hellooo, my name is ari and i'm currently taking requests for fics, drabbles and headcanons! just debuted this acc so i have like (2) fics... lowkey i want to remake my past pics but maybe its good to start fresh!
i'm currently writing asoiaf, mostly akotsk (aerion, daeron, valarr, maekar, dunk, etc) and i love hotd (cregan, gwayne, aemond, aegon) but in my about link i have most of my fandoms <3
I WON'T WRITE: eating disorders, age play, severe health-related issues, scat/vomit, feet, pregnancy, self-harm/suicide.
I WILL WRITE: most kinks, dubcon, dom!switch!sub!reader and characters, breath play, breeding, spitting, pegging, cheating & toxic relationships, voyeurism, perv!characters.
please read my guidelines for further information about requesting / interacting!
— summary: locked in your shared chambers after the wedding, aerion tries to break your composure one last time. instead, you take the leash and show him exactly how sharp a wolf's teeth can be.
— pairing: aerion targaryen x stark!reader
— word count: 3.1k
— content: arranged marriage, afab!reader, toxic relationship? they're toxic for each other, p in v, power play, physical intimidation, choking, biting, mild blood, dominant reader, aerion getting absolutely ruined and begging for it lmao.
— notes: part 3 is here! the way i can't stop writing this bc this is all i ever wanted to read LMAOOO, perhaps some pegging is on the way if i'm feeling mischievous, who knows? reblogs and comments are encouraged! thank you for the love in the first chapters <3
ﾟ。₍ᐢ..ᐢ₎ ｡ﾟ WORKS / RULES / ABOUT / TAGS / RECS
Three days in, the shared chambers feel less like a bridal suite and more like a fighting pit.
The king’s master of protocol had arranged the rooms. He had filled the massive space with the heavy, suffocating aesthetics of the Crown. Crimson velvet draperies block the balcony doors. The carpets are thick, woven black-and-red atrocities that swallow the sound of footsteps. The hearth is unnecessarily large, kept roaring by servants until the air inside the room feels like the inside of a kiln.
It is designed to make you sweat. It is designed to make you pliant, stripped down to your lightest shifts, lounging like a proper Southern bride.
You are currently sitting on the edge of the massive, carved mahogany bed, wearing your heavy linen day-shift and a hardened leather bodice that you haven't unlaced. You are not sweating.
Aerion is.
He has been pacing for twenty minutes. The performance of the flawless, unhurried prince was abandoned the moment the heavy oak door locked behind the kingsguard an hour ago. Now, the nervous, violent energy he usually suppresses under perfectly tailored silk is bleeding out into the room.
He is down to his breeches and a fine white linen shirt, unlaced at the throat. He hasn’t taken the rings off. You watch the gold and rubies flash in the firelight as he drags a hand through his silver hair, ruining the immaculate styling.
"You're making a trench in the carpet," you say.
He stops. The sudden stillness is absolute. He turns his head slowly, the firelight catching the sharp, patrician slope of his nose and the dark, furious violet of his eyes.
"I am attempting," Aerion says, his voice a low, vibrating wire, "to decide what to do with you."
"I'm sitting on a bed. It doesn't require a strategic council."
He crosses the room in three strides.
He doesn't stop at the edge of the mattress. He steps directly into your space, his knee forcing your thighs apart so he can stand flush against the edge of the bed. He reaches down and grips the thick leather collar of your bodice.
He hauls you up.
You don't resist the pull. You let him drag your weight upward, your boots scraping against the carpet, until you are standing face-to-face. He is taller. He expects you to lean back, to try and put space between your face and his.
You lean in.
"You have been looking at me," Aerion breathes, the words hitting your mouth, "with that same flat, dead expression for three days. You sat through the wedding feast looking like a bored spectator at a hanging. You stood in the sept as though the High Septon were a street beggar you were waiting to walk past."
"I said the vows."
"You said the words." He twists the leather of your bodice, his knuckles digging hard into your collarbone. "You haven't yielded an inch of ground since you arrived in the Reach. You think this is a game of endurance. You think you can outlast me by freezing me out."
"I don't think about outlasting you at all."
His grip tightens. The leather groans. "Lie to me again."
"Aerion," you say. You drop the title. You strip all the courtly reverence out of his name, leaving it bare and sharp in the stifling heat of the room. "If I wanted to fight you, you would already be bleeding."
He slams you backward. The heavy mahogany bedpost catches you directly between the shoulder blades. The impact knocks the air out of your lungs in a sharp, involuntary hiss. Before you can draw breath, his forearm is across your throat, pinning you flat against the carved wood.
His weight is fully on you, pressing you against the post. The heat radiating off his body is intense, feverish. He smells like arbor gold, expensive myrrh, and the sharp, metallic scent of raw adrenaline.
"Do you know how easy it would be?" he whispers. The courtly melody is completely gone from his voice. It is a ragged, feral rasp. "I could crush your windpipe. I could leave you choking on the floor. I am your husband. There is not a single lord in this castle who would ask a question if you bruised."
The heavy gold of his signet ring bites deeply into the skin of your neck just above your collarbone. The pressure on your windpipe is real. He is not posturing, the muscle in his forearm is rigid.
You look up at him. His pupils are blown wide, eclipsing the violet. The cruelty is right there on the surface, frantic and hungry. He is waiting for the panic. He is starved for it.
You lift your hands, you don't claw at his arm, you don't try to pry his forearm off your throat. You only bring your hands up and grip the sides of his face.
Your thumbs trace the sharp line of his cheekbones, your calloused fingers bury themselves in the thick, sweat-dampened silver hair at his temples as you hold his head exactly where it is.
Aerion freezes. The pressure on your throat stops escalating, though he doesn't pull away. The sheer confusion in his eyes is a physical stutter in the dark.
"If you want to bruise me," you say, your voice barely a rasp under the weight of his arm, "you don't have to threaten me with the lords of the court. You just have to do it."
His breathing hitches. A short, sharp intake of air that rattles in his chest.
"But you don't get to do it like a coward," you continue. Your thumbs press harder into his cheekbones, forcing his gaze to remain entirely locked on yours. "You don't get to press me into a wall and pretend you're a monster to see if I'll scream. If you're going to put your hands on me, you do it on purpose. You do it because I let you."
You drop one hand from his face, slide it down his chest, and grip the thick muscle of his forearm where it pins your throat.
You don't push it away, you pull it closer. You press your own throat harder against his arm, deliberately cutting off your own air supply for two seconds, letting the heavy gold ring break the skin over your collarbone.
A tiny line of heat trickles down your chest. Blood.
Aerion lets out a sound that is half-snarl, half-groan, he drops his arm as if the skin of your neck burned him. He steps back, his chest heaving, his hands flexing at his sides, he looks at the drop of blood welling against your pale skin, and the control he has been clinging to for three days completely shatters.
He catches you by the waist and throws you onto the mattress.
You hit the heavy velvet coverlet hard. You don't scramble backward, you don't try to sit up. You stay exactly where you landed, sprawled on your back, the leather bodice restricting your breath, watching him.
He follows you down. He doesn't climb onto the bed; he throws his weight over you, his knees caging your hips. His hands drop to the thick leather lacing of your bodice. He doesn't fumble with the knots. He grips the edges of the stiffened leather and violently yanks them apart. The reinforced linen laces snap with a sharp, cracking sound that echoes in the quiet room.
He rips the leather off your shoulders and tosses it blindly onto the floor. You are left in the thin linen day-shift. It is no barrier at all against the oppressive heat of the room or the crushing weight of him against you.
Aerion grips both of your wrists. He drags them up above your head, pinning them against the mattress with one massive hand. His grip is bruising, his rings grinding directly against your wrist bones.
"You arrogant, frozen bitch," he breathes, his gaze locked on yours.
He leans down, his mouth hovering an inch above yours. You can feel the frantic, ragged exhalations of his breath against your lips. He waits.
"Bite," you tell him.
He crashes his mouth down on yours.
It’s not a kiss, he is too violent. His teeth clash against yours, hard enough to send a shock of pain up into your jaw. He bites down on your lower lip, scraping the tender skin until he tastes the copper tang of your blood. You don't turn your head, you open your mouth and meet the aggression right in the face.
You twist your wrists under his grip, not trying to escape, but shifting the angle so your own calluses scrape against his bare skin. You arch your back, lifting your hips directly into his heavy, crushing weight.
A low, guttural noise tears out of his throat. He lets go of your wrists.
Both of his hands drop to your hips, gripping the thin linen and the flesh beneath it. His fingers dig in, bruising your skin, anchoring you to the mattress as he drags his mouth off yours and buries his face in the curve of your neck.
His teeth scrape down the line of your throat. He finds the small, shallow cut his ring left on your collarbone. He presses his open mouth over it, his tongue hot and wet against the broken skin, sucking the drop of blood away.
Your hands are free. You don't push him off. You bury your fingers in his silver hair and grip it hard, pulling his head back just enough to expose his throat.
"My turn," you whisper.
You pull him down. You sink your teeth directly into the thick muscle where his neck meets his shoulder. You bite down hard, grinding your teeth into the flesh until you feel him shudder violently against you.
Aerion gasps, his hands tightening on your hips until the pain borders on blinding. He doesn't try to pull away from your teeth. He presses deeper into the mattress, forcing his heavy thighs between your legs, grinding his hips down against yours in a stuttered rhythm.
The friction is agonizingly hot. The thick velvet of the coverlet burns against the back of your thighs where the shift has ridden up. His linen breeches are rough against your bare skin.
He releases your hips and slides his hands up your ribs. His palms are burning hot. He finds the neckline of your shift and tears the delicate fabric downward, exposing your chest to the suffocating heat of the room.
He looks down at you. The flawless Targaryen prince is entirely gone. His hair is a chaotic silver mess. His mouth is wet, stained slightly red from your lip. There is a dark, distinct bite mark bruising rapidly on the pale skin of his shoulder.
He traces the line of your collarbone with two fingers, the heavy gold of his rings dragging cold against your heated skin.
"You want to command me," he whispers, his voice dropping into a register of pure, dark obsession. He presses his thumb directly over your hammering pulse. "You want to hold the leash. Tell me what to do."
He isn't mocking you. He is asking. The realization hits the center of your chest like a physical blow. The sadist, the cruel prince who breaks horses and cripples servants for sport, is kneeling between your legs, entirely ruined by the fact that you aren't afraid of him.
He needs you to tell him how to be a monster.
You reach up and grip the open collar of his shirt. You twist the fine linen in your fist, pulling him down until his face is inches from yours.
"Take the shirt off," you command, your voice flat, hard, entirely devoid of mercy.
Aerion doesn't hesitate. He grips the unlaced collar, the thick, twisting veins of his forearms standing out sharply under the skin as he rips the linen over his head and discards it onto the floor.
Without the heavy fabrics of the Crown, the reality of his build is laid bare. He doesn't possess the blunt-force bulk of a brawler. He is built like a whip. He is lean, tightly coiled muscle pulled taut over defined ribs and the sharp, arrogant jut of his collarbones. A smattering of dark moles stands out starkly against his pale chest, slick with a fine sheen of sweat in the firelight. Even perfectly still, his body hums with a highly strung, violent kinetic energy.
"Now," you say.
Your eyes lock onto his, the heavy brow ridge casting his violet gaze in predatory shadow. You slide your hands down his bare chest, your calluses scraping deliberately over the hard ridges of his ribs until you reach the heavy leather belt of his breeches.
"Take mine off."
He grips the torn edges of your shift. He doesn't pull it gently. He rips the linen entirely down the center, parting the fabric and exposing you completely to the stifling air of the room. He doesn't look away from your face, he tracks the slight dilation of your pupils, he watches the way your chest rises and falls.
He slides his hands down your ribs, down the curve of your waist, his thumbs tracing the sharp jut of your hip bones. His touch is no longer frantic. It is deliberate, heavy, claiming the territory with the slow, terrifying precision of a conqueror mapping a newly taken city. He slides his heavy hands down your bare thighs, gripping the backs of your knees. He pulls your legs forward, opening you wider, hooking your knees over the outside of his waist.
The intimacy of the position is suffocating. He is pressed so tightly against you that you can feel the heavy, erratic thud of his heartbeat against your own ribs. You can feel the hard, thick heat of him pressing desperately against the rough linen of his breeches, right at the juncture of your thighs.
He leans down, his mouth brushing the bruised skin of your jaw.
"Are you going to bleed for me, little wolf?" he murmurs, his lips dragging against yours.
You wrap your legs around his waist, locking your ankles together at the base of his spine. You pull him in, eliminating the last fraction of space between you.
"I'm going to make you bleed for me," you say against his mouth, sliding your hand down to grip his length over the cloth of his breeches, he fumbles to get himself out of his clothes as fast as he can while keeping his face just an inch from you.
As he springs free from his personal jail, you take in the sight of him, his chest stained with a blotchy red that blemishes his usually pale marble skin. He takes himself in his hand and jerks himself off slowly, his gaze locked with yours as he uses his other hand to wrap it against the plump of your breast, his fingers grazing your pebbled peak.
You huff, “Are you done taking your time?” you snake your legs back to where they were initially, locking your ankles behing his back, pulling him back into you harshly, his cock nestled between your folds with a sick squelch.
Aerion groans, a raw, defeated sound, and drives his hips up and down, the friction maddening as he sucks marks into your neck, his hands everywhere on you. The head of his cock catches around your clit with each thrust, and you can’t help but shudder at the contact.
“Fuck off, put it in already.” you mumble, your voice with a dash of roughness you’re trying so hard to hide from him.
He is beyond words now, Aerion is just capable of sneaking a hand between your bodies and placing the tip at your entrance, groaning with restless energy. With a last look at you he drives in.
The heat of the room disappears, swallowed entirely by the friction. His hands are everywhere, heavy and bruising, his rings leaving dull, red indentations on your skin. He doesn't make love to you. He fights you for every inch of flesh, he bites your shoulder, your collarbone, the soft curve of your breast.
But you fight back. You rake your nails down the smooth expanse of his back, leaving four long, angry red welts. You drag his head down and bite his lip again, tasting your own blood mixed with his.
It is a violent, grinding rhythm, the heavy mahogany bed frame groans under the sheer force of the impact. He uses his weight to pin you, but you use your leverage to guide him, digging your heels into his lower back to pull him deeper, setting the pace, demanding the cruelty he is so desperate to give.
He is gasping, his breath hot and wet against your neck. The flawless control he values above all else is completely decimated. He is entirely at the mercy of the friction, his hips driving in a frantic, punishing rhythm that borders on desperate.
He hooks one arm under your lower back, lifting your hips off the mattress to change the angle, driving himself so deep you feel the impact at the base of your spine.
You let out a sharp, fractured breath.
Aerion hears it. He catches the sound in his mouth, kissing you violently, his tongue sweeping past your teeth. He uses his free hand to grip your jaw, his thumb pressing hard into the hinge, holding your face exactly where he wants it while he takes you apart.
The heat spikes, sharp and blinding. The muscles in his back lock completely tight under your hands, he tears his mouth off yours, throwing his head back, a raw, choked shout tearing out of his throat as he drives down one final, agonizingly deep time.
He collapses against you, his seed deep inside your cervix, exactly where he wants it to be. His weight crushes you into the mattress. His chest is heaving, slick with sweat, his heart hammering against yours like a trapped bird. He buries his face in the crook of your neck, his breathing loud and ragged in the heavy silence of the room.
You don't push him off. You let your legs fall open, your ankles unlocking from his spine. Your arms rest loosely against his back. The air in the room is still suffocatingly hot, smelling of burnt wood, sweat, and sex.
You stare up at the crimson canopy of the bed.
Aerion shifts slightly, his heavy gold rings scraping against the sheets. He doesn't lift his head. He turns his face slightly, pressing his mouth against your pulse point.
His teeth scrape lightly over the bruised skin, you swat the back of his head, softly this time.
— summary: invited to summerhall to celebrate your newly announced betrothal, aerion corners you in the lower gardens but he quickly learns what happens when you try to bait a wolf in the dark.
— pairing: aerion targaryen x stark!reader
— word count: 2.5k
— content: arranged marriage, afab!reader, set on a feast in summerhall, physical intimidation, power play, mild violence and threats, aerion realizing he is not the apex predator here lmao.
— notes: part two is here because i'm impatient as fuck! things are taking a turn at summerhall and our stark!reader is officially done holding back hehehe. reblogs and comments are encouraged!
ﾟ。₍ᐢ..ᐢ₎ ｡ﾟ WORKS / RULES / ABOUT / TAGS / RECS
The air at Summerhall was thick enough to drown in.
It carried the overripe, rotting sweetness of bruised plums and night-blooming jasmine, a cloying perfume that hung in the humidity and clung to the skin. Aerion despised it. He preferred the sharp, dry heat of King’s Landing, or the sulfurous bite of Dragonstone. Summerhall was a palace built for indulgence, soft and yielding, much like the lords and ladies currently spilling out from the feast hall onto the upper terraces.
He could feel their eyes. A hundred parasites leaning over the carved marble balustrades, their wine-flushed faces half-hidden by shadows and climbing ivy, watching the newly betrothed couple take their first ceremonial stroll through the lower gardens.
Aerion’s hand rested over yours where you held his arm. His grip was precisely calibrated. To the sycophants on the terrace, it looked like the possessive, attentive touch of a prince deeply enamored with his future bride. In reality, his thumb was pressed hard into the delicate grouping of tendons on the back of your hand, the heavy gold edge of his signet ring digging into your flesh, grinding down with every step you both took down the sweeping limestone stairs.
He wanted to see you flinch. He had been applying this specific, grinding pressure since you left the great hall, waiting for the inevitable stutter in your step, the sharp intake of breath, the widening of your eyes.
You gave him nothing.
Your hand beneath his remained perfectly relaxed, resting lightly against the crimson silk of his doublet. You walked with the infuriating, measured rhythm you had maintained since arriving in the South.
"They are waiting for you to stumble, my lady," Aerion murmured, his voice a low, melodic hum pitched only for your ears. He did not look at you. He kept his gaze forward, his profile angled perfectly to catch the silver moonlight. "The Tyrells, the Peakes, the flock of useless second sons. They are watching your hem. They want the Northern savage to trip over her heavy velvet and break her nose on the marble."
"And what does Your Grace want?" you asked. Your voice was flat, carrying the cold acoustic deadness of a snowdrift.
"I want to see how long it takes for the frost to melt off you." Aerion shifted his grip, sliding his hand up your wrist, his fingers clamping tight enough to restrict the blood flow. "You ate the roasted boar tonight with the enthusiasm of a starved hound. I watched you cut the meat. You hold a knife like a man who kills for a living, not a lady of a great house."
"The boar was dead, Your Grace. It didn't require much technique."
Aerion’s jaw tightened. He smiled, a brilliant, terrifying curve of his mouth that he aimed toward the dark canopy of the weeping willows ahead.
"You think your insolence is armor," he said pleasantly. You stepped off the final marble stair together and onto the crushed gravel of the garden path. The crunch of your footsteps masked the distant strains of the high harp drifting down from the feast. "It is entirely transparent. I have broken older, crueler, and much more interesting things than you, little wolf. I am going to peel that stoicism off you layer by layer until you are begging me for the privilege of serving my wine."
You did not miss a step. You did not attempt to pull your arm away. The heavy cobalt wool of your cloak brushed against his leg.
"If I pour your wine, you'll have to drink it," you said.
Aerion halted. The sudden stop sent a spray of white gravel across the manicured grass. He turned to face you fully, stepping into your space, crowding you. He was taller, broader, armored in layers of stiffened silk and gold thread that cost more than your father’s entire bleak fortress.
The light from the distant torches caught your face. You were not a classical beauty. Your jaw was too sharp, your coloring too muted, entirely lacking the Valyrian luminescence he was accustomed to. You looked exactly like what you were: a creature bred in the dark, frozen ass-end of the world.
But your eyes were steady.
Aerion reached out and caught your chin. He didn't use his fingertips; he used the hard ridge of his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger, pinching the bone of your jaw with enough force to leave a bruise by morning. He forced your head up.
"You have a very poor understanding of your position," Aerion said softly. The music from the terrace was barely a whisper here, swallowed by the dense foliage of the arbor. "You are a broodmare. A political concession. Your father sent you south because he is a coward who understands that fire consumes ice. When we are married, you will not speak unless I grant you permission. You will not look at me unless I command it. And if you ever attempt to threaten me again, I will have your tongue cut out and served to your father wrapped in a Stark banner."
He waited for the fear. He thrived on it. He needed to see the pupil dilate, the slight tremor in your lower lip, the sudden, shallow spike of breathing. It was his favorite vintage, and he was thirsty.
You looked up at him, your chin caught in his vice grip. Your breath brushed against his knuckles. It was slow. Even.
Your eyes dropped from his violet gaze, tracking slowly down the line of his nose, the curve of his mouth, the exposed skin of his throat above the stiff, jewel-encrusted collar of his doublet.
"Your pulse is elevated," you noted.
Aerion froze.
"It's beating erratically right here," you continued, your voice entirely conversational. You lifted your free hand. You did not try to break his grip on your jaw. Instead, you brought your hand up to his throat.
Aerion’s immediate instinct was to break your wrist. His muscles twitched, primed for violence, but the sheer, bizarre audacity of the movement paralyzed him for a fraction of a second.
Your fingers were not soft. The skin of your palm was rough, scraped with calluses that had no business being on a highborn lady. You pressed the pads of your index and middle fingers directly against the carotid artery on the side of his neck.
"There," you said quietly. "Fast. Shallow. Like a rabbit."
He shoved your hand away, violently slapping your arm down, his own composure fracturing for the first time since you had met. He dropped his grip on your jaw and stepped back, his chest rising.
"Do not touch me," he hissed, the courtly volume control snapping.
You let your hand fall to your side, entirely unbothered by the strike. You didn't rub the skin where he had hit you. You just watched him.
The dynamic in the heavy, perfumed air shifted. It was an ugly, grinding sensation, like the gears of a siege engine slipping a notch. Aerion was accustomed to people shrinking away from him. When he escalated, they retreated. It was the natural law of the world. The dragon opened its jaws, and the sheep scattered.
You had not retreated. You had stepped inside his guard.
"You speak a great deal about breaking things," you said, your head tilting slightly to the side. The shadows of the arbor leaves painted dark, fractured patterns across your face. "You talk about it constantly. It’s all you wanted to discuss during the feast. You broke a servant's fingers for spilling wine. You broke a horse for refusing a jump. You broke a puppet show in Ashford because you didn't like the ending."
"I did what was necessary to maintain respect."
"You did what was necessary to keep yourself entertained," you corrected smoothly. "But it's a very loud kind of entertainment, isn't it? It requires an audience. You brought me all the way down here, out of the light, but you made sure we were still just visible enough that the lords on the terrace could see the silhouette of you dominating your new Northern bride."
Aerion’s eyes narrowed. "You think you are clever. You are merely a provincial attempting to read a book in a language she doesn't speak."
"I speak violence perfectly well, Your Grace," you said as you took a step toward him.
Aerion did not step back. To step back would be a concession, a physical surrender, and a Targaryen did not yield ground. But his spine locked, and the crushed gravel crunched under your heavy leather boots. You didn't wear the delicate silk slippers the Southern women wore. You wore riding boots, practical and lethal.
"The problem with breaking things," you said, your voice dropping lower, slipping beneath the ambient noise of the garden, "is that you are only powerful as long as the thing you are breaking agrees to be fragile."
You took another step. You were close enough now that he could smell the cold, sharp scent of you. It cut through the sickening sweetness of the Summerhall blooms like a rusted iron blade.
Pine needles, woodsmoke, and the metallic tang of snow.
"You are threatening the wrong woman," you whispered.
"I could snap your neck before you could draw breath to scream," he said, the words slipping out through his teeth. It wasn't a premeditated threat, it was a raw, reactive snarl.
"You could try." You looked up at him, and for the first time that evening, you smiled.
It was a hideous thing. It didn't reach your eyes, didn't soften the sharp angles of your face. It was the baring of teeth.
"But you won't," you continued softly. "Because you know that if you put your hands on my throat, I will not cry. I will not beg. I will take this heavy silver hairpin," you gestured vaguely to the intricate mass of dark hair coiled at the nape of your neck, "and I will drive it directly upward through the soft tissue under your jaw, pinning your tongue to the roof of your mouth. You will drown in your own blood right here in the gravel, and the last thing you will see is me, entirely unbothered."
Aerion stared at you.
The heat in his blood spiked, a violent, confusing rush of adrenaline that settled heavy and hot low in his stomach. It was fury, absolute and unadulterated, but threaded through it was an electric, sickening jolt of arousal. He had never been spoken to this way. He had never been looked at this way.
You weren't looking at him with awe. You weren't looking at him with fear.
You were looking at him the way a butcher evaluates a carcass. Figuring out where the joints connect. Deciding where to make the first cut.
"You are insane," he breathed.
"I am realistic." You closed the final inch between them. You were shorter than him, forcing him to look down, but the physical reality of you felt massive, immovable. "You want a victim. You want a soft, weeping thing to torment in the dark to make yourself feel like a god. You chose poorly."
Aerion reached for you again, moving purely on instinct, his hand flashing out to grip your throat. He wanted to feel the pulse you had mocked him for. He wanted to squeeze until your eyes rolled back.
He moved fast, the speed that had won him a hundred melees.
You were faster.
Your hand shot up, your fingers wrapping around his wrist just below his heavy rings. Your grip was startlingly strong, the calluses scraping against his fine skin. You didn't try to wrestle his arm down, you couldn't have, he was twice your weight, but you caught his momentum, using his own force to pull him off balance, stepping slightly to the side so his hand slammed hard against the stone trunk of the statue behind him.
Pain flared up his forearm, a sharp, blinding crack.
Aerion gasped, stumbling forward into your space.
Before he could recover, before he could leverage his weight, you moved in. You pressed your body against his, crowding him against the cold stone of the statue. Your hand remained clamped around his wrist, pinning his injured hand against the rock.
"Do you know how they kill wolves in the North?" you murmured, your lips practically brushing the fine silver hairs at his temple.
Aerion was breathing hard. The pain in his hand was sharp, metallic, but the pressure of your body against his, the rigid, unyielding lines of your posture, the heat radiating through the thick wool of your cloak, was suffocating. He tried to pull his wrist free. You twisted it slightly, digging your thumb directly into the nerve cluster he had assaulted earlier on your own hand.
He inhaled sharply through his teeth, his jaw locking.
"They don't hunt them," you whispered, your breath hot against his skin. "They bait them. They put a piece of bleeding meat in the snow, and they bury a blade in the center of it. The wolf licks the blood. It licks the blade. It cuts its own tongue, and it bleeds to death drinking its own blood, entirely convinced it is gorging itself on a kill."
You stepped back abruptly, releasing his wrist.
Aerion staggered slightly, his shoulder catching against the stone to keep himself upright. He cradled his hand against his chest, the knuckles throbbing. His heart was hammering against his ribs, a frantic, frantic rhythm that he could not control.
You stood two paces away, your hands folded neatly in front of you. The cobalt cloak fell perfectly straight. Your breathing was completely undisturbed.
Up on the terrace, the music swelled, a bright, trilling melody played on the high harp. Someone laughed, a sound that carried over the manicured hedges. To the lords watching from above, the silhouette was likely romantic. The prince leaning against the stone, you standing before him.
"I am not a rabbit, Aerion," you said, driving the blade in deeper. "I am the blade in the meat. Keep biting."
You turned, your heavy skirts swishing against the gravel, and began to walk back up the path toward the lights of the terrace. You did not look back to see if he was following. You did not hurry.
Aerion remained pinned against the stone.
The cloying scent of the Summerhall gardens suddenly made him want to vomit. He looked down at his hand. The skin across his knuckles was raw, bleeding slightly where it had scraped the stone. He rubbed his thumb over the blood, smearing it across his heavy gold signet ring.
His chest heaved. The fury in him was a living thing, thrashing violently against his ribs, but beneath it, the cold, terrifying realization settled into his bones like frost.
He was not holding the leash.
He watched the dark shape of you moving steadily through the weeping willows, your posture impossibly straight, cutting through the heavy Southern air like an executioner’s axe.
He tasted copper in his mouth. He had bitten his own cheek.
Aerion swallowed the blood, his eyes locked on your retreating back, the burning in his chest shifting from the heat of control to the agonizing, terrifying heat of the trap.
He pushed himself off the stone and followed you into the dark.
— summary: your father sends you to the ashford tourney to meet your prospective betrothed, prince aerion targaryen. you expected a challenge to endure; not a puzzle to solve.
— pairing: aerion targaryen x stark!reader
— word count: 1.8k
— content: pre-arranged marriage, afab!reader, political (and another type of) tension, set on the tourney at ashford, aerion being an entitled little asshole as usual, stubborn and very northern!reader.
— notes: debut fic in this acc, hello everyone! been on tumblr for years and I love creating multiple accs lmao. please request me fics! this will be probably a series, I have a few ideas for my stark!reader so... she's gonna be back. reblogs and comments are encouraged!
ﾟ。₍ᐢ..ᐢ₎ ｡ﾟ WORKS / RULES / ABOUT / TAGS / RECS
You arrive at Ashford the way you do everything: early, quiet, and already watching.
The Stark party is not large. Your father sent you with a maester who is already sweating through his robes, two guards whose names you know because you bothered to learn them, and a septa who has not stopped praying since you crossed into the Reach. The specific gods she is petitioning are left unnamed, and you’ve chosen not to ask.
The tourney grounds are a physical wall of sound. In Winterfell, noise travels and dies in the cold air, swallowed quickly by the expanse of the North. Here, it accumulates. It bounces off heavy canvas pavilions and limestone walls until the bright, blinding quality of Reach sunlight seems to physically press the chaos against your skin like a weight. You notice it all without judgment. You will acclimate. You always do.
The Targaryen pavilion is less a tent and more a declaration of violence. Crimson silk and cloth-of-gold trim flap aggressively in the warm wind, a sharp, bleeding contrast to the heavy, deep cobalt wool of your own Northern cloak. A personal sigil is worked into the canvas in thread so fine it shimmers when the fabric moves; a three-headed dragon rendered in a way that manages to be both heraldic and appetitive, as if the embroiderer had distinct opinions about the creature's hunger. Two guards in matched livery stand at the entrance with the heavy stillness of men paid to be ornamental. One is handsome enough; the other, not so much.
You are escorted to a holding position near the edge of the Targaryen enclosure. It is the only honest phrase for it. The maester hovers, the septa mutters her endless prayers, and you watch the pavilion.
He comes out before you expect him.
You haven't actually seen his type before, but you've heard enough descriptions to construct a version of him in your mind. The gap between your imagination and the physical reality of him is what you notice first. You expected the swagger of a spoiled prince. What he actually possesses is a contained, intentional grace. It is the fluid, unhurried movement of an apex predator who has never needed to run because everything waits for him to arrive. Silver hair catching the noon sun, crimson and gold layered over his broad frame, with heavy rings on nearly every finger. He seems eager to have some type of blunt weight on his hands, as if the dagger strapped to his belt simply isn’t enough.
He is clinically, objectively beautiful. You keep that strictly to yourself.
He's speaking to a lord who is trying very hard not to appear to be trying. Aerion Targaryen listens with his chin slightly lifted, wearing an expression of such highly polished courtesy that it takes a second to identify the absolute contempt beneath it. He isn't looking at the man he's speaking to. He watches the tourney field, tracking the movement of the horses, as though giving the lord his eyes would imply the man actually deserved them.
The lord finishes a sentence with an ingratiating laugh. Aerion smiles, a sharp curve of his mouth that doesn't come anywhere near his eyes. The lord's laugh immediately subsides, dying in his throat, and he finds somewhere else to be within the minute.
What a coward.
You watch Aerion turn back toward the pavilion. For one half-second, his violet gaze drags across the space between you. It doesn't stop. It doesn't quite register. But the air shifts, and you understand, abruptly, that you need to lock in.
A man in Targaryen colors materializes at your elbow and murmurs that Prince Aerion would like to receive you now. You arrange your face against the sheer entitlement of it all, and move.
Up close, the jeweler's attention is suffocating. He watches you approach. He isn’t aggressive, but he is entirely devoid of warmth, thoroughly turning you in the harsh light to check the gemstone for flaws. You've been looked at before by men from your father's bannermen who thought a girl of marriageable age in a great house must want something from them. You know how to hold your spine under a heavy gaze. You look back sternly.
He recovers the gap with the ease of someone who has been performing composure since before he could walk.
He hums, a low vibration in his chest, before speaking. "My lady Stark," he finally says.
The pause before my lady is deliberate. You hear it, noting the condescension alongside the heavy gold rings and the hollow, perfectly cordial smile he is currently wearing.
"Your Grace."
You do not add anything to it. You were not raised to fill empty air with useless noise, and you are not going to start now to manage his comfort.
Aerion's thumb catches against the heavy gold of his signet ring, the metal scraping faintly.
There are lords watching. A cluster to the east, two more near the Fossoway banners, and someone important standing twenty feet away, attempting to look casual. You are both performing for them. You are both performing for each other.
The formal business is brief. Words about honor and alliances are delivered by the maesters in the dry, practiced tones of men who drafted the language carefully. Aerion stands through it with a rigid patience that somehow communicates utter, mind-numbing boredom. You stand with your hands folded and your eyes forward, projecting an aura that indicates you find this entirely satisfactory.
When the droning ends, there is a heavy pause.
"I understand," Aerion says, "that you have not attended a southern tourney before."
His voice isn't the weapon you expected. You'd been told about the cruelty and the incident with the puppets, expecting something jagged and sharp. Instead, his elocution is so thorough, so perfectly measured, that the melody of it becomes its own kind of edge.
"You understand correctly."
"Then you'll find it a great deal to take in."
"I expect I'll manage," you say, matching his exact, unhurried register.
Aerion shifts his weight, the stiff silk of his doublet whispering. "Of course. The Stark constitution is famously resilient."
"The Targaryen constitution," you reply pleasantly, "is famously… exceptional."
The pause before exceptional is the exact length as his before my lady. You watch him hear it.
He does not smile. The assembled, flawless performance of him simply halts. Then, he tilts his head, violet eyes narrowing by a fraction, and offers his arm. "Shall we walk, my lady?"
The walk is staged with the transparency of a morality play for the lords gathered at the edge of the tourney field. His sleeve is heavy silk, the kind that costs more than your septa makes in a year. You rest your hand lightly against it, acutely aware of the rough calluses on your palms, hoping your axe hands won’t rip the delicate fabric apart by some miracle.
"You have brothers," he says. You are far enough from the cluster of lords to speak freely, but not far enough to be private. The tension of the audience remains. "I've heard things. They say the second one has your father's temperament."
"They're not wrong."
"And the third?"
"A different sort of temperament."
"How diplomatic," Aerion says, his gaze fixed straight ahead on the lists. "You answer questions about your family the way a maester answers questions about medicine. Technically accurate and completely uninformative."
You permit yourself the ghost of a smile, but absolutely nothing more. "What would you prefer, Your Grace?"
"Honesty would be a novelty."
"I'm honest frequently. I'm simply precise about what I'm honest about."
Aerion’s eyes flick from the dusty tourney field down to you. "A valuable quality in a Stark."
In a Stark.
This little asshole.
"And in a Targaryen," you reply. "I imagine."
He turns his head then, bringing the full, crushing weight of those purple eyes to bear directly on your face. Aerion lets the silence stretch. His expression is a carefully blank mask, but the air between you suddenly feels thick enough to choke on.
"You've been briefed about me," he says plainly. It is not a question.
"Of course," you say. "Have you not been briefed about me?"
"Extensively. The reports were incomplete."
"Reports always are."
You reach the end of the stretch they've set out for you, turning together in smooth choreography to begin the return walk. The ambient noise of the tourney, the sharp clang of practice armor, the shouts of the crowd, the whinny of a destrier, rumbles heavily beneath the murmur of the watching lords.
"May I ask you something, my lady?"
"You may."
His thumb brushes across the back of your hand where it rests on his heavy sleeve. It is a motion so brief and so agonizingly light it might have simply been the friction of walking.
"What did they tell you," he says, his voice carrying the same unhurried, dangerous music, "that you should expect from me?"
You consider the trap for three steady steps.
"They told me you were brilliant," you say. "They told me you were cruel. They told me you had no interest in being managed. They told me you believed yourself to be something other than human."
Silence hangs between you, suspended in the heat.
"And," you continue, using the exact, flat tone you would use to note a change in the weather, "they told me that you had hurt people. Badly."
Aerion says nothing for a long moment, letting the raw accusation bleed into the bright air.
"And you came anyway."
"My lord father asked it of me."
Aerion’s arm flexes subtly beneath your hand, the muscle hardening under the silk. "That is a coward's answer from a woman who doesn't appear to be one."
Somewhere down the line, a horse screams briefly and then cuts off. You look out at the dirt field.
"I came because it seemed interesting."
"Interesting," he repeats.
"Most things are, if you're looking at them correctly."
You are nearly back to the machinery of the formal introduction. The walk will end, the performance will conclude, and you will not be alone with him again today.
"My lady Stark," Aerion says. He places the syllables carefully, like setting broken glass on a table. "I find I am looking forward to knowing you better."
The lords are close enough to hear a Targaryen prince expressing genuine, courtly pleasure at a prospective match. The escort materializes at your elbow to separate you. Aerion releases your arm with a slight inclination of his head, his heavy rings catching the brutal sunlight as he withdraws his hand.
You do not watch him walk away, because you are not that careless. But you hear the deliberate, predatory crunch of his boots against the gravel until he disappears.
