unicorn truther 𖦹

⋆‧°𓏲ּ𝄢˖᯽ ݁˖· ─ scale of dragon

[dreamfyr-e]

⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ ena ⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ twenty ⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ she / they ⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆

masterlist ❁ rules ❁ recs

┗━•❃°•°இ°•°❃•━┛

― jacaerys velaryon, cregan stark, rhaenyra targaryen, baela targaryen, helaena targaryen ( and others!! just ask <3 )

― asks / anons / thirsts open

― requests closed

𓆑 ao3

free, free palestine !!

[dreamfyr-e]

Can wolf cregan smell when reader is ovulating? The potential is endless dare I say

your brain 🙌 u the real thinker, anon.

in my head creagn isn't like ACTUALLY wolfboy, he's just... kinda wold coded. u know how rhaenyra and aerion are really dragonlike — like aerion freak ahh tounge and the way that rhaenyra does that draconic head tilt thing when shes talking to mysaria? i think it's like that, he just really exhibits canine coded behavior!!

all this to say, he can't smell when ur ovulating, but he knows... oh trust, he knows.

he knows when you're on your period, because what a sweet, attentive husband he is aw how cute, and he also knows how to track the days between period end and oculation beginning. dare i say he has some sort of medieval period tracking system — not written down, just in his head.

he's also an expert at tracking your behavior patterns, and what behavior corresponds to what part of your cycle. when doe, who is usally so rigid and skittish around him is a little more open and needy... oh he knows. and he caters to it! ☝️

ur unusally squirmy in bed, and too nervous to do or say anything, but he just knows. he just knows to slip his arm around your waist you pull you back against him, pressing your hips to his and nosing into your hair. HE JUST KNOWS!! he knows whats wrong and how to fix it, without you saying anything.

the possibilities are so endless... lmk more anon...

[dreamfyr-e]

OMGG I LOVE THE DOE!READER X WOLF!CREGAN DRABBLES SMM!! EEEEKKKK!

-🐇

YAYYYYY i love u bunny, send me all of the ideas from ur big beautiful brain!!!

[targlocket]

i can unite the south and the north i just need ALL THREE OF US to get very open-minded and willing super quick

[dreamfyr-e]

watched backrooms. want bobby carnally.

[ingystark]

WHERE THE FUCK IS CREGAN STARK

[dreamfyr-e]

deleted an anon on accident, but to answer: i write for jace because harry colette is older than me and i’ve been writing for his character since season one — i’m not anti writing luke as a whole, but it creeps me out that there are like thirty year olds writing freaky smut about his character when he’s visibly a child (and the actor was underaged!!) for the entire duration of his screentime on the show

[dreamfyr-e]

i am thinking of visiting king’s landing with cregan in the summer and having sex that is just so hot and sweaty!

my poor sweet angel baby cregan who can't tolerate any heat at all. have we discussed?

he was born and raised in the north, and i think with his father dying when he was so young he prob didn't really have a chance to travel! he couldn't be anyone's ward, because he was the only son of one the great houses, so he was locked into that on the job training from like four years old.

he's never really experienced anything warmer than the mild northern summer, so when he goes to treat in the south for the first time he's SO miserable. and its prob only like the riverlands or the eerie 😭 but its summer and he's so hot. he doens't have the clothes for the north, so he's in his thick ahh wool doublet.

he's so, so reluctant to go to king's landing. he's not interested in going anywhere past casterly rock — being a little older, and more aware of his wardrobe, he can handle that, but NOT the crownlands. sucks, cause he goes anyways. duty outweighs how much he hates being hot.

and he is just not having hot, sweaty sex. you've been there for like one full day and he's so miserable, so hot — linen tunic and his hair up and off of his neck, and STILL burning up. sex in a hot bedroom on an upper floor of the castle, in perpetually humid-damp sheets, engaging in an activity that will make him even hotter and sweatier? oh no. absolutely not.

but in the bath... hm, thats different. but he's def not willing to do any of the work, you can ride him.

seeing how miserable he is and dragging him down to the cold wine cellar: now we're talking. it's cool, and it's kind of some freak shit, which he likes!

the tunnels also have potential, but i don't know the logistics for that.

[dreamfyr-e]

we been knew but unfortunately for doe!reader cregan loves to bite… i think he goes to kiss your hand and gives it a little nip to see how your nose scrunches up

cregan is a biter and it FREAKS doe!reader out!! but he doesn't mean to ☹️ he feels bad ☹️

doe!reader who isn't used to the way that cregan like to touch her, how he's drawn to it. when he holds her waist or rubs her back, thats fine, but it's the casually intimate touches that drive her nuts.

smoothing a hand over her hair in front of his bannermen, or tracing his fingers over her arm in council meetings. when he backs her up against the cold stone in the hallway, or presses her body to his, just to smooch her cheek and tell her that she looks pretty. kissing her on the mouth in public — thats the worst.

kissing her hand is tame, and well within the bounds of what she's comfortable with — he abuses that privilege.

the little nips bother her more than anything at first, when he kisses her knuckles so sweetly only to clip the soft skin with his teeth. he's a worshiper, so kissing across her fingers and down her arms is the natural progression as she grows comfortable with him.

he'll kiss from the back of her wrist, up her fingers, and back down into the dip of her palm. he's passionate about it, dedicated to it; he curls his fingers around her wrist to hold her hand to his mouth. doe!reader starts to get a little unsettled when his mouth moves up her thumb, and the tip of the didgit scrapes against the smooth edge of his incisor. his tongue darts out for a second, wetting a strip of her soft skin. before she can wiggle her hand from his grasp, he moves it for her; his canine drags the inside of her thumb. font and back teeth meet on either side of the thin muscle that makes the curve of webbing — pressure, not pain. she jerks a little, but he holds her hand still, taking his teeth away to press gentle kisses to the front of her hand.

he would like for her to bite him, too!

[dreamfyr-e]

I NEED more cregan stark drabbles/headcanons! Please! Also I love ur blog theme it's so pretty!

-🐇anon

hi 🐇!! big things coming, trust!

[dreamfyr-e]

i bet doe!reader gets soooo so skittish around wolf!cregan. the predator smell, his size and the physicality, how attracted she is to him when she knows she probably shouldn’t be…… he’s def the type to hush her (“shhh, settle down now, pet”), to try and overwhelm her senses to get her to settle down, be it by squeezing her sides, scenting her, kissing her throat, and eventually biting. he calls her pet/little one/little doe/sweet thing, always in that deep, raspy, slightly dangerous voice of his.

#needthat

i love u nonny ur in my hall of fame 💗 i didn't even have time to write doe!reader hcs (got logged out of tumblr, thank u computer) !! and u read my mind!!

i imagine doe!reader and cregan to be married — arranged, or at least political union. shes afraid of him, because of everything shes been told about big, scary, brutish, northern men. she's also... she's also really into him. yeah...

not at first! hes fit, but its muddled by the apprehension and discomfort in the cold, drafty castle. the intensity of her attraction comes with his gentleness. the gowns and furs that he has made just for her, to keep her warm; her bath oils that he sends for from dorne; how he guides her through crowded halls with one hand on the curve of her waist to keep her close to him.

it's overwhelming, even when she warms up to him. cregan is big — tall and broad, his sharp features and long hair harden him more. some of the largeness comes not from his physicality, but from his aura. he's intimiating — he's the wolf of the north.

cregan has one set demeanor in public: stoic, straight faced, unflinching and unaffected by anything. he commands a room by how unsettling his presence is. his voice is always even and smooth, he never yells, rarely snaps at any of his bannermen.

i don't take cregan to be big on pet names (but we could discuss this...) his lady has a name, he likes it, he thinks its the respectful thing to refer to her by that given name. lady star sometimes, or my lady — thats reserved mostly for company. "dear" is his go to: my dear, dear girl, or just dear. its a little awkward coming out of his mouth, a little unnatural at first. but he's trying to make his lady more comfortable around him, and lord cerwyn told him that terms of endearment will help her warm up.

doe!reader is so freaked when cregan's careful facade breaks apart in private. he's unnervingly gentle with her when she's brought to winterfell the first time, dropping his voice to a soft lull when he speaks with her, refraining from touch until he can tell that she's comfortable with him. he shields her through the crowd at their wedding, gathers the train of her gown so she won't trip. he refuses a bedding ceremony, and assures her in the private of his chambers that they need not consumate.

he's freakishly attuned to her. she stays guarded months into their marriage, keeping him at arms length. he doesn't fight it, he works with her, lets himself be present when he's needed and doesn't force it when he isn't. if he's there when she needs him, she'll want to come to him more — this is his thinking.

because he's the only person she knows in winterfell, he's who she seeks out when she's nervous or overwhelmed or frightened. he's good at regualting her. holding her against his body and pressing little kisses down the side of her face; rubbing her back while she sits in his lap.

he can manage it when she won't tell him, too. he knows what to look for, the signs she displays when something is eating at her. the go-to is to slip his hand beneath her hair and rub the back of her neck with his thumb, soothing little semi-circles into her hairline. he finds that slipping an arm around her waist and pressing his palm against her stomach works too: i can feel you breathing, it tell her, slow down.

i could talk about this all day. predator x prey, wolf x deer, but he'd never imagine hurting her. sinking his teethn into the soft skin of her neck is just for fun.

[baeibby]

Glad child

[dreamfyr-e]

doe!reader ˚˖𓍢ִ໋ 𖦹

❝ either way you turn, i'll be there. ❞

doe eyes. unassuming disposition. soft voice.

stolen gazes. saffron and jasmine. stoicism.

[ femme!reader. no house / no apperance specified. ]

꩜ asks open

[dreamfyr-e]

big things coming!

[dreamfyr-e]

i’m ovulating BAD i’m feeling nasty, need #dat and #dat is #creganstark

[dreamfyr-e]

mama wants cregan stark

[the-darklings]

Valarr and ls with ls being needy? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

⎯⎯͟͟♥︎̼ fever. gdgw!verse // valarr's pov. you're sick, and you're soft, and valarr is not equipped for either.

Valarr is in the back of a town car, scrolling through a contract amendment with his thumb, when Matarys's name lights up on the screen. He picks up without thinking. His brother doesn't call during work hours unless someone's dead or someone's bleeding, and Valarr has learned, over the years, to answer Matarys the way you answer a fire alarm: immediately, and with the assumption that something is, in fact, on fire.

"She collapsed."

Valarr's thumb stops moving. For several seconds, so does his heart.

"In a meeting," Matarys goes on quickly, his voice careful and measured. "About forty minutes ago. She fainted. They called an ambulance but she came round before it got there. She's conscious, Val. She's okay. She's talking, it's a fever. A high one. Her assistant called me because she couldn't reach you—"

"Where."

"Val—"

"Where is she, Matarys?"

Matarys gives him the address. Valarr hangs up. He gives the driver the new destination in a voice he doesn't fully recognise. Then he sits in the back seat with his hands rigid on his thighs and watches the streets slide past, his heart doing something it hasn't done in a long time.

It panics.

He doesn't panic. Valarr Targaryen does not panic. He plans, he adjusts, he recalibrates. He's a man built for controlled responses, a man whose entire demeanour is designed to absorb shocks and redistribute them as composed, proportionate action.

He panics now. For the first time since his father's passing. There's an ugly, sickly, arrhythmic drumming in the centre of his chest that Valarr can't will into submission, and his hands—his careful, elegant, camera-ready hands—are shaking faintly against the wool of his trousers.

She collapsed.

The two words sit in the middle of his skull like a stone dropped through glass.

In a meeting.

The image assembles itself without his permission. You, mid-sentence, your mouth shaping some point and then the way your face must have tightened. Your eyes going unfocused. Your knees folding.

The sound your body would have made when it hit the floor of a conference room full of people who don't know you. who don't love you, and would not have caught you the way he would have caught you. Knowing, instinctively, to put their hand behind your head.

Valarr presses the heel of his palm against his sternum and tries to breathe.

—

By the time he gets you home, you're half-conscious and radiating heat.

Your assistant had called your doctor. Your doctor had been clear and blunt: fever, viral, fluids, rest, keep an eye on the temperature. Your assistant had looked at Valarr with barely concealed relief when he'd stalked through the door of your office and said, I've got her, as though she'd been waiting for someone to say exactly that.

He got you to the car. And you'd let him, which had alarmed him more than the fever. Because you don't let anyone steer you. You don't go limp. Don't put your head on anyone's shoulder and close your eyes and trust them to navigate the world on your behalf.

And in the car, you had put your face against his throat and gone heavy.

Now he's lowering you onto the bed in the penthouse. The sheets are cool. The late afternoon grey through the long windows.

Valarr has already kicked off his shoes, shrugged off his jacket, rolled his sleeves. He'd called Matarys back from the car—she's all right, she's running hot, I'm taking her home—and Matarys had said, do you need me to come? and Valarr had said, no, and meant: I need to do this myself, I need to be the one, please don't take this from me.

He eases you down against the pillows. The back of his hand finds your forehead, and the heat that comes off you makes his stomach clench. You're burning. Not warm. Burning. Your skin has gone damp at the hairline, the fine strands at your temple sticking to the sheen of sweat there. Your eyes are glassy when they crack open to find him.

"Val."

His name in your mouth; rough, low and scraped. You say it the way you say it when you're half-asleep. When the composure of you goes soft enough that there's only the raw thing underneath, the thing that knows his name before it knows anything else.

"I'm here, my love."

Valarr gets the thermometer from the bathroom, gets a glass of water while he's there too. He gets the ibuprofen from the cabinet with his other hand. He finds the soft flannel. The grey one you keep folded on the bottom shelf. The one he's seen you press to your face on bad headache days when you think he's not watching. Valarr runs it under cold water, wrings it, folds it.

He sets it on your forehead, and you make a sound.

A small, raw, involuntary sound. Not a word. Your eyes shut, and your face turns into the cool of the cloth, and you sigh. The sigh goes all the way through you, loosening something in the line of your shoulders that Valarr has been watching hold for three years.

"There," he says quietly. "There, my love."

He sits on the edge of the bed. He takes your temperature. 39.4. Too high, not dangerous, but the number lodges in him like a splinter. He makes a note of the time. He'll check again in forty minutes. He'll check every forty minutes until it breaks, and if it doesn't break by midnight, he'll call Dr. Essani at home and he doesn't care what time it is.

Your hand finds him.

Valarr doesn't expect it.

You're lying on your back with the flannel over your brow, eyes closed, face shiny with sweat, and your hand comes up—unsteady, half-asleep—and finds the front of his shirt. Your fingers close on the fine cotton, not gripping, not pulling. Just holding. The way a child holds the edge of a blanket.

Something in Valarr's chest fissures.

"My love?" he rasps. "What is it?"

"Stay," you mumble.

He blinks. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Stay close."

Your hand tightens on his shirt. A fraction. The pull of the cotton against his chest is so slight it's barely a force. It's nothing. It's everything. It's you, sick and stripped and burning, asking him to be near you without any of the steel you'd usually wrap around the asking.

Valarr lies down.

He lies down beside you on the bed, still in his work clothes, still in his watch and his cufflinks.

He shifts close enough that the line of his body is against yours, and you make another sound. A low, agonised little moan that isn't pain, exactly, but discomfort. The unguarded animal protest of a body that's too hot, too heavy and wants something it can't articulate... and then you turn into him.

You turn into him.

The full weight of you. Your face pressing into the hollow under his jaw. Your hand releasing his shirt and sliding instead around his side, your arm hooking at his waist, pulling yourself in. Your body finds his body the way water finds a depression in the ground, without thought, all instinct.

You burrow, pressing your hot forehead into the curve of his throat. Your knees come up, tucking against his thighs, and you make another sound—God, the sounds, the sounds—a thin, miserable, needing sound, muffled against his skin, and Valarr—

Valarr wraps his arms around you and holds on and doesn't breathe for approximately four seconds.

Because you don't do this.

In three years and four months of loving you, you've never once done this. You've let him hold you often, yes. Even seek it out yourself sometimes. You've slept against his chest most nights. You've nuzzled into his throat in the aftermath, when the sex has cracked you open enough that the soft thing underneath gets loose for an hour.

But you've never, while conscious, while in the middle of an ordinary day, crawled into his arms and pressed yourself against him and held on as if the only thing keeping you moored to the earth was the weight of his body.

You're the one who holds. You're the wolf, the steel, the steady one. The gravitational centre. Valarr orbits you. That's how it works. That's how it's always worked, and he's more than happy with it. He's never before you been happier.

He chose you because you're the strongest woman he's ever encountered and because your strength makes him feel safe and seen in a way no one else in his life has managed.

But this.

Oh, this.

You burrow deeper. Your nose drags along the line of his throat, finding the pulse point, and you settle there. Your breath comes in short, hot, damp puffs against his skin. Another sound bubbles up, and your arm at his waist tightens with a small, desperate squeeze. As though you're checking he's still solid. Your fingers curl into the back of his shirt.

"Val," you mumble again, like the last word a person says before they stop fighting consciousness, and Valarr presses his mouth to the crown of your head and holds you tighter and thinks, with a ferocity that frightens him: I would burn this city to the ground for you. I would take apart every institution I've ever built. I would ruin myself. I would ruin everything to make this go away.

The fever climbs.

At 5:00 p.m. it's 39.7. He changes the flannel. He coaxes water into you, a few sips at a time, tilting the glass to your mouth and wiping the small trickle at the corner of your lip with his thumb.

You take the ibuprofen without protest, which is another wrong thing, because you always protest. Always tell him you're fine, you don't need it, stop fussing, Val. Today you open your mouth and swallow and close your eyes and turn your face back into his throat.

At 6:00 p.m. he calls Matarys.

"How is she?" he asks worriedly.

"Fever's still climbing," he replies. "She's sleeping, mostly."

A pause. "How are you?"

Valarr laughs, once, without humour. "Outstanding."

"Val."

"I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine. You sound like you're about to do something stupid."

"I'm managing."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Matarys says, and Valarr can hear the gentle, knowing concern in his brother's voice. The concern that says: I know what you're like when the thing you love is threatened. I know you don't have a gear between composed and catastrophic. "Call me if you need anything. I mean it. You know I love her, too."

At 7:00 p.m., you start mumbling.

Not words. Sounds. Low, restless, unhappy sounds.

The fever has put you somewhere between sleep and waking, a fitful grey country where your body can't settle. You shift against him, kicking the sheet off. You pull it back, press closer. You make a thin, grinding sound of discomfort at the back of your throat that makes Valarr's chest physically hurt.

A sound so unguarded, so stripped of your usual composure, that hearing it feels like watching a lock come undone on a door he's never been allowed behind.

"Shh," he says, stroking your hair. "I'm here, my love. I'm here."

You settle for a minute at the sound of his voice. Then the restless shifting starts again. Your leg hooks over his, hand fists in his shirt at the chest, knuckles pressed against his sternum. Your face turns, pressing harder into his throat, and you mumble something.

"Val."

His hand stills in your hair.

"Val."

You're asleep. You're entirely asleep, and you're saying his name.

Valarr stares at the ceiling. He stares at the grey evening light on the plaster and he feels the shape of his name in your sleeping mouth against his throat. Something inside him rearranges itself so fundamentally that he knows, in the way you know certain things, that he'll never recover from this.

He'll carry this. Carry the weight of his name mumbled in your fever-sleep for the rest of his life, and he'll take it out in quiet moments. Hold it the way he holds every scrap of you he's ever been given: carefully, greedily, with the hoarding of a man who's always known that the soft parts of you are the rarest currency in the world.

"I'm here," he whispers to your sleeping face, and his voice cracks, and Valarr doesn't care. "I'm right here, sweet girl. I'm not going anywhere."

At 8:00 p.m. you wake up enough to be miserable.

The lucid kind of miserable. The kind where you're aware that you feel wretched and you're too tired and too hot to perform the version of yourself that doesn't admit to feeling wretched. You open your eyes. They're fever-bright, the pupils too wide, a glassy sheen over them. You find Valarr's face immediately, as though it's the first thing your visual cortex bothered to render.

"Hi," you croak. Your voice is ruined.

He exhales through his nose, trying to keep his expression straight, thumb gentle on your damp brow. "Hello, sweet girl."

"I feel awful, Val."

He almost laughs. Not because it's funny. Because you've never said that to him. In three years, you've never once told Valarr that you feel awful, Val. You've told him you're fine, that it's nothing.

You've told him, memorably, once, to stop looking at you like that when you had a 38-degree fever and a head cold and were clearly, visibly suffering. You'd gotten up and made your own tea and come back to bed and read for an hour as though spite alone could metabolise a virus.

Tonight you look up at him from the pillow and you say I feel awful, Val with the defeated honesty of a woman who can't, at this moment, be bothered to pretend.

"I know you do." He brushes the hair from your damp forehead. "You're going to be all right."

"Everything hurts."

"I know."

"My head."

"I know, my love."

Your face crumples in a grimace. The small, compressed grimace of someone in physical discomfort who wants it to stop and can't make it stop and is, for the first time in Valarr's memory, not pretending.

"Come here," he urges.

He draws you in. He arranges you against his chest, your head in the hollow under his jaw, your body against the long line of his. He pulls the thin sheet over you both. He keeps the flannel at your forehead, pressing it gently against the heat.

You groan into him. A low, guttural, agonised sound that vibrates through his chest.

"I know," he murmurs. "I've got you, sweet girl."

"Don't go, Val," you whisper.

"I'm not going. Not ever, love. Do you hear me? Not ever."

"Val."

His name again, dragged out of you on a moan, and the sound of it nearly kills him. The way you say it. The way you have, tonight, turned his name into the only word that matters. As though his name is the perimeter of something, and inside it is safety, and outside it is the fever and the ache of being sick.

He presses his mouth to your hair. "I'm here."

You cling to him. There's no other word for it. Your arm locks around his waist, your fist twisting tighter in his shirt. Your leg pushes between his, tangling, seeking more surface area, more of him. You press your burning face into the base of his throat and breathe, and each exhale is a small, hot wave against his skin.

Valarr absorbs every single one of them.

He changes the flannel three more times. He takes your temperature again: 39.8.

He talks to you, low and steady, a stream of nothing, a current for you to hold onto. He tells you about his day. About the contract he was reading when Matarys called. About the weather, the light on the buildings at four o'clock, and the peonies he'd been thinking of buying you on the way home before his phone rang and the afternoon cracked in half.

He tells you nonsense. He tells you things he'll never remember saying and things you'll never remember hearing, and it doesn't matter, because the telling is the point. The telling is the anchor. The low, steady, golden thread of his voice in the fever-dark, giving you something to follow home.

You mumble his name a fourth time. A fifth. Each time, fainter. Each time, more asleep.

He counts them.

The fever breaks at 11:23 p.m.

He knows because he's been checking every twenty minutes for the last two hours, the thermometer warm from his grip. 39.6 at 10:00. 39.2 at 10:40. 38.7 at 11:00. At 11:23: 38.1, and dropping, and the sweat that breaks across your skin is the good kind, the kind that means the body has won its war and is standing down.

Valarr sets the thermometer on the nightstand. He closes his eyes. He presses his face into the crown of your hair and breathes for what feels like the first time in nine hours.

You stir.

Not fully. A small, boneless shift. The fever has left you wrung out, the way a storm leaves a landscape: quieter, flatter, scrubbed clean.

Your grip on his shirt loosens, your fist opening into a palm pressed flat against his chest. Your breathing goes even and slow, the deep rhythm of a body that's stopped fighting.

But you don't pull away.

That's the thing Valarr registers and catalogues and presses into the permanent record of himself like a flower between the pages of a book he'll never lend.

The fever's broken. You're cooling. The crisis is over. The lucid you, the steel you, the you that would normally surface about now and say I'm fine, stop fussing, move over, I need water—that you would, on any other night, repack herself, reset the architecture, rebuild the walls that the fever had dissolved.

You don't.

You stay.

You stay pressed against him. Your palm stays flat on his chest, right over his heart. Your face stays turned into his throat, breaths still coming in those deep, warm, even pulls against his skin. The leg stays tangled between his. Your body is heavy and open, the whole of you poured against him without guard, without performance, without the wolf.

Just you.

Just the girl under the wolf. Just the soft, warm, exhausted creature who mumbles his name in her sleep and holds his shirt like a lifeline and says don't go like you mean it. One who stays close even after the reason for staying close has passed.

Valarr holds you.

He holds you the way he's always wanted to hold you: completely, with every part of himself, his arms locked around you, his chin at the crown of your head, his heartbeat against your palm. He holds you with the full, greedy, starving gratitude of a man who's been given the one thing he didn't know how to ask for. The one thing he'd assumed was simply not available.

Not because you didn't love him—he knows you love him, he's known it since year one—but because you love him in steel, in strength, in the particular fierce, predatory devotion that doesn't bend. You love him by being unbreakable. By being the one who holds. By being the centre, the gravity, the thing he orbits.

And tonight you loved him by being soft.

By being breakable. Being sick and miserable and needy and too exhausted to pretend otherwise.

By saying stay close instead of I'm fine, saying his name in your sleep not once but five times. Each one quieter and more surrendered than the last, as though even your unconscious mind knows where safety lives.

Valarr lies in the dark with you breathing against his throat and thinks: this is the happiest I've ever been because she feels safe with me.

Not the sex. Not the dark nights. Not the filthy, electric, extraordinary things you've done to each other in three years. Not the first time you told him you loved him, or the morning in Pentos when you woke up in hotel sheets and stretched in the morning light and he'd thought, delirious with it, I get to keep this.

This. A Thursday night. A fever. You, in an old t-shirt, sweaty and sick and clinging to him because you needed him and didn't pretend you didn't.

You shift in your sleep. A small nuzzle. The drag of your nose along the tendon of his throat. The way you do in the aftermath. The way you've done exactly thrice before in three years and each time he'd memorised it, filed it, kept it.

He tightens his arms around you.

"My love," he whispers, barely audible, to the crown of your head. "My beautiful love."

You don't answer. You're asleep. You're deeply, solidly, peacefully asleep in his arms, and your hand is still on his heart.

Valarr closes his eyes, sighing.

He thinks about the first time you looked at him.

About the way you'd looked, then: assessing, frank, unimpressed by the gold of him, the way no one had been unimpressed before you.

He thinks about the first time you'd touched him, your hand on his wrist, and the small, permanent rearrangement that had occurred in his chest at the contact. He thinks about the first time you'd fallen asleep in his arms, year one, and how rigidly you'd held yourself even in sleep.

How controlled the shape of your body had been against his, how even unconscious you hadn't fully let go.

And he thinks about tonight. About the way you'd folded into him like there was nowhere else in the world you'd rather be. About the grip on his shirt. The leg tangled with his. About the small, helpless, needy sounds he'll never tell you about, because you'd be mortified, and because they belong to him now.

Valarr presses one last kiss to the crown of your head, lingering.

He sleeps with you breathing against his throat, and his arms locked around you, and his hand flat against the warm curve of your back.

He's so happy he could die of it.