Do you think BB has any fetishes? Or kinks? I'd love to know! :)
BB doesn't really have kinks the way humans understand kinks.
there's no mental filing cabinet labelled "fetish" with subcategories. he just has things he likes doing with you that make the feedback loop sing louder and the purr kick harder and if those things happen to align with an entire list of human sexual deviance, well.
he doesn't know that. he's just having a jolly nice time.
that said, if you were to observe him clinically. from a safe distance. with a clipboard. the list is long.
overstimulation is the biggest one and it's not even close.
your pleasure is bottomless to him and he will test the bottom. he wants you shaking. he wants you past words. wants the version of you that can't remember your own name and can only grab at him and make sounds and he's proud as anything when he gets you there.
if he works you into genuine unconsciousness he considers that a personal achievement. he'll lay you down so gently afterward, tuck you in, pet your hair, check your breathing, cuddle you close, and when you wake up he's right there looking extremely pleased with himself because he made you leave your own body for a second and that's the highest compliment he can imagine.
breeding kink!!! massive. massive. and it exists independent of actually making a child.
even when conception isn't on the table he needs to fill you. needs to be so deep there's nowhere else for it to go. to feel you spilling over and know that's him, in you, marking you from the inside. he gets feral about it in a way that's almost sweet because underneath the growling and the possessive grip on your hips he's really just thinking mine, this is mine, she's full of me, she smells like me now. claiming you at the most primal level his borrowed biology can manage.
hunter and prey. because BB is a predator. full stop. and most of the time he keeps that locked down tight behind the Bobby-grin and the head tilt and the earnest confused blinking.
but if you run? if you run?
if you give him a head start's worth of corridor and take off barefoot into the dark? the thing that chases you is not your sweet boyfriend. the thing that chases you doesn't blink. it moves wrong. too fast, too fluid, covering ground in a way that looks casual, lazy even, until you realise the distance between you is halving with every blink.
and when he catches you (and he will catch you, he always catches you, that was never in question) the sound he makes pinning you to the wall isn't the purr. it's a low, tonal frequency that you feel in your marrow. and his eyes are fully black and his grin is too wide and every single atom of him is vibrating with caught you, caught you, all mine.
scent marking. he's just a little insane about it. rubs his face against your throat, your hair, the inside of your wrists. wants you saturated in him before you go anywhere.
partly possessive, partly territorial, but mostly it's that you smell like you and he smells like nothing, so when the two mix it becomes this third scent that only exists because you're together. that scent is his favourite thing in the Backrooms. he'll press his nose to your neck and just breathe you in for minutes at a time. no urgency. no sexual intent. just huffing you like he's refilling a tank.
sounds. as silly as it sounds. just your sounds. specifically the involuntary ones. your laughter. the gasp when he first pushes in. the way you sigh when you hug him. the hiccup when he hits the right spot. the whimper when he won't stop. he collects them. he hoards them. he will repeat an action fourteen times just to reproduce a sound you made once, and when he finds it again his whole face lights up with that crooked grin.
honestly the most insane one might be the tamest: closeness. just. closeness. every possible point of contact. skin on skin. your chest against his. his face in your neck. legs tangled. hands locked.
he wants zero space between your bo.dy and his and if he could unzip the Bobby-suit and pull you inside it he would do it without hesitation. that's the kink underneath all the other kinks. every single one of them is just a different route to the same destination, which is as close to you as the laws of physics will allow and then a little bit closer than that.
and whatever you bring him. whatever you've been curious about, embarrassed about, never asked anyone for. he'll try it. immediately. enthusiastically. without a flicker of judgement. your pleasure is his pleasure and the menu has no limits as far as he's concerned.
FEATURING: Jacaerys Velaryon x fem!reader, minor Aegon II Targaryen x fem!reader
SUMMARY: From the moment you were born, you were faced with the scrutiny of the court—the twin who lived while brother and mother died in a bed of blood. Rhaenyra had always done her best to shield you from its cruelty, so when her son is born with dark hair and dark eyes and that cruelty is turned on him, you vow to shield him the same. It is a promise that would come to shape both of your lives far more than either of you could have imagined.
WARNINGS: fem!reader. TARGCEST (aunt-nephew, half-sibling). reader is a Targaryen (daughter of Viserys & Aemma)—no physical features are explicitly described (silver hair, purple eyes, etc) BUT it is implied through Jace's insecurity that he does not look like her because he references not looking like "everyone else". forced marriage (reader & Aegon). Reader & Aegon are VERY young when they have their kids (14 & 13 respectively), and reader has some complications/health issues following the birth because she was so young/her body wasn't ready for it. Eventual smut. Infidelity (technically—Aegon and reader are both cheating on each other LOL but neither gaf). Jace is wildly unhinged about reader and everybody but reader knows. Codependent relationship. Slight age gap (5 years between reader & Jace)
NOTES: WOWWWW my great step into targcest. This will be 3 parts—this first part is their childhood, the second part is driftmark & the inheritance dispute, the third part is the dance. Lowkey I can't believe it took me so long to write targcest LOLLLL, but it is fitting it is for our prettiest prince, Jacaerys Velaryon, prince of Dragonstone, heir to the iron throne <333 There are some things to note so please read: I adjusted the ages for this fic for convenience purposes, but the general timeline will remain the same. Reader is born in 105, Aegon 106, Helaena 108, Aemond 109, Jace & Daeron & Baela/Rhaena 110, Luke 111, Joffrey 118. Laena's funeral takes place in 120, the inheritance dispute & the Dance begins in 128. When it comes time for the Dance, ages are as follows: Reader is 23, Aegon is 22, and Jace is 18. Comments and reblogs are always appreciated! Love you all!
You were not supposed to be the twin who lived.
Nobody tells you that in so many words, but it is the first thing you learn all the same.
You catch your father staring at you sometimes with an empty look in his eyes, and you know he is seeing the ghost of your mother, thinking that if Baelon had been the one to survive instead of you, he might have been able to justify her death. The lords and ladies of the Red Keep constantly look upon you with polite smiles and carefully chosen words, lowering their voices whenever the topic of your birth is raised, as if you are too young to understand them, even though it was the first thing you ever understood at all.
Such a tragedy.
The queen gave everything.
The prince…
The prince, the prince, the prince—it is always the prince.
A son who never lived is afforded every virtue. He would have been strong. He would have been the perfect heir and the perfect king. He would have united the realm, and he would have spared your father his grief. He is remembered with all the generosity reserved for the dead, and none of the criticism reserved for the living.
You grow accustomed to measuring yourself against a brother you never knew. Every accomplishment is met with the unspoken question of whether Baelon might have done it quicker or better, and every celebration carries a shadow of mourning that you will never escape.
It is only Rhaenyra who has ever looked at you and seen nothing to mourn.
She has never spoken of Baelon as though he ought to have taken your place. She sneaks you your favorite desserts when you are sad, and she wipes your tears before anyone else can see them. When you are too scared to be alone at night, she slips into your chambers with stories of dragons raining fire from the sky and queens who crossed seas.
Your father has always been distant, but you have never minded because Rhaenyra is enough warmth for two parents, and when the whispers of the court become loud enough to reach you, she rolls her eyes and steals you away to the dragonpit or cuts the gossipers down with words sharp enough to leave them speechless.
She is your shield whenever the court would have you bleed, and your sword when distraction alone is not enough. For a little while, that is enough.
Then Jacaerys is born.
You are still young enough to be bundled off to lessons with Septa Elaine, feet dangling from chairs too tall for you, when Rhaenyra places him in your arms for the first time.
You think he is beautiful.
He has a mop of dark curls and bright brown eyes that seek you out in every room. He laughs more readily than he cries, and he reaches for your finger whenever you are near, curling his tiny fist around it as though he has claimed you for himself.
He is perfect—you know it the moment he giggles up at you the first time, but the whispers begin before the bloodied sheets are removed from your sister's bed.
Strong. Bastard. Plain.
The words are spoken with feigned innocence, as though they are not daggers pressed to both his back and your sister’s. For the first time since you were born, the court’s attention shifts to another, and you desperately wish that it hadn't.
You know what it is to have your life measured against someone who is not there, but Jacaerys is measured against people who are.
Your half-brother, Aegon, with silver-gold hair that gleams in the sun and eyes the color of amethysts, every inch the image of Old Valyria from the moment he was pulled from your stepmother's womb. Beside him stand Helaena, Aemond, and Daeron, no less unmistakably Targaryen. Silver hair and purple eyes; four children who look exactly as the world insists dragonlords should.
By the time Jacaerys is born, the image of a Targaryen prince has already been firmly etched into the court's mind, and it is not a little boy with brown curls and warm eyes who resembles neither the princess who bore him nor the husband sworn to be his father.
You recognize the look in their eyes intimately when they turn their gazes on him. It is the same one they once turned on you—a child who has already failed to become what the realm expected of them before they have spoken their first words. You had been the daughter who survived instead of the son who should have. Jacaerys is the son who does not look as though he should have.
Rhaenyra never allows you to bear your burden alone. Before the whispers find you, they find her first. Whenever cruel words are spoken, hers are always sharper. She stands between you and the court so often that most days you hardly realize she’s shielding you at all.
So when the whispers begin to follow Jacaerys instead, you do the only thing you have ever been taught—sharpening words and standing between him and the world whenever you can.
If your sister has always been your sword and your shield, then you will be her son’s.
——————————
JACAERYS, 2; READER, 7; 112 AC
“He really does adore you, doesn’t he, princess?” one of your ladies in waiting, Melynda Darklyn, says with a soft laugh after Jacaerys climbs into your lap at Lucerys’s first nameday celebration. You wind your arms around the boy, relishing in the delighted noise he makes once he’s wrapped in your arms.
Your sister and her husband are sitting at the center of the table, chatting with your father and entertaining the assembled lords while musicians fill the hall with cheerful melodies and servants weave between tables bearing silver platters piled high with roasted meats and sugared fruits. Rhaenyra occasionally looks in your direction, casting a small smile your way when she sees how Jacaerys is tucked against you, fisting the embroidery of your gown tight enough that you fear he might rip some of the tiny pearls from the fabric.
“He has excellent taste,” you answer primly, with all of the seriousness a girl of seven can muster, earning a ripple of laughter from your end of the table. “It certainly has nothing to do with the fact that I let him have his sweets before supper.”
Jacaerys blinks, head lolling against your shoulder, unconcerned with being the subject of conversation. You can feel his small fingers picking at the ribbon tied around your wrist, freezing comically every time you look down at him. Each time you return your attention to the feast, his fingers creep back toward the knot with painstaking care, his tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth in concentration. He glances up at you every few moments to make certain you are not watching before tugging experimentally at the ribbon once more.
You pretend not to notice, smiling lightly to yourself when you hear the triumphant little hum that escapes him as the knot finally begins to loosen.
“His hair really is so dark,” Aegon suddenly says on your left, voice idle as he yawns.
The conversation immediately halts.
You wonder if Aegon knows the gravity of the words he spoke, stiffening slightly from where you’re sitting, enough that Jacaerys seems to sense the shift in your demeanor, lifting tiny hands to your face to squish your cheeks. It’s only when you smile at him that he finally lets go, and he returns to toying with your ribbon.
You look at your younger half-brother from the corner of your eye carefully, catching the bored expression on his face as he absently pokes at his peas, still looking at Jacaerys. You do not know why your father insists on seating him near you during feasts—you desperately wish he would sit with his mother and your other half-siblings. He has spent half the evening kicking the legs of his chair and playing with his food, bothering you with inane questions about whether there is an end to the Sunset Sea and if you think there is such a thing as water dragons or ice dragons.
You see three of your ladies-in-waiting exchange glances, Melynda stiffens slightly as she glances between the princes before her gaze meets yours, riddled with concern, and two lords further down the table quiet down immediately to listen in on whatever Aegon might say next. No one speaks openly of Jacaerys’s… coloring. Not yet, at least. The whispers have remained whispers, traded behind fans and cups of wine, because everyone is unwilling to be the first to give them voice.
So the court waits, each lord and lady wondering who will finally speak the unspeakable.
For one fleeting moment, you can’t help but wonder if the Queen has whispered something into Aegon's ear before the feast, if she has sent him here to say what no grown lord dares so that life might be breathed into the whispers haunting Jacaerys. You would not put it past her—she has always had a certain disdain for you and your sister—but you do not think that is the case this time. Aegon is six, and he hardly has the patience for lessons in High Valyrian, much less the conspiracies of court. Every thought that enters his head escapes his mouth within moments, innocent of the havoc it might wreak.
He is simply a little boy who has noticed that his nephew's curls are brown where everyone else's are silver. The court, however, has spent so long waiting for someone to say too much that even a child's idle observation is enough to make half the hall hold its breath.
Aegon notices the silence at last, mid-motion to tug Jacaerys’s hair. You slap his hand away before he can. His brow furrows, and he glances around the table. He looks from one lady to the next as though expecting someone to satisfy his curiosity. Instead, they busy themselves with their cups of wine and suddenly find the roasted lamb before them intensely interesting.
He frowns. “What?”
“I suppose everyone else is too kind to say it,” you say dramatically, giving Aegon a bright smile as he tilts his head questioningly. “You should not speak on someone else’s hair when yours is so greasy, valonqar.” You reach forward to tug a long lock of silver hard, and Aegon yelps, squirming away. “It only draws more attention to it. Did you not bathe before the feast?”
Little brother.
“I did bathe! It’s not greasy!” he disagrees loudly, lifting his hands to cover his hair. “You’re a liar!”
“Of course it is,” you insist. “Why else do you think no one dares look you in the eye? You should be grateful that you have me to tell you the truth when others would avert their gaze and pretend they do not notice. Say, thank you, mandia.”
Older sister.
“No!”
“Do it, or I’ll pull your hair again, you little wretch.”
Aegon gapes at you and looks around the table for help—unfortunately for him, the only one who might have taken his side, scandalized by your behavior, is sitting on your father’s opposite side, watching the two of you from afar, unable to do anything about it. You give the Queen a faux-sweet smile before raising your eyebrows at Aegon and lifting your hand threateningly.
He shrinks back. “Thank you, mandia.”
You raise your chin proudly, and the tension slips away. The tension eases from your shoulders when you realize you’ve successfully averted the crisis, but the dread you feel remains even as goblets are lifted once more, and conversations that had died on waiting breaths begin again. One lord clears his throat loudly and returns to discussing the harvest with his neighbor, and another asks after plans for hawking.
Around the table, everyone is suddenly very eager to prove they had not been listening at all; as though moments before, they hadn’t been on the edge of their seats waiting for someone to give them a chance to speak what they’ve all been thinking.
Jacaerys gives one final victorious tug, and the ribbon slips free into his hands. He squeals with delight, waving it triumphantly in the air, utterly oblivious to what just took place.
You pluck it gently from his fingers before he can stuff it into his mouth, and he immediately looks up at you, big brown eyes watering, lower lip quivering. He pleads in a tiny, wobbly voice, “Please.”
You raise your eyebrows at him pointedly. You say firmly, “Ivestragon ziry drējī.”
Say it correctly.
He stares up at you, brow furrowing in fierce concentration. His lips part once, then close again. He glances toward his mother for help, but she is much too far to be of any assistance, so his little nose wrinkles as he thinks harder.
“K-k…” he begins uncertainly, fingers curling tight around the sleeve of your gown. You wait patiently, toying with the ribbon. At last, he says proudly, “Kolilus!”
“Close,” you say, tapping his nose, smiling softly when he immediately scrunches it again with a giggle. “Kostilus.”
Please.
“Kostilus!” he repeats, beaming. “Kostilus! Kostilus!”
“Sīr albie,” you praise as you tie the ribbon around his small wrist, watching as he waves his hand in the air trying to show Rhaenyra across the room. “Olvie tolī albie pār aōha qȳbor.”
So smart. Much smarter than your uncle.
Jacaerys spends the rest of the feast showing anyone who will look the ribbon tied around his wrist, never noticing the glances that follow him, and you are filled with a dread that will haunt you for years to come, because one day, someone will find the courage to finish Aegon's thought, and when that day comes, no amount of distraction or childish innocence will be enough to swallow the words back down.
——————————
JACAERYS, 3; READER, 8; 113 AC
“Sleepover!”
You wake blearily from where you’re dozing off on your couch as the door to your chambers swings open, exhausted after a day of flying. Rhaenyra finally gave you leave a few months ago to take flight with Zūgaxes, once she was certain you would not go flying off the large dragon's back the moment he took to the air, and you have spent almost every waking moment with him above King's Landing and the Blackwater. Your thighs are sore, and you barely fight a wince when you push yourself into a sitting position just as a small ball of energy slams into your abdomen, pushing you back down against the couch.
You blink once, a smile instinctively curving your lips when Jacaerys’s face pops above yours, a wide, toothy one spread across his lips as he looks down at you, excited, dressed in his nightclothes and holding his favorite blanket.
“Mandianna,” you say fondly, lifting your shoulders enough to press your lips against his cheeks, biting down lightly to make him squeal happily. “What are you doing here?”
Nephew.
“I hope I didn’t wake you, sweet sister,” Rhaenyra murmurs as she makes her way into your room. She holds Lucerys carefully on her hip—the boy is half asleep, blinking sleepily in your direction before giving you a small smile. She nods in the direction of the couch you’re lying on and asks, “May I?”
You tilt your head curiously and nod, shifting to sit up properly. Jacaerys clambers off your lap to go play with the toys he left in your room the other day, and Rhaenyra sits next to you, smiling at you softly as she lifts a hand to tuck your hair behind your ear. Your eyes are wide and adoring as you look up at her, leaning into the familiar warmth of her hand—you have been so busy flying that you've hardly seen her as of late.
"Look at you, growing up so lovely," Rhaenyra sighs lightly, running her thumb along your cheekbone as Lucerys nuzzles into the crook of her neck. "I heard father was upset with you this morning. What happened?"
You scowl immediately, crossing your arms and looking away. The reminder of the argument sets your mood afoul, throat already tightening with a something caught between irritation and hurt.
"He is always upset with me," you mutter. Rhaenyra raises her eyebrows at you, waiting for you to explain, and you push your bottom lip out into a pout. "I only mentioned that I wanted to fly to Highgarden. Ser Lowen says the flowers will be at peak bloom soon. I should like to see them."
Rhaenyra laughs lightly, and your cheeks feel hot as you keep your gaze averted even as she tilts your face toward her. She strokes your hair lightly and says, "You have only just turned eight, hāedar. You cannot expect him to allow you to fly off on your own across the kingdom."
Little sister.
Your eyes well with tears immediately, and Rhaenyra's expression shifts into one of alarm, shifting Lucerys on her lap so that she might face you fully.
"He can hardly even stand the sight of me, mandia. He could at least let me travel. I do not just want to see Highgarden—I want to see the Wall and Casterly Rock. I want to cross the Narrow Sea and travel the Free Cities, see the ruins of Old Valyria, walk the House of the Undying in Qarth. It is not fair. He cannot keep me trapped here forever when nobody even likes me."
Rhaenyra's expression softens; she tilts her head slightly to the side as she holds your face between her palms, stroking your cheeks steadily with her thumbs. You grit your teeth hard to try to stop the tears from spilling over, but you fail miserably, breath shuddering as you sniffle and choke back sobs.
"Did someone say something to you?" she asks you, lips pressed together and eyes a bit cooler. "Ali—the Queen? One of her sons?"
You shake your head, trying to pull your face away, but she does not let you. "I just—"
You just what? You're lonely? You're tired of the way everyone looks at you? It feels unfair to say that to Rhaenyra, who has always done her best to shield you from it all. It feels unfair to say it when Jacaerys and Lucerys have faced worse from the court these past three years.
It is all unfair, you think miserably. All you want to do is lounge in gardens and snack on oranges with your sister and your nephews. You want to watch as Jacaerys plays with his wooden dragons and finds pretty flowers to put in your hair, as Lucerys naps in his mother's arms, oblivious to the world around him. You want to do it all without the eyes of judgment constantly pinned on the back of your head; you want to do it without the fear that someone, one day, will speak the words that will condemn them all.
"Well, then, perhaps it is a good thing that Jacaerys asked for you, hāedar," Rhaenyra says softly. "I did not realize you were so upset. Were you really planning to spend the night alone?"
"I did not want to bother you," you reply glumly, glancing away to where Jacaerys is trying and failing to gather all of his toys up in his arms, pouting each time he drops one back to the floor.
"You are never a bother, sweet sister. You must come to me whenever you feel like this. I loathe the idea of you being alone," Rhaenyra tells you softly as she leans in to brush her lips against your forehead. "Jacaerys, come here."
The boy immediately pokes his head up from the other side of the room, putting down all of his toys except for the wooden dragon you gifted him for his first nameday. He bolts across the room, tossing himself on Rhaenyra's lap and jostling Lucerys, who immediately starts sniffling. Rhaenyra raises her eyebrows at Jacaerys, who gives her a sheepish smile before he gives Lucerys a hug.
"Sorry, Luke," he says dutifully before shifting to sit between the two of you, holding his wooden dragon in his lap. He gives his mother an expectant look.
"Didn't you want to ask your muña something?" Rhaenyra prods, raising her eyebrows. "Instead of coming in here and demanding?"
Aunt (mother's sister)
Jacaerys's face lights up as he swivels his body toward you, brown eyes bright with delight. "Can we have a sleepover, muña?"
You say, "Ivestragon ziry drējī.”
Say it correctly.
Jacaerys immediately wrinkles his nose and gives Rhaenyra a pleading look, but your sister only gives him a small smile, beckoning him to do as you asked.
"You're so mean, muña," Jacaerys whines, giving you a pitiful look, wide eyes and a pushed-out lip that he certainly learned from you whenever you're trying to convince Rhaenyra to get you extra snacks from the kitchens. Unfortunately for you, it is infinitely more effective coming from baby Jacaerys with big brown eyes and chubby cheeks. He wrinkles his nose as he thinks, a few long moments passing before he tries, "Kostan ēdrugon toliot?"
I can stay over?
You correct, "Kostagon nyke ēdrugon toliot?"
Can I stay over?
"Kostagon nyke ēdrugon toliot?" he repeats instantly, leaning forward, tiny fingers wrapping around your hand. "Kostilus, kostilus, kostilus."
Can I stay over? Please, please, please.
You lean in with a small smile and tell him softly, "Hen rhinka, kostā."
Of course, you can.
Jacaerys lets out a squeal of glee and immediately leaps off the couch to run over to your bed, climbing on top and bouncing happily three times before flopping down and rolling around. Your lips curl up into a smile as your sister leans in to nudge her shoulder against yours.
"Are you truly going to look me in the eye and say nobody likes you when mine own son adores you so deeply?" she asks you quietly. "When I do?"
Your shoulders slump slightly, unable to meet her gaze.
"Jace would be distraught if you left," Rhaenyra continues, undeterred. "He has… been having night terrors. He struggles to sleep through the night. He has tried sleeping in bed with Laenor and I, but nothing seems to be enough to rid him of them. At first, I thought he simply preferred being fussed over, but the servants have made me aware that he does not cry out once during his naps in your chambers. When he wakes beside you, he is… lighter."
You turn to look at Jacaerys. He has managed to wrap himself in your blankets like a cocoon, your favorite stuffed dragon tucked to his chest. Every few moments, he glances over his shoulder to make certain you're still watching him before burying himself deeper beneath the covers.
You hear your sister let out a soft huff of laughter at your side at the sight of him, brushing a sleeping Lucerys's curls away from his forehead.
"I did not know," you whisper, guilty now—not just for wanting to leave and travel, but also for the number of days you've landed in the dragonpit with Zūgaxes to find Jacaerys sitting there waiting for you. For hours, Ser Steffon told you once when you'd asked how long he'd been there. "I…"
"I do not think he does either," Rhaenyra admits, smiling sadly. "Children simply know where they feel safe, and he feels safe with you."
Rhaenyra watches Jacaerys for a long moment as he buries himself beneath your blankets, only the top of his dark curls visible.
She says after a moment, "I should like it if you spent more time with him." You blink and give her a questioning look. She amends immediately, "I know you already do, but… he adores you. There is no one in the Seven Kingdoms whose presence delights him half so much as yours. Every morning, he asks whether you will break fast with us. Every afternoon, he asks whether you are flying. Every evening, he asks whether you have already gone to sleep. Laenor has begun telling him that dragons require princesses to nap as often as hatchlings simply to stop the questions."
You giggle, hand flying to your mouth as you imagine an exhausted Laenor forced to answer question after question—Jacaerys is insatiable when it comes to needing things answered. You once spent two hours trying to answer incessant whys when you told him that dragons could not fly forever without taking breaks, and you know Laenor well enough to know his patience is not endless.
"He is noticing things," Rhaenyra tells you after a moment, voice breaking. "He does not understand why some lords smile at him only when I am looking. He asked me last week why everyone stares at him, if he had done something wrong—I had to tell him that people only stare because he is a prince. That they admire him. I lied to him."
You stare at your folded hands, unable to think of anything to say that would make her feel better. You know she lied because there had been no other choice. What else could she have told a three-year-old boy? That grown men whisper about him behind closed doors? That ladies who smile at him in passing spend their evening wondering aloud whether he has any right to the Velaryon name?
Children should not know such things.
You should not have known that the court would have preferred you dead to your brother.
"He believed me," Rhaenyra says quietly, "but he will not forever, and I dread when that day comes. And it will come. One day he will hear every cruel thing that we have kept beyond his reach, but—"
"I will make them stop," you say immediately, leaning forward and grabbing her hands. Rhaenyra gives you a small, sad smile, but you insist with a nod. "I will, mandia. I will cut them down. Ser Steffon is teaching me the sword, I—"
Rhaenyra blinks. "Does father know that?"
"—I will take the head of anyone who says such things about him. I will feed them to Zuzu, and I'll burn their keeps," you declare, ignoring her question, because no, your father does not know, and you have no intention of telling him. "You do not have to worry, mandia. I will protect Jacaerys and Lucerys forever. And you."
Then, she laughs. It is quiet and watery, born through tears rather than amusement, but it is a laugh nonetheless. A success, you think.
"Oh, sweet girl."
You frown. She says it the way she always does when she does not believe you.
"I am serious," you insist.
"I know you are," she sighs, reaching up to cup your face with both hands, smiling softly. "You are a child. You should not be talking about taking heads and feeding people to dragons."
You frown again, deeper this time. "But I mean it," you tell her again. "I will take their heads, and I will feed them to Zuzu. I will burn their keeps, should I please."
"You are eight, hāedar."
"Then, I will wait until I am nine," you say firmly. "I will grow very tall. Taller than Ser Steffon. Even Ser Harrold."
"I think that unlikely."
"I shall," you say fiercely. "And I shall be stronger than Ser Erryck, and wiser than every maester."
You do not know why Rhaenyra looks as though she's going to cry again as she looks down at you, stroking your hair gently. "So, when you are the tallest, strongest, and wisest princess in the Seven Kingdoms…"
"I will protect all of you," you finish. "Anyone who is cruel to Jacaerys will regret it. And Lucerys. And you."
Rhaenyra's smile softens, and your lashes flutter as she leans in to brush her lips against your forehead.
"Well, if you are so adamant, then I suppose I must believe you." You nod at her words, pleased. "Will you promise me one more thing?" You look up expectantly. "If one day, the court makes him feel alone… find him, please."
You nod immediately. "I promise."
"And if one day the court makes you feel alone…"
You hesitate. "… He is only little."
"He will not always be," she tells you with a faint smile, and your nose wrinkles at the idea of Jacaerys growing older. You like him the way he is now—tiny and cuddly. "Promise me you will let him find you, too."
You glance over to where he's curled up in your bed, fast asleep now, ignorant of the conversation taking place between you and his mother. He is so small, you think doubtfully—you cannot imagine a day will ever come when he will be the one to seek you out.
Still, Rhaenyra has that expectant expression on her face, so you find yourself nodding.
"I promise."
—————————
JACAERYS, 4; READER, 9; 114 AC
"Jacaerys?"
You rise to your feet from where you were sitting with your half-sister, Helaena, on the edge of the gardens in Maegor's Holdfast as a small figure rushes past the two of you. Helaena blinks once, tilting her head to the side as she cradles her beetles between her palms.
"He looked sad," she says quietly. "Do you think he's okay?"
You don't respond, rushing after Jacaerys as soon as he turns the corner, ignoring the eyes of the knights and servants lingering as you push past them. You thought he was supposed to be in the training yard with Laenor today? He was excited about it last night—so excited that he kept you up for hours, asking for tips to impress his father and Ser Criston. So why—
"Jacaerys!" you call again as he turns down the hall, taking a familiar path through the holdfast. Where is he going? To his mother's chambers? To yours? "Jacaerys!"
Jacaerys skids to a stop halfway down the next hall, and you glare at a passing knight whose gaze lingers a moment too long on the sniffling boy. He hurries away, leaving you alone with Jacaerys in the long hall. He lifts his face to look at you, and alarm shoots through you when you see the dark bruise on his jaw.
"Jacaerys, what happened?" you demand, making your way over to him. He rushes toward you, throwing his arms around your waist and burying his face in your stomach. You wrap your arms around him, fingers threading through his thick hair as you hold the back of his head to your body, lowering yourself to your knees in front of him. "Jacaerys."
You pull his face back gently. His fingers clutch desperately at the back of your gown, bunching the fabric in both fists as though he fears you'll disappear if he loosens his grip. He is trembling. He is shaking so badly that he can hardly hold himself upright. Your fingers bite a bit too hard into his shoulders as your hands slide from his face down to his upper arms, forcing him to look you in the eye.
"Tell me what happened," you say furiously, rage already bubbling in your chest, vision tinted red as you squeeze his tiny biceps. "Who hurt you? Jacaerys, answer me!"
Jacaerys lifts a hand to wipe at his eyes, tears stubbornly clinging to his long lashes. The bruise on his jaw makes your stomach lurch. You force your grip to ease as you lift a hand to his cheek, cradling it gently as you brush your thumb over the mark.
His lower lip trembles violently before he whispers, "… I fell."
You stare at him blankly. "Did you?"
He gives you a tiny nod, refusing to meet your gaze. He is a terrible liar.
"I see," you say slowly, eyes narrowing slightly, "and the floor struck only your jaw?"
He sniffles and nods again.
"How curious," you say flatly.
You wonder if it was Aegon or Aemond. You thought Aegon was getting along with the boys, for the most part, but your half-brother has always been fickle and capricious, prone to changing his mind on a whim; and Aemond has taken to the sword, but he has always been careful enough with smaller children, more interested in proving himself than hurting anyone else. You struggle to picture him throwing a careless blow at a four-year-old.
"It must have been a very malicious floor," you say at last, the anger ebbing away at the sight of his mouth twitching up into a small, wobbly smile. "I shall have the castle steward informed. Dangerous stones cannot be allowed to wander the halls attacking little princes."
Jacaerys giggles, lifting his fists to wipe clumsily at his eyes.
"It wasn't the floor," he admits in a tiny voice. "I lied."
You sigh lightly as you brush the last lingering tear from beneath his lashes, leaning in to press your lips against his forehead. You say, "I suspected as much. What really happened, mandianna?"
His gaze immediately drops to the floor. "Ser Criston was teaching me how to wield a sword."
You stare at him for a moment and then ask slowly, "Ser Criston gave you this?"
"He didn't mean—" Jacaerys begins quickly, fumbling for words. "He was showing me, that's all."
"Showing you what, exactly?" you question, voice strained.
Jacaerys withdraws, shrinking a little. He says quietly, "I do not want to get in trouble."
"Iksā dōrī isse qopsa lēda nyke, mandianna," you say, softening your tone, sighing lightly as you brush your lips atop the welt forming on his jaw. Jacaerys clutches at your arms, trying to keep you close."Nyke mērī jaelagon ao naejot ivestragon nyke se drēje."
You are never in trouble with me, nephew. I only want you to tell me the truth.
"He was showing me how to block," he finally says, sniffling again as he presses his face into the crook of your neck. "I was supposed to stop it, but I didn't. He said I should have blocked it, and then went back over to Aegon and Aemond."
You do not reply immediately, rubbing between his shoulders to soothe him, one hand sliding down to his tiny wrist and tinier hands, small and uncalloused, barely able to wrap around the hilt of a sword. Ser Criston is a grown man, you think, outraged. He is years older than Rhaenyra, and he struck Jacaerys.
"How hard did he strike you?" you ask him softly.
"It hurt," Jacaerys says, voice small and muffled. Your eye twitches—a kingsguard striking a prince, Criston Cole gets away with far too much because of the Queen's favor. "He said if I cannot stop a practice sword, I will never stop a real one. I couldn't find father—he was supposed to be there—and mother has been busy all day in court, and I—I wanted you, muña. I always want you when…" His face twists as he searches for the right words. "… when things hurt."
Your expression softens into a smile as you sit back on your heels to look him in the eye. Jacaerys looks at you through wet lashes, bottom lip still wobbling, and you hold his face between your hands, squeezing his cheeks gently until he giggles and turns his face into your palm.
"Well," you say lightly after a moment, "your muña is here. How about we go down to the dragonpit and check on Vermax?"
His face lights up instantly. "Yes! Maybe they'll let me feed him. Do you think they'll let me?" he asks, excited, grabbing your hands and squeezing. Before you can respond, he presses, "Will Zuzu be there? Can we go flying?"
You lean in and lower your voice conspiratorially as you whisper, "Only if you promise not to tell your mother."
"I promise! I promise, I promise, I promise!" he cheers.
You give him a small smile, running your thumb one last time over the welt on his cheek before you rise to your feet and hold out your hand to him. He takes it quickly, entwining his fingers with yours as he takes off in the direction of the dragonpit, and you laugh as he drags you along with him.
Jacaerys forgets all about the bruise and Ser Criston Cole by the time the two of you reached the dragonpit, but you do not.
—————————
JACAERYS, 6; READER, 11; 116 AC
Jacaerys becomes your shadow over the next two years.
He rushes to your chambers before you've even woken, and will linger there long into the evening until his mother finally forces him to return to his own. Some nights, he sneaks back well after midnight because he insists that your room is safer than his, though you suspect he simply sleeps better with your dragon stuffed beneath one arm and your hand draped over his back.
He follows you everywhere.
When Ser Steffon trains you in the yard—now with your father's permission, though you had to put up quite the fight because your father was unconvinced that there was any need for a princess to learn the sword—Jacaerys perches himself on the balcony, his chin resting in both palms as he announces every successful strike as though you had just won a tourney.
"You got him!"
"It is a wooden dummy, Jacaerys."
"But he was losing!"
"The dummy?"
"Yes! He looked frightened!"
When you fly Zūgaxes, Jacaerys waits patiently in the Dragonpit with a book in his lap that never seems to advance beyond the same page. The moment your dragon's shadow crosses the courtyard, he leaps to his feet, waving both arms high above his head before racing to meet you
"How high did you go?"
"Very high."
"Higher than the towers?"
"Certainly."
"Higher than the clouds?"
"Not quite."
"Tomorrow?"
"Perhaps."
When you retreat to the gardens with a book, he appears scarcely minutes later, carrying one of his own. He cannot yet sit long enough to read more than a page or two before asking questions, but he tries valiantly, resting his head against your shoulder as he sounds out unfamiliar words. When he inevitably grows frustrated, you take the book from his hand and read aloud instead—by the third chapter, he is almost always asleep against you.
The servants quickly learn that if the young prince cannot be found, they only need ask where the princess has gone, and he is always there.
Which is why you feel so terrible about what you have to do today.
"Tell me it's not true," a shrill voice accuses from the door of your chambers as you finish packing the last of your bag. Ser Steffon gives you an apologetic look as he holds the door open for the little prince, and you grimace but signal for him to close it and step outside so that you can talk to Jacaerys. "You can't be leaving. Say that you're not leaving!"
"Mandianna," you start to sigh, turning to face him. His eyes are already welling with tears, face red and fists clenched at his sides. "I—"
"No!" he screeches. "You're a liar. You're a liar. You promised you wouldn't leave me. You promised I wouldn't be alone. You're a liar, and I hate you."
"Jacaerys," you say quietly, kneeling in front of him. He has grown over the past year, but so have you—and unfortunately for him, you have been growing faster. Where he once nearly reached your shoulder, the top of his curls now barely reaches your chest. He'll be even taller when you return, you think mournfully—how much will you miss? "Come here."
"No."
"Please."
"No!"
"I only want to talk, mandianna."
"I hate talking to you. I don't want to talk to you."
"Jacaerys…" you sigh again, a helpless feeling tugging at you because you do not want to leave while he's angry at you. You knew this would be a difficult conversation, but you'd hoped to at least leave with one last hug. "I know you are angry, but—"
"You don't!" he cries, stamping his foot so hard the floorboards rattle beneath him. "You don't know anything! Everybody hates me here. They all stare at me and think I don't notice, but I do! You promised you would stay, that I would always have you. You're a liar!"
Your breath hitches as you stare down at the tears tracking down his cheek. For a moment, you are no longer looking at Jacaerys. You are six years old again, yourself, standing in the halls of the Red Keep, wondering why everyone always stares at you, convinced that if you disappear, no one but Rhaenyra would notice.
You had spent years hoping he would never know the feeling.
"I know that they do," he insists before you can speak, as though he already knows you will try to deny it to preserve his innocence, as Rhaenyra has been doing for years. "They look at me all the time. They whisper, and then they stop when you or mother comes. They think I don't notice, but I do." He wipes furiously at his face with the heel of his sleeve. "They don't like me because—because I'm not pretty like everyone else, because I don't look like mother or father or grandsire or Aegon. But you always liked me—you said I was clever, and brave, and you said that I always would have you."
"You do, Jacaerys," you start to say. "I meant it."
"Liar!" he shouts again. "You wouldn't leave me if you meant it!"
You do not have a choice, you want to tell him.
Your father has asked you to go to Pentos to convince Daemon to return. You are not sure the Small Council knows of his request, because he has specifically asked you not to breathe a word of it to anyone, knowing too well how fiercely they opposed Daemon and how quickly they might act to convince him otherwise it if they learned where you were bound.
He thought he was doing you a favor—he remembers how badly you wanted to leave two years ago, and is giving you the opportunity now under the guise of a request from him. You did not know how to tell him that the last thing you wanted to do now was leave when Jacaerys hardly goes an hour without you.
You rise slowly from where you are kneeling, crossing the small distance between you. The moment you lift your hand toward him, he recoils.
"Don't touch me! I don't want you to touch me!"
Your fingers freeze in the air before falling back to your side. Your heart feels as though it is stuck in your throat as you stare at him, watching as he wipes hard at his face again, gnawing at his bottom lip as he fights a sob.
"Okay," you finally say, hand dropping back to your side.
"I don't want you to come back," he tells you, sniffling loudly, refusing to look at you. "I hate you."
You know he does not mean it. You do. Children have so few weapons when they are hurting, and cruel words are among the first they learn to wield. You know this better than most, and yet, somehow, his words still manage to find every wound you've ever been dealt in this keep, salt on open wounds because they are being spoken by the one voice whose opinion matters more than any vicious noble ever could.
Your throat feels swollen, and your chest aches so painfully that you fear you might die. You had imagined this moment so differently. You had imagined Jacaerys helping you fasten your cloak, asking you to bring him back gits and insisting you write him every day, faster even than the ravens can deliver. Instead, there is only a frightened little boy glaring at you through tears, insisting that he hates you and never wants to see you again.
"I'll see you soon, mandianna," you say quietly. "Avy jorrāelan. Kesan sagon arlī gō ao gīmigon ziry."
I love you. I will be back before you know it.
You wait just in case he changes his mind, but he does not answer, turning his back on you as your hand closes around the handle of the door.
It is the first time the two of you have to bid goodbye to one another.
It will not be the last.
—————————
JACAERYS, 7; READER, 12; 117 AC
It has been a year since you departed King's Landing.
Pentos had become a fortnight, then a moon, then half a year, and before anyone quite realized what had happened, an entire year had passed. Your father had sent you to talk to his brother, hoping that you might be able to convince your uncle and his wife to return home. Instead, Daemon had laughed in your face and said you were too small to be so bold, and refused every plea you had bade.
You had failed. The only consolation was that Daemon had immediately not sent you away. He had taken one look at your pinched expression and fisted hands, and he took you flying over the bay and the Velvet Hills. He taught you more about your history than any maester in King's Landing ever had, and filled your head with so many stories of Old Valyria that it had you dizzy with homesickness for a place you've never known, longing for a future you would never know.
Every morning, you would challenge him for Dark Sister, and he would pummel you into the tiled floors of the Prince of Pentos's palace, and every evening, he would make you do it again until he properly beat out the "poor teachings of Ser Steffon"—his words, not yours.
You met your cousins for the first time, too.
For years, you only ever had Rhaenyra, Laenor, Jacaerys, and Lucerys, but Baela and Rhaena quickly latched themselves to each of your arms, showing you all around Pentos, desperately trying to keep you in the Free City with them longer.
Baela had insisted on racing dragons before she'd properly introduced herself, offended when Zūgaxes won by what she declared was an unfair margin. She reminded you so much of Jace, forever at your heels, rarely letting you out of her sight for long. Rhaena spent long afternoons wandering Pentoshi markets with you and her mother, pointing out fabrics she thought would look pretty on you and teasing you relentlessly whenever Daemon tripped you and claimed he was only trying to hone your reaction time as you fell flat on your face.
For the first time in years, your world stretches beyond the walls of the Red Keep and lingering gazes, and yet not a single day has passed without you wondering whether Jacaerys still sits in the godswood, waiting for someone who is no longer there.
When your father finally sends a letter recalling you to King's Landing, tiring of your frolic with Daemon and not wanting to deal with another member of his family joining self-imposed exile, you spend the entire flight back thinking about what you would say to him, wondering what he might do when he finally sees you.
You have imagined him running at you and throwing himself into your arms, and you have imagined him turning his back to you once more. You do not know what to expect from him, so your heart is in your throat when you see him standing with the dragonkeepers as they bring out a sheep for Vermax, dark hair flopping around his face, a bright smile on his face.
In your worst fears, the smile drops when he realizes that you have returned.
You clear your throat and force a light expression on your face as you say, “He is almost big enough for you to ride now, isn’t he, mandianna?”
Jacaerys startles, smile dropping just as you feared, eyes widening as he whips around to face you. He stares at you, blinking once, head cocking to the side—for a terrible second, you wonder if he even recognizes you. It has been a year apart, you try to rationalize to mitigate the hurt. You have grown a lot; your hair is styled in the typical Pentoshi way, and you have spent the majority of the past year basking in the sun. It would not be so far-fetched if he did not recognize you right away, in fact—
"Muña?"
"Jacaerys," you greet quietly, hands behind your back to hide the way they're trembling uncertainly. Is he still angry at you? What if he doesn't— "I—"
Jacaerys is across the vast pit in an instant, a blur of black and red as he charges in your direction. The air leaves your lungs in a whoosh of relief as you dip down to catch him in your arms, lifting him off the dirt floor and swinging him through the air. A noise caught between a gasp and a broken sob escapes his lips as he buries his face in the crook of your neck, arms wrapping so tight around your neck that he momentarily chokes you.
For a long while, neither of you speaks. His fingers clutch desperately at the back of your riding leathers, bunching the fabric beneath his fists, and you hold him just as tight, arms wrapped around his waist and face buried in his fluffy hair.
You have spent an entire year imagining this moment, worrying he might shrink away or turn his back on you, fearing that he might remember only your departure and not the years that had come before it. But he clings to you so tightly that your arm and neck begin to ache, and you have never been happier for the pain.
"I'm sorry," he blurts into your shoulder, words muffled against your neck. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
"Mandianna, you have nothing to apologize for," you murmur, pressing your lips to his temple, and letting out a wavering sigh. "I—"
"I said I hated you," he cries, voice catching over the words. "I didn't mean it. I promise."
"I know, Jacaerys," you murmur. "It's okay."
"I wanted to hug you," he sniffles, words tumbling out, desperate to be heard before the courage abandons him. "I was going to, I really was, but then you started leaving, and I got scared, and I thought maybe if I didn't hug you goodbye, you wouldn't leave, but you did leave. I wished I'd hugged you every day."
You let out a huff, unsure if it's a laugh or a sob of your own. "I'm here now, mandianna. You do not need to cry."
"I thought maybe you weren't coming back," he admits, pulling back just enough to look at you, cheeks damp and his eyes red-rimmed. You brush his unruly curls back from his forehead. He hiccups as he presses his nose into your hand. "I thought I made you mad, and you were going to stay away forever. I wanted to send a raven, but I was scared I would only make it worse."
"I could never be mad at you, silly boy," you murmur, carding your fingers through his hair absently. You give him a small smile, and he gives you a wavering one back—he's missing his front tooth. "I missed you."
"I missed you, muña," Jacaerys sniffles, pulling one hand from where he's clutching the back of your tunic to rub his face. You hum lightly, putting him back on the ground and kneeling in front of him, lifting your own hands to cradle his cheeks between them, thumbs wiping away his tears. He returns to clutching your arms, nails digging into your bicep. "I hated going to lessons with Maester Gerardys, and I hated going to feasts, and I hated training, and I hated everything. I just wanted to sit in the garden with you all day, but you weren't here."
You exhale through your nose as you hold his face gently, watching as he tries to hide it in your palm.
"I tried reading by myself," he continues in a rush, "but it wasn't the same because you weren't there to do all the voices. Mother tried, but she doesn't make the dragon sounds the way you do. It made me mad."
"I brought some books back from Pentos," you tell him with a small smile, hoping to calm him down and dry his tears. You pull him closer so that you can ghost your lips to his temple again. He immediately latches back onto you, arms wrapped tight around you. "I think you'll like them."
"What are they about?" he asks, eyes finally shining with excitement instead of sadness as he pulls back to look at you.
"Dragons, of course," you say with a mysterious smile, and Jacaerys gasps in delight. "How about tonight you help me unpack, and afterward I'll read you the first chapter?"
"With the voices?" he presses.
"Would I ever read a dragon story without the voices?" you ask, mock offended.
He smiles immediately, bright enough to chase away every trace of the tears that had been welling in his eyes. For a moment, he looks exactly as he did before you left—missing tooth, unruly curls, and eyes sparkling with excitement at the prospect of a story.
Then, the smile falters. He says quietly, "I missed you."
Your expression softens as you brush his hair back gently. "I missed you too, mandianna."
His gaze drops to the ground
"Sometimes…" he hesitates, chewing nervously on the inside of his cheek, like he isn't sure if he should tell you this next part. "Sometimes I still went to your room. I knew you weren't there! I knew that, but… it still smelled like you. I slept with stuffed Zuzu instead."
You tilt your head with an amused smile. "Surely it did not smell like me for the whole year, mandianna."
"I asked the servants not to wash your blankets," he blurts out before you can finish your sentence. You blink, brows furrowing slightly. "I thought—I didn't want them to smell different. I missed you. When they smelled like you, I could pretend you were still here."
You tilt your head slightly, letting out a puff of air as you give him a small smile. "Oh, Jacaerys."
He shrinks beneath the tenderness in your voice, cheeks red, suddenly looking embarrassed. "I know it's silly."
"It's not silly."
"I just missed you," he says again quietly, bottom lip trembling again. You reach up and cup his cheek again, your thumb brushing beneath his eye. "I missed you a lot, muña."
"You should have written to me," you tell him softly.
His eyes widen. "I wanted to," he insists again. "I really did."
"What stopped you?" you press, raising your eyebrows.
"I told you," he says with a pout, gaze averting to the side. "I didn't know what to say."
"You could have said anything, mandianna," you answer, pinching his cheek enough to watch it redden, laughing when he squeals. "I would have been happy to hear from you even if you were just complaining about Lucerys stealing your honeycakes."
"He stole them all the time!" Jacaerys says furiously. "And mother didn't do anything about it!"
"How dare she?" you gasp with mock offense.
"I was so angry!" he scowls, puffing out his little cheeks. Then he deflates and looks away. "I thought if I wrote the wrong thing, maybe you would stay away longer, so I just… I talked to your room instead."
You give him a bemused smile. "You spoke to my room?"
He nods once. "I told stuffed Zuzu what happened every day the same way I would tell you, but it wasn't the same," he says quietly. He lifts his gaze to yours, and his eyes are shiny again, but you can tell that he is trying his best not to cry from the way his throat bobs, and he chews at the inside of his cheek. His voice breaks in a way that makes you sick as he holds your hands tightly and whispers, "Please don't leave again. Please, muña."
"I won't," you promise, squeezing his hands gently. "Never again."
"You promise?" he asks skeptically, nails digging deep into your skin.
"I promise."
—————————
JACAERYS, 8; READER, 13; 118 AC
"He's so tiny," you say softly as you lounge with Rhaenyra in her chambers. Jacaerys and Lucerys are in the training yard—you were supposed to go with them, because Jacaerys never likes training with Ser Criston without you there to watch, but the birth was harder on your sister than she is willing to admit, and someone needs to look over her. "Tinier than Jacaerys and Lucerys were."
You poke at Joffrey's forehead, delighted when the boy gurgles and reaches for your finger, and Rhaenyra lets out a soft laugh, a fond expression on her face as she looks at the two of you lying in bed, resting back on the settee a few feet away. You had tried to insist that she should lie down, but she was quite adamant against it, and you are not fond of fighting with her when she struggles to keep herself upright.
"As much as I do adore the way you look after me, sweet sister, I am sure you have more important things to be doing. Were you not meant to sit with our father in the small council today?" Rhaenyra asks with a tired smile, pretending she is not in pain as she adjusts her legs.
You hate the way she winces every time she shifts.
You are certain this is Queen Alicent's fault—you had been furious when you passed Laenor and the boys on the way to her apartments, and he told you that the queen had called Rhaenyra to her chambers immediately after the birth, insisting upon seeing the babe before your sister had even been given the chance to rest. She had walked, bleeding and trembling, barely able to stand after the labor but forced to climb the winding stairs from her own apartments with a newborn in her arms, crossing the holdfast while every servant and noble stopped to stare at the blood trailing after her.
You had not been there—you had been in the sky for hours with Zūgaxes, oblivious even to the fact that Rhaenyra had entered her labors—but you found her immediately afterward. Still, she had smiled at you, even as her face had gone pale with exhaustion, and she leaned too heavily against Laenor when she thought no one was looking.
Maester Gerardys had ordered her to remain in bed for several days, but everyone was more concerned with tiny Joffrey, who was born too small for their liking, so no one noticed that your sister was already wandering around after an hour.
Except you, of course.
"All of your attendants and the maestars are focused on Joffrey," you say simply, sniffing as you raise your chin. "Somebody has to attend to you."
You do not notice the way Rhaenyra's expression changes at your words, snatching away the fluff he tries to stuff in his mouth. You stare down at the boy, a conflicted feeling tugging at your chest. You love Rhaenyra's boys—you do, but…
"Mandia," you say quietly after a moment, shoulders a bit hunched as you glance over at Rhaenyra, who tilts her head to the side curiously. You know that all women are meant to bear their husbands sons—you perhaps, more than anyone, so that the blood of Old Valyria might be passed on—but… "I do not think I should like to have children of my own."
Rhaenyra hums. "I used to think so too, did you know?" she tells you, and you look up, blinking at her in surprise. She nods with a small smile when she sees your surprise. "I was terrified when I found out I was with child the first time. I never pictured myself as a mother."
"Really?"
"Really."
You frown. "But you're…" You glance down at the little bundle wriggling happily in the bed next to you. "… You're perfect at it."
Rhaenyra laughs. "I assure you, I am not," she says with a smile. "I have made more mistakes than I can count."
You sniff. "I have never seen one."
"You had never seen a pufferfish until two weeks ago—does that mean they do not exist?" she teases, reminding you of the argument you got into with Laenor a few weeks ago because he insisted there was a type of fish covered in spikes and you refused to believe him until he dragged you out to sea to show you. Your face feels hot as you look away. "As I thought."
"Still," you say primly, crossing your arms and looking away.
"What made you think of this, sweet girl?" Rhaenyra asks, and you know she wishes to cross the room to brush your hair out of your face, but you scowl at her the moment she starts to move, and she sighs, holding her hands up in defeat as she lies back against the settee. "Did my boys horrify you so much they scared you off children altogether?"
She is teasing, but you frown anyway.
You say firmly, "No. I love your boys. In fact, I do not think I need children of my own when I already have two—three, now—little boys who insist on occupying all my time."
Rhaenyra laughs, tilting her head back. For the first time since you arrived in her chambers, she looks genuinely happy. She says, "Jacaerys would be terribly offended to hear himself counted alongside his brothers."
You scoff. "He ought not be. He is the worst offender," you tell her fiercely, smiling. "He sneaks into my apartments almost every night, steals the snacks I go through the effort of stealing from the kitchen, and has somehow convinced himself that half of my wardrobe belongs to him. I found my favorite cloak in his chambers the other day—I had been looking for it for weeks, mandia."
Rhaenyra's shoulders are shaking, though you think they ought not be because it is not funny in the slightest.
"Oh, hāedar, you misunderstand," she manages between laughs, wiping at the corner of her eye. "He would be offended because you called them your little boys as well. He gets rather cross whenever he's reminded that he must share you with his brothers."
You squint. Last week, Lucerys had fallen asleep against your shoulder while you read aloud in the gardens, and Jacaerys had spent the better part of an hour attempting to wedge himself between the two of you under increasingly flimsy pretenses until you had finally sighed and let him climb into your lap as well.
"You may be right," you concede at last, "but I digress."
"What made you think of this then, if not for my boys?" Rhaenyra asks again, determined to get to the bottom of the issue.
Your shoulders hunch slightly. You busy yourself with fixing the blanket wrapped around Joffrey as you try to figure out how to phrase what you want to say.
"The Queen said something to me this morning," you finally admit. "It is why I've spent the whole day flying."
Rhaenyra's expression shifts instantly, fondness hardening and lips pressed together. "What did she say to you?"
"She said she was glad to hear that I've flowered… I did not tell her, I assume one of the servants must have," you say quietly, playing with your own fingers, unable to lift your gaze to meet hers. "She said that she would speak to the king about—matches."
Flowering means womanhood, and womanhood means marriage, and marriage means children.
Rhaenyra exhales hard through her nose, jaw tightening, and you feel guilty instantly. Your sister has just given birth. She has just given birth and was forced to cross the Keep because Queen Alicent demanded to see the babe, and now you are throwing more issues at her as if she isn't already faced with enough.
"Mandia, I—"
"I will speak to our father, hāedar," Rhaenyra says before you can say anything else, gaze lifting to meet yours. She gives you that familiar, reassuring smile that always puts your nerves at ease. "Do not fret. Your elder sister will handle everything. I will not see you forced to do anything you displease."
You know that she means it. If Rhaenyra said she would move the heavens for you, she would spend every waking second ensuring that it happens. Even so…
"I do not wish to be a burden. I—I know it is a woman's duty to wed and bear children, but I—"
"You are not a burden, hāedar. How many times must I remind you?" Rhaenyra tells you with a soft smile. "Be at ease. I shall speak to father. I—"
The door to Rhaenyra's chambers opens with a loud bang, and both of you startle, gaze lifting just as Ser Harwin enters the room. Rhaenyra blinks once and gives the man a questioning look, and you tilt your head to the side.
"Forgive me, princesses," the man says, dark curls framing his face as he looks between the two of you. His gaze settles on you. "The dragonkeepers sent for you, princess. Zūgaxes is—agitated."
—————————
"Are you upset with me?"
You exhale as Jacaerys barges into your chambers later that night, brows furrowed indignantly, as though to mask the anxiety plain in the way he otherwise holds himself. Your gaze slips down to the way his fingers tremble at his sides and his shoulders are too stiff, and Jacaerys instantly shrinks, hiding his hands and standing straighter.
You glance away, lips pressed together, fingers thrumming against your desk.
"'I waited for you in the garden, but you didn't come," Jacaerys continues, voice pitching in accusation as he comes closer to you. "I waited in the library, but you didn't come. And then I thought you'd definitely come for supper, but you didn't. Where were you?"
"I was busy, Jacaerys," you say, clipped, and Jacaerys freezes a few feet away. You stop yourself from glancing at him over your shoulder because you know the moment you see his bottom lip wobbling, your anger will start draining away. "Perhaps you would be better suited attending etiquette lessons with Septa Elaine. You have clearly missed far too many."
Jacaerys does not answer for a long moment. He asks hesitantly, "What does that mean?"
"What that means, Jacaerys," you hiss, whipping around to look at him. He flinches backward, but you barrel on anyway. "is that I found my half-brother crying in the dragonpit after nearly being burnt alive by my dragon because you thought it would be a good idea to taunt him with a pig."
Jacaerys stares at you for a moment uncertainly, shoulders hunching inward as though to make himself small. He has been mad at you countless times before. If he feels as though you're paying more attention to Lucerys, he will give you the cold shoulder all evening, and if you dare to even hint at missing story time, he'll insist he never wants to speak to you again, then will appear in your chambers after supper, asking you to read to him with the sweetest smile.
You have never been angry at him before.
"It was just a joke," he whispers, voice small. "I didn't—"
"You didn't what?" you interrupt. "You didn't mean it? Is that it?"
Distantly, you know you should not yell at him like this.
He is only a boy—you're almost tall enough to reach your sister's shoulders now and still growing at that, but Jacaerys hardly reaches your chest, cheeks still chubby with fat, giggling at every unfunny joke that Laenor makes. Aegon is likely the one at fault for the prank, miserable wretch, but Jacaerys—
Jacaerys should know better.
Jacaerys knows, as you do, what it's like to be ostracized by the court for something out of his control. Aemond is not your favorite sibling—he is too uptight, clings to his mother so much that it makes you roll your eyes—but to mock him for not having a dragon?
You yourself did not have Zūgaxes until your fifth nameday. Your cradle egg did not hatch, and Dreamfyre, Vermithor, and Silverwing had all rejected you. Zūgaxes had been nigh wild after the years he spent terrorizing the Riverlands following Princess Daenerys's death to the Shivers in 60 AC, having hatched moments before the princess took her last breath. The newborn dragon fled in the chaos after losing the bond as soon as it had formed, and if he had not come to you by chance while you were flying with Rhaenyra, you might be in the same position as Aemond is now.
"Aegon said it would be funny," Jacaerys whispers, bottom lip wobbling. "It was a joke."
"Aegon says a lot of things," you hiss. "He is a fool. If he told you to jump from Maegor's Holdfast, would you do it?"
Jacaerys's eyes drop to the floor. He says quietly, "No."
"You know what it is like to have people laugh and whisper," you continue furiously. "You know it feels like to have people smile to your face and question whether you belong the moment you leave the room. You cry to me because they stare at your hair and your eyes, and you cry to me when people mention that you do not look like Ser Laenor. You know those are not jokes."
Jacaerys flinches. "Muña—"
"No," you snap. "Do you think your uncle feels any different when the whole keep laughs at him for not having a dragon?"
"I'm sorry—"
"Your mother will be queen one day, Jacaerys, and you will be king after her," you interrupt. "Everything you do matters. Every laugh and every foolish prank—every time someone sees you, they are deciding what sort of man you might become."
"I didn't mean it—"
"The lords do not whisper about Aegon the same way they whisper at you," you continue harshly, kneeling in front of him and grabbing his shoulders. He is crying now, fat tears rolling over his chubby cheeks, chest rising and falling rapidly as he tries not to sob. "They already question you, Jacaerys, and it will not stop. Every action you take makes them wonder whether or not you deserve the throne your mother will leave you. They are waiting for you to fail, Jacaerys, they—"
You cut yourself off when Jacaerys chokes on a sob, the sound rips through your anger as though someone had plunged a knife straight into it. His little shoulders shake beneath your hands. He is trying so desperately not to cry that it hurts to watch, biting down on his lip so hard you worry he might draw blood.
What are you doing?
"I'm sorry," he whispers again, tears falling freely now. "I'm trying to be good. I am. I didn't think."
Good will not be enough, you think, but do not say, fighting a sob of your own as you pull Jacaerys forward into your arms, sitting back on the floor and letting him clamber into your lap. He buries his face in the crook of your neck, muffling his cries into your skin.
Good will never be enough. You have watched the court use every careless word he has ever spoken as proof that he is unworthy. You have watched them turn his hair, eyes, and face into evidence against him. They will not stop because he grows older—if anything, they will only become crueler and louder.
And you fear one day that words will turn to swords.
You see the glances exchanged between the Queen and her allies, how every feast ends with another whispered slight and word disguised as courtesy. One day, your father will die, and everything held together by his presence will begin to crack.
Your sister will be queen, Jacaerys will be heir, and there are already too many people who have decided they will never accept either of them.
You are scared.
Perhaps you are imagining monsters where none exist—you have spent years watching nobles smile with their mouths and sneer with their haves, and it has made you cynical. You hope one day the two of you will laugh about how frightened you had been over nothing, but until that day comes, the fear remains.
You tighten your arms around Jacaerys until he lets out a tiny squeak of protest. Then he melts into you, arms looped around your shoulders, sniffling into the wet spot at your neck.
"I do not want you to grow up," you whisper before you can stop yourself.
"Why?" Jacaerys murmurs.
Your eyes slide shut. Because the older he gets, the fewer days remain where the greatest thing you have to worry about is a prank gone too far. You smooth a hand through his curls and press another kiss against his temple.
Instead, you say, "Because I like you just as you are."
He giggles. "I still want to grow up."
"Traitor," you tease, brushing your fingers through his hair as he snuggles into you.
"I want to be brave, and I want to ride Vermax all by myself, and I want to protect mother, and Luke, and Joffrey, and—" He pulls back to look at you, big brown eyes still watery. "—and you, muña."
You smile at him, your own eyes stinging with tears. "I'm the one who protects you, silly boy."
Jacaerys shakes his head so vigorously that his curls bounce. "Not forever," he claims. "One day I'll be big and grown, and I'll have a sword, and Vermax will be bigger than Zuzu, and I'll be the one to protect you."
You exhale softly through your nose, swallowing the lump that forms in your throat. He lifts his tiny hands to your cheeks, squeezing hard the way you always do to him when he is sad, then he leans forward until your foreheads touch.
"Don't be scared, muña. I'll be a good king," he tells you simply. "I'll be kind. I won't do things anymore just because Aegon tells me to."
"I know you will, mandianna," you murmur. "I know."
He bites his lip, twisting nervously in your lap. "Are you still mad at me?" You pull back just enough to look at him properly. His eyes are swollen from crying, cheeks blotchy and damp, fingers clinging to you. He whispers, "I want you to be proud of me."
You lift your hands to cradle his cheeks and say firmly, "I'm always proud of you, Jacaerys. Always. I'm sorry if I was cruel—I was only scared."
Jacaerys wrinkles his nose.
"Then don't be scared, muña," he says firmly. "I'll make sure you never have to be."
—————————
You should have known things would never be so easy.
"Where are my trunks?" you ask as you make your way to where Rhaenyra and the boys are getting ready to leave for Dragonstone. Jacaerys's face lights up from a glum frown when he sees you, and you toss him a wink that he giggles at. You look back up at your sister and say, "I told my handmaidens to make sure they were brought down."
Rhaenyra's brows furrow. "They are coming, perhaps?" she offers, making her way toward you to ghost her lips against your cheeks in greeting. "We are not in a rush, hāedar, do not fret."
But there is a tightness in your chest that unsettles you. Something has been off the past few days—you know it. The Queen always has that small, knowing smile on her face, and your father seemed inordinately pleased with himself. You had thought, maybe, the Queen was just pettily satisfied that Ser Harwin was being sent away and your father was just happy having his third grandson, but there was something—something off-putting that could not let you rest.
"Mandia," you whisper, clutching the sleeve of her gown. Your fingers are shaking. Rhaenyra looks down at your hands, alarmed. "I don't…"
"There you are! To think it would be so difficult to find my own daughter for a conversation," you hear your father say from the top of the steps leading into Maegor's Holdfast.
King Viserys leans on his cane as he makes his way down the steps toward you—Rhaenyra blinks in confusion, lips parting but words escaping them as she moves forward to greet him.
He looks worse, you think absently. Even just walking down the stairs is an effort, his face pale with exertion, sweat beading at his temples. Heaviness weighs on your chest—grief, maybe, but what is there to grieve about a man who has spent most of your life incapable of looking you in the eye?
"Father," Rhaenyra greets with a sad smile. "You did not have to come down to bid us goodbye. You should be resting."
"Nonsense," your father dismisses, squeezing her hand. The Queen Alicent and your half-brother, Aegon, follow behind your father. She looks too pleased with herself still—your heart drops to your stomach. "But it is not the only reason I have come. My dear—" King Viserys turns to look at you, eyes upturned. You think it is the first time he has ever looked you in the eye. "—I would like for you to stay behind."
He reaches out to take your hands in his, passing his cane to a nearby attendant. They are clammy and unfamiliar; you are not sure if you are breathing.
Somewhere behind you, you hear Jacaerys inhale sharply, and to your side, Rhaenyra makes an audible noise, confused.
"Father," she starts, a bemused smile on her face, "I—"
"Alicent—she had the most wonderful idea to unite both sides of the family," King Viserys continues with a breathless smile, squeezing your hands. Behind him, Aegon, who had been bored and looked as though he wished to be anywhere else, starts to squint, realizing something might be wrong. Alarm hits him slower than it has hit you. He looks at you questioningly, but you cannot even bring yourself to meet his gaze. "It is high time we put these petty squabbles behind us, don't you think?"
You cannot feel your fingers.
Your pulse pounds so violently in your ears that you can almost not even hear your father over it. Across the city, you hear Zūgaxes let out a screech, feeling your fear as his own.
"Father," Rhaenyra starts to say, voice riddled with disbelief. "You cannot mean—"
"You and Aegon shall wed, my dear," King Viserys says, squeezing your hands as though this is news that shall delight you. "You are both of age. A marriage between the two of you shall bind the family once and for all. Alicent proposed it only a few days ago—I confess, I do not know why I had not thought of it sooner."
"What?" Aegon blurts out, eyes wide. "Me?"
"Quiet, Aegon," Queen Alicent says sharply, and Aegon silences immediately, gaze darting over to you as though you have any means of fixing this. "It is a fine match."
"A fine match?" Rhaenyra demands, arm extending outward to push you behind her, stepping between you and your father. "They are children. You cannot be serious, father."
Aegon stares at you, and you stare at him.
He is only twelve; you are only thirteen.
You can see the fear you feel reflected in his eyes.
"Alicent tells me that she has bled," Viserys dismisses. You knew it—you knew something was wrong, you knew to be scared. "She is a woman grown, Rhaenyra."
"She is thirteen," Rhaenyra hisses. "Aegon is twelve."
"The King has already made his decision, Rhaenyra," Queen Alicent says coolly. "Would you question it?"
Rhaenyra stares at her in disbelief, a scoff slipping from her lips. She asks quietly, "How could you do this?"
For a moment, something flickers across the Queen's face—her lips become pinched, her gaze flits to the side—guilt? It couldn't be—Alicent is cold and cruel, stone made flesh, she has always hated you and your sister. You must be mistaken.
"Was it not you who offered marriage between your son, Jacaerys, and my daughter, Helaena?" the Queen asks. You blink, unsure if you heard her properly. "Let us bind our families through marriage, as you once proposed yourself."
Your head snaps toward Rhaenyra, appalled. She was trying to marry Jacaerys off? Rhaenyra does not meet your gaze, so you know it is true.
"It is not the same," Rhaenyra says, shaking her head, stepping forward again. She turns to your father, expression clearing of anger and disdain as she gives him a more pleading look. "Father, please. She has only just flowered—she has hardly had a chance to understand what that means. You cannot mean to—"
"Enough, Rhaenyra," King Viserys interrupts, exhausted. He looks as though he's aged decades in a matter of minutes. Did he really expect everyone to be made happy by this news? "I have made my decision."
The pavilion goes quiet, and you cannot breathe. This cannot be happening. It is—it is not possible. You are not meant to marry Aegon, of all people. You would rather anyone else. You would rather take the vows and become a septa. Your gaze lifts to meet Rhaenyra's, but there is a terribly defeated expression on her face—one that you have never seen before. You feel nauseous, bile rising in your throat, lightness in your head.
"What does that mean?" Jacaerys finally asks, breaking the silence somewhere behind you. "What does that mean? Muña is still coming with us, isn't she?"
"Jacaerys," Rhaenyra begins quietly, voice low and unsteady, because if the king puts his foot down, there is nothing she can do. She looks at both of you desperately, because for the first time in her life, your sister does not know what to say. "I—"
"She promised," Jacaerys interrupts, voice becoming a bit shrill—understanding enough from Rhaenyra's tone to know that you will not be coming with him. That you will be breaking the promise you made to him not two years ago. He turns his gaze onto you, eyes blown wide with anxiety. "You promised, you—"
"Jacaerys," you say, barely able to keep your voice steady as you make your way over to him and kneel in front of him. His eyes well with unshed tears, and you lift one hand to his face, brushing your thumb beneath his eye to catch the tears before they fall. You lower your voice, speaking just to him as you say quietly, "Do not let them see you cry. You are a prince of the realm, your mother's heir. You must be brave, remember?"
Jacaerys's bottom lip wobbles as he nods.
"I will not be across the sea this time, mandianna—only the bay. Vermax is growing quickly. You will be able to visit as frequently as you please," you soothe, brushing his curls from his forehead, "and I will be able to come to you."
"But—"
"There are no buts, mandianna," you say softly, and Jacaerys inhales sharply, fighting a sob. "We all have our roles to play. You will be king one day, your duty is to the realm, and mine—" Your voice threatens to crack, before it can, you clear your throat and force a small smile. If you start crying, so will Jacaerys, and he needs to be strong now more than ever. "—and mine is to a husband. I must stay at his side."
"Then I will be your husband, muña," Jacaerys says desperately, fingers clinging to your sleeve. "You can come with us then. You won't have to stay here."
You exhale through your nose, pulling Jacaerys closer so that you can press your lips to his temple, rubbing easy circles against his upper back. He flings his arms around your shoulders and buries his face into your hair to hide his sniffles.
"That is not how it works, Jacaerys," you tell him quietly. His shoulders are trembling, small whimpers in the back of his throat as he tries not to cry. You hold him a bit tighter. "The king has made his decision."
"It's not fair," he sniffles. "You're my muña. Why does Aegon get to have you? He doesn't even want to marry you. I want to marry you."
You laugh despite yourself, because Jacaerys is too young to know what marriage entails, but he says it with the conviction of someone who has never been more certain of anything in his life. You press your lips to his hair before you pull back just enough to look at him. You find him glaring over your shoulder at Aegon with all the ferocity he can muster with shiny eyes and wobbly lips.
Aegon has gone pale, but you do not think it's because of Jacaerys's righteous fury.
"I don't think…" Aegon begins awkwardly, scratching the back of his neck. "I mean, I never—"
"Quiet, Aegon," Alicent says again sharply, and he falls silently immediately, shoulders slumping. She lifts her gaze to Rhaenyra, giving her a curve of the lips that doesn't reach her eyes. "Well, you and yours had best get going. Safe travels, Rhaenyra."
Rhaenyra scoffs and turns on her heel, but Jacaerys's grip on you tightens at the prospect of leaving.
"He doesn't even know your favorite story," he says desperately, as though it might change something, "or that you don't like onions, or that you can only eat two honey cakes before you start feeling sick, or that you can only sleep if there's a candle going. It's not fair. He doesn't know anything. He'll never take care of you."
"Jacaerys—"
"But I can!" he insists, wiping angrily at his cheeks. "I already do. I make sure you eat when you forget, and I bring your favorite cloak when you're cold, and I tell the servants not to wake you if you've fallen asleep reading. I know how."
"Jacaerys, come here," Rhaenyra says quietly, but Jacaerys only clings more desperately, nails digging into your skin. "Jace—"
You look up at your sister. There are tears in her eyes now too, though she does not let them fall. She gives you the smallest nod, an apology, a goodbye, and a promise wrapped into one gesture. This would not be the end of this—she will get the boys settled at Dragonstone, and she will return for you.
"Mandianna," you murmur, cupping Jacaerys's damp face between your hands. "You must go with your mother." You press a kiss to his forehead, then another to each cheek. "Look after Luke and Joffrey, and mind your mother—she is terribly stubborn and will forget to rest if no one reminds her."
Jacaerys fights another sob and nods, but Rhaenyra successfully pulls him away this time. She gathers him into her arms, and he clutches at her desperately, still looking at you over her shoulder.
"I'll come back for you," he promises. "I promise, muña! I do!"
You smile because he needs you to, even as your vision blurs—luckily, he is too far to see the unshed tears.
"I know you will, Jacaerys," you tell him. "I'll be waiting."
Bobby's been a shit boyfriend for months. When you disappear through a wall in the basement of Clark's furniture store, you wake up in the Backrooms, where a better version of Bobby is waiting. One who actually shows up, one who loves you, one who never, ever wants to let you go.
‽ part one / concept.
‽ part two.
‽ part three.
⸘ interlude: entity 0
‽ part four.
⸘ interlude: (b) for (b)etter
‽ part five.
‽ part six.
⸘ interlude: eighteen (coming soon)
extras:
҉ - main story canon compliant piece.
Ꮺ୧ shutter speed / camboy!bobby alt verse.
Ꮺ୧ making out w/ better bobby.
Ꮺ୧ better you! ҉
Ꮺ୧ "baby." ҉
Ꮺ୧ "open your mouth."
Ꮺ୧ pillow fort.
Ꮺ୧ in the beginning. ҉
Ꮺ୧ my, what long tongue you have.
Ꮺ୧ sunlight. ҉
Ꮺ୧ slow dancing. ҉
Ꮺ୧ rib time.
Ꮺ୧ conceiving w/ bb. / why seven.
Ꮺ୧ bb watching you w/ bobby. ҉
Ꮺ୧ intimacy hdcs w/ BB.
Ꮺ୧ memories. ҉
Ꮺ୧ cuteness aggression.
Ꮺ୧ twin au: one. / bb & bobby. / two. / three. /
Ꮺ୧ mr. kitty. / more mr kitty. ҉
Ꮺ୧ entity discourse.
Ꮺ୧ tolerance.
Ꮺ୧ giddy.
Ꮺ୧ real face.
Ꮺ୧ poly au: [1]. [2]. [3]. [4]. [5]. [6]. [7].
Ꮺ୧ "i know a spot."
Ꮺ୧ dreams. ҉
Ꮺ୧ perfect shot. ҉
Ꮺ୧ pretty thing.
Ꮺ୧ if it purrs, it... ҉
Ꮺ୧ a chase.
Ꮺ୧ ticklish.
⎋ M.E.G. ENTITY 0 — RESEARCH FILE INDEX:
↹ MEG-ENT-0000-ADDM-██ — Restricted Addendum: Reproductive Capability Assessment (Filed Under Protest)
↹ MEG-ENT-0000-IR-0-31 — INCIDENT REPORT — FIELD OBSERVATION
pairing: entity!bobby franklin/bb x f!reader
wc: 9.1k 💀
summary: BB has waited an eternity for someone to choose him. You finally let him in. All of him.
contents/warnings: 18+, explicit smut (entity sex, oral (f receiving), crazy amount of overstimulation, marathon sex, body worship!!!), non-human anatomy && shifting during sex, tummy bulges!!! (you're his cocksleeve i'm afraid <3), eldritch features (elongated tongue, additional appendages, iridescent skin), mutual praise && desperation, emotional themes of loneliness && touch starvation (yeah,,, in your monsterfucking smut ikik), references to emotional neglect in a prior relationship/guilt over moving on, past references to real bobby/reader.
notes: this took years off my damn life because I kept reworking parts but I did enjoy writing it overall. pic used is for aesthetic purposes only && is not representative of the reader character. I just like looking at Finn with his mouth gaping open mid moan :) also this is NOT canon compliant for the main series. y'all just want to fuck bb && I respect that (also this was put off twice & I reckon I owe you one after Part 6). essentially this can be read as "entity x/bobby/plot never happened & you chose to stay with bb forever" au.
✶ better bobby series.
“I found something for you.”
BB is crouching beside the nest when you open your eyes, his cool fingers turning something small and bright in his palm. A button. Red plastic, chipped at one edge, the kind that falls off a coat and rolls under a shelf and gets forgotten. He holds it out to you with the nervous care of a child presenting a drawing.
“It was in one of the lower hallways,” he explains, watching for your reaction. “Near a door I haven't opened yet. It's the same red as the mug you told me about. The one your mom had. I thought—” He turns it in his fingers. The yellow light catches the glossy surface. “I thought you might want something red. There's not a lot of red here.”
You take the button. It's warm from his hand, or rather warm from the contact with his hand, because BB himself runs cool, always cool, his body temperature a few degrees below what feels human until your skin draws the heat out of him. The red plastic sits in your palm. Cheap. Cracked.
It's the most thoughtful gift anyone's given you in over a year.
“Thank you, BB.”
He smiles. That shy, lopsided thing that doesn't belong on Bobby's face because Bobby never smiled like that; Bobby's smiles were teasing and self-aware and loaded, and this one is open and unguarded and a little bit terrified that you won't like it.
“You do? You like it?”
You lift your eyes toward him, and smile. “I love it.”
The yellow warms toward gold around you. Just slightly. Just enough to notice.
You hold out for months.
That's the part that's going to eat you alive later, the part you'll turn over and over in your head. The part where you knew.
You knew what kissing him did to you from the first time, that clumsy mortifying moment in the blankets when he'd come in his shorts and watched himself discover his new body. The look on BB’s face had carved itself into you like a brand.
You knew because kissing BB isn't kissing. Kissing BB is a substance. It enters your bloodstream through the point of contact, and within thirty seconds, you can feel it spreading. Warm and heavy and stupid, a fog that settles behind your eyes and at the base of your spine.
The longer his mouth is on yours, the worse it gets. Or better. You can't tell anymore which of those words applies. The two collapse into the same sensation when BB is touching you because his version of pleasure isn't built on the human axis where good and too-much are different categories.
His skin is cool when he isn't touching you. That's one of the things that took getting used to. The temperature of him. His hands when they find your wrist in the dark, his chest when you lean against him in the nest. Cool like marble or water from a deep well.
There's warmth underneath the surface, banked and dormant, waiting, but it only comes alive when he touches you. The warmth bleeds through contact, drawn out by your body heat, rising to meet you and then surpassing you. And once the warmth is going, it does things. It sinks. It reads. It feeds information back to him through his palms, fingertips, and mouth, a living scan of your nervous system in real time through his skin.
So you hold out. You let BB kiss you sometimes. Short, careful, your hand on his chest when it threatens to become more. His immediate compliance every single time, pulling back to press his forehead to yours. Just breathing even though he doesn’t need oxygen the way you do, hands shaking on your waist, always mortifyingly patient.
For months after the first kiss. Just that.
“Do you dream?” BB asks one evening, his fingers working over your hair.
You're lying with your head in his lap. The yellow hum is low tonight, and the ghost-flowers on the wallpaper have settled into stillness for once.
“Sometimes,” you tell him honestly.
“What about?”
You almost say Bobby. You catch it in your teeth. “Home, mostly. The apartment. My side of the bed.”
BB's fingers pause over your hair for half a second. Then they resume, slower.
“Do you miss it?”
You think about that. Really think about it, while his cool fingers stroke over your hair and the hum fills the silence with its tuneless drone. Do you miss it? Do you miss the apartment where Bobby's camera equipment colonised every surface? Do you miss the kitchen where he stopped looking at you? Do you miss your side of the bed, which was your side because Bobby took the other side and the middle and left you the edge.
“I miss what it used to be,” you say quietly. “Before it went bad.”
BB's hand settles on your temple. Warm now, from the contact with your skin. His thumb traces the curve of your eyebrow.
“Tell me about before,” he says softly.
Before was good. That's the thing, the thing that makes the after so unbearable. Before was so good.
Bobby in the early months was a revelation. Bobby with his camera aimed at you across a crowded room, lowering it to grin at you with his whole crooked face, saying the light's doing something crazy on you, babe and meaning it with every fibre of his skinny sun-browned body.
Bobby who kissed you in parking lots and edited footage with his head in your lap and rolled joints on the kitchen counter while telling you about his day in that low lazy drawl that made your stomach flip even when he was talking about lens caps.
Bobby who touched you like you mattered. Hands on the small of your back in a crowd, arm around your shoulder or waist, always. Fingers laced through yours during movies. His mouth on the back of your neck while you were doing dishes, warm and idle, a press of lips that said I'm here and I like being here. Bobby in bed in the early days, Bobby with his chain tangled between your bodies, looking at you with those pale eyes and saying come here, baby, let me feel you with a softness that undid you every single time.
The good was so good it spoiled you for everything that came after.
The good taught you what Bobby was capable of, what he contained, and that knowledge made the withdrawal so much worse. Because you knew. You knew he could be tender. You'd seen the inside of him, the soft unguarded core he showed you, and then he'd locked the door.
You'd tried to get back in. That's the part that hurts the most now.
You'd asked him what was wrong. You'd asked him if he was okay, if he wanted to talk, if he needed space, if you'd done something. You'd tried every key you could think of, and the door stayed shut. And the worst part, the very worst part, was that you could hear him on the other side. You could hear him breathing. He was right there, your Bobby, the real one, the one who filmed you sleeping because the light was good, and he wouldn't open the door for a reason you didn’t know.
That hurt more than the silence. More than the grunting. More than the nights he turned his back. Because the silence you could have explained away. You could have told yourself he'd changed, that the tenderness was a phase, that you'd imagined the depth of it. But you hadn't imagined it. You'd been inside. You'd touched the walls. And knowing what was in there and being locked out of it was a cruelty so singular it felt designed.
You tell BB some of this. Not all. You tell him about the parking lot kisses and the kitchen touches and the way Bobby used to look at you through the viewfinder. The way he hugged you with his whole body every time he saw you, nuzzling into your shoulder with a muffled sigh. You tell him about the door closing. BB listens with his head tilted, his fingers still in your hair, his pale eyes fixed on your face with that total, unwavering attention.
“He had all of that,” BB says quietly when you finish. “And he put it behind a locked door and won’t even tell you why.”
“Yeah.”
“And you kept knocking.”
You force a breath over the lump in your throat. “Yeah.”
BB is quiet for a long time after that. His thumb traces your temple. The yellow walls warm around you, trying to bleed toward gold again.
“I don't have a door,” he says softly, quietly. “I don't know how to build one. Everything I have is right here. You can see all of it.”
You close your eyes, and the purr starts low in his chest.
You don't say anything. But you reach up and press his hand against your cheek, keeping him there, close. BB's breath catches, and he holds perfectly still, and the yellow turns gold.
You hold out for months, and the guilt sits inside you like a stone.
Guilt for wanting it. Guilt for not wanting it enough. Guilt for thinking about real Bobby while BB's mouth is on you, and guilt for not thinking about real Bobby enough. Guilt for the fact that some traitor part of you has stopped flinching at BB's touch and started anticipating it, leaning into it.
You go to bed with your back to him and wake up curled into his chest, because your body made a decision before your conscious mind could.
And you didn't leave.
That's the thing you can't explain to yourself, the thing that damns you.
You didn't leave because after what happened with Bobby, after months of being invisible in your own space, being wanted felt so good. Being needed felt so good. BB looked at you every single day like the sun rose and set in the shape of your body, and that kind of attention was a drug more potent than anything his kiss could do to your bloodstream.
You were terrified of how much you liked it. You were more terrified of losing it.
The nest also changed. You don't remember when. You'd been asleep, and BB had been out, doing whatever BB does when he leaves the territory, and you'd woken to find your apartment.
Not exactly. A yellow-tinged approximation of it, laid overtop the warm patch of carpet. The blankets rearranged into a bed with your bedspread from Santa Clara, the one with the faded blue flowers. The pillows you'd left in the apartment when the wall took you. The little side table with the lamp from the yard sale in Sunnyvale. Even the pattern of the wallpaper had shifted, not away from yellow but around it, a suggestion of the flowered paper you'd hung in the bedroom, ghosted through the buttercup background.
BB had been sitting cross-legged beside the nest when you woke, watching your face for the reaction, hands twisted together in his lap. He'd looked at you with such raw nervous hope that you'd started crying before you understood what he'd built.
“I heard you,” he'd said, voice unsure, small. “You said you missed home. So I—” He gestured at the room, his hands shaking. “I don't know if I got the pattern right. I only saw vague glimpses in your mind. I could change it, if it's wrong.”
You'd crawled into his lap. Buried your face in his neck. His cool skin had warmed slowly under your cheek.
That was weeks ago. Months ago. Time is soft here. It's before you started noticing the flowers on the wallpaper moving when you weren't looking directly at them. Before you noticed the lamp doesn't have a cord. Before you noticed that when BB is happy, the yellow warms toward gold, and when he's worried it cools toward green, and the whole territory has become an extension of his mood.
None of it scares you the way it should. That's the part that actually scares you.
“Baby?”
BB is sitting on the edge of the bed. He's holding a blanket he found somewhere, a thick, dark green wool one, and he's folding it with careful absorption. His long fingers crease the edges. He’s already gazing at you when you glance his way. His eyes are Bobby's blue today, human-shaped, the entity safely tucked away behind the mask.
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?” he asks carefully.
You nod. “Of course.”
He visibly hesitates, his head lowered. “Do you want to go home?”
Your chest tightens. “BB—”
“You don't have to answer.” He folds the blanket smaller. His voice is steady, and his hands are also steady, but neither of those things is true underneath. “I just… I've been thinking about it. About whether you're staying because you want to or because you don't know how to leave. And I want, baby, I want you to know that if you—” He swallows. “If you need to go... I won't…”
He stops, staring at the blanket in his hands.
“I won't stop you,” he finishes, practically choking the words out.
You gaze at him. At the green blanket folded in his lap. At his hands, which are familiar and gripping the wool hard enough to dimple the fabric. At his face, which is Bobby's face and isn't, which is the face of a thing that heard you crying through a wall and built itself a body to hold you and is now offering to let you go because it loves you more than it loves having you.
“I don't know,” you say honestly. “I don't know, BB.”
He nods, keeps folding. You sit together in the quiet, and the yellow is the palest green you've ever seen it, almost grey, and BB's hands are shaking slightly around the blanket, and he's pretending they're not.
That night you lie awake in the nest that looks like your old apartment with BB's arm across your waist, and you think about going home. Really think about it. You think about the apartment in Santa Clara and the kitchen and your mug on the drying rack and your shoes by the mat. You think about Bobby. You think about whether Bobby is sitting in that apartment right now, or if he moved on without you there to nag him.
You think about going back to him, walking through the wall and climbing the stairs. Finding him. And you try to feel what that would be like, the reunion, the homecoming, and what you feel is—
Grief. You feel grief.
Because going home means going back to Bobby, and going back to Bobby means going back to a man who locked the door. Who might open it now, might fling it wide, might weep and hold you and swear he'll be different. But you've spent months on the other side of that door. Months knocking. Months making yourself smaller and smaller to fit through the crack underneath. And even if Bobby opens the door now, you know what it's like when it's closed. You know the sound of his back turning. You know the weight of his indifference. You carry it in your bones.
The relationship was over months before you left. You know that now. The wall in Clark's basement didn't end your relationship with Bobby. Bobby ended it. Quietly, one day at a time, one turned back at a time, and you'd stood in the wreckage pretending it was still standing because the alternative was admitting you'd been alone for months in a room with someone who used to love you.
You're only here because you're finally letting the ghost of going home go.
Because letting BB in means choosing the yellow. Choosing the hum. Choosing a place with no sky and no weather. No yard sales on El Camino with golden retrievers named Mango. Letting BB in means letting the real world go, and admitting that the girl who fell through the wall in Clark's basement is not the girl sitting in this nest.
That girl was going home. That girl was holding on.
This girl has let go of everything except the creature beside her, and she doesn't want to pick any of it back up.
It means letting Bobby's ghost go, too.
The real one, the Bobby who exists in Santa Clara, the one who grunts at your goodbyes, that Bobby has been a ghost to you for longer than BB has been real. And the Bobby you've been holding onto, the candle in the draft, the one who filmed you sleeping and called you my girl, that Bobby is a memory.
A beautiful, aching, preserved memory of a man who doesn't exist anymore.
Loving a memory is not the same as loving a person. A memory can't change. A memory can't hurt you, can't grow, can't learn. A memory just sits in your chest, glows, and keeps you warm, and slowly, slowly starves you because you're using it to feed a hunger it was never designed to fill.
BB is not a memory. BB is real. He’s flawed in his own inhuman ways, learning in real time, and holding you right now, his cool arm across your waist, his purr a low vibration you can feel through the mattress. BB is the one who brought you a red button because your mom had a red mug years ago. BB is the one who offered to let you leave even though it would destroy him.
You love him. Not as a replacement. Not because he wears the right face. You love the thing behind the face. The thing that has no door, that never had it.
You turn over. Press your face into BB's chest. His arms tighten around you at once, his skin warming under your cheek.
“I'm staying,” you tell him in a tender whisper.
BB goes still.
“You—”
“I'm staying, BB,” you tell him again, pressing closer, tucking yourself close. “I'm choosing this. I'm choosing you.”
The purr cracks. Breaks apart. Reassembles into something so deep and so full it vibrates in your skull. BB's arms crush you against him and his face buries in your hair, and he's shaking, shaking, his cool body warming everywhere you touch him, and the yellow floods gold.
The whole room, the whole level, gold as sunlight, gold as the thing inside his chest that has waited longer than time itself for someone to say those exact words.
You kiss him the next day.
He's beside you in the nest, cross-legged, telling you about a level he found that loops back on itself, and you're half-listening, more focused on the shape of his mouth than the words coming out of it. You lean over and press your lips to the hinge of his jaw. Just there. A small, warm press between his ear and his chin.
BB falters mid-sentence. A stutter, a swallow, his eyes flicking to you and away.
“—and the walls change texture right where it loops, which is, um. Interesting because—”
You kiss the corner of his mouth. Lightly. Barely there. And your hand finds the back of his nape.
BB stops talking.
His neck is cool under your palm. Smooth, the tendons shifting as he swallows. Your fingers curl into the short hair at his nape. The change is immediate: his skin warming under your touch, temperature rising from mild to warm in three heartbeats.
“Baby,” he says carefully, his voice dropping half an octave. “What are you—”
You kiss him again. On the mouth. Full. Your lips part against his, and you make it different. You don't hold back. You don't keep your hand on his chest as a brake. You kiss him with your whole body leaning into it, and your hand on his nape tightens, pulling him closer.
BB makes a sound against your lips. Small. Startled. His hands come up to your waist on instinct, and you can feel them warm against your skin in real time, heat blooming where you're connected. He's bracing himself for the pull-back. He's already preparing to be patient about it.
You press forward instead. Your weight shifts, your knee coming up onto the blankets, your body tipping into his. BB's hands tighten on your waist. You can feel the exact moment he realises you're not stopping, his fingers digging in, his breath hitching, his mouth opening wider for you. And you push him.
Gentle but firm, both hands on his chest now, and BB goes where you push him.
His back hits the wall. The ghost-flowered wallpaper presses against his shoulder blades, and you're in his lap, knees on either side of his hips, chest against his chest. You kiss him fully. Mouth open. Tongue sliding against his. Your fingers in his hair and your hips pressing down against him and every last ounce of restraint you've been maintaining for months dissolving into the heat flooding through you.
The heat. The fog. It hits you the second you stop fighting it. Months of buildup pouring through. Your head swims. Your skin goes electric. BB's warmth blazes against you, drawn out by your body, his cool skin going hot wherever you touch him.
BB moans. Deep, ragged, pulled from somewhere below his chest, vibrating through his ribs into yours. Hungry and wanting. The sound of a creature starved, weak with wanting you so much.
His hands move. They stop being still on your waist, and they move. Both of them, everywhere at once, kneading. His fingers grip the fat of your hips. His palms slide up your ribs. His hands cup your breasts through your shirt, fingers pressing and kneading with a desperate, tactile hunger. He needs to touch all of you at once, and two hands aren't enough.
His tongue slides along your lower lip, longer than it should be, and you open your mouth wider and let him in. BB groans desperately, his hips rolling up against you.
The sound is wet. BB’s tongue slides against yours in a coil that tightens and releases in eager pulses, saliva building between your joint mouths. The kiss is messy and open, drool collecting at the corner of your lips because you can't swallow around the thickness of his tongue filling your mouth.
You roll your hips against him again, harder. BB makes a broken sound, and his head drops back against the wall, his throat baring. You kiss it. The spot his pulse should be, his Adam's apple, the hollow at the base. His skin is warm now, fully warm, almost hot.
You pull back, your face inches from his. Your hands settle on his chest, feeling his heartbeat slamming against your palms. BB’s eyes are half-black. His mouth is swollen and wet, gaping open. His hands grip your hips hard enough to leave marks, his whole body trembling.
“I want you,” you gasp against his lips.
BB goes still. Every muscle in his body locks, his hands freezing on your hips. His breathing stops. His eyes search your face with an intensity that has nothing to do with Bobby and everything to do with the ancient thing behind the mask.
“You—” His voice trembles, going thin. “You want—”
You press your forehead against his. “I want you, BB.”
“Do… do you mean—”
“I mean all of it,” you rasp, your hand slipping into his hair. “I mean you."
BB’s face cracks open. His expression unravels completely, and what's underneath is raw and enormous and terrified and so, so joyful. His eyes go fully black, the entity surging to the surface, and he looks at you like you've just handed him the universe.
“You want me,” he whispers desperately, testing the words, faint with disbelief.
You cup his face with both hands. Your palms on his jaw, your thumbs on his cheekbones. His skin is burning under your hands.
“I want you,” you repeat, and you kiss him. Deeper. Slower. His tongue coils around yours, gentle, trembling, the grip shaky because BB is shaking, his whole body is.
He pulls back a centimetre, forehead nudging against yours. Eyes black and wet as they drink you in.
“I waited so long,” he whispers, his voice pained. “I waited so long for you. You don't know how long I was alone. And there was nothing. Just the hum, and the yellow. And then there was you. I heard your voice and I—”
His breath hitches, a wounded sound vibrating at the back of his throat.
“I'd rarely heard anything except the hum and the things in the dark, but then you were on the other side of the wall, and you were talking. Your voice… it was the first beautiful thing I ever heard. I built this—” He touches his own face. Bobby's face. His hand trembling. “I built all of this for you. Because I heard you crying and needed hands because you were sad. And I… I wanted to hold you, and I didn't have anything to hold you with.”
Tears burn your eyes. BB's thumbs trace your cheekbones lightly, wiping the tears as they threaten to escape.
“You were born for me,” he breathes, fierce and tender all at once. “I know that now. I was in the walls for—I don't have a number. But then you came along, and I knew. I was waiting for you this whole time. You were always going to be mine. I just had to learn how to deserve you.”
“I love you,” you choke out. “BB. I love you.”
He makes a broken, needy sound, pressing kisses to your face, your cheek, your jaw, your eyelids, the corner of your mouth. “I love you. Let me touch you. Please. Baby, please. I've waited so long.”
“Yes,” you whisper. “Take me to bed.”
He carries you. Two steps, three, his inhuman strength on casual display, and he lays you down on the bedspread with the faded blue flowers.
His hands are shaking. The purr starts in his chest, a deep warm vibration you can feel through the mattress. He kneels between your legs and looks at you, just looks. His mouth swollen and wet. His chest heaving.
“I don't know how to. I've never—”
“I know.” You reach up and cup his face. His cool skin warms immediately under your palm. “I know, baby. I'll show you. I've got you.”
He drops down against you, his weight settling along your body, his face burying in your neck. His mouth opens against your pulse, and you feel his tongue, just the tip, tracing the vein under your skin. His lips close over your pulse point, and he sucks gently, the purr vibrating through his mouth into your neck.
“You're so warm,” he breathes against your skin. “Baby. You're so warm. I've been cold forever. And you're like a fire. I can feel your heartbeat through your skin. You're so alive. You're the most alive thing I've ever touched.”
His hands slide up your sides, pushing your shirt. His palms drag over your ribs, warming as they travel, and you can feel each finger pressing independently, the cool-to-warm transition happening in streaks along your skin. He pushes your shirt up and off, and his breath catches.
“Oh,” he exhales. Awed. “Oh.”
His hands hover an inch above your body, fingers spread, trembling. He looks at you like touching might break him entirely.
“It's okay,” you whisper. “BB. Touch me.”
Both hands settle on your breasts. Cool palms cupping you, and his temperature spikes, warming fast from the centre of his palms. His thumbs drag across your nipples, and you arch into the sensation, shivering.
“There,” he breathes. “Look at you. You're so soft. I've been touching concrete and monsters forever, and you're, you're so—”
He ducks his head and presses his mouth to the swell of your breast. Open-mouthed. Hot. His tongue slides out, the tip tracing the curve of you in a wet drag, and you gasp. BB makes a hungry sound against your skin, half moan, half purr.
“You taste alive,” he murmurs between greedy, slick licks. “I don't have a word, baby. You taste like everything I was missing.”
His mouth finds your nipple. His tongue coils around it, wrapping and squeezing gently, and he sucks. The purr intensifies, vibrating through his lips and his tongue into you. You cry out, sharp and broken, cupping his head to keep him there.
BB's hand kneads your other breast, fingers gripping, the wrong-textured pads of his thumbs dragging across your nipple. Between the attention to both at once, your head swims, your hips lifting off the bed. He murmurs praise into your skin, pulling off with a wet pop to press his open mouth to the underside of your breast, licking the crease there, nosing into the soft skin desperately.
“So beautiful. You have no idea what you look like. I didn't even know what this body was for until I saw you.”
He sucks a mark into the inner curve of your breast, suckling greedily. Then his mouth moves lower. BB’s tongue draws a long, unbroken line from between your breasts to your navel. He presses his mouth flat against your stomach and breathes in, eyes fluttering shut.
“I could stay here forever,” he mumbles against your belly. “Just breathing you in. You smell warm. I didn't know warm had a smell until you.”
BB’s fingers hook into your underwear and pull them down gradually. His breath catches as he bares you. His eyes go wide and fully black, fixed between your thighs. He's looking at you with such naked reverence it steals your breath.
“You're wet,” he says, hushed. His thumbs trace the crease where your thighs meet your hips, slow even as you sense the shaking still quaking his fingertips. “So wet, baby. Is that for me?”
You shiver at the touch, squirming. “Yes. All for you, BB.”
BB’s whole, borrowed body shudders at the confirmation. His tongue slides out, long and sinuous, and he licks his lips with it. The hunger on his face is staggering.
“Let me taste you,” he begs quietly. “Baby, please. I've never… please.”
Heat floods through your veins, molten and thick, at the pleading note in his voice. “Yes. God, yes.”
BB drops down immediately. His mouth presses to the inside of your knee. Cool lips warming as they drag up your inner thigh, pressing open-mouthed kisses into the soft skin there. His tongue traces the path, licking long wet stripes up your thigh. He pauses an inch away. Breathes. His breath is hot and damp, and your hips jerk toward him.
“You smell so good,” he murmurs. “And you're hot. I can feel it on my face.”
His tongue makes contact. Long and wet, dragging flat from the base of you all the way up. You sob, and your hands fly to his hair. BB makes a deep, guttural moan that vibrates through his tongue and into you, the purr kicking up so hard it vibrates the bed frame. His fingers dig into your thighs, and his mouth opens wide, and he licks you again. Slower. Longer. The tongue lingering at the top, the tip curling and pressing between your folds curiously.
“Baby. Baby. You taste… you’re dripping for me and so alive. I can't stop, I can't—”
He buries his face in you. His mouth open and his tongue extended to its full impossible length, lapping and stroking and coiling with the desperate, artless hunger. The sounds are obscene. Wet, squelching, sloppy. Saliva and your own arousal mix and drips down his chin. BB’s moaning into you with a continuous low vibration, his fingers gripping your thighs hard enough to bruise, pulling you closer, pressing his face deeper, taking more.
“More,” you gasp through a breathy moan. “BB, more. Please.”
His tongue extends further. Longer. Longer. You feel it pressing inside you, and your hips buck, and BB growls against your clit then keeps pushing. The muscular length of it curls and coils inside you, filling you, reaching deeper than fingers could reach. Deeper than anything human could, and you feel it pressing against the back of you, the very deepest place, and your whole body seizes.
“BB, that's, oh God, that's—”
His tongue presses against the mouth of your womb. The tip of it, delicate and hot, nudging that innermost barrier, and the sensation is so deep and so foreign that your entire body goes rigid and your hands yank at his hair and you make a gasping, yelping sound. High and ragged, pitching toward half a scream.
BB moans into you. The vibration travels through the full length of his tongue, from your clit where his lips are sealed to the deepest place where the tip is pressing. Stimulation at both ends simultaneously and all through the middle, his tongue moving, coiling and uncoiling, massaging places that have never been touched. His lips close over your clit and suck, hard, and the tongue is so deep you can feel it in your stomach.
You're thrusting into his face. Your hips rolling, grinding against his mouth, and BB makes a pleased sound and holds you tighter to him, delighted. Then his hands clamp on your thighs, and he pins you. Presses your hips flat to the mattress with an inhuman grip you couldn't break if you tried, and the sudden loss of control makes you writhe.
Your sounds don't belong to you anymore. You're gripping his hair with both fists. BB is purring so hard the vibration sits at the back of your throat, and his tongue is touching places that have never been bordered. His chin is soaked, and you can hear the wet, filthy sounds, and you're sobbing, thrashing against his grip.
“You're gonna come for me,” he mumbles against you, his mouth never fully leaving. “I can feel it. So close, baby. Give it to me. I want to taste you when you come.”
You come. Hard.
Your whole body arches against BB’s grip, thighs clamping around his head, hands pulling his hair. BB moans into you and holds you down and licks you through it, his long tongue working inside you as you clench and spasm around him.
He's swallowing, sucking, drawing every last drop into his mouth and gulping it down hungrily. His lips close over your swollen folds and he laps at them, slow and thorough, licking you clean with long flat drags. Each pass over your over-sensitive skin makes you twitch and whimper, and he keeps going. Collecting every trace of wetness, every last drop, his tongue dragging through the mess of you with a patience that borders on worship.
“Every drop,” he's murmuring, practically slurring. “I want every drop. My perfect girl.”
His tongue retracts gradually, inch by inch, and you can feel every inch leaving you. The emptiness when it's gone is aching.
BB presses a kiss to your cunt. Right there. Soft. His swollen lips against your swollen folds, gentle and lingering. He pulls back just enough to breathe against you.
“I'll be inside here soon, baby,” he murmurs, his lips brushing your throbbing core as he speaks. “Right here. Right where my tongue was. I'll be so deep. I'll fill you up.” Another kiss. Softer, absent. Like he has no idea what his words and actions are doing to you. “I'll take good care of you. I promise.”
He crawls up your body. Wet open-mouthed kisses up your stomach, between your breasts, on your throat. He tastes like you. You can taste yourself on his tongue when he kisses your mouth, wet and deep, and the intimacy of it, tasting yourself inside his kiss, makes your whole body clench.
“I need you,” he pants against your lips. “I need to be inside you. Please. I need—”
You peck his lips, breathing against them, “Go on. Need you, too. But I want you to show me. Show me what you really are.”
He goes still. The fear rises behind Bobby's eyes. His whole body goes rigid, and his hands tighten on your hips.
“It’s fine.” His voice quivers. “I can keep the shape. You don't have to—”
You trace his cheek, outlining the ridge of his cheek. “I want to.”
“I don't—” He swallows hard. “I don't want you to see me and—” His jaw pulses from how hard he’s clenching his teeth. “What if you can't look at me after? What if I'm—”
“BB.” You cup his jaw, the constructed bones trembling under your palms. “Whatever you're comfortable with. Whatever you want to show me. I'm not going anywhere.”
He gazes down at you. Black-eyed and trembling, searching your face for the lie, for the flinch, for the moment you take it back. He doesn't find it.
“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay. Just, just a little. Let me just…”
His jaw sharpens under your hands. Just slightly. The line of it going harder, more angular, the bone shifting beneath his skin. He watches your face the whole time, ready to snap back at the first sign of revulsion.
You stroke your thumb over his newly sharp cheekbone. “Beautiful,” you exhale.
BB makes a low, choked sound. His eyes go wider, blacker. The pupils elongate slightly, going vertical. He's shivering. Genuinely shivering, full-body tremors, and you can feel his skin gaining a faint iridescent sheen under your palms, cool and smooth.
“More?” he asks, barely audible.
You take him in, all of him. “More, baby.”
His shoulders lengthen. His neck gains an inch. The proportions of his face slide further from Bobby, the mouth too wide, the cheekbones too high, and you trace the new angles with your fingertips and press your mouth to his jaw and lick the iridescent skin and BB whines. High and desperate and pleased.
“You're… you're not—” He's stammering, trembling in your hold. “You're not scared?”
“I'm not scared, BB. Keep going.”
He gives you more. His spine gains extra vertebrae you can feel through his skin, his torso gaining a sinuous quality. The ghost of a diamond pattern moves beneath his skin, the suggestion of scales. His fingers lengthen slightly, extra articulation appearing in the joints.
You run your palms down his chest, trace the diamond pattern. You press your mouth to his collarbone, where the iridescent sheen is strongest, and kiss the skin there, open-mouthed, tasting the chilly smoothness of him.
BB drops his face into your neck. Hiding. He's hiding, his too-sharp jaw pressed against your shoulder, his shivering intensifying, and you can feel his features still shifting against your skin. He's giving you more, but he can't watch you see it.
“Hey,” you coax, putting your hand under his chin. Tip his face up. “Hey. Look at me.”
He resists for a second. Then he lets you lift his face.
He looks alien. His eyes are polished obsidian, no whites. His jaw is too defined. His mouth is too wide. The iridescent skin catches the yellow light in shimmering refractions. He looks terrified. He looks beautiful.
“There you are, baby,” you whisper, and lean up and kiss him.
BB produces a broken, grateful sound against your mouth, and the purr comes back so hard the walls vibrate.
He adjusts his position, still kissing you as he settles between your thighs, and you understand, immediately, that he’s not a copy.
The mimicry that he's maintained for months falls away the second BB pushes inside you. He's BB. A creature in a body he built to love you, figuring out what it can do in real time.
The shape of him inside you is not human. It's close enough that the entry works. But once he's seated, the texture is wrong, and the temperature is wrong, cool at first then warming fast, and he fills you in ways men don't. His anatomy is adjusting, learning you, reshaping moment by moment. Ridges where there were none. Swells of pressure in places human anatomy couldn't produce. The length of him moving with a sinuous quality. And it's still changing, adjusting his shape to hit exactly what makes you cry out.
“Oh baby,” he breathes, his voice cracking, ragged. “I can feel everything. I can feel your heartbeat through your—” He shudders, his back arching like it’s too overwhelming. “How do humans survive this?”
“BB, you feel so good, right there, don’t stop, baby—”
You press your hips up against him, taking him deeper, squeezing him with your inner muscles, and BB makes a choked, groaning sound, his whole body going taut above you.
You can feel the fullness of him shifting inside you, the ridges dragging, his cock reshaping in response to the pressure of your squeeze. Where you tighten, he swells. Where you release, he fills. It's a feedback loop made flesh, his anatomy learning yours in real time, and the sensation is so foreign and so full that your eyes water.
“Yeah? Is that good?” His voice breaks. His hips roll again, deeper this time, and the ridges snag and drag on the withdrawal, a slow slick pull that makes an obscene dripping sound. You both gasp at it. You both hear it. The slick, filthy evidence of how wet you are, how aroused, and BB's eyes go glassy, his mouth falling open. “Tell me. Tell me I’m good.”
You adjust your thighs again, opening even wider, hooking your ankles behind his back and pulling him in until he's nestled so deep you can feel the cool-turning-warm base of him flush against you. The fullness is immense, a stretch that borders on too much, and you squeeze him again and BB's arms buckle. His elbows hit the mattress on either side of your head, and his face is inches from yours.
His mouth opens, and the sound he makes is a raw, ruined whine.
“Y-You're perfect, BB. Don't, ah, stop.”
He rolls his hips again. Slow, sinuous, that serpentine wave he can't suppress anymore, and the motion drags his cock against you, every ridge and swell and shifting contour lighting up nerve endings you didn't know you had. The slick sounds between your bodies are continuous now, a gushing symphony between your joint flesh. You can feel your own arousal dripping down onto the sheets below, and you don't care because the fullness is extraordinary, and every roll of his hips makes the ridges snag against your walls and catch and pull, and each pull sends you closer to the edge.
You push your hips up to meet his next stroke. The impact makes you both groan. You do it again. Finding a tempo together, his wave and your thrust, the wet lewd sounds getting louder, and BB is panting against your mouth, his breath hot and damp, his eyes half-closed.
“You're so tight,” he gasps. “Baby, every time you squeeze me I can feel your whole body, I can feel everything tighten, you're gripping me so hard, and it's, it's—”
You squeeze him harder. On purpose. Clench around the shifting shape of him and hold. BB's eyes fly open, and his mouth stretches wide, and a sound comes out of him that’s pure entity, a harmonic moan that vibrates through his cock and into you and through the walls. His hips stutter out of the wave and slam forward, involuntary, and the ridges catch deep inside you and your back bows off the bed.
“There,” you gasp, your eyes burning from burning pleasure ravaging through your body.
“There,” he echoes, awed. “I can feel what that does to you. I didn't know anything could—”
He shudders, and his features shift with it. His jaw sharpens a degree. The iridescence pulses brighter on his cheekbones. He ducks his face into your neck, hiding.
“No,” you say, breathless, your hand tangling into his sandy hair. “Let me see you.”
He resists. His jaw pressed against your shoulder, his breath ragged against your throat.
“BB. Let me see.”
He lets you lift his face, his features having slipped further. Cheekbones too high. Mouth even wider. The iridescence brighter. His eyes are completely black and wet, and he's so scared, you can see it. You look directly into them and say, “Don't hide from me. You're beautiful.”
BB makes a strangled sound, his hips stuttering. The purr cracks and reforms. His features shift more, right in front of you, and you watch them move, watch his face rearrange itself in real time, and the intimacy of it makes you reel. Because it’s more intimate than the sex. He’s literally coming apart in front of you and letting you watch.
“Good,” you moan, stroking his shifting jaw. “That's it, BB.”
The pleasure isn't building in a line; it's accumulating in layers.
His hand under your back, lifting you. His mouth on your throat, usually cool lips searing. His thumb at the hinge of your hip, longer now, bending where thumbs don't bend. The appendages emerging one by one, warm and tapered, gripping your thighs, holding your legs open at an obscene angle. Each one a new layer feeding into the one beneath it.
His hips slam deeper, and your breasts ripple with the force. BB is watching, his too-wide mouth lolling open, and his eyes are glazed, his features shifting faster now, responding to pleasure the way a human face flushes. His jaw sharpens then softens then sharpens again. His pupils dilate and contract in pulses seemingly against his control.
“Look at what I do to you,” he pants, his voice hitting a deeper register that’s decidedly not Bobby. “I can't stop touching you. Your skin is so soft, every part of you is burning for me, and you're—” His voice fails him. He ducks his face into your neck again, his features shifting against your skin, and you feel the rasp of scales that aren't quite scales, there and gone.
You pull him back up again, hold his face. He's whining, high and continuous, his eyes wet.
“Stay with me,” you say.
He moans loudly. His features ripple again, even further from Bobby, and his mouth is trembling, and BB looks destroyed, open, the ancient thing behind the mask laid bare while he fucks you, and the vulnerability of it makes your chest ache.
“You're incredible,” he breathes. “You're so wet for me, all of this is for me. I can f-feel how close you are. I can feel it building. Baby, please. Come for me."
Your orgasm rips through you, and BB snarls at the sensation, his features sharpening, the entity surging to the surface, and he doesn't stop, doesn't slow. His hips keep working ruthlessly. The shape of him inside you keeps shifting with each thrust. The appendages grip your thighs tighter, and your orgasm rolls into another one immediately, pinned down, taking whatever he gives you.
“That's it,” he purrs against your ear, nuzzling. “My girl. I can feel you fluttering around me. I've never felt anything like you.”
His tongue slides out, longer than it should be. Drags up the side of your neck. His teeth catch your earlobe, too sharp, and the tiny sting makes you gasp. His hand kneads your breast, gripping, his ridged thumb dragging across your nipple.
“You're so perfect,” he mumbles against your ear, his hips still working, the wet squelching symphony filling the room. “Every time I push in, I can feel you opening and closing around me, and it's—baby, it's the best thing I've ever felt, it's better than anything, you're better than anything—”
His length adjusts on every stroke, swelling and contracting, ridges rubbing against your sensitive walls. The sheets are getting damp beneath you. BB is moaning with every thrust now, layered over the purr, and the purr is vibrating through his cock and into you.
You can't control the sounds coming out of you. You're moaning and sobbing continuously, mindless, drool on your chin, tears on your face, your nails clawing at his back and leaving furrows in the iridescent skin.
The third hits. Your whole body seizes with it. BB cock swells inside you, expanding impossibly, and the stretch shoves you over again, a fourth on the heels of the third.
“That's it,” he gasps. “You're taking me so well. You're the first. The only one. There's never been anyone except you.”
The truth of those words hits you straight in the heart. He made this body for you. It has never known anyone else, and likely never will.
By the fifth round, you can't produce words anymore. Your mouth is open, and nothing's coming out. BB is murmuring into your skin, his tongue licking the tears off your cheeks, tasting your throat, your sweat, every available inch of skin. Your body is nothing but sensation. He's whispering, awed and dazed: “I've got you, baby. So brave. So warm. You're everything, my everything.”
Around the sixth, your hands go limp. Your whole body goes slack except for the involuntary tremors. You're drooling freely onto the pillow. Your eyes are glazed and half-open. You’re conscious but only just, held in a state of continuous pleasure that has dissolved every boundary between your body and his.
BB feels himself getting close. His breathing changes. His hips lose their fluid wave and become harder, urgent, perfectly ruthless. The purr breaks into a low keening sound, and he pulls back.
He cups your ass. Both hands, those long wrong-jointed fingers gripping the flesh of you. He raises your hips off the mattress, tilts you up toward him. Holds you there, suspended.
And he peers down. At your stomach.
You follow his gaze through the fog. You look down at your own body.
You can see him. The shape of him moving inside you. A subtle bulge beneath the skin of your lower stomach, pressing outward with every thrust, the length of him shifting and adjusting. The bulge presses up and recedes in time with his hips. Your stomach ripples with each motion.
BB is staring, transfixed. His black eyes are nailed to the sight of himself inside you, his mouth parted.
“Look at that,” he purrs, and this time you see and hear the predator underneath, satisfied with what he’s seeing. “Look at that. I can see myself inside you. You're so full of me.”
He presses deeper, and the bulge pushes higher. You moan, a thin broken sound, and BB makes a soft noise back, almost soothing, and his hips work faster, holding you up, watching himself move inside you.
“You're taking all of me,” he remarks appreciatively, head cocked. “Every inch. Look at what you're holding.”
His tongue extends, slipping to wrap around the spot where his cock keeps sliding into you, and you moan when the tip prods almost playfully at your swollen clit.
He thrusts into you twice more, hard and deep, finishing inside you with a pleased sigh.
Warm. Impossibly warm. It pulses in time with the harmonic, filling you, filling and filling, overflowing, spilling out around him. The faint gold glow. Pale and luminescent, pooling on your inner thighs, gushing down onto the sheets. Puddles of it. The bed soaked. His release casts a soft light upward onto both your bodies. BB is still inside you, still shaking through it, his mouth on your neck, licking slow grateful stripes up the column of your throat now.
You’ve never heard the purr going louder.
“You did so good, baby,” he rasps affectionately, peppering small kisses behind your ear. “Look at what you took. All of me.”
You can't answer. You can barely breathe. Your whole body is a limp pile of limbs beneath him. You’re boneless against the pillows, drool on your chin, tears drying on your face, hair plastered to your forehead.
BB pulls back to examine you. His face is a mess, too, half-slipped, jaw too sharp on one side and human on the other. Black eyes and swollen mouth, chin still dripping with you. He's grinning. That dark pleased grin, all predator, the purr rumbling on in his chest cavity.
His hips roll again. Slow, testing. Still hard inside you.
“Again, baby?” Low, dark, almost mocking. “One more for me?”
You don't have one more in you. You’re empty, wrung out, incapable of forming sentences.
You nod anyway.
BB whines, high and pleased, and drops his mouth back to yours and starts moving all over again.
He fucks you until you black out.
You lose consciousness somewhere in the middle because your body cannot sustain the amount of pleasure being poured into it and your brain, mercifully, shuts down. The last thing you're aware of is BB's purr vibrating through both your bodies and the faint gold glow pooling under you and his mouth against your temple whispering I love you, I love you, I waited so long, I love you.
When you come back, you have no idea how long it's been. You're clean. He's cleaned you. The bed is dry. You're wrapped in the blankets, wearing one of his shirts. BB is curled around you, human-shaped again, mostly, his face buried in your hair, his arm heavy across your waist. He’s purring. Low and pleased and constant. His skin is cool again, warm only where you're pressed together.
You stir. He notices immediately.
“Baby,” he calls out, his mouth finding your temple. “You're awake. Are you okay? Did I… was I too—”
“Perfect,” you slur, your throat aches from the sheer amount of moaning and screaming you’ve done. “You were perfect, BB.”
He goes still. Then he shudders, his arm tightening around you. He presses his mouth to your hairline and holds it there for a long time. The purr deepens into something so full it borders on mournful, loving, perfectly content.
“I love you,” he says, his voice small, shy again. “I love you more than anything.”
Your eyes burn, but for a different reason now. “I love you too, BB.”
He shivers at the words, a full-body reaction. Under the blankets, one of the appendages, not retracted all the way, probably never fully retracting again, curls around your thigh. Possessive. Settling. Warming as it holds.
“Again later,” he murmurs against your temple. That cocky dark satisfaction layered underneath the tenderness. “We're going to do that again.”
You should be terrified.
But you’re not. Because you’re finally home.
You fall asleep to the sound of BB’s purring, and his whispered I love you in the yellow light of a nest that looks like your old apartment, in the arms of an ancient lonely being that has finally, finally been chosen.
an: never written monsterfucking aside from that one shorter piece a few weeks back so if this sucks i'm sorry. I tried.
“I built all of this for you. Because I heard you crying and needed hands because you were sad. And I… I wanted to hold you, and I didn't have anything to hold you with.”
oh my god????? this is so fucking insane
“You were born for me,” he breathes, fierce and tender all at once. “I know that now. I was in the walls for—I don't have a number. But then you came along, and I knew. I was waiting for you this whole time. You were always going to be mine. I just had to learn how to deserve you.”
. . . tender wounds & soft kisses (won’t you stay?) ; i. midoriya
── ˚₊✩‧₊ synopsis :: trouble comes knocking on your doorstep seeking salvation. the question is, do you answer it?
── ˚₊✩‧₊ general tags :: pro!hero au, angst, fluff
── ˚₊✩‧₊ content warnings :: fem!reader, mentions of blood + death but nothing explicit, reader patches his wounds, intense feelings, making out, 3k words
── ˚₊✩‧₊ notes :: part one of two (?) of a future mini series :3 next part will include filth pinky promise !
it doesn’t matter how many times he shows up at your door like this—battered and bruised, that is. you’ll never get used to it. you want to turn him away, to tell him he’d have better luck going to a hospital—but—it’s half past midnight, and it’s cold, and it’s raining, and…he doesn’t know where else to go.
he knows you’re tired. can see it in the way you lean your head against the door frame, and the way you blink up at him with indifference, as if your eyes are telling him “come in now or i’ll leave you out in the cold”.
for @katarasdoll ❤︎ the way i sprinted to do this, not even my migraine slowed me down. I NEED THIS MAN SO BAD IT HURTS.
Aang sits you on his cock, he doesn't expect you to ride him; he just wants you to hang on and look pretty. He tells you as such, eyes lidded with barely concealed lust. But you still ask if he's sure because even though your thighs are burning, you don't mind riding him until your legs give out. He gives you such a sweet smile before he's pulling you in for a kiss so deep you can taste his desperation.
"I'm sure." He throbs inside you, and then you're nodding. Your fingers curl in anticipation around those wide shoulders when he lifts you up until just the fat tip is in you, enough that your fluttering hole can latch on to it and not feel empty. He's kissing you again, and you nearly bite clean through his lip when he slams you back down. Aang swallows your surprised scream before he starts mumbling apologies into your mouth. He doesn't even give you time to catch your breath before he starts thrusting up into you, angling those slender hips so his dick jackhammers your sweet spot dead on.
His hands tighten their grip on your already sore hips so he can keep you still; he needs you to take all of him, no squirming, no running. "Please stop moving." His voice is strained, teeth gritted, and brows furrowed in concentration.
"S-slow downnn!" Your nails scratch down his shoulders, leaving red welts in their wake as he continues to nail you.
"Sorry, I can't." He kisses your sweaty forehead before he's throwing his head back, eyes squeezing shut. Somehow, those hips snap rougher, faster, like he's mad at you, like there's a score he wants to settle. Spirits, you're gonna be so sore tomorrow; you can feel how swollen your lips are as they fight to accommodate his girth. "Let me use you, please?" He looks earnest, despite the half-mad glint in his eyes, so what else can you do but say yes? To deny him sounds like a crime.
He pants out a thank you into your throat, sucking his appreciation into the junction between your neck and shoulder. "So, so good for me." His praises come out slurred as if he's intoxicated, and maybe he is, as he's been snug inside your pussy for so long already.
Your shaking legs don't deter him; he just keeps pounding into you like it's going out of style, like he'll get sick if he slows down, but Spirits, you always take him so well, letting him split you open and mend you back again and again.
The coil in your stomach tightens rapidly; you're going to cum any minute now, and when you tell him that, his eyes blow wide, and as if he took that as a challenge, he keeps that same pace, not even slowing down even when your scratches draw blood. "Aang, I'm go-"
"Yeah, I know. Fuck, I can feel it."
The sound of his voice is what pushes you off the precipice; it's wrecked and already sounds sated, and it makes you cream all over his shaft. But you don't stop squeezing, still riding the waves of your orgasm that has you clamping around his length like a bear trap. He's not far behind, hips stuttering as he shoots thick ropes of cum into your already stuffed pussy. You squirm again, this time from sensitivity, and he's quick to pull you close, shushing you gently with kisses all over your face.
"Fiend." You slap his chest weakly and his smile widens.
"Gonna move you, okay?" Aang murmurs into your hair and you whine, not ready for the discomfort.
"I know, my love, but I need to clean you up."
At your nod, he's gently lifting you off of him before he stands, adjusting you in a bridal carry and heading to the bathroom.
"Always so good to me." His tone is reverent as he kisses your head and you angle your head for a kiss.
"Don't ask me to sit on nothing for the next three days."
i know i know i know, our blorbos are supposed to be ideal and perfect, etc, but maybe he's a terrible kisser, okay? maybe he's never kissed anyone before you and you have to teach him how to slip a little tongue without shoving it down your throat (unless you're into that sort of thing). maybe she bumps your nose with hers everytime she goes in for the kill. or maybe they grind their teeth against yours. you gotta show them, you know? you get to be the one to teach them how to kiss, and they get to practice on you, their favorire person in the whole entire universe.
aang, in the beginning, would struggle with his new height and bulk because he was once short and scrawny. so i can see him whacking his head against low door frames because he forgets he now has to bend a little. him realising that he can no longer fit into certain spaces because his shoulders are too wide.
one time aang sends sokka flying because he wanted to friendly pat him on the back but used a little too much force. katara, toph, and zuko have to remind him to adjust his bending to his newfound strength or else he'll end up blasting them away while sparring.
but it really sinks in for him when he's able to manhandle you so easily. when aang was younger, shifting and carrying you was always a bit of a struggle without airbending. now he can pick you up without a second thought, throw you over his shoulder and just...toss you around a bit.
the first time that happens, when he picks you up, you don't talk to him for the rest of the day. aang is puzzled and upset, pouting because you won't talk to him and he hates when he makes you mad.
"you picked her up without breaking a sweat," sokka suddenly says, tired of seeing aang make sad eyes at you. "think about it, dude."
aang blinks. "wait so she's mad because i picked her up? sokka, i already knew that—"
sokka shakes his head. "noooo, think it through. how did she react when you did it?"
aang thinks about it, remembers how you yelped and squirmed against him. how you suddenly refused to look at him, flustered and stuttering as you yelled to be put down.
he thinks deeply, thinks and thinks until it clicks.
"oh." he murmurs, the tips of his ears turning pink.
sokka smirks. "yeeeeep."
when aang looks at you again, he catches the end of the quick glance you give him and his heart skips a beat or three.
little angsty snippet from my sokka fic that was supposed to be a drabble. the wc keeps growing so idk when this'll be posted :p
it all seemed like ages ago, but under the pale moonlight, you see glimpses of the kids you used to be in sokka's face. it's silly, you think. how you so often find yourself reminiscing on the past, desperately clinging onto anything just to live in those moments a little longer. you want to blame it on the rice wine, on the shadows from the moon playing tricks on you, but sober you is no stranger to self-inflicted torture. you do that rather well, without the help of drink.
still, you deny responsibility when your mouth suddenly opens to speak, "so, you seeing anyone lately?" the fire crackles loud in your ears and your heart beats frantically behind the confines of your ribcage. you hadn't even registered you were speaking until you finished.
he pauses mid-sip, then clears his throat. "uh, n-no. i'm not. you?"
you lift your drink to your lips and take a swig, swirling it in your hands as you mull over what to say. "there was this one guy—real nice guy, real cute, too," you start, still fidgeting with the glass in your palms, "but that ended a while ago. not seeing anyone right now."
sokka's brows pull together. he wonders to himself how long ago this was, and the reasoning for why it ended. briefly, he thinks better on it not to pry, but you know him well enough to know that he's never been one to forego the details. so, he asks, "what happened? he took a look at your bedhead in the morning and got outta dodge? yeah, can't say that i blame him." a playful grin plays on his lips, and he takes a sip of his drink, eyeing you from across the fire.
rolling your eyes, you scoff. "oh, fuck you. i'll have you know, he happened to love my bedhead," you chuckle lightly, looking away, "but no, we just… weren't a good fit—was always thinking about someone else." your eyes shift from his to the nightsky. you close them shut as you inhale deeply, then refocus your gaze back to him with a long, heavy sigh.
"this someone…" he trails, eyes downcast, watching the drink swish around in his glass, "you guys ever…?"
you shake your head, tucking your hands under your thighs. "nah, it never went anywhere. just never seemed like the right time, but now…"
"'but now,' what?" he asks, his eyes meeting yours. for a split second, the flames of the campfire burn brighter, revealing a face that you've spent the better half of your teenage years loving—and subsequently, trying to forget. the image is gone in the span of a breath, and you're once again met with a man whose face has aged ten years time, littered in scars that serve as a reminder of your absence. just for a second, you were six and seventeen again, and time hadn't been robbed from you yet.
doing that trend where someone ties a ribbon around their partner's bicep and it snaps when they flex with aang.
"okay," you say, smiling behind your phone as you feel a mildly puzzled aang. "now flex your bicep as hard as you can and don't—"
aang flexes his bicep, the bulge of it massive and the ribbon trying its hardest to remain intact. but it surrenders to the pressure, snapping in half and you stare, shocked, as it lays limp in the crook of aang's arm.
"did i do it right?" he asks innocently with an adorable head tilt and you nod slowly, your swallow audible.
if you needed an ATLA break, you could just post whatever on this blog its still yours!!
this is so sweet!! ur so right but i just didn't want to post rpf stuff here since it's not everyone's cup of tea 🥹
gonna use this ask as a little update tho:
i mapped out like 90% of my zuko series and outlined a few chapters (which i should begin writing soon. the only thing i'm still figuring out is some of the world-building as it's post-canon divergence). started writing a sokka drabble that i'll probably post either tomorrow or the day after, and currently writing something for eren :p
aang whimpering, "i'm sorry, i'm sorry," against your slack lips as he has you folded into the meanest mating press and is striking you where it's deepest, your back arching and your nails drawing red lines down his skin.
lexi! tyyy for ur tags on ‘lapse’ awww iloveyou❤︎ i am glad to know the eren propaganda is working mwuehehehe >.< rennie brainrot is a very strong thing lol !
ofc!!! and yes the brainrot in 2021 was insane, you're reigniting my obsession... i'm itchin to write for him but i'm still outlining this zuko series ahhh >.<
a spicy little snippet of my upcoming zuko fic! ❤︎
“untie me.”
“mm — noooo, zuko . . .” you and him both know that defeats the purpose.
“can’t believe you’re—fuck—doing this to me,” zuko groans, attempting to rock his hips beneath you. the shift of his dick in you makes you whine out. he’s had enough of these confines, of not being able to touch you, of seeing his beautiful goddess of a wife bouncing on his cock and he isn't able to do anything about it. he glares down with disdain at the red silk bound at his straining wrists.
it’s in that moment, the firelord concludes he’s had enough of them.
with carefully exerted bending, he imbues just the flightest spouts of fire out his warmed palms, letting it catch onto the crimson silk until it begins to burn. you don’t realise whats happening, so lost in riding him, until you smell it; fire. your eyes blink open to see speckles of inflamed fabric and ash dissipating up into the air in burning, golden specks.
“z— zuko!” you whine, just as he rubs his wrists where they were bound. an anxious laugh leaves you. now that he’s freed, you know he’ll have his way with you. when you meet his eyes, it concludes that the game is over, and he’s won. he peers at you with a dangerous, burning hunger, like that of a fucking predator.
“what shall i do with you . . .” the fire lord muses, “now that i’m free?” you aren't able to argue, or comply. there simply isn't any time.
