property of the dragon
Based on this request!
Pairing: modern!BFF's dad!Baelor x f!reader // modern!BFF's dad!Maekar x f!reader
Warning(s): modernAU, established relationship, age gap, AFAB reader (no use of y/n), henna tattoo (reader has it), suggestive content.
You hadn't planned to show Baelor.
It had been a spontaneous thing — a Saturday market, a stall with a woman doing henna under a striped awning, a friend who'd grabbed your wrist and said come on before you'd had time to construct an objection. You'd sat on a folding stool for twenty minutes with your shirt rucked up while she traced the three-headed dragon of the Targaryens across your ribs in dark paste, careful and unhurried, the script beneath it forming letter by letter.
property of the dragon
You'd paid her. You'd laughed about it on the bus. And you'd thought about Baelor's face the entire way home and decided, somewhere around the third stop, that you weren't going to tell him.
You were going to let him find out.
It took two days.
An ordinary Tuesday evening, his flat, the two of you on his sofa with a book abandoned somewhere and his hands moving over you with the unhurried attention they always had. He worked your shirt up and over your head, his mouth already at your collarbone —
And stopped.
You felt the stillness before you saw his face. The particular full-system pause of a man whose brain had encountered something it needed a moment to process.
"That," he said, very quietly, "is my family’s crest."
"It is," you nodded.
He sat back slightly. His fingers found the edge of it — feather-light, the specific reverence he brought to primary sources, following the outline of the first dragon head with his thumb.
"It's very well done," he said. "The proportion of the necks to the body is correct, which people get wrong constantly. Most reproductions elongate them into something more serpentine, which is a nineteenth-century affectation, actually, there's no textual basis for—"
"Baelor."
"—and the triquetra arrangement is significant," he continued, entirely absorbed now, his fingers tracing the second head, "because the three-headed configuration predates the dynasty's own use of it by a considerable margin. There are Byzantine precedents. Thracian, arguably, if you accept the—"
He stopped when his eyes had reached the lettering. You watched the entire apparatus of Byzantine historiography leave him at once. Completely evaporated.
property of the dragon
He looked at it for a long moment. Just looked — at the dark lines against your skin, at the words, at what they meant in the specific context of his hands on your ribs and his name in your mouth most nights and everything that had somehow accumulated behind you both without either of you quite noticing it happening.
"You did this voluntarily?" Not quite a question.
"Market stall," you explained. "Completely spontaneous."
"Property of the dragon," he read aloud, his thumb moving along the script now, tracing each word with the same care he'd given the sigil.
"It's henna," you said. "It'll fade in a few weeks."
"A few weeks," he repeated.
"Give or take."
He looked up at you then, and the expression on his face was the completely undone one that lived underneath all the composed ones and only surfaced when he'd stopped managing it entirely.
"You came home," he said, "with my family's sigil on your ribs."
"Seemed an accurate depiction," there was mirth in your voice, and he loved it. "I think I did a pretty decent design."
"It is accurate," he agreed, very quietly, and something in the way he said it — the plainness of it, the absolute lack of hedging from a man who hedged professionally — landed somewhere warm and total in your chest.
Then he leaned down and pressed his mouth to the henna.
To the dragon first — one head, then the next, then the third, unhurried, his hands spread wide against your ribcage to hold you still. Then lower, to the lettering, kissing each word separately: property, his lips against the p and the r and the o; of, barely a breath; the; and then dragon, slower than the rest, his mouth lingering there.
You not only felt the slight tickle of his beard on across your skin; you felt it everywhere. Not just the physical fact of it — the whole shape of what he was doing, the deliberateness, a man kissing a claim he hadn't asked for and had clearly wanted more than he'd known how to say.
"Baelor," you breathed, your hand finding his hair and threading through it.
"Give me a moment," he asked, against your ribs. "I'm having a feeling."
"Take your time, love."
When he finally lifted his head, his eyes were dark through his glasses, and the smile was still there, warm and slightly wrecked, and his hands were still spread over the your skin like he was holding something that might otherwise get away.
"I want to say something," he said, "and I want you to understand that I have thought about how to say it and arrived at nothing better."
"Okay," you supressed a laugh that was forming in your throat.
"I don't own you," he said. "I want to be clear about that. That's not what this—" he gestured, faintly, at the lettering. "That's not what I feel."
"I know," you nodded, waiting for him to get to the point you knew he was trying to make despite the fog in his brain.
"But you chose to wear that," he continued. "You chose it, and had it drawn on your body, and came here and let me find it, and I find I am not able to construct a single sentence about how that makes me feel." A pause. "So I'm going to stop trying."
"Please do," you almost chuckled.
"I think the Byzantine precedents can wait," he said, moving his hands lower across your back.
"They really can."
He kissed you, and the historiography of Targaryen sigillography remained entirely unaddressed for the rest of the evening, which you suspected it could definitely survive.
You'd been in Maekar's house for twenty minutes before he noticed.
He'd been in the garden — some structural crisis involving the tomato beds again that had apparently required an hour and a half of his attention and had left his t-shirt filthy and his patience run thin — and came in through the back door with the particular focused irritation of a man who had solved a problem but resented having to.
He found you in the kitchen, stretching to reach one of the last mugs in the cupboard, your favourite. Maekar stopped in the doorway, removing his gardening gloves, and didn't come any further into the room.
"What's that?" He asked.
You followed his line of sight to your hip, where your shirt had ridden up and your waistband had slipped just enough — the three-headed dragon, dark and detailed, curving with the line of your body. The script clear beneath it.
property of the dragon
"Henna," you said, matter-of-factly.
He crossed the room in three steps, which was considerably faster than the situation warranted, and crouched down in front of you to look at it properly.
His eyes moved over it. The dragon. The lettering. The placement.
"Property of the dragon," he read. Flat.
"You remember your letters," you teased him.
He looked up at you. His jaw was doing the thing. His eyes had gone somewhere very dark very quickly, which you had anticipated and which had been, if you were being honest with yourself, approximately eighty percent of the reason you'd reached for that mug in the first place.
"You walked around all day," he said, "with that on you."
"Just this afternoon."
"Under your clothes."
"That’s just where my skin is," you chuckled.
He didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at it. His hand came up and his thumb pressed against the lettering — not tracing it, just pressing, testing whether it would smudge, whether it was real.
It didn't smudge.
"Property of the dragon," he said again, slower.
"It'll fade," you said. "In like a few weeks."
"Few weeks?"
"Depending on how much it is touched." His hands moved to the button of your jeans. "Maekar—"
"I want to see all of it," he said, already working it open, the flat purposeful energy of a man who had decided something and was implementing it without further consultation.
You let him peel the denim down, and the henna extended further than he'd been able to see — the dragon's tail curling down toward your upper thigh, the whole design sitting dark against your skin, considerably larger than the glimpse above your waistband had suggested.
He knelt all the way down and went very still looking at it.
"You planned this," he sounded sure of his words. This damned man knew you like the palm of his hand.
"Little bit," you acknowledged.
"Knew exactly what it would do, right?"
"I had a working theory," you smiled deviously. "Did it work?"
He made a low sound that wasn't quite a word, and then his mouth was on your hip — hard, not gentle, no reverence in it at all.
He kissed the lettering first, open-mouthed, his hands gripping your ass to pull you to his mouth. There was nothing careful about any of it, nothing exploratory. This was a man who had read property of on your skin and had gone somewhere that no longer had room for finesse.
"Mine," he all but growled against your hip, which was entirely redundant given the text and entirely necessary for him regardless.
"Yours," you said through a chuckled moan, your hands reaching to the nape of his neck. "Has been for a while."
He lifted his head to look at you and the expression on his face was one you'd seen exactly a handful of times, the look of a man who had encountered something that had rewritten a significant part of his brain and was still catching up to what he'd become because of it.
"Whose idea?" He asked, face tilting downward again and tongue lapping against the softness of your lower belly. There was a bit of teeth in his kisses now, which had you squirming slightly.
"A friend dragged me to the stall," you managed through a huffed laugh.
"And you picked it?"
"I designed it," you corrected. "I sat there for thirty minutes and could only think about your face after finding it."
He closed his eyes briefly. Opened them. "Don't let it fade," he said.
"Maekar, it's henna, it's chemically going to—"
"Then we get another one," he almost sounded commanding, with total flat certainty, like this concluded the discussion. "Or a real one. Whichever, I don’t give a fuck."
You laughed — you couldn't help it — and he did not laugh, which somehow made it better, because he'd meant it entirely and was already looking up at you from your hip with the focused intent of a man knowing exactly that this specific word carried real intent.
"You're serious," you breathed, looking at the darkness of his eyes, which had almost swallowed his near-lilac hue.
"I'm always serious," he said, and put his mouth back on the lettering and moved it progressively downward.
The tomato beds and the garden and the entire rest of the evening ceased to have any bearing on anything at all after that.
I'm trying to catch up with some older requests! It might take some time tho <3
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