Terry Pratchett owns all the Discworld everything. Not so sure he'd want to own this - pretty sure not.

It's taken weeks and weeks just to get these six pages written, and I don't know if I won't chicken out on more. But I read smut, and I prefer smut with more than just purple prose and repetitive dirty words going repeatedly in and out of other dirty words, so I tried to avoid that.

Now I'm just going to go hide my face in my pillow or something. Enjoy.

They made it through the door with all appendages still attached, which was, upon reflection, quite a feat. Considering that they were engaging in a kiss that had narrowed Susan's focus to only a few square inches of skin. Considering that 'through the door' meant 'not opening it, but rather taking flesh through solid wood'.

So. They made it through the door intact.

She deserved a reward in the form of a dessert. Preferably chocolate.

But later. Because of the kissing. Which Teatime was shockingly good at, Susan observed.

Those politely placed hands that had kept her from tumbling down the stairs outside slid up her sides, sweeping past her breasts to cup her face. Long fingers dug into her hair, pressing behind her ears, tilting her face just enough. Her hair slid from its updo and started coiling lightly around Teatime's hands; that he didn't react to that at all made any of Susan's lingering doubts sit down in the corner and sulk. The noises of shifting cloth and heavy breathing was punctuated by the surprisingly loud sounds of lips meeting and parting and meeting again. Oh, and the thump and clatter of her reticule and keys falling to the floor. Those too.

Susan was only faintly aware that they hadn't made it very far into her flat. She had stopped backing up once she'd estimated that they were clear of the door, and that was that. Cracking her eyelids, intending to find out how far it was to the couch, she saw, dimly, that Teatime's back was all of six inches from the door. Internally repeating an adage comparing misses and miles, Susan considered her surroundings. The front room was quite dark, illuminated only by the moonlight that made it around the edges of the drawn curtains. That would likely prove no trouble to Teatime, but her admittedly good eyesight needed a little more light to be of much use. Besides, the coals in the fireplace were banked, and Susan was chilly even through gown, cloak, and hormones.

This thought in mind, she broke the kiss and took a step back toward the fire. She moved slowly because her hair was still winding itself around Teatime's hands. She didn't make it further than that one step, though, due to Teatime transferring his lips to a soft bit of skin under the point of her jaw. The shock of it yanked a gasp out of her. His left hand shifted to cradle the back of her head; the right pressed into the small of her back, partly in support and partly to draw her closer. She felt him open his mouth and press his tongue against her neck as if to hold his place. Then he closed his lips against her skin and sucked.

This time, Susan's knees actually wobbled. She was grateful that she still had fistfuls of his lapels and yet irritated that her body was giving up control so soon. Once more, she pulled away, this time explaining, "The fire –" She went red at how thick her voice was.

Teatime blinked at her in surprise. In the faint light, she saw that his pinhole pupil had dilated far enough to look normal. He said, "I didn't think you were the sort who liked metaphors."

With some asperity, Susan answered, "The fire. It's cold. I can't see well." Metaphors – honestly! She hardly had any use for similes, and that only was because she taught children.

"You're cold?" He frowned. "I'm not that bad at this," he said with a pout.

"Not like that! That's fine."

Gods, more than fine. Inside her skin, she was beyond merely warm; she was damn near feverish. Outside her layers of clothing, though, was a room full of winter's chill, and she would be happy to eliminate distractions before they became distractions. That's what she told herself. She made a point of ignoring the annoying trembling her hands had taken up.

"I still can't see," she pointed out. "Some of us don't have scrying stones in our heads."

"Very well," he said, taking her face in his hands and kissing her again, fiercely. His lips plucked at hers, and his tongue darted in to caress hers; it was so powerful a sensation that, a moment later, when he'd dashed away and left her looking like an excited goldfish, she didn't feel too foolish. Difficult to feel foolish when you wanted to be made to feel that way again.

It was as though he'd wanted to stir up her hormones so much that her ardor couldn't cool while he stoked the fire, as it were. If so, he nearly managed it. It took her a moment or two to be aware enough to hear the hiss of cloth through air and the faint rhythm of feet plying the floorboards. The sounds stopped, and there he was at the fireplace in the front room, expertly building a scaffold of kindling and firewood in the grate and stirring up the coals. The moment that flames caught the kindling, he was off and doing it all over again in the fireplace in the bedroom.

But hers was not a mind to be distracted from practical considerations for very long, especially not when the distraction was a good fourteen feet away and doing something as quotidian as building a fire. All the little synapses that had fallen quiet while watching the light show that was Susan's hindbrain began to chatter to one another again. Flickers of Oh, my! chased after That was best kiss I've ever gotten. Ever, which was followed closely in turn by a chant that in anyone else would have been characterized as panicked: Teatime. Teatime. TeatimeTeatimeTeatimeTeatime. A lonely little neuron in a distant sulcus took note that not one of the iterations of the name was pronounced correctly.

It struck Susan with some force that she was intending to end her Hogswatch day by taking on her first lover, and that that lover would be Jonathan Teatime. She found herself strangely reconciled to it. She'd perceived from the first moment that he was attractive, if completely mad. They were friends now; even she was willing to admit that. And they'd worked reasonably well together during that month despite the bickering and power struggles. They each clearly gave a damn about what happened to the other – no denying that, now. They would not be the first couple whose relationship had started with insults and hair-pulling.

It struck her with rather more force that she was considering something quite long-term with him. Couple. Relationship. Follow that line of thought, and it terminated in visions of toddlers with infuriatingly curly hair and the vocabularies of university professors. And knowing Teatime the way she now did, Susan was confident that he'd already gone through this particular thought process, had found it acceptable, and had decided to proceed. First lover? Perhaps only. This was another thing she was surprisingly comfortable with – the kids part could wait a while, though.

Finally, it struck her with enough force to draw from her a dismayed, "Oh," that of all the sundry things she had in her flat – a too-well seasoned iron skillet from Albert, rather too many fireplace pokers of varying qualities and weights, as well as all the accoutrements necessary for a cat that Susan refused to adopt from her grandfather – not one of those items was a shonky.

Teatime was at Susan's side in less than one second, assessing her even as he moved. She'd slumped backward against the plain-papered wall in her living room, and her face was too pale for just a moment, rendering her as otherworldly as he'd ever seen her. At his questioning glance, though, Susan went a shade of red that looked painful and far more human. The white lines of the odd birthmark showed up on the skin of her cheek, and this time, Teatime submitted to his curiosity and reached up to stroke them with his fingertips. He found that they were merely a difference in coloration; there was no raised scar tissue, and the flesh under the marks was just as hot as the flushed skin surrounding them. Liking the feel of soft skin yielding under gentle pressure, he slid his fingers over her cheek again.

"What?" he asked her, hiding his surprise at his own voice. He hadn't meant to sound quite so hoarse – though he had a feeling his dignity was going to suffer plenty tonight, so what did hoarseness matter? – but when Susan went all the redder at the sound, he resolved to speak in whatever manner made her do that again.

She explained her problem in about four words, and Teatime felt that unfamiliar sensation (Was that concern? Apprehension? He didn't like it.) dissipate. His mind touched on shonkies and their purpose – delaying the arrival of the next generation – and then it moved on to the next thought.

"We won't be needing them," he said, shrugging.

Susan's brows nearly met above her nose. "We certainly will."

Teatime considered his revised plans and the body parts involved. Blinked. Retraced the plans to make sure he had everything straight.

"No, we won't."

Susan went rigid, pulling herself upright and away from his hand. "This," she said in what Teatime was beginning to recognize as the schoolteacher's voice, "Will not happen without shonkies. Do you understand?" He watched her go from pliant and overwhelmed to battle-ready in moments; her shoulders squared up, and her chin went from firm to outright pugnacious.

And even as his lips stretched into a smile, Teatime knew that Susan wouldn't take his amusement well. He couldn't help it, though. She jumped to the wrong conclusion so often! Like this, for instance. Did she really think he would turn this into a weapon? Killing was killing. Sex was sex. As far as someone with his mind and his skills was concerned, the two were unrelated. Surely he could appreciate each one individually and not adulterate the purity of either by mixing them.

"Do you?" he asked her, placing his hands against the wall at waist height. He was caging her loosely with his body, careful to let his forearm touch her torso just in case she tried to stop time; she could escape, though, if she really wished to. He'd allow it. He needed her to choose him; he didn't quite know why, and he was reluctant to find out, but it was important that she choose him.

Susan tensed, but she didn't try to run. She didn't understand, but she was willing to listen. Teatime found himself smiling again. She could be sensible!

"Assassins are taught to be at home in every situation, you know," he said. "Including this one. And there are dozens of things a man and a woman can do together…" Unaccustomed to purposefully being unthreatening, Teatime had to make do with not advancing any further and not kissing her again. The last part was really difficult. It would have been quite nice to kiss the suspicion out of her expression, but he thought it would backfire on him pretty spectacularly. This was Susan, after all.

"And not one of them ends with a child," he finished with what was probably an infuriating smirk. He never could tell when they became infuriating, because the muscle movements were the same as the non-infuriating type. He just had to see what reactions he got. He repeated, "We won't be needing them."

She frowned again, clearly thinking fast, and commanded, "Swear it. Gods help you, if…" Her hair, as telling of emotions as a cat's tail, twisted on itself, as if unsure whether to take the tight style that betrayed fear or to loosen in relief.

"I swear it," he answered plainly. He could control this, control her, himself. The benefits of doing so far outweighed the costs of losing that control. She would leave. Or try. Neither was acceptable. So he must make her stay and make her think it was her idea.

Teatime reached up, unable to resist capturing a pinch of hair and letting it slip through his fingers. It was much finer than his own; it slid across skin like satin and clung to his fingertips, as if reluctant to leave. It was little details like this that were able to distract him so.

Sucking in a deep breath, Susan shut her eyes and let her head fall back against the wheat-colored wallpaper behind her. They both already knew what her answer would be, else she wouldn't have demanded an oath, but Teatime waited for her to say it. She had to say it. That was important, too.

Finally, she opened her eyes – great, dark, dilated, expressive things full of a fear that she'd never admit to – and said a little hesitantly, "Show me, then?"

Wouldn't he just.

Adjusting his plans minutely to account for Susan's uncharacteristic case of nerves, Teatime pulled her away from the wall and into another kiss. She seemed to react to that much better than to talking. Her hands came up to the lapels of his overcoat again but slid downward to tug the buttons from their holes. Susan was able to get them free after only a moment of fumbling; the broken hand in its plaster did limit her dexterity a bit. Following her example, Teatime had the clasp at her neck unfastened in a flash and let her cloak slither to the floor. She shivered, but it couldn't have been from cold; the fires were going quite merrily now, and Teatime knew that he really wasn't that bad at this. So he let his fingers trace her collarbones, feeling a little proud of the gooseflesh he'd raised there.

It was with the calculated use of teasing kisses and some blind backward footwork that Teatime was able to get them into Susan's bedroom. To distract her – the new venue would stir up her nerves again, and she might have him neatening the room and drawing a hot bath just to slow things down – Teatime shifted his attention once more to the pulse point on her neck. She'd made a fantastic noise before – and lo! she was doing it again! The shocked sound of Susan releasing a lungful of air right beside his ear etched the moment into his brain and sent all the right signals to his groin. He nibbled down her neck to the collarbone, flattened his tongue, and licked the same path back to her jaw, relishing the choked gasps it pulled from her.

What he hadn't expected to find arousing was the tension of the fabric across his back, pulled tight by Susan's fingers fisting in the front of his jacket; the pull of her fingers dragged at the weird fiddly bits of his brain that he'd never really understood but suddenly started obeying. It had, after all, been rather a long time since he'd done anything like this.

And then Susan started nipping beneath his jaw, and fairly important bits of his brain put up an Out to Lunch sign and shifted it.

Susan was no gambler; she was a strategist. The only risks she took that weren't guaranteed wins for her were rare. In fact, they all seemed to be linked to her grandfather and somehow protecting the world. She was able to admit that those three instances were good times to run unwise risks, but they were good examples only because they'd turned out well for her. She preferred not to think of the alternatives; if she'd played them safe, then the least awful thing that could have happened would have been the death of one Llamedosian bard.

(It was to be noted that this Llamedosian bard was the person who had first taught her to enjoy the act of kissing and that it was preferable to come up for air once in a while. Imp had nearly blacked out by being so caught up in their first kiss that he'd forgotten to breathe through his nose while his mouth was occupied with Susan's.)

The more awful thing, of course, would have been the end of existence, and that hardly bore thinking about.

(It was Time's heir who taught her that, while "lip lock" was an interesting metaphor, one's lips actually could be put to much more interesting use elsewhere. As could the hands. They hadn't learned much more past that, though; Lobsang's visits had become increasingly erratic, and their interactions had gone back to being mostly friendly.)

The third instance was busy putting his own mark on territory previously explored by the History Monk. To imagine that he'd stop at over-the-clothes petting seemed childish.

So Susan was fighting considerable anger at the moment. She was taking rather a large risk, she thought, and any other maiden facing down a night with a mad Assassin would be quite frightened, no matter how much she'd grown to like him.

The fight was actually going in her favor, though, since anger couldn't keep her attention long after Teatime got her across the threshold of her room. He was moving ahead with the over-the-clothes petting, exploring the shape of her, mapping not just the usual landmarks but ridges and shallows that Susan had never considered erogenous. For instance, she'd never been so aware of her scapulae before. And from here out, she'd shiver whenever she had to roll up the cuffs of her blouse; forearms, it seemed, were terrifically sensitive.

Teatime returned to the known territory of her face and neck, tracing her brows, her cheeks and jaws with his fingertips. A little unevenly, he lightly kissed the same paths his fingers had taken; he favored her birthmarked cheek, but he spent more time tugging at her right earlobe. Twice, he paused to draw a deep breath – once behind her left ear, and once where her neck met her shoulder – and she couldn't tell if it were to take in her scent or to fight for self-control. Susan didn't dare ask. Besides, those pauses were brief, because she used them to focus on a little exploration of her own.

The body, the shell that Susan had forced Teatime's spirit back into had been atrophied, wasted, all bones and the softness of unused muscle. The difference between that and his past self was astonishing. What he had been on the Hogswatch of his death – indeed, the form his spirit had remembered and had taken this last month and more – had been a compact ideal of broad shoulders and narrow hips, though Susan had had no reason to examine further at the time. The last couple of weeks had allowed him to regain both weight and tone, but he was still just shy of twelve stone, leaving the shape beneath Susan's questing hands a bit sharp at the edges.

Here were his shoulders, solid if less broad than she recalled, and difficult to spend time on when his arms were getting in the way of hers. She stepped forward then, making quick one-handed work of the buttons of his lighter, indoor jacket and smoothing her fingers over the fine silk of his waistcoat. Here, then, were his hipbones, just where his waist tucked in at its narrowest, and on the far side was the furrow of his spine. Susan curled the fingers of her right hand under the edge of the waistcoat and pressed into the deep part of the spine's S-curve. At once, Teatime's hips jerked forward, closing the last distance between them; Susan became unquestioningly aware of his interest in the evening's events. He froze where he was, fingers of one hand tangled in her hair, the rest splayed against her side. Susan felt herself go painfully red. She couldn't tell if it were embarrassment or pride or, just possibly, a huge uptick in arousal. Whatever it was, she couldn't quite bear to meet his gaze. So, instead, she kept her right hand where it was and brought the left up to drag Teatime's cravat out of its complex knot. The silk – Assassins and their bloody expensive fashion sense! – slid free with little encouragement and let the collar of his shirt fall open. Susan wasted no time licking at the exposed skin; it was salty with sweat and had that sweet and musky flavor that only living skin could have. She could feel the half-moan she startled out of him almost before she heard it.

He murmured her name, the word half-protest, half-prayer. His voice was thick and complex enough to qualify as a dessert all by itself, and it worked over Susan's name twice more, making her shiver and nip sharply at his skin just to make him do something else.

Taking her so suddenly by the upper arms that she gasped, Teatime held her not quite at arm's length and said, "It has been too long since I've done this. If you continue…" He swallowed. "That… then I won't be of any use to you."

"I'm new at this, not stupid," she answered with a slight frown. "I'm not so naïve that I don't expect you to…" She was not going to say that word in that way. "…Be." She was twenty-three, damn it, not fifteen! "…First," she finished lamely.

Teatime's fingers tightened on her biceps, and his expression settled into what Susan was beginning to recognize as his stubborn face. Oh, dear. As if there weren't enough expectations and nerves to contend with tonight.

"You have a mirror," he chirped brightly. Susan could almost see a lamp flicker to life over his head; she, however, failed to see what it illuminated.

Not following the non sequitur at all, a literalism she was discovering that she did not like at all, Susan answered slowly, "Yes." It was a full-length one that hung from the wall by a picture-frame wire, which made it tilt ever so slightly downward, which distortion made her lower half look a trifle thinner than it was in reality. She suspected that as she aged, she would find that effect flattering. It certainly made it easy to see her entire ensemble before she left for the day; she would see and deal with a scuffed boot with efficiency and alacrity.

Without replying, Teatime swung her merrily about in an arc with himself as the pivot point. She grunted with surprise; he laughed. He then danced round her in a similar arc, and then pulled her into another semicircular path that terminated at the foot of her bed and right in front of that mirror. In one fluid movement, he turned her to face the mirror and slid behind her. Their faces and hands almost seemed to float in the firelit darkness of her room, their clothing fading into the background. It was faintly eerie. Perhaps that was just because of the anticipation that lit up Teatime's mismatched eyes, which got creepier when seen in reverse in the mirror.

"The big picture," he announced, his voice in that thoughtful territory between chirpy mania and focused threat. His hands came to rest on her hips. He leaned into her; she couldn't stop the soft sigh that escaped her when the whole back side of her, from neck to knee, came into contact with his warmth. His pressing the beginnings of his erection against her bottom made her squirm just a bit, and he grinned at her in the mirror.

He said quietly, just over her shoulder, "I think…" One quick step had him on her left side. A shudder rocked her. In very quick succession, she went white and then red, and her pulse went from thrumming to hammering.

Teatime's left hand stayed on her waist, and his right hand came up to brush her hair away from her face and neck. That is to say that he was emphatically not pinning her wrist behind her back and not pulling her hair and exposing her neck (something, in fact, that she was doing all by herself without conscious thought). But it was suddenly, somehow, the Tooth Fairy's castle all over again. This time, though, there was no Banjo. And there were very different reasons for her insides to quiver.

Well. Perhaps not quite such different reasons. She resolved to question her sanity later.

"I think," Teatime repeated from right beside her, his lips two inches from her ear, "That I want to watch you watch this."

One inch. "You will, won't you?" A whisper, now. She could feel his lips brushing her neck as he spoke.

"It will be … instructive."