summary — you and sirius had grown up in the same kind of family, and your friendship had been built on lavish lies just to vanish when sirius ran away. now, you're assigned as his potions tutor
content — established childhood friendship between sirius and reader - established friendship with the emeralds - fluff and banter and all that fun stuff, your house elf is called tilly
note — i lowk wanna make an angsty part two for this so let me know what u guys think!!!
inspired by my favorite fanfilm pls give it a watch and support the creators!!
You’d grown up in the same type of family, the same lavish parties where you were introduced every year as if you hadn’t known each other since you could speak. You’d spent holidays visiting each other’s family homes because your parents were “old friends,” being forced to talk because it was “respectful,” slowly forming a friendship because, even with all of its manufacturing, it came naturally.
But Sirius left it all behind. He left behind the sneaking away to the kitchens with you when you were kids, left behind the short conversations as you got older, he left behind his family and the parties, and your seasonal friendship that had all but vanished by the time you reached third year.
He saw who you surrounded yourself with, saw who your friends were, and what spells they practiced and played with like they were meaningless. He wanted nothing to do with it;
Nothing to do with you.
“Mister Black…” Professor Slughorn had pulled him aside after potions. “Your grades have been slipping this year,” he said frankly, but still with cautious sympathy, “I’m sure, of course, you can get them up, but I’ve assigned you a tutor anyway — hopefully, at least, to get your spirits up.” He gave him a smile that Sirius half-heartedly returned. “You can meet her in the library now if you like.” He knew it was an instruction rather than a suggestion, nodding before he left quietly with his things.
Ever since that night, not long into the year, when he made the mistake of pulling his worst prank to date, he’d been on the outskirts with his friends. He didn’t feel bad for Snape. He couldn’t. Most of all, he felt terrible for Remus, who was hardly speaking to him, even with James trying to pretend everything was fine.
It was all he thought about, constantly, to the point where he’d started to slack off on his schoolwork because he couldn’t stop.
He went into the library, which he hardly ever did, and found himself in front of a table occupied by one person who seemed to be waiting for someone.
“I was wondering when you’d make it here.” He knew that voice, pulling him out of his thoughts as you both looked up at each other. “Have a seat.”
It wasn’t that you were unkind, at least you never were to him — you were always polite, always said hello, even checked in on him when he seemed down, but he couldn’t bring himself to truly befriend you; your childhood friendship was like a well-kept secret between you, and you passed each other in the halls like acquaintances who only knew of each other. To him, your families were too closely intertwined, and he knew how close you were to yours.
He sighed. “Slughorn put me with you?”
“Is that so bad?” He pursed his lips. “If it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t his first pick. It’s just that everyone else is a bit cross with you.” You looked down at your book, playing with your quill as he stayed standing. After a long beat of silence, you sighed, “Fail if you want to. I can study alone.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.” He set his bag on the table with a heavy thud, pulling out his potions books and sitting across from you. “I won’t fail.”
“And you won’t do your work either.”
“What do you know?”
“You. Since we were kids.”
“Whatever.”
There was a beat of silence as you wrote in your notebook and he stared at his textbook with unmoving eyes. You glanced up at him. “You have to actually look at the words to read them.”
“Would you be quiet?” He snapped, beginning to actually read as you scoffed out a laugh.
“I heard about what you did, you know,” you said after a moment. He’d stopped reading again, and you took the opportunity to talk to him. “To Snape.” He sighed, putting his book face down to give you his attention. “He wouldn’t tell me exactly how he wound up all bloodied like that, but—“
“I don’t need your input,” he said frankly. “‘It wasn’t right’, ‘he could’ve died’, ‘you should’ve been expelled’, I’ve heard it all. I didn’t think he’d end up… bloodied.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say,” you said.
“I could guess.”
“I don’t think you know me that well.”
“Don’t I?” You raised a brow at him. “You seem to think you know me—“
“I do—“
“—so why wouldn’t I know you just as well?” You gave him a look. “We’ve known each other since we were kids, haven’t we? Surely I know you better than you think.”
“I doubt it,” you laughed. “I’m much more personable than you are.” He rolled his eyes. “Besides, I was only going to say I’m glad you weren’t expelled. I know he was hounding Remus about missing, and I know the kind of spells he makes up and practices… It wouldn’t have been fair.” He said nothing, opening his book again and starting to read.
This time, with the two of you actually studying, there was a long beat of silence before someone spoke. This time, it was Sirius, “Amortentia,” he said, making you look up, “have you brewed it?”
“Why?”
“Because it’s on our next test,” he said prissily, looking up at you with an impatient expression. “And I haven’t been able to get it right.”
“There’s not much to get wrong,” you said quietly, resting your cheek in your palm and looking at him. “You’ll have to tell me what you’ve been doing.”
“I’ve been following the instructions.”
“No need to get defensive.” Another eyeroll, and you huffed. “I hope you make up with your friends soon — you’re in an awful mood.”
“Maybe you’re an awful tutor.”
“Do you need a response for everything?” He said nothing, a smirk on his lips and a brow raised that made you roll your eyes. “How about tomorrow, after class, we can try and figure out what you’re doing wrong.”
“Quidditch practice,” was his response.
“After that?”
“Supper.”
“You’ve got time between.” He huffed. “Come if you want to. It’s not my grade in jeopardy.”
Your friends showed up just then, ushering you out of the library after you’d packed your things.
“What were you doing with Sirius?” Evan asked, Barty on the other side of you, and Dorcas and Pandora trailing behind. “Don’t tell me your parents want to set up an arrangement with him?”
“Goodness no,” you laughed. “They’re not arranging me with anyone.”
“Lucky you,” said Barty.
“Slughorn is having me tutor him,” you said blandly, Dorcas and Pandora chuckling behind you. “Not that he wants me to be his tutor, of course.”
“He should be thanking you. You never study with us anymore.”
“You guys talk too much.”
“More than Sirius Black?” Dorcas asked. “Really.”
“Really.”
Sirius, in all honesty, had no intention of showing up to the study session you planned. Instead, he talked with James in the locker rooms up until they had to leave for supper, walking together until they reached the table. Remus gave him a very quiet hello, tired and unenthused, but he took what he could get as he sat beside him.
He’d all but forgotten about meeting you, and he didn’t remember until he saw you walk into the Great Hall and head to the Slytherin table with Pandora, shrinking into his seat as if you were even looking his way.
“What is it, mate?” James asked, looking across the hall. “Panda?”
“No…” They all looked at him for an answer. “Slughorn assigned me a tutor.” He said your name as quietly as he could, as if they wouldn’t hear it. “I was meant to meet her after practice.”
“Why are you whispering?” Peter asked, whispering.
“And why do you need a tutor?” Remus asked. “You’re brilliant in potions.”
“My grades are shit right now,” he said. “Haven’t been focusing well. He said he assigned her to ‘get my spirits up’ — not sure how she’ll help with that, though.” Remus gave him a sorry look but said nothing.
“She’s nice,” Peter said. “You should talk to her.”
“I’ve talked to her plenty,” he said. “We’ve known each other since we were little, that’s why she’s so close with Reg.”
It was the most they’d talked in nearly a month at supper that night, entirely about Sirius’ misplaced irritation when it came to you. Until Remus told him he should meet you the next day. A Saturday.
He woke up the next morning with a chip on his shoulder, only going because his best friend asked, and found himself without any clue where you’d be. He went to the library and found nothing, to the astronomy tower, to the potions classroom, where you liked to practice, and even to the courtyard and fields. He found himself walking the expanse of the Black Lake’s shore, slow steps as he smoked and checked his watch. Quarter to one. He’d spent his entire morning looking for someone who made herself scarce, likely studying in the Slytherin common room or talking to the friends of hers he couldn’t stand.
That was when he heard the sound of gentle music. It was classical, something you’d probably enjoy listening to, and he found himself walking toward it. Your cassette player was on the ground, headphones next to it, and volume all the way up so you could hear the music softly through them. You were sat against a tree you could probably use to hide, great with shadowing branches, and you were writing while your potions textbook lay next to you.
“Busy?” He asked, snuffing out his cigarette and taking a seat on the other side of the cassette player.
“Not as busy as you,” was your response. You continued to write, but when he didn’t leave you said, “You’re welcome to study with me.”
“Haven’t got my books,” he said, and you pushed yours next to him.
Sirius, as if he were being forced to, picked up the book. “You don’t have to stay, you know?”
But he didn’t leave; he had nowhere else to go. His friends were busy, and he didn’t mind sitting by the lake to read about potions’ ingredients if it meant a quiet Saturday without getting into any more trouble — he was trying his best to stay out of it, hoping he wouldn’t make his friends any more cross with him than they already were.
It was, indeed, a quiet Saturday. You didn’t speak to him while you wrote, and he didn’t ask too many questions while he read.
He was shocked when you stood, yawning. The sun was getting low over the lake, casting the waters a shimmering gold that he looked up to admire. “I’m going to head to supper,” you told him, holding your hand out for your book. It was then that he realized you hadn’t been taking notes, frowning as he stood. Instead of handing you the book, he plucked yours from your hand. “Hey!” He moved it out of your grasp as he opened it, turning his back. “Sirius!” You reached for it, grabbing his shoulder. He held it up, laughing. “Give it back!”
“You’ve been writing all this?” He asked with a grin as he read the entries, little short stories about anything that inspired you; from a bird you’d seen fly by to one of your friends' laughs that lit up the room.
“That’s none of your business!” You pushed his shoulder back so he would turn, reaching to grab it from him and finding your faces mere inches apart.
“It’s not bad.” He quickly handed it over, along with your potions book, and stepped away. You huffed, turning and heading for the castle. “Can we reschedule that study date?” He asked, following you back. “The test is coming up.”
“Not a date.”
“It’s an expression.”
“Well, don’t use it with me.” He rolled his eyes. “And no. I’m busy.”
“How about Monday?” He asked anyway. “I’m free after classes; we have practice in the morning.”
He opened the door of the castle for you, giving you that smile that made him so charming to everyone he met. “Fine,” was your answer.
“Great. I know a place — private.” You raised a brow. “I can’t have anyone know Slughorn assigned me a tutor,” he said, whispering and looking around the hall. “Least of all you.”
“That doesn’t make me want to help you.”
“Don’t take it personally.”
“Not sure there’s another way to take it, Sirius,” You laughed. “But sure,” you said. “I’ll see you Monday after class.”
Monday came, and he waited outside of your History of Magic class, telling Marlene he had to ask Professor Bins something to make her leave. You came out last, after Crouch and Rosier, who he heard saying goodbye to you.
“Hi, Sirius.” You smiled as you stepped out of class, a bag of ingredients in your hands. “Slughorn’s given me everything we need to study for the exam.” You held up the bag, a lightening charm on it for the heavy iron cauldron inside. “Even a guide.”
“Keep your voice down,” he said, looking around before taking you by the hand to pull you to a secret passage.
You very quickly took your hand from his. “A thank you would suffice.”
“Thanks.”
The passage led you all the way to the seventh floor, a pair of iron doors appearing at the end of the hall that Sirius pushed open. It was an awfully small room for such giant doors, and there was one potions station in the center of it — not that there was much space around the center of the room, cramped and close-quartered like a broom closet.
You took the seat next to the wall and Sirius next to you as you began taking out the ingredients and cauldron. You handed him a sheet of paper. “There’s a lot more on the test than Amortentia,” you said, “I think we should work on all of them.”
“Alright,” he sighed, the thought of studying so much making him slump in his seat.
You laughed. “I’ll try not to bore you to death. We can start with something simple — Wiggenweld is always easy to brew.”
“We’ve been reviewing that since we learned it.” He grabbed the ingredients from the list and lit a flame under the cauldron. “Besides, I only need your help with Amortentia.” He began brewing the potion anyway, going from memory as you watched.
“You’re stirring backwards,” you said, making him glare at you. “The little things matter, you know? It won’t work right if you do that.” He continued, and you grabbed his hand, making him stir the other direction. “See? Now it's starting to shimmer.”
He was quiet for a moment, making himself accept that you were right.
“What does Amortentia smell like to you?” You asked, letting go of his hand as he put the cover on the bubbling cauldron.
He thought for a moment. “The forest at night… You know that earthy, rain smell.” You nodded as he started to smile. “And Mum’s baking — James’ mum, I mean. Mother never set foot in the kitchen, but Ephie makes the best cookies. They’re crisp and gooey on the inside, chocolate melts in your mouth when she adds it — I think it smells a bit like chocolate too — ‘course that’s because of Remus.” You smiled. “What about you? What do you smell?”
“Ink and old parchment,” you answered quicker than he did, “firewood, Tilly’s pudding, and…” You narrowed your eyes, trying to place the scent. “The Black Lake. I think it’s my favorite place on the grounds; there’s a spot I like to go to… It’s quiet. No one ever looks for me there. In the morning, when it’s shrouded in mist and the sunrise turns everything to gold, it’s the perfect place to write.”
“Do you enjoy having a window into the lake, then?”
You nodded. “Sometimes, I’ll sit in the common room and watch the kelpies. They’re beautiful, you know? Not as scary as you’d think.”
“‘Till they try to drown you.”
You laughed, nodding along, “‘Till they try to drown you, right.”
For a moment, it was like you had snuck away from one of your parents’ parties, hiding in the pantry and talking the night away until one of you was called to leave, and your friendship was left behind until the next time you snuck away.
The next time you met, he found you at the Black Lake that weekend, talking over the steps to make Polyjuice Potion, what it did, and why the ingredients for it were locked away. You also made sure to go over the less interesting things, even with his groaning, like Draught of Peace and Everlasting Elixirs.
“Oh, Wit-Sharpening Potion, that’d be perfect for you, Sirius!” You said with a smile the next time you were in the cupboard of a potion’s station.
“Shove off.” He laughed, nudging your shoulder and continuing to take notes as you brewed a Deflating Draught.
Next time he met you at the lake, you studied in silence. He gave you a smile in the hall the next day that made Pandora and Dorcas start asking questions.
One morning, you bumped into each other at the library.
“What a surprise,” you said, handing him the book you were both reaching for. “Studying Erumpents, are you?”
“You said we were going over the Erumpent Potion next. Thought I’d get a head start.” You smiled. “Don’t look so impressed.”
“I am!” He chuckled. “I thought you’d try to convince me to brew a Babbling Beverage for one of your pranks.”
“Great idea!”
The next meeting in the broom closet went smoothly, his Erumpent Potion coming out perfectly.
“There’s a quidditch match this weekend, so I won’t be at the lake,” he said as if it was something you’d agreed to start doing together, but it hardly registered to you as you nodded with a frown. “Don’t look so disappointed,” he chuckled, hand on your wrist, just close enough to your hand to make you look. He took it away. “Are you going?”
You shrugged. “I don’t usually,” you said. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Thought I might see you.” You were packing your things, standing as he continued to talk. “Practice has been hell. James is stressed, and since we already lost a match to Slytherin, he thinks Ravenclaw thinks it’ll be an easy win.”
“I’m sure you’ll do fine.” You reached into your bag, pulling out a very small vial. “But, you can have this.” He frowned as he took it. “It’s a Peace Draught; I come in here to brew my own potions sometimes.” You watched as he inspected it like it might be giggle water or a belching potion. “Slip it into James’ tea and you’ll see if I’m telling the truth or not.”
He laughed, pocketing the potion. “Thanks. I’ll definitely try that.” He grabbed his bag. “I kinda hope it is a prank now, though.”
“I’d never!”
“You could at least pretend to be fun,” he said as he left, laughing at his own joke.
He didn’t expect to see you in the stands, but he couldn’t help but smile when he did, the stress he felt seeming to fade away as he played on. He hardly noticed Pandora, Barty, Evan, and Dorcas in the stands with you.
He hoped to see you after the game, but you and your friends were long gone by the time he got away from his friends.
“Good game,” you said the next time you saw him, Monday after class.
That was all you said, as the two of you hardly spoke outside of the secret room and Saturdays at the lake, but Barty made sure to say something, “Too bad you’ll lose the next one against us.”
“Terrible sportsmanship,” he could hear you say to him as you walked away, Barty and Evan laughing together.
The mood shifted when you saw him next at the lake.
“You and Crouch are close?” He asked in the middle of your studying, and you couldn’t decipher his tone.
You shrugged. “We’ve all known each other a while… Not that you ever tried to make friends with anyone, but I’m sure you remember.” All the pure-blood families tried to introduce their children to each other when they were young; of course, he remembered. He just nodded. “Why?”
“Just wondering.”
You pursed your lips, looking over at him as he pretended to read. “Not all of us believe in what our parents do, you know?” He said nothing. “And, not all of us have a best friend to run away to, either. You might not have it easy, but you’re lucky.”
The next time you went to the secret room, he was nowhere to be seen. A full moon shone in the sky that night, and you decided to start brewing Amortentia for your next lesson, jogging your memory of the steps and fine details.
He found you at the lake the next morning, in the spot you always went to together, disheveled and looking like he hardly slept and somehow knowing you’d be there. “Remus was ill,” he said for an explanation the moment he got there, and you didn’t question it as you looked up and saw the sorry look on his face. “Really. I should’ve said something, I—“
“How were you meant to know?” He relaxed, letting out the anxious breath he was holding. “It’s alright. I was worried you were still upset with me about what I said…”
“Upset with you?” He frowned. “No, of course not.” He laughed as he sat down, like you were ridiculous for thinking he could’ve been cross with you at all. “You’re right—“
“Say that again?” You smirked. “Didn’t quite hear you.”
“Fuck off.”
The next day you were meant to meet, you were collecting the Amortentia when he came to the room, using a ladle to pour it into a vial so you could keep it in your collection of potions you’d brewed properly.
“Brewing Amortentia?” He asked. “Corridor smells like chocolate.”
“Bottling it.” You put a lid on the vial. “But we won't have to brew anything until the next exam. This one is writing out the instructions.” He nodded. “Maybe you should tell me the instructions,” you suggested.
“Right.” He racked his mind for an answer. “You start with…” He took his time explaining as you took notes, correcting some things.
“Never cut the peppermint leaves,” you told him, making him frown. “Changes the structure. You could blow up the school— and not in the fun way.”
“What about an explosion isn’t fun?” He joked.
“Why don’t you find the fun in reading your textbook?” He rolled his eyes. “You didn’t do that terribly, by the way.” You handed over your notes when he scoffed. “You’ll ace the exam if you study those.”
“You think?” You nodded.
You didn’t see each other at the Hogsmeade trip that weekend, you staying with your friends as he stayed with his, but he looked around for you when he got the chance.
“Looking for a date to sneak off with, Pads?” James joked.
“Oh, I’ll keep an eye out, too,” Remus said. “Wouldn’t want to bore you to death, hanging with us, Sirius.”
“Oh, stop it.”
Since the full moon, his friendship had all but gone back to normal, apart from sour looks when they passed by Snape, which wasn’t exactly new. But he couldn’t deny that the first thing he did when the sun rose was head for your spot at the lake, just hoping you’d be there to accept his apology.
“She’s sitting over there, you know?” James whispered after they found a table at The Three Broomsticks, pointing to a booth.
You were sitting with your friends, laughing at a terrible joke from Evan, but you seemed to notice eyes on you and looked up. He smiled when you looked his way, and he averted his gaze when you smiled back.
He found you in the library the next day, cassette player sitting on the table and headphones on your head. He suddenly realized it was a muggle device, surprised you’d even have something like it, and smiling to himself as he took a seat on the table.
You paused, looking up. You took off your headphones, and he set an old book in front of you. “What’s this?”
“A thank you gift.” You frowned. “I got an Excellent on the exam.”
“Knew you would.” You smiled as you looked down at the book, A Collection of Short Stories by Unknown Writers. “You remembered?”
He shrugged. “It was all old and dusty, seemed like something you’d like.” You scoffed, and he laughed. “Yeah, I remembered… And I read through a couple, they seemed interesting — yours were better, of course—“
“Oh, please,” you laughed. “What do you want?”
“I had to butter you up before I asked…” He joked, nudging your shoulder.
“Asked what?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have gotten an E if it wasn’t for you—“
“Naturally—“
“—So, I was going to ask for your help with this next exam, too.” He pretended not to hear your quip. “I could help you with Transfiguration, or Charms.”
“I don’t need it.” He gave you sad eyes, practically begging. “Stop that,” you hit his leg, “I’ll help. But, aren’t you and your friends back to normal? You don’t want one of them to help you?”
“Maybe I just like working with you.”
Your sessions went on as they always did, at the lake, in the cupboard-station, in private. Only you were becoming more friendly. You talked about more than class, stopped to listen to a cassette Sirius brought you, smoked and laughed together as Sirius convinced you to arm wrestle or play “thumb war”. It was easy, comfortable… A secret.
“Do you remember playing when we were little?” Sirius asked you one day, watching as you hugged his leather jacket around you as you sat by the lake, a cigarette between his fingers.
“I remember winning,” you said.
“You remember me winning, right.” He nodded, and you laughed, shaking your head. “Days like this remind me of going to yours for that holiday party your parents always threw.” The lake wasn’t frozen over yet, snow blanketed the ground, and the trees around you were bare, but there was still a warmth in the air that made it comfortable enough to sit. “And sneaking off to get dessert early.”
“Tilly made a good chocolate pudding,” you said, laughing. “That was always the best part of my holiday.“
“Me?”
“Dessert.”
The door to the room on the seventh floor was opened very quickly, Sirius sneaking in and swiftly shutting it behind him as he fanned his hand in the air. “Did you spray perfume down the hall or something?” He asked, making you frown. “It reeks of you.” You moved over as he sat next to you.
“What in Merlin’s name are you talking about?”
“You really can’t smell it?” You were looking at him like he’d gone mad. You looked around, the open bottle of potion you’d brewed before your last exam making you stiffen. You quickly put a lid on the vial.
“Um,” you said quietly, clearing your throat, “I thought you might try brewing your own Amortentia today — you know, since the exam is next week? I think you’ll get everything else—”
“You couldn’t have warned me?”
“You’ll do fine.”
He sighed as he started, grabbing ingredients. You very quickly took away the moonstone powder and replaced it with powdered moonstone. Two very different things.
He started adding ingredients, very careful with his portions.
“Don’t cut the leaves,” you reminded him as you took notes to help him remember what you’d changed about his approach.
He nodded and said, “Put them in whole, or it changes the structure.” You nodded along. There was a moment before he spoke again. “Which way do I stir?” He asked before he did it, making you chuckle.
“Clockwise.” He nodded. “Just seven times.”
He counted quietly, and when he was done, the potion began to bubble, popping and letting off a faint smell. “I’ve done it wrong, haven’t I?”
“Not yet.” He sighed. “Now add the moonstone before it stops bubbling.”
He was quick to add it, watching the potion settle and shine after he did, steam letting off a familiar scent. “You’re brilliant.”
“I’d argue that you are.”
He grinned, laughing as he looked over the cauldron. “So, who should I give it to?”
“Look, I know you’re joking, but—“
“But, just play along. Hypothetically, if it wasn’t so dangerous, who should I give it to?” You raised a brow. “Come on.”
“I don’t know, what about McKinnon?” He looked like he was going to throw up. “Never mind.”
“That’d be like giving a love potion to my sister.” He shook his head. “I mean, I could give it to you, but, of course, I don’t need to—“
“I’m sorry, have you lost your mind? Don't flatter yourself—“
“Oh! So I should give it to you?” He shrugged. “Alright.” He reached for the ladle, and you quickly grabbed his hand to stop him. He reached with the other one, and you took it, too. He laughed as you did, struggling against your grip to grab the ladle and pulling your arms toward him.
The struggle died when you found yourself inches from him yet again, breath fanning your lips as he met your eyes in a sudden stillness. The room seemed more quiet than it usually did, more confined, and heavy with the scent of leather and tobacco that had you drawing closer to him.
He kissed you first, quick and unsure, before he pulled back like he remembered he should ask for permission. But you didn’t give him the chance to speak, kissing him as your hands went to his shoulders with a softness that made him melt into you. His hand held your face like you were precious, your waist like you’d slip away, but his mouth moved like he was hungry, searching for more as he kissed you with the most gentle force you’d felt.
The next time you saw each other was in passing in the hall, his shoulder brushing yours as he walked past.
You found a note in your bag when you got back to the common room.
STOP PUTTING OC STORIES WITH "X READER" TAGS BRO WITH ALL DUE RESPECT YOUR STORY DOES NOT BELONG THERE....listen... im sure the story is great... BUT im literally gonna combust if i keep seeing ts. Im trying to feed my delusions and yall arnt helping. Sighhhhhhh
SUMMARY: A prince washes up on the shore outside your cottage, and you must decide whether you’re going to leave him to his fate or save his life. Either way, you know there will be consequences.
WARNINGS: fem!reader, commoner!reader, eventual dragonseed!reader, jace lives, eventual smut, class differences (jace is obviously a prince and reader is a commoner). Reader is not too fond of him at first because she is from Sharp Point. This is a bit of a mix of show canon and book canon in that Jace went to the Gullet to save his brothers and Rhaena still claimed Sheepstealer
AUTHOR'S NOTES: i HADDDD to do a fic for our beloved boy </3 i miss you jacaerys velaryon, prince of dragonstone, heir to the iron throne. I will truly never move on from this death </3 so we need a world where he does not die. I'm saur excited for this because it's my first time writing a reader who comes from a commoner background, AND I finally get to write the dragons ... originally she was not supposed to be a dragonseed, but I just cannot help myself. If I'm going to be writing a hotd era fic, our girl is going to have a dragon. ANYWAY I hope you guys enjoy! please leave a comment or reblog mwah mwah
You wonder whether it is chance or divine intervention that a Targaryen prince washes ashore beside your cottage.
By the time you get to the edge of the sea after catching a glimpse of the corpse from your porch, it is half buried in the wet sand, lying limp at your feet, and there is a lump in your throat that you cannot seem to swallow away.
You do not know how you didn’t notice the sigil sooner.
It should have been the first thing that caught your eye, considering it was only a fortnight past that the Prince Aemond brought the great dragon Vhagar over the town you were raised in and razed it to the ground. The green and gold banners have been flying over the area since, and soldiers from the Reach have been constantly patrolling the roads, seeking out rebels and sympathizers.
You know better than to involve yourself in the affairs of any man that dons the three-headed dragon, you tell yourself, trying to will yourself to walk away from the corpse before anyone can catch you standing near it.
Red or gold, black or green—it does not matter to you, the wars of nobles are graves for common folk, and you have no desire to meet an early one. You have done well enough for yourself since your father passed. You refuse to squander the life you’ve built because a prince washed up on the shore near your home.
The boy at your feet is young, you cannot help but notice—your age, perhaps—dark of hair and fair of skin. At a distance, he had looked like any other body the sea had decided to return, and your first instinct had been to rush toward him rather than avert your gaze and pretend you had seen nothing.
Your hands tremble at your sides, and you have to forcibly still them as you take in a deep breath.
This is war, you recall the soldiers saying when the survivors demanded to know the reason for the tragedy that took place at Sharp Point—mothers with tears in their eyes and no bodies to bury, fathers who had lost their livelihood and the children for whom they built it, your neighbors, your friends. They say Lord Bar Emmon sits on the usurper’s council, so all of the commonfolk who were unfortunate enough to be born beneath his banners have been made to pay the price of his loyalties, allies of a queen they have never seen and casualties of a war they never chose.
This is war, they will tell you the same as they cut off your head if they see you kneeling beside this corpse and call mercy treason. Because it is always the burden of the commonfolk, paying the price of noble quarrels. Princes speak of honor and succession, of rights and oaths and stolen crowns, and it is fishermen and farmers who have to bury their dead. They will not care to hear what you have to say if they think you're affiliated with the Black queen and her supporters, just as the Prince Aemond did not care whether the people of Sharp Point had declared for the Blacks or merely happened to be born beneath the wrong lord.
But now, a prince lies dead upon your shore, and you wonder if this is how it begins again.
You should leave him.
The thought comes immediately, sensible in light of the circumstances, even if it does make your stomach flip. You should turn around and go home, bolt your door, and tell no one what you saw. The sea will reclaim him, or the crabs will pick his bones clean; maybe the patrol will stumble upon the body before the tide rises, and they can parade it through the streets the same way you heard they did to Princess Rhaenys’s dragon.
By the morning, he will be gone one way or another, and you can move on with your life as though you never saw him at all. He will be somebody else’s misfortune, or more hopefully, no one else’s at all.
It is a corpse, anyway. The boy has not moved since you arrived, and his chest does not seem to be rising and falling. There are two arrows through his shoulder, and a blueness to his lips that you’ve only seen in the dead, so—
As though to mock you, he lets out a wet, ragged cough, water bubbling at his lips, lashes fluttering just enough for you to catch sight of dark, hazy eyes that slip over you once before they slide shut again.
You feel sick to your stomach.
He does not stir again. One side of his face is bruised an ugly purple, his dark hair plastered to his brow with seawater and blood. He cannot be much older than you—the traitorous thought crosses your mind again. There is something terribly young about him, lying there half-drowned in the surf, one hand curled weakly into the sand as though, even unconscious, he is still trying to cling to something.
He does not look like a prince, you think miserably. He looks like a boy who is going to die.
The sea foams around your boots, and his body twitches as it threatens to reclaim him—the only feeble resistance he’s capable of in his state. You do not know how he still breathes—the fires might still burn on the Gullet, but the fighting ended days past. How long has he been floating about, dragged around by vicious currents and tossed by waves? It doesn’t even seem as though it should be possible, as though the Seven themselves intervened and—
—and dropped him on your shore, in your hands, and you are contemplating leaving him to die.
The thought is unpleasant, a heavy stone in your chest in place of your heart.
You are not a cruel person. You have cared for gulls with broken wings, and you leave scraps outside your door for the old orange cat that wanders the area. During the winter three years prior, you spent a fortnight nursing a lamb that did not even belong to you because you could not bear the sound of it crying.
And now there is a boy at your feet—bleeding, drowned, scarcely clinging to life—and because there is a dragon sewn onto his chest, you are trying to convince yourself to let the sea finish what arrows and war could not.
His lashes are dark against his cheek. Young, you think again, even more traitorous than the last, no older than ten and nine, if even. There is salt crusted at the corners of his mouth and blood soaking through his tunic in sluggish, rusty streams that stain the pale sand beneath him.
He looks cold—traitor, traitor, traitor.
He looks like a prince, you try to insist. A dragon prince, fire and blood and ruin, dangerous.
Cold. Hurt. Dying.
You need to walk away, you tell yourself again, desperate this time, because the longer you stand there staring at him, the more you fail to convince yourself of the correct path.
A prince's life is worth more than yours, more than your cottage and your little patch of land and the fishing boat your father left you. It is worth armies and dragons and castles and men willing to kill for a name.
If this boy lives, others will come looking for him.
And if the soldiers discover him in your home, they will not ask questions. They will not care that you found him by chance or that you never bent the knee to Queen Rhaenyra—that you could not even tell anyone why one half of House Targaryen wishes the other dead. They will see the three-headed dragon on his breast and the roof over his head, and that will be enough to condemn you.
Worse, the Prince Aemond and the dragon Vhagar could return. You think of Tom, the miller’s son, pulled from the boiling river after dragonfire reached the gristmill. You think of little Grace’s face as she searched the ashes for her mother. You think of all of your neighbors, all of your friends, who hardly survived the first time fire rained from the sky, and you think of all of those who didn’t.
He is not worth it. He is not worth the risk. A prince is only a man born with a special name, there’s no reason you should save him and condemn countless others—he bleeds the same, he dies the same, and when the Stranger comes for him, he is no more spared than any other man.
Except, he didn’t, did he?
He should be dead—any other man would be dead.
Two arrows through the shoulder, half-drowned, tossed upon the sea for days on end—there is no surviving that. Yet he breathes still, ragged and shallow though it may be, his fingers twitching every now and then.
The Stranger came for him and left empty-handed.
The Stranger came for him and left him with you.
Why?
There are no prophecies in your life, no gods whispering in your ear. You are a fisherman's daughter with a cottage by the sea and enough coin to keep yourself fed through winter if the catch is good. You know little of the gods save for the prayers your father taught you as a child and the candles you light for him on his nameday. The Seven did not save your father or your town; they did not save Tom or Grace’s mother or any of the others who screamed as dragonfire turned their homes to ash.
So why? Why this boy? Why this prince? Why should the gods spare a dragon's son when they had not spared children and fishermen and mothers? Why have they left him for you?
You do not have an answer. The only answer before you is a body on the sand, breathing when it ought not to be.
You stare down at him, furious and distressed and so, so unsure. He looks dead again—still as driftwood, cold and pale, stiff. His lips are blue like the dead, and his chest hardly rises and falls. You wonder if you imagined what you saw before. If your guilt conjured a cough where there had been none, if your conscience simply could not bear the thought of walking away even from a corpse.
Slowly, you sink to your knees beside him, damp sand clinging to your knees, the sea foam wetting your trousers. Your hand is still trembling in spite of all efforts to still it. You lift it to his throat, hesitating only for a moment.
If there is life, you will do what you must.
If there is not, you will turn and walk away.
You have never prayed for someone to be dead before.
Please, you think now miserably. Please.
Your fingers brush the skin of his throat—it is cold. He must be cold. So cold, that for a brief, terrible moment, hope flares in your chest, and then—
There is a flutter—it is weak and uneven, so faint that you almost miss it, but it is there.
Your head hangs forward, and you blink away the tears that prick in your eyes, because you know this action will have consequences. You know that there is no going back once you have entangled yourself with dragons. You know that every story told of House Targaryen ends in blood and fire and ruin for everyone foolish enough to stand too close them.
You know that this boy could be the death of you.
The soldiers could discover him. Your neighbors could discover him—as much as they care for you, they fear Vhagar more. If word spreads that a prince of the black faction lives and is hidden beneath your roof, you could hang for it. They could burn your cottage to the ground. They could drag you through the streets and call you traitor.
Worse still, he could recover.
Because then he would not be a half-dead boy on the sand. He would be a prince again. A son of the house of the dragon. He would leave, and the war would continue, and perhaps one day you would hear his name in some tavern and learn that he had mounted a dragon and burned a town much like your own.
The sea rushes forward again, cold water washing over your boots and his legs alike. He does not move. He is so cold.
“Why did you have to wash up here?” you breathe out—frustrated, angry, resigned, because you have never been one to turn your back on someone in need.
His pulse flutters once more against your fingers, and he does not stir.
Then, because the gods have a cruel sense of humor and because your heart has always been softer than your head, you slide your arms beneath the prince’s shoulders and knees.
With a soft curse and the sea at your heels, you gather the dragon prince into your arms and carry home your ruin.
—————————
He is Jacaerys Velaryon, son of Queen Rhaenyra, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne.
Three days have passed since you found him on the shore, and he has hardly stirred since you dragged him into your cottage. You have been riddled with anxiety since, jumping at every sound and fearing the worst when someone addresses you. It is only a matter of time—whenever a rider passes on the road beyond the trees or the patrol sweeps down your shore, you think they care coming for him. Coming for you.
You spend the first day trying to keep him alive.
You drag him home, soaked to the bone and half-frozen, laying him atop your bed as you get a fire going and wrap him in your blankets. For a while, you can only stand there staring at him, because it is one thing to decide not to leave a boy to die and another entirely to realize you have no idea how to save him.
You have to cut away his tunic to remove it, and it makes it easier to breathe once the three-headed dragon is out of sight, but then you have to address the monstrosity beneath it—bruises darkening one side of his ribs, yellow and purple and black, cuts everywhere, salt crusting his skin and body a ruin of blood.
You wonder how many rocks the currents slammed him into before he finally washed to shore. The sea around Sharp Point is, well, sharp. Jagged rocks and narrow inlets line the coast, and more than one fisherman has vanished into the sea after his boat drifted too close to reefs beneath the tide.
It is a cruel stretch of sea—crueler still to a boy half-dead and alone.
And then there were the arrows.
The shafts protrude from his shoulders at awful angles, the flesh around them angry and swollen. You cry while removing them, because you have never done something like it before, and your hands cannot stop shaking. A part of you wonders if the gods left him for you so that his blood could be on your hands instead, and you cannot fathom what you’ve done to deserve this.
You expect him to wake once you start removing them. At the very least, you expect him to scream. The first shaft pierced cleanly through his shoulder and is easy enough to ease out, but the second lodged itself deep in the flesh, refusing to budge until you brace your foot against the bedframe and pull with both hands.
It should have been agony—any man would have cried out.
The prince does not so much as flinch.
You remember staring at him afterward, the arrow clutched in your hand and your own cheeks wet with tears, wondering if he had died while you were removing it. You press your fingers to his throat with a panic that borders on hysteria, and you aren’t sure if you’re relieved or disappointed when you feel the fluttering pulse still there.
A traitorous part of you wishes that he had died.
A corpse is a tragedy, but a tragedy can be dumped in the sea and abandoned. A tragedy will not bring more war to your ravaged home.
A living prince, on the other hand, is a catastrophe that you do not know what to do with. Your home has already faced ruin once, and the longer he remains in your care, the more at risk you will be of bringing it upon you all again, because if he is captured in your care, then that means war and blood and fire and more dragons. The whole town, all of the survivors, everyone will be branded traitors to the crown.
But the prince lived, so you can only hope that he will heal quick enough and be gone before you have the chance to regret helping him.
The fever comes on the second day, and the corpse in your bed finally gives to life.
You notice it when you are wiping the blood from his face, and your hand brushes his forehead. It’s as though all of the cold of the sea had fled his body at once and left only fire behind. It’s what you expect of a Targaryen prince, really—the burning heat, closer to dragon than man— it feels more natural than the cold, but you are scared anyway.
You do not know much about treating battle wounds, but you do know about fever.
Your younger brother died of it during a long winter a decade past—no matter how hard your mother worked to keep it at bay, he was dead by nightfall. Your mother passed in the same moon, to the same sickness, as did half of the children in Sharp Point, because fever does not care whether you are young or old, rich or poor, prince or peasant.
His skin is flushed, sweat beading along his brow and soaking the dark hair at his temples as he twists in the sheets violently, threatening to reopen the wounds you just stitched close. His breathing changes too—no longer the slow drags of air, shallow and erratic, like he had spent days at sea only to begin suffocating on dry land.
You fetch water from the well until your shoulders ache. You lay cloths upon his brow and change them whenever they grow warm. You feed the fire, then fear you have made him too hot and let it die down, only to panic that he would grow cold again and build it back up.
Every few minutes, you find yourself pressing your hand to his forehead or his throat, checking for fever and pulse alike. There is never a change—still alive and burning, and you don’t know whether to be grateful or terrified.
At one point, he begins muttering. You cannot make out most of it—the words are slurred, little more than broken sounds spilling from fevered lips. Names, you think. Places, maybe. Some do not seem to be spoken in the common tongue.
Once, very clearly, he whispers, "Mother.”
You have to change the cloth on his forehead afterward and pretend your eyes are not stinging with tears. You curse the gods throughout that second day—you wish that you’d never left the cottage at all the morning you found him, you wish you’d left him to die, you wish, you wish, you wish, as though any of it matters anymore.
You sleep little that night, sitting beside your bed and watching him breathe. Terrified every time his breathing slowed, and equally terrified every time it quickened. You count the moments between each breath until dawn creeps through your shutters, and by morning, you feel like you have lived a lifetime in a single night.
The third day—today—you have to make the trek into town.
You have used the last of your willow bark, and there is only a heel of stale bread left, a few onions, and enough drinking water to last another day if you’re careful. You need fruit and vegetables, more barley, and you have a catch that you never got the chance to bring to the market to trade the morning you found the prince.
You cannot put it off any longer, much as you may wish—the prince needs supplies, and unfortunately, so do you.
You do not like going into town. You have never liked going into town—you have always been fond of your neighbors and your friends, but you were not fond of the way they circle and crowd you whenever you make your weekly appearance for trade. You got overwhelmed too quickly, and you didn’t know how to make an exit without seeming rude, so you ended up staying there for hours when there were many chores you had to get done at home.
Now, it is like a graveyard. The destruction following the Prince Aemond’s attack on Sharp Point has yet to be cleared. The soldiers are too busy with war and patrols, and the survivors are too busy trying to salvage what they can of their ruined lives.
When you enter the town, you can still smell charred flesh and death.
The children usually run to you when you arrive, chattering about the games they’ve played and the rumors they’ve heard, if you saw the wild dragon Grey Ghost while you were out on your boat this week, and you smile and nod along with them. But all of the children are dead now, and you are not crowded by friends and neighbors eager to make conversation with you, because most of them are dead now too.
It is in the market when you overhear green-cloaked soldiers talking about the battle that took place in the Gullet, and you finally put a name to the face of the prince in your home. You try to pretend that you’re not eavesdropping, fingers shaking terribly as you sort through the fruits and vegetables that Wylem carted in from his farm, because you need to know if they have figured out what you’ve done, if they know the prince is in your care, under your roof.
But they only laugh as they speak of dead dragons and a mourning pretender queen. They say the Blacks have lost two dragons, and the bastard prince, Jacaerys Velaryon, is dead. Any man who can find his body washed up on the shore to deliver to the King will see unfathomable riches.
Momentarily, you are angry at yourself because the royals brought this war and have caused all of this suffering, but when your lashes flutter shut, for a split second, you can only picture the haunted look on your mother’s face as she held your dead brother in her arms. You think of Miss Ellyn, who tossed herself into the sea when she found out her son had been killed on the Kingsroad. You think of your friend, Marie, who you found screaming, fisting her infant daughter’s ashes after the burning of the town. You think of them, and then you think of the black queen on her throne, and you feel the same lump in your throat.
Then you remind yourself that this is her doing.
Her doing, her half-brother’s doing, the other nobles’ doing. They brought this war to Westeros, they brought death and destruction, fire and blood, and you force yourself to shake your head and push it all away, trading some of the fish you caught for fruits and vegetables and barley with a watery smile that you’re sure Wylem took notice of.
There are more important things to worry about: if there is a bounty on the prince’s body, everybody will be searching for him. Not just soldiers, the people too—your friends, your neighbors, everyone. Many starve, more struggle, so if there is an opportunity for gold, they will all be on the hunt. You need to burn his cloak and tunic when you get back to the cottage, anything that associates him with House Targaryen.
You nearly trip over your own feet racing back to the cottage, second-guessing every conversation you had in the town. Wylem asked you why you were getting twice as much food as you usually get—you do not remember how you responded.
Did you imply that you had a visitor? Why can’t you remember? What excuse did you give? Did the soldiers overhear? Are they following you? Do they know? Why can’t you remember? You’re scared—you do not think you’ve ever been so scared in your entire life.
You look over your shoulder every five steps, worried that they’re going to come charging after you, demanding you to bring them to the Prince Jacaerys before taking your head. You’re not cut out for this—you’re the daughter of a fisherman. There’s no world where you should be worrying whether soldiers are going to hunt you down for saving a prince.
There are tears in your eyes when you make it back to the cottage, and your fingers are trembling around the bags Wylem packed for you. You shut the door behind you, and it takes you three tries to bolt it properly. When you finally do, you rest your forehead against the wood and let out a trembling sigh.
You—
“Who are you?”
There is a knife to your throat.
You stare at the crack in the wood of your door, breath catching, desperately trying not to move lest you risk the knife slicing through your skin. The crack appeared last winter, you remind yourself, trying not to focus too much on the fact that you can feel the cool edge of the blade. Your friend, Evander, was meant to fix before the next, but Evander is dead now, and you may well be too, if the knife at your throat presses any deeper.
“Answer me, who are you? Where am I? Wh—” the prince—Jacaerys Velaryon, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne—falters suddenly, and you can only breathe again when the knife drops from your neck, and you feel the presence at your back disappear. “You—you are a woman.”
You do not turn to look at him immediately, eyes sliding shut as you fight to steady the frantic beating of your heart, drawing one slow breath after another until your shaking eases enough to trust your legs. Your fingers tighten on the bags cradled in your arms before you force yourself to turn around.
Prince Jacaerys Velaryon stands three paces behind you, one hand braced against the edge of your table, pained, pale, barely conscious. He is bare from the waist up, and the stitches you painstakingly worked through his torn skin have pulled loose, fresh blood soaking the bandages and dripping down his chest and back.
You see more clearly in the light of the afternoon sun just how ruined his body is, bruises and cuts—you think his ribs must be broken, you did not notice just how bad off he was when you had him lying in the dim corner where you keep your bed.
For a moment, you forget that you are face-to-face with a Targaryen prince—it is only the boy you dragged in from the sea and spent hours trying to keep alive.
Your lips curve down into a deep frown, brows knitting together. You exhale as you say, “You reopened your wounds. It took me an hour to get them properly closed.”
The prince stares at you.
As soon as the words fly from your mouth, you remember who it is before you. The son of a queen. The heir to the Iron Throne, if one listens to his mother. A pretender's heir and bastard, if one listens to her enemies. You do not know which of them is right, nor do you particularly care. Such questions belong to lords and knights and people with far too much time to argue over crowns.
To the likes of you, prince is title enough for you to keep your mouth shut and your head bowed.
He does not immediately respond, gaze flicking around your cottage uncertainly. Your bed, stained with his blood. The dying hearth. The table where you left out the last bits of the bread, just in case he awoke while you were gone and was hungry. The bandages you left at his bedside. The basin of pink water you forgot to empty before leaving for town.
His lips, dry and cracked, part as he stares at you and murmurs more to himself than to you, “You tended my wounds.”
You hesitate, then nod, swallowing once. “I found you on the shore a few days past, my prince—” Your Grace? What is the proper way to address a prince? My Lord does not seem grand enough for the heir to a queen. Prince feels the safest—whatever he may be, no one seems inclined to dispute that part. “—I… you should probably be resting.”
“I need to know what happened,” he says instead, stepping closer to you. He is too pale, sweat beads at his forehead, dark curls matted to his skin. His eyes are wide and wild, pupils dilated the same way you’ve seen in men mad with grief or fear or fury, moments before lashing out at the nearest person. You find yourself tensing instinctively. “What do you know of the battle that took place on the Gullet? Did Baela make it back to Dragonstone? And Rhaena—she was on that wild dragon, and—my brothers, did my brothers make it back? How long has it been? Where are we? How far is it to Dragonstone? I must return immediately, I—”
The prince only just seems to realize how you’ve drawn away, back pressed against the door to your own home, arms tightening around the sack in your arms whenever he comes closer. His tongue darts out to wet his cracked lips, gaze flicking to the knife he dropped onto the floor and the fear in your face.
Shame crosses his expression instantly.
“I—” His expression twists as he puts space between the two of you again. You wonder whether it’s from pain or from struggling to force out an apology. Both, likely. He continues, “You have helped me—saved my life, most like—and here I am frightening you. I… I thought I’d been captured. I woke in an unfamiliar place. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know if I was a prisoner or if the battle had been lost. I heard the door open and…”
He trails off, and you stand there awkwardly, tension easing slowly from your shoulders. He is still on guard, but he does not seem so inclined to pull a blade on you again. Your lips part to tell him where he is, what little you know of the battle on the Gullet.
Instead, you ask, “Do most enemy strongholds look like a fisherman’s cottage, my prince?”
You are mortified the moment the question spills from your lips—he is a Targaryen prince, they are known for blood and fire and madness, dragons and crowns, and you speak to him as though he’s one of your peers.
Prince Jacaerys stares at you for a long moment, and then, to your astonishment, his gaze flicks around the inside of your home again, and something suspiciously like embarrassment crosses his face.
“I suppose not.”
The corner of your mouth twitches despite yourself, and you let out a soft puff of air through your nose before making your way across the room to place the sack you’ve carried from town onto the table. You will have to sort all of what you’ve got later; for now, you need to get the prince resettled before he opens up any more of his wounds.
You turn to look at him again, faltering when you see the pained expression that crosses his face, so sudden that it steals all the color from his cheeks. His hand shoots to his side, fingers digging into the bandages wrapped around his ribs.
“My prince?” you ask hesitantly, taking half a step forward, arm only slightly extended. It is one thing to carry him to your cottage and treat his wounds while he’s unconscious; it is different now that he’s awake.
Prince Jacaerys inhales sharply through his teeth. He is swaying on his feet, breath gone shallow—he looks as though he’s moments from collapsing hard onto your wooden floor. Still, his jaw clenches and the muscles in his neck tighten as he draws himself upright through sheer stubbornness.
“I am fine,” he insists.
“You should sit, my prince.”
“I am standing,” he replies with a tight smile, as though a bead of sweat isn’t rolling down his temple from strain to remain upright and his lips aren’t trembling with pain.
“Barely.”
The prince blinks as though caught off guard by the response, casting a look that is partially confused, and mostly offended in your direction. Your lashes flutter shut as you brace yourself for a volatile reaction, because he is a prince and you are a fisherman’s daughter, and you are arguing with him as though he is an equal and not one of those dragon-riding royals people compose songs about. You think you must have lost your wits entirely these past few days.
Instead, he shoots back, with all the dignity he can muster while visibly swaying, "I have endured worse."
You stare at the blood soaking through the bandages wrapped around his shoulder, uncertain if you believe him. You say with less heat, "That is not the same as being well, my prince."
His jaw tightens, and you fight a sigh. Gods, he actually looks as though he is preparing an argument.
You wonder, briefly, what your life has become. Three weeks ago, your greatest concern had been whether the currents would ease up enough for you to take the boat out of the shallows to catch some fish. Now, Sharp Point has burned and you are standing in your cottage, arguing with a dragon prince about his injuries.
The absurdity of it nearly makes you laugh, wondering if perhaps this entire ordeal is some fever dream brought on by bad fish and Leila’s uncle’s dubious ale.
Then, Prince Jacaerys’s left leg buckles.
He reaches for the table and misses, injured shoulder slamming into the edge hard enough to wrench a strangled cry from him, and before you can think better of it, you're moving.
You let go of the sack of fruits and vegetables and barley you were keeping steady on your table; it topples over, and all of your pristine apples go rolling across the floor of your cottage, but you barely notice, panicked when you realize that he careening right toward the hardwood floor.
You catch the prince around the waist just as he starts to fall, but he is heavier than you expect.
You brace yourself, convinced that he is going to take you down with him, but you manage to steer him sideways toward the chair beside the table. He collapses into it heavily, breath hissing through clenched teeth as pain flashes across his face.
Momentum carries you forward with him—far, far too forward.
One hand lands against the uninjured side of his chest to steady yourself, the other gripping the arm of the chair. For a horrifying second, you are practically sprawled across the heir to the Iron Throne’s lap. You jerk away so quickly you nearly trip over one of the escaped apples, face burning and hands shaking.
"Sorry," you blurt, mortified. “Sorry. Sorry, I did not mean—”
“I believe,” Prince Jacaerys begins with a grimace, “that was my fault.”
You do not respond, flustered, trying to put more distance between you to calm yourself down. Your gaze flicks back over to him, but he is too busy grinding his teeth as he glances down at his wounds to pay you any mind. You let out a soft puff of air through your nose before you look at the apples rolling about your floor, and then reach for one still on your table—you might have lost some sense over the past three days with the little sleep you’ve gotten, but you are not about to feed a prince food off your floor.
You make your way back over to him and hold the apple out to him. He blinks once at it before his gaze lifts to yours questioningly.
“I do not know when last you ate—a while, certainly,” you tell him quietly. “You should get something in you while I redress the bandages. I’ll cook some stew once I’m certain you’re not going to bleed out.”
Prince Jacaerys exhales through his nose before he takes the apple from you, rolling it between his fingers. You step past him so that you can move the basin of water closer to where he’s sitting, grabbing a clean rag and the bandages that you left next to your bed.
You come to stand in front of him again, hesitating before you motion to the wounds on his shoulder. You ask, “May I?”
His dark gaze flicks up to yours briefly before he nods, and your throat tightens as you shift closer, fingers fumbling a bit as you grab for the edge of the bandages to unwind them from around him. It is much more intimidating doing this while he’s awake, inches away from you, and eyes tracking your every move.
“I found you three days ago, my prince,” you tell him at last, trying to remember all of the questions he asked earlier so that you can busy your mind with something other than the fact that you can feel his skin hot against yours. “Before that, the fighting died another three. In truth, my prince, I do not know how you survived so long at sea.”
Prince Jacaerys says nothing in response. His attention remains fixed somewhere beyond the wall behind you, expression distant. You suspect he is counting the days since the battle, the hours his family has believed he is dead, the minutes his mother has spent mourning him. You keep your gaze trained on his shoulder as you unwind the last of the bandages and set them down on the table.
You press your lips together when you see that the stitches have loosened at the back of his shoulder—where one of the arrows had dug deep, but not deep enough to pass cleanly through. Pulling it free had torn through muscle and flesh alike, leaving a ragged injury that had taken you nearly an hour to clean, stitch, and stop bleeding.
You exhale as you run the pad of your finger briefly over the stitches, trying to figure out if you can salvage what effort you already put in or if you would have to pull them out and redo them entirely.
“And my family? My younger brothers? Baela and Rhaena? Have you heard what has become of them?” the prince asks, and you glance up just enough to see how his jaw tightens when your finger brushes over the wound. “Did we win the battle?”
“I do not know if anyone can be said to have won that battle, my prince,” you answer quietly, tongue darting out to wet your lips as you finally start to get to work at reclosing the wound. Your gaze slips to the side when he finally starts to eat the apple you passed to him. He makes a noise in the back of his throat, as though he’s only just realized how hungry he is. “Both fleets were decimated. The dead still wash up on the northern shore.”
How did Prince Jacaerys make it to your shore, then?
Not for the first time, you have to wonder if the gods themselves placed him directly into your hands.
Most of the rest of the dead have washed up on the northern and western shores of Sharp Point, as it is where the currents run strongest, but the prince somehow made it to where your cottage sits on the eastern shore. If he had washed up anywhere else, the patrol would have certainly found him by now. You've heard they have spent the last several days combing the beaches, hauling bloated corpses from the tide and turning them over with the tips of their spears, searching for the dragon prince they are certain the sea claimed.
Prince Jacaerys’s breath hitches when you tug lightly at the stitches holding the skin of his shoulder together. Already, he’s finished the apple you handed him, absentmindedly turning the core between his fingers while his thoughts remain leagues away.
It is only when the last bite is gone that he seems to notice, and his gaze drifts toward the table. He hesitates, and you think it is almost comical—this is the heir to the Iron Throne, a dragonrider, a prince who has flown into battle, and he looks as though asking for another apple might be an imposition too great to make when he’s been floating at sea for at least a week.
You hold the stitches carefully with your right hand so that you can lean forward and grab another apple from your table to pass to him. His cheeks color slightly when he realizes that you noticed.
“I did not mean to stare,” he murmurs, taking the apple from you and cradling it carefully between his hands. He asks again, “Have you heard what has become of my family?”
You shake your head, focusing on tending to his wounds again. You think that you’ll be able to salvage your work. It is good, you think—you can get him resting and then cook some stew for the two of you. You didn’t eat much yesterday, frazzled by the fever and trying to keep him comfortable, and you’re starting to feel a lightness in your head.
“I’ve only heard what the soldiers say in town, my prince,” you murmur, trying to figure out how to go about speaking the news he certainly won’t take well. The last thing you need is for grief to send him bolting for Dragonstone before he can so much as walk across your cottage without collapsing. If he does not kill himself by straining his body when it is not ready, then the patrols will certainly catch him and have his head—and then yours.
You let out a soft sigh as you tie off the stitches on his shoulder blade and lean down to wet the clean rag before lifting it to his bloody skin. You’re careful around the edges of the wound, trying not to disturb the stitches, working slowly at the dried and wet blood from the curve of his shoulder, over the collarbone, down the length of his back.
You try not to think too hard about what you’re doing.
If you do, it begins to feel far too intimate.
It is one thing to drag an unconscious stranger from the sea. It is another to stand so close that you can feel the warmth radiating from his skin, to brush your fingers across the line of his shoulders. You have spent three days tending him without much thought, because there had been no room for embarrassment while the Stranger lingered at his bedside.
Now he is awake and watching you, and every accidental brush of your knuckles against his skin seems to linger a heartbeat too long. He is a prince of the realm, and you are a fisherman’s daughter—people like you are not supposed to touch people like him, and yet—
You exhale through your nose harshly. You busy yourself with the rag, scrubbing a little harder than necessary at a streak of dried blood along his collarbone simply to distract yourself, and his jaw pinches.
“Sorry,” you say quietly.
“It does not hurt,” he replies—a lie, surely, any man would be in agonizing pain. But maybe not; any man also would have died in the sea. Maybe the rumors are true: the Targaryens are closer to god than man; they do not feel pain or have to fear the Stranger the same way people like you ought to. “What have you heard from the soldiers in town? Where are we?”
“Half a league from Sharp Point, my prince,” you answer, still evading the question, which he seems to realize from the way he glances at you over his shoulder, gaze sharp and accusing. He knows you are withholding something. You exhale lightly through your nose and then say hesitantly, “They say two dragons fell over the Gullet. I could not tell you which.”
“Two?!” Prince Jacaerys demands, immediately rising to his feet, so quickly that the chair scrapes against the floor, and you fear he might rip back open the stitches. He whirls on you, eyes wide, pupils large as coins, and you almost flinch. “Two dragons?”
You swallow thickly as you nod. “My prince—”
“One must be—” His voice catches. He cannot finish the thought. For the first time since he awoke, real grief overtakes him completely. It drains his face of what little color had returned, leaves him staring at nothing as though he can already see the answer waiting for him. “I need to know the second. Whose was it? Which dragon fell?”
It unsettles you how close he sounds to pleading when moments before, you had been wondering whether the stories of the Targaryens’ deism held some weight, because gods do not look like this. They do not stand in a stranger’s cottage with fear plain on their face, hands trembling as they wait for an answer they already dread.
The same lump forms in your throat now that did when you heard the soldiers mocking a grieving queen and couldn’t help your thoughts from turning to your own mother, to Miss Ellyn, to your friend, Marie. For a moment, he is not a Targaryen prince or a dragonlord; you see a son and an older brother. A boy your age who knows there are only a handful of dragons flying over the Gullet, and every one of them belongs to someone he loves.
“I do not—”
“I need to return home,” he says immediately, as though his face isn’t white with pain and his stitches don’t strain every time he moves. His eyes glaze over you as though you’re not even there, and he takes a step toward the door to your small cottage. “Sharp Point—there must be passage to Dragonstone, there—”
Panic flares in your chest when he makes as though to leave. It is noon, and the patrols have become more frequent along the shores outside your cottage. They’ve spent a week carding through the western and northern shores, and they’ve been sending more and more men to the east—you worry they’re becoming desperate. The longer they go without finding a corpse, the more they may fear that there isn’t one.
If they have an inkling that Prince Jacaerys is still alive, they’ll start kicking down doors, and if they start kicking down doors, they will find him, and your life will be forfeit for harboring him.
“You cannot,” you say before you can think better of it, lunging forward as though to grab his wrist, but you stop yourself before you can make a terrible mistake, stopping a hairsbreadth from brushing his skin.
What is wrong with you? you think furiously. You need to rest tonight before you do something you cannot take back. Already you have gotten snide with and you have argued with a prince of the realm—now you have commanded him and nearly tried to seize him. You would have been lucky to only lose your hand in any other circumstance. Had he been standing in a hall instead of your cottage, surrounded by knights instead of rough-hewn furniture, you might have lost your head.
“I cannot?” Prince Jacaerys turns to you, bafflement momentarily eclipsing the fear that had consumed him only seconds before, as though he cannot quite fathom that someone has just told him no.
“My prince, you can scarcely stand,” you say. His gaze drops to where your hand is still hovering near his arm, head cocking to the side and brows lifting, and you snap it back to your chest immediately, heat flooding your face. “You have lost a lot of blood, you have barely eaten in a week, your wounds have only just been stitched again, and there are patrols searching for you every road between here and the sea.”
He continues to stare at you, disbelief riddling his expression. You have the distinct impression that no one has ever spoken to him this way before—certainly not a fisherman’s daughter. You force yourself to press on while he’s silent, hoping to make your point and rid him of this futile endeavor before he gets you both killed.
“The Prince Aemond burned Sharp Point’s harbor. There are no ships capable of navigating the currents of the Gullet, and the water still burns besides. I do not have a horse for you to ride to Stonedance. You could not get to Dragonstone even if you were not hurt,” you insist. “I will return to town tomorrow to try to get more information, but please, my prince, you mustn’t leave. You will only be putting us both at risk.”
For a long moment, you think that he will invoke his title or duty and insist upon leaving anyway, or maybe he will simply walk out the door despite everything you have said, and there is nothing you could do to stop him.
Then, his expression changes, twisting into something pained as he looks away, a shuddered breath escaping his lips. His shoulders, held tense since the moment you uttered the word two, sink ever so slightly. The panic that had driven him to his feet has nowhere left to go, draining from him all at once, leaving only exhaustion behind.
One hand drops back down to his ribs, pain crossing his face. Whatever strength carried him to his feet abandons him just as quickly as the panic, leaving him swaying where he stands. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he reopens them, the panic has been replaced by a type of defeat that is infinitely more difficult to look at.
You step forward cautiously when you see how his body is trembling, hand hovering uncertainly between the two of you, silently asking permission to help him. Prince Jacaerys stares at your outstretched hand, then at the bed on the far side of the room; you think, for a second, that he will attempt to cross on his own, but then his nostrils flare as he exhales, inclining his head just enough to grant you the permission his pride refuses to voice aloud.
Carefully, you slip beneath his uninjured arm, taking care to avoid the fresh bandages. He is warm—still warmer than he ought to be—and you can’t help but wonder if his fever has returned or if this is just how hot dragon prince’s typically run.
He leans into you only slightly, weight settling lightly against your shoulder—you suspect he is trying very hard not to. The journey from the door to your bed is scarcely a dozen paces, but it feels much longer.
“We were supposed to win this victory for her,” Prince Jacaerys says after a moment, voice breaking, the words slip free before he can stop it. You do not think the admission is meant for you, so you stay quiet. His throat works as he swallows. “We were supposed to—”
He cuts himself off, looking away again as you help him ease back down into your bed. As soon as he is seated, something close to relief crosses his face, lashes fluttering; the pain is still there, but not quite as terrible as it was when he was straining on his feet.
“The fact that you are alive at all is a victory, my prince,” you say quietly, even though you do not think the words will be of any reassurance. “You should rest. The sooner you are well, the sooner we can figure out a way to get you home. I’ll cook up a stew and wake you when it’s finished.”
He exhales again, jaw tightening as he looks away with a resigned expression. You turn your back on him to deal with the mess you made of the kitchen area, grimacing slightly at everything spilled across your floorboards and the table.
“What is your name?” Prince Jacaerys asks you suddenly. “I think I ought to know the name of the woman who saved my life.”
You let a soft breath, glancing over your shoulder at him. He is pained still, but there is an earnest look in his eyes that makes you falter—you remember how close you were to leaving him to his fate, and you have to look away again before he can catch the guilt that crosses over your face.
With a shaky exhale, you give the prince your name, and you cannot help but feel as though your life has irrevocably changed, and you do not think for the better.
————————————
The sea is on fire.
Jace cannot tell where the flames end and the water begins. Ships burn around him, masts collapsing into the waves with deafening cracks; men scream as they’re consumed by the fire, and dragons let out terrible shrieks as they dive low to bring down another ship full of Myrish mercenaries.
He tries to focus.
He chases after the rogue dragon, hoping to kill the rider before the dragon can burn any more of the Velayron fleet—or worse, catch Baela and Moondancer. But there is panic clawing at his chest, and smoke and salt clogging his throat and stinging his eyes. He’s screaming at Vermax to fly faster, to kill the rider, and then—then he sees Rhaena.
He sees Rhaena atop the wild dragon, and she is screaming, crying, desperately trying to get it under control, and Jace is confused, reeling as he yells at Vermax to stop at the last second. He and dragon both diving down away from the chase before Vermax could breathe fire on his cousin.
Rhaena does not have a dragon, he thinks, trying to figure out what is happening, and Rhaena is supposed to be with his brothers, and his brothers are captured by the enemy, and he isn’t sure if Stormcloud and Aegon made it to shore, and there is too much going on, and—
—and Vermax is falling.
Vermax is banking hard, being dragged down into the sea, and Jace’s stomach lurches. He’s yelling—begging—Vermax to fly, and Vermax is trying, he’s trying so hard, wings beating smoke through the air. He shrieks as another bolt catches him in the wing, and Jace feels the pain himself—he feels the pain, the primal fear, everything that Vermax does, because Vermax is his, and he is Vermax’s, and they are bonded, and Vermax is drowning, and the water is so cold, and Jace cannot feel his legs or his hands or his face.
He fumbles as he tries to unhook himself from the saddle, choking on water and air, maybe a sob, as Vermax sinks into the sea, a stream of bubbles rising to the surface as he cries for Jace, slowly disappearing into the dark waters. Jace desperately tries to dive after him, as if he has the strength to hold them both above the sea, because Jace has already lost Luke, and he—he cannot lose Vermax.
Not the dragon who had slept beside his cradle before he was old enough to walk, the hatchling he had grown up alongside, whose neck had once fit beneath his arm, whose first uncertain flights had ended with both of them tumbling into the sandy shore of Dragonstone while his mother laughed herself breathless.
Jace does not know a life without him—he does not want to know a life without him. His earliest recollections are not of nursery songs or wooden swords, but of warm green scales beneath tiny hands and the deep, rumbling croon that had lulled him to sleep when he was scarcely more than a babe.
When Jace learned to walk, Vermax learned to fly; when Jace’s voice deepened, Vermax’s roar had too.
There has never been a Jacaerys without Vermax.
But Jace’s lungs are burning, and he cannot see the familiar green scales anymore, and his body is reacting, seizing and spasming because there is no air left in him and water all around. He does not know which way is up and which way is down, the water is too dark and too cold, and he cannot think, but—but he sees the bubbles. He sees the bubbles, and he follows them, and even as Vermax sinks to the bottom of the sea, he saves his rider one final time.
He reaches the surface with a gasp, gulping the smoky air, and everything hurts. His arms ache, his chest is too tight, his eyes burn, and he cannot breathe, because Vermax is gone. He can feel that Vermax is gone; there is a gaping hole in his chest where his dragon used to be, and Jace does not know what to do, he does not know how to live anymore, and he wants—
He wants his mother.
He just wants his mother.
He hears the cheers before he feels the first arrow, gaze lifting to the sky as he searches for Baela and Moondancer—they are not too far, he thinks, she'll come for him.
And then, there’s a dull throb in his shoulder blade as he pulls himself over a floating piece of driftwood, but he hardly takes note of the pain, because everywhere hurts, because Vermax is gone, because he wants his mother. He turns when he hears the cheering, and he sees the men on the ship, and he sees the crossbows and the bows and the Myrish banners, but he does not see anything at all, really, blinking once, staring.
The second arrow catches him closer to the chest.
And then—then all he remembers is sea.
White foam and bubbles, vicious currents and sharp rocks. He thinks he is dead more than he thinks he is alive, but there is so much pain. There is pain and emptiness, and Jace just wants—
“... prince, the stew is ready.”
Jace startles awake, breath hitching in the back of his throat. His body tenses immediately, because he does not remember where he is—he remembers the sea and the waves and rocks and pain and Vermax, but he does not remember…
The cottage. Waking up alone. The door opening, the fear—was he captured? Where is he? Where are his brothers? Where is Baela? What was Rhaena doing on the wild dragon? Mother, mother, mother—
You avert your eyes suddenly, an awkward expression on your face, and Jace suddenly remembers. He remembers you, the apple you passed him as you tended to his wounds; how he held a knife to the throat of a woman who is risking her own life to save his. He remembers that he is stuck bedridden in the bed of a commoner while his mother thinks he’s dead and fights for her throne alone.
He opens his mouth to apologize—to tell you that he will leave as soon as he is able, that he will ensure you’re properly compensated for saving his life—but he falters when he feels something hot and wet drip down his face.
He lifts his hand to his cheek and wipes at his face, looking down at the wetness smeared on his fingertips. For a long moment, he does not understand—seawater, maybe? But he is no longer being tossed around by the sea. He is warm in your cottage, the hearth burns low and your blankets are tangled around him. He blinks once, and another fat droplet of water rolls from his eye down his cheek.
Is he crying?
Heat rushes to his face so quickly he thinks it rivals the fever. He wipes away furiously, not sure if it’s more or less humiliating that you’re pretending not to notice for his sake, turning your back to him to ready the table.
Jace has wept before, more than most ought to—for the father who taught him fishing and sea shanties, and the other who passed before either of them could speak the truth out loud, for the grandfather he never truly knew, for the brother who felt less like a brother and more like his other half—but never, never in front of a stranger.
Jace promptly clears his throat and pulls himself together. He glances at you, praying that his face does not betray him, an excuse on his lips as takes a deep breath. Then he falters, mouth watering instantly, gaze cutting to the side where you are busy ladling stew into two chipped wooden bowls, back politely turned, as though you never noticed anything at all.
Jace doesn't think he’s ever been this hungry. He has dined in castles all his life—roasted swan, lemon cakes, arbor wines. He has consumed the finest meals Westeros has to offer and found them lacking, but he almost feels dizzy with need and pleasure at the scent of the stew you made.
“It—” Jace’s voice is hoarse from sleep. Embarrassed, he clears his throat again to try to even it out. “It smells good.”
You look at him over your shoulder with a small smile and murmur demurely, “I’m sure nothing compared to what you’re used to, my prince.”
“I do not know that,” he says lightly as he forces himself to his feet, grimacing as pain immediately shoots through his body.
Everything aches—his chest, his shoulders, his legs, his arms, his head. In truth, all he wants to do is curl up and sleep more; he cannot bear to keep going. Not now. Not after Vermax, after Luke, after making such a terrible mistake that he might have cost his mother her throne. His stomach flips at the thought, and he fights a shuddered breath.
He needs to keep going—there is no other choice. He needs to get back to Dragonstone as soon as possible.
You pause in the middle of setting the bowls on the table at his words to give him a questioning look. “My prince?”
“I have not tasted it yet,” he tells you, forcing levity into his tone, because you have saved his life, tended to his wounds, and now stand over a pot of stew you cooked for him, worrying that it is not good enough to satisfy a prince. The least he can do is ease your mind. "It would seem unfair to compare a meal I have not eaten yet.”
You blink at him once, and then you smile slightly—it’s a genuine one, not like the small one you forced in his direction just before—and Jace tries his best to return it as he crosses the small room. He shuffles the last few steps toward the table with considerably less grace than he would have liked.
“Perhaps” you reply softly, waiting for him to take a seat at the table before you do as well.
You do not immediately lift your spoon, and Jace hesitates—for a brief moment, an old childhood lesson surfaces. Do not eat until someone else has tasted it. Feasts at King’s Landing and supper at Dragonstone had been meticulous about such things—cups were poured and tasted before his mother, and plates were sampled before any of them took a bite of their food. The paranoia claws at him and disappears as quickly as it comes.
You had dragged him half-dead from the sea, spent days stitching his wounds and breaking his fever, and gave up your bed so he could sleep comfortably. If you wished him dead, you need only have left him on the shore.
“I never thanked you for what you’ve done for me,” he says at last, fingers grazing the wooden spoon dipped into the broth. “When I return to Dragonstone, I shall speak with my mother. She will see you properly rewarded.”
“There is no need,” you murmur, finally taking a sip of the stew when Jace lifts the spoon to his lips.
The broth is hot enough to sting his tongue, but he scarcely notices. It is a simple meal—carrots and celery, chunks of what he thinks is rabbit. It is the plainest thing he has eaten in years, and yet somehow, the best meal he can remember.
His stomach twists painfully as warmth settles into it, and before he can stop himself, he takes another spoonful, then another, the hunger of the past week overwhelming whatever restraint court etiquette had once led him. It is only when half the bowl is gone that he realizes how quickly he is eating.
Embarrassed, he forces himself to slow, lowering the spoon.
“My apologies,” he says, clearing his throat. “I fear I may have forgotten my manners.”
“You haven’t had a meal in over a week, my prince. You’re allowed to be hungry,” you say with a faint smile.
Jace lets out a half-hearted huff of amusement through his nose, though his smile fades as quickly as it came, returning to conversation to try to force himself to slow down and show a modicum of etiquette before he embarrasses himself further.
“There is every need for reward,” he disagrees, leaning forward slightly to look at you. For the first time since he woke in your cottage, he actually observes you—you cannot be much older than he is, beautiful certainly, but there’s a weariness in your expression that Jace cannot help but feel as though is his fault. “You saved the life of the heir to the Iron Throne. You surrendered your bed, tended wounds that would have killed most men, and risked the wrath of the Greens simply by allowing me beneath your roof. I cannot allow that debt to go unanswered.”
You stare at him for a moment, a conflicted expression on your face, and Jace shakes his head slightly as he presses.
“I do not possess enough coin to repay such a debt myself—” nor, he suspects, does anyone “—but my mother will. You needn't live here any longer if you do not wish to. We could see your cottage rebuilt if the fighting has damaged it, or grant you land elsewhere, if that is what you'd prefer. Whatever you ask, so long as it is within my power, I will see it done.”
You are quiet for a long while as Jace finishes off the stew, but he expects hesitation as you mull over what to ask for: gold, land, a better ship, perhaps. Your gaze drifts off to the side, and Jace’s follows it, faltering when he realizes that you’re looking in the direction of what remains of Sharp Point.
That’s right, he remembers—you mentioned your cottage was less than a league away.
From where he sits, he can just see the destruction through the small window. The town is little more than scorched foundations and splintered timbers now, dragonfire having reduced generations of work to ash in the span of a single afternoon. He cannot look at it for long, stomach twisting so unpleasantly that he fears the stew you just cooked him might come right up.
You stay silent for so long that Jace wonders if you have not heard him, and his lips part to repeat himself futilely.
“We used to think they were beautiful, you know?” you say, voice barely over a breath. “We would watch your family fly from King’s Landing and Dragonstone. The children would cheer and call out the names of whatever dragon and royal was passing overhead, even though they knew you could not hear them.” A wistful smile tugs briefly at your lips, and Jace suddenly feels a rock in his stomach, a heaviness that he cannot seem to push away. “There is a wild dragon in these parts—we call him Grey Ghost. He hunts fish along the eastern shore. I see him frequently when I take my father’s boat out. We lived alongside him for years—sometimes he swoops down close when we have a big catch, but he never bothers us. My father always said he was curious—shy, but curious.”
You exhale suddenly as you rise to your feet; Jace wonders if he should ignore the unshed tears in your eyes the same way you politely did for him.
“Then the Prince Aemond and Vhagar came,” you say at last. “The only thing I want, my prince, is for this war to end, but I know you cannot give me that. If you don't mind, I should see to my father's boat before the tide turns. There is more stew in the pot if you would have it. Then you ought to rest. You'll not heal by arguing with your own body.”
Jace opens his mouth.
He does not know what he intends to say, caught between guilt and indignation, because everybody wants the fighting to end—he does, his mother does. Maybe not Daemon, but why do you say it as though he stands opposed to peace? He did not choose this, nor did his mother. It is not his fault that the Greens usurped his mother's throne.
He desperately tries to formulate an answer, but how is he supposed to respond to that? What were they meant to do? Yield to the usurpers? Stand aside while his mother’s birthright was stolen? Let Luke die for nothing? Should he say that he is sorry for your loss? That his mother would never have done this? That Vermax would never have burned a fishing village? That this was all the Greens? That they fight to avenge what happened here?
That dragons are not cruel creatures, he feels the need to tell you when he sees the disdain on your face—it is the people who ride them. It is the Greens. It is Aegon and Aemond, Alicent Hightower and her father.
His lips are parted as though to respond, but he only finds himself staring at you helplessly.
You incline your head politely before slipping out the door, the cool air rushing briefly into the cottage before it shuts behind you once more. Jace remains where he is, staring into the last of his stew until the steam no longer rises from it, the reality of his situation settling over him—Vermax is dead, Luke is dead, and his mother believes them both lost. He does not know whether his brothers and cousins are safe, if his mother still fights for her crown. He is useless, wounded in a fisherman's cottage, alive only because a woman from a town his family failed to protect chose mercy over sense.
He does not think he has ever felt less like the heir to a kingdom.
summary: If you’re meeting someone for the first time in a heavy rain, it’s tired of your souls missing each other so much in your previous life and the sky shedding tears of joy for this meeting.
Words: ~1,2k
Tags: Strangers to lovers-ish, Soulmate rain myth, Carpe Diem philosophy, Comfort, Fluff, Academic aesthetic.
It was Saturday afternoon. The sky was surrounded by gray clouds that collapsed like a heavy, leady curtain over the Hogwarts towers. It was obvious that the weather would cry at any moment. Most of the students would either go to Hogsmeade and leave themselves in those warm, cinnamon-scented arms of Kaymak Beer or enjoy the crispy wood fire by the fireplaces in their common rooms.
But you would like the weather to be off. That gray, gloomy sky would give a strange peace to his soul.
In those moments when everyone was running inside, you went out to the schoolyard where there was no one. It was thundering from afar. Maybe in a few minutes the sky would release all its load. With the book you held tightly in your hand, you left the empty corridors behind and started walking in the garden.
The garden, which was normally full of laughter and students running around, was now completely deserted.
The only people were rushing towards the castle.
Why were people so afraid of getting wet in the rain? From being sick? How ridiculous. No other air could give the peace of the rain that smells of earth and silenced the world.
You wore a white dress as if you were rebelling against that gray gloom. The blowing wind was tossing your hair in your face, blowing your dress, but there was no cold to make you shiver.
Your steps directed you directly towards The Black Lake. When the weather was like this, no one would stop by there, you knew. Exactly the kind you’re looking for, an absolute loneliness.
You would love more than anything to watch those small, perfect circles formed when raindrops hit the surface of the lake.
When he entered the opening where the lake was, a silhouette planted in the shade of the trees caught his eye.
Sirius? You thought for a moment. Sirius Black.
No. It wasn’t him. It was his brother, Regulus.
He was in a lower class than him, but he was much more dignified, much more mature than his older brother.
You knew him. Who wouldn’t know that perfect, noble “golden child” of the Black family?
Regulus knew you too. An acquaintance consisting of a few silent eye contacts in the corridors.
Regulus was moving away from the lake, and you were going towards the lake. In that moment you came side by side, both of you looked at each other.
You were torn between smiling and not smiling. You had no problem with Regulus; you even sensed that he was a very good and subtle child behind that dark family surname.
As you passed by, you gave him a very light, almost vague nod. Shame on you, you didn’t want it.
Just at that intersection, your perfume got mixed up. That heavy, dark, luxurious and reminiscent of winter nights has been blended with your powdery and fresh scent.
—“It will rain.”
You stopped, startled by that voice rising behind you, and turned to Regulus.
The boy was standing under the half-bare trees with the book in his hand, looking over his shoulder at you.
—“You get wet and sick. You can get cold,” he said, staring at you.
Regulus Black’s voice... was completely different from Sirius. Lower. More controlled. It was as if he was weighing every word on a silver scale in his mind, leaving it out like that.
You stopped for a moment and filtered it. The gray sky, that dull stagnation of the lake and the calm stance of Regulus as smooth as a marble statue...
—“I know,” you said, shrugging your shoulders lightly. Your eyes shifted to the sky. “I like the rain.”
Regulus tilted his head a little to the side; it was as if he was analyzing this simple sentence you said in the depths of his mind.
The sky didn’t seem to be able to take it anymore at that time. The first heavy drop fell on the surface of the lake. A thin, delicate ring... Then another one.
Regulus’ gaze shifted to the lake for a moment, then turned to your face again.
—“Loving doesn’t change the fact that you might be sick.”
His voice was still calm. But this time there was a slight, almost unnoticeable hardness, a protectionism in it.
It’s not like a warning, it’s like a habit. It was as if someone had taught him to always be cautious, to always stay within the boundaries since childhood.
You raised your eyebrows slightly, a mischievous smile appeared on the corner of your lips.
—“Sometimes you have to live in the moment, Mr. Black.”
The wind blew a little harder. The rain was accelerating as the leaves of the trees whispered to each other.
The drops, which fell in thin lines, began to leave small, dark stains on the white dress.
Regulus’s gray eyes were fixed on those spots. He didn’t take a step, but his stance changed. It was as if he was standing right on an invisible and dangerous line between leaving and staying.
—“Is it worth wasting the future for the sake of living the moment?” He asked slowly. There was a pure curiosity in his voice.
You laughed lightly. This time it was really a heartfelt smile.
—“The past does not come back, the future has not yet come. All we have is today, right now. That’s why...”You stopped, shrugged lightly and took a deep breath. You turned your gaze to the sky, you felt the coolness of the drops falling on your face.“It is necessary to realize the separation and live without delaying life. This includes risking being sick tomorrow.”
When he turned his eyes back to yours, the corner of Regulus’ lips curled up very slightly. This was the closest, rarest thing to the smile you could see on his face.
The sky suddenly thundered. This time it’s closer, more threatening.
The rain was no longer hiding; it was falling on you with all its might.
You felt your hair get heavy and stick to your face, but you didn’t move.
Regulus was still a few steps away.
There was a short, magical silence. Then Regulus took off his school robe from his shoulders, as if he had silenced those rules-filled voices in his own mind.
He took a step.
And with an undramatic but not at all, such a precise, protective movement, he dropped that robe on your wet shoulders...
—“If you get sick...” He said, his voice was that low, velvety tone again. His eyes were sealed on his eyes.“...It is not worth destroying the present moment of tomorrow to enjoy the present moment.”
The sentence was a bit strange. He is as distant as Regulus, but so deep.
The rain was falling like a thin curtain around the two of you now.
You felt that heavy, woolen texture of the robe on your shoulders. The smell of Regulus was much more pronounced now; that dark, sharp, mysterious smell enveloped you.
While your white dress was about to become transparent due to the rain, his robe was protecting you like an armor.
Regulus did not retreat. He didn’t get close either. He just stood there. And for the first time, it seemed to him that he had no intention of leaving completely.
Then he bowed his head slightly, as if he wanted to leave you alone with Your own loneliness.
—“If you want to stay, don’t get too wet anyway. You’ll get sick.” He said with a goodbye. He turned around and started walking towards the castle.
While looking behind the walking Regulus, you caught your eye on the roots of the old tree by the lake.
There was a knitted scarf with a Slytherin embed in green and silver colors. He must have forgotten.
You slowly picked up the scarf. It was soft between your wet fingers.
When you looked up, you saw that Regulus hadn’t gone far away yet.
If you ran, you would catch up. Would I be disgraced? You thought. I hope I won’t.
You took a deep breath and started walking with quick steps. Those steps soon turned into a light run.
—“Black!” You called from behind.
Regulus interrupted his steps and turned around. You stopped a few steps away from him, you were out of breath.
—“Your scarf... You forgot.” You said.
Normally you wouldn’t talk to him so formally, but you wanted to play the game by his rules because he addressed you with this distance.
Regulus cast a spell on himself with his wand so that he wouldn’t get wet; he didn’t have a single drop on him. But you in front of you...
You were soaked. The color of your hair was darkened by the water, your robe was heavy on your shoulders. Raindrops were hitting the hands that extended the scarf.
Regulus first looked at the scarf, then at the book you were holding in your other hand. It was exactly the same as the book in his own hand.
Dead Poets Society.
Regulus reached out to take the scarf, but paused when his fingers touched your hand for a moment.
The coldness of your skin met his warm fingers. His eyes shifted to the book, then back to your eyes.
The rain was rising and falling between the two of you like a silent spectator.
— “Is it a coincidence...” he said slowly, gently lifting the book in his hand. “...Or will people who read the same things find each other in bad weather?”
There was no mockery in his voice. But it wasn’t straight either. It was the whisper of a soul that was really looking for the answer.
You tilted your head slightly to the side. A vague, defiant smile appeared on his lips.
— “Maybe the weather has nothing to do with it, Mr. Black,” you said, your voice blending with the sound of rain. “Maybe it’s just... we’re doing as the book says. We’re catching the day.”
Regulus slowly pulled the scarf from his fingertips, but did not take his eyes off yours.
At that moment, under the gray sky, time stopped on the shore of the Black Lake.
Regulus had always lived all his life thinking about the future, that dark and necessary future that his family had drawn for him.
But right now, looking at the raindrops leaking through your hair, he stopped thinking about tomorrow for the first time.
— “Catching the day...” he whispered as if enjoying the words. “If it’s rain that day, I think it’s worth getting wet.”
He placed his wand back where he took it out. He lifted the protection spell he did to himself without saying a word.
Within seconds, those grumpy drops falling from the sky began to wet her black hair and flow from your face.
Regulus Black refused to be cautious for the first time in his life. He was breaking the rules for the first time.
You smiled. He looked at you too, and this time, that slight curl on the edge of your lips turned into a real smile.
An ancient wizard’s belief would say that if you meet someone for the first time in a heavy rain, your souls have missed each other so much in their previous life.
When you started walking side by side with Regulus towards the castle, neither of you knew that belief. But you both felt: The sky was shedding tears of joy that afternoon for the two souls who had been looking for each other for centuries to meet.
SUMMARY: the golden company arrives in lys, and aerion is forced into unfortunate situation after unfortunate situation in his attempts to avoid capture. but he realizes that he is not the only one the blackfyres are here for, and he does not know how to cope with the fact that he might lose you for good.
WARNINGS: fem!reader, reader comes from valyrian lineage but no physical traits are mentioned/described. the high valyrian is not properly translated because we don’t know the words for the words I needed so bear with me LOL. aerion's narration is well aerion aufhsduhf LOL he has fantasies of violence and love in the same breath. implications of valyrian exceptionalism from reader/jaenys with how they talk about targaryens/blackfyres but it's not explicit. mentions/references to pegging/aerion "unwillingly" fantasizing about it LOL. aerion is forcibly drugged at one point. brief reference to/mention of abuse of sex workers in lys. choking. there are implications of rape/torture in the first scene when reader & aerion are talking about what could happen if the blackfyres get their hands on him or realize what she's doing. brief self-harm (aerion holds the blade of a dagger against his hand too tight trying to ground himself). switch!reader, switch!aerion (as always).
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Yayyyyyy I hope you guys enjoy this part. It's the longest so far and will probably be the longest generally, I don't see myself ever writing an installment as long as this one LOLL (except maybe when they get married we'll see). But my god this one was a total beast and gave me so much trouble LOLLLLL. I have my first exam on Friday and another Monday, so wish me luck euhuhuuhhuhuhuh. I left one longer note at the end because I don't want to spoil anything that takes place in this part. Also here’s an art I got done of some of the more notable Volantene universe ocs, if you guys are curious. Anyway, comments and reblogs always appreciated! I hope you guys enjoy!
READ: EPHEMERAL
“Get up,” Aerion hears, blinking blearily as his sheets are ripped off his body. “Aerion, get up! Now!”
What the fuck—
Half awake, Aerion’s heart races as he pushes himself into a sitting position, trying to figure out what the fuck is happening. The only reason he doesn’t reach for his blade is that he recognizes your voice. He lets out a disgruntled noise when he feels fingers grab his cheeks hard, glaring when he sees your face inches from his.
Outraged, he sees movement from the corner of his eye and realizes that you did not come alone.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he demands, still trying to wake himself up. He tries to look to the side to see who the fuck you brought into his chambers, but your grip on his face tightens. He grimaces, giving you an annoyed look. “Answer me, you miserable wench. Why—”
“The Golden Company is in Lys,” you say, and Aerion doesn’t think that he hears you correctly at first, staring at you blankly. “Caelyx has clothes for you. Get up, and get dressed now.”
“What did you just s—”
Aerion’s head snaps to the left, a sharp pain spreading through his cheek as he stares at the open balcony looking over Magister Vyrano’s manse.
Did you just strike him?
His tongue darts out to wet his lips, brows furrowing in disbelief. Before he can look back at you and demand to know what the fuck is the matter with you, he feels your hands cradling his face, forcing you to look at him again.
“Aerion, wake the fuck up,” you say again, and he should be angry—he is angry, his chest is hot and bubbling, and his face stings, and indignity and pride flare terribly, and it all fizzles when he hears the fear plain in your voice. He’s never heard you sound this way before. He’s heard you furious, mocking, teasing, happy, but never scared. “Get up, and get dressed now. Stop asking questions. We do not have time.”
Aerion stares at you for a moment longer before he pushes himself out of bed, hardly given a chance to orient himself, before someone—your whore, Aerion realizes disdainfully, the silver-haired pillow boy who always attaches himself to you—is forcing silk chiffon over his shoulders. He looks at the white fabric that he’s being dressed in: revealing and clinging in a way that feels entirely inappropriate for the situation. Dress for a whore, not a prince. And then he looks at the fitted leathers you’re wearing, the red cape attached to your shoulder, the sword at your hip, and he shoves your whore away from him, sneering as he watches him stumble back into a table.
“I am not fucking wearing this,” he spits furiously. “What the fuck is going on?”
“You’re going to wear whatever the fuck I tell you to wear,” you reply, undeterred by his fraying temper. You step closer again, and you grab his cheeks to force him to look at you. You don’t let him yank his face away when he tries. “We need to get you out of the manse and into one of the whorehouses so that your kin don’t come and slit your throat. I’ve arranged for the Second Sons to take you on a ship out of Lys to the Disputed Lands, but the ship doesn’t leave until tomorrow morning, and they cannot leave earlier without drawing suspicion. So for the next day, you’re going to be Ari of Lys, dragon prince, and Aerion Targaryen will have left Lys a moon ago because he grew bored with whores and wine. Do you understand?”
Aerion shakes his head, and when your whore tries to get the clothes on him again, he raises his hand furiously, threatening to put his fist into his face. You immediately raise your hand in response, threatening to strike him again. Aerion gapes at you, betrayed.
“If you strike him, dragon prince, I will parade you around as you are,” you hiss, pointedly looking down at his current state: bare-chested and hair sleep-mussed. “Caelyx was kind enough to let you borrow his silks so that you may not be entirely indecent when you step outside. Or would you prefer to be dragged through the streets half-naked for all of Lys to admire?”
“It is transparent,” Aerion says furiously. “I may as well be bare.”
“It is disguising,” you shoot back. “No one will look twice at another silver-haired whore on an island full of silver-haired whores.”
“I am not a fucking whore.”
“You will be whatever the fuck I tell you to be if it keeps you alive,” you shout. Then you exhale, rubbing your face. “Aerion, please—they are docking, they have probably already docked by now. We do not have time for this.”
Frustrated, Aerion glares at you, and then he glares at your whore, who has the audacity to give him a sweet smile. Aerion bares his teeth at the boy, a disgusted expression on his face as he returns to dressing him in the soft silks.
Aerion spits, “How many men have you let fuck you in this?”
The whore raises his eyebrows, lips curled up. “They are my special silks, prince,” he purrs. He looks pointedly at you as he answers, “Only one person has fucked me in them.”
Aerion’s blood pressure skyrockets, pulse thudding dangerously in his ears as he turns to look at your whore. There’s no way that he’s being dressed in something that another man was wearing while you fucked him. The boy only gives him a smug smile, and Aerion’s gaze cuts toward you, questioning, and he blanches when he sees your eyes slide shut.
Instead of denying it, you give your whore a long look—a warning.
Aerion gapes again. “You cannot be serious,” he hisses at you, ripping his arm away when your whore tries to finish dressing him. “Will you—”
“We do not have the time for this,” you say through your teeth, turning a cold look on Aerion now, as though Aerion isn’t the victim in this situation. “Caelyx, stop antagonizing him. Aerion, get dressed.”
Aerion’s nostrils flare as he inhales deeply, tongue pressing against the back of his teeth as he wills himself to calm down. His gaze flicks back toward the open balcony as your whore—Caelyx—returns to wrapping him in the fine silks. He can’t see anything—Aerion’s balcony faces the west, and Lys’s ports are to the north, but he’s heard enough about the Golden Company in passing to imagine the fleet of ships with golden banners docking in the harbor. Recent reports have put their numbers at over twelve thousand—all of Essos has been whispering about them since the sacking of Qohor.
“How many are here?” he asks you, jaw tight.
“Enough,” you answer, arms folded over your chest as you stand in the doorframe of his chambers, one hand on the hilt of your sword, looking down the hall, as though you expect Aegor Rivers to come barreling down any moment. Aerion’s heart is pounding, he realizes, as the situation finally begins to hit him. “One of my harbor boys came running to me as soon as he saw the gold banners in the distance. I came here as soon as I got everything handled.”
Aerion lets out a sharp breath through his nose, dragging his hand through his hair as he paces once across the room, away from your whore, silk clinging to him in a way that makes his skin crawl.
“After you got everything handled,” he echoes, incredulous, turning on you, trying to turn the nasty panic that climbs his throat into something more manageable: anger. “Instead of waking me, you decided to—what—build a whole fucking scheme while I was asleep?”
“I did not have time to argue with you first,” you hiss. “By the time I reached the harbor to confirm the banners, the first ship was a mile out from docking. I—”
“You should have come to me first,” he interrupts, heat rising in his chest. “You should have—”
“Aerion.”
Aerion’s teeth grind, something uncertain spiking in his chest with his heart rate as he fists his hands at his side to hide the way his fingers tremble—he pretends it is fury and not fear. You look back over at him, gaze lingering on the way the sheer silks cling to his slim hips, hiding little more than necessary—barely what is necessary. He glares at you, but there is a lump in his throat, and he cannot swallow it away.
Aerion could die today.
There is a really good chance that Aerion will die today.
He exhales as he paces over to the balcony. When his back is to you and your whore, he lifts shaking fingers to his chest, over his rapidly beating heart. The last time it beat like this—wild and erratic, like it was trying to tear itself out of his chest—was during the Trial of Seven. In the mud, with blood in his mouth, in his eyes, iron on his tongue, vision blurring and head half in the clouds because he lost so much blood, staring up at a hedge knight who could have killed him if he wanted.
He had been afraid.
He’d been lying in the muck; he knew he had lost even before he yielded. He knew it the moment the oaf stood back up after Aerion had given it his all. He had no energy left, and he was bleeding out, and when he hit the ground that final time, he knew that he wasn’t going to get up. He remembers hearing his father yelling for him—my boy, Aerion! My boy!—and he remembers thinking that at least he would die in battle, at least he would die with his father’s voice in his ears, he would die knowing that his father cared enough to fight for him, to beg for him.
He is afraid now.
And there is no oaf in front of him this time, no enemy wielding a blade that he can try to strike down, and no father to save him; just ships on the horizon, men he cannot see yet, and the suffocating feeling of knowing that they are coming from him. The Blackfyres are here, on this island, searching for him, and there’s nothing he will be able to do if they find him. There will be no yielding, no surrender. If they figure out he is here, they will cut his throat, and he will die cowering in silks instead of armor, in silence instead of with his father’s voice in his ears.
He wonders, briefly and bitterly, if Maekar will even care.
Probably not—no, there’s no probably about it. His father will not care. He did not care when Aerion was choking over his own blood, hardly able to speak, when he delivered the news that he would be sent across the Narrow Sea. He did not care to hear Aerion beg him not to do this, did not care when Aerion reopened the stitches on his thigh, trying to scramble after him when he turned his back on his own son. His father knew that the Blackfyres and their allies were across the Narrow Sea. Knew that this was a risk. And he sent Aerion here anyway. Aerion died to Maekar the moment Baelor’s heart stopped beating.
He will not care.
Maybe, even, he was hoping for this.
A tragedy to befall the mad prince that he can work into a way to gather sympathy back home. Aerion was never useful to him alive, cost him far more than he was worth, but maybe in death—
Distantly, he hears you tell your whore to leave and then your boots clicking against the ground as you make your way over to him. He half wants to tell you to fuck off, to let him handle this himself, that he doesn’t need nor want your help, and he can face the Blackfyres himself, but then you slip your arms around his waist, rest your forehead against his shoulder blades, and the protests die on his lips. His throat bobs as your hand slides up his torso so that your palm is over his heart, feeling the rapid, fluttering pace of it.
“Do you trust me?” you ask quietly, lips against his shoulder.
It terrifies him how easily the answer comes to him. “Yes.”
“Then trust me,” you say. “Go with Caelyx. He will bring you to the Perfumed Garden. The First Magister and I will be meeting the Golden Company in the central square. The Garden sits on the north end of the central square. You will be able to watch and listen to what we say to the Golden Company, and if things go south, Caelyx will make sure you get to the west side of the city and—”
“And what about you?” Aerion demands, whirling around to face you. “If things go south, you expect me to cower and hide while you—” While you die. He cannot even bring himself to say it. “I will not. You cannot expect that of me. You—”
“I’ll be fine,” you say dismissively. “I—”
“Do not take me for a fool,” he hisses. “There is a reason you are armed.”
You press your lips together, staring at him for a long while, and Aerion feels sick. They are here for him, they will kill him if they get their hands on him, and you are trying to send him away so they cannot, but if they realize what you’re doing, they will kill you.
Aerion might die today, and Aerion might get you killed today, too.
He has never felt so useless before.
“They won’t kill me if things go south,” you finally say, shaking your head, and Aerion bristles, because you do take him for a fool and he should see your tongue removed for it, but all he can do is try to swallow his own as fear claws at his chest. “They won’t, Aerion. They will not risk making an enemy of Volantis. We have been over this before. If anything, they will take me hostage and—”
And what the hell do sellsword companies do with their hostages? he wants to scream at you. You are capable, he knows this. You are capable, and you are influential, and you are dangerous, but you are a woman. He wants to shake you to make you understand—if they take you hostage, then—
“They will do worse to you if they get their hands on you,” you say quietly. “They will make a spectacle of you. They will want something to show for it—something to carry back across the Narrow Sea and boast of. The Brightflame finally put out, the mad dragon tamed. They will keep you alive long enough for word to spread, long enough for your family to send men after you, and while they have you alive, they will do everything they can to break you—”
Aerion does not need to hear this from you. Doesn’t like the way it makes his skin crawl.
“You are a fool if you think they would break me,” Aerion says through his teeth. “They—”
“They will,” you interrupt, voice so firm that it makes a chill run down his spine. “Aerion, they will break you. They will take their time, and they will make you into something that can be passed from hand to hand, something they can laugh over and parade about as a prize to mock your family. And once word has spread, and there is nothing left of you worth keeping, then they will kill you.”
“I would sooner kill myself,” Aerion hisses, but his stomach is turning, and the room feels too small, and the silk is too tight, and the air is too thin. “I would—”
You grab his face between your hands hard, pinching his cheeks, and Aerion loathes what you must see in your eyes to make the frustration and anger drain the way it does into something softer, grip on his face more gentle as your thumbs stroke his cheekbones.
“They would not let you, Aerion. Please stop fighting me. We do not have time for this.”
He glares at you, fury and indignation rising rapidly in his chest, because he knows that you are right. He knows it in the way his pulse will not slow, in the way his thoughts keep circling back to the same suffocating end, no matter how hard he tries to twist them into something else. He knows, and he hates it, hates that you have named it, hates that you are forcing him to look at it, to feel it.
Will his father even care?
Will Maekar spare a second thought or go on his merry way?
“Do you trust me?” you ask again, firmer this time.
Aerion’s jaw tightens, and he nods.
“Then trust me,” you repeat, hands sliding from his cheeks to hold the back of his head, fingers threading through silver hair. “Trust me. Please. I need to meet with the First Magister before the Golden Company reaches the central square. Go with Caelyx and listen to him. He will relay everything else I don’t have the time to explain, okay?”
Aerion does not like it. He stares at you, and he is angry and helpless and so frustrated that he can feel his stomach churning, and he knows you know it from the way your eyes search his, begging him to just agree, not to make things more difficult.
He lets out a noise caught between a scoff and a sigh. “Fine. Fuck. Fine. But I do not like this at all, and if things go wrong—”
If things go wrong, then what? He’ll be dead, or worse. You’ll be dead, or worse.
His throat bobs as he swallows.
Still, you say with a smile, “If things go wrong, you may hate me for it, and you may tell me I told you so when we meet in hell.”
Aerion snorts. “That is not funny, wench.”
You hum, lips still curved up. “It is kind of funny.”
“Not even slightly.”
You laugh, leaning in to press your forehead against his temple, and he sighs, eyes sliding shut. You ghost your lips against his cheekbone, and then turn his face slightly to the side so that you can brush your lips against his.
You say quietly, “Pāsagon nyke. Nyke gīmigon skoros iksan gaomagon.”
“Eman ossēntan lēda qubykta vali,” you tell him, brushing your fingers through his hair. “Mirri kessa ivestragon iksan qubykta vali.”
I have dealt with worse men. Some would say I am worse men.
Aerion scoffs, but he finds himself smiling. “Iksā iā mittys, iksis skoros iksā,” he replies, voice weaker than he intends for it to be. “Māzigon arlī naejot nyke. Konir sagon iā udrāzma.”
You are a fool, is what you are. Return to me. That is an order.
Your lips curve up again, and you tilt your face to ghost your lips against his temple. “Kesan va moriot māzigon arlī naejot ao, zaldrīzes dārilaros.”
I will always return to you, dragon prince.
It should bring him some semblance of comfort, but the pit in his stomach only worsens.
———————
“You should be paying attention to me, prince,” your whore drawls as he leans against the doorframe to the room Aerion is waiting in. “I am trying to teach you how to behave properly as a courtesan.”
Aerion’s eye twitches, but he doesn’t look back at him, staring into the central square as you talk quietly to the First Magister, standing between him and his son, several of the Second Sons and the magister’s household guard lingering behind the three of you.
This is the first time he’s seen the man look so serious—he’s always been quick to smile, friendly enough to be overlooked, though you are quick to tell Aerion that he is quite the cruel gossip behind closed doors. A vicious tongue and sharp mind to match, because one does not become First Magister in Lys without both at his disposal.
Aerion has always dismissed it when you would tell him this; he’s never been able to reconcile the man you lauded as quick-witted and ruthless with the jovial man he portrays himself as, but now he can, with the way his eyes are cold and expression is stern as he stares in the direction of the ports, head tilted slightly toward you as he listens to whatever you’re saying. His son stands slightly behind the two of you, stiff, hand on the pommel of a decorative sword, gaze flicking nervously, visibly taking deep breaths to calm himself.
“Did you know Marcellus asked her to marry him when she first arrived in Lys?” Caelyx says as he makes his way over to where Aerion is sitting, lounging on the cushions across from him. Aerion gives him a cool look, but the whore only raises his eyebrows, smiling easily, as though the Golden Company isn’t about to come down on Lys.
“Who the fuck is Marcellus?”
Caelyx lets out a huff of laughter and then nods out to where you’re standing. Aerion realizes he must be referring to the First Magister’s son—Aerion never even bothered to learn the idiot’s name. He scoffs and says, “Him? He is a fool. I once saw him trip over his own silks walking into a feast. Nearly took half the table with him. Then had a servant whipped to make it seem as though it was her fault.”
“He is an idiot,” Caelyx agrees, taking a sip of wine, unbothered, “but he is also pretty, and he is also cruel, so that makes him just her type.”
Aerion sneers, gaze flicking back out to where he’s standing just a smidge too close to you. He isn’t sure if he’d go so far as to say pretty—he’s sun-kissed, tall and thin, not toned, missing the lean muscle Aerion has, missing the silver-gold hair of Valyria, even if he does have the purple eyes. It’s a tawny brown instead, braided over his shoulder; he finds himself shaking his head, a scoff on his lips.
No, Aerion thinks bitterly, not pretty at all. Not nearly your type.
“She liked him well enough for a few months,” Caelyx notes, smiling to himself as he watches the square. “Lasted longer than most, poor boy actually thought she might marry him. Eight whole moons, then he didn’t exist to her anymore. The two of you are coming up on that, aren’t you?”
Aerion stills, gaze sliding from the square to the whore sitting on the cushions next to him—too close to him, too smug. Aerion does not have time for this. Does not have time or patience. The Golden Company will arrive any moment, but—
—but he does not like the mockery in his tone. The implication. Aerion is not stupid, he knows what your whore is trying to say, and it settles very, very poorly.
Caelyx leans in a little, so close that Aerion can smell the cherry wine on his tongue. “I could teach you to pleasure her,” he murmurs, leaning in closer to brush his lips against Aerion’s ear. “So that she does not become bored with you like she does everyone else.”
Aerion shoves him away hard, seething. “I should take your tongue, whore,” he spits. “Who do you think you are?”
Caelyx is unbothered, smiling still as he leans back against the cushions again. “I only mean to help, prince—”
“My prince.”
“Would that you were,” Caelyx drawls smugly. “Think on it. We both know she grows bored easily, and we both know that in the five years she’s been here, she’s never grown bored of me. I love nothing more than to be of use. We could have fun—the three of us.”
“Do not speak to me again,” Aerion says through his teeth. “If you speak to me again, I will have your tongue removed, and not even she will be able to save you.”
“Did you know that sometimes she enjoys taking the lead?” Caelyx continues, unperturbed, silver hair falling in his eyes as he tilts his head to the side. As Aerion’s about to spit out a yes, reminded of the countless times you forced him onto his back and climbed on top of him, Caelyx adds, “In ways most men are too proud to learn.”
Aerion pauses, brows furrowing as he casts a side eye toward the whore, unsure of what exactly he is implying. He fights a snarl when he’s met with another too smug smile.
Caelyx only smiles wider. “It can feel good for men too, prince,” he purrs, leaning in again. “Taking it the way a woman does. She knows how to make it feel good.”
Aerion’s face burns hot as soon as Caelyx’s words register. He flounders, lips parting, attention drawing from the square fully now. Vile words threaten to burst from his lips, pride and indignity warring, insult for this whore to say something so crude, but they die in his throat, strangled by the heat that floods his chest and the unwelcome flicker of curiosity that follows. He hides it with a scoff, but—
His thoughts traitorously cling to the idea, envisioning what your whore dared to imply. He can see it too easily—your hands on Caelyx, pushing him back against the bed, holding him there, his head tipped back, mouth parted, gasping, moaning, violet eyes rolled back as you press deep inside him and take what you want.
Something green and ugly twists in Aerion’s chest, breath quickening, rage curdling, and then—
Then it turns. Then it is your hands on him instead, firm at his hips, nails digging into his skin as you force him down, as you hold him there, and all he can do is take everything you’re willing to give him. It would be a fight—everything is always a fight with the two of you, a war for dominance with blood drawn and bruises painted on smooth skin. He would not yield to you, not so willingly, not like your whore, but you would make him yield, and Aerion would—he would enjoy it. Aerion has never let anyone take control like that, has never given it, has never even considered it. The very idea should disgust him, should make him recoil the way he did just a moment ago, but it doesn’t.
He chokes, breath catching in his throat, heat flooding his face as he realizes how much his thoughts have drifted—that Caelyx has noticed it too, from the way satisfied expression on his face—and Aerion jerks his gaze away like he’s been struck.
“Shut up,” he snaps hoarsely, jaw clenched so tight it aches, because he cannot tell if he wants to rip Caelyx’s throat out for saying it or himself for imagining it.
Luckily, or unluckily, maybe, Caelyx does not have the opportunity to respond, because the Golden Company finally approaches the square.
Disgust curdles in Aerion’s stomach when he recognizes Aegor Rivers standing at the head of the group, black hair loose at his shoulders and dressed in plain armor, the Valyrian sword Blackfyre sheathed at his hip.
For a moment, he nearly rises. The impulse is sudden and violent—grab a blade, any blade, and cut his way through them until the bastard bleeds out in the dust and that stolen sword is returned to where it belongs.
Behind the bastard are the false claimants. Aerion recognizes them without introductions, and it makes him sick. It makes him sick that they look like him. Sick that they have the same silver hair, the same violet eyes, the blood of Old Valyria running just as true through bastards and pretenders as it does through him—and they dare to stand beneath the banner of the black dragon.
His body shifts, nails biting into his palm and teeth grinding together.
He hates them. He hates the way they stand there like they have a right to be, like they have not stolen everything they are from his family and twisted it into something lesser. Hates the way the city seems to hold its breath for them, as though they’re something to be reckoned with instead of something to be stamped out.
He starts to rise, and your whore tenses on his opposite side as though to stop him, and then—
—and then the First Magister steps forward, and Aerion loses the opportunity.
He draws blood from how hard he bites his tongue, feels it dripping between his knuckles, too.
“I must say, if you have come to conquer our fine city with such… modest forces, then you will find us less accommodating than you might hope,” the First Magister says, eyes sharp as he stares down at the Golden Company from the top of the marble steps. “We do not take kindly to uninvited guests.”
Aegor Rivers does not rise to the bait. He paces a few steps forward, standing at the foot of the steps, gaze sweeping from the First Magister to you to the First Magister’s son, and finally to the men arrayed behind the three of you—a small regiment of the Second Sons, Lys’s gonfaloniere, and the household guard. The other magisters are nowhere to be seen.
It is a statement of unity, Caelyx had explained when Aerion first made note of it—the Golden Company is not welcome in Lys.
“We are not here to conquer, magister,” Aegor Rivers replies at last, inclining his head to the First Magister. “We hear you harbor a guest of particular interest to us, and we hope to come to an… understanding.”
“How unfortunate that you have come all this way for a rumor,” the First Magister replies with a thin smile, and he exchanges a quick look with you that Aerion isn’t able to read, “and without the decency to give notice before your arrival. One would almost think you meant to insult us. Did you mean to insult the magisters of our lovely Lys, my lord?”
“He is no lord,” you interrupt blandly. “You are being far too generous, magister.”
Aerion’s lips curl up despite himself. But then you throw a wink back at the First Magister’s son, Marcellus, who snorts at your words, and his smile flattens, irritated again. He side-eyes the two whores who slip into the room with them—two girls, he’s seen them hanging around you before, but he doesn’t know either of their names.
“Caelyx,” the taller one says, glancing nervously out to the square. “How is it going?”
“She’s only insulted them once,” Caelyx says as he smirks into his wine. “So I would say well.”
The shorter girl laughs, settling onto the cushions next to Aerion, resting her head on her arms as she looks out into the square. Aerion finds himself irritated again all of a sudden—the silk clings to him, too soft and too light and too wrong, and the scent of perfume and wine hangs thick in the air, cloying and suffocating.
He should be down there—at your side, at the First Magister’s shoulder, steel in hand, not hidden in silk and pillows and painted smiles, not tucked away among whores. His fingers curl into the cushions, nails biting into the fabric as his eyes track you. This is fucking humiliating. He exhales hard through his nose, trying to calm his temper.
“Watch yourself, prince,” Caelyx drawls, watching him carefully from the corner of his eye. Aerion sneers at him. “I only mean to say that you know what is at stake. Do not let your pride get the best of you.”
“I do not need you reminding me, whore,” Aerion scoffs.
Still, his stomach flips as he remembers what you said earlier. He does not want to think about that, because if he thinks about that, he thinks about how he got here, and if he thinks about how he got here, he thinks about his father, and if he thinks about his father, he will wonder—will he even care? And Aerion will not like the answer he comes to, so he cannot think about what will happen if the Blackfyres see through the lies, so he does not.
“I had thought Lys better governed,” Aegor says after a moment, “than to allow its… wards such freedom with their tongue.”
You tilt your head, considering him.
“And I had thought you more impressive,” you reply. “Given the stories.”
“Across the Narrow Sea, a ward who spoke so carelessly would find herself corrected. Firmly,” Aegor says after a moment, voice low and edged. “It is a failing of the Free Cities that they keep such a gentle hand in the face of such disobedience.”
“If you are so fond of firm hands, I suggest you sail back to your Sunset Kingdom and find one willing to keep you,” you say, smiling, until you are not. “If you ever imply I need to be firmly corrected again, I will skin you alive and pour salt over every inch of your body.”
Aegor’s mouth curves, faint and humorless. “A bold threat,” he says. “Though I wonder—would your hosts thank you for starting a war in their square? It would be a shame to see Lys burn for your temper.”
“Lys would not be the city that burns, sellsword. It will be your ships and your men,” you drawl. “The sacking of Qohor has made you bold, but Lys is not Qohor—nor is Volantis, and you tread on making an enemy of both.”
“You are an exile, my lady,” Aegor says coolly, tilting his head. “You think your city will go to war at your whims.”
“Exile, maybe, but I am old blood, and you are the son of an Andal whore. They would never suffer the insult without consequence.”
Aerion barks out a laugh.
“It’s good to know you haven’t lost your teeth in the years you’ve spent amongst silk boys,” an unfamiliar voice says from the crowd of sellswords. Your expression shifts instantly, the irritation disappearing, eyes widening, and a pit inexplicably forms in Aerion’s stomach. He spares a glance at Caelyx, but Caelyx put down his wine, frowning as he straightens from where he was leaning back against the cushions. “I warned him that you would eat him alive if he tried to play this game. You should have listened, Rivers.”
Aerion watches as a man with silver hair, braided back from his face, makes his way across the marble toward you, all careless smiles and casual arrogance. He is tall, thin, but lean in the way of a man who knows weaponry, not the pillow play of the Lyseni silk boys—and he is very, very pretty. He dresses like you in black leather with a red cape over his shoulder, and he wears Valyrian steel like it’s fucking gold on his fingers, on his neck, on his ears, a sword at his hip and a dagger at his forearm.
Aerion knows before either of you speaks.
All of the tension bleeds from your body, disbelief spilling across your face, and Aerion feels sick to his stomach already.
“Jaenys?” you gasp, a breathless smile spreading across your face as you make your way down the steps to meet him halfway. Aerion doesn’t realize he’s rising to his feet until he already has, jaw tight as he watches the way the man reaches for your waist, pulling your body close until it’s flush to his. Your hands rise to his face, gentle, your cradle his jaw, thumbs brushing his cheekbones like you need to make sure he’s real. Aerion’s stomach twists. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“That’s one of her friends,” one of the girls says, and Aerion’s teeth grind because that is not the way friends hold one another. “From back home. I recognize the name.”
That is the way—that is the way you’ve held his face in the cove, in bed, when it is only you and only him. He watches as you let out a bright laugh, genuine and pretty as a bell, more real than anything Aerion has ever heard from you before. And Aerion feels fucking sick—he feels sick, and he does not want to see this, but he cannot draw his gaze away, watching as the other man draws you in close, burying his face in your hair, pressing his lips to your temple, your neck, laughing into your skin.
“Why is he with the Golden Company?” the other girl asks warily. “Caelyx, what should we do?”
Caelyx is no longer drinking. He has set his wine aside, watching the scene with calculating eyes, and he’s holding a small bowl in his right hand, and distantly, Aerion recognizes the fine powder that sits inside it from the corner of his eye, but he’s more focused on you, on the way your gaze traces Jaenys’s face, the way you’re holding him, the way he’s holding you. You’re talking to him, but your voice is too quiet now for him to overhear from the Perfumed Garden, as though you’d forgotten he was listening, forgotten you’d promised that you would talk loud enough so that he’d know what was happening, forgotten about him.
Aerion’s fingers curl at his sides, nails biting into his palms as he watches the way Jaenys lifts your hand to his lips, kissing your knuckles, your wrist, your pulse, smiling into your skin—the two of you curling into one another like the Golden Company is not in the square, like there’s no danger and no one is watching.
What the fuck?
You say something again, too quiet again, and then you nod toward the Perfumed Garden, and Aerion’s heart drops to his fucking feet. No—no, you wouldn’t. His mind scrambles to make sense of the motion you just made, to force it into something that doesn’t feel like a blade sliding between his ribs. You wouldn’t just—you wouldn’t just give him up so easily, not like that, not after everything you said, not just because, not just because—
He can’t even finish the thought, because he can’t even fucking convince himself of it. He knows well how much you long for home, more than he does; he knows the way you speak of the people you left behind, the future you lost, and he knows—
“It’s not what you think,” he hears Caelyx say, but it feels like there’s fucking cotton in his ears. Everything feels distant and far away, and he can only stare out at the square, at the way your head is bent together with Jaenys, at the way you motion again to the Garden, to Aerion. “It’s not—”
“I know,” he spits, and then he laughs once, sharp and humorless. “You do not need to—I do not need—”
He can’t even get a fucking sentence out, and his face flames red with humiliation, and his breath is too shallow. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t—iksan aōhon, iksā ñuhon. You said it, he said it. You would not give him up so easily.
“She told me to tell you that if the Golden Company pressed for negotiations, she would bring it to the Perfumed Garden so you could listen in on what’s being said in the chance it pertains to your house,” Caelyx says, and then shifts closer. Aerion shifts away, bumping into the whore on his other side, and he suddenly feels too closed in and too distracted, because he can’t drag his eyes from the square. “You need to take this.”
“I am not drugging myself when they are five feet from the fucking door,” Aerion snaps, rounding on him, voice low but vicious. His hands are shaking now—he curls them into fists to hide it, nails digging deeper into his palms. “When they will be in the same fucking room as me. Have you lost your damn mind?”
Caelyx doesn’t flinch. “You will give yourself away the moment they start talking about you or your family,” he says, lifting the bowl slightly, the fine powder shifting inside. It’s not the same one you took with him in the garden at the revel—this one is a shimmering blue. “Look at you.”
“I am fine,” Aerion spits.
“You are not,” Caelyx replies flatly.
Aerion’s pulse won’t slow; his thoughts are spiraling, circling back to you, the Golden Company, Jaenys, that gesture, to the way it looked, to the way it felt, to the way it hurt. Aerion isn’t even sure if he’s breathing properly.
Will his father care?
Will he think twice when news reaches him?
Will you care?
Will you—
Caelyx’s gaze flicks behind Aerion, and Aerion catches it a split second too late. His gaze snaps behind him as the woman on his opposite side grabs his right wrist hard, pinning it to the cushions, while the other one grabs his left. Aerion thrashes, but they are stronger than they look, and Aerion is thoroughly distracted.
“What the fuck—” Aerion snarls, twisting hard, muscles straining as he tries to rip himself free. The cushions shift beneath him, silk sliding, his footing useless, and fury spikes hot and immediate, cutting clean through the panic. “Get your hands off me—”
He jerks again, violently this time, and one of them gasps as his shoulder clips her, but her grip doesn’t loosen. The other tightens, digging her fingers into his wrist hard enough to bruise, and Aerion cannot get his footing for leverage to pull away.
“Hurry up, Caelyx!”
“You think you can lay hands on me? I am a prince of the blood,” Aerion spits, voice dropping into something more dangerous but riddled with panic that he cannot quite push down. His eyes flash, violet gone almost black in his rage. “I will have your hands for this—I will have your tongues, your lives—every last one of you—”
“Hold him,” Caelyx snaps, all softness gone.
Aerion bares his teeth, lunging forward despite the hold on him, trying to get at him, to hurt him, because this—this humiliation, this loss of control, this—
Caelyx moves faster. A hand fists in Aerion’s hair, yanking his head back hard enough to make his breath hitch, his throat exposed, jaw forced open on a startled inhale, and then fingers are shoved into his mouth, the powder coated on digits, and Aerion chokes, thrashing hard now, rage turning wild and frantic as he bucks against their hold. Your whores, to their credit, look guilty—the girls do at least, Caelyx is only watching with thinly pressed lips, holding his face and his nose so that he cannot breathe, forcing him to swallow the powder he pushed into his mouth.
“Sorry, prince,” Caelyx murmurs, though he doesn’t sound all too sorry. The powder is already dissolving on Aerion’s tongue, bitter and strange, and when he tries to gasp for air, he swallows. “She told us to use whatever force was necessary if it came to this.”
He shoves Caelyx away hard, scrambling off the cushions to the marble floor, on his hands and knees, vision blurred as he tries and fails to gag up whatever they forced him to take. One of the girls has the audacity to creep closer to him, worried, and he bares his teeth at her furiously, grabbing whatever is closest to him—a glass— and flinging it hard at her head. It misses, shattering against the wall, but it still has its desired effect, as the girl scrambles away.
“I’ll kill you,” Aerion gasps, eyes wild and furious as he stares up at Caelyx, who hasn’t budged from the cushions. “All three of you, her, I’ll kill you all, I’ll—”
Caelyx sighs, gaze drifting out to where you’re still laughing with your friend, limbs entwined, faces too close together, to where the Golden Company is waiting for the two of you to stop talking, and he says quietly, “Let’s make sure you live long enough to have the opportunity, yeah?”
Will you care? Will you care? Will you care?
———————
Everything feels distant and faraway.
After Aerion settles down, Caelyx explains that they give the younger ones this powder when they take their first clients. Men pay extra for whores who haven’t been passed around yet—cruel men, violent men, the kind that want to see the blood, that want to cause it, that want to hear the sound a girl makes when they hurt, but still want to convince themselves that they’re not doing anything wrong, because it’s only sex with a whore, after all.
The powder makes it easier for them; it softens the worst parts, turning something unbearable into something survivable. Not painless, because it’s never painless, but it makes everything more distant and manageable.
Aerion stares forward as you enter the room, laughing in the arms of your friend Jaenys, and there’s not even a tug in his chest or a twist in his stomach—as though everything happening around him belongs to someone else.
He knows what he should feel—the bitter, ugly flood of it, the heat and the humiliation, he knows it is there, but he just… cannot reach it. It sits somewhere behind his ribs, muffled and dulled down to a distant pressure that cannot claw its way to the surface.
Aerion watches you as you cross the threshold, Jaenys’s hand at your waist like it belongs there, like it has always belonged there, like Aerion is an imposter and never truly had a place in your life—the sight registers cleanly, but it does not cut the way he knows it should.
Your gaze slides over him like he’s not even there.
He should not have stayed.
(“You don’t have to sit in the room for the conversation,” Caelyx says as he gets the main room ready for the meeting about to take place—only the Perfumed Garden’s best permitted in the area. “You can wait in the back or upstairs. You’ll still be able to hear it all, but—”
“No,” he says after a moment, voice slow to his own ears. He cannot even reach the anger he knows he should feel. It is infuriating. “No. I need to be here. They won’t recognize me. Not like this.”
Because this is humiliating. This is shameful. This is everything Aerion Brightflame is not. Even if they do see a ghost of the Targaryen dynasty in his face, the whole world knows him well enough to know that he’d never be caught dead dressed in silk posing as a whore. That’s exactly why you insisted on this, exactly why he fought it.
He will put it to the test, he decides, and if it fails, and he is butchered in silk by the Blackfyres, then it will be your fault.
Will you even care? Will you even—)
He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like this at all. He doesn’t like seeing you with your friend. He doesn’t like the way you don’t acknowledge him. Doesn’t like the way the First Magister’s son trails behind you, looking out of place and like he wants to cling to you. Doesn’t like the pit in his stomach that forms when he sees Aegor Rivers duck into the Perfumed Garden with a twisted expression, distant and unreachable as that pit may be. Doesn’t like the sight of the Blackfyre bastards that follow in after him—three of them, silver-haired and violet-eyed.
“My lady,” Caelyx greets you with a demure smile, pressing his lips to your knuckles. You are leaning your body against Jaenys, as though you do not wish to stand on your own, as though the two of you are husband and wife, lovers who can’t bear to part. The sight of it makes Aerion sick—or, it should make Aerion sick. He cannot reach that either. He does not like this. “We’re here to serve as you please. Let us know how we may make your guests comfortable.”
“We’ll take the room,” you reply, and you shift to stand up straight. Aerion can breathe again. You finally look around the room, disinterest flicking across your face until your eyes settle on him resting against the cushions. He catches the irritation that flashes briefly in your eyes. “Get me Vaella and Rhalla. And a couple of the other girls. Boys too. And wine. Lots of it. Gods know I need it.”
You are a fucking idiot, you tell him without saying anything, fighting a frustrated sneer as your gaze lingers on him a moment too long. Why are you lounging about so carelessly? Why didn’t you go upstairs?
Aerion doesn’t raise his eyebrows mockingly, but he thinks you know he wants to, because your eye twitches before you mask it and turn back to your guests.
“We do not need whores,” Aegor Rivers says roughly. “Let us—”
“Do not speak to me unless I address you first,” you cut in, casting an annoyed look back to the sellsword.
Aerion knows it’s because you’re frustrated with him and taking it out on the first person who dared to speak to you, and it pleases him—or it should. He cannot feel anything beyond this muted numbness.
The silence stretches, taut, as Aegor stills at your interruption, something dark flickering behind his eyes, his jaw tightening just a fraction before he reins it in. You turn your back on him, dismissing him, then make your way over to the cushions, exhaling as you drop back onto them, head rolled back as you stare up at the ceiling for a moment. He wants to know what you’re thinking, he wants to know what’s happening, he hates this. He hates all of this.
The others begin to seat themselves—Aegor Rivers and the Blackfyre pretenders across from you, Marcellus on your left, Jaenys to your right. After what feels like an eternity, Caelyx returns to the room with the two girls from before, along with several others, boys and girls alike, all soft smiles and lowered gazes as they drift into the room, trying to figure out who to go to, where to stand, like they are nothing more than decoration.
Your head rolls to the side, gaze cutting across the room, straight to Aerion.
“Ari,” you purr, lips tilted up into a lazy smile. Aerion doesn’t react only because he can’t. The muted panic sits low and unreachable in his stomach when he realizes that you’re purposely drawing attention to him. What the hell are you doing? “Come here. I’ve missed you.”
The instinct to refuse is there, buried beneath the haze, sharp and stubborn and his, in spite of the drugs dumbing him down. He wants to bare his teeth and stay exactly where he is, wants to force you to come to him instead. But it never makes it past that first flicker, because Aegor’s gaze shifts, the room tilts in his direction, and Aerion is suddenly very aware of every pair of eyes that might look at him with suspicion if he hesitates or lingers too long or does anything other than exactly what is expected of him.
Because he is a whore of the Perfumed Garden. Ari of Lys.
Aerion fucking hates you. Aerion wants you dead. Not even this stupid drug can force away the resentment that bubbles in his chest as he forces himself to his feet, silk scraping uncomfortably against his skin as he makes his way across the room toward you.
Are you purposely doing this to humiliate him? Why would you do this? Will you care? Will you—
“Do you know all of the whores on this island by name?” one of the Blackfyres drawls across from you, distracted as he glances up at a pretty golden-haired girl who smiles sweetly at him.
Aerion realizes that no one is really looking at him anymore, not beyond the short glance when you first addressed him. By the time Aerion reaches you, the attention has already shifted away—he has been dismissed, just another pretty thing in silk.
That was your play, he recognizes too late, lowering himself into your lap when you guide him down. You pulled him into the center of the room, forced their attention onto him for a heartbeat, just long enough to see him clearly, to register him, and then discard him. Better this than the edges of the room, where he would linger, where sharp eyes might wander back to him, and suspicion might build, where he might become something worth noticing.
Now, he is nothing—a prop, a distraction already spent.
“Most of them,” you agree with an easy smile, one arm slinking around his waist possessively as you pull him close and he settles against you, shoulder pressed against your chest, hand sliding to rest loosely at the side of your neck, fingers grazing the edge of your jaw. “The ones worth remembering, at least.”
He hates this.
He hates the silk clinging to his skin, too soft and too revealing, nothing like the leather everyone else of note in the room wears, nothing like anything a prince of House Targaryen should ever wear. He hates the way they look through him like he’s not even there. He hates that his body sinks into yours, and he cannot help the way his eyes half-lid when your fingers slip beneath his silks, thumb rubbing soothing circles over his hip, out of sight from everyone else. He hates that it comforts him. Hates that his head dips toward yours instinctively. Hates that he can feel the heat roaring through his veins, that he knows he should be ripping himself out of your hold, baring his teeth, reminding them all exactly who the fuck he is: a dragon and a prince, better than them, all of them, but he cannot fucking reach it. He cannot reach the fire he knows is there; it dies before he can hope to grasp at it, and he—
Someone is still looking at him.
The hair on the back of his neck stands on end, and Aerion’s gaze shifts to the side, trying to figure out who is still looking at him, and he pauses when he sees that it’s your friend, Jaenys, watching him with sharp, calculating eyes, trained not on his face, but—
—Aerion forgot to take off the steel.
Aerion forgot to take off the fucking steel.
The Valyrian steel at his throat—the steel you gifted him, the steel you placed on his neck, the steel you found in the ruins of Valyria, likely with the boy sitting right next to you, weighs on his neck like a fucking shackle. How the fuck did he forget to take off the steel? He’s become so used to the weight of it that he doesn’t even notice it anymore. He didn’t even think anything of it until now, until someone who recognizes it stares at it like it’s the most fascinating thing in the room, because why the fuck would you gift the last relic you have of your home to some random Lyseni whore?
Aerion’s fingers twitch against your neck, a useless, delayed reaction, his mind scrambling sluggishly to catch up with what his body should have already done—hide it, move it out of sight, do something. But he doesn’t, because it’s too late, because moving now would draw attention and confirm exactly what he knows Jaenys must be suspecting.
Jaenys watches him for a moment longer, gaze lifting from the steel at last to his eyes, and Aerion hates the look in his eyes—amused and knowing and far too perceptive for Aerion’s liking. His lips curl, just slightly, but then he turns his attention back to you, lithe fingers reaching for your free hand.
Jaenys holds eye contact with Aerion as he lifts your hand to his lips, kissing your knuckles again before he leans in to ghost them against your ear. He says something quiet, only for you to hear, and Aerion can only make out the word special, but whatever is said is enough to make you physically tense, grip on his hip tightening.
“How is everyone back home ?” you ask, ignoring the Blackfyres and Aegor Rivers to focus on your friend.
“Miserable without you,” Jaenys says with an easy grin and a wink in your direction. “You could not imagine how boring things have been. You’ve probably been having more fun on this whore island than we are in Volantis.”
Aerion feels you huff out a laugh, chest rising and falling against his back. “Do not be dramatic, Jaenys,” you reply. “There is little to do here beyond fucking and drinking, and we both know I can only handle so much of that without some blood in between.”
Jaenys hums, amused, lithe fingers sliding absently up and down your forearm. Aerion’s gaze follows them, watching how easy the movement is, how familiar—thoughtless in a way that makes Aerion’s chest tight even though that powder should have him dulled into oblivion.
“You always did prefer a little chaos to keep things interesting,” Jaenys murmurs. “I’m surprised you haven’t burned this place to the ground yet.”
“If you are quite finished reminiscing,” Aegor cuts in, tone clipped, bold considering the way both you and your friend raise your eyebrows at one another, smiles easy, but not entertained. “We did not come here to hear tales of your boredom.”
You do not even look at him.
“Then perhaps you should not have come uninvited,” you reply smoothly, eyes still on Jaenys, as though Aegor is little more than background noise. You ask Jaenys quietly, “Why did you come, Jaenys? Why are you here with these Andal cunts?”
Jaenys exhales hard through his nose, averting his gaze for the first time since he entered that room, the easy amusement slipping into something more serious.
“I told you, it’s miserable without you,” he says with a sigh, fingers still against your arm, sliding down to entwine your fingers with his. Aerion can’t draw his gaze from it, can’t ignore the pressure rising in his chest, muted and distant but still somehow all-consuming. “The Tigers are restless, and the Elephants grow bolder by the day. Every assembly turns into the same argument and—” Jaenys exhales through his nose, and Aerion’s stomach twists. He doesn’t like where this is going before he even really knows where it’s going. “We are tired of waiting. Everyone is.”
Your thumb stills at Aerion’s hip.
“And you think I am the solution to that? Eight hundred miles away?” you ask, voice light and dry, but Aerion can feel the tension in your body now, the way your grip tightens at his hip. “Do not be ridiculous, Jae—”
“Not from eight hundred miles away, but yeah. You are.”
Aerion does not like this.
His fingers twitch at your neck, and he instinctively starts to shift in your lap, only to be stopped when the hand on his hip becomes painful, warning him not to move around and make a scene. Whores are meant to be pliant and obedient, seen but not heard, decorations not meant to react to anything being said around them.
But Aerion does not like this.
His heart thuds in his chest. He does not know if the powder is wearing off on its own or if he’s just so bothered by the implications of what’s being said that it’s forcibly sobering him—or worse, this is the muted version of what he should be feeling.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Jaenys?”
“You’re not meant to rot away on this island of fucking whores,” Jaenys says, grip tightening on your hand to force you to look at him. “We were never going to let you, and now we’ve finally got a way to get you back.”
Aerion can feel your heart against his back, racing in a way that he’s never felt before. Aerion’s is too. His mind is too slow right now—if he wasn’t drugged up on this stupid powder, he would’ve been able to put together what’s happening by now, but instead, he’s stuck, lagging behind his own thoughts, watching everything happen in pieces instead of all at once.
Aerion swallows hard, breath shallow, fingers tightening at your neck like he can ground himself there, like if he holds on tight enough, it will force everything to click into place like it already should be.
“And the Andals have something to do with this plan to get me back to Volantis?” you ask, voice riddled with disbelief, nails biting into his skin the same way his are biting into yours, trying to ground yourself with him the same way he does with you. “Jaenys, you—”
“They offer a path,” Jaenys interrupts, glancing briefly toward Aegor Rivers before returning his attention to you. “Just hear it out, okay?”
They’re supposed to be here for him, Aerion thinks desperately. They’re supposed to be here for him, are they—are they here for you? They’re here to—to take you?
“The Golden Company has the men and the means,” Aegor Rivers says, finally pushing into the conversation. Aerion expects you to shut him down again. You do not. “We would be willing to lend our support to the Tiger Party in the event of conflict. To ensure that the outcome is favorable.”
“Conflict?” you echo. Your voice sounds far away. Underwater. Aerion does not like the word, what it means, what it implies. Sellsword companies do not do anything for free. So what do they want from— “You mean to throw Volantis into civil war, Jaenys? What the fuck? We don’t need the help of the Andals if we want to take Volantis by force, but we don’t want—”
Jaenys says your name. Aerion hates the sound of that too—the way he says it, soft and lilting, begging for you to listen, and he hates the way you actually do, halting in your venomous rant as soon as he speaks. Your fingers on his hip are bruising, and his on your neck twice as hard. His gaze drags over to Aegor Rivers from where he was staring over your shoulder; the man stares right past him—at you—and Aerion doesn’t know if he’s breathing properly. His head feels light, and each breath is shallow.
He could kill him right now.
The thought cuts through the haze, and for a moment, Aerion almost feels like himself again.
Aegor Rivers sits barely five feet away—this registers for the first time since everyone seated themselves. No armor, no helm, no guard between them but a room full of distracted men to expect a blade from a whore’s hand. The Blackfyre bastards, too—silver-haired, violet-eyed mockeries of his blood, close enough that Aerion can see the faint scars on their hands and faces, the way their chests rise and fall as they breathe. He could do it. He could lunge forward, rip free from you, seize the fruit knife on the table between the cushions, and drive it through Bittersteel’s throat before the man could react. He could carve through the rest of them after, one by one, leave them bleeding out on cushions and marble like they deserve.
He might die.
He probably would die.
But—but his father would hear of it. Aerion Brightflame, striking down Bittersteel in a way that neither he nor his uncle was able to during the rebellion, cutting through pretenders with his own hand before falling in battle. Not an embarrassment. Not something to be ashamed of. Not an inconvenience to be sent across the Narrow Sea and forgotten about. A Targaryen prince. A dragon in full, not silk and perfume and humiliation.
You would probably die, too.
That is what makes him falter. If he jumped forward now, if he cut Aegor River’s throat and then carved up each of the Blackfyre bastards, you would be caught in the middle. You’re armed, yes, and the moment the lingering Golden Company sellswords drew their blades to cut Aerion down, you would draw yours (right? you would, wouldn’t you? would you defend him? would you even care? would anyone care?). And you are skilled, he knows you are, but there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of Blackfyre loyalists on this island right now, and not even you—
“We could do it,” Jaenys says quietly. “A full coup, rout the Elephants—”
“That’s not how things fucking work in Volantis,” you hiss, interrupting Jaenys, whose lips tighten with irritation at your words. “We are not Andal cunts who chop each other up over inheritance—who destroy our houses and birthright for personal ambition. The Triarchy is not won by butchering half the city in the streets and hoping the rest fall in line.”
“I thought you would want to come home—”
“Of course, I want to come home,” you spit, voice rising in anger. Your grip on Aerion’s hip is painful, and it grounds him, pulling him away from the violence and blood that threatens to put him into a situation that will get both of you killed. “But gods, Jaenys, does my father even know about this? The rest of the Tigers? This could destroy everything, this could—what?”
Jaenys tosses his head back, beckoning someone to come forward from the edge of the room. Aerion’s gaze drags, following the motion as a man steps forward from the line of sellswords. He carries something wrapped in dark cloth, held carefully, and Jaenys reaches forward to take it from him, peeling back the cloth to reveal a sheathed sword—ruby-embedded hilt, dark, rippling steel, the patterns in it catching the sunlight.
Aerion’s mouth dries, and you inhale behind him, leaning forward, lips ghosting his shoulder as you look over him at the sheathed blade. Jaenys gives you a pointed look before he places it between the two of you.
“He gave this to me before I left,” Jaenys says softly, “to give to you.” Jaenys continues, voice lower now, only for you to overhear, “He wants you to come home. We all do.”
Oh.
Aerion feels the change in you immediately. Your spine straightens, and your grip loosens on his hip. You don’t let go of Jaeny’s hand—you let go of Aerion as you reach out to brush your fingers against the hilt of the sword resting between the two of you. The aggression fizzles out of you, and you exhale in a way that is not frustrated or irritated; it’s contemplative.
Aerion’s throat goes dry. His fingers twitch at your neck again, a delayed, useless motion, like he’s trying to remind you he’s still there—he’s still here—but it feels weak, inconsequential, swallowed by everything else that just shifted in the room.
“And what? The Golden Company wants to displace the Elephants and put us in power out of the goodness of their hearts? What do they want in return?” you ask.
There is no derision in your tone. There is no bite or mockery, no easy dismissal waiting behind it.
It is a real question.
Aerion feels it like a blow to the gut, wind knocked from his lungs. His fingers falter against your neck, the last weak attempt at grounding slipping away into nothing as a slow and suffocating reality settles in around him. You’re not shutting this down, and you’re not laughing it off anymore. You’re really fucking considering it.
You might actually accept it.
The thought lands heavier than anything else—heavier than the Golden Company arriving in Lys, heavier than the thought of war, than his father not caring about him, than dying here. His lashes flutter, and the next breath he lets out is shaky.
This is what you’ve always wanted.
He knows that. Knows it in the way you talk about Volantis, about home, about what was taken from you. Knows it in the way you’ve never quite belonged here, no matter how easily you play at it, no matter how well you’ve carved a place for yourself in Lys. Knows it in the way you always look east.
You never wanted to be here—you just never had a way back home.
And now you have a way back.
But you promised him.
You promised him that you would come with him back to Westeros. You said it: iksan aōhon, iksā ñuhon, you told him you loved him, he asked you to come with him and you said I will. You promised, you promised—
“Well, we would like the Bright Prince, for one,” one of Daemon Blackfyre’s wretched sons says easily, gaze lingering for a moment on where Caelyx sits on the cushion next to Jaenys, before he focuses on you. “We heard he was here in Lys.”
Aerion’s pulse spikes hard and fast, blood rushing loud in his ears as his fingers lock at your neck—not gentle or grounding this time, clingy in a way that’s pathetic.
Do not give me up, he says without saying anything at all, desperate and pleading, not half as commanding as he would like, do not betray me, do not leave me.
He would not even be able to defend himself right now, he realizes, tense. He does not have the means—no armor, no sword, and if his body is half as sluggish as his mind is, he does not stand a chance. He is sitting right across from Aegor Rivers and the Blackfyre bastards, he is drugged with nothing to defend himself, and you might give him up to them now.
His breath catches shallowly against your skin, the haze fracturing as fear edges out the last of the powder. You don’t react to his fingers at your neck, not for a long, long time, but then your hand smooths over his hip, squeezing it lightly before you lean back against the cushions with a sigh.
“Even if the Bright Prince were here, I wouldn’t give him to you,” you say with a shrug, and Aerion doesn’t know if that was the right thing to say, but it puts him at ease, something terribly warm bubbling in his chest. “I’m fond of him. We got on well while he was here. He kept me—entertained.”
“Really?” another pretender drawls, mocking. “I hear he’s temperamental. Prone to mad fits. Not the sort one keeps for long.”
Aerion’s throat bobs at the words, remembering your whore’s comment from before: the two of you are coming up on that, aren’t you? So that she does not become bored with you like she does everyone else. Annoyance flares, teeth grinding; he shifts in your lap before he can stop himself, an instinctive movement like he’s trying to settle into you more firmly. Your grip tightens—a warning—you must realize that he’s coming down from the powder.
“Which one are you?” you ask suddenly, gaze roving over the Blackfyre. “Wait. Let me guess. Another Aegon? You Westerosi seem fond of that name.”
Jaenys snorts, turning his face toward you, a smile curving at his lips.
The silver-haired pretender flushes red, an irritated expression on his face. “Haegon, actually.”
You bark out a surprised laugh. “Wow, almost,” you drawl. “Well, Haegon, you’ll find I’m quite skilled at bringing temperamental little dragons to heel. I’m fond of it, even. You seem rather ill-tempered yourself. That, at least, is promising.”
Did you just flirt with that miserable fucking wretch?
A ripple of amusement moves through the room, and Haegon’s flush deepens, pale lashes fluttering as his gaze shifts to the side. Aerion wants to rip his eyes out. Aerion wants to rip your eyes out. Your tongue. His tongue. Aerion can’t deal with this anymore, Aerion—
“The Bright Prince is out of the question,” you say dismissively. “He’s not here, and I’m not wasting my time chasing ghosts. I assume you came with more demands than that, otherwise you make for poor bargainers, and I do not entertain poor bargains, be they in my favor or not.”
Aegor’s lips quirk into a smile, and Aerion feels unsettled. He knows what is coming before anything is said, but the words still make his stomach flip when Aegor Rivers finally speaks them:
“Once you are installed as Triarch, we would expect Volantene support during our campaign in Westeros and taking the Iron Throne from the Targaryens.”
———————
“Is this how it’s going to be, then? We’re not going to speak?”
Aerion doesn’t reply. Can’t reply. Doesn’t. This is the third time you’ve tried to start a conversation with him since returning to your chambers, and Aerion remains seated on the cushions on the far side of your room, face turned away, fiddling with the dagger he should have taken to the whorehouse so he could plunge it into Bittersteel’s throat. Your throat, too, maybe. His fingers slide along the edge, and the pain helps ground him, brings him back to the present, away from the shame eating at his stomach and the rage threatening to consume him.
He never should have let any of that happen. He never should have agreed to let you dress him in silk, never should have hidden himself away in a whorehouse, never should have allowed those stupid whores to drug him stupid and pliant. He should have just died with his blade in hand, one final stand for his father to be proud of—maybe he could have even taken one of the Blackfyres or Bittersteel out with him. His face is hot with mortification; he can’t even look at himself in a fucking mirror.
He cuts through the pads of his fingers once, beads of blood welling up and dripping down his skin. He watches impassively, and then he slides the edge of the blade through them again, deeper this time. A third time, then a fourth, then—
“Aerion.”
Aerion doesn’t reply, and he doesn’t react when you snatch the dagger from his hands and put it to the side. He doesn’t look up at you when you spit out a curse at the sight of his bleeding hand, and he doesn’t let you bandage them when you reach out, pulling away and pressing the injured fingers to his lips, staring blankly at the wall as he sucks the blood from the cuts. You kneel in front of him, and Aerion hates the expression on your face more than he hates anything else—you’re pitying him, you’re pitying him.
“Do you really want to?” Aerion asks, voice low and edged. “Because I do not think you are going to like what I have to say.”
You exhale hard through your nose, and Aerion can see the irritation thinly veiled. You have some nerve, he thinks. Some nerve to be irritated. Some nerve to question him. Some nerve to fucking pity him. He doesn’t need your pity, doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want anything, he doesn’t want you, he doesn’t—
Something wet tracks down his cheek, and his spiraling thoughts come to a halt. His brows knit, breath catching, and then—another, his opposite cheek now, more after that, one after another. His uninjured hand comes up quickly, swiping at his face, and he stares at the wetness smeared on his fingers like it’s something foreign.
What the fuck?
Aerion clenches his jaw hard, teeth grinding, panic flashing hot through the anger still clawing at his chest. He’s not—he’s angry, he’s frustrated, ashamed. He’s not fucking—he’s not upset. He scrubs at his face again, harder this time, like he can force it to stop, like he can drag whatever this is back down where it belongs, bury it under the anger, turn it into something that makes sense.
“Stop,” he hisses, and he doesn’t know if he’s talking to you or himself.
His breath hitches, quick and loud and fucking mortifying, and that only makes everything worse. Fuck. He’s sick of this. He’s sick of being in exile, he’s sick of the constant humiliation—things had been different for a while, different because of you, different because you made it feel like it didn’t matter. The exile, the rumors, the looks, and the shame—you made him feel like it could all be ignored if he just stayed close to you because iksan aōhon, iksā ñuhon, because he is yours and you are his, because you said you would come with him, because you said you wouldn’t leave him behind, and now—
Now it is back to those first few weeks of humiliation, when he was chasing you around like a fool, losing his temper before magisters and merchants, making a spectacle of himself every day. He trusted you—you told him to trust you, and he did. He trusted you.
And now you’re going to give everything up.
You’re going to give him up.
He knows it—he knows it’s the truth in his gut, in his heart. He knows it. You are going to give this up so that you can go home.
“Get the fuck away from me,” he tells you when you try to reach for his bleeding hand again. He rises to his feet and paces away. His heart thuds painfully in his chest, and his fingers sting, and his vision is blurry, and he cannot stop the fucking tears. He’s not even upset—he’s angry, he’s frustrated, he’s—he’s fucking betrayed. “You humiliated me. You—”
“I kept you alive,” you counter, rising to your feet and turning toward him. Aerion hates that you’re not angry, and he hates that look in your eyes—you’re still fucking pitying, you’re still— “I—”
“You had me drugged,” Aerion interrupts, furious, voice rising. “You had me drugged, dressed up in silk like a whore, and sat me in your lap like a damn pet. You made me sit there while you conspired—”
“I did what I had to do,” you spit, pity finally shifting to anger, and Aerion can deal with this. He prefers this. He’ll take all of your anger if it means he won’t be on the receiving end of pity. “If you had walked into that room as yourself, you would be dead, and you know it.”
That’s not the point, Aerion wants to scream. He wants to tug at his hair and fight you for the dagger you stole from him, so he can put it through your throat. He wants to—
“I do not care,” Aerion says, and he shuts it all down, pushes it deep, deep down, just like when he was young, when his mother died and Daeron changed and Maekar refused to speak to any of them. He pushes it down, and he blinks once, twice, three times, and he pushes away the anger and the frustration and the tears. “I trusted you. You told me to trust you, and I did, and then you couldn't trust me. I would rather have died than sit there like that. I do not care if it was necessary, or if it kept me alive, or even if you were right. I do not care. You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie to you,” you reply, and glee briefly bubbles in Aerion’s chest when he hears how your voice loses the heat, weaker. Aerion huffs out a laugh through his nose. “I didn’t, Aerion—”
“You did,” Aerion hisses. The heat bubbles again, and Aerion smothers it with another deep breath. He doesn’t look at you, raising his chin as he stares out over the balcony, over the gardens of the First Magister’s manse, where he has spent hours laid up in your arms, watching sunrises and sunsets, magisters’ sons make fools of themselves after too many glasses of wine, laughing and sharing breath, kisses, touches. His eyes slide shut. He pushes this away, too. “You did. You lied to me. You told me that I was yours, and you were mine. You told me that—” Breathe. “—that you loved me. That you would come with me. And you sat in there—you sat in there listening to them, conspiring with them—”
“Do not be a fool, I—”
“Do not call me a fool,” Aerion snaps, whirling on you again. It bubbles again, hotter and faster this time. Too much—you’re across the room, but he can feel your hands around his waist, running through his hair, your lips on his skin, and your breath against his ear. All of the promises, all of you. All of the fucking lies. “You were. I know you. The moment your friend showed up, when he gave you that sword—”
“Of course, I was, Aerion,” you shout at him. “They offered me an opportunity to go home. How could I—”
“Then go!” he shrieks right back, defensive, voice pitching higher than he intends. He needs to get ahead of it, needs to be the one to send you away so that you aren’t the one to choose to leave him. “Go back to Volantis. Take their deal, your city, your war. March against my family, march against me—fucking hand me right over to them while you’re at it, would you?”
“Wow. I knew you were hiding a secret, ñuha jorrāelagon, but I didn’t realize your special whore was the Targaryen prince everyone is looking for.”
My love.
Aerion goes stiff at the familiar voice coming from the entrance to your chambers. Your friend, Jaenys, leans against the doorframe like he owns the place, an easy smile curling at his lips, like he hasn’t just walked into something he was not meant to see. You’re as frozen as Aerion is, eyes widening as your gaze cuts to the side, anger draining into something far worse.
Jaenys pushes himself off the marble, slinking forward in your direction.
Aerion watches you, not him. Watches the way your mouth presses thin and the way your shoulders are tense. You never spoke much about your friends back home with him. Aerion hadn’t even recognized the name the way your whores had, he realizes bitterly. But he does know how you describe Volantis and its courts—cruel and vicious, people always looking for the next step up the ladder.
Will Jaenys give him up to the Blackfyres?
Will you let him?
Will you care? Will you care? Will you—
Aerion’s gaze snaps over to you, trying to gauge where you’re at, but he can’t tell, and all of the frustration begins to bubble again, the heat in his chest and behind his eyes. His pulse climbs, and he cannot push it back down. He has to stop him—has to stop both of you if that’s what it takes. He’s never fought you for real; the two of you have sparred occasionally, but always while drunk. He’s never seen you fight at full force, but he knows you’re skilled—knows your friend must be too, from the way you talked about the upbringing of Tiger children. Can he take you both out? Aerion is confident in his swordplay, but he was confident at Ashford, too, and everyone knows how that went, and you two would be much more skilled than that oaf of a hedge knight. But he can’t allow himself to be caught, can’t give his father another reason to—
Fuck.
“Is this how it’s going to be, then?” Jaenys asks you, raising his eyebrows mockingly, tilting his head to the side. “You’re going to choose some Andal cunt over a chance at coming home?” His gaze flicks over Aerion once, dismissively. “He’s not pretty enough for you to be so pussy-whipped, and we both know you’re not so sentimental.”
Aerion cannot stop the words from leaving his lips.
“What did you just call me?”
Everything is burning.
He thinks he laughs as he whirls on your friend, but it’s not really a laugh; it’s too quick and too sharp, breaking halfway through. Your friend tosses an impassive look over his shoulder, violet eyes sweeping over Aerion once before he rolls them, as though decided Aerion isn’t even worth the effort to properly address.
His pulse roars. Something breaks loose in his chest, hot and violent, and it feels more like him than the haze he’s been stuck in all day. All of the muted emotions that he couldn’t sort through in the whorehouse come surging: the rage, the humiliation, the frustration. He exhales hard and takes a step toward Jaenys.
“What did you just call me?” Aerion repeats, slower this time, voice dropping as he makes another noise in the back of his throat—laugh, scoff, something in-between.
“You heard me,” Jaenys replies, unbothered, barely looking at him. Aerion wants him dead. Aerion wants you dead. “Careful now. One word from me and every Blackfyre loyalist in this city will know exactly where to find you.”
Aerion’s lips pull back into something that might be passable as a smile if it weren’t so strained.
“Try it,” Aerion says, though he doesn’t even really register himself saying it. This whole day has been—fuck, wrong. It’s all been wrong. Wrong from the moment the Golden Company ships arrived in Lys. Wrong from the moment you looked at that sword. Wrong from the moment he sat in your lap, and you didn’t feel anything at all. Wrong, wrong, wrong—even he feels wrong now, like he’s not even in his own body, like he’s watching himself from somewhere just behind his eyes, feeling his mouth moving, hearing his voice as though it belongs to someone else. “Try it. See if you get the chance to finish the call out for them. I do not care who you are to her, I do not care where you’re from. If you say one word, I’ll have you skinned and hung from the—”
Jaenys laughs, loud and bright and mocking, genuine glee threaded through the sound.
“You? Kill me?” Jaenys echoes, a condescending smile on his lips as he looks over Aerion once. “Little prince, I would eat you alive.” He looks back toward you, dismissing Aerion again. He winks at you and says, “You know, I shouldn’t be so surprised you went for this one, ñuha jorrāelagon. You always did like the fiery ones—Visedor, Naera, Aenys. Can you tire of him already? Let’s give him over to those Andals and go home already.”
Aerion’s jaw locks.
You say through your teeth. “It’s not like that, Jaenys—”
“You say that every time,” Jaenys scoffs, “and every time it is the same. I am not going to sit here and let you destroy your shot at going home for a boy you won’t think twice of in a few months.”
Why does everyone always speak around him?
Why does everyone fucking talk about him as though he’s already half gone?
Aerion is a prince of the blood. A dragon. He is the one who takes and discards. He is not—
He is a prince nobody wants around. At best, a problem that cannot be fixed, and at worst, a mistake to be forgotten. To you, to his father, to the rest of his family, to everyone.
It is infuriating.
No one ever says it in those words, but they don’t fucking need to—they cast him out like he’s nothing, they do not say goodbye to him when he leaves, they do not send ravens unless someone has died, and even then, they still do not want him home.
And you—everyone seems to be certain that you’re on the verge of tiring of him. Caelyx says it off-handedly when he has far more important things to be worried about. Jaenys stands there speaking as though Aerion were some passing amusement you would soon tire of. As though Aerion should be grateful for whatever scraps of loyalty anyone saw fit to throw him, and Aerion is fucking sick of it. He’s sick of hearing it, sick of believing it—he just wants—
He just wants you. He wants you to want him. He wants you to choose him. He thought you would, because you told him that you would. Iksan aōhon, iksā ñuhon—he is yours and you are his.
And yet, he does not think you will anymore. Not now, and maybe you never planned to.
He should have expected it. He should have known better than to take you at your word, than to believe that—
He cuts the thought off before it can finish. He’s not going to stand here and pick himself apart over it—not in front of Jaenys, not in front of you.
Still, the idea sits under his skin, festering. That you might leave him, you might choose them, you might hand him over.
Fuck.
“… always told you, didn’t I?” Aerion hears Jaenys saying, drawn back into the conversation at hand when he notices him take a step back toward the open door. You don’t move to stop him. Aerion’s jaw tightens—he’s going to have to do this himself. Will you draw a blade against him if he attacks your friend? Did you ever actually care the way you claimed to? “I’m not going to sit back and let you make mistakes like this. I—”
Aerion does not flinch at the sudden crashing noise when you move forward and drive your foot into the open door, slamming it shut before Jaenys can leave, but his breath does hitch when he watches you shoulder Jaenys into the marble hard, putting the dagger you took from Aerion against his neck and pressing deep enough that blood dribbles down his pale skin.
The room is silent for a long, long time.
“I’m not letting you do that, Jaenys,” you say quietly. “You are my dearest friend. Do not put me in this position.”
Jaenys stares at you with an unreadable expression on his face. “You’d draw on me for him?” he breathes, voice riddled with disbelief. You do not respond, because the blade at his neck is answer enough. Oh. All of the tension that had spread through Aerion’s body, the heat beneath his skin and pressing behind his eyes, fizzles as he stares at you, throat working to swallow the lump that formed in it. “But the only person you’ve ever done that for is—”
Jaenys doesn’t finish the sentence, but understanding crosses his face instantly as he glances between you and Aerion one last time. Another few seconds pass with neither of you moving, staring at one another, and then Jaenys exhales, shoulders slumping as he shakes his head with a roll of his eyes.
“You are impossible,” he mutters, and when you don’t immediately drop the knife from his neck, he raises his eyebrows tauntingly. “If you keep that there for much longer, you’ll make my cock hard, and if you do that, you will be taking care of it, ñuha jorrāelagon—favored prince or not.”
Aerion’s lip curls up in disgust. Jaenys notices.
“He really doesn’t like sharing, does he?” Jaenys laughs, head rolling to the side to look over Aerion. He says lazily, “You’re lucky it was me who came, little prince. Naera or Visedor would have snapped your pretty head off if you wanted to keep her all to yourself. Lucky for you, I understand and will oblige you—for now, at least.”
Aerion gapes in fury, hand darting to grab the sword you’d rested against your wall so he can put it through the other man’s neck, but you give him such a cold look that he falters.
“Skoros iā qrīdronnor. Ao gīmigon skorkydoso naejot iderēbagon zirȳ, ñuha jorrāelagon,” Jaenys sighs, more serious now, silver hair falling in his face. “Skoros gaomagon gaomi sir?”
What a mess. You really know how to pick them, my love. What do we do now?
The tension bleeds from your shoulders at his words, and you drop the blade from his neck. Jaenys wanders over to your bed and sits at its edge like he belongs there, burying his face in his hands, and you lean against the wall you just had him pinned against, staring at the blood staining the blade. Aerion does not budge from the opposite side of the room—he doesn’t know what to say, if he should say anything. The way you stare down at Jaenys’s blood, and the way Jaenys is looking at you from the corner of his eye, it feels too personal. Aerion feels uncomfortable—he just, he wants to go back to how things were yesterday.
You’re choosing him. You’re going to choose Jaenys. You’re going to side with the Blackfyres. You’re going to march against his family—against him. You’re going to betray him. You’re going to—
You exhale, sliding down the wall until you’re seated on the ground, still staring down at the marble.“Eman iā kȳvanon naejot jiōragon zirȳla hen se tēgembōñ. Kessa henujagon lēda se Tȳni Trēsi hemtubis.”
I have a plan to get him off the island. He will leave with the Second Sons tomorrow.
“Gaomagon daor ȳdragon yno hae lo iksan daor kesīr,” Aerion hisses, still wound up, not sure what to do with himself anymore, but you let out such a heavy sigh that he physically falters, zeroing in on the exhausted expression on your face.
Do not speak of me as though I am not here.
Jaenys’s eyes flicker with interest at Aerion’s words, lips parting, but before he can say anything, you give him a cold look. He pouts and shakes his head, and then he says more seriously, “Pōnta jurnegon syt zirȳla sir. Issi jāre rȳ mirre hen lenton. Gaoman daor gīmigon lo kessi jurnegon bisy.”
They search for him now. They are going through all of the manses. I do not know if they will search this one.
You throw the dagger on the ground, frustrated, and the metal clatters against the marble loudly. You tilt your head back against the wall, and you hiss, “Nyke qogralbar ivestretan zirȳ īles daor kesīr!”
I fucking told them he was not here!
Jaenys shrugs helplessly and drawls, “Pōnta gōntan daor pāsagon ao.” Then he nods at Aerion, who sneers at him. “Nyke daor pāsagon skoro syt.”
They did not believe you. I cannot imagine why.
You knock your head back against the wall once, twice, a third time. Aerion makes his way over to you to stop you, but Jaenys is closer, and Aerion freezes dead in his tracks when he sees how Jaenys kneels in front of you, one hand slipping behind your head to stop you from smacking your head against the marble a fourth time. His throat is tight as he watches his free hand come up to cradle the side of your face, the way your eyes slide half open to peer down at him, the way you look so exhausted and still lean into his touch. Your eyes are soft, and vulnerable, and—
Have you ever looked at him this way?
“Jurnegon rȳ nyke,” Jaenys says softly, and Aerion’s skin fucking crawls. How could he ever compete with this? He’s known all along that you yearn for home and the people you left behind—more than he ever has, ever will—but it’s different seeing it in front of his face like this. The way you look at him, the way he looks at you, the tone of voice the two of you take with one another and the implicit trust. Aerion has never had that with anyone. “Kesan ziry, ñuha jorrāelagon. Kesi mirre ziry mirre hen hēnkirī.”
Look at me. I will handle it, my love. We will figure everything out together.
“Jaenys,” you start to say, voice quiet. “I—”
Your eyes slide shut when Jaenys leans in to press his lips to your temple. “We can talk another time,” he tells you. “If you have a plan for the Bright Prince to get off this island tomorrow night, then we will see it done. Until then…” Jaenys’s gaze flicks over to Aerion briefly. “Spend time with your little dragon, ñuha jorrāelagon. It might be your last with him.”
Aerion’s stomach lurches at his words, and you only sigh, gaze lowering again. Jaenys rises to his feet, tilting his head back slightly, a smirk curling at his lips as he looks over Aerion blatantly. Aerion sneers at him, but can’t help the way his eyes widen in disbelief when Jaenys hums:
“Perhaps if things work out—if I am still here and you are still interested in him when he returns to Lys, we can share him. Like old times. It’ll be fun.”
Jaenys lets out a huff of laughter, brushing his braid over his shoulder as he leaves your chambers, shutting the door behind him, and the silence that follows his exit is suffocating, pressing in from all sides, thick and heavy and ringing with everything said and unsaid.
Aerion does not move. For a long moment, he just stands there, staring at the door as if it might open again, and then at you, curled on the floor, gaze trained on the marble. You are not looking at him. You are not really looking at anything, he realizes. Your eyes are empty, expression just as vacant. Aerion has gotten good at reading you over the last eight moons, but now he cannot read a damn thing.
And then you sigh again, heavier this time, shoulders curling inward, making yourself small in a way he’s never seen you do before.
“I am sorry,” you say after a moment, so quiet that Aerion almost doesn’t hear you. “I should not have had them drug you.”
Aerion stares at you for a long moment. There are insults on his tongue—cruel and defensive, because he does not forgive you, he cannot forgive you. He needs to brace himself for what is about to come.
Then, his feet move before he knows what he’s doing, dragging against the ground in your direction. His back hits the wall next to where you’re sitting, and then he slides down it to sit with you. Thighs pressing, shoulders knocking together, Aerion’s jaw tightens when he feels you lean against him, resting your head on his shoulder as you let out another shaky breath.
“I would be dead if you didn’t,” Aerion replies quietly, the admission tastes like poison on his tongue. He inhales deeply, eyes sliding shut, head hanging forward. “I would not have been able to sit there listening to them. To—”
To you.
“I should not have had them drug you,” you repeat again, something hollow in your voice that makes Aerion press his lips together tightly. “I do not know what to do.”
The admission comes out so small that Aerion almost doesn’t hear it. You exhale through your nose again, sharp and shaky, jaw tight. You look up at the ceiling briefly, and Aerion falters when he sees that your eyes are glassy with unshed tears. His lips part to say something, but he cannot find any words.
“I thought it would be easy—that if an opportunity came for me to go home, there would be no question about it, I would take it no matter the cost,” you continue. “But this? This is—”
You let out another breath, head hanging forward as you shake your head. You look at him again, gaze dropping to his cheek, and your face twists—he’s not sure why until you lift your hand, fisting the fabric of your sleeve as you bring it to his face and wipe off the makeup Caelyx put over his scars so that he would not be recognized by them.
“If I return to Volantis this way, it will be the beginning of the end for our city,” you say, and something clenched terribly in Aerion’s chest when he realizes that this is the reason you’re wound up, not because of him, not because— “Volantis has existed as long as it has because of the Triarchy, because there are elections and we do not cut each other up over inheritance and right to rule. If I come back through a coup and am forcibly installed as Triarch, everything will change and not for the better.”
Aerion does not respond.
He doesn’t have anything to say that is not bitter and angry and vile, that would be more humiliating to admit out loud than to just keep it in, because he spent months battling with the fact that you would not return with him to Westeros, weeks questioning you, trying to gauge whether or not you would come if he asked you. The relief he felt when you said yes—it was enough to be debilitating, enough that he did not even care how he looked, did not care that he should be ashamed, did not care about anything, just that he would not have to part from you when the day came. And yet—
And yet, he does not even cross your mind.
You care about what it would mean for Volantis, you care about—
Shame floods him so quickly that it almost makes him sick. His next breath is quick, almost painful. Shame, humiliation, anger—he had always known in his gut that this was never as serious for you as it was for him. He tried to pretend the same, but it was intolerable. Aerion has never been good at handling his emotions; no matter how hard he tries to shove them down and pretend they don’t exist, they always bubble back to the surface at the worst possible times, unrelenting and all-consuming. And he could not bring himself to pretend that you did not matter to him—not when you were the first thing he thought of when he woke in the morning and the last that crossed his mind before sleep, not when the sound of your voice was sometimes the only thing to get him through bad days, not when he had begun to dread going home because he did not want to leave you behind.
His throat works as he swallows, fighting the heat that rises to his face, that presses behind his eyes. He has known this even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself, but still, hearing it with his own ears, seeing it with his own eyes—it hurts. Hurts the same way it hurt when Maekar turned his back on him when Aerion begged him not to send him away. The same way it hurt when he waited weeks for ravens from him, or Daeron, or Valarr, and never received anything.
And Aerion does not beg.
He does not beg anyone—not even you, especially not you. So if you wish to throw everything away and act like this never mattered, and maybe it never did to you, then so be it. He will get on the ship tomorrow, sail to the Disputed Lands with the Second Sons, and he will never think of you again.
He knows as soon as the thought crosses his mind that it is untrue.
There is no world where the two of you part ways and he will never think of you again. You will cross his mind every day, every hour, every minute—he will see you in the ocean and the sky and in every person that passes him by. He will spend the rest of his life chasing you, and you will be forever out of reach.
“I lied to you,” you suddenly say. Aerion’s thoughts come to a halt when your words register, brows furrowing. “I was never planning to go back to Westeros with you. I only said I would to get you to stop asking.”
A noise leaves Aerion’s throat before he can stop it—a scoff, maybe, a laugh, something in between. He stares at you, eyes wider than they should be, face hot and he’s sure red, because how dare you. Are you trying to rub it in? To make him feel worse about this? Are you trying to shove in his face just how little he meant to you? His stomach flips, and he—he feels embarrassed, again, because he had known this too. He knew it in his gut as soon as you agreed. He had known it was too easy, and nothing is ever easy with you, but he had let himself believe you anyway because—
Because he is a fool. He is a fool, and he loves you, and he wanted to believe you were telling the truth, wanted to believe that you would come home with him. Aerion hates you—he hates you. He hates that he cannot hate you. He hates that he wants to hate you, but cannot muster anything close. He wonders, briefly, if this is meant to be punishment—penance for getting his uncle killed—because he cannot imagine why else he would love someone who puts him through what you have.
Lying to him in the same breath you tell him you love him, humiliating him in the same second you step between him and a blade—nothing can ever be simple. There’s always some form of whiplash, and Aerion just—
“Right,” he says after a moment, trying not to let his thoughts spiral, voice thin with something he cannot quite contain. “Of course you did.”
He laughs then—short and brittle and entirely without humor—turning his face from you so that you cannot see how his expression crumbles. You do not deserve to know how much your words have wounded him—you cannot know.
“That makes far more sense,” he goes on, words coming quicker now. Harsher. “Gods forbid anything between us be that simple. I must have been so insufferable asking you to come home with me for you to be forced to lie just to silence me. My apologies. I shall not make that mistake ever again.”
“Aerion—”
“If I am such a bother to you, then maybe you should just hand me over to the Blackfyres,” he hisses, face flushing with fury and mortification, the weight of what you said hitting him in full. He is a fool, and you are—you are fucking cruel. “I would—”
“Aerion,” you interrupt, louder this time, grabbing his wrist when he tries to rise to his feet and pull away, but you do not let him.
Your grip tightens as you hold him in place, and he bares his teeth furiously, shoving you back when you won’t let go of him, but he cannot fucking get free. He cannot be free of you—he will never be free of you. His breath hitches traitorously, and his eyes feel hot again. Fuck—he is furious, and embarrassed, and he is—
Hurt.
He is hurt.
“Let go,” he spits. You do not. “Let go of me, you wretched fucking whore. I do not want to be here. I do not want to—”
Your hands find his face, cradling his cheeks, fingers soft and warm against his skin, and Aerion sucks in a breath that sounds like a whistle. He squeezes his eyes shut and turns his face away—distantly, he knows he can push you away. You’re off-balanced right now, half-leaning over him to force his face angled to you, so it would be easy to knock you away and storm off.
He does not.
“Listen to me,” you say. “Let me finish.”
No, he wants to say, because if he lets you finish, if he lets you try to explain your way out of this, he will listen, and if he listens, he will be weak. And Aerion is tired of being weak; he is tired of it—he has been weak all day. Longer than that, even—since the day he met you on that sun-warmed rock, and he let you mock him without consequence. He is sick and tired and he just wants—
“I thought it would be easy to disappear when the ship arrived to bring you west,” you tell him, and Aerion does not want to hear this. He does not need you to rub in his face how much of a fool he’s been. He tries to turn away again, but you do not let him, and he does not shove you away even though he could. “I convinced myself it would be—I would hide away in a cove and wait for the ship to leave port, would watch it leave with you on it, and go on with how life was before you showed up. But I have only been truly lying to myself, I think, because I do not know how I was ever going to disappear when the time came, when now I am handed an opportunity to go home on a silver platter, and I am hesitating because I know if I take this opportunity, I would lose you—for good.”
—you.
He still only wants you.
Fuck.
“It is… easier for me to focus on the logical flaws of Jaenys’s plan,” you continue, hands dropping from his face as you sit back on your heels and look away. “Easier for me to convince myself that I do not want to go along with this because it could spell the end of Volantis as we know it. The only thing I have ever loved more than my home is my brother, and it—it terrifies me that I find myself more upset over the thought of leaving you behind than I am at the idea of my city being on the brink of collapse. That I have a chance to see Viserys again, and—”
You do not finish that sentence, but you do not need to.
“You do not make any sense,” Aerion tells you, voice hoarse. Are you being honest this time? You do not look him in the eye now, gaze averted off to the far side of your chambers, expression downcast in a way he’s rarely seen from you. “You—How am I supposed to take this? Eight moons, and you have only just realized I matter to you? After all of the times you’ve said—”
He can’t spit out the words he wants to say, thoughts jumbled and dangerous, and saying them out loud would only make him feel more pathetic than he already does.
Avy jorrāelan, iksan aōhon, iksā ñuhon. All of the nights in the cove that is only yours and only his. All of the hunts through the streets that ended with you in his arms, legs entwined, tangled in sheets. All of the days laughing on balconies, drunk on wine and each other’s breath. And you are only just now realizing—
“That’s not what I meant—”
“It sure sounds like what you are saying—”
“Kessa ao ivestragī nyke tatagon ȳdragon?” you hiss, temper fraying.
Will you let me finish speaking?
The sharpness of your voice cuts through his spiraling thoughts, right through the mess of everything he’s trying and failing to make sense of. His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t speak again, waiting for you to continue.
“I did not just realize you matter to me. Do not twist my words into something easier for you to be angry at,” you say, inhaling deeply as you shift to sit next to him again, gaze pinned on your lap. “This is not simple for me, Aerion. I—I’ve known for months, since you came down with fever. Before that, since the first time I brought you to the cove, I just—”
He remembers that day—the way you disappeared all day, how he spent hours looking for you, only for you to show up in the middle of the night, dragging him through the dark, over rooftops in a storm to the cove that you claimed was only yours, and now only his. He remembers a couple of days after that, too, when you disappeared again: boredom is survivable, you had scoffed, and I’m not? he asked, and you did not answer.
You tilt your face to the side so that you can look at him, and his falls to the side, too. His gaze meets yours, and Aerion feels weak because he can feel the anger draining as the two of you share breath, as your eyes search his face. His throat bobs as he swallows thickly, and Aerion isn’t sure if he’s ever seen this expression on your face before. It is open—open and vulnerable in a way he’s only ever caught glimpses of when you tell him about home.
“Avy jorrāelan,” you tell him, and Aerion’s jaw tightens as he fights the instinctive need to look away, face hot and eyes burning. “Nyke drējī jorrāelagon ao, Aerion, se iksan zūgagon kesrio syt eman mērī mirre dija sīr kostōba syt mēre tolie issaros isse ñuha ābrar, se nyke pryjatan ñuha giez ābrar syt zirȳla. Tubī, nyke shifang bona kesan gaomagon keskydoso syt ao, se gaoman daor gīmigon skorkydoso naejot mazōregon lēda bona.”
I love you. I really love you, Aerion, and I am scared because I have only ever felt so strongly for one other person, and I destroyed my whole life for him. Today, I realized that I would do the same for you, and I do not know how to cope with that.
Aerion inhales quickly, breath hitching in a way that should leave him mortified, but he cannot even bring himself to care. He admits, voice hoarse, “Nyke pendagon īlē jāre naejot tepagon nyke bē rȳ mēre jēda.”
I thought you were going to give me up at one point.
You shake your head, and he is only consoled by the fact that your eyes are as wet as his are. “Dōrī,” you say. “Kesan daor emagon tepagon ao naejot zirȳ. Daor syt mirros.”
Never. I would have never given you to them. Not for anything.
Aerion doesn’t know why he says what he says next, because he should be taking advantage of this. Drive the nail into the coffin and make you stay with him with just a few well-placed words.
Aerion is not above it. He’s spent his whole life curating a softer, more palpable personality to put on for his father and grandfather and anyone of importance. He knows how to smile demurely, knows how to lower his lashes and give people exactly what they want to see. He knows what to say to make people give him what he wants, and he knows how to say it. Knows how to soften his voice just enough, how to let it catch on your name, how to make it sound like it costs him something to say it. Knows how to look at you like you are the only thing in the world that matters, like choosing you is not a question for him, was never a question for him. Knows how to reach for you slowly, carefully, like he is giving you time to pull away, even though he knows you won’t.
He has done it before. Not like this—not with something that matters so much to him—but the mechanics are the same. And the worst part is that it would not even be a lie this time.
“I love you,” he could say, and mean it.
“I don’t want to leave you,” he could say, and mean that too.
“I won’t survive it if you go,”—that might be a stretch, because Aerion would survive, he would just be forever haunted by the memory of you, but it would sound right, and you would believe it, because you already want to.
It would be enough to make you stay. Enough to make you choose him. Enough to pull you away from Volantis, from your brother, from everything you have ever wanted, and bind you to him instead.
He should do it.
He knows he should.
You’re halfway there already. He can see it already—the way your guard has cracked and your eyes search his face desperately. It would not take much. He knows how he can finish this and get what he wants, and Aerion has never hesitated in that regard. He always takes what he wants, regardless of the consequences it may have for others. It is his right as a prince, after all.
Instead, he says, “You could go home.”
His voice comes out too weak. He knows how much you’ve wanted this, knows it better than anyone. You should not be hesitating.
“I could go home,” you agree, voice just as weak as his. He finds comfort in that. “I might never get an opportunity like this again.”
He’s not sure which of you moves in first, but your lips are on his in the next breath—the kiss is chaste in comparison to the ones the two of you normally share, mouths sliding innocently against one another’s. It is slow and gentle in a way you both are so rarely.
It makes Aerion’s heart drop.
It feels like goodbye.
“I could come with you,” Aerion says quietly, a desperate hitch to the words that he cannot quite mask, lips brushing as he rests his forehead against yours. He hears you sigh, and before you can reject him, he continues, “I have little back home. I am the second son of a fourth son. My own father sent me away as an embarrassment, my brother does not write me. I—”
“And you would be okay marching against your own family? Cutting down your own kin?” you reply doubtfully. “You heard what the offer was. I would be installed as Triarch in return for Volantene support in taking the Iron Throne. Would you back the Blackfyre claim, Aerion? Betray your own blood?”
Aerion presses his lips together, rocks settling in his stomach as he squeezes his eyes shut. “You could not go through with it. Use them, and then—”
“We cannot go back on our word like that, Aerion.”
“If Volantis marches against Westeros, we will not lose,” you interrupt.
Aerion is frustrated. Why won’t you let him latch onto anything, even if it isn’t true? Why must you be so— “You do not know that.”
“I do, because I would be leading the campaign, and I do not lose,” you tell him. “If you can look me in the eye and tell me that you would be okay with it. Returning home with me, knowing I will march against your family, wage a war that ends with your blood executed—father, uncles, brothers, sisters—and you will not regret it, then I will take you home.”
Aerion’s eyes slide open to meet yours. His lips part. And—and he sees his father teaching him how to hold a sword, hears his voice, my boy, my boy, remembers the way he used to smile at him and Daeron when Dyanna was still alive, before everything changed. And Daeron—he remembers Daeron teaching him to fish. Daeron, finding him on the ground, clawing at his throat, and holding him until the madness passed, teaching him breathing exercises to calm him. Daeron, who would be no better than a trembling fawn on a battlefield, because he never took to combat the way Aerion did.
His throat bobs, and Aerion does not respond. Your lips curve up into a smile that does not reach your eyes, and he knows you know his answer without him needing to say anything.
Is this goodbye?
Will you choose to go home?
Are you going to leave him?
You lean in so that you can kiss him again, more firmly this time, one hand coming up to cradle his face, and Aerion’s drops down to your waist, sliding against the leather of your pants before his grip tightens on your thigh so he can pull you closer to him, onto his lap so that your bodies are flush. Your arms snake around his shoulders, and Aerion sighs into your mouth as you tilt his head back to deepen the kiss. You taste like firewine and faintly of blood—Aerion wonders how hard you must have been biting your tongue when he kept interrupting you.
“Gaomagon daor jikagon lēda zirȳ,” he murmurs against your lips, pulling back slightly so that he can meet your eyes as you slide his shirt off his shoulders. His breath hitches when you smooth your hands over his collarbones, nails scratching lightly at the hollow. He tilts his head back against the wall to look up at you, eyes half-lidded and lips slightly parted. His chest rises and falls beneath your palms, and his eyes slide shut when you lean in to kiss him again, slower this time. “Gaomagon daor henujagon nyke.”
Do not go with them. Do not leave me.
You do not answer him, and Aerion hates that it makes his heart sink. You are going to make him beg, and Aerion does not beg. He does not beg anyone, he does not beg you, but—but he will. And he hates that. He hates that he would bend, strip himself of every last shred of pride just to keep you here, that he would allow himself to become something smaller—not a dragon, not a prince of the blood, just… just a boy. Just a boy who will dig his nails in and won’t let go, ask you to stay, even if it costs him everything that makes him who he is.
“Kostilus,” he breathes into your both, shuddering when you press your lips to the corner of his, to his jaw, kissing down his neck. You drag your tongue from the hollow of his throat to the underside of his chin, and he fights a whimper. His chest heaves as you hover above him, lips ghosting his, tongue darting out to swipe teasingly against his upper lip. “Hah—shit. Kostilus. Kostilus.”
Please. Please. Please.
You kiss him again, deeper this time. You still do not respond, and Aerion hates this even more. Is it because you know he will not like your response? Is it because you cannot bring yourself to say that you do choose him, when it means you are choosing him over a chance at going home, over a chance at seeing your brother again? Aerion does not know, but he knows one answer is far more likely than the other.
“Aerion,” you start to say, and he decides immediately that he does not like the tone of your voice. There’s something in it—careful, hesitant, guilty—and Aerion’s heart rate spikes, because it sounds like the beginning of an answer he does not want to hear.
His hand comes up, fingers tangling in your hair, and he pulls you down into another kiss—harder, less hesitant, less asking. The words die on your tongue before you can get them out, and Aerion kisses you harder still, teeth biting into your bottom lip as his hands slide down to your thighs. He lets out a low grunt into your mouth as he shifts, lifting you with him off of the floor. Your legs instinctively wrap around his waist as he carries you a few steps over to your bed.
He drops you onto the mattress, following after immediately, hips slotted between your thighs, forearms braced on either side of your head, breath uneven as he searches your face for the answer he wants to hear.
But he does not find it. You press your lips together as you look up at him, and Aerion isn’t sure if he’s ever seen this look on your face before. His lashes flutter shut when you lift your hand to ghost the pads of your fingers against his cheekbone, tracing the lines of his face reverently.
“Iksā sīr gevie,” you say softly, two fingers resting over his lips as he stares down at you, hair curtaining either side of his face. Aerion fights a shudder, throat bobbing at your words. “Kesan tepagon ñuha giez ābrar lēda ao lo kostan.”
You are so beautiful. I would spend the rest of my life with you if I could.
This is goodbye, Aerion realizes, breath wavering as he stares down at you helplessly. You’re going to choose them. You’re going to go home. You’re going to march against his family, and you’re going to leave him.
“Kostā,” he tells you, pretending his voice doesn’t break over the word.
You could.
You exhale through your nose, brows furrowing, expression twisting; you let out a sigh that tells him you are still uncertain, battling between two warring desires, and Aerion leans down to kiss you again, pouring everything he has into it. All of the mornings spent hunting you through the streets of Lys, all of the afternoons spent indulging in wine and each other’s arms, all of the evenings at the cove that is only yours and only his, all of the times you cradled his face and said iksan aōhan, iksā ñuhon.
You kiss him back with the same intensity, legs wound around his waist, fingers tangled in his hair, back arching off the bed because even when your bodies are pressed together, it is never close enough. You whimper into his mouth when he rolls his hips, hands sliding from the back of his head to his cheeks, lips parting so that Aerion can swipe his tongue along the inside of your lip.
“Kostā,” he says again, dragging his lips from yours, to your cheek, your jaw, trailing open-mouthed kisses down your neck. “Kosti umbagon kesīr. Iā kosti jikagon naejot Vesteros. Kosti aerēbahon—naejot Qohor se Brāvos. Naejot Qarthi se Ashī. Skoriot mirre jaelā, kosti jikagon.”
You can. We can stay here. Or we can go back to Westeros. We can travel—to Qohor and Braavos. To Qarth and Asshai. Wherever you want, we can go.
It is a nice dream, he thinks, eyes sliding shut as he slides off your tunic and kisses down your chest. It is a—he lets out a shaky breath, nails biting into your waist as he rests his forehead to your sternum, face buried between your breasts—it is a really nice dream. He feels your fingers thread through his hair, and he presses his lips to the swell of your breast, fingers trailing down your body to slide your pants over your hips, and then does the same to his own.
He can almost imagine it when he closes his eyes. With your hands in his hair and your breath rising and falling unevenly, the warmth of your skin and the way you breathe his name—he can almost pretend that the two of you are on a ship to another city, just you and him, together, because he is yours and you are his, and nothing matters more than that.
It is childish, he knows that in his heart. He has known it since the argument in Vyrano’s manse, when you shouted at him and told him that things aren’t so simple, that you are bound by politics and the weight of your station, your titles, and your blood. Aerion knows one day he will be called home, and as much as it’s nice to dream of a world where he burns his father’s letter in retaliation for months of exile and chooses you instead, it just—
It is not so simple.
It will never be so simple, and that is why Aerion cannot get rid of the pit in his stomach, because he knows it is not simple for him, and it is even less simple for you. You could very well choose to go home, and Aerion wouldn’t even be able to blame you—not really. He would be angry, he would be cruel and cold, and he would pretend that he didn’t care half as much as he truly did, but he would not be able to blame you for it, even if you did end up on the opposite side of the battlefield one day. Even if you did—
You cradle his cheeks and lift his face again, bringing your lips to his as he rolls his hips against yours, eyes sliding shut as you kiss him deeper this time, gasping into his mouth when you feel his cock slide between your folds, tip pressing heavy on your clit before he drags it to your hole. His lips part, jaw half-ajar as he slowly sinks inside of you.
“Avy jorrāelan,” you whisper into his open mouth instead of giving him a proper answer, dragging your fingers through his hair, nails scraping his scalp. “Sīr olvie.”
I love you. So much.
Aerion lets out a hitched noise into your mouth, a gasp, a moan, something in between, lashes fluttering as he buries his cock deep in your cunt. One hand drops to your waist to hold you in place when you try to roll your hips up, and he presses his face into the crook of your neck, savoring the feeling of being inside of you, of your thighs around his waist, your chest pressed to his. He mouths absently at your neck.
I love you, you say—you’re hardly the first to say it to him. Many whores crawl into his bed professing their love as they paw at his chest and kiss his neck, thinking it’ll coax him into giving them an extra coin. But it’s… different coming from you, because you mean it. You have seen the very worst of him—vicious and violent and half-mad—and you mean it still. He knows it in the way you say it, the way you look at him, the way you drew your blade against your own friend to protect him. He knows you mean it, and he doesn’t know if anyone has loved him—truly loved him, all of him, even the worst bits—since his mother died.
And he is going to lose you, just like how he lost her, because you love him, but it is not enough to make you stay.
Fuck.
The next breath he lets out is shuddered, and his eyes burn, so he is glad he has his face pressed into the crook of your neck. His chest feels heavy all of a sudden, lust slipping away, and Aerion is frustrated—he’s so frustrated that he cannot even hold onto this. The feeling is there: your body wrapped around his, the heat, the closeness, the way you breathe his name and arch your back into him. His cock is buried in your cunt, warm and wet and tight, walls fluttering around him, but—
His hips still against yours, and for a moment, Aerion cannot move at all, pressed against you, breath uneven at your throat, grip at your waist tight, but not with desire. He does not want to lose this. You.
You card your fingers through his hair, a slow, soothing motion that makes him ache.
“We do not have to do this,” you say quietly, and he hates that you understand. You always understand. Nobody ever understands Aerion, but you always have; with little more than a glance or a look exchanged, you’ve always understood what he wants and needs. He does not want to lose this, he thinks again desperately. He does not want to lose you. “We can just lay together, if you want.”
Aerion’s jaw tightens at your words, frustrated with himself and the situation, because he let himself get too attached to you, because he loves you and now he is going to lose you, because he doesn’t want to just lay with you, he wants you, wants this, but he cannot pull himself out of his own head long enough to even fuck you properly.
“No,” Aerion says, voice strained. “No, I want this.”
His grip tightens at your waist, almost bruising, trying to anchor himself to you. He forces his hips to move again, slow at first, then rougher, chasing something he cannot quite reach, and it feels wrong—disconnected, like his body is moving without him.
“Fuck,” he breathes, forehead still resting on your shoulder, so frustrated that his eyes burn with tears that he can feel on the verge of spilling over. Aerion has not cried in years, and today he has twice. It is mortifying. “I just—”
He does not even know what he’s trying to say. That he’s angry? That he’s scared? That he does not know how life will be after he loses you? That he wants you to tell him that you will still be here when he returns, even if it’s a lie?
You lift his face from your shoulder and press your lips to his again, lips moving slowly against his, coaxing him out of his own head and back into the moment.
“Tell me something,” you say against his lips, fingers carding absently through his hair.
“Like what?” he mutters, sighing as he presses his nose against your temple, basking in your warmth, trying to settle back into the now with you beneath him, your hands in his hair, voice soft in his ear, cock buried deep inside of you.
“Anything,” you reply unhelpfully.
Aerion exhales through his nose, and then, he inhales deeply, drowning himself in the new lavender oil you bought at the market last week.
After a few moments, he says without thinking, “Your whore said something earlier.”
You hum. “Caelyx says a lot,” you say, amused. Aerion almost rolls his eyes when he realizes you know which one he’s talking about without him having to say anything. “What did he say this time?”
Aerion’s face is hot as he registesr exactly what he just said, remembering what it was that threw him so off kilter earlier, unsure why he even brought it up. His mouth opens, then closes again, jaw tightening because he already regrets it. You give him a curious look and he scowls.
“Something stupid,” he mutters, trying to brush it off, but your fingers tug lightly at his hair, trying to coax the answer out of him.
“Tell me.”
“That you—” Aerion cuts himself off, eyes flicking to the side until you press your fingers to his cheek and force him to look at you again. Irritation and embarrassment war within him, begging him to shut the fuck up. “That you like to take control. In ways most men are too proud to learn.”
You are silent for a long moment, and then you laugh—it is bright and pretty, and Aerion pulls back slightly to look at the way your eyes shine, and your smile splits your face. Your fingers drag through his hair as you look up at him, an adoring expression on your face that leaves him breathless.
“Gaoman raqagon bona, zaldrīzes dārilaros,” you purr, leaning up to nip his lips. “Issi jaelā naejot sylugon mēre tubis? Ivestragī nyke gūrogon toliot? Mazverdagon ao dijāves sȳz.”
I do enjoy that, dragon prince. Are you wanting to try one day? Let me take over? Make you feel good?
Aerion’s face flushes hot, and he instinctively moves to press his face into your neck again, but you do not let him, forcing him to hold your gaze. There are a dozen things he wants to say, sharp and cutting, to salvage what little pride he has left. But none of them can make it past the heat crawling up his throat.
“That is not—” he starts, then falters, scowling when your expression only grows more amused.
“Not what?” you murmur, thumb dragging slowly along his lower lip before pressing in slightly. His lips instinctively part for you, letting you trace the inside of his mouth. “Did you imagine it, prince? Taking it? Letting me set the pace, letting me decide how deep, how slow, how hard?”
Aerion’s cock twitches inside of you, breath shuddering, letting out something between a scoff and a strained breath, grip tightening. He stares down at you with wide eyes, and you watch him raptly.
“I think you’d like it,” you continue, thumb sliding further in his mouth to press down on his tongue. He thinks to bite down just to make a point, but he finds himself too consumed by what you’re saying to even try. “Being held down, stretched open, made to take it inch by inch, fucked hard until you forget how to fight me at all—forget to think, forget to breathe.”
Aerion chokes on nothing at the lewd words, face flaming red, pupils blown wide, breath quick and chest heaving. Something close to a whimper spills from his lips.
“You’d curse me for it at first,” you say, lips curved up, almost thoughtful, like you’re envisioning it yourself—him beneath you, back arching, jaw slack, eyes rolled back as you hold his hips. He is envisioning it too. “Try to push me off, tell me to stop—” Your lips brush his jaw, lingering there. “—and then you wouldn’t want me to, start to realize how nice it feels.”
His nails dig crescents into your skin, so deep that he’s sure he’s drawing blood. His hips twitch, but you stop him this time, legs tightening around his narrow waist to hold him still. He fights a complaint, teeth grinding together as he tries to hold himself together with the sliver of pride he has left.
“It is easy to make someone loud, you know? But I could make you feel so good you’d go quiet,” you tell him. “Turn this pretty head of yours to mush, until all you can do is lay there and take it.”
“You—”
Aerion does not even know what he wants to say, breathing ragged and heavy, cock aching in your cunt. He tries to move again instinctively, only able to grind his cock a little deeper inside of you, and it is not enough, not nearly enough. Your thumb slips from his mouth and Aerion’s head hangs forward, eyes half-lidded, a low groan escaping his lips when you roll your hips up.
“Jaelan so naejot qogralbar nyke se ñuhoso kesā jaelagon nyke naejot qogralbar ao,” you breathe, tilting the lower half of your face up to ghost your lips against his. “Sīr bona skori ao māzigon arlī, kostan gūrogon ao isse manta lēda.”
I want you to fuck me the way you would want me to fuck you. So that when you return, I can take you apart properly.
When you return—hope flares in his chest with a vengeance, and Aerion is rutting his hips into you before you even finish the sentence, choking over a breath, one hand flying to your hair to crane your head back so he can press his lips to yours. He moans into your mouth, eyes rolling back at the feeling of your walls tight around him, drowning in the lewd sound of skin on skin, the sloppiness of his cock pounding your wet cunt.
“Aerion—” you gasp, and he loves the sound of his name on your lips, loves it even more when you sound like this—whiny and needy, fucked out in a way you only ever get with him. Aerion will never get enough of you. He could have you forever, and it’ll never be enough. “Hah—shit—”
He grabs your thigh with his free hand and hooks your leg higher to reach deeper inside of you, bracing his knees on the mattress so that he can fuck you properly, relishing in the way you cry his name, back arching into his chest and—
—and for a second, he cannot stop himself from imagining that it’s him instead. That it’s your weight pressing on his body, your fingers pressing bruises into his thigh as you push it up to his chest, his back arched off the bed as you press deep into him, so deep that he cannot breathe, that all he can feel, all he can think is you. And—and it is wrong. Aerion is a prince, a dragon, he does not give up control to anyone like that, much less a woman, much less you, and he is angry. Angry at you for putting the image in his head, angrier at himself for wanting it.
Aerion’s hand slips down to your throat before he can think twice, pretending that it’s yours on his instead, fingers squeezing just enough to cut the air to his lungs, watching the way his face reddens as he gasps for air he cannot breathe in; he imagines the burn in his lungs as your lashes flutter and lips part, the way his head would go light and fuzzy, vision darkening at the edges.
Your hand flies to his wrist, nails digging deep into his skin, eyes rolling back with each thrust of his hips, lips wet and swollen as you try to suck in the air he deprives you. Your eyes are hazy as you stare up at him, hardly able to hold his gaze, his fingers cutting off the pretty moans of his name that he knows would be falling from your lips.
He cannot get enough of it—he cannot get enough of you. He will not let you leave him, cannot let you leave him. But—but he cannot stop you. He cannot stop you, and you love him, but it is not enough, and Aerion should not be surprised, because when has he ever—
—Aerion does not want to think about that. He does not want to think about it at all, so he leans down to press his lips messily against yours, groaning into your mouth as your walls flutter around his cock. You barely kiss him back, too focused on trying to stay conscious; he can feel the soft, breathless whines against his lips, the ones he cannot hear from his own doing, and he chokes over a moan when he feels you writhe beneath him, jaw falling slack when one particularly rough thrust has you cumming on his cock, hips jerking and body spasming beneath him.
He squeezes his eyes shut, willing himself not to finish with you, even as his cock aches, head hot and heavy, each drag against your tight walls making his whole body shudder violently. He only lets go of your throat when your fingers start to slacken on his wrist, when he notices the way your head starts lolling back against the pillows.
“Fuck,” he groans, watching as you inhale the air greedily, imagining the rush to your lungs, the way pleasure has started to shift to overstimulation as you squirm against him, hips still slapping against your ass as he fucks you hard, chasing his own high now, abdomen tense, body hot and prickly, mind half-way gone already.
“Aerion,” you gasp, nails digging into his shoulders as you seek something to hold to, head tossed back, throat bared to him, and Aerion bites down hard, relishing in the familiar taste of iron in his mouth, the way you cry out, hips jerking as you cum a second time already.
He cums with you this time, hips stuttering when he feels your walls tighten around him again, moaning into your neck as he spills his seed deep inside of you.
He collapses against you, chest heaving as he tries to regain his breath. His eyes slide shut when he feels your fingers on his back, tracing his skin lightly as he comes down from his high. He presses his nose into your neck, ghosting his lips against your skin.
After a long moment, he lifts his face from where he’s buried it in your skin so that he can look at you. There is an expression on your face that makes Aerion’s chest tighten—too sad, too close to goodbye, like you’re memorizing something that will soon be ripped away from you.
“You could come with me,” he says, grateful that it does not come out as a plea, because it certainly feels like one. “Tomorrow morning, on the ship. Join the Second Sons with me until the Golden Company leaves Lys. Come with me to the Disputed Lands.”
Aerion knows your answer before you say it. He sees it in your eyes, and his jaw goes tight, helplessness and frustration, pride and anger eating away at him. But before he can spit out a string of vile insults, accuse you of being a liar and a traitor and a whore and whatever else spills from his lips in a desperate attempt to salvage his mangled pride, you lift your hand to his face, fingers brushing beneath his eye before you hold his cheek in the palm of your hand.
“I do not want to fight tonight, Aerion,” you tell him quietly when you see the expression on his face.
Aerion does not care. You do not get to want anything; you do not get to ask him anything. Frustration bubbles and bubbles and bubbles, and he stares at you accusingly, angrily, because how dare you tell him this when, for all he knows, as soon as he leaves tomorrow, you’ll be on a ship with the Golden Company returning to Volantis.
And yet, it does not spill over. He does not know whether he is the one who does not allow it, or whether he is just tired and cannot muster it.
Aerion lets out a breath as he lowers his head to your chest, eyes sliding shut when he feels your fingers thread through his hair again, carding through the long locks gently. He sinks into your warmth, the feeling of your arms around him, legs entangled, so wrapped together that he can no longer tell where he ends and where you begin—as it should be, as it won’t be soon.
Will you be here when I return? he wants to ask desperately. Is this the last time we will be together like this?
He cannot bring himself to ask, because he’s not sure if he really wants to know the answer.
———————
Aerion wakes to the early morning light spilling through your curtains. He lets out a soft puff of air, pressing his face into your chest before he cracks his eyes open.
The sun only seems to be just breaching the horizon, and Aerion’s eyes slide shut again briefly when he realizes what that means. He feels your fingers still in his hair, absently twirling the ends, and his jaw tightens.
“How long have you been awake?” he rasps, not wanting to move from where he’s laid up in your arms, but he knows it’s only a matter of time.
“I did not sleep,” you say quietly after a moment, and Aerion pauses, staring absently out to the balcony looking over the First Magister’s manse, watching the sun rise over the sea.
For a few seconds, he does not respond. He just listens—to your breathing, to the faint sounds of the city beyond the manse, to the rhythm of your heart beneath his cheek. His fingers smooth over your forearm, sliding down your wrist to entwine his fingers with yours, the movement so instinctive that he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing until he feels your fingers tighten around his.
“Why?” he asks finally after a minute, feeling your fingers pause in his hair before you resume the slow strokes.
“You’re prettier with your mouth shut. I was appreciating the view without all of the snark.”
Aerion clicks his tongue harshly, but his lips curl up into a small smile despite himself. He mutters, “Miserable wench. I should have your tongue.”
He feels you huff out a laugh, and he shuts his eyes again, letting himself rest in your arms, exhaling softly when he feels your hand drift from his hair to trace idle patterns along his shoulder and back. He does not want to move. Does not want to ruin this moment. Does not want to leave when he doesn’t know if you will be here when he returns. He just wants to stay like this.
He thinks you want to, too, because your arms tighten around him, and you make a noise in the back of your throat. He feels you tilt your head down to ghost your lips against the top of his head, sighing into his hair.
“We need to get to the harbor before the rest of the island wakes,” you finally say, voice quiet.
Aerion wants to pretend that he doesn’t hear you, that the world outside this room does not exist and the Blackfyres aren’t a breath away, seeking his head—that it is only you and only him, as it should be, as it is meant to be—but his pride is already in tatters and he refuses to shred what little is left of it, so he pushes himself up, out of your arms.
He hesitates at the edge of the bed, sitting there, staring into the horizon, until he feels your arms slip around his bare waist, nails scratching lightly at his abdomen, your lips on the sun-warmed skin of his shoulder, and he lets his eyes flutter shut again.
Will you still be here when I return?
“I do not have proper clothes to wear,” he says instead. “I will not wear silks to—”
“You can wear something of mine,” you interrupt, and Aerion regrets brushing you off the moment you pull your arms back and shift off the bed, wandering over to one of your chests, pulling out black leathers for him to put on. “We’re going to have to move through the alleys—I’m sure the Golden Company still has men patrolling the streets looking for you. Once you get on the ship, you’ll be fine. They won’t risk starting a conflict with another mercenary company.”
Aerion knows all of this, and if it were any other day, he would make a snide comment about how you should put your tongue to better use than telling him something he already knows. But it is not any other day, and Aerion can only grind his teeth together as he pulls on the clothes you handed off to him.
The two of you dress in silence after that, quickly so as not to waste too much time, but slowly all the same, casting looks toward one another when the other is distracted, savoring in a sight that you will both soon be deprived of.
On opposite sides of the room, the two of you stare at each other after getting dressed. Your jaw is tight, and he’s barely keeping his breath steady. This is goodbye, he knows that, but he does not know for how long.
A few months, maybe.
Forever, maybe.
His lips part to speak, but no words leave them. You exhale through your nose and reach to your bedside, grabbing the steel you’ve carried the past eight moons. You stare down at it for a minute, fingers tracing the red gems embedded in the hilt—it’s not the Valyrian steel that your friend gave to you earlier, but it’s still one of the finest blades Aerion has ever seen.
Your grip tightens on it briefly before you make your way over to him.
“This was a gift,” you say quietly. “From the First Magister on my arrival. My father took my sword, my armor, my jewelry, and put it all back in the family vault. He allowed me only the necklace I took for myself from the ruins, and a short dagger to defend myself with. The magisters do not typically allow people who aren’t household guards or hired sellswords to carry steel, but the First Magister gave me this in hopes of making me feel more comfortable as I was not… adjusting well—” Aerion snorts, and you scowl at him, but then hold out the hilt of the blade to him. He gives you a questioning look. “We will not have time to stop by Magister Vyrano’s manse so you can grab the rest of your belongings. Take it with you. A sellsword without a sword makes for only—”
“Do not finish that sentence,” he mutters, chest tightening as he takes the blade from you. It’s light in his hands, balanced, the morning sun glittering against the rubies in its hilt. He admits, “It is a nice blade.”
You give a wry smile that does not reach your eyes. “Do not lose it, dragon prince, or I will take offense.”
Aerion would never lose something of yours, he thinks to himself, but does not say out loud because he cannot bear to admit more than he already has. He thinks you know, though, because your smile fades at the edges, expression slipping the longer you watch him.
“In my chambers in Vyrano’s manse,” Aerion says after a moment, chest tight, exhaling as he looks away, “there is a chest. A black one. It is important to me, will you—”
Aerion cuts himself off, lookin away, unsure what he’s really asking. But you nod, because you know—you always know.
“I’ll make sure nothing happens to it while you’re gone,” you say softly.
You turn your back on him without another word, making your way to the door, and Aerion’s lips part to call after you, panic spiking hard and fast, clawing up his throat. Once you leave this room, everything will end, and Aerion does not want this to end—not now, not ever. Your hand wraps around the handle of the door, and your name is on his lips, but—
—but he closes his mouth, eyes sliding shut as he follows after you instead, unable to rid himself of the heaviness weighing on his chest.
———————
It takes less than an hour to get to the harbor. There was only one brief scare at the market where one of the Blackfyres—Haegon, the one you flirted with—was lingering, talking to a Tyroshi merchant. Aerion had half a mind to put a blade through his throat before making his way to the Second Sons’ ship, but you stopped him before he could, much to his irritation.
He stands at the edge of the harbor now, the smell of sea thick in the air, watching as the sellswords move about the deck, preparing to set off to the Disputed Lands. The ship looms ahead of him, its shadow dwarfing the pier, and the lump in Aerion’s throat feels terribly uncomfortable.
His thumb tightens reflexively around the hilt of the blade you gave him, thumb brushing over the embedded rubies. Behind him, the city is just beginning to stir, voices carrying faintly from the square as merchants open their stalls, and the harbor children chasing one another down the docks. Life goes on, as it always does whenever Aerion feels as though his life is falling apart.
He lets out a breath, then turns to you.
For a long moment, neither of you says anything.
Up close like this, with the morning light catching in your hair, you almost don’t look real. Like something he imagined into being during those long, empty months of exile. He almost wouldn’t be surprised—Aerion is the last person who deserves to have met his other half, like in the stories and poems that Daella used to have their mother read to them, and madness always has run in Targaryen blood.
But you are real, you are here, and perhaps it does make sense that he has met you, only to lose you. That is a just punishment, he thinks, for who he is and what he has done. His gaze drifts over your face, lingering, memorizing—the curve of your mouth, the glint of your eyes under the morning sun, the way your lips part as you let out a soft sigh.
He swallows thickly, trying to find something to say, but before he can, you say, “Māzigon arlī naejot nyke, zaldrīzes dārilaros. Konir sagon iā udrāzma.”
Return to me, dragon prince. That is an order.
But will you even be here when I return? he wants to ask, the words lodged in his throat, because he is terrified of leaving you here with your friend and the Blackfyres, where they can whisper in your ear and convince you to go along with their plan to bring you home and he will be out of sight and out of reach, too far away to convince you not to forget about him. He is terrified of returning to find you long gone.
“Gaomā daor udrāzma nyke, quba ābra,” he says instead, grateful that his voice comes out steadier than he feels.
You do not order me, wretched woman.
Your smile lightens at his words—the curve of your lips softer, and the look in your eyes gentler than he has ever seen it, a flash of longing crossing your expression before you hide it with another quiet sigh.
A yell from the deck of the ship signals that it is almost time for it to disembark.
“Kesi rhaenagon arlī, mēre ñuhoso iā tȳne—bona iksan gīmigon hen,” you say easily, turning on your heel to leave without so much as another lingering look in his direction. Aerion almost calls after you, but he stops himself, watching you leave with his heart in his throat. “Ēva hembar jēda, dārilaros”
We will meet again, one way or another—that, I am sure of. ‘Til next time, prince.
———————
There IS a universe where our girl chooses to go home & takes the Blackfyres up on their offer instead of staying in Lys… That is not this au, but the idea of that au is saurrrr juicy to me. Like it would definitely be a much darker au because it would be centered on them being opposite sides of a war, which the Targaryes would ultimately lose—so his father/uncles would be killed, potentially his brothers/sister too unless they escaped or someone intervened (hint hint), and Aerion would be in the middle of tug of war because the Blackfyres want him dead because he’s a potential heir to the throne, and reader wants him and is refusing to let up on it. All this to say, it would be much darker and much more toxic LOLLL, Aerion would hate her profusely and also hates that a part of him can’t bring himself to hate her as much as he should, even after everything she did. Definitely tries to kill her several times but either can’t bring himself to do it or is half-assed so she’s able to stop him.
summary : They say caring is sharing, but to Legolas it becomes keeping upon meeting you. Keeping you from focusing solely on Aragorn and not on him; keeping Boromir from getting too much leisure with you. The feeling in his chest is wrong, yet it catches like fire and the flames are both delicious and excruciating.
request pairing legolas x Ranger!fem!reader (no use of y/n)
content warning : jealous!legolas, aragorn is found family, boromir is a flirt but it’s for the common good, kind of obsessed!legolas, reader has a backstory, foot massage (oops), fellowship timeline
author’s note : it’s finally here! last one shot before a little while; as i said already i’m focusing on my long fics (AHFAK and Bloodborne) for now! although i still have an imagine in my drafts to keep this blog active while i wrestle with exams’ week lolz- ,,idk what to think of this honestly, it’s like i like and hate it at the same time lmao, perhaps i just hate the amount of time this has taken to write because i’m usually faster :(
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A twig cracks in the distance, the forest swallows it before it reaches the ears of the nine men walking. Or at least partially. A blond man with a tall and lithe figure stops in his tracks to listen to it for half a second, before continuing his journey. His senses sharpen naturally, attuning to the smaller noises the woods always make. He knows them by heart, to the point where he knows when a rock on the ground is out of its place or a track freshly taken.
The sound of the branch cracking behind them seems odd, but he does not mention it to the others. A flaw of his kin: elves believe everybody has their acute hearing and perception. If nobody picked it up, it must have been his own mind made too wary by the dread of the adventure awaiting them. After all, who would not be on their guard when undertaking such a perilous journey? The hobbits, apparently. All except Samwise, as always the cautious one — much to his credit —, who keeps on frantically looking around and motioning to Pippin and Merry to cease their trifling and be quiet.
None of them can imagine something is following them in the shadows of the trees, not ten feet away. Someone, in reality. You hide behind a trunk and stop all movements with a grimace that says you’re cursing yourself the moment the twig cracks under the heel of your boot. You had done better discretion work. Weirdly enough, nobody turns your way and the hobbits continue to giggle merrily. You wouldn’t have thought you’d be able to follow them so long considering there was in their group an elf, a Ranger, and a wise magician. Yet, none of them seem to have spotted you. You think all the praise on elven hearing is largely undeserved if this one cannot even spot someone is following them for days now.
You let the group walk away a bit more, putting extra caution in being as light as a feather when you walk to guarantee discretion. You had to thank your life as a Ranger for that. It had taught you to breathe steadily in all circumstances, to walk without a sound, to climb trees with ease, to survive on harsh conditions. Harsh conditions such as spying on a group of nine men, five of them being excellent fighters, without being caught. Arwen owed you for that, she really did.
You hadn’t been able to refuse her when she fell down to her knees with a look so desperate in her eyes you wouldn’t have thought it possible for an elf to worry so much. Timeless beings did not worry over the rest of the mortal world as you did, so it had to be important. And it was. Your journey had taken you to Rivendell to seek the hospitality of Elrond on the night of the Fellowship’s departure. You were a friend of Aragorn, and because of that Arwen believed you were the only one capable to carry on with the task she had for you; and the only one she could trust with it. Moreover, you were a Ranger. She could send you off without worrying about your safety too much; you knew how to take care of yourself.
She told you of the formation of the Fellowship, of the evil that loomed over the world with great malice; however prompting you not to voice its existence to anybody else. Nobody could know you knew, not even Elrond, not even the members of said Fellowship if you could avoid it —for your safety, she had said. You were supposed to follow them until they reached the first hills of the Misty Mountains, where it was not safe for you to go anymore. You could not possibly follow them in secret in the white peaks of the mountains. Arwen wanted you to make sure they were safe until then; to make sure Aragorn was safe.
You had tried to reassure her at first, telling her he was accompanied by mighty warriors and risked little with his own fighting abilities. The elven princess heard only what she wanted to hear, and now you were starting to believe she had been right to an extent. If they had not spotted you yet, many more discreet evils could have been ambushing them.
Of course, you didn’t know the elf of the party had noticed an additional presence days ago —without being able to catch it. If he really did want to catch you, he would have, but again, Legolas thought everybody knew you were here. Aragorn knew; a little bit. He knew something was odd in the forest, but was unable to name it clearly. It manifested in crunching of leaves that echoed, making it impossible to track the noise, or sometimes it was just the eerie feeling that something else was enjoying the warmth of their fire in the shadows.
It made you laugh undercover: he should have seen you from the first day on. After all, it was Aragorn who had taught you everything you knew. You were a teenager when the Ranger found you begging for scraps of food to the mean innkeeper of a small tavern in a poor human village. The town was nastier than Esgaroth back in the days of the Battle of the Five Armies; Aragorn had visited it once a few months before the dragon Smaug burnt it to ashes. It was one of those humans slums whose inhabitants were either drunkards or bandits.
Aragorn figured it was not a place for you to dwell in, women were not fairly treated in those parts. He offered you a dirty hand, which you took with your equally dirty one, and his company until you could both reach a friendlier town and the Ranger could buy you a proper meal. How long had it been since your last meal? Weeks, it seemed. You had gotten used to eating the mud-covered stale bread you found on the street, and drinking off of animal troughs in the back of old crumbling farms here and there. Sometimes the cows and goats gave you curious company as you drank from their water and fed off their food, but they never utter a word, never betrayed your presence to their owners.
Most of the time, animal were more compassionate than men.
After a little while, without knowing why or how or when it happened, Aragorn could not bring himself to let you go your own way anymore. He had discovered you were nice, and funny, and curious. Above all, you were full of undeveloped potential because you had to focus on survival. He could see himself wave you goodbye and then stumbling on your corpse in the forest some weeks later.
No. You were still worth something. He could make a feisty woman out of you, he knew you had it in you. At first, it had been hard being seen as a Ranger by other Rangers. Not that you crossed path much, but sometimes they would reunite and then Aragorn had to bring you there to introduce you; you needed to recognise your people if you were in need of help. They had been hesitant, but if Aragorn had taken you under his wing it couldn’t be for nothing. You didn’t hold it against them: Rangers were wild men, not orphan girls. Yet you had in you something of a wild woman, you had to for having survived in the street so long.
Right now, it seemed Aragorn had trained you so well he was unable to catch your own presence. You had grown to be as discreet as him, though he handled you with a sword like a youngling still. You felt great looking after him in secret, like repaying him for what he had done for you. You made sure he was okay, to prove he could count on you.
Night had set on the Fellowship’s camp for a while now, you had climbed up a tree in silence in the early hours of the night and now took a well deserved rest. The fire of the camp allowed you to not be in complete darkness, even when you had made sure you were far away enough not to be seen. You could use the sleep, the journey was restless and it impressed you the four little hobbits could keep up with it —though Aragorn and another man often carried them up the trail. You didn’t need to fear your environment, for the men you followed took turn in watching the camp at night. Always in pair of two, the elf being the only one to never switch with anybody since he didn’t need sleep.
Legolas didn’t mind maintaining a vigil all night, he was used to it and his body was not even weary of the journey yet. He still felt all the youthful vigour of his muscles like he did the first day, and the small ration of lambas he was entitled to sufficed to keep his belly full.
He didn’t talk much, except with Aragorn. Boromir always seemed grumpy when roused out of bed for watch, Gimli already grumbled too much about having to ‘team up with an elf‘, and Gandalf preferred the wiseness of the quiet, something Legolas had in common with the old man. Only with Aragorn could the young prince exchange words and smiles. They had known each other for years now, and the Ranger was probably one of the most resilient people he knew.
Legolas was waiting for him to come out of his bedroll by the fire when a loud noise suddenly broke the calm of the forest. He shot up to his feet and fell into a defensive stance like second nature; one hand hovering over the arrows in his quiver and the other over the long knife strapped to his thigh. The sound echoed for a second: a loud thump, branches cracking, leaves crushing, birds flighting. Groaning, too? Yes, someone was groaning in pain not twenty feet away.
It seemed the sound had not reached the camp as loudly as it did where Legolas stood, on the border, because he heard no sound of people coming to see what it was or bedrolls rustling.
Right. He was going to have to deal with it on his own. It did not matter, as an elf he could approach the danger without making a single sound; unlike said danger.
Legolas made his way towards the noise cautiously. His boots touched the floor like he was walking on cotton, his breath steadied and his heart rate slowed to something imperceptible. All his composure frayed in a curious frown when he stepped past a tree and fell face to face with a form lying rigid on the ground, at the root of a bigger trunk.
Here, splayed on her back, eyes shot wide and chest heaving up and down in a struggle, laid a woman who had visibly fell from the tree she was perched upon. Legolas’s combat stance loosened a bit at the sight, before he took the long knife out of its sheath and pointed it right her way when she made the slightest move to scramble to her feet.
You couldn’t believe it: you fell in your sleep. You had forgotten the one important thing when sleeping in a tree, which was securing yourself to the bough with a rope. Now your whole body hurt and for a few seconds the force of the impact had kicked the breath out of you. Frankly, you could have passed out here until morning with how much your back and legs pulled with hot blinding pain; if it wasn’t for the man now threatening you with a weapon when you were in no shape for fighting. The pain worsened when you pulled yourself up with your hands to at least sit, but you bit it down and wobbled to your feet, aided with a grip on the treacherous trunk behind you.
Your lungs felt on fire and you wondered if you had not any broken bones that would reveal themselves once the adrenaline wore off, but for now a more important matter was at hand. You were discovered, and the blond elf in front of you seemed ready to end your miserable life if you even breathed wrong. Here, in the dead of night, he seemed menacing: blue eyes glowing in the dark and fair hair floating like eerie gossamer in a halo around him. If you didn’t know better, he could have been a ghost.
From Legolas’s point of view though, you looked nothing like the strong Ranger you really were. He had caught you in a dire position, and he was the one holding you had the end of his knife. From all that he could see, you were nothing but a lost woman. But if you were, why were you following them for days now? It didn’t make any sense, and Legolas knew better than to draw hurried conclusions. You had to be some kind of spy to be able to track them so long without being caught in plain day.
“Who are you? And what is your purpose here?“ his voice is stern and accusing. You cannot tell if it suits him in the darkness, but you imagine it does; elves are perfect by nature.
“I do not mean any harm, I swear it!“
“I have rarely seen someone follow a group of humble travellers without ill intents.“
Of course he lies about the real nature of the Fellowship. Clever, but you can be clever too.
“Only you are not just humble travellers, sir,“ Legolas’s grip on his knife tightens, he takes a menacing step towards you and you shoot your hands up in the air. “I am a friend of Aragorn.“
Closer, he looks even more ethereal, less of a ghost. You can make out the features of his face, the perfect pale ivory of his skin, the smoothness of his hair. There is not one strand that falls out of place, not a single wrinkle in his clothes. You know elves are this way, Arwen is the most beautiful girl you have ever laid eyes upon; yet this one feels different. The underlying storm in his eyes tells you he is less clam than his peers, more prone to the temper of wood-elves —for his blondness tells you he is not a child of Elrond. Of course, this is something you’ve spotted days ago, but now that he is here before you, your mind runs with curiosity.
Upon hearing the name of his companion, Legolas’s demeanour shifts. Instead of becoming more friendly like you would have thought, it gets more defensive.
“What business do you have with him?“
“None but peace. I am not a spy of the Dark Lord, I come from the inquiring of a dearly beloved.“
Legolas frowns. Arwen. But he has to make sure you are not lying, though he feels no ill intent coming out of you. “If you are a friend, you should be able to tell be who is Aragorn.“
Now it’s your turn to frown through the pain still stinging in your back. Is he friend enough with the man to know that?
“A Ranger…?“ you try.
Wrong answer. The elf takes another step to you, the blade of his long knife now inches away from your face. Not very patient for an elf, you note.
He looks like he is about to end you without further ado, and in your panic you cave in. He better know it already. “Son of Arathorn!“
As the name bounces against the trees around you, his knife lowers visibly and something passes over his face. Relief. His expression shifts the tiniest bit, he points at you with his chin.
“Hands behind your back. I am bringing you to camp.“
Okay. Not dying first, trust second.
The camp was oddly unfamiliar as you walked in front of Legolas to its centre by the fire, even though you watched it being set up. You had not stoped for a second than already someone in the distance was walking your way. Legolas stayed behind you without a word, posture straight and perhaps closer than required. Extra caution in case you tried to escape. You would not, but Legolas didn’t know that; it was good that he was careful.
You stared at the woods right in front of you, footsteps growing closer by the second before someone erupted out of the shadows. Not just anyone. Aragorn.
“Legolas, where have you been? I searched for you everywhere, and-“
The Ranger cut himself abruptly when his eyes landed on you. A beat passed before he called out your name: half-surprised, half-pleased, but mainly unhappy. You shouldn’t be here. It was dangerous, even for you. Aragorn’s mind went through all the horrible things that could have happened to you, before settling when it hit him that you were the oddity tugging in the atmosphere lately. This was silly. You were so good he himself had not been able to place you as other than just some strange feeling in the air he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and now he was worrying about you getting endangered when they would have been the endangered ones had you been unfriendly.
You tried a small smile, unsure. The quiet rummaging you three made dealing with an improvised reunion sufficed to stir Gandalf out of his sleep, which subsequently woke Boromir, Gimli and Sam —the hobbit had not slept on both ears since they departed from Rivendell.
Now, you were sat on a log near the warmth of the fire, ditto for Aragorn on the other side. Gandalf stood a bit crooked at his side; the redheaded dwarf mimicked him, leaning on a walking staff he had found for himself; and the other, younger one — Boromir, you thought he had been called —, sat next to him on the log, mirrored by the single hobbit almost like his shadow, only shorter. On your side stood only the blond elf, mute. He had not said a word since Aragorn’s appearance, and when you glanced back at him from time to time, he was already looking at you, a barely-there crease between his brows that said he was turning something in that head of his.
You whisper your name awkwardly to the four men who do not know it, hands flat in your laps to keep yourself from fidgeting. This was not how this should’ve gone.
“She’s a friend of mine,“ Aragorn says to summarise. You were more like family, but saying it would have resulted in questions you did not want to deal with tonight.
“Aye, what is she doin’ here without ya knowing, then?“ the dwarf asks. He has a point.
“This, I do not know, Master Gimli.“
The answer questions you back. You sigh.
“I have been following you on the account of Lady Arwen,“ you begin. “She…asked me to make sure you were doing okay until the first slopes of the Misty Mountains.“
Aragorn cannot help the smile that blooms on his lips. He gently shakes his head and sends you a look that says he trusts you.
“She tells the truth,“ he says. With that, the atmosphere seems to shift to something less tense, more welcoming for you.
In a way, it makes you proud that five grown men could have been on their guard in front of a single woman like you; it often only happened when you knocked one of them down on the ground.
“You can stay the night,“ he continues. “By the first light of day we will resume our journey, and you will turn back to Rivendell.“
You swallow thickly. “I am not, Aragorn. I’ve put great thought into it: I want to join you on your journey.“
The words land right in the fire and it strengthens a little bit with a small blow of the wind. You are allowed one quick breath before the answer is imposed upon you.
“Absolutely not.“
Aragorn’s mouth doesn’t move, and the voice doesn’t belong to him. Behind you, the especially quiet elf spoke up for the first time in what feels like an hour. Every gaze in the camp turns to him. Legolas suddenly feels very self conscious. He doesn’t even know why he refused so categorically, why the idea of your presence around him everyday felt… dangerous. Not threatening but dangerous. He could see the unguarded affection Aragorn had for you in his eyes, and decipher the smirk forming on Boromir’s lips at your feistiness. The prince couldn’t name the weight in his chest, but he could feel it and it was enough.
You were not coming. For his sake, you had to.
“Legolas, I think she made up her mind already,“ Gandalf gently says. Legolas could hear the wiseness in his words; how could he ever reasonably argue with a wise one? “The Fellowship doesn’t have to be restricted to nine people only; we could use with another addition. She has proven to be very discreet, I think you would not even notice her presence among us.“
Everybody agrees with the old man; Aragorn nods solemnly; Gimli makes an approving sound from the back of his throat; Sam seems more wary but agrees anyway; and Boromir looks right at you like he trusts you already. Gandalf had never been more wrong: it would be impossible for Legolas not to notice you. You lingered already and he only met you an hour ago.
Now it was worse, because you were officially a member of the Fellowship and had proposed to take the last night watch round with Legolas to make up for your trouble. He had to spend the hours before morning with you in the dark, just after having threatened you perhaps more than necessary and blatantly refused your presence. He had to make up for it. You were not responsible of the foolish way his mind acted around you. Boromir could look at you all he wanted, why did he care?
Legolas joined you on a log by the fire after everyone returned to sleep the last hours of the night away. He figured the rest of the night would be calm, he could let his careful scouting of the surroundings down for a bit. You were looking in front of you past the fire when he sat down, watching out for the darkness beyond the borders of your small camp.
There were more important things to look at, but the glow the fire casted on your face distracted Legolas from them far too easily. Shadows curled daintily under the angles of your face, emphasising them. You felt him stare, yet said nothing.
Curious for an elf, to be so unguarded. Was he an oddity amongst his peers or were you discovering the blunt pride of some of them could bleed into their other emotions? He doesn’t let you think this through long enough.
“I apologise for having threatened you. And for not seeing right away the trust Aragorn has in you must be fair.“
The sound of his voice is more gentle now, basked in the warmth of the flames as if they serve to loosen the strain in his throat. It takes you off guard at first. You do not rush a reply as you turn your head towards him, inspecting his features as he does you. You had not had the chance to see him this close, with his presence almost seeping into yours because your knees graze. None of you move away, you pretend not to notice it.
In your quiet observation, he seems even more ethereal than back in the forest, emerging from the darkness. He looks different, more like the being of light he was supposed to be: sharp jaw and aquiline nose cast like bronze in a perfect lost-wax mould. You had seen the process once in a forge the blacksmith had been kind enough to let you stay the night in; he was about your age, but a clever apprentice who already knew his master would be far too drunk to realise he had let anyone in without authorisation.
“Legolas, yes?“ you test the sound of his name on your lips. It ripples just the right way in his stomach. He nods. “Do not apologise for being on your guards. I would rather you’d react like this than the other way around, I can hardly blame you.“
It tears a smile out of him. You do not hold any grudge towards him and it’s a relief. Legolas has the strange wish of doing right by you, of showing you he can keep the group safe. He thinks of all the times he had not been attentive enough when you were following them and about how you must have laughed at him.
“I must tell you, I feel I am bound to trust you fully by the end of the night.“
His tone has a playful edge to it, you remember he must be your age in elven years. “You flatter me!“ you laugh softly.
“I wish it was the case.“
Deep in the marrow of his bones, the elf-prince feels the insatiable feeling of you settling. Your presence, your laugh, your good graces; he wants all of it. One thing about Legolas is that he never quits.
It takes weeks before you finally reach the Misty Mountains. Your journey finds itself delayed by several events, much of which are a pain to deal with. The bright side of things is that it allows you plenty of time to get to know your new companions.
The hobbits quickly take a liking to you: Merry and Pippin make it their lives mission to make you laugh and Sam to grouch after them under the amused eye of Frodo. Gimli, as always, doesn’t bother having you around as long as you are not an elf; and Gandalf often offers you wise words you keep in mind for later. Those are your companions. The others, however, are your friends in the Fellowship.
It is great sharing a path with Aragorn again. Nostalgia hurts less around him. It reminds you of a time in your life where everything seemed bright because he made things better. You talk for hours without an end during night watches, entertain yourselves with each other’s company in the day. When battle comes your way — much more than you want it to because you had hoped for a journey under the spell of discretion —, old habits die hard. You find yourself looking out for him again, just like you did back then. In the aftermath, you silently check up on him, scolding on the account of Arwen when he gets a little too reckless.
With Boromir, it feels like you have known each other for years. It is so easy laughing with him, talking about things as small as the weather, teasing the hobbits together. Liking him feels like second nature, like a friend you were always supposed to have. Boromir is the cheer in your mood, the soft man by the fire who sometimes tells you about his brother. He tells you you would like Faramir better than him, and you tease saying you already do, though it is not true.
However, there is one last man in the Fellowship and you do not know where you stand with him. Legolas is everything all at once and nothing all the same. He gravitates around you like a magnet, yet you can count the times you talk on the fingers of your hands. With him, things are different in the most obvious way. They are different because he observes you all the time; you can feel your skin prickling under his gaze, and when you turn around he is already looking at you.
Legolas hovers near you after every battle, silently hoping you would come to him. Each time you deflect and turn to Aragorn, he feels his blood boil uncontrollably. And yet he tries. He picks up every mushroom and berry on the side of the road to offer them to you; often without a word, sometimes explaining how to recognise them in nature. He feeds you to your heart’s content, so much that you can never complain of an empty belly. Legolas makes sure you are always sat close to the fire, he smiles at you when your eyes cross and lets you sleep even when you should scout with him.
The elf-prince doesn’t know why he acts this way, he looks out for you like instinct. He covets like instinct too. His heart squeezes of its own will when he sees you so close to the others. You laugh with Boromir, scold Aragorn, but shy away with him.
He fears you dislike him.
After all, why would you be so agreeable with Boromir and not with him? Has Boromir done half the things Legolas does for you in silence? Does he know your eyes glint in the moonlight? or the scrunch of your nose when Sam cooks somethings that smells delicious? or that you need to cling to something when you sleep?
Why is it that you worry constantly for Aragorn but never for him? Legolas hates that it messes with his mind so much, that you threaten his composure. He hates that you like everyone but him, that you talk freely but become mute once the prince approaches you. It’s sheer torture to the dejected elf; he who asks nothing more than to know the tune of your laughter, the memories of your past.
Legolas refuses to name it because he fears to make it true, but everyone else has noticed the way he acts with you. All of his friends can pinpoint the exact moment he boils with wicked feelings that belie his elven nature. Gimli even makes a great sport of counting the times he can catch him staring at you from afar, eyes soft until they land on either Boromir or Aragorn. Then they turn into a glare that the dwarf cannot qualify as anything else than jealousy.
The princeling is jealous. And he lets him know.
“Not tired of ragin’ in ya corner, princeling?“ his booming voice does little to keep their conversation discreet.
Legolas grimaces at how obvious his friend is being, but also because he has been discovered. “I do not know what is it you talk of.“
“Sure ye do! Can’t stop giving the lassie heart-eyes for a minute, can you?“
“I am not-“ he goes to reply before deciding against it. There is no use denying the obvious. Legolas sighs. “Do you think she dislikes me?“
At the question, Gimli laughs so hard you end up glancing at Legolas quizzically from where you stand. He dismisses it with an embarrassed wave of the hand before frowning at his companion who lands a harsh slap on his back. The strength of it makes Legolas stumble forward a little. Now the annoyance is visible on his perfect features.
“You’re still young, lass!“ are Gimli’s final wise words to his friend. They only serve to leave Legolas as confused as ever.
What does he mean ‘still young‘? He’s two thousand years old!
That night, after having assured Legolas you didn’t need more sleep and could keep watch with him without problem, things unfolded just as every other night. Until you heard featherlight footsteps behind you and a body sitting down next to you second later. You watched Legolas’s elegant frame fold down to your height, his back lean against the tree. If you closed your eyes hard enough, maybe you would be able to imagine the muscles under here rolling with every move he made.
Bad thoughts. You needed to get a grip.
“Endless night, uh?“ his voice drawls in the intimacy of the late hours.
Thing is, you could never get a grip with Legolas. His very presence triggered your alarms, sent goosebumps along your arms. He stepped close enough and your stomach twisted in the same way it did amidst battle. You wanted to befriend him, you really did, but every time he talked to you your words got lost in your throat; you wanted him to like you so much it got you mute. What if you looked silly? You could never rival with all the high society he was accustomed to, you were no elf, just a mere Ranger.
It didn’t help that he was as breathtaking as only an immortal man could hope to be. You hum in reply, fearing you’ll make a fool out of yourself if you draw a single syllable. Instead, it’s Legolas who feels a fool for talking to you. Perhaps you really do not want to talk to him… It’s not the first time you lock back into your shell at the sight of him; it makes the elven prince slightly depressed.
“I uh… am I bothering you?“ he asks without looking at you this time.
The thought makes you feel remorseful immediately.
“No, not at all! It’s just… Well, you’ll find it silly, really.“
“What if I promise I won’t?“
You breathe in. “I don’t know how to talk to you,“ it almost comes out as a whisper. There is naught for a moment but your hammering heart, and then the quiet is broken by the sound of Legolas’s laughter. “See, you think it is dumb.“
“I don’t, I don’t! I’m sorry it’s just– I thought I was the one who did not know how to talk to you.“
You hadn’t even thought about it. For him to be in the same anguish as you! Now you both look like fools as you observe each other in the dark, and the smile you crack widens his.
“How about we both try, then?“
After this, things between you are ten times more obvious for the members of the Fellowship. Legolas lives not five feet away from you at all times, his gifts of food multiply, and now you even talk endlessly on the road. Along with it, the wicked feeling in his chest when you let Boromir make you laugh or when you check on Aragorn increases. You are not just a woman he roots for now, you are the one he desperately searches to please and impress.
Whatever Boromir tells you, Legolas swears he could have thought about it way before him; and all the scratches Aragorn brings, the prince avoids. He can be greater in battle, funnier, more interesting. He can learn the answer to every single one of your questions just so you won’t ask anyone else. He knows he has no right over you, but it’s stronger than him.
Legolas cannot control the glare he sends, almost murderous, whenever he sees Boromir monopolising your attention, nor the cold shoulder he shows Aragorn when he is the one you run to after battle. Legolas can show off his skills and tricks all he wants, it’s like you are blind to them and never look at him amidst battle. If only you would just look at him. Except you do look at him — all the time — you are just more subtle than he is.
Legolas sees nothing and all companions alike have to deal with his newfound temper, with his jealousy. Boromir most of all, is the target of almost every killing glare. He is young and he is handsome, and the prince fears you like him better. From the other side of the camp, Legolas sends dirty, half-concealed looks to the son of the steward of Gondor; which makes him utterly self-conscious.
“Aragorn, why is Legolas looking at me like that?“ he finally asks his friend one day, trying to escape the death glares he gets. Legolas is being unreasonable, he knows it himself.
“I think it’s because you said her braids were lovely,“ Aragorn points at you with his chin. In the distance, you talk with Gandalf, carefully woven hairstyle adorning your head.
“What? because of this?“
“Yes, he did the same to me yesterday when she taught me how to make a flower crown for Arwen.“
The steward’s son snorts and shakes his head in disbelief. “I do not mind jealousy, but this is not justified.“
“At this length, even Pippin will soon notice something is up with him.“
“Of course he will, the kid has eyes everywhere…“ it tears a smile from Aragorn. Boromir continues. “The princeling wants to play jealous elven boyfriend with a woman he cannot even look at without blushing? I will give him something to be jealous of.“
It doesn’t fail.
Legolas feels even more blind resentment towards Boromir as days pass. It’s like the man means to make him jealous, to build up the envy coiling in his stomach. It’s purposeful, the prince knows it perfectly by the way the steward’s son looks right at him every time he talks with you.
But he does not only talk with you: he gets more physical. A hand on your shoulder, a feet grazing yours when you sit, a reach for a wild strand of hair falling across your face: everything is good to make Legolas fume. Boromir knows it and he takes great delight in seeing his usually composed companion struggle to hide away the feelings he has for you. Honestly, it’s as fun as a game of cards for him. Legolas says nothings, he seethes in his corner and glares like a madman until he gets the chance to have you back at his side.
Boromir wonders how long the prince will let this unfold. How much more flirting can he take before he bursts? After all, elves are not known for their nonchalance in matters of the heart, far from it. Everyone knows their friend’s behaviour is far from usual, except you. Of course, you have not known Legolas different than this: from the moment he met you he felt the irrepressible yearning of a man who has his heart’s other half at arms’ length, but cannot reach for it.
The more Boromir taunts him, the more he fails to keep his temper a secret. Up the snowy trail of the Misty Mountains, he has you as close as he can while still being correct. Down in front of the hidden door of the Moria, while waiting for Gandalf to solve the entrance’s riddle, Legolas still hovers close to you.
You see him pacing awkwardly a few feet from where you stand, and for once no one else pays as much attention to you. Aragorn and Boromir are busy with the hobbits, Gimli looks at them from afar, and you are alone at last.
You give Legolas a side glance, inviting him to your space once your eyes cross. He doesn’t waste a second in stepping towards you. Soon enough, his back leans against the same cold stone as you. The ground beneath you crunches under the sole of his boots, the air feels humid and rancid, it bullies your lungs at every breath you take. The heat of the elf’s body next to you smudges onto yours —the only heat that remains behind the frost of the Caradhras.
It seems the chilly wind has frozen your bones and the blood inside your system; even moving a finger is great torture. In your shoes, your toes are so numb it would be painless to chop them off. Your nostrils hurt like breathing underwater each time you inhale. You wonder if the pain will ever pass.
They say you can stay with your limbs frozen by the cold for days before it settles; never had you known such harsh conditions. You were a Ranger of plains and forests, of hilltops at best, not one of summits and caves.
Next to you, Legolas looks as vigorous as always. It’s like the weather is of no importance to him, like the cold avoids him on purpose because timeless beings do not deserve to suffer from climate as mortals do. His cheeks are only coated by a light haze of red, and in his hair you can still make out clinging snowflakes ornamenting his locks.
Proof from his undisturbed state is the warmth of his body. He is not even touching you and yet you can feel him burning like his own sun. Or at least it seems like it against your frozen cold frame. The duality makes you huff a laugh you regret as soon as it scratches your throat painfully. The smile on your face contorts in a wince, and Legolas is quick to lean forward, bracing his weight on his bended knees to better look at you.
“Is everything alright?“ he asks while you lose your voice in a dry cough.
“Yes, it’s–“ another cough. “The air,“ you gesture vaguely around yourself to prove your point.
“Is it the cold?“
You nod, unwilling to speak again.
“Here,“ Legolas unclasps the fibula at his neck, and in a second his heavy cape drapes around you like a shield.
The cloak keeps out every blowing of the wind. It basks you in a heat you have come to forget with time: the warmth of another body. The cape still holds Legolas’s, and his scent. The smell creeps up your nose steadily, soothes the burning when you snuffle.
You look at the elf-prince, incredulous, and open your mouth to begin a thanks. “No need, I will do just as good without it,“ he cuts.
For a moment, you just look at each other with smiles that can be described as none other than dumb. Legolas reaches behind you for the hood of the cloak, which he pulls to your head, and it just becomes worse. The cold is the least of your worries, you feel you could snuggle at his side wrapped like a moth in its papery cocoon. Instead, you just shift your foot to touch his and it nearly equals burning up in flames.
In Legolas’s mind, it’s a war not to take a look at Boromir and hope to see his crestfallen expressions while his own swells with swaggering pride. Childish, but the prince feels like a teenage boy hitting puberty with all that unreserved spite.
He looks at the spot your bodies connect for a few seconds, before delicate fingers wrap around your ankle and lifts it up to lay it down on his leg. Unable to do anything else than let him angle you as he pleases, you just stare at the elf in disbelief, watching the way his brows crease in concentration when he unties your boot and eases it off your foot. Through your woollen socks, you can feel the weight of Legolas’s fingers as he presses them right on every painful spot. It’s like the palm of his hands that grazes the slope of your foot can pinpoint them, like he knows exactly which way your body hurts and how to make it better.
The pressure is both delicious and soothing. It alleviates the soreness of your muscles, the stiffness in your tendons. Without thinking about it, your head lolls back against the stone and your whole body relaxes. You feel yourself sink in the ground: your leg stretch in his lap, your lips half-open to let out a shaky breath.
Through content, lidded eyes, you see him smile softly and chuckle; you mimic the pull of his lips by instinct and push your foot in his hand to coax him into the massage. It’s like his fingers lace a magic thread around your toes, for you feel them move again.
“Funny feeling?“ Legolas asks with a quick glance.
“You are a wizard with your hands, it can’t be any other wa–!“ the rest of the sentence goes lost in a deep groan, almost a moan that cracks towards the end, as he pops an especially tight knot in the flat of your foot.
Legolas’s stomach twists at the sound, worse when you shot a hand to his shoulder to stabilise yourself. Your fingers dig in the fabric of his tunic until your knuckles turn white, he can see yours toes curl despite the thickness of your sock.
Now that’s a bad thought to have. How else can he make you go all stiff and breathy, how much whiter can your knuckles turn, how much harder can you grip at his shoulders? Would your legs fit upon them?
He casts the idea away and rolls his thumbs where he pressed seconds before to soften the remaining pain.
“Better?“ now there is a slight edge to his voice, a danger you itch to plunge into.
Your fingers loosen their hold on his vest, they extend to reach his gossamer hair until you can easily slip them in between each digit. Slowly, you wrap some around your index before releasing your prey and repeating the process. Legolas observes as you play with his hair, inches away from the vibrating pulse in his neck. If you so much as graze it, you would feel how ready it is to come out of his chest.
“Infinitely.“
You both go quiet as he eases the last bits of tender flesh he finds, eyes sometimes boring into yours when your breath so much as hitches. His elven magic must play a part in this, though you do not know how. It is of no importance as long as you can wiggle your toes again and feel Legolas’s deft fingers creep as high as your shin, as if he were slick.
You tighten the cloak around your neck and it stays yours all throughout the Moria. It is safely wrapped around you when you step in and escape the aquatic monster, when you defeat the cave troll, and even when you cross the bridge away from the Balrog: a hair’s breadth from meeting Gandalf’s fate as you fight against a strong pair of arms which ultimately leads you out of the mine.
Out in the sun again, you do not collapse on the ground like the others. You do not cry, you do not look back. You only stand here paralysed, death replaying again and again in your mind. Death so quick it feels fake, leaving you so unprepared. Death like a rattlesnake, following you around as its noise gets louder the closer you think you are to safety. Death beautiful for the fear it casts upon you mortals, for the pain it achieves to give those like the elves.
The walk to Lothlorien is long, yet quiet. Nobody speaks much, only Boromir lightens up your mood with small talk. It doesn’t matter if you talk of things as trivial as the weather, as long as you talk the darkness away. You talk to make sure you don’t have time to find a missing piece to the Fellowship, to never stop and ask yourselves where do you go now.
But in the back of the group, there is a pair of eyes that never leave you. When you turn to them, it’s not you they look at but your companion, and Legolas seems so far away in his thoughts he might be unreachable. His steps are less concealed, his focus less sharp, like he sees only a tunnel bordered by darkness and leading to the scene playing before him.
It quickly becomes awkward, and it stays that way until Lothlorien. There, the elves sing obituaries you do not understand. They invite you in for a while, to eat and rest as much as you should. But to you and the rest of the Fellowship, separating after having spent so much time together feels weird. You find yourselves always in the same room as another, never alone with yourselves.
As a matter of fact, it is Boromir you stay with in one of the communal areas, though deserted by everyone else. You carefully tend to a wound of his he got while escaping the Moria. With as much precision as you can, your fingers assess the extent of the problem. You begin motion to stand up and search for a basin of clean water when movement catches the corner of your eye. By the doorway, standing at the threshold and looking at you with something in his eyes far from composure, is Legolas.
The elf-prince’s gaze switches from you to Boromir, from Boromir to you, and then to his wound and how awfully close it is from your fingers. He feels his blood loop in his veins at the idea, and takes a step forwards without thinking this through. Then another. And another. Until he stands in front of you both, sitting on the edge of a carved in bench.
You try to give him a reassuring smile, but Legolas ignores you altogether. Or rather he does not see you. His gaze is fixated on the steward’s son, frown evident on his usually perfect face. You frown too: there is something obviously strange in his attitude, a tension in his shoulders.
“I think she needs rest, Boromir,“ he eventually speaks. “You can seek for Lothlorien’s healers, they are the best in all the elven realms.“
“Thank you Legolas, but I will stick with this one.“
The twinkle in Boromir’s eyes and the sharp wit of his cunning smile pushes all of the prince’s buttons. The wrong ones. They drag out his impatience, his pride, his jealousy.
“She is quite skilled, you know?“
Legolas clenches his jaw so hard it shows. “I know. And skills come with rest. The healers are waiting for you, I called for them on your behalf.“
He lies. It is so evident he lies Boromir does not know what to do of it for a second. His reply hangs without falling for a while too much, so does the glare the two men send each other. But on Boromir’s side of the coin, he only rejoices in seeing Legolas so unabashed —so human. Jealous and yearning: those are traits unfit for an elf, yet they are the prince of the Woodland realm’s.
“Sorry, Miss,“ Boromir bows lightly as he stands to his feet. “It seems the princeling here really hates to see me taken care of.“
He steps away from you and past Legolas, so close their shoulders bump and the prince’s elven ears catch something in the breeze following the Gondorian.
“Thief,“ Boromir whispers with a smirk.
It makes Legolas burn and his inside knot in shame and anger. The feeling quiets when he closes his eyes, breathes in and opens them to you. Still here and still free to be his. Though this time he knows if he keeps on cowering, someone will take actions before him.
Legolas steps to you, but you raise to your feet the moment he does so. For a second, he thinks you will leave. You look like you will. Instead, you voice your obvious annoyance. It is not the first time you catch the prince drive away whoever is talking to you. In other circumstances, it would be sweet that he seeks for you so much, but not here. Not when you face death everyday and find your only comfort in your friends. You do not need to suffer the emotions he cannot keep in check.
“That’s enough, Legolas. I am growing tired of whatever this is.“
His breath catches in his throat. Legolas feels his heart stop once and his eyes slowly widen in surprise. “Excuse me?“
“Don’t pretend you don’t know. I am not a servant in your Halls appointed to your side.“
“Far from me is the idea of thinking of you as one,“ the calmness in his tone infuriates you. He who seemed so distressed a mere minute ago.
“The idea may be far, but the actions are not,“ the rest of your sentence comes after a moment of silence, as if you weight it in your mind. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk anymore, if you cannot see me befriend others.“
A punch in the guts.
It makes Legolas dizzy, turns his thoughts into a blurred mess, but he lets nothing be known of it. His mask of composure slips on again, just as it does whenever you make him nervous. Elven court had taught him that the greatest defence of his soul was clam, wiseness. Even if the situation did not call for it; even if his heart throbbed with conflictual emotions.
“We are in a fellowship together, it would be unreasonable,“ the flat tone of his voice emphasises your building anger. He talks like you are the one to blame, like you’re acting hysterical.
“Me, unreasonable? You are the one who is acting irrational here, Legolas!“
“I know, and I wish I could help it.“
“I thought elven self-control was remarkable,“ you scorn, not having it in you to be the sensible one.
“It is,“ he replies. “Usually.“
“What makes you so different?“
“You.“
Another punch in the guts. Aimed at you, this time.
He looks at you like someone whose thousand of years on earth have taught him words can be fruitless in the face of a devout pair of eyes. Words are meaningless and empty when rivalled with the way he looks at you: deep, sapphire blue. He says ‘you‘ with his eyes in all the languages of the world, with the force of a man who has been ripped from his common sense the moment he met you.
“Wh-what does that mean?“
He wishes his intensity could scare you away; he deserves only this for the way he has been acting. But Legolas swears you lean forwards. An instinct of your body rather than your mind. It snaps his restrain, cracks his perfectly carved out facade.
“It means I wish I knew how to stop but I cannot stand here unwavering when Boromir courts you so blatantly. Or watch you make sure Aragorn is alright after battle without being envious.“
There. He said it. You have the right to know. You should know.
In your eyes, the tempest softens. The frown you wear is no longer accusing. Perhaps you should condemn his jealousy, perhaps you should tell him it is no problem of yours, but it is impossible. Your hand lifts in the space between you without thinking about it, you stare at his cheek for a second before deciding against it. Somehow, it freezes the elf before you even more when your palm goes to rest on his chest, right above his heart.
Beneath the fabric of his clothes and the tender flesh and muscles of his body, you feel the steady hammering of it. Too fast to be casual. Matching yours without knowing.
“Legolas…“ you murmur as your eyes lift to his. “I do not look out for you as much because you never get hurt. Your elven abilities are so sharp it would be looking down at them to doubt you can protect yourself better than others. I am not doing it out of spite, I am doing it because I trust you,“ you do not let him the time to speak back. “You are the only one I can lean onto. It’s a relief having someone I do not need to look out for, but it does not mean I don’t care for you. Far from it.“
There is a shift at your waist. A steady warmth settles here, it pulls you a step closer to him. Dangerous. Innocent.
“What about Boromir?“ his voice is as low as a whisper, sheepish like he knows he shouldn’t push the subject. It’s stronger than him.
“What about him?“
“He courts you,“ Legolas states, like it is flagrant.
“I do not think he does, he acts just as you do.“
“That is the problem,“ your mouth opens but no sound comes out of it. “Would you let him court you?“
Legolas hates that you seem to think about it. He hates that your response is not immediate and in the negative. He resents that he even has to ask, that he is not confident enough to just know you won’t.
“I do not know. Why would it be a concern of yours?“
The answer comes out hurried. You could vanish if he waits too long. You could end up in another’s arms, and Legolas would have had the chance to tell you nothing. He would sail to Valinor or die with unrequited feelings that know only one way out. And it’s you. “Because I am afraid you would. And if you do it means you cannot be mine after all of this is over.“
Time stills. None of you speak. The shift of your hand from his chest to his cheek is slow, agonisingly so. With half a mind to the external world, Legolas leans into your touch. Your pinky strokes the underside of his jaw, you see the prominent slope of his throat bob as he swallows.
“You are willing to wait until our mission is over?“
“I am.“
At that point, it’s a whisper to the wind. The space between you closes, slowly, unhurried. You lean until your noses brush, and every time he breathes it’s into your mouth.
“But human patience is not as great as yours, my prince,“ your lips graze when you speak. It’s already a kiss but you know you both need more.
Legolas’s pulse jolts under your fingertips in his neck, and it’s not for the mere ghost of your mouth: it’s for you whole. He is not satisfied until your jaws hang slack to welcome the other against your mouth. He wraps his lips around yours in barely concealed hunger, nibbles at them softly when he feels you melt in his hold.
His hands slip from your waist to the small of your back to bring you closer. You let your chests collide. Legolas pushes you impossibly close, like he wants to absorb you, to watch you dissolve in him like a body his same size.
Your fingers crawl up his nape, twist the golden hair here and massage his scalp until he gets breathier into your mouth.
In the distance, the elves have stopped their singing. You fist at Legolas’s tunic with your other hand, still clinging when you pull away to catch your breath, pulling his bottom lip between your teeth in the process. Your ragged breath calms after a little while where you stare only in his eyes, the blue of them swallowed almost whole by the width of his pupil.
You can see your distorted reflection in them: flushed and out of breath, bordering the little orphan you once were. You came a long way from here, and the road before you still has no end.
Legolas cups your cheek lovingly, leans to rest his forehead against yours. You watch his lids close in awe, marvel at the disheveled state of his hair now that you ruffled them. It is such a rare sight to see: an elven prince made wild by a woman.
His breath hits against your face when he speaks, barely above a sigh.
“You were not made for mortal hands,“ he says, referring to your Gondorian friend.
Indeed, you have yet to address his jealousy. It seems you take joy in toying with him; he deserves it a little.
“Neither were you,“ you point out.
“You are mistaken. I was carved to the exact pattern of your palm, and my lips to fit the hollow space between your knuckles.“
To prove his point, he lifts your hand up to his level and places soft, lingering kisses to your scraped knuckles: fighting does not spare them. It is so odd that you should be the one an immortal prince chooses to bestow his affection upon; you, a mortal. You, an orphan made Ranger. You, wild against his calm, roughed where he is smooth.
“Then stops doubting the Valar made me to fit you back.“
It is a promise that needs not to be said as one. You seal it with your lips melting back against his, this time with a newfound strength as you pull him down to you by the collar.
In Legolas’s stomach, the rot turns to spring and he feels no longer consumed by ugliness. Flowers bloom in his chest where you rest your palms, all the other men of the world are forgotten, and you taste like the path to righteousness. Caring is not keeping you for himself selfishly, the elf-prince knows it now, but by rights if he will not marry you when all this is over.
He can see it for yourselves: a life in a beloved forest, at place to settle to for once and a bed to share until you grow old. Maybe he can even convince the Valar to let you go to Valinor as his only and very last wish. And if they do not, he will smuggle you in like a burglar; for where there is a place for him, there is also one for you.
dare i say, the best written fic of Aerion i have found...in my opinion aerion is written so well here-and the story build up is just....wow. the angst, the YEARNN, the spice, GOD....everyone needs to read this.
