SUMMARY — Prince Valarr and his wife struggle to conceive a child as months pass and everyone is starting to get worried. Eventually, his Lady Wife finds out that their previous lack of experience in the matter is to be blamed.
AUTHOR’S NOTE — Not requested but I saw that gifset from Bridgerton yesterday, which reminded me of this hilarious scene with my favourite family from the show (Featheringtons >>> Bridgertons) and I just knew I had to write it ASAP but with Valarr and his Lady Wife. There is no actual smut but obviously lots of intimate things are being discussed so be warned.
WORD COUNT — 3,800
ENGLISH IS MY SECOND LANGUAGE.
INSERTS HIMSELF WHERE?
Around that time when you moved to King’s Landing to marry Prince Valarr, one of Lady Jena’s ladies-in-waiting – Aemma – left the court to come back to her castle. Apparently, she turned out to be pregnant after her husband’s visit.
You were very happy for the woman because she seemed to be kind and understanding but also funny. You knew she would be an amazing mother and the sight of her glowing face reminded you that soon you would become a mother yourself.
It was a scary thought – to become pregnant with a man you only just met. But you knew it was inevitable. Perhaps other marriages could wait a year or two before starting the journey of parenthood but you were marrying the heir to the throne. You knew your position and your place. You would become the Queen one day but in return you had to offer your body and womb to the battles of nearly constant pregnancy and childbirth.
Prince Valarr himself was not scaring you, though. You couldn’t believe that an arranged union with an heir to the throne could turn out to be so harmonic. He was charming, handsome, chivalrous and smart. Not much older than you, not a brute, not a drunkard, not a man-whore. It felt as if you won a lottery.
Not a man-whore at all. In fact, he was as pure for you as you were for him.
That was one of the reasons why he demanded that no bedding ceremony was to be held. He didn’t have to convince his father for long, though. Prince Baelor would be surprised if his son requested this tradition to take place.
“You must not worry, my Lady,” Valarr held your hands after leaving his father’s chambers. You were waiting for him in the corridor, pacing nervously. “My father agreed to ignore the bedding ceremony tradition. I explained to him it would be disrespectful to my wife and the future Queen of the Realm. It is not proper for anyone to see you like this. Anyone but me, that is,” he added with a blush.
“Oh, my Prince, thank you so much!” You squeezed his hands tight. “I am so grateful.”
“You should not be. It is my duty as your betrothed to be your protector whether it means shielding your body from injury or your honour and pride.”
After a beautiful and elegant wedding feast, without any prying eyes, the wedding night was rather heavenly. You were over the moon for the whole morning and still giggling slightly while having supper, squeezing Valarr’s hand under the table. His cheeks were crimson red while his parents were exchanging looks. King Daeron seemed to be pleased that your union was so happy and Prince Matarys was furrowing his brows, not understanding why you were acting like that.
After the supper you were supposed to take a walk in the gardens with Lady Jena. She spotted your impatience during the walk as you couldn’t wait to join your newlywed husband in your chambers and do all the things from the night before once more.
“(Y/N), my dear… There is something I must inquire about,” Lady Jena began carefully.
“What is it, my Lady?” You asked her.
“It is… awkward to talk about but…the maid has informed me that your bedsheet this morning was… clean,” she swallowed thickly, struggling to find the right words. “I hope you understand it is important for people to see the… the blood,” she finally muttered and you widened your eyes at her words.
What did she mean that the people needed to see blood?!
Lady Jena noticed your scared facial expression.
“I don’t mean to accuse you! My son is pleased with you and I have no reason not to be either. But you did not have a bedding ceremony and people need proof that…” Lady Jena hesitated once again. “You did consummate the marriage, right?”
“O-of course!” You gasped.
“Perhaps my son’s lack of experience is to be blamed for the inconvenience…” Lady Jena kept speaking in unfinished or mysterious sentences, which was frustrating you greatly. “Just please, do so again tonight.”
“Oh, we will!” You fervently assured with a head nod and she cracked a smile at that.
When you finally went back to your chambers, your excited and blushing husband was already waiting for you. He opened his arms for you to hug him but you sighed and frowned instead.
“What is it, my sweet?” He asked, worryingly. He approached you and rubbed your arms. “Do you not feel well? Do you need anything?”
“No, it’s just… Your mother told me…” You huffed and he furrowed his brows. “That the maid was complaining about our bedsheets being too… clean,” you explained, hoping he would know what that meant but he seemed to be as puzzled as you were.
“Too clean?” Valarr blinked a few times.
“Apparently it should be stained with blood as a sign of consummation,” you whispered shyly and his cheeks turned even more pinkish than before.
“Oh,” he took a step back from you. “Well, that is the most curious and odd custom. I do wonder why my father has never told me about it.”
“I wasn’t told either. But I got an impression that your mother rather insisted,” you said, looking down.
“Do not worry, my Lady, I will not let any harm come to you,” Valarr took his dagger from the desk as he approached your bed. “I assume the custom is for the woman to bleed but I am a gentleman,” he assured you and cut the inside of his arm right below the elbow slightly. You hissed and looked away.
He made sure the blood dropped onto the sheets and then he walked away to clean the fresh wound and bandage it quickly. It was a shallow cut and did not require much attention. He could easily hide it beneath his tunic during the day and it would heal in no time.
“Thank you so much, my Prince,” you approached him to kiss him on the lips.
“At your service, my Lady,” Valarr smiled sweetly and leaned in to kiss you back.
Lady Jena was pleased in the morning as she nodded at you by the breakfast table. You nodded back, feeling so mature now.
Months passed and you were not blessed with a babe of your own. At first everyone was understanding and kind about it, telling you that it took time sometimes. But when Lady Aemma already had her own and you still were not pregnant, people started worrying.
You were worrying the most, terrified they would consider you useless and send you away. You were aware of the fact that you were failing at the only task you had been sent to King’s Landing for – to give Prince Valarr heirs.
“Please, my Lady, we still have time. Besides, I will not allow anyone to send you away. I swore to protect you for the rest of my life,” Valarr assured you as he held you tight when you were crying on the edge of the bed. He put his arm around you and placed a kiss upon your temple.
“My Prince, you say that now but soon they will manage to convince you to get rid of me! I am good for nothing if my womb is barren!” You sobbed, hiding your face in the crook of his neck.
Valarr awkwardly patted your back and shushed you, caressing the back of your head.
“My darling, you are to be my Queen. That means much more than carrying my heirs,” he whispered.
“If I don’t give you sons, your bloodline and legacy end with you,” you sniffled and squeezed him even tighter.
“I have a brother, I have cousins. My family’s bloodline is safe,” Valarr tried to convince you.
But he also tried to convince himself. He loved you – of course. He loved you as much as he could love someone. He had been waiting his whole life to meet his future wife and finally be happy and devoted like his parents were. But he knew that if you were truly infertile then your future would be a difficult one and full of whispers in the court.
And he truly wanted to have children with you. More than anything.
“Perhaps the problem lies in me, not you,” he added and you moved away to look into his wet mismatched eyes. “We do not know who is to be blamed.”
“They always blame the woman,” you reminded him.
“We will make them blame me. If it comes to cruel gossip and accusations, I will make sure they all believe the fault is in me,” Valarr promised, his lower lip trembling slightly.
He would do anything to protect you.
You sobbed even more now, this time out of the amount of love that you felt for this man. You cupped his cheeks and pressed your forehead to his, your tears mixing.
“I love you,” you breathed out.
“I love you,” he replied. “And nothing will change that.”
Lady Aemma visited with her babe when her husband was in King’s Landing for business. The boy was six moons old already and the cutest baby you had ever seen. His name was Steffon.
You frowned at the sight of him, though, as you sipped on your tea in Lady Jena’s chambers. Your mother-in-law was cooing to the boy, beaming with happiness and you couldn’t help but feel jealous. Your heart was stinging at the sight because you knew how much she had to wish to be a grandmother finally.
“What an adorable little boy he is,” she smiled at Lady Aemma. “You are so lucky, my dear. I am so happy for you.”
“Thank you, my Lady,” Aemma bowed her head. “Does Lady (Y/N) wish to hold the babe?” She glanced at you.
“I am not sure,” you admitted, putting the cup of tea down with a forced smile. “I lack experience with babies.”
“Nonsense, it comes naturally,” Lady Aemma insisted as she put the boy into your arms.
You held him awkwardly. He was staring at you with big eyes and you began to rock him softly as you imagined it should be done.
“See? A natural,” Lady Aemma smiled at you.
“If it was natural for me, I’d be blessed with a babe by now,” you muttered.
“Hm?” Lady Aemma asked but you were not looking at her anymore, focused on Steffon. So she laid her eyes on Lady Jena.
Your mother-in-law sighed and took Aemma by her elbow to walk her to the corner of the room.
“Lady (Y/N) and Prince Valarr struggle to conceive,” she whispered but you still could hear. You gritted your teeth but said nothing, pretending that you were too busy with the babe that you were not aware of the conversation taking place.
“Really? I thought they simply wanted to enjoy their marriage and wait,” Lady Aemma confessed.
“No,” Jena shook her head. “They have been trying since their wedding night.”
Long silence occurred.
“Oh!” Lady Aemma exclaimed and turned around to look at you. “But what can possibly be so difficult about conceiving a babe?”
Lady Jena’s eyes widened. She extended her hands as if she begged her former lady-in-waiting to drop the subject but Aemma was already approaching you.
You were looking at her with a terrified expression. You were surprised at her insolence but also the way she seemed to be so confident was quite intimidating.
“I am already expecting my second,” she caressed her small bump that was now visible under her hand. You blinked a few times in disbelief.
“Congratulations,” you whispered, handing Steffon to Lady Jena who sat next to you.
Lady Aemma took a seat in the armchair in front of the sofa you and your mother-in-law were occupying.
“I am an expert now, I guess,” Aemma chuckled. “I can give… tips,” she laid her eyes on Lady Jena as if she was waiting for her approval.
Lady Jena sighed and nodded. She knew her son and you were desperate and she hadn’t been bold enough to speak so openly with you herself. Nothing Lady Aemma would say could possibly make your situation worse anyway.
“My Lady?” Lady Aemma looked at you now and you nodded, hesitantly. You fidgeted your fingers with the hem of your sleeve nervously.
“How often do you lay with your husband, may I ask?” Lady Aemma asked. “Frequency is important with these things.”
Lady Jena blushed and you could feel your cheeks burning, too.
“N-nearly every night,” you answered.
“Good, that’s good,” Lady Aemma smiled warmly. “Well, now, many people fail to realise that what helps women to conceive is … the pinnacle.”
Lady Jena looked away immediately and you furrowed your brows.
“Pinnacle?” You asked.
“Do you experience it?” Lady Aemma asked, excitedly waiting for your answer.
“I do not know that that is,” you admitted, openly.
“It is a feeling of… Of intense pleasure,” Aemma explained patiently. “When you lay with your husband, that is.”
“Oh!” Your eyes sparkled as you nodded. “Oh, yes, I do. It feels very nice to lay with Valarr.”
Lady Aemma smiled politely.
“Hm, I’m not sure if we understand each other correctly. It is no ordinary pleasure…” She scratched the back of her head and your smile dropped. You were lost again. “A woman’s pleasure is somewhat more subtle than a man’s…” Lady Aemma was trying to look for the right words.
You were so confused. Each time you were talked to about those things, people seemed to struggle. Your mother, your septa, Lady Jena, the maester and now even Lady Aemma. You had a feeling this whole baby-making thing had to be extremely difficult after all. Perhaps that was why you were failing constantly.
“You see…” Lady Aemma took a deep breath in. “When he… inserts himself…”
“Inserts himself?” You interrupted her. “Insters himself where?”
Lady Aemma did not finish her sentence nor answer but her mouth stayed open slightly. She looked at Lady Jena and your mother-in-law looked back at her with equal astonishment. Meanwhile, you couldn’t understand those reactions and still wondered what the insertion was supposed to be about.
“My darling… When you lay with my son… What do you do, exactly?” Lady Jena asked.
“Oh!” Your cheeks burnt as you looked down to avoid her gaze. “We… We kiss a lot! We kiss like we couldn’t kiss when we were only betrothed. And we… We touch… We touch each other and it feels so nice,” you couldn’t help a loving smile even though you were embarrassed. “I enjoy being close to him. That’s more than I could ever ask for.”
Lady Jena smiled sweetly. Even though she found the situation both shocking and funny, she did not laugh. She handed the fussy babe to Lady Aemma and moved closer to you as she put her arm around your shy form to hold you closer. You looked up at her with a scared gaze and she kept on smiling.
“It warms my heart to witness how much you love my son. Truly,” she assured you and fixed your hair gently. “But darling… It is no wonder any longer why you cannot conceive a child.”
“What do you mean?” You asked, swallowing thickly. You laid your eyes on her, then on Lady Aemma.
“To conceive a babe you have to… become one,” Lady Jena explained. “The act of consummation requires Valarr to… insert himself inside of you and spill his seed,” she added, her face red as tomato now.
“H-his what?” You asked.
Goodness, that was all so odd and scary.
Lady Jena cracked a smile and put her hand on your abdomen to rub it gently.
“When a man spills himself inside of a woman, the babe grows in her womb from the seed he planted there,” she explained.
“But what does he insert and where?” You shook your head, still confused.
“The intimate parts,” Lady Aemma answered quickly. “His… you-know-what must go into your… you-know-what.”
You winced at the thought, which made the women laugh.
“It is painful for a woman but only at first,” Lady Aemma added. “Do not get discouraged. After that, you will find pleasure you never thought would be possible to experience.”
“Speaking of,” Lady Jena furrowed her brows as she laid her eyes on your face. “What was the blood on your bedsheets after the wedding night?”
“We thought it was a tradition to cut the bride… Valarr cut his arm instead… I guess we thought wrong?” You bit your lower lips and the women chuckled once more.
“What a gentleman our Prince is,” Lady Aemma commented.
“Oh, darling, no… No one cuts brides on their wedding nights. The blood should come out of your… you-know-what,” Jena used Aemma’s phrasing, “after the first… insertion. That is why it’s so important. It is proof that the marriage was consummated.”
You blinked slowly a few times. You finally understood as it clicked inside your brain.
Your marriage remained unconsummated even though you had been married for over a year now.
Now you had to figure out how to announce it to your husband.
“Wh-what?” Valarr asked, his pretty mismatched eyes widening and his hands sweating already.
“Our marriage is not consummated properly,” you repeated quietly and looked down. He was sitting by his desk after answering the letters and you were standing above him, nervously playing with the sleeves of your dress between your fingers. “That is why we can’t conceive.”
“Who told you that?” He asked, swallowing the lump forming in his throat.
“Lady Aemma and your mother agreed with her after she learnt that there was no… insertion,” you whispered.
“Insertion?” Valarr raised his brow at you.
He felt extremely stupid. As your husband, he should have been the one to show and teach you. If he had failed at that… It meant he was a pathetic excuse of a Lord Husband. Perhaps staying pure and never visiting brothels before his marriage hadn’t been that good of an idea.
Just like your septa had told you once to just lay down and take it, his father had only told him that he would know what to do. Obviously, both of you remained oblivious.
“They mentioned seed. That it must be spilled inside a woman for the child to grow,” you looked into his eyes nervously and his mouth opened slightly.
“A-ha…” He gasped. “I… I think I might know what that part means.”
“I was thinking of that, too. Is it that wet thing that…?”
“Yes,” Valarr interrupted you as he nodded, his face becoming red in an instant.
“Apparently this… fluid should go inside of me,” you sighed.
“How? Through that… insertion?” Valarr looked up and you nodded.
“You should put your… Into my…”
“I think I know now,” Valarr shushed you as he stood up, wiping his sweaty hands into his breeches. After that, he put his hands on your arms and looked deep into your eyes. “Do you want to try it?”
“I mean… We have to… to have a baby,” you explained. “But… But I am scared. They mentioned it will hurt me at first. And the blood… There will be blood,” you bit on your lower lip.
Valarr hesitated.
“How am I supposed to be doing this when I made an oath to protect you from harm? How can I be the one to bring you pain?” He wondered out loud.
“I do not know!” You nearly sobbed. It was all so scary and confusing but you also felt like a complete idiot that you two had failed at something that seemed to be simple for others.
“There must be a way around it… There must…!” Valarr leaned in to peck you on the lips as he took a step back. “I shall speak to my father. He will tell me everything. And we will try tonight. Only if you wish to,” he added, looking carefully at your facial expression and looking for any sign of disapproval.
“No, no, please do. We must,” you insisted, lifting your chin up. “We must,” you repeated.
One moon later your monthly blood did not come. Another moon later you fainted while walking up the stairs, which caused the maester to confirm the happy news.
Three moons after finding out about the insertion, your abdomen was already slightly swollen with the growing babe.
Valarr was exceptionally proud, his hand constantly rubbing your bump, his face beaming with joy and pride. You were equally happy but you felt awkward each time Lady Jena and Prince Baelor were smirking at the sight of the growing life inside your womb.
The fact that you were finally expecting and the rumours had stopped meant more than anything, though.
You were sitting in the garden and embroidering by Lady Jena’s side. You were making a blanket for the babe and she was making a tiny hat for her first grandchild.
“Can I ask something?” You inquired after biting on your bottom lip for quite a while now, waiting for the right moment.
“Darling, always. Please, always inquire. No matter what the question is about,” Lady Jena looked at you intensely.
“I was thinking… How long after the babe is born do we have to wait until we can… lay together again?” You asked, less shyly than before because over the past few weeks you had learnt how educational such conversations could be.
Lady Jena chuckled.
“Usually the maesters ask for at least six weeks of abstinence after the labour. That is if everything goes well. Why?” She answered.
“Oh… So six moons and six weeks more?” You looked displeased. “Goodness, it is a torture.”
“Wait… You… You have stopped now?” Lady Jena raised her eyebrow.
“Well, of course! We do not want to harm the babe!” You gasped, looking at her funny.
“But the maester said the babe is alright and the pregnancy is going well,” Lady Jena explained. “There is no need for abstinence,” she added.
“I see…” You hummed to yourself. “Well, I will tell Valarr to inquire from the maester about it. Just to make sure.”
“Very well then,” Lady Jena nodded with a chuckle.
“Lady Mother?” You went back to your embroidery so you weren’t looking at her anymore but you wanted to keep the conversation going.
“Yes, dear?”
“Lady Aemma was right. There is truly nothing difficult about conceiving a babe,” you admitted with a shrug of your arms.
Your mother-in-law laughed but it was a laughter filled with affection and joy.
“I’m glad, my dear. Hopefully it means I will become a grandmother to many children.”
Pairing: Baelor Targaryen x Maiden!Reader (Faith of the Seven)
Synopsis: Told through the Maiden’s eyes, a divine being sworn to preserve innocence become entangled with Prince Baelor after witnessing his rare mercy in a world of war and duty. When she breaks divine law to save his life, their belief, sacred love reshapes both their fates…
Word count: 6k words
Content: 18+ Suggestive themes, Canon divergence, no Use of Y/N for Female Reader Insert
A follow-up to The Soldier, Poet, King fanfic I wrote, told from the Maiden’s POV. I was sick in bed, fighting pneumonia, but now that I’m well, I finished it at last. I even cried a little while writing this ; o ;
“Close your eyes,” she whispered low.
This shall be my gift—
to him, and yet unto myself...
for a love that may not be...
Let it pass, and live only in remembrance.
“The maiden dances through the sky
She lives in every lover’s sigh.
Her smiles teach the birds to fly,
And gives dreams to little children”
-The Song of the Seven
The Brook
In the bare moonlight, at the hour of the wolf, when the last prayers lie spent a schemes lie sealed, and only the wakeful keep their watch…there wandered a maiden robed in trembling light. Upon mortal lips and the world lies balanced between sin and absolution, she walked. Not as flesh walks. But as something remembered. She moved unseen among the daughters of men, answering whispered pleas for virtue, for solace, for grace unbroken.
The Maiden moved where she was called, and where she was not. In every whispered vow, she lingered. In every trembling doubt, she listened. For she was not one alone, but one of Seven, and never wholly separate from them.
The Father weighed.
The Mother wept.
The Warrior burned.
The Smith endured.
The Crone watched.
And she…
She felt.
Not as mortals felt, in bursts and wounds, but as a tide that never ceased. For such was her charge: to guard what fragile innocence the world so carelessly profanes.
Men came and went as storms upon a field…taking, breaking, leaving naught but ruin in their passing. Maidens knelt to her with tear-stained prayers: for love betrayed, for vows undone, for lovers lost to war’s unyielding maw. Ever the same lament, yet never did she wholly despair. For still she sought beauty… in valor, in mercy, and in innocence held fast as shield against the dark.
She passed unseen among the daughters of men, gathering their prayers as one gathers fallen petals…each fragile, each already fading. Broken vows. Stolen innocence. Love unreturned, or worst forgotten.
Men, she had learned, were creatures of taking.
And yet…not all.
There was one.
A prince. Dragon-blooded, yet tempered not in fire alone, but in conscience.
She had seen him beneath the sun. Where men performed themselves in steel and splendor. Where the Warrior’s gaze burned brightest. She beheld him once, Prince Baelor, at the wedding tourney of his aunt, Daenerys. That day, she had turned her ear to the bride’s silent pleas, torn between duty of marrying the Prince of Dorne and a forbidden love. The realm bent toward union, yet beneath it stirred defiance: Daemon, wrathful and unyielding, his heart laid bare in steel, willing to risk it all for Daenerys.
He fought like a tempest unchained.
But Baelor—Baelor brought the storm to heel.
She had not meant to linger upon him. He was but one thread among many, one life among countless that would rise and fall beneath the Father’s judgment. And yet, when he rode, it was not wrath that guided his hand. It was restraint. When he struck, it was not hunger that followed. But ending.
Lance met lance in thunderous accord, till in the final tilt the fury broke. The bastard prince was cast down, struck hard and humbled, his rage scattered like splintered wood upon the ground. Not for glory did Baelor ride, but to preserve what sanctity the day yet held, to shield the innocent from the ruin of another man’s grief.
The Warrior had watched him.
The Father had weighed him.
Even the Crone had stilled her turning gaze.
And she…
She had wondered.
What is this thing that does not take, when it may?
In that moment, she had known this one was different.
Rare as starlight at dawn.
And though she was but a spirit…unseen, untouched…something within her stirred. A longing most improper for one such as she. To be known. To know.
Yet she stilled her heart.
I am no maiden to be chosen, she thought, but one to whom prayers are given.
Better to feel nothing…than to break as those she pitied.
Still, the memory of him lingered.
And so, beneath a warm summer night, she turned among the fireflies…each a fleeting star caught in mortal air. The fireflies gathered, as they always did, drawn her not to her form, but to what lay beneath it. For a moment, they circled her in quiet orbit…Seven light…always, there were seven.
A breath.
A sound.
Now, beneath gentler light, she let herself take shape.
Not wholly. Never wholly.
She turned among them, her motion less a dance than a drifting, like a thought not yet spoken. And from her lips came song, though she had never learned it, and never needed to. Her spirit brimmed too full, she sang of valor, of longing, of a prince who made the world seem briefly kinder.
Of Baelor Breakspear.
A prince of breaking lances.
A man who chose less when given more,
Curious. How curious.
“Why should you linger?” murmured the Crone, somewhere behind her thoughts.
“Why should you care?” pressed the Father, soft but unyielding,
“Why should you not?” whispered something that might have been her own voice.
And so she sang.
So lost was she in song that marked not his coming —-until the earth betrayed him.
A misstep. A fall.
The world narrowed.
Steel found her hand, not from her, but from memory. The Warrior’s echo, faint but present.
“Who goes there?”
“A soldier,” came the answer, rising. “and a clumsy one.”
“Show yourself, ser, else you shall taste a sharper greeting.”
“Believe me, my lady, of the two, I am likelier to end this quarrel.”
And when he stepped forth into the moon’s pale grace
Her breath faltered.
Not a soldier.
The prince himself.
When he stepped into the light, she felt it then.
Not divinity.
But gravity.
For the first time in all her quiet watching, she was seen.
Not as whisper, nor presence, nor prayer but seen.
As though, for the first time, something in the world pulled her instead the other way around. And she who had never needed to steady herself…felt something like imbalance. She, who had watched the hearts of countless souls, found her own laid bare in that fleeting instant.
“Forgive me, my prince…I knew not who walked at such an hour.”
She would not have said it. She should not have known him.
But she did.
She always did.
“Nor I, fair lady, why one so gently bred walks unguarded in the dark.”
She dared not speak her truth. Yet truth, ever stubborn, slipped through in softer guise.
“I sought but breath and quiet. This brook soothes more than counsel halls. All this talk of war…it wearies me. Green boys thirst for renown, and yet…” her voice fell, “...it is not glory they remember at the end, but gentleness….all for an heirloom sword placed in princely hands.”
When he answered, ah, how it struck her.
Not pride. Not hunger.
But burden.
As he spoke, she listened, and something unfamiliar stirred.
Not the endless tide of mortal longing she had known since time’s first breath.
This was…
Singular.
Bound.
Finite.
His words did not echo. They did not multiply.
They stayed.
With her.
She listened.
Not as goddess.
But as woman.
Here stood no creature of empty song, but one who bore the very virtues she was sworn to keep alive. Honor without cruelty. Duty without blindness.
What a wondrous thing, she thought.
“A bitter charge,” she said softly. “Must it not gall you… to fight in your father’s name?”
And when he answered, when he spoke of truth above blood, of conscience above crown…something within her yielded. This was no fleeting spark. This was flame that might endure.
When he spoke of mercy,
of the lives weighed upon a single choice,
of sons and brothers, and lovers he would never wish to slay.
It did not ripple outward into the world. It settled.
Here.
And when he spoke of the lives he would not take…
She felt, for the first time, the shape of a choice that could not be undone.
“How strange,” she thought, though she did not say it. “To live where every act is final.”
And how heavy that must be. And how… beautiful.
Her heart, though divine, knew then a mortal ache.
Not for glory.
But for him.
The night shifted. An owl’s call cleaved the silence—The Crone’s quiet summons. Time, ever watchful, drew its veil. She turned her gaze skyward, lips parting in silent answer.
I know… I must go.
“My prince, I must away. Forgive my boldness. My thoughts run freer that my caution.”
“No, my lady. Your words were dearly given…and dearly taken.”
That undid her more than any blade.
“I did but amuse myself. I thought not the subject of my song would walk forth to hear it.”
She moved to pass, but he stayed her.
A hand.
A touch. And then—
A kiss.
Fire.
Not of flame. But of feeling long denied.
For one impossible instant
The Father did not judge.
The Warrior did not burn.
The Crone did not turn her gaze forward.
All stilled.
And she felt…not everything.
But one thing,
Warmth.
Sharp. Immediate. Terrible in its clarity.
Her breath caught, not from surprise, but from limitation.
She could not feel this everywhere.
Only here.
Only now.
Only because of him.
And that…
That frightened her more than any prayer she had ever heard.
“You have eased my troubled mind,” he said. “I would see you again.”
Again.
Such a small word.
Such a mortal word.
It implied time. Waiting. Wanting.
Such perilous hope.
The Crone stirred.
The Father weighed.
The Mother, distant, grieved for something not yet lost.
And she…
She chose
Just a little.
Fate had already begun its weaving.
“Then return, my prince,” she said softly, “I shall pray the Seven guide you through the storm of war…”
Her hand lingered in his, treacherous in their reluctance.
Not because she forgot to withdraw it—
But because she wished, for the briefest treason—
To know how it felt.
To hesitate.
“And…that they show you mercy.”
======================================
The Hastilude
Since the war, the Seven had been called upon in many guises.
The Father, to weigh justice, that the rightful might find his seat upon the Iron Throne.
The Mother, to cradle the wounded, to comfort the orphaned, to fill the cold halls with bread and warmth.
The Warrior, to lend strength where steel was drawn.
The Smith, to forge and shield, that even the frail might stand in battle.
The Crone, to grant wisdom, that men might yet discern their path in a broken world.
And the Stranger…
That it might, at last, be stayed.
But the Maiden…
She remained among those who endured. A gentle keeper of hope, of innocence unbroken, she walked where prayers were whispered still: among septas in their vigils, among maidens in quiet homes, among children who yet believed in spring beyond ruin.
The war did end.
She saw it as one might see the turning of a tide.
Baelor rode with his host from one horizon, and Maekar from the other. Two brothers drawing the realm back into itself. It felt, in that moment, like a herald’s cry made flesh: it is done.
And then came Bloodraven. Arrows fell like rain.
Daemon and his sons were struck drown, and the field was made red with ending.
She did not turn away.
War demanded witness, and she, above all, must be fair.
Yet within her, in some small and secret place, there lived a single fragile wish:
Let him live.
And he did.
She felt it before she saw it. The quiet easing of breath. The loosening of dread. He rode for home with a heart made heavy by victory, his gaze shadowed not with triumph, but with remembrance. He mourned them all. Even those who had stood against him.
Eight moons passed.
The realm rose slowly, like a child long neglected, learning again to stand. From ruin came order. From grief, a fragile kind of pride. A good king was praised, and a just Hand beside him. Fields were tilled. Bread was baked. Life, stubborn and unyielding, endured.
And from afar, the Maiden watched.
She smiled, at times, to see what he became.
Yet sometimes a thought would trouble her:
Did he remember?
Surely not. She had been but a moment, a passing thread in the long weaving of a prince’s life.
Then came the feast, held for the birth of Maekar’s son, Daeron, named for the good king. The great and lesser houses gathered, clothed in splendor, eager to forget the taste of war in wine and song.
The young sought her favor, whispering prayers for love, for fortune, for gentle matches.
And she granted what she could.
Yet a thought, bright and dangerous, stirred within her:
May I not, just once, be granted the same?
The Crone would have warned her.
The Mother, perhaps, would have understood.
So she yielded.
Just once.
She withdrew to the godswood. There, beneath ancient boughs, she let her voice rise, not in praise as minstrels made it, all grandeur and gilded falsehood, but in truth.
She sang what she had seen.
What she had known.
What she had come, despite all reason, to love.
And she thought herself unheard.
“Wake me, my lady,” came a voice behind her, soft and breathless, “for if this be a dream, I would know when I must mourn its passing.”
She turned.
Baelor stood before her, winded from haste, his gaze fixed as though afraid she might vanish between one heartbeat and the next.
“My prince—”
“Yes,” he said gently, stepping nearer, “it is I. Led by a voice I could not mistake, though all the world conspired to drown it.”
They spoke. Lightly, at first.
As though neither dared name the weight beneath their words.
He spoke of a soldier—-
She answered as though she did not know him.
Yet in every turn of phrase, they circled the truth.
For all the times she had felt his presence in the press of a battle, she knew the measure of each stroke.
When it should fall true, and when it should turn aside. In some small, guarded chamber of her mind, she had never wished it would not land….that fate might stay its hand, and grant her but one meeting more.
The thought did flood her then, and summon forth a smile most fond, unguarded, and bright with quiet grace.
“He lives,” said she, soft as a prayer. “The gods, in mercy, saw fit to return him.”
“Then I must thank them,” he murmured.
“You stand before gods not your own,” he said.
“I am,” she answered. I am one of them.
“yet I think the world too wide for any one voice…or any face of it. There are spirits in all living things, I would have them know they are not forgotten.”
She said it lightly, but something in the air stilled, as though the trees themselves listened.
“Then you are kinder than most rulers I have known,” said he.
“And you?” she asked. “Are you kinder now, my prince...or only more careful?”
“Careful enough,” he said, “to know the difference.”
The night deepened around them, soft with bloom and silvered light.
“It is good to see you again, my prince." The ache to say those words has finally eased her heart.
“And I you,” said he, and it made her heart feel warm of all sorts.
He held forth his hand, and never before had such an offering been made to her. A fleeting thought did stir, what judgement the Seven might cast upon so strange a touch…yet she did drown it swift and silent.
And then she placed her hand in his, and his grasp about it felt as the warm embrace of morning, breaking gentle after a bitter dawn.
She had known the rugged press of his palm, battle worn were his hands, and longed to kiss away their harshness…to restore them unto gentler grace. Yet, ah how tenderly did he cradle hers. And as her eyes did linger upon his face, she marked a graze upon his cheek.
“You are marked.” she murmured, her fingers brushing the faint scar upon his cheek.
“A small remembrance.”
“War leaves little that is small,” she replied.
“Then let this be counted among its mercies,” he said, smiling fondly.
They laughed, then soft, unguarded, as though the world beyond the trees had no claim upon them. And in that laughter, something shifted. Something neither could name, yet neither could deny. When his hand seeked her again, with the loving brush of his thumb, she felt his willingness to cross oceans to stand beside her.
“Tell me your name,” he said at last, quieter now, “I would not lose you again to silence.”
She hesitated.
To be known…or to remain as she was: untouchable, unseen, safe.
Yet nowhere in all the realms did she wish more to remain than here.
With him. A touch of heaven for him, and for her more than anything.
Then laughed she, like unto the spring in bloom, and moved as summer leaves upon a gentle breeze, light and unencumbered, with a merry gleam within her easy eyes. A modest twirl did bear her just beyond his reach, as though she took delight in being near yet not attained. She turned the tide of their discourse, for well she knew it would but break her heart to watch this fair and budding feeling unravel before them both. And so she asked the poet to spare her verses and bid her time still.
“Must I perform at your bidding?” he said at last, recovering. “And be commanded so boldly? I ought to have you seized for such insolence.” he jested.
“Oh how noble,” she laughed and he could not help but join her. Oh their laughs, it sounded like a million little stars twinkling.
“Come, my prince. Spare a few pretty words, if any be true to your spirit.”
Please, for it might be the last time I might see you…
And so he stilled. And drew courage from within
As if his life depended on it, as her lady commands him.
He spoke with such earnest and unashamed manner, being seen for who he was, not by titles, and for the grace he was given, for the chance to see her once more.
And she too never had felt more seen, appreciated, and yearned for. Of feelings growing out of love? Oh. Of love that cannot be. For she was a god, and he was a mortal. Her tears fought her back, and trickled upon her somber cheek.
“Forgive me,” he said softly, stepping nearer. “I had hoped for smiles, not sorrow.”
“It is no sorrow,” she answered, her voice warm despite the trembling. “But something…growing.”
It was all she can tell him. She smiled then. Soft, unguarded.
“As payment for such words, my prince, I would offer you a token.”
“A token?” he said lightly, though his voice betrayed him. “What treasure might suffice for one so burdened with titles?”
“Close your eyes.” she whispered low.
This shall be my gift.
To him, and yet unto myself.
For a love that may not be.
Let this pass, and live only in remembrance.
And when he did—
She kissed him.
Lightly at first, as though the moment itself might break beneath too much truth.
But it did not break. It deepened. Careful, searching—not conquest, but recognition.
When they parted, it was only for breath.
“I was lost in it,” she said, wonder trembling through her voice.
“It is I who must beg pardon,” he answered, unsteady. “For answering boldness with more of the same.” They laughed again, softer now. Changed.
And then…from the hall beyond faint yet unmistakable, rose the same ill-wrought song he had so despised.
The hammer smashed the bastard with giant veiny—-Host of Dornish spearman!
Baelor groaned, closing his eyes. “Of all the moments to be remembered, must it be that one?”
She laughed again, brighted now. “Take care, my prince. The realm already makes you legend.”
“A poor one, if sung so badly.”
“Then you must give them better verses.”
He looked upon her…in earnest did he behold her. His gaze, his very eyes, and the quiet hold he kept upon her seemed to stay the march of time itself.
Scarce had the echo of that wretched song faded from the air when another voice broke the night, clear, well-known, and far less sufferable in its insistence. His dearest brother called out for him, seeking his presence amidst the godswood. The world returning.
“Stay,” he said, taking her hands once more. “I would have you known–not as some passing dream, but as you are.”
Her smile faltered. “There are truths,” she said gently,”that fare better in quiet places.”
“Then let me be the judge of that,” he replied, smiling gently. “I would not have you fade again into some dream I must doubt come morning.”
Her lips parted…
She almost told him.
Almost.
The moment hung, fragile as spun glass.
“My prince…” she began.
And stopped.
Her gaze did soften then. And whatsoever truth had stirred therein sank once more beneath the surface. A tender strife.
Oh that I might be seen, her spirit cried, and yet remain unseen, to be held in truth, yet never wholly known.
She would not steal from him the fullness of his days. She would have him live—live richly, brightly—take joy, take love, and raise fair children who should bear his likeness, his mismatched eyes and his bearing. Such was the quiet mercy she chose, though it tore at her breast.
For the realm had need of good men such as he—steadfast, gentle, and true—and she would not be the shadow that dims worthy a light.
Love, she knew, could unmake as surely as it could bless.
I must not wound his heart anew, this must be done.
“Go,” she said at last. “I shall remain.”
He believed her.
With one last kiss, he turned—and was gone.
And when he returned—-
There was nothing.
No trace. No sign.
Only silence beneath the pale tree.
The wind stirred, soft as a farewell.
And there, upon the carved face of the weirwood—
A single firefly glowed. It lingered…
Then drifted toward him, slow and gentle, until it came to rest upon his shoulder.
Baelor did not move.
His eyes fixed upon it, wide with something he dared not name.
Then it flew. Gone.
He stood very still.
And at last—
A single tear fell.
======================================
The Tourney
She heard them before she came.
Not with ears, as mortals do, but in the quiet turning of devotion. In whispered hopes tied with ribbon and breath. In soft, trembling prayers laid at unseen feet.
Gwyn of Ashford. A maiden crowned in bloom and expectation. They called for love. For beauty. For favor. And so she came. Not as a queen, nor as judge, but as a blessing.
She moved unseen among garlands and laughter, her presence no heavier than sunlight upon water. Where Gwyn walked, the air softened. Where she smiled, courage found root. A gentle hand, unseen, guiding the tilt of a chin, the grace of a word.
This was her place. This was what she was.
Until—
He came.
Baelor.
Not in prayer. Not in plea. Not seeking her.
And still—she knew him.
Her stillness broke.
Not outwardly, no mortal eye marked the change, but within, where no change had ever been before.
A remembering.
Not of thought… but of feeling.
Her gaze found him across the tourney grounds. And for the first time since her making, something in her faltered.
He lives.
Not wonder. Not yet.
Something closer to trembling.
Then came cruelty.
Swift. Thoughtless. Bright with arrogance.
Aerion Targaryen moved as fire does, all consuming, not caring what it left behind. A scream. A girl’s finger, broken.
The Maiden stepped forward and was stilled.
Not by force. By presence.
The Father’s gaze.
The Crone’s knowing.
Do not.
Not common. Not unkind.
But law.
She stilled.
And watched.
Then a hedge knight stepped where she could not.
Again—choice.
Again—cost.
And something within her, long untouched, bent toward him in quiet approval.
Men who chose.
Men who could fall—and did not.
Duncan, rough-handed, uncertain, carrying truth like a burden too heavy for his years. He asked for justice—not with grace, but with need.
And Baelor answered.
She watched that closely.
Not the words, but the choice.
Recognition stirred in her again, not of face, but of soul. The same man who had stood at the brook. The same quiet defiance of ease, the same turning toward what was right, though it cost him.
He remembers, she thought.
Not her.
But what she had shown him.
And that was enough to wound her.
When Baelor sought Duncan, she lingered near.
So near. Closer than breath. She could have spoken to them.
A word. A whisper. A nudge of knowing.
A nearby brook offered him solace in pondering what must needs be done, to fight against kin, or to fight for what is right.
The Crone turned her gaze.
Trust.
So she did not.
And for the first time…it hurt to obey…
The trial was called. Seven stood. And Seven watched. Not as one—but as many. She stood among them.
Whole.
Untouched.
Unmoved—until him.
Steel rang. Bone answered.
Men broke beneath force and will—and she remained as she had always been: unshaken, unmarked.
Until Baelor bled.
Then—something tore.
Not flesh. Not form.
Something deeper.
Every blow he took echoed where no blow had ever reached.
And when the mace fell—
When brother struck brother—
She gasped.
A sound not meant for her.
Small. Broken.
No.
She moved.
Too fast. Too far.
And the Stranger stood before her.
The stranger did not bar her with hand, but with certainty. “He is mine.”
“No,” she said.
The word came raw. Unshaped.
The Warrior did not turn.
The Smith did not speak.
The Mother wept—but did not move.
The Crone watched.
The Father…considered.
“I beg you,” she said.
Not as goddess. Not as aspect.
But as something lesser.
Something learning how to kneel.
Silence held.
Then—
A yielding. Not victory. Not mercy.
Allowance.
“Until dawn.”
They laid him out in a noble bed. Washed and still. Mourned in waiting.
Between fire and earth.
Between king and god.
Between ending and decree.
And in that narrow space…She came.
He was broken.
Even in stillness, the wound spoke. Bruise beneath skin. Blood beneath bandage. The quiet violence of what had been done. She touched him—and trembled. Not from fear. From knowing.
This could end.
This should end.
Her hands hovered, then pressed—light as prayer.
“Mother,” She whispered, voice unsteady, “lend me mercy.”
“Crone…show me what must be done.”
No answer came.
A bramble lay within her hand, poised to be wrought into a circlet, each thorn and tendril bent toward that should bespeak the Seven. Her will was steel beneath the silk, unyielding, resolute, bent wholly to her prince, and yet, in truth, to him.
All this she bore for that man, whom the realm had scarcely yet beheld in full measure. For in him there burnt a promise not lightly spent, and she, though set apart, would see it flourish, though it cost her every hidden longing.
So she chose.
It was not power.
Not as the others wielded it.
It was giving.
Piece by piece.
Moment by moment.
Something of her…undone…
Something of him…restored…
She did not know when it was enough.
Only that she could not stop.
Until—
Breath.
When he stirred, she broke. Not into light. Into tears.
“Spare him,” she whispered—not to gods now, but to whatever still listened.
“Spare him.”
And when he spoke—
She became something new entirely.
He spoke—and the world altered. Not in sound. In meaning.
She had been called before. Praised. Named. Worshipped in fragments of understanding. But never…seen.
“You’re alive.”
Such simple words. Such mortal relief.
And something within her answered—not as goddess, but as woman newly made.
He reached for her. Slowly. As though she might vanish if he moved too quickly.
She did not withdraw. She could not.
Not when something in her—unformed, unnamed—leaned toward him in answer.
“Do not leave me again.”
Again.
The word struck deeper than any prayer.
He remembers.
Not her face.
Not her name. But the absence she left behind.
“I cannot stay,” she said.
And this time, it was not truth alone.
It was cost.
When he woke again, the night had deepened. So had she.
Time did not pass for her as it did for him.
But now—now she felt it.
Each moment thinning.
Each breath…borrowed.
He looked at her as one looks upon something already half-lost.
“Tell me your name.”
She almost did.
The impulse rose—sharp, sudden, dangerous.
To be known
To be called.
To belong to something beyond prayer.
She shook her head.
Because if she spoke it—she feared she might never return to what she had been.
“You are no courtly maid,” he said softly.
His gaze did not waver.
“You come as prayer comes…unseen…and all at once.”
She stilled. There it was.
Not knowledge. Not yet.
But nearness.
He did not understand her.
But he had begun to understand the shape of her.
And that… frightened her more than the Stranger ever had.
“Then be mine.”
The words came fragile and fierce all at once
“And I shall give the realm a queen worthy of it.”
A mortal promise.
Earnest.
Impossible.
And for the first time—
She felt sorrow not as observation…but as wound.
“The gods would forbid it.”
“Then why are you here?”
Because I chose you. Because I broke.
Because I wanted—
She swallowed the truth.
“Because I asked to be.”
“I pleaded with time,” she continued, quieter now. “For this moment.”
“And what price?”
Everything.
Nothing.
Something still unfolding…
She lowered her gaze.
Not in shame.
In uncertainty.
A thing she had never known before him.
He did not press.
And in that mercy—she loved him.
When he drew her close, it was not possession.
It was invitation.
“Let me love you,” he said, voice rough with pain and something brighter beneath it. “If only for this night. Let the dark be our witness…and no god judge us.”
At that, she stilled. Something flickered across her face…like candle light shaken by breath. Something in the air shifted, subtle, but certain. As though the world itself had drawn breath.
“No god…” she echoed, softer. Not in defiance…but in wonder.
Then she closed her eyes.
Then whispered…
”Then I am yours.”
“And I, yours.”
And she, who had never been asked, answered.
At first, she did not understand what passed between them.
Touch, to her, had always been distant.
Wind through leaves. Light upon water.
The brush of prayer against something unseen.
But this—
This was weight.
Warmth.
Nearness that did not fade.
She trembled.
Not from fear.
From too much.
Every place his hands found her became suddenly known.
As though her form, once only shape, now filled with meaning.
“Am I—” she faltered, the question breaking before it formed.
He stilled at once.
“You are,” he said gently, though she had not finished.
Always answering.
Never taking.
She followed him then.
Not guided—but learning.
As though each motion revealed something newly possible.
Where he was careful, she grew certain.
Where he hesitated, she answered.
Not as mortal woman taught by time—
But as something discovering what it means to become one.
Their breaths met.
Not taken. Shared.
And in that sharing, something passed between them that neither god nor man had named.
Not hunger. Not innocence lost.
But innocence given.
Freely.
Knowingly.
Once.
Time bent around them. Or perhaps—she simply began to feel its passing.
Each moment sharper than the last. Each touch more fleeting.
As though the world itself had grown aware of what it would soon reclaim.
When stillness came, she lay against him.
Listening. Not idly.
But with quiet urgency.
His heart.
Unsteady.
Mortal.
Finite.
“I would give my crown,” he whispered, voice worn thin, “to keep you.”
Her hand stilled over his chest.
“You cannot.”
“I would.”
“I know.”
And she did.
That was what made it unbearable.
And sleep took him, she felt it.
The failing. Not yet death…but its nearness.
The slow unmaking already begun.
“No,” she whispered.
This time—not to him.
To everything.
She bowed her head. And prayed.
Not as a goddess.
But as supplicant.
“Let him live.”
Silence.
“I will leave him,” she said. “I will not come again. I will not touch what ist not mine to touch.”
Still silence.
Her voice broke.
“Take from me what must be taken—but let him live.”
And somewhere—something answered.
Not in words.
In balance.
When he woke—whole—she was already gone.
But not far.
Never far.
She watched as he searched.
As he spoke her into doubt before others.
As he tried, and failed, to make them understand what cannot be held in mortal certainty.
And still—he did not forget.
It began softly. As such things often do. A cough in the city. A fever in the alleys. A quiet closing of doors that did not open again.
No trumpet marked its coming. No omen named it. The Great Spring Sickness.
And yet—she felt it.
Not as mortals did, in flesh and failing breath—but as a shift. A rebalancing. A scale long tilted…correcting.
She stood above King’s Landing. Unseen among its towers, and listened. Not to prayer. To absence.
Where voices should have risen, there came only stillness. Where candles should have burned, there was wax left cold and untouched.
And beneath it all—the Stranger moved.
The Stranger did not rage. Did not hunger.
He gathered.
Quietly. Endlessly.
As he always had.
As he always would.
She knew it then. Not in thought. In certainty.
This was not cruelty.
This was answer.
“One life,” said a voice behind her.
The Crone.
She did not turn.
“One life, held past its hour…must be answered.”
Her hands trembled. Not with doubt. With recognition.
“I did not take them,” she said.
“No,” the Crone agreed. “But you asked.”
“And I was answered.”
“And so,” said the Crone gently, “must the world be.”
Below, the city broke. Septas fell at their altars, hands still folded in prayer. Children burned with fever, their cries fading into silence. Mothers held bodies that would not wake.
And among them—
Him.
Baelor wept.
Not as king. Not as symbol.
As father.
She came to him. Or as close as she could.
Closer than wind. Closer than memory.
And still…he did not feel her.
“Why?” he asked the empty air.
His voice did not rage. That would have been easier.
It broke.
“I gave what was asked. I ruled as I must. I kept faith.”
His hands clenched.
Then opened.
Powerless.
“Is this the cost of living?”
She knelt before him. Though he could not see. Though he could not know.
“I am here,” she whispered.
“I am here.”
But her voice did not reach him.
Not anymore.
That had been the price she named.
Jena wept beside him. A mother with empty arms. And Baelor….Baelor did not curse the gods. That, more than anything, undid her.
His grief did not turn to cruelty. Did not harden into wrath. It opened. Wider. Softer. As though loss had carved in him a space large enough to hold the suffering of others.
And she understood. Too late to undo it. Perfectly in its design.
He lived.
And so–-others did not.
Not by his will. Not by hers alone.
But because the world does not bend without breaking elsewhere.
“I would have borne it,” she whispered, unseen. “All of it. If only it had been mine to take.”
But she was not the Mother. Nor the Stanger.
She was only—
The one who chose.
And so she watched. And wept.
And learned the shape of consequence.
Years had worn him. Not into weakness, but into quiet. The kind that comes when a man has outlived too much of what he loved.
The Crone came to her once more.
Not unkind. Never unkind.
“It is time.”
This time—she did not beg.
She only asked.
Once.
And the answer came—
Not as resistance.
But as opening.
So she went. To the godswood.
To the place where memory had taken root.
He came as she knew he would.
Drawn not by command…but by something older than reason
He walked slower now.
Each step measured. Each breath known.
And yet—
When he saw her—
He stopped as though struck by something beyond pain.
“Will you leave me again?”
His voice broke on the question.
Not as king.
As the man who had once woken to emptiness and never ceased remembering it.
She smiled.
And this time—
There was no sorrow in it.
Only truth.
“No.”
He did not run to her.
Did not fall.
Did not question.
He came to her as one approached something long awaited and finally understood.
“I have known you,” he said, voice low, unsteady, “all my life since.”
Not certainty. Not proof.
But something deeper.
“I have looked for you in every kindness I could not name.”
“I have come to bring you home,” she said.
He exhaled. Not in fear, not in grief. But in release.
“To them?” he asked.
“To all you have lost.”
She paused.
Then softer—
“And to me.”
She reached for him as he took her hand. It was warm. It was real. And for the first time he understood why it had always felt so certain. As though all mercy he had ever known had once passed through it.
And now—he felt it.
Not as flesh. Not as heat.
But as recognition fulfilled.
“My maiden fair,” he whispered.
And for the first time…she did not turn away from the name.
“My king,” she answered.
Behind him, the world remained. Before him, something gentler. Not darkness. Not ending. But a place where nothing was taken. Only kept.
And together…he went.
He laughed then. Soft. Worn.
Almost disbelieving.
“I wondered,” he said, “if I had dreamed of you.”
“You did,” she answered. “And you did not.”
His hand found hers.
No tremor now.
No hesitation.
“I would have followed you then,” he said.
“I know.”
“I would follow you now.”
“I know.”
And this time, there was no cost left to name.
The world did not shatter.
Did not mourn.
Did not mark the moment with storm or flame.
A king died.
So softly, none might mark the hour. Within the quiet of the woods he passed as though the earth itself had hushed to keep his rest.
They found him laid upon a bed of grass, as one but newly fallen into gentle sleep…
Peace upon his brow, and his lips a smile so warm, so kindly set, it grieved the heart to wake him.
But something else…long divided was made whole…
And where head fallen—there came, in time, a small and quiet blooming.
summary: you were meant for valarr targaryen. his father had approved the match himself. neither of these facts stopped baelor breakspear from looking at you the way he did, and you were running out of reasons to look away. (10k)
pairing: baelor targaryen x fem!reader
content: brief side of valarr targaryen x reader, lannister!reader, age gap (reader is adult, baelor is older ig), arranged marriage, slow burn, angst, so much yearning, protective!baelor, reader has never been enough for anyone until now, father who means well and says the worst things, baelor is down bad, allusions to smut 18+ (MDNI): hand kink (you'll know when you get there), wedding night, baelor asks permission like a gentleman and then doesn't hold back, fade to black.
The gods had a particular sense of humour, Baelor though, in giving him everything he was supposed to want and then you walking through his gates.
He had approved the match himself, between you and Valarr, which was, he would come to understand, the single most foolish thing he had ever done. Of course it wasn’t official yet, but why else would Lancel Lannister bring his daughter to King’s Landing?
Lancel had said it plainly enough in the small council chamber three weeks prior, with the particular straightforwardness of a man who has run out of patience “my daughter is of age, Your Grace, and I would see her settled well, and there is no finer match in the Seven Kingdoms than your son,” and the council had agreed, Baelor had agreed, and the whole thing had been arranged with smooth efficiency.
King Daeron II's nameday celebration had been Baelor's own suggestion as convenient cover for the visit. A natural occasion for the Lannisters to travel to the capital, he'd said, and you had apparently been wanting silks that weren't available back home, it would also give Valarr and you time to find footing without the weight of a formal betrothal negotiation hanging over every interaction.
The Lannister procession came through the gates of the Red Keep at midday, when the autumn sun was still high enough to be warm without being punishing, and Baelor was already in the courtyard to receive them– standing at the foot of the keep's great steps with two of his household knights behind him and Lord Tarly at his elbow, saying something about trade routes that Baelor was not listening to.
He could not have said, afterward, why he had come down himself rather than sending a steward. It was not customary, strictly speaking, for the Prince of Dragonstone to stand in the courtyard like a man waiting for something. He had told himself it was a matter of courtesy.
The horses came through first, then the outriders, then the luggage carts, and then the carriage– crimson-lacquered, the Lannister lion picked out in gold on the door, and Baelor watched a groom move to open it and watched Lord Lancel step down first, broad and unhurried, already scanning the courtyard. Then a figure behind him, partly obscured, one hand catching the carriage door for balance as you stepped down, and then the hand let go and you straightened, and Baelor–
Baelor stopped thinking about trade routes.
He was not certain how long he stood there before he remembered he was supposed to be doing something. You were looking at the keep, at the towers of it, with the unhurried attention of someone who has decided to take a place in properly before saying anything about it, and there was something in it, in the simple fact of you standing in his courtyard looking at his home like it was worth looking at, that struck him somewhere in the chest with a precision he had not been braced for.
You were not looking at him. Most people, upon arriving in the courtyard of the Red Keep to be received by the Prince of Dragonstone, looked immediately at the Prince of Dragonstone. It was a reliable quality in people, the instinct to locate the most important person in a space and orient toward them.
Though you were looking at the towers.
And then, as if you had simply finished with them, your gaze came down and found him, and Baelor, who had stood in front of armies without flinching, who had presided over councils that decided the fates of thousands, who had buried his wife and raised two sons and not been rattled by anything in longer than he could remember– felt something move through him that he could not name and did not try to.
"—wouldn't you say, Your Grace?" Tarly was saying.
"Mm," Baelor said, which covered most things, and walked forward to meet Lord Lancel.
The man clasped his hand with both of his, warm and firm, the grip of someone genuinely pleased to be here. "Your Grace," Lancel said, with the easy warmth of a man whose plans were going according to schedule. "You're too generous, as always." He glanced around the courtyard briefly. "King Daeron will be well celebrated. The city seems in fine spirits for it."
"It does," Baelor agreed, pleasantly. "His Grace will be glad you've come, my lord. He asks after you." He said it to Lancel's face the way a man was supposed to, and not to the figure just behind Lancel's shoulder, who had not moved and had not spoken.
He was extremely aware of not looking at you.
And then Lancel shifted, stepping slightly aside with the particular ease of a man about to make an introduction he has been looking forward to, and Baelor looked, because there was nothing else to do, because the alternative was to visibly avoid looking, which was worse, and you were there.
He extended his hand and said, "It is a pleasure to finally meet you, my lady…" and stopped, because he found, absurdly, that he wanted to hear your name from you rather than say the version he'd read in correspondence, which had always felt like a different thing from the real one.
You looked at him with the same look you'd given the towers and said your name, and offered your hand, Baelor took it and thought, with a clarity that was almost violent in its precision: I have made a terrible mistake.
Your name sat on his tongue like it had always been there. Like it belonged. He filed that away with considerable force, straightened and said pleasantly, "We hope King's Landing treats you well, my lady. I understand there are silks here you've been after?"
Something shifted in your expression, brief, contained, the ghost of something wry moving across your face before being put away. "There are, Your Grace," you said. "Though I suspect my father has also brought me here for reasons that have considerably less to do with silk."
Beside you, Lancel made a sound in his throat that wasn't quite anything, and Baelor looked at the man and found him studying the middle distance with the focused interest of someone who had absolutely heard what was just said, and Baelor looked back at you and felt the corner of his mouth move before he'd decided to let it. "Perceptive," he said.
"Occasionally," you said, and the word had a lightness to it, almost a warmth, and you held his gaze for just a beat longer than was strictly necessary before you looked away toward the keep, and Baelor looked away toward Lancel, and that was the first thirty seconds, and he was already in considerable trouble.
It had not been long before Valarr eventually came down. Baelor still in conversation with Lancel, still being perfectly composed about all of it, when the doors of the keep opened behind him and Valarr came down the steps into the courtyard with the easy, unhurried confidence of someone who had been told guests had arrived and saw absolutely no reason not to come and find them immediately.
He was, Baelor thought, with the particular mixture of pride and something considerably less straightforward, very like his mother in that way. Jena had never waited for things to come to her either.
"My lord," Valarr said, extending his hand to Lancel with the bright warmth he gave most people on first meeting, the smile of a young man who genuinely liked people and wanted them to know it. "I've been looking forward to your visit." And then his gaze moved easily, the way it always did, searching out the most interesting thing in the space, and found you, and something in his expression shifted into the particular surprised pleasure of a man who had been given something better than he expected. "And you must be–"
"His daughter," you said, with a faint lift at the corner of your mouth. "Yes."
Valarr blinked. Then laughed, a real one, caught off guard by it, and said, "I was going to say my lady, but yes, that too." He took your hand and bowed over it with a gallantry that was entirely genuine and only slightly showing off, and when he straightened he was already tilting his head with that look he got when something had caught his interest and he intended to find out more about it.
Baelor watched his son look at you with the slow dawning delight of someone who had been expecting a pleasant obligation and found something else entirely, and felt something move through his chest that he could not call by its right name in a courtyard in broad daylight. It was not pride, though there was pride in it somewhere. It was something uglier than pride– the sudden, unreasonable, completely inexcusable awareness that he did not want this.
That he had arranged it himself, had sat in a council chamber and approved it with both hands, and was standing here now watching it begin to work exactly as intended, and wanted, with a clarity that shamed him, to undo all of it. To send Lancel Lannister back to Lannisport. To find some quiet room and keep you in it and not share you with anyone, least of all his own son, who deserved none of what his father was currently thinking and had done nothing wrong except arrive in a courtyard and smile at a girl.
Baelor looked away. He was not a selfish man, had never been, had spent the better part of his life making sure of it. He was not going to become one now, and certainly not at the expense of Valarr, who was good and kind and deserved a match that his father had not already decided to covet before the first afternoon was out.
He was not going to do that.
He looked away, and kept looking away, and was thoroughly disgusted with himself.
"—wouldn't you say, Your Grace?" Lancel was saying beside him.
"Entirely," Baelor said, and looked back at Lancel with the practiced ease of a man who had been half-present in conversations for most of his life and had learned to manage it gracefully.
Behind him, Valarr said something that made you tilt your head and give him that look — the assessing one, the one that made people feel they were being read — and then say something back that made Valarr laugh again, and Baelor kept his eyes on Lancel and his expression pleasantly attentive and turned away.
He was very good at turning away.
He was considerably less good at it than he used to be.
King's Landing was louder than you had expected, and warmer, and smelled quite differently from Lannisport, which smelled of salt and sea wind and the particular clean cold of the Westerlands coast. Here it smelled of people and dust and something underneath it that wasn't quite pleasant but wasn't quite unpleasant either, the smell of a city that had been alive for a very long time and had no interest in apologising for it.
You had wanted the silks, and you had gotten them, three bolts of Myrish lace and two of a pale sea-coloured silk that you had been thinking about for the better part of six months, and your chambers in the Red Keep were comfortable and the servants were efficient and the view from your window was the sort that made you stand there longer than you meant to every morning, the whole of the city spread out below you in the early light.
It was fine. It was more than fine. You were being very ungrateful, you told yourself, for the small persistent feeling at the back of your mind that said your father had not brought you all this way simply because he was feeling generous about silk.
Your father had done it again. Brought you somewhere and arranged for there to be a man, the way he always did, the way he had been doing since you were old enough for it to be a thing worth arranging.
Lord Whatshisname from the Reach, the second son of somebody important from the Stormlands, the cousin of someone your father owed a favour to. They arrived, they were pleasant or they weren't, they made their interest known or they didn't, and nothing ever came of any of it. Your father would look at you afterward with that expression of fond, exhausted patience and say that your heart was merely just too big for most men to know what to do with it, which you had decided a long time ago was a very kind way of saying that you were too much.
You were used to it by now. You were good at making peace with things you were used to.
What you were considerably less good at, you were discovering, was making peace with Baelor Targaryen.
You had noticed him noticing you, which was the problem, and you had noticed him in return, which was a bigger one.
It would have been easier if he were not handsome. You had not been prepared for that, which in retrospect was foolish of you, he was a Targaryen, and Targaryens were not, as a rule, difficult to look at, but there was a difference between knowing a thing and being confronted with it in a courtyard on a random warm afternoon when you had nowhere to put your face.
He was broad-shouldered and distinctive-bearded with greys decorating spots of it and had the kind of face that had been lived in long enough to have something behind it, though his eyes were mismatched, one brown and one blue, and they were the most specific thing about him, the thing that made looking at him feel like being caught even when he wasn't looking back. You had decided on the first evening to stop noticing any of this and had been failing at it consistently ever since.
And then there was the other thing, which was worse than the handsome, which was the way he paid attention. Not in the way men at court paid attention to women, which was a performance you had seen enough times to recognise immediately and set aside without much effort. This was different. The difference was in the quality of it, the way his attention when it landed on you felt less like being looked at and more like being seen, and those were not the same thing at all and you wished they were, because you knew how to handle being looked at.
You had been handling it your whole life. You did not know what to do with someone who listened to the things you said and also, somehow, to the things you didn't say, who noticed the small ways you held yourself in a room and said nothing about it, who had looked at you on the first afternoon across a courtyard with those mismatched eyes and made you feel, for one disorienting moment, like you had already been known by him for a very long time.
You were fighting it. You wanted to be clear about that, at least to yourself, because there was no one else you could be clear about it. You were fighting it with the practical, clear-eyed determination of someone who understood the situation completely and had absolutely no intention of making it worse.
The situation was: you were here for Valarr. Your father wanted this match and your father's wants were not nothing, they were the product of careful thought and genuine care for you, and Valarr was warm and kind and had laughed at something you said on the first afternoon with a genuineness that had caught you off guard.
Valarr was fine. Valarr was more than fine. Valarr was who you were supposed to be thinking about, and you were thinking about him, you were making a concerted and ongoing effort to think about him, and it was working, mostly, except for the times you were sitting in a room and his father said something quietly funny and you had to remind yourself, with more effort than should have been necessary, that you were not there for his father.
You were very good at not finishing thoughts that started that way. You had gotten a great deal of practice at it over the past week and expected to need considerably more before this visit was over.
The tourney held in honour of King Daeron II's nameday was on a bright, punishing afternoon, the sun sitting high and merciless over the yard and the heat of it pressing down on everything like a hand laid flat on the back of your neck.
You sat in the royal box with your father on your left and the awareness you had been managing for two weeks now on your right, in the form of Baelor Targaryen, who had been there when you arrived and had set aside whatever he had been discussing with Lord Tarly when you sat down with the easy unhurried attention of a man who was very good at making you feel like the most important thing in the room without doing anything that could be specifically identified as doing that.
"How are you finding the celebrations so far, my lady?" he asked, as the lists filled below and the crowd noise swelled around you.
You fanned yourself with the folded programme your maid had pressed into your hands on the way in and looked out at the yard. "Considerably hotter than I was prepared for, Your Grace," you said.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "King's Landing in early autumn. It gets worse before it gets better."
"That is the least reassuring thing anyone has said to me since I arrived," you told him.
"You've been speaking to the wrong people, then," he said. "Most of them are much less honest."
You glanced at him sidelong and found him looking at the lists with that composed half-smile of his and looked away again before he could catch you looking. "And is that what you are, Your Grace?" you asked, directing your words at the yard below. "Honest?"
"Occasionally," he said, and something in the way he said it made it feel like more than a word, like it was the beginning of a sentence he had decided not to finish, and you fanned yourself again and watched the first knight take the field and told yourself the warmth in your face was the sun.
It was midway through the afternoon, when the crowd had warmed to the sustained pleasant noise of people who were genuinely enjoying themselves, that you heard your name called from below.
You looked down. Valarr was on his horse at the edge of the lists, having just unhorsed a knight from the Vale with the easy competence he brought to most things physical, and he was looking up at the royal box with that bright open smile of his and a question in his expression that he made verbal a moment later, raising his voice just enough to carry. "My lady, would you do me the honour of your favour?"
The crowd nearest the box rippled with the pleasant noise of people who found this charming, and you felt your father shift beside you with the satisfied stillness of a man watching something go according to plan, and you stood carefully because standing quickly in this heat was inadvisable and reached up to unhook the laurel wreath from your hair.
"Good luck, my prince," you called down, and leaned over the railing to pass it to the page who had appeared below, and as you straightened you became aware of two things at once. Your father's expression, which was pleased in a way he was not quite bothering to conceal. And the quality of the silence on your right.
You sat back down. You looked forward at the lists. You told yourself you wouldn’t even gaze upon Baelor but you did the eaxt opposite.
He was watching the yard, his profile composed and still, he did not look at you, and somehow that was worse than if he had, because you had spent enough time in his company over the past week to know the difference between him not looking at you because there was nothing to look at and him not looking at you because he had decided not to.
Valarr won. Of course he won. He was young and quick and had been trained by the best in the kingdom, and he dispatched the Dornish knight he was paired with in two passes with a thoroughness that brought the crowd to its feet. You clapped with everyone else, genuinely pleased, and told yourself the warmth in your chest was simple uncomplicated gladness.
And then Valarr rode up to the box again and the crowd went quiet in the anticipatory way of people who knew what was coming, and he looked up at you with that bright easy smile and declared you queen of love and beauty, and the yard erupted, and you rose and accepted the crown of pale roses with the composed grace your mother had spent years teaching you, and you smiled, and it was fine, it was genuinely fine, you were glad.
You just also couldn't stop thinking, somewhere very quietly underneath all of it, about what it would have felt like if it had been his father asking for your favour instead. What Baelor's voice would have sounded like carrying across that yard. Whether he would have smiled after, the way Valarr was smiling now, or whether he would have simply looked at you with those mismatched eyes of his and let that be enough.
You sat down and did not think about that anymore, and were almost entirely successful.
The feast was held in the great hall on the fourteenth evening of your stay, by which point you had been in King's Landing long enough to stop finding the noise of it startling and long enough to have developed, you were privately admitting to yourself, feelings that were becoming increasingly inconvenient.
Not for Baelor. You were managing that. You were managing it very well, you thought– you had developed a system, which was to look at him only when it was necessary and to keep your expression pleasantly neutral when you did, and to occupy your mind with other things when you found it drifting in directions it had no business drifting, and it was working, mostly, except for the times it wasn't, which were more frequent than you would have liked but still, you felt, within the bounds of manageable.
The inconvenient feelings were for Valarr.
This was not something you had planned for. You had arrived in King's Landing with your silk. your suspicions, your practiced composure and your very sensible intention to be pleasant and unattached to let your father do whatever your father was going to do without getting your own heart involved in it, and then Valarr had been– Valarr. Warm and easy and funny in a way that didn't require anything from you, and genuinely interested in the things you said in the way that some men performed interest and some men actually felt it, and you had caught yourself, over the past two weeks, looking forward to seeing him in a way you hadn't planned on and were now trying to figure out what to do with.
It was fine. It was more than fine. You were making peace with it, the way you always made peace with things. Your father wanted a match, Valarr was a good man, and you were starting to feel something real, perhaps that was simply how it worked sometimes.
You had almost entirely convinced yourself of this by the time Valarr appeared at your shoulder during a lull in the dancing and said, "My lady, would you dance with me?" and held out his hand, and you looked at it for a moment. "I would," you said, and took his hand, and let him lead you out among the other dancers, and told yourself the warmth in your chest was uncomplicated.
He was a good dancer, better than you'd expected, though you weren't sure why you'd expected otherwise. He held you with the comfortable confidence of someone who had learned young and never had reason to be nervous about it. The music was good, the hall was warm and bright, you talked while you danced the way you had started talking over the past two weeks, easily, without the careful weight of people trying to make impressions on each other.
"You look like you're enjoying yourself," Valarr said, with a slight lift of amusement in it, like he was pleasantly surprised.
"I am," you said, which was true. "Should I not be?"
"Most people look slightly terrified at formal feasts," he said. "Like they're being evaluated."
"I am being evaluated," you said. "I'm just choosing not to find it terrifying."
He looked at you with that tilted-head thing he did when something caught him off guard, and laughed. "That's– yes. That's exactly the right way to think about it, actually." He turned you neatly through a gap in the other dancers. "My father says something similar. He says the court can only make you small if you let it."
"Your father," you said, very carefully, "seems like a wise man."
"He is," Valarr said, simply and without hesitation, the way people spoke about things they had never had cause to doubt. "He's a good man. Better than he gets credit for, I think. People see the prince and they forget the man."
You looked at him while he said this, at the open uncomplicated affection on his face, and felt something complicated move through your own chest in response to it that you did not examine. "That must be–" you started, and then Valarr's feet stopped.
Not gradually. Not the slowing of someone who has decided to stop. It was a full, immediate, involuntary halt, like a man who has walked into a wall he didn't see, and you stumbled slightly into him, and said, instinctively, "Oh– I'm sorry, did I–" and started to look down at his feet, thinking you'd trodden on him.
"No," Valarr said, distantly, already not quite looking at you. "No, you didn'™ forgive me, my lady, I–" He was looking past you, toward the doors of the great hall, and his expression had done something you hadn't seen it do before, something unguarded, startled and– lit, somehow, like a man recognising something he hadn't expected to see here. "Forgive me," he said again, already moving, already stepping back from you with a brief apologetic incline of his head. "There's someone I– I'll find you later, my lady.”
And then he was gone, moving through the crowd with a purpose that had nothing to do with you, and you stood in the middle of the dance floor as the music continued around you and the other couples moved past you like water around a stone, and you turned, slowly, because some part of you already knew you didn't want to see it and were going to look anyway, and found Valarr across the hall at the doors, smiling at a girl you had never seen before.
She was beautiful, which you noticed the way you noticed most things that were true and inconvenient, with a flat, clear-eyed acknowledgment that didn't help at all.She had pink hair, dressed in the particular style of the Free Cities that sat slightly apart from the Westerosi fashion around her in a way that drew the eye, and Valarr was taking her hand and pressing his lips to it and saying something that made her laugh, and his smile– his smile was different from the one he'd been giving you all evening. Wider. Less considered. The smile of someone who had forgotten, just for a moment, that they were in a room full of people.
You were still standing in the middle of the dance floor.
You became aware of this, and of the number of people around you who were either too polite or too interested in their own conversations to remark on it, and you moved smoothly, with the composed unhurried walk of someone who had somewhere to be and had chosen this direction deliberately, back to the table, back to your seat, back to the cup of wine your father's steward had left for you, and you sat down and folded your hands in your lap and looked at the table.
Your father noticed. Of course he noticed, he noticed everything, always, it was his most reliable quality, though he said nothing, because he also knew when silence was more useful than speech.
You did not look at Valarr and the pink-haired girl.
You looked at them for approximately forty-five seconds, which told you everything you needed to know, and then you looked at the table and felt the heat of embarrassment move through you slowly from your chest outward, warm and thorough and deeply unpleasant. It wasn't grief, exactly. It wasn't heartbreak you hadn't been there yet, you hadn't had time to get there, it was something smaller and sharper, the embarrassment of having started to let yourself believe something that turned out to be beside the point.
"My lady."
You looked up. Baelor was watching you from further down the table, his expression giving nothing away, his eyes doing that thing where they were more specific than his face, seeing more than the face admitted to, or so it always felt when they were directed at you. "Are you alright?" he said, quietly enough that it was for you and not the table.
You smiled. You were very good at smiling when you needed to, you had been practicing since you were old enough to understand that a lady's face was a thing she owed to the room she was in. "Of course, Your Grace," you said, pleasantly. "It is a wonderful evening."
His eyes did not move from yours for a moment, and in that moment you had the uncomfortable feeling of being seen very clearly by someone who was not going to say so. "It is," he agreed, and looked away, you looked at your hands in your lap, while the hall moved cheerfully around you, and the wine in your cup was very good and you barely tasted it.
"I think I need some air," you said, to no one in particular, or to your father, and rose before anyone could respond, and walked to the doors of the great hall with the measured, unhurried steps of someone who was fine, who was perfectly fine, who was simply in need of a moment outside and would be back shortly.
The Red Keep was large enough that you could walk for some time without doubling back, and you had been walking for ten minutes before you found yourself in a part of it that was quieter than the rest, an older wing, by the look of the stonework, the torches fewer and the ceiling lower and the whole corridor having the particular quality of a place that was maintained but not often used.
There was a window alcove at the end of it, deep-set, with a stone seat worn smooth by what must have been centuries of people sitting in it, looking out at whatever this particular angle of the keep faced. You sat in the alcove and pulled your knees up slightly and looked at the courtyard and let yourself, finally, in the absence of anyone watching, feel all of it.
It wasn't much, in the end. A few tears, which you caught with the back of your hand before they could make it past your cheekbones, the kind of tears that came less from sadness than from the pressure of holding a face together for too long. It was the frustration of it.
The frustration of being here, again, in this same position you had been in a dozen times before, having tried and adjusted and made peace and tried again, and somehow always arriving at the same place: standing in the middle of a room watching someone look at someone else the way you had started, foolishly, quietly, to hope they might look at you.
Your heart is too big. You had always thought that was a generous interpretation of the evidence. It suggested rather more plainly that there was simply something about you that people grew tired of, some quality you had too much of or not enough of, something that made men perfectly happy to spend a fortnight in your company and then look across a room and find someone else entirely, the fact that you could never identify what it was did not make it better, it made it worse, because you couldn't fix a thing you couldn't name.
You wiped your eyes with the back of your hand and took a slow breath and looked at the dark courtyard and told yourself firmly that you were done, that this was enough, that you were going back to the feast in five minutes and you were going to be perfectly pleasant for the rest of the evening and you were going to stop being so–
The voice came from behind you, low and unhurried, and you knew it before you had finished turning. You stood up too quickly, nearly getting your foot caught in the hem of your dress, as you brought your hands to wipe your face, the hem of the dress righted itself.
Baelor was standing at the entrance to the alcove, a few feet away, looking at you with an expression you had not seen on him before and could not immediately read.
“Your Grace,” you said, your voice came out steadier than you deserved credit for.
"Just Baelor," he said, quietly. "If you'll allow it."
You lowered your hands. You could feel that your eyes were red, that there was very little you could do about it. "Baelor, then," and the name sat differently in your mouth than the title had, warmer, more familiar, like something you had been saying for longer than two weeks.
He did not look away from you, and did not look around the alcove or at the courtyard below or at anything else, just at you, and you had the sense that the looking was very deliberate, that he was choosing to look at you the way people chose to say difficult things, because they had decided it was the right thing and were going to see it through. "What's upset you?" he asked.
"Nothing," you said immediately, with a smile plastered on your face.
Baelor looked at you, and the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, not quite anything else, just a small acknowledgment of what you had just done. "My lady," he said.
"Nothing worth mentioning," you amended.
"That isn't the same as nothing," he said.
You looked at him. He looked back at you. The torch at the end of the courtyard below moved in a breath of wind, sending the shadow of it shifting across the stones.
"I'm merely–" you started, then stopped, then started again. "It has been a long evening, Your Grace– Baelor." The name again, and the same warmth in it, and you saw something shift very slightly in his expression when you said it. "I needed a moment away from the noise."
"You've been crying," he said, simply and without cruelty, just the fact of it.
You opened your mouth then closed it, looking at the courtyard then back at him, because looking away from him felt somehow more revealing than looking at him. "A little," you admitted. "It's nothing."
"It doesn't look like nothing," he said. He had not moved from the entrance of the alcove, had kept that careful distance, and you were aware of it. Aware of the distance and his awareness of it, of the sense that it was a choice he was making and maintaining. "If something has happened to distress you, I would know of it."
There was something in the way he said it, not a demand, not the authority of a prince requiring information, but something quieter than that, something that had more weight in it than a command would have had, precisely because it wasn't one. You felt it somewhere in your chest and looked at your hands.
"I was enjoying myself this evening. Before." You smoothed your skirt, a small unnecessary gesture. "And then I found myself somewhat abruptly not, and I think I simply needed to…" gesturing vaguely at the alcove, "...be somewhere quiet for a moment. That is all."
"Valarr," he said.
You looked up. He was watching you with that steady, specific attention, and you felt the back of your neck go warm despite the cool of the corridor. "I don't—" you started.
"You don't have to," he said.
The quiet between you held for a moment, full and textured, the kind of quiet that was made of things not said.
"I feel foolish," you said, finally, quietly. "I know it is foolish to feel foolish about feeling foolish, so please don't tell me that." You said it with a small attempt at lightness, and he received it without patronizing it, and so you continued. "I had started to think perhaps there was something there. Between Valarr and I. Something real." You looked at the courtyard. "And then he looked across the room at her, and I could see that whatever he'd had with me was. It was practice, maybe. Or kindness. And she was the actual thing."
Baelor said nothing for a moment. You could feel him looking at you, and you kept your eyes on the courtyard because meeting it felt like more than you had the composure for just now.
"You think you scared him off," he said, carefully.
You made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. "I think I always do, somehow," you said. "My father says my heart is too big for most men. Which is very kind. I have somewhat less kind interpretations of the evidence."
"What evidence," Baelor said, and something in his voice had changed, something that made you look at him despite yourself, and find him watching you with an expression that was more intent than before, something in it that you couldn't name.
"The pattern of it, I suppose. The same thing, more or less, every time. I am, I think I am quite a lot. I talk too much, or feel too much, or– I don't know exactly what it is, only that it seems to be reliably too much for people to–" you stopped, because you had said rather more of that than you intended to, and your voice had done something at the end of it that you were not pleased with.
"Look at me," Baelor said. You looked at him.
"You are not too much," he said, and he said it the way he said things he meant.
His eyes had not moved from yours, and they did not move now, and you felt the looking of them like something warm and specific, like a hand placed with care. "You are not too much and you have not scared anyone off and whatever the pattern is that you think you've found, you have read it wrong."
You looked at him, this man standing in a quiet corridor with torchlight from the courtyard moving on the stones behind him, looking at you with something in his face that had no safe name and that you had been avoiding naming for two weeks, and felt something in your chest pull in a direction that was deeply inconvenient and completely beyond your ability to manage.
"Baelor," you said. Very quietly. Not as a sentence, not going anywhere, just the name, because it was the only thing you had.
"Yes," he said. Just as quietly.
His jaw tightened fractionally, and he looked at you, and you looked at him, and the torch moved in the courtyard below, and neither of you said anything else for a long moment that held everything and nothing at once.
Then he straightened, and something careful came back into his expression, the composed half-smile of a man rearranging himself. "Come back to the feast," he said. "You have nothing to be ashamed of, and I won't have you sitting in a corridor thinking otherwise."
You looked at him for another moment. Then you stood, and smoothed your dress, and said, "Yes, alright," and followed him back through the quiet corridor toward the noise and the light, and did not think about the way he had looked at you.
You thought about it for the rest of the evening.
"This is absurd."
Your father's voice had the particular controlled fury of a man who had been raised never to shout and was currently finding that a significant inconvenience. He had been saying it for the better part of ten minutes now, in various configurations, and each time it landed a little heavier than the last.
"I did not travel to the Red Keep to be humiliated," he said, to the room, to the lords seated around the long table, and most specifically to Baelor Targaryen, who sat at the head of it in the place of King Daeron, who was ill. Nobody had commented on that. Baelor was the Prince of Dragonstone and the Hand of the King. "My daughter did not travel to the Red Keep to be humiliated. We had an agreement– Valarr was to court my daughter, and in return House Lannister offers the crown its full support and cooperation. And now, a week after the feast, Lady Kiera of Tyrosh appears and the boy announces he will be marrying her and no one else."
He looked at Baelor directly. "It’s fucking nonsense."
You were looking at the table.
You had been looking at the table since you sat down and had no immediate plans to stop. You were not upset about Valarr. That was what made all of this so much harder to sit through. You were not upset about Valarr, not genuinely, not in the way your father seemed to believe you should be. You had seen the way Valarr looked at Kiera of Tyrosh across the great hall and understood, with a clarity that was almost kind in its simplicity, that whatever had been between you and Valarr had been warmth and nothing more.
It was genuinely fine.
What was not fine was that your father had reminded you last night, when the news spread through the Red Keep and reached your chambers before supper, that you were once again unwed, once again the almost, once again the woman that men were perfectly pleasant to and then left for another woman. He had not been cruel about it. He was never cruel. But he had been sharp, in the way only people who loved you could be, and the sharpness of it had stayed with you through the night and was sitting with you still.
You kept your eyes on the table. Hands folded in your lap. Face arranged into something you hoped read as dignified rather than what it actually was.
"My lady."
You looked up before you had decided to.
Baelor's voice had a quality that did that to you, had done it since the first afternoon in the courtyard, and you still had not worked out how to stop your body from responding before you had chosen to respond. He was looking at you from the head of the table with an expression that was calm and unhurried and gave nothing away, the way his expressions always did, except for his eyes, which were doing the thing they always did, which was see you considerably more clearly than you wanted to be seen. He did not look stressed. He did not look rattled by your father's outburst or by the situation or by any of it. He looked, infuriatingly, rather pleasant.
"What are your thoughts on the matter?" he said, and leaned back in his chair as he said it, settling more fully into the seat, and his hands came to rest on the armrests with the unhurried ease of a man entirely comfortable in the space he occupied.
You noticed his hands, which you had no business noticing– the width of them, the rings he wore, the particular way they moved when he was thinking, deliberate and unhurried, like everything else about him. He was turning one ring slowly with his thumb, the one on his right hand with the Targaryen sigil carved into dark stone, turning it in a slow circle without seeming to know he was doing it, and you watched it for a moment longer than you should have and thought, with shame of a person whose mind had gone somewhere they had absolutely not given permission to go, about what those hands would feel like.
Around your wrist. Against your jaw. Curved at the base of your throat, pressing, the weight of them, the warmth.
You looked back at the table.
Your face felt very warm. You were grateful, for the first time, for the poor lighting in the small council chamber.
When you looked back up at him he was still looking at you, and his expression had shifted by something so small it was barely a shift at all, just a quality in the eyes, something that said he had noticed exactly where your attention had gone and was choosing, with great deliberateness, not to say so.
The heat moved from your face down the back of your neck.
"I am quite happy for Prince Valarr and Lady Kiera," you said, with every ounce of composure you had been rehearsing since the night before. "They seemed very well suited to one another and I wish them–"
"No the fuck she isn't," your father said.
The room went very quiet in the specific way of rooms where people are pretending very hard not to have heard something. You closed your eyes for one brief moment. Opened them. Looked at the table.
Baelor's gaze moved from you to your father with the slow deliberateness , something in his expression cooled, not unkindly, but with the quality of a man who had a great deal of patience and was keeping careful track of how much of it was being spent.
"I appreciate Lord Lancel's candour," he said, evenly, and then looked back at you, which was somehow worse. "If there is a grievance—"
"The grievance," your father said, the restraint in his voice something impressive in its way, "is that my daughter has been made to look a fool, and House Lannister has been made to look a fool, and this needs to be resolved before I say something in this chamber that I cannot unsay, or I swear to the gods that—"
"Wed her to me."
The words fell into the room like a stone dropped into still water, and everything stopped.
Your mouth opened. You were not aware of deciding to open it. You became aware of it after, along with the fact that you had looked at Baelor before you looked at anyone else, which said something you were not going to examine right now, and he was looking back at you, just at you, not at your father or the lords or the room, just at you, with an expression that was entirely unreadable and eyes that were not.
"What," your father said. Flat and slow, the voice of a man refusing to accept that he had heard correctly.
"Wed her to me," Baelor said again, with the same even unhurried certainty of a man repeating something perfectly reasonable that someone had simply failed to hear the first time.
He had not looked away from you. You were having some difficulty breathing at a normal rate.
Your father looked at you with an expression you could not parse, something between disbelief and calculation, and you looked back at him and then back at Baelor because you could not seem to stop doing that, and Baelor was still watching you , and you felt warmth moving through you that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber.
"This does not solve the insult to my house," your father said. The snarl had gone out of his voice, replaced by something more careful, a man recalibrating. "My daughter was brought here under the understanding that she would be a prince's wife. You're asking me to consider her a consolation prize, Your Grace, which I find—"
"I am asking you to consider her a princess and future queen," Baelor said, still without looking at anyone but you, his voice patient and his hands still on the armrests of that chair. "She would be Princess of Dragonstone. When the time comes, queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Any children we had would be princes and princesses of the realm." A pause. "House Lannister would lose nothing it was promised and gain considerably more. The alliance holds, my lord, and your daughter's position would be rather more significant than the one you came here seeking."
"More significant," your father repeated, with the flat tone of a man being maneuvered and knowing it and not yet having decided how he felt about it.
"Considerably," Baelor said.
Your father looked at you again. You looked back at him and tried to make your face say something useful, and were not entirely sure what it said instead. Whatever it was, he looked at it for a long moment and then looked away, pressing his mouth into a thin line and saying nothing, which was Lancel Lannister's version of thinking very hard about something.
"She's been on the market longer than I care to admit, as the whole of Westeros is aware. You'd be getting goods that no one wanted, Your Grace, with respect to my daughter." he said finally, the snarky edge back in his voice, the particular one he used when he was testing something.
You stared at the table.
You had spent your entire life being loved by this man and in this moment you wished, very sincerely, that he would stop.
"Lord Lancel," Baelor said, and something in the way he said it made you look up despite yourself, and you found him looking at your father with an expression that was perfectly pleasant and had a quality underneath it like stone. "Your daughter is not goods, nor is she something to be appraised. I'd ask you to remember that in my council chamber."
Your father had the grace to look briefly taken aback. He cleared his throat. "I only meant—"
"I know what you meant," Baelor said, mildly, and looked back at you, and the shift from that cool quality to the way he looked at you was so immediate and so different that you felt it somewhere behind your sternum like a hand pressed flat. "I also know it isn't what I think."
The room was very quiet.
"I think it's rather a good idea."
Your voice cut through the quiet of the room cleanly, and you felt everyone in it look at you, and you looked at your father.
He was staring at you with an expression you had not seen on his face in a very long time, something between surprise and the particular stillness of a man recalibrating quickly. You held his gaze and kept your face very still and said, quietly, "After all, since no one wants my goods," and you let the words sit there between you, his words, and watched something move across his face that he could not quite contain, something that was not quite guilt but was adjacent to it, "he wants me for how I am."
The indifference in your voice was real and it was not real, both things at once, because underneath it was something older and more tired than anger, the particular hurt of being spoken of that way by someone who loved you, you were absolutely not going to cry in this council chamber in front of four lords and Baelor Targaryen, but you let your father see it in your face for one moment, the hurt, before you looked back down at your hands.
The silence in the room had a different quality to it now.
Your father said nothing. You could feel him beside you, the particular stillness of a man who had said the wrong thing and knew it and did not yet know what to do with that knowledge, and you did not look at him.
“Alright,” your father said finally, his voice stripped of its earlier edge, much softer this time.
You looked at Baelor without meaning to.
“In a moons time then.” He says, concluding the council.
You were a wife.
You still could not quite believe it, even standing in the middle of your shared chambers with the candles burning low around you and the sound of the city muffled behind the thick stone walls and the weight of the day sitting on your shoulders like something physical. Wedded to Baelor Breakspear Targaryen. His princess. The words sat strangely in your mind, too large for the space you had made for them, and you stood with your back half to him and your hands clasped in front of you and tried to find somewhere to put yourself in this room that was now yours as much as his.
You had heard things, today. People talked at weddings the way they always talked, freely and without much care for who was listening, and you had caught enough of it in passing– in the sept, in the corridors, at the feast– to know what the court thought of this union. That he had married for duty. That he was trying to put a ghost to rest. That you were an alliance and a convenience and that Jena Dondarrion would always be the woman who had actually held his heart, and everything after her was simply duty.
You had smiled through all of it. You were very good at smiling through things.
The door closed behind him.
"Are you alright?"
His voice, even now, even after weeks of hearing it, did something to the back of your neck. You kept your eyes on the far wall and said, "Yes," and heard, in the small silence that followed, that he did not believe you.
"We are wedded now," he said, and his voice was soft, unhurried, the way it always was. "I would rather you not speak lies to me."
You felt his hand before you fully registered that he had moved, his fingers closing gently around your arm and turning you, not forcing, just the suggestion of it, and you let yourself be turned because there was no version of this where you were going to stand with your back to him all night. He was close. Closer than he had been permitted to be before tonight, and the candles threw his shadow long across the floor behind him and caught the silver in his beard and the particular quality of his eyes, one brown and one blue, both of them on you.
You opened your mouth. Closed it.
"Can I ask you something?" you said, and your voice came out smaller than you intended.
"Of course," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved.
You looked at the middle of his chest because looking at his face felt like too much right now. "I heard things today," you said. "People talking." You stopped, felt the embarrassment of it move through you, and made yourself continue anyway. "About your lady wife. Jena." You said her name carefully, like a thing that needed to be handled. "They said — they said you married again for duty, to put her memory to rest, and that I am an alliance and nothing more." You looked up at him then, because you needed to see his face when he answered. "Is that true?"
He looked at you for a long moment and there was no anger in it and no grief, just that steadiness, that particular focused attention he gave you that you had never quite gotten used to. "My lady wife who perished was the duty," he said, simply and without cruelty. "I was fond of her. I did love her, in the way that you love someone you have built a life alongside. But that was many years ago, and it was not–" he paused, and something shifted in his expression, something that looked like a man choosing his words not because he was being careful but because he wanted to be accurate. "It was not what I felt the day I saw you in that courtyard."
You went very still.
"I have never felt that in my entire life," he said, and his voice was quiet and even and utterly without performance, the voice of a man stating a fact he had already made his peace with. "That feeling. The strength of it." His eyes had not moved from yours. "I came close to calling off the betrothal entirely. I could not justify it to myself — I thought you had feelings for Valarr, I thought I was simply a man of a certain age wanting something that was not his, and I told myself that every morning for weeks and believed it less every time."
"You thought I had feelings for Valarr," you said.
"I did," he said.
"I didn't," you said.
Something moved across his face. "I know that now," he said.
The candles moved in a breath of air from somewhere and the light shifted across his face and you stood there in your wedding clothes in your shared chambers and felt the heat of the past weeks, all the looking and not looking and the rings and the council chamber and the alcove and every moment you had pressed down and put away, rising up through you all at once like something that had been held underwater finally breaking the surface.
"Baelor," you said.
"Yes," he said. Not a question. Just the word, steady and warm, and he was already close and he did not move closer and did not move away and simply waited, the way he always waited, with the patience of someone who had decided something and was content to let you arrive at it yourself.
You reached up and touched his jaw before you decided to, your fingertips against the grey of his beard, feeling the texture of it, and you heard the quiet sound he made at the back of his throat, barely anything, just the smallest exhale, and it moved through you like heat.
His hand came up to cover yours where it rested against his face, his fingers closing over yours, warm and certain, and you felt the size of that hand, the breadth of it, and thought about everything you had thought in that council chamber and felt your face go warm.
"I have been wanting to do that," you admitted, very quietly, "since the first week."
"Only the first week," he said, and the warmth in his voice had a low quality to it now, something underneath it that you had not heard before, and you felt it in your chest and lower.
"Perhaps since the courtyard," you said.
"That's more honest," he said.
You laughed, a small unsteady thing, and he smiled at the sound of it, and then the smile faded into something more intent as he looked at you, and his free hand came up slowly, giving you every opportunity to move away, and curved at the side of your neck, his thumb at your jaw, tilting your face up, and you felt the weight of it exactly the way you had imagined it and it was worse than imagining, it was so much worse, warm and specific and certain.
"I am going to kiss you," he said, low and unhurried, watching your face.
"I know," you said.
"Are you alright with that," he said.
You looked at him, this man who had been patient for weeks and built a fire in your chest without touching you and was asking you, on your wedding night, if he was allowed. "Baelor," you said, and your voice had gone soft with something you did not bother to hide anymore. "Yes."
He kissed you slowly, the way he did everything, without rush, and his mouth was warm and his beard was exactly as strange against your skin as you had imagined and also nothing like you had imagined, and his hand at your jaw tilted you into him and his other hand found your waist and you felt the warmth of both of them through the fabric of your dress and made a small sound against his mouth that you had not planned on making.
He pulled back just enough to look at you, his forehead nearly against yours, his thumb moving once along your jaw, and his eyes were very dark in the candlelight.
"I have been wanting to do that," he said quietly, "since considerably before the first week."
You laughed again, breathless, and felt him smile against your temple when he pressed his lips there, and then to your cheek, and then to the corner of your mouth, unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world who has nonetheless decided to use it very specifically.
"Baelor," you said, against his mouth.
"Mm," he said, which was not quite an answer and did not need to be.
His hands moved to the laces at the back of your dress, slowly, finding them without rushing, and you felt the loosening of it, the give of the fabric, his fingers warm against the skin of your back as he worked, and you pressed your forehead to his jaw and breathed him in and felt the particular quality of the quiet in the room.
"Are you still nervous?" he asked, low against your hair.
"A little," you admitted.
His hands stilled at your back, just resting there, warm and certain. "We have time," he said. "All the time there is."
You pulled back enough to look at him, at his face in the candlelight, at those mismatched eyes that had been looking at you since a courtyard in early autumn, and felt something settle in your chest that had been unsettled for a very long time.
"I don't want time," you said. "I've been patient for months."
Something shifted in his expression, something that moved through his eyes and down to the curve of his mouth, warm and unhurried and very deliberate. His hands at your back drew you closer rather than stilling, and when he kissed you again it was different from the first time, deeper, less careful, and you felt the warmth of it move through you all the way down, and slid your hands up into his hair, and stopped being patient.
Seven times Lyonel fell for modern!reader, who has to pretend to be his wife
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1. He falls for your sassiness and how you come to him to talk shit about your day.
Huffing and flopping down onto the surprisingly large bed in the golden tent, you spread your arms dramatically across the soft sheets.
“What’s the matter, my lady wife?” He asks, smirking down at your exhausted form.
“Are all princes pompous assholes or is that dragon fuck just special?”
Your sudden outburst causes a thunderous laugh to erupt from his smiling lips. Joy at your forwardness and subject matter, very apparent on his handsome face.
“Princes are usually quite pompous, yes, although unfortunately, it seems Aerion is a special kind of pompous asshole,” he confirms, now looking into your eyes and smiling warmly at you.
“His uncles not bad though,” you comment with a cheeky smirk.
“You’re not wrong there,” he smirks back at you with a flirty twinkle in his eye.
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2. How beautiful you look in the Baratheon colours
You watch the Baratheon banner with a strange pride as you spot your faux husband making his way out for the joust.
Lyonel loves jousts, to him they are just another fun party. Cheering along with the crowd he is all laughs and fun, until his eyes land on you, and he freezes. Standing proudly on the raised seating, you look to him, as if to call him over with some enchantment. The Baratheon gold of your dress makes you look like a shining star and causes his heart to skip a beat.
In your hand he notices a piece of fabric, a golden scarf given to you on the ride to the tourney. He smirks as he remembered how you thought it silly to wear a scarf to protect your hair when riding a horse. You’d told him that if you were a ‘lady’, surely half the joy would be being able to ride freely and then have your ladies fix your hair.
The fabric hung from your fingertips like an invitation, one that he definitely couldn’t refuse.
Riding up, he stops right in front of your awaiting form.
As you lean down from your seating to tie your favour to his lance, you make sure to whisper in his ear.
“Be safe, have fun and show them what you’re made of, my love.”
While Lyonel expected something cheeky or snarky from you, it seems your genuine words make him blush even more than anything dirty or cheeky you could have said.
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3. The way you flirt with him at celebrations
Lightly stumbling through the thinning crowd, the celebration was coming to an end, but Lyonel was not willing to go to bed anytime soon.
“Why, Ser Duncan, it seems you’ve stolen my husband away from me,” your words coming out a little flirty and slurred.
Lyonels eyes light up at your teasing, and then his smile grows are you confidently sit in his lap. He would usually be cautious about touching you, especially because of the truth of your relationship, but with your forwardness and the alcohol coursing through his body, he throws caution to the wind as his hand comes down the grab at your ass.
“I-I I’m sorry, my lady,” the giant knight stutters out.
“It’s okay, sweetie, but can I steal him away?“ you ask the knight, but you’re mischievous eyes never leave Lyonels.
You don’t wait for a reply as you drag your ‘husband’ to dance, asking the band to play something slow.
“This isn’t what I usually dance to,” Lyonel smiles lovingly at you.
“Yes, but it’s a good excuse to hold a beautiful lady so close against your body isn’t it?”
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4. How soft you are with Egg
Soft cries reach your ears as you read your book, comfortable in your large bed. Placing the book down, you put on your robe and venture to investigate. Stepping out into the night, you spot Egg walking away from you. His shoulders shake as he sniffles.
“Egg,” you lightly call after him, jogging to catch up.
“M-my l-lady,” he politely welcomes.
Despite his obvious sadness, he is still polite and sweet.
“What are you doing out here, sweet boy?” You ask, crouching down to his height.
He tries his best to answer, but his words are overwhelmed by his sniffles and whimpers. You don’t force him to continue, instead you gently usher him out of the cold night and into the warm tent.
Lyonel was struck with the image in front of him, curled up in his ‘wife’s’ arms was Dunks squire. Tears stained his pale face and his body shook from crying.
Then there was you.
Your arms wrapped tightly around the small boy as you rock him. Eyes closed and your head on his, you hum a song unfamiliar to Lyonel, probably one from your world.
Lyonel never dreamt of children, but seeing you now, his heart yearns for it.
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5. Standing up for yourself
You could see the drunken knight begin to advance on you, but by the time he was a close enough distance to grab you, it was already too late to flee.
“Come dance with me!” He slurred his demand over the loud room.
“No, no thank you,” you tried your best to be polite, to pull away, you were now a lady after all.
You were sure you could manage this without raising your voice, he’s a knight after all, maybe he’s just having a bit of fun. You were calm but firm, until, he grabbed at your ass and spoke crude words drunkenly against your neck.
The crack of the powerful slap landed across his face caused the whole celebration to go quiet within an instant. If you weren’t so furious, you might have been embarrassed. Instead, you decided to play the role of the lady.
“If I see you, or any other knight,” you call to him and the crowd, eyeing the others, “grab at a woman or speak to a woman like that again, you will not have to fear the wrath of my husband, you will have to fear mine, which, believe me, is far worse,” you scold the now stunned knight.
“Fo-forgive me, my lady. I will do no such thing to any lady h-“
“No! Not just the ladies. Any woman, servants, maids, slaves, performers, any of them! Am I understood?”
“Y-yes,” the knight stuttered before stumbling away.
Lyonel was stunned by you. To see how you handled yourself with both grace and power, made his heart swell with love and desire.
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6. Your unique way of both acting like a lady and going against the grain
Most at your table seemed to see the way the lord had slapped his servant, but none seemed to react, even as the poor girl held back tears trying to clear the plates from the floor. This disgusted you and you felt the need to do something.
As you were about to rise from your chair, Lyonel grabbed your arm.
“Leave it,” he pointedly whispered in your ear.
“Just because everyone else is a coward, doesn’t mean I am,” you growled lowly back.
The sneer on your face made it clear he wouldn’t win this. Begrudgingly, Lyonel released your arm. You rose from the chair with the grace of a lady and he prepared for your raised voice, but it never came.
Turning around to face you, he was met with the heart-warming image of you crouched on the ground with the young girl. You looked the part of a lady, a mother and the warrior all in one. Grace, tenderness and bravery all radiated from you.
A warm smirk grew on his face.
“You should learn how to control your wife,” one of the fellow lords on his table scoffed.
“You should learn how to fuck yours.”
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7. How dirty you get when you’re drunk
Lyonel loved a party and at first he was nervous to push you into a big celebration. You’re new to this world and now at a tourney, he feared it might be too much for you.
While you appreciate this patience with you, you’re also at a tourney and would like to have a good time. You knew you shouldn’t have snuck off to a party like some teenager, but you’d made a new friend, Rowan, and she did a great job convincing you.
When Lyonel returned to your shared tent and you weren’t there, he began to panic. Luckily for him, one of your young handmaidens had cracked quickly and told him.
Of all you’ve done to amaze and enchant him during your time here, the site before him was certainly the most amazing and enchanting. Sweat caused your hair to stick to your face and your dress was slightly askew. You danced without a care in the world and seemed to be the life of the party. He couldn’t help but just stare at you.
His amazement only grew when you approached him and you confidently wrapped your hands around the back of his neck.
“Hey, baby,” you loudly flirt over the music, pushing yourself further against him.
“Hello, my lady. Are you having fun?” He asked with a grin, his hands now sitting on your hips.
“Yeah, missed you though. Fuck, you’re so sexy,” you compliment as your hand strokes through his beard, “bet we could have a better time back at our tent,” you continue to flirt, biting his earlobe as your hand travels down the front of his trousers.
He didn’t say anything, only taking your hand and dragging you out of the party.
Summary: A conquered daughter of House Blackfyre is given to the Prince of Dragonstone as both peace offering and prize. Each night, at the hour of the wolf, she is summoned in his chambers.
TW: dubious consent (dubcon), noncon, power imbalance, forced marriage, captivity, possessive behavior, obsessive dynamics, emotional manipulation, coercive intimacy, isolation, unhealthy relationship dynamics, explicit sexual themes, reader has valyrian features (plot relevant), skintone ambiguous, blackfyre reader, valarr targaryen has an inferiority complex, fixation on appearance and legacy, political marriage, post-war setting, targaryen vs blackfyre tensions.
WC: 10K
The knock came at the same hour it always did.
Three sharp raps against the iron-banded door of your chamber. Not loud enough to wake the dead, but loud enough to wake you. The rhythm was burned into your bones now, two quick strikes, a pause, then a final blow that seemed to reverberate through the cold stone walls like a death knell. It was the knock of a man who took no pleasure in his task but performed it with the grim efficiency of one who had long ago learned not to question the orders he was given.
Ser Alan of the Kingsguard. A broad shouldered Reachman with a face like weathered granite and eyes that had seen too many horrors to be surprised by anything anymore. He had been assigned to you the day you arrived at the Red Keep, a silent shadow who followed you everywhere and nowhere, appearing only when you were summoned to your husband's chambers or when you attempted to wander somewhere you were not permitted to go.
You were not asleep. You never truly slept anymore, not since the first night they had dragged you from your bed at this same wretched hour. Now you simply lay in the darkness, your violet eyes fixed on the embroidered canopy above you, counting the silver threads that formed the three headed dragon of House Targaryen. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. You had counted them a thousand times. You knew every stitch, every knot, every place where the thread had worn thin from age and neglect. The dragon's ruby eyes seemed to watch you in the darkness, patient and eternal, waiting for you to break.
The door opened without your leave. It always did.
"His Grace requires your presence, my lady."
Ser Alan's voice was flat, carefully neutral, stripped of anything that might be interpreted as either sympathy or satisfaction. He stood in the doorway like a statue come to life, his white enameled armor gleaming faintly in the light of the single candle that burned on your bedside table. His hand rested on the pommel of his sword, not in threat, but in habit. A Kingsguard was never truly at ease, even in the bedchamber of a traitor's daughter.
He did not look at you directly. None of them did. The servants, the guards, the ladies in waiting who had been assigned to attend you, they all treated you as if you were made of smoke and shadow, something that existed on the edges of their vision but could not be acknowledged without risking contamination. You were a Blackfyre. The blood of Daemon Blackfyre ran in your veins, the blood of rebels and usurpers and men who had dared to challenge the rightful rule of House Targaryen. Looking at you too long might be mistaken for sympathy, and sympathy for a Blackfyre was treason.
You had learned that lesson within your first week in the Red Keep, when a young kitchen maid had smiled at you in the corridor and offered you a warm roll fresh from the ovens. The girl had been dismissed the next day, sent back to her village with a black mark on her name and a warning never to seek employment in King's Landing again. You had not seen her go. You had only heard the whispers, carried to you by Lady Jeyne with a smile that did not reach her cold gray eyes.
"It seems some servants forget their place. A shame. She seemed a sweet girl."
The message had been clear: kindness to the Blackfyre was a crime, and crimes were punished.
You rose from the bed. The stone floor was cold beneath your bare feet, the spring chill seeping through the mortar despite the thin rushes scattered across the flagstones. The chamber was always cold. The servants who tended the fires in the royal apartments seemed to forget that this room existed, or perhaps they remembered all too well and chose to let the flames die out of quiet, spiteful neglect. The single candle on your bedside table guttered and smoked, casting long shadows that danced across the bare stone walls like specters at a feast.
You had been given this chamber on your wedding night. You had been naively grateful then. "Your own space," Valarr had said, his mismatched eyes warm with false consideration. "Every woman deserves a refuge. Somewhere she can be alone with her thoughts, away from the demands of court and husband. I would never deny you that."
A refuge. That was what he had called it. But there was no refuge in this cold, barren room with its bare walls and its threadbare tapestries and its single window that looked out over the black waters of the Blackwater Rush. There was only silence. Only the slow, grinding erosion of everything you had been before the war, before the surrender, before they had stripped you of your name and your family and your future and dressed you in Targaryen red.
You had not bothered with a robe. The first night, you had wrapped yourself in a heavy cloak, clutching it around your shoulders like armor as Ser Alan led you through the darkened corridors. When you had arrived in Valarr's chambers, he had looked at you with that gentle, puzzled expression he wore so well and said, "Why do you hide yourself, sweet wife? You are the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms. The blood of Old Valyria flows in your veins. You should be proud of what you are."
He had taken the cloak from your shoulders himself, his fingers brushing against your skin with deliberate, lingering softness. He had folded it carefully and set it aside, and you had never seen it again. The next night, you had worn a different robe. The same thing had happened. By the third night, you had understood the lesson he was teaching you.
You will come to me as you are. You will hide nothing. You belong to me, and I will see all of you.
So now you wore only your shift. Thin linen, pale cream in color, cut low enough to show the elegant soft swell of your breasts. It had been laid out for you by one of your ladies in waiting, Lady Alia, you thought, though it might have been Lady Mariene; they all blurred together in your mind, a procession of cold faces and colder eyes.
The shift was too fine for a prisoner, too revealing for a proper lady. It was a garment designed to display you, to emphasize every curve and hollow of your body, to remind you that you were an object to be looked at and touched and possessed.
And you hated it. You hated your beauty because it was the reason you were here, in this cold room, in this cold castle, married to a man who looked at you like you were a prize he had won in battle. If you had been plain, if you had been ordinary, perhaps they would have sent you to the Silent Sisters, like your sisters had been, or allowed you to join your brothers at the Wall. But you were beautiful, and your beauty was Valyrian, and Valarr Targaryen wanted to possess it.
You followed Ser Alan through the corridors of Maegor's Holdfast. The hour of the wolf, they called this time. The torches burned low in their iron sconces, their flames reduced to guttering embers that cast more shadow than light. The stone walls were slick with condensation, moisture beading on the ancient masonry like sweat on a dying man's brow.
The Red Keep was never truly silent. Even at this hour, there were sounds, the distant tread of guards on the battlements, the scurrying of rats in the walls, the mournful cry of gulls wheeling over the Blackwater. But the silence between those sounds was vast and empty, a yawning chasm that seemed to swallow everything it touched. You walked through it like a ghost, your bare feet making no sound on the cold stone, your breath forming small clouds in the chill air. The thin linen of your shift did nothing to ward off the cold, and you could feel your nipples hardening beneath the fabric, could feel the gooseflesh rising on your arms and thighs. By the time you reached the Prince's chambers, you would be shivering, your body betraying your vulnerability to him before you ever spoke a word.
You knew the way by heart now. Down the winding stair from your tower chamber, past the door to the servants' quarters where you sometimes heard muffled laughter that fell silent the moment you drew near.
At the end of the passage, a heavy oak door bound with iron bands marked the entrance to the Prince's private chambers. Two more Kingsguard stood on either side, Ser Roland Crakehall and Ser Gwayne Gaunt, their white cloaks hanging still in the motionless air, their faces hidden behind the gleaming visors of their helms. They did not acknowledge you as you passed.
Ser Alan pushed open the door and stepped aside, his duty discharged. His eyes met yours for the briefest moment, a flicker of something that might have been pity, quickly suppressed, and then he was gone, melting back into the shadows of the corridor like a wraith.
You crossed the threshold alone, as you always did. The warmth hit you first.
It was like stepping from a frozen wasteland into the heart of a dragon's lair. A great fire roared in the stone hearth, flames leaping high and golden, filling the room with a heat that seemed to seep into your bones and thaw the chill that had settled there during the long, cold walk. The air was thick with the scent of sandalwood and smoke and something sweet and faintly musky, like the perfume of night blooming flowers mingled with the clean, sharp scent of male skin. It was the scent of him, you realized. The scent of Valarr Targaryen, embedded in every tapestry and cushion and fur, saturating the very air you breathed.
The Prince's chambers were vast, easily four times the size of your own barren room. The furniture was dark and heavy, carved from exotic woods that had been imported from the Summer Isles and the forests of Qohor at unimaginable expense.
And there, in a high backed chair before the fire, sat your husband.
Valarr Targaryen did not look up when you entered. He was reading a leather bound book that lay open in his lap, its pages yellowed with age and covered in the spidery script of some long dead maester. The firelight played across his features, highlighting the sharp planes of his face, the strong line of his jaw, the slight furrow of concentration between his brows. He was dressed in a robe of black silk embroidered with red dragons, loosely tied at the waist, revealing a glimpse of his chest, lean and muscled, with a dusting of dark hair that matched the short cropped locks on his head.
He did not look like a dragon. That was the first thought that had crossed your mind when you had seen him at your wedding, standing before the High Septon in the Great Sept of Baelor as the realm watched and whispered. And it was the thought that returned to you now, as fresh and bitter as ever, each time you laid eyes on him.
He was handsome. You could not deny that, no matter how much you wanted to. His jaw was strong and sharp, his nose straight and aquiline, his brow noble. His mouth was perpetually curved in a half smile that never quite reached his eyes, giving him the look of a man who knew a secret that no one else did and found immense satisfaction in that knowledge. His body was lean and well made, not bulky like a tourney knight, but wiry and graceful, with the long muscles of a swordsman and the easy, coiled tension of a predator at rest.
But his coloring was all wrong.
His hair was dark, a deep, rich brown that bordered on black, and cut short, close to his skull in the martial style his father Baelor Breakspear had favored. It was thick and soft looking, and you had felt it beneath your fingers enough times to know that it was indeed as soft as it appeared. There was only a single streak of silver gold to mark his Targaryen blood, a narrow ribbon of pale brightness that ran from his temple to the nape of his neck like a brand. It was as if the gods had begun to paint him in the colors of Old Valyria and then grown bored, abandoning the work halfway through.
And his eyes. Those mismatched, unsettling eyes. One was a clear, piercing blue, the blue of the Stormlands sky, the blue of his mother Jena Dondarrion's bloodline. The other was a deep, warm brown, almost black in certain lights, flecked with amber and gold, the brown of his Dornish grandmother. They sat together in his handsome face like two strangers forced to share a room, never quite meeting, never quite agreeing. They gave him the look of something assembled from spare parts, something the gods had cobbled together from whatever materials they had at hand and then sent out into the world unfinished.
He looked like a Stormlander. He looked like his mother's son. He looked like a mongrel.
And there you stood, Y/N Blackfyre, the spitting image of Daena the Defiant reborn.
You were everything a Targaryen should be. You were the living embodiment of the bloodline that had conquered Westeros, the bloodline that had ruled for nearly two hundred years, the bloodline that Valarr Targaryen could claim by name but not by appearance. And you wore the name of his family's greatest enemy, Blackfyre, the house of the usurper, the house of rebellion and treason and broken oaths.
The irony was not lost on you. It was certainly not lost on him.
You could feel his attention on you even before he looked up. It was a physical thing, a weight, a pressure, like the heat of the sun on bare skin. He was always aware of you, always attuned to your presence in a way that made you feel like prey being stalked by a patient, methodical hunter. And when he finally raised his eyes from his book, the impact of his gaze was like a blow.
His mismatched eyes traveled over your body with the slow, deliberate thoroughness of a man savoring a fine wine. They lingered on the swell of your breasts, visible through the thin linen, on the curve of your hips, on the length of your legs. They traced the line of your throat, the soft hollow where your pulse fluttered visibly beneath your skin. They drank you in, consumed you, devoured you. And when they finally met your eyes, there was something in them that made your breath catch, a hunger so raw, so intense, so utterly possessive that it stole the air from your lungs.
He wanted you. That was nothing new; you had known that since your wedding night. But there was something else in his gaze tonight, something darker and more complicated. It was as if he resented you for making him want you. As if your beauty was a personal affront, a reminder of everything he was not, everything he could never be. He looked at you like a man starving, and hating himself for his hunger.
"My wife," Valarr said, his voice low and smooth. He did not look away from your face, though you could see the effort it cost him. His eyes kept flickering down, tracing the lines of your body, before he forced them back up. "How kind of you to join me. I was beginning to fear you had forgotten the way."
As if I could forget. As if I could ever forget anything about this nightmare you have constructed for me.
You said nothing. You had learned that too, in the long weeks since your wedding. Silence was safer than words. Words could be twisted, weaponized, turned back upon you with that gentle, reasonable smile he wore so well. Words could be used to trap you, to expose you, to give him more ammunition for the slow, grinding war of attrition he waged against your spirit every single day.
Silence, at least, was your own. He could not take your silence. He could not twist it or weaponize it or use it to humiliate you. He could only wait, and watch, and try to find new ways to make you speak.
He closed the book and set it aside, but he did not rise. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, his legs spreading slightly, his posture one of casual, arrogant ease. The robe fell further open, revealing more of his chest, the flat plane of his stomach, the trail of dark hair that disappeared beneath the silk. He was aroused, you realized with a jolt. The evidence of his desire was unmistakable, pressing against the fabric of his robe, and he made no effort to hide it. Why would he? This was his chamber, his kingdom, his world. You were the intruder here, the supplicant, the conquered.
"Come here," he said.
Just that. Two words. Soft as a lover's whisper, heavy as a command. It was not a request. It was never a request, no matter how gently he spoke it. Every word that fell from his lips was an order wrapped in silk, a demand disguised as consideration.
You walked toward him. Your bare feet made no sound on the thick Myrish carpet, and you moved with the unconscious grace that had been drilled into you since childhood, the posture of a noblewoman, the bearing of a lady, the carefully cultivated elegance that marked you as someone of consequence even when you had no consequence at all. The thin linen of your shift whispered against your skin as you walked, a constant reminder of your vulnerability, your exposure, your complete and utter dependence on his mercy. You could feel his eyes on you with every step, could feel the weight of his gaze like a physical caress, sliding over your breasts, your hips, the shadowed juncture of your thighs.
You stopped before his chair, close enough to feel the heat of the fire on your skin, close enough to smell him, that intoxicating blend of sandalwood and smoke and warm male skin that you had come to associate with long nights and tangled sheets and the slow, inexorable erosion of your will. He looked up at you, his head tilted slightly to one side, his mismatched eyes gleaming in the firelight.
His hand rose. You braced yourself for his touch, on your face, your throat, your breast. But instead, he caught a strand of your silver gold hair between his fingers, rubbing it gently as if testing the quality of fine silk. His touch was light, almost reverent, and his eyes softened with something that might have been mistaken for genuine admiration by someone who did not know him.
But you knew him now. You had spent a moon learning him, studying him, cataloging his every expression and gesture and word. And you knew that the softness in his eyes was not admiration. It was hunger. It was envy. It was a desperate, consuming need that he hated himself for feeling.
"Beautiful," he murmured. His voice was rough, almost pained. "Gods, do you have any idea what you do to me? What you've done to me since the moment I first saw you?"
He drew the strand of hair to his face and pressed it to his lips. His eyes closed for a moment, and you watched his throat work as he inhaled the scent of you, the faint perfume of the lavender soap you were permitted to use, the clean, sweet smell of your skin. When he opened his eyes again, they were dark with something that looked almost like anguish.
"You know," he said, still stroking your hair, still holding it against his lips as if he could not bear to let it go, "I used to dream of hair like this. When I was a boy, I would pray to the Seven every night, every single night, to make mine silver. To make me look like my grandfather. Like my uncles. Like a true Targaryen."
His voice was soft, musing, but there was an edge to it now. A bitterness that he could not quite hide.
"I would kneel before the altar in the royal sept," he continued, "and I would promise the gods anything, anything at all, if they would just change the color of my hair. I promised to be brave, like my father. I promised to be wise, like my grandfather the King. I promised to be pious and just and merciful and all the things a prince is supposed to be. And every morning, I would wake up and run to the mirror, hoping that this time… this time, they had listened."
He released your hair, letting it fall back against your shoulder. His hand moved to your face, his fingers tracing the line of your cheekbone with a touch so light it was almost not there at all. His thumb brushed the corner of your mouth, and you felt your lips part involuntarily, a small, betraying response that you could not control.
"They never did," he said. "The gods have a cruel sense of humor, don't they? They gave the Valyrian beauty to the Blackfyre, the daughter of traitors and rebels, the spawn of a usurper's bloodline. And they gave the dornish coloring to the Prince of Dragonstone, the heir to the Iron Throne."
His thumb traced your lower lip, pressing slightly, feeling the soft, full curve of it. His eyes were fixed on your mouth now, and you could see the conflict in them, the desire warring with resentment, the hunger battling with something that looked almost like hatred. Not hatred of you, you realized with a start. Hatred of himself. Hatred of his own weakness, his own need, his own desperate, consuming want for something he believed should be beneath him.
"You should have been mine by right of blood," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "You should have been born a Targaryen. You should have been my sister, my cousin, my equal. Instead, you are my enemy's daughter, and I have to pretend that I married you for politics. For duty. For the realm."
His hand slid from your face to your throat, his fingers wrapping around the slender column with a gentle but unmistakable pressure. He could feel your pulse beneath his palm, quick, fluttering, like a trapped bird. His thumb stroked the hollow of your throat, feeling the warmth of your skin, the life that beat just beneath the surface.
"But that's not why I married you," he said, and his voice cracked slightly, revealing a rawness that you had never heard before. "I married you because I couldn't stop thinking about you. Because from the moment I saw you, standing there with your family, defeated, kneeling, surrounded by guards, your head held high even in defeat, I knew I had to have you. I had to possess you. I had to make you mine."
He hated you because you made him feel weak, made him feel wanting, made him feel like a mongrel scrabbling at the gates of a palace he would never be worthy to enter.
And beneath all of that, beneath the hunger and the envy and the resentment and the hate, there was something that looked almost like tenderness. Almost like love. But it was a twisted, possessive, consuming love, the love of a dragon for its hoard, the love of a collector for his most precious acquisition.
His hand tightened on your throat, not enough to hurt, but enough to make you aware of his strength, his power, his absolute control over you. His mismatched eyes blazed with an intensity that was almost frightening, and you could see the muscles in his jaw working as he struggled to contain whatever was raging inside him.
"You are mine," he said, and it was not a statement. It was a vow. A curse.
His hand released your throat and moved to the back of your neck, tangling in your silver gold hair. He pulled you down, and you went willingly, or perhaps not willingly, but without resistance, which amounted to the same thing. His mouth found yours, and he kissed you with a desperate, consuming hunger that stole your breath and set your blood on fire.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was not the careful, controlled kiss of a husband performing his marital duty. It was raw and hungry and full of all the twisted, complicated emotions that churned inside him, the desire, the envy, the resentment, the need. His tongue swept into your mouth, claiming you, tasting you, devouring you. His hand in your hair held you in place, not allowing you to pull away, not allowing you to escape the intensity of his kiss.
And gods help you, you kissed him back. You did not mean to. You did not want to. But your body betrayed you, as it always did. Your lips parted beneath his, and your tongue met his, and your hands came up to grip his shoulders, whether to push him away or pull him closer, you could not have said. The taste of him filled your mouth, wine and smoke and something dark and addictive that you could not name. The heat of him surrounded you, enveloped you, consumed you.
When he finally broke the kiss, you were both breathing hard. His forehead rested against yours, and you could feel the rapid beat of his heart against your chest. His hand was still tangled in your hair, and his other hand had found your waist, his fingers pressing into the soft curve of your hip with a possessive grip.
"You are cold," he observed, his thumb tracing the line of your cheekbone. "The walk from your chambers is too long. I have told the servants to keep your fire burning through the night, but they seem to forget. Careless of them. I shall have to speak to the steward."
You will do no such thing, you thought. You want me cold. You want me to arrive here shivering and desperate for the warmth of your fire, the warmth of your bed, the warmth of you. This is by your design, as everything is by your design.
But you said nothing. You simply stood there, letting him touch you, letting him pretend to care about your comfort. What else was there for a traitor's daughter to do?
"The hour is late," he said, withdrawing his hand. He rose from his chair with the easy grace of a man who had never known a moment's true hardship, who had never had to fight for anything in his life. He was not tall, shorter than his father had been at his age, you had heard, and shorter than most of the knights who served in the Kingsguard, but he still loomed over you, close enough that you could count the flecks of lilac in his blue eye, the flecks of amber in his brown one. "I trust your chambers are comfortable?"
Cold. Empty. A prison with silk curtains and a bed that feels like stone. "Yes, my prince."
"Good." He smiled, and for a moment, he almost looked kind. "I would hate to think you were suffering. You have suffered enough, I think. Your family's choices… well. We need not speak of that. The past is the past, and you are my wife now. The future is what matters."
He reached down and took your hand. His fingers were long and elegant, a musician's fingers, a scholar's fingers. They wrapped around yours with a gentle but unmistakable firmness, a claim of ownership that needed no words to express.
"Come to bed," he said, his voice rough and low.
He rose from the chair, pulling you with him, and began to walk toward the great canopied bed. You followed, because you had no choice. Because your body was already responding to him, already softening and warming and preparing itself for his touch. Because some traitorous part of you wanted this, wanted his hands on your skin, his mouth on your throat, his body moving against yours.
He did not release your hand as you walked. His fingers were warm and strong around yours, and you found yourself gripping back, holding on to him as if he were the only solid thing in a world that had turned to water and smoke.
The act itself was never violent. That was the worst part. That was the part that made you want to scream, to weep, to claw at your own skin until you could feel something other than this terrible, suffocating gentleness.
If he had been cruel, you could have hated him. If he had hurt you, truly hurt you, if he had taken you with the brutal entitlement of a conqueror claiming his spoils, you could have built walls of rage and disgust to shield yourself from his touch. You could have retreated into the cold, clean fortress of your hatred and watched him from behind its battlements, untouched and untouchable.
But Valarr Targaryen was not cruel. He was gentle. And his gentleness was more devastating than any cruelty could ever be.
He laid you down on the bed with the care of a man handling something precious and fragile. The furs were soft beneath your back, the silk sheets cool against your heated skin. He loomed over you for a moment, his mismatched eyes traveling over your body with that hungry, reverent gaze, drinking in the sight of you spread out before him like a feast. The firelight played across your skin, gilding your silver gold hair, casting shadows in the hollows of your throat and the valley between your breasts.
"You are so beautiful," he breathed. His voice was thick with emotion, almost pained.
He lowered himself beside you, propped on one elbow, and his free hand began to explore your body. His touch was light, almost reverent, as if he were mapping the contours of a holy relic. His fingers traced the line of your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder, the soft swell of your breast. They circled your nipple through the thin linen of your shift, feeling it tighten and peak beneath his touch, and he made a low sound in his throat, a sound of satisfaction, of possession, of hunger barely restrained.
"I want to see you," he said. "All of you."
He did not tear your shift away. He did not rip the fabric from your body. Instead, he gathered the hem in his hands and slowly, slowly drew it upward, revealing you inch by torturous inch. The mound of your sex. The skin of your stomach. The curve of your waist. The undersides of your breasts. And then, finally, your breasts themselves, full and round and perfect, the nipples a color that darkened as he watched, tightening in the cool air of the chamber.
He made that sound again, that low, almost pained sound, and lowered his head. His mouth found your breast, and you gasped as his tongue circled your nipple, hot and wet and devastatingly skilled. His hand found your other breast, his fingers rolling and teasing the sensitive peak until you were arching beneath him, your body betraying you with every shudder and moan. His tongue swirled around the bud, sucking gently at first, then harder, teeth grazing just enough to make you arch into him. A gasp tore from your throat, your fingers threading into his hair, tugging at the silver streak as pleasure warred with the haze in your mind. Was this what you wanted? His free hand slid up your thigh, pushing the hem of your dress higher, fingers brushing your wetness.
He took his time. Gods, he always took his time. He explored every inch of you with his hands and his mouth, learning you, memorizing you, claiming you. He kissed the hollow of your throat and the inside of your elbow and the sensitive spot just below your ear that made you gasp and clutch at his shoulders. He traced the curve of your hip with his tongue and pressed open mouthed kisses to the soft skin of your inner thigh. He touched you everywhere, tasted you everywhere, until you were trembling and desperate and utterly, completely his.
And through it all, he watched you. His eyes never left your face, cataloguing every reaction, every gasp, every involuntary arch of your body. He wanted to see your pleasure. He needed to see it. Because your pleasure was proof, proof that you were his, proof that your body recognized his claim even if your mind resisted, proof that the Valyrian beauty he coveted responded to the mongrel prince who should have been beneath you.
"Feel how wet you are for me," he growled, slipping a finger to stroke your slick folds. You bucked against his touch, a moan betraying your body's eagerness even as you bit your lip, eyes fluttering shut. He circled your clit with pressure, dipping lower to push one finger inside you, then two, curling them to hit that spot that made stars burst behind your eyelids. His mouth returned to yours, swallowing your cries as he pumped his fingers, stretching you, preparing you, your whispered 'wait' lost in the rhythm of his thrusts, but your hips rose to meet him, chasing the building tension.
"Look at me," he commanded, his voice rough. "I want to see your eyes when you come apart for me."
You tried to look away. You tried to close your eyes, to retreat into the darkness behind your lids where he could not follow. But his hand caught your chin and turned your face back to his, and you had no choice but to meet his gaze as his fingers found the slick, aching center of you and began to move with devastating precision.
"Look at me," he repeated, and there was something in his voice, a desperate, almost pleading quality that made you obey. "I need to see you. I need to know that you feel this too. That I'm not the only one burning."
Your climax crashed over you like a wave, and you cried out, a sound you could not contain, a sound that was torn from you against your will. Your back arched, your fingers digging into his shoulders, your eyes locked with his as the pleasure consumed you. And through it all, he watched. His mismatched eyes blazed with triumph and hunger and something that looked almost like worship.
"That's it," he murmured, his voice thick with satisfaction. "That's my girl. My beautiful, perfect girl."
He moved over you then, settling between your thighs, and you felt the hot, hard length of him pressing against your entrance. He paused for a moment, his forehead resting against yours, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"Say my name," he said. "I want to hear you say my name."
You did not want to give him that. It felt like too much, like a surrender too complete to be borne. But his hips shifted, the head of him pressing against you but not entering, and you knew, you knew, that he would wait all night if he had to. He would wait until you broke, until you gave him what he wanted, until you acknowledged that he was the one giving you this pleasure, that he was the one you needed.
"Valarr," you whispered. The name tasted like defeat. Like surrender. Like the death of everything you had been before.
His smile was a thing of terrible beauty, triumphant and hungry and impossibly tender all at once. "Again."
"Valarr."
He thrust into you in one smooth, devastating motion, and you cried out his name a third time, not because he asked, but because you could not stop yourself. He filled you completely, stretched you perfectly, and for one endless moment, you simply stared at each other, joined in the most intimate way possible, your breath mingling, your hearts pounding in tandem.
"Mine," he breathed, and began to move.
He made love to you slowly, reverently, as if you were something holy and he were a pilgrim who had traveled a thousand miles to worship at your altar. His thrusts were deep and deliberate, each one designed to draw out your pleasure, to make you feel every inch of him, to imprint himself on your body and your soul. He watched your face the entire time, his eyes dark with intensity, cataloguing every flutter of your lashes, every parting of your lips, every gasp and moan that escaped you.
"So perfect, so mine," he whispered, voice thick with emotion, slow thrusts that built like a gathering storm, pulling out almost fully before sliding back in, grinding against your clit with each hilt. His hands worshipped your body, one tangling in your silver hair to tilt your head back for his kisses, the other pinning your hip to the bed, controlling the pace. You wrapped your legs around him, heels digging into his ass, urging him deeper despite the lingering fog of consent's shadow.
The intensity mounted, his reverent touches turning possessive, gripping your thigh hard enough to bruise, sucking marks into your neck that would linger like claims. Sweat slicked your skin, bodies sliding together in a symphony of gasps and moans.
He shifted, angling to hit deeper, faster now, the bed creaking under the force. Your walls clenched around his cock, the coil in your belly tightening unbearably. "Come for me," he urged, thumb finding your clit again, rubbing in tight circles as he pounded into you.
The climax crashed over you like a wave, your pussy spasming around him, milking his length as you cried out, silver hair sticking to your damp forehead, purple eyes glazing with release. He followed moments later, thrusting erratically before burying himself deep, cock pulsing as he flooded you with hot cum, ropes spilling into your core, burying his face in your breasts as his body shuddered against yours. You felt the hot pulse of his release inside you, felt his arms tighten around you as if he were afraid you might disappear, felt his lips press reverent kisses to your throat and shoulder and the corner of your jaw.
For a long moment, neither of you moved. You lay tangled together, your breathing slowly returning to normal, your bodies still joined, your skin slick with sweat. His weight was warm and solid on top of you, and despite everything, despite the hatred and the resentment and the bitter knowledge of what he had taken from you, you felt safe.
It was a lie. You knew it was a lie. But in that moment, in the warm, firelit darkness of his chambers, with his body pressed against yours and his breath soft on your neck, you could almost believe it.
He stirred finally, rolling off you but not letting go. His arm remained wrapped around your waist, pulling you against his side, and his hand came up to stroke your hair with a gentle, almost absentminded tenderness.
He pressed a kiss to your temple and settled back against the pillows, his arm still wrapped around your waist.
"You may return to your chambers now," he said, his voice already growing distant, dismissive. "Ser Alan will escort you."
The words were the same as they always were. The dismissal was the same as it always was. And yet tonight, something was different. Tonight, the thought of leaving, of rising from this warm bed and walking back through those cold corridors to your cold, empty chamber, filled you with a despair so profound that it threatened to swallow you whole.
You did not move.
The silence stretched. One heartbeat. Two. Three. You could feel his attention shift, could sense him turning his head on the pillow to look at you. You kept your eyes fixed on the canopy above, counting the dragons. Five. Six. Seven.
"You are still here," he observed. There was no surprise in his voice, only a kind of clinical curiosity. "I gave you leave to go."
You swallowed. Your throat was dry. "I know."
"Then why do you linger?" He propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at you with those mismatched eyes. In the dim light, they seemed to gleam with an inner fire of their own, the blue one cold as ice, the brown one warm as embers. "Have I not been a considerate husband? Have I not given you your own chambers, your own space, your privacy? I would never force you to remain where you are not wanted."
Where you are not wanted.
The words hung in the air between you, heavy with double meaning. You were not wanted in his heart, you knew that, had always known it. He did not love you; he possessed you. He coveted you. He resented you and worshipped you in equal measure. But he did not love you, not in any way that you recognized as love. And you were not wanted in his chambers either, except when he summoned you, except when he wanted to use your body and watch you respond to his touch.
But here you were. Tangled in his silk sheets, breathing his air, warmed by his fire. And the thought of leaving, of rising from this bed and walking back through those cold, dark corridors to your empty room, made you want to weep.
"You summon me," you said. Your voice was barely above a whisper. "You summon me every night."
His brow furrowed with perfect, practiced confusion. It was a mask you had seen him wear a hundred times, the face of a man who could not understand why anyone would question his actions, who genuinely believed himself to be acting only with the purest of intentions.
"I summon you because you are my wife," he said, as if explaining something simple to a child. "It is my duty to attend to you. To ensure the continuation of our line. The realm needs heirs, sweet wife. Our union must bear fruit."
He reached out and brushed a strand of silver gold hair from your face, his touch feather light, almost tender. His fingers lingered on your cheek, tracing the line of your jaw, the curve of your ear.
"But I would never keep you here against your will," he continued. "That would be… unseemly. You are not a prisoner. You are my wife. If you wish to return to your chambers, you have only to say so. I will summon Ser Alan myself."
You are not a prisoner.
The words were a lie, and you both knew it. You were a prisoner in all but name. Your every movement was watched, your every word reported, your every attempt to reach out to the world beyond the Red Keep carefully and quietly thwarted. You were not permitted to write to your brothers at the Wall, not permitted to see your sisters, not permitted to send word to your mother in Tyrosh, not permitted to leave your chambers without an escort of guards who claimed to be protecting you but who served only to remind you of your captivity.
You had tried, once, to walk in the gardens alone. It had been a small thing, a tiny act of rebellion. You had simply slipped away from your ladies in waiting and wandered down a path you had not been shown before. Within minutes, two guards had appeared at your side, their faces carefully neutral, their voices politely insistent. "For your safety, my lady. The Red Keep can be dangerous for those who do not know its ways."
You had not tried again.
And your ladies in waiting, they were not companions. They were watchers. Spies in silk and velvet, assigned to report your every word and deed to the Prince. They whispered behind their hands when they thought you could not hear, their voices dripping with contempt. "Traitor's daughter." "Blackfyre whore." "She thinks herself a dragon, but she's nothing but a pretender in borrowed scales."
They pulled your laces too tight when they dressed you, leaving bruises on your ribs. They brought you cold food and colder stares, and when you asked for something, a book, a warm bath, a moment of peace, they smiled sweetly and promised to see to it, and nothing ever came of it.
The world had been carefully, methodically stripped away from you. Your family, your name, your freedom, your dignity. Everything that had made you who you were had been taken, piece by piece, until only he remained. The only person who touched you without care. The only person who looked at you without disgust. The only person who spoke to you as if you were a person, not a symbol of a defeated rebellion.
You were tired. Gods, you were so tired. Tired of the cold walks. Tired of the cold bed. Tired of the cold stares. Tired of being alone with your thoughts and your grief and your rage until you felt like you might shatter into a thousand pieces.
And he was warm.
He was here, solid and real, his body radiating heat beside you in the vast bed. He was the only person in the Red Keep who touched you without making you feel like something unclean. His hands on your skin, his voice in your ear, his presence filling the empty spaces inside you, it was a poison, you knew, sweet and slow and deadly. But it was the only warmth you had.
You hated him for it. Hated him with a fierce, burning intensity that sometimes took your breath away. Hated him for what he had taken from you, for what he continued to take, for the way he made you need him even as you loathed him.
And you needed him. That was the worst part. That was the part that made you want to scream. You needed his warmth, his touch, his voice. You needed the only human connection that was offered to you, even knowing that it was offered with chains attached.
"Valarr."
His name felt strange on your tongue. You usually called him "my prince" or nothing at all, maintaining that last, fragile barrier of formality between you. But in this moment, in the dying firelight, with your body still humming from his touch and your walls crumbling around you, you could not bring yourself to maintain that final pretense.
"Yes?"
His voice was soft. Encouraging. The voice of a man who already knew what you were going to say and was savoring the anticipation, drawing out the moment like a cat playing with a mouse.
You closed your eyes. You could not look at him while you said it. You could not watch his face as you surrendered this last, precious piece of yourself.
"Let me stay."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing you had ever heard.
You could feel him smiling in the darkness. You did not need to see his face to know that the satisfaction was radiating from him like heat from the dying embers, that his mismatched eyes were gleaming with quiet triumph. You had given him exactly what he wanted, exactly what he had been working toward since the night of your wedding.
"I'm sorry," he said, and there was nothing but gentle confusion in his tone. "I don't understand. Stay where?"
You bastard. You utter, complete bastard.
You knew what he wanted. You had always known. He wanted you to say it clearly, to spell it out, to beg for the privilege of sleeping in his bed like a dog begging for scraps at the master's table. He wanted you to acknowledge that you needed him, that you wanted him, that all his careful manipulation had worked exactly as intended. He wanted you to hand him this victory on a silver platter, to kneel before him and offer up your last shred of pride as a gift.
And you were going to give it to him.
Because you were too tired to fight anymore. Because the thought of that cold walk back to your empty chambers, of lying alone in that cold bed with nothing but your thoughts for company, made you want to weep. Because whatever this was, this twisted, poisonous thing between you, it was better than the alternative.
"The corridors are cold."
"The corridors are always cold." His tone was mild, pleasant. "I have offered to have braziers placed along your route. You declined."
Because accepting would mean admitting I notice the cold. Because accepting would mean I owe you gratitude for every scrap of warmth you deign to give me.
"I did not wish to trouble the servants."
"Ah." He said it as if you had revealed something profound.
"You are too considerate, wife. Most ladies would demand a dozen braziers and complain of the smoke. But not you. You bear your discomforts in silence." His hand found yours beneath the furs, his fingers interlacing with your own. His palm was warm. "I admire that about you. Truly."
You wanted to pull your hand away. You did not.
"Please," you said instead.
The word tasted like ash in your mouth, like defeat, like the death of something precious and irreplaceable. It was the word of a supplicant, a beggar, a woman who had been stripped of everything and was grateful for whatever scraps were thrown her way.
"I am asking. I want to share your chambers. I want…"
You faltered. What did you want? You wanted your family back. You wanted your freedom. You wanted to wake up and discover that the last moon had been nothing but a nightmare, that you were still in Tyrosh with your mother and your siblings, that the war had never happened and Daemon Blackfyre still lived and the world still made sense.
But those things were gone. They were ashes and dust, scattered on the wind of history. All that remained was this room, this bed, this man.
"I want to stay," you finished, your voice barely audible.
His smile was a thing of terrible beauty.
It transformed his sharp, mismatched features into something almost angelic, the face of a savior, a protector, a man who had rescued a fallen woman from the consequences of her family's treason and lifted her up to stand beside him. His blue eye sparkled with warmth. His brown eye gleamed with satisfaction. He looked like a painting of some ancient hero, a knight of legend who had slain the dragon and claimed the maiden as his reward.
"Oh, my sweet wife," he murmured.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to yours. The kiss was soft, tender, achingly gentle. It was the kind of kiss a devoted husband might give his beloved wife after a long separation, a gesture of pure and selfless affection. And it made you want to scream.
"Of course you may stay. I would never deny you anything you truly wanted. I told you, did I not? I am the only one in this world who will care for you. The only one who sees your worth."
He pulled the furs up over your body, tucking them around your shoulders with careful, almost paternal attention. His hands smoothed the fabric, ensuring that you were completely covered, completely warm, completely enveloped in his care. Then he lay back against the pillows and drew you against his side, one arm wrapping around your waist and pulling you close.
His body was warm. Solid. Real. And for one terrible, shameful moment, you felt safe.
It was a lie. You knew it was a lie. This safety was an illusion, a gilded cage dressed up as a sanctuary. He was not your protector. He was your captor, your jailer, the architect of your slow and methodical destruction. The warmth of his body was the warmth of the dragon's breath, and you were the lamb curled in its jaws.
But it was warm. And you were so tired. And for just this moment, just this one moment, you could pretend.
"Sleep now," he murmured against your hair. His breath was warm on your scalp, his voice a low, soothing rumble. "You are where you belong. With me. Where no one can hurt you. Where no one can whisper their poison in your ear. Just us, sweet wife. Just us."
His arm tightened around your waist, pulling you even closer. You could feel the steady beat of his heart against your back, the rise and fall of his chest, the solid reality of his presence. He was everywhere, surrounding you, enveloping you, claiming you.
And then his lips found your ear, and his voice dropped to a whisper so soft you almost didn't hear it.
"I will make you love me," he breathed. "I will make you need me so completely that you won't remember how to breathe without me. And when that day comes, when you finally see that I am the only one who will ever truly want you, I will be there. Waiting. As I have always been waiting."
He pressed a kiss to the curve of your ear, his tongue tracing the delicate shell of it, and you shivered, not from cold, but from the dark promise in his words.
"Sleep," he said again, his voice returning to that gentle, soothing tone. "Dream of me. Dream of us. Dream of the life we will build together."
You closed your eyes.
The tears came then. Silent and hot, sliding down your cheeks to soak into the silk pillowcase. You did not make a sound. You had learned not to cry where anyone could hear, learned to swallow your grief and your rage and your despair until they became a hard, cold knot in your chest. But you could not stop the tears. They flowed from you like water from a broken dam, an endless river of sorrow that you had been holding back for too long.
His arm tightened around your waist. You felt his lips curve into a smile against the crown of your head.
He knew.
He always knew.
And tomorrow, when the sun rose and the world went on as it always did, you would wake in his bed. You would open your eyes to the sight of his chambers, surrounded by his scent and his warmth and his quiet, suffocating care. You would look at yourself in the polished bronze mirror that hung on his wall and see a stranger, a woman who had begged her captor to keep her close, who had traded her last scrap of independence for a few hours of warmth.
The servants would know. They always knew everything that happened in the Red Keep. By midday, the whispers would have spread through every corridor and every kitchen and every stable. The Blackfyre whore has moved into the Prince's chambers. She begged him to let her stay. She crawled into his bed like a dog seeking warmth.
Your ladies in waiting would smile their cold, knowing smiles. Lady Jeyne would make some cutting remark disguised as concern. "How wonderful that you and the Prince have grown so close. I'm sure your mother would be so pleased to know that you have found… comfort… in your new home."
And Valarr would watch it all with those mismatched eyes, that gentle, reasonable smile playing at his lips. He would see the whispers and the stares and the quiet cruelties, and he would do nothing to stop them. Why would he? They served his purpose. They reminded you that he was the only one who treated you with anything resembling kindness, the only one who touched you without making you feel like something unclean.
He was the disease and the cure. The poison and the antidote. The dragon and the knight who slew it.
And you were his.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight, in the dying firelight, wrapped in his furs and his possession, you lay still, your body pressed back against his in the spoon of his embrace.
His cock, still half hard from your earlier joining, nestled against the curve of your ass, warm and heavy. You tried to focus on the rhythm of your breathing, to let the exhaustion pull you under, but the tears kept coming, silent tracks carving paths down your face.
Then you felt it, a subtle twitch, a thickening against your skin. His length stirred, growing firm once more, pressing insistently into the cleft of your cheeks. Your breath hitched, a fresh wave of emotion crashing through you.
Not again. Not when your heart felt so raw, so fractured. But your body, traitorous as ever, responded with a faint clench low in your belly, the lingering slickness between your thighs a reminder of how he'd already claimed you.
Valarr shifted behind you, his hand sliding from your waist to cup your breast, thumb brushing over the still sensitive nipple. He hardened fully now, his cock rigid and hot, the veined shaft sliding along your ass as he rocked his hips forward in a slow, deliberate grind.
"Shh," he murmured into your hair, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through your back. "Let me hold you closer. Let me make it better."
You didn't protest, words caught in your throat, choked by the sobs you refused to voice. His free hand trailed down your side, over the flare of your hip, fingers dipping between your legs to part your folds. He found you wet, despite everything, his touch gentle as he stroked your clit in lazy circles, coaxing more arousal from your unwilling core.
A whimper escaped you, muffled into the pillow, as his cock nudged at your entrance from behind, the broad head parting your lips.
He pushed in slowly, inch by inch, filling you again with that stretching burn that blurred the line between ache and need. Your walls fluttered around him, gripping his thickness as he sank deep, his hips flush against your ass. The position pinned you in place, his body a solid weight over yours, one arm banded across your chest to hold you tight while the other worked your clit with unerring precision. He didn't thrust yet, just held himself buried inside, letting you feel every pulse of him, every throb against your inner walls.
Tears streamed faster now, soaking the silk beneath your cheek, your purple eyes squeezed shut against the overwhelming flood.
Why did it feel good? Why did his possession twist the knife of your despair into something almost like solace? He began to move then, shallow rolls of his hips that dragged his cock along your depths, grinding against that spot that made stars burst behind your lids.
His breath was hot on your neck, lips pressing soft kisses there even as his pace quickened, thrusts turning firmer, the slap of skin on skin echoing softly in the chamber.
"That's it," he whispered, his mismatched eyes no doubt fixed on the back of your head, imagining your surrender. "Take me. You're mine to comfort, mine to fuck, mine to keep." His fingers pinched your nipple lightly, rolling it as he drove deeper, his cock pistoning in and out with controlled power.
You cried silently, body rocking with each impact, ass pressing back against him involuntarily as pleasure coiled tight despite the grief tearing at your chest.
He fucked you like that, possessive, unyielding, his hand leaving your clit to grip your hip, pulling you onto him harder.
The angle let him hit deeper, his balls slapping against your thighs with every plunge. Your sobs broke free in quiet gasps, tears blurring your vision, but your pussy clenched around him, soaking his length with fresh wetness. He groaned, low and reverent, burying his face in your silver hair, inhaling your scent as if it were his lifeline.
The build was relentless, his thrusts erratic now, chasing release while forcing yours. "Cry if you must," he said softly, voice laced with that dark tenderness. "But come for me again. Show me you need this as much as I need you." His hand snaked back to your clit, rubbing fast and firm, and the dam broke. Your orgasm ripped through you, walls spasming wildly around his cock, milking him as you shuddered, tears flowing unchecked.
Valarr followed with a muffled curse, slamming deep one last time, his release flooding you hot and thick, ropes of cum painting your insides. He held you through it, cock twitching as he emptied himself, his arms wrapping tighter, as if to absorb your sorrow into his own body.
In the quiet aftermath, he stayed inside you, softening slowly, his lips trailing kisses along your shoulder. The fire had died to embers, casting faint shadows over the furs tangled around you both. Your tears slowed, exhaustion finally claiming you, and as sleep pulled you under, the dreams came, of dragons, but also of mismatched eyes watching over you, a cage that felt, in the haze, almost like home.
And Valarr held you through the night, his possession complete, your cries a secret shared only in the dark.
Just a lighthearted stroll along the gardens, nothing remarkable about it, right? right?
How would Baelor and Maekar react to being called a good boy?
Includes: Baelor Targaryen x f!lady in waiting!reader / Maekar Targaryen x f!lady in waiting!reader
Warning(s): slight praise kink (really, they are discovering they have it)
The gardens in late morning had that particular quality of light that made everything look slightly more significant than it was.
Baelor had always appreciated this in the abstract way of someone who noticed beautiful things and filed them appropriately. The spring sun at this hour caught the stone paths and the new leaves and turned the whole space into something unhurried and golden and easy to breathe in.
He was finding breathing moderately straightforward today.
This was not always the case when he walked with you.
You moved beside him with the ease of someone who had decided simply to enjoy the morning, which he found — as he found most things about you — both uncomplicated in its surface and entirely undoing in its effect. You had been pale recently. His mother had noticed and said so. He had noticed considerably before his mother said so and had said nothing, because saying I notice everything about you with a specificity that has become somewhat consuming was not a thing he had found an appropriate moment to say.
He was still looking for the moment, though.
"Your lady mother was right," you said, tilting your face briefly toward the warmth with an unselfconsciousness that he appreciated and tried not to look at too directly. "It is a very fine morning."
"It is," he agreed.
You glanced at him. That look — the one that found his composure slightly amusing without being unkind about it. He had catalogued this look. He had not found a way to be unaffected by it.
"You did not have to escort me," you said. "I am quite capable of a garden unaccompanied."
"I am aware," he said. "I am here because I wished to be."
You held his gaze a moment longer than necessary. Then you smiled warmly and returned your attention to the path.
He kept his breathing even and said nothing and walked beside you in the comfortable silence that had developed between you across months of proximity, the kind that did not require filling, the kind he had come to think of privately as one of the better things his life currently contained.
Then you stopped. He stopped beside you. And he followed your gaze to the dog.
A perfectly ordinary dog — medium sized, brown and white, the amiable expression of an animal constitutionally incapable of suspicion. It sat on the path ahead regarding you both with the mild optimism of something whose tail had already decided how this encounter was going to go.
You made a sound. Baelor looked at you.
Your face had changed completely. Not performed delight — nothing so managed. Something simpler and more total than that, like a part of you had recognised the dog and responded before the rest of you had been consulted. An immediate and unconditional softening that arrived in your expression and stayed there, warm and unguarded and entirely itself.
He had seen you in many registers across many months. He had not seen this one before.
You crouched.
"Oh hello," you said. In a voice he had also not heard before.
Soft. Warm. Unconscious of itself in a way that most things about you were not — you were an observant person, a careful person, someone who knew what they were doing in most situations. This was you not knowing and not caring and it was—
The dog came to you immediately.
"Hello, you," you said, holding out your hand for the animal to sniff. "Where did you come from then?"
The dog offered its answer through the medium of attempting to climb into your lap.
You laughed.
Baelor felt the laugh somewhere in the region of his sternum, which was not new — your laugh had been doing things to him for several months — but the combination of the laugh and the voice and the expression on your face and the spring morning and the general accumulated weight of having feelings about you that he had been managing carefully for a very long time—
"You are very friendly," you told the dog, with great seriousness, catching it with both hands. "Yes you are. Aren't you."
Baelor stood very still. He was good at standing still. It was one of the things he did well — composure under pressure, stillness in difficult circumstances, the management of his own responses in situations that called for management.
"Who's a good boy?" you innocently said.
It turned out that his composure was not immune to this specific kind of pressure.
He could not have described what happened to it precisely. A structural event, somewhere beneath the surface — the careful architecture of five months of management developing, not a crack, but a quality of strain that had not been there before.
"You are," you told the dog warmly. "Yes you are. You are such a good boy."
Such a good boy.
Said in that voice. That specific soft certain warm voice that he was aware, with sudden and total clarity, he had never heard directed at anything before and that his entire nervous system had apparently been waiting for without his knowledge or consent.
Something happened. Not managed at all. Not the careful noting of a detail to be examined later in the appropriate privacy of his own solar. Something immediate and specific and entirely beyond the reach of the system he had constructed for exactly these kinds of situations.
He felt it in his hands first — the sudden awareness of them, the desire to do something with them that was not standing correctly at his sides. Then in his chest, which had developed a quality of tightness that breathing did not entirely resolve. Then lower, which was—
He looked at the middle distance.
"Such a good, good boy," you said. Warmly. Certainly. Like you had no idea — and you did not, you could not, you were talking to a dog — what those words in that voice were doing to a man standing three feet behind you who had been quietly in love with you for the better part of a year.
The middle distance was not helping. He looked at the line of trees to his left. Those were not helping either.
He was a prince of the realm. He had sat in war councils. He had ridden into battle. He had managed himself under pressures that would have unmade lesser men and he had done it with the composure that was perhaps his most reliable quality.
"Who's the best boy?" you said. "You are. You are the best boy." The dog let out an entirely too pleased bark, lolling its tongue at your words.
He closed his eyes briefly. Opened them. Stared at the trunk of one particular tree. The trunk remained entirely uninstructive on the subject of how a grown man was supposed to conduct himself when the woman he loved used a particular voice and a particular phrase to talk to a dog and his body responded as though the words had been meant for him, which they had not, which was the entire problem, which was—
The kennel master arrived, and Baelor had never been so grateful to see a kennel master in his life.
The man appeared at the far end of the path with the apologetic efficiency of someone who had been looking for an animal for some time, attached a lead, offered pardons, and departed, taking the dog with him.
You stood, brushed your skirts and turned to him with the easy manner of someone who had simply enjoyed a pleasant interlude and was entirely unaware of having caused a significant structural event in the composure of the man standing behind her.
You looked at his face. Something in your expression shifted.
"Is something amiss, my prince?" you asked.
"No," he said.
The word came out — not as it usually did. Usually, his words came out with the considered evenness of someone who knew what they were saying before they said it. This one came out slightly — unsteady. Not enough for most people to notice.
You were not most people.
"You look—" You tilted your head. Reading him the way you always did, with that observational patience that had been one of the first things he had catalogued about you and one of the things he had since found both most compelling and most dangerous about being in your company. "Strange."
"I am perfectly well," he offered a smile.
He added nothing more. Baelor was generally good at saying nothing in a way that communicated composure. He was not entirely certain he was managing this currently.
You looked at him for a long moment.
He watched the thought arrive in your expression — assembling itself from available evidence with that precise intelligence — and felt the specific sensation of a man observing an inevitable thing and having no means of stopping it.
"Has this," you said, very carefully, "got something to do with being called a good boy?"
The tree trunk to his left.
"I don't know what you mean," he said. His voice did the thing again and you looked at him with a slight frown on your brow.
You looked at his face, which was — not composed. Not in the way it usually was. Something had happened to the composure, somewhere between who's a good boy and this moment, and he could feel its absence the way you felt the absence of something load-bearing and could not immediately identify what was holding things up in its place.
"I am quite sure," you said softly, and the softness of it was — not helping, the softness was the precise problem, the softness was the voice, adjacent to the voice, close enough that his hands were doing something at his sides that he was choosing not to examine — "that you are a good boy too, my prince."
Something in his expression did something he was not in control of. He was aware of this. He could not, for the life of him, stop it.
Your eyes widened very slightly — not with surprise exactly, more with the quality of someone who had made an educated guess and found it confirmed beyond what they had quite anticipated — and then something warm and wondering moved across your face and you pressed your lips together against what was clearly a smile you were choosing not to deploy immediately.
"Oh," you said quietly. Simply. The full comprehension of it in one syllable.
He said nothing. There was nothing available to say.
You held his gaze for one long suspended moment in which he stood in a garden in the middle of a fine spring morning and felt five months of careful management simply — absent. Not destroyed. Not abandoned. Just temporarily unavailable, which amounted to the same thing.
Then you smiled.
Not the court smile. Not even the real one he had catalogued. Something new — warm and slightly wondering and threaded through with a tenderness that arrived in his chest and stayed there.
"Are you coming, my prince?" you said softly as you turned and walked along the path.
Baelor stood where he was. The morning continued around him. Somewhere distant a bird. The spring light doing what it did.
He looked at the path ahead of him, where you were walking with that ease that had been undoing him since autumn, and he thought — with the honesty he tried to bring to most things, including the inconvenient ones — that his emotional integrity had not survived the morning intact.
He was not certain he minded.
He walked after you and said nothing, and felt, underneath the considerable wreckage of his composure, something that was warm and slightly terrifying and — when he looked at it honestly — not entirely unwelcome.
The good boy thing was going to be a problem.
He was fairly certain it was going to be a very specific and recurring problem.
He found too, to his own surprise, that he was not entirely opposed to this.
The gardens had been his mother's idea.
Maekar had not needed the explanation — Myriah had simply said she has been indoors too long, take her for some air with the serene authority of a woman who considered her suggestions equivalent to directives and had been proven correct often enough to have earned this — but he had received it with the standard combination of mild irritation and complete compliance that characterised most of his interactions with his mother's instructions.
He was not irritated now.
This was the thing he was choosing not to examine.
You walked beside him with the ease of someone comfortable in silence, which he appreciated more than he would say, which was consistent with how he appreciated most things about you — thoroughly, privately, without any apparent intention of doing anything about it. The morning was fine. The gardens were doing whatever gardens did in spring. You had your face tilted slightly toward the warmth with an unselfconsciousness that he was filing alongside everything else he filed and not looking at directly.
"Your lady mother worries," you said.
"My lady mother manages," he said.
"Is there a difference?"
He considered this with more genuine attention than the question probably warranted. "Not in practice." You made a sound that was almost a laugh. He filed that too.
You had been walking for perhaps twenty minutes when he heard it.
Not you — something ahead of you on the path. A sound he placed immediately and without enthusiasm: large animal, heavy movement, the particular quality of something that had not been trained to be quiet about existing.
He looked up.
The dog was enormous.
Not dangerous — he assessed this in the first two seconds with the automatic threat evaluation of someone who had spent considerable time in situations where assessment speed mattered. Large, yes. Powerfully built, yes. The kind of animal that had clearly been bred for something serious rather than companionship. But its ears were soft and its tail was doing something that could generously be described as wagging and its overall bearing was that of a creature that had simply not yet encountered a situation it found concerning.
Maekar had encountered concerning situations. He recognised the absence of one.
He was going to say something about continuing along the other path, yet he did not say it. Because you had made a sound.
He turned and your entire face had — changed. Not subtly. Not in the careful managed way of someone controlling their reaction. Completely and immediately, like every professional composure you carried had simply stepped aside for something more fundamental.
"Oh," you breathed. "Oh, look at you."
You were already moving toward the dog.
Maekar watched this happen with the focused attention of a man observing something he had not anticipated and was rapidly recalibrating around.
The dog, for its part, had identified you as a person of interest and was giving the matter its full enormous attention.
You crouched.
The dog came to you immediately, with the confidence of an animal that had never been given reason to doubt its welcome, and you received it with both hands and an expression that he was going to need to stop looking at if he intended to maintain any of his current functioning.
"Hello," you said, in a voice he had not heard from you before. Soft. Warm. Entirely unconscious of itself. "Hello, you enormous thing. Aren't you magnificent."
The dog agreed with this assessment enthusiastically.
"You are," you confirmed, with great seriousness, apparently conducting a conversation that satisfied you both. "You are very magnificent. And very large. And very good, aren't you?"
He should look somewhere else. He could not.
"Who is a good boy?" you said, in that voice — that voice — warm and certain and soft in a way that arrived somewhere in the centre of him and did something he was not going to examine in a garden in the middle of the morning. "You are. You are such a good boy."
Maekar went completely still.
This was not a conscious decision. His body simply — stopped. Everything stopped. The reasonable function of a man going about a morning in a garden ceased operating at the specific combination of that tone and those words directed at a creature that was not him but that his entire nervous system had apparently decided was close enough for the distinction to become briefly irrelevant.
He was aware this was not rational. He was aware of very little else, in all honesty.
"Such a good, good boy," you told the dog warmly, and Maekar looked at the wall to his left with the focus of a man who has identified an architectural feature as his primary means of survival and is committing to it fully.
The wall was unhelpful.
The dog made a sound of profound contentment. He envied the dog with an immediacy that was deeply undignified.
The kennel master arrived — thank gods, thank every god that had ever been worshipped in any corner of the known world — with the apologetic efficiency of someone who had been looking for an animal for some time and had found it in the company of people whose patience he hoped he had not exhausted.
"Begging your pardons," he said, managing the lead. "He's a wanderer, this one. I hope he wasn't any trouble."
"None at all," you said warmly. You gave the dog a final thorough pat — small hands, large dog, the dog was enormous and you were — you were not enormous and the contrast was — he was looking at the wall again — and then you stood and brushed your skirts and turned to him with the easy manner of someone who had simply enjoyed a pleasant interlude.
You looked at his face. Something shifted in your expression.
"Are you well?" you asked.
"Yes," he said.
You looked at him with that specific quality of attention that he found, on the best days, compelling and, on days like today, genuinely dangerous.
"You look strange," you said.
"I am perfectly—"
"You did not strike me as someone afraid of dogs, my prince,” you tried for that explanation.
He said nothing and you looked at him for a long moment.
He watched a thought arrive in your expression — assembling itself from available evidence with that observational intelligence that had been causing him problems for months — and felt the specific sensation of a man watching an inevitable thing approach and having no means of diverting it.
"Has this," you said carefully, treading an uncharted path, "got something to do with being a good boy?"
The wall to his left remained structurally unchanged.
"No," he said.
You looked at him.
"My prince," you said, with a lightness that was doing nothing to conceal the precision underneath it. "I am quite sure that you are a good boy too."
His jaw tightened.
Something in his expression did something he was not in control of.
You held his gaze for one more moment — something moving through yours that was amusement and warmth and the specific satisfaction of someone who had understood something they perhaps should not have understood and found it delightful — and then you laughed, genuine and unguarded, and turned and walked along the path as though you had not just fundamentally destabilised an entire person.
"Are you coming, my prince?" you called, several steps ahead, without looking back. The ease of it. The complete unbothered ease of it.
Maekar stood on the garden path.
The kennel master had gone. The dog had gone. The morning continued around him with complete indifference. He looked at the horizon and conducted a rapid and unflinching assessment of the preceding five minutes and found the results both clear and deeply inconvenient.
You did not look back at him, but he could see, from where he finally walked behind you, the quality of your shoulders — the faint remnant of suppressed amusement still present in them — and he looked at that for a moment and felt, underneath the considerable weight of his current situation, something that was almost fond.
He was going to need to think about the good boy thing later. In private. At length.
He was fairly certain it was going to be a problem.
A.N.: something in these two makes me just raaaaaa i can't help it i need to watch them come apart with just the smallest details. This was a shorter, lighter work. I practically wrote it this morning at the gym whoops
Baelor discovers his wife's personal reading material and it's very different from the books he's used to.
Pairing : Baelor Targaryen x wife!reader
Warnings : explicit language
Word Count/read time : 1.3k / 6 minute approx
a/n : In an effort to take a more "post it anyway" attitude I'm sharing this, it's basically a first draft/concept piece, it's not finished but should be mostly readable. My plan would be to develop the concept further, create more of the "wife" character and have them working their way through a variety of spicy scenes but idk
The stack of books had been inconspicuous enough, piled next to his wife's dressing table, in the shadowy space between it and the wall. They were haphazardly stacked a foot high, some with their spines facing out and others with their spines toward the wall. He had only noticed them after the top one had slipped off the stack and hit the floor with a soft thwack. Intrigued, he had left his small desk by the window and gone to replace whatever had fallen, the book now splayed open on the floor was a little larger than his palm and would be less than half an inch thick when closed, hardly a book at all.
Baelor picked it up, skimming over the text, stopping suddenly, his eyes caught by a phrase
"The princes tongue slipped between the wet folds of her cunt, lapping at her like a man parched. She gripped at his dark hair, drawing him in closer, forcing his tongue deeper."
His brow furrowed, what manner of thing had he stumbled on? What was his wife keeping squirrelled away in this dark corner of their room. Intrigued he flipped the book closed and studied the front.
The cover was dark in colour and flimsy, and was barely any more substantial than the thin pages between. The corners were curling up and the spine was cracked in several places showing it had been well thumbed. Even the ink on the pages was a paling grey rather than the strong black used in the library books he was more used to. The whole thing had a temporary quality to it, like too much rough handling and it would disintegrate.
There was no information on the cover, but after leafing through a few pages he found what appeared to be the title page. It read simply "The Dark Prince", it had no author or any further information about where it had come from or what it was about.
Perplexed he sat down on the edge of the bed, opening the book to its first page and he started to read.
It was unlike anything he had ever read before and Baelor devoured the pages. It told the story of a prince with dark hair and dark eyes and the wooing of his second wife, initially it seemed as if the pair despised one another, but Baelor found that didn't stop them succumbing to their lusts on almost every page. He couldn't help but laugh to himself each time the two apparent enemies found themselves alone in a dark corridor or hidden away behind a conveniently placed rose bush and where able to rid themselves of their clothes in seconds.
As he read, Baelor forgot about the missives he was supposed to be replying too and became engrossed in the story in front of him, he didn't mind at all that the plot was nothing more than a way to move the two characters from one illicit tryst to another and he soon settled back against the pillows, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his feet crossed at the ankles.
He was almost at the climax of the story (and yet another climax for the characters) when the door to the bedroom opened and his wife walked in, closing it quickly behind her with a soft groan. With closed eyes she pressed her hands into the small of her back and stretched, her chest thrusting forward as her head fell back.
"I thought I'd never get away,' she said softly, her eyes still closed.
She had spent most of her afternoon in the great sept, praying with the other women of the court in celebration of the Mother. Baelor knew his wife's devotion was mostly for appearances and she'd have hated the hours lost in the draughty sept, kneeling for hours in mock piety.
"All the kneeling and praying and kneeling and praying, gods, it's utter murder," she continued, having not noticed her husbands silence.
She finally turned her attention to him, her eyes inquisitive as she took in his prone position on the bed and the small object in his large hands. She smiled as she took a step toward him.
"I see you've found my personal library," she said softly.
"It's been a most enlightening afternoon actually," he replied, "I had no idea such reading material was available,".
She couldn't help but grin, moving toward him again, the distance between them quickly shrinking.
"You don't have the right people in your employ then, my love," she purred as she started to climb onto the bed with him, her hands pulling at the skirts of her dress so she could kneel beside him.
"These are courtesy of one of your ladies then?" he asked.
"One of the maids, she told me about a house on the street of silk that deals in more than just flesh, she's been bringing them to me whenever she learns of a new one,".
"Which one are you enjoying?" she asked, prowling up the length of his body on her hands and knees.
"Ah, The Dark Prince," she purred, "he cuts a rather familiar figure don't you think?".
Baelor's eyebrows quirked upward, inviting her to say more and she just grinned at him.
"A dark haired prince with a mysterious gaze, next in line to the throne who needs a new wife?" she explained, "doesn't he sound a bit like you?".
Baelor laughed, reaching out to his wife and stroking her cheek.
"Nothing like me,".
"Entirely like you," she replied, letting herself be drawn closer to him by his gentle touch on her cheek, "even the way you like to fuck first thing in the morning," she teased, her lips now just a breath away from his.
"Are you suggesting the author of this text has intimate knowledge of me?" Baelor asked softly , feeling the heat of her body rolling over him like a wave. She shrugged, a grin still on her lips.
"Perhaps she just made a good assessment of your more… personal tastes?" she replied as she placed one hand on his chest, feeling the rise and fall of his breath.
Baelor placed his hand over hers.
"You know I've taken no lovers since we married?" he asked solemnly.
"I know," she said, her heart swelling with love.
She lowered her head and kissed the back of his hand where it covered her own. She looked up at him through her lashes, mischief in her eyes.
"But you were a young prince once, and I presume you sowed your wild oats from Dorne to the Wall? Perhaps she's a lover from years gone by?".
Baelor laughed again and shook his head.
"I learned too hard a lesson about wild oats," he said softly.
"She's just someone with a wild imagination then," she replied, lowering herself onto her hip and curling against her husband, their hands still joined and resting on his chest. She lay her head on his shoulder and sighed.
"Have you read the bit in the bath?" she asked, "that's a particular favourite of mine,".
"Yes, I have," Baelor replied, lifting the book up and using his free hand to flip the pages back a few to a very detailed section in which the characters couple in large, copper bathtub.
"Sounded a little impractical to me," he added, a playful grin turning up the corners of his lips, "not to mention, messy,".
"Shall I call for a bath? We can discover together how impractical and messy it really is,".
Baelor laughed again, lifting her hand up from his chest and kissing the inside of her wrist.
"Is that what you want? Do you want to reenact your favourite parts?" he teased, his tongue flicking out and tasting the skin of her wrist.
She lifted her head and looked into his eyes, he was thrilled to see them alight with excitement.
"Would you? Can we?".
"There is nothing I wouldn't do for you, my love,".
would valarr go crazy if FMC ever wore lingerie in bed (to seduce him)??? does he have a specific color he prefers (maybe black and red…) 👀
Hehehhe smut this way.
Early on in the relationship, before things become too heavy and complicated, you genuinely do not know what to get Valarr for his birthday.
It is not because he is difficult in the usual way. It is because Valarr already has everything.
Money is not an issue for him. Taste is not an issue either. He wears expensive watches without thinking about them. His suits are tailored. His home looks like it belongs in a magazine. Every gift idea you come up with feels either too small, too obvious, or embarrassingly sentimental.
And you are still new enough with him that you are nervous about getting it wrong.
You want to give him something meaningful, but you also do not want to look too eager. You want him to know you care, but not enough to scare yourself with how much you care. So you make the mistake of telling your friends.
They are merciless.
One of them says, “Girl, what do you give the man who has everything? Yourself.”
You immediately choke on your drink.
They laugh. You insist you are not doing that. Absolutely not. You and Valarr have only been together for a year, and while things between you are already intense, you are still shy with him in certain ways. Valarr has a way of looking at you that makes you forget how to stand properly. The idea of intentionally trying to seduce him feels almost impossible.
Which, of course, only makes your friends worse.
They drag you lingerie shopping under the excuse that “it is just for fun” and “you do not have to actually wear it if you chicken out.” But somehow you end up in a fitting room surrounded by lace and silk, listening to them argue outside the curtain about whether Valarr seems like a black-lace man or a deep-red-silk man.
And the worst part is, you start thinking about it.
You start imagining his face when he sees you. That controlled expression of his breaking for half a second. His eyes going dark. His voice going quieter. His attention narrowing until the whole world feels like it has been reduced to you and the space between his hands.
You are embarrassed by how much the thought affects you.
So you buy it.
Not because your friends pressured you. Not really.
You buy it because, secretly, some reckless part of you wants to know what Valarr looks like when he realizes you dressed yourself for him. You want to know if you can make him lose control. You want to know if, for once, you can be the one who makes him nervous.
And when his birthday finally comes, you are the nervous one.
You sit on the edge of his bed in the lingerie your friends helped you choose, heart beating too fast, second-guessing everything. The gift bag you brought him is still on the nightstand, but suddenly it feels irrelevant. This is the real gift. The one you are terrified to give.
Then the door opens.
Valarr stops.
For a moment, he says nothing.
And that silence is worse than anything he could have said.
Because you realize immediately that your friends were wrong about one thing.
This is not just lingerie to him.
This is you offering him proof that you want him. That you thought of him. That you wanted to be beautiful for him on purpose.
And Valarr, who has been so careful with you up until now, looks at you like you have just handed him something far more dangerous than a birthday present.
//
You sit frozen on the edge of your bed, the black lace bra hugging you like a secret you’re not sure you should have told. The matching thong sits high on your hips, the delicate garter belt and sheer stockings framing your thighs in a way that suddenly feels far too revealing under the low glow of the bedside lamp. Your hands are clasped tight in your lap, fingers trembling. The gift bag with the tie you’d picked out as a safer backup sits untouched on the nightstand. You’d rehearsed this moment in your head a dozen times, but now that Valarr is here—door just clicking shut behind him after his shower—you feel like you might actually combust from sheer nerves.
He stops halfway into the room, towel still slung low on his hips, hair damp and steam curling faintly around him. For a long beat, he says nothing at all. His eyes move over you slowly, deliberately—tracing the lace edge of the bra, the way the garters press faint lines into your skin, the flush already creeping down your chest. Then the corner of his mouth lifts, just a fraction. Not a full smile, but something amused, warm, and unmistakably hungry.
“Well,” he murmurs, voice low and rough with that quiet laugh you’re starting to recognize as his version of delight. “This is… unexpected.”
You swallow hard, cheeks burning hotter. “Happy birthday,” you manage, barely above a whisper. Your voice cracks on the last syllable and you want to sink through the floor. You shift your weight, trying to sit up straighter, and the lace shifts against your nipples in a way that makes you bite your lip. The movement only draws his gaze lower.
Valarr drops the towel without ceremony and sets it aside, crossing the room until he’s right in front of you. He can see it—the way your shoulders are drawn tight, the faint tremble in your thighs, the way you keep glancing at the floor like you might bolt. His expression softens, the amusement still there but gentled now, layered under something protective and heated.
“Hey,” he says softly, sitting on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips under his weight. One hand comes up to brush a stray strand of hair behind your ear, thumb grazing your heated cheek. “You’re shaking, sweetheart.”
“I’m sorry,” you whisper, mortified. “I just… I wanted to surprise you. I didn’t know if this was too much, or—”
“Shh.” He cuts you off gently, eyes dark with want. “It’s perfect. You’re perfect.” His fingers trace the strap of the bra, slow and reverent, not tugging, just learning the texture against your skin. “But I can see you’re nervous. Come here.”
He opens his arms slightly, an invitation rather than a demand, voice warm and coaxing. “Come to me.”
Your heart stutters. The words your friends had whispered during that mortifying shopping trip echo in your head—kneel for him, right between his legs, look up all shy and blushing—and the reckless part of you obeys. You slide off the bed on unsteady legs and sink to your knees on the floor right in front of him, positioning yourself between his spread thighs. The carpet is soft under your stockings. You tilt your head back and look up at him—cheeks flaming, lashes low, lips parted just slightly. The position makes you feel small and exposed and utterly his, the lace of your bra brushing his knees, your hands resting lightly on his thighs as you gaze up through your lashes.
Valarr’s breath catches. Then a low, delighted chuckle rumbles out of him, warm and dark. His hand slides into your hair, fingers threading gently through the strands in a slow caress, thumb stroking along your flushed cheekbone with possessive care. But there’s a new edge in his eyes—something a little jealous, a little territorial—as he tilts your chin higher so you can’t look away.
“Who taught you this?” he asks, voice rough with amusement and that faint possessive bite. “Who told my sweet girl to get on her knees and look up at me like she’s begging to be ruined?” His thumb brushes your lower lip, pressing lightly, tracing the curve as if memorizing it. “Tell me, sweetheart. I need to know who else has been putting ideas in that pretty head.”
You shake your head, too shy and too turned on to form words, cheeks burning hotter under his stare. He chuckles again, softer this time, but the jealousy lingers like a spark he’s enjoying.
“Doesn’t matter,” he murmurs, still caressing your hair in lazy strokes. “You’re here now. All mine.” His voice drops, low and commanding, but laced with teasing delight. “Go on, then. Give me my gift. Show me what that mouth can do… but slowly. I want to enjoy every second of my birthday present.”
Your hands tremble as you reach for him, freeing his cock from where it’s already heavy and half-hard against his stomach. It’s thick, flushed, the tip already glistening. You keep your eyes locked on his as you lean in, pressing the softest, shyest kiss to the head. Then you drag your tongue in one long, slow stripe up the underside, tasting him, feeling him twitch against your lips. Valarr groans low, fingers tightening just a fraction in your hair, but he doesn’t push. He just watches, amused and hungry, as you swirl your tongue around the tip, sucking gently, taking him in inch by careful inch.
He lets you set the slow, teasing pace for long moments—praising you in that velvet-rough voice. “That’s it… just like that. Look at you, so pretty with your lips wrapped around me.”
Every time you try to take him deeper he eases you back with a gentle tug of your hair, drawing it out, making you whimper around him in frustration. “Not yet, sweetheart. Tease me the way I’m going to tease you.”
Then something shifts. A flicker of something a little cruel, a little wicked, crosses his face. His hand flexes in your hair and he thrusts forward—slow but deliberate—pushing deeper until the head of his cock hits the back of your throat.
You gag softly around him, eyes watering instantly, a single tear slipping down your flushed cheek. The sound only makes him groan louder, hips twitching again with another shallow, testing thrust that has you gagging once more, more tears gathering at your lashes. He holds you there for a heartbeat longer than you expect, watching the way your eyes glisten, the way your throat works around him, before easing back with a wet pop.
“Fuck… look at those tears,” he murmurs, voice dark with lust, thumb brushing the tear from your cheek almost tenderly. “So pretty when you choke on me. My perfect little birthday gift.” He strokes your hair again, soothing even as his cock throbs in front of your face. “Come up here, sweetheart. Sit on my lap. We’re nowhere near yet.”
You rise on shaky legs and climb onto the bed, straddling him. He guides you down so his thick cock rests hot and heavy between your bodies—nestled right under the curve of your ass and along the soaked lace of your thong, the underside pressing teasingly right against your pussy. The position makes you feel every throb of him, every vein, without him entering you yet. You whimper at the contact, hips twitching instinctively.
Valarr’s hands settle on your hips, holding you exactly where he wants you. He rocks up once, letting his cock slap lightly against your covered folds with a wet, obscene sound. Then again—harder this time—so the head taps right against your clit through the thin lace. You gasp, thighs trembling.
He chuckles, low and pleased, eyes gleaming with that mix of amusement and hunger. “Are you my present tonight?” he asks, voice velvet-rough as he slaps his cock against your pussy once more, the wet smack making you jolt and whimper louder.
“All wrapped up in this pretty lace for me?” His thumbs hook under the garter straps, tugging them lightly, letting them snap back against your skin. “Can I unwrap you, sweetheart? Can I take my time peeling every inch of this off you while you sit here dripping on my cock like a good girl?”
You nod frantically, cheeks burning hotter, a broken little “please” slipping out before you can stop it.
That’s all the permission he needs—but he still doesn’t give you what you crave.
He starts slow—seductive, deliberate, torturously teasing. His hands roam your body in long, possessive strokes, tracing the lace over your breasts without removing it, rolling your nipples through the fabric until they pebble tight and ache.
“So sensitive,” he murmurs, amused, pinching lightly then soothing with his thumbs.
"Look at you… already soaking through this tiny thong just from a few slaps and my hands on you.” One hand slides down to cup your ass, squeezing and spreading you open so his cock can slide along your folds again, the head catching on your clit over and over in lazy drags that make you rock helplessly against him.
He keeps you like that for long, torturous minutes—caressing every curve, every inch of lace and skin, pulling the bra straps down just enough to expose your breasts but leaving the rest on. He traces the garter straps with his fingertips, then the curve of your waist, then back up to tug and roll your nipples again—light, then firmer—until you’re whimpering his name, thighs shaking, trying to grind down harder. Every time you do, he holds your hips still, slapping his cock against your pussy in playful punishment.
“Not yet,” he teases, voice dark with satisfaction. “I get to play with my gift as long as I want. Listen to those pretty little whimpers… you’re getting wetter by the second, aren’t you? So desperate already and I haven’t even fucked you.”
He rubs the head of his cock against your clit in slow, firm circles through the ruined lace, never pushing inside, never letting you sink down, just building the ache until you’re trembling and panting, tears of pure frustration mixing with the earlier ones.
"Tell me how bad you want it,” he coaxes, lips brushing your ear. “Tell me you’re my present… and maybe I’ll start unwrapping you properly.”
You’re lost in the teasing, the lace still half-on, garters snapping softly every time you squirm, when the words slip out—raw, unplanned, the first time you’ve ever said them to him.
“I love you, Valarr.”
His rhythm falters. His eyes snap to yours, dark and wild. The controlled, amused man who’d been teasing you so patiently shatters.
A low, broken sound tears from his throat and he finally lifts you just enough to sink into you inch by inch—slow, deliberate, letting you feel every throb as he fills you completely after all that torment.
“Fuck,” he groans, forehead pressed to yours. “Feel that? How perfectly you take me?” His hands grip your hips, holding you still for a long moment, savoring it.
Then he starts to move—deep, unhurried rolls of his hips that drag against every sensitive spot. One hand stays on your ass, guiding you. The other plays with your clit, your nipples, then wraps lightly around your throat to tilt your head back so he can watch your face. He kisses you through it, tongue sliding against yours, swallowing every moan.
You’re lost in the rhythm, the lace still half-on, when his control finally snaps completely. He flips you onto your back in one smooth motion, still buried deep. The slow seduction turns fierce—his hips snapping forward hard, driving into you with deep, possessive thrusts that make the bed creak. “Say it again,” he growls against your mouth, voice wrecked. One hand pins your thigh higher as he fucks you like he can’t hold back anymore. “Say it.”
“I love you,” you gasp, the words tumbling out between moans as he hits that spot relentlessly.
That’s all it takes. He buries himself to the hilt and comes hard, groaning your name like a curse and a prayer, pulsing hot inside you. The feeling tips you over right after him, walls clenching as pleasure crashes through you in shaking waves.
For a long moment he stays there, forehead pressed to yours, breathing ragged. Then he kisses you—slow, deep, almost reverent now that the storm has broken.
“Best birthday of my life,” he whispers, voice hoarse, lips brushing yours.
"I love you too. Fuck… I’ve been waiting to hear you say that first.” His arms wrap around you tighter, still inside you, the lingerie tangled between you like a promise.
“And we’re nowhere near done. Not after you just said that to me.”
Warning: Disgustingly affectionate gestures. Read at your own risk.
You loved to toy with Baelor’s rings.
It had become a habit you could not quite explain. Somewhere between idle afternoons and quiet evenings with nothing demanding your hands, you would find yourself reaching for his - turning each ring slowly as you slid them along his long, thick fingers.
Baelor would continue reading, speaking, or listening to lords drone on for hours while you kept yourself occupied beneath the table, feeling the warmth of his large hand covering yours.
He never once stopped you.
Baelor owned many rings. There was the heavy gold wedding band he never removed, worn smooth with time. A dark silver ring crowned with black stone sat often upon his index finger, severe and princely. Another bore the shape of a dragon curling around itself, its ruby eyes catching candlelight whenever he moved his hand.
Others came and went depending on the occasion. Plain bands, signets, rings etched with Valyrian patterns.
Most men would never care for such things. But Baelor did. Or rather, he cared because you did.
It was you who chose which rings to adorned his hands each morning, standing beside him while he dressed for court. He would simply watch you with quiet amusement as you decided which metals suited his doublet best.
And perhaps because he allowed you such freedoms so easily, your boldness had grown with time. Sometimes you would slip one ring from his finger and wear it yourself for an hour or two before returning it without a word. Sometimes longer.
He had been the one to encourage it during the periods when duty kept him away from you.
“Have something to remind you of me,” he had said, pressing a kiss to the back of your hand. And, of course, you happily obliged.
Until one morning, just after breakfast, you reached for his hand out of pure instinct and found his fingers bare.
Your eyes lifted immediately to the ring box atop his dresser. The velvet grooves held nothing but the faint impressions of where his collection usually rested.
You turned to him. “Where are your rings, husband?”
“I sent them to be cleaned,” he answered, glancing up briefly before returning to the cuff of his doublet with suspicious concentration.
“Sent them away?” you repeated, brows knitting together. Something uncomfortable twisted inside your chest. “B-but, Baelor, I usually cleaned them.”
He glanced up again. “I know. It will only take a few days.” He crossed to the mirror, smoothing the front of his clothes in silence, with no apparent intention of explaining himself further.
“And why did you not inform me?” you pressed. “What possessed you to do such a thing?”. Madness had begun to stir unpleasantly beneath your skin, and it was barely morning.
“My love, trust me.” He walked back toward you. “They are safe. I will have them returned within a few days, I promise.” With that, he leaned down to press a kiss to your forehead and disappeared into the endless duties of his day, before you could ask anything more.
A few days. The words turned endlessly in your mind long after he had gone.
Why would he send them away? Had you annoyed him somehow? Had he finally grown tired of your constant fiddling with his hands and rings? Had he simply endured the habit until he no longer could?
You tried to bury the thoughts before they could take root. You failed.
The first day passed, so did the second. By the third day, the absence had begun to feel physical.
You sat beside Baelor in the small council chamber while lords and ladies rambled through endless matters of court. Out of habit, your hand reached toward his beneath the table, only to find bare skin where cool metal should have been.
Your looked down to study rings that sat on your fingers instead - your wedding band, your house's sigil, and a slender ruby ring Baelor had gifted you during your courtship - all precious, all beloved. Yet none settled against your hands the way his rings did.
Something sore and foolish gathered quietly beneath your ribs.
And in the silence of the following nights, your thoughts returned again and again to the same possibility: Perhaps he had simply grown tired of indulging you. Tired of watching you steal his rings onto your own fingers. Tired of your constant touching. Tired enough to remove the temptation entirely rather than tell you outright.
It was a small thought, a cruel one. But once it lodged itself inside you, it refused to leave. And you said nothing to him, because you did not know how to ask without sounding like someone who had already decided the answer.
On the fifth day, he found you at mid-day and said he had something to show you in the garden. So you followed him.
The afternoon was pale and breezy as he led you down familiar stone paths lined with trimmed hedges. He stopped beside the bench where the two of you often sat together in the evenings and turned toward you quietly.
Then he reached into his doublet and took out a small cloth pouch. He pulled it open with eassness and held out a neat row of rings. Silver and dark metals glimmered beneath the sunlight - some plain, others engraved with familiar patterns.
Your breath caught. They were his rings. But only smaller?
You stared at them in confusion before looking back at him. “Baelor…?”
Did he have them resized? Why?
Your expression must have betrayed your bewilderment, because his mouth curved slightly as he reached for your hand.
Gently, he slid the first ring onto your finger. Then another. And another. He worked in silence, fitting each piece carefully into place while you sat there stunned beneath the drifting garden breeze. When he finished, he turned your hand over in both of his, admiring the collection now adorning your fingers.
After a moment, he reached into his pocket again and withdrew a second pouch. His own rings. Oh. One by one, he slid them back onto his large fingers before lifting his hand beside yours.
“See?” he said. His fingers threaded through yours, metal clinking softly together. “Now we match.”
You looked down at your joined hands. The same silver, same craftsmanship, same weight. Mirrored perfectly across both pairs of hands, as though they had always belonged that way.
“I know how much you love mine, so I had matching ones made for you," he said softly. "That way, you may carry a part of me wherever you go,” he continued.
Sunlight caught against the silver bands, turning his eyes molten with warmth. Before you could open your mouth to respond, he spoke again - words that would leave a permanent mark upon your chest.
“I want the whole realm to know you are my equal. My queen.” He gave your hand a light squeeze. The sunlight glimmered against the silver once more, and his love sat plainly within his gaze, without hesitation or restraint.
And suddenly, everything inside you gave way at once. All the foolishness. Every miserable hour spent convincing yourself he had taken the rings away because he no longer wanted your affection.
You should have known better. Baelor had never been a man careless with silence. He moved through the world quietly, gathering his intentions close until the moment came to place them gently into your hands all at once.
Your vision blurred. You cupped his face with both hands and kissed him hard enough to draw a startled laugh from his chest. Tears burned behind your eyes as the rings continue to glittered between your intertwined fingers beneath the afternoon sun.
The Crown Prince and his Lady. The future King and Queen of Westeros. Written plainly in silver for anyone with eyes to see.
baelor moved to lay down on the rug of his solar, close enough to the hearth to feel the warmth of it against his sprawled form, and intertwined his fingers over his stomach expectantly.
“are you certain?” you find yourself asking once more, face weary as you peer down at him.
you had arrived only several minutes prior, in your nightgown, to keep him company through the hours of the evening that he would often spend assessing scrolls or writing correspondences.
baelor gave an assured nod of his head, his hips canting upwards as you moved closer towards him.
“but,” you began, a wave of heat spreading across your face, “what if I suffocate you?” concern was woven into your tone as you kneeled beside him.
“then, I will have passed a pleased man,” was his reply, evoking a humiliated gasp from you.
“husband.”
“come.” baelor persisted, a hand rising to hold yours.
your skin buzzed when it came in contact with his, the nervous jittering within your belly turning into an excited swirl as you pulled your sheer skirt up before you sat atop his abdomen, your thighs pressing into either side of his torso.
“there, that was not so difficult,” he murmured, the colouring of his mismatched gaze nearly entirely absorbed by his widened pupils, all that remained of their hue was a thin circle of blue and brown.
you began to rise, “I cannot–,”
“I promise,” baelor interrupted, hands rubbing soothing circles into the expanse of your waist, “I will notify you the moment I feel discomfort.”
you stared down at him, deciding to accept his vow despite not believing his words in the slightest.
distractedly, you noted the length of his beard and the shininess of the hair; he must have trimmed it shorter than usual that morning as well as have oiled it before you had arrived.
was it in preparation of this request, you wondered, a fond affection filling your chest at the reminder of the consideration he held towards you and your comfort at all times.
“are you truly sure?” you question again, hands gliding up his torso until your fingers were combing through his greying beard.
“yes, my dear.”
he had freshly oiled it, you mused bashfully, the usually coarse strands were now much softer to the touch. your breath quickened at the realization that your husband never decided anything on a whim, and so this must have been a fantasy he had been entertaining for quite some time.
“absolutely certain?”
“oh, most definitely,” baelor relayed once more, the rumbling from his chest vibrating between your legs as his hands dragged you further up.
he paused, allowing you to close the remaining distance, not only as confirmation that this was something you were willing to try, but to ensure you were aware of the control you had in this position.
after several beats of stillness, you lifted your hips until your bare core was directly above his mouth, your head hanging low to observe his next move.
immediately, baelor’s head sprang forward, mouth opening wide to swipe at your cunt as his odd-coloured eyes remained attached to yours. messily, he dipped his tongue within you, the wet appendage exploring with a familiarity that had you nearly toppling over.
you were already dripping onto him, the smell of your arousal filling the solar.
“baelor, it’s–gods, it’s too much,” you squirmed, accidentally rubbing your swollen clit against the tip of his sharp, twice-broken nose, eliciting a startled moan from deep within your throat.
“like that,” he mumbled against your wet flesh, his hands rising to grip your hips, pulling you harder against his face, “take what you need, anything–all of it.”
your first release hit you embarrassingly quickly, a flood of wetness gushing against his face and down the expanse of your inner thighs. your eyes rolled into the back of your head as pure ecstasy shot up your spine, settling at the base of your neck as your inner walls repeatedly clenched around nothing except for the tip of his nose.
your hips moved frantically back and forth, fingers tugging painfully at the short, greying strands atop his head with a surprising amount of strength.
yet, baelor did not complain; he remained focused on your body, his hands kneading into the flesh of your backside as he assisted you with your frantic rocking movements.
instinctively, your thighs tightened around his head when he continued to sloppily lap at your sensitive clit, a shiver passing through you when his lips enclosed around the enlarged bud.
“baelor, please..”
he ignored your pleas, languidly licking at your cunt until you were on the edge of another, more intense release.
“oh!” you cried, an embarrassed flush travelling up your chest as you felt a stream of fluid escape your convulsing passage, a loud moan leaving your body at the same time the liquid did.
baelor’s arms moved to wrap around your waist, holding you in place as your body convulsed pleasurably on top of him.
he mumbled incoherent words against your heated flesh, his low-lidded eyes fixated on the little of your face he could see as you continued to tremble and shiver from the force of your orgasm.
once you had come down from your second release, and finally stopped quivering, you flung yourself backwards, landing clumsily atop his stomach.
“you–,” you were breathless, fingers tightening over his clothes as you struggled to breathe properly, “that was..”
you trailed off, attention drifting to the wetness that dripped down the side of his face; most of his beard was drenched in your scent and arousal.
baelor’s hands moved to help you stay upright even as his eyes remained glued on your swollen core, his tongue swiping against the remnants of you on his lips.
“how was that, my love?” he asked quietly, his mismatched eyes twinkling like he already knew the answer.
instead of replying, you exhaled deeply, straightened your back, and moved to sit back atop his face.
if we go superrr crazy and assume anyone can claim a dragon…how would ls’s dragon be with aerion//valarr or their dragons? what does that add to the dynamics?
You know what? If we go FULL crazy, let’s go ALL the way. Because if we wanna talk BDE, if we wanna talk a chance of a dragon bonding outside the Targaryen bloodline. Then there’s only one candidate:
The Cannibal :)
It doesn’t start with you approaching him, either.
It starts with him watching you.
You don’t even know he’s watching at first. You’re on Dragonstone visiting Valarr (some tedious political errand your father sent you on, or maybe you just wanted to see the dragons, it doesn’t matter). You’re in the pit with Vermax, scratching under his jaw while Valarr prepares the saddle for flying, and you don’t notice the shadow that passes over the entrance. Don’t notice the way the torches flicker. Don’t notice the way every other dragon in the pit goes suddenly, dangerously quiet.
But Vermax notices.
His head snaps up. Stops purring. Goes absolutely still in that way that means predator nearby. His pupils contract to slits. A low growl starts in his chest.
You look up. “What—”
And then you see him.
Just for a split second. A massive black shape silhouetted against the sky outside the pit entrance. Easily twice Vermax’s size. Black wings that block out the sun. Eyes like green fire in the darkness. And then he’s gone, launching back into the sky with a sound like thunder.
“What,” you say slowly, your heart hammering, “was that.”
Valarr has gone white. “The Cannibal.”
“The— oh.”
“He doesn’t come to the pit. He doesn’t come near the pit. He hates other dragons. I don’t know why he—” Valarr stops. Looks at you. Looks at where the Cannibal was. Looks back at you. “…oh no.”
“What.”
“He was looking at you.”
You laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would he—”
Vermax is still growling. Still staring at the entrance. Through the bond, Valarr feels: THREAT. DANGER. KEEP HER AWAY FROM THAT ONE.
—
The Cannibal — Day One:
New human in his territory. Small. Smells like cold and stone and something old. Not like those little ants that crawl around my territory. Not like the spoiled Targaryen princelings. Something animal, something wolf. Interesting.
She’s with the green grief-dragon. The one who whines all the time about his dead rider. Pathetic little thing. But the green one likes her. Lets her touch him. Purrs for her like a hatchling despite no Targaryen blood.
Hm.
The Cannibal has been alive for two hundred years. He’s seen dragons bond to humans before. Boring. Pointless. Humans are weak. They die in a blink. Why bother?
But this one… this one is petting the grief-dragon. Talking to him. The grief-dragon is melting under her hands like warmed bronze.
And she’s not afraid. Every other human who comes near the grief-dragon is afraid. He can smell it on them: the fear, the uncertainty, the knowledge that the grief-dragon could kill. But this female doesn’t smell afraid. She smells… amused. Fond. Like the grief-dragon is a puppy.
The Cannibal hasn’t been interested in anything in decades.
He’s interested now.
—
The second time you see him, you’re flying with Aerion.
Caraxes takes off from the pit with you and Aerion in the saddle (you pressed against Aerion’s chest, his arms around you, trying very hard not to think about the heat of him). You’re laughing at something he said (some derisive comment about the Myrish ambassador) when Caraxes banks hard. So hard you nearly lose your grip.
“What—” Aerion starts.
And then you see him. The Cannibal. A black, terrible shape, keeping pace with Caraxes off the left wing. Close. Too close. Close enough that you can see every dark scale, every spike, the way his wings move like a slash of night against the sky.
Caraxes screams. Not a threat. A warning. Too close. Back off. MINE.
The Cannibal doesn’t back off.
He just… looks at you.
You stare back. You don’t know what possesses you (maybe the wolf-blood, maybe sheer, utter stupidity) but you don’t look away. You meet those green fire eyes and you hold.
The Cannibal tilts his head. Like he’s considering something.
Then he dives. Straight down. Gone in seconds.
Caraxes is shaking with fury, you feel it in your bones. Through the bond, Aerion feels: danger-threat-BIGGER-stay away from her-MINE-
“What,” Aerion says, voice tight, “the fuck was that?”
You’re still staring at the space where the Cannibal was. Your heart is racing so loud it almost drowns out the question. Not from fear. From something else.
“I think,” you say slowly, “he was saying hello.”
—
The Cannibal — Day Five:
The tiny wolf is with the red one now. The loud serpent-dragon. The one who screams too much and thinks he’s vicious.
Please.
The Cannibal invented vicious.
He follows them. Just to see what the red one will do. Just to see if the female will flinch.
She doesn’t flinch.
She looks at him. Right at him. No fear. Just… curiosity. Interest. The same way she looked at the grief-dragon.
Oh.
Oh.
She’s not prey. She’s a hunter recognising another hunter.
The Cannibal has never been interested in a human before.
He’s interested now.
This is a problem.
—
It keeps happening.
Every time you’re on Dragonstone, the Cannibal appears. Not close. Never close enough to be a real threat. But… there. A shadow in the sky when you’re walking the battlements. A distant shape on the mountain when you’re in the yard. Once, you swear you see him perched on the rocks above the beach, just… watching.
The dragonkeepers notice. Start whispering. “The Cannibal’s come down from the mountain now.” “He’s never stayed this close to the castle before.” “What’s he hunting?”
You know what he’s hunting.
Or who.
Valarr is worried. “You need to stay inside when you’re here. Or at least stay away from open spaces. He’s a wild dragon, he could—”
“He’s not going to hurt me,” you say.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know.” You don’t know how you know. But you do.
Through the bond, Vermax agrees: She is right. The big black one is… watching. Considering. Not hunting. WATCHING.
Valarr doesn’t find this comforting in the slightest.
—
The Cannibal — Week Two:
The small wolf is fascinating.
She flies with the red one (annoying, too loud, but vicious enough to be interesting). She flies with the green one (pathetic, but protective, the Cannibal will give him that). She pets them. Talks to them. Treats them like they’re hers even when she has no claim to them. She doesn’t treat them like glorified pets the way some Targaryens do (insulting), she just… loves.
And they let her.
The red one (who has killed before, who tore the throat out of the biggest dragon in the world once) purrs for her. Lets her scratch his jaw. Carries her gently like she’s pretty treasure.
The green one (who spent a century trying to bite anyone who came near him) bows his head for her. Lets her sit against his side. Whines when she leaves.
She has tamed two dragons who should not be tamable.
The Cannibal wants to know: can she tame him?
(Not that he’d let her. Obviously. He’s not some pet dragon. He eats other dragons for breakfast. He’s older than the Targaryen dynasty. He doesn’t BOW to humans.)
(But if he did… would she pet him the way she pets the others?)
(This is a stupid thought. He’s going to stop thinking it immediately.)
(He’s going to go back to his cave and eat something and forget about the small human.)
He doesn’t go back to his cave.
He lands on the rocks outside the keep and waits.
—
You find him by accident.
You’re walking the coastal path alone (against Valarr’s advice, against your own better judgment, but you needed air and space and quiet). It’s dusk. The sky is going purple. The sea is loud against the rocks, churning.
And then you round the bend and stop.
The Cannibal is thirty feet away.
Just. Sitting there. On the black rocks. Wings folded. Watching the sea. He looks like a breathing, rumbling mountain. Like a piece of the island that got up and decided to have a shape.
You should run for dear life and not stop. You know you should run. This is the most dangerous dragon alive. He’s killed people for less than being in his line of sight.
You don’t run. You, foolishly, take three steps closer.
The Cannibal’s head turns. Slowly. Those green fire eyes lock on you.
You stop. Hands loose at your sides. Breathing steady. Waiting.
For a long moment, neither of you moves. Just the sea, roaring in your ears and the rumbling mass of him.
Then the Cannibal does something you don’t expect.
He lowers his head. Just an inch.
An invitation. Or a test. Definitely a test, a taunt.
You take another step. Then another. Unhurried. Non-threatening. The way you’d approach a wolf.
The Cannibal watches. Doesn’t move, and you know this is the moment your life is going to change forever or end abruptly.
You’re ten feet away now. Close enough to smell him. Sulfur and smoke and something wilder, older, like deep earth and ancient stone. Close enough to see the scars on his scales. The chips in his horns. The sheer, impossible size of him up close.
“Hello,” you say quietly.
The Cannibal’s eyes narrow.
You stop. Don’t reach out. Don’t push. Just… exist in his space. Proving you’re not a threat. Proving you’re not prey, either.
For several minutes, nothing happens.
Then the Cannibal huffs. A hot gust of sulfur-smoke that ruffles your hair and nearly sends you stumbling.
You don’t flinch.
The dragon’s mouth (could swallow you whole, could bite you in half) curves slightly.
If you didn’t know better, you’d say he was amused.
—
The Cannibal — Week Three:
She didn’t run.
The Cannibal has lived for hundreds of years. He’s seen thousands of humans. They all run. Or they try to fight (stupid). Or they try to claim him (more stupid, always fatal).
She didn’t do any of those things.
She just… stood there. Gazed at him. Said hello like they were meeting for chat.
The sheer audacity.
He likes it.
No. Wait. He doesn’t like it. He’s just… interested. He’s bored. He’s interested in a particularly clever seal before you eat it.
(He’s not going to eat her.)
(Probably.)
(The red one and the green one would be upset if he ate her. And they’re annoying enough without being grief-mad.)
She comes back the next day. Just sits on the rocks. Twenty feet away. Doesn’t approach. Doesn’t try to touch him. Just… sits. Reads a book.
The Cannibal has never been ignored by a human before.
It’s infuriating. It’s also fascinating.
He’s going to eat her.
He’s definitely going to eat her.
Any day now.
—
It becomes a routine.
You come to the rocks at dusk. The Cannibal is always there, waiting. You sit. You read, or watch the sea, or just exist in his space. He watches you. Sometimes he’s twenty feet away. Sometimes he’s fifty. Once, he’s close enough that you could reach out and touch his foreclaw if you wanted to.
You don’t dare.
You’re not that stupid. This is the Cannibal. He’s killed people for less. Killed dragons. Has done so for sport. You’re not going to push your luck by trying to pet him like he’s a pet.
(Even though you want to. Even though your fingers itch with it. To feel that beautiful, black mass of him. Caraxes and Vermax have made you soft for dragons and some stupid part of you wants to know if the Cannibal’s scales are as warm as theirs.)
Two weeks of this. Two weeks of sitting in silence while a nightmare dragon watches you like you’re the most interesting thing he’s seen in a century.
And then one evening, the Cannibal moves.
Not away. Closer.
One step. Two. Three.
He’s ten feet away now. Then five. Close enough that you can see the rise and fall of his chest when he breathes. Close enough that his exhale moves your hair.
You sit very still.
The Cannibal lowers his head.
Not an invitation this time. Not a test.
A claim.
His snout warm, scaled, big enough to crush you, presses a little roughly against your shoulder. Just. Rests there. The way Caraxes rests his head in your lap. The way Vermax nudges you when he wants attention.
But this is different.
This is the Cannibal. The dragon who has never had a rider. Never wanted a rider. The oldest, most vicious, most untamable dragon in the world.
And he just… claimed you.
Your hand lifts. Careful. You touch his jaw. Just your fingertips. Just enough to feel the heat of him, the rough texture of his scales.
The Cannibal purrs.
It’s not like Caraxes’s purr (smug, loud, pleased, possessive). It’s not like Vermax’s purr (warm, rumbling, relieved, grateful). It’s deeper. Older. A sound like the earth shifting. Like a mountain deciding to move.
You scratch under his jaw. The same way you scratch Caraxes. The same way you scratch Vermax.
The Cannibal’s eyes half-close. The purr deepens.
“Well,” you murmur. “Hello to you too.”
The dragon huffs. Amused. Satisfied.
He’s decided: This one is his now.
She’s survived him. Hasn’t run. Hasn’t tried to fight. Hasn’t tried to claim him like he’s some pet to be conquered. She just… existed in his space. Respected him. Treated him like an equal.
No one has ever treated the Cannibal like an equal.
He likes it.
(Fine. He likes her. Happy? He LIKES the small wolf- human. She’s his human now. The red one and the green one are going to have to COPE.)
The bond forms. Not like other bonds. There’s no rider here. No master. Just… partnership. Mutual respect. The Cannibal has chosen her. She’s chosen him back (by not running, by not pushing, by trusting him not to eat her even though he absolutely could).
It’s done.
You sit there for an hour with your hand on his jaw, the Cannibal purring like the world’s largest, most dangerous cat, and you think: Valarr is going to have a heart attack. Aerion is going to lose his mind. This is a terrible idea.
The Cannibal huffs again. In your head (not words, exactly, but feeling) you sense: Good. Let them.
You laugh. “You’re going to be a problem, aren’t you?”
The Cannibal’s eyes open. Fix on you. And you swear (you swear) he smiles.
You fly him two days later.
No saddle. No reins. Just you on his back, hands fisted in his spines, holding on for dear life while the Cannibal launches into the sky like a gods-damned comet.
It’s nothing like flying Caraxes or Vermax.
Caraxes is fast, vicious, likes to show off. Vermax is steady, powerful, protective. The Cannibal is wild. He doesn’t fly like he’s carrying something precious. He flies like he’s free. Like he’s been alone for hundreds of years and now he has someone to share the sky with and he’s going to make the most of it.
He dives. Hard. Straight down toward the sea. You scream (half terror, half exhilaration) and the Cannibal pulls up at the last second, claws skimming the water, sending up a spray that drenches you both.
You’re laughing. Breathless. Soaked. Alive in a way you’ve never been alive.
The Cannibal rumbles. Pleased. Smug. See? I’m BETTER than the red one and the green one. I’m FASTER. STRONGER. I don’t PURR for treats. I’m a REAL dragon.
“You’re showing off,” you shout over the wind.
The Cannibal banks hard. Agrees: Yes. AND?
You fly for two hours. Over the sea. Over Dragonstone. Over the keep, where you see tiny figures on the battlements staring up at you in shock because no one has ever ridden the Cannibal before and you’re up there anyway.
When you land, Valarr is white-faced. Aerion looks like someone lit a fuse in him. Caraxes and Vermax are both screaming from their respective pits (fury-shock-how dare she-OURS-).
You slide off the Cannibal’s back. Leeds your palm to his black scales. “Thank you.”
The Cannibal huffs. Butts his head against you gently (for him; it still nearly knocks you over on your ass, there’s a long way to go). Then spreads his enormous wings and leaves, launching back toward his mountain cave with a gust that makes you stumble.
do you think anything changes in a iceflamespring au with dragons (also find it funny that ls name is first in this pairing) and i was wondering which dragon you think valarr would have gotten
You’re their alpha and they’re your two pretty twinks 🙂↕️
In the early days I said Tessarion for Valarr, I believe, but honestly now I would say Vermax. And that's because I had this very specific idea how that would go:
Vermax, as we know, is Jacaerys' dragon. In canon, Jace dies during the Dance (rip king, love you </3). And Vermax, his dragon, goes feral with grief.
By the akotsk timeline (so, about 130 years post-Dance), Vermax is still alive. Still at Dragonstone. And according to my headcanon, he's even meaner than before. Ill-tempered. Vicious. Refuses human contact. Snaps at dragonkeepers. Hasn't let anyone near him since Jace died. He's been grieving for over a century and he's made it everyone's problem.
The dragonkeepers have basically given up on him. He's fed from a distance. Left alone. Considered too dangerous, too unstable, too broken to bond again.
And then young Valarr Targaryen walks into the dragonpit.
Here's what I think happened: Valarr looks like Jacaerys. He looks like Jace reborn. Dark hair (brown-black, the kind that's definitely not Targaryen silver but could pass for Strong bastard colouring if you're being cruel about it) except for that one distinctive white streak that catches light like a knife slash. Mismatched eyes, one darker than the other, heterochromia that makes him instantly recognisable. The Dornish warmth in his skin from his father's line. He's beautiful in that specific way Jace was beautiful. Like he knows he doesn't look the way a Targaryen prince should but he's trying very hard to be good anyway.
The resemblance is uncanny. If you put a portrait of Jace next to Valarr, you'd think they were brothers. Cousins at minimum. The same dark hair, the same build, the same earnest set to the jaw like they're both trying to prove something. Valarr even has Jace's energy. That golden-hearted, duty-bound determination with an edge but desire to be good despite everything. At least at first.
So Valarr walks into the pit. He's there for his first official bonding attempt (he's sixteen or seventeen, similar age Jace was when he died). He's nervous. Trying not to show it. Baelor is watching from the gallery, proud and worried in equal measure.
And Vermax, who's been snarling and snapping at every human who's come near him for 130 years, goes very still. Lifts his head. Stares.
The dragonkeepers freeze. This is new. This is wrong. Vermax doesn't look at people. He threatens them.
Valarr, who doesn't know any better, takes a step forward. Vermax makes a sound. Low. Uncertain. Not a growl. Almost a whine.
And then he moves. The keepers shout. Baelor stands. Valarr freezes... and Vermax crosses the pit floor in three strides and presses his great head to Valarr's chest. Gentle. Desperate. The way he used to greet Jace after long separations. The rumble that comes out of him isn't aggressive. It's relieved.
For a handful of heartbeats, Vermax thinks his rider has come back.
Valarr, shaking, lifts a hand. Touches warm green-bronze scales. "Hello," he whispers.
Vermax keens. High and broken. Because the boy is not Jace. He's not. The scent is wrong. The voice is wrong. But he's close. Close enough that Vermax, who's been alone for longer than any dragon should be alone, decides: close enough.
The bond forms. The dragonkeepers stand there, stunned, as one of the most vicious dragons in the pit bows his head for a boy who looks like a ghost of another prince.
Vermax is old, but not ancient. He's around 150 years old. That's peak power for a dragon. He's past the rapid growth phase but not yet into the slow decline. He's large. Not Vhagar-large, not Caraxes-large-but-make-it-serpentine, but solid. Intimidating. A hundred feet of green-bronze muscle and rage.
He's experienced. Vermax fought in the Dance. He survived the Gullet (Jace didn't, but the dragon did). He knows battle. He knows death. He's killed other dragons. He's dangerous in ways that go beyond size.
A century of grief has made him foul. He doesn't trust easily. Doesn't like other dragons. Snaps at keepers. Territorial. Possessive of the few things he allows himself to care about. And he's bonded to Valarr out of desperation, not love. At first. The bond isn't what it was with Jace. Can't be. Jace was his first. His true rider. Valarr is... a replacement. A placeholder. The best Vermax can get.
But over time, it deepens. Valarr is kind to him. Patient. Talks to him. Cares for him. Doesn't try to make him forget Jace. Just offers himself as he is. And slowly (very, very slowly) Vermax starts to love him for himself, not just as an echo of someone lost.
If we're putting dragons-survived-the-Dance Caraxes next to Vermax, here's what we get:
Caraxes is older (nearly 200 by akotsk timeline), smaller than Vermax in bulk but longer (that serpentine build), far more experienced in battle (fought in the Dance, killed Vhagar, survived), bonded to Aerion who is sharp and vicious and matches his energy. Caraxes likes you immediately because Aerion likes you and the bond doesn't lie. He's territorial, possessive, but from a place of certainty. You're his rider's, which makes you his, simple as that.
Vermax, on the other hand, is younger (150ish), larger in bulk, more traditionally powerful, experienced but bitter about it (lost his first rider, never got over it), bonded to Valarr who is earnest and trying so hard to be good. Vermax doesn't like you at first because you smell like Caraxes and Caraxes is a problem. He takes FOREVER to warm up to you, but once he does, he's worse than Caraxes about the possessiveness.
The first time you meet Vermax, he hates you. Nothing personal. You just smell like Caraxes. You've been in the meadow with Aerion and his nightmare wyrm, and the scent clings to you, and Vermax takes one whiff and snarls.
Valarr goes white. "Vermax, no—"
You freeze. This dragon is huge. Easily twice Caraxes's bulk, even if he's shorter in length. Green-bronze scales catching torchlight, eyes like old amber, teeth bared. He looks like he wants to bite you.
"I'm sorry," Valarr says quickly. "He's—he doesn't like other dragons, and Caraxes—"
"I understand," you say calmly. You don't back away. Vermax's eyes narrow. You're not running. Interesting.
It takes weeks before Vermax lets you near him. And even then, it's grudging. He tolerates you because Valarr clearly cares about you, and Vermax has decided (reluctantly) that he cares about Valarr.
But the shift happens slowly: you bring him food once, not trying to feed him, just leaving a sheep carcass near his preferred corner of the pit because you noticed the keepers are afraid of him and he's been underfed because of it. Vermax eyes you suspiciously. Sniffs the carcass. Eats it. The next time you visit, he doesn't snarl.
You don't push. You let him come to you. Sit in the pit with Valarr and just... exist. Read. Talk quietly. Ignore the dragon watching you from across the chamber. Vermax appreciates this. He's been pushed at for 130 years. You're the first person who just lets him be since Valarr.
The first time you touch him, it's an accident. You're reaching past his neck to hand Valarr something and your hand brushes green-bronze scales. Vermax goes still. You freeze too. Wait for the snap. It doesn't come. He just... watches you. When you pull your hand back slowly, he makes a low sound. Not quite a growl. Not quite approval. Considering.
You start talking to him the way you talk to Caraxes. Straightforward, no coddling. "You're being an ass today, aren't you? Yes, I can tell. Valarr's trying very hard and you're making it difficult." Vermax likes this. Likes being spoken to like he's intelligent, not a beast to be managed.
By the time Vermax actually accepts you, it's been months. And when he does, it's sudden: you're in the pit, Valarr is adjusting the saddle, Vermax is drowsing, you walk past the dragon's head without thinking, and Vermax reaches out. Nudges you. Gently. With his snout. The way he used to nudge Jace.
You stop. Stare. Slowly, carefully, lift a hand. Touch his jaw. Vermax purrs.
Valarr, behind you, makes a choked sound. Drops the saddle strap. "He's never— not with anyone but me—"
You scratch under Vermax's jaw. The dragon's eyes half-lid. The purr deepens.
"I think," you say quietly, "he's decided I'm acceptable."
Once Vermax decides you're his (his rider's, his hoard, his to protect), he's unbearable about it. Caraxes is possessive, yes. But Caraxes is possessive from a place of certainty. He knows you're his. He's smug about it. He purrs when you're near.
Vermax is possessive from a place of loss. He lost Jace. He will not lose you or Valarr.
He refuses to let Caraxes near you when you're in Vermax's territory. If you visit Valarr in the pit and Caraxes can smell you from three chambers over, Caraxes will try to come see you. Vermax will scream. Wings mantled. Claws out. No. MINE. Get your own.
He follows you. If you're walking through Dragonstone (or wherever the dragons are kept), Vermax will track you from inside the pit. You can hear him pacing, keeping time with your footsteps overhead. Valarr finds it endearing. You find it unnerving.
He growls at Aerion. Just. Constantly. Aerion will be standing next to you, making some cutting comment, and Vermax will growl from across the pit. Low. Steady. I see you. I'm watching. Don't try anything.
He will not let you fly Caraxes if he knows about it. You tried once. Vermax lost his mind. Screaming. Thrashing. Valarr had to physically calm him down. Through the bond, Valarr felt: SHE IS OURS. NOT HIS. OURS.
But here's the thing: Vermax is possessive, yes. Territorial, yes. But he's also protective in a way Caraxes isn't. Caraxes protects you because you're his. A treasured, precious thing. Vermax protects you because he can't lose anyone else.
When someone threatens you (verbally, physically, doesn't matter), Vermax moves. Puts himself between you and the threat. Wings spread. Neck arched. The message is clear: I have lost too much. I will burn the world before I lose her too.
And that's when you realise: Vermax doesn't love you the way he loved Jace or Valarr. But he loves you the way a dragon who's grieved for 130 years loves the few things he allows himself to care about. Desperately. Irrevocably. Without compromise.
If you thought Caraxes hating Vermithor was bad, wait until you see Caraxes vs. Vermax. These two dragons DESPISE each other.
From Caraxes's perspective: the green one is IN THE WAY, the green one carries the WRONG prince (the guilty, soft one, the one who keeps looking at her like he has rights), the green one snarls at him (HOW DARE HE), the green one is YOUNGER and LARGER and Caraxes is OFFENDED by both of these facts, and she pets the green one and Caraxes can smell it on her when she comes back and it makes him FURIOUS.
From Vermax's perspective: the red one is DANGEROUS, the red one's rider is DANGEROUS (sharp, cruel, the wrong kind of Targaryen), she smells like the red one ALL THE TIME and it's WRONG, the red one is older, more experienced, bonded to someone who knows what he wants (Vermax's rider is still guilty and conflicted and it's EXHAUSTING), and the red one won and Vermax HATES that he won.
The result is that they can't be in the same sky, they can't be in adjacent pit chambers, if they see each other they fight, Aerion and Valarr have to coordinate their schedules to avoid overlap, and you're caught in the middle, smelling like both of them, and both dragons are furious about it.
The first time you fly with Valarr after having flown with Aerion the day before, Vermax can smell Caraxes on you. He refuses to launch. Just sits there, growling. Valarr is mortified.
"I'm so sorry, he's being—"
"I know what he's being," you say tiredly.
You have to wash before Vermax will let you up. Even then, he grumbles the whole flight. Aerion finds this hilarious.
"My dragon has marked you. Yours is just going to have to cope."
Valarr looks miserable. You look at both of them and think: I'm going to be killed by jealous dragons and no one will be surprised.
But here's what changes with time: the dragons start to tolerate each other. Not quickly. It takes months. Maybe longer. But they're both Dance survivors, both riders of Targaryen princes, both bound to the same impossible girl through their riders. And eventually, grudgingly, they start to accept what their riders have already figured out: they're going to have to share.
Key word: try.
They try to share you. Vermax hates it. Caraxes hates it. But they start to manage brief periods in the same space without immediately trying to kill each other because it upsets you which upsets their riders. You can visit both in the same day without one of them losing their mind. Aerion and Valarr can be in the same room as you without their dragons screaming three floors down.
It's not peaceful. There's still growling. Still territorial displays. Still moments where one dragon decides the other has gotten too much of your attention and needs to be reminded of boundaries. But it's... manageable. Barely.
And then something shifts.
Because the dragons realise something their riders realised long before them: there's one thing they agree on. One thing that matters more than their rivalry, their jealousy, their territorial bullshit.
You're their riders. No one else's.
Some lord makes a comment about you in the yard. Something dismissive. Crude. The kind of thing that would normally just get him a cold look.
Both dragons scream. Simultaneously. From their respective nests.
The lord goes white. Aerion and Valarr, standing on opposite sides of the training ground, both feel it through their bonds. Their dragons' fury, sudden and unified. The keepers scramble. And when they get to the pits, Caraxes and Vermax are at their respective gates, necks arched, wings mantled, making the exact same threat display. Not her. Touch her and we BURN you.
It happens again. And again. Any threat to you (perceived or real) gets the same response from both dragons. Someone speaks to you too sharply in the hall? Dual screaming from the pits. A knight gets too close in the yard? Both dragons trying to break through their gates. Caraxes and Vermax spend three days doing synchronised threatening rumbles that make the entire keep nervous.
The dragonkeepers don't know what to make of it. Dragons don't cooperate like this. Don't share territory. Don't agree on anything.
But Caraxes and Vermax have discovered they have a common interest: you. And by extension, each other's riders. Because you love Valarr (even if you won't admit it fully). And you love Aerion (even if you're trying to fight it). And the dragons can feel that through the bonds.
Which means: Valarr is important to you, which makes him important to them. Aerion is important to you, which makes him important to them.
So when someone speaks ill of Valarr in the yard (some lord's son, drunk, running his mouth), Caraxes and Vermax both scream. When someone insults Aerion at a feast (calling him mad, unstable, dangerous), both dragons rattle their chains.
You're all a bonded shape. A strange, tangled, impossible shape. Two dragons who hate each other but love you more than they hate each other. Two princes who want you and are learning to exist in the same space without killing each other because you've made it clear: you won't choose. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And the dragons who share their riders' feelings and have decided, in their reptilian way, that if they can't have you separately, they'll have you together.
Caraxes still snaps at Vermax when the green dragon gets too smug. Vermax still growls at Caraxes when the red wyrm gets too possessive. They still can't be in the same sky without supervision. They still compete for your attention, your touch, your affection like greedy, dangerous cats.
But when an outside threat appears? When someone who isn't Aerion or Valarr tries to touch you, threaten you, take you?
The dragons are united. Absolutely. Unquestioningly.
Because you're theirs. Both of theirs. Their riders'. And anyone who doesn't understand that is going to learn it the hard way.
And Valarr, watching this shift happen, feels something change in himself too. He was guilty at first. Torn up about wanting you when Aerion wanted you, when he had no right to want you. He tried to be good. Tried to step back. Tried to let you go.
But then he sees Aerion with you in the yard. Sees the way Aerion makes you laugh. Sees his cousin's hand linger at your waist. Sees the way you look at Aerion. Hunger barely concealed, want you're trying to fight.
And something in Valarr just... breaks.
Shifts. Hardens. The guilt doesn't disappear but it gets buried under something darker, more selfish. He starts thinking: Why should I let him have you? Why should I be good when being good means losing you?
The change is gradual. Subtle at first. He stops apologising for wanting to be near you. Stops pulling away when you touch him. Starts touching you back: hand at your elbow, fingers grazing yours, standing closer than proper, whispering in your ear and calling you love.
He starts competing. Not obviously. Not the way Aerion competes, all sharp edges and deliberate provocation. But quieter. More insidious. He learns what makes you smile. What makes you soften. He uses it.
He stops feeling guilty about using it.
He watches Aerion steal you away for flights and instead of stepping back, he asks you to fly with him the next day. Watches Aerion bring you gifts and starts bringing you things too: books you mentioned wanting, flowers from the gardens, your favourite wine. Watches Aerion make you laugh and learns how to make you laugh harder.
Through the bond, Vermax approves. Finally. FINALLY. His rider is fighting for her.
And the worst part (the best part) is that it works. You notice. You notice Valarr changing, shedding that guilt, leaning into something darker and more certain. You notice him looking at you the way Aerion looks at you: hungry. Possessive. Like he's decided you're his and he's just waiting for you to catch up.
And you're drawn to it. To both of them. The sharp vicious certainty of Aerion and the dark, tender hunger of Valarr-who's-stopped-being-guilty. You're caught between them and you don't want to escape.
The dragons know. Feel it through the bonds. Feel their riders' want, your want, the impossible tangle of it all.
And they've decided: if their riders won't force you to choose, neither will they. You're theirs. All of theirs. The four of you bonded into something that has no name, no precedent, no rules.
Authors note: This is one of those ideas that get in your head and wont leave till you write it out of you. In this fic you're a Tyrell! Congratulations! Myriah Martell is playing matchmaker, for her son Baelor, she wants him happy, can you really blame her? In this fic Baelor is a widower, its not explicit so you can ignore that part if you want. I ask that you be gentle with me because yes, this is not my first time writing a fanfic but it a first time doing anything with explicit smut. Hope its not too cringy. And sorry for the random Gif it's just how i imagine him looking at her in that moment.
Warming: there is smut here, male masturbation, very descriptive, like I go in detail on how he does it, also probably grammar errors
The queen received him in her solar beneath the drifting orange light of late afternoon. Two of her ladies sat nearby with embroidery abandoned in their laps, though one chair remained occupied.
The Tyrell girl rose at once when Baelor entered.
She was young, younger than he expected, dressed in soft green velvet with roses sewn along the sleeves in pale gold thread. Pretty, certainly, though not in the manner court singers praised. There was too much life in her face for that. Curiosity brightened her eyes too openly.
“Your Grace,” Baelor greeted.
“Baelor.” Myriah smiled warmly. “Come, I wished you to meet Lady—”
“I know who she is,” he said gently.
The girl dipped into a hurried curtsey. “My prince.”
Myriah watched them both with infuriating calm.
“Yes,” she said lightly. “Well. Lady Alaine’s daughter has spent enough years in my court that I thought it long past time the two of you became acquainted.”
Baelor looked at his mother for one long moment.
Then, pleasantly said. “Would you leave us a moment?”
The girl blinked in surprise before immediately lowering her head. “Of course, my prince.”
She gathered her skirts quickly and disappeared beyond the door with the other ladies following behind her.
The moment the door shut, Baelor exhaled sharply.
“No.”
Myriah did not even pretend confusion. “No?”
“You know precisely what you are doing.”
“I should hope so. I would be greatly concerned otherwise.”
He stared at her. His mother merely reached for her wine.
“She is intelligent,” Myriah continued calmly. “You complain endlessly that every conversation at court bores you half to death.”
“That does not mean I require a maiden delivered to my chambers.”
“Your study,” she corrected. “Do not be dramatic.”
Baelor almost laughed despite himself. “Mother.”
“You overwork,” she said, voice softer now. “Your headaches worsen. Half the time you cannot bear to read your own correspondence by candlelight. You need assistance.”
“I have servants.”
“You have men who stack parchment in crooked piles and cannot distinguish trade accounts from military reports.”
“That is hardly reason to parade a Tyrell girl before me.”
“She is not being paraded.” Myriah took a slow sip of wine. “She is bored nearly to tears. Clever girls rot in courts if left idle long enough.”
Baelor folded his arms.
Myriah continued as though he had not spoken at all.
“She enjoys being useful. I have watched her invent tasks for herself for years. If a cup spills, she is already cleaning it. If a lady drops her embroidery, she kneels before servants can move. The child is desperate for purpose.”
“She is not a child.”
“No,” Myriah agreed quietly. “Which is precisely why she should have something meaningful to occupy her mind.”
Baelor knew this tone. Calm. Reasonable. Carefully truthful.
The worst kind of argument.
“She does not need to assist me.”
“That is fine,” Myriah said easily.
Too easily.
His eyes narrowed.
“You may tell her yourself.”
Before he could answer, she called toward the door.
“Come back in, sweetling.”
Baelor closed his eyes briefly.
The girl returned almost at once, nervousness written plainly across her face. Yet beneath it sat unmistakable excitement.
Myriah smiled at her.
“I was just telling my son how pleased I am. I think this arrangement shall make two people I care for very happy.”
Color rose instantly into the girl’s cheeks.
“You are very kind, Your Grace.”
“Nonsense.” Myriah waved a hand dismissively. “You have been dying of boredom for months.”
The girl laughed softly, embarrassed. “It is not quite so terrible.”
“It is exactly so terrible,” Myriah replied. “Tell him.”
The poor thing glanced toward Baelor as though uncertain whether she was permitted to speak honestly.
“I only…” She hesitated. “I only thought it might be useful, my prince. I would not be a burden. I can sort correspondence and copy ledgers well enough, and I read quickly besides. And…” Her face brightened despite her obvious nerves. “It would be nice to be of help to someone.”
Baelor opened his mouth. He had intended to refuse.
He should refuse.
He knew perfectly well that his mother had engineered every moment of this conversation before he ever entered the room.
Yet the girl looked at him with such open hopefulness that the words would not come.
There was so much eagerness in those eyes.
Beside him, Myriah lifted her wine cup to hide her smile.
Got you.
******
The Tyrell girl became a constant presence within Baelor’s study thereafter.
At first she arrived timidly, carrying ledgers against her chest as though afraid she might drop them. By the second moon she no longer waited to be instructed. Correspondence sorted itself beneath her hands with alarming efficiency. Trade reports remained stacked separately from court petitions. Letters requiring immediate answers appeared beside his morning meal before he had even asked for them.
She possessed an irritating habit of anticipating his needs.
On days his headaches worsened, she drew the curtains before sunlight sharpened into pain. When maesters drowned him in endless figures and accounts, she read aloud instead, her voice soft enough not to grate.
Worse still, she filled silence comfortably.
Most people mistook silence for invitation or insult. The Tyrell girl seemed to understand it merely as silence.
At court she remained bright and warm as summer wine, laughing easily with Myriah’s ladies, forever finding small tasks to occupy restless hands. Yet within his chambers she settled into quieter rhythms, as though instinctively sensing which version of herself belonged there.
Baelor found this unsettling.
******
She reads the letter to him.
He should be listening to the damn thing properly. He hears it well enough, every word of it, but it doesn’t stay where it’s meant to. It keeps slipping off into her instead.
She’s got that steady way of reading, eyes on the page, voice even. Too steady for him to ignore. He keeps looking at her face while she does it, which is not what he’s supposed to be doing, but there it is.
She tilts her head a little as she moves down the page, and he catches the line of her neck without meaning to. Nice thing, that. Clean line. Soft.
Her mouth moves through the words, and he finds himself watching that more than anything the letter is actually saying.
There’s a bit in it that must annoy her, because her nose scrunches up for a second, quick and unguarded.
That gets him more than it should.
He likes that. Likes her doing that without thinking about it. Sweet thing.
He remembers her too close once, leaning in to reach something, hair brushing past him, that clean scent of hers catching him off guard and sticking around longer than it had any right to.
It’s there again now, in his head while she stands there reading like nothing’s going on.
Which is the thing of it.
Nothing is going on.
Except he can’t seem to stop looking at her instead of the letter she’s reading out for him.
And he’s not even trying that hard to stop.
“It’s not good news,” she says.
He doesn’t answer right away. The words are there, somewhere in his head, but they won’t line up properly. Pieces of the letter, fragments, nothing sitting still long enough to be useful.
“What?” he says.
She’s looking at him now.
“The letter,” she says.
Right. Yes. The letter.
He exhales through his nose. A bit too slow.
“Yes,” he says. Then, after a beat that feels slightly wrong in his mouth, “I heard it.”
He didn’t. Not properly. Enough to follow her voice, not enough to repeat anything back if someone pressed him on it. Her eyes stay on him a moment longer than usual.
“You didn’t,” she says.
That should irritate him. It doesn’t land clean enough for that. He should fix it. Pull the letter back together in his head. Try. It doesn’t come. What comes instead is her sitting there, watching him like she’s measuring something.
“I did,” he says, but it comes out late. Thin.
Silence sits between them. She shifts the page in her hands.
“You should go and rest,” she says. Like she’s talking about weather. “We can finish this later.”
Rest. He catches on that word more than the rest of it.
“No,” he says immediately.
Then a half-beat later, “I’m fine.”
It doesn’t sound like something he believes much in the moment. Her gaze doesn’t move away. Now she’s looking at him properly. Not the letter. Him. Like she’s noticed the gap. He can feel it. The way he’s been looking at her. The way he hasn’t stopped.
That should be dealt with. Put back in place.
It isn’t.
“If you say so,” she says.
There’s something in her mouth that almost becomes a smile, but doesn’t quite commit.
“Shall I read it again?” she asks.
No.
Bad idea.
He knows it before she finishes speaking.
“No,” he says.
Then, after a delay that feels like it belongs to someone slightly behind him, “Summarise it.”
She blinks once.
“A summary?” she says.
“Yes,” he says. Too quick now. “Just the substance.”
She looks at him a moment longer, like she’s deciding whether this is efficiency or collapse.
Then she nods, slow.
“Alright,” she says. “But after that, you’re done for the day.”
He doesn’t answer that. Just watches her adjust the letter in her hands. And waits for her to start talking again.
After she had summarized the letter, he realizes his attention lay with her, and it would not return to the letter no matter how much he tried.
Instead of saying anything further, he smiles at her softly and tells her she was right, that he was tired.
She tilts her head to the side, her mouth upturning into a smile, and says gently, with no mockery in her tone, that they should continue tomorrow then.
She approaches him, places the letter on his desk, then bows respectfully and wishes him a good night.
He nods in acknowledgment.
And then she leaves.
His eyes followed her departing figure.
The dress she's wearing is a tad bit revealing, it showed him her upper back, partly exposed, the cut of it following down to her figure as she moved.
He grasps his hands together, exhaling deeply.
Gods, she was the sweetest torture, a temptation he found himself not wanting to resist.
Soon after, he departs from the cellar to his bed, his thoughts filled with her.
As he lays down, sleep does not come to him. His body is tired, but his mind roamed, it always went back to her.
She was beautiful, in every sense of that word.
He had never met another person who tried so hard to appear less than she was. She tried to act cold and distant, but her natural warmth could not be hidden.
She was sunlight he basked in.
She was good, truly good.
He wanted her.
Gods above he wanted her.
Her mind.
Her spirit.
Her body.
What did she feel like? Was her skin as smooth as it looked? Her lips as soft as he imagined? Her hands as warm as he thought they'd be grasping at him as he took his time with her laying underneath him.
The more he though of her, her face, her lips, the curve of her neck, those dresses she wore, revealing just shy of inappropriate, the harder he got.
He lowers his breaches and takes himself in one hand. A low groan leaves his lips as he begins to stroke himself.
Eyes shut he envisions her coming into his study as usual, but this time instead of speaking she stands there, a gentle smile on her face, then she unclasp her dress, her gaze locked on him unashamed. She opens it and slides it down her shoulders, the dress falls to the ground.
She is bare for him. She calls him in.
The hand on his cock moves faster. The vision of her naked breasts only serve to encourage him.
In a swift motion he's off the chair and pulling her closer, their lips lock as he guides her to him, chest to chest, their breaths mingle. One hand he lowers to the to reach her behind and and he kneads it, she gasps in his mouth pushing her breasts more onto him.
His clothes come off him with her assistance as he leads her to his chair, he sits with her straddling him and pressing her warm center on his cock.
As his hand moves he imagines his mouth on her breasts, kissing and gently biting, her head thrown back as she moans, then guides his hand to her mound. She is wet, so deliciously wet.
He groans harder now, palm sweaty mixed with precum, as he continues to stroke.
Fingers circling her clit, the sweet noises she makes are enough to send him close to the edge, then quick he grabs her by her hips and places her on his desk, she lets out a surprised yelp but he does not give her a moment to adjust, instead he kneels Infront of her, using his palms he spreads her legs and nears his face to her mound.
He tastes her on his tongue, this lovely center is a sweet as she is. And he is ravenous.
The strokes are as quick as he imagines himself licking and sucking her in his head. He's close now. So close. He waits until she falls apart, her pleasure evident on his beard. Then he allows himself release.
As he cleans himself feeling, he feels ashamed of what he'd done.
How would she feel knowing he has been stroking himself to thoughts of her?
That every night since the first time she spend in his study he has spend with his hand on his cock imagining her.
She'd probably be appalled knowing how he envisioned her in his head.
How many times had he imagines those sweet lips wrapped around him? Her bent over his desk as he took her from behind. The steady rhythm she kept as she rode him on the chair.
In truth, he imagined more then that every night, after release came shame, and when shame lost it's hold, came sweet comforting thoughts.
Her in his bed, naked, spent and utterly content, curled under his arm.
Close to him, where he could hear her steady breathing, kiss her brow and tell her how she made the room warmer with her presence.
Everyone knows Maekar is the youngest of the king's four sons, and therefore feels a lot of pressure, having to keep up with his elder siblings — especially with Baelor, obviously, since they are both regarded as cut out for warfare from the beginning. But Maekar is also in a position where, essentially, less is expected and demanded of him than of his brothers — simply because he's the youngest, and he's not supposed to be the heir. No one in their right mind would think he would ever become king — for this to be a possibility, something crazy would have to happen. So, Maekar is also very likely to be especially privileged and even pampered, right?
Maekar's paradox is that, by the looks of it, he's fucking both. He carries the impossible weight of consciously being "the spare" for Baelor — at first keeping up with him, then earning his position as a Targaryen warlord, then taking the blows so that Baelor doesn't have to, and so on. But — even despite his harsh personality — he's also the darling of the family (or at least a part of it), and simply has to have the best of everything. Oftentimes, he can even have some luxuries denied to Baelor — like marrying a girl he genuinely likes, for example. And he develops a strong sense of entitlement which he later, for the most part inadvertently, passes on to Aerion, Daeron, and, to a degree, Egg.
At least partially, it comes from Baelor. Generosity and kindness come naturally to Baelor, and he will generally bend over backwards for the people he loves. Maekar occupying a special place in his heart would reinforce Maekar's love for getting special treatment — particularly from Baelor — further still. The situation where he gets to have his perfect elder brother, the prince of the realm, all to himself (the wives and the children get left out of the equation, simply because they kinda belong to a different world) would be the peak of it.
And this is why at Ashford, when it comes to the trial of seven, Maekar is incensed not only because of the whole situation, but also because Baelor has suddenly prioritised the well-being of some guy he has literally just met over his own. Though it is never stated explicitly, the obvious offence Maekar took likely made him fight even more fiercely than he could have (that, and the perceived threat to Aerion's life, of course). And the rest just happened.
hi! first of all, i would like to say that i am obsessed with your caged series!!! i literally visit ur page as soon as i open tumblr because ur writing is soo goood!!! by the way i was wondering, what would be aerion’s thoughts on valarr’s obsession with fmc? and what would be the dynamics between aerion and fmc? would valarr be jealous of aerion as well?
Thank you so much. I'm glad you enjoy the series. And yes, Aerion’s presence in Caged would be so interesting because he is one of the few people who would look at Valarr and FMC and immediately think:
Oh. So this is where all your madness went.
Aerion would clock Valarr’s obsession almost instantly.
Not because he is morally superior. He is not. Aerion is also a Targaryen disaster, just in a louder, crueler, more theatrical way. But that is exactly why he would recognize it. He knows family madness when he sees it. He knows possessiveness, entitlement, obsession, vanity, and violence dressed as devotion.
The difference is that Aerion would find Valarr’s control funny.
He would see Valarr hovering behind FMC at a family event, hand at her lower back, eyes tracking everyone who speaks to her, and Aerion would smile into his drink like:
"Oh, cousin. You’ve become boring in the most interesting way.”
Aerion would absolutely tease him about it.
Not openly enough to cause a scene at first. Just little remarks designed to make Valarr’s jaw tighten.
“Does she breathe without written permission, or is that scheduled too?”
Or:
“Careful, Valarr. If you keep holding the leash that tightly, people may start to notice the collar.”
And Valarr would go cold.
Because Aerion is not guessing.
He sees it.
Aerion’s thoughts on Valarr’s obsession
Aerion would think Valarr is pathetic and terrifying at the same time.
Pathetic because Aerion would see the need underneath all that control. He would understand that Valarr is not just commanding FMC because he enjoys power. He is commanding her because he is afraid.
And Aerion would despise fear when it looks too much like vulnerability.
He would think: You love her so much you’ve made yourself ridiculous.
But he would also be fascinated because Valarr’s obsession is effective. Valarr did not just want FMC. He built an entire life around keeping her. The house, the daughter, the marriage, the routines, the family narrative, the security, the legal structure — all of it.
Aerion would be half-mocking, half-impressed.
Like:
“You caged her with domesticity. How tasteful. I would have expected something more dramatic.”
Valarr would hate that because Aerion reduces his grand, tortured devotion to a trick.
And yet Aerion is not wrong.
I also think Aerion would be one of the few people who could make Valarr feel exposed. Baelor can judge him. Matarys can be disappointed in him. Mira can hate him.
But Aerion can name him.
Aerion would see Valarr’s obsession and say the ugliest truth out loud, with a smile:
“You do not want a wife. You want a hostage who kisses you back.”
That would be nuclear. Valarr might genuinely consider murder for three seconds.
Aerion and FMC’s dynamic
Aerion and FMC would have a very strangely entertaining dynamic.
She would not trust him.
Aerion is not safe. He is charming, volatile, observant, and cruel when bored. He likes poking wounds to see what color people bleed. He would not be a gentle ally.
But he would be oddly honest.
That is the thing FMC might almost appreciate.
Valarr’s danger is wrapped in tenderness. He makes control sound like care.
Aerion’s danger is much more naked. He does not pretend to be good. He does not bother dressing the knife as a flower.
So FMC might find him unsettling, but also weirdly easier to breathe around because Aerion is not trying to convince her the cage is a garden.
He would probably be amused by her from the beginning.
In a predator-recognizes-intelligence way.
He would see that she is not stupid. He would see that she knows exactly what Valarr is doing, even when she cannot stop him. He would enjoy her humor, her quiet resistance, the way she refuses to perform gratitude just because Valarr has placed her in finer things.
Aerion would say something awful at a dinner, like:
“Tell me, does my cousin let you choose your own shirt, or does he consider that a security risk?”
FMC would look at him calmly and say:
“He lets me choose. He only makes notes for later.”
Aerion would laugh. Valarr would not.
That would be the dynamic.
Aerion provokes. FMC answers better than expected. Valarr silently plots several crimes.
Would Aerion flirt with FMC?
Yes, but mostly to upset Valarr early on in the relationship.
Aerion would not necessarily be in love with FMC. I do not think his interest would be pure desire, though he might find her beautiful and intriguing. The real temptation for him would be the effect she has on Valarr.
FMC is the one person who can make Valarr look less than composed.
That alone makes her fascinating to Aerion.
So he would flirt like a match held near oil.
A hand kissed too slowly. A compliment made too intimate.
A joke about how Valarr clearly has excellent taste.
Something like:
“If I had known museum girls came this sharp, I might have donated more often.”
FMC would roll her eyes.
Valarr would appear beside her like summoned death.
Aerion would smile because he got Valarr's attention.
He would enjoy making Valarr jealous because Valarr’s jealousy is so controlled that seeing it crack would feel like sport.
But Aerion would also be careful. He knows Valarr is dangerous. He knows there are lines that, if crossed, would stop being funny.
The problem is Aerion loves crossing lines.
Would Valarr be jealous of Aerion?
Horribly.
And not only because Aerion is a man.
Valarr would be jealous of Aerion because Aerion has access.
Family access.
Aerion can enter rooms other men cannot. He can insult Valarr in ways others would not survive. He can stand too close to FMC under the excuse of family intimacy. He can joke with her at dinner, corner her near the terrace, offer her a cigarette, say something poisonous and funny enough that she laughs before she remembers not to.
That would drive Valarr insane.
Not because he thinks FMC wants Aerion seriously.
But because Aerion represents chaos.
Valarr can control respectable men. Donors. Professors. Colleagues. Social climbers. Exes. Staff. Suitors.
Aerion is not respectable.
Aerion does not care enough about consequences.
And worse, Aerion can see through him.
So if FMC and Aerion ever shared a look across a table — not romantic, just knowing — Valarr would hate it.
Because it means someone else understands the private language of his marriage.
Aerion would weaponize that immediately.
He would catch FMC watching Valarr quietly correct a staff member for not knowing where she was that afternoon, then murmur:
“He does that when he is frightened.”
FMC would look at him.
Aerion would smile.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised. Dragons can get scared too.”
And Valarr would know Aerion said something even if he did not hear it.
Aerion as a dangerous almost-ally
I do think Aerion could become a strange almost-ally to FMC — not because he is noble, but because he enjoys undermining Valarr’s certainty.
If Valarr is becoming too controlling at a family event, Aerion might step in with a comment that makes the control visible.
For example, Valarr says:
“My wife is tired. We’re going to leave.”
FMC has not said she is tired.
Aerion, smiling:
“Remarkable. He’s learned to experience exhaustion on your behalf.”
The room laughs awkwardly.
FMC gets one second of air because suddenly the thing Valarr was doing has been named in public.
That is Aerion’s usefulness.
He does not save her.
But he punctures the illusion.
He makes the invisible visible.
And Valarr hates nothing more than having his control turned into a joke, because jokes are social weapons he cannot easily punish without looking worse.
Aerion understands that.
He would use it. But Aerion is not safe for FMC either
Aerion might enjoy her, might even feel protective in a twisted family way, but he is not a clean savior figure.
If FMC trusted him too much, he could hurt her.
Not necessarily by betraying her to Valarr deliberately, but by treating her pain like entertainment. Aerion has a cruel streak. He might push too far because he wants to see what happens.
He might say something like:
“You know, if you truly wanted to leave him, you would have done it.”
That would wound her because it is both unfair and close enough to truth to hurt.
Valarr warning Aerion off
There would definitely be a private confrontation.
Maybe after Aerion makes FMC laugh too freely at a family dinner. Maybe after he kisses her hand too slowly. Maybe after he says something about cages within Valarr’s hearing.
Valarr would find him afterward on a balcony or in the smoking room.
Very calm.
Aerion would not even turn around. “Come to threaten me?”
Valarr: “I thought I’d ask politely first.”
Aerion smiles. “How novel.”
Valarr would step closer.
“Do not play with my wife.”
Aerion: “She plays better than you think.”
That would be the wrong answer.
“If you want to cut me, do it directly. Do not use her.”
And Aerion might, for once, become serious.
“That is rich, coming from you.”
Because Aerion knows enough.
Maybe not the custody threat.
But enough.
How Aerion sees FMC
Aerion would see FMC as the one person who made Valarr both more human and more monstrous.
That would fascinate him.
He might say to her once, privately:
“You ruined him, you know.”
She would look at him coldly. “He was like that before me.”
Aerion would smile. “Yes. But now he has a religion.”
That is exactly how Aerion would understand it.
To Aerion, FMC is not just Valarr’s wife. She is the altar Valarr built his madness around.
He would see the way Valarr watches her and think it is almost funny, almost tragic, almost obscene.
And maybe, in a rare honest moment, he would pity her.
He might say:
“The trouble with being loved by men like us is that we call it worship when we mean hunger.”
FMC would answer: “At least you know the difference.”
Aerion: “Of course. I simply don’t care.”
FMC: “Valarr cares.”
Aerion would look at her then. “Yes. That is why he is worse.”
Valarr’s care is sincere. His tenderness is real. His desire to protect her is real.
That sincerity makes the cage harder to hate cleanly.
Aerion, by contrast, would be easier to condemn.
Would FMC ever use Aerion against Valarr?
Maybe a little. If she is in a strategic mood, yes.
Not by truly flirting or crossing lines, but by allowing Aerion’s attention to annoy Valarr when she wants Valarr unsettled.
She knows Valarr watches.
So if Aerion says something outrageous and she laughs instead of shutting it down, Valarr notices.
If Aerion offers her his arm at a family function and she takes it for ten steps, Valarr notices.
If she asks Aerion a question about Valarr’s childhood, Valarr notices.
And later:
“You enjoyed that.”
FMC: “Enjoyed what?”
Valarr: “Making me watch him touch you.”
FMC: “He offered his arm, Valarr.”
Valarr: “He offered provocation.”
FMC: “And you accepted?”
That would make him furious.
Aerion becomes one of the few social weapons FMC can use because he is too high-status and too family-connected for Valarr to erase.
Valarr can punish random men.He cannot erase Aerion.
And Aerion knows it.
Aerion’s deeper function in Caged
Aerion would serve as a mirror.
Matarys sees Valarr’s darkness and is saddened by it. Baelor sees it and judges it. Mira sees it and hates it.
Aerion sees it and grins.
Because Aerion understands that darkness is not foreign to the Targaryens. It is inheritance. Valarr simply wears it better. More beautifully. More domestically. More dangerously.
Aerion would look at the townhouse, the wife, the daughter, the ring, the controlled schedules, the perfect public image, and think:
You made tyranny respectable.
And he would admire the craft even as he mocks the sentiment.
Aerion's sprawled across your bed in those grey sweats—the ones that should be a war crime, that ride low enough on his narrow hips you can see the cut of him, the trail of hair, the tattoo creeping up his ribs where his shirt's crinkles. Propped on his elbows. Bare feet crossed at the ankles. Running his mouth.
He's been running it for the better part of an hour.
About the neighbour's dog. About Daeron's driving. About how Egg cheated at Mario Kart this morning and the moral implications thereof. About the way your hair looks when you've just woken up (like you've been mauled, wolf, it's hot) about absolutely nothing of consequence, in that low rasping drawl, that lazy smug cadence.
You've stopped tracking about thirty minutes ago.
The man who goes monosyllabic around people he hates, who answers his brothers in grunts and sneers, who looks at strangers in the grocery store like he's waiting for them to bite, in private, with you, cannot shut up. Will narrate his entire life at you while you're trying to read. Explain in granular detail why the dishwasher loading is a punishment and not a chore. Will, at 2 a.m., wake you up to tell you something he's just remembered about a movie you saw four months ago.
You love him. You're also going to kill him.
"Aerion."
"—and I'm just saying, if Daeron's going to keep parking the truck like that he can at least—"
"Aerion."
He looks up. Lilac eyes lazy, dark-lashed, that mouth pulled into the crooked half-smirk that's been getting people punched since he was twelve. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's been doing it on purpose. He's been doing it on purpose for forty-five minutes because he likes watching you get wound up, likes the moment your patience snaps, lives for it like it's sustenance.
"Yes, wife?"
You aren't his wife. He calls you that anyway. He calls you that constantly purely to piss you off and the worst part is that you don't, entirely, dislike it even if he treats it as a joke.
You set your book down. Carefully. Climb up the bed.
He watches you come. That smile sharpens—turns hungry, turns interested—and when you swing one leg over his shoulders and brace your hands on the headboard above him, Aerion makes a low pleased sound deep in his throat. Like a cat being handed exactly what it had been waiting for.
You're wearing one of his shirts and a dress underneath. A thin slip of a thing, summer-soft, the hem riding up around your hips now that you're straddling his face. His hands come to your thighs immediately. Warm. Calloused. Possessive.
He pushes the dress up higher. Slowly. Eyes on yours.
Then he stops. Tilts his head.
That smirk. That fucking smirk. It pulls slow and mean across his full mouth.
"Wife. Are you— " his voice goes register lower, gone amused, gone delighted, "—are you not wearing any—"
"Shut up."
"Filthy girl, I can't take you anywhere—"
"It's because you keep ripping them."
"That's a baseless accusation—"
"It's not baseless, Aerion, I have witnessed it, you ripped a pair off me last Tuesday—"
"Slander."
"—and don't think I don't know you've been stealing them, you freak, Daeron found one in the laundry that I know I didn't put there—"
His smirk widens. Goes downright radiant. He's not even trying to deny it. He's looking up at you with those lilac eyes glittering with pure undiluted satisfaction. Hands sliding up the backs of your thighs, and he has the audacity, the gall, to lift one shoulder in the laziest, most unrepentant shrug you've ever seen.
"They smell like you," he says, like it's that simple.
"Aerion Targaryen—"
"What was I supposed to do, wife? Throw them out? Like a philistine?"
You're going to strangle him. Going to wrap your hands around his stupid, pretty throat and—
Aerion drags you down onto his mouth mid-thought.
Whatever you were going to say dies in a noise that doesn't belong to a human being. His tongue is (Christ) his tongue is immediately on you, no warm-up, no working up to it, just sliding hot and wet and deliberate through your folds like he's been thinking about it for hours. Like he was running his mouth that whole time just to get here, and his lips catch against you in a way that makes your hands fist in the headboard.
He moans. He moans. Into you. Like he's the one being undone.
His hands slide up under the dress, up the backs of your thighs, settle on your ass with that grip—that possessive, splayed-finger grip he gets when he doesn't intend to let go—and then he's pulling you down, grinding you into his greedy mouth. His face, his sharp-jawed, gorgeous face rubs into you, and he's not even trying to let you control the pace.
He's setting it. He's setting it filthy and slow and thorough, working you with his tongue in long flat strokes, swirling, and every time you try to lift up he growls and yanks you back down.
You're making noises. You don't know what noises. But you can't hear yourself over the white roar in your ears.
Aerion pulls back, just enough, drags his mouth in a hot, wet line down to your inner thigh.
Bites you.
Hard enough that you yelp, your hips buckling and he laughs against your skin, low and pleased. Then he's sucking—sucking the bite, drawing the blood up, working a bruise into the soft skin high on the inside of your thigh where only he's going to see it. Where he's going to check for it tomorrow. Where his fingers are going to find it absent-mindedly in the kitchen and his eyes are going to go dark and smug all over again.
"Aerion—"
"Mm."
He kisses the bruise. Soft. Reverent. Then he does it on the other thigh (bites, sucks, marks) like he's signing his work, like he's labelling you, and you have a wild, incoherent thought that this is what he meant by they smell like you, this is what he means, this man is a nightmare, this man is—
His tongue is back on you.
Inside you.
You hiss a high, throaty sound, arching into him with a gasp.
He's tongue-fucking you. There's no other word, there's no prettier word, he's working that tongue into you in slow, filthy thrusts and his slick tongue catches just so and his nose is pressed up against your clit and he's humming, the bastard is humming, low pleased vibrations that go straight up your spine and unspool every coherent thought you had —
Aerion's hands tighten on your ass. He drags you down harder. Grinds you into his face like he's trying to suffocate himself with you, like that's the goal. Like he'd die happy and you can feel him hard against the sheets behind you. Feel the way his hips are working against nothing, rutting up into empty air because he's that gone for this, because he gets off on this so badly it's almost embarrassing.
(It's not embarrassing. He has no shame. He has never had shame.)
You can't breathe. Can't think past the sheer, burning pleasure. You glance down, and Aerion's eyes are open, fixed on you, lilac and dark and burning, watching your face like he's taking notes. His cheeks are flushed and his hair is an absolute disaster where you've fisted one hand in it without remembering doing it and—
"I'm—Aer, I'm—"
He hums. Approving. Doesn't let up. Doesn't slow down, tongue curling, sucking and kissing, kneading the flesh of your ass greedily. Just works you with that tongue and those wicked, clever lips, grinding you down onto his mouth and—
The coil in your lower stomach snaps and you come so hard you see colours.
You come with both hands fisted in his hair and one of his hands splayed across your lower back holding you down and the other gripping your ass so tight you'll have his fingerprints there tomorrow. Aerion's mouth works you through it in long, filthy strokes that don't stop, don't let up, drag you through it and into the next wave before you've even finished the first, and you're whining now, whimpering, thighs shaking, "Aerion—too much, it's too much—"
He gentles. Finally. Mouth softening. Tongue easing into slow, soothing strokes, then just... kisses. Open-mouthed, lazy, worshipful. The inside of your thigh. The crease of your hip. The bruise he made. The other bruise he made. He's kissing his work, the absolute—
You collapse sideways off him. Your legs don't work. Your spine is liquid. There's nothing in your brain for once, except soft, cottony nothingness.
Aerion props himself up on one elbow. Mouth wet. Chin wet. Hair a pale disaster. Eyes glittering with that lazy, smug afterglow he gets, the one that's not even about him (he hasn't been touched, he's still hard in those grey sweats, visibly, obscenely) it's about you, about what he just did to you. About the fact that you're lying there boneless and wrecked and his.
He gazes at you. That crooked half-smile, the pale fire of his eyes, devouring you.
Opens his mouth.
"So as I was saying about Daeron's parking—"
You hit him with a pillow.
He's laughing. He's still laughing when you drag him up the bed by the front of his shirt and kiss him—taste yourself on his tongue, on the wet, slick mess of his mouth—and laughing when you bite his lip hard in retaliation for the smirk. Laughing when you shove him onto his back and straddle his hips, feeling him throb against you through the sweats, and only stops laughing when you reach down between you and slide your hand under the waistband and—
Yeah. That shuts him up.
(For about ninety seconds. Then Aerion's running his mouth again. Filthier content, this time. Much filthier. About what he wants you to do. About what he's been thinking about all week. About—)
