#kinda. this one's probably gone as far as it will go | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

touchme-teezme · 13 hours ago

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hi mimi! idk if u take requests but last pick was everything to me like i lovedddd the book that inspired you 😭🥹 can i PLEASE get a san version with the “did you want to watch me burn” poem? just destroy me. my heart is yourssss

This Time.

PAIRING | collegeboy!san x fab!reader

TAGS | arguments, smut with a plot, kissing, oral, angsty unprotected breakup sex, san has great pull out game, and a (sort of?) cliffhanger… again? idk i suck at writing tags and proper endings lolololol

RATINGS | NSFW 18+ (minors pls DNI/if it makes u uncomfortable don’t read it)

SONGS | No One Noticed - The Marías, Not You Too- Dr*ke & Been Like This - Doja Cat

SUMMARY | The breakup for this couple was on the horizon. One of them was in denial, and it’s not you.

AUTHOR’S NOTE ▸ thank you all for showing Last Pick a lot of love & anon for enjoying it. since a san version was requested, here ya go :) lmk which member should be next if u want me to make this into an angsty atz smut series. kinda like the idea they’re all connected?¿ like a smutiverse… im a little tipsy rn writing this part. also if u catch mistakes, no u didn’t. k bye love u

inspired by a quote from Save Me An Orange by Hayley Grace:

what more did you want from me?

i gave you my heart my soul my body

i let you build a home inside of me

but you still went to the store and bought a lighter

just to set me on fire

did you want to watch me burn?

You’re usually an optimist but it wasn’t until San smashed the vase you bought and painted together at that one arts and crafts store that you realized optimism could only take you so far.

A screaming match broke out immediately. Words bounced off the walls, echoing in your small apartment as fingers were being pointed. He followed you around the entire house as you tried to walk away from the conversation, pinging in your ear like a fly.

San gets emotional when he cares. It was the first thing you liked about him when you first started to talk. How nice would it be to be with someone so well in-tune with their emotions that they don’t why away from it?

If only you’d known it would result in this.

The relationship was done for. It had been for a while. He had been far too busy juggling classes, work, and his new friends who seemed to suddenly fill all the time he used to spend with you. You’d barely even seen him in weeks, and when you did, it was like you were fighting for scraps of his attention.

San’s voice cracked as he shouted behind your head. “You think I don’t know I’ve been busy? I’ve been juggling everything, trying to keep it all together, and you—you—think I don’t feel guilty? You want me to just drop everything? Stop hanging out with my friends? Quit school? What do you want from me?”

He was following you now, not letting you get a moment of peace. You forced yourself to focus on the task of cleaning up the shards, trying to block out his words as you looked for the broom around your house.

“Do you think I want this? You think I want to feel like this? You think I want to hurt you? But you keep demanding more from me, and I can’t do it anymore! I can’t just stop living my life to fix yours!”

“Oh fuck off!” You barked back, finally finding the broom that was in an odd spot in your wardrobe (probably because San had placed it there the last time he used it). You were now growing more annoyed.

“Don’t curse at me! Listen to me for goodness sake!”

Your hands trembled around the broom handle, but you marched towards the vase shards and started sweeping, trying not to hear the poison dripping from his mouth. You had given up on fighting—there was no point anymore. He was too far gone, wrapped up in his own world that was so difficult for him to show up.

“You’re too much, alright?” he spat, his voice cracking with frustration. “I can’t breathe, I can’t think. Every time I try to focus on something else, you’re right there, needing something from me. I can’t fix this. I can’t keep being suffocated—“

You dropped the broom.

You turned slowly, meeting his gaze for the first time, and in that moment, you never felt like this about him before.

“Do you hear yourself?” Your voice was shaking, but it was steady, sharp. “In that whole rant you just forced me to hear, not once did you mention us—not once did you mention me like i’m not in this fucking relationship with you! Not once did you mention all i’ve done for you, and the only time you did was to insult me!”

San opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He just stood there, eyes wide, lips trembling.

You stepped forward as if to challenge his speechlessness, your heart pounding in your chest. “What the fuck are you still doing here then?!”

The room fell silent.

And then, out of nowhere, he tried to reach for you.

It was a movement fuelled by panic if he was truly honest, it was a final desperate attempt to fix things without actually knowing how.

He just knew that he had to have you in his arms and you’d melt. His hand caught yours, pulling you closer, but you yanked it away.

He stepped closer, his breath ragged, reaching for you again with a look in his eyes that was pure guilt you knew all too well.

Your stern face broke when he managed to get you in his large strong arms that wrapped around you.

You stood there, shaking, breathing hard, barely able to hold back the tears.

“Why do you keep doing this to me?” Your cracking voice was muffled against his hard chest.

And then, in his painful silence, he cupped your face and pressed his lips against yours.

You did not stop him.

In fact, you couldn’t.

His next kiss was more desperate and frantic than the last, like he was trying to compensate for all the times he had utterly let you down.

When he finally found the self control to pull back, both of you were panting, faces flushed, hearts racing. He looked at you with a mix of fear, guilt, and longing in his eyes. He wiped your damp cheeks, cupping the sides of your face.

"I don’t mean to," He whispered. “I-I swear, everything I said, I-“

You shook your head in denial, wanting to just shut him up with more kisses knowing if you both talked, you’d eventually argue.

For once, you didn’t want to fight. If the relationship was crashing and burning right now, might as well get one last lick out of it, right?

Metaphorically, and quite literally.

San groaned softly into your mouth, his hands coming up to tangle in your hair and snake to the small of your back as he deepened the kiss with his tongue.

"You drive me insane," He breathed against her lips, breaking the kiss to look into her eyes.

It was true, you always had, in the best and worst ways possible. The feeling was mutual as you stared back at him.

He couldn't resist your pull, the way you were in the moment consumed him entirely. His hands roamed your curves, and reached down to grip your ass firmly as he walked you backwards towards the couch.

You let out a soft gasp, your fingers digging into his waist as you let yourself get sat down with him positioned above you. His knee perched up right between your slightly parted legs.

The friction his knee brushing between your legs sent a jolt of desire straight to your core. He could feel your pulse quickening, and your breath hitching as he sucked and kissed the sides of your neck.

Your hands slipped beneath his black shirt, seeking for skin. With a slight eager tug, he took it off without any argument, revealing his lean muscled torso that you did not hesitate to touch and admire knowing it was going to be the last time.

Instead of letting that knowledge crush you or him, with a low moan, he just leaned into your touch.

“Tell me to stop…” He breathed out, hands on your shoulders to steady himself. He struggled to maintain control as his arousal throbbed against the inside of his zipper.

“Keep going.” You replied in a husky whisper.

With a groan, he gave in to the temptation. His tongue met yours, as his hands slid down to your chest to cup your breasts through the thin fabric of your top, having to bite back a smirk when your back arched into his technique.

Your nimble fingers freed him from his jeans. Unbuttoning, and then zipping down before massaging his hard on through the fabric of his underwear. A breath of relief escaped his lips when his throbbing cock was finally freed.

He helped you out of your top, watching you stroke his impressive length in your hands from above. His hands glided down your back and unclasped your bra, letting your breast sit in all its glory.

He was going to take care of you first until your mouth engulfed him without missing a beat.

“O-oh my god.” His hips bucked involuntarily forward as your skilled hand continued to stroke, the dual sensations of her and her fingers wrapped around his member threatening to overwhelm him.

San’s eyes rolled back as you took him entirely into your mouth. His body weight leaning on his forearms that were on either sides of your head, holding onto the back of the couch for dear life.

Your skilled tongue and throat working in tandem to bring him to the brink of madness. The wet heat blanketing his aching cock was almost too much to bear, each bob of her head sent him more and more over the edge.

"Oh f-fuck!” His mouth hung open as he fisted your hair and fought the urge to thrust deeper.

A part of him couldn’t make sense why this was happening now of all times. He could’ve just taken your desperation to touch him for granted but something about it didn’t feel right.

With effort and a hell lot of focus, San gently stopped you before he could cum. He stroked the side of your face when you looked up at him confused. He shot one of the sweetest dimpled smiles at you.

Seeing that dimpled smile light up your face.

With a hand behind your head, he laid you back on the couch gently. Your hands politely stayed on your own chest, cupping them as you watched his next move.

In one swift motion, he tugged down your underwear with your pyjama shorts and tossed them away.

One of your legs get thrown over his shoulder, and he used his other hand to part your leg wider. His head moved down to your glistening sex and his tongue licked a strip up your folds.

Air got caught in your throat. You let out a shaking deep breath through your lips. His hand on your thigh moved up to your chest, intertwining his fingers with your fingers against your racing heartbeat.

You gripped onto his fingers every time he’d do something that sent shockwaves through your body either with his lips, tongue or his nose. He kissed your sensitive clit, alternating his tongue between that and pounding into your entrance.

“San,” You whined, which only encouraged him to keep going. You tilted your chin upwards, facing the ceiling as tears began welling in your eyes. Unclear if it was the pleasure or the sinking feeling in the out of your stomach.

Then you felt that body shock again, jolting you as you let out a loud moan.

You met his eyes. Those cat-like eyes staring back at you between your legs with laser focus before lazily shutting when he turned his head to the side to lap up your slick arousal from the inner part of your thighs.

He got up and took off his underwear before hovering on-top of you, centring his hard shaft just past your entrance as he supported himself up by the armrest behind your head.

His chain necklace to drop down and dangle in your face.

He gazed into your eyes, reaching down to rub your slick folds once more. He leaned down to kiss you, tasting yourself on his lips as he readjusted his hard dick between your legs. Your hands wrapped themselves in the dip of his waist as your knees pressed against his hips.

“We can’t keep fighting forever,” You told him in a faint whisper.

Leaning down, he distracted you by capturing your lips into a tender loving kiss to slowly pushed in. He felt your teeth on his lip as your walls adjusted to him.

“I know.” Was all he could murmur against your face as a hand cupped one side of your face.

He kept having your lips in between his as he started to move, his hips rolling in a slow rhythm designed to slowly ease into you. Small gasps escaped your lips and you clutched onto his biceps for support while your neck stretched upwards.

“Baby, you feel incredible.” He picked up the pace slightly, his thrusts growing deeper, and more insistent, as he chased the intense feeling coursing through him.

The way your body clenched around his length, the soft gasps falling from your lips.

With your moans of approval, he seized the opportunity to go even deeper and quicken the pace in your wet welcoming heat. He pulled in your mouth for intoxicating searing kisses he couldn’t get enough of.

“I miss you,” You whimpered out the truth between the kisses. “S-so much.”

He snapped forward with new determination accentuated by the lewd sounds of your skin slapping against each other.

He let go of your mouth to focus on your chest. "I'm right here baby." He mumbled over your breasts as he cupped one in his large hands, brushing over your nipples before reaching down to lick.

He alternates between wet kisses and whirling his tongue, aimed to only give you pleasure. In his defence, he hasn't had the opportunity to do this in a while.

You grabbed a side of his face to look into his lustful eyes. “I really did love you.” You breathed out.

“I love you too.” He replied, too entranced by the moment to catch that single word in your sentence.

You crashed your lips against his. The technique of his kissing made you moan loudly into his mouth, and then against his jaw with your eyes shut when he was hitting the perfect spot over and over.

Your body was tensing up tighter and tighter as the pressure of the inside you. You could feel yourself teetering on the edge, ready to shatter into a million pieces at any moment.

“I’m close,” San panted. “Come for me. Come first.”

As a result of his husky words, your walls clench around him, and your climax comes crashing in. One passionate thrust as he buried himself inside your convulsing sex, the intense orgasm shook your entire body violently.

While your final convulsions faded, you slumped against the couch, panting heavily. Meanwhile, San rode off your enjoyment only to abruptly slip out of you before blowing a load inside you without a condom on.

He released himself from your legs that were wrapped around him and hurried to your nearby bathroom, his hard-on in his hands.

You lay there in a daze, trying to make sense of everything, feeling a mix of confusion and shame. You covered your face with your hands, desperate to hide from the reality of the situation.

Slowly, you pulled yourself up from the leather couch to sit up, its surface sticking a little to your sweaty skin, before you reached for your underwear lying forgotten at your feet.

You managed to get most of your clothes back on when he returned. The sight of him—his broad athletic build and that confident stride—distracted you just long enough for him to lean down and kiss you, his hands gently resting on the side of your neck.

You instinctively covered his hand with your own, locking eyes with him.

“Are you okay?” His voice was soft.

You stayed quiet for a moment, the weight of his question sinking in.

He kissed you again, his lips warm and insistent, and for a moment, the thoughts swirling in your head began to fade.

Before you knew it, he lowered himself down onto the floor across from you, wanting to pull you on top of him to straddle him.

“Stop. No more.” you murmured, pushing him away gently.

Your heart pounding as your knees pressed against the hardwood floors when you realised you were already sitting on his thighs.

San sharply sighed, a little disappointed, but he didn’t fight it. He let go of his grip on your waist, and you slowly kicked yourself off him.

The two of you lay on the floor, side by side, your breaths finally slowing after whatever that was. The silence between you wasn’t comforting in the slightest.

He reached for his underwear with his feet, slipping it on slowly, his eyes never leaving you. He was trying to read you, trying to understand what was going on.

You turned your head to look at him. His eyes turned to the ceiling, his expression unreadable, distant even though he was right there.

“San,” you began softly, your voice breaking the stillness. “I think we—”

His phone buzzed, cutting through the tension, and he glanced at it with another sigh. You felt the moment slip away as he got up and fumbled for his phone left in his pants by the couch.

“It’s Mingi,” he muttered.

“San,” you tried again, your tone heavier this time, begging for his attention. But he’d already answered the call.

You stayed on the floor, your chest tightening as fragments of their conversation reached your ears.

“Dude, what? I’m in the middle of… Huh? No, I haven’t heard from her,” San said, his tone sharp but tinged with concern. “She’s been dodging everyone since that night at Yeosang’s when you wouldn’t shut up about your conquests.”

Your frown deepened as you propped yourself up on your elbows to watch him. His brows furrowed, his full attention on the call like you weren’t even there.

“Well, maybe you should go check on her then,” San said, leaning back against the couch. “What, come over? Her place or yours?”

A pause, then his expression shifted—confusion, followed by clear exasperation.

San ran a hand through his messy hair. “Fine, whatever. I’ll come over later.” He hung up, tossing the phone onto the floor like it had personally wronged him.

“Mingi needs help with something,” he said it like that was enough explanation.

You stared at him, baffled and angry, “So you’re going?”

He turned to you, guilt flashing briefly in his eyes before he looked away. “I don’t have a choice,” he said quietly.

The words hit you like a slap, but what was worse than the sting was the inevitability that this was always how it would be. You, waiting for scraps of his time, his attention. Him, running off to play hero for everyone but you.

“San,” you said, your voice trembling. “You always have a choice. You just never choose me.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?” You shot back. “You couldn’t even let me finish breaking up with you before answering his call.”

“What? It’s not like that. This is serious to him—he really likes her—”

“Save it,” you cut him off, your voice sharp. “Since you’re always serious about everyone else, just go.”

He hesitated, his hand hovering near his phone. “You’re being—”

“Go,” you repeated firmly, tears welling in your eyes but your tone unwavering. “And don’t ever come back this time.”

For a moment, he looked like he wanted to defend himself, or to stay, but then he stood up. He pulled the rest of his clothes back on, grabbed his phone, and shoved it into his back pocket without a word.

He glanced at you on his way out, his gaze searching for something, anything, to make this easier. He convinced himself he’d call you tomorrow, that this wasn’t really goodbye like the other times you both have tried to end it. He didn’t realize how serious you were this time.

He walked past the shards and the broom and left. The door clicked shut behind him.

#ateez #choi san smut #ateez smut #ateez fanfic #ateez x reader #choi san #ateez oneshot #atz smut #san x reader #atz x reader #ateez fic

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notasapleasure · 10 months ago

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Fait prosperer qui n'est à croire vain please?? Tell me everything!! I forgot abt this but it sounds AMAZING (I’m partial to the Marthe/Güzel but ofc would love the Jerott/Lymond too!)

Oh it's all my end of PiF feelings again, about Marthe and sacrifice, Lymond and depression/recovery (or lack thereof) and Jerott and 'kindness'. Also i think Marthe deserves to rule Russia with a fist of iron and have a blazingly hot strategician girlfriend.

Uhhhhhh so this starts as a good fic and then gets utterly bogged down in me trying to make Jerott and Francis fuck. Sometimes a fic is better when there is no smut, Jo. Also paging @oughtaagh because there's Jerott, there's Francis, there's water, there's recklessness and rescue.

I'll write a bit about how I would have continued it/ended it at the end, but first

I'm just gonna post it.

It's LONG, so if you're struggling to read it all here on tumblr and really want to read it let me know and I'll stick it in a doc or something.

[Peak Lymond draft problems: googling a Latin quote you stuck in there because you have no idea what it meant, and learning that it's from Cicero, but still not knowing what it meant. Truly, it is just like dealing with Francis Crawford himself. Or lunchtime in the undergrad common room as the only dunce who didn't do the Latin module. Anyway I did find rough translations in the end but I'm leaving the quotes untranslated so you all get the authentic Dunnett experience]

---

The wagon slowed to a halt beside the figure among the trees.

Men at arms, moving with no anticipation of a threat, approached with open hands and a foreign greeting.

Taking their assistance, with golden head bowed and covered by a soft cap, the weary traveller got on board. Among cushions and furs, long limbs settled with grace. Cornflower blue eyes held mischief, and wide pink lips smirked satisfaction.

Kiaya Khatun's own eyes widened.

"You."

The straw in the stable had been piled up to cover worn buckram, silks and cottons. The boot prints around it were narrow and had scuffed the stone floor in their haste.

Only one pony remained.

Lymond ran a hand, already trembling with effort, down the thick fur on the animal's neck.

It was dawn, and it was cold in the mountains behind Volos. The pony's fur was sprinkled with a fine glitter of dew and its breath coiled in the air beside him.

He had it saddled, but the girth hung loose and unbuckled as he leaned against the animal's warm flank. He was certain he could travel, but the longer he stood in the damp morning air the less willing his body was to collude in this belief.

Marthe had gone early, and she had worn men's clothing, changing her outfit in the stable.

She had taken his place, asking no leave, contradicting her sanguine words about Camille de Doubtance's wishes.

All she had left was the discarded dress and a ghazal written on a scrap of paper, crumpled and stained, as though she had regretted it and nearly destroyed it:

"A friend is the one who beheads you.

A swindler puts a hat on your head.

A host who pampers you becomes your burden.

The Friend deprives you of yourself."

Inside the main building one person still slept. Jerott Blyth lay oblivious to the competition to leave him behind.

No voices were raised: raised voices travelled.

"Silly girl," Kiaya Khatun said softly.

The fates would be displeased; the planets misaligned; the old woman would not take this news kindly.

"She is dead."

"As she predicted she would be. So it is up to us to continue her work."

Lymond's sister raised a cynical brow. "It is very easy to predict one's own death, if one is willing to play a part in it."

This brash effrontery made the courtesan laugh.

She would allow Marthe the morning to talk to her of fantasies. At first stop, the girl would be returned, and Kiaya would send a man to retrieve her intended companion.

Russia needed warriors, not soothsayers.

Lymond crouched by the embers of the hearth.

He picked up the packet he had left. It was addressed to his sister: letters to make arrangements for her inheritance. A request that she uphold her promise. A warning that he should not be followed when he left.

He had returned to the building to ensure that these details were not left for the wrong eyes.

If Jerott read it in the absence of both Marthe and Lymond there would be recklessness, and Lymond could not afford to leave recklessness in his wake.

He had returned to the building to protect his exit.

It should have been clean. It should have been quiet. It should have been easy.

Following the sound of shuffling feet, the door opposite the fireplace began to open and Lymond breathed a curse.

On impulse, he tossed the paper packet into the orange bed of coals. Its edges blackened, and a smoky eclipse rushed over its surface before flames kindled and crackled, smacking their lips on the dry words.

"It's early."

Lymond stood - too quickly. His head swam.

The other man paused in the doorway of his room, rubbing rough-skinned hands over tired eyes and morning stubble.

"Was it a bad night? Are you ok?"

"I am fine," Lymond answered.

Jerott peered at him with a dubious expression.

In the trees up the slope a woodpecker hammered out its breakfast rhythms.

"Have you been outside?"

Lymond let his arms open in a sort of shrug.

Droplets of mist had caught in his hair, turning its ends to darkened twists. His boots had straw stuck in the mud on their soles and his riding cloak hung from his shoulders.

Glancing at the hearth, Jerott took in the tongues of flame that were already dying down, and the grey rectangle of ash sheaves from which they had sprung: the ghost of the letter packet.

The cot beside the fire was empty, its curtain drawn back and bedclothes rumpled.

Marthe had few belongings, but none remained in their accustomed places.

Jerott looked at Lymond with sharp new panic.

"Where is she?"

Jerott was outside, halfway to the stable block even as Lymond called the answer Jerott already knew: "She's gone."

Standing within the stable, Jerott picked up the dress. He pressed it, unhesitatingly, to his face. He breathed in the smell of her body, mingled now with the dry scent of fresh straw.

His eyes opened to the sight of the saddled pony and it added insult to injury.

Jerott stormed back to the other building and tossed Lymond's packed satchel on the stone flags before the hearth. Combined with the hurt in his eyes, no accusation needed to be spoken.

In response, Lymond's expression was closed and wary, but his body language was resigned.

She had taken his place. That was all.

He did not know how long she would survive in it if he did not reclaim his position at Kiaya Khatun's side.

"Russia?" Jerott exploded. "Why would she go to Russia?"

Because, Lymond thought to himself, she had chosen to ignore Camille de Doubtance's plans. She had elected to claim her birth right: the adventure that should have been hers without question had she been born a man. She had intended to set her brother free of the webs that had been woven for him. To take up their severed bonds and turn them to a bridle for her own destiny.

"She is looking for a new station."

Jerott looked at the ash fluttering on top of the embers.

"But I was going to marry her."

It took little enough time for Iphis to have her way.

Among furs a sea-weathered cupid rolled with the movement of the cart. A gift and a promise; ambition and proof; the cupid had changed hands in Djerba, and ridden as the strange confidant of Kiaya Khatun since then.

She drew the lithe body of Lymond's sister into the cushions beside her. The blonde head rested against her shoulder and Marthe sighed with pleasure.

Kiaya Khatun had always been too curious.

Ambition was a virtue, but without restraint it was dangerous. Curiosity ignored boundaries and left ambitious women seeking more.

No need to be a warrior when you can be a shapeshifter. No need to be a soothsayer when you can forge your own fate.

"You don't understand."

Jerott had been stung by multiple barbs. He nursed the knowledge that Lymond had meant to leave him. He wondered about the future with Marthe that might have been - he contrasted her placid sweetness in recent memory with her old cruelty. Had she been kind because she knew it would come to an end before it came to marriage? Had that been an act to appease Lymond as much as Jerott?

Because it was always Lymond who stood between them. Always Lymond, in the corner of Jerott's eye, in the back of his mind, like a conscience double-checking all of his actions.

Lymond, who stood now in inscrutable stillness with his back to the wall. Beneath heavy lids and golden lashes, he regarded Jerott with an expression of weary patience.

"I understand." Lymond spoke softly but firmly.

"No," Jerott slapped an open palm on the door jamb. He stared at it, disappointed that the shock of pain caused by the gesture was already fading.

Lymond's jaw tensed.

"I love her. How can you, you, possibly understand?"

Lymond's fingers flexed against the stone wall to either side of him. His posture remained defensive, an animal backed into a corner. "I am not immune to the feeling, Jerott, despite what you seem to believe of me."

Jerott scoffed and looked at him with the kind of tolerance he might show a particularly stupid child. "Really. When you intended today to make for Russia on the touring bed of a Turkish courtesan."

Lymond did not flinch. "Kiaya Khatun is Greek."

"Clearly I am mistaken, and your profound connection with her runs deeper than I realised," Jerott said bitterly.

He missed the hot, blue flicker of irritation in Lymond's eyes.

"And I should learn about the profundity of love from you, I suppose?"

Jerott flushed red, though the firelight camouflaged it.

"Do not sully this by claiming you have encountered its like in the debauchment of the French court," he muttered. His ears prickled with heat.

Lymond sighed: "Ah."

He leaned his head back against the stone. "You think that such things occur in the absence of sentiment."

Lymond considered, in turn, the joy that Thady Boy Ballaght had brought men and women alike. The meeting of experience he had had with Oonagh O'Dwyer. The broken heart of the archer Robin Stewart.

"I find that, all too often, it is a surfeit of feeling that makes court such as it is."

Jerott's hands curled into fists, propped above his head on the jambs to each side of the door. He shifted the weight of his hips and feet, glaring at the swept stone floor. "It is hardly the same thing."

Lymond, tiring, conceded a final justification of his words. "I will not claim to have felt as you feel for Marthe. But I have seen more of life than exists in an Auberge on a small island, Jerott. Allow me some understanding of its rhythms."

Finally, Jerott raised his black head and met Lymond's eyes. He shivered visibly when he looked into that fine, Della Robbia face. All its foundations were etched sharply in the firelight and what daylight entered through the door around Jerott's blocking form: the elegant sweep of cheekbones and jawline, the plaintive sockets and the translucent, gem-like glitter of blue in their depths.

Jerott's lip curled, but he did not quite manage to keep his voice steady. "Then thank you. For your understanding."

In angry silence, Jerott was left with a familiar discomfort: the idea that each of them, Lymond and Marthe, had all these months been occupied with plans they had never shared - would never share - with him. It was now joined by the unhappy knowledge that both had tried to leave him behind in secret - whether abandoning Jerott to the arsenal of their sibling, or perhaps abandoning their sibling to Jerott's uncultured company.

The worst of it was that Jerott thought back over all that had happened since Philippa Somerville had insisted on pursuing the seemingly sanguine Crawford of Lymond - keeper of armies, uncaring father to a lost bastard - across the continent, and Jerott could barely recall the moments he would not choose to live again. His thoughts dwelt only on the thrill of the horse show, the pounding of his heart as he raced across Moorish rooftops and powered through the warm Mediterranean with a body in his arms - precious salvage from the wreckage of Zuara. He held to the memory of a single, longed-for look of pride and the dangerous glamour of gold hair and white linen beneath the African moon.

Lymond retrieved his pack wordlessly and eyed Jerott, who remained in the doorway.

"I will take the pony and catch up to them. If Kiaya Khatun has not already sent her on her way back here, I will tell her you are waiting."

Jerott did not move. His arms tensed as he grasped the wooden jambs and he raised his chin in defiance. "No."

This was precisely what Lymond had feared.

"I am losing time," he said warningly.

Ironically, given his present position, Lymond thought about how Jerott was like a door that would not stay shut. He could exhaust one's energies on an impossible task. And for a man used to a lifestyle of discipline and regiment, Jerott had shed the obedience demanded by the Order with a speed that left one reeling.

Attempting to shake him off was like negotiating with quicksand.

"They won't be travelling quickly." Jerott reasoned. "You said she would be bringing a train. We can catch them up with the pony - they won't make it to Larissa in a single day, even on the old road."

Lymond had to grit his teeth against the pain that was rising in volume in his head.

He lacked the strength to stop Jerott from snatching the pack away again.

"Besides, you are not in a fit state to stop me," Jerott muttered. "So you are not fit to travel alone."

Had all gone according to plan, Lymond had feared that Jerott would try to follow him. Why should it be a surprise, now, to find that Jerott would not leave him?

He watched Jerott through the doorway, thinking of St Mary's and every instance since in which Jerott had simply remained.

Once, Lymond had asked Jerott not to let himself be driven away.

To that one order, Jerott had remained faithfully compliant.

At first stop, Kiaya Khatun laughed beneath pear trees still laden with browning, over-ripe fruit. She sat on a bench covered by woven rugs, steaming kahveh set between her and her lover.

She was patron of the young champion in practical brown hose and doublet: a peacock dining with her graceful hen.

With a dagger on her belt and her hair braided tight beneath her cap, Marthe was not quite comfortable. She was not quite Lymond. But she rode the thrill of Kiaya's smile and placed olives into her mouth, and they made new plans. They drew up their own charts, for the planets they had pushed off course.

Russia needed warriors. Most of all it needed strategists. And what was running a household, navigating a seraglio, buying and selling ancient artefacts, but being a strategist?

A storm was rolling in from Mount Pelion, and Kiaya Khatun watched Marthe learn the vocabulary of command needed to arrange the vast train accompanying them.

Although she lacked Lymond's confidence, Marthe compensated with a ruthless assumption that none would choose to do as she asked without the threat of misery held over them. This tone made the men hurry to prove themselves capable, and Marthe stood back, astonished and pleased, as mules and servants, tents and shelters, arranged themselves in regimented practice to construct a small village of cloth and leather, enough to barrack them all through the heaviest of snows.

There was pride in Kiaya Khatun's eyes as she said "Khorosho."

Marthe's heart ran like Ottoman cavalry across the plain. Not once in her life had anyone looked at her in that way.

Time passed in a slow descent through the mists that left Lymond furious at their pace - and exhausted in every muscle. They wove through the thin trees silently, droplets of cold water clinging to their hair and cuffs and the pony's thick fur.

Even had he been alone he would have made slow progress. The soil was slick with streamlets of groundwater that began to crunch and crackle as the earth cooled, and the rock beneath them juddered down from the mountain in uneven steps, laced throughout with treacherous, snaking roots.

The pony, sturdy and gallant though it was, followed Jerott's lead, its heavy hoof-falls striking hollow sound from root and rock.

When the mist left them - quite suddenly, and well before they reached the Thessalian plain - it was replaced by a thin, warning breeze. Lymond pulled the woollen collar of his cloak up around his neck and set his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

Still they could see no further through the leaning boughs of conifers. Colour was absent beneath the white spotlight of the high clouds: trees were the shade of iron, their needles and the cobwebs that hung on them were bleached and silver-gilt by dew.

Walking at the bridle, Jerott did not attempt to make conversation. His black hair clung in damp runnels to the edges of his face, to his head and neck. Water beaded and pooled in the folds of the pack on his shoulders but his pace did not tire.

He would be thinking over what had almost happened and, perhaps, trying to distinguish between his anger at Lymond and his anger at Marthe.

Lymond regretted it, but he remained silent.

He had thought that his sister had reached an understanding with him - and with Jerott.

Marthe had professed a prophecy of kindness for a man adequate to his fate and then - in an act of hubris - she had changed her mind and stolen away in the crepuscular light.

Lymond considered all that had proved true since it had been foretold in Lyons, and all that could have been proven true even then. Information was not art magique; an understanding of the past was not the same as a vision of destiny. Whatever she had been, or was meant to be, to Camille de Doubtance, Marthe must have recognised this and preferred some other path.

Perhaps, when they caught up to her, she could explain how she had broken free of the framework of fate, and explain to Jerott how he might do the same.

For his part, Lymond would inform Marthe that she had jeopardised not some nebulous destiny or chart dictating his future; not some unsolicited vision of lives conducted by an old woman in a Saxon wig; but a decision made by a rational and lucid mind. A decision of his own making, that he had every intention of holding to.

Large, feathery flakes of snow were beginning to penetrate the thinning tree cover. The slope was no longer as steep, and they could now glimpse the pale expanse of the Thessalian plains beyond.

Lymond pressed the pony to a faster pace, taking over the lead, and Jerott's stride lengthened to compensate, his cheeks bright with colour.

On the plains, the snow had been blowing down from the uplands, and it smudged grass and river and track and building into indistinct grey. Only the black water of Lake Karla stood out, its surface stippled like old metal beneath the wind and the precipitation.

Jerott broke into a jog to keep pace with Lymond's descent towards the edge of the lake. He glanced up between footfalls, searching what could still be seen of the horizon for Kiaya Khatun's encampment. It was where Marthe would be, and he sent his heart out into the weather, thinking of the pricking of his skin when he was in her presence, of the dragging ache in the pit of his stomach and the way she made his arms feel like they would always be empty.

Without her, he did not know what he would do. All he could imagine, that was not in proximity to her, was the endlessly occupying struggle of following the rider ahead.

Now Lymond was directing the pony into the marshy land at the lake's edge. He was making for a shallow-bottomed fishing dory, Jerott saw, and not the reed-thatched shelter nearby.

Wet ground tugged at Jerott's boots as he plunged after Lymond. He had begun to worry that the other man would not wait, and tried to close the distance between them when Lymond drew to a halt.

"Francis! Do you see them?" Jerott called, hoping that, in giving an answer, Lymond would think to allow Jerott to catch up.

Lymond swung his feet from the stirrups and paused for a moment, both of his hands resting on the pommel. Like a bird tucking its head into its own neck feathers, he glanced back at Jerott over the cloak bundled around his shoulder.

His face looked as grey as the whirling snow over the lake, and Jerott recognised, at last, the frailty Lymond had tried so fiercely to hide all morning.

Jerott did not take the time to drop his heavy pack but flung himself forwards through the freezing mire, swinging arms and pumping hot, tired legs to reach Lymond before he fell.

He got to the pony's side too late to stop Lymond from dismounting, but in enough time to support him where he landed, clinging to the saddle in limp desperation. Lymond's legs seemed beyond his control, liquid and powerless beneath the pressure of some unseen agony.

"The boat," Lymond ordered through pressed lips.

"No. In God's name no," Jerott swore. He heaved Lymond's weight, his hands hard and unforgiving against the trembling body of the other man, wedged into armpits and scrabbling at wet clothing. Lymond clearly wanted to protest, but his white fingers could not maintain their furious, stubborn grip on the saddle. His throat released a sound of mingled pain and rage when Jerott kept him upright and forcibly rearranged Lymond's hold in order to boost him, unwilling, back into the saddle.

He went, in a cascade of cold muddy water, spurs catching on cloth and skin as his legs struggled against the air. Back onboard, Lymond curled over the pommel with hands hooked in pain. His eyes were screwed shut, his body shook from exertion, and his breathing howled in him like the wind on the mountains. But he did not attempt to dismount again, and he gave no further orders.

Jerott took the pony's bridle and turned towards the little hut on the lake's edge. He wiped the drizzle of blood on his chin with the back of one soaking, frozen hand and sighed at the new rip in his weather-worn jerkin.

Dreams now were too full of the familiar. Lymond longed for the bewildering terror of early withdrawal: the howling, bleeding, unknown of those visions.

In sleep he saw a child, scared and uncertain. The dress that Marthe had left in the straw turned to straw in a dress, stuffed unevenly, imperfect seams covered by black curls of hair.

Green eyes shaded by the holes of a sequined mask; then empty sockets, misshapen under leathery skin, their depths tangled with straw.

He heard a lisping voice beg in many-accented English; an Irish lullaby; it segued into raucous singing, the whispered promises of the court, the babbling of a demigod pinned down by mutes on the corner of a chessboard.

He turned from the scene, blood on his doublet, though he did not know where it came from. Through a door he saw Sibylla smile and beckon him to her, he heard Richard's merry laughter mingle with that of his wife and the child he dandled on his sturdy knee. Lymond hurried forwards, but only in order to heave one side of the heavy double door shut. Across the entrance, where they should have been helping him by closing the other door, Marthe and Philippa watched him toil and Marthe murmured: "A friend deprives you of yourself."

Inside the small fishing hut, some terrible battles were being fought.

"Mother, it is me." - "But I cannot come home." - "Mo chridh..." - "Do not make me promise it. Do not make me." - "I cannot go home. I have no brother. I have no home." - "I beg of you. You know not what you ask." - "Mother, mother I am tired..."

Already tormented by questions that arrived in pursuit of words he should never have heard, Jerott could stand no more. He arranged his aching legs and crossed the room in two strides to crouch by Lymond and shake his shoulder roughly.

"Francis! Francis wake up."

"I am tired," Lymond repeated, a frown troubling his alabaster brow. From beneath the darkened, matted gold lashes, tears had spilled.

Somehow seeing them was more troubling than all of the physical suffering, and Jerott shook him harder.

At last, Lymond's eyes opened with fury. One hand flew, sharp-nailed, to Jerott’s wrist.

Jerott stilled, waiting for consciousness to catch up with instinct.

The hand that clawed at him loosened slowly, and Jerott felt the wet chill of broken skin revealed beneath one nail.

Breathing heavily, silently, Lymond folded his hands over his abdomen. He became an uncomfortable jumble of slackness and fraught tension, blue eyes wide and teeth minutely bared.

"The dreams. You were shouting," Jerott explained, and found his own voice hoarse and unsteady on his lips.

"And what is it that you would like me to clarify about my situation?" Lymond put as much acid as he could muster into the words. "What sordid detail piqued your interest?"

The glitter of saltwater remained on the shadows beneath his eyes, but Lymond did not move to wipe the tears away. He seemed half submerged in dream still, barely conscious of where he was.

The antagonistic tone unbalanced Jerott just as it always did, and he sat down hard next to where Lymond lay, confusion mingled with exasperation on his features. He shook his head at Lymond's venomous stare.

"Are you in pain?"

Lymond's eyes glinted as though he had been provoked. "What did I say?"

Jerott sighed and let his shoulders fall into an aspect of defeat. His eyes were hot with misery. "All sorts of things. I don't know. You said you can't go home."

One of the loosely folded hands flinched and began to shake before Lymond regained control of it. He swallowed drily.

"I see. Well that much you already knew."

Lymond's eyes closed and his expression was subsumed by nausea. On one temple a muscle tightened, and a purplish vein showed through translucent skin. He struggled with the weight of one arm, moving it so as to lie his fingers across his lowered eyelids.

Jerott reached for a leather flask with water in it, and softly determined to move Lymond's hand and help him to sit up against the wall.

Instead, Lymond made himself an intractable dead weight. Resistance set itself in Lymond's jaw, and Jerott felt something give, like a worn cord breaking with a twang inside himself.

"For God's sake, Francis, I don't care what family secrets you feel the need to keep from me! I no longer wish to know any more than I do about Marthe's parentage or yours. You are clearly related - " Jerott glanced away with regret. "The heavens would never play such a cruel trick twice otherwise. But that is not why I am here."

Lymond lay deep among the bedding, recoiled and withdrawn like a threatened predator. His breathing was laboured and some unseen agony twisted each joint and tendon. The shape of his skull was more clearly defined than usual, his pallid skin drawn tight up to his hairline, where sweat began to darken the coils of blond hair. Enmeshed in pain, he would speak only of pain; he would inflict only pain; he would embody the thing that was consuming him because no other care would suffice to dull it.

In this context, Jerott's words offered to lay a responsibility of explanation in his hands that Lymond could only thrust away from himself viciously.

"Then why are you here? I see no wayward teenagers twisting your conscience; no innocents left to save, no need for vengeance gone unaddressed. You would not even press on to find the woman you profess to love - have you any idea of the danger she has likely put herself and Kiaya Khatun in?"

It wasn't enough. In Stamboul he had thrown a knife, lashing out like he might at a stray dog, and that had not been enough either.

His expression grim, resigned, Jerott replaced the flask on the floor and - Lymond's heartbeat sharpened with fear - looked momentarily as though he might stand and leave Lymond to stew in his discomfort.

Instead, he pried Lymond's unwilling shoulders from the nest of blankets on the floor with ungentle fingers.

Lymond hung back, a weight that acted against the strength drawing him into Jerott's hold. But when the balance of his body shifted and he fell forwards against the other man's chest, all the weight with which he had pulled away now collapsed into the waiting embrace.

Lymond was submerged in Jerott's arms, which were a tourniquet around the torrent of pain in his body. His head dropped into the shape of Jerott's neck, his raw nerves scuffing against the cotton ruff of his collar. His body shook and Jerott's hold tightened; Lymond's fists balled as though to fight off this imprisonment, but he brought them to rest against Jerott's back. He did not embrace him in return, his palms felt like they had on the galleys: flayed and exposed, bloodied and ruined. But his arms took strength where they lay alongside Jerott's rib cage, and he gasped in the hot air trapped between their bodies, inhaling the scents of fire smoke and damp wood that were imprinted on Jerott's clothing.

Jerott's was not a gentle gesture, but a fierce onslaught of care that fastened as stubbornly to Lymond's being as the ache of withdrawal did. He did not release him, even when the shivering slowed and became intermittent. He did not release him even when Lymond's eyes drooped and fell closed in the dark of Jerott's shoulder. Lymond's breathing steadied and still Jerott could not let him go.

Jerott stared at the wall with unfocused, fearful eyes. The blond hair that tickled and stuck to his cheek was familiar and yet not; the thin shoulders and bony, hard-muscled back was like Marthe's but different. The need with which Lymond had, at last, drawn on Jerott's care was wholly new, and intoxicating.

With stilted, stiff movement, Lymond's fists loosened and unfurled. He lay his palms on the plains of Jerott's shoulder-blades and slowly, cautiously, wrapped himself closer to the source of respite and relief.

Jerott leaned his jaw against Lymond's head, and wondered whether Lymond could hear his blood thunder like floodwaters in his veins.

It was rare that the expressive features ever lay so still.

It was rarer yet that Jerott Blyth paused to examine anything with such care.

Lymond's body had sunken against him, true sleep imposing its peace at last. Jerott guided him carefully back to the floor and arranged the covers around him, unconsciously tweaking at folds and ripples of wool until Lymond lay neatly beneath an even covering, protected from the many draughts in the little hut.

Moving on the way to tidying Lymond's unruly waves of hair, Jerott caught himself, his hand poised by the curve of Lymond's brow and the elegant line of his temple.

When he had looked at Marthe he had drunk in all that he could about her appearance, wide-eyed and unashamed, letting his longing gaze caress each and every quadrant of skin and shape. He could enumerate and bring to mind all the tones of her hair - lemon flesh, saffron and sand, ochre and brass - all so unique to her - and all the gradients of her sun-basted skin. He had imagined what it would be like to hold Marthe before he had held her; he had sought frantically to recall the taste of her lips that time in the tekke he thought he had made her endure his kiss (all that he recalled, though, was the subtle fire of the raki on his own tongue).

He did not look at anyone else in such a way.

He did not look.

He did not let himself look.

But here were those familiar features, softened in sleep, their edges chiselled and bevelled into something stronger, perhaps even more striking. All those colours that he had told himself were hers alone, flagrantly sported by another.

As though he had placed an ember from the fireplace on his tongue and swallowed it in one gulp, Jerott felt heat slash a line deep into his body. His heart twisted: a resistant, bucking animal. He could not explain whether it was the same feeling that was kindled when he thought of Lymond's sister. That had been a need, a demand that his every fibre clamoured for without shame. This - this made his pulse quicken in a new way. A furtive, hopeful way that left him feeling physically bruised.

He murmured a prayer and it rebounded on him. His mind offered only a mocking rejoinder:

Stay me.

Refresh me.

I am sick with love.

As though his fingers belonged to another person, Jerott watched his own hand descend to stroke sweat-streaked golden coils off Lymond's skin. The hair at his temple was softer and finer than Eastern silk, the feeling of it beneath the sensitive pads of Jerott's fingers something that he wanted to experience again and again.

Shyly, he smoothed its satin strands with short strokes of touch. His thumb moved out to compare the feeling of one perfectly shaped brow, and it was only when Lymond uttered a sigh in his sleep that Jerott withdrew. He flexed his fingers, feeling their skin changed as though burned.

For a time, he sat wondering at himself and at the newly peaceful body curled among the covers. He had contributed to the rest that Lymond now enjoyed: it was an act of construction the likes of which he had never thought he would experience outside the spiritual ceremonies of the Order.

This was a fearful new discovery that made his pulse run in feverish haste. Where faith and protectiveness and the sweetness of touch eddied together.

Shaken, Jerott returned to the other end of the shelter and wrapped himself as well as he could in a leftover blanket. He listened to the storm, and did not intend to sleep, but the strange emotions of the already-long day left him wrung out and exhausted. His chin smarted and he was at last beginning to feel the chill of his damp clothes and hair.

His mind blundered in pained desperation against all the choices of the previous year. He covered his face with his hands and asked himself how it had come to this, so soon after Gabriel's betrayal, so soon after he had made a promise to keep his love in check. And yet - he could not imagine choosing differently. His memories shone with the gilt adornment of Lymond's sanction, also: he had needed Jerott, as much as Jerott had needed to be there.

He moved his fingers apart, like fretwork over his eyes, so that when he blinked rapidly at Lymond's resting form, he felt his lashes flutter against skin. […]

[…]

His eyelids grew heavy as he looked across the fire at the peaceful hills of Lymond's form beneath covers. Jerott drifted out of consciousness wondering what it would be like to bury his face in the back of blond curls; to touch his cheek to the fine-muscled neck and shoulder; to press his mouth to skin as smooth and beautifully freckled as a goldfinch egg.

[…]

Lymond awoke with a sense of lack. He was wound round in a plethora of blankets and covers but felt exposed. The blankness of thought that followed a deep sleep lingered, and he struggled to grasp the context of where he had slept and what time of day it was. Memory and pain repelled one another, like oil and water.

All he could discern was that it was cold and it was dark.

He blinked rapidly, squeezed his eyes shut and opened them wide. The darkness endured, but he moved his head and was able to identify the embers of a low burning fire. Relief prickled his scalp at the sight, at the confirmation of sight, and the clue as to where he had found himself.

It was a small room - no, a small building - thin-walled, thatch-roofed, sparsely furnished with details he could not quite identify. Pots and herbs hung from beams that criss-crossed the space beneath the sloping roof, biding, draped in spider webs, cloaked by winter disuse. The air was heavy with the smell of wood smoke and wet cloth and the only sound he noticed was the occasional hiss of protest from the embers as meltwater dripped through the narrow vents in the ceiling.

He was not in Volos any longer and he was not in a travelling tent or wagon. Even as consciousness surged, he could not say where this building was or how he had come to be there.

Without having done more than crane his head from the covers, Lymond felt his heart pound with exertion. A reflexive sweat of panic chilled his temples and his body, and the throbbing of his veins was like the warning of distant thunder. He rolled onto his back and made his hands into fists within the blankets.

His thoughts were like moth-eaten silk, unravelling as he grasped for them.

He had left the monastery at Volos. He had ridden downhill, through forest and mist, through thinning trees and cooling air, dogged all the way by regret. He had to cross the lake, though he did not want to - but it was the only way back onto the path he had lost. And the harder he pushed to reach it the more hopeless it seemed, the further behind he appeared to have been left, the more he understood and sorrowed for how much he had let them all down.

That thought finally snagged on something: he flinched, his eyes closed, throat tight, as though he could look away from the recollection of that silent knife and the blood, staining purple satin to wet black. He began to shake, and his dreams started to seep into his mind again like the snow dripping from the chimney vents. All of those he would never see again: doors closing, closing.

Among the dead and the distant who haunted his thoughts were Marthe and Güzel, who he had seen together at Djerba, even as he made his own plans. Pride with pride, a pursuit of power that forged onwards with inexorable need, loosed from a divine grasp like the apple of Eris. The ear of the Tsar would be bent to new fortune tellers, those who were unafraid to answer back to the heavens and tell them to speak their predictions anew.

He understood the compulsion, he supposed, but he had to stop it, else they would become just another sphere within his nightmares.

It was also, he acknowledged, out of a selfish fear that he recoiled from giving up Russia to them. If they kept him from his intended work he must face his present position: depleted of all resources, robbed of family twice over, and, by necessity, a sword for hire and a pair of strong rowing arms as he had once been before.

Lymond turned to his side again and curled, animal-like, about his knees. Deep in the muddle of blankets and clothes he picked up the scent of another body: something difficult to define, sweaty and damp like he was himself, but of a different source. Leather where Lymond wore velvet; woollens where he wore silk. He inhaled deeply, but the smell of the other was elusive and soon lost in his own miasma. It made him lie still with concentration though, and in stillness he found another memory: the salvation of warmth and an embrace that had gathered together all the fraying parts of Francis Crawford's being, fusing his shattered person like a smith might melt down old silver to forge it anew.

He sighed into that memory because it did not hurt like all other thoughts hurt. It was fresh and simple, familiar and yet long awaited, as though he had been able to find comfort in his pocket when he needed it most, where once he had placed it and forgotten about it. Demanding nothing, promising nothing - Lymond's mouth twisted wryly against the blankets - understanding nothing. Just the memory of an embrace, like a dogged presence he could not shake free of.

Almost wary of breathing lest he disturb the recollection, he imagined the shadow of touch steadying, tethering him. A hard jaw against his trembling head and flexed muscle across his shivering back.

There had, after all, been one person absent from his nightmares. One who did not need to be mourned and who countered regret with stubborn continuity. One who - Lymond opened his eyes and stared with resignation into the darkness - was yet to be freed of his thankless task, but who needed, like all the others, to be shown why he must leave Lymond to his own lonely path.

If only Jerott had not woken at Volos. There would be no new act to bring to mind previous occasions in which Jerott's utility could not be denied. No need for Lymond to resent his own weary body for clamouring in hope of peace and rest, for its treacherous nostalgia for a firm, warm embrace standing between Lymond and the beckoning road.

Just a night, his flesh seemed to beg him, quaking more at the idea of cold than at its actual penetration of the covers. A night to sleep and be warm and to let another shoulder the burden of his needs. Just to sustain him through whatever lay beyond here, his skin pleaded, tightening and puckering like a plucked fowl along the backs of his arms and his neck.

Lymond pressed his short nails into his palms and regretted their bluntness. He thrust himself up to a sitting position and threw back the blankets to make his body aware of the cold properly and fully. He would master this childish longing more easily than he had mastered the withdrawal from the drug. He must do so, for he feared stopping now, feared the war within himself: continue or - cease. He saw no way to navigate a path in between.

He forced himself to stand and waited for a moment as the darkness wavered murkily and a tide of nausea grasped at him.

Stiff-legged, aware with each movement of the aches of riding and of sleeping on a hard floor, and more besides, Lymond shuffled to the area where a jumble of packs and shoes, old fishing rods and reed woven receptacles lay. On the opposite side of the grey lines of light that edged the doorway, he saw Jerott's sleeping form.

His body crumpled awkwardly against the wall in the draught from the entrance, his head to the wooden panels, knees drawn up and arms tight across his body. He had positioned himself as far as he could be from Lymond in the small building.

Lymond approached with trepidation and was assaulted by the stench of wet horse: the only blanket Jerott had kept for himself was the saddle blanket, beneath which he snored lightly. His hair was still damp from outdoors, clinging to his forehead and cheek in dark lines. On his chin was a separate stain, rising from the shadow of his throat, a strand of newly dried blood, smudged carelessly, neither deep nor long, but enough to make Lymond frown.

He did not remember causing it, but the guilt he felt was adamant. It was further confirmation that Jerott Blyth would be much better off without him.

Lymond shuddered and turned away to pull on his boots and cloak. He ensured that Jerott was left with all he would need on the road, and hauled the pack to the door with shivering, unsteady determination.

Gently, Lymond pulled open the door of the fishing hut and the gust of fresh oxygen made the embers behind him glow brighter.

He glanced back, but Jerott continued to sleep, caught now between the firelight and the cool blue of the evening. On impulse, Lymond left the pack and retrieved one of the blankets he had had for his own bed. It was dry and still warm, and he tucked it around Jerott's legs carefully, ensuring that he did not wake.

Outside, snow had met the edges of the building in arrested drifts, packed thick and undulating over treacherous marshy ground. The sky above the mountains was the colour of mallow flowers, and it was impossible to tell cloud from the deepening of night. All had the heavy, expectant stillness of winter, when the world took a deep breath between snowfalls and adjusted thoughtfully to its new mantle.

The pony was nowhere to be seen. Jerott must have turned it loose to let it find its own way through the storm. It would have discovered shelter in the woods or it would have provided a boon for the hungry winter wolves. It had not waited by the hut with any misguided sense of attachment. No trace of it remained: the snow was pristine, untouched even by the birds chattering in the trees or the squirrels that shook the occasional dusting of white loose from the branches.

Lymond gazed at the scene, and as he did he began to piece together the journey there. He glanced down at the heel of his boots and saw the trace of crimson glint on the wheel of his spur. He grimaced and left the pack for the moment, taking instead one of the oars and beginning, methodically, to clear a path to the lake's edge.

[... about this point in the fic there's overlap between chapters because I couldn't decide on the perspective etc, and I kept going back to rewrite the build-up/add more in]

"Are you leaving?"

Lymond paused in the act of shouldering on the pack. He hid the way his face pulled in a wince at the weight of it and turned to the door. "I told you, I am going to Russia alone."

Jerott's body pushed him to stand, leaning against the wall, even though sleep still lay heavily on his mind and his face. "But I thought - If Marthe does not want - If she no longer -" Jerott rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and shook his head. They had already had this talk, hadn't they?

Things had seemed to simple, for a few days at Volos. Now that tenuous bond he thought he had forged with Marthe had been swept away like a fine veil of cobweb, and he no longer knew where he should turn.

"Would you not have use of me there?"

Lymond's shoulders moved a fraction, and he sighed. "It is not that, Jerott."

For a moment it seemed that Lymond might offer more, unbidden, but when he looked up the gem-like glitter of his eyes was resolute. "This is something I must undertake myself."

Jerott's voice came, impulsive as ever, from the shadow where he stood, beyond the reach of the dying fire. "But I would serve under you."

Lymond smiled. "Up to a point, I have no doubt that you would. But as the proverb says: bonum esse, habere amicos: sed miseros esse, qui his uti cogantur."

He arranged his gloves and put his hand on the latch.

Jerott moved forward with a frown, his sluggish mind picking at the Latin. "There is no compulsion when friendship is offered freely. You barely have the strength to carry that pack. How will you make it even as far as Güzel's camp?"

The low red embers now illuminated Jerott from beneath, light picking out the worried angle of his brows, his flared nostrils and bow-curved lip. And - Lymond's eyes alighted on it instantly - the fresh wound on his jaw.

"I will manage. I have a great deal of experience with rowing through discomfort," he said sourly.

Jerott, seeing before him only a long and lonely journey West, spoke with exasperation. "You don't have to always do this alone."

The cornflower blue eyes, muddied by the red light, widened a fraction. "Alle þinges er maad of one alloon substance of one alloon ordinance. I will not involve those who do not need to become involved. I have allowed it to happen too often, and it has not been myself who has paid the price."

Jerott noticed the other man's gaze rest on his chin and touched his fingers to the injury. "This was an accident."

Lymond said nothing more. He reached for the oars that leaned in a corner of the hut with the fishing tackle, and Jerott felt panic, like drowning, push him another step closer.

"For God's sake, you don't always have to be the martyr!"

"I thought that martyrdom was done entirely for God's sake?"

Jerott made a noise of frustration and grabbed for his travelling cloak, its wool still damp from the earlier journey. Lymond flung the door of the fishing hut open and the gust of fresh oxygen made the embers glow brighter.

Snow had met the edges of the building in arrested drifts, packed thick and undulating over treacherous marshy ground. The sky above the mountains was the colour of mallow flowers, and it was impossible to tell cloud from the deepening of night. All had the heavy, expectant stillness of winter, when precipitation had ceased and the world adjusted thoughtfully to its new mantle.

Lymond paused for a moment and then stabbed the oars into the knee-high drift at the empty doorway and began the task of forging a path.

Jerott surged forwards but stopped, stunned, when Lymond flipped his cloak back to lay a hand on the decorated pommel knop of his dagger.

"I will write word to you at Lyons. Go back to Volos and then to France. If I can send Marthe to you I shall."

"It seems a poor kind of charity," Jerott told him bitterly, but he stayed back on the limen, his hands braced in each side of the entrance as he watched Lymond toil at the snow.

Lymond made good pace, but Jerott saw the forced control of his movement, the uneasy line of his shoulders. Occasionally he had to stop and release a single, shuddering breath before he continued his work, and then Jerott would take a few steps along the path behind him, reluctant to simply turn away and let him go.

When he reached the water's edge and hooked the dory close to land, the slush of ice in the surrounding water hissed and chattered at the disturbance. A family of rooks started up a raucous chorus in the trees at the foot of the mountain, and above the lake a v of waterfowl coursed its way across the sky.

Lymond pulled the frozen oilskin from the boat and clambered in, his movements catching and stiff, and Jerott approached the edge only a little too late to step on board.

As the boat drifted and Lymond settled himself and his pack and oars, he called back once: "I need someone I can trust outside of Muscovy, Jerott. I need you to be my guide to the ongoing world." He looked up at Jerott, over the oars, and his face was shrouded and dark like the sky, his eyes hidden beneath the shadow of his unruly hair.

Jerott clenched his fists and breathed heavily. His fingers were frozen and his lungs ached; his boots and stockings were still damp from earlier, and now damp again anew, and the crisp air made the smell of wet wool a cloying distraction.

Once, the slender arms extended, willow-straight, and once, the oars dipped smoothly into the thick water before Lymond's arms were pulled back, close to his chest.

Then the mechanism that drove his perfect movements seemed to fail: a cog with worn teeth, an unoiled thread. The oars burst from the water roughly, with uneven angles. They wavered in the air and the arms shook and strained as they extended. Lymond bowed his head, his shoulders shaking, and he might have made a small sound of pain or frustration.

Jerott did not hear it. He did not take the time to steel himself, but plunged into the soupy water at the lake's edge, slipping down hidden, muddy banks, weighted and steadied only by the cold lakewater that poured mercilessly into his boots. The chill of it enclosed his skin instantly, dragging at his movements and travelling up his body like a fever. He pushed through it. He had to. Lymond had not travelled far, and Jerott had faith that the lake was not yet that deep.

It reached the tops of his thighs when he waded at last to the prow of the boat.

Lymond's head had raised, his eyes searching the darkness blankly as Jerott splashed closer. His mouth was locked shut and there was unmistakable fear in his expression.

Jerott spoke to him as calmly as he could through chattering teeth, tugging at the oars and removing them from Lymond's hands and the waters. "It's me, Francis. Let's go back." He laid the oars in the boat and turned to pull the shallow vessel back in among the frozen knees of the reeds.

"I did not ask..." Lymond whispered hoarsely.

Jerott swallowed a gulp of cold air and considered his speech between each slow, lapping footstep. "You never do," he finally grunted.

He fell to his knees once in getting to land, but his legs already burned with cold and he got to his feet methodically, tying the dory back to its mooring and extending a hand to Lymond, who could not see it.

"Francis, get up," Jerott tried to speak softly. He leaned and took a fistful of Lymond's brocaded cloak, and at last prompted the other man to unfurl, wobbling on the rocking dory.

Lymond insisted on taking the pack, fumbling for its straps, and levered himself unsteadily onto land with aid of the oars as well as Jerott's hold.

They struggled slowly back along the path in the snow, stepping up to the raised deck of the fishing hut and stumbling into a room no longer so well warmed by its neglected fire.

Jerott did not release his grip on Lymond, but he stopped, his legs freezing, burning, and his chest aching still more with a regret and a guilt that he did not understand.

"Francis..."

Lymond's eyes, dark and dilated, looked wild, but they did, at last, look at him. Then he tugged his arm free and Jerott realised how bruisingly tight he had been holding it.

"Oh, Christ," Jerott breathed. "I'm sorry." He stepped back, his palms placatory.

Lymond swayed like a birch sapling and reached a hand out - not for the wall, but for Jerott's fingers, which his icy grasp closed on as he stumbled to his knees.

Jerott's cold hands tried to capture Lymond's focus, to make his questions intelligible to the mind trapped within its brittle husk of agony. He cupped Lymond's face, he clasped his temples, and the coolness of Jerott's palms against the pulsing heat in Lymond's head made Lymond's eyes flutter closed in a moment's bliss.

Pain made his head feel light, but Jerott's hold seemed to tether him to the stuff of reality.

He had no answers for the questions he was bombarded with and he grasped, instead, at the cloth of Jerott's clothing.

Continue his journey or simply cease to be. Those had been the choices he had allowed himself.

Instead he was, once more, at the mercy of another's care. Not the impersonal, professional touch of Archie, not the unconditional sweetness of family, nor even the resentful acidity he had received from Oonagh. Jerott kneeled before him, his hands on Lymond's face, his eyes dark and wide and full of concern. Lymond's gloved hands pawed and clutched at his cloak and jerkin like a cat settling, unable to speak his need but seeking, in desperation, the respite that seemed to be on offer.

It was his body, he thought to himself between the strikes of pain in his head. His body that demanded Jerott's nearness when his mind could not rule with sense and articulation.

But he could not make his shaking fingers withdraw their plea, and Jerott drew him close against his chest.

Lymond's breath heaved, once more contained within the safety of Jerott's hold. His head was in Jerott's neck again - such an easy place to rest - and he gnashed his teeth in the darkness against Jerott's cold cloak, wishing, fervently for it all to be at an end.

Amid the agony in his head, Lymond forced a rough laugh out from his aching throat, determined that he should not have comfort if he could not have autonomy. "Well, Jerott. Twice have you held me and twice have you prevented me from leaving. I suppose now, like Proteus, I am to reveal my true form and grant you all that you wish."

He felt the results of his words instantly: Jerott flinched and let out a breath like he had been dealt a blow. Lymond felt the pressure of Jerott's Adam's apple move against his head when the other man swallowed.

"I ought to have left you in that boat to freeze?"

"Yes."

He did not even think about the answer, it had been on his lips before Jerott's sentence finished. Lymond clutched icy fists in wet gloves to his chest, leaning on Jerott with body alone, forcing Jerott to take his weight in his arms.

"No," Jerott returned, the single syllable wavering with horror. "No."

Lymond's laughter was devoid of joy: a hacking sound, the noise of a fox chewing its way out of a trap. "As you say. Then you have won me. The price salbe presentit til thaim that best has disseruyt."

Jerott tried to lift Lymond's body from him, to hold his juddering arms and torso at a distance and meet his eyes.

Sullenly, Lymond kept his head down. He felt trapped by the pain, trapped by inaction, trapped by a slow recovery and a fate that he thought he had learned to be more resigned to. The rich care in his gaoler's expression did not ease his frustration. The tight grip on his upper arms pinched just enough that he bared his teeth and leaned into it, fighting Jerott's hold with his bodyweight.

"Christ, what do you think I want?" Jerott breathed in a horrified whisper.

From Lymond's throat emerged another rasp of sound that mocked the very idea of humour.

He finally raised his head to bestow a withering look on Jerott.

"I don't begrudge you it."

Jerott's face was very close, and Lymond leaned towards him, his body still tripping with spasms of pain even as his eyes delivered a challenge.

Confusion and disgust were all he was met with. Jerott jerked his chin away pointedly as he let Lymond fall against Jerott's shoulder again.

Lymond's forehead furrowed uselessly against the thick wool of Jerott's cloak. Its weave was abrasive against his screwed-up eyelids and it felt nothing of the furious struggle of Lymond's features in response to the pain. He rocked his head against the curve of Jerott's body, and he realised, with despair, that to be held against linen or skin would provide a far better distraction from the discomfort of his own corporeal prison.

His body's conflicting demands seemed to tear at his sinews and joints: pain and pleasure, cruelty and comfort. Care always came at a cost, did it not?

At last, a blankness, like a snowed-in landscape, followed his fury. The flames of frustration that had been fanned were reduced to white embers, cooling, crumbling as they settled into ashen byproduct.

He subsided against Jerott, breathing against the skin of his neck, and heard Jerott's rueful murmur as though through water.

"If you knew what you offered."

Jerott had dropped to his own knees in stunned recognition of the plea in Lymond's gesture. The gloved hand grasping his fingers had been an admission of need that Jerott fumbled to answer, shuffling close to Lymond like they were children sharing secrets beneath the kitchen table.

Jerott laid his touch on Lymond's shoulders as Lymond's fingers coiled and bunched in Jerott's cloak. He was able to see his surroundings now, Jerott was almost certain, but the pain made his expression into a death mask, rictus tight, the blue eyes bulging uncomfortably wide.

The embrace had seemed to calm Lymond, to stymy his frustration and anger, and it had given Jerott a sense of a contribution made. Lymond's form, even with the racking sobs of pain pulling through it over and over, felt right in his arms. It felt neat and compact, strong and graceful. When his face nuzzled Jerott's collarbone and his hands pulled at his clothes, when Jerott leaned his jaw on Lymond's head and let flaxen strands adhere, tickling, to his dark stubble, it felt as natural and as proper as anything else he used his body for.

So when, spitting venom, the creature in his arms had attempted laughter, Jerott was struck cold anew at the implication of Lymond's words. What had he won? His arms tightened reflexively on Lymond's body and then he made them loosen, trying to disentangle himself, to see Lymond's face and to understand the despair in that voice.

Lymond's body was limp, doll-like in Jerott's struggling grip, but the blue eyes glimmered from behind blond curls, mocking and hungry as he tried to absorb pain and turn it into a weapon of his own.

Jerott shook his head, not really wanting to hear a response to the question drawn from him. "Christ, what do you think I want?"

His arms folded across his body like an funereal effigy, Lymond shivered and made a sound, and looked at Jerott with something that perhaps was intended as a seduction.

"I don't begrudge you it."

His alabaster skin was clammy and the hollows of his eyes were purple and uneven. His lips were drawn into a thin white blade across his mouth and the fine, neat hairs of his brows were dishevelled from contact with Jerott's cloak. He leaned towards Jerott with the inevitability of a tree falling, and Jerott raised his chin aside to make his disinterest in the offer clear.

Lymond's face was against his shoulder again, pressing for comfort like a nesting animal. He would not unfold his arms to hold Jerott, but he would not let Jerott move away.

Jerott wrapped himself around that fragile form again and suppressed his own shivers. His legs were soaking wet and the cloth on them clung. The fire was perilously close to going out and the winter's night had enclosed the fishing hut and its surroundings.

But, now wordless, unable to speak or act upon the easement and solace he required, Lymond had stilled in Jerott's hold. He wished, it seemed, to be close, though he hated to acknowledge it, and Jerott would not drive him away in order to arrange his own comforts.

Jerott had seen Francis Crawford endure a great deal in the past years: fire and water, the blade and the thonged whip. Nothing had penetrated the marble-poised, expertly composed demeanour like this withdrawal though. External forces could be rebuffed or managed, met with raised chin and accepting defiance. But this was a pain from within: Lymond's own body turning against itself, matching and outwitting his defenses because the pain was a mirror of himself, accustomed to all of Lymond's tricks already. Jerott had never heard such misery as that contained in a single, unthinking word when he had asked if he ought to have left Lymond to perish on Lake Karla.

Yes.

Jerott knew how to handle wounds: sword, arrow, broken bones. He knew how to calm and control his own fears, how to push through pain and tap into the rush of aroused senses to keep on fighting. To keep on living. But he did not understand the sickness that ravaged Lymond in these intermittent raids. He did not understand the darkness or the desire for darkness.

He knew only that he would not leave a wounded man to travel alone unless the need was dire. And he clung to that principle, which he recognised and welcomed, and he understood that the impulse to stop Lymond from going was separate from the impulse to hold him close. The two needs may have joined in felicitous convenience when Francis had reached for his hand, but Jerott reassured himself that he could tell the difference, even if, in his pain, Lymond apparently could not.

The episode had passed, and Lymond lay unmoving against him. Jerott at last let his chin lower to rub against Lymond's hair again, let his eyes close as he re-examined what had passed.

He did not want a reward, or a prize. He had seen how Lymond deflected pain with his body - from himself and from others.

What do you think I want?

Jerott sighed and shifted his shoulder so that Lymond's breath warmed his neck. Lymond lay as heavily on him as before, and Jerott turned his cheek against the thickets of blond curls.

"If you knew what you offered..." he trailed off, imagination failing him.

[I think the next bit was written earlier than the above chapters - emotions are running higher, and as often happens with F/J I feel I have to go back and cool them down, and then they cool too much and inertia sets in. I was definitely overthinking this. It then turns into really fluffy smut that probably belongs with a totally different fic, but it's sweet and I like the headcanon that Jerott might know something about massage, so I'm plonking it here with everything else for anyone who's interested.

Just imagine I took a screenshot of that post saying 'all Jerott/Francis fic reads like it was written by Jerott as wish-fulfillment' and pasted it here. It is a post that has haunted me since I first went tag diving, and I will never escape the sense that it mocks every J/F fic I write.]

Shakily, Lymond drew the cocoon of blankets about his shoulders and plucked at the toe of one damp stocking. The fire was regaining warmth, but Jerott continued to fuss around it, prodding wood and kindling into rigid formation and judiciously failing to meet Francis's eyes.

"The attacks affect your memory also?"

"They do."

Finally, he looked up and scanned Lymond's expression. A frown scored his brow, but Lymond could not tell what source Jerott's temper drew on. He sighed and sat back, staring at Lymond over the rising flames and the thin breath of smoke winding its way towards the roof.

"What do you remember?" he asked grudgingly.

"Enough to surmise that I have been unjust."

Jerott shook his head and looked away.

Lymond wrapped his arms around his knees and tried to summon warmth from within his own body. "My intention was to leave, and yet I am still here. Will you resent me for that, when it was not my own choice?"

That struck a chord, hammer to string, and a shudder ran through Jerott's shoulders.

"You dream. And you speak when you do." He looked up, and trouble and care mingled in his eyes. "You feel you let them down. The child, your mistress. Philippa. God knows who else. Your family. I think. You miss them, but you say you cannot see them. I don't understand it, when it seems to bring you no relief to be away."

Lymond made himself hold Jerott's gaze, though his throat closed with hard tension and his eyes stung from the smoke.

"You have - twice - intended to take the dory out onto the lake, alone by preference, when it should have been as evident to you as the weather in the sky or the lateness of the day that you lack the strength."

Where he rested it against the floor, Jerott's hand formed a balled fist. His legs shivered and he moved them, sitting on the side of his thigh to hide his body's nerves. "You are not a prisoner here. I am not your keeper. But you would have - I couldn't leave you like that."

Silent, Lymond measured Jerott's hurt and confusion.

[…]

There was more he had said. Lymond could see it, he could practically taste the other words in his mouth, and in Jerott's miserable expression he saw their confirmation. In Lymond's mind was a store of language, a magpie's hoard of treasure gleaned from books and papers and people. Where his own wits failed him, he always had recourse to the prepared cleverness of others.

"The price salbe presentit til thaim that best has disseruyt."

Jerott's eyes closed and he turned his head to the shadows, nausea crawling over his features.

Lymond watched him, very still and very wide of eye, conscious of the renewal of bodily charge that he felt in the wake of the migraines. Suddenly there was heat in his blood again, and he was like a clepsydra filling, drop by drop: it pooled in his belly, accompanied by the sensation of having come upon his own sentiments unexpectedly.

In rashness and in the desperation of pain, he must have offered himself: the prize for Jerott's loyalty. It had been a crass gesture, diminishing to both of them, but rooted, sure as a weed, in something real.

The idea of his offer being taken up produced an honest quickening of his pulse.

[…]

Once I loved a girl and wished to make her my wife, and once I loved a man and wished to make him my leader.

[…]

He caressed the stubborn bloom with his mind, wondering when its seed had settled. Gratitude may have nourished it, but probably it had rather thrived on neglect - Lymond did not recall its cultivation at any point between St Mary's and the Mediterranean.

It was not amor de profundis, of that he could be fairly certain, but it was within him, unlovely desire, scrabbling for purchase among the rubble of his being. It was selfish and heedless of all the others who had been hurt before, of all who had left their hurt on him in turn. Perhaps it was some state of bestial default, an insensible need, to which his parched self had turned when all others had fallen by the wayside: left behind, snatched away, driven from him for their own betterment and protection.

Lymond's lips twisted. As an invitation, it seemed that what he had said was akin to the death he had given the delly on the road to Volos. Nothing else had driven Jerott away - but that lack of finesse had probably done more than anything else Lymond might have tried.

"I have shown you improper thanks," Lymond said quietly. "But I once more owe you my life, it seems."

"You owe me nothing," Jerott snapped, getting to his feet.

He stormed two short, absurd paces to the edge of the small room and stood facing the wall, his breathing heavy. Jerott snuck a single glance over his shoulder.

"My clothes are soaked," he muttered.

Being a man of spiritual rather than physical shame, he began to remove each item with violent haste, loosening ties and freeing clinging cloth from skin that looked blue with cold even in the firelight.

Lymond, whose cloak, gloves and boots had been taken from him with care and the utmost gentleness, allowed a shiver of interest to run through his body.

Jerott laid his clothes over the rack he had created by the fire and stooped smoothly to pick up a blanket, one dry enough to be capable of warmth. He swung it over his shoulders and was momentarily displayed against its red pattern: lean and toned, the skin of his chest still swarthy even where it had not been exposed to the sun, fine black hair gathering in a line down his centre to draw the eye.

He met Lymond's interest with a glare and an astonished blush and wrapped the blanket about his torso loosely. It fell to the tops of his thighs, leaving stocky, muscled legs exposed and lit by the flames. His knees were scuffed and red, the colour of his mouth.

A pace away.

He might be at Lymond's side before either of them could catch breath, but Lymond had ruined any chance of that. Logic said that this was for the best - the depths of Jerott's attachments were notoriously abyssal. But loneliness had found a way to raise its grizzled head, loosed by the migraines, slipping free while the pain distracted Lymond. He wondered what Jerott's hold would feel like to a body not savaged by pain, what his embrace could do for a man who found himself all too sober and aware of what he had lost - as well as of the value of what remained.

"Francis. You're shaking."

Jerott frowned, and the distance between them drifted away like fire smoke. His hands reached for Lymond's wrists, his eyes studied Lymond's own. "Is it happening again? Already?"

Lymond blinked rapidly and shook his head. He tucked himself deeper into his own wrappings and dusted off a wan smile.

"No, no. I am just cold." He had not in fact noticed until asked, but although his core retained heat, his back and his feet had begun to feel like ice.

"You should take the wet stockings off," Jerott advised.

Lymond stared at him: guileless, impulsive, loyal to a fault. Unable to leave and unable to admit why he remained.

Oblivious to Lymond's grim resignation, Jerott sighed and his fingers shifted to the ties at the knees of Lymond's britches. He loosened them so as to reach the ribboned stockings beneath. He worked brusquely, but the feeling of his hot hands sliding silk down Lymond's calves was enough to make the air shudder in Lymond's throat and blood drop to the pit of his stomach.

Jerott froze at the sound and looked up. His head was bowed and his expression was difficult to read, but he let his fingers remain where they were on the folds of knitted silk.

"Are you all right?"

It was not an expression he could remember seeing on Lymond's face before.

It was not an expression he recalled seeing on anyone's face in recent times. Unless there had, perhaps, been a mirror in the tekke.

Jerott's fingers lay heavy on wrinkled silk, and he pressed them into the fabric, sliding it against Lymond's skin once more.

The heavy-lidded eyes widened minutely; the dark flourishes of Lymond's nostrils flared with another intake of air. The result seemed to be the same whichever stockinged leg Jerott stroked, so - he told himself prosaically - it was probably not a response garnered by bruise or injury.

He wrapped each hand around the athletic calves and their coverings, his weight on his own grazed knees, the blanket he wore hanging to either side of his naked body. Lymond's golden lashes moved quickly, like the wings of a small bird or a moth, and his lips parted as Jerott drew touch and silk together down to Lymond's two fine ankles. The golden hair on his milk-white skin glittered like embellished thread in the firelight. Jerott let one warm palm travel down the bare front of Lymond's shin, smoothing the soft texture beneath his touch, ostensibly trying to warm, but savouring the meeting of flesh.

Pleasurable sensation was somewhat spoiled by the sodden chill of the knitted feet, but Jerott pulled each stocking away quickly then, and sat back with a small, triumphant smile.

Lymond's breathing was noticeably rapid. Two spots of colour has risen to his cheeks and he held both covering and knees protectively close to his body.

As though the realisation of what he had done only now caught up to him, Jerott felt his own skin glow with heat. He blinked and his smile faded and he remembered to close the blanket around his body once more. Touch had stirred his flesh, and he gritted his teeth, trying to battle his bodily response with a regimen of thought and prayer from a lifestyle that was no longer his.

He looked down at Lymond's bare toes in penitence, overlaying the memory of warm, smooth skin with the sight of Lymond's damp-puckered feet, bloated and patterned and blued from their enclosure in damp cloth.

But he could not silence the need to know what Lymond's own response was. While Lymond had slept, Jerott had admitted to himself the existence of a feeling that he thought could never truly be reciprocated, and to feed it with hope was only to increase the inevitable disappointment.

But - there was nothing in existence like being looked on with pride and pleasure, those perfect, clever features appraising him and finding him worthy of trust.

The feeling that caused him to blush built in intensity: were Lymond's eyes on him, hungry and questing? Or had he looked away in shame and repulsion?

Jerott made himself raise his head to face Lymond, and found him staring back, closer than Jerott had thought he was, blonde curls in tousled disarray. He looked neither feral nor afeared, but his expression was not edited to fine control, and its openness made Jerott flinch - like he would flinch from staring direct into sunlight.

It took him a moment to notice that one of Lymond's hands had emerged from the blankets. Fingers as delicate as the petals of orange blossom extended an invitation to him: one that Jerott took before even considering what it could be. He laid his own hand across Lymond's, fingers wrapping around fingers.

I am sick with love.

With reserves of strength that surprised Jerott, Lymond held him and drew him close by the hand. Jerott approached, moving his knees against the hard floor, his eyes caught by hypnotic blue, until he was close enough, between Lymond's legs, for Lymond's other hand to touch his cheek.

Comfort me.

His eyes closed and he leaned into the contact. Gabriel had been free with such gestures, offering brotherly comfort and affection that did not need to be earned so dearly as Lymond's wary friendship. Hard breathing, after battle, a fond hand on his face; a calloused touch raising his chin when Gabriel saw Jerott look away doubtfully from the words of another Knight.

Stay me.

He swallowed and jerked his head away, squeezing his eyes tight shut. The cool backs of Lymond's knuckles tried again, brushing his jaw, sweeping around his chin until exploratory touch found the cut left by Lymond's spurs. It was not a brotherly touch: the crook of one finger bracketed the wound while Lymond's thumb extended upwards to Jerott's lower lip. The slight pressure of the thumb pad made Jerott's mouth open with a gasp and he tried, with all his fervour, to remember kissing Marthe in the tekke. He had kissed her, hadn't he?

Jerott opened his eyes tentatively and looked across Lymond's knees to his face. His eyes were wide and quite dark, but the blue rim of his irises was like a secret only Jerott knew how to read. His mouth was set with determination - or regret? - and the firelight showed a divot between his brows where he frowned.

Jerott swallowed, but his throat was dry. "You told me you'd rather I had left you in the boat to freeze."

Lymond's frown deepened. His eyes watched his thumb as it continued to play along the underside of Jerott's lip.

The touch was an overstimulation of sensitive skin, and it began to feel to Jerott as though his lip has been numbed by caresses. He bit it to try and regain feeling.

"Having been provided with the time to reflect, I think I would choose to be here instead," Lymond murmured.

It seemed a familiar sort of deflection, and Jerott's smile was hard. "In preference to death."

Lymond's expression turned sharp and he withdrew the hand on Jerott's face, though his grip remained firm on Jerott's fingers. "That is not quite what I meant."

The heat of the fire made the exposed soles of Jerott's feet tingle. Its light moved over Lymond's changeable features, cycling through almost-expressions that played directly into Jerott's fears.

He wanted, very much, for the offer to be real. He wanted to surge into Lymond's arms, to feel that touch on his lips again and more. He wanted completion, connection, a revelation of contact that would change him utterly.

But he had been told to strip his altars. To let go of heroes, to let go of love.

"Then what do you mean?" Jerott asked bitterly.

Lymond sighed. "Militat omnis amans, Jerott." He looked tired, the shadows deep and richly coloured on his face.

"I want peace. I want to think of pleasure, not of pain or punishment. And - I fear that I am no longer able to."

As he spoke, Jerott's hold on Francis's hand tightened. He let go of the edges of blanket that he had clasped together and, falteringly, reached for Francis's cheek. His fingers brushed the barley-fine tips of curls, and he crushed them beneath his palm, feeling Francis's hair as a handful of foliage between their separate skins. His thumb smoothed the silken line of Francis's temple and he leaned close, testing his feeling, testing Lymond's assurances.

He could not remember kissing Marthe in the tekke. He began to believe he had never done so. Jerott's mind filled instead with the memories of gemstones and signet rings held beneath his lips, of relics and swords, brotherhood and penitence.

He wavered close to Francis's face but found that he could not make himself do what he had in mind. With a gasp and a shudder he touched his forehead to Lymond's temple instead, then rolled his cheek against the other man's, breathing hard into the fine little ringlets that coiled around Lymond's ear.

"Yes," Jerott made himself say, the syllable a half-swallowed whisper. "I want to. To help you."

Francis clasped the back of his head and kept him close, but did not try and turn Jerott's face.

He had been a boy when he joked that the site of his home was in reality The Ostrich Inn. Still a boy when his father had arranged for them to stop there on the road to Solway, and Blyth the elder had been struck to rowdy laughter as he learned that every lady of the house already knew his son quite well.

If he had been just a boy then, what had he been before that, hunting kisses from the kitchen maids, making eyes at his father's well-dressed guests over the rim of his ale cup?

Elizabeth, he had never touched. She had died unblemished, a vessel filled with mystery and reverence. And for her sake, the boy he had been vowed to forgo all others. Guilt for breaking this vow should have compelled him to pull away, it should have stopped him from wanting the heat of Lymond's skin against his and the feeling of the other man's breath on his body. It should have been enough but it no longer was.

Jerott pressed his face into Francis's cheek, his ear, his hair, his neck. He threw both arms around Francis's thin shoulders and let himself be drawn forward, his hips between Francis's thighs, Francis's hands carefully, gently, keeping the blanket enfolded across Jerott's shoulders.

It was not, all told, the response he had intended to elicit. Thoughts of pain and punishment certainly ran alongside any thought of pleasure in Jerott Blyth's mind at that moment.

As though he had to wrestle himself into conviction, Jerott squirmed his body against Lymond's, his face pressed into the open collar of Lymond's doublet, his hips seeking a comfortable position against the cloth of Lymond's breeches.

Lymond shut his jaw tight and felt his bodily response begin to press against the inside of that material. Heat, single-minded and insistent, was driven to that one part of him, pricking awareness of the naked body on top of him, of the tantalising closeness of Jerott's mouth to his skin.

The feeling of Jerott's own erection on the other side of his clothing was enough to convince him to seek more. Francis released the blanket that covered Jerott's shoulders and scooped his face from Francis's throat, raising it to his own.

He kissed him without preamble, not waiting for Jerott to imagine what was to happen. Francis pressed his mouth over Jerott's lips before they shut against him. He licked their bitten surface with his enquiring tongue. Jerott made a sound of surprise: pleased but uncertain, his lips vibrating with it beneath Francis's kiss.

A flush of desire leapt through Francis at this sensation and he pressed his mouth again to Jerott's closed mouth, seeking still for a response.

Jerott's hands fumbled to his shoulders and pushed Francis away slowly, though his grip was tight. While close enough, Francis's lips lingered on Jerott's, following up with kisses that brushed softly against hot skin, but he was repelled with inevitable force and had to look up into Jerott's wide-eyed expression.

Seeing something of Lymond's exasperation, Jerott managed a shaky smile - Francis wanted, savagely, to obliterate it with his kisses. He wanted, he supposed, to be deprived of himself as promised: in the physick of touch and taste it was possible to forget recent history and the foreboding future, and to live, momentarily, with no demands but those of his body.

But evidently, Jerott retained some reservations about this approach.

He sighed, breath cooling the saliva on his lips, his dark eyes round and black and astonished.

"Might we wait?" Jerott swallowed. His throat moved as though he wanted to laugh, but nerves stole the sound. "It has been...some time since I -"

Lymond had to bite his tongue to contain a rash comment on the proclivities of monks, but he did so, for the sake of the colour in Jerott's face.

Still Jerott frowned and looked again at Lymond's expression. "My God. When did anyone last say no to you?"

Francis scoffed and bit out a sharp crack of laughter. He tossed his eyes ceilingwards to avoid Jerott's earnest gaze, but he did not answer. By the time one was in another's bed chamber, or holding a naked body in one's arms, the time for saying no had usually long passed.

"You are saying no now, then?"

Jerott licked his lower lip. "For now. But I would like," his glance turned bashful again. "To bring you comfort."

He raised his hand to Lymond's hairline again and swept fingers through his curls. "If I might."

Francis shivered and wished it did not show. He closed his eyes and wondered what Jerott could intend - comfort was for children and the dying.

There were enough blankets to cover the hard floor as well as the two persons who lay down to sleep by the light of the fire. Lymond wore his linen shift and undershorts and was warm and still in the cupped form of Jerott's body. His breathing was steady, quiet, untroubled by the stresses and pains of consciousness.

Jerott's forehead touched the smooth skin of his shoulder where Lymond's shift had slipped, the collar stretched across the top of his back. His left arm curled around Lymond's small ribcage, held in place by Lymond's left arm. The cold soles of Lymond's feet pressed against Jerott's shins and the warm curve of Lymond's arse sat against Jerott's thighs.

Jerott's eyes were closed but he did not sleep. His knees prickled where ice had grazed them, his jaw tingled from the cut, and his muscles throbbed with heat from the exertion of the day. His thoughts grew ragged with protest and justification, with hallucinations of the smell of spikenard and the sound of Gabriel's voice.

He flattened his nose to Francis's skin and drew the deepest breath he could. He wondered if he would still smell the Aga Morat's perfume, stained into Francis's body.

But Francis smelled only of himself, and that was something Jerott was still new to: linen and leather, spice and incense lingering in his pores, the earthen, shoreside scent of exertion. He touched his lips then to the surface of Francis's body, covering the dark spots of his moles one by one with honest abstraction of thought. It was easier, knowing that Francis was asleep - that Jerott's curiosity was not about to be confronted by a sharp and worldly scrutiny.

He could not say why he had needed to postpone the consummation he knew he wanted. Tiredness, perhaps, fear of Francis's tiredness and the possibility of another migraine - perhaps, if Jerott wished to persuade himself of unselfish motives. But a deeper fear lingered in him, tangled and knotted up in the memory of Lymond's first offer. His body as a prize, to be collected by the last man standing, a cynical gesture of resignation when he found himself unable to choose for himself when and how to leave.

For ten years, Jerott had followed a man who had, in the end, discarded faith and loyalty and brotherhood without a second thought. Jerott had been a strut for Gabriel's vanity, a trophy of sorts himself: proof of Gabriel's leadership and worthiness, proof of Gabriel's persuasiveness and skill.

Jerott did not want, only, to be yet further proof of Francis Crawford's charisma.

It finally made sense to him, poised on the blurred edge of sleep, that there was one very simple way by which he could ensure that Francis wanted him. That he wanted Jerott from affection and not from some twisted notion of duty or reciprocity. Jerott had earned the rare coin of Lymond's gratitude before. He would simply have to do so again, in new ways. Timorously, his nerves jangling with anticipation, Jerott smiled against Francis's shoulder and the fingers of his left hand tangled around Francis's fingers.

He slept without dreaming.

Morning light meant nothing inside the snow-insulated hut. Jerott's skin was russet toned in the glow from the fire's embers, his dark eyes sparkling with interest.

Beneath strata of blankets - wool and cotton, waxed and frayed, stained and creased - Lymond's body shivered with involuntary glee at the expression in Jerott's black eyes. He lay in Jerott's loose embrace, the edges of his hands pressed against the hot skin of the other man's chest. For once, he was not cold; did not know for what or who he had gotten into this nest other than himself, from his own selfish desire. And now he simply waited, thrilled with curiosity.

First, with a slow care that made Lymond's eyes close as his body anticipated a grasping, hard touch, Jerott loosed a hand and it settled on Lymond's cheek. The meeting of flesh was soft, far softer than Lymond expected, and Jerott's fingers pressed against the hair above his ear, smoothing the strands back against his skull.

Jerott watched the motion of his own hand, his lips parted, wondering, and then he looked into Lymond's blue eyes.

The answer was there, risen to the lapis surface, but Lymond's mouth moved anyway: "Yes," he told Jerott.

Jerott's face flushed with colour and his hand settled, a form fitted to Lymond's jaw, and he raised his head from their shared pillow. He kept his eyes open until the last minute; his lips planting, pursed, against Lymond's own.

Lymond responded as he could, carefully, feeling a tremor of unfamiliar nervousness run through Jerott's body. Lymond's lips pressed against Jerott's closed mouth in return, his tongue raised against the back of his own teeth impatiently. He wanted, very much, to taste Jerott's flavour, to seek out the contours of his mouth with all the senses he had been given. To share the joy of touch given freely.

But he waited, allowing the first kiss of the morning to remain chaste, allowing Jerott the absorption of sensation, the experience of closeness, the long-unfamiliar reciprocity of affection.

A strand of Jerott's hair fell down to tickle Lymond's brow and he smiled within the kiss and fumbled a hand free of the covers to comb his fingers through smooth black locks, pushing Jerott's hair back with gentle insistence.

At last Jerott's mouth parted to release a gasp, and he let his eyes fall closed for a moment despite his curiosity. He ran his teeth over his lower lip.

When he looked again for confirmation in Francis's eyes, there was a renewed, fortified certainty in his steady breath and his firm touch on Lymond's cheek. It made Lymond shiver, the fierceness that glinted in Jerott's dark eye and the wordless depth of the colour that spread across his chest and neck.

Jerott bowed to him again and his tongue quested against Lymond's mouth, and Lymond opened and let him in.

Jerott's hand tightened against his jaw, feeling Lymond's response as taste encountered taste.

Lymond's confident movements sidled around Jerott's exploratory forays, guiding him, intercepting him, encouraging Jerott's pressure. Jerott covered Lymond's mouth with his own, savouring each meeting, his kisses learning precision, mapping out each new piece of flesh uncovered.

Lymond's fist closed in his hair, knowing Jerott's strength and impulsiveness, his body wondering when this methodical introduction would give way to something less ordered. The pressure of Lymond's grip elicited a moan, sound that he lapped up greedily with his own mouth, and there was an echo of response, Jerott sighed again, and again Lymond captured the expression of feeling.

When he drew back, Jerott's hand was shivering against him, and Lymond let his own eyes stay closed, his mouth curving into a grin at the simple honesty of Jerott's body.

For his part, Jerott let his fingers plough deeper into the corn silk curls, felt his heart hammer, too much for his chest as he lay cramped and gasping on his side. Francis was smiling, at or despite what he had done. It seemed genuine, not mocking, and Jerott wondered what it felt like beneath his own hot mouth. He kissed the dimple at its edge and felt muscle and flesh respond as Lymond's smile deepened. He kissed the corner of his lips, then the centre, and let want drive him, opening his mouth and pushing his tongue between Lymond's smiling lips.

Lymond gripped him back, one hand around his jaw, the other sending smooth fingers over the skin of Jerott's collarbone and shoulder.

Caught up in his own eagerness, Francis coiled like a serpent and rose from the pillow of blankets. He pushed Jerott back and leaned his face and chest over him, pressing into the kiss, one hand holding Jerott's jaw, the other propped against the floor.

Jerott ruffled the loose sleeves of Lymond's shift, feathering touch and texture as he swept his hands up Lymond's arms. His fingers clasped at the base of Lymond's skull, and he pulled his chin free of Lymond's hold to stretch into the kiss.

Lymond used his empty hand to feel out the anatomy of the body beneath him. His fingers started in the hot groove beneath Jerott's jaw and followed the beating of his jugular to the sharp definition of his collarbone. The pads of his fingers spread across Jerott's sternum and stroked along the hair of his chest before his thumb swerved away to the side and pressed and flickered over one brown nipple.

Jerott bucked beneath him, his hips thrusting his hardened cock against Lymond's side. Francis gasped and laughed into his mouth, then pinched the tip of Jerott's nipple with calculated mischief.

Jerott swore and surged up from the covers, his hands on either side of Francis's face, his abdomen tightening as Francis let his roving hand drop to tease touch over his stomach and thighs.

His more customary violence of passion awoken, Jerott was not shy in manoeuvring Francis's body so he could get his hands beneath the edges of Francis's shift. He pulled at the cords of the linen undershorts and Francis heard stitches rip.

Another torrent of impatient language fell from Jerott's mouth as he leaned away to see what he was doing. Francis’s grin was delighted, and he could not help but remark upon Jerott's hurry after a decade's waiting.

He received a furious, heated glare in return and Jerott abandoned the tie to bend Lymond's body against him in another deep kiss. On their knees, swaying with imperfect balance, they tangled together until Jerott felt he had made his point and slid his hands once more to the waistband of Francis's underclothes. His fingers dipped inside the cloth, his knuckles on the skin to either side of Francis's navel and he pinned Francis with a look of warning and a small, subversive smirk.

Francis's eyes widened and he was on the cusp of protesting a shortage of spare clothes, but the breath he drew was obscured by the dry cough of linen tearing and his words did not get past Jerott's kiss.

The underclothes dropped down his arse but remained caught and tented on the shaft of his cock.

Francis smiled toothily into Jerott's kiss and nipped until the other man let him speak. "Very well then. Stronge in his despoylle, wel armed in the batayll."

Jerott's groan of amusement - or exasperation - buzzed against Francis's lips and his hands smoothed a path from the base of Francis's spine to the crease between arse and thigh. He gripped flesh and jerked Francis towards him, trapping body against body, rolling his hips to press himself fully against the folds of Francis's half-fallen underclothes.

They kissed until touch was sloppy, the skin surrounding Francis's mouth stinging from the roughness of Jerott's stubbled jaw. Jerott disproved Francis's apprehension that, once aroused to it, all his movements would be as full of bruising force as he could make them. Jerott's hands were gentle in the waves of Francis's hair, his fingers quested in the short ringlets at the nape of his neck. Soft down the hollow of his spine and around his hips, carefully plucking the cloth of Francis's undershorts away at last and rocking his body against Francis's with hot, pulsing regularity.

It was obvious that he would try to pull the shift up over Francis's body next - but it was more difficult to explain why Francis resisted.

Lymond clamped his elbows to the sides of his ribcage and said "No," with automatic firmness. His torso was marked with the mistakes of his past: cut and branded and flayed. It was a source of fascination to some and pity to others, and he did not want it to distract - to come, now, between himself and the unexpected pleasures of Jerott's touch, to encourage the doubt and dread that remained, ever-ready, on the edges of his mind.

Jerott's brows raised, his expression poised and worried. "I've seen it before, Francis."

"Not since it healed," Lymond snapped and shut his eyes, regretting the words and the tone. It was the reminder he could not resist giving: Jerott had ordered the most recent whipping experienced by Francis Crawford's ruined back. He had watched it all happen. Close enough to feel the mist of spattered blood.

Jerott's hands had ceased their exploration at the sharp protrusions of Lymond's hips. His thumbs moved over the sensitive place where bone came close to skin and he touched his lips to Francis's again, his mouth soft, open, lingering. It wasn't an apology, but it felt like one. Jerott did not try to raise the shift again.

His acquiescence did more to settle Francis's tightened nerves than any other persuasive words might have. The room was dark after all, and he had surely been in more compromising states around Jerott.

Francis banished the ticklish memory of Robin Stewart's gaze on his scars, steeled himself, and pulled the shift up in one swift motion.

He had barely discarded it when Jerott caught him up in another tight folding embrace, one arm about the small of Lymond's back, the other at Jerott's favoured position on the side of Lymond's face, his fingers in the soft hair above Francis's ear. He pressed his skin to Francis's skin and kissed him as though he had been waiting for the opportunity his whole life. He didn't look for the scars on Lymond's torso with his eyes or his hands, he just sought a dizzying maximum of touch.

Francis let himself sigh, a slipping of control, and pulled Jerott back down to the covers with him, grunting as his body hit the blanketed floor side-on.

Jerott laughed, lying on his back, his hair a scattered mess of spilt ink around his face. Mirth made him seem younger, his eyes closed trustingly, with genuine humour, and one hand reflexively grasping for Lymond's skin.

Francis stared, remembering the wild young man from Solway, his heavy, earnest gaze and sharp questions. There was so little he had left from then, and Francis was barred from returning to those others that remained. A swell of gratitude seemed to tower over Francis as he looked down at Jerott, the feeling dredged from deep within, carrying with it the chill of authenticity.

He was glad not to be alone. Not to be with Kiaya Khatun and her imperious assumptions. But here, with a reminder that Francis Crawford's life was more than just a string of disconnected events pushing him from pillar to post. A reminder that some things endured.

He aimed to put all of that feeling into his kiss, leaning over Jerott and moving his tongue with languid, eloquent motion. Judging by the noise that emerged from Jerott's throat and the way his cock twitched under Francis's hand, something of his intended message seemed to have gotten through.

Francis splayed his fingers over the hot, smooth skin of Jerott's dick and slid them down over his balls, kneading the soft flesh with gentle, probing touch. The muffled moan between their mouths contorted into a curse and Jerott's hand joined Francis's, holding him still while Jerott breathed hard against his lips.

"Wait. I can't. It won't take long," he said grudgingly.

Francis smiled angelically and dropped a garland of kisses along Jerott's brow. His fingers tightened again on the sensitive, velveteen skin and Jerott's back arched a little as he gasped.

"It matters not. I believe you will rise to the occasion more than once."

Whether Jerott's frown was for the concentration he tried to summon or for Lymond's pun was unclear. But he shook his head, his eyes closed.

"I want you to...I want to," he swallowed and laid his hand over Francis's once more, though he no longer tried to stop the strokes Francis was making at the base of his shaft. Jerott opened his eyes, his expression plaintive. "I want you to enjoy this also."

"Believe me, Jerott, I already am. And we are in no hurry. There is plenty more to be done."

Jerott looked like he might make some clever comment about forging a path through the snow or rowing across a frozen lake, so Francis precluded these suggestions by tightening his grip a little and increasing the speed and length of his strokes.

Jerott's throat curved towards the thatched roof, his eyes closed reflexively and his heels dug into the folds of the blanket beneath him.

Francis rolled to a kneeling position and clambered over Jerott's closest leg. He bent to use his tongue in tandem with his hand, pushing into the base of Jerott's dick with the tip of his tongue and licking along the length of the shaft.

The first clear discharge was already on his hand and glistening on the reddened dome at the end of Jerott's cock. Francis gathered the taste of him with lips and tongue and at last enveloped him in his mouth.

Jerott made an appeal to a number of the manifestations of the Christian deity as well as to several saints, but not one of them offered him a reprieve from Lymond's touch.

Indeed - it did not take long at all. Lymond's lips tightened, his tongue swiped the sensitive folds of skin, and he felt a rush beneath his hand as Jerott's hips leapt from the floor with sudden urgency.

Momentarily, his own movements slowing just as Jerott's jerking thrusts slowed, Francis raised his head, removing his lips gradually like a man sucking the juice out of a peach.

He sat up and swiped his wet lip with one thumb. He reached for and swigged from the flask of water, kneeling between Jerott's legs, while Jerott lay splayed before him, his eyes barely open but regarding him with a fresh new awe.

Francis responded to Jerott's open-palmed, begging hand by moving to stretch himself alongside the other body again. He ran his fingers against the lay of Jerott's body hair, ruffling dark strands before smoothing them down again. He rested his head on his elbow and smiled at the wondering look in Jerott's eyes.

Jerott rolled to face him, and took Francis's chin in his hand. He tightened his grip for a moment, keeping Francis's face held still and at a distance. His eyes scanned Francis's expression like it was a code he needed to decipher, like he suspected and feared some imminent revelation of underlying motive.

The lovers Francis had lain with before tended not to seek answers like those Jerott searched for. The coin of those transactions was common currency, from border brothel to Ottoman palace, and Francis Crawford knew its rates and exchanges well.

Less familiar was the insistent need in Jerott's serious expression. It was not a need for Francis's touch, for more of what he had given or could give. It was a need to please and a need to prove, a need to make certain the freedom of what was offered.

Jerott bit his lip and looked at the steady blue gaze and the wet red mouth - he had to steel himself, but this he did, and then he kissed Francis carefully, tasting what remained of himself on the other man's mouth. He had swallowed enough of the Mediterranean in his life to find the hot, salty taste less than startling, and he soon forgot his reticence.

Francis's tongue was seasoned, his lips felt swollen and soft beneath Jerott's kisses. He shuffled closer across the blankets and hooked one leg over Jerott's calves.

The strange, unsettling idea of his own discharge between their kisses made Jerott think of the rites and rituals of the ancients. Mingling blood with blood to forge new ties, tasting one another's flesh to prove that they would to do anything to remain by each others' side.

Jerott, his eyes closed, his hand on the uppermost side of Francis's face, his nose touching the other man's nose still, murmured a half-formed question. It seemed to him that it was a query that would appeal to Francis's broad knowledge and omnivorous sensibilities.

"What is it that Lucian says of the bond of friendship?"

As he had hoped, delight rang clear in Francis's response. "Lucian! I did not expect you to know the texts of the barbarians, Jerott."

"Not his satires. One of More's translations. A discourse on friendship? It was a popular text in the Auberge."

"Toxaris. Now that does make sense," Francis said, smirking and moving his head so that their noses brushed together. "Sacrificamus inquam haud tamen deos esse arbitrati, sed viros bonos."

Jerott's reply was firm. "Not sacrifice. About loyalty."

Francis's smile was sharp like that of the fox preaching to the geese. "Etenum simulat que incisis digitis, sanguinem in calicem destilla verimus, sumus que instinctis gladiis, ambo pariter ad moventes biberimus, non est quicquae quod deinde nos quiat dirimere."

Jerott blinked at the vivid imagery. "Yes. I had forgotten about the swords."

Francis's lips stretched wide and he summoned a sound of amusement from deep in his throat. It made Jerott shift impulsively: in order to lay his lips on the source of that noise he pushed Francis to his back, unpeeling his arms from his curled body to kiss Francis's Adam's apple; the firm cords of the tendons in his neck; the convergence between his collarbones.

Pinned down to the far side of Francis's body, Francis's fingers twisted and knotted with Jerott's and he chuckled again at Jerott's kisses, adding to the cascading vibrations in his throat, creating more waves of sensation for Jerott's hungry mouth to chase over skin.

Much as Francis's body was strange machinery to him, Jerott was well trained to observe and to learn from what he discerned. The first thing he had understood was how hungry any touch could make Francis - if it were offered in the appropriate manner.

And, Jerott thought excitedly, if he could also engage that steel trap mind...

Jerott pushed himself away from Francis's skin to prop himself above him.

"Do you know of a man named Paré? A barber surgeon."

A frown crossed Francis's brow, but with it he wore a bemused smile. He shook his head wordlessly, then Jerott saw his eyes widen.

"The man with new-fangled techniques concerning the treatment of bullet wounds?" Francis ran his fingertips down Jerott's sternum and belly and smirked at the shiver he elicited. "I don't know what your idea of pleasure entails, Jerott, but I prefer the firearms to remain outside the bed chamber."

Jerott grinned and tossed his hair from his face before lifting a leg over Francis, to sit astride his narrow hips and feel Francis's cock move enquiringly against his thigh. "He also has ideas about providing physick through touch. Massa," Jerott said in Arabic. He held Francis's face between his hands, his thumbs beginning to roll in circular motions over Francis's temples. "Le massage," he added in French.

Francis's expression was one of polite patience, but as Jerott increased the pressure of his thumbs, moving the supple flesh beneath and occasionally stopping to push his fingers firm and hard in trailing lines against Francis's scalp, Francis's face began to relax, and his eyelids fluttered lower and lower as his smile unfurled.

"Jerott, where did you learn this?" he said, his voice emerging as a weary gasp.

"There were a couple of Knights who had fought for the French at Piédmont before realising the threat of the Turk. Paré demonstrated his techniques there."

As the cranial massage seemed more likely to relax Francis to sleep than arouse him to other activities, Jerott gently removed his hands from his head and smoothed his fingers across Francis's chest, watching the near-invisible golden hairs shimmer as his touch passed over them. "I understand that it is particularly beneficial for the shoulders," he said hopefully.

Francis swept his own hands through his hair, familiarising himself with the sensation of his aching skull having been remade. He glanced up at Jerott, his eyes dark like royal dye, his expression thoughtful. "I think I should like that," he admitted, quite quietly. Combined with his serious expression it felt like a covenant, and Jerott leaned down to seal it with a kiss, luxurious and slow.

They rearranged their bodies, Francis turning carefully onto his belly and elbows, all tension in his joints renewed before Jerott's eyes. His back shone with scar tissue, like an iced-over lake of old pain, white and scored, puckered and ridged. Many of the wounds had blended and pooled together, but at its edges, at its sloppy borders, lone strokes had ploughed silvery furrows into flesh, and Jerott, who had been expecting it, still had to bite the inside of his mouth and shake his head. He had seen such things often enough - he did not forget his own role in the creation of some of the landscape before him now - but never had they felt as much like a knife between his ribs as this sight did.

He laid his palms flat over Francis's shoulder blades and rubbed his thumbs against the groove of his spine. The scarred skin was softer than anything he had touched in his life, but it moved and stirred beneath Jerott's fingers just as any other flesh. He let out a sigh and swept his hands up to Francis's shoulders and neck. Jerott flexed his fists against the tightly bunched sinew and muscle and Francis let out a sound like air escaping from broken bellows.

Jerott blushed with immediate pride, and began to settle into his motions, watching his own brown fingers knead Francis's fair body. There was little covering on Francis's light bones, but Jerott's hands found the places where smudges and twists of hard pressure worked their effect nonetheless. Once he knew that the sensation was pleasurable to its recipient, Jerott found it easy to leave his hands to figure their way around Francis's body without conscious direction: the hands of an expert horseman, they knew the benefit of finesse and caution as well as the brutality of combat. Thumbs and knuckles ground out stiffness from the column of Francis's spine, around the sweeping curves of his ribs, ruffling nerves where scar tissue met healthy skin, pressing down into the softer parts of his back: the hollow dimples above his arse and the subtle curve of his flanks.

Francis arched his spine and raised his arse beneath Jerott's body, pushing back into his touch and trying to muffle his moan in the arms that he held crossed beneath his forehead.

Jerott was drawn to the sound by need though, and followed the trail of his hands back up Francis's body, leaning forward to nuzzle his face in the curls at the nape of Francis's neck. Jerott kissed the overspill of hairs that trickled down into an uneven v at the back of Francis's head. He dragged his teeth along pristine, freckled skin at the curve where Francis’s neck met his shoulders and he felt his cock grow lively once more against the flesh of Francis's lower back.

Beneath his body Francis twisted like an eel. Newly facing Jerott, their faces close enough to mingle breath, Jerott saw the expression he had been searching for. Undeniable points of emotion coloured the pinnacles of Francis's cheekbones. His gaze was steady but on edge, seemingly alarmed by his own response, but he took Jerott's face in his hands and kissed him deeply, and Jerott at last let himself believe that this was not a hidden bargain. It was not merely Francis's body offered in exchange for Jerott's acceptance of his onward journey - something further had been secured.

Francis rocked against Jerott in the kiss, his cock a hot pressure between Jerott's legs, pushing into sensitive, hidden parts of his flesh.

Unwilling to cede the initiative yet again, Jerott guided his knee between Francis's legs to push them apart. He ran his hand up the length of Francis's thigh, then began to squeeze handfuls of muscle and to rub his fingertips against the smooth skin on the inner part of his leg. He felt Francis adjust to the position, stretching from the floor to maintain contact with Jerott's mouth, to steady himself with his own sure grip on Jerott's shoulders.

Jerott's fingers trailed their way down the taut muscle at the back of Francis's leg and pried his arse cheek from the floor. He fed his hand into the space between Francis's body and the blankets, searching for the textured line of the perineum, hot and enclosed between curving flesh.

The unexpected pressure of Jerott's finger at his arsehole made Francis flinch at first, breaking from Jerott's kiss with a smacking sound, regarding him with heavy breathing and raised brows.

Jerott merely lifted his own eyebrows and pushed again at the opening, stroking across and around it until he felt Francis stop clenching his muscles warily tight.

He still regarded Jerott thoughtfully though, and murmured through gritted teeth, his breath scorching on the skin of Jerott's cheek and ear: "You are full of surprises, Jerott," before Francis captured Jerott's earlobe in his mouth and sucked on it vengefully.

Jerott could not hold his gasp, but he kept his confidence on all else. It did not seem like the opportune moment to point out his experience with the tricks of the women at The Ostrich Inn, nor was it they who he wished to occupy his thoughts.

Two joints of his finger made their way within Francis, and Jerott grunted at Francis's weight and the pressure on his digit, while Francis made his own sound as Jerott's finger twitched inside him.

"Go deeper," he instructed, grasping Jerott's own arse with one straining hand. Francis lay back on the blankets, seeking the purchase to push back against Jerott's finger, his body relaxing rapidly to accommodate the touch now that he had settled into it.

Jerott strove to do as he was ordered. He twisted his finger to nudge the wall of flesh and muscle and heard Francis release a sigh of air. Using the strength of his wrist and swordsman's hand, Jerott made his touch cramp against the spot that seemed to make Francis most likely to whimper and bite his lip and flex his body against the spread of cloth below them.

Jerott used his free hand tentatively at first, acclimatising himself to the strange feeling of another man's cock in his grasp, but found that he could hold himself alongside Francis. Jerott thrust against his palm and against Francis's shaft and his eyes fell closed in concentration as he tried to align the gestures of his two hands and their two sets of hips. Flesh jumbled with flesh, sensation with sensation, desperate and reckless, dry and hot.

The first he knew of his success was not the bitten-back sound Francis made - a shudder of relief like a collapsing building - but the sudden lubrication on his hand and his cock as Francis's ejaculate spilled over all. Jerott gasped and swore as the warmth of it hit him, triggering a jolt within his own body that he could do nothing to control.

His hips moved under the sway of no intent, his body surged with bliss for the second time that morning, and his could not avoid daubing Francis's firelit skin with fresh discharge.

That which carried more momentum missed Francis's face and hair by mere inches as he jerked his head to the side, laughing.

Jerott looked down at the two softening dicks in his hold and laid Francis's down with a dazed sort of reverence.

"God," he gulped, removing his finger from Francis's body less gently than he intended, and holding both of his ruined hands before him in bewilderment. Each one was stained with the ink of sin, slick and shining in the dim light, but he felt no guilt or shame - only their shadow, the sense that he ought to feel them. Instead, his mind was as blank and settled as the pristine snow outside, dazzling and dazzled.

Francis was shaking, his head rolling to one side on the pillow of covers, his own palms hanging uselessly in the air above the puddled mess on his belly.

He was still laughing, now in total silence, his eyes screwed shut and his teeth bared helplessly. His chest was blotched with colour and his cheeks were darkened by blood risen to the surface; his curls were clustered and dark with sweat; and the same salty sheen sparkled on the skin of his abdomen and thighs.

Jerott collapsed back on his heels, one of Francis's legs still trapped beneath him.

"Sorry," he managed to mutter, though it was a response made out of obligation.

Francis sat up as though stung and hastened to be close to Jerott, yet he still smiled. The pool of fluids on his skin dripped, catching on the golden hair around his navel. He took each of Jerott's hands in his own, shamelessly, palm to sticky palm so that Jerott was suddenly afraid they would be joined never to be parted, a punishment for what they had done. Francis gripped him more tightly as he tried to pull away, his eyes steady, inviting Jerott to look at him and find calm.

Francis murmured something - French; poetry; Jerott's swirling mind thought - and kissed him softly.

His lips already seemed so familiar, so much like a welcome, and the vague cloud of Jerott's unease started to dissipate. With their hands entwined to each side they leaned together, and Jerott only shuddered a little as the cold, wet stain on Francis's belly was shared with his own skin.

"Apology not accepted," Francis smiled against his mouth. His fine lashes brushed Jerott's cheek when he moved his face closer, and he let Jerott lean, exhausted, against him in turn.

Jerott's body shuddered against his bare skin. He kept his head and his eyes lowered, though he let Francis retain a grip on his hands.

"There is nothing to apologise for," Francis said against the swell of Jerott's mouth. His body was chilled with fresh sweat, his back felt frighteningly exposed, but there was no taking back how good it had felt to have Jerott's touch on him, how strangely content he had felt when he looked up and saw a familiar, trusted face lit by the furnace of passion.

Jerott's breath caught and he leaned his cheek against Francis's.

"Nothing we did was wrong, Jerott," Francis murmured. Their bodies rested close, their hands to their sides, Francis's thumbs working softly over Jerott's, though his grip was firm and he would not allow Jerott to pull away. Not like this. Not after that.

"Did any of it feel wrong, to you?"

Jerott's neck tensed and his head flinched back from Francis's, just far enough that he could meet his eyes. A series of muscles moved in his face, around wordless lips and wide, dark eyes.

Finally, "No - " he managed to answer.

Francis's expression cut off whatever caveat he might have been about to add. Jerott drew in a gasp and his colour deepened beyond the red blotches on the high points of his cheeks. He looked wonderingly at him, so that Francis could feel his own skin grow hot again, and Jerott kissed him.

His fingers shivered from the cleansing snow, and Francis wiped them on the shift he had replaced over his quickly cooling torso. He stood in the doorway to the hut, gazing out onto the painfully bright morning landscape. The tracks they had made the previous evening, on Francis's last attempt to divert their course, had been covered by fresh snow. Their meandering path to the lakeside and back again to the door - that which had been ice and mud and snow churned together - had turned now to soft white curves, like a line of small tumuli on the land.

Francis's eyes narrowed and his breath coiled in the air. Only the rooks stirred, and the sun was too low to do any more than skim across the glittering surface of winter's coat, like a pebble on a lake. He could smell no other fire smoke but their own, could hear nothing over the cawing of the rooks, and felt dizzy at the weight of snow that now lay between him and Kiaya Khatun's caravan.

But it was not the dizziness that sucked at his consciousness like a swamp, nor did the sun's brightness feel like hot daggers in his skull. Francis wrapped his arms about his body and loosed a held breath, steady and slow. He watched the air bloom with it, expanding petals of condensation that drifted away from him, glittering as they caught the sun. For perhaps the first time since he had boarded a ship provisioned by Onophrion Zitwitz, he felt good, clear: clear-headed, clear-sighted, clear of pain. His whole body hummed with the freshness of sensation like that experienced around a newly-healed wound, when spiking, tingling nerves begin to reach out again in exploration.

Shy at first, the hands that wrapped around his body smoothed his shift beneath their weight, and Francis blinked at his own response: he did flinch protectively, but hardly knew it through the roiling tide that crashed against the nerves below his stomach. He wanted the touch of those hands, then; it was not complicated, physically.

As for the rest - could he think of this existing beyond the little hut, and to what end? - Francis supposed that might wait. Waiting was all they had left for the present.

"It's cold," Jerott's reminder was spoken quietly, with a vein of uncertainty. As though he expected Francis to tell him it was as mylde as a mornyng of May. As though, if Francis told him so, he might try and make himself believe it was true.

Francis stepped back against Jerott's body and let him push the door closed, Jerott's arm reaching around them both. Francis twisted about and closed his eyes against the darkness inside the hut. Gentle, wondering fingers were at his hairline again, combing, teasing against his scalp in warm tracks. Jerott's mouth was at his, brushing querulously and catching on skin, his lips skimming close to Francis's spreading smile.

Francis, so used to playing to the melodrama of romance, so used to folding his lovers over his arm, pinning them in a deep kiss of passion that was calculated to undo the mortar of their knees, laughed at first as Jerott's body curved over him, into him. He almost thought that he simply would not be bent that way, half expected a snap, like an overstrung bow breaking. But instead, there was just Jerott's palm, splayed wide in the centre of his back, easing out his trust as they leaned into each other, as Jerott's other hand supported his head.

Jerott was still undressed, and Francis had to slide his arms up Jerott's bare body to find purchase, fingers clawing and grasping at smooth muscle and the submerged outline of his bones. Francis exchanged the long kiss for a series of gasping, nipping touches, mouth to mouth, untidy and competitive, each man striving for the final touch.

It was Jerott who, at last, pulled away, allowed Francis to take more of the balance of his own weight back, and looked at him with an expression far too serious for Francis's liking.

And that's it! For now, probably for ever? Though if anyone wants to write gap fillers or a conclusion that would be very sexy and I'm totally cool fwith that happening.

So, from what I remember of this, the lads catch up with Marthe and Kiaya on the other side of the lake. I think they plan to sneakily infiltrate the camp because they realise exposing Marthe will just create dangerous chaos, and I guess they (Francis) think they can reason with Kiaya.

I think I imagined some Mexican stand-offs, Marthe definitely has a gun, and she maybe even got to use it.

Details of the resolution are not a thing I recall at all, but the satisfactory conclusion is, I think, that all four of them go to Russia. Maybe Marthe still gets the chance to cosplay as voevoda now and again, and Kiaya Khatun doesn't have to threaten any small boys because Marthe is keeping her busy. She and Francis probably still think of Marthe and Jerott as place-holders of a sort, and I think Francis always regrets the vulnerability of letting Jerott in - there would be some absolutely blazing rows about some of his Ringed Castle behaviour, even if it was mellowed a little by changed circumstances, it's still pretty wild, and there's a lot he'll be keeping from Jerott about family circumstances.

I hadn't really thought through to ultimate resolutions, but left it so Francis/Philippa could still be a thing, ideally with Jerott having come to terms with enough about himself and about Francis to accept that they're probably not an optimal long-term match. He's always got Danny, who will have been making eyes at him from the ranks all winter long. I also think Kiaya's ambition should mellow, she and Marthe should have a Gabriel mummy bonfire/sell him for parts like the Egyptians did with their mummies, and then retire to Lyon together to be weird traders/fortune-tellers/coffee-sellers. CRAZY idea! Marthe/Kiaya coffee shop AU!!! Get your stars read when you buy ten cappuccinos! Sorry we're all out of caramel syrup but we can grate a little dessicated finger bone on top? I'm sorry we don't take payment in cloth sir, but if you can spare that antique relic we'll toss in a whole bag of our finest roast beans. No? Oh well, just keep your eyes on me, that's it. What, no, that's not my wife behind you with a dagger haha, what are you suggesting?

#wip ask meme #my wips #kinda. this one's probably gone as far as it will go #i resisted editing so forgive the clichés/jumps in register #this is a draft after all #francis/jerott #marthe/guzel #lymond chronicles

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hanjisungs-bigtittyg0thgf · 8 months ago

Text

Sugar

best friend!san x fem reader

Trigger warnings: none that i can think of

Content warnings: names (sweetheart, baby, sugar), oral (m&f receiving), choking (briefly), breeding, dacryphilia (kinda?), san’s got a big dick (what else is new) and is down horrendous for mc.

Summary: your best friend just can’t keep his hands to himself

Word count: 5.7k

A/N: hey babes! i finally finished it!!! its unpolished as fuck but it’s done!!! it’s only taken me forty-seven years 🥴 not saying this is a full comeback as i’m still dealing with some personal shit but i hope i’ll have something else for you relatively soon. anyways, pls reblog if you enjoy the story!! 🥰🫶🏻

Tags: @bahng-chrizz @foxinnie8

Smut below the cut

Most likely to remain high school sweethearts. That’s the yearbook superlative you and your best friend had been awarded your senior year of high school. The kicker? You had never dated him. The thought had just never crossed your mind. You were content being the hot best friends that everyone either wanted to get with or wanted to be. He wasn’t, but you didn’t know that.

Choi San had harbored the biggest crush on you since the two of you were fifteen. He’d gone through a hard breakup back then, his ex spreading rumors and lies all through school, and despite claiming he was fine because he was a player, he was heartbroken. He had been in love with the girl and she’d broken his heart and tried to ruin his reputation. So when you comforted him and confronted his ex, which ended in a cat fight in the hallway that got both of you suspended, he began to fixate on you. He dated around to keep his mind busy and off you, but he was infatuated with his best friend. With the girl who would throw down with anyone who wronged him.

He’d been heartbroken when he found out you were going away for college instead of staying local, even more so when he realized the school you’d chosen didn’t have the major he wanted. He was distraught at first, thinking you’d be too far apart to visit often. Every school he looked at seemed so far away from yours until he found the school where he was currently enrolled. This one was only an hour drive away from you and he was relieved to find that your schedule at your part time job still allowed for you two to take turns visiting each other every weekend.

You were oblivious to his feelings. You often noticed how he had trouble sleeping at your apartment but whenever you asked, he claimed he’d developed insomnia. He hadn’t, he just couldn’t sleep because of the thoughts that filled his mind from knowing you were in the next room. He felt guilty to be honest. He was constantly having dirty thoughts that normal people didn’t have about their best friend. Your mere presence reduced him to little more than a giddy, horny teenager.

You also noticed that he became more clingy after the two of you left for college but you never addressed that. He was always an affectionate person and adjusting to college life was definitely hard, so you figured it was probably that. That was part of it. But really, he just missed you. It was that simple. He missed his best friend and his heart leapt every time you opened your door or he opened his. Seeing your face made everything so much better.

Today was no different. He lit up like a neon sign when your door swung open to reveal you in a cropped white hoodie and a pair of black yoga pants, a bright smile on your face. “Sannie!” You held your arms open and he immediately stepped inside, wrapping his arms around your waist and hooking his chin over your shoulder. Everything that had been bothering him up until that moment melted away as you hugged him, your grip tightening right before you stepped back. Oh how he loved your hugs.

You led him inside and motioned for him to sit on the sofa as you grabbed the bag of goodies you’d bought the night before. “I got your favorites.” You grinned as you rejoined him, opening the bag to show him the snacks, sodas, and alcohol you’d purchased. “Oh, also, my roommate is staying with her boyfriend this weekend so you can yell at the tv all you want, we don’t have to be quiet.”

He managed to conceal the excitement he felt at your words, knowing you didn’t mean what he was thinking. “Noted.” He hummed as he settled in. “Are we picking back up where we left off on that anime?”

“We can. I think we can finish the next season if we stay glued to the couch all weekend.” You hummed as you began to stage the snacks on the coffee table, only then realizing you’d forgotten glasses for the alcohol. “We can watch something else if you don’t want to watch that though. I’ve got some other streaming services if you wanna watch a drama.” You shrugged as you got up, heading to the kitchenette.

When you came back, he was sprawled out on your couch. His arms were resting on the back and he had the full man spread going on. He kind of resembled a starfish like that and you rolled your eyes as a smile tugged at your lips. You froze when he let out a low groan as he stretched, throwing his head back. Suddenly, images of you getting him off flashed in your mind. “Let’s watch that. We can watch a drama next weekend.”

You cleared your throat a bit and nodded as you recovered. “Okie dokie.” You singsonged as you joined him, sitting close enough that you could feel his body heat but still leaving enough space that you didn’t have those thoughts again. Where the fuck had that come from? You grabbed one of the bags of chips and settled in, his arm sliding down from the back of the couch to rest on your shoulders as you pulled up the show.

The episode started and you opened the bag, offering it up to San, who shook his head. “I’m good right now, sugar.” You shrugged and leaned into him, pulling your legs up underneath you. He tensed when he realized he’d called you something he’d only imagined calling you but you didn’t seem to mind so he forced himself to relax.

What you didn’t address was the surge of arousal that flooded your body. You were a bitch for pet names and he knew that. You weren’t sure why you were turned on by his words, though. It was San. Sure he was beautiful but he had never affected you like this before. Clearly it had been too long since the last time you’d slept with someone.

Your eyes locked on the screen and you focused solely on that for four episodes before you became aware of the ache in your joints. You’d managed to sit perfectly still for two hours straight and now your body was screaming at you to move. You gently shrugged San’s arm off your shoulders and stood as the fifth episode began, letting out a soft groan of appreciation as you stretched your muscles and cracked every joint you could.

The sound of your voice caught San’s attention and his eyes locked on the exposed portion of your back, wondering what it would feel like to press kisses there. Should I try and find out? Absolutely not. Why the fuck would you even think about that? Fucking dumbass. He shook his head and let out a sigh just as you turned to ask him if he needed anything from the kitchen. “What’s wrong?” You asked softly, noticing how irritated and distressed he looked.

“Huh?” His head snapped up and his jaw dropped slightly before he recovered. “Nothing, I’m fine.” He gave you a warm smile and you responded with a confused but playful wrinkle of your nose before heading off to grab a water. That was fucking close.

You opened the bottle and took a big gulp as you reentered the room, finding him sitting up properly now. He patted the spot next to him and you plopped down beside him, leaning back into his side, this time with your back to him. You brought your feet back up on the couch and took his hand, guiding his arm around your neck in a hug and tipping your head back to rest on his shoulder.

As you once again became enthralled with the show, his fingers absentmindedly traced shapes on the side of your neck. You shuddered at his touch every few minutes but didn’t register any of it as you focused on the tv. You whined a little when he moved his arm back to the back of the sofa but didn’t protest further, too invested in the show to care too much. You shifted to rest your head on San’s lap, grabbing one of the throw pillows to lay on.

With you stretched out like this, San was struggling to focus on the show. He was fixated on your exposed belly and began to discreetly drop his arm off the back of the couch towards your waist. He bit his lip as his hand made contact with your warm flesh, trying to appear focused on the show like you. You glanced up at him and took a moment to admire the view of his jawline before poking his chin. He looked startled and almost guilty when his gaze met yours. “What’s up with you today?” You asked in a teasing tone. “You seem extra cuddly and touchy-feely.”

“What, I can’t be touchy-feely with my best friend?” He grinned down at you and something in you shifted. “I just missed you. We used to see each other every day and for the last two years we’ve only been able to see each other on weekends.”

“Simpler times.” You sighed and turned your attention back to the screen, not bothering to move his hand. It felt nice.

He was surprised that you hadn’t swatted him away but he certainly wasn’t about to complain when you were delicately tracing shapes on the back of his hand. His heart was pounding and he was thankful you hadn’t continued with that line of questioning because he wasn’t sure if he could form a coherent sentence at this point. He should’ve known better than to start to get comfortable though. The second his hand wandered a bit higher, you grabbed his wrist and he froze. Fuck.

“That’s more than touchy-feely, San, that was almost my titty.” You didn’t appear to move your attention from the tv but all you could think about was just how close his hand was to your chest. What had gotten into him? And why were you so affected by his touch? You were just friends…right?

“Oh…sorry.” He mumbled, trying to appear nonchalant despite his internal panic. You didn’t buy it though and looked up at him again, taking note of his flaming cheeks. Cute.

“Seriously, San, what’s actually going on with you?” You hated how harsh your voice came out. You hated the way he flinched at your words. You weren’t trying to scold him, you wanted to put out feelers.

“Nothing.” He shook his head and refused to look at you. You thought for a moment before biting your lip. You clearly didn’t buy it and wanted to ask if he was thinking what you were so suddenly thinking. You were about to speak up when he continued. “I’m just tired. Come cuddle.” He opened his arms.

“Tired already?” He nodded. “Must suck to be any woman you fuck.” You snorted.

“I’ll have you know I have excellent stamina, thank you.” He fired back instantly and you laughed. There he was.

“I’ll believe it when I see it, gramps.”

“Is that an invitation, sweetheart?” You were almost taken aback at his tone, as you’d only heard him use it when he was actively trying to bed someone.

“San-” He just laughed and shook his head as if to assure you he was only teasing. Somehow that bothered you more. Desire had already begun to pool between your legs. You gave a little huff and released his wrist, which you’d been holding this whole time, abruptly sitting up as you swatted his hand away. You turned to look at him as the pillow you’d been resting on toppled from his lap, exposing the semi he was rocking. So he actually did want you. “Yeah, actually, it is.” He sat in stunned silence and you bit the inside of your lip to hide the smile tugging at the corners of your mouth, only speaking once you had successfully concealed your grin. “What? Did you think I’d get flustered and back off?” You raised an eyebrow and tilted your head to the side, your tone almost mocking.

“Yeah, kin-”

“Cute.” You cut him off and placed a hand on his thigh as you leaned towards him, your gaze flicking towards his lips for a brief moment before lifting back to his eyes, which still refused to actually look at you. “Tell me, Sannie, how long did it take you to work up the courage to try and feel me up?”

“I wasn’t-”

“Oh come on.” You rolled your eyes, your hand trailing a bit higher on his thigh as your voice dipped a bit. “You’re already half hard, clearly you were trying to get something out of me.” He squirmed at both your words and your touch, suddenly trying to squeeze his thighs together as he avoided eye contact in favor of staring at your hand, which he felt was far too close to his crotch for him to properly think.

He didn’t get a chance to respond before you spoke up again. “It’s never crossed my mind before, but now that I’m thinking about it, there’s so many things I could do to you, Sannie.” You whispered as you moved your hand away from the swell in his gray sweats and moved to straddle his lap. “What do you think? Should I?” You rolled your hips, grinding against his hard on, and he nodded far too quickly for his liking.

“Please do…” He whispered back, finally meeting your eyes. “Anything you want. ‘M all yours.” You got the feeling he wasn’t just referring to the current moment but you weren’t in any state to be asking for clarification.

You weren’t sure if you were prepared for the ramifications of fucking your best friend but you would have to deal with that later. The ache between your legs required immediate attention. You carded your fingers through his hair before turning your hand into a fist and tugging his head back. Your other hand rested on his neck as you caught his lips in a demanding kiss. The whimper that slipped past his lips went straight to your pussy and you shivered, leaning into his touch when his hands moved to your ass.

He was short circuiting. He was finally getting the chance to touch you and you weren’t pushing him away. In fact, you were the one initiating it. He licked over your bottom lip but you refused him entry, taking the chance to nibble on his lip instead. He gasped against your lips and you smirked, subconsciously tightening your grip on his hair.

“I never pegged you as the submissive type, Sannie.” You teased and he frowned against your lips, clearly pouting. Despite being a switch, he was more dominant than submissive. He was just following your lead because he’d dreamt about this for ages and he didn’t want to get ahead of himself. “Don’t worry, I’ll be nice to you. I’ve been told I’m almost too gentle.”

He whined at your ribbing and you chuckled softly as you pulled back, moving to sit on the floor between his legs. His eyes followed your every movement. You sat on your knees and pushed his oversized tee up a bit to admire his toned stomach before hooking your fingers in the waistband of his sweats. You tugged them down, his now-fully-hard cock springing free and slapping against his belly. “No underwear? Must’ve been real confident things would play out like this, huh?”

“No, actually. I just rarely wear them.” He rolled his eyes and you made a face. He seemed to be getting bolder and you weren’t sure how you felt about that. You were having fun with him. If he decided to take over…well, you doubted that would happen but you might have a brat on your hands.

You didn’t respond, just finished pulling his pants to his ankles, took his dick in your hand, and licked the head. His head tipped back as he let out a surprisingly deep groan and your previous visions came rushing back to you. He looked and sounded just as pretty as you imagined when you took him in your mouth.

“Holy fucking shit, y/n…” He groaned, one hand moving to rest on his belly, holding his shirt up while the other curled into a fist on the sofa. You hummed at his reaction and continued, taking him as far as you could manage. You gagged a little around him and he hissed, his hips jerking a fraction of an inch before he could stop himself. “S-sorry. ‘M sorry, y/n. Didn’t mean to.”

You giggled softly at his apology and he bit his lip, looking down at you. You bobbed your head as your gaze met his and he damn near lost his mind. You looked so pretty with his cock in your mouth. He wanted the image burned in his memory for the rest of his life. Who knew when or if he’d get the chance to do this again?

Given how you responded to his accidentally fucking your face, he decided to experimentally roll his hips. He almost met God when the tip slipped down your throat and you gagged around him, swallowing harshly as you tried but failed to relax your throat. You’d never deepthroated before and it showed as you tried to recover, tears filling your eyes and quickly overflowing to your cheeks. He gently pulled you off and wiped your cheeks, cooing at you as you coughed. “Breathe for me, sugar.” You nodded and took a deep breath, letting him dry your face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what possessed me to do that. Are you okay?”

You nodded again and offered a small smile. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? I don’t wanna go full send and hurt you or-”

“I’m fine, Sannie. I promise.” He finally nodded after a few beats of silence and you tilted your head, eyes narrowing as you studied him for a moment. “Now, what’s with the name? You said it earlier too.”

He looked panicked at first before a grin crept onto his face. “Well, I would call you honey since you’re so sweet, but I feel like that’s a bit overdone, don’t you agree?” You shrugged in agreement and he leaned down, taking your jaw in his hand and jerking you closer. He was a breath away and you were going haywire. “I wonder if your personality is all that’s sweet.”

“What are you saying?” You asked quietly, surprising both of you at just how quickly you’d folded with a single rough touch. So much for him not taking over.

“I wanna taste you, y/n.” He moved to whisper in your ear and your breath hitched. “Every. Single. Inch.” He punctuated his words by kissing and licking up the side of your neck, then biting down softly on your earlobe and drawing out a tiny whimper.

You squeezed your thighs together and closed your eyes for a moment. You grounded yourself with a deep breath before opting to respond by simply tugging at his cock, teasing the head with your thumb. The groan he let out scratched an itch in your brain you never knew existed and his grip on your jaw grew tighter as he inhaled your scent.

“Get up.” You blindly followed his command, standing when he backed away. He didn’t speak as he kicked his pants the rest of the way off and stood with you, hauling you over his shoulder before starting for your room. You squeaked in surprise but didn’t fight, a smile creeping across your face.

You couldn’t stifle the giggle that slipped out when he kissed your side. It shouldn’t have tickled as much as it did.

San had an idea of the things you liked, you’d both talked about your escapades enough, so it came as no surprise to you when he gently placed you on your feet only to grab you by the throat and push you back onto the bed. Still, a thrill ran through your body as you wrapped your hands around his wrist. You sucked in a gasp just before he began to apply pressure to the sides of your throat, your eyes rolling back.

You felt his breath on your face as he leaned down to crash his lips against yours. Your hands left his arm and moved to his shirt, pulling him as close as possible. As he slipped his tongue into your mouth, he slowly relieved the pressure on your throat, allowing blood flow to return to normal and give you a head rush. You moaned into the kiss and wrapped your legs around his waist in a desperate attempt to keep him close when he started to pull away.

“I’ve always wanted to do that…” His voice was a low rumble that made your panties uncomfortably wet. “Always wanted to try everything you mentioned being into. The choking, the biting, the breeding…everything.”

If you weren’t aware of your panties sticking to your folds before, you were after that. “Please do.” You exhaled, trying to pull him back in even as he righted himself between your legs. “All of it. Whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want?” He raised an eyebrow as his hands moved to rest on your hips and you nodded. “Anything?”

“Anything.” You nodded again and bit down on your bottom lip when he rocked his hips, the blunt head of his cock smearing precum across your yoga pants as he rubbed against you. “Please…”

He didn’t speak as his hands slid up your sides, fingers inching under the hem of your hoodie and ghosting over your cool skin. He reached higher still until his hands cupped your breasts. “No bra? Must've been real confident things would play out like this, huh?”

You rolled your eyes and tried not to laugh as the conversation from only a few minutes prior repeated itself. “No, actually. I just rarely wear one.”

“Take it off.” He groaned in response, pushing your hoodie up so your chest was entirely exposed. You sat up, which took a bit of effort given your legs were draped over his thick thighs, and pulled the surprisingly-thin material over your head. He immediately knocked you back and caught your lips in a feverish kiss, propping on one arm while his free hand wandered along your belly.

Your arms wrapped around him, one hand moving to his back while the other tangled in his faded pink locks. He’d dyed his hair magenta a few weeks back and it had since lost its vibrancy - though not before staining a few towels and his pillowcase. You gave his hair a gentle tug and he groaned into your mouth, sending a wave of electricity down your spine.

He began to trail kisses along your jaw and neck as his hand cupped your breast, his thumb swiping back and forth over your nipple. You pushed your chest into his touch, head tipping back as your back arched. Your breath hitched when he brought his kisses to your chest, lips encasing your nipple as his tongue flicked back and forth. “Sannie-” You gasped, your grip on his hair tightening. His hand gave your other breast equal attention, lightly pinching and rolling your nipple before swapping sides.

You couldn’t say you’d ever been curious about what it would be like to sleep with San but you were certain his skills would exceed his reputation if he already had you drenched with minimal effort. You wondered if he could feel the wet patch between your legs, starting to soak through your yoga pants.

He could. He found himself eager to bury his head between your legs despite being determined to take his time with you. He worried he’d disappoint you if he moved too quickly but he still began his descent, peppering sloppy kisses down your belly as his fingers hooked in your waistband. He took your pants and panties both in one go as he moved off the bed. You didn’t miss his sharp inhale.

“Y/N…” Your face flushed red as he knelt between your legs, gaze locked on your glistening cunt. You wanted to tell him not to stare, to urge him along, but you couldn’t seem to break your silence. Finally, you lifted your head and he met your eyes, his own eyes widening in something akin to adoration, though more intense. “Is this all for me, sugar?” There was that name again. You nodded eagerly but he shook his head. “Words.”

You frowned a bit, annoyed that he was making you speak up when he could just take one look at you and know. Of course, you knew he wouldn’t give in so you gave a soft whine before speaking. “Yes, Sannie, it’s all yours.”

You didn’t know why you were so against speaking up. The sound he made the second you did respond made you clench around nothing. He noticed, of course, and let out a low groan as he hooked your legs over his shoulders and kissed your thigh. “May I touch?”

“Please do.” You whispered and caught your lip between your teeth.

He continued to litter your thighs with messy kisses and soft bites as his fingertips teased their way up to your pussy, never once breaking eye contact. Your head fell back to the sheets as soon as you felt him run a finger through your folds, gathering up some of your arousal. He moved torturously slowly, rubbing feather-light circles on your clit before easing one digit into you.

“You’re drenched, baby…” His voice, though painfully sexy, was full of wonder and amusement.

“Your fault…” You mumbled and he chuckled softly.

One finger wasn’t enough. You needed more. He could tell and you felt him smirk against your skin as he curled his finger. You let out a soft sigh at the action but he wasn’t satisfied and so he added another finger, and another when you still didn’t give him the response he wanted.

“Fuck this cunt’s gonna feel so good-” He sighed.

Now three fingers deep, he began his search for your g-spot. It didn’t take him very long if your embarrassingly loud moan was anything to go by. “So fucking pretty, baby.” He groaned, suppressing another sound when you clenched around his fingers. “You like it when I call you pretty? Or was it ‘baby’?” He teased.

“Both.” It was all you could muster as he leaned in and flicked his tongue over your clit. You immediately brought a hand up to your mouth to stifle your sounds but he pulled back and nipped at your thigh.

“Let me hear.” At that point, you had no fight left in you. You just wanted him to touch you and you’d do anything to get your way. You gave a nod, a small ‘okay’ slipping from your lips, and he slowly leaned back in, lips closing around your clit. He sucked and you let out a soft curse, bringing your hands to your chest to knead at the soft flesh of your breasts. He groaned in appreciation and set a slow pace, working you up with his fingers while his tongue traced different shapes over your clit.

You suddenly felt ridiculous for never having wondered if he truly lived up to his reputation. He was proving to you just how good he was and you were cursing yourself for never having thought about having his head between your legs. “Sannie- oh-” You keened, one hand flying to tangle in his hair once more as he pressed against your g-spot at the same time as he sucked on your clit. You wouldn’t last long like this. He was too good.

Your toes curled as he brought you closer and closer to the edge, his tongue dipping into you occasionally in place of his fingers. Your muscles ached with the tension that was building but you knew you wouldn’t be relaxed until he made you cum. Hoping to encourage him to get you off faster so he’d fuck you, you began babbling praises, only inflating his ego.

He made sure you felt his appreciative groan before pulling back for a quick breath then diving back in, tongue flicking with vigor. His cock throbbed as he inhaled your scent and his eyes rolled back briefly. He wanted more of you. All of you. So when you announced you were close, he backed away entirely and smirked. “Not yet, baby.”

“Sannie, what the fuck?” You whined indignantly, lifting your head when he sat up between your legs.

“Decided I want you to cum on my cock instead.” He shrugged, moving up the bed to catch your lips in a kiss. You were surprised by how sweet the kiss was considering how feral he’d just been acting over your pussy but you welcomed it, tugging him closer with a soft groan as you tasted yourself.

“So fuck me then.” You whispered between kisses, lapping your juices off his lips a moment later. The whole scenario was filthy and intoxicating.

“You mean like this?” He grunted as he slid into you with ease. Your jaw dropped and you gasped at the stretch. He fit perfectly, like you were made for each other - a thought that both terrified and intrigued you. He wasted no time in setting a slow, deep pace, each thrust driving you up the bed with the force.

“Just like that, Sannie.” You nodded furiously, wrapping an arm around his broad shoulders while your other hand twisted the sheets by your head.

San was on another planet. He finally had you. You, the girl of his dreams ever since he was fifteen. He was finally fully sheathed inside your warmth and he never wanted to leave. He’d give anything to stay with you.

He hadn’t intended to babble that out loud and realized his error when you responded.

“Yeah? Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Then fuck me harder and treat me like the most precious thing you’ve ever held.”

It was an easy ask. He had no problem cherishing you. Even as his hips began to snap harder and faster, the sound of skin slapping filling the room, he showered you with kisses and words of adoration. “So fucking good, baby. Do you have any clue how long I’ve wanted to feel this perfect little pussy? To make you fall apart on my cock?”

“Tell me, Sannie. Tell me how long you’ve wanted me.”

“God- ever since we were in school. It was so hot the way you fucked her up for hurting me and I’ve wanted you ever since.” His admission sent a thrill rushing through you and you clenched involuntarily, earning a low groan from him.

“And you held it together for that long? Fuck, Sannie, you- oh-” The tip of his cock just barely kissed your cervix but it was enough to make your thighs squeeze his hips.

“Shit, baby, you keep that up and I’ll cum…”

“Then keep fucking me just like that.” You demanded, back arching as he dipped his head down to lick and suck on your chest. He caught your nipple in his mouth and allowed his teeth to graze the stiff peak, grunting against your skin when your walls fluttered in response. “Want you to cum inside as many times as you can until you make me cum.” It wasn’t a demand or a plea, it was just a simple fact but he was eager to comply with your wishes.

“Christ, y/n, you’re killing me…” San groaned, resting his forehead on your chest as his hips pistoned relentlessly. He pulled back just enough to look up at you and you could tell by his expression just how close he was. “You really want that? Want me to breed you like a good little cocksleeve and keep filling you up over and over until you fall apart for me?”

Your nod and whimper were the only convincing he needed. He let go instantly, stars dancing behind his eyes as he pumped you full of cum. This was all he’d wanted for the better part of a decade and he was on cloud nine over finally getting you.

He briefly pulled out and flipped you over, taking a moment to watch a bead of cum drip down your folds before he slammed back into you. He might regret this later given how sensitive he was but he needed to give you anything you asked for.

Your back arched as he hit your sweet spot and you let out a soft cry. “There! Just like that!”

It didn’t take long before he felt another orgasm building. He warned you and you demanded he continue, begging him to give it to you. His cock twitched and he let go at your behest, filling you all over again.

Before he was finished, he reached around to roll your clit between his thumb and forefinger. He delighted in the squeal you let out and did it again, tears welling in his eyes from all the sensation.

“Oh god, Sannie, I’m so close!” You cried, your thighs trembling as your orgasm threatened to wash over you.

“Cum for me, sugar.” His voice was a low rumble in your ear, hoarse with unshed tears, and you couldn’t hold back. You let out another squeal as he toyed with your clit, tipping you over the edge. Your high hit you like a bus and you let out a sob of ecstasy as your pussy clamped down on San’s leaking cock.

You felt a tear fall on your back and gently pushed him back, forcing yourself to roll over. “You okay?” You asked softly as you pulled him to you, still buzzing with the aftershocks of your orgasm.

“‘M fucking perfect.” He offered a lazy smile as he leaned down to capture your lips in a sweet kiss.

“Mm then what’s this?” You teased as you pulled back, wiping a tear from his cheek.

“Proof that I’ve met my match.” He chuckled softly and wiped his face dry. “Seriously, that was…fucking amazing.”

“It was. Can someone explain to me why we didn’t do this sooner?”

“Who knows.” He shrugged and flopped down beside you, then pulled you to lay on top of him. “But I say we do this every weekend, sugar.” He laughed deeply when you swatted his chest in response but deep down you knew this was more than a one time occurrence.

#kpop smut #ateez #ateez smut #ateez x reader #choi san #choi san smut #choi san x reader #alura’s works #pls reblog if you enjoy this!!

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