all my gender problems went away when i realised i was a femme lesbian. all of a sudden the body i hated because of the male attraction is brought me became my prize; it’s not for them, it’s for me and all the beautiful lesbians in my dms
drunk! perv! dunk. let me say it again. DRUNK.. PERV.. dunk.. the possibilities r endless. does he cum fast? does he fall asleep eating it? does dunk fuck you until HE’S overstimulated and basically crushing you? put me in his world and im putting medieval contraceptives to work, or im just locking it down and having his fat stupid babies
babe omfg YOUR MIND ???? i kid u not this ask actually drove my ass to open a google docs file
LOOK AT HIMMMM im getting him pregnant!!
thank you so much for these delicious thoughts anon, i’ll write a whole thing bc this food is too fucking good but walk with me for now
18+ minors dni
drunk!perv!duncan the tall
content: slight intoxication, leg humping (yay!)
imagining a swaying dunk being dropped off at your tent, already through the worst of it, but he still goes moony-eyed at the sight of you.
you take him from lyonel, who leaves you with a grin like he knows something you don’t (dunk spent the whole night rambling into his mug, in great detail, about the filthy dreams he’s been having of you and how badly he wishes it was real).
dunk is touchier when he’s drunk, shoving his clammy face into the crook of your neck when you lead him into your tent. doesn’t even hide how he’s inhaling the scent of you with open-mouthed huffs.
whines when you plop him down on his bedroll, clutching at your leg when you try to go get him something to drink. dunk presses his forehead to your belly, arms locked around you to keep you from leaving.
you know he’ll have a shit time of it tomorrow if he doesn’t sober up soon, but you like being trapped in dunk’s strong, brutish grip a little too much to do anything about it.
your hand buries in those sandy blond strands, scratching at his scalp while you try to figure out how to reach the waterskins.
dunk groans, loud and wet, and you watch with your jaw slack as he ruts his hips against your lower leg. one slow, firm drag that has his shoulders curling in and his broad back bowing.
“fuckkk,” dunk slurs, hooking a thick arm around the back of your thigh, moving you to his liking for a better angle to grind his cock.
your breath stays lodged in your chest, burning you from the inside out when he starts humping your leg in earnest, setting a sloppy, jagged rhythm that has him moaning wantonly into your dress.
“dunk–?” your voice cracks, pitched up in surprised — that he’s using your body for his own pleasure, and that you’re wetter than you’ve ever been watching your hedge knight reduced to the pathetic mess at your feet.
“want you s’bad,” dunk whines, spit pooling at the corner of his lips. he drags those glossy blue eyes up to meet yours, and thrusts even harder at the sight of your face.
“want t’fuck you,” he confesses, pressing himself deeper into the folds of your dress, like if he tries hard enough he can find his way inside. “think about you all the time– i wan’ you crying on my cock. want to know how you taste, m’lady.”
you file away his confessions for later, content to let him use you to his own end.
“bet you’d be sweet,” he grunts, eyes fluttering as he buries his face to your lower body, as close as he can get to what he wants. “–taste like fuckin’ heaven.”
your hands press harder into his head, digging your nails in until he whimpers. the sound goes straight to your core, fluttering and painfully empty.
“does that feel good, hm?” you coo, stroking the back of his head to soothe the sting. “you look so handsome like this, dunk.”
you can feel the heat of him leaking — he’s rucked up your skirts with greedy hands, only so he can soak your soft skin with the wet patch blooming on his trousers.
dunk pants open-mouthed, nodding with desperate jerks of his head. choked out grunts escape his glistening lips and that grip on your thigh is sure to leave a bruise, but none of that matters when he’s spilling into his trousers with a broken whine, cursing and shuddering through the syllables of your name.
all the while, you soothe him through it, distantly wondering how long it’d take him to get going again if you keep calling him pretty.
he’s easier to manoeuvre in his post-orgasmic haze. sits down where you tell him to, cleans himself up and waits obediently while you fetch the waterskin.
though when you hold it out for him to take, he stubbornly refuses to drink, turning his head from the mouth. he’ll dodge and protest, until your hand comes up to hold his head still, fingers gripping his jaw as you tilt the opening against his lips.
only then will he drink, sharp gaze never leaving yours. his blue eyes are clear — so clear you begin to wonder how drunk he’d really been at all.
contents (nsfw): Ser Duncan The Tall x fem!mer!reader (Reader has long hair because of it), wounded knight saved by a mermaid trope, switching POVs (indicated with dividers), descriptions of pain and wounds, wound tending, mild blood and gore, some fluff, virgin!Dunk, soft!Dunk, mutual pining, size kink, Dunk has a big dick (I don't make the rules), slit fingering, very slight choking, unsafe sex, monsterfucking.
synopsis: Wounded in battle he doesn't know if he won or lost, Duncan stumbles into what he thinks is his final resting place. There, a siren finds him, and she decides to spare him and keep him.
word count: 12,6K
a/n: Banner is by me, dividers by @honeyluvsw! Some dialogue is in Gaeilge, but it's translated within the text. Fathach Caoin means 'gentle giant'.
He’s seeing red. Everything around him comes muffled, as if the world has been packed with wool, but inside his own body there is no hush at all. His heart booms in his ears. He hears blood leaving him in slow, thick spills with every step. Then, the wet pull of torn flesh at his side each time he lurches forward, the wound widening, skin stretching, opening. Bruises come up under his harness like something boiling. His body has turned loud as a battlefield, though the forest itself has gone strange and far away. All the noise erupts from within him, while Ser Duncan The Tall stumbles forth through the strange land, seeing red.
The trees begin to thin by such small degrees he does not mark it at first. Trunks stand farther and farther apart, the undergrowth giving way under his boots to softer ground. Above, the sun has gone to a pale smear behind steel-coloured cloud, drained of all warmth and shape. He keeps on a little farther by stubbornness alone, one step and then another, until the wood opens sudden and wide before him. His knees fold. His sword slips from his hand. He goes down full-length upon a patch of yielding grass, too spent to break the fall, cheek turned into the damp. Somewhere close by, the world gathers itself into a single sound: the low hum of water. A bank, then. A shore of sorts. His last crossing, he thinks dimly. When he shuts his eyes, the red at last gives way to black.
He had wanted knighthood so long it seemed, once, the whole shape of a life. In younger years, trailing after his old master, watching and learning, he had thought of knights as men made for roads and vows and hard duty borne plain. He had not thought on how they died. Or rather, he had thought it would be as his master died: after long service, after years spent in defence of those weaker, with witnesses near at hand to mark the passing of a good man. Age upon him, and peace of a sort. Duncan had carried that picture without knowing it, as boys carry many foolish certainties. Never had he reckoned with ending this way—alone in a red wood, blood soaking into strange ground, unable even to say whether the last fight had been won or lost.
His fingers have gone cold. So have his feet, his arms, the long hefty span of him. The chill is working inward, creeping from the edges, and the rest of his body feels heavy in some queer and dreadful way, as if the earth has begun to claim him piece by piece. It is a weight alien to him. Duncan has known weariness, hunger, what it is to ache clean through after a day in the saddle or a hard bout in the yard, but this is different. This is heaviness without labour and cause. One that drags a man down and means to keep him.
Suddenly, warmth spills over the back of his neck.
He comes to in a jerk of breath, half-lucid. A face hangs over him, close enough that he sees the beads of water trembling on skin, the startled wideness of her eyes. Her mouth is parted. It is full of teeth, small and shining and far too many, and she watches him with the still intent look of something wondering whether he will go peaceably.
Duncan swallows. Even that hurts.
“Have you come to carry me over?” he asks, and his voice shakes like an old man’s.
She says nothing. Only cocks her head, studying him.
He tries to wet his lips and cannot. “Beg pardon,” he murmurs, for courtesy’s sake if nothing else. “I never thought death would have so fair a face.”
Her gaze shifts at that, though whether in surprise or hunger he cannot tell. Then, the dark takes him again.
A noise comes from within the trees. At first it reaches you through the water as blunt disturbance only—stamping passed down through mud and root, a dull knocking felt more than heard. Then come the sounds above it: groans and wails like some wounded thing, and the shrill scrape of metal grinding on metal. When your head breaks the skin of the pond and your ears clear the water, the truth of it comes plain: no beast; a man. His shape flickers between the trunks, hunched and monstrous in the dim.
You keep low beneath the spread of frogbit and white water-lily. The pond has taught you patience. Through the torn green of it, you watch him blunder nearer.
He is vast. Not merely tall, but made on a scale that puts him wrong against the wood. The trees themselves seem to crowd back from him. Iron drags at every step he takes. What serves him for a second skin has gone red in places where the blood has soaked through and dried and soaked through again. He has no helm. His head hangs bare. Whatever face he was born with is all but lost under blood, mud, and the blackening swell of bruises. He comes on bent at the middle, one hand clamped to his side, the other still wrapped stubborn round a sword that appears to grow heavier with each stagger.
Men do this. They go out under bits of cloth and beasts sewn on shields, under one lord’s temper and another lord’s hunger, and tear one another to ruin over slights, borders, pride, inheritance, the old dead grievances of old dead men. They fight their fickle battles over fickle things and pay the dear price with their fickle lives. You do not know what quarrel has opened this one from rib to hip. You do not know whether he earned such an end entire. Yet if he is witless enough to wear steel and bleed for some lord’s cause, then it is grace enough from any god that he should die in a place as fair as yours.
It makes your work easier. There is no need to sing for him. No need to show him a glimmering shoulder through the reeds, no need to sweeten your mouth and set a trap in your voice. Someone else has done all the hard part already. They have wearied him, broken him open, driven him half-blind right here. All he must do now is come near enough.
And the fool does. You see the moment the trees begin to fail him. The ground changes first. Leaf mould gives way to blacker, softer earth. Moss fattens green around the roots. Sphagnum swells at the water’s edge in thick, wet hummocks, bright as something lit from within. He stumbles into the clearing as if he has reached the last place appointed him and knows it.
One more step. Another. Then his knees give way.
The sword drops from his hand and vanishes into the moss with hardly a sound. He falls face-first onto the bank, onto soft bright spread of grass, all that huge bloodied length of him striking the earth. He does not even throw out a hand to save himself. For a breath he lies still.
Then the pond gathers itself around him and gives him one last sound: its low hum against the shore.
Near enough.
You draw yourself from the water slow as a reptile, hands first, then shoulders, then the long drag of the rest of you through weed and black silk mud. Pondweed clings between your fingers. Duckweed pearls green along your wrists. The smell of his blood hangs so thick in the damp that it touches the back edges of your tongue. Fresh. Salt-rich. Strong. Flesh like that would feed you well. Might make you stronger too.
Without the trees to diminish him, and laid flat upon the bank, he looks no smaller. He is still an enormity. A felled thing, all sprawled in a ruinous heap. Breath yet labours out of him in thin, rattling bursts. So he lives. Barely.
You sink nearer, careful with your hands, with your weight, your mouth already parting over the place where neck meets shoulder, where the flesh would be hottest and the taking quickest, when—
He jerks. You go still at once and wait.
His lids drag open.
Blue. A strange clear hue infants keep before the world has time to weather it into something harder. His have stayed. Though pain has driven the sense from his face and left his gaze loose with it, the colour remains clean. A row of copper lashes rims it. Tells you what the blood and mud had hidden: that the hair under all that filth must run copper too.
He swallows. Winces for it. Looks at you straight on, with no flinching, no scramble to crawl back, no fumbling for the sword gulped by the moss.
He asks his question, and for a beat you only stare. Then it comes plain: he thinks you are the thing at the edge of life come to fetch him. A ferrier. A final guide. Death with a wet face and a patient mouth. The more he speaks, the less appetite you retain.
I never thought death would have so fair a face.
And there it is. It is not the praise that stays your teeth. Men have wanted beautiful things before. Men have called you fair with their hands already reaching. Men have named your mouth sweet and your body finer than any liquor, and meant only hunger by it. This is another thing. Stripped of wits by blood-loss, emptied near to death, believing you his last companion, this knight speaks to you as though you are owed gentleness. He thinks he has met the end of his life and chooses, in that meeting, to be kind.
You have never seen the like.
For a moment longer you remain above him, bent close enough to feel the heat leaking from his body into the chill air, your own hunger held open and waiting. Then his eyes slip shut again. The weight of him settles back into the earth. The bank goes quiet save for that poor, thin rattle in his chest.
Your mouth closes.
In your world, the choices are plain: eat or spare, whether it is your own kind or any other. Each is a way of keeping, in the strictest sense of the word. Who is kept in the belly and who in the groin depends on the keeper’s strength, or mercy. Just now, both are at war within you. You are stronger than the dying knight, for the moment. Yet you can see exactly how much the ugly world of men would lose if he were gone. And how much you might gain if you chose to keep him, the way a maiden keeps a man.
“Stócach amaideach,” you groan. A foolish lad indeed.
Both hands go to him first at the shoulder, to test the matter. Give him a shove—nothing. A second, harder. His body shifts no more than the grass does under him. The iron makes a carcass of him. Nearly seven feet of man, all breadth and bone, dressed up in rings and plates enough to drown an even bigger creature outright. You bare your teeth at him though he does not see it.
There is no hauling him anywhere like this. Not up the bank, not into the reeds, not to the shelf of drier ground beneath the alders. You might drag a stag. You might drag two men grown soft on bread and ale. This one is another matter. The blood has not emptied him of his size.
With a sound low in your throat, you drop flat upon your belly beside him, tail lashing once against the water and sending a fan of duckweed spinning. Mud cools your ribs, slickens the gills there. Annoyance goes hot through you all the same. For a little while you lie there glaring at the side of his ruined head, as though the knight has done this on purpose purely to spite you.
Then your eyes go to the armour. That, at least, can be mended.
You push yourself up and set to work. His belt first, stiff with wet and caked dark. The buckle fights you, so you wrench it free. Then the straps at his shoulders. His surcoat clings where the fabric has dried to him. Under it the mail hangs heavy as river chain. You plant one hand in the moss, coil your tail hard beneath you for leverage, and tug until the weight of it gives with a dull wet drag. Piece by piece, you unmake him from what men have put on him. A pauldron slick with mud. A vambrace. The quilted jack beneath, sodden through. Rings of mail whisper and clink against one another as you peel them back from his chest.
He grunts once when you shift him. Still alive enough to object. “Be still,” you mutter, though he has no say in it now—more of him comes free.
The body under all that iron is much as the rest promised: broad, hard, made thick with labour rather than vanity. His chest is furred copper-gold where it is not slicked flat with sweat. Old scars lie pale across his skin, each one laid down by some earlier foolishness survived. New hurts crowd among them. One brow is split deep enough to mat blood right through his lashes and into his hair. Purple has risen ugly under one eye and along the hinge of his jaw. His shoulder is swelling wrong beneath your hand, whether wrenched or bruised hard enough to half-dislocate. The worst lies at his side: a long slash below the ribs where flesh has opened and opened again with every step he took through the wood. Blood still wells there in slow thick gleams.
You draw back and look at it. A man should have dropped sooner from such a wound. This one had walked. Again you click your tongue at him, softer this time.
The bog gives you what you need, as it always has. You know where the thick green pillows of sphagnum swell brightest above the black water, where soft rush grows in clumps fit for binding, where yarrow lifts its ragged leaves higher up the bank, spared the deepest wet. You move quick, gathering with both hands. Sphagnum in great dripping handfuls. Yarrow torn bitter at the stem. A strip of bark from the willow bent low over the far edge of the pool. When you return, you rinse the moss in clear seep-water where it runs cold from the stones, then squeeze it once between your palms.
He does not wake when you clean the cut. His body only flinches under yours. Blood loosens and runs anew beneath the water. Mud comes with it. You work your fingers carefully through the parted flesh, clearing grit, clearing leaf-rot, clearing whatever would fester if left in. When the wound is clean enough to judge, you bend close and press your mouth to the torn edge of him.
Your saliva floods warm.
It tastes of iron and rain and man. Under your tongue the flesh stirs, not closing whole and clean—that would be a greater gift than he has earned—but quickening. The bleeding slows. The raw edges draw tighter. Heat gathers where your mouth has been, the body taking instruction from yours. You do it again, lower, then once more along the deepest part of the gash until your jaw aches and the blood comes less freely.
Curiosity keeps your hands on him after the bleeding eases. You set them at his hips, thumbs fitting into the hollows where hard muscle sheathes over bone, and wonder how such a frame would feel beside yours, under yours, pinned between your tail and the bank. For a moment you lower your cheek to the warm plane of his belly, where coarse hairs narrow and point the way down. Then, before sense can catch up, you slip a finger under the damp edge of his braies and lift. There the weight of him rests, soft with unconsciousness and still imposing.
“My, my,” you murmur, mouth wetting at the sight. No smaller than the males of your own kind, only stranger made—smooth where they are barbed, blunt where they are built for tearing. Pretty. To unwrap him and coax him up in your hand would not be difficult. But you want him back at full strength. Better to let the blood replenish before it is asked to labour elsewhere.
After, you pack the cut with sphagnum, dense and cool, pressing the moss into the cut place until it drinks what still seeps out. You bind him round with rush and the torn strips of his own undershirt, winding them firm beneath his back and over the waist. For the brow, more moss. For the swelling shoulder, willow bark chewed soft between your teeth and laid in a mash against the worst of it. You wipe your wrists across your mouth and sit back to inspect your work.
He looks only a little less like carrion, but it will have to do.
For a while you remain beside him as dusk thickens in the reeds, one hand spread on the broad plane of his chest to feel the rise and fall. It still rattles. It still rises. Great fool that he is, he keeps choosing life even senseless.
With the worst of the grime rinsed from him, the other kind of pretty emerges from under the wreck. His hair, where it dries in the last of the light, indeed burns a dark copper, made richer still by the sinking sun. Fair skin lies under it, though hard-used, and across the breadth of his cheeks there runs a scattering of freckles so pale they only show when the blood is gone from them. Strange, that a face built on such a scale should keep anything of boyhood about it. Stranger still that it does not make him look foolish. Only unguarded.
A giant sleeps at your shore, broken open, and he is gentle.
“Fathach caoin,” you murmur, as though naming him might make the task lighter. Then, with a weary glance at the bank and the darkening pond beyond: “You had best prove worth the trouble.”
He’s seeing orange. Warmth bakes him into the ground and paints the inside of his lids. Dunk feels significantly alive for someone who’s welcomed death with tranquil acceptance. Something binds his ribs quite tightly and the morning chill lakes his chest with gooseflesh.
He frowns before his eyes are even open. The hurt is there, yes, but dulled to something he knows how to bear. Instead of the white-red tearing he remembers and the feeling of his side coming apart each time he drew breath comes soreness. Pull. Throb. The pain a living man may yet complain of.
Slowly, as if he half expects the effort to prove too much for him, he pries his lids apart.
Sunlight drives in, bright and merciless. Duncan winces and shuts them again, turning his face away. For a little while he lies still with his teeth gritted, waiting for the hot dazzle behind them to settle. Then he tries anew, more careful, peering through his lashes first.
Sky. Reeds. The hard gold of morning laid over black water. No seven hells. No pale halls. No ferryman either.
He pushes himself up on one elbow. At once the world tells him several impossible things. His chest is bare to the air. Something coarse and damp is wound round his middle and under one arm, binding him up with more ingenuity than neatness. Looking down, he finds his side packed thick with green-brown moss where blood should have been. Another clot of it has been pressed to his brow. When he touches the binding with cautious fingers, he feels the pull of torn skin made tighter, cleaner, less ruinous than he remembers.
Dunk stares. “Well,” he mutters hoarsely to no one. “That is queer.”
A pile lies beside him on the bank, close enough that he might have reached it in the night had he been able. His surcoat, his mail, his sword belt, the quilted jack beneath—everything dark and stiff with dried blood. His sword has been laid atop the heap as if set there by a hand that understood what it was. The sight of it turns his stomach strangely. So he had not dreamt the fight, nor the wound, nor the red wood or the black water at the edge of it.
He looks again at the moss stuffed into his side. His hand goes once to his chest, as if to make certain the heart is still there and working—it is. A touch too fast, perhaps, but stout enough. He draws a deeper breath to test himself and finds the pain sharp but bearable.
Someone has saved him. The notion is so unlikely that it holds him for another moment, blinking in the sun, bare as a babe from the waist up and swaddled in reeds like some marsh-born fool. He is still trying to make sense of it when the pond beside him breaks with a sudden heavy splash. Something larger than a fish. Considerably larger.
He turns toward the sound and finds you already looking at him.
You lie stretched along a flat rock at the water’s edge, belly to the stone, chin propped in your hands as though you have been there some while, waiting for him to wake. There is nothing shy in the stare you give him. It is the stare of a creature keeping watch over what it has caught. Your claws rest plain against your cheek, curved and dark at the tips. Behind you, the long reach of your tail trails down into the pond and moves through it in an idle sweep that sends rings over the black water.
It is a tail fit to shame his legs. Longer by far than any fish’s ought to be, thick where it begins, made with a strength that shows even in stillness, it narrows and lengthens until the water takes it from him. Where it passes below the surface, it almost disappears. The pond seems to claim it for its own. Under the water it turns rich moss-green, flickering pale now and then like the quick side of a fish. Above the water, the scales catch the morning sun and answer it back in shifting colours—green first, then blue, then a coppery rose, then something gold at the very edge of each movement, bright and hard as the back of a rose chafer.
Dunk’s gaze follows the whole splendid length of it before he has the wit to stop. By the time he reaches the place where human’s buttocks should be, heat is already climbing his neck. He jerks his eyes aside and only worsens the matter for himself. Your body broadens there in a way that leaves him shamefully aware of himself, aware too that he is gaping and that you have likely caught him at it. He goes higher in haste, seeking some safer sight, and finds none waiting.
The scales climb and thin along your shape, framing the inward draw of your waist and the line of your spine before scattering into singular bright points that glitter in the sun like freckles thrown there by a careless hand. Along your ribs, slits open and close in a steady rhythm. Your forearms are drawn carefully over your chest, though what catches him hardest is your face.
He had seen it once before through blood-loss and darkness, and thought it the face of death. Morning does nothing to disprove him.
Your mouth is wet and soft-looking despite the sharpness of your teeth. Your lashes cast faint shadows. Your brows pull together in what seems meant for sternness, though something in the set of them goes sweeter than severe. You watch him with an intensity that strips him bare quicker than the lack of shirt ever could. Duncan swallows and feels the movement all down his bruised throat. Intimidated hardly begins to cover it.
He wets his lips once, then reaches blindly for the nearest bit of cloth from the heap beside him and drags it awkwardly across his chest, as though that might restore some part of his dignity. It does very little. Still, he gathers what remains and bows his head as best he can from where he sits.
“M-m’lady,” he says.
The word leaves him before he can better it. He has no notion whether you are a lady, some water-spirit, or a peril he ought to fear a deal more than he does. Courtesy is what he has, so courtesy is what he gives you.
His eyes lift again, wary and earnest both. “I would thank you,” he says, a touch hoarse, “if thanks is what’s due. Though I confess, I do not rightly know to whom I owe my life.”
“Dúisithe faoi dheireadh.”
Awake at long last.
You roll from the rock with scarcely a sound but for the slick slap of your body leaving stone. A moment later your tail hauls a great sheet of water in his direction. It strikes his shoulder and chest and darkens the shirt bunched there in his fists.
“You must wash,” you tell him. “You may no longer be dying, but other people’s death still clings to you. It disturbs me.”
“Beg pardon, I—” he stammers, blinking water from his lashes. “I’ve bled on your shore.”
That wins from you a laugh, full-chested and bright. You drift onto your back with the ease of something born to water, and the movement sends your hair sliding from your front. The glimpse of side-breast that follows is enough to set Duncan’s head swimming worse than the blood loss did.
“That you have,” you say. “Nothing cold water will not clean. Come—” You pause, eyeing him. “What kind of knight are you?”
“A hedge knight. Ser Duncan the Tall,” he says, eyes down.
At that, Dunk climbs to his feet, clutching the shirt. Then, as if seized all at once by the knowledge that standing half-naked before a water spirit may call for some greater decency, he drags it hastily over his head and very nearly tangles himself in it besides. When he straightens, he finds the cloth has shrunk by half a war. The hem catches well above where it ought to, leaving a broad strip of his stomach bare. Duncan could swear your mouth parts a little at the sight.
“Ser Duncan the Tall,” you repeat. Your hand spreads over the skin of the pond, fingers trailing. “Come. I’ll show you where the water runs clear.”
He goes as bid, though each step he takes toward the pond has a measure of caution in it, as if the water might change its mind and bite. The bank gives under his weight. Mud takes his feet to the ankle and holds them there a moment before letting go with a soft obscenity. He comes on anyway, the chill already rising from the water before he has set so much as a toe into it.
When he does, it is cold enough to strike a sound from him. He sucks breath through his teeth. The next step brings it to his shins, the next to his thighs. By the time it has him to the waist, the whole of him has gone tight with it. His wounds wake afresh under the shock. Cloth blooms and tugs round him under the surface, braies and shirt both dragging with the pull of the current. You move ahead with idle ease, and he follows as far as his long legs will allow. Half because you bade him, half because there is little else to do now but trust the creature who has already had him helpless and left him living.
The pond proves stranger the farther in he goes. The black stillness near the bank gives way to movement. Water threads colder and quicker round his knees, then his thighs, shouldering itself through narrow places between stone and reed. Ahead, it clears to glass over a bed of rock and pale sand. A basin, he thinks dimly. A widening in the course of some hidden run, where stream feeds pond and pond feeds stream in turn. He has just enough time to marvel at it before his next step finds nothing.
The ground drops clean away.
He pitches forward with all his size behind him and vanishes in a single great plunge. Water slams into his ears, nose, his open mouth. Something hard clips him on the face as he goes down—stone, sharp-edged enough to split the lower lip—and the taste of blood bursts quick over his tongue. For a flurried instant all he feels is cold. He flings out an arm and finds no purchase. Then, hands seize him under the pits.
Even now, with his clothes heavy, the water takes enough of his weight that you can haul him. He comes up hard, breaking the surface with a ragged gasp that tears at his side. Blood slips bright from his mouth and strings briefly from his chin before the current steals it.
“Forgive me,” he coughs, wiping at his lip with the back of his wrist.
Your eyes go to heaven, or whatever part of the sky may serve in its place.
By the time you guide him to firmer footing, the bottom has steadied under his soles, though the river still holds him high—up beneath the arms, cold at the ribs, tugging at his clothes. He stands there dripping and raw-lipped while you watch him as one might watch an ox brought in mud-caked from the field.
“You must undress.”
The words strike him near as sharply as the stone did.
Dunk blinks. “That would not be decent.”
“It would be fouler still to put those rags back over clean wounds.” Your gaze flicks once to his side, to the bindings gone dark in patches where the water has touched them. “You would ruin my work.”
That shuts him up more thoroughly than any modest protest might have done. “Aye,” he says after a moment, head bowing of its own accord.
His fingers fumble at the hem of the shirt. He peels it away in stages, the cloth reluctant to leave him. Across from him you have sunk almost wholly beneath the surface, all save the upper plane of your face and the shine of your hair fanned around it. The water holds your shoulders, your belly, the long hidden strength of your tail. Only your eyes remain fully above water, fixed upon him without so much as a blink, and something about that unwavering regard makes his hands clumsier still. He feels all at once too large for his own body, too visible in it, as though every inch he uncovered made his size, his awkwardness, his youth plain.
He gets the shirt off at last and stands with it bunched stupidly in one hand. You come nearer.
There is scarcely a sound to mark it. One moment you are several feet away, the next the water has shut and opened round you again at his side. You dip below the surface to inspect the wound, and Dunk, who has faced armed men before with steadier nerves than this, goes rigid all through. Cool fingers find the knot at his ribs. They work it loose with an efficiency that leaves no room for fantasy, yet fantasy arrives all the same, unbidden and hot. The reeds slacken. The binding eases. He lifts his arms because it seems prudent to put them somewhere, and winds up standing with them out from his sides in a posture so awkward he would laugh at it himself were he not busy dying of shame.
The moss comes free in blood-dark clumps. They spin away upon the water and catch in eddies near his hip. Your hands return. This is the first time he truly feels them: not the fact of being tended, but the touch itself. Your fingers are cool, though warmer than the current. Slender and firm. Certain in what they mean to do. They pass over the torn place at his side, then farther across him as you steady him with a palm spread low on his belly.
Every part of Dunk seems to wake.
Heat pours through him so fast it is near alarming. It starts where you touch him and goes everywhere else with indecent speed—up his throat, across his chest, down into the water where he would rather remain altogether unreadable. He fixes his eyes on the far bank. On a stand of reeds. On anything. The hand on his stomach holds him with easy confidence, keeping him from swaying while you clear the wound, and he throws all his strength into stillness. He holds himself rigid. Even the smallest movement seems perilous to him now. His breath goes thin and careful. His body, treacherous great thing, feels poised to answer even that much.
Water laps softly at his waist. Your hair moves against his skin once, a drifting brush, and he nearly groans from so little. He swallows and keeps his gaze pinned ahead.
The effort of seeming untroubled occupies him so completely he is half convinced he manages it. Then he hears himself breathe—thin, careful, wholly unlike a man at ease—and knows the game is lost.
When Duncan stands, you realise he has not borne the name The Tall in vain. He rises and rises, broad as a gate, sun-struck and awkward and shamefully magnificent. Your mouth parts, caught between awe and a hunger that sits perilously close to longing.
You lead him through the water towards the clearer part of the basin, and your fingers itch to lay hands on him again. The fool manages to stumble, worsen his hurts, and apologise for it besides, which makes your heart swell in a way that sits badly in your chest. His reddened lip distracts you so thoroughly that you duck beneath the surface to wash him.
While you work, it becomes noticeable.
Above the waist, Duncan holds himself as if discipline alone might carry him through it. He stands in the basin like some half-ruined statue planted there by an older people, chin up, mouth set hard when you peer at him through the wavering skin of the water, eyes fixed stubbornly on the trees beyond your head. His hands stay spread from his sides, fingers splayed, as though touching you by accident would be the greater impropriety.
Silly man.
Below the waist, his body keeps no such vows. It knows you and answers. Your hair drifts with the current and combs across the taut plane of his belly. At that, his pelvis gives the smallest, betraying hitch. Lower still, the thick shape under his braies stirs and knocks against the damp cloth, a blunt, eager motion that sends a small heat through you sharper than any craving. He goes all the stiller for it, as though he might shame the flesh back into obedience by refusing to move another inch.
When the work is done, you decide to be cruel enough to enjoy it.
You rise slowly, fingers following the plane of his stomach, and break the surface so close to him that he starts. Water spills from your lashes and straight across your open eyes, and still you do not blink. “It heals well,” you tell him.
“H-how?”
“All the tricks the hedge-witches know too. Plants, mostly. And then some wound-licking, like all beasts do.”
You watch the meaning strike. First confusion, then comprehension, then a flush that begins high on his cheeks and runs everywhere: down his throat, up to the tips of his ears, even into the split and swollen shape of his mouth. His gaze jerks away and comes back again, poorer for somewhere to rest. It is a lovely thing to do to him.
His hands drop beneath the water, too late to hide what has already announced itself. When he looks at you again, the blue of his eyes has gone grave enough to pin. “You’re no beast to me,” he says, and says it like an oath.
The words catch you wrong-footed. Before you can think better of it, you lunge and wind your arms round his neck, bringing your mouth near enough his bruised lip that he must feel your breath there. “I am a beast,” you hiss. “You live because I chose not to feed. Because I chose to keep you.”
His answer is stranger still. Instead of putting you off, he catches you. His hands come to your waist on instinct, spanning so broad they nearly cover the gills laid along your ribs, steadying you where the water shifts under your weight. “Keep me?” he asks, and the words come rough, thinned by the effort it costs him not to notice how your breasts have pressed to his chest.
You nod. “Even if you run from me, it is no great loss. The world has too few men who can look death in the face and mind their manners. Too few who, once made prey, speak kindly to what means to devour them.”
“Are you,” Dunk asks, voice gone low and uneven, “meaning to devour me?”
You smile at that, slow and mean. Your tail coils round one of his legs, the fin dragging light along the inner seam of his thigh. “Would you have me?”
He jerks at the touch and clutches you tighter before sense returns and he tries, clumsily, to loose his hold. You do not let him. “I—” he begins, and fails. His throat works. “I oughtn’t—I mean—”
“Do you fear me?” you ask. “I gave you the force your body needs to mend itself. If I had wanted you dead, I had better chances of it when the bank was drinking your blood.”
“No,” he says, and then, because truth seems to drive him even where he would rather hedge, “No, only—I swore vows. To defend the innocent. To do no dishonour where I can help it. I’d serve you gladly for what you’ve done, but—”
Understanding comes over you whole. It is there in the way he cannot meet your eyes for long, in the care with which he holds even the body he wants, in the shame that seizes him over wanting at all. This vast creature of iron, oath, and sinew; this man all through in his shoulders, his scars, the weight between his legs, the old-fashioned decency that dogs him like a second shadow—and here, hidden in plain sight, the untouched part of him. The boy still tucked inside the knight.
“You’ve never had a woman,” you say softly.
Dunk shakes his head once. Abashment settles red along his skin again, deeper this time, and something like fear goes with it.
It makes you ease. Your grip slackens, though you do not yet slip from where you hang at his neck. “Does it pain you?” you ask, and bring a hand to his mouth. Your thumb passes over the split in his lip, smearing what blood has dried there. He flinches hard enough for the water to stir round you both, then gives a small, unwilling nod.
“Would you like me to mend that too?”
“Please,” Duncan says, and his lids lower as if in surrender.
You lean in and lick the cut clean. His eyes shut fully; yours stare. Your mouth closes over his lip and draws at it, then worries it with the gentlest edge of your teeth, careful of the torn place. His arms gather you closer. Strong. Enormous. Built for hauling men from saddles, for splitting shields, for holding fast—and now holding you with such caution that the thought of what else those arms might do goes through you like fire.
His mouth parts under yours. The sound he makes is so slight you nearly miss it, a breath more than a voice, and you take it in greedily. He breathes through his nose, hard and unsteady, one broad palm spread between your shoulder blades as though to keep himself from crushing you nearer.
So you deepen it. Your tongue goes into his mouth with all the boldness he lacks, while his answers with a care that undoes you more thoroughly than hunger ever has. He tastes of river water, blood, and the plain, clean want. A hand leaves your back and comes up to your face, awkward in its tenderness, pushing the wet fall of your hair behind your shoulder. From a single kiss you know enough: he would be fervent and quiet both, and all the fiercer for how he tries to govern himself. But the fear in him stays your hand. He is not yours for the taking.
You draw back by degrees. “There,” you murmur, close enough that your mouths nearly brush again. “It should trouble you less by morning.”
Then, you force yourself to loosen from him altogether and turn half away, though it does nothing to cool the ache low in your body. “You may remain here until you are mended. A day or two, I think. I’ll bring fish. You may make a fire on my bank if you like. And after that, you may go—if going is what you want.”
When you look back, he is standing just as you left him: dazed, eyes gone bright as wet glass, his bruised mouth drawn into a frown as though he does not trust the ground under him. He swallows once. “I thank you for your kindness, m’lady,” is all he says.
He is grateful. For the food. For the fire you let him light. For the mercy of being allowed to remain what he is at heart, though Dunk has the growing sense that it is you who preserve his virtue, not he yours. That first night he sleeps with his belly full, his side held in a band of warmth, his body laid in the soft cradle of the grass. The fire cracks and settles beside him. Beyond that comes the lazy wash of water and the faint shifting drag of your tail through it.
He dreams.
Of your mouth first, cool and clever on his split lip. Then of it lower. Of his own full of your breast, drinking at you like a starving babe made monstrous. Of his hands running up the long strength of your tail until they find your hips and hold them down. Scales scatter over your back in his dream like coins on a saint’s cloth, and he counts them with his tongue. Your hair winds round his throat like a ribbon and pulls when you want him closer. Your hands go to his backside and drag him hard against you, and the force of it jars through his whole body until he wakes with a gasp, hot through, his cock throbbing so fiercely under his braies it near doubles him.
For one sick instant he thinks you must have seen it. Then shame takes him by the nape and he turns hard onto his belly, as though the earth might swallow what his body has done. By the time the dawn has thinned the mist, the linen between his legs is damp and cooling and he can scarcely bear to think of himself at all.
You spare him the privacy of not noticing, or else you are kind enough to pretend. Dunk does not know which. He only knows he would split his lip anew for the chance to taste your tongue again, and the knowledge sits in him like a brand.
Until now he has always known his body in one fashion only. As weight, reach, hunger, ache. As a thing for fighting in and sleeping hard upon. As something too large for most benches, most doorways, most rooms, most companies of men. It serves him well enough with a sword in hand and badly enough when there is no sword to hide behind. His business has always been to master it, to make it useful, to keep it from frightening decent folk more than can be helped.
Around you another kind of knowing steals over him. He feels your eyes on him and they do not hold the flinch he is used to. Sometimes there is curiosity in them. Sometimes amusement. Once or twice a look that smoulders so plain it puts heat into his face and lower. At moments there is even fondness, which disarms him worst of all. He is certain he looks at you much the same and wonders if you know it. Wonders if a creature such as you can smell want on a man the way a hound scents blood.
Decency remains dear to him. Dear as his vows, dear as any lesson Ser Arlan ever gave him. Yet for the first time in his life the thought of something softer and stranger than his own calloused fist closing round him keeps him restless at night and tight-strung through the day.
That day passes in your company. He tells you of his old master, and you listen with your head tilted and your hair afloat round you in the shallows like weed in a current. In return you show him the marsh as though it were a keep under your charge. You tell him of your kind in scraps, never enough to satisfy him. You show him where the yarrow grows white at the edges of the reeds, how to gather sphagnum from the wetter ground without taking rot with it, how willow bark must be chewed soft before it will give up its bitterness proper. He watches your mouth while you work and has to look away when the thought comes of what else he might lay between those teeth for gentle use.
He mends quickly. Quicker than he ought, perhaps. By the second evening he can stand without feeling the world slide off its hinges beneath him, and that ought to please him. Instead it leaves him sore in some place no salve will reach. For you have not only spared him and kept him, but released him besides, and Dunk has seen so little mercy in the world of late that he scarcely knows what to do with this kind. It does not feel like mercy at all. It feels like a hole opening in his chest as the light goes out, broad and clean and incurable.
He lies wakeful by the bank while the last of the fire gnaws itself into red. After a time he rolls to his side and watches you drift in the water, half-lost in reeds and moon-glimmer. You hum into the night, low and strange, the tune turning back on itself like current in a narrow place. It puts him in mind of no song he knows. A marsh spirit’s song, perhaps. Or a prayer said by something older than men.
He thinks, not for the first time, how beautiful you are. Not in the dainty fashion of courtly tales, all ribbons and rose-leaf mouths, but in some harsher, truer way. Beautiful as deep water, as polished stone, as the flash of a fish’s belly before it is gone. He thinks too how lucky he is that it was you who found him and not some greediest thing the bog had hidden. Any fiercer creature might have taken the copper from his purse, the sword from his hand, the flesh from his bones. You took only the blood he could spare and then gave him back the rest. It feels almost as if some god bent close to him in the dark and chose, for reasons of its own, to be gentle.
The thought leaves him raw. Absently, he says into the reeds, “I shall be in your debt all my days.”
You start as though struck. Your head comes up sharp from the water. The humming breaks. For an instant he thinks it was the words alone, but then you turn too quickly and the long of your hair snags in the split crotch of a root thrust out over the bank. At once you jerk the wrong way. The strands draw tighter. Water slaps. You hiss—a quick, furious sound more like an otter’s than any lady’s.
Dunk is on his feet before his side has time to object.
“M’lady—hold still.” He stumbles the last step and drops to one knee at the bank. You bare your teeth at him, half in pain, half in temper, one hand tangled in the caught mass while the other braces on the root. The more you pull, the worse it winds.
“Do not tell me to hold still.”
“I only meant—” He stops himself, for this is plainly no hour to explain. “Only let me help.”
You glare at him through the dark shine of your wet hair. Then, with a muttered Mo chreach in a tongue he does not know, you cease fighting it. It sounds like it means Curse it.
The caught strands are wrapped tight round a knob of bark and threaded through a split in the wood where floodwater must have worried it open. Dunk sets both hands to it with more care than he has ever given a blade-edge. Your hair is slick as river weed and finer than any silk he has touched, and every time his knuckles brush the side of your neck your breath goes short. That does not help him any.
“There,” he murmurs, though there is not yet any there to it. “I have it. Near enough.”
“You do not.”
“Ah,” he admits. “Not yet.”
A laugh catches you by surprise then, small and unwilling. It startles him worse than your teeth did. He glances up. You are watching him with your mouth parted a little, all that fierce, uncanny beauty drawn close and strange in the moonlight.
So he bends back to the work, patient as any septa with a snarl of thread, prising one lock free after another while the bank smells of mud and willow and the water keeps kissing softly at your ribs. By the time the worst of it loosens, he is breathing hard, and not only from the ache in his side.
What comes over him then Dunk could not have said, not for all the gold in Casterly Rock. Perhaps it is the sight of you bent fierce and helpless over your own caught hair. Perhaps the feel of it still sliding over his hands. Perhaps only the thought of leaving at dawn and going from this place with nothing of you but the memory of your mouth. Whatever it is, it has him speaking before sense can catch up.
“Would you like me to braid it?”
You stare at him. In the moonlight your eyes look blacker than the bog. “Can you?” you ask at last. Then, with that sharpness that never quite leaves you: “And will my bare chest not shame you?”
A breath of laughter from him. “It surely will,” he says, honest as ever. Then some small, stubborn courage rises in him from parts lower than his vows and lodges square in the chest. “But I’d count it an honour besides.”
“Yes,” you say, quick and certain, as though you had only been waiting for him to prove worthy of the task. “Braid my hair.”
So you turn your back to him and come nearer the bank, sitting, while Dunk settles awkwardly behind you. He is no great hand at it. Once, long ago in Flea Bottom, he watched women plait one another’s hair on stoops in the evening light, fingers flying while they gossiped and laughed and cuffed any boy who stared too long. He remembers only the principle: divide, cross, gather, keep even. His hands are built for reins and sword-hilts, not this. Still, he tries.
The first pull earns him a flick of your tail and a hiss through your teeth.
“Beg pardon,” he mutters.
“Do not beg. Learn.”
So he learns. A little. Enough to draw the mass together and work it down into something serviceable, if not handsome. It lies thick as a rope by the time he reaches the end, damp and heavy in his hands. All the while you sit strangely still for a creature of current and appetite, save for the occasional impatient twitch when he tugs too hard. Dunk does his best not to notice the whole smooth span of your back before him, bare where moonlight finds it, narrowing to the wet dark of your waist. He notices it all the same. By the end of it his mouth has gone dry.
“Done,” he says, and hears how weak it comes out.
Then, gods above and all the stranger gods below, you turn.
Moonlight has you whole this time. No reeds in the way. No water to break you into pieces. You come between his spread knees with the slow certainty of something that has already decided the matter, and settle there close enough that the cool of your skin reaches through his clothes. “Thank you, ser,” you say, and sweetness in your mouth is a far more dangerous thing than any hiss.
His heart turns over so hard it near stuns him. Before he can think what he is about, he takes your hand and bows his head to it, pressing his mouth to the back of it in a gentlemanly way, as though you were some great lady and he a proper knight with a proper title to his name.
Your fingers curl against his. Still holding, Dunk takes your palm and turns it over in both of his. He brings one claw to the split in his lip and presses until the cut opens fresh. Pain bites, quick and clean. He keeps your finger there while the blood wells dark along his mouth and watches what comes over your face when you see it.
“Would you mend it once more?” he asks.
Your answer is to catch the end of the braid in one hand, wind it once round the back of his neck, and draw him in.
This time there is nothing medicinal in it. You drink from the torn place with open greed, tongue hot and searching where before it had been careful. Dunk makes a rough sound into your mouth and grips at your waist, all thought burning off him in a rush. The blood is hardly there before you have taken it. What remains is the kiss itself, deep and wet and ruinous, until his head swims worse than it did from the blow that felled him.
“I thought,” you breathe, the words broken by another hungry press, “you meant to leave me without letting me have you.”
His eyes roll back with the force of wanting. He gathers you closer without meaning to, one arm under you, the other firm at your back, and rises in a single clumsy surge to his feet. The movement tears at his side and he barely feels it.
“Have me,” Dunk says, and there is only naked truth to it. “Gladly. I do not know what you see in me, m’lady, nor why a wonder such as you should want aught of mine—but if you do, I’d be the world’s greatest fool to deny you.”
You look at him then as if he has said something finer than he knows how to say, and for once you do not mock him for it.
So he carries you.
He carries you as though he was built for nothing else, down from the bank and over the water to the flat stone where first he saw you rise, pale now under the moon and waiting like an altar. Your arms stay looped round his neck. Your braid drips cold against his shoulder. His pulse beats wild where your breast is pressed to him, and by the time he sets you down, his hands are shaking with the effort of holding back all the things he means to give you if only you will show him how.
For one wavering instant he only looks at you, chest labouring. You give him but a moment to stand there in it.
One of your hands goes to him, greedy and unashamed, and the touch of it through the cloth strikes through him so hard he bows like a man hit low with a poleaxe. Breath leaves him. His fingers claw at the air beside him before finding the rock. Heat tears through his middle, bright and ruinous, and with it a helpless sound he has not the dignity to swallow back.
“Mercy,” he says, though there is no true wish for it in him. “Slow—pray, slow a little.”
Your eyes flash up at him, bright with appetite and amusement both. He feels warm to the throat, near trembling, and still he tries for courtesy, for order, for some scrap of knightly manner in a place that has stripped him of all armour worth the name.
“I’ll do as you tell me,” he says, voice roughened nearly past bearing. “Only—show me. I would not wrong you for want of knowing.”
That stills you. The greed stays in your face, but it settles into something more intent. You ease back against the stone and let your body lengthen there, all bold invitation and perverse ease, your hands opening toward him as though calling a beast from the dark. Moonlight gathers along the line of you. Your tail glimmers where it falls away into shadow. Your breast spills softly with the movement, and Dunk, poor soul, is half-struck through by the sight of it.
He comes when beckoned. With obedience and without confidence. With awe, almost. He lowers himself to his knees over you, great and awkward and trying so hard to be careful that you give him a charmed look. The rock receives his weight with a dull scrape. His breath comes hard through his nose. He does not know where to put his hands until you take one of them and place it high, against the soft warm weight of your tit. The other you guide lower.
He shudders. Squeezes your chest and takes note of how neatly the heft of your breast fits his palm. The rest he lets you guide, because the threat of shattering from the sight alone is far too great.
You draw his fingers over the scales until skin finds a hidden place where they part. There lies a slit, smooth and silky and made to unman him. Duncan breathes, “Oh, by the gods.”
“This is where you fill me,” you tell him, eyes rapt. “This is where I want you.” Then, your lips find his once more. He tastes the same tongue that healed him, the same teeth that could end him and did not. Never in his life had Duncan thought he would find anything to swell so sweetly in his mouth as food or ale, yet here it is. How he came all this way with no more than grateful pecks to the cheek and otherwise wholly unkissed feels, all at once, beyond belief.
All the while, you keep guiding his hand until your body answers him open. And Duncan is made painfully aware that up until now, the body has only ever seemed to him a thing for work. Whenever he had been troubled by primal urges, he tried to throttle the feeling by haste and harshness, or else by the sheer force of his will. Now, as he slides one finger inside you, he’s being shown plainly that bodies exist not only for work. Gods have given them the ability to feel pleasure and it is evident on your face and in the way your shape flutters and arches and pushes itself onto him.
“You’re the softest thing I’ve ever touched,” he whispers, bewildered by himself. By the way his blood shifts places and fills him below the loins until he’s hard. By the way he answers your wetness with his own—pearling at the tip, soaking through the cloth and making the crown of his cock feel cold when he shifts on his knees.
“More,” you rasp, wriggling. “Give me one more.” At that, your hand finds the braid. You draw it over your shoulder and wind it twice round his neck, slow as a tether being laid. Not hard enough to hurt. Hardly hard enough to hold at all. Just enough that he feels the claim of it. Just enough that he understands.
He brings his forehead to yours and the second finger inside, feeling you stretch and swallow him down to the last knuckle. Mere thought of the same sensation enveloping his cock sends Duncan’s head spinning.
When he thrusts gently, the loveliest purr spills out of your mouth. Your face rises and rubs itself on his, lips pulling on his chin and cheek rasping on cheek. “Is liomsa thú,” you murmur.
“What’s that mean?”
“You’re mine,” you tell him. “No soul will know but you and I. But you are.”
“Aye,” he breathes. “That I am.”
“Then give me the rest of you,” you say. “Fill me properly.”
The words slice through him like strong drink on an empty stomach. For half a beat Duncan can only stare, as if he has misheard you and the night will kindly correct itself if he waits.
It does not. You mean it. Worse—better—you mean it without shame, as though wanting him were the simplest thing in the world. No woman has ever spoken to him so. No woman has ever looked at him as though his body were something desired for its own sake and not borne because it must be. Heat surges through him so hard it leaves his thoughts in disarray. He has dreamed, in the clumsy miserable way of lonely men, but dreams had never prepared him for the sound of such words in a living voice, said with your mouth still swollen from his kisses.
When he pulls his hands out of you, they come covered in clear brine. He fumbles at the ties of his braies with fingers that no longer seem wholly his own, and your palm comes over his—cool, assured, impatient with trembling. Your fingers tangle with his and for a moment he can do nothing but hang his head down and watch the two of you joined there. The way you help him find his girth and stroke it. The way your slick coats him. His hand, obeying, as though it has always belonged under your instruction.
“Gods help me,” Duncan mutters. “If you keep on so, I shall shame myself.”
By the time you draw him nearer, he is beyond any rescue. Your hands go elsewhere then—up under the hem of his shirt, stripping the last hindrance from him, then down again with fresh purpose. They travel the width of his sides and settle hard at his buttocks, claiming, directing. Duncan bows over you on a shuddering breath, feeling himself handled like something wanted, something chosen, and scarcely knows how to bear it.
“Have no fear,” you say. “I want you.”
He nods, more to himself than you. “If I hurt you—”
“You won’t.” Your fingers stroke his cheek. “I know your size and I will take it. Courage, my Fathach Caoin. My gentle giant.”
His eyes mist up. He’s there, on the precipice, with your warmth calling him on. Gaze steadfast on yours, Duncan lets himself breach you. And you welcome him like the bravest thing he’s ever seen. Crown already swallowed by your body, yet your face is still clear. There’s an eager stretch around him and a twitch of a tail below him. It coils round his thigh, his knee and ankle, while one of your fists finds the braid once more and pulls, collaring his neck tighter. It’s all the signals he needs to persevere.
The more of him you take, the greedier your answer grows. Claws in his arse, muscles working on his cock in vicious spasms, he manages to fill you with everything some trickster god has given him, and he finds it accepted.
Your mouth is agape. Breath comes through it loud and ragged. “Yes,” you grit, eyes rolling and all of you twitching. “Gods, fuck me. Make me yours.”
“Sweet mercy,” Duncan says, voice gone rough. “You ask it as though I could deny you aught.” His brow drops to yours, air shaking out of him on its leave. “If I am yours, then have all of me.”
At first, he scarcely thrusts. Ruts, more like. Feels the shape of you inside, plastered snugly to him. When he discovers he’s being received fully and without reluctance, his movement boldens. His hips rise and fall, and instinct guides him. Pleasure guides him too, for beyond being permitted, Duncan is being answered as well. With tightness. With the press of your belly into his. With your neck baring and gills there quivering around air whenever he sheathes himself up to the brim.
That is the miracle he never thought possible. With a lifetime of too much ringing around him, awkward and large, he was convinced romance was not written for him. Yet here you are, with hunger gathered on your features and no shadow of hurt visible. It shakes him, that. Here, in your hold, that old wrongness turns. Here what he is suits and is welcome.
“You were made for this as much as for war,” you say, as if reading through his thoughts. “More. I like what you do to me.”
It makes him release his own little stuttered moan. “M’lady—”
Your arms circle his shoulders and hold. “You sound so pretty. All of you is so beautiful, Duncan.”
He searches your face for foulery and finds none. Only bliss and appetite. Only round, wet mouth and dark eyes. Duncan has been commended for strength before, for endurance, for taking a blow and giving one back. None of that has prepared him for the shock of finding that his hands, his mouth, his earnest body can bring a creature like you to such clear delight. With each look, his courage grows.
That growth proves dangerous soon enough. Wonder gives way to urgency. Urgency mounts toward something steeper. Duncan feels it gathering in him with an inevitability that borders on terror. He has been admitted to a marvel and already fears the speed with which he may be cast out of it. The thought makes him cling harder to what steadiness he can muster. He tries to linger, tries to learn the pace of your pleasure and keep himself to it, but his body has begun to outrun obedience.
“Look at me,” you say. “Keep on, you needn’t worry. You please me—ah—” There’s a twitch inside you that nearly ends him. “You fit me. Gods, you please me—”
What happens after, he cannot rightly say. First, your neck wrenches, then delivers your face close so that you can kiss him. Little mumbles of yes and oh and ones that call on various gods in various tongues flood his mouth. His throat gets cinched by your hair and your arms, and tail wraps round him so fiercely it makes his leg go numb and cold at the toes. Chest flattened against his you moan out his name into the night and then—
He’s seeing white. It overtakes his vision entirely when your body does an unimaginable thing. Traps him in that narrow edge of flesh and milks him for seed. Ferocious and wild, it takes and takes, and Duncan’s understanding of himself alters. He is not taking. He is giving and being wanted in the giving.
“My sweet Lass,” he rasps, manners abandoned. “I never knew—Gods, I never knew.”
Dunk never knew something could feel like this. He’s never been shown that things could live where brutality and tenderness meet. That bodies can do all this: bleed, bruise, fill and empty, hurt and please, all while remaining gentle. His gentleness drives him to a point where he feels sensations folding in on themselves. His toes curl against the stone so much that his foot almost cramps. Thighs harden. Lungs burn, yet he feels the most alive he’s ever felt. His belly tugs so violently it is as though someone has delivered a blow with an iron fist. Amidst all this ruthless undoing, Duncan senses his soul coursing through his blood vessels, pushing through his pores in its rise to meet you.
Warmth becomes warmer. Wetness grows wetter. All of his joins all of yours. The pull empties him of everything he carries right into the snug nook of your body. “Yes,” he mutters. “Yes, gods help me.”
With that, he forgets the weight of himself and falls on top of you off his trembling arms. His face lands right into the curve of your neck and the breath that comes through slits there cools the slickened skin of his forehead.
For a little while you do nothing but hold him through the ruin of it.
Your hand moves slow between his shoulders, then lower, smoothing the hard jump of muscle as if gentling some great spent beast after battle. Praise comes from you under your breath in scraps and murmurs, half words, half wonder, and Duncan, who had thought himself beyond surprise for one night, finds that too much for him as well.
A laugh bursts out of him sudden and helpless, honest as the rest has been. It shakes once through his chest against you. He lifts himself just enough to look down, dazed and shining with it still, then bends and presses his mouth to your forehead with a care that seems almost too tender for the body that has just spent itself so violently.
“There are no words for it,” he says. “None I know, leastways. For making me feel—” He stops there, smiling crooked at his own uselessness. “For this.”
You look at him as if his gratitude is a stranger thing than all that passed between you on the stone. Your fingers stroke through the damp at the nape of his neck, over the braid still looped there like some token of your claim.
“You deserve it more than any man I’ve met.”
The laughter leaves his face by slow degrees. In its place comes something quieter, heavier. He studies you and the dread arrives plain enough then, settling under his ribs where pleasure had just torn through him. Because a man cannot be given such a thing and fail to understand that it may yet be taken away.
“How am I to part from you now?” he asks.
You answer him honestly, as you have answered him in all things. “You are strong for it.”
Then you kiss him and gather him down again, one arm curved round the breadth of his shoulders, the other tracing idle paths along his back until the last fierce throbs ease out of him. Great body that he is, he grows heavier by the moment. Sleep comes on him without dreams. His head finds its rest upon your chest. The braid bejewels his throat and there he lies pillowed on you like something claimed and cherished both.
By morning the chill has found him first.
It wakes in his body and deeper than the body too, in the place where certainty ought to sit and does not. The stone has cooled under him. Mist lies low over the black water. Reeds stand pale with dawn.
Duncan opens his eyes and knows at once what the day requires of him. Whatever quarrel spilled him into your bog has not vanished. Roads still run outward from this place. Men still wait at the end of them with their needs, their vows, their battles. He knows he must rise. Knows too that seeing you again would be another miracle, and that miracles are not things a sensible man counts upon.
When at last he stands on the bank, iron on his body and sword at his hip, you drift below in the water and watch him. “Will you be here,” he asks, “if I come again?”
“I don’t know,” you tell him. “Come and see.”
The words might have been cruel in another mouth. In yours they fall as simple truth.
“But—” You lift a hand and beckon. “Give me your sword.”
He does not hesitate. That, perhaps, startles him more than anything. Dunk reaches for the blade and lays it across his palms before offering it over. You take it with both hands, testing the weight of it, your mouth tightening faintly at the smell of old blood still left in the metal. Then your other hand goes to the end of your braid. For a heartbeat he only watches, uncomprehending, until the edge comes up bright in the morning and he realizes what you mean to do.
“Wait,” he says, too late, and only because the thought of any part of you severed from the rest hits him oddly in the chest.
You cut through it clean. The shorn length lies across your palm, heavy as wet rope. You hand the sword back hilt-first. Then, with more care than men give holy relics, you place the braid in his hand.
“You have earned it,” you say. “Keep it, and remember me.”
Duncan looks down at what you have given him as though it were a king’s ransom or a saint’s finger-bone wrapped in silk. The braid spills over his callused palm and nearly to his knees, gleaming and impossible. He closes his hand round it slowly.
“I should remember you without help.”
“Yes,” you say. “But take it all the same.” Your gaze lifts to his, clear as cold water. “Remain gentle. Do not let the world temper you into something you are not. It has enough hard men already. I will not forget you, Ser Duncan The Tall.”
He comes to the shore in all his bulky magnitude, iron making a burden of him once more. Yet the burden sits differently now. He drops to one knee at the water’s edge, heedless of mud. His free hand comes to your face. Cups it. The skin beneath his thumb is cool and smooth and utterly dear to him. Then he kisses you with all the force left in him, with gratitude and hunger and the grief of leaving all tangled together.
“I’ve a love for you I’ll carry always,” he says against your mouth when at last he parts from it. “You made me a man, Lass.”
Something shifts in your face at that—fondness, perhaps, or pity, or the knowledge that men will always name themselves too small.
“You are more than merely a man, Duncan,” you tell him. “You are a giant. And wherever you go, I will keep you.”
He stays there one heartbeat longer, kneeling in the mud like a man before a shrine, looking at you as if he would learn the whole of your face by force and carry it clear to the grave. Then he rises, slow under the weight of steel and parting, and turns at last toward the trees.
masturbation, caught in the act, oral sex (f!receiving), outdoor sex, size difference, praise kink (good girl), double entendre (thanks Egg), mutual pining
word count: 7.3 k
Ser Duncan the Tall is a knight of spotless honor, sworn to chivalry and restraint. Unfortunately for both of you, he also has eyes. And when he finds you beneath his favorite elm, skirts rucked up, fingers buried deep, his name spilling from your mouth like a shameless little prayer — the knightly composure cracks in half.
Caught red-handed, you expect shame. Judgment. Maybe a lecture about propriety. Instead you get the man behind the armor: big, breathless, and suddenly starving. Dunk doesn’t just want to protect you anymore; he wants to drag every needy sound from your throat, bend you over the moss and prove exactly what happens when a loyal warhorse finally snaps his reins.
And really, the Maester did say a good, hard ride was the only cure.
A/N: i’m usually my own toughest critic, but i have to say, i especially enjoyed writing this one. as a side info, i’m working on yer requests and a few other fics so i’ll keep you well-fed in the following days and weeks. love you all 🩷
The wind rustled through the leaves of the old elm, the same one Dunk favored for his quiet moments. You leaned your back against its rough bark, the texture a grounding sensation against the thin fabric of your gown. The afternoon sun slanted through the branches, dappling the ground in shifting patterns of light and shadow. It was here, in this quiet solitude, that your mind began to wander, unbidden, toward him.
A familiar heat bloomed in your belly, a slow, insistent flush that had nothing to do with the sun's warmth. You squeezed your thighs together, a futile attempt to quell the sudden, sharp ache that had taken root there. You shouldn't be thinking of him like this, not here, not now. The thought was a spark of shame, but it was quickly smothered by a wave of need.
You pictured him, fresh from the practice yard, his linen shirt plastered to the broad expanse of his chest, dark with sweat. You imagined the way the muscles in his back would ripple as he swung that massive sword of his, a fluid, deadly dance that never failed to steal your breath. But it was the thought of him after a real fight, blood-splattered and panting, that truly undid your composure. His blue eyes, dark with something more than just exhaustion, pinning you in place as if you were the only person in a crowded tourney ground.
"Gods," you whispered, the word barely a puff of air in the rustling leaves.
Your corset suddenly felt impossibly tight, the laces digging into your ribs, constricting your lungs. Each breath was a struggle, a shallow gasp that did little to ease the frantic beating of your heart. You needed more air, more space, more him.
Your hands, acting on their own volition, rose to your breasts. They were heavy and tender beneath your palms, the peaks already pebbling into tight nubs that strained against the layers of your clothing. You cupped their weight, your thumbs brushing over the sensitive tips, a faint, frustrating pressure through the fabric. A soft whimper escaped your lips.
"Gods, Dunk, Seven fucks," you breathed, your eyes fluttering shut. "I need you."
The image in your mind sharpened: him, striding towards you, on his face untamed desire. You imagined the texture of his rough hands on your skin, the heat of his body pressing you against this very tree. You pictured his mouth, that rare, genuine smile replaced by something that promised pleasure and pain in equal measure. You could almost feel the weight of him, the solid, grounding presence that aroused you and scared you in equal measure.
You squeezed your breasts again, harder this time, your fingers digging into the soft flesh. The ache between your legs intensified, a throbbing, relentless pulse that demanded attention. You felt shameless, lost in a fantasy of your own making.
The wind picked up, whipping your hair across your face, cool against your flushed cheeks. You were exposed, vulnerable, and yet utterly, completely alive. So lost in your fantasy, so consumed by the fire you'd stoked within yourself.
Your hands moved with a desperate urgency now, one still cupping your breast, the other sliding down, past the constriction of your corset, over the curve of your belly. You lifted the velvet of your skirts, the fabric bunching in your fist as you sought the heat between your thighs. The air was cool against your bare skin, in contrast to the fever that raged within you.
Your fingers found the slick folds of your cunt, and you gasped, a needy sound that was swallowed by the wind. You were so wet, so ready for him — because of him. You dipped a finger inside, then another, the stretch such a sweet pleasure. Your thumb found your clit, a tight, aching pearl of nerves, and you began to circle it, the rhythm frantic.
Your moans grew louder, uninhibited, raw cries that echoed in the quiet of the grove. You were no longer aware of the world around you, of the tree at your back or the sun on your skin. There was only this, this feverish chase for release.
And in your mind's eye, he was there, not blood-splattered and fierce, but naked and glorious, standing in the river, the water sluicing over the hard planes of his chest and abdomen. You'd seen him a few days ago, a stolen glimpse that had haunted your dreams ever since.
"Dunk," you cried out, his name a prayer on your lips. "Oh, gods, Dunk."
You imagined the water beading on his skin, tracing the path of the dark hair that tapered from his navel to... You squeezed your eyes shut, your fingers working faster, deeper. The image was so vivid, so intoxicating. You pictured the thickness of his cock, the way it would feel inside you, filling you completely.
A wave of shame washed over you, hot and suffocating. But the shame was fleeting, drowned out by the rising tide of your desire. You didn't care. You would burn in all seven hells for this, for the thought of him, for the memory of his body glistening in the sunlight.
Your thumb pressed harder against your clit, your fingers curling inside you, seeking that secret spot that would send you over the edge. You were so close, so painfully close. You could feel the tension in your lower belly, the muscles in your thighs trembling with the effort of holding yourself up. Your breaths came in ragged, uneven gasps.
"Mmmm Dunk," you sobbed, the sound broken and desperate. "P-please... gods... please."
It was a cruel, wicked thing, this fantasy, this stolen pleasure. He had no idea, no inkling of the thoughts that plagued you, the desires that consumed you. You pictured him, so earnest, so honorable, completely unaware of the depraved fantasies you spun around him. The thought made you ache, made you burn. You were a sinner, a seductress in your own mind, and you loved every second of it.
Your fingers worked faster, the slick sounds of your pleasure mingling with your cries. You were a mess, your mind a whirlwind of erotic images. Him, above you, inside you, his name a constant chant on your lips. You were lost, completely and utterly lost, to the sensations that consumed you.
The world around you had faded to a blur of green and gold, the wind a mere whisper against your fevered skin. You were deaf to everything but the frantic beating of your own heart, the rush of blood in your ears, the pants of your breath.
You didn't hear the snap of a twig, didn't register the heavy footfalls that crunched on the fallen leaves.
You were so close, so agonizingly close. The pressure was building and building. You threw your head back, your neck arching, your body taut as a bowstring. Just a little more, just a little...
But in a second he was there, a silent, towering presence behind you. His shadow fell over you, a sudden darkness in the dappled sunlight. You froze as a low, rumbling growl of your name cut through the haze of your pleasure.
"What in the seven hells..."
Your fingers buried deep inside you, your body locked in a state of suspended animation. The voice, gravelly and warm, was unmistakable. Ser Duncan. It was a dream, a hallucination brought on by your feverish mind. It had to be.
You didn't dare turn around. You couldn't. The shame that had threatened to consume you earlier now washed over you in a crippling, all-consuming wave. You were caught. Red-handed, flush-cheeked, and utterly, completely compromised.
A large, calloused hand came to rest on the trunk of the elm, right beside your head, caging you in. The sheer size of it, the sheer presence of him, was overwhelming. You could feel the heat radiating from his body.
Your fight or flight instinct screamed at you to run, to bolt into the woods and never show your face again. You tried to yank your hand from beneath your skirts, to smooth down your dress and pretend none of this had ever happened, but his other hand shot out, wrapping around your wrist with a gentleness that belied its strength.
"Hold now," he rumbled, his voice still close, still impossibly deep. "None of that."
You struggled against his grip, a pathetic, frantic attempt at escape. "Let me go," you choked out, your voice thick with unshed tears. "Please, just let me go."
"Easy," he murmured, his thumb stroking the sensitive skin on the inside of your wrist. "Easy now. It's... it's alright."
"It's not alright!" you sobbed, the tears finally breaking free, hot tracks on your cold cheeks. "It's not... I wasn't... Oh, gods." You couldn't form a coherent sentence, your mind a jumble of humiliation and shame.
You buried your face in your free hand, your shoulders shaking with the force of your sobs. How much had he seen? How much had he heard? The thought was a fresh agony, a new wave of mortification that left you gasping for air.
He didn't say anything for a long moment, just held you, his presence an unwavering force at your back. Then, he spoke..
"Look at me," he said, his tone gentle but firm.
You shook your head, refusing to turn, to face the judgment you were sure to see in his eyes.
“I can't."
"Yes, you can." He shifted, moving to stand in front of you, blocking your path. He still held your wrist, but his grip was loose, a suggestion rather than a command. He used his other hand to gently tilt your chin up, forcing you to meet his gaze.
His face wasn't a mask of disgust or anger. It was... complicated. There was a faint blush high on his cheekbones, a telltale sign of his own discomfort, but his eyes were soft. So soft. They held a mixture of concern, and something else, something you couldn't quite name.
"It's not a big deal," he said, his words slow, as if he was choosing them with care.
"It is!" you cried, trying to wrench your chin away. "It's a huge deal! It's... it's indecent!"
A faint smile touched his lips, a wry, self-deprecating thing. "Aye, maybe. But it's also... human." He paused, his thumb brushing away a tear. "And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't flattered."
You stared at him, your tears momentarily forgotten. "Flattered?"
He nodded, his gaze dropping to your lips, then back to your eyes. "Aye. Flattered." He took a step closer, the space between you shrinking until you could feel the warmth of his breath on your face. "To hear you say my name like that..." He trailed off, a muscle working in his jaw.
Then he leans in, his deep blue eyes darkening with emotion. He was so close, so unbearably close. You could see the faint lines around his eyes, you could smell him, a heady mix of sweat, leather, and something that was deliciously him.
You tried to pull away again, a fresh wave of mortification washing over you as you remembered the slick heat on your fingers. But he held you fast, his grip gentle but unyielding. "Don't," he murmured, his voice a low rumble. "Don't be ashamed. Not with me."
You shook your head, a fresh sob catching in your throat. "But I... you heard... I was..."
"Moaning my name?" he finished for you, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. "Aye, I heard."
You could have died. Right there, under that old elm, you could have simply expired from sheer humiliation. "I'm so sorry," you whispered, your eyes squeezed shut.
"Don't be," he said, his thumb stroking the back of your hand. "Don't you dare be sorry." He brought your hand to his lips, but instead of kissing your knuckles, as you expected, he turned it over, exposing your palm. Your fingers were still glistening, the evidence of your desire obvious in the afternoon light.
Your eyes flew open, a gasp of protest dying on your lips as you watched, mesmerized, as he brought your slick-coated fingers to his mouth.
"Dunk... no," you breathed, but it was a half-hearted plea, your body already betraying you, a fresh wave of heat gathering in your belly at the shocking intimacy of the gesture.
He ignored you, his gaze never leaving yours as he slowly took your middle finger into his mouth. His tongue swirled around it, a slow, sensual exploration that made your knees weak. He tasted you, tasted your desire, and the look in his eyes, that unbridled hunger stole the air from your lungs.
"Mmm," he hummed. "Sweet as a summer berry."
He released your finger, but he wasn't done. He leaned in, his face so close to yours that you could count the individual whiskers on his jaw. He kissed the tear tracks on your cheeks, his tongue lapping at the salty moisture, a tender, cleansing gesture.
"There now," he murmured, his breath warm against your skin. "No more tears. Not for this."
You were trembling, a fine, uncontrollable shudder that wracked your entire body. You were a mass of conflicting emotions, a tangled knot of shame, desire, and a bone-deep awe at the masculinity of the man in front of you. He wasn't Ser Duncan the Tall, the gallant hedge knight, the embodiment of all that was good and honorable. He was just Dunk, a man of earth and muscle and need, and he was looking at you as if you were the only woman in the world.
"Please," you whispered. "Don't."
"Don't what?" he rumbled, his thumb stroking your tear-damp cheek. "Don't taste you? Don't want you?"
"I'm... I'm a mess," you sobbed, the words a pathetic excuse.
"Aye," he agreed, a small smile playing on his lips. "A beautiful, desirable mess." He brought your hand to his face again, burying his nose in your palm, inhaling deeply. "And you smell like heaven."
You tried to pull away again, but it was a token resistance, a half-hearted struggle that you both knew was futile. "It's indecent," you whispered, the words a last, desperate attempt to cling to your crumbling decorum.
"It's natural," he corrected. "It's what happens when a woman wants a man. And you," he paused, his gaze dropping to your lips, "you want me.
The world tilted, the green leaves blurring into a dizzying whirl of color. You felt a strange, floating sensation, as if your feet had left the ground. Your knees buckled, and you would have fallen if not for the solid arm that shot out to wrap around your waist, pulling you against him.
"Easy now," his breath felt warm against your hair. "I've got you."
And you did. You had all of him. The hard planes of his chest pressed against your soft breasts, the solid muscle of his thighs cradling your own, and, most undeniable of all, the heavy, rigid length of his cock, straining against the fabric of his breeches, pressing into your belly. He was hard. So hard. For you.
The last vestiges of your shame burned away, consumed by a fire so hot it was a wonder you didn't go up in flames. You looked up at him, truly looked at him, and what you saw made your heart hammer against your ribs. He was flushed, a deep, dusky red that stained his neck and crept up to the tips of his ears.
"Gods," you breathed, the word a reverent whisper. "Dunk."
A smile spread across his face.
"Aye.” His gaze dropped to the place where your body pressed against his, to the proof of his desire. "Apologies," he murmured, his voice sending shivers down your spine. "Didn't mean to... interrupt you. But I heard every sweet, filthy word." He leaned in, his lips brushing against your ear, his breath a moist caress. "And I'd be a cad and a fool to stop a lady from her pleasure."
He shifted, his thigh pressing firmly between yours, a delicious, tantalizing pressure. "But since I'm here," he continued, "perhaps you'd allow a humble knight to... assist?"
Before you could answer, he swooped down, lifting you as if you weighed nothing. Your feet left the ground, and you gasped, your arms wrapping around his neck. He held you against him, your body flush with his, your skirts bunched around your thighs. He was so strong, so solid, a mountain of a man who held you as if you were the most precious thing in the world.
Then he kissed you. It was a wet, messy, utterly filthy kiss that stole the breath from your lungs and made your toes curl. His lips, warm and firm, slanted over yours, a perfect, intoxicating fit. His tongue swept into your mouth, tasting you, claiming you, possessing you in a way that felt overwhelming yet right. You could taste yourself on him, a sweet, musky flavor. The act sent a fresh gush of heat between your legs, a wet warmth that soaked your smallclothes and made you moan into his mouth.
You kissed him back, a desperate thing, your hands tangling in his thick hair, your body arching against him. You wanted to crawl inside him, to merge with him until there was no telling where you ended and he began.
He broke the kiss as he set you back on your feet. His hands, those wonderful big hands, went to the laces of your corset, his fingers fumbling with the intricate knots with a surprising dexterity. "Easy, girl," he whispered, his breath warm against your cheek. "Let me have you."
The laces gave way with a soft sigh, the tight constriction around your ribs loosening. He wasted no time, his hands slipping inside the loosened garment, cupping the weight of your breasts, his thumbs brushing over the already-peaked nipples.
"So beautiful," he groaned, his voice thick with desire. "Gods, you're so beautiful."
He leaned down, taking a nipple into his mouth, his tongue swirling around it. You cried out, your head falling back, your hands fisting in his hair.
But even as you lost yourself to the pleasure, a small, nagging voice of reason intruded. "Dunk," you gasped, your hands pushing weakly at his shoulders. "Someone might come."
He grunted, a reluctant sound of agreement. "Aye. Egg might come looking for me." He straightened up, his eyes dark with frustration. "Or worse, some squire with more eyes than sense."
He looked around, a considering gleam in his eye. Then, with a decisive nod, he scooped you up again, this time settling you on a broad, moss-covered branch of the old elm, just out of sight of the main path. He stood between your parted legs, his hands braced on the branch on either side of you, caging you in.
"This'll have to be quick," he said. "And quiet. Can you be quiet for me?"
You nodded, your eyes wide with anticipation, your body thrumming with a need that bordered on pain. You could try to be quiet. You could try to be very, very quiet.
He smiled. "Good girl."
He knelt before you and his hands, rough and warm, slowly gathered the fabric of your skirts, pushing them up, over your knees, past your thighs, until the cool air kissed the heated skin of your core. He then looked up at you.
"Dunk," you breathed, his name a prayer on your lips.
He didn't answer, not with words. Instead, he leaned in, inhaling deeply, a low, guttural groan rumbling in his chest. "Gods above," he murmured, his breath a warm, moist puff against your aching cunt.
His breath was a physical caress. You were so wet, so ready, you could feel it dripping down your inner thighs.
His fingers hooked into the waistband of your smallclothes, the fine silk a fragile barrier between you and the pleasure he promised. He pulled them down, slowly, the fabric whispering against your skin. As he drew them away, a gossamer thread of your arousal clung to the silk, a shining, shameless testament to your need.
You wanted to die. You wanted to disappear into the tree, to be swallowed whole by the earth. But you also wanted to spread your legs wider, to offer yourself up to him, to let him do whatever he wanted, however he wanted.
He held the damp fabric up to the light, a small, wicked smile playing on his lips. "Soaked through.” His gaze dropped back to your glistening cunt. "A right little mess you've made, girl."
You whimpered, a pathetic, pleading sound. "Dunk, please... I... I won't last. I feel like I'm going to burst."
"I know," he said, his voice a soothing murmur. "I can see it. I can feel it." He leaned in, his nose nuzzling the damp curls at the apex of your thighs. "And I want you to."
Before you could process his words, before you could even draw a breath, his mouth was on you. His tongue, broad and wet, swept through your folds, a slow exploration. He lapped at your entrance, gathering your slickness, before moving up to circle your clit.
A white-hot explosion of pleasure ripped through you, a wave so intense, so all-consuming, that it stole the very air from your lungs. You cried out, a sharp, unrestrained cry. Your hands flew to his hair, your fingers tangling in the thick, dark strands, holding him to you as if your life depended on it.
He didn't stop. He growled, a low, possessive sound. His lips closed around your clit, suckling greedily, his tongue flicking against the sensitive nub in a maddening rhythm."Dunk!" you gasped, your hips bucking against his face. "Gods! Oh, gods!"
You were coming, and you couldn't stop. The pleasure, a force that crashed over you again again, left you breathless. You flooded his mouth, a gush of hot, slick fluid that he drank down with a guttural groan of satisfaction. He rode out your orgasm, his tongue and lips working you through, until you were a trembling, whimpering mess until your body remained pliant against the rough bark of the tree.
When he finally pulled back, his face was glistening, a self-satisfied, utterly male smile on his lips. "Told you," he murmured, his voice a husky rasp. "Told you I wanted you to finish in my mouth."
You could only moan in response, your head lolling against the tree, your eyes fluttering shut. You were completely spent. But as he stood, his hands going to the laces of his breeches, you felt a familiar stirring, a renewed ache deep in your belly.
"My turn," he said, his eyes dark with a hunger that was far from sated.
He freed himself, his cock springing forth, heavy and thick and impossibly hard. He wrapped a hand around his length, stroking himself slowly, his gaze locked on yours.
Your breath hitched, a strangled gasp at the sheer, overwhelming sight of him. He was massive, a monument of flesh and desire, and for a dizzying moment, you wondered how in the seven hells he would ever fit inside you. A primal, instinctual fear warred with an equally primal, instinctual need. You wanted him. You wanted all of him.
As if sensing your trepidation, he leaned in, capturing your lips in a kiss that was both tender and demanding. It was a kiss that said, "I know," and "Trust me," and "I'm going to fuck you." He tasted of you, of your pleasure, of your surrender, and the intimacy of it was dizzying.
"You took my fingers so well," he murmured against your lips. "You'll take my cock just as good."
He shifted, the broad head of his cock nudging against your entrance, a tantalizing, maddening pressure that made you whimper. He was there, right at the threshold, and you were ready, your body willing...
"Look at me," he commanded.
You obeyed, your eyes locking with his. He held your gaze as he pushed forward, a slow invasion that stretched you to your limits. It was a burning, pleasurable ache, a fullness that was both agonizing and exquisite. You bit your lip, trying to stifle a cry, your hands flying to his back, your nails digging into the hard muscle through the thin fabric of his shirt. He was so big, so impossibly big, and the overwhelming sensation of him filling you, was almost too much to bear.
"Fuck," he rasped, his forehead resting against yours. "You feel... so good. Better than I ever... ever imagined."
He began to move, a slow, deep rhythm. Each thrust felt measured, a slow, delicious torture that built the pressure in your belly, coiling the tension tighter and tighter.
"Quiet now," he grunted, his hips snapping forward, a little harder this time. "Remember? Quiet."
But it was impossible. The sounds were torn from your throat, a litany of whimpers and moans that you couldn't contain. You buried your face in the crook of his neck, your teeth sinking into the salty skin, a desperate attempt to muffle the cries of pleasure that he was wringing from your body.
He couldn't stay quiet either. His breath was ragged in your ear, a series of harsh, guttural grunts and low, desperate whispers. "Wanted you," he breathed, his voice a raw, broken thing. "Wanted this for so long. So many nights... thinking of you... touching myself... pretending it was your hand... your mouth... this sweet, tight cunt."
His words were a dirty, intimate confession, a glimpse into a fantasy you never knew he had. They fueled the fire in your belly, the need for him, the need for this, a desperate, all-consuming thing.
"Wanted to bend you over every table we've ever sat at," he growled, his thrusts becoming faster, more erratic. "Wanted to lift your skirts and have you right there, in front of the gods and everyone. Wanted to hear you scream my name as I filled you."
He was losing control, the solid, steady rhythm of his hips devolving into a frantic, desperate pounding. His grip on your hips tightened, the bruises he was leaving a sweet, satisfying ache.
"Gods, I might die for it now," he panted, his forehead still pressed against yours. "If Egg walks up that path... if anyone sees... I swear, I don't think I could stop."
Your nails raked down his back, the thin linen of his shirt no protection against the sharp points of your need. "Then don't," you gasped. "Don't stop, Dunk. I don't care if the entire tourney ground watches. Fill me. I want to feel you so deep I can taste you. Let me die with you inside me."
He buried his face in your neck, his teeth scraping against the sensitive skin. "You say such wicked things," he growled, his hips slamming into yours, the tree groaning in protest. "Such sweet, wicked, perfect things."
He pulled back, just enough to look at you. "And what kind of knight am I?" A bitter, self-deprecating laugh rumbled in his chest. "What manner of chivalrous fool is so lost to a woman's heat that he'd tup her against a tree like a common dog? I'd fuck you anywhere, anytime you asked. On a throne, in a stable, in the mud. I have no honor when it comes to you. None at all."
The words were a confession and they broke something open inside you. You wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, taking all of him, every last inch.
You seized the moment. With a strength born of desperation and a fury of need, you pushed against his chest. He stumbled back, caught off guard, and you went with him. You landed on top of him, the mossy ground a soft, welcoming cushion beneath you.
For a heartbeat, you stared at each other, both panting, both wild-eyed. He was beneath you, this mountain of a man, this knight who had faced down foes in the tourney ground without a flicker of fear, and he was looking at you as if you were the most wonderful woman he had ever seen.
"Your turn to be quiet, ser," you panted, a wicked, triumphant grin spreading across your face.
You didn't wait for a response. You rose up, positioning yourself over his magnificent cock, and then you slammed down, taking him to the hilt in one movement.
A scream was torn from your throat. He was so deep, so impossibly deep, a solid, unyielding pressure that hit a place inside you that you never knew existed. It was pleasure so sharp, so intense, it was almost pain.
"Ahhh hells!" he roared, his hands flying to your hips, his fingers digging into your flesh, bruising, claiming. "You... you mad, wicked girl!"
You began to ride him, a wild, frantic rhythm that was more animal than human. Your body was moving on instinct, a desperate chase for the pleasure that only he could give. You threw your head back, your hair a wild curtain against the dappled sunlight, your breasts bouncing with each powerful downward thrust.
You were completely exposed. Anyone could stumble upon you now, could see you, this wild woman riding a knight as if he were a prize stallion. The thought was a fresh jolt of arousal, a wicked thrill.
Your words came out in a stream of half-formed blasphemies and desperate pleas. "Dunk! Gods, Dunk! Your cock... you're splitting me... it's so good... harder... make me take it..."
His control, already frayed to breaking, finally snapped. With a guttural roar, he surged up, covering your mouth with one huge, calloused hand. The other hand clamped onto your hip, a band of iron that guided your movements, forcing you to take him harder, deeper.
"Quiet," he grunted, his voice a raw, desperate command. "For the love of the seven, woman, be quiet!"
You whimpered against his palm, the sound muffled, desperate. But you didn't stop. You couldn't. The feeling was too all-consuming. You were lost in a haze of sensation, your mind a blank slate filled only with the overwhelming reality of him inside you.
In a fit of wicked inspiration, you leaned forward, smothering his face with your breasts. He groaned, the sound vibrating against your skin, and you felt his other hand move from your hip to grip your ass, pulling you even tighter against him. His thighs, bunched with powerful muscle, began to piston upwards, meeting your downward strokes with a force that made you see stars.
He was fucking you now, truly fucking you, a relentless rhythm that pushed you both towards the edge.
"Faster," he panted, his words muffled by your flesh. "Gods, we have to finish. They'll be looking for me. They'll be looking for you."
You obeyed, your body moving in a frantic, desperate dance. There was no grace and no finesse, only a raw, primal need for release. The sounds were wet, sloppy, debauched. The moss beneath you was damp, the scent of earth and sweat and sex the only perfume that filled the air. You were a mess, a glorious, shameless mess, and you loved every second of it.
His hands were everywhere, one tangled in your hair, the other gripping your hip so tightly you were sure you'd have bruises in the shape of his fingers. He was guiding you, commanding you, using you for his pleasure, and the thought, the submission, sent you towards your own release.
"I'm close," he grunted, his thrusts becoming more erratic, more desperate. "Gods, girl, I'm so close."
His fingers tightened in your hair, a sharp, insistent pull that forced your head back, your back arching. He used his other hand to push at your hip, trying to lift you off him.
"Get off," he panted, his voice a raw, desperate command. "Get off now. I'm going to... ah, gods... I'm going to spend."
But you didn't move. You stayed there, a stubborn, unyielding weight, taking him deeper, forcing him to the very brink.
"Girl," he growled, a warning in his tone. "I'm warning you. Get off."
You just shook your head, a wild, reckless grin on your face. "Then I'll have your babe, ser knight," you gasped, your words a breathless, wicked challenge. "I'll have a part of you inside me always."
He pulled you off him then, a rough almost violent movement. Then he immediately came, a deep, guttural groan tearing from his throat. It was a primal, possessive sound, and it made your skin crawl, a delicious, tingling sensation that shot straight to your cunt.
You felt the hot, wet gush of his release on your inner thighs. He spilled onto the mossy ground, a pearly, life-giving fluid that seemed to soak into the very earth beneath you.
You were not one to let such a thing go to waste. Before he could even catch his breath, you reached down, your hand closing around his still-hard, still-sensitive cock. He flinched, a sharp intake of breath, a look of pain and pleasure warring on his face.
"Easy, girl," he grunted, his hands flying to your wrist. "Easy now. That's... that's enough."
But you didn't let go. You squeezed him, your thumb stroking the sensitive head, milking him for every last drop. You watched, fascinated, as another pearly bead of fluid welled up at the tip.
"Ahhh," he breathed, his head falling back, his eyes squeezed shut. "You're trying to kill me. I swear it.”
"I'm just collecting my due, ser," you purred. "A knight shouldn't waste such a fine offering."
He laughed, a weak, breathless sound. He watched you, his eyes soft, a small, fond smile playing on his lips as you released him, bringing your slick-coated fingers to your lips.
"Sweet," you murmured, tasting him.
"Aye," he agreed, a flush creeping up his neck. "So you've said."
You leaned down, your breasts brushing against his chest, and kissed him. It was a slow, lingering kiss, a taste of shared pleasure and unspoken promises. When you finally pulled back, he was looking at you, his expression unreadable.
"Come here," he said. He shifted, pulling you into the circle of his arms, your head resting on the solid warmth of his chest. His heartbeat, a slow, steady rhythm, was a comforting sound beneath your ear.
Then you helped each other dress, a slow, unhurried process sprinkled with soft kisses. His hands lingered on your hips as he tied the laces of your gown, and you couldn't resist the urge to run your fingers through his hair, now hopelessly disheveled.
"You look like you've been tumbled in a haystack," he rumbled, his thumb brushing away a smudge of dirt from your cheek.
"And you look like a well-satisfied stallion, ser knight," you retorted, a wicked glint in your eye. "Or a dog who's had his way with a willing bitch."
He laughed, a deep, hearty sound. "Only with you," he said, his voice a low, intimate murmur. "Only ever with you."
You were still leaning against him, your head on his chest, when you heard it. A distant call, a young, clear voice cutting through the quiet of the grove.
"Ser Duncan! Ser Duncan, where are you?"
You froze, your eyes flying to his. He looked like a deer caught in a hunter's trap, his face a mask of comical horror.
"Egg," he breathed, his voice a panicked whisper. "Gods be good, he's looking for me."
You scrambled to your feet, smoothing down your skirts and trying to tame your wild hair. You were a mess, a glorious, well-fucked mess, and there was no hiding it. The flush on your cheeks, the swollen state of your lips, the twigs in your hair... it was all a blatant advertisement of your recent activities.
Dunk was no better. His tunic was askew, his hair a tangled mess, and he had a very distinct, very suspicious grass stain on the knee of his breeches.
"What do we do?" you whispered, your heart hammering against your ribs.
"Act natural," he said, his expression so comically serious that you had to bite back a laugh.
"Ser Duncan!"
The voice was closer now, accompanied by the crunch of leaves underfoot. A moment later, Egg himself appeared, a small, squire-like figure with a thatch of blond hair and a perpetually puzzled expression. He stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes widening as he took in the scene before him. You, leaning against the tree, looking thoroughly ravished. Dunk, standing beside you, looking like he'd been wrestling a bear and lost.
"Ser Duncan," Egg said, his voice laced with a concern that was so genuine it was almost painful. "I was worried. You've been gone a while. And... your horse."
Dunk blinked, a slow, confused look on his face. "My horse?"
"Aye," Egg said, nodding earnestly. "I went to the stables to check on Thunder, and he's... well, he's very worked up. And sweaty. I thought he might have colic, but Maester says it's... something else."
Dunk stared at the boy, a slow, dawning horror creeping across his face. You could practically hear the gears turning in his head, the connection being made between the sweaty horse and the... activities... that had just transpired.
"He's been... restless," Dunk managed, his voice a strangled croak. "Pacing in his stall."
"I know!" Egg exclaimed, relief washing over his features. "That's what I said! But Maester said he just needed to... ah... 'run off some excess energy.' He said it's natural for a young, virile stallion. Said a good, hard ride will do him a world of good."
Dunk's blush, which had just started to recede, returned with a vengeance, a deep, fiery red that crept from his neck to the tips of his ears. He looked like he might actually spontaneously combust.
"A good, hard ride," Egg repeated, nodding sagely. "That's what the Maester said. So I came to find you. Thought you might want to... ah... take him out again. Before dinner."
You pressed your lips together, a desperate, futile attempt to stifle the giggle that was bubbling up inside you. You failed. A small, undignified snort escaped.
Dunk shot you a look, a mixture of panic and mortification. You just shrugged, a picture of innocence, a small, wicked smile playing on your lips.
"I... uh..." Dunk stammered, rubbing the back of his neck. "I think... I think Thunder's had enough... exertion... for one day."
Egg frowned, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Are you sure, ser? He seemed... quite eager. Very... spirited."
That was it. The dam broke. A great, whooping laugh escaped your lips, a loud, unladylike sound that echoed through the quiet grove. Dunk, after a moment of stunned silence, joined in, his deep laughter mingling with yours, a chaotic, joyous symphony. You clutched your sides, tears streaming down your face, the absurdity of the situation washing over you in waves.
Egg just stood there, looking from one of you to the other, a look of complete and utter bewilderment on his young face. "I... I don't understand," he said, his voice small. "What's so funny?"
"We're... we're just..." you gasped, trying to get the words out between fits of laughter. "We're just... appreciating the... the wisdom of the Maester."
Dunk, wiping tears from his eyes, managed to straighten up, a wide, goofy grin still plastered on his face. "Aye. Very... insightful."
Egg shrugged, clearly deciding that the antics of adults were a mystery best left unsolved. "Well, if you'll excuse me, ser, my lady," he said, with a bow that was surprisingly graceful for a boy his age. "I promised young Lord Ashford I'd show him how to skip stones by the river."
He turned to leave, then paused, looking back at you. He gave you a small, shy smile, a flicker of understanding, or perhaps something else, in his bright violet eyes.
"My lady," he said, his tone serious and sincere. "You look very beautiful today. No wonder Ser Duncan gets all... spirited... around you. Just like his horse."
And with that, he turned and scampered away, leaving you and Dunk staring after him, the silence of the grove suddenly feeling very, very loud.
Dunk was the first to break it. He groaned, a low, guttural sound of pure, unadulterated mortification, and buried his face in his hands. "Oh, gods," he mumbled, his voice muffled by his palms. "The boy knows. The gods be good, he knows everything."
You just laughed, a soft, tinkling sound that was full of affection and a wicked sort of glee. You reached up, pulling his hands away from his face. "He's a clever boy, our Egg," you said, your fingers intertwining with his. "And he's right."
"Right about what?" Dunk grumbled, though a small, reluctant smile was already tugging at the corners of his lips.
"About me being beautiful," you said, leaning in to kiss him. "And about you being... spirited."
He kissed you back, a slow, lingering thing that was full of unspoken promises. "Aye," he murmured against your lips. "Spirited. That's one word for it."
He pulled back, his gaze serious, his eyes soft with an emotion that made your breath catch. "But you have to know one thing.”
"What's that?" you asked.
"You," he said, his thumb stroking your cheek. "You were out here, needing me, and you had to... take matters into your own hands." He paused, a look of genuine remorse on his face. "That should never have happened."
Your blush, which had just started to fade, returned with a vengeance, a deep, fiery red that crept from your neck to the tips of your ears. You felt a fresh wave of shame, a hot, suffocating wave that threatened to pull you under.
"I... I was..." you stammered, your eyes downcast, unable to meet his gaze.
"Hey," he said, his voice gentle but firm. He tilted your chin up, forcing you to look at him. "No. None of that. It's not you I'm angry with. It's me. I'm your knight. I'm supposed to be here for you. To take care of you. In all ways."
A smile full of heat and promise spread across his face. "So, listen to me, and listen good. You'll never have to do that again. You'll never have to be alone with a need like that. You'll come find me. In the training yard, in the stables, in the gods-damned privy if you have to. You'll find me, and I'll take care of you. Do you understand?"
You could only nod, your heart hammering against your ribs, your body thrumming with a renewed need.
"Good," he said, a satisfied smirk playing on his lips. "Because, you wicked, beautiful girl, I'll be wanting you to."
He leaned in, capturing your lips in a final, searing kiss. As you pulled away, your lips still tingling, a thought struck you, a wicked, mischievous glint in your eye.
"And what if you're busy, ser knight?" you asked, your voice a low, teasing purr. "What if you're in a council with lords, or polishing your armor for a tourney? What if you can't just... drop everything?"
He blinked, a slow, considering look on his face. "Then I'll make an excuse. I'll say I've seen a ghost. I'll say the seven hells have frozen over and the dead are walking. I'll say whatever I have to say to get away."
A shiver ran down your spine, a delicious, tingling sensation. You were lost, completely and utterly lost, to this man, to his words, to the promise of his touch.
He leaned down one last time, his forehead pressing against yours in a moment of quiet, heavy intimacy, those deep blue eyes burning with clarity.
“Let them have their songs of chivalry and blood," he breathed, his voice a honest vow against your lips. "I’d trade every scrap of my honor just to see that look in your eyes again, and to hear you scream my name against the trees until the sun goes down."
some more dunk x witch!reader snippets bc i'm obsessed
at one point during travel you offered to make the boys little sachets similar to yours. egg agreed immediately, dunk a little more curious and wary, but still interested. in no time you presented them with a tiny drawstring pouch that carried different herbs you had collected. egg's held catnip, motherwart, and rosemary while dunk's contained ground rose petals (for the obvious reason of it influencing romantic energy duh), two cloves, and chamomile flowers. they now have it tied to their belts, much like the little bundle that you carry at your hip.
dunk loves when you read to him. whether it's fiction or even your spellbook that you refer to from time to time, he's all ears. bonus points if you decided to "randomly" purchase something romantic with a bit of smut and he approaches you wordlessly, easing you against his chest muttering something along the lines of "aloud, m'lady," and is confused when you just tense, cheeks warming. his brow furrowed as you stuttered an excuse he didn't quite comprehend. eventually you just give up trying to explain why you can't read the novel to him and say, "you best not heed me any judgement" and carry on. dunk is taken by surprise at the vastly vulgar language, suddenly understanding your previously avoidant and blushing appearance. he is (involuntarily) replacing the two characters with you and himself in his mind as you continue to read, his calm manner growing fidgety as the tent grows in his breeches, silently praying you don't notice.
when you're the one prepping food or retrieving meals and drinks, you make sure to whisper incantations into the dishes, often goading the gods to give him (and egg) some good fortune. the first time you did this the boys were so confused. you just brushed them off and told them you were talking to yourself—even then you're sure that was no real defense and you still look insane when you do it.
as dunk's hair gets longer, you'll eventually coax him into letting you braid a small strand near his nape. it mirrors the braid(s) you keep for luck and divine protection. it's also definitely not a reason to touch the man and get him either in your lap or between your legs. dunk loves the way your fingers thread through his hair, parting the auburn waves, nails just barely grazing his scalp. he would let you do whatever you pleased with his hair and more.
note currently working on a dunk x fem!knight!reader fic, but for right now i'm indulging in my witch!reader fantasies
── summary: During your travels, you and Dunk come across a pond. It is hard for him not to admire you when you bathe, you invite him to dip in with you
— fluff with smut, smut with feelings, first time, fem reader, PiV, sex in water, build up, light teasing, contemplation of knight vows, “subtle” ogling each other, mild idiots in love, hint of a praise kink, caring Dunk, stumbling Dunk, flustrated Dunk, Dunk is a little liar
Word count: 3, 3k, this took me too long to finish
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The road could be cruel, with long, twisted paths, its cold weather, or the sun throwing its rays on the top of your head, burdening your shoulders.
No matter how kind Dunk could be, there were times he couldn't change. In merciless nights of the wind, he'd hold you close, shielding with only his body cupped around yours, legs and arms broad enough to be your blanket. In the breathless days of summer, he’d oftentimes make you drink water — despite his own throat burning and the last puddle having been left behind you miles ago. And in the night, he'd let you sleep against his chest when atop a horse, his own eyes sleepy and heavy in need of rest while he gently kicked Thunder onward.
He was tender and never wished for anything in return for his graciousness.
“Just stay alive for me,” he’d say, and get clumsy because of how sentimental that rang, quickly attending to something different entirely.
It could have been a blessing from the Gods when, after days of travel, you happen upon a pond, sweeping and clear, hiding among the trees. You couldn't contain your enthusiasm, tumbling off the horse’s back amid-trot and rushing to the waters with pure joy as you left Dunk to watch you off.
“Be careful,” he called out behind your shoulder, loosening the reins as he tipped with Thunder’s last steps, “we don't know if it’s safe out here.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere, ser!” you said when reaching the edge of the pond, gathering its gift into your hand to drink.
“That’s the best place for trouble.”
Dunk explored the surrounding woods with his eyes, ever so careful, only then jumping off Thunder with a grateful pat on the stallion’s side. Soon, he began to unravel the humble gear you carried, while you supped the water with any dignity forgotten, lying on the grass at its edge. After filling your flask, you scraped up, dusted off the dirt that clung to your clothes, and dared to sniff the fabric by the way. Wrong decision — the odour of sweat, blood, horse, mud, shit, and the Gods know what else, stung at your eyes, dizzied your head, and made you swallow down your breakfast curling up in your throat.
“Oh- Gods be good… I need a wash.”
Dunk glanced your way at your words, only for his eyes to find the garments gliding off your body, baring smooth skin to glimmer in the glow. His heart nearly leapt out of his chest, breath stilled to a shallow huff in his mouth.
It wasn't the first time, far from it, yet his being froze into place as if enchanted. He knew it wasn't proper to stare, and he didn't most of the time, but glimpses of your form were enough to waver him. The sight should be desensitised to him by this point, Dunk was aware, but what could cease that pang in his soul that called out every time he saw you?
His head turned to the other side when his senses returned, looking at the foliage instead while his heart thought of you. Strong hands worked on whatever they could reach; his chest ached with the knowledge of you there, sinking into the waters as their waves echoed against the walls of the enclosing trees.
“You can look.” Your voice startled Dunk despite its gentleness. “It’s not as though you haven't seen a naked woman before.” The sound of your nonchalance made him shake his head low.
“Or have you, ser?” you asked as you led your gaze over your shoulder towards Dunk on the grass, sudden uncertainty slinking into your judgment. His silence and the harsher pull of his grasp on the packs were the only responses you got, his focus seemingly elsewhere. A merry curl stretched upon your lips.
“Perhaps not.”
“That’s enough,” he called, his tone firmer in his fluster when he accidentally glanced at you again. He saw your nude back staring back at him, the water tall enough to cover places that might have distracted him more. He forcefully set his eyes on yours and nowhere else, his mouth writhing restlessly as you smiled at him.
“It’s not the first time you have seen me,” you elaborated as if that were a reason, causing Dunk to twitch on his legs. His head shook once more, lips pursing hard and eyes trailing downwards.
But the murmur of the water pulled Dunk’s gaze up again, falling on your hands moving upon your body. He allowed himself to look, even for a brief moment, watching you smooth your arms with dampness, droplets drippling down the arch of your spine, following its path. He traced the curves of your shoulder blades, his eyes coming to touch at your waist, your hips drenched beneath the surface — Gods, you were a pretty one, he couldn't resist the thought, and his body seemed to agree by the warm bloom that poured over it.
You weren't oblivious to his attention, smiling to yourself away from him. It was only natural for a man to be curious about the woman he was travelling with so close. But what made Dunk a better man was his courtesy.
He never touched you when you didn't wish to, didn't try to; his gaze was harmless even when he looked at you like that. It was as if he didn't lust after you, even if he might, but admired the work of the Gods before him.
“Have you been with many women, ser?” you asked, words flowing from your lips all too easily. You heard him hesitate to answer, the rustling of him unfolding the bags returning as if he tried to deflect the question.
“Not many,” he replied after a longer while, preparing the camp for today.
“You’re a good lad then, Dunk,” you mused, “some men can't stop themselves from misleading girls.”
“Hm, some men are idiots.”
You laughed at that.
The water fluttered around you, accompanying the following question spilling out of your heart.
"Would you ever have me?"
Dunk's silence replied to you first, even if the answer was a painful, lasting yes. He felt it crawl at his throat, and he swallowed it down hard enough for it to hurt. He was a good knight, and good knights didn't stray because of their cocks.
The hefty exhale that left his nostrils made you look back at him, witnessing the sheer struggle in his taut frame.
"You shouldn't ask things like that," he rumbled gently, despite the dismay in the shake of his head, "it might make me less of a good man."
"To desire would make you human, ser," you replied, tone measured in your truth. "It is not an insult to me."
"It is a broken oath," he defended and met your gaze frankly, not as skittish as before you noticed. His eyes were earnest, soft even when he scolded you, and made you feel strangely timid under their honesty. Your hands came to clasp over your breast, and he was quick to look away if his stare brought you shame.
With a tight jaw, Dunk began to prepare the bonfire for the night, his tall build reaching down for branches of weight that some men might have trouble lifting. You found yourself looking, taking in each shift of his muscle beneath his modest clothes, the bulging of his forearms exposed by pushed-up sleeves, the faint grunts rolling deep within his chest. And yet, his face appeared so delicate, the carvings of his features mild in the setting sun's glow in a way that made you think of kissing his lips.
"Are you willing to dedicate your own feelings to pledges forced upon by men who don't obey them?"
"What else is there for me to do?" Dunk murmured as he let the wood fall on the grass near a tree, "I don't know anything else. That's all Ser Arlan has taught me." He crouched down, weight pressing on his strong thighs, and pulled out a handy flint and steel often present in his pocket.
"And did Ser Arlan follow those oaths?"
Dunk wavered, the flint almost aiming at his fingers. His eyes flickered towards you, trying to hide the uncertainty in his stare with more defensiveness.
"Let's not talk about that. Not disrespect the bygones."
"You're too good, Dunk."
The hiss of the fire breaking aflame filled the silence between you, a burning beam settling over the dimming ground. You watched Dunk sitting at the fire, its heat dancing on the planes of his face as a solemn expression settled in his features.
"Aren't you going to bathe, ser?" you asked meekly, fingers nibbling at the ends of your hair.
"Hm? Later," he dismissed you in goodwill, even if any other man would read your seemingly innocent question in any way he wanted to. You weren't certain if you found his obliviousness endearing or maddening.
"Duncan."
"Mhm?"
"Come join me."
He flinched as if scorched, and you saw the turmoil of conflict storming through his eyes — shock, fear, restraint, duty.
"My lady..."
"You have to wash too, don't you?" you asked, smiling in the coyness of your excuse for something so scandalous. "There's enough space for both of us."
A slightly amused breath left him in reluctant entertainment at your antics, a smile ghosting his lips in return.
"I... couldn't possibly..." but he paused when he looked at you again, saw your body soaring over the calm surface of water, standing there like an invitation. So many thoughts passed through his mind, but he couldn't focus on any of them when the aching turmoil grew within him. It's just a wash, he thought, trying to justify the fact that he stood up and began to peel off his humid shift.
Fresh waves pushed at your back when you heard Dunk stride into the pond behind. Your heartbeat skipped. You dared not look behind you just yet, but you knew he was there, just as bare as you. A moment or two passed by where you didn't move, listening to every splash of water that might be coating his skin.
Slowly, your gaze moved towards him, finding him standing at a distance that should stay respectful — strapping back, muscles piled with strength, yet tenderness of his smooth flesh, besides a few scars fading in. Dunk’s physique, though undeniably powerful, was so gentle as well, curved and bulbous enough to make you want to squeeze.
His hands spattered water on his face, and you heard him groan in a way that splattered your thoughts to wander even more than before. His hair was wet, perfect for running your fingers through or pulling at.
Without you noticing outright, Dunk peeked through his fingers in your direction, just out of curiosity, to see you looking at him so intently through the dim light of the evening sun.
Gazes met, everything stilled, breaths seemed to shrink to a tremble.
“I should go,” Dunk uttered through his haze, blinking away the lust fogging his eyes as he moved through the waters in a few steps.
“Dunk.” Your call bewitched him in place, mighty in its quietness. He waited; his heart fluttered. “Stay.”
“My lady,” he warned, and you saw the sprang of his shoulders, the twitch in his neck lines. He wanted you, and you knew you wanted him.
You were the one to move now, making the waves stir around your thighs as you approached him and nearly made the poor hedge knight flinch. Soon, he found you before him, and Dunk swore that his head got light as he looked at you there, so unapologetic for the flush of your chest, the shape of your waist. You smiled at him, kind but knowing; the glimmer in your stare was heavier than usual, he observed.
“My lady-” he spoke again, this time almost in fear when you dared to lean closer. But he didn't run away, despite the emotion spilling on his face, “I have lied…”
“Oh?” you mused through the dense heartbeat in your chest. Dunk appeared to squirm.
“I have not been with a woman before. A mere kiss as a lad is all I know…”
Dunk wasn't certain what to expect as your reaction, guessing that you might laugh like those girls who could see through his clumsiness. Yet, you didn't giggle, didn't scrunch your nose in disbelief, or overly praise his virtue. You looked at him just as you looked at him before — fondly, warmly. And he stopped being scared.
“Do you wish to change that, ser?”
“With you, yes-” he blurted out with a shaky exhale. “But… won't I be misleading you then, like all those lords and men?”
A smile pulled on your lips again.
“Not if I’d want it.”
Dunk nodded slowly with the most seriousness, and it looked awfully handsome on his face.
“And… you want it.”
“Yes.”
With that answer, hovering over the waters, Dunk’s frame relieved just a little, and he accepted the ache within him, let it guide him as he bent to you. His hands found your cheeks, stable in their quiet tremble. Holding them so carefully, the waves swirled around him as he closed the remaining distance between you, closing your bodies in a whispering cage. His warmth streamed into you, just as unpretentiously as his touch, a lingering presence that brought you protection.
The look in his eyes made you shiver, deep concentration coiling in the reflections of his gaze. His hands were naive when they began to descend over your body, little kinks of his fingers burying into your flesh, but just as honest when he caressed you. He found the path of your neck, the slope of your shoulders, the shape of your chest as he touched its curve. A small breath parted his lips, and he allowed himself to look at you without turning away, without shame eating at him.
“How did the Gods send something so beautiful my way…” You heard him utter, and those words stroked you from within.
“Dunk.” Your voice passed by as a sigh when you reached for him, hands cradling the strong contour of his face. Your eyes urged him, quietly but desperately enough for him to understand.
He kissed you, as well as he could. You tasted salt on his lips, drips of water soaking into your skin, and the softness he gave you. It was gentle, clumsy at times when his mouth didn't follow yours.
“I’m sorry, my lady…” he whispered into your mouth when his teeth accidentally grazed your lip, embarrassment creasing his face.
“Don’t be,” you cooed, feeling your skin prickle where his nose brushed yours, his forehead almost sealed against yours. “I liked it.”
Dunk’s breath hitched, his heart beat harder than before as something tensed his being and narrowed his hands upon you. You felt the wet press of his body against yours when he leaned closer, flesh tightly laced together, and the growing strength behind his lips. A small sound clogged the back of your throat at how his mouth began to work, how his form pushed into yours as if he wanted to merge into you. His hands grew braver, almost frantic, as they travelled from your waist, to your back, your nape, and burned you with heat. Your own hands moved, and he couldn't hold back the low groan he spilt into your mouth when your fingers splayed across his chest.
A brisk splash of water broke the smooth surface of the pond when his arm hooked around your waist, pulling you as close as possible, the petal of your ass cheek filling Dunk’s hand so perfectly. He squeezed, you whined and bucked into him with the strain growing in your roots. You felt him curse against your lips, grind almost instinctively against you in kind with his thickening cock. Your hand slipped down, embracing his width to draw a gasp from his mouth as his lips shattered away from yours with a backwards tilt of his head. He breathed your name out, looking down at you in a plea too sweet to ignore.
His size drowned between your thighs with a slow glide, torturous for both of you. Dunk watched closely as he faded within you, awed at the pliant nature of your slick folds. The moment he sank entirely in your warm cunt, he sighed in relief.
“I hope I'm not hurting you, my lady.”
“No.” You shook your head lazily. Locking your gaze with his, you felt yourself flutter around him. And so did he, moving his hips ever so slightly in an excuse to adjust himself. “You’re perfect.”
He met your words with a whimper, unable to deny how he twitched when buried deep in your slit. His hand squeezed your plump again, thumb smoothing across your flesh as his hips began to roll — slowly at first, cautious as the new sensation settled within him. Every thrust steeped in your sap felt overwhelming, and the little gasps you let out only overtook him more.
Dunk had tried moving harder, pushing into you with more force, as the mild tingle inside his stomach became familiar — he wanted more. With a few rigid snaps of his pelvis, your breath hitched, your cunt pulsed around him as if this was exactly what you needed all along. He had you mewling by the time he set a steady pace, observing how your body trembled, how he drove himself over and over again inside you.
Dunk’s other hand wandered between your forms, just like when he caught Ser Arlan doing to a whore once, his fingers petting over the pearl his cock couldn't reach. His breath caught as he watched you arch into his touch, your moan dropping into the water around you.
“Duncan…”
“Am I pleasing you, my lady?” he huffed through repeated jabs of his hips, his thumb beginning to circle your swollen nacre in tender rings.
“Gods, yes…”
The encouragement seemed to provoke Dunk more, and you felt his cock riding deeper into you, more persistent. Waves crashed against your tangled bodies as he went faster, short and deliberate thrusts jolting pleasure through your roots while he chased the climax with you. Your arms closed around him tightly, his face nestled in the crook of your neck as he softly chanted “my lady, my lady, my lady,” like a prayer into your skin.
A cry broke from Dunk’s throat, planted in your neck, when he spilt into you, warmth dribbling into your cavenrs in streams. Tight around his stuttering length, you couldn't open your eyes for a long moment in your heightening delight, your fingers cutting into his skin.
It was silent afterwards, your breaths echoing over the pond in union. You felt Dunk shivering against you, still sealed so close to you with his sighs melting on your flesh. The movement of his thumb lasted in the stillness, caressing you gently as if to comfort. Slowly, his head lifted, his face came to yours as your gazes caught each other in the haze. A dear blush dusted his complexion, his lips parted perfectly for you to close them with a light kiss.
"I think we should go dry," Dunk whispered into your mouth; you nodded.
Adorned in your clothes again, you sat before the dancing bonfire, watching it flare and curve with Dunk. You rested against his shoulder, just like many times before, a solace settling within you. You felt the weight of the glances he stole your way, something unspoken present in his eyes.
"Do you think... that I will ever get to do that again?" he asked, voice no louder than a rumble of the flames. A smile came to rest on your face, only for his eyes to see.
"I think you will get to do it more than once, ser."
Dunk shared a smile with you, leaning his head gently against yours, as a shade of contentment settled in his features.
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