shh… don’t cry.

Her scrub top is too big. A size, maybe a size and a half, the neckline sitting too wide on her frame, exposing the ridge of a clavicle that reminds him of a bird's bones. Hollow. Breakable. He thinks about how easily things that are built like her come apart, and the thought comes sudden, unbidden, a flicker of currents jumping between axons and dendrites, the briefest neural spark that should fizzle and die the way all intrusive thoughts should fizzle and die, should dissipate into the white noise of a busy shift and a surgery at two and twelve minutes of lost time he can't get back.

But it doesn't fizzle. Something dark in the back of his mind reaches out and snatches the dying flicker before it goes cold, closes a fist around it, drags it forward through the folds of gray matter and settles it into his conscious thought like coal in a nest of kindling. Something ancient and starved and holy in the worst way, living in the unlit nave behind his sternum, breathing slow, fed on small things for years. The thought grows teeth. Opens its eyes. Looks out through his and sees her standing there with her too-big scrub top and her bird bone clavicle and likes what it sees.

He thinks- more strongly now- about how easily things that are built like her come apart. How little force it would take. How she probably doesn't even know that about herself, probably never tested the boundaries of her own construct, never had anyone grip her hard enough to find out where the give is. She's walking around inside of a body she's never been shown the limits of, and something about that untested quality makes the back of his mouth water.

(He thinks about how those hollow bones would look spread out and trembling under his weight, stretching that tiny frame until her belly showed the ridge of him dragging back and forth inside her, until the give in her body became the only thing keeping her intact.)

(He thinks about the deer.

He was sixteen, hunting alongside his father in the Alleghenies, early November, the air cold enough to see his breath and the light coming through trees in long amber shafts that made the frost on the ground look like something out of a painting. The deer walked out of the tree line, a doe, young, standing in the clearing maybe fifteen yards from where he crouched in the brush and looked at him with huge, dark, liquid eyes that contained absolutely no understanding of the danger it was in. No fear. No wariness. No flicker of ancestral recognition that the shape in the shadows was a shape to run from. It just looked at him with the dumb, trusting curiosity of a thing that had never been hunted and therefore didn't know it could be.

His father whispered take the shot.

He didn't take the shot.

He went back the next morning. And the next. And the next. He brought grain, left it at the edge of the clearing, sat in the brush and watched the doe find it and eat it and lift its hard and look towards the place where he was hidden with an expression that was almost... grateful. Devotion of it indistinguishable from worship if you didn't know which one of them was the god and which was the sacrifice.

By the seventh day it walked right up to the grain and stood there, chewing, close enough that he could see the individual lashes framing those huge dark eyes, close enough that if he'd extended his arm fully he could have touched the velvet flat of its nose.

He didn't touch. Not that day.

His father asked him what he was doing. He said he was practicing patience. His father looked at him for a long time and didn't ask again.)

Her badge is clipped to the breast pocket: EMMA NOLAN, RN. EMERGENCY MEDICINE

The badge is clean and the photo looks like it was taken this week, the eager, unweathered headshot of someone who ironed her scrubs for picture day.

Her pockets are full. That's the third thing that does something to the inside of his chest that he recognizes immediately and doesn't bother to suppress. Both front pockets of the scrub top are distended, stuffed to capacity with supplies- pen lights, hemostats, a folded reference card, alcohol swabs, a roll of tape- and she offered him a pen. The absolute, guileless, unironic earnestness lands in the space behind his ribs that most people assume is empty and isn't. (There's something housed there. Something with stone walls and no windows and an altar that has never once been clean.)

She's brand new. He can smell it. Bright eyed, overprepared, hopelessly convinced that the distance between the classroom and the floor is a gap she can bridge with enthusiasm and color coded notes with textbook knowledge that has never once been pressure tested- walking into a building full of people who've had the softness ground out of them and expecting healthcare to be like the brochures. Expecting the job to be what their professors told them it would be. Expecting the people to be kind.

He looks at Emma Nolan and her clean badge and her bird bone clavicles and his teeth ache; a real, physical throb in his jaw, deep in the hinge where the masseter anchors to the mandible, the dull pressure of a bite that hasn't happened yet but wants to- involuntary and grandular.

(He wants, vicerally, to sink her between his jaws, feel the whole of her caught in the cage of his bite, the fine bones and the thin skin and the rapid, hummingbird pulse, to close down slowly enough that she'd feel every degree of increased pressure and understand, in the shrinking space between his teeth, that the only thing keeping her intact his his decision to not bite down all the way. That the structural integrity of Emma Nolan is not a fact. It's a favor. One he can revoke.)

He swallows and the ache doesn't leave. It just settles, migrates from his jaw into the back of his throat, takes up residence somewhere behind his soft palate.

Not here, not now. The thought doesn't come with urgency. It comes with the patience of something that has a den and a long winter and is in absolutely no rush because the thing it's watching doesn't know it's being watched and there's a specific pleasure in that- in the looking, in the having looked, in the accumulation of details that the source of the details doesn't know are being collected. Has been collected for the past thirty seconds and already has more details in it than she'd be comfortable knowing about.

He takes the pen.

Their fingers don't touch. She's holding it by the very end, maximizing the distance between her hand and his. Polite. A deeply ingrained, reflexive politeness, someone who was raised to be considerate of other people's personal spaces. Who says excuse me when passing by one person in an otherwise empty hallway. Who holds open doors for people thirty feet behind her. Who has probably never once in her life taken something from someone without saying thank you.

(He wonders what her thank you would sound like with his hand around her throat and his cock buried deep in her cunt. Resting on the column of her neck with his thumb against her pulse while she says it, so he could feel the words in her larynx before they left her mouth. Feel the vibration of her gratitude hum against his palm while he fucks her open, dragging every inch of his heavy shaft along her walls until he's grinding right up against her cervix, carving himself so deep inside of her, she'll feel him for days.

He bets she'd still say it. He bets she'd look up at him with those too big eyes, glassy and lust drunk now, lips parted and trembling, and moan a soft breathy "thank you" while he's fingers tighten on the carotids just enough to make her head spin and her pussy clench around him like a fist. The kind of girl who'd find something to be grateful for in the grip that's killing her.)

She's smiling at him.

It's a terrible smile. Not because it's unattractive- her face is good, open and symmetric, a mouth slightly too wide for the rest of her features in a way that makes every expression she produces disproportionately loud- but because it's real. Completely, recklessly, almost offensively real. No calculation. No armor. No awareness that the man she's smiling at has been described by three separate residents, in three separate interviews, as the reason I changed specialties.

She doesn't know who he is. Or she does know, in the abstract way that new graduates know things- a name on a directory, a face in an orientation packet- but the knowledge hasn't translated into the wariness it should produce. The knowledge hasn't reached her body yet. Her shoulders are open. Her weight is forward, on the balls of her feet, leaning towards him slightly, the posture of a person who moves towards other people instead of away from them because the world hasn't yet taught her that some people you move towards are the reason the lesson exists.

He wants to teach her.

The want is there, fully formed, sitting in his chest since the moment she extended a shaking hand with a cheap pen and looked up at him like he was a person and not what he actually is. Because she is smiling at him the way she would smile at anyone else. She has one smile and it costs her nothing and she has no idea- no framework, no instinct- that giving it to him is different than giving it to anyone else. That most people in this building are furniture and she is the first thing he's looked at in months.

He wonders how long it would take to make her stop smiling.

Not by being cruel. That would be too easy. He could do that in a sentence, in a comment. He could wipe that smile off her face in four seconds and she'd probably apologize for having it.

No. He wonders how long it would take to make her stop smiling at other people. To make the smile something only she does for him. To hollow out the indiscriminate generosity of it and reshape it into something specific, something that only activates when he walks into a room, that only exists on her face the way a reflex exists, involuntary and entirely dependent on the right stimulus.

He wants to be the stimulus. He wants to be the only one. Not by earning devotion but by salting the earth around every other altar until there was nowhere left to worship but at his feet.

The thought doesn't alarm him. He settles alongside the others- the bird bone clavicle, the overstuffed pockets, the voice that doesnt take up space- and it fits. Like the space was always there. Like he's been carrying the space of this particular want for a long time and she just walked into the hallway and filled it.

"I'm Emma," she says. "I just started today. Not just here. I mean this is my first- I'm a new grad, so everything is kind of my first-"

She's rambling. He watches her realize she's rambling. Watches the precise second she hears herself, the little spark of realization in her eyes, the flush that darkens the warm brown of her cheeks, deepening the skin below her ears and across the bridge of her nose into something richer, bilateral bloom, embarrassment heat he can see against her cheekbones until even the press of her lips looks swollen with embarassment.

She swallows and he watches the delicate tendons in her throat shift, flex beneath smooth skin, a subtle bob that makes his cock twitch and fuck, his mind goes straight to imagining putting his teeth on that tendon, the points of his canines resting in the shallow valley between the sternocleidomastoid and the strap muscles and holding. Holding until she stops talking. Holding until the rambling dies and her breathing hitches and stops and the only sound is the pulse he can feel hammering against his mouth.

He wonders if she would go still, frozen, every voluntary muscle locked, the ancient mammalian hardware taking over and telling her body that thing with its teeth on her throat might lose interest if she doesn't move.

(He imagines sliding two thick fingers between her lips right then, pressing down on her tongue until she gags, teaching her the only safe place for her words is wrapped around his knuckles while he finger-fucks her throat open, to make her drool and to make her apologize for the drool. The thought makes his cock throb so hard he has to shift, to keep it from pressing visibly against his scrubs.)

"Sorry," she says. "You probably don't care about any of that."

She apologized. She apologized for talking to him. For taking up space in his day. For the crime of existing in his vicinity with her shaking hands and her big eyes and her pockets full of supplies. She apologized like its second nature, like she moves through the world with sorry always on the tip of her tongue, making herself smaller, tucking herself into corners, the perpetual apology of a person who was taught that her presence is an imposition and never questioned the lesson.

He thinks: who taught you that.

He thinks: I want to meet them. I want to shake their hand. They did all the groundwork and they don't even know what they built.

Because that's what she is. Groundwork. A foundation already poured. Someone- a parent, a teacher, some formative cruelty she probably doesn't even remember- already taught Emma Nolan that the correct response to authority is deference. That the correct response to taking up space is apology. That the correct posture in the presence of someone who matters more than her is small. All that training, all those years of learned submission, and nobody bothered to teach her what it looks like from the other side. Nobody told her that making yourself small in front of certain predators isn't safety. It's an invitation.

He should respond. The social contract of this interaction requires it- a name, a thank you, a dismissal. This is a five second exchange. He's has millions of them.

He stands there with her pen in his hand and he looks at her and the thing in the dark of his brain, the thing living behind his sternum isn't opening one eye anymore. It's on its feet. It's pacing.

She's still looking up at him. The embarrassment hasn't faded. Her eyes are brown and in this kind of lighting they look almost black. Wet. Not crying-wet. Just the general shine of eyes that still react to things. Eyes that haven't been dulled by decades of fluorescent lights and administrative indifference. Eyes that feel things still and show the feelings and don't know that showing is giving and giving is losing and she's been losing since she walked over here.

He can see everything in those eyes. He can see the nervousness and the eagerness and the desperate, aching hope that she's making a good impression, and beneath it all, buried so deep she probably can't even name it, he finds the think he's actually looking for: the need. The need to matter to someone who matters, to be singled out, to be chosen, to have someone look at her the way he's looking at her right now and make her feel like she's the only person in the building.

She has no idea that need is a door. And she just showed him exactly where the handle is. That she is looking up at him with the same eyes as the deer. The same absence of understanding. The same willing to stand in the open and be looked at by something she should be running from.

"Thank you," he says. He clicks the pen. "Emma."

He says her name and watches what it does to her face the way he watched the doe's ears rotate towards the sound of his footsteps- a full body orientation towards a stimulus she should be flinching from and instead leans into. Her mouth opens slightly, a millimeter of space between her lips that she's not aware of producing. Her pupils dilate.

She doesn't know what any of that means. She doesn't know that her body just handed him a blueprint, that every involuntary response she's produced in the last ninety seconds is a map he's drawn of her. A map that shows him every unlocked door and unlocked window in the architecture of Emma Nolan, and she assembled it for him herself. Handed it over with a pen and a smile. Free of charge.

"Thank you for the pen, Emma," he says again, and he lets her name sit in his mouth a beat longer than necessary. Lets the second syllable land softer. Watches the softness hit her nervous system like the grain in the clearing.

She lights up. The smile comes back, wider now, and she ducks her head- a small, deferential, instinctive motion that exposes the back of her neck.

The back of her neck.

He looks at it. The fine hairs at her nape. The knobs of her cervical spine pressing against skin so thin he can see the vulnerable hollow at the base of her skull. She's showing it to him. She doesn't know she's showing it to him. She ducked her head because she's pleased and this is what pleased looks like on a body that hasn't learned to guard itself, and the back of her neck is right there, six inches from his hand, close enough that if he reached out and set his palm against the nape and squeezed-

She'd make a sound. A small one, startled, and he wants to hear that sound. He wants to file it along side every other response her body has produced in the last ninety seconds and then spend however long it takes learning which ones he can produce on command.

(He imagines setting his palm flat, fingers splayed wide, on the back of her skull until her cheek is smushed into his mattress, ass up high, her knees forced apart by the width of his thighs as he pushed his cock into the silk of her cunt. Hand locked on her nape the whole time, pinning her there, using the leverage to pull her back on his cock again, again, little muffled cries vibrating against his palm as her pussy flutters and clenches around the stretch of him-)

He doesn't reach out.

He gives her a nod- brief, professional, a nod that anyone watching would read as a senior physician acknowledging a new staff member and nothing more.

"Welcome to PTMC," he says.

She beams, full wattage, the kind of smile that uses every muscle in her face and crinkles the corners of her eyes and makes her look even younger than she is, which is already too young, which is already so young that thing in the back of his brain hums in delight. Delight in the guarantee, that this will be easy, that she will come willing, a lock he's already been handed the key to, that the gap between who she thinks he is and who he actually is will shorten until she she walks into the door he holds open for her and the door closes behind her and she realizes there's no handle on the inside.

She turns and walks towards the Pitt, her pigtails bouncing. Her too-big scrub top shifts on her shoulders with every step, exposing the nape of her neck and then covering and then exposing it again. He watches the rhythm of it. Bare skin. Cotton. Bare skin. Cotton.

She pulls something from her pocket. Another pen. Of course. Of course she has more pens. Of course she came prepared for every possible scenario except the one she doesn't know she's in.

He clicks the pen twice. It makes a tinny, unsatisfying sound that he's going to hear for the rest of the day every time he reaches for his breast pocket and feels the outline of a ballpoint he didn't buy.

He thinks of mythology- every religion, every dead civilization that scratched it's fears into cave walls and temple stones- of the offering. The first fruits. The unblemished lamb. The thing you bring to the feet of something vast and indifferent and lay down with trembling hands because you don't understand what it is, you just know it's bigger than you and the only way to survive in its proximity is to give it something. To feed it. To prove that you know your place in the hierarchy of the living and the thing at the top of the hierarchy is not you.

The offering is never for the god's benefit. Gods don't need pens. Gods don't need lambs, or the grain, of the wine poured into dirt. The offering is a transaction- worshippers buying the illusion of safety, and the god accepts because the acceptance is what keeps them coming back. Keep accepting and they keep giving. Keep taking the small things and eventually they'll give you the big things. Their harvest. Their firstborn.

Their throat.

Emma Nolan walked across a room full of people who knew better and she held out a ballpoint pen to something she mistook for a man, and she smiled her full, reckless smile, and she said you looked like you needed it.

An offering. Brought to the altar on trembling hands by a girl with bird bones and Bambi eyes who doesn't know the predator she walked up to. Who thinks the warmth she felt when he said her name was kindness. Who has no framework, no mythology, no ancestral memory whispering to her that thing smiling back at her from behind the altar has never once in its existence been kind. That it has only ever been patient. And that patience, in a god, is not a virtue.

It's a hunting strategy.

He thinks about the deer again. The clearing. The mist. The huge dark eyes and the absolute absence of fear. He didn't shoot it that morning. He sat in the brush and he watched it graze and he let it walk back into the tree line on its own legs and he came back the next day and the day after that until the deer stopped flinching at the sound of him and started walking towards the brush instead of away from it.

You looked like you needed it.

Yeah.

He did.

(Park puts the pen in his breast pocket. Accepts the offering.)

The parking garage is nearly empty. The late night shadows and overhead fluorescents are doing their usual thing- that sickly amber wash that makes everything look darker and more jaundiced, turns concrete pillars and painted lines into something out of a liminal space photograph. Your shift ended nine minutes ago. You've been sitting in this car for three of those minutes and you're no closer to leaving than you were when you got in.

You try the ignition a third time because you are a person who went to medical school, which means you are clinically incapable of accepting a result without attempting to replicate it, and the result is the same.

Silence.

The dashboard stays dark. The engine stays dead. Your car, the one last reliable thing you have left in your life has chosen today- today- of all days, to stop working.

Something behind your sternum cracks, a seam letting go, a thread that's been holding two pieces of fabric together finally giving up under the accumulated weight of seventeen hours of Park's voice in your ear, Park's corrections on your chart, Park's particular way of standing just inside your peripheral vision so that you could never fully forget he's watching. The sound he makes when you do something wrong, a small exhalation through his nose that somehow communicates more disappointment than a full sentence. The way clicks his tongue when you fumbled the angle of the retractors, not loud enough for the scrub nurse to hear, pitched just for you, intimate in its cruelty.

You get out of the car.

The concrete is gritty under your sneakers. The garage has that particular underground acoustics thing where every sound arrives twice, once directly and once as an echo off the low ceiling, so the slam of your door comes back to you a half second later, duller, like the garage is mocking you. You walk to the front of the car. You pull the hood release. You prop the hood up with the little metal arm and you stare at the engine.

You have no idea what you’re looking at.

You know this. You are aware, in a detached and increasingly unhinged way, that you possess exactly zero mechanical knowledge, that the greasy labyrinth of hoses and reservoirs and metal components in front of you might as well be quantum mechanics for all the good looking at it is going to do. But you’re looking anyway, because the alternative is standing in an empty parking garage at eleven pm and crying, and you are not going to cry. You are not. You’ve made it through seventeen hours without crying and you are not going to let a dead battery or a seized alternator or whatever the fuck is wrong be the thing that-

Your eyes are wet.

You blink. Hard. Twice. You sniff, once, sharp, and press the back of your wrist against your nose and stare at the engine and try to convince yourself that you are absolutely, categorically not falling apart in a parking garage. The fluorescent light catches the moisture on your lashes and turns it amber. A tear escapes down the side of your nose and you swipe it away with your knuckle so hard the skin stings.

Headlights bloom across the concrete behind you.

The light stretches your shadow forward, elongates it across the front of your car, and for a second you’re just annoyed; someone pulling through on their way out, someone who got to have a normal end to their shift and get in their functioning car and leave. The engine behind you is idling, smooth and low, and it doesn’t pass. It slows. It stops.

A door opens.

You don’t turn around because some self preserving corner of your brain already knows. Before the footsteps, before the particular rhythm of that walk-  unhurried, deliberate, the gait of a man who has never once rushed to be anywhere because everywhere he goes adjusts to accommodate his arrival-  you know who it is.

You know the way you know a headache is about to become a migraine. The way you know a patient is about to code before the monitors catch up. A full body premonition, cellular and certain.

Park’s footsteps stop somewhere behind your left shoulder.

You keep staring at the engine. Your vision has gone blurry, half tears, half exhaustion, half the flat refusal of your eyes to focus on anything that isn’t a pillow. You can feel him behind, the shift in pressure and temperature that changes the quality of the air against the back of your neck.

He doesn’t say anything for five seconds. You count them.

Then he leans past you.

His arm enters your field of vision from the left and he reaches into the engine compartment with the casualness of a man who reaches into open body cavities for a living and finds a car engine charmingly simple by comparison. His shoulder is close enough to yours that you can feel the warmth radiating off him through his clothes. 

You catch it then, his cologne, or whatever it is, something clean and warm and slightly woody that cuts through the garage smell of concrete and motor oil and settles into the space between your throat and your chest with an specificity that makes you want to bite down on something.

He smells good. Offensively, inappropriately good. And you hate him for it with a purity that borders on religious, that causes you to jerk back, take several steps away with your arms crossed over your chest and your teeth clenched so tight your jaw is clicking. 

He doesn’t let you get very far before. “Come here.”

He says it without looking up from the engine compartment, one hand braced on the frame, the other buried somewhere in the tangle of hoses and cables, and he says come here like he’s calling a dog that pissed on the carpet. 

You don’t move.

“I said come here. I’m not going to say it again.”

You move and he grabs your wrist, fingers closing around delicate bones, and pulls you forward until you’re standing beside him with your hip against the bumper and your face approximately eighteen inches from an engine block you couldn’t identify at gunpoint.

“Look.” He positions your hand over a cable terminal crusted with greenish white buildup. Presses your fingers down onto the corroded metal and holds them there. “Feel that?”

You feel it. Gritty. Calcified. Wrong.

“That’s neglect.” He says it close to your ear. Not whispering. Just close. “Months of it.”

He lets that sit for a second. His thumb shifts against the inside of your wrist, a small, almost idle adjustment that drags across your pulse point and there’s absolutely no way he doesn’t feel how fast it’s going.

“When did you buy this car?”

“Two years ago.”

“Two years.” He drops your wrist like he lost interest in holding it, and straightens up. Pulls a cloth from somewhere- his back pocket, his jacket, the fucking ether- and wipes his hands with slow, methodical attention, finger by finger, knuckle by knuckle, while you stand there with engine grease on your palm and the residual ghost pressure of his grip still pulsing around your wrist bones. “And you’ve never once popped the hood. Not once. You’re telling me you’ll spend six hours memorizing the branches of the brachial plexus but you can’t spend five minutes making sure the thing that keeps you alive on the highway actually works.”

He’s not looking at you. He’s looking at his own hands as he cleans them, like they’re the only thing worth his tim,  has all the time in the world and you are not a factor in how he spends it.

“I mean, it’s almost impressive.” He glances at you. Just a flick of his eyes, there and gone. “The commitment to not giving a shit. You’re consistent, I’ll give you that.”

“That’s not- ”

“Your positive cable’s loose. Terminals are shot.” He’s still cleaning his hands. Still not looking at you. “The whole system’s been dying for weeks and you just- what? Turned the key every morning and assumed it would keep working because it always had?” He folds the cloth. Tucks it in his pocket. “That’s not optimism. That’s not even denial. That’s just being stupid about the things you depend on.”

The word stupid lands different coming from him. Not like an insult. A fact. Like a lab value being read off the chart, something they can’t be interpreted in any other way, just is, and always will be. 

“You’re smart in the OR. I’ve seen it.” He says flatly, without investment, a concession that costs him nothing. “You’ve got good hands when they’re not shaking. Good instincts when you’re not choking on them. But then you do this- ” He nods at the engine. “And I have to wonder if the OR version of you is the anomaly and this is the baseline.”

He lets that hang.

“Get in the car.”

“What?”

“My car.” He says, an instruction, not an offer, delivered with the expectation of immediate compliance.

“I can call a- “

“It’s eleven at night, you’re not calling a tow from a parking garage, and you’re not sleeping in your car. Get in.”

“But-”

He’s already walking away. He doesn’t wait, doesn’t look back. Just walks to his car- a dark Lexus that looks like it costs more than your annual salary- and gets into the driver’s side and sits there with the engine running and the passenger door unlocked and the absolute unshakeable certainty that you will follow. 

You follow. 

The inside of his car smells like him. That’s the first thing you register as you pull the door shut, the contained, ambient version of whatever you caught leaning over the engine, multiplied and warmed by the closed space. 

You put on your seatbelt. You stare straight ahead. You give him your address in a voice that comes out smaller than you intended and you feel him register that, feel the quality of his silence change as he files it away. 

He pulls out of the garage. 

He doesn’t speak.

You wait for it- braced- shoulders locked, breath held, every nerve ending oriented toward him. You’ve spent enough time in his proximity to know how he operates: silence first, then the observation, then the correction, delivered with the flat, unhurried precision of a man who learned a long time ago that volume is unnecessary when accuracy will do. You know it’s coming. You sit in the passenger seat with your hands in your lap and your spine so straight your lower back is already aching and you wait.

A minute passes.

Two.

The streetlights strobe across the windshield in rhythmic amber intervals. The road noise fills the car, a low, constant hiss of tires on asphalt, the faint vibration of the chassis transmitting through the seat into your femurs, your pelvis, the base of your spine. The heater is on. You can feel it against your shins, a warm current that smells like clean filters and leather conditioner.

Three minutes.

He’s not going to say anything.

The realization doesn’t bring relief. It brings something worse, a vacuum. The silence that Park deploys in the OR when a resident has made an error significant enough that commentary would be redundant. The silence that says I’m not going to dignify this with a response. The silence that forces you to sit inside your own failure without the scaffolding of his criticism to push against, without even the dignity of being yelled at, because yelling would mean he cared enough to raise his voice and Park does not care enough to raise his voice. Park has never cared enough to raise his voice. He saves his volume for the things that matter and you, apparently, do not meet the threshold.

Your throat is doing something. Tightening. The muscles along the anterior triangle contracting in a slow, involuntary squeeze that you recognize as the precursor to crying and you clench your jaw against it so hard you feel your masseter pop. You are not going to cry in this car. You are not going to give him the satisfaction of watching you cry in his car with his cologne in your lungs and his silence pressing against you from every direction like something with weight.

You stare at the dashboard. The blue numbers of the clock. The GPS display showing your route- a clean, illuminated line from the hospital to your house, nineteen minutes, no traffic, as though the journey is simple, as though the distance between where you are and where you’re going can be measured in miles.

“The tibial plateau.”

His voice enters the silence without disturbing it. No change in his posture, no preliminary breath. Just the words, arriving with the same flat, unremarkable cadence he uses to call out hardware sizes mid-procedure.

“You hesitated.”

That’s it. That’s all he says. He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t explain which moment, which hesitation, which specific fraction of a second he’s referring to. He doesn’t need to. You know. He knows you know. The sentence is a key inserted into a lock you’ve been trying not to look at all day, and it turns with a click you can feel in your back teeth.

The silence returns.

It’s worse now. It has a shape. The two words gave it a frame and now the quiet is no longer empty, it’s full- full of every specific thing he could have said and chose not to, every elaboration he’s withholding, every detail of your performance that he catalogued and filed and is currently letting you imagine instead of stating outright. Your brain fills the silence the way fluid fills an enclosed space, expanding into every available cavity until the pressure builds against the walls.

You think about the tibial plateau. You think about the oscillating saw in your hand and the way your fingers tightened on the grip a half second before you made the cut and that half second is what he’s talking about. That imperceptible pause. That flicker of uncertainty between intention and execution. Anyone else would have missed it. The scrub nurse didn’t see it. The anesthesiologist didn’t see it. But Park was standing across the table with his hands resting on the sterile drape and his eyes on your hands and he saw it, he felt the hesitation, stored it, and now he’s taken it out of storage and placed it between you in the car like an exhibit.

Your eyes are burning.

“And the hardware count.”

Four more words. Still no elaboration. 

Flat, observational, a statement of fact that requires no emotional emphasis because the gravity is inherent. He keeps his eyes on the road.

You know what he’s referring to. The post-op notes. Six screws documented instead of eight. A discrepancy in the record that could follow the patient to every subsequent surgery, every future scan. He caught it. He corrected it. He didn’t report it.

He’s telling you now, in this car, in the dark, with nineteen minutes of road between you and your house, and the telling is worse than a formal write up because a formal write up would have structure. A formal write up would have a process: documentation, a meeting, a remediation plan, something to do with the failure. This has nothing. This is Park dropping two facts into the silence and letting you drown in the space around them.

Your left hand is trembling. You flatten it against your thigh and hold it there, pressing the tremor into the muscle, willing the vibration to disperse through the fascia and the quadricep and the femur beneath it. Your dominant hand. Your operating hand. The one that held the saw. The one that miscounted the screws. The one that’s been shaking on and off since hour six of a seventeen hour day and you’ve been hiding it by keeping it busy, keeping it occupied with tasks and tools and the physical business of the job so that nobody- so that he- wouldn’t see.

“You should have asked for a break during the reconstruction.”

You close your eyes.

“Your hand was fatiguing by hour four. You compensated by overtightening your grip on the retractor, which changed the angle.” A pause. “You knew the tremor was developing and you chose to hide it rather than ask for relief because you were more concerned with how it would look than with how it would affect the surgical field.”

That’s the most he’s said at once. Three sentences. They land in your chest like hardware being placed in sequence- tap, tap, tap-  each one seated precisely, each one load bearing, the cumulative construct designed to hold a specific weight.

Silence again.

The thing that’s happening in your chest is not something you can name with language. It’s too large and too formless and it keeps changing shape, contracting into something hot and dense behind your sternum and then expanding outward into your ribs, your clavicles, the soft tissue of your throat where the tightness has progressed from uncomfortable to actively painful. You swallow against it. Your throat clicks. The sound is audible in the quiet car and you hate it, hate the way your body keeps betraying you in small acoustic ways, producing evidence of its own distress for him to collect.

You think: say something back.

You think: defend yourself.

You think: tell him he’s wrong, tell him the hesitation was clinical judgment not fear, tell him the hardware count was a transcription error not negligence, tell him the tremor was fatigue not incompetence, tell him he doesn’t get to sit there in his seventy-two-thousand-dollar car smelling like that and sounding like that and dismantling you with seven sentences spread across ten minutes of silence-

You don’t say any of it.

You don’t say any of it because your throat is closed and your eyes are wet and your hands are shaking and everything he said is true. Not approximately true. Not partially true. Not true-with-caveats-you-could-argue-if-you-had-the-energy. True. Completely, specifically, documentably true, and the fact of its truth is sitting on your chest like a sternum retractor, cranking you open one inch at a time.

A tear escapes. It tracks down the side of your nose and catches at the corner of your mouth and you taste salt and you don’t wipe it away because wiping it away would require moving your hand and moving your hand would require admitting that you’re crying and you are not admitting that you’re crying. You are sitting in this car looking straight ahead and the moisture on your face is condensation, it’s a physiological response to dry air, it’s anything other than what it is.

Park doesn’t look at you.

He knows. You know he knows. The quality of his silence has shifted again- it’s softer now, or not softer, that’s not the right word, it’s attentive. The silence of a man who is aware that something is happening beside him and has decided to let it happen. To let you sit in it. To not offer a tissue or a word or even the small mercy of turning up the radio. He just drives, steady and unhurried, and the road unspools, and you cry without sound in the passenger seat of his car while he navigates the route to your house.

You wait for the rest. The elaboration. The lecture.

It doesn’t come. Instead, after a long moment, he says something worse.

“You know what’s funny?”

You don’t answer.

“You’re actually not bad.”

The sentence lands wrong. It lands wrong because it sounds, for one disorienting half second, like a compliment, and your starved, exhausted brain almost reaches for it before the rest of him catches up- the tone, the timing, the particular way he says not bad. A minimum. A floor. The lowest possible bar of acceptability, offered with the cadence of praise so your body responds to it like praise while your brain is still trying to decode that it isn’t.

“You’ve got a feel for the work. I’ve seen you read a fracture pattern faster than most of my third years. Your spatial reasoning’s above average. Your hands- ” He pauses. You feel the pause in your sternum. “When your hands are right, they’re right.”

He’s building something. You can feel it assembling in real time, each sentence another load bearing element, and you don’t know what the structure is yet but you know it has a weight it hasn’t distributed.

“That’s what makes it hard to watch, actually.”

There it is.

“Watching someone who could be good just… ” He makes a sound. Not a sigh. Something smaller. Something almost like amusement, which is so much worse than disappointment that your vision blurs. “It’s like watching someone with perfect pitch sing off key on purpose. You want to fix it. But you can’t want it more than they do.”

He turns onto your street.

“And I’m starting to think you don’t want it at all. I think you want to want it. I think you like the idea of being good. But when it actually costs you something, when it means admitting the tremor, asking for the break, counting the fucking screws, you’d rather protect your ego than protect your patient. And that’s- ”

He pulls into your driveway.

The engine idles. The blue dashboard light hums. Your house is dark. The porch light is off because you forgot to set the timer this morning, because this morning happened to a different person in a different version of your life.

“That’s not a skill problem. I can fix a skill problem.” He’s looking straight ahead. Blue lit profile. One hand on the wheel. “That’s a you problem. And I can’t fix you.”

I can’t fix you.

Four words that shouldn’t feel like anything. Four words that are, technically, a statement of professional boundaries, an acknowledgment that his role has limits, that your development is ultimately your own responsibility. That’s what they are on paper. That is not what they are in this car at eleven pm with salt drying on your face and his cologne in your lungs.

I can’t fix you means you’re broken. It means I looked, and what I found isn’t worth the effort. It means he assessed you the way he did with the engine and the prognosis is: not salvageable. Not worth the parts.

You should get out. You should open the door and walk inside and lock it behind you and shower and sleep and come back tomorrow and be better, be sharper, be the version of yourself that doesn’t hesitate on the approach and doesn’t miscount hardware and doesn’t sit in a man’s car at eleven pm leaking tears onto her own scrub top.

Your hand is on the seatbelt release.

“The hesitation,” Park says.

You stop.

He’s looking straight ahead. His profile is blue lit, jaw set, one hand resting on the steering wheel at twelve o’clock. His index finger taps the leather once, a single, idle percussion that might mean nothing and might mean everything.

“It’s going to get someone killed.”

Six words. Delivered without emphasis, without cruelty, without any of the sharp edges that have characterized everything else he’s said today. That’s what makes them worse. The previous comments were barbed, they were designed to cut and they cut and the cutting was something you could be angry about, something you could push against, something that gave the pain a direction.

This is different. Neutral. Factual. Almost gentle in its certainty.

It’s going to get someone killed.

Not it might. Not it could. Going to. Future tense. Inevitable. A definitive, not a warning.

You sit there with your hand on the seatbelt and the salt drying on your upper lip and you feel the sentence settle into the shape of your self concept like a fracture propagating, a slow, branching failure that spreads outward from the point of impact into every adjacent structure until the whole system is compromised.

He doesn’t say anything else.

He just sits there. Engine idling. Blue light. One hand on the wheel. And the silence after the sentence is the worst silence of the night because there’s nothing left to wait for. He’s said the thing. The final thing. The thing that all the other things were building toward- the corroded terminals, the loose cable, the tremor, the miscount- all of it was scaffolding for this, the load bearing statement at the center of the construct, and now that it’s in place the scaffolding falls away and you’re left sitting in the bare, terrible clarity of what he actually thinks.

He thinks you’re going to kill someone.

He thinks it with the same certainty that he had when he looked at your engine and found the problem in four seconds. He looked at you the same way. He looked at your hands the same way. He’s been looking at you for months, confirming what he already suspected, and tonight- the car, the drive, the prognosis- tonight was the consultation where he tells you the findings.

Your seatbelt is still buckled. Your hand is still on the release. Your body is doing something that doesn’t align with the plan your brain is trying to execute, which is: unbuckle, open door, leave. Simple. 

Three steps. Motor planning so basic a first year anatomy student could diagram the neural pathway. But the signal is getting lost somewhere between your prefrontal cortex and your extremities, scrambled by the interference of everything else your body is processing- the smell of his cologne in the warm car, the blue light on his hands, the tear track tightening on your cheek, the ache in your trapezius, the tremor in your dominant hand, the sound of his breathing.

His breathing.

You’re listening to him breathe. You’ve been listening to him breathe for the entire drive, you realize, a low, even rhythm that hasn’t changed once, that maintained the same rate and depth through every cruel observation and every silence and every tear you failed to hide. His respiratory rate is probably twelve. Maybe fourteen. Resting. Resting. He’s been resting this entire time. His nervous system has been in parasympathetic mode for the entirety of this drive, calm and regulated, while yours has been in full sympathetic cascade- tachycardic, diaphoretic, pupils dilated, hands trembling- and the asymmetry of it, the sheer physiological unfairness of it, lights something in the back of your skull that isn’t sadness and isn’t defeat.

It’s rage.

Not the sharp, vocal, defensible kind. Not the kind that generates arguments and rebuttals and righteous indignation.

Something lower. Something that lives in the body, not the mind. Something that has nothing to do with what he said and everything to do with the way he’s sitting there, breathing his twelve fucking breaths a minute, resting his hand on his thigh, occupying his leather seat with the boneless ease of a man who has never once lost sleep over the things he’s said to someone while you sit fourteen inches away vibrating at a frequency that might actually be damaging your soft tissue.

You want to hit him.

The thought arrives without preamble. You want to hit him in his calm, blue lit face. You want to put your fist into the hinge of his jaw and feel the impact travel back up your metacarpals and into your wrist and you want him to feel something, anything, any disruption at all in the flat, metronomic equilibrium of his goddamn resting heart rate.

You don’t hit him.

You look at him.

You turn your head and you look at him and he must feel the weight of it because he turns too, slow, unhurried, and his eyes find yours in the blue dark of the car and they’re steady. Completely steady. No tension in his eyes, no furrow in his corrugator, nothing in his expression that suggests he’s experiencing any version of the catastrophic internal event currently leveling every structure in your chest. He’s just looking at you. The way he looks at the surgical field. The way he looks at a fracture pattern on a film. Assessing. Reading. Processing the data without any visible emotional response to the findings.

But there’s something else. Something you almost miss because it’s buried so deep in his face that you’d need to be exactly this close, exactly this wrecked, exactly this far past the boundary of professional distance to catch it.

His gaze drops.

To your mouth.

It’s fast. A quarter second. Maybe less. And then it’s back, steady and clinical and blank, but you saw it and the seeing rewires something in your brain so fast you feel it as a physical lurch, a tilt in the axis of the car, the sudden sickening recalibration of a system that just received information it doesn’t know how to process.

He looked at your mouth.

He has spent the last twenty minutes telling you that you’re negligent and broken and dangerous and going to kill someone and he just looked at your mouth.

And the thing that breaks you isn’t the cruelty. It isn’t the silence, or the criticism, or I can’t fix you, or it’s going to get someone killed. It’s the quarter second glance. It’s the knowledge that somewhere inside of this man who has spent seventeen hours making you feel like the smallest, most incompetent person in the building, there is a circuit that looked at your mouth. That the same eyes that catalogued your hesitation and your tremor and your miscounted screws also, in the same sitting, looked at your mouth. And he thought you wouldn’t catch it. And you did. And now you’re both sitting in the knowledge of it and the air in the car has changed entirely.

And something about the way he can sit here in the aftermath of everything he’s said and look at you with the same detached focus, cracks the last load bearing wall in whatever structure was keeping you upright.

Your body, which has been running on cortisol and adrenaline and seventeen hours of accumulated fight-or-flight with no outlet, moves without conscious thought. Your hand comes off the seatbelt release and goes to the back of his neck and your fingers close in the short hair above his collar and you pull, and your mouth finds his in the dark, and it’s not a kiss so much as a loss of structural integrity. Catastrophic failure at the point of highest stress. The break you saw coming but couldn’t prevent because the forces were already in motion before you understood what they were.

He doesn’t flinch.

That’s the last thing you register before everything goes: he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t stiffen. His mouth is warm and the sound he makes against your mouth is quiet and short and so unsurprised it makes your blood run sideways.

He was waiting for this.

The knowledge doesn’t stop you. It should. It should be the thing that makes you pull back, that trips the wire between mistake and trap, but his mouth is already moving against yours and your brain has been demoted to a purely observational role, a bystander taking notes while your body runs the operation.

You kiss him like you’re trying to hurt him. Teeth and pressure and the graceless, artless force of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and doesn’t care, and for a second- a long, terrible second- he lets you. He sits there and he takes it, your mouth on his, your hand fisted in his collar, your breath coming in sharp little pulls through your nose, and he doesn’t move. Doesn’t reciprocate. Doesn’t push you away. Just absorbs it, and the passivity of it is so much worse than rejection that you feel your eyes sting behind your closed lids.

Then his hand moves.

It goes to the back of your neck, fingers closing around the nape and gripping, thumb pressing into the tendon beside your spine, the rest of his hand spanning the width of your neck, and he holds you there. Holds you mid kiss, mid breath, mid everything, and the grip says stop. Not stop kissing him. Just… stop. Stop thrashing. Stop fighting. Stop moving.

You stop.

He pulls you back. Just enough to break the contact. An inch of cold air between your mouth and his, and you can feel the heat of his breath against your wet lower lip and you can see his eyes, close enough to make out the individual fibers of his iris contracting in the low light, and he’s looking at you with something that makes your animal brain go very, very still.

He doesn’t say anything.

He just looks. And the quality of the looking is- you don’t have language for it. Something pre-verbal, pre-civilized, something that belongs in a context where the lighting is firelight instead of dashboard glow and the power dynamic is measured in muscle mass and jaw strength rather than titles and institutional hierarchy. 

He looks at you like he’s deciding where to bite down.

His grip on your neck tightens. Fractionally. A compression you feel in your molars.

Then he kisses you.

And it’s different. Everything about it is different. Where yours was frantic and desperate and searching, his is slow. His mouth moves against yours with a patience that feels predatory, that feels like the unhurried gait of something that doesn’t need to chase because it already has what it was after, and his hand on your neck isn’t holding you still anymore, it’s steering. 

Tilting your head where he wants it, adjusting the angle, his thumb pressing under your jaw until your chin lifts and your throat is exposed and the sound that comes out of you is something you’ll hear in your own head for weeks.

Your fingers scramble against his shoulders. Your nails catch the fabric of his scrub top and drag and you feel the muscle underneath shift in response, a twitch, a contraction, involuntary and brief, and that one small proof that his body is responding makes you desperate in a way you don’t recognize.

You need to be closer. The thought is incoherent and absolute. There’s a center console between you and fourteen inches of dead space and it’s intolerable, physically intolerable, your body rejecting the distance, urgently, violently, without higher input.

You pull back. Fumble the seatbelt. The buckle snaps free. You get one knee on the console and your hand on the headrest behind him and you’re climbing, graceless, desperate, your shin banging the gear shift, your elbow catching the rearview mirror, and the logistics are terrible and you don’t care. You don’t care because his hands have dropped to his sides and he’s not helping you, he’s just watching, his head tipped back against the headrest, his eyes half lidded, tracking your clumsy, frantic movements in the space with something that isn’t amusement and isn’t patience.

It’s hunger.

Controlled, banked, hunger behind glass.

Your knee finds the seat beside his thigh. Then the other one. You settle into his lap and the steering wheel cuts into your lower back and his thighs are solid beneath yours and you’re breathing too hard, chest heaving, hands shaking where they grip his shoulders, and he’s… still.

Completely still.

Looking up at you. His hands at his sides. His jaw set. The only thing moving is his chest, rising and falling with breaths that are marginally faster than they were ten minutes ago, and you fixate on that the way a drowning person fixates on a piece of floating debris.

You wait for him to touch you.

He doesn’t.

The seconds stretch. Three. Five. Seven. You’re sitting in his lap and his hands are resting on the seat on either side of his thighs and he’s looking up at you with that banked, glass walled hunger and he is not touching you. 

He is making you sit in it, in the wanting, in the desperation, in the raw, humiliating fact that you just climbed into your attending’s lap in a driveway and he’s giving you nothing back.

Your hips shift. You can’t help it. A restless, involuntary roll that presses your cunt into his cock, and you feel his abdomen tighten beneath you, a hard, sudden contraction that he controls almost immediately but not before you feel it, not before you register the proof that his body is doing things his face won’t admit to.

His jaw tightens. You see it. The masseter flexing, the tendon standing out below his ear.

Then finally- finally- his hands move.

They don’t go where you expect. They go to your hips. Both of them. Settling over the bones with a grip that is immediately, unambiguously possessive, not exploratory, not tentative, not the careful hands of a man testing boundaries. He grips you like you’re his. Like you’ve always been his. Like the last four months of corrections and cruelty and silence were just the long, patient process of wearing you down to this, to the moment where you’d put yourself in his hands because you had nowhere else to go.

His thumbs dig into the hollows inside your hip bones. The pressure is just on the edge of pain, right at the threshold where sensation tips from one thing into another, and you gasp and his hands tighten in response and you realize with a full body lurch that the sound you made didn’t concern him. It fed him.

He pulls you forward. Down. A controlled, forceful drag that seats you flush against his him, and the contact makes your vision white out at the edges and one of his hands goes from your hip to your hair and he's gripping it, pulling it, fingers twisted strands at the crown of your head, yanking, exposing your throat, and the sound he makes rewires something fundamental in your nervous system.

His mouth finds your neck, teeth grazing the tendon that runs from your ear to your clavicle, a slow, dragging pressure that leaves a trail of heat in its wake, and then he bites down, hard enough to make you jolt, to make your fingers tighten on his shoulders, to make your hips roll forward again in a motion that is completely involuntary and that he responds to by pulling you into his clothed cock harder, fingers digging into the meat of your hips with a strength that’s going to leave marks. 

You know it’s going to leave marks. You know because his hands are surgeon’s hands, hands that crack bones into alignment and drive hardware through cortical shell, and they are currently clamped onto your body like he’s setting a fracture and the thing he’s reducing is you.

He doesn’t let go of the bite. He holds it. His jaw flexing against your throat, his breath hot against your pulse point, and you can feel your own heartbeat hammering against his teeth and he can feel it too; you know he can feel it, your pulse trapped between his mouth and your skin, and he stays there. Counting it, maybe. Tasting it.

Your hands are moving without thought. Down his chest, pulling at the fabric, trying to find skin and not finding it fast enough. You’re making sounds- small, fractured, desperate things that you’ve lost the ability to be embarrassed about because embarrassment requires a functioning prefrontal cortex and yours left the building sometime around the moment you smelled the cologne on him in the parking garage.

He releases the bite. His tongue passes over the indentation once, flat and slow and then his mouth is at your ear and his breathing is different now. Ragged at the edges. Fraying. The composure that he’s worn like a second skin all day is coming apart in increments you can measure by the roughness of each exhale and the tightening of his grip.

“You should eat more,” he says and his hands slide under your scrub top, palms flat against your bare skin and the heat of them is obscene, radiating a constant steady warmth that seeps into your tissue, spreading outwards from the points of contact and into the muscles beneath. His hands slide up your sides, palms dragging over abdominal muscles, calluses catching against your skin, and his thumbs find the ridges of bone, thumbs tracing your ribs, counting them. “I can feel every one of these.”

It’s not tender. It’s not concern. It’s inventory. He’s cataloguing what’s his and finding it insufficient and the disapproval is so tangled up with the want that you can’t separate them, can’t tell where the criticism ends and the desire begins because in him they’re the same thing. The same impulse. He wants you and he’s angry about the state of what he wants, angry when something he’s claimed isn’t being maintained to his standard.

His hands stop. Bracketing your ribcage, fingers splayed across your back, thumbs resting in the shallow valley between bones. The heat of his palms is sinking through your intercostal now, settling into the spaces between your ribs like something poured, and you can feel your own lungs expanding against his hand with every breath, pushing into the warmth, your body leaning into him without your permission because its been so long since anyone touched you with this much sustained focused heat.

His hands drop to the hem of your scrub top. He pulls it up, bunching the fabric at your ribs, exposing your waist, your stomach, the line of your hip bones above the drawstring of your scrub pants until your shirt is pulled above your head and dropped somewhere to the side. The air in the car hits your bare skin and you shiver and he flattens his palms against your stomach.

“Someone needs to feed you,” he mutters. His thumbs press into the soft tissue below your navel. “Make sure you actually sleep.” His hands drag down, hooking into the waistband pads of his fingers against your lower abdomen, the weight of his grip tilting your pelvis toward him. “You’re a goddamn mess.”

You are. You are a goddamn mess. You are shaking and crying and half undressed in your attending’s lap in a parked car and his hands are on your bare skin and his teeth marks are throbbing on your neck and every word out of his mouth is an insult wrapped in something that sounds, horribly, like a promise.

A promise that he’s going to fix what you can’t fix. That he’s already decided. That this- the car, the drive, the cruelty, the bite, his hands inside your waistband- this is just the intake assessment. The preliminary exam. The first step in a treatment plan that he’s been designing for months, one that ends with you exactly where he wants you, which is right here. Underneath his hands. Dependent on his attention. Unable to function without the particular combination of damage and repair that only he provides.

You should be terrified.

His hands tighten. He pulls you into him again, harder, and your breath leaves your body in a rush and your forehead drops to his shoulder and your teeth find the muscle where his neck meets his trapezius and you bite down because it’s the only language your body has left.

He groans. The sound travels through his chest cavity into yours, a vibration you feel in your sternum, and his hand slides up your spine and fists in your hair again and pulls, arching your neck back, exposing your throat, and he looks at you, looks up at you from below, his lips parted, his breathing finally, irrevocably wrecked, and the expression on his face is the most honest thing you’ve ever seen from him.

It’s not the mask. It’s not the bored superiority. It’s not the carefully metered cruelty he portions out across an operating day.

It’s greed.

Simple, uncut, undisguised. The face of a man who found something he wants and is currently in the process of closing his hand around it and he does not intend to open that hand again.

“Come here,” he says, for the second time tonight, and this time it means something completely different and exactly the same.

You come, your body answering the order the way it answers every order he’s ever given- before thought, before shame, before the part of your brain that still pretends it has dignity can raise an objection, and you lean in, mouth crashing against his.

You hate yourself for it. You hate the speed of it, the automaticity, the way your knees dig harder into the leather on either side of his thighs and your mouth finds his again. You hate that you’re shaking and he’s not. You hate that your hands are fisted into his collar and pulling and desperate and his are still, idle, unbothered, a man being kissed by someone while he decides whether or not to kiss back. 

He tracks you. Every tremor of your lower lip, every frantic slide of your tongue against his, every wet graceless sound you make when his teeth catch your bottom lip and tug. Controlled. Proprietary. Taking this in like he takes in everything, filing it, noting it, adding it to whatever mental inventory he maintains of all the ways you embarrass yourself in front of him. 

You pull back. Your chest is heaving. His isn’t.

“Fuck you,” you say.

It comes out wrecked. Shaking. Nothing close to the strength you want it to be. He looks at you flatly, unimpressed. 

He hooks two fingers into the drawstring of your scrub pants and pulls. One motion. The knot gives. The pants slide down your thighs and you should stop this. You should stop this right now. You should climb off his lap and open the door and walk into your house and lock it behind him and never look at him again. You know this. The knowledge is clean and certain and completely irrelevant to what your body is actually doing, which is lifting one knee, then the other, kicking cotton of your ankles, while your hand stays fisted in his collar like letting go would kill you. 

His hand goes behind your back. One flick of his thumb and the bra releases and the straps slide down your shoulders and you feel the air hit your skin and the humiliation is so acute it tastes metallic, like biting down on foil, like blood from a split lip. 

He doesn’t even look. 

He lets the fabric fall and his palms settle over your breasts and his thumbs brush across nipples already tight from the cold and the adrenaline and he does it with absent focus, like this is a step in a sequence, like your body is a series of tasks to be completed on the way to something else. 

“You’re an asshole,” you whisper. Your voice cracks. “You know that? You’re a completely fucking-”

His hand slides down your stomach. Hooks into the waistband of your underwear. Drags. The fabric catches on your thighs, resists, then gives away with a tear. 

“- asshole.”

“Yeah,” he says. That’s it. Yeah. One syllable. Bored. His eyes haven’t changed. His breathing hasn’t changed. You are sitting in his lap in nothing but the blue dashboard light, stripped and shaking, every flaw and rib and tremor illuminated, and his pulse is resting. 

You want to claw his face off.

You want to rake your nails down his cheeks until he bleeds, until something in his expression breaks, until he shows you one single shred of evidence that this is affecting him even a fraction as much as it’s affecting you. But he’s still dressed beneath you- scrub top, scrub pants- and the obscene imbalance of naked and clothed, wrecked and composed, is doing something to the power dynamic that you feel in the base of your skull like a boot on your neck. 

One hand leaves your hip. You hear the shift of fabric, the elastic drag of a waistband, and then he’s there, cock pressing against the inside of your thigh, hard and hot. He wraps his hand around himself and strokes once, slow, lazy, and you watch the muscle in his jaw flex and that’s it. That’s all he gives you. One flex of one muscle while you’re sitting naked in his lap with tears drying on your face and your whole body vibrating like a plucked string. 

Then he lines the head of his cock up, blunt insistent pressure of him against the entrance to your cunt, and your body- your traitorous, mutinous, shame soaked body- is already wet. Has been wet. Has been wet since the you smelled his cologne in the parking garage, maybe earlier, maybe since the OR, maybe since the moment you were first introduced to him as your attending and the knowledge of that is so humiliating you actually close your eyes against it, squeeze them shut like a child who thinks not seeing makes them invisible. 

“Sit.” A command. Like he’s speaking to a dog, like you’re a dog, like you’re a misbehaving mutt caught doing something you shouldn’t and he’s issuing a command to correct. Sit, heel, lay down, roll over-

Don’t, you think. 

You sink. 

The stretch is immediate. Obscene. A slow, relentless parting that you feel in your cunt, your thighs, your abdomen, your teeth, and you hate every inch of it and the contradiction is going to break you in half. He fills your cunt the way he takes up any space around him- completely, unapologetically, without any interest in whether you were ready to accommodate him or not. 

Your hands fly to his biceps. Nails through fabric into muscle. And for one heartbeat you sit there, trembling, adjusting, feeling the way you body has to restructure around him, and your eyes are open now and burning and you’re looking directly at his face and his expression is…

Calm. 

He looks calm. His dick is buried inside of you to the hilt and his face is the face of a man sitting in traffic. Waiting for the light to change. Reading a notification on his phone. And you want to scream, wrap your hands around his throat and squeeze until something in those steady, half lidded eyes shows you that he’s here, that he’s present, that this is costing him anything at all. 

His hands find your hips again. Thumbs pressing bruises into bone. And then he moves you. 

Up. Down. Controlled. Like you’re nothing more than a doll, an instrument, something he can use and play until he’s had his fill, and that pisses you off.

You start to move on your own and the first roll of your hips without his guidance is yours, angry and hard, grinding down onto him with a force that’s closer to violence than fucking, and you watch his face for the flinch, for the flutter of his eyes, for his lips to part open, for any crack, any goddamn indication that you’re getting to him. 

His eyes lower. Barely. The faintest contraction around the corner of his eyes. 

That’s it. That’s all you get. 

His hands tighten and he takes back control of the rhythm, pulling you down on his cock hard, forcing the depth, and the sound that rips out of you is something between a sob and a moan and you hate it, hate the wet broken sound, hate that he heard it, hate that his expression doesn’t change when he hears it. 

“This is what you’re good at.”

The words are like a slap and you feel them behind your eyes, in your lungs, in the slick slide where your body is betraying you again, again, again.

“Fuck you- “

“Not the tibial plateau.” His hips drive up. “Not the hardware count.” Again. “Not even remembering to get your fucking car serviced.” His hands drag you down so hard onto his cock that your clit grinds against the base of him and your vision whites out and your mouth falls open with a sound you can’t control, high pitched and needy. “This. This is the only thing I’ve never seen you hesitate on.”

“I hate you- “ Your voice splinters with another thrust, that grinds his cock against the spot that has your nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to break skin through fabric. “I hate you, you fucking-”

“I know,” he says. Quiet. Unbothered. Like you just told him the weather. And then he rolls his hips up into you with a hard grind that makes your spine arch and your head fall back and the I hate you dissolves into a whimper you’ll never forgive yourself for. 

“Look at you,” His breathing hasn't changed. Twelve per minute. Resting. While yours comes ragged and sobbing, chest heaving, your whole body shaking on top of his. “Seventeen hours of your hands shaking. Seventeen hours of being unable to hold a retractor steady. But you can ride cock like this. Perfect rhythm. No tremor. No hesitation.” He pulls you into another downstroke, meets you with his hips, punches the breath from your lungs. “Maybe this is what I should have had you doing all along instead of letting you pretend you’re a surgeon.”

You hit him. 

Your palm connects with his face, an open handed strike that lands hard enough to make a sound in the car, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t tense, just absorbs it the way he absorbs everything, and his hands on your hips don’t even stutter. 

He smiles. 

Not wide. Not warm. A thin, asymmetric thing, one corner of his mouth pulling up in the blue dark, and it’s the first genuine expression you’ve seen on his face and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever looked at. Because the smile says he liked that. The smile says do it again. The smile says he has been waiting, patiently, methodically, for the entire duration of the encounter, for you to hit him, and now that you have he can file it alongside every other piece of evidence that you are exactly as out of control as he’s always suspected. 

“There she is.” His thumb slides between your bodies. Finds your clit. Circles it in a way that makes your spine lock and your teeth clench. “There’s the good girl I knew was buried under all that incompetence.”

“Don’t call me- “ Your voice breaks, hips moving faster not, frantic, beyond your control. “Don’t you dare-”

“Come on.” His thumb presses harder. His other hand drags you down into the next thrust. “Show me the one thing you’re actually competent at.”

“I fucking hate you- “

“You keep saying that.” His mouth is close to your ear. His breathing is finally, finally different- rougher, a fraction faster, the composure fraying at the thinnest edges- but his voice is still steady. Still controlled. Still the voice of a man who is winning and knows it. “And yet here you are.”

And yet here you are. 

The truth of those words- the bare, unarguable, catastrophic truth of them- hits harder than anything else he’s said all day. Here you are. In his lap. In his car. In his hands. Naked and shaking and full of him and crying and still moving, still rolling your hips into his, still chasing the orgasm that’s building in your lower abdomen, because he told you to and because you want to and because the wanting and the hate have fused into something singular and molten that you couldn’t separate even if you had the higher brain function to try. 

The car is rocking on its suspension. The windows are opaque. Sweat slides down the valley of your spine. Your breasts move with every thrust and his eyes track them and the shame of being watched makes something tighten in your lower belly and you hate that too, hate the wiring of your own body, hate that humiliation and arousal are using the same neural pathways and you can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. 

“This is what you’re good at,” he says again. Quieter now. Almost fond. And the fondness is worse than the cruelty because the cruelty you can fight but the fondness seeps in and finds the soft tissue and stays. “Not saving lives. Not pretending to be a doctor. Just this. Just taking what I give you until you forget you ever had anything else to fuck up.”

“Shut up.” You’re crying openly now. Tears and sweat and the sounds coming out of your mouth are wet and broken and you can’t stop them and you can’t stop moving. “Shut the fuck up-”

“Make me.”

Two words. And they’re not said like a challenge. They’re said like a dare, and underneath the dare is something that sounds terrifyingly like affection, the way someone would talk to a small animal that keeps trying to bite them, amused and patient and completely unthreatened. 

Your orgasm is building. You feel it in every trembling muscle, the quiver in your inner thighs, the tightening low in your abdomen, the involuntary clenching of your body around his cock that makes his breath hitch for one unguarded second before he smooths it over. 

You’re close. You’re so close it’s blurring the edges of your rage, softening the anger into something needier, something that wants to collapse forward against his chest and be held and the wanting of that- the wanting to be held by the man who’s been destroying you- is the most humiliating thing that’s happened all night and that is a competitive field. 

His grip adjusts. His thumb digs in deeper. His pace doesn’t falter. 

His mouth finds your ear. 

“Don’t you dare come until I tell you you’ve earned it.” His thumb circles your clit and the contradiction- don’t come while his hands do everything to guarantee you will- is so perfectly, characteristically cruel that a laugh rips out of you, unhinged and wet and bordering on hysterical. “You don’t get to be good at anything unless I say so.”

And you keep bouncing, because he told you to. 

Because somewhere between the parking garage and the engine and the drive and the months of him taking you apart and breaking you down like you were a failed construct, you stopped being a person who makes her own decisions and became a person who waits for his. 

You hate him.

You don’t stop. 

***

The hospital smells the same. 

That’s what gets you. The absolute, insulting sameness. You walk through the door at six thirty and the air hits your face with its standard cocktail of antiseptic and recycled ventilation and floor wax and the distant, perpetual ghost of coffee, and it is exactly, precisely, atomically the same as it was yesterday morning when you walked in as a person who had not yet detonated her entire life ion the front seat of a Lexus. 

Your neck hurts. 

Not the muscular ache of a bad night’s sleep, though there’s that too- you slept maybe ninety minutes, in twenty three minute increments, each one interrupted by the sensation of waking up inside a body that still smelled like him despite the shower. The shower that was too hot. The shower where you stood with your forehead against the tile and your hands flat on the wall and mentally assessed the damage- bruise on your left knee, bruises on your hips in the shape of his fingerprints, raw patch on your lower back from the steering wheel, and the bite. The bite on your neck, which you examined in the bathroom mirror, reddish purple, visible above the collar of a scrub top. Visible above the collar of anything you own. 

You’re wearing a turtleneck under your scrubs. In September. 

You keep your head down. Badge clipped. Hair pulled back so tight your scalp aches. You walk with a posture that says normal day, regular morning, nothing to report, and you’re almost to the locker room when another resident steps into the hallway and says, “Admin wants you.”

Every drop of blood in your body goes cold. You stare at him. 

“Underwood’s office.” He says. “Now.”

You don’t ask why. You don’t ask why because your body already knows. Your body already knows before he opened his mouth, maybe before, maybe the moment you walked through the doors and the air tasted the same and the hallway looked the same and nothing was different except everything was different. 

The walk takes ninety seconds. You count your footsteps because counting is something your brain can do while the rest of it shuts down. 

You see him through the open door. 

Park is in the left chair. One ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He’s holding a coffee, steam curling from the lip, which means its fresh, which means he stopped on his way here, which means he budgeted time into his morning for this.

He doesn’t look up when you walk in. 

Gloria Underwood is standing beside her desk. She’s holding a manilla folder. It’s thick. Too thick for something assembled this morning. Too thick for a single incident. The thickness of it does something to the air in your lungs, displaces it, compresses it, makes the next breath feel like trying to inflate against a weight. 

Gloria’s face is arranged in the express you’ve seen administrators use when they’re about to change the trajectory of a person’s life. Controlled. A mask of professional compassion that has been practiced in mirrors and refined in meetings and has nothing to do with whether the person wearing it actually feels anything at all. 

“Please sit down.”

You sit. The chair is identical to his. Your elbow is inches from his elbow and you can smell him, smell the coffee, and the soap, and the cologne, and your body responds with a full system lurch of sense memory so violent you have to press your fingernails into your palms to stay in the chair. 

“A formal complaint has been filed,” Gloria says, opening the folder. Turns to a page that’s already been flagged with a colored tab, pre-marked, pre-organized, the administrative infrastructure of a process that was set in motion before you arrived. “Regarding conduct of sexual nature directed at Dr. Brendon Park by a subordinate member of the surgical team.”

Directed at. 

The preposition enters your ear and detonates. 

Directed at Dr. Park. Not by Dr. Park. Not between you and Dr. Park. At him. By you. 

“Dr. Park has reported that over the course of several months, he has been subjected to escalating patterns of inappropriate attention from an intern under his direct supervision.” Gloria’s eyes move across the page but she’s not reading. She memorized this. “Including persistent attempts to initiate physical proximity, repeated instances of unprofessional fixation during surgical procedures, and recently, an incident of unsolicited sexual contact initiated in his vehicle after he offered professional assistance with a mechanical issue in the hospital parking garage.”

Persistent attempts to initiate physical proximity. 

That’s- standing near him. In the OR. Where he assigned you to stand. 

Unprofessional fixation during surgical procedures. 

That’s- watching him operate. When you were assisting. 

Unsolicited sexual contact.

That’s-

The room is doing something. The walls aren’t moving but the space between them is contracting, the air thickening, the fluorescent light taking on a quality that feels granular, particulate, like you’re trying to see through something that’s settling between you and the rest of the room. 

“The complaint has been supported by documented observations,” Gloria continues. She turns another page. Another colored tab. “Dr. Park has provided a written timeline of concerning behavior, including specific dates and incidents.”

A timeline. 

He kept a timeline. He’s been keeping a timeline. Every shift, every surgery, every moment you stood too close or looked too long or held your breath- he was writing it down. Dating it. Building a file. Constructing a narrative in which every single thing your body did in his presence was evidence of you pursuing him, and the evidence is in Gloria Underwood’s hands right now, and it’s thick, and it has colored tabs, and it’s been here since before you walked in the door. 

“Given the nature of the supervisory relationship and the severity of the allegations, you are being placed on immediate administrative suspension pending investigation, effective as of this meeting.”

You open your mouth.

Nothing comes out. 

You try again and what emerges is a sound that isn’t a word, is a breath, a fragment, the beginning of that’s not what happened that stalls in your larynx before your larynx has done the math that your brain hasn’t finished yet. 

The math is:

He is a senior attending. Board certified orthopedic surgeon. Ten years at this hospital. Published. Respected. The kind of name that appears on department letterheads and in the acknowledgment section of textbook chapters. He has a reputation. He has colleagues. He has a record, spotless and long and documented in the same filing system that is currently absorbing this complaint. 

You are an intern. Four months in. No publications, no tenure, no institutional weight. You have a shaking hand and miscounted screws and a performance record that he has been personally authoring for your entire rotation. 

Who is Gloria going to believe?

Who is anyone going to believe?

The intern who can’t hold a retractor steady? The one who freezes on approaches and forgets to count hardware and cries in parking garages? The one who ended up naked in her attending’s car at midnight? 

Or the attending who has spent months carefully, meticulously, documentably expressing concern about a subordinate’s fixation. 

“During the suspension period,” Gloria is saying. “You are not to enter clinical areas, access patient records, or make contact with Dr. Park directly or through intermediaries.”

You turn your head. 

Park is looking at Gloria. He’s been looking at Gloria the entire time. Sitting in the chair with his coffee and his crossed ankle, and his face arranged in an expression of restrained concern; brows drawn, mouth set, carefully composed like a man navigating a difficult situation with professionalism and grace. He looks like someone this is being done to. He looks like a man who tried his best with a troubled intern and is now dealing with the unfortunate consequences of his own generosity. 

He is sitting in this chair, hours after his teeth were in your neck and his cock inside you and his hands on your hips dragging you down onto him while he told you that riding him was the only thing you were competent at and he looks troubled. 

Something happens behind your face. Not tears. Something past tears, something drier and more dangerous. A sensation like the moment before something snaps, the last frame of structural integrity, the instant where the material is still holding its shape but the forces have already exceeded its capacity and the failure is inevitable, just not yet visible. 

“Do you have anything to add,” Gloria asks you. 

You're still looking at Park. 

He turns his head. Finally. Slowly. Meets your eyes for the first time since you walked in. 

His face is still wearing the mask. The concern, the gravity, the restrained compassion of the Wronged-Mentor. It’s flawless. Every muscle recruited, every micro expression calibrated, the kind of performance that could only be produced by someone who’s been rehearsing it for a very long time. 

But his eyes.

In the space behind the performance, in the deep architecture of his gaze, where the mask doesn’t quite reach, there’s something looking back at you that makes your blood crystallize in your veins. 

It’s not guilt. It’s not satisfaction. It’s not even cruelty.

It’s patience.

The bottomless, immovable patience of a man who built something and is now watching it work. 

He holds your gaze for two seconds. Then he turns back to Gloria and picks up his coffee and drinks and the meeting continues, and the folder stays open, and your badge is collected, and you walk out of the hospital at seven forty one am wearing a turtleneck in September and it’s sunny outside and the sky is very blue and you don’t remember driving home.

(And Park watches you leave, coffee in hand. You look very small. Smaller than you looked in scrubs, which is saying a lot, because you already looked like a stiff breeze would snap you in half-

(And the first part is done. Solved. He doesn’t have to watch you bite your lip when you concentrate anymore, doesn’t have to correct the angle of your hands and pretend the contact is clinical. Doesn’t have to stand behind you during a procedure and smell your shampoo and keep his hands professional while he vividly imagines what he’d do to you if the room was empty- 

(Four months of that. Four months of keeping his hands on the instruments instead of on your waist, of watching your throat move when you swallow and thinking about his teeth there, of memorizing the exact pitch of your voice when you’re nervous because he wanted to know what it would sound like under him, or fucking his fist to the memory of the little punched out breath you made when you startled coming out of the supply closet, imagining you making that sound with his fist in your hair and his cock grinding against your cervix-

(And you’ll spiral. That’s fine. That’s the design. You’ll go home and fall apart and burn through the anger hot and fast the way you burn through everything, and then the anger will run out and what’s left will be the silence. No OR. No corrections. No one watching. No one who knows you hold your breath when you’re nervous or that your left hand shakes first or that you haven’t been eating enough or sleeping enough or taking care of yourself the way someone should be taking care of you. The way he would, if you’d stop being so fucking difficult about it-

(Give it three weeks. Maybe four. You’ll reach for your phone. You won’t call, not yet. But the intervals between looking at his name and putting the phone down will shrink every time until eventually you just stop putting it down. And he’ll answer when he’s ready, and you’ll be crying, and he’ll listen the way he always listens to you you- completely- because that’s the drug and he’s the only supply you’ve got left. 

(Pavlov’s dog with a prettier face. He spent four months ringing the bell- every correction a tap, every silence a withhold, every rare scrape of approval timed to land when you were most desperate for it- and now that the bell is gone and you’re salivating into nothing, confused and aching and reaching for the only hand that ever fed you even though it’s the same hand that kept you starving-

(He’ll feed you. Get your weight back up. Move you into his place once you can’t make rent. He’ll frame it as practical. You’ll be grateful. And in six months you’ll be standing in his kitchen in his T-shirt and you’ll look up when he walks in with that open, searching expression- the same one you used to give him across the operating table- checking his face for what he wants you to do next, his pretty obedient wife, trained so fucking well-

You’ve known one another for years, passing in corridors, teasing and knowing words given to his cousin while you were offered but a warm smile as your arm linked around his. But in Gwayne’s absence it’s different.

Now, it was different. War had broken the realm into two sides, green and black banners thrown over every seat in the kingdoms. And you, without your husband. Every passing day, every journey further from your home, the man you once barely remembered the face of, lingers everywhere around you.

He stands at your side. Demands guards around the perimeter of your tent at all costs. He doesn’t speak much for the first few weeks, every time you move across rolling fields in the rickety old carriage and him in the leading garrison, you don’t do much as see him. But he makes a point to show his face, to allow himself a closeness to you.

And it begins at Tumbleton. With tensions growing higher and Rhaenyra taken King’s Landing, he acts as their lord, and in turn you as their lady. You are still dressed in fineries much too delicate for the dire times you are in, jewellery and perfumes sent to your assigned chambers.

And as ravens from your husband grow less and less, presumably lost, Ormund finds more excuses to keep you close, and he starts looking at you less like his cousin’s wife and more like something he believes should be sought after, to be properly treated, to have been his all along.

Across the Crownlands, Gwayne fights a war, never realising another one is unfolding behind the safety of his own men’s camp. Ormund becomes more than just a commander, power isn’t just about battles and successes anymore, it is about what he can give to you. Your comfort, your safety, what you need even if you state otherwise.

Ormund who starts insisting you dine with him because “it’s safer.” Ordering his men around you like wildfire before your eyes, and tending to your every need. Though he won’t speak on it longer than that, he simply turns the other way, the smugness in his face hidden from view.

Ormund who escorts you everywhere because the streets are “Far too dangerous for a lady.” and yet Daeron eyes you expectantly from across the room, just as confused at his sudden chivalry.

Ormund who’s begins finishing your sentences and speaking for you in the room full of lords and ladies with you near enough on his arm because “It’s easier.” But it doesn’t change the fact his eyes don’t leave your own, much less they linger when you look away. Always watching, lurking, calculating the next move.

Ormund who has pride in his chest for the way you look after Daeron, his prodigy, his creation of sorts. He looks up to you as a mother figure, and something about that stirs even more want in his chest.

And truly it is for your comfort and safety, yours and the Prince’s, he tells himself. But his sense of responsibility is lost between getting what he wants and control more than he’ll admit. None of the men question it, why their commander will stand by another man’s wife so closely or ask after her whereabouts so often. Or why he even cares? But he does.

Except Daeron does notice after a while.

He begins noticing the way Ormund’s eyes always find you in a crowded room, the way his voice softens only when speaking to you and not even for him anymore. Even when he loses his temper, his jaw ticks tighter with you in the room. How when letters arrive he takes longer to look at them, not allowing anyone else to see, no names, no addresses, not even any signs of life.

And yet he still holds you as you cry from no word of your husband, unknowing that the last words weeks before we’re settled in ash in the hearth.

Your fears and confusion are only heightened the moment the young Prince nudges the door gently to your private chambers in the late evening, stone walls flickering with the orange glow of the candles at your desk.

Daeron hangs his head low, offering you a soft smile as he ducks his way in. And you usher him in, because he had always done it, ever since he was a small boy, the one you had known to be your own since he was just a babe in Oldtown.

Your fingers tangle around the braids of his hair as he rests into your lap, Valyrian silver hidden beneath ashen red. He huffs quietly, so deeply that you stop. A longing one, a sadness that he attempts not to speak of.

“When is my uncle coming?”

this was a city ruled by a queen who had taken the throne only to find that a crown did not come with endless gold, the treasury a gaping wound that refused to heal.

rhaenyra had looked at her council with a desperation that mirrored the people in the streets, her eyes pleading for a solution that didn't involve more taxes on people who had nothing left to give.

the war had swallowed everything.

shipments were delayed. the riches hid their wealth. the treasury that had once seemed impossible to empty now felt frighteningly small. every day brought another report, another number, another desperate request from the people who had nowhere else to turn to.

rhaenyra had listened to every one of them. she was desperate too, her eyes shadowed by the weight of a city that was eating itself alive. but then a thought crossed her mind.

there was a man called ser dyron horden. he had once served rhaenyra's father, viserys the peaceful and knew where the hidden caches of the crown were tucked away in the provinces. and you had been the only one who knew how to track a man who didn't want to be found.

the problem was that the man had fled to tumbleton, and tumbleton was currently under the suffocating grip of the hightower army.

"send a raven to lord ormund." rhaenyra ordered, her voice thin from lack of sleep. "tell him we do not seek the town, but the man. tell him that ser horden is of no use to him as a prisoner, but of immense use to the crown. offer him a trade of terms for the man's release."

"what sort of trade, your grace?" you asked. "we have nothing. not even a handful of grain to offer as a gesture. and what is stopping him from using ser horden as a leverage point to demand our surrender?"

"let him try," rhaenyra replied, a flicker of the old fire returning to her eyes. "we still have the advantage of the dragons. his refusal will be met with fire, but his cooperation will be met with mercy when the war is over."

"your grace... why not simply send someone to smuggle him out of tumbleton?" you had suggested, but the queen's resolve was as hard as the iron throne itself. rhaenyra wanted a formal negotiation, a paper trail of legitimacy. she wanted the world to see that she could command the cooperation of the hightowers without burning their fields to ash.

so, you were the one chosen.

a raven was set out with a letter sealed with a red wax stamp. the journey was a blur of muddy roads and the lingering scent of smoke. by the time you arrived at a salt-stained inn tucked between the marshes and the city walls which was the agreed designated neutral ground, your whole body was vibrating with nerves.

your queen was counting on you. the starving people of king's landing were counting on you to succeed. you took a lungful of deep breath before pushing the door open.

you had expected lord ormund, a cunning man of predictable pomposity. you had expected a battle of wits against a man who viewed you as a mere servant of the crown.

you did not expect gwayne hightower.

he was downing his second cup of ale when you walked through the door. gwayne didn’t stand nor looked at you. he simply leaned back in the creaking wooden chair. he looked exhausted, the kind of weariness that came from spending too many weeks listening to ser criston cole's endless, circling rhetoric. his armor was dusty, his cloak was frayed at the edges, his auburn hair was slightly mussed and his eyes rimmed with a deep fatigue. and yet he still carried himself with the arrogance that came with the hightower name.

"you aren't ormund," you stated, your voice cutting through the silence of the common room.

"disappointed?" he repeated, the word barely a whisper as he downed the rest of his ale.

"where is he?" you demanded. "the letter was addressed to lord ormund. i was promised a meeting with lord hightower, not his cousin."

"busy." he answered simply, his voice raspy as if he hadn't spoken in hours. he didn't move to greet you. gwayne looked like a man who had reached the absolute limit of his patience with the living, and you were merely the latest inconvenience in a long line of them.

"busy? what could he possibly be too busy for?" you snapped, crossing your arms.

gwayne sighed, a heavy, rattling sound that seemed to vibrate in his chest. he was still not looking at you but instead focusing on the way a single drop of condensation slid down the side of his flagon.

"busy counting the ways he can irritate me into an early grave," he murmured. "ormund decided that since this is a matter of diplomacy and nuance, a man of his particular temperament was too precious to risk on a muddy road."

"and he sent you in his stead?" you scoffed, stepping closer to the table. "he sent a man who looks like he’s about to fall over from a nap to negotiate the release of a royal asset? the audacity of your house is truly boundless."

gwayne's eyes snapped up, flickering with irritation. he stood slowly, the chair screeching against the floorboards like a dying animal. he wasn't tall, but he occupied the space with a heavy, oppressive presence.

"my audacity is matched only by my patience, which is currently thinner than the soup they serve at this gods-forsaken hovel," he countered, stepping into your space. "you come here with the smell of flea bottom still clinging to your skin and think you can lecture me on the propriety of my house?"

you didn't flinch. you had been born in the dirt, a nobleman’s sneer was nothing compared to the roar of an empty stomach. you stepped closer, your chest nearly brushing his, your voice dropping to a lethal, quiet hiss. "the smell of flea bottom is the smell of the people who actually keep this kingdom running while you lot play at war in your gilded gardens. if you have any shred of honor, you'll stop insulting my origin and start discussing the terms for ser horden."

gwayne’s lip curled, but there was a spark of something in his eyes. an irritation mixed with curiousity. the fire in your stance intrigued him, somehow.

you slammed the scroll of rhaenyra’s terms onto the scarred wooden table, the parchment snapping like a whip. "lord horden's release in exchange for a guaranteed ceasefire of the trade routes leading into tumbleton for one moon's turn. it is a generous offer, considering your cousin's current lack of supplies."

gwayne didn't even blink. he didn't even reach for the scroll; he simply stared at it as if it were a particularly boring species of insect. "generous. how quaint... but no."

"no?" you spat, the word vibrating with disbelief. "why in the gods' name is it 'no'? your supplies are dwindling, your men, despite occupying the homes of the people of tumbleton, are eating horsemeat and sawdust. a ceasefire on the trade routes would allow you to actually move goods without risking a dragon's breath every ten leagues."

gwayne finally reached for the scroll, not to read it, but to flick it with a dismissive finger, sending it sliding across the table. he stepped around the table to close the distance between you. he smelled of old leather, stale ale, and a sharp, masculine musk that felt intrusive in the small room.

"you assume ormund cares for the stomachs of his men as much as he cares for his own vanity," he explained, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous register. "he doesn't want trade routes, my good lady. he wants a concession. he wants rhaenyra on her knees kissing his feet. and as for me, i find the idea of a 'generous offer' from a flea-bottom rat to be an insult to my intelligence."

"that is to assume you had any in the first place, hightower." you smirked, the words tasting like venom.

but gwayne appeared to be a man who was not easily deterred by venom. he let out a sharp, jagged laugh that didn't reach his eyes, his gaze dropping to your lips for a fraction of a second before snapping back to your eyes.

"a rat with a tongue like a razor," he mused. "perhaps that's why the queen sent you. she knew a highborn lady would be too terrified of the mud to actually make a demand."

then he leaned in, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous vibration. "my people are enduring, my lady. your people are starving. do not mistake my exhaustion for weakness, or your desperation for leverage. and your 'generous' offer is a thinly veiled attempt to slip a spy into our lines under the guise of the master of coin. ormund isn't blind, and neither am i. the man stays."

"absolutely not," you spat, the word hitting him like a slap. "the man is a civilian. he—"

"you said he was a master of coin, so he is a tool of the state," gwayne interrupted, his voice a low rumble that seemed to vibrate in the narrow space between you. "civilian is a word for people who don't know where the gold is hidden. he is a map, and ormund doesn't give away his maps."

"the people in king's landing are starving, hightower. there will be no crown to bear, no throne to sit upon, no kingdom to rule if the city burns from the inside out," you snarled, your voice shaking with a fury that felt like it could crack the floorboards. you didn't care about the political chess anymore, you cared about the hollow-eyed children you'd left behind. "you sit here in your dusty armor playing games while people eat rats to survive. give me the man, or so help me, i will walk back to the queen and tell her that the hightowers are too cowardly to negotiate with a woman."

gwayne’s eyes darkened, a flash of irritation finally piercing through the veil of his exhaustion.

"cowardly?" he murmured, the word tasting like a threat. "you come here with a handful of promises and the stench of desperation and have the nerve to call us cowards because we know the value of the asset you're begging for."

"the value of the asset?" you hissed, the words vibrating between your lips. "you speak of a man as if he were a piece of livestock! you hightowers are pathetic."

gwayne’s jaw tightened, a small muscle leaping in his cheek. for the first time, the boredom had vanished, replaced by a sharp, jagged energy. "the master of coin stays in tumbleton," he declared. "and you will return to your "queen" and tell her that her 'generosity' is as empty as her treasury."

before you could reply, a thunderous crack split the sky, shaking the inn’s rotting foundations. the rain followed instantly, not as a drizzle, but as a violent deluge that turned the road into a river of sludge within seconds. the elderly couple who ran the establishment hurried forward, their faces pinched with worry as they shuttered the windows against the wind.

"it'll be a night of it," the old woman murmured, her voice a dry rasp. she looked between you and gwayne, her eyes lingering on the way your body was still practically vibrating with rage.

"so be it. this negotiation is over." gwayne said, though he didn't move an inch away from you. you stepped back, finally breaking the physical contact, but the heat where your chests had touched lingered like a brand.

"your horses won't survive the storm, ser, or the treacherous roads back wherever you two came from." the old man grunted, wiping a glass with a rag that had seen better decades.

"that won't be a problem for me," you snapped, though the sight of the rain hammering against the shutters, turning the world outside into a grey, drowning blur, suggested otherwise.

"a lady is not fit to travel these roads in a deluge," the old woman said. "and the horses are already spooked. you'll stay."

you glanced at gwayne, who looked as though he’d rather be burned by dragonfire than spend another minute in your presence. the thunder rolled again. the road back to the was already a river of sludge. to attempt it now would be a suicide.

"the good woman is right," he muttered, though his tone remained clipped. "the road is a river. you'll be swept into a ditch before you reach the first milestone."

you glared at him, your fingers curling into fists. "i would rather drown in a ditch than spend another moment breathing the same air as you."

"as if i'm particularly keen on the prospect of your company." gwayne retorted, his voice flat, though his eyes drifted downward to the curve of your hip.

"the room is ready," the old woman announced, her voice cutting through the tension like a knife. "only one left. the roof leaked in the west wing, and the east is full of merchants who beat the storm."

"only one? absolutely not." you shot down. you looked at the old woman, then at gwayne who looked as if he had just been told he had to spend the night in a cellar with a swarm of bees.

"it is one bed, or it is the mud," the old woman replied simply, her voice devoid of any inclination to negotiate.

"she'll take the bed. i'll sleep in your barn." gwayne muttered, though his eyes betrayed a flicker of doubt as another crack of thunder shook the inn's foundation. 

you were quite surprised that he even had the heart to let you take the room all for yourself.

"the barn is flooded," the old man called out. "the roof gave way an hour ago. everything in there is swimming in muck."

you looked at gwayne, who looked back at you with a level of misery that almost made you feel pity. he looked like a dog that had been kicked too many times, yet he still possessed that stubborn, ingrained pride that refused to let him admit defeat.

"is there any other inn within here?" you asked, your voice hopeful and desperate.

"the next one is a three-hour ride through a swamp," the old woman replied. "unless you've found a way to walk on water, you're staying here."

"i am not—" you began, but the word died in your throat as a sudden, violent gust of wind slammed against the shutters, rattling the heavy oak frames with a sound like a siege engine.

gwayne let out a sound that was halfway between a groan and a snarl. "fine," he snapped, his voice tight. "we share."

"no! i will not share a bed with a man—a hightower at that—who mocks a woman's origin while her people starve!" you snapped, though the thunderous reply from the heavens makes the floorboards beneath your boots shudder.

"believe me, my lady... the prospect of spending the night tangled in the linens with a woman who possesses the temperament of a cornered cat is hardly something i desire. but i prefer my sleep to be dry." he muttered before turning his heels to the narrow stairs.

the room was small, smelling of old lavender and damp stone, with a single candle flickering on a bedside table. the bed itself was a narrow, sagging thing of straw and linen, just wide enough for for two adults.

the silence between you as you stepped inside was deafening, heavy with the remnants of your shouting match. you didn't look at him, and he didn't look at you, both of you preoccupied with the sheer, absurd indignity of the situation.

"take the floor." you told him, your voice clipped. it wasn't a request; it was a command.

gwayne didn’t even look at you as he let out a sharp, mocking huff of laughter. "and what makes you think i would ever consent to sleep on a floor of rotting pine while you lounge in the linens?" he asked, his voice dripping in sarcasm.

you knew the "i'll sleep in the barn" was merely an act in front of the elderly couple. typical hightower.

he didn't move toward the floor. instead, he began to unbuckle the straps of his armor, the metal clinking slow. "you are a guest in this space by the grace of my tolerance, and i have spent the last three days listening to ormund's voice. i will not spend the night with a tick in my spine."

you watched him strip, all the way to his under tunic, and the sight of his shoulders and the lean muscle of his chest under the thin garment made the air in the small room feel suddenly thin. the anger was still there, a hot coal in your gut, but it had morphed into something else that made your skin itch beneath your travel-worn clothes.

before he could catch you staring, you turned first, stripping off your outer layers with what was left of your energy and the journey here and the debate match with gwayne. you didn't care for modesty, not when you were shaking with a mixture of adrenaline and something else that you redused to acknowledge. you climbed into the bed, claiming the far edge, leaving a sliver of space between you that felt like a canyon. the linens were coarse and smelled of old dust, but they were warm at the very least.

"stay on your side and do not attempt to touch me," you warned, your voice a low vibration in the dark. "if you so much as breathe on me, i will find a way to ensure you never sleep comfortably again."

gwayne let out a tired scoff, sharp enough to cut through the room as he climbed in beside you. the bed groaned under his weight, the mattress dipping violently and pulling you toward the center. you instinctively braced yourself against the edge, but the narrowness of the bed made a boundary impossible. every time he shifted, you felt the heat of him radiating through the linen and seemed to fill the entire room.

the silence was not peaceful. every breath you took felt too loud, every shift of the straw mattress sounded like a landslide. you lay rigid, staring at the dark ceiling, while the rain continued to lash the shutters in a relentless rhythm. beside you, gwayne was a mountain of radiating heat, his presence an intrusive weight that made the small bed feel like a coffin.

something happened and it started with a stray movement. a shift of his leg that brushed against yours. you jerked away.

"stop twitching," he muttered with his eyes closed, his voice a low gravelly vibration that seemed to hum against your skin.

"stop moving then. what are you, a fish out of water?" you snapped back, your voice a sharp whisper in the dark. you turned to face him, and in the dim, amber glow of the dying candle, you saw the way he huffed in irritation.

a couple minutes passed where the only sound was the rain and the harsh, synchronized rhythm of your breathing. you couldn't sleep. you couldn't even move. the air felt thick, like honey, pinning you to the mattress. the thunder rolled again, a low, guttural groan that seemed to echo the tension in the room.

when you glanced, gwayne was seemingly already asleep. you sighed, mind running wild over the failed negotiation the look of disappointment on rhaenyra's face. but as you shifted to find a more comfortable position, your leg brushed against his thigh. it was a momentary contact, only a sliver of heat, but it acted like a spark in a dry forest. you felt him stiffen, his breath hitching in a way that wasn't accidental.

"still twitching, are we?" his voice was a low, dangerous rumble right beside your ear.

he hadn't been asleep. he had been lying there, acutely aware of every inch of you pressing against him, this whole time.

feeling brave, you didn't pull away this time. instead, you turned your head, your nose brushing against the rough stubble of his jaw.

"perhaps i'm just trying to find a sliver of space that isn't occupied by your ego." you retorted.

something in him snapped the moment those words left your lips. gwayne moved swiftly, rolling over so he hovered above you, his hands trapping either sides of your head. the movement was so abrupt it knocked the breath from your lungs, pinning you beneath the weight of his body. his eyes were dark, pupils blown wide, searching your face for a sign of retreat that you were too stubborn to give.

"you are far too bold for a woman in such a precarious position," he said, though it sounded restraint.

"and your patience is far too thin for a man of your standing," you shot back. you didn't flinch as his chest pressed against yours, the thin fabric of his tunic doing nothing to hide the hard plane of his muscles.

"you talk... so much," he murmured, his voice a rough, jagged edge. "always talking, always demanding. i wonder if that tongue of yours is just as sharp when it's not being used for insults."

your throat went dry at his last words. you weren't stupid, nor lack the knowledge of what he was insinuating, being a low born girl who had seen the underbelly of the city where desire was bought and sold in every alley. and yet, having it directed at you by a man who looked at you with such irritation mixed with lust made your heart hammer against your ribs like a trapped bird.

you didn't give him the satisfaction of a stutter any further. instead, you reached up, your fingers curling into the collar of his tunic and pulling him down until your lips were a mere breath apart. "why don't you find out, hightower? or are you too exhausted to handle a girl from the gutters?"

gwayne didn’t kiss you so much as he collided with you, his mouth crashing against yours with a hunger that felt less like romance and more like a punishment. you groaned into his mouth, your hands sliding from his collar to the back of his neck, pulling him closer until there wasn't a single molecule of air left between your bodies. he tasted of bitter ale and salt, and most importantly he tasted like the enemy he was, which only made the sudden surge of heat in your belly more violent.

gwayne groaned into your mouth as you fisted into his linen. he pinned your wrist beside your head and swallowed a small gasp of yours, his tongue sweeping against yours with an aggression that mirrored the storm outside and as you arched your back, pushing your hips into his, you felt the heavy, hard length of his cock pressing against your thigh through the layers of cloth.

he broke the kiss to trail a line of searing heat down your throat, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin of your collarbone. his hand left your wrist, sliding down to rip open the front of your bodice. buttons flew, clicking against the floorboards like rain on stone. gwayne didn't wait. he dipped his head, his mouth finding the swell of your breast with a hunger. you let out a sharp, ragged moan, your head hitting the pillow as he sucked the peak of your nipple, his teeth grazing the flesh in a way that made your toes curl and your vision blur.

"fuck, you are as loud as you are arrogant," gwayne rasped against your skin, his voice a low, distorted growl. he didn't stop, his mouth returning to your breast, his tongue swirling around your nipple with an intensity that left you breathless.

he pushed your dress to your hips impatiently, his eyes scanning your body with in hunger. there was no softness in the way he looked at you. it was the gaze of a man claiming territory, and you met it with a defiant glare that only seemed to spur him on. his hand travelled to your cunt, his fingers grazing the damp heat of your folds.

"fuck, you're already dripping," gwayne muttered, his voice thick with a dark, triumphant satisfaction. he rubbed your clit with somehow a precise pressure that made you cry out. "all that fire, all that screaming in the common room, and you're just a fucking mess for me, aren't you?"

"shut up and touch me," you gasped, your fingers digging into the lean muscle of his shoulders.

"have you been with a man before?"

you let out a sharp, jagged laugh, the sound half-smothered by a moan as his thumb continued to circle your clit. "i grew up in the gutters, hightower, as you so often mentioned. we don't have the luxury of sheltered innocence that you lot cultivate in oldtown."

he smirked, a dark, predatory expression that made your heart gallop. "good. because i have no intention of being gentle with a woman who thinks she can outwit me."

he didn't waste another second. gwayne slid two fingers deep inside you, the sudden invasion making you gasp and arch your back off the mattress. he was thick and calloused, his movements rhythmic and demanding, driving into you with a relentless pace.

"look at you," he groaned, his thumb pinning your clit down and grinding against it with an intensity that pushed you toward the edge. "begging for it. a little rat from the slums, having her cunt stretched open by a hightower. do you like it? do you like how it feels to have me inside you?"

you couldn't even form a sentence, not only because you were biting down your lip from giving him the satisfaction of hearing you beg, but because the sheer friction of his fingers was turning your insides to liquid.

"nothing to say now, is it?" gwayne mocked, his voice a jagged rasp. he shifted his weight, his thumb pressing harder into your clit, sending a jolt of electricity straight to your core. "tell me you want it. tell me you want this highborn prick to ruin you."

his words should disgust you. they should feel like an insult to everything you had fought for, a reminder of the gap between a girl who scavenged for scraps and a man born to a spire of gold. not to mention the war. rhaenyra did not send you here to fuck the enemy, she sent you to secure a man who could save a city. but as gwayne’s fingers worked you, the only thing you felt was this aching need to be filled.

"i want it," you gasped, the admission feeling like a surrender. "fuck, gwayne, just... put it in."

the way his name fell from your lips, broken and pleading, already made him addicted. "say my name again."

"gwayne," you whimpered, your voice sounding foreign and fragile in the small, dimly lit room. "please, gwayne."

he let out a sharp exhale, his chest heaving against yours. he didn't waste another moment of hesitation, he yanked his trousers down in one fluid, freeing himself. his cock was thick and pulsing, a heavy weight that seemed to mirror the intensity of the room. he grabbed your thighs, hoisting your hips higher off the sagging mattress to create a steeper angle, and positioned himself against your entrance.

he entered you slowly, much to your surprised, his eyes locked on yours as he sank into your heat. you let out a sharp, strangled cry, your head snapping back against the linens as he filled you completely. it was a heavy, stretching sensation that drowned out the sound of the storm, replacing the chaos of the rain with a singular, thrumming focus on where your bodies joined. he paused for a heartbeat, his muscles trembling with the effort of restraint, his breath hot and ragged against your neck.

"you're so tight," he groaned, the sound vibrating deep in his chest. "fuck, you're trying to squeeze the life out of me."

he let you adjust to him for a second, his gaze searing into yours. then he began to move slowly, pulling almost all the way out before sinking back in. it wasn't the frantic pace you had expected. he wanted you to feel every single ridge of him, every millimeter of the friction as he stretched you open. you let out a whimper, your hips instinctively trying to chase him, to close the gap, but he held you firm, his grip on your thighs like iron bands.

"gwayne..." you whimpered, the sound breaking as you tried to pull him deeper. your legs were locked around his waist, your heels digging into his lower back, trying to force a momentum that he was stubbornly denying. he continued that agonizingly slow pace, his hips grinding into yours with a heavy, deliberate pressure that made your nerves scream. every time he retreated, you felt the sudden, cold void of the air, only for him to plunge back in with a slow, rhythmic thud that resonated in the very marrow of your bones.

he was watching you, his eyes dark and focused, savoring the way your face crumpled with desperation. "not so loud now, are you? where is all that fire, little rat? where is the woman who called me a coward?"

he shifted his angle, hitting a spot deep inside you that made your vision spark white. you let out a strangled cry, your fingers clawing at the muscles of his back, begging for a speed that would end this torture.

"gwayne, please," you sobbed, the word barely a whisper against the roar of the rain. you were shaking, your body a taut string vibrating at a frequency that threatened to snap. his pace was a cruelty of its own. he was savoring the friction, the way your walls clamped around him in a desperate, pulsing rhythm. he stayed in that slow, agonizing orbit, his hips rotating with a heavy precision that kept you perched on the very edge of a climax you couldn't reach.

you arched your spine, your chest heaving, as he pulled back until he was barely grazing your entrance before sinking back in with a slow, thudding weight. the sensation was too much and yet not enough. you were starving for the release, your clit screaming under the pressure of his pelvis grinding against you. you didn't care about pride anymore. you didn't care about the political divide. you just needed the friction to turn into a fire.

"faster," you gasped, your voice cracking. "fuck, gwayne, go faster. please."

"beg again," gwayne commanded, his voice a low rumble that vibrated against your collarbone.

"please," you whimpered, your voice breaking into a sob of pure frustration. "please, please."

when he finally decided to grant your request, it wasn't with a sudden rush. he began to hammer into you with a rhythmic, punishing force that stole the very air from your lungs. gwayne’s composure broke with the pace, his breath coming in jagged, guttural snarls as he drove himself deep into your heat, his hips colliding with yours.

"that's it," he groaned, his voice raw and stripped of all nobility. "take it all. take every fucking inch of it."

you were drowning in the sensation, your eyes rolled back as you clung to him, your nails leaving red crescents in his shoulders. the friction had become a blinding white light, a heat that started in your core and radiated outward until every nerve in your body was screaming.

“is this what you came for?” he growled. “rhaenyra’s little rat spreading her legs for a hightower cock?”

"you arrogant prick." you managed to gasp the words out, but they were stripped of any real venom. you wrapped your legs tighter around his waist, pulling him so deep that there was no space left for air or pride.

gwayne let out a sound that was half laugh and half groan. "so loud in the common room, so fierce with your demands... and here you are, shaking under me, taking every inch of my cock like you're starving for it."

the words should have sting, should have felt like an insult to your dignity, but in the heat of the moment, they only served to fuel the fire.

"you’re so fucking wet. do you have any idea how much i’ve wanted to shut you up since the moment you opened your mouth? to see you break like this?" he groaned, his voice a guttural rasp that vibrated against the shell of your ear.

he didn't wait for an answer, his pace becoming a frantic, bruising rhythm that left you breathless. "tell me, does it feel good to be ruined by the man you hate? does it feel better when i'm deep inside you, stretching you out?"

you couldn't find the words to argue, only a series of broken, high-pitched sounds that spurred him on. you gripped his biceps, feeling the lean muscle twitch under your palms as he hammered into you. "yes," you sobbed, the word lost in a gasp. "yes, fuck, gwayne."

you were nearing the edges of the world, your breath coming in shallow hitches as gwayne’s pace became frantic. he didn’t let up, his hips slamming against yours with a bruising force that threatened to push you right off the sagging mattress. he shifted his weight, one hand sliding down to grip your thigh, pinning you firmly against the sheets while the other hand found the small of your back, arching you up to meet every deep thrust.

you felt the internal pressure build, a coil of tension tightening in your gut until it was almost unbearable. gwayne sensed it. he felt the way your walls began to spasm around him in. he let out a guttural sound, his pace becoming sloppy, his teeth grazing the skin of your shoulder as he drove himself into you.

"come for me," he commanded, his voice a raw, distorted growl. "come for me, you stubborn little thing."

the command was the final spark. you shattered, your entire body arching violently as a wave of pleasure crashed through you, pulling you under. you screamed his name into the crook of his neck, your internal muscles clamping around him in desperate, rhythmic contractions that felt like they were trying to pull him into your very soul. the world dissolved into a blur of amber candlelight and the suffocating heat of his skin, leaving you gasping and blind as the orgasm ripped through your frame in jagged, electric pulses.

gwayne didn't stop. he let out a low, animalistic sound, his movements becoming uncoordinated as he chased his own release. he hammered into you with a final, bruising intensity, his chest heaving against yours, his eyes locked on your flushed face with a hunger that seemed bottomless. with one last, deep plunge that felt like it hit the very base of your spine, he stiffened. a guttural groan ripped from his throat, his head falling into the hollow of your shoulder as he spilled himself inside you.

the silence that followed was heavier than the storm with the ragged gasps of the two of you being the only sounds that filled the room. gwayne remained slumped against you for a long minute, his weight an oppressive yet grounding presence. the heat of him was still radiating, his sweat acting like a glue that bound your skin together. slowly, the adrenaline began to dissipate, leaving behind a hollow, dizzying exhaustion and the sudden, sharp return of reality.

he withdrew from you with a slow, wet slide that made you shiver, the sudden absence of his heat leaving you feeling cold and exposed. gwayne didn't immediately move away. he rolled to the side, his chest still heaving, his eyes staring at the ceiling with a look of profound disorientation. the arrogance was gone, replaced by a stillness. he looked less like a lord of a great house and more like a man who had been blindsided by a blow he hadn't seen coming.

you laid there for a long time, the damp sheets clinging to your skin like a second, colder layer of clothing. the rain continued to lash against the shutters, a rhythmic drumming that felt far too loud in the sudden vacuum of the room. your muscles were trembling, a lingering aftershock of the climax that had nearly stripped the breath from your lungs. you could feel the sticky heat of his seed beginning to cool inside you, a visceral reminder of the transgression you had just committed.

"gwayne—"

"do not," he interrupted, his voice still a jagged rasp, though the cruelty had vanished. he didn't look at you. he remained staring at the ceiling, his jaw tight, as if he were trying to reconstruct the walls of his pride around him.

"just... sleep. we shall discuss this in the morning." he added, his tone returning to a resemblance of nobility, though the cracks were still visible. he didn't move to leave the bed, and neither did you. instead, you shifted, your skin sticking to the linens, and felt the sudden, sharp prickle of shame and triumph.

you had not secured the master of coin, but you had dismantled the composure of gwayne hightower.

you knew that the discussion won't happen because when morning came, both of you were eager to be the first to leave. the dawn didn't break with a golden glow, but with a stale grey light that filtered through the grime of the inn's windows. 

gwayne was fastening his belt, his movements sharp and jerky. he didn't look at you, and you didn't look at him, though you could feel the weight of his gaze whenever he thought you weren't watching. the shared bed, which had felt like a battlefield of lust only hours ago, now felt like a crime scene. the sheets were twisted and damp. you dressed quickly, your fingers trembling as you fought with the buttons of your bodice, feeling the lingering ache in your thighs and the sticky evidence of his conquest still clinging to your skin.

he approached the door and paused, his hand hovering over the heavy iron latch. for a heartbeat, you thought he might turn back, might say something that acknowledged the way his voice had sounded when he begged you to call his name. but gwayne hightower was a man built of stone and tradition, and the stone was already sliding back into place.

"i accept rhaenyra's terms."

your hands that were busy fixing your bodice froze. you looked up at him, the grey dawn light casting a sharp silhouette of his frame against the door. 

"what?" you breathed, your voice still raspy from the screaming of the night.

"under one condition." he breathed. "lord horden is to be escorted by a hightower soldier while in king's landing and is to be returned back to tumbleton the moment the funds are secured," gwayne said, his voice regaining its polished edge, though he still wouldn't meet your eyes. "i would not have him simply handed over to a woman who thinks a few trade routes are a fair exchange for a man's loyalty. but... i find myself suddenly inclined to be merciful."

you stared at him, your mind racing. this was a victory. a massive one. rhaenyra would be pleased, and the people of the capital would finally see bread and gold.

but still, the victory felt jagged. you looked at gwayne and saw the slight tremor in his hand as he gripped the door handle. the distance between you was only a few feet, yet it felt like a chasm.

"mercy," you repeated, your voice regaining its sharp edge, though it lacked the venom of the previous evening. "or perhaps you simply couldn't bear the thought of me leaving this inn without knowing you'd finally given in."

"just accept it, will you?" he said in an exhaustion that sounded almost like a plea. he finally turned his head, his gaze flickering across your face, lingering for a fraction of a second on your swollen lips before he looked away. "i cannot stand the thought of another hour in your company. the air in this room has become... intolerable."

you wanted to snap back and remind him that he spent the night with you just fine but decided against it.

"is this a plan to have the hightower escort spying on rhaenyra and report back to ormund?" you asked, stepping forward, your voice regaining its professional weight.

"no, it is not. i can assure you." he answered confidently.

"how can i trust you?"

"because the escort will be myself."

oh.

you blinked, your brain momentarily failing to process the implications. gwayne hightower, a man who had spent the last forty-eight hours treating you with a mixture of disdain and hunger, was offering to personally escort the master of coin into the heart of the enemy’s capital.

he will be in king's landing. where lord horden goes, he will follow. which includes the red keep, and most likely, the very rooms where you spent your days strategizing for rhaenyra.

you and gwayne hightower will be in same room again.

is he implying what you think he is implying? the thought flickered through your mind, a spark of curiosity. the escort of a high-value prisoner was certainly not a task for a man of his rank. yet, gwayne stood there, his posture rigid, his eyes finally meeting yours with a look that was no longer mocking, but something far more complicated. it was a gaze that held the memory of the mattress, the sound of your voice breaking, and the way your nails had carved paths into his skin.

"you are remarkably quiet," gwayne noted, his voice regaining that irritating timbre from last night. "has the gutter-girl finally run out of things to say, or are you simply calculating how much of my dignity you can strip away once we are within the walls of the keep?"

"you planned this." you said instead, a small, knowing smile tugging at the corner of your mouth. "the noble lord of oldtown, suddenly burdened by a sense of duty to personally escort a master of coin. it's almost as if you've realized that the walls of this inn are too thin to contain whatever this is."

gwayne stiffened. but the ghost of a smirk playing on his lips, though he fought to keep it hidden behind a mask of indifference. "do not flatter yourself, my lady. it is a strategic move. i trust no one else to ensure lord horden isn't bribed or spirited away by your queen’s agents before the gold is accounted for."

"and yet you did not offer this yesterday," you countered, crossing your arms over your chest. the movement made you acutely aware of the soreness in your muscles. "you were quite content to let him rot in tumbleton."

gwayne finally let out a short, dry huff of laughter. it was not the mocking sound of the common room, but something almost fond, though he quickly masked it. he stepped toward you, his presence filling the small space of the room once more. "yesterday i thought i was negotiating with an enemy."

"and today?" you asked, not moving he closed the gap.

gwayne stopped just inches from you, the heat of his body radiating through his armour. he didn't touch you, but the air between you crackled, thick with the residue of the night's wreckage.

"today," he murmured, his gaze dropping to your throat where a faint, reddish mark lingered from his teeth, "i find myself wondering if the red keep has enough corridors for us to avoid each other. or if it has enough locked doors to ensure we do not."

the tension broke not with a kiss but with gwayne stepping back, his hand reaching for the knob once again.

The laughter doubles and strangles Gwayne accordingly, who is completely and utterly out of his element now. He swallows hard through a tightening throat and draws a slow breath through his nose, trying once again to steady himself — because it was not for himself that he was out here in the first place. It was for Daeron, and for the dozen other boys just like him that Ormund had lined along the front ranks to take the war’s first bite. 

So Gwayne presses on, forcing an evenness into his voice that he doesn’t exactly feel beneath the death glares all around him. “My cousin, Ormund, has taken leave of his senses. As I’m sure you’re aware. He’d rather die than admit defeat—”

“And you?” Daemon lilts lazily, resting his arms along the hilt of his sword.

Gwayne’s eyes cut across the men arrayed before him, still only a fraction of the true Black host. “Well, I’m not blind… I know we will not survive the day if you attack. So… As a token of good faith… I return your Hand.” 

He drops Corlys’s shackles with a heavy clinking sound, but does not take the blade from his side. The silence that follows seems to last for an eternity, until your pretty voice breaks it at last.

“Can he be a Hard with only four fingers?” you joke, tilting your head towards the old lord’s bandaged fist.

The laughter returns again. Gwayne’s icy blue eyes flits once more to you in a quick, assessing pass; he does not mean for his gaze to linger upon you, but he can’t quite manage to look away. Your armor catches in what little light breaks through the clouds overhead, carved with the intricate detailing of your house. And beneath all that heavy steel is your much softer face — beautiful and unbothered by the promise of war simmering in the heavy summer air.

There is something very wrong about you, Gwayne knows; something he can’t quite decide to be afraid of or intrigued by. A bit of both, perhaps.

“I’ve come to sue for peace,” Gwayne announces, louder now, forcing the words out over the laughter. ‘To plead with you at the behest of Daeron Targaryen.”

The amusement in Daemon’s pale eyes flickers at once, a distant warmth running cold as his thin mouth curls into a sharp grin. “The war will end when all the traitors’ heads are mounted on spikes about the King’s Gate,” the older man answers. “And not before.”

“Listen to Daeron’s entreaty,” Gwayne pleads, eyes growing wide behind the silken auburn tendrils swaying over his brows. “Divide the realm. Let the Queen rule over the Crownlands, the North, the Vale, all the lands watered by the Trident… And let Daeron rule from Oldtown—"

“Oh, gods…” Roderick groans in disgust from his left.

“He’s boring me, Daemon,” you tell the silver-haired man standing on foot before you, voice flat with a theatrical ennui that borders on girlish. “Just kill him already.” 

“Do you hear that?” Daemon laughs as he turns back to Gwayne. “You’re boring her… And trust me, Ser, you do not want to see how she gets when she’s bored—”

“You jest?” Gwayne spits as his composure splinters all at once. The words seem to spill from his mouth before he can stop them, as he approaches the older man on instinct alone. “You would rather callously cast aside the lives of thousands—”

He does not get another word out before Daemon’s hand closes suddenly around his throat.  The world tilts sideways as the man drags him downward in his fist. His metal glove digs hard into Gwayne’s milky white neck, cutting off just enough of his air supply to keep him conscious, though Daemon does not so much as blink at the show of strength.

“No one will rule but Rhaenyra,” Daemon tells him in a casual voice, even as Gwayne’s hands scrabble uselessly for purchase at his wrist. “The ordained Queen of the Andals, of the First Men, of beggars and thieves and cowards, like you. A new Valyria will rise from the ashes of her usurper half-brothers. And of the Hightowers of Oldtown.” 

Gwayne can hardly hear him over the thunder of his pulse in his skull as black spots begin to speckle in his vision, like so many drops of ink spreading through water.

“But…” Daemon trails off. His grip on Gwayne’s neck does not loosen, but something in his eyes does. The cold burn of rage melts away into a distant look of calculation. “Since you came under the banner of peace… Perhaps I’ll give you a choice…” 

Daemon turns slowly to you, peering up at you from behind the wisps of white hair blowing across his face. Gwayne’s watery, unfocused eyes follow in turn and find you watching the whole ordeal with your head tilted gently to one side. There is no horror in your face, nor an ounce of pity either. 

“You said you wanted to live in a pretty castle, didn’t you?” Daemon calls to you, with a sort of fondness creeping into his voice while Gwayne turns purple under his fist. “To twirl around in pretty silk dresses, with a pretty silk husband?”

You had said it half in jest a few months past, in a hall far too to the north for anyone to remember its existence, except for when they needed its sword. You were the last living heir to a name older than most in the realm, ruling alone with more soldiers under your command than servants, when Daemon had come with his dragon asking for whatever men you could spare.

You’d given him what he asked, and when he’d wondered in turn what you wanted for it, you answered him evenly. “A castle… And a few dresses… And perhaps a husband to warm my bed— all the pretty, useless shit people like you worry about.”

You hadn’t expected to be repaid so soon, and certainly not on the battlefield on the very eve of war, with a dead man crumpling to his feet before you.

“What of it?” you say with an arched brow.

“Here’s your pretty husband,” Daemon nods his silver head down toward the man gasping in his grip. “Right here… If you want him, of course.”

Gwayne’s bleary eyes flit back to you. Through the black in his vision, he finds you studying the whole of him as if he were livestock to be appraised at market. He comes to the rather humiliating realization that he wants very badly for you to say yes — both with a primal despair of wanting to live and with the distant desperation of wanting your approval.

You scrunch the bridge of his nose. “He’s a bit puny, isn’t he?”

“A bit?” Ser Rodrick scoffs.

“Well, what he lacks in height and muscle, he makes up for twice over in wealth,” Daemon tells you. “Far wealthier than you’re like to find anywhere else, to be sure… What do you say?”

You consider for a long moment, then, despite watching Gwayne slowly slip from consciousness. He can no longer tell if it takes you one minute or one hour to decide, which you finally do with one lazy bounce of your shoulder. 

“Alright.” 

Daemon’s fingers loosen at once. Warm, summer air rushes back into Gwayne’s body as he crumples to his knees onto the dried grass below. The oxygen burns in his throat, his shoulders heaving as he retches. It takes a long moment for the world to come back into focus. And when it finally does, Daemon’s voice finds him again as he looms a long shadow over the kneeling man.

“Do you hear that? I will spare your life — and that of your precious nephew’s, should he bend the knee to the rightful Queen — and you will live out the rest of your days as lord husband to the new Lady of Oldtown… How does that sound?”

It sounds nothing like what Gwyane had walked out here to discuss, to be sure. He’d only meant to save Daeron’s life, and somehow bartered his own for a marriage to a woman he had known for the length of one terribly humiliating conversation. But he is still breathing, at least, and his nephew is too. And for now, that’s enough.

He nods wordlessly in response, and feels an aching in his throat when he does so.

“Thank her,” Daemon scolds like a parent would their child. When Gwayne’s bowed hands snap in his direction to make sure he’d heard him right, he feels the man take a sudden fistful of his auburn hair, wrenching him towards you again. “That was not rhetorical, Ser Gwayne— Thank your new lady wife for saving you. It’s only fair.”

Gwayne swallows hard through a raw throat and peers up at you with bleary eyes from where he kneels on the ground before you. “Thank...” he attempts to speak, but the word comes out strangled. “Thank you...”

“My lady,” Daemon reminds him.

Gwayne coughs. “M-My lady…”

You look down at him from where you idle on horseback. A small smile hints at the corner of your mouth as you hum in satisfaction. “Mm… You’re welcome, lord husband.”

You turn on your horse without so much as a backward glance, gathering the reins in your fist and looking instead toward the gates of Tumbleton — where Ormund’s men prepare their archers for the first wave of battle. “Now…” you say, grinning over your shoulder at your house’s men gathered just behind you. Your voice carries across the length of the plain. “Let’s go win this fucking war!”

The ranks roar a wordless answer in response — a ragged, joyous, bloodthirsty sound as swords beat against their shields. Gwayne hears the battlecry swell all around him, and wonders if his death would’ve been a kinder fate than what is sure to await him when the fight is done.

The wedding was done by evenfall, while smoke rose from the ashes of Tumbleton; the air still thick with the scent of blood and rot. 

You exchanged vows while your armor was still splattered with the blood of the Green Army and your hair was still matted with sweat. There had been no sept, no godswood, no seven blessings, no ribbon tied around clasped hands. There was only a shaded tent, a Tumbleton septon kept alive for the very purpose of ceremony, and a scrap of parchment to sign your names — though Gwayne’s hand was still a little sore from the heavy chains wrapped around them.

No feast follows. No song, no celebration, no bedding. Because too many people had died on both sides — Ormund among them, burnt and buried in ash. And though Daeron breathes still, safe and unbloodied by sword, Gwayne wears the cost of that safety in the shackles around his wrist and waist. He was lord now, and a husband, and he did not ask to be. 

He only wanted his nephew to live to see sixteen.

“So… That’s it then,” Gwayne said on an exhaled breath while a worse-for-wear Daemon shoved the old septon out by his neck. His pretty face was softened by the candlelight of the war tent, even despite the soot streaked across his face and the flaming tendrils clinging to his forehead with sweat. “Husband and wife, are we?”

“Seems that way,” you said beneath the quiet glugging of the ale you poured. The watered wine spilled slightly over the maps scattered there when you turned briefly to flash him a smile over your shoulder. “Congratulations, my lord.” 

Gwayne felt a tired smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, right before a sharp breath escaped him in a sad sort of laugh. “Aren’t you concerned?” he said, pale eyes fixed on your armored form. “I’m not sure how a marriage such as this can be held up by law…” 

“Oh, I’m not worried,” you assured him with a shake of your head.

“No?” 

“No…” you insisted and turned back around to face him, sporting an old goblet in your bloodied fist. “Because I know you have no interest in being killed— or your nephew, besides… It’s righteous of you, really, so… You’re not going anywhere, Ser Gwayne.”

Your lips curled into a slow, sharp grin as you brought the cup to your mouth, chugging the whole of it until the soft purple wine started to drip down to your chin.

Gwayne still could not yet decide what you had planned for him — if you meant to love him truly or kill him the second you arrived at Oldtown. And a distant, disgusting part of him could not wait to find out.

Oldtown, as you’ve come to find it, smells nothing like the wet cobbles, and horse dung, and rotted wood of the half-forgotten manse you grew up in. Here, everything smells of salt and lemon trees and sun-warmed stone. It is everything you’d asked Daemon for — a large castle, enough silk to drown in, hands that tended to your every want, and a husband to warm your bed. Though you still spend most of your days in the fighting yard, tearing and sweating through whatever fine silk you’d dressed in that day.

Gwayne is still getting used to the presence of you and your men in his ancestral home, and his newfound position within it. Daeron, too, spends many weeks wary of the very sight of you — the reason for the death of his uncle, and simultaneously, the reason for his freedom. You do not ask for his forgiveness; you just put a sparring sword in his hand and ask him to give you all the brunt of the anger you know he keeps hidden. 

You and your men put the sweet boy on his back more often than not, but he keeps coming back for more anyway.  And somewhere in that routine, gratitude creeps in where the resentment used to live, and Daeron comes slowly around.

“Well… You’ve made a fine swordsman out of him,” Gwayne sighs without turning from the window overlooking the courtyard, where his nephew continues to spar with the northern knights. He hears you waltz by somewhere behind him, your pretty silk gown rustling at your ankles and clinging at the sweaty small of your back. “Ormund would never let the boy train this hard…” 

“Daeron has good enough instincts, it seems,” you answer, tugging lazily at the lace in your bodice. “Which I find rather surprising, considering the company he grew up with…” 

Gwayne finds himself smiling at the jab, far wider than he realizes. You’ve never run short of witty, merciless quips, he’s found throughout his time with you; and he finds himself taking a strange liking to the way you so effortlessly cut him down. 

“And what is that supposed to mean exactly?” he says as he turns away from the window. 

Whatever quip had been sitting on his tongue then, turns to ash in his throat at the sight of you — with your gown abandoned in a pile on the cobbles, and you slouched at your vanity stool in nothing but the thin slip beneath it. The fabric rises from your knee, revealing the soft canvas of your thighs. You’ve slid one arm free from the thin sleeves to bare a shoulder painted a darker shade from the fresh bruises blooming there.

Your skin is littered with scars from battles past, and he struggles to look away from any of it. His chest stings with the thought of you ever being hurt, then warms twice over at the sight of your breast threatening to spill over from where the slip had gone askew.

“You needn’t look so scandalized, husband,” you laugh as you reach for the clay pot of healing ointment, which never strays too far from your side. “Surely, you’ve seen worse than a woman’s shift… Handsome as you are.”

Gwayne’s face flushes at the compliment, and he hates how boyish he feels.

He clears his throat and averts his gaze, folding his clammy palms behind his back. “I only find myself surprised, I guess, at how… little you seem to mind it, is all.”

“Mind what? The bruises?” you scoff, dabbing the ointment along your shoulder and hissing at how tender the skin has gone. “I’ve had far worse from far better fights, I assure you. Maybe one day I’ll show you the scar on my—”

“Modesty,” Gwayne blurts before you can finish. “I meant modesty…” 

“Oh…” you hum, face screwing faintly as you work the earthy salve in slow circles. “I never had much use for modesty, I suppose… A keep with more soldiers than servants doesn’t have much of it, in truth…”

You reach back then, trying hopelessly to work the balm into the worst of the bruise along your shoulder blade, but the angle is not so forgiving. You huff and twist and achieve nothing but a fresher ache for the trouble. 

Gwayne exhales a sympathetic sigh from across the room. “Here…” he huffs as he crosses the distance between you, reaching out an expectant hand when he looms just behind your chair.

You consider arguing for a moment, if only out of habit, but place the clay pot into his pale palm regardless. “Try not to enjoy it too much,” you joke with a small grin tugging at your mouth.

“I make no promises, my lady,” he quips in a low deadpan. 

But even his sarcasm cannot mask the tenderness he holds in his hands when they find your shoulder, working the ointment in with a care you didn’t know he was capable of — a care you didn’t know you were deserving of. The pad of his thumb smooths slowly over the worst of the bruise, and you feel something soften in your chest.

“You’re better at this than I would’ve guessed,” you tell him, if only to fill the suffocating silence pressing hard on either side of you.

“I’ve had ample practice with bruises of my own,” Gwayne confesses, lifting his eyes to peer at you through the smudged looking glass. “I didn’t come into this marriage entirely unmarked, if you recall…”

“Mm… I do recall,” you croon lowly, as though amused by the memory. Your head tips back to grin up at him with a fond reminiscence. “You were very purple. And very sore… For weeks… It was delicious…” 

Gwayne shakes his head. “Well, you’ll forgive me if I don’t find the memory as amusing as you do…” 

“I find everything amusing,” you scoff.

“I know you do,” he huffs a not-quite laugh. “Honestly, it’s among the things I’ve come to… appreciate about you, I suppose.” 

Your eyes narrow in suspicion of his compliment. “Careful, Ser Gwayne… A lady could get ideas, hearing you talk like that…”

“Really?” the man hums, still working gently at your bruised skin. “And what ideas are those, I wonder?”

You do not answer him with words. Instead, you rise slowly from the creaking vanity stool until you’re stood just before him. Then you reach for the remaining sleeve of your slip and trail it down your arm until you’re free of it; until the thin fabric falls to your feet in a forgotten piece of cotton; until you’re stood utterly bare before him — made of warm skin, soft curves, and faded scars. There’s one at your sternum, a longer one at your hip, and a darker one along your ribcage.

Gwayne’s breath catches audibly in his throat. The composure he’s spent weeks holding onto — full of dry wit and careful distance and a week’s worth of telling himself this was a political arrangement and nothing more — seems to abandon him all at once. His glassy eyes drift over your naked form, and he feels some warm, boyish feelings sparkling somewhere deep in his chest. 

It takes everything in you not to cower — not because you are ashamed at his staring, you’ve never been ashamed of anything, but because you have never once been looked at with so much reverence.

“Do you get the hint now, Ser Gwayne?” you quip drily as you close the scant distance between you. Your palms splay over the chest of his emerald coat and drift slowly upward until they settle cold along his warm neck, dragging him down with a little more force than necessary. 

You kiss him then like you’ve kissed him a thousand times over, like you’ve kissed a thousand men a thousand times over. There is little reservation in the way you slot your lips against his, or in the way you lick into his mouth and sigh hard through your nose at the taste of him — like mint and wine and whatever fruit he’d been snaking on before you found him here. 

His mouth is far softer than your own, you realize, a far gentler touch than you think you’ve ever felt before. He spreads one wide hand along your back, pressing your bare chest flush against his clothed one, while his other trails down down down the ladder of your spine. 

Your breath nearly catches when his calloused palm settles warm along the plush of your ass; you lose it completely when he grabs a fistful of the skin to pull you closer. 

You rise onto the tip of your toes, curling your arms around his neck while your noses knock under the weight of your searing kiss — which breaks only when Gwayne’s knee slots between your thighs, and when the rough fabric of his trousers brushes the most sensitive part of you.

His rosy mouth curls into a slow grin at the pretty sound you make for him then.

“Yes. To answer your question…” the man quips through panted breaths, with the tip of his nose brushing the bridge of yours. “I believe I am starting to get the hint, my lady.”

You find Gwayne and Daeron first. Both of them are bruised, bloodied, and covered in ash, but whole all the same. The younger boy helps his uncle slump against the broken remains of the wall behind him, while the auburn-haired man squints through the blood trickling into his left eye from a deep cut in his brow.

“Ormund,” you say in lieu of a greeting when you approach the two of them. His name comes out in rasps from the smoke hanging thick in the air. “Where is Ormund?”

Daeron looks over his shoulder at you, round cheeks dirty with soot, and shakes his head in wordless response.

Gwayne lifts his head to look at you. His porcelain skin is coated in a thin layer of gore; his auburn hair is stringy with sweat; his pale eyes are bloodshot and watery. A humorless laugh sputters rough from his dry mouth. “Ask your gods,” he spits. “You were so certain of them before, weren’t you?”

You do not flinch at his ire. You only nod.

“Yes, my lord,” you tell him in an even, gentle voice despite the massacre all around you. “I still am.”

You continue on through the remains of the day, until at last you reach the collapsed ruins of the eastern wall. A small glint of silver, half-buried in the rubble, catches the light bleeding through the smoky sky — Ormund’s pomander, you realize, cracked down the middle but still attached to its chain.

You rush towards it without thinking, dropping to your knees beside the fallen timber and stone before clawing at the wreckage with bare hands. “Help me,” you call in a ragged voice to the men limping slowly behind you. Gwayne winces through his own injuries as he and Daeron help you drag the broken beams aside until the man beneath it is revealed.

Ormund lies amid the rubble — one leg bent at too awkward an angle, dark red blood covering half of his face and turning to paste from the ash. The dirt beneath him turns a darker brown color from the pool of crimson underneath him, from a wound you cannot yet see. 

But his chest still rises and falls with weak, shallow breaths under the scratched armor he wears. So you crouch at his side and take his dirty face in your palms and tap gently at his cheek in an attempt to wake him from his unconscious state. “Ormund,” you call to him, voice splintering. “Ormund, wake up, c’mon—”

His eyes are slow to open. 

His lashes flutter across his cheeks before he blinks slowly awake. He squints at the blinding light overhead as his pale gaze comes slowly into focus — more confused than truly aching, too far deep in shock for the pain to hit him truly. When his eyes finally settle on you, concern twists his stained face.

“You’re hurt…” he rasps through a dry throat when he sees the blood splattered across your face. Because even on the verge of death, he is still more worried about you. 

You catch his blood-stained fingers twitching feebly at his side, wanting so desperately to reach but being far too weak to do so. You take his hand in yours instead, and reassure him with a smile. “It’s not my blood.”

That seems to soothe him, if only for a moment. Until his gaze drops down the length of his body, at least, and he sees the damage down to him. He cannot feel the pain from the wounds in his sides exactly, but he can feel the warm blood slowly weeping from them, and the way it wets the ground beneath him. The scent clings to his nose and the very back of his throat — the inherent stench of death.

A low, guttural groan sounds in the back of his throat as he tips his heavy head back against the ground, chiseled jaw clenching tight. “Am I...” he attempts to ask, then swallows hard through the invisible hand choking him. “Am I going to die?”

His weary eyes flit back to yours. Even as the life slips slowly from the soft blue of them, you can see the hope glinting faintly in his gaze — waiting for you to tell him no; waiting for you to work one of your miracles, just like you always have. 

You only give him a weak smile in return. “Yes, my love,” you coo with a slow nod. “You are going to die.”

You feel Gwayne and Daeron go very still behind you.

Ormund’s breath catches beneath his heavy chestplate, as his features crumple with a boyish sort of grief — the grief of a man who’s followed your every word like spoken scripture, only to be abandoned by you in the very last of his moments.

“But you— You said—” he stammers out, choking on his own blood as his eyes dart wildly between yours. “You said that we would… You promised me this war—”

“I promised you victory,” you tell him, smoothing a thumb over the blood and ash on his cheek; as gentle as The Mother, as firm as The Crone. “And I still do.”

His breath trembles through his weak body. Blood rises heavy up and throat and sits thick on his tongue, splattering warm across his chin when he coughs. You cradle his face in your hands as he shudders slowly into death, leaning close enough into him that your foreheads nearly touch — close enough that you may be the very last thing in the world he sees before the darkness takes him.

“Sleep now, my love,” you whisper gently to him. “I’ll see you when you wake.”

You press your mouth to his, tasting the copper and smoke stained on his lips while Ormund goes limp in your hands. His blood stains your mouth when you part from his suddenly still form, turning over your shoulder to face the men standing behind you — their dirty features twisted with similar looks of horror.

The softness you’d had moments ago slips now into a sterner look. 

“Help me with him,” you command.

And no one dares refuse.

You drag Ormund back to the sept, laying his limp body onto a cold, concrete altar in the depths of its crypt. The stale air there is thick with ghosts and time gone by. The wet, dark cobbles around you glow with the weak candlelight Gwayne fixes onto the walls. Shadows dance in the corners, swallowing the edges of the ancient chamber. Every sound — every drip of water, every scrape of shoe on stone — echoes back twice over.

Ormund’s body is slack and already cooling by the time you get to work on him. Your fingers move with a practiced grace as you unbuckle his ruined armor — piece by shattered piece. His smallclothes follow; you tug the stiff and bloodied fabric from his skin, made a much tougher feat from his heavy and unmoving weight. And when he lies bare before you on the stone bier, you take a cloth and a basin of water Daeron had fetched from the cistern and wash him clean.

The ash and blood fade beneath your hand to reveal the pale, broken canvas of his golden skin underneath it. His chest is bruised a sickly green-purple. He sports a number of gashes score deep along his ribcage from where a sword had cut so mercilessly through him. And his leg, bent wrong at the knee, snaps back into place with one brutal snapping sound beneath your steady hands.

Only when he is clean — washed truly from dirt and sin alike, and left glittering beneath the torchlight — do you take a small knife to a lock of his dark, matted curls. You toss the tendril into the brazier burning low in the corner, and let the orange flame hiss beneath it. Then you draw the same blade across your palm, letting the blood well and drip into the fire beside the offering.

Daeron and Gwayne watch silently from the corner of the dark crypt as you return to Ormund’s body and begin to chant. “We ask the gods to shine their light, and lead a soul out of darkness,” you say in High Valyrian, the foreign language sounding low and thick in your throat. “We beg the gods to share their fire, and light a candle that has gone out. From darkness, light. From ashes, fire. From death, life."

Gwayne shakes his head as he watches with a jaw clenched tight. “This is madness,” He mutters to Daeron. “Chanting over a corpse like some Essosi hedge-witch—”

The boy snaps his head in the older man’s direction, still too deep in his boyhood for his glare to be as intimidating as he means. “You haven’t seen her do the things I’ve seen,” Daeron scolds, still gentle in his way even in his defense of you. “Do not mock her. Not now.”

You pay no mind to the bickering as you focus completely on the pale-blue body before you. Your palms rest flat over Ormund’s marred skin as you inhale a deep breath through your nose, grounding yourself upon him as though you were trying to draw something from the very marrow of his bones. And then you wait.

The chamber falls silent, except for the low crackle of the torchlight. The minutes that pass seem to last an eternity as you wait for Ormund to warm again beneath your palms. He does not. 

No answer comes from the darkness. There is only a suffocating silence, mocking you with everything it refuses to give back. And for the first time, you feel your faith begin to splinter with doubt.

Your eyes burn with unshed tears when the grief you hadn’t let yourself feel before finally hits you. You turn to face the men behind you; the older one smiling cynically, the younger one heavy with a dwindling grief. “I— I’m sorry,” is all you can manage out before you turn sharply on your heel and head back towards the stairwell you entered from. 

Your skirts drag heavy and blood-soaked behind you as you plan to return to the wreckage, and give yourself to the dust.

“Well…” Gwayne hums from behind you in a biting monotone that sears straight through your chest. “Even the great prophetess has her limits, it seems—”

A sharp gasp cuts through the quiet chamber like Valyrian steel.

You freeze mid-step. Your head snaps hard behind you, where you find Ormund’s nude body trembling on the cold, concrete altar. His eyes fly open, wide and wild in the torchlight. His broad chest heaves with violent, rasping breaths as his lungs drag desperately for air. 

“Ormund!” His name tears suddenly through your throat as you rush back to him, nearly tripping over your skirts as you go. Your hands fly to his face, his chest, his scarred ribs — anywhere you can reach to prove to yourself that he’s real, that he’s alive — while Daeron scrambles for the velvet emerald cape discarded by the armor to throw hastily over his uncle’s bare body.

Gwayne remains frozen by the stairwell with his mouth parted in shock, the color long drained from his pale face.

Ormund's eyes dart around the dark chamber in half-frantic confusion before finally settling on you. He rises off the cold stone, naked chest still heaving with shallow breaths. “Wha—" His voice comes out hoarse until he swallows thick through his throat. “What’s happened to me?"

You let out a broken, disbelieving laugh and let the warm tears spill down your ashen cheeks as you cradle his warming face between both hands.

“I brought you back.”

Ormund is still weak from the death ebbing slowly from his body when you carry him to the least ruined chamber in the eastern wing; the living quarters where the clergy used to sleep. It had survived the worst of the flame, it would seem, though the smoky scent of dragonfire remains. Ormund leans the bulk of his weight against you, with his arm thrown heavy around your shoulder, as you lay him down on the narrow bed pressed against the wall. 

No one speaks a word of what had happened in the crypt. Not now, at least. There will be plenty enough time for that in the morning, for the questions and for the reckoning of what comes after. But tonight, there is only quiet. And stillness. And the promise of another day after this one.

But his body, Ormund finds, is not quite sure how to be alive again. 

He shivers in the cotton sheets while sweat beads along his brow. He’s cold and burning all at once, like his blood cannot decide whether it belongs in a grave or in the world above it. It rushes like freezing ice or a white-hot flame up and down his being. The very marrow of him is still humming with whatever it was you’d poured from yourself back into him. His pulse hammers hard in his neck while the adrenaline surges through him — with nowhere to truly settle, now that the danger has long passed and there is nothing left for him to fight.

But it finds somewhere to go even still; in his stiffening cock that aches and throbs between his thighs despite himself — leaving him whining and rutting against the blankets twisted around his hips. 

He catches your hand when you reach down to check his forehead for fever. He peers up at you with glassy, blue eyes as he smears his mouth to your fingers in a not-quite kiss. “Please,” he rasps against your knuckles. “I need— I need something, my love. Please…”

You shake your head, torn between the ache in your chest and the ache written plainly across his face. “You’re hurt, Ormund. I don’t want to make it worse—”

“You won’t,” he swears and urges you closer with what little strength has returned to his healing body. “You’re the one who brought me back… You couldn’t hurt me if you tried…”

And you could not refuse him — in the same way you were designed by the gods to bring him back to life, you were not fashioned to deny him of anything.

So you settle over his lap with your bare chest pressed flush against his, with your beating hearts as close as you can muster, and give his adrenaline somewhere else to go. 

Your clit rubs against the coarse thatch of brunette hair at the base of his stomach as you glide gently over his scruffy thighs, careful to avoid the poultice clinging to the cuts on his ribcage. Ormund’s cock sits nestled within your velvety walls, jerking faintly within your honeyed depth while his newfound life continues to buzz through his veins. He’s made profoundly sensitive accordingly — so much so that he feels a coil tensing in his stomach already; so much so that the obvious pain in his limbs from the battle feels negligible in comparison. 

He wouldn’t care if you split every wound of his open again, as long as he got to cum inside of you now.

His wide hands dig into your hips, far rougher than he realizes with his slowly building strength, as he tries to rock your hips harder against his — never mind the stinging in his ribcage, or the throbbing in his knee. “Please,” he pants hopelessly against your mouth, his broad nose knocking against the side of yours. “I need it so bad, my love, please—”

Your fingers thread through his wild curls as you shake your head against his. “I don’t want to hurt you,” you pant, lips smudging against his parted mouth.

“Hurt me,” Ormund begs, eyes wide and pleading. “The gods gave me back to you once already… I do not fear what you’ll do with me now…”

His words knock loose something tight in your being. You begin to grind over his lap with a bit more purpose than before, with the intention of milking an orgasm from his body drop by merciless drop. 

“Yes…” Ormund slurs within a sigh when your cunt clenches tight around him. His calloused palms smooth along the canvas of your sweat-slick back — one between your shoulder blades and the other to the small of your spine — to keep you pressed wholly against his battered body. Though the pain only seems to add to his pleasure, which blooms in the pit of his tightening stomach now. He smears wet kisses along the skin of your neck as he buries his pitiful whines there. 

“Don’t stop…” he pleads. “Don’t stop, and I’ll give you all of it, I promise…” 

“Now,” you command in a whisper, lips brushing the shell of his ear — because you cannot stand to hurt him any more than you surely must have already. “Cum now. Cum inside me. Give me all of it—”

Ormund shudders beneath you, not unlike the way he had when he died in your arms. 

Except now, he grumbles a groan of pleasure like thunder in his chest and digs his fingers hard into your soft skin. He holds his breath and tenses for a flicker of a moment; and you feel the very depths of your stomach blooming with warmth on his next trembling exhale, as his sensitive cock twitches within your pulsing cunt. 

You pet him through every wave of his orgasm, until he settles finally just against you with his face hidden completely in your neck. His panted breaths fan warm along your skin — the very proof of his life — while you find it suddenly very difficult to stomach that you had nearly seen the very last of his breaths not so long ago.

“Are you hurt?” you ask him, and sigh hard through your nose when you feel him leaking slowly out of you.

Ormund feels a dull ache in his ribs most of all, and a panging in his knee as it sets awkwardly into the correct position, but he shakes his head against your shoulder until the words to respond catch up to him. “No,” he huffs. “I’m— I’m alright.”

He feels your hand tighten in his hair not a moment later. You urge him back from your neck and force his bleary eyes to meet your suddenly hardened ones, still heavy with pleasure but stern all the same.

“If you die on me again, Ormund Hightower, I will kill you,” you warn him in an unwavering deadpan that makes it difficult to tell how much you surely jest.

A weak, breathless laugh rattles out of him then, more felt against your own chest pressed against his than truly heard. “Then let it be by your own hand,” he pleads in a low voice. “And no other’s.”