(A/N: An author's note before a chapter? For what? Well, this is a smut chapter, and it comes with a warning. This protagonist is not an alpha male always top gigachad with an infinitely large c- No. He's a submissive with a penchant for forcing people to top him. That's not all he is, but that's what this chapter is. It's also plot relevant in both the beginning and very end. because fuck you.)

 

“So. Dungeon sickness, you said. How exactly did you treat me?” The man Kara had almost forgotten about by the time her shift had ended asks her with a look of genuine concern on his face. Two days she’d had him in her bed, which made her own ability to sleep rather awkward. Fortunately, he seemed to be capable of moving now, considering he’d managed to find the blanket she’d been using to cover him at night during his long sessions of sleeping.

 

“You don’t remember most of it, do you?” Leuen just shakes his head at her. “Good. It’d be the most embarrassing story of your life. I had to help you eat, shit, drink, and had to order you around whenever I couldn’t force you to do those things under my own power. You’re very susceptible to instructions after being pinched.”

 

Leuen’s face is one of utter betrayal, yet the spike of blue that had been in his eye when Kara walked through the door is gone.

 

“Speaking of, you can talk now. Means you’re getting better. Which is good, because it was getting hard to explain to the guild that I knew you were recovering from dungeon sickness but couldn’t explain where you were doing that or why.” Kara tries her absolute best not to look at his body, recognizing that it would be poor form to peek at the fact his manhood is exposed, since he doesn’t seem have noticed that he’s still completely naked. As if her thinking it had been the trigger for him to notice, or perhaps he’d simply followed the very brief glance her eyes had taken down his body, but he immediately paled. Weirdly, though, he recovered quickly.

 

“I suppose that’s not going to affect you much, based on what you said you did to help me. So again, what exactly did you do to make it go away?” Leuen rapidly gathers up the blanket back over himself while laying back down in the bed. It doesn’t help the outline of everything, but technical modesty is the only type that matters, in a legal sense.

 

“Dungeon sickness makes you want to be a mindless… puppet, I suppose. You do what you routinely do, justify things based on patterns and routines, and you struggle to be self aware and to think about your emotions. It wears off on its own, theoretically, but the more time you spend without that self awareness and emotions the longer it will last. Basically, I cared for you like someone infirm, and then pampered you like a baby until you started doing things on your own.”

 

“That was… very nice of you. No, more than that, really-”

 

“Shut it. I don’t know why I did it either and based on guild policy I should’ve left you to suffer. Technically speaking, what I’ve done is considered kidnapping.” Kara forces herself to look away from the man and to her shelf, wherefrom she grabs out a book she ‘borrowed’ from the guild yesterday on common dungeon related injuries. “Plus… I owe you, for the money you gave me for the name thing.”

 

Kara isn’t sure what reaction Leuen has, but she does hear shifting on the bed behind her. Is he whispering to himself about something? Or maybe he’s just breathing heavily? Kara is too busy flipping through pages to find the part that Leuen wants to actually pay attention to him, but she does manage to find her way to her stool beside him.

 

“Ah… Thank you, Kara, thank you anyways. You’d make a pretty bird.” Leuen’s voice interrupts her searching, and her attention rests fully on Leuen. Before she can express her shock and confusion, Leuen says the next ridiculous thing. “Well, shit. Anything other than that would’ve been more intimate, wouldn’t it?”

 

Kara looks at Leuen, then blinks. A few seconds later, Leuen blinks. Then, when Leuen is the one who attempts to look away first, Kara can’t help herself. Unfortunately for her, Leuen’s body appears to be made out of steel, because the thrown book doesn’t do anything more than make him flinch despite impacting his nose dead on.

 

-X-X-X-

 

Surprise surprise, the guild girl is a tsu- Is the least sane thought he’s had in days, dungeon sickness be damned. Or at least, it would’ve been, if not for the fact that mere moments after he’d managed to successfully wrangle the book to a spot to the right of him on the bed, a heavy something smashed into his body from the left. Leuen’s not an idiot, so he’s not going to attempt to call Kara a tsundere, mentally or out loud, while she’s got her lips on his neck.

 

It’s an intoxicating feeling, both because of how sensitive it feels to have someone kissing you right where your collarbone is, and because she’d quite literally pounced on him to do it. Unfortunately for his sexual sensibilities, Kara pulls away. She doesn’t get off of him, though, leaving the significantly smaller girl awkwardly pressing into his stomach with her body.

 

“Sorry- I… Shit- I shouldn’t have done that… You’re still recovering and I’m not supposed to woah!” The only thing Leuen’s brain thinks to do as a response is to forcibly move her around a little. Mostly because her elbows were digging into him, but secondarily because no matter what excuses she can try to make, that’s not going to explain why she wanted to at all. “Ah… Can you let me go… No… Got it.”

 

Leuen is impressed at how quickly she resolves to accept her fate and put her arms around his body, the same way he’s doing to force her to stay on top of him. He’s still awkwardly half-hunched up, but now Kara’s weight is distributed along the part of him that’s laying down, mathematically more comfortable.

 

“Ok. Now. I’m going to make some assumptions.” Leuen announces, hoping to take charge for a little bit, considering Kara seems to be quite content to silently hug him as long as he’s willing to force her to stay there. Unfortunately for Kara, she started this, and now Leuen is obligated, by all known laws, to finish it.

 

It doesn’t take much effort to force Kara’s chin up off of his chest, and she clearly puts an equal amount of effort into making their lips meet, but Kara doesn’t close her eyes until Leuen lets go of her face, freeing Leuen to do the same.

 

As if that was the last floodgate being opened, Kara’s hands suddenly explode outwards, exploring his chest and crawling towards his cock depending on whether you ask her right or left, but unfortunately Leuen has far more sensible plans, for now.

 

Forcing Kara to stop reaching for his member is a genuinely difficult task without breaking the kiss, as it means he must move his (still mildly disobedient) arms around without the ability to see them, but he eventually manages to get hands around her wrists and pull them off of his body. As soon as Kara realizes she’s been forced to stop feeling him, her lips leave Leuen’s just enough for her to breath heavily, clearly trying for normal breath again.

 

“Is that not…” Kara pauses as Leuen pulls his head away from hers and look into her eyes. She doesn’t continue the thought process Leuen was intending to start, so he gives her ‘the look’. The universal one, with the slightly cocked head, eyes resting in a way that says ‘Really?’ louder than any spoken version could ever possibly convey. After a tense thirty seconds, Kara’s face goes completely red and she leans backwards onto his legs. “Five minutes.” Leuen rolls his eyes. “Pleeeease?”

 

Oy, is she an idiot after all? Leuen can’t help but think, until finally, after a fully minute of staring at each other, Kara seems to finally get it. 

 

“Oh. Right. That… Should’ve occurred to me sooner.” Kara says to herself before Leuen finally releases her arms. “Thank you… I only have one set of good work clothes.”

 

-X-X-X-

 

Kara couldn’t help herself. It was the heat of the moment, she wasn’t thinking clearly, and… Ok, no, none of that was true. She was fucking horny. She’d had to, no, not the word, been given the opportunity to baby a veritable card carrying ‘mysterious stranger’, totaled up with him being at her mercy. She’d checked his stuff when she’d undressed him the first time, and Leuen has to be the single dumbest rich dude imaginable, or telling the absolute truth when he said he had no idea what those gold coins are worth.

 

His body… A bit of a tangent for her mind to be going on while she’s fumbling to shove off her clothes as fast as possible, but most adventurers fall into one of three categories. Workers, people who’ve done manual labor before becoming adventurers, and as such have physiques that match what they did before fighting monsters, and nothing much changed about them afterwards. Hit or miss, in the attractiveness department. Muscleheads, categorically unattractive, plus most tended to prefer other muscleheads, of any gender, Kara might add. The third category would be the type like Leuen. Heroes.

 

Leuen is perfect. Too perfect. Sculpted perfect. Chiseled out of a suspiciously fleshy marble, with exactly enough muscle completely evenly throughout his body. Except you wouldn’t know that while he was in his adventuring clothes, and even after she’d got him out of those, it didn’t sink in until she had her hands on it.

 

She hadn’t used her breasts to try and get Leuen to understand that he had dungeon sickness, she’d used Leuen’s dungeon sickness as an excuse to see how well they fit in his hands. Kara knows that’s ridiculously thirsty, even if she went by the standards of those perpetually ‘in-heat’ beast-people that very rarely stop by Riverwake, but it was the truth.

 

Even that still wouldn’t fully explain her own actions, but Leuen seems to understand them well enough. Leuen’s not an adventurer. Not really. All the adventurers she’s been with, all three of them, have a distinct feeling to them. Back when she was one of them, she had a reputation for cozying up with the rogues, and some of them had actually led to something. Adventurers, herself included back then, aren’t the type to be understanding and gentle about sex. Leuen can’t be an adventurer from far away, disregarding his lack of adventuring knowledge, that’s the bottom line, he wants Kara, but didn’t immediately take her.

 

He’s not a noble either. Nobles don’t stoop enough as to go into dungeons alone, and more importantly, wouldn’t have let a dirty peasant girl make them moan with a kiss on the neck, so he isn’t one of those. He’s not a noble bastard, either. All of those, categorically, are not as self confident as Leuen seems to be.

 

Which leaves two options. Leuen is perfect, and Kara is totally justified in wanting to spill all her secrets and open her heart and legs for him. Or. Leuen is a dangerously self-destructive adventurer with a lot of money and an odd look in his eyes, making him historically the exact type of person she’d ruined her life for.

 

-X-X-X-

 

Kara is aggressive. Leuen should’ve guessed that, but it’s weird to have it confirmed. The moment she’d gotten her clothes fully removed, she’d pounced on him again, but this time, it wasn’t an awkward lunge out of apparent desperation. It was a calculated assault.

 

Kara had landed perfectly on top of him, her wetness rubbing against his right thigh as her lips immediately found his neck and began hungrily kissing and sucking while she rubbed herself against him. Naturally, Leuen is now well and truly in his element. He can’t remember who it was, and it doesn’t matter, but someone once called him a bitch for prefering this sort of treatment. That loser has never experienced anything like this, so Leuen is winning.

 

Of course, he can’t let Kara have all the fun. In the brief lapses in Kara’s assault, when she’s switching sides on his neck for example, he squeezes her ass with both hands, doing his absolute best to not be completely helpless, even though he has no intention of taking any sort of control he isn’t ordered to. Why? Because that’s the game.

 

Kara moves up to his face and locks lips with him for a moment, crashing her tongue into Leuen’s with fervor. Melting into it, Leuen can’t help but moan mindlessly into her. As if encouraged by this, Leuen feels a hand suddenly grab his cock, and he can’t help but squirm a little when Kara pulls away from his face to look him in the eyes.

 

“You’re a softie… But only right now… I get it.” Kara concludes something or other before shifting herself over his crotch and inserting his tip into her wetness. “Hmph~ I think I get your ahn~ Ha… Game…”

 

Leuen smiles and leans forward, forcing Kara to impale herself fully as he grabs her by her sides and twists her, switching their position to one with both of them on their sides. Then, pressing his full length into Kara’s depth, Leuen shifts his hips side to side once, to get a feel for her. Kara’s pussy is tight and incredibly wet, and her insides seem to twitch a little when Leuen forces himself in fully, and the girl’s face seems incapable of hiding the fact that she desperately wants more. Perfect.

 

Now it is Leuen’s turn to make Kara squirm, as he goes first for her face, but dodges her attempt at a passionate kiss to instead blow hot air in her ear as he forces her to remain perfectly still as his cocksleeve.

 

“You… Tease…” Kara lets out between heavy breaths, prompting Leuen to laugh a little.

 

“You don’t like it when I’m messing with you, do you? Then. Make. Me…” Leuen licks his lips as he waits for the best part, the part all of the game leads up to. “Behave.”

 

-X-X-X-

 

The best part about being a teasing submissive with a woman like Kara? To Leuen at least, it’s the fact that without fail, they will always try to act like the thing they want isn’t to end up exactly the way they’ve been for the last hour, passionately making out occasionally interrupted by one of the two of them deciding it’s time for another round.

 

It’s remarkably easy and incredibly fun for him to watch someone mentally switch from lovey-dovey makeout session to dominating someone objectively capable of overpowering them physically. It’s cute, when Kara finds herself teasing Leuen’s chest with her lips, before the realization hits her that the only reason she could force him down is because that’s what Leuen wanted.

 

Now, though, the act is done. The concept of time was forgotten long ago, but it’s been very dark for a while outside the window high up on the wall of Kara’s apartment. As fun as it was, teasing dominance out of Kara, and as much as he enjoyed giving in to her demands and needs, that might be it, really. Leuen’s probably completely over the dungeon sickness thing, and he really ought to read the book on it Kara had once the two wake up in the morning, but that will probably be the last time they speak with each other. Leuen can’t help but feel like this wasn’t supposed to happen, or at least not like this.

 

(A/N: Jk it's because pacing is hard and chapter lengths will never be uniform)