MyLadySapphire

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[myladysapphire]

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A03 and wattpad request in inbox list MDI, 18+ blog Rules Currently writing for AKOTSK and HOTD

Currently working on | drabbles and headcanons, in the turn of a moon (cregan x reader)

Recent posts | Everything i do, i do with reckless abandon, The sun will set, Seafoam, mine, golden III, My man on Willpower, Sweet nothings, where is my husband!, AKOTSK men attachment style and love language, AKOTSK men courting autistic!reader

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personal favourites

False god (Maekar x targ!reader)

Pretty in pink (Maekar x Florent!reader)

Golden (Baelor x Lannister!reader)

The Stags Knight (Ser duncan the tall x Baratheon!reader)

The Rose and The Hammer (Baelor x tyrell!reader)

Solace (Jace x targ!reader)

please, please, please (aegon x targ!reader)

seduction (Jace x Targ!reader)

none of my work is beta read!

post last edited: 23rd June 2026

dividers by @zaldritzosrose and @saradika-graphics

[targlocket]

SWEET TASTE OF PRAYER

gwayne hightower x wife!reader

cw: (mdni +18), oral (f!receiving), praise, face humping, fluff fluff fluff, unplanned voyerism (cole watches them lol), dirty talk, hair pulling, sub!gwayne if you squint really hard, scent kink, pussy drunk gwayne, dry humping, (1.7kw).

synopsis: It is said Ser Gwayne knows not how to please a woman. Is it truth or lie?

Ser Criston taunts Gwayne about his supposed inexperience with women, even if he has a lady wife, betrothed to him for a few fortnights already.

Surely he doesn't know how to please you, right?

Too pious, too knightly to even know where to put his cock, most likely. Oldtown's teachings must've left him bereft of any talk about a lady's cunt or other erogenous places.

He's sure all those letters the knight keeps sending back to Oldtown are full of prayers and flowery words meant to soothe his lady, and nothing sort of salacious, like the other knights oftentimes scribble on the parchment meant for home.

A man like Gwayne has no knack for such things, Cole is sure of it.

"Your lady longs for you so much that you're sending a second letter this fortnight, Ser Gwayne?"

And the Hightower heir can sense the slight dissatisfaction beneath Ser Criston's tone, but he does not dwell upon it. Only smiles, nodding. "Yes, Ser. My lady worries, for her heart is pure and sensible. I must do what I can to quell her doubt of any mishaps that might've befallen me."

"Ah, of course. A most dutiful husband you are, Ser."

It isn't until their troops inevitably need to fall back to Oldtown two moons later that Gwayne gets to see his sweet lady wife again.

You've been waiting for this moment for so long, your heart hammering into your chest like a bird's wings as you see your husband's horse trot through the gates.

No one and nothing matters when you finally are cradled in Gwayne's arms, pressed to his steel-clad chest, sweet nothings whispered against your temple as your man peppers your warm skin with kisses of tenderness and longing.

Ser Criston looks away from the sight, scoffing. He knew the acclaimed Hightower heir was good for nothing but sweet presses of lips and warm embraces. Not even a kiss on the lips when greeting his lady wife? He should be ashamed to not bestow such gifts upon a gorgeous creature such as you.

Later, when the crowd had thinned and most knights were off to their sleeping arrangements, the Commander had to do one last search of their horses and supplies before calling it a night as well.

What Cole didn't think to find in the stables was Gwayne, on his knees, head squeezed between your thighs as he feasted on your cunt, moaning like a man starved, the sound muffled by the folds of your pussy.

The sight stopped Ser Criston dead in his tracks.

Ser Gwayne. Pious, dutiful, ever devoted to the faith, now sitting in the same position one would for prayer, but using his mouth not to plead to the Gods, but to bring his lady pleasure.

And what immense pleasure he did bring, for your hands were fisted in his auburn hair, tugging with intent, the demand for more crystal clear. You wanted more, smushing the knight into your heat, hips grinding against his face with abandon as you whined, trying to quiet the volume of your wantonness with your hand pressed to your mouth, but it was in vain. Nothing felt as good as your husband's tongue between your legs, only second to the feeling of his cock splitting you open.

"Yes, yes, my love, yes," fell from your ruddy lips, eyes glistening with unshed tears from how good Gwayne was making you feel. "I missed your mouth greatly," you lilted, fingers unrelenting as they weaved through your husband's hair, offering him respite from your rough insistence, petting him as you would an obedient hound as he continued to circle his tongue against your hole, the tip of his nose bumping against your clit. "Couldn't wait until we were together anew, husband."

All you got in return was another moan, unbashed and wet from the slick of your cunt against Gwayne's mouth, your words spurring him on, broad palms smoothing up your thighs to lift your skirts higher, bunching them at the waist, held in his fists. "My sweet wife," he babbled, flattening his tongue from hole to clit, parting your folds on the ascent. "The moons without your cunt have been dreadful," your knight says, words woven around a whine, lapping at the peeking nub between every word, kindling the heat in your lower belly. "Not being able to taste you each morrow left me wanting, even in times of battle and bloodshed."

Oh, what a debauched picture that was. Your dutiful husband, ever present when called to arms, thinking about worshipping between your legs as he swung his sword, falling enemies and stealing breath after breath from steel-clad men. The thought made you shiver, brushing auburn hair from Gwayne's temples to get a good look at those baby blues you so cherished, a dopey smile onto your lips as you whispered. "You must be cautious, my love," you chastised, albeit tenderly, running your fingers through his hair to soothe, hoping the ache for you had dwindled, if only a little. "Such thoughts might distract you, and then you might not come back to me."

Gwayne shook his head swiftly upon hearing your reprimand, leaning into your touch as a flower moves towards the sun, soaking up all its warmth down to the marrow. "Never," he protested, eyes widening, ever eager to prove his devotion to you. "I shall never fall to another man's sword, if it meant not seeing you again, sweetling," and he turns his face towards one of your palms, pressing a searing kiss upon the skin as he whispers. "That is my solemn vow."

You feel like your heart is going to burst out of your chest and splatter at your husband's feet from the earnestness of his promise, weaving warmth along your body, from your head down to your toes, a full-body gratefulness at having such allegiance offered to you.

"A vow you had upheld valiantly, my love," you praise, your hand shifting to cradle his jaw, thumb brushing against the plump of his bottom lip as you slowly tug him down, back towards your cunt, to which he allows without resistance. "One for which you shall have the prize you so dreamt of, even in bloodshed."

Gwayne's tongue lolls out as you guide his head, eager to have you on his palate again, eyes fluttering shut as the sweet musk of your pussy becomes more potent. It coaxed him to dip his chin so he could press his nose in damp curls and inhale deeply, exhaling a punched-out groan, as if he had forgotten the smell of you in the mere moments that had passed since he'd been tongue deep between your thighs.

"This cunt is a gift from the Gods, sweetling," he praises, mouth open and panting against your folds, just breathing you in lungful by lungful. "I wish I could have it with me on campaign," Gwayne continues, white-knuckling the skirts bunched at your waist, as if the imagery of such a thing wounds him. "Feast on it from morrow to dawn. Allow you to have my tongue whenever you please, my love."

You cannot help but moan at such a confession, fingers returning to his auburn strands to grip and tug, eliciting a muffled whine from your husband, whose tongue dipped between your folds anew, flicking at your clit on the upstroke, knowing how much you favoured it. "You're so good to me, husband," you coo, lips curling into a loving smile, holding your knight still by his hair as your hips resume their grinding, humping against Gwayne's awaiting tongue, using him for your pleasure.

And he loves it. Gods, does he love it. Blue eyes half-lidded, heated with love and lust as he only gives you more of it, poking his tongue as far as it would go for you to rub your clit against, moaning with each movement of your hips, bringing you even closer by the grip on your skirts.

"Oh, my sweet husband," you moan, feeling the heat tingling up your spine and pooling low in your belly with each wet swipe against your clit. "I can't wait to have your cock as well." The words are the opposite of pious, not at all what a lady wife should offer her betrothed, but you are past caring. "For your mouth feels heavenly, and still, I cannot wait to feel you inside me again."

The words melt and light Gwayne in equal measure, feeling his cock strain even harder against his breeches, hips kicking, rubbing himself along the seam of his pants in anticipation of what's to come. He nods, the motion making his tongue rub in rapid succession along your clit, the stimulation so delicious it makes you cry out, wanton and unbashed. Words fail him, the only thing that matters now being making you cum so he can sheathe himself into your pussy and have you milk him for all he's worth, like a prized stallion made for breeding.

It doesn't take long for your back to arch off of the hay bale you are lounging upon, Gwayne's name on your lips, your juices flowing down his tongue and chin, which your husband laps greedily. He has to stop the grind of his hips to not cum into his breeches like an untrained squire, even if the friction of his hard cock against the material of his pants feels heavenly.

He knows your pussy surpasses that by the thousands, which is why he forces himself to still the pathetic humping of his hips. It's only moments now until he'll be inside you, letting you catch your breath, pressing sweet, open-mouthed kisses to your inner thighs and behind your knees as he massages the muscle there, willing you pliant and lax for what's to come. "Thank you, sweetling. Gods, so pretty for me," he whispers against warm skin, reverent and grateful, mouth still wet with your slick. "Missed you so much. Never want to be away from you again. Never, never—"

Perhaps it's safe to assume that Ser Criston Cole will not utter a word about Gwayne and his lack of prowess anytime soon, after what he witnessed tonight.

[ladythedrunken]

Why are the Hightowers so fukcing HOT though

[sintaera]

𝐁𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐒𝐅𝐔𝐋 𝐓𝐄𝐌𝐏𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 | 𝐎𝐑𝐌𝐔𝐍𝐃 𝐇𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐑.

One more week, and Ormund Hightower is beginning to suspect his greatest trial was never war, but surviving the sweet torment of his betrothed's teasing. He gives you a taste of what's to come.

𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒: explicit sexual content, oral (female and male receiving), jealous!ormund, fingering, sexual content so minors dni.

The feast is alive with laughter, music, and clinking goblets, yet Ormund’s attention never truly leaves you.

Even as he listens to the lord beside him speak of harvest yields and coastal trade, his eyes drift, inevitably, stubbornly back to you.

Across the hall, you are a vision of practiced innocence.

You stand near Aemond Targaryen, speaking to him as though the world has neatly arranged itself into polite conversation and harmless courtesy. Your posture is composed, your voice soft enough to be lost in the music when you choose for it to be.

And yet your eyes betray you.

You look up at Aemond through fluttering lashes, slow, deliberate, almost angelic in their timing and then you smile, the kind of smile that suggests you are listening closely, but perhaps thinking of something else entirely.

Aemond’s expression remains unreadable, as ever, but he tilts his head slightly toward you as you speak, acknowledging your words with that precise, measured attention he gives to everything. His focus is steady, almost unsettling in its calmness.

Across the hall, Ormund’s grip tightens imperceptibly around his goblet.

He sees it all.

The tilt of your head, the soft curve of your mouth, the way you angle yourself just slightly toward the prince, as if the rest of the feast has faded into something unimportant.

A lord beside Ormund continues speaking, unaware that he is talking to a man who is no longer listening.

Ormund’s gaze does not leave you.

It sharpens instead.

When your eyes flick back toward him for the briefest moment, as if you can feel the weight of his attention even from across the hall, you meet something far less patient than before.

Only the quiet promise in his stare:

I am still watching.

And when you turn back to Aemond, smiling once more as if nothing has changed, Ormund finally exhales, slow, controlled, and dangerously restrained, like a man deciding exactly how much mercy he intends to grant you later.

You had been insufferably smug all evening, offering him knowing smiles from across the table, brushing your fingers against his sleeve whenever you passed, then pretending complete innocence whenever his gaze sharpened.

By the time the feast wanes, he catches your wrist with quiet confidence, drawing you just close enough that only you can hear him.

“You are either remarkably fearless,” Ormund murmurs at your side, his smile pleasant enough to fool the hall, “or spectacularly determined to test the patience of the man you're meant to marry. Tell me, sweetling, which is it?” His gaze slides to yours, sharp with warning. “Keep provoking me through this feast, and I may have to remind you that wit is best wielded with caution... especially against a Hightower who is just as capable of giving it back.”

But Ormund does not stop there.

“I am a faithful man. I am a patient man,” he murmurs, a wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “But my little sweetling, you are temptation made flesh. So do not test my restraint further, lest I decide to remind you precisely why you are my betrothed.”

His thumb brushes lightly across your knuckles, possessive without causing a scene.

“You delight in making me jealous,” he says, amusement and warning woven together. “At a feast, of all places. You tilt your head, smile that innocent smile, and somehow expect me to believe you do not know exactly what you are doing.”

A quiet chuckle escapes him, though there is a dangerous warmth behind it.

“Very well, enjoy your victory while the musicians still play.” His eyes meet yours, unwavering. “You delight in testing my patience as you shall have all of my attention and I suspect you will discover that provoking a Hightower is a game best played with care.”

Then, with effortless composure, Ormund releases your hand, returns to the feast as though nothing had happened, and leaves you wondering whether you have won the exchange at all.

“He seems quite protective over you,” Aemond murmurs quietly beside you, “makes a man want to work harder.”

And that's when you make the mistake, one simple, single mistake that makes Ormund Hightower forget every fucking oath he has ever made.

You laugh, throw your head back and fucking blush, “He is to be my husband, Your Grace, I would think any man would be protective.”

The hall doesn’t seem to notice the shift at first, music still spilling from the musicians’ corner, laughter still skating across polished stone, but something changes anyway, subtle as a blade turning in light.

Ormund hears you and that’s the mistake.

Your words land clean and careless, dressed in innocence, wrapped in that soft little laugh as you tilt your head back, a blush still warm on your cheeks as though you’ve said nothing more dangerous than a passing compliment.

For a heartbeat, Ormund doesn’t move.

Not because he hasn’t heard you, but because he has, too clearly and the goblet in his hand stills mid-air. The laughter in his chest dies before it ever becomes sound. And whatever oath he has been carefully, painfully living under, courtesy, restraint, duty, reason fractures in a way that is almost silent.

His gaze finds you across the hall like it’s been pulled there by force rather than choice.

Possessive in a way that has nothing to do with courtly expectation and everything to do with the fact that you are smiling like that, like you don’t know what you’re doing to him.

The court goes on breathing around him, oblivious, but Ormund Hightower doesn’t, because in that moment, the idea of “any man being protective” stops being a polite sentiment and becomes an insult he suddenly cannot tolerate.

His jaw tightens once, controlled. Once more, less controlled.

And when he finally sets his goblet down, it is not gentle.

Across the hall, his attention never leaves you and this time, it isn’t restraint holding him there.

Ormund moves with the intention of a man bordering on making a decision he knows he'll soon regret. “Your Grace,” he murmurs as he bows his head towards Prince Aemond, “I hope my bethroted hasn't been dull company but it appears she has indulged in too much wine so if you'll excuse us, I'll bid you a good night.”

You frown, lips parting in quiet protest as you glance between the two men. Heat still lingers in your cheeks from the wine, but your mind is far clearer than Ormund seems willing to believe.

“I have had two cups,” you say, smoothing an imaginary crease from your skirts with exaggerated dignity. “Hardly enough to render me incapable of conversation.”

Your eyes lift to Ormund's, narrowing just enough for him to recognize the familiar spark of mischief that always seems to find him.

“You make me sound as though I am moments away from climbing onto the banquet table to sing for the court.”

A faint murmur of amusement ripples from those close enough to overhear.

You fold your hands sweetly before you, all innocence despite the challenge gleaming in your gaze.

“If you simply wished to steal me away, my lord,” you murmur, smiling with infuriating softness, “you needn't blame the wine. I would have followed you regardless.”

The words are gentle, almost affectionate but you know exactly what you've done.

You've exposed him.

Not to ridicule, but to everyone with eyes enough to see that Ormund Hightower was not rescuing an inebriated betrothed.

He was claiming what was his.

“I intend to make you scream my name, later, my sweetling.” Ormund’s voice was a low, vibrating rumble that seemed to echo in the very marrow of your bones as he guides you away from the hall.

Ormund didn't wait for a response. His hand clamped firmly around your wrist, his grip possessive and unyielding as he steered you away from the lingering eyes of the court. The transition from the bright, echoing expanse of the hall to the dim, narrow corridor was abrupt, mirroring the sudden shift in his energy. He wasn't just walking you, he was claiming you, his stride long and purposeful, pulling you along with an intensity that left you breathless.

The moment the heavy oak doors of your chambers swung shut, the silence of the room was shattered. Ormund didn't waste a second. He slammed the door closed with a resounding thud and shoved you back against the wood. The impact wasn't violent, but it was commanding, pinning you between the hard surface of the door and the heat of his massive frame.

He loomed over you, his presence suffocating in the best way possible. His eyes, dark and hungry, searched your face, tracing the flush on your cheeks and the frantic beat of the pulse in your throat. He leaned in, his breath hot against your ear, that low rumble returning as he spoke, his voice now a dangerous growl.

“You've spent the entire evening playing a game, sweetling,” he murmured, his lips grazing your skin, sending shivers racing down your spine. “Testing my patience. Pushing me to the very edge.”

One of his hands slid from the door to your throat, not squeezing, but cupping your neck with a firm, dominant pressure that forced you to tilt your head back. His thumb traced the line of your jaw, while his other hand descended, gripping your hip and hauling you flush against him. You could feel the hard, thick ridge of his cock pressing through his trousers, straining against the fabric, demanding entrance.

“The teasing ends now,” he groaned, his voice thick with desire. He crashed his lips onto yours in a bruising, hungry kiss, his tongue forcing its way inside to claim your mouth with an aggressive passion. It wasn't a request, it was a takeover.

He tasted of wine and raw longing, his kiss mirroring the intensity of his grip as he sought to devour you right there against the door, but knowing you deserved better, Ormund guided you further into the room, devouring every gasp that tumbled from your lips.

The patience he had worn like a cloak for so long finally snapped, replaced by a raw, hungry desperation.

“You are fucking mine,” Ormund murmured as he pushed you down unto the bed, fingers bunching up the skirts of your dress as he sank to his knees, his eyes never left yours, burning with a possessive fire that promised both devotion and total ruin.

He didn't waste another second as his large hands gripped your thighs, his fingers digging into your skin to hoist your hips upward, spreading you wide and exposing your dripping heat to the cool air.

He let out a sharp, guttural groan at the sight of your swollen folds, glistening and ready for him.

“My sweet, beautiful temptation,” he murmured against your skin, his hot breath sending shivers racing up your spine as he pulled aside your smallclothes, and then, he lunged. His tongue lashed out, a thick, muscular muscle that found your clit with unerring precision. He didn't start gently, he flicked his tongue upward in a rapid, rhythmic motion, sucking the sensitive nub deep into his mouth.

The sensation was an electric shock, forcing a loud, jagged moan from your throat as your back arched off the surface beneath you. “Fuck, Ormund!”

Ormund was relentless. He used his tongue to part your lips, diving deep inside you, licking your walls with long, sweeping strokes that mimicked the motion of a cock. He slurped at your juices, drinking you in as if you were the only thing keeping him alive. Every time you tried to pull away from the intensity, his grip tightened on your thighs, pinning you in place so he could continue his assault.

He shifted his focus, swirling his tongue around your clit in tight, agonizingly perfect circles before suddenly sucking it hard, creating a vacuum that sent waves of white-hot pleasure crashing through your pelvis. You began to shake, your fingers clawing at his shoulders, your breath coming in short, desperate gasps.

“Yes, break for me,” he growled, his voice muffled against your pussy. “Come undone for your husband.”

Gods, he's already speaking like he's already yours and the promise of marriage, spoken in the heat of the moment, only fueled the fire. He increased the pace, his tongue vibrating against your clit while his fingers slid inside you, stretching you open and pumping in sync with his mouth. The friction was overwhelming. You felt the tension coil tight in your gut, a pressure building that demanded release.

“You are mine, my sweetling, and by the gods I will make sure everyone knows just exactly who is fucking his tongue into your tight little cunt.”

Just as you reached the precipice, Ormund looked up at you, his face smeared with your cream, a predatory smirk on his lips. “Remember this feeling, my love. Because once I have you as my wife, I will spend every night making sure you cannot walk. I will fuck you until you forget your own name.”

With one final, powerful suction on your clit and a deep thrust of his fingers, he pushed you over the edge. You screamed, your internal muscles clamping down hard around his fingers as a violent orgasm ripped through you. You shuddered uncontrollably, your vision blurring as you came in great, pulsing waves, completely undone beneath the tongue of the man who had finally run out of patience.

As the aftershocks of your orgasm continued to ripple through your thighs, leaving you breathless and trembling, you looked up at Ormund. His eyes were dark, blown wide with a hunger that bordered on desperation. He was hovering over you, his chest heaving, the scent of musk and arousal radiating off him in waves.

Driven by a sudden, primal urge to taste him, you reached down and gripped his thick, throbbing cock, through his breeches, “Fuck, what the fuck are you doing?”

You cocked your head, still breathless, “Isn't it obvious, sweet boy? I wish to make you rethink every decision you have ever made,” you murmured as you tugged, Ormund letting out a sharp, guttural gasp as you guided the head of his length to your lips. You didn't hesitate, swirling your tongue around the leaking tip before sliding your mouth over him, sucking him deep into your throat.

Ormund froze for a split second, his fingers digging into the mattress beside your head. A loud, strangled moan ripped from his throat as you worked him, your cheeks hollowing as you sucked the head of his cock with a greedy intensity. The sensation of your warm, wet mouth was almost too much for him to bear.

"Fuck... fuck!" he swore, his voice a raw, jagged rasp. His fingers twisted deeper into your hair, not to pull you away, but to pin you there, his hips twitching in frantic, involuntary jerks. "Gods, you little tease... you're trying to kill me, aren't you?"

But you didn't stop. You sank lower, taking his shaft to the root, nose brushing the coarse curls at his groin. Your throat stretched around the fat head, muscles rippling as you swallowed him whole.

Your tongue lapped at the underside, tracing the thick vein that pulsed against your palate, while your cheeks hollowed with each deliberate, wet suck. You pulled back just enough to let his cock pop free, glistening and slick with your saliva, then plunged down again, faster, harder, taking him deeper than before.

A broken groan tore from his chest. His thighs tensed, the muscles cording under his trousers as he fought to hold still. His grip in your hair tightened to the point of pain, but you welcomed it, let the sting anchor you as you worked his length, your jaw aching, your throat burning with the need to please.

He bucked.

A wild, unguarded thrust that buried himself to the hilt. His balls drew up tight against your chin, and you felt the first hot spasm rocket through his cock. A thick, salty flood erupted straight down your throat, pulse after pulse of heavy, creamy cum, each one painting your tongue and coating your gullet.

You swallowed greedily, throat working in rhythmic gulps, never breaking the seal of your lips around his base. His hips ground against your face, grinding out every last drop while you milked him dry, your fingers digging into his thighs to steady him.

When the last tremor faded, he slumped back against the wall, chest heaving, his cock softening but still held captive in your mouth. You lapped at the sensitive head, cleaning him with tender strokes, until he finally eased his grip, stroking your hair with a trembling hand.

He suddenly pulled back, breathless and shaking, his cock glistening with saliva and pre-cum. He looked down at you, his expression a volatile mix of absolute devotion and raw, animalistic lust.

But Ormund was a man of discipline and tradition, and the weight of his devotion to you acted as a tether. He wanted this to be perfect. He wanted the sanctity of the wedding night to be the moment he truly claimed you, marking you as his in every sense of the word.

“I want to fuck you so bad I can taste it,” he groaned, leaning down to press a hard, bruising kiss to your lips, his voice dropping to a low, possessive growl. “I want to stretch you open, fill you to the brim, and hear you scream my name while I drive myself into your gut. But I'm going to wait. I'm going to do this right.”

He shifted, his hard length brushing against your soaking wet pussy, teasing the entrance but refusing to enter. He looked into your eyes, his gaze burning.

“A fucking week, just one more week and when the doors are closed and the vows are spoken, I am going to fuck you proper. I'm going to spend hours breaking you down, exploring every inch of you, and making sure you know exactly who you belong to. You won't be able to walk for a week when I'm finished with you.”

He gave your clit one last, teasing flick with his finger, leaving you aching and desperate for the very thing he was denying you until the ceremony. “Gods, please, Ormund.”

“Sweetling, just one more week. You'll be a good girl for me, won't you? Such a good fucking girl.”

[artemisuns]

when i'm at the 'who loves their coworker the most' contest and these mf show up

[ghostlybfgf]

HOW DID YOU GET SO MANY?

summary: you have long wondered with your husband’s nature, just how he came to father six children. and its high time he proved it to you.

pairing: maekar targaryen x second wife!reader

warning(s): porn with little plot, rough sex, breeding kink (it’s maekar), fingering, hair pulling, biting, dirty talk, slight degradation, slight bit of spanking

word count: 3.6k

a/n: will i ever stop writing maekar with breeding kink? uhhh.. no :)) i hope you enjoy lovelies

If there was one thing more than anything else he’d been forced to endure, it was you.

Not that, but the things that had come with it, the questions and nonsense from others. And some, even worse, from you.

“For the way he acts it is a wonder.”

“Mayhaps he is just nervous.”

“Id wager he’d enjoy the idea of it.”

“But how exactly did you?” That one, was you.

Endless questioning. That was all he had heard, and it was just about enough to drive him crazy, past the point of insanity if possible.

You were no fool, he knew of it. He would not have stepped foot into another marriage let alone being forced to take a bride, if she was dimwitted. And you were far from it.

Callous, stern and prickly many called him, and yet you and what followed had wandered round him like a buzzing fly. Though it was not your company he despised, he liked that more than he could admit, but it was the mockery. For a man of his age, not old and yet not young with six children in his stead, you had been incessant in wondering exactly.

How.

He was handsome, far more than people had mentioned or cared to, striking in that fierce way. Hardened by battles and fatherhood alone. And you were captivated, and curious. And luckily for you, you were the thing, the creature, the pest that consistently managed to get under his skin.

The way you walked, talked, the way you made eyes at him across the feasting table, the way you’d so perfectly slotted into the family and how everyone, including the children adored you. For that he was thankful, truly, but it didn’t stop the fact you drove him mad.

“She is a new addition to the family, and she is fitting in quite well I should say.” Baelor countered as both men walked through the punctured halls of Maegor’s Holdfast.

“She has taken over.” Maekar muttered with a roll of his yes , stalking slowly beside his brother.

“Your senses perhaps.” Baelor replied coolly, an edge of amusement following.

Maekar slowed, squinting piercing eyes at his brother as they moved to stand over the edge, overseeing the court below where you and the children had played. Egg and Rhae had tugged at your hands, making you stand to play and duck behind the plant pots with them in small strides, with Daeron watching on. Even Valarr stood at the corner with a smile, whispering no doubt pleasantries and flattery about you. Some said you would have been more suited to one of the younger Prince’s, perhaps there would be more in common, a likeness, but even though he remained shadowed, the idea made his blood boil. A possessiveness over territory he had yet to claim.

Not a chance.

“What I mean is, she does no harm. It has been a long time since they have all looked like this.” Baelor reasoned, picking at the stone underneath his palm as he eyed Maekar.

“Around you she may not.” The grumble came fast, quick to override his brother’s words. But his throat felt dry, tacky and stuck like the words could barely come out. Like what he had heard was true.

His senses, overtaken his senses. How?

What with your cunning ways, your ability to charm and please, and weasel your way in without needing to, to be so beautiful and too good for him. It needled at him. The marriage both of you had been so blessed with was not necessity, not by anyone’s means, but yet it came anyway.

Swift and secure, as all things should be, strengthening alliance or something else they had bothered to give title.

The loss changed him, hardened him in ways that most wouldn’t be able to understand, but you had tried to. Endlessly. Attempts to break down the brick wall that was your husband became futile, and so you decided to go around him. For it was jsut as new to you as it was to him, and with him years your senior, you had expected him more forthcoming.

And yet he was not.

He was reserved and callous, moving through the halls of Summerhall like a gust of wind more than a steady hand, ignoring all of your questions insisting they were nothing but “nonsensical whims.”

But you had longed for something different. Perhaps not the chivalrous fanciful lords and their ways, but his own.. the longing looks he had given you across court, the fleeting touches at your lower back and arm when duty had warranted it. But you wanted more, you wanted him, not duty. And he had been rather intent on keeping it from you.

But one thing he didn’t deny, was that his brother may well have been right. None of them had looked like it in such a long time, nor had he felt the way he had in so long. So.. undone, having to pry himself from his thoughts, especially when you caught his gaze from across the din.

Your smile bright and curved, more like a smirk, knowing and tempting. His jaw ticked harshly, tongue pressing deep into his cheek, only for a fleeting moment before you had looked away, and his fingers had all but gripped the stone under his fingers enough to chip it.

Baelor had caught it, a single glimpse to his side and back onto you and the children again. The heat that burned from the man beside him was enough to scold and he had not lingered on the thought of what had wandered through his head.

Nor did he need to, because before pulling away, Maekar’s eyes barely left you.

His thoughts were, you.

——

The chamber was cool, years of aged stone encasing you more than you’d have liked. The day had .. wonderfully, breaking your fast with your ladies and the children, tending to them in the gardens and watching over some of their lessons, and retreating back to your ladies once more. For them you were thankful, able to wander the lower halls without question or prying eyes, and the ability to talk as freely as you wished.

“If only he wasn’t so prickly.”

“Careful, he is our Prince after all.”

“It is a miracle he has fathered children of his own at all, not near as pleasant as his brother.” Quickly followed by, “Apologies my lady, we only wish to see you happy..”

You had confided in them briefly, private chatter between you of how exactly to woo the prince, or rather atleast to accept his affections that so many had claimed to have seen. Also that so many had claimed the Prince did not have a heart to give.

But they were wrong.

Not with the way he looked you, so dark and delicate, like he could snap at any moment..

You must have made him feel green again, one had giggled, as you did.

You had asked him to visit your chambers many nights, and yet he did not, instead your maid came to you, always. She bathed you often, brought tea and a fresh pitcher of water, even sat with you a while when you had wanted it. Almost as if it had been sent for you, and for that you were thankful. But there was no sign of him.

And alas, you had had enough.

They were not wrong, you had noticed it too. Such fighting for restraint and the tension that lingered was inevitable, a livin thing that made you ache.

And so you had taken their advice.

If he will not make such a move, perhaps you should.

And you liked that idea, you liked it very much. Because out of all the talk and gossip, the questioning of your husband’s want for you was dwindling, and yet you did not give in.

Your chambermaid, Niamh, had just finished setting out the tray in the small table, a glass bowl of fruits beside a candle, a hand towel and your bodily oils. She stood straight backed and patient for what her ached body would allow, resting her arms at her middle with a small, expectant smile.

“I have run you a bath, should you require assistance, my lady?”

“That will be all thank you Niamh, you are dismissed.”

She nodded curtly, and with the turn of her heel the oak creaked behind her softly. You had waited a further few moments to let the echoes of her footsteps die out before you moved, stepping into the thinness of your laced nightgown with a devilish grin.

Because it was not the bath you were ready for.

Your steps patterned the lines of the corridors you’d mapped out for some time, every corner and shortcut that was hidden beneath stone. Maekar’s own chambers was not far from your own, a whole stretch of hall and a turn away. Every outline of jagged rock shadowed with a trail of sconces and the few tapered and coloured tapestries that hung from the walls.

Your heart thrummed harshly in your chest with adrenaline, your fingertips flexing as you clutched your arms around yourself from the cold night air. And once you arrived outside of his chambers, the feeling only seemed to grow, goose pimples trailing your skin. But with a single look, defiant and what confidence you could muster up, the two men standing vigil outside had stepped aside without protest for you.

Seemingly aware of the mission you had embarked yourself on.

The chambers were darker than your own, everything lined perfectly and sparse just as you had remembered it from your night together moons ago. The last time he had truly touched you. You stepped inside carefully, snaking yourself around the door before closing it shut with a heavy click.

The hearth warmed the room, dimming it in golds and oranges across banners of red and black. Your breath stuttered as you turned, so taken with breathing the space in you hadn’t known the figure staring right at you. And a look of confusion etching the striking, miserable features.

His robe was a dark and velveted crimson, one that wrapped to his shins and broadened his shoulders. His eyes glistened in that light, twinkling more tender than they had let on, almost enticing.

“Husband.” You greeted innocently.

“Who let you in?” Maekar spoke sharply, like the words were a bad taste on his tongue.

“Your kingsguard, very thoughtful of them.” You gestured behind you at the door as you moved further into the room, closing the gap between you as much as you could dare.

“You should be asleep,” His eyes raked over you for a single moment, rather all he could allow himself before he turned to his side, back facing you as he made for the bed, “in your own chambers.”

Your nightdress was of the finest silk, cream and a lightness that hugged your curves in the most torturous way, your hair clung to your shoulders and your skin bared.

Something he should not have seen, should not have wanted as much as he did.

“I have come to see you.”

You dared a foot forwards, planting it across the cool floor and onto the myriah carpet just at the end of the bed, a small smile peeking at your features. He had rested himself onto the edge of the bed, sitting hunched as his legs trailed far and long in front of him, shoulders sagged and tense.

“Well now you have seen. Now leave.”

But you did not, you couldn’t. He was far too close, and you had not yet begun.

You didn’t answer to that, instead you had crawled toward him on the edge of the bed, a mere arms length away.

“I have missed you.”

He only looked at you as he took a heavy inhale, a simple look, displeased and thrown. Why. You blinked up to the violets that bore into yours, a face like statue and stone. How could you. After all that was placed on you both, all the gossip and venomous words that spilled behinds backs, after how much he had attempted to keep from ruining you.

“What are you saying?”

“Well you hardly spend any time here.. with me.” You kicked your legs in front, swinging just beside his, close enough to knock together where yours didn’t meet the length of his own.

“Do not pretend to be so stupid.”

“It scares you.” You inched closely, carefully, arms reaching toward him, through the robe. And he allowed you to, legs spread wide and shamelessly as you settled yourself over him, a knee perched on either side.

“What?” He blinked up through lidded eyes, pupils blown and decisive, even if he would not speak as such. He would let you have your fun, amuse yourself and find out what you had so longed to have.

“The thought scares you.” You continued, fingers running along the collar of his robe, lining the silk just across the hem where his skin was bared. Few silver hairs littered his chest where the material opened, hard planes of pale muscle rising and falling sharply.

“What thought woman? Speak.” Maekar snapped through the quiet, impatience clawing at his skin like a fire.

“Surrendering yourself.”

He almost laughed, almost, a short incredulous huff bubbling from his throat.

“It is not my duty to surrender.”

“But it is your duty to put a babe in me is it not, the marriage was consummated moons ago and you had done so little as touch me.” Your fingers worked at his shoulders, taut muscle pulling between your nails. He stayed rigid, batting your hand away with a flick.

But you moved it back, placing it right back to where you had it.

“Do not test me.”

You could feel him there. The warmth of his breath, the burning glare that did not leave your face, the heat brushing between you through thin layers of fabric. Arousal flooded your core, and you had half the mind to bite back a moan. You had not had him like this, and he was not denying you.

“I’am not testing you.” You shrugged, hands slowly circling to meet around his neck. A brave move, even if not wise. He swore he could hear the hammering of your heart, and still see the curve of the smirk he had not from forgotten hours earlier, the one that plagued his mind.

The one he wished to wipe off of your face and take you over his lap in an instant—

“Perhaps it is more than duty you require..” Your fingers continued at his collarbones, humming dreamily at the thought. “Perhaps it is want.”

Your eyes met, bearing down into one another as your breaths mingled, your faces somehow rocked closer together on instinct, where your lips neared touching.

“Though if you do not wish for more, nor to consummate this marriage.. I wouldn’t be offended. Perhaps you are scared.. and after having so many it would be more than enough for an old man to—“

That was enough. The pure breaking point he’d sure he’d lost a long time ago. All resolve had seemed to snap with a heavy punch in his gut.

You didn’t have time to contemplate another word before he had shifted you both roughly. Long, thick fingers circled around your throat, your back shoved down into layers upon layers of silken sheets and furs. The tassels of his robe had fallen in his swiftness, bearing his chest completely leaving him only in his breeches and you had completely lost your breath.

You were pinned, folded with your legs pressed into his thighs as he kneeled over you.

“Do not anger me, girl.”

You blinked up at him, gasping at the pressure against your throat. You could smell him from there, more than before. And he was intoxicating. His scent, the smell of woodsmoke and pine, and need.

“You know well that is not it.” He gritted, glaring down at you with a gaze that made the pressure in your belly pinch hot.

“Then what is it.. mayhaps that you are older—“

The fingers tightened at your throat as he leaned down, body rising over yours as more weight anchored you down.

“Seven hells no. Tell me what you want. Say it, tell me you want this as I do, before I change my fucking mind.” The hand at your waist clamped tighter, stretching the seams of your nightgown. Your skin was ablaze, ignited under his touch and the aching deep in your core.

There was much you could have said, even struck him for making you wait so long, for denying himself of you for reasons he couldn’t even begin to name, but you had forgotten all else, raw need buzzing through your skin.

“Want you to put a babe in me husband.. want you to show me how well you fuck.”

You breathed out with a whine. And he growled, deep and beastly, like a primal instinct that could not be tamed. So guttural it sounded almost dragonlike.

His grip curled around the back of your neck, shoving you up to face him with bared teeth as he pressed himself further down, nose nudging harshly into yours.

“Good girl.”

His lips crashed to yours, fierce and unyielding, the force shoving you both back onto the bed as he bent over you. Your tongues swept together before his pushed his between your lips, tasting you, savouring and claiming all at once.

“You have driven me mad, wife.” With one hand he reached between you, unlacing the confines of his breeches in one heavy tug. They fell away down to his knees, the sharp ‘v’ of muscle trailing down to his cock defined and pulsing with vein. Even through lidded and lusted eyes you could see him, all of him. He was thick as he was long, the tip reddened with an aching blush and the beading sticky stream of precum.

Maekar waited a moment, slowing as he rose, releasing his grip on your neck, tracing his fingers over the bunched hem of your nightgown. He pushed it up, inch by inch until he brought it to your chest.

“Off.” Was all he called gruffly, and the command made you dizzy, raising your arms shakily as he snaked it off of you before tossing it somewhere to the floor where neither of you had cared to look for it.

He had longed for this sight. You had lingered long in his memory since the first time, the swell of your breasts and nipples pebbling under the cool air, the dip of your waist and curve of your stomach. The flush of your face under the firelight flickering behind you, silhouetted only by his shadow above you. Gods you did drive him mad.

And he was a fool to wait so long, to make you wait.

Hands brushed down your sides, callouses scratching along your skin as you shivered under his touch, fingers splaying over your belly and parting your thighs.

“All of this teasing.. and talk with your ladies who do not know fuck all.”

His fingers dug into the flesh of them, ignoring the way you inched downward to him, the hard press of his length just above your aching cunt.

“She must be so needy for me for being desperate like some common whore...” He tutted sharply, running a finger from your navel to your heat, slipping through the wetness that gathered over your clit and entrance. Flush crept your cheeks brazenly, hips arching instinctly as he curled two inside of you.

You moaned loudly, digits filling you at once as your cunt sucked them in greedily, rocking back onto them as he flexed them. He worked you open like that, scissoring as you bucked and humped yourself back onto his hand restlessly. And again he let you, urging you on, pumping his fingers deep while his thumb circled at your clit, letting your sticky sweetness coat his hand.

The sounds were lewd, a squelch against his palm where it filled you, motioning and massaging at your g-spot over and over until you had broke a sweat across the sheets, working yourself up with a desire that needed to be sated.

He didn’t let you finish, couldn’t, not even the satisfaction of having you come undone on him was enough. He had to have you, and there was only way it was going to happen, with having you wrapped around his cock and buried deep inside of you.

“Why the fuck did you—“ Your words caught on your tongue, dying as he angled himself, heavy length rubbing through your folds with a sickening tease. He slipped himself inside, thickness filling you with a burning stretch as you took him. His mouth moved back over yours, catching your whines and enduring the way your nails clutched at his back with a groan.

He stilled only to feel all of you, sheathed so far inside you swore you could feel him in the your belly. His cock punched deep, fingers gripped in a swarm around your hips to only anchor himself further, tongue sweeping over yours in a feverish haze. You could hardly breathe, the air punched from your lungs as he thrust inside of you, pulling out gently just to shove himself back deeper, and purposefully until stars blurred your vision.

Your thighs curled at his hips, muscle tensing and straining where he fucked into you like a man possessed, grunts muffled into the curve of your jaw as you begged and whined for him, wrapping yourself tight at his middle as he huddled himself over you. The hard bone of his knees braced at the bottom of your thighs, stretching you further for him to get more of you, your body on full display and all for him.

You tried to speak, to rise over the lack of words as your mouth parted, but it failed you, he was merciless.

“Take. It.” He rasped, rising over you to tug your legs upward, resting them onto his chest and up to his shoulders. Your husband was undone, completely. Silver flattened hair had fallen into his eyes, pale skin flushing with a sheen of sweat and desire, his eyes burning as he took you in. As if to study you so deeply and commit you to memory, finally having you in his arms, unable to spout those stupid questions and irk him further.

But it did not last long, not until he had you flipped again, this time with your face pressed into the furs, a heavy palm smoothed over your back.

“You want to know how hm?” His breath hit the shell of your ear, cock sliding over your arsecheek.

Your blood ran cold, a shiver wracking your body as fingers twisted into your hair, forcing you up along with his hips. He had you bent beneath him, his hips dragging into your arse as he lined himself up once more. You were arched up into him, breasts bunched into the mattress and your cries muffled into the sheets.

The angle there hit deeper, fuller, settling that spot inside of you with every snap of his thrusts. The sound of slapping filled your ears, punctuated only by his grunting and your moans. He tugged you back onto him where you fell completely boneless, his cock spreading you open as your arms spread wide, clutching and fisting at the pillows as you moaned into the mattress.

“This is what you wanted is it, to fuck you full..” A hand cracked down onto your arscheek and you mewled, arching your back to meet the stinging pressure. He fucked into you still, sinking in and out so deeply it was certain to kiss your cervix.

“Perhaps this will shut you up.. spilling inside of this cunt.”

Your whines became babbles, a plea of “yes yes yes” falling from your lips needily, and he gave you it, everything you desired, begged for, everything you deserved. His head fell, a hand moving over the trail of your spine, cinching at your waist to bring you closer.

You couldn’t take it.

The pair of your fell apart together, every slap of skin and pant sending you over the edge. His teeth bit into your shoulder from behind, tongue smoothing over the marks that punctured your skin.

“Please..” You whined, your walls spasming wildly around him as your climax crashed over you.

“Let go for me, my girl..” He groaned through gritted teeth, grabbing a harsh fistful of your arse as you clenched around him, your swollen cunt milking him dry as he chased his own high. He gave few more thrusts before spilling inside of you, fucking it back into you as you shook round him, legs limp beneath him.

He did not let go of you right away, pulling from you carefully, your wetness and his spend leaking from you as he rested your hips back onto the bed. A pillow was placed under your middle as he lifted you without fuss, tilting you ever so slightly downward. So it will keep. Your heart eased its hammering as your body began to rest, heavy warm arms tugging you upward and onto his chest.

The sheets were pulled over you carefully in silence, only his ragged breaths and the crackling of the hearth filling the heavy silence in the room.

“Rest.”

A hand combed through your hair, smoothing over your face as you looked up at him, and this time he found yours, and really looked. Your arm wrapped over his as his hooked under your legs, sweeping you closer, together wrapped in your warmth.

He felt you looking, and he waited, expecting another quip as per usual.

“Are you done with the nonsense now?” He mumbled, resting his head back onto the wooden headboard.

“Mhm.. maybe.” You hummed, tracing the silver hairs at his chest.

“For fucks sake..”

“I believe you’ll have to do it again.”

There it was.

The mouth that drove him mad. His arm tightened around you, but he said nothing.

Though he didn’t need to, his exhales grew harsher, his spend still dripping from you as you rubbed your thighs together, and over the hardening of his cock.

Not as duty, not as requirement, but as your husband, and the pure unrestrained need for wanting you, and how he wasn’t to deny it again.

loving taglist: @targlocket (let me know if you want to be tagged for future reference, i’m accumulating a proper taglist) 💗

[baelorthebeloved]

iv. I Spy.... // A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms (bts) Ep 6 The Morrow

[sintaera]

𝐇𝐈𝐃𝐃𝐄𝐍 𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐒 | 𝐁𝐀𝐄𝐋𝐎𝐑 𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐀𝐑𝐘𝐄𝐍

Baelor accidentally reads your diary and discovers the vulnerable desires you never dared confess. Instead of judgment, he offers understanding, honesty, and a promise to cherish every hidden part of your heart—and starting it with bending you over his desk.

WARNINGS; explicit sexual content, baelor does indeed bend you over a desk, he is not subtle, possession, rough sex and then gentle sex, minors dni.

NOW EXCUSE ME WHILST I WATCH WALKING WITH DINOSAURS BECAUSE OUR MAN HERE IS THE FUCKING NARRATOR!

The sunlight of King's Landing filtered through the high, arched windows of the Tower of the Hand, casting long, golden rectangles across the polished mahogany of the great desk.

Dust motes danced in the stillness of the solar, swirling around stacks of parchment and heavy leather-bound ledgers. Baelor Targaryen sat in the high-backed chair, his broad shoulders filling the space.

He had spent the morning immersed in reports from the Reach and the Stormlands, his mind a disciplined machine of statecraft and duty.

Beside a stack of tax records lay a small, unassuming book bound in pale blue leather. It was not a ledger, nor was it a history of the Seven Kingdoms.

It was yours.

You had left it behind in your haste to attend the midday meal with the Queen, a lapse in caution that you would soon regret.

Baelor had no intention of invading your privacy. He respected you, loved you with a quiet, steady intensity, and viewed you as the sanctuary of his life. He had reached for a scroll, but his hand brushed the blue leather, and the book fell open.

His eyes scanned a page of looping, elegant script. He intended to close it immediately, to preserve the sanctity of your inner thoughts.

Then, his gaze snagged on a single sentence.

I crave the weight of him, not as a lover who asks permission, but as a master who claims his prize; I want him to bend me over the very desk where he writes his laws and fuck me until my legs fail and I cannot walk.

Baelor froze. The air in the room suddenly felt thick, heavy with a heat that had nothing to do with the afternoon sun. He stared at the words, reading them again, then a third time.

The image flashed through his mind, you, his sweet, soft-spoken wife, the woman who blushed when he kissed her neck in public, pinned against the wood, your breath hitching in a way that wasn't caused by gentleness.

He turned the page and then the next.

The diary was a map of your hidden hunger. You wrote of the way his broad chest made you feel small and fragile, and how that fragility sparked a desperate need to be overpowered.

You wrote of the silence between you in the bedroom, the polite, tender exchanges of pleasure that left you satisfied but longing for something more visceral.

You described the fantasy of his calloused hands gripping your hips, the sound of your own whimpers turning into screams, and the sight of him losing the legendary Targaryen composure to the raw, animal heat of desire.

Baelor felt a slow, pulsing throb begin in his groin. His trousers tightened, the fabric straining against the sudden hardness of his cock. He had always treated you with a reverence that bordered on the sacred.

He feared his own strength, the sheer physicality of his frame, and he had spent their marriage tempering his passion to ensure he never overwhelmed you. He had been the perfect husband; patient, kind, and careful.

He looked at the desk. He looked at the heavy oak surface, the inkwells, the scattered papers. He imagined you there. He imagined the sound of your skin slapping against the wood, the scent of your arousal mixing with the smell of old parchment.

A small, predatory smile touched his lips. He closed the book with a soft thud and set it exactly where he had found it, though he did not move from the chair.

He waited.

The sound of your footsteps echoed in the hallway, light and hurried. The heavy oak door creaked open, and you stepped inside, your silk gown of pale cream shimmering in the light. You stopped short when you saw him, your chest rising and falling in a quick rhythm.

“Baelor,” you breathed, your voice soft. “I realized I left my journal here. I hope you didn't...”

You trailed off, your eyes falling on the blue leather book. Baelor did not speak. He simply watched you, his mismatched eyes dark, the pupils dilated until the blue and brown of his irises was a thin, shimmering ring.

The intensity of his gaze pinned you to the spot. “Did you see it?” you asked, your voice trembling as you took another step into the room, eyes wide and lips parted.

Baelor stood up. He was a towering presence, his silhouette blocking out the sun. He moved toward you, not with his usual measured grace, but with a slow, deliberate prowl. Each step sounded like a heartbeat against the stone floor.

“I saw many things,” Baelor said. His voice had dropped an octave, vibrating with a low, gravelly resonance that sent a shiver racing down your spine. “I saw things my sweet, innocent wife had been hiding from me.”

“I... I didn't mean for you to read that,” you whispered. “It was just... fantasies.”

Baelor stopped inches from you. The heat radiating from his body was an oven, smelling of cedar, expensive ink, and masculine musk.

He reached out, his large hand wrapping around the nape of your neck. His grip wasn't painful, but it was firm, possessive, leaving no room for retreat. He tilted your head back, forcing you to look up into the storm of his expression.

“Fantasies,” he repeated, his thumb brushing over your jawline. “You wrote that you didn't want softness. You wrote that you wanted to be claimed.”

You swallowed hard, your throat dry. “Baelor...”

“Do you still want it?” he asked, his voice a low command. “Do you still want your husband to stop being gentle?”

You couldn't speak, but could only nod, a small, frantic movement. The admission broke the last shred of his restraint.

You backed away, your heels clicking against the floor, until the small of your back hit the edge of the mahogany desk. You gasped, your hands flying up to your chest. The panic in your eyes was there, but beneath it, a spark of electric anticipation ignited.

Baelor's hand shifted from your neck to your waist, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of your hip. With one sudden, powerful motion, he gripped your shoulders, spun you around and shoved you forward.

You let out a sharp cry as your stomach hit the mahogany desk. The impact knocked the air from your lungs, and you found yourself sprawled across the wood, your chest pressed against the cool surface, your hips tilted upward.

The position was vulnerable, exposing and raw.

“Look at the desk,” Baelor commanded, his voice right at your ear. “Look at where you wanted this to happen.”

You looked, your vision blurring as you saw the inkwell wobble from the force of your landing. You felt his body press against your back, a wall of hard muscle and heat.

He didn't kiss you.

He didn't whisper sweet nothings, but instead, he reached down and gripped the hem of your cream silk gown.

The sound of fabric rending filled the room. He didn't slide the dress up; he tore it. The silk groaned and gave way, ripping from the waist down to your thighs.

The cool air of the solar hit your bare skin, making your nipples harden against the desk. You whimpered, a sound of pure, unadulterated want.

“You've been so quiet in our bed,” Baelor murmured, his breath hot against the shell of your ear. “So polite. I wondered why you always seemed to be holding something back.”

He reached around, his hand sliding between your thighs, he did not tease, he did not linger, but without warning, he had pushed aside your smallclothes and shoved two thick fingers deep into your heat, finding you already drenched.

The sound was a wet, visceral squelch that echoed in the quiet room. “You're soaking,” he noted, his voice devoid of its usual softness. “You've been thinking about this while I was reading reports. While I was playing the dutiful prince.”

He withdrew his fingers and you felt the sudden absence like a wound. You arched your back, your hips instinctively seeking him.

“Please,” you gasped. “Baelor, please.”

“Please what?” he asked, his hand moving to grip your hair, pulling your head back so you had to look at him over your shoulder. “Tell me exactly what you want, since you were so brave in your writing.”

“I want you to fuck me,” you sobbed, the shame melting into a fierce, burning desire. “I want you to take me. Hard. Don't be gentle. Please, don't be gentle.”

Baelor let out a low, guttural growl. He reached for his belt, the leather creaking as he unbuckled it with efficient, hurried movements. He shoved his breeches down, and you heard the heavy thud of his cock springing free.

You didn't have to see it to know the size of him; you could feel the heat radiating from the length of him as he pressed it against the crack of your ass.

He was massive, a thick, pulsing vein thrumming against your skin. He didn't use lubrication; he didn't need to. Your own arousal was a slick lubricant, coating your folds. Baelor gripped your hips, his fingers bruising your skin, and aligned the head of his cock with your opening.

He thrust.

The entry was a violent, singular motion. You screamed, a loud, echoing sound that would have shocked anyone outside the door, but in this room, it was the only music that mattered. He buried himself in you in one go, his cock stretching your walls to the absolute limit.

The sensation was overwhelming, a mixture of pressure and piercing pleasure that made your vision go white.

You felt the air being pushed out of your lungs as your chest slammed back down onto the desk. Baelor didn't give you time to adjust. He began to move, his thrusts deep and punishing.

Shlick. Squelch. Slap.

The sounds of their union were loud and vulgar. Each time he drove forward, his balls slapped hard against your perineum, a rhythmic, meaty thud that vibrated through your entire body. The friction was intense, the head of his cock rubbing against your cervix with every deep plunge.

“Is this what you wanted?” Baelor roared, his composure entirely gone. “Is this the weight you craved?”

“Yes!” you shrieked, your fingers clawing at the mahogany, leaving scratches in the expensive wood. “Yes, more! Harder!”

Baelor obliged as he shifted his grip, hooking his arms under your armpits and pulling your upper body slightly off the desk, angling your pelvis to take him even deeper.

The change in angle allowed him to hit a spot deep inside you that made your toes curl and your mind fracture.

The pace accelerated, for he was no longer a prince; he was a predator, a dragon claiming its hoard, his thrusts became frantic, overzealous, the force of his movement caused him to slip out almost entirely, the wet, sucking sound of his cock leaving your body echoing in the room, only for him to slam back in with a force that made the desk slide several inches across the stone floor.

“Gods, you're so tight,” Baelor groaned, his voice a ragged edge. “You're squeezing me... you're trying to drain me dry.”

You couldn't answer as you were lost in a sea of sensation. The feeling of the hard wood beneath you and the hard man behind you created a vice of pleasure. You could feel the sweat dripping from his forehead onto your back, the saltiness of it mixing with the scent of sex.

He began to grind his hips, his pubic bone smashing against your backside with every stroke. The friction on your clitoris, though indirect, was enough to send you spiraling. You felt the tension building in your lower belly, a coil of heat tightening until it was unbearable.

“I'm... I'm going to...” you gasped, your voice breaking.

“Not yet,” Baelor commanded, his voice a low snap. He reached around and gripped your clit between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing it with a brutal, fast intensity.

The combination was too much. Your orgasm hit like a tidal wave, a series of violent spasms that gripped your internals, squeezing his cock in rhythmic waves. You wailed, your body shuddering, your head tossing from side to side as the pleasure ripped through you.

Baelor let out a choked sound, his own climax imminent. He stopped the grinding and went back to the deep, piston-like thrusts, each one more desperate than the last. He was panting, his breath coming in ragged gulps, his muscles corded and straining.

“Fuck, look at what you have done to me, my sweet girl, I intend to fill you to the brim with my seed and take you over and over again," he groaned, the words almost a plea.

With one final, devastating thrust, Baelor buried himself to the hilt. He stiffened, his entire body locking up as he erupted. You felt the hot, thick jets of his seed hitting your cervix, filling you to the brim.

He didn't pull away, he stayed pinned inside you, his chest heaving against your back, his heart drumming a frantic rhythm against your spine.

The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the sound of their synchronized, labored breathing. The room felt different, the air charged, the sanctity of the solar replaced by something primal and honest.

Slowly, Baelor began to relax. He didn't pull out immediately. He leaned down, pressing a tender, lingering kiss to the nape of your neck, his lips soft and warm. The contrast was jarring, the sudden return of the gentle husband after the storm of the master.

He slid out of you with a wet, lingering pop. You collapsed onto the desk, your limbs feeling like lead, your breath still coming in shallow hitches. You were shaking, a fine tremor running through your muscles.

Baelor stepped back and looked at you. Your dress was ruined, your hair a wild tangle, your skin flushed a deep rose. You looked broken, claimed, and utterly satisfied.

He reached down and picked up the blue leather diary. He didn't hand it back. Instead, he tucked it under his arm. “I think I'll keep this for a while,” Baelor said, his voice returning to its princely calm, though a hint of the gravel remained. “I find I have a sudden interest in your... literary pursuits.”

You rolled onto your side, looking up at him. You felt a strange mixture of vulnerability and empowerment. The secret was out, and instead of judgment, you had found a hunger that matched your own.

“You read the whole thing?” you whispered.

Baelor smiled, a slow, knowing expression. He reached down and offered you his hand, pulling you up from the desk with effortless strength and as you stood, you felt the warmth of his seed leaking from you, a sticky reminder of the last hour.

You tried to take a step toward him, but your knees buckled, your legs truly unable to support your weight.

Baelor caught you, sweeping you into his arms and holding you tight against his chest. He looked down at you, his eyes shimmering with an affection that was now laced with a new, dangerous understanding. “You said you wanted to be unable to walk,” he murmured, kissing your forehead. “I believe I have fulfilled the request.”

You leaned your head against his shoulder, closing your eyes. The Red Keep continued to hum with the business of the crown outside the door, but inside the solar, a new treaty had been signed.

“Will you do it again?” you asked, your voice barely a whisper.

Baelor began to carry you toward the bedroom, his stride confident and strong. “My sweet, innocent wife,” he said, his voice vibrating through your chest. “I intend to spend the rest of our lives exploring every single page of that book.”

As he laid you down on the silk sheets of your bed, the sunlight had shifted, leaving the solar in shadow. But in the bedroom, the fire was just beginning to burn. Baelor stripped away the remains of your gown, his eyes roaming over your body with a possessive hunger that made you ache all over again.

He didn't start with kisses. He started by pinning your wrists above your head with one hand, his weight pressing you into the mattress.

“Now,” he whispered, his lips brushing against yours. “Tell me what else you wrote. Tell me everything you've been craving while I was being a gentleman.”

You opened your mouth to speak, but he silenced you with a kiss, not a gentle one, but a deep, demanding exchange of saliva and heat.

His tongue pushed into your mouth, claiming your space, sucking on your tongue with a hunger that mirrored the act on the desk. You moaned into the kiss, your hips lifting instinctively, searching for the hardness you knew was waiting for you.

He broke the kiss, trailing his lips down to your throat, biting softly at the sensitive skin.

“I want to hear you say it,” he commanded.

“I want... I want you to take me however you want,” you gasped, your voice trembling. “I want to be yours, completely, no more politeness and no more hesitation.”

Baelor paused, his gaze locking onto yours. The love in his eyes was still there, but it was now intertwined with a raw, dominant energy that made you feel like the only woman in the world.

“As you wish,” he said.

He moved down your body, his hands exploring every curve, every fold, with a renewed sense of purpose. He spent a long time with his tongue, tasting you, swirling around your clit until you were sobbing and begging for him to fill the void.

He played you like an instrument, knowing exactly where to press, how to suck, and when to tease and when he finally entered you again, it wasn't with the violence of the desk, but with a slow, agonizing deliberation. He pushed inside inch by inch, watching your face as you stretched to accommodate him. He wanted to see the pleasure, the slight pain, and the utter surrender in your eyes.

The sex in the bed was different, longer, more intimate, but no less intense. He explored every position, bending you, twisting you, making sure you felt every single inch of him.

He was attentive to your needs, but he dictated the pace, the rhythm, and the depth, his cock dragging deliciously through every crevice within the warmth of your cunt. “Fucking take it,” Baelor groaned into your ear, “This is what you wanted, isn't it? I am but a husband fulfilling his sweet wife's desires, so do not fucking hide from me, as you've learnt what I am capable of when you hide from me.”

Your breath hitched, a broken sob of pleasure escaping your lips as Baelor’s words sank in. The threat wrapped in affection was a catalyst, sending a fresh surge of heat flooding your pussy.

You arched your back, pressing your chest hard against the sheets, offering yourself up to him completely. You didn't dare hide; the memory of his previous punishments, the way he broke your resolve until you were begging for mercy, was enough to keep you wide open and trembling.

Baelor didn't give you a moment to recover. He gripped your hips with bruising force, his fingers digging into your skin to anchor you as he shifted his angle.

He withdrew almost entirely, the head of his cock teasing the very entrance of your cunt, before slamming back inside with a wet, heavy thud that knocked the air from your lungs.

“Look at you,” he growled, his voice a low vibration against your skin. “Shaking for me. So desperate to be filled.”

He began to drive into you with a relentless, punishing rhythm. Each thrust was calculated, designed to hit that part of you that made your eyes cross together with brutal precision.

The sound of skin slapping against skin filled the room, a rhythmic percussion to your whimpers. He wasn't just fucking you, he was claiming every inch of your interior, stretching you wide and filling you to the absolute limit.

As he hammered into you, Baelor reached around, his large hand finding your clit and grinding against it with a firm, demanding pressure. The dual stimulation was overwhelming. You felt your walls pulsing, clamping down on his thick shaft in tight, involuntary spasms.

“That's it, squeeze me,” he hissed, his pace accelerating into a frenzied blur of friction and heat. “Take every fucking inch of it. Let me feel how much you need your husband.”

You were spiraling, the tension building in your lower belly until it became an unbearable ache.

You tried to push back against him, seeking more of that crushing depth, but he shifted his weight, pinning you flat and asserting total control over the movement.

He slowed down for a heartbeat, dragging his cock slowly, agonizingly, through the slick walls of your pussy, savoring the way you whimpered in frustration.

Then, he surged forward one last time, burying himself deep enough to touch your cervix. He held himself there, pulsing inside you, as he felt your orgasm shatter through you in violent waves.

“Baelor!” you screamed into the pillow, Baelor let out a guttural roar, his own release hitting him as he pumped load after load of hot cum deep into your womb, filling you to overflowing while he held you pinned, ensuring you felt every drop of his dominance.

Hours later, as the moon rose over the Blackwater Bay and cast a silvery glow over the Red Keep, you lay entwined in his arms. You were exhausted, your body humming with a lingering electricity, your skin smelling of salt and sex.

Baelor held you close, his chin resting on the top of your head. He was quiet, his breathing steady and calm. “Are you alright?” he asked softly.

You shifted, feeling the soreness in your hips and the pleasant ache in your core. You smiled, pressing a kiss to his chest. “I've never been better,” you replied.

He tightened his grip, a small, possessive gesture. “Good,” Baelor whispered. “Because I've been thinking about the chapter where you mentioned the gardens. I think it's time we started a new entry.”

You shivered, not from cold, but from the thrill of knowing that your husband, the perfect prince, had finally discovered the darkness you carried and that he loved it even more than he loved the light.

The Tower of the Hand had always been a place of law and order, but for the first time in its history, it had become a sanctuary for the beautifully undone.

“I am still keeping it.”

[chuluoyi]

light the hightower

- gwayne hightower x wife!reader x ormund hightower

ser gwayne hightower may be known for his chivalry, but beneath his courtly smile is a man of steel and blood. vows have made you his lawfully wedded wife, and when his most peculiar cousin starts weaving his traps for you to fall into… you will see another side of him you have never seen before

genre/warnings: 18+ suggestive content—minors do not interact!—arranged marriage, lots of romance and fluff, hurt/comfort, sunshine!gwayne and grumpy!reader, ormund is his own warning, first time with gwayne (bc he lost it), targaryen!reader (reader is rhaenyra's younger sister)

notes: gif by @/baelcrtargaryen and @/alysmond. part 2 of to court a princess but can also be read as a standalone. this brainrot has been brewing for a while and i love it :)) so i hope you will too!

“...and even when our bones return to dust, may I find your soul still sworn to mine.”

Before the Seven, as the great bells chimed, you and Gwayne Hightower pledged your vows, sealing them with the tenderest kiss.

The wedding between a princess of the blood and a noble knight of House Hightower was the liveliest celebration the realm had seen in a while. King Viserys was overjoyed, and even Queen Alicent wore a rare genuine smile for both you and her brother. Rhaenyra pulled you into a warm embrace, offering her heartfelt wishes with a glowing smile.

Yet… amidst the sea of well-wishers, there was one gaze that was heavy upon you.

“Many congratulations on this most auspicious union, cousin.”

Ormund Hightower stepped before you, looking impeccably sharp in his exquisite emerald doublet. His voice was cool and devoid of warmth.

While your new husband was kind-hearted, you had heard the future Lord of Oldtown was a Hightower of a different stripe—a true son of his father.

Then, Ormund turned his gaze to you, his lips curling into a crooked smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “And to you as well, Princess...”

His dark gaze wandered, raking down your face to your bust, before returning to meet your eyes unabashedly.

“The songs do you a disservice, Your Grace. You are a far lovelier sight than what they claim.”

There was something in the way he appraised you that made you uncomfortable. It was your first encounter with the infamous son of the Lord of Hightower, and yet you knew instantly what sort of viper he was.

Gwayne’s arm, still resting over your waist, tightened subtly—a silent warning for him, also a reassurance to you.

“She has my heart, Ormund, and my sword,” Gwayne replied smoothly, his eyes flashing with a protective warmth as he looked down at you. “The realm has never seen a more beautiful bride, and I am the luckiest man in the Seven Kingdoms.”

“Why, of course. You have done our house a great service today, Gwayne, and I’m certain you’ll make a fine husband,” he said with a careless shrug, his crooked smile not wavering. He raised his goblet in a mock toast. “May the Light of the Seven bless your union.”

With a final, lingering look at you, Ormund turned on his heel and melted back into the sea of lords and ladies.

“Don’t mind him,” Gwayne hissed under his breath.

The moment his cousin was out of sight, you leaned closer to your groom, noting the sharp clench of his jaw. Sensing your concern, however, he immediately masked his irritation and turned to you with a reassuring smile as he drew you securely against his side.

Yet, as the music surged back to life around you, you couldn’t deny the chill that still prickled your skin. Ormund Hightower would remain at court for the rest of your wedding festivities—

And you had a foreboding feeling you would soon see him again.

The first day of your wedding celebration finally drew to a close. With the feast over, the princess and her new husband were left in the confines of their marital chambers, and—

The time has come for this marriage to be consummated.

A nervous flutter stirred in your chest. Gwayne had given explicit instructions for your handmaidens to leave after removing your headpiece, saying he would take care of the rest.

And try you might to look away as a proper lady should, your eyes kept drifting towards him as he began to undress— all the while bracing yourself, expecting the shift from chivalrous knight to demanding husband.

“If you’re stealing glances at me like an innocent maiden does her first love,” he suddenly remarked with an amused grin, “you’re truly going to make me blush.”

Heat rushed to your cheeks, and you averted your gaze, suddenly finding everything more appealing than him.

Left in just his loose linen shirt, Gwayne had a meaningful smile on his face as he stepped behind you, his fingers reaching out to you to unlace the stiff bodice of your gown.

Oh, this is really happening, is it not?

“We...” You suddenly found it hard to breathe as the heavy layers of your dress came loose. “Are we—”

“Yes, darling?” he chuckled softly, his dimples deepening in the firelight. He clearly found satisfaction in how flustered you had become all of a sudden.

You merely looked down, biting your lip to keep yourself from stammering. Your face felt hot too as his large palm traced the contours of your body— from the line of your ribs to the curve of your waist, and the dip of your hips.

After all, you were inexperienced. You had heard stories of how hurt the first night could be— how rough the men liked it, and how comfort was the last thing a woman should expect.

As his arms circled your waist from behind, pinning you gently against him, you choked out:

“Could you be gentle... at least?”

“Hm?” he hummed, smiling against your skin, his breath warm as he pressed a kiss to your shoulder.

Who could have known that the stern princess could be so shy? Gwayne indulged himself, trailing a path of kisses up the sensitive nape of your neck, savoring the way you shivered beneath his touch.

Precious thing, she truly is.

With a knowing smile, he lifted you effortlessly into his arms, and you gasped, clinging to his shoulders.

He laid you down upon the silk sheets, climbing in above you, and leaned down— immediately pressing his lips to yours in a searing kiss that tasted faintly of sweet wine.

“Mmh...” His mouth moved against yours with hunger, tangling his fingers into the locks of your hair. He kissed you until you felt the room spin— each time he pulled back a fraction of an inch, it was only to catch his breath before leaning down to devour your lips again, deeper and more bruising than before.

His toned hips pressed down firmly against yours, pinning you into the silk sheets. Through your thin linen shift, you could feel the hard, growing length of his bulge pressing against your thigh.

A quiet moan caught in your throat as he started rolling his hips, the friction sending a wave of unfamiliar heat straight to your core. Your fingers grasped the nape of his neck, and he groaned, a low vibration that you felt as much as you heard.

“Do you even know—” he rasped against your lips, still grinding against you, his voice tinged with unbridled desire, “how badly I want you?”

Just as the tension stretched to a breaking point, Gwayne suddenly went still. With a ragged exhale, he pulled away, leaving your lips tingling. He leveled his dark gaze on you, watching you panting for breath.

Lowering his head to rest his forehead against yours, he made no move to strip away the rest of your linen shift. He simply anchored his weight against you.

“Ser Gwayne…?” You blinked up at him, confusion clouding your eyes.

He let out a low chuckle, his fingers tracing the curve of your jaw.

“We have just survived the court of vipers today, my darling. Both of you and I need rest, nothing more.”

“But—”

His eyes then crinkled, his smile softened, looking at you as if he knew clearly what were currently going through your mind.

“What did I vow to you before the Seven?”

Wide-eyed, spellbound, with swollen lips of his making. Gwayne found his princess bride really endearing. Looking at you as he would a treasure, he recited the words he had spoken before the High Septon:

“I pray that my days will be long at your side. May your hand be in mine, by sun and by night...”

His dark blue eyes bored into yours with sincerity that made your chest tighten.

“Let our breaths twine and our blood become one, and even when our bones return to dust... may I find your soul still sworn to mine.”

Once again, he caught your heart with his sweet devotion. The way he was pure in his affections for you made you almost tear up.

Is this what it feels like to feel completely safe?

“There is no rush.” He traced a finger on your lips. “My only desire is to cherish you. With me, you are free to speak your mind— and as I am yours, you are entirely mine.”

He flashed you another sweet smile before rolling onto his side. He reached down to grasp the velvet blankets, pulling the covers all the way up over you both to block out the chill—tucking you securely under his arm and pulling you against his chest.

When you clung to him, he let out a giddy laugh, his hold instinctively tightening around you.

“Thank you, husband,” you whispered against his broad chest, nuzzling your face closer to him.

You received a tender kiss on the crown of your head in return.

For the most part, you were the happiest bride in the Seven Kingdoms.

Everyone in the realm, from the lowly stableboys to nobles, had offered their felicitations, your knight’s devotion was absolute and his tenderness behind closed doors a sanctuary against the court.

Yet, you hadn’t missed the way Ormund Hightower, the heir of Oldtown and Gwayne’s cousin, had eyed you at each and every turn.

His morning greetings had felt entirely too personal for your comfort, and the way he boldly stared at you made your skin crawl. You hadn’t seen fit to tell your husband just yet, choosing instead to give his cousin the benefit of the doubt.

Now, with the last day of your wedding festivities concluded, the gates of Red Keep were open as the lords and ladies of the realm prepared their wheelhouses to leave King’s Landing. Seeking an escape from the noise, you ducked into a cloistered walkway near the Godswood.

But you weren’t alone.

A shadow fell over the stone floor, and before you could turn, Ormund stepped out from behind a carved pillar, blocking your path in the deserted corridor.

“Your Grace,” he greeted with a cold smile.

“Ser Ormund.” Your voice adopting the icy tone you had practiced for years, as you began to question what he was truly after. “Should you not prepare to return to Oldtown? I imagined you would want to be ready for the long journey back to the Reach.”

Ormund didn’t answer right away. He closed the distance between you, tilted his head, a patronizing smile touching his lips.

“Preparations can wait. I merely wanted a private moment to bid my farewell to you.”

“You have had seven days of feasts to bid your farewells,” you retorted.

His smile only deepened. Instead of moving away, he stepped closer, trapping you between his frame and the pillar.

“Now, Princess... You know it as well as I do that we play a less than pretty game here.”

His gaze dropping to your collarbone before lifting to pin yours, with a look of a man who knew how much you weighted before the Iron Throne.

“Everything you lack in birthright is amply compensated by that pretty face of yours.” His blue eyes narrowed. “With a face like that, you could bewitch knights and lords across the Seven Kingdoms. A tragic shame... If only the timing had been right, you could have chosen me instead.”

A wave of disgust rushed through you. “You would do well to remember yourself. You are already wed.”

“A man never knows,” he replied in a sultry whisper, “when he might find himself in need of another wife.”

Ormund chuckled at your horrified expression. He leaned in closer, his eyes boring into yours with a terrifyingly casual entitlement, and in that moment you caught a striking smell on him.

Incense? Pomander? It was a potent smell, but surprisingly and jarringly pleasant.

“Why him?” he sneered, placing both arms against the wall on either side of your head. “An easy prey, is he?”

“He is kind,” you spat, your gaze hardening with defiance, willing yourself not to tremble before him. “A kinder man than anyone could ever be. Now I command you to let me pass, as I will not suffer you insulting my lord husband, Ormund Hightower.”

“Kind, is he now...? My cousin is the very paragon of a gentleman, and you thought you could bend him to your will, no?”

He leaned even closer to your ear that you could feel his breath—his scent filling your being, his blue eyes narrowing and burning into you with cold certainty.

“A word of counsel,” Ormund warned, his voice dropping to a menacing purr. “Gwayne remains a Hightower. The blood of Oldtown runs thick in his veins, and whatever sweet words he whispers in your bed… In the end, he will never betray his own house.”

The words echoed in your mind, striking a sudden chord of doubt— before nausea and fury flared within you.

With a sudden surge of strength, you shoved hard against Ormund’s chest, breaking his hold and causing him to stagger.

Without giving him the satisfaction of another word, you spun on your heel and swept past him, leaving him alone in the shadows of the corridor.

Throughout the seven days and nights of your wedding festivities, Gwayne Hightower had been a man utterly besotted, and he wasn’t reluctant in showing it before the court.

These were, without a doubt, the best days of his life. A dizzying happiness bestowed upon him by the Gods.

And patience was a virtue he possessed and would gladly practice if it meant your comfort. He had no wish to rush you and would like to give you as much time as you wanted, because after all, he knew deep-seated worries a new bride had regarding the marriage bed.

To that end, he had been standing by the hearth for a while now, stoking the coals so the chamber would be warm. When the heavy oak door finally creaked open and you stepped inside, Gwayne turned, already expecting you.

“Well, hello again, darling,” he greeted, an easy smile instantly gracing his features. “Are you ready to retire for the night?”

“Oh—!”

A startled gasp escaped you, and you nearly jumped out of your skin, completely caught off guard to find him waiting. Even from across the room, he caught the rigid hunch of your shoulders and the panic in your eyes. It took only a second to realize how you were shaking.

His smile vanished, replaced by a sudden, sharp concern.

“You look unwell,” Gwayne noted, frowning. Immediately letting go of the poker, he stood and crossed the chamber to you.

However, you were always a quick thinker. Meeting his gaze, you forced a placating smile. “No— It is just the wind, husband, and I am weary. I shall summon my handmaiden to help me undress and get ready for bed.”

Now there really was an unsettling weight gnawing at his chest. It was something he realized recently, but you were actually a wretched liar when caught unprepared. And now, you looked fragile, as though you desperately needed comfort.

“Has something happened?” He closed the remaining distance, his hands sliding up to catch you gently by the arm, drawing you closer to him.

His first instinct was to unquestionably provide you that comfort, and he was just about to pull you into the safety of his arms when—

His nostrils flared as he caught the fragrance clinging to you— and the air left his lungs. It was a scent he loathed with a visceral hatred, yet one he recognized almost instantly.

Gwayne went rigid, the blood turning to ice in his veins. A dark, sickening realization settled over him in a matter of seconds.

How?

Just how close had you been... to carry his scent so clearly upon your skin?

His gentle demeanor hardened into a sudden steel, and his voice dropped:

“Were you with Ormund?”

. . .

You wanted nothing more than to collapse in his arms.

You were really going to when suddenly you noticed how his face darkened. Gwayne’s blue eyes locked onto yours, demanding the truth you were trying to hide.

“Why were you with him?”

That striking smell, you realized. “No, I wasn’t—” you stammered, the words catching in your throat as panic flared inside you.

But Gwayne was far from convinced. He immediately let go of you, stepping back as if your very touch burned him. The sudden loss of his warmth made your heart ache with a sharp pain.

He looked utterly lost now, unable to look you in the eye. And worst of all, he looked terribly hurt.

“Nothing happened between us!” you blurted, desperate to bridge the sudden chasm between you. “We just exchanged a few words—”

“Do not lie to me. Ormund has a certain pomander he prefers—a blasted scent I would know anywhere. To carry that scent, you must have been so near to each other, so close that...”

He couldn’t even finish the sentence. The compromising image of you and his cruel cousin choked the words right out of his throat, his jaw clenching as he fought back the raw betrayal burning in his chest.

You, however, wouldn’t allow him to believe the worst. You forcibly threw yourself into his arms, desperate to mend the fracture between you—

“Gwayne, I swear this upon my mother’s name: I would never hurt you in such manner.”

You wrapped your arms around him tightly, burying your face against him. In that moment, even you found a fleeting peace in his warmth and listening to his erratic heartbeat. At first, his entire frame went completely stiff under your touch.

But as your vow settled over him... the tension broke, and he melted into your embrace in surrender, holding onto you with a crushing grip.

Oh. Such a sweet man, he is. The clarity almost made you cry—even when he thought he was in his darkest moment, he silently chose to believe you.

The two of you stayed like that for a while until a sudden, dark terror seemed to occur to him. His eyes snapped back to yours, searching your face for any sign of ruin.

“Did he force himself upon you?” he asked then, his voice uneven, almost trembling with rage at the mere thought. “Because if he did— if he laid a single unwanted hand on you, I will—”

“No!” you fiercely rejected the notion. “Nothing happened! I— I might have incited his displeasure, yes, but nothing more!”

Gwayne let out a relieved sigh, cradling your face with both of his hands to anchor himself, looking down at you like a lovelorn man. The ache in his chest subsided somewhat, and for a moment, he contemplated hearing more.

Ormund was not a kind man. He knew that better than anyone, having spent his childhood under his whims. And Ormund was ruthless and cunning— so if he had approached you, he undoubtedly had a purpose.

It might prove him a fool, and it would cost him another piece of his soul, yet Gwayne chose faith. Just as he had done a hundred times before.

“Whatever transpired between you, I do not wish to hear of it.”

You blinked at him, only to find him staring back with a grave expression.

“Just do not come near him again,” he warned, his voice a low, commanding growl. “Can you do that?”

You barely nodded when Gwayne leaned down and captured your lips in a punishing kiss—one born of relief, jealousy, and a fierce need to erase every trace of his cousin from your skin.

His hands, usually so practiced in their courtesy, lost their gentleness as he crushed you against him. He groaned against your mouth, breaking the kiss only to drag his wet lips down your throat, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin over your pulse point just roughly enough to make you gasp.

The sounds of your mingled breaths and sensual sighs filled the room. Your thoughts burned away by the sudden, suffocating heat of him. He backed you towards the high, velvet-curtained bed, and then swept you off your feet—

“Oh! Ser Gwayne!”

Just like your first night together as man and wife, he laid you down on the marital bed, but this time, he came down over you—his hands tearing at the laces of your dress, his breath hot on your jaw.

“Princess, I can’t—” His voice broke into a growl as he lost it, capturing your lips in another senseless kiss.

Somewhere in the feverish haze, he shrugged off his own shirt, letting out a grunt when he felt the burning touch of your fingertips wandering across his bare skin.

With a single, fluid pull, he rid you of your dress, and only then did he draw back, his dark eyes wide and dilated as he drank the sight of your naked form.

Every inch of you... is dazzlingly woman. How had the heavens deemed him worthy of a wife so breathtaking?

A primal urge flared within him— he had to mark you, to write his name upon your skin. Every lord in the Seven Kingdoms should know that he alone was husband to the princess.

Gwayne buried his face in your chest, suckling your breasts, swirling his tongue around the aching peaks until you arched off the mattress, breathless.

Fuck patience.

He roughly parted your thighs next to devour your sweet cunt with his mouth and lips, making you squirm to hold back your lewd moans. Within minutes, the intense coil inside you burst, your fingertips clawing at the bedsheets as your climax tore through you.

Fuck virtues.

Your head were still spinning in a daze as he proved just how masterful he was in pleasuring you. Before you could properly recover, Gwayne parted your knees wider and settled his weight over you.

“Will it hurt?” your voice came in a whisper, laced with such raw innocence when you realized what was to come that it immediately softened him.

“The first time always is,” Gwayne answered truthfully. “Scratch me, bleed me, scream if you must. Tell me if the pain outweighs the pleasure, and I will stop.”

He aligned himself against your entrance and with a push, inched himself inside you. You winced, a sharp cry escaping your lips at the foreign intrusion, your nails digging into the skin of his back.

“Hush, darling... I have you,” he whispered thickly. He held you tight, anchoring you against the mattress as he drove himself deeper. You trembled beneath him, half in tears and choked by little gasps of pain, your body struggling to accommodate his sheer size.

So tight. Gwayne really was on the verge of losing it when he realized he had broken your maidenhead. Still a maid, and I have claimed her.

When he sheathed himself completely, your body stretched against an agonizing fullness and more tears fell from your eyes. Gwayne held himself perfectly still, giving your body a moment to adjust to his length, before pressing a tender kiss to your lips to soothe you and beginning to move.

As his hips drove into yours with bruising thrusts, the initial sting quickly melted away, replaced by a deep, rolling friction that felt incredibly good, drawing whimpers from the back of your throat.

You looked sinful beneath him. His hands slid up from the mattress to cup your face, his thumbs wiping away the stray tears at the corners of your eyes even as his lower body dictated a merciless pace.

There was only the heat, the slick friction binding you together, and a man utterly possessed.

“You are mine,” Gwayne rasped against your skin, his voice a ragged edge of pure devotion and dark triumph. “From this night... until my last.”

The pleasure wound tighter and tighter within you— until the dam broke, shattering you in a blinding release. You cried out his name, your body clamping tightly around his length.

Fuck.

The pulsing squeeze of your walls was the final blow to his restraints— your husband groaned aloud, as he thrusted into you one last time, before collapsing against you and spilling his seeds inside your womb.

You awoke before him.

With the morning light filtered through the velvet curtains, you observed your husband’s serene, sleeping face. Free from his courtly mask and the heat from the night before, Gwayne looked peaceful, almost like a boy.

Even in sleep, he had one arm on your waist. His red hair was a mess against the sheets, and the blanket barely covered him, exposing the impressive breadth of his back—and the faint red marks where your nails had scratched him last night.

Sweet man, and he’s all mine.

A wave of tenderness washed over you, a deep-seated realization sank that you were truly his woman now. Reaching out, you gently cupped his jaw, the pad of your thumb tracing his cheek.

At your touch, his eyelashes soon fluttered. His eyes blinked open, unfocused with sleep.

“Good morrow, husband,” you fixed a sweet smile, and he blinked blue eyes at you, staring at you in a hazy daze for a moment as his mind worked to bridge the gap between his dreams and reality.

Then, a soft sigh escaped him. He reached out, his strong arms wrapping around your waist to pull you against him, burying his face into the crook of your neck.

“Forgive me,” he murmured in a drawl, his voice muffled against your skin.

You blinked. “What for?”

“I have conducted myself in a manner entirely unbefitting of your husband.”

“Oh?”

“I was far from gentle with you,” he mumbled into your neck. “When you have asked it from me.”

He really thought that? A giggle bubbled up from your chest, the light sound causing him to curl into you even further, hiding his face like a guilty boy.

“I am perfectly well,” you laughed, hugging him close to your chest. “A bit sore, perhaps, but quite intact.”

You stroked his red hair, and he clung to you a little tighter, as if you were the only anchor he needed. However, you were in the mood of being mischievous.

“Although, I must confess, I never knew you had that side in you, husband.” Your lips curling into a smirk as you looked down at him. “I must admit I doubted its existence.”

Gwayne went utterly still in your embrace. Slowly, he pulled back, looking at you with an expression of pure despondence. Then as though he couldn’t bear to look at your face, he groaned, clenching his jaw.

“I am glad my utter lack of composure is a source of amusement for the princess.”

His cheeks had started to redden, and your heart swelled. Reaching out, you caught his jaw with one hand and stole a quick kiss, catching him off guard.

“Am I not your wife?” you teased. “What is there to be so flustered about?”

“Are you secretly a wanton?” Gwayne fired back, a dimpled, shy smile breaking through his lingering embarrassment. “You certainly seem fond of kissing me first.”

Would a man so devoted to you not choose you, when he is faced by the impossible choice between his wife and his house?

Mayhaps that was a question that would find its answer in the years to come.

“This is how you kiss, darling.”

And with that, he leaned in and captured your lips in a chaste yet deep kiss. The shyness that had flushed his cheeks moments ago vanished, replaced by the effortless grace of a man who knew exactly how to cherish his wife.

When he finally parted from you, he didn’t pull away far. He rested his forehead against yours, his breath mingling with your own as the early morning sun caught the rich blue of his eyes, and his grin was the sweetest as he gazed at you.

What is that light shining through the window? It matters less, because you are the sun, and you are in his arms.

tagging @luvweezer @j3ons4 @heavenlypuggs @salinaiacono6 @thelastemzy @meowingtotheoldies @violetrainbow412-blog @reading-it-all as per request <3

[lovebugism]

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

summary: you're wed to ser gwayne hightower in one last desperate attempt to unite the realm; but when the war tears the two of you apart, you're taken prisoner by his cousin, lord ormund hightower, where the line between duty and desire begins to blur. (12k)

characters: gwayne hightower / fem!reader, ormund hightower / fem!reader, alicent hightower, daeron targaryen

contents: targ!reader (no physical descriptions), love triangle, enemies to lovers, angst, hurt/comfort, forbidden love, infidelity, canon divergence, cw for brief mentions of attempted assault and smut 18+ (MDNI): fem receiving oral, unprotected sex, ormund has a scent kink

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

i. DUTY & HONOR

Your last name was, perhaps, your greatest burden. It was the very walls of your prison; the unseen chain cinched perpetually around your throat. You had inherited the dragon’s blood, it seems, but not the dragon’s freedom — and when Rhaenyra’s fleet sailed across the Narrow Sea to wage war over a throne of swords, it forgot to take you with it. The only home you’d ever known was soon filled with ghosts donned in Hightower green and whispers of your leaving.

You were going to die here. That is a truth you learned long ago. Your only wish was that they’d hurry up and get it over with. 

They gave you a husband instead.

Your marriage to Ser Gwayne Hightower was heralded as an act of wisdom, the proof that wounds carved by old grievances could yet be stitched together, with silk ribbons tied around the wrists and a few spoken vows declared before the Sept. It was to be the very bridge that united the green and black. But the bridge burned anyway, and left the two of you behind.

“They wed us to prevent a war that had already begun,” you’d scoffed, already deep into your cups at the feasting table, when Maester Orwyle called the fight to come inevitable.

“No…” Gwayne hummed from beside you, still perfectly temperate, though his blue eyes were heavy with a burden too old for a man of his years. “They wed us so that, when the histories of this moment are written, someone might say that they tried.”

You’d laughed then, loud enough to gain the attention of the rest of the courtiers at the long table — because Ser Gwayne was not entirely wrong, to be sure, but he was far too generous for his own good; generous enough to believe that the effort of your marriage actually meant something in the grand scheme of things.

Gwayne Hightower was a sensible man. He was not outwardly affectionate, maybe, but he was no less kind. There was no great love in your union — not like all the songs and fairytales insist, at least — but there was safety. Security. Stability. His presence often found you like the thick walls of an ancient keep, steadfast against the howling winds of a summer storm. You would find no certainty of your future in war, but being Gwayne’s wife meant, at the very least, that you were still alive today.

That unsaid assurance is perhaps a greater gift than any truly loving marriage could’ve been for you. And, perhaps, it was with that unsaid assurance that you came to admire him, without ever realizing you were doing so — always searching for his face in crowds, waiting every night for the familiar sound of his footsteps to walk outside your chamber doors, constantly watching him from a distance (which has become a most embarrassing habit of yours).

You find him now on the western balcony overlooking Blackwater Bay, where the moon climbs high over shimmering midnight waters. The salty breeze mixes with the scent of damp stone and dying fires from the lantern light glittering in the city below. Gwayne stands alone with his forearms propped on the pale stone balustrade, having exchanged his armor for a forest-green doublet embroidered with winding gold vines. The fading torchlights gild his silken auburn hair, stirred loose by the sea breeze.

You linger just beneath the archway, hidden in the place where the torchlight turns to shadow, studying the slope of his strong shoulders and how they rise and fall with each breath. He looks lonely; lonely enough for your chest to tighten with the want to close the distance between you and slip in beside him. But your feet refuse to move. And whatever affection was warming in your chest before pierces through you like a sword.

“You’re staring.” The suddenness of his voice startles you.

“…You’re supposed to be watching the sea,” you respond, half-shy. He doesn’t look back at you when you emerge finally from the shadows; slippers scuffing the cobblestones, black skirts fluttering at your feet.

“I was,” Gwayne nods.

“Then how could you possibly notice I was standing there?”

He turns to face you then, as you settle on the balcony just beside him, keeping a few feet of careful distance between you like you always did — as if, in your union, an invisible line had been wedged between you and could not be crossed. 

The corner of his mouth lifts slowly into a crooked smile. “Because I notice everything about you,” he answers like it’s simple, like he hadn’t just stolen the breath from your lungs.

Heat crawls up the low neckline of your dress, speckling across your cheeks and the very tip of your ears. You turn away, face screwed in a feigned disgust, and busy your hands with an imaginary wrinkle on your sleeve. 

“That,” you murmur. “Is a terrifying thought.”

“Well, it ought to terrify you,” Gwayne quips knowingly, bending softly at the waist to fold his arms along the stone railing. “I’ve seen the way you steal the candied slices off of all your lemon cakes just to leave the sponge untouched, you know? Like an utter madwoman.” 

“Well…” you huff, face flaring hot at the acknowledgment of being so openly seen by another. “It seems I made the dreadful mistake of marrying the observant man in the Seven Kingdoms.”

“And here I thought that distinction belonged to my cousin,” Gwayne jokes lowly, brows raised to his hairline. “I shall write to Lord Ormund at once and relieve him of the title.”

You laugh quietly through your nose and turn away again. Silence settles comfortably over you once more, filled only by the distant clanging of metal as guards change their shift and the far-off crowing of a caged raven. The night feels impossibly dark, emptier than usual. It feels like an omen of sorts.

“It grows worse, does it not?” you wonder aloud through the breath that catches in your chest, as if you were half scared to even ask.

Gwayne’s thin smile slowly fades. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “Aye,” he nods. “I fear it does.”

“I keep… hoping that…” You swallow around the invisible hand tightening around your throat. “That they’ll remember I am your wife before they remember whose blood I carry. I feel it’s the only reason they’ve yet to take my head.”

“Of course, they remember,” he assures you.

“It feels less and less so these days.”

“They’re only frightened—”

“I’m frightened,” you remind him.

The admission lingers between you like the salt water scent hanging in the air. Gwayne studies you for a long moment — he sees the flicker of sincerity flashing across your face right before you turn away from him again, and the way your jaw clenches a second later in regret of saying the words aloud. 

He leans an elbow along the parapet to face you fully. And, as if to soothe you, he asks, “If there were no war… No thrones, no dragons—”

“No Hightowers?” you add.

“—If the Stranger himself appeared before you now and offered you another life,” the auburn-haired man continues with a hint of a smile gracing his lips. “What would you do?”

You ponder the question for a moment, eyes zeroed on the navy black horizon ahead as your fingers fidget on the stony barricade. “I should like a farm,” you answer, mouth twitching into an absentminded grin. “Somewhere far away from here. So I could raise chickens—”

“Chickens?” he scoffs a dry laugh, then softens a second later at the sincere look you give him. He swallows hard and nods supportively. “Most ladies would’ve said children, is all…”

“Well, I am not most ladies…” you tell him. “I would have a field of apple trees, and a hundred dogs to protect all my chickens and horses and fluffy cows— you know, the ones that live down in the Reach?”

“Well…” Gwayne croons. “You’ve certainly thought about this, haven’t you?”

“Every day,” you confess. The honesty in your answer strikes him down like a blade; the sorrowful look that heavies your face even more so. The reality of your situation returns to you then, settling over you like gravity’s inevitable weight. You swallow hard before you confess, “I fear they’ll kill me if matters grow worse at Dragonstone.”

“They won’t.”

“You cannot know that.”

“I do,” Gwayne assures you and takes a slow step closer, until the inherent warmth of his skin dulls the bite of the bitter sea wind. He ducks his chin to his chest to chase your gaze, peering down at you with glittering blue eyes. “I swore a vow before gods and men, did I not?”

“So do most men—”

“Well, I am not most men,” he lilts with an air of amusement hanging on the edge of his words. “I actually meant my vows.”

Your eyes soften as they search his face, looking for any hint of hesitation or doubt in his handsome features. You find no uncertainty there; just the maddening, immovable confidence that seems to be stitched into the very fiber of his making.

“If this castle should fall tomorrow…” you whisper to him, eyes narrowing in skepticism. “Or if your family decides that I have become too great a burden to keep here… What happens then?”

“Then I shall stand in the doorway,” he shrugs.

A shocked laugh sputters from your mouth at his boyish conviction. “And if they mean to come through it?”

“Then…” His lips jut softly. “They shall first have to make a corpse of me.”

“You are a valiant knight, Ser Gwayne, but you cannot fight an entire army.”

“Perhaps not,” he replies with a sad sort of smile. “But armies are made of men. And every man who wishes to reach you will first have to face me... As I said… I meant my vows.”

Something in his words strikes a deep sadness within you. No one had ever spoken of your being like it possessed any value worth defending, and now the words come from the very family you were meant to despise.

But even still, for the first time since the ravens brought the tidings of war and the dragons took wing against dragon, you believed him. You believed that, should the whole realm come crashing down around you, Ser Gwayne would likely be the only one left standing at your side when the last stone fell.

And, gods, how stupid you were to do so.

ii. OATHS & ASHES

The news of your husband’s leaving came not from your husband himself. 

It came, rather, in whispers at court, slithering through the Red Keep like snakes beneath rushes — passing from Gold Cloak to stable boy to serving girl to scullion. “They say Ser Criston and his knights are marching for Harrenhal on the morrow,” says a thick-accented handmaiden. “Lord Hand means to smoke Daemon from the castle. It’ll be Prince Aemond’s before the next moon, no doubt.”

Your stomach dropped so harshly at the whispers that you nearly retched upon the marble. It was not Gwayne’s leaving that frightened you so, but rather what his absence would represent — he might as well throw you to the hounds himself before he goes, because you were as good as dead with him gone.

Your slippers strike the ancient stone in a frantic rhythm as you turn on your heel to storm back the way you came. The harsh echo of the soles catches the attention of surrounding servants, who flatten themselves against the walls as you hurry suddenly past. Your heartbeat pounds like thunder in your ears, far louder than the bells of the Great Sept that toll the evening hour — the combination of both feels like an ominous funeral knell.

You rush up the winding stone staircase with your crimson skirts gathering in your fists. Gwayne’s chambers sit directly opposite yours, and you find the heavy wooden door is cracked ajar. The hinges screechbeneath your palm when you shove it the rest of the way open without warning. The sight you find on the other side hollows you from the inside out — a travel satchel, laid open along the emerald sheets. Inside, a whetstone, riding gloves, a leather-bound prayer book, a sword belt, a flask. 

The careful order of it all feels almost cruel. Chaos, at the very least, would suggest some air of hesitation from the man; a faint pause at leaving you behind. This, however, feels far too final.

Gwayne stands at the head of the bed with his back facing you. His pale hands work with a quiet precision to roll a Hightower-green cloak into his bag. He did not need to turn at the sudden intrusion. He learned the sound of your footsteps long ago.

“I wondered how long it might take,” the man croons distantly. The calmness of his voice, the indifference, sets you entirely aflame.

“Why would you not tell me?” you bite in response.

Gwayne glances over his shoulder at you then. The flickering candlelight turns his hair a more golden shade of Hightower-red, and carves the soft edges of his face out in shadow. He was still every inch the striking knight that the whispers purported him to be — broad as an oak tree, handsome as a saint carved into an altar — but there’s a foreign weariness etched into his features now. It darkens the skin beneath his eyes, turns his gaze a duller shade of icy blue.

“Well, I was going to, of course.”

“When?” The sharpness in your voice could draw blood. 

“…Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Your laugh splinters the otherwise silent room, sharper than broken glass. You shut the door behind you with an aggressive hand and close the distance between you, dress skirts billowing wildly at your ankles. “When you ride at dawn? And you meant to tell me when your horses were already saddled?”

“Yes,” Gwayne sighs, lowering the folded doublet into its place. “I thought I might spare you one night’s grief—”

“You’re abandoning me,” you tell him then, as if to translate the man’s words back to himself. You linger at his side, eyes darting wildly over his profile when he fails to meet your gaze. “Just like all the rest of them. You do realize that, right?”

“The king has given orders—”

“Well, it wasn’t the king who stood beside me at Blackwater Bay not even a week ago, was it?” Your voice lowers into a faux-masculine tone, trying and failing to mock him. “If anyone comes for you, I shall stand in the doorway—”

Gwayne scoffs. “Surely, I do not sound like that.”

“—They shall first have to make a corpse of me.”

“Yes… I remember,” he answers through a slow huff of annoyance, stepping back from his travel bag to drag a pair of weary hands down his face. “I was— well into my cups by then, as you well know—”

“Oh, do not cheapen those words now,” you spit, shoving hard at his shoulder. Gwayne’s features twist in offense as his wide eyes glance down at the hand you’d pushed him with, though he doesn’t move an inch. “Don’t dishonor yourself with a coward’s excuse just to make up for the fact that you lied.”

Gwayne’s composure fractures at that. He had spent too much of his life trying to be a good knight, a good man — one that maybe his callous father could be proud of — so he refuses to stomach accusations of otherwise from you. 

His icy blue eyes harden into a glacial sort of look, more hurt than truly angry. He lays his cloak into place to face you fully.

“Do you not see that I am leaving to keep the fight from coming here?”

“Do not you see that by leaving me here that I’m as good as dead?” you retort through a jaw clenched tight. “If you do not take me with you, then—”

“Of course I’m not taking you with me!” he scoffs with a crooked smile, like it’s funny to him. “You’d be dead before we made it to the God’s Eye—”

“And I will be dead before this war is won if you leave!” you shout, voice wet and fragile with the unshed tears burning the backs of your eyes. “The fight is already here! The people who wish me dead are in these walls! They pour my wine, they wash my hair, they cook my food, they bow when I walk by and whisper when my back is turned! And if you aren’t here, then…” 

You trail off with a ragged breath. Your corset feels suddenly tight against your ribs. You choke back the sob that strangles your throat and blink rapidly to clear the haze of tears blurring at your waterline. You peer up at the man with the sternest gaze you can muster.

“I am… frightened,” you tell him, though your voice cracks into a fragile whisper halfway through.

The anger disappears from Gwayne’s face as quickly as it arrived. His shoulders deflate with a slow huff through his nose as he takes a slow step towards you. His hands release their clenched fists to reach hesitantly for your face. His palms are warm and softly calloused when they cup your cheeks, caressing you with a tenderness he hasn’t shown since your bedding ceremony six or more moons ago.

The quiet half-smile he gives you, then, is weighed down by a palpable sadness.

“To tell you the truth… I have never been more afraid than I am right now,” he confesses in a low murmur, swiping his thumb over the warm apple of your cheek. The softness in his voice threatens to undo you entirely. 

“So then don’t go,” you plead in a small voice, grasping at the front of his emerald doublet until the golden vines wrinkle under your grip. “Please.”

“If Harrenhal remains in Rhaenyra’s hold, and if Daemon rallies the Riverland armies, then the war will come here,” Gwayne continues in a painfully steady voice. “I fear I don’t have a choice in the matter.”

“Everyone has a choice,” you tell him, filled with a girlish sort of rage once more. “But, I suppose you’ve already made yours.”

The man meets your scowl with a tired, slightly heartbroken smile. “Please do not make me spend my last night with my wife quarreling with her,” Gwayne jokes quietly, swiping an eyelash from your cheek with the pad of his thumb. “At least leave me with something to hold onto until my return.”

Your tight chest deflates with a slow sigh from your nose. The rage ebbs evenly into grief. “And what shall I have, hm? Considering tonight is very likely my last one alive and all…”

Gwayne laughs. “You are being… catastrophically dramatic.”

Your chest burns with a mixture of rage and desire. He could never possibly understand you, but somehow, he is the only one with the walls of the Keep who ever has. The contrast is dizzying.

“I hate you,” you hear yourself say.

“Perhaps...” Gwayne hums, warm breath fanning across your cheek. “But not nearly as much as you love me.”

Your first instinct is to strike him for the sarcasm in his words; your second is to weep at the truth of them. He kisses you before you can do either.

He ducks down to press his lips to yours in a tender kiss, a mere brushing of your lips. The last time he had done so was beneath the glowing candles of the Sept, following the declaration of your wedding vows. But that was an obligation, a political victory of sorts.

This kiss is far sweeter in comparison. You feel the man heavying against you as he falls deeper into your touch. He opens your mouth with his and flicks the pad of his tongue against yours, like velvet brushing velvet. Your hands tremble as they leave the chest of his doublet to rake through his auburn locks, like silk between your fingers. You sigh against his open mouth at the taste of him — like wine and mint and oranges — sweet enough to get drunk on.

It takes you a long moment to realize his hands have snaked around your waist accordingly. You don’t realize his deft fingers are loosening the tie in your corset until the discomfort in your ribs disappears entirely. Your body acts before your mind, and your arms slither from their sleeves to curl once more around Gwayne’s broad shoulders.

The man folds the top of your dress down until your bare chest is revealed to him. A grumbled moan sounds in the back of his throat as he pulls you back into him with two wide palms along your bare back, pressing your breasts flush against his chest. He thinks, if he concentrated hard enough, he could feel the steady thundering of your heart like this.

“Gwayne—” you whisper against his mouth when you feel something hardening against your hip. Your hands drop from his hair to slide between your bodies, headed for the tie in his trousers to release the stiffness growing there. 

He twists you round in the meanwhile, shoes scuffing the cobbles, until the bend of your knees meets the edge of the mattress behind you. He lays you down without once taking his mouth off of yours, with one wide palm splayed along your ribcage and his other cradling the back of your neck.

He pulls off of you with a quiet smack to catch his breath. A small whimper sounds in the back of your throat when his warm body leaves yours, rising to reach down for your skirts. Your bare chest heaves as you sit up on your elbows to watch him fumble with your dress. “Gods above, how many skirts are you wearing?” you hear him complain under his breath. “I’ve faced hedge knights with fewer defenses than this.”

You giggle when he finally pushes the layers of your dress up to your hips. Your thighs spread on instinct, exposing yourself to him. Gwayne’s mouth waters at the sight of your silken folds, already glittering in anticipation. Your chest tightens when he falls to his knees before you. 

“What are you doing?” you ask on bated breath.

Gwayne flashes you a love-drunk grin and a pair of glassy blue eyes. His warm palms smooth along the velvety skin of your inner thighs to spread them further. “Call it a knight’s act of service, shall we?” he quips.

His auburn head disappears beneath your bunched-up skirts a second later. Your face twists momentarily in confusion before you feel his tongue slotting in the silk folds of your cunt. He licks a fat stripe up the length of it, until his tongue finds something that makes your hips twitch despite yourself. His mouth closes around the sensitive button, suckling at it with a grumbled moan in the back of his throat.

Your head tips back at the feeling. Your lips part as if to moan, but the electric shock in the pit of your stomach knocks all the available air from your lungs. You feel him laughing against you when your thighs clench suddenly around his head, tighter than you realize.

Gwayne pulls off of you with a quick smacking sound. He wears your slick down to his chin as he flashes you a teasing, glassy-eyed look. “I’d quite like to keep my head, dear wife—”

You say nothing in response to his quip. You just dart a head to the crown of his skull and shove his face back between your thighs.

 Gwayne complies without complaint, lapping at the honey you leak for him, until the wet sounds of his mouth fill the quiet chambers. You rock your hips against his face, bracing yourself with the auburn locks you clench in your fist.

His nose nudges the swollen bud that makes you keen, right before he takes it in his mouth again. Your skin buzzes at the foreign feeling.

“Gwayne—” you gasp. A tight feeling settles deep in your stomach, like a fraying knot about to snap. Your back arches off the mattress. Your hand tightens in his hair. Your features screw in a pain look, half-scared at the pleasure welling within you. “I can’t—”

“Mm…” he just keeps moaning against you, letting the vibrations deepen your pleasure. His wide hands smooth up and down your outer thighs when they tremble on either side of his head, clenching around him as your orgasm hits you with a pleasured whine. He laps up every ounce of honey you leak for him, and sighs hard through his nose at the salty-sweet taste of you.

Only when your legs grow finally lax around his jaw does he pull back from your thighs. A smile curls lazily at his rosier, more swollen mouth. The bottom half of his face glitters in the candlelight with a mixture of saliva and cum — you lift your head in time to watch him wipe his mouth with the back of his hand.

“If this truly is my final night alive…” you say through panted breaths, eyes still wide from the shock of your simmering pleasure. “I feel I could finally die a happy woman.”

“I’m glad I could be of service, princess…” Gwayne smiles lazily, grimacing slightly at the ache in his knees as he rises from the unforgiving cobbles. He leans down to lay his warmth back over you. You stop him with a firm hand on his chest.

“I want to be on top this time,” you confess in a breathless whisper, eyes darting back and forth between his.

Gwayne’s brows raise slowly in shock at your sudden display of dominance. The corner of his lip twitches into a smile the same way his cock twitches in his boxers. He nods until the words catch up to him. “As you wish…”

iii. CROWNS & CAGES

You did not weep when they came for you, scarcely a fortnight after your lord husband’s leaving.

Gwayne was gone by first light, perhaps already a league or more away before you stirred awake that morning to the chill of an empty bed. He parted with nothing but a folded scrap of parchment resting where his head had been the night before. In his scrawled handwriting, half-smudged from where his wrist had dragged the ink in haste, he wrote: “Write to me. Don’t die. I’ll build the form for you myself.”

You keep the note tucked safely inside the chest of your corset now, folded so many times that the edges have already begun to soften. You keep it close to your heart like a holy relic, or perhaps, a threat to whatever unlucky son of a bitch kills you first — something to discover on your corpse after they slit your throat, so they’ll know who to answer to upon your husband’s return.

Eventually, the servants ceased asking whether you needed anything, and all your meals came cold. Conversations ceased the moment you entered a room, and doors slammed shut before you could reach them. And then, when word spread that a wild dragon had taken wing not far from here, all eyes of suspicion turned to you — to whom a dragon had never belonged, though the blood in your veins wearied the courtiers all the same. Rhaenyra had already added three new riders to her fleet; she certainly did not need another.

You were no longer a bride, but a prisoner in pretty gowns — it was the Queen Dowager, and your sister by law, who confirmed as much to you.

“I had hoped…” Alicent started slowly, bathed half in sunshine and half in shadow from where she stood before the window in your quarters, watching the distant storm clouds blow in over Blackwater. “That I might never have to ask this of you.”

Her auburn curls swept over her pale shoulder when she turned to face you. Something heavy sat in her round green eyes, as if she wanted you to finish the rest of it for her. But you remained as stoic and silent as ever from where you sat at the small dining table just across from her. Your hands wrung into knots over your skirts, hidden beneath the surface, as you waited for the words of your fate to fall from her lips.

“The council believes that— Should the opportunity present itself, you would attempt to reach the wild beast. The Cannibal, I believe it’s called,” Alicent said. “And through him, Rhaenyra.”

“So…” You sighed, making no attempt to argue the subject. It did not matter whether or not it was true; the possibility was enough to make you a criminal. “The Black Cells, then?”

“No,” Alicent shook her head, half-offended by the suggestion. “Of course not. My cousin, Lord Ormund, he commands the Hightower host. He has agreed to keep you under his… protection for the time being.”

“Protection?” you echoed through a scoff. The word tasted foreign and bitter in your mouth. “What a pleasant name for captivity.”

Alicent’s face flickered with a mother’s sort of sympathy. Her hands wrang together beneath the draping sleeves of her emerald dress.“You will be treated with every courtesy your station deserves, I assure you.”

“If your council means to bargain with me, Your Grace…” you started with a sad smile. “They mistake me for something worth bartering for. Rhaenyra already abandoned e— keeping me hostage will not make her respond to your offered terms.”

“Even still… You would be far safer there than you would be here, whether or not you believe that’s true,” Alicent said. “I know what my brother would wish of me. And Gwayne would never forgive me if I didn’t do everything I could to keep you safe.”

The long journey south smells of wet earth and horse dung. By the time you reach the Hightower encampment — which sprawls across the rolling fields like a second city — your fine silk gown has long surrendered to the dust of the road, and your hands now bear the tenderness of a week spent in the saddle. 

Your broad-shouldered escort guides you through the avenue of canvas tents billowing wildly beneath snapping green banners. The air smells of woodsmoke, cooked venison, and salty sweat — the soft breeze carries with it the sound of laughter, barking hounds, clanking chainmail, and shouted commands.

A pair of guards draw back the heavy canvas of the biggest pavilion in the camp. “My lord,” one says to announce your arrival inside, right before the entrance flap closes heavily behind you.

Inside, candles burn despite the lingering daylight, filling the enclosed tent with the smell of beeswax and parchment from the large map covering the long oak table. Pieces carved from ivory and oak mark castles and armies across the whole of Westeros, waiting to be won or maybe burned. 

A strange man stands over them with his broad hands planted along the edge, visibly built beneath his ornately decorated armor, and standing several inches taller than the rest of the knights in the room.

Lord Ormund was not pretty like Gwayne, but he was his own kind of handsome, made of sharp edges and strong features. His Hightower-auburn curls are less vivid in color and sheared short. He has his family’s pair of striking blue eyes, too, which feel a little like they’re piercing you when he glances up from his map. 

“Leave us,” he commands his guards in a low, melodic voice, keeping his eyes on you as his knights filter out of the tent. Their armor clatters faintly as they go. The man doesn’t say another word until they’re gone. 

“So…” he hums, one corner of his mouth lifting upwards. “The infamous dragon bride.”

Your brows bounce at the title. It feels like another chain around your neck. “I suppose I’ve been called worse…” you sigh, studying him with the same curiosity. “You must be Lord Ormund.”

“I must,” the man nods as he rounds the war table at an unhurried pace. 

His boots sink into the woven rungs laid across the hard earth with each step. He towers several inches over your head when he plants himself in front of you. He smells of steel and sweat and strongly of incense.

“I expected someone… older.”

His brows raise in amusement. “And here I expected someone taller.”

“Well,” you deadpan, eyes narrowing up at him as your hands clasp behind your back. “I’m sorry for disappointing you, Ser.”

“Oh, I’ve endured far worse disappointments, my lady, I assure you.” A ghost of a smile graces his pink lips as his eyes soften slightly around the edges. “I give you my word. While you remain beneath my banners, no harm will come to you.”

You sigh hard through your nose. “Yes… People keep promising me that.”

“I’m sure they have… But I intend to honor it.” The certainty of the man’s words unsettles you. It’s strange, you find, to be looked at like you were something worth protecting. “And if you require anything— anything at all. You need only ask.”

You nod slowly with a deep exhale, considering the offer. “A quill,” you conclude firmly.

Ormund blinks. “A… A quill?”

“Yes,” you say. “And parchment.”

“For… What purpose?” he laughs.

You glance over your shoulder towards the tent’s fluttering entrance, where the last light of the early evening burns gold against a sea of green banners. You wonder, briefly, how many soldiers outside this pavilion would celebrate if they found you dead on the morrow — how many would mourn, how many would care enough to do anything at all. 

You think, perhaps, that in the whole of the Seven Kingdoms, there is only one person who would weep for you. And he was a hundred leagues away.

“So that I may write to my lord husband,” you answer finally. “And tell him that I was right… And that he still owes me a farm.”

Lord Ormund allows you to write to Gwayne that night, and every seventh day after. It was the only thing you could look forward to, since there was little else to do at camp. He had been gracious enough to give you your own pavilion at the edge of the command encampment, close enough for the sentries to watch but far enough away to force you into solitude. 

It was clean and moderately comfortable — with a narrow cot draped in a single wool blanket, a traveling chest for the few dresses you were allowed to bring, a wash basin, and a small writing table tucked beneath the only slit in the canvas that permitted daylight. Inside smelled of candle wax, pressed linen, and lavender soap.

Outside smelled of war — of pressed metal from the blacksmiths, of men cursing over burnt porridge, of stableboys tending to horses who fouled the earth faster than they could shovel it. It was cruel, how the world went on while you could go scarcely a step without an escort. Eventually, you became accustomed to feeling a hundred eyes upon your back — most curious, others suspicious, some outright hateful.

The letters you wrote to Gwayne, at least, gave you the illusion of escape. You tended to each with careful precision — melting the wax, stamping it shut, then tying it off with a ribbon — and watched from afar as one of Ormund’s knights carried them toward the rookery. It was not until the twentieth day at camp, when you wandered further than you were typically allowed, that you noticed that none of your messages had been sent. You watched the knight toss the letter into the fire, flinching slightly when the flames sparked beneath the fresh kindling.

It had been four days since then. 

And you haven’t eaten once in protest.

It took roughly half that time for Lord Ormund’s patience to run thin. He’s suffered the endless whispers of your attempts to starve to death with an increasing displeasure. He commands thousands of knights beneath his banners, serves as the leader of his house with grace, and yet — he still cannot seem to manage to command one lady to supper. It was absurd. Humiliating. And worse, it invited doubt. What army will follow a man whom they believe incapable of governing his own household?

On the fifth evening, after your breakfast tray went untouched that morning, Ormund opts to bring you your supper himself. He marches through the crowded camp with his jaw clenched tight like a soldier headed into battle. His chainmail clanks with every step. Avoiding the stares he gets from surrounding knights feels borderline impossible.

He throws open the entrance of your tent without ceremony. The canvas snaps sharply beneath his aggressive hand as he ducks suddenly underneath it.  The light of the golden evening pours suddenly inside around his towering silhouette before the flap falls shut behind him once more, trapping the two of you inside.

There, he finds you lying on your cot, staring upward at the slit in the pavilion where one lonely shaft of sunlight spills through. Your fingers drift lazily through the rays, as if you were trying to catch it somehow. 

Your head snaps suddenly to the side at the sudden intrusion — your hair is loose and unkempt, because no one ever taught you how to do it yourself, and all of your dresses are now wrinkled and stained with dirt. The thin white nightgown you wear makes you look more sunken, more lifeless. 

Ormund grasps your tray with one hand and reaches for your small writing desk with the other. He lectures you through the distant pang of sympathy in his chest.

“I have commanded men twice your size—” His boots are heavy on the thin rug as he carries the desk over to you. “I have started sieges, I have broken sieges. And yet—” He slams the table in front of you with a dull thump. You try not to cower under the icy blue glare he gives you. “I cannot seem to persuade one prisoner— a lady, no less— to eat her supper. And I confess, it does very little for confidence in my command. So eat.”

Ormund slams the tray onto the desk. The broth steaming in a small wooden bowl sloshes over. Next to it, strips of leftover venison and a broken loaf of stale bread. Your empty stomach twists painfully with a mixture of nausea and hunger.

“So…” you start lowly, clearing your throat when your voice comes gravelly. You rise from your supine position on weak limbs. The fabric of your nightgown rides up your thighs as you turn to place your bare feet on the ground — eyes dull when you peer up at the man from beneath your lashes. “You admit it, then? That I am your prisoner here?”

His jaw clenches tight. His nostrils flare through a sharp breath. He no longer finds amusement in your banter. “Your status here depends entirely on your pliancy,” he spits, ripping off a piece of the stale loaf. “Now eat.”

You flinch when his fist rears suddenly towards your face, holding the broken bread just in front of your mouth. You blink wildly up at him, features screwed in offense. “…Excuse me?”

“Eat.”

You swat his hand away; it moves scarcely an inch. “I’m not a child—”

“Well, at present, you are behaving remarkably like one,” Ormund argues through a tight jaw. “Now open your mouth.”

You respond with only a glare.

Fury rages through the man’s chest. He wishes wordlessly for the strength of the Mother and the Warrior engraved upon his armor as he offers bitterly, “Or shall I make you?”

You spend a long moment staring up at him with eyes cold enough to freeze wine. You hold his gaze as your mouth parts slowly to accept the chunk of bread he pinches between his thumb and forefinger. He places it upon your tongue with a surprising gentleness, considering the wrath he’d had moments ago.

“Chew,” he commands, glaring down the bridge of his nose at you. Your jaw moves slowly. Ormund nods in approval. “Swallow.” 

Your heart lurches into your throat at his order. But you do as you’re told, throat bobbing as the piece of bread goes down. Another piece follows soon after; this time, your lips part before he asks you to do so. Relief crosses over his strong features as he places the food onto your tongue. His shoulders sag with the exhaled breath that it feels like he’s been holding for days.

He looks almost worried for you; relieved, almost, to have fed you. A warm, foreign feeling settles in your chest accordingly.

“I am trying… Very hard to be kind to you,” Ormund confesses, scarred hands twitching at his sides.  “So I cannot, for the life of me, understand why you insist on making this so difficult.”

“My letters,” you tell him. “Why aren’t they being sent?”

“The rookery master feared they could be intercepted,” he answers plainly. “I could not risk one falling into enemy hands. I… meant to tell you.”

“When?” you spit.

“When I found a safer way to deliver them.”

A bitter laugh sputters from your mouth. “What curious men you Hightowers are,” you quip with narrowed eyes. “So fond of deciding what sorrows I ought to be spared.”

His brows lower in confusion. “Is that not a kindness?” 

His answer lingers between you for several long moments. There was no cleverness in his words, only an honesty that strikes you like a fist to the stomach.

“Aye. I suppose it is,” you answer, clearing your throat when your voice catches. 

A strange emotion strangles you, and burns at the back of your eyes as you look down at your dress. Your dull nails pick at a smudge of mud on the fabric that will likely never come off. An embarrassed sort of laugh tumbles from your mouth. 

“Perhaps I… I spent so long waiting for someone to hurt me that I no longer remember what kindness is supposed to feel like.”

Ormund nods through a slow exhale from his nose. He glances to the side and walks the short distance to the stool that the table had knocked over in his rage. Your wet eyes follow his form as he walks away and then back to you, setting the chair on the other side of the table. You can feel the warmth radiating from his body, even in the scarce distance between you.

“I’ll admit— A man spends enough time at war, they start to forget that mornings are not meant to begin with fear,” he says, reaching again for the loaf of bread, but this time breaking it in half. “I forget myself, at times, but… if you’ll allow me… I’d very much like to prove to you that I can be kind.”

Your weary features soften around the edges. “Well, I don’t have much of a choice in the matter, do I?” you tell him, with a more sincere smile hinting at the corners of your lips. “I am your prisoner, after all.”

“So you keep insisting,” Ormund quips with his own quiet grin. “But I should rather you thought of yourself as my… responsibility.”

Your heart stumbles a beat. Responsibility felt much safer than hostage, or bargaining piece, or burden. It felt, you’ll admit, like a kindness.

iv. SILK & SWORDS

You fall into a steady routine at the Hightower encampment by the fifth moon of your captivity.

Each morning arrives with the same mournful groan of a warhorn that rolls across the grass green hills before the sun has even broken the horizon. You wake to the distant ringing of hammers against anvils, hounds barking for gristles off the cookfires, and knights shouting for their squires. The first hours were reserved for armorers; the afternoons for drilling knights whose swords cracked together until you could feel them ringing in your skull; and the evenings for songs, laughter, and ale.

Your days, however, remained painfully empty.

Lord Ormund had been kind enough to provide you with greater comforts as the weeks went by — cushioned pillows and heavier woolen blankets for when the nights got colder; sprigs of lavender for your bedside to keep out the stench of man; more parchment and colored ink to busy your hands when the days were especially long. And all of them were especially long. He’d given you his leather-bound prayer book, too, and even though you were not an entirely pious woman, you’d read through it enough times to recite each passage from memory.

The camp has since grown accustomed to your being there, ever since Ormund slackened his metaphorical leash on you — “You’ve had more than ample opportunity to run,” he’d said beneath the scratching of his quill. “Besides, where exactly would you go? No one else would take you.” No one bats an eye when you leave your tent, after three days of relentless rain had finally broken, to pick fresh berries from the brushes along the treeline.

Your crimson silk dress scrubs the dewy evening grass as you collect wild raspberries into a small wooden bowl. The juices stain your fingertips the color of red wine. The sweet scent mixes with the smell of wet earth and mint leaves crushed beneath your slippers. You bend at the waist to parse through tangled brambles, searching for the ripest berries. For the first time in months — years, maybe — you feel almost peaceful.

“Is that a love letter—?”

The voice cuts through the quiet like a blade. Your heart lurches into your throat as you jerk to full height again. The small bowl of berries slips from your grasp and rolls through the wet clover like so many drops of scattered blood. Behind you, you find a vaguely familiar hedgeknight, scarcely ten paces away — made of broad shoulders, broken teeth, and greasy hair that falls to his shoulders.

It takes you an embarrassingly long moment to catch your breath.

“I’m sorry,” you say through a tightening chest. “You… You startled me.”

“Did I?” he hums gruffly, in a voice that borders on amusement.

You cower into the hedgerow behind you as he approaches you, reaching you quickly on much longer limbs. He looms close enough for you to smell the sweat and ale and horse piss on his chainmail, close enough for you to lift your chin to meet his gaze.

His eyes never quite reach yours. They linger, instead, on your chest. “Letter from your lord husband, is it?” he asks, motioning with his head.

Your chin ducks to follow his eyes, where the rough edges of parchment nestled against your chest peek out from your corset. Your hands lift to cover it instinctively. “Yes. It’s a… a letter. From home.”

“Mind if I take a look at it?” he asks, taking another daring step closer. You wince at the sour smell of him. “What does Ser Gwayne write his pretty wife, hm?”

“Please, don’t—”

His hand shoots out. Thick, filthy fingers hook beneath the neckline of your gown, hard enough to stretch the fine silk with an audible crack. You react on pure instinct accordingly, lifting your own hand to strike him before your mind could forbid it.

The sound of your palm colliding with his bearded jaw cracks through the hedgerow like a whip.

His head turns slightly under the blow.

Your breath catches in surprise at yourself.

The back of his hand catches you across the cheek before you can blink. A red-hot pain explodes from your ear to your jaw as your world lurches suddenly sideways. You hit the unforgiving earth below with a huff when the air rushes from your lungs. Coppery blood pools thick on your tongue from where your teeth had cut the inside of your cheek.

“You little cunt—” you hear the man say, right before he catches a fistful of your skirts to pull you back towards him. The fabric screams beneath his hand. The cool evening air strikes your legs all at once when the silk rips up to your thighs.

You kick wildly at the man. Your slipper strikes uselessly against his shoulder. Your fingernails claw muddy furrows through the soaked earth.

“I am— Gwayne Hightower’s wife—” You tell him through panted, fearful breaths. He flips you onto your back by your ankle. Your foot burns beneath his grip. Your head strikes the soaked earth. Through the lack of air in your lungs, you heave, “He will have your head for this—”

“Oh, will he?” the hedge knight laughs with a brown-tooth grin. “‘Cause he ain’t here—”

The hand not holding your squirming ankle reaches for the tie in his trousers.

Then, in a blink, steel sings with a clean rasping sound. Warm blood splashes from your right jaw up to your left temple. For a flicker of a moment, you can’t quite comprehend why — not until the hedge knight kneels suddenly before you, with open eyes that have gone strangely distant. He topples suddenly sideways with his neck bent at an awkward angle, head half cut off and spouting bright red blood.

You blink wildly through the haze of death until you find Ormund standing just behind the corpse, chest rising and falling beneath his heavy armor. His longsword drips crimson onto the grass where your raspberries lie.

Sweat from the long day clings to his dark curls, wetting them against his temples and forehead. Flecks of blood dot his jaw like crimson stars. His blue eyes burn with something fierce, but his voice remains remarkably soft.

“My lady…”

You open your mouth to answer him, but nothing comes out.

Only then do you notice how violently your body is shaking, buzzing with a white-hot fear, as you scan the scene surrounding you — your torn skirts, the blood staining your chest, the dead body at your feet. You stare at the hedge knight’s gushing throat without fully understanding the sight of it.

Ormund reaches you in three long strides. He sheaths his sword without a word before dropping carefully to one knee. He slides one arm under your leg and his other behind your back, hoisting you upward with a pair of strong arms. The scent of blood and earth gives way to the smell of leather, incense, and bathing oils as he cradles you to the broad wall of his chest.

Your trembling hands clench a fistful of the green velvet cape draped along his shoulder.

“You’re safe, my lady,” Ormund murmurs as he carries you back to camp. “You’re safe.”

Your face finds the hollow space between his jaw and collarbone. You’re not entirely sure if you believe the words he speaks, but you know now that you do believe in the man who speaks them.

v. SANCTUARY & SIN

The weeks that followed could be divided into two — the days before the attack and all the days after.

For a time, you startled far too easily. A dropped shield sent you into a panic. A knight laughing too loudly made your pulse skyrocket. And if a pair of bootsteps walked too closely behind you, you lost all your breath before your mind had time to remind your body that no one meant you any harm. 

Nights proved harder still. You dreamt of nothing but rough hands and torn silk and crushed berries that smelled so sweet the thought alone made you sick. One moment you were suffocating beneath the sweaty body of a hedge knight, and the next, your canvas door was thrown open while you were choking on a scream.

Ormund stood silhouetted before you, barefoot, with a sword in his naked hand. He’d reached you with haste, after having your pavilion packed up and pitched again not quite twenty paces from his following the attack — “It’ll be easier that way,” he assured you. “If another fool decides to trouble you, I’d rather not have to cross half of Westeros to remove his head.” 

His curls were flattened from slumber, his linen shirt unlaced to reveal his broad chest heaving with panic. His sleep-swollen eyes swept every corner of the empty pavilion before they settled finally on you. His steel lowered as he crossed the tent to settle beside you, smoothing a hand up and down your back despite the way your nightgown clung uncomfortably to your sweaty skin.

“We’ll move your bed into my tent,” he’d said. “You’ll sleep there for the time being.” 

It was concern disguised as a command. One you could not refuse if you wanted to.

Ormund’s tent was large enough to pass for a modest hall — maps and banners occupied one half, while the other had become something half-resembling living quarters. Your smaller cot was placed opposite his beneath the same sloping canvas roof, separated by little more than a table crowded with candles and books. You would wake occasionally to find Ormund already seated beside the brazier in nothing but a linen shirt, reading dispatches by firelight while occasionally glancing over to see whether you were sleeping soundly.

You pretended that you were, if only to keep on watching him.

But then the late summer storms arrived; and the unforgiving deluge washed over the camp with enough violence to shake the pavilion you slept beneath. Thunder cracked like an explosion closely overhead, and you woke with another frightened gasp before remembering where you were.

Ormund was already awake, as if stirred in knowing that you were scared.

“If you’re frightened…” he murmured from across the darkness. A flash of lightning revealed his blanketed body, and his face half-smushed into his pillow. “I imagine my bed could accommodate two people without either touching the other."

You crossed the space between your cots and climbed beneath his blankets without another word.  

You haven’t left his bed since.

The days soon settle into something almost resembling normalcy. Ormund, you find, possesses an absurd fondness for taking care of you — always making sure that you’ve eaten breakfast before he’s started his mornings; delivering his wool blankets to you before you can complain that you’re cold, warming your hands between his calloused palms when he does so; and escorting you through camp with a protective hand splayed along the small of your back.

No one ever cared for you with such deliberate attention before — even Gwayne, as gentle as he was, could only love you from a respectful distance before the war had sent him off. Your husband washed away into memory, into the note left abandoned somewhere on the forest floor. 

You did not know whether he still rode beneath banners or if his corpse had been picked clean by crows. You did know, at the very least, that Ormund was here — he was there in the mornings when you woke and each night when old fears crept back into your skin. It was a dangerous thing, you soon realized, to mistake safety for love. Or more dangerous still, to suspect that the two were any different at all.

You watch from Ormund’s bed — freshly bathed beneath your thin ivory slip, with your legs kicking lazily from where you lie on your stomach — as his squire removes pieces of his armor. A sketchbook lies open before you, alongside a collection of colored inks.

“This is what you get for tightening the straps so much,” Ormund hums as Daeron struggles with the final buckle across the man’s broad shoulders. 

“Well, you’d like them to remain attached, wouldn’t you?” the boy quips back.

The man smiles despite himself. “You complain more than any squire I've ever met, do you know that?”

“I learned everything from you, did I not?”

When the final piece of armor comes finally free, Ormund dismisses the boy back to his tent. The entrance cover opens and shuts behind the boy, letting in a rush of cool evening air before it closes again. Silence returns to the expansive pavilion, filled only by the crackling of burning candles.

Ormund, left only in his loose dark breeches and a linen undertunic, walks to the round table to pour himself a goblet of wine. “What is occupying you so completely over there?”

“I’m hard at work,” you answer vaguely.

“So I see.” He eyes you carefully over the glugging of the flagon. A faint, unreadable flicker crosses his face. “Writing to Gwayne, are you?”

“No,” you sigh. “I’m drawing you.”

You set the quill into the inkpot and lift the sketchbook to face the man with a girlish grin, which seems to be becoming more and more frequent as the days go by. Ormund’s light eyes squint to study the page. It was unmistakably him drawn in the ink, though perhaps only if one was exceedingly charitable. The proportions are all wrong: his nose is too large, his mouth is too small, one eye sits higher than the other, and he’s missing his left brow.

His eyes flick to meet yours again. “…Is that intended to be me?” he asks, motioning with the goblet in his fist.

“Of course,” you shrug like it’s obvious.

“Well,” he sighs, raising the cup to his mouth. “I had no idea that I resembled that of a rotting turnip.”

You gasp in faux-offense that’s soon overcome by a fit of laughter. “It is not that bad!”

“My lady…” Ormund huffs sympathetically, abandoning his ale to saunter slowly towards the bed. “This could be considered treason— I should confiscate this immediately."

“You shall do no such thing,” you tease.

“Oh really?” he croons, brows raised in amusement.

He lunges for you in an instant. You jerk back onto your haunches with a squeal, cradling the sketchbook to your chest. You dodge each of his attempts to take it with a girlish gracelessness, laughing harder with each of his failed attempts. Ormund smiles at the sound without realizing it, dropping the table of ink to the rug below before clambering onto the bed to follow you. 

One final tug sends the book flying across the bed, and the two of you go to reach for it at the same time. The momentum carries you forward until you land clumsily against his chest, knocking the breath out of him as his back hits the mattress, with you squarely on top of him.

It takes you a long moment to realize your precarious position — your chest brushing his beneath your thin slip, noses nearly touching, breaths nearly entwining. Your laughter fades first, but you still do not move. Ormund’s smile flickers, but his hands lift to rest lightly along the arms you use to prop up your weight on top of him.

You can feel each of his warm breaths fan against your chin. You could get drunk on the ale stained on his mouth from the proximity between you alone. Closer by an inch or two and you would taste it on his lips.

“We ought not,” Ormund murmurs lowly, as if he can read your mind.

“Ought what?”

“This,” he answers. His blue eyes flick briefly in the space separating your mouths. “You are another man’s wife. My cousin’s wife.”

You swallow hard at the mention of Gwayne. It had been far easier to forget him, in truth. “I have not seen my husband in nearly a year,” you reply in a small voice. “I do not even know whether he yet lives…”

Pain etches in Ormund's strong features before disappearing behind his usual practiced restraint. His hands tremble with the urge to smooth away the frown between your brows, but he does not allow himself the satisfaction. 

“I swore on oath to protect you,” he says. “To serve you in my cousin’s absence.”

You, without possessing a similar self-control, lift a hand to brush a wild curl from his temple. “And do you intend to keep that promise, Lord Ormund?”

He nods against the mattress. “Of course I do.”

“Okay then…” you hum as a smile tugs slowly at one corner of your mouth. “Then serve me.”

You duck down to close the distance between you without a second thought. The tip of your nose grazes the strong bridge of his as you press your lips to his chapped ones, nothing more than an experimental brushing of your mouths. You go to pull away just as quickly as you came, and whatever restraint Ormund had had before vanishes in an instant.

He lifts his head from the tousled blankets to chase your mouth, cradling your neck with a wide hide to draw you back into him again. The second kiss lands with none of the careful uncertainty of the first. This one is slower, deeper, and far more languid. His tongue licks into your mouth, tasting of wine and the mint leaves he always chews after supper. You sigh through your nose to savor it, melting further into his chest.

Your mouths move together with an awkward sort of tenderness, learning one another by the second. Ormund kisses you far rougher than Gwayne ever did — it’s all tongue and teeth and spit, as if he were committing the taste of you to memory: the meat from your supper, the berry from your tea; the guilt from your broken vows, the relief of being found after believing yourself long abandoned.

Your breath catches in your throat when Ormund suddenly takes charge, urging you onto your back with his mouth still on yours. He pulls off you with a quiet smack, wearing your spit on his rosy mouth like gloss. 

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks with heavy eyes that dart back and forth between your glassy ones.

You shake your head against the cushions beneath you, features twisting with a pained look at the thought of stopping now.

“Do you understand what will follow? What… vows both of us will be breaking?”

Your eyes glisten as they dance between his blue ones. “The war broke those vows,” you tell him, half-breathless. “Not us.”

Ormund nods wordlessly for a moment, pleased with your answer. “Then open,” he says.

Your mouth parts for him on instinct. He lifts his middle and pointer finger to your lips, wetting them on your tongue, before sliding them in between your bodies. His hand disappears beneath the skirt of your slip. Your head tips back when you feel his fingertips sliding between your velvety folds, brushing your clit before sinking into your waiting cunt.

Your sigh fills the quiet tent, accompanied by the low groan in the back of Ormund’s throat.

“You’re softer than I imagined…” he confesses, almost to himself.

“Imagining me a lot, are you?” you tease on bated breath.

“Yes,” he answers without missing a beat. “I dreamt of how your cunt would wrap around me… of how you’d soak the sheets… of what noise you’d make when I moved my fingers like this—”

A whine catches in your throat when he crooks his fingers just so, nestling the fatty part of his palm flat against your clit. Your hips buck into his hand despite yourself. Your exhaled whine is half-drowned beneath his breathy chuckle.

“There it is…” he praises.

“Fuck me,” you plead, face crumpling under the weight of your need. One hand twists in his hair, while your other fists in his thin white tunic to keep him close. You only vaguely realize how little you sound like yourself as you plead: “I need it so bad, Ormund, please, fuck me—”

The man goes dizzy at the sound of your begging, as if he brought you into his camp, his tent, his bed, to do anything other than serve you. 

His fingers glitter with your slick when he drags them out of your cunt. He brings them to his nose, nostrils flaring slightly as he inhales the scent of your musk upon them. You whine at the sight of it — half-disgusted, half-intrigued. You watch with heavy eyes when he brings the same hand into his trousers to fist his half-hard cock fully stiff for you.

It’s a mess of tangled limbs for a moment, as you drag his shirt gracefully from his torso while he attempts to free himself from his breeches. He’s made of tanned skin, toned muscles, and a dusting of auburn hair from his sternum to his stomach. It grows more dense at the root of his cock — which is not quite as long as Gwayne’s, but thicker still and adorned with more prominent veins. 

Ormund works himself hard with his fist; the reddened head of his cock leaks pearly drops every time his hand moves upwards. Your mouth waters for a taste. You let him smear it along the folds of your cunt instead.

You curl your arms under his broad arms to splay your hands along his shoulder blades. They flex slightly under your touch as he leans down over you. You tense on instinct when he pierces you with the tip of his cock. “Shh, shh, shh,” he soothes lowly, fighting back his own grunt as you spread so perfectly around him.

He sinks slowly into you, slow enough for you to feel every vein and ridge of his cock as he mounts you until his hips are flush with yours. Your mouth parts. He ducks down to kiss you before a moan tumbles out, swallowing the pretty sound with his mouth. 

He stays still against you for several long, agonizing moments. Your hips buck against his in anticipation. “Please move,” you whine, digging crescent shapes into his shoulders with your nails. “I need you so much, please—”

Ormund’s jaw clenches tight. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve been inside another woman?”

Your face screws. “I’d rather not hear about your previous exploits at the moment—”

“Don’t,” Ormund spits, shuddering on top of you when you roll your hips into his once more. He grasps your thigh hard enough to dig bruises into the plush skin with the hand not holding himself up beside your head. His light eyes turn glacial in an instant, darting wildly between both of yours. “I won’t… I won’t last…” he confesses.

Your eyes soften around the edges with a faux innocence. “This isn’t going to be the last time you fuck me, is it?”

The crude word falls so effortlessly from your pristine mouth that it makes his cock jerk within your drooling confines. “I don’t want it to be. No,” he answers, half-shy.

“Then I don’t care how long you last,” you assure him with a lazy grin. “You have kept me hostage for nearly a year— Surely, I’m entitled to make some use of my captor while the realm delays the war, am I not?”

Ormund’s resolve crumbles under your permission. He rolls his hips forward and back again, never quite pulling all the way out of you. He groans quietly when you clench around the sensitive head of his cock; and you swallow down a whimper when the coarse hair below his stomach rubs mercilessly along your sensitive clit. 

Your head tips back. He falls to the hollow space between your neck and shoulder.

Ormund’s open-mouthed breaths fan warm along your burning skin as he stumbles into a graceless rhythm, thrusting hard enough to make the wooden frame of his bed squeak quietly beneath you. 

The pressure on your clit is relentless. You squirm underneath his sweat-slick body, chasing and running from the pleasure all at once. “I know. I know. It’s okay,” you hear him slur against your skin. “Just take it. Just fuckin’ take it— Fuck—” His voice breaks like splintered glass. 

He tenses suddenly above you, taut muscles trembling. You hear his breath catch for a moment, right before a foreign warmth pools in the very pit of your stomach. He groans in time with his release, heavying his weight further against you. 

You aren’t far behind.

He grinds his hips lazily to ride out his high, smothering your sensitive clit as the warm, wet, sticky feeling continues to bloom inside of you. “Ormund—” you gasp, tensing beneath him.

“There it is…”the man praises as you tremble underneath him, smearing his lips against your jaw until they reach your parted mouth. “There it is— Fuck, that’s it,look at me.”

Your eyes snap open at his command, bleary and heavy-lidded. You ride out the rest of your orgasm with your gaze locked with his glassy one. 

The honeyed moment doesn’t last nearly as long as either of you would’ve liked.

“My lord?”

The two of you sober in a flash as the spell between you shatters. Ormund stills suddenly above you, as if pierced by steel. The warmth flees from his features at once, replaced by the hard composure of the commander of House Hightower. You, too, freeze where you lay beneath him — pulse thrumming hard in your throat as the muffled voice drifts once more through the pavilion.

“My lord—”

“Yes, Daeron,” Ormund spits through gritted teeth, nostrils flaring as he breathes through the rage searing in his chest. “What is it?”

The squire hesitates at his uncle’s harsh tone. “Forgive me for the intrusion, my lord…” the boy says carefully, hidden behind the covered entrance. “But a messenger arrived from the river road. He bears urgent word from Ser Criston’s camp.”

You feel your stomach sink — or, perhaps, it’s only the mixture of cum seeping out of your still fluttering confines, soaking the sheets beneath you. You feel unspeakably dirty now, and the lack of regret only deepens the feeling.

Ormund remains motionless above you for a moment before sitting back on his haunches. You shiver at the absence of his warmth, and wince slightly when his softening cock slips out of you. “A letter?” he calls to the entrance, brows lowered. “What news?”

“It is sealed, my lord,” Daeron says. “The messenger said it was to be opened by our hand alone.”

Ormund’s confusion deepens. “And who sends it?”

After another brief hesitation, the voice answers solemnly: “Ser Gwayne, my lord.”

[louloucake]

inner desires ₊⊹⟢

ser duncan the tall x runaway!princess!reader

-18+, you and dunk encounter sex pollen unknowingly!, aphrodisiac/pollen-induced arousal, size kink, some breeding undertones, creampie!!!, overstimulation, multiple orgasms, semi-public sex, spit play!! ᥫ᭡

the wood was alive with the scent of the lover’s bloom, those delicate, violet flowers that bloomed only under the light of the moon. it was a scent meant to drive the fiercest lion mad with desire.

and now you were burning up. not from a fever, but from something far more primal.

"ser duncan," you whined, your voice small and breathless. you kicked at the furs, your skin glistening with a sheen of sweat that made the coarse fabric of your dress stick to you. "it is suddenly far too hot to sleep…"

dunk sat on the other side of the fire, his massive frame tense. he was staring at you with eyes so dark they looked like pools of molten iron. he was trying to be a good knight. he was trying to keep his distance, to protect you from the dangers of strange men and evils of the woods. but the air between you was thick, electric, charged with the scent of your arousal mixed with the intoxicating perfume of the flowers.

he hadn’t known, truly. if he had, he would have never suggested resting here. but it was now far too late, and before he could understand what was happening, he too felt his own body temperature rise with a pulse throbbing in his breeches.

"m’princess," he rasped, his voice gravelly and deep. "you must attempt to rest, we have a long road ahead in the morrow."

"i can't sleep," you said, rolling onto your side to face him fully. you could feel the heat radiating from your body, the fire and his own body a solid wall of comfort. "it's too hot, ser duncan. i need..."

"water?" he offered, reaching for his canteen.

"no," you whimpered, the word barely audible over the crackle of the fire.

you pushed yourself up from the furs, your legs trembling slightly. you walked toward him, your eyes fixed on the massive figure sitting by the embers. the ground seemed to stretch endlessly beneath your bare feet.

you needed him. you needed the feeling of his skin, the strength of his arms, the way he looked at you like you were the only star in the sky.

dunk watched you approach, his jaw tightening so hard you could see the muscle working beneath the skin. he shifted, his boots scraping restlessly on the dirt, and his hand hovered near the hilt of his sword, as if he were fighting an internal battle.

"you are burning, m’lady," he rasped, his voice rougher than before. the air around him was thick with the scent of musk and wildflowers. he couldn't hide it anymore. he was sweating, his tunic damp at the collar. "the bloom...it is in the air. it is making you feverish."

"i cannot feel my own face i am so flushed," you breathed, stopping right in front of him. you reached out, your fingers brushing the hard line of his chest through his shirt. the contact sent a jolt of electricity through both of you. "i am...i am so empty, dunk."

his eyes snapped down to your hand, then back up to your face. the restraint he had been clinging to for days- the chaste knight, the guardian, the protector- shattered. he let out a ragged exhale, his hand flying up to cover yours, his grip desperate and trembling.

"gods," he groaned, the sound vibrating through his chest.

you took his massive hand- palm rough with calluses, fingers long and capable- and guided it to your waist. you ran it down your side, over your hip, and pressed it flat against your stomach.

dunk froze. his eyes widened as he felt the heat of your skin through your thin shift. he looked up at you, his adam's apple bobbing.

"you want me to touch you?"

"yes," you cried out, a tear slipping from the corner of your eye. the pollen was making everything hypersensitive, every touch a spark of lightning. "please, ser duncan. dunk…"

he didn't hesitate this time. his hand, rough and calloused, moved from your waist to your cheek, his thumb brushing away the tear. he leaned in, pressing a kiss to your forehead, his lips lingering on your skin like he was memorizing the sensation.

he moved his hand down your neck, his fingers tracing the line of your collarbone, his touch reverent and worshipful.

he watched as you shivered under his touch, the firelight dancing across your skin. you reached up, your fingers fumbling with the ties of your bodice, and slowly, agonizingly, began to undress.

dunk watched you with rapt attention, his mouth slightly open, his chest heaving. the sight of you, exposed to the cool night air, made his heart hammer against his ribs like a trapped bird. when the shift fell away, pooling at your waist, he let out a low, guttural sound.

"by the seven," he whispered, his hand moving to cup your breast, his fingers tracing the sensitive peak. "you are breathtaking."

you reached for him, your hands shaking as you pushed at his tunic. he sat back slightly, allowing you to pull the fabric over his head, tossing it aside. the air hit his skin, and he was revealed to you- broad, muscular, scarred, and magnificent. he looked like a warrior forged in the fires of battle, a god made flesh.

"you are so beautiful," you murmured, your hands tracing the hard lines of his chest, feeling the rapid thud of his heart.

he smiled, a rare, genuine expression that softened his rough features. he reached out, his hands gripping your waist, and lifted you easily, settling you on his lap. the contact was electric, your skin sticking to his in the night air.

he pulled you close, burying his face in the crook of your neck, inhaling your scent—the scent of sweat and pollen and you. he kissed you then, slowly and reverently.

it was a deep, soul-searching exploration. his lips moved against yours, slow and tender, his tongue tracing the seam of your mouth, tasting you, claiming you.

"you taste like honey," he murmured against your lips, his voice thick with desire. "i am a brute for wanting you like this. i am a heathen for thinking of you in my bed."

“you are a man, a sweet- gentle man and i do not fear you, dunk.” you whispered in his ear, pressing kisses to the skin below his earlobe.

his hands roamed your body, his fingers mapping every inch of your skin, his touch both gentle and demanding. he kissed you again, deeper, harder, his tongue tangling with yours. he pulled back slightly, his eyes dark with lust, looking down at you with an intensity that took your breath away.

"please, ser duncan. i need you to make me feel something other than this heat," you cried out, arching against him.

"tell me you want this," he growled against your lips, his huge hand squeezing your breast softly. "tell me you want your knight to take you."

"yes," you sobbed, your hands tangling in his hair, pulling him closer. "yes, dunk. take me. make me yours."

he lifted you slightly, pulling his burning hot, leaking cock out of his breeches and slowly guiding himself to your entrance.

you were both radiating so much body heat that even your pussy was like an oven. he guided his tip past your tiny stretched hole, and it was searing warm inside you. slowly, agonizingly, he sank into you. you gasped, your back arching, your nails digging into his shoulders. he was huge, filling you completely, stretching you to your limits.

"gods above forgive me," he whispered, his forehead resting against yours. "you're so tight. you're squeezing me so hard."

“it's because you are s-so huge, dunk. i always wondered if you’d fit!” you mewl, fingers gripping the sweaty hair at the base of his neck.

he began to move, his hips rocking against yours, slow and sensual. he watched you, his eyes drinking in the sight of your face, the way your lips parted, the way your eyes rolled back. he wanted to map every curve, every sigh, every trembling breath.

"look at me," he commanded softly, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through your chest. his hands, slick with sweat, gripped your waist, holding you steady as he drove himself deeper, harder. “p-please look at me, sweet girl.”

his eyes dark and unfocused, drinking in the sight of your face flushed with heat. he shifted his angle, his hips angling downward to strike that spot that made you gasp and arch your back. your nails dug into his shoulders, leaving crescent-shaped marks on his skin.

"you are squeezing me so tight. it feels...it feels like i am drowning in you," he hissed, the sound strangled.

the heat was overwhelming. you were slick with sweat, your bodies sliding against each other with a wet, obscene sound. he watched you, his eyes hooded and heavy with lust, as he thrust into you, slow and deep, over and over again.

in your haze you reach for one of his hands to then guide him down to find your clit, rubbing the sensitive nub in slow, tight circles.

"there?" dunk murmurs quietly, his voice a ragged rasp as he pulls back just enough to look into your eyes, his dark gaze searching yours for approval, for permission to continue.

"a bit- bit faster please-" you whine out, your voice trembling with need.

his hips snap up with sudden, brutal force and his fingers move faster against your sensitive bundle of nerves, a blur of motion that has you seeing stars.

you cry out his name, a broken, desperate sound. "dunk! oh dunk!"

"say it," he growls, his voice thick with need, his eyes dark and unfocused, burning with a possessive fire. "say you want me. say you are mine."

"i am yours," you sobbed. “i am yours, dunk. please, don't stop."

he leans down, kissing your forehead, your nose, your lips, his breathing heavy and ragged, his chest heaving against yours. "you are so good for me. m’good girl. m’princess. you take me so so so well."

then, the wave hits. he works your clit furiously, his thumb and fingers rubbing in tight, desperate circles, feeling the way you clench around him. you scream as you come undone, a rush of wet heat clamping down around him, your body spasming in his arms.

as you ride out your high, he pulls back slightly, wiping the sweat from his brow. he looks at his hand, sticky with your juices, and then spits into his palm, mixing it with your essence to create a slicker, messier glide.

"hold on," he grunts, his voice thick with lust. he resumes the assault on your clit, using the spit to make it even better, his fingers slippery and warm. "i'm not done with you yet. you're going to take everything i have."

he thrusts again, harder this time, chasing his own release, his body aching with the need to fill you completely.

he kissed you again, a searing, desperate clash of lips and tongues, swallowing your moans. he couldn't hold back anymore. the pollen was too strong, the heat too high. with a guttural roar, he buried himself to the hilt, his body locking up as he spilled himself inside you, filling you with his hot, thick seed.

he held himself there, his chest heaving against yours, his arms wrapped tight around you, as he rode out the waves of his pleasure. you could feel him throbbing inside you, pulsing with life, marking you as his own.

he pulled back slightly, looking down at where you were joined, his dark eyes drinking in the sight of his seed mixing with your own juices. he reached down, his thumb brushing through the mess, spreading it around.

he watched your face, his thumb pressing firmly against your clit, rubbing in slow, torturous circles.

“d’you feel any better, m’lady?” he murmured, his voice a dark, husky whisper that sent a shiver down your spine. "do you need more, sweet girl?…i vowed to serve you in every way, every life."

he didn't let you rest. the pollen was still humming in your blood, a relentless tide. his thumb still on your swollen nub, slick and warm, and he began to rub in tight, vicious circles.

“c’mon- c’mon m’love. one more, squeeze down one more time.”

the sensation was overwhelming, a second wave crashing over you before you were even ready.

you screamed. the pleasure was too much, too sharp, too bright. your body seized, your hips bucking uncontrollably as the second orgasm ripped through you, even stronger than the first. you saw white, your vision blurring as the world spun.

your eyes fluttered shut, your body going limp in his arms. the heat of the pollen, the exertion, and the sheer force of your pleasure overwhelmed you. darkness claimed you, and you slipped into a deep, exhausted slumber.

dunk kissed your forehead, his lips lingering on your skin. he gathered you into his arms, his strength unwavering.

he stood up, carrying you back to your makeshift tent and sleeping ground. the cold night air bit at his skin, but he didn't care. he walked with a steady, confident gait, the protector, the lover, the man who had claimed his runaway princess.

he laid you gently on the linens covering the grass, pulling the blanket up over your body. he slowly sat beside you, listening to your breathing slow down.

"you're safe now," he whispered, his voice thick with emotion. “my princess…”

[goat-limbs]

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, synaesthesia, 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.

[myladysapphire]

Talking a small break from writing

Hey guys, soo last week I was attacked and chased. I’m not going to go into detail of it but I am okay and wasn’t harmed physically. But it has really messed with my mental health, so I will be talking a small break from writing for now. Hopefully I’ll be ready to write again soon.

But I am okay so don’t worry I just want you all to know that if I disappear for a bit that’s why. I don’t know when I’ll be able to focus on writing again but I have so many ideas to write for so hopefully I’ll be mentally ready soon.

[alysmond]

PRINCE JACAERYS VELARYON [114 AC – 130 AC]

It is said that Jacaerys Velaryon leapt free and clung to a piece of smoking wreckage for a few heartbeats, until some crossbowmen on the nearest Myrish ship began loosing quarrels at him. The prince was struck once, and then again. More and more Myrmen brought crossbows to bear. Finally one quarrel took him through the neck, and Jace was swallowed by the sea.

[searockwell]

underground fighter maekar and his #1 supporter egg (happy fathers day!!) 👨

[king-baelor]

twinning

[maybestrid33]

Bedrest

Jacaerys Velaryon x wife!reader - House of the Dragon (spoilers for s3 ep1!!)

Summary: Jacaerys survives the Gullet, so naturally the maesters have opinions about what he should and should not be doing during his recovery. Unfortunately for them, Jace has opinions too.

Warnings: 18+ SMUT hurt/comfort, handjob, oral (blowjob), eventual smut, near-death aftermath, medical treatment, injuries/blood, married couple shenanigans, excessive flirting, Jace Velaryon lobbying campaign

A/N: this works as a standalone or sequel to Saltwater, except this fic is significantly less angsty and significantly more "what if jace spent a month trying to argue with medical professionals." :) must admit i cracked myself up a lil writing this and also PLEASE send in reqs im running out of ideas

MASTERLIST - REQUESTS (open) - WC: 4.0k

A month after the Gullet, the castle still smells faintly of medicines, as though the sea itself has followed Jacaerys home and settled in the stone with him.

You have grown so accustomed to it that you hardly notice anymore.

A month ago, you would have given anything to smell it. A month ago, there had been blood. So much blood. But now there are only maesters, all the time.

Three of them stand gathered around the table right now near the window, speaking in low, serious voices while Jace sits in a carved chair looking increasingly irritated with every minute.

Sunlight spills through the narrow panes behind him, catching in his dark curls and turning the edges of them gold, softening him in a way that makes him seem almost boyish despite everything he has endured in the last couple weeks.

His injuries have faded from terrifying to merely alarming. The worst of the bruising is gone, the cuts have begun to heal, and colour has returned to his face, though not yet enough for you to relax.

Unfortunately for everyone else, so has his stubbornness.

You stand beside him with one hand resting lightly on the back of his chair, partly affection but mostly precaution if you're being honest with yourself, because the prince has developed an unfortunate habit of forgetting that nearly dying is supposed to slow a person down.

"Your Grace is recovering admirably," Grand Maester Gerardys says at last.

Jace straightens immediately, as if the words themselves have restored him. Gerardys clears his throat with the patient air of a man who has spent his life delivering unwelcome truths to the powerful. "Recovering admirably, however, does not mean recovered."

Jace slumps back with all the theatrical suffering of a man condemned to the Wall. Gerardys continues as though he has not noticed the prince's offence.

"Your ribs are still mending. The wound to your side has not fully healed. The fever has passed, but weakness remains. Any unnecessary strain could set back his recovery considerably."

Jace folds his arms. "What strain?"

The three maesters exchange a glance, and you immediately become suspicious. Jace notices it too, his brows drawing together. "What strain?" he repeats, sharper this time.

Nobody answers.

The silence stretches, and stretches, and then stretches a little further, until finally the old maester clears his throat again, looking faintly pained. "This includes physical exertion."

Jace nods at once. "Yes, I gathered that, obviously."

"Excessive physical exertion."

"Yes."

"Particularly..." Gerardys pauses, and one of the younger maesters suddenly finds the floor fascinating. "...marital exertion."

The room falls completely silent.

For a single moment Jace simply stares at them. Then his face changes all at once, horror and outrage arriving together.

"I beg your pardon?"

You turn away quickly because you can already feel laughter rising in your throat and you know if you let it out now you will never stop. Beside you, Jace looks scandalised beyond measure. "What do you mean?"

"My Prince-"

"No." The word echoes off the stone walls. "Absolutely not. This is absurd and I refuse to accept it."

Gerardys remains maddeningly calm. "It is only temporary."

"Temporary?" Jace sounds personally betrayed. "You are forbidding me from bedding my own wife."

The younger maester goes slightly red. You stare very intently at the tapestry across the room, because if you look at Jace now you will lose whatever dignity you have left. He points an accusing finger at the entire collection of healers. "I survived a naval battle."

"Indeed."

"I was shot."

"Yes."

"I nearly drowned."

"Correct."

"And your conclusion is that my greatest threat is my wife?"

The maesters look vaguely embarrassed. Jace looks outraged. And suddenly, despite the lingering ache that still lives in your chest whenever you remember the sight of him bleeding on a bed, you feel lighter, because this is familiar. This is your Jace. He's alive enough to argue and complain. Alive enough to glare dramatically at innocent old men and be stubborn.

Your hand slips from the chair to his shoulder, and immediately he covers it with his own. Gerardys notices, and his expression gentles. "My Prince," he says, "the restriction is not punishment."

Jace groans. "I would beg to differ."

A few of the maesters smile despite themselves. Gerardys gathers his papers, "It is only another month."

Jace nearly chokes. "A whole month?"

"Perhaps less, if recovery continues."

"A month."

"You survived the Gullet. Surely you can survive a few more weeks."

Jace mutters something deeply disrespectful under his breath, and you squeeze his shoulder in warning and affection both. His fingers immediately tighten around yours as he looks up at you, exhaustion and frustration playing on his features.

You smile at him, and his expression softens immediately.

Then Gerardys speaks again, and the spell breaks at once. "And separate beds may also be advisable."

Jace's head snaps around, "No."

Silence settles over the chamber. Jace's hand remains wrapped around yours, firm and warm and immovable. "I nearly died, so I am not sleeping without my wife."

They exchange glances and then, wisely, surrender. "Very well."

You lower your head to hide your smile, because truly, there are battles even the maesters cannot win.

That evening the matter should have been settled, at least in theory.

The maesters had spoken, their instructions delivered and their warnings had been repeated no fewer than six times over supper, as though saying them often enough might somehow make Jace more inclined to obey.

Instead, he is attempting to negotiate, which is perhaps exactly what you should have expected from him and yet still feels faintly absurd when he is sitting there shirtless on the edge of the bed, looking incredibly offended by the very concept of restraint.

You sit beside him with a fresh roll of linen in your lap while he holds one arm lifted so you can reach the wound along his side.

The chamber is quiet except for the crackle of the fire and the distant, steady sound of waves striking the cliffs below; night has fully settled beyond the windows, leaving only darkness on the other side of the glass and the warm gold of candlelight within.

Carefully, you peel away the old bandage, and he hisses through his teeth at the movement. You glance up at once. “You are being dramatic.”

"Three arrows pierced my body.”

“A month ago.”

“It still counts.”

You make a skeptical sound and reach for the ointment, though you cannot quite keep the corner of your mouth from twitching. For a few moments silence settles between you. You smooth the salve across healing skin, studying the angry scar that is beginning to form there, the sight still makes something twist painfully in your chest.

There are moments when you look at him and see only Jace; your husband, your best friend, the boy who once raced you through castle corridors and stole lemon cakes from the kitchens with the shameless confidence of someone who had never once been told no in his life.

Then there are moments like this, when memory comes back all at once and with it the blood, the fever, the endless waiting, the terrible certainty, however brief, that you might lose him. Your fingers pause before you can stop them.

Immediately, his hand settles over yours.

He notices. Of course he does.

You lift your eyes, and his expression softens at once. “I am all right,” he says quietly.

“Mm.”

His thumb brushes slowly across your knuckles.

Then, because Jacaerys Velaryon possesses the survival instincts of an overconfident golden retriever, he says, “I still think the maesters are being unreasonable.”

You close your eyes for a brief, weary moment. You had been wondering how long it would take.

“You are recovering from grievous injuries.”

“I am recovering exceptionally well.”

“You still tire walking up stairs.”

“Well, I dislike those stairs.”

You begin wrapping the fresh bandage around his ribs. “They are not unusual stairs, Jace.”

"They are steeper than other stairs."

Despite yourself, you laugh, and his grin appears immediately. He tilts his head, thoughtful in the way that always makes you suspicious.

“What exactly constitutes marital exertion?”

You nearly drop the bandage. “Jacaerys.”

“It is a reasonable question.”

You finish tying the linen perhaps just a little tighter than necessary, and he winces. You feel no guilt whatsoever.

“They were quite vague,” he says after a moment.

“They were not vague. They were, in fact, extraordinarily clear.”

Jace considers this with the air of a man weighing evidence in a trial he has already decided to win. “Perhaps to you.”

“To everyone.”

“Not to me.” His smile widens, and you are suddenly struck by the realisation that the maesters should perhaps have prescribed confinement in separate castles.

“They said strain,” he says, as though he's continuing a perfectly sensible conversation.

“Yes.”

“And exertion.”

“Yes.”

“So theoretically-”

“No.”

“What if-”

“Jace.”

He stops, though only because he is laughing now, actually laughing, and the sound fills the room so easily that for a moment you forget everything else.

“You are impossible,” you inform him.

“I have been told.”

He reaches for your hand, and you let him take it. His fingers close around yours with a warmth that feels almost unbearably familiar, and when he speaks again his voice has lost its teasing edge. “Another month is a very long time.”

You shake your head, smiling softly, but before he can begin constructing another ridiculous argument, you lean forward and press a kiss to his mouth.

The effect is immediate. Jace falls silent, blessedly, wonderfully silent, and when you pull back he blinks once, then twice, as though he has forgotten every thought he was having.

A second kiss lands at the corner of his mouth, then another against his cheek, and with each one his smile grows slower, softer, warmer, until by the third he has entirely abandoned his campaign against the maesters.

You feel rather proud of yourself.

He grins and reaches for you, and you allow him to pull you nearer. The blankets shift around you both as you settle beside him carefully, because he is still healing and you are both painfully aware of it.

His arm slides around your waist. Your head finds its familiar place against his shoulder.

The first week after the maesters' decree is irritating.

The second becomes ridiculous.

By the third, it's infuriating.

Jacaerys Velaryon approaches recovery the way he approaches every obstacle in his life: by refusing to accept that it is truly an obstacle at all.

If the maesters insist upon restrictions, then he will simply find exceptions.

One evening, as you sit beside him on the bed with your book open in your lap, he glances over and says, almost casually, “I stand by my opinion that their instructions were imprecise.”

You do not look up. “No.”

“They never actually provided definitions.”

You turn a page. “They are maesters, Jace, not scholars debating philosophy.”

He sighs, long-suffering and theatrical, and shifts a little closer.

Recently, he has become fond of finding excuses to sit beside you, or hold your hand, or drape an arm around your shoulders, or rest his head in your lap while insisting he is 'too weak' to move despite having spent the entire afternoon arguing in council.

“What if,” he begins. You close your eyes.

“What if,” he repeats, undeterred, “the concern is specifically overexertion?”

“It is.”

“Then surely the solution is simply avoiding overexertion.”

At last you lower the book and look at him properly. His expression brightens at once, as though he has won something merely by drawing your attention.

“Jace.”

“Yes?”

“No.”

He groans, and you return to your book.

Three nights later, he appears to have developed a new argument. You discover this when he is sprawled across the bed with his head resting against your shoulder, warm and comfortable and entirely too pleased with himself.

“What if,” he says thoughtfully.

You nearly laugh. “Again?”

“I have had several days to refine my position on the issue.”

“Gods preserve me.”

“What if I simply did not move very much? You could do all the... moving... uh, like difficult parts.”

You lower your embroidery hoop and glance down at him. He looks entirely sincere, which somehow makes it worse.

“Jacaerys.”

“I am not going to do any part because we are not going to do anything.”

He studies the ceiling for a moment, then turns his head just enough to look at you. “I think you are dismissing my proposals too quickly.”

“I think you enjoy hearing yourself talk.”

“I enjoy talking to you.”

Oh, you hate how good he is at being charming.

His arm slips around your waist. “You know,” he says quietly, “I do understand why you’re worried.”

The humour fades a little. You look at him, but his gaze remains fixed on your joined hands.

“You frightened me,” you admit.

Something flashes behind his eyes. “I know.”

Silence settles between you, gentle and sad and comfortable all at once. Then, because he is incapable of allowing a serious conversation to remain serious for too long, he lifts his head and says, “So that is still a no?”

You stare at him.

Jace immediately begins laughing, and when you throw a cushion at his face he catches it easily, looking delighted by the rejection.

Which, unfortunately, only convinces you that recovery is proceeding exceptionally well.

One morning at the beginning of the fourth week you're standing at the edge of the bedchamber, the salt-laced wind moaning through the open shutters as the last embers in the hearth crackle low.

Jacaerys is desperate today, even more than usual

He lies propped against the pillows, his bare chest rising and falling with quick, restless breaths, the angry red scars along his ribs and hip still mapped in fresh pink, but they are scars now, nonetheless.

It's been two months since the Gullet.

To the naked eye he seems fully recovered — he partakes in council meetings, goes on long walks with you along the shore, is no longer winded by those particularly steep stairs — but the maesters’ edict remains iron.

No strain, no exertion, no touch that might tear what they say has barely knit. Yet here he is, dark eyes fixed on you with shameless hunger, voice low and frayed.

“Please,” he murmurs, the words thick with frustration, his hand extended, palm up, fingers flexing as if he can already feel the shape of your waist.

“I cannot do this, I’m not some broken thing anymore. I feel you every night in my dreams, and then I wake up and you won't even let me touch you properly. I need your hand, your mouth, anything. Just… let me feel you again.”

He sits up a little straighter, a small grin finding his lips, voice dropping to a growl. “You’re aching too, I know it. Two months without feeling how wet you get for me-"

"Jacaerys, stop being so crude, you cannot possibly think-" but he continues, completely disregarding your objections.

"Gods, I’d give anything to see you under me like I used to, but I won’t move. I swear it. Just you, I'll even lie still.”

Your fingers tighten on the bedpost, because you cannot dent he's right. You do miss him, painfully so. You miss the feel of his hands on you and the stretch of him inside you, but reluctance still coils tight in your chest.

You take one hesitant step closer.

The cool stone floor beneath your bare feet gives way to the softness of the mattress as you perch carefully at his uninjured side, your fingers brushing the edge of the linen without yet touching him.

“Jacaerys,” you whisper, “I cannot, the maesters said-” But the way his hips twitch, just once, desperate and involuntary, stops the protest on your tongue.

A soft, helpless sound escapes him, and something shifts inside you, because this, in a way, is also him in pain, except this time you actually have the power to help him.

Your hand drifts over the sheet, hovering just above the bulge you can just start to see emerging beneath the linen.

“You must promise me you’ll lie perfectly still,” you remind him, the words gentle but unyielding, “There are reasons they forbid it; you could open one of the wounds.”

His dark eyes flash, jaw tightening as if he might argue, but apparently the months of forced stillness have left him too raw, too aching, and he nods once, a bead of sweat tracing down his temple.

You smile then, small and maybe a little teasing, and let your fingertips graze the linen over the head of his cock.

Slowly you peel the sheet down, then work on the laces of his breeches before pulling them down and finally revealing him fully to the firelit air.

His cock thick and flushed dark, the vein along its length pulsing visibly as you wrap your fingers around the base with deliberate lightness, still not quite sure how this is going to go.

He groans, low and broken, head tipping back against the pillows, but he holds himself rigid as promised, muscles trembling with the effort.

You lean in, breath ghosting over the sensitive head, and press the softest kiss there, tasting the salt of him while your free hand rests lightly on his uninjured hip to remind him of the boundary.

“Only on my terms tonight, dearest husband,” you whisper against his skin, stroking him once, slow and torturous, savouring the way his breath hitches and his fingers clutch the bedding instead of reaching for you.

“I will give you this, you just lay there and let me take care you.”

You tighten your grip just enough to draw another shuddering groan from him, your thumb circling the slick head of his cock in slow, deliberate strokes that make his thighs tense against the sheets.

He’s so hard it must be painful, the heavy length twitching in your fist with every pass,

The sight of your big, strong husband, normally so commanding, now reduced to biting his lip to keep from thrusting stirs something warm and aching in your chest.

It feels like the biggest relief.

You still remember every moment of the last two months, watching him wince at every breath, lying awake beside his bandaged body while fear gnawed at you both, and now here he is, flushed and leaking for you, trying so hard to obey even as his hips give one tiny, involuntary roll.

It’s adorable, that stubborn flicker of dominance surfacing in the way he grits out your name, only for it to dissolve into a whimper when you lean down and drag your tongue along the underside of his shaft.

His fingers fist the bedding harder, knuckles white, and you can see the war in his eyes, the urge to grab your hair and guide you deeper warring with the maesters’ warnings and his own fragile healing.

“Fuck… just like that,” he rasps, voice cracking with need so raw it makes your own neglected body clench.

You take him deeper into your mouth, hollowing your cheeks with a soft suck that has him arching his head back.

It's as if you're watching him heal in real-time, because he’s becoming himself again, that fierce, passionate man who once pinned you laughing to the furs.

You hum around him, savouring the salt-bitter taste of him while your free hand strokes soothing circles over his tightening stomach.

You pull off just enough to murmur against the flushed skin, teasing the slit with the tip of your tongue until his breath stutters.

“Still, Jace.”

Then you resume your rhythm, slow, twisting strokes of your hand paired with wet, deliberate licks. He trembles beneath you, every suppressed sound proof of how desperately he’s craved your touch.

You quicken your pace with deliberate mercy, not seeing a point in dragging this out any longer than you have to, lips sealed tight around him as your tongue swirls and your hand pumps in steady rhythm, feeling the way his thighs quake despite his vow to stay still.

His voice breaks on your name, half-command and half-plea, while one of his hands finds your hair and grips tight, not that you mind at all.

Finally, he spills hot and pulsing across your tongue, thick spurts you swallow with a soft moan of your own. You keep stroking him through it, gentling your touch as the last tremors fade, watching the tension drain from his battered body until he lies boneless and breathless, dark eyes glassy.

For a long moment afterward, neither of you says anything.

The chamber is quiet except for the soft crackle of the fire and the distant rhythm of the sea beyond the windows. The candles have burned lower than either of you realised, leaving the room washed in warm gold and shadow.

Jace lies beside you with that same dazed, contented smile still lingering on his mouth, as though he has not quite remembered how to put it away.

You glance at him from the corner of your eye and shake your head. “What?”

His smile only deepens. “Nothing.”

“Mhmm.”

He gives a quiet, breathless laugh and reaches for your hand where it still rests atop his stomach, threading his fingers through yours. His thumb moves over your knuckles, warm and absentminded.

The sight of him like this, softened and unguarded, makes something in your chest loosen.

You fuss over him out of habit more than necessity, fetching a washcloth, straightening the blankets around his hips and making certain he is comfortable, searching his face and posture for any sign that he has overdone himself despite every promise he made.

Jace watches the whole business with open affection, his expression growing gentler by the moment.

“My darling,” he murmurs, though there is no real complaint in it. You ignore him. “You are checking on me.”

“Someone has to.”

His teasing fades then, leaving something softer in its place. For a moment he simply watches you, and when he lifts your joined hands and presses a kiss to your knuckles, the gesture is so familiar that it catches you off guard all the same.

“Thank you,” he says quietly.

You look up at him.

The words are not playful nor triumphant, not even particularly clever. Your chest aches unexpectedly, because beneath all the bargaining and persistence and impossible shamelessness, you know what this has really been about.

Weeks of fear. Weeks of recovery. Weeks of being careful. Weeks of wondering whether life would ever feel normal again.

You squeeze his hand, and his fingers tighten around yours at once.

“You do not need to thank me.”

“I do.”

His voice is gentle. “I know I was insufferable.”

You giggle softly. “Do you now?”

Without either of you needing to say anything, Jace opens his arm toward you. You move into it at once, as naturally as breathing, as though you have done it a thousand times before. Because you have. Your head settles against his shoulder, his arm folds around your waist, and the blankets shift around you both as you settle more comfortably together.

Eventually you feel his lips brush lightly against your hair, a sleepy, lingering kiss that makes you smile before you can stop yourself.

“Tired?” you murmur.

“A little.”

“You should sleep.”

“So should you.”

The waves continue their endless song beyond the walls.

somehow i ended up writing a several-thousand-word account of jace velaryon attempting to find loopholes in doctor's orders. i regret nothing <3 lemme know if you guys liked this, trying to decide wether to write more for jace or not.