the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
💋it was rare, but whenever Adrian could give up two days of patrol, he would agree to go out with you.
💋 Adrian sits so patiently while you get ready, keeping conversation with himself. You swear he holds his breath at the same moments you do - eyeliner, mascara, anything to avoid messing up and starting over
💋of course when you do your makeup, he has to tell you how much you don’t need it. That you were sooooo sexy hot the other day and you didn’t even have makeup on! But he is still obsessed when you do a full face. Everytime the two of you talk you watch his eyes get caught in your painted lips. Your addition of body glitter is even more distracting for him.
💋at the bar, Adrian does whatever you want, as long as he can face the door. Can’t risk anything right? Between sips of beer he tells you how amazing you look in your little ‘going out’ fit and how excited he is to go home - with a wink of course.
💋after a few drinks, both of you are pretty much ready to go. Before you leave Adrian always has to go to the bathroom first. So you just wait by the door for him and stare at your phone. You weren’t really aware of the swarm of guys coming closer until one was on the verge of popping your personal bubble. His shirt is off, his muscled chest is flushed with pink, and he looks barely 21. You can feel your face twisting with discomfort as his mouth opens. “My friends wanted me to tell you-“ “it’s ok, you don’t need to tell me anything!” The young man looks confused and tries to recover. As he takes a step closer you put up your hands and say, “you don’t need to be near me either” right as the words come from your mouth you notice Adrian behind the group, watching from afar. You rush to him and take in his face. His jaw is clenched and seems to be trying to figure out a reason to kill any rando who approaches you. “Deep breath Ade, I didn’t even let him get 5 words out,” resting your hands on his chest, you try to get eye contact from him.
🧜♂️the only part of having a hot girlfriend that Adrian doesn’t like, is killing all the guys who hit on her. He could be gone for a SECOND and they swarm in like she’s prey. Curse his weak bladder, the three minutes it takes for him to piss is always the perfect amount of time for some douchebag to creep on her. Standing at the urninal, pants all the way down, Adrian has the angriest pee imaginable. When he’s done he washes his hands real quick and almost jogs to get back to you. And surprise, surprise, a posse of clowns are almost surrounding you, one almost touching you. His hands twitch for a weapon, but you don’t even let him bring anything when you go out. As he’s creating beautiful torture scenarios for every set of eyes taking in your curves, he watches as your face turns thunderous and you meanly shoo the boy away. Finally you catch him in the crowd and turn towards him. That’s his girl.
💋 Adrian is always such a gentleman by leading you around with his arm and helping you get into the car. You don’t need any help but it’s nice. He opens your door and when he buckles you in, he takes the opportunity to get a big hug. “You looked so good tonight, baby” he whispers in your ear. You can feel your face heat up and smile at him. He keeps going, “I want to say if you’re going to look this good we should stay home so I don’t have to kill anyone. Your butt is too sexy in this baby, it drives me and every other man crazy. Like you’re wearing a big ole sign that says ‘hit on me’” your eyebrows raise at that, “Adrian I try my best but I can’t help that they try to talk to me!!” He leans back and gives a big huff, “well I don’t see a sign that says ‘don’t hit on me’. “ and you explode with laughter.
💋at home, Adrian scrolls Facebook market place for beanie babies while you get ready for bed. Once your makeup is off and you’re changed into a nightgown, you join him on the couch. It’s easy to snuggle up into his side. Adrian’s arm instantly opens up and wraps around you, squeezing you close. A little drunk, all you manage to do is fall into his chest and sleepily watch his screen.
🧜♂️Adrian can’t help but get jealous when other men hit on you. He knows he’s older than you, dangerous, and you’re totally out of his league. All he can think about as he pulls you in for a kiss is how easily guys surround you like sharks in the water. You’re the tastiest piece of bait imaginable. The more he kisses you, the images in his mind fade and all he can think about is you. Slowly he ditches his laptop and crawls on top of you. His fingers find the hem of your night gown and pull it up high enough to find out that there’s no panties on underneath it. A helpless groan leaves his mouth as he looks down at you. “You’re mean, you’re mine, and you give me a perma-boner just like an alligator.” Then your sexy man pushes his glasses up before peppering your skin with kisses. He can taste the beer in your sweat, his kisses leaving goosebumps on your feverish skin. Adrian loves that your body is so extra reactive when you’re drunk - it’s impossible for you to hide anything. It only takes a couple kisses for your nipples to harden and Adrian takes care of them instantly. His rough hands palm and massage in tandem with his mouth. He only falters when you wrap your legs around his waist and grind into him. Warm wetness presses into his pants and nearly wraps around his cock, Adrian feels like he’s going to explode. He has to pull back and untangle you from him. Standing above you, he gazes at your body, glistening with a thin sheen of sweat, and glides from your tired face, to your chest - covered in small bites, same as your hips, and finally settles his eyes on your pussy. Breathing heavy and completely single minded, a hand trails down your stomach until it reaches your folds, sampling your slick and driving a soft moan from your mouth. As he plays with your pussy he can’t help but think about the guy from before. His fingers get a little rougher, from a swirling finger to a thumb on your clit with two curling inside you. Underneath him, you become a moaning mess and he can’t help but love that only he’s allowed to do this.
My biker Adrian headcannons (lowkey a mess but work w me)
💋his motorcycle helmet def has a red visor
💋 it takes a while but you start to notice the same guy everywhere - he’s driving around when you get off work. He gets caught at the same red lights as you. You watch him speed past whenever you take an exit or park somewhere.
💋Adrian is uuuuuber confident in any mask - whether he’s on patrol or not, he’s totally waving as he sees you, doing finger hearts, grabbing your side mirror when he speeds along side you on the highway
💋biker Adrian parking behind you and fucking you in your carrrrrrrrr (wait I’m on to something)
💋finally interacting with biker Adrian after months of harmless flirting… he catches you at a light, windows down, enjoying your music. When you notice him, he does a little shimmy - mimicking you. It’s funny and when the light turns green you drive carefully, hoping to get caught alongside him again. At the next light, he pulls up close as he stops. A gloved hand simply just holds a phone in your face with a silent invitation. So now he has your number
💋 biker Adrian following you around and getting jealous about who you’re meeting. Leaving your sneaky links house and finding him blocking your car. Biker parked, leaning against it, waiting for you to leave and find him there.
💋Biker Adrian taking you for a ride - he’s cutting up lanes, speeding so fast you can barely breathe. Eventually you make it to his spot and he encourages you to get off and stretch your legs. He really means that he found a secluded spot off the nearest exit to bend you over his bike and take you from behind.
Summary: Tom wakes you up in the middle of the night to "talk about your paper" ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆
Tags: nipple play, munch tom, magic theory I made up, gf stealer tom, Legilimency, parseltongue lisp, bondage, probably voyerism,
Word count: 4.7k
a/n: posting this so im motivated to finish pt 2 !!
We weren’t betrothed but it didn't make our relationship any less real.
After months of being potions partners, murmuring encouragement and advice to each other, Malfoy finally took the next step. When Abraxas Malfoy greeted you in the great hall with a bouquet of roses, you were completely bewitched. Now, he guides you by the arm classroom to classroom. The perfect gentleman. His courtesy, confidence, and respectfulness was always extended to you. Even if his parents didn't approve of you as a final match, they still welcomed you to the manor and treated you befitting to a Malfoy heiress.
Snuggled up in your emerald green silken nightgown, you studied Abraxas’ profile. As he lays on his back and unleashes his burdens to you, the candle light highlights his blonde eyelashes and pointed nose. Hoping to soothe his worries, you drape yourself across his chest, you trace the embroidered ABM on the pocket of his matching pjs.
“Dont lose sleep over the future, Brax.” You reach for his pale fingers and grasp them. “Everything will work out for us!” With a sleepy smile, you try to coax him from his anxiety and go to bed.
“I know, darling, but with the ministry-”
You never meant to, but you snapped back at him. “The ministry doesn’t matter! Are we graduated? Do you suddenly need employment? Please, Brax, it’s late!”
“Sorry darling, you’re right. Let’s just go to sleep.” Abraxas sighs, obviously miffed that you cut off his nightly rant. Silky yet strong arms wrap around you as you get situated. He turns so that you may spoon, his left arm under your pillow while the other tucks under your chest and pulls you tightly against him. Abraxas buries his face into the crook of your neck and takes a deep breath.
“Father is pushing me too hard. A perfect heir would bend and strengthen under the weight.” His grip tightens. “I can’t let it break me…” When his voice cracks, so does your heart. Grabbing his right hand from your chest, you bring it to your lips.
Kissing his thumb you whisper, “You are strong!”
Another on his knuckle, “Worthy.”
“You shall bring your family a most promising future, my love.” And you kiss the center of his palm before settling it on your heart. Abraxas’ body relaxes just a tad.
“Goodnight my love.” Within minutes, he's fast asleep. Listening to Abraxas night after night, when he shares his frustrations and fears with you, is frankly, heartbreaking. At least, you have to pretend it is.
Behind you, Abraxas is asleep and unaware. As you lay awake, like most nights, you ruminate about your relationship. How being connected to him opened so much of the world to you. Yes, you were pureblooded, just as he was, but not of the sacred 28. Your blood had bought you status, not riches. But on the arm of Abraxas Malfoy, you had both. People actually acknowledged you as more than chattel, not another pureblooded princess, ready to breed. It may have been cruel to use him… Actually you knew it was. But the way people were forced to listen to you! Even as a date to the Slug Club Christmas party, you got a chance to make connections. A chance to show off that you were a witch with a brain. The conversation you had with the Head Archivist of the Library of Alexandria was mind opening!
More than proud to be the second in your class, you took life very seriously. There was no way you could settle for the future society believed you to be on track for. Thinking of the marriage mart, birthing heirs, and being a doting mother put a shiver down your spine. It wasn’t for you.
Merlin, sometimes you could only hopelessly wonder why you weren’t a man. It was so unfair that they automatically were accepted, promoted, and respected. Like always, you can’t help it as you roll your eyes at the thought that Tom Riddle is top of the class thanks to his dick and balls. He didn’t have to parade around in dead-end relationships to get people to even look at him. He was also insufferable.
One of the main reasons you loved being potions partners with Malfoy so much was because it prevented the routine pairing of you and Tom. Being the top two students in the class, the most vocal in class, and often debating with each other and baffling professors - you always got paired up. Beery clearly tried to push you and Tom together. Slughorn, Merlin, he was a force. Slughorn probably thought that you and Tom would create the next generation of genius wizard babies, and wasn’t very subtle about it. So, yes, having to explain every potion to Malfoy like he was 5 was a small price to pay.
While on the subject, your brain couldn’t resist bringing up the years of being desk buddies with Tom Riddle. How at twelve, you thought he was so smart and so charming. When you were first years the two of you talked about everything - magic, spells from the library, stories, gossip. Well, actually he was more of a good listener.
And he was so handsome. Honestly, the most annoying thing about Tom is that he refused to date anyone, so you got stuck with Malfoy. Merlin, what an obtuse prick he was. Tom was such a more powerful wizard than Malfoy. Better in every way.
Wait, what? You shake your head in confusion. Squeezing your eyes tight and exhaling, you wiggle a little before sinking back into Abraxas’ chest. He hums in his sleep and buries his face in your hair. He talks a lot, but you cannot deny how cute he is. Deciding to try to turn your brain off and go to sleep, you think about your usual bedtime thoughts.
Mentally, you peruse Hogwart’s library, reading titles as you walk down the aisle. History of Ancient Magick catches your eye. Grabbing it, you continue until you find Dead but not forgotten: A Wizard’s Guide to Obsolete Magick. You always managed to work out your papers before you fell asleep, it was calming, categorizing and organizing information into paragraphs. Professor Binns was horribly boring, but that didn’t dampen your love for History. As he droned on in the background, you read and annotated the textbook. You found that the curriculums were oddly similar - as each was only a brief overview of history chopped into 7 sections. The only difference being the level of analysis and allowance of “darker” themes.
Anyways, your fingers close around a particular scroll named Unseen and Unheard: How Ancient Wizards Utilized Silent Magick. Tucking it away into your elbow, you turn on your heel and head for the study tables in the back of the library. Picking your table by the window, you sit down and crack open the first book you grabbed. Before you read it, you check the card, a habit of wanting to know who had checked the book out before you. The first name is dated from 1866 and the last was Tom M. Riddle, 1944. Even mentally, you can’t help but groan and roll your eyes. He’d probably read every book in the entire library by now. Of course Tom had gotten his hands on this one. His big hands. Those fingers of his, the way they were always covered in ink, like he was too impatient to let it dry before tracing back over his words. How the only color on his skin was a fine spattering of freckles, giving him the most elegant and perfect complexion. Oh, and how those freckles landed so perfectly on his face, drawing attention to his mouth and cheekbones.
The sound of Malfoy’s curtain opening makes you jerk awake. It’s been pulled back maybe a foot and Tom is standing there, peering down at you.
“What did you do for your conclusion on Binn’s paper?” He whispers down at you.
“What?”
“About the analysis of the adaptation of magick.” You try to get your eyes open and stare at Tom confused.
Tom rolls his eyes and tries again, “Get up, tell me what sources you’re using.” He extends his hand to you. Feeling a bit more awake, you try to get up, but remember that Abraxas is still lovingly wrapped around you. Tom stands by and watches as you try to remove Abraxas’ arm, but he holds you tighter. Forcing you to kind of pry him off of you…
Finally free of his loving grip, you grab Tom’s hand and slip out of bed. The dorm is dark and all the curtains are shut tight besides Abraxas’ and Tom’s. Impatiently, you are pulled across the gap into Tom’s bed.
At first, you just sit against the headboard, mirroring Tom. But, after he reaches around you and ensures his curtains are shut, he readjusts until he is simply laying on his side and facing you. He’s comfortably under his covers, only his upper half is visible. You sit there confused, looking at Tom, in his small white undershirt, seemingly tucked into bed, with one arm bent and propping his head up, the other resting on top of the blanket.
“Your paper…?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Yeah, right.” Accepting that you are awake, you answer him. “I’m looking into the research about the connection of accidental magic with silent magic. Did you know it is just as likely to complete a task you do habitually with accidental magic as it is with silent? Like, the only difference is that its almost completely opposite amounts of effort. Silent requires so much effort, years of practice and a lot of self-discipline. But accidental is primal, it will save you, it can give you what you really need. Let’s say it’s 15,000 years ago and you’re cold. No one waved a wand and said, ‘Inscendio!’” You paused for a deep breath and realized how much you’ve been talking with your hands. Tom follows your gaze and catches your train of thought. A low laugh rumbles from his chest as he just examines you.
“You know it isn’t due ‘til May?”
“So what? You say that as if your’s isn’t finished!” you shoot back. Tom considers this.
“True. I guess I just forgot that you never shut up about History.” You can see the mischievous glint in his eye.
Poking him in the chest, you knowingly ask, “Like you don’t do the same about DADA?”
Tom stares at you and gently grabs your prodding finger. “So, what?” The glint is gone and you are surprised at the shift in his tone. You’re used to him trying to agitate you, push you into some debate. This is almost daring? As you pull your hand back, Tom doesn’t let go. His hand follows yours back to your hip and rests there. Just as gently as before, his hand moves to your hip then squeezes.
“I think Binn’s is going to give you a recommendation when we graduate. I heard Slughorn talking about it.” Tom reveals. This news is crazy - Professor Binns was known for never writing professional recommendations. Even if his curriculum was lazy, he still was well renowned for simply teaching everyone for the last 200 years. A good word from him was extremely rare, but valuable.
In your excitement, you leaned towards Tom and got more comfortable. Accidentally mirroring him again, you also failed to notice how his hand shifted to your knee as you got talking.
“If he does that I can work in any fucking archive I want!” Disbelief painted your face. “You know when I asked Slughorn if he would do it at my career counseling last year, he said it was impossible.”
“Something must have swayed him.” Tom smiled and drank in your expression, just as much as he enjoyed sliding his hand up your thigh.
“Yeah,” you softly respond. A soothing silence washes over the two of you. Somehow, it isn’t awkward as you watch Tom just as intensely as he watches you. Remembering before, your eyes catch on the freckle under his left eye, then automatically dart to his mouth, where another freckle sits just to the right of his bottom lip… His angular face becomes amused while you take him in. The hand on your hip pulls a little, inviting you to come closer to him. So you scoot, grabbing his arm to help pull yourself along. Under the thin material of his sleep shirt, Tom’s arms are lithe and smooth.
Inches apart, no one says anything as hands slowly explore. Typically, you were elbow to elbow at your desks, or elbow to ribs when he was annoying. But now there’s no need for the intellectual contest, both of you are learning in silence. Tom’s left hand trails up your side until he is able to caress your face. And again, when he gently pulls, you move towards him. His chocolate brown eyes are pouring into yours. When your noses touch, he tilts his head just slightly to the right and closes in to brush his lips against yours. Suspended in the moment, you intimately examine Tom’s irises. How they’re ringed in black, with tiny golden ridges. Long black eyelashes that are to die for frame them perfectly, and his eyebrows are perfect, just like his whole face, and I bet even his-
You flinch, feeling a little dizzy. A small headache throbs behind your ear and you catch a small smirk on Tom’s face. He rubs his thumb across your cheekbone assuringly before pulling you in for a real kiss. Melding your lips together, a sigh escapes when you feel something deeper. As he goes from kissing you tenderly to insistantly running his tongue along the seam of your lips, you respond in earnest. When your tongues touch, you open your eyes and find Tom admiring you. He takes your shock and doubles it, sucking on your lip and biting it. A small sound leaves you and he swallows it, keen on making it happen again. In between heavy kisses, he peppers your lips with pecks.
Feeling weakened, you let him cradle your head in his hand and lean further into his flurry of affection. You push your tongue into his mouth until your teeth click. Tom clutches your cheek and kisses you feverishly. All you can perceive is the cycle of swollen tips, his tongue, and teeth against yours. When you pause and take a breath, the fog breaks and you consider each other.
Now, Tom’s eyes are darker, the brown encroached by his pupils. “Kiss me more,” he orders. His hand pulls your lips back to him and his arm tucks around you. It’s easy to melt into his embrace, letting him lead you. His heated kisses make you go limp in his arms, overwhelmed by the touch. Giving you a breather, Tom draws back and plants kisses down your throat. They’re hard and Tom sucks just enough to where you know your skin is marked. Arching your back and pressing into him, you turn into his kisses, begging him to go harder and harder. Once Tom’s lips have reached the spot between your neck and shoulder, he bites down. While you are gasping and shuddering under him, he tugs the collar of your nightgown aside, and continues to your chest.
It doesn’t take much for you to snatch Tom’s hand from your collar and guide it to your breast, encouraging him to massage at his will. He takes the cue instantly. His large hands are able to cup your entire breast, pushing it up so he may leave wet kisses at your cleavage. Your other hand sinks into his curly brown hair, grasping it while holding him closer and closer. Tom briefly releases you, only to push at your shoulder so you can lie on your back. He moves with you, shifting so his leg is draped over yours and he is on top of you. One of his hands is massaging your breast and the other is rubbing your nipple all while Tom dutifully worships you. Through the silk, his touch is cloying, almost giving you a buzz. You ache for more.
All you have to do is grab his wrist and whine and Tom stretches the collar of your nightgown and pulls your breasts out. Before gravity can settle them, he presses his thumbs over your nipples and brings them together. Flicking back and forth, as if your nipples were light switches and he wanted you on, he collapses into your bosom. Soon, his lips are replacing a hand and instead of the increasingly rough flicking, his tongue is now swirling around your nipple. Sometimes he breaks away with a pop, his swollen lips no longer holding suction to your breast.
You squirm under his ministrations, smother him in your chest, and try not to moan so loud.
“Merlin, Morgana, and fucking Mordred!” you try to pull Tom back by his hair but he refuses to unlatch. Trying again, you yank him back, and Tom looks at you dumbly. His lips are red, swollen, his face is smeared with his own spit. When you don’t say anything, his eyes drop back to your breasts and he bites his lip. Seeing as he’s gone stupid, you grab him by the hair again and bring him in for a fierce kiss. You force your tongue into his mouth and swirl around him, until he awakes from his daze and returns your effort. He pushes back into your mouth and you suck on his tongue, drawing a groan from him. This encourages you, sucking a little more before biting his lip and finally pulling back.
Tom’s eyes are not only nearly black, but heavily lidded. Tom Riddle would never slur his words but it was very close when he whispered, “I want you to list the knights of the round table next.” Then he dove back down to your breasts and pressed a knee in between your legs. This time, when he sucked and bit and you rolled your hips, there was friction. A strangled cry left your lips and Tom rocked his knee into you, making it harder to keep quiet. His mouth was marking your skin with prayers, eternally grateful to pay homage to you. The sweep of his tongue combined with grinding on his knee made you see stars. Feeling your body tensely arch into Tom, your deep breaths bury his face into your chest. Mean fingers clench your nipples, the pain pushing your head back in ecstasy. His knee follows the pace of your shudder until it stops and he is just softly kissing you everywhere.
“You never listed them,” he reminded you. Your already weak body sunk deeper into his arms as you sighed with dismay.
Turning away from him, “Don’t make me think, Tom.” The knee pressed against your center twitched, making you whimper.
“If you’re going to make a mess on my pants, at least do what I say.” You feel his nose dig into your cheek, but still ignore him. Tom continues to rock his knee against your center and you jump, not being able to hide your reaction.
One of his hands turns your face until you are cheek to cheek and he can whisper in your ear, “Just lissten.” A shudder runs down your spine but you still resist.
His irritation is palpable.
“You know it, slut, list them for me.” Your head whips towards him at the insult.
“Excuse me?”
He leaves small kisses on your cheek, all the way to your ear, and whispers, “The knights of the round table my love, lissst them.” The tingle of his breath on the shell of your ear makes you flush. With a stuttered breath, you do as he says.
“Sir Lancelot.” He rewards you with a kiss under your ear.
“Sir Galahad.” His teeth run across your collar bone and you take a sharp breath.
“Sir Percival.” With his open mouth, Tom sucks the swell of your breast until it hurts.
“Sir Bedivere,” you whimper and he blows cool air on the bruise.
“Sir Kay.” Swollen lips engulf your puffy nipple and suck.
“Sir-” a moan breaks your recitation and when you halt, Tom tenses. He appears back in your face and gets close. Sweaty foreheads collide and you study each other. His hair is a right mess, his cheeks are so wonderfully pink, and his skin is shining with sweat. You want to keep thinking about how beautiful he is but he interrupts you, rather bossily.
“Say it again.” he orders.
Confused, you start again. “Sir-” his mouth muffles the rest. It takes a second for you to realize what he means. You can’t help the small laugh.
“Well then, sir, shall I continue?” you inquire, smiling cheekily. Tom graces you with a smile and kisses your cheek. Then he scoots back down to continue where you had left off.
It’s hard to talk with his mouth back on your nipple, but you manage. “Sir Tristan.”
“Sir Bors.” Tom gives you a chase kiss on your stomach.
“Sir Gareth,” comes out as a gasp because Tom is kissing in a sinful line from your hip to the soft curls between your legs.
He stares up at you and says, “Good job, now thank me.” And with him looking so angelic with his mouth so close that his breath is sending a chill over your center, you do. Tom doesn’t react the way you want though. He draws back and bites your inner thigh. When his eyes pan back to yours, they’re irritated and you recognize where you went wrong.
“Thank you, sir” you purr. Tom’s arms wrap around your thighs until his hands are splayed across your hips. His nose bumps into your pussy and you can feel his body inflate as he breathes in. When he breathes out, he dives in.
Tom moans when he tastes you. He teases your slit before pushing past your lips and finding your clit. He laps at it eagerly and you have to grab his hair in your desperation to get him to slow down. Dark eyes zero in on yours and watch as you melt in his mouth. The eye contact only breaks when he slides his face down into your cunt. Using his tongue to penetrate and his nose to nudge against your clit, Tom goes to town. His hands grasp your hips as they buck and try to redirect them so he can get deeper.
If you had a single sane thought in your brain, you would feel bad about smothering Tom in your pussy as you ride his face. But he must be as stupid as you are, because he obviously loves it. Apart from the wet sounds of him being completely engulfed in your wet heat, he's moaning and muttering to himself. It's all incomprehensible under the moans leaving your own mouth.
One hand leaves your hips and replaces his tongue. Fingers glide into your pussy, the only resistance being your walls clenching around him. As your body reacts, Tom goes still, and gives you a knowing look.
“Thank you, sir,” and his fingers curl inside of you. They push at just the right spot to make you almost scream. The back of your hand barely conceals it. Suddenly in tandem, his tongue and fingers fuck you perfectly, causing your body to practically float off the bed. Genuinely having to hold you down now, Tom keeps kissing your clit and pumping his fingers in and out of you. Stars reemerge in your vision and he works you through the pleasure. After your orgasm, Tom rises back into your vision.
You beat him to the punch, “Thank you, sir.” And just cause, you pull him in for a kiss.
However, Despite that, Tom doesn’t look pleased. You cannot fathom why.
“I’m sure you’ve done all that with Malfoy already.” He sneers at you. Tom’s games are tired, so you just cross your arms and wait for him to get it all out. Of course, an indignant addition was coming along.
“I deserve a new experience.” As the idea appears to process on his face, you aren’t so sure you’re happy to let this pass. Tom has a wicked smile as he quietly opens his curtain and ushers you out of his bed. He leads you around the side, near the end of Abraxas’ bed.
And he opens the curtain.
Looming over you, Tom asks a question that you know only has one answer, “Are you a good girl who listens?”
Unsure of what will happen next you swallow, “Yes, sir.” Tom’s eyes flash and he flourishes his wand. He casts silencing spells, a notice me not, and something else, who knows. Tom’s hands grab you at your neck and waist and pull you in for a kiss. You can feel his hard length pressing into you and you’re hoping you know what’s coming next. Giddy, you follow his guiding hands and spin for him. He walks you up until your hips are against the foot of the bed, steers your hands until they are wrapped around the bed posts. Wiggling your ass, you hope to tempt him to tear your clothes off already, but he has other plans.
Tom whispers, “Incarcerouss.” Phantom ropes bind your wrists to the bed posts. Tom pushes your back forwards, until you are bent over the bed. Then he grabs your hair and pulls your head back until your eyes focus and you realize you are staring at Abraxas’ sleeping form, sweetly clutching your pillow.
Anxiety kickstarts your heart and when you tug at the ropes, panic sets in. Tom watches this and his only consolation is, “As long as we’re quiet, we’re fine, my love.” You feel his fingers grab the hem of your silken nightgown and slide it slowly until its bunched around your waist.
Closing your eyes, you try to forget that Abraxas is right infront of your face. In the darkness, your body relaxes. The heels of your feet inch farther apart as you spread your legs.
A dark chuckle comes from Tom. “You were mad I called you a slut and now you’re doing this…” A finger runs along your slit, he finds it dripping wet. He takes his time teasing your already sensitive pussy. Lazy fingers sit there while you grind against him. The word slut echos in your mind. You could hear the smile on his face when he said it. Something thicker than his finger bump into your pussy and your mind goes blank. All you can think of is the cool wood biting into the front of your thighs and Tom’s throbbing head dipping into your cunt.
A hum of contentment leaves Tom’s lips as he slides his cock through your folds.
“I bet you’ll love this,” he promises. Hands grip your ass while he snaps his hips into yours. He buries himself to the hilt and your pussy barely manages to stretch with him. The bed shakes with his thrust and there is no holding back your small scream. Both you and Tom stop, watching Abraxas, waiting for a reaction.
He’s still asleep. Tom watches you tense up, remembering all over again the consequences of moaning. The dread of waking Abraxas up, getting fucked by his best freind, is too much. Before you can start pulling at your wrists and protesting, Tom unburies himself and sets a nice pace. The newfound pleasure of his hard cock finally fucking you just as you needed it makes you completely forget about Abraxas. All over again.
The bed is rocking but you can't find it in you to care. Tom’s hand is pushing your face into the blankets, maybe trying to muffle you, all while slamming his hips into yours. Drunk on the pleasure from the rhythmic pounding, you dont notice the scene before you until Tom pulls you up by your hair again.
Abraxas is awake, clutching the blanket to his chest and watching you in horror. It’s plain on his face. Before your brain can process the damage you must be doing to him, Tom says, “Don’t be so upset about this Malfoy, you’ll love it.”
if you enjoyed lmk so i can finish the next part !! ( its tom x abraxas x reader !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! )
Summary: After your first encounter with Vigilante ends with you knocked unconscious and more terrified than ever, you call Adrian. Luckily, your sweet and amazing coworker is more than happy to help.
Adrian Chase, on the other hand, couldn’t possibly be more relieved. Because, despite a little bump in the road and the need to enact one of his many backup plans…well, everything is falling into place.
Warnings: 18+ Minors DNI: So many for this one, Stalker!Adrian, Adrian is toxic, Manipulation, Smut!! (like this chapter is mostly smut whoops), Use of chloroform, Mentions of violence, Mentions of murder, Stalking, Breaking and entering, Obsession, Adrian misunderstands a joke and gets a little sexy about it?, Vig being turned on by threats, Please let me know if I forgot anything!! (Seriously, especially with this one).
Word Count: 9.1k
Author's Note: Good golly this boy is toxic. Love him. The balance between Adrian being a sweet goofus and genuinely terrifying is a toughie to write, but hoo boy it sure is fun!! Please make sure to read the warnings, and know that stalking is a crime and I am definitely not condoning it outside of fiction!! And as always, please let me know what you think!!
(This is part of the series All Mine, Forever. If you haven't checked it out yet, please do!)
-
In a lot of Adrian’s fantasies, when he truly saves you for the first time, you swoon. Maybe you even wrap your arms around him and tremble with relief and…and maybe you peel his mask off for him, and press your lips to his, and even let him take you right there in the alley surrounded by dead bodies in the most fucked up, romantic way possible. And then he’d tell you about all the other creeps he’s killed for you, the ones you didn’t witness, and you’d swoon again and kiss him again and let him bring you home where you’ll help peel the armor from his body and he’ll smear the bloodstains of those criminals on your skin as he makes love to you again and again and-
Well, none of that happened. Fantasy totally ruined. But he gets it. He prepared for it.
“You.” You’d whispered, eyes wide and horrified as they met his visor, and his blood had run cold in his veins.
Even with the shock and realization and horror on your face, you looked so fucking beautiful. You. Right there, with your back against the alley wall and your eyes wide and that lovely, lovely stain of crimson on your cheek. The blood of the man who tried to hurt you, that he had killed for you, marking your skin like evidence of his victory. You, safe and still standing in front of him.
Oh, fuck. If he could just touch you right now. If he could just crowd you up against that wall and make you shake in a way that isn’t from fear. He’d leave his mask on, just for now, but he’d pull his gloves off so he can feel your skin against his and trail his fingers over your body until the goosebumps on your arms aren’t from panic but because of him. And then, then he’d pull his mask off so he could kiss you and feel your hands in his hair and he’d hike you up against that wall and when he makes you scream his name, be it Adrian or Vigilante, he’ll have to cover your mouth because public indecency is a crime but maybe it would be worth it if he could just-
You’re running. Fuck, of course you’re running. Shit.
It takes ten seconds to get the chloroform rag around your mouth, maybe five more for you to stop wiggling in his arms, and when you finally go limp against him, the fight leaving you with one last muffled scream, he can’t help but sigh as he presses a kiss to your cheek through the cloth of his mask.
“I’m sorry.” He murmurs again, blowing out a guilty breath as he pockets the rag and gathers you up into his arms. “Like I said, I really didn’t wanna do that. But I get why you panicked. Those guys must’ve scared the shit out of you.” He knows, of course, that you freaked out because of him. Because no amount of stealth is gonna be able to truly hide how often he’s been around. But you already didn’t swoon and he had to literally knock you out and he’d like to preserve the fantasy for a little while longer.
It’s a little difficult to get you all the way back to your place. Chloroform doesn’t last as long as he’d like, and there are one or two times where you rouse and start freaking out again, and he has to stop to press the rag over your mouth and nose. He shushes you as gently and as soothingly as he can when he does, and even rests his masked forehead against yours in a gesture that he’s sure would be very romantic if your eyes weren’t so filled with fear before they fell closed again.
It’s even more difficult to pick the lock of your apartment with you in his arms, as skilled at picking this particular lock as he may be, but he manages it. And before long, he’s laying down beside you on your bed and brushing the hair from your eyes like he has a hundred times before.
“I’m sorry.” He murmurs for the millionth time, nuzzling his nose against your cheek again. God, you smell good. Like you always do, but with the irony tang of blood beneath it. Perfect. “I know, I know a boyfriend should never ever chloroform his girlfriend. But I think if you knew everything you’d totally agree that I had to do it.”
His arms slides around your waist, and you make a soft noise as he tugs you closer to him, curling around you and rubbing soothing circles against your hip with his gloved hand.
He keeps talking, just for now, because at least one good thing about having to drug you like that is that you’ll be out for a while, with no risk of waking up. Still, he keeps his voice low, tugging his mask off so he can press soft kisses to your neck and shoulder as he speaks.
“And I know you’re gonna be freaked out when you wake up.” He hums. “But it’s okay, because you’re gonna call me, and I’ll make you feel better.” His lips brush the hollow of your throat, and you make a soft noise in the back of your throat that has his mind wandering to all the ways he could make you feel better when you do call him.
He planned for this. He’s planned for everything. It’s a little inconvenient, yeah, but it’s gonna be okay. In fact, it might even be better than before.
He pushes up beneath your shirt, fingers trailing over your waist, and wishes he could take his gloves off and feel more of your skin against his own.
You were supposed to ask him for a ride home when your car wouldn’t start. He even had a change of clothes nearby in preparation for the call. He had to learn so much crap about cars in order to break your engine down in a way that wouldn’t cost you thousands of dollars to fix.
But you’re a little stubborn, one of the many things he loves about you, so you’d chosen to walk. That’s fine. Saving your life might even better than ‘fixing’ your car.
But now, mechanic or not, he’s already established himself as someone you can go to. Who you might want to go to, if you’re scared or upset. And while he would rather have had you weep with gratitude and fling yourself into his embrace back in that alley, this backup plan works just as well.
After a while, you make another noise, possibly close to rousing again, and he hums as he presses another soft kiss to your shoulder.
“Shhh, I’ve got ya.” He coos, tugging you a little closer. “You have no idea how safe you are. Safest girl in the world, I swear. It’s okay. You’ll get it soon.”
He should get going, as loathe as he is to pull away from you right now. But if he’s gonna get home and wash all of this blood off of himself before you wake up and ask him to come over, as well as take care of those bodies in the alley, he’s gonna have to go.
“See you later.” He murmurs, and slides out of bed.
-
You wake up in your apartment. In your bed.
You bolt upright so quickly, flailing so violently, that you actually fall to the floor, and when you clamber to your feet and wipe at your eyes your hands come away bloody.
Oh God. Oh God. It’s Vigilante. The fucking borderline serial killer Vigilante is fucking stalking you.
You dart around your apartment, grab your gun off the bedside table, and try not to shake as you check every nook and cranny in the place. Make sure every single window is locked. Twice.
Panic is cold and heavy in your stomach as you fall back onto the couch. As memories of a man being fucking beheaded in front of you play through your mind, over and over.
The too-sweet smell of the rag as it was pressed against your mouth and nose. The arm locked around you like a vice. The feeling of the mask against your skin as he whispered an apology into your ear.
You can’t be alone. You can’t be here alone. It might be dangerous for another person, sure, but you…you can’t.
You don’t know who else to call.
Adrian answers on the first ring, bright and happier than ever. “Hiya.”
You open your mouth to speak. Close it. Hesitate.
“Hey. Can I…can I come over?”
“Yes.” He answers immediately. “Yeah. One hundred percent.”
“This is gonna sound weird but…” your throat is dry. It’s still a little hard to form a thought. You don’t know if it’s panic or the fucking drugs. “Can I uh…can I stay with you, maybe? For a night or two? There’s some…something going on at my place and I-“
“Hey, yeah. Of course you can. You okay?”
No. No you’re not. You’re really, really far from okay.
“What’s that sound?”
“Hm?” The sound clicks off. You frown, but you use the noise to distract yourself from breaking down and sobbing into the phone.
“The uh…that whirring sound.”
“Garbage disposal.” He answers, easily, and his voice is calm and familiar and anchoring you while every other part of you is threatening to float away with panic. “You want me to pick you up?”
Fuck. You forgot about your stupid car.
“I…yeah. Can you? My car won’t start.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He says, too quickly again. “Oh, wait, right. Where do you live?”
-
Adrian Chase grins from ear to ear as he sets down the bone saw and removes his apron and gloves.
Perfect.
He’ll finish all of…this, later. After he finds the time to get back. For now, his girlfriend called him, just like he planned. The bodies of the men from the alley can sit in his ‘Vigilante Lair’ (a much cooler word for the basement of his mom’s house) a little while longer.
He makes sure to triple check himself for blood or similar evidence of his activities tonight before he hops in his car. When he gets to your place, he knocks. It’s a little weird, to knock on a door to which he’s picked the lock more times than he can count, but whatever.
You’re starting a new chapter with him, and you don’t even realize it.
The relief on your face when you open it and see him on the other side feels like a drug. Shot right to his system and filling him with an unspeakable sense of euphoria.
The temptation to swoop in and kiss you is overwhelming enough that he has to physically hold himself back. There’s fear lingering in your eyes. It makes you look so pretty. And that bag you have slung over your shoulder, with your stuff packed inside in preparation to stay with him… God, he really did a great job with this. Those bags under your eyes? That way your gaze is darting around with all that misplaced paranoia? He’s gonna fix that. He’s gonna help you sleep again, and hold you, and brush his teeth with you in the morning and get you to really actually smile with him.
“You okay?” He asks, and you’re so tense. Too tense.
“Mhm.” Your eyes are still behind him, searching for someone who isn’t hiding in the shadows but is right in front of you. It’s okay. You’re not supposed to know that. Not yet. “Can we go?”
“Yup.” He takes the bag from your arm, and cuts off your protests by scooping you up in his arms again.
This time, you actually laugh, and it’s music to his ears.
“Okay, okay. I don’t need-“
“Shush.” He says, pulling your door shut behind you, and begins to make his way down the stairs. “I gotcha, remember?”
You laugh again, like you’re already feeling a little better, and he might melt at the mere sound of it.
All according to plan.
-
Once again, you find yourself in Adrian Chase’s bed. This time, you’re in your own pjs that you brought from home, rather than borrowed sweatpants and a t-shirt, and it makes the whole thing feel weirdly…domestic.
You haven’t told him what happened. Haven’t explained why you’re here. A part of you is worried he’ll be in danger if he knows anything, and another part of you is selfishly afraid of scaring him off. The rest of you, however, is desperate not to think about it. Just for now.
“Do you always sleep shirtless?” Even as you ask it, you have to fight the burn in your cheeks. He’s laying beside you, on his back while you sit up with your arms curled around your knees, and fuck if you can’t see every stupidly defined muscle in your peripheral vision.
“Yup.” He smiles, the expression easy and casual save for the glint in his eyes. “Sometimes naked, actually. You can sleep naked too, if you want. Totally won’t be weird.”
“That would definitely be weird.”
“I could sleep naked too.”
“Which would be weirder.”
“Why?”
“Just watch the movie, Chase.”
“I’ve seen it before.”
You huff a laugh. You can’t help it. Despite everything, all of the horror and fear you’ve felt tonight, there’s something about him that is so ridiculously soothing that you feel almost stupid for feeling better.
You turn to him, and he’s looking right at you. You like this. You like not feeling afraid, even if it’s just for now.
“You’re flexing.”
“Nope. No I’m not.”
You raise an eyebrow.
“Even if I was flexing, it would be a totally natural response. This is a stressful part of the movie. Maybe I’m just tense because of the anticipation. I don’t know if Liam Neeson is gonna-“
You lean down, and you kiss him.
You shouldn’t do it. You know you shouldn’t do it. But when your lips meet his, and that tingle flutters through your muscles and into your bones just like it did the last time, you stop thinking for a moment. You don’t worry. You don’t panic. You don’t feel tired or worn out or paranoid. You just feel the way he hums against your lips, the way that hum moves through you, and the way he’s so warm against you that every thought finally melts out of your mind.
His arm curls around your waist. He sits up for a moment, lips never breaking from your own and muscled chest pressing against yours as you shift to accommodate his movements. For a moment, you think he’s going to pull you onto his lap. So much so that you squeak in surprise when he suddenly lifts you up and flips you onto your back, settling atop you with a mischievous little grin.
You smile back, and he makes a noise of approval before sinking his teeth into your lip.
The sudden sting makes you gasp, and that sound makes something shift in the air, a weight beginning to grow behind the kiss as Adrian’s playful smile falls. He groans, body pressing down against yours, and the feeling replaces all rational thought with tv static.
You don’t think about Vigilante. About last night. About the fear and paranoia of the last couple of months. And it feels good. Your brain is finally empty, finally focused on something else. You feel a little selfish for it, but…
“Adrian.” You gasp, as his lips trail down to the hollow of your throat, and he groans low and deep and deliciously at the sound of it.
“Again.” He doesn’t sound entirely like himself. His tone is low, and there’s something dark coating the command that makes a little shiver fall down your spine.
“Adrian.” You say again, and he bites down so hard against the sensitive curve of your neck that you whimper.
“Fuck.” His hips rock against yours, and he pulls back to kiss you even more deeply than before. “That’s the best sound in the world, I swear.”
You match his fervor with your own, hands tangling in his hair to pull him closer to you with a ferocity you didn’t know you possessed.
This is a bad idea. It’s happening too fast. You can’t do this without at least telling him what’s going on and-
His hand skates down your side, and he hikes your leg up around his hip in a movement that is so smooth and determined that it almost doesn’t feel like Adrian Chase should be the one to make it. He kisses you until your mind turns to butter, all tongues and teeth and hunger until you’re nearly fucking shaking beneath him, and rocks his hips again as he moves down to bite at the shell of your ear.
“You’ve thought about this too, right?” His voice is so low, so hungry, that you feel molten heat shoot straight to your core. His hand is moving over your waistband, those strange callouses scraping against your bare skin until you’re shivering beneath him. “About how perfect we are together? How good I can make you feel?”
You arch against him, pull his mouth to yours again, and his hands tighten on you until you think you might bruise.
“Wait.” You gasp, trying to pull yourself back to clarity. This is wrong. Definitely wrong. You can’t continue this until he knows exactly how much fucking baggage you’re carrying with you. “I-I’ve gotta tell you something.”
“Mm,” he just kisses you again, and grinds against you so deliciously that the strangled noise the feeling pulls from your throat barely sounds fucking human. “Tell me when I’m fucking you.”
Your brain empties for a moment. “Adrian.”
“Yeah, just like that.” His tongue traces over your lower lip, like he’s savoring the taste of you. “I promise you can tell me anything in the world, just let me make you feel good. Fuck, I can make you feel so fucking good, I swear…”
It takes everything you have to push at his chest, to break his lips from yours. Even as you do, he slides his arm around your middle and tugs you up with him until you’re straddling his lap, lips finding yours again like he truly can’t help it. The new angle of his hips against yours is painfully distracting, and it makes you hold onto him even more tightly.
“I…mmh…” Fuck, he’s a good kisser. If he wasn’t Adrian, you might think he’s trying to distract you. “I’ve seriously gotta tell you something.”
He seems to finally sense the urgency in your tone, pulling back with a concerned frown as his hand slides up over your back, beneath your shirt, sending little sparks of want from every inch where your skin connects.
“What’s wrong?”
How the absolute fuck are you supposed to tell him? How are you supposed to say it out loud, when no one else has believed you? When the police told you it was probably sleepwalking, and sleep deprivation causing hallucinations?
Adrian kisses your nose. Your cheeks. Slides his hands over your bare back beneath your t-shirt and tugs you a little more firmly onto his lap.
“You don’t have to tell me.” He hums. “We can just-“
“I think Vigilante might be stalking me.”
Adrian goes still, but he doesn’t let you go.
You’ve scared him off. Of course you have. And of course it’s fair, and his response will be correct when he asks you to leave so he doesn’t get fucking killed, and what was blossoming into something genuinely nice and sweet is over and it’s not his fault but it still-
“Are you scared?”
You blink. Hesitate. Nod.
“Yes.” You finally whisper, throat constricting at the thought. At the memories of feeling invaded. Violated, even. At waking up with blood on you and seeing a blue suit and a red visor in your peripheral. “I-I don’t know why. I don’t know what he wants. He’s been breaking my locks and coming into my apartment and I can’t sleep and I’m worried he might hurt you too and-“
“Hey. Hey.” Adrian pulls you closer, until you can feel the brim of his glasses against your nose. “You’re okay, you know that?”
You furrow your brow, and shake your head. “I don’t…I don’t think I am. Adrian, this is why I wasn't sleeping. I bought a gun. I don’t even know how to use it but-“
“Shh.” The noise is gentle, sweet, and his had slides over your back again. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
You’re frustrated, and the feeling of his body against yours is distracting, and that’s frustrating you even more. “Why don’t you realize how fucked up this is?” Your voice is harsh, but he doesn’t seem bothered by it. “You…I…this guy is a fucking serial killer.”
“Hey, look at me.” His voice is soft, in that strange way it gets sometimes, and his fingers are sliding through your hair.
When you look at him, the intensity of his gaze twists something in your gut.
“You are always gonna be safe with me. You get that?”
“I…”
He tugs you closer to him, and his lips brush against yours. “Always.”
“You’re not scared?”
“Nah. Not even close.”
You frown, and you let him kiss you. Slow, warm, and deeply enough that he has you newly melting against him in moments.
“Adrian.” You finally murmur, as he hums in recognition of his name. “What if he hurts you?”
He pulls back, just far enough to press warm kisses against your jaw, down to your throat. “He won’t. I’ll kick his ass if he tries.” You can feel him smile at his own words, and your fingers curl against his skin.
“I’m not kidding.”
“Me neither.” He slides his hand up to your hair, and tilts your head to offer himself more access to your throat. “Nothing is ever, ever gonna hurt you.” His breath is warm against your neck, and the shiver he pulls from you with his kisses has him pressing even closer.
Weirdly, you do. The way he’s touching you, and holding you like he’ll never let you go…you believe him.
“He might-“
“He won’t. No one will. I can take care of myself. Pinky swear.” He’s still kissing you, lips trailing over your skin and fingers skating along the waistband of your pajama pants. “I can take care of you, too.”
You could give in. You could let him make you forget. You could just…feel.
You want that. You want that so fucking badly.
So, as he lays you back down against the mattress, and covers your body with his own again, you allow yourself to forget.
-
Bliss. Pure, wonderful bliss.
Adrian Chase wakes beside his girlfriend, and his heart nearly explodes.
Good things come to those who wait, and he waited so long, and now here you are. Here you finally are. In his bed, bare skin against his, marks from his fingers and teeth on your body.
You hum as he slides his arm more tightly around your middle, lips trailing down over your shoulder until you turn sleepily in his arms.
You belong here. Right here. He might never let you leave this bed, actually.
This is how it was always meant to be. Since the moment he first laid eyes on you, this is the way you both should always have woken up. Holding you while you slept, without your knowledge, only to slip out of the apartment when you began to stir? Compared to this, that was absolutely nothing. Miserable. Nothing.
He traces his lips over a new mark on the hollow of your throat, remembers how he sank his teeth into your soft skin and whispered how perfect you are as you gasped and dragged your nails over the skin of his back.
And there, those reddened blossoms in the shape of his fingertips against the outside of your thigh, where he’d gripped you to him as you moved in his lap and he could swear he nearly blacked the fuck out. He wonders if the mark of his teeth is still on the inside of that same thigh, where he bit down like he’d dreamed of doing a thousand times until you were tugging desperately on his hair and he thought he might have died and gone to fucking heaven.
“Morning.” You mumble, breath warm against his collarbone, and that’s all he needs to roll atop you and slide his lips over yours. Can someone be addicted to the feeling of another person? He should probably google it. He knew he was pretty much addicted to you before, but now…fuck, now he doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough of you. How is he supposed to let you ever leave his bed when you feel this good?
You smile back, so much of your bare skin against his, and he wonders for a moment how the feeling of human skin can be so awful when it isn’t yours. He wants to touch you all the time. Feel you against him like you are right now, with every inch of your body holding memories of how he’s touched and felt and claimed you.
Adrian doesn’t speak for a while, just savors the feeling of your lips against his own, and when he finally rocks his hips helplessly against yours you make a noise between a giggle and a gasp and he feels like he’s going to explode.
“Oh, good morning.” You repeat, feeling the evidence of his happiness against your thigh, as he presses closer and drags his teeth over your lip.
You’re so perfect. So unbelievably incredible and you’re in his home and in his bed and he made you scream his name last night but he’s pretty sure he can make you scream it louder if he just-
“I’ve gotta go to work.” You murmur, but he’s already making plans. Plans to keep you in this bed for as long as possible.
“Call out.” That spot, just below your ear. When he bit it last night, you writhed and gasped his name even louder than before. Now, you hold onto him a little tighter, and he grins.
“I work a double.”
“Call out.” He’s trying really hard not to sound demanding, but in his defense he would burn Fennel Fields to the ground to keep you in this bed with him.
“Adrian…” you’re thinking about it. He can tell. His hand skates down your side, lips trailing their way over your collarbone, alternating between teasing scrapes of his teeth and apologetic kisses to the marks he left behind last night.
“You never ever miss a shift. You had something fucked up happen to you last night.” He murmurs, risking a deep inhale into the hollow of your throat. You smell so good, he can barely think straight. “Just lemme make you feel better today. I’ll make breakfast.”
You frown, and he kisses you again until you’re smiling, body relaxing beautifully beneath his. “Dave’s not gonna believe that I’m sick.”
“Mmm.” He hums, already feeling drunk off of the taste of you, already craving more. He barely manages to pull himself back, just far enough to press his hand against your forehead. You giggle, and he leans back down to kiss you again. “You feel warm.”
“Fine. Fine.” You huff, still grinning against his lips, and he pats blindly at the bedside table until he finds your phone.
He makes it maybe two minutes. Or less. All he knows is that the phone is ringing, and by the time he hears someone answer he’s already trailing kisses down over your stomach. You swat at his head, but it’s too light to be fully convincing, and he huffs a breath of silent laughter as he bites at your hip.
“Hey, I feel like shit. I don’t think I’m gonna make it-“ his mouth finds the apex of your thighs, and you’re cut off by a sharp gasp.
“I-I yeah. I’m fine. I mean, no, I’m not fine. I’m sick. I just thought I was gonna throw up but I’m- oh fuck.” Your fingers tangle in his hair, and he doubles his efforts as he feels your heel dig into his back.
“Okay. Thanks. Thank you. I’ll see you tomorr- n-next time I work. Okay, bye.” You slam your hand against the end-call button, and glare down at him as you drop your phone. “You’re an asshole.”
And you look so flushed and pretty like this that it should be illegal.
I love you, he thinks, for maybe the thousandth time in the last twelve hours, before his hand comes up to push your leg aside so firmly that he almost worries he might hurt you.
You don’t seem to be complaining, especially with the noise you make as he continues his mission.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Mine.
-
In the few relationships you’ve had before, you’ve never really experienced a…honeymoon phase? Is that what you could call this?
Whatever it may be, it’s amazing.
You and Adrian stay in bed until noon, and when you finally wander to the kitchen on shaky legs in search of food, he just hurriedly tosses a plate of pizza rolls into the microwave before moving right back over to you and lifting you up onto the counter.
You laugh, and he laughs too as he presses his lips to yours, sliding his arms around your waist until you’re making a muffled noise of protest into the kiss.
He pulls back, and frowns a little. “What’s up?”
“You didn’t turn the microwave on.”
He turns around, surprised, and releases you just long enough to hurriedly punch a few numbers onto the timer before he goes right back to kissing you, muffling your delighted laugh with his lips.
Later, you watch a movie on the couch, and somewhere towards the middle of it you end up on your knees before him, tugging his sweatpants down over his hips until he’s tangling his fingers in your hair and groaning your name in a way that sounds like music. Like prayer.
You nap together after that, and you wake him up by rolling atop him, and you hear that delicious groan again as he sits up and drags you into his lap, the two of you quickly losing yourselves in each other until he’s panting against your shoulder and sinking his teeth into your collarbone.
“Mine. All fucking mine.” He whispers, hoarse, and any illusion of you being in control has shattered with the way his strong hands are guiding you in his lap like you weigh less than a fucking paperweight.
You whimper, and he just moves faster, crushing you to him and pulling back to slam his mouth to yours.
“Mine.” He repeats, and you can do nothing but nod. The acknowledgment makes him grip you tighter, eyes nearly crossed as they look right into yours, and when you break he does at the same time as you and you worry you might black out.
By the end of the day, every muscle in your body holds a pleasant ache, and he still snuggles close to you as he chatters about everything and nothing while the two of you eat takeout in bed.
You’ve never felt this level of comfort before. This…fullness. This wholeness in your heart. In such a short amount of time, this weird, dorky, beautiful man that is feeding you a bite of his lo mein and kissing your cheek with an exaggerated ‘mwah’ as he tugs you closer to his side, seems to have made himself as much a part of you as your achy arms and legs.
It’s all laughter and light. Even in your most passionate moments, even when your mind empties of everything but the feeling of his body against your own and you hit your peak so violently that you feel like you might fucking die, you still can’t help but giggle as he kisses you and his glasses bump awkwardly against your nose.
“Best day of my life. You should get fake-sick all the time.” He says now as you snuggle into his side, and you realize that you have barely thought about Vigilante all day. Barely had the time between the sex and laughter and comfort to even remember why you were so scared before.
“I think if I get ‘fake sick’ again, I won’t be able to walk anymore.” You joke, and his grin is so wide it’s almost manic as his hand skates up beneath your borrowed t-shirt.
“I’ll carry you everywhere.” He hums, nuzzling against your cheek. “But you do look cute when your legs are all wobbly. Like Bambi, but sexy.”
“Weird comparison, but I’ll take it.”
He smiles, and kisses you again, and you smile right back as he lays you back against the pillows, hands already beginning to wander.
This time, it’s slow and sleepy and wonderful. You’re both worn out by the day, and your body is more than a little sore, but his lips move against yours like it’s the most natural thing in the world. As he moves with you, as you gasp his name and hide your face in his neck, his hand catches your own. His fingers tangle with yours against the pillow by your head, and you whimper as he increases his pace. In response, he pulls your joined hands to his mouth, pressing his lips to your knuckles before ducking down to whisper your name against your lips.
Later, as he collapses atop of you with an exhausted and satisfied hum, and snuggles you into his chest, you fall asleep within seconds. Safe, warm, and happier than you can remember being in a very long time.
-
The days pass. Quickly, and sweetly, and wonderfully.
Vigilante becomes a problem of the past. Yeah, he’s still on the news sometimes. You still tense and panic whenever he’s mentioned. You still worry about Adrian’s safety whenever you’re not together.
But you’re always together. He drives you to work. You sleep at his place almost every night. There are even a few times, when he passes by your table while you’re taking an order, when he’ll lean over and kiss your cheek in front of the customers. You usually get a few ‘awww’s as you flush and try to hide your smile, but you can’t find it in yourself to ever be truly embarrassed.
And then, later. he’ll pull you into the alley, and you’ll make out like teenagers until Dave shows up to shoo you away from each other.
You even hang out with his friends, and you like them. A lot. And they like you. And it feels…good. So good. So comfortable.
So your life changes, just like that. You become Adrian Chase’s girlfriend.
And you almost forget about Vigilante. Almost.
-
He got you. He fucking got you. You’re truly and officially his. And yet, since you’ve been dating, he’s somehow gotten a little…worse.
But he doesn’t want to call it worse, because it’s not bad. Right? It’s not bad to follow his girlfriend home, or to use the key you made him to get into your apartment. And when he isn’t out doing superhero shit, you’re always sleeping next to him anyway, so it’s fine now that he snuggles up beside you when he’s taking a break from killing bad guys. Nothing creepy about it now, no sir-ee. If you sense anything amiss, you’ll just call him and worry to him and he’ll comfort you and kiss you and tell you that you’re totally fine.
But this…this was bound to happen eventually.
You should be at his place, but he can’t keep ignoring his vigilante duties every single night. Plus, you’ve barely even been home in a week.
But he can’t spend a night away from you. He just can’t. So, like usual, he took care of what he needed to, killed a few bad guys, and ended up here.
He likes it better when you’re wrapped up in his arms. In fact, he kind of wishes he had ignored his patrol and convinced you to come over again so he could be lying next to you without his armor, with you naked and warm against him naked and warm. Maybe he can still have that, if he uses his key as Adrian and comes over super early and climbs into bed with you. You like it when he does that. You’ll make that little humming noise and curl up against him and he’ll drag his lips over that sensitive part of your neck and you’ll melt and let him help you out of your pajamas and then he’ll have you bent over so beautifully for him as he-
He’s curling a lock of your hair in his fingers when he feels it.
You wake up. You wake up fast.
You’re not sleep deprived anymore. You’re not out like a light the second your head hits the pillow. He’s been extra careful at times like this lately, but he must have been a little too cocky tonight. A little too loud.
Your beautiful eyes fly open, and lock right on him. On the way he’s sitting beside you, the way your hair is curled around his gloved finger.
Fuck.
You open your mouth to scream, and he’s on you in a blink, palm covering your mouth as he lies atop you and you fight him with an amount of force that is actually pretty impressive, considering.
“Shit.” He whispers, and you’re clawing at his arm and shouting curses against his hand, biting down until he hisses in pain. You thrash, hands coming up to push at his face and shit shit shit you’re trying to rip his mask off.
“Hey, hey. Stop that.” He finally manages to shift atop you enough to hold your wrists above your head with one hand, his free hand still clamped firmly over your mouth, and he has the chloroform in his pocket but he so doesn’t want to use it. He hates using it on you.
You wiggle, kick, and scream again.
“C’mon, stop. I’m not gonna hurt you. Just be good for a sec. I hate drugging you, I promise, but I can’t have you screaming like that. You’ve got neighbors, you know. They’re gonna think you’re being murdered or something.” He’s already regretting the way he chose to disguise his voice. It’s too low, and it’s kind of hurting his throat.
You make a furious noise, and kick again. He sighs, and leans down to tuck his nose into the crook of your neck, allowing himself a deep inhale that makes you start wiggling again. Sure, you probably think it’s creepy, but you definitely wouldn’t if you knew who he was. What a frustrating dilemma you’ve both found yourselves in.
“Okay. I’m gonna let go of your mouth, just for a second. Okay? Then you’re gonna wake up, and I’ll be gone. No need to freak-“
“Mmph!” You shake your head behind his hand, and he sighs.
“I don’t want to. I have to.”
You shake your head again. And, to his surprise, you relax beneath him.
He frowns as he pulls back to look down at you. Your eyes are still wide, but you’re not kicking anymore. You stop trying to pull your arms away, and flex your fingers a little like you’re trying to communicate something.
He gets it. He knows you, of course. And yet, it feels a little too good to be true.
“Are you…gonna be calm?”
You nod, and he grins behind the mask. “Promise?”
You roll your eyes, and nod again.
He experiments for a moment, releasing your wrists to see if you’ll start clawing at him again. You don’t. Instead, you reach up to hold onto his arms, more gentle than he was expecting.
“I’m gonna take my hand off, and you’re not gonna scream, okay?”
You nod again, and your compliance and proximity is gonna give him a fucking boner if he isn’t careful. It has to be too good to be true, right? All that fighting, and now you’re gonna be good for him?
Oops. He shifts a little atop you, but you notice, and your eyes widen again.
“Don’t worry. Not gonna do anything. All good, here. You’re just…well, you know. You’re hot.” He explains easily, and you mumble something behind his hand that he is going to pretend isn’t a biting insult.
Carefully, and with his free hand hovering over his belt just in case, he pulls his hand away.
You don’t scream. He can see his fingerprints on your cheek. He wants to pull his mask off and trace them with his tongue.
“Hi.” He says instead, and you don’t speak. You just stare.
“Do you…mind?” You ask, glancing down at where he is still very much lying atop you. More pointedly at where the evidence of his arousal is pressing into your thigh. And you weren’t complaining last night, but then you knew it was him, so it’s fine.
“Sure. You gonna try to run away?”
“You’ll just catch me.”
Aw. You’re so smart. Worlds best girlfriend, here.
“Mhm.” He sits back, and you scoot back against the headboard. Look him over. Clearly try to keep yourself as relaxed as possible.
“What do you want?”
You. You you you in every single way he can possibly have you. He already has you, and he still wants more. He wants to lock you in a room forever so you’re only his and he wants his name to be the only name you know and he wants you so bad he aches-
“To keep you safe.”
You laugh, humorlessly, and give him a look that he’s probably supposed to understand.
“So you’re breaking into my apartment?”
“Yup.”
“Are you gonna kill me?”
“No!” The word rips from him so harshly he nearly shouts it, and you flinch, and he hates that. “No, of course not. I’ll never hurt you. I promise.”
“Why not?”
Because you’re everything to him, obviously. You’re perfect. “I just won’t, okay?” He can’t say these things, because you might freak out, and it’s frustrating. Lying to you is fucking frustrating.
“Okay.” Your voice is softer, and it makes his shoulders relax a little. “Are you gonna kill my boyfriend?”
God, he loves it when you call him that. Your boyfriend. You’re his girlfriend. You don’t even know how funny that question is, and his snort of laughter makes you furrow your brow. “Nah.”
“Okay.” You don’t look like you believe him. That’s okay. You’re talking to him. You look so pretty right now it’s ridiculous. “Let me hold that.”
He frowns, heart hammering a little faster in his chest, and glances down at his crotch.
“The fucking sword. Let me hold the sword.” You gesture again, and he realizes that he must have been so busy staring at you to see that you gestured the same way a second ago.
He shrugs, and slides the weapon out of its sheath, wordlessly passing it over.
You look surprised, but you take it. “Thanks.”
You can fucking kill him with it if you want, but he knows you won’t. That is definitely not helping his boner. “No problemo.”
“Stop breaking into my apartment.”
As if. “You’re safe. I’m not gonna hurt you.”
“Do you not realize how fucked up this is?”
“Uh…yes?” No. But you don’t get it.
“Why do you keep breaking into my apartment?”
Because he loves you? Because he wants to hold you all the time? Because- “you keep changing your locks.”
“Because of you.”
“Yeah, but you don’t need to. Because I’m not gonna hurt you.”
You’re frowning at him, and there’s something in your eyes that makes him tense a little. If this keeps up, you might draw some comparisons. There’s only so much he can disguise his voice. He’s still Adrian, and you know Adrian.
Shit.
His hand moves down to his belt, and you sense it, and-
And then there’s the blade of a sword at his throat, and your eyes are hard and focused, and oh fuck oh shit this is the hottest thing he’s ever experienced.
“Stop. That.”
“Fuck.” It comes out as a breath, hoarse, and you narrow your eyes. “This is so hot. Seriously. So hot.”
Your eyes narrow. Shit. How is he supposed to keep it together right now? He’s already running his mouth, and you’re already furrowing your brow like you do when you’re thinking about something, and he is about to feel so, so guilty.
“I’m so sorry I have to do this. Really. You have no idea.”
You open your mouth, panic sparking in your eyes, but it’s too late. He knocks the machete to the side, yanks your foot down to pull you onto your back, and presses the rag over your mouth in a second.
You shriek, furious, and you’re out in seconds.
The second you’re unconscious he yanks the mask over his head, pressing his lips to your cheeks and forehead in a desperate flurry of apologies.
“I love you. I’m so, so sorry. I love you so much. I’m so sorry.” He kisses your jaw. Your ear. Even pulls back to press a gentle kiss to your lips. “You did so good, too. So good. I just can’t let you recognize me, you know?”
You don’t stir, still out cold, and he groans miserably as he pulls you into his arms.
“Yeah, you’ll get it one day. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. Promise. God, I love you.” The way you relaxed beneath him like that? The way you held his own sword to his throat? He’s the luckiest guy in the fucking world.
Still, he’s gonna have to figure out a way to apologize to you. As soon as possible.
-
Adrian is there the next morning. Breakfast burritos in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in another.
Your feet are unsteady beneath you, mind foggy with memories and that motherfucking chloroform.
“Hey.” His smile falls, and he cocks his head to the side. “You okay?”
Your sweet, wonderful boyfriend. You pull him to you by the front of his sweatshirt, and press your nose into his shoulder. He holds you so quickly that he nearly drops the bag of food in his hand.
“Fucking Vigilante.” You mumble, still hazy, and you aren’t in your right mind quite enough to feel him tense.
“What?”
“He…” ugh, it’s hard to think. “Broke in again, last night. Drugged me again.”
“Oh. Oh. Shit.” Adrian slides his arms around you, and you hear the food and flowers fall to the ground as he drops them in favor of holding you close and nuzzling his nose into your temple. “I’m sorry. I’m here.”
He’s here. He’s holding you. Everything is gonna be okay. And yet, the Vigilante Problem is becoming too normal. You should probably be freaking out a lot more.
“Are you scared?” He asks, and something is off in his voice. It gets like that, sometimes, in little moments that always pass too quickly for you to really catch them. He doesn’t sound overly concerned, like one might expect, but there’s something lower in his voice. Something in the way he asks with his lips brushing over the shell of your ear, or the way his hold tightens on you a little bit.
“I should be, shouldn’t I?” You murmur, and his breath catches a little in his throat as his lips drop down to the hollow of your throat. “I should be fucking terrified, right? Is it fucked up that I’m not?”
You think, as you tilt your head to the side and his warm hands begin to slide up beneath your shirt, that you can feel the corner of his lips twitch upwards. But that would be weird, right?
“Nah. You don’t have to be scared of anything.” He tugs you closer to him, teeth scraping over your earlobe until a shiver falls down your spine. “Not while I’m here.”
“I…what’s with the flowers?” You try, quickly losing any and all ability to form a solid thought. “You cheat on me or something?”
It’s a joke, of course, but when he pulls back to look at you his eyes are almost black. You blink, surprised, and his hand comes up to cup your chin between strong calloused fingers.
“I’d rather die.” He says, firm and almost…angry that you would even suggest such a thing, even as a joke. “I would seriously rather die. Don’t say that.”
“Hey, I was kiddi-“ he interrupts you with a kiss. A hard, hungry, rough kiss that makes you gasp into his mouth as your fingers come up to tangle in his curls.
“Don’t say that.” He says again, tone low and dark in that way it can sometimes be. He backs you up, bites hard at your lip, and pulls back to drag his teeth down to the hollow of your throat.
You just nod, painfully distracted, and he bites down hard enough to make you whimper.
“Adrian.” You try, but you’ve already forgotten what you could possibly be trying to say.
“Get on the couch.” He responds, and that low, quiet tone is sparking something familiar in the back of your mind.
“Ade, I was kidding. I didn’t mean-“ he cuts you off with something akin to a frustrated grunt, and gives you a gentle push until your back hits the cushions. You bounce a little, blinking with surprise as you look up to him, and his eyes are dark as he climbs atop you, pressing you down into the cushions with one hand catching your jaw.
“If you’re gonna joke, you should really say something beforehand.” He chastises, leaning down to catch your lip between his teeth. You make a soft noise, and he grinds his hips down hard against yours until you forget how to breathe. “Because I would never cheat on you.”
“I know.” You try to laugh. “Hey, what’s gotten into you?” Sure, he can get a little…intense, sometimes, but it’s usually played off with some kind of joke. Some break in the darkness of his eyes when he laughs and snuggles you close or does something cute that makes you forget about the whole thing.
He doesn’t do that now. His hand comes down, skating over the back of your thigh before he hikes it up around his waist and grinds again.
“Tell me you’re mine.” He all-but growls, catching the lobe of your ear between his teeth until a whimper pulls its way from your throat.
“I’m yours.” You breathe, and he groans as he moves down to scrape his teeth over your throat.
“Again.”
“Adrian-“
“Again.” His hand is sliding over your stomach, dipping beneath the waistband of your shorts as he crushes his lips to yours.
What the fuck has gotten into him? Why is it so hot you think you might fucking die? This is your sweet, goofy boyfriend. This is the guy who mumbles spider facts into your hair when he sleeps. Who woke up after that party at Emilia’s wearing her robe because he gave you the literal shirt off of his body when you were drunk and chilly on the roof.
“Y-yours.” You arch a little beneath him, a moan swallowed by his lips as his fingers find the apex of your thighs.
“Right.” His breathing is a little more ragged. His nose is bumping yours. His fingers are making you see stars and his eyes are almost completely overtaken by his pupils. “All mine. You’re all mine.”
He works you apart almost embarrassingly quickly, dexterous fingers seemingly on a mission to bring you to the edge within minutes, and in no time at all you’re gripping at his hair and fisting your own fingers in the back of his sweatshirt until he pulls away just enough to rip it off of himself. The movement is quick enough to muss his hair and knock his glasses askew, and he barely stops kissing you as he pulls you out of your own clothes, trailing hungry lips and teeth down your neck between ragged and desperate breaths.
He’s eager, like always, but this time there’s a darker sort of control to his movements. There’s no smiling between kisses, no playful nipping at your jaw. Instead, his hand tangles in your hair, forcing your head back to look at him as he moves at a deliciously rough angle that has you seeing stars right off the fucking bat. As his lips hover over yours, noses bumping and eyes crossed.
“This. I think about - mmm - this all the time, you know that? I think - fuck - I think about you all the time.”
“I-I…” you can’t speak. You can’t think.
“Say my name.” His forehead presses against yours, glasses digging into the bridge of your nose. Your fingers, in turn, dig into the skin of his shoulders, your high approaching too quickly for you to even remember how to breathe right.
Adrian growls, grip tightening on your hair and pulling a sharp gasp from your throat. His hips slow, pulling you back from the edge, and you whine in protest. “Say it.”
“Adrian.” You nearly sob, and he groans as he speeds up his movements once again.
“Yeah, you’re mine. Never ever letting you go. All. Fucking. Mine.”
You break with a wail of his name, and he follows with a growl of yours, lips slamming against yours hard enough for your teeth to knock together.
When you can open your eyes again, it’s to the feeling of Adrian smoothing his thumb over your cheek, still breathing heavily as he looks down at you with that same dark and hungry expression.
“That was…intense.” You murmur, searching his eyes and reaching up to brush your fingers over his cheek.
And then he smiles, bright and happy and sweet and so so much more like himself, and you laugh as he nuzzles his nose into your neck and pulls you closer to him.
“Mmhmm.” He hums, pressing a gentle kiss to the marked skin of your throat. And yet, despite the quick return to normalcy, you can still hear something…heavy in his voice when he murmurs again.
summary: While bathing in the creek, your clothes mysteriously disappear. Luckily, a certain hedge knight is there to help.
words: 8.1k
cw: explicit, smut, piv sex, unprotected sex, fingering, size difference, outdoor sex, teasing, semi switch!dunk, inexperienced!dunk, reader is ferally horny, guiding dunk through it, dunk has a big dick, naked female/clothed male, canon typical sexism, dunk calls reader 'my lady' and 'sweet girl', fairytale vibes, reader's clothes get stolen, egg the accidental wingman, an abundance of sword metaphors, i'm here to spread the pretty boy dunk gospel, dunk is my sweet himbo, not beta read, not proof read we die like [redacted targaryen prince]
a/n: do not look at me i blacked out and didn't read this after i finished it. thank you to @urhoneycombwitch and @runawaywerewolf my beloveds for indulging me while i screamed about this
ALL MY WORKS ARE 18+ MINORS DNI
"Apologies, m'lady. I did not know you were here."
You pause, your hand wrapped around the ends of your hair as you gaze at the strange man who just interrupted you. You had heard him tromping through the brush. He stomps like an ox— you're sure that half of the nine kingdoms could have heard him coming, but the most you could do to hide yourself was dip your chest beneath the surface of the water. Even then, the water is so clear that you don't think it would have hidden much. You figured that one person finding you bathing would make no difference in the grand scheme of things.
"That's all right," you say after a moment, and continue wringing out your wet hair. Water trails over your skin, dripping in long rivulets that the man is clearly trying very hard not to focus on. The man gazes down at the grass and turns his head away, as though he can somehow unsee you in your nakedness. In fact, he looks anywhere but at you; the tree line, the water, the rocks on the far side of the creek. You tilt your head, examining his demeanor, the way he holds himself stiff and straight, as awkward as can be at the sight of you. "What is your name?"
"Dunk— Ser Duncan the Tall. My lady." He shifts on his feet, and then makes an attempt to bow, a little too late. He still doesn't chance a look at you. "I am… a hedge knight, you see, and I have been sleeping under the tree over there—" he points at the elm tree in the glade, under which a palate has been laid, far enough away that you actually hadn't noticed it, "—for several days, now."
"Yes, I do see."
You snicker under your breath and look at him again, raking your eyes up and down his frame. He's huge, a giant of a man with strawberry blond hair that shifts in the breeze. Even from the side, his profile is handsome, his brow drawn with nervous tension. You figure you would have to look up at him if you were face to face with him, and yet he stoops bashfully as though he expects you to tear him apart just for looking at you. Biting your lip, you can't help the flirtatious smile that stretches across your face.
"Ser Duncan," you say, wading through the waist-deep water towards him. You watch his adam's apple bob as he swallows, moving as though he means to turn away from you. You introduce yourself to him, running your fingers over the surface of the water. "I apologize for my intrusion. I didn't know that this glade was in use. The error is entirely mine."
"No. No, with respect," he looks at you, and then his eyes widen as he remembers himself and averts his gaze again, "I have no claim here. I— I would leave you to your washing, but you are… terribly exposed here, I'm afraid."
"Yes, that usually happens when one bathes, Ser."
"No, I—" He puffs out his cheeks and blows out an exasperated breath. He thinks for a moment. "Begging your pardon, m'lady. What I mean to say, is that there are many people afoot who are not… not honorable."
"Honorable," you repeat, with an air of amusement.
"That would place you in jeopardy, I mean."
"And you would not?" You can tell just by looking at him that he wouldn't do anything to harm you; he looks like he's mortified just at seeing you naked.
"You have nothing to fear from me," he confirms, nodding his head, almost to himself more than to you.
You're almost immediately smitten with him. It takes you a second to come up with a response that won't come off as overbearing; but you can't resist teasing him, at least a little. A small smile stretches across your face as you muse, "Because you don't wish to see me naked, Ser?"
"What? No, I— I mean, I don't— I… I wouldn't—"
"You find me ugly, then?"
"No, ma'am, I—"
"Mhm. Horrid. Repulsive."
"No! No, by the gods, you're beautiful. I just mean—" He breaks off with a deep sigh, clapping his hands over his face. He shakes his head, as though chastising himself. "I am sorry, my lady. I've never been good with words. I would not presume to look upon you in any way that could be un— untoward—"
"Because you are honorable." You giggle at his distress over something so trivial, as you walk out of the water and face him. With a warm smile, you tell him, "I understand you quite well, Ser Duncan. Forgive me for teasing. I meant nothing by it."
He sets his lips in a firm line, shooting you a glance out of the corner of his eye. "Thank you."
You nod at him encouragingly. "I will take my leave, as soon as I am dressed. If you don't mind?"
"No, please. Do as you like, I'll stand watch." And then he turns his back to you, his hand placed on the hilt of his sword with purpose.
You let out a soft laugh. "Quite right." There is a moment where you stand, watching his back, waiting for him to turn around again; he doesn't. You are not shocked, but you still smile to yourself as you turn to retrieve your clothes from where you left them, on the old stone wall.
What does shock you is that your clothes are not there. You had left them within plain sight, and they are nowhere to be seen— not on the ground, or behind the wall at all. They couldn't have been blown away in the wind.
"Ser Duncan," you say, and clear your throat as you turn towards him. "Where are my clothes?"
"Where—?" He glances over his shoulder, and then whirls away again. "How— how should I know?"
"Well, they didn't walk off by themselves." The night air is cool on your damp skin as you place your hands on your hips. "Clearly, someone took them."
All is quiet for a few seconds, and then: "You think I did?" He sounds utterly appalled.
You had, for only a moment— but now, you aren't so sure. You approach him slowly from behind, folding your hands and watching him curiously. He's so wound up tight that he holds his shoulders near his ears, his chest seemingly heaving. He won't even look at you. You have given him every opportunity to, and he won't. Why steal your clothes, and then refuse to reap the rewards?
"Ser Duncan, you may look at me. I don't mind."
You hear him take a shaky breath, and then he turns and looks down at you. His eyes are bright azure, positively glowing in the low evening light and so striking that you nearly recoil from the sight of them; but even so, they drop to the ground almost instantly.
The wind picks up just a bit, rustling his hair. You shiver in the breeze, squeezing your arms against the sudden cold. He immediately snaps to, untying his cloak before handing it out to you. "Here, m'lady."
You feel your heart swell at his gallantry, as he drapes the fabric over your shoulders. The linen is worn and soft on your skin, and warm in the shoulders from his own body heat. Unsurprisingly, it's so long that it pools around your feet, whereas it floats around his knees when he wears it. You're momentarily distracted by the sight of his large hands so close to your face, tying the cloak beneath your chin so that it remains secure.
Once you're covered, he doesn't seem quite so hesitant to look at you. He meets your eye with a gravely serious look. "I do apologize. I did not take your clothes, I assure you."
"No, I'm sure you didn't. Since you seem more concerned about it than I am." Concern is the kindest word you can come up with— really, he looked about to vomit at the prospect of your suspicion. You draw his cloak tight around you, the smell of loam and woodsmoke permeating the fabric. "At any rate, this does put me in a bit of trouble. I am a long way from my tent."
"Would you like me to accompany you back to camp?"
You let out a quiet chuckle, probably giving him a more affectionate look than you mean to. In a voice sweet as honey, you say, "I'm flattered, Ser, but I don't believe that walking through camp on the arm of a knight, dressed in nothing but his cloak, would reflect well on my reputation. I'm afraid I'm stuck here, unless I find some way to steal another change of clothes from someone else."
His head tilted down, he appears lost in thought. You stare boldly up into his face while he isn't paying attention, just simply… admiring him. How have you never seen him before? He looms over you, seemingly cut from marble and brought alive by sunlight. It's humbling, how lovely he is, even without all his chivalry.
Then, he snaps his gaze up to your face. "You could stay here, just for tonight. I'll keep you safe 'til morning, and then I can send my squire to fetch you some clothes from camp. No one need see you, my lady."
"Other than yourself, of course."
He closes his mouth swiftly, flushing red and looking away. You smile to yourself, having to hold yourself back from reaching out towards him.
"I only jest, Ser," you whisper conspiratorially. "I already told you, I don't mind if you see me."
"Right." He laughs weakly, still flustered. "I… I'll alert my squire, then?"
"Yes, I would be glad of it." You step back, trying not to trip on the frayed ends of his cloak. "I thank you for your kindness, Ser Duncan. You're a good man."
"Aye, well… thank you. My lady." He stares at you for a long time, and then seems to remember himself. "Ah… stay— stay here, and, ehm. I'll be back." He turns to leave, and then thinks better of it and turns the other way, before tromping back through the grass the way he originally came.
"Ser Duncan?" You call, just before he disappears from sight. When he turns, looking at you expectantly, you give him a sweet smile. "You're beautiful, too. By the gods."
You feel inordinately proud of yourself when he goes red up to his ears.
Dunk is fucked.
He spends a long time beating his head against a tree trunk. You know, for posterity.
He doesn't know what he's doing. Oh gods, he has no fucking idea. All he knows is that it's a terrible trick to play on a lady, to steal her clothes while she's vulnerable and leave her stranded. He doesn't even know if you're a lady of noble birth— you could be a bar maid, or from one of the brothels, for all he knows. It doesn't matter to him. Dunk would never say no to anyone in trouble, let alone anyone as beautiful as you. And you are. What was he supposed to do? You came out of the water like a vision, as splendid as a water nymph or a goddess. You took his breath away without even trying.
So. Dunk doesn't know how he's going to survive this. He probably won't.
"Egg?" Dunk rears back from the tree, wiping his nose on the back of his sleeve and shaking his head. He might throw up from his nerves, but it wouldn't be the first time.
"Ser!" He hears the boy's tiny feet pattering along dirt path as he answers Dunk's call. Egg rounds the tree Dunk leans against, staring unseeing into the creek as the sun sets over the horizon. Egg pauses, standing with something clutched in his hands as he looks up at Dunk. "Are you well, Ser?"
"Ehm. Not sure, really." Dunk glances at the boy. "What… do you have, there?"
Egg holds it up— it's a bird. The little thing squirms in Egg's grip, and then blinks up at Dunk placidly. "Pigeon. Fell out of a tree, I think. I didn't want to leave it."
"Right." Dunk blinks, sucking on his teeth as he tries to think of a way to explain the situation. "Look, lad. I, eh, have matters to attend tonight. In a wee bit of a bind."
"Do you need help, Ser?"
"Well." Dunk tilts his head back and forth. "I— It's not me, really." Dunk sighs and flexes his shoulders, straightening his spine. "There's a lady will be sleeping with me under the elm, for tonight."
"Oh… oh." Egg hums, wiggling his blond eyebrows mockingly at Dunk.
"D'you want a clout in the ear?" Egg doesn't even flinch at the faux severity in Dunk's voice; he simply cradles the baby pigeon close to his chest and pets its head. Dunk sighs, trying not to show how hard he's blushing. "She's… the lady, she was bathing in the creek, and now… she doesn't have any clothes, see."
"She doesn't have clothes?" Egg echoes, screwing up his face.
"Aye, someone took them, it seems." A look of realization crosses Egg's face, but Dunk doesn't give him a second to respond. "And she can't be expected to walk into camp with no clothes on her back, because plenty of men would take advantage, and— and her reputation would be ruined, o' course."
"Of course." Egg frowns. "Ser, I wanted to tell you, I found some clothes—"
"So." Dunk swallows, nodding to himself resolutely and shooting Egg a silencing look. "So, what you'll do is take Thunder and Chestnut— and your bird— and you'll go sleep across the meadow. And you'll go to camp and fetch the lady some clothes on the morn. Is that clear?"
"But Ser—"
"No buts." He points one large, stern finger at the boy. "I'll hear none of that from you. There's a lady needs help, and you best not argue about it. We're meant to protect people in need, not turn them away."
Egg blinks his big violet eyes at Dunk, his mouth on sideways. "Is she pretty, Ser?"
"What?" Dunk does a double-take. He blusters like mad. "What matter is that of yours?"
"Well, it would just make sense, is all." Egg rocks on his feet. "Pretty girl in need of clothes, and a knight willing to defend her. Like they wrote about in the stories. Is she?"
Dunk sighs, knocking his head back against the tree in defeat. "Aye. She's a true beauty, so she is. But I'll hear nothing of it, now. Begone with you. And take the horses."
Egg looks as though he has more arguments to make, but saves them. His mouth ticks upwards, and then he turns, cooing down at the baby bird in his hands as he wanders off down the path. "Have a good night, Ser."
"Shut it."
Dunk bends down and braces his hands on his knees, trying to even out his breath. He takes a long, deep inhale, leaning into the breeze as if it can cleanse him. He's terrified. He's never been good with women, and you've already unraveled him, taken him completely by surprise.
He can't get the image of you, naked as the day you were born, water dripping over the curve of your breast and down across your belly from his mind. That very water drying on the linen of his cloak, wrapped around your body as you wait for him somewhere down the meadow path.
"Fuuuuck me." He drags his hands down his face. There's a place in the seven hells for him somewhere, he's sure.
He's going to die.
"Ser Duncan." He finds you in the glade, still wrapped in his cloak. You've started a small fire in the rudimentary pit near the elm tree. You smile up at him, glowing in the light of the flames, and Dunk temporarily forgets where he is. "I almost began to think that you'd left me."
"Never, my lady." He rests his sword against the trunk of the tree. "And… it's Dunk."
"… Sorry?"
"My— er, my name." He swallows, looking sort of like he wants to crawl into a hole and die. "Most people call me Dunk."
"Okay. Dunk." You smirk, endlessly charmed by him. Your hand drifts over the thin linen of his cloak on your shoulder, fretting about a threadbare spot. "I could mend this for you, if you'd like?"
"Thank you, but, ehm… that isn't necessary." He blinks, the corner of his mouth turning upward. "I do most of my own mending."
"You did these?" You fiddle with a few mended patches on the edges, where he has darned them with green thread. It's been done with very immense care; the weave is tight and strong. "This is lovely work. Where did you learn to do it?"
"Aye, well… I had a lot of time for practice, squiring for Ser Arlan of Pennytree."
"You have a delicate hand," you remark, and look up at him just in time to see him blush a pretty shade of pink. "Still, I think it's the least I could do, for you being so kind to me."
"M'lady, that's… you don't have to do anything." He tilts his head toward you. "I'm just glad of your company."
That makes your heart stutter in your chest. You blink down at the fire, not really seeing it at all. You search for something to say in reply, but you can't think of anything; you look back up at him with what you're sure is an adoring smile. "Will you please sit with me? Or am I to enjoy the fire alone?"
Dunk gives you a wobbly smile and sits beside the fire. He can't move on from the sight of you in his cloak— you've pulled it around you like a blanket, tucking it under your chin while you hug your knees to your chest. You're spellbinding, so small and swathed in orange fire and silvery moonlight, and Dunk can't help imagining you in ways that he ought not to. He imagines you sharing a bed with him in an inn, or tending a flock of sheep on a farm, with his babe in your arms.
Dunk clears his throat. "You look—" He stops as soon as you gaze up at him, an expectant gleam in your eyes. He was going to say 'good,' which is probably not the most proper thing to say to a lady, wearing naught but his cloak. So he swallows and says, "comfortable."
"Considering the circumstances, I suppose." You laugh. It twinkles like stars in the night. "Pleasurable company, good ale and warm tents… I guess I can see why you knights love these tourneys so much."
"Aye, it's not so bad. Though, I'm only a hedge knight. There's food and drink, a chance for a prize, but… we don't do much with tents. Can't afford one, really."
"I can't see how that would be much of a problem. I mean, maybe you get cold or wet sometimes, but… I think you're the fortunate one." You peer up at the stars, tilting your nose toward the sky. "A view of the infinite. It's good for you. Reminds you to stay grounded." You give him a look over the campfire; his blue eyes catch the flames and dance with them. "Have you jousted, yet?"
"Not yet, my lady. I hope to on the 'morrow." He shrugs. "At his lordship's pleasure, of course."
"Of course." You wink at him. "The lord does love to watch men knocking poles about, I hear."
"I guess," Dunk replies quietly, a blush upon his cheeks. He squirms under your scrutiny, and then to fill the silence, he says, "I… told my squire to fetch you some clothes, come morning. Let him know not to come 'round."
"I hope he wasn't too put out," you hum, picking up a stick to nudge the embers. "I'd hate to know I ruined his night."
Dunk shakes his head. "Nah, he's a good boy. He can take care of himself. Doesn't fuss about much."
"Mm, so you do all the fussing, instead."
"Me?" His eyes go round as saucers. "No— no, I don't— I don't fuss… not really…"
You peer up at him through your lashes, a devilish smirk plucking at the corners of your lips. Dunk's heart starts to beat faster— he knows that look. You're going to do something to completely unmoor him, and he'll eat his words as quickly as he says them.
True to form, you shrug his cloak aside and expose your chest. Dunk stares for a moment at your breasts, feels his face warm just at the sight of them— their soft curves, the peaks of your nipples in the cool night air. He takes a staggering breath and turns his eyes away when he feels his cock stir, his trousers tightening uncomfortably.
You huff a little laugh that makes him flush even redder. "See? Fussy."
"Must you be so… so wicked?" He mutters, casting you a despairing look.
"Wicked? No, darling, this isn't me being wicked." You tilt your head at him coyly. "This is me trying to fuck you. There's a difference."
"What?" That seems to rattle him even more. He stares at you, utterly bewildered. "Wh— you want to— why?"
"Why?"
You give him eyes like you want to ravish him where he sits, and by the gods, Dunk thinks he might let you. He shifts in his seat, believing that he might let you do anything that you want to him, if you just keep looking at him like that. But then you lower your knees and rock forward, crawling around the fire like an animal stalking its prey, and Dunk is so painfully hard it doesn't even occur to him to move away. He doesn't want to.
"Because you're beautiful," you tell him slowly, easing toward him on all fours. You watch him trailing you with his eyes, his jaw clenching and unclenching as you inch closer to him. "Because you are… so exceedingly wonderful, Ser Duncan. A good man is hard to find, these days."
"'S D—Dunk," he stutters, nearly jumping out of his skin when you crawl into his lap. His hands fly up of their own accord and snatch onto your hips, and his heart lurches at the feel of you, soft and hot beneath his fingertips.
"Ser Dunk. My apologies."
You smile at him, straddling him while untying his cloak from around your neck and letting it fall by the wayside. For all your bravado, you nearly tremble at just how imposingly big he is; your hand looks comedically small against his chest, your thighs parted unbelievably far to accomodate the width of his own. Still, you drag your hand down, down, down, until you palm him through his trousers— and then bite your lip as he hisses, jerking against you.
"Well," you gasp, trying not to gape at the size you feel beneath your hand. "A hard man is good to find, though. Isn't that right?"
"M—My lady, please—" He gazes at you wide-eyed, his lips parted. He digs his fingers into your hips so hard that you swear he might rip you in two.
"Please, what?" You lift your hand away and trail your fingers back up his stomach to his chest. "Want me to stop?"
"No. Please, don't—" He sighs, almost defeatedly, and closes his eyes. "Don't stop."
Still, you pause. You lift your hands and cradle his face, waiting for him to blink his eyes open and look at you. You stroke a lock of hair away from his forehead, and his brow knits in confusion.
"You must be the loveliest thing in all the nine kingdoms, Ser Dunk," you whisper to him, not even bothering to conceal the awe in your voice. "The gods must have made you, because I think you're too… bloody perfect."
"Me?" He takes a small, astounded breath, and then cracks a slightly humorous smile in spite of his nerves. He quirks a brow. "Shall I send for a looking-glass for you, as well?"
"Charmer." You trace your thumb across his lower lip and watch his eyelashes flutter. "You don't get many women throwing themselves at you, do you?"
"Not— Not really. No."
"Gods know why. You're really something to behold." You drag your knuckles down his cheek, bending forward to crush your chest up against his. You didn't expect him to be lecherous, but he's so tentative, you guess that he must be grievously inexperienced— possibly even a virgin. You can desire him, hunt him like some deranged beast, but you don't want to frighten him. "Mind if I throw myself at you?"
Dunk shakes his head, but leans forward and kisses you before he can say anything else. His arms come around you, wrapping you in an embrace that all but engulfs you. You are surrounded by warmth, and his lips taste like sweet spiced mead.
He breaks away from the kiss with a sharp gasp and stares down into your face with a mildly terrified expression. "'Pologies. Needed to do that 'fore I— I said something stupid."
You grin, leaning close to nuzzle your nose against his. "Never apologize for a kiss, Ser Dunk. You can have as many as you want, from me."
There's a bright pink blush beneath the freckles on his cheeks and his dimples when he cracks a smile. Dunk clears his throat, feigning composure. "Do you want to, uh… y'know…?"
"Fuck?"
"Yes, that." He laughs nervously. "What— what would you like me to do—?"
You hum in a low voice, reaching down to take one of his hands in yours. His palm dwarfs your own; the comparison of the two is enough to make you ache with want. He watches you closely as you lift his hand towards you, looking somewhat confused. That is, until you run your tongue along the length of his two fingers and take them into your mouth, and his confusion is rewritten into complete shock.
"My lady." Dunk blinks rapidly, speaking with a slightly chastising tone. That was the last thing he expected you to do, and it somehow feels more debased than having you sit on his lap entirely naked. His fingers come out of your mouth covered with your saliva, glistening in the light of the fire.
"No need to fret, Ser. I can guide you." You already sound a little breathy, the look in your eyes much darker than before. You drag his hand down between your breasts, his two fingers trailing wet along your skin. You lead him downwards until his fingers brush through your soft curls, while the breadth of his warm palm flattens over your lower stomach.
Dunk's breath hitches and his mouth drops open the moment his fingers dip into the soaking heat of your pussy, and a shudder flows through your body. A wrecked moan leaves you, your thighs trembling on either side of his hips from the single touch.
"Feel what you do to me?" You ask him, snatching onto his shoulder to prevent yourself from simply jamming yourself down onto his hand with your full weight. It's overwhelming— the warmth of his touch and the pressure of his naked skin on you, even if it's just a hand, a finger.
"Y—You feel—" Dunk sucks in air through his teeth, his eyes flicking frantically from your face to where his hand dips further between your legs, his fingers gliding through your wetness. The touch is intimate, exploratory. "Seven hells, you feel unreal."
"Oh, I'm very real." You cover his hand with your own— or, you try. You have to spread your fingers wide to even approximate the width and placement of his own. "Want me to show you how?"
He gives you the briefest little nod, like if he moves too far in any way you might disappear. You wrap your thumb and pinkie around the edges of his hand, lining up your two fingers with his own.
"It's not unlike shining a blade," you tell him softly, beginning to move his fingers with yours, rocking your hips as you do. "You keep— keep this amount of pressure. And you just move back… and forth… just like that."
Dunk's eyes widen at the sound of your moan, his entire body feeling as though it's filled with fire. The Targaryens might believe themselves to be dragons, but Dunk is sure that in this moment, he must be turning into one. Everything feels too hot beneath his collar, as though his skin might melt away and flay him bare. "How— How does it feel?"
You shiver, a smile curling at your lips. He's still so eager to please, even now. "Feels good. But it can feel better."
"Show me."
You swallow past the thickness in your throat, lifting his hand just the tiniest bit. "There's a spot on every woman— it's a… a sweet spot. You focus on it, and she'll sing to the heavens."
"Will you sing, my lady?" Dunk's deep voice is so much lower than you've heard it yet. He watches everything you do so closely, his free hand pressing into your lower spine to keep you steady, holding you fast against the hand that you guide between your legs.
"I will if you make me. If you focus… here." And you guide the calloused pads of his fingers over your clit.
Hot pleasure sweeps through you at the touch, making you gasp aloud. He keeps up the pressure and the movement that you've shown him, feels the swollen hardness of your clit and stays there. His pupils are so wide they nearly cover the beautiful azure of his irises, becoming two black mirrors to reflect the fire.
"Is that it?" Dunk's eyes are locked on yours, and you whine, hips twitching toward his touch. Something passes over his face— be it possession or resolution, you can't be sure. But his jaw sets and he adjusts the pressure of his fingers as he dips his fingers down to collect some of your wetness, and brings it back up to your clit. When you keen loudly, he hums, "Mm. There."
You nod, your hand slipping against his. It seems like you don't need to guide him anymore, but you keep it there anyway, just to feel the way that his knuckles tense and release, to feel the warmth against your own palm.
"Gods above, Dunk," you gasp, nearly launching forward into his chest when he traces a circle around your clit. You close your eyes, swallowing a sob. "You don't— don't need my help."
"I want it," he urges, his mouth watering at the sounds of the breathy moans that fall from your lips. His fingers never stop moving, even when he adds, "Want to hear you sing for me, m'lady."
You whimper and push on his hand, moving him downwards. Dunk follows your directions, letting you guide him, until his fingertips catch on your entrance. Without any further instruction, Dunk prods inside. The stretch to accommodate him is immense, even just with his two fingers.
Dunk is in agony. His cock is straining in his trousers, throbbing unbelievably hard at the smell of you, the feel of you, every gasp and moan that falls from your lips. Still, he grits his teeth, and he ignores it. His voice a quiet rasp held tight in his throat, he asks, "And now?"
You blink your eyes open, feeling yourself beginning to unravel at the seams. "Dunk…" You take a deep, sobering inhale, while he gazes at you like you hung the stars in the sky. "Shine your blade."
Dunk's lashes flutter, his breath still coming out in little pants between his lips, but he does as you tell him. He crooks his fingers just the way you showed him how, and the entire fucking world shatters.
With a cry of his name, you fling your arms around his neck. It's so abrupt— enough to make him falter and hug you to him with one arm, his big hand cradling the nape of your neck. The other has gone still, while he listens to you gasp and lets you press your forehead against his cheek.
"Have I—" Dunk turns his head a bit, wanting to look at you, but unable to. He murmurs your name, and you shiver in his arms. "Did I hurt yo—?"
"No." You're shaking your head before he can even finish the question, gripping at the ends of his shaggy hair. "No, Dunk, it's so— you— you're just so good."
He huffs a little sigh of relief, and feel him smile as his hold on your shoulder loosens just slightly. "You make it easy."
You shift your hips, and Dunk feels your lips drag against his cheek. He's almost scared to let you go, now, and strokes his thumb over the back of your neck just to soothe you. But then you whisper, "Don't stop," and he doesn't want to deny you.
His fingers slide into your hair, feeling it slip soft through his fingers as he holds you to him. Testing, he moves his fingers again, flexing them within you just to hear you gasp and feel you squirm against him. That same fire blooms in him, creeping up the back of his neck and deep into his chest— the fire that makes him dare to feel like the dragonborn— and he thinks that he may hold you for as long as you like. For as long as he can.
Moaning his name against his skin, you seek out his lips, turning your head just to capture him in an open-mouthed, desperate kiss. Dunk makes a noise of surprise, but keeps up his movements, plunging his fingers in and out and stroking you from the inside, feeling each pulse and flutter of your core like a punch to his gut.
He curves his fingers a particular way that sends a wave of euphoria shooting up your spine, and you moan pathetically loud into his open mouth. Dunk seems shocked by it, pausing for half a second, before doing it again, just to hear you keen.
"You do sing very pretty for me," Dunk murmurs against your lips.
The sound of his voice in that low register— like soft rolling thunder— does things to you that you never even thought possible. It bores a hole through you, melts everything within you. Then he grinds the meat of his palm up against your clit, and all your muscles seize up.
"Seven fuck— Dunk." You feel around for something else to grab onto, but only get his shoulder, his hair, his bicep. Your breath hitches, and then you cum with his name falling from your tongue, your hips bucking into his hand. Dunk marvels at the feeling of you spasming around his fingers, the flood of wetness that drips from you and coats his skin.
You hear him breathe your name. It sounds so sweet coming from him, a reverent prayer spoken in the night. Still trembling, you open your eyes to find that you've shifted— you've somehow lifted yourself with your hands on his shoulders, and his spine has bowed into an arc beneath your hold. You look down at him. Dunk looks up at you, like he's glimpsing the divine in your very face.
"Did you come off just then, my lady?" It's a quiet, almost too innocent question for the way that he's looking at you— like he could throw you to the ground and completely decimate you, if he was a little less controlled, a little less staunch in his respect for you.
"You know very well that I did, Ser." Your chest still heaves with the effort of your breathing.
His eyes flick down to your lips, then back up. "D'you think I could make you do that if I put my mouth on you, too?"
Your mind reels around that. Dunk gazes at you with open hunger, flushed and almost as out of breath as you. The sight makes you dizzy.
"I'm sure that you could," you tell him. You hold the sides of his throat, tracing the line of his jaw with your thumbs. "But I want you too much right now. Must I beg you to take that beast out of your pants? Or will you leave me wanting?"
The thought of leaving you wanting for anything is enough to make Dunk balk. He withdraws his hand from you, and with it comes a dreadful absence, an ache where pressure should be. Instinctively, you want him back, carressing you and filling you as he had been, but he moves to untie his trousers.
"If I were a more noble man, I would lay you down in furs, as you deserve," Dunk confides in you, a touch of insecurity lacing his tone. "But I am only a hedge knight— all I can offer you is the tall grass."
"Then I'll be glad to have you in the tall grass," you say, feeling his pulse jump beneath your fingertips. "I don't want furs, I want you."
Impatient now, you reach down to untie his trousers yourself, and—
Well.
"Seven fucking hells, Dunk."
Gods above, he's going to die. He's going to die, you're going to kill him and it won't even be in combat. "What?"
You stare down at his cock, and feel the barest inklings of fear creeping in. You'd known just from the size of him and the barest touch through his clothes that he'd be big, but this… It's glorious. Thick and long, with a flushed red tip dripping with precum. He looks painfully hard, and the weight of it nearly drags it downwards.
"Nothing in the entire world needs to be this big."
The tips of his ears redden. "Well, I—I'm quite large—"
"Yes, I know that. I know that very well, indeed. You're magnificent." You chew on your lip, feasting your eyes upon it for a moment. With the lightest touch, you trace one finger up the vein that runs along the underside of his shaft. Dunk gasps and twitches against you. "Mm. I can take it."
There is a concerning amount of resolution in your tone, as you shift your hips and hover over him. He snatches at your waist, practically holding you aloft without even trying. His eyes wide, he blurts, "M'lady, don't hurt yourself—"
"Shh. I do what I want. Right now, that's you." You lift your hips, lining him up where you want him. "Don't fuss."
"M'not fu—UCK!" Dunk growls the curse with his eyes closed tight. The head of his cock is engulfed in the sweet, excruciating heat of your pussy. He bares his teeth as he grits out, "Oh, fuuuck me."
"Mhm." You gasp, pausing and trying to acclimate to the stretch. Fuck, he's enormous. You rock your hips and try to shift your weight, adjusting to take more of him, despite the pain of the stretch.
Dunk squeezes at your waist, fingers digging into the curve of your back. You lift up and sink down again, slipping down further, and he's sure he's done for. He's sure that you could cut out his heart with a dinner knife, and he might thank you for it. He hangs his head, resting his forehead against yours. "You feel like heaven. I kn— I knew you would."
He groans softly as you seat yourself finally with one achingly slow push of your hips. It nearly knocks the breath out of your lungs, feeling him hit the end of you. He grinds up into you, not wanting to be rough, but gods. Each move, each small breath that falls from your lips against his feels like a dream.
"Told you I could take it," you whisper brokenly. You sound just about wrecked, your fingers tangling in his hair as you rock against him. It burns in the best way, stretching you so wonderfully, filling you to the brim. A pleasant tingling slinks up your spine. "You fit me perfectly, my knight."
The fire crackles. Somewhere across the creek, crickets sing in the brush. Perhaps back in the camp, lovers roll as one in the solitude and warmth of tents, but here in the glade you seat yourself upon the hedge knight, guiding him with one hand to squeeze at your breast, and you would not trade the night air for any tent or pillowed furs in the world. Be it rough, be it dirty and perhaps a bit animalistic, it is only as you want it to be.
Dunk's nostrils flare as he uses one arm to haul you up, lifting you like it's nothing, and he lays you down in the grass. Your head hits the wide palm of his hand, protecting you from knocking your head against the ground. And he slides back into you with one fluid motion, filling you again and making your toes curl. He groans obscenely loud, his eyes fluttering shut as he braces one enormous forearm against the ground beside your head.
You arch against him, his name caught in your throat as you clutch at his shoulders and neck. He looms over you, hulking and godly, and desire bubbles up like a torrent in your throat. Your eyebrows tilt upwards in earnest.
He makes you feel so small. Cages you in the shelter of his arms, keeps his weight from crushing you— but presses his warm chest to yours, so that your sensitive nipples scrape against the rough linen of his tunic. Your hands cup his shoulders, nails scratching at the fabric keeping you from feeling his skin.
"Dunk, please—" you hiccup, squeezing at the muscles beneath his shirt.
"What is it, sweet girl?" There is an edge to his voice hinting at desperation. Dunk thinks that he would give you anything you want. Money, fame, a life of beauty and devotion. There's no coming back. He would do anything that you ask, if only to stay in this feeling forever. Breathing in your air, feeling you quiver and tremble as you grind your hips against his.
You tighten your fists in the fabric of his shirt, bunching it up to tug at it. "Off."
Dunk plants his hips flush against yours, so deep that you can feel him in your throat. He dips his head and lets you pull at the fabric of his shirt, until it slips down his arms and his overheated skin meets the cool night air. Your hands glide along his strong biceps, smooth over the curves of his shoulders and down his chest.
"Kiss me," you breathe. "Dunk, kiss me—"
You gasp when he snatches you by the waist and lifts you, rocking back on his knees to seat you in his lap. Crushed up against his broad chest, you wrap your arms around his neck and push yourself down onto his cock, as far as he can go, moaning as he hits heaven up inside you. The coarse hair at the base of his cock grinds sharply against your clit, sending sparks of hot pleasure coursing through your veins.
Mouth open, he breathes in small, quick pants as he smoothes your hair away from your face, his large hand cradling your cheek. It's a tender touch, even while you feel like he could tear you to shreds from the inside out. You push your face into his palm, turning to pepper the breadth of his hand with kisses.
"Kiss me, please," you beg him again, and Dunk pulls you towards him, meeting you with a hot, open mouthed kiss. It sears you, makes you whimper onto his tongue.
"My lady," Dunk groans, tilting his head just slightly where it rests against yours. "I will not last."
"Then don't," you tell him. "And I'll love you a dozen more times before the night is out."
And then, so fast it's as though he's following your orders to the letter, he cums. Moaning as he jerks his hips up into yours, he shoves himself deep and cums so long and hard that he swears he sees stars behind his darkened eyelids. A ragged gasp tears from his throat while his hips twich and buck up into yours, muscles flexing and nearly throwing him off-balance.
Dunk blinks open his eyes, gazing at you with his brow furrowed in consternation. "But you— you didn't—"
You shush him, taking his hand to guide it between your legs. "Remember what I told you?"
Dunk hums, flicking his gaze downwards. His throat jumps when his fingers brush through your wet curls. "Yes, m'lady."
His breath catches in his throat when he touches your clit, and he feels you clench down on him. Oversensitive as he is, he doesn't think to pull out or refuse you— he stays there, deep in the heat of you, while he strokes you the way you showed him before.
With a feeble noise, you cant your hips further toward his hand. A pleased hum tears from your lips. "You learn fast, my knight."
Dunk blushes. It's the first time anyone has told him that. "I want to please you."
"You do," you whisper, holding his face in the cradle of your small hands. "You please me so well, Dunk."
The evidence of your words burns in your core, wound up more and more by the movement of his fingers over your clit. You rock against him and hear his slight hiss of breath, and you know that it won't be long. Your thighs twitch and your fingers dance through his hair while your breath mingles with his, washing over your skin.
Then your muscles clamp down tight as your orgasm washes over you, and Dunk nearly chokes at the feeling. "Oh, fuck," he grits out, feeling you pulse on his cock, clenching around him so hard that his eyes nearly roll back in his head. "Ah, gods above—"
It burns through you like fire, enveloping you in its grasp. You collapse against Dunk's warm chest, resting your head on his shoulder. As you tremble through the aftershocks, you giggle weakly, biting your lip when the feeling has him moaning again. You hum, sighing as you come down. "Beautiful thing, is it not?"
"Yes, you are," he chuckles, breathless. He meets your eye with a pleading, starry look. He traces his fingers down your spine, reveling in the warmth and softness of your body. "I would— I think I would like to, again…"
"Let me give you some respite, first." You lift off of him, hissing as he leaves you achingly empty. He squeezes at your hips, his fingers pressing into your lower back as he keeps you steady. You press a kiss to his lips, tasting the salt of his sweat on his skin. "Have some ale, my love. We'll go again when you're ready."
Dunk clears his throat, nodding. "Yes, my lady."
"And Dunk… take off your pants, this time?"
"…Yes, my lady."
In the morning, you rouse from beneath the shelter of Dunk's cloak, and find a pile of clothes set out on the wall that separates the glade from the meadow. You stare at it for a moment, recognizing the jewel toned embroidery on the dress, the tanned leather of the shoes. Beside you, Dunk shifts, pulling you closer by the hip. He'd put his clothes back on in the night, right before he swaddled you again in his cloak, preferring not to insense his squire whenever the boy came round.
"Dunk," you murmur, nudging him in the shoulder.
"Mmph."
"I thought you said you didn't know what happened to my clothes."
"I know not, m'lady," he slurs tiredly.
"Right." You click your tongue. "But it appears that your squire did."
Dunk's eyes fly open, giving you a wide, bright blue stare. You tilt your head at him, a smirk stretching across your face as you nod towards your missing clothes, perched on the wall. He looks at the pile of clothes for a moment, blinking sleep out of his eyes. And then, he screws up his face as something Egg said comes back to him.
"Seven fucks." Dunk scrambles up, remembering Egg's insistent and earnest face when he'd been silenced.
contents (nsfw): Ser Duncan The Tall x fem!widow!reader, switching POVs (indicated with dividers), attempt at humour, Duncan is a big lad, protective!Dunk (of like... kids and virtue and stuff), soft!Dunk, mutual pining, dirty thoughts, voyeurism, need to be quiet, finger sucking, grinding, dry humping, coming in pants.
synopsis: Tournament season brings Ser Duncan the Tall to Bitterbridge and to a household where a young widow is dying of boredom. Soon enough, simply looking at one another proves insufficient.
word count: 12,9K (sorry, the concept of moderation is alien to me)
a/n: Banner is by me, dividers by @strangergraphics! Genuinely floored by the reception of earlier Dunk fics, thank you so much guys!
Boredom is death to the mind. It must be kept in motion, twisted, fretted, stretched thin as gut on a frame, lest it go soft and begins to rot. You feel yours doing just that, worn down by the holy sameness of country days. Walk out. Read a page. Feed the hens. Skim the milk. Sweep the rushes. Kiss scraped knees. Admire beetles. Let one child hang from your skirts while another screams for honey-cakes and a third comes running to show you a frog as if you have never seen a frog before in all your born days.
Your sister means kindly by it. She does. Her invitation had all the look of family affection and all the substance of pity besides—come stay with us awhile, come out of that lonely house, come be amongst noise and life, as though noise and life were sovereign cures for widowhood.
And perhaps they are for some women. Perhaps some woman, not yet a year bereft, would be glad enough to clap eyes on the nearest decent man, let him grunt his way over her, and set to breeding by way of proof that the world had not ended. That has never been your method.
Life has had the indecency to go on this past year. That is the trouble. It goes on in your own lonely house, and it goes on here, in your sister’s bustling one, with a cow to be milked and a kettle to be watched and small sticky hands forever catching at your sleeves, while every soul about you peers on as if waiting for you to remember your proper business and take another husband. In the meanwhile the plain truth is that the countryside is dull enough to drive a woman to gnaw her own hand for want of diversion, if only to see what might happen next.
Before your teeth reach the tendon, though, Bitterbridge answers. It gathers everything to itself: lordlings and lowborn, sellswords and cutthroats, the poor, the rich, the young, the old, the whores and the ones hot for them. Another tournament is proclaimed in honour of some spoiled highborn brat because she happens to be her father’s favourite daughter, and the town and its outskirts swell with ale, coin, filth, and horseshit.
Any breach in this boredom will serve. Any face but your sister’s—leg-spreader, Gods bless her, and lovingly said, though not without a pinch of envy—her kind-hearted husband’s, and those of her full-cheeked children might yet be your salvation. To walk streets bursting with life. To see blood running from men’s temples and lust bright on the faces of those who slip away by night to the makeshift brothel. To live vicariously through them might well save you from losing a hand after all.
What you are going to lose, beyond doubt, is either your sanity or your hearing, perhaps both, brought about by your sister’s piercing screech one morning. One of her offspring is lost. Unseen by his siblings the whole night past, likely wandered off into town to gape at knights and steal ale from the bottoms of half-drunk cups. A little hellion, that one. Curious and sweet in his own fashion, and by far the one nearest your heart.
“I’m taking the horse,” you tell your sister, shrugging into your cloak. “I’ll search the outskirts while Harlan searches the town.” She only stares at you, shaking. You cross to her, cup her face in both hands, and rest your brow to hers for a moment. “Be brave, my darling. We’ll find him.”
“What if he’s lost?” she whispers. “What if he’s taken, or split in half for disturbing a lord?”
Then you have four others still, you think first, sharp and ugly as a pin. “Nonsense,” you say. “What use would the Gods have for sweet little Pate, hm?”
“Gods? None.” She gives a weak little smile. “But I feel the Hells would take him gladly.”
You laugh at that, kiss her brow, fold her tight to you once, and then you are off.
First, you ride for the meadows where the contestants have pitched their camps. The horse you leave hitched beneath a willow, and the rest of the search you take on foot. You ask after Pate wherever there is a face to ask, though half the camp is too drunk, concussed, or both to trust their own names, much less a boy’s. The others tell you only that this is no place for a child alone, which you had gathered already. One man asks what it would cost to have your legs spread.
You smile at him sweetly. “I fear you have not coin enough for that, goodman.”
He is comely enough that, under other circumstances, you might have gone with him all the same. Being taken for a whore does not prick your pride half so much as perhaps it ought. There are worse things to be mistaken for, and you have another errand in hand. Still, the press of so many fine men in one place is enough to do a widow’s head in. You have not been touched in an age, and your body, faithless thing, seems minded to remind you of it now.
Then you hear your name, shrilled above the crush of voices spilling between the food stalls, trinket boards, and smiths’ tents. You turn, looking low first, towards the height of men’s thighs, and so it takes you a blink to find him.
Pate is not on the ground at all. He is perched high on a man’s shoulders, little legs dangling down the broad plane of his chest, both hands fisted in the man’s hair to keep himself steady.
“Aunt!” he cries, cheeks scored with clean tracks where tears have cut through the dust. “Ser Duncan—there’s my aunt!”
The knight turns at once, and the first thing that strikes you is his size. He is a mountain of a man, broad enough to block half the lane, with a face so open and kindly upon it that the whole effect goes strange. He glances at you almost fearfully, as if braced for a scolding for carrying off your sister’s child. The nearer you come, the bigger he seems. Your gut gives an odd little stir at the thought of trading places with Pate, of sitting astride those immense shoulders with your hands sunk in his hair. Then you come nearer still and are struck by the full offence of him.
Gods above, the man stinks.
Horse, old leather, sour sweat baked hard by the day’s sun, and something so thoroughly masculine and foul beneath it that your nose near gives up its office altogether. At this rate you shall end the morning with but one sense left to you, and it is fortunate that sight is proving such a useful one. For all his reek, the knight is a thing very well worth looking at.
“Beg pardon, m’lady,” the man says. “I found him wandering alone, crying—”
“I wasn’t crying!” Pate protests.
“I swear this to you, I was about to bring him home,” the knight says, all in a rush. His eyes are huge and honest, boyish in a way that sits almost absurdly on so large a frame. Pate has much the same look when caught at mischief.
You blink yourself back into the matter at hand. “I’ve no doubt of that,” you say, then tip your head further back to peer up at your nephew. “What did they feed you, little devil? You’ve grown rather tall overnight.”
You reach for the boy. He comes down from the knight’s shoulders into your arms, and nuzzles into you with a sweet little sigh. “Come. Your mother’s worried sick. Your father has gone all the way into town, and you know how much he hates that.”
Pate gives a small wet laugh against your neck. Harlan is a house beast through and through and holds that too much town air breeds wickedness by degrees. The man would sooner bed down with his pigs than pass a cheerful day amongst crowds.
“What’s this?” you ask when something warm touches the skin of your throat.
A sniffle. “Will he whip me?”
You put a hand to his back and rub. “There will be no whipping. No one whips children while I am here,” you say softly.
Then you turn back to the knight and find him gaping, caught at it beneath long lashes. “Thank you, er—”
“Dunk. Uh—” He checks himself, pulls out of his slouch, and for the space of a breath seems to grow even broader, as though the title is the only shape large enough to hold him. “Ser Duncan the Tall.”
“Thank you, Ser Duncan,” you say. “Come.” You beckon him closer, having already taken his measure well enough. “My sister will want to give you her thanks for finding this unruly little demon.”
“Oh, no, m’lady, there’s no need,” he says at once. “I could not take payment for doing what’s only right.”
You smile. “Have you comfortable lodging?”
That stops him. His silence answers plain enough.
“Come, Ser Duncan,” you say. “There is no shame in accepting gratitude. My family has not much, but we may at least offer you a warm meal and a bed for the night.” Your gaze slips over him once, slow and knowing. “And a bath.”
The blush that rises on him is so sudden and so violent it is all you can do not to laugh outright. It goes straight through the grime. Endearing is too small a word for it.
He ducks his head. “Beg pardon,” he mutters, then falters and says, “All right. I thank you for your kindness. I’ll only have to fetch my squire.”
“Fetch him, then. I’ll wait for you by the willow tree at the back entrance to the camp.”
Little Pate must have been awake all night, for he falls asleep almost at once when you settle him before you in the saddle. A ridiculous sight, his limbs gone loose and boneless in slumber, but a calming one all the same.
Within minutes the frame of Ser Duncan appears again, already ahorse, which only serves to make him seem larger still. Behind him, on a smaller mount, trots his squire, and your heart gives an odd little catch at the sight of him. He is no more than a boy—small for a squire, with eyes so large you can make out their colour even at a distance, and a bare head shiny as though he had only just come squalling into the world.
When they draw near, you mount carefully so as not to wake the nephew. “You are rather young—” you say to Ser Duncan’s squire, and see him brace at once for insult, “—to be so thoroughly cursed with baldness.”
His mouth quirks. He lets out a breath. In the voice of a child who has more wit in that bald head than is entirely proper, he says, “You are rather grown to be losing children.”
“Egg,” Duncan hisses. “Beg pardon, m’lady. He ought not say such things.”
“No harm done.” You lift a hand once to stay him. Then, to the boy: “‘Tis not my child that got lost. I have none.”
“And why is that?”
“Seven hells, Egg—” Duncan mutters, reddening under the dirt.
“My husband was taken by a fever before he had much chance to get about the business of begetting any,” you say, and leave it there.
You put your horse to motion to lead the way. As you pass Duncan, you murmur low enough for the boy not to hear, “Do not smack him. I do not mind it. Spend a day in my sister’s house and you will thank the Seven for putting a child with such a sharp tongue in your path.”
“He’s not my child, m’lady,” he says, plainly taken aback.
Thank the Gods. “He is a child all the same. And he is with you. And—” You glance over at him. “I am no lady. You may speak plainly.”
He nods a moment later, though not before his eyes make a slow and thorough passage over your face. It tells you that he means to keep calling you lady regardless. You do not much mind that either.
On the road home, where the town gives way to the tourney camps, you pass an inn that has turned bawdy for the festivities. Women in dresses scant enough to shame a summer day lean in the doorway and spill laughing onto the road; men half-laced and half-dressed stumble out after them, rumpled, red-eyed, and greasy with old drink. Hair hangs loose, bodices sit crooked, one fellow has his belt in hand and no visible haste to remedy the matter. You are glad Pate sleeps through it, cheek pillowed warm against your breast. Glad, too, for the discovery. It lies not far from the house—fifteen minutes on horseback at worst. Something to keep in mind, if only for a cup of ale and a look about the next time boredom drives you to the lip of madness. Or desperation.
Ser Duncan keeps his gaze fixed sternly ahead, all courtesy. Egg stares as any boy would, sharp as a magpie and twice as interested.
“Egg,” Duncan says under his breath, “it is not seemly to gape.”
“I am only looking,” says Egg. “I had thought eyes were for that.”
“They are not for staring at women.”
Egg considers this gravely. “Then it is a wonder you know so much of staring, ser.”
That draws a laugh out of you. The knight only keeps getting redder. Egg, seeing himself successful, sits a touch straighter in the saddle with the insufferable composure of a boy pleased by his own cleverness.
By the time you reach the house, your sister is already outside. The moment she sees Pate, she breaks into a run as though he had been missing a month rather than a night. You cannot help rolling your eyes, though your chest loosens at the sight of her. She reaches up the instant you rein in, lifting the boy from the saddle into her arms.
“You insolent fool,” she says first, fierce with repose. Then her hand goes over his head, over and over, smoothing and mussing his hair. “Are you in one piece, my love? What came into that little head of yours, hm? We have been worried sick.”
“Oh, he has been saved all right,” you say, swinging down from the horse. “By no less than a true knight. I have brought Ser Duncan to us in thanks.”
“Ser Duncan, is it?” your sister says, turning to him. She shifts Pate against her hip, then thrusts him at Harlan, who has come hurrying round the side of the house, and catches both of Duncan’s hands in hers. “Oh, ser, you must stay. You must. I am so grateful to you.”
Then, after one brief hitch of hesitation, gratitude gets the better of her. She steps forward and throws both arms awkwardly round his waist, sobbing once against him. You can see in real time the stench of him getting to her nostrils. “Thank the Seven for you,” she says on a held breath. “Such a good lad.”
Duncan starts as though struck, then lets out a startled laugh and folds his great arms about her with touching care, as if afraid he might break her by recognition alone.
When she pulls back, she pats his chest once, brisk and affectionate. “Forgive me. I am only glad.” Then she turns to Egg, all softness again. “And who are you, sweet thing? Would you like a honey-cake?”
Egg puts on the most counterfeit pout you have ever seen. “Very much so, mistress. I have not eaten a proper meal in half an age. Ser Duncan requires all the food in Westeros merely to remain upright.”
Your sister blinks once at that, glances up at Duncan’s immense frame, and nods with a vague little murmur of sympathy, as if this explains a great many things.
“Egg,” Duncan hisses in a tight whisper of warning.
You snort into your hand, wholly lost. Between the giant knight, his bald and insolent little squire, and your sister already bustling them toward the door, perhaps this is your salvation from death of the mind after all.
Dunk is having a day of it.
It begins at the lists, where a clerk with a neck like a suet pudding informs him that Ser Duncan the Tall may well be entered to joust three days hence, but Ser Duncan the Great Oaf most certainly is not. Egg, when hauled up by the shoulder and stared at, only says he had thought the man might enjoy a little wit to brighten his scratching. The man has not enjoyed it. The man has in fact grown firmer on the matter, insisting that names cannot simply be altered once set down, not without the steward’s leave, and that if Dunk means to be Ser Duncan the Tall then he ought to have named himself so in the first place.
“I did,” Dunk says.
The clerk sniffs. “Then you should not have sent a bald liar in your stead.”
So Dunk, already cross, sends Egg back to camp before he says something that earns them both a kicking. Camp, as ever, lies under a tree beside a little run of water, because Dunk likes shade and Egg likes grumbling about roots in his back, and both arrangements suit them well enough.
From there the day worsens by degrees. A drunken knight makes some jest at table—something about tall men and how little use they are once unhorsed—and Dunk, who does not understand which part is meant to be laughed at, keeps his mouth shut. That somehow proves worse than laughing wrong would have done. The man takes offence, calls him a thick cunt, and gives him a punch in the belly for good measure. Dunk lets him. Better a hard fist to the gut than a brawl that ends with somebody’s blood up and steel drawn. The blow hurts. The knight’s friends laugh. Dunk goes away hungry.
Then a little cutpurse makes bold enough to try his belt. Dunk catches the boy by the wrist easy as anything, silver safe where it belongs, but in turning too quick he plants one boot on slick ground and comes down square on his arse in a pile of horse dung so fresh it near steams.
By then he is tired clear through. He is not to ride in the lists for another three days. He stinks, more than usual. His pride has been handled roughly from several directions at once. So he goes to a stall for ale, sits on a bench in the shade, and thinks perhaps the day has spent its malice.
Then something wraps round his calf. Dunk startles and looks down. A boy, no more than four or five springs, has both arms round his leg and his face pressed into Dunk’s knee as if he means to hide there forever.
Dunk blinks. “Hallo.”
The child peeps up at him with a filthy face and eyes gone gummy from crying. “Don’t let him take me.”
Dunk looks over the table. Nobody in sight seems keen to take the boy anywhere. Men are drinking, shouting, pissing against fences, arguing over horses, and minding their own business poorly. The boy smells of sleep gone stale, old tears, and whatever sweet thing he has spilled down the front of himself sometime yesterday.
“Who?” Dunk asks.
The boy only clutches tighter.
Dunk drinks half his ale one-handed, hoping matters might explain themselves if given a moment. They do not. The child remains fixed to him like a burr. When coaxing gets nowhere, Dunk buys the boy a heel of bread. That earns him a name at last, spoken round a mouthful.
“Pate.”
“Right,” Dunk says. “And where’s your father?”
Pate shrugs.
“Your mother, then?”
Another shrug.
It takes the better part of the ale and two women passing by, both too hurried to help, before Dunk pieces together that Pate belongs somewhere out beyond the town, where the houses thin and the road runs out into kitchen plots, goat pens, and muddy little holdings. Near Bitterbridge, the boy says, which is no use at all because they are already near Bitterbridge. Then, after much prompting and a fresh bout of tears, he gets something about a sister, then another sister and a brother, and some more, and a house with pigs and hens and blue window frames.
That is how Dunk finds himself with a sleepy child on his shoulders trudging toward the outlying crofts beyond town because he cannot, in conscience, do anything else.
Pate, now that he has decided Dunk is safe, sits astride his neck as if born to it, small hands sunk in Dunk’s hair for balance, kicking his heels lightly against Dunk’s chest. Dunk keeps one hand clamped round a skinny leg and wonders whether all children change temper so quick, from terror to comfort and back again. He cannot remember what kind of boy he had been himself.
The day, having spent itself on lesser indignities, answers him at last with something stranger.
The boy’s kin is found. Dunk sees the woman who comes striding through the crowd and is struck by a feeling so swift and so enormous he scarcely has time to know it before it is gone: a foolish, piercing regret that Pate is not his own, if only so she might belong with him. Then the thing rights itself. You are no mother to the boy, only his aunt. Why that should ease anything in him Dunk could not say, yet it does. Something heavy shifts off the inside of his chest.
After that the fist to his belly feels like nothing much. You do not look made for tourney crowds and camp filth, and yet you move through both as if you can manage either well enough. There is nothing grand about you, nothing painted, but you are prettier than any lady he has seen ride by that day, and prettier than the women leaning from the inn doors. When you tip your face up at him, Dunk forgets to breathe. Then he does breathe, and remembers at once how badly he smells.
It gets worse after that. The way you take the boy down from his shoulders. The way you hold him easy, as if you have always had a place for frightened children. The hand on the boy’s back. Your voice when you soothe him. It does something soft to Dunk’s insides that he does not care to examine too closely. When you ask him in, he says no once because he feels he ought to. When you insist, he is glad of it.
The moment you are out of sight, he turns back quick for the tree by the stream where Egg is waiting.
Egg is crouched by their things, poking at the bank with a stick. He looks up as Dunk comes near. “You’ve been gone long enough. I was beginning to think the stream had swallowed you.”
“I’ve got us lodging for the night,” Dunk says. “Fetch the horses.”
Egg straightens. “Lodging? I thought a hedge knight required nothing but the open sky and a sore back.”
“I reckon you’re old enough to sleep under it by yourself, if you love it so much.”
Egg gives a small huff and goes to gather their few things. Dunk, in spite of himself, feels a grin begin under his nose.
“How did you come by this lodging, ser?” Egg asks, bundling up the blanket roll.
“A woman invited us.”
Egg pauses. “A woman.”
“I found her boy wandering and brought him back.”
“Ah,” Egg says. “So we are heroes.”
Dunk shrugs. “The family means to thank us with supper and a bed.”
Egg glances up at him. “And you accepted.”
“It would have been rude not to.”
“Yes,” says Egg, in a tone that means he is filing this away forever.
Dunk bends to tighten a strap that needs no tightening. “What?”
“Nothing, ser. Only, you are not commonly so eager to let women be kind to you.”
“She asked proper.”
“I do not doubt she did.”
Dunk frowns at him. “You’ve a deal to say for someone who’s meant to be packing.”
Egg’s mouth twitches. “What sort of woman is she?”
“A common woman.”
“That was plain from the tale. I meant what sort.”
Dunk opens his mouth, then finds he has no good answer to that which does not sound foolish. Egg waits. Dunk scowls. “She’s—” He stops, annoyed with himself. “Decent.”
Egg nods once, very solemn. “Ah. Curious.”
“There’s naught curious in it.”
“No, ser?” Eggs says. “Because when washerwomen smile at you, you turn pink and look for a hill to die behind. When innkeepers’ daughters offer you broth, you near choke to death refusing it. Yet now a woman asks you in and suddenly you are all courtesy and gratitude.”
Dunk busies himself with the saddle so the boy cannot see his face too plain. “She asked proper.”
“I am sure she did.”
“She did.”
Egg’s mouth twitches. “And is she ugly, then?”
That catches Dunk square. He lifts his head. “What?”
“It would explain a great deal.”
Dunk stares at him. Egg’s eyes go bright with malice. “She is not ugly,” Dunk says, too quick.
Egg lets the words sit between them a moment, warm as stolen bread. “Hm.”
Dunk knows he has said too much. “Get on your horse.”
Egg does, though with all the relish of a boy carrying a secret he means to turn over for pleasure later. They ride back at a fair pace, Dunk ahead and Egg just behind, the stream noise falling away as they rejoin the road. His stomach has begun to remember the promise of supper. His body remembers the promise of a bath better still. Worse than both is that his mind keeps running ahead to the willow tree, to the woman waiting there, to the quick look she gave him when she told him to come.
By the time they reach the meeting place, he has straightened himself three separate times to no profit. You wait with the sleeping child in your saddle, and mount up as soon as you spot them. Dunk feels the same strange knock inside his ribs as before.
Egg, seeing everything because he sees too much, makes a small thoughtful noise through his nose and says nothing at all, which is worse. Then, he speaks again and Duncan is lost as to which is more troublesome, Egg speaking or not speaking. Firstly, because his own squire has a way of making Duncan feel a fool besides a knight. Secondly, because the news of your widowhood, though it stirs pity in him, fills him with terrible gladness.
Soon enough he learns that Egg’s tongue ought to be cut out, for despite Dunk having given the insolent prince the last of his supper only the night before, Egg somehow manages to make him look a selfish brute before a family full of gratitude. You seem to enjoy it immensely, and it is only the sound of your laughter that makes any of the misery worth bearing.
The rest of the day also does not improve matters. It undoes him.
Dunk has known inns where a man gets his trencher slapped down and is meant to be grateful for whatever gristle lies on it. He has known halls where a hedge knight is fed last, watched all through, and left to wonder whether asking for more bread would see him turned out into the yard. He has known too many places where a man is tolerated so long as he keeps small.
This house knows none of that. Your sister heaps his plate as if his size were a challenge set to her by the Seven themselves. When he scrapes it clean, she asks whether he wants more, and her face says she hopes he does. He cannot remember the last time anybody looked pleased by his appetite.
The children take to him so fast it near makes his teeth ache. One hangs off his forearm. Another begs to be lifted. A third wants to see whether his hand is truly as big as a trencher. Dunk obliges them all, laughing like he’s a child himself, and when he lifts two at once and makes them squeal, the little ones look at him as if he has performed some feat finer than unhorsing a champion.
He catches you watching him from across the room, chin propped in your palm. The sight of it makes him believe The Seven themselves have made him go through all the morning torment so that he can be here now.
You drop your hand the moment you find him looking. A blink later, you look again.
Your eyes are very beautiful. So is your hair, though he has no proper words for hair beyond dark or fair or long, and yours defeats all three for usefulness. The house smells of stew and bread and rushes and children and the clean warmth that comes of many bodies under one roof, but beneath it all he can pick out you. He does not know how. He only knows he can. It keeps pulling his head your way like a hand at the back of his neck.
And he wonders. You are too young, he thinks, to be speaking of widowhood with that dry edge in your mouth. Too young to have such a settled bitterness in you already. Too pretty by half to be without a husband, and clever too, which may be the trouble. What sort of man had you had? What sort would you want now? Something finer than a hedge knight, surely. A man with land under him, perhaps, or silk on his back, or a name that means something when said aloud.
Not him.
Even so, when the children clamour for stories, he gives them stories. He tells them of roads gone white with dust in Dorne, of rain in the Reach, of a black boar that chased a knight up a tree and left him there till dawn. He drinks mead. He eats honey-cakes. He watches Egg, who at first stands apart pretending not to care, and then somehow finds himself drawn into a game with the younger boys using nutshells and pebbles for soldiers. The sight of him, bald head bent over so solemn a campaign, stirs a softness in Dunk he knows he will regret the next time the boy opens his mouth.
No matter. For a little while he lets the feeling stay.
Now and again he sees you turn at some sound from the road, some burst of laughter drifting in from beyond the yard, and a look passes over your face quick as a swallow’s shadow. Restlessness, maybe. Hunger of some sort. He cannot name it, but he sees it. You laugh with your sister, chide the children, fetch more bread, and all the while some part of you seems to be listening elsewhere.
By evening he is clean-fed, warm, and so unaccustomed to ease that it leaves him half-wary.
He has been shown to a little guest room with a bed better than any he has had in months. He stands in the middle of it with no notion what to do with his hands. The room smells of lavender and old wood. His own stink still clings to him despite the washbasin in the corner, because a basin is not a bath and there is only so much a man can do with a rag.
Then, comes a knock.
“Enter,” he says, and hears at once how stiff he sounds.
The door opens no more than a crack. You peer through with a candle cupped in one hand, the flame shivering behind your fingers in a little chamberstick. “Are you decent, Ser Duncan?”
He nearly chokes and folds his arms across himself though he is still fully clothed. “M-m’lady.”
“Hallo,” you say. The candlelight softens your face. “Supper’s near ready. And I told you already I am no lady, which I think you have gathered by now.”
“Beg pardon.” He ducks his head. The silence after seems to ask something more of him, so he snatches at the first thing that comes. “I—I am sorry. About Egg. What he said. And about your husband.”
You look at him a moment, quizzical, the corner of your mouth beginning to stir. “Are you truly sorry, or are you waiting for me to tell you time has passed and I am well enough now, so you may think yourself compassionate?”
“I—” He takes one helpless step forward and spreads his hands. “M’lady, I meant no—”
“I jest.”
Your smile widens. It shows your teeth. Fine lines gather at the corners of your eyes, and Dunk is struck by the want to put his mouth there, right there where your face folds with mirth. The thought is so sudden and so improper it leaves him stupid.
“Besides,” you say, “time has passed, and I am well enough. It was a marriage made for convenience. Poor luck that he died before I could come to love him. But thank you.”
Dunk stares, trying to set all that in order. He feels there ought to be something to say. Something wise, perhaps, or kind. He has none of it.
“I don’t know the right words,” he admits.
He is looking at his boots when you step closer, so he does not see your hand coming until it rests lightly on his forearm. He jumps as if burnt.
You chuckle under your breath. “You need not be so skittish, Ser Duncan. You are wanted here. You and your squire both. I am sure my sister would be glad to lodge you until the tournament ends.”
The candle flickers between you. Each small movement of the flame changes your mouth. Makes your eyes shine in a way that seems unearthly. Dunk can smell the soap on your skin, and something warmer under it that he has no name for and wants badly all the same.
“I could not put your family to such trouble,” he says. “I eat near as much as all the children together.”
“It is no trouble. It is an honour to host a knight.”
“H-honour. M’lad—” He swallows. “You flatter me. Needlessly. I am only a hedge knight.”
“A knight is a knight, Ser Duncan.” Your hand moves a little up his arm, no more than an inch, and stops there. He feels the place of it as if you had laid a coal against him. “I have prepared your bath,” you say.
He flushes hot. “Forgive me. For the stench. I—”
You laugh then, open and genuine, and not at him so much as at the whole miserable fact of his shame. “This house keeps hens, pigs, a barn full of beasts, and five little mongrels running underfoot. Do you think a man’s sweat will shock us?” Then you lower your voice. “And I have smelt worse on a man than on you. You make up for it elsewhere.”
Dunk’s head comes up. “What do you mean?”
“Only that you are kind,” you say. Your hand leaves him, and the loss of it is so immediate he hates himself for noticing. “And half-ashamed of it besides.” A pause. “Come, while the water is still warm. My sister found clean clothes for you as well.”
“That is much too kind. I cannot—”
“Oh, stop.” There is a smile in your mouth again. “You are not going to bathe and then drag horseshit breeches back on, are you? Harlan has a cousin near your size. They ought to sit on you well enough.”
Dunk lets out a breath that wants to be a laugh. “No,” he says. “I reckon not.” He looks at you because he cannot seem to stop. “Thank you,” he says. “Truly.”
Something changes in your face at that. Not much. Just enough for him to think you had expected another kind of man entirely.
Then you step back to the doorway. “The bath’s in the little room off the kitchen,” you say. “I’ll leave you to it.”
You go, and Dunk stands another moment in the middle of the chamber like the fool Egg says he is. Then he follows, because what else is there left to do.
By the time dusk settles proper, your mind feels raised from the dead.
Not only your mind. Other parts besides. Parts that have sat these past months like hinges gone bitter and unoiled, stiff with disuse, now creak with the force of wanting to move. All day you have found yourself staring at a great dirty fool of a man in your sister’s house as though he were a rare beast wandered in from the woods. Bigger than any doorway deserves. Goofy as a calf. Running with children dangling from him, making a giant child of himself for their delight, his whole face split with such open joy the dimples in his cheeks near end you. His teeth are uneven. They are beautiful. It pains you, absurdly, that they are not sunk somewhere on your body. He eats as if food were a thing meant in earnest, not pecked at and praised and left. There is pleasure in setting more before him and watching it vanish. Once jam runs from a cake down his chin and you have to hold yourself still with all your strength to keep from catching it with your finger and putting that finger in your own mouth in parody of a kiss.
He has woken something long asleep in you. Made want stir where want had sense enough to lie quiet.
When he lifts two of the children, one hanging from each forearm while they shriek with laughter, your throat goes hot and tight and the place between your thighs turns damp where you sit cross-legged by the hearth pretending to mend. After that there is nothing for it but to test your luck. So you see the bath prepared full and steaming, lavender thrown in to lend it some gentleness, and carry the news to him yourself.
Even then the sight of him catches. He stands in the guest chamber looking misplaced in the way of very large men inside small rooms, still carrying a trace of his day’s foulness, still gorgeous enough that you would take him if he came to you with horseshit on his arse and river mud to his knees. That is how bad the matter has grown in the space of a single day. Yet at a touch he jumps. At a look he drops his gaze. Either he is grievously inexperienced or so decent it borders on affliction.
You leave him to it and duck back through the kitchen with what remains of your good sense calling after you. It tells you to go about your business. To leave the man to his washing. To remember you are not sixteen and witless and peeping after stableboys through chinks in the wall.
There is, however, a crack in the boards between kitchen and bathing room so fine as to be near invisible unless one knows it is there. Press an eyeball to it, though, and the room beyond opens narrow and bright as a secret. You know this because you knew everything about this house when you were twelve, and some forms of knowledge stay put.
So you gutter the candle. The room goes dim around you. The bath chamber beyond holds only the wash of firelight from the small brazier and the soft pale steam rising from the tub. Then comes the creak of the door, the answer of the boards under his weight, and you do the unimaginable. You put your eye to the seam and look.
He goes first to the bath and lays in two fingers as careful as if testing broth for a babe. The heat seems to strike him. His shoulders loosen. His whole face changes. For one ridiculous moment he looks near to tears at the blessing of being able to wash in hot water instead of some stream cold enough to shrivel a cock back into the body. The sight of that plain gratitude in a grown man’s face moves something in you so tender it hurts.
Then he undresses. He catches the hem of the tunic and hauls it up over his head in the thoughtless way of men, and the motion stretches him so nicely you have to close your mouth against the sound threatening out. His stomach lengthens and bends. His skin pulls over muscle and softness. He is made of all of it. Sinew under flesh, yes, but flesh too, honest and abundant. Little folds appear when he bows his head and works the cloth free. His belly is soft low down, dusted with fine hair that thickens as it runs toward the waist of his breeches. His chest is broad enough to make a mockery of the basin stand, covered with copper fuzz. The paps upon it full and heavy and strong, larger than your two palms side by side. It comes to you with humiliating force that you could lay your hands there and feel his heart between them.
He strips with none of the vanity prettier men cultivate. There’s no posing, nor admiring of himself. He is only intent on getting clean. Boots off. Hose peeled. Then, he bends for the rest and you stop breathing.
You take him from the ground upward, greedy as famine. His feet are large, nails rimmed with the day’s dirt. One toe is blackened, as if trod on or kicked against stone or caught under some wheel of his own making. All likely with a man like him. His shins are marked. His knees are bruised. His thighs—God. Magnificent things. Thick enough to part a crowd by walking through it. Strong enough to sit a warhorse all day and still have ease left for children after.
Above them—well. Gods above.
He is large in a way that seems at first gentle, until the eye takes proper measure and understands what it sees. Heavy-hanging. Thick at the root. More than handsome there; startling. The sort of endowment that ought to put a strut in a man’s walk, and yet he has none. The same bashful lout as before, only naked now. His legs drive up into him as if fixed there by a blacksmith’s hand, all the lines of him gathering inward and down. Beneath hangs a full low sack, weighty and ripe-looking. The hair that is dirty-gold elsewhere on him deepens there to brown so dark it reads near black in the low light. A gorgeous man. A gentle one too, despite carrying such size without the least cruelty in it.
When he turns you get the clean sweep of his back, broad enough to make you dizzy, the round of his arse, and a little ugly scar on the plump of one calf. Then he steps into the bath and the water takes him piece by piece. All that riches you have only just discovered, gone under with a faint ripple that feels personal in its meanness.
As he lowers himself the rest of the way, his mouth lets out a sigh so low and filthy in its pleasure that your knees loosen beneath you. You close your eyes, though there is nothing to see with them shut. Keep the sound instead. Fold it up and tuck it away somewhere private for later.
This is no good. Nor is it manageable. When you straighten, your thighs are damp again, and your thoughts go skittering from one bad notion to the next: asking him outright, which is impossible; finding that man from the tourney who offered coin for your company and lying back under him pretending it is Duncan bent over you; or else taking the matter in hand yourself. Of the three, the last promises the least ruin, so you choose it.
The thirst remains. Seeing him again at supper—eating with that earnest appetite, smiling with those crooked teeth, clean now, smelling indecently like a babe made anew—only makes it more torrid. So, once the meal is done and the house fed, banked, and dressed for sleep, you wait until slumber lies thick in every room. Then you throw a cloak over your night-rail, quiet your mare so she does not wake the yard, and ride. For the inn. Only to look. Only to slip in and out unseen. Better to be a pervert for one night than die of something stupider than boredom. Excitement, perhaps.
Dunk lies awake. Tomorrow he and Egg will have to go back to the tourney outskirts. If he accepts any further kindness from your family, Egg will never let him know a moment’s peace again. His belly is blissfully full, and his mind is too, though morosely. It runs over with images of you. Eating. Clearing trenchers. Slipping past his gaze whenever it catches on you. He wishes you would hold his eyes for longer than a breath.
When he hears footsteps in the passage, he only means to see who is stirring at such an hour. Harlan, perhaps, or your sister up with one of the little ones. By now he knows the sounds of this house near as well as his own harness. By now he knows yours best of all. Even in the dark, with only the banked glow from the hall and the house asleep around it, he knows it is you.
You go softly. Cloak over your shift, a hood drawn up, one little lantern in hand with the light half-shielded. There is purpose in it, beyond wandering to the privy or fetching water. You mean to be out.
For the space of two breaths he tells himself to keep to his bed. You are grown. You owe him no accounting. Then you slip through the yard gate and into the night, and the thought of you riding alone amongst tourney roads thick with drink, camp followers, thieves, and men with more want than manners has him up before sense can catch him by the ankle.
He dresses in a scramble that feels shameful for how eager it is. When he gets to the yard you are already mounted and riding. He has only just enough time to throw himself onto his own horse and go after.
Some part of him knows to keep back. If you are abroad in secret, you would not thank him for riding up at your shoulder like a gaoler. So he follows at a distance, quiet as a man of his size may manage, keeping the little bob of your lantern in sight between hedges and trees. The road is near empty now but for the last of the drunkards reeling homeward and the odd cart sunk in the ruts. Your mare knows the way. So, it seems, do you.
The inn comes up out of the dark and Dunk feels something cold go through him. Even by day the place had looked rough. By night it is plain what it has become for the tourney: a bawdy house in all but name. Light spills from the lower windows. So do voices. A woman laughs somewhere high and sharp, then a man answers with the slurred confidence of one already too deep in his cups. There are bodies at the windows still, leaned together in tangles of shirt and skin, and more in the doorway. The whole place sweats ale, lust, and bad intent.
What in Seven’s name is a woman like you doing here?
He draws his horse off into shadow and waits, because surely you have only lost your way. Surely you will turn back once you see the sort of den this is. You, of course, do not.
You ride past the front altogether, circle wide, and make for the back of the place where the yard runs muddy and dark behind the stables. There you dismount, hitch your mare, and go to a ladder propped against the wall as if you have known all along it would be there.
Dunk watches you climb. For a moment he can make no sense of what he sees. Then the truth of it begins to gather in pieces, each worse than the last. Perhaps there is some man waiting in that attic room above the rest. Some groom, some archer, some merchant with more coin than sense. Perhaps you have done this before. Perhaps widowhood sits lighter on you than he thought. Perhaps the look in your face all day had nothing to do with him at all. All of them thoughts are ugly.
He grips the reins till the leather creaks. It is none of his business. You are no maiden under his protection. You are no kin of his. If you have a tryst above a brothel roof, that is your choosing, and he ought to turn his horse and go. Only he cannot.
Because if there is a man up there, Dunk does not like the look of the place he has chosen. Because any woman alone in such a house might come to harm. Because tomorrow he will be gone back to the tourney fields, and if he rides away now he will lie the whole of the night wondering what became of you in that attic. Because some part of him, meaner and more hopeful than he cares to examine, wants to know. So he ties off his horse in the dark and goes after you.
The ladder shifts under his weight. The higher he climbs, the louder the house grows. Laughter leaks through the boards, wicked and wine-sour. Men’s voices. Women’s too. Then moaning, plain enough that Dunk’s face goes hot before he has even hauled himself to the top. By the time he gets into the attic, his cheeks are burning fit to set the dust alight.
There, the room holds only you.
You are stretched flat on your belly with your cloak spilling round you, face pressed near to the floor. Light comes up through the slits in it in narrow orange bars, filthy and bright as fire through shutters. The noises from below drown the creak of his boots, so he drops to hands and knees and crawls the last little way, trying with all his clumsy might to make no sound.
As he comes nearer he sees the quick lift of your ribs. Your whole attention is fixed below. So Dunk looks too.
Through the gaps he can make out a room beneath, high-ceilinged and close with candlelight. A man and woman are tangled together, kissing with wet, open mouths, pawing at one another as if trying to get under skin rather than clothes. The man fumbles at her laces. She gets her hand into his breeches and closes it round him greedy as hunger. He lets out a laugh thick with phlegm.
Dunk stares one foolish moment, then looks away hard, appalled less by them than by you watching.
He cannot make sense of it. Why would you come to see such a thing? Why would you creep into a foul place like this to lie on a floor and spy on strangers coupling below? You, who smell of lavender and fresh bread and speak softly to frightened children. You, who made him still under your touch and looked at him as if you meant to do it again.
He ends up on all fours beside you before he has decided what he means to do. You have not noticed him. Your hood is up, half-shielding your face. One of your hands is curled against the boards. The other lies open by your cheek. There is something so strange in it—your body stretched out long and intent, your face hidden, your breath coming a touch quicker than it should—that for a moment he can only hover there and stare.
If he speaks, you will yelp. If you yelp, the whole cursed inn may come running.
So, very gently, Dunk moves. His frame hangs above you, then presses down and he reaches out and clasps a hand over your mouth.
You go rigid at once. Your whole body jerks under him and you begin to fight trying to wrench free.
“It’s only me, m’lady,” he whispers fast, mouth to your ear. “Beg pardon. I thought you’d get yourself in trouble. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
You breathe out so hard the warmth of it shocks his palm. The fight goes out of you, and with that his own weight settles further. His belly goes where your spine dips. His head hangs over your shoulder. One of his knees ends up braced between yours on the boards, and the whole position is suddenly far too close. Your arse cushions him snugly and fire licks Duncan’s hips so violently he can feel his cock stir and give one helpless kick against you.
“Forgive me, I—” he breathes. Begins to shuffle on you, only making himself more tragic. When you mumble something out, he remembers his hand is still muzzling your mouth. “Oh, right.”
He lifts his palm. Spit stretches from your lips to his fingers. Other than the gag, you do not seem half so troubled with the predicament. Your head cocks slightly until you’re whispering into his cheek. “What are you doing here, Ser Duncan?”
“I—I—” He swallows. “I thought you—”
“—were in trouble? I am not. Yet.” You give the smallest jerk of your chin towards the room below. Then, after a beat: “Is that the only reason you came?”
The truthful answer rises up in him and sticks there. No. He came after you with his head full of you. He came because you rode out alone and because he could not bear not knowing where. He came because he hoped for something he has no right even to name. With everything pressing in him, all he says is, “Yeah.” Then, wincing at himself: “I mean—yes.”
You let out a short breath that balances amusement and disdain on an uneven scale. “Then leave me be.”
“But—” He still does not move. The sounds from below make the boards faintly alive beneath you. “You oughtn’t look. You mustn’t.”
Your head turns just enough to pin him with one eye from under the hood. “Quiet.”
“It’s wrong,” he whispers, voice rising as Duncan’s forgetting himself. “The… coupling. It’s for them. For the—them. Not for—”
“For us to hear you blunder through your outrage?” you murmur. “Do you want your neck broken over peeking at strangers?”
“No, but I cannot let you—”
“You cannot let me?” There is a warning in your whisper, low and sharp. Mercifully, you ignore where his blood has settled between your back and his front. “What are you going to do, Ser Duncan? Drag me out by force?”
He has no answer to that, only a thudding pulse and the certainty that every choice before him is the wrong one.
“Leave,” you whisper, “or I will scream, and then you may have your neck broken for peeking at strangers after all.”
Dunk shuts his eyes for a second. The oaths come back to him in broken scraps, half remembered and badly timed. Protect the weak. Defend the innocent. Serve with honour. He is no wiser for them now than he was before.
“Forgive me,” he mutters.
And before you can answer, he brings one hand up over your eyes.
You start under him. “Ser Duncan, you have brought this on yours—”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and when your voice threatens to carry, his other hand finds your mouth again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please, forgive me.”
The attic goes weird after that. He closes his eyes too, as if blindness might make the thing less wicked, but it does not. If anything, it sharpens it. The noises below seem louder for being all they have left: laughter gone low, a bedstead knocking, breath laboured. Beneath him you strain once in annoyance, once in warning, and each small movement turns the whole of him to misery.
He tries to hold himself rigid. It’s unbearably filthy, all of it. All of it is so deeply debauched, and he tries not to feel the shape of you under him. Tries not to notice how near your cheek is to his wrist, how your hair smells even here through the dust and old wood. He’s hard, possibly leaking, and he tries with such conviction his whole body is shaken by the effort, and still he does not move.
Then, The Seven lay two horrible tests upon him. The first is your tongue—it darts out and wedges itself into the cup of his palm and along the creases where his fingers join, warm and wet and so soft it shocks him worse than teeth might have. It sends his breathing hoarse.
“Cease this,” he whispers. “I beg of you. Oh, Seven fu—”
The second is your arm. It is a snake. Your whole hand slides down his side and then under, squeezing between his front and your back, where he is plain as day. A man, no better than the one beneath the floorboards. When you touch him, Duncan feels a horrendous cramp in his groin and simply has to buck. His hips roll into you, his palm leaves your mouth because he needs to brace against the wood, and his face presses into your neck as he strains out, “Oh, fuck. Fuck—I’m sorry—”
“It’s your fault I’m here,” you whisper to his trembling fingers. “I had been faring well enough. I was good to my family. I kept my peace. I had no need of a man.” Dunk makes a stricken sound, but you go on.
“Then you came into my sister’s house and spoiled it all. I know nothing of the art of coaxing a man. Nor is it becoming, I think, to go about seducing a knight. Beyond feeding you and seeing you bathed, I did not know how else to tell you what I wanted.” Your hand stays where it is, quiet and sure, and it burns him with fire The Hells have nothing on, Duncan’s certain. “My husband wanted me because he did. That was the whole of it. But you keep dragging your eyes from me, so I thought you had no want of me at all. I thought this”—a small shift of your fingers—“the least harmful way to help myself.”
For a moment Duncan can only endure it. Words crowd in on him, while your palm makes him into such mess his thoughts do not so much gather as drag themselves through mud. Then, the fact that you think him untouched by you, all while every pulse in him beats where you have him, causes such bewilderment his voice hitches a notch higher.
“You think I do not want you? M’lady, I—”
“I told you not to call me that.” Your hiss comes sharp, though not unkind. “It is unwise to use titles one has not been granted. I am no lady.”
“To me you are,” Duncan argues. “I’ve laid eyes on you for one day only,” he strains, “and already I know when I leave here I’ll never see such beauty again.”
Your hand freezes. Then—Gods above—closes around him more fiercely than before. “So… this is for me alone?”
His swallow goes down like a bolus. Then he lifts his palm from your eyes. You blink, and turn your head to look at him. Light from below catches in your irises and sets them aflame. Duncan stares into them. “Do you not see?” he asks on a breath. “I am all for you.”
Anger floods you cold, then hot. Heat comes with his body. How a man this size can sneak up on you eludes you entirely, but you are so shamelessly engrossed in a fat man’s hands on a whore’s body below that you notice Duncan only when he seals your mouth shut.
A knight with all the grace of an oaf and the body of a demigod, with dung still on his arse when you found him, has managed to catch you at your most humiliating: alone, needy, sprawled on dirty boards above strangers’ noise like some starved little creep. And he has the gall to be scandalised, bless his soul, while pressing his huge hard cock into your backside. How infuriating to be made to listen to him blunder on about honour, yourself unable to speak, while his whole body has cast honour off the moment his eyes were subjected to the same sight as yours.
His weight should crush you, but does not. It feels right. Just as you imagined: an enormous, total burden that extends beyond the borders of your body. His arms yoke your neck and shoulders, his stomach fits into the length of your back. Your feet reach only halfway down his calves when he lies atop you. His hips are right where they belong. He is all cumbersome care in his effort not to sag into you, and his breath comes warm and trembling and loud against your ear.
Shame prickles your neck. One moment the sight below is enough to sate you, the next you forget it altogether, because your knight has come to rescue you from indecency. Humiliated, you hiss at him as sharply as the scene allows, eager to be rid of him before he notices how disgraced your inner thighs are, how your jaw clenches and the veins in your neck stand out with the struggle not to make some telling sound.
First you are blinded. Then you are on the verge of throwing it all away, of screaming and setting the whole inn of scoundrels upright, yet you cannot. Gagged again and pressed into the wood, you lie there bathed in dust, bathed in the sounds of coupling below, nerves wailing for him to move, to leave you, to touch you—
So you touch him. A tell that tells you nothing beyond how large and dangerous he is where he is most a man. Any boy as shy and tender as Duncan would stir at the mere sound of a woman sighing. A boy at heart, yet built like no boy should be—armed with a cock fit for some swaggering brute who ought to walk broad-legged through the world, though he does not. He makes manliness and benevolence into something so uncommon, so singular and strange, that you understand at once why no other has ever tempted you to take up the burden of marriage again. He is simply the only one like this you have ever met.
Then, he begs. And with that comes the truth of who the thick one is here. For all Duncan frets over his wit, it is you who has been witless. You had not even thought his apprehension might spring from want. That it is for you he throbs in your hand. That his breath shakes because it is you who measures him there.
“Get up,” you whisper, rapt by his confession.
He blinks once and nods, already crestfallen. It is clear he thinks you are sending him off. He scrambles away from you with painful care, lifting himself to all fours first as if that might somehow hide what has no hope of hiding. Red climbs his ears. He stays there a beat too long, awkward and waiting, and the sight of such ready obedience draws your chest tight.
“There,” you murmur, pointing to the wooden pillar. “Sit.”
And so, Duncan sits. Backs himself to the post and folds down against it with the graceless caution of a dog trying not to dirty a clean floor. His knees fall wide because they must. His hands hover, useless and uncertain, as if any place he puts them might be wrong. In the dim light his face is still open with amends and want and that same ruinous virtue which has brought you to this in the first place.
You go to him on hands and knees, slowly, careful where you place your weight so the old boards give no treacherous groan. Dust clings to the hem of your night-rail and the sleeves of your cloak. He watches you come with his lips parted and his breath held badly, as though any movement on his part might scare you off.
When you reach him, you settle one hand to his shoulder for balance and climb into his lap with all the care the narrow space requires. Even so, the fit of it steals a sharp hitch from him. His head tips back against the wood. Breath leaves him through his mouth in a soft, stunned rush.
“I’m sorry,” he mutters. “M’lady, I did not mean to—”
“Shh,” you hum, fingers brushing his lip. “You’re doing nothing wrong. But if you wish to stop, tell me.”
“No,” he says. “No, I do not.”
He is still apologising. Still half afraid of his own body. Still looking at you as if you are something above him while you pant against him like a sinner. He is so decent he becomes indecent by accident. Where your bodies meet, he is all weight and impossible girth. His cock spans the whole length of your groin, and there is still some of it left unattended at the tip when you keep still.
You wrench the linen of your night-rail from the press of legs so it falls to either side of you. Bare against him, you run your hands over his cheeks and up, pull his hair back from his forehead, then slide down his scalp to settle at the neck. You lower yourself fully and into him. The cloth of his braies rasps against the tenderest skin while your buttocks spill into his lap. The limit is right there—one roll of your pelvis, and you are giving yourself away with a breathy, wanton, “Duncan—”
“Shh.” His palm finds your mouth again, even more delicate than before. He clasps one there and brings the other to the hinge of your hip. “Petal mine, hush, I beg of you,” he whispers. “You’ll ruin me by sound alone.”
Under his touch, you smile. Search his face in the barred orange glow rising through the boards. His brows are drawn tight. Wrinkles gather at the corners of his eyes each time they narrow. Freckles come and go across his cheeks and nose with every small shift of light, as if the attic itself cannot decide how much of him to show you.
You nod and move again. His forehead drops against yours. “Death be kind to me,” he mutters. “By the Seven, you are—”
At that, your own hands act. Fingers sink into his hair to hold him still while you cover the noise before it gets him into trouble. So that is how you stay then: mutually silenced, mutually trapped, breathless in the mouths. Your body, furious, clenches round bare air so viciously Duncan’s cock kicks. His hips give a helpless start, and you answer only with gestures: a pull at his roots. Your eyes roll heavenward, unseeing. Thighs quiver and knees skid on the floor while the strain of staying quiet becomes its own fresh torment.
Though he is doing the work of it well enough himself, you are making him damper still at the crotch. He lifts a little and adjusts, rides up and rocks you back and forth. The hand at your hip helps guide you and teaches you where he is most sensitive—at the crown. So you keep to that, spreading your cunt over wool, and however thick the cloth, you would know the shape of him exactly.
In silence, your shared breathing rings loud as a sept bell. Duncan huffs through his nose like a tired animal, and his grip grows confused. On your hip it tightens, but loosens over the mouth. You take the chance and wrap your lips round his fingertips, sucking lightly. He lets out the groan of a man on the threshold of something terrible or wonderful, and you tug his hair once more to straighten him.
“Shh, my darling,” you whisper. “You ought to be quiet.”
He begs with his whole being. His forehead is all drawn up, lines cut deep between his brows while the brows themselves disappear beneath the fall of his fringe. His eyes do not know where to rest. They find you, lose you, squeeze shut for a beat, then open again, all within the span of one second. Pleasure unfastens him from the inadequacy that normally clings to him. He is still unpolished, but stripped to something young and honest. Perhaps this is what he must be like in battle too: all the loose, awkward parts of him pulled into their proper place by force of need. Graceless to look at. Never elegant. But wholly given over to the matter at hand, with no room left in him for doubt or self-consciousness. Here, as on a field, he is too occupied to mistrust himself, and so becomes devastating.
Though your palm keeps his mouth covered, sound still escapes him: breath breaking hot against your skin, a muffled grunt deep in his throat, the low helpless noise of a man trying very hard not to come apart. His nape is damp under your fingers. Each time you hold him there and move, something in him gives. His chest brushes yours. His thighs brace wide beneath you to keep you up. His whole great body tries to contain itself and fails by degrees. The feeling of him is everywhere—his size hemming you in, his heat through the cloth, the trembling under all that strength. He is beneath you, around you, almost too much of him, and that is part of the pleasure too.
All of it carries you steadily over your own threshold. Come morning there will be soreness, an ache where skin has been rubbed raw to the fit of his cock, but for now you only rut and let your thighs shudder and lock round his ribs. You suck his fingers in to the last knuckle to silence yourself.
He has been so brave. Bracing so well. So you let it take you and eat you whole until you are so small he could fit you in the hollow of his hand.
Your mouth opens, but no sound comes. He slips his fingers from it, drags the dampness across your cheek and into your hair beneath the hood. Draws you so close your palm is crushed between mouths, so you let that go too. The instant he is free, he starts panting. Murmuring yes, oh Gods, as if he is dying of it rather than being carried under.
From the back of his throat he hums—the last frail barrier between him and outright noise. When even that begins to fail him, he fits his mouth to yours and whispers, “Kiss me. Please, kiss me when it takes me, else I won’t keep quiet.”
With your head feeling dragged underwater, you loll your tongue out first. Lids drowsy and heavy, you force them open. Lick the crest of his upper lip and stare him dead into those big blue eyes when you kiss him properly. He looks. Rubs himself on you with artless jerks of hips, driving your tender flesh to a sting. Keeps looking when his hands come up to your face and hold the whole span of it, from chin to temples. He covers your ears too.
Then you watch him lose himself in it. His lashes flicker like wings, and at last rest lowered when he can bear seeing no more. His body tightens into a thousand knots beneath you—shoulders locking, neck straining, thighs shaking, stomach jumping. Kissing becomes holding. Your mouth becomes a well for his sounds.
“Petal mine,” he murmurs. “Seven fucking Hells, just—f-fuck—ah—”
He shatters in a way that makes pity and hunger strike you both. From the look of him, it would be gentler to drive a dagger through his heart than keep doing what your weight is doing to him. He is wholly gone. His face loses all shape but strain. Mouth breaks against yours, then at your lip, biting down not hard enough to hurt, only enough to keep the worst of himself in. What sound escapes him does so mangled—grunts, groans, one destitute moan dragged raw from somewhere deep and private. His whole body bears it badly. A shudder runs through him from shoulders to thighs. His hands cinch at your face as if he means to hold on and has forgotten to what.
Then all at once it stops. Words and noises ease. Breaths come, pulled in great wrecked draughts like a man hauled half-dead from the water. Under you he goes loose, still shaking. Warmth spreads between your thighs, blooms and soaks through his bottoms onto skin. His forehead drops to your shoulder and stays there, damp and dazed, while he fights his way back to the world one breath at a time.
You take his heavy head in your palms. It feels like holding the rounded crown of a helm, all weight and surrender. He has gone boneless as a cut puppet and lets you handle him as you please. “Ser Duncan,” you say, searching him. “Are you well?”
His eyes open slowly, blue and dazed. For a moment he only blinks at you, as though the question itself is beyond him. Then he breathes again, ragged and embarrassed both. “Aye,” he says, though it sounds discovered rather than known. “I think so. Are you, m’lady?”
You nod. Smile, then chuckle. He smiles too and shows you his teeth.
“What became of petal?” you ask softly.
His eyes slip from yours. The colour in his face deepens, and for a moment he looks near ready to sink through the boards from shame. Then, instead of answering, he gathers you in closer. His arms come round you with quiet strength. He tucks his face beneath your ear, great and warm and shy there, and draws one breath of you.
“You are so beautiful it pains me,” he says.
Your fingers twitch against his back, then catch in the cloth of his tunic and hold. “Stay with me then,” you murmur. “Till the end of the tourney.”
He stills. Pulls back to look at you. There is something naked in his face that has nothing to do with what has just passed between you. “Do you mean it?”
The poor fool. As though he should be the one asking shame from the other. As though it is he who was found here half-sprawled over strangers’ sin, wanting like an idiot and grateful besides that the one who caught him still wanted him after all. As though he’s not at all the one who saved your mind and body from withering away in a world that is all bliss and honey-cakes.
You are opening your mouth to tell him so when a voice booms from below the boards.
“Who goes there?!”
You come by just after breaking your fast, pass Dunk a chunk of bread and cheese, and leave honey-cakes with Egg. On your way past, your hand lands once on Dunk’s shoulder—just a squeeze, no more—and yet it leaves him sitting there as if a mark has been pressed clear through cloth and skin alike.
Egg waits until you are well out of earshot. He turns a stick in his hands, pares another thin curl from it with his knife, and says, “She is not ugly at all.”
Dunk keeps his eyes on your back. “I told you so.”
“You did.”
A pause. The knife goes on scraping. “So we’re staying till the end of the tourney, then?”
Dunk tears off a piece of bread with more force than the matter requires. “Her family asked us.”
Egg nods as if this confirms some private reckoning. “Yes. I thought it might be something of that sort.”
Dunk finally looks at him. “What sort?”
“The sort where a hedge knight finds reasons to be grateful.”
Dunk frowns. “Mind your tongue.”
Egg’s mouth twitches. He lifts one shoulder. “I only meant she seems kind.”
“She is,” Dunk says, too quick.
Egg glances at him sideways, insufferably mild. “Yes. That too.”
Dunk opens his mouth, then shuts it again because you have turned in the yard and sunlight has caught in your hair. By the time he remembers Egg exists, the boy is already smiling into his stick.
“I’ll box your ears,” Dunk mutters, with no conviction in it at all.
“I know you mean to, ser,” says Egg, carving on. “That is why I cherish the time between.”
synopsis: After breaking up with Adrian Chase, you find your dating life thwarted at every turn by Evergreen's own Vigilante.
pairing: adrian chase x reader
tags: stalker vigilante, possessive & jealous adrian (wait maybe this also works for your suggestion @genuinelygemini!), that being said - generally lots of antics and humor, angst, fluff, (but it's adrian so there's still murder), reader kind of matches vij's freak, brief sexual references, language, attempted mugging, gun violence
word count: 9.1k (sorry I got carried away)
note: (Based on this request from @danversxwasabi <3) as I'm not sure what's going on with the tumblr reblog/comments/notes situation this is a reminder that all my work is also cross-posted on my AO3 (I'm actually going to be changing my username there to match here soon!)
You were fairly certain that Vigilante was cockblocking you.
If you were being technical, your suspicions had started a few months ago, when you’d gotten back on the market after a particularly painful breakup with –
Adrian Chase had been…Adrian Chase had been the perfect boyfriend. Until he wasn’t.
You’d met just over a year ago, when Adrian waltzed into your coffee shop just before closing, a gleam in his eye and a demand for “something that’ll keep me awake. For like, a really, really long time. I want to get punched in the face with caffeine.”
It was said with the particular intensity of a man who definitely didn’t need caffeine ever, but you’d indulged him anyway.
“Have you tried cocaine?” you’d asked, a small smirk on your lips.
“What? No! Cocaine is like…” he’d lowered his voice and leaned over the counter, scowling. “Very illegal.”
Then he leaned back abruptly as if burned, and looked you up and down. “Why? Do you do cocaine?”
“Not my scene,” you’d replied, your turn to lean forward conspiratorially. “But I can make you something just as efficient. We’ll have you practically vibrating out of that little dad outfit of yours in no time.”
And that had been all it’d taken. Six shots of espresso and a criminal amount of vanilla syrup over ice with milk. You’d expected to see his face plastered on the morning news for a caffeine overdose. Instead, he became a regular, always in right before closing. Sometimes he’d stay and chat with you until the shop was closed up for the evening and then he’d insist on walking you to your car.
Which became you two sitting in your car and talking for hours.
Which, one particularly cold evening, became you two making out in your car. (You’d finally had to be the one to initiate - Adrian couldn’t pick up on a goddamn signal if his life depended on it.)
Adrian decided you were boyfriend and girlfriend after that, always said with a beam of pride and like it was one big mashed up word: “boyfriendgirlfriend”. As if he was afraid if he didn’t say it fast enough that would be the exact amount of time you’d need to break up with him. You weren’t sure how much say you’d actually had in the matter of becoming boyfriendgirlfriend, but it was weirdly nice, actually. After the last several years of fuckboys and ghosting and “not putting labels on things”. You’d had a gnarly past with dating - you’d probably be a serious contender for Guinness World Record for Most Times Someone Had Been Cheated On. And Adrian knew that. And Adrian Chase was built different.
Until he wasn’t.
At first, that was a good thing.
Sure, he was obsessed with you in a way that was sometimes vaguely disconcerting, but he loved you. Hard. You weren’t sure he knew any other way. He loved his friends hard, too. They were basically all a package deal. You never quite understood how they all became friends? They were like a random grab bag of people flung together by circumstances that were entirely unclear to you, no matter how many times one of them gave you a half-assed explanation.
And really, the problem with Adrian Chase had been a slow build. The issue had always been there, it just became more and more prominent over the year you were together until there was simply no ignoring it.
He had been hiding something from you.
You’d never confirmed he was cheating, not like you had with all the others. There was no smoking gun: no incriminating texts accidentally sent to you, no “hey girlie” DM from some stranger, no friend who’d seen him at the club making out with someone else. There was just...something. Something not right.
He’d go radio silent for long stretches of time, which was uncharacteristic of a man who often sent you over 100 texts a day. He’d be evasive about what he was up to when he wasn’t with you or at work. Once, you’d gone to Fennel Fields to drop off his jacket that he’d left at your apartment when he left “for work” only to find he wasn’t scheduled at the middling Italian restaurant at all.
The final straw had been when you’d woken up in the middle of the night to find his side of your bed empty. He didn’t come back for three days.
Then he’d shown up at your door in the middle of the night, soaking wet from the rain, his eyes brimming with tears, a set of scratches down his cheek. He looked like some cat that had come skulking back to its owner after discovering the alleycat life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
And you’d hated that his pained expression made you feel anything at all. That your heart squeezed tight when you looked at him. That his choked, desperate pleas had been almost convincing. But you’d learned your lesson the hard way in the past and you weren’t willing to repeat your mistakes. The risk of Adrian breaking your heart all over again was insurmountable.
Worse still was the fact that the anger never came - only the sorrow and the loneliness. You’d stayed awake for nights after, wondering if you’d made the wrong decision. Because Adrian wasn’t like the others…right? He’d adored you. Worshipped you, even. The way he looked at you like you hung the moon and stars…
Either way, he wasn’t being honest with you. You had to hold tight to that certainty.
Adrian Chase: i’m so sorry please forgive me
Adrian Chase: i can’t explain but I promise i’d never hurt you
So you’d spent an entire weekend drinking Three Buck Chuck (you didn’t give a flying fuck if inflation made it $4.49, it was still $3 in your heart) and repeatedly washing every fabric in your apartment until none of it smelled even remotely like Adrian Chase. You’d stood numbly over the washing machine, bottle in hand, and willed yourself not to cry.
If only it were so easy to wash your brain clean.
Unknown Number (Possibly: Adrian Chase): you were right to break up with me
Unknown Number (Possibly: Adrian Chase): i won’t bother you again
But time heals all wounds, right? And time was certainly making a valiant effort at it.
Your best friend had made you re-download Hinge, your coworkers at the coffee shop had all consulted on your profile, and you were officially back on the market after much protest and turmoil. Of course, dating would require your heart to be “in it”, which it certainly was not. But some casual dating to take your mind off of things surely couldn’t go amiss.
That was, of course, until Vigilante showed up.
The first time seemed like pure coincidence.
It just so happened that Vigilante was in a foot chase with some low level criminal or another and ended up knocking over the outdoor dining table you had been sitting at with your first Hinge date. That could happen to anyone! Especially in godforsaken Evergreen.
In the end, it was actually kind of fortuitous that Vigilante had shattered a perfectly good table in your lap. Your date had turned out to be some kind of red pill loser who listened to Andrew Tate like it was mindful meditation. He had just been going on about “low value females” when glass and ceramic and wood exploded and spared you from another second of any of that bullshit. You were…weirdly grateful to Vigilante?
He stood up from the table, dusted himself off and held out the purse to a woman standing breathless on the sidewalk a few feet away. He kicked the purse thief in the ribs for good measure, waved at you and started to take off.
“Wait!”
You weren’t sure why you said it. You stooped to collect the hunting knife that’d fallen off his…utility belt?...and offered it to him. He came back and reached for the knife, but for some reason your fingers had been unable to let go. At the time you’d chalked it up to some kind of panic response - your brain synapses simply weren’t firing correctly. Shock. Or something. It was only later that the real reason became startlingly clear.
You’d been struck by the odd desire to keep him close.
“Uh…thanks, citizen?” he said with a clumsy attempt to disguise his voice. You released the knife into his grasp unwillingly.
“Why do you sound like that?” you asked, crossing your arms over your chest.
“Like what? I don’t sound like anything. I just sound like me. Vigilante.”
“No,” you replied, shaking your head. “Why are you doing a weird voice? You sound like Yoda swallowed Kermit the Frog.”
“That’s…no I don’t!”
You paused for a long moment, trying to place the vaguely familiar insistence in his tone. “We’ve met before.”
“N-no we haven’t,” he said lowly, a tremble in his voice. “Because I - I would definitely remember meeting you.”
It was strange, how you felt a little dejected that he didn’t remember that night. In his defense, it had been over a year. Probably a little after you and Adrian had originally started to become friends, actually.
You’d been walking home one night and he’d appeared out of nowhere - handed you the earbud you hadn’t realized had fallen out of your pocket about two blocks prior and then just…stayed. Walked you home in a companionable quiet (which you remembered thinking was weird, because all the reports you’d heard and the late night Reddit posts you’d read about him mentioned how chatty he was) and disappeared the moment you were safely in your apartment with the deadbolt slid into place.
At the time you’d thought: he probably did that sort of thing all the time, right?
Of course, now you knew better.
That first date had ended with your date looking back and forth between you and Vigilante, before calling you a “freak bitch” and leaving you splattered in salad dressing with a check to cover.
What, in all likelihood would have technically been the second time Vigilante crashed your date, you’d gotten ghosted instead.
So maybe you decided to have a drink or two while you waited for what had clearly become a total, radio-silent abandonment. And maybe you’d not eaten anything beforehand because it was supposed to be a dinner date. And you’d fucking driven yourself there but your ass would be walking home.
It was probably for the best - you were pretty sure you’d only matched with the ghoster because he had glasses that reminded you of Adrian.
Of course Vigilante was standing in the parking lot when you tripped out the front door. You walked straight past him and straight past your car and you didn’t even bother to look to see if he was following. Somehow, you knew he was.
He fell into step beside you silently, somehow feeling not like a threat, but a gentle comfort. A wordless offer of companionship.
“I imagine you’re not on any dating apps, Vigilante, so you don’t get it, but it’s fucking bleak out here,” you complained. “There are no good men left on this Earth. I finally had one who was good and he still managed to let me down in the end.”
“How?” came the gruff, muffled, accented reply. You stumbled on the uneven sidewalk and your hand flew to his bicep just as his hands wrapped around your waist. You didn’t pull back, you just stared up at him, hoping maybe your drunk self would see something your sober self couldn’t.
“It’s…hard to explain,” you replied, scrunching your brow as you studied his featureless face, head tilted back slightly to look up at him.
“Try me,” he said, his voice painfully soft. For not the first time you wondered what the man under the mask was really like. You reluctantly released your hold on his arm, and, in turn, his fingers drifted away from your waist. You started walking again, weighing whether there was any harm in unburdening your heart to Vigilante.
“Adrian was the first guy I dated who really and truly made me feel loved? Like I never doubted that he adored me. And I think because of that I was willing to overlook some things for a long time. And then suddenly one day I realized he’d disappear a lot, or be vague about where he was or sometimes he was straight up lying to me. And it didn’t matter how much I thought he loved me because his actions proved that maybe I shouldn’t have been so certain,” you explained, really focusing on your words, wondering in the back of your brain if you sounded like a drunk idiot.
When he didn’t say anything, you continued, “I’ve dated more than my fair share of guys who cheated or fucked around and even though I felt so certain Adrian wasn’t like that, there was still this doubt in the back of my mind that overweighed everything else. Maybe he wasn’t cheating but I’d given people the benefit of the doubt in the past and always been sorry in the end. Cheating or not - which, I’ll be honest, I find really hard to believe he was cheating because of the way he’d…um, actually you don’t need to hear about that! Uh, cheating or not, he was keeping something from me.”
Vigilante’s decisive lack of response kept your drunk mouth running. “I think the worst part is I maybe miss him? Or, not maybe, I know I miss him. I think about him all the time even when I try not to. I even miss his quirks – of which he had many, let me tell you! But I guess that’s what happens when you love someone that much. And now I’m worried maybe that was the best it’ll ever get for me and it’s gone and I fucked everything up forever.”
You could feel his gaze on you but you didn’t indulge it. You were too busy thinking about the thing you knew you shouldn’t say, the most painful, stupid, ugly part of it all. “The worst part is that it makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me? That there’s something inherently unlovable about me baked into my DNA or something. Why else would all these guys cheat on me, or lie to me, or whatever? Like there must be something fundamentally wrong with me. I’m the common denominator.”
You felt his gloved hand scrape at your elbow, fingers pressing into the skin firmly.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” came his quiet reply finally, his voice strangely ragged. You squinted up at him.
“Yeah, well, why would you?” you asked, genuinely confused.
“I…wouldn’t,” he replied slowly, before nodding emphatically.
“Right…”
“Right.”
You weren’t totally sure if he was being confusing or you were just drunk? Maybe both?
You turned and found yourself at your apartment door. You blinked for a moment - you’d been so preoccupied you didn’t even remember marching up the stairs. Wait, did it mean that he did remember walking you home all those months ago? Or you’d just led him right straight there. Again. A total psycho knew where you lived.
“Good night,” he said suddenly in that stupid put-on voice. Your heart leapt into your throat anyway. Were you that desperate?
“Good night, Kermit Yoda,” you taunted, flashing him a smile as you closed the door and you definitely didn’t wobble on your feet. You made an auditory show of dramatically flipping the deadbolt and sliding the chain lock into place.
“Fuck.” You heard him whisper from the other side of the door in a voice that sounded much more real than the one you’d come to know. There was a small thump and you wondered if you looked through the peephole you’d see his forehead resting against the door.
You decided it was better not to know.
You leaned with your back against the door and pulled out your phone. Against your better judgment, you scrolled through your old texts until you found the Unknown Number (Possibly: Adrian Chase) thread that you’d been so good about not looking at. Mostly. You hadn’t had the heart to block him, but you’d deleted his number to remove the temptation. And true to his word he hadn’t bothered you again.
You dragged your thumb along the edge of the screen as you debated. Maybe there would be no harm in just…checking in on him? You were still somehow unaccustomed to the total lack of him in your life after a year that was so full of him. You’d find yourself missing him in tiny ways over and over again, even if you were loathe to admit it. There was a stupid, Adrian Chase sized hole in your heart.
Your other hand drifted into the waistband of your jeans. What if you opened the door and invited Vigilante inside to fill something else of yours? Maybe you could bite into one of those biceps of his and convince him to let you call him Adrian.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. What the fuck was wrong with you? You pulled your hand from your pants, closed your messages and opened Hinge instead.
The second time (ghosting date notwithstanding) was perhaps the strangest of all.
It was quick drinks at a bar downtown before he suggested you two hit the club. You could tell what he was after the moment you’d laid eyes on him, but you didn’t mind. You’d been meaning to fuck Adrian Chase right out of your system (and apparently Vigilante, too) and your date was easy on the eyes, if a little smarmy. You could deal with that if it meant getting railed so hard you forgot your own name. Though, if you were judging by the rhythm of his hips as he grinded against you, you might be out of luck on that front.
“Club’s a front for drug smuggling!” a familiar voice called as it passed you, so casual your brain didn’t process it until a moment later. You barely had time to react before Vigilante was pulling a gun and executing the club owner right in front of everyone. Your mouth dropped open and for a second you swore he was turning back to look at you, like he was looking for your approval.
Then, the club burst into understandable chaos. People went running for the door, shouts filling the room in lieu of music. Someone knocked straight into you and you hit the deck hard. You managed to get yourself onto your knees (the drink-slick floor was not agreeing with your choice of shoewear) when your date’s hand appeared in front of you. You grasped onto it, grateful for your only lifeline, and opened your mouth to thank him when you realized rather suddenly that the hand was gloved and attached to the rest of fucking Vigilante.
“Are you okay?” he asked, sounding strangely breathless.
You yanked your hand out of his and scowled at him. “That was really fucked up.”
“I thought you said drugs weren’t your scene,” he snipped back. Was that some sort of accusation? It felt loaded with a meaning you couldn’t quite parse. The club music was still blasting and you’d just watched Vigilante kill a man in front of your very eyes. Your brain was…not thinking clearly.
Still, it reminded you of something distant. Or someone.
“What?”
“Nothing!” he exclaimed. Then he looked over his shoulder and you both processed that the dead club owner’s security seemed to be getting themselves together, hands reaching into jackets for what you could only imagine were concealed weapons. He spun you around and pushed you towards the door.
“Oh! I ordered you an Uber: silver Honda Civic, license plate JG8566, Jamil has a 4.9 star rating. Get home safe!” he chattered at you before pushing you out the front door and onto the sidewalk. The heavy metal door slammed shut behind you.
The driver of a small Honda Civic waved at you from across the street. He poked his head out the window. “Uber for Vigilante?”
You looked around furtively to see if anyone had heard him and then with a hearty sigh you stepped off the curb.
The third time was the time that really pushed you over the edge.
Your new date had taken you to one of those trendy places-of-the-week that filled a niche so specific you weren’t sure how they sustained a business on “boutique rice pudding”. As it turned out, they didn’t. In fact, it turned out that Rice to Riches was a money laundering scheme.
A money laundering scheme that Evergreen’s own Vigilante had taken upon himself to break up right in the middle of your date. He’d breezed right in the front door, waving at you as he passed. For a moment you presumed you were actively hallucinating. But the sound of a fight in the kitchen had you realizing otherwise. You listened to the sound of fists hitting flesh over and over and by the time your brain was able to properly have the feeling that you should definitely leave, Vigilante was standing at your table.
“Hey!” He was still doing the stupid voice, apparently.
“Hi?”
“So, just a heads up this place was a money laundering front.”
“Okaaaay,” you drawled, uncertain of how you were supposed to respond to that info. “You know, a heads up usually comes before you murder a bunch of people.”
“Oh, I didn’t murder anyone. They’re just uhhhhh out cold. Tied up,” he replied in a way that was utterly unconvincing.
“Jesus Christ,” you muttered. You turned to your date to say something but he was white as a sheet, his fingers still gripping his spoon while his mouth hung open, slack jawed.
“Are you on a date?” he asked flippantly, examining the fingers of his gloves as if he were casually looking at his nails.
“Yes?”
“You sure go on a lot of dates.”
Wait a minute, did Vigilante think you were a slut?
“Three dates is not a lot of dates. And, not that it’s any of your business but…I’m trying to get back out there after a really shitty break up. Is that a fucking crime?”
His sure-fire posture shifted slightly and he crossed his arms over his chest. Your gaze caught on his biceps and suddenly your fingers itched with the memory of them. God damnit. “Maybe it should be.”
Your brow furrowed. Was he fucking pouting? You were indignant, and feeling a little reckless. “Well, then, Vigilante, go on - put that dumbass sword on your back to good use and kill me.”
“Uh…do you two know each other?” your date asked. You blinked at him dumbly - you’d forgotten he was there.
“No!” you and Vigilante snapped at the same time. You stared hard at him, trying to make out anything beyond that stupid red visor of his.
“Look, you seem nice but this has been deeply weird, sooo I’m gonna go,” your date said, but not before taking his rice pudding with him. You couldn’t blame him - for a money laundering scheme the pudding was really good.
You whipped back towards Vigilante as the bell sounded over the front door and the only person with a lick of common sense in the scenario fled the scene.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” you demanded. You clarified before he could shrug it off, “Why are you so hell bent on ruining all my dates?”
He laughed, an awkward, strained sound that devolved into a cough as he clearly tried to disguise the sound. “Um, selfish much?”
“Excuse me?”
“You really think the world revolves around you so much that I’m specifically trying to interrupt your little dates or whatever?” he scoffed, apparently intent on doubling down on his unusual attempt at indifference. “I’m a little busy fighting crime to worry about your inept dating life, dude.”
You narrowed your gaze at him, almost positive he was lying. But the alternative did seem insane. He sighed. “What possible reason could I have for wanting to keep you from dating?”
“I don’t…I don’t know,” you admitted. What else were you meant to say? There was no proof, not really. But you didn’t believe in coincidences.
“Oh, so he’s like…in love with you?” your friend said when you’d finally finished recounting the strangest weeks of your life.
Coffee threatened to spill out of your nose as you choked, “What?”
One of your regulars piped up from their usual table by the counter. “Oh, yeah, no I agree. It sounds like he’s totally in love with you.”
“On what planet is he – oh my god, there’s no way, guys!” you argued, even if the sinking feeling in your stomach said otherwise. Was it possible? And if it was – why? Why you?
You waved them both off. “He doesn’t even know me.”
Even if you were unconvinced of some kind of undying love you were convinced that it was all on purpose. Fate had often been unkind to you in the past, but it was a level of sadism that even you could not believe existed naturally in the universe.
And all of it – the failed dates, the weird, strangely intimate encounters, the skin-crawling feeling of being followed, the gnawing feeling of familiarity – had led you to a totally logical, reasonable plan: set a trap for Vigilante.
So maybe you’d spent maybe a little too much time planning it. Thoroughly vetting the restaurant, the people who ran it, pouring through social media accounts and a background check on your date - certifying that there was no off-hand excuse for Vigilante to crash your date.
No crimes, no drug fronts, no nefarious owners. Just an above-the-board night out with a nice guy. It was your own little challenge to him, a desperate bid to prove your theory right. If he crashed this date you would know for sure that this wasn’t just some weird cosmic intervention and that he was doing it on purpose.
“Are you okay?” your date asked. Alex? Andrew? Adrian? (NO, definitely not.) Fuck. What was his name again? “You seem a little…distracted.”
You dragged your gaze back to him and put on a carefully practiced smile. “I’m so sorry. I am distracted, you’re right. And that’s not fair to you.”
“Anything I can help with?” he offered with a lift of his brows and a small tilt of his head. He took a sip of his drink, waiting for you to fill in the blanks for him. Adam! Adam seemed…nice. And you were…toootally blowing him off. You sighed, defeated, and smiled apologetically.
“It’s going to sound crazy,” you started, raking your hands over your face.
Adam smiled. “Try me.”
You shifted slightly in your seat. “Okay, so you know Vigilante?”
“Vaguely? The costumed maniac who works with Peacemaker and is somehow not in jail?”
You chuckled. “That’s the one. Well, uh, I think he might be – ” In love with me? But you figured that was not the right thing to say on a first date. Was the alternative really much better? “Stalking me?”
Adam choked on his sip of wine. “What?”
“Or it’s total, weird karmic coincidence that he just keeps showing up where I am!” you offered. Adam’s head tilted slightly to the side, bewilderment written across his handsome features.
“How many times has this happened exactly?”
“Four. Give or take. Not counting the time he walked me home like a year ago.”
“Sorry, Vigilante walked you home?” he asked in disbelief.
“Yeah, I know how it sounds.”
Adam’s eyes studied you for a moment before he turned and flagged your waiter down. Damn it, you thought, he doesn’t even need to be here to ruin dates for me. Maybe you’d have to store the Vigilante card in your pocket for some bad date down the line.
But instead, Adam leaned back in his chair and smiled at the waiter. “I think we’re going to need another glass of wine. And what’s the best dessert you’ve got?”
When the waiter disappeared to fetch both things he leaned his elbows on the table. “Okay, start from the beginning.”
Outside the restaurant you two did the awkward dance between lingering and saying good night once and for all. With both your rides ordered the two of you stood waiting, close together. (It was cold! Who could blame a girl?) Adam reached up and tucked a strand of your hair behind your ear.
“Listen, I’m really hoping I don’t get a visit from Vigilante later for this, but, uh, can I kiss you?” Adam asked. His sandy hair was given an orange halo by the streetlight above you both. He really was handsome in a sort of everyman kind of way. Considerate, kind, easy to look at and not Vigilante – you nodded. His lips pressed against yours gently and something that felt almost like guilt twisted in the base of your stomach.
When his car rolled up first he offered to stay with you but you’d waved him off. “Can’t lose you to Vigilante, now can I?”
He pressed a kiss to your cheek and made you promise to text when you got home safe. The second his car disappeared around the block your driver cancelled on you. You’d already waited an eternity and getting a rideshare in downtown Evergreen on a Friday night was a nightmare scenario. Besides, the walk would be good for you. There was plenty to think about on the way home. Like…
Where the fuck was Vigilante?
Maybe you were back to the drawing board entirely. You’d been so convinced he was doing it on purpose, but maybe you’d been wrong? Maybe it really was just all coincidence? What a weird, specific curse to have upon you.
And then you heard the footsteps behind you.
The feeling of being followed was familiar now, unfortunately expected, but when you whipped around the very clear glint of a knife pointed at you, well…that was new.
“Oh!” you managed to squeak out. It wasn’t Vigilante at all. Instead, you were face to face with some guy who was very clearly trying to mug you.
“Jesus Christ,” you sighed.
“Give me your purse, bitch!”
You raked a hand over your face. “Please don’t do this. I’ve been having a really shitty few months and I’m - ”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Listen, asshole, I’m just trying to warn you. Vigilante has been stalking me so you probably don’t want to fuck with me.”
You didn’t think you’d get to play the card so soon! A strange delight unfurled in your gut. Maybe invoking his name would somehow finally make him appear. Your life in danger would be his very own Bat Signal.
The man faltered slightly before tightening his grip on his knife. “Why would Vigilante be stalking you?”
“You know, man with knife, that’s a really good question,” you said, nodding thoughtfully. The strange sense of calm running through you really should have been more alarming. You felt yourself take a step towards him and his expression shifted into pure confusion. Maybe that was good. Maybe you could actually handle this yourself. Maybe this was like when people gave advice to out-freak your would-be attacker. Maybe –
A single gunshot silenced the rest of that train of thought. Hot blood splattered against your clothes, your cheek, in your slightly open mouth.
“Oh my god,” you managed, frozen for just a moment before bending to spit onto the sidewalk. You lifted the hem of your sweater to your mouth to scrape the taste of blood out of your mouth while you tried desperately not to gag.
“Nice! I’ve been looking everywhere for this guy!” Vigilante cheered, a slight hop in his step as he crossed the street to where you stood.
“Are you okay?” he asked, giving your shoulder a slight nudge with his own. You at least had the good sense to recoil from his touch. His hands shot up to shoulder height, palms towards you in a show of reassurance.
“Sorry! I was running a little late. Did I miss your date?”
“Yeah, you did,” you replied, realizing a moment too late that you sounded a little disappointed. Seriously, what the fuck was wrong with you? “I even got a good night kiss. Which, before you say anything, is not a crime.”
Tension visibly rippled through Vigilante’s muscles. “Was he…was he good to you?”
“He was very nice.”
“That’s it? Just ‘very nice’? Sounds kind of lame to me!”
“Well, he’s not you.”
“Not me good, or not me…bad?” he asked quietly.
You faltered a moment, genuinely unsure. Sure, the stupid, depraved thought had been knocking around in your head for a little while now. That while Vigilante was actively ruining your dating life, at least he was somewhat consistent. At least he showed up for you. And maybe there was something kind of hot about the mask now that you thought about it.
God damnit, you really needed to get away from him before you did something stupid. So, you continued walking towards your apartment, thinking maybe he’d have to stay behind to deal with the body. But instead he just followed along with you like some hapless dog.
“For one thing, he didn’t just murder someone in front of me again,” you said instead of really answering the question.
He put his hands on his hips. “That guy was going to hurt you. You’re telling me you would have preferred I let him stab you in the face over a purse? That would be a total waste of a really good face.”
“No! I’m not saying that, I’m saying…fuck I don’t know, Vij,” you sighed. He froze, a particular tension to his posture. But your brain was busy playing catch up with the fact that he’d said you had a…good face?
“Say that again,” he murmured. Something was so, so familiar about the cadence, the desperation. An impossible thought prickled at the back of your mind and you batted it away.
“Say what again?” you asked.
“Call me Vij. I like it when you say it.”
A shudder rolled down your spine, involuntary and unwelcome. You struggled against the feeling settling in your gut. “Not until you admit that you’ve been trying to ruin my dating life.”
“Why would I admit that?” he scoffed. “Or, um, I mean, uhhh…I told you before, I think that’s a really self-centered way of looking at the world. To assume that just because I happen to show up at all your dates and they happen to be interrupted or end badly while I’m around doesn’t mean that I’m doing it on purpose! And actually, as a feminist, I find that kind of assumption offensive.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes, really! I think all women should be allowed to date whoever they want!”
“All women?” you asked.
“Mhmm!”
“Even me?” you continued to press.
His shoulders shifted slightly. “Yup!”
“And so I should be able to fuck whoever I want as much as I want?”
His entire body went stiff as he seemingly tried to force himself to nod.
“For sure. Yes! Definitely! Go off, diva! Have sooooo much sex. Like maybe even have too much!” he rambled. You just stared at him with wide eyes. Then he laughed sharply, and the familiarity of it ran through your whole body. There was no way… “I mean, can one even have too much sex? Probably not!”
You tilted your head slightly. “Are you okay?”
“Can I admit something?” he asked, the question bursting out of him like he’d been biting his tongue, his voice sounding strained. He waited for your sharp nod before he continued, “I’ve been trying to ruin your dating life.”
You faltered. “What?”
“Yeah, ha, you totally caught me!” He scratched at the back of his neck and again that sense of familiarity ran through you like ice in your veins.
“You know, my friends think it’s because you’re totally in love with me.”
His head tilted slightly and you would have given anything to see the expression on his actual face. “Oh! Well, probably because I am.”
For a moment you could practically smell the short-circuiting happening in your brain. “You…huh?”
He shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other as you both stood at the bottom of your apartment complex stairs. “Sorry, I thought it was obvious?”
“Why else are you doing all this?”
“Is love not enough these days?” he joked breathlessly.
Something like panic started to crawl down your spine. You had, of course, considered the possibility, but faced with the simple truth of it you didn’t know what to do or say. So you did the only thing you could think of in the moment - you turned wordlessly and walked up the steps towards your apartment. You fished your keys out of your bag, fingers brushing over the lock before you turned back around to look at him one more time.
It was a mistake.
You couldn’t believe it. You were about to do something so, so fucking stupid. But the theory brewing in the back of your mind needed to be accounted for.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?”
No sooner had you asked then Vigilante ducked his head down and pressed his mouth to yours, fabric scraping at your chin. You made a noise of surprise, muffled against his mask, as he pushed you back against your front door. All you could taste was polyester and sweat and something metallic. His tongue tried to lick desperately into your mouth but was constrained behind the fabric, now wet and sticking to your skin and his. It was entirely unsatisfying, frustrating even, but still you couldn’t deny the warmth spreading in your stomach.
So you slid your fingers up his suit until you were prying at fabric, pushing it up until his hands grabbed your wrists firmly and made you stop. He pinned your arms down at your sides but still you leaned back to examine the small stretch of canvas he’d allowed you, taking in the pale expanse of his neck, the very bottom of his face. Even in the dim light something about it was familiar.
You leaned forward and peppered kisses to his exposed skin until you reached his uncovered mouth and waited. He surged forward, kissing you for real this time - nothing but wet lips and eager tongues and hot breath and his hands fisted into the fabric of your shirt as he yanked you against him and – oh.
You pulled back.
“What the fuck?” you panted. If you’d felt insane moments before, you now felt the Earth had completely flipped on its axis the moment your lips had touched his.
Because you knew that mouth.
“Adrian?”
“Um…who?” he attempted.
“Take the mask off right now,” you ordered, pulling away from his grasp.
“I can’t, I, uh, well, I’d have to kill you! If you saw my face! Because, you know - secret identity,” he scrambled. Oh my god. How had you not realized it sooner? You really were a fucking idiot.
“You won’t kill me,” you said firmly, crossing your arms over your chest.
“You don’t know that!”
“I do. And besides, I already know what your face looks like, Adrian Chase,” you snapped.
He looked frantically over his shoulder. “Can we please talk about this inside?”
“Why the fuck would I let Vigilante inside my apartment?” you asked.
“C’mon, please don’t be like that,” he whined.
“Like what? Seriously, tell me why I should let a stranger who is a murderous superhero wannabe into my home,” you said, putting your hands on your hips. “I’ll wait.”
“I don’t wanna be pedantic but you did just let Vigilante put his tongue in your mouth, so, I’m not really sure what the difference is?”
You stood your ground. You just wanted to hear him admit it. Because you knew him and you knew he’d cave.
“Fine! Fuck! It’s me, Adrian!” he exclaimed in a rather loud whisper. You rolled your eyes at him and he reached up to take the mask the rest of the way off.
“Jesus Christ, don’t! Don’t do that out here, you idiot!” you gasped and reached up to stop him. You cursed under your breath as you unlocked your door and then dragged him inside, your fingers hooked under the chest plate of his suit. With the door closed behind him and the lock safely in place, Adrian reached up and pulled the mask off with a gasp.
He stared at you with those wide, bright green eyes of his and smiled from ear to ear. “See, you do care about me still!”
You shifted uncomfortably and avoided his gaze directly. You knew exactly what it was like to fall into those eyes and you weren’t totally convinced you’d be able to climb your way back out.
“No, I care about my nosy neighbors seeing me with a wanted criminal.”
“Sure,” he agreed, clearly sarcastic. He fished his glasses out his pocket and slid them onto his face. For some reason, seeing your Adrian - glasses and all - in the Vigilante suit was more befuddling than it was before. Worse still, it was also strangely arousing.
And then it hit you like running headfirst into a brick wall.
This is what he’d been hiding the whole time.
“Why?” you asked, somehow the only word you could seem to muster.
“You’re gonna have to be a little more specific…”
“Why the fuck were you lying to me about this, Adrian?”
“I mean, not to be technical but I was lying to you about other stuff. You never asked me if I was Vigilante!”
You rolled your eyes and groaned. “Well, pardon me for not thinking to ask if my boyfriend is the psychopath running around Evergreen killing people for minor infractions! Adrian, you’re weird but you’re like…sweet weird. You don’t exactly give off psycho-killer vibes.”
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
You punched him straight in the arm. “Please be serious right now!”
“Sorry! I couldn’t help it! That song is so funny. Because like, what is this, you know? They’re really asking the right questions.”
“I cannot believe I spent a year dating you,” you sighed.
“Hey!”
“You don’t get to ‘hey’ me! You’ve been living a double life for…wait, was it the whole time we were together?”
Adrian chewed at his lower lip. “Maybe.”
“Adrian!”
“Yeah, okay, the whole time we were together and also like…for a while now.”
Your mind was reeling, trying to deal with the puzzle pieces and details and – oh yeah, the gnawing of your own presumed morality at the back of your brain. The man you loved was a killer. And maybe you loved the killer, too.
“When you disappeared for three days were you…doing Vigilante shit?”
“Oh, ha! Yeah, I was on a super serious top secret mission,” Adrian laughed. Then he took in your expression and he, too, sombered. “I wanted to tell you then. I wanted to explain. That night on your doorstep I planned to…um, but when I came back…when you told me we were breaking up, that you couldn’t trust me, I…I think it broke something in my brain. But I also realized you were right to break up with me. That actually you’re safer when you’re not dating me. I couldn’t live with myself if someone were to somehow trace me back to you. But then I realized that I could protect you as Vigilante, even if I couldn’t protect you as Adrian.”
“I didn’t want to break up with you, you know that, right?” you asked quietly. Something like a glimmer of hope flashed in his bright green eyes. “But I had to protect my heart.”
“What if…do you think there’s a chance you could let me protect that, too?” he asked, voice quiet and unsteady. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”
“Is that what you think you’ve been doing this whole time? Protecting me?” you asked, genuinely trying to understand the way his clearly warped brain worked.
“I know I don’t deserve it, but you do. You deserve the world. Because you’re not the common denominator in a sea of shitty men. You’re like a bright star that everyone is drawn to. And bright lights attract some losers, too and…I think I’m losing track of the metaphor but all I really mean to say is: you’re exceptional.”
Call it weakness, call it stupidity, call it what it was: a kindling breath on a flame you’d tried desperately to snuff out. You loved him.
It was unclear if it was you who leaned forward first or him but either way you found your head pressed against his chest, his arms sure and firm around you.
“I have to ask — how did you know it was me?”
“I had my suspicions,” you laughed. Though clearly not enough. “But I knew for certain the second my lips touched yours.”
Adrian well and truly cackled. He lit up all over, exactly the same man you’d fallen in love with the first time you’d met him. Just with a little…more than you could have conceived of before. Maybe you weren’t ready to admit it to him quite yet, but a part of you clamored to get to properly know Vigilante, too. There was a whole new, strange, thrilling part of Adrian Chase for you to discover.
“I can’t believe you recognized my mouth, dude! That’s kind of insanely romantic if you think about it!”
“Yeah, I’m actively choosing not to think about it, thanks!” you retorted. Then, because for some reason you couldn’t help it, “I mean, I’m very familiar with that mouth’s work, it would be a crime if I didn’t recognize it.”
“Are you flirting with me right now?” Adrian asked, the question half a gasp, half a squeal of excitement.
“No! I don’t know! Maybe a little bit! Fuck! I can’t help it.” You scrubbed at your face with both hands like maybe you’d be able to wipe it all away. “It’s like…in me, you know?”
“What is?”
“Everything about you. I see your face and it’s like you’re hardwired in my skull and in my heart. I could have gone on one hundred dates or none and it wouldn’t have made a difference at all, because none of them were you!” you exclaimed, breathless. You knew Adrian well enough to know you were maybe being too flowery for his very literal brain to fully comprehend.
“Me Adrian or me Vigilante?” he asked, surprising you.
You forced yourself to meet his gaze and then gave a defeated shrug. “Both, I think.”
“Fuck, I think that’s the nicest and the coolest and the hottest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Adrian murmured. He pulled you tight against him by the hips. “Can I kiss you again? I think I need to or else I’ll die.”
You answered him by pressing your lips to his, his chin captured in your hand, fingers pressed firmly into the skin – just enough pressure, not too much or too little for dear, sweet, Adrian. You kissed him hungrily, which seemed to take him delightfully by surprise, if the noises he made were anything to judge by. His tongue scraped over your teeth, and you bit at his lower lip and pulled. His fingers pressed so hard into your hips you thought they might bruise and you also thought you didn’t give a fuck. Adrian’s mouth travelled from your lips to your jaw to your neck. He sucked at the skin just below your ear and you knew he was trying to mark you as his. That was the question, wasn’t it? Were you willing to be his again, knowing what you know?
It was utterly incongruous: your perception of Adrian, the man you’d loved and practically lived with for an entire year versus Vigilante, a man you knew to be a totally cold-blooded, obsessive killer. Did it make a difference if it was in the name of justice? You had seen on the news when he’d been involved with saving the planet from those butterfly alien things with Peacemaker. How was he the kind of guy who could play D&D for hours, and talk incessantly about Pokemon, and kiss you so gently, and also the kind of guy who kicked criminal ass with no remorse and saved the planet from alien invasion?
“What are you thinking?” he asked, pulling back suddenly. He had that gentle, focused look in his eye that you knew all too well.
“I think I should probably be scared of you,” you replied honestly. His tight hold on you loosened almost imperceptibly, but still you felt it. Of course you did.
“I would never hurt you,” he whispered. “Please believe me.”
“I do. And, I also think you’ve permanently fucked up the wiring in my brain,” you grumbled against his mouth.
“Does this mean we’re getting back together?” he asked, and you could practically feel the excitement of the idea thrumming through his body.
“Maybe,” you offered. He deflated slightly. “If we’re going to try and figure this out then there’s no more secrets between us, okay?”
Adrian nodded. “Sick! I mean, now you basically know all my secrets. Except, I guess, about all the drugs and blood money in my basement.”
“The what now?”
He darted forward and peppered your forehead, your eyelids, your cheeks with kisses. Somewhere between them all he managed to say, “Thank you for giving me another chance. I’ve missed you so fucking much.”
“Hard to miss someone when you’re stalking them, Adrian,” you reminded him.
“But I miss you every time I blink,” Adrian breathed, wide-eyed and stupidly adorable and achingly earnest. Your fingers itched for every part of him but you refrained, hooking your fingers into the chest plate of his Vigilante armor.
“I need to hear you say it – no more secrets. We are both totally honest with each other, for better or worse,” you demanded.
Adrian nodded, a wide grin on his lips. “I’ll never keep anything from you ever again. You can trust me, I promise. In fact, I promise on Peacemaker’s life! He’s the only thing I cherish in this life even remotely close to you, so you know I mean it. If I was gonna swear on the most important thing, well, that would be you, but I figured that’s a little counterproductive to the whole swearing on something thing.”
When you kissed again it wasn’t hungry any more. It was slow, it was deep, it was an acknowledgment that you had all the time in the world. Your fingers wove into his curls and pulled tightly, just the way you knew he liked. Because you knew him. He groaned his approval into your mouth and he wrapped around you, practically enveloping you. The next thing you knew his hands were under your ass and he was supporting you so you could wrap your legs around his waist. He carried you effortlessly towards your bedroom, pausing along the way to press your back to the wall and kiss you even deeper, his fingers needy and clumsy at the hem of your shirt. His fingers, still gloved, scraped across the skin of your stomach, reacquainting themselves with familiar territory.
His lips didn’t leave yours the entire time, even as he carried you to your bed and laid you down like the most precious thing on the planet. He leaned over you, hands pressed into the mattress, you hooking your fingers into the straps on the front of his suit to try and pull him as close as humanly possible. Things blurred into a hot, slow, haze of Adrian.
Suddenly, you drew back with a gasp, both desperate for air and with another gnawing question on your tongue.
“Wait wait! You didn’t kill any of those guys I went on dates with, right?”
“Only the first one,” he said with a kind of severity that sent a chill down your spine and had you anticipating the feeling of him between your thighs in equal measure. Then you realized, somewhat dreamily, that Adrian already was in between your thighs. So you squeezed your legs around him tighter – you weren’t letting him go again. Adrian Chase really had ruined you forever.
“And what crime did he commit?” you asked against his mouth, your arms snaking around his neck.
“Being an asshole to the person I love most in the world.”
Then he unhooked your legs so he could slide down your body until he was kneeling at the edge of your bed. His fingers made quick work of your pants and yours pressed into the mattress as he made himself at home between your thighs like no time had passed at all.
Adrian watched you sleep for some time, your limbs tangled with his, you asleep in one of the oversized shirts he’d left behind, the poster of Fargo printed across your chest. The evening had gone better than he could have ever planned. And he had done a lot of planning.
Sure, he hadn’t anticipated your date kissing you, but it didn’t even bother him anymore. But he’d heard what that stupid guy had said to you while he was hidden out of sight.
Can’t lose you to Vigilante, now can I?
Now the mugger had been a total coincidence but one that made him look so cool and tough. He’d saved you from death, not just a shitty date with some stupid guy! Extra points for Vigilante! He’d high five himself if he could.
Adrian moved slowly, making sure not to disturb you in the slightest. He got distracted for a long moment just watching you sleep peacefully, a ghost of a smile on your beautiful mouth.
When he slipped back into the bed he had the Vigilante mask on and your phone in his hand. He cuddled up behind you and then tucked his chin into the crook of your neck. He ensured the flash was off and then took a picture. He opened your texts and found Adam (Hinge) with ease.
He attached the photo and then, smiling from ear to ear, typed:
You lose.
breaking up is hard to do taglist: @sideblogmeanz @danversxwasabi @countvonklit @tlfg-adrianchase @bunch-of-bens @lovenerdywhitemen2 @morguegrl89
gen adrian taglist: @countvonklit @tlfg-adrianchase
(if you want to be on my adrian taglist let me know below! x)
