who? me?

The wedding night had been your masterpiece. You still remembered the weight of crimson silk and the scent of crushed roses. He approached you with a reverence bordering on the sacred. His hands trembling as he unbound your laces.

You had let him get so close, the heat of his skin searing against yours, the ragged edge of his breath brushing your neck, all before you pushed him away. Using his own words against him: “Stop me if you are not ready.” So you did, though entirely for your own amusement.

As the days followed, coming up with more excuses and distractions became as easy as the maids kneading bread. Seeing him tremble beneath your whims had become your favourite pastime. It wasn't out of malice, but from a hunger to see how far his devotion would stretch before it finally snapped.

When your father’s scribes demanded signatures on a mountain of land grants, you saw your opening. You visited him at the Tower of the Hand, pressing your chest firmly against the crook of his arm, the warmth of your breasts moulding against his sleeve. You felt his entire body stiffen, breath hitching in a way that sent a thrill through your veins before you slipped from his touch once more.

At night, you would wear the thinnest silk nightgowns you owned, with nothing beneath them, pretending to sleep whenever your husband entered the room after a long day buried in papers and quills. The tension he had hoped to find release from crackled in the air between you.

But now, it seemed the air had left your victory entirely. Four days ago, you had seen him guiding the daughter of a Reach lord toward the shade of a weirwood tree, his fingers brushing her forearm in a way that felt far too familiar. The next day, he offered to pour tea for one of the wives of the lords he hosted, his voice warm and attentive as though she alone occupied the room. 

Then, during court that very evening, you watched him lean down to murmur something into the ear of a young noblewoman, his lips curving into a smile so soft and effortless that it made your stomach knot. You began to feel a strange twitch around your heart, something you could not quite put into words.

The feeling only grew stronger when, just last night, he had missed your usual supper, leaving you cold and alone in your shared chambers. When you sent a servant to fetch him, he replied that you should eat without him, as he would be spending the night finishing his tasks. For the first time since your wedding nearly a moon ago, your bed felt unbearably empty without his presence.

And this morning, it seemed the tension had finally begun to unravel when you saw Baelor standing in the gardens, surrounded by a flock of ladies-in-waiting and noble daughters. He wasn't standing with his usual reserved posture. He was leaning in, his shoulder brushing against the silk sleeve of Lady Alerie. He whispered something into her ear, and she erupted into a fit of giggles. The gesture was so intimate that it sent a jolt of ice through your veins.

You had never seen this side of him. Baelor was the paragon of propriety, the man who before the betrothal had even taken place, had asked permission to touch your hand. Yet there he was, his laughter ringing across the courtyard with other ladies, while he cast not a single glance toward where you stood above.

Was this the price you had to pay for pulling his strings? For treating his devotion like something endlessly bendable beneath your fingertips?

By the time the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in bruised purples and oranges, you were pacing the length of your shared chamber. The room was dim, lit only by a few flickering wall sconces that cast shadows across the stone floor. When the heavy oak door finally groaned open, you stopped mid-stride.

Baelor entered with a calmness that unsettled you. He did not rush to your side, nor greet you with the soft smile you had grown used to. Instead, he shut the heavy oak door behind him and unclasped his cloak, tossing it over a nearby chair. The leather of his sword belt creaked softly as he loosened it from his hips and set it atop the carved table with a muted thud.

“You were very popular in the gardens today,” you said, your voice tighter than intended.

“The ladies of the court are exceptionally charming.” His tone remained maddeningly even as he reached for the silver goblet. “I found their company... refreshing.”

The words struck like a slap. You stepped toward him, your silk gown whispering across the stone floor. “Refreshing?” you echoed, the confidence in your voice beginning to waver. 

“Since when do you find the company of other women refreshing, Baelor? You barely even look at them when I am in the room.” A strange chill crept beneath your skin despite the warmth of the chamber.

Baelor let out a short, mirthless laugh. “It is my duty to welcome guests and treat them kindly. I am the prince of the realm.”

“That is utter nonsense,” you snapped, your voice lacking its usual sharpness. “You were practically draped across Lady Alerie by the fountain!”

This time, silence answered you. When you finally looked up, you found his attention already fixed on yours. Gone were the patient eyes of the gentle prince who had once blushed simply from standing near you.

What stared back at you now was darker, heavier, sharpened by something that made your breath catch in your chest.

“Nonsense?” he said. “Like what you did to me?” The question landed far harder than if he had shouted.

He took a step forward. The distance between you shrank until you could feel the heat rolling from his body.

“Stringing me along for weeks,” he continued. “Touching me only to pull away the moment I reached for you.”

Your breath caught as his gaze dragged slowly over your face. “Leaving me aching beside you on the night we became husband and wife.” He did not stop.

“You made a game of my restraint,” he said, his voice lowering further. “You think my desire existed solely for your amusement?”

You opened your mouth to offer some clever denial, but the words withered before they could leave your lips. The playfulness you had carried for days dissolved all at once, replaced by a sharp, curling rush of adrenaline.

For the first time since marrying Baelor, you sensed a change in balance under you.

“I... I do not know what you mean,” you stammered weakly. The confidence drained from your voice.

“You enjoy tormenting me, don't you?” His voice carried a roughness now, something frayed at the edges. 

You tried to muster another retort, to insist it had only been harmless jest, but the look in his eyes silenced you where you stood. 

“I respected you,” Baelor said, never once looking away from you. “I waited because I believed you were frightened or uncertain. I gave you space, I gave you time, I gave you every ounce of patience I possessed.” A muscle in his jaw tightened.

“But if you truly do not want me...” His voice lost the last traces of warmth. “Then I shall seek comfort elsewhere. I am certain Lady Alerie would gladly fulfil the duties you seem to find so… tedious." The words ripped through you with startling force.

“Would you prefer that?.” He was close enough now that you could feel the brush of his breath against your face, close enough that one more step would press your bodies together entirely. His eyes held you captive, dark and unwavering, leaving nowhere for you to run.

The thought of another woman touching him, of Baelor offering that tenderness, that warmth, to someone else, made something ugly twist painfully inside your chest. You had pushed him to the edge expecting him to break beneath you, only to realise he had stepped willingly into the fire instead. 

“I asked you a question, wife.”

Heat rushed to your cheeks. “N-no.” Your fingers instinctively curled into the fabric of his tunic before you could stop yourself. “I do not want you to.”

A faint smile touched his lips at the gesture. Then he moved closer still. You instinctively stepped back until the cold stone wall met your spine. Baelor followed without hesitation, one hand rising to cup your chin firmly between his fingers, tilting your face upward until you had no choice but to meet his gaze.

“You have toyed with the heir to the Iron Throne,” he said. “Do you understand there are consequences for those who dare make sport of the crown?” 

Your pulse thundered so loudly you were certain he could hear it. Yet Baelor did not soften. He did not pull you into his arms or soothe away your fear the way he once always had. His eyes flickered briefly toward the hands clutching at his clothes before lifting back to your face again

“You should be on your knees,” he breathed, his voice like dark velvet against your skin, “begging for forgiveness.” 

The command sent a shiver racing down your spine. The shift in his authority was sharp enough to steal the air from your lungs. Without another word, you nodded and sank slowly to your knees before him. The cold stone bit against your skin, yet it barely registered the heat unfurling through your body. You looked up at him, breaths uneven and shallow, your eyes fixed on his face with quiet desperation.

Baelor remained still above you, silent and imposing, regarding you as though you were a subject standing before the Iron Throne itself, pleading for mercy. He reached down and gripped your chin between his fingers, tilting your head back until your gaze could no longer escape his.

"You like to see me tremble, don't you?" he murmured. "You like to see me ache." He released your chin and reached for the fastenings of his breeches. The sound of the leather sliding open was loud in the silence of the room.  

When he pushed the fabric down, his cock sprang free, thick and pulsing with a heavy, insistent need. It was a beautiful, daunting sight - the tanned skin stretched tight, a bead of clear pre-cum glistening at the tip, smelling faintly of musk and salt.

“Say it,” he ordered, his voice roughened at the edges. “Tell me how sorry you are for toying with me.”

You leaned forward, the heat from his groin warming your face. You wrapped your lips around the broad head of his cock, the taste of him - salty and potent - filling your senses. You swirled your tongue around the rim, tasting the pre-cum, before sliding your mouth down the length of him.

You pulled back, a string of saliva connecting your lips to the glistening head of his cock. "S-sorry," you whimpered.

“I'm so sorry, Baelor.” You looked up at him as heavy tears began to pool in the back of your eyes. Whether from pain or pleasure, you did not know.

“Again.” He let out a sharp, guttural hiss of breath, his hips jerking forward instinctively. He gripped your hair, not painfully, but with a firm possessiveness that anchored you to him.

You slid back over him, taking him deeper this time, your throat tightening as you pushed yourself to the limit. You focused on the sensation, the velvet texture of his skin, the way he pulsed against your tongue. You used your hand to stroke the base, your thumb rubbing circles into his balls, which were tight and heavy against his perineum.

The sound of your mouth on him filled the room - a wet, rhythmic squelching, the sound of air being pushed out of your lungs as you worked him. You looked up at him through your lashes, seeing his head tilted back, his eyes closed, his jaw clenched in a mixture of agony and ecstasy.

“More”, he groaned, his fingers tightening in your hair. “Suck every bit of the frustration you put into me."

You obeyed, your tongue flicking against the frenulum, the most sensitive part of him, while you created a vacuum with your cheeks. The sound was vulgar, a loud, shlicking noise that echoed off the stone walls. You could feel him growing harder, the veins in his cock standing out like cords under the skin.

He began to thrust his hips, a slow rhythm that forced you to move with him. Every time he pushed in, you felt the head of his cock hit the back of your throat, causing you to gag slightly. Instead of pulling away, he pushed harder, demanding your complete submission. 

He let out a low growl, his hips accelerating. He was no longer the gentle prince; he was a man reclaiming what was his. He pulled you off him abruptly, the sudden release leaving you breathless and glistening.

"Sorry," you managed to moan, the word muffled and wet. "I'm sorry...", tears had already soaked both of your cheeks.

"Enough," he panted. "I want to feel you. All of you." 

He seized your arms and pulled you to your feet in one swift motion, turning you sharply until your back met the solid frame of the bedpost. The force took your breath away. He leaned into you, and you could feel his arousal. This awareness sends a rush of desire through you. All those secret touches and intentional teases had clearly impacted him just as much as you had wished. Perhaps even more.

"You feel that?" He rolled his hips against you, and you whimpered. "That's what you've done to me. Did it amuse you? Did it make you wet knowing I couldn't do anything about it?"

You tried to speak, to form something coherent, but no strength gathered behind your thoughts. The words simply would not come. All you could manage was a faint, breathless hum of hesitation. 

“When a prince asks you a question, my dear… you answer,” the words edged with a cutting mockery. His hand slipped beneath the thin fabric of your gown, palm hot against your bare thigh.

"Yes," you breathed. "Yes, it—" You gasped as his fingers traced higher, finding the edge of your small clothes. 

Before you could respond, his mouth claimed yours. There was nothing gentle about it. His lips moved with a desperate hunger, his tongue sliding past your defenses, tasting and taking. A startled moan escaped your throat, swallowed by his kiss. 

Your hands flung his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his tunic. You meant to push him away, to maintain the upper hand you had clutched so carefully all week. Instead, you pulled him closer. His fingers found your center instantly. You were drenched, your cunt weeping with a need that had been building for weeks. 

"You've been aching for this, haven't you? While you were laughing at me, you were getting wet for me."

As his middle finger slid inside you, you let out a loud, piercing cry, head snapping back against the wood. He added a second finger, stretching you open, the sound of the interaction a wet, squelching noise that made your toes curl. He began to pump his fingers in and out, a fast, relentless motion that hit your spot with surgical precision. At the same time, his thumb found your clit, rubbing in hard, fast circles.

"So wet," he whispered, almost to himself. "All those teasing, and this is what you truly wanted. To be taken in hand."

"Baelor, please," you sobbed. Your inner walls clenched around him, desperate for more. 

But he withdrew his hand away, and you protested with a sound that turned into a moan when he lifted you, your legs wrapping around his waist as he carried you to the bed. He put you down on the soft mattress, standing over you with flushed cheeks and hungry eyes. 

His hands moved to his pants, and you watched, mouth dry, as he removed them, letting them drop to the floor. His tunic followed, revealing the lean muscles of his chest, with a trail of dark hair leading down to his cock. 

He then reached for the hem of your gown, pulling the fabric over your head and tossing it aside. His eyes roamed over your bare skin, lingering on your hard nipples, the curve of your hips, and the glistening liquid that clinging at your core. Now you lay exposed before him, trembling with anticipation and desire. He took you in, his breath uneven. 

"Beautiful," he murmured. "And all mine."

He joined you on the bed, his weight pressing you into the mattress as his mouth found your throat. He kissed and bit a path down to your collarbone, your chest, taking one nipple into his mouth and rolling it with his tongue. You arched into him, fingers tangling in his dark hair.

"You've tormented me long enough," he said against your skin. His hand slid between your bodies, finding your wet heat once more. "Now it's my turn."

He positioned himself perfectly at your entrance, his gaze intensely locked onto yours. You closed your eyes, preparing for what was to come. Yet, an unexpected stillness enveloped the moment. When you opened your eyes, your breath hitched in your throat. It dawned on you what he was silently requesting.

Despite the roughness in his words and the force in his presence, he would not cross that final line without you. He was waiting for your permission.

So dutiful he was. So perfect in his princely restraint.

“Please,” your voice came soft and breathless, hands rose to cradle his face, "I do want you inside me, Baelor."

He shut his eyes and entered you with one slow, excruciatingly careful thrust. You gasped, the sound muffled by the thick curtains of the bed. He was so big, much bigger than you had envisioned in your dreams. He filled you entirely, stretching you to your limits. You felt the tip of him press against your cervix, a deep, blunt sensation that sent flashes of white light through your mind.

He stayed there for a moment, buried deep within you. The silence of the room was replaced by the sound of your synchronized, ragged breathing. 

"Do you still find this funny?", his forehead pressed against yours.

“No.” You drew him closer, arms winding around his neck. “It never was. I’m sorry.”

A smile spread across his handsome face as he began to move, pulling back almost completely before thrusting back in. The sound was raw - the slap of his skin against yours, the squelching of your mingled fluids. The friction was intense, nearly overpowering. Each thrust felt like a mark, burning your insides. He was plunging into you with a need that had built up over weeks of restraint. You could sense how your bodies connected, how your breasts bounced and jiggled against his chest with every thrust.

The whole time Baelor watched your face, studying every flicker of expression as if memorising the effect he had on you. He paused often, leaning in to kiss you before drawing back again. Whispering promises of eternal devotion, his voice a low hum in the quiet of the room.

"Baelor," you cried out, your voice straining. Your internal muscles clamped down on him in rhythmic, violent spasms. You felt the intense, throbbing pressure of your peaking, sending waves of electricity through your entire frame.

The feeling of your climax triggered his own. "Look at me," he commanded softly. Baelor let out a loud roar, his body stiffening as he delivered several final, deep thrusts. You felt the hot, thick jets of his seeds erupting inside you. 

Slowly, Baelor eased back, yet he remained close, the space between you still and intimate. He looked down at you, his blue and brown eyes softer now, carrying a new confidence that hadn’t been there before. Reaching up, he brushed a stray lock of hair from your damp forehead.

“I’m not done with you,” his voice regaining its playful edge, now threaded with unmistakable desire. “You owe me a few nights.”

You lifted a brow in mock questions, though your smile gave you away. “I think I might not be done with you either, Your Grace,” you said, voice softened by exhaustion.

“I cannot believe you flirted with Alerie.”

Baelor gave a quiet laugh, the sound vibrating through his chest. “She does have a lovely laugh. But she hardly compares to you when you are apologising.”

You nipped lightly at his shoulder, a small, playful rebuke. “You are a menace, Prince Baelor.”

“And you,” he said, pressing a kiss to your hair. "Enough with the foolish game." You sensed he was only half-serious. A smile appeared on your lip, knowing this wouldn't be the last of your playful exchanges.

As your breathing steadied and reason slowly returned, you caught the lingering heat still present between you. And so the night continued, neither of you quite willing to yield control to the other.

And yet, it had evoked a scalding heat within your core, one that did not relent until you had, later that night, pressed the palm of your hand against the source of the ache. It had taken barely a minute for bright stars to dance across your vision, the lights interwoven between flashes of Baelor’s mismatched stare peering down at you.

You were not able to meet his eyes for weeks afterwards; each time your gaze would accidentally graze his own, a spark of excitement would course beneath the sinew that was wrapped around your limbs.

He had noticed your suddenly reserved demeanour, as he noticed every minuscule change in the behaviour of those who were under his care. The realm, the court, his house, his children, and now, you. 

Baelor had labelled your change as a distancing of oneself from their guardian and decided it was a natural progression, having experienced it with both of his sons prior–albeit, not to this degree. 

You would come around, he had figured, perhaps unwisely.

In the following days since you kissed him, there’s a different weight to Baelor’s stare when it lands on you for a beat before it's flitting to someone–something, anything–else. 

The depth of it is loud with unutterable words and thick with vulgarity.

In those fleeting moments, your eyes would settle on the partially-hidden mark that had bloomed over the skin of his throat, courtesy of your suckling, and you would become feverish.

What excuse did he give to those who bravely inquired of its origin, the question flickered across your mind, smearing a slickness between your thighs.

A delirious, wanton fervor licks at your belly, set alight with a growing desire to suck varying shapes and sizes into the older man’s neck; an array of vivid bruises that would mimic the alignment of the scar that had been carved into your own throat–ones that could not be hidden beneath collars or sharp-tongued excuses.

The day finally comes when you can no longer endure his absence or conceal the extent of your longing. 

Your feet steer you to the edge of the corridor that led to the hallway of his bedchamber, the knowledge that there was a guard stationed outside his door, despite the fact that he was not on the castle grounds, made you halt. 

A pebble tossed in the opposite direction, as you hid behind a stone column, was enough of a momentary distraction for you to slip past the guard’s peripheral.

The quiet closing of Baelor’s chamber door should have knocked even the smallest bit of sense into you. Anyone else in your position, given what you had already done, would have behaved in a manner that portrayed a deep sense of regret–a willingness to move forward and forget what had taken place. Instead, a finger trails along your lips as you recall how he had tasted. 

With hesitating steps, you approach the bed in the middle of the room, running your hand across the silken, decorative blankets that had been draped over the length of it. The thought of them touching his bare skin causes a tightness to form in your throat, briefly triggering a prickly ache along the stretch of your scar.

Does my envy know no bounds, you scoff aloud at the thought.

You slip the outer layers of your attire off, goosebumps rising over your skin when you remain only in your chemise. Eager fingers slide downwards, not stopping until they reach your dampened, puffy folds.

As you bend at the waist, descending until your cheek is resting over the plush of his bedding, your lungs are filled with the spicy, woody smell that clung to his body. It was as mouthwatering as you remembered; a pool of saliva quickly darkens the fabric below as every noisy glide of your fingers along your slit echoes filthily in the space. 

You think of him over you, his touch replacing yours to bring you to completion. 

Just then, the memory of how much larger his hands were in comparison to yours is overwhelming your thoughts, eliciting a mewling whimper from your chest.

Baelor's hunched behind your seated form, carefully moving your fingers around the quill until they’re holding it with a sturdier grasp. 

“Firmer–excellent, good girl,” he murmurs, removing his hand from atop yours so that you may begin copying the passages he had delegated for you to practice on.

He had remained looming above you for several minutes, his watchful gaze assessing every nervous, shaky stroke you etched into the thick page. 

Finally, he lets out a soft, thoughtful hum and moves away.

Your fingers move faster, frantic and messy in their pursuit of toppling you over the ledge Baelor had, unknowingly, daggled you over. If you had been quieter, less sloppy in your movements, you may have heard the click of the door of his chamber opening and closing.

A lone knee slides up the side of his bed as you imagine him stretching you, his movements in tandem with the hushed murmur of praises he would breathe against your ear. 

His thick digits, soaked and pruned, glistening in the candlelight with your essence.

From across the room, you heard the repetitive sound of parchment turning. 

Each one was more enticing than the last because, having studied his pattern, by the fifth page he would bring the tip of his middle finger to his tongue and moisten it before reaching for the corner of the page.

His hold would return to the spine, but the sight of his finger, still wet with his saliva, leaving a damp spot on the leather encasing the book would fan the embers of desire in your belly, flaring the simmer until it turned into a wild, uncontrollable inferno–one that you feared would swallow you whole.

Loud, unguarded moans leave your lips; the motion of your hips riding your own fingers is frenzied as your release washes over you.

Would he make you look at the mess you made? Reprimand you in that specific way that he did when he was disappointed because he had expected better from you?

A startled, fearful gasp exits your throat when a hand is suddenly enclosing over your arm to turn you around, the fingers that dripped with your climax now hang limply by your side as you find yourself face to face with the object of your fantasies and affections.

Baelor’s adorned in his riding attire; boots speckled with mud and droplets of water, a mixture of perspiration and rain shone in the grey around his temples.

“What have you done?” 

His eyes trail over your dishevelled appearance, from the sweat soaked slip that is clinging to your form, to the drool on his bedding, before finally settling on the mess you had created between your legs.

How long had he stood there and observed you, waiting until you reached your peak to chastise you?

Trembling, slippery fingers clasp at his clothes, pulling until he’s breathing in every one of your exhales. 

You can smell the leather, sweat, and earthiness that had adhered to his body from the long ride, concluding that he must have returned to his quarters to wash the grime and exertion off of his body. 

Brazenly, you weave your sticky fingers into the dark, silvery strands of his beard; vivid fantasies had plagued your mind for years, all of which portrayed, in detail, your face rubbing against the same coarse hairs you were currently combing through. 

If you rubbed against it thoroughly enough, would his scent remain attached to you?

And so, as the last of your restraint drains, you press the sensitive, heated plush of your cheek against his. It hurt pleasantly–a scratchy, ticklish sensation that you hope will burn later as a reminder. 

Baelor remains still, even as your face descends to lick the beads of sweat that run down the side of his throat with wide, hungry swipes of your tongue. 

“Stop,” he mumbles, moving closer, crowding you into the bed.

With a furrowed brow and grimace, he watches you fumble with the drawstrings of his breeches, gaze darkening when you spread your legs further apart.

The head of his soft cock drags through your folds, nudging your swollen clit over and over again as clear fluid drips out of its tip and mixes with your own wetness. With aroused fascination, you slap the meaty weight of him against the top of your slit, causing your body to quiver and the tremor in your thighs to worsen. 

“Gods–,” Baelor chokes, jerking as a full body quiver wrecks his towering frame.

You tug harder each time his eyelids droop further, not only to prevent him from hiding the wretched way his pupils had expanded, but to ensure he sees the extent to which your heat is repeatedly prodded by the tip of his ruddy, pliable cock.

The raw openness his eyes reflect as they meet yours makes your chest ache; as you had done days ago, you lean backwards and offer up your scarred throat in exchange for the vulnerability he was displaying before you.

The first press of Baelor’s lips against the old wound had you jolting against him, the grip you held him with tightening until every tender kiss he places along the column of your neck is accompanied by an erratic, low sound.

“It was never your father who was destined to ruin me, but you.” he chokes as the words tumble from his parted, glossy lips, a hand rising to grip the bedding you were sprawled atop.

The statement triggers another, far more intense, release from you–one that was met with his own when the spurts of his peak drips over your slit and down the length of your thighs.

“After the trial, I could not–,” he begins to explain after a moment but halts.

Had that been why he was so willing to find you a suitor, given his prior reluctance?

Once the aftershocks subdued, you tuck him back into his breeches, tie the laces, and then, with wobbly legs, walk over to the small desk in the corner of his room.

Baelor silently watches you write for what feels like hours but is truly only a moment, then goes rigid when you are returning to his side.

You had woken that morning to Adam's alarm, which was earlier than yours and which he had silenced immediately with the efficiency of someone who had been doing it for long enough that the motion was automatic. You had made a noise of protest into the pillow. He had said, very quietly, go back to sleep, and pressed his lips to your shoulder, and you had heard him move through the flat with his customary unhurried silence — the kettle, the shower, the soft sounds of a man getting dressed in the dark so as not to wake you.

You had not gone back to sleep.

You had lain there and listened to him move and felt the particular quality of that morning — the specific weight of it, the thing it was the morning of — and when he came back into the bedroom to find his watch you had reached for his hand in the dark.

He had sat on the edge of the bed and held it.

"You're ready," he had said. Not a question.

"I know," you had answered. And then, "Say it again."

A pause. And then, with the quiet seriousness he brought to things that mattered, "You are ready. You have always been ready. The jury is fortunate to evaluate you."

You had pulled him down by his tie — his good one, the ceremony tie, deep navy, which you had straightened that morning with a proprietary attention he had submitted to with barely concealed pleasure — and kissed him once, firmly.

"Go be promoted, commander," you had smiled against his upturning lips.

He had looked at you in the dark with the expression that was still, after all this time, the most affecting thing you had ever seen on a human face. Then he had tucked the loose strand behind your ear and gone.

Presently, your thesis sat on the table in front of the jury. Five copies, spiral bound, representing three years and four months of your life in approximately ninety thousand words. You had read it so many times in the past fortnight that the sentences had lost their meaning and become simply shapes, and now, standing at the small lectern with your own annotated copy open before you, the meaning had returned with a clarity that was almost violent.

The argumentation came out cleanly. You had practised it enough that the words arrived in the right order without requiring conscious assembly, which left a portion of your attention free to read the jury — a skill you had developed not from academic training but from years of understanding, via Hardy, via the long education of paying attention, that what people communicated in a room was rarely confined to what they said aloud.

The external examiner, a professor from Edinburgh with a reputation for rigour and a publication record in Victorian poetics that you had read comprehensively, was watching you with an expression of focused scepticism that you had decided, in the first five minutes, to interpret as engagement rather than hostility. The internal examiner, who had supervised a colleague of yours and was known to be sympathetic to interdisciplinary arguments, was making small notes in the margin of her copy. Good notes, you thought. The angle of her pen suggested agreement.

The third member of the jury had asked two questions already, both of which had landed in the right place — the place where your argument was strongest, which suggested either that he was building toward something more difficult or that he was genuinely following the logic. You chose to believe the latter and remain alert to the former.

The fourth was thinking. You left him to it.

You were midway through the section on The Well-Beloved when the door opened.

It opened carefully — the specific quality of careful that you knew, the consciousness of a person aware of the room they were entering and trying very hard not to disrupt it. You did not look. You were mid-sentence, the argument at its most critical juncture, the external examiner's pen hovering above his notepad with an attention that you were not going to interrupt.

But the air in the room shifted, and then — underneath the chalk and old paper smell of the seminar room — something else arrived.

His cologne. It was faint — he was not a man who wore it heavily — but the specific quality of it was unmistakable and had been unmistakable for approximately eighteen months now. Clean and somewhat resinous, the specific warmth of it that you associated with his coat and cold mornings and the hollow of his shoulder on every morning that had followed that first December one. Faint enough that no one else in the room would have registered it. Present enough that you registered nothing else.

Something in your chest settled.

Not the anxiety — that had been manageable throughout, the argument solid enough to carry you. But the particular quality of aloneness that came with standing in front of people who held authority over something you had given three years of your life to. It settled, and in its place arrived a warmth that moved through your shoulders and down your spine, the warmth of being known, of being held in someone's attention from across a room even when that attention was completely invisible and completely silent.

You made your next point with more conviction than any that had come before it.

The questions ran for forty minutes, and you met every one of them.

The external examiner did not, as it turned out, intend hostility by his expression — he intended rigour, which was exactly what you'd prepared for and considerably preferable to goodwill. His questions were precise and demanding and you met each one in the same register, without apology, without deflection. At one point he pushed on the third chapter — the argument about formal constraint as emotional strategy — and you pushed back, calmly and with the particular certainty of someone who had been turning that argument over for three years and had long since arrived at the place beyond doubt.

He made a note. The note had the quality, from where you stood, of agreement reluctantly reached.

The fourth jury member, who had been thinking throughout, asked the last question: whether your argument about structural repression in Hardy could be applied beyond his work, or whether it was, in the end, specific to his particular biographical and historical context.

You considered this for a moment. In the chairs along the wall, the figure was still.

"The biographical specificity is part of the argument," you said. "Hardy matters because he was who he was, in the time he was, under the pressures he was under. To extract the structural principle and apply it universally would be to do exactly what Hardy resisted — to treat individual emotional experience as interchangeable. The general principle exists. But it only becomes meaningful in the specific case."

A pause.

"That seems like a philosophical position as much as a literary one," the fourth jury member said.

"I think the distinction is overdrawn," you said. "Literature is psychology conducted by other means."

You had said that before, some eighteen months ago, to a certain man standing in a small bookshop across from you with a quality of attention that had rearranged several of your assumptions about what it felt like to be listened to. The memory of it arrived briefly and completely and you set it aside, and the fourth jury member nodded, and wrote something down.

The external examiner looked along the table at his colleagues and back at you.

"Thank you," he said. "We'll ask you to wait outside while we deliberate."

The corridor was beige and institutional and had the particular quality of corridors outside rooms where decisions were being made. Your supervisor was there and was now standing with her arms folded and an expression that was carefully neutral in the way of someone who was not neutral at all.

"The Edinburgh man," you said.

"Came around," she said. "I saw it in his face. Third chapter. Great job there."

You exhaled with a laugh.

Adam was standing a little further down the corridor with his back to the wall and his hands in his pockets and he was still in the full dress uniform of a Commander of the Metropolitan Police, which was a formal and precisely cut garment and which he was wearing with the composed authority he brought to everything — except that his hair was slightly wind-disordered in a way that contradicted the formality entirely, and there was a quality in his stillness that was not the usual kind, not the practised quality of a man who had chosen stillness, but the stillness of someone who had been waiting with focused intensity and was very glad the waiting was over.

He looked at you when you started to approach him and crossed what remained of the corridor in three strides and his hands came out of his pockets and he put them on your face — both of them, your face held between his palms, his eyes moving over you once with the diagnostic attention of a man who read people for a living and then settling, warm and certain.

"Well?" he asked.

"I think so," you mumbled.

"I know so," said your supervisor, from somewhere behind you, and disappeared with the tact she occasionally produced when the situation called for it.

"You were extraordinary," he said with that particular look of adoration that he had institutionalized when it came to looking into your eyes.

"You were late," you teased.

"I ran," he said with a smile that began to show on his lips. "Across three floors of Scotland Yard in full dress uniform. I am reliably informed it was undignified."

"I felt you coming in."

"You were mid-argument about The Well-Beloved." The corner of his mouth moved a fraction more. "I did not want to interrupt that."

You looked at him — the uniform, the slightly wind-disordered hair that contradicted it, the quality of slightly effortful composure that told you he had in fact been running, or close to it.

"You came straight from the ceremony?" you asked.

"Yes."

"They'll have wanted you to stay."

"Undoubtedly," he said, and his tone placed the matter precisely where he intended it.

You looked at him for a moment longer, and the warmth of it — the specific, accumulated warmth of knowing this man and being known by him — was such that the beige corridor and the institutional overhead lighting and the decision being reached twelve feet away behind a closed door became briefly and completely irrelevant.

His thumb moved at your cheekbone.

You laughed — a real one, sudden and warm — and he watched it happen with the expression that had always been your favourite: quiet, unperformed, completely glad. Then he drew you forward and wrapped his arms around you properly, fully, and held on with the unguarded completeness of a man who had long since stopped requiring a reason to hold on.

You pressed your face into his chest. The uniform was slightly scratchy at the lapel, and he smelled of his cologne and beneath it, warmer, simply of him.

"The external examiner," he said, into your hair. "How was he?"

"Rigorous."

"And?"

"And I was better," you said.

His arms tightened. "Yes," he said. "You were."

You heard the door open. The external examiner's head appeared.

"If you'd like to come back in," he said, nothing in his tone of voice indicated any effect because of the scene of warm stillness in which you and Adam found yourselves in.

The jury had questions of a different order now — revisions, minor corrections, a request to expand a footnote in the second chapter that you immediately identified as the Edinburgh man leaving his mark on the final document, which was his prerogative and a small price. The internal examiner was smiling. The fourth jury member had closed his copy of the thesis, which you had come to understand, by the end, meant he was satisfied.

The external examiner said Doctor when he addressed you for the first time, near the end, and did it with the slightly ceremonial air of a man conferring something he respected the weight of, and the word landed with a quality you had not anticipated — not triumphant, but settled. True. A thing completed.

Afterward, the room filled with the particular atmosphere of post-viva gatherings — colleagues and supervisors and a few departmental faculty, wine opened too early in plastic cups, the compression of three years of work into an hour of communal relief. You moved through it in a state that was simultaneously present and slightly removed, the way you sometimes felt after something enormous had resolved, the nervous system still running at the pitch of the event while the event itself had concluded.

Professor Hartley found you near the window.

He was the sort of man who was kind in the abstract and specific in his unsolicited opinions, and he had a great deal to say about chapter four. You listened. He was not wrong, precisely — his point about the secondary literature was fair — but the subtext of his commentary was that you had been too confident in your departures from received critical consensus, too willing to stake a position and defend it, and this was a criticism you had heard before and had no particular intention of acting on.

You nodded at intervals.

And then Adam was beside you.

He appeared at your shoulder with the quiet, unannounced quality of movement that was characteristic of him — not stealth, simply a man who had learned to occupy space without announcing himself, and who had crossed the room while Hartley was mid-sentence and arrived without disrupting anything. He looked at Hartley with a pleasant, measured expression that communicated polite attention and disclosed nothing.

"Professor Hartley," you said, "this is Adam Dalgliesh."

Hartley, to his credit, registered the uniform without making a matter of it. "Commander," he acknowledged, and returned, with the confidence of a man comfortable with his own authority, to his point about the secondary literature.

And then — so gradually and with such complete naturalness that it might not have been deliberate, except that with this man nothing was not deliberate — Adam's hand settled at the small of your back.

The touch was light. His fingers moved in the same slow, deliberate way they moved across the small of your back on evenings at his flat when you were reading and he was thinking and the room was warm and neither of you needed to speak. It was a private touch. A touch that knew you, that had learned you, that belonged entirely to the register of your life together and had been transposed, without announcement, into the room full of your colleagues.

You nodded at something Hartley said about methodological confidence.

The circles continued.

You became aware that your attention, which had been dutifully directed at Hartley's point about received consensus, had migrated entirely to the four square inches of your lower back and the hand moving quietly against it, and that you were nodding with the serene focus of someone who had understood nothing in the past thirty seconds and was entirely at peace with this.

— and I think the argument would benefit from a more measured engagement with the existing scholarship, rather than the somewhat declarative approach you've taken in places —

You nodded. Adam's hand continued its circles. You were, you decided, absolutely not going to revise a single declarative sentence.

"Thank you," you said to Hartley, when he reached a natural pause. "That's very useful."

Hartley looked gratified and moved away toward the wine, and you turned to Adam.

He was already looking at you. He had, you suspected, been looking at you throughout. His expression was composed and pleasant and entirely innocent, and his eyes were doing something considerably less innocent, and his hand had not moved from your back.

"Commander Dalgliesh," you said.

"Doctor," he said. And the word in his voice — the specific warmth he put into it, the private version of his register that still, after everything, arrived differently from all his others — did something to your sternum that you were not going to examine in a room full of your colleagues.

"The ceremony," you said. "How was it?"

"It was formal," he said. "The Commissioner is a thorough man. He spoke at some length about institutional responsibility and the obligations of rank."

"And you left in the middle of it."

"I left," he answered carefully, "at a natural interval."

You raised an eyebrow.

"A relatively natural interval," he amended, with dignity.

"Adam."

"There was a gap between speakers," he said. "I used it."

"And ran across three floors of Scotland Yard."

"Efficiently," he said. "I'm told the pace was barely noticed."

You looked at him — the hand at your back, the expression that was composed on the surface and underneath it simply and entirely happy — and felt the warmth of it move through you with the thoroughness of something you had grown so accustomed to that its absence would now be inconceivable.

"You should have stayed," you smiled at him. "It was your promotion. You've spent so many years earning it."

He looked at you for a moment with the long, quiet look that was its own form of speech. His hand on your back moved — not in circles now, simply his palm flat and warm, the uncomplicated weight of it.

"I have spent many years," he said, "earning a great many things. Some of them are at the Yard and I am glad of them." He held your gaze with the complete and unhurried attention that had been, from the very beginning, his most devastating quality. "And some of them are here."

You looked at him.

"There is nowhere," he said, "that I would rather have been."

He said it the way he said the things that were most true — quietly, without ornament, with the directness of a man who had learned, at considerable cost, that the distance between feeling something and saying it was not a distance worth maintaining.

You reached up and straightened his tie, which did not need straightening, which was simply something your hands knew how to do now — the good navy tie, the ceremony tie, which you had pulled once this morning in the dark of the bedroom and were straightening now, and he stood still for it with the expression of a man who found this more affecting than he intended to let on.

"Take me home, Adam," you said. Quietly, so only he heard it.

His hand on your back pressed in, warm and certain.

"Yes," he smiled, and the smile reached his eyes in that way you so adored.

Outside, the December light was clean and pale and honest across the street, the kind of winter light that simplified everything, that stripped away the soft qualifying layers and left only the clear fact of things. He took your hand as you walked. Simply, naturally, without preamble, as though it were something he had been doing his whole life.

You walked beside him through the pale winter afternoon — the Commander of the Metropolitan Police in his formal uniform with his slight wind-disordered hair, and the newly minted Doctor in her good coat with the strand of hair already escaping — and the city continued around you with its magnificent indifference, and the winter light lay over everything with the simple, unelaborated quality of a true thing acknowledged.

His thumb moved against the back of your hand as you walked. The same slow, deliberate tracing that had begun in a corridor and would end, you knew, in the warmth of wherever the evening took you. You tightened your hand in his.

He looked sideways at you, and the look was the morning version, the open version — the face of him that existed before the day assembled its management, which was the face you now carried with you when he wasn't there.

"Robert, from the Bodleian," he said. "We should write to confirm the appointment."

"Sweet Robert," you nodded. “Yes, we should.”

"Thursday, perhaps?"

"Or," you said, "maybe we could not do that today."

A pause. His thumb continued its slow circuit against your hand. "We could not do that today," he agreed, with the seriousness of a man making a considered decision.

"We could do considerably nothing today," you said.

"An attractive proposal," he said. "Put forward with your characteristic decisiveness, doctor."

You smiled at the pavement. He lifted your hand — briefly, without ceremony — and pressed his lips to the back of it, warm and certain, in the middle of the December street, without appearing to concern himself in the slightest with who might see a Commander of the Metropolitan Police doing so.

You looked at him.

He looked back, and the look was everything — the bookshop and the pub and the poem on the table and every lamplit room and every morning since that first December one — all of it present in the simple, unhurried quality of his gaze.

"Come on then," he said.

And you walked on together into the honest winter afternoon, his hand warm around yours, the pale light making everything clear.

A.N.: well, we've come to the technical end of this story. I have to confess that I cried a little while writing this epilogue, there's something about Adam (not just my characterization of him, but the real P.D James' Adam Dalgliesh) that just speaks to my soul.

As I said in previous chapters, this may be the "end" of the story I had originally in mind, but it will definitely not be the definitive end. I have a handful of scenarios planned out (just pending writing) for them.

As a side note, I've created a Spotify playlist with the works that somehow inspired this story. It is the first time I do this, but I wanted to share it with you, so here you can find it.

Thank you so much to everyone that has read this cute lil' story. You will always have a place in my heart.

Dalgliesh taglist: @harubonchari @baelorenthusiast @probablydeadbynowdotcom @caffeinatedwoman @thorins-queen-of-erebor @sgmwester @ms0anthrop @himbohunnicutt