TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS ─── gwayne hightower
gif creds: @userarmand
summary: you nurse gwayne back to life again when the war leaves him for dead, and he finds himself in no hurry to be rescued from you. (5k)
characters: gwayne hightower / fem!reader
contents: strangers to lovers, hurt/comfort, domestic fluff, mutual pining, canon divergent, not proofread, cw for mentions of blood and injuries, smut 18+ (MDNI): sub!gwayne, unprotected sex, premature ejaculation, face riding (this man has been through enough i just need someone to take care of him okay)
( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )
Gwayne’s heavy eyes open first to a low, timbered ceiling made of clay and dry-rotted oak — certainly not the ornately embellished stone of the Red Keep, which would’ve suggested that Daemon’s army had won in their ambush and had since taken him hostage; but it wasn’t the sagging canvas of a war tent either, which also meant that no green army had yet come to his rescue. This place, wherever this place was, was small and warm and heavy with the scent of a home-cooked meal and the coppery tang of his own blood.
The hurt returns to him as slowly his consciousness does. His body aches in a way that tells him, a bit more clearly than his own memory could, that he had been long in the dying not too long ago. All of his bones feel rusted shut and heavy; each breath feels like gravel in his lungs and blades against his ribs.
“Where am I…?” Gwayne wonders aloud in a near-inaudible rasp, almost lost beneath the crackle of a fire and the soft hiss of a pot simmering somewhere close.
His heavy head lolls on the thin pillow beneath him. The cushion propping up his stiff neck smells like something floral and sweet, like a woman. As his eyes scan the room, he finds that this quaint house, if it could even be referred to as such, is made of only one room — there’s a dining nook crowded in the corner by the window, a cluttered living area in the opposite corner by the hearth, and apparently a sickbed in which he languishes now.
Through the haze still clinging in his vision, he spots a figure dressed in tatters stirring at a pot with practiced hands — sleeves pushed up to the elbows, faded skirts flowing just below the knee. You do not startle at the sound of his voice, nor do you turn to look at him right away as you crush a handful of dried rosemary into the bubbling water before you.
“Starry Hill,” you answer plainly, as though you were talking to an old friend rather than a half-dead ghost in your bed. You turn slowly over your shoulder and watch confusion twist at the man’s handsome features — (he’d studied every keep, holdfast, and port in Westeros his father told him to, and yet he’d never once heard of this one). “And no, you haven’t heard of it before.”
The grin is evident in your voice as you turn away to wipe your palms off on a rag. You catch the man’s glassy blue eyes darting around your home — over the crooked shelf of clay jars, past the mismatched chairs around the ancient dining table, and towards the narrow window where dim orange light falls in slanted rays. He cannot yet tell whether it’s dawn or dusk, and the notion disorients him further.
“Apologies for the mess, my lord,” you sigh. “If I’d known I was going to be housing a Hightower for three days, I might’ve tidied the place up a bit first.”
Gwayne’s auburn brows furrow slowly as his face twists in a deeper confusion — both at the thought of having spent three days unconscious in this place, and at the ease with which you seemed to know his name. His house. His blood. “How… How did you know I was a Hightower?”
Your head turns lazily on your shoulder to flash the man a narrow-eyed, almost pitying sort of look. Your gaze falls across his flaming copper hair, the aristocratic slope of his nose, and the inherited Hightower beauty that not even war, nor three days on his deathbed, could manage to take from him. Even halfway ruined, the man still looks like something bred for portraiture. And it would, perhaps, be so easy to tell him as much.
“Well, you were wearing the sigil all over your armor, to be fair,” you deadpan instead and turn back to your cooking.
Only then does Gwayne realize that the heaviness of his armor is long gone from his frame. All of his clothes, in fact, are gone — the pale canvas of his bare chest is on display now, carved lean from a lifetime in the training yard, and now sporting a square piece of plaster across his ribcage. Beneath the heavy quilt thrown over his legs, he can feel a pair of baggy trousers riding low on his hips that do not belong to him.
Which means you had to have undressed him; bathed him; patched up his marred skin. The thought alone is dizzying.
Panic wraps its hands around his throat as he rises onto his elbows, grimacing at the ache it puts in his side and somewhere deep in his bicep — where a linen cloth has been wrapped tight.
“How did I get here?”
“Your guess is as good as mine…” you huff without looking away from the pot ahead of you. “You’re the one who showed up half-dead on my doorstep, if you’ll recall— So I think I have more questions for you than you have for me, in truth.”
Gwayne’s eyes go glassy and distant as he strains to recollect the events that led him here.
He remembers Ser Criston’s words about a death march, and the sudden screeching of his horse when the first volley of enemy arrows came flying every which way. He vaguely remembers his mare rearing up and tossing him onto his back against the heavy forest floor, and the way the world erupted with the shouting of a hundred men or more all at once. But he does not know what became of any of them now.
“I need to leave,” he announces at once.
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” you wince as you watch the man fling the quilt from his body, visibly toned from years of knighthood but still pale from his lingering brush with death. “Not on that leg of yours— I’m still not sure I set the bone just right.”
Gwayne’s jaw clenches tight as he swings his legs over the side of the bed. His tired muscles pull taut in protest, though it doesn’t hurt him nearly as badly as his left shin does when his bare feet hit the ancient floorboards. A white-hot pain sears from ankle to knee; his chiseled face screws tight as he chokes on a scream.
He doubles over in agony and digs his trembling fists into the thin sheets of the down mattress, struggling to take stock of his injuries.
There’s a plaster just below his knee and a sickly yellow-green bruise blooming just below that, from where the bone came through when the weight of his horse fell on top of him, perhaps. There’s a hot, pulsing feeling beneath the plaster on his right arm — a small but concentrated signature that must’ve come from an arrow. And the length of the shallow scrape along his ribs suggests that it came from a kiss of an enemy blade.
All of it is dressed now in clean linen, from the same kind hands stirring supper across the room from him, entirely unbothered by his suffering.
“Seven fucking hells…” you groan, more to yourself than to him. “I forgot the bloody potatoes.”
Gwayne blinks wildly at your passing figure as you trade the wooden spoon in your hands for the dark, beaten cloak hanging beside the door. “P-Potatoes?” he stammers in response, because he can think of a thousand issues much more pressing than potatoes.
“Yes,” you nod, sliding your arms through the thick woolen sleeves gone soft and shapeless with age. “You can’t have rabbit stew without potatoes. It ruins the whole dish— I’d think you’d know that, as a pretty little lord and all.”
He perks slightly at the mention of it — of food, and of the thought that some other man must surely live here to have killed and skinned the meat for your stew.
“Where is your father?” he calls to your retreating form.
There’s a certain edge of command in his voice that tries to surface past the wavers of pain. He attempts to assert some Hightower authority in the walls of your home, despite being half-dressed and hunched over the edge of your bed and completely at your mercy.
“Or a husband, perhaps? Someone I can speak rationally with.”
“No father… No husband…” you sigh and tie the top of your coat, which is a size or three too big for you. “You can speak rationally to me, if you wish, though I fear your current hysterics might render conversation somewhat impossible… But I require no thanks for saving your life, to be sure.”
Your words carry a certain bite that pierces him straight through the chest; the devastating reminder of a debt he has not yet had any sense to acknowledge.
The door opens with a high-pitched creaking sound; the cool breeze that rushes in tells him that the day is ending rather than just beginning. You pause at the threshold, hand on the frame and hood half-raised
“If you’re going to leave, at least remember to shut the door behind you,” you tell him, detached but not totally unkind. “I don’t want the smell of supper bringing the animals down from the hill.”
The door screeches and clicks behind you, punctuating your leaving. The little house — smaller than his bathing chambers back in Oldtown — goes very quiet and very still with your absence. The eeriness unnerves a distant, boyish part of him that wishes most desperately for your return. The rest of him, however, wants nothing more than to be rid of this place entirely — from the strangeness of it and of you most of all.
Gwayne grits his teeth and hauls himself not-quite to full height. He’s doubled over and bracing his white-knuckled grip on the ancient wooden bedframe as he hobbles the short distance towards the door, fighting through the screaming ache shooting up and down his left leg. He makes it not even five steps before it gives out on him completely.
He crumples to the unforgiving ground in a graceless heap of limbs and injured pride, catching himself on instinct with the arm sporting the throbbing arrow wound going down.
He lies there, groaning and writhing and choking down cries of frustration with his cheek pressed to the cold floor. The sound of his ragged breaths fills the small, empty house as he watches the sunset dip low past the window, quietly waiting for the sound of the door to open — and for your presence to follow.
It opens at last; three minutes or three hours later. A silken breeze rushes in alongside you, as you enter with a basket of potatoes and other vegetables on your hip. You falter in the doorway at the sight of the man sprawled out on your floor, a crumpled puppet with all of its strings cut clean.
A strange, satisfied smile creeps across your face as you swipe your hood back with your free hand. “Well…” you croon lowly. “What do we have here?”
Gwayne lifts his heavy head. He looks up at you with watery blue eyes through the strands of wild auburn hair hanging over his brow. He loses every ounce of his composure in that moment, turning into a doe-eyed and pleading thing as his wet gaze peers at you from beneath his lashes.
“Please…” he rasps. “Help me…”
He doesn’t learn your name until the second day. He does not stand on his own until the fifth. And he does not bathe himself unaided until the seventh.
You do not coddle him for any of it. You clean his wounds and change his bandages twice daily, and scold him for flinching at the sting — telling him that he’d spent too many years being pampered by wetnurses and that was precisely why he healed so slowly. But, after that first week, he learned to walk the length of your small home without his leg buckling underneath him; though he still requires the cane you’d fashioned for him out of a stag’s antler if he plans on taking more than a step or two.
“Here. So you can stop looking like a newborn calf every time you cross the room,” you’d said when you gifted it to him. “It’s starting to get hard to watch, if I’m honest.”
He is, if he’s being entirely truthful with himself, entirely unused to being spoken to this way. The ladies of his acquaintance back in Oldtown — the soft, sweet-voiced daughters of high lords and ladies — would never have dared to call him hysterical to his face or handle his wounds with such unromantic efficiency. They never would have laughed, as you had, at the sight of him crumpled on the floor.
You’re nothing at all like the ladies he grew up with.
You swear like a dockhand; you name your goats like they're your kin; you wear your dead parents' old clothes without a trace of shame and speak of your own life with a bluntness that would scandalize every septa he'd grown up with. It should, perhaps, trouble him a great deal more than it does.
Gwayne knows he could’ve and likely should’ve left days ago. He suspects that you know it, too. Tumbleton was not far from here, you told him, and his kin held the fortress now — a real castle with a real maester to tend to him — rather than this strange, sharp-tongued woman with rough hands and a rougher sense of humor. But still, he does not go. He tells himself that it’s his leg; that the roads were surely not safe yet and that he’d be long in the dying should he cross Daemon’s army a second time.
So he stays, and he makes himself useful to you in the waiting, in whatever small ways he can manage. He could not do much, at first — he could not chop firewood or carry water; he could barely carry himself, in truth — but he could mend a fence while seated, and feed the farm animals while leaning on his cane, and shell the peas you bring in from the garden for supper.
Gwayne quickly discovers, to his own mortification, that he takes a strange satisfaction in it all. This was not a life meant for knights, certainly not one meant for a Hightower, but yet he can picture all the rest of his days playing out exactly like this — utterly unremarkable, but his just the same.
It has been three weeks since his arrival, give or take, and his days feel less like exile now and more like routine. He sits propped on the pillows after his bath, milky-white skin glimmering from your homemade oils, with nothing but a pair of borrowed trousers covering his lower half.
You sit on the edge of the bed beside him and redress the stubborn wound on his arm that refuses to heal — the worst of his injuries he came here with, Gwayne insists; a nerve-deep pain that he swears he can feel when he’s dreaming. But even still, weeks into the habit of tending to him, you are no gentler about it than you were that very first night.
“Ow—” Gwayne winces when you press too firmly against the wound. You catch his elbow before he can draw it away and urge it back into place with an unsentimental force.
“Stop squirming,” you scold and continue to dab the homemade, herb-flecked ointment onto the irritated skin.
“It hurts,” the man insists.
“It hurts because you’re squirming.”
Gwayne attempts to glare at you as you reach for the linen cloth on the table beside you. The playful frown softens with a soft smile despite himself. “Has anyone ever told you that your bedside manner is just extraordinary?”
“All the time…” you lilt back and slide the fabric around his arm, tying it off with one particularly harsh tug. “Usually right before they tell me that they're feeling much better and no longer require any of my help.”
“Well…” Gwayne croons, pale eyes glittering in the dancing candlelight. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you wanted me gone…”
You glance finally up at him from beneath your lashes, at the handsome knight sharing your house — with bright copper hair gone soft from his bath, and bright blue eyes a little too earnest for someone meant to be teasing — the kind of man that belonged in the fairytales you’d read as a child; not in your own home in your own bed.
Something in your sharp expression finally gives, like The Wall finally weeping after the first warm day of summer.
“You’re the prettiest thing I’ve seen in years, Ser Gwayne,” you hum lowly. “So if you haven’t realized by now that I’m keeping you hostage here, then I fear you haven’t been paying attention.”
A breathy laugh shakes his toned stomach, and the scar along his ribs no longer pulls to do so. He’s fairly certain that you’re jesting, but even still, he doesn’t think he’d care all that much if you weren’t.
“I find that…” he trails slowly off with a squinted look in his pale eyes, as if the realization were hitting him the moment the words fell from his mouth. His melodic voice carries a sort of airiness in it despite the soft confession. “That perhaps I wouldn’t mind it. Being your hostage… Staying here. With you… I don't think I'd mind that at all…”
“Well… That’s a very dangerous thing to say to a woman with nothing to lose, Ser Gwayne,” you murmur, propping your fists on either side of his waist as you lean in close to him — until he can smell the lavender soap on your skin and count the flecks of firelight in your gaze. “Your army has surely presumed you dead by now… No one will come looking for you here… So if you do not wish to be kept by me, the door is still open…”
Something in his chest flares hot at your words, at the thought of being kept by you.
“For how long?” he teases with an arched auburn brow, pink lips curling into a slow smile.
Your eyes flit away and back again. “…Roughly the next ten seconds.”
“Well…” he lilts as his hand lifts slowly from the blankets to cradle your jaw, urging you that much closer. “That seems like plenty of time.”
He leans off the pillow to press his mouth to yours. His nose smushes into the side of yours as his plush lips slot with your softer ones. Your tongue darts between them with little warning and a degree too eager, swiping against his like velvet on velvet. Gwayne exhales a heavy sigh through his nose at the taste of you — like supper and wine and something foreign that he chases with each languid kiss.
You kiss him long and slow, like biting into the sweet skin of an apple, and shift on the mattress to straddle his waist. Gwayne’s free hand shoves the quilt down his thighs to accommodate you upon them. Your fingers rest around his neck like a collar as you grind your hips over his, up his lap and down again. A groan rumbles like thunder in his throat.
His hands dart instantly for your waist, knotting his long fingers in the skirts pushed up to your thighs, as he pulls off of you with a quiet smack. “Don’t,” he hears himself plead.
“Why?” you pant, blinking back at him with heavy eyes.
“It’s been…” His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “A long… long time.”
Your lips curl into a grin before your head ducks down again. Your mouth smears along his pulse in a sloppy kiss. “Three weeks isn’t so long, is it?”
A laugh sounds in his throat. You feel it rumbling against your mouth. “The war’s been going on for a lot longer than three weeks, my dear…”
“Don’t tell me Ser Gwayne hasn’t taken his fair share of whores on the road,” you quip against the milky white tendon of his neck.
He smiles with his nose in your hair. “Not many whores on the battlefield, I’m afraid…”
“Oh, you poor thing…” you croon as you pull slowly back from him, more gentle with him now than you were when he was half dead on your porch; though there’s still a playful air about you that he doesn’t yet miss. “No wonder you’ve been so uptight… You’ve just been looking for a little… release, haven’t you? Spit—”
Gwayne’s eyes widen as they flick between your expectant face and the hand you hold under his chin. Despite his obvious diffidence, he ducks his head and spits a glob of saliva onto your palm — and watches with held breath as your fingers dip under the hem of his trousers. They wrap around his cock, laying half-soft on his thigh, and use his spit to work him the rest of the way hard. He feels like heavy velvet in your fist.
His dizzy head tips back against the wall with a quiet thud. Your quiet giggling melts with his pleasured groan as he hardens slowly in your fist.
“I’ll bet you’ll cum the second I tell you to,” you laugh.
Gwayne nods slowly, adam’s apple moving in his long throat as he fights to keep his lidded eyes open. His breath catches in his chest when your thumb swipes over the sensitive tip of his cock.
“I’ll bet you’ll do anything I tell you to… Won’t you?”
Gwayne nods again, jerking in your fist at your words.
“Oh…” you huff a mixture of a contented sigh and a devilish laugh as you squeeze him harder in your fist. “I am going to have… so much fun with you, Ser Gwayne…”
He has little time to ponder the weight of your words when you shift on top of him again. You pull your fingers from his trousers and tuck the hem beneath his heavy balls. His eyes snap open to find you urging your dress skirts further up your thighs. He’s left mourning the warmth of your touch only for a moment, before your hand slides between your bodies once more to guide the drooling tip of his cock into your already weeping confines.
He’s long and slender — not nearly as thick as the butcher’s son in town who’s been tending to your needs for years, but an inch or three longer still — and made of meandering veins you can feel when you pierce yourself upon him. Your head tips back to exhale a moan at the ceiling, mouth curling into a lazy smile as you adjust to the length of him.
Gwayne chokes on a groan in his throat when your hips sit flush with his again, fingers clutching mercilessly at the plush of your thighs hard enough to etch bruises on the skin. The sound turns into a strangled whimper when you clench absentmindedly around him, warmer than velvet and drooling something fierce.
“I can’t…” the man whines, chiseled features twisting into a pained sort of look as he shifts his hips under your weight — trying to chase his pleasure and run away from it all at once. “I— I can’t— Seven fucking hells…”
You smile down at him when he tries and fails to get the words out. He misses the amusement flashing across your face with his eyes squeezed shut, hard enough to make white stars speckle behind the deep black of his eyelids. You clench around him again, just to hear him whimper for you again.
“Can’t what, my lord?” you coo to him, with a gentleness he didn’t think you were capable of before now. Your hands smooth up and around his neck until your fingers twist in the short auburn tendrils at the very nape of it. Chills erupt down the length of his spine in their wake.
“I don’t wanna cum yet,” he protests through gritted teeth. “’S too soon—”
“But I want you to cum,” you tell him, and punctuate your command with a calculated roll of your hips. You tighten around him once more when your clit brushes the coarse, dark-auburn hair above his cock. You swallow his subsequent groan in a sloppy kiss, more tongue than mouth, and run the tip of your nose along the bridge of his after. “And then… after I’ve milked your cock—”
“Fuck…” he swears, though it comes out more like a sob.
“—I’ll let you clean me up with your mouth,” you continue.
A moan tears through his throat at the thought — of pressing his mouth to your cunt until his nose is smushed against your clit, of lapping at the mixture of pleasure leaking out of you like honey, of your hands in his hair pushing him further into your pussy. He bursts at the thought, losing himself completely as he draws you into his bare chest with two strong arms wound up and around your back.
Gwayne hides his flushed face in your neck as he hugs you against him, meeting your thrusts with weaker ones of his own. He buries each of his pitiful moans into your pulsepoint while his cock jerks wildly within your unforgiving confines— spitting ropes of warm cum that your clenching cunt milks from him.
“I’m sorry,” he hears himself say as he shudders just against you. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… Seven hells— I’m sorry…”
You pet at his wild hair as he comes down from his high, whispering murmurs of praise in his ear as the pleasure ebbs from his trembling body. “There you go… Good boy… That’s it— Give me all of it…”
Gwayne pulls his face from your neck once he’s fully spent. His trembling hands reach for your face again, cupping your cheeks between his calloused palms to meet your eyes with his wide, wet, and pleading ones. “I’m sorry,” he whispers again. “Let me make you feel good— I want to make you feel good.”
“I know,” you coo to him, almost sympathetically so. “On your back.”
Gwayne’s auburn brows knit softly together, but his body obeys like it was designed to submit to you. You remain straddled against him as he descends back onto the pillows. He watches down the bridge of his nose as your hands smooth up his milky white torso — past the fine trail of hair on his lean stomach, over the healed scar on his ribs, and towards his heaving chest.
Your eyes stay locked with his heavy ones as you shift your weight above him, inching up up up. You cage your bottom lip between your teeth as you reach for the hem of your skirt. You drag the heavy fabric of your dress up and over your head. Gwayne has little time to admire your bare body before you’re straddling your knees on either side of his face. His mouth waters instantly at the sight of your glittering pussy as it descends over his mouth — he curls his arms around your thighs to pull you further in.
He groans when the taste of you hits his tongue — a sweet-salty mixture of your combined pleasures — and you feel the vibrations of the sound from your cunt to the top of your spine. You keep one hand braced on the wooden headboard and your other woven through his silken auburn locks, guiding his mouth along your cunt.
“Yes…” you sigh when his mouth meets your clit. “Right there…”
Gwayne moans again at your praise and does everything in his power to make you give it to him again. He focuses on the bundle of nerves — lapping his tongue against it and suckling it between his lips. You make a noise for him he’s never heard before, a high-pitched cry that swells across the quiet room. “Keep going,” he hears you whimper when his mouth wraps around your clit. “Fuck yes, keep going like that—”
Your fingers twist hard in his hair as your hips grind down over his tongue. He moans when you give the strands an especially harsh tongue, and the sound makes you tremble on top of him. You cum for him with a strangled cry, and Gwayne sighs through his nose when a mixture of his cum and yours drops onto the velvety pad of his tongue.
He laps at every ounce of it with an eagerness that you can hear, a chorus of panted breaths and muffled suckling sounds.
He doesn’t stop until you’re shoving him away by the crown of his head.
You exhale a heavy breath and sit back on your haunches, resting your ass over his chest and propping your weight along his ribs. Your heavy eyes rake over his face — cheeks flushed red, pale eyes glassy with desire, pink lips swollen, chin glittering with your cum, hair wild from the pillow and your fingers alike. An angel carved from in.
A lazy smile tugs at the corners of your mouth as you shake your heavy head down at him. “You’re not going anywhere, Ser Gwayne… You understand that, right?”
“Gwayne,” he corrects, glittering lips curling upward. “Not ser.”
“You’re not going anywhere… Gwayne.”
“I’m glad to hear it, in truth…” he confesses on an exhaled breath. “I was starting to like it here anyway…”
