El Cucuy @elcucuylover - Tumblr Blog

May 7

Venus as a Boy

contents (nsfw): Ser Duncan The Tall x travelling companion fem!reader, sex pollen (but it's actually mushrooms), yearning, mutual pining, idiots in love, synesthesia, explicit consent, scent kink (act surprised), praise kink, body worship, coming untouched, size difference, outdoor sex, unprotected sex, prone bone, and to be super judicious also chem-sex (because well, they are high).

synopsis: They get lost in the woods and eat some mushrooms :')

word count: 13,1K *sigh*

a/n: Banner is by me, dividers by @strangergraphics! Thank you lovely humans for giving it a read before publishing (@hextoken, @lateknightbites and @ladyoftheelm).

Duncan is hungry. Beyond upset with himself, though he cannot show it. His boots grind after your footsteps in the moss, quite literally mangling the prints you leave behind with his large feet, eyes down because he cannot even force himself to look at you.

You had been right, of course. Right when you said to buy more long-lasting supplies. Right when you said there might be no inn for miles and miles, and the last bed and fair meal in your bellies were already fading from memory. Right when you said to walk around the woods instead of cutting through, because no one could see the stars under crowns grown so thick, and this particular forest had looked queer even from the road.

It had unsettled him too, if he is honest. The trees stood too close together. The path under them seemed less like a path than an invitation made by something with poor intentions. But Duncan had wanted, badly, to be the sort of man who knew the way.

He had said the coin purse was too light for the inn. He had said north was north. He had said the road through was straight enough, and if you kept going you would come out three days sooner than if you went around. He had said Ser Arlan taught him to read land and wind and moss on bark.

You had only looked at the forest and said, “Moss grows where it pleases in a place like that.”

And now moss grows everywhere. On stones, on roots, on the wrong sides of trees. It slicks the ground under his boots and makes a fool of every scrap of road-wisdom he dragged out to defend himself. The sky has been gone for two days. The trees keep swallowing the light. Little ways open ahead of you and close behind you without sound.

Worst of all, you have stopped telling him you were right. That is how Duncan knows you are truly angry, and it is the last thing he wants. Everything he does is to show you how dear you are to him. When you are only cross, you sharpen yourself on him. When there is still play in it, you peck and prod and make sport of his solemn face until he either laughs or thinks hard about putting his head through a tree. Now you walk ahead in silence with your cloak hem dark from mud, one hand pressed to your empty stomach when you think he cannot see. But he sees.

With the ache in his legs he can't decide whether it is a new punishment from the Gods, or merely a top up of his ongoing one. Being doomed to spend all his time around creature who smells of woodsmoke and crushed green things, whose laugh comes out meaner for hunger yet makes something in him lift like a hound hearing its name, whose hands can bind a cut with such brisk mercy he feels forgiven before the knot is tied, then cuff him round the arm a breath later for moving too soon.

Those hands trouble him. The gentleness of them troubles him worse. The little sharp swats you give him when he says something thick-headed trouble him worst of all, because Duncan is a boy beneath the height and mail and borrowed vows, and boys think where they are forbidden; boys wonder how the same hand might fall in privacy, in play, in anger sweetened by permission.

He cannot have you. That is the root and rot of it. So he keeps you where a hedge knight may keep what is precious and impossible: in his head, in his heart, and, when he strays furthest from the knightly path, in those low, shameful devotions that take him half-awake before dawn, hand gone traitor under the blanket while you sleep near enough to unman him, face softened by the pale morning, mouth parted and begrudgingly unkissed.

A rock hits the tree bark, and a grunt follows. The same crow that has yelled at the pair of you twice already flies off with a menacing cackle, and Duncan sees you standing there with your shoulders drawn and anger practically fuming off your neck.

“If we kill it, we can eat it,” you announce grimly.

“You cannot eat a crow,” he tells you. “It’s a bad omen.”

It is much too quiet. Much too calm, and matches your mood not at all, for you are beyond livid and looking for something to punch outright.

“Oh?” you quip. “Worse than dying of hunger in the middle of the meanest fucking forest I’ve ever been to?” There, you stomp your foot hard enough to feel the impact travel thighwards and spread a vile ache. Your boot sinks into the moss.

Duncan gapes at you, clearly frightened. “We’ll find something soon enough,” he says, taking a few steps forward. His hands fist the belt of the satchel nervously. When you give him nothing but a death stare, he bows his head and mumbles, “Forgive me, I—”

It makes you explode. “Stop this! We’ve found nothing for two days except for disgusting birds!” you yell at him. Or rather, your stomach yells at him, and there is a lot of space within it to draw air from. “We’ve passed the same split ash twice, and there’s no sky in here. Where is your north now, hm?” You move in, throwing your hands around. When he says nothing, you press on: “I told you we should’ve stayed at the inn. I told you we should’ve walked round, but you never listen. Ser Arlan this, Ser Arlan that, I’m sick of listening to the wisdom of that old fart! And quit standing there looking like I should pity you, it’s infuriating!”

His eyes jerk around, but his head doesn’t. “A-aye,” he stammers. Walks right past you. “As you wish.”

“Duncan, I’m—”

“Keep moving.” He cuts you off. Hurt. “Start marking the trees, and perhaps we will stop walking in circles.”

You know damn well you’ve hurt him, regret it dearly, and get only more cross about it. Stupid boys with their stupid I-can-do-this attitudes. Stupid Duncan with his stupid we-can-make-it every time you offer an easier solution. You are well aware of how light your shared purse is, but there are ways around things. You could’ve charmed the innkeeper. Could’ve haggled with the grain seller. Could’ve hunted small game on your way around the woods, and at least there would be some stars above your heads. At least the air would be fresh and not rotten-smelling and damp all the way. Stupid Duncan with his stupid frowned mouth that wouldn’t even show you his endearing teeth or the way his eyes wrinkle when he laughs.

There are moments when you let yourself be deluded into thinking he has a kinder eye on you than merely a companion’s. He looks longingly whenever a larger patch of your body shows, and blushes furiously when he gets caught looking. Always makes you eat your ration first and pretends he’s well fed while his stomach could obviously host yours and his, and he’d still be hungry. He helps you into and out of the tall places, walks first through suspicious lands, and hides you with his broadness whenever someone ill-looking crosses your path. Often you find him staring at you in the mornings. He misliked the idea of you flirting your way into a warm bed so much the door rattled behind him when he stormed out of the inn. Went ahead guilty-looking and pulled at his brows as if it was some sort of personal betrayal.

You were very close to telling him that if you shared a bed you might be able to afford it, but something in you told you no. The same voice that acts as a constant apologist for all the deceptions of a girlish heart. It yearns for his lashes to tickle your cheeks when he kisses you and for his hands to smooth down your thighs, while the mind, still steadfast, screeches at you that he is a knight. A man honourable enough to apply all those gestures selflessly, out of duty and his soul’s purity. So you keep those little fits of unbearable pining to yourself, and only let them boil over from frustration in situations like this one. When the threat of closeness becomes so grand, you end up in the middle of nowhere instead, with no provisions, wineskin empty and body so hungry it feels as if it has started feasting on itself.

Watching him try to be competent while exhausted makes you furious in an oddly specific way. So much so that it takes an additional ounce of effort to look away from what it attempts to disguise. You insisted because food and shelter are sensible, yes, but underneath that: you are tired of him deciding what hardships both of you will nobly endure. You are tired of him being far away all the time. You are tired of him being able to admit a mistake exactly never, because he has some ridiculous fear of failing you.

So you drag yourself behind him, silent, functionally hostile, letting him mark the trees while your eyes remain fixed on the forest’s groundcover. For a long time there is nothing but moss and decomposing bark. Then, a little pale congregation shows itself under the lip of a fallen trunk.

You stop so quickly your knees almost forget the arrangement. Mushrooms. A whole clutch of them, bunched close in the wet dark, caps the colour of old cream and bruised grey at the edges, stems thin and stubborn where they push up through the rot. They look indecently alive in a forest that has offered no berries, no nuts, no rabbit flashing white under a bush, no squirrel rude enough to be killed, no clean water except what one might wring from the moss like from an old rag. You crouch and pick one. The stem gives with a soft little snap. It smells damp, earthy, faintly sweet in a way that makes your stomach fold in on itself with need.

You turn it over. Gills. Fine ones, packed tight underneath, pale as milk. You try to summon every scrap of sense you own about things growing wild and free: what colour means death, what smell means bellyache, what little skirts and bulbs and stains should send a person praying. The knowledge arrives in tatters. Old women muttering by cookfires. A girl you once knew who swore the brown ones were safest, until another girl swore the same about the white. You split the cap with your thumb and watch it bruise darker where you have hurt it.

The forest holds its breath. That is what Duncan notices first. The lack of you behind him. Muttered complaints, boots dragging and hungry little curses aimed at roots, birds, Gods, or him, cease entirely. He turns and finds you knelt in the moss bed, hunched over your own lap as if you have discovered treasure or a corpse.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Mushrooms,” you tell him, eyes fixed on whatever's before you.

He goes still. “Put them down.”

“They seem good enough.”

“Put them down,” he says again, and this time it lands as command. “You do not know what they are.”

Your mouth sets. Oh, there it is. The last rotten twig laid on the pile. You are hungry enough to feel hollowed with a spoon. Cross enough to bite the next thing that comes near your mouth. Cross with him for the inn, for the road, for the woods, for treating you as if you are some soft lady to be carried through hardship rather than the companion sharing it. Cross with him for touching you only when duty gives him permission. Cross with him for staring with those huge blue eyes full of thoughts he never once has the courage to drag into words. Cross with him for standing over you now as if he gets to decide this too.

You gather two fistfuls from the moss and sit back on your heels.

“Don’t,” Duncan says.

So you stuff the first handful into your mouth.

It is a dreadful decision immediately. They are wet and cold and spongy between your teeth, tasting of soil, pepper, old leaves, and something almost buttery enough to coil nerves. You chew with the wild-eyed conviction of a person proving a point no sensible man asked you to prove.

Duncan runs. For a man so large, he hits the ground beside you with shocking speed. “Stop that! Spit them out!” His hand catches your chin, thumb at one side, fingers at the other, trying to turn your face up. True fear has made him clumsy. “Spit them out, I said. Seven hells, are you mad?”

You clamp your jaw shut.

“Open your mouth.”

You shake your head with such force his grip slips. He catches you again, gentler and worse for it, because all that concern is going straight through your skin where his fingers hold you. He is stronger, of course he is, but strength has poor purchase against a mouth sealed by spite. You make a muffled, triumphant sound through the chewed mess of shroom flesh, and Duncan looks one breath away from prying your lips open with both hands.

“D'you want to die?” he snaps. “Is that it? You want to make a corpse of yourself because I told you no?”

It is enough to tip your anger over. You surge up into him with the second fistful crushed in your palm. He jerks back too late. Your hand smears over his mouth, damp caps and broken stems mashed against his lips, and for one glorious, idiotic heartbeat you have him pinned in sheer surprise, your other hand shoved hard against his jaw to keep him from throwing you off.

Then, he does throw you off. You land in the moss with a graceless thump while Duncan spits, coughs, spits again, one hand braced on the ground and the other scraping at his mouth as if he has kissed plague. “Fuck,” he chokes, which would be deeply satisfying under finer circumstances. “Fuck—”

You lie there with your chest heaving, ground cold under your back, and watch him retch up a sorry fleck of pale cap. “You ain’t dead yet,” you tell him.

Laughter bubbles out of you. Thin, cracked, half-starved, ugly with deranged little triumph. It keeps going because his face is appalled, because he has mushroom pulp on his chin, because the whole thing is so childish and awful that laughter is the only shape your body can make around the shame of it.

Then, you see his eyes and the humour dies.

Duncan wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist. Spits once more into the moss. When he looks at you, he is furious, yes, but beneath it something scared sits bare and wounded. “That was foolish,” he says, low and rough. “Cruel foolish.”

You push up on one elbow. “Duncan—”

“No.” He stands too quickly, sways, and pretends he has not. “Enough of this childish nonsense. Get up. Keep walking before we drop dead in this place and the ground eats what is left of us.”

You get up because staying on the ground would mean staying beside the shape of your own idiocy. There is no victory in your belly. The mushrooms sit there damp and useless, offering neither meal nor death nor apology. Your stomach remains hollowed. Your tongue finds some last shred of cap stuck against a tooth and you swallow it down because spitting now would feel too much like agreeing with him.

So you follow Duncan who walks ahead with his shoulders drawn hard, nicking the trees with more force than the trees deserve. Each cut shows pale through the bark. A poor little wound, then another, then another. You keep your eyes on them because looking at the back of his neck seems unwise. Because there is shame in you now, a hot coal of it under the hunger, and because the whole matter will surely sort itself out once there is road underfoot again. Road, sky, a stream, some village woman with a pot over the fire and enough mercy to sell you both porridge on credit.

The more you walk in dead silence, the more odd everything grows. First, the green deepens. Moss goes dark and bruises emerald where your boots press it flat, then almost black around the roots. The rot in fallen trunks shows itself in bands: brown, rust, yellowed cream, a wet red near the heartwood that makes you look twice. Beads of damp shine on bark like threaded glass. The world has somehow grown a skin and every part of it is tender.

Your eyes roll themselves to look ahead, to check whether up matches the down, and something unfeasible happens: Duncan's hair catches auburn where there is no sun to put it there. You blink hard, but it is still in place. Burning copper, warm at the roots, as if late summer has claimed him and crowned him its ruler.

He is ten paces ahead, fully clothed, filthy at the hem, angry with you in every line of him, and still something in the sight of his back opens a door you have spent months pretending was only a crack in the wall. His shoulders shift under the cloth. His rope-belt rides where his stride pulls it. One hand hangs near his thigh, broad and scraped at the knuckles, fingers flexing now and then as if he is still trying to close them around his temper.

And you can smell him. From there. From too far. Wool and old sweat. Iron, leather, green bark crushed fresh under his boots. The sour-sweet human warmth gathered at his throat after two days beneath the same clothes. It comes into you with the air and sits in your mouth, intimate as a thumb pressed on the tongue.

Your face goes hot. “Duncan,” you say before you mean to.

He stops, and turns only half-way. “What?”

Nothing. Everything. You have no answer fit for speech, only the sudden, humiliating perception of him through distance, moving among the trees like the forest made room grudgingly and only because it had to.

“I—” You swallow. The hollow in your stomach twists, and lowers into a stranger ache. “Nothing.”

He looks over his shoulder then. Only for a moment. His eyes are still angry. Still hurt. Something else beneath. The blue of them near takes the knees out from under you.

The white of your shift under the cloak flashes blinding to him. For a vile moment he knows the body beneath the cloth with alarming accuracy. The curve and press of it. The warm hidden places where fabric clings. The space between your thighs where his fingers would fit if his hand twitched one inch further into sin. He blinks, and once his lids lower he can feel the forest pulsing around him. Trees throb from root to crown, or so he thinks. Leaves shiver high above, though there is no wind he can hear. Only you.

Your breath comes from behind him, fine and close, though he knows you are several paces back. The small draw of it, the break and the swallow after. If he stays inside the sound too long, his head fills with images that shame him: blood moving thick and slow through veins, mouths parting in the dark, the slick red place behind your teeth. It comes again, and this time he hears the scrape of teeth over your lower lip. Hears your tongue shift when you swallow. Hears the wet click of it like a secret told directly into his ear.

He turns away hard and starts walking before his face can betray him. The ground gives strangely under his boots. Too soft to carry him, or too willing. Moss takes his weight and keeps the shape of it. Roots, slick and glossy, groan like sleeping limbs. Behind him your steps begin to sound coloured. Brown-black when you tread on earth. Pale when you crush dry leaves. Red when you stumble and curse at the tree that caught your sleeve.

Duncan scratches at his wrist. The itch has started there, under the cuff, a mean little needling. Then the other wrist. Then the side of his neck, just beneath the hair. His skin feels wrong on him, pulled too tight over bone, and the collar of his tunic rasps his throat with each breath. He hooks one finger under it and drags, angry with the cloth, the nature and his own flesh for having the gall in a time like this.

He stops at the next tree and lifts the knife. The mark comes crooked. His hand is less steady than he thought. Bark peels under the blade, wan tissue showing beneath, and when he braces his palm against the trunk the taste of it goes through his skin. Warm resin and bitter green. Something cloying and golden underneath, thick enough to coat the tongue.

For one dreadful breath, he wants to put his mouth to it. Then, he snatches his hand back.

You catch up while he stands there, staring at the tree as though it has whispered something incredulous to him. Your shoulder comes near his arm. Near enough that your warmth finds him through sleeve and cloak and all his ruined good intentions. He employs every nerve in an effort of not looking down. Looking down would show him your mouth, and he already hears too much of it.

Duncan sucks in a breath and regrets it at once, because it tastes like your laughter. "D'you feel—"

"N-no," you snap, visibly clawing at your sleeve.

The itching has gone worse now that you are close to him. You try to look everywhere but at his face and still it pushes itself into vision. More gorgeous than ever, which is a terrible thing to discover about a man who has just called you cruel foolish and looked as though you had stuck a knife between his ribs. His mouth sits soft even in anger, upper lip fine and nearly secretive, lower lip fuller, tenderly made, the whole of it held in that slight crookedness that makes him look as if a smile has once lived there and left its shape behind. Kissable enough to seem wet with sweetness. Near dripping, like split fruit. You can almost tell what it would taste of: salt, hunger, the warm copper of his bitten cheek, some grave and boyish mercy he keeps trying to spend on everyone but himself.

Beneath it, when his lips part around another breath, you catch the heart-wrenching disorder of his teeth. Crooked and ivory, youthful enough to undo the rest of his solemn, knightly face. His canines show for one bare second and something in you folds toward them with such obedient stupidity you want to laugh again, or bite your own hand. You would let them hurt you. You would lick over the uneven enamel just to learn the shape of him there too. His cheeks are freckled under the dirt, and the little mark high on the left one sits like a sign left by some indecently helpful god: here. Peck him here. His eyes are so blue they have no right to be warm, and yet they are, even scared, even angry, even with the pupils blown strange in the forest’s dim. His lashes would shame half the women in Westeros. His throat shows above his collar, working hard, begging for hands to circle it lovingly and feel the swallow pass under the thumbs.

It is the whole complex architecture of him that shreds you. The way his face moves before he can command it. Wrinkles with laughter. Saddens openly, no matter how quickly he ducks his head. Sets in anger he throttles inside himself until his jaw looks pained with it. He is a book flung open so wide the spine must be creaking, and still he behaves as if no one can read him. You want that face in your hands. At your neck. Bowed over you in the dark. You want that mouth at your breast, licking sweat from skin, lower too, in places the hunger in you has grown too proud to give it a name. He is a young man made, in this instant, to be loved down to the bone and back again, and you cannot understand why he will not simply let you.

“I feel… something,” you say after a moment, small and ashamed, and Dunk’s head snaps to the side to glare at you properly.

“I told you.” His voice comes out sharp, and he scrapes a hand over his mouth as if he can wipe the tremor from it. “I told you not to eat them.”

He looks worse now, which is a cruel way of saying better. Sweated through at the temples. Lips parted. The anger in him has gone twitchy, pulled tight, and every part of him seems brighter for it, as if fever has decided to make a feast of him first.

You ignore the fit because looking at him too long makes the ground loosen under your feet. “Do you feel it too?”

“I feel…” He stops.

The words plainly fail him. His jaw shifts. His hands open and close at his sides, large and helpless, missing something they have no right to know the shape of yet. There are knightly words for pain, for hunger, for wounds taken cleanly, for fear swallowed and carried forward. There are no words decent enough for this kind of yearning. No chivalric term for a cock so hard it makes thought limp and useless. No sweet, courtly account of his tongue feeling parched as old leather, as if only the salt of your skin could wet it. His whole body has turned want into a task. His hands want your flesh, specifically, under them. His mouth wants sweat. His chest wants weight. Even his bones seem to ache in your direction.

“Sick,” he says at last.

That throws you off enough to cool your face by one degree. “Sick how?”

His eyes shut briefly. “Wicked-sick.”

“Duncan.”

“Below the gut,” he grits out. “Aching.”

You move without thinking. One step, then another, drawn by the sound of him admitting anything at all. Your hand lifts near his chest, not touching yet, though the heat of him rises through the little space between you. “Well then—”

“No.” He backs away so quickly his spine hits the marked tree. Bark shudders behind him. For one absurd moment you think the forest gives a pleased little pulse. “No,” he says again, weaker. “I will not. I cannot throw all we have away for one witchcraft misery.”

A frown pulls at your mouth. You swallow, and Duncan feels it as if the working of your throat has passed through his own. His eyes drop there and jerk back up, pained.

“But we’ve got nothing but each other,” you say.

It comes out bewildered. Worse than that, wet at the edges. The tears mortify you the instant they gather, because you are hungry and furious and lit up from the inside by some vile little mushroom, and still the part of you that hurts most is the old part. The standing outside him part. The watching him lock himself away with all his goodness like a miser with coin.

“Duncan,” you mumble, and step in again.

He makes a sound under his breath. Almost your name, but more a plea with its back broken.

Then both his hands come down on your shoulders. Firm, but not harsh. Even now, with his face ruined and his arms trembling from the work of resisting it, he holds you as if you are something flammable he must keep from the fire. His fingers bite only as much as they need to. He keeps you at arm’s length, and the distance feels tormentuous, heartending and warm all the same.

“Sit,” he says.

You stare at him.

“Please,” he adds, and that does worse things to you than any command could.

With absolute pain written into every muscle, Duncan guides you back from him and down onto a mossy rise between two roots. He waits until you are seated, then pulls his hands away as if touch itself is thorned. He goes several paces off, too damn far, and lowers himself heavily to the ground with his back to another tree.

“We wait,” he says, breathing hard through his nose. “That is all. We wait it through.”

You hate the idea, but keep sitting where he put you because your head confuses the command for beguilement. The first few hauls of air almost convince you it might work. Your hands are folded badly in your lap, nails pressed into meat below the thumbs. He stays with his knees drawn up, head bowed and eyes closed. Looks as if he means to endure his own body by refusing to believe in it.

The distance should help; it does the opposite. It makes you want to scream. Whatever lives in your blood follows him across the ground and brings him back whole. His smell grows stronger with space, more exact, meaner for being denied. Salt has gathered at his hairline, and the place beneath his jaw where a mouth could fit grows warmer. You shift on the moss and the moss answers too softly, sinking under your hips with a sympathy you resent.

Across from you, Duncan’s hand closes around a fistful of earth and your own palm burns with it. His fingers dig in. Soil packs under his nails. A root bends against the heel of his hand, and your skin reports the pressure as if the soil has confused you for him.

He hears something. His head turns a fraction when you breathe through your mouth. Sweat slides down the side of your neck, slow as an insect. His lashes lift. His eyes go there with such naked soreness that your throat tightens around nothing.

“Stop listening to me,” you say.

His mouth twitches into a strained smile. “I am tryin'.”

“You look like you are praying.”

“I am tryin' that too.”

A stupid, tender ache opens in your chest and gets swallowed by the lower one. You drag your sleeve over your neck; it makes the itching worse. Cloth rasps over skin and the sound of it seems to pass through Duncan’s teeth; he winces and shifts, hard, then stills with both hands flat on the moss.

There is no hiding it. The line of him under his breeches is plain enough even in the dim. Angry, trapped, dragging each breath out of him by force. You look before you can tell yourself not to. Then you cannot look away quickly enough to make it innocent, and, begrudgingly, Duncan notices.

His face goes the most painful red. One hand flies down to cover himself, and the pressure makes him give a low, broken sound through his teeth. He jerks his hand away again, humiliated nearly past bearing, and turns his face aside. “Do not,” he says.

You should feel triumphant. Some sour little part of you tries, but it dies quickly. He looks wretched with it, sweating and rigid, punished by the very thing you have been imagining for months with all your private, girlish cruelty. Your own body answers him with a deep pull that leaves your thighs weak. Nothing shows on you so simply. That feels unfair too. You are suffering just as stupidly, only your suffering has the manners to hide under skirts.

“Dunk,” you say, softer.

His shoulders climb.

“We could help each other—”

“No,” he grits.

“You did not even let me finish.”

“I heard enough.”

“You heard what you wanted.”

“I heard what I feared.” He swallows, and the sound arrives in you wet and close. “And I said no.”

He feels your stare on him. His hands go into fists again, punishing the green because the green will not bruise like the body would. He is picturing it now, Gods help him. How wet you must be under all that cloth. He does not know much, but he has learned enough to know girls do that when they start looking like you look now: flushed and wounded and angry with wanting. He thinks of putting his hand there and near loses the thread of his own breathing. Thinks of the heat of you opening under his fingers. Thinks of being allowed the taste of it, then the taste of your mouth after, and in the state he is in now he cannot help wondering whether that too would have colour, or sound, or smell. Whether kissing you would ring gold in his teeth. Whether your breath would taste the way your laughter does. The sweetness of permission feels so distant it turns appalling, and Dunk sits there starved with the effort of keeping those pictures caged.

“It would be wrong,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because we are half mad.”

“We were half mad before.”

“This is different.”

“You mean easier.”

His eyes cut to you. The look makes heat climb under your ribs. There he is, the part of him that can be stern when forced to it, that can stand between you and ill-looking men on the road with all that height suddenly gathered into threat. It should warn you away, but instead it scrapes through the need and brightens it.

“I would not have you come back to yourself and curse me for it,” he says.

The words land too near the old fear. That miserable little thought that perhaps his whole pain is honour fighting witchcraft, while yours is only the truth made louder. You breathe through a phlegmy laugh. “Curse you.”

His brow knots.

You are about to leave it be. To sit through it, wait through it, whatever is a brilliant solution that Duncan has thought of. Your hips shift on the ground, and make you mutter, inadvertently, “I wanted you before I ate the bloody things.”

Duncan stares. Truly stares. The blue of his eyes has gone strange again, wide and dark at the centre, his face emptied of everything save for shock. “W-wha—what?”

You lick your lips. His gaze drops there and returns with visible effort. “Y-yeah,” you say, now that it is out and steaming on the groundcover. “That.”

He blinks. Your courage begins to thin immediately, because why wouldn't it. It was never courage, only fever with a mouth on it. You pull your knees closer, as if there is still some arrangement of limbs that could restore dignity.

“I mean—” Your voice catches. You hate it. “Never mind. I know you are trying to do right by me. I know. We can wait it through. Forget I said anything.”

Duncan’s chest rises, and the forest seems to rise with it. He breathes out your name, barely shaped. His hands have opened, the dirt clings to them. He looks frightened still, painfully so, but the fear has changed its direction. Some part of him has stepped to the edge and found ground there after all.

“Say it again,” he says.

Your heart gives a foolish, violent knock. “What?”

His throat moves. “What you just said."

You stare at him. “Duncan—”

“Please.”

It takes more from you than the mushroom, that one word. You sit there with your skin singing and your mouth swollen around the truth, while he waits as if you have a blade to his neck and every intention of mercy.

“I wanted you before,” you say.

His eyes close, and his face changes direction so fast you nearly miss it. It seems to not be able to settle between hurt and then hurt getting alleviated, then the rest of locked places opening at different speeds. A bewildered, boyish joy gets smothered so quickly by hunger that your hands twitch in your lap.

“I thought—” he chokes. “I thought it was only me.”

A smile, toothy and horrible, pulls your mouth and it suddenly makes sense what one old woman has said to you about smiles: that they are deceitful, that creatures bare their teeth in fear and pain mostly. “Idiot,” you say, laughing, because the shake it gives to your shoulders at least loosens something up.

“Aye,” Duncan says. For the first time in days his mouth tips upward. "I might be."

You nearly cry then. Properly. From fury, from tenderness, from the unfairness of him sitting there all this time with the same wound as yours hidden better than yours. Your lips part to tell him that waiting is fine, that you can both be noble and miserable and half-dead until the mushrooms spend themselves, that he need not come closer, that you are sorry for making it worse, when he lifts his head and rasps, "C'mere. C'mere, girl."

He manages to stand, but only just. Poor thing limps for the ballast between his legs, face drawn tight with the effort of making his body obey him. You find no such strength in yourself, so you crawl on all fours, getting fistfuls of moss between your fingers, knees drowning, cloak slipping off one shoulder as you go to him with whatever dignity hunger and witchcraft have left you.

When he gets close enough, he falls to his knees and into you. His arms come round you, pulling you in, the both of you stumbling with it. He sinks your back into the ground and his mouth onto yours. Groans loudly for it. The sound goes through you before the kiss does, and then the kiss is there too, wet and hard and poorly aimed for the first starving second while his mouth is learning yours by error.

Duncan feels like a hundred fists that have been holding each joint of his spine let go in the same instant. Suddenly he can bow deeper, go at it harder. Get more of himself over you, around you, as if he means to wrap you into himself. Your body tastes like absolution through his palms and covers him in its odd soot. It gets into the lines of his hands, beneath the nails, under the skin, and he does not know whether to pray over it or lick it off.

His cock presses to your thigh, and it is worse and better somehow than it has ever been. Worse because there is cloth between you and still the pressure nearly blinds him. Better because it is you, actually you, warm and shifting, making a place for him with your legs and your hands and your open, foolish mouth.

Into his mouth, you are laughing. He is kissing you and you are laughing, giggling so saccharine you might be made of sweet things. The laughter itself has a taste in Duncan’s ears, the sound of it melts on his tongue, enters the bloodstream through all the grooves in it, and when he pictures licking your neck, he wonders: would your skin giggle too?

His hands find your collar because the thought has nowhere else to go. He pulls at the laces with none of the skill he has for knots, fingers too large, too eager, too angry with cloth for existing. The shift gives under them, opening enough for air to touch the skin below your throat, and he lets his lips slide from yours.

It goes badly for him. Your jaw is slick from his own mouth. Lower, it goes open and wet and panting, tongue rolling out as if he has forgotten any courtly use for it. He licks down the side of your throat to the collarbone to find out whether laughter lives there, and learns it gives him praise instead. All of you tenses beneath him. Your legs jerk. Your nails go hard into his back through tunic, and the pain comes through bright enough to make his hips grind down.

“Duncan—”

“Yes—” he mumbles into your skin, uselessly. Then, because he's gone foolish: “You taste—Gods—like being let in. Like rain after I thought there’d be none. I don't know—”

He tries again with his tongue since words make a poor account of the matter. His weight settles over you, heavy and shaking, and you answer by wrapping your legs round his hips. The cradle of it, the permission of it, make his head dizzy. His cock settles where it most wants to be, when you take his face in both hands.

Duncan stills, or tries to. Your palms press his cheeks, thumbs push under his upper lip with such strange, fond boldness that his breath stops. You bare his teeth yourself, exposing the crooked row of them while he looks down at you, broken and burning, too far gone to be ashamed quickly enough.

Then you crane up and lick across them, and a slide of flesh on enamel rings in his bones like a bell. A sound leaves him that has no knightly ancestor.

“You’re so pretty I could kill you,” you say.

He makes another sound, worse than the first, and you press your face to his before he can hide from it. Rub your cheek against his, nose dragging clumsily along the dirt and wet of him as if looking is suddenly insufficient, as if you must take the shape of his face by touch too.

“Undress me,” you breathe against him. Your hands clutch at his collar next, less patient than his. “And you. Take it off. I want to see you. Undress us.”

"A-all of it?" he asks dimly. The only thing he gets is a nod. A glint in the eyes that have gone so dark Dunk has to squint to recognise the ring of remaining colour in them. His mind is still considering it, while the body has taken to obeying briskly: he undoes the rope and tosses it into moss, gets his hand under the hem of the tunic, drags everything over his head and for a moment blinds himself in linen.

When he comes free his hair is rucked up and the sight of him near bends you with affection. He looks younger like this. Exposed by acquiescence before he is exposed by skin.

“Boots,” you tell him, because he has gone still under your looking.

“Aye. Boots.”

He nearly tangles himself in the work of them, kicking one free, then the other, cursing when the heel catches in wet. His breeches follow with even less dignity, shoved down and worked off in an ugly struggle of knees and hips and breath held through his teeth. He is too large for haste. Too flustered for grace. Beautiful in the middle of both.

Then, his hands come back to you and change. Shaking terribly and clumsy as ever, but tender in a way that seizes your throat. He unlaces you as if he's wronged the ties and has to make amends. His knuckles drag against your breastbone, and he looks at your face like he still expects rebuke.

"Duncan," you say. "You can touch me."

"I—I know," he says. "I'm tryin' to be gentle."

“You can be quick and gentle.”

He blinks to that. Grows as heedless as you wished him to be all this time and you watch the permission taking shape in a mind trained to deny itself. He pulls the laces loose, opens the front of your bodice, works fabric from shoulders and arms with an urgency that keeps catching on worship. When cloth sticks at your elbow, you both swear at it. When your skirt snags beneath your hip, he makes a noise close to despair and you have to lift yourself enough for him to drag it free.

Once you're denuded properly, framed by green and dark, he sits back on his heels and his face breaks open around the sight so quickly he has no time to hide it. Want, yes, awful and plain. But wonder too, and fear of the wonder, and that same helpless grace he wears when given food he did not ask for and badly needed. His hands hover near your sides without touching, fingers flexed, palms dirty, as though he has come upon something hallowed and has no idea what Gods do to fools who reach too fast.

“Do not look like that,” you say, though you want him to look exactly like that until the trees fall down.

His throat works once. “Like what?”

“Like it's a trickery,” you tell him. "I'm here."

To prove it, you push yourself up on your elbows and reach. Crawling. Climbing. You're climbing, climbing, climbing and there is no end to him. Duncan The Tall, Duncan The Broad, Duncan the man you've wanted so badly all this time and suddenly cannot contain it. Whatever it is that is happening now has not so much set you to be doing this, but has stripped the already precarious layers of we shouldn't, I couldn't, he wouldn't and made your mind and heart and hands and legs go need you, want you, death to me if I can't have you, please, please, please—

Your arms make it to his neck, hips slot into his lap, and there he is, angry and throbbing and so needy for you that the heat of him seems to have found its own heart. His hands catch your waist, grip harder when your skin gives under them. The first press of you against him turns his face ruinous. His mouth opens. His lashes jump. For one breath he looks as if he might beg pardon of your bones for wanting them so badly.

Then, you push him, barely. Pressure on the chest, a lean of your weight, and still he goes, pliant, as if all the strength has been taken out from under him. His back sinks into the moss, arms fling to the sides for he'd let you crucify him. You land with your palms on either of his shoulders, knees wedged into the dirt and thighs crowding his ribs. Between your legs his stomach rises softly, and the hairs on it tickle the skin most sensitive.

“There,” you breathe.

Duncan is stricken. Drained of volition as if volition were blood, and that one is occupied to gather elsewhere. He bends his knees slightly to ease some of the terrible sensation of air cooling the weep of his cock, and thinks he's never been so close to bursting just from being. He has his eyes closed to achieve anything—regroup, withstand, persist this unbearable wave of tenderness that thrashes in him—when your fingers get to the tendons of his neck and caress him, and it's all he needs to tip his head back and bare his throat to you.

There, your looking turns worse. You gape at the long working line of it until Duncan’s breath snags. The notch above his breastbone. Sinew drawn tight under the skin. The pulse batting there as if trying to get out. Your fingers follow first, light enough to make him suffer, then firmer when his head lolls to the side and his mouth opens on a sound he seems to bite in half.

“Don’t do that,” he says, palms flexing in the dirt.

You pause. “Do what?”

Dunk's lids crack open and he finds you above him with your hair all wild, staring as if you've found a chunk of gold in the mud. “Look at me so,” he says. "As if I'm—"

He fails there, since there are no words for it. As if I'm worth looking at. As if you're seeing something comely. Too much feeling is brought to a narrow door and made to wait outside because no word is plain and large enough to carry it in.

"You are," you tell him. Set both palms lower, where his chest is warm, alive and broad enough that your fingers look foolishly small against it. Through the sparse hair, over the hard-won muscle and the softer give laid over it, and that one you give a greedy squeeze. His nipple tightens under the heel of your hand and he jerks, shocked enough to look double-crossed by his own body, so you do it again.

“Gods,” he says, strangled.

“Good?”

His answer comes late, dragged through the teeth. “Aye," he says, though the mind still lingers in the country of mortification. Arms begin their raise, some old reflex reaching to cover himself, to help you or stop you, or simply manage the unbearable position of being wanted.

You swat them away, go back to cradling his jaw, and tell him softly, "Don't." He freezes, then melts under your thumbs on his cheekbones. "Don't be scared of me," you whisper.

“I ain't scared of you.”

“You are.”

His face twists, proud even now. “I’m scared of what I’ll do.”

“What will you do?”

"Shame myself," he says. "Fail you, I—"

"You won't," you tell him. "Is it shameful if we are both ruined? I just want to—" A swallow. "I just want to look." You bend over him, and the shift of your hips brings proof to your side of things. Your cunt grinds his stomach, leaves him all slicked and warm, and Duncan learns it helps little to nothing that you are equally fervent. Only makes him worse for it. He lies under you, enormous and nearly unmanned, and hears you whisper an absent, "Let me," a second before your mouth finds his chest.

He goes silent in that alarming way men do when noise has become too small for the body. Every part of him tightens. You kiss him, once, then again, then open your mouth and press your tongue to skin which tastes like freedom you have with him on the road, human and dear, and when your teeth graze him he gasps, and your own skin goes hot at the power of it. “You’re beautiful,” you say into him.

He shakes his head hard. “N-no.”

“Yes.”

“No, girl, don’t—”

“Yes,” you say again, and put your mouth lower to make the word enter him another way.

With it, your frame slides down his. His muscles pull tighter for it, cock strains against your stomach, hard and furious with denial, and the sight of him suffering through praise makes something in you go soft and feral both. Your hands glide from his ribs to hips, thumbs follow the inward cut there, then squeeze the warm, soft belt of flesh low on his belly. It's so generous and male and so violently lovely it makes your teeth set. Some songs ought to be rewritten for men like him. Some maiden's graces ought to be stolen back and hung on his foolish body where they belong. The supple flesh at his middle should be praised the way poets praise hips and breasts and long necks. His breadth should be Venusian, size should be called lush. His stubborn, hungry, frightened beauty should have men lighting candles under it and women lying awake from thinking too long.

It feels as if he sets of the beauty in you when he's all across your lips, gentle, coarse, freckled with the body that bears marks of every touch. It blooms easily where your fingers rake him, where your teeth nick him, where you suck and lick and kiss. He blemishes red against milk, and then the milk whole blushes into pink from all the blood that's alive within him, and for you.

“You're so gorgeous,” you murmur, face lost in skin. “It makes me angry that you do not see it.”

"You oughtn't eat those mushrooms," he says, trying for light, coming out pitiful. "They fool your eyes."

Your mouth splits into a smile. "I'm telling the truth," you tell his belly. "Only now I've the courage for it."

"Aye, well." Duncan swallows, and his spine bends towards you with it. "It's doing me harm, girl," he says anyway.

"Hm, good," you hum. Keep going lower, lower still until your nose finds his navel and rests there. The hair thickens beneath your mouth, darkening downwards, and you press your face into it because you can, because he lets you, because the smell of him there goes straight through your skull. You wedge your nose into the small dip of his belly and breathe him in.

It makes him feel like he's dying. Lust has him hard and fevered, yes, but your adoration takes his joints apart. He has imagined your mouth for months in shameful pieces: the shape it takes when you sleep, the wet inside of it when you laugh, the feel of it in a bedroll dream that left him waking guilty and sticky and half-mad with it. Now those same lips chose him, return to him, find new places to be fond over. He has no defence built for being cherished.

“Please,” he says, though he's unsure what he begs for. His hips jump, hand joins the begging in your hair, and you just stay, drunk, half-conscious, with every breathing device body offers devoted to the densest parts of him.

There's no friction to explain it. It's only his mind draining and draining of thought so his blood can fill him elsewhere. He feels himself sweating, muscles in his sacrum thumping, sack going hard as rocks, before he even realises he's going to come simply from this. “My girl—" he tries, voice cracking around it. "Wait. I'm—oh—”

You do hear him, but understand too late. He goes rigid beneath you, helpless and huge, and his lower back lifts off the ground, breath breaks into loud, choked moans, and then he spills so hot against your body it shocks you. A wicked part of you goes yes. Give me. The gentler one holds him through it, sighs all delighted and lets him rut into a poor cradle made of your bodies pressed together.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, shaking. "I'm sorry. Forgive me."

Your head lifts, sluggish, and you catch him turning his face aside, red to the ears. "Forgive you?" you ask.

“I didn’t mean—” He swallows hard. “I should’ve held. I should’ve—”

“Stop,” you say. Come back up to have your eyes level and drag some of the wet with you. "I could kiss you bloody for that.”

You brush the hair off his forehead. It shines satin. Makes him this much more beautiful. He looks at you, dumbfounded and startled, then lets his lids lower when you put your mouth back on him. To his cheek. Then, the high freckle on it you have wanted since before the forest went strange. “Pretty,” you tell him. “Gorgeous. Sweet stupid man.”

“Do not call me sweet after that.”

“I’ll call you what I like.”

He tries to look stern. Fails because your mouth is on his again. Fails worse because he has barely softened at all, still hard, still wanting, already gathering toward the next hunger while shame loosens its fingers from his throat.

His hands come to you, and arrive with less fear. Still careful, but firmer now, dirt-palmed and shaking, learning the shapes that've been bludgeoning him in his sleep. His mouth opens wider, touch slides up, then down, then around, and when you gasp he hears it bright as struck metal and groans as if the sound is next to his ear.

“Tell me,” he says against your lips.

“What?”

“If I do wrong.”

“You won’t.”

“Tell me.”

You look at him then, this great man under you, stubborn and proud and delicate where he has hidden it worst, heart bigger than his body and twice as easy to wound. “I’ll tell you,” you say. “And I’ll tell you when it’s right.”

His eyes close briefly. “Aye,” he breathes. “Do that.”

"And you tell me," you say, "what do you want."

“Your neck,” he says, gathering you closer. Rising to sit, and pulling you with him. You let yourself be lifted and sat back onto his lap. "The nape." His voice roughens. "I want—Seven forgive me, I want to smell you there."

The wish should be strange. It is strange. It feels like a hand closing under your ribs. “Then do it,” you tell him.

He finds your hips and turns you, guiding rather than hauling, mouth already searching for the place before he has settled you. You feel him shift, chest coming to your back, breath over your shoulder, and when his nose presses where it ought to, he makes a sound so low it seems to enter the ground before it enters you.

“Gods,” he says.

You brace yourself on both hands. “What?”

There's no proper answer. Just mouth opening over skin, wet and hot and shaking. He breathes you in there, kisses, breathes again, each pass less composed than the one before. His groan reaches your spine as heat before sound.

One permission opens the next in him. More private. You let him smell you without recoiling or calling him a creep, and worse—seem to enjoy it, because the sweet scent of your cunt joins all the other ones. The locked, starved part of Duncan takes the gift and grows bold from enduring it. Your body softens forward, the shape of yes becomes flesh under him. It loosens something old and badly tied. If he may put his mouth here, then he may want the slope of your back. If he may want that, then perhaps the weight of himself over you is no crime. Perhaps wanting to cover you is only wanting, and no beast’s law until he makes it one.

He presses you down and you go willingly, sinking onto the moss, cheek turned to the side, hips lifting because Gods, I want you here, I want you right here. The earth gives as if it has been waiting to receive the shape of you both and smells loud.

Then, his frame comes over you. One arm wedges itself across your shoulders, the other braces on the ground. His weight lowers in pieces: chest to back, belly to pelvis, cock—slick and warm—to ass, calves to your feet, and it thrills you that there is so much of him still going on when you yourself end.

“I want you like this,” he says, mouth to your ear.

Your arms weaken. “Dunk.”

Your voice makes gold flare behind his eyes. He sees it, absurdly, as his name leaves your mouth: gold struck thin, gold swallowed, gold caught in the hollow under his tongue. His arm tightens, asking with the pressure before his mouth can manage the question. “Can I? Have you like this?”

“Yes,” you near cry. “Yes. Take me.”

Duncan closes his eyes. Settles a bit heavier. “Too much?” he asks, wrecked.

“No.” You push back against him, furious with tenderness. “I swear to the Seven, I’ll bite you. More, Duncan. Give me more.”

Your restlessness does something terrible to him. So he gives you more, in small increments, though he wants to give you all of it at once. Shields you with himself until the forest air can hardly get between you. You feel his heart hammering through his chest, buzzing like it's bees sealed under bark, and him rolling his hips into the plush of your buttocks. The promise of him is tremendous—slick, large, rigid, veined perfectly, with a thick blunt head that barely squeezes itself through the crease, and heavy, potent balls, ready to fill you up to the brim.

“I want you,” he murmurs at your ear, words broken by the drag of his pelvis. “I want you so much. Wanted you—Gods, I wanted—”

“Then have me,” you whine and almost impale yourself on him. Duncan huffs a laboured breath, trembles when his hand leaves the dirt to guide himself inside you and you welcome the sweet weight pressing your shape into the ground. He's all over you. His scent has bled over to your tissues. His thighs flex over yours, and then, oh—

"Fuck—" he grits, and it's deeply satisfying. The crown breaches you. The whole wood pulses dark green, copper, red at the roots. The girth splits you. Only then do you remember how unbearable the need has been, because the answer to it comes shaped like Duncan and hurts accordingly. Your body takes him by inches, each one too much until the next one proves it survivable. He pushes in so slowly you can make out the build of him in your mind, impossibly present, taking his place through clench and that bright pain that flashes behind your eyes whenever your body tries to change its mind.

“Easy,” he pants, though there is nothing easy in him. “Easy, girl.”

He grips your hip, shaking so much the fingers jump on you. Holds himself there, barely inside enough to destroy you, nowhere near enough to save you. The restraint of it turns wicked. You feel the carefulness in him like another ache, another place he refuses to fill. “Duncan,” you whisper, pleading.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

“You don’t.”

He tries to breathe. You feel it against your back, great lungs straining, arm tight across you. He gives you another inch and your vision darkens. Your thighs start quivering under his, badly enough that he stops. “Sweetheart,” he says. “You were to tell me.”

“I am telling you.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Yes." You swallow. Find his forearm and squeeze it meanly until your nails leave dents there. "Because you stopped.”

He hides in the back of your neck. For a second Dunk seems to lose the whole battle against himself there, hips twitching, cock dragging deeper by a cruel little accident that makes you choke on his name. He goes still immediately, horrified by his own body, and you could howl from the piety of it.

“Keep going,” you say.

“I’ll hurt you.”

“N-no—it hurts wherever you aren’t,” you say, and he groans. “Please,” you say, needy, crazed, with your truth made fanatic. “Duncan, please. I need you. I need you, I need you—”

"Gods damn it, girl," he says. "Gods damn it, I need you too."

He pushes in farther. Rougher, all of him, setting you aflame from the inside. Your body empties of room for hunger or air or shame, because he's taken up all of the space within it. He rolls his hips and finds another impossible depth, making the burn open into something lovely enough to frighten you.

“There,” you sob. "Right there."

He is all over you. In you. Around you. Heavy enough to press your breath into the earth, careful enough that you can feel forbearance shivering through him. His groan comes against your spine before your ears receive it, and when his mouth opens by your neck, all you can do is push back and take the shape he has made of you.

Then, Duncan's hips lift. He feels himself dragging all the way back, and your cunt grips him on the exit like it disagrees with the hollowing. "Fuck, you're so—" he says. Sinks back in, faster, hungrier, worse, better, more, and finds that however little space the angle grants you, you use it wisely. Push your sweet ass out for him until your bodies meet with a wet slap and only then does he understand how wet you've made yourself for him. How ready you are. How willing.

He slots flush to you and finishes his thought: "—tight."

"Gods, fuck me more," you say. "Dunk—"

His name turns gold behind his eyes again. Brighter this time, struck hard enough to spark. He works his muscles and feels the colour burst through his skull, down his spine, into the hand he has braced across you.

“Like this?” he asks, already doing it again.

“Yes," you breathe. "Jus' like that. Oh, fuck—”

So he gives it to you. Just like that.

The boy in him, the one who blushes and stammers and hides his wants under duty until duty starts to resemble cowardice, gets shouldered aside by something broader. Some man’s part of him with dirt under its nails and your heat round its cock and no room left for pretty suffering. He still holds you with care; that remains. But his hips are done pretending they do not know what they want.

He fucks you harder, and the moss takes the force of it. Your fingers claw into green and black and flesh of his forearm. His palm slips in the dirt and catches again. The earth smells damp and opened. Leaves taste bitter on the air, and beneath all of it is you: hot, slick, clenching down each time he draws back as if your body would rather keep him entire.

“Duncan,” you gasp.

He buries his face against the back of your neck. “Say it again.”

“Duncan.”

Gold, again. He groans, broken loose enough that his mouth starts working without permission. “You’re beautiful,” he says. "So beautiful."

You laugh, though it comes out ragged. “Now?”

“Aye, now.” His hips grind deep on the word. “Especially now.”

“Liar.”

“No.” He lifts enough to look down the line of you, the turn of your cheek, the sweat on your neck, the place where your malleable body strains under his and endures more, asks for more than he would ever suspect. “You are. Gods, you are. I can scarce stand it.”

You shudder around him. That does him harm, too.

He drops his mouth to your ear. “If the sun never came up, I’d not care. If this wood kept us here and there was only this, only you under me, I’d—” His voice catches. He drives into you again, short and rough. “I’d be a worse man than I thought.”

“You’d be honest,” you say, smiling. Exhilarated. Turn your face enough that your cheek drags in the moss. “Tell me more.”

That should shame him. It does, but the shame is toothless. The mushrooms have made a ruin of his monastery for silence, and his body has found the ruin agreeable. “I hate when men look at you,” he says.

Your breathing trips. “What?”

“I hate it.” His hand tightens on your ribs, then loosens quickly, remembering. “In inns. On roads. When you smile to get us bread cheaper. When some man thinks you soft because you’ve a soft mouth, or thinks you easy because you are kind, or thinks—” He thrusts harder, angry now, the memory of every look finding your body through his. “I know what they think.”

You push back into him, mean with pleasure. “How do you know?”

He goes still for half a breath. Then his mouth finds the shell of your ear, and his voice drops so low it seems dragged from the ground.

“I am a man.”

There. There it is. The confession under all confessions. He has looked too. He has thought. He has watched the curve of your smile over a cup, the bend of your back by the fire, the softness of your mouth in sleep, and made himself suffer for it as if suffering could make him clean. He has wanted with the rest of them and hated them for wanting less carefully.

You clench around him so hard his forehead knocks between your shoulder blades.

“Seven hells,” he chokes.

“Were you thinking too?” you ask, cruel because you need him to say it.

“Aye.”

“What?”

His hips start again, less measured, sloppier and greater for it. The more they do, the more you drip for him and Duncan no longer knows anything. He just feels.

“Your mouth," he says. "Your hands. How you’d sound if I—” He loses the sentence inside you and has to drag it back by force. “How you’d look under me. Over me. Anywhere. I thought of you so much I near made myself sick with it.”

“Good,” you pant.

“Good?”

“Yes. I wanted you sick.”

He gets punched to the gut by sheer force of words. Drives into you harder, close and blunt and heavy, his arm drawing you up enough that your back bows under him. His chest drags over your skin and hums through you, hair falls forward, tickling your cheek. His mouth returns to your neck as if that place has become a home he means to worry open.

“My girl,” he mutters.

“Yes,” you breathe.

“My girl?”

“Yes, Duncan, yours, just—fuck—”

More, more, more is what you want, so he gives it. Gives you more because you asked and because he has wanted to be asked for so long the wanting has grown limbs. He gives you the weight, and the girth of him until the tip touches the spot that makes you go there. There, right there, fuck me there, more, you keep saying. He smiles through it, nods through it, and despite his balls going laden enough to feel heavier than whole of him, he still manages to tease you.

“There?” Duncan asks.

“There," you say. "There, don’t stop.”

Your legs tense. Feet curl against his calves, and your toes find them for purchase. He wonders if he is deep enough to dent the earth beneath your belly when he fills you. If you will be sore from him. If you will let him soothe you with his mouth after.

“I wouldn’t,” he says, and then feels the change in you. The hardening of your buttocks under him. The faint tremor starting low, travelling outward through muscle, your body drawing itself tight around the place where he is buried. His hips falter, then go meaner because you push back for it. “Close?”

“Oh, fuck, Dunk.” Your face has gone into the dirt. Your cheek, your mouth, all that cleverness pressed to moss and leaf-mould while you pant under him like the ground has stolen the rest of your words. “Fuck, my darling, I—”

His whole body stumbles at that. “Say that again.”

“Yes—” you breathe instead, uselessly, beautifully. Your thighs shake beneath his. “Darling, Oh Gods, yes—”

You tighten on him. Duncan chokes. His arm bands across you with a blind little jerk, keeping you under him, keeping himself in you, his other hand clawing at the earth by your shoulder. “Girl—”

Then it has you. Breaks hot and huge through your nerves, too large for the body it has been given. Your hands seize in the ground. Hips kick back into him and then can do nothing but bear it, taking the thick drag of him through each bright pulse while the world opens its wet mouth around you. Soil at your cheek. Leaves green on the tongue of the air. His chest heavy over your back, a low-humming cage. His breath at your neck, ragged and stunned. His cock inside you, absolute.

Pleasure rolls through so fiercely it feels delivered, brought down to you by the only body that could have carried it. Your Venusian boy. Your tall knight. Your man with the freckled face and the foolish, breakable heart. You had wanted him before the mushrooms. You want him through them. You will want him when the forest has spat you both out into ordinary daylight and made cowards of all this green magic.

“Duncan,” you sob into the dirt.

He tries to hold. For one more breath, he tries. There is some last thread in him that thinks of weight, of gentleness, of the promise he made you with his mouth and his shaking hands. Then you clench again, deep and helpless, sucking him in as if your body means to wring the marrow out of him, and the thread snaps clean.

He slots himself tight to you. All the way in, hips pressed hard to your ass, whole of him poured over you, size finally surrendered to yours with no cleverness left in it. His mouth goes into your hair.

“Fuck,” he bites out. “Fuck, fuck—Seven—”

He comes worse than the first time. Brutal enough that he thinks, distantly, he might go blind from it. His body drives deep and stays there, sack flattened against you, him spilling hard into the tight, shuddering hold while the whole woods dissolve from his vision. His groan tears out loud, then breaks into something rawer. Teeth catch in your hair. For a moment he forgets how much of him there is, forgets all the roads he failed to find, forgets everything. Remembers his girl only.

“My girl,” he cries into your hair, ruined with it. “Gods—my girl.”

Several heartbeats continue the spending in him as aftershock, profound and almost soundless. It leaves him hollowed in a way hunger never managed, emptied clean through and simple with awe: he has put himself in you. Some living of him has gone where his hands and mouth and morning thoughts have been circling for months, and no witchcraft can explain the feeling spreading through his ribs now. That is his own. The fierce gladness of being allowed to give you something his body made, before sense arrives and worries it with teeth.

“Oh—” you say.

It is the first small sound either of you has made that belongs to the after. Thin, dazed, almost curious. Duncan hears it and comes back to himself by ugly degrees: ground under his knees, sweat cooling along his spine, the fist of his hand in your hair, the full weight of him poured over you as if you are something the earth gave him to smother.

“Seven hells,” he whispers. Gathers himself off you with a haste that makes both of you wince, then gets an arm beneath your ribs and rolls you with him onto your sides. The movement is clumsy, tender, terrible. You end up tucked against him, his chest to your back for another breath, his mouth at the crown of your head, both of you still joined in the softening.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks.

You laugh. It comes out loose and pleased and completely unhelpful.

Duncan lifts himself enough to look at your face. “That is no answer.”

“I know.” You turn your head with difficulty, cheek streaked with dirt, eyes gone drowsy in a way that makes him ache all over again. “Ask me again when my bones remember their duties.”

His brow pulls, worried despite everything. “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been taken apart and put back wrong.” Your smile curls, lazy and wicked at the edge. “Happy.”

Satisfied enough, he eases himself from you, jaw tight with the sensation, and then goes still. For a second he only stares, caught by the sight of his seed slipping warm down your thigh, white as milk, taking grains of dirt with it. Wonder hits first. Possession after. Then sense comes in like cold water poured down his neck. “Oh, Gods,” he breathes.

You turn into him before he can get any farther into horror, nuzzling your face against his chest as if you mean to burrow under the skin there and quiet the heart hammering beneath it. “Don’t worry,” you murmur. “I know how to make moon tea. Hush. Just—hush a moment.”

His hand hovers above your back, then settles, broad and shaking. “You are sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“And the itching?” he asks. “Is it still on you?”

You tip your face up enough to look at him. The forest has begun to dull around the edges. Green is green again, mostly. His hair is only light brown where damp has darkened it, though a warm thread still catches in it when he moves. The air no longer tastes quite so loudly of leaves. “No,” you say. “All my itches have been scratched.”

Duncan nods, solemn as a septon receiving grave news, and draws you closer. You let him have that for three breaths. Then, you add: “Doesn’t mean I won’t itch again.”

His face changes so quickly it makes you laugh: worry struck through, then comprehension, then that wide boyish smile he has been hoarding from you like a miser. He laughs too, and the sound rolls through his chest into your cheek.

“I’ve got you all covered in dirt,” he says, as if this is suddenly the great shame of the hour.

His palms move over you, brushing at your shoulder, your arm, the smear along your hip, making a worse mess of it because his hands are filthy too. The gentleness of the attempt makes your throat pinch.

“Yeah, you brute,” you say. “Manhandling me like that. So unknightly—”

He cuts you off with his mouth. Better for it, like he's taken the lesson and learnt carefully. Long, deep, with no hunger's panic or teeth knocking, and no witchcraft dragging him by the blood. Loving too, with his hand at your jaw, thumb near the mouth's corner. You soften into him. Breath leaves him through his nose. He tastes only of ruined man.

When he lets you go, his forehead stays against yours. “Will you listen to me next time?” he asks.

You look down and trail your fingers through the hair on his chest, damp and curling under your touch. “No.”

His eyes open. “No?”

“I would go hungry another week if this is where it gets us.”

“Girl,” he says, despairing and fond in equal measure. He wraps you in before you can make it worse, chin settling on the top of your head. You feel the shape of his smile there, hidden in your hair. Beyond him, the trees stand dense and black and wet, all their malice used up or merely bored of you at last.

Then Duncan goes still. “Hey,” he says quietly.

You shift against him. “What?”

His hand smooths once over your back, then points past your shoulder. You twist to look, and between the close trunks, farther ahead than any path had shown itself before, light pours through in a clean, ordinary sheet.

“Look,” he says.

"Gods be good," you say. "See? You ought to trust me more."

"As if that is your doing," Duncan huffs, all exasperated but still endeared.

"Hush, knight," you tell him. "Or I will eat you."

Duncan mutters something about never eating anything you hand him again, then takes your hand before you can answer. It rather spoils the threat.

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