Chapter Text
Dunk settled atop him, mouth open and panting, with his huge right hand braced against Baelor’s chest. Baelor could barely breathe against the weight of him, the heat of him, hips shakily pressing upward and hands curled like greedy dragon’s claws over the crest of Dunk’s hips.
Baelor could feel Dunk twitching up and back restlessly, forcing short, breathless sounds from Baelor’s lips as Dunk tested his body’s reaction to the intrusion, speared on Baelor as he was.
Dunk was scorching hot and slick inside with the oil he’d pressed into himself after the cleansing ceremony, tight in a way that sucked Baelor in faster than he’d intended to enter him.
“Don’t, gods,” Dunk started, “don’t move yet, your Grace, else I think I’ll split in two.”
“I will remind you again that the usefulness of noble titles has long passed, Ser Duncan, in such a position as we now find ourselves,” Baelor replied, left hand sliding in toward Dunk’s flagging erection.
“I’m afraid that the list of liberties you’ll be taking with me shall only grow longer this eve.”
Baelor smoothed oil and pre-cum down Dunk’s length with an exploratory hand, tugging insistently. He smiled in satisfaction at both the speed which Dunk rose and the heft of his huge cock in his hand, watching the flush of effort and arousal spread across Dunk’s broad chest.
Dunk began to drag his hips opposite the motion of Baelor’s hand, lifting up and sitting back cautiously, but gaining confidence with each rise and fall. Baelor’s smile dropped from the obliterating wave of pleasure that followed.
“Ah, fuck! As- as you say, Baelor.” Dunk groaned as he dropped down harder than before, bracing his left hand on Baelor’s knee behind him.
“Let me set the pace then, if that’s not one liberty too many.”
The sound of his given name, combined with the vulgar sounds of Dunk riding him, made Baelor writhe against Dunk. He helplessly dragged his heels up the bed, seeking leverage to press up just a little more, but he found himself completely pinned by the heavy hand on his chest and knee, Dunk’s solid weight across his lap. He let out a shuddering moan at the loss of control, how it made his toes curl and his balls draw up tight to his body.
“I don’t think I have much choice than to follow your lead, Ser,” Baelor wheezed out.
“I find myself at your mercy. What would you have me do?”
Thinking to try the handling that his wife had once used on him to great effect, he coordinated a clever twist of his wrist with a soft circling of his thumb across the slit of Dunk’s wet cockhead.
Not so different as touching myself, after all, simply reversed, Baelor marveled.
Dunk let out a shocked sound, thrusting forward hard into that tight grasp as his cock blurted out a drool of pre-cum. He sat back down on Baelor with surprising force, driving Baelor deep into him and forcing a shout from both of them.
It satisfied something primal in Baelor to hear their pleasure echo off the castle’s stone walls. He could only imagine the earful that the serving staff would get tonight – more than enough to feed the rumor mill for weeks after the tournament.
“Ser Duncan, please, mm- it has been years since I’ve had anyone in my bed, and I have little enough experience with men in any case.”
Dunk let out a breathless laugh. “I’d say you’re doing great,” he started, but was interrupted as Baelor tried another twisting pass with his hand and rubbed more insistently with his thumb, back and forth at the slit this time.
“Ah, Baelor!” Dunk gasped, “You keep that hand where it is and this will be over faster than you think.”
He thrust forward into the tight circle of Baelor’s hand, nearly lifting all the way up off Baelor’s cock, and then back again swiftly, rolling his hips backward into a grind with a hitching moan.
“There’s something…inside too, like that, fuck,” Dunk cursed, deliriously giggling something about Alice with three fingers.
I wonder what that will feel like when it’s my turn, Baelor thought hungrily.
The way Dunk was learning how to take his pleasure from Baelor’s body was incredible for him watch and nigh impossible for him to withstand.
Finally, Dunk continued distractedly, “I’ve naught else to suggest, seeing as uh- well, I haven’t... this is the only time I’ve been taken to bed.”
Baelor groaned, ineffectively trying to grind up into Dunk as he sat back down on him. He was struck dumb by reflexive pleasure and a healthy dose of guilt.
He released Dunk’s cock, receiving a whine for his trouble, and smoothed his hands up Dunk’s chest until he could reach to clasp the back of his neck.
Baelor leaned up to press Dunk’s hot forehead against his own.
“Can you forgive me for it, Ser Duncan? Can you forgive me for taking now what you had little choice but to give?”
Dunk shifted forward, pressing Baelor flat to the bed and sliding both his hands under Baelor’s shoulders to grip the soft linen bedspread on either side of Baelor’s head. He had to spread his knees wide in order to bring their bodies together and press his chest to Baelor’s. They both moaned long and loud at the change in position.
Dunk restlessly rubbed his cock against Baelor’s stomach and seemed to relish the rough scrape of Baelor’s curly body hair along his sensitive cockhead and nipples. Baelor bit down hard on his own lip as Dunk clamped down on him like a vise and his weeping cock smeared warm, slippery pre-come between their bellies.
Don’t come yet, he told himself firmly, not yet.
Regaining the thread of conversation, Dunk leaned forward so that he could speak hoarsely into Baelor’s ear.
“Aye, Baelor, I’m your man. You saved my life, or at least my hand and foot. I swore to see this through, same as you, and it doesn’t hurt to be riding the handsomest dragon in all the seven kingdoms.”
He tenderly traced the tip of his nose up the side of Baelor’s face from the point of his jaw, across his cheekbone, and then tucked up against Baelor’s own nose, speaking directly against his lips.
“And I’d thank you to call me Dunk when you’re so far up my guts that I can nearly feel you in the back of my throat.”
That was all that Baelor needed to shed his guilt and grab his knight firmly by his ass with one hand and his cheek with the other, looking hungrily up into Dunk’s panting, smiling face.
“Perhaps I desire the reminder. Ser Duncan, my true knight,” he said, honey-sweet, using his grip to roll Dunk’s hips against his at that extraordinary angle, “My good man. Mine husband-” Dunk swallowed whatever other admission might have come tumbling out, making his reply with only his tongue.
It had been Baelor’s idea, when no other voice could turn his nephew Aerion from his folly. As the confrontation in Lord Ashford’s solar escalated and Aerion made increasingly bizarre demands, Baelor realized that his advice to the hedge knight had missed the mark. The painfully young and guileless Ser Duncan the Tall would likely forfeit his life for this family. His family, whom he loved and mourned in equal measure, and who now teetered on the edge of dishonor.
“No, Aerion. There will be no Trial of Seven,” Baelor stated emphatically. Raising a hand against the ensuing backlash and leaning forward in his chair, he sifted through the archives in his brain for a clean solution.
Be quick, he thought, and cut this malice to the quick before it grows legs.
Daeron’s dream of the dead dragon and the elm tree turned and turned in his mind, that dream which Duncan had hesitantly confided to Baelor in their prior meeting. Doom lay over the Ashford tournament field, and Baelor rather thought it could be his own if they did not set this path to rights.
“I bid you remember that we dragged our retinue to this tournament in the backend of beyond precisely because the king bid us cultivate a specific image among our bannermen and the smallfolk. There are whispers spreading among the dishonored houses that once supported Bittersteel. Unrest stirs where the violence of Redgrass Field has been forgotten, and across the Narrow Sea. Now more than ever, we must walk a fine line between exerting authority and abusing it, elsewise be seen as the mad tyrants such that they would paint us,” Baelor said.
“Your deeds, Aerion, may seem a folly to you, but mummers and bards have the ear of the people, and they will not cast you in the role of protagonist. Word of your cruelty will spread and grow in the telling, doing us no favors among those who during the next rebellion could be swayed to our side, or away from it. You will not make further theater of this family.”
The idea taking shape his mind was even more absurd than Aerion’s archaic fourteen-man trial-by-combat. It was as likely to get himself and his sons disinherited as to save them from whatever doom was portended by Daeron’s dream. It could start a new war between the Faith and the Crown, or spark another Blackfyre Rebellion, no less. A dangerous path, being one hitherto untrodden.
I must choose now - act now, he felt in his bones, or lose this chance to change our fate.
Clearing his throat to draw the attention of the room, he cast his gaze on Dunk, staring directly into his eyes as if to warn him of this rogue idea by way of telepathy. He had not the skills of his aunt Sheira, and thus Dunk could not have known what shock lay in store for him. Whether the knight before him would be affronted by Baelor’s solution, or would allow it, Baelor knew not.
“By my word as Protector of the Realm and Hand of the King, Ser Duncan will be exempted from any trial because his honor is tied to mine. I hereby betroth him,” Baelor proclaimed, turning his gaze down the table to Aerion.
“Nephew, if you wish to challenge my honor, it will be a trial by combat between the two of us, and no others. Choose now.”
Aerion’s head whipped up to stare back at Baelor in stunned silence, bruised mouth dropping open in surprise. His idle hand dropped to the table, scattering walnuts everywhere. The noise startled everyone into various exclamations of disbelief, all except for Daeron, who only murmured, “That might just do it.”
Maekar was the loudest of all, standing and snapping, “What in the ever-loving fuck are you going on about?”
Dunk broke in, hand outstretched, with a miserable, “Begging your pardon, your Grace?”
Aerion interrupted too, laughing, “You would lower yourself to this - with a fucking nobody hedge knight – and a man?”
Baelor rose decisively, walking around the table to stand next to Dunk, who turned to him with such a bewildered look on his face that he felt, for a moment, some great regret in ensnaring this compelling stranger to his scheme; he who had stumbled into Baelor’s life with such a lack of design.
Baelor himself certainly hadn’t considered this one of Dunk’s few options when they had spoken earlier. There was no precedent in the Realm for men marrying one another, as marriage was mostly a political and financial tool. Only the smallfolk might marry for love alone, and even then, it was rare.
Through this union with a hedge knight, no restless house would be assuaged by a rise of station and power, no heir begotten, and no great exchange of property or trade alliances made. By the same token, there would be no leveraging for political influence, no ulterior motives, no constant vigilance against showing vulnerability.
Pulling the signet ring from his own finger and pressing it into Dunk’s slack hand, then turning to face his brother and nephews, Baelor’s voice rang a challenge across the room.
“I have made my choice. Ser Duncan the Tall is my man, and we will be handfasted as soon as the gods allow. Will you withdraw your grievance, Aerion, or will you meet me in a trial by combat on the tournament field for all to watch?