Dāria Perzys (Aerion x courtesan!reader/OC)
Chapter 3 of Bound by Fire
As always crossposted on ao3 as "One Face to the Morning" by necromanceress
After a bloody introduction to the Second Sons, the course of the night leads him deeper into the city's underbelly. But the wanting that follows him through the backstreets and into a moonlit garden threatens to burn him. And he has been dreaming of dragons. So when he sees below her veil, he is beginning to suspect that Lys had other intentions for him all along. As it seems, does she.
This is where it starts getting explicit, so WARNING FOR GRAPHIC VIOLENCE AND MILD SEXUAL CONTENT
also a little westerosi history lesson, I strongly recommend you look some of these references up to fully grasp the parallels, especially later on.
I redid some small parts of this chapter because I felt Aerion was too nice, and I had gotten lost in the descriptions. From now on, I'll leave it up to you to look up references to asoiaf canon or include a little explanation in the notes...it just breaks the flow too hard when I have to do it in the text. Still regarding character, this should be one instance of weakness after the sleep deprivation, drunkenness, and overall emotional state of him...he will absolutely return to his normal cruelty, and the slow burn will continue very slow.
btw i looked up his birth date and compared it to when ashford tourney took place...his ass is between 15 and 18 years old... that's a child. For the sake of this story, we'll assume it's the latter and say he's already passed his 19th name day when arriving in lys. If you want to make him older, feel free, but i build on him still acting like a dumb, impulsive teenager
The solar was a kiln, the air thick with the dust of parchment. Aerion reached for the flagon of wine, but his hand stopped, his fingers brushing the heavy vellum of the commission, adorned with the seal of the Second Sons, an iron-clad demand for his presence at the training grounds. Bidden by a merchant, a festering indignity that galled his pride. It was a leaden weight, the same weight he had felt pressing upon him three nights ago as he returned from that dizzying, fevered spectacle.
He could still see Ser Raynard's face the set of his jaw, the hard line of his mouth. The knight had been a silhouette of rigid steel, his hand a permanent fixture upon the hilt of his longsword as he scoured the shadows. Aerion had offered no justification for the hours he had lost, nor any word of the contract he carried. He had simply walked past, leaving Raynard to fester in a silence that had only grown more jagged in the days since.
As Aerion approached the main doors, the moonlight caught a small, pale shape slumped upon the stone steps. It was Lysara, drawn into herself and half-lost to sleep. Aerion halted, his brow furrowing as he looked down at the silver-haired girl. He demanded to know if the household staff had disregarded his orders to provide her with a servant’s chamber.
"No, My Prince, they showed them to me," she replied, rising to her feet. Her voice was remarkably steady, though the thin, frayed edge of it betrayed her exhaustion. She offered no further explanation, but the implication was clear. She had chosen the cold stone of the threshold to await his return.
He walked past her without a word. The door closed behind him with a hollow thud. It was only now that he found himself wondering, for no reason he intended to pursue, how long she had been sitting there.
A burst of laughter drifted up from the gardens, a hollow, mindless merriment that grated against his nerves. His retinue was out there, idling in the spray of the marble fountain and soaking in the Lysene sun, yet he had bound himself to this limestone cage.
He surrendered the daylight hours to pacing the airy halls and going over the ledgers Vaelo had bestowed upon him. He did not miss the lickspittles nor the silk-clad vipers who had haunted his every step, yet he found himself hungry for the deference he had once commanded. Here, he was just another high-priced sword in a city of mercenaries.
The nights he devoted to the solar, consumed by a fever that no amount of Lysene wine could cool. He would stand for hours in the silver spill of moonlight that fell from the high, narrow window, watching as it turned the Valyrian steel box into a dark altar. His fingers habitually traced the cold, stony scales of the verdigris egg. In the gloom, it seemed to pulse with a pale, sickly light, a remnant of a fire that had gone out a century ago. It sat nestled in the crimson alongside his own red-and-gold egg, two silent promises of a power that remained stubbornly dormant.
He wondered if Vaelo truly possessed the catalysts to wake them or if the promise was merely a lure to bind a Targaryen to a merchant’s contract. Regardless, he spent his nights hunched over his own crumbling scrolls, his eyes burning in the candlelight. It was a familiar obsession, a grim continuation of the labors he had begun when he still resided at Summerhall.
He weighed the cost of writing to the Citadel, to the brother who wore a maester’s chain. No doubt the old croaks had only deepened his devotion to the pious lies of the Seven since their parting. That fool would call his quest madness, conveniently forgetting that their ancestors had not conquered a continent with prayers, but with the very blood-magic the Citadel now abhorred.
By the small hours, Aerion sat amidst a battlefield of parchment, the floor littered with the crumpled remains of letters that sounded too eager or too much like a plea. He would not beg that runt.
The candles had guttered out hours ago, leaving the solar in a thick, charcoal gloom. The prince’s eyelids felt like lead, as his chin sank toward his chest. His last waking thoughts were not of the Citadel, nor of Vaelo’s ledgers, but of the woman in the pits. He suspected the trick of the flame, the mummer’s oil and the careful breath, yet the sight of it had stirred a quiet, persistent hunger, even as sleep dragged him down into a dazed dream.
The heat was absolute, a dry and suffocating hearth, as Aerion stood upon an endless, cracked plain, empty but for the dust. Above him, the sun curdled into a bruised, bloody disc, eclipsed by a shadow that swallowed the sky. He squinted against the dying glare, catching only the vast, silhouette of a three-headed beast.
The black shape tore itself apart. The single shadow splintered into three distinct dragons, spiraling upward into the blinding corona. Aerion stood paralyzed, his eyes watering against the searing light, mesmerized by the sheer, lethal grace of their flight.
The silent spell of the creatures was shattered by a violent, rushing hiss of displaced air.
A bolt of cold iron punched into the sky. It caught the smallest of the three, tearing straight through its throat. The creature made no sound. No shriek, no roar. It simply folded its wings and plummeted toward the cracked earth in a lifeless spiral.
The stillness shattered, swallowed by a deafening roar of panic. Aerion was suddenly crushed in a press of men, a breaking infantry line, their faces obscured by half-helms, stinking of stale sweat and raw fear.
"Dragon!" a voice shrieked, the sound tearing through the chaotic din.
The earth shuddered beneath his boots with the heavy, rhythmic thud of scorpion engines discharging their iron payloads.
From the heavens, a wail of jagged, almost human grief cut through the mechanical thunder. As the surviving shadows broke through the smoke, the blinding glare finally stripped away the dark. The largest of the beasts, a writhing storm of dark green scales, cried out for the fallen kin. It was the second dragon, a behemoth of blood-red, that alone answered with wrath. The sky vanished behind a sheet of blinding fire as a wave of incineration washed over the infantry, turning the screams to something worse. A wet hiss of metal softening against skin, plate, and flesh melting into one another until the men inside could no longer be separated from the steel they wore. Through the roaring inferno, the red beast descended, a falling mountain of scales and vengeance, and it came for him specifically, crashing through the broken lines and collapsing directly upon him.
Aerion woke with a violent jerk, his unlaced silken tunic plastered to his skin by a cold, clinging sweat. His heart battered against his ribs, beating so wildly he feared the bone might crack. The stench of scorched meat and brimstone still coated the back of his throat, thick enough to make him gag.
He had dreamed of the Conquerors before, but never with such suffocating clarity. Every child of Valyria knew the history of Hellholt, how the Dornish sands had reached up to swat Rhaenys and Meraxes from the sky, leaving the three-headed dragon broken and bleeding upon the dunes.
The fallen dragon had been swallowed by the red wastes, and the very sand of its grave galled him. He carried the dust of that desert in his own veins.
His thoughts snagged on the memory of his mother, a fleeting phantom of pale hands and soft words that instantly soured. The image of her brought no clear sorrow, only a sudden, jagged tightening in his chest that he could neither name nor abide. She had simply withered away, leaving him bound to this fragile, half-mortal flesh. Flesh that could sicken. Flesh that could fail.
His eyes locked onto the Valyrian steel box resting upon the table. Within its crimson velvet depths lay the two eggs. In the curve of their petrified scales, he saw the exact beasts that had just burned through his sleep. They were the survivors. Aegon and Visenya. But the dragon must have three heads, and the third was a void waiting to be filled.
Aerion stared at his hands, studying the pale, fragile architecture of his own flesh, while his mind locked onto a dark, irrefutable certainty. He would have to burn away the human weakness he had inherited and ascend to take the empty place himself.
Three sharp knocks upon the heavy oak door shattered the stillness of the solar. The fevered euphoria of his revelation did not evaporate. It merely retreated, settling somewhere beneath the surface as he arranged his features back into their accustomed order. It was the same mask he had worn for years beneath the scrutiny of his kin, however poorly it had served him of late. It would have to hold. He was a prince of the blood and today, he had a company of cutthroats to bring to heel.
"Enter," he said. The word scraped his throat, emerging as a dry rasp rather than the imposing command he intended.
A squire hovered in the doorway bearing a silver tray of figs and warm bread, but the phantom stench of the dream still clung to the back of Aerion’s throat. The very sight of food turned his stomach, so he waved the offering aside. It was time to shed the soft silks of his exile. Sellswords felt no loyalty to banished lordlings dressed in velvet. They respected only strength. If he intended to command their absolute obedience, he had to stand before them as a dragon. He ordered the boy to ready his armor for the yard and fetch the heavy enameled plate he had brought across the Narrow Sea.
As the squire lifted the pieces, Aerion’s eyes caught on his helm. The metal was still warped and the ornate steel flames were twisted or missing entirely. The sight of the ruin brought the taste of Ashford mud back to his mouth. He remembered the heavy, suffocating weight of the hedge knight bearing down on him, the jeers of the crowd, the utter, crippling humiliation of yielding in the dirt.
"Leave the helm," Aerion snapped, his tone freezing the squire in place. "Box the rest. I will not hide my face from these mongrels."
By the time he reached the eastern periphery, the sun was high and brutal. He stood beneath the canvas of a command tent, staring out at the dust, as his squire strapped the heavy, flame-wrought steel to his limbs, fastening the blazing cape to his pauldrons, the weighted velvet adding a deceptive bulk to his frame
The detachment was already drawn up in uneven files. Near two hundred men stood in the dust, a ragged assortment of Lysene exiles, Tyroshi sellswords with sun-faded beards, and scarred veterans of the campaigns in the Disputed Lands. There was no uniformity in their kit. They were armed with a chaotic assortment of curved Lysene sabers, heavy Westerosi longswords, and notched spears. They looked less like a company and more like the aftermath of one.
He walked the line. The rust blooming on the edges of mail shirts, the poorly oiled leather, and the way the men shifted their weight with a casual, practiced insolence. They were a far cry from the iron discipline his great-uncle, Aegor Rivers, had hammered into the Golden Company.
"Which of you holds the rank of senior serjeant?" Aerion demanded, his voice carrying a hard, metallic edge that cut through the low murmur of the yard.
A man stepped forward from the center of the formation. His face was a map of old scars, and his nose had been broken so frequently it was little more than a lump of gristle above his lip. He offered a perfunctory, abbreviated salute, his gaze lingering on the three-headed dragon that now flew alongside the usual banners.
"I am, Captain," the man grunted, his Common Tongue accented with the harsh sounds of the Myrish coast. "The men were told a Prince of the Blood was coming to take the commission. They expected a chest of gold, not an inspection of their boots."
"They will find I am sparing with both," Aerion replied, already looking past him. "Have the quartermaster produce the ledgers for the armory and the payroll. I will not lead a detachment that cannot maintain the integrity of its own steel."
The serjeant held his gaze for a moment longer than was strictly wise, then turned and barked the order to straighten the files.
Most of them had straightened. He moved slowly, hands clasped behind his back the way he had seen his father's commanders do it. These were not bad men, he decided. They were comfortable men, which he suspected was worse.
He was nearly at the end when a file leader stepped out. A broad man, sun-darkened and scarred across the jaw. He met Aerion's gaze with the particular flatness of a man who had outlasted commanders before and intended to outlast this one.
Aerion glanced at him once. Tyroshi, unmistakably. The hair dyed the same ridiculous colours as the wench his cousin had married.
He turned to walk when a hand closed around his pauldron from behind and yanked him back.
Aerion's gauntlet caught the man across the face snapping his head sideways.
The circle formed before he had fully processed what was happening. Ser Raynard was restrained by the mass that had closed around his charge. The serjeant had taken two steps back and clasped his hands behind him.
The Tyroshi was quick. There was a sword in his off hand before Aerion had cleared his scabbard, and he had the reach besides. He knew how to use both. He came in low and fast, the way men fought in the Disputed Lands, where battles were decided in the mud and there was no glory in the method. Aerion gave ground. Once. Twice. Felt the man's certainty swell with each step, felt him open up the way men always did when they believed they were winning. On the third exchange, he stepped inside the blade and took the hand off at the wrist, clean through the gap where the vambrace ended and the gauntlet had not yet begun.
Aerion looked down at him for a moment, then turned back to the line.
"Had he maintained the integrity of his steel," he said, "that hand would still be attached." He considered the shape of the man in the dust. "Though who is to say. Perhaps I would have gone for the head instead."
It was the serjeant who told him afterward, a custom of the company; any sellsword might challenge for the captaincy. The stronger led. It had been their way since the first blood was spilled under their banner. "Though most men wait for the proper rites before they issue their answer," the serjeant added. The corner of his mouth twitched, a gesture that fell short of a smile.
By nightfall, Aerion was already saddling his horse with no further thought for the company of sellswords he had come to command. The setting sun had bled across the horizon in a wash of gold and shimmering red that danced across the shadows of the stable, bringing the dancing girl back to the forefront of his mind. Three nights of it had not dulled the pull and apparently, neither had the violence.
Ser Raynard appeared at the stable entrance as he mounted, already in his riding cloak, already expecting to be needed. Aerion looked at him for a moment.
"Back to the manse," he said. "I will not require you tonight."
The knight's expression did not change. That was the worst of it. The careful neutrality of a man who had spent three days watching his charge pace limestone halls and exhaust candles over crumbling scrolls. He had decided that whatever Lys was about to offer his ward was a mercy long overdue. He bowed and withdrew.
Aerion let him think it. Let the man believe his prince was merely seeking the comfort of a common brothel. The truth was far more pathetic.
The attendants in their deep crimson tunics had not questioned his return. They had simply pulled the iron doors wide and let the heat swallow him.
The hall was different without Vaelo. Fuller, louder, the fire pits burning higher than he remembered. He barely registered any of it. The performers moved through the smoke, girls in translucent silks drifting between the stages, and he scanned them without meaning to. Not their faces. The way they moved. Whether any of them caught the light the way she had.
He took a position near the furthest pillar, back to the black volcanic glass, where the shadows were deepest and he could see the whole of the central stage, the entrance to the lower galleries, every curtained opening along the far wall.
He ordered wine he did not intend to drink.
The archways opened and closed. Guests. Attendants. A performer adjusting her veil before stepping into the light. Her eyes held nothing he recognized.
Still, each time the curtain moved, he looked. Each time, it was not her.
Then two attendants rushed through the nearest archway in quick succession, smoothing the curtain back and holding it open with the particular urgency of men preparing for someone who did not like to wait. Aerion straightened almost imperceptibly.
The Magister's eyes found him immediately, and in them was the quiet satisfaction of a man who understood exactly whom Aerion had been hoping to see. He crossed the hall without hurry, settling beside him with the ease of an old acquaintance.
"I had begun to think you would not return," he said. "I expected you two nights ago."
"I had ledgers to review."
"Of course you did." Vaelo gestured for wine. "I heard you maimed one of my men."
"You did not exactly give me the easiest men to work with."
"No," Vaelo agreed, with a faint grin. "I did not." He turned his cup. "You left him a cripple. In this company, that is a worse sentence than death."
"Your men have queer customs. You might have warned me."
"They think you cruel," Vaelo said. "Which is considerably more useful than them thinking you merciful."
Vaelo was quiet for a moment, his eyes moving across the hall with the practiced sweep of a man taking inventory. Then he signaled to an attendant, and a second cup appeared at Aerion's elbow, though the first had not been touched.
"I am afraid I have other business tonight," he said, rising. "Stay as long as you like."
He was three steps away when he paused.
"She may not come at all, you know," he said, still not turning. "She does that sometimes. A small pause. "I would not take it personally."
Aerion looked at the cups. Then, at the archways, where the curtain shifted and parted for an attendant carrying an empty tray. He reached for the wine.
The third cup went the way of the first two, and he was no closer to leaving.
He was being an idiot. He knew that with the clarity that comes just before the wine takes the edge off knowing it. His eyes had begun to droop, the heat and the drums and the slow amber light working against him, and he was already thinking about the ride back when the sheer crimson fabric crossed his vision.
She was already past him, moving through the hall as though she had somewhere to be. But her eyes had already found his in the moment before he raised his head and the challenge in them was the same as it had been three nights ago, patient and certain and faintly amused.
At the far curtain she paused, her back to him, one hand resting against the dark fabric. She did not look back.
The alley was empty when Aerion reached it, which did nothing for his temper.
Then he felt it. A faint, slow trace beginning at his shoulder, moving down his back.
"What is it with you," she mused, close enough that her breath touched the back of his neck, muffled slightly by the fabric of her veil, "always dressed for war." The claw-like jewelry on her fingers caught in the links of his chainmail as she dragged them down, pulling a slow, quiet song from the metal.
She came around to face him then, her eyes studying him in the dark with unhurried patience. Whatever she found in his expression seemed to satisfy her, turning from him and walking further into the alley, the gold links of her dress catching what little light the city offered.
She moved through the backstreets the way she had moved through the hall, deliberate, willing her surroundings to accommodate her pace. He fell into step beside her.
"The fire," he said. "How."
She glanced at him sidelong. "That is your first question."
"It is my only question."
She was quiet for a moment, picking her way around a sleeping dog stretched across the path without breaking stride.
"Another time." She nodded toward a torch-lit corner ahead where a crowd had gathered around something he could not yet see. "Where are you from?"
"You know where I am from."
"I know what you are," she said. "That is not the same thing."
He looked at her. She was watching the crowd ahead, her profile calm and unreadable in the torchlight. "Westeros," he said finally. "King's Landing."
"That tells me nothing. Are you from the loving embrace of the Red Keep or another great bastard they've farmed out to the Free Cities?"
His hand closed around her arm instinctively, fingers finding the bone with the particular precision of a man who had done this before and knew exactly how much pressure was required to make a point.
She broke the grip. Not frantically, not with a struggle, but with a practiced rotation of her wrist that barely interrupted her stride.
She glanced down at her arm, faintly red marks forming.
"Trueborn, then," she sighed with distaste in her eyes, that struck something in him. It was not guilt. He was certain of that.
"And what does a prince of the blood want with Lys?"
"That is not what I asked."
They had reached the edge of the crowd by then, a press of bodies around a raised platform where a fire-eater was working the small hours audience. The flames bloomed and died in rhythmic sequence, and Aerion watched them with an attention he did not bother to disguise.
"You are looking for something," she murmured, beside him.
"Everyone is looking for something."
"Most people are looking for pleasure or coin." She tilted her head slightly, studying his face in the torchlight. "You are looking for something else."
"And what are you looking for?"
She smiled then, properly this time. He could tell by her eyes alone, the way they crinkled at the corners. "I already found it," she said. "That is why I am still here."
He turned to look at her, but she had already moved on, slipping through the crowd ahead of him.
The backstreets widened into something that was almost a square, stalls and stages and makeshift seating, crowding in from all sides until the gap between them became a place. Food vendors worked the edges, the smell of roasted meat and spiced oil hanging heavy in the thick air. She stopped at one without breaking stride, exchanging a coin for a handful of dark figs, eating as she walked, lifting the veil just enough that it showed him nothing. He lifted a cup from a passing tray without stopping, the owner's protests fading behind him as he pushed further into the crowd following her.
Spicier than Dornish, sweeter too, better than anything he had before.
At the far end of the square, a raised stage held a company of players mid-performance, torches burning at each corner, the audience pressed three deep around the edges.
The play was broad and violent, the kind of thing that required no common language to follow. She had stopped to watch, fruit in hand, and he stopped beside her.
The players took their bows to a roar of approval, and the crowd shifted, redistributing itself toward the edges of the square where the night's other entertainments were making themselves known.
They came from the side in pairs, some silver-haired and all near-naked, moving with the practiced ease of people who had learned long ago that their appearance was currency. Men and women both, their bodies on full display in the torchlight, offered up as spectacle for the crowd who pressed coins into their hands and whistled for their attention. The suffocating temperature was worse than it had been. He was aware of that in a distant, unexamined way, the warmth sitting differently in his skin than the Lysene night accounted for, loosening something at the edges of his attention.
She had drifted slightly ahead of him, pausing to exchange a word with a vendor, and in the space of her absence, his eyes moved without his permission to one of the dancers working the near stage. She moved differently than the silver-haired girls around her, something in the set of her shoulders, the quality of her stillness between movements.
He was still looking when the woman reappeared at his side.
She said nothing. She simply turned her attention toward the stage with the unhurried ease of a woman taking in the scenery. She grinned as she spotted one who shared a particular likeness with her companion, looking at him the way Aerion had just been looking at the dancer. Longer, if anything.
He was aware of her watching him from the corner of her eye. Still, he could not hide the disgust. It was the same unsettled feeling the dancers at Vaelo's hall had stirred in him, but rawer here, as the man wore a face that was close enough to his own that the insult of it landed somewhere more specific than pride.
"The blood of old Valyria is no rarity here," she said conversationally, still watching the man. "Quite the opposite, actually."
He looked at her. She was still smiling.
"None of these peasants have the blood of the dragon."
She turned to look at him then. Something in her eyes had settled, quietly satisfied.
"Oh please, my prince." The mockery in it was blunt. "Your ancestors resided here for centuries. Did you truly imagine they kept entirely to themselves?” She tilted her head, voice dropping into something almost sweet. “Aegon the Unworthy left half the silver-haired whores in this city with his get. Shiera Seastar’s mother was Lysene. Virtue has never run strong in your line from what I have seen tonight.”
She held his gaze with calm. She had placed a blade on the table and was waiting to see what her companion did about it.
He realized he was running hot and not entirely from anger.
He was still looking at her when the square tilted slightly. Not enough that anyone watching would have noticed.
The insult, it was the specificity of it that caught him. Not the slight itself, but the knowledge behind it.
This was not a simple courtesan making conversation.
She opened her mouth. Then she looked at him properly, the way she had not looked at him since the alley, and whatever she saw there changed what she had been about to say.
"There is a garden," she said. "Not far."
He did not argue. That, more than anything, told him something was wrong.
The city moved around them as she led him through it, her hand still on his arm. He was aware of very little beyond the point of contact, the warmth of her grip, which he was fairly certain was not helping.
She glanced at him once on the path, said nothing, and kept walking.
He focused on putting one foot in front of the other and not doing anything that would require explanation.
The garden opened before them and he stopped without meaning to. Pale reddish stone and running water, moonflowers climbed the walls in pale cascades, their scent heavy and sweet and slightly too much in the heavy air. She led him through the gate and away from the main path where a pair of lovers were trailing fingers through a fountain basin, their laughter carrying soft and unhurried through the dark.
It reminded him, with a sudden and disorienting force, of what he had heard of the Water Gardens. Built for his own blood by a Dornish prince, because his bride had found the heat of Sunspear unbearable. A gift of stone and water and orange blossoms meant to make a Targaryen princess feel that someone had thought of her comfort.
Her hand was still on his arm.
She was leading him toward a covered alcove at the far corner. In the state he was in, the intention seemed obvious and the distance between them seemed unconscionable, but he was fairly certain he was wrong on both counts.
She sat him down on a cold stone bench without ceremony and settled beside him, not close, not far.
Behind them, the city carried on without concern, its noise reduced by distance to something almost pleasant. Beyond it, the sea lay dark and vast, the moonlight coming apart on the surface in slow, scattered pieces.
The breeze came off the water cool and salty, but did nothing for him whatsoever.
The silence between them had a quality the city behind them lacked — unhurried, without expectation
He became aware, slowly, that he was looking at her.
Her veil was gone. He could not have said when she had removed it. The moonlight had found her face in a way the fire pits had never quite managed, the orange glow replaced by something cooler, more honest and yet her gaze held the same heat. He had memorized her eyes already, had been doing so since Vaelo's hall, but the rest of her face was new, and he found himself looking with a thoroughness that the circumstances did not excuse.
She turned to look at him then, catching him at it, and he looked away toward the sea.
"No," he answered, which was more honest than he intended.
Her fingers were cool against his forehead, then moved through his drenched hair, making him shiver as the line between her brows deepened.
She slowly stripped him of his chain mail, and he let her. Further stoking the feeling that was already unbearable. He exhaled sharply when she was finally done.
At that, her head tilted slightly. She leaned in and breathed him in, slow and deliberate, eyes narrowing."What did you drink tonight?"
He looked at her through the haze of it, the question dissolving before it reached him.
She took his face in both hands and ran her tongue lightly across his lips. The spices bloomed in her mouth, sweet and unmistakable.
He kissed her before she could pull back, fierce with want that had built up all night.
She stayed where she was, only for a moment.
Then her hands, still framing his face, pushed him back. She looked at him in the dark, her breathing not quite what it had been, which was the only concession she made.
"Not like this," she told him softly.
He looked at her, the tightness of his breeches a humiliating betrayal. The roaring in his blood had climbed past the point where he could reason with it. Drowning out everything except the urge to take what was in front of him.
She went very still. So did he.
Then something in her face closed over and she pulled back fully.
"You took a cup from a stranger's tray and did not think to ask what was in it." The pity in her eyes had sharpened into something less forgiving. "That was extraordinarily stupid."
"I don't care," he said, like he had been deprived of air.
"You will." A breath, almost to herself. "In the morning."
The silence stretched. He reached into his surcoat.
The slap came the moment the words were out. Open-handed, full across the cheek. The sting of it spread through him and found the heat already there, the fire in his loins only growing hotter.
He stood. That was a mistake.
The garden tilted. Three cups of Lysene wine and whatever had been in the fourth, the evening's compulsion, the pain of the slap still fresh on his cheek and the shame beneath it. The combined weight of it found him all at once and he wretched, barely making it to the edge of the pergola.
She was beside him, one hand gathering his hair back with a grip that was anything but gentle, the other at his shoulder. Keeping him upright. Nothing more.
When it was over, the cool stone received him and he shut his eyes. Somewhere below them, the sea moved on without concern. The garden had gone very quiet, and the fever in his blood had finally, mercifully, begun to lose its grip.
"You will feel better," she said, after a while.
He meant to say something else. Something that would restore a measure of dignity to the evening.
Aerion looked at her again. In the grey before sunrise, something in her had come untethered. The gold links were gone from her hair, knees drawn up on the stone bench beside him.
Nothing between her face and the dawn.
"You came back," she said, after a while. Not an accusation. Not quite a question.
"You knew I would, you expected me."
She was quiet long enough that he thought she had decided against answering.
"There are things in this world that were lost a long time ago," she said finally, her eyes still on the water. "Things that cannot be recovered without the right blood. Blood that has been diluted and scattered and mostly forgotten."
Her gaze returned to him again.
He was already asleep, his head tipped back against the stone. In the growing light, his face was younger than she had expected. Softer. Sleep had returned something to him that waking had long since taken.
Then she turned back to the sea and waited for the morning.
Literally the only way to realistically get Aerion to act in a way that makes space for romance is to drug him first, otherwise he would have broken her wrist at the Aegon the Unworthy comment. However now that thats done and hes already shown some vulnerability we can proceed normally while keeping an accurate Aerion.
This chapter is quite long again, but i dont think I can keep up with the output. So please let me know if you prefer shorter chapters every week or a long one every two to three weeks. For example, I could have split this chapter into two, but I usually, as a reader, prefer the flow and happenings that still relate to each other to be in one chapter, so let me know!
Also, Im wondering what you guys prefer...are you here more for the story or the romance, let me know so I can set my focus accordingly
