Temporary notice July 21, 2026: NO MORE DICK GRAYSON REQUESTS. I HAVE TOO MANY ALREADY. ANYONE ON MY CHARACTER LIST EXCEPT DICK GRAYSON IS ACCEPTED.
hello, call me Cherry! 🍒
i’m 26, Chinese American, and i’ve been in fandom for almost 15 years. i write fem!reader-insert fics for DC and Marvel characters.
i’ve been reading reader-insert fic for a long time, but this blog is my first time writing it myself!
🍒 about my writing
i try to keep my reader-inserts inclusive by avoiding specific physical features like eye color, hair texture, and so on.
i’m also a plus-size, curvy woman, so that naturally influences how i imagine and write the reader, even when it isn’t explicitly mentioned—or at least, i try not to make it too obvious lol.
🍒 before you follow
this blog is 18+. minors are not the intended audience, particularly when it comes to NSFW content.
i’m not responsible for monitoring what others choose to consume, so please use your own discretion when viewing or interacting with anything here.
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if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, my Ko-fi is here. tips are never expected, but always deeply appreciated
🍒 characters i write for
DC: Jason Todd, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Wally West, Roy Harper, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, and Minhkhoa Khan.
Marvel: Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers.
Poly and multi: JayRoy, BirdFlash, TimKon, SuperBat, BatKhoa, and Stucky.
🍒 requests
requests are open! please read my rules before sending one.
keep in mind that i have my own projects planned for this blog, and this isn’t the only place where i write fanfic, so it may take me some time to get to your request.
🍒 interacting with me
i don’t always see comments added to reblogs. if you’d like a response from me, send me an ask or reply directly to the post so i’ll definitely see it!
not gonna put anyone on blast, but i got an ask earlier today that was technically a request, except it was so detailed that it was basically a full story outline.
i don’t accept those—i’m happy to take prompts or small fic ideas, but i’m not going to write out a fully outlined fic for someone. sorry!
hello!! i binged eat your fics but i refrained from spam liking 🥺 love ur work!! can i ask for tim drake x chubby reader ? there's not enough of them on tumblr!!
i personally dont feel that insecure about the extra weight but it's always nice to have someone voice their appreciation for you :D
hey nonnie!
here's your fic, hope you like it!
this one hit close to home bc im definitely a lil chubby too so i really loved this one
Warnings: explicit sexual content, established relationship, chubby reader, body-image insecurity, body worship, praise kink, possessive language, oral sex, vaginal sex, unprotected sex, overstimulation, multiple orgasms, soft dom!Tim, aftercare
Summary:
A rare day with nowhere to be leaves you and Tim tangled together between pancakes, terrible movies, and kisses that keep turning hungry.
When old insecurities slip between you, Tim is determined to show you exactly how much of you he loves.
Author’s Note:
for this anon; nonnie’s right that there really isn’t enough chubby!reader fics on this website. i didn’t want to be too descriptive but i did my best :)
and yes the title is a Hozier lyric i felt it was about time
The rain had started sometime before dawn, settling over Gotham in a steady hush that made the city beyond the windows look softer than it had any right to.
From bed, the towers were reduced to blurred silhouettes behind rain-streaked glass. Traffic passed far below in muted waves, every horn and engine swallowed by the height of Tim’s apartment and the thick curtains he had forgotten to close the night before. The sky remained dark enough that you could have believed it was still early if the clock on the nightstand had not informed you otherwise.
You stared at the glowing numbers for several seconds. It was already 11:43, yet for once Tim was still asleep, a discovery that mattered far more than the time.
He lay on his stomach beside you with one arm folded beneath his pillow and the other stretched across the mattress, his hand resting against your hip as though even unconscious he needed proof you had not slipped away. His hair had dried in several impossible directions after the shower he had taken at nearly two in the morning, and the faint crease pressed into his cheek made him look younger than he usually allowed himself to appear.
There were no shadows beneath a domino mask, no careful composure, and no alertness sharpening his features. He was simply Tim, warm and heavy with sleep, wearing an old black T-shirt and the gray sweatpants he had abandoned halfway down his hips sometime during the night.
You tried to resist the urge to pull them lower, but your fingertips had just reached the exposed line of his waist when his hand tightened around you.
“You’re awake,” he mumbled into the pillow.
“So are you.”
“I was conducting surveillance.”
“With your eyes closed?”
“It was an advanced technique.”
His voice was rough, nearly swallowed by the pillow, but you could hear the smile in it.
“You were drooling.”
Tim lifted his face enough to glare at you with one barely open eye. “That allegation would be difficult to prove.”
“The evidence is on my pillow.”
“Circumstantial.”
“It’s wet.”
“The window could be leaking.”
“The window is ten feet away.”
“I haven’t completed my investigation.”
He dragged himself closer without opening his eyes again, sliding his hand from your hip around your waist. You made a small sound as he pulled you against him, more surprised than resistant, and Tim immediately took advantage of it. He tucked his face into the space beneath your chin and pushed one cold foot between your calves.
“You’re freezing.”
“You’re warm.”
“That isn’t a defense.”
“It isn’t supposed to be.”
The hem of the shirt you had borrowed from him had ridden above your waist during the night. His palm settled against the bare softness of your stomach, spreading over it with such easy familiarity that you did not think about the contact until his thumb began tracing slow, absent lines across your skin.
His thumb continued moving over your stomach, tracing the faint lines left by the waistband of your sleep shorts. The touch was unhurried, almost thoughtless, and your body softened beneath it despite your determination not to encourage his continued theft of your warmth.
“What were we supposed to do today?” Tim asked.
“Nothing.”
His eyes opened, and you smiled at the suspicion in them.
“Nothing?”
“You agreed to it.”
“When?”
“Thursday, after I found you asleep at your desk,” you reminded him.
“That sounds circumstantial.”
You laughed, and the sound finally pulled a proper smile from him. Tim lifted his head, his expression still softened by sleep, and leaned in to press a kiss against your mouth.
It was not a demanding kiss. He seemed content to brush his lips against yours and linger there, breathing the same warm air while the rain tapped steadily against the glass. You curled a hand around the back of his neck, your fingers slipping into his hair, and Tim hummed his approval.
His morning kisses were different from the ones he gave you after patrol, when adrenaline still moved through his blood and every touch carried the memory of how easily the night could have ended another way. They were different from the kisses he stole in hallways, elevators, and quiet corners at galas where he was supposed to be maintaining the appearance of a respectable Wayne heir.
These were loose and lazy. He kissed you as though he had nowhere else to be, his mouth warm and slightly chapped, his body gradually shifting over yours until one of his thighs rested between your legs.
You moved closer, and Tim rolled onto his side with you, tangling your legs beneath the covers as his palm slid over the skin exposed by your twisted shirt.
His fingers were cool enough to make you flinch.
“Sorry,” he murmured.
“You should be.”
“I’ll warm them up.”
He drew his hand away, but you caught his wrist before he could retreat completely.
“You’re fine.”
Tim looked at you for a moment, then turned his hand and laced his fingers with yours. His gaze moved across your face with the quiet focus that had unnerved you when you first met him. He rarely glanced at anything. Tim observed, cataloged, compared, and considered. Even after years together, there were moments when being the sole object of that attention made something restless move beneath your skin.
“What?” you asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m looking at you.”
“For an unusually long time.”
“I like you.”
“You’re very brave for admitting it.”
“I’ve been told.”
He kissed your knuckles before easing your joined hands between you.
You could not remember the last time either of you had slept so late.
“We need food,” you said.
Tim’s face remained tucked near your shoulder. “Eventually.”
“I’m hungry.”
You pushed the blanket away and sat up. Cold air immediately touched your bare legs, making you reconsider every argument you had made in favor of leaving the bed.
Behind you, Tim made a smug noise.
“Not a word.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re thinking loudly.”
You escaped before he could pull you back again and made it to the kitchen, with Tim following a few seconds later and resting one hand at the small of your back.
The kitchen carried the evidence of the life you had built together. One of your mugs sat beside Tim’s preferred coffeemaker. A grocery list written in both your handwriting was on the whiteboard magnetically attached to the refrigerator. His case notes had been cleared from the island, though a single red pen remained between the fruit bowl and a stack of unopened mail.
You opened the refrigerator and surveyed its contents.
“Eggs?” you suggested.
Tim rejected eggs in favor of pancakes, apparently because they were more appropriate for rain.
Tim stood behind you while you whisked the batter, one arm curved around your middle and his free hand holding a mug of coffee. He had refused to wait for it to cool and burned his tongue on the first sip. Rather than learn from the experience, he had immediately tried again.
“You’re making this difficult,” you said as he rested more of his weight against you.
“I’m helping.”
“You haven’t done anything in five minutes.”
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re drinking coffee and touching my stomach.”
“Both essential tasks.”
His fingers pressed lightly into the softness beneath your shirt, and you shifted before you meant to. It was a small movement, little more than an adjustment of your weight, but your elbow tucked closer to your side and created a barrier between his hand and your body.
Tim stopped while you kept whisking. He did not ask what was wrong; he simply lifted his hand and placed it on your hip instead, his thumb stroking once over the fabric of your shorts. Relief came first, followed quickly by guilt, and you hated that he would notice both.
Tim did not force you to explain your body to him every time you felt strange inside it. He knew confidence was not a problem he could solve through sufficient praise, just as he knew his loving attention could feel overwhelming on the days when you were already too aware of every place your body curved, folded, or pressed against your clothing.
Sometimes he asked, and sometimes he waited. Today, he chose the latter, pressing a kiss to the back of your shoulder before reaching around you for the bowl.
“I’ll scoop,” he said.
The finished stack leaned noticeably to one side, but it was edible. Tim added some fresh fruit to both plates and carried them to the couch while you brought the syrup and more coffee. The living room windows provided a wider view of Gotham, though the rain had reduced it to a wash of gray buildings and watery light.
You settled into the corner of the couch, pulling a blanket over your legs. Tim sat close enough that his thigh pressed against yours despite the available space.
You chose a science-fiction movie with terrible reviews because neither of you would need to pay attention. Tim objected to that logic, then agreed it anyway.
For the first twenty minutes, you both pretended to watch it. The plot involved a physicist, an unexplained signal from space, and several government officials who appeared determined to ignore obvious danger. Tim objected to nearly every decision they made.
By the thirty-minute mark, your plate was empty, and your feet were in his lap.
At forty minutes, Tim had placed his tablet on the coffee table after you caught him looking up whether the film’s depiction of radio telescopes was accurate.
At fifty, you were lying against his chest beneath the blanket, and neither of you knew why the physicist had been arrested.
Tim’s hand rested on your thigh.
He stroked it absently, his palm moving over the bare skin between the hem of your shorts and the blanket. Each pass carried him slightly higher. His fingers brushed the soft inner curve of your thigh and retreated, only to return a moment later.
His gaze dropped to your mouth, and the simplicity of it made warmth curl low in your stomach.
“I’m distracted,” he said.
“By what?”
His hand moved higher. “You.”
The answer should not have affected you as much as it did, but you leaned in first.
Tim met you halfway, his mouth soft against yours. He tasted faintly of coffee and syrup, and when you traced your tongue along his lower lip, he opened for you with a low hum.
The movie continued unnoticed.
His hand slid beneath the loose leg of your shorts and curved around your thigh. He drew your leg more securely across his lap, bringing your body closer until you were nearly straddling one of his hips.
When the blanket slipped toward the floor, you caught it and pulled it back over your waist. Tim’s mouth paused against yours, making you aware of a movement that had been automatic until you felt his eyes open.
You kissed him again before he could speak. He returned it, though the rhythm had changed, his hand remaining warm against your thigh while his mouth moved more slowly over yours. When you shifted to deepen the kiss, the blanket moved with you. Tim caught the edge, and you tightened your grip. Neither of you moved for one suspended second before he released it, the immediacy of the gesture tightening something in your chest.
Tim leaned back far enough to see your face.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No.”
“You can want this and still want the blanket.”
You knew he would leave the decision with you. Tim had never treated your boundaries like puzzles waiting to be solved, and the certainty made it easier to loosen your grip.
Tim touched the edge of the blanket again.
“This okay?”
You nodded.
“Words.”
“Yes.”
He drew it slowly from your hands.
The blanket slid across your thighs and pooled near your knees. You felt the cooler air immediately, though it was not the temperature that made your stomach tighten.
You wore his shirt and a pair of thin sleep shorts. There was nothing revealing about either piece of clothing, but the shirt had ridden above your waist while you lay against him. Your stomach remained partially exposed, soft where it curved above the waistband.
Tim looked, and your first instinct was to tug the shirt down. His hand settled over yours before you could, not pinning it in place, but merely covering your fingers and leaving you room to move if you chose.
“You’re doing it again,” you murmured.
“Looking at you?”
“Like that.”
“What does ‘like that’ mean?”
“You know.”
“I want you to tell me.”
His voice had changed. It remained soft, but the sleepy teasing had faded, leaving the calm focus that could draw truths from reluctant witnesses and stubborn vigilantes.
You looked toward the television. The screen had filled with another burst of blue light.
“Like you’re trying to memorize me.”
Tim was quiet for a moment.
“I’m not.”
The answer stung before he continued.
“I already have.”
Your gaze returned to his.
His thumb moved over your knuckles. “I’m looking because I like looking.”
“It isn’t particularly interesting.”
“To you.”
You exhaled. “Tim.”
“I’m not arguing with how you feel.”
“It sounds like you are.”
“I’m arguing with the implication that your opinion is objective.”
His eyes dropped briefly to your stomach before returning to your face.
“You don’t have to feel beautiful because I think you are,” he continued. “You don’t have to feel confident every time I touch you. I’m not expecting you to perform anything for me.”
“I know.”
“But?”
You looked down at his hand covering yours.
“But sometimes you look at me like you want me so much that it feels impossible.”
“Impossible because you don’t want me to?” he asked.
“Impossible because I don’t always understand why you do.”
His brows drew together in the expression you privately called his detective face.
“You cannot cross-examine me into having better self-esteem,” you told him.
“I know. I also know I can’t talk you out of every bad day.” His fingers eased between yours. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend I agree with you.”
His mouth curved faintly, but his attention remained fixed on you.
“Can I tell you what I see?” he asked.
The question should have been simple, but it was not. Praise from Tim rarely felt casual. He did not say things merely to fill silence, and he had no talent for empty reassurance. If he told you something, it was because he believed it with a certainty that made arguing exhausting.
You nodded.
“Words,” he reminded you again.
“Yes.”
Tim lifted your hand from your stomach and kissed your palm.
Tim’s eyes warmed. “I see the stretch marks near your hip that you pretend I haven’t spent an unreasonable amount of time kissing.”
Heat spread across your face.
“I see the way your stomach curves when you’re sitting in my lap and how soft you are when I put my arms around you.” His thumb traced your wrist. “I see your thighs, which I think about often enough to become a serious productivity issue.”
“Tim.”
“I’m being honest.”
“You’re being indecent.”
“I haven’t started being indecent.”
The promise beneath the words sent a pulse of warmth through you, and Tim watched your reaction with quiet satisfaction.
“I see the body of the woman I love,” he said. “The one I want. Those aren’t separate observations.”
Your throat tightened.
Tim brought your hand to his chest, pressing your palm over the steady beat of his heart.
“You don’t have to believe everything I believe about you,” he said. “But don’t ask me to look at you and see less.”
You leaned forward and kissed him.
It was not graceful. Your knee caught against his hip and your hand slid awkwardly across his shirt, but Tim gathered you closer before you could pull away. His palm curved around the back of your neck while his other hand settled against your waist, holding you with careful strength.
The kiss deepened almost immediately.
All the earlier laziness remained, but it had changed shape. Tim kissed you slowly because he wanted to feel every response, his tongue stroking yours before retreating, coaxing you to follow. When you did, he made a low sound that vibrated against your mouth.
You shifted across his lap until one knee rested on either side of his hips.
His hands moved to your waist.
The position drew the hem of his shirt higher, exposing the lower half of your stomach. You felt the cool air and the warmth of his palms at once.
When Tim broke the kiss, you expected him to look down. Instead, he kept his eyes on yours.
“Can I touch you?”
“You are touching me.”
“Can I touch you the way I want to?”
Your breath caught.
“Yes.”
His fingers slid beneath the shirt.
Tim’s palms moved over your sides, broad and warm against your skin. He traced the curve of your waist and the softness below it, touching with enough pressure that you could not mistake the contact for caution.
He had never treated your body as fragile. Tim could be painstakingly attentive when he feared hurting you, but careful was not the same as hesitant. His hands did not skim over the parts you sometimes wished were smaller; he held and explored them, pressing his fingers into your softness because he genuinely liked the way your body yielded beneath his touch.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured.
You kissed him to avoid answering, and Tim allowed the evasion for several seconds before his hands tightened around your waist and he drew back.
His hands traveled higher, pushing the shirt with them until the fabric gathered beneath your breasts.
Your bra lay somewhere near the bedroom door with the rest of yesterday’s clothing. Beneath the thin cotton, your nipples had already hardened, visible enough that Tim’s gaze finally left your face.
The look he gave you made your body heat.
“You were saying?” he asked.
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He bent and pressed his mouth against your stomach, drawing a sharp breath from you before he kissed the soft curve above your waistband. Then he turned his head and kissed the faint line where your body folded as you sat across his lap. The touch was warm and deliberate, his hands holding your sides while his mouth moved slowly over your skin.
You resisted the urge to straighten, to lengthen your body and smooth the places where it creased. Tim felt the tension enter you and looked up.
“Stay,” he said.
It was not quite an order. The word carried too much tenderness for that, but your body responded as though it were. You forced yourself to relax as his mouth returned to your stomach.
Tim kissed every inch he could reach without changing your position. He brushed his lips over stretch marks and traced one with the tip of his tongue, following its pale path toward your hip. His fingers kneaded gently at your waist, pulling you closer whenever your balance shifted.
The affection in it was almost more overwhelming than hunger would have been. You threaded your fingers through his hair as he pressed another kiss lower, just above the waistband of your shorts, and your hips moved before you could stop them. Tim noticed that too.
His hands slid around to cup your ass, pulling you more firmly against his lap. The thin fabric of his sweatpants did little to conceal his arousal, and the pressure made heat rush through you.
You rocked against the hardness beneath his sweatpants, and the quiet control in his face fractured just enough to satisfy you. Tim kissed you harder, guiding another slow roll of your hips before one hand slipped between your bodies and settled low on your stomach.
You both went still without speaking. His hand covered the softest part of you, his thumb resting near the waistband of your shorts. You could feel every point of contact: his spread fingers, the steady pressure of his palm, and the warmth that seemed to sink deeper than skin.
Tim looked at you.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
“You stopped.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to move my hand?”
You looked down.
His wrist disappeared beneath the gathered shirt, his skin contrasting against yours only in the sharpness of bone and tendon. There was nothing tentative in the way he touched you. His hand looked like it belonged there.
“No,” you said.
Tim waited another moment. “Sure?”
“Yes.”
His thumb stroked across your stomach until you exhaled slowly.
“Good,” he murmured.
The approval went through you like heat.
Tim kissed you again, but he kept his hand in place. He touched your stomach while you moved over his lap, feeling the muscles tighten beneath your softness every time pleasure gathered. His palm rose and fell with your breathing.
The earlier self-consciousness did not vanish completely. You still felt the occasional spark of awareness when his fingers pressed into a fold or his hand shifted lower. The difference was that Tim did not allow the moment to become an apology.
He wanted to touch you. The certainty of it was in every slow movement of his thumb.
You rocked against him again.
“More,” you whispered.
His eyes sharpened. “More what?”
“Touch me.”
“I am.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
You narrowed your eyes, and Tim had the audacity to look patient.
“Between my legs,” you said.
His mouth curved. “Knew you could do it.”
You kissed him before he could become more insufferable.
Tim slipped his hand beneath the waistband of your shorts. His fingers moved through the soft hair between your legs and found you already wet. The first stroke over your clit was light, barely more than a brush, but it made your hips jerk.
His fingers circled your clit with just enough pressure to make your thighs tighten around him. When you asked him to take your clothes off, Tim withdrew his hand despite your protest, curved both arms around you, and stood.
He carried you toward the bedroom.
“You left the TV on.”
“I’ll turn it off later.”
“The plates are still on the coffee table.”
“Later.”
He set you on the edge of the bed and stepped between your knees.
“Clothes off,” he said, the quiet authority in his voice making your stomach flutter.
You lifted your arms. Tim drew the borrowed shirt over your head slowly, giving you every opportunity to stop him, and tossed it behind him.
For a moment, Tim simply looked at you.
Your breasts were full and heavy, one nipple still slightly creased from where the fabric had pressed against it. Your stomach curved over the waistband of your shorts. Sitting made it fold, softness gathering where your body bent.
The urge to shift returned, but Tim stepped between your knees before you could act on it and settled his palms on your thighs.
“You’re doing the detective face again,” you said.
“No.”
“You are.”
“I’m appreciating evidence.”
“That’s worse.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be.”
His hands moved upward, spreading your thighs around his hips.
“I love these,” he said.
“My legs?”
“Your thighs.”
He squeezed them.
“Especially when they’re around me.”
Your face warmed.
Tim bent and kissed the inside of your knee. His mouth traveled slowly higher, each kiss placed along the soft inner curve of your thigh.
You leaned back on your hands as he stopped near the hem of your shorts and looked up.
“Lie down.”
You obeyed.
The mattress dipped as Tim followed, kneeling between your legs. He hooked his fingers beneath your waistband.
“Lift.”
You raised your hips.
Tim drew the shorts and underwear down together, his gaze following every newly exposed inch. He pulled them over your ankles and tossed them aside, leaving you bare to his gaze.
His eyes moved over you.
You had been naked beneath him countless times, but something about the afternoon light made the moment feel different. There were no shadows to soften your outline, no urgency to distract you, and no darkness to hide in. Gray daylight filled the bedroom, touching every curve.
Tim lowered himself between your thighs, sliding his hands beneath them to lift and open you.
“You’re staring,” you whispered.
He turned his head and kissed the softest part of your inner thigh.
“I told you,” he said. “I like looking.”
Another kiss, closer.
“You’re so beautiful.”
His breath warmed your cunt while your fingers tightened in the sheets, and his mouth brushed the crease where your thigh met your body.
“And you’re already so wet for me.”
“Because you’ve been teasing me for an hour.”
“I’ve been taking my time.”
“You’re slow.”
“Lazy day.”
The reminder made you laugh, though the sound broke into a gasp when he licked through your folds.
Tim watched your face as he did it again.
His tongue moved slowly, gathering your wetness before circling your clit. He knew your body too well to waste time searching for what made you react, but he rarely rushed toward it. Tim liked the process. He liked every hitch in your breath and every involuntary movement of your hips, storing each response away even when he had learned it long ago.
His hands held your thighs open as you tried to muffle a moan against the back of your wrist. Tim lifted his head.
“Don’t.”
You blinked down at him.
His mouth shone with you, his hair already disordered from sleep and your hands. The sight made another pulse of heat move through you.
“Don’t what?”
“Hide.”
“I’m not hiding.”
“You’re covering your mouth.”
“The neighbors—”
“Can’t hear you.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I improved the soundproofing.”
“Why?”
Tim’s eyes dropped to your cunt.
“Oh.”
“Exactly.”
He pressed his mouth against you again before you could respond.
This time, he did not begin slowly. His lips closed around your clit, sucking with enough pressure to make your back arch. The sound that escaped you was louder than the one you had tried to hide, and Tim hummed his approval against you.
You grabbed his hair, and his answering groan sent a vibration through your clit that settled deep in your stomach.
“Tim.”
He slipped one hand from beneath your thigh and pressed a finger at your entrance, prompting you to lift your hips in invitation.
Tim pushed inside you slowly, the angle precise. He curled his finger toward the place that made your thighs tremble, then added a second before you could recover.
Your body stretched around him.
Tim’s mouth remained on your clit, tongue moving in slow circles while his fingers worked steadily inside you. He didn’t give you the quick, relentless pace that might have carried you over the edge before you could think. He built pleasure gradually, making you feel every rise.
Your thighs wanted to close, but his shoulders prevented it, so you tightened them around his head instead and drew another pleased sound from him.
The bed creaked beneath you as your hips moved. His free hand slid over your thigh and settled on your stomach, pressing down gently while his fingers curled inside you.
The added pressure made sparks burst behind your eyes.
“Fuck.”
Tim lifted his head without stopping the steady movement of his fingers.
“Good?”
“You know it is.”
“Tell me.”
You glared down at him, though you suspected your open mouth and uneven breathing ruined the effect.
“It feels good.”
“How good?”
“Tim.”
His fingers slowed, drawing a frustrated sound from you.
“How good?” he repeated.
“So good. Please don’t stop.”
His expression softened with satisfaction.
“Good girl.”
Tim resumed the same steady rhythm with his fingers. His palm remained spread over your stomach, holding you in place as your body tightened beneath him.
Pleasure gathered slowly, becoming too large to contain. It built in your lower stomach and spread outward, making your legs shake around his shoulders.
Tim felt every change. His eyes lifted to your face.
“That’s it,” he murmured against you. “Let me see.”
You could not answer.
His tongue flattened over your clit while his fingers curled again, and the tension finally broke.
Your orgasm moved through you in a hot, overwhelming wave. Your back arched from the mattress. Tim’s name left you broken and breathless as your cunt tightened rhythmically around his fingers.
He kept touching you through it.
His pace slowed, but he did not withdraw. He pressed soft kisses against your clit until the pleasure blurred into sensitivity.
You tugged weakly at his hair.
“Too much.”
Tim lifted his mouth immediately and slid his fingers from you with care.
He kissed your inner thigh, then the softness below your stomach, then the place beside your navel. By the time he reached your mouth, your breathing had begun to settle.
You tasted yourself on his lips.
Tim kissed you deeply, one damp hand braced beside your head while the other stroked your side.
“You okay?” he asked.
You nodded.
“Words.”
“I’m good.”
“Want more?”
You looked down between your bodies and found him still dressed, his erection pressed visibly against his sweatpants and the fabric darkened slightly where he had rubbed against it while eating you out.
“You haven’t taken anything off.”
“I was busy.”
“Take it off.”
Tim’s eyes darkened.
“Yes, ma’am.”
He sat back on his heels and pulled his shirt over his head while you watched shamelessly. Tim was lean rather than broad, his body shaped by years of training and an inability to remain still for any reasonable length of time. Scars marked his chest and abdomen, some thin and pale, others uneven beneath your fingertips when you traced them. You knew their stories, though Tim had not told you all of them at once.
He pushed the sweatpants and underwear down together, freeing his cock to spring flushed and hard against his stomach.
Tim caught your wrist before your fingers could close around his cock and brought your hand to kiss your knuckles.
“Not yet.”
“I wanted to touch.”
“I know.”
His thumb stroked slowly over your pulse.
“You could let me.”
“I could.”
“But?”
Tim lowered your hand to the mattress and leaned over you.
“But I have other plans.”
His mouth brushed your breast, kissing the curve before his tongue circled one nipple. He took it between his lips and sucked gently.
You arched into him.
Tim cupped your other breast, his fingers pressing into the softness. He weighed it in his palm before rolling your nipple between his fingers.
His cock dragged against your inner thigh, and you shifted your hips in an attempt to bring him closer. Tim answered by biting lightly at your nipple.
“Patience.”
“You’ve been teasing me all day.”
“It’s been like three hours.”
“It feels longer.”
“That sounds like a compliment.”
“It wasn’t.”
He moved to your other breast, giving it the same attention. Tim liked your breasts with an enthusiasm that had survived every stage of your relationship. He liked resting his head on them, touching them beneath your clothes while you watched television, and covering them with his mouth until your nipples remained tender long after he stopped.
He liked their weight in his hands and the way they moved when you rode him, facts he had shared in settings where no reasonable person would have considered them appropriate.
Now he pressed them together and dragged his tongue along the space between them.
“Tim.”
He looked up through his lashes, and your body tightened under the weight of his attention.
“You’re doing that deliberately.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
“Yes.”
At least he was honest.
He kissed the underside of one breast and then lower, following the curve of your stomach. His palms moved with his mouth, caressing every place he had already touched as though repetition could never make it less meaningful.
When he reached your hips, he kissed one stretch mark after another while your fingers combed more gently through his hair.
“You really like them,” you said.
Tim looked up.
“My stretch marks.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They’re part of you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is.”
“It’s an evasive answer.”
His mouth curved.
“You’ve been spending too much time with me.”
“You created this problem.”
Tim kissed one of the pale lines.
“I like the way they look,” he said. “I like the way they feel under my tongue. I like that they’re in places I already want to put my mouth.”
“That sounds rehearsed.”
“I’ve had time to consider it.”
“Of course you have.”
He traced another mark with his fingertip.
“I love your body,” he said. “I’m not tolerating it because it belongs to you. I’m not trying to overlook anything.”
Your throat tightened again as Tim leaned over you and braced one hand beside your head.
“You know that, right?”
You looked at him and found no accusation in his face, only carefully controlled concern.
“I know,” you said.
“Do you believe me?”
“Most days.”
“And today?”
You considered the question.
His body rested against yours, warm and solid. His erection pressed between your thighs, but he waited, attention fixed on your answer rather than his own pleasure.
“More than I did this morning.”
“That’s enough.”
He kissed you softly.
You wrapped your arms around his neck and drew him closer. Your stomach pressed against his abdomen. Your breasts flattened slightly between you. Tim settled into the contact without hesitation, letting his weight hold you against the mattress.
You loved the way he felt over you and the fact that he never made you feel too large to hold. When your thighs opened around his hips, Tim inhaled sharply as his cock slid through your wet folds.
“Condom?” he asked.
You shook your head.
“You took your pill?”
“This morning.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. I want to feel you.”
His eyes closed briefly.
“You can’t say things like that and expect me to remain functional.”
“I’m not expecting you to.”
You reached between your bodies and wrapped your hand around his cock, making Tim’s hips jerk.
“Fuck.”
“Focused?”
His forehead dropped against yours.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“Extensively.”
You stroked him once, spreading the bead of precum over the head with your thumb.
Tim caught your hand and pinned it gently beside your head.
“Enough.”
“You said I could touch you.”
“You’ve lost the privilege.”
“For being good at it?”
“For being a menace.”
“I learned from you.”
“That isn’t a defense.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be.”
He laughed softly against your mouth.
Then he reached down, took his cock in hand, and guided himself to your entrance. The first press made your body tighten, and Tim stopped immediately.
“Still sensitive?”
“A little.”
He rubbed the head of his cock slowly through your folds, coating himself in your wetness.
“We can wait.”
“I don’t want to wait.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, Tim.”
Tim searched your face, but you lifted your hips before he could ask again, letting the head of his cock slip inside and drawing the breath from him.
“That’s unfair,” he said.
“You were taking too long.”
His hand settled firmly on your hip.
“Then I’ll be faster.”
He pushed forward.
Your body stretched around him slowly, the fullness almost too much after your first orgasm. Tim watched every change in your expression, advancing only when you relaxed enough to take more.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “You’re doing so well.”
You tightened around him and watched his jaw flex.
“Still conclusive?” you asked breathlessly.
“Very.”
He sank deeper.
You felt every inch as your body opened for him. Tim was not the longest man you had ever taken, but he was thick enough to make the stretch delicious, especially at this angle. Your thighs rested high around his waist, opening you completely.
When his hips finally settled against yours, both of you froze, and Tim pressed his forehead to your shoulder.
“You feel incredible,” he whispered.
Your fingers moved down his back.
“So do you.”
He remained still long enough for the initial stretch to ease. His cock pulsed inside you, betraying the control he otherwise maintained.
You shifted experimentally and drew a groan from him.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He withdrew slowly and pushed back in.
The first strokes were deep and measured. Tim held your hip with one hand while the other braced beside your head, keeping his weight from pressing too heavily against you.
You pulled him down, but he resisted.
“Tim.”
“I don’t want to crush you.”
“You won’t.”
“You can’t accurately assess—”
“Put your weight on me.”
His pupils widened as you wrapped your legs more firmly around him.
“Please.”
Tim lowered himself carefully.
His chest pressed against yours. His stomach rested against the softness of your body, and his hips drove deeper as the angle changed.
A moan escaped you.
“Better?” he asked.
“Yes.”
His mouth found your neck.
Tim began moving again, no longer holding himself at a distance. Each thrust rolled his body against yours, your stomach shifting beneath the pressure. The contact was inescapable and exactly what you wanted, so you held him closer.
Tim kissed along your throat while his hips established a steady rhythm. He did not fuck you hard. He moved with enough force to make the mattress shift beneath you, but each thrust remained slow, drawing pleasure out rather than chasing it.
When his hand slid between your bodies, you caught his wrist.
“Too sensitive.”
“I’ll be gentle.”
“You always say that.”
“I’m frequently gentle.”
“You have a flexible definition.”
Tim smiled against your skin.
His fingers found your clit. The first circle was light enough to make you shiver without pulling away.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He touched you while he fucked you, matching the movement of his fingers to the slow roll of his hips. Pleasure began rebuilding almost immediately.
You buried your face against his shoulder, and Tim kissed your temple.
“Look at me.”
You turned your face reluctantly and found his eyes already holding yours.
“I love you,” he said.
The words struck harder than they should have. Perhaps it was the intimacy of the position, his body covering yours while he moved inside you, or the lingering vulnerability of the conversation on the couch.
Perhaps it was simply Tim.
He rarely offered parts of himself casually. Loving you had been a decision he made every day with the same stubborn dedication he brought to everything else.
“I love you too.”
His next thrust came harder, pulling a gasp from you as his fingers pressed more firmly against your clit.
“There?”
“Yes.”
He repeated the angle until your nails dug into his back.
Tim’s rhythm began to lose some of its restraint. His thrusts grew harder, pushing you into the mattress while his breathing roughened against your mouth.
You loved the moment when Tim’s careful control began breaking beneath the weight of his desire for you.
His composure never vanished completely. Even now, he monitored every response, adjusting the angle of his hips whenever your breath changed. But the precision became hungrier. He kissed you with too much force, caught your lower lip between his teeth, and made a helpless sound when your cunt clenched around him.
“Again,” he said.
“What?”
“Do that again.”
You tightened deliberately, making Tim close his eyes with a rough curse. When you smiled, he opened them again.
“That was intentional.”
“You asked me to.”
His hand caught your thigh and pushed it higher. The new angle drove his cock against a place that made your smile disappear.
“Oh.”
Tim thrust again. “More?”
“Please.”
He gave it to you. The headboard began striking softly against the wall. Tim’s hips snapped into yours with controlled force, his cock filling you over and over while his fingers circled your clit.
Pleasure climbed faster this time.
Your body was still sensitized from his mouth. Each stroke felt sharper, every deep thrust tightening the knot inside you. You clung to him, your thighs trembling around his waist.
Tim watched you.
“There you go,” he murmured. “Let me see you.”
You turned your face away, and his pace slowed.
“Don’t hide from me.”
The words were gentle, but they carried enough authority to make you look back, and Tim rewarded you with a kiss.
“That’s it.”
His thumb pressed over your clit, making your body jolt.
“You’re so beautiful like this.”
You made a broken sound.
“So soft for me,” he continued. “So warm.”
“Tim.”
“I love holding you.”
His hand moved from your thigh to your stomach, spreading over it while his thumb continued working your clit.
The contact made your entire body tense. Tim felt the change and slowed his thrusts without stopping.
“Too much?”
You shook your head.
“What is it?”
You looked down at his hand, and he followed your gaze.
“I can move it.”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
His palm pressed more firmly against you, loosening something in your chest as his eyes returned to yours.
“My beautiful girl,” he murmured.
Your cunt clenched around him and his breath caught in his throat.
“You like that.”
You could not bring yourself to deny it, and Tim leaned closer until his mouth brushed your ear.
“My beautiful, soft, lovely girl.”
The next thrust drove deep.
“You have no idea what you do to me.”
His fingers circled your clit again.
“You walk around in my shirts with your thighs bare and expect me to think normally.”
A laugh tried to escape you, but it became a moan.
“You climb into my lap like you don’t know I’m going to spend the rest of the night thinking about the way you felt there.”
“Tim.”
“You think I don’t want to look at you?”
His hand stroked over your stomach.
“I can barely look anywhere else.”
The pleasure inside you tightened until it hurt.
“I’m close.”
“I know.”
“Don’t stop.”
“I won’t.”
His thrusts became harder, each one pressing the air from your lungs. His fingers stayed steady over your clit even as the rest of his control frayed.
You held his gaze.
“Come for me,” he said.
Your body responded before your mind could, and the orgasm tore through you.
Your cunt tightened around his cock in hard waves, drawing a strained groan from him. Pleasure flooded outward from your center, making your thighs shake and your stomach clench beneath his palm.
Tim kept moving.
His pace became uneven as your body pulsed around him. He pushed through your orgasm, extending it until sensitivity began sharpening every touch.
“Tim,” you gasped.
“I know.”
His mouth pressed against your cheek.
“You’re doing so well.”
“Too much.”
“Just a little more.”
His fingers left your clit, but his hips continued.
You clung to him as he chased his own release. The overstimulation made every thrust almost unbearable, pleasure and sensitivity tangling until you could not separate them.
Tim buried his face against your neck.
“Where?” he asked, voice strained.
“Inside.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Please.”
His hips drove forward once, twice, and then he went rigid over you. Tim came with a low, broken moan.
You felt his cock pulse deep inside you, warmth filling you while his fingers tightened against your stomach. His final thrust pressed your bodies together so completely that you could feel his heartbeat racing against your chest.
For several seconds, neither of you moved. Rain continued tapping against the windows while the forgotten movie played faintly in the other room, and you stroked the back of Tim’s neck as his breathing gradually slowed against your skin.
You stroked the back of his neck.
Tim remained over you until both your breathing steadied, then shifted enough to spare his numbing arm without putting any real distance between you.
His hand still rested on your stomach. You covered it with yours, and his thumb moved beneath your palm.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Amazing.”
“Physically?”
“Sore. In a good way.”
“Emotionally?”
You gave him a look.
“It’s a valid question.”
“You sound like an intake form.”
“I could make a scale.”
“Don’t.”
“One through ten.”
“Tim.”
“Fine.”
He kissed your shoulder while you looked at your joined hands.
“Better,” you said.
“Than this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Because of the sex?”
“The sex helped.”
“I’m glad.”
“But not only that.”
Tim waited while you traced the edge of one of his knuckles.
“You didn’t make it a lesson.”
His brows drew together slightly.
“You didn’t act like I needed to learn to love myself before you were allowed to love me.”
“You don’t.”
“I know.”
“You also don’t owe me confidence because I’m attracted to you.”
“I know that too.”
“I want you when you feel good about yourself,” he said. “I want you when you don’t. Your bad days aren’t personal failures.”
Your eyes stung unexpectedly, and Tim noticed as he always did.
“Hey.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re allowed to cry.”
“I’m not crying.”
“That wasn’t an accusation.”
You blinked quickly, and Tim kissed beneath one eye.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
“I know.”
“And I’m not going to stop looking at you.”
You laughed softly. “I know.”
“Good.”
He kissed the other side of your face.
“You’re also going to let me buy you better sleep shorts.”
“What’s wrong with those?”
“They’re structurally unsound.”
“You tore them.”
“The seam was already compromised.”
“You hooked your fingers under them and pulled.”
“They came off.”
“That was the intended function.”
“Then they performed adequately.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You love me.”
“Unfortunately.”
Tim smiled before finally pulling out of you with deliberate care. You winced at the empty feeling and the immediate warmth of his release slipping from you. Tim’s eyes dropped between your legs.
His expression sharpened in a way that made your stomach flutter despite your exhaustion.
Tim cleaned you with a warm cloth, brought you a glass of water, and helped you into one of his clean shirts. He moved around the bedroom with the focused efficiency he brought to every form of care, checking the temperature of the cloth before touching you and waiting until you had finished drinking before setting the glass aside.
Only then did he retrieve his phone and begin the unexpectedly complicated process of ordering dinner. He ordered burgers, fries, and two chocolate milkshakes after rejecting every other suggestion you gave him as insufficient fuel.
“Thirty-five minutes,” he said, setting his phone facedown.
You lifted the blanket.
Tim climbed beneath the blanket, and you curled against his chest while the rain moved steadily across the windows. By the time the food arrived, neither of you had recovered enough ambition to leave the bedroom. You ate propped against the headboard, Tim stole half your fries and several drinks of your milkshake, and his hand eventually settled over your stomach beneath the loose shirt.
Earlier, you might have shifted away or pulled the fabric flat. Instead, you placed your hand over his, and Tim’s fingers spread beneath yours.
He did not make a comment, turn the small choice into a victory, or ask whether it meant you felt better. He simply kept touching you while the rain continued falling over Gotham.
Inside, Tim ate half your fries despite having his own, disputed every plot point in the second terrible movie you chose, and kept one hand on your body as though it belonged there.
By evening, the trash had migrated to the nightstand. The blankets had tangled around your legs. Tim had fallen asleep again with his cheek against your chest, one arm curved securely around your waist.
You traced your fingers through his hair while his palm rested warm and relaxed against your stomach beneath the shirt. You did not move it as you looked toward the rain-streaked windows, the dark city beyond them, and the vague reflection of the two of you in the glass.
Then you settled deeper into the mattress and let yourself be held.
credit to @uzmacchiato for the cherry divider and @toxisyddy for the Robin divider ❤️💛
SUCH a boobs man i’ll literally fight to the ends of the earth to prove you wrong.
bruce is sooo old fashioned that whenever you’re wearing a push up dress for a gala, his gaze would shamelessly lower to your boobs with his hands practically itching to cup and fondle them. to his defense, they were staring at him first
like i swearrrrrr his hands would be where your ribs were so he can press his thumbs on the lower part of your boobs
im also a firm believer that whenever this man would fuck you via doggy, the first thing his hands would be grabbing onto would be your boobs. his large hands would be groping them and pushing your body back on his over and over by your boobs, his thrusts rougher and burying his cock deeper in you
it would do nothing but make you gape your lips more and arch your back more into his cock with a moan. bruce let out a groan from your pussy walls clenching more as a response to his hands, his blue eyes darkened with desire and pinned on how his hips snapped at your ass repeatedly
bruce’s lips would trail kisses on your neck until he reached the back of your ear, lightly biting it before whispering filthy things in your ear
“fuck, look at my girls go” yes, he was talking about your boobs. “so warm—" thrust. “and soft--" thrust. “all for me”
—
DICK GRAYSON — both
dick grayson is a greedy man, he wants anything that he could grab
and YES, his hands would grip on your ass and push your pussy more to his length while you’re riding him, burying his face in your cleavage and letting out muffled moans absorbed by your skin from how good you were taking him
“attagirl” dick panted on your chest, his lips glistening with saliva and smeared all over your skin. “just like that— fuuuck, make this dick yours”
you couldn’t say anything. all you could do was mindlessly moan with your head knocked back and lips fully parted, your head dizzy from how his cock was hitting all the right angles in you and how big he was in you
you arched your back and buried his face even more to your chest, making dick moan and push another deep thrust in you. the depth made your hips jerk a bit, but his grip on your ass made sure you stayed on his lap as he slowly took over
your boobs were bouncing in dick’s face from how fast and deep he was dragging you in and out of his twitching cock.
“cmon gorgeous” dick murmured, licking a clean stripe on your cleavage before moaning from your pussy clamping around him. “let me see you make a mess f' me”
—
JASON TODD — ass
now dont get me wrong, jason todd loves every part and curve of your body. but if he had to choose, it would be your ass a million percent— bonus point for thighs too
honestly, he loves when there is something for him to grab on. yes, his hands would slither down your ass whenever you were sitting on his lap and talking to him about your day. yes, his hands would just rest between your thighs when sleeping
and yes, he would bend you anywhere just to see that back of yours arch and press your ass to his hips
a moan of jason’s name left your lips when you felt his cock give you another slow yet deep thrust, your walls fluttering from his size and arching your back to press your ass more for his length
when i meant he would bend you anywhere, i meant anywhere— including the kitchen counter
he would purposely send slow yet deep thrusts just to admire your ass, mesmerized by the way it kept making contact with his hips. it was enough for him to let out sounds of his own
“that’s it, sweetheart” jason grunted with another roll of his hips to send to your pussy, gripping your thighs to keep them spread and pinning his eyes on your ass. “just keep that ass up for me”
—
TIM DRAKE — boobs
timothy jackson wayne-drake is a boobs man, no argument needed
i mean, let’s be for real. it’s no stranger that tim was a workaholic and was often stressed from juggling his two secret lives as tim drake and red robin
but all it took to relieve himself off that stress was to have you sit on his lap and fondle your boob with one hand like a stress toy while the other was mindlessly clicking his mouse
“tim” you whined to get his attention, making him hum back a response without looking away from the monitor and still fondling your boob. the fact that he’s not paying attention to you made the heat between your legs unbearable
so unbearable you would start to slowly grind your clothed cunt on his thigh, biting your bottom lip to conceal your sounds as your eyes stayed focused on tim— blue eyes concentrated on the monitors, blue light reflecting the features of his face and lips pressed into a thin line from how focused he was
“tim please” you panted before a small moan left your lips, arching your back to press your boob more into his hand and trying everything you can to satisfy the aching heat in your core. “need you so bad”
you realized you finally caught his attention when his hand squeezed your boob a bit more, making you let out a whimper and place a hand on his cheek, wanting him to look at you and do something about your urge
“i know, love. i know” tim murmured softly, clicking another piece of evidence with his mouse and circling your nipple with his thumb. “im almost done with work. slide a finger in for me in the meantime, yeah?”
—
CLARK KENT — ass
guys, he’s a farmer’s boy. what else did you expect?
everytime you walked away from him to get or do something, clark’s eyes would always and i mean always trail down to your ass and how it swayed with your walk. and everytime, he would immediately fluster under his glasses and look away, pushing his glasses up as a nervous habit
but when you two were in bed and you were sitting on his face, the last thing this man would be was nervous
“more” clark blabbered on your cunt, gripping and squeezing your ass with your large hands as his mouth. only to bury your cunt more into his mouth and suffocate his face in the best way possible. “moremoremoremore—“
clark could be asking more for two things. more for your delicious pussy that he could never get over or more for his hands to continue fondling and squeezing your ass— knowing him, its both
you moaned from his nose now nudging your clit, tightening your grip on his hair and arching your back more on his mouth. “c-clark… oh my god”
your ass was spread more by clark’s hands that refused to let go and the angle his tongue reached in you made a loud moan of his name leave your lips, now grinding your clit on his nose for more
poor man couldn’t get enough that his hands on your ass kept pushing your soaked pussy more into his mouth, so much so that you thought he was gonna suffocate between your thighs
“taste so good, honey” this man was so pussy drunk it was pathetic. “wanna stay here forever”
—
SUPERBOY PRIME — boobs
clark kent may be superboy but he was still a #loser at heart, which was why he almost never let go of your boobs when he could.
when clark came back home after his shift at the comic store? he let out a tired sigh and immediately walked towards you, already lifting your shirt up and murmuring about his tired day with his face shoved in your boobs
when he would hug you from behind? his hands would slide under your shirt and trail up to cup your boobs. and he’d let out a small whine whenever you’d take his hands off
it’s safe to say that clark kent was obsessed with your boobs. so much so that when your legs were around his waist and his cock was disappearing in and out of you, his hands were groping your boobs. gripping them and playing with your nipples between his fingers as your soft sounds were entering his ears like a melody
“you’re so hot, babe” clark moaned with another thrust to keep up with his pace and depth. “feelin’ amazing, in and out” he gave your boobs another squeeze to make his point
the sounds were quick ‘clap!clap!clap!’ sounds repeating over and over and over in the room
his touch, his words, it was sending you into a frenzy. all you could do was moan and pant endlessly, arching your back and pressing your boobs more into his hands with a whine of his name leaving your lips, throwing your head back into the pillows with a pornographic expression on your pretty face
the new angle made him whimper out “shitshitshitshiiiit” and thrust his cock deeper in your pussy, feeling your pussy suck him in more and his cock already twitching. “im gonna cum already, baby”
—
ROY HARPER — ass
abosutely LOVES your ass its almost unhealthy
roy tries to keep his hands to himself whenever lian is in the same room as him (because he doesn’t play with his babygirl).
but when he looks over her shoulder during their pretend tea time and sees you bending down while rummaging through a cabinet… don’t get me started on that
his eyes would go to your ass and he quietly bites his bottom lip to hold back a grin and those dirty thoughts of his— before lian would make him snap out of it by reminding him to finish his ‘tea’, innocently oblivious from how distracted her dad was
but the minute lian left for a sleepover, the first thing roy made sure to do was to drag you in the bedroom and have you do reverse cowgirl
“uh huh, just like that” he panted, hands gripping on your waist t and watching your ass bouncing back and forth on his cock. a groan slipped out of his lips. “fuuuck, i love this ass. could stare at her all day”
the drag roy’s cock was giving you felt so good it was making you arch your back and moan for more, the wet sounds so filthy and loud it made you thank god lian wasn’t home
“royyy” you whined, feeling the pace of your hips falter despite your orgam just starting to build up in you. “c-cant… need you to t-take over”
you didn’t have to ask him twice. immediately, roy’s hands on your waist took over by dragging your warm walls more onto his length. you felt so warm that he couldn’t help but move his hips back on your ass and knock his head back onto the headboard with a moan
“attagirl” he let out a breathless chuckle from your sounds, lowering his head to admire the view one more time. “just sit there with that pretty ass and let roy do the work, yeah?”
—
WALLY WEST — boobs
if there wasn’t a day where wally west didn’t show love to your boobs, i can assure you that is not him
he loved your boobs. the warmth, the softness, the size, everything. burying his face in your chest with a lopsided grin was wally’s favorite thing to do in the world; nothing sensual, just him absorbing your body warmth and keeping you close to him
can we say he loved them too much? .. maybe
“w-wally! fuck!” you moaned, knocking your head back and burying your hands more into his ginger locks. wally’s mouth was full with the swell of your boob, sucking it while using his super speed to flick your hard nipple with his tongue. his hand gave your other boob attention by fondling it
you can feel your boob practically drenched with his saliva, the sensation of his warm tongue going at such a fast pace driving you crazy.
wally let out a muffled moan when you arched your back and pressed your boob more into his mouth, sliding another hand down to rub a slow circle on your clit with his thumb and hearing a breathless gasp leave you.
“fuck, you’re soaked” he said on your boob. “and i didn’t even touch you properly.” the vibrations of his voice making your clit throb in anticipation. and of course, wally just had to grin from that
“wally…” you panted, bringing your head up to look down at him with pleading eyes. “please.. i need you...”
“shh i know, beautiful” his fingers was tracing your entrance, feeling your folds pulse from how you need him in you. “let me finish giving my girls more attention and ill get back to her later”
—
—————————————————————————
(@patientofarkhamasylum enjoy <3) okay why tf did this take me three days to write bruh.. bring back the olden days where i would have finished this in one go
Warnings: objectification, anxiety/panic, sexual tension, non-explicit nudity, consent and boundaries, purity culture, references to past violence
Summary:
No one touches her in this chapter.
Somehow, that does not make it less intimate.
🛡️⚜️👑⚜️🛡️
By the third fitting, you had decided Prince Adrian deserved to drown at sea.
It was not a serious thought. Probably. You had never met him, and murder before introduction was the sort of thing your mother called politically inconvenient. Still, as you stood on a low platform in the center of your dressing room with three seamstresses kneeling at your hem, two ladies-in-waiting watching from the cushioned bench, Mistress Alis holding a folio like a weapon, and the royal dressmaker frowning at your waist as if it had personally complicated diplomacy, you felt the idea had merit.
Prince Adrian was not even in the kingdom yet, and already he had become everyone’s favorite excuse to torment you.
“Lift your arm, Your Highness,” Madame Isera said around a mouthful of pins.
You lifted your arm.
“Not so high.”
You lowered it.
“Now the other.”
You gave her the other.
“Shoulders back.”
“My shoulders are back.”
“Softly back.”
You looked down at her. “Is there a court version of softly back, or am I meant to guess?”
One of your ladies made a strangled sound behind her hand. Mistress Alis did not react. She had been standing near the full-length mirror for the better part of an hour, making notes about fabric, posture, presentation, and several other subjects that would have been improved by her absence.
Your chambermaid, Elowen, stood near the wardrobe with a bundle of rejected sleeves over one arm and deep sympathy in her eyes. She was wise enough not to speak. She had been with you since you were twelve and knew better than to interfere once you began losing patience with clothing.
The gown was beautiful, which made you resent it more.
It was deep green silk threaded with gold at the cuffs and bodice, designed to complement the blue-and-silver banners of Veyr without looking as if your family had surrendered taste at the harbor. The skirts fell in heavy, elegant lines that made every step feel ceremonial. The bodice shaped your waist with ruthless competence and lifted your breasts in a way that had made Madame Isera hum thoughtfully and made you threaten, very calmly, to climb out the nearest window.
The nearest window was too narrow.
You had checked.
“You are slouching again,” Mistress Alis said.
“I am breathing.”
“Both can be managed.”
You turned your head slowly. “Do you breathe by appointment, Mistress Alis?”
This time, Lady Tamsin laughed before she could stop herself. She was the younger of the two ladies-in-waiting, recently married, pretty, and prone to looking guilty whenever she found you funny. The older one, Lady Veyna, gave her a disapproving glance that made her sit straighter.
Madame Isera tugged gently at the side seam. “The princess has a naturally athletic carriage. It can be accommodated.”
Athletic carriage.
That was a kinder way of saying what half the court muttered when they thought you could not hear. You had shoulders from swordwork and thighs from riding. Your waist was strong from hours in the yard, your arms shaped by years of drills, your palms marked in places no amount of rose oil could fully soften. You had curves too, because the gods had apparently enjoyed contradictions when making you: breasts the bodice insisted on presenting like diplomatic assets, hips that made formal skirts fall dramatically, and an ass Roy had once referred to as “strategically noticeable” before Jason kicked him under a banquet table hard enough to make him limp for ten minutes.
None of this had bothered you much before.
Your body was your body. It climbed, fought, bled, healed, carried knives, took bruises, and kept surviving. You had spent more hours in trousers than gowns by choice and had been called unladylike so often the word had lost all sting. If courtiers wanted a princess who moved like porcelain, they could commission a statue and let it bore them.
But this was different.
This was your body being adjusted for a man you had not met.
“Perhaps a narrower line through the waist,” Mistress Alis said. “Something to emphasize maturity without boldness.”
Madame Isera’s hands tightened very slightly in the fabric. “The gown already emphasizes Her Highness’s figure.”
“Yes, but Prince Adrian’s court favors refinement.”
You looked at Mistress Alis through the mirror. “How fortunate that my waist may assist with foreign policy.”
Lady Tamsin choked again.
Lady Veyna murmured, “Your Highness.”
“No, I am fascinated. Please continue. Shall we ask my ribs to sign a trade agreement?”
Mistress Alis closed her folio. “No one is objectifying you.”
The room went quiet.
It was such a foolish sentence that for a moment you only stared at her reflection. The seamstresses lowered their hands. Elowen’s mouth tightened. Even Madame Isera, who had survived royal tempers, court fashions, and one infamous winter when the queen declared orange silk unacceptable under any circumstance, looked abruptly interested in the carpet.
“No?” you asked.
Mistress Alis seemed to recognize, too late, that the ground beneath her had become unstable. “I mean only that these preparations are ordinary. Every princess who receives a suitor must consider how she is seen.”
There it was again.
Seen.
The word slid beneath the too-tight lacing and pressed against your lungs.
“How I am seen,” you repeated.
“Presentation matters.”
“To whom?”
“To everyone.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the truth.”
You turned carefully on the platform, ignoring Madame Isera’s alarmed gasp when one of the pins tugged free. “To Prince Adrian, then.”
Mistress Alis held your gaze. “Yes. Among others.”
“And how should he see me?”
The question hung in the dressing room like a drawn blade.
Lady Veyna looked at her hands. Lady Tamsin had gone pink. Elowen’s eyes flicked toward you, worried. Madame Isera began gathering loose pins with intense focus, as if she might escape the conversation by becoming very small and useful.
Mistress Alis lifted her chin. “As a suitable match.”
You smiled.
It felt ugly.
“Suitable,” you said. “Refined, mature, soft enough not to frighten him, modest enough not to challenge him, shaped correctly enough to interest him, and covered carefully enough to protect him from believing I knew what my own breasts were before he arrived.”
Lady Tamsin whispered your name.
Mistress Alis went pale. “Your Highness, that is vulgar.”
“No,” you said. “It is accurate. You dislike that more.”
Madame Isera stood quickly. “Perhaps we should pause.”
“Yes,” you said.
Mistress Alis stepped forward. “The fitting is not complete.”
“It is for now.”
“The prince arrives in eleven days.”
“Then he has eleven days to develop better eyesight.”
You reached behind yourself for the lacing at your back, found only knots, pins, and the infuriating architecture of the gown. Your fingers caught on silk. A seamstress made a distressed noise. You did not care. Panic had begun coiling low in your chest again, smaller than the day before but hotter, sharpened now by embarrassment.
You were suddenly aware of everything.
The mirror. The watching women. The shape of your waist. The lift of the bodice. The weight of skirts around your legs. The cool air touching the upper swell of your breasts where the neckline sat lower than anything you would choose for yourself. The knowledge that this gown had been designed so a foreign prince could look at you and find meaning in what he saw.
You had faced men with knives and felt less exposed.
Elowen moved first, setting the sleeves aside and stepping toward you with practical urgency. “Let me help, Your Highness.”
You let her. Barely.
Her fingers were quick with the worst of the pins, freeing the overskirt and loosening the back of the gown enough that you could breathe. Madame Isera murmured something about creasing the silk, but she said it softly, and when you looked down at her, she stopped saying it altogether.
Mistress Alis drew herself up. “You cannot simply walk away because a discussion has become uncomfortable.”
“I can do several things because a discussion has become uncomfortable.”
“Princess.”
That did it.
You stepped off the platform, skirts dragging, bodice half-laced, hair coming loose from its pins. “I have spent my entire life being taught to withstand discomfort. Hot baths. Long sermons. Court dinners. Broken fingers. Men explaining naval strategy badly. I can withstand discomfort. What I am finished with is standing still while you discuss my body like an embassy table.”
“You are overreacting.”
“You keep saying things as if they become true because you dislike my tone.”
Mistress Alis’s mouth pressed thin.
Your mother would have told you to breathe. Jason would have told you to lower your shoulder before you left yourself open. Roy would have said something ridiculous enough to make the room survivable.
None of them were in the dressing room.
Jason and Roy stood outside the main doors to your apartments because even your freedom from propriety had limits when seamstresses were pinning silk around your underthings. They had not seen the fitting itself, but they had heard enough. They always heard enough. That knowledge burned through you as you pushed past Elowen, through the dressing chamber, and toward the inner corridor of your apartments.
“Your Highness,” Elowen called, “the gown—”
“Can suffer.”
You swept into the hall, nearly tripped over the loosened hem, caught yourself on the wall, and kicked the nearest length of silk out of your way.
The two guards posted at the outer doors straightened when they saw you. They were palace men, not yours, and their eyes widened at the sight of you half-dressed and furious, which was the last mistake they made that afternoon.
“Look at the wall,” Jason snapped.
Both men looked at the wall.
You had not seen him move from the antechamber, but suddenly he was there, broad and dark and furious in a way that should have reassured you. Roy came a step behind him, his easy expression wiped clean. His gaze flicked over you once, not lingering, taking inventory the way guards did when something was wrong: no blood, no visible injury, no attacker, gown compromised, princess livid.
Then he looked away.
So did Jason.
That should have pleased you.
It did not.
You walked past them into the private wing of your apartments, dragging half the dignity of the court behind you in wrinkled green silk.
🛡️⚜️👑⚜️🛡️
Your private solar had never been what royal decorators wanted it to be.
They had given you a pretty room when you moved into the adult apartments at sixteen. Pale walls, delicate chairs, embroidered cushions, a harp you had touched exactly twice, and a little writing desk positioned to catch the morning light. Within three months, the harp had been relocated to a cousin who actually liked music, the delicate chairs had been replaced by heavier ones that could survive boots, and the writing desk had become a place to lay maps, knives, and unfinished books.
Now the room was yours in a way few parts of the palace were.
There was a hearth along the inner wall, usually unlit in summer. A long couch sat before it, wide enough for you to sprawl on while reading reports you were not supposed to have. There were shelves of books and treaty maps, a locked cabinet containing contraband sweets and several excellent throwing knives, a low table scarred by blade marks, and a pair of doors leading to a balcony that overlooked the old rose court. Roy had once claimed the room looked as if a scholar, a soldier, and a spoiled princess had fought for custody of it, and all three had won.
You loved it.
At the moment, you loved it because it had a door you could close.
You did close it, though Jason and Roy followed you inside before you could shut them out. That was their right and their duty. It also irritated you, which meant you did not know what feeling to put down first.
“You are bleeding?” Jason asked.
“No.”
“Did someone touch you?”
“No.”
“Threaten you?”
“Only with sleeves.”
Roy exhaled, slow and controlled. “Do not joke yet.”
You turned on him. “I will joke whenever I please.”
“You usually do.”
“And?”
“And when you joke like that, it means you are deciding whether to stab someone or cry.”
The accuracy of it was insulting.
You crossed the room and stopped near the hearth. The gown moved awkwardly around your legs, half-loosened and still too heavy. You reached behind yourself again, trying to find the remaining laces. Your fingers brushed knots, stays, fabric, and more pins. A sharp point caught your thumb.
You hissed.
Jason stepped forward before he caught himself. “Let Elowen help.”
“No.”
“Princess.”
“Elowen will fuss. Madame Isera will mourn the fabric. Mistress Alis will hover in the doorway like a judgmental ghost. I would rather be swallowed by the floor.”
Roy glanced toward the closed door. “That can probably be arranged if we ask the masons what happened in the east corridor last winter.”
“Not helpful.”
“I was trying to be comforting.”
“You are bad at it.”
“Only under pressure.”
Jason had turned partly away from you, which made anger flash hot through your embarrassment. His eyes were fixed on the balcony doors. His jaw was tight. The muscle near his temple jumped once.
Roy was looking at the rug.
You knew why. Of course you knew why. The gown had been loosened enough that the structured bodice sat improperly, one shoulder slipping lower than intended. Beneath it, your shift showed white against your chest and collarbone. Your hair had half fallen from its pins, your feet were bare because you had abandoned the formal shoes somewhere between the dressing platform and your private corridor, and the skirts were caught up enough to show a glimpse of ankle, calf, and the knife sheath strapped just below your knee.
It was not the most undressed they had ever seen you.
Jason had seen your back bare to the waist while a physician stitched a slash beneath your shoulder blade after the east tower attack. Roy had carried you through a rainstorm in a shirt soaked nearly transparent after your horse broke its leg on a ravine path. They had both seen you in training trousers torn at the thigh, in bandages, in blood, in armor half-fastened over your night shift when alarms rang before dawn.
You had never cared then.
You cared now.
The realization infuriated you so much that you yanked at the lacing again and nearly tore the bodice.
“Stop,” Jason said.
You froze.
He did too.
The word was not sharp this time. It was quiet, almost pained, but it still landed between you with the memory of the terms from the night before.
You released the fabric. “I am allowed to undress in my own rooms.”
“Yes.”
“Then stop looking like I have done something to you.”
Jason’s head turned slightly, though he still did not face you fully. “I am trying to respect you.”
“I know what respect looks like.”
“Do you?”
That struck harder than it should have.
Roy muttered Jason’s name, but Jason did not take it back.
You stood in the middle of your solar, half-trapped in silk and fury, and felt the panic of the fitting shift into something more complicated. “You have seen me in worse states.”
“This is different,” Jason said.
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
“Because it is.”
“Why?”
Roy rubbed both hands over his face. “Gods.”
You looked at him. “Do not ask them for help now. They let Mistress Alis exist.”
Despite himself, Roy laughed once. It broke some of the tension, not enough to make the room easy, but enough for him to look at you again. Carefully. His gaze went to your face first and stayed there.
“It is different,” he said, “because no one is bleeding, dying, freezing, or trying to kill you.”
“An improvement, surely.”
“Usually.”
You crossed your arms and immediately regretted it because the bodice shifted in a way that made both men look elsewhere again. Heat climbed your throat.
Roy noticed. His face softened.
That was worse.
You lifted your chin. “If either of you pity me, I will throw you from the balcony.”
“We are not pitying you,” Roy said.
“You look like you are.”
“I look like I am trying not to make anything worse.”
“That is a kind of pity.”
“It is a kind of terror, actually.”
Jason shot him a look.
Roy spread his hands. “What? She likes honesty.”
“I like useful honesty,” you said.
“Then yes, Princess, this is different because you noticed us noticing.”
Your breath caught.
Roy’s expression remained gentle, but he did not soften the words further. Jason had gone still beside the balcony doors.
You looked down first because, for once, you needed the reprieve. The gown looked ridiculous from above: expensive silk pulled askew, pins missing, laces loosened, the elegant line of the skirts ruined by your own hands. Beneath it, your body was the same body you had carried into a hundred training sessions, the same body you had refused to let court shame into stillness.
The same body that suddenly felt like a question.
“I hate this gown,” you said.
Roy accepted the change in subject with more grace than you deserved. “The gown has committed several crimes.”
“It makes me look like someone else.”
“No,” he said.
You looked at him.
His gaze flicked briefly over the dress, then back to your face. “It makes other people think they have succeeded in making you look like someone else. That is not the same thing.”
You did not know what to do with that.
Jason’s voice came from near the balcony. “The waist is too tight.”
You turned toward him. “That is your contribution?”
“It is restricting your breathing. The left shoulder is pinned badly. The hem is dangerous near stairs. You would have trouble drawing the blade at your back if the overskirt stayed fastened.”
Roy stared at him. “That is what you noticed?”
Jason looked back, flatly. “Yes.”
Liar.
The thought arrived so quickly it startled you.
Jason’s eyes returned to the balcony doors, and that was when you understood. He was telling the truth, but not all of it. Jason had noticed the dangers because Jason always noticed danger. He had noticed the fit because restrictive clothing could get you killed. He had noticed the knife access, the stairs, the bad pinning, and the breath trapped in your ribs.
He had noticed everything else too.
That was why he would not look.
The knowledge moved through you slowly, almost delicately. It did not feel like the fitting room. It did not feel like Mistress Alis’s notes or Madame Isera’s measuring tape or Lady Veyna’s careful warnings about presentation. This felt more like the moment before a practice bout turned real, when both fighters understood the next move would matter.
You drew a breath.
The lacing stopped it halfway.
“Help me out of it,” you said.
Jason’s answer came at once. “No.”
Roy’s came nearly on top of it. “Elowen can—”
“I am not asking Elowen.”
“You should,” Jason said.
“I am asking you.”
“No.”
You smiled without humor. “Was that your refusal or your panic?”
Jason turned then. Fully.
His eyes met yours, dark and controlled and furious with himself for reasons that were beginning to make sense. “It is my answer.”
The terms. Always the terms.
You pressed your lips together, then made yourself nod once. “Fine.”
Some of his tension eased. Not all of it.
You looked to Roy. “You?”
Roy’s throat worked. “I can help with the outer laces if Jason stands by the door and glares at the furniture.”
Jason’s face tightened. “Roy.”
“She is trapped in a gown and will rip it off with a dagger if nobody helps.”
“I was considering that,” you admitted.
“I know. That is why I am being practical.”
Jason’s gaze moved from Roy to you. “You are sure?”
The question was directed at you.
It should not have mattered as much as it did. You had asked. Roy had offered a limited answer. Jason was confirming, because the act itself was small and the context was not.
You swallowed. “Yes.”
Roy approached as if you were a skittish horse with a knife habit, which was unfair but not inaccurate. He stopped behind you, far enough away that you could still change your mind.
“Outer laces only,” he said. “Then I step back.”
You rolled your eyes because you needed to. “Yes, Sir Virtue.”
“Sir Virtue died in a dice game. I am his disappointing cousin.”
A laugh escaped you, thin but real.
Roy’s fingers touched the laces at your back.
They did not touch skin. They did not need to. The first gentle tug seemed to travel through every place the gown held you too tightly. Silk loosened. The bodice eased by a fraction. Air slipped deeper into your lungs. Roy worked quickly, his hands deft from years of bowstrings, bandages, knots, and the small, practical tasks guards did without ever being thanked for.
Jason stood near the door now, facing outward. His shoulders were rigid.
“You look ridiculous,” you told him.
“I am not looking.”
“That is the ridiculous part.”
Roy’s fingers paused. “Princess.”
“What?”
“Do not bait him while I am untying you from expensive diplomatic silk. My nerves are loyal but finite.”
You held still, though the temptation was severe.
The last outer lace gave. The gown relaxed around you, no longer a cage so much as a very costly inconvenience. Roy stepped back at once and came around to face you, stopping beside Jason rather than behind you. There was color high on his cheekbones.
You felt better.
You also felt more exposed.
The gown had slipped lower at one shoulder. The stays beneath remained firmly in place, plain cream fabric against your shift, structured but far less formal than the court bodice. Your collarbone was bare. Your throat was bare. The linen of your shift softened the line of your chest without hiding the shape the dressmaker had been discussing all afternoon. The heavy skirts still covered most of you, but the undone gown changed everything.
You were not naked.
You were not even indecent by the standards of a battlefield, a sickroom, or an emergency. By court standards, however, you had moved beyond presentable and into the dangerous territory of private.
Jason still faced the door.
Roy looked at your face.
You hated that you liked the difference.
🛡️⚜️👑⚜️🛡️
The next silence lasted long enough for the old solar clock to mark three uneven ticks.
You gathered the loosened gown in one hand and crossed to the couch, sitting with less grace than any princess in formal silk was meant to manage. The skirts pooled around you. You curled one bare foot under the edge of the fabric and left the other on the rug, ankle visible, knife sheath still strapped just above it.
Roy’s gaze dipped there for half a second.
You noticed.
So did he.
He closed his eyes briefly. “This chapter of my life will end with Jason murdering me.”
“You are assuming I will wait my turn,” Jason said.
You smiled despite yourself. “You are both very dramatic.”
Jason finally turned from the door, though he kept his gaze above your shoulders. “You wanted help out of the gown. You have it.”
“I wanted help out of the fitting.”
“That requires arson,” Roy said. “We can discuss logistics after supper.”
“I do not want logistics.”
“You always want logistics.”
You looked from one to the other. The charged air from before had changed, not vanished. It had stretched itself thinner, woven through the room until everything familiar felt newly dangerous. Roy by the table, Jason near the door, the blades in the cabinet, the books on the shelves, the couch where you had fallen asleep a dozen times with one or both of them standing watch nearby.
All of this had existed before.
The difference was that now you knew where to look.
“You said there are different kinds of looking,” you said.
Roy’s humor faded.
Jason’s eyes moved to yours.
You ran your fingers over a fold of green silk, smoothing it flat over your thigh. “The court looks to measure. Guards look to protect. Enemies look for weakness.”
Roy nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“And desire?”
Neither answered at once.
That silence was answer enough to make your pulse change.
You sat straighter. “That is the next lesson.”
Jason’s face closed. “No.”
“You have been saying that often. It has become less impressive.”
“Good. Then you can hear it without flinching.”
You glared at him. “I did not flinch.”
“You did yesterday.”
Roy looked between you. “This feels like the kind of argument that starts with wording and ends with furniture damage.”
You ignored him. “I am not asking either of you to touch me.”
“I know,” Jason said.
“I am not asking you to undress me further.”
“I know.”
“I am asking you to explain the thing everyone keeps pretending is either too shameful to name or too delicate for me to understand.”
“You are asking us to look at you.”
The bluntness of it made heat rise beneath your skin.
You forced yourself not to look away. “Yes.”
Jason’s gaze held yours for a beat, then lowered no farther than your mouth before snapping away again. That tiny failure did more to you than a compliment would have.
Roy saw it. His expression turned careful.
You drew a breath and corrected yourself because the terms deserved it, and because you hated that Jason had been right about how easily you hid behind command. “I am not ordering you to look.”
Jason’s attention returned to you.
“It is a request,” you said.
Roy’s eyes softened. “That was well done.”
“I am not a dog learning to sit.”
“No,” he said. “You would bite the trainer.”
“Only if the trainer were slow.”
Jason exhaled, almost a laugh.
The sound steadied you. It made the room feel less like a cliff and more like a place where falling might not kill you.
Roy came around the low table and sat in the chair across from the couch, not too close. Jason remained standing, which surprised exactly no one.
“Then we answer first,” Roy said. “Before anything else.”
You nodded.
“There is looking that takes,” he said. “You know that kind. Men in court do it when they think rank makes them invisible. They look at your title and your body at the same time, and you can feel them deciding what each part might be worth.”
Your fingers tightened in the silk.
Roy saw and continued carefully. “There is looking that measures. Tailors, advisors, painters, ambassadors, the whole cursed palace before a formal event. Sometimes they mean no harm. Sometimes harm is not the point. They still make you feel like a thing being arranged.”
You thought of Madame Isera’s pins, Mistress Alis’s folio, Lady Veyna’s quiet concern, your mother’s unfinished apology.
“Yes,” you said.
“Guards look differently.” His mouth quirked. “Mostly. We look for danger. Hidden hands. Strange movement. Bad exits. Poison. Archers. People standing where they should not stand. Whether your hem will trip you near stairs.”
Jason grunted.
“You look for knives,” you said.
“I look for everything,” Jason corrected.
“You missed my eighth dagger yesterday.”
Roy pointed at him. “She did get you there.”
Jason ignored both of you. “Desire is different.”
The word settled over the room again, heavier than silk.
Roy glanced at him, then took over when Jason did not continue. “Desire notices without needing an excuse. It notices because looking feels good and dangerous and sometimes impossible to stop. It can be gentle. It can be greedy. It can be respectful. It can be a warning. The difference is what the person does after they notice.”
You looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“A decent man can want and still keep his hands to himself. He can look because he has been invited, and stop when he has not. He can admire without collecting. He can be affected without making that your burden.”
The words sank into you slowly.
You had been admired before, or at least praised in ways meant to sound like admiration. Court compliments were rarely simple. Men told you your gown suited you when they meant your family’s alliance would suit them. They praised your wit while hoping you would use less of it. They admired your spirit until your spirit inconvenienced them. Even kind compliments came wrapped in expectations, as if beauty were a room someone else had built and you were merely expected to stand in it correctly.
“What if I want it to be my burden?” you asked.
Roy’s eyes darkened. Jason went very still.
You realized what you had said a breath too late.
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” Roy said, although his voice had changed.
“Do you?”
“I think so.” He leaned back in the chair, not closer, never closer. “Sometimes being wanted feels powerful because someone sees you and you choose what to do with it. That can be good. Very good.”
The last two words were quiet enough to make your stomach tighten.
Jason’s jaw flexed.
You looked toward him. “Do you disagree?”
“No.”
“You look like you disagree.”
“I look like I am thinking.”
“You look like you are being executed by thought.”
Roy nodded. “Common Jason expression.”
Jason gave him a look, then returned his attention to you. This time, he did not look away from your face. “Being desired can feel like power. It can also make you vulnerable. Both matter.”
“You are very committed to ruining everything pleasant with warnings.”
“I am committed to you surviving pleasant things too.”
The sentence caught you unexpectedly.
Roy went quiet again.
You studied Jason, trying to understand the line of him in the low light: the broad shoulders held too stiffly, the crossed arms, the guarded face. The careful distance. Always the distance. If Roy made desire sound like warmth and laughter and the delicious danger of being admired, Jason made it sound like a blade laid gently in your hand, hilt first, edge turned away from your skin.
You understood why you needed both.
“All right,” you said.
Roy tipped his head. “All right?”
“Look at me.”
Jason’s answer was immediate. “No.”
You threw a cushion at him.
He caught it one-handed.
Roy coughed into his fist.
“I was asking,” you said.
“You were provoking.”
“I am capable of both.”
“We know,” Roy said.
Jason set the cushion on the nearest chair with ridiculous care. “Why?”
You blinked. “Why what?”
“Why do you want this?”
You almost snapped because snapping was easy, and because questions like that felt too close to being denied. Then you remembered the night before. Terms. Truth. No hiding behind the crown. No turning fear into command.
You looked down at the gown around your body. “Because they looked at me all afternoon like I was not inside the body they were discussing.”
Neither of them spoke.
Your voice steadied as you continued. “Because they kept saying Prince Adrian should see me properly, and what they meant was that he should see whatever version of me makes him interested without making him cautious. Because I have been seen by painters, advisors, tutors, guards, enemies, physicians, and half the court, and all of them were looking for something. Lineage. Weakness. Health. Threat. Obedience. Marriageability. Trouble.”
Roy’s mouth curved faintly at the last word, but his eyes stayed serious.
You lifted your gaze. “I want to know what it feels like when the looking is mine too.”
Jason’s expression changed.
It was very small. The kind of shift someone else might mistake for nothing. But you knew his face in the way one learned weather before battle. Something in him softened and tightened at once, an old instinct striking a new wound.
Roy drew a slow breath. “Then yes.”
Your eyes moved to him.
He did not look away. “I can look.”
You swallowed. “You can stop.”
“So can you.”
“I know.”
He smiled. “Good.”
Then Roy looked at you.
At first, it was almost disappointing.
His gaze stayed on your face, warm and familiar, the same kind of attention he gave you when you were speaking in council and he wanted you to know he had caught the insult hidden in a minister’s polite phrasing. Then his eyes lowered, carefully enough that every movement felt offered rather than taken. He looked at your hair, half-pinned and messy around the sharpened hairpin. He looked at your throat, your bare collarbone, the shoulder where the gown had slipped, the structured line of your stays over the shift, the place where the loosened silk folded over your waist.
You felt each glance without being touched.
It should have made you want to cover yourself.
It did not.
Your hand curled in the silk, and Roy saw that too. His mouth softened. “You look like you fought the entire court wardrobe and won by dishonorable means.”
A laugh burst out of you before you could stop it.
His smile widened. “There she is.”
“That is your compliment?”
“It is my opening compliment. I was building momentum.”
“You need momentum to compliment me?”
“Princess, complimenting you honestly while Jason stands there looking like a thundercloud with murder training requires courage.”
“I am not stopping you,” Jason said.
“You are spiritually stopping me.”
You laughed again, and this time it came easier. Some of the tightness in your chest unwound. Roy looked pleased, but not triumphant. That mattered too. He had made you laugh without turning the moment into a joke.
His gaze dipped again, slower this time, and the humor in his face gentled into something else.
“You are beautiful,” he said.
The simplicity of it almost made you flinch.
Court men had said it before. Visiting lords, poets, cousins by marriage who drank too much wine at feasts. Beautiful princess was one of those phrases the world produced without thought, as meaningless as lovely weather or fine music. But Roy said it like he had considered other words and decided this one was true enough to stand alone.
“You say that like it is obvious,” you said.
“It is.”
“I was covered in sand yesterday.”
“You were beautiful then too.”
Your throat went tight.
Roy’s voice remained light, but only because he was choosing to be kind with it. “Infuriating, armed past reason, and one wrong step away from giving the captain of the guard a permanent headache, but beautiful.”
You looked down, overwhelmed by the tenderness of being insulted accurately.
“And now?” you asked.
Roy’s smile changed. “Now you look like someone tried to make you soft and only managed to prove they have never understood what softness is.”
You did not know what to do with that either.
He continued, quieter. “There is nothing wrong with the silk. There is nothing wrong with the shape of you in it. That is not the part they ruined.”
Your fingers loosened in the gown.
“What did they ruin?” you asked.
“They tried to make you feel like being seen meant being handed over.”
The words landed exactly where the panic had lived.
Your breath went thin.
Roy leaned forward, just a little, then stopped himself. “It does not.”
You believed him.
Not completely, perhaps. Not enough to undo years of silence in a single afternoon. But enough that the room felt steadier. Enough that you could sit in half-laced silk under a man’s admiring gaze and understand that nothing had been taken from you.
You looked at Jason.
He was still standing. Still controlled. Still watching Roy as much as he watched you, perhaps because it was easier to assess another man’s desire than admit his own.
“You are quiet,” you said.
“I know.”
“Are you angry?”
“Yes.”
Roy sighed.
You lifted your chin. “At me?”
Jason’s eyes cut to yours. “No.”
“At Roy?”
“Always a little,” Roy said.
Jason ignored him. “At the room they put you in. At the things they said. At the fact that you had to ask us because everyone else failed you first.”
The anger in his voice should have made the room colder. Instead, it warmed something low in your chest, dark and unsteady.
“And at yourself?” you asked.
Jason’s mouth tightened.
There it was.
Roy looked down.
You stood before you could think better of it.
The loosened gown fell around you with a heavy whisper. Roy straightened but stayed seated. Jason’s attention sharpened at once, alert to movement, to imbalance, to every possible danger in a room that held none except the one all three of you had invited inside.
You stepped out of the worst tangle of skirt and let the overdress slide from one shoulder. The fabric slipped lower, still caught at your waist, leaving you in the stays and shift beneath, the green silk gathered around your hips and trailing behind you.
Jason looked away.
It hurt.
That startled you more than anything else had.
“Do not,” you said.
His eyes closed.
You did not move closer. “That was not an order.”
“No,” he said, voice rough. “It was a request.”
“Yes.”
“Then do you understand what you are asking?”
The question scraped against your temper. “Do you understand how tired I am of being asked that?”
His gaze returned to yours, and this time there was no distance in it. “Yes.”
The honesty stopped you.
Jason took a breath. “I am not asking because I think you are foolish. I am asking because if I look at you now, it will not be the way I looked when you were bleeding, or cold, or half-conscious after an attack. It will not be security. It will not be duty. It will not be something I can pretend is clean because I am your guard and you are my responsibility.”
Roy was motionless.
Your heartbeat struck hard once, then again.
Jason’s voice lowered. “If I look, you will know.”
The room seemed to narrow around him.
You felt the choice with terrifying clarity. It was not theoretical now. It was no longer a discussion of men, desire, courtship, and Prince Adrian. It was Jason standing in your private solar, asking whether you understood that his restraint had never been indifference.
You could tell him to stop.
You could tell him to leave.
You could put the gown back over your shoulder and summon Elowen and let the day retreat into something manageable.
Instead, you stood with your bare foot on the rug, silk at your hips, knives hidden beneath the remnants of formal clothing, and made yourself answer without crown or command.
“I want to know,” you said.
Jason went still.
Roy whispered a curse under his breath, not at you.
Jason looked.
It was not like Roy.
Roy’s looking had been warm, careful, admiring in a way that gave you room to laugh. Jason’s gaze moved over you like the first touch of a storm before rain, slow and charged and almost unbearably controlled. He looked at your hair, your throat, the line of your shoulder, the place where the shift softened against your chest above the stays. He looked at your waist, the loosened silk gathered there, the strength in your arms, the bruising near one elbow from practice, the knife strapped at your calf where the skirt had fallen open enough to reveal it.
He saw all of it.
That was the difference.
Not your breasts, your hips, your skin, or the parts of you the court had spent the afternoon trying to arrange into invitation. He saw those too; you could tell, because he was a man and because the air between you changed where his gaze went. But he saw the rest of you at the same time. The bruises. The weapons. The stubborn line of your jaw. The fact that you were frightened and refusing to retreat from it. The spoiled, sharp-tongued princess who had demanded sword lessons until the palace surrendered. The woman standing in silk she hated because everyone else kept trying to decide what her body meant.
Jason looked at you like leaving the room would cost him something.
And because he had taught you the language for it, you knew.
Your breath came shallowly. “Is that desire?”
Jason’s eyes lifted to yours.
“Yes.”
The word was quiet and absolute.
Roy looked at him, then at you, and something in his expression made your chest ache. He was affected too. You could see it now, knew how to read the care in his posture, the tension in his hands, the way humor had become something he held back for your sake.
But Jason’s yes had shifted the room.
You swallowed. “It does not feel like I thought it would.”
Roy’s voice was gentle. “What did you think it would feel like?”
“Smaller.”
Jason’s face changed.
You looked down at yourself, at the exposed shift, the stays, the silk caught around your hips, your bare foot against the rug, the knife at your leg. “I thought being looked at this way would feel like losing something.”
Roy said nothing.
Jason’s voice came low. “And does it?”
You considered lying because the truth made you feel unsteady. Then you remembered the terms.
“No,” you said. “It feels like holding a weapon I have not learned how to use yet.”
Roy’s mouth curved, slow and bright with something like wonder. “That sounds like you.”
You smiled back before you could help it.
Jason did not smile. He looked as though your answer had hurt him and relieved him in equal measure.
You shifted your weight, and the silk rustled around your legs. Both men noticed. This time, neither pretended they had not.
A strange confidence moved through you, thin but real. It was not the brittle confidence of rank or temper, not the kind that made ministers stumble and servants hurry. It was quieter than that. More intimate. A choice settling into your body.
You lifted the fallen edge of the gown and let it slip another inch down your arm.
Jason’s hand flexed at his side.
Roy breathed out through his nose.
You stopped there. Not because you were afraid, though perhaps you were that too. Because you wanted to see whether stopping could be part of the lesson.
It was.
Neither man moved toward you. Neither asked for more. Neither filled the silence with hunger and called it permission.
Roy’s gaze returned to your face. “You can put it back on.”
“I know.”
“You can take it off.”
Jason’s eyes cut to him.
Roy did not look away from you. “With Elowen’s help. Or alone. Or with no one. Or later. Or never, if you decide to burn it.”
“I like that option.”
“I thought you might.”
You gathered the loosened gown against yourself, though not as quickly as you might have before. “What am I supposed to do when someone looks at me like that?”
Roy’s answer came after a pause. “Decide whether you want him to stop.”
The simplicity of it struck harder than all of Mistress Alis’s careful warnings.
You looked at Jason.
He was not looking away now.
“And if I don’t?” you asked.
The silence that followed was no longer empty. It was full of every rule from the night before, every line drawn and redrawn, every word the court had refused to give you and every truth these two men had placed carefully in your hands.
Jason’s gaze held yours.
“Then you decide what you want him to do next,” he said.
Your pulse jumped.
Roy closed his eyes for one brief second, then opened them again, warmth and warning both written across his face.
You held the gown against your body and smiled despite the heat in your cheeks. It was not your court smile. It was not the pretty thing tutors had trained into you, measured and polished and safe enough to offer visiting princes.
It was yours.
“Then I suppose,” you said, “the next lesson should be about asking.”
Jason looked as if the gods had personally abandoned him.
Roy laughed, low and helpless, and the sound moved through the room like sparks catching in kindling.
Outside your private solar, the palace continued preparing for Prince Adrian. Somewhere, Mistress Alis was probably recovering her dignity. Madame Isera was grieving over creased silk. Your mother was perhaps planning another conversation she did not know how to begin.
a/n: a present for my dear friend @skeeets that I hope you all enjoy as well :)
cw: heavy sexual tension, exchange of favor for goods (reader is willing), makeouts, Roy is partially nude/objectified, gn!reader
masterlist ao3 requests
PREVIEW:
You need a gift for your friend, but lack the funds to pay for it. It turns out that Roy has an excellent bargain for you instead.
Blacksmith!Roy Harper/Reader
You find yourself walking in careful, dedicated fashion to a place in town you’ve frequented on errand for before: but never in purpose like this.
There’s something shameful, something almost hesitant in the way that you make determined tread down this dusty road that kicks up refuse onto your boots, your clothes. Marking you as down in the dirt where you feel yourself no better in the ascension.
But still you walk to an oft-used corner of town, well-attended and belching smoke in thick issue from voluminous chimney. With it, as you draw in closer proximity, is the discordant clang of honed steel hammered in corrective rhythm.
And as the distance is made in shorter duration with each continuous stride, so too is the person who wields such tools in masterful motion.
You know him as well as everyone does in town; Roy. Roy the blacksmith, who crafts such fine furnishings that have populated the walls of the townsfolk, spooned food in countless meals to open mouths, cobbled furniture that has housed many a weary body.
Roy, the blacksmith, with mellow, unassuming demeanor. Who is patient with capricious customers and firm with those demanding unfair return of goods and services exchanged.
Who has few enemies but perhaps fewer friends that know him in the confidence of that low, untroubled diction:
Roy, the blacksmith. Whomst you search for his figure illuminated in the cesspool of the forge, made celestial body incandescent with the glow of roaring flame and evaporating smoke. Who wears little more than the trousers that hang low on the cut of those muscular hips, and the boots he walks about town in.
Who glistens with the sweat he has accumulated from the hours he toils making necessities for the town, from when the dawn crests over the horizon, until late in the hours.
Roy, who swings down the coil of prominent arm to levy the hammer into a flat piece of iron. So of proficiency is he that you can determine the tang of the blade will make a fine sword—once it is finished.
But as he directs the blow down onto the metal that yields to his ministration, sparks flare out in molten splatter. And they singe the ground where they leave scorched earth behind.
And Roy: who makes final percussive chord against the anvil he has made storied collection upon. And then, with masculine grunt muffled by the clenching grit of teeth, hefts the white-hot blade into the air—and douses it into sidelong bucket of water.
The hissing exhale of steam that gusts into the air, fills the room with such angry auditory outburst that it makes you hesitate in the doorway. The flames further stay your approach, scorching as you draw further into the fray.
But you have not gone unnoticed. His back is to the inferno, his front cloaked in shadow—yet those eyes in such blue dictation have alighted upon you.
He straightens, letting you see the sharp definition of those muscles, those arms, unfurl to full plateau. And Roy makes atmospheric transition from Roy the Blacksmith to Roy your fellow towns-person.
Which is, to say, the difference is marginal at best.
But when he says your name, there is something enunciated in the pronunciation of it, something rugged in the timbre. Something that makes a heat you desperately deny pool caramelized-honey-sweet in the juncture of your legs.
You remember the efficiency of words, and step further into the mutual blaze. “Good morning, Roy.”
“Good morning,” he returns back in coarse definition.
He watches you as his hand searches without looking for a rag in no better condition than his sullied body. He makes swipe against the terrain of his chest, leaving dearth of exertion on the skin: you struggle to move your gaze in more appropriate directions.
“What do you want me to make for you?” Roy asks before you have even supplied breathless continuation. Your hands make useless pirouette through the air as you dither about—he has taken the air out of your sails.
“Uh, I wanted to know if you would make something for my friend—”—You begin with halting demeanor.
How his eyes seem to grow more incendiary the longer they remain upon you, made stronger by degrees as he lopes a leg around the diameter of the anvil.
“Such as?” Roy is not impatient as he interrupts—he is of gruff encouragement, reaffirming your request will be heard. And perhaps this is what moves your body an instinctive step further, and another.
“Well,” you worry your fingers between each other in latticed intersection, “I had hoped that you would make them a cooking tool—a spoon rest.”
“A spoon rest?” He asks—again, it is not rude in bearings, but he is searching the archive of memory for a spoon rest. You progress with your claim.
“To hold a ladle when it is not being used,” you supply in protracted, halted manner; he continues to survey you with unmoving sway.
“She has been hired as a cook and I wanted to congratulate her,” you explain, taking another precarious step forward in plea yet made.
Roy makes a contemplative hum paired with another cursory dab behind his ears. The flat, toned anatomy of his stomach flexes and your own makes valiant swoop.
“How soon do you want it made?” Roy asks; something both heartens at acceptance of your request—and curdles in same intake of breath. You find your response only bolstered as you search for the unimpressive pouch you produce from the depths of your pocket.
And Roy waits in patience while you wallow in worry.
“That’s the thing,” you confess with the brevity of someone enunciating syllable to better expose the wound afresh, “I know you make fine quality. I want it made—”
At this, you allow your numb tread to lead you before him, to shuck in chiming melody what few gold coins you have to your name. That you have scarpered and scraped up for the purpose of this occasion. Though he makes no change in mien, one thing is clear to both of you.
It's not enough. Your eyes bear penitence, shame at having darkened his doorstep, wasted his time in this manner. So you seek to supply what you can with the slurry of words that jettison from your mouth.
“—And if it’s not enough, I understand. If there’s anything else I can do—”—Your eyes search the room for tasks left to swelter on the back-burner—“—Fetch water. Help to stoke the fire.”
It rings sour even as you articulate it, inferior substitute for compensation. Roy remains the unfettered silent, watching you in that unhurried way. You suppose he is formulating way to disappoint you most painlessly.
“If—if—”—You are less articulate the longer he does not speak—“—There is anything I can do—I only want to celebrate her.”
You finally permit yourself to look away from the dismal pile of coins to Roy. And to see that there is something in the cant of his eyes that is considering a thought not yet expressed.
You wait in suspense for only the briefest of silence. His voice sings through you as he holds up a hand: to fold your fingers closed over the pittance you offer him. His hand is warm and dry, rough with work earned over the years.
“Keep your money,” He informs you in low soothe, “And I will make you your gift.”
You feel like you cannot believe the truth divined before you. “I—I don't understand—”
“I will make it for you,” Roy gently interrupts, “If you give me a kiss.”
Here you draw still, the weight of the coins carrying gravity beyond what registers on the scale. Your heart takes spastic meter as it leaps the length of your throat, your eyes widening. The room scalds to threshold you did not think possible.
“I—”—You begin. Roy’s hand is a gentle squeeze over yours—he still has not moved the fan of those fingers.
“You don’t have to,” he murmurs, “But that will be my price.”
Your eyes sink to those full-bodied lips; terrain that you have openly thought of in whiling hours. Your tongue swipes across your own in involuntary swipe, and he savors the sight with careful observation. A gift in exchange for a gift—an offer you are certain, based off of gossip that darts through town square—that he has offered to none other.
A kiss. As long as you dictate it to be. You pocket the money in a moment dragging in glacial centimeter, already missing the way he kept your hand in secure grasp.
“Alright,” you resurface, looking up to him with resilience unbefitting such a task. Perhaps you imagine the smirk that curls that handsome mouth.
But you know you don’t imagine the search of a hand that marks territory on the apple of your cheek. That turns your face up to his to read the want that he bears like unspoken oath.
And the way he utters your name carries intention that you have not known. Not until now, when the corrective puzzle of retrospect suddenly slots into place.
But you have no time to consider this. Not as his mouth meets yours, lips moving to savor the shape of you to him.
His hands are careful, but they are insistent. One draws to the nape of your neck, the other searches for the swell of your hip, draws you close. And the heat of his lips move against yours, the wet lap of his tongue requesting entrance at the seam of unbidden words.
You cannot resist the moan against him as you open your mouth. Feeling the insistence of the muscle that seeks to taste you; that is desperate to feel the desire your own body works against him.
When your hands search to find purchase on the slick surface of his chest, warm with no give—a man’s body—Roy’s body—he makes needful groan.
Something melts: his teeth bump against yours in his fervor to keep you in this embrace, a jolt of pleasurable hurt that spreads honeyed through your body. That makes you pull him to you, makes you desperate to clasp more of him under your wanting fingers.
You don't realize the wall has met your back until he urges you against it, as his tongue makes further discovery that summons greedy noises from you. It is a parting that is made because you must breathe—though it seems as though Roy has no need for this.
Not when he is rewarded with the privilege of you in his arms, your mouth his to admire. You have to clutch to this man who holds you in his arms with a smoldering need he has only had to chance to voice now. S
houlders heave in paired tandem, mouths open, despairing of oxygen when all you want is to continue.
“May I—”—Your voice clotted, ragged—yet-satisfied—“—Can I kiss you more?”
He leans close, his body sheltered harbor for you to take refuge and delight in.
“Kiss me more and I’ll build you a ladder to the moon, honey.” His grasp coaxes you back to him. “Come here.”
And you don’t refuse the euphoria of his body, his lips, as he closes distance between you once more, with hunger you seek to match.
Warnings: objectification, anxiety/panic, sexual tension, non-explicit nudity, consent and boundaries, purity culture, references to past violence
Summary:
No one touches her in this chapter.
Somehow, that does not make it less intimate.
🛡️⚜️👑⚜️🛡️
By the third fitting, you had decided Prince Adrian deserved to drown at sea.
It was not a serious thought. Probably. You had never met him, and murder before introduction was the sort of thing your mother called politically inconvenient. Still, as you stood on a low platform in the center of your dressing room with three seamstresses kneeling at your hem, two ladies-in-waiting watching from the cushioned bench, Mistress Alis holding a folio like a weapon, and the royal dressmaker frowning at your waist as if it had personally complicated diplomacy, you felt the idea had merit.
Prince Adrian was not even in the kingdom yet, and already he had become everyone’s favorite excuse to torment you.
“Lift your arm, Your Highness,” Madame Isera said around a mouthful of pins.
You lifted your arm.
“Not so high.”
You lowered it.
“Now the other.”
You gave her the other.
“Shoulders back.”
“My shoulders are back.”
“Softly back.”
You looked down at her. “Is there a court version of softly back, or am I meant to guess?”
One of your ladies made a strangled sound behind her hand. Mistress Alis did not react. She had been standing near the full-length mirror for the better part of an hour, making notes about fabric, posture, presentation, and several other subjects that would have been improved by her absence.
Your chambermaid, Elowen, stood near the wardrobe with a bundle of rejected sleeves over one arm and deep sympathy in her eyes. She was wise enough not to speak. She had been with you since you were twelve and knew better than to interfere once you began losing patience with clothing.
The gown was beautiful, which made you resent it more.
It was deep green silk threaded with gold at the cuffs and bodice, designed to complement the blue-and-silver banners of Veyr without looking as if your family had surrendered taste at the harbor. The skirts fell in heavy, elegant lines that made every step feel ceremonial. The bodice shaped your waist with ruthless competence and lifted your breasts in a way that had made Madame Isera hum thoughtfully and made you threaten, very calmly, to climb out the nearest window.
The nearest window was too narrow.
You had checked.
“You are slouching again,” Mistress Alis said.
“I am breathing.”
“Both can be managed.”
You turned your head slowly. “Do you breathe by appointment, Mistress Alis?”
This time, Lady Tamsin laughed before she could stop herself. She was the younger of the two ladies-in-waiting, recently married, pretty, and prone to looking guilty whenever she found you funny. The older one, Lady Veyna, gave her a disapproving glance that made her sit straighter.
Madame Isera tugged gently at the side seam. “The princess has a naturally athletic carriage. It can be accommodated.”
Athletic carriage.
That was a kinder way of saying what half the court muttered when they thought you could not hear. You had shoulders from swordwork and thighs from riding. Your waist was strong from hours in the yard, your arms shaped by years of drills, your palms marked in places no amount of rose oil could fully soften. You had curves too, because the gods had apparently enjoyed contradictions when making you: breasts the bodice insisted on presenting like diplomatic assets, hips that made formal skirts fall dramatically, and an ass Roy had once referred to as “strategically noticeable” before Jason kicked him under a banquet table hard enough to make him limp for ten minutes.
None of this had bothered you much before.
Your body was your body. It climbed, fought, bled, healed, carried knives, took bruises, and kept surviving. You had spent more hours in trousers than gowns by choice and had been called unladylike so often the word had lost all sting. If courtiers wanted a princess who moved like porcelain, they could commission a statue and let it bore them.
But this was different.
This was your body being adjusted for a man you had not met.
“Perhaps a narrower line through the waist,” Mistress Alis said. “Something to emphasize maturity without boldness.”
Madame Isera’s hands tightened very slightly in the fabric. “The gown already emphasizes Her Highness’s figure.”
“Yes, but Prince Adrian’s court favors refinement.”
You looked at Mistress Alis through the mirror. “How fortunate that my waist may assist with foreign policy.”
Lady Tamsin choked again.
Lady Veyna murmured, “Your Highness.”
“No, I am fascinated. Please continue. Shall we ask my ribs to sign a trade agreement?”
Mistress Alis closed her folio. “No one is objectifying you.”
The room went quiet.
It was such a foolish sentence that for a moment you only stared at her reflection. The seamstresses lowered their hands. Elowen’s mouth tightened. Even Madame Isera, who had survived royal tempers, court fashions, and one infamous winter when the queen declared orange silk unacceptable under any circumstance, looked abruptly interested in the carpet.
“No?” you asked.
Mistress Alis seemed to recognize, too late, that the ground beneath her had become unstable. “I mean only that these preparations are ordinary. Every princess who receives a suitor must consider how she is seen.”
There it was again.
Seen.
The word slid beneath the too-tight lacing and pressed against your lungs.
“How I am seen,” you repeated.
“Presentation matters.”
“To whom?”
“To everyone.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the truth.”
You turned carefully on the platform, ignoring Madame Isera’s alarmed gasp when one of the pins tugged free. “To Prince Adrian, then.”
Mistress Alis held your gaze. “Yes. Among others.”
“And how should he see me?”
The question hung in the dressing room like a drawn blade.
Lady Veyna looked at her hands. Lady Tamsin had gone pink. Elowen’s eyes flicked toward you, worried. Madame Isera began gathering loose pins with intense focus, as if she might escape the conversation by becoming very small and useful.
Mistress Alis lifted her chin. “As a suitable match.”
You smiled.
It felt ugly.
“Suitable,” you said. “Refined, mature, soft enough not to frighten him, modest enough not to challenge him, shaped correctly enough to interest him, and covered carefully enough to protect him from believing I knew what my own breasts were before he arrived.”
Lady Tamsin whispered your name.
Mistress Alis went pale. “Your Highness, that is vulgar.”
“No,” you said. “It is accurate. You dislike that more.”
Madame Isera stood quickly. “Perhaps we should pause.”
“Yes,” you said.
Mistress Alis stepped forward. “The fitting is not complete.”
“It is for now.”
“The prince arrives in eleven days.”
“Then he has eleven days to develop better eyesight.”
You reached behind yourself for the lacing at your back, found only knots, pins, and the infuriating architecture of the gown. Your fingers caught on silk. A seamstress made a distressed noise. You did not care. Panic had begun coiling low in your chest again, smaller than the day before but hotter, sharpened now by embarrassment.
You were suddenly aware of everything.
The mirror. The watching women. The shape of your waist. The lift of the bodice. The weight of skirts around your legs. The cool air touching the upper swell of your breasts where the neckline sat lower than anything you would choose for yourself. The knowledge that this gown had been designed so a foreign prince could look at you and find meaning in what he saw.
You had faced men with knives and felt less exposed.
Elowen moved first, setting the sleeves aside and stepping toward you with practical urgency. “Let me help, Your Highness.”
You let her. Barely.
Her fingers were quick with the worst of the pins, freeing the overskirt and loosening the back of the gown enough that you could breathe. Madame Isera murmured something about creasing the silk, but she said it softly, and when you looked down at her, she stopped saying it altogether.
Mistress Alis drew herself up. “You cannot simply walk away because a discussion has become uncomfortable.”
“I can do several things because a discussion has become uncomfortable.”
“Princess.”
That did it.
You stepped off the platform, skirts dragging, bodice half-laced, hair coming loose from its pins. “I have spent my entire life being taught to withstand discomfort. Hot baths. Long sermons. Court dinners. Broken fingers. Men explaining naval strategy badly. I can withstand discomfort. What I am finished with is standing still while you discuss my body like an embassy table.”
“You are overreacting.”
“You keep saying things as if they become true because you dislike my tone.”
Mistress Alis’s mouth pressed thin.
Your mother would have told you to breathe. Jason would have told you to lower your shoulder before you left yourself open. Roy would have said something ridiculous enough to make the room survivable.
None of them were in the dressing room.
Jason and Roy stood outside the main doors to your apartments because even your freedom from propriety had limits when seamstresses were pinning silk around your underthings. They had not seen the fitting itself, but they had heard enough. They always heard enough. That knowledge burned through you as you pushed past Elowen, through the dressing chamber, and toward the inner corridor of your apartments.
“Your Highness,” Elowen called, “the gown—”
“Can suffer.”
You swept into the hall, nearly tripped over the loosened hem, caught yourself on the wall, and kicked the nearest length of silk out of your way.
The two guards posted at the outer doors straightened when they saw you. They were palace men, not yours, and their eyes widened at the sight of you half-dressed and furious, which was the last mistake they made that afternoon.
“Look at the wall,” Jason snapped.
Both men looked at the wall.
You had not seen him move from the antechamber, but suddenly he was there, broad and dark and furious in a way that should have reassured you. Roy came a step behind him, his easy expression wiped clean. His gaze flicked over you once, not lingering, taking inventory the way guards did when something was wrong: no blood, no visible injury, no attacker, gown compromised, princess livid.
Then he looked away.
So did Jason.
That should have pleased you.
It did not.
You walked past them into the private wing of your apartments, dragging half the dignity of the court behind you in wrinkled green silk.
🛡️⚜️👑⚜️🛡️
Your private solar had never been what royal decorators wanted it to be.
They had given you a pretty room when you moved into the adult apartments at sixteen. Pale walls, delicate chairs, embroidered cushions, a harp you had touched exactly twice, and a little writing desk positioned to catch the morning light. Within three months, the harp had been relocated to a cousin who actually liked music, the delicate chairs had been replaced by heavier ones that could survive boots, and the writing desk had become a place to lay maps, knives, and unfinished books.
Now the room was yours in a way few parts of the palace were.
There was a hearth along the inner wall, usually unlit in summer. A long couch sat before it, wide enough for you to sprawl on while reading reports you were not supposed to have. There were shelves of books and treaty maps, a locked cabinet containing contraband sweets and several excellent throwing knives, a low table scarred by blade marks, and a pair of doors leading to a balcony that overlooked the old rose court. Roy had once claimed the room looked as if a scholar, a soldier, and a spoiled princess had fought for custody of it, and all three had won.
You loved it.
At the moment, you loved it because it had a door you could close.
You did close it, though Jason and Roy followed you inside before you could shut them out. That was their right and their duty. It also irritated you, which meant you did not know what feeling to put down first.
“You are bleeding?” Jason asked.
“No.”
“Did someone touch you?”
“No.”
“Threaten you?”
“Only with sleeves.”
Roy exhaled, slow and controlled. “Do not joke yet.”
You turned on him. “I will joke whenever I please.”
“You usually do.”
“And?”
“And when you joke like that, it means you are deciding whether to stab someone or cry.”
The accuracy of it was insulting.
You crossed the room and stopped near the hearth. The gown moved awkwardly around your legs, half-loosened and still too heavy. You reached behind yourself again, trying to find the remaining laces. Your fingers brushed knots, stays, fabric, and more pins. A sharp point caught your thumb.
You hissed.
Jason stepped forward before he caught himself. “Let Elowen help.”
“No.”
“Princess.”
“Elowen will fuss. Madame Isera will mourn the fabric. Mistress Alis will hover in the doorway like a judgmental ghost. I would rather be swallowed by the floor.”
Roy glanced toward the closed door. “That can probably be arranged if we ask the masons what happened in the east corridor last winter.”
“Not helpful.”
“I was trying to be comforting.”
“You are bad at it.”
“Only under pressure.”
Jason had turned partly away from you, which made anger flash hot through your embarrassment. His eyes were fixed on the balcony doors. His jaw was tight. The muscle near his temple jumped once.
Roy was looking at the rug.
You knew why. Of course you knew why. The gown had been loosened enough that the structured bodice sat improperly, one shoulder slipping lower than intended. Beneath it, your shift showed white against your chest and collarbone. Your hair had half fallen from its pins, your feet were bare because you had abandoned the formal shoes somewhere between the dressing platform and your private corridor, and the skirts were caught up enough to show a glimpse of ankle, calf, and the knife sheath strapped just below your knee.
It was not the most undressed they had ever seen you.
Jason had seen your back bare to the waist while a physician stitched a slash beneath your shoulder blade after the east tower attack. Roy had carried you through a rainstorm in a shirt soaked nearly transparent after your horse broke its leg on a ravine path. They had both seen you in training trousers torn at the thigh, in bandages, in blood, in armor half-fastened over your night shift when alarms rang before dawn.
You had never cared then.
You cared now.
The realization infuriated you so much that you yanked at the lacing again and nearly tore the bodice.
“Stop,” Jason said.
You froze.
He did too.
The word was not sharp this time. It was quiet, almost pained, but it still landed between you with the memory of the terms from the night before.
You released the fabric. “I am allowed to undress in my own rooms.”
“Yes.”
“Then stop looking like I have done something to you.”
Jason’s head turned slightly, though he still did not face you fully. “I am trying to respect you.”
“I know what respect looks like.”
“Do you?”
That struck harder than it should have.
Roy muttered Jason’s name, but Jason did not take it back.
You stood in the middle of your solar, half-trapped in silk and fury, and felt the panic of the fitting shift into something more complicated. “You have seen me in worse states.”
“This is different,” Jason said.
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
“Because it is.”
“Why?”
Roy rubbed both hands over his face. “Gods.”
You looked at him. “Do not ask them for help now. They let Mistress Alis exist.”
Despite himself, Roy laughed once. It broke some of the tension, not enough to make the room easy, but enough for him to look at you again. Carefully. His gaze went to your face first and stayed there.
“It is different,” he said, “because no one is bleeding, dying, freezing, or trying to kill you.”
“An improvement, surely.”
“Usually.”
You crossed your arms and immediately regretted it because the bodice shifted in a way that made both men look elsewhere again. Heat climbed your throat.
Roy noticed. His face softened.
That was worse.
You lifted your chin. “If either of you pity me, I will throw you from the balcony.”
“We are not pitying you,” Roy said.
“You look like you are.”
“I look like I am trying not to make anything worse.”
“That is a kind of pity.”
“It is a kind of terror, actually.”
Jason shot him a look.
Roy spread his hands. “What? She likes honesty.”
“I like useful honesty,” you said.
“Then yes, Princess, this is different because you noticed us noticing.”
Your breath caught.
Roy’s expression remained gentle, but he did not soften the words further. Jason had gone still beside the balcony doors.
You looked down first because, for once, you needed the reprieve. The gown looked ridiculous from above: expensive silk pulled askew, pins missing, laces loosened, the elegant line of the skirts ruined by your own hands. Beneath it, your body was the same body you had carried into a hundred training sessions, the same body you had refused to let court shame into stillness.
The same body that suddenly felt like a question.
“I hate this gown,” you said.
Roy accepted the change in subject with more grace than you deserved. “The gown has committed several crimes.”
“It makes me look like someone else.”
“No,” he said.
You looked at him.
His gaze flicked briefly over the dress, then back to your face. “It makes other people think they have succeeded in making you look like someone else. That is not the same thing.”
You did not know what to do with that.
Jason’s voice came from near the balcony. “The waist is too tight.”
You turned toward him. “That is your contribution?”
“It is restricting your breathing. The left shoulder is pinned badly. The hem is dangerous near stairs. You would have trouble drawing the blade at your back if the overskirt stayed fastened.”
Roy stared at him. “That is what you noticed?”
Jason looked back, flatly. “Yes.”
Liar.
The thought arrived so quickly it startled you.
Jason’s eyes returned to the balcony doors, and that was when you understood. He was telling the truth, but not all of it. Jason had noticed the dangers because Jason always noticed danger. He had noticed the fit because restrictive clothing could get you killed. He had noticed the knife access, the stairs, the bad pinning, and the breath trapped in your ribs.
He had noticed everything else too.
That was why he would not look.
The knowledge moved through you slowly, almost delicately. It did not feel like the fitting room. It did not feel like Mistress Alis’s notes or Madame Isera’s measuring tape or Lady Veyna’s careful warnings about presentation. This felt more like the moment before a practice bout turned real, when both fighters understood the next move would matter.
You drew a breath.
The lacing stopped it halfway.
“Help me out of it,” you said.
Jason’s answer came at once. “No.”
Roy’s came nearly on top of it. “Elowen can—”
“I am not asking Elowen.”
“You should,” Jason said.
“I am asking you.”
“No.”
You smiled without humor. “Was that your refusal or your panic?”
Jason turned then. Fully.
His eyes met yours, dark and controlled and furious with himself for reasons that were beginning to make sense. “It is my answer.”
The terms. Always the terms.
You pressed your lips together, then made yourself nod once. “Fine.”
Some of his tension eased. Not all of it.
You looked to Roy. “You?”
Roy’s throat worked. “I can help with the outer laces if Jason stands by the door and glares at the furniture.”
Jason’s face tightened. “Roy.”
“She is trapped in a gown and will rip it off with a dagger if nobody helps.”
“I was considering that,” you admitted.
“I know. That is why I am being practical.”
Jason’s gaze moved from Roy to you. “You are sure?”
The question was directed at you.
It should not have mattered as much as it did. You had asked. Roy had offered a limited answer. Jason was confirming, because the act itself was small and the context was not.
You swallowed. “Yes.”
Roy approached as if you were a skittish horse with a knife habit, which was unfair but not inaccurate. He stopped behind you, far enough away that you could still change your mind.
“Outer laces only,” he said. “Then I step back.”
You rolled your eyes because you needed to. “Yes, Sir Virtue.”
“Sir Virtue died in a dice game. I am his disappointing cousin.”
A laugh escaped you, thin but real.
Roy’s fingers touched the laces at your back.
They did not touch skin. They did not need to. The first gentle tug seemed to travel through every place the gown held you too tightly. Silk loosened. The bodice eased by a fraction. Air slipped deeper into your lungs. Roy worked quickly, his hands deft from years of bowstrings, bandages, knots, and the small, practical tasks guards did without ever being thanked for.
Jason stood near the door now, facing outward. His shoulders were rigid.
“You look ridiculous,” you told him.
“I am not looking.”
“That is the ridiculous part.”
Roy’s fingers paused. “Princess.”
“What?”
“Do not bait him while I am untying you from expensive diplomatic silk. My nerves are loyal but finite.”
You held still, though the temptation was severe.
The last outer lace gave. The gown relaxed around you, no longer a cage so much as a very costly inconvenience. Roy stepped back at once and came around to face you, stopping beside Jason rather than behind you. There was color high on his cheekbones.
You felt better.
You also felt more exposed.
The gown had slipped lower at one shoulder. The stays beneath remained firmly in place, plain cream fabric against your shift, structured but far less formal than the court bodice. Your collarbone was bare. Your throat was bare. The linen of your shift softened the line of your chest without hiding the shape the dressmaker had been discussing all afternoon. The heavy skirts still covered most of you, but the undone gown changed everything.
You were not naked.
You were not even indecent by the standards of a battlefield, a sickroom, or an emergency. By court standards, however, you had moved beyond presentable and into the dangerous territory of private.
Jason still faced the door.
Roy looked at your face.
You hated that you liked the difference.
🛡️⚜️👑⚜️🛡️
The next silence lasted long enough for the old solar clock to mark three uneven ticks.
You gathered the loosened gown in one hand and crossed to the couch, sitting with less grace than any princess in formal silk was meant to manage. The skirts pooled around you. You curled one bare foot under the edge of the fabric and left the other on the rug, ankle visible, knife sheath still strapped just above it.
Roy’s gaze dipped there for half a second.
You noticed.
So did he.
He closed his eyes briefly. “This chapter of my life will end with Jason murdering me.”
“You are assuming I will wait my turn,” Jason said.
You smiled despite yourself. “You are both very dramatic.”
Jason finally turned from the door, though he kept his gaze above your shoulders. “You wanted help out of the gown. You have it.”
“I wanted help out of the fitting.”
“That requires arson,” Roy said. “We can discuss logistics after supper.”
“I do not want logistics.”
“You always want logistics.”
You looked from one to the other. The charged air from before had changed, not vanished. It had stretched itself thinner, woven through the room until everything familiar felt newly dangerous. Roy by the table, Jason near the door, the blades in the cabinet, the books on the shelves, the couch where you had fallen asleep a dozen times with one or both of them standing watch nearby.
All of this had existed before.
The difference was that now you knew where to look.
“You said there are different kinds of looking,” you said.
Roy’s humor faded.
Jason’s eyes moved to yours.
You ran your fingers over a fold of green silk, smoothing it flat over your thigh. “The court looks to measure. Guards look to protect. Enemies look for weakness.”
Roy nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“And desire?”
Neither answered at once.
That silence was answer enough to make your pulse change.
You sat straighter. “That is the next lesson.”
Jason’s face closed. “No.”
“You have been saying that often. It has become less impressive.”
“Good. Then you can hear it without flinching.”
You glared at him. “I did not flinch.”
“You did yesterday.”
Roy looked between you. “This feels like the kind of argument that starts with wording and ends with furniture damage.”
You ignored him. “I am not asking either of you to touch me.”
“I know,” Jason said.
“I am not asking you to undress me further.”
“I know.”
“I am asking you to explain the thing everyone keeps pretending is either too shameful to name or too delicate for me to understand.”
“You are asking us to look at you.”
The bluntness of it made heat rise beneath your skin.
You forced yourself not to look away. “Yes.”
Jason’s gaze held yours for a beat, then lowered no farther than your mouth before snapping away again. That tiny failure did more to you than a compliment would have.
Roy saw it. His expression turned careful.
You drew a breath and corrected yourself because the terms deserved it, and because you hated that Jason had been right about how easily you hid behind command. “I am not ordering you to look.”
Jason’s attention returned to you.
“It is a request,” you said.
Roy’s eyes softened. “That was well done.”
“I am not a dog learning to sit.”
“No,” he said. “You would bite the trainer.”
“Only if the trainer were slow.”
Jason exhaled, almost a laugh.
The sound steadied you. It made the room feel less like a cliff and more like a place where falling might not kill you.
Roy came around the low table and sat in the chair across from the couch, not too close. Jason remained standing, which surprised exactly no one.
“Then we answer first,” Roy said. “Before anything else.”
You nodded.
“There is looking that takes,” he said. “You know that kind. Men in court do it when they think rank makes them invisible. They look at your title and your body at the same time, and you can feel them deciding what each part might be worth.”
Your fingers tightened in the silk.
Roy saw and continued carefully. “There is looking that measures. Tailors, advisors, painters, ambassadors, the whole cursed palace before a formal event. Sometimes they mean no harm. Sometimes harm is not the point. They still make you feel like a thing being arranged.”
You thought of Madame Isera’s pins, Mistress Alis’s folio, Lady Veyna’s quiet concern, your mother’s unfinished apology.
“Yes,” you said.
“Guards look differently.” His mouth quirked. “Mostly. We look for danger. Hidden hands. Strange movement. Bad exits. Poison. Archers. People standing where they should not stand. Whether your hem will trip you near stairs.”
Jason grunted.
“You look for knives,” you said.
“I look for everything,” Jason corrected.
“You missed my eighth dagger yesterday.”
Roy pointed at him. “She did get you there.”
Jason ignored both of you. “Desire is different.”
The word settled over the room again, heavier than silk.
Roy glanced at him, then took over when Jason did not continue. “Desire notices without needing an excuse. It notices because looking feels good and dangerous and sometimes impossible to stop. It can be gentle. It can be greedy. It can be respectful. It can be a warning. The difference is what the person does after they notice.”
You looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“A decent man can want and still keep his hands to himself. He can look because he has been invited, and stop when he has not. He can admire without collecting. He can be affected without making that your burden.”
The words sank into you slowly.
You had been admired before, or at least praised in ways meant to sound like admiration. Court compliments were rarely simple. Men told you your gown suited you when they meant your family’s alliance would suit them. They praised your wit while hoping you would use less of it. They admired your spirit until your spirit inconvenienced them. Even kind compliments came wrapped in expectations, as if beauty were a room someone else had built and you were merely expected to stand in it correctly.
“What if I want it to be my burden?” you asked.
Roy’s eyes darkened. Jason went very still.
You realized what you had said a breath too late.
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” Roy said, although his voice had changed.
“Do you?”
“I think so.” He leaned back in the chair, not closer, never closer. “Sometimes being wanted feels powerful because someone sees you and you choose what to do with it. That can be good. Very good.”
The last two words were quiet enough to make your stomach tighten.
Jason’s jaw flexed.
You looked toward him. “Do you disagree?”
“No.”
“You look like you disagree.”
“I look like I am thinking.”
“You look like you are being executed by thought.”
Roy nodded. “Common Jason expression.”
Jason gave him a look, then returned his attention to you. This time, he did not look away from your face. “Being desired can feel like power. It can also make you vulnerable. Both matter.”
“You are very committed to ruining everything pleasant with warnings.”
“I am committed to you surviving pleasant things too.”
The sentence caught you unexpectedly.
Roy went quiet again.
You studied Jason, trying to understand the line of him in the low light: the broad shoulders held too stiffly, the crossed arms, the guarded face. The careful distance. Always the distance. If Roy made desire sound like warmth and laughter and the delicious danger of being admired, Jason made it sound like a blade laid gently in your hand, hilt first, edge turned away from your skin.
You understood why you needed both.
“All right,” you said.
Roy tipped his head. “All right?”
“Look at me.”
Jason’s answer was immediate. “No.”
You threw a cushion at him.
He caught it one-handed.
Roy coughed into his fist.
“I was asking,” you said.
“You were provoking.”
“I am capable of both.”
“We know,” Roy said.
Jason set the cushion on the nearest chair with ridiculous care. “Why?”
You blinked. “Why what?”
“Why do you want this?”
You almost snapped because snapping was easy, and because questions like that felt too close to being denied. Then you remembered the night before. Terms. Truth. No hiding behind the crown. No turning fear into command.
You looked down at the gown around your body. “Because they looked at me all afternoon like I was not inside the body they were discussing.”
Neither of them spoke.
Your voice steadied as you continued. “Because they kept saying Prince Adrian should see me properly, and what they meant was that he should see whatever version of me makes him interested without making him cautious. Because I have been seen by painters, advisors, tutors, guards, enemies, physicians, and half the court, and all of them were looking for something. Lineage. Weakness. Health. Threat. Obedience. Marriageability. Trouble.”
Roy’s mouth curved faintly at the last word, but his eyes stayed serious.
You lifted your gaze. “I want to know what it feels like when the looking is mine too.”
Jason’s expression changed.
It was very small. The kind of shift someone else might mistake for nothing. But you knew his face in the way one learned weather before battle. Something in him softened and tightened at once, an old instinct striking a new wound.
Roy drew a slow breath. “Then yes.”
Your eyes moved to him.
He did not look away. “I can look.”
You swallowed. “You can stop.”
“So can you.”
“I know.”
He smiled. “Good.”
Then Roy looked at you.
At first, it was almost disappointing.
His gaze stayed on your face, warm and familiar, the same kind of attention he gave you when you were speaking in council and he wanted you to know he had caught the insult hidden in a minister’s polite phrasing. Then his eyes lowered, carefully enough that every movement felt offered rather than taken. He looked at your hair, half-pinned and messy around the sharpened hairpin. He looked at your throat, your bare collarbone, the shoulder where the gown had slipped, the structured line of your stays over the shift, the place where the loosened silk folded over your waist.
You felt each glance without being touched.
It should have made you want to cover yourself.
It did not.
Your hand curled in the silk, and Roy saw that too. His mouth softened. “You look like you fought the entire court wardrobe and won by dishonorable means.”
A laugh burst out of you before you could stop it.
His smile widened. “There she is.”
“That is your compliment?”
“It is my opening compliment. I was building momentum.”
“You need momentum to compliment me?”
“Princess, complimenting you honestly while Jason stands there looking like a thundercloud with murder training requires courage.”
“I am not stopping you,” Jason said.
“You are spiritually stopping me.”
You laughed again, and this time it came easier. Some of the tightness in your chest unwound. Roy looked pleased, but not triumphant. That mattered too. He had made you laugh without turning the moment into a joke.
His gaze dipped again, slower this time, and the humor in his face gentled into something else.
“You are beautiful,” he said.
The simplicity of it almost made you flinch.
Court men had said it before. Visiting lords, poets, cousins by marriage who drank too much wine at feasts. Beautiful princess was one of those phrases the world produced without thought, as meaningless as lovely weather or fine music. But Roy said it like he had considered other words and decided this one was true enough to stand alone.
“You say that like it is obvious,” you said.
“It is.”
“I was covered in sand yesterday.”
“You were beautiful then too.”
Your throat went tight.
Roy’s voice remained light, but only because he was choosing to be kind with it. “Infuriating, armed past reason, and one wrong step away from giving the captain of the guard a permanent headache, but beautiful.”
You looked down, overwhelmed by the tenderness of being insulted accurately.
“And now?” you asked.
Roy’s smile changed. “Now you look like someone tried to make you soft and only managed to prove they have never understood what softness is.”
You did not know what to do with that either.
He continued, quieter. “There is nothing wrong with the silk. There is nothing wrong with the shape of you in it. That is not the part they ruined.”
Your fingers loosened in the gown.
“What did they ruin?” you asked.
“They tried to make you feel like being seen meant being handed over.”
The words landed exactly where the panic had lived.
Your breath went thin.
Roy leaned forward, just a little, then stopped himself. “It does not.”
You believed him.
Not completely, perhaps. Not enough to undo years of silence in a single afternoon. But enough that the room felt steadier. Enough that you could sit in half-laced silk under a man’s admiring gaze and understand that nothing had been taken from you.
You looked at Jason.
He was still standing. Still controlled. Still watching Roy as much as he watched you, perhaps because it was easier to assess another man’s desire than admit his own.
“You are quiet,” you said.
“I know.”
“Are you angry?”
“Yes.”
Roy sighed.
You lifted your chin. “At me?”
Jason’s eyes cut to yours. “No.”
“At Roy?”
“Always a little,” Roy said.
Jason ignored him. “At the room they put you in. At the things they said. At the fact that you had to ask us because everyone else failed you first.”
The anger in his voice should have made the room colder. Instead, it warmed something low in your chest, dark and unsteady.
“And at yourself?” you asked.
Jason’s mouth tightened.
There it was.
Roy looked down.
You stood before you could think better of it.
The loosened gown fell around you with a heavy whisper. Roy straightened but stayed seated. Jason’s attention sharpened at once, alert to movement, to imbalance, to every possible danger in a room that held none except the one all three of you had invited inside.
You stepped out of the worst tangle of skirt and let the overdress slide from one shoulder. The fabric slipped lower, still caught at your waist, leaving you in the stays and shift beneath, the green silk gathered around your hips and trailing behind you.
Jason looked away.
It hurt.
That startled you more than anything else had.
“Do not,” you said.
His eyes closed.
You did not move closer. “That was not an order.”
“No,” he said, voice rough. “It was a request.”
“Yes.”
“Then do you understand what you are asking?”
The question scraped against your temper. “Do you understand how tired I am of being asked that?”
His gaze returned to yours, and this time there was no distance in it. “Yes.”
The honesty stopped you.
Jason took a breath. “I am not asking because I think you are foolish. I am asking because if I look at you now, it will not be the way I looked when you were bleeding, or cold, or half-conscious after an attack. It will not be security. It will not be duty. It will not be something I can pretend is clean because I am your guard and you are my responsibility.”
Roy was motionless.
Your heartbeat struck hard once, then again.
Jason’s voice lowered. “If I look, you will know.”
The room seemed to narrow around him.
You felt the choice with terrifying clarity. It was not theoretical now. It was no longer a discussion of men, desire, courtship, and Prince Adrian. It was Jason standing in your private solar, asking whether you understood that his restraint had never been indifference.
You could tell him to stop.
You could tell him to leave.
You could put the gown back over your shoulder and summon Elowen and let the day retreat into something manageable.
Instead, you stood with your bare foot on the rug, silk at your hips, knives hidden beneath the remnants of formal clothing, and made yourself answer without crown or command.
“I want to know,” you said.
Jason went still.
Roy whispered a curse under his breath, not at you.
Jason looked.
It was not like Roy.
Roy’s looking had been warm, careful, admiring in a way that gave you room to laugh. Jason’s gaze moved over you like the first touch of a storm before rain, slow and charged and almost unbearably controlled. He looked at your hair, your throat, the line of your shoulder, the place where the shift softened against your chest above the stays. He looked at your waist, the loosened silk gathered there, the strength in your arms, the bruising near one elbow from practice, the knife strapped at your calf where the skirt had fallen open enough to reveal it.
He saw all of it.
That was the difference.
Not your breasts, your hips, your skin, or the parts of you the court had spent the afternoon trying to arrange into invitation. He saw those too; you could tell, because he was a man and because the air between you changed where his gaze went. But he saw the rest of you at the same time. The bruises. The weapons. The stubborn line of your jaw. The fact that you were frightened and refusing to retreat from it. The spoiled, sharp-tongued princess who had demanded sword lessons until the palace surrendered. The woman standing in silk she hated because everyone else kept trying to decide what her body meant.
Jason looked at you like leaving the room would cost him something.
And because he had taught you the language for it, you knew.
Your breath came shallowly. “Is that desire?”
Jason’s eyes lifted to yours.
“Yes.”
The word was quiet and absolute.
Roy looked at him, then at you, and something in his expression made your chest ache. He was affected too. You could see it now, knew how to read the care in his posture, the tension in his hands, the way humor had become something he held back for your sake.
But Jason’s yes had shifted the room.
You swallowed. “It does not feel like I thought it would.”
Roy’s voice was gentle. “What did you think it would feel like?”
“Smaller.”
Jason’s face changed.
You looked down at yourself, at the exposed shift, the stays, the silk caught around your hips, your bare foot against the rug, the knife at your leg. “I thought being looked at this way would feel like losing something.”
Roy said nothing.
Jason’s voice came low. “And does it?”
You considered lying because the truth made you feel unsteady. Then you remembered the terms.
“No,” you said. “It feels like holding a weapon I have not learned how to use yet.”
Roy’s mouth curved, slow and bright with something like wonder. “That sounds like you.”
You smiled back before you could help it.
Jason did not smile. He looked as though your answer had hurt him and relieved him in equal measure.
You shifted your weight, and the silk rustled around your legs. Both men noticed. This time, neither pretended they had not.
A strange confidence moved through you, thin but real. It was not the brittle confidence of rank or temper, not the kind that made ministers stumble and servants hurry. It was quieter than that. More intimate. A choice settling into your body.
You lifted the fallen edge of the gown and let it slip another inch down your arm.
Jason’s hand flexed at his side.
Roy breathed out through his nose.
You stopped there. Not because you were afraid, though perhaps you were that too. Because you wanted to see whether stopping could be part of the lesson.
It was.
Neither man moved toward you. Neither asked for more. Neither filled the silence with hunger and called it permission.
Roy’s gaze returned to your face. “You can put it back on.”
“I know.”
“You can take it off.”
Jason’s eyes cut to him.
Roy did not look away from you. “With Elowen’s help. Or alone. Or with no one. Or later. Or never, if you decide to burn it.”
“I like that option.”
“I thought you might.”
You gathered the loosened gown against yourself, though not as quickly as you might have before. “What am I supposed to do when someone looks at me like that?”
Roy’s answer came after a pause. “Decide whether you want him to stop.”
The simplicity of it struck harder than all of Mistress Alis’s careful warnings.
You looked at Jason.
He was not looking away now.
“And if I don’t?” you asked.
The silence that followed was no longer empty. It was full of every rule from the night before, every line drawn and redrawn, every word the court had refused to give you and every truth these two men had placed carefully in your hands.
Jason’s gaze held yours.
“Then you decide what you want him to do next,” he said.
Your pulse jumped.
Roy closed his eyes for one brief second, then opened them again, warmth and warning both written across his face.
You held the gown against your body and smiled despite the heat in your cheeks. It was not your court smile. It was not the pretty thing tutors had trained into you, measured and polished and safe enough to offer visiting princes.
It was yours.
“Then I suppose,” you said, “the next lesson should be about asking.”
Jason looked as if the gods had personally abandoned him.
Roy laughed, low and helpless, and the sound moved through the room like sparks catching in kindling.
Outside your private solar, the palace continued preparing for Prince Adrian. Somewhere, Mistress Alis was probably recovering her dignity. Madame Isera was grieving over creased silk. Your mother was perhaps planning another conversation she did not know how to begin.
so frustrating to be a skeptic with a sense of whimsy because like. I want there to be cryptids. I want there to be magic. I want there to be evidence of something we don't fully understand and can't explain. but then 99% of the "proof" out there for that stuff is like. the most obvious scam you've ever seen in your life.
Warnings: medieval fantasy AU, prince!Jason Todd, knight!reader, childhood friends to lovers to separated lovers, presumed death, grief, references to imprisonment and torture, complicated power dynamics, dom/sub, established BDSM dynamics, possessiveness, jealousy, light degradation, praise kink, biting, marking, throat holding, oral sex, fingering, vaginal sex, rough sex, overstimulation, unprotected sex, emotional vulnerability, aftercare, angst with a happy ending
Summary:
Five years after Prince Jason Todd was murdered, he returns to the capital commanding an army sworn to him alone.
The crown orders his former knight—and former lover—to discover whether he has come home seeking justice or conquest.
Jason only wants to know whether the promise you made him survived his grave.
Author’s Note:
written for this anonymous ask
Another Knight!Reader AU :)
Some quick backstory: you and Jason grew up together, fell in love in secret, and then he died. After that, there were five years of grief and resentment and hope and love between them when he finally came back to you.
The great doors opened during Lord Sionis’s testimony.
The timing was so precise that, for one irrational moment, you believed the interruption had been planned as part of the proceedings. Sionis had spent the better part of an hour describing grain tariffs along the eastern road, each sentence polished until it carried no meaning at all, and half the court had begun to wilt beneath the summer heat trapped inside the throne room. Even the king looked as though he might welcome an invading army if it spared him another account of damaged wagons.
Then the guards at the doors lowered their spears.
Steel rang against stone. Courtiers twisted in their seats, silk whispering over silk, and the herald on duty stumbled backward before he remembered that fleeing the throne room would only ensure everyone saw him do it.
A man walked between the crossed spearheads without slowing.
He wore black plate beneath a dark red cloak, the armor scarred in places no ceremonial suit would ever be permitted to show. A sword hung at his left hip, another shorter blade at his right, and a narrow strip of cloth had been wrapped around one gauntlet as though to hide a damaged fastening. There were soldiers behind him—six in the same dark armor, wearing neither the crest of Gotham nor the colors of any neighboring kingdom. Each carried only a red hawk worked into one shoulder, the mark of the commander they had chosen to follow.
He left them at the threshold and crossed the length of the hall alone.
You knew the set of his shoulders before you saw his face.
Your hand closed around the pommel of your sword so hard that the leather beneath your glove creaked.
Five years vanished with a cruelty no blade could have matched. You were fourteen again, standing barefoot in the training yard while a dark-haired boy laughed at the wooden sword he had knocked from your hand. Seventeen, crouched beside him behind the chapel after he had split his knuckles against a stone wall rather than admit the king’s words had hurt him. Twenty-two, pressed against the armory door with Jason’s mouth at your throat and his promise breathed against your skin.
When I leave, you come with me.
Anywhere, you had told him.
The man walking toward the throne had the same mouth, though a scar cut through one corner now. His hair was longer than court fashion allowed, swept back from a pale streak at his temple. The boy you had loved had carried every emotion openly when he trusted you enough to show it. This man gave the court nothing.
He stopped at the foot of the dais.
No one announced him. No one seemed capable of finding breath enough to try.
King Bruce rose slowly from the throne.
Jason looked up at the father who had buried an empty coffin for him and smiled without warmth.
“Your Majesty.”
The king’s face changed so little that anyone who had not grown up watching him would have missed it. His fingers tightened once around the carved arm of the throne. Beside him, Prince Richard had gone completely still.
Sionis was the first to speak.
“This is impossible.”
Jason turned his head.
Lord Roman Sionis had stood three paces from you when the royal party returned from Blackwater Pass without its second prince. He had placed one consoling hand on your shoulder while you were still wearing Jason’s blood across your surcoat. He had testified that the ambush had been the work of border raiders, that no prisoners had been taken, and that the ravine fire had left nothing worth recovering.
Jason drew something from beneath his cloak and tossed it onto the floor.
A gold signet rolled across the stone and came to rest against Sionis’s shoe.
The black mask carved into its face was unmistakable.
“I thought you might want that back,” Jason said. “Your man dropped it while he was explaining how much you paid him to change my escort route.”
The court erupted.
Voices collided beneath the vaulted ceiling. Sionis kicked the ring away as though it had burned him, shouting about forgery and foreign plots. Richard descended one step from the dais before stopping himself. The king did not move at all.
Neither did you.
Jason’s gaze crossed the hall through the confusion and found you beside the throne.
For five years, you had imagined this moment in a hundred impossible forms. Jason wounded at the city gates. Jason waiting in the old orchard where the two of you had hidden as children. Jason appearing at the foot of your bed in the hour before dawn, smiling because death had been some elaborate mistake the gods had finally chosen to correct.
You had never imagined him looking at you as though you were another weapon pointed in his direction.
“Commander,” he said.
The title struck harder than accusation. He had called you little knight when you were children, a name that followed you even after you had grown into your armor and learned how to put him flat on his back despite barely reaching his shoulder. Later, when the court could not hear, he had called you love. On the last night before Blackwater Pass, he had rested his forehead against yours and whispered “my knight” with such fierce certainty that the words had felt more binding than anything spoken before an altar.
Now you were Commander of the King’s Guard, and Jason made it sound like a verdict.
You stepped down from the dais.
Protocol demanded that you kneel before a prince of the realm. Your body remembered the motion for entirely different reasons.
Your right knee touched the stone.
Jason’s jaw tightened.
“My prince,” you said.
A tremor passed through the hall. Sionis stopped shouting. Richard looked between the two of you with an understanding that came several years too late, and the king’s expression hardened into something unreadable.
Jason stared at you for one long moment.
Then he looked back at the throne.
“I have brought records from three fortresses, testimony from two surviving guards, and the name of every noble who profited from my death,” he said. “I also have twelve hundred soldiers camped north of your walls. They answer to me, and they have been instructed to remain there unless someone in this room does something stupid.”
Sionis went pale.
King Bruce descended from the dais. “You came with an army.”
“I came with my army.”
The distinction moved through the court like a drawn blade.
Jason’s gaze never left the king. “They are prisoners I freed, soldiers their lords abandoned, and people whose villages your council decided were too distant to defend. They did not belong to another crown before they followed me, and they do not belong to one now.”
You remained kneeling until Jason glanced down at you again.
“Stand, Commander.”
You obeyed.
His gaze dropped briefly to the sword at your hip. It was not the blade you had carried at Blackwater Pass; that sword lay broken inside Jason’s tomb beneath the royal chapel. The red cord tied around the pommel, however, had once fastened his cloak.
Something moved behind his expression and vanished.
The king ordered the throne room cleared.
Sionis was seized before he made it halfway to the eastern door. The court scattered in a storm of rumors, each noble carrying a slightly different version of Jason’s resurrection into the corridors. Richard remained long enough to embrace his brother, only to receive no embrace in return. Alfred came down from his place near the council table with tears bright in his eyes, and Jason allowed the old steward to touch his face as though confirming he was real.
You waited beside the throne because that was where duty had placed you.
Jason did not look at you again.
By sunset, the eastern guest chambers had been prepared for him.
The rooms had belonged to visiting princes for generations, though no visitor had ever arrived with twelve hundred soldiers and evidence that half the royal council had conspired to murder him. Guards were posted at every stairwell. Jason’s six officers occupied the adjoining rooms, and three clerks carried sealed chests of documents into the king’s private study beneath Alfred’s supervision.
You stood before Bruce’s desk while evening light turned the windows to sheets of bronze.
“He will not accept one of my guards,” the king said.
“He accepted six of his own.”
Bruce’s mouth flattened. “He was held for nearly two years in a fortress beyond the northern border. He escaped with fewer than twenty prisoners and took the fortress before the garrison realized he was free. Afterward, he began gathering the people the border lords had abandoned—discharged soldiers, displaced families, escaped prisoners, and villages forced to defend themselves without support from the capital.”
You kept your face still. Every fact entered the space where five years of uncertainty had lived, each one creating a new image you did not want and could not prevent. Jason in chains. Jason beneath foreign walls. Jason discovering that the kingdom—his kingdom, his home, his family—had stopped searching, and building something of his own from everyone else it had failed.
“He commands a force twelve hundred strong now,” Bruce continued. “Not because a duke appointed him or another king armed him. They chose him. He has taken control of the northern passes, destroyed three raiding companies, and forced every lord in the region to negotiate on his terms.”
“Then he does not need your throne.”
“No,” Bruce said. “That may be what concerns the court most.”
“Did you know?” you asked.
“That he lived? No.” Bruce’s answer came immediately. “That Sionis had altered the route? I suspected it after the inquiry was closed.”
“And you left him on the council.”
“To watch who continued meeting with him.”
Your laugh held no humor. “Five years of watching.”
The king accepted the blow because he knew better than to defend himself.
You had remained in his service for the same reason. Sionis had controlled the royal roads, the prison records, and the flow of correspondence across the border. Resigning your commission would have cost you access to every archive where the truth might be buried. You had spent years collecting fragments while the court mistook your silence for grief disciplined into obedience.
Perhaps Jason had made the same mistake.
Bruce pushed a sealed order across the desk.
“You will take command of the guard outside his rooms.”
You looked at the wax but did not touch it.
“And report whether he intends to take the throne?”
“Report whether he intends to start a war inside the capital.”
“He told you his soldiers would remain outside the walls.”
“He also told me members of my council sold him to an enemy kingdom.” Bruce’s voice lowered. “He has reason to hate every person under this roof.”
“Some more than others.”
The king’s gaze shifted toward the red cord at your sword.
“He will speak to you.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know my son.”
You finally picked up the order. “You buried him without a body.”
Pain crossed Bruce’s face, quick and controlled. “I know what I failed to do.”
The answer should have softened you. It did not.
You turned toward the door.
“Commander.”
You paused.
“If he asks you to leave with him,” Bruce said, “what will you do?”
Five years ago, there had been no hesitation.
There was none now.
“I will decide whether he is asking me to follow him—or testing whether I still would.”
The guards outside the eastern chambers saluted when you approached. You dismissed all but two to the lower stairwell, then took your position beside the carved doors. Through the wood came the murmur of unfamiliar voices, the clink of armor being removed, and once, unmistakably, Jason’s laugh.
The sound nearly undid you.
It was rougher than you remembered, but it was his. For an instant you were back in the stables with hay caught in your hair while Jason tried to convince you that stealing the crown prince’s horse did not count as theft if the horse preferred him. You had been eleven. He had been twelve and already furious at any rule he had not personally approved.
You had met when you were six years old and your father brought you to court after accepting a position under the master-at-arms. Jason had found you hiding behind the practice targets with a bruised cheek and demanded to know who had struck you. When you refused to answer, he challenged all three boys who had done it and lost with spectacular enthusiasm.
You had helped him back to his rooms afterward.
That was the beginning of everything.
He taught you how to climb the western tower without being seen. You taught him how to fall from a horse without breaking his wrist. He smuggled books out of the royal library for you, and you lied to Alfred about where the kitchen tarts had gone. When your father died during a winter campaign, Jason sat outside your chamber door until morning because grief had made you unable to bear another person’s touch.
At sixteen, you were appointed to his household guard.
At eighteen, he kissed you in the armory after you defeated him in front of the entire training company.
At twenty, he learned how you liked to kneel.
At twenty-two, he left for Blackwater Pass with your promise in his mouth.
The door opened.
One of Jason’s officers stepped into the corridor. She was broad-shouldered, silver-haired, and looked at the sword in your hand before she looked at your face.
“He wants you inside,” she said.
You did not ask whether she knew who you were. Her expression suggested everyone in Jason’s army had heard some version of the story.
The chamber doors closed behind you.
Jason stood near the open windows with his back turned. The heavy plate was gone, leaving him in dark trousers, boots, and a black linen shirt unlaced at the throat. His sword rested within reach on the table. A pitcher of wine sat untouched beside it.
He waited until the latch settled.
“Did he tell you to count the knives?”
You looked around the room. “Seven that I can see.”
“Eight.”
“You still keep one in your boot.”
Jason turned.
For the first time since he entered the throne room, there was no audience between you—no king, no court, and no officers bearing witness to the person he had become or the authority he had built for himself. The distance across the chamber felt greater than the five years that had separated you. The men and women beyond the door did not follow him because of his birth. They followed because somewhere beyond Gotham’s reach, Jason had become the person who freed them, protected them, and gave them something worth defending.
His gaze moved over your armor. You wore the formal half-plate of the king’s guard, polished steel over black leather, with a short cloak fastened at one shoulder. Jason had once complained that the uniform hid everything he liked best about you.
The memory entered his expression at the same moment it entered yours.
He reached for the wine and poured a cup.
“So,” he said. “Commander.”
“My prince.”
“Still doing that.”
“You are still a prince.”
“Am I?” He drank without looking away from you. “No one seemed certain this afternoon.”
“The kingdom has believed you dead for five years.”
“The kingdom.” Jason set the cup down. “Is that what we are calling you now?”
You absorbed the bitterness because you had expected it from the moment he looked at you across the throne room.
“What would you prefer to call me?”
“I had several names for you once.”
“You did.”
“None of them wore the king’s crest.”
Your hand tightened at your side. “Say what you brought me here to hear.”
Jason laughed softly. “Still impatient.”
“Still trying to make anger do the work of honesty.”
His expression hardened.
There he was. The boy beneath the commander, the wounded prince who would rather draw blood than admit where he had already been cut.
You knew him too well. Perhaps that was why he hated you most.
Jason walked toward you.
He had grown broader during the missing years, heavier through the shoulders, and he carried himself with the controlled balance of someone who had learned to fight in places where armor could not be trusted. You had once known every scar on his body. Now there were pale lines at his jaw, his throat, and across the backs of his hands.
He stopped close enough that you could feel the heat of him through your armor.
“What did he order you to report?”
“Whether you intend to begin a war inside the capital.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think if you wanted the throne, you would not have left your army outside the walls.”
“Maybe I wanted him comfortable.”
“You have never cared enough about comfort to use it as a weapon.”
His mouth twitched before he suppressed it.
“You remember me, then.”
The words were quieter than anything else he had said.
You looked at the scar cutting through his lip. “Every day.”
Jason stepped back as though you had struck him.
The movement made anger rise in you at last—not because he doubted you, but because some part of him had decided he alone was entitled to the pain of the last five years.
“You do not get to return from the grave and speak to me as though I placed you there.”
“I sent letters.”
“I never received them.”
“You stopped searching.”
“The king stopped the official search.”
“And you continued wearing his crest.”
“Yes.”
His eyes flashed. “Of course you did.”
You crossed the room before caution could stop you.
“Sionis controlled the border archives,” you said. “He controlled the road ledgers, the prison transfers, and every messenger who crossed the northern gate. I stayed because leaving would have surrendered every path that might lead to you.”
“You expect me to believe Bruce let you investigate his council for five years?”
“I did not ask his permission.”
Jason’s gaze sharpened.
“I bribed clerks. I threatened caravan masters. I rode to Blackwater Pass every spring after the snow melted and searched the ravine myself.” Your voice broke, and you hated it for doing so. “I found three buckles, part of a saddle, and enough bone to bury six men. None of it was yours.”
He said nothing.
“I knew Sionis lied. I knew the route had been changed from inside the palace. I stayed close enough to prove it.”
“And when you could not?”
“I kept looking.”
“For five years.”
“I would have for the rest of my life, if necessary.”
Jason stared at you.
The chamber had become too quiet. Beyond the open window, the city bells marked the hour, each note spreading across rooftops that had mourned him and then learned to live without him.
His gaze dropped to the red cord tied around your sword.
“That was mine.”
“Yes.”
“You wore it into the throne room.”
“I have worn it every day since Blackwater.”
His mouth tightened. “A strip of cloth makes a poor memorial.”
“It was not a memorial.”
“What was it?”
“A promise.”
Jason’s laugh came out harsh. “You knelt to Bruce with my promise on your sword.”
“I knelt to the throne because I was on duty.”
“You always did know how to make obedience sound noble.”
“And you always knew how to make cruelty sound like wit.”
The silence after that was immediate.
Jason moved closer. “Careful.”
“Or what?”
“Your king ordered you to guard me. I doubt he intended you to provoke me.”
“He knows you.”
“No,” Jason said. “He knows the son he lost. You are the one who thinks you know what came back.”
You looked at him—at the unfamiliar scars, the weight he carried through every movement, the fury sharpened into discipline—and understood what he wanted. He wanted you to recoil. He wanted proof that he had become too altered to love, because that would hurt less than believing you had loved him all this time and he had been wrong to hate you.
You reached for the laces at your throat.
Jason caught your wrist.
The movement was fast enough that another person might have reached for a weapon. Your pulse jumped for an entirely different reason.
His hand closed around the leather guard at your wrist, thumb pressing over the point where your heartbeat raced beneath it.
“What are you doing?”
“Showing you.”
His grip tightened. “Showing me what?”
You pulled your cloak clasp loose with your free hand. The black fabric slid from your shoulder and fell across the floor.
Jason’s gaze followed it.
Then you unfastened the top buckle of your breastplate.
Understanding entered his face, followed so quickly by hunger that it left you breathless.
“You should stop me,” you said.
“Do you want me to?”
“No.”
His eyes lifted to yours.
The old question stood between you, familiar as prayer.
“What stops me?” he asked.
“Winter.”
“And if you cannot speak?”
You tapped three times against the inside of his wrist.
Jason closed his eyes.
For one suspended moment, his grip trembled.
Then he released you.
“Take off the sword.”
The command settled low in your body.
You unbuckled the belt and laid the weapon across the table beside his. Jason watched every movement. His anger had not disappeared, but it had changed shape, mixing with five years of want until the air between you felt dangerously thin.
“The dagger.”
You drew it from the sheath at your back and placed it beside the sword.
“The other one.”
You raised a brow.
His mouth curved. “You taught me that trick.”
You bent, pulled the narrow blade from your left boot, and set it on the table.
Jason stepped behind you.
His fingers found the buckles of your breastplate. He did not hurry. Each fastening came loose with a soft scrape of leather through metal, the sound unbearably intimate after years in which no one else had been permitted to help you out of your armor.
The weight lifted from your shoulders.
Jason set the breastplate aside and stood close enough that his chest brushed your back. His breath moved against the side of your neck.
“You let anyone else do this?”
“No.”
“Anyone else touch what was mine?”
The possessiveness should have angered you. Instead, heat gathered between your thighs.
“You were dead,” you said.
His hand came around your throat.
He did not squeeze, only held you there, palm warm against your skin and fingers spanning the line of your jaw. Your body remembered him before your mind could catch up. Your head tipped back against his shoulder. Your breath slowed because he liked to feel you surrender it deliberately.
“I asked you a question.”
“And I answered it.”
“Poorly.”
“No one else touched me.”
Jason’s mouth brushed your ear. “No one?”
“No one.”
His fingers tightened slightly.
You swallowed against his palm.
“Why?” he asked.
The question held no arrogance now. It was raw enough that you could have turned and ended the argument with a kiss, but Jason had spent five years doubting the answer. He needed to hear it in the language the two of you had built before death interrupted you.
“Because I was waiting for you.”
His breath caught.
Jason released your throat and moved in front of you.
“Kneel.”
The stone floor was hard beneath your knees. You lowered yourself without looking away from him, settling with the same straight-backed discipline you had once used in the privacy of his old rooms. The first time he had asked this of you, both of you had been nervous enough to laugh. Jason had touched your face as though your obedience frightened him more than any refusal could have done.
Now he looked down at you with hunger and grief carved into every line of him.
“Why are you kneeling?”
“Because you told me to.”
His hand closed in your hair near the nape, not pulling yet. “That is not what I asked.”
“Because I want to.”
“Is this because Bruce ordered you to keep me calm?”
“No.”
“Because you pity what came back?”
“No.”
His thumb moved along your jaw. “Then tell me.”
The words lodged behind your ribs. You had spoken them in empty chapels and over winter graves. You had whispered them into the red cord while tying it around your sword each morning. Saying them to Jason should have been easier.
It was not.
“Because I’m still yours.”
Something in his face broke.
He bent and kissed you.
There was nothing gentle in the first touch of his mouth. Jason took the back of your neck in one hand and held you where he wanted you, kissing you with five years of fury behind it. The scar at his lip was unfamiliar beneath yours. Everything else was devastatingly the same—the way he tilted your head, the rough sound he made when your mouth opened, the brief press of his teeth when he wanted more than you could give quickly enough.
You clutched his thighs to steady yourself.
Jason pulled back only far enough to look at you.
“You should hate me,” he said.
“For surviving?”
“For coming back like this.”
“You came back alive.”
His grip tightened in your hair. “You do not know what I did to stay that way.”
“Then tell me when you can.”
“And until then?”
You turned your face and kissed the inside of his wrist. “Let me remember you.”
Jason stared at your mouth against his skin.
Then his expression sharpened into something familiar and commanding.
“Open my trousers.”
Heat spread through you so quickly that your fingers nearly fumbled the fastening. Jason noticed. He always noticed.
“Five years,” he murmured. “And my perfect knight still loses all that discipline on her knees.”
“You always talked too much.”
His hand tightened in your hair and pulled your head back.
“Careful, love.”
The name struck deeper than any command.
You looked up at him, breathing hard.
Jason’s thumb traced your lower lip. “I wondered if you would still look at me like that.”
You opened his trousers and freed him. He was already hard, heavy in your hand, and the first stroke drew a rough breath from him. The sound made your body ache. You had remembered this too many nights with your own hand between your thighs, chasing a ghost through sensations that never quite became real.
Jason brushed your hand away.
“Use your mouth.”
You leaned forward and licked slowly along the underside of his cock.
His head tipped back.
The reaction sent a fierce satisfaction through you. Jason had returned with an army he had built himself and enough power to make the king’s council tremble. Hundreds of people waited beyond the walls because he had earned their loyalty without a crown, a title, or the family name that had once failed to protect him.
Here, in the privacy of his bedchamber, you could still make his breath break with the same deliberate sweep of your tongue.
You took him into your mouth.
His hand settled against the back of your head. At first he let you choose the pace, watching as you drew him deeper, your lips closing around him while your tongue worked beneath the head. The taste of him filled your mouth. You moaned softly, and Jason’s hips jerked before he caught himself.
“Still like this?” he asked.
You looked up at him.
“Taking me on your knees where anyone could knock on the door.” His thumb stroked the hinge of your jaw. “Did you think about it while you stood outside pretending to be loyal to the crown?”
You drew back enough to answer. “I thought about it while I stood beside your grave.”
The cruelty left his face.
You regretted the words at once, but Jason did not release you. He touched your cheek with a tenderness that made your throat tighten.
“I am sorry,” he said.
It was the first apology either of you had offered.
You turned your face into his palm. “I know.”
Then you took him into your mouth again because neither of you was ready for everything the apology contained.
Jason let you set the rhythm for only a few breaths before the hand in your hair became firmer. He guided you down, slowly enough that you could stop him, until the head of his cock pressed deep and your throat tightened around him.
“Good,” he murmured. “That’s my good knight.”
The praise went through you like an arrow.
Your fingers dug into his thighs. Jason held you there for one heartbeat, then eased you back and let you breathe. Tears pricked your eyes. He wiped one away with his thumb before guiding you down again.
The pace remained controlled, each movement measured against your breath. You took him deeper every time, jaw aching pleasantly, the wet sounds obscene in the quiet room. Jason watched you with the focus he had once reserved for battle plans and your body beneath his hands.
“Look at you,” he said. “All that polished armor, all those men following your orders, and this is still where you want to be.”
You moaned around him.
“That is what I thought.”
He pulled you off before he could finish.
You gasped for air, lips swollen, a line of saliva connecting your mouth to the head of his cock until Jason wiped it away with his thumb. He pushed that thumb between your lips.
“Suck.”
You obeyed.
His gaze darkened.
“Up.”
Jason caught your arm and drew you to your feet. Your knees protested after the stone, but he gave you no time to recover. His mouth found yours again as he backed you toward the table. Maps and correspondence scattered when he swept one arm across the surface. His sword remained beside yours, the two blades touching at the guards.
He lifted you onto the table.
The mail beneath your leather tunic scraped against the wood. Jason cursed under his breath and reached for the side fastenings.
“Too many layers.”
“You used to say that about ceremonial gowns.”
“I was right then too.”
He stripped the leather jerkin from you, then dragged the mail shirt up and over your head. Your linen undertunic followed, leaving you bare from the waist up in the cool evening air.
Jason stopped.
You had scars he did not know either. A narrow line crossed your ribs from a training accident two winters after his death. Another marked your shoulder where an assassin’s arrow had found the gap above your breastplate. Jason touched that one first.
“Who?”
“Sionis hired someone after I began asking about the changed route.”
His expression went still in the way that had terrified the court earlier.
“He will not survive the trial.”
“That is for the king to decide.”
Jason’s fingers closed around your waist. “You are in my rooms, half naked on my table, and still defending Bruce’s authority.”
“I am reminding you that murdering Sionis before he speaks would be inconvenient.”
A reluctant laugh escaped him. “There is my little knight.”
He bent and put his mouth over the scar.
Your breath shuddered.
Jason kissed along the pale line, then lower, his hands spreading over your ribs as though relearning their shape. He reached your breast and took one nipple between his lips. The first pull made you arch toward him.
He had always known how sensitive you were there. Time had not changed it. Jason’s tongue circled the hardened peak before his teeth closed with just enough pressure to make you gasp. His other hand cupped your breast, thumb moving in slow strokes that left you trembling.
“You kept this from everyone too?” he asked against your skin.
“Yes.”
“All of you?”
“Yes.”
“For me?”
You took his face in both hands and forced him to look at you. “Do not ask questions when you already know the answer.”
Jason’s eyes searched yours.
“I need to hear it.”
The admission softened something inside you.
“All of me,” you said. “For you.”
He kissed you more slowly this time.
The tenderness lasted until your legs opened around his hips. Jason made a low sound, grabbed the back of your neck, and kissed you hard enough to bruise. His free hand found the fastening of your trousers.
“You know exactly what you are doing.”
“I have not done anything.”
“You opened your legs for me.”
“You were standing between them.”
“And that was enough?”
“You already knew it would be.”
His mouth curved against yours as he pulled your trousers down to your knees and dropped into a crouch before you.
You braced your hands on the table.
Jason dragged one boot from your foot, then the other, and stripped away the remaining leather with deliberate efficiency. He left you bare on the edge of the table while he remained mostly dressed, the imbalance calculated and familiar.
His gaze moved between your thighs.
“Wet already.”
“You put your hand around my throat.”
“That was all it took?”
“You also told me to kneel.”
Jason’s mouth curved. “Honest at last.”
He spread your knees wider.
The exposure made heat rise through you, but you did not look away. Jason had always loved that—your willingness to meet his gaze even while giving him control.
He ran one finger through your wetness.
Your hips jerked.
“Sensitive,” he said.
“It has been five years.”
His expression darkened at the reminder. “Then I have been neglecting my duties.”
Before you could answer, he lowered his mouth to you.
The first stroke of his tongue pulled a broken sound from your throat. Jason gripped your thighs and held them apart while he licked you slowly, learning what time had changed and what it had not. He remembered the pressure you liked, the way you needed his tongue flatter at first, the brief teasing circles that made your legs tense before he focused directly on your clit.
You reached for his hair.
Jason caught your wrist and pressed your hand flat against the table.
“Stay still.”
“You know I cannot.”
“Then disappoint yourself trying.”
He returned to your cunt before you could insult him.
Your head fell back. The carved ceiling blurred above you as Jason worked you open with his mouth, his tongue pressing inside before dragging upward through your wetness. When he closed his lips around your clit and sucked, your body lifted from the table.
Jason held you down with one forearm across your hips.
“Still cannot follow one simple order,” he murmured.
“You chose the order knowing that.”
He bit the inside of your thigh.
You cried out.
“That was for arguing.”
“You missed me arguing.”
His eyes lifted to yours from between your legs. “More than I missed breathing.”
The answer stole every clever response you might have made.
Jason pushed two fingers inside you.
You clenched around them immediately. He groaned against your thigh, then began to move them in slow, firm strokes while his thumb circled your clit. Your hands gripped the edge of the table. The stretch was almost enough and nowhere near enough, pleasure building too quickly after years with no one but yourself.
“That is it,” he said. “Let me feel you.”
You tried to hold his gaze. Jason curled his fingers, found the place that made your vision flash white, and watched your control break.
“Jason.”
His name left you without title or restraint.
He went still.
You had spoken it a thousand times since his death, but this was the first time he had heard you.
“Again,” he said.
You breathed his name.
Jason kissed your inner thigh and thrust his fingers deeper.
“Again.”
You gave it to him until the name became a plea. He worked you relentlessly, mouth returning to your clit while his fingers moved inside you. The pressure gathered low and tight, every stroke pulling it closer. Your thighs shook around his shoulders.
“Come for me,” he ordered.
You broke with a cry.
Pleasure tore through you hard enough to arch your back from the table. Jason held you down and kept his mouth on you, drawing out every pulse until your legs trembled and your breath came in helpless gasps.
He did not stop when the first wave passed.
You twisted beneath his arm. “Jason.”
“You waited five years.” His fingers slid inside you again. “You can give me another.”
“It is too much.”
“Winter?”
The word grounded you.
“No.”
His eyes sharpened. “Then take it.”
He sucked your clit again.
The overstimulation burned at the edge of pleasure, intense enough that your hands searched blindly for something to hold. You found his shoulder. Jason let you grip him this time, fingers digging into the linen of his shirt while he drove you toward another climax.
The second came quicker and rougher. Your body clenched around his fingers, thighs closing despite his grip, and Jason groaned against you as though your pleasure belonged to him.
When he finally rose, his mouth shone with you.
He wiped it with the back of his hand and looked entirely too pleased with himself.
“You are insufferable,” you managed.
“You missed that too.”
“I missed parts of you.”
Jason stepped between your legs. “Which parts?”
You reached for his shirt.
He caught both your wrists.
“No.”
The refusal came too fast.
You looked at him properly. Hunger remained in his face, but beneath it was fear—small, well-hidden, and familiar from nights long ago when he had believed every kindness might be withdrawn without warning.
“Take off the shirt,” you said.
Jason’s grip tightened. “You are in no position to give orders.”
“Then consider it a condition.”
His expression closed.
You pulled against his hands. “You do not get all of me while hiding half of yourself.”
“You said you were still mine.”
“I am. That does not make me blind.”
The space between you changed.
Jason released your wrists and stepped back.
For a moment, you thought he would order you out. Instead, he reached for the hem of his shirt and dragged it over his head.
The scars began at his ribs.
Some were narrow and clean, left by blades. Others crossed his skin in pale, uneven ridges that spoke of restraints, burns, and wounds left too long without care. One thick mark curved beneath his collarbone. Another disappeared around his side toward his back.
You slid from the table.
Jason stood rigid while you approached him.
“Do not,” he said.
You stopped with your hand inches from his chest. “Do you want me to stop?”
His breath moved unevenly.
“No.”
You touched the scar beneath his collarbone.
Jason flinched.
The reaction was so slight another person would have missed it. You laid your palm flat against his chest and waited until the tension eased beneath your hand.
“You are alive,” you whispered.
“Barely, for a while.”
“But you are here.”
“I came back wrong.”
Anger tightened your throat. “Do not tell me what I am allowed to love.”
Jason looked at you.
You traced the scar around his ribs, then bent and pressed your lips to it. His hands hovered at your shoulders as though uncertain whether to push you away or drag you closer. You kissed another mark, then another, not trying to erase what had happened or turn his survival into something beautiful. You only wanted his body to learn that touch could reach those places without pain.
When you reached the thick scar at his side, Jason’s hand settled in your hair.
“They made me dig the grave first,” he said.
You went still.
“For the men who survived the ravine.” His voice sounded distant. “Sionis’s buyers wanted the prince alive until they knew whether Bruce would pay. When no message came, they stopped keeping the others useful.”
You pressed your forehead against his stomach.
“I am sorry.”
“I hated you.”
“I know.”
“I told myself you had chosen him. That you had put on the crest and forgotten every promise you made me.”
“I know.”
Jason’s fingers tightened in your hair. “Why are you not angry?”
“I am furious.” You looked up. “But I understand why you needed to believe it.”
He stared down at you.
“You always were too merciful.”
“No. I simply know you.”
Jason drew you to your feet and kissed you with both hands on your face.
The kiss was different from the others. It still held hunger, but the anger no longer stood between you as a weapon. He kissed you like the boy who had hidden beneath your window after nightmares and the man who had crossed half a kingdom because some part of him still remembered home.
You wrapped your arms around his neck.
Jason lifted you.
Your legs closed around his waist as he carried you toward the bed. He laid you down against the heavy coverlet, then stood over you while he stripped off his boots and trousers. The sight of him bare made your breath catch for reasons beyond desire. There were scars along his thighs too, more evidence of years you had not witnessed.
He noticed where you were looking.
“Later,” he said.
You nodded.
Jason climbed over you and settled between your legs. His cock pressed hot against your stomach. He lowered himself onto one forearm and touched your face with the other hand.
“Tell me again.”
“That I am yours?”
“That you waited.”
You cupped the back of his neck. “Every day.”
His eyes closed.
“I hated you most days,” he confessed.
“I loved you through it all.”
Jason kissed you once, almost gently.
Then he reached between your bodies and guided himself to your entrance.
The first push stretched you slowly. Your body resisted after so long, and Jason stopped the instant your breath changed.
“Too much?”
“No.” You tightened your legs around him. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He pressed deeper.
The stretch burned, then softened into fullness as your body opened around him. Jason watched your face with fierce concentration, inching forward until his hips met yours and he was buried completely inside you.
Neither of you moved.
The moment was too large for motion. Five years collapsed into the place where your bodies joined, every remembered touch becoming real again beneath the weight of him.
Jason lowered his forehead to yours.
“You feel the same,” he said roughly.
“You do not.”
Pain flickered across his face.
You ran your hands down his back, over muscle and scars you had not known. “You feel alive.”
His breath broke against your mouth.
Then he began to move.
The first strokes were slow, almost careful, Jason drawing back and pressing into you with enough control that every inch registered. Your body adjusted quickly, wetness easing the drag. Pleasure built with each deep thrust, the angle pressing him against places your fingers had never reached.
You held his shoulders and watched him lose some of that control.
Jason’s mouth found your throat. He kissed the pulse there, then bit hard enough to leave a mark. Your cunt clenched around him.
He groaned.
“You like that.”
“You know I do.”
“I knew who you were.” His hips drove forward more sharply. “I do not know who you became.”
“Then learn.”
Jason rose onto his hands and thrust harder.
The bed struck the wall with each movement. Your breasts moved beneath him, your legs spread wide around his hips, and Jason watched as though determined to memorize every response. He changed the angle, pulling one of your knees higher, and the next thrust made you cry out.
“There.” His voice was thick with satisfaction. “Still there.”
You dug your nails into his back.
Jason hissed and caught your wrist. He pinned it above your head, then the other, holding both in one hand.
“On you?”
You pulled once against his grip. “Let me leave mine too.”
Something fierce entered his face.
Jason released one of your wrists and guided your hand to his shoulder before driving into you harder.
He drove into you harder.
Pleasure climbed again, rough and relentless. Jason’s free hand closed around your throat, pressure firm at the sides rather than the center. Your breath shortened. The controlled restriction sent heat racing through you, sharpening every thrust until your body trembled beneath him.
“Look at me,” he ordered.
You forced your eyes open.
“Whose knight are you?”
The question held years of doubt.
“Yours.”
“Who do you kneel for?”
“You.”
“Who were you waiting for?”
Your chest tightened.
“You.”
Jason’s expression twisted.
He released your throat at once and bent over you, pressing his face into the curve of your neck. His hips did not stop, but the rhythm broke, becoming desperate rather than punishing.
“I’m sorry,” he said against your skin. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
You freed one hand from his loosened grip and held the back of his head.
“Come home,” you whispered.
Jason made a sound you had never heard from him before.
He drove into you with renewed force, one arm sliding beneath your back to hold you against him. The position pressed your bodies together from chest to thigh, each thrust grinding the base of his cock against your clit. Your next climax gathered too quickly to resist.
“Jason, I’m—”
“I know.” His mouth covered yours. “Give it to me.”
You came around him.
Your cunt clenched in hard pulses, dragging a curse from him. Jason kept moving through it, thrusting deep while your body shook beneath him. The pleasure blurred into overstimulation, but you held him tighter, wanting every second of the proof that he was here.
His rhythm became uneven.
Jason pulled out with a broken groan and spilled across your stomach. His hand tightened around your hip as his body shuddered. For a moment he remained above you, breathing hard, his face turned away as though even now he could hide the force of what had happened.
You touched his cheek.
He looked at you.
There was no prince in his expression then, no commander of the army waiting beyond the walls and no dead boy haunting the court. There was only Jason, exhausted and alive and terrified that the moment would end if either of you moved.
“Stay,” he said.
You had once promised to follow him anywhere.
This request was smaller and somehow more difficult.
“I’m here.”
Jason lowered himself beside you.
He pulled a cloth from the washstand and cleaned your stomach with careful hands. The tenderness after roughness had always affected you more than any command. When he finished, he drew the coverlet over both of you and settled on his side facing you.
For a while, neither of you spoke.
You traced the scar at the corner of his mouth. Jason let you. His hand rested on your hip, thumb moving in slow, absent strokes.
“Bruce asked what I would do if you told me to leave with you,” you said.
Jason’s hand stopped.
“What did you tell him?”
“That I would decide whether you were asking me to follow you—or testing whether I still would.”
His mouth curved faintly. “And if I ask as myself?”
“I would ask where we are going.”
The answer did not please him as much as you expected.
Jason looked toward the windows. Night had settled over the city, the lamps below turning the streets into lines of gold.
“I did not come to stay,” he said.
You had known. The certainty had lived beneath every accusation, every test, every desperate touch. Jason had returned for justice, not reconciliation. He had brought his own soldiers because he no longer trusted Gotham to protect him and because they trusted him to return to them. Once Sionis and the others were exposed, he intended to leave before the court could decide whether to welcome him as a prince, fear him as a rival, or claim authority over what he had built without them.
“You command the northern passes,” you said.
“I command my people.”
There was a difference, and Jason clearly expected you to understand it.
“They chose me,” he continued. “Not because I was Bruce’s son. Most of them did not know who I was until months after they began following me.”
“So did I.”
Jason looked back at you.
“I came here prepared to find you married,” he admitted. “Or loyal enough to Bruce that you would put a sword through me if he asked.”
“He would never ask.”
“You did not answer the important part.”
“I am not married.”
“I noticed.” His fingers moved over your bare hip. “Eventually.”
You caught his hand. “I did not stay untouched because I believed you would return.”
Jason’s expression became guarded.
“I stayed untouched because loving you did not stop when hope did.”
He looked down at your joined hands.
“You deserved a life.”
“I had one.”
“Waiting beside a grave?”
“Searching for the truth. Protecting Richard. Keeping Sionis close enough to watch. Becoming someone who could stand in that throne room when you came back with an army and not draw a sword because everyone else was afraid.”
Jason’s thumb moved across your knuckles.
“I almost wanted you to draw it.”
“I know.”
“I thought if you fought me, at least I would know where we stood.”
“You have always preferred a wound you can see.”
He gave a quiet laugh. “And you have always preferred healing things that bite you.”
“You were very small when we met.”
“I was seven.”
“You were feral.”
“I was charming.”
“You threw a practice sword at Edmund Davis because he called me a stable rat.”
“He deserved worse.”
“You missed him and broke a window.”
Jason smiled properly.
The sight hurt more than his anger had.
You moved closer and rested your head against his chest. His arm came around you after only a moment’s hesitation.
“I cannot be the boy you lost,” he said into your hair.
“I am not the girl who lost you.”
“What does that leave us?”
You lifted your head. “Two people who still know how to annoy each other.”
“Promising foundation.”
“And an oath.”
Jason’s expression changed.
You slipped from the bed before he could stop you.
Your legs were unsteady, and the chill of the room raised gooseflesh along your skin. Jason watched as you crossed to the discarded armor. You knelt beside the table, took up your sword, and pulled the red cord free from its pommel.
The cloth had faded over five years. One end was stained dark from Blackwater Pass, though you had washed it until your hands cracked.
You returned to the bed.
Jason sat up against the carved headboard, the coverlet low around his waist. You placed the cord in his palm.
“You gave me this the night before you left,” you said.
“I remember.”
“You said we would go north after the treaty was signed. You would surrender your place in the succession, and I would resign my commission.”
“I was young.”
“You were certain.”
“I was wrong about what waited at Blackwater.”
“Not about us.”
Jason closed his fingers around the cloth.
You lowered yourself to one knee beside the bed.
His gaze sharpened. “What are you doing?”
“What I should have done in the throne room.”
“You were following protocol.”
“This is not protocol.”
You drew your sword and laid it across your palms.
The words of a formal knight’s oath rose easily to mind. You had spoken them before the king at eighteen, promising service to the crown, defense of the realm, and obedience to the laws that bound them both. Those words had made you a knight.
The promise you made Jason had never needed witnesses.
“My sword was yours before the king placed his crest on it,” you said. “My loyalty remained yours when the court called you dead. I cannot return what I never surrendered, but I can offer it again.”
Jason stared at you, the red cord caught in his fist.
“I am not asking you to kneel,” he said.
“I know.”
“I may never forgive Bruce.”
“I am not asking you to.”
“I will leave the capital when this is finished.”
“Then I will go with you.”
His throat moved.
“You command the king’s guard.”
“Someone else can learn to stand beside a throne.”
“My people will not follow you because you wear polished armor.”
“I would be concerned if they did.”
“They are loyal to me.”
“So am I.”
Jason studied you, searching for hesitation.
You raised your sword until the flat rested against your shoulder.
“I am not asking them to accept me as your commander,” you said. “I am asking to stand beside you while I earn my place among them.”
Jason laughed once, unsteady and disbelieving.
“That sounds less like devotion and more like a threat.”
“You always liked both.”
He leaned forward and wrapped the red cord around your wrist.
His fingers were careful as he tied it, the same way he had fastened it to your sword five years earlier. When he finished, he lifted your hand and pressed his mouth to the knot.
“My knight,” he said.
The words settled into the oldest part of you.
You sheathed the sword and climbed back into bed.
Jason pulled you against him before your head reached the pillow. His arms closed around you with an urgency he no longer tried to disguise, and you held him just as tightly.
Outside the chamber, the guard changed at midnight. Somewhere below, clerks continued sorting evidence that would bring down half the council. Beyond the northern wall, twelve hundred soldiers waited for the man who had freed them, armed them, and taught them that loyalty could be given rather than inherited.
They belonged to no kingdom waiting to reclaim them.
They were Jason’s people because they had chosen him, and he was theirs because he had chosen them in return.
For one night, their commander slept with his face against your throat and his hand wrapped around your wrist, fingers resting over the faded red promise tied there.
By morning, the palace knew you had spent the night in Jason’s chambers.
No one was foolish enough to mention it when you entered the king’s study wearing yesterday’s uniform, your armor properly fastened and Jason’s red cord tied openly around your wrist.
Bruce stood behind his desk. Richard occupied the chair near the fire, attempting and failing to hide his interest. Alfred placed a cup of tea in front of you without comment, though the corner of his mouth suggested he had already reached several conclusions.
Jason came in behind you wearing black armor and no cloak.
The king’s gaze moved from him to the cord at your wrist.
“You were ordered to observe him,” Bruce said.
“I did.”
“And what does he intend?”
Jason leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, watching you.
You thought of Blackwater Pass, an empty coffin, and five years spent carrying a promise everyone else believed had died. You thought of Jason on his knees before no one, surviving through spite and fury until he could return to the place that had failed him. You thought of the road north and the army waiting beyond the walls.
“He intends to see Sionis tried,” you said. “He intends to expose every person involved in the attack. After that, he will return to his people.”
Bruce’s face tightened. “And you?”
You rested one hand on the pommel of your sword.
“I renewed my oath.”
Richard exhaled a quiet laugh. Alfred looked down at the tea tray.
The king held your gaze for a long moment, then looked at his son.
Jason did not ask permission.
Neither did you.
When he left the study, you followed him into the corridor, matching your stride to his as naturally as you had when you were children racing toward the training yard.
At the turn of the stairs, Jason glanced at you.
“Anywhere?” he asked.
This time, there was no court to hide from and no grave waiting between the promise and its answer.
“Anywhere.”
credit to @uzmacchiato for the cherry divider and @toxisyddy for the Red Hood divider ❤️💛
Hi! I'm the anon who sent the dick grayson and lantern fic request and I just wanted to say that I loved it! I loved the banter and the dynamics were perfect. You're awesome and thanks for doing my request 🤍
thank you so much!!
i'm really glad you enjoyed it, especially the banter and everyone's dynamics. that was one of those requests that clicked in my head immediately, so it was a lot of fun to write.
thank you for trusting me with your request, and thank you for coming back to let me know you liked it. that genuinely means a lot!! ❤️💛
