supplied one in return. You wanted to explore, and you intended to do so regardless of instruction. That was one beneficial thing of being a Lady, you would gossip of the court and the men, but of one another was kept minimal, and if the men need not know then they would not find out.

The road was quiet enough. Well really it was less of a road and more of a side path, it led you in the direction of the true meadows that provided Ashford its name. A beautiful place, stoic and changing with each season, but the early spring had provided a new wave of colour to the grasslands of the Reach.

Truly you had only intended to stay an hour, or two. But the sunset hours were so entirely welcoming you could only sit and admire the vast view before your eyes. It was stunning. The flowers had blossomed an array of pinks all the way to blues and yellows, scattered across one another like a childish finger painting. As the colours clashed you could hear the bird song, watching them dance across the now pinkened sky as the hollow sun begun to hang low beneath the horizon, the last thing on your mind was the time. Time felt futile in a place like this, where you could become so enamoured by your surroundings you felt extraterrestrial - time felt unnaturally mundane to such a foreign feeling. So you did not let it consume you, instead you remained.

Amongst the grassland, the heathers begun to part to your left. A wandering fawn and its mother, brown and speckled you smiled. A childish grin for something so naive. With your knees pulled to your chest and your skirts soddened with dried earth you remained still. You did not wish to unnerve such a beautiful creation, they were so easily startled. Despite being the sigil of your house, your home led so close to the coast combined with horrific storms you rarely got such a sight of wildlife, even that of your house sigil. It was a refreshing memory to see one so close again. You had not since you were merely a girl. You admired quietly, contented. It was peaceful, peace you had brought and provided yourself that days in that stuffy tent could have never. It was the footfall of a horse that startled the poor creatures, fleeing back the path they came in a hurry. You frowned in annoyance, turning to see a large white stallion pausing a short distance from you, a pale hardened prince upon its back.

Maekar watched in confusion, undoubtedly you were Baratheon, he could see that a mile off by your black and gold attire - even then if he were in doubt the small stag antlers at the back of your head gave him all the message he needed. Yet the fact you were a woman alone in a field concerned him nonetheless. He lowered from his horse, patting her nose gently as he walked over.

You, seemingly did not care to hold your tongue in the presence of a prince - nor greet one properly.

“Must you be such a brute? You are scaring the animals of this meadow.” You pouted, it appeared childish to him. You were a woman, he knew as such for you had been a contender to marry his eldest son Daeron, but your father had declined upon learning the drunken nature of the man.

“You are Baratheon’s spawn then.” He grunted, he regretted ever stopping for you. But then again, his mother had raised him better than to leave a girl alone and vulnerable no matter the circumstances. “Spawn is a rather insulting term is it not?” You rebutted, you did not stand. Why would you? He was interrupting your private time.

“Should you not be with the other ladies?” He raised an eyebrow, eyeing the state of your undoubtedly expensive skirts now coated with, dampened but drying, mud. The dramatic groan of annoyance you let out caught him off guard, he was struggling to hide the amusement it brought him. He had never met a woman quite so openly dramatic, many saved that for the privacy of the bedchamber - if even then.

“Why does every man think that we ladies want to spend all day with one another cooped up like chickens. It is not enjoyable, it is not fun, and we do not often like each other. Gods forbid I want to enjoy the scenery you men get to frolic in freely - even then you do not use it to your full advantage! Look at the beauty of this place, and entirely undisturbed as well!” The smile of quiet amusement that fell upon his face at your passion was unusual for you to witness. He was spoken to be brazen, stoic, hating of all people including publicly his children. Yet here he was, Maekar the Anvil, grinning at your description of what men were doing wrong. “You can move on, I do not wish for company.”

“I was raised better than to leave a woman vulnerable, even if the scenery is so enticing.” His voice was low, but equally as enticing as the sight before you as you tore your eyes from it to gaze up at him. His words were an indication for you to move on, not waste his time. He had no authority over you, well maybe technically speaking he was a prince so he did, but you were a Baratheon - and stubborn by even those standards.

“Your presence is not wanted nor desired my prince, you best hurry back.” You instructed, in any other circumstance such a tone could end in punishment for your house but seeing as the fact he was bothering you, you deemed it more than appropriate for the situation. However much to your surprise, he sat down in the tall grass to your right. Your brows furrowed at the gesture. “No need to hurry when there is no one waiting on me.” The way he said it even struck a sliver of guilt within your chest, you had not been the one to wound him in such a way but your attitude had likely added to the internal bleeding.

“And why is that?” You asked sincerely, you had no dealings with Targaryens so you had no knowledge of their doings unless your father got drunk enough to start spewing anti-targaryen propaganda disguised as dark humour. “My eldest and youngest sons have strayed from the path on the journey here. Their whereabouts are unknown. My second son… he does not need me truly, he is independent and a man now.” The confession of his children cut deep, you were close in age to his eldest two, slotting right between them in terms of it. You had no siblings of your own so you could not share the sentiment of them. “I didn’t take you for one to confess feelings.” Your smirk was gentle, but telling. Only trying to lighten the mood when he felt so sentimentally dampened by his kin.

“Well. They don’t listen to me, my brother has other occupants to adhere to. And you won’t tell anyone as the last three days I have seen you in no company but your own.” You stared at him, blinking. This man was known to scare off any who dared to tread to close and he was insulting your lack of company? The audacity of a man never failed to impress you.

“So you are watching me now?” You watched him falter at your words, trying to silently regain his composure with a deep breath. “You’re hard to miss.” He admitted, “your father always makes sure you are the best dressed in the room.” There was no doubt within that statement, the finest silks, head to toe gold from crown pieces to earrings to necklaces and rings, intimately sewn adornments onto the black priceless fabrics of your owns all designed and paid for by your father. You were spoken of to be the best dressed in the realm on more occasion than one, envied for the loving coin your father carelessly doused you in.

“Well. I cannot deny my fashion sense outranks yours even if my status does not.”

He chuckled quietly at the bluntness of the statement, among Targaryens at the least he was given the grace of being best dressed. Baelor did not care especially and allowed Jena to adorn him as she saw fit, Aerys had more pressing matters than the intricacies of clothing, and Rhaegel was naked more often than he was clothed. Sure Maekar dabbled in fashion, that was no secret. His time in Dorne as a growing man had taught him a thing or two. What fabrics complimented, what caught an eye - or on the contrary, what forced you to blend in. His children were always styled well of course, he took pride in the cohesion of his boys. Though two were no longer boys, the third he had not seen in over a year, and the fourth would happily run around in a potato sack if he let him. Regardless he could not deny you the truth in your words. You did always look stunning.

“Mm. I could have your tongue for that.” He nodded, eyes narrowed

“But would you go through the effort? You look rather depleted my prince.” Gods he hated that grin, you resembled your father in that alone. The arrogant smirk of the Laughing Storm. Unfortunately in Maekar’s eyes, in his life experience and from reading the history, if a child had a Baratheon parent they were undoubtedly going to come out near identical. There hadn’t been a Baratheon born for centuries without the hair or the eyes. The case was no different in you. You had your own features yes, ones that were not your father’s. But even then, your essence was entirely that of an arrogant stag - attitude and all. “No.” He mumbled, “but I can see why your father hasn’t managed to marry you off yet, what with a tongue like that.”

You glared at him, smirk depleted the same as his energy. But he had gotten under your skin, he knew it and you knew that because he was watching for your reaction, corner of his lips upturned tightly. “If you must know my father is speaking to Leo Tyrell’s father.” You answered proudly. Did you especially care for Leo Tyrell? No. But the Highgarden was said to be the most beautiful standpoint in Westeros, who wouldn’t want to make that their home? If you could not marry for love you would certainly be marrying the man with the nicest house.

Maekar looked as if he’d eaten a particularly sour berry, he scoffed in distaste. “And here I thought you had taste Lady Baratheon, Leo Tyrell would not make a good husband for you.”

“Oh do tell?” You rested your chin upon your knees, listening truly and intently.

“He’s a pushover, he cannot hold a satisfactory conversation, he’s a good fighter i’ll give him that - he’s bested my Aerion a few times but he lacks the wit to keep up with a mouth like yours.” He explained in a way that was subtly animated, his hands following the guidance of his words as you nodded along. “I mean there is always Symon Stark in the north, Winterfell.” You continued, watching him roll his eyes so far back you feared he might blind himself. “Symon Stark would not put up with the insolence you carry. And with a dress as you are currently wearing you’d freeze to death in the north.” Your mouth hung wide, “you said you liked my fashion sense!”

“I never said I liked it i just acknowledged it’s more widely favoured than my own.” His hands fell upward in mock defence as you let out a near animalistic noise. “God’s you are rude Maekar Targaryen! Bloody rude!” You exasperated, he only laughed softly, shaking his head.

You shook your head in annoyance, “Tybolt Lannister was the last who asked. Don’t get me wrong I had my eye on the gold that would come from that alliance but he was so bloody arrogant I wanted to smack him.”

“Should have done it.” Maekar nodded, leaning back lightly as you took a breath, more of a huff really, then continued. “Oh let me tell you Maekar I bloody wanted to, he was all we Lannisters all know how to treat a woman right, and so i said to him is that the reason why I’m the fourth woman this moon you’ve tried to court, and he turned all you’re not the fourth woman-” Maekar was highly amused at the animation of your story, the changes in your voice and tone, not to mention the yapping motion you were making with your hands for yourself and Tybalt Lannister. “Then he went to his father and said he didn’t want anything to do with the Baratheon brat, well, let me tell you my father ripped him a new one. There’s one man who can call me a brat and that’s my father, and I only allow it because he pays for everything.”

“Oh is that so my dear?” He teased as you nodded rapidly, “Yes. He always calls me a spoiled brat but then he’ll say you’re the light in this world, daughter so I don’t really get the chance to be mad at him, or he buys me another necklace. I like necklaces you know, gold. But I think the red and gold is tacky as it reminds me of the Lannisters even though that’s what you can most often find. I prefer gold and sapphires.”

“They are more expensive.” He acknowledged, looking down at you and the sapphire and gold necklace that hung by your collarbone, the pendant a golden stag crowned in the icy blue gems. It was small and subtle, but definitely there, and most certainly worth more than what he was wearing - and for a crown prince that was certainly quite daunting, a Lady of a noble house having a necklace worth more than royal attire. He could only chuckle at the thought.

“They are. But if I desire them, I will get them.”

“You will never find a husband willing to provide the level your father does, not even with a face that can pout like yours.” He responded gruffly, but you supposed there was a compliment dug in there tightly.

“No?” You questioned, eyes gazing up at his as he shook his head, “no. And those men you have told me about are certainly not worth the time of day.”

“But then I am left without a husband.” You pouted, you didn’t especially care either way but you enjoyed toying with this prince, watching the way his emotions played on his face, hitting either side of the scale repeatedly. “Good. You’d be better off without them.” He concluded.

“Why? Would you like to wed and bed me, my prince?” His eyes widened as your laughter filled his ears. He glared at you, cheeks reddening lightly, “and here I thought we were having a genuine conversation.” He stood, dusting off his trousers and whistling his horse. “Well. It was a lovely conversation my prince, enjoy your journey.”

“Don’t be fucking daft.” He grunted, “get on the horse.”

Your eyes widened, lips parting “excuse me?”

“You heard what I said, get on the horse.”

“But I am not done out here!” You protested, yet he clasped your forearm and pulled you to stand, feigned annoyance plastered over his aged features.

“Nobody likes a whiny brat, get on the horse. I already told you I was not leaving you out here, shut up and get on.” You huffed before grabbing your skirts and mounting the horse, he took place on the saddle behind you, his firm chest feel-able even through the fabrics of his tunic and cloak. “Do not call me a brat.” You glared, the only angle you could truly locate his face from, was up. Meaning you were staring directly at that scratchy looking beard that suited him oh so well. “I can see why you have your nickname.” Was the only response you got, not an apology. So you complained again as you begun your journey.

“Apologise.”

“No.”

You watched every passing tree, bush, or even the skyline as it passed you as you ventured back to Ashford castle, wallowing in your last taste of freedom. He noted the travelling of your head, sensing your eyes were tracking the movements of the scenery he prompted his horse to slow, allowing you to watch less hurriedly. Maybe he was perceived as a brute, yes, but he was not unkind. The silence between the pair of you was welcome, neither of you needed to say much else, he was simply your escort home by this point.

You begun to near Ashford, you knew this because you could see the rising pavilions and bonfires. An involuntary sigh escaped you at the sight of the courtyard. A stable boy took the reins of the horse as Maekar stepped down, putting out a hand for you, and only once you were back on firm ground did he guide you in the direction of the nearest Kings Guard. “Please see to it this insolent girl is returned to her father, best he knows she was wandering in the dark and alone in Ashford’s meadow.”

“Why you foul git how-” You begun, but Maekar cut you off with a firm nod of direction and the Kings Guard clasped your upper arm before near dragging you to your father’s tents.

Mentally exhausted from such a taxing, yet amusing, conversation Maekar followed the winding paths up to the guest wing of Ashford castle. Baelor stood in the bay window of the corridor, he turned to eye his younger brother with a small smirk.

“Have a nice accompanied evening did you?” Baelor questioned, an eyebrow raised as he fought back a grin.

“Bloody Baratheon’s.” Was all Maekar could manage in response, shuffling into his bedchamber and slamming the door enough to rattle the hinges.

A/N: guys i have a thing for targaryen men in fields can you tell?? ooc maekar but idrc. hope you guys enjoyed seeing as i haven’t written for maekar in a lil while. but why this was kind of cute as fuck.

general akotsk taglist:

@noone1233nobody @antobooh @mikariell95 @kravitzwhore @vanillafan6 @ae-gax @galactict3a @aleemendoza2425-blog @feral-postings @n3rdybirdee @mossthedevouring @loveslide @serduncansdelight @seekingtherapyasap @moonlights-muse @icebearcucumber @poisonedsultana @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @qardasngan

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Your sister means kindly by it. She does. Her invitation had all the look of family affection and all the substance of pity besides—come stay with us awhile, come out of that lonely house, come be amongst noise and life, as though noise and life were sovereign cures for widowhood.

And perhaps they are for some women. Perhaps some woman, not yet a year bereft, would be glad enough to clap eyes on the nearest decent man, let him grunt his way over her, and set to breeding by way of proof that the world had not ended. That has never been your method.

Life has had the indecency to go on this past year. That is the trouble. It goes on in your own lonely house, and it goes on here, in your sister’s bustling one, with a cow to be milked and a kettle to be watched and small sticky hands forever catching at your sleeves, while every soul about you peers on as if waiting for you to remember your proper business and take another husband. In the meanwhile the plain truth is that the countryside is dull enough to drive a woman to gnaw her own hand for want of diversion, if only to see what might happen next.

Before your teeth reach the tendon, though, Bitterbridge answers. It gathers everything to itself: lordlings and lowborn, sellswords and cutthroats, the poor, the rich, the young, the old, the whores and the ones hot for them. Another tournament is proclaimed in honour of some spoiled highborn brat because she happens to be her father’s favourite daughter, and the town and its outskirts swell with ale, coin, filth, and horseshit.

Any breach in this boredom will serve. Any face but your sister’s—leg-spreader, Gods bless her, and lovingly said, though not without a pinch of envy—her kind-hearted husband’s, and those of her full-cheeked children might yet be your salvation. To walk streets bursting with life. To see blood running from men’s temples and lust bright on the faces of those who slip away by night to the makeshift brothel. To live vicariously through them might well save you from losing a hand after all.

What you are going to lose, beyond doubt, is either your sanity or your hearing, perhaps both, brought about by your sister’s piercing screech one morning. One of her offspring is lost. Unseen by his siblings the whole night past, likely wandered off into town to gape at knights and steal ale from the bottoms of half-drunk cups. A little hellion, that one. Curious and sweet in his own fashion, and by far the one nearest your heart.

“I’m taking the horse,” you tell your sister, shrugging into your cloak. “I’ll search the outskirts while Harlan searches the town.” She only stares at you, shaking. You cross to her, cup her face in both hands, and rest your brow to hers for a moment. “Be brave, my darling. We’ll find him.”

“What if he’s lost?” she whispers. “What if he’s taken, or split in half for disturbing a lord?”

Then you have four others still, you think first, sharp and ugly as a pin. “Nonsense,” you say. “What use would the Gods have for sweet little Pate, hm?”

“Gods? None.” She gives a weak little smile. “But I feel the Hells would take him gladly.”

You laugh at that, kiss her brow, fold her tight to you once, and then you are off.

First, you ride for the meadows where the contestants have pitched their camps. The horse you leave hitched beneath a willow, and the rest of the search you take on foot. You ask after Pate wherever there is a face to ask, though half the camp is too drunk, concussed, or both to trust their own names, much less a boy’s. The others tell you only that this is no place for a child alone, which you had gathered already. One man asks what it would cost to have your legs spread.

You smile at him sweetly. “I fear you have not coin enough for that, goodman.”

He is comely enough that, under other circumstances, you might have gone with him all the same. Being taken for a whore does not prick your pride half so much as perhaps it ought. There are worse things to be mistaken for, and you have another errand in hand. Still, the press of so many fine men in one place is enough to do a widow’s head in. You have not been touched in an age, and your body, faithless thing, seems minded to remind you of it now.

Then you hear your name, shrilled above the crush of voices spilling between the food stalls, trinket boards, and smiths’ tents. You turn, looking low first, towards the height of men’s thighs, and so it takes you a blink to find him.

Pate is not on the ground at all. He is perched high on a man’s shoulders, little legs dangling down the broad plane of his chest, both hands fisted in the man’s hair to keep himself steady.

“Aunt!” he cries, cheeks scored with clean tracks where tears have cut through the dust. “Ser Duncan—there’s my aunt!”

The knight turns at once, and the first thing that strikes you is his size. He is a mountain of a man, broad enough to block half the lane, with a face so open and kindly upon it that the whole effect goes strange. He glances at you almost fearfully, as if braced for a scolding for carrying off your sister’s child. The nearer you come, the bigger he seems. Your gut gives an odd little stir at the thought of trading places with Pate, of sitting astride those immense shoulders with your hands sunk in his hair. Then you come nearer still and are struck by the full offence of him.

Gods above, the man stinks.

Horse, old leather, sour sweat baked hard by the day’s sun, and something so thoroughly masculine and foul beneath it that your nose near gives up its office altogether. At this rate you shall end the morning with but one sense left to you, and it is fortunate that sight is proving such a useful one. For all his reek, the knight is a thing very well worth looking at.

“Beg pardon, m’lady,” the man says. “I found him wandering alone, crying—”

“I wasn’t crying!” Pate protests.

“I swear this to you, I was about to bring him home,” the knight says, all in a rush. His eyes are huge and honest, boyish in a way that sits almost absurdly on so large a frame. Pate has much the same look when caught at mischief.

You blink yourself back into the matter at hand. “I’ve no doubt of that,” you say, then tip your head further back to peer up at your nephew. “What did they feed you, little devil? You’ve grown rather tall overnight.”

You reach for the boy. He comes down from the knight’s shoulders into your arms, and nuzzles into you with a sweet little sigh. “Come. Your mother’s worried sick. Your father has gone all the way into town, and you know how much he hates that.”

Pate gives a small wet laugh against your neck. Harlan is a house beast through and through and holds that too much town air breeds wickedness by degrees. The man would sooner bed down with his pigs than pass a cheerful day amongst crowds.

“What’s this?” you ask when something warm touches the skin of your throat.

A sniffle. “Will he whip me?”

You put a hand to his back and rub. “There will be no whipping. No one whips children while I am here,” you say softly.

Then you turn back to the knight and find him gaping, caught at it beneath long lashes. “Thank you, er—”

“Dunk. Uh—” He checks himself, pulls out of his slouch, and for the space of a breath seems to grow even broader, as though the title is the only shape large enough to hold him. “Ser Duncan the Tall.”

“Thank you, Ser Duncan,” you say. “Come.” You beckon him closer, having already taken his measure well enough. “My sister will want to give you her thanks for finding this unruly little demon.”

“Oh, no, m’lady, there’s no need,” he says at once. “I could not take payment for doing what’s only right.”

You smile. “Have you comfortable lodging?”

That stops him. His silence answers plain enough.

“Come, Ser Duncan,” you say. “There is no shame in accepting gratitude. My family has not much, but we may at least offer you a warm meal and a bed for the night.” Your gaze slips over him once, slow and knowing. “And a bath.”

The blush that rises on him is so sudden and so violent it is all you can do not to laugh outright. It goes straight through the grime. Endearing is too small a word for it.

He ducks his head. “Beg pardon,” he mutters, then falters and says, “All right. I thank you for your kindness. I’ll only have to fetch my squire.”

“Fetch him, then. I’ll wait for you by the willow tree at the back entrance to the camp.”

Little Pate must have been awake all night, for he falls asleep almost at once when you settle him before you in the saddle. A ridiculous sight, his limbs gone loose and boneless in slumber, but a calming one all the same.

Within minutes the frame of Ser Duncan appears again, already ahorse, which only serves to make him seem larger still. Behind him, on a smaller mount, trots his squire, and your heart gives an odd little catch at the sight of him. He is no more than a boy—small for a squire, with eyes so large you can make out their colour even at a distance, and a bare head shiny as though he had only just come squalling into the world.

When they draw near, you mount carefully so as not to wake the nephew. “You are rather young—” you say to Ser Duncan’s squire, and see him brace at once for insult, “—to be so thoroughly cursed with baldness.”

His mouth quirks. He lets out a breath. In the voice of a child who has more wit in that bald head than is entirely proper, he says, “You are rather grown to be losing children.”

“Egg,” Duncan hisses. “Beg pardon, m’lady. He ought not say such things.”

“No harm done.” You lift a hand once to stay him. Then, to the boy: “‘Tis not my child that got lost. I have none.”

“And why is that?”

“Seven hells, Egg—” Duncan mutters, reddening under the dirt.

“My husband was taken by a fever before he had much chance to get about the business of begetting any,” you say, and leave it there.

You put your horse to motion to lead the way. As you pass Duncan, you murmur low enough for the boy not to hear, “Do not smack him. I do not mind it. Spend a day in my sister’s house and you will thank the Seven for putting a child with such a sharp tongue in your path.”

“He’s not my child, m’lady,” he says, plainly taken aback.

Thank the Gods. “He is a child all the same. And he is with you. And—” You glance over at him. “I am no lady. You may speak plainly.”

He nods a moment later, though not before his eyes make a slow and thorough passage over your face. It tells you that he means to keep calling you lady regardless. You do not much mind that either.

On the road home, where the town gives way to the tourney camps, you pass an inn that has turned bawdy for the festivities. Women in dresses scant enough to shame a summer day lean in the doorway and spill laughing onto the road; men half-laced and half-dressed stumble out after them, rumpled, red-eyed, and greasy with old drink. Hair hangs loose, bodices sit crooked, one fellow has his belt in hand and no visible haste to remedy the matter. You are glad Pate sleeps through it, cheek pillowed warm against your breast. Glad, too, for the discovery. It lies not far from the house—fifteen minutes on horseback at worst. Something to keep in mind, if only for a cup of ale and a look about the next time boredom drives you to the lip of madness. Or desperation.

Ser Duncan keeps his gaze fixed sternly ahead, all courtesy. Egg stares as any boy would, sharp as a magpie and twice as interested.

“Egg,” Duncan says under his breath, “it is not seemly to gape.”

“I am only looking,” says Egg. “I had thought eyes were for that.”

“They are not for staring at women.”

Egg considers this gravely. “Then it is a wonder you know so much of staring, ser.”

That draws a laugh out of you. The knight only keeps getting redder. Egg, seeing himself successful, sits a touch straighter in the saddle with the insufferable composure of a boy pleased by his own cleverness.

By the time you reach the house, your sister is already outside. The moment she sees Pate, she breaks into a run as though he had been missing a month rather than a night. You cannot help rolling your eyes, though your chest loosens at the sight of her. She reaches up the instant you rein in, lifting the boy from the saddle into her arms.

“You insolent fool,” she says first, fierce with repose. Then her hand goes over his head, over and over, smoothing and mussing his hair. “Are you in one piece, my love? What came into that little head of yours, hm? We have been worried sick.”

“Oh, he has been saved all right,” you say, swinging down from the horse. “By no less than a true knight. I have brought Ser Duncan to us in thanks.”

“Ser Duncan, is it?” your sister says, turning to him. She shifts Pate against her hip, then thrusts him at Harlan, who has come hurrying round the side of the house, and catches both of Duncan’s hands in hers. “Oh, ser, you must stay. You must. I am so grateful to you.”

Then, after one brief hitch of hesitation, gratitude gets the better of her. She steps forward and throws both arms awkwardly round his waist, sobbing once against him. You can see in real time the stench of him getting to her nostrils. “Thank the Seven for you,” she says on a held breath. “Such a good lad.”

Duncan starts as though struck, then lets out a startled laugh and folds his great arms about her with touching care, as if afraid he might break her by recognition alone.

When she pulls back, she pats his chest once, brisk and affectionate. “Forgive me. I am only glad.” Then she turns to Egg, all softness again. “And who are you, sweet thing? Would you like a honey-cake?”

Egg puts on the most counterfeit pout you have ever seen. “Very much so, mistress. I have not eaten a proper meal in half an age. Ser Duncan requires all the food in Westeros merely to remain upright.”

Your sister blinks once at that, glances up at Duncan’s immense frame, and nods with a vague little murmur of sympathy, as if this explains a great many things.

“Egg,” Duncan hisses in a tight whisper of warning.

You snort into your hand, wholly lost. Between the giant knight, his bald and insolent little squire, and your sister already bustling them toward the door, perhaps this is your salvation from death of the mind after all.

Dunk is having a day of it.

It begins at the lists, where a clerk with a neck like a suet pudding informs him that Ser Duncan the Tall may well be entered to joust three days hence, but Ser Duncan the Great Oaf most certainly is not. Egg, when hauled up by the shoulder and stared at, only says he had thought the man might enjoy a little wit to brighten his scratching. The man has not enjoyed it. The man has in fact grown firmer on the matter, insisting that names cannot simply be altered once set down, not without the steward’s leave, and that if Dunk means to be Ser Duncan the Tall then he ought to have named himself so in the first place.

“I did,” Dunk says.

The clerk sniffs. “Then you should not have sent a bald liar in your stead.”

So Dunk, already cross, sends Egg back to camp before he says something that earns them both a kicking. Camp, as ever, lies under a tree beside a little run of water, because Dunk likes shade and Egg likes grumbling about roots in his back, and both arrangements suit them well enough.

From there the day worsens by degrees. A drunken knight makes some jest at table—something about tall men and how little use they are once unhorsed—and Dunk, who does not understand which part is meant to be laughed at, keeps his mouth shut. That somehow proves worse than laughing wrong would have done. The man takes offence, calls him a thick cunt, and gives him a punch in the belly for good measure. Dunk lets him. Better a hard fist to the gut than a brawl that ends with somebody’s blood up and steel drawn. The blow hurts. The knight’s friends laugh. Dunk goes away hungry.

Then a little cutpurse makes bold enough to try his belt. Dunk catches the boy by the wrist easy as anything, silver safe where it belongs, but in turning too quick he plants one boot on slick ground and comes down square on his arse in a pile of horse dung so fresh it near steams.

By then he is tired clear through. He is not to ride in the lists for another three days. He stinks, more than usual. His pride has been handled roughly from several directions at once. So he goes to a stall for ale, sits on a bench in the shade, and thinks perhaps the day has spent its malice.

Then something wraps round his calf. Dunk startles and looks down. A boy, no more than four or five springs, has both arms round his leg and his face pressed into Dunk’s knee as if he means to hide there forever.

Dunk blinks. “Hallo.”

The child peeps up at him with a filthy face and eyes gone gummy from crying. “Don’t let him take me.”

Dunk looks over the table. Nobody in sight seems keen to take the boy anywhere. Men are drinking, shouting, pissing against fences, arguing over horses, and minding their own business poorly. The boy smells of sleep gone stale, old tears, and whatever sweet thing he has spilled down the front of himself sometime yesterday.

“Who?” Dunk asks.

The boy only clutches tighter.

Dunk drinks half his ale one-handed, hoping matters might explain themselves if given a moment. They do not. The child remains fixed to him like a burr. When coaxing gets nowhere, Dunk buys the boy a heel of bread. That earns him a name at last, spoken round a mouthful.

“Pate.”

“Right,” Dunk says. “And where’s your father?”

Pate shrugs.

“Your mother, then?”

Another shrug.

It takes the better part of the ale and two women passing by, both too hurried to help, before Dunk pieces together that Pate belongs somewhere out beyond the town, where the houses thin and the road runs out into kitchen plots, goat pens, and muddy little holdings. Near Bitterbridge, the boy says, which is no use at all because they are already near Bitterbridge. Then, after much prompting and a fresh bout of tears, he gets something about a sister, then another sister and a brother, and some more, and a house with pigs and hens and blue window frames.

That is how Dunk finds himself with a sleepy child on his shoulders trudging toward the outlying crofts beyond town because he cannot, in conscience, do anything else.

Pate, now that he has decided Dunk is safe, sits astride his neck as if born to it, small hands sunk in Dunk’s hair for balance, kicking his heels lightly against Dunk’s chest. Dunk keeps one hand clamped round a skinny leg and wonders whether all children change temper so quick, from terror to comfort and back again. He cannot remember what kind of boy he had been himself.

The day, having spent itself on lesser indignities, answers him at last with something stranger.

The boy’s kin is found. Dunk sees the woman who comes striding through the crowd and is struck by a feeling so swift and so enormous he scarcely has time to know it before it is gone: a foolish, piercing regret that Pate is not his own, if only so she might belong with him. Then the thing rights itself. You are no mother to the boy, only his aunt. Why that should ease anything in him Dunk could not say, yet it does. Something heavy shifts off the inside of his chest.

After that the fist to his belly feels like nothing much. You do not look made for tourney crowds and camp filth, and yet you move through both as if you can manage either well enough. There is nothing grand about you, nothing painted, but you are prettier than any lady he has seen ride by that day, and prettier than the women leaning from the inn doors. When you tip your face up at him, Dunk forgets to breathe. Then he does breathe, and remembers at once how badly he smells.

It gets worse after that. The way you take the boy down from his shoulders. The way you hold him easy, as if you have always had a place for frightened children. The hand on the boy’s back. Your voice when you soothe him. It does something soft to Dunk’s insides that he does not care to examine too closely. When you ask him in, he says no once because he feels he ought to. When you insist, he is glad of it.

The moment you are out of sight, he turns back quick for the tree by the stream where Egg is waiting.

Egg is crouched by their things, poking at the bank with a stick. He looks up as Dunk comes near. “You’ve been gone long enough. I was beginning to think the stream had swallowed you.”

“I’ve got us lodging for the night,” Dunk says. “Fetch the horses.”

Egg straightens. “Lodging? I thought a hedge knight required nothing but the open sky and a sore back.”

“I reckon you’re old enough to sleep under it by yourself, if you love it so much.”

Egg gives a small huff and goes to gather their few things. Dunk, in spite of himself, feels a grin begin under his nose.

“How did you come by this lodging, ser?” Egg asks, bundling up the blanket roll.

“A woman invited us.”

Egg pauses. “A woman.”

“I found her boy wandering and brought him back.”

“Ah,” Egg says. “So we are heroes.”

Dunk shrugs. “The family means to thank us with supper and a bed.”

Egg glances up at him. “And you accepted.”

“It would have been rude not to.”

“Yes,” says Egg, in a tone that means he is filing this away forever.

Dunk bends to tighten a strap that needs no tightening. “What?”

“Nothing, ser. Only, you are not commonly so eager to let women be kind to you.”

“She asked proper.”

“I do not doubt she did.”

Dunk frowns at him. “You’ve a deal to say for someone who’s meant to be packing.”

Egg’s mouth twitches. “What sort of woman is she?”

“A common woman.”

“That was plain from the tale. I meant what sort.”

Dunk opens his mouth, then finds he has no good answer to that which does not sound foolish. Egg waits. Dunk scowls. “She’s—” He stops, annoyed with himself. “Decent.”

Egg nods once, very solemn. “Ah. Curious.”

“There’s naught curious in it.”

“No, ser?” Eggs says. “Because when washerwomen smile at you, you turn pink and look for a hill to die behind. When innkeepers’ daughters offer you broth, you near choke to death refusing it. Yet now a woman asks you in and suddenly you are all courtesy and gratitude.”

Dunk busies himself with the saddle so the boy cannot see his face too plain. “She asked proper.” 

“I am sure she did.” 

“She did.” 

Egg’s mouth twitches. “And is she ugly, then?” 

That catches Dunk square. He lifts his head. “What?” 

“It would explain a great deal.” 

Dunk stares at him. Egg’s eyes go bright with malice. “She is not ugly,” Dunk says, too quick. 

Egg lets the words sit between them a moment, warm as stolen bread. “Hm.” 

Dunk knows he has said too much. “Get on your horse.”

Egg does, though with all the relish of a boy carrying a secret he means to turn over for pleasure later. They ride back at a fair pace, Dunk ahead and Egg just behind, the stream noise falling away as they rejoin the road. His stomach has begun to remember the promise of supper. His body remembers the promise of a bath better still. Worse than both is that his mind keeps running ahead to the willow tree, to the woman waiting there, to the quick look she gave him when she told him to come.

By the time they reach the meeting place, he has straightened himself three separate times to no profit. You wait with the sleeping child in your saddle, and mount up as soon as you spot them. Dunk feels the same strange knock inside his ribs as before.

Egg, seeing everything because he sees too much, makes a small thoughtful noise through his nose and says nothing at all, which is worse. Then, he speaks again and Duncan is lost as to which is more troublesome, Egg speaking or not speaking. Firstly, because his own squire has a way of making Duncan feel a fool besides a knight. Secondly, because the news of your widowhood, though it stirs pity in him, fills him with terrible gladness.

Soon enough he learns that Egg’s tongue ought to be cut out, for despite Dunk having given the insolent prince the last of his supper only the night before, Egg somehow manages to make him look a selfish brute before a family full of gratitude. You seem to enjoy it immensely, and it is only the sound of your laughter that makes any of the misery worth bearing.

The rest of the day also does not improve matters. It undoes him.

Dunk has known inns where a man gets his trencher slapped down and is meant to be grateful for whatever gristle lies on it. He has known halls where a hedge knight is fed last, watched all through, and left to wonder whether asking for more bread would see him turned out into the yard. He has known too many places where a man is tolerated so long as he keeps small.

This house knows none of that. Your sister heaps his plate as if his size were a challenge set to her by the Seven themselves. When he scrapes it clean, she asks whether he wants more, and her face says she hopes he does. He cannot remember the last time anybody looked pleased by his appetite.

The children take to him so fast it near makes his teeth ache. One hangs off his forearm. Another begs to be lifted. A third wants to see whether his hand is truly as big as a trencher. Dunk obliges them all, laughing like he’s a child himself, and when he lifts two at once and makes them squeal, the little ones look at him as if he has performed some feat finer than unhorsing a champion.

He catches you watching him from across the room, chin propped in your palm. The sight of it makes him believe The Seven themselves have made him go through all the morning torment so that he can be here now. 

You drop your hand the moment you find him looking. A blink later, you look again.

Your eyes are very beautiful. So is your hair, though he has no proper words for hair beyond dark or fair or long, and yours defeats all three for usefulness. The house smells of stew and bread and rushes and children and the clean warmth that comes of many bodies under one roof, but beneath it all he can pick out you. He does not know how. He only knows he can. It keeps pulling his head your way like a hand at the back of his neck.

And he wonders. You are too young, he thinks, to be speaking of widowhood with that dry edge in your mouth. Too young to have such a settled bitterness in you already. Too pretty by half to be without a husband, and clever too, which may be the trouble. What sort of man had you had? What sort would you want now? Something finer than a hedge knight, surely. A man with land under him, perhaps, or silk on his back, or a name that means something when said aloud.

Not him.

Even so, when the children clamour for stories, he gives them stories. He tells them of roads gone white with dust in Dorne, of rain in the Reach, of a black boar that chased a knight up a tree and left him there till dawn. He drinks mead. He eats honey-cakes. He watches Egg, who at first stands apart pretending not to care, and then somehow finds himself drawn into a game with the younger boys using nutshells and pebbles for soldiers. The sight of him, bald head bent over so solemn a campaign, stirs a softness in Dunk he knows he will regret the next time the boy opens his mouth.

No matter. For a little while he lets the feeling stay.

Now and again he sees you turn at some sound from the road, some burst of laughter drifting in from beyond the yard, and a look passes over your face quick as a swallow’s shadow. Restlessness, maybe. Hunger of some sort. He cannot name it, but he sees it. You laugh with your sister, chide the children, fetch more bread, and all the while some part of you seems to be listening elsewhere.

By evening he is clean-fed, warm, and so unaccustomed to ease that it leaves him half-wary.

He has been shown to a little guest room with a bed better than any he has had in months. He stands in the middle of it with no notion what to do with his hands. The room smells of lavender and old wood. His own stink still clings to him despite the washbasin in the corner, because a basin is not a bath and there is only so much a man can do with a rag.

Then, comes a knock.

“Enter,” he says, and hears at once how stiff he sounds.

The door opens no more than a crack. You peer through with a candle cupped in one hand, the flame shivering behind your fingers in a little chamberstick. “Are you decent, Ser Duncan?”

He nearly chokes and folds his arms across himself though he is still fully clothed. “M-m’lady.”

“Hallo,” you say. The candlelight softens your face. “Supper’s near ready. And I told you already I am no lady, which I think you have gathered by now.”

“Beg pardon.” He ducks his head. The silence after seems to ask something more of him, so he snatches at the first thing that comes. “I—I am sorry. About Egg. What he said. And about your husband.”

You look at him a moment, quizzical, the corner of your mouth beginning to stir. “Are you truly sorry, or are you waiting for me to tell you time has passed and I am well enough now, so you may think yourself compassionate?”

“I—” He takes one helpless step forward and spreads his hands. “M’lady, I meant no—”

“I jest.”

Your smile widens. It shows your teeth. Fine lines gather at the corners of your eyes, and Dunk is struck by the want to put his mouth there, right there where your face folds with mirth. The thought is so sudden and so improper it leaves him stupid.

“Besides,” you say, “time has passed, and I am well enough. It was a marriage made for convenience. Poor luck that he died before I could come to love him. But thank you.”

Dunk stares, trying to set all that in order. He feels there ought to be something to say. Something wise, perhaps, or kind. He has none of it.

“I don’t know the right words,” he admits.

He is looking at his boots when you step closer, so he does not see your hand coming until it rests lightly on his forearm. He jumps as if burnt.

You chuckle under your breath. “You need not be so skittish, Ser Duncan. You are wanted here. You and your squire both. I am sure my sister would be glad to lodge you until the tournament ends.”

The candle flickers between you. Each small movement of the flame changes your mouth. Makes your eyes shine in a way that seems unearthly. Dunk can smell the soap on your skin, and something warmer under it that he has no name for and wants badly all the same.

“I could not put your family to such trouble,” he says. “I eat near as much as all the children together.”

“It is no trouble. It is an honour to host a knight.”

“H-honour. M’lad—” He swallows. “You flatter me. Needlessly. I am only a hedge knight.”

“A knight is a knight, Ser Duncan.” Your hand moves a little up his arm, no more than an inch, and stops there. He feels the place of it as if you had laid a coal against him. “I have prepared your bath,” you say.

He flushes hot. “Forgive me. For the stench. I—”

You laugh then, open and genuine, and not at him so much as at the whole miserable fact of his shame. “This house keeps hens, pigs, a barn full of beasts, and five little mongrels running underfoot. Do you think a man’s sweat will shock us?” Then you lower your voice. “And I have smelt worse on a man than on you. You make up for it elsewhere.”

Dunk’s head comes up. “What do you mean?”

“Only that you are kind,” you say. Your hand leaves him, and the loss of it is so immediate he hates himself for noticing. “And half-ashamed of it besides.” A pause. “Come, while the water is still warm. My sister found clean clothes for you as well.”

“That is much too kind. I cannot—”

“Oh, stop.” There is a smile in your mouth again. “You are not going to bathe and then drag horseshit breeches back on, are you? Harlan has a cousin near your size. They ought to sit on you well enough.”

Dunk lets out a breath that wants to be a laugh. “No,” he says. “I reckon not.” He looks at you because he cannot seem to stop. “Thank you,” he says. “Truly.”

Something changes in your face at that. Not much. Just enough for him to think you had expected another kind of man entirely.

Then you step back to the doorway. “The bath’s in the little room off the kitchen,” you say. “I’ll leave you to it.”

You go, and Dunk stands another moment in the middle of the chamber like the fool Egg says he is. Then he follows, because what else is there left to do.

By the time dusk settles proper, your mind feels raised from the dead.

Not only your mind. Other parts besides. Parts that have sat these past months like hinges gone bitter and unoiled, stiff with disuse, now creak with the force of wanting to move. All day you have found yourself staring at a great dirty fool of a man in your sister’s house as though he were a rare beast wandered in from the woods. Bigger than any doorway deserves. Goofy as a calf. Running with children dangling from him, making a giant child of himself for their delight, his whole face split with such open joy the dimples in his cheeks near end you. His teeth are uneven. They are beautiful. It pains you, absurdly, that they are not sunk somewhere on your body. He eats as if food were a thing meant in earnest, not pecked at and praised and left. There is pleasure in setting more before him and watching it vanish. Once jam runs from a cake down his chin and you have to hold yourself still with all your strength to keep from catching it with your finger and putting that finger in your own mouth in parody of a kiss.

He has woken something long asleep in you. Made want stir where want had sense enough to lie quiet.

When he lifts two of the children, one hanging from each forearm while they shriek with laughter, your throat goes hot and tight and the place between your thighs turns damp where you sit cross-legged by the hearth pretending to mend. After that there is nothing for it but to test your luck. So you see the bath prepared full and steaming, lavender thrown in to lend it some gentleness, and carry the news to him yourself.

Even then the sight of him catches. He stands in the guest chamber looking misplaced in the way of very large men inside small rooms, still carrying a trace of his day’s foulness, still gorgeous enough that you would take him if he came to you with horseshit on his arse and river mud to his knees. That is how bad the matter has grown in the space of a single day. Yet at a touch he jumps. At a look he drops his gaze. Either he is grievously inexperienced or so decent it borders on affliction.

You leave him to it and duck back through the kitchen with what remains of your good sense calling after you. It tells you to go about your business. To leave the man to his washing. To remember you are not sixteen and witless and peeping after stableboys through chinks in the wall.

There is, however, a crack in the boards between kitchen and bathing room so fine as to be near invisible unless one knows it is there. Press an eyeball to it, though, and the room beyond opens narrow and bright as a secret. You know this because you knew everything about this house when you were twelve, and some forms of knowledge stay put.

So you gutter the candle. The room goes dim around you. The bath chamber beyond holds only the wash of firelight from the small brazier and the soft pale steam rising from the tub. Then comes the creak of the door, the answer of the boards under his weight, and you do the unimaginable. You put your eye to the seam and look.

He goes first to the bath and lays in two fingers as careful as if testing broth for a babe. The heat seems to strike him. His shoulders loosen. His whole face changes. For one ridiculous moment he looks near to tears at the blessing of being able to wash in hot water instead of some stream cold enough to shrivel a cock back into the body. The sight of that plain gratitude in a grown man’s face moves something in you so tender it hurts.

Then he undresses. He catches the hem of the tunic and hauls it up over his head in the thoughtless way of men, and the motion stretches him so nicely you have to close your mouth against the sound threatening out. His stomach lengthens and bends. His skin pulls over muscle and softness. He is made of all of it. Sinew under flesh, yes, but flesh too, honest and abundant. Little folds appear when he bows his head and works the cloth free. His belly is soft low down, dusted with fine hair that thickens as it runs toward the waist of his breeches. His chest is broad enough to make a mockery of the basin stand, covered with copper fuzz. The paps upon it full and heavy and strong, larger than your two palms side by side. It comes to you with humiliating force that you could lay your hands there and feel his heart between them.

He strips with none of the vanity prettier men cultivate. There’s no posing, nor admiring of himself. He is only intent on getting clean. Boots off. Hose peeled. Then, he bends for the rest and you stop breathing.

You take him from the ground upward, greedy as famine. His feet are large, nails rimmed with the day’s dirt. One toe is blackened, as if trod on or kicked against stone or caught under some wheel of his own making. All likely with a man like him. His shins are marked. His knees are bruised. His thighs—God. Magnificent things. Thick enough to part a crowd by walking through it. Strong enough to sit a warhorse all day and still have ease left for children after.

Above them—well. Gods above.

He is large in a way that seems at first gentle, until the eye takes proper measure and understands what it sees. Heavy-hanging. Thick at the root. More than handsome there; startling. The sort of endowment that ought to put a strut in a man’s walk, and yet he has none. The same bashful lout as before, only naked now. His legs drive up into him as if fixed there by a blacksmith’s hand, all the lines of him gathering inward and down. Beneath hangs a full low sack, weighty and ripe-looking. The hair that is dirty-gold elsewhere on him deepens there to brown so dark it reads near black in the low light. A gorgeous man. A gentle one too, despite carrying such size without the least cruelty in it.

When he turns you get the clean sweep of his back, broad enough to make you dizzy, the round of his arse, and a little ugly scar on the plump of one calf. Then he steps into the bath and the water takes him piece by piece. All that riches you have only just discovered, gone under with a faint ripple that feels personal in its meanness.

As he lowers himself the rest of the way, his mouth lets out a sigh so low and filthy in its pleasure that your knees loosen beneath you. You close your eyes, though there is nothing to see with them shut. Keep the sound instead. Fold it up and tuck it away somewhere private for later.

This is no good. Nor is it manageable. When you straighten, your thighs are damp again, and your thoughts go skittering from one bad notion to the next: asking him outright, which is impossible; finding that man from the tourney who offered coin for your company and lying back under him pretending it is Duncan bent over you; or else taking the matter in hand yourself. Of the three, the last promises the least ruin, so you choose it.

The thirst remains. Seeing him again at supper—eating with that earnest appetite, smiling with those crooked teeth, clean now, smelling indecently like a babe made anew—only makes it more torrid. So, once the meal is done and the house fed, banked, and dressed for sleep, you wait until slumber lies thick in every room. Then you throw a cloak over your night-rail, quiet your mare so she does not wake the yard, and ride. For the inn. Only to look. Only to slip in and out unseen. Better to be a pervert for one night than die of something stupider than boredom. Excitement, perhaps.

Dunk lies awake. Tomorrow he and Egg will have to go back to the tourney outskirts. If he accepts any further kindness from your family, Egg will never let him know a moment’s peace again. His belly is blissfully full, and his mind is too, though morosely. It runs over with images of you. Eating. Clearing trenchers. Slipping past his gaze whenever it catches on you. He wishes you would hold his eyes for longer than a breath.

When he hears footsteps in the passage, he only means to see who is stirring at such an hour. Harlan, perhaps, or your sister up with one of the little ones. By now he knows the sounds of this house near as well as his own harness. By now he knows yours best of all. Even in the dark, with only the banked glow from the hall and the house asleep around it, he knows it is you.

You go softly. Cloak over your shift, a hood drawn up, one little lantern in hand with the light half-shielded. There is purpose in it, beyond wandering to the privy or fetching water. You mean to be out.

For the space of two breaths he tells himself to keep to his bed. You are grown. You owe him no accounting. Then you slip through the yard gate and into the night, and the thought of you riding alone amongst tourney roads thick with drink, camp followers, thieves, and men with more want than manners has him up before sense can catch him by the ankle.

He dresses in a scramble that feels shameful for how eager it is. When he gets to the yard you are already mounted and riding. He has only just enough time to throw himself onto his own horse and go after.

Some part of him knows to keep back. If you are abroad in secret, you would not thank him for riding up at your shoulder like a gaoler. So he follows at a distance, quiet as a man of his size may manage, keeping the little bob of your lantern in sight between hedges and trees. The road is near empty now but for the last of the drunkards reeling homeward and the odd cart sunk in the ruts. Your mare knows the way. So, it seems, do you.

The inn comes up out of the dark and Dunk feels something cold go through him. Even by day the place had looked rough. By night it is plain what it has become for the tourney: a bawdy house in all but name. Light spills from the lower windows. So do voices. A woman laughs somewhere high and sharp, then a man answers with the slurred confidence of one already too deep in his cups. There are bodies at the windows still, leaned together in tangles of shirt and skin, and more in the doorway. The whole place sweats ale, lust, and bad intent.

What in Seven’s name is a woman like you doing here?

He draws his horse off into shadow and waits, because surely you have only lost your way. Surely you will turn back once you see the sort of den this is. You, of course, do not.

You ride past the front altogether, circle wide, and make for the back of the place where the yard runs muddy and dark behind the stables. There you dismount, hitch your mare, and go to a ladder propped against the wall as if you have known all along it would be there.

Dunk watches you climb. For a moment he can make no sense of what he sees. Then the truth of it begins to gather in pieces, each worse than the last. Perhaps there is some man waiting in that attic room above the rest. Some groom, some archer, some merchant with more coin than sense. Perhaps you have done this before. Perhaps widowhood sits lighter on you than he thought. Perhaps the look in your face all day had nothing to do with him at all. All of them thoughts are ugly.

He grips the reins till the leather creaks. It is none of his business. You are no maiden under his protection. You are no kin of his. If you have a tryst above a brothel roof, that is your choosing, and he ought to turn his horse and go. Only he cannot.

Because if there is a man up there, Dunk does not like the look of the place he has chosen. Because any woman alone in such a house might come to harm. Because tomorrow he will be gone back to the tourney fields, and if he rides away now he will lie the whole of the night wondering what became of you in that attic. Because some part of him, meaner and more hopeful than he cares to examine, wants to know. So he ties off his horse in the dark and goes after you.

The ladder shifts under his weight. The higher he climbs, the louder the house grows. Laughter leaks through the boards, wicked and wine-sour. Men’s voices. Women’s too. Then moaning, plain enough that Dunk’s face goes hot before he has even hauled himself to the top. By the time he gets into the attic, his cheeks are burning fit to set the dust alight.

There, the room holds only you.

You are stretched flat on your belly with your cloak spilling round you, face pressed near to the floor. Light comes up through the slits in it in narrow orange bars, filthy and bright as fire through shutters. The noises from below drown the creak of his boots, so he drops to hands and knees and crawls the last little way, trying with all his clumsy might to make no sound.

As he comes nearer he sees the quick lift of your ribs. Your whole attention is fixed below. So Dunk looks too.

Through the gaps he can make out a room beneath, high-ceilinged and close with candlelight. A man and woman are tangled together, kissing with wet, open mouths, pawing at one another as if trying to get under skin rather than clothes. The man fumbles at her laces. She gets her hand into his breeches and closes it round him greedy as hunger. He lets out a laugh thick with phlegm.

Dunk stares one foolish moment, then looks away hard, appalled less by them than by you watching.

He cannot make sense of it. Why would you come to see such a thing? Why would you creep into a foul place like this to lie on a floor and spy on strangers coupling below? You, who smell of lavender and fresh bread and speak softly to frightened children. You, who made him still under your touch and looked at him as if you meant to do it again.

He ends up on all fours beside you before he has decided what he means to do. You have not noticed him. Your hood is up, half-shielding your face. One of your hands is curled against the boards. The other lies open by your cheek. There is something so strange in it—your body stretched out long and intent, your face hidden, your breath coming a touch quicker than it should—that for a moment he can only hover there and stare.

If he speaks, you will yelp. If you yelp, the whole cursed inn may come running.

So, very gently, Dunk moves. His frame hangs above you, then presses down and he reaches out and clasps a hand over your mouth.

You go rigid at once. Your whole body jerks under him and you begin to fight trying to wrench free.

“It’s only me, m’lady,” he whispers fast, mouth to your ear. “Beg pardon. I thought you’d get yourself in trouble. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

You breathe out so hard the warmth of it shocks his palm. The fight goes out of you, and with that his own weight settles further. His belly goes where your spine dips. His head hangs over your shoulder. One of his knees ends up braced between yours on the boards, and the whole position is suddenly far too close. Your arse cushions him snugly and fire licks Duncan’s hips so violently he can feel his cock stir and give one helpless kick against you.

“Forgive me, I—” he breathes. Begins to shuffle on you, only making himself more tragic. When you mumble something out, he remembers his hand is still muzzling your mouth. “Oh, right.”

He lifts his palm. Spit stretches from your lips to his fingers. Other than the gag, you do not seem half so troubled with the predicament. Your head cocks slightly until you’re whispering into his cheek. “What are you doing here, Ser Duncan?” 

“I—I—” He swallows. “I thought you—”

“—were in trouble? I am not. Yet.” You give the smallest jerk of your chin towards the room below. Then, after a beat: “Is that the only reason you came?”

The truthful answer rises up in him and sticks there. No. He came after you with his head full of you. He came because you rode out alone and because he could not bear not knowing where. He came because he hoped for something he has no right even to name. With everything pressing in him, all he says is, “Yeah.” Then, wincing at himself: “I mean—yes.”

You let out a short breath that balances amusement and disdain on an uneven scale. “Then leave me be.”

“But—” He still does not move. The sounds from below make the boards faintly alive beneath you. “You oughtn’t look. You mustn’t.”

Your head turns just enough to pin him with one eye from under the hood. “Quiet.”

“It’s wrong,” he whispers, voice rising as Duncan’s forgetting himself. “The… coupling. It’s for them. For the—them. Not for—”

“For us to hear you blunder through your outrage?” you murmur. “Do you want your neck broken over peeking at strangers?”

“No, but I cannot let you—”

“You cannot let me?” There is a warning in your whisper, low and sharp. Mercifully, you ignore where his blood has settled between your back and his front. “What are you going to do, Ser Duncan? Drag me out by force?”

He has no answer to that, only a thudding pulse and the certainty that every choice before him is the wrong one.

“Leave,” you whisper, “or I will scream, and then you may have your neck broken for peeking at strangers after all.”

Dunk shuts his eyes for a second. The oaths come back to him in broken scraps, half remembered and badly timed. Protect the weak. Defend the innocent. Serve with honour. He is no wiser for them now than he was before.

“Forgive me,” he mutters.

And before you can answer, he brings one hand up over your eyes.

You start under him. “Ser Duncan, you have brought this on yours—”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and when your voice threatens to carry, his other hand finds your mouth again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please, forgive me.”

The attic goes weird after that. He closes his eyes too, as if blindness might make the thing less wicked, but it does not. If anything, it sharpens it. The noises below seem louder for being all they have left: laughter gone low, a bedstead knocking, breath laboured. Beneath him you strain once in annoyance, once in warning, and each small movement turns the whole of him to misery.

He tries to hold himself rigid. It’s unbearably filthy, all of it. All of it is so deeply debauched, and he tries not to feel the shape of you under him. Tries not to notice how near your cheek is to his wrist, how your hair smells even here through the dust and old wood. He’s hard, possibly leaking, and he tries with such conviction his whole body is shaken by the effort, and still he does not move.

Then, The Seven lay two horrible tests upon him. The first is your tongue—it darts out and wedges itself into the cup of his palm and along the creases where his fingers join, warm and wet and so soft it shocks him worse than teeth might have. It sends his breathing hoarse.

“Cease this,” he whispers. “I beg of you. Oh, Seven fu—”

The second is your arm. It is a snake. Your whole hand slides down his side and then under, squeezing between his front and your back, where he is plain as day. A man, no better than the one beneath the floorboards. When you touch him, Duncan feels a horrendous cramp in his groin and simply has to buck. His hips roll into you, his palm leaves your mouth because he needs to brace against the wood, and his face presses into your neck as he strains out, “Oh, fuck. Fuck—I’m sorry—”

“It’s your fault I’m here,” you whisper to his trembling fingers. “I had been faring well enough. I was good to my family. I kept my peace. I had no need of a man.” Dunk makes a stricken sound, but you go on.

“Then you came into my sister’s house and spoiled it all. I know nothing of the art of coaxing a man. Nor is it becoming, I think, to go about seducing a knight. Beyond feeding you and seeing you bathed, I did not know how else to tell you what I wanted.” Your hand stays where it is, quiet and sure, and it burns him with fire The Hells have nothing on, Duncan’s certain. “My husband wanted me because he did. That was the whole of it. But you keep dragging your eyes from me, so I thought you had no want of me at all. I thought this”—a small shift of your fingers—“the least harmful way to help myself.”

For a moment Duncan can only endure it. Words crowd in on him, while your palm makes him into such mess his thoughts do not so much gather as drag themselves through mud. Then, the fact that you think him untouched by you, all while every pulse in him beats where you have him, causes such bewilderment his voice hitches a notch higher.

“You think I do not want you? M’lady, I—”

“I told you not to call me that.” Your hiss comes sharp, though not unkind. “It is unwise to use titles one has not been granted. I am no lady.”

“To me you are,” Duncan argues. “I’ve laid eyes on you for one day only,” he strains, “and already I know when I leave here I’ll never see such beauty again.”

Your hand freezes. Then—Gods above—closes around him more fiercely than before. “So… this is for me alone?”

His swallow goes down like a bolus. Then he lifts his palm from your eyes. You blink, and turn your head to look at him. Light from below catches in your irises and sets them aflame. Duncan stares into them. “Do you not see?” he asks on a breath. “I am all for you.”

Anger floods you cold, then hot. Heat comes with his body. How a man this size can sneak up on you eludes you entirely, but you are so shamelessly engrossed in a fat man’s hands on a whore’s body below that you notice Duncan only when he seals your mouth shut.

A knight with all the grace of an oaf and the body of a demigod, with dung still on his arse when you found him, has managed to catch you at your most humiliating: alone, needy, sprawled on dirty boards above strangers’ noise like some starved little creep. And he has the gall to be scandalised, bless his soul, while pressing his huge hard cock into your backside. How infuriating to be made to listen to him blunder on about honour, yourself unable to speak, while his whole body has cast honour off the moment his eyes were subjected to the same sight as yours.

His weight should crush you, but does not. It feels right. Just as you imagined: an enormous, total burden that extends beyond the borders of your body. His arms yoke your neck and shoulders, his stomach fits into the length of your back. Your feet reach only halfway down his calves when he lies atop you. His hips are right where they belong. He is all cumbersome care in his effort not to sag into you, and his breath comes warm and trembling and loud against your ear.

Shame prickles your neck. One moment the sight below is enough to sate you, the next you forget it altogether, because your knight has come to rescue you from indecency. Humiliated, you hiss at him as sharply as the scene allows, eager to be rid of him before he notices how disgraced your inner thighs are, how your jaw clenches and the veins in your neck stand out with the struggle not to make some telling sound.

First you are blinded. Then you are on the verge of throwing it all away, of screaming and setting the whole inn of scoundrels upright, yet you cannot. Gagged again and pressed into the wood, you lie there bathed in dust, bathed in the sounds of coupling below, nerves wailing for him to move, to leave you, to touch you—

So you touch him. A tell that tells you nothing beyond how large and dangerous he is where he is most a man. Any boy as shy and tender as Duncan would stir at the mere sound of a woman sighing. A boy at heart, yet built like no boy should be—armed with a cock fit for some swaggering brute who ought to walk broad-legged through the world, though he does not. He makes manliness and benevolence into something so uncommon, so singular and strange, that you understand at once why no other has ever tempted you to take up the burden of marriage again. He is simply the only one like this you have ever met.

Then, he begs. And with that comes the truth of who the thick one is here. For all Duncan frets over his wit, it is you who has been witless. You had not even thought his apprehension might spring from want. That it is for you he throbs in your hand. That his breath shakes because it is you who measures him there.

“Get up,” you whisper, rapt by his confession.

He blinks once and nods, already crestfallen. It is clear he thinks you are sending him off. He scrambles away from you with painful care, lifting himself to all fours first as if that might somehow hide what has no hope of hiding. Red climbs his ears. He stays there a beat too long, awkward and waiting, and the sight of such ready obedience draws your chest tight.

“There,” you murmur, pointing to the wooden pillar. “Sit.”

And so, Duncan sits. Backs himself to the post and folds down against it with the graceless caution of a dog trying not to dirty a clean floor. His knees fall wide because they must. His hands hover, useless and uncertain, as if any place he puts them might be wrong. In the dim light his face is still open with amends and want and that same ruinous virtue which has brought you to this in the first place.

You go to him on hands and knees, slowly, careful where you place your weight so the old boards give no treacherous groan. Dust clings to the hem of your night-rail and the sleeves of your cloak. He watches you come with his lips parted and his breath held badly, as though any movement on his part might scare you off.

When you reach him, you settle one hand to his shoulder for balance and climb into his lap with all the care the narrow space requires. Even so, the fit of it steals a sharp hitch from him. His head tips back against the wood. Breath leaves him through his mouth in a soft, stunned rush.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters. “M’lady, I did not mean to—”

“Shh,” you hum, fingers brushing his lip. “You’re doing nothing wrong. But if you wish to stop, tell me.”

“No,” he says. “No, I do not.”

He is still apologising. Still half afraid of his own body. Still looking at you as if you are something above him while you pant against him like a sinner. He is so decent he becomes indecent by accident. Where your bodies meet, he is all weight and impossible girth. His cock spans the whole length of your groin, and there is still some of it left unattended at the tip when you keep still.

You wrench the linen of your night-rail from the press of legs so it falls to either side of you. Bare against him, you run your hands over his cheeks and up, pull his hair back from his forehead, then slide down his scalp to settle at the neck. You lower yourself fully and into him. The cloth of his braies rasps against the tenderest skin while your buttocks spill into his lap. The limit is right there—one roll of your pelvis, and you are giving yourself away with a breathy, wanton, “Duncan—”

“Shh.” His palm finds your mouth again, even more delicate than before. He clasps one there and brings the other to the hinge of your hip. “Petal mine, hush, I beg of you,” he whispers. “You’ll ruin me by sound alone.”

Under his touch, you smile. Search his face in the barred orange glow rising through the boards. His brows are drawn tight. Wrinkles gather at the corners of his eyes each time they narrow. Freckles come and go across his cheeks and nose with every small shift of light, as if the attic itself cannot decide how much of him to show you.

You nod and move again. His forehead drops against yours. “Death be kind to me,” he mutters. “By the Seven, you are—”

At that, your own hands act. Fingers sink into his hair to hold him still while you cover the noise before it gets him into trouble. So that is how you stay then: mutually silenced, mutually trapped, breathless in the mouths. Your body, furious, clenches round bare air so viciously Duncan’s cock kicks. His hips give a helpless start, and you answer only with gestures: a pull at his roots. Your eyes roll heavenward, unseeing. Thighs quiver and knees skid on the floor while the strain of staying quiet becomes its own fresh torment.

Though he is doing the work of it well enough himself, you are making him damper still at the crotch. He lifts a little and adjusts, rides up and rocks you back and forth. The hand at your hip helps guide you and teaches you where he is most sensitive—at the crown. So you keep to that, spreading your cunt over wool, and however thick the cloth, you would know the shape of him exactly.

In silence, your shared breathing rings loud as a sept bell. Duncan huffs through his nose like a tired animal, and his grip grows confused. On your hip it tightens, but loosens over the mouth. You take the chance and wrap your lips round his fingertips, sucking lightly. He lets out the groan of a man on the threshold of something terrible or wonderful, and you tug his hair once more to straighten him.

“Shh, my darling,” you whisper. “You ought to be quiet.”

He begs with his whole being. His forehead is all drawn up, lines cut deep between his brows while the brows themselves disappear beneath the fall of his fringe. His eyes do not know where to rest. They find you, lose you, squeeze shut for a beat, then open again, all within the span of one second. Pleasure unfastens him from the inadequacy that normally clings to him. He is still unpolished, but stripped to something young and honest. Perhaps this is what he must be like in battle too: all the loose, awkward parts of him pulled into their proper place by force of need. Graceless to look at. Never elegant. But wholly given over to the matter at hand, with no room left in him for doubt or self-consciousness. Here, as on a field, he is too occupied to mistrust himself, and so becomes devastating.

Though your palm keeps his mouth covered, sound still escapes him: breath breaking hot against your skin, a muffled grunt deep in his throat, the low helpless noise of a man trying very hard not to come apart. His nape is damp under your fingers. Each time you hold him there and move, something in him gives. His chest brushes yours. His thighs brace wide beneath you to keep you up. His whole great body tries to contain itself and fails by degrees. The feeling of him is everywhere—his size hemming you in, his heat through the cloth, the trembling under all that strength. He is beneath you, around you, almost too much of him, and that is part of the pleasure too.

All of it carries you steadily over your own threshold. Come morning there will be soreness, an ache where skin has been rubbed raw to the fit of his cock, but for now you only rut and let your thighs shudder and lock round his ribs. You suck his fingers in to the last knuckle to silence yourself.

He has been so brave. Bracing so well. So you let it take you and eat you whole until you are so small he could fit you in the hollow of his hand.

Your mouth opens, but no sound comes. He slips his fingers from it, drags the dampness across your cheek and into your hair beneath the hood. Draws you so close your palm is crushed between mouths, so you let that go too. The instant he is free, he starts panting. Murmuring yes, oh Gods, as if he is dying of it rather than being carried under.

From the back of his throat he hums—the last frail barrier between him and outright noise. When even that begins to fail him, he fits his mouth to yours and whispers, “Kiss me. Please, kiss me when it takes me, else I won’t keep quiet.”

With your head feeling dragged underwater, you loll your tongue out first. Lids drowsy and heavy, you force them open. Lick the crest of his upper lip and stare him dead into those big blue eyes when you kiss him properly. He looks. Rubs himself on you with artless jerks of hips, driving your tender flesh to a sting. Keeps looking when his hands come up to your face and hold the whole span of it, from chin to temples. He covers your ears too.

Then you watch him lose himself in it. His lashes flicker like wings, and at last rest lowered when he can bear seeing no more. His body tightens into a thousand knots beneath you—shoulders locking, neck straining, thighs shaking, stomach jumping. Kissing becomes holding. Your mouth becomes a well for his sounds.

“Petal mine,” he murmurs. “Seven fucking Hells, just—f-fuck—ah—”

He shatters in a way that makes pity and hunger strike you both. From the look of him, it would be gentler to drive a dagger through his heart than keep doing what your weight is doing to him. He is wholly gone. His face loses all shape but strain. Mouth breaks against yours, then at your lip, biting down not hard enough to hurt, only enough to keep the worst of himself in. What sound escapes him does so mangled—grunts, groans, one destitute moan dragged raw from somewhere deep and private. His whole body bears it badly. A shudder runs through him from shoulders to thighs. His hands cinch at your face as if he means to hold on and has forgotten to what.

Then all at once it stops. Words and noises ease. Breaths come, pulled in great wrecked draughts like a man hauled half-dead from the water. Under you he goes loose, still shaking. Warmth spreads between your thighs, blooms and soaks through his bottoms onto skin. His forehead drops to your shoulder and stays there, damp and dazed, while he fights his way back to the world one breath at a time.

You take his heavy head in your palms. It feels like holding the rounded crown of a helm, all weight and surrender. He has gone boneless as a cut puppet and lets you handle him as you please. “Ser Duncan,” you say, searching him. “Are you well?”

His eyes open slowly, blue and dazed. For a moment he only blinks at you, as though the question itself is beyond him. Then he breathes again, ragged and embarrassed both. “Aye,” he says, though it sounds discovered rather than known. “I think so. Are you, m’lady?”

You nod. Smile, then chuckle. He smiles too and shows you his teeth.

“What became of petal?” you ask softly.

His eyes slip from yours. The colour in his face deepens, and for a moment he looks near ready to sink through the boards from shame. Then, instead of answering, he gathers you in closer. His arms come round you with quiet strength. He tucks his face beneath your ear, great and warm and shy there, and draws one breath of you.

“You are so beautiful it pains me,” he says.

Your fingers twitch against his back, then catch in the cloth of his tunic and hold. “Stay with me then,” you murmur. “Till the end of the tourney.”

He stills. Pulls back to look at you. There is something naked in his face that has nothing to do with what has just passed between you. “Do you mean it?”

The poor fool. As though he should be the one asking shame from the other. As though it is he who was found here half-sprawled over strangers’ sin, wanting like an idiot and grateful besides that the one who caught him still wanted him after all. As though he’s not at all the one who saved your mind and body from withering away in a world that is all bliss and honey-cakes.

You are opening your mouth to tell him so when a voice booms from below the boards.

“Who goes there?!”

You come by just after breaking your fast, pass Dunk a chunk of bread and cheese, and leave honey-cakes with Egg. On your way past, your hand lands once on Dunk’s shoulder—just a squeeze, no more—and yet it leaves him sitting there as if a mark has been pressed clear through cloth and skin alike.

Egg waits until you are well out of earshot. He turns a stick in his hands, pares another thin curl from it with his knife, and says, “She is not ugly at all.”

Dunk keeps his eyes on your back. “I told you so.”

“You did.”

A pause. The knife goes on scraping. “So we’re staying till the end of the tourney, then?”

Dunk tears off a piece of bread with more force than the matter requires. “Her family asked us.”

Egg nods as if this confirms some private reckoning. “Yes. I thought it might be something of that sort.”

Dunk finally looks at him. “What sort?”

“The sort where a hedge knight finds reasons to be grateful.”

Dunk frowns. “Mind your tongue.”

Egg’s mouth twitches. He lifts one shoulder. “I only meant she seems kind.”

“She is,” Dunk says, too quick.

Egg glances at him sideways, insufferably mild. “Yes. That too.”

Dunk opens his mouth, then shuts it again because you have turned in the yard and sunlight has caught in your hair. By the time he remembers Egg exists, the boy is already smiling into his stick.

“I’ll box your ears,” Dunk mutters, with no conviction in it at all.

“I know you mean to, ser,” says Egg, carving on. “That is why I cherish the time between.”

He purses his mouth involuntarily when a girl sitting in front of him on the bus has her hair gathered in a ponytail that reveals the nape of her neck. She’s wearing a thin chain necklace that pulls on the tiny hairs. His hands itch to brush the skin and untangle the mess carefully, then place the whole breadth of his palm there, from tendon to tendon, to ease the sting. Before he gets to live his life’s most torrid affair, the girl yanks on the chain viciously, plucking out singular strands with a small hiss, and gets off the bus.

When he falls in love again, he is disastrously unready for the prospect of permanence. Handshakes and congratulations muttered over keys passed to the flat next door have far too much of long-term arrangement about them for his peace of mind. Duncan’s beloved of today is wearing paint-stained dungarees, the knees pushed out and sagging with age. Her hair is messy and her cheek smudged with dust. Her socks do not match either. She’s thanking the building manager with glassy eyes and a smile pulled so wide she looks about to cry.

The manager delivers one last pat to her back, then reveals Duncan’s presence by bidding him a quick, “Morning.” Duncan nods once, then keeps his head down as he passes by. Before descending the staircase, he allows himself one last glance: you sigh, pause, and step into your flat. Certainty floods him cold: he’s in love with his neighbour.

He spends the day at work trying to reason with himself. You are only one girl who happens to live on the other side of his bedroom wall. Duncan hardly ever sees the other neighbours as it is. For all he knows, you keep odd hours and spend weekends elsewhere and have a boyfriend already hanging pictures in that flat in his head. If luck is willing to show him some mercy, he will not be sentenced to pine after the girl next door. By lunch he has bargained himself into a kind of peace. By the end of the day, he almost believes it.

Then he comes home.

Your door is ajar. Passing by, Duncan catches through the crack the beginning of a new life. The hallway yawns open to the room beyond, where a mattress—not nearly wide enough for two—lies on the floor with its sheets crumpled up in a twist. There is a mug sitting on the windowsill with a teabag string dangling over the rim. A charger. A few cardboard boxes hunch by the wall, half-opened and all of it kills him a bit with tender, domestic ache. You’re really here, starting from scratch.

From deeper in the flat comes your voice, frayed by an argument with a consultant. It grows louder. Nearer. Duncan finds what is left of his wit and slips past as quietly as he can, key already in hand. He is through his own threshold and turning the lock on a held breath before you come into view. A second later, your door slams shut hard enough to carry through the wall. He hears you thank someone over the phone tightly and end the call. Then, he catches the cutest little growl of frustration he’s heard in his life. When he closes his eyes he can see you again in all your disarrayed glory and decides the girls from cafés and pubs and buses may as well pack it in, and Duncan is in trouble.

He wakes the next day hoping the universe will spare him permanence, only to get sucker-punched by the sight of you fighting your post box in the main hall. The same girlish growl he already knows leaves you when the box will not budge (despite you asking it very nicely by rattling the lock with the key stuck inside it). He tries to disguise his gasp and it comes out as a dumb, hiccuped chuckle, which, of course, gets your attention.

“Is something funny?” you ask, face dangerously frowned, yet still the prettiest thing Duncan’s ever seen.

“N-no. No,” he gulps, loudly. “You have to, uh… bully it a bit. Here—can I?”

His hands come out and you step away at once, making Duncan wonder whether it is because you believe his good intentions, or is it merely his intimidating size.

He leans in, presses on the little door and turns the key between his fingers until it clicks.

Your eyes are on him, bewildered. “That’s ‘bullying’ in your world?”

Duncan shrugs. “I mean…”

“Good to know.” Before he realises what is happening, your palm is out and disappearing in his, and he learns your name, and from this moment he will remember it forever. “Thirteen C,” you add, as if he has not noticed.

“Duncan,” he says. “Fifteen C.”

“Yeah, I know,” you say, smiling.

“So, err… how’s it going?”

“Alright. Just getting to…” Your eyes drag to the post box, then back to him. “—you know. Oh, um… it might get a bit”—your fingers pinch together to present what a bit means—“loud over the weekend. I’m having furniture delivered and I have to assemble it.”

That is it. Duncan’s heart behaves as if it has somehow acquired a brain of its own and is currently attempting an escape by slicing his chest open, lest he say something normal. Words pour out of his mouth and, to him, they sound like begging.

“D’you need a hand? I could—” As he speaks, you go still. Your eyes drop, and Duncan falters at once. “Unless you’ve that sorted already,” he says. “I only meant—I’m good with carrying, is all.”

After a beat, there’s a nod. “Yes,” you say, and Duncan realises you are nervous. “God, okay, yes. I’ve no one. I’m not even going to pretend I’m competent, or that it’s an easy job. My delivery company insists that we’ve agreed on a downstairs drop-off and it’s a ton of bookshelves. If you were just being nice, that’s absolutely fine though. God, sorry,” you mumble, holding your throat. “Moving is stressful.”

He has never seen awkwardness to match his own packed into someone so lovely. He feels an impossible urge to hug you, but knows that could make his affair fleeting, and suddenly finds himself wanting the opposite. “I wasn’t. I mean—I was. I’d gladly help. I’ve the weekend off.”

“Wicked,” you say, a shy curve on your mouth. “They come at eight on Saturday. That works?”

“It does. Yeah,” Duncan says, nodding once, then again, as if the second one might make him sound less like a man who has just been handed a winning lottery ticket in broad daylight. “That works. I’ll, uh… catch you later.”

He turns on his heel and starts back upstairs like a fool.

“Weren’t you heading out?” you ask.

He stops so abruptly he nearly misses the next step. “Right,” he says, and clears his throat. “I was actually—” Jerks a thumb towards the front door, then has to come back down past you with what dignity he can gather. “Going to work.”

Your smile does something unhelpful to his insides. “Thought so.”

“Yeah.” He gives a small nod. “So. Saturday.”

“Saturday,” you echo.

“Deadly.” The word slips out on its own. Duncan feels his ears burn. “I mean—good. Grand. I’ll see you then.”

He goes before his tongue can betray him any further, out through the front door and into the morning with his heart beating high in his throat, having managed to turn a straightforward goodbye into a full display of personal deficiency in under thirty seconds.

And deadly he is. You’re left smiling and so struck, it takes you another thirty seconds to clock that you are wearing an absurdly torn T-shirt, pyjama shorts and mountain climbing boots (classic just going to check mail assembly). Then another five to release a breath.

You were a bit too overwhelmed by the sight of your own four naked walls and a slice of floor to sleep on when you first saw him to assess him properly. Now, though—eyes, first and foremost. Huge, and blue and with lashes that belong on a doll rather than on a grown-up man. Proportional to the rest of him, which is also huge in a way that makes you feel safe and taken care of, not hunted.

Then his voice, which sits warm in your ear after he is gone, low and soft and careful with every word. His face: freckles over the bridge of his nose and across his cheeks, hair that cannot decide whether it is dark blond or ginger, and a blush that rises so easily it almost seems unfair on a man built like that. And his arms—Christ on a stick. They look as if they could hug any worry clean out of you. Crowning all of it is the most endearing smile, all crooked teeth, which he seems to reach for whenever the colour in his face becomes unbearable. Absolutely dear lad.

And he has agreed to spend the weekend with you, playing adult Lego with IKEA bookshelves. An offer you probably shouldn't have accepted, but he’s a sweetheart who, by all rights, ought to take up space more confidently than he does. Instead he ducks his head, fumbles his goodbye and flees, leaving you with your lip bitten raw.

You know damn well it is entirely unwise to develop a crush on your neighbour. Nevertheless, the tiny voice in the back of your head is already chanting, please don’t be a psycho, please don’t be a psycho.

The rest of the day you spend pointlessly cleaning the space that will get obliterated by dust and cardboard come weekend anyway, then listening to his footsteps through the wall in the evening. Saturday, you realise, while you have been busy making goo-goo eyes at him, you completely forgot to give him any actual logistics. Where are you meant to meet? Who carries what? How much time does he have?

You knock on his door at 7:45 a.m. and might as well just kiss the doorknob. Nothing. Try again, and still nothing. By the time the phone starts vibrating in your hand with an unknown number, your stomach has already dropped low enough to bruise. The delivery driver is downstairs. They are waiting for a signature. You swear, apologise, swear again and hang up feeling like an absolute clown for ever believing a kind stranger was something that just happened to you.

When you get down to the main hall, Duncan is already there. Waiting. In jeans and a white T-shirt with paint stains set so deep into it they look permanent. The sight of him hits you hard enough to wipe your mind for a second. Broad shoulders. Sleep still clinging somewhere about his face. Hair not fully decided yet. He turns at the sound of you coming and your heart gives one awful, hopeful kick.

“I thought you, uh—hi,” you say.

“Morning,” he says, straightening. There is a crease between his brows, like he has been wondering where you got to. “Sorry. I went down when I heard the van.” His eyes flick over your face quickly, then away. “You all right?”

That lands badly enough in your chest that you have to clear your throat before answering. “Yeah. Yes. I just thought you’d changed your mind.”

The blush comes up at once, easy as breath. “No,” he says. “No, I’m here.” His eyes flick to the heap of boxes crowding the entrance, then back to you. “And thank God, it seems. How many bookshelves d’you need, anyway?”

You shrug, already flustered. “I have a lot of books?”

Something in his face gives. Worse than a mockery—a smile. “Right.”

The delivery men are in no mood for inept romance. They want signatures, directions, confirmation that yes, all of this misery belongs to you. Duncan takes the handheld scanner from one of them before you can fumble it, passes it back, then bends to the first box with the ease of a man picking up a child’s toy. You stand there a second too long watching his forearms jump under the weight and have to jolt yourself back into usefulness.

So, it’s carry the lighter things. A flat-packed desk. Narrow boxes of shelves. Bags of fittings that clatter and bruise your shins. Duncan gets the proper monsters: the long boxes that seem designed to take out the ankles of whoever dares lift them, the thick ones packed with boards, the pieces that turn every staircase into an insult. By the second trip, his white T-shirt is sticking to the middle of his back. By the third, you have learned that the muscles there move under cotton in a way that ought to be regulated. He goes up the stairs with a box balanced on one shoulder and one hand free for the rail, and every time he turns sideways to clear the landing, you get some fresh reason to stop believing in a merciful god.

“Sorry,” you mutter for the fifth time, wrestling a carton through your front door.

“What for?”

“For owning things.”

He ducks under the doorframe with another box. “Bit late for that.”

You laugh despite yourself. He smiles without looking at you, sets the load down exactly where it needs to go and is gone again before you can decide whether to stare at his back or his hands.

Eventually, the entrance hall gets empty, so the one outside your flat can look as though a Scandinavian warehouse has exploded. Inside is worse. Cardboard everywhere. Thick white foam. Plastic corners. Long, baffling pieces of wood in shades with names no tree has ever deserved. You are sweaty and breathing through your mouth. Duncan wipes the back of his wrist across his forehead and leaves a pale streak through the dust there.

You lean against the wall and attempt a joke through your lungs. “If you’re fed up, I can probably handle the rest alone.”

His head comes up at once. “What, you’re kicking me out before the best part?”

“You think this is the best part?”

The blush arrives with such force it nearly does him an injury. “I meant—” He huffs a laugh at himself and looks down. “The building. The shelves.”

“Right,” you say. “The shelves.”

“Mm.”

You let him suffer for one beat longer than strictly kind, then rescue him. “Tea?”

He looks at you with real gratitude. “Go on, then.”

The kettle buys you both a little grace. For a while, it works. He tears through cardboard, stacks the big pieces, gets the general logic of things faster than seems fair. He is excellent at the parts requiring weight, reach or brute confidence. When you come back with two mugs though, Duncan is crouched in the middle of your floor among split boxes and hardware, reading the leaflets with an expression usually reserved for bad news from the doctor.

You pass him a cup, and he mutters an absent, “Ah, thanks, luv,” making your stomach twist. Goes back to frowning. Squinting, while holding the paper a little further away. Then further still, arm almost fully extended. His eyes narrow into slits. He turns the page one way, then the other, like Satan himself may be written on the back in clearer print. Under his breath, he whispers, “Shite.”

You are beginning to enjoy yourself immensely. “Everything all right there?”

“Mm.”

That is plainly a lie. His jaw sets, and finally he reaches into the pocket of his jeans. Out comes a pair of glasses so practical and slightly old-fashioned they look as though they have been with him longer than some friendships. He puts them on with the air of a man making a grave concession to weakness.

You nearly go through the floor. The lenses give him the most ridiculous, endearing bug-eyes. Not distorted exactly, but gentled, opened up. Softer, somehow. Boyish in a way the rest of him does not allow. He glances up and catches you looking.

“What?” he says, already half-defensive.

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not lying.” You set your mug down very carefully. “You just look…”

He waits. There are a hundred things you could say and none of them are survivable. Dear. Ridiculous. So lovely it hurts. You land on, “Serious.”

Duncan snorts, unconvinced, and looks back at the paper. “This thing was written by the devil.”

You kneel beside him and lean in. The leaflet rustles between you. Up close, his shoulder is warm. So is the line of his thigh where it nearly touches yours through old denim. He smells of soap and sweat broken by honest work.

“I thought it was the best part,” you say, forcing your gaze onto the tiny drawings instead of his glasses.

Duncan glances up. “Best part’s the company,” he says, and with those huge eyes behind wire frames, your crush leaves the realm of manageable things entirely.

He doesn’t really know what he’s doing. This, leastways, feels natural: helping. And it gives him enough space to push through anxiety and have something like a conversation with you. Nothing that would make his ridiculous in-love feeling flee has happened yet, so Duncan allows it to persist. At least as long as he gets to spend time with you assembling bookshelves.

That goes as expected: he’s tormented by your hands brushing his whenever you pass him a screw. Then by his own indignity at being unable to work with the smaller bits, where you step in—much too close for safety—with your nice-smelling hair and cute jokes. “Whatever would you do without me, hm?” you say, turning the smallest Allen key Duncan’s ever seen.

He clears his throat. “Uh… let’s see. Watch telly? Go down the pub for a game? Go running?”

“How utterly boring,” you mutter, focused on the task.

Duncan nearly rests his chin in one hand. “I know. I consider myself saved.”

You smile. Huff at the key refusing to go any further and deem your job done. “Alright,” you say, then deliver one more nail to his coffin. Your hand comes up to lift the hair off the back of your neck and cool off. He immediately goes to judge the kissability of it. Duncan, who in his lifetime has inspected necks’ napes in abundance, considers himself an expert on the matter. The verdict: yours is everything-able. Grabbable. Lickable. Kissable, and when he focuses enough he can imagine it smells heavenly too. Before he can blink himself out of it, you turn and ask, “Hungry?”

“Always,” Duncan says, and curses internally at how breathy he sounds. “Where d’you want these?” he asks, pointing at the whopping four assembled bookshelves, which currently create a little maze in your living room/dining room/bedroom—a room serving as all three.

“Oh, wherever you think,” you say, already scrolling through the food ordering app. That one hits him square in the gut, being allowed to do something domestic in the home of a girl he’s known for not even a week and is still deeply, hopelessly fallen for.

When he’s put everything where it looks best, you reappear with two beers in hand. He’s managed to find himself a spot on the floor where he’s sitting cross-legged, fully engrossed in the manual of the furniture already assembled, and your mind briefly goes to what it would feel like to wedge yourself onto those thighs.

You pass him a bottle, plop down next to him, and say, “Got us pizza. Fastest.”

“Grand,” he says. Leans back, trying to find something to stare at that is not your feet. “So—” The bottles clink. “How’s it feeling?” he asks, then pauses to watch you down half of yours in approximately five greedy gulps and chuckles, all helpless.

“Jesus, sorry.” You stop when you catch him staring like you have grown horns. Wipe your mouth. “It’s, um… less echo-y. Weird. But good. Like I’m starring in a rom-com. Oh shi—”

One of the shelves tips and starts falling face-flat. Duncan is up before you can properly register him moving, catching it with one hand.

“Got it. Got it. Yeah, the floors.” He wedges a folded bit of cardboard underneath to keep it straight. “They’re round as the earth.”

You blink, then slam the bottle onto the floor so hard some beer erupts from the neck. “Fuck, so I was right all along? It does feel like I’m going downhill from that corner.”

“Seems you were,” Duncan says, sitting back down. “Got to screw those to the walls, or you might get flattened in the night.” He points out the trajectory of it. If it went, it would go straight for the mattress. “We can do it tomorrow?”

“Two days in a row? Guess I bought you dinner, so everything’s by the book,” you mutter, and Duncan chokes on his beer. “Sorry. God, sorry. It’s the beer, I promise I’m not an obnoxious neighbour.”

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “If that’s obnoxious, I’d say I’m managing.”

You blink at that, then smile fully, teeth and all, and Duncan counts them before licking the backs of his own in a poor imitation of what it might be like to kiss you.

You turn towards him and lower your voice. “So you’re saying I should keep plying you with pizza and lager?”

There is a crust of dust in the corner of your eye. A strand of hair curled at your temple. The hinge of your jaw, where he would gladly suck a pretty pale bruise, just so you’d remember him as a man who leaves souvenirs. The collar of your T-shirt is darkened with sweat, and he can smell it and wants to press his nose there. On the floor between you, your hands point towards each other, fingers a hair’s breadth apart. He has half a mind to lean in.

The buzzer goes off roaring so suddenly you jump.

“God, that’s… loud,” you say. “One minute.”

The pizza arrives in a flurry of apologies, change, the brief humiliation of you having to shoulder the sticking front door with your hip. By the time you come back, Duncan has schooled his face into something he hopes resembles a man here for neighbourly reasons and not because he is one missed interruption away from pressing you into a wall so you can learn another purpose for all this strength.

You sit on the floor to eat because there is nowhere else to do it. The box goes between you. Grease blooms through the paper. Your knee knocks his once and stays there just long enough to keep his heart misbehaving.

The conversation comes in starts. Where you moved from. Whether the building is always this loud. How many books is too many books. He tells you he works mornings more often than not; you tell him this move has already shortened your life by a year. He laughs when you do impressions of the delivery men. You laugh when he tells you the names of the shelves sound like obscure illnesses. It should feel awkward. It does, a little. It also feels good enough that Duncan keeps forgetting to be shy until his own voice brings him back to himself.

He does not want to go. He knows he should. So he puts on the fakest yawn of his life, stretches his arms over his head for effect and says, “Right. Better leave you to it.”

Your face falls so slightly he almost calls it back.

“What time d’you want me tomorrow?” he asks, before he can stop himself.

That brings you back at once. “Whenever works for you.”

Duncan nods like a man with options. “I could do ten?”

“Ten’s perfect.”

“Good.” He gets to his feet and brushes nonexistent dust from his jeans. “I’ll see you then.”

When he leaves, it is with pizza marrying lager in his stomach, your laugh in his ears, and the growing suspicion that the universe has no intention of sparing him permanence at all.

He lies awake in bed, acutely aware that you are just behind the wall, and snorts helplessly into his pillow when a loud Fuck! follows a loud bang—presumably a toe fallen victim to one of the corners in the dark.

There is something insanely erotic to Duncan about a girl who lets him in and allows him to see the raw bones. No objects yet to hide behind or define yourself with; all he gets is your personality, stripped right down, and the version of you made intimate by imperfection. The one whose socks are nearly brown on the soles from cardboard dust, whose fingernails are dark beneath the crescents from handling metal bits all day, who stops herself from downing a whole bottle of beer only because he, in his dumbness, looked at her sideways.

And it feels nothing like his other crushes, which lived in perfect sealed-off vignettes, girls caught on their way somewhere else. You are going nowhere. Better: you are trying to stay. And Duncan has the honour of watching and helping it happen.

On Sunday he is ready at ten sharp and knocking on your door. His hair is still wet, and he is standing there with two coffees because he has no idea whether you have managed to unpack the coffee pot yet. That is the only reason.

Your voice comes muffled from inside. “Coming! One sec—”

He hears fumbling. Water running. Something hits tile and you hiss, “Shit!”

When you open the door, you look like you have only just dragged your shirt down over your back. Your hair is lifted with static. Your feet are bare, and Duncan has to force his eyes up from them. There he finds the corner of your mouth whitened with a trace of toothpaste.

“Hi. Sorry, I overslept,” you say, flattening your hair down with both palms.

“D’you want me to come back later?”

“No! No,” you say. “I’m up, promise. Also, is that for me?” Your finger points at the cups.

“No, luv. Brought them so I could drink two coffees in front of you.”

He presses one into your hands. You snort, then step out of the way. The hallway is narrow enough that he has to turn sideways to get through, and your stomachs still brush faintly. Duncan stops dead, points at his own mouth. “You’ve got a little—”

Your hand flies up and scrubs at your mouth with alarming force. You huff, embarrassed. “Sorry. I don’t drool, it’s just toothpaste.”

“Thank God.” A smile, unguarded and crooked and just so dear you want to squish his cheeks. 

He steps in fully and is met by the sight of the place properly gutted this time. Boxes split open. Books in tottering stacks. Fragile things wrapped in newspaper. Clothes half-freed from bin bags. He crouches over one of the boxes nearest to him, whistles low, and lifts out a hardback thick enough to stun a horse.

“What have we here? Remember how we talked about how many books is too many books yesterday? This—”

Then he leans further into the box, and mind leaves your body.

His shirt rides up over his loins. The muscles there rise in two thick ridges either side of his spine. They deepen the groove between them, pull his waistband tight, make a gap between skin and denim that would fit a flat palm perfectly. Fucking biteable, is what they are. Unbearably hot. You could live there, happy and fed and entirely unbothered, your cheek resting in the well of his back. It doesn’t help at all that his butt is as round as your floors which are as round as the earth.

It takes him a second to turn. When he does, he looks almost pleased with himself. “This is too many books, lass,” he announces. The lass does not help either. His brow pulls in. “Hey. You good?”

“Hm?” you hum, and bury the lower half of your face in the coffee cup in a futile attempt to hide the heat of it. “Yeah. Hunky-dory. And there is no such thing as too many books, Duncan.”

“You can call me Dunk. Friends do.” He stands then, book still in hand, and your body takes that as fresh bad news. “Right,” he says. “You ready?”

“As ever. Are you? I see no glasses.”

Something bright flickers across his face. He sets the book down, reaches into his back pocket and produces the case with a little flourish. Flips the arms open with both thumbs and settles the glasses on his nose like a man about to perform surgery.

“There,” he says. “Happy now, lass?”

“Very.” You clear your throat. “Okay. What should I do?”

He looks round your flat, glasses low on his nose, taking stock. “Might be better to clear some of this first,” he says. “Leave the drilling till later. We’ve the desk still, don’t we?”

Yes, unfortunately. So you unpack the desk while Duncan deals with the cardboard. He breaks boxes down with an efficiency that ought to be illegal, folds them once, twice, then stamps them flat under one boot. It should not do what it does to you, that sound, that force, that careless certainty of a body built to make stubborn things give way, but it does. Repeatedly. By the time he hauls the broken-down mountain downstairs, you need a moment so badly it arrives without asking.

You end up spread flat on the floor, muttering, “Fuck, fucking fuck,” into the air, heels of your palms pressed into your eyesockets hard enough to make your vision exist only in shades of black.

The front door opens quietly. A few steps, and: “Tired already?” Duncan asks.

Off with your head, then. When you look up, he is standing over you with the ceiling nearly on his shoulders. Not really. It only feels that way. A sigh. “Just… regrouping,” you say.

His mouth twitches. He puts a hand out. “C’mere, wee thing. It’s nearly done.”

It stirs your lower belly hot. So does the sight of his hand waiting for yours, broad and open and patient. You give him your arm because the other option is to reject it and scramble yourself up in an entirely undignified way. His palm closes round your elbow. Instead of yanking, he lifts steadily, calmly, as if you simply have no weight. The pressure of him stays even once you are upright. He is still holding you when you straighten fully, and for one daft second you let him.

“Right,” you say, smoothing your hands down your jeans. “I just need some water. Do you want some?”

He nods and follows you into the kitchen.

You reach up for the glasses from the top cupboard. There are only two unpacked. Duncan notices that at once. Notices, too, the way your shirt rides with the stretch and catches there above your hip, folded back on itself, leaving a strip of stomach bare. He feels it clean in the chest. Affection and neighbourly feelings that somehow have managed to fester into want, plain and greedy. He wants a lot, he realises. And he’s certain he’s obvious as daylight in it, and so engrossed in his own inadequacy things elude him.

What he misses is that you are no less obvious, only quieter. The way you hand him the glass so your fingers drag against his and stay a fraction too long. The way you drink from yours fast, quenching thirst that water has nothing to do with. The way your eyes travel down the line of his jaw to his throat as he swallows, unabashed for a second before you blink and pull them back.

Thank god he cannot read minds. Yours is all clatter. He looks right in here. In your kitchen, such as it is. A bit sweaty. A bit messy. Big enough to crowd the room without trying. The flat already warmer and more lived in for having him inside it. And you want him to stay so badly it makes your palms damp round the glass. Spoken aloud, it would sound ridiculous. Inside your head, it has already settled into fact.

You clear your throat and look anywhere but at his mouth. “Right,” you say. “If we stand here much longer, that desk will build itself out of spite.”

That gets a smile out of him. Small. Crooked. Ruinous. “Can’t have that.”

So, the desk gets built. The shelves end up arranged into a final, satisfying shape which, if everything goes to plan, will make a small home library. Duncan measures them up, shifts them by inches, squints, steps back, shifts them again, makes them line as evenly as the old building allows and does the bulk of the work with the drill. You end up his nurse, passing him sleeves and screws when he asks, holding things steady where he tells you, fetching the bits that roll away.

At one point he grunts and squints at the wall with such offence in his face that you ask, “Did BILLY say something rude?”

He snorts. “No. But I might need your hawk eyes here, luv.”

“I see,” you tease. “I’ll tell you a secret. Can’t see shit from afar. I suppose that makes us one properly sighted person between us.”

The prospect of making something whole with you is so enticing Duncan nearly misses the fact that you have slipped under his arm and then between his biceps. From there he gets your neck again. The shape of the space behind your ear. The little hollow where he decides his fingers would sit perfectly, cradling your head while he kissed you stupid. He puts all his strength into pressing the shelf to the wall while you screw the tiny bits in, holds his breath and prays for his body to behave. The space between his stomach and your back is so narrow he could close it in one step. Then he could bury his nose in your nape. Then—

He blinks against the thought so hard something scratches his eyeball. “Bloody fu—” he mutters, trying to wipe his face against his shoulder.

You feel the shift and turn your head a little. “You all right?”

“Yeah, just… something in my eye. Dust, I—”

You crane your neck first, then turn in the cage of his body. Set the screwdriver down. Dust your hands off on your jeans. “Hold it,” you say. “Come here.”

Dear Lord above.

Your hands reach for him. One finds the bridge of his glasses and pushes them up till they catch in his hair. The other comes to his cheek. Then both of them are there, cool skin, cradling his face as you pull him down to your height and look straight into the ruined eye. Duncan goes still from boots to teeth.

“D’you see it?” he chokes out.

“Yeah. Just an eyelash. Long one,” you mutter.

Your knuckle comes to his lid and draws it down gently. The eyelash—a brown curved thing, outrageous in its prettiness, like he has put a bloody curler to it—works itself loose, catches him once more for spite, then blinks far enough free for you to pinch it between thumb and forefinger. You hold it up in front of him, forgetting he likely cannot make out a thing without his glasses.

“There,” you say. “Better?”

“Can’t see it, but I believe you,” Duncan breathes.

He stays bent over you, close enough that the freckles show one by one. You could count them if given the time. You want the time. All day, if possible. Or a year. All year to count them and then find out whether they continue elsewhere. He licks his lips once and then keeps very still, save for the faint trembling in the arms.

You pull him a fraction lower. Then another.

Duncan looks like he wants to say something and rejects each option in real time. His mouth opens. Shuts. When he thinks you are about to kiss him, you slide his glasses back down onto the bridge of his nose and he makes the smallest wounded sound in his throat, near enough a whine to count. But you keep coming. Closer. Closer. He can feel your breath wash warm over the tip of his nose, over his upper lip. Then your mouths are there, set together already, the contact made and held. Soft and dry with the day. Neither of you moving. Both of you letting the other back out if they want it badly enough. There are no takers. 

Duncan closes his eyes. His voice comes out low and strained. “C’mon, girl. Give me something.”

“This?” you say, and then move. And god, what a movement that is. He feels it everywhere. In his toes, where you step on them to lengthen your reach, and he welcomes that weight. On his scalp, where your fingernails scratch him so deliciously a shiver skitters down his spine, making his hips move forth. On his upper lip that gets framed by both of yours and then his mouth opens and his tongue slips out and Duncan is so trustful of his own work his palms finally leave the shelf. They come to gather what there is of you. He wraps you all tight and around in his arms, sets his hands on your waist and hip and with it you lift a little, and in that lift Duncan’s kissing his neighbour.

His glasses get skewed. He steps away from the bookcase and to the nearest wall, where he presses you in. One tug, and your legs know exactly what to do—they cinch him, ankles crossed in the small of his back, and you’re airborne, clutching his neck, thighs supported in his grip. He keeps kissing, because this is simply impossible and if there is news about to be broken to him that permanence is not an option he’d rather receive it later than sooner.

“Wait,” you mutter. “God, I’ve been trying not to do that.”

“Y-you?” he stammers. “Why?”

“Because you’re my neighbour,” you say, swiping hair off his forehead. For once, your faces are level. He’s so damn gorgeous it’s nearly absurd for him to be unaware of it. Angular where it matters, soft where it’s unexpected. You can think of another arrangement where height will not exactly come into play, but first—

You’re overcome with need to glue yourself to him, so you hug him into a full-body shackle: tighten your arms and legs where they keep you up, and bury your face into his neck to mumble a wishful, “You’re not a player, are you? You don’t go around calling women lass like you know what it’s doing, right?”

His palms twitch on your thighs. Face moves towards you, then stops, held there by caution so naked it shreds. He lets out a breath that is a quizzical chuckle. “Jesus, no,” he says. “I can barely talk to you.”

A laugh breaks out of you, and then out of him too. He tips his forehead to yours for a second, still holding you up like it costs him nothing.

“Are you?” he asks, quieter. “A maneater?”

The thing is, you were struck with him from the start. There was lust in it, greedy enough to startle you with your own nerve. But the rest has come on slower and worse. Out of use. Out of kindness. Out of watching him take the weight of things without making a show of it. Out of seeing him go soft-faced with concentration, seeing how badly he wants and how carefully he handles the wanting, as if it is something that could do damage if let loose carelessly. You have known him three days and already the flat feels rearranged around his presence. Maybe this is what blessing looks like in real time. Proximity. Repetition. Two people getting an unfairly clear look at each other too quickly.

You lean back enough to see him. “Do I look like one?”

His eyes go over your face as though the answer might be written there if he studies hard enough. “No,” he says, with such immediate certainty it almost hurts. Then, because apparently that is not enough for him: “You look pretty. And kind.”

A smile tries to happen. Your throat goes tight around it. “That so?”

He nods once. “Yeah.”

You smooth your thumb over the heat in his cheek, the rasp of ginger stubble there. His glasses are still crooked. His mouth is still open the slightest bit from the last kiss. Entirely too dear. Entirely too much.

Oh, and does he. The second time it comes with all his better judgement buried alive beneath it. He gets his mouth on yours like he has finally understood the point of having one. Bolder now. Hungrier. Your lower lip catches between his teeth and there is nothing neat about the way he bites it, only care and the lack of enough care, both at once. Crooked teeth bite just fine, you learn. Better than fine. He mouths you until your breath goes thin, then drops to your neck and inhales so deeply it feels dragged out of the soles of his feet. Nibs, and whatever was warming in you goes past that. Burning now. Clean through.

“Bed,” you mutter, fingers twisted up in his shirt.

Duncan had no idea that was even possible, that one word from you could turn his whole body into a set of orders barked and obeyed in the same second. He does what he is told. Walks with you held high on him, your weight gathered tight and easy, and when he reaches the mattress on the floor he goes down with care, one knee first, then the other, until your back is sinking into bed that is still only a mattress and a fitted sheet half-pulled loose at one corner. He stays over you, breathing hard enough to show it, one hand planted by your head, the other still hooked under your thigh.

“You sure?” he asks.

You nod too fast, then colour. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m just…” Your face does something shy and pained. “Sweaty.”

Duncan looks at you. Thoughtfully. Like this is a thing worth considering from all angles. Weren’t he the biggest sweetheart god ever let loose on the public, that look might be labelled as menacing, too.

“I know,” he says. Then, lowers his face to your belly.

Words leave your body. That is all. They just go. He presses his mouth to you through the shirt first, then rides it up with both hands, bunching cotton inch by inch until your arms have to lift. The chance is taken: his hand slides to your wrists and sets them above your head. Your breath catches so sharply it nearly cuts. Duncan’s nose goes to your skin and he smells you like he means to learn something useful. Belly first. Then higher. He drags slow through the middle, mouth open now and then, breathing in. Your chest. The damp little hollows under your arms, where the tickle of his breath makes you squirm and laugh helplessly. Higher still, until he reaches your throat. He sweeps your hair aside with his cheek to get a clean stripe of skin and settles there, breathing you in as if he has come home to it.

“I like the way you smell,” he says against your neck. His voice roughens on the last word. “Bloody maddening, if you ask me.”

It does something murderous to your insides. You twist under him, wrists flexing in his hold, just to get closer. His grip tightens by a hair from pure absorption. Nose traces the line under your jaw. Another small bite. Your heel drags against the sheet.

“Duncan,” you say, and it comes out wrecked enough to make him lift his head.

Hair is falling into his eyes. Glasses sit crooked on his nose. His mouth is wet and pink from kissing you, cheeks spill red all over his skin and you wonder if that blush exists below the T-shirt too. Sensitive. There is a look on his face like he is trying very hard to keep being good while every part of him is begging for permission to stop.

“Yeah?” he says.

You swallow. Feel his thumb resting on the inside of your wrists. The whole blunt weight of him held off you by restraint alone.

“More,” you tell him.

Lances him clean through, that one. Duncan’s eyes drop to your mouth, then lower, as if he means to be sensible about it and catalogue the options. “Where?” he asks, voice thick. “Tell me where, lass.”

You could laugh at how decent he is, kneeling over you in a state that ought to excuse much worse, still asking like the answer matters more than his own pain. Instead you lift your wrists a little in his hand and he understands. Lets them go. Your palms land on his shoulders and stay a second. On the impressive spread of him and the hard work of holding himself up. “Everywhere,” you say, then, because he looks like he may pass out from being too good, “Start with here.”

You guide him back to your neck. The instruction is taken with shameful gratitude—he might go down as a man who leaves souvenirs after all. Mouth finds the place he’s already put some mind into, perfecting the bruise with focused lips, then the edge of his teeth, then the flat of his tongue to soothe what he has done. Then, he shifts—nose wedging the collar of your shirt aside, finding skin hidden all day under cotton and sweat. Every new inch offends him with how little of it he had before.

Sounds get born in his throat and die into a hiccup every time your body speaks up. There are fingers in his hair. Little gasps. Movement under his groin is particularly unbearable when your leg brushes him. No matter how old and stretched, jeans were simply not made to contain a boner, and Duncan learns it the literal hard way.

“You’re doing me in,” he says into your throat.

It bounces off your pulse. “You seem alive enough.”

He laughs, a breathy little snort. Lifts his head just far enough to look at you. His face is flushed down to the neck. He reaches between your bodies with obvious reluctance and catches the hem of your shirt in both hands. Stops there. “Can I?”

You nod. It still does not satisfy him.

“Mm. And now can you tell me that I can?” he says.

“Yes, you can,” you tell him. “Take it off.”

He strips you with the care of a man undoing bandages. Your shirt goes up in stages, dragged over your ribs, your bra, your face, until it is gone. He stares long enough to make your stomach jump. It’s slower than everything—than a quick skim of current wants or broad hungry looking. Almost dazed. Like each small part of you has to travel the whole way through him before he can move to the next one. His thumb runs along the underside of your breast through the bra, testing nothing more scandalous than weight, and his eyes close briefly at the feel of it.

“Jesus,” he says under his breath.

“What?”

He opens his eyes. “You’re…” Then stops, mouth twisting, unhappy with every word available. “A lot.”

You grin before you can help it. “Good a lot?”

His answer is to lower himself and press his face between your breasts, right into the warm cleft through the bra, as if language is a thing failed beyond repair. The sound you make at that goes straight to his hips. Duncan exhales hard, rubs his cheek on the lace, then wedges his fingers between your back and the mattress, to the clasp at your back with more hope than skill. The first try gets him nowhere. The second worse. He pulls away far enough to glare at your tits like they have personally insulted his family.

“Need help?” you ask.

He looks embarrassed for exactly one second. “Need a miracle.”

You laugh. Arch and bend and press your belly out and your arms briefly make it look like you’ve grown small wings. That is worse for him somehow, watching you undo your own bra for his benefit. When it loosens he sighs like he is the one being let out of it. He peels it away, lets it fall wherever, then just looks again. His hands come up and hover, huge and uncertain, before settling on your ribs. Warm. Shaking faintly.

“Still alright?” he asks.

“Yes.”

You find him. Guide him higher. The effect is immediate. Duncan’s breath leaves him in one stunned pull. Then, it’s roughness on skin. Palms large enough to divide equally, a tit per one. He holds you and smiles like an absolute goof.

“There,” you murmur. “That’s better.”

His mouth opens. Nothing useful comes of it. Which, really, fair.

You slide one hand down from his neck to the hem of his T-shirt, bunch it in your fist and tug. It lifts enough to show a strip of stomach, warm and furred and indecent in its ordinariness. A man’s body right there in your hands. “Can I take your shirt off, Dunk?”

That sobers him by half a shade. Makes his eyes search yours. “Yeah,” he says. Then, because permissions have to be balanced: “You can.”

You peel it up and over him. Duncan helps in the last second, ducking his head, pulling one arm free and then the other. The shirt lands somewhere by the mattress and suddenly there is too much of him at once. Chest broad enough to lay a proper grievance on. Shoulders built for carrying things that have no business being carried by one person. A scatter of pale freckles over the tops of them, which feels like information the public should not have access to. Hair dusting through the middle and down his stomach, where it disappears under the waistband of his jeans and leaves your mind to finish the route unsupervised.

“Oh, Jesus,” you say before deciding whether you mean to.

The colour in his face deepens. As you suspected, it bleeds down: stains that bloom like bruises sketch his neck and lower. “What?”

“Nothing,” you lie. Your hand goes out, palm to his chest, just to see. Warm. Slightly damp. Hard and alive under skin. His heart is going like a thing trapped. “You’re very…”

He watches you try to land it. Offers, “Big?” and somehow even that comes out apologetic.

“Hot,” you say, and the laugh that breaks out of him is so helpless it nearly kills you.

You kiss him to put him out of his misery. Or yourself. Or deepen it. Hard to say. His hands wake up after that. One stays on your breast, thumb dragging over the nipple until your back leaves the mattress. The other travels down your ribs, your waist, the notch of your hip, then lower still until he reaches the button of your jeans and stops there like someone brought up against a locked gate.

His forehead drops to yours. “Can I?”

“Yes.”

The button goes. The zip next. Duncan’s fingers slip below and the sound you make at the first pass of his knuckles is enough to make him shut his eyes. There’s no rush in it, just checking. He decides one yes about bottoms is probably enough, so instead of cramming a palm into denim, he hooks both hands over the waistband and slides your jeans down to your knees. You kick the rest off.

A quick examination of conscience later, Duncan realises he is the victim of the mysterious ways the universe works. One day he sees a girl in a corridor and thinks all the unhelpful thoughts about her. The next, he offers to help because he’s built like that. Now the same girl lies below him, naked as day, clearly wanting him back if he’s learnt anything at all about why girls get wet between the legs. This is the part he wasn’t prepared for. Pining over a face with no name to it is one kind of torture. Being desired is another, because desire asks something back.

He runs a hand the whole length of you, ankle to knee to thigh, until it lands there. The skin is damp, curls glossy, and when he squints hard enough through those goddamn stupid glasses he can see your muscles clenching, impatient. Impatient for him. Your hands get impatient too: they come for his buttons, shake there a little. He lets you fumble a bit, even allows one clumsy tug, until, inevitably, his trousers stay locked round his thighs.

“We in a hurry?” he asks.

“N-no, I just—” Your brows furrow; throat bobs. You inhale, then sigh out, “want you.”

His mouth pulls crooked with it, because the sweetness of being wanted hurts him a little. He comes down next to you, onto his side, one arm sliding under your neck so your head has somewhere proper to go. He kisses your temple once, warm and brief, then the corner of your eye.

“Soon, lass,” he says.

You only huff at that, offended on principle. The offence does not survive long. His hand drops between your legs and one finger presses inside with all the patience he has got, and your whole body gives a startled little jump.

“Oh—”

“Good oh?”

“Best fucking oh,” you say, and a cute smile blooms on him.

He works it slow, watching your face with such naked concentration it ought to count as indecent. The glasses are slipping again. He nudges them up with his shoulder, fails, gives up, so you help by plucking them off. His thumb finds the place above and your breath leaves you in strips. He swallows, looks faintly green around the gills with the effort of saying the next thing, then says it anyway.

“You got a condom?”

“N-no, but—” A sharper thrust of his thumb splits the thought clean in two. “Fuck—I’m on the pill.”

Something truly frightful must cross his face, because you rush to fix it.

“Nothing whorish, I promise. Just health reasons. I’m all alone like a country dunny otherwise.”

Duncan shuts his eyes for half a second and bows his head, not out of judgement but because the opposite has arrived too hard and fast. A blessing to him, that. A crime, otherwise. He gets half a mind to entertain the daftest thought alive—that maybe it was always meant to go this way. You, alone like a country dunny. Him, not much better.

Second finger joins the first. You make a sound into his throat and the silly thought dies happy.

He works you open by degrees so thoroughly you start wondering if there’s going to be a follow up to that condom question. Not that his fingers don’t feel good—the fucking do, almost too much. But from where you’re cradled you can see exactly the way his cock is jerking in his underwear, still framed by the fly of his jeans. Simultaneously you know he’s the kind of guy who’d close your trembling legs after you come, then cuddle into your neck until he softens, because this is not about him. So you try again.

“Duncan,” you breathe. “Enough, I—”

“You’ll need more than that for me,” he says. Abashed. I’m sorry that my cock’s too big to fuck you right away and there will be no quickies in our life kind of embarrassment. It’s unbearably sweet. Insanely hot. Blood pumps your cheeks plump and warm already, and then Duncan nearly ends you by saying, “Need to sort you out first.”

And it’s the first time in your life a man has told you his size might be a problem while making it sound like care came first and ego didn’t show up at all. He’s everything but swagger. Your heart does something daft and soft around the edges while the rest of you clenches hot around his fingers.

“Okay,” you say, cupping his face. “Okay, one more. Just—” A swallow. “Fair warning, I might come.”

It startles a grin out of him. Mean by his standards. Lovely by any other. “How’s that a bad thing?” he asks. Kisses you once, hard enough to shut you up for a second, then gives you that remedy for a cock-too-big problem of his and your vision bleaches.

God, you’re full. If girth blesses every part of him evenly, you may indeed be doomed. You would be already if he wasn’t this thoughtfully slow. You can feel in real time how your muscles adjust round him, then take a second to unclench when he withdraws to the first knuckle.

“You alright?” he asks, and his own voice tells on him. Tight. Thinned out with strain. You look so pretty it’s becoming unendurable. Hair dragged wrong, mouth open, eyes gone bright and glassy in a way that makes him so hard it’s difficult to think with any dignity.

Your nails dig into his nape. “I’m so good I’m gonna lose my mind in a second,” you breathe. A swallow. “Can you please take your pants off?”

He nods, nose brushing yours. “Alright,” he says. “If anything hurts, you tell me, yeah?”

Then he has to do the humiliating bit. First, he drags the shoes off his feet by pressing a sole to each heel. Then, shimmies out of the jeans, dragging the underwear down with them. Kicks that off too, and one leg catches, stubborn, round his ankle. By the time he joins you in nudity, he is red right up to the ears and flat on his back, camped next to you in all his difficult truth, cock heavy on his stomach.

Your eyes drop and your breath does an audible hiccup. You can feel his stare burning a hole through your forehead. He lies there tense, arms pinned to his sides like they are itching to cover himself up. God, what a waste that would be. It hits you then that he is boyish in random places so he can be an exaggeration of a man in others, and somehow all of that adds up to just a lad.

And since the opportunity has presented itself, you take it.

He is large enough that the head reaches near his navel, and yes, the girth is something to reckon with—but haven’t you just been worked open for this exact occasion? There is something insanely lovely about a man who would have half a locker room struck dumb standing for verdict, only to lie there with tension standing out in his forearms like he expects to be judged instead of wanted. He is not carved out of marble either, thank god. There is softness to him. Hair lies over his chest in an even, soft spread and trails down his stomach, which has the smallest give to it, a swell around the navel that looks made for a cheek to rest there. A vein runs the whole length of his cock, and with the pulse inside it he twitches, lifts off his stomach and falls back again. Heavy thing. Solid. Human. Entirely too much and, for that very reason, exactly right.

You put a palm on his arm. Murmur, “Come here,” and squeeze till he gets the message.

Duncan rolls back onto his side to face you, still halfway looking like he might apologise for the state of himself. You hook a thigh over his hip and pull him in until your groins meet. The contact draws a raw little grunt out of him. Good. Let him suffer a bit too. You kiss him—once, slow enough to make it stick, then again with your mouth smiling into his.

“I like you,” you whisper. His face does a helpless thing around the eyes. “Come on,” you say, nudging his nose with yours. “I’ll take it easy on you.”

“Will you?” he asks, while suffering internally. Both a promise of bliss and a difficult animal before him, he fists himself at the base and lines up. Your lips kiss the crown. Arms yoke his neck until noses flatten against each other. He can feel where your thigh, the meat of it, spills over his hip bone, quivers and settles heavier than he’d suspect it can. First inch, and he’s breathing hard. A bit more, and you join him.

“Shit,” you mutter. “Keep… keep going.”

He does, but so slowly it nearly stops counting as movement. Your body loses the line between pain and pleasure. There is excruciating sweetness in his hand. He manages to hold man’s favourite handle (your ass) while rubbing his thumb in compassionate strokes. Mouth hums and lashes tickle your cheek, eyes search for signs of sore that’s unwanted. The stretch he delivers burns, the opening is downright rude in its bluntness, but Duncan remains gentle, and that’s what turns this whole thing so total.

Underneath the turmoil, deeper, stranger, comes fullness that puts your musings about fingers to shame. There’s weight to it, length to it and, fundamentally, intent that makes your body waver between flinching from it or gathering it closer, so it tries both.

Duncan sees the whole war pass through your face and stops dead. “Too much?”

“N-no,” You breathe through it. Feel the wait in the whole of his frame. “Stay a minute. Just let me—”

He goes still at once. By force of patience, and by that old art he has been made to practise all his life and still has not mastered. A man built like Duncan does not get much leave to move through the world carelessly. People take one look at the size of him and hand him a part before he has opened his mouth: lift this, carry that, mind yourself, do not crowd, do not startle, be gentle. So he learns slowness. Learns to take the edge off himself before it reaches anyone else.

Now all of that gets spent on holding still while your cunt drags on the little of him already inside, hot and slick and so tight round the crown and upper body of his cock it feels like a clean seizure. He had let himself think of this in useless scraps. The sight of it. The permission of it. The prospect of being taken in where he has wanted to be since that first day. The actual feel is another beast entirely. The yielding comes by increments. The muscles take him, think better of it, grip again. Heat packs close enough to border on pain. If this much is enough to strip every spare thought out of his head, Duncan has no idea what shape he will be in when you let him deeper.

When your hips start making little lawless attempts at settling further onto him, he asks, “What’re you doing, hm?”

You huff at him. “Bouncing on it crazy-style, what does it look like?”

Insane, is what you are. He lets out a full snort, then another, and it all breaks into a boyish giggle. “Have I got a mad girl, then?”

“Yeah, I’m fully bonkers,” you grin. Sweat breaks on your forehead and it looks pretty. “Probably should’ve told you before—” The angle shifts, minutely. You sink deeper. Moan tears your mouth open and Duncan’s cock jerks inside you. “Oh fuck, it’s getting good. Oh, there—”

“There?”

“Yeah, right there,” you say, hugging him tighter and speaking into his mouth. “Oh God, you’re precious. You were right.” A swallow. “With that sorting-out thing.”

He kisses the corner of your mouth. “You tell me,” he says. “Tell me if I’m being a bastard.”

“Impossible,” you whisper. “No chance. Fuck, Duncan—”

One of your hands comes loose from his neck and slips between your bodies. You press it low on your belly first, just above where the softness gives way to strain, and when you sink carefully again you can feel it there if you mean to. A hard shape. Buried enough that the knowledge of it makes your face go hot all over.

“Christ,” you breathe.

Duncan’s brow pulls in. “What?”

You catch his wrist and drag his hand from your hip to your stomach. Flatten it there. Make him feel it. Then, because the thing asks to be proved twice, you rock down on him again and pin his palm in place.

“Look,” you say. “Look what you’re doing to me.”

There he is, a proof of blood under flesh—filling you so completely it overspills. His fingers flare over your stomach, press, and Duncan can touch his own cock through the membrane of skin. His mouth falls open. Red surges up his throat so fast you nearly laugh.

“Jesus,” he says, stunned. “Lass.”

You do it once more, slower, both of you feeling for it. “That’s me,” he says, dazed.

You nod against his cheek. “That’s you.”

His eyes shut. One beat. Two. Then he makes a sound into your mouth that is pure loss of it. His forehead presses to yours. “Girl,” he says, thumb twitching over your belly, “you keep doing that and I’ll be no use to either of us.”

“It’s your turn,” you say, wrapping your arm back where it belongs. Wrapping him all over with your limbs until he’s shackled and happy about it. “Fuck me. Please.”

“Okay,” Duncan says. Swallows. “Okay, just—can you tell me again? Please,” he says, hoping you’ll catch the meaning. That’s it’s not about smugness, but for a big bastard like him, needing to hear it twice before he believes someone truly wants him this bad.

“Come on, Dunk. Fuck me.” There’s a kiss on his forehead. “Nice and slow until you come, yeah?”

Before he knows it, he’s nodding like a daft thing, and his hips start moving. Gentle thrusts, deep, fat rolls of pelvis until a smile pulls your lips. “Just like that,” you tell him. “You’re doing so good. God, you feel good, fuck—”

“Take it easy on me, lass,” he breathes. “You promised.”

He holds you, or himself onto, the dip of your hip. Kisses you through it, badly at first because neither of you can keep the rhythm of your mouths and bodies straight, then better, then worse again when the feeling climbs. The heel of his palm presses on your stomach where he bulges you out and the fingers he keeps pointed down so they can brush you whenever you decide a twitch from your side is due. Crude little arrangement, but effective.

“Shit,” you grunt. “How you doing, hm?”

"Barely," he says. "You?"

The truth of it is written all over him. The tremor in his thigh and the way his breath snags. The slow loss of that thoughtful caution he has worn like a second skin all day. He is trying, still, to be good. It only makes the strain of it show more plainly.

"Close," you tell him, feeling your own spine prickling with it. "Fuck, so close. Will you come inside me?" 

His whole face changes around it. “Jesus, luv,” he says, nearly bitten off. Wedges his nose into your neck. Then, lower: “Yeah. God, yes.”

You can tell exactly how sore you are going to be tomorrow and expect your insides to have a different shape starting now. But your body has already made up its mind about him. It is learning him in real time and keeping the record. From the look of him, he would let himself be kept if asked, so you have a growing feeling that this must be the place. And then another thought comes, equal parts romantic and foul: that if he finished there, if he gave you all of it, the ache might turn kinder.

And Duncan, god—he's truly barely holding. He tries to think of neutral things but whenever his lids part your mouth is there, blurred and lovely, and you smell so good skin is about to melt off his cheeks. His balls ride up a notch, tense, and go hard with the strain in the sack, and the whole of his length burns so bright he feels it in his temples. It’s hard to keep his thigh from quivering and his hand from misbehaving. Fingers dig where he holds you and there’s a growing worry he’ll leave you with a palm-shaped bruise on your ass. He hopes you’ll forgive him.

“F-fuck,” you grit. “Duncan—”

You tighten like you mean to choke the soul out of him. Everything—arms, legs, cunt—seizes around him. The skin goes taut under his touch and you stare him dead in the eye from under eyelids so fuck-drunk he’s never been granted a sight like this in his life.

In this entanglement of trembling thighs and shoulders working so hard they seem knocked senseless, he feels it pulled out of him by force. Comes, and keeps coming, with his face pressed into yours, panting, and muttering yes, girl, yes, until his toes go cold and Duncan realises he’s way too long for your mattress and his feet kept touching the floor the whole time he’s been making love to you. 

He blinks and feels the resistance of skin against his eyelashes. Learns that he’s crushed you in a bear hug so tight your breath has gone shallow. His arms loosen. Face comes up to scan for damage and instead of asking if you’re alright, Duncan hears himself saying, “I’ve been half gone on you since the hallway.”

Your eyes are glassy. Your mouth does that helpless pull that’s a smile around something overwhelming. One that happens when people burst out laughing instead of crying.

“I hope I lived up to expectations,” you say. “Because I’ve been half gone on you since the post boxes and now I’m fully.”

“My girl,” Duncan says, swiping hair off your forehead and disbelieving his own boldness. “Are you my girl?”

You nod and hold your arms out for him. It does something quiet and final to his face. Duncan folds himself back down into you, gathers you up proper, then draws back just enough to look. His hand runs the line of your side, careful and searching.

“I didn’t hurt you?”

You shake your head. “No.” A laugh, weak and warm. “I’ve learnt a thing or two, though.”

That gets one out of him too. He ducks his head, grinning into your cheek, then lifts it again with some practical thought arriving behind the eyes. “Hold on a sec.”

You blink at him. “Why?”

He glances down at the mattress, the sheet, the general state of things. “Because that bed’s poor enough without me making a full show of it,” he says. “I don’t see another in here, so I’m trying to save you the mess.”

You do hold on. Arms and legs go round him at once, locking him in place so completely it startles a pleased little huff out of him. Duncan plants a palm behind him and gets to his feet with you wrapped round him. The lift goes through his whole body. A hard breath. A tightening in the jaw. One small adjustment of grip when your weight shifts. Then he is up, broad and warm and breathing a touch harder than before, and you are still exactly where you want to be.

Still, you ask, “I’m sorry, and what exactly are you going to do? Pull out over a bin?”

Duncan looks mildly offended. “You strike me as a lady,” he says. “I had the shower in mind. If you’ve one of those.”

You smile into his mouth. “I’m tempted to say no only to make you march us like this to your flat.”

He fixes his grip by hitching you once higher on him. There’s a small girlish yelp. His nose rubs along yours, playful and mean and soft and—

“Will you take it easy on me, lass?”

You nod with your face still tucked close to his. “Will you?”

He will, or lightning may as well strike him where he stands. Because Duncan is in love with his neighbour, and this one is not going anywhere.

Sentiment. The crowd's maudlinism over him, back when they still let him pretend he was Principal and invited him, charitably, to dance the lead part on the second night. Or the matinee one.

He thinks him and the company practice a liaison of sick codependency, but there isn't much in Daeron that is not sick in some sense, so he'd rather keep facing the sickness he knows than get stranded in a new one. He used to try harder. Used to be quite remarkable if somebody asks him, and had enough of a career not to muse on what might happen when he retires. Then, as any substitute addiction, ballet ceased to suffice and he started to make mistakes. Getting late—both to rehearsals and with his steps. Too drunk to notice his partner trying to cover up his cotton joints with her resilience. Too weak to lift her, once. They gave him six months. He got worse. They told him a brief vacation as First Soloist might do him good. He asked them why he should stay under demotion. They told him he could go if he so wished.

Brief is three months now. His partner left after the first. The ballet remained in repertory. Daeron did not. It's doing him nothing, neither bad nor good, just nothing.

He's late to the company class, only a little. Enough to join the middle of barre and then fumble through centre work. The ballet master glances at him once, irritated, then the second time, assessing. How drunk, hopefully just moderately. And Daeron is exactly that—merely primed for the day to make it bearable, but with how far he is in, the inebriety keeps stacking in him. He's been drunk for so long the glassy eyes and shiny forehead have been filed as just the way he looks.

He's done the bare minimum today, which took some forethought. Two coffees, both primed, and nothing more since leaving home. Enough to remain safely past that terrible threshold of lucidity without becoming difficult to stand upright. They give him less work, so he drinks more. The more he drinks, the less they give him. A miserable little loop, lovingly maintained by all involved.

He hasn't performed since his partner left. Hasn't been cast in anything either, until now. Only stumbled from rehearsal to rehearsal, gathered every disdainful look available and gone home with them. Then yesterday, after three months of professional purgatory, they put his name on Onegin. Second cast, naturally. Yours sat beside it: Tatiana, new to the company and apparently unlucky. When you come in, he is interested despite himself.

Hope still lives in him somewhere. Very low down, evidently, and feeding on scraps.

You've no intention of giving him a first impression. You enter in the break between company class and rehearsal, speak briefly with the ballet master and begin to warm up without looking about for the person you've been brought here to meet. Daeron thinks they have warned you. Perhaps softened it into something professional: difficult period, reduced schedule, former Principal. Perhaps they told you he needs patience. They do enjoy asking women for that on his behalf.

He stares some. Your feet are good—strong through the arch without clawing at the floor, heels staying where they ought during pliés. The right ankle has been taped beneath your tights, cleanly and with experience. You give it an extra circle when you think the ballet master is looking elsewhere. Daeron notices, because this is a hidden thing, and he's good at spotting those. In the meantime, the Principals begin their marking, and everyone's eyes turn to them. Very exact, good-looking, making this ballet thing look easy because they sweat born to dance, all that nonsense.

Daeron was born to evade. He looks at you. You rise through demi-pointe several times, test your balance, fold over one leg. Economical. He mislikes that.

His previous partner was no enabler, merely further proof that the old doctrine about opposites has been oversold. She had his appetite and enough discipline to keep it from turning rabid. When he wandered off into the music, she knew which wanderings were worth following and which required hauling him back. Nobody got to hang mad genius over them. Passion and skill had to suffice.

She went out with him a few times. Let him drink without making faces. Let him kiss her too, and he is decent at that, hands and legs and mouth being the parts of him most willing to cooperate. There might have been something in it had the rest ever joined them. It did not. They remained friends. And good riddance—curing whatever makes Daeron's brain such a burden with love belongs with the rest of the century-old nonsense.

You look built to ration effort, feeling, and patience. And they have cast you as Tatiana. Perhaps the company has developed a sense of humour. He suspects somebody has decided to try opposites on him after all—a counterweight, a corrective. Something tidy to set against him until he behaves. That much is plain enough from the set of your mouth when Daeron finally stands.

His body objects some, starting at the ankle, then the back of his knee, then the knot under his left shoulder which has lived there so long it ought to be paying rent. He bends, reaches for the floor with his palms, and slowly rolls upright. You seem to catch the single tremor in his hand when he braces it on his thigh. It's one bland glance. Then, it goes away with no concern, nor second-hand embarrassment offered. He likes you slightly better for that.

"Second cast," the ballet master says. "From Onegin’s entrance. Mark it first, both of you."

The pianist begins. Daeron moves to his place. By the first eight counts he can tell you've learnt the tape exactly. Every pause copied, every arm placed according to the dancers who recorded it years ago, including a transition they abandoned after one of the touring stages proved too narrow. He marks his own entrance with little more than the feet and the direction of his shoulders. Muscle remembers better than his head, so even though he is late into the turn, he manages to finish right where it belongs.

You watch him in the mirror. He enjoys that.

On the next phrase you travel across the floor. You are better in motion. No surprise there, most dancers are. At first he finds you tense and somewhat bloodless. Then you move fully and he notices that your control is concealing considerable power. Less insipid, though still quite meagre with emotion. Daeron gapes so keenly he misses his cue.

"Daeron," says the ballet master.

Daeron rolls his eyes. "I know."

"Then get on with it."

Two counts late but he makes it, and still he is in time by the end, which used to earn laughter and now earns silence. The music stops.

There's a huff. "Mirror pas de deux," says the ballet master. "From the promenade. Take it through the first lift."

The other casts begin their marking. Daeron comes to stand beside you. "You learnt the old recording," he whispers.

You crane your neck to look at him. It creases in two places when you do. "I learnt what I was sent."

"Well," Daeron drawls. "It's old."

You give him a flat stare which tells Daeron you have a very short fuse. Fun, possibly, if he plays his cards well. "Someone's neglected you already. A fine welcome."

"Show her the changes," says the ballet master.

You roll your shoulders. Daeron goes through the altered sequence. The arm remains lower through the first turn. The transition comes two counts later. You watch once, then repeat it without asking.

"Now together," says the ballet master.

Daeron crosses the floor to you and extends his palm. "Give me your hand."

"Which one?"

"Left." You frown but pass him your left hand, and Daeron corrects, "The other left."

There's a small, shallow breath. A flutter of lashes. You're exasperated already and he hasn't even touched you yet. A pulse works high in your neck from the warm-up. One loose piece of hair has stuck to the damp beside your ear. You smell oddly. Of rosin and soap and some hair product that's supposed to keep your hair sleek and is failing. Your nostrils move when he comes within reach.

There it is. "Are you… drunk?" you ask.

"Hah," Daeron sighs. "Was that left out of the introduction?"

"Yes."

"How very careless of them."

"Are you done with the small talk?" asks the ballet master.

Daeron takes your hand. It's ice-cold and damp. The other he puts at your waist. You look down at it. "Higher."

He moves it a little.

"Higher," you tsk.

"I know where it goes," Daeron says, smiling.

"Then put it there."

He slides it up another inch. Your ribcage shifts beneath his palm with the breath you take. Then he is granted precisely the required contact on his shoulder, while the rest of you remains kept elsewhere. The music rounds about to where you should both start.

The first section asks for very little: a walk, a turn, his hands hovering. You are quick to each position, in places too quick. He keeps finding you already there. "Wait for me," he says under his breath.

There's a shade of a smile on your lips. "Keep up," you quip.

Daeron beams at you, purely out of inadequacy. It's his default reaction to every public discomfort, and for a second he thinks you will laugh back. To his complete lack of surprise, you do not.

When you both move into the promenade, you rise and extend one leg behind yourself. It's a damn long leg, and stiff as a log too. The rest of you is settled over the supporting foot. Daeron takes your hand and places the other back at your waist. You keep all the weight to yourself.

He turns you a quarter. Another. Your balance barely touches him. "You may give me some of it," he mutters.

Your eyes come to his in the mirror. "Some of what?"

"Your weight."

You frown. "I know how partnering works."

"Oh, how lucky for me then."

The sarcasm works some. On the next turn he's granted some thin crumb—enough for his palm to feel where your centre sits. It's different from the old familiar body he has spend years expecting. Higher through the ribs, in the hips more guarded. He tries to adjust. The promenade comes round cleanly.

The ballet master remains silent, which passes for approval. The pair of you continue into the supported turn, which is considerably worse. Daeron gives his hand late and you step down from pointe to save yourself. It's not so much the stumble, as the look you give him that's terryfiying.

Daeron wipes his palm against his shirt. On the do-over you've already pulled away. "You're anticipating," he says.

"I am dancing."

"You're doing my half as well."

"Someone ought to."

The ballet master stops the pianist. "If you two have finished."

Daeron looks away first. In the mirror some of the dancers look like those little music box ballerinas, halting to a freeze once the winding of the gears runs out. There's a bunch of sideways glances in his direction. He wishes, badly, he could take a sip from his hip flask. There's a dislike in him for being mistrusted when he hasn't done much yet to deserve it.

"From the turn," the ballet master says. "And she waits. You support her. Properly this time."

You take your place. Daeron holds out his hand. You look at it for one beat, then give him yours. The turn works. So does the next. He catches you through the middle as you tilt away, brings you upright, changes hands. Some sense begins to pour into the combination. Your timing is severe enough to drag him into precision, and he finds himself paying attention.

The drink retreats from the front of his mind. You come through the final turn and open against him, your back to his chest. He feels the heat of you between his hands. The repetition ends with your head turned towards his shoulder, face close enough that he can see one dark eyelash stuck beneath the lower lid. Then the music rounds about again and you step away.

"First lift," says the ballet master. "Mark the entry once."

You walk through the approach. Three quick steps. On the last, you turn away and let your upper body go backwards, one arm opening while the other passes by Daeron's shoulder. He catches you high through the ribs and waist and lets your momentum carry you round his front. He takes none of your weight. You find the floor again and continue through the exit.

"Again," says the ballet master. "With weight this time."

Daeron cracks the joints in his neck. You return to your mark. "Ready?" he asks.

You look at him. "Are you?"

There are several answers available. Daeron choses none and only listens through the ballet master counting you both in.

You run. One, two, three. On the last step, you turn away and give yourself backwards. Daeron catches you high. Your momentum swings you across his front and up round one side of him. One arm trails open while the other catches loose at his shoulder. For one count, the sweep works. His knee folds while your weight is still travelling.

It's merely a blink. The motion breaks. He tries to pull you back into him, but the hand at your ribs slips and gathers a fistful of fabric and skin, none of which are useful. You spill from him sideways and strike the floor in instalments: first the hip, then the forearm, until your cheek kisses the Marley.

"Shit," Daeron grits. He crouches next to you. His previous partner he would've touched without thinking. Here, it all feels arrested. "I… I had you. Are you alright?"

"Daeron—" The ballet master comes close. "Everybody take five," he says. The dancers start murmuring and walking out slowly. He leans in and checks your head. With eyes fixed on you, he mutters, "Daeron, you take a day. Come back tomorrow."

"Giles—"

"Come back tomorrow."

"I had her!" Daeron argues.

Giles gives him a look. "The floor has her." Then, he turns back to you. "Can you continue?"

You nod.

"Good," Giles says. "You'll do solo work today. Tomorrow we start over, is that understood?"

Daeron understands, which doesn't mean he won't act out. He looks heavenwards. When his lids slide back into the eye sockets they feel cold and slimy. He goes back to collect his things and stomps through the rehearsal room. As the door shuts behind him, he can hear the muttering of the ballet master: Do you need to see physio? He will come around. We'll do light work today. Once Daeron is out in the corridor, he takes a sip from his hip flask.

Tomorrow, perhaps, he should show up reeking even worse. Though he himself can no longer smell it, so there would be no pleasure in the effort. He has really had you. He just needs to learn you better.

Outside, the flask goes back into his coat. Daeron walks half the corridor before the satisfaction spoils. There will come a day when they stop providing him with wide-eyed ballerinas and accommodating every issue he brings through the door. There are only so many demotions he can survive. At some point the last person who remembers what he looked like under good lighting eight years ago will do their portion of forgetting. They will kill the darling. They should have already, and Daeron knows that.

No other company is waiting to take him either. Even the ones who might still want the name would call here first. Giles would be kind, too, and provide the substantial material for those who are more interested with what's between the lines. When still has to come before good in one sentence, any idiot can figure they are getting an exploited product.

What Daeron does not know is how to do anything beyond this. He's not qualified for life elsewhere, and going to rot back at home would amount to digging himself a neat six-foot hole and pulling a duvet of dirt over his head. Everybody would wait for him to recover from the thing he has been recovering from all his life, so Daeron flounders between two options, equally dramatic. He could simply not recover. Or he could sober up a little.

The thought is so unpleasant he nearly drinks to chug it.

Instead, he buys coffee, the boring kind. Then another. He finds food somewhere near the theatre and forces down eggs which taste of pan grease, two pieces of toast and half a tomato. In the lavatory he drinks water from the tap, splashes his face and decides this does not count as trying, only as preventing immediate unemployment.

The rehearsal has approximately three hours left. So Daeron goes home. Washes his hair twice, his body three times, and brushes his teeth long enough to make his gums swell. His hands become worse as the alcohol thins out. Fine tremors first, then a telling little stutter through the fingers when he attempts to button his shirt. He chooses a dark one so the sweat will have somewhere discreet to go.

There is little to be done about the circles beneath his eyes. He leaves them. One must preserve some continuity.

When Daeron returns, dancers have begun pouring from the rehearsal room in twos and threes. A few look directly at him. The coffee sits in his stomach with a punitive amount of acid. Inside, you are talking to Giles.

"It's your first day," Giles tells you. "It will work itself out. In the meantime, stop attacking the floor."

You are sitting on the Marley with your legs wide apart and your chin propped in both hands between them. A pout has settled over your face with such commitment that Daeron thinks it may have been there throughout the solo work. You begin lifting your head to answer and catch sight of him in the mirror. Giles turns.

His first glance is stern. It moves over Daeron and something terrible happens to his expression. It softens by one degree. Daeron has the vile suspicion he has just been perceived.

Ordinarily, he would vanish after humiliation. Miss tomorrow too, perhaps the day after, and return when everybody had grown tired of discussing him. Giles knows it. Giles knows Daeron knows he knows it. A distressing amount of knowledge passes between them.

"I'll leave you two," Giles says. He picks up his bag from beside the piano. You begin gathering yourself as well, reaching for the clothes heaped near your dance bag.

At the doorway, Giles stops beside Daeron. "You stop if she says stop." Daeron looks at him. "Don't break your new ballerina," Giles adds. Then, he leaves without closing the door.

You have loosened considerably over the last three hours. Hair has worked free round your temples and neck. Sweat sheens your chest satin where the leotard gives way to skin. You pull one foot towards yourself and begin peeling tape from the ankle. Daeron watches until you look up.

"What?"

He shrugs. "Nothing."

"Then you can do it elsewhere," you say, reaching for your trousers.

"Give me one hour," Daeron chokes out. "Just one."

Your hands stop inside the waistband. "Why? Did you come to finish what you started?"

"Just—" His voice catches dryly. He swallows. "Just to reintroduce myself."

You continue fumbling with the trousers. "I remember you."

"Poorly."

"I remember the relevant parts."

"I have better parts," Daeron says.

You stare at him. He allows the silence to sit. Charm would be easier. A smile, something lazy but enough to make himself tolerable until he could escape. He has used up his tolerance for escaping today. "One hour," he says again.

You sigh. The trousers drop back to the floor. "Fine. But no alcohol. No large lifts. You tell me if you get distracted. And I can leave without argument."

"I'm sober," Daeron insists.

Your eyes pass over him, pausing on his hands. "I'm sure you believe that to be true."

He laughs. Fully. It kicks out of him before he has time to flatten it into anything more sane. With it your face changes. The guard drops beyond your reach for a second. Your lips part. The eyes soften too, losing that mean little concentration you have carried for him since the promenade. Then you find yourself again and look down at the tape hanging from your fingers.

So his charm still works. Good to know.

He tries not to give a second thought to the charm you hold, looking like that. Instead, he steps onto the Marley. His legs feel hollow, head unpleasantly clear. He rolls one shoulder, then the other. "Let's do the same pas de deux," he says. "Marked. And slower. We only indicate the lifts."

You consider him. Then: "Okay."

Daeron nods and takes off his shirt. Shrugs the sweatpants from his hips. They catch briefly at his calves before he steps out of them and leaves them collapsed on the floor, his tights offering a far less forgiving account of the tremor in his legs.

He takes his place at Onegin’s entrance and you return to yours. There is no pianist now, so Daeron counts quietly as you begin, keeping each turn small and each transition legible. Marking removes the momentum and leaves the scaffolding: a hand extended without urgency, an arm passing overhead, two people walking through the memory of what their bodies are supposed to do together. By the time you reach the first lift, the quiet has become severe enough that Daeron says, stupidly, “Lift,” and the pair of you merely traverse the floor side by side.

The next phrase brings him behind you. He lays his palm against your sternum to indicate the backbend, and you look down at it before giving way. Rigidly. The bend travels through you in grudging inches; then you come upright and hook an arm round his neck for the drag.

He takes your waist and pulls you across the floor. You have braced every part of yourself so thoroughly that he feels as though you have made yourself heavier out of spite. Your feet move, though the rest of you resists him in one solid piece, and his hands close harder in answer. Too hard. He sees the wince tighten one side of your mouth and loosens his fingers, by which point the movement has already gone wrong. You step where he means to turn, he turns where you have placed a foot, and the two of you spend the exit quietly obstructing each other.

“Again,” he says.

The second attempt is worse. You anticipate the drag and start travelling before his hands have properly settled; Daeron catches up too late, clips the side of your shoe and nearly walks into your elbow. By the third, sweat has reappeared in a fine line across your forehead. He realises then that you have already worked through the remainder of rehearsal after he left, while Daeron has eaten, washed and returned with a presumption that the day restarted when he did.

“Look—” you begin.

But Daeron cuts across you. “Can you just hang yourself off me? Don’t even lift the leg, just—”

“What for?” you ask, folding your arms.

“I’m trying to feel you out and you’re not letting me.”

You scoff. “You dropped me.”

“Fair.” He rubs his palms against his thighs. “I’m not lifting you now, though. Very low chance of dropping. Just hold onto me, that’s it.”

He swears there is a child in front of him in that moment. Your foot taps the floor with an annoyance made cartoonish by the pointe shoe adorning it, the satin toe knocking out a small and furious rhythm. He bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

You trudge towards him, then inhale a great reserve of breath as though Daeron is the foulest person you have ever had the displeasure of approaching. At last, both arms go round his neck and you hang yourself off him like a puppet, stiff through the middle and solemn about the indignity.

Daeron merely stands there and looks you in the eye. “Are you not going to breathe?”

You shake your head. He smiles, sets both hands firmly at your waist and begins walking backwards. Your feet slide over the Marley, and the full press of your chest comes against his, held there by your arms and the breath swelling uselessly inside you.

Wickedness takes him about halfway through. Daeron can be childish too, and with considerably more practice. He leans closer and releases a warm huff of breath directly into your face.

The exhale punches out of you. Your arms loosen, your feet lose their skim of purchase and you begin to slip towards the floor. Daeron pulls you sharply against him, securing you through the waist, then lowers his mouth beside your ear.

“Was it so foul?” he whispers. “I brushed my teeth. Twice.”

“You fucking prick,” you spit, pressing your palm into his face. When he releases you, you turn and begin stomping towards your things.

“Come on!” Daeron calls after you. “You said you’d give me an hour. It’s been barely twenty minutes.”

“Apparently that’s how long you can manage without acting like a dick.”

“How is holding your breath around me not dick behaviour?” he asks.

“I thought it was necessary.” You reach for your trousers again, and Daeron recognises the gesture as a threat now. Another few rehearsals and he imagines you will only have to glance at them to bring him to heel.

“Was it, then?” he asks, coming towards you.

You turn and look at him. The anger has emptied out of your face, leaving something so hollow that a chill licks down Daeron’s spine. “Yes,” you tell him.

His body laughs for him. The sound comes out light enough to pass inspection. “Fine,” he says. “See you tomorrow.”

Then, he bends and snatches up his sweatpants. Prepared to make far more theatre of the exit than it deserves, he begins marching into the corridor with them fisted in one hand and his thighs exposed to whoever might care to witness the final death of his dignity, when you grunt behind him.

“I don’t want to babysit you.”

Daeron stops and looks back over his shoulder. You remain beside your bag with one hand caught in the waistband of your trousers, face tired now rather than furious.

“I was very excited when I got this job,” you say. “And Onegin too. Fantastic. But it keeps coming with smaller and smaller loopholes. I got the role, and your name dwindled in front of my nose until I had to plug the gaps during rehearsal and—”

“Oh.” Daeron closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “So that’s what this is about.” He turns and begins walking back to you, very slowly. “I presume you watched my recordings. Which one?” He gives you the most expensive, most shit-eating grin he possesses. “Romeo and Juliet? Or Mayerling? I was so hot in that one, right?”

Your mouth tightens, but Daeron continues. “It must be terrible to arrive and learn that you’ve been assigned to someone with a name that only used to mean something. Must be such a blow to your ego.” The words are acrid enough that he feels their burn in his own throat. “You poor thing.”

Your face prepares to vomit something equally hurtful. He watches it gather, almost welcomes it, but the expression sags instead. Resigns. Your eyes drop and you begin walking towards the door with your feet barely lifting from the floor.

“I am sorry for dropping you,” Daeron says after you. “It will never happen again.”

“No, it won’t.” You stop without turning fully. “I am sorry, but I don’t think I’m a good partner for you.”

That is a horrific thing to hear. Daeron hates grovelling; it gives another person too clear a view of what he wants, and his wants have always done better under costume. Still, he is not beyond it. Especially now.

“You haven’t even given me a chance,” he says. “And you haven’t let me feel you out once.”

“Okay.” You turn with a heavy huff. “What would you have me do? Do you want to do trust exercises, like the ten-year-olds do?”

“If it will help.”

Your mouth frowns further, and Daeron finds it oddly endearing amongst the rest of this unpleasant interaction. “Can you get into arabesque?" he asks. "A flat-footed one, even.”

“What good would that do?” you ask.

“Please?” Daeron drops the sweatpants again. “Let me just show you. You can hold your breath.”

You sigh and walk closer, though you stop several steps away and leave him to cross the rest. Once he does, you turn sideways and assume the position, supporting foot flat, the other leg extended behind you. Daeron watches the movement settle, then stands in front of you and places one palm on your hip. The other rests low on your stomach, fingers pointing down.

Your muscles tighten beneath his hand. He waits, then tilts you a fraction to one side. You correct through the waist. He takes you the other way, then back, each adjustment small enough that your standing foot remains quiet. Your belly rises beneath his palm, falls, then rises again.

He tips you towards him. Your hands come to his shoulders to catch the balance, remaining there through a moment of doubt. Then your arms slide back round his neck and you breathe out through your mouth, the warmth of it passing close to his cheek.

He begins walking backwards, slowly. Your feet drag across the Marley, but this time your body comes with him. At last he feels your heft resting on him, the useful part of you that had been missing from every attempt before. You follow the direction of his hands rather than arriving ahead of them.

Daeron takes his time. Once something is granted, it does not mean you will refrain from taking it away; this much he has learnt about you already. He is learning new things by the minute. Up close, he watches your lips.

Drink has left his cock limp for so long that Daeron has shifted some of his vanity upwards. His mouth still does what he asks of it. He can kiss blind drunk and kiss well; his tongue has never deserted him, even when the rest of his body has become unreliable. Lips have therefore acquired a disproportionate power over him, and yours are exceptionally suited to abuse it.

They have relaxed for the first time since you met him. The lower one is fuller than he thought, damp at the centre, and without that hard line between them he can finally imagine what his own mouth would feel like pressed there. Whether you would remain this severe while being kissed. Whether the arms around his neck would tighten or attempt to shove him away again.

He keeps walking until his heels run out of Marley. With each step, you soften further: shoulders lowering, elbows settling, the leg behind you losing its rigid tenacity.

“There you are,” Daeron says, as if he's just discovered you. He brings you back to vertical and keeps his hands at your waist until your feet have settled beneath you. “Was it so terrible?”

You give him an uncertain look. “No.” Another glance follows, shy if he did not know any better. “What about me?”

“I think you’re wrong,” he says. Your eyebrows rise, and Daeron lets the smallest smile return. “We can be good partners, eventually. One poor rehearsal doesn’t make a prophecy.”

Light passes beneath your lashes and makes your irises flare brighter. Merely a glimpse. Daeron looks deep into that enlivened version of your eyes and, for one reckless moment, feels he could tell you the most awful things about himself. Every rotten, humiliating verity, and you might keep looking at him like this. An unbearable urge seizes him to beg you for something. He stays upright instead and keeps whatever plea has risen in him behind his teeth.

Neither of you have any knowledge of how long you’ve been there, nor how many times you’ve peaked. The evidence of your orgasm now making a sticky mess between your legs and spraying his thighs, creating a wet sound that’s nearly lewd each time you lower yourself all the way down onto his cock and bottom out, sitting all pretty on his lap.

A goddess hovering above him, mighty and glorious. And there he remains, but a servant at her mercy.

Gwayne is lost in the haze of your body and your cunt and the way you're making him feel—so lightheaded that he can hardly even comprehend your words. Though he does, for he was made to listen to you, to answer to you, to obey you, to receive whatever you choose to bestow upon him. 

“N-no,” he babbles his reply, his lovely lips—all wet with sweat and his own spit—tracing a trail of sloppy kisses down your throat. His lean arms lock your body tight against him in an unavoidable cage, his hands molding to the outline of your hips and guiding you up and down on top of him, to ride him like a savage. “Never let me go, my love. I could not bear to be away from you any longer—hmm!—”

The dirt clinging to him, the fine dust of the trail ground into his skin, the smudges of earth dried against his jawline, temple and cheekbones from days of relentless travel, doesn’t diminish him. It fucking heightens him. Every sweat-streaked trace of soil on his flushed face and along the tense line of his neck only serves as a raw, tangible marker of how far he had pushed himself in the last days, how tirelessly he journeyed... just to reach you.

Seeing him like this; weary, filthy, and thoroughly pathetic, ignites something fierce and primal deep within you. It makes your blood run hotter, turning every harsh, heavy bounce of your hips into a claim over every inch of him.

“And what did you do all this time we’ve been apart?” you question him in a remarkably steady voice, considering just how utterly overwhelmed he's making you feel, tugging sharply at his reddish hair to force him off your neck so you can look him straight in the eye. “How many whores were you with while I was gone, husband?”

The sight of him—your sweet, perfect knight—now reduced to a ruined mess begging for your mercy, makes your insides clench even tighter. Your cunt pulses around the length of his hard cock, impossibly tight, sucking him deep inside, so deep that his swollen tip bumps up against that one special little spot inside you that lights up stars everywhere you look.

It’s a remarkable circumstance, that you two have withstood all these months away from each other. The only thing that could ever separate you would be death or war, and war has fallen in between you, unfortunately locking you into opposing sides. Your birth name and your dragon are what, months ago, dragged you away from the peace of Oldtown and back to Dragonstone, where you were summoned to take on an important role alongside your mother Rhaenyra, the true heir to the Iron Throne.

And Gwayne, by his family name, had to follow his sister's orders and swear allegiance to the Usurper.

Your husband shakes his head in despair, whimpers slipping from his half–open lips, and big tears welling up in the corners of his beautiful eyes, blue and sparkly like a sky full of stars. “N–none, my Princess. I could never be with anyone else.”

You know it’s true, and that someone like Gwayne—your Gwayne—could never even consider being with anyone other than you; he could never possibly betray you. His own values as the most righteous and honorable man in the Seven Kingdoms forbid it, and most importantly, he is simply much too in love with you to view anyone else with the kind of gaze that is only reserved for you.

His body belongs to you; his soul, heart, and mind are yours.

“No?” nevertheless, you question through a low whisper, taking full advantage of the fact that you’re performing a slow circular motion down his lap so you can lean toward him and kiss his lips. He moans into your mouth, making you breathe him in, his thrill, his pleasure, his appreciation.

The very moment your dear husband spotted the ominous silhouette of your dragon swooping down from the cloudy sky and onto him and Criston’s futile little army, he knew it was all over. He had endured so much over the past few moons, forced to follow that foolish man around. It was absurd—what other choice did they have? Nothing but to beg for the dragon’s mercy.

Fortunately for him, it was you who descended from the clouds, for if it had been anyone else, he would be as dead as Cole.

He keeps whimpering as your hips rise again, your velvety walls wrapping all around his cock, making him twitch inside you, as your tongue runs passionately along his cheekbone, wiping away the tears that have dampened his freckled, flushed skin.

“No one takes me the way you do, my beloved,” he claims, kissing your lips to seal it like a promise. He kisses you again and again before continuing to whisper sweet things to you. “No one feels like you—so tight and perfect. I—fuck—I am yours.”

He pulls you down hard against him, his hips snapping upward to meet your descent with an ungodly, wet slap that knocks the breath clean from your lungs. The tip of his cock buries itself ruthlessly against that exquisite, agonizing spot inside you, making the world behind your eyelids fracture into brilliant bursts of gold and white, of him, his soul.

“Yours,” he repeats, a broken, desperate prayer against the seam of your lips. His slender fingers dig brutally into the soft flesh of your hips, leaving bruises that will surely bloom tomorrow. “Always yours. Slice open my chest, my love... look inside, feel it... there is no room for a King or a crown or a throne. Only you. Only my wife, my sweet wife.”

Gwayne locks his arms around your waist and shifts his weight, rolling you both over in one fluid, breathless movement. In an instant, the tent spins, and he settles above you, his heavy, warm body pressing you back into the wrinkled bed and thrusting his hips into you.

He looks down at you through a veil of disheveled, reddish hair, his sky–blue eyes dark with emotion and body utterly undone by yours.

“G–gwayne...” you moan out his name, your hands moving up to the broad curve of his shoulder blades, your fingers digging into his freckled skin as he frames your face with trembling hands. “My dearest”

“Yours,” he pledges, the words rolling off his tongue and onto your lips like a prayer and he kisses you again, and again. “Let me give you everything. Take it all—all of me.”

He sets a relentless, desperate pace, driving both of you straight past the edge. Your back arches into him, your legs wrapping tightly around his waist as the tension builds to an agonizing, exquisite peak.

When the wave finally breaks, it crashes over both of you at once—a blinding, overwhelming release that leaves you clinging to one another, gasping for air and crying each other’s names as your heartbeats clash against each other’s chests in tandem.

Gushes of his seed warm your insides, coating your walls in his color and laying claim to your womb.

The feeling is so familiar, the way he fills you right to the brim, so much that trickles overflow out the edges of your throbbing, abused cunt.

“Gods above...” Your lover sighs weakly against your collarbone, leaving a wet trail of saliva on your skin. “Thank you, thank you, thank you...”

You stroke the soft, auburn hair at the nape of his neck, breathing in the scent of rain, leather, and him.

Your fingers trace appreciatively the familiar curve of his back as your chest heaves in time with his, the wet warmth between your thighs a quiet, lingering mark of the love he just poured into you.

“Gwayne,” you call out to him softly into the dark, your voice cutting through the heavy silence of the tent.

He shifts slightly, pressing a tender kiss onto the sensitive skin beneath your jaw. “I'm here, my love. I'm right here.”

You cup his beautiful face in your hands, forcing him to lift his head so you can look straight into those clear, desperate blue eyes. The tears have dried on his cheeks, but the vulnerability in his gaze is raw and absolute.

“Then come with me,” you say, the command laced with a quiet, pleading ache that makes his breath catch in his throat. “Leave all of this behind tonight. Fly with me to King’s Landing and bend the knee to my mother; she will grant you mercy and forgiveness.”

Gwayne freezes, his chest resting heavily against yours as the weight of your words sinks in.

“My love...” he begins, his voice thick with an ache so profound, for love and for you. He presses his forehead against yours, his warm, uneven breath fanning over your lips. “Would that truly make you happy? Is this what you need from me?”

“It is what I desire above all else in this world,” you answer without hesitation, your voice trembling with the full weight of your devotion. You kiss him tenderly, tasting the salt on his skin. “I want you by my side, Gwayne. I want you, alive, safe, and mine. I need you with me.”

A shaky, shuddering breath escapes his chest, and a brilliant, tearful smile bleeds across his flushed face.

While my giftee is no longer involved their prompt was illuminated manuscript with a kneeling Dunk (amazing line up with my own offer), and I knew just the Codex Manesse image.

Though the 'plot' veneer here is after Ashford, Ser Arlan's coat of arms (with the black diamond of a funerary hatchment) gets a top spot as part of Dunk's lineage.

Dunk's arms are simplified to be a little more real world heraldic.

The Targaryen arms are not the show version again for real world heraldry - where the important part is a consistent blazon (written description) rather than a absolutely consistent image. So unless the dragon was specified as in annulo (in a circle), these are can still be described as Sable, a thee-headed dragon Gules.

The little arm beasts are also Dunk & Baelor. I like to imagine them curled up together like the weirdest little cat things.

Dunk-beast is pointing specifically at the 'hold honor in their breast' line as an "I remembered my vows, did you?"

The helmet Baelor is presenting has the Targ color torse (fabric twist) as livery for a knight sworn to the house - the similar twist on Dunk's arm is absolutely his King's ✨favour✨. Winged crests in shield colors were very common in Germanic heraldry though it also double up here as a trace of Ser Arlan again.

Baelor's little cape has a pattern called vair which is supposed to look like a squirrel's winter fur. Royal mantles and all that.