A/N: I know I've said this a lot but I really am sorry about the slow turnout with these chapters. This story just doesn't seem to be forthcoming easily. On the other hand, these chapters are nearly twice as long as my other stories, which could be contributing to the time it takes to write them as well. Anyway, point was, thanks for your patience and loyalty – especially to everyone who reviews/favourites/alerts. This chapter contains a present of the lemon variety. (So the rating has gone up to reflect that)

Chapter 10

By the time Schofield made his way back to the small apartment with pram in tow, he'd had to stop once to change Beth's diaper and once to wrestle her tiny arms into the jacket, the sun had set and the air was rapidly getting cold. Shane was relieved they made it home before evening really set.
He was also relieved to find Aloysius Knight making a mess in his kitchen.

"Hey," he said by way of greeting, "What are you doing?"

Schofield wasn't about to just come out and ask Knight where he'd been all day. Knight could be oddly touchy about these things. If he chose to volunteer the information then Shane would gladly accept it but he wasn't going to push for it.

"Cooking," Knight replied.

"You can cook?" Shane asked dubiously.

Knight looked like he had a witty retort up his sleeve but just then the phone rang so he settled instead for a shrug as Shane reached to answer it.

It was his nana, just checking up on how things were going. Shane listened absentmindedly to his nana's chatter, leaning relaxed up against the wall to watch as Knight wandered over to the pram still containing Beth and unbuckled her. He watched the way Knight pulled faces at her and lifted her high above his head, making plane noises as he carried her off to her room. Before he disappeared into the hallway though, he turned back quickly to face Schofield and said, "keep stirring that, will you."

Shane chuckled to himself and dutifully reported the day's events as he stirred the pot full of what smelt like cheese sauce.

Shane was just saying good bye when Knight came back, wiping his hands on the pair of faded black jeans he was wearing.
"Just settled her," he said, "she looks absolutely beat, fell asleep immediately."

"Yeah, we had a busy day," Shane replied as Knight nudged him out of the way and resumed stirring. "What did you get up to?"

Knight shrugged by way of reply and Schofield didn't press the matter.

"I managed to sort out a week's worth of leave to hold us over until we can sort out something more permanent," Shane continued slightly tentatively. "Are you planning on sticking around."

Knight turned to look at him over his shoulder, without stopping stirring, and shot him a brilliant smile.
"I'm cooking you dinner, aren't I?"

Schofield snuffed a laugh as Knight directed him to grab something out of the oven. A something that turned out to be a large dish of pasta bake which Knight poured a generous helping of the cheese sauce over before putting it back in the oven for a couple of minutes until the whole thing turned a perfect, golden brown.

Shane had to admit; it looked and smelt like perfection.

They ate in silence for a while, shovelling down mouthfuls of creamy pasta but it was comfortable silence. Eventually, however, the silence turned awkward, heavy with a question that had been burning Schofield's tongue for a while now. Knight looked up from his bowl and caught Schofield's eye whilst Shane bit down on his lower lip.

"Have you told Rufus yet?" Shane asked quietly.

A lot hung on the answer despite the seemingly simple question. Rufus kept Knight anchored, stopped him – or tried to - from doing the really stupid things and made sure he got back alive when he went and did them anyway. If Knight told Rufus, it meant he was serious. It meant he was staying.

Knight dropped his gaze almost immediately.
"Not yet," he replied, almost as softly as Schofield.

It was a marker of the situation that they both spoke with such hesitancy in little more than whispers, barely making eye contact. It was as though they feared being made vulnerable before the other and in doing so, they revealed just how vulnerable they really were. The outside world might have seen heroes and villains, men that could've taken the world by storm on a whim but here, in Shane's little apartment, they couldn't fool each other.

Shane never quite knew where he stood with Knight. Sure Knight had taken him to his old place, showed him the hidden boxes containing his past and let him in just that little bit. Sure they had had fun, found each other's company as easy as it ever was but he had no proof whatsoever that Knight wanted anything more from him than the shared experience of parenthood, if he even wanted that at all.

Shane never knew where he stood with Knight but that was the way it always had been.

The first time he'd turned up on Schofield's doorstep, sheepish to have woken him up in the middle of the night, Shane just shrugged and let him in, setting up blankets and pillows on the couch.

The second time, he was shaking and his shirt was stained with someone else's blood. Shane didn't argue when Knight followed him back to his bedroom. He had efficiently divested Knight of most of his clothes and tugged him into the bed with him; let his own warmth and strength bleed into Knight until he stopped shaking. If anyone understood that you couldn't be a hero all the time, it was Schofield.

And if he had woken up the next morning with Knight's face tucked against the hard lines of his chest and Knight's erection pressing into his hip, it didn't much bother him. The only thing that did surprise him when Knight took the arm he had managed to sling across Shane's body at some point in the night and slid it down his body, dipping under the loose waistband of his pyjamas, was how quickly he himself went from half-mast to bucking into Knights firm grip. They had both spilled too soon. It was brisk and perfunctory, sticky and sweaty and absolutely nothing more than an easy release.

One which Knight quite clearly needed and if Shane was honest with himself, after many lonely nights since Libby had died, he needed too.

After that, Knight never went back to the couch.

And as long as the name on his lips didn't match the hand on his dick, Shane reasoned, it was fine.

A set of unspoken rules were set up pretty quickly. Hands and mouths were great in combination with dicks but never two hands clasped in each other's or two mouths pressed together. And they never talked about it in the morning unless it was to argue about who had to do the washing.

It had been fine.
Great actually.
It was exactly what they both needed.

Until one bottle of bourbon made them realise it wasn't.

They were both drunker than they cared to admit and splayed out across the double bed, barely big enough for both of them. The alcohol had made Knight playful so he had Shane on his back, divested of his clothes and common sense and was teasing him. His tongue tracing little lines around the curve of Schofield's hipbone, inside the crook of his knee and alongside the pale skin of his inner thigh, enough to reduce the Scarecrow to a panting, needy mess but nowhere near enough to do anything about it. Shane's hand was tangled in the short hair at the back of Knight's neck, tugging enough to cause a little pain, enough to express his displeasure. He licked another long stripe up Schofield's thigh, felt the muscles beneath him shake with need and the fingers in his hair twist sharply but most of all, he heard the muffled groan Shane let escape.
God he loved the sounds he could coax out of Schofield, normally so reserved and in control.

He wanted to reward those sounds.

Without warning, he covered Shane's length with his lips until he reached soft skin and coarse dark curls at the base before bobbing back up slowly, trailing his tongue firmly along the underside the entire way. As he did so, Knight slipped one tentative finger down the sensitive skin behind his balls, tracing, barely touching, teasing lower until he reached the line where thigh bled into perfectly formed ass and the whole way, Schofield shivered.

Knight kept his mouth where it was, sucking hard at the head of Schofield's cock, whilst his fingers explored his ass. One careful finger dipped into the line between his cheeks to graze at his entrance with dry insistent pressure and Shane gasped beneath him.

"Shit, oh - " he managed in a strangled voice, using the hand still clutching Knight's hair to yank back sharply, forcing him upwards, whilst he untangled the other from the sheets and reached down to grab his own cock but not stroking. Rather, he clenched down hard at the base of it, the pressure enough to calm the quaking in his thighs.

Knight splayed one hand across the flat plane of Schofield's stomach and watched with wide eyes as he saw and felt the way Shane tried to slow his racing breath, his skin flushed and mouth still mumbling incoherent and involuntary sounds.
Christ, he'd practically come from that alone.

"Shit, you're sensitive," Knight said with a wicked grin, not moving his hand away, the heady fire in his eyes lit by something other than the alcohol.

"I'll be right back," he said, pressing a swift kiss to the inside of Schofield's hip, "Do not touch yourself, that's an order."

And with that he had flung himself off the bed and strode off as naked as the day he was born. Shane used the time to collect himself and steady his ragged breathing, which was hard with the memory of Knight's fingertips still tingling on his skin. He felt electrified and like he was spinning out of control into something dangerous.
He definitely did not use it to contemplate the lines he thought they might have been about to cross.

Knight came back only a minute or two later but it felt like much longer, the cool air was sharp against his hot skin and especially on his cock, still wet with Knight's saliva.

Then Knight was back, casually tossing a small dark bottle off to the side, his fingers already slick with something wet and glistening and when he returned them to Schofield's body, Shane couldn't help but yelp at the cold, wet sensation, such a shock against the heat of his own burning body and the trapped heat coiling in the small space between himself and Knight.

"The fuck is that?" He asked, glad to just be comprehensible.

"Gun oil," Knight practically purred, his fingertips barely stroking Schofield, slicked like that it would need so little pressure, just a little push. "It was that or butter."

Shane let his head fall back hard against the bedframe with a dull thump and brought his arms up to cover his face in an attempt to muffle the noises rising involuntarily from his throat. If he hadn't been able to see Knight out of the corner of his eye, he would have thought Knight was the orchestrator of the noises but Knight's mouth was firmly shut, was smirking at him actually as his fingers continued to circle him intimately. His voice didn't sound like his own. It was rough and low, like gravel in his throat.

"You done this before?" Shane managed to ask, voice catching in his throat, "With another guy, I mean."

"Nah," Knight replied, pushing that little bit harder and using his other hand to pin Schofield's hip down into the mattress, "but I tried it on myself once."

He pushed a little harder again but found he was met with resistance, Schofield's body tense and on edge beneath him.

"Just relax," he said, taking his other hand off Shane's hip and brushing his sweaty hair out of his eyes, surprisingly gentle. "This'll feel good, I promise."

For Shane, the image of Knight riding his own fingers went straight to his belly like a flame and in that instant, his body relaxed and Knight surged forward, easily slipping one slick finger inside of him.

It doesn't feel good.
It feels like an intrusion. The single finger stretches and burns and he doesn't know how he could possibly take any more but when Knight crooked that finger inside of him, grazing something deep inside, then he understood. Schofield's back arched off the bed even as Knight kept a hold of his hip to steady him and his body relaxed enough for Knight to worm another finger inside him. It still felt like an intrusion but a welcome one as he thrust backwards, seeking more friction and a deeper sensation of being filled. The pleasure made so much sweeter by the burn, the stretch, the little tang of pain.

"There?" Knight asked, jamming his fingers repeatedly against that spot, hearing Schofield's breath hitch in time with the rhythm of his strokes. The unintelligible string of moans and muttered curses falling from Shane's lips were answer enough.

Whilst he scissored his fingers, stroking and stretching Shane not too gently, he turned his mouth to better use, leaving little nips and bruises up Schofield's body. He'd already left some pretty impressive half-moon scratches along the curve of Shane's hip where he'd dug his fingernails in so he gave it a matching bite mark before moving up his body, tracing the plane of muscles with his tongue. Reaching the collarbone, he sucked hard against skin, feeling blood vessels break and an impressive bruise rise to the surface. The angle drove his fingers in harder and beneath him, Schofield let out a surprised noise.

"Don't," he gasped out, "stop."

Knight's fingers stilled immediately and he looked up from the latest bruise to meet Schofield's eyes, pupils blown so wide they were practically black.
"One sentence or two?" He asked sharply.

"Two. In. Now." Shane replied, words rough. "Not going to last."

"Pretty sure you need more prep," Knight replied but he had already slipped his fingers out swiftly and slicked his cock liberally with the gun oil.

Schofield shook his head firmly.
"Now or not at all."

Knight didn't need any more invitation that that, lining himself up between Shane's spread legs, he pushed in in one smooth, long stroke, his own legs trembling all the way until he was nestled in the crook of Shane's hip. His cock brushed against Knight's stomach, leaving glistening little streaks of pearly fluid.
"Shit, you're tight," Knight said through gritted teeth.

Beneath him, Shane could only manage, "fuck," drawn out and desperate.

Knight waited, and waited, until Shane pushed back at him with an impatient roll of his hips. Then he began driving forward in earnest, loosing himself in the feel of Schofield's body clenched tight around him, drinking in the sight of him and the sounds that fell from his lips. He was right about one thing though, Schofield is sensitive and he drove forward into him with abandon until they're both breathless and gasping more than their level of fitness should allow.

It was harsh and hurried, driven by a single purpose as Knight dragged himself forward and slid his hands under Schofield's thighs. Feeling every restless twitch of muscle both inside and out, Knight supported and lifted him just a little so he could get a better angle. He knew he had it when Shane let out a strangled cry.

He drove in relentlessly until Schofield was an incoherent, sweaty mess beneath him, pushing back and writhing, aching for release. It was all Knight could do to hold on until Shane came hard against his chest without a single touch to his cock, before giving himself over entirely to the wet heat, barely holding himself up as he buried himself deep in Schofield and came hard, grinding their hips together.

It was only then that he let himself drop a sloppy kiss against Shane's open and very surprised mouth, before pulling out and rolling over. Shane had been happy to follow him to sleep before he could consider how empty and cold he suddenly felt, how he bemoaned the loss of contact. He fell asleep before he could realise he had come with Knight's name on his tongue.

With hindsight, Shane now knew that Beth must have been conceived that first time because afterwards, Knight had left and hadn't returned for over three weeks.
Thirty three and a half weeks later, Beth was born.

They cleared up the dinner plates quickly enough and Shane offered to do the night feeds since Knight had handled them the night before. Knight nodded his thanks and they both stumbled off in different directions, Knight heading for the couch and Schofield for his bed.

When he entered his bedroom, he noticed immediately that something was off. The bottom drawer in his mostly empty chest of drawers was slightly open at one end. Not large enough to be a possible threat, it had been left that way deliberately. Just enough that he would notice it.

Opening the drawer, he discovered where Knight had gone that day.
He had evidently gone back to whichever safehouse he was currently utilising because his clothing was folded, neat and tidy, in the bottom of the empty drawer.
Knight, it seemed, wasn't going anywhere just yet.

That thought left Shane smiling to himself as he fell asleep.