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He has no place here.
It’s not something Dunk likes to dwell on, generally. The gods are a flimsy, distant topic, to be discussed in citadels and among Maesters, septons and scholars, and they are certainly not the Kingsguard’s concern. He has tangible, material things to worry about: the crown prince’s safety, for one, seeing as the man had decided to wander about the Great Sept past nightfall; a pointless excursion with no apparent goal other than to create unnecessary shuffles in the White Sword Tower. Still, he’s there, as dutiful as his sworn brother patrolling the premises on the other side of the large, cavernous hall, eyeing the great statues of the Seven.
It’s knighthood that he’s suited for; he had been sure – and had hoped to be right – his entire life. The gods towering above him here, in the stifling heat of the temple, are shapeless, hectic bouts of mercy and pain, births and deaths, wars and the calm between them. He watches Prince Aerys light his candles and mutter to himself and there seems to be a method to it – six of them in six directions barring one, his prayers fervent but inaudible. It’s the statue that he’s omitting that draws Dunk’s eyes, a commotion of some sort arising just as his wandering mind decides to stray towards the hunched, shadowy back of the Stranger.
There’s a cloaked figure at the foot of it, arguing with one of the workers of the sept in hushed, angry tones, the way the words are hissed out making something inside him stand on edge. He knows that timbre from somewhere; knows the fear in the servant’s eyes as they flinch back from the sound of it. He knows better than to react to it as well, or he should, but Prince Aerys is visibly irritated at the distraction and Dunk nods his fellow white cloak closer as he sets out to investigate, the hair at the back of his neck rising when he hears the hesitant, pacifying whisper of, “But, Your Grace—”
Not just a disruption, then. The disruption.
At the dais in front of the Stranger, neatly organised candles – he counts fourteen of them – illuminate the black-and-red velvet of a cape wrapped around a stiff, pointed set of shoulders poised for attack. As their owner lifts his head again, the hood slips just enough for a silvery fringe to slip out and Dunk stops, closing his eyes for just a moment. It had been an expected bout of trouble, but perhaps not quite this late at night, and certainly not here.
“This is a place of worship,” Aerion Targaryen grits out and Dunk can’t see his face, but he can imagine the smile settling onto his insufferable face when the servant shifts backwards. “Would you want to be considered sacrilegious, boy? Or school a prince of the blood on how to pray?”
“No! No, I would never, m’lord. The gods are for all, and they are sure to favour you.” He offers a quick, distracted bow. “But if you’ll please, Your Grace—”
“I will not.”
“—it’s a hazard is all. I meant nothing of it.”
“Then make sure that you say nothing of it, either. The dragon does not fear the flame. Do you hear yourself?”
A moment of resigned uncertainty and then a short, miserable nod. “As you will, Your Grace.”
“And you,” the prince continues, gesturing in Dunk’s general direction, having apparently caught a glimpse of his armour even though he hadn’t deigned to turn around, “See to it that I’m not disturbed anymore.”
“I had thought two years in Lys were supposed to have seen to that.”
He gets the momentary satisfaction of watching Aerion stiffen up further, back straight, eyes so wide that he can see the change in his expression even in profile, before he’s pinned down with a look that would have eviscerated a lesser man – something that Dunk is, thankfully, not. “You,” he says again, quieter this time. “You would be wise to return to your charge.”
“You make rather a lot of noise, Your Grace,” Dunk persists, a maelstrom of well-buried emotions bubbling up to the surface as he takes in the prince of the realm. He’s much the same as he had been when they’d last met, though his face had lost its bruises and returned to its cold sheen of otherworldly beauty, the only thing marring it being a thin cut through his lower lip, a residue of what must have been a recent altercation. To his shame, he feels something between heady desire and bitter jealousy wash over him at the thought that someone else had put that there. From the whispers he’d heard from across the Narrow Sea, Aerion had spent the last year as a mercenary and while he clearly hadn’t met his match if he’s still quite so intact, he’d been close enough to be injured somewhere else. It’s a baffling thought to have, and an impossible one to ignore. “It bothered him during his prayer, I think.”
“Oh, we cannot have that. It must have been so distressing to have someone else light the very same candles a little way away from him.”
“It is if it might set the sept afire, m’lord.”
“Ser Duncan!”
He turns just in time to face Ser Donnel’s apologetic smile and a moment too early to doubtlessly witness another snarl from the prince still busy arranging his – irregular, apparently – candles. “What is it?”
“Prince Aerys has instructed that I take him back to the Red Keep. If you would make sure that his nephew also arrives safely whenever he’s ready to leave, that would be splendid.” He offers a helpless shrug, as if to say ‘what can you do?’ and beams, satisfied, upon receiving a weary but resolute nod from Dunk. “Thank you.”
And just like that, he’s gone.
“I would appreciate being left in peace,” Aerion chimes in and Dunk barely spares an exasperated glare at him before he starts the rounds to rouse the staff and any lingering worshippers from the lull in activity. The Great Sept hadn’t been emptied for the heir to the Iron Throne, but it would be cleared out for Prince Maekar’s wayward son. He’s not quite sure what he’d expected, but Aerion had somehow managed to remain precisely the same person he had been two years ago. And, sure enough, “Are they all gone?”
“Yes.” Dunk casts a suspicious glance at the Stranger’s altar. “You can go back to your incantations now.”
“Oh, I was just about finished, Ser Duncan.”
He delights in angering him and is being difficult on purpose; a feat for such a natural talent at the art of being a problem. Dunk’s irritation reaches its peak just in time for the prince to catch him by the wrist and pull him down to the dais, white cloak and all, and onto his knees.
~.~
He has no place here.
Situated at the feet of the Stranger, the faceless, star-eyed god’s back turned to him, is the most tolerable place in this temple, but it’s still not particularly pleasant. He’d been all but strong-armed into the Great Sept under the pretence of humility and repentance and doing what little he can to make it feel closer to something he could actually see himself believing in had been the only way to make the indignity not stick. His uncle’s presence had undone some of that effort, but the arrival of one specific – and brand new, from what he knows – member of the Kingsguard had been a far different blow.
It’s all he can think about, even after two years away; the flood of wild, unrestrained sensation that the tourney of Ashford had been. It had changed anything and everything, for the realm even more than it had for him, but it had all narrowed to a single, concentrated spot upon his return, at least for the time being. Seeing the exact same thing in Ser Duncan’s eyes had been nothing short of a relief and dragging him down into his own world is the most natural, most selfish thing he can manage. It’s irresistible.
The fact that Duncan responds with the same hungry, devastating fury to Aerion’s first attempt at a kiss is all the answer he needs to whether it’s only irresistible to him. Certainly not, it seems.
He feels restless and set ablaze, desperation clawing at his insides as if he’d suddenly grown too big for his skin, and Aerion pushes the knight’s knees apart with one of his own, settling onto his thigh when he finally gets what he wants, arms braced on Duncan’s shoulders to keep himself steady as he shifts around for the right angle. It thrills him that he’s the only one to move, too, until tentative arms wrap around his waist, and he shudders at the way his own chainmail bites into his skin as a result. He’s so hard that he’s dizzy with it and his first uncoordinated thrust downwards punches a whimper out of him, choked off and almost surprised.
“Oh,” Duncan says, the awe in his voice rushing through Aerion like wildfire, and then he shifts his leg just enough to jostle him upwards – closer – into him. The pressure feels just right now and he shivers, doing his best to subdue the reaction even as he moves again, and even through his half-lidded eyes, he can see the smile blooming in response, self-satisfied and a little disarming in its honest smugness. “Is this what you, ah, wanted? Is it what you need?”
“Quiet,” Aerion scolds him, but it comes out breathless and overeager and Duncan pays it no mind other than to hail him nearer still. It’s part of the allure of this; always had been, no matter how reluctant he is to admit to it. It feels so intolerably good to finally have someone push back when he shoves them, strike back when stricken and it’s a shameful, rotten thing to want, but if there’s one thing that his time away had taught him, it’s that the world is, at large, rotten at the core when put under the slightest pressure. No one in Lys had thought it uncouth to dive into one’s urges and desires. His father had sent him there to learn and he’d learnt. “You enjoy this, don’t you,” he forces out, shifting the focus as well as the blame as it had always been terribly tempting to do, “having your prince indulge you so, here, in the eyes of the gods?”
That makes the knight flush and it’s a pretty sight, flustered and reluctantly pleased. “Were you not, fuck,” he cuts himself off when Aerion finds enough coordination in his body to get a hand into his clothes and wraps it around his cock. He would bite his own tongue off before admitting it, but he’d missed the sensation; the feel of him under his touch, the way Duncan squirms and gasps and bucks up into each stroke and still somehow gathers the strength to try and speak again. “Were you not telling that servant off for being sacrilegious?”
“I am as pious as I can be,” he fires back, settling into a rhythm. The friction of the clothing between them sends surges of pleasure up his spine, more divine than anything that had happened in this temple before. “I wouldn’t be fucking you in front of the fourteen flames otherwise.”
“Fourteen—” He watches as Duncan tries to process that and promptly gives up a moment later, too busy rutting up into Aerion’s fist and chasing his own release. He steadies them both, one hand creeping down Aerion’s stomach as if he wants to return the favour and he shakes his head, adamant.
“Don’t touch me,” he manages, pleased when that same touch settles heavily on his waist instead, having apparently grasped what he means. “I want—” But there’s no way for him to articulate it properly; not when he’s this far gone. He doesn’t want the easy relief of being pleasured nor the quickness of it when he can have it like this instead, frustrating and intolerable and just on the edge of his reach. “I want—”
“All right, all right.” There are hands gentling him through it, running up and down his back to keep him grounded as his hips move frantically against the thigh being pushed up into each movement he makes and it makes ecstatic tears well up in his eyes. He hides them well enough by dragging Duncan into a kiss, hungry and sharp, so that he can make him bleed as only he knows how. A dragon is to be worshipped, for sure, but he’d had his fill of that for two years; of feather-light touches and reverent lovers. He craves nothing more than the reminder that he’s to be feared, too, that there is someone in this world who can stand it when he bites and scratches and takes, and that that same man gives back as good as he gets, tongue running experimentally over Aerion’s split lip in revenge. He smiles into the kiss just to feel the sting as the skin stretches and parts and gives way to blood again. They’re matched in that, now, as they are in so much else, and it soothes something inside him even at the height of his bliss. “There you are.”
There he is.
Duncan gasps into their kiss when he comes, his bright eyes wide and earnest as they always are at his most vulnerable, and Aerion finds himself following soon after, his desperate thrusts devolving into a quivering, breathy sort of embrace, clumsy and graceless as his pleasure courses through him. They’re a both a dirty, dishevelled mess and trying to escape this building unnoticed will be a chore and he can’t find it in himself to care, entirely consumed by the thrumming string of pleasure still reigning over his body.
There’s a moment of heavy, pointed silence and then Aerion laughs when he feels a sticky, bloody kiss being pressed onto his forehead. The flickering flames of the still-burning candles he’d carefully arranged upon arrival, his fourteen little beacons home, still lighten up their corner of the sept and in a moment of wild recklessness, he lifts a hand up to his own lips, gathering some of the blood to be found there before smearing it above his knight’s furrowed brows. Sure enough, it makes the confusion he gets in response even deeper, which in turn only makes him laugh more.
“What—”
“Hen lantoti ānogar, va sȳndroti vāedroma,” he says just to watch Duncan narrow his eyes in distrust, but doesn’t bother to explain. He might tell him one day, or he might find out on his own. Either way, it would be their secret to keep. “We would do well to leave, I think, before someone in the Red Keep has a fit over being a prince and a knight short.”
“Oh. Right.” Duncan gets to his feet and dusts himself off, face reddening again as if he’d suddenly remembered where they are. “I did promise to deliver you back to your family at a reasonable hour. Your father will be most wroth.”
“My father is always wroth. He will be happy enough to have his family in one place. Come on out, Ser Duncan,” he adds just to taste the power of it on his tongue. He could get used to it, he thinks, and for once, the urge to stifle that thought doesn’t immediately follow.
The night air outside the Great Sept is pleasantly chilly, the familiar – if not particularly pleasant – scents of the city invading his senses, and Aerion smiles as he makes his way down the stairs with his knight in tow. Far above them, the fires he had started keep on burning and he can feel their light follow them all the way back to the Red Keep.