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kylorengarbagedump · 9 days ago

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Playing Soldier: Chapter 28 (NSFW)

Read on AO3. Part 27 here.

Summary: Look, you've never been good at "talking" or "sharing your feelings", so why should you start now?

Words: 9000

Warnings: choking, face-slapping, spanking, forced orgasm, overstimulation

Characters: William Tavington x Reader

A/N: Co-written with @bastillia.

Hello! We hope everyone has had a good Pride month, if you celebrate! This chapter has been an absolute BEAST (second longest of the fic, I think) and we re-wrote it about 3 times hahaha. However I think we're pretty satisfied with the outcome! We also hope you enjoy :)

We've got about 10 chapters left, now, which is crazy. Truly want to thank everyone for their patience and engagement and just everything. We truly have the best and most thoughtful readers and it warms our hearts so deeply <3

SEE YOU SOON <3

For the third morning in a row, Grace stirred in your arms. Her eyes flicked wildly beneath her lids, her limbs trembling against an invisible tether. Wincing, you held her close, shushing into her hair, rocking her against your chest to wake her. With a jerk and a cry, she burst to consciousness, seeking out the monsters that had fled behind her eyes.

“It's all right,” you said, rubbing her back. You glanced around the room you shared with Lottie. She'd already risen for the morning. “It's all right. I'm here. You're safe.”

Grace blinked and shuddered before meeting your gaze, her face falling. “Goodness me,” she whispered, snuggling into you. “I can't help but disturb your sleep, can I?”

You shook your head. “Nonsense. I worry for you.”

“Well, I find it exhausting.”

“I'm sure,” you replied, then looked down at her. Her cheeks had regained some of their lively color since her arrival with Ferguson those few days past. But her countenance remained somber. Of the battle, she had said little. You knew only that the site had been King's Mountain, and the toll had been tremendous. “Tell me about them. Please?”

“Stop asking,” she grumbled. “They’re terrible.”

“It will help.”

“Nothing helps,” she groaned. “It is too awful to even think of.”

“But you’re thinking of it anyway,” you said, poking the side of her head. “So don't allow it to swim about in there all day.”

“I've no room for anything to swim in there!” she hid a half grin in your shoulder, batting your hand away. “You and Papa filled it with too much nonsense when I was a girl.”

“Very funny,” you said, finger jabbing the middle of her forehead and tipping her back to look at you. “Now confess your nightmares.”

She sighed, flicking your finger away with the most half-hearted of scowls before relaxing into you. “They're strange tangled webs,” she murmured. “Like the day itself happens out of order.” A pause as she chewed her lip. “But it always starts with Patrick getting shot.”

You nodded.

“He always falls. Sometimes off his horse, sometimes right into my arms. He's bleeding, bleeding everywhere, from his head and his mouth and his face is covered in dirt. And all I can do is plug his wounds with my hands as more appear.” Her voice tightened. “And he's gasping, saying my name, holding onto me. And then somehow he's shot again, and blood covers both of us.”

“Oh, Grace…”

“And I tear off my kerchief, and I rip my petticoats, and I tie off every wound I can find, but they keep opening, until the blood is like a river, and men are dying all around us, and I stop being able to hear his voice and it's just muskets and horses and screams and—”

She whimpered, drew in a shaky breath, and you squeezed her close, shushing her again. A sob choked through her.

“It was awful,” she said. And then, after a pause and a sniffle, “But it is less awful to speak of it than to think of it.” Finally, she exhaled, her muscles melting. “It seems my mind resolves to contort the horrors where my tongue lends them temperance.”

“Ah,” you said, grinning to yourself, “so you're saying I was correct?” You released a teasing, self-satisfied giggle. “Who could have anticipated this?”

Grace grumbled. “If only something might temper your pride!” she said, giving you a shove.

“I suppose I’ll refrain from gloating too much this time,” you said, grinning as you deflected her attempt to poke you in the ribs. A true smile of her own had broken through, and the sight lifted a weight from your heart. You allowed yourself to bask in the feeling for a few moments before tussling her hair and flinging the covers from you both. “Come, now. Shall we break our fast?”

She rolled over and stretched until her limbs popped, sighing. “That sounds more appealing than it has in days. And I want to visit Patrick, as well. He managed to speak a bit yesterday and I have hopes that we'll complete an entire conversation.”

“You’ve spent quite a bit of time at his bedside.” You began to ease out of bed, unraveling Grace from your protective embrace. “Is it really necessary to visit him for so many hours each day?”

Her eyes narrowed. “When he tires of my company, I shall relent,” she replied, flipping herself to sit. “Which is to say, I never shall.”

Grace sprang up and twirled away from the bed like a forest sprite. Though her mirth made you warm, her complete disregard of your concern coiled up to sting you behind the nose. With her back turned, you swallowed your smile and reached for your clothes in silence.

When both of you were laced, tied, and pinned from toe to collar, you set off together down the hall to exit the main house. Just as you reached for the door it burst open and two soldiers stomped through, nearly shouldering you aside. You rolled your eyes.

“What’s the bloody rush?” you mumbled.

Beyond the perimeter of the house, more noise, men’s voices clamoring, the rumble of feet and hooves. Grace stiffened beside you, and you grabbed her hand, pulling her through the house and out to the front.

The gate was splayed open, soldiers already filing into columns on either side of its entrance. Through the portal, flags whipped in the wind, a handsome, ornamented cavalry cresting the hill. At its front was a familiar gilded shape. You steered Grace behind the soldiers. His arrival could only be due to the King's Mountain debacle—something you could almost certainly attribute to Goddard’s intervention—and his presence put the both of you in even greater danger.

“Who’s that?” Grace whispered, trying to catch a glimpse of him through the men you’d positioned yourself behind.

“Lord Cornwallis!” proclaimed an officer you didn’t recognize, stepping forward to greet him.

“Food?” you said, ushering Grace away from the soldiers.

“The general?” She tried to tug herself from your grip. “God, he could be here to discipline Patrick. But it wasn’t his fault—”

You tightened your hold, dragging her. “That’s not our concern right now.”

The sound of shuffling, the clink of metal as Cornwallis dismounted his house. “Where is Colonel Tavington?”

Your heels ground the dirt.

“In his office, my Lord,” replied the officer.

“Take me to him,” Cornwallis replied. “Posthaste, if you will.”

“Right this way, sir,” said the officer.

Your mind leapt over a dozen hurdles at once. If Cornwallis was indeed here due to King's Mountain, then his communication with William, who was already suspicious of Goddard, meant that the target on Goddard was about to balloon. The size of such a target on Goddard inherently brought its edges closer to you. And that was a precipice you’d prefer not to walk, given the rather explosive manner in which you last left William.

You hadn’t spoken to him since that fight. You couldn’t so much as consider it these past days without a ripple of rage rising in your belly. He’d been such an arse. As if the distance you’d enforced had been unreasonable somehow. As if he were incapable of surmising how a discovery of this… whatever it was between you might devastate Grace and rend your relationship with her. It was not a rigorous leap of logic to perform. So why, on God’s most holy celestial planet Earth, was he clinging to such willful ignorance to the difficult position you occupied?

Yet somehow the most vexing part of it all was that those ripples of rage bore an undercurrent. An insurmountable pull. Beyond resentment of his absence, it was a subconscious prayer each morning that you would open your eyes to find that the warm presence beside you was his, and not your sister’s.

It made you sick. It struck a fissure down your heart that could not be tarred over by any application of rage or artificial apathy. And with Cornwallis’ arrival, a new shunt had induced its hemorrhaging: the fear that any day William would discover your lies, and you’d never awaken beside him again.

Grace hissed your name. “Are we going, or not?”

Whatever your feelings for William—and the danger those feelings presented—you needed to know what he and Cornwallis were discussing.

You shook your head, reorienting yourself. “Yes, yes,” you replied. “Let’s.”

The moment you and Grace arrived at the kitchen, you stopped in the entry, mumbling a curse under your breath.

“What?” Grace asked. “What is it?”

“I wanted to write a letter this morning to send off before noon,” you said, already turning back. “To update Dr. Moore on the situation here.”

“Oh,” Grace said. “Must you right now?”

“I'll forget, otherwise!” You waved her off. “I'll be back in a moment, save me some milk porridge!”

Holding your breath, you darted around to the back door of the main house, slipping through and pausing in the shadow of the staircase to listen. A bassy hum bled through layers of wood, the words indistinct but the timbres familiar.

You'd need to get closer.

Hands shaking, you ascended the stairs, deciding to make your way toward the water closet, since William’s office was on the way and it gave you as good an excuse as any to be up here should you be caught. As you crept to his office door, the cotton voices grew clearer, divided: a soft, tense baritone accompanied by a dissonant tenor.

“You’ll need to assume his duties at present, then, Colonel.”

“Ferguson’s remaining provincials have already been incorporated with the Legion,” came William’s voice. He added dismissively, “Those that have not fled.”

Cornwallis heaved a deep sigh. “I trust I needn’t impress upon you the gravity of this situation.”

“Indeed not, my Lord,” was the reply.

Heavy boots crossed the floor. “These bands of militia rabble are out of control,” Cornwallis continued anyway. “First your ghost, now these banditti from over the mountains,” he grumbled. “If more are allowed to gather, to organize, the Carolinas shall slip through our very fingers like water. That mustn't happen.”

“I agree entirely,” replied William, his tone tight.

“I depart tomorrow to Ninety Six. Upon my return, I expect a clear strategy in place for the enforcement of loyalty in this God-forsaken region. And bear in mind, Colonel,” a pause, a creak of the floorboards, and the general’s voice lowered. “The more blood you wantonly spill into this land, the more ghosts and banditti will come crawling out of it. Proceed accordingly.”

No response. You couldn’t tell if William was chastened or furious. Or both.

As you leaned closer, a pair of footsteps thumped the stairs behind you. You flailed and tripped forward, galloping into the hall, eyes straight ahead as you marched to the water closet door, opened it, and flung it shut behind you. Beyond it, you heard a knock on William's office. Your heart pounded in your temples.

“My Lord?”

“I'm occupied at present, General O’Hara. It can wait!” Cornwallis called without hesitation or even bothering to open the door.

“My Lord. I beg your pardon,” said the man—O’Hara, who you barely remembered from the ball at Middleton Place—and then, “I must speak with you at your earliest convenience.”

With that, you heard him disappear down the steps. You exhaled.

Easing the door open, you slid back into the hall, crept forward with feather steps until you could make out patches of conversation again.

“...must discern how these rebels discovered Ferguson’s position on King’s Mountain. How they acted so swiftly.” Cornwallis’ voice and footsteps crossed the room. He was pacing. Agitated. Perhaps Goddard had been right—perhaps this rebel victory held far more weight than you could have imagined. “Ferguson is a careful and deliberate man,” he continued, half-murmuring as if pondering a tricky cypher. “I doubt it was rashness that pushed him toward calamity.”

“Not rashness, my Lord.” William’s voice had remained fixed in the center of the room.

Cornwallis’ footsteps halted. “You speak as if you have an idea, Colonel.”

Silence.

“Out with it, man!”

“I suspect,” said William slowly, “that the rebels have an informant.”

“A spy?” Cornwallis scoffed. “Your dragoons have torn this countryside to ribbons. Surely they would have caught such a scoundrel.”

Another pause. When William spoke, it was as if through splintered glass. “Within our own ranks.”

More silence. Then Cornwallis took three slow, measured steps. “You are quite confident in this speculation?”

“It is only with such intimate knowledge that a massacre of this severity could have been achieved,” William explained, and you recognized in his tone a brittle yet carefully schooled deference to duty. Beneath the veil, you knew his blood boiled to say the words aloud. Your heart knocked your sternum. “The militia knew not only of Ferguson’s position but of his intended path. His plans to rendezvous with Your Lordship in North Carolina. The strength of his forces and the disposition of his arms and supplies.”

“I hope,” growled Cornwallis, “that by raising concerns regarding such an egregious oversight in your own leadership, you also assume the responsibility of resolving it.”

“I have—”

“Colonel, we lost almost one thousand men during this disaster. There is very little time and even littler manpower to be spent on this task. I expect you to see it done personally.”

“As was my plan, my Lord.”

“Excellent. Good day, Colonel.”

Cornwallis’s boots quaked the ground. You scrambled behind the water closet door again, listening for the office entry to squeal open and slam shut. Following it was the storm of the general as he pounded down the steps, his fury silencing the air.

You waited for what seemed like at least half an eternity, your ear pressed to wood, your pulse in your throat, in your fingertips. When you heard no other movement, you allowed a breath to leak through your nose and opened the door. Relieved, you stepped out into the hall and turned.

Straight into William Tavington.

At once, your chests collided, and he grunted, snatched you by the shoulders and held you at bay.

“William,” you breathed. “I—”

“What are you doing?” His gaze cut you like a scythe to grass, his face hardened. “Come to overhear something of interest, did you?”

Your cheeks lit up. “What? No! I wasn't—” You squirmed in his grip, which only caused his fingers to dig deeper. “Let go of me, you odious cur!”

“I loathe to imagine what that makes you, given the position I’ve found you in.” His eyes narrowed, his jaw shifted, and he pulled you closer. “I believe we are due a conversation, girl.”

“Is that right?” You laughed sharply, joy absent from your face. “I couldn't agree more!”

He growled, looming into your space, brow low over the obsidian point of his stare. “Then let us converse, hm?”

Footsteps on the stairs. Growing closer. “My Lord?”

William’s eye twitched, and he pushed you away, letting you stumble back to a respectable distance.

“Tonight,” he muttered between his teeth. “After sunset. At the redoubt.”

You shrugged off the tingling remnants of his hold. “Very well, Colonel,” you replied, chin tilted toward the air.

“Ah. Colonel,” said O’Hara with the enthusiasm of the grave. “I must speak with you.”

You gave William a curtsy. “Good day, Colonel Tavington,” you said, and with another stiff bow to O’Hara, brushed past him to scuttle down the stairs.

The pounding did not fade from your ears until well after breakfast, through the midday and past the sun’s zenith. It lent your hands an irritable flair as you attended your patients, earning complaints which oddly appeased the worst of your enmity. Then the pounding resumed as Grace struck up a cloying exchange with Ferguson, a correspondence which sent her spirits soaring and yours equally plummeting.

Thinking perhaps a correspondence of your own might absorb your distress, you trudged back to your room to actually write the letter you'd lied about earlier, since it was likely a good idea for Dr. Moore to get your report, anyway. Though you assumed that by now Cornwallis had already demanded Moore’s presence, you still didn't wish to add more lies to the pile you'd already told your sister.

Grace. Every minute spent around her only deepened the anger you felt toward William. Toward yourself. Yourself for betraying her and every value you'd impressed upon her, and William for being so… himself. Your despair would not be nearly as keen if he was a man who was kind, or generous, or gentle.

In other words, a man who would have never obtained your affections to begin with.

And that really was the crux of it, wasn't it? If you truly wanted to exorcise the wrath from your body, all you would need to do is never see William again, just as you'd threatened a few nights prior. You had no issue refusing his company for one night for Grace's benefit, and you'd gone a few days without it since.

You had refused yourself everything, in fact, for your father’s benefit, for Grace’s benefit, refused every last desire and instinct in service of something that seemed less and less tangible. Refusing it all, really, for reasons that seemed more and more asinine the longer Grace spent in your presence fawning over Ferguson. She had no compunction stirring your umbrage. All you had done was collect greater burdens without a moment of reward or gratitude. Unbidden, you remembered the exhaustion that had colonized your mother’s eyes.

Had fate placed your footsteps in hers? Were your efforts to be supped from, your own cares unheeded until you withered away just the same?

It was terror, then, that gripped you.

For every drop of living water you offered from your own cup, its returns seemed to diminish. It seemed a certainty that you would fail Papa. Even more a certainty that you would lose Grace. That no matter how adamantly you refused William, even if you refused him for eternity, nothing at all would come of it. But that was the point, wasn’t it? To give freely of yourself whatever was required and wish for nothing in return? It was what had always been expected of you. A burden that had brought you pride to bear.

And yet the idea of refusing William for eternity—never again burying yourself in his embrace, never again whining as his mouth burned your throat, never again seeing the crinkle near his eyes when fighting off a smile—made your stomach want to invert itself onto the ground.

Perhaps that was why you found your palms sweating as you watched the sun descend below the trees in the west, why your heart had become a bird flitting against its bone cage. You did not know how this conversation with William would end, but the circumstances under which it was demanded stoked an unfamiliar, wretched fear within you.

He had, you were sure, caught you in a dubious position one too many times.

His summons were to inform you that he could no longer withstand lying next to a woman who had deceived him as you had.

Death did not even enter your thoughts as a consequence. Instead you worried that the day you feared had come. The any day from which you might never awaken beside him again. Perhaps it would be akin to death.

Perhaps it would be worse.

Once the sky fully engorged itself in darkness, you excused yourself from your room, hands in fists. This was how they remained as you whisked through the main house to the front gates, which appeared to be conspicuously unmanned. A sign, you knew, that William had already made his way through, that he was waiting for you at the redoubt. Your tongue dried.

In the darkness, the abatis along the path raked up from the ground, like werewolves rising to feast in the moonlight. Your skin felt raw, vulnerable in their shadows—or perhaps it was the knowledge your own werewolf waited for you at the end of the path, star-blue eyes devoured by their own hunger.

As the redoubt came into clarity with its patchy stockade built into the earth, so too did this werewolf, cloaked now in the skin of a man. He stood with hands folded behind his back in the shade of the stubby earthwork, his gaze trained on you as any experienced hunter’s would be. His attention flicked to every potential unnatural movement of your feet, your hands, your throat. Like he was waiting for you to turn and run. Like he was waiting to give chase.

When your feet finally hit the dirt-weathered planks, your heart bounced. You stared at William Tavington, unwilling to speak first; even less willing to allow yourself to feel strangled by his presence.

“Well,” you announced, pushing the crown of your head toward the sky. “I’ve arrived.”

William stared. “Indeed you have.”

“You said we—”

“The same day Major Ferguson arrives gutted from battle,” he began, stepping toward you, “you arrive in my office with a prepared excuse to avoid me.” He drew closer, turned. Circled. “The same day we sustain massive casualties, you evade nearly all conversation with me as well.”

You frowned, twisting to follow his path with your eyes. “I beg your pardon?”

“I find it… curious.”

“Find what to be curious?” Hair prickled on the back of your neck. “There are a great many things that men have considered curious about me.”

He shrugged, as if offering a simple possibility. “The coinciding of these events.”

You rolled your eyes. He was going to dangle you like a fish from a line, watch your gills claw for air before gutting you. “If you’re to accuse me of something, then say it plainly.”

Spinning, he pinned you with his gaze. “Why must I?” he snipped. “I said it plainly enough this morning. Have I overestimated your intellect?”

“You…” You laughed, hoping the crow of your voice would conceal the break of nerves. “You must jest.”

William’s lip twitched, and he stepped closer. “So you admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“If you think me foolish enough to dismiss how I found you—”

You sneered. “Tell me how you found me. Say it aloud!”

“You are the only one with the knowledge, opportunity—”

“Opportunity?” you barked. “Are you absolutely mad? I’ve been half-dead with the agues these past weeks! You should be well aware of that!”

“—you are the only one with the rancor toward Ferguson to see it done—”

“And I saved the man’s life!” you snapped, throwing your hands to the air. “You believe I would orchestrate his death only to drag him back from the grave?”

William’s voice thinned to a blade. “I believe your efforts would have appeared far less admirable had your sister not been present.”

“Yes, the suggestion of being even suspected of incompetence utterly thrills me!” you snarled. “I could not have damned King's Mountain just as you apparently cannot catch your ghost!”

Fury flashed in his eyes, an expression which you matched in kind. Perhaps it was only the technical truth—you had spoken to Goddard and you had traded information—but his words stung like hornets nonetheless. And suddenly, in your furious mirror, you beheld a perfect reflection. Your jaw fell half-open.

“You accuse me of trading intelligence while deathly ill because you are hurt.” The words hardly made sense as you spoke them, yet they felt right on your lips. “You are hurt that I rejected you.”

He snorted, stepping back like you’d made a joke. “You cloak these decisions in advantageous excuses,” he replied, mock-thoughtful. “Were you not motivated, perhaps, by guilt?”

“Guilt!”

“For endangering the man your sister so dearly loves?” he said, lingering on the final words like honey. “For slipping in and out of my bed pretending to entertain my advances all while dispensing information that undermines the Crown?”

“You are mad!” The admission that he considered your affections a performance wounded you deeper than any other jab. “I feel no guilt for either of those things!” you hissed. “Because neither of them are true! But you are—you are so bound up in your own selfish pride that you cannot bring yourself to consider it!”

You laughed again, hands on your hips. The reality of your feelings was the only reason you stood before him, and it seemed he planned to discount them entirely.

“But if you truly wish to accuse me of deception and never risk me slipping in and out of your bed again, then so be it.”

William smirked, like you’d somehow proved him correct. “How assuaged of responsibility you’d be then.”

You advanced on him, hands aching to strike. “Assuaged of responsibility?” you cackled mirthlessly. “I’ve not known a day without it since my mother died!”

“Then you must ache for relief from it,” he replied quickly, meeting you step for step until your bodies were inches apart. “You must crave to escape from being beholden to anything inconvenient to you.”

“I do not and never have!”

“Is my presence not an inconvenience while under your sister’s shadow?”

“I…” You blinked, shaking the words off—was he wishing to end your association or not? “I did not reject you because of inconvenience!”

He snorted. “That is exactly why you rejected me,” he murmured, “and why you claimed you would continue to reject me.”

“No,” you replied, even though it felt true, “that isn’t what—”

“Do not think I do not still detest you for these reasons as well,” William replied, voice affected with an irritatingly accurate imitation of you.

“That sounds nothing like me.”

“It sounds precisely like you.”

“Ugh!” You pounced, slamming the heels of your hands into his shoulders and shoving him back. Sneering, William seized your wrists and drove you against a high retaining wall. “Why, then?” you spat as you connected with it, wriggling between the strength of his grip and the gnarled wood gouging your spine. “Why desire me, why pursue me, why bring me here under pretense of conversation? If you so truly believe I have skulked about beneath your nose, make your accusations and have done! I will no longer indulge whatever pleasure you take in raking me over the coals.”

“You impossible—”

“You wish me gone,” you cried. “You wish to report me, wish for me to hang, just as you have since the moment you met me.”

“That is not—”

“You have taken my virtue! You have had my body for your amusement! You have branded my flesh and my spirit and now wish to be rid of both! You claim that I deny you, and yet do such accusations not conveniently facilitate your denial of me? Why, after all, would you desire the company of a traitor?”

“I do not desire the company of a traitor!”

He thrust backward a step, leaving you to sag against the wall, each staring at each other and fighting for the breath you’d lost. In the threads of moonlight that draped the silence, in every second that passed without him drawing farther away, the unsaid words took shape: so I cannot bear to deem you one. For the first time since you entered the redoubt, William averted his gaze. His hands flexed at his sides, lip curling as he shook his head, before his attention pierced you anew.

“And I am not the one who must answer for denial.”

Your jaw slackened, chin trembling. Realization worked its way into you like fingers through a wound. He still wanted you. And you—despite the reality that you were lying to him, that you were a traitor, that you even now deceived him—could not claim this to be your motivation in denying him what he wanted. What you wanted to give him. No, as ever, it was fear that had tethered you to distance. He had once called you a coward, and you had spent nothing short of months only proving him right.

That very distance you’d so deliberately wedged between your bodies now felt like a misplaced dam. Fragile. Intolerable. And in the silence you felt only a longing for him to reach out, rip one stone free, and topple it.

“You were right,” you whispered.

He blinked. “What?”

“You were right!” you choked out, arms falling to your sides. “I was afraid! I rejected you because I was afraid!” The words constricted your throat. “Had the pagan gods granted me but one boon of courage I would have lain in your chambers that night.” You shook your head, folding your arms. “And every night since.”

William’s jaw stiffened. His steel gaze flicked across your face. “You deny pretending to entertain my advances?”

“You are utterly foolish,” you huffed, “to believe I would permit your mouth upon my throat if I had an ounce of pretending within me.”

William’s head tilted as he considered you. A split second of hesitation was the only vulnerability he exposed as he closed the distance between you like a gaining tide. Awash in his shadow, your arms dropped again, revealing your body like a stretch of open shore to receive him.

“I thought you might be persuaded to reason,” you said.

“Reason hardly governs me at this moment.” He exhaled, near enough that his breath skated your skin, scrutinizing you as if you might flee. “Do you deny me now?”

“That depends, Colonel,” you replied. “Am I your calculating spy?” Your throat thickened, and you slid a hand up his chest, admiring how broad it looked underneath your palm. “Or your vicious, uncollared thing?”

His lip twitched upward. “You are neither,” he said, his arm snaking around your back, arching you flush with his body. His mouth ghosted your ear. “You are simply mine.”

Breath catching, warmth flooded your chest. Your hands smoothed over his shoulders. “Then make me yours.”

William said nothing else, his free hand cupping your cheek and guiding your face toward his.

It was strange, at first—his mouth brushed yours like a kitten dipping its toes in water—once, twice, testing that the surface would heed his will. When you sighed into him, his fingers curled around the back of your skull, and he kissed you as if he’d erupted from the dirt just to taste your lips.

Desire swelled within you. Between illness and war and your own stubbornness, you had denied yourself its presence but for brief, increasingly greater intervals, and in his arms, standing on your own feet, you found it alive, fighting to command you. So you reached up, scraped your nails over his scalp and pinched his lip between your teeth—deciding you would let it.

William stiffened, a groan skipping in his throat, and snatched both of your wrists and slammed them beside your head. A shudder rippled over him, like a muscle threatening to blister free of skin, and he stared at you, eyes untouched by the moonlight. Shaken breath escaped him, his boot edging between your feet.

“I fear you lack instincts of self-preservation,” he murmured.

Smirking up at him, you replied, “I do not fear it at all.”

The night enshrined him in lust. “I see the pagan gods have answered your prayers for courage,” he said, scraping his teeth across your neck, “but I do not plan to consider your welfare.”

Before you could reply, his grip on your wrists tightened, and he sank his teeth into your throat, earning a sharp, delighted howl. William groaned, sucking a bruise to life through broken veins, branding you from your pulse to the skin beneath your kerchief. You wilted against him, hips rolling, exhilarated need rushing from between your thighs to your fingertips, blowing your mind clear of everything but him.

His mouth met your shoulder and paused, panting fog into your flesh. A grunt escaped him, and he kissed your lips again, possessive, furious, twisting your arms behind your back and binding you against him. You squealed, shivering as his tongue swirled over yours, and bucked into him, writhing against his hold. Not because you wanted to be free. You simply wanted to see what he’d do.

The moment you fought him, his muscles tightened, and he broke away, flipped you around and smashed your chest into the wall. He loomed over your shoulder, heaving, and ripped your neckerchief free and to the ground, fumbled with your bodice before bidding it join the rest. His hips kept you pinned to the wall as he unlaced your stays, grumbling when this yielded no further access to your body.

Without a word, he raised your arms above your head and thrust your stays upward before tossing them to the side, leaving you in your shift and petticoats, your nipples hardening in the cool air. Gooseflesh bloomed alive—you wanted more, more, more of him, wanted to wind him so taut that he unleashed his longing in a rage. Biting your lip, you took advantage of your position and rocked backward into him, grinding your ass against his pelvis, feeling the evidence of that need straining behind his breeches.

William snarled. A fist curled into your hair, jerked your head back to face the sky, and his other hand clutched your exposed throat, squeezing just enough to blur your sight. You wheezed, eyes rolling to the back of your skull.

“You are far, far too willing to taunt me,” he muttered, adding pressure to his grip. “It’s nearly as if you wish to suffer.”

It had been weeks. Weeks of illness, weeks without this ferocity of attention, and you realized now how deeply you had ached for it, how deeply you had craved the freedom to bare your teeth without shame, to unsheathe your claws without fear of reprimand, how deeply you reveled in the opportunity to draw blood and find retribution in only in throbbing, weeping bliss.

You reached behind you and grabbed his hips, undulating against him again. “If you believe you can make me.”

Something feral rumbled far in his chest. His hand at your throat pinched, pushed you flat against him, his other hand moving from your hair to gather your skirts above your knees. You whined, laughed with fleeting joy as he slid his hand over your exposed thighs to the anticipation between them. The moment his fingers coursed through the curls there, your eyelids fluttered, your knees shook, and you twitched, trying to force his touch to your clit.

Tutting, he squeezed your throat again, your vision melting into the night sky, and skimmed between your folds, a needy breath skating your ear when you moaned. William rocked into you, his grip tensing, his greed for you brimming at the edge of his skin—and when you trembled, two fingers teased your clit, then swirled over it with practiced, determined ease.

“Oh,” you whimpered, woozy from the hand at your neck and the weight of your own desire. “My God—”

“I’m flattered,” he said, and pressed his mouth to your ear, teasing his tongue across the shell, nipping at the lobe. “Now name for me the master to whom your body submits.”

You nuzzled against him, gripping his hips, your mouth falling open as his fingers moved faster, tighter, engulfing you in instant, overwhelming pleasure. Your cunt clenched, your thighs parted, you felt yourself wet and hot at his hand, and you knew there had ever, would ever only be a single answer.

But you did not want to give him that just yet.

“I know no such master,” you managed to say.

William huffed. “Do you not?”

In a single beat he released you, spun you, and smacked your back to the wall, his chest crushing yours. His concealed cock ground against your thigh, his mouth warm and beckoning at your ear. Without hesitation, his fingers plunged into your cunt and the heel of his palm wedged against your swollen clit, pushing a cry free. Writhing and helpless beneath his strength, the liquor thrill of it weakened your limbs, clouded your mind.

“Ever the liar. But allow me to remind you,” he murmured. “Come for me.”

Head swimming, you snorted. “I cannot with so little effo—oh, God!”

His whole arm began to move. Fingers hooking into the depths of your belly, he nearly lifted you up with it, piercing and merciless, plunging liquid fire into your being with thrusts so rapid that your vision blanked. You yelped, clutched him for stability, but something was rising inside you with a wicked, consuming swiftness that seemed to answer only to the onslaught of his fingers. You could hardly name it as pleasure—it burned, licked out through your limbs, then imploded to a blazing point within your core. Everything tightened. You might have screamed.

Some terrible paroxysm seized your body and you broke like jagged bone in his hand, a frenzied, excruciating rapture. His breath was upon your neck, warm wetness soaked your thighs. His fingers slowed and the intensity, the suddenness of it vanished as quickly as it had descended. You burst from it as if escaping a frozen river, swimming for the banks of your sanity.

“Christ,” you said, testing the solidity of the earth with your toes. “Thought you were meant to make me suffer.”

A dark laugh resonated in his throat. “You’ve not yet begun to suffer.”

It was then you realized his pace was unceasing—fingers pumping, his arm tensing, your cunt dripping around him—and you heard the lewd, slick sounds of his effort stealing your breath. Then his palm pressed to your clit once more.

You hollered, twisted in agony, the sensation like stabbing a pick in bloody gums.

“It’s—” You were still too tender, too sensitive to bear his attention. “Wait—”

William laughed again, his voice whispering like pistol smoke, his bulge prodding your thigh as he compressed you further along the wall.

“Have you recalled the name of your owner?” His free hand curled around your neck, his hips rocking against you. “Or has your memory failed you again?”

Before you could respond, his fingers struck that overworked spot inside your cunt, and reluctant bliss blinded you. Brined in beading sweat, you scratched at his arms, whipped your head side to side, gnashed futilely at the air; your body was succumbing to his will, dragged like a corpse through the shards of pleasure he shattered upon you, wishing simultaneously to be buried underneath them.

Your mouth wordlessly hanging open, you drenched your thighs again, your climax searing through you with fracturing stability—it sapped you of strength, and you liquified, kept standing by William’s hand between your legs. Shivering, you grasped at him, your fuzzy vision fighting to focus as you returned. He squeezed your neck and you whimpered, meeting his gaze.

In front of you was a man rabid with lust, his eyes thin silver encircling a void. He leaked eager breath, cruel lips curved in demonic, electrified hunger, his body rippling with its power. His fingers twitched at your throat as if they craved to crush it.

“You need not prolong the denial of whom you belong to.” The refined timbre of his voice was like cracked porcelain. “Your body admits it quite readily.”

You forced a laugh, biting your lip in defiance. “I know not a man with that privilege,” you replied, grazing your fingers across the steel between his legs, “but if I did, then he surely has not earned it.”

His nostrils flared. Jaw stiff, he pulled his fingers from your core and whipped you from the wall and to the side, your stomach colliding with iron as you were bent over something solid, your skirts flipping onto your back, exposing your soaked cunt to the night. It was only when you heard him sucking his fingers clean with a groan that your reality sharpened. You’d been tossed across the barrel of a cannon.

“You speak with such impunity,” he said, grabbing your arms and folding them behind your back. He stuck them there with a single hand as the sound of fabric shuffled. “And behave without fear of reprisal.” A thin strip of cloth wrapped and bound your wrists together.

A thrill shot through you. “Am I to be punished, Colonel?”

William huffed. “You will plead for punishment before I’m through.”

Two fingers drove into you again. You sobbed, twisting beneath him, robbed of leverage—you were still raw from your previous orgasms, flesh like a bruise—but he offered no mercy, instead swiping his thumb over your clit. Thunderous, awful pleasure shook you, and you winced, tried to slam your heels into his shins and found no purchase.

He laughed, thumb rolling over your clit through your faux-protest. You grew tense, your peak closer than you’d ever felt it, the threshold drawing nearer with every break. Breathless garbled nonsense escaped your mouth, and he fucked his fingers into you with sloppy, wet thrusts, each one pushing you closer to that indefinable edge—and then you were writhing, choking, the serrated edge of your orgasm slicing through you.

“My—my God, oh God,” you sobbed, trembling in its fleeing wake as his fingers left you empty. You hadn’t even known you could come off this many times in succession. “What—what in God’s holy living heaven are you—”

His hand thwacked your arse.

“Ah!” You laughed in disbelief, the sting ringing through your legs. “Did you—are you—” He did it again. “Christ!” you screeched. “I am not a girl!”

“Your insolence implies differently.” William spanked you once more, earning a jiggle of blazing flesh against the cold body of the cannon. He hummed appreciatively. “And I find you rather agreeable in this position.”

“You are—” Another. “How—” Another.

The worst part, you realized, was how delightful the pain felt, how it ricocheted to your clit, how it ferried you toward another climax. His hand cracked your ass again, again, the sting growing teeth, teeth that sunk into your skin and forced deep, satisfied moans from your mouth. Your cunt throbbed, pulsed from the attention, more swollen than a storm-fed creek, and he gave you another, and you were arching into them now, like your body was begging, and behind you he snarled, paused—then slapped his palm against your needy, tender clit.

The sound that left you was one you’d never heard from you or any other. With it came a spear of torment, of euphoria, an orgasm lancing through your stomach. You convulsed, attempting to evade its inevitability, but were bereft of all articulation. All you could do was endure it.

“Please,” you groaned, uncertain for what you even wanted, “please.”

A low, satisfied grumble from behind you. “I told you that you’d plead.” William caressed a globe of burning flesh. “This is what you’ve been needing since the moment I met you.” His figure blotted the moon. “To be forced into your place by your betters.”

You were damp with sweat, panting as if you’d run for days. “Better than me, are you?” you sputtered. “Is that why your cock aches in your breeches?”

“My cock,” he said, “is what makes me your better.” William leaned forward until the hot head of it dragged between your arse. “This is, after all, the relief for which you beg.” He slapped it on your still-tender skin. “What you crave inside your cunt. What you cry to come off around.”

You whimpered, your hollow core clenching. You were not certain if you could withstand what he wished to give you—you felt whatever held you together was fraying at the threads—but you were certain, however, that you would likely die without it.

“Your arrogance,” you replied through staccato gulps of air, “knows no limit, does it?”

William snarled, one hand snatching your hair, the other between his legs as he guided his cock to your sore, ruined cunt. He panted, fingernails scratching your scalp as his length parted your puffy folds.

“Many facets of my character eschew limitation.” His mouth pressed to your ear. “Now, do what you do best, little beast,” he said, taunting you by slicking the tip in your wetness. “Lie to me, and tell me you don’t want this.”

Arching your back, you tried to trick him deeper inside you, but he dodged your effort. “Do what you do best,” you said, “and behave as the brute you are.”

With a grunt, William cranked you backward, twisted you toward him, and backhanded you across the face.

Pain rang in your ears, your jaw dropped in shock—but your cunt pulsed, alive with need.

A delighted, manic laugh escaped you. “You utter bastard.”

“Still impudent.” He shrugged, dropped with you until your stomach connected again with the cannon. “It was at least effective on your sister.”

In any other position, you would have ripped his head from his body. In this position, however, you were slammed full of his cock before you could even think to try.

William choked, muscles quaking, and buried his face in your neck as he sank easily into your dripping core. When his hips hit yours, he finally released a desperate, heavy breath before sucking in air through his teeth.

“God,” he muttered, shifting so one hand stayed tangled in your hair while the other curved around your throat once more. “Should have done what I wished in Dorchester.” He slid out, seething, before driving in again. “Fucked you until you were an obedient husk.” You tightened around him, and he groaned. “Made you come until you—until you sobbed.”

Words fled your tongue. This was all you had wanted, all you had been wanting; your brief tryst in his bed those few days ago had not been enough to purge the root of it from your blood. No, you needed to be taken, to be fucked, and as his cock filled you with another thrust, you moaned in deep, elated relief.

“That’s right,” William said, setting a rough, steady pace. Every stroke forced a sound from your chest, a sound he throttled with his palm. “This is exactly where you belong.”

You groaned, mollified by his cock to agreeability. His body settled on top of yours, his breath heating your shoulder as he pumped his hips, splitting you wider, the noise in his chest becoming something bestial. Primal. The grip in your hair and your throat cinched as he moved, as if to cling to you, to anchor to you as his composure unwound.

The heat between you bore sweat to your temples, your thighs painted slick with it—or perhaps that was your own effluence, the sound of it smacking your ears while his hips struck your ass. With each stroke, his pace quickened, his breath shallowed; bowing waves devolved to hard, choppy swells of motion, pounding into you so deep his balls slapped your clit, the thick stretch of his cock wrenching utter, mind-erasing bliss from the depths of your flayed nerves.

Spontaneous prayers escaped for more. For less. For God.

William spat a curse like poison, releasing you and slipping free of your cunt, earning from you a protesting sob. He jerked you up by your bound wrists and spun you, shoving your back against the stockade, cupping beneath your thighs to hoist you up along the wall. You wailed from the pull on your shoulders, your wrists wedged between your back and the wood, but then he positioned himself between your legs, heaving like an animal. Jaw tight, he stuffed himself deep in your cunt with a single snap of his hips.

Your eyes rolled back. He stifled a moan.

Face falling to your shoulder, he drew in a breath, resuming his pace as if his cock throbbed to be buried inside you. William consumed you, his frame enfolding you, length breaking into your belly. The new angle siphoned whatever lucidity you thought you'd had, and you went limp in his arms, your forehead falling against him.

“You feel…” He laughed, smothered in pleasure. “You feel like heaven,” he managed. “I could—I could lose myself. In this cunt.” William squeezed your thighs until you felt them ache, hammering your core until you felt it in your ribs. “I could… I could—” Silencing himself by sinking his teeth into your clavicle, you released a strangled wheeze.

You imagined just that—imagined him fucking you full over and over, numb to anything but your body, imagined his control slipping as he sought his release, imagined him spilling every drop of his seed inside of you—and did not reel with horror. Whether intoxicated or insane, you cared not in the moment. You almost, almost wanted it.

“William,” you tried to croak, legs wrapping around him. “William—”

“Yes,” he said into your neck, “and whose name is that?”

“The one who owns me,” you gasped, words hiccuping with the force of his hips. “The one to whom I belong.”

He dropped his forehead to your shoulder and moaned, his rhythm becoming erratic. “My dandelion,” he said. “My pretty, wild flower.”

Stepping closer, he angled you away from the wall, fucking straight into the over-sensitive hill in your core; without even a brush of attention to your clit, you were shoved through some intangible barrier like a boulder over a waterfall, plummeting toward the open maw of your orgasm.

“Oh, God, please,” you called out, though you knew He could not save you. “I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. You will.” The world tunneled to William’s voice, his touch, the assault of his hips. “Take what I give your body,” he purred. “Come around my cock.”

You could not respond in liberty. You simply obeyed.

The sensation that swallowed you was neither ecstasy nor agony. It was the intake of breath while still drowning, the bursting of a too-full stomach, the breaking of a limb to escape its shackles.

“William,” you groaned before disappearing beneath it.

You came with an empty sob, clenching and milking his cock as it punished your cunt into a swollen, quivering submission. Still holding you, William viciously pursued his own release, growling as he felt you break, his own voice collapsing into sated moans. With a stutter of his hips, he held you to the wall with his weight, grunting before he forced himself from your core and into his fist. Not even a second passed before he shot loads of hot, sticky seed across your legs and stomach, gritting his teeth through the pleasure.

“Hell,” he said before drawing in a breath. “Damn.”

You could hear him panting like a dog in summer. You were too wrecked to even think.

Finding himself, William relaxed his grip, smoothed his hands over your thighs. His lips soothed your neck, and he pulled away, seeking your focusing eyes. As reality returned to you, you met his gaze, gave a half-nod, and he guided your feet to the floor. Still bent over you, he massaged your sore arse with a gentleness you’d forgotten him capable of possessing.

“Good,” he said, almost to himself. “Very good.”

The words glowed like a hot meal in your chest. You wondered if maybe you could fall asleep here, crumpled against the stockade, and William could collect you in the morning. As your eyes shuttered, he unbound your wrists—it had been his cravat he'd used—rubbing the joints before dropping them, finally stepping away from you. You wobbled, unmoored from dexterity.

“There we are,” he said, holding your hips until you steadied. “Hold still.”

You were dazed, either by his demeanor or the number of orgasms you’d had. Either way, it kept you silent as he eased your stays back over your head, taking the time to deftly lace them before helping you dress into your bodice and neckerchief.

Throughout it, he was quiet too, his gaze focused with a decisiveness he reserved for those under his command. A sort of security in his place—a certainty of what he deserved, the confidence to obtain it. It dizzied you with affection, with yet another new urge. But this was one you had no intention of fighting.

William finished straightening the hem on your bodice, and you glanced up at him, offering a lazy smile before crumbling into his frame, curling your arms around him. He was warm, solid, straightening as you nestled your cheek against his chest and sighed. It took only a breath before his arms wound around you, sealing you in a firm embrace.

“I will sleep in your room tonight,” you mumbled against his woolen breast.

“You should know I depart early tomorrow,” he said, fingers tracing circles over your side. “I shall disrupt your rest.”

“I care not,” you replied. “I wish to sleep there.” And then, after a moment, since you genuinely wanted to know: “Where does the war call you to this time?”

He sniffed. “Identifying our calculating spy, of course,” he said. “By any means necessary. Including the destruction of rebels and their homes.”

You swallowed. You did not wish to think on that now. You would save it for tomorrow. After he departed. “Exitus acta probat,” you said, uncertain to whom it was directed.

“Indeed,” he said, and pressed a kiss to the top of your head.

A minute or so passed like that. You might have been content to stay an hour. But soon a hand moved to the small of your back, turning you toward the path to the fort. Looking up at it, glittering above like a ship frozen upon the crest of a wave, you sighed.

“Unless you wish to remain here all night,” said William.

“Of course not.” You gave him the smallest shove you could muster. “Though a gentleman might call his lady a carriage after such an ordeal.”

He smirked. “A gentleman might.”

You wrinkled your nose at him and his smirk grew wider. He watched you waddle from the redoubt, and you shot him a playful frown before ascending the hill. As he disappeared below it, you tried to silence your mind. He planned on slaughtering rebels. Burning farms. He would identify the spy.

No, you would save it for tomorrow. For now, you would anticipate his company, his presence. Tomorrow you would think on that. Tomorrow you would consider it. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

#william tavington #colonel william tavington #colonel tavington #the patriot #jason isaacs #playing soldier #fanfiction problems #if you don't like william tavington being mean during sex dont read this chapter : ) !!!!

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kylorengarbagedump · 11 days ago

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hi!! sorry to bother you if youve answered this already but is defy your authority coming back?

Hey! No worries - I don't have plans to continue this fic right now. It's been a bit soured for me and I feel I've written myself into a corner with it. Perhaps at some point, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, personally.

#nerd whinings #cuties #defy your authority #fanfiction problems #fya2 #i think

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kylorengarbagedump · 13 days ago

Photo

Adam Driver behind the scenes of Star Wars: The Last Jedi

#god these turn me on so bad still holy shit #he has such big big boobies #the contrast he has of this uber-masculine figure #like broad built muscular and BIG #with the soft curl of his thick hair #his pretty delicate nose #those pink lips #god i hate him #he will forever dominate me #kylo ren #bebe

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kylorengarbagedump · 18 days ago

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I hope, in the next chapter of playing soldier, reader and William reconciliate😭😭(I know they're both too proud but let's hope) 😍😍😢

HAHA I think we'll see what happens. There has to be a bit of push and pull to build the tension, you know, but he might have reason to speak with her!

It's getting nerve-racking for us because we're building up these final chapters and the tension is getting higher and higher! So the time between chapters takes a bit longer, especially because we find ourselves agonizing over getting it right.

So we definitely appreciate the patience and the engagement 🩷🩷🩷

#nerd whinings #cuties #playing soldier #fanfiction problems

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kylorengarbagedump · 18 days ago

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Can't wait to read 28th chapter of playing soldier❤️❤️

Thank you! It's nearly finished - it's just been a crazy busy month with travel and my work schedule has been a fucking nightmare that I've had basically no time to write (I've been on a call for two hours right now, as an example). I think you'll like it! Or hope, anyway <3

#nerd whinings #cuties #playing soldier #fanfiction problems

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kylorengarbagedump · 1 month ago

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I came back here to read your work AFTER YEARS because it’s like one of the only ways I can cope with my intrusive thoughts LOL

I had a baby in 2023 and I’m like struggling

The body changes have really affected my self esteem and your work really helps…

It takes me out of my head space and lets me escape into somewhere where the intensity matches the intensity of my feelings. I hope that makes sense.

I still can’t help but imagine Kylo wouldn’t like that I had a baby though and that makes me sad… 😞

Absolutely. I'm really glad to hear my work can give you so much comfort. <3 It's so hard when your body goes through changes and you don't know how to feel.

I don't really know what you mean when you say "wouldn't like that you had a baby" - I think that depends entirely on the circumstances. No reason to tell yourself one thing when the other option is just as valid :)

#nerd whinings #cuties #i mean i wrote an entire au where the point is him impregnating the RC #so......#perhaps im biased but i don't think this something to make yourself feel bad about lol #fanfiction problems

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kylorengarbagedump · 1 month ago

Text

Playing Soldier: Chapter 27

Read on AO3. Part 26 here. Summary: More than anything, you wish you could be happy to see your sister. But these circumstances don't permit that.

Words: 6000

Warnings: medical gore

Characters: Colonel Tavington x Reader

A/N: Co-written with @bastillia.

HI WE'RE BACK. Sorry for the delay - lots of travel, lots of recovery-related bullshit, lots of re-writing the entire third act of this fic occurred prior to posting this!

BUT we're so happy to give you this chapter today! Truly, we appreciate your patience and kind words. I hope to be back to a regular posting schedule (every 2 weeks-ish) soon, but the upcoming chapters promise more meat and potatoes, so... perhaps we shall be taking our time HAHA. Who knows?!

Much love to all of you, very excited to see you soon. <3

“Grace!” You shouldered past the men and seized your sister by the elbows. “What in Hell’s name are you doing here?”

You searched her eyes—wide, shining, tunneling somewhere both through and beyond you. As they focused, her face crumpled.

“Please,” she sobbed out your name, clutching your sleeves as if you might disintegrate between her hands, streaking you rust-red. “You must help him, I beg of you, you must, you must!”

“Are you hurt?” You searched her, following the blood for its source. “Tell me what happened.”

A wet gasp arose from the cot and Grace propelled into you, staggering you back.

“Patrick!” She twisted from your arms, flinging herself into a heap at his side. “Patrick, I’m here.”

The two men who had dragged him inside straightened, looking first to each other and then to you. Just as one opened his mouth to speak, Lottie emerged from the supply room.

“Good Lord!”

The tray in her hands clattered onto a table and she ran to Ferguson’s side opposite Grace. She had barely glimpsed him before she wailed, twisting to cast you a look of such grim desperation that her knuckles whitened on the edge of the cot.

Your eyes cut back to the men as one began to speak. “Where is Colonel Tav—”

Your name, screamed through your sister’s lips, was a lightning bolt to your limbs. You lurched past the two soldiers and flew to her.

Crimson spread through the sheets, welling from beneath both of her hands where they pressed against a wound at Ferguson’s shoulder.

Assessment was a rapid matter. One visible ball entry wound in the ribs, hastily packed, another presumably hidden beneath Grace’s palms. Vital organs intact given the fact that he was still breathing, though lung damage was likely given the sound of it. Limbs still generally attached. Blood wept from another crater in his thigh—it would need to be evaluated for amputation.

“Lottie.” She nodded tightly when you spoke, still not looking down at the bloody scene. “Probe, forceps, lint, and whiskey.” She bolted like a hare for the supply room, and you whipped around to address the men. “Are there more wounded?”

“Y-yes, miss—”

“Bring them in.”

You turned back to Ferguson, grimacing. Only the sound of boots clattering through the door answered as you began yanking wads of torn cloth from the wound in Ferguson’s middle. A series of barked commands resounded outside, and you felt Lottie’s presence return across the cot. Beside you, Grace sobbed, cupping Ferguson’s face as he fought to breathe.

“Grace,” you murmured, touching your sister between the shoulders. “Give him something to bite down on.”

She ripped her kerchief from her breast and twisted it into a cord. As she brushed the fabric against his face, Ferguson’s eyes flashed lucid, darting from the ceiling to Lottie to you—frantic, searching, until they landed on Grace and sank into her like an anchor.

“Bite this,” she implored him through tears, wedging the cloth between his teeth as he let out a wordless huff of pain. “Trust me.” And then, softer, fingers brushing the sweat from his temple: “Trust me, my love.”

The word struck your stomach like round shot, nausea filling the crater. Your vision tunneled on the pulsing pit of blood.

“Whiskey,” you muttered, offering your palms up to Lottie.

She splashed several dashes over your hands, following with her own as you worked it between your fingers. As she set the bottle down, you contemplated snatching it and taking a swig.

The clamor of soldiers dragging more men into the hospital snapped your senses alive and you shook your head, refocusing. It was impossible to discern how deeply the ball had struck based on sight alone—it could be just beneath the skin or wedged behind a rib.

“I’ve doused the instruments,” Lottie said, voice quavering as she passed you the probe.

“Well done.” You gripped the red-checked fabric of Ferguson’s shirt and ripped it open. “Now the wound.”

Hands shaking, she winced away but did as you asked. Ferguson groaned, the sound tattered through the kerchief.

“Look at me,” Grace pleaded with him, “just keep your eyes on me.”

Another wave of nausea pitched you, and though you wished to attribute it solely to the devotion that saturated your sister’s voice, your awareness flittered to the teapot full of medicine sitting abandoned across the room.

You swore under your breath, willing your body not to give out as you nodded to Lottie.

“Hold the edges,” you said, and though she let out a squeak of dread, she hooked her fingers into the bloody fringes of linen, keeping your workspace clear as you lined up the probe.

With the wound irrigated and the angle of entry clear, you eased the probe into Ferguson’s flesh. Inch by inch you adjusted, letting the path of the ball guide you. He roared in agony, gripping the edge of the cot, and Lottie’s knuckles paled as she averted her eyes.

“I’ve got it,” you said as the rod bumped against solid mass. “It’s just…”

The probe slipped and you swore, glancing at your hands to find them shaking. The corners of your vision blurred. Bracing on the cot, you slid the probe free and let it clatter to the side table, snatching the long forceps from where Lottie had placed them.

A long, measured breath flowed in through your nose, out through your mouth. You lined the forceps up with the wound, mind conjuring the angle and depth you’d found with the probe. Then your vision dimmed, numbing your fingers, and your grip slackened. The forceps fell, and you caught yourself on the edge of the bed.

Lottie’s head snapped up. “What’s the matter?”

Grace twisted around, your name leaving her lips in a terrified query.

You gritted your teeth, looking up to Lottie, but the outline of her swam in two. You licked your lips and found them salted with sweat.

“No,” she whispered as understanding crashed like rubble over her face. She twisted toward the teapot in the corner of the room. “You need medicine—”

You caught her wrist. “There isn’t time.”

“Time for what?” Panic quaked in Grace’s voice. “What medicine?”

“Keep pressure on this,” you said, returning her hands to the wound in Ferguson’s shoulder.

Grace gasped. “You’re shaking.”

“I know.” You swallowed, steeling yourself against a sickening squeeze in your chest.

There was no living part of you that would allow your own situation to compound your sister’s terror. And yet the forceps lay on the cot, your own hands unfit to wield them.

“Lottie.” You pinned her wide-eyed stare with your own. “The ball is just over two inches deep, forty degrees to the distal side.”

As you spoke, you pressed the forceps into her hand, swapping them for the lint she held at the ready. Her fingers did not resist, but her head shook.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“You must.”

Lottie’s eyes jumped from you, half-slumped upon the side of the cot, to Grace’s tearful panic, then to Ferguson, barely conscious and likely not for long. She knew this as well as you did—you saw it in her shaky inhale, the way her eyes squeezed shut against some internal battle you could not see. Then as the breath sank from her shoulders, she finally looked at the wound. Her fingers tightened on the forceps.

“Tell me how.”

Relief nearly swept you from your feet, and before you could stop it, your free hand shot out to squeeze Lottie’s. She squeezed you back with a tiny nod.

“Line up the forceps here.” With trembling fingers, you guided her hand into place. She felt steady. Resolute. Your heart filled with air. “You’ve seen Moore extract a ball before, yes?”

Lottie shook her head, only the slightest tremor around her mouth. “I could never watch.”

“That’s all right,” you said, “just insert the ends there. Just like that, you’ve got it, now go slowly.”

A crease scored Lottie’s brow as she took another deep breath.The forceps disappeared an inch into Ferguson’s flesh.

“Almost there,” you said, reaching out to tip her hand into just the right angle. “You’re going to run into something hard.”

“I feel it,” Lottie gasped, “I’ve got it, I can feel where it is.”

Her gaze pierced through Ferguson as one might track a coin beneath a magician’s cup. Even as he groaned, seized the edges of the cot, thrashed his head and his legs, her concentration did not waver.

“Grasp it firmly, now.” You watched her grip expand and squeeze on the forceps’ handles. “Have patience.”

She huffed in frustration, squeezed again, then let out a little squeak of triumph. “I’ve got hold of it!”

“Excellent, Lottie,” you breathed, “now pull slowly. As if—” You winced against another dizzying wave of darkness that nearly knocked the strength from your knees. “As if it’s a thread you don’t want to break.”

Lottie’s face was stony with focus. Inch by crimson-laced inch, the forceps emerged until the ends came free, a dark wet ball pinched between them. A held breath burst from her and the ball thunked to the floor.

“That’s it!” you cried, “Lottie, you’ve done it!”

Through the quaking of your hands, you managed to stuff lint into the wound until the seepage slowed. Across from you, Lottie swayed, as though drifting in and out of a dream.

“Done it,” she echoed you numbly, blinking at the scene. “I’ve done it.”

“Yes,” you said, jamming the last bit of lint that would fit into Ferguson’s punctured ribs. “Now you shall do it again.”

“I shall?”

Grim clarity leapt into Lottie’s eyes as she steadied on her feet, forceps still dangling from her fingers. With every grain of resolve you could summon, you fixed her with your stare.

“You shall.”

Swallowing, she tightened her grip once more.

“Trade places,” you grunted, jerking your head toward Grace.

The two of them orbited the bed in parallel. Pushing against the frame you tried to straighten, but your body spurned your will. You buckled.

Grace cried your name again and you swore, wrestling the disparate planes of your vision back into one. Dimly you became aware of small hands around your shoulders, coaxing your weight onto a stool. Then Lottie emerged from around you and pointed toward the anterior of the room.

“The tea,” she said as Grace whipped around to follow her gesture. “She needs to drink it.”

Grace disappeared and Lottie hovered over Ferguson’s shoulder wound, pulling in another deep breath.

“All right,” she murmured almost to herself, “I can… no, I will do it.”

“Here.” You felt for the probe and found it where you’d discarded it, passing it up to Lottie. “Clean it with whiskey. The forceps, too, and irrigate the wound.”

Lottie took the probe from you and reached across for the whiskey bottle, quietly repeating your instructions under her breath like a hymn as she worked. Beside you there was warmth, a familiar scent permeated with iron, and a cup was pressed into your hands.

“Drink,” came Grace’s plea, and you choked the liquid down in jagged gulps until the dregs soured your tongue. Gasping, you relinquished the cup back to your sister.

“The wound is clear,” Lottie said above you. “It’s… it looks deep.”

You grimaced, leaning forward on the stool to glimpse what you could of her work. Probe in hand, she hesitated as Grace reappeared beside Ferguson’s head.

“Do exactly as I did,” you said, and Lottie nodded, brow knitting again as she aligned the probe. “Don’t force it,” you added, forcing yourself instead to breathe evenly. “Allow the cavity to guide you to the ball.”

The wound was deep, you noted as the probe continued to disappear, pushing another agonized groan from Ferguson which Grace absorbed with her soothing. But Lottie did not waver, grounding herself instead with whispered repetitions of don’t force it and guide you to the ball, until she interrupted herself with an exhale of victory.

“Found it.”

Before you could utter a single instruction or word of encouragement, she had extracted the probe, exchanged it for the forceps, and was delving straight for the ball with a focus and confidence that stunned you.

Another brief, fumbling moment as she grappled with the buried marble of lead, and then it came free with a squelch and dropped to the floor. A shudder wracked Lottie but she shook it out through her fingers, banishing it to the corners of the room.

Sucking a lungful of air, you hauled yourself to your feet and began to pack the wound before your legs could give out again. Lottie and Grace cast you looks of alarm which you ignored, instead nodding toward Ferguson’s bleeding leg.

“Now that one,” you said, and after hesitating for only a moment, Lottie darted around the table to begin the ritual anew, softly chanting each step.

Across from you, Grace sniffled your name. She hadn’t stopped weeping. “You’re not well.”

“I’ll explain everything later,” you said, stabbing another clot of lint into the wound before raising your eyes to Grace. “As will you.”

Tearful, she nodded, and your attention jumped back to Lottie as she spoke.

“It’s missed the femur,” she announced, probe harpooned within the meat of Ferguson’s thigh. Again you were struck by her relative composure—the tremor in her voice had receded to a ripple. “The artery as well.”

“Fortunate,” you grumbled, dipping away from Grace’s stare to seek respite upon your stool and prepare more lint. “He may yet keep the leg.”

Another groan tore through Ferguson as Lottie fished the last ball from his thigh. As you swooped in to pack the wound, you tried your best to ignore your periphery where Grace had brought her forehead against Ferguson’s, his hand weakly cupping the back of her neck.

Clearing your throat, you shifted to palpate his ribs, causing him to flinch just enough to force them apart.

“One or two broken,” you said, pausing to listen to the hitch that pebbled his breaths. “The lung is bruised. You’ll have to remain with him to ensure that he keeps breathing.”

Grace gave a solemn nod, her hand tightening around his.

“Wait,” she said just before you turned away. “Is there… Can you do anything for his pain?”

You winced. “Lottie?”

“Hm?” She blinked, returning from somewhere far away, hands limp and bloody at her sides. “Yes?”

“Is there any opium left?”

She shook her head. You’d known the answer before you’d asked, and the wretchedness of your momentary hope squirmed through your belly like vermin. The hope that, at some point during your week of fevered sleep, a British supply convoy might have managed to penetrate the South Carolina backcountry unmolested. The hope that, by extension, your father and his soldiers had failed.

“Rum, then?”

You snapped the question too sharply and Lottie flinched, twisting her fingers together.

“Dr. Moore said we need to ration it…“

“Please,” said Grace.

Lottie looked between you and your sister, her eyes wide and innocent. A weight dragged your heart in two.

“I think we can spare a portion,” you said.

Lottie simply nodded and spun toward the supply room. As she fetched it, you turned to survey the hospital. Men lay scattered throughout the room. Some in cots, some on the floor. Some dying, some dead. Fellow soldiers, wives, even a few children sat sentinel at bedsides or slumped upon the blood-stained floor. A few cast desperate glances your way.

You managed to stand just as Lottie reappeared at your side, offering to steady you, but the tea was already doing its work. You nodded to her, and she to you. Wordlessly you each gathered your supplies and set upon what flesh you could mend. Only after the last suture was placed, the last bone set, and the last body dragged from the ward trailed by his wailing widow, did the haggard shape of Lottie collapse into your arms.

Her body steadied yours, and yours hers, two tired rafters leaned against the other in the wake of a terrible storm. You allowed yourself to sigh into her embrace, and as you pulled away, you caught Grace staring. Her gaze fixated on the weight you allowed to be supported in Lottie’s arms, on the shallowing furrow in your brow. Lips thinning, she glimpsed the ground before absorbing herself in Ferguson again, studying the way his breath softly rose and fell in his chest.

Lottie squeezed your arms before gazing between the two of you and nodding to herself, leaving you and trudging toward the kitchen. You returned your attention to your sister.

Grace’s face simmered with worry—a type of worry you’d only ever typically seen her direct toward you. Realizing it was now being proffered to a man who you had deemed a stranger made your throat tighten.

You approached her from the side, drawing your hand along the edge of the bed to signal your arrival. Grace shook herself from her stare, glimpsing you briefly before turning to look at Ferguson again.

“Good evening,” she murmured, her shoulders sinking. Her arms and chest were still dark with browned blood. She sighed, looking at you again. “I’m so sorry.”

You grabbed a stool and pulled it up to sit beside her. “What in God’s shining and golden heaven happened for you to end up here?”

Grace pulled her lips in over her teeth, eyelids fluttering. “I…” Her chin trembled for just a moment. “The house. It was… men appeared at the door. Patriots from across the county. Our neighbors.” A long, slow breath left her. “They…” Her voice became a squeak, and she swallowed it. “After the army came through, they were angry. Said no King’s friend had a home in Catawba. They called me so many horrible things…” Meeting your eyes, her own brimmed with tears. “And they chased me out. I couldn’t fight them, I had nowhere to go.”

“Dear God.” You enveloped her in your arms, tugging her against you. She trembled, silent. “Grace, I’m so sorry. I…” You hadn’t considered that your neighbors would fail to find joy in their beloved Michael’s apparent betrayal by his own daughters. “Did they hurt you?”

“No,” she replied, shaking her head with a sniffle. “No.” She wiped the little beads at the corners of her eyes. “And the house is all right as far as I know.”

You rolled your eyes. “Damn the house,” you replied. “They could burn down the bloody house five thousand times over if it meant you’d be safe.” Your heart squeezed with guilt. “I’m… I should have been there. I would’ve protected you.”

This earned a laugh. “You taking up arms against a dozen men?” She glanced at you, a smile fighting its way onto her face. “I’m not certain there’s much you could have done.”

“More than Ferguson was able to do, clearly,” you mumbled.

Grace frowned. “It was Patrick who found me and took me in after all of this,” she replied sharply. “He was there. You weren’t.”

You stiffened, but held her closer. It was foolish for you to even be picking a fight about this to begin with. “I’m tired,” you said, hoping this would do for an apology. With a bit of levity in your voice, you offered, “You know I’m recovering from marsh fever, don’t you?”

“What? That’s what you meant earlier?” she gasped, and leaned back, inspecting you. “You… You’re all right?” Her eyes danced over you, as if this would reveal the missed indication of your illness.

“On the mend,” you replied. “Peruvian bark works miracles.”

She sighed. “You are so fortunate to have had some on hand,” she said. “The illness in the field is terrible. Patrick’s men have been devastated by it.”

Your heart skipped. A flash of cold silver eyes, hooves pounding against the dirt. Against time.

“Yes.” You looked at her, rubbing her back. “Very fortunate.”

As if on cue, the hospital ward opened, and through the door strode the exact person you did not want to see while seated next to Grace.

William Tavington surveyed the ward like a preening bird before his attention landed on you, an echo of how he’d regarded you this morning. His brow twitched, and he marched forward. Breath catching, you scrambled to your feet and formed a barricade between him and your sister.

“Colonel Tavington,” you said, folding your arms behind your back. “Good evening.”

William frowned, staring at you in pause before his gaze traveled over your shoulder to land on your sister and the man asleep next to her. His nostrils flared.

“I hardly understand what’s good about it,” he said, casting a look across the beds filled with wounded. Though he was silent, you could see the unspoken words in his countenance: This is a bloody disaster. “The major’s condition?”

“He’s resting,” Grace muttered.

You held your arm out to quiet her, raised your chin to the air. “He’s not well.”

William glimpsed Ferguson in the bed, tilting his head to the side as he considered his condition. Brow rising, he turned his focus to you, and his jaw shifted. You returned his stare, seeking the part of him that had allowed you to curl your fingers into his hair.

“Let him rest.” Grace placed a hand tenderly over Ferguson’s healing arm.

With the politest, smallest smile you’d ever seen him muster, William replied, “A resting man can report. A dead one cannot.”

You bit your tongue to prevent it from lashing. The irony in his voice was likely evident only to you. “Fifty-three men returned here tonight. Seventeen died. I’ll gather what remaining information I can from the men here and provide you with a written account later this evening.”

His gaze leapt between you and Grace before settling on you with reluctance. “Very well.”

You returned his tiny, polite, bereft-of-joy smile. “Best of luck to you, Colonel.”

William glimpsed each of you and snorted before striding off and out of the ward. The moment the door closed behind him, both you and Grace’s shoulders crumbled in heaps of exhaustion.

“Good Lord,” she said. “I can’t even comprehend how you speak to that man with such civility.”

Slumping back into the empty stool beside her, you shrugged. “Perhaps I’ve been inured to his behavior through frequent exposure.”

“No amount of exposure could endear me to such a savage,” she said, turning her attention back to Ferguson. A soft sigh escaped her. She ghosted her fingers over his hand.

“What’s this discussion of savages?” came Lottie’s voice as she bustled in behind you. In her hands was a teapot, two empty cups, and one cup already full.

“Colonel Tavington just stopped by,” you replied, pointedly meeting her gaze. As she approached, you grabbed the full cup, no doubt brimming with another dose of Peruvian bark tea. She was so thoughtful it made your chest ache. “Grace is no admirer.”

“Well, he isn’t the embodiment of warmth, certainly.” Lottie placed the tray by Ferguson’s bedside before glancing at Grace, who nodded. Lottie began to pour her a cup. “But I’m sure he’s in possession of positive traits.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” Grace took her cup gratefully. “He’s a barbarian. An insult to all those serving the crown.” After a long sip, she sighed, her shoulders rolling. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s Lottie, right?”

“You’ve got it!” Lottie beamed. “And it’s no trouble. Thought maybe we could use some after all this.” She finally took in Grace’s current appearance. “Goodness, have you not had a moment to wash up?”

Grace glanced at her. “I…” She looked at Ferguson. “Patrick…”

“No, no,” she said, taking the tea from Grace’s hands and putting it on the tray. “There’s a basin out back. Wash yourself before drinking.” She took Grace’s hand to bring her to her feet and urged her from Ferguson’s bedside. “Go on, now. Your sister and I shall watch over him. He could not be in better care.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Grace said, a small smile breaking onto her face. “I’ll only be a moment.”

As your sister shuffled out of the ward, Lottie’s eyes met yours, and your gaze widened before you directed it to the floor, taking a long sip of your tea. God, it was still awful.

“‘An insult to all those serving the crown’?” said Lottie, pouring herself a cup. “She must have become acquainted with the colonel’s gentler side.”

You snorted. “Neither of us had a particularly pleasant first encounter with him,” you replied. “Though Grace’s was arguably worse.”

Lottie hummed as she brought the tea to her lips. Sitting close to you, she glanced at Ferguson—still completely out—before lowering her voice. “Not an ideal scenario for a brother-in-law, is it?”

“Oh, enough with that,” you said, leering. “I don’t anticipate it being an issue.”

“No?” Lottie grinned. “And how’s that?”

You shrugged. “Grace will never have reason to find out.”

“I see.” She regarded you with some level of hesitation. “And if she somehow does?”

“Then you may plan my funeral.” Only a hint of jest lifted your voice.

You were not ignorant to the war of hypocrisy you’d been waging against Ferguson. Nor were you unsympathetic to Grace’s very real reasons to revile William. Part of you still reviled him for these exact same reasons. But at some point that part had been dwarfed by that portion of you which delighted in his humor, the portion that found warmth in his arms and sanity in his company.

“I may start planning now, if it’s all the same to you,” Lottie said with a laugh. “Gossip travels like pollen on the wind in this place. Not everyone has my flawless integrity.”

Giving her a tight smile, you raised your brows in agreement as you took a silent sip. Perhaps it would only be days before someone with looser lips caught you exiting the colonel's quarters in the morning. That would be the last sort of heartbreak Grace needed—especially if Ferguson didn’t recover.

You glanced at him, lip furling. It would have been so much easier and far more satisfying to you to let him die. But even beyond despising the insult that would be to your skill, the knowledge that it would steal from Grace the man she loved made his death an impossibility.

Love, you thought, snorting as you finished your tea. So powerful it had her begging to save the life of the man who would in any other circumstance see her own father killed. You were grateful that you and William seemed to agree on the uselessness of such an emotion in the boundaries of your current arrangement.

Upon Grace’s return, the evening slipped beneath a bloody veneer of normalcy as tea was shared and conversation exchanged in weary murmurs. As though one word out of place might invite the curtain of death to fall upon the hospital once more. It was through the combined urging of yourself and Lottie that you managed to pry Grace from Ferguson’s bedside for supper, and to your lack of surprise, Grace integrated easily with the rest of the women within the fort walls. It wasn’t minutes into the meal before she was grinning and adding humor to the conversation. Even Alice, the embodiment of a perpetual frown, was shielding her giggle at Grace’s interjections.

Your heart swelled. Seeing your sister smile despite the terror that had to be simmering beneath it was enough to soothe your own wrought nerves. You knew—because you knew her—that she would be trembling herself to sleep, that without the certainty of Ferguson’s good health, she had the potential to renounce sleep entirely.

Taking a bite of your meal, you sighed. You’d need to speak to William.

As supper was finished and the washing up completed, you grabbed a piece of parchment and a pen and scribbled what little information you could gather from the soldiers able to be roused. William had by this point surely gotten information from the few non-wounded, but you knew that he would want Ferguson’s report regardless, when he could obtain it. You hoped your efforts would placate him.

In the quiet, candlelit dark, you approached his study, the paper sticky between your fingers. Though you had nothing to fear from William with consideration to your career, you now had an understanding of what men must feel on the precipice of delivering him bad news.

It rather made one want to consider the precipice of a cliff, instead.

Holding your breath, you knocked on his door.

“Enter,” came his voice, already exhausted.

You turned the knob, stepping inside. Seated at his desk, a quill in hand, William’s eyes landed on you, his spine straightening. You ignored the heat this brought to your cheeks and closed the door behind you. William glimpsed his paper, electing to finish the sentence he was writing as he spoke.

“And here I was considering if I would fail to hear from you before the end of the evening.”

“And I was considering whether a man might prefer his arm sawed off, or to be pricked incessantly by the shards of his own bones,” you said, approaching him with what suddenly felt like a very silly paper full of nonsense. With a prim smile, you placed it on a stack of other parchment. “Your report, Colonel.”

William eyed the paper before placing a full stop on his work and sitting back in his chair. With the air of a disaffected aristocrat, he plucked it from the stack and scanned what little you’d managed to gather.

“Mhm,” he said, before returning it to the stack. “And the major?”

“Fortunate to be alive at all,” you replied. “I’m hopeful for his recovery, but he needs rest.”

He nodded, gaze lingering on the report. There was a heavy, bulging awkwardness in the silence. Your behavior at Ferguson’s beside—in Grace’s presence—seemed to weigh equally on both of you. William returned to writing. And at the same time, each of you spoke:

“I’m going to be staying in my room.”

“I shall expect your company this evening.”

You paused. His writing hand stilled.

“Oh,” you said. “I’m—what was that?”

“I was to expect you,” he replied. “In my quarters.”

You nodded, your hands folding into each other behind your back. “I see.”

His brow raised. “Am I incorrect in such an expectation?”

“I…” You gave him a tight smile. “I cannot.”

William could not look less enthused if you’d told him he was about to be castrated with a dull knife. “You appear more well now than you pretended last night.”

“No,” you said, attempting to ignore the quickening pace of your heart. “It’s…” You exhaled. “My sister has need of me. I must be there for her.”

“Does your sister demand this with a pistol placed against your temple?”

You frowned. “No, of course not.”

“Then I request you use the correct verb in your response,” he snipped, “for it is inaccurate to say that you cannot. You will not.”

You rolled your eyes. “Fine, pedant,” you said, affecting your voice with an air of his affluence. “I will not be joining you this evening.”

“Fine indeed,” William replied, and continued to write. “Though your adult sister hardly appears in need of a surrogate parent to tend her through the night.”

A bristle of irritation rolled up your spine. “You don’t know my sister,” you replied. “She’s tender, and sweet, and deeply worried about your major. I sense you are incapable of understanding these traits and emotions.”

“And yet,” he said, his jaw tightening, “I remain capable of recognizing the difference between want and need.” The tip of his quill sliced into the parchment. “Children want. Adults do not.”

“An adult never wants?”

“Adults obtain, dandelion,” he said, and his silver gaze speared you. “As I obtained you.” Tutting, he continued, “And your sister does not need you. Hence you are not bound to her desires.”

You exhaled a half-laugh. “I will always fulfill whatever my sister desires of me. She will always be my utmost priority.” You folded your arms over your chest. “And you presume to have obtained me, but the truth is that you want me in your quarters. I will not be there.”

William raised a brow. “And shall you forgo this for as long as your sister wants for your company?”

You shrugged. “Even if she does not.”

He ceased writing, now, sitting back in his chair. “As long as your sister is merely present you would decline me.”

“She hates you, William,” you said. “I cannot put it any more gently. She utterly detests you.” You laughed when he sat straighter, as if appalled by this response. “You slapped her. You murdered one of our neighbors in front of her.” The words tasted like dirt. “Do not think I do not still detest you for these reasons as well.”

William regarded you, eyes narrowing. With a snort, he returned to writing. “For all the coddling you do of her, your sister is far braver than you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your sister surely knows the depth of your resentment for Major Ferguson,” he said, “yet she abandons propriety to throw herself across him like a coverlet.” He shrugged. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that integrity doesn’t run in the family, given the tree from which the fruit tumbles.”

You barked out another laugh. “Your tired remarks may have had an effect by now if you knew anything of my father, but you don’t, and you never shall,” you growled. “You are selfish and bitter that I refuse you in favor of the ones who love me.”

“You shrink yourself out of cowardice,” he said, placing the quill on the table. His shoulders tensed with irritation. “You are too afraid to want anything for yourself.”

“What importance is that to you?” you said, looming over the desk. “Are you so certain that my wants include you?”

“You were the one to speak of next time,” he replied with a smirk. “Not me.”

You snarled. “Presumptuous bastard,” you hissed. “Perhaps I no longer want a next time!”

“I see I was mistaken,” he said, a cruel lilt in his tone. “A coward and a liar.”

“As if your intentions are noble!” you said, your hands hitting his desk. “You sanction me for appeasing my sister’s wants, yet here you are hurling insults toward me because you can’t have yours.”

“And what of your wants?” He leaned forward, face inches from yours. “Are they inconsequential in comparison to whatever any family member may or may not demand?”

“Of course!” you spat, pushing off his desk. “Of course they are! And they always will be!”

Quite finished with this conversation, you marched toward the door.

“You say this even as your sister plans to marry and abandon your misplaced loyalty!”

You spun on your heel, teeth bared. “My loyalty to my family is never misplaced, but I suppose I cannot expect a man without one to understand.” You grabbed the handle. “And if you cannot understand this, then you will never have me again.”

With that, you flung open the door and slammed it behind you. The clatter of the wood reverberated, a death knell through the hall.

#william tavington #colonel william tavington #colonel tavington #the patriot #jason isaacs #playing soldier #fanfiction problems #OHHHHH my fucking god i love making them yell at each other hehehee

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kylorengarbagedump · 1 month ago

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After almost 2 years away from this universe, I am re-reading Little Bird for the 3rd time in my life—while listening to a song called Everytime by Ethel Cain—and my heart is in the fucking floor.

Despite doing my best to prepare myself before diving back into this story, I am yet again destroyed. And I'm only halfway through.

With all of the kindness I can express, I have to say that you have transformed the depths of my soul with your profoundly beautiful command of language. Everything reminds me of this man; of the way he would stare, kiss, think—and love. And it's all because you have brought that to life with Little Bird.

I don't think I can ever see reality the same, anymore.

To give you some context, the world sees me as a young woman in her early twenties with a new job, accomplishments, education, friends, a family—and on the inside, all of those things resonate with me. But now, I realize that I only thought I was starting to get things figured out. I only thought I was beginning to understand life. I only thought I was starting to have knowledge of myself and of other people. I only thought I was starting to discover what it truly means to be loved by someone. And yes, I know that Little Bird is not real, I know it is just a story, I know he is just a character—but all of what I once thought is eclipsed and shattered by the intensity, by the realness of what I am going through right now.

I can never go back to the way I was before.

I think I could stay here forever—wherever 'here' is, I can't even put into fucking words. I just know that I want to stay.

The song, the one by Ethel Cain, is a melody in my mind:

"...I make believe / That you are here / It's the only way / I see clear / What have I done? / You seem to move on easy / And every time I try to fly, I fall / Without my wings, I feel so small / I guess I need you, baby / And every time I see you in my dreams / I see your face, you're haunting me / I guess I need you, baby..."

My god, I don't even know if there are words for me to express my gratitude or how this has touched me. But this is certainly one of those asks that will stay with me because of how powerfully I feel your sentiment resonate through. Little Bird is a fic I transferred almost all of myself into when I was going through some of the very hardest and one of the most transformative periods of my life. I think, retrospectively, it makes sense why the melodrama within it is so heightened, but for me, that is what makes it special! Writing Kylo the way I wrote him not only reflects why I love his character so deeply, but also how a part of me deeply craved - and still craves - to be loved. And I'm so glad that can connect with you too. Thanks so much, again - I am so so glad you took the time to write and I really hope you continue to enjoy the story for as many times as you read! You are far too kind.

#nerd whinings #cuties #little bird #fanfiction problems

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kylorengarbagedump · 1 month ago

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imagine advocating for people to be arrested for thought crimes. this is NOT the flex you think it is, babe!

do you know the entirety of ptwt are making fun of you? there's 22k likes on a tweet that calls you out for ur incest fics and everyone (THE 1.7K quote reteets are agreeing) I would off myself.

but thankfully your government will start to charge women like you with felonies soon enough and I can't wait for that 🥰

being on twitter these days outs you pretty much immediately as a piece of shit

Soooo whyyyy should i care?

Not even going to respond to the comment about felonies lmao

#nerd whinings

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kylorengarbagedump · 2 months ago

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Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman in BlacKkKlansman (2018)

My GIF masterlist

#his confidence with the gun turns me on so much i stg #fuck #adam driver #bebe

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kylorengarbagedump · 2 months ago

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STAR WARS: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

#not going to lie this does get me #kylo ren #bebe

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kylorengarbagedump · 2 months ago

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Terribly Eligible (NSFW)

Read on AO3.

Summary: It was unlike anything you’d heard before or since.

A sound that was fully, unmistakably male. A sound that, in its maleness, bid you to know—to understand—what could possibly draw such a noise from any man’s lips.

You really shouldn’t have looked.

Words: 7500

Warnings: extreme innocence kink, face-fucking, William Tavington is Not Nice

Characters: William Tavington x Reader

A/N: Thank you to my fellow William Tavington's Big Fat Ass Appreciators for your assistance in the development of this oneshot. I'd like to say this was a deeply thoughtful artistic work, as I would with anything I write - but genuinely I'm just extremely horny and can't not think about this man touching his cock.

Thank you to @bastillia for betaing and horny-crying with me.

And thank YOU for reading! I truly hope you enjoyed me taking yet another break from my regular porn to write MORE porn. Love y'all so much. <3

The day was spoiled from the moment it started.

When you rolled out of bed and adjusted your nightgown, you stumbled across the floor, nearly tripping into the chair that held your robe. Wrapping yourself in said robe became an affair that involved turning both sleeves right-side out, and there was absolutely no scent of breakfast being prepared, nor tea left at your door.

Just as you drew a breath to shout for your parents, you were pulled to your window by voices outside, spotting a group of mounted British soldiers at the steps of the house. Your heart leapt—perhaps there’d be an officer willing to sit on your porch and enjoy your company. You’d have pop on your newest bodice and petticoats, of course, but that would require no great effort.

These officers, however, appeared to be greeting your parents with guns drawn just as the sun was grazing the grass. Your father’s hands were raised at his sides. Your mother was shrinking underneath the horses’ shadows. Your stomach dropped. These soldiers, unfortunately, were not here to court you.

You paused. Even if not here to court you, there was no reason to assume bad intentions. Not when your entire family had pledged allegiance to the crown and always treated every British soldier they encountered with respect. You drew closer to the window, their hushed voices giving no indication of what was happening.

One officer leapt from his horse. As he did, your mother’s face whipped toward your window, her eyes bulged in terror. Your heart joined your stomach. She mouthed a single word to you in the silence of the soldier’s approach.

Go.

So you did what you’d always practiced, what you’d discussed with your parents since before the war reached your home. What were you, a young unmarried girl, meant to do when danger appeared at the door?

You ran.

Running was, at best, an undignified activity. The shudder of your breath repulsed you, the sweat beading at your nape made you cringe. Every stride made your legs chafe together, made your breasts bounce painfully. But the indignity did not last long.

Perhaps it was the shimmer of silk as your nightgown fluttered beneath your robe, or your slippers crunching the dirt, but within moments of you fleeing the back porch, one of the men spotted you.

It was seconds until the thundering of hooves overtook the heaving of your chest. And before you even reached the tree line, a leather glove snarled in your hair and ripped you back against a solid flank. Your scream rang hollow, your struggle like one of a rat in an owl’s talons.

“Spare the world your theatrics,” said your captor, curling his fist and jerking your head to meet his eyes. They were bluer than the sky, paler than first light. They were devoid of anything you might call mercy. “Return to join your mother and father. You may walk or you may be dragged behind my horse. It matters little to me.”

“Ugh!” You grabbed at his hand, scratching at the leather to no avail. He yanked your scalp in retribution. “Ow! Unhand me, you brute!”

“No.”

“You’ve no idea who my parents are! They’ll be—you’ll be sorry when they catch word of this! I’ll report you to your superiors! They’ll report you!” You squirmed, and he held you fast, studying you, glancing between your lips and the rage in your gaze. “I’ll make you regret ever laying a hand on me!”

A tiny smirk curled his lips. “Terrifying,” he replied. “Do you prefer to be dragged, then?”

You scoffed. “How dare you.” Despite this, you stilled, waiting for him to release you. He tugged your head again and you winced. “You—I’ll walk.”

“Capable of intelligent choices, then, I see.”

With that, he unlaced his fist from your hair. You seared him with a glare before rounding the house to meet your parents’ horrified faces.

The soldiers walked the three of you to their camp, your father bearing your mother’s grief and his own like boulders on his back. You, however, were far too bewildered to grieve, or to feel anything but the flitter of your heart against your breastbone with every step of your journey.

When you arrived at camp, your parents were ushered toward a man wielding chains. Breathless, your mother turned and shouted for you, but was swiftly spun until she stumbled, collapsing forward to follow your father, whose eyes remained trained on you. One of the younger soldiers turned to your captor, still perched on his mount.

“Colonel Tavington,” said the soldier, grabbing your arm and pulling you against him. “What of the girl?”

The man—Tavington—glimpsed you from atop his horse like a spider might glimpse a struggling fly. “Are you married, girl?”

Your cheeks burned. “I repeat myself, sir, how dare you.”

His gaze skimmed your figure. “I thought not.” He clucked his tongue. “No point in interrogation, then.” A pause, his attention flicking between you and the soldier gripping you. “Do whatever you wish with her.”

With that, Tavington turned his horse away. You huffed, preparing to shout at him, but the hold on your arm tightened.

“Don’t fight,” said the soldier. “I won’t allow harm to come to you.”

“Sir,” you said, meeting his eyes, “I know you’ve not all of the information, but my family—we are very wealthy, and honorable Loyalists. And I’m sure we could make it worth your—

“I’m sure that’s true,” he said calmly, moving you into the sea of white tents. “I’ll keep you near me. I’ll protect you.” A pause, and he held you closer. “My name is Charles.”

Your heart curled in on itself. You had no clue why this man kept speaking of harm and protection, but it was beginning to grate your patience, since all you had interest in doing was getting out of the blasted camp. In all of your interactions with soldiers, they had always presented as civilized and clean. Half of these men appeared to have been born of the swamp, with the stench to match. You double-checked every step before you made it, nose wrinkling.

“Listen!” you said, trying to pull yourself from him. “I demand you take me to my parents. I—”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Charles replied. “Your parents are meant to be moved to Charleston once the cavalry departs. That’s no place for someone like you.”

“No place?” you said. “This is no place for someone like me!”

“I understand—”

“You do no such thing!”

“Enough!” Charles growled, grip pinching you now. “Silence, or I’ll lose my patience with you.”

Nothing in your mouth would move the way you urged it to. You should have argued, should have insisted you be sent with your parents wherever they went—that the three of you were a unit, propriety be damned—but instead you were silent, an observer to your own body as this Charles brought you to a tent and sat you near what you assumed was his messy bedroll. The sight of it made your nostrils curl. Clearly not an officer, from the sight of things.

“I must leave you here,” he said, “and I won’t chain you. But running will get you caught by men far less charitable than myself.” The threat in his voice was so thinly veiled it was obscene.

“What do you mean charitable?” you asked, gazing around what very little existed of his paltry tent. “Are you not meant to return me to my home?”

“Simply wait until I return, all right?” When you didn’t reply, only stared, he sighed. “What’s your name?”

You frowned. Paused. Turned up your chin and gave it to him. “If you must call upon me.”

“All right then,” he said, repeating it like a prayer, “I’ll return this evening.” A final look in your eyes, and he left.

From the sound, it seemed an entire unit left the camp for hours. Noon passed, and the sun followed, descending into evening. You had initially decided to obey Charles’ advice, hoping that your good behavior would earn you some sort of special treatment, perhaps even a release to your home per his apparent charitability.

But as darkness approached and men returned—loud, rowdy, insistent men, shouting at each other beyond Charles’ tent—you found yourself sitting alone, abandoned next to a putrid bedroll splayed across the dirt.

Your back ached, your ankles throbbed, your backside had begun to numb from its place on the ground. The odor of the blankets had settled in your nose. And men drew closer to Charles’ tent, their shadows grazing your knees as they passed, apparently oblivious to your presence within.

More, more shadows marched by, more soldiers chanted uproariously with one another. Throughout all of it, Charles did not return.

You frowned, gazing with disgust down at your dirtied robe, your slippers caked in grass and mud. It was becoming apparent to you that wherever the men had gone, Charles would not be returning with them. It was technically an opportunity to escape.

But where would you even go? If your parents had been moved to Charleston, that was at least a few days ride from here—not that you knew exactly where here was—and you had no horse, no proper way to ride one, and you were certain that these army horses weren’t as finely bred and mannered as the ones you were used to riding, anyway. The thought of climbing astride one and getting the grime of these men and their sweaty mounts all over your nightgown made you gag.

There was always the option of sleeping in the woods. That seemed even more affronting than the horses.

You pouted, folding your arms across your chest. It wasn’t possible that all of these men were as boorish as Charles—or Tavington, for that matter. Never had a man touched you as if you weren’t made of porcelain, never had a man looked upon you in any way other than how you imagined God looked upon his creations. Certainly most of the men here would treat you as you deserved.

With a soft huff, you clambered to your hands and knees, grimacing at the way the dirt dusted your sweaty palms, and peeked from the tent. The celebrations centered around the fires strewn through the campsites. For now, you were alone. It couldn’t be that difficult to find a man uninterested in drinking—perhaps a gentleman who would take pity on you, see this was all a massive misunderstanding, and see you back to your home, if not to Charleston.

You wiped your hands on Charles’ blankets—as it seemed unlikely he’d ever need them again—and crept from his tent, casting about for others that seemed occupied but quiet. Most seemed empty. Frowning, you bent your knees, skulking along the perimeter of the camp to see if you could spot any hope.

All you’d need to do was introduce yourself with a gentle curtsy, explain who you were, and you were certain that one of these gentlemen would escort you without issue. That was a man’s duty, after all, to protect women in need, particularly delicate ones, particularly ones with delicate and refined senses. One such as yourself.

Toward the edge of the encampment, you spotted a tent that appeared more generous than the rest. This tent, you were sure, belonged to a man who had earned his rank, with a genteel manner and chivalrous disposition. Most encouraging of all: the linen pulsed with orange light, as if it were occupied. Gathering your wits, you held your breath and tiptoed toward it.

The festivities had become more raucous as the sky darkened, the sounds similar to the gatherings your parents hosted. If, of course, those gatherings had been permitted to descend into some sort of bestial rollicking, which would have never been the case.

Truly, you had expected better from the soldiers of His Majesty’s army. Conducting themselves like wolves rather than men, reveling in filth instead of vying for honor. That Tavington had asked you if you were married. Perhaps in this moment, you were relieved not to be betrothed to any one of these creatures.

The tent now feet away, you held your breath. There was no other occupied canvas within a dozen yards, at least, so any sound you made could be alarming. The last thing you wanted to do was frighten your would-be rescuer, so your steps slowed. Your heart raced. Your ears opened.

And within the glowing heart of the tent, you heard it.

It was unlike anything you’d heard before or since.

You’d heard men groan in the fields, heard gravel churn in their chests as they pushed ploughs through the dirt. You’d heard them choke through their teeth, palms sliced open on the blade of a too-sharp axe. You’d heard them gasp as they doused their skin in cold water while cooking in the sun, and heard the grumble of their muscles melting into the chairs on your porch.

This sound was all of them at once, and none of them at all. A sound that was fully, unmistakably male. A sound that, in its maleness, bid you to know—to understand—what could possibly draw such a noise from any man’s lips.

You really shouldn’t have looked.

A step, a squat, a shift of the linen was all it took. Within the boundaries of this tent was the man who’d captured you—William Tavington—in a state wholly unfamiliar to your eyes.

Tavington loomed over a table, cold eyes shut, brow pinched. Rust-reddened cheeks bloomed above his raw, parted mouth, his stock tie loosened, his jacket and waistcoat splayed open. His shoulders hunched forward, his back curved like a beast’s, his body shook with an unfamiliar tension. One hand clawed at the table, clean nails scraping the wood, while the other—the other—

Your tongue dried. Your sight blurred, then focused between snaps of your eyelids. Heat engulfed you from your knees to your scalp, frizzing your nape with sweat, siphoning your breath with shame. Flames of it licked your skin, peeled it in flakes as you stared, transfixed.

Tavington’s other hand was curled—gripped—around what you knew to be something far too intimate to name. The mere thought of it made you forget to breathe. It was anatomy you'd seen dozens, hundreds of times on animals. But on a man—it was horrifyingly, terrifically different.

As a young, marriageable woman, you should have been disgusted by this revelation, this display of nakedness in so strange a situation. As a young, marriageable woman, you should have noticed your embarrassment and kept your dignity intact by turning and finding another tent. And as a young, marriageable woman, you should have forgotten every inch of what you'd seen and saved your fascination for your future husband.

But then Tavington made that sound again, a moan from the depths of his chest. And you found yourself unable to look away.

His fist tightened around it, drew itself to the tip where his flesh was flushed and shiny, and his thumb traced underneath. A gasp escaped him, his teeth grit, and he resumed stroking it, his hips thrusting forward into his hand, like he was, perhaps…

The word wouldn't even collect itself in your mind, so humiliating was it to consider. Why, in God's name would a man want to do this to himself? When you watched horses or dogs or any other animal in the act, it had been impassive, if not painful. But Tavington seemed utterly…

Enraptured.

“That's it,” he growled, and every muscle beneath your belly tensed with a strange warmth. “Wrap your pretty lips around it—ah—that’s right.”

Your throat thickened. A mouth? How and why would that work? Before you could consider it, Tavington spat onto himself and groaned, slicking himself wet as he pumped into his fist.

The heat below your waist blossomed into a clamoring, like a hungry animal existed between your thighs—a hungry animal with which you were not familiar and had no understanding of how to feed. You tried to shift your position, press your thighs together to silence it, but this only made it more urgent, demanding more pressure, more friction.

“Suck,” Tavington murmured, and spat again onto the thing in his fist, the string of saliva clinging to his lower lip. He exhaled, his hand moving faster. “Yes—you enjoy serving a brute, don’t you?”

Your eyes widened. Your heart stuttered. He was thinking about you. While doing this almost certainly depraved, indecent, completely mesmerising act.

Tavington swirled his thumb around the tip again, a gentle grunt leaving his nose, and his hips pitched forward, driving faster into the hole of his fist. He gasped, head bowing, threads of hair falling from where they’d become unbound from his queue into his face. A smirk curved his half-open mouth.

“What if I keep you here?” he said, his voice strained. “Shall you report me then?”

Saliva pooled beneath your tongue. You swallowed it. The place between your thighs burned, as if it were alive, as if this animal had grown claws and teeth and was fighting to rend its way through your flesh. You pressed your hand there, trying to find a position that relieved any of the heat. You found only a foreign desire to grind against your palm.

“What if,” Tavington continued, tone a ragged reflection of your own hungry animal, “I fuck your sweet little face?”

Air caught in your throat. You choked. Tavington’s eyes snapped open, and he froze.

You didn’t dare move. Tavington surveyed the tent, hands busy tucking himself away before he snatched his pistol off the table. With the raised hackles of a hunting dog, he stepped forward once, twice, waiting to catch another sound.

This was a mistake. You should not have stayed. No, you should have left the moment you’d heard him make that terrible noise. With shaking hands, you rose to your feet, your knees pinching—and being so unfamiliar with pain, you whined.

Perhaps if you had been spying on a man who wasn’t a well-trained, highly efficient officer, events would’ve proceeded differently.

But you had been spying on such a man. And his eyes flicked to the gap in his tent and landed immediately on you.

A flash of fury, like flint striking powder, and before you could register his speed, his hand—wet and sticky and warm—gnarled in your hair and ripped you through the gap in the canvas and onto your knees.

“Explain yourself,” he snarled, pistol pressed to your temple. Silver eyes glinted steel in the candlelight. “Quickly.”

What words could you possibly call upon to summarize your state when you could hardly understand it to start?

“E-explain myself?” Your heart lodged in your throat as you attempted to stop your gaze from darting to the straining bulge at your sightline. You failed spectacularly. “Explain yourself, sir!” you stammered. “How is it possible an officer of the British army could be discovered in such a… a position!”

His brow fell. “Such a position,” he repeated, as if you’d just said the most witless succession of words imaginable.

“So uncouth.” Your teeth clacked in the silence. “I—why I never—to be…” You glanced at it again, and shut your eyes. “And so… truly, how crude, how, oh…” The animal between your thighs was wild with need. “Just, utterly obscene, and—and debauched—”

A snort from above you. The pistol eased off your temple half an inch. “Tell me,” Tavington said, hand uncoiling from your hair, “what position I was in.”

A knot swelled in your throat. The ground was cold at your knees, the chill seeping into your skin and rushing it with goosebumps. The only question you wanted to answer was twinging hotly at the crux of your legs. And you had little idea how to respond to him anyway. You kept your eyes closed.

“Look at me,” he muttered, the barrel of the gun tapping you under the chin.

You obeyed.

“You’ve no intimation,” Tavington said, examining your face. “Do you?”

“I—”

You turned your head, but the pistol guided you back. No, you had never seen any behavior like his, and why would you have, anyway, since you were a very good and proper girl and it was clearly wrong. You pinned your knees together, squirming. For reasons you didn’t understand, Tavington registered your struggle with a recognition of delight.

“How—how dare you,” you mumbled.

He tutted. “Oh, you poor creature,” he said, the gun still fixed on your throat. “You ache between your thighs, don’t you?”

Your face burned. Your gaze shot to his boots. How could he possibly know that?

“Yes, I’m sure you do. Considering how long you must have been staring.” He cocked his head. “Hm?”

Every time words came to your tongue, you remembered the ones he’d breathed as he stroked himself, remembered the exaltation in his brow as he thrust into his wet fist. Remembered that sound, the one that had broken like a starving bear from his chest.

As you met his eyes, pale and sharp, you felt an unmistakable throb where you ached, as if you longed to be filled with something, as if part of you was empty. It was a devastating, painful sensation, and only seemed to grow stronger with every beat of your heart—like a cave yawning open with the quake of the world.

It overwhelmed you, overflowed every river of thought in your mind. There would be nothing else until you could resolve this pressure, until you could bring yourself respite from its domination of your body. And if Tavington knew something of what caused this, or of how to stop it, you needed his aid.

Nodding, you replied, “I do.” And then, with a fear of tearing petals with your tongue, “Please. How do I make it stop?”

A silence fell between you. A realization crested over him, a well of delight in the pits of his pupils. Tavington crouched to eye-level with you, pistol still gripped as his hands rested on his thick thighs. The scent of sandalwood and iron flooded the air.

“You are pitiable, aren't you?” he asked. “Have you never once explored yourself? Taken your own pleasure?”

You blinked at him. Slowly, you shook your head.

Tavington exhaled. Shadow sliced across his cheeks. He smirked.

“I can assist you,” he said, standing. “I may even let you leave.” Gaze focused on you, he placed the pistol on the table behind him. “If you agree to assist me in turn.”

You glanced between his legs again. It was still erect, still straining against his breeches, and the realization inspired another throb, like a desperate clench twisting open your belly. You wanted nothing more than to reach there, shove your fists against it to stop it—but feared being wrung inside-out like a snake swallowing its tail.

“I’ll—I’ll help you,” you replied, that desperation climbing up your throat and behind your eyes. You wobbled to your feet. “Just tell me what—”

“Ah, ah.” Tavington stepped toward you, and you retreated. “Back on your knees.”

Your jaw dropped. “I beg your—”

“The thinner you run my patience, the thinner your chances of relief,” he replied. “On your knees.”

Pinching your lips between your teeth, you obliged him. The ground felt even firmer on your knees than it had just a moment ago. Colder, too, perhaps. You weren’t sure why else you’d be trembling.

Tavington’s gaze raked over you. “Remove your clothing.”

Your eyes widened, your arms clapping across your chest. “I will do no such thing! I—just because you wish to engage in—”

“What needs to be done can’t be done while wearing them.” His jaw shifted with irritation. “I trust you’ll recognize my expertise in the matter.”

There was no denying to you, now, that whatever you were about to engage in was nearly as inappropriate as what you’d intruded upon. You had little inkling of what that could possibly be, but you knew well enough that a woman was to never been seen nude by a man outside of matrimony.

You knew that intercourse happened, of course, but understood so little about the act that a husband and wife in their marriage bed may as well have looked like dragonflies—a single body glued together at the arse and trotting around the room until such a time was reached that they decided to be finished.

You had never imagined it would involve growling men, or burning heat, or a part of your own self widening from an animal into a monster made of teeth and need. But was soothing this monster worth your own dignity?

“I—” Your grip curled in the thin fabric of your nightgown. “I want to help you. But I can’t permit you take my virtue,” you replied. “Please.”

Tavington sighed. A pause, and an expression of reluctant acquiescence fell over his face. “You’ll keep your virtue, girl. But do go on.” He held out a hand. “I’ll take your garments from you.”

You met his eyes, your attention falling over the strong curve of his nose, the strength of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders. Candlelight shimmered over his hair in red-gold waves. And below his waist, between the thick corded muscle of his thighs, was that bulge that you longed to see revealed again, if only because your monster demanded it.

As long as your virtue remained intact, your future husband needn’t know of any of this.

“Yes,” you replied, “all right.”

His thin lips curved into a cold grin. “Go on, then.”

Another aching roar from your monster as you shrugged off your robe, exposing your shoulders and arms, goosebumps blanketing them both. Tavington said nothing as you handed it to him—only continued to stare—and you averted your gaze, unsure you could continue looking at him as you gathered the hem of your nightgown into your hands. Blood rushed your face, your chest, and you tried to breathe, finding the air thinning.

Closing your eyes, you pulled it higher, and higher, until it revealed your thighs, the tuft of hair between them, your soft stomach, your heaving breasts. Every inch seemed like prying free your own skin, but not like a flaying—instead like an insect molting and drawing air into its fat, new flesh.

A pulse ricocheted in the depths of your belly, and with shaking hands, you freed yourself of your nightgown.

Tavington’s gaze pressed like a saber at the exposed skin, as if he were testing every curve for a later carving. Another pulse, and you squeezed your thighs together, earning nothing but frustration. Throat tight, you handed over your nightgown. He glanced at it before placing it on the table with your robe.

An exhale as he appraised you. “Yes,” he said softly. “That’s lovely.”

Your lips parted. “Oh,” you breathed.

His mouth tugged in a hint of a smirk. “Listen carefully.” His hands curled in and out of fists. “Place your hands on your thighs. Good, yes. Now, begin by trailing them up your sides.”

You dragged your palms up your skin. A knot stuck in your throat.

Your own hands had made contact with your body every day of your life. But somehow, in this instance, your skin felt as if a storm had started beneath the surface, lightning flinging through the clouds. Each brush of fingertips over your nudity sent a ripple of chills up your spine, and you shivered, a breath shaking free.

“Very good,” Tavington said, his voice deeper than you remembered it from just seconds ago. “Keep going. That’s right. To your breasts.” You obeyed. “What is that like?”

“It…” Even if you wanted to stop, you weren’t sure if you were capable of it any longer. The sensation of your own hands was wine to your parched and needy flesh. “It feels good…”

“Mhm.” His hand hovered in front of his breeches, as if he were considering something. “Take them in your hands. Tell me how you feel.”

Your chin quivered. You briefly met his eyes, and the fascination within them beckoned to your monster. You glided your hands over your breasts, cupping them in your palms, and a soft, quiet sound of delight fluttered from your mouth. Tavington exhaled, and squeezed himself through his trousers, and this excited you—you rolled yourself in your fingers, flicking across your nipples, bringing forth a squeal.

“That’s right.” His tone was a rewarding scratch under your jaw. “What have you to fear of your own body, hm?”

“Nothing,” you said, your breath lost somewhere in the dizzying impact of what you could only identify as pleasure washing over you. “It feels good. I feel good.”

“Yes,” he replied, his hips rocking against his own hand, his fingers stroking at the sides of his bulge. “Soft, aren’t you?”

You nodded, kneading your breasts to be sure. “Yes.”

His jaw tense, he tightened his grip around himself. “Good.”

The sight of it glittered from your toes to the place between your legs—the place now that felt swollen and hot and no matter what you did only seemed to throb worse, to command more and more of your attention. You whinged.

“You’re—you’re torturing me,” you said.

“Torturing you?” Tavington drew a soft breath, fingers loosening. “How so?”

“It’s getting worse,” you replied, nodding toward the heat in your belly. “It—it feels… more.”

He tilted his head, gazing at you like someone would gaze at a child with a broken toy. “Oh, you are suffering.” He huffed. “Where does it ache the most?” he asked. “Show me.”

Pinching your lips between your teeth, you led a hand from your breasts down your stomach to the throbbing hearth where your thighs met.

“Ah.” He smirked. “Your cunt.”

You looked away. The word pierced your ears like a stake to the dirt.

“Say it,” he said, “if you wish for me to help. Tell me what aches.”

You glanced at him, eyes wide. “Say—I can’t say that!”

“Don’t be stupid, girl. You certainly can. And if you truly ache, you will.”

A gust of fire swept over you, and you looked at his boots, taking a deep breath before you dared to speak the words. “My…” A thickness not unlike shame closed on your throat. “My cunt,” you squeaked. “My cunt aches.”

“There we are,” he replied, a salacious gratitude on his tongue. “Touch yourself there.”

You had only ever touched there to wash. But as your fingertips grazed across your folds, your nerves lit up like a valley of fireflies, sparkling with even the gentlest caress. You gasped, your jaw dropping, and you stroked yourself there, the sensitive skin exploding with an unfamiliar pleasure.

“Oh,” you managed to say, your fingers continuing to test the rawness it found. “Oh, my goodness…”

Tavington said nothing, only exhaled as he finally, finally freed himself from his breeches, and you gazed upon—upon it—again. His hand wrapped around it, and he groaned as he pumped the shaft with his fist. The sight of it made your… your cunt clench, a pulsation to your fingertips, and you teased and touched yourself hungrily, groping at the layers to find relief.

“Yes.” He watched you, his chest rising and falling, his throat working. The soft shuffle of his hand harmonized with the wet fumbling of your fingers. “You delight in watching me stroke my cock, don’t you?”

The word cock brought another whimper free. Your hand could only find wetness, your folds tender, puffy lips slipping between your fingers. Something felt out of reach, like an answer you could not find the question to. You wanted to please him. Wanted him to spare you from further torment.

“I do,” you replied honestly, “I like watching you.”

He hummed appreciatively, swirling his thumb around the tip. “All the words.”

“I like…” You whined. “I like watching you stroke your cock.”

Tavington’s head dropped back just an inch, and he grunted, thrusting deep into his hand. At this angle, you could see the patch of dark hair at the base, found yourself curious about what the rest of his body looked like. Found yourself curious about what he was doing at all. If his experience was as frustrating as yours, you could hardly understand why he would continue.

“What is it that you’re doing?” you asked.

He paused, slowing the jerk of his hand, studying you for a moment. “How does it feel when you caress your breasts? Your cunt?”

You swallowed. “Good.”

“That’s how this,” he said, teasing his fingers along the underside of the length, “feels for me.”

“But I’m… It’s stuck,” you said, your lower lip popping out in exasperation. “I can’t… I don’t understand.”

His focus tunneled on your pouting lip, and he squeezed himself with a gentle exhale. “Come closer,” he said, nodding toward the spot in front of him.

You waddled on your knees toward him as if there was an anchor between your thighs and stopped an inch from his cock.

“Do as you’re told,” he said, his free hand slipping to cradle the back of your head. “And I’ll show you.”

Gazing up at him, you replied, “I will.”

“Yes, you will.” His thumb passed over the side of your cheek. “You’re going to make me feel good. Understand?” Darkness had subsumed the blue ink of his gaze. “Open your mouth.”

Despite the tremble of your jaw, you lowered it.

“Good.” His grip guided you forward, until your parted mouth met the warm, silky tip of his cock. “Ah—there we are. Take it in. Mind your teeth.”

You recalled his earlier words—wrap your pretty lips around it—and your face glowed at the implication that he might find you pretty. How strange, you realized, to feel warm at this thought as you kneeled naked at his feet offering a kiss to his most intimate parts.

As he ordered, you took the end of him into your mouth, and he sucked a breath through his teeth, his hold tightening in your hair. You whimpered, your attention pulled between the flickers of bliss on his face and the salt of him on your tongue.

“Perfect,” he said. “Now, suck.”

You sealed your mouth around his cock, and as if it were a piece of rock candy, offered a gentle, firm suck. He hissed again, his nails scraping your scalp. This seemed like the correct response to you, so you continued, pressing your tongue against him, suckling in a slow rhythm. Tavington groaned, his hips twitching, driving into your mouth only an inch before pulling back out, and again, and again. Your heart skipped, your cheeks hollowed, and you placed your hands on his thighs to steady yourself as you reveled in it.

Though you had absolutely no idea what you were doing, knowing that you were making him feel good—as sounds escaping him implied—was enough to spur you on. There was something gratifying about it, some sort of compulsive thrill that fed into itself, and you wanted more, wanted to continue making him feel good, wanted to make yourself feel good while you did it. You sought out his eyes with a whimper.

“Very good,” he exhaled. “I want you to—I want you to put your finger at the top of where your cunt opens.” His other hand curled around the back of your head. “Yes, good. Now slowly slide it down—”

“Mmf!”

Your finger grazed a small, brief point of oblivion, and your eyes shot wide, drool leaking down your chin. Tavington’s cock pulsed between your lips, and your finger hovered over that spot, frantic to touch it again, terrified of how it would feel. It had been perfect—almost too perfect, almost more than anything you’d ever felt before in your life.

“That felt good, hm?” he purred, holding your head in place. “Don’t stop.”

Swallowing, you continued to lave at his cock, and ghosted your finger across that spot again. Another moan, and you did it again, again, finding it to be a stiff, swollen nub buried in your folds, eager to be toyed with, more eager to bring currents of delight all the way to your toes. If touching your breasts and nipples and skin had been like rain, this was a waterfall—a torrent of pleasure that you hoped, craved to drown within.

And as you circled your finger around it, it felt better, and better, and the cock in your mouth throbbed harder, and you were moaning onto it, smothering it with your saliva until it was wet and hot and every second another hint of salt graced your tongue.

“Yes,” Tavington murmured, “yes, yes, yes, that’s it.”

Lost in the whirlpool of sensation, his encouragement earned boldness. With a gasp, you pulled off of his cock, and, staring him straight in the lust-hazed eyes, spit onto his shaft before swallowing the tip again.

He choked, head falling back, a sound escaping him that was more guttural, more deviant than the first one you’d heard ever him make.

The monster between your legs was ravenous, now—faster, it demanded, more, more—and you were subject to its whims, your fingers swirling the precious nub, your head bobbing to take more, more of his cock in your mouth. You moaned, gasped onto him, unable to find your breath and at the same time unwilling to catch it. There was a burgeoning, devilish enormity between your thighs, and needed to feed it, needed to stuff it full until it—until it—

A deep, low sound, rumbled in your chest, your jaw hanging open, your muscles locking. The duty to chase this feeling had eclipsed the duty to Tavington’s cock and in response, he snarled, clasped each side of your head, and drove straight to the back of your throat.

You retched, squirming, your hands losing focus for just a moment, and his hips snapped, his cock treating your mouth like his fist—something to thrust into, something to bring him pleasure. Something to be abused.

“You enjoy this, don’t you?” he growled. “You enjoy having your little virgin face fucked.”

Another gag, tears building and spilling down your cheeks, your sight bleary. And yet, despite that, despite the air rattling through your nose, you could do nothing but relish the stretch of your lips around him, the throbbing of his cock on your tongue, the breath grit through his teeth.

In his stare, you met the empty gaze of a predator gloating in the death throes of his prey.

You nodded, humming in assent.

Eyes shutting, your resumed stroking your nub, the angle, the intensity, the heady scent of his musk—you were groaning louder, longer, fingers moving faster, and you were staring down a mountain, or perhaps up at one, uncertain if you were about to ascend it or collapse underneath its cliffside.

“Enough.” Breathless, Tavington tore you free. “How does it feel?”

“Good,” you sputtered, “good, it feels good, I can’t stop—” Your head rolled, mouth lolling open. “I can’t stop!”

With a grunt, he snatched your arm and hoisted you up, tearing you from possession. You wailed, flailing weakly in his grip.

“What are you doing,” you cried, “stop this! Please, don’t—”

“Quiet.”

Without another word, Tavington flung you forward, your stomach colliding with the edge of the table with a whump. He smashed your chest against the top, and before your spiraling mind could even connect the events of the past few seconds, he was kneeling behind you, strong hands parting your thighs.

“I beg yo—oh, God.”

Soft, wet warmth enveloped your cunt. Without looking, you knew it was his tongue, knew he was kissing between your legs like a man might kiss a woman’s mouth. But if your fingers had felt perfect, this was—

It was what you imagined the promise of death would feel to a soul bound for heaven, what you pictured the angels bestowing onto those they guarded. Yet something so exquisite in a context so lascivious could mean too this was instead was the temptation of the devil, a fruit to lure innocent souls to hell.

Whichever it was, frankly, you didn’t care. Tavington’s lips sealed around your nub, his tongue teasing it, and you sobbed, your entire body wracked as it was quartered in limbo.

“Please, please, please,” you whimpered, terrified he would stop. “I—I can’t—something’s happening, please!”

Tavington hummed against you like he was savoring his final meal, and perfection split into one thousand separate shards, each a reflection of the pressure within you, and you breathed, gripped the table, shut your eyes, quaking as euphoria echoed to infinity. You were dying, or you were being born, or your skin was bursting, or you were, you were—

You screamed, rupturing with bliss, your limbs jolting and your eyes rolling to the back of your skull. At the edge of your awareness, Tavington’s tongue fluttered on your nub, his grip stilling your hips as they jerked, his own low moans a resonance against you. It continued, you thought, for ages, waves after waves cascading over you, until his mouth finally released you, and you broke into reality with a sudden gasp.

You laid on the table, sweat pearling underneath you, and as the ringing died in your ears, you heard a panting, a grunting, a slap of skin on skin. Tavington was behind you, one hand pinning your back, the other stroking himself.

“From now on,” he hissed, “you’ll think of me, think of my hand, my mouth—you’ll forever be mine—”

Speechless, you could only watch his hips pitched, his teeth bared, and he gripped his cock, choking as warm, white fluid roped over your arse.

“Christ,” he groaned, milking his length until the fluid dribbled from the tip. His chest fell in an exhale, his hand slowing until he seemed to return to himself. Another breath, and he swallowed, looking at you and buttoning himself away. “You see?” he said, voice stretched thin. “Virtue still intact.”

The cooling spatter across your backside made you suppose differently. But it was clear to you now that losing your virtue involved his cock going inside of you, and that hadn’t happened. Though you were still completely nude and bent over this British officer’s table like a disobedient child.

You made to move, found your muscles limp, your knees shaking at the thought of losing the table’s support. Whatever had happened to you had apparently stripped you of half your strength. With a weak hand, you gathered up your clothing and forced yourself to stand.

“What…” You stared at the ground as you pulled your nightgown over your head, the silk sticking to your back. It made you shiver. “What was that?”

Tavington huffed, crossing to a corner of his tent where a desk laden with parchment was waiting. “The French call it la petite mort,” he drawled, sitting.

You frowned, pulling your robe over your shoulders. “What do the English call it?”

He paused, then looked back at you. “Coming.” His eyes narrowed. “I presume you enjoyed it.”

“Oh.” Folding your arms across your chest, you looked at your feet. “I did.”

“Good,” he said, and turned back to his desk, grabbing a quill and dipping it in an open inkwell. “Don’t permit your future husband to forgo allowing you to experience it.”

You had no idea what to say to that. The air in his tent had fled beneath the canvas. “Um… Colonel. Where do I—”

“Bordon!” Tavington called. He glimpsed you from over his shoulder. “Captain Bordon will see to your needs.”

“But I need to see my parents, and—”

A stout blonde officer flung open the tent. “Sir,” said Bordon, presumably. His eyes landed on you, and he frowned. “Oh.”

“Bordon, what became of the family we visited today?” Tavington asked between scratches of his quill. “Were they indeed sent to Charleston?”

“Ah, no,” Bordon replied. “We interrogated them, sir, but they were cleared. Staunch Loyalists. We sent them home.”

“Mhm.” Tavington tilted his head toward you. “Their daughter. She was creeping about camp. Return her, to them, won’t you?”

Bordon nodded. “Of course,” he replied, and held out his hand. “Come along, miss.”

Moving should have been simple. But your feet were stone, anchoring you from being stolen in another tornado of deviance. You only stared.

A muscle in Tavington’s jaw jumped, and he glared at you. “Go on, girl. We’ve not the entire evening to attend to you.”

Cheeks hot, you forced yourself toward Bordon, cleaning your mind of every lurid memory that you’d made in the perimeter of this tent. As you went to cross the threshold into the evening, Tavington cleared his throat.

“And Bordon?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Do see if any of the officers would be interested in courting her,” he said. “She’s terribly eligible.”

Your face burned. Bordon glanced at you, then back at his colonel.

“Yes, sir,” he said with a hint of resignation, and urged you forward.

The last you saw of Tavington were his eyes, shimmering like a shallow pond in the candlelight. They watched you until the tent flap fell and you walked into the darkness.

#william tavington #colonel william tavington #colonel tavington #the patriot #jason isaacs #terribly eligible #fanfiction problems #god i love innocence kink S O M U CH

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