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SEVEN STEPS TO TAME A BEAST

Aerion 'Brightflame' Targaryen x Reader

Word count: 14k

a/n: Read on AO3 here

The lords of the Seven Kingdoms had long memories, and pride that clung even longer.

Prince Maekar learned that slowly, one letter at a time. One refusal after another, each dressed in courtesy and sealed with finality. House Tarly sent a courteous refusal, all neat phrases and careful distance. House Rowan said nothing for three months, then finally replied with a claim that their daughter had been promised already. The lie was thin enough to show through the parchment. House Baratheon sent condolences. Condolences, as if a death had occurred instead of a proposal. House Hightower did not answer at all, and Maekar did not press them. Smaller houses followed suit, each with their own reason. A daughter too frail, a daughter already in love, a daughter too young, too old, too recently in mourning.

The reasons piled up, one over the other, until they blurred together.

A year had passed since Ashford Meadow. A year since his son dragged that puppeteer girl through the dirt by her hair and broke her finger. Since he called for a Trial of Seven over an insult most men would have swallowed with their wine and forgotten by sunrise. A year since Maekar stood in the field with a hammer in his hand and felt the weight of his own name shift into something people spoke of carefully, if they spoke of it at all.

Men who had never stood near a tourney field could recount it with certainty, as though they had been there themselves. They told it with small changes, but the shape remained. A prince undone in public.

He had tried threatening Aerion with sending him away, exile him to Lys, he wouldn’t be the last Targaryen to do so. He had tried locking him down. He had tried shame. But after all that, Aerion didn’t even flinch, he endured it too easily, quiet in a way that made Maekar uneasy.

So now he had turned to marriage.

At last, Maekar wrote to Dorne. Your father was not the ruling prince, but from Lord Orran Martell, his brother. Close enough to matter, far enough to manoeuvre. When the letter reached him, he read it once, then again, then a third time, slower. Only then did he allow himself a smile.

The carriage carried the scent of cedar and dust, and the road behind you stretched longer with each turn of the wheels.

Your father had spoken plainly. No softening, no illusions. He laid out the value of the match, the reach it offered, the place it would secure. He spoke as he would to a man he trusted with consequence. That was his way of showing regard.

He did not pretend the groom was good. He did not ask you to pretend either.

You are strong enough for this, he had said. I would not send you otherwise.

He had expected hesitation, perhaps fear, but he had not found it.

You watched the land shift through the narrow window, red stone fading into green, dry air thickening with damp. The world changing in slow increments.

You turned the name over again and again, testing it.

Aerion Brightflame.

You had heard the Ashford story, of course, everyone had. The mercy of the hedge knight that some called wisdom and others called weakness. What stayed with you was not the cruelty itself, cruelty was common enough among men with power and power made men careless with other people.

I am no man, he had reportedly said. I am a dragon.

You found this almost amusing.

Not because it was foolish, though it was. Because it told you something useful. A man who believed himself a dragon was a man who had built his entire self upon a story. And stories had seams, they could be read, they could, if one were careful, be rewritten.

Maekar thought he was sending you to tame his son. You could feel it in the careful tone of his words, you could feel the hope through the careful diplomacy of his acceptance letter, which your father had allowed you to read. The prince wanted a strong wife for his son. A steady hand. Something that might anchor Aerion to the earth before he burned everything around him.

But you intended to do something more interesting than that.

The journey north gave you time, and you used it well. The rhythm of the road settled into your bones, wheels creaking, hooves striking dirt, the quiet murmur of voices beyond the curtains. Long hours where nothing changed except the light.

You let your thoughts arrange themselves without forcing them. That was how it always worked best. Piece by piece.

By the time you reached the Crownlands, the structure of your plan had taken shape. You named it: Seven Steps to Tame a Beast.

King's Landing announced itself in smell before sight, woodsmoke, salt, something sour beneath both. Too many people, too little space, all of it pressed together and left to simmer. The Red Keep rose above it all, pale stone against a dull sky. It looked less like a crown and more like something grown in the wrong place.

The reception was brief, formal and efficient.

Maekar received you himself. He stood solid and broad, the years written into his face in hard lines. His hair had gone mostly to silver. His eyes were sharp, searching, measuring. You held his gaze just long enough, then gave him courtesy and nothing more.

Aerion was not there, you noticed.

STEPT 1. Keep Your Distance from the Wild.

A wild creature does not welcome approach. Every movement is weighed, every sound judged. You do not step into its space uninvited. You do not reach. You watch. You learn the rhythm first. Where it rests. What startles it. What draws its attention and what it ignores. Rush, and it turns. Wait, and it forgets you are there.

You did not seek Aerion in those first days, even if it took some effort.

There were servants willing to arrange a meeting. Courtiers who offered, curiosity thinly veiled. You declined each time, politely, with reasons that could not be pressed. Fatigue, settling in, amild headache.

In truth, you were mapping him. You began where he could not avoid being seen.

Meals.

He sat very straight, almost too straight, not relaxed. Every movement placed with care, hands set just so. Shoulders squared. The stillness was deliberate, the kind that came from control, not comfort. He ate little. Drank more than he should, though he kept it from showing. His eyes moved often. Not restless. A sweep, measured, taking stock of the room without drawing attention to it. He noted everything.

He laughed twice in three days, both times it was wrong. Too quick, it stopped at his mouth and went no further. The men around him laughed as well, they always did. You watched them more than him in those moments. Watched how easily they bent to it. Mirrors, all of them, they gave him back what he wanted to see.

On the second day, a steward stumbled over a name. A small mistake, barely worth notice. But Aerion noticed. His jaw tightened, just once. A brief pause before he spoke, a fraction longer than natural. Then it passed, the steward went on, unaware. You did not miss it, he disliked error. Disliked imprecision. The world, in his mind, should hold its shape. When it did not, something in him bristled.

On the third day, there was a gathering. Music, wine, low voices. People playing at ease.

You took a place near the edge, beside a column. Your handmaid stood with you, quiet, unobtrusive. You spoke when required, smiled when expected, nothing more.

Aerion crossed the room twice. The first time, he did not look at you. The second time, he did. A brief glance, flat and measuring. The kind given to something not yet worth attention. You were already looking elsewhere when it happened. Your focus set just past him, as though he were incidental.

Still, you saw enough. The slight tension at his mouth, the way his gaze held for a breath, then moved on. He knew you were there. Of course he did, and he was not interested.

Good.

Interest that comes too easily is useless. It has no weight; it does not last. Curiosity had to be earned.

That night, you sat by the window and let the city settle into silence beneath you.

He was proud, that was obvious, but there was something under it. Control, carefully maintained. He was not as unrestrained as the stories suggested. It meant the outbursts were not constant. They built. Pressure, then release.

He was intelligent. More than most around him allowed. That kind of mind, left without challenge, turns inward. Finds its own amusements, not always good ones. He had been told he was exceptional for too long. Ordinary things no longer held him.

Boredom, then. Boredom as a spark.

You suspected he had never been met with anything real. Only reflections and performance. That would have to change. You drew your braid over your shoulder, thinking.

You were not satisfied. You never were, this early. But you understood the ground beneath your feet now. Where it dipped, where it held. You had not spoken to him yet; you had barely shared a room. And still, you were closer than anyone here knew.

The ceremony took place at dawn.

Black candles burned low, their smoke thick and sweet, curling into the corners of the chamber. The maester spoke in High Valyrian, his voice steady as he shaped words that had existed long before the Conquest. Pale light slipped through a narrow window, thin and colourless. Maekar stood off to the side, his posture rigid, his expression set in that familiar way of a man who no longer expected much in return for doing what was required.

Aerion arrived on time.

He was dressed as expected, red and black, pale hair brushed to the side. He took his place beside you without hesitation, carrying himself like a man waiting out an obligation he could not avoid. He did not fidget; he was too controlled to do so. Instead, he held still, composed to the point of absence, his attention drifting toward the candles now and then as if searching for something that was not there.

When the maester's words required it, he took your hand. His grip was exact, dry and cold. It lingered only as long as custom demanded, then released at once, as if he had touched something hot and withdrawn before the burn could catch.

You kept your gaze forward and before you let your mind move forward, it was over.

The feast was small and slightly mournful. The kind of gathering where people ate and spoke because it was expected, not because they wished to. The food was well prepared, the wine even more so. Conversation moved carefully, never quite settling.

You were seated beside Aerion.

He spent the early portion of the meal demonstrating how effortlessly he could ignore you. He spoke across you, around you, treating the space you occupied as if it had always been empty. It was not for your benefit, it was for the others, for himself, for the quiet need to show that nothing had changed.

During the second course, he turned his head slightly in your direction, just enough to acknowledge you without granting you the full courtesy of attention.

"You are quieter than I expected. I was told Dornish women always had opinions about everything."

It was not the sharpest thing he could have said. You suspected he was holding the sharper things in reserve, testing whether blunt instruments would serve before reaching for finer ones. You let your fingers rest on the stem of your cup before answering.

"We do," you said. "We simply learn early which conversations are worth having."

Then you returned to your plate.

The silence stretched. You could feel it tighten, like cloth pulled just a little too far. You did not look at him; you did not need to. Beside you, he drank, then turned away, letting the moment dissolve.

Across the table, Maekar was watching. When the music began, it was him who moved first. You saw the decision before he acted. He crossed the room with purpose and spoke low to Aerion. You did not hear the words, but you did not need to. There was no request in the exchange.

Aerion turned toward you. He extended his hand with slow precision, making absolutely certain that every person in the room understood this was costing him something.

"Will you honour me, dear wife," he said, the words shaped correctly, the tone less so.

You placed your hand in his.

The floor was not crowded. The other couples kept their distance, leaving a space around you that felt exposed rather than open. He danced well, you noted without surprise, he had been trained to do everything.

This close, you could see the pale sweep of his eyelashes, lighter than his hair, catching the faint light when he blinked. The depth of his lilac eyes was clearer up close, not just colour but something layered beneath it. He had two scars under his cheek, but his skin still looked almost unreal in its smoothness.

His hand at your waist was the same as his grip during the ceremony, measured, controlled, with no warmth.

“Let us understand one another,” he said, his voice low enough to remain private, though there was nothing intimate in it. "I did not want this. I want you to know that I know what my father intends by it, and I want you to know that it will not work."

You let the music carry you through a turn before answering.

“I know you did not want it," you said. "I did not ask for your wanting. I asked for nothing at all, if you recall.”

"You will want things eventually. All wives do."

"Perhaps." You met his gaze briefly, then let it drift past him. "But I did not come here to want things from you, Aerion. I came because the arrangement was made, and I do not refuse an arrangement simply because it is inconvenient."

His hand tightened slightly at your waist, not painfully, but enough to notice.

"You think you can manage me." he said almost curious.

"I think, that they have been trying to manage you your whole life." you said. "And it has not served you much. I am not interested in managing you. I am interested in being your wife. That means I will keep this household in order, I will hold my place properly, and I will do what is required of me. Whether you choose to be part of that is yours to decide."

Another turn as the music continued.

"But I will be here," you added, quieter now. "That part is not negotiable."

He said nothing after that, but you did not mistake the silence for agreement.

Your chambers had been prepared with careful attention as expected. The fire lit, the bed done, everything arranged with quiet precision. You dressed for the night and sat near the hearth with a book open in your lap, though you were not reading.

You waited but he did not come.

The fire burned low. The sounds of the city shifted beyond the walls, settling into the deeper quiet of night. Somewhere, the watch called the hour and you closed the book.

You were not offended; you were not disappointed. You had already known Aerion would rather spend his wedding night in a brothel.

You extinguished the candle by the window and watched the room fall into shadow.

STEPT 2. Become a Familiar Shape.

Constant presence, always at the same distance, without sudden change. Given time, you stop being something to watch for. You become part of the world itself.

In the days that followed, you made yourself ordinary. It took more care than it appeared. True ordinariness had to be consistent. Too much absence would be noticed. Too much presence would draw the eye. You chose your places and kept to them. The great hall in the morning, a corridor near the training yard in the afternoon, a chair by the window in the library, once, where you read for two hours without lifting your head when he entered.

You did not seek him out and you did not avoid him. You were simply there. Aerion noticed.

At first, it was nothing clear. A pause when he entered a room and found you already in it. A shift in his attention, brief and controlled. The smallest recalculation. He had expected something from you. You could see it in what he did not find. No coldness, no wounded pride, no performance at all.

You gave him nothing to work with. Three days after the wedding, he passed you on the library and spoke to you for the first time since the feast.

“I trust you slept well. I confess I cannot say the same for the woman I spent the night with. She complained I kept her awake until dawn.”

You stopped reading and looked up at him.

“Kept her awake, or kept her waiting?” you asked, tilting your head slightly. “There is a difference, I find, between a man who exhausts a woman and a man who simply prevents her from sleeping. One leaves her satisfied. The other leaves her staring at the ceiling." A brief pause. “From what I have heard of you, I suspect she saw rather more of the ceiling than she would have liked.”

You walked away with your book before he could answer.

You had learned early that a voice could betray a person faster than any blade. Most people used it badly. They made it loud when they wanted to be heard, sharpened it when they wanted to cut. They filled it with weight and urgency, as if force alone could make something true. Your father had taught you otherwise. In his solar, he spoke with the same measured evenness whether he was discussing grain yields or deciding a man's fate. A voice that only rises when threatened, he had told you once, is a voice that teaches people when you can be threatened.

You remembered that.

STEP 3. Let It Hear You Before It Sees You.

A calm voice, used often, without command. No edge to it, no sudden movement tied to the sound. The creature learns the voice first, without reason to fear it. Given time, the sound settles into the background. Familiar, expected, something it turns toward without quite knowing why.

So, you began to speak.

The first time was nothing. A grey morning, the stone still holding the night’s cold. Aerion walked the corridor outside the great hall with two of his usual companions, and you were walking alone, and there was no reason to say anything, silence would have served just as well, would in fact have required less effort, but you spoke anyway.

“The easternmost courtyard is iced over this morning,” you said as you went by. “If you are riding, the south gate will be quicker.”

You did not look at him as you said it. You did not look back after.

Behind you, there was a brief silence, and then the low sound of his companions resuming their conversation. You could not tell if he had answered, it did not matter. The point was the sound itself, your voice, steady, offering something useful and nothing more, left behind in his morning like a small, ordinary fact.

You did this again two days later. And again, after that.

An observation about the kitchens. A remark about a particular courier who had been delayed. Once, on the stairs, a quiet comment about a book you carried, spoken into the space without asking for anything in return.

He said nothing the first time. The second time, he gave you a look, the same one you had seen before, sharp and narrow, weighing, deciding whether what it saw was worth the trouble of attention. The third time, he answered, briefly, as if the words had slipped out before he could stop them.

You counted this as exactly what it was, progress.

The friction came eventually. Midday meal, smaller than the evening gatherings, the kind where people allowed themselves to speak a little more freely. You were seated across from Aerion rather than beside him, which meant you had the less comfortable position of being visible to him rather than adjacent.

He had been in a particular mood all morning. You had seen it earlier, out in the courtyard. A tightness in the way he held himself, a coiled irritation that suggested some earlier conversation had not gone as he'd wished. He kept it contained, but it showed in small places. The set of his shoulders, the way his gaze lingered a fraction too long.

Halfway through the meal, he looked at you directly.

“I saw you speaking with the hedge knight this morning. The boy could barely look at you.”

“Ser Duncan,” You corrected, “Could barely look at anyone,” you said. “He has learned that drawing attention to himself is dangerous. A useful instinct, when one lives in a dangerous environment.”

Around the table, the shift was immediate. Eyes moved away, shoulders shifted, someone found their cup suddenly very interesting. No one wanted to be part of whatever this was.

Aerion's mouth curved, but not warmly.

“You say that as an observation. I wonder if you mean it as a criticism.”

“I mean it as neither.” You set down your knife. “A knight who flinches is a knight who has learned what happens when he does not. That tells you something about where he lives.” You looked at him steadily. “The more interesting question is what it tells you about yourself.”

“I am not in the habit of concerning myself with knights anymore.”

“No,” you said. “But you might concern yourself with the fact that a man who fears you will serve you only as long as he must. Fear is a short leash, and the moment it slackens, the moment you turn your back, a frightened man will not think of loyalty. He will think of himself.” You picked up your knife again. "Respect holds longer. It is less satisfying, I imagine, but considerably more reliable."

The table was very quiet.

Aerion's expression did not change, which was its own kind of change, in the vocabulary you had spent weeks building. The muscles around his jaw held with a precision that was not natural stillness. He was choosing his next words with more care than usual, which meant the previous ones had landed somewhere he had not expected them to reach.

“You speak as though I require your counsel,” he said almost thoughtful.

“I speak because the observation seemed worth making,” you said. “What you do with it is your own concern.”

You returned to your meal.

He said nothing more. But he did not look away for a longer moment than was comfortable, and when he finally did, it was not with a quick dismissal, it was with adjustment.

In the library, three days later, you found him already there when you arrived.

This was unusual. Aerion was not, in your observation, a man who spent mornings in libraries by preference. You entered anyways and took the chair you usually took, near the far window, which had the best light and a view of the inner yard, and opened the book you had brought.

For a time, neither of you spoke. The fire cracked softly. From outside came the steady rhythm of steel on steel, practice in the yard below.

“The Celtigar boy.”

You did not look up immediately. You marked your page, then lifted your eyes.

“The one my father is considering for a trade agreement,” he went on. “You spoke with him yesterday.”

“Briefly.” you said.

“He is not what he presents.” There was something restrained in the way he said it. Irritation, perhaps, or reluctance, as though the act of asking you something, or almost asking you something, cost him more than he was willing to fully account for.

You studied him for a moment. “No,” you agreed. “He is not. His family's debts are larger than they've admitted, and his uncle's position in the city has been weakening for two years. The trade agreement would favour him considerably more than it would favour the crown.

Aerion's eyes moved over your face, his gaze precise.

“You gathered that from a brief conversation.”

“From the conversation, and from the days before it,” you said. “People show where the pressure is, if you pay attention.”

A pause.

“My father should know,” he said.

“He should,” you agreed. “I thought you might be the appropriate person to tell him.”

You let that rest between you without elaboration, the implicit suggestion that this was a useful thing, that you were offering it to him rather than taking the credit for it, that you were treating him as someone worth offering useful things to. You did not dress it in sentiment. You did not soften it into a gesture. You simply left it there, plainly, for him to take or ignore as he chose.

He chose to take it. Not gratefully, not with any acknowledgment of the exchange's nature. He simply gave a short, almost inaudible sound of agreement and turned back to his book.

You had met, in your life, exactly three people who understood the particular discipline of the open hand.

Your father was one of them. A merchant woman in Sunspear who had built a trading empire from a single stall was another. The third was a maester who had served your household for eleven years and who had, in that time, quietly accumulated more influence over its workings than anyone with an official title. None of them had achieved what they achieved through force, or through the performance of authority. They had achieved it through the same mechanism, over and over, they gave things away, then let them go.

STEP 4. Offer Without Expectation.

Something of value left within reach, knowledge, advantage, ease. Then you step back. You do not insist. You do not demand. You do not watch too closely. The creature must come to the thing on its own terms, or the thing carries the smell of a trap. Patience here is not passive. It is the most active thing you can do, the discipline of the open hand, extended and then stilled, asking nothing, waiting without the tension of waiting.

You began small, that was where patterns took hold.

The first thing was almost accidental, simple enough to pass unnoticed.

Over weeks, you had seen how Aerion’s mornings turned. When his correspondence waited in disorder, something in him tightened. It was a small irritation, but it spread, it created a particular friction that compounded into the broader texture of his day. His steward handled it unevenly, some days careful, others careless.

You said nothing about this to anyone.

Instead, you mentioned to the steward’s assistant, a young man called Pell, anxious and observant. You mentioned once, that mornings that begin clean tend to stay that way, as though sharing a general philosophy, and then you moved on.

Next day, the letters were sorted before Aerion reached his study. You were nowhere near him when he noticed. You were in the eastern courtyard, the air sharp enough to sting your throat, walking slow circles over frost-hardened ground.

The second offering was more direct, and more deliberate.

The previous night, you had lingered in the great hall long enough to catch a conversation not meant for you. Two of Maekar’s advisors, careless in their angle, speaking of the Plumm family, a loan, a disputed inheritance, a claim that had the potential to become inconvenient for the crown if left unaddressed. The kind of thing that moved slowly until it did not.

You wrote it down, simply a single sheet of paper, placed beneath a volume you had observed Aerion taking from the library shelves twice in the past fortnight, angled just so, easily visible to someone reaching for the book.

You were gone before he arrived, you did not check if it had been taken. This was the discipline, the open hand, and then the stillness.

He found you in the corridor outside the great hall two days later. The way he approached told you enough, straight line, no hesitation, you knew the paper had been found and used.

“The Plumm family matter,” he said. “My father addressed it this morning. He mentioned information that reached him through unusual channels.”

“Did he.” you said.

“He did not know the source.” A pause. “I did.”

You met his gaze, nothing more. “Anyone listening could have heard it,” you said. “I assumed it was worth noting.”

“You assumed,” he repeated sceptical. “And the assumption led you to leave an unsigned document in a place you knew I would find it, rather than simply speaking to me, or to my father directly.”

“Speaking to your father directly would have made it mine to claim. It seemed more useful for it to be yours.” You said, you were well aware that he needed to slowly gain his father’s trusts again.

“You expect me to believe you want nothing in return.” He said.

“I expect nothing from you,” you replied. “I noticed something that seemed relevant to your interests. I noted it where you could find it. That is all.”

He studied you for a long moment, measuring again, then stepped past you without another word. You turned in the opposite direction and continued walking.

The pattern continued.

Days filled with small things, each one easy to miss on its own. A map left open to the right page before a meeting. A quiet word to a knight whose behaviour toward Aerion had been developing a particular insolence. Not a warning, only a reminder of how quickly favour could turn. The knight corrected himself. Aerion noticed the change; you were reasonably certain he had chosen not to address it directly.

During a meal he caught you refilling his cup before the servant reached it, an automatic gesture, barely conscious, and he watched your hand as you set the jug down.

“You do not behave like someone who dislikes me,” he said.

“I am not certain I dislike you,” you said, truthfully. “I have not yet seen enough of you to decide.”

“You have been living in the same castle for a month.”

“So, my husband has taken to keeping track now?” you said, a light note of teasing slipping in despite yourself. You lifted your cup and took a slow sip, letting the taste of the wine linger as a small, knowing smile curved at the corner of your mouth.

He exhaled through his nose, not quite a scoff he meant to share. He didn’t answer. His gaze lingered, a fraction too long to be careless, as if he were trying to smooth over something that had caught him off guard. There was a faint tension in his face, in the set of his jaw and the stillness of his shoulders, the sort of thing that suggested he was trying very hard not to let any hint of embarrassment show.

Later you noticed he took the map you left on his desk. Maekar’s manner afterward told you enough, less strain and more thought behind his words when he spoke to his son. Aerion did not mention it and you did not either.

The absence of acknowledgment said what it needed to. He would take what was useful, he would not name the source. Pride held that line, but still, he had used it. He had accepted the offering, even reluctantly, even silently. That mattered more.

Which meant the distance was slowly shrinking.

He came to your chambers late on a Thursday, when the castle had settled into its quieter rhythm and the corridors carried only the distant steps of the watch.

You sat at your vanity, drawing the brush through your hair in slow, even strokes, winding you down toward sleep. Your sleeping gown was light, meant for the warmth of the room and the privacy of it, nothing more. Your hair hung loose, longer than it appeared when pinned, falling across your shoulders in a way that belonged to a version of yourself you did not generally allow the castle to see.

The door opened without warning, but you did not turn.

You watched him through the mirror instead. It gave you a clearer view than facing him outright. He stepped inside, then paused when he saw you, or the version of you caught in the glass. Something flickered across his face, quick and unguarded, before he shut it down.

You kept brushing your hair.

He crossed the room at an unhurried pace. No sudden movement, no sign of haste, still, there was weight in it. He stopped behind your chair and rested both hands on its back. In the mirror, his eyes met yours directly, without the usual angle or distance.

You held his gaze and continued the brush stroke to its end.

The silence lasted several seconds. In the mirror you watched him watching you. The loose hair, the gown, the particular version of you that belonged to this room and this hour, and you watched him notice that he was watching, and tighten slightly around it.

“I have been really patient with you,” he said at last, his voice low. “I have watched you move through this household for weeks. The documents, the steward, the arrangements that appear before I ask for them.” A pause. “No one does this without a ledger. Show me yours.”

“I told you I keep no ledger,” you said.

“Everyone keeps a ledger.” The words came sharper now. “Whether they admit it or not.”

You set the brush down on the vanity and folded your hands in your lap, and looked at his reflection. The candle shifted, and for a moment the light caught him differently in the mirror. The closeness of him. The space between you that had narrowed without either of you naming it.

“You are angry,” you said. “Not because you think I want something from you. You are angry because you cannot determine what it is, and that distinction is troubling you more than you would like to admit.”

His grip tightened slightly on the chair, his frown deepened. “Do not tell me what troubles me.”

“Then tell me yourself.” You said. “You came here and opened that door without knocking. If you have something to say, say it plainly.”

“What you have offered me,” he said, and this time the control thinned, sharpened into something colder, “is the manner of a woman who wants something. The oldest trick there is. Every woman I have met wanted things. Every woman in this castle wants things. You-” and here something almost contemptuous entered his voice, directed less at you than at his own inability to solve you “-stand there with your quiet gestures and your useful information and expect me to believe it costs you nothing, that you want nothing from me.”

“I told you I expect nothing from you,” you said, for the second time in your acquaintance “Which is not the same as wanting nothing.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. For a moment, his gaze dipped, catching on the fall of your hair over your shoulder, the line of your neck in the candlelight, before returning to your reflection with more force than before.

“Then what do you want,” he said lowly, moving a strand of your hair behind your ear.

You watched him for a moment. The tension in his shoulders. The way he held himself still, as if movement might betray him. The closeness of him, the warmth of it at your back.

“To see you for what you truly are,” you said, now turning around to look up at him. “When no one is performing fear at you.”

The room went quiet.

He did not move at once. His hands remained on the chair, though you felt the subtle shift in them, the restraint in it. His breathing changed, barely, but enough to notice. His gaze stayed on yours, searching now in a way it had not before.

Then he straightened. His hands lifted from the chair with care, as if he had to think about the motion before making it. He held your gaze for a moment longer, something unreadable passing through it. Then he turned and left.

The door closed with a loud thud behind him.

You looked back at your reflection in the glass. The room holding a trace of him still, something unsettled in the air. You reached for the brush and finished what you had started.

A man like Aerion did not adjust. He did not take pressure and reshape himself around it. His world ran on confirmation, on power answered with submission, on a rhythm that reassured him of his place in it. You had been interfering with that rhythm since the morning you arrived. Quietly, consistently, without giving him anything he knew how to answer.

A disruption like that never passed without consequence.

STEP 5. Survive the First Test of Teeth.

Before any bond forms, there is a test. A feint of violence, a warning, a measure of what you are made of. Not always meant to hurt, but whether to see of you will break or bite back. If you do, is over.

You held this thought in the quiet of your morning as you dressed carefully and went about your day.

The argument started in the corridor outside his study, late in the afternoon, when the light came through the western windows, catching dust in the air, turning it gold. You had passed him with the usual moderate acknowledgment, not ignoring him, not seeking him, the same distance you had maintained for weeks, and he had stopped walking.

“You were in my father's solar this morning,” he said.

“I was,” you said. “He asked my opinion on a correspondence from the Arbor.”

“He asked your opinion on that matter,” Something tightened in his face. “Instead of asking me?”

“He did.”

“You have been very busy these days,” he said, “Making yourself useful, to my father, to every corner of this household except the one that is actually your concern.”

“You are my concern,” you said. “Which is precisely why I do not sit waiting for you to need something."

“I do not need anything from you.”

“No,” you agreed. “You have made that very clear last time we discussed. And yet here we are, having this conversation, which you initiated.”

He turned and walked into his study. Not an invitation, but not a dismissal either, and you followed because the conversation was unfinished.

“You think you are very clever,” he said, moving behind his desk, putting wood and distance between you, like it might help him sort what he could not name.

“I think I am.” you said defiantly.

“You think,” he said, and the voice had dropped into its most dangerous register. “That you can arrange yourself into something that suits you, move pieces across a board you were not invited to play on, smile at my father in his solar, look at me like that, and that none of it will have a cost.”

“I have never believed anything is without cost.” you said.

“Then if you are so clever, you should have calculated more carefully.” He stepped past you, toward the door. “You will remain in this room until I say otherwise.” The words came out with anger and the door shut behind him.

You stood in the centre of the room for a moment. Then you moved to his chair, behind his desk, and sat in it, and looked at the documents arranged across the surface, and began, with the unhurried attention, to read them.

Three days later, in the great hall. You had not sought Ser Duncan out specifically. You had spoken with him before, briefly, like with most people in the Keep, and found him to be earnest, possessing more native intelligence than his manner suggested. He was easy to be around. You were in the middle of an unremarkable conversation about the road conditions north of King's Landing, he had travelled them recently, and you had asked a practical question. You felt the shift before you saw him.

A hand settled at your waist. Firm, claiming, meant to be seen, his fingers pressing into the fabric of your dress. Ser Duncan's expression went still, not quite discomfort and not quite confusion.

“My wife,” Aerion said. “I was looking for you.”

Duncan inclined his head and stepped back. You kept your expression exactly as it had been. Aerion’s gaze lingered on you, then flicked once toward the knight, measuring, assembling something he did not like. The hall had gone quiet.

“Is this a game to you,” he said under his breath. An accusation that had the shape of a question.

“No,” you said.

“Then what is it.” He moved in front of you. “What are you doing with the hedge knight-” He stopped, jaw tightening. “Are you provoking me, deliberately.”

“I was having a conversation about road conditions,”

“Do not.” His voice dropped further. “Do not use that voice with me.”

“Which voice would you prefer then? One where I lie?”

“You know,” he said quietly, to you, only to you. “What he did to me.”

“I know what happened at Ashford,” you said, equally quietly. “As does most of the kingdom-”

The struck came fast. Mid-sentence, mid-breath, in front of the hall and the fire and Ser Duncan's suddenly rigid stillness. The back of his hand across your cheek with a force that turned your head and produced a sound that silenced the nearest conversations.

You straightened. You did not touch your face. You did not look at Duncan, who you could feel in your peripheral vision. You looked at Aerion, directly, steadily, with the same expression you had worn in the study, and you said nothing at all.

His jaw was tight and the hall was watching it all. He gripped your wrist, hard, the mark already beginning, and turned toward the corridor, and you went with him because the scene that would result from not going would cost you more.

In your chambers, he released you without a word and left. The door shut and the lock clicked.

You sat by the window. The light had shifted, pale now, moving slowly across the stone. You looked at your wrist, at the faint marks forming. You were not afraid and you were not angry, so you waited with patience.

Maekar went to Aerion that same evening, of course he did. No one told you outright, but you knew before a word reached you. The servant who came to open your chamber door avoided your eyes, her hands slower than usual on the latch. Raised voices, you guessed. Maekar did not shout often, but when he did, it carried. Aerion would have been made to stand there and take it. For the insult. For making a spectacle of his own wife. For stepping, once again, where he had been warned not to. You could almost hear it. The sharp edge of Maekar’s restraint, the threat beneath it.

You let out a slow breath. This would not help. It would tighten something in Aerion, push him further into himself before it loosened anything at all.

He did not return that night, or the next.

On the third, you woke to the sound of your door.

The room was dark, the fire long since reduced to coals and a faint red glow. The kind of hour when even the castle seemed to pause, caught between one watch and the next. You lay still for a moment, listening to the sounds that followed the door, unsteady footsteps, the sounds of a man navigating a familiar space with less precision than usual.

You had smelled the wine, thick and sour on the air, and something else beneath it, cheap perfume and sweat. You had passed enough doorways in this city to know it came from a brothel.

He moved through the dark toward the bed with care that bordered on effort. Not quite stumbling, but close. You lay still with your eyes not quite closed and your breathing steady and you watched him through your lashes.

He stopped at the bedside. For a moment, he only looked at you.

He was less put together than you had ever seen him, his hair dishevelled, collar open, his clothes carrying the evidence of hours spent in places this castle was not and had not bothered to hide it well. His gaze moved over you, slower than usual, lingering in places he would have ignored in daylight. There was anger in it. That much you knew. But there was something else tangled into it, something the drink had loosened.

Then his hand shot out and closed around your throat.

The force of it drove the breath from you before you could think. His grip was sure, fingers settling with a familiarity that made it worse. The ceiling tilted as your body reacted, instinct rising fast and sharp. His face was above yours, close, and it was not the face of a man in full command of himself. His eyes were bright, unfocused in a way that had nothing to do with the dark. His grip tightened.

You felt the tightness clearly, the pressure at your windpipe, the pulse hammering under his hand. The animal instinct toward struggle that rose in you like a tide and that you identified and still you did not move.

And then, quietly, helplessly, from somewhere underneath the shock and the constriction and the absolute clarity of your own danger, you laughed. Not loudly. Not mockingly. Not shaped for him, not meant for anything at all. It simply came, as if your body had found something in the moment that did not fit the rest of it. Simply absurd and honest and almost intimate in its desperation.

The sound of it, barely audible, stopped him completely.

His hand did not leave your throat, but it stopped tightening. His expression shifted, confusion cutting through whatever had driven him here.

“What are you-” he said. It came out raw, his voice rough, stripped of its usual control. “What are you doing, what are you doing to me.”

You said nothing. You held his eyes in the dark and did not struggle, you did not look away.

“I hate you,” he said. The words came out flat, almost tired, like a confession.“I hate what you do. I hate that I cannot-.” His voice broke across the unfinished sentence. “I cannot find the edges of you. I cannot-.”

His grip loosened, fractionally, and then fractionally more.

Something in his face gave way. The control slipped, not all at once, but enough. His shoulders dipped, the tension draining in uneven pieces. Something beneath the surface rising without permission. His forehead dropped, his weight shifted, and then, with the slow, helpless gravity of exhaustion, he leaned against your chest, his hands still loosely at your throat, his body giving what his pride would not. Choked sobs forming on the back of his throat as his shoulders trembled.

You lay still beneath him. The room held its silence. No voices in the corridor, no movement beyond the walls. Only the weight of him, and the strange, unguarded vulnerability he had not allowed himself before.

Carefully, you lifted your hand. Slow and measured. The way one moves around something that might startle.

He felt the motion before you completed it.

He pulled back at once. Your hand knocked aside, not gently, but not the way he had struck you before either, with less force and more reflex. He was off the bed and standing before you had fully processed the movement, and the reassembly was happening in real time, you could watch it, the walls going up stone by stone, the expression reorganizing, the posture recovering its usual architecture.

He did not look at you as he wiped his tears with the back of his hand, and left.

You lay in the dark for a long time after the door closed. Your throat ached. When you touched it, you could feel where his fingers had pressed, the marks already forming under the skin. You let your hand fall back to the bed. You had survived the teeth.

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a storm.

It is not peace, peace settles. This waits, it hangs over what is left, thin and watchful, as if the ground itself is deciding whether anything will take root again. You lived in that silence for six days. You ate in it, walked the corridors in it, spoke when required and otherwise let it sit around you, like weather that refused to move on.

Aerion was never where you were. Not once, not even by accident.

You noticed the pattern the way you noticed everything else. He left rooms when you entered them, not with obvious avoidance, but with quiet efficiency, but avoiding something nonetheless, something that he had not yet decided how to face. The corridors he had habitually used became corridors he did not use. The hours he had kept became hours he abandoned.

Like he was afraid of you. Not in the way people feared harm. In the way they feared being seen too clearly.

STEP 6. Allow Contact on Its Terms.

The first touch is not taken, it is allowed. A still hand. No pressure. No attempt to hold or redirect or claim. The creature must choose the contact, or the contact means nothing. It is the most fragile moment in the entire sequence the one where everything that has been built can collapse in a single wrong movement. Patience here is not strategy. It is something closer to faith, the belief that what has been established is enough to bear weight, if the weight is placed gently enough.

You dressed with care that seventh night, with a specific kind of nightgown your hair loose again, and went to him.

His chambers were deeper in the keep than yours, further from the outer walls, further from the sounds of the city, the kind of rooms that held heat and shadow in equal measure. The door was heavy. The light beneath it was the particular amber of firelight rather than candle, which meant he was awake and the hour was not the reason.

You did not knock.

The room was larger than you had expected, and sparser. There were maps on one wall, detailed ones, and a writing table covered with papers that had the disordered quality of work abandoned mid-thought. A shelf of books, several displaced at a specific angle with care. On a low table near the window, a cup and a flagon, mostly empty. The fire was high, built up more than the room's warmth required, the kind of fire you build when you want something to look at.

He was standing before it.

He turned when you entered, and the firelight caught his face in a way that daylight had never been permitted to. His eyes carried the particular redness that came not from drink but from something that had happened before the drink. His shoulders, which were always exact, held themselves with an effortful maintenance, but it took effort to keep it that way.

You closed the door behind you. The latch caught with a sound that was very small in the quiet.

“You should not be here,” he said.

“Probably,” you agreed. You did not move further into the room yet. You stood near the door and looked at him across the firelit space between you and said “What is wrong.”

“Nothing that concerns you.” He turned back to the fire. The set of his shoulders said the conversation was over, but the fact that he had not told you to leave said something else.

You crossed the room.

Slowly, without purpose written into the movement. You stopped beside him. Not close enough to require acknowledgment, not far enough to be a withdrawal, and you looked at the fire.

Neither of you spoke.

The fire crackled, wood settled with a low crack, and you waited.

A minute passed, then another. The fire shifted, settling lower in the grate, and in the new configuration of light you saw it, brief, barely visible. A single track of tears, catching firelight, at the corner of his jaw.

You did not look at it directly.

“Aerion,” you said.

“My father-.” he began, and then stopped, like the words had caught on something.

You let the silence hold.

“He saw,” he said with flatness. “The marks on your neck. He saw them. Someone spoke of what happened at the hall too.” His jaw tightened. “He made himself very clear.”

“How clear,” you said.

“In all his wisdom, has threatened me, again, to send me into exile.” The word sat between you. Heavy enough on its own. “He called it a last chance. He has called it that before.” Something crossed his voice that was not quite bitterness. “The words had begun to lose their meaning, but it felt too serious now”

You turned to look at him then.

He was still facing the fire, but the profile of him had changed. The structure of his expression had begun to crack. Not enough for others to notice but enough for you. He looked, in the firelight, less like the man who had locked you in his study and struck you in the great hall and more like something earlier than that, rawer and less certain and considerably more alone.

You reached out. Slowly, with the deliberateness you had promised yourself, no force, no urgency, no claim. Your hand found his and held it with the lightness of something offered rather than taken.

He looked down at it.

“I should have covered the marks better,” you said. “I misjudged the consequence. That was my error, and I am sorry for it.”

“That is not-.” He stopped; his hand had not moved. “That is not what this is about.”

And he pulled away fast. Almost startled by it. With the sudden, electric motion of something that has allowed contact and immediately regretted the allowing. He stepped back, something sharp and unsteady in his eyes.

“Do not,” he said, and the word came out wrong, cracked across the middle of it. “Do not do that. Do not stand there and apologize and take my hand and look at me like-.” He stopped again, breath uneven. “Like there is something worth-.” He stopped again. His hands had closed into fists at his sides and he was breathing with effort. “You do not know what I am.”

“I know what you have done,” you said.

“Then you know enough.” He turned away. “You know I hurt people. You know I cannot-.” His voice fractured. He pressed on through it. “I cannot stop myself… there is something wrong with me. There has always been something wrong with me and everyone who has come close enough to see it leaves or breaks. And you are here, in this room, at this hour, and I do not-.” He stopped.

The fire was the only sound.

“I am a beast,” he said, very quietly. Tears running free down his cheeks. “That is what I am. That is all I am.”

You looked at him for a long moment.

“You are a man,” you said, “who has been told a story about himself for so long that he has stopped questioning whether it is the only story available.”

“It is not a story. It is evidence of everything I have done.”

“Evidence can be read in more than one direction,” you said.

“Do not make me into something I am not.”

“I am not making you into anything.” You held his gaze. “I am telling you that what you are is not to be fixed. That the thing you have been, it is not the only version of you that exists. And that-.” You paused, because the next words required accuracy, and accuracy required care. “You matter to me. Not the prince, not the name. You. What is underneath all of this. That matters to me.”

The room was absolutely still.

He looked at you with an expression you had no entry for in the vocabulary you had built of him, something unguarded, almost frightened, like he has been handed something he does not know how to hold and is not certain he can afford to drop.

Then something gave way.

Not loudly. Not all at once. His breath shifted. His shoulders dropped. Whatever he had been holding together slipped. His breathing changed. You did not move toward him, but you did not need to.

He crossed the remaining distance himself without thinking about it, and then his forehead was against your shoulder and his hands were at your sides without grip, without force, simply present, and he was not making a sound but you could feel the shaking of him and the wetness against the fabric of your nightgown and the weight of him.

You stood very still.

You did not put your arms around him. You did not make any movement that could be felt as claiming. You simply held yourself and let him use it, and the fire burned lower as he came apart quietly against your shoulder without asking permission and without being asked to stop.

You did not know how long it lasted. Long enough.

You raised your hand slowly, slowly enough that he could have pulled away again, enough to be refused, and brought your fingers to his hair.

It was shorter than it looked. Silver-pale and fine, the kind of hair that carried light rather than colour, and beneath your fingertips it was softer than you had anticipated. You drew your hand through it once, carefully, from the crown of his head down to the nape of his neck, where the hair ended and the skin began, warm and taut over the column of his spine.

He did not move away.

He leans into your touch involuntarily, as if starved for contact. His eyes flutter shut, a shudder running through him at the simple gesture. It's a chink in his armour, a crack in the façade he has built around himself. He hates how good it feels, how desperately he craves your gentleness, like something that had been starved for so long it had forgotten the word for hunger until the smell of food arrived. He hates that it's you, a woman he has dismissed as a nuisance, a distraction.

You kept your hand still at the nape of his neck and waited until the tension in him eased, just a little, then you took his hand. He did not resist the guiding.

That told you more than anything else had. Aerion Brightflame, who resisted everything, who turned even small things into contests, let himself be guided across the room, no argument, no pause. Just the quiet, spent compliance of someone who had nothing left to push with.

You lay down and he lay beside you.

For a moment he remained on his back, staring upward, and you could feel the effort in him, his composure still running even now, still attempting to impose order on something that had moved past the reach of order.

Then, slowly, as if testing each inch of the movement, allowing himself permission one fraction at a time, he moved closer. His head found your chest. His arms came around your waist, and the grip that followed was not gentle exactly, it had too much need in it for gentleness, but it was not aggression either, it was anchoring.

“Don't mistake this for weakness,” he muttered, eyes fixed somewhere above you, studying something very far away. “Or tenderness.” A pause. “I merely refuse to let my father's words haunt me alone tonight.”

“All right,” you said.

You brought one hand up to his hair again. The same movement, slow, unhurried, from crown to nape and back, repeated with the consistency of something that asked nothing in return. Your other hand rested against his back, barely any pressure at all.

The fire had burned low and the room was mostly shadow.

“If you much as breathe a word of this to anyone,” he murmured into your chest, his voice rough but stripped of its usual edge, “I'll deny it until my last breath.” His arms tightened slightly, involuntarily. “Stay with me tonight… please.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” you said.

As the night went on, Aerion slowly succumbed to sleep. Something about being held, about your gentle touch, brought a peace he had rarely known. He did not dream of dragons or conquests, for once. His sleep was free of the constant restlessness that usually plagued him. He burrowed into your chest, unconsciously seeking more of your warmth, of your presence.

You lay awake longer than he did. Not from discomfort, too much to process, lying in the dark with their thoughts arranged in rows like objects after a flood.

His breathing had changed, his weight against you had changed. The man who had come apart was now simply sleeping. With his face against your chest and his silver hair tickling your collarbone and his arms loosely maintaining their hold even in sleep, the grip eased to something that felt closer to a choice rather than necessity.

You ran your hand through his hair one more time, very slowly. He made a small sound, low and entirely unconscious, and pressed closer.

You looked at the ceiling for a long time and eventually, sleep took you too.

The room was in the grey-dark of late night, not yet dawn, but the black had thinned to something softer. His breathing had changed again; he was watching you.

His breath caught as he took in the sight of you, soft, vulnerable, beautiful in the unguarded way of sleeping things. A strange warmth curled in his chest, foreign and unsettling. He hesitated. His fingers twitched toward your hair, as if to brush a stray lock from your face, then stopped. He scowled at himself, at this weakness. But the scowl faltered when his gaze lingered on the way your lashes rested against your cheeks, the rise and fall of your breath.

Slowly, carefully, he shifted closer, draping an arm over your waist as if claiming you, not with arrogance, but with something dangerously close to possessiveness. His lips pressed against your temple in a fleeting, uncharacteristically tender kiss.

You opened your eyes. The ceiling was grey above you. Beside you, or rather, around you, Aerion had stilled, as if caught in the act of something he had not meant to do.

“Is something wrong?” you asked quietly.

He cleared his throat, his thumb idly tracing circles on your skin, trying for normalcy, trying to ignore the way his stomach twisted at your proximity.

“Are you comfortable?”he asked.

“Yes,” you said. You turned your head slightly to look at him. “Are you?”

He gave a noncommittal hum, not meeting your gaze. The truth was he had slept better than he had in years, but he was not about to say so. That would imply weakness. He shifted slightly, the arm around your waist drawing you a fraction closer without him seeming to notice. His fingers continued their circles, almost absentmindedly, as though he were lost in thought and the touch was the only thing keeping him tethered.

The grey outside the window had begun its slow migration toward something lighter. The fire was entirely cold now, the room held only the warmth of the bed, of proximity, of the particular heat that accumulates between two bodies in the hours before dawn.

Then awareness settled in him fully. Of the closeness. Of the precise arrangement of you against him, the warmth of your body, the thin fabric of your sleeping gown, the way the hem had shifted in the night to lie differently against your skin. His hand tensed briefly.

He swallowed.

You felt it, the shift that moved through him, the awareness sharpening into something specific, something that did not belong entirely to the vulnerability of the preceding hours. His lips parted, but no words came. He looked at you with an expression caught precisely between irritation and something he could not arrange into anything controllable, frustrated by the evidence of his own body, by the want that had surfaced without authorization.

You could feel it, the warmth of him. The unmistakable pressure of his want against your hip, present and unambiguous, and the particular tension of a man who has noticed you noticing and does not know what to do with it.

Neither of you spoke.

His hand, which had stilled, began very slowly, as though testing whether the motion would be stopped, to move again. Not the idle circles of before. Something more deliberate, more aware of itself, tracing the line of fabric against skin, as if testing whether the moment would break.

You did not stop him.

Not passive, there was nothing passive in the attention you were giving to this moment, to his breathing, to the fractional shifts of his weight and the warmth of his mouth near your temple and the press of him against your hip that had not diminished. But still in the way you had always been still near him, present, available, making no demand and offering no resistance, letting the space between you be defined by what he chose to do with it.

He exhaled.

“You are-.” he began, and stopped, his jaw tightened. He tried again, and the words he found were not the ones he had started with, “This changes nothing.”

“I know,” you said.

“I mean it.”

“I know you do,” you said.

His hand moved again with less hesitation, no longer tentative, something with more intention behind it, and his body followed, shifting against you with the weight of a man who has been resisting something for weeks and has arrived, at last, at the particular exhaustion of wanting and the decision to stop pretending otherwise.

His mouth found your throat, the same throat he had gripped days ago in the dark. You brought your hand to his hair, fingers threading through silver.

Aerion exhales slowly, a controlled breath that does nothing to conceal the tension wound through his jaw, his shoulders, the deliberate stillness of his hands. He's beautiful in his conflict, you think. Unbearably so. That sharp face, that proud mouth, carved for cruelty or for this, and tonight the line between them seems very thin.

He opens his eyes again, his gaze locking with yours again. He looks almost pained, his pride warring with the desire that's quickly consuming him. He wants you. Gods, he wants you so much it hurts, and he hates that he can't bring himself to deny it any longer. He hates how powerless he feels at your touch, how he craves more despite his better judgment. His breathing is ragged as he leans over you, his eyes dropping to your lips. “Stop me. Say... say no.” The words come rough, almost like a plea.

You looked at him for one long moment, you take in the conflict laid bare for the first time, the stubborn pride, the hunger he can no longer hide, the exhaustion of holding both apart.

Then you kissed him first.

He kisses you back like a man drowning who has finally stopped fighting the current. His hands come up to grip your face, not gently, and the sound that escapes his throat is low, rough, barely human. The careful prince, the controlled and calculating Aerion Targaryen, dissolves in the space between one breath and the next. What replaces him is something rawer. Hungrier. Something he's kept caged behind violet eyes and cutting remarks for far too long.

The kiss deepens without hesitation, consuming. His mouth moves against yours with a kind of desperate precision, tasting, claiming, as if he's cataloguing every detail through touch alone. You feel the heat of him, radiating off his skin like fever, like fire, like something that has been burning in secret for too long and has finally found air.

His hands roam your body with a feverish desperation, as if trying to memorize every curve, every gasp, every shudder beneath his touch. His kisses trail from your lips down your neck, nipping and sucking at your skin, marking you as his, branding you in the only way he knows how. His hands grip your hips, pulling you flush against him, letting you feel just how badly he aches for you. He's lost in the sensation, in the fire between you both, consumed by it. He's not gentle about it. He leaves a trail of hot, open-mouthed kisses down your neck, his teeth grazing that sensitive point where your shoulder meets your throat. He wants to mark you, to make you scream his name, to make sure there's no doubt in your mind or anyone else's of who you belong to.

His free hand slides under your nightgown, his fingers trailing up your thigh, leaving trails of fire in their wake. His touch is possessive, demanding, as if he's making up for every minute he's denied himself this pleasure. Your breath hitches as his fingers trace higher, teasing, taunting, every brush of skin against skin sending sparks through you. His lips return to yours, swallowing your gasp as his touch grows bolder, more deliberate. He plays with your breasts, kneading them and pinching at your nipples until you arch into him, your back lifting from the mattress like a prayer. His hands clutch at you, clinging as if you're the only solid thing in the world. He's panting now, his control frayed to the breaking point.

“Gods,” he breathes against your collarbone, “I've been waiting-.” He cuts himself off and bites down instead of finishing the sentence, leaving a bruise.

He buries his face in that spot on your neck, his breath hot against your skin, his lips roaming feverishly as if he can't get enough. Then he kisses down your body, his mouth leaving a trail of hot, wet marks down your stomach, your hip, your inner thigh. His hands slide up your legs, his touch rough but reverent, the touch of a man who has never let himself experience something so wholly, so completely. He moves with the focus of someone who has thought about this, who has imagined and resented and wanted in equal measure.

He pauses for a moment, looking up at you, the desire in his eyes burning hotly as he takes in the sight of you, spread out before him like a feast.

“Gods, woman...” His voice comes out low, cracked at the edges. “You look exquisite.”

Your hand goes to his hair, gripping it, silver-pale between your fingers, and you guide him where the ache pulses hottest. He goes willingly, like a man possessed, his lips tracing a path to the very heart of you. He worships at your altar, exploring you with a fervour that borders on madness, his tongue drawing slow, deliberate strokes against your folds, lapping at the slick heat of you with a thoroughness that makes your thighs tremble. He kisses your core the way he kissed your mouth, thoroughly, hungrily, as if he intends to ruin you for anything else.

He slides one finger inside you, curling, exploring, while his tongue continues its work, finding the rhythm that makes your hips roll helplessly toward him. Then two fingers, stretching you slowly, his pace maddening, his silver head moving between your thighs while his free hand pins your hip to the mattress. He teases. He draws it out with the patience of a man who has denied himself too long and now intends to take his time about the undoing. Every time you feel yourself cresting toward the edge, he eases back, withdrawing just enough, slowing just enough, his eyes flicking up to watch your face with something that looks almost like satisfaction.

The third time he pulls back from the precipice, you take a fistful of his hair and drag him up.

“Now,” you tell him. “Take me now.”

A feral smirk curls his lips at your demand. He rises up over you, his chest heaving, his entire body taut with anticipation. He leans down to capture your lips in a bruising kiss, you taste yourself on his tongue, one hand gripping your thigh, the other cupping your face as if to brand the moment into your memory.

“As my lady commands,” he growls against your mouth.

He shifts his hips, pressing himself against your entrance. Then, with one sharp thrust, he buries himself inside you, filling you completely, claiming you in every way possible. The moment he's sheathed inside you, a ragged groan tears from his throat, half pleasure, half disbelief. His forehead drops against yours, his breathing ragged, his fingers digging into your hips as if he fears you'll vanish.

“Gods,” he chokes out. “You feel so- warm. So tight.”

He's barely coherent. That, more than anything, undoes you.

His hips roll against yours in slow, deliberate strokes, each one deeper, more possessive than the last. He watches your face, memorizing every gasp, every flutter of your lashes, as if this is the only thing that's ever truly mattered. His eyes, those violet eyes that have looked at you with contempt and hunger and everything in between by now, are dark, pupils blown wide, and he doesn't look away. He watches you as if watching you is a compulsion he can no longer afford to deny.

“Look at me,” he rasps, when your eyes begin to close. “Don't you dare-.”

And you do, you hold his gaze.

His jaw tightens. Something moves across his expression that he doesn't have the composure left to conceal, something raw and frightened and ferocious all at once. His strokes deepen; his grip hardens.

Then he flips you, without warning, rolling you onto your stomach with the ease of a man accustomed to taking what he wants. The mattress shifts beneath you. His hands find your hips and drag you up to meet him. One palm presses flat between your shoulder blades for a half-second, then slides up, fingers winding into your hair, pressing your face into the pillow.

His lips find your ear, his voice low and rough as he whispers, “I won't be gentle, sweetling.”

It sounds like a warning. It sounds like a promise.

“I don't want you to,” you answer.

The sound he makes at that is almost feral, something ripped from somewhere deep in his chest that he would never willingly give you in daylight. His fingers dig into your hips as he takes you with a force that borders on brutality, each thrust deeper, harder, driven by pure unrestrained need. His lips drag across your shoulder, teeth sinking into your skin to stifle his groan as he loses himself in the heat of you. He releases your hair so both hands can grip your hips, holding you in place, as if he fears you might slip away if he doesn't, his fingers leaving half-moon marks you will feel for days.

His pace is relentless. Desperate. Driven by a hunger that has been building since the first moment he looked at you and hated that he wanted to keep looking.

“I can't-.” you gasp, the pleasure coiling impossibly tight.

“Come for me,” he growls, the words bitten off, rough and low. “Come on- I want to feel you. All of you.”

And you do, you shatter. Your whole body arches into it, trembling beneath him, clenching around him, and you hear his sharp, broken exhale, feel the way his rhythm stutters.

His release hits him like a storm, violent, consuming, unstoppable. His body tenses, his fingers digging into your flesh as he spills inside you with a ragged groan, his forehead pressed between your shoulder blades. For a moment, he just breathes against your skin, his chest heaving, his muscles trembling with the aftershocks.

Then, slowly, he collapses over your back. His weight settles, heavy, present, real. His lips move against one of the bruises he's left on your shoulder. Then another. Not in apology, Aerion Targaryen does not apologize. But in something. Acknowledgment, perhaps.

Neither of you speaks.

His arm slides around you, not tenderly, but with a kind of quiet insistence, as if placing himself between you and something invisible. You feel his heartbeat against your back. Fast, still. Then slower. Then slower still.

The silence stretches. It does not demand anything from either of you. His breathing deepens, but his grip does not loosen. You close your eyes.

Sleep comes for you both like a tide, not gentle, not kind, but inevitable. The way all true things are.

STEP 7. Never Cage What You Cannot Break.

A beast is not tamed by taking away its fangs. That only makes it weaker, and weakness is not the same thing as trust. It is tamed, if it ever is, by giving it a reason not to use them. It stays because it chooses to. It stays… because it chooses to.

The manse Maekar had given you sat at the edge of a quieter part of the city, near enough to court to satisfy obligation and far enough to breathe in peace. It was smaller than the Red Keep, less grand, but that suited the both of you. No one had said so out loud, yet it was clear enough. The walls were warm stone. The windows faced east and caught the morning light instead of shutting it out. Lavender grew along the outer walk, planted by someone before your time, and it had survived the winter with a stubbornness that felt almost personal.

Inside, signs of a shared life had gathered in slow, ordinary ways. His books beside yours on the shelf. Your embroidery frame positioned near the best window, which he had moved without comment one afternoon when he noticed the light falling wrong. A second cup on the table by the fire, already poured.

None of it was dramatic, all of it mattered to you.

You settled deeper into the chair, adjusting your weight carefully. The pregnancy sat heavy in your lap, in your lower back, in the way you rose slowly from chairs and descended stairs with one hand trailing the wall. Seven months had left their mark. Your belly was full and round beneath the loose linen of your gown, warm to the touch, occasionally shifting with the insistence of someone who had not yet been born but already had opinions on its own.

You pressed a hand briefly to your side where the movement was. A flutter, a press. I know, you thought at it. I know you're there.

The fire crackled. Across the room, Aerion sat at the writing table with his back half-turned to you, working through correspondence with the focused quiet of a man who had learned, slowly, imperfectly, to channel his energy into something productive rather than destructive. Candles burned at either side of the table. His silver hair, longer now, caught their light and held it.

He had not spoken in some time. Neither had you.

The silence was not tense. That distinction still struck you sometimes, even now, the difference between his silences then and his silences now. Before, quiet had been the space between provocations, the held breath before a storm. Now it was simply the room at rest, two people existing in the same warmth, without the need to perform that fact.

Your needle moved through the embroidery. A branch. Leaves in pale green thread, stitched slowly because you no longer rushed things that deserved to be unhurried. You had learned that too, somewhere along the way, though you weren't certain when. Perhaps it had been a lesson you taught yourself while teaching him.

“You've been rubbing your back for the better part of an hour.”

His voice came without him turning. Your hand had drifted there without you noticing. You lowered it. “I'm fine.”

“I didn't say you weren't.”

You went back to the embroidery and the scratch of his quill resumed.

You looked at the back of his head for a moment, at the set of his shoulders, the long line of his spine. He was still proud in his posture. That had not changed, nor would it. But there was something different in it now. Less like a man braced for attack. More like a man who had simply grown comfortable inside his own frame.

Maekar had expressed quiet satisfaction, the last time you had attended court. Not in words, the prince was not a man for words where a look would suffice. But satisfaction nonetheless. You had understood it without needing it explained. So had Aerion, which had caused a complicated expression to move across his face, something between pride and the ghost of old resentment, before easing into something closer to acceptance.

He was still Aerion. He could still cut with a word when he chose to. His patience was a thing learned rather than natural, and it occasionally showed its seams. Two weeks prior, at a supper that had run overlong, he had said something to Lord Peake's second son that had made the table go briefly silent. But he had stopped there, he had not pursued it. He had reached instead for his wine and redirected the conversation with a deliberateness you recognized, because you had practiced that deliberateness in front of him, repeatedly, until he understood what it looked like.

He was not fixed, he was better. There was a meaningful difference.

The fire shifted, throwing new shadows. You set down the embroidery and pressed your palm flat against the side of your stomach, feeling the weight of it, the warmth. The child moved again, long, slow, like something turning in a dream. You breathed around it.

The scratch of the quill stopped.

You did not look up immediately. You felt, rather than saw, the moment his attention shifted, the feeling of being observed by Aerion, which you had long since learned to recognize. It was different now too.

You looked up.

When you looked up, he had already turned in his chair. He was watching you with those violet eyes of his, pale in the candlelight, and there was something in his face he had learned to hide less well over time. Not because he had grown careless. Because keeping it hidden had begun to cost him too much, and he had finally decided, with the quiet certainty he brought to every important thing, that it was no longer worth the price.

Then he rose from the table.

He crossed the room at an unhurried pace, the way a man walks when he has already made up his mind. When he stopped in front of you, his gaze dropped from your face to your hands, then to the rounded curve beneath the linen. Then he knelt.

Not in surrender. Not in show. One knee to the floor, steady and deliberate, bringing himself level with what he meant to honour. He reached out, and his hand, the same hand that had once gripped and demanded and taken, settled with impossible gentleness against the side of your stomach.

He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the fullest part of you.

He stayed there a moment, forehead resting lightly against you, his hand curved around the life you carried. His breathing evened out. His eyes were closed. He did not speak at once, and you did not ask him to.

Then, very quietly, without lifting his head, he said, “I love you.”

You looked down at the top of his silver head, at the broad line of his shoulders bent in a shape that was not quite defeat and not quite humility, but close enough to make your throat tighten. You thought of the man who had once watched you across a banquet table with cold, assessing eyes and found nothing in you worth his attention. You thought of all the months between then and now. The arguments. The patience. The slow, stubborn work of remaining.

You reached down and touched his face gently. He looked up at you. The candlelight made his eyes very bright.

You held his gaze and said, simply, “I love you as well.”

No strategy in it. Just the truth, spoken in the same quiet room where you had spent months learning each other's silences.

He turned his face and pressed one more kiss to your stomach, almost habitual, as if he had already developed the instinct, then rose slowly and settled himself on the arm of your chair. His hand remained at your side, warm and present. You returned to your embroidery. His shoulder rested against yours, and he did not move away.

The fire burned low. The night spread softly around the manse.

Later, when he had drifted into sleep beside you and his breathing had gone slow and even, you lay awake in the dark and thought about the whole path that had brought you here.

Seven steps, written out with the clean, measured certainty of someone who understood that hearts, even difficult ones, had their own structure. You had approached him with respect for what it was, patience for what it could become, and no illusions about the process between.

But somewhere in the long careful middle of it, something had shifted that no guide could have anticipated, or perhaps the guide had always known it and simply not named it. The method had worked. But the method had not been the point.

The point was that he had changed.

Not because you had fixed him. Not because you had caged him or diminished him or stripped away the things that made him difficult. He was still proud. Still sharp. Still capable of the particular cold cruelty that had earned him his reputation, though he used it less now, and never against you.

He had changed because he had chosen to. Because somewhere in the accumulated weight of all those quiet days and careful moments, something in him had found a reason.

And he, Aerion Targaryen, the Bright Prince, the man they called Brightflame for the way he burned, had stayed too.

His hand rested over yours in the dark, light and warm and present.

The beast doesn't need its fangs removed, you thought, closing your eyes. It just needs something worth protecting more than it needs to bite.

Sleep came, slow and complete, and took you both with it.

THE END.