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[lovebugism]

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2)

summary: gwayne finally returns from the war after months away to claim you at last, only to find that you and ormund have grown far closer than he anticipated, and that his cousin has no intention of letting you go so easily. (13k)

characters: gwayne hightower / fem!reader, ormund hightower / fem!reader, daeron targaryen, the baratheon envoy *wink wink*

contents: targ!reader (no physical descriptions), love triangle, enemies to lovers, angst, hurt/comfort, forbidden love, infidelity, canon divergence, cw for emotional manipulation, mentions of ptsd, descriptions of blood and gore, s3ep6 spoilers, smut 18+ (MDNI): gwayne gets a much needed handjob, fem receiving oral

( PART ONE ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

vi. RUIN & RETURN

It had been six days since Gwayne’s letter arrived at camp; five since the Hightower host marched for Tumbleton; and one since you arrived within the ancient walls to wait. 

Ormund had not allowed you to read it. He tossed the parchment into the hearth before you could so much as ask and promptly reached for his sword, unsheathing the steel with a strange air of control, right before a shout tore from his throat. He brought the blade down onto the war table hard enough to splinter the old wood. “Useless craven— Coward— Cunt!” he bellowed with every blow, until the ivory pieces sitting atop the map scattered to the floor like knocked-out teeth.

You stood on the far side of the tent, wrapped in your nightgown and still sticky with sex between the thighs, and watched the man lose all of his usual composure in the space of a single breath. Daeron stood just in front of you, not quite broad or tall enough to protect you from his uncle’s rage, but trying to shield you from it nonetheless.

With one final wavering exhale, Ormund sheathed his sword again and left it lying flat on the ruined table before him. His tense shoulders loosened as he raised a hand to swipe a rogue auburn curl from his brow. He turned to face you again with a much more careful, if only slightly unhinged, smile on his mouth.

“There has been no sight of Aemond,” he announced at last. “Nor Vhagar— We’ll have to proceed to Tumbleton on our own. Gwayne will meet us there in time.”

It was not joy alone that heavied your chest at the sound of his name. It was much closer to dread, which burned as it rose into your throat like bile — alongside something that should’ve felt like love but had since grown into something far more complicated in your last few moons as prisoner. You turned from him at once and shoved the tent flap aside just in time to exorcise your sickness onto the dewy grass below.

The dread did not leave with it, and neither did the guilt.

Now you sit at the long table of another manse’s dining hall, far humbler than that of the Red Keep but still a palace compared to the war tents, and watch the last of the orange sunrise die over the hills through the arched windows. Somewhere down that road, your husband rides towards you — alone and hunted and entirely unaware of what awaits him in these walls. 

“You’ve hardly touched your supper,” Ormund says beneath the soft scrape of his knife as he cuts himself a slice of honeyed boar. Despite not having properly dined since the war began, he eats with a methodical sort of restraint. He takes small bites, chews each of them thoroughly, and doesn’t talk again until he swallows. “I’m not going to have to feed you myself again, am I?”

You miss the amusement dancing on the edge of his melodic voice with your attention fixed on the window, where the dark edge of the hill meets the violet sky. “I’m not hungry,” you answer distantly.

“Yes. You said as much yesterday as well,” Ormund sighs with all the exasperation of a man grown tired of losing his battles with you. “I’d have thought you might be glad to have a proper kitchen. With proper cooks. With proper food.”

His apathy cuts you like a blade, which has grown sharper and more frequent since the letter arrived at camp. It seemed to sever whatever spell had briefly held the two of you together before now; or otherwise shut something in Ormund that has not opened since he learned of his cousin’s imminent arrival.

“Well, forgive me, my lord,” you say with a voice as thin as Valyrian steel. “If my husband’s sudden return from the dead has rather spoiled my appetite.”

Ormund’s eyes snap up from his plate at once. They’re pale and unreadable and utterly void of the warmth you’d grown so accustomed to. When the blue of his eyes are warm, they’re like swimming in the languid blue of a summer sea. They carry none of that silken familiarity tonight.

“He is not dead yet," Ormund reminds you with his brows raised to his hairline. “So far as either of us knows, anyway.”

Yet. The word alone makes you flinch, though you cannot yet tell if he means it as cruelly as it feels. You find more and more these days that you can no longer tell the difference with him now.

“What am I to say to him?” you wonder suddenly aloud, as if the question had been building in your throat since you learned of Gwayne’s arrival. Your anxious hands twist in the charcoal-silver skirts borrowed from Lady Footly’s closet; a gift, Ormund called it, despite it not belonging to either of you. “When Gwayne arrives— what do I tell him? How am I meant to look at him?”

“You are his wife,” Ormund responds plainly, with one careless roll of his broad shoulders. “I suppose you’ll look at him as you always have.”

Your face screws with a choked-back anger. “That’s not an answer—”

“No. But it’s the only one I have.” He sets his fork and knife on the plate with a heavy clink and leans back in his chair. He tilts his chin upward to stare at you over the top of the glittering candles between you, ringed fingers fidgeting over the pale white cloth.

“I have an army to feed, men to protect, and walls to build before Rhaenyra’s dragonfire can swallow the castle whole,” he continues in a monotone. “Unfortunately, I no longer possess the luxury, or the patience, of coddling your guilt.”

His words burn red-hot through your chest, searing you like a brand. You flinch away from them as if he’d struck you physically, though it might’ve hurt less if he had. Your eyes sting as your throat tightens around all the words you want to fling back at him — perhaps that he had not seemed so burdened by you a week past, when his mouth was on you and his fingers were in you; that he had not been so burdened by your guilt all the weeks before that, when he swore your safety mattered to him above his cousin’s own claim to you.

But you swallow down the accusations now and throw your napkin onto your untouched plate instead. Your chair scrapes hard against the cobbles as you rise from the table in a rush of black and silver silk.

“Where are you going now?” Ormund huffs.

“For a walk,” you answer without looking back at him.

“You haven’t even touched your food,” he calls to your retreating figure, motioning to your uneaten plate with a ringed hand. His even voice begins to fray at the edges, “Sit down and eat—”

“Feed it to the hounds—”

“Sit!” His voice cracks through the room like thunder when your hand curls around the cold brass door handle. The sheer volume of his voice, the raw bite underneath it, roots you in place. Your head turns slowly to find the man glaring at you from his spot at the table, though the scowl on his chiseled features disappears just as quickly as it came on.

His eyes flutter shut as his broad chest inflates behind his emerald coat, with a slow breath in through his nose. You watch the man walk himself down from some invisible ledge — tense shoulders dropping, clenched fists easing, rough breaths coming easier again.

“I’m sorry…” Ormund says when he opens his eyes again. The light in the pale blue of his gaze has returned to him, you find, and so has the softness in his smile when he rises from his chair to meet you. “I am sorry, my love— I forget myself— This war has driven me half-mad, if you could not already tell.”

He exhales a faint laugh that you do not join him in. He crosses the distance between you in a few short strides, wide hands settling along the outsides of your elbows — warm, even through the thin sleeves of your gown. You peer up at him through your lashes, uncertain whether the tenderness he extends to you now is real or simply the version he’s allowing himself to show you.

“If ever I am… cross with you. Or short with you in any way— It is never because of you, understand?” Ormund confesses lowly, eyes darting back and forth between your weary ones. “It takes me a moment to remember myself, is all… You understand that, don’t you?”

You swallow hard and nod wordlessly in response, though what you most desperately want to tell him in that moment is that Gwayne had never been so cross with you. That not once in your moons of marriage had he so much as raised his voice at you or frightened you the way Ormund has in such short time. You want to say it if only to see it hurt him the way his words have hurt you. Instead, you say nothing. 

“He does not have to know,” Ormund murmurs to you, thumbs brushing your arm in an absent, reassuring gesture. “Nothing occurred between us that was not asked of me. I gave you only what you wanted— Surely a man cannot be faulted for answering his summons.”

Your brows lower over your narrowed eyes. “Are you saying that… that what we did is my fault alone?”

“Of course not!” Ormund laughs, broad hands rising to cup your burning cheeks between them. His palms are warm and calloused; they feel like velvet as they brush your skin. “I’m saying neither of us is at fault— You said it yourself, did you not? The war broke your vows. Not us.”

Some traitorous part of you, so desperate for absolution, nearly softens into his touch at that. You did not ask to be taken from the Red Keep; you did not ask for Ormund's protection; you did not ask for a husband to ride off at dawn and leave you to wonder all these months whether he was living or dead.

You are desperate and half-convinced in your own madness, but you think that perhaps Gwayne will understand that. That surely a woman who believed herself abandoned and already widowed cannot be faulted for the comfort she found in the meantime. It is a thing far too fragile to build a conscience on, but you cling to the comfort of it anyway.

“My cousin rides to Tumbleton alone— without his own army and with Daemon’s surely hunting him,” Ormund coos gently to you, sweeping his thumb across your skin. “It is entirely possible that he will not survive the journey here at all. And then there would be nothing for you to confess… And you would’ve spent all these days worrying for naught.”

The words settle over you like ice in your veins. Your eyes dart back and forth between his own as you search for something human within him — some acknowledgment of what he’s just comforted you with — and find nothing in return.

“You speak of his death like it would be a mercy to me,” you whisper, voice thick with unshed tears. 

“I speak of it only as a possibility," Ormund corrects softly. “I only mean to spare you the fear of it, my love. Is that not a kindness?”

You do not answer him. You could not even if you wanted to; not with the invisible hand curling its way around your throat, as you listen to the man who’s protected you from certain death frame your husband's demise as a kindness done on your behalf.

But when Ormund ducks softly down to press a sickly sweet kiss to your mouth, tasting of the sweet wine and honeyed figs from supper, you cannot seem to pull away from him. Gods forgive you, but you lean into it instead; you ball the collar of his coat into fists and chase the comfort in his mouth the way you’ve chased the safety of his hands since you were brought to his side.

You think of the man who fed you bread from his own fingers when you would not eat; who cut down a hedgeknight before he could harm you; who wrapped you in his blankets and warmed your fingers in his hands on particularly freezing nights. 

That man is still in there, somewhere, hidden beneath the throes of war. 

You fear what might become of him before it’s done.

vii. MUD & MERCY

You stand before the tallest window of the Tumbleton manse, overlooking the winding ivied streets below. They lead straight to the western gate, where the scouts had seemingly spotted a rider without banners in the distance — a messenger from another camp, they said, or maybe Gwayne. The dying sunlight paints the sky in milky orange hues while you pick at the ragged skin of your thumbnail in an absentminded worry. The delicate nailbed splits and blooms red.

You do not notice until a silken handkerchief is motioned suddenly in the corner of your eye.

Your head whips to find Daeron standing at your elbow, green eyes glimmering and pink mouth fixed into a firm line of boyish solemnity. He stands taller than you now, which hadn’t been the case when you first arrived at camp — now you have to look up to properly meet the young boy’s gaze.

“Oh,” you say within a surprised breath. “Thank you.”

You take the cloth from him with a trembling hand. The pale linen blooms pink when you press it to the raging skin of your bleeding thumb. Daeron grimaces sympathetically in return, though you aren’t looking at him to see it. 

“Are you nervous?” he wonders aloud, hands crossed firmly behind his back.

“A bit…” you confess in a sigh, dabbing at the wound and knowing that there is no string of words you could possibly put together to express just how nervous you are.

“Aye,” he nods. “I suppose I am, too… I’ve not seen him since I was a child.”

Your head turns slowly to flash the boy a knowing look. “You are still a child, my prince,” you remind him with a smile.

“A younger child, then,” Daeron mutters sheepishly back, freckled cheeks flaring as he turns back toward the window. His long, auburn tendrils sway softly at his shoulders when he shakes his head. “Long enough that I can no longer recall the last conversation I had with him… Though I’m sure it was about you, no doubt, with his betrothal to you and all…”

“Well, he spoke of you often,” you tell him, and watch the boy’s pale eyes flicker with a newfound life when he turns to you again. “He made it clear he was quite proud of you… And if it’s any consolation, I did not intend to steal him from Oldtown.”

“I’m glad for it,” Daeron blurts, then shakes his head at himself when the words don’t come out right. “Not that he left, of course, but that it was you he was given. There are far worse fates, to be true…” 

He trails off and watches your face twist with confusion. His anxious gaze drops to the blood-spotted handkerchief as the tips of his ears glow pink. The words seem to escape him without a single thought in his floundering attempts to explain himself. 

“I only mean that— that he is good. My Uncle Gwayne. The best of us, really, and Ormund is…” Daeron forgets why he brings up the older man the second his name spills from his lips, though he cannot seem to stop talking. “Ormund is good, too, I’m sure. Somewhere deep down. But he— He does not lose well, my lady. And I’ve learned that… that it's a dangerous thing, to— to be the prize he’s decided he’s won.”

The words come out of him in a rush; sentences half-formed and stumbling. He glances at you only once in a quick and searching look, before looking away again like he can’t stomach a second more of the contact. Your stomach twists in a sick feeling at each word from his mouth. Your throat runs dry as you choke on whatever response you might have given him — some careful deflection, maybe, or a warm laugh to soothe the boy — but a horn sounds from the tower before you can find any response at all. 

Three short, sharp blasts send the keep into motion immediately.

“He’s here!” someone yells, far off in the distance. “Open the gates— it’s Ser Gwayne!”

Your feet seem to move on their own accord. Despite the dread sitting heavy in your belly, your legs carry you instantly towards Gwayne. You hold your dress skirts in your fists as you rush down the winding stone stairs, through the crowded hall, and out the heavy oak doors of the entrance. The humid, evening summer air takes the breath from your lungs as it strikes you across the face; it becomes near-impossible to take another one in, with your heart climbing so suddenly in your throat.

The thundering of hooves against cobblestone finds you before you’ve made it down the steep stone steps of the ancient castle. You’re blinded, briefly, by the setting sun until you hold a hand over your squinted eyes. Armored knights and groomed horses come into view — straddled loosely behind Bold Jon’s mare is Gwayne, though his face and hair are so caked with dirt and blood you scarcely recognize him.

Gwayne tries and fails to dismount on his own. His legs betray him after days of nonstop walking, and the exhaustion makes them buckle almost instantly. “Gwayne!” he hears you shout, right before he feels your hands reach for him before he can fall. 

Your arms curl beneath his own to keep him upright. He leans the bulk of his weight against you without ever really meaning to, clinging to your warmth and the scent of floral bathing oils he isn’t quite used to. And, though he smells like dirt and death, you hold him back just the same. 

“You’re alive,” you pant, breaths fanning in his muddied hair.  “Gods, you’re alive—”

“Well…” He huffs a not-quite laugh that you can feel in his shoulder, pulling just far enough away to meet your wet eyes with a pair of duller, paler ones. “I told you I meant my vows, didn’t I?” 

His words come out in rasps, voice dry from days of thirst and weeks of shouting. His chest sears with a foreign feeling at the way you’re looking at him now — like he’s half stranger, half god. “Apologies for my appearance, dear wife,” he pants and swallows down the sudden urge to cry. “But I have had a… rough go of things as of late…”

Your features crumble under the weight of your own tears. You shake your head at the man, and at his sorry attempt at a joke. “Gods, I’ve missed you...”

Gwayne exhales slowly through his nose as his cracked lips curve into a crooked smile, visibly exhausted but his even still. “Not nearly as much as—”

“Ser Gwayne.” The voice cuts through the bustling courtyard at once.

You feel every muscle in your body seize on instinct as your head whips back towards the stone steps, where Ormund stands at the top of them. His eyes scan the scene below — of you and Gwayne and your bodies only just now easing apart as the red-haired man attempts to stand on his own. 

The silver chain of Ormund’s pomander clinks faintly in the newfound quiet as he brings the perfumed incense up to his nose, inhaling deeply to rid the scent of sweat and blood and death from his nostrils.

“I see you’ve made it,” is all he says.

Gwayne exhales an exhausted huff, a mixture of a laugh and a scoff. He sways softly on his muddied boots and clutches onto your shoulder with his free hand. “It’s good to see you too, cousin…” he responds in a monotone.

Ormund turns to Daeron, who’s hovering just beside him with his pale hands clenched into fists — it takes every bit of strength in the young boy’s body not to run down to his uncle alongside you, worried about how Ormund might react. 

“See that a room is made ready for your uncle. And a hot meal is sent with haste— whatever the kitchens can manage quickly,” Ormund says to the boy, then pauses as his eyes drift back to Gwayne’s. “And perhaps a bath.”

Gwayne’s cracked lips curl into a slow smile. He breathes a laugh through his nose as he watches his cousin spin on his heel to walk away. “You always did have delicate sensibilities…” he attempts to call to the man, though he fails to muster the strength in his voice to be heard. 

It is you who insists on escorting Gwayne to the bath. You wave off hovering knights and Tumbleton servants with a firmness that surprises even you — no longer a prisoner of war, but a high lord’s wife. 

Gwayne, it seems, is much too spent from the journey to do anything more than lean into your shoulder the whole way up the winding castle. He braces himself on your firm weight as you peel the ruined layers of clothing from his body and coax him gently into the steaming tub. 

Your own borrowed gown joins his tattered things in a forgotten heap on the cobbled floor as you sink into the water alongside him. The warmth laps gently at your waist as you shift yourself over his lap, resting the bulk of your weight on his thighs.

The bathwater turns the color of weak tea by the time you’ve worked the worst of the grime from Gwayne’s pale skin. Dark streams of dirt and old blood swirl away beneath the cloth in your hand, brushing a tad too gently over his shoulders and chest and back, as if anything too hard might break him entirely.

Gwayne sits slumped against the tub, eyes half-closed and head lolled back. The war had certainly taken its due upon his pretty features — the new hollows beneath his cheekbones, the fresh scar above his brow, the deep grey exhaustion under his once bright eyes. There’s a leanness to him now that suggests missed meals and weeks of marching; and a sort of heaviness in his gaze that suggests longer weeks of grief.

But still he softens for you, minute by minute, as you drag the cloth over the angle of his dirtied jaw. He exhales slowly through his nose and leans instinctively into your touch.

“You needn’t do this to yourself, you know?” the man murmurs, but makes no further move to stop you. “There are servants more than capable of tending to my bath.” 

“I want to do it,” you tell him simply, dabbing at a speck of blood on his cheek. “I’ve missed you too much— I’d rather not share you with a servant just yet.”

He gives you a tired, crooked smile in response. “I missed you, too,” he says with a sigh, fingers clutching you harder by the waist beneath the water’s surface, like he’s still trying to make sure you’re still real. “Gods, you cannot imagine how badly…” 

You rinse the cloth in the cooling water and press it gently to his hairline, dabbing at the remnants of dirt clinging stubbornly to him there. His adam’s apple bobs as he swallows through a tightening throat — being touched this gently threatens to undo him entirely, after weeks away and days of nonstop bloodshed. 

His tense shoulders finally sink beneath the water as he admits, “I thought only of you… The entire way here… I fear it’s the only way I managed it— knowing that I could not die without seeing you first.”

Your throat tightens as guilt strangles you all over again; the bitter reminder of what you’d done, and all the nights you forgot to miss him back. Your fingers move anxiously to set the cloth on the rim of the tub and dip into the ceramic dish lying there. You scoop a handful of lavender soap onto your fingertips, and work it between your palms until it starts to foam.

“I thought of you, too,” you tell him with an averted gaze, which is true enough even though it feels like a lie when it escapes your mouth. “Every day.”

“And what of Ormund?” Gwayne wonders aloud, cracking one pale eye open to study your face as you rake the suds through his long auburn hair. The dull, muddy strands slowly return to their proper flaming color with each gentle pass of your fingers, as the last of the war’s blood and grim streams down his pale shoulders in dark rivulets. “I trust my cousin treated you well in my absence. He can be insufferable, I know, but he is not unkind… Not truly.”

You falter at the mention of him. Your hands still briefly in his damp tendrils as a sick feeling curls in the pit of your stomach. You swallow hard through the cold hands of guilt strangling your throat and force your fingers to keep moving, praying he does not notice how they tremble faintly against his scalp. 

“He was… accommodating,” you answer carefully, eyes trained on his hair rather than on his attentive gaze, lest he read the whole truth of it plainly upon your face. “He kept me fed. Housed. Safe… For the most part— Tilt your head back; let me rinse your hair.”

You lift yourself slightly off the man’s lap to reach for the pitcher resting on the table beside the tub. Glittering rivulets of bath water cascade down your arms, glimmering in thin ribbons over the curves of your breasts in the dancing candlelight. Gwayne tips his head back to oblige you when you settle astride his scruffy thighs once more. His long, pale fingers smooth absently over your hips beneath the water, tracing idle circles along your soft skin.

“You’ve gone rather short with your answers, dear wife…” he observes lowly, peering at you from the bridge of his nose. “That’s not like you…”

“I’m just tired, is all…” you deflect, cupping one hand over his brow to shield his eyes while your other pours the clean water steadily over his hairline. The suds run clear down his temples and trickle back into the bath below. “It’s been a long day… A long several months, if I’m honest…”

“Yes… For us all, I’m sure,” Gwayne sighs and lifts his head once more when you shift to place the pitcher back onto its table. He arches an auburn brow and musters a quiet smile; the simple ease of being with you returns to him by the minute now, as his fingers settle over your ribcage again. “Though I do hope my letters kept you some company… Small comfort as they must have been.”

You go suddenly very still above him, muscle locking despite yourself. The guilt that had been simmering in your chest surges up your throat all at once now, in a red-hot flame that makes you feel halfway sick. For a long moment, you fail to make sense of the words — his letters — after so many months of waiting to hear from your husband, and after so many months of hearing Ormund tell you each day that there had been not a single word from him.

“…Your letters?” you repeat on bated breath.

“Yes,” Gwayne nods, brows pinching at your confusion. “I wrote every time I could manage it— At every stronghold we arrived… Did you not receive them?”

Your mouth opens and closes as you struggle to find the words to respond — words that would placate your own confusion without disclosing what you had been doing in the days awaiting his letters. “Perhaps… Perhaps they got lost. Along the road…”

Gwayne scoffs a humorless laugh at the thought. “Well, I pity the poor hand who got my letters instead of you…” he croons lowly.

“Why?” you press with a wavering grin. “What did they say?”

“Nothing of substance,” he shrugs his bare shoulders. “Just… foolish things.”

“Like…?” you trail off, soothing your palms down the pale canvas of his chest.

A faint uncertain smile tugs at his mouth as he watches your hands dip below the waterline. “I wrote of… what fields I passed. What foolish things Ser Criston said that day. What I’d seen— What I missed of home, what I missed of you…” 

He trails off when your fingers find his cock, lying limp along his left thigh. He feels like velvet in your fist as you massage him slowly hard. “Keep going…” you coo to him.

His hips twitch beneath you when you tighten your grip on his stiffening length. “I— I wrote of your hands,” he manages, and swallows hard when your thumb swipes across the sensitive tip of his cock. His eyes grow heavy with desire as he watches you work at him through the haze of cloudy water. “How I missed the— the feel of them on me… Gods…” 

“Go on…” you murmur, smearing your lips along his jaw.

“I wrote that… that I missed your smell,” he confesses, fraying with each slow pass of your hand. “Your hair after a bath… The wine on your breath after supper… The sweat between your thighs after a long day— Seven fucking hells.” 

His jaw clenches tight when your free hand dips down to cradle his balls, squeezing the sensitive sack between your fingers until his cock jerks in your fist. His heavy head lolls into your kiss; he feels you smiling against his cheek. 

“You’re already close, aren’t you?” 

He swallows hard. “You have no idea how long it’s been…” he confesses in a blissful sigh.

“I’m sure there were plenty of whores on the road,” you singsong in his ears.

He shakes his head instantly in protest. “None as beautiful as you…” 

His denial does little to comfort you. Instead, you feel a white-hot rage searing in your chest. Some distant, ugly part of you wishes he had taken a thousand whores while he was away, if only to take the weight of your own betrayal off your shoulders. At least then you could share it, this guilt, instead of living alone in your sin. You hate yourself most of all for even wishing it, and you feel very suddenly disgusted in your own skin — eager to be free of him and this moment altogether.

“Then cum,” you command against his pulse, jerking his cock faster in your fist. Gwayne’s fingers clutch at the plush skin of your hips hard enough to etch bruises there, and you revel in the hurt as his grumbled moan fills the bathing chambers. “Come on. Cum for me—”

He makes a broken sort of sound in the base of his throat as he seizes just beneath you, tense and trembling as his high hits him full force. The cooling water threatens to slosh off the rim as he twitches through his orgasm, which spurts into the cloudy water in short ropes of pearly-white, until he relaxes finally with a sigh.

“Give me a moment…” he pleads through ragged breaths. “I’ll make you feel good, I just— I need a moment…”

“I’m alright,” you assure him with a shake of your head, and with a sad smile that he doesn’t catch with his eyes still closed. “You rest tonight… I’ll see you in the morning.”

viii. CAGE & CONFESSION

You do not go to find Ormund until long after Gwayne’s breathing has steadied. 

He takes up the whole of the bed in his inhuman exhaustion; one leg straight and the other bent beneath the quilts, one pale arm slung over his bare stomach and the other left reaching out for your empty side of the bed as you slip from beneath the silk. You storm for Ormund’s solar in the dimly lit halls in nothing but your thin ivory nightgown; the fabric catching at your ankles with every furious stride in the man’s direction.

You find the room lit by a sea of glittering candles when you throw open the door without ceremony. It strikes the wall a harsh bang, far too loud for the late night; the wind of the blow makes the flames gutter wildly in their sconces. 

Ormund’s head snaps up from his dispatches at the sudden intrusion. His quill pauses on the parchment — because the work of war is never truly done, not even at the dead of night. His eyes are cold for a flicker with a soldier’s instinct, then warm again all at once when he finds no threat — only you. The corner of his mouth curls into a slow, knowing smile accordingly.

“Come to warm my bed already, have you?” the man lilts in his usual melodic voice, setting his quill aside as he slouches back into his cushioned seat. “I confess, I hardly expected to see you tonight, what with your husband so newly returned. Bold of you, really—”

“Don’t,” you snap. 

The word slices through the solar like a blade, and wipes away the smug curve of his smile in an instant. Your nightgown billows around your ankles with every furious step inside; the shadows of the fabric catch in the candlelight and turn you into something half-spectral as you loom over the desk across from him.

“He wrote to me. For months, he wrote to me,” you agonize. “And when he asked whether I’d received them, I sat there like a fool, knowing I hadn’t gotten a single one.”

Ormund draws a long, even breath through his nose. His ringed fingers settle flat over the desk as he keeps a measured composure about him, even though yours unravels by the minute.

“Ah…” he hums under his breath.

A shocked laugh escapes your mouth. “That’s all you have to say to me?”

“What would you have me say?” he asks, pale eyes locked with yours as he braces himself on the arms of his chair to rise. The wood scrapes harshly along the cobbles when he stands to full height. “That I kept them from you? That I— read them for myself and burned each one in the hearth when I’d finished? Very well… I did.” 

The plain admission threatens to knock the breath from your lungs. You had braced yourself for denial, to be true, to spend these late hours coaxing the truth from his lips. You were not prepared for confession; not so soon, and not so easily. 

“Why?” you demand, half-breathless with tears. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because I did not wish to hurt you,” Ormund says, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. “You wept for that man every night for the better part of a moon’s turn. I thought it might ease you, if you’d believed he didn’t care enough to write to you at all. I thought I was sparing you the grief of it.”

“That was not yours to decide!” you shout, voice shaking beneath the weight of your girlish fury. “Those were my letters, Ormund! My husband's words! You had no right—”

“No right?!” he thunders through an emotionless laugh, ocean eyes flickering with madness in an instant. “You are my prisoner! Or have you so quickly forgotten, given how generously I’ve treated you?”

You flinch back as he rounds the desk, though you cannot seem to leave the spot ahead of him as he inches towards you like a predator to prey.

“You’re lucky you’re standing here at all. Any other Targaryen beast would be in chains, but you…” he continues, prowling another step closer. “I let you share my tent, my table, my bed. And I did it gladly because I came to love you despite the— taint in your blood.”

You peer up at him through teary eyes when he towers finally in front of you — brows raised, eyes hardened, jaw clenched tight.

“But… you are still my prisoner,” he reminds you evenly. “You have been since the day you arrived at my camp. So I have every right to decide which letters enter your hands and which ones do not.” 

Each word strikes you like a physical blow — worse, somehow, than the searing one the hedgeknight had dealt you, which has caused an unnatural cracking of your jaw ever since. Maybe because these cruel, cruel words come from the same mouth that has kissed you, pleasured you.

“Prisoner?” you repeat tearily, features screwed in disbelief. “You say you love me and yet you call me beast in the very same breath. Wh… What am I meant to make of that?”

Ormund’s face falters finally at the sight of your tears, clinging to your lower lashes and glimmering gold in the candlelight. A soft crack splits down the unforgiving marble of him as he shakes his head down at you. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says and turns away.

“Like what?” you spit at the back of him.

“Like I've wounded you,” he snaps, long coat fanning slightly at his waist when he turns to face you again, now several paces away. “Where was your Gwayne when you hadn’t eaten in five days, and I fed you bread from mine own hand? Tell me that.” 

Your mouth parts, but nothing comes out.

“Where was your dutiful husband when that hedgeknight had you pinned in the dirt with your skirts torn to your thighs?” Ormund continues, palms splayed at his sides for effect. “Because I did not see him riding to your rescue as I had. I did not see him holding you through the nights you woke screaming. That was me— Only me— And yet you still stand here and weep over a handful of mindless letters, as if that erases the whole of what I've done for you.” 

Your chin jerks back as you flinch hard at his words, at the weight of them, which you can feel heavying your chest until every new breath feels impossible. Ormunds goes silent for a moment; the shadow of his clenched jaw comes and goes as he grits his teeth. His fists open and close at his sides until they finally relax, when the anger within drains into mourning.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters suddenly, boots padding along the cobbles as he closes the distance between you once more. “Forgive me. You’re right, I— I should not have kept them from you. I only meant to spare you, you understand that, right?”

His wide, gently calloused hands reach for your cheeks with a tenderness that feels maddeningly sincere compared to the vitriol he’d thrown at you moments ago. He lifts your chin and ducks his head into your eyeline when you do not meet his gaze. His blue eyes go round and wet with a boyish grief as hurt sears through his chest.

“I only want to keep you safe,” he whispers. “Whatever else I’ve done wrong— that much has always been true… You know this, don’t you?”

He peers down at you and waits on bated breath for a response. You say nothing just yet. Your trembling hands reach from the gold buttons of his coat. At first, he thinks you mean to push him away — you want nothing more, in fact, than to push him away and wrench yourself from his hands and return to your place in bed next to Gwayne.

You do not.

You just close your eyes, exhausted past the point of arguing any further. The threads of guilt and love and fury and anguish tangle together somewhere deep in your chest, until one is utterly indistinguishable from the others. The only thing you know now for certain is that the whole of your life can be categorized into two groups: those who have stayed and those who have gone. 

Your own family had sailed across the Narrow Sea and left you behind without so much as a backwards glance; and Gwayne, gentle as he is, still rode off to serve a cause that mattered more to him than you. 

Ormund is, perhaps, the only person in your life who has never once abandoned you. Whatever else he has done to you before now — however cruel or calculating or maddening he has since become — he has never once walked away from you. Not when you intended to starve yourself, not when you were pinned in the mud by your skirts, not when you woke up screaming on particularly brutal nights.

You hate how much it all matters to you, however fickle it may seem. You hate it, and you hate that cannot make yourself stop needing it all the same.

“I don’t know what to do…” you confess in a broken voice, clutching him hard by the collar of his coat. His softened face is bleary behind the tears burning in your eyes. “I feel so guilty, Ormund— I do not know for how long I can bear it. It sets heavy on my chest, all the time, and I cannot set it down—”

“Then let me carry it,” he tells you. His grip goes more solid when you attempt to turn away, thumbs pressing harder into your cheeks. “I can bear it well enough for the two of us, I swear it—”

The breath of his words fans across your chin when he ducks down to kiss you, hard and sudden and searing. He tastes of wine and mint leaves when the velvety pad of his tongue licks into your mouth without warning. 

You sigh hard through your nose at the feeling of him and cling to the front of his coat as he walks you backward a few paces towards the desk. The edge of the wood catches hard against the backs of your thighs. Ormund’s hands dip from your face to your hips, balling the fabric of your gown until it rises up your legs.

“Did you take him into your bed tonight?” he pants rough against your mouth, with the tip of his broad nose nudging yours. “Your husband? Did you fuck him? Tell me.”

“No,” you shake your head on an exhaled breath. Your fingers curl into his dark curls as his wet mouth drags along your neck, down to your exposed collarbone. “I only pleasured him with my hand. Nothing more.” 

Ormund nods swiftly, as though pleased by the admission. He peers up at you through his lashes as he kisses down your clothed chest. “Always a giver, aren’t you?” he hums lowly, mouth quirking softly at the edges. “Allow me to return the favor, then…” 

He sinks to his knees, with your ivory skirt now pushed up to your thighs. You keep one hand splayed along the back of his knuckles and the other tangled in his curls as he kisses your cunt like he would your mouth. He moans when his tongue slots between your sticky folds, a muffled growl you can feel in the very pit of your stomach.

Ormund is not quite as measured with his mouth as Gwayne had been the evening before he left you. He’s fast and sloppy and loud — you can hear his tongue as it flicks against you, his lips as they suckle your clit, his moans as your honey pools on his tongue.

You swallow down a moan before it can swell through the quiet room. It turns into a whimper in your throat instead. “Ormund—” you gasp quietly, tugging him hard by the hair as his tongue laps at your swollen clit.

His bleary eyes open to peer up the length of your body — your heavy head tilted to your chest, your gaze lidded and glassy with pleasure, your chest rising and falling with uneven breaths. “Let me have it,” he slurs against your pussy, and smiles to himself at the pretty sound you make for him in response. “That’s it— Let me have it…” 

Your mouth presses into a tight line to choke back a moan when his mouth returns to your cunt, suckling the sensitive button between his lips and flicking his tongue against it simultaneously. You shudder against his mouth when you cum for him, whimpering when he buries his moans and muffled murmurs of praise against your drooling pussy.

You do as you’re told — you give it all to him, you let him bear it — while Gwayne sleeps off the remnants of war across the hall.

ix. GARDENS & GHOSTS

The gardens of Tumbleton are modest things compared to the grandeur of the Red Keep, though you struggle to remember it so vividly now. Here there are only a few neat rows of late-summer roses gone wild for want of a gardener, an overgrown path winding between shaggy hedges, and a slowly weeping fountain gone quiet and still. You spend Gwayne’s second evening at the foreign castle walking beneath a canopy of drooping wisteria, with your hands looped loosely through the crook of his arm and your dress skirts whispering against the stone with every languid step.

“I’d nearly forgotten what this was like…” Gwayne hums, studying the wilting roses with distracted interest. “Walking somewhere without waiting for an arrow to find me first…”

“Don’t worry, Ser Gwayne…” you squint with a teasing lilt. “I’ll keep you safe.”

And though Gwayne hasn’t so much as seen you hold a real sword in your hand, he flashes you a tight-lipped smile anyway. “Of that, dear wife, I have no doubt…” 

You fall into an easy quiet thereafter; the ordinary rhythm of marriage, though it still feels a bit foreign to you now. He asks only about small things: if the summer storms had frightened you too badly, if the men at the Hightower camp treated you well, and if you’d truly meant what you said about that farm. You answer each in turn, grateful for the ease of it — or, at least, for the brief illusion that nothing had changed between you at all.

“And the encampment?” Gwayne asks then, flashing you a knowing look from the corner of his eye. “You’d said precious little of it thus far. Surely, it wasn’t so unbearable— Though I’m sure my cousin likely wasn’t making it easy for you.”

“There isn’t much to say,” you shrug with a feigned air of detachment, though the words come out a little quicker than you mean them to. You catch the faint furrow of confusion between his brows, and pretend to be more preoccupied by the wilting wisteria overhead instead. “It was… eventful. I suppose. In its own way.”

“Eventful?” Gwayne repeats with an arched brow. An unsure laugh sputters from his chest a second later. “I can’t tell whether that’s meant as a comfort or a warning…”

“It’s nothing worth troubling over,” you tell him. “Truly.” 

Gwayne’s eyes flit down to where your wrists are curled lazily around his bicep. The dull nails of your right thumb and forefinger pick aimlessly at the already marred skin of your left. He stops instantly in place — he had sensed something amiss since you caught him in the yard, to be true, but he sees it more plainly in your being than he had the night before.

“Did something happen?” he blurts.

Your head whips to him, eyes widening in an innocuous look. “I… I don’t know what you mean?”

He swallows once and rephrases. “Something happened…” he repeats, this time as a firmer statement. “At the camp. Something you’re not telling me.” 

You exhale a slow and shaking breath, though it does little to loosen the tightness in your chest now. You find that, once cornered and with his pleading eyes searching your face, you cannot quite bring yourself to lie to him again.

“There was a… a man," you start unsteadily, eyes fixed on the overgrown hedge behind his shoulder rather than his face. “A hedgeknight. I was out gathering berries, and he— He asked me about a letter. The one you left me. And when I wouldn't— He tried to—”

“He tried to what?" Gwayne presses when you trail off, ducking his auburn head into your eyeline when you avert your gaze. His voice is low and careful, but you can hear the tension straining beneath it already. 

“He grabbed for it… And I struck him, without thinking, and he struck me back…” Your fingers lift absently to your cheek, brushing the ghost of a bruise with your finger, long since healed but not yet forgotten. Your gaze goes glassy and unfocused with the recollection of the memory — the smell of the berries, the taste of the blood, the feeling of the wet earth beneath you. The rest of the words come out in choppy and nonsensical. “And I fell— and my skirts— I think he meant too— I don’t know truly, but I— I could not stop him—”

“Gods…” Gwayne huffs, as if the breath had been punched out of him entirely. His pale, handsome features screw together in horror as his pale eyes glitter with anger at himself. “I should’ve been there… I never should’ve left you.”

“Ormund killed him,” you add quickly and watch a complicated look flicker behind Gwayne’s eyes at the name. “Before he could…”

Gwayne nods when you trail off, signaling that you need not go on any further. “I am glad for that, at least,” he says, though there is a strain in his voice that suggests something other than gladness. His palms reach for your hands then, preventing you from picking at the skin there. “I am glad my cousin was there for you. Truly. I was a fool leaving you behind. I should’ve stayed, I should’ve—” 

You shake your head in protest of his apologies. “No—”

“I should’ve been there—”

“Don’t,” you tell him, though the word spills broken from your mouth when you jerk your hands free from his. The sudden loss of his touch leaves your fingers strangely cold. “Don’t apologize. I do not deserve it.”

“Deserve it?” Gwayne echoes with lowered brows. “What do you mean, deserve it?”

“Your kindness,” you sniffle. “I don’t deserve it.”

Gwayne blinks owlishly at you, and feels a strange searing in his chest when you flinch back from him as he tries to step closer. “Why are you saying this?” 

“I have— I have sinned.” Your breath catches hard on a sob. Your wet eyes try and fail to meet his gaze. “I have betrayed you.”

Gwayne tenses at once. His face goes still and solemn; the warmth he’d had for you moments ago drains slowly from his features now. “What do you mean?” he wonders lowly.

“With— With Ormund— We— I,” you attempt to speak through hitched breaths, though you cannot seem to get any of the words out. “I cannot express to you— how unspeakably lonely I have been—”

“Lonely?” he repeats, spits back at you like venom. “Do you think I was not lonely?”

“You at least had a war to fight!” you argue tearily. “I was taken prisoner, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“And do you think I would not have rather been home?” Gwayne shouts. “With you, instead of watching my men die in a field over a war I never wanted any part of?”

“You’re the one who left!” you exclaim when he turns away from you, already retreating down the gravel path before he can lose his composure completely. “If you stayed, we could’ve been together! And none of this would’ve happened! You act like someone was dragging you by your boots to go fight a useless war!”

Gwayne stops at that, a few paces ahead. His shoulders are rigid beneath his borrowed doublet when he turns to you again, though not enough to face you fully. Only his profile is visible to you now, with his auburn hair falling over his brow and his emotionless grin hinting at the corner of his mouth.

“I did not… want this marriage…” he confesses in calculated murmurs. “Not at first, anyway. That much I’ll admit, but… From the moment I wed you, it never once crossed my mind to seek comfort elsewhere.”

“Gwayne, I—”

“I meant my vows,” he tells you and turns, finally, to face you fully. You found no trace of fury in his face now, only a pained sort of look that turns his pale eyes a glassier shade of blue. “I have always meant them.”

“I didn't know if you were alive!” you agonize through a sob. “Don’t you understand that? Months, Gwayne — months without a single word! Not knowing whether you were breathing or rotting in some unmarked grave! And I couldn't even write to you to ask, because Ormund told me it wasn't safe. He said the letters might be intercepted, might lead Rhaenyra's army straight to you, and I could not risk that—”

“Ormund told you that?” Gwayne interjects, voice gone dull and cold. “That your letters weren’t— safe to send?”

“Yes,” you nod. “He said that—”

“And mine?” Gwayne presses with a slow step closer. “I presume he kept mine from you as well. That’s why you never got them, isn’t it? Because of him?”

You go quiet, unsure of how to answer — like there’s some joke here somewhere you have not yet been let in on. But, to Gwayne, your silence is answer enough. He exhales a long, shuddering breath through his nose.

“Ormund and I used to play a game,” he tells you suddenly, with a humorless smile ghosting across his mouth. “Run the tower, we called it— a footrace to the top beacon. And I let him win. Every time. Because he could not bear to lose even the smallest thing.”

Your eyes widen slightly, as you remember Daeron’s warning in the castle window — his anxious, hardly intelligible ramble. “It’s a dangerous thing to be the prize he’s decided he’s won,” the boy had told you. You hadn’t understood what he meant by that until now.

Gwayne’s features screw with a withheld fury, one that Ormund would’ve already unleashed on you tenfold by now if the roles were reversed.

“He was a thin-skinned twat even then. I thought it harmless, at the time. I never imagined…” he trails off, clicking his tongue against his teeth when he turns to you again. He shakes his head as his mouth twitches into a sympathetic sort of smile. “If you think Ormund loves you, dear wife, I assure you, he does not. He simply decided that you were another game worth winning.”

He does not wait for your response. He turns on his heel, and when he walks away this time, he does not stop. 

His feet carry him down the overgrown path, through the winding unfamiliar castle, and straight towards Ormund’s solar — without him ever fully registering any of it; not until he swings open the heavy oak door, at least, and is met instantly with the humidity of an incensed bath. He nearly chokes on the musky oils sitting heavily in the air.

“Leave us,” Gwayne orders Daeron in lieu of a real greeting. The boy’s eyes widen in shock at the sudden intrusion from where he stands obediently off to the side, robe in hand. His gaze flits to Ormund’s on instinct, who gives him a curt nod of approval without looking up, before scurrying out of the room.

The older man sits submerged to the chest in a steaming copper tub. A wooden tray sits balanced across the rim, with his inkpot and parchment laid before him. His quill scratches against the paper in swift strokes until Gwayne unsheathes his long sword with a sharp hiss. The older man tenses when the steel kisses the soft skin of his throat.

“You will explain yourself,” Gwayne says, peering down at the man from the bridge of his nose. “Or, by the gods, I will open your throat right here in this tub.” 

Ormund does not so much as flinch when he sets his quill back into its inkpot. He tilts his chin just slightly to look up at the man and feels the faint pressure of the blade against his adam’s apple. Amusement flickers in his blue eyes.

“She told you, then,” he hums — not quite a question but not entirely a statement either. “I did wonder how long that might take.”

“She told me everything,” Gwayne bites out through clenched teeth. “The letters— mine to hers; hers to me. Months of lies, cousin, you called protection.”

“Yes. I protected her," Ormund nods without reservation. “More than you ever did, seeing as you were hundreds of leagues away and all. I fed her when she attempted to starve herself grieving you. I killed a man who meant to rape her in a berry patch while you were off playing at war like a child—”

Gwayne tenses at the accusation buried in his words. The edge of the blade presses harder to Ormund’s throat, but still, he does not waver.

“I gave her a place to sleep when the storms came, and warmth when the nights grew cold, and company when she felt no one else in the entire realm cared whether she lived or died,” the man lilts evenly. His voice does not rise and his stare does not yield, not even with the cold steel resting steadily against his pulse. “So, please, spare me the outrage, cousin. I only gave her what she asked for— freely, and often, and more enthusiastically than you can imagine.”

Gwayne’s whole body goes rigid. A mixture of fury and humiliation prickles red-hot at his pale skin. His knuckles turn white around the hilt of his sword, but the blade does not move an inch.

“Well, go on, then,” Ormund tilts his head, eyes glimmering with amusement. “Finish it, if you mean to. Open my throat here, in my own bath, and we’ll see who she weeps for. You or me.”

Silence fills the empty solar. Gwayne grits his teeth and wills his hand to move; to either strike the man down or turn away entirely. He cannot seem to do either. 

Ormund lifts a lazy hand to swipe the blade away without a word. He rises slowly from the bath a second later. Rivulets of water glisten as they rush down his lean body and trickle audibly when they hit the surface again. He stands before his cousin, unabashedly bare, and reaches for the linen cloth draped over the edge of the tub. 

“For what it’s worth, cousin,” he says, swiping the nettle across his toned, golden skin. “I never intended to make an enemy of you. And I rather think, whatever she may tell you now to spare your pride, that she’d choose to stay exactly where she is, if given the choice.”

Gwayne opens his mouth to argue.

“Daeron!” Ormund calls out before he can. 

The door creaks slowly open a second later. The younger boy reappears with an obvious hesitance, refusing to meet either of their eyes as he rushes to his uncle’s side. He settles the emerald fabric over the older man’s broad shoulders, and Ormund slides his arms through the long sleeves. He ties the sash with slow hands and with an expression that looks almost sympathetic.

“Best wash up soon, cousin,” he grins. “It’s nearly time for supper.”

x. STEEL & SUPPER

Supper that evening is a small and wretched thing; four places set at a round table dragged in from some lesser hall to make the arrangement feel less tribunal. It’s close enough that you can feel the heat of both men suffocating either side of you, along with the cold, watchful silence of Daeron across the way; young enough to shift awkwardly in his seat at the tense silence, but old enough still to understand exactly what such silence truly means.

No one speaks a word of the hard truth of it out loud. Neither of you needs to — the whole of your sin sits at the table like an uninvited guest, souring the wine in every cup and thickening the air until you can scarcely draw a single breath around it.

“So…” Ormund says first to break the silence. He talks beneath the soft scraping of his knife against the porcelain as he cuts into his meat. “Ser Criston fights on, and yet you alone have returned to us… Why is that, I wonder?”

Gwayne turns slowly to glare at the man with dull, blue eyes, already too annoyed for idle blather. “Because fighting on is madness,” he answers distantly.

Ormund scoffs with a wad of food in his cheek. He smiles as he swallows it down, angling his head in the young prince’s direction. “Do you think me mad, boy?”

Daeron’s eyes shoot up from his plate. His spine straightens instinctively at his uncle’s sudden attention. “No, sire,” he answers quickly.

Ormund nods, pleased, and then turns slowly to you. A fondness flickers in his pale gaze behind the challenge in his eyes. “And you, my—” He catches himself half a breath too late; my love, he’d nearly said, though you cannot tell if it was an intentional attempt to rile his already aggrieved cousin. “My lady… Do you think me mad?”

Your brows bounce in response, though your gaze never lifts from your lap as your nails work relentlessly at the already torn skin of your thumb. “I don’t think you want me to answer that—”

You freeze in place when Ormund’s wide hand reaches suddenly to splay his calloused palm over the back of your knuckles. Your head whips in his direction. You struggle to tell if the action is heedless or entirely uncaring, as Gwayne sits close enough to watch the exchange on the other side of you. The man inhales sharply through his nose and straightens his spine as he reaches for his goblet, trying hard to pretend he hadn’t noticed it at all.

“Why do you insist on ruining yourself this way?” Ormund wonders lowly, as his thumb rubs soothingly over your marred one.

“Seems to be a common affliction as of late,” you answer distantly and draw your hands from beneath his touch. “Messing with things we ought to leave well enough alone…”

“You are aware—” Gwayne says gruffly as he swallows down his bitter wine, setting down his chalice with a bit more force than likely necessary. “—That while you’re all in here playing happy families, there’s a dragon sitting on the hill above us? And five more not thirty leagues away?”

“Why do you think we came here, cousin?” Ormund scoffs and waves his concern away with a lazy flick of his knife. “Rhaenyra will not burn her own subjects. She is a woman, after all. Squeamish, by nature.”

A short laugh spills suddenly from your lips. “Squeamish?” you echo. “Says the man who requires a milk bath twice daily, lest he make it everyone else’s burden to bear?”

The jab earns a proud smile from Gwayne that he tries hopelessly to bite back, and a small grin from Daeron that he conceals behind the rim of his goblet. Ormund swallows hard through the embarrassment strangling his throat, angled jaw clenching as he grits his teeth.

“Well… If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were taking up the usurper’s cause.”

“I’m not taking up anyone’s cause,” you mutter. “I just want to go home.”

“Oh?” Ormund hums with a feigned air of curiosity, though you do not miss the bite in his words as he wonders aloud, “And where is that precisely? King’s Landing? Oldtown?”

“Well, it’s certainly not here—”

“No,” he agrees instantly, warmth freezing over in an instant. “But when the usurper’s host comes here, we will fight on our own terms, on our own ground— turning King’s Landing against that overweening cunt, little by little, bite by bite… And when we expose her as weak and unsuited to rule, the great houses will flock to our side, and then, my lady, we can all go home.”

“Have any yet come?” Gwayne wonders knowingly. “Great houses, I mean.”

Ormund’s gaze snaps in his direction. “The patient hunter gets the kill, cousin,” he says through gritted teeth. “I’d have thought you’d learned that much by now.”

“Only one of us at this table has actually been hunted, if you’ll recall…”

“Yes, you have endured much,” Ormund huffs and returns to his boar. “Though I’m sure you find some solace along the road… with whores, perhaps, or your… brothers in arms…”

The insinuation sits heavily in the quiet, thicker than smoke and choking the three of you accordingly. Gwayne’s jaw tightens hard enough to make the muscle flex. Whatever retort had been rising in his throat at that moment is killed instantly by the sudden creaking of the heavy door across the room. Bold Jon enters, flanked by a couple of punier squires. 

“My lord,” the older knight announces. “House Baratheon has sent an envoy. They mean to bend the knee to House Hightower.”

Ormund is aglow in an instant. The sourness of the previous moment rolls off of his broad shoulders as a newfound satisfaction kindles behind his blue eyes. “Let the Stormlands lead the way…” he mutters to himself, mouth curling into a grin. “Highgarden will have no choice but to follow…” 

He flashes you a proud and knowing look as he rises from his seat. “Alright. Stand up,” he says and begins to round the small table. When no one follows him quick enough, he snaps, “Stand up! All of you.”

You rise at once, abandoning your plates as you follow him to the front of the dining table. The three of you fall into line beside the high lord, who stands just ahead to greet the incoming knights Ser Jon ushers in. The knights are caked in dirt from the long road; their yellow cloaks are crusted thick with mud, and their boots track dark prints across the fine pale stone beneath them. They smell like earth and sweat, hardly noticeable to you, though you spot Ormund’s shoulders tensing instantly when the stench hits him.

“Lord Ormund Hightower,” Roxton announces formally. “Beacon of the South, Defender of the Citadel, and Voice of Oldtown.”

“Well met, Ser Ormund," the head of the envoy greets with a polite nod, arms propped along the pommel of his longsword. “I come on behalf of Lord Borros Baratheon, Lord Paramount of the Stormlands.”

“Mm…” Ormund hums, ringed fingers fidgeting at his sides as he attempts to swallow through the invisible hand strangling him. “You are quite welcome, Ser…?”

“Ser Arrion Baratheon. Cousin to Lord Borros.”

You freeze at once. A newfound fear settles ice-cold in your veins. Your eyes squint as you study the stranger’s bearded face more closely — his curls, his eyes, his nose, his mouth. You find that he looks nothing like the Ser Arrion you had once met, at a tourney some several moons back; the one where you first laid eyes on Ser Gwayne Hightower.

The man himself tenses at your elbow. His jaw clenches tight with knowing as he turns slowly to flash you a single, silent glance. You communicate without words. His folded hands fall casually beside the sheathed sword at his hip; yours cross behind your back, as you reach blindly for the fruit knife idling somewhere beside the plates of supper.

“I most regret presenting ourselves to you in this state,” the stranger continues. 

Your jaw clenches tight in frustration as your fingers miss the handle in several agonizing attempts. You slide it closer with the very tip of your middle finger, slowly so as not to draw attention, before your fingers close finally around the hilt. You grip the blade to your back, palm going clammy around the grip.

“The road was long and filthy, but I thought it best to speak to you immediately.”

“We are honored to receive you,” Ormund assures him, entirely unaware. “And what word does Lord Borros send?”

“House Baratheon offers its banners in alliance with House Hightower,” the envoy says. “I have been charged to swear fealty on Lord Borros' behalf.”

“Well,” Ormund grins. “Your lord has made a wise choice—”

“Ser Arrion?” you call at once, stepping forward and drifting instinctively in front of Daeron with your arm still tight around your back. The boy’s eyes widen when he catches sight of the blade behind you. Your smile remains as artificially sweet as ever, despite the way your heart hammers hard against your ribs. “You do remember me, don’t you?”

The man’s heavy brows furrow as confusion flickers across his bearded face. He musters a similarly fake grin. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, my lady—”

The hesitant answer is confirmation enough. Gwayne unsheaths his sword in a blink and slices the imposter across the neck before he can finish his sentence. His throat splits wide open, bright crimson blood gushing out instantly. You feel it splattering across your cheek as the man falls limp to the ground in front of you.

The dining hall erupts into chaos in a blink. The shouting of Baratheon imposters and Hightower knights fills the room at once. One lunges towards you, trying to get to Daeron, you figure, though he’s met with the small blade clutched in your trembling grip before he can. 

You drive the knife into the first soft place you can find — his eye, you think, and then the side of his neck, before he crumples to the floor screaming.

“No!” Ormund’s voice shouts over the ringing of colliding blades, flashing a fiery look at Ser Jon. “Stop them, you fool!”

Daeron steps quickly in front of the older knight. “No!” he says to the man, small as he is, but standing his ground regardless.

“These are assassins!” Gwayne shouts over the clash of steel, kicking one knight down before striking him across the skull. “Sent for Daeron— and probably you!”

A pair of thick hands close hard around your wrist, cold and calloused and unforgiving. It yanks a memory from some buried place in your mind — spilled berries, wet earth, pooled blood in the mouth. You do not know whether or not he intends to strike you, or if he truly does, or if he only means to stop you. You only feel a girlish fury clawing its way from your throat as a buzzing adrenaline prickles at your burning skin. 

The bloody knife in your fist cuts him clean across the face — his throat, his jaw, his cheek, his eye, his temple. He stumbles back against the wall, bloodied and unrecognizable, but still you do not stop. Your blade follows him as he sinks to the ground in a gurgling, limp ball. His blood splashes warm across your face, clinging sticky to your fingers, but you still do not stop.

“Enough, enough…” you hear a voice say from behind you, muffled through the ringing in your ears. You feel a warmth press against your side and a gentle hand curl around your wrist. Gwayne’s voice follows more clearly in your ear, “He’s dead… It’s over now...”

The adrenaline seems to ebb from your veins at once, with a raw sob sputtered from your mouth. The knife slips from your limp fingers, clattering audibly to the bloodied cobbles below. You feel something warm trickling across your forehead and reach to wipe it with the back of your hand; blood smears wet across your brow in its place.

Across the wrecked hall, Ormund hunches over the back of his chair on the other side of the table. His face has gone pale-white; made more ashen, perhaps, behind the drops of vivid crimson splattered across his face. The thick copper stench of it settles in the back of his throat, along with the sweat and mud and death and shit hanging in the air.

“How—” he chokes hoarsely out. “How did you know— These men were false?”

“I was nearly betrothed to Lord Borros’ son once,” you hear yourself answer, though the words sound a bit distant, like they’re coming from someone else’s mouth. “I met his cousin… Lord Arrion…  at a tourney in King’s Landing years ago… I gave him my favor that day—”

“Right before I cut him down,” Gwayne adds through panted breaths, with a distant satisfaction in his voice at the memory. “The real Ser Arrion Baratheon has hair of light chestnut, stands near a foot taller and is, as it happens, far more comely."

Ormund makes a low, strangled sound in the back of his throat. “I will cleave the bitch— From crown to cunt—” he manages between heaving breaths “—She will die wishing she never dared to... dared to…” 

His body seizes as he retches — once, then twice — before doubling over the table and vomiting his supper along the plates ahead of him.

Gwayne watches on with a grim sort of amusement. “Best wash up now, cousin,” he hums in jest, as drily as Ormund had to him earlier that day. 

His amused smile fades when he catches you swaying in the corner of his eye.

The room seems to tilt on its axis under your feet. The cobbles sway softly beneath you, as if you were standing on water instead of stone. You reach blindly for the back of the nearest chair to steady yourself; you watch your fingers curl around the embellished wood, though you cannot feel it under your palms. Daeron’s quick hand catches you beneath the elbow in a small attempt to steady you.

“My lady?” he mutters softly, beneath Gwayne’s firmer, “Are you hurt?” 

Your mouth parts, but it takes a moment for the words to come out. They fall from your tongue in strange slurs that sound nothing like your voice. “My back…” You trail off before choking on a whimper. It is not pain you feel, not completely, but rather a cold numbness blossoming wide along the left side of your spine.

Ormund perks instantly, swiping a hand along his chin and fighting off his own dizziness when he watches Gwayne close the distance between you. His long, pale fingers skim carefully along your shoulders as he examines the back of you. They settle finally just above the thin tear in your bodice, where the fabric of your borrowed dress starts to bloom a darker crimson from the blood spreading from underneath it — from where a soldier’s blade must’ve kissed you in the chaos.

“Gods…” you hear Gwayne breathe just behind you. “You’re bleeding— Someone call the maester!” 

Your knees buckle underneath you as the strength spills from your body like sand through your fingers. Two sets of hands keep you upright; one smaller and trembling, the other wider and far more steady. They guide you into the seat before you can collapse. You watch Gwayne kneel into your vision with his palms resting firmly on your knees. The world continues swaying all around you.

“Let me see it,” Ormund says through panted breaths, gripping the table’s edge as he attempts to walk to you despite his own weakening state. He’s still pale and sheening with sweat from the blood clinging to his skin and nostrils.

“You can barely stand yourself,” Gwayne scolds drily. “She is my wife— I am more than capable of tending to her.” 

Ormund attempts to laugh, though the chuckle comes out wearier than he means to. “Are you?” the older man manages to choke out. “Because you surely haven’t cared about tending to her while you were off playing at war—”

“Enough…” The word comes out slurred and hoarse from your mouth. The men fall silent at once. Their heads whip in your direction with matching expressions of concern that would’ve felt almost comical in any other moment.

The pain has started to sharpen now beneath the somewhat pleasant numbness. A hot, insistent throb begins to settle in its wake, searing through you like fire.

Your first instinct is to reach for Gwayne, but the guilt of what you’d done to him weighs on your hands like cement — what right do you have, you think, to reach for him now with bloodied hands, after months of reaching for another? 

And then you think inevitably of Ormund and the particular safety you’ve always found in his hands, after he’s already seen you blood-soaked and broken and ugly from war, and never once flinched away at any of it. And then you think of the burned letters and the lies, and then of Gwayne’s departure with only a sliver of parchment left in his wake. 

You reach, in the end, for neither of them.

“Daeron,” you call instead to the boy hovering beside you. You turn your swimmy gaze to his wide and frightened ones. Your voice is unnaturally thick in your throat as you ask him, “Can— Can you help me up to my chambers, please?”  

The boy blinks and forgets to look to his uncle for approval first as he nods. “O-Of course, my lady,” he stammers and loops your arm carefully over his shoulder. “Lean on me…” 

You do not look back at either man behind you as Daeron eases you from the chair and guides you slowly towards the door; but you do feel both of their eyes following you like twin points of heat searing through your dress, just like the soldier’s blade had. Neither Gwayne nor Ormund says a single word; the hollow sound of your fading footsteps fills the silence as you go. 

The two of them are left standing alone together, amid the bloody wreckage of the unfamiliar hall, staring at the space where you’d once been.

to those of you who made it this far, thank you, i love you, and i'm sorry lol more to come soon!

[lovebugism]

TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS ─── gwayne hightower

gif creds: @userarmand

summary: you nurse gwayne back to life again when the war leaves him for dead, and he finds himself in no hurry to be rescued from you. (5k)

characters: gwayne hightower / fem!reader

contents: strangers to lovers, hurt/comfort, domestic fluff, mutual pining, canon divergent, not proofread, cw for mentions of blood and injuries, smut 18+ (MDNI): sub!gwayne, unprotected sex, premature ejaculation, face riding (this man has been through enough i just need someone to take care of him okay)

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

Gwayne’s heavy eyes open first to a low, timbered ceiling made of clay and dry-rotted oak — certainly not the ornately embellished stone of the Red Keep, which would’ve suggested that Daemon’s army had won in their ambush and had since taken him hostage; but it wasn’t the sagging canvas of a war tent either, which also meant that no green army had yet come to his rescue. This place, wherever this place was, was small and warm and heavy with the scent of a home-cooked meal and the coppery tang of his own blood.

The hurt returns to him as slowly his consciousness does. His body aches in a way that tells him, a bit more clearly than his own memory could, that he had been long in the dying not too long ago. All of his bones feel rusted shut and heavy; each breath feels like gravel in his lungs and blades against his ribs.

“Where am I…?” Gwayne wonders aloud in a near-inaudible rasp, almost lost beneath the crackle of a fire and the soft hiss of a pot simmering somewhere close.

His heavy head lolls on the thin pillow beneath him. The cushion propping up his stiff neck smells like something floral and sweet, like a woman. As his eyes scan the room, he finds that this quaint house, if it could even be referred to as such, is made of only one room — there’s a dining nook crowded in the corner by the window, a cluttered living area in the opposite corner by the hearth, and apparently a sickbed in which he languishes now. 

Through the haze still clinging in his vision, he spots a figure dressed in tatters stirring at a pot with practiced hands — sleeves pushed up to the elbows, faded skirts flowing just below the knee. You do not startle at the sound of his voice, nor do you turn to look at him right away as you crush a handful of dried rosemary into the bubbling water before you. 

“Starry Hill,” you answer plainly, as though you were talking to an old friend rather than a half-dead ghost in your bed. You turn slowly over your shoulder and watch confusion twist at the man’s handsome features — (he’d studied every keep, holdfast, and port in Westeros his father told him to, and yet he’d never once heard of this one). “And no, you haven’t heard of it before.”

The grin is evident in your voice as you turn away to wipe your palms off on a rag. You catch the man’s glassy blue eyes darting around your home — over the crooked shelf of clay jars, past the mismatched chairs around the ancient dining table, and towards the narrow window where dim orange light falls in slanted rays. He cannot yet tell whether it’s dawn or dusk, and the notion disorients him further.

“Apologies for the mess, my lord,” you sigh. “If I’d known I was going to be housing a Hightower for three days, I might’ve tidied the place up a bit first.”

Gwayne’s auburn brows furrow slowly as his face twists in a deeper confusion — both at the thought of having spent three days unconscious in this place, and at the ease with which you seemed to know his name. His house. His blood. “How… How did you know I was a Hightower?”

Your head turns lazily on your shoulder to flash the man a narrow-eyed, almost pitying sort of look. Your gaze falls across his flaming copper hair, the aristocratic slope of his nose, and the inherited Hightower beauty that not even war, nor three days on his deathbed, could manage to take from him. Even halfway ruined, the man still looks like something bred for portraiture. And it would, perhaps, be so easy to tell him as much.

“Well, you were wearing the sigil all over your armor, to be fair,” you deadpan instead and turn back to your cooking.

Only then does Gwayne realize that the heaviness of his armor is long gone from his frame. All of his clothes, in fact, are gone — the pale canvas of his bare chest is on display now, carved lean from a lifetime in the training yard, and now sporting a square piece of plaster across his ribcage. Beneath the heavy quilt thrown over his legs, he can feel a pair of baggy trousers riding low on his hips that do not belong to him. 

Which means you had to have undressed him; bathed him; patched up his marred skin. The thought alone is dizzying.

Panic wraps its hands around his throat as he rises onto his elbows, grimacing at the ache it puts in his side and somewhere deep in his bicep — where a linen cloth has been wrapped tight.

“How did I get here?”

“Your guess is as good as mine…” you huff without looking away from the pot ahead of you. “You’re the one who showed up half-dead on my doorstep, if you’ll recall— So I think I have more questions for you than you have for me, in truth.”

Gwayne’s eyes go glassy and distant as he strains to recollect the events that led him here. 

He remembers Ser Criston’s words about a death march, and the sudden screeching of his horse when the first volley of enemy arrows came flying every which way. He vaguely remembers his mare rearing up and tossing him onto his back against the heavy forest floor, and the way the world erupted with the shouting of a hundred men or more all at once. But he does not know what became of any of them now.

“I need to leave,” he announces at once.

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” you wince as you watch the man fling the quilt from his body, visibly toned from years of knighthood but still pale from his lingering brush with death. “Not on that leg of yours— I’m still not sure I set the bone just right.”

Gwayne’s jaw clenches tight as he swings his legs over the side of the bed. His tired muscles pull taut in protest, though it doesn’t hurt him nearly as badly as his left shin does when his bare feet hit the ancient floorboards. A white-hot pain sears from ankle to knee; his chiseled face screws tight as he chokes on a scream. 

He doubles over in agony and digs his trembling fists into the thin sheets of the down mattress, struggling to take stock of his injuries. 

There’s a plaster just below his knee and a sickly yellow-green bruise blooming just below that, from where the bone came through when the weight of his horse fell on top of him, perhaps. There’s a hot, pulsing feeling beneath the plaster on his right arm — a small but concentrated signature that must’ve come from an arrow. And the length of the shallow scrape along his ribs suggests that it came from a kiss of an enemy blade.

All of it is dressed now in clean linen, from the same kind hands stirring supper across the room from him, entirely unbothered by his suffering.

“Seven fucking hells…” you groan, more to yourself than to him. “I forgot the bloody potatoes.”

Gwayne blinks wildly at your passing figure as you trade the wooden spoon in your hands for the dark, beaten cloak hanging beside the door. “P-Potatoes?” he stammers in response, because he can think of a thousand issues much more pressing than potatoes.

“Yes,” you nod, sliding your arms through the thick woolen sleeves gone soft and shapeless with age. “You can’t have rabbit stew without potatoes. It ruins the whole dish— I’d think you’d know that, as a pretty little lord and all.”

He perks slightly at the mention of it — of food, and of the thought that some other man must surely live here to have killed and skinned the meat for your stew. 

“Where is your father?” he calls to your retreating form.

There’s a certain edge of command in his voice that tries to surface past the wavers of pain. He attempts to assert some Hightower authority in the walls of your home, despite being half-dressed and hunched over the edge of your bed and completely at your mercy. 

“Or a husband, perhaps? Someone I can speak rationally with.”

“No father… No husband…” you sigh and tie the top of your coat, which is a size or three too big for you. “You can speak rationally to me, if you wish, though I fear your current hysterics might render conversation somewhat impossible… But I require no thanks for saving your life, to be sure.”

Your words carry a certain bite that pierces him straight through the chest; the devastating reminder of a debt he has not yet had any sense to acknowledge. 

The door opens with a high-pitched creaking sound; the cool breeze that rushes in tells him that the day is ending rather than just beginning. You pause at the threshold, hand on the frame and hood half-raised

“If you’re going to leave, at least remember to shut the door behind you,” you tell him, detached but not totally unkind. “I don’t want the smell of supper bringing the animals down from the hill.”

The door screeches and clicks behind you, punctuating your leaving. The little house — smaller than his bathing chambers back in Oldtown — goes very quiet and very still with your absence. The eeriness unnerves a distant, boyish part of him that wishes most desperately for your return. The rest of him, however, wants nothing more than to be rid of this place entirely — from the strangeness of it and of you most of all.

Gwayne grits his teeth and hauls himself not-quite to full height. He’s doubled over and bracing his white-knuckled grip on the ancient wooden bedframe as he hobbles the short distance towards the door, fighting through the screaming ache shooting up and down his left leg. He makes it not even five steps before it gives out on him completely.

He crumples to the unforgiving ground in a graceless heap of limbs and injured pride, catching himself on instinct with the arm sporting the throbbing arrow wound going down.

He lies there, groaning and writhing and choking down cries of frustration with his cheek pressed to the cold floor. The sound of his ragged breaths fills the small, empty house as he watches the sunset dip low past the window, quietly waiting for the sound of the door to open — and for your presence to follow.

It opens at last; three minutes or three hours later. A silken breeze rushes in alongside you, as you enter with a basket of potatoes and other vegetables on your hip. You falter in the doorway at the sight of the man sprawled out on your floor, a crumpled puppet with all of its strings cut clean.

A strange, satisfied smile creeps across your face as you swipe your hood back with your free hand. “Well…” you croon lowly. “What do we have here?”

Gwayne lifts his heavy head. He looks up at you with watery blue eyes through the strands of wild auburn hair hanging over his brow. He loses every ounce of his composure in that moment, turning into a doe-eyed and pleading thing as his wet gaze peers at you from beneath his lashes.

“Please…” he rasps. “Help me…”

He doesn’t learn your name until the second day. He does not stand on his own until the fifth. And he does not bathe himself unaided until the seventh. 

You do not coddle him for any of it. You clean his wounds and change his bandages twice daily, and scold him for flinching at the sting — telling him that he’d spent too many years being pampered by wetnurses and that was precisely why he healed so slowly. But, after that first week, he learned to walk the length of your small home without his leg buckling underneath him; though he still requires the cane you’d fashioned for him out of a stag’s antler if he plans on taking more than a step or two.

“Here. So you can stop looking like a newborn calf every time you cross the room,” you’d said when you gifted it to him. “It’s starting to get hard to watch, if I’m honest.”

He is, if he’s being entirely truthful with himself, entirely unused to being spoken to this way. The ladies of his acquaintance back in Oldtown — the soft, sweet-voiced daughters of high lords and ladies — would never have dared to call him hysterical to his face or handle his wounds with such unromantic efficiency. They never would have laughed, as you had, at the sight of him crumpled on the floor. 

You’re nothing at all like the ladies he grew up with. 

You swear like a dockhand; you name your goats like they're your kin; you wear your dead parents' old clothes without a trace of shame and speak of your own life with a bluntness that would scandalize every septa he'd grown up with. It should, perhaps, trouble him a great deal more than it does.

Gwayne knows he could’ve and likely should’ve left days ago. He suspects that you know it, too. Tumbleton was not far from here, you told him, and his kin held the fortress now — a real castle with a real maester to tend to him — rather than this strange, sharp-tongued woman with rough hands and a rougher sense of humor. But still, he does not go. He tells himself that it’s his leg; that the roads were surely not safe yet and that he’d be long in the dying should he cross Daemon’s army a second time.

So he stays, and he makes himself useful to you in the waiting, in whatever small ways he can manage. He could not do much, at first — he could not chop firewood or carry water; he could barely carry himself, in truth — but he could mend a fence while seated, and feed the farm animals while leaning on his cane, and shell the peas you bring in from the garden for supper. 

Gwayne quickly discovers, to his own mortification, that he takes a strange satisfaction in it all. This was not a life meant for knights, certainly not one meant for a Hightower, but yet he can picture all the rest of his days playing out exactly like this — utterly unremarkable, but his just the same.

It has been three weeks since his arrival, give or take, and his days feel less like exile now and more like routine. He sits propped on the pillows after his bath, milky-white skin glimmering from your homemade oils, with nothing but a pair of borrowed trousers covering his lower half.

You sit on the edge of the bed beside him and redress the stubborn wound on his arm that refuses to heal — the worst of his injuries he came here with, Gwayne insists; a nerve-deep pain that he swears he can feel when he’s dreaming. But even still, weeks into the habit of tending to him, you are no gentler about it than you were that very first night.

“Ow—” Gwayne winces when you press too firmly against the wound. You catch his elbow before he can draw it away and urge it back into place with an unsentimental force.

“Stop squirming,” you scold and continue to dab the homemade, herb-flecked ointment onto the irritated skin.

“It hurts,” the man insists.

“It hurts because you’re squirming.”

Gwayne attempts to glare at you as you reach for the linen cloth on the table beside you. The playful frown softens with a soft smile despite himself. “Has anyone ever told you that your bedside manner is just extraordinary?”

“All the time…” you lilt back and slide the fabric around his arm, tying it off with one particularly harsh tug. “Usually right before they tell me that they're feeling much better and no longer require any of my help.”

“Well…” Gwayne croons, pale eyes glittering in the dancing candlelight. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you wanted me gone…”

You glance finally up at him from beneath your lashes, at the handsome knight sharing your house — with bright copper hair gone soft from his bath, and bright blue eyes a little too earnest for someone meant to be teasing — the kind of man that belonged in the fairytales you’d read as a child; not in your own home in your own bed.

Something in your sharp expression finally gives, like The Wall finally weeping after the first warm day of summer.

“You’re the prettiest thing I’ve seen in years, Ser Gwayne,” you hum lowly. “So if you haven’t realized by now that I’m keeping you hostage here, then I fear you haven’t been paying attention.”

A breathy laugh shakes his toned stomach, and the scar along his ribs no longer pulls to do so. He’s fairly certain that you’re jesting, but even still, he doesn’t think he’d care all that much if you weren’t.

“I find that…” he trails slowly off with a squinted look in his pale eyes, as if the realization were hitting him the moment the words fell from his mouth. His melodic voice carries a sort of airiness in it despite the soft confession. “That perhaps I wouldn’t mind it. Being your hostage… Staying here. With you… I don't think I'd mind that at all…”

“Well… That’s a very dangerous thing to say to a woman with nothing to lose, Ser Gwayne,” you murmur, propping your fists on either side of his waist as you lean in close to him — until he can smell the lavender soap on your skin and count the flecks of firelight in your gaze. “Your army has surely presumed you dead by now… No one will come looking for you here… So if you do not wish to be kept by me, the door is still open…”

Something in his chest flares hot at your words, at the thought of being kept by you.

“For how long?” he teases with an arched auburn brow, pink lips curling into a slow smile.

Your eyes flit away and back again. “…Roughly the next ten seconds.”

“Well…” he lilts as his hand lifts slowly from the blankets to cradle your jaw, urging you that much closer. “That seems like plenty of time.”

He leans off the pillow to press his mouth to yours. His nose smushes into the side of yours as his plush lips slot with your softer ones. Your tongue darts between them with little warning and a degree too eager, swiping against his like velvet on velvet. Gwayne exhales a heavy sigh through his nose at the taste of you — like supper and wine and something foreign that he chases with each languid kiss.

You kiss him long and slow, like biting into the sweet skin of an apple, and shift on the mattress to straddle his waist. Gwayne’s free hand shoves the quilt down his thighs to accommodate you upon them. Your fingers rest around his neck like a collar as you grind your hips over his, up his lap and down again. A groan rumbles like thunder in his throat.

His hands dart instantly for your waist, knotting his long fingers in the skirts pushed up to your thighs, as he pulls off of you with a quiet smack. “Don’t,” he hears himself plead.

“Why?” you pant, blinking back at him with heavy eyes.

“It’s been…” His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “A long… long time.”

Your lips curl into a grin before your head ducks down again. Your mouth smears along his pulse in a sloppy kiss. “Three weeks isn’t so long, is it?”

A laugh sounds in his throat. You feel it rumbling against your mouth. “The war’s been going on for a lot longer than three weeks, my dear…” 

“Don’t tell me Ser Gwayne hasn’t taken his fair share of whores on the road,” you quip against the milky white tendon of his neck.

He smiles with his nose in your hair. “Not many whores on the battlefield, I’m afraid…”

“Oh, you poor thing…” you croon as you pull slowly back from him, more gentle with him now than you were when he was half dead on your porch; though there’s still a playful air about you that he doesn’t yet miss. “No wonder you’ve been so uptight… You’ve just been looking for a little… release, haven’t you? Spit—”

Gwayne’s eyes widen as they flick between your expectant face and the hand you hold under his chin. Despite his obvious diffidence, he ducks his head and spits a glob of saliva onto your palm — and watches with held breath as your fingers dip under the hem of his trousers. They wrap around his cock, laying half-soft on his thigh, and use his spit to work him the rest of the way hard. He feels like heavy velvet in your fist.

His dizzy head tips back against the wall with a quiet thud. Your quiet giggling melts with his pleasured groan as he hardens slowly in your fist. 

“I’ll bet you’ll cum the second I tell you to,” you laugh.

Gwayne nods slowly, adam’s apple moving in his long throat as he fights to keep his lidded eyes open. His breath catches in his chest when your thumb swipes over the sensitive tip of his cock.

“I’ll bet you’ll do anything I tell you to… Won’t you?”

Gwayne nods again, jerking in your fist at your words.

“Oh…” you huff a mixture of a contented sigh and a devilish laugh as you squeeze him harder in your fist. “I am going to have… so much fun with you, Ser Gwayne…”

He has little time to ponder the weight of your words when you shift on top of him again. You pull your fingers from his trousers and tuck the hem beneath his heavy balls. His eyes snap open to find you urging your dress skirts further up your thighs. He’s left mourning the warmth of your touch only for a moment, before your hand slides between your bodies once more to guide the drooling tip of his cock into your already weeping confines.

He’s long and slender — not nearly as thick as the butcher’s son in town who’s been tending to your needs for years, but an inch or three longer still — and made of meandering veins you can feel when you pierce yourself upon him. Your head tips back to exhale a moan at the ceiling, mouth curling into a lazy smile as you adjust to the length of him.

Gwayne chokes on a groan in his throat when your hips sit flush with his again, fingers clutching mercilessly at the plush of your thighs hard enough to etch bruises on the skin. The sound turns into a strangled whimper when you clench absentmindedly around him, warmer than velvet and drooling something fierce.

“I can’t…” the man whines, chiseled features twisting into a pained sort of look as he shifts his hips under your weight — trying to chase his pleasure and run away from it all at once. “I— I can’t— Seven fucking hells…”

You smile down at him when he tries and fails to get the words out. He misses the amusement flashing across your face with his eyes squeezed shut, hard enough to make white stars speckle behind the deep black of his eyelids. You clench around him again, just to hear him whimper for you again.

“Can’t what, my lord?” you coo to him, with a gentleness he didn’t think you were capable of before now. Your hands smooth up and around his neck until your fingers twist in the short auburn tendrils at the very nape of it. Chills erupt down the length of his spine in their wake. 

“I don’t wanna cum yet,” he protests through gritted teeth. “’S too soon—”

“But I want you to cum,” you tell him, and punctuate your command with a calculated roll of your hips. You tighten around him once more when your clit brushes the coarse, dark-auburn hair above his cock. You swallow his subsequent groan in a sloppy kiss, more tongue than mouth, and run the tip of your nose along the bridge of his after. “And then… after I’ve milked your cock—”

“Fuck…” he swears, though it comes out more like a sob.

“—I’ll let you clean me up with your mouth,” you continue. 

A moan tears through his throat at the thought — of pressing his mouth to your cunt until his nose is smushed against your clit, of lapping at the mixture of pleasure leaking out of you like honey, of your hands in his hair pushing him further into your pussy. He bursts at the thought, losing himself completely as he draws you into his bare chest with two strong arms wound up and around your back. 

Gwayne hides his flushed face in your neck as he hugs you against him, meeting your thrusts with weaker ones of his own. He buries each of his pitiful moans into your pulsepoint while his cock jerks wildly within your unforgiving confines— spitting ropes of warm cum that your clenching cunt milks from him. 

“I’m sorry,” he hears himself say as he shudders just against you. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… Seven hells— I’m sorry…” 

You pet at his wild hair as he comes down from his high, whispering murmurs of praise in his ear as the pleasure ebbs from his trembling body.  “There you go… Good boy… That’s it— Give me all of it…”

Gwayne pulls his face from your neck once he’s fully spent. His trembling hands reach for your face again, cupping your cheeks between his calloused palms to meet your eyes with his wide, wet, and pleading ones. “I’m sorry,” he whispers again. “Let me make you feel good— I want to make you feel good.” 

“I know,” you coo to him, almost sympathetically so. “On your back.” 

Gwayne’s auburn brows knit softly together, but his body obeys like it was designed to submit to you. You remain straddled against him as he descends back onto the pillows. He watches down the bridge of his nose as your hands smooth up his milky white torso — past the fine trail of hair on his lean stomach, over the healed scar on his ribs, and towards his heaving chest.

Your eyes stay locked with his heavy ones as you shift your weight above him, inching up up up. You cage your bottom lip between your teeth as you reach for the hem of your skirt. You drag the heavy fabric of your dress up and over your head. Gwayne has little time to admire your bare body before you’re straddling your knees on either side of his face. His mouth waters instantly at the sight of your glittering pussy as it descends over his mouth — he curls his arms around your thighs to pull you further in.

He groans when the taste of you hits his tongue — a sweet-salty mixture of your combined pleasures — and you feel the vibrations of the sound from your cunt to the top of your spine. You keep one hand braced on the wooden headboard and your other woven through his silken auburn locks, guiding his mouth along your cunt.

“Yes…” you sigh when his mouth meets your clit. “Right there…”

Gwayne moans again at your praise and does everything in his power to make you give it to him again. He focuses on the bundle of nerves — lapping his tongue against it and suckling it between his lips. You make a noise for him he’s never heard before, a high-pitched cry that swells across the quiet room. “Keep going,” he hears you whimper when his mouth wraps around your clit. “Fuck yes, keep going like that—”

Your fingers twist hard in his hair as your hips grind down over his tongue. He moans when you give the strands an especially harsh tongue, and the sound makes you tremble on top of him. You cum for him with a strangled cry, and Gwayne sighs through his nose when a mixture of his cum and yours drops onto the velvety pad of his tongue. 

He laps at every ounce of it with an eagerness that you can hear, a chorus of panted breaths and muffled suckling sounds.

He doesn’t stop until you’re shoving him away by the crown of his head.

You exhale a heavy breath and sit back on your haunches, resting your ass over his chest and propping your weight along his ribs. Your heavy eyes rake over his face — cheeks flushed red, pale eyes glassy with desire, pink lips swollen, chin glittering with your cum, hair wild from the pillow and your fingers alike. An angel carved from in. 

A lazy smile tugs at the corners of your mouth as you shake your heavy head down at him. “You’re not going anywhere, Ser Gwayne… You understand that, right?”

“Gwayne,” he corrects, glittering lips curling upward. “Not ser.” 

“You’re not going anywhere… Gwayne.”

“I’m glad to hear it, in truth…” he confesses on an exhaled breath. “I was starting to like it here anyway…”

[lovebugism]

ANGEL OF MY DREAMS ─── ormund hightower

summary: you are sent to ward in oldtown when the war begins; ormund finds that his attempts to erase your targaryen heritage cannot reach the strange prophetic dreams you cannot seem to control. (5k)

characters: ormund hightower / fem!reader, daeron targaryen, mentions of rhaenyra targaryen and otto hightower

contents: targ!reader (unspecified relationship, no physical descriptions), enemies to lovers, angst, hurt/comfort, possessive!ormund, dragon dreamer!reader cw for manipulation, mentions of reader relying on alcohol, brief mentions of attempted assault, allusions to smut 18+ (MDNI)

You part from the Red Keep in a gown of Targaryen black and crimson; the silver dragons embroidered along the bodice worked by your cousin Helaena’s own hand. The small beaded stitches are, perhaps, the only piece of home you were allowed to carry with you across the narrow waters. Your heart has still not yet caught up to the news that sent you here — a family cracked down its center, each of them vying for a throne made of swords, all of them destined to cut their hands in the reaching.

And you, the only child of a middling southern lord and a Targaryen mother who stood dozens of names removed from any crown, had little blade to lend to either side of the war. So you were sent away from it, to ward with your cousin down south in Oldtown — whom you only met once when he was a small babe, though your parents insisted no one with your blood could ever be a stranger to you. Not in the midst of war anyway.

A hooded cloak of Hightower green and gold is draped over your head and shoulders upon your arrival — a kindness, you thought at the time, though you’ve come to understand it as more of a shroud these days. You’re led through winding streets and ivied alleyways to a pale-stone tower that descends high into the clouds — where Lord Ormund Hightower receives you, in a hall full of idle banners and stained-glass windows that turn the sunrays to shades of emerald green. 

“My lord,” you said as you dropped into a practiced curtsy before the long table he sat behind, feeling the ache in your legs on the descent after three long days at sea. You fought to remember the words your father told you to repeat, because he’d fought alongside Lord Ormund once, and knew much of his peculiar propensities. “My family thanks you for… providing me shelter here, among family, in such… troubled times.”

“Family,” Ormund scoffed in amusement. His mouth curled into an amused grin as he rose from his chair, wooden legs screeching along the cobbles. He rounded the table in slow strides and shook his dark-auburn head. “No, child— Daeron is family.”

He motioned to the chairs behind him with a lazy, ringed hand as he approached you. It was not hard to find which men sitting there belonged to your cousin; he was the youngest of them, to be sure, and wore a slightly more masculine version of Alicent’s face upon his rounder one.

“You, my girl, are a guest,” Ormund corrected with an artificial kindness that made your stomach feel sick. 

Sicker still was the smell of candlewax and salt and sea brine stained on the walls. The scent of bathing oils and incense filled your lungs the moment Ormund planted himself before you, with two wide palms splayed on either side of your arms. His chiseled features, carved from stone, looked almost apologetic when he ducked his head into your eyeline. 

“I do this as a favor to your father, and to my nephew,” the older man confessed. “Daeron has seen little family over these years, save myself— and I will not deny him the comfort of the blood he still has left to him.”

His voice was warm with a knight’s tenderness, though there was little of it in his words. 

His fingers were tender, too, as he drew them around the hood upon your head to pull it back from your hair — but the way he examined the Valyrian-silver strands between them was far less than kind. His strong jaw clenched; his pale eyes hardened; his chest rose and fell beneath his coat with a huff.

“Mm,” he muttered in disgust.“We’ll have to do something about this.”

Your hair is dyed a shade to complement your skin tone two days later. Your wardrobe is stripped of its Targaryen silks and replaced with Hightower green and gold within a week. You study the Hightower histories, you pray to the Hightower gods, you speak the way Hightowers speak. Within a month at Oldtown, you are stripped of any remnants of your Targaryen identity — a fact which seems to please Ormund, whose praise comes more and more frequently these days.

In his own accounting of the matter, he sees it as good work. Godly work. To have tamed a wild Valyrian beast, who rides no dragon but carries the blood of one all the same. They say Targaryens are destined to destroy, never create. And yet, Ormund has made a civilized thing out of you — fit for suppers at his tables, fit for silence everywhere else.

But he does not yet know about the dreams. 

You have always had them, or at least, since you were capable of comprehending their existence. They come less like sleep and more like drowning — fires not yet lit, soldiers not yet dead, rulers not yet born. You haven’t yet found a safe way to say I dreamed it and be believed, or be forgiven in the saying. So you do not say it.

Instead, you drink.

It started as a cup of Arbor Gold to sand down the edges of a dream when it still clung to you at breakfast, the only remedy the maesters could summon to ease your temperament. That turned into silver flasks tucked into the boning of your bodice — to be snuck during lessons and meetings and dinners with middling ale, to quiet your mind whenever the dreams began to claw at it. 

That, inevitably, turned into passing out at bars and brothels only to be woken over the shoulder of a soldier carrying you back home again.

It’s how you learned of Ormund’s keen nose, when he insisted he could smell the scent of ale on your breath from a hall’s length away, and could perfectly name which wine you’d snuck from the cellar accordingly. His worry for your obvious excess comes masked as irritation — because he is the one who had built you so carefully, and still he is the one watching you come apart at every seam he had sewn so carefully for you.

When you go missing one day until sundown, and Bold John interrupts the lord’s supper with news of your whereabouts and your refusal to return, Ormund goes to get you himself. He finds you a half-league outside the city, in a half-rundown pleasure house that wreaks of smoke, sour ale, and very heavily of sex — stale air humid from golden candles and naked bodies pressed too close together.

Ormund presses an embroidered handkerchief to his nose as he weaves through the crowd, spine straight and chin level. He finds you in the very back of the den of sin, slouched alone at a table with empty mugs of ale scattered all around you. Your dyed hair is half-loose from its pins as your heavy head lolls on your fist. With your tired eyes fluttering open and closed, you don’t realize the man’s towering over your table until he slams his fists upon it, jostling the cups standing there.

“Why, in the name of the Mother, are you in a brothel?” Ormund spits in place of a greeting.

Your eyes lift slowly to meet his sharper ones. The man’s angry features are softened slightly by the haze of alcohol clouding your vision. “This is the only ale in the city that isn’t watered down…” you shrug and can’t quite tell if you’re slurring or not.

“Well,” he scoffs a not-quite laugh. “I would hate to ask how many establishments you must’ve visited to figure that one out—” 

His head whips over his shoulder when a woman wearing nothing above the waist drifts past him, trailing her manicured fingers across the curls twisting at the nape of his neck — surely mistaking him for a rich lord in want of company. He flinches from her touch as if it had burned him. His chest flares with embarrassment and rage alike when you bury your laugh behind your cup.

“This is not godly, what you’re doing to yourself. Do you know that?” he scolds lowly, features twisted in disgust. “I have given you a home, a place at mine own table, and yet you repay that gift by—” 

He cuts himself off and exhales hard through his nose before the anger can get the best of him. He tilts his chin to peer down at you from the bridge of his nose as his long fingers twitch at his sides. 

“Perhaps Oldtown was the wrong place for you after all,” he concludes in a more even tone. “Perhaps you are better suited elsewhere, somewhere more able to accommodate your… temperament—”

“It’s the dreams,” you blurt, as if the words had been pushed out of you at his disappointment — at the thought of being abandoned, again. Your features crumble as you peer up at him with glassy, wet eyes. “Drinking is the only thing that helps… I cannot stop them, but I cannot bear them sober—”

“Dreams?” Ormund repeats, chuckling with a newfound amusement. “You’ve ruined yourself over a few childish fantasies?” 

Your chest burns red hot at his laughter. The embers prickle at your skin and the backs of your eyes. “I dreamt of Rhaenyra,” you spit through gritted teeth. “Sitting the Iron Throne.” 

“There!” Ormund chuckles, shrugging with his palms splayed ahead of him. “A dream, indeed— A woman upon the Iron Throne.”

“The news of King’s Landing’s fall will come with the news of your uncle’s death,” you continue lowly, hardly audible over the bustling brothel, without once taking your eyes off of his. “Slain by Rhaenyra’s own hand… And it will not be a swift death, either, my lord…”

Ormund’s features flicker under the weight of your words — a look of distant horror gone again in a blink. He shakes his head with a smug sort of smile. “My uncle is at Highgarden. Securing the Tyrell’s loyalty. He will return, in time, with gold and bannermen, though I’m sure you will have drunk yourself to death by the time they arrive.”

Rhaenyra takes King’s Landing a month later. 

A raven is sent with haste, disclosing that her very first act as Queen was to slay the catalyst of this very war. Otto Hightower’s head sits now on a pike outside the Red Keep, the scrawled parchment says, which Ormund reads with a frightening sort of composure about him.

“Sire?” Daeron presses the other side of the desk, anxious hands trembling behind his back. “Is everything alright?”

Ormund’s eyes lift slowly to look at him. “Your grandsire is dead,” he answers plainly and without reservation. “Slain by Rhaenyra the Usurper, who now sits the Iron Throne— where is your cousin, pray tell?” 

Daeron’s wide eyes flit away and back again, pink mouth parting as he tries to make sense of the sudden news and his uncle’s strange question. “My— I’m not sure— In her bedchamber, perhaps— But why—” 

Ormund rises from his chair and storms out of the room before the boy can finish his stammering. He makes a beeline directly for your chambers; a small space near enough to the servants’ quarters where the handmaidens can keep an eye on your comings and goings. He slams the heavy door open with so much as a knock to announce himself — it strikes hard against the wall with a resounding bang that shudders the glowing candle flames beside it.

You sit up straight in the center of your bed, blanketed by quilts and already donned in your pale white nightgown. The heavy novel on your lap slides from your thighs as you lurch suddenly in fright. 

You have little time to make sense of the sudden intrusion before Ormund closes the distance between you, wrapping a firm hand around your throat to pin you back against the pillows again — he holds you not with cruelty, but with fear. And you can feel it in the way his long, cold fingers tremble around your throat.

“You knew,” he snarls. 

Your wide eyes flit back and forth between his narrow ones as your weak hands attempt to pry his calloused fingers from your neck. “Knew what—?”

“My uncle’s slaughter,” Ormund shouts over your fearful wavering. “I cannot believe I allowed a traitorous Targaryen dragon to sit at my table— to sleep under my roof—” 

“I only dreamt it, my lord,” you choke out. 

“Liar.” 

You whimper when his fist closes tighter, but you do not fight him. Instead, your pleading gaze searches within his raging one for something that feels halfway human. 

“You wept the night your mother died,” is the first thing you think to say — the first dream you had the first night you slept within these walls. Ormund falters instantly at the sudden confession. “Not at her bedside, because you didn’t want to look weak in front of your father, but after. In the Godswood. Where no one would think to go looking for a Hightower.”

Ormund’s hand slackens slightly around your throat. A look of surprise softens his features.

“That’s why you keep the Seven so close now,” you continue tearily. “Because you still feel guilty that you turned to the Old Gods, and you worry that doing so disappointed your father, even though you’re not sure he ever caught you—”

“How—” Ormund chokes on the simple word. It gets lost somewhere in his throat and turns to ash on his tongue as his wet eyes dart between both of yours. “How do you—”

“I dreamt it…” you repeat again, voice thick with tears.

His calloused hands gentle around your throat. The pads of fingers ghost along your pulse as they drift to the edge of your jaw, and up to your temple where your silver roots begin to show through the dye. He looks half-horrified and half-bewildered.

“I have… dreamt of you,” Ormund confesses distantly, breathing fanning warm along your cheek. “I thought it madness at the time, a man dreaming of his own ward, but… It was you in my head, was it not? Or— was it only mine own guilt wearing your face to taunt me?”

“I cannot help it,” you answer vaguely, voice trembling. “I’ve never been able to stop it.”

“I do not want you to stop it,” Ormund shakes his head, firm with reverence as he clasps both warm hands around your jaw. His touch is solid enough to make you tense but still achingly tender in his way. “This is the work of the gods… I thought I was doing some small kindness for Daeron’s sake, taking you in, but…”

The rough pad of his thumb smooths gently over your burning cheek as he trails off.

Your eyes widen at his words, at the madness swimming in his glittering gaze. The same man who stormed in here minutes ago with the intent to hurt you, now one confession shy of dropping to his knees and worshiping you like the gods themselves. He touches you softly now, for perhaps the first time since you set foot in Oldtown. And you, having gone so long without any gentle touch at all, almost let yourself take sanctuary in it. Almost.

“Do you have any idea what we could do with this mind of yours?” He smiles wide until his eyes squint at the edges. “We could rule the world entire if we wished.”

We, he says, and you don’t know whether to be comforted or frightened by the implication.

“I don’t want to rule the world,” you tell him in a small, shaking voice. “I just… I want to rest.”

“Then rest,” Ormund nods with a smile that creases the corners of his pale eyes as his hands slide down to rest around your neck like a collar. “But dream. For me.”

The war leads the Hightower host to Tumbleton, where the town’s ancient castle is seized for Ormund’s use alone. The army idles there in wait for Aemond’s arrival and for Vhagar’s great shadow to fly in overhead. And in that waiting, you’ve seemingly become one of Ormund’s most trusted confidants. 

He visits your chambers more nights than not now. Enough that you’ve grown used to waking with him already beside you — with his warm weight settled into the mattress and his arm heavy across your waist, prepared to hold you through the nightmares that find you more regularly these days. You spend the bulk of your days with him, too, standing at his elbow before his campaign maps and his questions of whether the visions have given you a day, a name, or a river crossing to avoid.

You have told him of your limits far more than once, though he seems to forget in his unrelenting hunger for victory. “I cannot see everything, my lord,” you told him in the bath, as his gentle fingers smoothed fresh dye into your silver roots. “It only comes to me in sleep, and I cannot— summon an answer from them at command the way a maester can summon an answer from his books.”

“And yet…” Ormund crooned, dipping his stained hands into the warm water beside your bare chest, and washing the swirling dye from his fingertips. “You have given me more than any maester I have ever paid for in gold.”

You peered up at him with teary eyes. “I fear you place too much faith in me, my lord.”

“And I fear you place too little,” he grinned.

You spend a slow morning hunched over a chessboard with Daeron — the only true companion you’ve managed to find in all your time away from home, other than Ormund perhaps. The morning sun spills in silver-gold rays from the narrow windows, falling over the carved pieces ahead of you and turning the boy’s long hair a more flaming shade of Hightower red. 

“You’ve cornered my king again…” you croon within a feigned sigh of defeat, head lolling on one hand while your other drifts lazily over the wooden board. “You’re getting rather good at this, cousin.”

Daeron glares playfully at you beneath his lashes, green eyes glinting with amusement as his lip twitches with the hint of a smile. “You moved your bishop away from my king last turn. And now you’ve sacrificed your queen to a pawn.”

“Have I?” you hum in faux-puzzlement, brows lowered and lips jutted.

“If you’re going to let me win, you could at least be convincing about it—”

The door swings wide with a rusted screeching sound. Ormund’s shadow falls over the board like a cloud crossing the sun. “Leave us,” he tells his nephew in lieu of any actual greeting and leaves little room for argument as his broad form lingers at the entrance.

Daeron tenses instantly at the man’s sudden presence and rises from his seat without a word. He flashes you a quick glance that looks almost like trepidation at leaving you alone with him, but obeys his uncle nonetheless. The door shuts behind the boy with a quiet click. The remaining oxygen in the room goes with him.

Ormund flashes you a polite smile from across the room, though you aren’t looking at him to see it. “You weren’t in bed last night,” is all he says.

“I fell asleep in the library,” you tell him and hope he doesn’t notice how the words catch briefly in your throat. You reset the board ahead of you with anxious hands and hear the soft scrape of his boots along the cobbles as he approaches you.

“And what of your dreams?”

You shake your head, gaze averted. “Nothing of importance, my lord.”

“But you have seen something?” he presses.

You inhale sharply through your nose. “I saw a… a village in the Riverlands— burned down to its bones— women wailing over children with no faces left to grieve over,” you confess, more of a half-truth than a whole lie. “It concerns no war of yours, my lord.”

Ormund says nothing as he descends into the seat Daeron had left warm and watches you arrange the bone-carved pieces into their proper squares. His eyes crease at the edges with a quiet sort of tenderness. “Tell me, then,” he hums with an airiness you see rarely from him. “Will I win this round?”

Your eyes lift finally to his narrowed ones. “You will,” you answer, but do not tell him how.

He makes the first move, plucking his pawn between two fingers and moving it to the center. You answer with your pawn of dark onyx. “Have you ever heard of Meria Martell? The Yellow Toad of Dorne?” he asks as he pushes his knight forward.

“No,” you hum and advance your bishop, a fine move but admittedly not the best one. “I don’t believe I have.”

“Shame…” Ormund sighs and ponders his next move, pale fingers drumming lightly over the table. “She was the only woman ever to have been gifted with a truly military mind… Though the gods divested her of beauty in turn— hideous, hairless, thick of waist, blind.” He advances his knight again, claiming the territory undefended by your bishop. “She does not sound so formidable, but when Aegon the Conqueror claimed her lands, she swore that Dorne would ever be unbowed, unbent…”

Your fingers push your rook a square shy of where it ought to go. You swallow hard and look at Ormund through your lashes, wondering if he’d noticed. But he’s too deep in his ramblings to realize.

“Then a great host descended from the Red Mountains— us Hightowers regrettably among them,” he explains and claims your rook from the board, setting it to the side with a satisfied click. His quiet pride at himself eases the unrelenting panic in your chest. “Meria poisoned her own wells, hid her soldiers in the sand. Her castle, when they found it, was empty. The thought she was vanquished, but… She rose from the darkness and slaughtered them all in their beds.”

You meet Ormund’s amused smile with a wearier one. “Was she a hero, then? Or a villain?”

You move a pawn forward instead of the knight that would’ve threatened his king.  A flicker of hesitation crosses his strong features at the tactless move, but he dismisses the oversight a second later and plucks his ivory queen forward two squares.

“The Targaryens knew nothing of our civilization— the Faith, the Citadel,” Ormund answers, and seemingly forgets that you, yourself, are Targaryen by blood in his ramblings. A smile sits loosely on his mouth as he watches you consider your next move. “What they had, what they still have is strength. Their armies, the… obscenity of their dragons… But Meria outwitted her enemy. Because a cunning mind can resist the most savage of…”

You advance your remaining undefended piece, opening a path across the board for Ormund’s taking. His features screw in confusion a second later.

“What are you doing?” he scolds, brows lowered over his narrowed eyes.

You blink owlishly at him. “What do you mean, my lord?”

“That piece,” he spits and points a ringed finger at the board. “Why would you move it there when you very well could’ve taken my queen?”

Your breath catches somewhere in your throat, which feels like it’s tightening more and more by the second. Daeron was right, you think to yourself. You could stand to be a bit more convincing. 

“I-I’m sorry, my lord,” you stammer. “I didn’t notice—”

“Oh, don’t patronize yourself by playing the fool,” Ormund scoffs. “You are letting me win— Like I’m some child who cannot stomach the thought of losing.”

“We can start again, my lord,” you assure him, fingers trembling as you reach across the board. 

Your body jolts when he catches your wrist in a blink, quick like a snake going in for the strike. The sudden sweeping motion sends pieces from the board scattering to the cobbles below. Fear flashes hard across your face. Ormund softens at the sight of it, with a practiced breath in and out through his nose. His long fingers loosen slightly around your wrist, but they do not yet draw back.

“You should always want to win,” the man lectures you firmly, but without the bite in his voice from before. “Never hand a victory to anyone. Not even to me. The gods did not grant you that gift of yours so that you might spend it sparing another man’s pride.”

You shake your head, features crumbling at words. “It is not a gift,” you tell him in a tiny voice.

Ormund softens for you instantly. He rises slowly from his seat and pulls the adjacent one nearer to you. His knees brush your dress skirts when his hands again find yours. All the anger from before is gone from his touch now, as he warms your cold fingers between his warmer ones. 

“You’ve seen something,” he says — not quite a question, but not an assured statement either.

You shake your head and turn back towards the table. “It was nothing—”

Ormund watches you for a long moment. A fond smile twitches at the corners of his mouth as he ducks his head to catch your averted gaze. “You always look away when you lie. Did you know that?”

Your eyes snap to his on instinct. Your chest flares with a mixture of embarrassment and something that feels like intimacy, at the thought of being so noticed in such a small, simple way.

“Tell me,” he coaxes gently. “Tell it plain, however brutal it may be.”

You inhale deeply through your nose and try to will the words past the invisible hand around your throat. “I saw your death,” you waver and watch as his broad shoulders inflate with a breath he forgets to let go. “Here. At Tumbleton. Against a northern army— a bleeding man missing one arm.”

For a long moment, Ormund just looks at you. The edges of his eyes soften slightly just before his pink mouth curls into a slow smile. A laugh sputters from his lips all at once, more disbelieving than unkind.

“A one-armed man?” he repeats, aglow now with amusement. “I have fought hundreds of whole men and lived to tell it over supper afterward— I’m sure I can manage a rogue short one limb.”

When your weary look doesn’t soften to match his own ease, Ormund gentles again with a more sincere answer. “But… now that I know it, I can simply… step around it now. Can’t I?” he mutters. “Is that not the true use of your gift?”

You’re not all the way certain that’s how the “gift” works — if a dream can ever be undreamt — but you don’t tell him as much now. You’d much rather go on believing his truths over anyone else’s

“Is this why you’ve been avoiding me?” Ormund wonders quietly, brows lowering over his glimmering eyes. “Because of what you’ve seen?”

You nod once.

“And now… looking at me… do you see it still?”

You nod again, slower this time. 

For one blink, Ormund’s features go grey and slack before your eyes — his curls are matted to his forehead with blood, and his throat is cut open and weeping from a blade. Then you blink once more, and he’s Ormund again; whole and breathing and alive. The constant change is disorienting. You can never quite be sure, from one blink to the next, which face is truly his.

His broad hands rise to your face, cupping your jaw between his calloused palms with a gentleness that threatens to undo you completely. “I am here,” he tells you sternly, though his thumb smooths along your cheekbone much sweeter in comparison. “I am still whole, and I plan to stay that way for a great while yet— especially now that I know precisely what’s coming.”

You feel your hands reach up towards his own. You fold your fingers around his wrists and clutch him hard by the sleeves of his coat. You try hard to feel the steady thrum of his pulse under your touch, to remind yourself that his heart’s still beating.

“See?" he mutters. “I’m still here."

He draws you in and presses his forehead against yours. A whimper swells in the back of your throat at the foreign act of tenderness, though it turns into a stuttered breath on the way out.

Your eyes flutter shut as you breathe him in — the sun-fresh linen of his clothes, the sweet soap from his bath, the mint leaves on his breath. 

Ormund shifts slightly and turns his head until his nose brushes your hair, smelling of earthy dye and bathing oils. His eyes drift towards the narrow window and the sliver of blue sky beyond it; where Vhagar has not yet come, and where Rhaenyra’s dragons could appear at any moment.

“We could sit that throne,” he breathes suddenly into the quiet. “Daeron, as the rightful heir... Myself as his Hand… And you, at my side…”

You go very still against him.

“Think of it," Ormund presses. “A king who need not gamble at war the way every other fool king before him has— Rhaenyra sits a throne she cannot see one single day into. But we— We could sit together and never once be surprised by anything the world sends our way ever again."

Ormund draws back just far enough to look at you properly. His calloused hands are still tender on your cheeks, but something much more mad in comparison swims in his eyes now.

“We would bring the realm a peace it has not known since its creation. We could stop a war before it’s ever started— famine before the granaries empty— rebellions before the first man raises his sword.” The words tumble quickly from his mouth, as if he were seeing the future unfold behind his own eyes. “Daeron is kind; he’s righteous. He’d be the first king to sit that throne in a hundred years and truly deserve it… And we could help him restore peace to the Seven Kingdoms… Is that not what you want?"

“I don’t know what I want,” you waver, features crumpling under the weight of your burning tears as his face turns corpse again. “I just want it to stop—”

His expression gentles past his wonder, twisting sympathetically as he draws you back into him again. 

“Then let me make it stop,” Ormund mutters, tracing the bridge of your nose with the tip of his. “And if I cannot make it stop, at least let me carry it… So that you will never have to bear the weight of it alone again—”

He turns his head to swallow your mouth into a searing kiss. You sigh through your nose at the firm weight of it, and at the sweet-mint taste on his tongue when it finds yours in a long, languid lick. 

You hold him hard by the wrists and kiss him back even harder, burying all your withheld fears and desires into his mouth. His hands drop to your waist, and yours settle behind his neck on instinct, fingers toying at the auburn curls coiled at the nape of his neck.

Ormund guides you up from your seat and against the table’s edge without taking his lips off yours. The last of the scattered pieces fall to the ground as he urges you upon it, bending down over you until your back is flush against the cool oak below. Then he kisses down, down, down your body — smearing his lips along your jaw and neck and chest and the lace of your corset. 

You hear his knees hit the cobbles with a quiet thud, and feel his cold hands pushing your skirts up your warm inner thighs, right before his wet mouth kisses the most sensitive part of you. 

Your back arches off the table as your hands dart immediately to his curls, keeping him pressed against you there. A broken moan tumbles gracelessly from your mouth. It’s the first time in your life that you’ve ever felt almost human — held — whole.

[lovebugism]

BLOOD OF MY BLOOD, KIN OF MY KIN ─── ormund hightower

summary: a glimpse into the years you and ormund raised daeron before the war took its toll, and all the years after. (10k)

characters: ormund hightower / wife!reader, daeron targaryen, alicent hightower, viserys i targaryen, mentions of rhaenyra and daemon

contents: established relationship, found family, domestic bliss, angst, hurt/comfort, protective!ormund, canon divergent, not proofread, cw for mentions of pregnancy complications and miscarriages, brief mentions of blood and gore, canon typical manipulation and psychosis from ormund towards the end lol

115 A.C. / Oldtown

The bed is still warm from your blood on the morning the babe arrives.

It had not been quite two days since the maester had drawn the small, still shape of your daughter from you and told you, gently enough as not to break you further, that she had never drawn breath at all. You had told none of the household that you had been carrying her at all, save for the maesters and your closest of handmaidens — for you had learned, after the second loss, how courtiers feed on grief like vultures to carrion. So while you wept for days longer than your babe would ever live, the rest of Oldtown simply assumed that their lady had taken ill with a woman’s ailment, and kept to her rooms accordingly.

But today the King is coming, and your mother would surely turn in her early grave if she knew the lady she raised up planned to receive a king from a sickbed — pallid, unlaced, and undone.

“There is no harm in resting, my love,” Ormund coos from across the room, watching with attentive eyes as your handmaiden laces you into a gown of Hightower green. You keep yourself braced on the wooden back of a chair and grit your teeth with every tug, pulling carefully to conceal the subtle bump of your stomach.

The man tilts his head and crosses his arms over the chest of his emerald doublet, in a feeble attempt to extinguish the worry searing between his lungs. “Viserys is a king man. He will understand. Alicent, more than anyone, would understand—”

“And what has Alicent lost?” you argue, sharper than you intended. Your head whips hard to the side in time to find Ormund flinching beneath the bite of your words — a small flicker at the edges of his eyes; a brief lowering of his brows. 

You soften with a sigh a moment later and remind yourself that Ormund lost something too, even if the loss was not pulled from his body to claim it. 

“Forgive me, I… I only meant that… The Queen has four living children. And she carried each one with grace— There is no part of her that could possibly understand how I feel… And I wouldn’t wish it upon her besides.”

Ormund exhales through his nose and takes a step closer, boots scuffing the cobbles. “Then at least let me tell them that you are unwell—”

“No,” you dismiss with a shake of your stubborn head, eyes shutting briefly when the corset tightens again. “I refuse to be spoken of like some frail, ailing thing while the King sups at our table.”

Your gaze is wet with unshed tears when they open again, snapping to Ormund’s pale ones with a glimmering determination. “I am the Lady Hightower,” you tell him, brows raised and eyes firm. “So I will greet them standing. On my own feet. In my own home.”

Ormund’s chest, still heavy with grief, blooms with a distant sort of pride at your words. Perhaps because a part of him had long understood that you did not always dream of being the Lady Hightower. Your marriage was made of meetings and ledgers and alliances rather than any actual tenderness, as was true in most great marriages in Westeros. He knows, had you had it your way, you would’ve wed that gardener’s boy you grew up with — who you attempted to bring with you to Oldtown upon your betrothal, along with many of your household’s servants.

Ormund had the brawny, olive-skinned boy sent away within a fortnight — the moment he understood what kind of feelings the peasant boy had for you, and you for him. It was perhaps the first mad thing he ever did for you and, by Ormund’s later admission, the first time he realized that he might love you truly. (Though he had not thought it mad at the time, or love until many moons later, when he was struck with the sudden realization that the thought of Oldtown with you in it would be entirely unbearable.)

“Then we shall go,” Ormund nods in acquiescence as he plants himself just ahead of you. His gaze fixes into a sterner look a second later, as he tilts his chin to his chest and ducks into your eyeline. “But know I am not happy about this.”

“And yet Oldtown will remain standing anyway,” you joke in a softer coo. “I have faith that we’ll survive one of your unhappy mornings, my lord.”

The walk from your chambers to the gates of Oldtown is not long, but you feel every stone beneath your slippers as if the journey were some great pilgrimage across the whole of Westeros. 

You brace Ormund’s strong arm with both your hands, fingers curling into the fine wool of his coat hard enough to blanche your knuckles. He slows his long stride to match your smaller, more careful one without a word shared between you — a wall of green and muscles at your side, shielding you from the curious eyes of courtiers wondering why their lord and lady moved so slowly. So close.

It’s the first time you’ve tasted fresh air in three days. The breeze smells of the sea from the harbor and fish from the markets — mixing with the sweet citrus of the orange and lemon trees blooming in the gardens. Their white petals scatter like snow along the pale stone with every gust off the bay. You breathe in deeply through your nose, trying hopelessly to clear away the metallic tang of your own blood stubbornly clinging to the inside of your nostrils.

“His Grace, Viserys of House Targaryen,” the herald calls as the royal party files in on fine horses and gilded carriages, black banners snapping in the wind. “First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men.”

Viserys is the first to exit when the caravan finally stills. He descends the steps a knight places down for him, portlier than you remember from your last journey to King’s Landing, some years before your marriage. His kind face has started to wither from fatigue and age alike. The crown seems heavier upon his head, though perhaps it’s only from where his silver hair has started to thin at the scalp.

Alicent follows out just behind him. She wears a black dress with drooping sleeves and a veil to cover her long auburn curls, fit for a funeral procession. A knight of white armor and long black hair helps her descend the steps as she cradles a small, dark bundle squirming in protest in her arms.

You sink into a curtsy. A white-hot pain swells from the pit of your stomach to the top of your spine — a lightning strike that burns for minutes after. You grip Ormund’s arm until your fingers tremble, though the polite smile on your face remains when you rise again.

“Ormund,” Viserys greets with an easy smile. He clasps your husband’s free arm with a genuine affection while his tired eyes drift along the white stone towers of the city. “My… Oldtown is just as fair as I remember it.”

“I agree, Your Grace, though I confess I am far more partial,” Ormund responds with a dry humor and a knightly smile. “I hear the view improves the longer one is forced to stare at it.”

Viserys laughs while, beside him, Alicent tries and fails to summon her own. Her elegant features are worn from the weeks of travel, many of which you imagine were spent balancing the fussing weight concealed against her chest just now.

“And my lady…” Viserys inclines his silver head towards you, studying your face with a pair of kind eyes. “You look well.”

You feel, in a word, like death dressed in Hightower green. You feel hollowed out and stitched together again, the farthest thing from well. But you nod once and thank the King all the same, profoundly grateful when your voice doesn’t shake.

“Truly. Marriage suits you both well,” Viserys nods. “Though, I admit, I’d hope Daeron might have had a cousin or two near enough in age to grow up beside him here. Once he’s old enough for such things, of course.”

Ormund tenses beside you. 

His arm feels very suddenly like holding onto stone. His pale eyes turn glacial in a flicker; a withheld grief that he forces himself to swallow down the second it rises like bile in his throat. You say nothing at all. You just keep smiling and pray to whatever god will hear you that you do not weep in front of the King and all his men.

“But there’s still time— You’ll have one of your own before long, I’m sure of it,” the older man continues, possessing no notion of what had happened behind these walls hardly two days past. If he notices anything amiss, he does not dwell on it, and turns instead to Alicent. “Go on. Let them see the boy.”

Alicent’s arms tighten instinctively around the bundle in her grasp and inhales sharply through her nose. It had been her own decision that Daeron be sent to her family’s ancestral home. Her last child was not quite six months when she counseled her King to send him to ward, far from the chaos of King’s Landing. But she finds herself suddenly plagued by the harsh realization that this will be the last time she will hold this baby as he is now. The next time she’s like to lay eyes on him again, he’ll be an unrecognizable young boy, and not nearly the small thing fussing against her collarbone now.

“He hasn't slept," Alicent warns as she steps closer. Her green eyes are warm and weary when they flit to you. “He didn’t take well to the carriage. Or the ship. He’s cried the whole way from Blackwater, I think. Poor thing…”

“I’m sure we can manage a crying babe, my Queen,” Ormund says gently, though there’s a distant aching in his voice disguised as good humor that only you could recognize. “I grew up with Gwayne, if you remember. I’m more than acquainted with wailing boys by now.”

Alicent musters a small smile and closes the distance between you to settle her son in your arms. 

He’s warm — that’s the first thing you notice — he’s a small furnace swaddled in Targaryen black. He stirs briefly at the transfer from one chest to another, round face screwing tight in the prelude to a wail. Your heart clenches to brace yourself for that sound. It never comes.

The babe turns his face into the curve of your throat and settles into stillness with one small fist curled into the fabric of your gown. The tiny sound he makes isn’t a cry, but it isn’t quite a coo either. He sleeps, finally, in your arms — not even two days after you held your daughter between them, who had never awoken at all.

Ormund’s wide hand settles at the small of your back. Even in its steadiness, you feel the subtle tremor of his fingers against your spine. His throat tightens with the sudden urge to cry at the sight — of you, still frail and yet so bravely composed, cradling another woman’s child after laying your own to rest in the sept. He swallows through the hands of grief strangling his throat and feels a warmer feeling settling in its wake.

“Well…” Viserys hums, watching the baby sleep against you with a proud look in his weathered eyes. “It seems the boy’s found his corner of Oldtown already— Isn’t that lovely, Alicent?”

The woman nods, though shock still etches slightly in her pale features and behind the dark green of her eyes. “Of course, Your Grace,” she says and clears her throat, blinking back her tears with a queen’s practiced grace. “Thank you both for taking him.”

“He'll want for nothing here," Ormund swears with a firm nod. “You have my word. We'll raise him as if he were our own trueborn son.”

You pull the blanket gently back to peer at the sleeping baby swaddled within it. He’s practically all cheeks, with his mother’s mouth and nose. 

You had been certain, two days past, that your life had surely ended with your daughter’s. That there would be nothing more to life than a hollow, vacant silence. But now, there is warmth — and a babe’s slow breath fanning along your collarbone. 

You do not yet have a name for the foreign feeling swelling inside of you. It’s not joy, not yet, but it isn’t grief either. Or, at least, not only grief. And for now, that would have to be enough.

127 A.C. / Training Yard

The sound of clashing steel finds you before the sight of it does. The ring and scrape of blade on blade carries across the bustling courtyard, where you’ve gone to look for a young prince who was, as Maester Yorrick informed you with a palpable impatience, nearly an hour late for his lessons. You find the boy exactly where you imagined he would be — sword-training with his uncle, who has since stripped down to a pale tunic now darkened with sweat from the exercise.

Daeron, now thirteen years of age, is all knees and elbows from a sudden growth spurt that had taken him seemingly overnight. He presses a defensive attack upon his uncle with all the fierceness of a knight, but with the gracelessness of a teenage boy. Even you could tell from where you stood that his swing had no hope of landing. Ormund turns the blow aside with a lazy flick of his wrist, no more troublesome than swatting a fly from the air.

“Awful,” you hear the man scold from afar. When Daeron grits his teeth and presses forward once more, Ormund steps back and lets the boy’s momentum carry him a half stride too far. His blade misses his mark by inches. “Gods, that’s even worse—”

Daeron lunges a third time, fuelled now by a boyish rage that twists his freckled features. Ormund steps inside the overextended reach, hooks a boot around the boy’s ankle, and trips him onto the dirt with his blunted blade pressed to his ribs. Daeron hits the ground with a thud, red-faced and breathing heavy. His long auburn tendrils cling to his sweaty temple when he whips his head to glare up at his uncle.

“Dead,” Ormund proclaims from where he stands over the boy, flat but not totally unkind. He raises his brows and tilts his chin to his chest. “If this were a real sword, I’d have had your head before the thought to swing finished forming in that head of yours.”

Daeron twists himself upward and shoves the faux blade away with a boyish scowl. “You always say that,” he grumbles, refusing the hand Ormund extends to help him up. He rises to full height on his own and swipes dirt from his pale palms.

“Yes. I always say it because it's always true. You're thinking with your temper again— I can see it in your shoulders before you’ve even moved,” the older man lectures as he turns on the heel of his boot and walks off a few paces. “Again. And this time, think before you swing. Not after—” 

“I think that’s enough for this morning,” you call to them as you step further into the yard, dress skirts rushing around your ankles in the summer breeze. “Maester Yorrick has been waiting all morning. And his patience, unlike yours, my lord, has its limits.”

Daeron nods once, shoulders sagging with an absent relief. “Yes, ma’am—”

“Give us a few more minutes,” Ormund dismisses simultaneously. “He’s close to getting his footwork right. I can feel it.”

You flash the man a look — one slight lift of your brow, one flicker of dullness behind the eyes. Years of marriage have honed that wordless look to a firm edge, one which finds Ormund like a blade. He nods in concession with a heavy exhale through his nose.

“You heard her, boy. Go on,” Ormund says, jerking his chin toward the tower and extending his hand out for the practice sword.

Daeron obeys without question. He passes the dull blade over and crosses the yard to you. You see the sweat and dirt streaked across his freckled face the closer he gets. “Come here to me,” you sigh and catch his round chin between your thumb and forefinger when he plants himself ahead of you. You swipe the filth from his cheeks with the hem of your sleeve like you’ve done since he was small enough to fit in one arm.

“I’m not a child anymore, you know," Daeron reminds you with a childish grimace as he suffers your motherly affections. “I’m a squire now.”

“Oh, a squire, are you?” you croon in response with an obvious air of sarcasm. You smooth wild auburn hair from his temples before pressing a chaste kiss to his hairline. “Go on now— before Maester Yorrick decides to make you study your histories until sundown.” 

Daeron nods and ducks past you towards the tower stair, though you catch the corner of his pink mouth twitching upward into a grin before he’s turned away. You watch him leave with an attentive stare as Ormund discards the training swords at their posts. He approaches you in long, slow strides, allowing you to see the mark that training has left upon him — the way the sweat dampens his dark curls and the collar of his tunic, making the fabric stick to his broad shoulders and toned chest. 

He smells of sweet wine, musky bathing oils, and salty sweat when he towers just before you. He tips his chin to his chest and raises his brows to his hairline, pale eyes glimmering with an expectant look.

“…Well?” 

You blink up at him with a feigned innocence. “Well, what?”

“My kiss,” he answers with a shrug like it’s obvious, like he were a man coming to collect his debts. “You gave the boy his, and I’ve spent half the morning training him— I should think that I’ve earned at least that much.” 

“Oh, really?” you squint. “After you told the boy he’s like to lose his head?”

“I told him the truth,” Ormund argues with an unrepentant laugh and takes a slow step closer to you. “Is the truth unkind merely because it stings a little going down?” 

His hands splay along your waist, wide and warm along the edges of your corset. It takes everything in you not to cave for him right there, in the full view of the crowded courtyard. You cross your arms over your chest instead. “If you keep being so hard on him, he’ll grow to hate sword training altogether—”

“May be. But he will go on alive a good deal longer for having learned it the hard way now— instead of on a real field, with real steel, without me there to guide him.” Ormund ducks his head to catch your eye, pale gaze glimmering in time the pink smile tugging at his lips. “Surely you are not truly cross with me, my love…” he croons quietly.

You shrug with a raised chin, unwilling to concede so easily. “Perhaps I am.”

“Well, then, it’s hardly my doing,” he chuckles, a sound far warmer than the silver-gold sunshine sprawling over the courtyard. The pads of his thumbs smooth over your ribs in an absentminded affection. “You've gone so soft on the boy that you can scarcely bear to watch him lose a practice bout, without petting his hair over it after."

“Well, someone in this household has to be soft with him," you argue lightly, more teasing now than truly cross. Your slipper scrapes the dirt as you take a short step closer to him. What little distance remained between you closes now in an instant; each rise and fall of his chest brushes your folded arms. “You spend your mornings convincing the poor boy the world means to kill him, and I spend my nights convincing him that he could rule the world entire if he wished... Perhaps he’ll come out well-balanced for it, in the end.”

“Assuming one of us doesn’t kill the other over the method first,” Ormund quips.

“Precisely,” you nod.

“Well, I think it’s a fine system,” the man agrees gravely, drawing you an impossible inch closer by the hands still on your waist. His breath fans warm across your jaw as he leans in closer, still smelling of the mint leaves he’d chewed after breakfast. “And one I certainly intend to go on employing indefinitely… If my wife forgives me long enough to let me kiss her.”

His low voice glitters somewhere in the center of your chest. Your eyes narrow despite the small smile curling hopelessly at your mouth. “I don’t think I’ve yet decided,” you lilt.

“Well, I have,” he croons quietly, and does not wait for your retort before leaning down to press his lips against yours.

His broad nose flattens into the side of yours under the weight of his kiss, a slow and languid thing — as natural as the white waves ebbing and flowing against the pale stone tower of Oldtown. Your hands twist in his pale tunic billowing in the sea breeze, dissolving into the man like salt in water. 

There is nothing you would not forgive this man for, you think distantly to yourself. There is no madness he could not lead you toward, not if he kisses you like this the entire way there.

130 A.C. /  Ormund’s Solar

The raven arrives like all the rest — unceremoniously, on a sunless grey morning, from the trembling hands of the weathered maester. You tend to your needlework by the crackling hearth, burning low to fight off the morning chill blowing in from the sea, while Daeron reads in the opposite chair with one leg slung over the arm of it — both of you still waking with the early morning.

Across the room, Ormund sits at his desk and breaks the seal with a dull crack. Your gaze drifts to the man as he unrolls the letter, parchment whispering beneath his ringed fingers. You watch his pale eyes flit across the words once, and his brows lower in confusion a moment later. He shifts in his seat and reads it again, slower this time. His spine straightens with a soldier’s subconscious instinct as he draws a deep breath in and forgets to let it go. 

The quiet feels loud as it swells within the solar. The popping fire startles you briefly, as you get lost in Ormund’s wordless dread. You feel his silent panic as if it were your own. You rise from your seat and lay your needlework on the cushion behind you, careful not to trouble Daeron’s reading as you stroll to the man’s side.

“Ormund?” you call quietly to him. “Ormund— What does it say?”

He says nothing in response; he just lifts his ringed hand and passes you the parchment curled between his middle and forefinger. His eyes remained fixed on a negligible chip in the cobblestone wall across the room as you pluck the paper from his hand. His silence is not convincing; his silence, as you’ve learned in years of marriage, is far more frightening than any voice he could raise.  

Your eyes dart over the scrawled ink thrice over, just as he had, because your mind refuses to process the words on the first two passes.

“By the time this reaches you, the city has already fallen. Rhaenyra Targaryen holds King’s Landing and names herself Queen upon the Iron Throne. She has taken the Queen Dowager prisoner, as well as the King’s wife and last living heir. Send word of your household’s safety. Guard the boy.” 

The letters blur and steady and blur again, swimming before your eyes. Your blood runs cold while the glowing hearth simultaneously fills the room with a near-unbearable heat. As your breaths come faster and shallower to you, you hear a small voice call from behind you.

“Is something wrong?” Daeron wonders aloud as he glances up from the heavy novel in his lap. His auburn brows knit low over his green eyes, casting a faint shadow over his freckled cheeks, which are slowly starting to lose the softness of boyhood.

“Go on to your chambers, Daeron,” you tell him in a voice strangely steady compared to how shaken you feel. “It’s time to break your fast. I’ll have the servants fetch it for you.” 

“I’m not hungry,” the boy insists as he rises slowly from his chair, setting his book aside and walking slowly from the hearth. His eyes dart back and forth between your profile and Ormund’s when both of you refuse to look at him. His shoulders straighten with a strangling tension. “What’s happened? What does it say—?”

“Daeron,” Ormund snaps, voice cutting through the quiet room like a blade. His eyes are similarly sharp when they snap finally to the boy’s pleading once. “Listen to your mother, boy. Go.”

Mother, he says. The word lingers and hangs in the air for a long moment. Even in his newfound worry, Ormund’s eyes still flicker with a startled awareness at how easily the slip-up had escaped him, though there is little time to dwell on it now. 

Daeron's pink mouth parts with some half-formed protest at the ready. Whatever words he could conjure up on such short notice turn to dust on his tongue at the look his uncle gives him, chiseled features hardening into an unfeeling sort of look. Daeron exhales a held breath, gathers his book from his seat, and heads for the door without further argument.

Ormund’s knowing voice follows him out: “And don’t stand outside the door eavesdropping, either. Straight to your chambers. I'll know if you've stopped on the stair."

Only when the door shuts behind the boy with a soft click do your teary eyes lift from the parchment in your trembling hands. You say nothing for a long moment. The muffled sounds of the bustling castle fill the silence — the sounds of an oblivious world still living, though it feels a little like yours has stopped.

“I know," Ormund says before you’ve spoken, before you’ve needed to speak. “I know.”

“Okay,” you nod once. “So what are you going to do?”

He huffs a not-quite laugh. “I’ve only just found out about this. As have you,” he answers, a little sharper than he means to. “I’ll need a moment to think about the problem before you ask me to solve it, my love.” 

“A moment is no longer a luxury we have,” you argue, voice rising despite yourself and wavering on every syllable with a palpable fear. “Rhaenyra has dragons, Ormund— she has Daemon and three new bastard riders sworn to her besides. She does not need a moment to bring any of them to our door.”

Your dress skirt spins around your ankles when you turn suddenly in place. Ormund’s pale eyes follow your form as you storm back towards the hearth, ranting the whole way there.

“She will come for him, Ormund— not if, when. She will stop at nothing to silence any claim that challenges her own,” you continue, voice cracking under the weight of your unshed tears. “Daeron is a threat to her! Simply by breathing, he is a threat to her, and she will not leave him idling here out of some… familial courtesy for some half-brother she’s never met.”

The flame crackles quietly when you toss the letter into it. The wax seal blackens and weeps; the ink turns slowly to ash. You’d hoped that destroying those words might, in turn, settle the uneasy feeling they’ve brought you; but to no avail.

“I know that,” Ormund nods with a jaw clenched tight, ringed fingers curling into fists over his thighs beneath the desk. 

“Then think!” Your shout bounces off the cobbled walls as you turn to face him once more. His face blurs behind the burning tears clouding your vision. The swelling emotion thickens your voice as you yell to him, half-wild with a preemptive grief. “I have already buried children who never got to draw breath— I will not bury another who has drawn fifteen years of them under this roof! Do not let them take him, Ormund— I don't care what it costs. Do not let them our boy!”

Ormund’s chair scrapes the cobbles as he rises slowly to full height. He crosses the solar in slow, silent strides. Your glassy eyes stay locked with his as he nears. You peer stubbornly up at him from beneath your lashes, clumped with unshed tears; but you do not protest when his palms smooth over the outsides of your elbows to pull you into his arms. 

You melt hopelessly against his chest, fisting the back of his doublet in both hands, and trembling slowly as you choke down a sob. Ormund’s wide hands smooth along your back and feels his chest tighten with a striking, familiar ache. He thought once there was no worse sound in the world than hearing your weeping over a lost child; but he knows, now, that there is something equally as troubling: your weeping over a child you fear you’re about to lose and feeling like there is no time yet to stop it.

“I will not let anyone take him,” Ormunds promises evenly, with a distance that suggests he’s already assembling a plan in the depths of his mind. His arms curl tighter, pressing you harder against him. “I swear it to you. By the gods, they will not have our son.”

You pull back from him, just far enough to search his steady gaze with your wearier one. “But how?” you press weakly, more of a demand than a real question.

Ormund ponders for a long moment. The shadow of his adam’s apple rises and falls in his throat as he swallows. And when he speaks again, the words fall from his tongue flat and even, as if he were testing each one the moment they left his mouth.

“No one at court has laid eyes on the boy since he was a babe in arms…” he answers lowly, brows lifting to his hairline. “Alicent hasn’t seen him in years… There is no one outside these walls who would know what he looks like… So if they come— when they come… I suppose Rhaenryra would presume any silver-haired boy as Viserys’ heir.”

Your brows furrow as confusion twists slowly across your face.

“We’d only need enough lye and patience,” Ormund continues with a shrug. “And a boy willing enough to answer to a name that isn’t his, and to go with Rhaenyra, should her dragons come calling.”

You tense within his hold as the words run through you like ice-cold water. “You mean to… to send a different child in his place?”

“Yes,” Ormund answers instantly and without apology. “It isn’t a kind plan, I know. And I won’t pretend that someone else’s son won’t have to suffer for it, if it comes to pass, but… You did not ask me for a kind plan.”

You grieve the heat of his hands when he lifts them from your back, just to smooth his gently calloused palms over your jaw a moment later. He rubs the rough pads of his thumbs along your burning cheeks. You melt into his touch of warm velvet and peer up at him with teary eyes. Ormund’s gaze softens around the edges as his mouth lifts into a sad sort of smile.

“You asked me not to let them take our boy,” he continues lowly. “And however cruel it may be… this is but the only coin I have to buy that promise with.”

You know that a part of you should be horrified. You know what he is describing is a monstrous thing — an innocent boy’s whole life offered as a shield for another’s. You search deep within yourself to find that terror, but cannot seem to locate it. Instead, you find relief, like a crack of sunlight peeking through storm clouds — the very hint of a promise that your family was not long in the dying just yet.

“Do it,” you hear yourself say, shaking your head between his hands. “Whatever it costs… Whoever it costs… Do it.”

Ormund nods with a deep inhale through his nose, leaning forward to press his mouth to your hairline — to seal his promise with a kiss.

130 A.C. / Tumbleton Sept

Rhaenyra's dragonriders come for Daeron not nearly a fortnight into the army's march. Ormund sends the son of a merchant in his place — a boy of the right age and the right pale coloring, plucked quietly from Oldtown and dressed in borrowed finery before anyone thought to look twice. “Be brave, young prince," Ormund had said to the blanch-haired boy, only for show, though what he really meant was: “I will have your family hanged if you do not play your part.”

Ormund knelt before Daemon Targaryen and swore his fealty to the Queen, but marched on for Tumbleton the second the dragons took flight, all the shame. 

The chaos follows them there, too.

Daeron attempts to seek a momentary refuge in the foreign castle’s candlelit sept. A cramped chamber made of brown stone and hazy smoke from the flickering candles, where Tessarion grumbles in protest of captivity. The lack of sunlight has dulled her fluorescent blue scales, and has made her ill-tempered due to the lack of exercise. Daeron alone she allows close, pressing her great head into the boy’s small neck, and momentarily forgetting about the heavy chains around her throat when he pets her stony scales. 

Ormund finds him there. Ormund has a way of finding him anywhere. It is a gift and a curse, perhaps — comforting when Daeron was small and frightened of the dark; but less so now, when Daeron’s every attempt at solitude is interrupted by his uncle, constantly watching him as if he were a traitor to be surveilled and not his kin.

“I have warned you against indulging in affections for the best,” Ormund says as he approaches. The man cradles the boy's freckled cheeks in his wide, calloused palms despite Tessarion's low growl of warning.“You are a good boy,” he says, and in the very same breath, without losing the tender smile on his face: “You have a taint in your blood,” and “You must be king.”

Ormund makes less and less sense to him these days — the throes of war, Daeron supposes, though a part of him is frightened that it began long before that. 

Sometimes he thinks Ormund only makes sense when you’re near enough to translate his tangled, wild emotions back into something grounded and real. You’ve always had a way of gentling the man; usually with nothing more than a steady hand along his wrist to calm whatever storm had been moving within him. 

Daeron has seen you do it a hundred times over without ever quite understanding how. But he prays now for your swift return from the city, so that you might do it again — so that you might soften whatever unfamiliar thing has taken root in his uncle when he commands his soldiers to drag in the peasant man from earlier that afternoon. The one who broke Ser Garrick’s nose defending against his own wife’s assault; an act any decent lord would have called simple justice. 

Ormund draws his sword from its sheath at his hip. The hiss of the steel leaving the leather fills the small stone sept, loud enough to echo off the old walls that have likely seen a great many prayers and, Daeron suspects, not so very many murders. The older man turns the blade and offers the embellished hilt to the boy, pale eyes hardening when he hesitates.

“We have risked much and more to raise you up,” Ormund says, strong features twisting into something resembling offense. “Surely, you do not wish to disappoint us now.”

Us. Daeron is pulled into his uncle’s orbit at that single syllable alone; the unbearable thought of failing the only two people in this world who have ever troubled themselves to love him — one standing before him with a blade held out like a peace offering, and the other somewhere in the depths of the dark city but still steady on his mind all the same.

Daeron lays his palms out flat before his brain has fully comprehended the motion. He prays Ormund doesn’t notice how they tremble when he rests the sword upon them — the weight of the blade cold and heavy upon his fingers.

Daeron’s hands tremble around the ornate leather hilt of Ormund’s sword. His misty eyes find the prisoner kneeling just before him on the cold stone — bloodied and chained for a crime any noble man in Westeros would surely commit with honor — before glancing slowly to where his uncle looms behind him. Candlelight flickers in shades of orange-gold upon the man’s chiseled features, pooling a deep black in the hollows of his eyes.

“What would Mother think of this?” Daeron hears himself ask, voice cracking under the weight of the tears burning hot in the backs of his eyes. 

It is his last and most desperate attempt to reach for his uncle, just as he has seen you do, and to pull him back from the dangerous ledge he stands upon. But he knows the man has already made up his mind; and he knows that there is no version of him that walks out of this sept without spilling blood.

Ormund’s face softens slightly, though there is little tenderness in what he asks of the boy now. “Alicent would understand,” he coos in a gentle voice. “War asks difficult things of every great house—”

“I didn’t—” Daeron swallows hard, smaller now than moments before. “I did not mean the Lady Alicent…” 

Realization flashes across Ormund’s face — a visible recognition of exactly which woman the boy had meant, and has always meant every time the word slipped accidentally from his mouth and was never corrected for it after. Daeron was not yours by blood, but he was yours in every other way that matters. The small, warm weight of him stopped crying the moment he was placed into your arms fifteen years ago, and never truly stopped being yours since.

Still, Ormund does not soften for it. If anything, something in him hardens further as he takes a slow step closer to the boy.

“Your mother would be proud,” he answers, brows lowered as if the answer was the plainest thing in the world. “Don’t you see? Any strike against this army is a strike against her, against everything she’s built to keep you safe… Any man who raises his fist against our men raises it, in the end, against her… And do you not want to protect her, just as she has spent every day protecting you?”

Daeron swallows hard. The weight of Ormund’s words feels heavy in his throat, heavier than the blade in his hands as his trembling fingers tighten around its hilt. His teary green eyes linger on the steel, flickering shades of gold in the candlelight. 

“No, please, I beg you,” the battered prisoner rasps, dried blood matting at his curls from whatever rough handling had brought him here. “I have a family, my lord. Please—”

Daeron’s eyes lift to find the man’s pleading gaze and linger upon him for a long while. He sees your face in the very back of his mind, the only real mother he’s ever truly known, and hears Ormund’s disappointed voice layered over it as he draws the heavy blade back. 

Then he strikes. 

The cut is not clean. The blade lodges at an off angle in the man’s corded neck and sticks somewhere deep between flesh and bone. The man’s pained shout comes out wet and gargled, bouncing off the cobbled walls and in the depths of Daeron’s mind. 

The boy’s body flinches from what his own hand has done as bright crimson blood spouts from the gaping wound and splatters along the old stone. 

His face crumples as he removes the blade. It takes a world of strength in his thin arms to wrench it out again. A quiet whimper sounds in his throat when the blade drags against bone and stumbles backward when the man’s limp body collapses at his feet with a dull smack. Dark blood spreads slowly across the stone in a widening, glistening pool that catches the candlelight like moonlight on the bay.

Daeron looks down at the crimson dripping off the steel blade. He does not notice his uncle’s approach until his broader hands are gently guiding the sword from his fingers — fingers that no longer feel like his own. 

Ormund wipes the steel clean against the dead man's tunic, one side and then the other, with the methodical care of a man cleaning a hunting knife after a kill. He sheaths the blade back into its hilt and closes the remaining distance between him and the boy.

When Daeron’s mind finally returns to his body — ears still ringing, vision still hazy — his wide eyes snap to his uncle’s face and sees a quiet pride swimming in his features once more. It’s as comforting as it is horrifying. And when Ormund's strong arms wrap around the boy’s shoulders and draw him close to his chest, that feels like a dizzying concoction of the two even more so.

“I am proud of you, boy…” Ormund tells him as he leans in close, pressing his mouth to the boy’s hair in a near-kiss, though he whispers to him instead:  “Do not tell your mother of this. Understood?"

Daeron does not answer, though Ormund does not ask him for one now.

130 A.C.  /  Tumbleton Castle

You return to the castle late in the evening, weary down to your bones from the long day. 

You had gone into town with what coin and grain the army could spare, and found Lady Kat there among the frightened smallfolk, tending to the smith's wife, whose arm still sat bound in a rough splint. The woman's round face was kind, but you knew that no amount of offered bread or soft words could cure what comfort had been taken from her.

“Do you know where my husband is?” she had asked you before you left, with something desperate in her voice that made you wish you had a better answer than the only truthful one you could give.

“I’m sorry. I do not know," you told her, smiling in what sympathy you could muster, honest in your ignorance if nothing else.

The question sits strangely in your chest on the ride back to the castle, though you struggle to place exactly why.

Dinner is already laid out by the time you arrive. The long table is embellished with more food than Tumbleton's starving smallfolk have likely seen since the war began. The notion sits heavy in your stomach before you’ve even entered the dining hall, where Ormund rises from his seat to greet you. 

His warmth is striking, a shade too bright for the late hour. He presses a jeweled chalice of ale into your hand with a tender grin and a pair of soft eyes, asking after the wife and the town's wounded with an attentiveness he doesn’t usually spare for such small domestic accounts.

“Sit,” he tells you with one wide hand along the small of your back to urge you the short distance to the table. “You've had a long day, my love. Eat something before it goes cold."

Confusion floods your face at the emptiness beside your usual seat. “Where's Daeron? He hasn’t missed out on lemon cakes since he was old enough to chew them.”

“He's not feeling well. Best to let him rest,” Ormund answers with a polite smile as he pours himself a goblet of wine. His soft eyes flit between you and the glugging flagon. “Sit with me, love. I’m sure you’re half-starved yourself."

He sits down in his cushioned seat at the head of the long table and gestures for you to take yours. You remain stubbornly in place, because you know him far too well for anything else. Years of marriage have taught you every register of his voice; every flicker behind his eyes; every twitch in his features. And this one, all warm and careful and slightly too eager, is one you’d learned to trust least of all.

“What have you done?” you deadpan.

Ormund scoffs a breathless laugh, bouncing his broad shoulders in a shrug. “Why do you insist I’ve done something?” 

“Because I can hear it in your voice.”

Ormund huffs again, though it’s more of a sound of surprise than true laughter this time. “Well, I assure you, dear wife, I have done nothing at all.”

“Is that what will Daeron tell me?” you press. “When I go to his chambers and ask him myself?"

“He will tell you that I'm an excellent uncle and an even better husband," Ormund quips with his elbows propped on the table and his pointer fingers steepled together. “And also that you ought to sit down and eat your supper with your poor husband, before you go making a production out of a boy's upset stomach.”

You leave despite his words, led purely by the intuition swirling in your stomach that drags you directly to Daeron’s chamber door. You knock once and receive no answer — when the silence holds on the third try, you let yourself in and find the boy alone in his room, curled small on the edge of his bed in a way that strikes you deep in the chest; a reminder of that swaddled babe curled against your chest fifteen years past.

He does not look up when you enter, nor when you lower yourself gingerly onto the edge of the mattress beside him without a word. His shoulders shake in small, tight increments as he struggles to choke down his own sobs. He drags each breath in through his nose and holds it for a beat too long until it shudders out of him again.

He freezes when you lay a gentle hand on his shoulder, going rigid against whatever emotion he’s trying not to shake loose.

“What's happened, my love?" you coo to him, gentling your voice the way you might for a much younger child. “Tell me."

He shakes his auburn head against the pillow and sniffles to himself. “He told me I couldn't…"

“Who? Ormund?”  you press and feel a preemptive anger kindling hot in your chest before you’ve even heard the whole of it. “Well… Your uncle tells me a great many things that I’ve long since learned to ignore. So I imagine he can spare us the indulgence of a secret or two.”

After another shaky breath, Daeron pushes himself up from the mattress. He snivels wetly and wipes his flushed cheeks with the back of one hand. You smooth down his wild flaming tendrils until he finds the words to speak.

“The blacksmith…” he wavers. “The one who struck Ser Garrick this morning…”

Your stomach swirls with a sick feeling when he trails off. Your blood runs cold with a fear of what he might say next. You think instantly of the woman with the kind face and the splinted arm, asking so gently if you knew where her husband had run off to. You have to remind yourself to breathe again as you ask, “What of him?”

“Ormund made me…” Daeron’s breath catches in his throat with a horror reignited in the pit of his chest. “He said any strike against the army was a strike against the crown. Against me. Against you.” He forces each word out through unshed tears and feels half-furious at himself when his voice shatters. “He told me it would be a king’s justice. That it— that it would make you proud.”

The boy’s eyes lift to yours then, glassy and green and rimmed red. They dart back and forth over your face, searching for an ounce of comfort within it.

“Are you?” he asks in a voice barely above a whisper. “Proud of me, I mean.”

You nod until the words have climbed through the fear swelling in your throat.

“Of course I am,” you answer breathlessly, but with no hesitation at all despite the dread searing in your chest. “I have been proud of you since the day I met you. Nothing you could do— Nothing of what your uncle made you do could change that. And you did it, I have no doubt, because some part of you believed it would keep our family safe. Protecting the people you love, even when doing so costs so much, is no easy feat, my love. I know this better than you might think…” 

Your mind drifts to the pale-haired boy — the merchant’s son who was brown of hair before you found him. The boy who was borrowed and dressed up in a prince’s wardrobe and sent off to whatever fate Rhaenyra’s justice had in store for him. The boy who is very likely chained or worse for a crime that was never truly his, simply because you and Ormund decided his captivity was a fair trade for Daeron’s freedom.

Daeron watches your eyes well with tears of your own, and his freckled face crumples further at the thought of hurting you further. “I did not mean to make you sad…" he mutters with a wet gaze that flits between yours.

“You haven't," you tell him firmly, though your voice remains steady. You gather the boy into your arms and press your cheek against his hair, feeling his tear-stained cheeks wet the skin of your chest. “I’m not sad, my love. I promise. I only love you. That's all….”

You sit with him for a long while after that — until his breathing steadies and his shoulders lose their edge. Only then do you rise, with one last kiss to his forehead, and leave him to whatever uneasy slumber he can manage after what the long day had done to him.

You run into Ormund on your way down the long corridor. His broad form towers in the narrow passageway as his wide hands splay before him in confusion. “What’s taken you so long? Your dinner’s already gone cold.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Your shoulder scrapes along his arm as you shove by him with little affection. Ormund huffs and falls easily into step with you on his much longer legs. The two of you move through the stony corridors in a silent tension that grows with every step you take, torchlight guttering along the damp walls as you pass them. The words of an argument well in your throat the whole way to your chambers and refuse to break free until the door has shut finally behind you.

“I cannot believe you!” you shout, features twisted in anger. “How dare you tell my son to lie to me! After everything—"

Ormund shakes his head. “I only told him to spare you a grief that serves no purpose—"

“You told him to kill a man, Ormund! A smith. A husband.” The words come out through a jaw clenched tight. Your eyes glitter in the flickering candlelight with every one that spills from your mouth, hands gesticulating wildly at your sides. “I stood in that town not an hour ago and told his wife I didn't know where he was. And I didn't know, because you hadn't thought to tell me you hadn’t let him go at all! And now I have to carry that too, on top of everything else because you've decided I didn’t need to be troubled with it—”

“It’s war!” Ormund shouts, voice ringing through the cobbled walls. His handsome features harden instantly as he stares you down with emotionless pale eyes. His long fingers curl into fists before relaxing once more in a repeated cycle intended to calm him. “I will not apologize for teaching that boy what war requires of men who mean to survive it. For now, it’s only Ser Garrick’s broken nose, but we will have far worse than that done to us before this war is through. If Daeron doesn’t learn that now, he’s as good as dead—”

“He’s sixteen—”

“He’s the King's last trueborn son, with any righteous claim to the throne!” Ormund thunders over your teary retort, approaching you with long strides. “He is the rider of a dragon that is the only thing standing between this army and total ruin— What don’t you understand about that?”

Ormund towers over you at once. His firm hands close hard around your arms, keeping you close and unmoving before him. He ducks his head to your height, eyes darting wildly between yours.

“Do you think I enjoyed putting that sword in his hand?” he continues, quieter now. “Do you think I've slept easy a single night since we left Oldtown, knowing what I'm shaping him into— why I have to?”

You swallow hard through a tight throat, peering up at him through the tears clouding your vision. “I think you’ve decided his suffering is a fair price for war,” you waver. “And I think you decided that without asking me.”

“Yes,” Ormund nods without reservation. “I have decided a great many things without asking you first— I did not ask you first when I decided to blanch that stranger’s hair and send him off in Daeron’s place, did I? And yet you still thanked me for it with your words and body when it kept our boy breathing.”

His words tear right through your chest. You shake your head in protest of them even though you know that he’s right — that you are no better than Ormund even in his madness; that you would do worse and more for Daeron if the war called for it, if you were brave enough to do it. 

“Did I complain, all those years, when grief after grief left this house without an heir of its own blood?” Ormund goes on, quieter now but no less harsh, as his features twist in a stifled sort of anguish. “Did I complain when courtiers wondered in whispers why a man would stay wed to a wife that could not give him an heir?” 

You flinch at his words like you can feel them physically, tearing you from the inside out, though his long fingers caging you force you to stomach them.

“I never complained. Because I love you and because I understood it was no fault of your own,” Ormund continues. “So I have earned, I think, the right to make one hard choice without you looking at me as though I’ve become some monster for it.”

Anger pricks your skin beneath your heavy gown like needles.

It is not the unfairness of the blow of his words that sends you reeling, but rather the sheer astonishment at how low he has stooped in his fury — in his grief. It is, perhaps, the cruelest thing he’s ever said to you; made crueler still for how plainly he does not seem to recognize his own cruelty at all.

“Say that again,” you tell him in an emotionless monotone. “Say it plainly, exactly how you mean it— that you think I am some monster—”

“I didn’t mean…” Ormund huffs and hangs his head, tense shoulders dropping as the lingering anger slips from his skin like rain. “I am not saying this to be cruel— Gods know, I’d sooner cut out my own tongue before I meant any cruelty to you.”

His pale eyes are wet and soft again when they lift to meet yours. His hands loosen their grip on your arms as they lift to cradle your cheeks, softly calloused and warm like velvet along your blazing skin.

“Daeron is the only child either of us has been permitted to keep,” the man continues, softer now. “He is not merely a boy I love, though gods know I do, but he is the only proof that we were ever meant to be parents at all… After everything this life took from us in the trying… Do you understand what I’m telling you?"

“So what?” you press, voice breaking. “The only way he gets to stay ours is if he survives long enough to sit a throne? Is that the only way to remove the taint from his blood— that’s what you called it, right?”

Ormund softens further in the face of your anger.

“Without Aemond, without Vhagar, this army has no dragon to answer to whatever Rhaenyra sends against us next… But Daeron has Tessarion, and Daeron has a claim that half this army would follow into the fire itself,” he coos gently to you, as if anything louder might break you entirely. His thumbs smooth gently along your cheekbones, wiping away a tear that clings stubbornly to the burning skin there. “The war is coming here, my love. It is not a thing we can shield him from any longer. He is our only hope of surviving what is coming, and every bit his birthright to lead it."

“Surely…” you trail off in disbelief, wild eyes searching his bluer ones. “Surely you do not mean to make our child fight in this war."

“It is the will of the gods,” Ormund croons as if it were that simple.

Something in you knows, as each word spills from his mouth, that this is not a man reasoning clearly. You can hear it in the smoothness of his voice and in each too-quick answer on his tongue. And yet, you want more than anything for him to be right. You want it so badly it frightens you — for the gods to will this war’s end, for Ormund’s victory, for your son’s survival. 

You don’t realize you’re crying until Ormund draws you fully into his chest with one wide hand along your back and another cradling the back of your head. Tears fall from your lashes and wet the front of his emerald doublet.

“Listen to me…” he mutters into your hair. “If he sits that throne, no one in this realm could ever call him anything but ours. He is Viserys’s heir, yes, but he became a Hightower the moment you held him— and if he rules, no man will ever again whisper that he is not truly yours. He will restore ancient order to the throne. That is how we keep him.”

You shake your head in protest as you lean back from him again, just far enough to peer up at him with tear-heavy eyes. “Just bring him back to me,” you plead fiercely to him. “When this battle is done, I don't care what it costs you to manage it. Bring him back—”

“I will," Ormund nods with the same iron certainty that has carried you through every hard year of your marriage. “I swear it to you. I’ll bring him home—”

“And you,” you remind with a stern finger jabbed into the center of his chest. “You come back to me, too— I have buried enough of what I love in this life, Ormund. I will not bury another. You come back to me. Both of you.”

He nods and leans down to press his forehead against yours. Each of his heaving exhales through his nose fans warm across your chin.

“I will,” he breathes against you, thumbs sweeping again along your cheekbone. He shifts against you to brush the smallest of kisses to the bridge of your nose — so gentle that it makes you feel like crying. Your hands curl hard around his wrist to keep him close. “The gods owe us a debt. And we will see it repaid in full before this war is through, I promise you.”

You cling to the certainty in his voice the way a drowning woman clings to driftwood; the way a starving woman clings to the memory of her last full meal — you cling to him the way a grieving woman clings to the gods themselves.

[lovebugism]

THE WILL OF THE GODS ─── ormund hightower

summary: ormund's growing anger has nowhere to go, and you know exactly which bruises to press to make him unravel until he snaps. (5k)

characters: ormund hightower / fem!reader, daeron targaryen

contents: witchy!reader part 2, mother figure!reader, protective!ormund, angst (hurt/comfort), mutual pining, mutual obsession, talks of religion, not proofread soz, cw for smut 18+ (MDNI): unprotected sex, some choking, dom!ormund but also kinda sub!ormund

Your hand moves slowly through the silken water of the bath, stirring at the flecks of dried chamomile drifting along its surface. The earthy, medicinal aroma of the flowers melts with the sweet orange oil you’d sprinkled in, a concoction known for its soothing properties. Ormund has yet to feel any hint of that promised relaxation, though.

His strong chest, flushed red from the curls of steam, heaves over the waterline. His fingers tighten over the copper rim every time the ripples of your fingers find the most sensitive part of him. It would be so easy, his mind races, for you to reach lower and close your fist around him — to bring him pleasure with nothing but your fingers wrapped around him.

But you had never given him anything so freely, not without first making him earn the ache of waiting for it. So he keeps his gaze on the bath tray above his knees and refuses to let his eyes wander to your hand.

“Is it to your liking, my lord?” you ask from where you kneel at the tub’s edge, with a hint of a knowing smile tugging faintly at your lips.

Ormund nods until the words to respond catch up to him. “Yes, my lady— Thank you,” he stammers, flustered with a heat he’d sooner blame on the bath. 

His pale eyes follow the line of your throat until it disappears into the collar of your gown, dipping low enough for him to see the shadow of your breasts just before you rise to full height above him. You hold the draping sleeve with your free hand and shake your other free from the warm water clinging to your skin.

“Lay out my tiles for me, will you?”

Daeron smiles from his spot on the cushioned chaise by the hearth. The rays of morning light streaming in through the narrow windows catch in his auburn hair, turning them to flames of orange. “As long as you promise not to cheat this time,” the boy jokes drily, already sorting the carved bone tiles on the low table just ahead of him. 

“Winning is not cheating, little prince,” you quip with an arched brow, crossing the distance to join him by the fire. “There is a difference—”

“And you’d do well not to accuse the lady of cheating again,” Ormund cuts in without glancing up from his parchment and quill. “It isn’t polite.”

“Yes, uncle,” Daeron nods once with the smile long gone from his face, suddenly as solemn as a septon.

You glance at Ormund over your shoulder, eyes sparkling with amusement. “It was only in jest, my lord. The little prince meant no harm, I’m sure—”

A sharp knock sounds at the door before you’ve settled by the hearth; three sharp raps in a brisk and dutiful rhythm. “Come,” Ormund calls out, still half-lost in his correspondences. The old oak door groans open a second later. A steward announces from the doorway: “My Lord. Lord and Lady Footly, requesting audience.”

Ormund’s jaw grinds with a preemptive annoyance, though he sets his letters aside on the bathing tray as the lords of Tumbleton enter — Lord Footly first, narrow-shouldered and twitching with the particular anxiety of a man about to recite a complaint his wife had sent him in to tell. Lady Footly comes a pace behind, spine straighter than a spear-shaft beneath her heavy yellow dress. She sneers when her eyes find yours, narrow features twisting at the sight of you in her home, which by any right or blood should never be yours.

“My lord,” Lord Footly begins, voice thinner than paper as he wrings his hands together. Sweat beads on his long forehead, rolling down from his woolen chaperon. “We come regarding our lodging situation. Your men have taken the hall, the granary, all but one of our guest chambers—”

“Yes,” Ormund huffs with a slow nod, growing quickly weary in his patience. “I’ve heard that you are unhappy with your lodging.”

“’Tis only that we are very fond of our ancestral home—”

“You are sleeping in our bedchamber,” Lady Footly interjects, far harsher than her husband by a mile. Her gaze cuts towards you then, like a drawn sword. “And your priestess— or whatever lie you’ve taken to calling her— has filled my mother’s chambers with her… things. Her vials, her herbs, her— poisons. And I will not have my family sleep beneath the same roof as some witch.” 

Her words suck all the air out of the room, or seem to, rather. The humidity rising from the scalding bath feels borderline suffocating in an instant. The sounds of trickling water fill the heavy silence as Ormund rises from the bath without a word. 

Silken rivulets cascade down his muscular form — from his broad shoulders, to his chest, and down his lean stomach — where a line of coarse brunette hair leads to his cock, hanging heavy and limp at his left thigh.

He stands in the center of the tub, dripping and undressed, too angry to care about his own modesty. Lord and Lady Footly fight to avert their gazes without appearing weak.

“That… witch,” Ormund spits through a clenched jaw, as if the word itself were some grave insult. “Is not a guest in this house you are simply meant to tolerate, my lady.” 

Water pools on the cold cobblestone at his bare feet when he steps out of the tub, unbothered by his own nakedness, and refusing to look away from either of them. 

“She is under my protection, as I am under hers— and there is no line I can find between an insult to her and an insult to me. And I would remind you both that I have executed men for lesser treasons than what’s just uttered in this room,” he continues in a low, melodic voice, reaching for the towel hanging beside the tub and smoothing the rough nettles over his glistening skin. “So consider it a mercy that I choose to remember that you are only frightened, and not that you are traitors— That’s why you bent the knee to Rhaenyra, was it not? Because you were scared?”

The silence that follows feels like a thing with teeth, gnawing desperately at the ankles.

“My lord, we meant no—”

“I understand the situation is… less than ideal. For us all, no doubt,” Ormund interjects, though a lighter air has returned to him now. “I assure you that I will keep my men on their best behavior… So long as you remain on yours.” He goes cold again, dismissive in an instant. “See them back to their new chambers, will you, nephew?”

Dareon rises at once, dutiful and only slightly fearful. He escorts them back to their rooms despite the quiet “don’t” that Lady Footly spits at the young prince when he attempts to lead her by the arm. The woman does not glance at you again on her way out, which you see as its own kind of quiet concession.

Your slippers pad along the cobbles as you walk back towards the bath. You pluck the robe from its hook and drape the silken, emerald fabric over Ormund’s broad shoulders, walking in front of him to draw it closed over his chest. His eyes follow your hands the whole while. His chest heaves the remnants of his rage. 

He clears his throat, words softer now, “I apologize, my lady—”

“Have you done something, my lord?”

“She shouldn’t have spoken that way— not of you, not ever,” he stammers. His Adam’s apple bobs in his long throat as he swallows. His fingers twitch anxiously at his side. “Perhaps I ought to punish her. Cut her tongue from her mouth and then geld her husband for allowing his wife to say such things.”

“You were gracious to them, Ormund, as you have always been,” you coo with a tender smile, smoothing the robe flat over his damp collarbone. You think you can feel the thunder of his racing pulse beneath your palm; the heartbeat of a warhorse after a charge. “You said it yourself— they are only frightened. Most people are, of the things they do not understand. It costs her nothing to sneer at me from her doorway. But it will cost her a great deal more to watch the prophecy prove itself true, and to know that she mocked it to my face.”

He eases a little at that, broad shoulders loosening beneath his robe. His breath catches a moment later when your hands dip between your bodies to tie the waist of his robe. His chest tightens, strangled by a heat he can feel crawling up his neck and into his jaw when he feels his cock twitching — with all the helplessness of a teenage boy only just learning the touch of a woman, utterly reeling by the proximity of your hands alone.

You glance down at his lap, and then back up at him, mouth curling with a poorly concealed amusement. “Shall I have some cubes from the icehouse sent up for your bath, my lord?” you wonder with a feigned sincerity. “For your… situation?”

Ormund glows as red as the flame of the Oldtown hightower. “…No,” he chokes out before clearing his throat. “No, my lady. I— I believe I'll manage.”

The solar, which had once belonged to Lady Footly’s mother, now smells of crushed anise and tea leaves — of willow bark, tallow, and smoky embers from a crackling fire. Jars and vials line the shelves where needlework once sat; the glass catches the low firelight in shades of crimson, emerald green, and ocean blue. A pestle sits half-buried in scarlet powder on the worktable, and just beside it, a small iron pot bubbles over burning coals. The steam climbs in slow silver ribbons towards the rafters.

You flit between the two — pot and pestle, stirring and milling — with an ease that suggests you’ve done this a thousand times before, and would likely do it a thousand times again. A knock comes at the door as you crush a handful of spice into the boiling water. The sound is much too gentle to belong to a knight’s hand.

“Come in, Prince Daeron,” you call into the quiet.

The door eases open a moment later. The boy slips in with his head bowed, half in respect and half in his own innate shyness. “How did you know it was me?” he wonders aloud, brows lowered in a boyish look of confusion.

“Well, that is sort of my specialty, is it not?” you hum with a smile and a lazy shrug. “I make potions, and I know things.”

“Is that what you’re making now?” the boy asks, nodding his head to the boiling pot you stand in front of. “Potions?”

“This— is only tea.” You scoop your pointer finger into the simmering liquid without flinching, testing the bittersweetness on your tongue. “It’s ginger and willow bark. For the peasant’s wife whose arm was broken by Ser Garrick. It’s meant to help with the pain. But this…” You trail off and walk to the opposite end of the worktable for the bowl and pestle. You grind the scarlet bits into a finer powder with a few expert turns of your wrist. “This is for the Lady Kat. The woman he attacked. Or tried to.”

“…Is she a lady?” Daeron presses and inches further.

“Well, her husband is a dragonrider for Rhaenyra, so she might as well be,” you sigh, swiping your palms together to rid them of the last of the powder. “He’s surely a knight now, no doubt— or a slave, depending on how you look at it…”

Daeron leans over the other side of the table, peering down into the bowl of foreign grains with a childlike curiosity.

“Best not to get too close, little prince,” you tell him, firm but not unkind. “This could knock even the strongest of knights on his back, should he breathe too deeply of it. I'll have it bagged and sent to Lady Kat at once— so she need never fear another Ser Garrick crossing her threshold again."

Daeron nods slowly to himself in admiration. He knew long before Tumbleton that you were both the strangest and kindest person he’d ever met. His uncle was kind, too, in his own way — but he had a temper that could change quickly and with very little warning. You were gentler than that, strong without having to raise your voice to proclaim it. The kind of gentle that makes tea and poison to protect peasant women you’d never met before, as if it were something you took to by instinct alone.

You notice a pensive sort of look etching in his rounded features before he’s said another word. “Is something troubling you, little prince?” you ask him, wiping your hands off on a cloth as you round the table towards him. 

“I watched,” Daeron starts quietly, emerald eyes dropping to the cobbles. “Ser Garrick’s punishment, I mean— my uncle had him gelded for what he did, and he wanted me there for it. I didn’t want to watch it but… I couldn’t look away, in the end.” 

“Well, that’s only natural,” you assure him. The casual air in your voice eases the furrow from his brow. “Not being able to look away, I mean. Morbid curiosity is stitched into all of us— witnessing that sort of harm is often the only way we can safely face our own fears. Of death, or injury, or misfortune… You're not bad for watching it, Daeron. You're only human."

“What if I couldn’t do the same? If I were in my uncle’s place?” he presses then, voice smaller now. “Would that make me bad?” 

He says the words as if they’d been sitting on his tongue for some time — words he would not dare ask his uncle, whose love for him was absolute, but came with an edge even still. There are no edges to measure with you, he finds, so he speaks freely when the two of you are alone accordingly. You know this, too; so you take the boy’s round face in your palms and tilt it gently upwards.

“You could do the same,” you tell him, with a mother’s firm warmth, though you were not one yourself. “Not the gelding, perhaps, but the choosing. Because you are good, little prince— and sometimes goodness means refusing to let cruelty go unpunished. The gods do not ask us to enjoy it; only to be capable of it, when the hour comes."

Daeron's round eyes dart between both of yours, searching in your gaze the way children search in their parents’ — for permission, for certainty, for a safe place to land. “So you’re saying that… the hour will come for me someday?”

“It comes for every prince who lives long enough," you nod, brushing the pad of your thumb along his freckled cheekbone. “But not today. Today you are only meant to watch. And remember. And grow into a man who can someday bear it."

Daeron’s mouth parts to respond. 

The door slams open before he can. 

Ormund storms through the threshold like a sky of dark-black storm clouds blowing in — shoulders rigid, jaw tight, eyes glassy with a withheld fury. A folded letter is crushed beneath the firm grip of his left hand, while his right opens and closes in a fidgeting fist.

You feel Daeron tense beneath your palms accordingly.

“Best leave now, little prince," you murmur to him. 

The boy nods and slips free of the room’s growing tension, casting one anxious glance at his uncle before shutting the heavy door behind him.

You watch from your worktable as Ormund crosses the expansive room in long, swift strides. A growl builds low in his throat before breaking finally free as he hurls the crumpled letter at the wall. “Useless craven!” His shout rings through the room. He swipes his forearm across the table in the same breath — a vase, a candle dish, an inkpot, and miscellaneous slips of parchment, all shatter against the cobbles in a bright, violent cascade.

“Coward— Cunt!”  He unsheathes his sword from its hilt. The scrape of the steel hisses loudly in the quiet room. He drives the blade into the edge of the great oak desk until the wood splinters from the grain. He bellows through each blow. “Cunt! Cunt! Cuuunt!” 

You watch wordlessly from afar, letting the storm pass on its own. Ormund’s chest heaves beneath with each wavering breath he fights to take through his nose. His sword hangs limp in his trembling hand. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, struggling to ground himself again. 

You say nothing as you walk to his side, lingering at his shoulder and grazing your knuckles along the warm tendon of his neck — from his jaw to his collar and back again. You can feel his pulse hammering beneath the burning skin. Ormund exhales evenly through his nose, leaning instinctively into your featherlight touch. 

Only when his breaths come easier to him do you ask, “What’s happened, my lord?”

It takes him a long moment to find the words, longer to find the evenness in his voice. “My cousin has sent word from Harrenhal…” he says finally, slightly hoarse from his yelling, and sheathes his sword with a steadier hand. “It seems Daeron’s brother, Aemond, will not be joining us after all.”

“So Gwayne is coming in his stead?” you press lightly, splaying your fingers along the back of his neck, where his dark-auburn curls coil at the nape of it. “I’m sure Daeron will be glad to hear it, at least.”

“Yes. My cousin. Who I’d wager has never held a blade with intent in his life,” Ormund nods with a humorless laugh, though a palpable rage simmers behind the smile he gives. “We’re meant to rely on him for protection, in place of the biggest dragon known to man.” 

You can feel the fury radiating off of him still, like heat waves glimmering off a flame. The raging coils tight beneath his skin; you can feel it humming like a plucked bowstring under your fingertips. You know this feeling in him well — you’ve tasted it before, took doses of his rage like medicine. Tonight it was a wellspring, sweet and plentiful and begging for somewhere to go.

“Give it to me,” you blurt suddenly.

Ormund blinks down at you, brows lowered in confusion, chest still rising too fast.

“Give it to me. All of it," you repeat, firmer this time. Your hand slips from his neck, down his taut shoulders, and over his chest. Your palm rests flat over his quilted doublet, over the furious drum of his heart. “Your anger. Give it to me. Let me take it from you— make something stronger out of it.”

Your fingers curl in his collar, drawing him closer towards you. You peer up at him from beneath your lashes, and he finds something dark swimming in your pleading gaze.

“Take it out on me,” you beg him, desperate in a way he hasn’t seen you before. “I can take it. I was made to take it."

Ormund watches with a lidded gaze as you plant yourself on the table ahead of him, right over the splintered gouge where his sword had shattered the wood. You lift your velvet dress skirts without once breaking his eye, unbothered by the wreckage of his previous outburst surrounding you. When the fabric is bunched high at your thighs, you spread them for him and rest back on your palms.

Ormund’s fingers twitch at his side in distant disbelief at your offering — at the sight of you laid open before him — at you. You watch the hesitation crumble his features; the way his adam’s apple bobs in his throat; the way his hands curl and uncurl into unsure fists.

The softness slips from your face all at once.

“Why are you holding back?” you ask, voice now stripped of everything gentle it carried moments ago. You tilt your head to your shoulder, studying him with a surgical precision — wondering which part of him to cut open first. Each word leaves your mouth like a sharp-edged blade tracing along the skin. “I know you hate that you couldn’t stop it— Your own knights, turning on the smallfolk you swore to protect.”

Ormund’s brows lower in confusion. “…What?”

“You watched them snap Ser Garrick’s arm and then strip him of his clothes to geld him for his sin,” you continue. “And you felt nothing but relief that it was done. That for one moment, you were in control of something… Say it.”

Ormund’s jaw clenches tight. He shakes his head to himself, mouth twitching. “Stop.” 

“And all of it for naught…” you shrug, rising onto your palms. “Because you have no Aemond, no Vhagar— Nothing more than your cousin’s scraps. And now you must pretend like your plan isn’t unraveling by the second. Say it.”

A mixture of offense and fury twist across his face; one entirely indistinguishable from the other. His squinted eyes dart between yours, searching for the trickery in your gaze — for the mercy.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks, voice cracking like a boy’s instead of a knight’s.

“Daeron is your only hope now— your only defense against Rhaenyra, should her dragons come— and you cannot stand it,” you press, leaning forward still, moving your body in a slow and deliberate provocation. “You raised that boy, and still some part of you hates him. Every time he speaks, you hear his father’s voice living inside him, and you want so desperately to beat him for it. Beat all that kindness out of him until he’s just flesh you can control—”

“Stop it!” 

The shout tears suddenly from his throat. His hand shoots out before reasoning can catch it ringed fingers close firmly around your throat with a primal sort of instinct. He can feel you, even now, flitting through his every thought like pages of a book. It terrifies him more than any battlefield ever has.

“—It’s why you’ve got that man in chains down there, isn’t it?” you continue through what little breath remains, smiling when Ormund’s features twist in shock at how you could know such a thing. “You want Daeron to be the one to kill him. You want to ruin that gentle boy just as much as prove to yourself that he’s more yours than Targaryen—”

“Enough,” Ormund spits through gritted teeth.

You smile wider when his fingers clench tighter around your throat, testing the give of you there. He finds none. You lift your hands and curl them around his wrist instead — neither pushing nor pulling him away, just holding him there.

“There it is,” you choke out with all the pride a woman who’s just gotten precisely what she asked for — a kitten to milk. “All that hatred. All of it. Give it to me.”

Something dark flashes across his face like lightning. He draws you in by the hand wrapped around your throat before you can blink, kissing you like he means to swallow you whole. It’s all tongue and teeth and spit — his nose smushes into the side of yours as he licks into your mouth with a ruthless abandon. The pad of his tongue feels like velvet against yours, tasting of bitter ale and sweet oranges.

You sigh hard through your nose at the distant burning in your throat from where his fingers hold you in an unrelenting grip — no longer choking you now, but making your head go heavy with a dizzy sort of feeling. You vaguely feel him shift before you, as he works his swordbelt off with his free hand to push his trousers down to his scruffy thighs. 

You don’t see his cock before he pierces you with it, and there is no gentleness in him when he splits you open, though you ask him for none. A pained noise sounds in your throat at the distant burning feeling when he enters you with little warning; a rush of breath mixed with a whimper that makes Ormund falter for a moment.

You shake your head, stern again, when you catch the hesitation that threatens to return to him. “Don’t stop,” you command.

Ormund fights his every instinct to be gentle with you when he urges you flat against the oak table with the hand around your neck. His other grips the back of your thigh to keep you spread open for him as he thrusts hard enough into you to make the desk scrape against the hard stone beneath you, adding to the symphony of sin — to the sound of skin clapping against skin, to the wet sounds of him piercing you, and to the strangled grunts from the back of his throat as he chases his orgasm.

“Yes…” you sigh in contentment as the coarse thatch of hair above his cock rubs mercilessly against your clit. You hold him by the wrist to keep him close and praise him in breathless rambles. “Give it to me, my lord— I can take it— I was made for this, made for you—”

The words spill from your mouth with a calculated provocation, like you know all the right things to say to make him tick. Ormund can hear the lazy smile in your voice as you continue to babble; his chiseled features crumble under the weight of his pleasure, eyes squeezing shut in time with the pressure building in his taut stomach.

“You’re close… I can feel it,” you say between whimpered breaths, head tipping back against the table. Your grip on his wrist tightens. Your thighs tremble around either side of his waist as your own pleasure crescendos. “I want it— I want to make you feel good, my lord— I want to feel you leaking out of me—

“Fuck!” Ormund groans as he tenses suddenly above you. The sound turns into a quiet whimper when his cock begins to jerk violently within your unforgiving confines. “F-Fuck—”

His bruised hold on you loosens when he doubles suddenly on top of you. He braces himself on your hips instead, gripping you tightly there to keep you in place while he spits ropes of cum inside you. Your cunt pulses around him, threatening to suckle him in further. 

He buries his pathetic whines in your neck and trembles through every wave of his orgasm, while your hips buck with the start of yours. You moan in his ear, fingers twisting in his wild curls — spurred on by the pressure on your sensitive clit, and by his warm seed blooming slowly inside of you.

“There it is…” you coo to him as you come down, feeling his tense body slowly relax on top of yours. “There you go, my lord… Yes… Let me have it…”

It takes Ormund a few moments more to sober from his pleasure. Dread settles like steel in his veins a second later; he smears his mouth over your throat, kissing you where his fingers had once dug into the delicate skin. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs against your pulse. “I’m sorry, my love—”

You shake your head, still catching your breath. “You did nothing wrong, my lord.”

“I hurt you,” he chokes out, half-muffled.

“I wanted it,” you remind him, urging him off of your neck with your hands in his hair. His face is flushed pink and screwed with a mixture of pleasure and regret. Your lips curl into a slow smile up at him. “I wanted to make you feel good. You deserve to feel good.”

His chest swells with a foreign emotion that makes him suddenly feel like crying. He presses a searing kiss to your mouth instead. “Thank you,” he mutters against you. “Thank you…”

[lovebugism]

CONTRITION ─── ormund hightower

summary: you come to oldtown as a novice seeking sanctuary in the seven, you find ormund hightower instead. (9k)

characters: dark!ormund hightower / fem!reader, daeron targaryen

contents: novice!reader, slow burn, strangers to lovers, mutual pining, angst, hurt/comfort, religious imagery cw for power imbalance, obsessive behavior, gaslighting, spiritual manipulation, barely proofread, smut 18+ (MDNI): ormund has a scent kink, mutual masturbation, m!receiving oral, thigh riding, dubcon due to manipulation (but everyone is kind of a perv here so it balances out), this is a pretty dark fic so please heed the warnings!!!

Sometimes you think you were unforgivably damned from birth.

You had been born, as far as anyone could tell you, on no particular night in no particular place to no one in particular who cared enough to claim you. You belonged to nothing more than whatever poison you’d inherited flooding your veins, and the years of constant isolation that had drawn an invisible line between you and the rest of the world.

Everywhere you went, you tried to copy what you understood was expected of you, but humanity had never come all that easily to you. You spent most of your life, instead, feeling like a gown turned inside out, with all of your seams and soft parts showing.

First, it had been the other orphan girls you were raised with in childhood, rows and rows of flocking sparrows in matching tatters of grey and navy. Then it was the septry in the Riverlands, where you’d spent the bulk of your teenagehood; and then it was the handful of minor households you served, scattered along the coast from Storm’s End down to Sunspear. After that, it was Septa Enith — who had known you since you were small enough to be lifted onto a washing stool to reach the basin — who sent a raven to the sept keeping you for the season, imploring you to come to Oldtown. 

“Lord Ormund Hightower stands in need of a tutor to assist in his nephew’s instruction,” the letter wrote in the old woman’s perfect script. “If the Mother grants it and your present duties permit, come to Oldtown with due haste, and the Seven may yet make some purpose of you.”

So you had gone to Oldtown the way you had gone to every foreign town throughout your childhood. A ghost wandering a half-gone graveyard, a stranger let loose in another man’s sanctuary — hoping, always hoping, that someone might finally decide you were something worth keeping. 

When the city rose finally before you in tiers of sun-bleached stone, with a towering lighthouse crowning its center like a great white candle, you believed that you had only traded one kind of nothing for another — as you had done your whole life.

Septa Enith leads you through the corridors of the tower with her habit whispering faintly behind her. You follow a few paces back with your eyes downcast, dressed in a gown of plain wool that marked your status — lesser, unfinished, a novice still — lacking the septa’s seven-pointed veil you had not yet earned, and allowing your hair to hang loose behind you.

“Septa Enith,” Lord Ormund greets from further inside his office upon her entrance. The room is warm with early-morning light, turning motes of dust aglitter where they drift through the tall stained-glass windows. The air is sweet with the scent of pine logs smoldering low in the hearth, where a young boy lingers — Daeron, you figure, still soft-cheeked with the last days of childhood.

His uncle rises from the great oak desk, full of organized letters and ledgers. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome to the point of devastation. He comes around the desk, boots padding softly along the cobblestone. 

“This must be the girl you wrote me of.”

You sink into a small, practiced curtsy with your gaze fixed on the cobbles. Septa Enith introduces you like a woman would present her own handiwork — that you were traveled and well-taught; a little green yet, but still diligent and pious beyond most girls your age.

But you were not devout, in truth. Not really. The gods were like your parents in that regard: neither one was coming to look for you now. And in the few times you had sunk low enough to beg the gods for mercy, they only seemed to shove more suffering down your throat to keep you from crying out again. But devotion was never the point — a girl so alone in the world, with no dowry and no kin to speak of, had precious few paths laid before her. The grey wool and the seven-pointed star was, perhaps, the only one that would ever choose you back.

With your eyes still lowered, you see only Lord Ormund’s polished boots enter the narrow scope of your downcast vision.

He lingers before you, close enough for you to catch the scent of him — leather, incense, and musky bathing oils. He waits with a polite grin for you to lift your eyes, and raises his brows to his hairline when you don’t. 

He ducks his head instead, made of short, dark-auburn curls, trying almost playfully to catch your gaze from below — the way a young boy might peer beneath a table to startle someone hiding there.  He leans closer then, enough for you to hear the soft pull of breath he draws in through his nose.

You flinch involuntarily at the nearness of his warmth, before willing your body back into its practiced submission once more.

“Rosewater…” Ormund mutters, almost to himself, as if he were solving some sort of riddle. “And something else beneath it— orris root, I’d wager.” 

He straightens then, satisfied with his guess, and waits again for a response from you that never comes. 

It was always easier to be quiet, you found, after so many years spent in the company of high lords and ladies who cared not if you lived or died. You had learned to stand so still in a room that you all but vanished from it, refusing to give away even the smallest, truest piece of yourself.

Ormund’s grin grows wider at your silence. His deep, melodic voice is coated in amusement as he quips, “Septa Enith hasn’t sent me a silent sister, has she? I’d hate to think my nephew’s new tutor has sworn off speaking entirely."

“No, my lord,” you answer finally, though the words are swallowed back down again almost as soon as they leave you.

“She speaks!” Ormund chuckles, the sound ringing through the quiet expanse of his office. “A voice like a mouse, yes, but a voice all the same.”

Still, though, you fail to lift your eyes to meet his own. You’re grateful when the man doesn’t press you any further for it, though you can feel a tension that suggests he wants to — like the glimmering heat off a flame. There’s something strangely gentle in his palpable restraint; a simple courtesy that costs him nothing, though he seems to take a private pride in offering it nonetheless.

“You needn’t be frightened,” he tells you, gentler now. “You’ll be treated kindly here. Enith keeps a fair house, as I’m sure you know, and Daeron is no great trial— are you, boy?”

He glances over his shoulder towards the hearth, where Daeron stands with his hands folded behind his back and his eyes watching the exchange with an attentive, green-eyed stare — a future knight in the making no doubt.

“No, uncle," Daeron answers, firm but gentle, and with a deep voice that still fractures slightly with the remnants of boyhood.

Lord Ormund's pink mouth curves into a pleased grin. “Well, what do you think, then? Shall we keep her?"

He poses the question lightly, as if you were a piece of livestock being brought to market. You suppose he means it in jest, or at least, as something far more light-hearted than the words truly sound, but it strikes you deep in the chest anyway.

“If it please you, uncle,” Daeron responds politely. 

Lord Ormund turns back to you then, still sporting the same polite grin. His brows bounce with amusement as his pale gaze sweeps your form in a slow, daunting pass.

“Then yes…” he hums to himself. “I think we shall…”

Your days, for the first time since childhood, take a shape that feels almost permanent. 

You rise each morning before the sun, kneel through your morning prayers alongside Enith and the other septas in the hush of the sept, break your fast on stale bread and watered wine, and then report to the small, sunlit chambers where Daeron takes his studies. Septa Enith watches every day from her chair by the window, tending to her needlework while you lead the young prince’s lessons, and correcting you only rarely.

Daeron, as you had come to find after weeks within the Hightower keep, was a perfect pupil. He was quick, attentive, and always very sweet. He minds his histories well and his prayers even better, and only rarely drifts his attention out the window toward the training yards where the squires train with blunt swords. But you had been a child once, too, even though it felt a very long time ago now — and you deign to crack his knuckles with the pointer stick the way your teachers had once done to you.

“We’ll start easy,” you say from across the low table, where a scattering of parchment lay between you. “The Hightowers of Oldtown."

“‘An old, just, and true line,'" Daeron recites the text easily, with his eyes fixed out the window and his finger drumming with a boyish distraction. “‘Keeper of the light, guardian of the Citadel and the Faith.' Words: We Light the Way."

“Good,” you hum. “The Tyrells of Highgarden?”

“Words: Growing Strong. Their sigil is a… a golden rose on a green field. They hold Highgarden by right of the Gardener kings— though they were stewards once, not lords."

“The Lannisters of Casterly Rock?"

“Words: A Lannister always pays his debts—”

“A common phrase, yes, but not their true words,” you correct gently, lips pursed to keep from smiling. “Try again.”

“Words…” he trails off, wrinkling his freckled nose in thought. “Hear Me Roar. Their sigil is a golden lion on crimson. They say they're the richest house in the Seven Kingdoms, though Septa Enith says rich men are always saying that about themselves—”

“That was not meant for you to repeat, boy,” the older woman scolds without looking up from her stitching. Daeron ducks his head with a grin pursed to the side of his mouth, and you allow yourself the smile you’d been holding back all lesson.

A steward arrives in that moment, rapping twice along the door frame to announce his presence. “Begging pardon, Septa,” he says with a polite bow of his head, just before his eyes find you. “Lord Ormund has requested your presence in his office.”

“Oh—” Your eyes widen as you glance back at Daeron, then to the half-done lesson laid out before you, and then to the lanky man across the room. “I— We’re still at our studies, ser. Might I come after we’ve—”

“Girl,” Enith snaps, her voice cutting through the room like a whip. All eyes turn to her in an instant. Her wise, watery gaze hardens at you. “Lord Ormund does not wait on the patience of novices. You will go to him now, and you will be grateful he thought to send for you at all."

Heat crawls up your neck from the high collar of your woolen dress. You swallow through the distant shame of being scolded before your own pupil, as if you were a child of Daeron’s own age, and rise with a murmured apology to no one in particular. You follow a few paces behind the steward with your eyes fixed on the floor. 

Ormund’s office, you find, is washed in beams of silver-gold from the morning light spilling through the high windows. He stands within the rays with his strong hands clasped loosely behind his back as he gazes out over the tower's long descent to the river below. 

The sound of the door clicking shut behind you draws his attention. He turns his head, and the light catches in his sheared curls, turning them a richer shade of auburn. 

“There you are,” he greets with a kind smile, motioning to his desk in the center of the room with a broad hand. “Come in. Sit, if you like.”

You do not move from your place. You remain just inside the door, with your head bowed and your hands folded obediently in front of you, the way you had been taught. You say nothing in response until he asks.

“How does my nephew’s lessons fare?”

“Well, my lord.” Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to, trembling at the edge of each syllable despite your attempts to steady it. “He’s very smart. He’s very clever, too, as I’m sure you already—”

“Come closer, won’t you?” he interjects suddenly, though not unkindly. “I can hardly hear a word from you all the way over there.”

Your slippers pad along the cobbles as you near him with small, hesitant steps, and with your breath caught somewhere in your throat. You stop an arm's length from him before the great stained-glass windows — Ormund closes what little distance remains himself, smothering you in his warmth and the incense clinging to the silver pomander hanging at his sword belt.

His wide hands lift to rest along the outsides of your elbows without warning. You’re perhaps more startled by the gentleness of his touch rather than the touch itself — you can feel the warmth radiating from his palms even through the thick sleeves of your dress. He dips his head the same way he had the first time he met you, trying once more to catch your downturned gaze.

“You needn’t be frightened of me,” Ormund tells you softly, though it did very little to loosen the perpetual knot in your chest.

“I am not, my lord,” you tell him, half-strangled, and wonder distantly if a lie is still a sin if it’s meant to spare someone else the trouble of you.

Ormund says nothing for a long moment. When you dare to lift your eyes, you find that he’s already leaning in — the way he had that very first day. Your pulse falters a beat when you hear him draw a slow breath beside your temple. You go very still, like a trapped animal going quiet in the hope of being spared.

“Lavender,” he muses to himself. “And… beeswax.”

He straightens once more, pleased with himself, and smiles down at you again. 

“The motherhouse must be running thin, if you've had to make do with the castle's plain milling,” he quips with an attentiveness that feels borderline intrusive. “I’ll have something better sent along to you at once.”

You say nothing. There is nothing to say to that, you think — nothing that wouldn’t feel like spurring on his kindness, which has started to feel like comes with a debt you didn’t agree to owe.

“Well,” he says in response to your silence, dropping his hands to his sides. The warmth in his strong face returns again, with the negligible tenderness of a lord dismissing one of his middling servants. “I won’t keep you from your duties any longer. Go on back to my nephew— I imagine Enith's grown fond of her needlework again, now that she's free to listen to you instead.”

You drop into your usual curtsy with a“yes, my lord,” murmured beneath your breath. You rise again and turn to go, but Ormund catches you before you can. 

He ducks down and presses his mouth to yours in a parting kiss that a great lord might bestow on any woman of his household. His lips are soft and light against your own, but lingering nonetheless — long enough that the peck turns from well-mannered to borderline indecent.

You go rigid at the shock of it, too stunned to do anything more than stand there with your hands clenched into fists at your sides until he pulls away from you again.

“May the Seven be with you, sister,” Ormund says with a kind, untroubled grin, as if nothing strange had passed between you at all.

“And with you, my lord,” you manage through the invisible hand still wrapped around your throat. 

It takes the length of the corridor outside for you to remember how to breathe again. You feel the ghost of his mouth on yours for hours after he’s let you go.

Something about Ormund sticks in you like a splinter under the skin. The thought of him grows on you like ivy on cobblestone — quiet and quick and everywhere. It was his unwavering tenderness, you think, or maybe the way his eyes always seemed to linger on you a beat longer than courtesy required, which left something raw and unfamiliar in its wake. Like what little you remember of love in your girlhood, a childhood infatuation that was usually very fickle but always very intense.

It was this same constant turning-over of him in your head that made it so easy to suspect him when your slips began to disappear.

It was a small thing at first — a sliver torn from the edge of your thin linen, leaving the hem pulled and frayed. A rat, you assumed, gnawing for fabric for its nest; or a splintered edge, maybe, from where your trunk had snagged it. And when a second strip vanished, this time cut clean from the chest, you believed it had been a rat then, too.

But then an entire slip had disappeared outright, gone from the wicker basket of unwashed linen, and no amount of searching your small chamber seemed to turn it up.

Septa Enith called you mad when you told her of your suspicions, but you knew what kind of man Lord Ormund was. 

You had felt his breath along your temple, heard him murmur rosewater and lavender and beeswax against your skin with the quiet reverence typically reserved for prayer. And, thus, the thought crept into your skull unbidden, shaped like that same warm breath along your skull. Try as you might to laugh it off as foolishness — the overactive fancy of a girl raised with gossiping novices, forever seeing shadows where none existed — the thought did not leave you. And after a time, you understood it would not leave you until you knew if it was true.

And so you lie.

You tell Septa Enith that you were feeling poorly and asked if she could take Daeron’s lessons herself that day. You bore her subsequent scolding with your eyes down and your hands folded — that you ought to have more of a backbone than to let a little queasiness keep you from your duties; that a septa's calling was not so easily set aside as that. You had already memorized the prayers of contrition you would say for it later, kneeling before the Mother to confess the small sin honestly.

But for now, you spend the rest of the morning in your chambers — sitting first upon your bed and then, when that grew tiresome, at the writing desk by the window. You watch the morning light drift across the ancient floorboards and feel more and more foolish by the minute. By midday you’ve nearly convinced yourself that you’ve wasted a perfectly good lie on nothing, and that the missing slips had simply been misplaced; that Lord Ormund had far better things to occupy his time than a novice septa's undergarments.

Then you heard his voice in the corridor, exchanging some brief word with a passing servant outside — “See that the eastern rooms are aired before the Citadel men arrive,” he says.

It would have meant nothing to you at all if it hadn’t been drawing nearer to your bedchambers. Your heart lurches wildly in your chest as you scramble from the desk and into the small adjoining bathing room — easing the door shut until only a hair’s-breadth crack remains. You press yourself against it, scarcely daring to breathe.

A knock comes at your door a moment later. It’s soft and courteous, two sharp raps against the wood, as if to make certain that no one at all was behind it. The heavy door creaks open without invitation. You hear the scuff of boots against the floor and the click of the door easing shut, just before Ormund comes into view.

Through the crack in the door, you watch the man move slowly through the narrow confines of your quarters. The late morning light catches the auburn flecks in his curls as he passes the window by your writing desk. He lingers there for a long moment, studying the things scattered across its surface as if he were already well acquainted with them. 

He lifts the smooth river stone you’d kept since childhood, somehow already knowing where to find it, and runs his thumb mindlessly over the smooth edge. As he does so, he dips his head to skim through the parchment scattered there — clumsy sketches, scant prayers, and miscellaneous writings of dried ink.

Ormund touches nothing else. He only looks, cataloging the smallest parts of your life with his eyes alone.

He sets the small stone down with a quiet thud and crosses to the hamper of unwashed linens tucked beside your washstand. He peers inside and, without hesitation, plucks one of your slips from the pile.

Your heart goes still but very loud all at once as you watch the man bring the linen up to his nose to inhale the scent of you upon it — of rosewater, soap, and faintly of sweat. His strong chest rises beneath his emerald doublet as he takes a slow breath in. His eyes fall shut on the long, lingering exhales that follow. 

You see only the profile of his broad form from where you stand. He goes quiet and still thereafter with something that seems almst peaceful.

When his hand moves into his trousers, with the linen slip still caught in his fist, you do not move from the doorway. You stand frozen in disbelief while his hand disappears in his pants, while the rest of your slip hangs lazily at his thigh. You scarcely breathe — because your heart has moved so far up into your throat that you cannot, maybe; or because you long to hear the man’s grumbled groan as he works himself hard with his fist.

His adam’s apple bobs in his throat when he tips his head back. His moan comes from the very back of his throat, sounding like distant thunder as it rolls across the quiet room. The pleasured sound feels like a hand between your thighs, where a strange throbbing has started to settle — an ache that longs to be smoothed out.

“Yes…” Ormund groans to himself through a jaw clenched tight. 

And, as if spurred on by his own words, you feel your hand reaching down to lift your skirts — and to shove your fingers where the dull pulsing has settled. 

Your pointer and forefinger slot wet between the velvety folds of your cunt. You pierce yourself with them slowly, the way it had been down to you by a young knight somewhere between The Twins and Riverrun in your girlhood. 

You remember the way he attempted to pleasure you with his fingers, dragging them in and out and in and out of you. And even though you failed to orgasm then the way the knight said you ought to have, you fight now to chase that pleasure warming in the very pit of your stomach now.

You brace yourself against the doorframe with your free hand and watch the man stroke himself with a lidded gaze — with the same violating scrutiny he always seems to watch you with. 

You’re no different than he is, a cynical voice screams in the very back of your head. The two of you are made out of the same kind of sin. But even still, you find yourself hunting the feeling simmering in your stomach; a knot pulled tight and threatening to snap.

Ormund tenses in place, bracing himself with a strong hand along your bedframe as his towering body quakes with the tremors of his orgasm. His knuckles go white around the ancient wood, gripping there hard enough to splinter it. 

His moan sounds like thunder in his chest — “Fuck…” he grumbles lowly. “Fuck, yes…” 

He reaches his pinnacle before you do, and when the aftershocks have subsided and his limbs have stopped shaking, Ormund pulls your dress from his trousers. Something sticky darkens the pale fabric where his fist had held it. You catch only a sliver of the stain before he tosses it back into the basket of unwashed linens.

Your heart slams against your ribcage; hard enough that you worry he might hear it through the door as he slips back out of your bedchambers, just as quietly as he had come in.

You remain in the crack of your own bathing room door long after the sound of his footsteps has faded down the corridor. 

You wonder how many times Ormund has let himself into your chambers while you attended your lessons and prayers each day. You wonder how many times he’s pleasured himself using your garments as a rag, and how many of those garments you must have washed without noticing his pleasure stained upon it. 

You wonder, even more so, if you should feel more violated by the thought than you do — if it would be such a sin to take pleasure in the thought of being so carnally desired.

You drag your fingers, finally, from the depths of your pulsing confines. The pads of them have started to prune with the slick gathered upon them, shiny with honey and slightly stringy when you separate your middle and pointer finger from one another.

What are these hands supposed to do now? the voice berates you still, while your loins tingle with a lingering pleasure. Because they are certainly far too stained now to pray.

You need a mother to comfort you; a father to shield you; someone older and wiser to cry to, because the skies are empty and no god has answered you yet. 

Your attempts to tell Septa Enith what you’d seen had failed you entirely. You had gone to her that afternoon, before the courage could leave you, and found her in the small garden off the sept where she typically took her afternoon needlework. You told her what you had witnessed (and nothing of what your own fingers had done to yourself while you witnessed it). 

Her needle stilled mid-stitch. For a moment, you thought she might believe you, as her wrinkled face twisted in shock at your confession. But when she finally spoke, her voice came flat with something closer to anger than alarm.

“So you lied to me this morning?” she asked after several moments of daunting silence.

“Yes. I did,” you answered honestly from where you knelt beside her chair, with your hands clasped in your lap like a penitent child. “And I do mean to repent for it, Septa, for however long you think fit. But I saw him. With my own eyes, in my own chambers. I saw him take my—”

“Oh, enough of that,” she grunted, as if she were dismissing a child mid-fancy. Her face screwed with annoyance as she berated you. “I have known you since you were a girl of seven years. Sniveling and friendless and full of stories that were never true; stories you told yourself to escape the real truth of things. I remember it. The other septas remember it besides.” 

You cowered at her words. Her mouth thinned into a tight seam; her watery blue eyes hardened in a way that you had not seen since your earliest, clumsiest days under her instruction — when you were still learning which lies got a girl a slap and which got her days of confinement.

“And now you would have me believe that Lord Ormund — a kind man who has shown you nothing but courtesy since the day you set foot in this tower — has been sneaking into your chamber to steal your smallclothes and use them to… pleasure himself like a lovesick stableboy?"

“I saw it," you repeated, voice cracking with a desperation to be believed. You blinked away the haze of tears burning at your waterline as you begged her. “Septa, please—"

“Enough,” she shoved your pleading hand away and stood, smoothing out her skirts with hands that were not quite steady. “I’ll not hear any more of it. You'll do your penance tonight as you've promised, and you'll pray besides for honesty — and for gratitude, perhaps, that a house such as this took in a girl with no name and no prospects and gave her some purpose at all.”

You stayed where you knelt as the woman moved towards the tower, heavy with the sinking feeling that she was moving to Lord Ormund’s solar to carry your confession to him herself. 

“I’d have thought you'd grown past your stories by now,” she scolded without looking back at you.

The summons, which you knew was inevitable, doesn’t come until the sun has dipped low over the horizon — turning the cloudless sky into a mixture of deep orange and dark lavender. A steward knocks at your door and does not meet your eyes when he tells you that Lord Ormund awaits your presence in the castle sept. You had lain through the afternoon anticipating exactly this, but your stomach still flips in spite.

The sept is empty and quiet with the remnants of evening prayer. The air is stale and thick with the scent of burning incense and glowing candles. What little light remains falls through the stained glass in slanted beams of color across the ancient wood — deep red where it touches the Warrior’s carved shield, soft green pooling at the Mother’s feet, and jewel-blue catching the folds of the Father’s robes where he stands in eternal judgment above the altar. 

You find Lord Ormund standing near the front with his back to you, and with a leather-bound copy of the Seven-Pointed Star in his hands. His voice is low and even as it carries through the empty nave, reading aloud to no one at all: “…And the Crone raised her lantern, saying: truth is the light by which the righteous find their road, while falsehood is a mist that leads only to darkness.” 

He speaks the words as if he knew precisely when you would arrive, and had arranged the moment accordingly to catch you in some sort of trap.

Ormund does not look up when your slippers pad along the narrow aisle. He lets you linger there instead, like a stupid lamb walking itself to the slaughter. The silence grows too suffocating to bear. You feel the weight of the sept pressing down on either side of you — old wood and candle-smoke and the watchful, carved eyes of seven gods who had never once troubled themselves to answer your prayers.

“Septa Enith came to speak with me this afternoon,” Ormund says in lieu of a greeting when he turns finally to face you. His smile is thin-lipped and gentle, if not a little disarming. “She tells me you’ve become… distressed.”

It takes you a long moment to find the courage to speak. The words well up into your throat like bile but refuse to come out, lingering bitterly on your tongue instead. The candles crackle in the silence you leave behind.

“I— I only told her the truth, my lord,” you tell him. And though your voice does not waver, your folded hands start to tremble despite your effort to keep them still.

“The truth…” he echoes, as if he were tasting the word on his tongue for the first time. He saunters down the steps of the altar with the leather-bound book tucked beneath his strong arm.  “You believe, truly, that I entered a novice’s chambers without invitation? That I used her garments for something so sinful? That I’ve been… stealing pieces of her garments for my own keeping?” 

A laugh leaves him then, warm with amusement.

“Surely, you do not think so little of me as that.” 

“I only know what I saw,” you answer and hold his gaze until it feels like a little rebellion. It’s the first time you’ve ever offered him your eye contact so freely, to be sure, and it feels like it costs you something to do it.

“Would you swear it?” Ormund asks, approaching you like a hunter would a prey animal caught in a snare. The candlelight catches in the strong curve of his jaw and the blue of his eyes, carving him out of flickering gold and shadow. “You would swear it before the Father himself. Invoke His judgment upon your soul, should you speak false."

Your mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water until you find the breath to answer. “I… I would never lie before the Seven, my lord.”

“No,” the man hums with a shake of his head, studying you still from a few paces off. Something in his chiseled features turns gentle, or seemed to besides. “I do not believe you would.”

You think the words are meant to comfort you. 

They do not.

“But I do believe something else," Ormund continues without his gaze straying from yours. “I believe loneliness makes strange companions of the mind. Wouldn’t you agree?”

You stiffen from where you stand before him, bracing yourself for his following words, which you know are bound to find you like a rod to the thigh.

“You grew up without mother or father. Without kin of any kind, as I’m told,” Ormund rambles with all the tenderness of a man delivering some sad, gentle truth. “A child left alone in such a place learns to invent reasons for the things she cannot understand, does she not? It is not a fault in her, to be sure. It is only what loneliness does to a mind left too long to its own devices."

“I am not a child,” you try to argue, though the words come out more strangled than you intend.

“No,” Ormund grins, devilish enough to squint the edges of his eyes. “But perhaps some distant part of her lingers in you yet."

Your hands clench into fists. Your dull nails bite crescent shapes into the delicate skin of your palms. “I saw you—”

“You've always had a fondness for stories, haven’t you?” he interjects, almost fondly so. “Septa Enith told me as much herself— said that you used to… frighten all the other girls with tales of dragons in the rafters, of shadows that moved on their own in the dark.”

“I was a child then—”

“She said you often mistook the wind for voices; and shapes in dark corners for things with faces,” Ormund continues with a grin, tilting his head until the candlelight pools in the hollows of his eyes. “So tell me, sister, and weigh it honestly, as the Seven would have you weigh it… What is more likely— that a lord of this tower crept into a servant's chamber to steal her smallclothes like a common thief? Or that a girl who has spent her whole life inventing stories has done so once more?"

His words close around your throat like a pair of cold hands. You search desperately for a response but find nothing immediately waiting. Your voice has sealed itself shut around whatever truth you might have offered him, choking instead on the smothering weight of his.

Ormund steps closer and holds the Seven-Pointed Star out between you. His voice comes out sterner this time as he commands, “Read. I’ve already marked the page for you.”

“My lord—"

“Read."

Your hands tremble when they reach for the book he motions towards you. You find the leather still warm from his palms and impossibly heavy between your fingers as they fumble for the scarlet ribbon tucked inside. The thin pages turn heavily, until the inked words swim finally before you, blurred at the edges with time and something hot building behind your eyes.

“Aloud,” Ormund presses at your silence.

Your voice is scarcely more than breath when it finally comes to you.

“False witness is… is a wound upon the soul. For the tongue that fashions lies… distances itself from the light of the Father— and the Mother turns Her face from deceit until repentance is sought…” you swallow hard through a tight throat, fighting the tremor in your voice. You press on before you lose the nerve, and pretend not to notice the weight of Ormund’s stare fixed upon you.

“Let he who bears false tales examine his own heart before… before casting stones upon another. For the Crone's wisdom teaches that the eye deceived is— is no less guilty than the tongue that speaks the falsehood aloud—”  You cut yourself off with a shake of your head, a stubborn refusal at Ormund’s plain attempt at manipulation. “I cannot.”

“You can,” the man nods, warm and almost encouraging. “Continue.”

Your voice cracks in two, but you obey regardless — because some well-worn part of you never learned how to do otherwise.

 “…And let the penitent seek not to defend his pride, but to humble himself before the Seven. For truth asks no champion, and innocence need fear no judgment,” you continue, voice thick and wet with unshed tears, breath hitching occasionally in your throat. “Bow thy head before the… the Father, confess thy trespass before the Mother… and the Smith shall make whole— that which falsehood hath broken. So shall mercy be granted— unto the contrite, but the stubborn shall… shall dwell in the Stranger's shadow… until the last of their days—”

By the time you reach the passage's end, your vision has dissolved entirely into tears. They burn hot and humiliating down your cheeks and chin until one strikes the page before you could catch it. It blooms dark against the old vellum. You scrub at it with your sleeve, as though you might undo the stain before it set.

“I—I’m sorry," you stammer — to the book, maybe, or to Ormund, or to the Seven watching from their carved and unmoving faces. 

The man says nothing for a long while. When he finally speaks again, the sternness has slipped entirely from his voice — replaced by something that sounds, almost, like kindness.

“You’ve carried a great deal on your own, haven’t you?” Ormund wonders suddenly aloud. You peer up at him with your eyes still glittering like stained glass. His hardened face has softened slightly, because of the tears clouding your vision maybe, or perhaps due to a newfound warmth.  “You've spent your whole life learning to survive on what you need. But tell me, my girl— What do you want?"

You don’t realize until then that no one has ever asked you that before — not once, in all your years of learning to be small,  useful, and no trouble to anyone who might otherwise have turned you out into the cold. The question moves through you like a key turning finally into an old lock that’s long rusted shut.

“I…” you try hard to speak, but your breath catches somewhere in your throat before you can. “I don't know, I… I’ve never…”

You trail off, shaking your head. Ormund ducks down to catch your gaze when it falls away once more.

“Tell me,” he presses gently, brows softly furrowed. “Speak true.”

“I’ve… I’ve never belonged anywhere, my lord,” you confess for the first time aloud. “I don't remember my mother's face. Nor my father's. No one’s ever… ever chosen me before. The only reason the sept took me in was because there was nowhere else for me to go, I… I think that— I’ve always been in… in someone's way. I don't— I don’t even know what I’m supposed to want.” 

A laugh sputters from your mouth, all watery and ashamed. You trail off again, so quietly you can barely hear your own voice over the pounding of your heart. 

Your face screws into a pained sort of look as you admit to him, “I think… I think I only want someone to— to tell me what to want, what to do.”

The candles gutter along the altar, though no draft has moved through the sept. Your words cling so ardently to the incense-thick air between you that you wish so desperately that you could reach out and put them back in your mouth again — suddenly terrified that you’ve given away far too much of yourself.

Ormund steps forward, close enough to smother you with the warmth radiating from his towering form. He plucks the leather-bound scripture from your trembling hands, closes it with a resounding thud in one broad fist, and tosses it blindly to a pew just beside him without once looking away from you. The book hits the wood like a door slamming shut. Your shoulders jerk as the sound echoes through the quiet sept.

You try to will your hands to stop shaking at your sides as you peer at the man from beneath lashes clumped wet with tears. He spends a long moment staring down the bridge of his nose at you, chest rising and falling with even breaths beneath the clasps of his doublet.

When he speaks again, his words come out low and steady from his mouth — far gentler and far more certain than any god has ever been to you before.

“Kneel,” he commands plainly, needing no further adornment to carry the weight of the word.

You stand frozen before him for several long moments thereafter. 

The last color pooling from the stained glass thins now as the sun sinks somewhere beyond the windows — crimson bleeding to rust, green fading to a negligible yellow, blue fading to the color of an old bruise. Above the altar, the Seven look down upon you with nothing but judgment. They offer you no counsel, no rescue, no sign that they had ever been listening to all your years of prayer.

Then, with your cheeks still wet with thick streaks of tears, you clasp your hands tightly together and lower yourself to your knees. They meet the cold wood with a quiet thud, and the chill of it climbs up through your skirts. 

Your lowered gaze lifts slowly to the man towering above you. You find no comfort waiting in his strong features. There is nothing behind his light eyes except the flickering candlelight and the same coldness as the Father looking down from his stone alcove — as if Ormund, too, felt owed something you had not yet given.

“There can be no absolution without obedience…” he says without taking his eyes off yours, even as his hands reach for the buckle of his sword belt. 

The gold clinks faintly together; the leather hisses faintly when it’s pulled through. At first you think he means to spank you with it — bend you over his knee, lift up your skirts, and whip you bruised. Your stomach twists with excitement at the thought. 

A mixture of dread and self-deprecation consumes you a moment later, when he tosses the scabbard aside and reaches for the tie in his trousers instead.

“…Show me the second,” Ormund continues, this time with his fist hidden in his pants, massaging himself there the same way he had in your chambers. “And perhaps I’ll be gracious enough to give you the first.”

Your mouth waters like a starving hound when he frees his cock from the confines of his slacks, tucking the hem beneath his balls. It’s heavy and half-hard in his fist — a shade paler than the rest of his skin, and glowing a faint pink color at the tip. This one is far bigger, far prettier than the cocks you’d seen throughout your teenagehood — when high lords and lanky knights would pull it out for you, “c’mon, just kiss it,” they’d beg, right before berating you when your face screwed in disgust instead.

All that repulsion seems to leave you now. Your mouth parts without further command from him, as if an unconscious part of you had longed to wrap your lips around his cock and taste the glittering spend he’d buried into your slip that morning. Your tongue darts out in a soft kitten lick to collect the pearls drooling from the tip, more salty than sweet.

“All of it now. C’mon…” you hear the man coo above you, like a parent urging their child to finish their supper. 

You abide him willingly and take the rest of his cock into your mouth. Your eyes squeeze shut as your hands ball the fabric of your dress into fists, fighting back the gag that rises in your throat as you force yourself to take the entire length of him — if only to prove to yourself that you could, that you would lay the whole of your obedience at his feet for the smallest word of praise from his lips.

Ormund’s head tips back. A mixture of a laugh and a moan rumbles in his throat when the tip of your nose buries in the coarse thatch of brunette hair above his cock, smelling of sour sweat and musky bathing oils. Tears prick at the backs of your eyes like burning embers. His wide hand splays along the crown of your skull, more gentle than forceful, and it feels like an act of clemency.

“The gods weren’t enough for you, were they?” Ormund says, a lazy grin audible in his voice, as his thumb smooths over your hair. “No, you needed someone real to teach you, didn’t you? Someone real to belong to…”

His words make you nauseous. 

You feel the urge to puke, but stronger still is the urge to make him feel good. You want to please him and murder him — you want to be obedient to him alone; you want to make him smile; you want to make him proud; you want him to forgive you and hate you and desire you all at once. You want to kiss him all over, and then beat him for making you so unholy, and then kiss him so more, and then let the hounds consume his sin to the bone.

You let him cum in your mouth instead.

“Take it all. There you go…” he praises in murmured slurs, keeping you pressed against him while he tenses above you. You nearly gag when the first drop of his spend stains your tongue, heavy and slightly bitter. “Take it all, and I’ll make you holy again,” Ormund babbles, almost to himself, as he shivers against you. “I promise… I promise…” 

He pulls you off him with his fingers twisted tight in your hair, though not quite hard enough to hurt. He stares down at you with lust still swimming in his glassy blue eyes, and you wonder what you must look like from his perspective — on your knees, swollen-mouthed, heavy-eyed, wearing a mixture of cum and saliva down to your chin. The statue of the Father looms just behind him. You pretend not to notice.

“Open your mouth,” Ormund commands before you can swallow. 

You do as you’re told, careful not to let the pearl-colored spend drip off of your tongue when you show it to him. Ormund’s chest heaves at the sight, as if it had snatched the breath from his lungs entirely. And then, before you can blink, he kneels before you — holding you by the chin with the hand not knotted in your hair, and kissing you hard enough to swallow you whole.

His tongue swipes against yours to collect his own cum and sighs hard through his nose at the taste of it, a mixture of himself and you. You can taste the ale on his lips and the lemon dessert from his dinner right before he pulls away from you; still close enough to run the tip of his broad nose over the bridge of your nose.

“Have you ever done that before?” he whispers, breath fanning warm against your mouth. You shake your head against him, too breathless for words. “Good…” he hums, then wonders aloud with all the sheepishness of a young boy. “Has anyone ever made you cum before?” 

“They’ve tried,” you confess.

A smile curls slowly on his lips at that, pleased by your answer.

Ormund drops his hand from your chin to your dress skirts. His palm is warm and calloused as it creeps up the hem. You hold your breath in anticipation, waiting to feel his fingers slip into your cunt the way yours had done when you watched him pleasure himself. They slip around your thigh instead, digging into the skin hard enough to leave bruises when he drags you suddenly into his lap.

You brace yourself on his broad shoulders at the sudden shift in position, reminding yourself to breathe when the newfound proximity forces him to lift his chin to look at you properly. He keeps one hand on the back of your head and his other on the swell of your ass. His whisper fans across your jaw as he says, “If absolution is what you want… Then claim it.” 

Before proper reasoning can take over, you grind your hips up and down his strong thigh, chasing the same pleasure you’d been so close to giving yourself earlier that day. 

With your dress skirts now pushed up to your hips, your cunt is able to press fully to his trousers — the delicate skin parts along the fabric with every pass, exposing your sensitive clit to the merciless rhythm. You can already feel the wet spot you’re leaving on him there.

Your broken whine of pleasure and embarrassment echoes throughout the empty sept.

Ormund grins wider at the pathetic sound. “It’s okay, my girl… Take it… You can do it…” he praises lowly, helping you rock your hips up and down his thigh with his free hand. “There is no sin here that I cannot pardon for you. Leave your guilt to me and let go. That’s it… Let it go.”

Your hips lose their rhythm, hopelessly chasing the warmth swelling in the pit of your stomach — a rope pulled tight and fraying, bound to snap at any moment. 

“You’re so needy for it now, aren’t you? After you couldn’t pleasure yourself with your fingers earlier? Hm?” he whispers in your ear, then smiles wider when you falter. “No, don’t stop now. Keep going. There you go.

You bury your face in his shoulder and twist your trembling hands in his shirt, choking on the pleasured moans welling in your throat. You feel dizzy and half-disgusted with yourself, as your heart hammers harder with every word from his mouth.

“You thought I didn’t notice, did you?” Ormund hums with an audible grin. “I could hear you whimpering behind the door… You liked watching me using your dress to make me cum, didn’t you? …Hm?”

You nod wordlessly into his neck, and feel the rumble of his laughter there as he chuckles to himself. 

“I knew you would… I knew the kind of girl you were when you stepped into my office— the kind who mistook her loneliness for devotion…” he mumbles against you, helping your hips move up and down his thighs when your own rhythm falters. “The kind who prayed for guidance and got only silence in return… Well, the gods might’ve abandoned you, my girl— but I will not.”

You peer at the altar ahead with teary eyes, where all the eyes of the Seven look down upon you as you unravel in your sin. You cum with a fragile whimper in your throat a second later, trembling in Ormund’s lap and holding onto him like a raft while your sensitive cunt drools on his thigh.

“Yes…” the man praises in your ear, smoothing his nose across your temple just before he presses his mouth to the burning skin there. “There it is… Give me all of it, my girl. I can take it...” 

Ormund continues his sweet murmurings until the aftershocks have passed – until you’ve gone lax on top of him, with your body heaving enough to melt against his. You want to be soldered to him, just like this, with his cheek against your cheek and his hands in your hair and your cunt to his thigh. Perhaps this was your purpose, you think to yourself, as the last of your pleasure drips onto his thigh. Perhaps the gods sent you here to find religion in the crooks of his body, and Ormund in the crooks of yours.

“Am I forgiven now?” you ask in a small, teary voice. Though whether the question is meant for the gods staring down at you from their alcoves, blurred now by the unshed tears clouding your vision, or for the man holding you through every wave of pleasure and guilt — you cannot say.

“Yes,” Ormund answers instantly, soft mouth brushing the shell of your ear as he smooths your hair from your temple. He feels your body slacken with a breath of relief against him, as if some unbearable weight has finally been lifted from your shoulders. “You will always be forgiven, my girl… So long as you remember that you must kneel to me to ask for it.”

You close your eyes at that, distantly ashamed of the relief blooming in your chest, unable now to tell where the comfort ended and the feeling of captivity began.

[lovebugism]

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

summary: you're wed to ser gwayne hightower in one last desperate attempt to unite the realm; but when the war tears the two of you apart, you're taken prisoner by his cousin, lord ormund hightower, where the line between duty and desire begins to blur. (12k)

characters: gwayne hightower / fem!reader, ormund hightower / fem!reader, alicent hightower, daeron targaryen

contents: targ!reader (no physical descriptions), love triangle, enemies to lovers, angst, hurt/comfort, forbidden love, infidelity, canon divergence, cw for brief mentions of attempted assault and smut 18+ (MDNI): fem receiving oral, unprotected sex, ormund has a scent kink

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

i. DUTY & HONOR

Your last name was, perhaps, your greatest burden. It was the very walls of your prison; the unseen chain cinched perpetually around your throat. You had inherited the dragon’s blood, it seems, but not the dragon’s freedom — and when Rhaenyra’s fleet sailed across the Narrow Sea to wage war over a throne of swords, it forgot to take you with it. The only home you’d ever known was soon filled with ghosts donned in Hightower green and whispers of your leaving.

You were going to die here. That is a truth you learned long ago. Your only wish was that they’d hurry up and get it over with. 

They gave you a husband instead.

Your marriage to Ser Gwayne Hightower was heralded as an act of wisdom, the proof that wounds carved by old grievances could yet be stitched together, with silk ribbons tied around the wrists and a few spoken vows declared before the Sept. It was to be the very bridge that united the green and black. But the bridge burned anyway, and left the two of you behind.

“They wed us to prevent a war that had already begun,” you’d scoffed, already deep into your cups at the feasting table, when Maester Orwyle called the fight to come inevitable.

“No…” Gwayne hummed from beside you, still perfectly temperate, though his blue eyes were heavy with a burden too old for a man of his years. “They wed us so that, when the histories of this moment are written, someone might say that they tried.”

You’d laughed then, loud enough to gain the attention of the rest of the courtiers at the long table — because Ser Gwayne was not entirely wrong, to be sure, but he was far too generous for his own good; generous enough to believe that the effort of your marriage actually meant something in the grand scheme of things.

Gwayne Hightower was a sensible man. He was not outwardly affectionate, maybe, but he was no less kind. There was no great love in your union — not like all the songs and fairytales insist, at least — but there was safety. Security. Stability. His presence often found you like the thick walls of an ancient keep, steadfast against the howling winds of a summer storm. You would find no certainty of your future in war, but being Gwayne’s wife meant, at the very least, that you were still alive today.

That unsaid assurance is perhaps a greater gift than any truly loving marriage could’ve been for you. And, perhaps, it was with that unsaid assurance that you came to admire him, without ever realizing you were doing so — always searching for his face in crowds, waiting every night for the familiar sound of his footsteps to walk outside your chamber doors, constantly watching him from a distance (which has become a most embarrassing habit of yours).

You find him now on the western balcony overlooking Blackwater Bay, where the moon climbs high over shimmering midnight waters. The salty breeze mixes with the scent of damp stone and dying fires from the lantern light glittering in the city below. Gwayne stands alone with his forearms propped on the pale stone balustrade, having exchanged his armor for a forest-green doublet embroidered with winding gold vines. The fading torchlights gild his silken auburn hair, stirred loose by the sea breeze.

You linger just beneath the archway, hidden in the place where the torchlight turns to shadow, studying the slope of his strong shoulders and how they rise and fall with each breath. He looks lonely; lonely enough for your chest to tighten with the want to close the distance between you and slip in beside him. But your feet refuse to move. And whatever affection was warming in your chest before pierces through you like a sword.

“You’re staring.” The suddenness of his voice startles you.

“…You’re supposed to be watching the sea,” you respond, half-shy. He doesn’t look back at you when you emerge finally from the shadows; slippers scuffing the cobblestones, black skirts fluttering at your feet.

“I was,” Gwayne nods.

“Then how could you possibly notice I was standing there?”

He turns to face you then, as you settle on the balcony just beside him, keeping a few feet of careful distance between you like you always did — as if, in your union, an invisible line had been wedged between you and could not be crossed. 

The corner of his mouth lifts slowly into a crooked smile. “Because I notice everything about you,” he answers like it’s simple, like he hadn’t just stolen the breath from your lungs.

Heat crawls up the low neckline of your dress, speckling across your cheeks and the very tip of your ears. You turn away, face screwed in a feigned disgust, and busy your hands with an imaginary wrinkle on your sleeve. 

“That,” you murmur. “Is a terrifying thought.”

“Well, it ought to terrify you,” Gwayne quips knowingly, bending softly at the waist to fold his arms along the stone railing. “I’ve seen the way you steal the candied slices off of all your lemon cakes just to leave the sponge untouched, you know? Like an utter madwoman.” 

“Well…” you huff, face flaring hot at the acknowledgment of being so openly seen by another. “It seems I made the dreadful mistake of marrying the observant man in the Seven Kingdoms.”

“And here I thought that distinction belonged to my cousin,” Gwayne jokes lowly, brows raised to his hairline. “I shall write to Lord Ormund at once and relieve him of the title.”

You laugh quietly through your nose and turn away again. Silence settles comfortably over you once more, filled only by the distant clanging of metal as guards change their shift and the far-off crowing of a caged raven. The night feels impossibly dark, emptier than usual. It feels like an omen of sorts.

“It grows worse, does it not?” you wonder aloud through the breath that catches in your chest, as if you were half scared to even ask.

Gwayne’s thin smile slowly fades. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “Aye,” he nods. “I fear it does.”

“I keep… hoping that…” You swallow around the invisible hand tightening around your throat. “That they’ll remember I am your wife before they remember whose blood I carry. I feel it’s the only reason they’ve yet to take my head.”

“Of course, they remember,” he assures you.

“It feels less and less so these days.”

“They’re only frightened—”

“I’m frightened,” you remind him.

The admission lingers between you like the salt water scent hanging in the air. Gwayne studies you for a long moment — he sees the flicker of sincerity flashing across your face right before you turn away from him again, and the way your jaw clenches a second later in regret of saying the words aloud. 

He leans an elbow along the parapet to face you fully. And, as if to soothe you, he asks, “If there were no war… No thrones, no dragons—”

“No Hightowers?” you add.

“—If the Stranger himself appeared before you now and offered you another life,” the auburn-haired man continues with a hint of a smile gracing his lips. “What would you do?”

You ponder the question for a moment, eyes zeroed on the navy black horizon ahead as your fingers fidget on the stony barricade. “I should like a farm,” you answer, mouth twitching into an absentminded grin. “Somewhere far away from here. So I could raise chickens—”

“Chickens?” he scoffs a dry laugh, then softens a second later at the sincere look you give him. He swallows hard and nods supportively. “Most ladies would’ve said children, is all…”

“Well, I am not most ladies…” you tell him. “I would have a field of apple trees, and a hundred dogs to protect all my chickens and horses and fluffy cows— you know, the ones that live down in the Reach?”

“Well…” Gwayne croons. “You’ve certainly thought about this, haven’t you?”

“Every day,” you confess. The honesty in your answer strikes him down like a blade; the sorrowful look that heavies your face even more so. The reality of your situation returns to you then, settling over you like gravity’s inevitable weight. You swallow hard before you confess, “I fear they’ll kill me if matters grow worse at Dragonstone.”

“They won’t.”

“You cannot know that.”

“I do,” Gwayne assures you and takes a slow step closer, until the inherent warmth of his skin dulls the bite of the bitter sea wind. He ducks his chin to his chest to chase your gaze, peering down at you with glittering blue eyes. “I swore a vow before gods and men, did I not?”

“So do most men—”

“Well, I am not most men,” he lilts with an air of amusement hanging on the edge of his words. “I actually meant my vows.”

Your eyes soften as they search his face, looking for any hint of hesitation or doubt in his handsome features. You find no uncertainty there; just the maddening, immovable confidence that seems to be stitched into the very fiber of his making.

“If this castle should fall tomorrow…” you whisper to him, eyes narrowing in skepticism. “Or if your family decides that I have become too great a burden to keep here… What happens then?”

“Then I shall stand in the doorway,” he shrugs.

A shocked laugh sputters from your mouth at his boyish conviction. “And if they mean to come through it?”

“Then…” His lips jut softly. “They shall first have to make a corpse of me.”

“You are a valiant knight, Ser Gwayne, but you cannot fight an entire army.”

“Perhaps not,” he replies with a sad sort of smile. “But armies are made of men. And every man who wishes to reach you will first have to face me... As I said… I meant my vows.”

Something in his words strikes a deep sadness within you. No one had ever spoken of your being like it possessed any value worth defending, and now the words come from the very family you were meant to despise.

But even still, for the first time since the ravens brought the tidings of war and the dragons took wing against dragon, you believed him. You believed that, should the whole realm come crashing down around you, Ser Gwayne would likely be the only one left standing at your side when the last stone fell.

And, gods, how stupid you were to do so.

ii. OATHS & ASHES

The news of your husband’s leaving came not from your husband himself. 

It came, rather, in whispers at court, slithering through the Red Keep like snakes beneath rushes — passing from Gold Cloak to stable boy to serving girl to scullion. “They say Ser Criston and his knights are marching for Harrenhal on the morrow,” says a thick-accented handmaiden. “Lord Hand means to smoke Daemon from the castle. It’ll be Prince Aemond’s before the next moon, no doubt.”

Your stomach dropped so harshly at the whispers that you nearly retched upon the marble. It was not Gwayne’s leaving that frightened you so, but rather what his absence would represent — he might as well throw you to the hounds himself before he goes, because you were as good as dead with him gone.

Your slippers strike the ancient stone in a frantic rhythm as you turn on your heel to storm back the way you came. The harsh echo of the soles catches the attention of surrounding servants, who flatten themselves against the walls as you hurry suddenly past. Your heartbeat pounds like thunder in your ears, far louder than the bells of the Great Sept that toll the evening hour — the combination of both feels like an ominous funeral knell.

You rush up the winding stone staircase with your crimson skirts gathering in your fists. Gwayne’s chambers sit directly opposite yours, and you find the heavy wooden door is cracked ajar. The hinges screechbeneath your palm when you shove it the rest of the way open without warning. The sight you find on the other side hollows you from the inside out — a travel satchel, laid open along the emerald sheets. Inside, a whetstone, riding gloves, a leather-bound prayer book, a sword belt, a flask. 

The careful order of it all feels almost cruel. Chaos, at the very least, would suggest some air of hesitation from the man; a faint pause at leaving you behind. This, however, feels far too final.

Gwayne stands at the head of the bed with his back facing you. His pale hands work with a quiet precision to roll a Hightower-green cloak into his bag. He did not need to turn at the sudden intrusion. He learned the sound of your footsteps long ago.

“I wondered how long it might take,” the man croons distantly. The calmness of his voice, the indifference, sets you entirely aflame.

“Why would you not tell me?” you bite in response.

Gwayne glances over his shoulder at you then. The flickering candlelight turns his hair a more golden shade of Hightower-red, and carves the soft edges of his face out in shadow. He was still every inch the striking knight that the whispers purported him to be — broad as an oak tree, handsome as a saint carved into an altar — but there’s a foreign weariness etched into his features now. It darkens the skin beneath his eyes, turns his gaze a duller shade of icy blue.

“Well, I was going to, of course.”

“When?” The sharpness in your voice could draw blood. 

“…Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Your laugh splinters the otherwise silent room, sharper than broken glass. You shut the door behind you with an aggressive hand and close the distance between you, dress skirts billowing wildly at your ankles. “When you ride at dawn? And you meant to tell me when your horses were already saddled?”

“Yes,” Gwayne sighs, lowering the folded doublet into its place. “I thought I might spare you one night’s grief—”

“You’re abandoning me,” you tell him then, as if to translate the man’s words back to himself. You linger at his side, eyes darting wildly over his profile when he fails to meet your gaze. “Just like all the rest of them. You do realize that, right?”

“The king has given orders—”

“Well, it wasn’t the king who stood beside me at Blackwater Bay not even a week ago, was it?” Your voice lowers into a faux-masculine tone, trying and failing to mock him. “If anyone comes for you, I shall stand in the doorway—”

Gwayne scoffs. “Surely, I do not sound like that.”

“—They shall first have to make a corpse of me.”

“Yes… I remember,” he answers through a slow huff of annoyance, stepping back from his travel bag to drag a pair of weary hands down his face. “I was— well into my cups by then, as you well know—”

“Oh, do not cheapen those words now,” you spit, shoving hard at his shoulder. Gwayne’s features twist in offense as his wide eyes glance down at the hand you’d pushed him with, though he doesn’t move an inch. “Don’t dishonor yourself with a coward’s excuse just to make up for the fact that you lied.”

Gwayne’s composure fractures at that. He had spent too much of his life trying to be a good knight, a good man — one that maybe his callous father could be proud of — so he refuses to stomach accusations of otherwise from you. 

His icy blue eyes harden into a glacial sort of look, more hurt than truly angry. He lays his cloak into place to face you fully.

“Do you not see that I am leaving to keep the fight from coming here?”

“Do not you see that by leaving me here that I’m as good as dead?” you retort through a jaw clenched tight. “If you do not take me with you, then—”

“Of course I’m not taking you with me!” he scoffs with a crooked smile, like it’s funny to him. “You’d be dead before we made it to the God’s Eye—”

“And I will be dead before this war is won if you leave!” you shout, voice wet and fragile with the unshed tears burning the backs of your eyes. “The fight is already here! The people who wish me dead are in these walls! They pour my wine, they wash my hair, they cook my food, they bow when I walk by and whisper when my back is turned! And if you aren’t here, then…” 

You trail off with a ragged breath. Your corset feels suddenly tight against your ribs. You choke back the sob that strangles your throat and blink rapidly to clear the haze of tears blurring at your waterline. You peer up at the man with the sternest gaze you can muster.

“I am… frightened,” you tell him, though your voice cracks into a fragile whisper halfway through.

The anger disappears from Gwayne’s face as quickly as it arrived. His shoulders deflate with a slow huff through his nose as he takes a slow step towards you. His hands release their clenched fists to reach hesitantly for your face. His palms are warm and softly calloused when they cup your cheeks, caressing you with a tenderness he hasn’t shown since your bedding ceremony six or more moons ago.

The quiet half-smile he gives you, then, is weighed down by a palpable sadness.

“To tell you the truth… I have never been more afraid than I am right now,” he confesses in a low murmur, swiping his thumb over the warm apple of your cheek. The softness in his voice threatens to undo you entirely. 

“So then don’t go,” you plead in a small voice, grasping at the front of his emerald doublet until the golden vines wrinkle under your grip. “Please.”

“If Harrenhal remains in Rhaenyra’s hold, and if Daemon rallies the Riverland armies, then the war will come here,” Gwayne continues in a painfully steady voice. “I fear I don’t have a choice in the matter.”

“Everyone has a choice,” you tell him, filled with a girlish sort of rage once more. “But, I suppose you’ve already made yours.”

The man meets your scowl with a tired, slightly heartbroken smile. “Please do not make me spend my last night with my wife quarreling with her,” Gwayne jokes quietly, swiping an eyelash from your cheek with the pad of his thumb. “At least leave me with something to hold onto until my return.”

Your tight chest deflates with a slow sigh from your nose. The rage ebbs evenly into grief. “And what shall I have, hm? Considering tonight is very likely my last one alive and all…”

Gwayne laughs. “You are being… catastrophically dramatic.”

Your chest burns with a mixture of rage and desire. He could never possibly understand you, but somehow, he is the only one with the walls of the Keep who ever has. The contrast is dizzying.

“I hate you,” you hear yourself say.

“Perhaps...” Gwayne hums, warm breath fanning across your cheek. “But not nearly as much as you love me.”

Your first instinct is to strike him for the sarcasm in his words; your second is to weep at the truth of them. He kisses you before you can do either.

He ducks down to press his lips to yours in a tender kiss, a mere brushing of your lips. The last time he had done so was beneath the glowing candles of the Sept, following the declaration of your wedding vows. But that was an obligation, a political victory of sorts.

This kiss is far sweeter in comparison. You feel the man heavying against you as he falls deeper into your touch. He opens your mouth with his and flicks the pad of his tongue against yours, like velvet brushing velvet. Your hands tremble as they leave the chest of his doublet to rake through his auburn locks, like silk between your fingers. You sigh against his open mouth at the taste of him — like wine and mint and oranges — sweet enough to get drunk on.

It takes you a long moment to realize his hands have snaked around your waist accordingly. You don’t realize his deft fingers are loosening the tie in your corset until the discomfort in your ribs disappears entirely. Your body acts before your mind, and your arms slither from their sleeves to curl once more around Gwayne’s broad shoulders.

The man folds the top of your dress down until your bare chest is revealed to him. A grumbled moan sounds in the back of his throat as he pulls you back into him with two wide palms along your bare back, pressing your breasts flush against his chest. He thinks, if he concentrated hard enough, he could feel the steady thundering of your heart like this.

“Gwayne—” you whisper against his mouth when you feel something hardening against your hip. Your hands drop from his hair to slide between your bodies, headed for the tie in his trousers to release the stiffness growing there. 

He twists you round in the meanwhile, shoes scuffing the cobbles, until the bend of your knees meets the edge of the mattress behind you. He lays you down without once taking his mouth off of yours, with one wide palm splayed along your ribcage and his other cradling the back of your neck.

He pulls off of you with a quiet smack to catch his breath. A small whimper sounds in the back of your throat when his warm body leaves yours, rising to reach down for your skirts. Your bare chest heaves as you sit up on your elbows to watch him fumble with your dress. “Gods above, how many skirts are you wearing?” you hear him complain under his breath. “I’ve faced hedge knights with fewer defenses than this.”

You giggle when he finally pushes the layers of your dress up to your hips. Your thighs spread on instinct, exposing yourself to him. Gwayne’s mouth waters at the sight of your silken folds, already glittering in anticipation. Your chest tightens when he falls to his knees before you. 

“What are you doing?” you ask on bated breath.

Gwayne flashes you a love-drunk grin and a pair of glassy blue eyes. His warm palms smooth along the velvety skin of your inner thighs to spread them further. “Call it a knight’s act of service, shall we?” he quips.

His auburn head disappears beneath your bunched-up skirts a second later. Your face twists momentarily in confusion before you feel his tongue slotting in the silk folds of your cunt. He licks a fat stripe up the length of it, until his tongue finds something that makes your hips twitch despite yourself. His mouth closes around the sensitive button, suckling at it with a grumbled moan in the back of his throat.

Your head tips back at the feeling. Your lips part as if to moan, but the electric shock in the pit of your stomach knocks all the available air from your lungs. You feel him laughing against you when your thighs clench suddenly around his head, tighter than you realize.

Gwayne pulls off of you with a quick smacking sound. He wears your slick down to his chin as he flashes you a teasing, glassy-eyed look. “I’d quite like to keep my head, dear wife—”

You say nothing in response to his quip. You just dart a head to the crown of his skull and shove his face back between your thighs.

 Gwayne complies without complaint, lapping at the honey you leak for him, until the wet sounds of his mouth fill the quiet chambers. You rock your hips against his face, bracing yourself with the auburn locks you clench in your fist.

His nose nudges the swollen bud that makes you keen, right before he takes it in his mouth again. Your skin buzzes at the foreign feeling.

“Gwayne—” you gasp. A tight feeling settles deep in your stomach, like a fraying knot about to snap. Your back arches off the mattress. Your hand tightens in his hair. Your features screw in a pain look, half-scared at the pleasure welling within you. “I can’t—”

“Mm…” he just keeps moaning against you, letting the vibrations deepen your pleasure. His wide hands smooth up and down your outer thighs when they tremble on either side of his head, clenching around him as your orgasm hits you with a pleasured whine. He laps up every ounce of honey you leak for him, and sighs hard through his nose at the salty-sweet taste of you.

Only when your legs grow finally lax around his jaw does he pull back from your thighs. A smile curls lazily at his rosier, more swollen mouth. The bottom half of his face glitters in the candlelight with a mixture of saliva and cum — you lift your head in time to watch him wipe his mouth with the back of his hand.

“If this truly is my final night alive…” you say through panted breaths, eyes still wide from the shock of your simmering pleasure. “I feel I could finally die a happy woman.”

“I’m glad I could be of service, princess…” Gwayne smiles lazily, grimacing slightly at the ache in his knees as he rises from the unforgiving cobbles. He leans down to lay his warmth back over you. You stop him with a firm hand on his chest.

“I want to be on top this time,” you confess in a breathless whisper, eyes darting back and forth between his.

Gwayne’s brows raise slowly in shock at your sudden display of dominance. The corner of his lip twitches into a smile the same way his cock twitches in his boxers. He nods until the words catch up to him. “As you wish…”

iii. CROWNS & CAGES

You did not weep when they came for you, scarcely a fortnight after your lord husband’s leaving.

Gwayne was gone by first light, perhaps already a league or more away before you stirred awake that morning to the chill of an empty bed. He parted with nothing but a folded scrap of parchment resting where his head had been the night before. In his scrawled handwriting, half-smudged from where his wrist had dragged the ink in haste, he wrote: “Write to me. Don’t die. I’ll build the form for you myself.”

You keep the note tucked safely inside the chest of your corset now, folded so many times that the edges have already begun to soften. You keep it close to your heart like a holy relic, or perhaps, a threat to whatever unlucky son of a bitch kills you first — something to discover on your corpse after they slit your throat, so they’ll know who to answer to upon your husband’s return.

Eventually, the servants ceased asking whether you needed anything, and all your meals came cold. Conversations ceased the moment you entered a room, and doors slammed shut before you could reach them. And then, when word spread that a wild dragon had taken wing not far from here, all eyes of suspicion turned to you — to whom a dragon had never belonged, though the blood in your veins wearied the courtiers all the same. Rhaenyra had already added three new riders to her fleet; she certainly did not need another.

You were no longer a bride, but a prisoner in pretty gowns — it was the Queen Dowager, and your sister by law, who confirmed as much to you.

“I had hoped…” Alicent started slowly, bathed half in sunshine and half in shadow from where she stood before the window in your quarters, watching the distant storm clouds blow in over Blackwater. “That I might never have to ask this of you.”

Her auburn curls swept over her pale shoulder when she turned to face you. Something heavy sat in her round green eyes, as if she wanted you to finish the rest of it for her. But you remained as stoic and silent as ever from where you sat at the small dining table just across from her. Your hands wrung into knots over your skirts, hidden beneath the surface, as you waited for the words of your fate to fall from her lips.

“The council believes that— Should the opportunity present itself, you would attempt to reach the wild beast. The Cannibal, I believe it’s called,” Alicent said. “And through him, Rhaenyra.”

“So…” You sighed, making no attempt to argue the subject. It did not matter whether or not it was true; the possibility was enough to make you a criminal. “The Black Cells, then?”

“No,” Alicent shook her head, half-offended by the suggestion. “Of course not. My cousin, Lord Ormund, he commands the Hightower host. He has agreed to keep you under his… protection for the time being.”

“Protection?” you echoed through a scoff. The word tasted foreign and bitter in your mouth. “What a pleasant name for captivity.”

Alicent’s face flickered with a mother’s sort of sympathy. Her hands wrang together beneath the draping sleeves of her emerald dress.“You will be treated with every courtesy your station deserves, I assure you.”

“If your council means to bargain with me, Your Grace…” you started with a sad smile. “They mistake me for something worth bartering for. Rhaenyra already abandoned e— keeping me hostage will not make her respond to your offered terms.”

“Even still… You would be far safer there than you would be here, whether or not you believe that’s true,” Alicent said. “I know what my brother would wish of me. And Gwayne would never forgive me if I didn’t do everything I could to keep you safe.”

The long journey south smells of wet earth and horse dung. By the time you reach the Hightower encampment — which sprawls across the rolling fields like a second city — your fine silk gown has long surrendered to the dust of the road, and your hands now bear the tenderness of a week spent in the saddle. 

Your broad-shouldered escort guides you through the avenue of canvas tents billowing wildly beneath snapping green banners. The air smells of woodsmoke, cooked venison, and salty sweat — the soft breeze carries with it the sound of laughter, barking hounds, clanking chainmail, and shouted commands.

A pair of guards draw back the heavy canvas of the biggest pavilion in the camp. “My lord,” one says to announce your arrival inside, right before the entrance flap closes heavily behind you.

Inside, candles burn despite the lingering daylight, filling the enclosed tent with the smell of beeswax and parchment from the large map covering the long oak table. Pieces carved from ivory and oak mark castles and armies across the whole of Westeros, waiting to be won or maybe burned. 

A strange man stands over them with his broad hands planted along the edge, visibly built beneath his ornately decorated armor, and standing several inches taller than the rest of the knights in the room.

Lord Ormund was not pretty like Gwayne, but he was his own kind of handsome, made of sharp edges and strong features. His Hightower-auburn curls are less vivid in color and sheared short. He has his family’s pair of striking blue eyes, too, which feel a little like they’re piercing you when he glances up from his map. 

“Leave us,” he commands his guards in a low, melodic voice, keeping his eyes on you as his knights filter out of the tent. Their armor clatters faintly as they go. The man doesn’t say another word until they’re gone. 

“So…” he hums, one corner of his mouth lifting upwards. “The infamous dragon bride.”

Your brows bounce at the title. It feels like another chain around your neck. “I suppose I’ve been called worse…” you sigh, studying him with the same curiosity. “You must be Lord Ormund.”

“I must,” the man nods as he rounds the war table at an unhurried pace. 

His boots sink into the woven rungs laid across the hard earth with each step. He towers several inches over your head when he plants himself in front of you. He smells of steel and sweat and strongly of incense.

“I expected someone… older.”

His brows raise in amusement. “And here I expected someone taller.”

“Well,” you deadpan, eyes narrowing up at him as your hands clasp behind your back. “I’m sorry for disappointing you, Ser.”

“Oh, I’ve endured far worse disappointments, my lady, I assure you.” A ghost of a smile graces his pink lips as his eyes soften slightly around the edges. “I give you my word. While you remain beneath my banners, no harm will come to you.”

You sigh hard through your nose. “Yes… People keep promising me that.”

“I’m sure they have… But I intend to honor it.” The certainty of the man’s words unsettles you. It’s strange, you find, to be looked at like you were something worth protecting. “And if you require anything— anything at all. You need only ask.”

You nod slowly with a deep exhale, considering the offer. “A quill,” you conclude firmly.

Ormund blinks. “A… A quill?”

“Yes,” you say. “And parchment.”

“For… What purpose?” he laughs.

You glance over your shoulder towards the tent’s fluttering entrance, where the last light of the early evening burns gold against a sea of green banners. You wonder, briefly, how many soldiers outside this pavilion would celebrate if they found you dead on the morrow — how many would mourn, how many would care enough to do anything at all. 

You think, perhaps, that in the whole of the Seven Kingdoms, there is only one person who would weep for you. And he was a hundred leagues away.

“So that I may write to my lord husband,” you answer finally. “And tell him that I was right… And that he still owes me a farm.”

Lord Ormund allows you to write to Gwayne that night, and every seventh day after. It was the only thing you could look forward to, since there was little else to do at camp. He had been gracious enough to give you your own pavilion at the edge of the command encampment, close enough for the sentries to watch but far enough away to force you into solitude. 

It was clean and moderately comfortable — with a narrow cot draped in a single wool blanket, a traveling chest for the few dresses you were allowed to bring, a wash basin, and a small writing table tucked beneath the only slit in the canvas that permitted daylight. Inside smelled of candle wax, pressed linen, and lavender soap.

Outside smelled of war — of pressed metal from the blacksmiths, of men cursing over burnt porridge, of stableboys tending to horses who fouled the earth faster than they could shovel it. It was cruel, how the world went on while you could go scarcely a step without an escort. Eventually, you became accustomed to feeling a hundred eyes upon your back — most curious, others suspicious, some outright hateful.

The letters you wrote to Gwayne, at least, gave you the illusion of escape. You tended to each with careful precision — melting the wax, stamping it shut, then tying it off with a ribbon — and watched from afar as one of Ormund’s knights carried them toward the rookery. It was not until the twentieth day at camp, when you wandered further than you were typically allowed, that you noticed that none of your messages had been sent. You watched the knight toss the letter into the fire, flinching slightly when the flames sparked beneath the fresh kindling.

It had been four days since then. 

And you haven’t eaten once in protest.

It took roughly half that time for Lord Ormund’s patience to run thin. He’s suffered the endless whispers of your attempts to starve to death with an increasing displeasure. He commands thousands of knights beneath his banners, serves as the leader of his house with grace, and yet — he still cannot seem to manage to command one lady to supper. It was absurd. Humiliating. And worse, it invited doubt. What army will follow a man whom they believe incapable of governing his own household?

On the fifth evening, after your breakfast tray went untouched that morning, Ormund opts to bring you your supper himself. He marches through the crowded camp with his jaw clenched tight like a soldier headed into battle. His chainmail clanks with every step. Avoiding the stares he gets from surrounding knights feels borderline impossible.

He throws open the entrance of your tent without ceremony. The canvas snaps sharply beneath his aggressive hand as he ducks suddenly underneath it.  The light of the golden evening pours suddenly inside around his towering silhouette before the flap falls shut behind him once more, trapping the two of you inside.

There, he finds you lying on your cot, staring upward at the slit in the pavilion where one lonely shaft of sunlight spills through. Your fingers drift lazily through the rays, as if you were trying to catch it somehow. 

Your head snaps suddenly to the side at the sudden intrusion — your hair is loose and unkempt, because no one ever taught you how to do it yourself, and all of your dresses are now wrinkled and stained with dirt. The thin white nightgown you wear makes you look more sunken, more lifeless. 

Ormund grasps your tray with one hand and reaches for your small writing desk with the other. He lectures you through the distant pang of sympathy in his chest.

“I have commanded men twice your size—” His boots are heavy on the thin rug as he carries the desk over to you. “I have started sieges, I have broken sieges. And yet—” He slams the table in front of you with a dull thump. You try not to cower under the icy blue glare he gives you. “I cannot seem to persuade one prisoner— a lady, no less— to eat her supper. And I confess, it does very little for confidence in my command. So eat.”

Ormund slams the tray onto the desk. The broth steaming in a small wooden bowl sloshes over. Next to it, strips of leftover venison and a broken loaf of stale bread. Your empty stomach twists painfully with a mixture of nausea and hunger.

“So…” you start lowly, clearing your throat when your voice comes gravelly. You rise from your supine position on weak limbs. The fabric of your nightgown rides up your thighs as you turn to place your bare feet on the ground — eyes dull when you peer up at the man from beneath your lashes. “You admit it, then? That I am your prisoner here?”

His jaw clenches tight. His nostrils flare through a sharp breath. He no longer finds amusement in your banter. “Your status here depends entirely on your pliancy,” he spits, ripping off a piece of the stale loaf. “Now eat.”

You flinch when his fist rears suddenly towards your face, holding the broken bread just in front of your mouth. You blink wildly up at him, features screwed in offense. “…Excuse me?”

“Eat.”

You swat his hand away; it moves scarcely an inch. “I’m not a child—”

“Well, at present, you are behaving remarkably like one,” Ormund argues through a tight jaw. “Now open your mouth.”

You respond with only a glare.

Fury rages through the man’s chest. He wishes wordlessly for the strength of the Mother and the Warrior engraved upon his armor as he offers bitterly, “Or shall I make you?”

You spend a long moment staring up at him with eyes cold enough to freeze wine. You hold his gaze as your mouth parts slowly to accept the chunk of bread he pinches between his thumb and forefinger. He places it upon your tongue with a surprising gentleness, considering the wrath he’d had moments ago.

“Chew,” he commands, glaring down the bridge of his nose at you. Your jaw moves slowly. Ormund nods in approval. “Swallow.” 

Your heart lurches into your throat at his order. But you do as you’re told, throat bobbing as the piece of bread goes down. Another piece follows soon after; this time, your lips part before he asks you to do so. Relief crosses over his strong features as he places the food onto your tongue. His shoulders sag with the exhaled breath that it feels like he’s been holding for days.

He looks almost worried for you; relieved, almost, to have fed you. A warm, foreign feeling settles in your chest accordingly.

“I am trying… Very hard to be kind to you,” Ormund confesses, scarred hands twitching at his sides.  “So I cannot, for the life of me, understand why you insist on making this so difficult.”

“My letters,” you tell him. “Why aren’t they being sent?”

“The rookery master feared they could be intercepted,” he answers plainly. “I could not risk one falling into enemy hands. I… meant to tell you.”

“When?” you spit.

“When I found a safer way to deliver them.”

A bitter laugh sputters from your mouth. “What curious men you Hightowers are,” you quip with narrowed eyes. “So fond of deciding what sorrows I ought to be spared.”

His brows lower in confusion. “Is that not a kindness?” 

His answer lingers between you for several long moments. There was no cleverness in his words, only an honesty that strikes you like a fist to the stomach.

“Aye. I suppose it is,” you answer, clearing your throat when your voice catches. 

A strange emotion strangles you, and burns at the back of your eyes as you look down at your dress. Your dull nails pick at a smudge of mud on the fabric that will likely never come off. An embarrassed sort of laugh tumbles from your mouth. 

“Perhaps I… I spent so long waiting for someone to hurt me that I no longer remember what kindness is supposed to feel like.”

Ormund nods through a slow exhale from his nose. He glances to the side and walks the short distance to the stool that the table had knocked over in his rage. Your wet eyes follow his form as he walks away and then back to you, setting the chair on the other side of the table. You can feel the warmth radiating from his body, even in the scarce distance between you.

“I’ll admit— A man spends enough time at war, they start to forget that mornings are not meant to begin with fear,” he says, reaching again for the loaf of bread, but this time breaking it in half. “I forget myself, at times, but… if you’ll allow me… I’d very much like to prove to you that I can be kind.”

Your weary features soften around the edges. “Well, I don’t have much of a choice in the matter, do I?” you tell him, with a more sincere smile hinting at the corners of your lips. “I am your prisoner, after all.”

“So you keep insisting,” Ormund quips with his own quiet grin. “But I should rather you thought of yourself as my… responsibility.”

Your heart stumbles a beat. Responsibility felt much safer than hostage, or bargaining piece, or burden. It felt, you’ll admit, like a kindness.

iv. SILK & SWORDS

You fall into a steady routine at the Hightower encampment by the fifth moon of your captivity.

Each morning arrives with the same mournful groan of a warhorn that rolls across the grass green hills before the sun has even broken the horizon. You wake to the distant ringing of hammers against anvils, hounds barking for gristles off the cookfires, and knights shouting for their squires. The first hours were reserved for armorers; the afternoons for drilling knights whose swords cracked together until you could feel them ringing in your skull; and the evenings for songs, laughter, and ale.

Your days, however, remained painfully empty.

Lord Ormund had been kind enough to provide you with greater comforts as the weeks went by — cushioned pillows and heavier woolen blankets for when the nights got colder; sprigs of lavender for your bedside to keep out the stench of man; more parchment and colored ink to busy your hands when the days were especially long. And all of them were especially long. He’d given you his leather-bound prayer book, too, and even though you were not an entirely pious woman, you’d read through it enough times to recite each passage from memory.

The camp has since grown accustomed to your being there, ever since Ormund slackened his metaphorical leash on you — “You’ve had more than ample opportunity to run,” he’d said beneath the scratching of his quill. “Besides, where exactly would you go? No one else would take you.” No one bats an eye when you leave your tent, after three days of relentless rain had finally broken, to pick fresh berries from the brushes along the treeline.

Your crimson silk dress scrubs the dewy evening grass as you collect wild raspberries into a small wooden bowl. The juices stain your fingertips the color of red wine. The sweet scent mixes with the smell of wet earth and mint leaves crushed beneath your slippers. You bend at the waist to parse through tangled brambles, searching for the ripest berries. For the first time in months — years, maybe — you feel almost peaceful.

“Is that a love letter—?”

The voice cuts through the quiet like a blade. Your heart lurches into your throat as you jerk to full height again. The small bowl of berries slips from your grasp and rolls through the wet clover like so many drops of scattered blood. Behind you, you find a vaguely familiar hedgeknight, scarcely ten paces away — made of broad shoulders, broken teeth, and greasy hair that falls to his shoulders.

It takes you an embarrassingly long moment to catch your breath.

“I’m sorry,” you say through a tightening chest. “You… You startled me.”

“Did I?” he hums gruffly, in a voice that borders on amusement.

You cower into the hedgerow behind you as he approaches you, reaching you quickly on much longer limbs. He looms close enough for you to smell the sweat and ale and horse piss on his chainmail, close enough for you to lift your chin to meet his gaze.

His eyes never quite reach yours. They linger, instead, on your chest. “Letter from your lord husband, is it?” he asks, motioning with his head.

Your chin ducks to follow his eyes, where the rough edges of parchment nestled against your chest peek out from your corset. Your hands lift to cover it instinctively. “Yes. It’s a… a letter. From home.”

“Mind if I take a look at it?” he asks, taking another daring step closer. You wince at the sour smell of him. “What does Ser Gwayne write his pretty wife, hm?”

“Please, don’t—”

His hand shoots out. Thick, filthy fingers hook beneath the neckline of your gown, hard enough to stretch the fine silk with an audible crack. You react on pure instinct accordingly, lifting your own hand to strike him before your mind could forbid it.

The sound of your palm colliding with his bearded jaw cracks through the hedgerow like a whip.

His head turns slightly under the blow.

Your breath catches in surprise at yourself.

The back of his hand catches you across the cheek before you can blink. A red-hot pain explodes from your ear to your jaw as your world lurches suddenly sideways. You hit the unforgiving earth below with a huff when the air rushes from your lungs. Coppery blood pools thick on your tongue from where your teeth had cut the inside of your cheek.

“You little cunt—” you hear the man say, right before he catches a fistful of your skirts to pull you back towards him. The fabric screams beneath his hand. The cool evening air strikes your legs all at once when the silk rips up to your thighs.

You kick wildly at the man. Your slipper strikes uselessly against his shoulder. Your fingernails claw muddy furrows through the soaked earth.

“I am— Gwayne Hightower’s wife—” You tell him through panted, fearful breaths. He flips you onto your back by your ankle. Your foot burns beneath his grip. Your head strikes the soaked earth. Through the lack of air in your lungs, you heave, “He will have your head for this—”

“Oh, will he?” the hedge knight laughs with a brown-tooth grin. “‘Cause he ain’t here—”

The hand not holding your squirming ankle reaches for the tie in his trousers.

Then, in a blink, steel sings with a clean rasping sound. Warm blood splashes from your right jaw up to your left temple. For a flicker of a moment, you can’t quite comprehend why — not until the hedge knight kneels suddenly before you, with open eyes that have gone strangely distant. He topples suddenly sideways with his neck bent at an awkward angle, head half cut off and spouting bright red blood.

You blink wildly through the haze of death until you find Ormund standing just behind the corpse, chest rising and falling beneath his heavy armor. His longsword drips crimson onto the grass where your raspberries lie.

Sweat from the long day clings to his dark curls, wetting them against his temples and forehead. Flecks of blood dot his jaw like crimson stars. His blue eyes burn with something fierce, but his voice remains remarkably soft.

“My lady…”

You open your mouth to answer him, but nothing comes out.

Only then do you notice how violently your body is shaking, buzzing with a white-hot fear, as you scan the scene surrounding you — your torn skirts, the blood staining your chest, the dead body at your feet. You stare at the hedge knight’s gushing throat without fully understanding the sight of it.

Ormund reaches you in three long strides. He sheaths his sword without a word before dropping carefully to one knee. He slides one arm under your leg and his other behind your back, hoisting you upward with a pair of strong arms. The scent of blood and earth gives way to the smell of leather, incense, and bathing oils as he cradles you to the broad wall of his chest.

Your trembling hands clench a fistful of the green velvet cape draped along his shoulder.

“You’re safe, my lady,” Ormund murmurs as he carries you back to camp. “You’re safe.”

Your face finds the hollow space between his jaw and collarbone. You’re not entirely sure if you believe the words he speaks, but you know now that you do believe in the man who speaks them.

v. SANCTUARY & SIN

The weeks that followed could be divided into two — the days before the attack and all the days after.

For a time, you startled far too easily. A dropped shield sent you into a panic. A knight laughing too loudly made your pulse skyrocket. And if a pair of bootsteps walked too closely behind you, you lost all your breath before your mind had time to remind your body that no one meant you any harm. 

Nights proved harder still. You dreamt of nothing but rough hands and torn silk and crushed berries that smelled so sweet the thought alone made you sick. One moment you were suffocating beneath the sweaty body of a hedge knight, and the next, your canvas door was thrown open while you were choking on a scream.

Ormund stood silhouetted before you, barefoot, with a sword in his naked hand. He’d reached you with haste, after having your pavilion packed up and pitched again not quite twenty paces from his following the attack — “It’ll be easier that way,” he assured you. “If another fool decides to trouble you, I’d rather not have to cross half of Westeros to remove his head.” 

His curls were flattened from slumber, his linen shirt unlaced to reveal his broad chest heaving with panic. His sleep-swollen eyes swept every corner of the empty pavilion before they settled finally on you. His steel lowered as he crossed the tent to settle beside you, smoothing a hand up and down your back despite the way your nightgown clung uncomfortably to your sweaty skin.

“We’ll move your bed into my tent,” he’d said. “You’ll sleep there for the time being.” 

It was concern disguised as a command. One you could not refuse if you wanted to.

Ormund’s tent was large enough to pass for a modest hall — maps and banners occupied one half, while the other had become something half-resembling living quarters. Your smaller cot was placed opposite his beneath the same sloping canvas roof, separated by little more than a table crowded with candles and books. You would wake occasionally to find Ormund already seated beside the brazier in nothing but a linen shirt, reading dispatches by firelight while occasionally glancing over to see whether you were sleeping soundly.

You pretended that you were, if only to keep on watching him.

But then the late summer storms arrived; and the unforgiving deluge washed over the camp with enough violence to shake the pavilion you slept beneath. Thunder cracked like an explosion closely overhead, and you woke with another frightened gasp before remembering where you were.

Ormund was already awake, as if stirred in knowing that you were scared.

“If you’re frightened…” he murmured from across the darkness. A flash of lightning revealed his blanketed body, and his face half-smushed into his pillow. “I imagine my bed could accommodate two people without either touching the other."

You crossed the space between your cots and climbed beneath his blankets without another word.  

You haven’t left his bed since.

The days soon settle into something almost resembling normalcy. Ormund, you find, possesses an absurd fondness for taking care of you — always making sure that you’ve eaten breakfast before he’s started his mornings; delivering his wool blankets to you before you can complain that you’re cold, warming your hands between his calloused palms when he does so; and escorting you through camp with a protective hand splayed along the small of your back.

No one ever cared for you with such deliberate attention before — even Gwayne, as gentle as he was, could only love you from a respectful distance before the war had sent him off. Your husband washed away into memory, into the note left abandoned somewhere on the forest floor. 

You did not know whether he still rode beneath banners or if his corpse had been picked clean by crows. You did know, at the very least, that Ormund was here — he was there in the mornings when you woke and each night when old fears crept back into your skin. It was a dangerous thing, you soon realized, to mistake safety for love. Or more dangerous still, to suspect that the two were any different at all.

You watch from Ormund’s bed — freshly bathed beneath your thin ivory slip, with your legs kicking lazily from where you lie on your stomach — as his squire removes pieces of his armor. A sketchbook lies open before you, alongside a collection of colored inks.

“This is what you get for tightening the straps so much,” Ormund hums as Daeron struggles with the final buckle across the man’s broad shoulders. 

“Well, you’d like them to remain attached, wouldn’t you?” the boy quips back.

The man smiles despite himself. “You complain more than any squire I've ever met, do you know that?”

“I learned everything from you, did I not?”

When the final piece of armor comes finally free, Ormund dismisses the boy back to his tent. The entrance cover opens and shuts behind the boy, letting in a rush of cool evening air before it closes again. Silence returns to the expansive pavilion, filled only by the crackling of burning candles.

Ormund, left only in his loose dark breeches and a linen undertunic, walks to the round table to pour himself a goblet of wine. “What is occupying you so completely over there?”

“I’m hard at work,” you answer vaguely.

“So I see.” He eyes you carefully over the glugging of the flagon. A faint, unreadable flicker crosses his face. “Writing to Gwayne, are you?”

“No,” you sigh. “I’m drawing you.”

You set the quill into the inkpot and lift the sketchbook to face the man with a girlish grin, which seems to be becoming more and more frequent as the days go by. Ormund’s light eyes squint to study the page. It was unmistakably him drawn in the ink, though perhaps only if one was exceedingly charitable. The proportions are all wrong: his nose is too large, his mouth is too small, one eye sits higher than the other, and he’s missing his left brow.

His eyes flick to meet yours again. “…Is that intended to be me?” he asks, motioning with the goblet in his fist.

“Of course,” you shrug like it’s obvious.

“Well,” he sighs, raising the cup to his mouth. “I had no idea that I resembled that of a rotting turnip.”

You gasp in faux-offense that’s soon overcome by a fit of laughter. “It is not that bad!”

“My lady…” Ormund huffs sympathetically, abandoning his ale to saunter slowly towards the bed. “This could be considered treason— I should confiscate this immediately."

“You shall do no such thing,” you tease.

“Oh really?” he croons, brows raised in amusement.

He lunges for you in an instant. You jerk back onto your haunches with a squeal, cradling the sketchbook to your chest. You dodge each of his attempts to take it with a girlish gracelessness, laughing harder with each of his failed attempts. Ormund smiles at the sound without realizing it, dropping the table of ink to the rug below before clambering onto the bed to follow you. 

One final tug sends the book flying across the bed, and the two of you go to reach for it at the same time. The momentum carries you forward until you land clumsily against his chest, knocking the breath out of him as his back hits the mattress, with you squarely on top of him.

It takes you a long moment to realize your precarious position — your chest brushing his beneath your thin slip, noses nearly touching, breaths nearly entwining. Your laughter fades first, but you still do not move. Ormund’s smile flickers, but his hands lift to rest lightly along the arms you use to prop up your weight on top of him.

You can feel each of his warm breaths fan against your chin. You could get drunk on the ale stained on his mouth from the proximity between you alone. Closer by an inch or two and you would taste it on his lips.

“We ought not,” Ormund murmurs lowly, as if he can read your mind.

“Ought what?”

“This,” he answers. His blue eyes flick briefly in the space separating your mouths. “You are another man’s wife. My cousin’s wife.”

You swallow hard at the mention of Gwayne. It had been far easier to forget him, in truth. “I have not seen my husband in nearly a year,” you reply in a small voice. “I do not even know whether he yet lives…”

Pain etches in Ormund's strong features before disappearing behind his usual practiced restraint. His hands tremble with the urge to smooth away the frown between your brows, but he does not allow himself the satisfaction. 

“I swore on oath to protect you,” he says. “To serve you in my cousin’s absence.”

You, without possessing a similar self-control, lift a hand to brush a wild curl from his temple. “And do you intend to keep that promise, Lord Ormund?”

He nods against the mattress. “Of course I do.”

“Okay then…” you hum as a smile tugs slowly at one corner of your mouth. “Then serve me.”

You duck down to close the distance between you without a second thought. The tip of your nose grazes the strong bridge of his as you press your lips to his chapped ones, nothing more than an experimental brushing of your mouths. You go to pull away just as quickly as you came, and whatever restraint Ormund had had before vanishes in an instant.

He lifts his head from the tousled blankets to chase your mouth, cradling your neck with a wide hide to draw you back into him again. The second kiss lands with none of the careful uncertainty of the first. This one is slower, deeper, and far more languid. His tongue licks into your mouth, tasting of wine and the mint leaves he always chews after supper. You sigh through your nose to savor it, melting further into his chest.

Your mouths move together with an awkward sort of tenderness, learning one another by the second. Ormund kisses you far rougher than Gwayne ever did — it’s all tongue and teeth and spit, as if he were committing the taste of you to memory: the meat from your supper, the berry from your tea; the guilt from your broken vows, the relief of being found after believing yourself long abandoned.

Your breath catches in your throat when Ormund suddenly takes charge, urging you onto your back with his mouth still on yours. He pulls off you with a quiet smack, wearing your spit on his rosy mouth like gloss. 

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks with heavy eyes that dart back and forth between your glassy ones.

You shake your head against the cushions beneath you, features twisting with a pained look at the thought of stopping now.

“Do you understand what will follow? What… vows both of us will be breaking?”

Your eyes glisten as they dance between his blue ones. “The war broke those vows,” you tell him, half-breathless. “Not us.”

Ormund nods wordlessly for a moment, pleased with your answer. “Then open,” he says.

Your mouth parts for him on instinct. He lifts his middle and pointer finger to your lips, wetting them on your tongue, before sliding them in between your bodies. His hand disappears beneath the skirt of your slip. Your head tips back when you feel his fingertips sliding between your velvety folds, brushing your clit before sinking into your waiting cunt.

Your sigh fills the quiet tent, accompanied by the low groan in the back of Ormund’s throat.

“You’re softer than I imagined…” he confesses, almost to himself.

“Imagining me a lot, are you?” you tease on bated breath.

“Yes,” he answers without missing a beat. “I dreamt of how your cunt would wrap around me… of how you’d soak the sheets… of what noise you’d make when I moved my fingers like this—”

A whine catches in your throat when he crooks his fingers just so, nestling the fatty part of his palm flat against your clit. Your hips buck into his hand despite yourself. Your exhaled whine is half-drowned beneath his breathy chuckle.

“There it is…” he praises.

“Fuck me,” you plead, face crumpling under the weight of your need. One hand twists in his hair, while your other fists in his thin white tunic to keep him close. You only vaguely realize how little you sound like yourself as you plead: “I need it so bad, Ormund, please, fuck me—”

The man goes dizzy at the sound of your begging, as if he brought you into his camp, his tent, his bed, to do anything other than serve you. 

His fingers glitter with your slick when he drags them out of your cunt. He brings them to his nose, nostrils flaring slightly as he inhales the scent of your musk upon them. You whine at the sight of it — half-disgusted, half-intrigued. You watch with heavy eyes when he brings the same hand into his trousers to fist his half-hard cock fully stiff for you.

It’s a mess of tangled limbs for a moment, as you drag his shirt gracefully from his torso while he attempts to free himself from his breeches. He’s made of tanned skin, toned muscles, and a dusting of auburn hair from his sternum to his stomach. It grows more dense at the root of his cock — which is not quite as long as Gwayne’s, but thicker still and adorned with more prominent veins. 

Ormund works himself hard with his fist; the reddened head of his cock leaks pearly drops every time his hand moves upwards. Your mouth waters for a taste. You let him smear it along the folds of your cunt instead.

You curl your arms under his broad arms to splay your hands along his shoulder blades. They flex slightly under your touch as he leans down over you. You tense on instinct when he pierces you with the tip of his cock. “Shh, shh, shh,” he soothes lowly, fighting back his own grunt as you spread so perfectly around him.

He sinks slowly into you, slow enough for you to feel every vein and ridge of his cock as he mounts you until his hips are flush with yours. Your mouth parts. He ducks down to kiss you before a moan tumbles out, swallowing the pretty sound with his mouth. 

He stays still against you for several long, agonizing moments. Your hips buck against his in anticipation. “Please move,” you whine, digging crescent shapes into his shoulders with your nails. “I need you so much, please—”

Ormund’s jaw clenches tight. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve been inside another woman?”

Your face screws. “I’d rather not hear about your previous exploits at the moment—”

“Don’t,” Ormund spits, shuddering on top of you when you roll your hips into his once more. He grasps your thigh hard enough to dig bruises into the plush skin with the hand not holding himself up beside your head. His light eyes turn glacial in an instant, darting wildly between both of yours. “I won’t… I won’t last…” he confesses.

Your eyes soften around the edges with a faux innocence. “This isn’t going to be the last time you fuck me, is it?”

The crude word falls so effortlessly from your pristine mouth that it makes his cock jerk within your drooling confines. “I don’t want it to be. No,” he answers, half-shy.

“Then I don’t care how long you last,” you assure him with a lazy grin. “You have kept me hostage for nearly a year— Surely, I’m entitled to make some use of my captor while the realm delays the war, am I not?”

Ormund’s resolve crumbles under your permission. He rolls his hips forward and back again, never quite pulling all the way out of you. He groans quietly when you clench around the sensitive head of his cock; and you swallow down a whimper when the coarse hair below his stomach rubs mercilessly along your sensitive clit. 

Your head tips back. He falls to the hollow space between your neck and shoulder.

Ormund’s open-mouthed breaths fan warm along your burning skin as he stumbles into a graceless rhythm, thrusting hard enough to make the wooden frame of his bed squeak quietly beneath you. 

The pressure on your clit is relentless. You squirm underneath his sweat-slick body, chasing and running from the pleasure all at once. “I know. I know. It’s okay,” you hear him slur against your skin. “Just take it. Just fuckin’ take it— Fuck—” His voice breaks like splintered glass. 

He tenses suddenly above you, taut muscles trembling. You hear his breath catch for a moment, right before a foreign warmth pools in the very pit of your stomach. He groans in time with his release, heavying his weight further against you. 

You aren’t far behind.

He grinds his hips lazily to ride out his high, smothering your sensitive clit as the warm, wet, sticky feeling continues to bloom inside of you. “Ormund—” you gasp, tensing beneath him.

“There it is…”the man praises as you tremble underneath him, smearing his lips against your jaw until they reach your parted mouth. “There it is— Fuck, that’s it,look at me.”

Your eyes snap open at his command, bleary and heavy-lidded. You ride out the rest of your orgasm with your gaze locked with his glassy one. 

The honeyed moment doesn’t last nearly as long as either of you would’ve liked.

“My lord?”

The two of you sober in a flash as the spell between you shatters. Ormund stills suddenly above you, as if pierced by steel. The warmth flees from his features at once, replaced by the hard composure of the commander of House Hightower. You, too, freeze where you lay beneath him — pulse thrumming hard in your throat as the muffled voice drifts once more through the pavilion.

“My lord—”

“Yes, Daeron,” Ormund spits through gritted teeth, nostrils flaring as he breathes through the rage searing in his chest. “What is it?”

The squire hesitates at his uncle’s harsh tone. “Forgive me for the intrusion, my lord…” the boy says carefully, hidden behind the covered entrance. “But a messenger arrived from the river road. He bears urgent word from Ser Criston’s camp.”

You feel your stomach sink — or, perhaps, it’s only the mixture of cum seeping out of your still fluttering confines, soaking the sheets beneath you. You feel unspeakably dirty now, and the lack of regret only deepens the feeling.

Ormund remains motionless above you for a moment before sitting back on his haunches. You shiver at the absence of his warmth, and wince slightly when his softening cock slips out of you. “A letter?” he calls to the entrance, brows lowered. “What news?”

“It is sealed, my lord,” Daeron says. “The messenger said it was to be opened by our hand alone.”

Ormund’s confusion deepens. “And who sends it?”

After another brief hesitation, the voice answers solemnly: “Ser Gwayne, my lord.”

[lovebugism]

IN OUR BEDROOM AFTER THE WAR ─── jack abbot

summary: you saved jack abbot's life once, and now he insists on returning the favor. (6k)

characters: jack abbot / fem!reader, michael robinavitch, trinity santos

contents: army medic!reader, friends to lovers, slow burn, mutual pining, angst with a happy ending, hurt/comfort, canon divergence, not proofread cw for medical inaccuracies, heavy mentions of ptsd and grief, mentions of blood and gore, and allusions to smut 18+ (MDNI)

You find Jack Abbot the same way you left him — covered in bright red blood — though it doesn’t seem to be his this time.  

You’re a few hours on your first shift as interim attending when the man rushes in from the ambulance bay. The camo tactical gear sitting heavily over his muscular form is strikingly familiar to you, along with the sweat matting his curls to his forehead. The wild strands are a lot more grey than you remember, and the smile lines that weren’t there before have since etched themselves into the corners of his eyes. The years have been endlessly kind to him, by the looks of it.

“Intubated neck wound. Sats not great. We were diverted here— Is there a trauma room open?” the man rambles all at once, before he’s even glanced up from the plastic mask he squeezes in a gloved hand. He jogs alongside the rolling gurney with a faint limp from his prosthetic. His stride stutters slightly when his eyes finally lift to find you, rushing to the stretcher with Robby at your side.

There’s a faint twitch of uncertainty in his light eyes, like he’s trying to gauge whether or not he’s seen a ghost. You miss the look of flickering amusement entirely as you snap on a pair of blue latex gloves, gaze zeroed in on the blood gushing around the intubation tube in the unconscious man’s throat.

“What’s the story?” Robby asks, following in the man’s hurried stride.

“My buddy, Officer Hiro,” Jack answers immediately, through a series of panted breaths. “High-velocity GSW, warehouse robbery gone sideways. He’s getting harder to bag.”

The windowless trauma room swallows you whole as you wheel the gurney inside. The four walls swell suddenly with the scent of coppery blood and bitter chlorhexidine. Nurses rush to wake the surrounding monitors with a set of electronic chirps, while Jack escorts the officers he came with out of the room. “We’ll take care of him, I promise,” you hear the man say as you slide your stethoscope into your ears.

You press the chestpiece to the man’s bloodied sternum, bare from where his uniform had already been cut down to his waist and sticky with fresh blood. His heartbeat is weak and rapid in your ears, barely maintaining enough pressure to reach his brain.

“Pulse is thready,” you murmur and slide the diaphragm half an inch higher. “Diminished breath sounds on the right…” 

Jack appears across from you, mouth curling into a familiar crooked grin. “We have got to stop meeting like this, Doc,” he jokes in a gritty deadpan.

“That’s crazy— I was thinking the exact same thing,” you quip and slip the stethoscope back around your neck. “Dr. Santos, let’s make sure these lungs are up.”

“You two know each other?” Robby wonders aloud. He glances between you and Jack with a pair of suspiciously narrowed eyes as he plucks a pair of scissors from the metal tray beside him.

“Yeah, you could say that…” Jack huffs with his eyes on the blade, which slices mechanically through the end of the endotracheal tube protruding from Hiro’s throat.“Pulling out,” the man announces before sliding the thing out through his mouth. “Bag.”

A silver-haired nurse, whom you’ve yet to come acquainted with, squeezes at the valve mask at Jack’s instruction. Air bubbles at the wound.

“He’s not moving any air,” you call to the crowded room. “Get me a neonatal mask.”

“Neonatal?” Santos echoes with furrowed brows.

“Yeah, we’re gonna put it over the wound to keep his airflow up while Dr. Abbot cuts a full-length tube and Dr. Robby shifts his trachea back into place,” you explain with a firm nod, smiling softly as you turn back to the attendings across from you. “Sound like a plan?”

Robby glances up at you from where he’s hunched over Hiro’s body, with two gloved fingers searching for his vocal cords. A faint smile lifts the corner of his mouth. “Do you always explain procedures like you’re assigning homework?” he laughs.

“If you’re asking if she’s always been this bossy, yes, she has,” Jack quips with a crooked grin that widens at the edges when you roll your eyes, turning away to accept the neonatal mask a nurse passes from behind you. “And yes, it saved my life— Santos, cut me down a 6-0 ET tube, will you?” 

“Oh, do tell…” Robby hums.

“There’s nothing to tell,” you huff and set the mask of the neonatal tube over the bubbling wound, helping the air move in and out of the unconscious man’s lungs. “It’s just the kinda stuff that happens when you’re an army medic— you win some, you lose some.”

“Oh, she’s just being modest,” Jack croons drily as he irrigates the wound with saline, washing away clotted blood until the displaced trachea emerges beneath the crimson. His gloved fingers move alongside yours as he rambles. “She had orders to leave me after I got hit by that IED… The rest of ‘em were pulling back— didn’t have much of a choice but to, really, but… She didn’t… She dragged me about… What was it? Two-hundred meters?” 

Jack’s eyes lift and find yours have gone strangely distant. Your gaze zeroes in on the neck wound below; your mind wanders against your will.

The freezing A.C. of the emergency department grows sweltering in an instant, burning like the familiar desert heat that feels like dry fire in your lungs. Black smoke threatens to fog your vision all at once. The antiseptic smell turns suddenly to burning fuel. And the blood on your hands becomes darker, fresher, running over your fingers like an open faucet. 

Your hands start to tremble the same way they did when you tied the tourniquet around Jack’s wounded limb, made of nothing more than exposed nerves and tendons from the knee down. You feel your legs weaken the same way they did when you dragged Jack’s weight across unforgiving ground beneath earth-shaking explosions and whizzing bullets. 

Jack apologized through his guttural screams — because, even now, he swears the pain from the tourniquet hurt more than losing his leg — as you sat him up behind an unmanned tank.

“Shut. Up,” you commanded, covering his mouth with your bloodied hand. “Or I swear to god, I will kill you if we make it out of here— Do you understand?”

You made it out. And it became a funny story everyone told back at the VA — that time you threatened the life of the man you were saving — though you still struggle to laugh about it even still.

“…Right, Doc?” Jack presses, head ducking in an attempt to catch your eye.

Your hands remain firm over the small mask pressed to the wound in Hiro’s neck, but your face has emptied into an expressionless sort of look. It takes a long moment for your brain to will your eyes to blink, and only then does the sun-bleached desert in your mind return to the hospital where you plant your feet — buzzing fluorescent lights, beeping monitors, blinding white walls. You list everything you can see until your brain recalculates its surroundings.

Your wide eyes flit across the unblinking stares looking back at you, each of them waiting for a response. Your heart lurches in your chest. Your mouth opens and closes as you struggle to recall the last thing you’d heard. 

“Uh, n-not quite two-hundred,” you stammer with a trembling smile. “We had a team find us before then, I’m pretty sure.”

“See what I mean?” Jack hums with a surer smile, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. His softened gaze remains fixed on you, studying you despite all your attempts to hide. “Modest.”

The automatic doors of the ambulance bay sigh open and shut every few seconds behind you. Each mechanical breath exhales waves of freezing air into the thick July evening, which smells overwhelmingly of hot asphalt, cigarette smoke, and gunpowder from far-off fireworks. 

You stand next to Jack beneath the overhang, with summer wind whipping through the thin fabric of your tied isolation gowns as you wait for the incoming trauma together — roughly five minutes out, Dana had said.  

“So…” you start slowly, wringing the loose pair of gloves in your anxious hands as your eyes fall to the man beside you. He’s still wearing the baggy camo pants he’d arrived in, though he’s since traded his heavy plate carrier for the fitted black t-shirt underneath it, which clings ardently to his muscular torso. “…SWAT, huh?”

“My therapist said I needed a hobby,” he jokes with a lazy shrug. “And, turns out, I suck at golf, so… I chose the next best thing.”

You shake your head and turn away, exhaling a quiet laugh in response — perhaps your first real one since the unforgiving shift started. The corner of Jack’s mouth lifts into a grin, proud of himself for having heard the pretty sound. He hadn’t thought to miss it until now.

“…How long has it been, you think?” he wonders suddenly, with a pair of squinted eyes.

You draw a deep breath through your nose. Your eyes scale the milky pink and orange skyline beyond the ambulance bay, where a molten gold sunset streaks across the sky. “A while…” you settle on after a few long moments.

“Anything new with you I should know about?” he asks, rocking gently to ease the weight on his prosthetic. 

You scoff like it’s funny — maybe because you can’t remember the last time anyone other than your therapist was asking after you. “Nope…” you sigh. “Unfortunately, I am still the exact same person you knew back then…”

“Doesn’t seem so unfortunate to me,” he insists, brows furrowed, like he’s half-offended by your own self-degradation.

“Well, you’d think after— I don’t know— a decade of pretty intensive therapy that I might be a little different,” you quip with an awkward laugh. The humor dissolves a second later when you realize how pathetic you sound. “But, uh… I’m still working through it, I guess...”

“Aren’t we all…” Jack trails off with a slow nod.

“I don’t know,” you lilt, eyes drifting unconsciously towards his hand, where a black wedding ring sits around his fourth finger. The sight of it makes your chest ache more than you’d like to admit — as if a not-so-distant part of you had expected him to be as single and miserably lonely as you, even after all this time. 

Of course, someone loves him, you think to yourself, how could they not?

“You seem to be doing pretty alright for yourself, I’d say.”

Jack follows your gaze and, almost instinctively, clasps his hands behind his back as if to hide them. His anxious grip tightens on the blue latex he holds between them. “Yeah, uh—” He clears his throat, eyes fixed on the street beyond the overhang. “My wife, she… She passed. A few years ago.”

The humid summer air becomes harder to breathe in an instant. Your mouth parts with shock, though it takes a long moment before any words of apology fall out. “Oh— Shit, Jack, I— I’m sorry. I—”

“It’s okay. You didn’t know,” he assures with a gentle smile, rubbing absentmindedly at the ring with his thumb from where it hides behind his back. “It’s my fault for still wearing the damn thing. I just— feel weird taking it off, I guess…” 

You nod slowly to yourself and glance away. You’ve gotten well acquainted with grief and its tricky rituals over the years.

“What about you?” Jack wonders aloud, smiling a little wider when you turn back to face him with a pair of raised brows. “You seeing anyone?”

Your first instinct is to laugh. “No. God, no.”

“Oh, c’mon…” he croons. “It can’t be that bad.”

You flash him a cynical look and a sad sort of smile. “Yeah, well… I don’t think most people are looking for a girl like me, to be fair.”

“Yeah?” Jack hums, crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” you scoff. “A girl who… works all the time. Who barely sleeps. Who can’t sleep if someone’s breathing wrong in the next room. Who… goes to therapy twice a week— three times if things are real bad— I mean…” A laugh sputters from your lips. “I’m a total nutcase.”

“Hey,” Jack argues, weathered face screwed in a playful offense. “Some guys are into nutcases, I’ll have you know.”

“Oh, really?” you hum drily.

“Me chief among them,” he nods.

“What?” you laugh. “Is that supposed to flatter me or something—?”

Boom! An explosion crackles across the evening sky. Your body reacts before your mind, going into panic mode in a flicker. Your shoulders jerk violently, your heart leaps into your throat, your eyes snap instinctively for cover. A red-hot spark rushes down your legs as though your body was telling you to run. 

Your brain catches up a second later.

It’s a firework… It’s just a firework, you think to soothe yourself, and to ease your suddenly pounding pulse. But as the fear fizzles slowly away, the self-hatred comes next — the undeniable fact that your body will always belong to a war that ended years ago.

You force your shoulders to relax once more and pray that Jack hasn’t noticed any of it. But you can see his expression softening in the corner of your eye — first with concern, which flickers thereafter into a softer sort of pity. 

At the very least, however, he gives you the dignity of pretending he hadn’t seen it at all as sirens rage in the distance — growing nearer and nearer until the red-yellow lights of the ambulance whip around the corner. The two of you snap your gloves on in tandem.

Jack steps off the curb first when it squeals to a park just in front of you. “You picked a hell of a day to come in, Doc…” he huffs and rushes towards the back doors. 

“I’d rather be here than working,” you scoff and follow behind him. “It’s less depressing that way, I think.”

“Is it?” Jack quips with narrowed eyes.

You laugh through your nose. “Yeah, jury’s still out on the one, I guess…”

Fourth of July rages across the city. You pretend not to notice. 

You stand in the muffled quiet of the breakroom, tucked away from the chaos of the emergency department, and watch the coffee machine in front of you sputter as it coughs up steam that smells like burnt grounds and vanilla creamer. You let the bitter stench singe your nostrils as the firework show begins in the heart of the city.

Boom!

A firework sounds off in the distance, closer than all the ones from earlier in the evening. You wrap both hands around the paper cup of coffee, letting the scalding warmth seep into your palms. The heat nearly burns you, but it’s half-grounding nonetheless.

Boom!

You swear it’s shaking the ground beneath your feet, and trembling the thick, concrete walls on either side of you. Though, with the way your day is going now, it’s impossible to tell what’s real and what lives only inside your head.

Boom!

Your fingers tighten around the cup to the point of trembling. You close your eyes and attempt to count your breaths — in for seven, hold for four, out for eight. Your brain tries to trick you — tries to convince you that the freezing cold of the emergency department smells like desert heat and metallic blood and burning gunpowder. It works.

“Counter…” you mutter aloud to yourself, despite how strange it seems, flattening your hand along the white laminate below, even as your shoulders jerk from another explosion in the city. You place your hand on the smooth curve of the cold sink next, and then on the rough cloth draped just behind it. “Faucet… Dishrag…”

Your attempts to anchor yourself to reality only halfway work. You opt to abandon your coffee on the counter altogether as your pulse continues to climb. You’re grateful to find the E.R. still waiting for you on the other side of the door, instead of a memory you can’t seem to leave. 

“Oh, hey— I was just looking for you.”

Your head whips over your shoulder to find Jack strolling down the half-empty corridor with a tablet in his hands, now dressed in his dark black scrubs instead of the tactical gear he arrived in. 

His shift has probably started now, or is about to, at least — which means you should be leaving with the rest of the day shift. But you fear what waits for you outside these walls and those automatic doors; the crushing certainty of solitude that always seemed to be waiting for you back home, to be more specific.

You exhale a trembling breath, falling into step with Jack when he walks by. “Where is everyone?” you wonder aloud.

“Day shift went up to the roof, I think,” he answers with most of his attention on the tablet as he scrolls absentmindedly through it. “Watching the fireworks and drinking beer, I’m sure… Lucky bastards.”

“Santos did invite me to karaoke today,” you tell him.

“A karaoke invite on your first day, huh? Impressive,” Jack croons, laughing softly through his nose when you lean to knock your shoulder against his broader one. He gets a faint whiff of the perfume still lingering on your clothes, beneath layers of antiseptic and hospital soap. He misses your warmth the second you’re gone. “You gonna go?”

Your shoulders sag with a sigh. “I don’t know… I’m kinda liking this adrenaline rush, to be honest. Might try and ride it ’til the wheels fall off.”

“Well, that always ends well, in my experience,” Jack quips with a lopsided smile as he slows to a stop in front of you, tucking the tablet under his bicep. He towers a few inches over you, close enough to make you lift your chin to properly meet his eyes. “But I do have something you could help me with, if you have a few minutes to spare…”

“Of course.”

“I, uh…” he trails off, turning to glance awkwardly at his left shoulder. “I took a hit… You know, in the field earlier… I’m pretty sure the vest caught most of it but—”

“You were—” You catch yourself before your voice can carry down the hallway. You take a step closer, lowering your voice into a harsh whisper as you scold him. “You were shot?”

“Shot at,” he corrects, with his brows raised to his hairline. “And it’s not as bad as you’re thinking. I tried to clean it up myself, but it’s pretty… inconveniently located…”

He rolls his shoulder in an attempt to ease the discomfort building there from his scrubs rubbing against the wound. His scruffy jaw tightens with a faint grimace, enough for you to notice the pain in his weathered features that he’d been pretending wasn’t there before now.

Concern flares white-hot in your chest. “Let me see it.”

The tone leaves little room for argument. It’s the same one you’d used on him all that time ago, when you ordered him to shut up and quit apologizing for bleeding out before the people trying to kill you could find you.

“Yes, ma’am,” he nods.

Jack leads you to the nearest empty exam room and slips inside while you gather the supplies you suspect you’ll need from the cart outside the door. You hold them to your chest when you return to the room, where you find Jack undressing, tugging his scrub top off by the collar. 

The pale tendons in his back flex unevenly when he pulls the fabric off completely. The milky white canvas of his back is exposed to you then, along with the raging scrape glowing a bright scarlet along his left shoulder.

The door clicks shut behind you and garners the man’s attention. Jack turns to face you. You find he’s grown strangely broader with age. His stomach is full but toned, and his chest is filled out with a similar strength. Both are dusted with faint freckles and light colored hair that trails down from his sternum and disappears beneath his scrub pants.  

He seems to mistake the subtle shock on your face for concern.

“I’ve had worse,” he assures you.

“I know, Abbot,” you deadpan, reaching for the glove dispenser on the wall with your free hand. “I was there.”

Jack settles on the edge of the exam table while you arrange the supplies on the metal tray before you — gauze, saline, antibiotic ointment, steri-strips. Your hands remember the motions before your mind has to. It comes to you as easily as muscle memory. You work with an effortlessness that only comes with years of experience; and Jack weathers the pain with an effortlessness that only comes with years of aching.

“You wanna know something funny?” he announces suddenly. The muscles in his back tense slightly when he twists to glance at you over his bare shoulder. 

“You getting shot at and not telling anyone for half a shift?” you answer in a monotone.

He exhales a quiet laugh and turns back around.

“I had… the biggest crush on you,” Jack confesses in an achingly gentle voice, and pretends not to notice when your hands still suddenly behind him. He inhales slowly through his nose, as if he’d been sitting on those words for some time, and crosses his arms over his bare chest as if to shield himself from them in some way. “I was, uh… I was gonna ask you out, actually. You know, when we got back home, but… You disappeared before I could.”

His quiet laugh sounds much louder in the silence that settles heavily between you.

“I, uh—  I’m pretty sure I still have the letter I wrote you, actually, when I figured out your address— in a box somewhere in the attic probably, but… It felt a little too stalkerish to send it, and… Then I met my wife, and I figured you moved on, too, and…” he trails off, struggling to find the right words. “I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. You’re here now.”

“It was probably for the best,” you tell him, and clear your throat when your voice shakes. You pretend not to notice your fingers trembling when you smooth down the edge of the bandage you press over his wound. “I wasn’t exactly… the best company back then.”

“You were always good company,” Jack scoffs. “Even when I thought I was gonna die, I was glad I was with you. I mean, I hated that you were gonna have to witness it obviously, but… I was still glad it was you— Even when you were threatening to kill me.” 

You’re pierced almost physically by his words. You blink rapidly to clear the haze of them when your vision starts to blur, another memory threatening to drag you under. Memories you’d spent years and a shit ton of money working through in therapy, that are now eating away at you from the inside out.

His shoulder beneath your fingertips is covered suddenly in shredded camouflage. The bandage on his freckled skin stains red until it gushes once more with warm blood. His laughter turns to screams. The air turns to smoke. The fluorescent lights turn to a white-hot sun.

Jack frowns to himself when he feels your hands freezing once more behind him. He glances over his shoulder and finds that your eyes have gone empty again, fixed somewhere far away — the same way they had earlier that day. His chest pinches with an instant worry. 

“You okay?” 

His words sound like they’re muffled by water or light-years of space. You can’t hear them over the heartbeat whoosh, whoosh, whooshing in your ears, pounding harder against your pulse with every second that passes that you can’t catch your breath. 

Another firework explodes outside like distant thunder. Your body jolts in response, and reality slams back into you a second later.

“I, uh…” You swallow hard, eyes flitting wildly around the room, like you’re struggling to place yourself inside it. “I-I’m all done here, I think.”

“Hey…” Jack coos and turns around to face you completely. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

You step back from him and rip off your gloves with two dull pops. You chuck them hurriedly into the bin, feeling overwhelmingly like the walls are closing in on either side of you. 

“I, uh... I just need… I’ll, um…” You shake your head when the words don’t come out right. The next ones leave in a whimper when you try and fail to catch your breath. “I’m sorry.”

You rush out of the room, gone before Jack can gather his shirt.

“No…” That’s the only thing you can seem to make out as you hide yourself in the breakroom. The word scrapes against your throat, still too narrow to properly let air flow through. You wedge your pointer fingers painfully in your ears when the far-off fireworks become unrelenting gunshots in your skull. Your vision tunnels, the room blurs, every breath seems to catch somewhere in your chest. “No, no, no—”

The words dissolve into a half-strangled whimper in the back of your throat. You crouch slowly down in the center of the room and curl inward on yourself, forehead nearly touching your knees. Every muscle draws tight enough to ache. Your body makes itself smaller on instinct, as if it still believed that smaller targets survived the longest.

You vaguely hear the sound of your name coming from behind you — far away at first, like a voice carried underwater — and then much closer, when a pair of warm, calloused hands curl gently around your forearms. Despite the inherent softness of the touch, you flinch violently in the sudden hold.

“Hey… It’s just me,” Jack coos. 

His voice cuts through the buzzing panic with a remarkable steadiness. Your head snaps in his direction. You find him looming just beside you, bent over at the waist. His face is slow to flood into focus. For a gutwrenching flicker of a second, he’s the same dark-haired, bloodied, and crying man that nearly died in your arms.

Reality settles in a moment later.

The silver threaded in his curls catches the buzzing fluroscents overhead. His light eyes, still so soft despite the carnage they’ve witnessed, dart over your features with a silent concern.

“It’s just me,” he continues. “You’re okay. Just keep looking at me.”

You try to until— Boom! Another firework crackles in the distance. Your eyes squeeze shut despite yourself. Your entire body recoils. “I can’t—” you whimper through a ragged breath that catches in your throat. Your chest sears white-hot accordingly.

“Okay. That’s okay,” he nods. “Just breathe with me. Don’t fight it, okay? Just breathe.”

Jack inhales slowly, drawing in one exaggerated breath until his chest rises beneath his scrubs. You try to mimic it, but it stutters painfully halfway through. Your lungs seize despite yourself. Your face twists into a pained sort of look.

“That’s okay. There you go,” he praises. The corner of his mouth lifts into the faintest hint of a smile. His thumbs rub softly along the buzzing skin of your arm. “I know it doesn’t feel good. Just keep trying for me.”

It takes several long moments for your breaths to finally even out. Jack holds you through every single one of them. Only when your hands slip from your ears and your shoulders stop trembling does Jack carefully guide you to your feet, with a pair of warm hands clasped gently around the outside of your elbows. 

He keeps you stable on unsteady limbs as he guides you the short distance to the plastic chairs gathered around the breakroom table. You collapse into one. He pulls up another to be nearer to you — close enough for your knees to slot between each other’s and for his fingers to thread with yours when he reaches for you again. His palm is warm and gently calloused; a little like velvet as it glides against yours.

You rest your other arm on the table beside you, hiding your face behind the palm of your free hand. When you regain your breath, the first thing you think to do is laugh — a wet, brittle, exhausted sort of sound.

“What the hell am I doing here?” you ask within a weak chuckle, shaking your head at yourself. “The VA recommended me because I was supposed to be good at this, but… I’ve been here for one shift… And all I’ve done is make everything worse—”

“C’mon,” Jack hums. “You know that’s not true.”

“Look at me!” you laugh, gesturing helplessly towards yourself when you lift your head to meet his eyes. Tears glisten in your gaze, clumping your bottom lashes together. “I’m supposed to be taking care of people, Jack! I’m not helping anyone like this!” 

The man studies you for a long moment. His eyes narrow with a careful curiosity. “Does this happen a lot?” he wonders gently. “These… spells?” 

You shake your head, eyes fluttering shut. “No. Not in— years. I thought they were gone. I mean, I certainly pay my therapist enough; they should be gone by now, but…” You end your ramble with a heavy sigh. “I don’t know… I think… Seeing you, you know, for the first time since… Since we came back home, it just… Opened something…”

Jack’s thumb swipes across your knuckles. You expect him to be half-offended at your confession. He smiles instead.

“Well, you know how we fix that?” he asks, with something short of amusement on the edge of his voice. “We go get a beer tomorrow night. Or whenever you’re up for it. And we talk about all this shit. All of our— trauma or whatever. We just… We have it out.”

Something like sunshine threatens to swell in your chest. It burns out quickly, though.

“But what about everything else?” you wonder in a small voice, wet eyes drifting towards the closed break room door. “I can’t go back out there. Not like this. What if… What if I freeze again? Three seconds is enough to… to kill someone if they’re in critical condition.”

“We’ll make sure you have dual coverage— if you freeze again, you’ll have another attending to step in for you,” Jack answers with a firm nod and unwavering gaze, confident enough to soothe you. “But, for now, we take you upstairs to neuro. Maybe do an EEG since you’re having new symptoms, just to rule out anything structural. And then tomorrow, you book an appointment with your doctor, and I’ll drive you— I don’t care when it is. Just call me, alright? I’ll give you my number.” 

You crumple under the weight of his tenderness, of his thumb running soothingly across the ridges of your knuckles. You shake your head, brows knitting softly together. “Why—?” you go to ask, but the words get caught halfway through. 

Why are you doing this? you want to say. Why are you doing this for me?

“Well, you pretty much carried me through hell, in case you forgot,” Jack answers with a tired laugh. “And I spent a long, long time wishing I could’ve helped you the same way you helped me.”

Silence settles comfortably between you once more. Your wet eyes fall to your joined hands, where his larger one engulfs your own. His are warmer, slightly rough around the knuckles, and calloused at the palms. It’s hard to imagine, you realize, that the hands that once clawed desperately at the sun-hot desert when you tended to his leg are now reaching so gently out for you.

A series of voices race down the hall all at once, yelling over the buzzing wheels of a gurney. “—What do you mean he lit it in his mouth?” 

“He thought it’d shoot out the opposite way—”

“Sir, please, stop trying to pull the bottle rocket out yourself—”

“There it is…” Jack huffs. “The annual reminder that fireworks are nature’s way of thinning out humanity.”

You exhale a quiet laugh through your nose, too weak for anything else, and follow Jack when he stands to full height. The distance between you is barely a step. You feel yourself closing it before your mind can catch up, sliding your arms experimentally around his shoulders and pressing your chest against his.

For the faintest fraction of a second, Jack goes still. His breath leaves him in a quiet rush at the feeling of having you so close. His arms raise slowly, wrapping around your waist with a tenderness that threatens to undo you all over again. One broad hand settles warmly between your shoulder blades, while the other spreads carefully along the small of your back.

You haven’t been this close to him since the day he almost died. In fact, the last time you held him, your hands had been slick with his blood — so much of it, that the dirt turned to sticky paste on your palms. But now, he no longer smells of the metallic blood and burning gunpowder and death that haunts your dreams. Instead, he smells of fresh laundry, expensive cedar cologne, and hospital soap. Like home. Like life.

You breathe in through your nose, inhaling him deep into your lungs. 

“Thank you…” you hear yourself say, chin bobbing on his shoulder, words brushing over the fabric of his scrubs.

“Don’t thank me,” Jack scoffs humorously, though his hands drift up and down your spine with an unyielding tenderness. “I’m still paying off a debt.”

“What debt?”

“You’re the one who refused to leave me behind, remember?” he asks. “Well, now it’s my turn to make sure nobody leaves you.” 

Outside, another firework climbs high into the starry summer sky and bursts into a thousand brilliant stars with another far-away explosion. Only this time, you hear it without hearing the war. 

Summer softens slowly into autumn.

The relentless early-July heat gives way to crisp mornings and cool evenings. Dusk arrives a little earlier every day, spilling through the closed bedroom curtains in silvers of honey-colored rays. Outside, a late afternoon breeze stirs the trees until the copper-colored branches brush the window — tires buzz across the worn pavement while the streets fill with the comforting chorus of the early evening.

Life always has a way of finding its rhythm, you find.

You continued working at the PTMC even after Robby returned from his sabbatical, settling into permanent dual coverage on the night shift with Jack. Your symptoms subsided after that first shift — no more blank spots since you switched medications; no more nightmares since you started spending the majority of your nights in Jack’s bed. Your mind feels like home again.

You lay there, tangled in the rumpled gray comforter, the majority of which you had unconsciously stolen during the night, and listen to the man’s even breaths as he sleeps soundly just beside you.

Jack lies on his stomach with his strong arms folded beneath the thin pillow under his head, facing away from you. You watch the gentle rise and fall of his back from where the dark sheet has slipped around his waist, exposing the freckled canvas of his back — and the healed scrape along his shoulder, now a thin scratch of marred, pink skin.

Your hand wanders slowly beneath the blankets — finding his clothed hip first, then crawling up the familiar landscape of his spine, before settling in the strands of silver curled at the nape of his neck.

The man wakes with a sharp inhale and turns his wild head slowly to face you, still not quite awake.

“Jack…” you whisper to him, fingers still twisting in his curls. “Jack.”

“Mm?” he grunts without opening his eyes, brows pinching in protest.

“We gotta start getting ready.”

Your hand parts from his neck to reach for the phone charging on the other side of you. You don’t make it far before a large, warm hand catches your wrist.

“No,” Jack grumbles halfway into his pillow, voice still gruff with sleep. He tugs your hand back to the back of his neck. “Keep going…”

You exhale a quiet laugh but oblige him anyway. His shoulders deflate with a contented sigh when your fingers return to his hair, scratching gently at his scalp. “Why is it you make me do this every morning, but when I ask you to scratch my back before bed, you’re asleep in two minutes?”

“I have a medical condition,” he slurs into his pillow, with his eyes still shut.

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“Mm… Pretty sure that’s a HIPAA violation, honey.”

A laugh escapes you before you can help it. “You’re so annoying.”

“Here— We’ll do it at the same time,” Jack mumbles.

He grunts quietly as he twists on his left shoulder until his facing you properly. His right hand slithers around your waist, urging you closer until your knees bump beneath the blankets. His hand is warm and gently calloused when it slips beneath the hem of your oversized shirt. His dull nails scratch lazily up and down the length of your spine. Still without opening his eyes.

“See?” he hums. “Teamwork.”

You exhale a satisfied sigh, then joke drily despite yourself. “Your breath smells, by the way.”

He peeks a tired eye open at that. “Oh, yeah? And what do you think yours smells like, huh? Sunshine and rainbows?”

He leans in to kiss you anyway — a mere brushing of your lips for no longer than a second. But then the second lingers, and so does his mouth against yours. The kiss turns sleepy and slow, mouths gliding and tongues brushing.

Jack lifts himself onto the elbow of his free hand and urges you onto your back until half of his heavy weight is resting on top of you. The stiffness tucked in his boxers rubs against your thigh. A smile curls slowly on your mouth.

“We only have an— an hour to get ready—” You just barely manage to protest between his kisses. “You know that right?”

His mouth slides down to your neck to smear wet-hot kisses along your pulse. His hips flatten further against yours, pressing his hardening length more ardently against you. “I only need five minutes, honey. I promise.”

“Oh, trust me,” you scoff drily. “I’m well aware.”

Jack pulls off of you with the quiet smack of his mouth parting from your jaw. His sleep-swollen features twist in a feigned offense. Slumber clings stubbornly to every inch of him — curls flat on one side and wild on the other; stubble a shade darker on his jaw; pillow creases stamped along his cheek.

“Oh, you are just asking for it, aren’t you?” he squints.

“Clock’s ticking, Dr. Abbot,” you tease with a lazy smile, fingers dancing through his silver curls. “I’m gonna be in that shower in five minutes— With or without you.”

A flicker of amusement flashes across his face, right before he ducks back down to swallow you whole in a searing kiss. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

[lovebugism]

IN THE LIGHT OF THE SEVEN ─── ormund hightower

summary: there is a fine line between worship and desire, and ormund hightower has long forgotten where it lies. (2k)

pairing: ormund hightower / fem!witchy!reader

contents: mutual pining, worship as a love language (and a form of manipulation kinda), unhealthy devotion, sub!ormund lowkey, mild smut 18+ (MDNI)

Beyond the yawning arch of your open balcony, the Reach lay sleeping beneath a haze of silver mist. Green banners, bearing the sigil of House Hightower, whip against their posts — stirred by the cool night breeze that carries in the scent of damp earth, dewy grass, and the lingering smoke of dying cookfires. The air slipping through your doors mingles with the smell of incense and beeswax from prayer candles stained permanently within your chamber walls.

The room glows shades of amber from flickering torchlight, which dances across the pale stone and polished oak. The shelves lining the walls bow slightly beneath the weight of a hundred tiny glass vials, shimmering like emerald, sapphire, and ruby jewels beneath the guttering flames. An iron brazier burns sweet myrrh in one far corner, and in the other, steam curls lazily from a copper bath.

You laze in the scalding water; eyes lidded in quiet contemplation while your fingers skim the soapy surface, disturbing the white jasmine petals floating gently there. The sudden knock at your door does not startle you when it comes — in three measured, half-shy raps against the wood — as though a part of you had expected its coming somehow.

“Come,” you call into the quiet.

The heavy oak opens inward with a slow creaking sound. Lord Ormund enters with all the solemn reverence of a man stepping into a holy sanctuary. He freezes instantly in the doorway at the sight of you there, resting in the bath like an angel in a painting hung along an ancient sept wall — head lolled back, bare breasts rising and falling from ribbons of steam. For a long moment, he could not fathom looking away from it.

“Oh—” The noise escapes him like a punched-out breath. He falters in the doorway, turning his head and lowering his gaze, as speckles of pink creep up the collar of his green doublet. “I— I didn’t mean to disturb you, my lady.”

“You could never disturb me,” you hum with a tender smile. “Please. Come in.”

Ormund obeys. Ormund always obeys. He commands thousands of knights as leader of his house by day, but the simplest request from you always threatens to unravel him completely. He bends entirely to your will, perhaps more desperate for your approval than The Father’s.

The door clicks shut behind him. The room seems smaller for it, warmer, as the heat of the candlelight grows the moment he’s alone with you. He shifts on his weight like a shy child before you, clasping his pale hands behind his back like a squire awaiting instruction. He was a six-foot, broad-shouldered knight, but a single smile from you makes him want to get on his knees and pray.

“There is a vial on that shelf beside you,” you tell him, lifting your chin slightly to motion to it. “The clear one— If you would?”

His body answers before his mind. Ormund turns, as if every bone in his body was made to be under your control, and skims the shelves with a broad hand until his fingers find a slender bottle. “This one?”

“Yes.”

His boots pad firmly along the cobbles as he crosses the distance between you, towering over your copper tub. The candlelight turns his wild curls a deeper auburn shade of Hightower red; the dancing flames carve out half of his chiseled features in blurred shadow.

Water slips from your arm in clear rivulets as you raise a waiting hand, glittering breasts rising once more from the still water. Ormund clears his throat, adam’s apple bobbing as he glances politely elsewhere. “Is this another one of your… miracles?” he wonders aloud, because it felt too ungodly to call them potions.

You uncork the small bottle with a faint pop. You tap your pointer finger against the glass to empty a few drops into the warm bathwater below. “It’s only lavender, I’m afraid,” you confess.

“…Lavender,” he echoes with an owlish blink.

Your eyes gleam with amusement when they flit back up to his. “Do I disappoint you, my lord?”

“No. N-Never,” he stammers with a shake of his head. “I— I quite prefer the smell, actually.”

“I’m aware…” you lilt with a wider smile. “Perhaps, I should lend you a bottle when we march.”

Ormund swallows hard and forgets to speak. His mind reels at the thought of keeping a pomander of your bath water chained to his armor — to inhaling the sweet scent of your musk and bathing oils while in the heart of battle.

“The gods spoke to me in prayer this morning…” you start with a sigh, eyes fluttering shut as you relax further into the water, with the vial hanging loosely at your fingertips. “The Warrior said, ‘Tonight, you will enjoy your last bath before the war… Make it count.’”

Ormund’s strong brow furrows in a grave sort of look, appearing almost stricken.

Your lip lifts into a smile. “A joke, my lord,” you tell him. “Though not a very good one, I’m afraid.”

“Oh,” Ormund says with an awkward chuckle, as relief crosses his strong features in slow confusion. “Forgive me, my lady— Humor is not my strength, I’m afraid.”

“That’s because most jokes are lies… And you are devoted to the truth.”

He nods once, then frowns thoughtfully. “Well… If they are lies, my lady… Are they not best avoided?”

You tilt your head to your bare shoulder, regarding him with an unmistakable fondness. “Not always… Sometimes, a soul must first be led astray before it can discover the proper road… A trick that leads them to the truth.”

You motion your head towards the shelves across the room.

“Like those bottles…” you tell him and watch as his head swivels in the direction of them almost instantly. “The green one sends a pillar of emerald flame into the heavens if thrown into a fire… The blue one creates a cloud of black smoke that would make the most seasoned knights piss themselves in fear… And that pink one…”

Ormund turns back to you when you trail off, chest tugging at the smile that graces your lips.

“Yes?” he presses.

“If slipped into a man’s wine… Drives him absolutely mad with lust.”

Ormund freezes, breath hitching somewhere in his chest. It feels, for a moment, like he’s finally got an answer for his own insanity — an explanation of why his mind cannot seem to roam anywhere without bumping into thoughts of you.

“Did… did you… Did you use that on me?” he stammers.

That question hangs between you for several long moments. You tilt your head and peer up at him in a thoughtful sort of look. “…Would I have to?” you press with an arched brow.

His face flushes pink to the tips of his ears. His light eyes widen as the answer spills immediately from his lips. “No! N-No. Of— Of course not,” he stammers, lowering himself to his knee beside your bath like a scolded squire, like a pilgrim before an altar. It was instinct almost, to kneel at your feet. “Forgive me, my lady— I exist only to serve you.”

The words leave his mouth as if pulled out by a hand down his throat. It frightens him, how easily his faith has entangled with you — how often his eyes sought yours before the Seven-Pointed Star. He could no longer tell if he worshipped you because of the gods, or if he worshipped the gods because of you.

“There is nothing to forgive, my lord, I assure you,” you coo to him, as gentle as The Mother herself, though something mischievous dances in your eyes even still. “But… if you truly wish to serve me… Then serve me.”

Ormund’s breath catches, heart thundering hard behind his ribcage.

Your brows lift in an expectant look. “Take off your clothes.”

The man rises slowly to full height again, towering once more before you. You watch with an unwavering stare as he reaches for the buckles of his doublet, unlatching the golden buttons there with a pair of trembling hands. The emerald jacket falls to the cobbles with a quiet thud. His pale tunic follows, which he unties and then tugs off at the collar.

The canvas of his milky white torso is exposed to you, toned from years of knighthood, and sprinkled with sparse brown hair along the stomach and sternum.

He has to remind himself to breathe as his hands fumble with the button of his trousers, toeing off his boots simultaneously. The fabric falls to his ankles. He steps out of them with two firm steps, a lot more confident than his pounding heart. The cobbles are cool beneath his feet, and damp from the steam of your bath.

Ormund fights the instinctive urge to cover himself as your eyes part finally from his to trail down the length of his lean body. You find his cock hanging heavy between his scruffy thighs, favoring the left one as it curves slightly in that direction. Your head tilts once more to your shoulder in observation. Your eyes dart suddenly back to his face.

“Get in the bath,” you command.

So Ormund gets in the bath.

The water trickles as you shift within its depth to make room for the man. He steps in, one leg at a time, and braces the edge of the copper as he descends into the steam. His thighs spread between both of yours, knees bent to accommodate his taller form.

You set the vial on the edge before inching towards him. Ormund’s hairy chest hitches with an unsure breath when you straddle his waist, delicate hands braced along his broad shoulders. He’s imagined having you like this for so long, on him and all over him, that he can scarcely tell reality from his own boyish dreams.

The velvety skin of your inner thigh brushes his half-hard cock, and he feels half-heretic for it. He hates himself for imagining your cunt as it brushes the tip of length — hates how easily he can picture the petal-like folds parting around him and the way it would feel to pierce them with his manhood. He feels like he should fall to his knees and repent for it.

“I’m sorry, my lady,” he says on bated breath, adam’s apple bobbing when he tips his chin to meet your gaze. “It’s— It’s been a while. Forgive me.”

“It’s only flesh, my lord,” you shrug with a tender smile, stiff nipples brushing his bare chest. “It needs what it needs.”

Your fingers twist into the auburn tendrils curling at his temple and smile softly when Ormund leans instinctively into the warmth of your touch.

“There is no act done in service of the gods that could ever be called a sin,” you remind him.

He exhales a held breath. His hands rise from the water to reach for your body at your words, at your permission. They tremble with a strange hesitance he thought he lost in boyhood — yours was certainly not the first he’d ever touched, but perhaps the only one he truly revered. His palms are calloused from decades of training as they smooth up your soft stomach and over your ribs, before cupping the underside of your plush breasts.

“I thank the gods every day for bringing you to me,” he says on bated breath— a confession you can read all over his face every time he looks at you.

“Don’t thank me yet,” you remind him, tipping up his chin with your pointer finger when his lidded eyes lock on your breasts. “Not after I’ve won you this war.”

[lovebugism]

PEAR MILLE-FEUILLE ─── carmy berzatto

summary: the evolution of you and carmy's relationship, as told by the layers of the dessert that brought you together in the first place, and almost ruined your life. or: the four times carmy caught himself falling in love with you, and the one time he actually let himself. (10k)

characters: carmy berzatto / fem!reader, mentions of claire / carmy, luca, richie jerimovich, sydney adamu, chef terry

contents: slow burn, strangers to friends to lovers, idiots in love, angst (hurt/comfort), jealousy, so much yearning, reheating sydcarmy nachos, canon divergent (i kinda mish-mash the events of season 2 and 3 together here for funsies), cw for mentions of grief, talks of depression and anxiety, smut 18+ (carmy's touch-starved and cries during sex, you heard it here first guys!)

( NAVIGATION ) | ( AO3 )

pear mille-feuille, a classic parisian dessert, meaning "a thousand layers" in french, pronounced: pair-meel-fwee.

—

I. BURNT CARAMEL

Carmy rushed out of the restaurant with his pulse thrumming in his throat and the word of David Fields bouncing around in his pounding skull. “I don’t think about you at all,” he’d said. “I don’t think about you at all. I don’t think about you at all—” Carmy shoved the metal door open with a too-aggressive hand, so hard it hit the brick wall on the other side with a resounding bang.

He waited for the cool Chicago night air to smack him in the face, to remind him how to breathe again. He got a heavy whiff of warm caramel and sweet pear instead. 

With his tattooed knuckles running hard along his tight chest, he turned his head to find a strange woman he only vaguely recognized sitting on the curb a few feet away — dressed for a funeral, wearing a wrinkled black dress and a run in her tights along the knee. A plate of something sweet rested in her lap.

“Uh… Hi,” Carmy greeted shakily, half-strangled from the leftover panic still clutching him hard by the throat.

“Hi,” you responded quietly, as if choked by some strange emotion of your own.

The man’s wet, ocean eyes flit between your face and the food in your lap. A rogue brown curl fell over his forehead as he nodded down towards you. “What’s, uh… What’s that?”

“My mortal enemy,” you answered gravelly, before turning away. “It’s a Pear Mille-Feuille… I thought maybe I could finally get it right before we closed…”

Carmy blinked owlishly at your profile. “…Well, did you?”

“Nope…” you answered through a heavy sigh, popping your lips together. “The pastry’s too soft. But somehow the pears are still overdone, so… I can’t win.”

Carmy looked it over with an inquisitive eye — the thin gold layers of puff pastry, all stacked neatly atop one another; pears poached to the perfect amber color; thick cream piped with a near impossible precision. It looked like something straight out of a magazine. And, if Carmy had to guess by how hard you were on yourself about the whole thing, it’s entirely likely you’d been published in one before.

“Well, it looks good, at least.”

“That’s only ‘cause you’re standing six feet away.”

Carmy scoffed a quiet laugh and found his breath coming more easily to him. “Here,” he offered, shoes scraping the worn pavement as he approached you. “Let me try it.”

Your head snapped in his direction. Your wide eyes raised to follow his form as he loomed suddenly over you, black blazer rippling in the cool, late-summer breeze. The night air filled suddenly with the scent of him — deep cologne, cigarette smoke, and nicotine gum.

“Wh…What?” you stammered.

“Sometimes you just need a fresh perspective, is all. Like, uh… A new pallet, you know?”

Carmy reached a tattooed hand in your direction, leaving little room for argument. You got the feeling that he must run a restaurant of his own as you passed him the ceramic plate, fingers trembling. You watched anxiously as he took the fork in his large hand and cut himself a slice of the pastry.

He shoveled it into his mouth — an explosion of butter, vanilla, pear, and caramel — the near-perfect balance of elegant and comforting. Just refined enough not to impose too much on itself. 

His cheek jut softly out as he chewed. He nodded to himself until the words caught up to him. “Yeah, this is… incredible, Chef,” he said through the mouthful, laughing slightly through his nose. The sweetest thing he’d ever tasted.

You didn’t believe him, not entirely, but the line in your taut shoulders relaxed slightly at his praise anyway. Sometimes, feeding others felt like a leap of faith. Sometimes, feeding someone felt like handing over a piece of yourself to them, and hoping they found something worth keeping.

—

Months later, Carmy realizes that there are only two kinds of things a person holds onto in this world — things they can’t bear to lose, and things they never meant to keep.

Mikey belongs perpetually in the first category. And, ever since you started working here, he’s begun to realize that you belong in the second. Maybe that’s why he felt himself on the verge of a panic attack for the third time today, ‘cause he was spending his evening excavating his brother’s office like an archeological dig, and found himself surrounded by both at once.

This office had belonged to Mikey, and would be the last thing that ever truly did.

Carmy thinks, knows, that’s why he put off cleaning it out for so long — like keeping it exactly the way his brother left it would preserve his ghost there in some way. This place was practically his tomb, made of four concrete walls faded to the color of old dishwater, an ancient desk so cluttered you can barely see its surface, and a bunch of dented filing cabinets that haven’t been organized in at least three presidential administrations.

They’re all half empty now, organized in boxes with Mikey’s frantic scrawl left on every crumpled receipt, invoice, and payroll record. Soon this office would match the rest of the place — clean, sleek, erased — and what’s left of his brother would be gone.

Carmy slouches against the cool brick with his arms propped on his bent knees, holding the last of Mikey’s things in a tattooed hand. A prescription pill bottle with the label scratched off, which he found while grave-digging through the cabinet drawers. He clutches it tight in his fist, holding the remnants of addiction as if it were his brother’s hand.

The grey, mildew-and-coffee-scented abyss of his grief is abated only by the sound of your laughter, which bounces off the concrete walls and finds him like the rays of milky-orange sunlight filtering through the stained window above his head, which turns his wild curls a more golden shade of brown.

His heavy ocean eyes lift and find you instantly — the way they always seemed to do — and his features flood with horror when he finds you with his sketchbook in your hands.

“What’s all this?” you wonder with a quiet laugh, beneath the subtle thwipping of the pages as you flick through them with your thumb.

Inside are random lists, phone numbers, and mock-ups for the restaurant, all in Carmy’s scrawled handwriting. Then you stumble upon a series of sloppy portraits — some of them of the others in the kitchen; most of them of you, like he was trying to capture you just right.

They feel like memories in some way, moments stolen when no one else was looking. They’re slightly messy, as if drawn by a loose and absentminded hand. It’s quite strange, looking at yourself from another person’s perspective. But even still, you don’t think you’ve ever looked so pretty, so alive, than on these pages of smudged ink.

“I didn’t know you could draw.”

Carmy shrugs lazily with his pink mouth softly jutted, feigning an air of indifference despite the red tint speckling across his cheeks.

“I can’t,” he mumbles through a huff as he stands to full height again, bracing himself on the cleared-out desk beside him. He tucks the pill bottle into the front pocket of his slacks and clears his throat when he feels his pulse skipping there. “N-Not really.”

“Well, I beg to differ,” you scoff and turn another page.

Another scribbled portrait of you sits in the center, drawn in blue ink this time. You’ve got the eraser end of a pencil in your mouth and another sitting behind your ear, concentrating on coming up with a new dessert menu. You were captured quite beautifully, even in your subtle frustration. “I didn’t think I was capable of looking this good until now.”

“You look good all the time,” he dismisses quietly, curls swaying when he shakes his head at you.

He grimaces at himself right after the words spill from his lips, face flaring hotter when the expression on your face shifts slightly in response to them. He lacks the courage to meet your eyes as he looms before you, smelling of stale cologne and sweat from days of renovation.

“What do you, uh— What do you usually draw?” you stammer and pass the sketchbook back to him.

“I don’t know…” Carmy mutters. “Whatever’s, you know, on my mind, I guess—”

Your heart lurches in your chest, both at his words and at the office door slamming suddenly open across the room. Your heads snap to the side in tandem to find Richie towering in the narrow doorway. “Cousin, I swear to god, I’m about to fuckin’ lose it, man—”

“You’re so dramatic, Richie, jeez…” Sydney sighs as she walks past him and further into the newly renovated kitchen, to busy herself with actual work.

Carmy hangs his head and closes his eyes, digging his thumb and forefinger into the sockets in a quiet frustration. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t come to me with any problems while I was in here—”

“I know that,” Richie shrugs. “It’s not a problem.

“—I don’t have time for this shit right now, Rich.”

“Well, it’s not a fuckin’ problem, Carm! What do you want me to say?” the older man repeats, louder now.

“It’s literally a problem,” Syd monotones from somewhere further inside the kitchen.

“Well, Ms. Know-It-All over here wants less tables in the dining room— says it’ll fuckin’… make it more systematic or whatever, I don’t know,” Richie rambles, gesturing wildly with his hands. “But I told her we’re opening a restaurant here. Not a library. More seats means more customers, which means more money— Which we’re slowly running out of, might I add!”

He turns over his shoulder to yell into the kitchen. You wince when his voice bounces off the bare concrete walls.

“Yeah, Syd’s right,” Carmy nods.

“Thank you!” the girl calls distantly.

Richie blinks slowly in offense. “…What?”

“Syd’s right—”

“No, I heard you—”

“Then why’d you say what—?”

“‘Cause you’re fucking with me,” Richie scoffs an emotionless, half-delirious laugh.

“I’m trying to be efficient here, Rich—”

“You’re all fucking with me—”

“We can turn over tables quicker if there’s less of them,” Carmy explains, much more calmly in response, though there’s a sudden bite behind his words that you don’t miss. He keeps one hand propped on his waist while his other gestures with the sketchbook between his fingers. “Which means more customers, which means more money, which… we are running out of…”

Richie laughs like it’s funny. “Well, that’s real funny, Carm, ‘cause I bet if I brought Claire-Bear in here, and she agreed with me — which she would, by the way — you’d change your mind like that—”

Carmy flinches when the man lifts his hand to snap in his face. He swats him away with a little more aggression than probably necessary. “Get your hand out of my face— What are you twelve?”

“Yeah, you’re mad ‘cause you know I’m right.”

Your head tilts to the side like an intrigued puppy at the foreign name, which you haven’t yet become acquainted with in your weeks working here. Your wide eyes dart between the two men in front of you. Your smile trembles slightly at the edges.

“Who’s… Who’s Claire-Bear?”

Carmy’s head snaps in your direction. His mouth parts, but nothing comes out for an embarrassing fraction of a second, as if he wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. Bringing her up in front of you feels wrong in a way he can’t explain.

“She’s uh… She’s— She’s no one,” Carmy stammers.

“Oh, please,” Richie scoffs, dark blue eyes flitting in your direction. “She’s his girlfriend.”

Your stomach sinks, even despite Carmy’s arguing.

“For the last time, she’s not my fucking girlfriend. Richie—”

“Well, not for lack of tryin’, cousin—”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Carmy repeats, this time only to you. There’s a solemn look in his light eyes, like he’s trying to make sure you really hear him. “She’s, you know, an old friend. A family friend. That’s all.”

“Oh,” Richie laughs. “I bet Claire-Bear would love to hear that.”

“Fuck off, Richie,” Carmy spits.

“Oh, there you are.” A softer, deeper, more foreign voice breaks through the boyish bickering in an instant. Luca appears in the doorway behind Richie — golden locks pushed over his forehead, physically built beneath his white undershirt, looking a lot less plagued by the chaos of the kitchen than the rest of them. His pink lips quirk into a smile at the sight of you. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you— I need an expert opinion on this lemon-blueberry trifle I’m trying out.”

“Yeah, put this girl out of her misery. Please,” Richie scoffs drily, then turns back to you with a warm, sympathetic hand on your shoulder. “I apologize for my cousin, Sunshine. I did warn you he could be a bit of an asshole—”

“Richie.”

“It’s… okay,” you murmur with a sheepish laugh, before glancing over at Carmy beneath your lashes in a sheepish look. “Are you… okay in here?”

Carmy’s expression shifts slightly, like he’s about to say the exact opposite of what he really means. He feels his chest stinging with a pinch of misplaced jealousy — because he knows you spent time in Copenhagen with Luca some years back, and the idea of someone knowing parts of you that he doesn’t feels a little like a punch to the stomach.

“Yeah,” he nods anyway, slightly strangled, like his body’s trying to keep him from saying the words. “Yeah, I got the rest of it. Go ahead.”

You flash the boy a smile that doesn’t quite meet your eyes as you go. Carmy watches you trail behind Luca out of the office and back towards the dessert station. Richie watches Carmy watch you.

“So about the tables—”

“Enough about the fucking tables, Richie!”

II. ORANGE BLOSSOM HONEY.

There were only two times in your entire life that you swore you’d never bake again: first, when you got your first scathing review that sent you on a downward spiral for longer than you’d like to admit, and second, when Ever closed down for good.

There was still joy in it, somewhere deep down, you just couldn’t find it anymore. Honestly, you had trouble finding it most days in most anything. Which is probably why Luca told you to give The Bear a shot in the first place.

“I’ll tell him you’re stopping by, alright?” he’d told you over the phone that evening. “Just talk to Carmy. See the place out. And if you hate it, I will personally fly myself across the Atlantic so you can say ‘I told you so’ to my face.”

“That sounds very expensive, Lu.”

“Well, it’d be worth every penny.”

So there you were, weaving through a restaurant that seemed more abandoned than not — as though someone had taken a perfectly good kitchen and detonated a small explosive in the center of it. Walls had been torn down. Floors were covered in sawdust. Extension cords snaked across the room like vines. The smell of drywall and fresh paint grew stronger the further you went.

For a moment, you worried that no one was inside waiting for you, and that you had accidentally committed a breaking and entering — until you spotted a curly-haired stranger hunched over a metal counter in the not-quite kitchen, scribbling at a notepad with his pen.

He glanced up at the sound of your footsteps, dark curls hanging over his eyes. A mixture of surprise and confusion flashed in his gaze, brows raising and lowering again.

You lifted a hand in an awkward wave. “Hi…”

“Hey…”

“I’m sorry. I let myself in— I… I tried to knock, but I guess you couldn’t… hear me…” You trailed off with a wavering smile, scratching anxiously at the back of your neck. “Uh, Luca was supposed to call you, I think...”

Realization flooded the sharp edges of Carmy’s face.

“Oh. Right,” he nodded. “Yeah, for the, uh...”

“Yeah…”

Carmy swallowed hard, tapping his pen along his palm, no more anxious than you are now. “Well, uh, I— I hope he warned you that we don’t have much of a kitchen yet...”

“Yeah…” you answered with a breathless laugh, eyes wandering across the spray-painted tarps hanging as makeshift walls as you strolled further inside. “I just… I thought he was exaggerating a little bit.”

A short laugh escaped him then as he rounded the counter in front of him. “Yeah, this is— basically a construction zone more than a kitchen at this point, so… Sorry in advance.”

“Well, if we’re sharing apologies, I’m sorry for not bringing a résumé,” you confessed sheepishly, struggling to meet the man’s gaze when he stood before you. The scent of paint and sawdust clung heavily to his navy sweatshirt. “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want me working here.”

“C’mon. I know your résumé,” Carmy scoffed. “I’ve actually eaten your food before, remember?”

“The desert I was crying over at Ever, you mean?”

His lip twitched into a soft smile before he turned away, too shy to say this to your face:“Well, in my opinion, something that perfect is worth crying over.”

You grinned at the back of him, wider than you realized. “You’re still sparing my feelings after all this time…”

Carmy planted himself on the right wing end of the soon-to-be kitchen and turned to face you again. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but… This is gonna be our dessert station. Hopefully. If this entire place doesn’t cave in—”

‘Ours,’ he said, as if it were already yours in some way, too.

“—That’s a joke. Sorta,” he said, scratching at the back of his wild curls. He glanced up at you once more. “Have you tried making it again since we met?” he wondered suddenly. “You know that… pear… mill-fill thing?”

A giggle sputtered from your lips before you could stop it. Your hand flew to your mouth, as if you were trying to put it inside.

Carmy grinned shyly at having earned the pretty sound, despite his mild embarrassment. He fidgeted with the pen in his tattooed hands and gave you a sheepish look in response. “Help me out here…”

“It’s French,” you told him. “It’s mee-fwee.”

His brows lowered with a visible hesitation. “Mee… foy…”

“Close enough,” you laughed with a shake of your head. “And, to answer your question, no. I haven’t made it again. And I probably never will— I’m too fragile for another defeat.”

The grin that tugged at the corner of Carmy’s mouth then was brief, but no less genuine. “You will,” he said, like some kind of an oath, with so much conviction you couldn’t help but believe him.

—

“You seem happier here.”

Luca’s observation comes suddenly. His English-deep voice cuts through the soft quiet of the empty restaurant, renovated to near completion now. The two of you lie supine on the cool hardwood, the tops of your heads nearly brushing, as you put together Carmy’s newest splurge — which his uncle called “expensive, ergonomic, fuckin’ hippie tables.” You screw each bolt in by hand. You can feel your fingers threatening to cramp around the screwdriver clutched between them.

“Happier than Copenhagen, I mean,” he continues.

You scoff. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure any version of me is happier than I was in Copenhagen…”

“Oh, c’mon…” Luca lilts lowly. “I wasn’t that bad company, was I?”

“You know it wasn’t about you…” you mumble.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I know…”

It was the fault of that goddamn critic, and the devastating review he left that seemed to compliment everything but your work alone.“The pear mille-feuille reads less like a dessert and more like a young chef begging for validation,” the publication read. “For all its technical accomplishment, the pastry never once feels human. It is difficult to imagine, dear reader, a pastry with so much insecurity baked into each of its layers.”

Your world seemed to shrink after that. The singular paragraph of disapproval lodged itself somewhere deep within your psyche, along with all the cynicism and sorrow that built a home inside you, too. Every other failed recipe somehow led back to it, and every success thereafter felt purely accidental — until, eventually, baking stopped being fun and started being the one thing most capable of hurting you.

It hollowed you from the inside out. You worked the kitchen like a ghost returning to its haunt. You wanted to quit, in virtually every sense of the word, and it was Chef Andrea who convinced you to stay — by sending you four thousand miles away to Copenhagen, that is, to remember a world without critics and service and non-stop perfection; to remember what it felt like to exist without constantly needing to prove yourself.

It was there that you met Luca, who taught you what it meant to approach food with curiosity again. And it was here now, in the bones of The Bear, that reminded you how to love the work again — the simple joy of making something with your bare hands and sharing it with the people who mattered most.

“I’m just glad you didn’t stop cooking…” Luca continues with a quiet grunt in the back of his throat as he slides out from under the table. “And I’m glad Chef Andrea sent you over to my neck of the woods.”

“Let me?” you scoff, tilting your head back against the floor to look at the boy upside down. “She practically forced me on that plane.”

“Best thing she ever did,” the boy croons with an air of sarcasm to mask his sincerity. He rises to full height and dusts his palms off on his slacks. “I’m headed out for the night… Need a ride?”

“I think I’m gonna stay here for a while…” you sigh.

“Suit yourself,” he huffs and walks away. “Just don’t overdo it.”

“Or what?”

“Or I will be very upset with you,” he deadpans with faux-solemnity.

“Oh, the horror!” you call to his disappearing figure, right before the door shuts behind him.

Silence returns when he’s gone. Your chest deflates with a heavy sigh, a held breath you didn’t know you were keeping, as you return to your work — twisting the screwdriver in your fist and reveling in the burn in your wrist, the only thing keeping you from thinking.

About that critic. About Copenhagen. About Carmy’s sketchbook, about Carmy and the girl called Claire-Bear.

You rise onto your elbows with a huff when you’re done, stretching out the aching tendons in your neck. You vaguely hear the kitchen door swishing open and shut again before a sudden voice calls out. “Oh, hey—”

The sound of Carmy’s voice startles you for a reason you can’t name. You sit further up on instinct and slam your head against the table with a whack that jostles one of the screws.

“Ow...” you whimper.

“Shit—” Carmy rushes to your side, catching the wooden top when it wavers. His long, tattooed fingers curl around the edge of it to keep its weight from falling back on you. He ducks his head to look at you, features twisting with a sympathetic grimace as you rub at your aching forehead. “Sorry… Didn’t mean to scare you…”

“You didn’t scare me…” you assure him weakly.

His mouth lifts into an amused half-smile. “No?”

You shrug, lips jutted in feigned apathy despite the newfound pounding in your skull. “Not even a little bit...”

Carmy’s grin widens, but he makes no further argument. He just crouches down in front of you and keeps the tabletop steady while you lie back to realign its leg. You spend the next minute or so screwing the loose bolts back into the blanched oak, hands going clammy around the screwdriver at the proximity between you now. The air grows considerably warmer accordingly, filled with the familiar scent of him — of cologne, garlic, and cigarette smoke. You have to keep reminding yourself to breathe.

“You, uh— You never told me,” Carmy starts suddenly, as if he’d been sitting on the words for some time and only now got the courage to say them. He swipes at his nose with the back of his free hand and mumbles shyly behind his fingers.“About, you know, why you almost didn’t come here… Why you went to Copenhagen...”

Your breath hitches faintly in throat. You hope he doesn’t notice. The screw twisting itself back into the pale wood above you becomes the most interesting thing in the room. “It never came up…” you answer quietly. “It was stupid anyway…”

“No, what the asshole critic said was stupid.”

You turn your head against the floor to flash him a playful look, hiding behind the veil of your sarcasm. “There you go again…”

“There I go again?” he echoes.

“Sparing my feelings.”

“No, I— I’m serious.” Carmy stammers with a breathless laugh. “And I know I’m right because I’ve had your stuff before.”

“Yeah,” you scoff and turn away again. “That stupid fucking pear dish that I still can’t get right.”

“No, it was, uh…” Carmy trails off and shakes his head, going distant with recollection. He rests the elbow of his free arm on his bent knee and drops his wild head into his palm. He digs his thumb and forefinger into his eyes as he struggles to recall the name. “It was, uh… It was the— the Bordeaux, I think?”

He lifts his head to glance down at you once more. Your arms fall to your lap, eyes narrowing in confusion as your lip twitches into a shock half-smile. “The Canalé de Bordeaux?” you repeat with much more ease.

“Yeah,” Carmy nods, brown curls swaying. “It was right before I took over here— when I was, you know, eating everywhere I could, trying to learn as much as I could, and I…” His mouth lifts into a distant smile; his eyes glaze over at the memory. “I didn’t even place it until you made it for the kitchen the other day… Don’t think I would’ve noticed otherwise…”

“That was… God, that was forever ago,” you say with a laugh of disbelief, rising back up onto your eblows. “I’m surprised you remember it now.”

“I remember everything,” Carmy shrugs.

“That sounds… terrifying,” you scoff.

“It is. Sometimes,” he jokes with a breathy chuckle. “But, I don’t know… Now I’m starting to think it’s not so bad…”

His light eyes lock with yours. You lose your breath almost instantly, chest aching as your lungs struggle to find it again. You feel like the distance between you has vanished in a blink; each of your breaths feels like inhaling him in some way. You feel like you can taste him, almost, and your mouth waters at the thought alone, parting for his on instinct.

With your heavy eyes settled on his glassy ones, you catch the soft blue of his irises flick down to your lips. You think he might kiss you. You want so desperately for him to kiss you. And you hate how badly you need it.

“I-I don’t think this is a good idea,” you hear yourself blurt.

Carmy’s brows lower in confusion as you scramble suddenly out from under the table. You rise to full height on shaky legs and place several feet of distance between the two of you, crossing your arms over your chest in a feeble attempt to soothe your racing heart.

Carmy rises slowly from his crouched position, blinking the lingering haze from his eyes. “Wha… What are you talking about?” he stammers with his hands splayed in front of him, approaching you again the way someone would a stray puppy.

“Because of, you know… Because of… Claire.” You whisper the name like it’s a curse of some kind.

The confusion etched on his features only deepens further. “Claire?” he echoes, face screwed. “Wh—What does Claire have to do with this? Claire is— Claire is nobody—”

“Does she know that?” you press, brows raised.

“Yes!” he answers without missing a beat. “Because nothing ever happened between us! Because nothing will ever happen between us! Because I— I’m not into her that way!”

“That… way?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs, tattooed biceps straining against the sleeves of his undershirt as he rests his hands on his hips. “You know, the— The way I’m into…”

He trails off when he catches himself. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he swallows. His unwavering stare bores into yours as he weighs the words in his head, wondering briefly if he should say them aloud. His wild curls sway as he shakes his head to himself. “You know what. Fuck it. The way I’m— The way I’m into you.”

Your chest warms at his words. So furiously, it feels someone has taken a white-hot blade and pierced your sternum with it. You can feel the heart flaring in your face, too, as your mouth curls into a wide, slightly apprehensive smile.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Carmy nods firmly, though something in his gaze seems distantly surprised by his own forwardness. He scratches at the back of his curls and looks down at the table just beside you. “Are you, uh— Are we you good here?”

You nod rapidly until the words to speak catch up to you. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Good,” he hums. “Do you… Do you need a ride, or…?”

You hesitate on instinct, nose scrunching sheepishly. “If it’s not too far out of your way…”

Carmy scoffs like it’s funny. “You’re never too far out of my way,” he says and turns on the heel of his sneaker to walk away, as if he hadn’t just taken all the breath from your lungs right with him.

III. ALMOND PRALINE.

Your hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

You pressed your back hard into the rough brick behind you, letting it snag against your chef whites in a feeble attempt to ground yourself. You tipped your head back for further assistance, and fought every instinct that told you to beat your skull against the concrete as your heart thrummed wildly in your throat — as though it were trying to burst through the delicate tendon there altogether.

Adrenaline soared through your veins. The starry night air refused to pierce through your burning skin, face burning red-hot while your fingers turned to ice.

You had survived a million dinner services much harder than this one, The Bear’s very first. You had survived Carmy’s anger, Richie’s shouting, and the entire kitchen learning how to operate itself. But it was the food critic that nearly killed you — the man who came in older than you remembered, greyer, and a little skinnier than you recall.

It took you a long moment to remember to breathe as you watched Fak seat him through the kitchen window. “I need you back at your station, Chef,” you heard Carmy telling you from the expo, though his voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. “Back at your station, Chef! Now!”

You listened, but your body seemed to work on autopilot. You broke out the baking sheet, the jelly roll pan, and the perforated pastry tray without thinking. You patted out the puff pastry and fired the pears like it was muscle memory to you. You had Richie deliver it to the man, on the house, and tried to expel the rest of it from your mind.

You forgot how to be human thereafter, hardly more useful than a fumbling ball of panic. Carmy told you to get out of the kitchen when you dropped a bowl of sourdough starter you’d been tending to for nearly two months. And now there you were, post-shift, with all the anxiety of a prey animal being hunted for sport.

And the worst part was, you couldn’t tell if you were terrified or exhilarated. Or both.

The heavy metal door beside you squeaked slowly open. A familiar voice broke through the memory. “There you are…” Carmy hummed as he walked out, chef coat hanging open, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows to reveal the expanse of his tattooed arms.

His wild curls were still damp from sweat and steam, glowing a more golden shade beneath the amber streetlights. The exhaustion of the shift seemed to carve into all the chiseled edges of his face. But his eyes were heavy with relief at finally being alone with you all the same.

You grew sheepish as he stood before you, struggling to meet his gaze like a scolded child. “I’m sorry, by the way. For… all that.”

Carmy shrugged and cupped his palm around the cigarette he pinched into his mouth. His lighter clicked a few times before it lit, basking his features in a flicker orange hue. “It happens,” he mumbled before inhaling the nicotine into his lungs. The grey smoke left through his nostrils a few seconds later as he flashed you a sterner look. “Just don’t let it happen again, Chef.”

You nodded once. “Heard, Chef…”

Carmy flicked the orange filter with his thumb. His eyes fell to your lap, where you wrung your hands together in a feeble attempt to keep them from trembling. Concern surged through his chest instantly.

“Jeez,” he mumbled.

Your eyes followed his form as he crouched to set the newly-lit cig to the sidewalk, leaving it burning there as he rose to full height again.

“What?”

“Your hands… You’re shaking…” He closed the brief distance between you and took your hands in his warmer, larger ones. The contact stole the breath from your lungs. You’re still getting used to touching him so freely. “God, you’re ice cold.”

You laughed breathlessly. “Because my nervous system is shot.”

Carmy began to rub the warmth back into your fingertips. His palms felt like velvet, calloused from years of burns and knives and hard labor. The gesture was so gentle that it made you feel the crying. Again.

“He liked it, you know,” he told you. “The critic, I mean.”

Your stomach fell as anxiety flooded your veins once more. “I appreciate the sentiment, Carm, but… You can’t know that…”

“No, he said it. Cousin cornered him on the way out— asked him about it,” Carmy confessed. “And after he answered, Richie defended you. Said the guy was an asshole, and that he was a pretty shit critic if he didn’t know what good food tasted like.”

Another startled laugh sputtered from your lips. “That means we’re definitely getting a bad review outta him, you know that, right?”

“Yeah,” he shrugged. “But it’ll be worth it.”

Quiet settled between you. The city grew louder on either side of you in its wake — wind whipping warmly down the alley, cars passing distantly, a train rattling against the tracks somewhere further away. Carmy still hadn’t let go of your hands; he just kept holding you there as his eyes flicked down to your mouth.

He spent a long moment just staring, as if silently trying to will some courage into his body.

Your lips curled slowly into a sheepish smile. “You gonna kiss me, Bear?” you wondered lowly, almost inaudibly.

He nodded for a moment, then pinched his brows to ask. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

“I always want you to kiss me,” you laughed.

His mouth twitched shyly. “Then get over here then.”

Your chest swelled when he urged you forward with a gentle tug at your hands. You pressed yourself to his chest as his mouth ducked down to yours, tasting of nicotine and garlic and boy. You moaned at the feeling of him against you, fingers twisting in his silky brown curls. His larger, tattooed hands splayed along your waist, a little less confident in comparison.

The metal door shrieked open once more with little warning. The droning of ten different conversations filled the air as the rest of the kitchen staff spilled out all at once. You and Carmy sprang apart quickly, losing any and all ability to play it off.

The conversation quietened in an instant. You turned away, wiping at your mouth with the back of your hand and refusing to meet their eyes. The three or more seconds of silence that went by felt like a lifetime, until—

“Pay up, assholes!” Richie shouted, fist pumping triumphantly in the air. He continued gloating through the chorus of laughter and groans of failure. “I knew you idiots were dating, and everyone acted like I was losing my mind! But the house always wins, baby!”

—

Carmy sat along the top of the booth with a plate of Canalé de Bordeaux in his lap. Family was your turn tonight, and you’d opted to make the first dish of yours that Carmy had ever tried for the rest of the kitchen. No one knows just how much tenderness is cooked into the caramelized crust and soft custard. No one, perhaps, other than Carmy.

His sneakers dig into the smooth pleather booth below as he props his back against the wall behind him. The rum-vanilla dish melts in his mouth as he surveys the bustling dining area, filled with his family and friends, some of whom were halfway strangers to him a few years ago. His eyes fall to you without trying as you deliver an alcohol-free dessert to a heavily pregnant Sugar. A distant smile tugs at his mouth as he watches your lips move with a conversation he can’t hear from here.

The soul music playing on the radio drowns out your conversation, but not the sound of Richie’s voice as he slides into the booth next to Carmy. His long, graceless limbs bump against the table as he goes, trying to cut a bite of dessert to shovel into his mouth at the same time.

Annoyance twists in the younger boy’s features on instinct. “I’m not cleaning that up if you spill it—”

“I’m not gonna spill it!” Richie argues boyishly, with his mouth full of food, as he settles into the booth a few inches from Carmy’s sneakers. He nudges the boy’s leg with his elbow. “And get your feet off my booth, you fuckin’ animal... Jeez, I don’t know what that girl sees in you…”

“You’re a fuckin’ asshole…”

“No, I’m serious!” the older man laughs with amusement glittering in his dark blue eyes. He shovels another too-big bite into his cheek and talks through the yellow custard clinging to the sides of his mouth. “I don’t know how you managed to pull that off, cousin— There’s no way you even know what to do with all that.”

Richie turns away, still laughing through his nose at his own stupid joke. He cuts himself another bite, already calculating a retort to Carmy’s inevitable argument on the matter — only one never comes.

The younger boy just stabs absentmindedly at his plate, distracting himself from the topic under the guise of forming the perfect bite.

Richie pauses with his own fork to his mouth. He turns slowly over his shoulder, brows raising to his hairline until four wrinkles line his forehead. “Oh, shit,” he scoffs after a few moments. “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”

“Shut up…” Carmy murmurs under his breath, taking another aggressive bite.

“Oh, c’mon! Don’t tell me you’re not gettin’ your dick wet, Carm—”

“Keep your voice down, fuck-o!” he spits through his mouthful, eyes darting anxiously to make sure no one else had heard him — that you hadn’t somehow heard him, from your spot all the way across the room, laughing with Sugar and Tina. Carmy turns away with a lazy shrug. “We’re just… We’re taking things slow. Not that it concerns you, FYI.”

“Well, FYI, you guys have been dating for months—”

“Oh, thanks for keeping track. I had no idea.”

“—And if she isn’t getting it with you, she’s gotta be getting it from someone else,” Richie rambles absentmindedly as he turns back to his plate. “I mean, I don’t even swing this way, obviously, but if I were a chick, I’d be all over that Luca guy—”

Carmy’s chest stings with a misplaced jealousy. He shouldn’t listen to Richie; he trusts you far too much for any of that. But maybe it’s his own lingering insecurity coming through — the cynicism that always lingers in the back of his head like a shadow, telling him that he’s unworthy of touching you, and then berating him for not being man enough to try.

He huffs. “Well, this is making me feel a whole lot better, cousin. Thank you.”

“I’m just sayin’!” Richie says, muffled through the dessert wadded in his cheek. “She’s obviously crazy about you, man— She looks at you like you hung the fuckin’ moon! I’m just sayin’, you know, trust your instincts. That’s all.”

“…Trust my instincts?” Carmy monotones.

“Yeah,” the older man shrugs. “You’re a chef. Isn’t that supposed to be, like, your whole thing?”

Carmy just blinks at him. “Your point?”

“My point is… She likes you. And you like her— I’m pretty sure half of Chicago knows that by now. So just… Stop getting in your own damn way before you ruin somethin’ good, alright? She picked you, cousin—”

Carmy leans back when Richie gestures too closely with his fork.

“So if you can’t trust your own judgment, at least trust hers.”

Richie’s words pierce him almost physically, giving him that surge of courage he’d been lacking these past few months with you. It makes him want to stop dissecting each of his feelings, for once, until they’re just lying there ahead of him, dead and useless.

Carmy’s light eyes narrow suspiciously. “You know… You’ve gotten, like, really good at giving advice since becoming house manager. You know that?”

“Yeah, I know, it’s freaking me out, too,” Richie deadpans, stabbing at his plate. “Sometimes I hear myself talk and I’m like, who the fuck said that?”

IV. PUFF PASTRY.

The first time you spent the night at his place, Carmy had a panic attack.

It started as a dream, or a nightmare, or maybe a memory. It played through static like an old film — Christmas Eve at the Berzatto house, beneath glowing Christmas lights and smoke from his mother’s cigarettes and something she burnt on the stove. He could smell the nicotine hanging in the hair, and the thick smell of tomato sauce, and Cicero’s expensive nose-stinging cologne.

Carmy was sitting at the head of the table, unable to move from his chair. The rest around him were empty, save for the one at the opposite end. Mikey’s seat. The ghost of his brother was laughing one moment, then screaming at him, then crying the next. Carmy was terrified — the kind of terrified he got as a kid when his mother got in another one of her moods — but he was comforted, at the very least, that his brother was here.

Alive.

Then the lights went out, for only a fraction of a second. And the Christmas lights were glowing again, but his brother’s seat was empty. And the silence was worse than the screaming.

Carmy woke with a sharp breath to a bedroom filled with a navy blue darkness. He rose to his elbows, chest aching as he waited, for a fleeting moment, for the Christmas lights to come back on. Then he realized that he was back in his bedroom, and his brother’s still dead; but you were beside him now, and that was enough.

As his eyes adjusted, he found you lying beside him, bathed in the dim glow of the muted streetlamp outside his window. You’d kicked off the sheets, revealing the expanse of your bare legs and the softness of your stomach from where your shirt had ridden up — one of his, which you wore with a plain pair of cotton underwear. Your mouth was softly parted; your breathing was even and slow.

He tried to match each of your exhales, but the panic dug deeper into his chest. His lungs refused to fill properly. His skin felt too tight. The air was too hot, but his teeth were still chattering. He couldn’t ask you for help if he tried.

The walls spun around him as he rushed immediately to the kitchen. He bent over the sink, gripping the counter hard enough to blanch his knuckles with one hand, while his other scooped handfuls of freezing water into his mouth. He was not sure how much it was helping.

The muscles in his back tensed when a warm hand settled suddenly between his shoulder blades. Carmy didn’t realize you’d followed him out until then; until he heard your voice in his ear, cutting through the wild pounding of his heartbeat.

“It’s okay,” you told him. “Just keep breathing. You’re okay. It’ll pass.”

His breath came easier to him after that. The kitchen soon filled with the sound of his trembling pants and the loud hissing of the kitchen sink. Carmy’s shoulders loosened slowly under your hand.

“Do you need me to do something?” you wondered quietly.

He shook his head, curls hanging over his eyes from where he was still hunched over. “No, I— I got it— I’m… I’m good now.”

He waved you off with a trembling hand. You couldn’t help but notice the way he avoided your gaze; the way he fought every instinct to tense again when you rubbed along his spine. You wondered if you were only making it worse.

“Do you want me to go—?”

“No,” Carmy blurted instantly. His head snapped in your direction. He blinked back at you with wet ocean eyes. “Please. D-Don’t go. I just— I had a bad dream. I’m okay, I swear.”

You didn’t look convinced, and, honestly, neither did he.

“No, you’re not, Bear…” you murmured gently, with a sleepy smile that bordered on sympathetic. But you didn’t ask him to explain the feelings he didn’t have the words for. You just stood beside him and asked if he wanted breakfast.

—

Carmy’s apartment always smelled different when you were in it. Less like an ashtray and more like warm sugar, and your fruit-sweet perfume, and whatever sweet treat you’d spent the service dreaming about. Tonight, it was homemade churros.

Carmy can smell it down the hall when he exits the bathroom. The shower steam mixes with that sweet cinnamon wafting from the kitchen — where he finds you standing at the stove, tapping a socked foot to the synth pop on the radio, and stirring a pot of glossy chocolate syrup with a wooden spoon.

“Only a psychopath spends all night cooking just to come home and cook some more,” he says to announce his presence as he leans against the doorway, replacing his uniform with a sweatshirt and a pair of plaid boxers. “You know that, right?”

“What can I say?” you grin as you glance over your shoulder at him. “You’re rubbing off on me, Bear.”

Carmy exhales a quiet laugh and spends a long moment just watching you, with all the attentiveness of someone who watched sunsets come or go or mapped constellations in the starry sky. You occupied his kitchen as if you’d been there this whole time, in a sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed to your elbows, big enough to hide the less-than-flattering underwear you’re wearing beneath it. You look like home, in every sense of the word.

“You know…” Carmy starts lowly, swiping at the tip of his nose with his thumb. “For a while there… I kinda thought I was done with all this…”

Your spoon slows as it slides along the bottom of the pan. “…What do you mean?”

“Cooking,” he answers. “There was a stretch where I couldn’t even look at a stove without… hoping it would blow up.”

He laughs at himself, though, admittedly, the words sound slightly more concerning leaving his lips than they did in his head. He swallows hard, grateful when you don’t press him on the matter. You just eye him with a carefulness that makes him shift his weight on his bare feet — uncomfortable at being so foreignly vulnerable.

He crosses his arms over his chest in a childlike attempt to hide, scratching along the expanse of his bicep. “Yeah, I, uh… I just— didn’t enjoy it anymore. I didn’t enjoy anything anymore.”

“What changed?” you press gently.

“You came around,” he confesses. “And I watched you learn to love it again— have fun again, and it made… realize why I loved doing what I do.”

Your mouth lifts in a sheepish half-smile. You turn away, grinning wide at the pot of dark chocolate below as it ripples beneath the spoon.

“Well, I probably wouldn’t have learned to have fun again if I didn’t start working at The Bear…” you tell him. “It’s very likely I would’ve stopped baking altogether. I mean, Copenhagen was great and all, but… you, and Syd, and Richie— watching all of you work… I feel like I could do this forever…”

Carmy’s eyes soften as he watches you. A strange emotion surges warmly through his chest and up into his throat. He feels like he could cry.

“Yeah,” he hums, half-strangled. “Me too…”

Your smile turns shy when you look back at him, nodding your head to beckon him over. “C’mere. Come try this.”

Carmy obeys instantly, as if every muscle and bone in his body was made to be under your command. You twist the spoon to gather the liquid chocolate and hold it out toward him, cupping your free hand beneath it to catch any rogue drizzles. Carmy’s pink mouth parts for a taste — the syrup is warm on his tongue, silky and rich as it coats his mouth.

A low sound of approval sounds in the back of his throat. His damp curls sway as he nods.

Your smile widens instantly, eyes crinkling at the edges. “Yeah?”

“Mm,” he hums. “Hell yeah.”

His smile falters slightly when your free hand reaches suddenly towards him. Your thumb brushes the corner of his mouth, gathering the bit of chocolate lingering on the corner there. You press the pad of it to his lips without thinking, and Carmy drags his tongue against it just the same.

The motion was more instinctive than not. He didn’t realize how charged the moment was until your eyes flickered with it — going glassy and heavy in an instant. Even still, you don’t part from his stare as you bring your hand to your mouth, licking the remnants of chocolate on your thumb that was more of Carmy’s spit than anything.

Carmy’s ocean eyes darken in a flash. The cynical, uncertain thing that lingered in him like a shadow seemed to vanish, as his racing heart lurched with an emotion that bordered on primitive. He decides not to think — to follow his instinct, as it were.

He ducks down to kiss you, hard, with the bridge of his nose smushing against the side of yours and his tongue licking into your mouth.The spoon in your hand clatters hopelessly to the tile floor when he urges you back against the counter with a pair of wide hands splayed along your waist.

Behind you, the chocolate continues to simmer.

V. SPICED PEARS.

The first time Carmy had tasted any part of you was at Ever.

It wasn’t long after Mikey died, and he was making his tour around the city to try new food — seeing what changed and what hadn’t — and trying to take his mind off all the rest. He sat alone at a small square table, finishing up his lemon chicken piccata, when another plate was slid suddenly in front of him.

“Oh, I— I didn’t order this,” he stammered.

Then his eyes lifted to find Chef Terry standing before him, with a smile much gentler than he remembered.

“This one’s on the house,” she’d told him. She did not mention the death of his brother, but Carmy knew that was likely why she came over. “Figured you might appreciate something with a wee bit of alcohol in it. I had our pastry chef whip it up for you—” Her eyes flickered with warmth at the mention of you, who Carmy had not yet met. “I’m quite proud of that one.”

She left him with a pat on the back and nothing more. Carmy eyed the dessert before him, studying it.

The burnished bronze pastry sat on the small plate ahead of him like a tiny piece of architecture. The caramel on the ridged exterior gleamed in the candlelight. The shell cracked audibly beneath his fork, a delicate snap that most chefs spend weeks trying to perfect. The inside yielded immediately — golden custard oozing from its center.

Carmy scooped a bite into his mouth, and his world stopped for a fraction of a moment.

The deeply caramelized sugar hit his palate like a memory; a taste of nostalgia accompanied by a satisfying crunch. The silken custard melted on his tongue, rich with vanilla and warm with dark rum. A brittle shell followed by an impossibly soft heart.

Carmy thought, at the time, that it was the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted.

But it wasn’t.

—

You were.

His face burns hot between your thighs, which tremble on either side of his flushed cheeks from your previous orgasm (that he gave you with two of his fingers, a lot quicker than you’re willing to admit to.)

“Can you take another?” he’d asked, right after pulling his hand out of your underwear and licking your cum off his fingers, which glistened down the knuckle. You whined at the sight of it, half-scared at the warmth still lingering in the pit of your stomach. “C’mon. Let me taste it, yeah?”

You lift your head from the pillows to watch the boy slink down your body, still wearing all of his clothes despite you lying half-naked in the center of his unmade bed. He slides your panties to the side with a pair of tattooed fingers and licks a fat stripe up your pussy, from your pulsing hole to your already sensitive clit.

Your whine fills the lamplit bedroom as your hips buck to follow him.

Carmy pulls off wearing a barely-there half-smile. “Good?” he asks, for the hundredth time or so since you started.

“Yes…” you moan, head tipped back.

And then he starts eating you. Like eats you, eats you — with his mouth wide and his broad nose smushed into your clit. He’s led by nothing more than primal emotion and pure instinct as he laps all the honey you leak for him. The lewd wet noises of his mouth are only slightly muffled by your contented sighs and his own moans, as he rocks his hips against the mattress in a feeble attempt to relieve the ache in his boxers.

Your fingers tighten in his wild curls, as though you mean to pull him off of you, though your hips chase his tongue all the same. His lips latch on your clit, sucking the delicate button, and you cum with a drawn-out sound you didn’t know you were capable of making. He pushes your knees to your chest with a pair of wide hands to milk the orgasm from your pulsing confines.

“No— No more,” you whine feebly, watching with a pained sort of look as he continues licking at you. “It’s too much, Carm—”

“Just let me taste it, baby,” he says, half-muffled against you.

He’s wearing your glittering cum down to his chin when he crawls back up your body. It’s a mess of awkward, tangled limbs as you drag his sweatshirt up his torso from the hem while he reaches into his nightstand for a condom (a feat made more difficult by the fact that the box is still wrapped in its plastic). He kneels between your thighs, open and wet, and tucks his heavy balls under the hem of his plaid boxers.

You watch him as he rips the foil open with his teeth and rolls the latex on. Your eyes trail down his tattooed torso — over the sparse brown hair along his sternum and down to where it trails along his stomach in a thin line. His cock is heavy in his fist, glowing crimson with desire at the tip and leaking drops of pearly-white.

You should tell him that it’s been a while for you — long enough that you’re not sure if you can take something so thick — but you don’t want to stop the momentum you have going, not even for a second. You just curl your arms down and over his shoulders, palms splayed along his sweat-slick back, and fall back with him when he leans down over you.

His gold chain brushes your chest as he ducks down to open his mouth against yours. He rolls his hips forward and back, gliding his cock through your velvety folds, before piercing you fully.

There’s a fleeting, burning sensation as your cunt stretches around him — which quickly floods into a warmer, fuller feeling when he’s seated fully inside you, with his tuft of coarse hair pressed mercilessly against your throbbing clit.

“Oh, fuck—”

Carmy’s words sound less pleasured and more terrified.

Your eyes snap open. You catch a mere glimpse of his profile as his lips smudge along your burning cheek. “You okay?” you ask through panted breaths.

“Y-Yeah. I just—” The words come out strangled and half-muffled against your neck. “It’s just… been a while for me. I can’t— I can’t move.”

A delirious grin tugs at your mouth. You rake your nails gently along the expanse of his spine, until he shivers on top of you. “You can move, Carm,” you tell him.

He laughs breathlessly, though it comes out more like a punched-out breath. “I can’t, babe. I— I really can’t.”

“It’s okay if you’re close,” you murmur gently, smearing your lips along his flushed cheek. “You already made me cum— twice. This is about you feeling good, too, you know?”

Carmy makes a strangled noise, as if your words had hit him physically somehow. He lets himself go at your permission to feel good and rolls his hips against you. There is little rhythm or precision to his thrusts. They’re shallow and quick and a little sloppy, never pulling all the way out, as he buries his moans into your neck. The bed creaks below you like it might break.

“Fuck,” he groans like it hurts him, like he’s half-scared of his own orgasm.

“That’s it...” you coo in his ear. “I know you’re close, Carm. It’s okay. Just cum for me—”

“Fuck!” It comes out like more of a whimper this time, because he’s trying to calculate how long it’s been — two minutes, if that — but his brain’s too fogged and his stomach is starting to cramp from how hard he’s tensing to keep the feeling going a little longer.

Carmy doesn’t warn you when he cums. Not that you need him to. His heavy body just tenses on top of you, forearms shaking beside your head. You exhale a contented sigh when you feel him pulsing inside of you. “There it is…” you whisper in his ear. “Give me all of it, bear. C’mon. Doing so good for me…”

As your hands rub soothingly along his spine, you feel his bare shoulders shaking a little harder than before. It’s like he’s laughing to himself, or crying maybe. Then you feel something warm and wet drip along your neck.

“Bear?”

“Fuck—” He clears his throat when his voice breaks, lifting one hand to wipe at the tear running down the bridge of his nose. He laughs wetly at himself. “Fuck, I’m so lame. I’m sorry.”

“Are you okay?” you whisper, as if anything too loud might break him.

“Yeah, I’m good,” he assures you, sniffling as he pulls slightly off of you. “It was just— a lot, you know?”

“Yeah,” you nod.

“I wasn’t lying when I said it’s been a while for me.”

“Wow,” you hum sarcastically. “You’re telling me the anxious-avoidant chef who keeps his jeans in his oven isn’t absolutely drowning in ass? In this… very illustrious bachelor pad?”

His laugh is more humorous this time. “Fuck you.”

“You already did,” you remind him with a cheeky grin. “Unless you’re askin’ for round two— which I’m not opposed to.”

His mouth twitches into a more sincere grin. His glassy eyes soften further as they dart across your features, memorizing the wrinkles beside your squinted eyes and how your smile sits a little crooked to the left.

He shakes his head, ocean eyes still a little wet, as he smooths his fingers over your temple to brush away an invisible strand of hair there. “You’re gonna kill me, you know that?”

“Oh, but what a sweet, sweet way to go,” you croon as he ducks down over you again.

But if loving you is a slow death, why does kissing you taste like salvation?

if you made it this far, thank u so much! pls let me know what you think and reblogs are always appreciated! here's a virtual forehead kiss for me to you *mwah*!!!

[lovebugism]

UNFINISHED BUSINESS ─── jack abbot

summary: you've been trying to get over dr. abbot for weeks now. jack, unfortunately for you, has other plans.

characters: jack abbot / fem!reader, brendon park / fem!reader, lena handzo, samira mohan, ms. abbot mention

contents: love triangle, mutual pining, idiots in love, friend with benefits (w/ park), angst (hurt/comfort), talks of grief, cw for mentions of gunshot wound, very brief mentions of assault, medical inaccuracies, not proofread

FIC #6 / 20 FOR 20

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

You’re starting to understand why everyone calls him Park the Shark.

The man was made of toned muscles and strong features and sharp eyes that looked like they could cut you in half if he had any real power to. He was terrifying and mean and borderline narcissistic, but god, you love that he kisses you like he’s trying to swallow you whole.

Brendon presses you into the expensive gray sectional in the center of his suspiciously clean, minimally decorated apartment. Everything’s arranged with a serial-killer-like precision, but he’s so good with his mouth that you can’t find it in yourself to care.

He pins you beneath his heavy body, balling the fabric of your dress into his calloused fingers. He approaches each kiss like he would his work — he’s decisive, aggressive, confident in a way a person only gets from years of experience. His tongue tastes of spearmint and nicotine gum when it licks against yours. He keeps one hand braced on the cushion beside your head and his other firmly on your waist, rolling your hips up into his lap so you can feel the stiffness growing in his slacks.

You can’t remember the last time anyone kissed you like this, like they wanted you so badly they could barely stand it, like Jack—

Fuck.

You’d gone a whole half hour without thinking of him, which you think must be a sort of record at this point. You’d been trying to get over the guy for months, and Trinity told you the best way to do that was by getting under someone else. Turns out it wasn’t as foolproof as she made it out to be.

“You gonna get that?” Park wonders suddenly, slurring slightly when he pulls back from you for the first time in several minutes. His thin lips are slightly swollen from his kisses and slightly rosy from your lipstick. Your spit glistens on his chin like gloss.

Your heavy eyes flit back and forth between his for a moment. “…What?”

“Your phone,” he says. “This is, like, the third time it’s gone off.”

You blink hard and turn your head against the arm of the couch, to where your purse slouches on the floor beside you. Your phone vibrates inside, glowing faintly within its depths. You can see half the caller ID from here — Jack (ABSOLUTELY DO NOT ANSWER). Your stomach swirls with a sick feeling that your body almost mistakes for excitement.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me…”

Brendon’s expression darkens immediately.

He can tell who it is by the look on your face — a subtle annoyance mixed with a touch of longing. He leans away from you with a huff, slouching back against the corner of the sofa with his muscular thighs spread and his arms propped along the back. He couldn’t hide his irritation if he tried, because this was the first time he’s ever had to compete with another man for another woman’s affection. (The fact that this man was nearly twice his age only rubbed salt into the wound.)

“You should ignore it, you know?” he tells you, half-muffled behind his hand as he swipes lingering desire from his heavy eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

“Yeah, I know—” you sigh and sit further up, not bothering to adjust the dropping sleeve of your dress as you bring the phone up to your jaw. “—What?” you snap.

“Wow,” Jack laughs. His familiar, gritty voice sounds much louder in the quiet of Brendon’s expansive apartment. You hate how much it soothes you. “Good evening to you, too.”

“I’m busy, Jack. What do you want?”

“There’s a patient here asking for you,” he says, a bit more solemn now. His voice goes a little distant on the other line, like he’s looking over his shoulder at something. “Name’s Smith. Bethany. Her chart says she was here two nights ago for a—”

“Yeah,” you sigh, and let all your lingering annoyance evaporate on the exhaled breath. “I know. I treated her.”

“So I’m sure you know why she doesn’t want to be seen by anyone else.”

You avert your gaze, tugging anxiously at a thread in the hem of your dress until it becomes a more noticeable problem than before. Bethany was a young kid, a good one, who got herself mixed up with a string of bad people. She came in a couple nights ago after a particularly brutal assault, and insisted she didn’t need any help when you offered it to her. You told her, however, to swear to come back in if things ever got too bad again, that you’d help her with no questions asked.

The night came much sooner than you thought.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” you huff. “Don’t let her leave—”

You hang up before he can utter another word and pretend not to notice Park’s glaring as you slide off the couch. “There’s no way you’re leaving right now,” he scoffs, watching with an emotionless grin as you toe your shoe back on.

“It’s a patient—”

“It’s Jack,” he corrects with a dry laugh. “How do you not see that? He’s doing this on purpose because he knows we’re out together.”

“He wouldn’t lie to me about a patient,” you huff and stand to full height, slinging the strap of your bag over your shoulder and heading towards the door. How quickly you’ll drop everything when he comes calling, a cynical voice in the back of your head berates you.“He’s an asshole, but he isn’t that big of an asshole.”

“Yeah, I beg to differ…”

You flash the man a pleading look from where you stand in his doorway, midnight air rippling in the fabric of your dress — which Park had been so achingly close to ripping off of you.

“You’re not too mad at me, are you?”

“Go save your patient,” Park dismisses with a wave of his head, huffing as he rises off the couch. He heads to the organized minibar by the kitchen island, plucks a clear bottle of amber liquid from the shelf without looking back at you. “And when you’re done, try to save whatever the hell’s left of your judgment.”

You roll your eyes to hide how much his words truly sting and close the door behind you. “Yeah, I’ll see you at work, Shark…”

—

Your kitten heels click along the pristine linoleum as you rush to the workstation from the ambulance bay. The automatic doors swish open and shut behind you, replacing the cool night air with something colder and far more sterile. Chills pebble along your exposed skin as you weave through the familiar chaos of the PTMC, peering through each glass door you pass for any glimpse of the young girl you came to find.

“Lena,” you call to the red-haired nurse.

“Yep?” the older woman responds automatically, right before she glances up from the monitor ahead of her. She smiles at the sight of you and croons, “Well, don’t you look pretty…”

“Thank you…” you smile shakily, as your face flares with a mild embarrassment. Your arms cross over your chest in an instinctive attempt to hide. “I got a call from Jack— Dr. Abbot. Uh, he said Beth, my assault patient from a few days ago, came back in and wanted to see me. Do you know which room she’s in?”

The woman ponders for a moment, clicking her tongue against her teeth. “I think you just missed her…”

“…What?”

“Last I heard, Dr. Abbot was taking care of her,” Lena explains absentmindedly as she turns back to her computer. Her manicured fingers fly across the keyboard while she rambles. “Yeah, he patched her up and sent her home with a few refills of chlorazepam for the withdrawals. I’m pretty sure he gave her some money for a hotel room, too, called one of his police buddies to pick her up and make sure she’s okay for the night. He’s a good guy— It’s a shame it didn’t work out between you two.”

“Work out?” you sputter through an awkward laugh. “I don’t— We never even— I don’t even know what you’re—”

The woman flashes you an unamused look over the top of her cat-eye glasses.

You swallow down the rest of your excuses. “Do you know where he is?”

“Well, he came in after working TEMs today complaining about his shoulder, so… I’m sure he’s somewhere hiding.”

You exhale a grieved sigh, wiping at your tired eyes in a feeble attempt to wake up. “Yeah, I’ll find him…” you grouse and walk off.

“Clean up your lipstick while you’re at it!” the woman calls after you.

You swipe aggressively at your chin with the back of your hand, cursing quietly under your breath as you. “Shit—”

You find Jack with a greater ease than you’d like to admit to. He has a habit of disappearing when he’s hurt — equal parts because he’s stubborn and because he hates nothing more than being fussed over. You find him in the last treatment room at the end of the hall for that reason, where the chaos of the emergency department dims into a distant nothingness.

You open the door without knocking and find Jack sitting on the edge of the exam bed, with a trauma kit spread out neatly on the metal tray before him. His scrub top lies forgotten on the mattress behind him, revealing the freckled expanse of his torso, made of toned muscles and milky-white skin. The sight of him takes your breath away for a fraction of a moment before your brain reminds you to stay angry.

Jack glances up when you enter, with his brows raised to his hairline. His mouth curls into a slow smile as his light eyes rake over your form. “Well… Don’t you clean up nice,” he croons lowly, then motions to his scruffy chin with his pointer finger. “You missed a spot, though.”

“Yeah, I know,” you huff, still scrubbing off the lipstick smudged on your mouth.

“I remember that dress,” the man continues, too casual for his own good, as he tears off a sliver of medical tape. He presses it along the edge of a square bandage with practiced hands and says, “I’m pretty sure you wore it for me once—”

“Where is my patient?”

“Already discharged,” Jack shrugs, then winces when it adds to the ache in his shoulder.

“So you lied to me?” you huff in annoyance, but pluck a pair of gloves from the dispenser on the wall all the same.

You shove them on and close the distance between you, trudging towards him with all the exasperation of a woman scorned. Jack follows your form with careful eyes, that glimmer distantly with amusement.

“I didn’t lie,” he corrects as you round the bed behind him. He faces ahead while you survey the wound he sports on his left shoulder. The muscles in his back flex slightly when your gloved fingers run over the warm, red scrape — still raw from where the bullet had grazed his vest, and angry at having been left untreated all day. “I just happened to win her over. With my good looks and charming personality.”

You scoff drily. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

You reach over the man for the tube of antibiotic ointment sitting on the tray in front of him. Jack inhales, getting a whiff of the musky-sweet scent clinging to your hair and skin. “Oh, wow…” he lilts in a monotone. “You broke out the expensive perfume tonight—”

“Shut up,” you grouse harshly, spreading the ointment along the abrasion with a much softer touch in comparison. He tenses under you, clenching his jaw to hide how much it hurts. You fight the urge to apologize. “How’d this happen to you, anyway?”

“Bullet grazed my vest—”

“You were shot?” you exclaim.

“Shot at,” he corrects, like that makes any difference, and crosses his muscular arms over his bare chest. “A bunch of geniuses thought today was a good day to rob a goods warehouse. Didn’t realize how long it’d take to load the supplies, so… They panicked, obviously, and… All hell broke loose.”

You shake your head at him, swallowing down your rage like bile. He isn’t yours, you remind yourself, you have no right to tell him what he can or cannot do. The words tumble from your mouth anyway.

“I wish you’d stop doing this.”

“I’d rather be shot at than spend a night with Park the Shark— Ow.”

His head whips over his shoulder to glare at you when you press down harder on the wound. “That’s what you get for interrupting my date, asshole,” you spit at him and reach for the prepped bandage on the tray. “God, I cannot believe I keep letting you do this to me.”

“Do what?”

“Keep me late. Call me in,” you ramble, pressing the gauze gently to his shoulder. “Sabotage every relationship I try to have, like you weren’t the one who left.”

Silence falls over the two of you, heavy enough to suck all the air out of the room. Jack can hear the quiet buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead and the subtle hitch in your breath when you don’t get a response from him. Your bitter laugh sounds much louder in the quiet, along with the pop of your blue gloves as you pluck them off.

“That’s it? I don’t get one of your snarky responses to that?” you scoff and part from his side to chuck the latex into the bin. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised— You left that morning like it didn’t mean anything to you, I don’t know why now would be any different.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Jack assures you in a low, solemn voice and a mournful glint in his soft eyes.

You almost believe him. You almost feel sorry for him, even. Almost. Until you’re bitterly reminded of the morning you woke up alone in your sun-drenched bedroom, the morning after you and Jack decided to cross a line you swore you never would. You remember calling out his name, and then reaching for your phone when you didn’t get a response, only to find that there was no message from him there either.

You remember how cold the sheets felt, how one side of them was still twisted with his shape. You remember the ache between your thighs as you got ready for the day. You remember the white-hot pain in your chest when he treated you like a stranger the following shift.

“Well, what was it like, then?” you say with a cynical laugh as you migrate to the sink against the wall. The faucet hisses on, spitting out scalding water almost instantly. You revel in the burn as you scrub your hands with a meticulous precision that’s more of an anxious tic than anything. “Because for me it’s like you got what you wanted and then you left—”

“That can’t be how you see it.”

“—And now, you can’t stand that I’m moving on from you,” you continue, then mumble under your breath as you pluck a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. “Or trying to, anyway…”

“I left because I was happy,” Jack blurts for the first time out loud.

Your head snaps over your shoulder. You find the man standing to full height again with a soft grunt in the very back of his throat. He keeps his shirt balled into his fists, fidgeting awkwardly with the fabric. He winces as he adjusts his weight on his prosthetic when he turns to face you.

You blink owlishly back at him. “What?”

“It was the first time I’ve slept in a bed with someone— or with someone since my wife passed,” Jack mumbles, focusing most of his attention on locating the sleeves of his scrub top. “And the first time I woke up not missing her, and I… I felt guilty.”

Your anger ebbs almost instantly. The rage that had been building a home inside of you for so long caves in a landslide.

“I was scared that if I stayed, I’d never be able to leave. And that scared me—” He rambles as he slides his pale arms through the sleeves, grimacing when the bandage on his shoulder tugs slightly. “And I didn’t know how to tell you… I guess I still don’t, if I’m being real honest.”

His voice muffles as he tugs the shirt over his silver curls.

“I thought I was doing us both a favor, and I just… Made it all worse.”

Jack tugs the hem of the black top down his toned stomach. He gives you a strange look — an emotionless, tight-lipped grin and a pair of brows raised to his hairline — not quite happy, but not quite sad either.

Your hands clench tight around the damp paper towel still wadded between them. You forget, momentarily, to respond. You wouldn’t know what to say if you could speak, anyway.

The silence between you swells suddenly with every conversation you never had before, every feeling you both have spent weeks swallowing down. So many months spent hurting, pretending, wasting.

Your eyes catch the blur of a shadow across the room. They widen as they flit away from Jack and toward Samira, who appears suddenly in the glass door, shoes squeaking when she stops suddenly in place at the sight of him standing there. She’s visibly exhausted when she swings the door open, dark eyes heavy and black hair wild. Her chest heaves with heavy breaths beneath her scrub top, as if she’d been searching for quite some time.

“I’m not interrupting something, am I?” she pants, eyes darting back and forth between the two of you. They linger briefly on your form. You think this is the first time she’s seen you in anything other than scrubs. “Lena was worried I might be interrupting something.”

Jack doesn’t give her a straight answer. “You need something, Mohan?”

“We got a trauma. Five minutes out,” she tells him. “Possible splenic rupture.”

Jack’s expression hardens. He nods once in concurrence, shifting back into physician mode in a blink.

“Got it,” he says, and waits for the door to shut behind Samira before turning back to you. There’s something distinctly shier in his eyes as he clears his throat and scratches at the back of his corded neck. “I’m, uh— I’m sorry... For sabotaging your date and… Everything before that…”

The sincerity in his voice makes your chest ache. You nod with a wavering, tight-lipped grin. “Yeah, I know…”

He swallows hard, adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. He tilts his scruffy chin to peer down at you from the bridge of his nose. You can tell by his suddenly defensive stance that he’s about to ask you something — or, more specifically, something he’s scared to hear the answer to.

“You going back to Park the Shark?”

Your sheepish smile spreads into something more sincere. “Depends,” you shrug and turn away to chuck the paper towel into the bin.

“On?” Jack crosses his arms over his chest, biceps straining against his scrub sleeves.

“On if you’re gonna let me scrub in or not.”

His pink mouth lifts into a smug half-grin. “Then I guess you’d better go get changed, doc…”

[lovebugism]

CASUAL ─── michael robinavitch

summary: robby tells you he wants to keep things casual after you catch him flirting with noelle. he's less enthusiastic when he finds out you've been seeing his best friend. (5k)

characters: michael robinavitch / fem!reader, jack abbot / fem!reader, trinity santos, dennis whitaker, mel king

contents: established relationship, friends with benefits, jealousy, mutual pining, angst, possessive!robby, allusions to smut

FIC #5 / 20 FOR 20

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

You and Robby were not together. Not officially, and definitely not publicly. You were hardly together privately, if you were being real honest with yourself — aside from a few stolen nights after particularly draining shifts, where he’d show up at your place with takeout and exhaustion sitting heavy in his eyes and promises of distracting you from the hard day; where he’d then wake up before sunrise and leave before you had the chance to miss him.

Casual. That was the point. Because he was an attending, and you were his resident, and Robby had already made the mistake of blurring those lines once before. “It gets messy, sweetheart,” he murmured against your bare shoulder one night, voice heavy with sex and sleep alike. “And when it ends, it… It really fuckin’ ends, you know?”

You didn’t know what he meant by that, actually. You figured he was saying that dating within the hierarchy tends to crash and burn in some way or another, but you didn’t press him on the issue then. Though now you think that maybe you should’ve.

You should’ve told him to give this a name back then — whatever this thing was between you — because at least then you’d have a name for the feeling searing in your chest just now, as you’re forced to watch Robby flirt with Noelle on the other side of the workstation.

You’re examining the chart glowing from the iPad in your hands, trying hard to ignore the ache in your lower back and the fact that you haven’t eaten since six that morning, when the sound of Robby’s sudden laughter graces your ears — finding you despite the buzzing chatter of the crowded E.R. 

You glance up automatically and find him leaning against the counter, with the sleeves of his undershirt pushed up to his elbows and his stethoscope looped lazily around his neck, towering several inches over Noelle.

“You’re getting less grumpy in your old age, Robinavitch,” the older woman quips beneath a quiet smile and the faint flush coating her caramel-colored cheeks. She arches a manicured brow in his direction, dark eyes glimmering beneath long lashes. “Something been improving your mood lately? Or some-one?”

Your palms go clammy around the tablet in your hand. You never wanted anyone to find out that you were dating your attending, but god, your heart stops beating just to hear your name fall from his lips.

Robby laughs instead, a sharp exhale from his nose. 

“You always think you know everything,” he says with a shake of his head, though you can still hear the smile in his voice when he tells her, “I’m not sure your new boyfriend up in ortho would like you asking about my love life, Hastings…”

“Oh, I stopped seeing him ages ago,” Noelle scoffs. “He kept calling himself an alpha male unironically, and I— couldn’t take it anymore.”

Robby physically recoils. “Jeez… And here I thought your taste in men improved after me.”

Their laughter entwines and lingers in the air for several lingering moments. It’s more familiar than flirtatious, but your stomach twists with a sick feeling anyway. Because Noelle was, to put it simply, everything you weren’t. She was effortlessly gorgeous and carried all that confidence in her matching pant suits and pulled-back curls. She was much closer to Robby’s age, too, and their lengthy history is one you know you couldn’t compete with if you tried.

You feel a little like a child as you watch them talk in hushed voices. You flare with all the embarrassment of one, too, when Robby’s eyes lock suddenly with yours.

You turn away a beat too late, just in time to catch the look that flashes suddenly across his weathered features — as if he’d somehow been caught. You pretend not to notice, or otherwise care, when he dismisses himself from Noelle and closes the distance between you. He towers over you the same way he had with her, smelling like a mixture of his cologne and your bed sheets.

“Hey…” he says, all casual, stuffing his hands into his scrub pockets and nodding to the tablet in your hands. “You get that CBC back on Central Eight?”

“Yep,” you deadpan, still without looking at him. 

He flinches slightly when you shove the chart suddenly at his chest with a less-than-gentle hand. His brows lower in confusion when you turn on your heel and walk away a second later, with considerably more ire than you had that morning. (‘Cause you’d been complaining about some mild insomnia for a while now, so Robby fucked you to sleep the night before. He figured you’d be in a better mood today accordingly. But alas.)

“So I take it you’re not helping with this endoscopy?” he calls after you, pulling his glasses from his shirt pocket for a better view of the screen in his hand.

“Nope,” you call back, already halfway down the hall — not as his resident, but as a woman halfway scorned.

Whitaker’s eyes dart back and forth like he’s watching a tennis match — between you, Robby, and the bloodied head wound he’s watching you stitch up with practiced hands. There’s a heavy tension he can feel simmering in the air, snatching all the remaining oxygen out of the room. Even from where he stands behind you, peering over Trinity’s shoulder, he feels hardly shielded from the building stress.

“Call ortho for a consult for me, will ya?” Robby asks you, or rather politely commands, without looking away from the chart in his hands.

You, similarly, don’t glance up from your sutures as you tell him, “You have a pair of free hands, don’t you, Dr. Robby?”

The man’s eyes dart to you in an instant, peering at you over the top of the glasses sitting low on his broad nose. His dark brown gaze glimmers with a mixture of amusement and shock as a faint smile flickers beneath his beard.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll do it!” Whitaker blurts, half-strangled by the tension, as he rushes for the red phone across the room. It’s quite telling, the younger boy finds, that he’d rather suffer a call with Park the Shark than watch this lover’s quarrel unfold.

Robby squints as he takes a slow step towards you. His eyes flit from your deadpan face, to your gloved hands, to the balding head of the unconscious patient you stitch up. 

“Have you eaten today?” he wonders aloud.

“Are you gonna ask if I need a nap next to?” you scoff. “I’m not a child.”

“Well, you’re kinda acting like one,” Robby says within a breathless chuckle. “So do you wanna maybe dial the attitude back a notch?”

“Sorry, Dr. Robby,” you say flatly, tying off the final stitch with sharp, methodical movements. “I’ll remember to stroke your ego next time—  Maybe then you won’t accuse me of being a bitch.”

“I wasn’t—”

A laugh sputters suddenly from Santos’ mouth before she can help it. She hides it behind her fist when Robby glares at her and pretends to cough instead.

The tension between the two of you doesn’t snap until around the tenth hour of the shift, when you’re hiding from the chaos of the E.D. with the excuse of fetching more supplies from the walk-in closet. Robby enters like a dark cloud, mixing with your own storm, and threatening to create a most fatal concoction when he corners you against the shelf. (You hadn’t stopped moving for about four straight hours, to be fair — this was his only real chance of getting you alone.)

“What the hell is your problem today?” the older man says in lieu of a greeting.

You huff and roll your eyes, shoving at a pack of saline flushes a little harder than necessary when they threaten to fall from the shelf and on top of you. Robby watches with narrowed eyes and a pair of weathered hands splayed on his hip. 

“Did I do something to you? ‘Cause you’ve been acting crazy all day—”

You slam the cabinet door shut with a resounding clang, so hard it refuses to latch,before spinning on your heels to face the man behind you. The glare you give him almost makes him flinch before he swallows down the instinct to.

“Crazy?” you echo through a tense jaw. “You flirt with Noelle all day, right in front of me, and now you’re calling me crazy?”

Robby blinks owlishly back at you for several long moments. 

You almost think you see a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth beneath his mustache, before a chuckle sputters suddenly from his lips. You flinch at the intensity of his laughter, and at the distant mania glimmering in his dark eyes.

“Oh, my god—”

“Don’t laugh!” you exclaim, face burning under the weight of your embarrassment.

“—That’s what this is about?”

“Yes! It is. Because I thought I was enough for you.”

His weathered features soften with a heavy sigh, though traces of his amusement still remain — equal parts fond and exhausted. 

“Oh, c’mon… You know this wasn’t supposed to be anything serious,” Robby croons gently, taking slow steps towards you. “That was the agreement, right? Casual. So we could avoid all… This.”

You peer up at the man from beneath your lashes when he plants himself in front of you. You try not to melt when you catch a whiff of his dizzying cologne. “This?” you echo.

“Yeah… You know, all the… jealousy and the— arguments,” he huffs with a lazy shrug and crosses his pale arms over his chest. “I’ve been through this before, kid. Trust me. This is… This is what’s best.”

Your chest sears with a mixture of red-hot anger and ice-cold jealousy. Your jaw tightens at how detached he sounds, how rational, as if he were discussing policies instead of real actual feelings. (If he was even capable of those). You want him to feel this, too — this awful, wretched jealousy clawing at your ribs from the inside out. 

You fold your arms tightly across your chest, forcing your voice into a deadpan as hurt simmers somewhere beneath the words. “So I can see whoever I want?” you ask him.

Robby’s expression flickers slightly, almost imperceptibly. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he swallows, but his dark gaze never once wavers from yours. 

“Of course, you can,” he tells you, though his taut voice threatens to betray him. “We’re casual. That was the deal.”

“Okay,” you nod once and turn away from him again, giving him very little to play off of as he tries and fails to call your bluff. 

Robby’s forced to stare at the back of you while you pull a large pack of lap pads from the shelf. His brows knit in confusion when you spin back around to face him, mostly back to normal again, with a ghost of a polite smile dancing the edges of your mouth.

“Run these to Trauma 1 for me, will ya? Dr. Al-Hashimi needs ‘em for a trauma patient coming in.”

You press the package to Robby’s chest before he can answer and walk past him for the exit before he can blink.

Three days after the fact, you’re sitting in a crowded bar a block away from the PTMC, drowning your post-shift sorrows in half-priced beers. 

In those three days, you haven’t seen Robby once outside of work. There were no more stolen kisses in empty elevators, no more lingering touches in stairwells, no more “come over” texts sent in the dead of night. And Robby thought it was strange, because the two of you weren’t even fighting anymore — not technically, anyway — and yet you were more distant now than ever.

“Question,” the man murmured casually from the other side of the desk while you finished up your charting at the monitor. “Is it me you’re avoiding or just my apartment?”

“What?” you scoffed, still typing. “I’ve just been— busy, Robby.”

“Hm…” he sighed, less than convinced.

You didn’t spare him a second glance — not then and not when you took Santos’ offer of happy hour and Friday night karaoke. The girl herself returns now to the cracked pleather booth in the corner of the dingy bar, where you sit with Mel and Whitaker, after butchering another Alanis Morrissette song. 

Her chest heaves with panted breaths under her black tank top, pale skin sticky with a thin layer of alcohol-induced sweat.

“Okay, what’s with the long faces over here?” Trinity jokes as she steals a room-temperature fry off your plate, talking through the mouthful. “I know you and Robby are fighting or whatever, but I just gave the performance of a lifetime up there.”

You slurp nosily at the remnants of your fruity drink and nearly choke on it at the accusation. “What?” you cough with the thin straw still in your mouth. “We aren’t— fighting. What are you talking about?”

“Oh, please,” Trinity scoffs and reaches for her beer. “You’re both been acting like a couple of… divorced parents at soccer practice.”

“Okay, I don’t even know what that means—”

“Playing nice in front of everyone as not to evoke suspicion, which inevitably turns the obvious tension between you from angry to sexually charged,” Mel rambles matter-of-factly. Her blonde hair sways around her jaw as she nods, left slightly crimped from her undone braid.

Your eyes flit to Whitaker then, who nods much more solemnly in agreement.

Your face burns red-hot in response. “Well— we’re not even, like, together or anything, so…”

“Mhm…” Santos hums with a knowing look that makes you shift uncomfortably in the booth. She takes another quick swig from the amber bottle in her hand before her gaze zeroes in on an unfortunate Whitaker. “C’mon, Huckleberry. You’re up.”

His light eyes widen, glassy with exhaustion and alcohol alike. “I’m… Up?”

“Yeah. You’re doing karaoke with me. Let’s go,” Trinity says as she slides once more off the weathered vinyl. She frowns when she rises and finds the boy still sitting in place. “Let’s go, I said! We gotta get back in line before the spots fill up—”

Whitaker scrambles to follow the girl towards the stage despite his better judgment. You use that as an excuse to get another drink, tugging the skirt of your dress further down your thighs as you go. You weave through the crowd of strangers and coworkers alike until you reach the sticky wooden counter. 

You lean your elbows against it and flash the bartender a kinda smile. “Can I get another aperol spritz, please?”

“Put that on my tab,” a familiar voice says from beside you.

Your head whips to find Jack sitting there, one chair down and nursing a sweaty amber bottle of cheap beer in his pale hand. He looks more relaxed now than you think you’ve ever seen him — camo pants baggy around his legs, black t-shirt untucked from the belt, warm around the edges from the alcohol.

You feel very suddenly overdressed in your form-fitting velveteen number and cross your arms over your chest to hide beneath the loose cardigan you wear over top of it. “Oh, you don’t have to do that—”

“I insist,” the older man smiles. “You deserve it after that canthotomy you did today. You were a real trooper.”

The bartender slides a cocktail glass across the wooden surface over to you. The orange liquid threatens to slosh over the thin rim. You give him a polite grin in return. “Thank you,” you tell the man, then grow considerably shier when you turn back to the attending sitting a stool down from you. “Thanks, Dr. Abbot.”

“Jack,” the older man corrects before bringing the lip of his bottle back up to his mouth.

“Jack,” you echo softly.

The man shifts on the hard stool, keeping his prosthetic limb stretched slightly ahead of him beneath the bar. A not quite silence settles between you then, filled by the buzzing bar all around you. Your eyes cut to the stage on the far side of the room, where Santos belts the lyrics to “You Oughta Know” and Whitaker stumbles over himself to get the foreign words out. 

“I think Shen is looking for a karaoke partner,” you quip, nodding your head towards the doctor standing by the stage and flipping through the binder of song choices there.

The dim overhead lighting turns Jack’s silver curls a softer golden shade when he turns his head to follow your gaze. He grimaces instantly at the thought. “Yeah, absolutely not.”

“Why?” you laugh softly, with the thin straw dancing against your mouth. “You scared?”

“Yes,” the man answers without a second thought. “And I’ve been shot at before— Today, even— And somehow karaoke still feels more terrifying.”

Your eyes squint in his direction, glittering with something foreign. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t ya think?”

“Eh. Maybe a little.”

You scoff and slide into the bar stool beside him. “You don’t strike me as someone who embarrasses easily, Dr. Abbot.”

“That’s because you only know me at work,” he quips halfway into his beer, before licking the amber sheen from his mouth. “Where I am equal parts competent and mysterious.”

“Mysterious?” you repeat skeptically.

“Mm,” Jack nods with narrowed eyes and a faint smile twitching the corner of his lip. “Very tortured, you know? Very brooding.”

“Ah, yes…” you sigh with alcohol glittering on your lips like gloss. “The very brooding, tortured doctor who makes dinosaur noises to win over scared children in pedes.”

Jack pauses mid-sip, pale eyes narrowing. “Well, this is new…” he hums.

Your stomach flips at the way he’s looking at you. Heat crawls instantly up your neck. You feel very suddenly suffocated by the heavy cardigan on your shoulders. “…What is?”

“I don’t know,” he answers with a lazy shrug, though his heavy eyes dart once down your form and up again. You don’t realize, until then, that this is his first time seeing you in anything other than your dark black scrubs. “You… Flirting with me.”

You exhale a breathy laugh, if only to dispel the anxiety clawing at your chest. “Flirting? Is that what this is?” 

“Hey— You’re the one who called me mysterious.”

“Actually, I was clarifying if you thought you were mysterious.”

“Still counts.”

“Does it?” you squint.

Jack smirks behind the lip of the beer bottle against his mouth. His adam’s apple bobs with a short sip before he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You know… For a while there, I thought you hated me… Considering you never talked to me unless you had to.”

“You work nights, Jack— I don’t talk to you because I see you for, maybe, twenty minutes out of my day,” you scoff, and don’t realize you’ve called him by his first name until his eyes glimmer with amusement. You turn away with a shake of your head as your face burns, bringing the straw back up to your mouth. “Though, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t consider it…”

“Oh, really?” Jack hums with raised brows. “What’s the verdict now, then, huh?”

You let your gaze drag over him deliberately as you ponder the question, biting at the straw between your teeth. You scan over his toned biceps, his lean stomach caged beneath his form-fitting tee, and his spread thighs that make your head spin, before meeting his eyes once more. 

“Now,” you hum sweetly, “I think I’m starting to understand the appeal…”

Jack stares at you for a long moment before he lets out a low, disbelieving laugh. The lamplight shines in his greying curls as he shakes his head. “Yeah? And how does Robby feel about that?”

Your eyes harden in an instant.

Jack raises a free hand in surrender. “Hey, I’m just sayin’— He looks like he wants to put his fist through a wall any time another attending talks to you for more than thirty seconds.”

Your chest tightens unexpectedly. You swallow hard to fight the strangling feeling — of Robby, and of his laughter in the supply closet — as you shrug a lazy shoulder in response. You don’t bother to lift your cardigan when it slips softly down your arm.

“It’s casual,” you tell him.

Jack studies you for a long moment. The corner of his mouth curls into a slow half-smile, and you feel your heart stuttering behind your ribcage. 

“Casual, huh?” he hums and brings his bottle back up to his mouth. “Interesting…”

Morning arrives slowly through the veiled curtains of the quiet bedroom, where pale golden light cuts softly over hardwood floors and rumpled sheets. You rouse gradually, cocooned beneath strangely heavy blankets that smell differently from your own back home — like unfamiliar detergent, cedarwood, and musky cologne. 

For a blissful wink of a moment, you don’t remember where you are. Not until you stretch your tired limbs and brush a scruffy leg with your foot, anyway.

Your breath catches. Your heavy eyes snap open. Your body prickles with heat as flashes from the night before return to you at once — of the walk home from the bar, of Jack’s laugh against your throat, of his stubble scraping your skin, of the teasing murmur in his velvety voice as he told you to cum for him.

Your thighs clench together at the memory, while a lingering ache pulses pleasantly low in the pit of your stomach.

You lift your head from the pillow and inhale sharply through your nose as your eyes scan the foreign bedroom, which you had been too busy to do the night before. 

There’s an expensive-looking record player in one corner, sat beside a crate of well-loved vinyls. There’s a bookshelf lining the far wall — cluttered with medical textbooks, old paperbacks, and framed photos from his military days. His camo bag, etched with his name, slouches by the entrance, and over the foot of the bed, you can see his prosthetic limb lying beside your shoes.

Other than that, it’s strikingly empty, with very little decoration on the wall or bedside tables. It makes sense, you figure, for a man who is working far more than he isn’t.

Your head turns in the opposite direction to find Jack sleeping soundly just beside you. The gentle rays of morning light brush over the canvas of his bare back, turning his freckles there a deeper shade of golden brown. He’s got one arm shoved beneath the pillow he folds into his cheek and the other lying loose across the mattress — from where your waist must’ve been before you slithered out from underneath it.

Your chest pinches at the sight of him. With pride, maybe, at having conquered him. And with a pang of white-hot guilt that twists when your mind inevitably drifts to Robby.

You slide out of bed, careful not to let the mattress give too much beneath your weight. You grimace when the fabric of your t-shirt twists uncomfortably around your form, only to find that you’re wearing Jack’s shirt, which had seemingly been given to you at some point last night. It falls over your thighs when you stand, bare feet padding as you gather your discarded clothes.

You bend down to drag your underwear back up your thighs and wince when your head throbs from last night’s cheap cocktails. With your dress and knit cardigan balled in your arm, you toe your shoes back on. Your breath hitches when the mattress shifts with a soft creak.

Jack squints when he raises his wild head. His mouth twitches when he finds you at the foot of the mattress. “Y’know…” he rasps, voice rough with sleep. “I’m at least grateful you’re not robbing me before sneaking out. That’s very courteous of you.”

“I’m not sneaking,” you scoff. “I just… didn’t want to wake you.”

The man inhales sharply as he twists onto his back, charcoal sheets tangling around his waist. You force yourself to look away from his lean stomach and the red claw marks you left on his scruffy chest when he stretches his toned arms above his head. 

“That’s sweet,” he says with a wince. “But unfortunately, I wake up if somebody breathes wrong in the next room.”

You exhale a soft laugh. 

Jack’s eyes soften around the edges at the sound of it. “You workin’  today?”

“Yep, in about…” Your eyes flit to the alarm clock on his nightstand. “Half an hour.”

“Brutal,” he scoffs.

“You’re fault.”

“Don’t say that like you didn’t have a good time,” he teases with narrowed eyes, then softens slightly when you turn away. You fumble with the stubborn back of your shoe, and his chest twists at your silence. “Do you… Do you regret it?”

“No,” you answer instantly.

“Good,” he hums, relaxing visibly once more into the sheets. “Me neither.”

Your stomach blooms with warmth. You shift awkwardly on your feet before him, even still. “So, uh… What— What now?”

“Well, feel free to use my shower, if you want—”

“I’m serious, Jack,” you insist gently, then add, more sheepishly. “But I will be using your shower, actually, thank you…”

Jack inhales deeply, considering. “Well,” he starts carefully, “I like you. Obviously.”

Your pulse rushes like a teenage girl.

“But,” he continues, as relief and disappointment tangle in your chest all at once. “I also know that neither of us is in the right spot for a relationship right now…”

“So… Casual?” you offer lightly, mouth lifted in a tired smile.

“Casual,” Jack agrees with a firm nod and glassy eyes.

You wear the night before all over, despite your desperate attempts to hide it.

Robby notices it the moment he sees you — how relaxed you are, how happy you seem to be. Whatever had been plaguing you before is now long gone, and that alone should be enough to comfort him. But still, he can’t shake the feeling that someone had gotten rid of all the aching for you — fucked it out of you the way only he could.

“You’re in a good mood today,” he observes while signing off on the chart you’d given him.

“Am I?” you hum.

“Yeah,” he nods, clicking his pen with his thumb. He glances at you over the top of his glasses before averting his gaze once more. “What’d you get up to last night, huh?”

“Nothing,” you shrug. “Other than watching Santos butcher Alanis Morrissette’s discography at karaoke… Maybe I just slept well.”

“You usually only do that at my place.”

Your brows furrow when he passes the clipboard back to you. “I’m sorry— Are you accusing me of something, Dr. Robby?”

His mouth opens to respond — to tell you that he can smell the foreign body wash on your skin, far muskier than the delicate sweet-vanilla he’s used to. But the automatic doors across the station swish open and shut before he can. 

Jack enters with his camo pack slung over his shoulder and brings a cool evening breeze in with him. Robby can’t help but notice how your eyes find each other’s almost instantly, clicking like magnets and lingering together like there’s a secret that only the two of you know about. His stomach swirls with jealousy.

“Look alive, degenerates,” Jack announces in lieu of a greeting, then quiets slightly when he reaches your side. “What’d I miss?”

“I was just briefing Robby on last night at karaoke,” you answer with a polite smile. “And how I will never be able to listen to Alanis Morissette after Santos’ crimes last night—”

“Fuuuck you,” Trinity drags out from the desk beside you, still sluggish from the long day and the hangover that won’t seem to leave her.

“Don’t drag me into this,” Jack quips. “I took an oath as a physician to do no harm.”

You exhale a quiet laugh. The man’s eyes soften around the edges, as though pleased at having earned the sound, before walking off towards the locker room. He leaves a trail of musky cedarwood as he goes, and Robby’s heart drops when he finally places the scent — the one he’s been smelling on you all day. 

The realization hit him like a truck.

His expression darkens instantly when he turns back to you.

“Supply closet,” he mutters lowly as he walks past you. “Now.”

Your stomach drops at his tone. He takes all the remaining breath from your lungs with him as he goes. Your chest stings accordingly — with a surge of pride at his jealousy, and with a pang of distant regret at his hurt. You follow behind him down the long hallway to the supply closet like a scolded child. He barely waits for the door to click shut behind him before rounding on you.

“You slept with him?” he shouts, eyes wide and wild.

You cross your arms tight over your chest, with your head tilted inquisitively to your shoulder. “Aren’t you the one who said I could see whoever I want?”

“Yeah, I meant random assholes at the bar,” he snaps. “Not my best fucking friend!”

An incredulous laugh sputters from your lips. “Oh, so now we have rules? What happened to just being casual, huh? If you can flirt with your coworkers, why can’t I?”

Robby’s dark eyes narrow as he takes a slow step towards you. You catch a faint upward flicker of his mouth as he asks, “So that’s why you did it, huh? You just wanted to piss me off?”

Your anger spikes instantly. You feel it prickling red-hot beneath your scrubs. Because he’s an arrogant asshole, maybe, or maybe because a distant part of you knows that he’s right.

“No, actually,” you tell him anyway. “Because not everything’s about you, Robby. I did it because Jack wanted me. Because he didn’t treat me like I was just another one of his dirty secrets—”

“Yeah, alright,” Robby scoffs a breathy laugh and turns away, running a pale hand through his chopped brown hair.

“Because being with him made me feel good—”

“I said alright!” 

“Aw, what’s wrong, Robby?” you coo, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Does it bother you that somebody else wanted me?”

Robby exhales another one of his stupid laughs.

Your chest swells with a burning feeling that makes you feel like crying. “Why is it so hard to admit that you care about me?”

“I care about you! Of course, I fucking care about you!” he exclaims, red in the face. “Because I’ve spent months trying not to screw this up.”

“Oh, please,” you roll your eyes. “Says the man who practically shoved me into someone else’s bed.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Robby squints.

“Do what?”

“Act like this is what I wanted—”

The words die in his throat when the silver knob to the closet door clicks suddenly behind him. The hinges open with a quiet squeak a second later. Your heads whip in sync to find Santos in the threshold, rubbing at her tired eyes as she steps into the room. She doesn’t realize the two of you are in there until the door shuts behind her again. 

Her wide eyes dart back and forth between the two of you for a moment. “…Why does it feel like I just walked into a hostage situation?” she quips in a monotone.

“Now you know how I felt last night,” you joke back weakly.

She flips you off and walks further inside. Neither of you says a word as she retrieves a case of saline flushes and four-by-fours from the shelves. The plastic crinkles loudly in the silence. 

“Please. Feel free to continue,” Santos deadpans as she leaves. “I definitely won’t be listening with my ear pressed against the door.”

The entrance shuts behind her with a dull click that sounds much louder in the quiet. You let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding as Robby pinches his nose between his thumb and forefinger. When he lifts his head against, his eyes zero in on you. 

“We’ll finish this when we get home,” he tells you, firmly.

“Can’t tonight,” you shrug, lying through your teeth. “I have plans.”

“Yeah, not anymore, you don’t.”

Your stomach does a back flip at his words, at his very sudden act of dominance that makes you feel like melting into a puddle at his feet. And judging by the newfound glint in Robby’s dark eyes, he notices it, too.

You couldn’t hide from him if you tried.

[lovebugism]

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE ─── jack abbot

summary: jack has been trying to get the pretty pediatric caseworker from upstairs to fall in love with him for weeks now. the only problem is, you have no idea that he's even into you. (4k)

characters: jack abbot / fem!reader, michael robinavitch, dana evans

contents: sunshine!reader, slightly ditzy!reader, friends to lovers, mutual pining, idiots in love, humor, fluff, not proofread :P

FIC #4 / 20 FOR 20

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

PEDES CONSULT — CENTRAL 14.

The message scrolls across your pager on the elevator ride down to the bottom floor, where the chaos of the E.D. hits you before the doors have even opened. A monitor wails from somewhere inside the trauma bay. A nurse rushes by with a crash cart rattling violently against the tile. Someone in triage is crying; someone else is swearing. A thousand conversations fill the air until they turn into a dull roaring in your ears.

You enter like a sliver of sunlight breaking through storm clouds, weaving through the chaos with a practiced sort of ease. A pale blue cable-knit sweater bunches around your wrist, while a flowing ivory skirt patterned with delicate forget-me-nots sways around the tops of your sneakers with each step. You’re made of much softer stuff than the sterile brightness of the E.R. — like springtime washing over a war zone.

Robby and Jack stand together outside the closed door of Central 14. Exhaustion sits heavily in the former’s bearded face, weighed down with the regret of not clocking out an hour ago like he should’ve when he had the chance. The latter flips through the chart in his pale hands, scruffy features screwed in concentration until you enter into his eyeline.

He straightens almost instantly, hardly able to stay casual when it comes to you. “Little Miss Sunshine…” he greets with a cool grin, tucking the clipboard under his strong arm.

Your polite smile widens a little at the nickname. “You paged?”

“We’ve got a three-year-old girl. Suspected meningitis,” Robby briefs in a monotone, each word coated in a thick layer of fatigue. “High fever, lethargy, neck stiffness— labs are ugly, too.”

Your features soften instantly. “Oh, poor baby…”

Your eyes dart to the window. You catch only a sliver of the family through the edge of the curtain — young parents, likely in their early twenties, faking teary smiles for their sick baby, who sits in a too-big bed in a too-big hospital gown patterned with so many cartoon puppies.

“Parents are freaking out, obviously,” Jack adds gently, never once taking his eyes off of you. “We thought you could walk them through the admission process before we take her upstairs.” 

“Of course,” you nod, with a voice as gentle as you look.

Jack passes the clipboard over to you and allows his calloused fingers to brush your softer ones for a beat longer than probably necessary. Though if you notice it, you make no mention of it as you flip through the thin pages and follow behind Robby into the dim room. 

The chaos outside muffles when the door clicks shut behind you. 

A young mother — Nia, the form tells you — sits in a chair beside the bed with a wadded tissue clutched in her trembling hands. Her husband, Malcolm, sits on the edge of the hospital bed, wearing the long day all over, as his daughter curls lazily into his side. Ruby Turner is clammy with fever; her round eyes are heavy with it, too. And beneath her chubby arm, is a stuffed animal wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope around its long neck.

“Hi, there…” you greet in a gentle lilt, crouching beside the bed until you’re eye level with the toddler, who eyes your warm smile with a weary suspicion. “I have to say, that is a very serious giraffe you’ve got there, Miss Ruby.”

The girl blinks back at you with sleep-weary eyes; the same dark brown as her mother’s. “Pickles,” is all she can make out through her hoarse throat. The words came out like dry gravel, which rattles harshly in her chest when she coughs hard a second later.

Her dad pats her gently on the back with a wide hand and flashes you a tired smile. “She named him Pickles,” he clarifies.

“Pickles?” you gasp. “I had a dog named Pickles when I was growing up— He looked a little like that one there.”

You motion to the shaggy white dog on her hospital gown. The girl tilts her curly head down and begins pointing at each puppy herself, aptly naming each of them Pickles. It’s the first time the child has been moderately alert, or otherwise has been willing to engage, since she arrived some hours ago. Watching you work feels a little like watching a magic trick.

“Sorry. Hi. I should probably introduce myself,” you laugh warmly and rise to full height again, shaking both of the parents’ hands. “I’m one of the pediatric caseworkers upstairs— My job is basically helping families know what’s happening next. You know, all the boring insurance details, and making sure you guys aren’t going through things alone.”

The mother nods, wiping her nose with the crumbled tissue in her fist. “So what happens now?” she asks, voice teary and trembling.

You nod with a polite smile. “Yeah, so the pediatric unit is gonna start preparing a room for her upstairs, so our doctors can give her the full evaluation she needs— They’ll probably monitor her over the next few nights, too, just to make sure everything’s okay. And you’ll be able to go with her once transport comes, of course, we’ll just need to get everything squared away with insurance while she’s getting tested.”

“So she’s gonna be okay?” the father presses, half-strangled.

You never lie to families. Not ever. It was, as you saw it, the golden rule in any hospital. Jack noticed that about you, too — because he couldn’t help but notice everything about you. But he saw how hopeful you were without ever being dishonest, without ever making promises you knew you could not keep.

“She’s exactly where she needs to be,” you answer carefully. “And she has the best doctors I know taking care of her now. You guys made a great decision by bringing her when you did.”

The mother beside you sniffles. Her exhale leaves her mouth in a quiet sob, which she buries behind her hands before her daughter can see her crying. It’s not quite sad — certainly not as much as it had been earlier that day — but rather it’s a cry of distant relief; the first time all day she hasn’t felt like the worst mother on the planet.

Robby exhales quietly through his mouth behind you — scruffy cheeks puffing, obviously eager to leave. Jack, however, just keeps on staring at you, as you turn back toward the little girl with your voice now lowered in a feigned sort of seriousness.

“Now, Miss Ruby, I’m gonna need your professional opinion on this, okay?”

The girl blinks slowly back at you.

“…Do you think Mr. Pickles needs his own hospital bracelet, too?”

Jack sees the young girl laugh for the first time all day when you’re helping her wrap a plastic arm band around the giraffe’s stuffed leg. It’s basically your superpower, the way you make all the terrifying things feel halfway manageable. By the time you’re stepping back out into the hallway, with Jack and Robby at your side, the family is a little bit steadier than they were before you arrived.

Jack eyes you up and down for a moment, before leaning in to nudge your shoulder with his broader one. Your soft sweater grazes his bare arm, and he gets a faint whiff of your pretty perfume before he leans away again.

“When did you get so good at that, huh?”

Your head whips to the side. You blink like an owl up at him “…At talking?”

“Sure, yeah,” he laughs. “At talking people off the ledge.”

“Oh.” You bounce a shoulder in a lazy shrug, then reach to pull the neck of your sweater back up again when it slips off your collarbone. “I don’t know, I just… try not to sound like a hospital brochure, I guess.”

“Hear that, brother?” Jack quips, reaching behind you to clap Robby on the shoulder. “Try not to sound like a hospital brochure next time, yeah?”

The older man says nothing. He just lifts his hand and scratches at his temple with his middle finger, discreetly flipping him off.

You laugh under your breath and head back towards the elevator, pretty skirt swishing around your ankles. “Try not to traumatize anyone while I’m gone, alright?”

“Can’t make promises like that down here, Sunshine,” Robby calls back. “You know that.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to think we should just keep you down here permanently,” Jack says with a lazy shrug. His freckled biceps flex slightly when he crosses them over his broad chest, swaying back and forth on his feet. “You know, just— bring you into every room before the doctors go in. We’ll call you the Emotional Support Coordinator.”

“Oh, would you?” you scoff a faint laugh and hit the button for the upper floor. 

The doors part with a soft ding a second later. You step in through the threshold and turn to face him once more, giving him a much better view of the smile on your face.

“I mean, it’d certainly make me feel better,” he jokes.

“Well, you’re not the patient, Dr. Abbot,” you retort with a devilish grin. “I’m pretty sure you’ve got a few more years before your geriatric assessment, right?”

“A few,” he echoes sarcastically, light eyes squinted. “My opinion still counts, though.”

You shake your head at him despite the soft grin still dancing on the edges of your mouth. “You’re funny, Dr. Abbot,” is all you say, as you press the panel on the inside of the lift. The doors whir when they slide shut; your grin remains visible between them until hatch closes just ahead of you.

Jack drops his head with a chest-deflating huff when you’re gone.

Robby tries and fails to choke back his laughter. 

“You are officially 0 for 6, brother,” the man jokes. He claps Jack on the shoulder, hard, as his dark eyes squint under the weight of his smiling. “It’s honestly getting a little painful now.”

Jack turns to flash him a deadpanned look. “Shouldn’t you be clocking out now?” he wonders in a monotone.

“Not anymore,” Robby scoffs. “It’s just starting to get fun.”

The pediatric floor was quieter in the mornings, you found, after switching to the day shift some weeks back. It was never truly silent, exactly, but it was still a little bit softer, as the panic from the overnight patients faded into a calmer sort of quiet. 

Cartoon reruns play quietly behind closed doors, while lively children’s music can be heard from further in the main area, down the hall to your right. A softer set of lullabies, meanwhile, plays more distantly from the nursery behind the double doors to your left. And, somewhere within the soft sanctuary of it all, a wailing baby is fighting a losing battle against taking their liquid medicine.

It’s all confetti to you, really, from where you sit behind the reception desk with three different charts open on the monitors ahead of you. 

There’s a highlighter in your hand, a pen behind your ear, a paper cup of cooling coffee between your teeth, and approximately fourteen unfinished tasks glaring at you from the computer screen. 

You have not yet properly woken up — the same way the sun has not quite yet risen over the horizon. Your hair has been haphazardly dealt with, for one. Your cherry-colored sweater is bunched awkwardly at your waist, for another, while the white button-up you wear beneath it sticks out over top of your plaid-patterned bottoms. You vaguely noticed that your socks were mismatched when you slid into your scarlet flats, but were much too tired to bring yourself to care.

You don’t even flinch when the phone rings beside you. You reach for it with your free hand without looking, missing twice before finally plucking the plastic from the hook.

“PTMC—” You falter when you realize you still have the paper cup between your teeth. You scramble to set it back on the desk with the hand not holding the phone. You clear your throat and try again. “PTMC Pediatrics— How can I help you?”

“Morning, Sunshine.” 

Jack’s low voice crackles from the other line. You can practically picture him downstairs in the E.D. just now — leaning against the workstation with a computer glowing before him; with his messy silver curls, and his tired blue-green eyes, and that stupidly handsome half-smile he gets every time he talks to you.

You’re smiling at the thought alone before you even realize it. 

“Dr. Abbot?” you answer. “Do you need something? What didn’t you just page me—”

“Weren’t you the one who said I can call just to say hi before you switched to the dark side?”

(The day shift, he means.)

You scoff quietly and lean back in your swivel chair. “Well, I guess, that is preferable to getting paged about sick babies, so… I’ll take it.”

“Wow…” Jack croons drily. “You always say the sweetest things to me, you know that?”

“Well, what can I say? I’m very charming before seven A.M.”

“I think you’re very charming all the time, Sunshine.”

You falter for a brief moment, unable to tell if he’s flirting with you or if he’s just being nice and you’re the weirdo for thinking otherwise. So you shake the thought from your head and change the subject entirely.

“You sound tired, old man— Isn’t it almost bedtime for you?”

“Almost…” His sigh crackles through the faint static of the landline. “But unfortunately, there’s this case manager upstairs who won’t stop distracting me…”

You exhale a frustrated huff, utterly oblivious as you begin to gossip with him under your breath. “Is Hastings bothering you, too? Because she’s been hounding me about clearing beds up here since I came in an hour ago.”

There’s a long beat of silence on the other line, filled by the sound of distant chatter from the E.D.

“…I’m talking about you, Sunshine,” Jack clarifies.

“Oh…” you trail off, face burning hot. Your brain scrambles further when the light starts flashing on your desk, another call waiting. “That’s, uh— Sorry. There’s— There’s just someone on the other line.”

“Oh.”

You tuck the phone between your shoulder and cheek, fingers whizzing across the keyboard as you type with practiced (only now slightly anxious) hands. “So if you wanna have a conversation, you’re gonna have to trek all the way up to pedes, unfortunately.”

“Damn…”

“Yep…” you hum absentmindedly. “It’s a real difficult journey. Very treacherous elevator ride.”

“Well, you’re making a pret-ty compelling argument here, Sunshine.”

“Goodbye, Jack,” you lilt with a big dumb grin on your face, that you hope isn’t as audible in your voice.

“See you soon, Sunshine.”

You think nothing of his words when you decline his call and take another. You hardly expect to see him now, not when he’s still wrapping up the long night and briefing the day shift that’s trickling slowly in downstairs. He’s about half an hour shy of going home and collapsing face-first into his mattress — and you’re hardly special enough to lose sleep over.

Jack, however, respectfully disagrees. 

And so does Dana, who saunters into the workstation to start her morning, only to find the man hanging up the desk phone with a lazy grin hinting at the edges of his mouth. 

“What’s that look for, huh?” she croons in place of a greeting, shrugging off the jean jacket she arrived in and spreading it on the back of her chair before her.

Jack looks up from where he’s shoving the phone back into its cradle. “What look?” he scoffs. “I don’t have a look.”

“Oh, you most certainly have a look,” she argues.

“I have a face, Dana.”

“Uh-huh,” the older woman deadpans, half-distracted, as she logs into the monitor ahead of her, with her glasses sitting low on her nose. “And right now, that face looks like you’re the main character at the climax of a Nora Ephron movie.”

“…What’s a Nora Ephron?” Jack wonders with furrowed brows.

The corner of Dana’s mouth lifts in a crooked half-smile as she peers at him over the top of her clear frames. “Go ask Little Miss Sunshine about it. She’ll tell ya.”

Jack’s light eyes narrow in a smug sort of look as he strolls slowly past her. “Thanks for giving me an excuse to go up there, Evans,” he quips. 

“Oh, please,” she scoffs. “You were already on your way.”

There’s a newfound skip in his step, along with a faint limp in his prosthetic from the long shift, as he makes the elevator ride up to the pediatric floor — where he’s greeted instantly by soothing lullabies, children’s laughter, and reruns of old cartoons.

He’s swaddled instantly by the dim lighting and the soft warmth — both of which are rare to find in the cold, sterile chaos of the unrelenting E.D. just a few floors down. It’s like entering a whole new world when he steps out of the elevator.

Jack hears your voice, distant at first, but growing louder the further he treks down the hall. “No, I understand the policy, sir. You don’t have to explain it to me again—”

You exhale an annoyed sigh when the man on the other line prattles on, anyway, talking in a slow monotone as if you hadn’t understood him the first time. Despite your irritation, you perk instantly when Jack enters your vision, still in his black scrubs from the night shift, with a new exhaustion etched across his scruffy face.

He greets you with a tight-lipped smile anyway.

Your chest swells with a funny feeling accordingly.

“Sorry,” you mouth apologetically. “Just— one second.”

Jack waves a hand in your direction. “You’re fine,” he mumbles and turns away, idling awkwardly some feet away with his hands in his pockets, pretending not to hover. He marvels at the paintings on the walls, vivid scribbles from children of all ages, as he shifts on his weight — trying to relieve the distant pressure in his artificial limb.

You return to your phone call some feet behind him: “Yes, I get that. But this is a six-year-old going through extensive leukemia treatment— Delaying authorization for inpatient care would—”

You grumble an annoyed breath and drop your head into your hand when the man on the other line speaks over you once more. Jack glances over his shoulder at you, features softening instantly.

“—No, why should his parents waste their time fighting insurance, which should already be in place, by the way, when they could be spending it with their son? How is that fair?” you continue, obviously angry, but still so soft in your way. There’s a few seconds of silence as the person on the other line responds. You nod wordlessly to yourself at whatever they’re saying. “Yes, I will absolutely call back when your supervisor comes in— and every day until this is handled. Alright? Great. Bye…”

You set the telephone back on the hook with a huff.

“…Asshole,” you grumble around your breath, then get all sheepish again when your eyes find Jack’s. You cower under his softened stare. “Sorry… This insurance company’s trying to deny extended coverage for one of our oncology kids— because apparently compassion is illegal now, so…”

Jack musters a weak smile as he closes the distance between you. “I’m sure it’ll all work out.”

“Hopefully…” you sigh, a little embarrassed now, as you shrink further in your swivel chair. “So, uh... H-How was your shift?”

“Better now,” the older man croons, folding his arms along the countertop ahead of you, and leaning in until you can smell the cologne lingering on his skin — a mixture of leather and sandalwood.

“You’re such a suck-up, Dr. Abbot,” you say with squinted eyes.

His face twists into a look of faux-offense. “Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say to someone trying to invite you out for lunch, now is it?”

You brighten instantly. “Wait, really? That sounds so fun! Are Shen and Ellis coming, too— I haven’t seen them in ages!”

Jack’s smile falters slightly at the edges. “Well… Well, no, ‘cause I.. I thought, you know, it’d be just us. You know, you and me. Like a date.”

You blink owlishly back at him. “Oh…”

“Unless— Unless you don’t want to—” Jack stammers, quickly losing his ground.

“Of course I want to!” you blurt, a little louder and a far quicker than you mean to. “I just… I didn’t— I didn’t realize that you, you know, that you… liked me.”

His brows lower in confusion because, to him, it couldn’t have been more obvious that he was into you. He’d spent months tripping over himself to get your attention, including the time he ran into a crash cart ‘cause he was too busy staring at you to notice that it was in his way.

A chuckle sputters suddenly from his mouth accordingly. “I’ve been flirting with you for weeks! I mean, I’ve been calling up here just to talk to you since you changed shifts!”

“I thought you just liked bothering me!” you giggle in return, face burning hot.

“Yeah, well,” Jack tilts his silver head. “I do like bothering you, actually.”

“I like when you bother me, too…” you murmur sheepishly, struggling to meet the man’s unwavering stare as you swivel anxiously back and forth in your chair. You catch yourself smiling wider than you realize when you tell him, “And lunch sounds great, by the way.”

“Great…” Jack exhales a breath he didn’t know that he was holding, that he feels like he’s been holding in for weeks now. “‘Cause Robby’s kinda been threatening to ask you out for me if I didn’t do it myself, so… Happy to save myself the embarrassment.”

Your eyes widen with a girlish sort of horror. “Wait— Robby knew?”

“Sunshine,” Jack grins. “I’m pretty sure the entire hospital knew.”

[lovebugism]

TRIAL RUN ─── jack abbot

summary: when an abandoned baby takes the e.r by storm, and seems to only be comforted by you, jack takes a keen interest in the maternal streak he didn't know you had. (5k)

characters: jack abbot / wife!reader, dana evans, emma nolan, michael robinavitch, whitaker and his ducklings (joy and ogilvie), baby jane doe!!!

contents: grumpy!reader, established relationship, angst, hurt/comfort, humor, not proofread cw for mentions of child abuse (r had a bad upbringing), smut 18+ ft. breeding kink!!

The smell of fresh coffee clings to the stale air of the empty break room, mixing with the stubborn scent of antiseptic that always seems to follow you and the ghost of Shen’s egg salad that he just had to pack for lunch. You sit slouched in a plastic chair at the round table, with one leg hooked over the spare one at your side, and a clipboard resting on the thigh of the other.

You hope to spend the next hour or so of your shift right here, pretending to stay busy flipping through MRI results and procedure notes until it’s time to go.

“I won’t tell anyone you’re camping out here if you promise to do the bulk of the driving to the cabin tonight,” Jack had told you when you found him in the break room, passing you the mug of steaming coffee he’d made for himself without a second thought.

The caffeine is the only thing keeping you going this far into your shift; along with the fact that you’ll be spending the rest of your Fourth of July with him in his countryside cabin — the furthest from the PTMC either of you has been since you got married.

“How about you don’t tell anyone, and you do the driving?” you propositioned, flashing the man a faux-innocent look from over the top of the rim as you brought the cup to your mouth. The fresh brew singed the tip of your tongue a bit, just enough to jerk your exhausted mind awake.

“Fine…” Jack caved with a slow huff; his first good breath all day. His following words came out slightly muffled as he leaned forward to press a fleeting kiss to your temple before walking on by you. “How much we got left on our sentence, huh? An hour? Two?”

“Sixty-four minutes, but… Who’s counting?”

“Well, that’s plenty of time for something fun to happen.” Jack turned in the doorway to flash you a knowing grin that you met with a tired scowl.

“Don’t jinx it,” you called to his retreating figure.

You’ve given enough of yourself for one night, you think; and after a rather urgent thoracotomy that nearly killed both the patient and you (though mostly in the metaphorical sense), you feel like you’re owed the small break. Now that the day shift is trickling slowly in, you’ve decided to stay hidden until somebody absolutely needs you.

You sink deeper and deeper into the plastic chair, willing yourself into invisibility, until a baby’s cry shatters the sacred quiet. 

The high-pitched whine cuts through everything — your heavy exhaustion, your simmering headache, and the steady hum of the emergency department you’ve learned to tune out over the years. You drag yourself from your seat with a distant groan in the pit of your throat, ‘cause you know you won’t be able to relax until you know someone else has got it handled. 

You trudge to the door and take a peek down the hallway, if only to say that you did, and find the long corridor bustling with an energy much livelier than you are. When the crowd parts, you spot Dana walking your way with something tiny swaddled in her arms — much too small to be as loud as it is now.

Her eyes light up at the sight of you.

“Dr. Abbot— Just the person I was looking for!” the older woman croons in her usual gritty monotone, with a knowing smile sitting crooked on her mouth. “We got a baby Jane Doe, ditched in the bathroom.”

Your features crumple under the weight of your exhaustion. Your head tips back to groan a long and theatrical, “No…” though your sneakers scuff the floor as you trudge her way despite yourself. “I only have one hour left on my shift— Please don’t make me do anything else.”

“Well, I also got a central line placement in Central 13,” Dana deadpans. “You know, if you’d rather not waste time takin’ care of this perfectly nice baby.”

The swaddled thing fusses when it’s shifted in her hold. Your eyes flit from its scrunched face, round and wet with tears, to the wise look in Dana’s eyes. She grins at your obvious hesitation.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

You sigh and step forward, like a martyr to the gallows. You trade the clipboard in your hand for the baby in Dana’s. She sets the thing gingerly in your hold — a warm and delicate weight between your arms, fitting just perfectly against your chest.

You had done a rotation in pediatrics before you settled on emergency medicine some years back. You know what it means to take care of a baby in the most technical sense, though none of it ever seemed to come totally naturally to you. 

You move like a robot accordingly, all tense and methodical. The whining baby settles into your hold with a gentle coo anyway, like a switch suddenly flipped.

“Well, look at that,” Dana hums with an arched brow of amusement. “You’re a natural.”

“You’re evil,” you deadpan.

“So they say,” the woman quips drily, patting you on the shoulder with a warm hand. “C’mon. Show my shadow how to do a proper pedes check-up— Dr. Abbot’s not as mean as she looks, Miss Emma, I promise.”

You flash the young, fresh-faced nurse a polite smile that doesn’t quite meet your eyes before leading her towards the pediatric unit across the way. She’s made of bright smiles, braided chestnut curls, and sunshine incarnate as she scurries just behind you. She’s got a sparkling look in her dark eyes that you’re pretty sure you lost somewhere around your first week of residency.

You pass the workstation with a sort of tunnel vision zeroed in on the vibrantly painted pedes room. You nearly miss Jack standing there, leaning over the desk with his arms folded and his biceps straining against his scrub sleeves.

The silver-haired man briefs a newly arrived Robby on the morning cases and pauses at the sight of you — his whole entire life, cradling a much smaller one in her arms, with an exhausted frown on your face that you don’t bother trying to hide.

Robby traces the man’s suddenly distracted gaze over his shoulder. His brown eyes follow your form, lighting up at the sight of you the same way Jack’s do. 

“Well…” the older man croons. “Would you look at that—”

“Don’t,” you cut in sharply, and don’t bother slowing your stride as you pass them.

Jack’s quiet laughter follows you across the room. His eyes do, too, as he drinks up every ounce of you and the tiny thing swaddled in your arms. He finds himself getting drunk on a craving he didn’t know he had until that very moment.

Robby’s dark eyes squint. “Why do I have a feeling that you’re mentally siphoning through a bunch of baby names right now?”

“I always liked the name Milo for a boy. And Iris for a girl— but the missus is pretty allergic to pollen, so I’m not sure she’d go for that,” Jack answers without missing a beat, as though the thought had haunted his head at least once before. He only turns to face Robby again once you’re out of view. “What do you think?”

Robby just scoffs out a laugh.  “I think you’re screwed, brother.”

Baby Jane Doe is mostly stable, all things considered. 

Physically, she’s perfect. She had obviously spent the bulk of her little life being properly cared for. And, if you had to guess, she spent most of the time being held — if her immediate protest at being left in the warmer had anything to say about it. Her breathy whines fill the otherwise silent room as you perform a routine evaluation with practiced hands. You pay little attention to her annoyed cries and slip into teaching mode despite your palpable fatigue.

Emma hovers just behind you, with empathy glittering in her dark doe eyes. “Gosh,” she sighs. “How sad…”

“Eh,” you hum with a lazy shrug. Your gloved fingers lift the hem of her tiny white t-shirt to check for any bruising on her soft, pale skin, or for any other markers that might indicate signs of infection. You ramble on, half-distracted, “If you think about it, this baby got pretty lucky— If it really was abandoned, I mean. Better to be left here than with a family that can’t love it properly, right?”

Emma’s eyes widen at your cynicism. She can’t shake the feeling that you’re speaking from experience as she swallows hard and nods once in response. “Right…” 

The door swings open across the room. The noise of the E.D. swells for a brief moment, before muffling when it clicks shut again a second later. Robby steps in first, with Jack following close behind. The former stands on the opposite side of the warmer and keeps his suddenly softened gaze on the cooing baby before him.

Jack migrates to your side the same way he always does — never as close as he’d like to be while on the clock, but never more than a few inches away from you when he can be. 

“What are we thinkin’ here, Doc?” he asks.

“Normal pulse. Normal BP,” you rattle off with an air of indifference. “She’s well-hydrated, too. No visible sign of infection, either — though I guess we can’t rule out a benign virus just yet.”

“Do you think she qualifies for Safe Haven?” Emma wonders from Robby’s side.

You shake your head, lips softly jutted. “No. Either this baby is gigantic, or it’s well past the twenty-eight-day mark for Safe Haven. Worse-case scenario at this point is obviously abandonment. She’ll likely be put in foster care after a full evaluation.”

The young girl’s face falls slightly.

You soften despite yourself.

“But,” you add, if only to make her feel a bit better. “Past experience tells me that her parents might’ve just needed a break. Maybe they— I don’t know— stepped out for a cigarette or something. God knows, I’d need one if I had to take care of an alarm clock twenty-four-seven.”

Robby scoffs a weak laugh and shakes his head. “I’ll get Lupe to make an announcement in Chairs. See if anyone’s looking for her— If you’ll excuse me,” he nods with a polite smile down at the squirming baby below before sauntering out of the room.

The baby jerks when the noise of the crowded E.R fills the room again, startled by Dana’s yelling, who seems to be telling off a rowdy patient down the way. Her wet eyes squeeze shut as her gummy mouth opens to bellow a tiny wail. You reach out to comfort the baby, if only to hear less of the thing, with a methodical palm placed against its frail chest. 

It whines for a moment before softening with a contented sigh.

“Look at that… You’re good with her,” Jack mumbles, taking a step closer to peer over your shoulder — until you can smell the coffee on his breath and the musky cologne lingering on his skin. A small smile lifts the corner of his mouth as he watches you with glittering eyes. “Told ya you should’ve gone into pedes.”

You flash him an emotionless scowl. “Don’t patronize me,” you scold.

“Have you guys ever thought about having kids?” Emma wonders with a kind smile, having assumed your marital status from your matching last names and golden wedding bands. She cowers instinctively when your eyes turn to her in sync, fearful she might’ve said the wrong thing. “Or is that super rude to ask? I’m sorry—”

“No, it’s not rude at all,” Jack assures her, reaching to wrap his hands around either end of the stethoscope around his neck. It makes his freckled biceps strain against the black sleeves of his scrubs as his silver head swivels slowly to look at you. Something mischievous swims in his blue-green eyes as he lilts, “We’re just… going with the flow. Right, Dr. Abbot?”

You meet his tightlipped grin with a deadpanned look. The two of you agreed long ago that, while neither of you is totally opposed to having children, you’d also be perfectly happy living a completely childfree life. 

But instead of getting into all of that with less than an hour left on your grueling shift — in front of the newest addition to the nursing team, no less — you just nod with an artificial smile.

“Right. Yeah,” you say, already inching back towards the door. The baby starts to cry again a second later, in a series of revving whines that lead to a sharp shriek. You flash an apologetic grimace over your shoulder from your place in the doorway. “You guys have fun with… all that.”

You spend the next half hour finishing up your already-completed charting. You reword, backspace, and click occasionally at your mouse — pretending to work to keep from being bothered, though it isn’t quite as foolproof as you would’ve liked. Whitaker rushes your way with one of his interns in tow, sporting a worried sort of glint in his wide puppy dog eyes that he only gets when something’s going wrong.

“Hey… Dr. Abbot. Are you— Are you busy at the moment?”

“Nope,” you answer in a monotone, without looking up from the bright-white computer screen ahead of you. “And I’d very much like to keep it that way.”

“Well, uh…” Whitaker falters, shifting awkwardly on the other side of the desk. “We— We kinda need you. In pedes.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Baby Jane Doe hasn’t stopped crying since you left,” the woman behind him says, standing several inches shorter than the boy and sporting a heavy pair of glasses and a glittering silver septum in her nose.

Your eyes dart toward the stranger — Joy Kwon, MS3, the badge on her chest reads.

“That was, like, twenty minutes ago,” you say with an incredulous twist to your features.

“Exactly,” she deadpans.

You huff and lead the duo the short distance back to the pediatric unit. The crying hits you before you’ve even crossed the threshold — a sharp, unrelenting wail that adds to the headache you’ve been nursing all day. 

You find a lanky, blonde-haired man who eerily resembles Whitaker in the vibrantly painted room, though his badge reads James Ogilvie, MS4. The young med student flashes you a wide-eyed look of horror, holding the writhing baby in a visibly awkward hold.

“Please help me,” he pleads.

You don’t bother trying to hide your apathy as you trudge across the room to close the distance between you. You slip the tiny baby back into your hold, where it settles almost instantly, heavying against your chest with another breathy whine. You rock it gingerly in your arms the way you were taught to. Its wet eyes flutter slowly shut as fat tear drops trail down its reddened cheeks.

Whitaker gestures with a dazed smile. “See? Knew it. Total natural.”

You flash the boy a deadpanned look over your shoulder. “Because I’m a woman? That means I’m automatically a natural-born caretaker?”

His light eyes widen with an immediate panic. Joy tries and fails to hide her amused smile as she purses her lips to the side of her mouth. Whitaker, meanwhile, stumbles over himself to get the words out.

“W-What? No! No, not at all! I just—”

“She’s just messing with you, kid.” 

Jack’s voice drifts in as he steps through the door, saving the boy from his own stuttered-out apology. He’s perhaps the only one in Pittsburgh who can decipher your usual monotone from your humorous one, which he was only able to master after years of loving you. 

“Oh…” Whitaker says, deflating with a relieved sigh, though his pink cheeks are slow to lose their newfound color.

“Go check on Mr. Alvarez for me, will ya?” you tell him, jutting your chin back towards the door. “You know, since I have to take care of… this thing.”

Whitaker leaves and takes his interns with him, who trail after him in line like ducklings. They pass by Jack in the doorway, who peers at you over their heads with a pair of wide eyes. 

 “This thing?” he scoffs.

You bounce a shoulder in a lazy shrug. “I’m not getting attached to it.”

“It?!”

You huff and adjust the baby in your arms, with one hand resting on its diapered bottom and your other rubbing gently over its tiny back. You sway gently back and forth, far too sweetly for the following words out of your mouth.

“The entire reason I got into emergency medicine was so I could help people without having to deal with all the— baggage that comes with him.”

“Well, babies don’t have baggage, honey,” Jack laughs as he strolls slowly towards you. “They’re brand new— that’s literally their whole thing.”

“Yeah. That’s because the parents give it to ‘em through… years of psychological torment.”

Jack studies you for a long moment with a pair of squinted eyes. “I think you might be projecting a little bit here…”

“I know I am,” you scoff. “Which is why I’d be a horrible mother. ‘Cause I’d just be a mirror of my mom, and our kid would just be a mirror of me, and it’ll just be a whole cycle of… emotionless, unaffectionate women...”

You trail off with a heavy sigh, lifting your gaze from the calming baby to the man towering over you. You find him wearing a much softer gaze than you expect him to. He tilts his silver head to his shoulder, eyes narrowing and lips curling slowly.

“Our kid?”

Your eyes flick away and back again. “…What?”

“You said our kid,” Jack clarifies with a wider grin.

You roll your eyes at him despite the way your cheeks blaze beneath his unwavering stare. “Well, we are married, you know? Who the hell else would I be having kids with— Robby?”

“God, I hope not— Poor kid,” Jack quips drily before leaning in to press a soft, fleeting kiss to your temple. His silver scruff brushes our delicate skin when he pulls away, far sooner than you would’ve liked. “And, just for the record, I think you’d be an amazing mom.”

Something warm flickers in your chest at his words, like embers stoked suddenly to flame. You recoil physically from the foreign feeling, with a grimace twisting your features.

“Eugh…” 

“What?”

You shake your head in response, parting from him to set the now-slumbering baby into the warmer at your side. You lay it gingerly onto the blankets before stepping away with your hands splayed out, as if it had burnt you in some way.

“It got too real for a second there,” you mutter with a look of disgust on your face. “I started feeling all… warm and… and fuzzy— I didn’t like it…”

Jack laughs. 

“Yeah, that’s what they call happiness, Dr. Abbot,” he jokes in a gritty deadpan. “And I’m glad you’re finally getting to experience it after three whole years of marriage.”

Jack can’t get the sight of it out of his head. You, in the rocking chair in the corner, with the pedes room dimmed to a dull lamplight, cradling a sleeping baby to your chest and looking half-asleep yourself. 

“Thought you weren’t getting attached?” he whispered into the serene silence from his place in the doorway.

“’M not,” you mumbled back, head lolled to your shoulder, eyes half-closed. “‘M just using this as an excuse to shut my eyes for a second.”

Something about it all catches him off guard. Not the baby, exactly — he’s seen a thousand babies before — held them, handed them off, charted them like any other patient in a sea of a hundred different patients. They were always temporary things to him, always someone else’s. 

But then he sees you — his future, his eternity — with someone else’s baby tucked to your chest as if it had always been there. You had one hand instinctively supporting the weight of her head while your other smoothed up and down her back. And your voice, often edged with sarcasm dry enough to sand wood, had softened into something warm and low and honeyed. And the seemingly orphaned baby, who could cry loud enough to rattle glass, goes instantly still in your arms like it finds sanctuary in you alone. 

It does nothing more than pique his curiosity at first — the idea of having kids with you, of how great a mom you would be — which isn’t a completely rare thought, but one that is typically fleeting. But then the thought lingers. Festers. Settles somewhere in the pit of his chest until he can’t breathe without thinking about it. 

By the time you’ve settled in the empty cabin, six hours away from the PTMC, the desire has rooted itself somewhere far deeper than he’d like to admit.

Jack, freshly showered, reclines on the clean sheets of the familiar bed, smelling of detergent and time gone by. The bedroom settles slowly into a lamplit darkness in time with the late night. Fireworks crackle faintly in the distance, in mere echoes rolling across the midnight-colored lake outside. The quiet feels borderline suffocating compared to the never-ending chaos of the E.D. 

You move through the space as if you had always been there. Jack watches you from his spot on the bed, which gives him a perfect view of you in the adjacent bathroom. 

Your hair is still slightly damp from the shared shower, dripping onto the t-shirt swallowing your body whole. Your bare feet pad softly along the tile as you complete the last steps of your skincare routine; your attention flitting between your reflection in the mirror and the video playing on your phone.

It strikes him somewhere deep — swells from his stomach, to his chest, to his throat, until he gets the very sudden urge to cry.

“Should we have a kid, you think?” Jack blurts, as if the question were as simple as asking you if you wanted pizza for dinner.

You still in place in the golden-lit bathroom. Your fingers freeze on your cheeks, mid-swipe of moisturizer, as you flash him a deadpanned glare from the doorway.

“…Do you hear that?” you wonder in a monotone.

“The sound of my sperm dying?” Jack jokes

“The sound of quiet,” you correct before turning away to continue your work in the mirror. “Which doesn’t exist when you have kids. I mean, think about it— We wouldn’t have even been able to come here today if we had a kid. We wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

“Well, that’s just not true,” Jack scoffs, folding his arms behind his silver curls until his biceps strain beneath the sleeves of his black undershirt; the hem rises just enough to reveal the tuft of light brown-blonde hair trailing down into his sweatpants. 

His silver scruff brushes his freckled skin when he turns his head. “Parents take their kids places all the time— or alarm clocks, as you so lovingly called them.”

“Yeah, well, not mine,” you murmur distantly as you chuck your crumpled cotton pads into the bin beside the sink. “They always told me that I was the reason we couldn’t afford to do anything. ‘Cause apparently feed and clothing me was such a burden to them— as if I asked to be here.”

“Your parents were just assholes, babe.”

“The crazy thing is, they were actually pretty nice…” you sigh, bare feet padding softly across the floor as you trudge to bed, plugging your phone into its charger on the nightstand. “Just not to me. Like I ruined them or something.”

Jack’s chest flares with a white-hot warmth that makes his eyes sting. “You know that’s not your fault, right?”

You don’t answer him with words. You just bounce your brows and tilt your head, though he struggles to tell if it’s an agreement or not. He shifts on the mattress when you pull the fluffy comforter down to slide into bed beside him, brows lowered as he keeps his unwavering stare locked on your face.

“Is that why you don’t want kids?” he wonders gently. “Because you think you’ll end up like your parents?”

You scoff, kneeling on the mattress until you settle into place next to his reclined form. “Isn’t everyone terrified of ending up like their parents?”

“Sure, but… You’re nothing like them. I mean, I saw you with that Jane Doe today— You were perfect.”

“Well, you have to say that.”

“No, I don’t,” Jack scoffs. “If I thought any differently, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. But I know you’d be a great mom because I saw that today— Saw the rest of my whole goddamn life in that place…”

He trails off with a faraway look in his eyes.

You watch him with a suspicious glint in yours. 

“…You really mean that?” you murmur, halfway shy, picking at pills of cotton on the blanket thrown over your legs. “The part about me… You know, being a good mom, I mean?”

“Of course I do,” Jack laughs like it’s obvious, eyes glittering as he peers up at you. “And it’s not like I expect you to change your mind right now— or ever, if that’s what you want. It’s just… Something to think about, you know?”

“Well…” you tilt your head and trail off with a mischievous sort of lilt in your voice. “They do say the best part of having kids is trying for one.”

Jack grins up at you, brows raised to his hairline. “Do they?” he hums lowly.

“Mhm,” you nod.

“Should we test that theory out, you think?” he teases, all giddy like a teenage boy.

You shrug lazily, t-shirt sleeping off your shoulder, pretending to remain uninterested despite the excitement flaring red-hot in your chest. “Well, what the hell else are we gonna do?”

Something about your indifference makes Jack ravenous. It always has. It makes him feel like he’s got something to prove. And there’s nothing he loves more than watching your mask slip, than watching all your attempts to tease him fade into moans you couldn’t hold back if you tried. 

You melt for him first, when his long fingers slide your pretty panties to the side, dragging an orgasm from you with an expert hand — and then further when he presses his mouth to the wet spot in the thin cotton, drinking the honey you leak from him until he licks another twitching orgasm from your buzzing body.

Jack’s wearing your slick down to the silver scruff on his chin when he crawls back up your trembling form, massaging his stiff cock through his boxers. “You’re not too sensitive, are you?” he wonders gently despite the proud smile sitting crooked on his face and the honey still coating his tongue.

Your hips buck on their own accord, chasing a pleasure you’re not entirely sure you can take.

“Fuck a baby into me,” you plead in a half-drunken slurs, etching scratch marks long his back in an attempt to ground yourself. “Wanna make you a daddy, Jack— Want feel you leakin’ outta me…”

“Jesus Christ,” Jack huffs, like you’ve just punched all the air out of his lungs. “You can’t talk like that, baby— I’ll cum before we’ve even started.”

He knows it’s just the previous two orgasms talking, ‘cause you’re still on the pill after all —  having a baby now is pretty much out of the equation even if you really wanted to. But Jack isn’t in the business of depriving you of what you want. So he gives you all he has for the time being.

He folds your knees to your chest with a pair of wide, calloused hands, keeping your drooling pussy spread for him as he pierces you slow. The head of his cock, glowing red with need, disappears inside your pulsing confines. His throaty groan entwines with your quiet whimpers as your cunt suckles him further in. Once he’s sheathed fully inside, he stills just against you, with the greying thatch of coarse hair above his cock nestled against your sensitive clit.

“Yeah, you feel that?” Jack croons with a breathy laugh, which turns into a moan when your nails rake down his muscular chest. “You’re so full of me, aren’t you, baby?”

Your heavy head nods lazily against the pillow, eyes bleary and wet with desire. They squeeze shut a second later, when Jack’s hips drag back, until only the head of his cock is left inside you. Then he slides back into you, slow enough that you feel every ridge and vein of his cock, and smiles when your back arches off the mattress.

“I’ll give you a baby one day, honey, I promise,” the man babbles, choppy between his measured thrusts. “Fill you up so much it’ll be leakin’ outta you for days—”

You whine, hips bucking into and away from his cock all at once.

“Yeah, that’s it… I’ll get you all round and full… ’Til you’re walking around the E.D… Showin’ everyone what I did to you— how good I make you feel…”

“Please,” you whine.

“Yeah?” Jack coos sympathetically, beneath the wet schlick, schlick, schlick sound of his thrusts inside you. “That what you want?”

You nod, head tilted back and eyes squeezed shut, though the pathetic “please, please, please”’s continue spilling from your kissed mouth.

“Take it then, baby— Take it.”

He buckles down over you, punching into you with shallow thrusts that slowly start to lose their rhythm. He talks you through every inch of your orgasm, which hits you so hard it makes tears swell in the corners of your eyes. 

“That’s it, honey. Let me have it,” he murmurs in your ear as your body starts to twitch beneath his muscular one. “Give me all of it, baby. That’s it.”

Your stomach pools with heat a second later when Jack tenses on top of you, burying his groans in his neck as his jerking cock spits thick ropes of warm cum inside of your pulsing confines. He deflates on top of you when he’s finally spent, sticky body melting with yours, until both of you are melting into the tousled sheets below.

“You okay?” Jack asks through panted breaths, muffled into your sweat-slick neck. 

You nod wordlessly, swallowing hard as the high fades, and shoving lazily at his bare shoulder. “Get off— I gotta go to the bathroom,” you huff. 

Jack slides off your body and falls heavily onto the other side of the mattress. He watches with lidded eyes as you hurry to the bathroom with your thighs clenched together. You clean yourself up inside and return some minutes later to Jack having wiped himself off and tucking his soft cock back into his grey boxers.

“Do you wanna… talk about all that?” he asks with a knowing squint in his eyes.

“Remind me tomorrow,” you sigh, feet heavy as you trudge back into bed. 

Jack scoffs a laugh, knowing you’ll likely tell him the same exact thing tomorrow, and flips off the lamp on the nightstand. The golden bedroom delves into a midnight-blue darkness.

His limbs entwine with yours on nothing short of muscle memory when he slides back into bed with you. His long legs slot with yours beneath the covers as he throws a heavy arm over your stomach, folding his free one beneath his head.

Quiet settles over the dark bedroom like a blanket. 

“Actually,” you blurt into the silence, catching Jack right before he falls asleep.

“Yeah?” he mumbles, warm breath fanning over your shoulder.

“It’ll probably take about— I don’t know, three or so days for all the results to come back. You know, for Baby Jane Doe’s workup,” you murmur, half-shy. “And we’ll be back to work by then, so… I was thinking maybe we could… Never mind, it’s stupid.”

Jack lifts his head before you can shrink back into yourself, eyes flitting across your shadowed profile. “No, what is it?”

You roll onto your back to meet his darkened gaze with a far more sheepish one. “Maybe we could take her, you know? Just foster her on an emergency basis until we can find her family. Or someone who can foster her long-term. Like a…”

“A trial run?” Jack finishes for you with an audible grin. “Yeah, that’s definitely one way to pitch it, honey.”

You grimace, hiding your burning face behind your hands. “I told you, it’s stupid,” you whine, muffled behind your palms.

“It’s not stupid,” Jack assures you with a quiet laugh. He pries your hands from your face with gentle fingers wrapped around your wrist. “I think it’s a great idea. We can, you know, taste the waters about the whole baby thing and help a kid in need at the same. Sounds like a win-win to me.”

“Yeah?” you hum with a soft wince.

“Yeah,” he nods. “We can look into it when we get back.”

Your chest swells with a sunshine sort of warmth when he settles back into bed beside you, tossing a muscular arm over you to tuck you back into his bare chest. It’s a pure, unadulterated feeling of overwhelming happiness that weirdly makes you feel like crying. ‘Cause only Jack would agree to foster an abandoned baby you found at work not even a day ago; only Jack would see all of you and still love you completely, for a reason you still can’t name.

“I hate when you’re supportive,” you grouse on instinct as you bury your head back into the pillow, even though you mean the exact opposite.

Jack knows this, too, so he just grins into your hair and jokes, “Yeah, I know. It’s definitely my worst quality.”

[lovebugism]

OVER COLD SHOULDERS ─── maekar targaryen

summary: maekar, still not used to physical affection, turns you down one morning before a council meeting; you, not used to being rejected, make him pay for it the only way you know how. (3k)

characters: maekar targaryen / wife!reader, baelor targaryen, lyonel baratheon

contents: lark of my heart cinematic universe, bratty!reader, brief angst, but w a happy ending ofc, not proofread, cw for smut 18+ (MDNI), sex in a public-ish place, and getting caught in the act (by lyonel lol)

FIC #2 / 20 FOR 20

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

The chambers they’d given you in Storm’s End faced the rolling sea, painted a blue-golden color from the early morning. The shutters at the edge of the room are cracked open just enough to let a glimmer of sunlight through and to allow a whisper of the sea-drenched wind to billow through the thin slats. 

It would have been a gentle awakening, had Maekar not roused from his slumber to find you draped across his body like ivy on cobblestone. Your thin white nightgown twists around your body as you lie on top of his, pressing lazy but persistent kisses along his corded neck, bearded jaw, and pockmarked cheeks. 

He had tried and failed to disentangle himself from you a while ago. Now he lies with his silver hair wild from your fingers and his sleep, and with his mouth pressed in a thin, impatient line that you know all too well — waiting for you to get this out of your system. He exhales hard through his nose when your warm hand trails down his bare chest, to the knot in his baggy trousers beneath the tousled blankets.

“I told you. I have duties,” the man scolds, voice gravelly with sleep, as he catches your wrist in a calloused hand. “I have no time for this folly—”

“You never have time for anything,” you protest, half-muffled, as you brush your lips along the corner of Maekar’s mouth. 

“What I don’t have time for are whinging princesses so needy for attention that they must make a nuisance of themselves to have it—”

You draw back from them then, blinking at him with sleep-swollen eyes, as if he had burned you. “A nuisance?” you echo. “You mean to say I’m bothering you?”

“You’ve been bothering me ever since we arrived,” Maekar deadpans.

You exhale hard through your mouth in a not-quite laugh. “Well… My apologies, Your Grace, for trying to be a devoted wife.”

The softness in your voice, which the man had grown so used to, turns cold in an instant and pierces his chest somewhere deep. You make a big show out of getting out of bed — rising from your knees and to your feet, and walking over Maekar’s body to the edge of the mattress. 

The older man huffs as he rises out of bed, now that he is free of you. “Thank you,” he grumbles, knowing it’s bound to start another argument, as if he were instinctively trying to keep you from storming away.

The only response he gets is that of your bare feet padding along the cobbles as you head to your bathing chamber — and the final click of the heavy wooden door shutting behind you.

Maekar does not see you for the rest of the morning. 

He readies himself alone in his separate quarters, and finds himself missing the scent of your perfume from where you’d typically be getting ready right next to him. He dresses in silence in his bedchamber, with nothing but the clink of belt buckles and the gentle rasps of leather to fill the silence you left behind. 

He takes his time leaving for the meeting across the castle, hoping you’ll come out before he goes. You never do. (Your handmaidens insist that you’re still bathing, and even though Maekar knows how lengthy you like your baths, he knows that you’re avoiding him now.) 

Maekar leaves for the Round Hall without a kiss goodbye from you. He tells himself that it’s only a small thing, a relief that he didn’t have to spend five minutes prying you off of him before he left, like he usually would.

It was neither of those things, turns out. 

Maekar spends the council meeting distracted by his thoughts of you, while the lords and knights around him talk at length of trade and ships and the growing tempers along the Narrow Sea. 

Their whispers blur to nothing but a dull drone in the man’s ears. He doesn’t even pretend to take interest in any of them, as he sits slouched in the seat beside his brother’s and doesn’t say a word until the meeting is done.

“It’s eerily calm today, is it not?” Baelor says after the high lords have cleared out, backlit by the grey sky as he stands at the window, with a handful of dates in his palm. “One could almost mistake the waters for a painted thing…”

Maekar rolls his eyes in response. His older brother only ever speaks in poems, it seems.

“Look, there— A swimmer. Would you believe it? In this weather?”

That piques the younger brother’s interest. 

His chair scrapes the tiles as he stands and walks to Baelor’s side, following his gaze past the miles of shore to the grey-blue sea in the distance. A shape cuts through the rippling waters, wet hair streaming like a banner just behind them. 

They’re far too distant to make out properly, but Maekar knows it must be you — you, who’s been wanting to swim since you arrived; you, who’s been begging Maekar to come with you for days.

His stomach drops as thunder rolls in the distance; a promise of an incoming storm.

“Fucking hell…” the man grumbles under his breath, cloak fanning around him as he storms back towards the doors.

Baelor’s eyes follow the man, brows lowered in confusion. “What is it?”

“That swimmer is my wife,” Maekar spits. “Trying to drown herself, no doubt— or me.”

His boot kicks up grains of damp sand and leaves imprints on the dunes just behind him as he heads to find you — weaving through eroding rocks and towering trees as he nears the ragged shoreline. 

He finds your handmaidens first, seated upon the grassy rise a ways back from the shore, talking in whispers with their heads bent over their embroidery hoops. They flinch slightly when Maekar storms by them without a word.

Down the rocky hill, the sea stretches out before him, growing darker in time with the black clouds gathering overhead. He stops just ahead of the shore, where the strangely languid tide ebbs and flows at his boots. 

There, he finds you, closer now and as naked as the day you were born. The blue sea cradles you in its hold as you float along your back.

Maekar scowls.

“Get out,” he commands, shattering the blissful silence.

Your head turns until the water kisses your cheek. You give him a quiet smile and a pretty “No,” in response.

His jaw tightens, clenching hard beneath his silver beard. “Get out,” he repeats, firmer now.

“No,” you echo with a wider smile.

Maekar exhales hard through his broad nose. “They can see you from the Round Hall— Did you know that?”

He doesn’t tell you that that isn’t exactly true, though you likely wouldn’t care either way.

“Well, at least someone’s noticing me for once…” you sigh.

You sway your arms above your head to glide gently in the water, which ripples like angel wings around you. The serene waves dance over your bare breast and stomach, leaving the skin there kissed with clear droplets. Maekar’s mind is at a push and pull — of wanting to rage at you and kiss you all over at the same time.

“You’re punishing me,” he deadpans — not a question, but not exactly a statement either

“Yes,” you nod, wet hair swaying in the water. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. You’re very observant, Your Grace.”

You smile wider when his scowl deepens.

“Get. Out,” he spits slowly.

Your grin twists into a quieter, more wicked thing. “As you wish, Your Grace.” 

You take your time drifting to the water’s edge. You walk out of the water, unhurried and unashamed, as the sea slips from your naked skin in glimmering rivulets. 

The humid, stormy breeze washes over your bare form while Maekar swears under his breath, ripping his cloak from his shoulders. His boots splash in the tide as he rushes to close the distance between you. He wraps you in the heavy red fabric as your handmaidens would a wool cloth after a bath, covering your body before any lingering eyes could drink their fill.

“Where are your clothes?” the man scolds.

Your bare shoulders rise and fall in a wordless shrug. 

He exhales hard through his nose. “Do you take pleasure in testing my patience?”

“Yes, actually,” you smile.

The blue-eyed glare he gives you then might have cowed a lesser woman — because you take too much of a sick pleasure in angering the man.

“I’m only doing what you wanted,” you lilt with an air of faux innocence. “You don’t have time for me, remember? So I’m giving you your space.”

His pink mouth twitches beneath his silver mustache. “How long do you plan on holding that one over my head?” he questions in a dry monotone.

“Until you make it up to me,” you answer simply.

Maekar prepares to grovel.

It happens far sooner than he expects.

You tell him that you know a shortcut back to the castle, when rain starts to fall in fat droplets from the sky — a tunnel, hidden within the rocky cliff side, that feeds back into the tower. A postern gate, scarcely used, yawns open into a dim stone passageway — lit only by the grey afternoon outside. The air grows colder as the world narrows into darkness. The sound of your footsteps bounces off the damp stone surrounding you.

You’re bathed in shadow when you push Maekar suddenly into the wall. His boots scuff the damp cobbles for a step, until his back meets the gnarled stone. He hits it with enough force to knock the air from his lungs — though you’re leaning in to kiss him before he can take another proper breath.

You lick into his mouth without warning, tasting the wine and dates on the pad of his velvety tongue. Your kiss is wild and unrelenting, charged with all the words left unsaid from earlier that morning. Maekar’s hands find you, as if by instinct, while yours drift from their hold on his collar to the tie in his trousers.

“I thought I was supposed to be making it up to you,” the older man quips in a monotone.

“You will be,” you assure him with a knowing arch to your brow.

Maekar can just barely make out the edges of your face and the glimmer in your eyes from the dim tunnels embracing you on either side. His silver head tips back against the misshapen rock behind him when you massage his soft cock in your delicate palm, coaxing it stiff for you.

You kiss down his neck, mouthing at his thrumming pulse as you work him with your fist. Maekar’s grumbled moan, sounding from somewhere deep in his throat, bounces off the dank stone. 

He expects you to stop once he’s hard for you, but you don’t. He finds it suddenly difficult to catch his breath when you cup his heavy balls in one hand and pay gentle attention to the sensitive tip with the other.

You know exactly what you’re doing.

Maekar knows exactly what you’re doing, too, but he lacks the heart to stop you.

He keeps his heavy eyes locked on your shadowed face, peering down at you from the bridge of his nose with his head still tipped back. His jaw sets tight; his teeth grind; his hands tighten on the cloak clasped haphazardly around your naked body. 

He figures this must be his punishment — cumming in your hand like an inexperienced boy and having to wear the evidence of his orgasm like a walk of shame back to your quarters.

Maekar prepares to take it all on the chin for you, as his lidded eyes flutter shut to prepare himself to burst in your expert hand. His knees nearly buckle when your hands still suddenly around him, halting his orgasm the moment it begins to pool in his stomach.

He lets out a moan, mixed with a grumbled breath of frustration. It sounds like a growl in his throat. “You— are cruel…” Maekar groans, choking on a whimper.

“You’re going to make time for me from now on, aren’t you?” you ask with a faux-innocent lilt in your voice, and with big wet eyes he can see sparkling in the shadow.

Maekar’s control, worn so carefully like armor, fractures in that morning. He nods against the stone behind him, as sharp and immediate as the affirmative that spills from his lips. “Yes...”

You hold his gaze for a moment longer. “Then prove it to me,” you tell him.

It takes a blink and a strangled inhale for Maekar to regain his bearings. 

He pushes you with less gentle hands to the opposite wall, but cradles your back and the crown of your head in his palm before it can hit the stone behind you. The cloak around your naked forms pools to your feet with one hard pull, and hits the floor with a dull thud that echoes in the heavy quiet.

Maekar fucks you in the damp tunnels of Storm’s End, with your leg propped on his hip and your mouth moaning in his ear. He fucks you with a lack of restraint he thought he lost some time ago — around the time he married and lost his first wife; around the time his back started aching a little bit more with each passing day.

You drag something wild out of him, something so fierce he’d sooner call you a witch than a woman. You pull an orgasm from his body like a siren song; he bites at your neck to bury his moans as he crumples his body weight against you, pinning you beneath his towering form and the unforgiving rock behind you — not that you seem to mind, anyway. Your bliss-drunk laugh bounces off the walls, combining with the rain and Maekar’s grumbled moans.

“I’m getting too bloody old for this…” the man grouses when he pulls away, wincing as he pulls his softening cock from your pulsing confines.

He scowls while he tucks himself back into his trousers. You flash a lazy smile and sigh when you feel his warm cum leaking out of you. 

“No, I’m keeping you young…” you assure him and bend at the waist to grab the cloak at your feet, using that to clean the honey smearing between your thighs.

“You’re filthy,” the man leers.

“It’s your mess.” 

“Yes, and it’s my cloak.”

“Have the tailor make you another,” you shrug.

Maekar shakes his silver head, frowning despite the warmth swirling in his chest. “You’ll be the death of me, girl.”

“Oh, but what a happy way to go,” you lilt.

A torch flares to life further down the passageway. 

The two of you squint as the bright orange flame nears, after your eyes had grown so accustomed to the dark. The dancing flame reveals the face of Lyonel Baratheon, and the smile he wears beneath his heavy beard. 

He doesn’t seem all that affronted to have caught the two of you fucking — in the secret tunnels only he and a few good men are supposed to know about, no less. He seems amused, really. Delighted, almost.

“Well…” the man croons, voice deep and rich with mirth. “It seems I missed my invitation.” 

Maekar’s jaw tightens in annoyance — at having been caught, and having let himself be caught. He shifts in front of you to cover your naked body. You flash the lord a smile over the man’s shoulder as you hold the heavy cloak over yourself, hardly fazed by his presence.

“Did you enjoy the show, my lord?”

“Oh, yes,” Lyonel croons, heavy curls swaying as he nods. “Me and all of my men, to be true— We can hear you in the council chambers, in case you didn’t know.”

“Then I trust we did not disappoint?” you grin.

“Don’t…” Maekar spits down at you, not-so distantly mortified.

Lyonel squints. “Not in the slightest, princess.”

“Careful, my lord…” you lilt playfully. “Your praise stands at attention more boldly than your breeches do.”

The shadowed tint in his trousers is as impossible to mistake as the mischief in his hazel eyes, glittering in the flickering light of the torch he holds in his ringed hand. Lyonel’s grin curls wider beneath his greying beard, amused by how easily you banter with him — a feat only a few at Storm’s End have seemed to master.

“Come on, my love,” you hum to Maekar, reaching for his wrist with one hand while your other keeps the cloak in place around your naked body. You lead the man further down the dim pathway, leaving Lyonel with nothing more than a fleeting view of your bare ass as you go.

[lovebugism]

PRESS PLAY ─── jack abbot

summary: jack returns home from work, earlier than you expect him to, and catches you getting off to another's man voice. (2k)

pairing: jack abbot / fem!reader

contents: established relationship, shy!reader, basically just an excuse to write smth about that shawn hatosy quinn audio lol, not proofread, cw for smut 18+ (MDNI), caught in the act, oral (fem receiving), while listening to audio porn

In retrospect, Jack knew something was off the second he stepped through the door.

It was the strange quiet that tipped him off — your absence, more so. There was no soft padding of your footsteps down the hall, no half-distracted greeting from the couch where you’re usually curled up and watching some reality TV show (that Jack swears he hates but always gets a little too invested in), no absentminded “hi, honey” tossed over your shoulder as you tend to daily household chores.

Jack, for the first time in a long time, is greeted by nothing but silence. The clinking of his keys hitting the coffee table sounds much louder in the foreign quiet — so does the sound of his creaking footsteps down the hall. He worries that you’re sick, or worse, and then forces himself to shake away that thought as he heads for the bedroom.

“Baby?” he calls into the quiet, as his fingers twist on the cold brass knob. The silence he gets in return is hardly reassuring.

He pushes the squeaking door open, then freezes in the threshold when he finds you there — perfectly well and languishing in the unmade sheets. Your bulky headphones are snug over our ears; your head is tossed back against the pillow; your eyes are fluttered shut. Your phone rests just beside you, the screen glowing faintly in the lamplit room.

And, in the stillness, Jack can hear a subtle and unmistakable humming sound coming from beneath the blankets, where your knees are bent and spread.

Jack almost retreats. His instinct tells him to — to give you your privacy, to close the door, to pretend he hadn’t walked in on such an intimate moment. But something deeper roots him in place; the strange warm feeling swirls in his chest, maybe. 

There’s something strangely intimate, he finds, in watching you when you think no one is looking — when you have nothing and no one to perform for. You look peaceful, completely undone, totally in your own world. 

Jack freezes in the doorway when you shift on the bed, sinking further into the mattress as you adjust the vibrator between your thighs. It seems to hit the spot, as you exhale a whimpered sigh a second later. 

So Jack just decides to watch you — he migrates to the desk chair, in hopes of relieving the strain of his prosthetic, but the old floorboards betray him with a soft creak.

You don’t react immediately, but your expression flickers a bit, as a subtle awareness prickles up your spine. You worry, briefly, that someone may be watching you — you always are, in a way, especially when your headphones are on — but you struggle now to shake the feeling.

Your eyes flutter open, if only to prove to yourself that there’s no one there, and they widen in shock when they land on Jack in the corner of the room.

“What the fuck—?” you exclaim, clicking the vibrator off with one hand and slinging off your headphones with the other.

Jack startles, too. His hands lift in surrender as a laugh sputters from his lips. “Sorry! Sorry, I— I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Your face burns red-hot. You can feel the heat climbing up your neck and to your ears as your eyes flit to his eyes and away again. “H-How long have you been standing there?”

“Not long,” he shrugs and crosses his strong arms over his chest. His freckled biceps strain against the sleeves of his black tee, which he wears tucked into his camo fatigues. A crooked smile tugs slow at his mouth as he tilts his head. “Two minutes. Give or take.”

“I thought you weren’t coming home until later— Why didn’t you say something?”

“I tried to,” he quips, brows raised to his hairline. “But then I realized you were having a pretty good time in here, so… I didn’t want to interrupt.”

You bury your burning face into your hands. “That’s so embarrassing…” you groan, muffled into your palms.

Jack’s laughter doesn’t make you feel any better. 

“Why is it embarrassing?” he chuckles as he closes the distance between you. 

You can tell that he’s limping from the quiet scuff in his step. The mattress sinks under his weight as he sits on the edge of it, relieving the ache in his amputated limb that he’s been carrying all day. 

He looks over his shoulder at you, lips curling into a sly smirk when he can still hear your headphones playing from just beside you. It’s a muffled, indistinct humming that he can’t quite make out, but it’s very obviously someone else’s voice.

He nods towards it, silver curls turning golden in the amber light. “What are you listening to over there, huh?”

“Nothing,” you answer, a little too quickly, as you take the headphones back into your hands.

“Oh, yeah?” he hums. “Let me see.”

You jerk them away when he reaches out for them. “Don’t…” you murmur, all shy, like a scolded child.

“I’m not upset, baby,” he assures with a gritty laugh. “I just wanna know what you’re into. That’s all.” 

He eases the headphone from your grip; this time, with little protest from you. He holds your weary gaze with his glimmering one as he slips them over his own ears. He’s met with a bassy, masculine voice: “—God, you’re so sexy… Look at how you’re dripping on my fingers, baby…”

You watch, mortified, as confusion etches across his weathered face — eyes squinting and brows lowering. “Who is this?” he asks.

“No one,” you mutter, gaze averted, as you pick at pills of cotton on the blanket with anxious hands. “He’s just… some guy on the internet. I don’t even know what he looks like, he just makes… You know… Audio stuff.”

“Audio stuff, huh?” Jack echoes with raised brows, before huffing a quiet laugh. “God, I’m old…”

He slides the headphones from his silver curls and passes them back to you with something different etched across his features now, something thoughtful. Curious. Interested, even.

“…You’re not mad?” you wonder in a timid voice.

“Why would I be mad?” he scoffs, then bounces a shoulder in a lazy shrug. “I think it’s hot. I like knowing what you’re into.”

He leans in to kiss you, and your stomach does a back flip. His scruff brushes your delicate skin when his lips meet yours. You melt against him with a heavy sigh through your nose, as some of the embarrassment from before slips from your skin.

“C’mon,” he slurs between his kisses. “Keep listenin’ for me…”

You pull back, features screwed. “Really?”

“Yeah,” he nods once, without taking his unwavering stare off yours.

Your fingers tremble with hesitancy as you go to put the headphones back over your ears. Jack’s hand catches your wrist in a soft, calloused grip — redirecting you with a gentle touch. 

“No,” he says in a gravelly voice, eyes low and lidded. “Let it play.”

He reaches over and taps your phone screen with his pointer finger — once to disconnect the wireless headphones and second to unpause the audio. The voice resumes, sounding a little foreign now as it plays throughout the otherwise silent bedroom.

“—You always get so sweet for me when I kiss your neck,” the masculine voice slurs.

Jack doesn’t miss a beat. 

He props his fist beside your blanketed thighs and twists his upper body to lean in closer. His warm breath fans over your jaw right before he plants a wet kiss to your neck. Your jaw tightens as you fight back a shiver.

“See? I can feel your heart racing for me…” the stranger mumbles between mimed kisses. “Let me see if I can find that sweet spot, huh? Right… here…”

Jack’s teeth graze over your pulse point — not enough to hurt, but enough to make your breath hitch. You raise your hands to his shoulders, balling the fabric of his shirt into your fists. His mouth curls into a slow smile against you, and you sigh when his scruff brushes your delicate skin.

“You love this, huh?” Jack mumbles into your skin.

“This is…” you trail off in mild anguish. “Both incredibly hot and wildly embarrassing.” 

“Why is it embarrassing?” the older man laughs, as his lips slide over the thrumming tendon of your neck.

“I don’t know…” you mumble, trailing your hands up and over his broad shoulders until your fingers find the silver curls at the nape of his neck. “I feel like… Like you just caught me watching porn or something, and now we’re watching it together— It just feels weird.”

Jack hums against you, as if it were a proposition that needed considering.

“Sounds pretty fun to me,” he hums and pulls off of you with a quiet click. His mouth is softly swollen from his kisses, and his eyes are lidded and glittering with mischief when they lock with yours. “Wanna try that later?”

You swallow hard, features crumpling in distant shame as you squeak out, “Yeah…”

Jack’s grin widens right before he presses it to your mouth — in a lengthier and more languid kiss that pushes you slowly back into the mattress again. You sigh hard through your nose when his tongue licks into you, like velvet in your mouth. Your fingers tug harder at his silver curls, and you smile to yourself when he groans quietly against you.

He follows the direction of the foreign male voice spilling from your phone, and it leads him to your spread legs — where a wet patch has already started to form in the thin cotton of your underwear. You melt into the mattress when his strong arms wrap around your thighs to hug you close against him.

“Look at how wet you are for me, baby… Your pussy’s just begging for my mouth, huh? God, you’re such a little slut for me, aren’t you?”

Jack freezes, mid-kiss on your inner thigh. He flashes you an amused look up your clothed body, clad in one of his oversized t-shirts that’s slipping off your shoulder now.

“Do you like being talked to like that?” he asks.

Your mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water for an embarrassing moment. “I… I don’t know… Maybe?”

“Hm… Good to know,” Jack nods and gets back to work.

“I’ll warm you up with my tongue first, okay? Nice and slow…”

Jack takes the instruction in stride. 

He slips his pointer finger in the hem of your panties, slipping the fabric to the side, until your drooling pussy is on display for him — already needy and craving the orgasm it missed beforehand. 

Jack ducks down to lick a fat stripe up the length of your cunt in time with the sound effects of the audio. His tongue slots just perfectly within your silken folds.

Your mouth parts in a silent moan as your head tips back against the pillow. You feel Jack smiling against you when your hips buck instinctively to chase his mouth. 

“You like that?” he mumbles, in time with the foreign voice playing just beside you.

You exhale a breathless laugh that turns into a moan when Jack returns to your pussy, kissing you there like he would your mouth. He groans against you when your fingers twist harder in his curls; the vibrations only add to your sensitivity. Your whine swells within the walls of the quiet bedroom, entwining with the wet sounds from the audio and the realer ones coming from between your thighs.

“Now… How about I suck on the pretty little clit, huh? Get it nice and swollen for me…”

Your face flares at the overtly crude language.

Jack doesn’t miss a beat.

He spreads your velvety folds with his thumb and forefinger, bearing the most sensitive part of you for him. His lips wrap around your clit a second later, and your thighs clench instinctively around his head. His scruff prickles at your delicate skin when you jerk against him. A cry spills from your parted mouth before you can stop it.

“Wait, wait, wait—” you hear yourself say.

Jack pulls off of you with a quiet smack. His eyes are lidded; his mouth is swollen; his chin is coated in a layer of your slick. “Too much?” he asks.

You lift your head to stare down your body at the man between your thighs, nodding until the words catch up to you. “I’ll— I’ll cum too fast if you keep doing that.”

His brows lift as something teasing swims in his heavy eyes. “Isn’t that the point?”

Jack returns to your weeping pussy, licking and sucking you there, with noises far more lewd than the ones spilling from the speaker beside your head. There is no further protest from you, as he drags an orgasm from your trembling body — a much more powerful one than you would’ve gotten with just your vibrator, had he not walked in on you. His fingers threaten to dig bruises into the plush of your thighs as your hips twitch wildly against his face.

“Good girl— Good fucking girl,” the stranger’s deep voice croons throughout the quiet bedroom, coaching you through the orgasm Jack gives you with nothing but his tongue.

He caresses you gently on the comedown, with his calloused hands and his wet mouth, molding you back together again as he kisses his way back up your trembling body. 

The voice on the phone continues while the two of you work with graceless limbs to undress — your fingers scramble with the buttons of his camo pants while he tugs his shirt up and over his body by the neckline.

A heavy sigh grumbles in the back of Jack’s throat when you free his half-hard cock from the confines of his boxers, pulling the hem down beneath his heavy balls. His muscular chest, flushed with need, heaves as you take him into your hand.

“I’m gonna fuck you now, okay?” the masculine voice continues to slur. “You don’t have to beg for it, baby, I’m gonna give it to you. I’m gonna give you all of it—” 

Jack reaches for the phone again while you massage his cock the rest of the way hard; he feels like heavy velvet in your fist. He taps the screen to pause it.

“Alright, enough of that,” he huffs as he shifts on his knees. “I need to focus.”

You blink up at him, a little dazed from your lingering orgasm, as a smile curls slowly at your lips. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at multitasking, Dr. Abbot?”

“Multitasking’s for paperwork, baby,” the older man quips with a smug smirk and a pair of squinted eyes. He takes his stiff cock in his fist and eyes you carefully as you lean back onto your elbows, thighs nice and spread for him. “And this—”

He nudges the drooling tip of his cock against your already sensitive clit and grins wider when your head tips back with a moan.

“This deserves my full attention, don’t ya think?”