I absolutely loved don’t trip! and i was wondering if maybe you could write a scenario where instead of bobby being the one to go down with the rope tied around his waist, its the reader instead and maybe it could be rlly angsty and maybe the reader gets injured or dies or somethin? Hopefully this isn’t too vague love your work!🫶
I'm so glad you liked it!!
Take me instead
desc: Taking your boyfriend's place in exploring the shallow room that was angled away, you explore too much, and whatever you just discovered catches up to you..
warnings: death, cussing, being manhandled (not in a sexy way), blood, screaming, crying, throwing up 😬
spoilers!
You were leaning against your counter in some nice underwear and a random tee you found on the floor, with a bowl of cereal in your hand, and some random cartoons playing on the living room t.v. not really paying attention, just enjoying the background noise. What you didn't hear was Bobby getting out of bed and slotting himself between you and the counter, putting his hands on your waist, and resting his chin on your shoulder.
"Good morning, babyyy," he drawls, his voice deep from sleep, making you giggle in your head.
"Good morning, handsome," you say with a smile, but you don't look at him yet, taking another bite of your cereal.
"Could I have some?" Bobby asks quietly. Normally, he would just take it from you with a smirk and give it back half-eaten, but you didn't wanna ruin the opportunity of him asking. So, you scoop as much cereal as you can into your spoon, tilt your head a little bit, and spoon-feed your boyfriend some cereal. You could hear him munching in your ear, and you laugh.
"Thank you!" He says in between chews, and you smile at him. Setting down your cereal bowl (which Bobby picks up immediately afterwards), you walk towards the t.v. turning it down slightly, before returning to the kitchen. By that time, Bobby had already finished the cereal and drank the milk from the bowl.. you were gone for 10 seconds..
"I was thinking of calling Kat and inviting her over tonight. How does that sound?" You ask while leaning against the fridge, playing with your chipped nail polish. Bobby nods his head in agreement while wiping milk from his chin.
"Yeah, that's cool. I think I left my bong at her place last time we went over there..?" He says, raising an eyebrow, making you shake your head.
"Perfect! Another reason for her to come over!" You say happily while walking towards your home phone and dialing Kat's number, just as it starts ringing, someone knocks on the door a couple of times, before you hear them knock on the window.
"Bobby! Could you get that, please!" You scream from the other room with the phone in your hand, and you hear him shuffle to the door. After a few seconds, you hear Kat's voice through the phone speaker.
"Hey, y/n/n! What's up?" Shs asks happily, and you smile widely.
"Hey, Kat! I was wondering if you wanted to come over tonight? Bobby and I bought from this new guy, we know we can't smoke it without you, and he's asking for his bong back." You say with a light laugh, and you could hear her laugh on the other line.
"Duh, I wanna come over! And I've been meaning to bring Bobby his bong back.." she says with some guilt in her voice. Just as you were about to talk again, Bobby calls out to you.
"Busy!" You scream out from the room, turning your attention back to Kat, but Bobby calls out again, louder and a little snappier this time.
"Oh my fucking God. Hold on, Kat." You say annoyed, setting the phone down, and walking far enough to see Bobby at the door.
"Bobby, what the fuck?" rings through the house, and he just motions you over, making you huff and walk to the door, seeing your boss, Clark, standing there awkwardly.
"Clark? What are you doing here?
After the interaction with Clark
You and Bobby packed up your stuff and headed to pick up Kat, and head to Cap'n Clarks for God knows what.
As you three arrived at the store, you felt a feeling of uneasiness, almost as if you were going to stumble onto something you weren't supposed to.. Clark guided you guys to the basement, which was weird. You tried to brush it off, but something was just gnawing at you. Soon, you guys were in this yellowish-brownish maze of fluorescent lights and moldy-smelling walls. It was apprehensive.
How you got here, you didn't know.. one minute you were eating breakfast with your boyfriend Bobby, then your boss Clark comes knocking at your door, begging to use Bobby's camera, and for you and Bobby to help him 'research' this place he found. Which made him sound like an absolute fucking lunatic, in your opinion ofc. But you guys went nonetheless.
The walk through the maze was intoxicating, and not in a good way. Bobby was amazed at the place, cheesing into his camera, catching almost any angle he could of the place, and Kat was just as scared as you were, holding onto your arm tightly.
"Clark.. what is this place?" You ask with a tremble in your voice, and Kat looks at you with a shaky gaze.
"I'm still trying to figure that out myself.." He says with an amused tone, making you suck in a breath.
Just as you were about to yell at him, he stops in front of an old bedframe and a dirty mattress, putting his bag on the floor and pulling out some rope.
"Oh great, he's tying us up.." Kat says shakily, and you could almost throw up. Is he seriously gonna tie you guys up and leave you here to die? No, he wouldn't.. would he?
"No, we're tying ourselves up." Clarks says, correcting Kat with a gruff.
"Whoa, kinky. Y/n, we should try that sometime~" Boby says with a smirk, and you roll your eyes.
"Not the time, Bobby." You say a little irritated while going over and helping Clark with the rope.
"One of us has to go down there and check out what we can't see. I didn't bring enough rope for all of us, and someone has to hold the line for the person down there." Clark says firmly, looking at the three of you. You gulp at his words, but volunteer yourself.
"I'll do it."
"WHAT?!" Bobby and Kat say at the same time.
"I said I'll do it, I don't have to explain my actions all of the time," you mutter while you take the rope from Clark, putting it around your waist.
Bobby shakes his head quickly before handing the camera to Kat and taking your hands away from the rope, letting it fall to the floor with a light thump.
"Baby, you were literally pissing yourself on the way here, and almost threw up when we got inside. You're not going down there." His voice is stern, and it makes your heart race. "I'll go instead."
You huff at his words, pulling your hands away from his and picking up the rope again, re-wrapping it around your waist.
"No, Bobby. I said I was gonna go, so I'm going."
Clark sighs at the interaction, taking the rope from your hands and tying it around your waist tightly. Bobby kisses your head and takes the camera back from Kat, recording you taking the steps to the slope, but Kat grabs your arm.
"You don't have to do this! we- we could just make Bobby go down there!" she says hopefully. Bobby side-eyes her quickly, "What the fuck, Kat??"
You take her hand off your arm and give it a squeeze, "I'll be fine.. It's just a room. It's not like there's a monster down there or something!" You say jokingly, but Kat couldn't find it in her heart to laugh fully.
Bobby hands you his camera, repeating over and over to be careful with it, making you roll your eyes over and over. He kissed you one more time before watching you slowly walk down the slope, his hand tight on the rope that was attached to your waist. You walk slowly before sliding down at the end, and then you were gone in the darkness.
Once you reached the end of the slope, it reeked of death and rotting flesh. Making you gag and cover your nose.
"Jesus! What the fuck died down here?" You mutter while trekking around the smelly room, still holding the camera in your hands. There were piles of black, sludgy substances surrounding the walls of the space, making you go teary-eyed, but you kept moving forward.
The further you moved, the worse it got. There was random furniture everywhere, or clothes, you couldn't tell, everything was so dark, and eerie, you just couldn't get a grasp of anything.
As you walked deeper into the area, there was a room with flickering lights, almost as if it was calling your name. You walked towards the room, but you felt a snag at your waist; the rope was out.
"Can I have some more rope?" You yell out, but there isn't an immediate answer.
"There's no more!" Bobby yells back, and you sigh, taking a glance at the room, then the rope before sliding the rope down your legs and walking closer to the room. The closer you got, the more the light flickered, but the more it flickered, the clearer the thing that was inside the room became. A loud groan shook the room and knocked out the flickering light, shattering to the floor, and you almost dropped the camera.
For some reason, your feet were stuck to the floor, and your breathing came out in small huffs. You couldn't move, but you could hear something coming closer, breathing hard. It almost touched you, but you ran as fast as you could to the rope, attempting to slip it back on before the thing grabbed you by the collar of your shirt and threw you backwards.
Your body slammed against the damp wall, knocking the wind out of you and leaving you dizzy. The rope against your legs is squeezing tightly as someone is pulling it slowly. You were halfway across the room before something grabbed you by the hair and slammed you back down. blood pools behind your head, causing you to choke on the blood in your mouth. You feel something wet drip down your nose and slide to your lips, tasting of metal and sweat.
The world around you is reeling, and the smell is only making it worse. The sound of your name being called, then a sudden rumble of people falling over. After a few seconds, you hear yelling, and someone is holding your head carefully.
"Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!" Kat cries at your side, hesitating to touch you.
Bobby wipes the blood from your nose and cradles your face.
"Oh my god- baby!" Bobby yells out, almost trying to shake you awake, but it was of no use.
The rope still attached to your legs was being pulled at again, some small at first, until it kept increasingly getting stronger. Bobby grabbed your torso and held you tightly while Kat was attempting to pull the rope from your legs, but the thing kept pulling you till Bobby Physically couldn't hold on.
"B-Bobby?" You say quietly, the blood that was previously pooling in your mouth now dripping out, and your grip on his forearm was weak, and you couldn't get a full hand around his arm.
You were ripped ouf out of Bobby's arms and dragged into the darkness, with no clue of what had happened.
Bobby had run after you, Kat sat there and cried, and Clark disregarded your death as if you weren't important.
lowkey need to see how real!bobby handles his girl's disappearance 🚬..delicious
pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby
contents/warnings: bobby's pov, emotional neglect in a relationship, heavy grief and loss, angsty in general, emotional volatility/verbal cruelty, alcohol abuse (clark), existential/cosmic horror (erasure from reality), self-loathing and guilt (told you he'll be going through it!)
notes: we're giving this twink a character as promised! got carried away but surprisingly?? really like how it came out?? hope y'all enjoy, and excited to see if the tide changes on the Real Bobby hate lol.
📹better bobby series masterlist.
Real Bobby notices on a Tuesday.
Not right away. That’s the single most damning thing. The part that’ll eat at him later, that’ll sit in his chest like a hot coal for months, perhaps the rest of his goddamn life if he’s being honest.
He doesn't notice right away.
The first night, he figures you're pulling a double at the store. It's happened before. He eats cereal standing over the sink, leaves his bowl on the counter, sleeps diagonally. Doesn't think about it.
The second night, he's annoyed. You could've called. He almost picks up the apartment phone but gets distracted by something on TV, and the receiver stays in the cradle, your number undialed, and he falls asleep with the light on.
The third morning, he reaches for you.
It's not conscious, really. It's that old reflex in him. The one from the early days. Something he thought he trained out of himself because tenderness was starting to feel like a liability, so he resorted to laziness instead. His hand slid across the mattress toward the warm dip where you normally sleep. But his fingers find only cold sheets. Flat, undisturbed. No impression of a body. And something in Bobby’s chest pinches, just slightly, like a hand closing around a tender nerve.
He sits up. Looks at your side of the bed. The pillow still has the shape of your head from three nights ago. Nothing's been moved.
He checks the answering machine. The red light is steady. No messages. The last thing you said to him—actually said, out loud, in person—was I'm closing tonight, don't wait up. He'd grunted. Hadn't looked up from the TV. He remembers that now.
You stood in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your jacket half-on, and you looked at him. He realises now that you looked at him, really looked, like you were waiting for something, and he grunted.
He calls the store. Clark picks up, says you didn't show for your shift last night. Or the night before. Didn't call in either. Clark sounds worried, but not in a panicked way. Just the clipped, pragmatic worry of a man already calculating how to cover the hours.
Bobby tries to sound like he already knew, like he's been handling it. He's the kind of boyfriend who would obviously know that his girlfriend's been missing for three days.
He hangs up, stands in the kitchen and looks at the apartment.
Your coffee mug is still on the drying rack. Your jacket's on the hook by the door. Your shoes—the white ones, the ones you wear everywhere, the ones he's made fun of a hundred times—are sitting by the mat. You didn't leave, didn't pack anything. You didn't take your shoes or anything at all.
Bobby files a missing persons report that afternoon.
The cops tell him to come in the following morning.
The detective's name is Moreno. He's got a desk in the back of the precinct, a cup of coffee that's been sitting there long enough to develop a skin, and an expression that Bobby doesn't like. There’s no hostility. It’s the other thing, the worse one. Interest.
“So,” Moreno begins, flipping open a notebook. “Three days.”
“Yeah.”
“And you noticed this morning?”
Bobby's jaw tightens. “I thought she was working doubles.”
Moreno lifts his eyes briefly. “For three days.”
“It's happened before,” Bobby says a little defensively.
“Has it?” Moreno writes something down. Slow, purposeful, the pen moving like he wants Bobby to watch it, to feel the weight of each letter being recorded. “Walk me through the timeline, Bobby. When's the last time you actually saw her?”
Bobby tells him. The doorway. The jacket. The don't wait up. The grunt.
Moreno nods. Writes. “And after that? What'd you do that night?”
“Watched TV. Went to bed.”
“Alone?”
Bobby stares at him. Jesus Christ. “Yeah. Alone.”
“Okay.” Moreno takes a sip of his dead coffee. Sets it down. “We talked to your neighbours, Bobby. Just routine. The couple in 4B, the Nguyens, mentioned hearing arguments. Through the walls. More than once, over the past few months.” He looks up from the notebook. “You want to tell me about that?”
Bobby's chest goes tight. “Couples argue.”
“Sure they do. What were you arguing about?”
“I don't—stuff. Normal stuff. Dishes. Schedules.”
“They said it sounded pretty heated sometimes,” Moreno remarks. “Mrs Nguyen used the word volatile.”
Bobby feels something cold move through his stomach. “I never touched her. If that's what you're—”
“Nobody said that,” Moreno's voice is easy, perfectly calm. The practised calm of a man who's done this before. “But I've got a missing woman who was last seen by her boyfriend, who didn't notice she was gone for three days, whose neighbours describe an argumentative relationship. You can see why I need to be thorough.”
Bobby can see alright. Bobby can see exactly what this looks like from the outside, and the cold thing in his stomach turns to ice because it looks bad. It looks like exactly what it isn't, and there's no way to explain the difference between I was a shitty, negligent boyfriend who took her for granted and I hurt her without sounding like he's making excuses for both or covering his ass.
“We'd like to take a look at your camera equipment,” Moreno says. “Your footage. You're a camera guy, right? Clark at the store mentioned you're always filming.”
Bobby nods. Numbly.
They take the camera. They take the tapes, too.
Bobby sits on the couch in the apartment and stares at the empty shelf where the equipment used to be, and feels naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes. The camera was the last layer between himself and the world. They've taken it, and now there's just Bobby, sitting in an apartment full of evidence of his own failures, waiting for strangers to watch his footage and decide what kind of man he is.
They call him back in four days later. Moreno's got a different look on his face now. Still interested, but muddied, thoughtful. Like he's found something he wasn't expecting.
“We reviewed the tapes, Bobby,” Moreno says.
Bobby waits.
“There's a lot of footage of her,” Moreno says carefully. Neutral. Watching Bobby's face the way you'd watch a surface for ripples. “A lot. Some of it she doesn't seem to know about. You filming her while she's sleeping. While she's cooking. While she's reading.”
“The light was good,” Bobby says automatically, the old excuse, and it sounds hollow even to him.
Moreno lets the silence sit. Then, “Bobby. I've got a missing woman. Her boyfriend has hours of footage of her, some of it taken without her apparent knowledge. Her neighbours describe fights. The boyfriend didn't notice she was gone for seventy-two hours.” He leans forward, knotting his fingers on the table. “You see the picture I'm looking at, right? It doesn’t look good. If you want to tell me anything, I can help you—”
“That's not—I never hurt her. I was—”
“What were you?”
And Bobby opens his mouth to snap back with something defensive, sharp. Bobby, who uses his tongue like a blade when he feels cornered, rears up to go, and what comes out instead is:
“I love her.”
Not loved. There’s no past tense here. This isn’t careful distancing of a man constructing an alibi. Present tense, raw, graceless, blurted out like a cough. Like something expelled from deep in his lungs against his will. His voice breaks on her, and Bobby’s eyes burn.
Moreno is staring at him, and Bobby is sitting in a police precinct with his chain tangled and his crop top wrinkled, his earring catching the overhead fluorescent light. And he looks, in that moment, exactly like what he is: a twenty-something-year-old asshole who didn't know what he had until the world seemingly swallowed it whole.
“I love her,” he repeats, quieter now. Like now that the word is out, he can't stop saying it, like the dam has cracked and the only thing behind it was this. “I love her, and I was—I wasn't good to her, I know that, okay? I know what it looks like, but I didn't—I would never—”
Moreno watches him for a long time. The precinct hums in the background. Phones, footsteps, murmur of voices.
They let him go. No evidence. No body. They're able to confirm his alibi, and ten again.
There’s no proof of anything except the fact that Robert Franklin is a man who films the woman he loves while she sleeps because he can't bring himself to tell her she's beautiful while she's awake.
He goes to the store that night.
Not because he thinks he'll find anything. The cops already searched it. Half-heartedly, briefly, the way you search a place when you've already decided the boyfriend did it, and the crime scene is somewhere else.
They walked through the showroom and poked around the loading dock. Went down to the storage level, shone flashlights between the flatpack bookshelves and the plastic-wrapped headboards, and found nothing. Because there's nothing to find.
Bobby just knows that this is the last place you were.
That your hands touched the furniture down here. The inventory sheets, the shelving units, the boxes of cabinet hardware and drawer pulls you organised on the night shifts he couldn't be bothered to stay for. Your fingerprints are on everything. The ghost of your routine is embedded in the layout of this room. The way the boxes are stacked, the system you developed for sorting shipments by vendor, and the little handwritten labels in your writing on the bins.
Bobby stands in the middle of it, and he can feel you. He can feel you the way you feel someone in a room they just left—the displaced air, the warmth fading from a surface, the sense that if he turned around fast enough, he'd catch the edge of you disappearing around a corner.
He sits down on the concrete floor. Puts his back against the wall. The far one, behind the shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, the one that feels different from the others in a way he can't articulate. Cooler. Thinner somehow.
He doesn't plan to talk. But at one point, the silence gets too much, and it just… comes out.
“Hey, baby. It's Bobby.”
His voice sounds strange in the empty room. Too loud, too small. Bouncing off the concrete and the flatpacks and coming back to him slightly changed, echoed.
“I don't know if you can hear me. I don't—this is stupid. This is really fucking stupid. Obviously, you can’t hear me because you’re not here. But I just—” He stops. Presses the back of his head against the wall. Stares at the ceiling. “The cops think I did something to you. They looked at me like—” He swallows. “I don't care about that. I don't care what they think. I just need you to know I'm looking. Okay? I'm looking, baby. I'm not gonna stop.”
The draft brushes against his palm. Cool. Steady. Like a pulse.
He comes back the next night. And the next. And the next.
It becomes the only thing that makes sense. The apartment is a museum of his failures. Every unwashed dish, every unanswered question, every space where your things are slowly being buried under his carelessness.
But the store is different. The store is where you were. The last place your body occupied space. Sitting in it feels like sitting in the shallow end of your absence rather than drowning in the deep. He can think down here. He can talk. He can say the things he should've said when you were standing in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he was looking at the TV.
Hey baby. It's me. Found one of your socks behind the dryer today. The fuzzy ones. I put it on the dresser. Just in case.
I keep thinking about Thanksgiving. When you burned the rolls, and I said, "guess we're going to my mom's next year", and you laughed, but you weren't really laughing. You were hurt. I knew, and I didn't fix it.
I'm sorry about the rolls. They were good. They were a little burnt, but they were good. You made them, and I should've eaten every single one.
Bobby pauses. Picks at the concrete with his thumbnail. The storage level smells like particleboard and cardboard. Somewhere deep in the room, he can feel that draft again. That impossible nowhere-breeze he still hasn’t found a source of.
I was thinking about that morning. In the kitchen. You were making breakfast, and you turned around with a spatula and asked if I wanted toast, and the light was behind you, and I—I felt this thing. This huge thing. Like my chest was going to crack open. And I said, "sure." I said SURE. You were standing there in my kitchen looking like that, and I felt the biggest thing I've ever felt, and I said sure and loaded film into my camera like it was nothing.
It wasn't nothing. It was everything. I just didn't know how to—I couldn't—
Bobby stops. Presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.
I was so scared you'd see how much I needed you and you'd leave. So I made you leave by not letting you see. That's the dumbest shits anyone's ever done. Baby. I'm so stupid.
He comes back every night. Even when there are no words. Even when he just sits with his hand on the wall and his eyes closed, breathing in the sawdust and the nothing-draft, feeling the concrete thrum against his palm like a second heartbeat.
No leads. No calls. No breaks in the case because there's no sightings, no signs of a break in, nothing. Eyes follow him around town, full of questions and suspicion. There's those who genuinely believe he did something to you. It's stupid, so fucking stupid. He's many thins, but he would never—
Except he did. He did hurt you. Just not in the way these people think.
So Bobby keeps coming because this room is the last place you were. And as long as he keeps sitting in it, as long as he keeps talking to the walls, you're not gone.
You're just somewhere he hasn’t found you yet.
Month two.
The news spreads the way news does in a place like Santa Clara.
A slow seep through the neighbourhood, through the strip mall. The regulars who used to come to Clark's store for dining sets and bed frames and the occasional impulse-buy end table. A girl went missing. She worked there. The police questioned her boyfriend. No arrests, but you know.
People stop coming.
Not all at once. But the thin trickle becomes a drought.
The regulars find reasons not to visit. Other stores, other errands, a sudden preference for the furniture place on Stevens Creek that doesn't have a missing-person case attached to it.
The showroom gets quieter. The displays gather a fine layer of dust that Clark used to wipe down every morning, and now he only gets to it every other day, then every third day, then whenever he remembers. Which is less and less because Clark is a man watching his business die and his marriage fracture.
He can feel both things slipping through his fingers at the same speed, and the bourbon is the only thing that makes the slippage feel like someone else's problem.
So Clark hires Kat.
Not because he needs a full-time replacement. Frankly, customer traffic no longer justifies it, but the showroom needs a body in it. A presence. Someone to make the store look like a place where things are still happening. Kat is bright and cheap, and she doesn't ask about the missing girl, at least not at first, and Clark is grateful for that.
Bobby notices her the first time he comes in for his nightly visit to the basement.
She's behind the register, leaning against the counter with a pen behind her ear, doing something with a stack of delivery receipts. Radio plays something tuneful from a boombox she's brought from home. Dark hair. Quick smile. She looks up when the door chimes and gives him that particular once-over that Bobby used to live for. The slow sweep, the lingering, the way women's eyes always catch on the chain, the earring, the slice of toned stomach under the crop top.
She says, “We're closed.”
“I know. I'm not shopping.”
She watches him walk past the display couches and the dining sets, then down the stairs, all with undisguised curiosity. Bobby doesn't turn around.
The second time, she asks.
“You're the boyfriend, right? Of the girl who—” She catches herself. Has the decency to look uncomfortable. “Sorry. Clark mentioned it.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm Kat,” she says. “I'm covering her shifts.”
“I know.”
Bobby keeps walking. Past the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lamps, down the stairs, into the storage level where the real furniture waits in boxes. He sits on the floor. Presses his palm to the wall.
Hey baby. It's me again.
That night, back in the apartment, Bobby can't sleep. He lies on his side of the bed with his hand on your side and stares at the ceiling. The silence is so complete it has a texture, thick and too heavy. He gets up. Goes to the living room. Stands in front of the shelf where the cops put the tapes back, lined up in a neat row they were never in before.
He picks one up. Turns it over in his hands. The label is in his handwriting. A date, nothing else.
He tells himself he's looking for clues. That's the reason he gives himself as he threads the tape into the camera, plugs it into the TV, and sits on the floor with the remote in his hand.
The apartment is dark except for the blue wash of the screen. He's going to watch the footage with detective's eyes, with Moreno's eyes, looking for something everyone missed: a person in the background, a car that didn't belong, a moment where your face changed because you knew something was coming. He's going to be useful. He's going to be the kind of boyfriend who solves this.
And there you are. In the kitchen. In the morning light. Turning around with a spatula in your hand, your hair messy from sleep, one of his t-shirts hanging off your shoulder. You're saying something—he can't hear it over the lump in his throat, but he can read your lips, do you want toast—and the light is behind you, exactly the way he remembered.
You're so beautiful, so real and so present on this tape that for a second Bobby forgets. For one perfect, idiot second, his body forgets you're gone and his hand almost lifts to touch the screen.
Then the moment passes and you're still in the TV and he's still on the floor and the distance between those two things is the rest of his life.
He watches everything. All of it. Hours. The sleeping footage that made Moreno look at him like that. Bobby sees it now, sees what it looks like from the outside, and he also sees what it actually was: a man so stunned by the existence of this person in his bed that he needed the camera between them to survive it.
You in the kitchen. You reading on the couch with your feet tucked under you, turning pages with one hand, the other hand resting on Bobby's thigh without thinking about it. He filmed that too, the hand, just the hand. Five minutes of your fingers against his jeans because he couldn't say you touching me is the best thing in my life, so Bobby recorded it instead. You at the store, sorting inventory, your lips moving along to the radio, and you catch the camera, and your face does that thing—the mock-exasperated smile, the Bobby, stop that you never really meant—and your eyes are warm.
Your eyes are so fucking warm. Alive.
He watches until the tapes run out, and then Bobby rewinds them and watches again. He can't help it. The apartment fills with the sound of you. Your voice, your laugh, the particular way you said his name, Bobby, half-scolding and half-tender. For a few hours, the silence has a crack in it and something warm leaks through.
He starts watching them every night. Before the store, after the store, sometimes both. It becomes a ritual. Some sick twin devotions, the basement and the tapes, the wall and the screen, one hand pressed to concrete and the other pressing play.
Month three.
Kat starts leaving coffee on the counter for him.
It's hot, and it's there every night when he walks in, balanced on the edge of the register next to a ceramic lamp that's been on display since before you vanished.
She doesn't make a thing of it. Doesn't say I made this for you, or I thought you might want. It's just there. An object in his path. Bobby takes it because refusing would require a conversation he doesn't have the energy for.
She starts sitting on the stairs when he's in the basement. Not coming all the way down, just perching on the third step, legs crossed, chin in her hand, talking to him through the open stairwell.
She tells him about her day. About the customers, mainly. The couple who spent three hours testing every sofa in the showroom and then bought a lamp, the woman who wanted to return a bed frame she'd clearly had for two years, and some guy who asked if they sold waterbeds. Clark apparently almost threw him out. She's funny, in a way that's different from you. Louder, broader, more direct.
You were a scalpel. Kat's a blunt instrument, and right now Bobby is so hollowed out that even blunt force registers as contact.
He doesn't laugh. He doesn't encourage her. But he stops telling her to go away, and Kat reads that correctly as the only invitation Bobby knows how to extend right now.
It's the tapes that start to bother him first.
Not anything he can really name at first. It's more like a feeling. Particular unease of looking at something familiar and sensing, at the periphery, that it's shifted. He's watching the kitchen footage—the toast morning, his favourite, the one he's rewound so many times the tracking wobbles at the edges—and something feels off. Bobby stops the tape. Rewinds. Watches again.
You turn around with the spatula. The light is behind you. You say do you want toast. Everything is exactly the same.
Except your face.
Bobby leans closer to the screen. Squints. Your face is… fine. It's your face. Your eyes, your mouth, the way your hair falls. It's you. But there's… something. Some flicker of wrongness so faint it's less than a shadow. Like the difference between a photograph and a photocopy of a photograph. The information is all there. It's just one generation removed from real.
He tells himself it's the tape. Old footage, cheap equipment, the kind of VHS degradation that happens when you rewind the same section a hundred times. He tells himself it's his eyes, his exhaustion, the fact that he's watching the same clips at two in the morning in a dark apartment obsessively.
His brain is doing what brains do when they're tired and desperate: finding patterns in the static.
He believes it. For a while. He presses play.
One night, Kat is quiet for longer than usual. Bobby can feel her watching him from the stairs, her chin on her knees, the stairwell light behind her making her silhouette sharp.
“You loved her a lot, huh,” she says. Soft. Not a question.
Bobby goes rigid. His hand is flat on the wall. The draft tickles against his palm.
He turns his head. Looks at her. And whatever's on his face, he knows it’s not warm. It's the Bobby that bites, the one who gets mean, and Kat sees it happen, feels the temperature drop. The wall goes up behind his expression like a bulkhead slamming shut.
“I still love her,” he says, cold and flat. Corrective. Present tense.
He turns back to the wall. Kat is quiet for a long time. Then she gets up and goes back upstairs, and Bobby hears her footsteps cross the showroom floor above him. He closes his eyes, pressing his forehead to the concrete. He hates himself for being cruel to one more person who didn't deserve it or ask him but did you do it?
But he can't—
He can't let her use the past tense. He can't let anyone use the past tense. Because that means it's over, and it's not over. It's not. You're somewhere, he can feel it.
Bobby is a man sitting on a concrete floor talking to nobody, and the only woman who ever mattered to him is gone, and the last thing he gave her was a fucking grunt.
He can't live in that version. He won't.
Month four.
Bobby starts going through the inventory records.
Your handwriting is everywhere. The logs, the labels on the bins, the sticky notes on the shelving units, reminding Clark which shipments need to go out first. He sits in the storage level with the binder in his lap and traces your letters with his fingertip. He can hear your voice in the loops and slants. The way you wrote like you talked, quick and slightly messy, always abbreviating things so he had to ask you to translate.
The tapes are getting worse.
He can't deny it anymore. The wrongness he felt at month three has deepened into something visible, a decay he doesn't need to squint to see.
Your face has lost something in the kitchen footage. Nothing he could point to, nothing a stranger who'd never met you would notice. But Bobby has watched this clip a thousand times, and he knows the terrain of your face the way a sailor knows coastline.
Something has shifted.
Your eyes are the right colour, but the light behind them is dimmer, muted, like watching a candle through frosted glass. Your mouth moves and the words come out (do you want toast), but there's a fraction-of-a-second delay. The audio arriving just a breath after the lips, and it gives your voice a quality that makes the hair on Bobby's arms stand up. A dubbing. A sense that someone else is speaking through you, almost perfectly synchronised but not quite.
He goes through the other tapes. One by one. Methodical. The sleeping footage first. And you're there, you're sleeping, but the quality of your stillness is wrong. Too still. A person breathing doesn't look like that, doesn't have that uncanny smoothness, that mannequin-serenity.
The footage of you at the store next. Sorting inventory, lips moving to the radio is the worst affected so far. Your hands look right, but they move in a way that's almost, almost correct. The way a marionette's hands move when the puppeteer is very good. Bobby watches your fingers sort through drawer pulls and cabinet hardware, and he knows that those are not the hands that touched him.
He doesn't tell anyone. Who the hell would he even tell? Moreno? Hey, detective, the girl on my tapes is turning into something else? Yeah, same one that went missing and everyone thinks I secretly killed! His mom? Terrence? They already think he's losing it. Or, worse, they would think he’s high again.
They already use that voice with him now. The careful tone people use when they're managing a dangerous animal. This would be the thing that tips it, the thing that sends Bobby from grieving boyfriend to guy who cracked.
He starts making a list of his failures instead.
An erosion in reverse. Every day, some new memory surfaces, a moment he discarded when it happened and now can't stop replaying. Each one is worse than the last because each one is a place where he had a choice and chose wrong and didn't even realise it. Or maybe he did. And that’s worse.
The night you came home excited about something—a movie, a book, something a friend said, he can't even remember what it was, and that fact alone makes him want to put his fist through drywall—and you'd been lit up, talking fast, gesturing, and he'd been reviewing footage on the couch.
He'd said uh-huh without looking up. Not even once. Not once during your entire story did he lift his eyes from the viewfinder. You trailed off mid-sentence and went quiet, and Bobby hadn't looked up then either.
He tries to find that moment on tape. He knows he was filming that night. The camera was always running, always capturing, the viewfinder his permanent excuse for not being present. He scrubs through the footage looking for it. Looking for your face lit up. Looking for the moment you dimmed.
He finds the timestamp. And what Bobby sees makes his stomach drop.
You're sitting on the couch. He can tell it's you by the posture, the clothes, the way you're tucked into the corner cushion with your legs folded. But your face. Your face is… smeared. Like a thumbprint pressed across wet paint. The features are there, technically. But only technically. Eyes, mouth, nose. But they've lost their arrangement, their specificity.
The uniqueness that makes a face your face instead of just a face.
Bobby is looking at you, and he can’t tell what you look like. He’s lived with you, slept beside you, fucked you in every spot in your shared apartment, filmed you obsessively for months, and yet he’s looking at a tape from four months ago, and he can’t reconstruct you.
The audio is worse. Your voice—the one he knows better than his own, the one that said his name like a bell, half-scolding and half-tender—is distorted.
Vowels flattened, consonants dissolved. That familiar melody of your speech now reduced to a low warbling tone that doesn't sound like language anymore. It sounds like a recording of a recording of a recording. Each new generation losing fidelity, losing you, until what's left is just the shape of where a voice used to be.
Bobby ejects the tape. His hands are shaking so hard he almost drops it. He puts it back on the shelf and sits on the couch in the dark and doesn't move for an hour.
He sits with the inventory binder the next night and reads your handwriting and says to the wall:
Something's happening to you, baby. I can't—I don't know how to explain it. But something's happening to the tapes, and I think it means something's happening to you. I need you to hold on. Okay? I need you to hold on because I'm still here, and I'm not leaving. I need you to still be you when I find you.
I think I got scared of how much I needed you. So I stopped letting myself need you. And that's not an excuse. I know that's not an excuse.
The truth is, I wanted to be there so much that it was destroying me. I wanted you so much it made me fucking mean. I loved you in a way I couldn't control, and I've always been an idiot who quits everything. Who gives up when things get too big and scary. You were the one thing that made my hands shake, and I hated it, and I needed it. I needed you because you saw me. I didn't know how to need something without resenting it.
So I resented you. For making me believe in myself. For making me need something other than the weed. And I showed it by turning away and turning away and turning away until you thought I didn't feel anything at all, when the reality is I felt everything. I felt too much. I've always felt too much, and I've never once known what to do about it except hide behind the camera and make a dumb joke and let the moment pass.
He pauses. Slams the binder shut. Runs his hand over the cover where your coffee ring stains the cardboard.
I should've told you about the toast morning. The spatula. The light behind you. I should've put the camera down and told you right then.
I should've told you every morning.
Baby. I can still see your handwriting. I need to—I need that to mean you're still somewhere. That this is just the tapes. That the tapes are old and I'm tired and you're fine, wherever you are, you're fine and you look like you and you sound like you and when I find you I'll know your face.
Month five.
Kat touches his arm.
It happens on a Wednesday. She's handing him the coffee, and her fingers brush his wrist and stay there. A half-second too long. Warm. Intentional.
Bobby stares at her hand. Looks at her. She doesn't look away.
“You know,” she says cautiously, “you don't have to sit down there alone every night. You could stay up here. Sit on one of the display couches. They're actually pretty comfortable for fake living rooms.” She smiles. Not the interested once-over from the first night. Softer now, more careful.
Bobby takes the coffee. Goes downstairs.
His pager buzzes against his hip later that night. He unclips it, tilts it toward the light. Kat's number. She must've pulled it from the staff contact sheet Clark keeps.
He looks at the little green screen for a long time. Clips the pager back to his belt. Presses his forehead to the wall.
That night, at home, he puts in the toast tape. It's become a test now, a compulsion. He checks the way you'd check a wound, needing to see if it's gotten worse, even though looking makes it worse too. He sits on the floor in front of the TV and watches the kitchen footage load.
The spatula is there. The counter. The window with the morning light. The t-shirt hanging off one shoulder. Everything in the frame is crisp, real, and correctly rendered.
Except there's no one holding the spatula.
Bobby's breath hitches. He leans forward, hands shaking. Rewinds. Plays it again.
The spatula lifts. Turns. The t-shirt shifts on a shoulder that isn't there. Or is there, maybe, but wrong. A smudge of colour where a body should be, a heat-shimmer distortion where your outline used to sit. The light comes through the window and falls on the kitchen counter and on the empty space where you stood, and there is something in that space.
Not nothing, or blank tape, but a presence that has no edges, no features, no face. A blur. A smear. The visual equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come.
The audio says — — toast — and then dissolves into a sound that Bobby can only describe as the noise a voice makes when it's being pulled apart from the inside. Each syllable stretches thinner and thinner until it snaps, and what's left is a low, sustained hum that sounds like buzzing lights in an empty hallway.
Bobby presses stop. Ejects the tape.
He goes to the shelf. Pulls another. The one where you're reading on the couch, your hand on his thigh. He puts it in.
Your hand is gone. His thigh is there. Bobby can see his own jeans, the denim folded at the knee. That specific wear pattern on the left leg. But the hand that used to rest on it has dissolved into a faded wash, a blurry disturbance on the surface of the image, like someone pressed their palm to a fogged window and then the fog closed over the print.
He puts in another. The store footage. You sorting inventory.
The bins are being sorted by no one. Cabinet hardware moves through the air. Drawer pulls lift and settle into containers by themselves, organised by a system invented by a person the tape can no longer render. The radio plays in the recording. Bobby can hear the music. Unchanged. But the voice that used to sing along to it is gone. Replaced by a low, pulsing tone that rises and falls in a pattern that almost, almost resembles the melody you used to hum, if he listens hard enough, if Bobby presses his ear to the speaker and closes his eyes and believes—
He can't. He can't believe it hard enough. The tape runs, and the inventory sorts itself. The radio plays somewhere underneath it all in a frequency that used to be your voice.
Bobby puts every tape in, one by one. Every single one. And on every single one, you’re fading. The early tapes—the oldest ones, the ones from before the store, from the first months—are the worst.
On those, you’re gone entirely. The frame exists, as does the light. But the space you occupied is smooth and empty, the image healing the wound of your absence like skin closing over a wound.
Reality itself seems to be deciding you were never there and quietly, methodically, is editing you out.
On the very last tape he checks, the most recent, he can still see you. Barely. A silhouette that won't resolve. A shape in the doorway that could be a person or could be a trick of the light. He pauses the tape and stares at the shape, and it looks like you the way a cloud looks like a face. If you want it to, if you squint hard enough and ignore the parts that don't match.
Bobby sits on the floor, holding the remote, staring at the paused frame. He understands, with a certainty that bypasses logic and settles directly into his bones, that you’re being erased. Not just from his life. Not just from the apartment, the store, or the neighbourhood that forgot you. From reality. From any evidence that you existed at all.
The tapes were his proof. Not for Moreno, or the cops, but for himself. Proof that you were real. That the toast morning happened. That your hand rested on his thigh. Love, in all its messy, imperfect shape between you, was real. That you sang along to the radio and burned rolls at Thanksgiving. That you stood in doorways waiting for him to look up. For once in his life, to just look up and see you.
He filmed you because he couldn't tell you he loved you, and thought the films would be enough. They were going to be the evidence he'd have forever, the record of what he felt even when he couldn't say it aloud.
And now even that’s being taken.
He doesn't go to the store that night. He goes straight to the basement and puts his whole body against the wall. Not just his hand. His whole body, chest, cheek and palms flat against the concrete. Maybe he’s going insane, finally, properly insane, but he talks until his voice gives out.
Don't go. Whatever's happening, whatever this is—please. Don't go. I know I didn't earn you. I know I don't get to ask you to stay when I didn't give you a reason to stay. But I’m asking. I'm begging. Please.
I can barely remember your face, baby.
I looked at the tapes, and you're not—you're going away. You're going away, and I can't stop it. The last version of your face I have in my head is from the doorway, the night you left, and I didn't even LOOK at it. I fucking grunted. You were looking at me, and I was looking at the TV. Now your face is disappearing from my own tapes, and the last real look I had at you I wasted on a GRUNT.
Baby. Please don't make me forget what you look like.
The wall breathes against him. The draft. The nowhere-breeze, cooler than the room, steady, almost rhythmic. Like breathing. Like something on the other side pressing back, watching him.
Bobby lifts his head but he's alone down here.
He stays until morning anyway.
Month six.
The apartment is starting to forget you.
Your shampoo ran out first. Bobby couldn't bring himself to buy more, so the shower shelf has a gap now.
Your magazines are buried under his mail, his camera equipment that's migrated back to every flat surface because there's nobody to complain about it. The coffee mug—your mug, the one on the drying rack—he put it in the cabinet. High shelf. Behind his. He can't see it when he opens the door, but he knows it's there.
The tapes are blank.
Completely blank. Clean, smooth, unrecorded type of blank. As if the camera was never pointed at anything, as if the record button was never pressed. Hours and hours of footage simply un-happened.
Bobby put in the toast tape last week, and what played was thirty minutes of soft grey nothing. The gentle hiss of virgin magnetic tape, the sound of a medium that has never held information. He put it in the camera, connected it to the TV, and watched nothing. Rewound it. Watched nothing again, ejected it, held it in his hands, turned it over and read his own handwriting on the label.
The date, just the date. The label is the only proof left that something was once on this tape, because the tape itself has forgotten.
All of them. Every single one. He checked them all, one after another, on a Saturday afternoon with the curtains drawn. By the time Bobby reached the last one, he wasn't even surprised. Just hollow. The shelves are full of labelled cassettes that now contain nothing.
A library of blanks. An archive of absence.
He has no pictures of you.
He realises this with a physical lurch, sitting on the floor surrounded by dead tapes. He has no pictures of you.
Bobby the camera guy, Bobby who filmed everything, Bobby who pointed the lens at you while you slept because he couldn't survive the sight of you without a barrier, and somehow, he has no proof you exist. The tapes are blank. He never took photographs because the camera was always rolling. And the only image of your face he has left is the one in his head, and that one is fading too.
Just the ordinary human erosion. The way memory smooths out detail over time. Six months of absence turns a face into an impression, an atmosphere, a feeling-where-a-face-used-to-be.
He remembers your eyes. He thinks. He remembers warmth, colour, the way they changed in kitchen light, and the blue wash of the TV at midnight. But he doesn't remember their exact shape. Doesn't remember if the left one was slightly different from the right.
The details are blurry; the tapes can't tell him anymore, and no one else can, either. You’re being unmade—from the record, from the world, from his own goddamn memory—and Bobby is the man who was supposed to preserve you, who pointed a camera at you for years, and he couldn't even do that right.
He still goes to the store. Every night. Without fail.
Even when it rains, or when he's sick, or when his hands shake on the steering wheel, driving down at eleven PM. He sits on the floor, and he talks. Sometimes he brings the coffee, your order, and a paper cup from the place on El Camino that makes it the way you like best.
Bobby sets it on the concrete beside him like a place setting at a table for two, and it goes cold while he talks. Eventually, he pours it out in the utility sink by the loading dock, rinses the cup and drives home.
It's getting harder to believe.
He can feel it.
Faith eroding the way your shampoo scent eroded from the pillow, the way you eroded from the tapes, gradually, then suddenly. Six months. People don't come back after six months. The cops have functionally closed the case.
Bobby's mom called and talked around the subject for forty minutes before finally saying honey, maybe it's time to— and Bobby hung up on her. His buddy Terrence sat him down at a bar and said, awkwardly, carefully, the way everyone talks to Bobby now, man, I know you don't want to hear this, but— and Bobby walked out before he could finish the sentence.
He knows what they're going to say. He knows because he's been saying it to himself at three in the morning, lying on his side of the bed with his hand on the cold spot you should be, a thought looping in his brain: she's not coming back. She's not coming back.
But Bobby goes to the store. And he sits on the floor. He puts his hand on the wall. The draft is still there—that impossible nowhere-breeze, cool against his palm—and it feels like breathing. Bobby presses his whole body against the concrete.
This space is the last thing that still holds you. The tapes gave you up. The apartment gave you up. The neighbourhood, the cops, his friends, his mother, everyone has let go. Bobby presses himself against the wall every night because this is the one place in the world that still has you in it. The last surface that carries your imprint, and he’ll not leave it.
He will not let the last proof of you go.
Bobby thinks about who he was seven months ago, and the contempt is so total it's almost cleansing.
A twenty-something-year-old asshole in a crop top who thought he was too cool to say I love you, who hid behind a camera lens because looking at things through glass was easier than looking at them with his bare, stupid, cowardly eyes.
He had a girl who made him breakfast and stayed up waiting for him. Who asked do you even want to be here anymore and answered her with don't be dramatic because the truth was too enormous and too terrifying to fit through his teeth.
The camera was supposed to be the thing that kept you. The proof, the record, the insurance policy against loss. He filmed you because he couldn't hold you, and now the film is empty. His arms are empty too, and the only thing left is a dusty basement with a strange wall and a man who doesn't deserve the comfort of it.
Robert Franklin, who quit everything, who let every good thing in his life rot through neglect and cowardice—Robert Franklin refuses to quit this.
This is the one thing he will hold onto with both hands. Because if he lets go, he has to look at who he is without it, and that person has nothing. That someone is an idiot with a camera and a crop top sitting in an empty apartment full of blank tapes, where he ground something beautiful down to dust because he was too chickenshit to be soft.
So he goes. Every night. He goes.
Month seven.
Clark is drunk.
Bobby can tell before he's through the door.
The showroom lights are on, but the sign is flipped to CLOSED, and the radio's playing louder than usual from somewhere in the back. When Bobby makes his way past the dining displays, he finds Clark sitting in the leather recliner. The expensive floor model, the one that's been here since the store opened, with a bottle of Jim Beam wedged between his thigh and that look on his face.
The one Bobby sees in the mirror. The look of a man whose life is falling apart.
“Bobby.” Flat. Not unfriendly. Voice of a man who's been drinking past sloppy and into something cold and brittle on the other side. “Right on time.”
“Clark.” Bobby eyes the bottle. “Where's Kat?”
“Sent her home early.” Clark takes a long, gulping drink. He's still wearing his work shirt, that same button-down he always wears, but it's untucked and the collar's stained. He looks like he's been in that recliner for a while. “Sit down.”
“I'm going downstairs.”
“No.” Another wet gulp. His eyes are red but steady. “You're not. That's what I need to talk to you about.”
Bobby stops.
“Linda kicked me out,” Clark says conversationally. The way he'd talk about lumber prices or a late shipment. He gestures around the showroom with the bottle. “So I'll be staying here. Back office. Maybe downstairs, if I can clear space between the Scandinavian imports.” The joke almost lands. Almost. “Which means I need the room, Bobby. All of it.”
“You're—what?”
“I'm saying you can't come here anymore.”
The words land like a slap. Bobby's hand tightens on the strap of his camera bag.
“Clark—”
“Seven months.”
And there it is. That thing that happens when Clark drinks, when the bourbon strips away the politeness and the it's not my place and the careful middle-aged-man diplomacy, and what's left is just the raw compressed anger of a man who's been swallowing his own resentment for months.
Clark is a man who holds everything down until the whiskey lifts the lid and whatever's underneath comes out scalding.
“Seven months of you in my basement. Seven months of—do you know what's happened to this place since your girlfriend disappeared? Do you? Because I do. I watch it every day. I watch the customers not come in. I watch the phone not ring. I watch the neighbourhood look at my store like it's a goddamn crime scene and take their money to Stevens Creek because nobody wants to buy a dining set from the place where a girl vanished.” Clark's voice is rising, a deep rumbling anger spilling outwards. “I built this store. And now I'm sleeping in it because my ungrateful wife thinks I'm a failure and my customers think I'm cursed and the only person who walks through my door every night is you, Bobby, sitting on my floor, talking to my wall—”
“That's not my fault —”
“She's not down there.” Clark slams the bottle on the end table. It cracks the mahogany finish, and he doesn't notice or doesn't care. “She's not in the walls, or the ceiling or the goddamn floor, son. She's not inside a goddamn flatpack bookshelf.”
Bobby sucks in a breath. “You don't know that. Nobody does.”
“Yeah, I do.”
Clark leans forward. Red-eyed. Steady. And the thing he's been holding between his teeth for months comes out. The ugly thing that isn't about Bobby at all, it's about Clark, about a store that was failing before you ever disappeared and a marriage that was cracking before the customers stopped coming.
A man who needs someone to blame because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing his own fingerprints on everything that's broken. And right now, tonight, drunk and newly homeless and sitting in a recliner in a showroom full of furniture nobody's buying, Clark has found his someone.
“She's either dead,” Clark says, and the word just hangs there, settling on Bobby's skin like hot oil spilling over— “or she left you. And either way, son. Either way. You need to stop. Because I can't have you down there anymore. I can't have this—this haunting—attached to my store. I'm trying to save what's left, and you sitting in my basement every night is—”
He stops himself. A crack appears in Clark’s anger, a fissure where the sober Clark underneath can see what the drunk Clark is doing. Using Bobby's grief to deflect from his own failure. Blaming a missing girl for a business that was haemorrhaging money long before she vanished, for a wife who kicked him out because Clark worked sixty-hour weeks and never once asked how her day was.
Clark knows. Underneath the bourbon, he knows. And the knowing makes his face twist with both sadness and fury.
“Bobby.” His voice changes. Drops. The anger drains out of it like water from a cracked glass, leaving only the exhaustion underneath. Clark rubs his eyes with one hand, and suddenly, he looks old. Older than he is, tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. “I didn't—that came out wrong. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it like that.”
Bobby doesn't hear him.
Because Bobby is already moving. Past the display couches and the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lives. He shoulder clips the corner of a dining table hard enough to shift it on the showroom floor, and the door chimes behind him when he rips it open.
The night air hits him, and he's in the parking lot, his hands are on his knees, and he's breathing in short, ragged, tearing bursts that feel like they're coming from somewhere below his lungs.
Somewhere that's been sealed shut for seven months and has just been cracked open with the words she's either dead or she left you.
Dead or she left you.
Dead.
Or she left you.
He can't fucking breathe. He can't—the air is right there. Santa Clara night air, warm and full of eucalyptus and car exhaust, but he can't get it into his lungs. Because Clark said dead, and that word is a door Bobby has refused to open for seven months, and now it's open, it's wide fucking open.
And behind it is a version of reality where you’re in the ground somewhere and the last thing he ever said to you was a grunt and your last memory of him is the back of his head and the blue light of the television and the sound of a man who couldn't be bothered to look up.
And the tapes are blank. And your face is gone. And there is no record anywhere in the world that you existed except the label on a cassette in Bobby's handwriting and in a basement he's just been locked out of.
“Bobby. Bobby, wait—”
Kat. Coming around the side of the building, car keys in her hand. She didn't go home. She was sitting in her car, headlights off, engine off, just sitting there, and she's been doing that, he knows she's been doing that, waiting for him, watching the door. And he's never said anything because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging everything it implies.
“Bobby, hey, stop, are you okay? I heard him through the door, what did he—”
Bobby straightens up. Pivots toward her. And he knows—somewhere in the functioning part of his brain, in the part that isn't currently on fire—that she doesn't deserve what’s coming. She's been nothing but kind.
Coffee on counters, stairs and parking lots and pager numbers he never called back. She never once asked for anything in return. She’s a good person standing in a parking lot trying to help a man who’s bleeding out from a wound she didn't inflict.
But the thing inside Bobby right now is not rational. It's not kind. It's the wounded animal, the cornered dog, the part of Robert Franklin that has always turned his pain into teeth and aimed them at whoever's closest because the alternative is feeling it. And he…
He can't feel it; if he feels it right now, he’ll come apart on this asphalt, and he doesn't know if he'll come back together again.
“Don't do that. Don't chase me. Don't wait in the parking lot. Don't leave me coffee. Don't—” His voice cracks, and he hates it. Hates the sound of himself breaking in front of her. Another woman who's being kind to him, and he's going to ruin it with his inability to do anything with tenderness except flinch from it. “I'm not going to fuck you, Kat. Alright? Is that what you need to hear? My girl is missing. The girl I love is fucking missing, and I don't know where she is, and I can't—I can't do this. Whatever you think this is going to become. I can't.”
He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. Hard. Grinding the tears back because Bobby doesn't cry in front of people. Even though he's been doing it alone on concrete for seven months, even though the irony—Bobby Franklin pushing away the person trying to be there for him while grieving the person he pushed away by not being there—is so perfect and so cruel it feels engineered. Like the universe is holding up a mirror and saying see? You're doing it again. You learned nothing, idiot.
He knows. He knows he's doing it again. He can't stop doing it.
“I can't,” he rasps. Quiet, broken. “I'm sorry.”
Kat stands still. Her keys dangle from one finger, catching the orange glow of the streetlight. She doesn't step back. Doesn't cry or get angry or tell him to go fuck himself, though she definitely should. Bobby almost wishes she would because it would give him someone to push against.
The tapes are blank, and your face is a smear. Reality is closing over the hole you left like water closing over a stone, and soon there’ll be no evidence you were ever here at all except a man in a parking lot who can't stop saying your name in the present tense.
Kat shifts her keys to her other hand. Takes one step closer. Not touching. Just closer.
She looks at him, and she says, quietly, softly, “I don't need you to love me, Bobby.”
Quiet. Simple. Like she's telling him the time.
Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His hand drops from his face. The parking lot is quiet. Only the buzzing streetlight fills the silence.
He looks at her, and he looks wrecked, he knows. Absolutely wrecked, hollowed out and scraped clean from last seven months, standing in a place where the only options are forward into something he's not ready for or backwards into a basement he's just been locked out of, and he doesn't say yes.
But he doesn't walk away, either.
an: ohoho, i'm so excited to hear what ya'll think after that lmao. we're picking up with BB and you next time. stay tunedddd~
i still can't get over the fact that aerion was fitted down to his horse serving fatal levels of cunt and daeron just... showed up in a random armour he ordered online the night before
Ohhh the idea of riding tt! Aerion or Gdgw! Val and mid way through when they’re completely drunk and overstimulated snarling in their ear “tell me you love me” and making them say it again and again and again-
why not both? also, we need more mean!ls right neowwwww. pure rawdogged this, so not proofread. been cooking all day and now i'm gonna go think more about evil twinks and drink tea toodles~
tt!aerion.
aerion has a mouth on him at all times. filthy, sharp, always running, always in control of the scene even when he's flat on his back. good girl, just like that, c'mon, take it. the commentary doesn't stop because the commentary is the leash he keeps on himself. as long as he's narrating, he's in charge.
and then you find the angle.
you shift your hips or grind down or clench around him in exactly the right way and the commentary just—dies. mid-word. his mouth goes slack. his hands stop guiding and start gripping, fingers denting your thighs with bruise-force, not steering anymore because he can't. whatever part of his brain was responsible for sentences has gone dark. there's nothing behind his eyes but static and pleasure and you, you, you.
and that's when you grab his jaw.
your fingers dig into the hollow of his cheeks, force his face toward yours. his eyes struggle open (glassy, blown, barely tracking) and you lean in close enough that your mouths almost touch and you say it low and mean, with your teeth in it: tell me you love me.
aerion goes rigid. because this is the one thing he has never, ever given anyone.
he'd rather bleed. he'd rather bite through his own tongue. and you're not asking for it sweetly across a pillow. no, you're demanding it while his cock is inside you and his brain is soup and every single defence he has ever built is in ruins around him and there's nowhere left to hide.
his jaw works under your grip. grinds. his eyes are wet and furious all at once. you don't let go. you roll your hips, slow and devastating, and tighten your fingers on his chin and say it again, harder. say it.
and the sound that comes out of him is barely human. scraped from somewhere behind his sternum, dragged out of him like you're reaching into his chest and pulling. i love you. rough, wrecked, pure fury. like it's being stolen, like you're taking something he swore he'd die before giving.
again.
i love you. louder, raw, his hips stuttering up into you because his body has outrun his pride entirely. he can't separate the pleasure from the confession anymore. it's all one thing. you've made it all one thing.
again.
and by the third time he's not fighting it. i love you, i love you, fuck, i love you. it's all pouring out of him messy and broken, his eyes squeezed shut. his whole body shakes, and he comes like that. with your fingers on his jaw and the words still wet in his mouth. an expression on his face like you've flayed him open and found something tender underneath all that rot and held it up to the light.
afterward: silence. his chest heaving. his eyes fixed on the ceiling. the humiliation seeping in like cold water because he begged. aerion targaryen (who would rather swallow glass than be vulnerable) just told you he loves you three times in a row because you rode him stupid and demanded it with your hand on his face and he couldn't not.
the shame of it is a living thing in the room.
you trace his tattoo and don't mention it. he loves you so much for that mercy it makes him sick. he shoves your hand off his jaw and calls you a bitch with no heat in it whatsoever. you smile against his chest because you both know what just happened and neither of you can take it back.
he'll be meaner to you for days. more defensive, more sharp-edged, more cruel. and you'll let him, because you understand: he's not punishing you for hearing it. he's punishing himself for meaning it.
gdgw!valarr.
valarr is a different species because valarr has no shame about love. he says it freely. over coffee, against your hair, in texts from boardrooms. i love you is not a secret valarr keeps. it's his native language. so you can't weaponize the confession itself.
what you weaponize instead is the context.
because valarr overstimulated is valarr with his inner world in collapse.
the narration is gone. the composure, the eloquence, the precise controlled cadence he maintains even while he's inside you. all of it, dissolved.
you've been riding him slow and thorough. so well for long enough that the man who runs a company and speaks in complete paragraphs during sex has been reduced to breath and nerve endings and the wet, desperate sound he makes every time you grind your hips.
and he's looking up at you with awe. the brown eye is black. the blue one is swimming. the white streak is plastered to his temple with sweat and his cheekbones are flushed. his lips rest parted and he is, in this moment, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. because valarr is completely, perfectly unmade, and he isn't even trying to rebuild himself. he trusts you that much. he's given you this.
so you grab his chin.
and his breath hitches. audibly.
not in fear or in resistance, but in shock. because for ally our cold edges, you don't do this. you're the one who cups his face gently, who strokes his cheekbone, who pulls him in lovingly. grabbing his jaw, fingers pressing hard enough to dimple skin, forcing those glassy mismatched eyes to meet yours—that's a register of you he hasn't met before, and you can see the recognition move through him. the understanding that something has shifted.
tell me you love me.
low, with your teeth bared, a command from someone who expects to be obeyed, and you watch his whole body react to your voice like it's a physical thing. his cock twitches inside you, throbbing almost violently, his stomach muscles pulling tight. his hands shake where they grip your thighs.
i—I love you —
look at me. mean it.
and you grind down, slow, merciless, and hold his jaw tighter. and valarr who is always so articulate, who has a word for every shade of what he feels, makes a sound like a sob. overwhelm. because he means it so much and he's so deep in the pleasure, so deep in you. and you're demanding devotion from him like something enthroned. something consecrated, and he's never in his life been more willing to worship.
i love you, he rasps, and his voice splits clean down the middle. i love you, i love you—
again.
i love you, my love, I love you, please—
and the please is what undoes you both, int he end.
because he's not asking you to stop or to let him finish. he's asking you to keep going.
to keep demanding it. keep making him say it. he wants to live inside this moment where your hand is on his jaw and you're taking the words out of him one by one and each time he says it the pleasure crests higher. the two things become indistinguishable.
the love and the feeling of you, fused into one sensation he couldn't separate if he tried.
he comes saying your name. not my love, not sweet girl. your name. the real one. the one underneath the wolf and the Stark armour. and he holds your face in both shaking hands afterward and looks at you with devastated, tear-tracked, transparent wonder and says, quietly: you are the most terrifying woman alive.
he means it as the highest praise he knows how to give.
SUMMARY - Having met as children and reuniting once you've grown into a woman, Aerion's previous suspicion of you grows into the softest spot imaginable.
CONTAINS - pure fluff, reader is extremely kind, aerion is only kind to reader, classic sunshine x grumpy
A/N - i personally couldn't stop giggling while writing the "pastry" scene. Ughh i need him
The blazing sun over Summerhall was unforgiving, but it did nothing to melt the sour disposition of Prince Aerion.
At barely ten name days old, the boy was already terror embodied. He sat on a smooth rock by the edge of the river, a fishing rod held tight in his small, tense hands.
His eyes glared at the water as if he could command the fish to bite by sheer noble decree.
“They won’t bite if you keep scowling at them,” a bright voice chimed from behind him.
Aerion stiffened, his jaw tightening. He turned his head sharply, expecting a person sent by his father to drag him back to his lessons.
Instead, he saw you.
You were the daughter of Maekar’s most trusted ally, having arrived only an hour ago.
While the adults spoke of their business, you had wandered out into the sun, your heavy skirts already trailing in the damp grass.
You looked entirely out of place among the solemn guards, a little burst of warmth against the grey stones of summerhall.
“Go away,” Aerion snapped, turning back to the water, “You’ll frighten them.”
“You’re the one frightening them,” you retorted easily, completely unbothered by the venom in his tone.
You marched right up to his rock, your slippers squelching in the mud, and plopped down beside him without asking. “My father says that fishes can sense when someone is angry. They don’t like the energy.”
“Your father is a fool, and so are you,” he hissed, expecting you to cry or perhaps run back to the castle.
But you didn’t seem bothered as you tilted your head, watching the bobber dance on the ripples. “You’re doing it wrong anyway. The bait is too high.”
Aerion opened his mouth to deliver a cutting remark—something about how a dragon did not take lessons from a silly girl—but before the words could leave his lips, your smaller, warmer hands brushed against his.
You reached out, bypassing his defensive posture, and gently adjusted his grip on the handle, lowering the tip of the rod so the bait sank properly into the water.
The prince froze. No one touched him without permission. No one dared.
Yet, as the silence stretched between you, the bobber suddenly dipped aggressively. A heavy tug yanked the line down, nearly pulling the rod from his hands.
“See!” you gasped, your face lighting up with a blinding grin. “Pull, Aerion! Pull!”
Forgetting his pride, Aerion yanked the rod back with all his boyhood strength. A massive trout broke the surface, thrashing wildly and splashing mud and lakewater directly across his pristine tunic, and right into your face.
Aerion braced himself for the screaming. Noble girls and boys always screamed when they got dirty.
But then a bright laughter echoed across the banks. “Look at the size of it! We caught it!”
Aerion looked from the wiggling fish to your mud splattered face. His lips twitched, fighting a smile before he forced his features back into a proud mask.
“I caught it,” he corrected, though his voice lacked any real bite. “You merely watched.”
“We caught it,” you insisted, bending down to take a closer look at the trout.
Your father’s visit ended shortly after, and the brief, strange kinship evaporated into memory as the years pulled you both down separate paths.
Years slipped by like water through fingers, and when you finally returned to court as a young woman, the boy by the lake had become a man feared by the entire realm.
Aerion was breathtakingly beautiful, and notoriously cruel. He walked through court with a sharp tongue and a sharper temper, but that did not faze you.
From afar, Aerion watched you navigate the treacherous nature of court. You were a vision of light, offering warm smiles to the guards, listening patiently to the older women, and showing unfaltering kindness to everyone you crossed.
To him, it was grating. All noble ladies were trained to be sweet, performing acts of grace to secure a good match or win the favour of higher lords.
He waited for you to finally lose your cool.
But the day never came. No, the reality of your kindness crashed directly into him one afternoon near the small council chamber.
You were walking down the corridor with a butterfly that had landed on your arm when the doors of the chamber burst open.
A flurry of lords tumbled out into the hall, fleeing in terror. Among them was the master of coin, frantically wiping dark ink from his doublet with his bleeding hands, his face pale as death.
“Seven hells,” one of the other lords whispered hoarsely, scurrying past you. “The prince has lost his mind entirely!”
You stopped, watching the chaotic retreat. Instead of turning back like any sensible person would, you set the butterfly on a nearby branch and stepped through the heavy doors.
An iron candelabra laid overturned on the floor, dark wax spilling across the polished wood, and an inkwell had been shattered against the wall.
Aerion stood by the high window, his back to you. His shoulders were incredibly tense, and his chest was rising and falling with heavy, angry breaths.
“I thought I made it clear,” Aerion growled without turning, “The next soul to disturb me will lose their tongue.”
“Then it is a good thing I am capable of writing. I do not need my tongue.” you responded lightly, closing the heavy door behind you.
Aerion went still. He turned slowly, his stormy eyes dark with lingering rage. When his gaze landed on you, he let out a harsh, bitter scoff.
“Come to play the saint for me too?” he sneered, maintaining his distance. “Save your sweet smiles for the lords in the hall. I have no patience for your endless charity.”
You took a few measured steps into the room, keeping a respectful distance yourself.
“I don't think they don’t understand how stressful it can be,” you said softly, ignoring his cruel words. “they whisper and push, expecting you to sit quietly while they try to manage your family’s rights. It makes sense that you’d lose your patience when they refuse to listen.”
He stared at you from across the room, his mind struggling to process what he was hearing. He had expected an admonishment, or at the very least, fear.
“They are parasites,” Aerion muttered, his posture unlocking just a fraction. “They look at me as if I am mad because I refuse to let them dictate my bloodline’s terms.”
“I can see that,” you replied gently, giving a small smile. “They may be stressed as well, but no one should have to bend to their whim.”
The room went silent before you spoke again.
“Whenever the court gets too loud for me, I find that walking around the gardens helps. The fresh air is always calming.. maybe it would help you too. It’s quiet out there.”
The fire in his eyes flickered, clearly caught off guard by the suggestion. He stared at your face, the lines of his memory remembering the specific curve of your smile.
A breathless laugh escaped him.
“The gardens?” Aerion repeated, his voice dropping the edge it possessed just moments ago.
He took a step forward, assessing your form. “You haven’t changed at all, have you? Years ago at Summerhall, you told me the fish wouldn’t bite because of my ‘anger.' Now you’re trying to herd me into the bushes to calm down.”
Your eyes widened slightly in surprise, a soft laugh bubbling up. “You remember that?”
“I remember a girl pushing my hands around and getting me covered in mud,” he murmured.
He then let out a soft click of his tongue, turning to look at the doorway. “Fine. We will walk the gardens. But only because your previous method somehow worked.”
“Of course,” you smiled.
As the weeks progressed, a unique friendship blossomed between you.
Aerion still remained difficult as ever to the rest of the world, but your presence seemed to simmer that down.
The shift did not go unnoticed by the ladies of the court, leading to an afternoon that they wouldn’t stop gossiping about for days.
You were walking through the outer courtyard with a small retinue of noble ladies, the daughters of prominent lords from the Reach. They were talking endlessly, giggling as they spoke of whatever irrelevant topics crossed their minds.
“You must be careful, my dear,” one of the ladies said, leaning in closer to you. “Prince Aerion may be amused by your novelty but once he grows bored of playing with his new toy, you will be left with nothing but yourself.”
“He is a prince of the blood,” another lady chimed in, her voice tight. “They take what pleases them for a moment and cast it aside. Do not mistake a tyrant’s passing curiosity for actual regard.”
“Aerion simply values sincerity,” you replied, offering an unbothered smile. “There is no game being played.”
“You are far too gullible–” the former lady was cut when Aerion walked out from the room beside.
The ladies instantly adjusted their posture, immediately dropping to curtsies as he approached, each of them desperately hoping to catch the prince’s favour despite their previous warnings to you.
Aerion ignored them, his eyes locking firmly onto you.
Without a word of greeting, and completely disregarding decorum, he walked into the center of the group and stepped right into your space, his frame towering over you.
“You’re late,” his voice was low—meant strictly for you, though it carried across the hall.
“Late for what, my Prince?” you asked, tilting your head up to meet his gaze with your beaming expression.
“I am going to the cliffs, and you are coming with me,” he stated flatly.
Behind you, a collective intake of breath echoed from the ladies. Here he was, actively seeking you out, his attention consuming you and utterly shattering their spiteful claims that you were just a passing game.
You looked back at the girls, giving one last smile before parting from them. “Very well, my Prince, if you insist.”
“I do,” Aerion tilted his head, turning on his heel to fall into step right beside you, his side brushing against yours as he guided you out of the yard.
That would not be the first or last time the court would witness the two of you separating from the rest of the world.
During one evening, after failing in your search for Aerion through the whole castle, you found him alone in the secluded parts of the library.
He was sitting alone, staring dead at a massive volume of ancient Valyrian history.
“I am not in the mood for company,” he hissed out, “leave.”
Your eyebrows furrowed in worry before approaching and setting down a small plate of pastries on the corner of the table. You pulled out the empty chair beside him and sat down despite his request.
Reaching over the plate, you picked up a small pastry and held it right in front of his face, completely disregarding his brooding glare.
“Eat,” you insisted gently as Aerion still refused to acknowledge you. “You always go for these specific ones. I know you like them.”
His fingers that had been gripping the edge of the book twitched, and he finally turned his head to look at you.
The weight on his shoulders gradually disappeared as he looked at the pastry, then up at your fond expression.
Aerion didn’t move to take it from your hand. Keeping his intense gaze locked firmly onto yours, he leaned slightly forward.
Then, totally unprompted, he took a bite right out of the pastry while it was still held between your fingers.
A tiny giggle slipped past your lips, a bright warmth blooming all the way to the tips of your ears at the sheer intimacy of it.
You tried to bite your lip to hide your surprise, but your shoulders shook with quiet amusement as you looked into his smug face.
Aerion chewed slowly, the corners of his lips twitching at your giddy reaction.
“You are ridiculous,” he murmured as he swallowed.
“Maybe,” you agreed, your heart fluttering as you set the remaining half down onto the plate. “But it worked. You feel better already, don’t you?”
Aerion stared at you for a moment, drinking in your presence. He did feel better—the tight, suffocating knot in his chest had already unraveled. But it was certainly not because of the pastry.
Slowly, he hesitantly reached out across the small space between your chairs. With one deliberate movement, he dragged your chair until it hit his.
Then, his hand moved to flip over on the table with his palm facing up, his fingers sprawling open in a silent, stubborn invitation.
You, on the other hand, did not hesitate. You slid your hand into his palm, your fingers easily weaving through his.
Aerion squeezed your hand, his rings pressing firmly against your skin, though his touch was surprisingly careful.
However, the true demonstration of expanse that you two had built played out before the entire court during a grand feast, where Aerion’s attempt to maintain his reputation crumbled.
The feast was deafeningly loud.
You were seated next to Aerion by Prince Maekar.
Aerion had spent the first half of the feast interacting with other lords while you conversed with other ladies.
He was glaring at a group of lesser lords when he noticed your sudden silence. Just then, some of the lords he had been talking to earlier called out to him and he tried to force his eyes back on them.
Aerion was aware that you two were the topic of conversation as of late. He couldn’t let the people of court think he had gone soft. At least that was what his pride told him.
But the sight of your fragile form pulled at him like a physical anchor, shattering his resolve. His demeanor instantly changed.
He turned fully in his seat toward you, his cold stare evaporating.
“You’re pale,” Aerion murmured, voice stripped away of anything harsh. “What is it?”
“Just… a headache, Aerion,” you whispered softly, giving him a tired smile. “The noise is particularly loud tonight.”
Aerion didn’t waste a second as he gently used his hand to cradle the back of your head.
His fingers began combing through the loose parts of your hair, his thumb tracing circles down your temple to ease the pressure.
The chatter around the surrounding tables died down, dozens of eyes tracking his movements, yet no one dared to disrupt. They watched as Aerion paid no mind to everything else the moment you showed discomfort.
You leaned into his touch, a smile returning to your face. “Aerion… everyone is watching.”
Aerion let out a defeated sigh as he grinned. “Let them stare,” he concluded, his fingers tucking in a strand of hair behind your ear. “You’ve broken me anyway.”
Shifting his broad shoulders, he blocked the rest of the room from view, shielding you from prying eyes.
“You are tired,” he paused, “if anyone breathes a word about that, I will have their heads.”
“You can’t murder the entire court,” you teased, lifting your head up for a moment.
A faint smile broke across his face. “Watch me,” he repeated, guiding your head to rest on his shoulder. “Now hold still and let me fix it.”
the time the bright prince feels terribly and woefully neglected by his wife… and you become convinced he’s having an affair
genre/warnings:
mildly suggestive, crack, misunderstandings, insecurities, comfort, fluff, mentions of blood, lannister!reader, they have a newborn!
notes:
another part of the dragon and the lioness but can be read as a standalone. based on this ask heheh <3
Maegor Targaryen.
Aerion had told you that was the only name worthy of his son.
Thankfully, he was nothing like the fearsome legacy attached to that name. With his round, full cheeks, soft silver curls, and wide violet eyes brimming with pure curiosity, the babe looked every bit the picture of innocence. Wherever he went, hearts seemed to melt at the sight of him.
Yet for all his sweetness, Maegor possessed one trait that vexed his father to a degree—
He demanded every ounce of his mother’s attention all day and night. Your attention.
“He’s three moons old,” you reminded him one evening with a frown as Aerion watched Maegor sleeping peacefully against your chest, after telling you how his son had to start learning to let go of you. “He needs his mother and I would have him.”
“Three moons old,” Aerion muttered darkly, “and already a usurper.”
Maegor chose that exact moment to sigh contentedly in his sleep and burrow deeper against you, as if mocking him altogether.
The Bright Prince had begun keeping count of your neglection of him. You would visit the nursery first thing in the morning, and should the babe merely blink his large violet eyes and make a particularly pitiful sound, he would refuse the wet nurses and only cease his whimpering when you held him.
And thus, if he cried, you were there.
If he fussed, you were also there.
Spoiled little thing, his son was. What was the purpose of wet nurses if the boy spent half his waking hours attached to you? He really ought to fire them one of these days.
“They said sons take after their fathers, do they not?”
Daeron let out a snicker after draining another goblet of wine, seemingly enjoying his brother’s predicament. “Your son simply makes it obvious to the rest of us how ravenous you are with your lady wife, brother.”
Aerion shot him glare, internally questioning himself why he had agreed to sit down for drinks with his wastrel of a brother.
“I have spent the past three moons exercising a degree of restraint bordering on sainthood, you mongrel.”
That was actually not an exaggeration. Since Maegor’s arrival, the intimacy he once enjoyed with you had become frustratingly few and far between, and he had to think at least thrice these days to take you to bed!
To his credit, he had adhered to the advice of maesters so far— that was to give you more time following the difficult birth.
Daeron stared at him, then barked out a laugh loud enough to startle the maids.
“Gods above, you are serious!”
Aerion threw him a dark glare, as his brother leaned back in his chair, grinning like a fox.
“Well, since you have nothing better to do, then come with me tonight.”
“For what?”
“For a good time, obviously. There is a feast in the city. Music, drink, performers, gambling, a lot of pretty wenches too—”
“Bwah!”
It astounded even you that your babe could be this adorable.
At times, it felt as though you were cradling a happier, guileless miniature of your husband in your arms. There really was no doubt that this child was his.
“He looks so much like his sire, does he not?” You poked Maegor’s plump cheek, and he immediately rewarded you with a toothless grin.
Your lady’s maid sighed with a smile, nearly melted on the spot. “The image of him, my lady. Those eyes and hair especially.”
You laughed softly and pressed a kiss to Maegor’s forehead, placing him back in his cradle.
Motherhood suited you far more than you had imagined. The long nights, the exhaustion... none of it seemed to matter whenever your little boy wrapped his tiny fingers around you or smiled at the sound of your voice. You loved every moment of it.
Yet if you were being truthful with yourself, you missed Aerion too. Before Maegor’s birth, your prince had scarcely gone a day without finding an excuse to pull you into his arms, but now your days and nights revolved around your son, and the moments you spent alone together had become increasingly rare.
And lately, something felt... different. Aerion had begun returning later than usual, and he smelled of wine. The first time, you dismissed it, but by the fourth, a knot had begun forming in your stomach. Since when had he taken to drinking?
Then one afternoon, while walking through the castle with Maegor in your arms, you happened upon two servants speaking in hushed voices—
“The princes have gone again!”
“Again?”
“Aye. To the town.”
“The new establishment?”
“The very same. They say the owner imported women from across the Narrow Sea and Essos. They cost a fortune...”
It didn’t take you long to figure out that they were talking about a pleasure house. Your stomach twisted. The princes?
They must mean Daeron, surely? But who was the other prince? Because, there was no way that Aerion was seeking comfort from common whores now—
Then again, the word of his brashness towards the princess consort, Valarr’s wife, was apparently quite well-known in King’s Landing. A princess from Pentos, she was an exotic beauty, meanwhile you...
People rarely described you as beautiful. Sweet and pleasant to look upon, they would say, but definitely not the kind that would ensnare princes at the first sight like she did. Moreover, after bearing a child, your body was no longer quite the same as it once had been.
The thought lodged itself in your mind, and despite every effort to dismiss it, a terrible possibility began gnawing at you. What if he has indeed sought comfort elsewhere?
You hated yourself for even thinking it. But when one night, several days later, you spotted him near the servants’ quarters with a woman adorned with golden ornaments unlike anything worn in Westeros—
Your breath caught when Aerion had both of her wrists pinned together in one hand and cornered her.
A great many things seemed determined to test Aerion’s patience these days.
The councils. His father’s demands. Daeron’s antics. By the time evening fell, a dull ache had settled behind the back of his head, and all he wanted was peace, a cup of wine, and his wife.
Especially his wife. The thought to have you wrap him in your arms was enough to ease some of the tension from his shoulders as he strode through the corridors toward your chambers.
However, when he entered it, the warmth he expected was entirely absent. The chamber was darker than usual, half of the candles unlit. You sat perfectly still before the vanity desk, didn’t even turn or rise to greet him.
“Wife?” he asked, stepping forward with a frown. Usually, you favored dark room when you were unwell. “Are you ill—”
“Who is she?”
Your voice was eerily quiet, yet cut through the air so sharply. It was so abrupt that for a moment he simply stared at you, and only after a solid minute did you turn to him, your expression cold enough to frost glass.
“If you tell me now, I may still find it in myself to be merciful and merely send her away. Is it Pentos? Myr? Or perhaps Lys?” The corner of your mouth curved into a sneer. “Lys is famous for its prostitutes, after all.”
Aerion’s jaw tightened. “What do you imply me doing, wife?”
A surge of anger rushed through his veins, severely taking offense. How could you think that lowly of him?
But whatever retort had been forming on his tongue died immediately, because to his astonishment, there were tears in your eyes.
“I gave you a son. I nearly died bringing him into this world.” Your voice trembled slightly as you rose from your seat. “I know we are not always of the same mind, but how could you humiliate me by bringing a common whore here? Do you intend to flaunt her to me?”
You looked devastated, and more than anything, he hated that look in your face. Who had planted this absurdity in your head?
“You are talking nonsense—”
“Nonsense?” Your voice rose sharply. “I saw you with her!”
This had to end. Suddenly Aerion crossed the distance between you in three strides, and you flinched as his hand caught your shoulder, attempting to pull away, but he would not allow it and forced you to face him.
“Look.”
He lifted his other hand before you. At first you did not understand, then your gaze fell upon the gold band encircling his finger. His wedding band.
Aerion stared at you hard, his violet eyes blazing.
“I have worn this since you put it on me on the day of our wedding, and never removed it since.”
On the day of your wedding, the two of you had scarcely been able to tolerate one another. You blinked as another tear fell, trying to hold yourself together.
“You think I would dishonor you? Shame the mother of my son?” he growled through clenched teeth. “I still could see the blood you shed in childbed even in my nightmares. Does that mean nothing to you?”
Three days after Maegor’s birth, your fever worsened and you fell unconscious. You remembered feeling cold, and the bleeding had the sheets beneath you soaked with red. When you awoke, the maesters were surrounding your bed, and your maids were crying.
But standing tall amidst them was Aerion, who never left your side for the remainder of the night. Later, you were told he had threatened every maester in the Red Keep with death should they fail to save you.
The fury in his violet eyes burned brighter. “Now do tell and enlighten me. What part of that ordeal would make me look at another wench and decide she is worth more than you?”
You were still not fully convinced. “But you... the servants saw you going to the whorehouse—”
Aerion let out a harsh exhale.
“I was retrieving Daeron,” he grounded out, each word bitter. “Father’s orders. The wench you saw me with is his whore. A fortune-seeking dullard, I just banished her from Summerhall.”
“You have been drinking lately too—”
“So now I’m forbidden from having a drink?” A muscle twitched beneath his right eye. “I face constant shit and my foolish brother every day. I can’t even bed my wife when she’s next to me and our son hogs her time all day and everyday, meanwhile she is thinking I’m hiding some whore in another chamber— and now I cannot drink? Tell me, do you actually want me to keep my sanity, or do you want to see me lose it and hang the first man I see?”
Somehow, the way he phrased it made you feel sorry for him. You pursed your lips, looking away. “Sure, have your drink, then...”
“Oh, I fucking will, woman, but first thing first—”
Before you could even gasp, he dived in, crushing his lips against yours.
The anger that had choked the room only moments ago dissolved into an instant, consuming heat. It was a punishing kiss at first, choking the breath out of you, but it quickly melted sensually as his hands roamed the curve of your body.
It sure had been a while since he had his hands on you. A moan escaped your lips when he fondled your breasts and pressed you against his torso, creating a delicious friction.
When he finally pulled away, it was with a heavy, ragged breath. His gaze burning down into your eyes as his thumb gently traced your lower lip, which was now swollen from his kisses.
“If it were up to me,” Aerion murmured, his voice a gravelly whisper, “I would fuck you senseless—”
His expression softened, a rare, vulnerable shadow crossing his features along with the rise and fall of his chest. “It’s taking everything in me not to. The fever after your last labor nearly took you from me, and I won’t gamble with your life.”
“I can take moon tea—”
“That blasted tea will make you sick. You are not taking that until it’s absolutely necessary.”
You blinked up at him, your expression softening into a sweet gaze that completely disarmed him. The sheer innocence in your eyes was his undoing.
With a low groan, Aerion leaned down and pulled you in for another deep, lingering kiss, sealing his lust against your lips, before trailing his mouth downward, burying his face in the crook of your shoulder to suck your skin hungrily.
“Who could have known…” His voice was a low, teasing rasp, the words vibrating directly against the skin of your neck, “that my wife is such a fiercely jealous woman that she actually made herself cry?”
He was relishing in this, you realized. When he broke away this time, a victorious smirk touched his lips. “Are you content now, my jealous wife?”
You shot him a look, feeling a heat rush to your face. You tried to muster a glare, but the blush staining your cheeks betrayed you entirely.
“Incorrigible man...” you muttered, turning your face away to hide your embarrassment.
Aerion only laughed, the sound rich and genuinely amused—a rare sound for him these days. “Perhaps,” he conceded, his thumb gently tugging your chin back so you were forced to look at him. “Now what else should I prove to you so you will be satisfied?”
“I want Maegor now.”
Your husband arched an eyebrow, exasperated.
“This is absolute treachery,” he muttered, though there was no real heat in his words. “I finally get you to myself, and you immediately call for that little tyrant?”
. . .
A few moments later, the maids entered the chamber, gently putting baby Maegor into your waiting arms. The moment the infant settled against your chest, he let out a happy, bubbling giggle, his tiny hands reaching up towards your face.
Aerion stood unhappily over the two of you, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched the display.
“He is fat.”
You scowled at him, tightening your hold over your son protectively. “I love him fat.”
That little boy could be the fattest babe in the Seven Kingdoms and he would still be the apple of your eye. Yet, as your husband looked down at his son, a sudden realization washed over him—
He had always thought the boy took entirely after him, but looking closely at Maegor’s beaming smile, Aerion saw you. The babe had his violet eyes and his silver hair, but the contour of his face, the gentle curve of his lips, the crinkle of his eyes—it was all yours.
Now he sort of understood why he also found him adorable.
“Let me hold him,” he said, already pulling the babe from your grasp.
He brought Maegor against his own broad chest. It was a surreal sight, seeing your brooding prince cradling a fragile, soft infant with the utmost care.
Your heart warmed at the sight though, a profound sense of peace settling over you as you looked at the two absolute loves of your life.
Epilogue
The tender silence lasted for only a minute. Maegor, apparently deciding he had tolerated his father’s hold, suddenly squirmed. With a whimper of protest, the babe pushed his small hands against his father’s chest, fighting the embrace.
Before Aerion could adjust his grip, Maegor’s chubby little hand shot upward, unceremoniously slapping right at his father’s face, as well as scratching his jawline.
Aerion blinked, his head tilting back in sheer disbelief at the audacity of his own flesh and blood. He looked completely stunned, before a look of deep betrayal crossed his features as he glared at his son and you utterly failed to contain yourself and burst into a fit of giggles.
the time has come for your prickly prince to prepare for fatherhood! what awaits you as the days tick down to the arrival of your first child?
genre/warnings:
suggestive, fluff, pregnancy, protective!aerion who will burn the masses if they ever do you wrong, quarrels here and there, lots of kissing too bc he is ravenous, attempt at poisoning, hurt/comfort, childbirth, overall very self-indulgent, lannister!reader
notes:
another part of the dragon and the lioness series. fluff, protective aerion and uhhh a sprinkle of drama? yeah that's the plot <3
“Every part of you… is mine to taste, wife...”
Once, the very idea of being the Bright Prince’s wife was unfathomable to you. But now...
You had grown to savor the way Aerion kissed you with shameless greed, and most of all, the rare moments when his sharp features softened for you alone while he held you against him. Even his temperament, dramatics, and the irritated arch of his violet eyes whenever something displeased him had somehow become… lovable in your eyes.
Gods, when had that happened?
When had Aerion Brightflame ceased to be your insufferable husband and become the man whose embrace you sought without thinking?
“Mmh…” You blamed the babe growing within you. Surely that had to be the reason, you thought, as you kissed him back with equal fervor, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt while his arms lowered you to your marital bed.
“Heh,” Aerion chuckled under his breath, watching your screwed-shut eyes as you chased his lips, incredibly wanton to him.
Strange, wasn’t it? The way life could twist bitter enemies into lovers before either of them even realized it themselves.
Your breath hitched as his hands slid beneath your knees, spreading your legs apart. He broke the kiss then, drinking in the sight of you— and you became self-conscious, only then realizing that he had made a quick work of your dress and you had been left in nothing but your lace undergarments.
“Y-You can’t...” You pressed your lips together, instinctively touching the swell of your belly. “That won’t… be good for the babe.”
Aerion’s lips curved with visible amusement.
“Oh?” he drawled, violet eyes glinting as they swept slowly over you. “Then why, pray tell, are you dressed like this, sweet wife?”
He was right, this was your own doing. Why would you have chosen such a racy, provokating thing to wear tonight?
Perhaps because—even if you wouldn’t admit it—a part of you had already suspected the evening would end with his hands on you and that dangerously pleased look in his eyes.
“A lesser man might say you want to tempt him,” Aerion mused, tracing a slow finger along your cheek, his smile still unbearably wicked.
“So you are not tempted?” you questioned boldly, meeting his gaze, despite the furious heat blooming across your face.
“No.” He shook his head, leaning closer until his lips nearly brushed yours, his voice smug and smooth as velvet. “I am, after all, a man blessed with extraordinary restraint.”
He said that, yet the way his sharp violet eyes focusing on your lips and the way his fingers drifted between your legs said otherwise.
Really, what man could resist the sight of his wife beneath him— soft, flushed, thoroughly marked as his with a babe in her belly while pretending innocence with those wide, coy eyes?
Your husband decided you were playing with fire, so you would get burned. Aerion suddenly slipped two fingers inside your underwear, before pushing one into your folds that made you wide-eyed and suck in a sharp breath—
“You just boasted about restraint!”
“And I possess it. I’m just choosing not to neglect my good wife,” he countered, his cruel grin returning as he inserted another finger, making you gasp in process.
Perfect. You were unraveling by the second, and he had barely even begun.
“There are, after all, many ways to pleasure an expecting wife like you... without compromising the babe.”
Such was your marital life now— with your prince bringing you pleasure nights after nights with the same greedy devotion he seemed to reserve only for you.
And somehow, this was merely the beginning of your happily ever after.
Ever since the word got out that you were with child, Aerion had become more protective of you.
Suddenly, servants were reprimanded for allowing sharp objects near your chambers, guards trailed several paces behind you whenever you wandered the gardens alone and healthy meals appeared at exact hours, prepared according to whichever elderly midwife had most recently filled Aerion’s head with warnings.
And once again, you noticed it most that afternoon when you merely tried to descend the stairs.
Your husband had been halfway through a conversation with his steward when he abruptly stopped speaking altogether, violet eyes narrowing upon you as you placed a hand against the railing.
“…What are you doing?”
You turned to him, blinking innocently. “Walking.”
Not that he would admit it or realize it himself though.
The steward wisely lowered his head, pretending sudden fascination with the floor tiles as Aerion strode towards you with an irritated frown.
“You nearly slipped yesterday,” he hissed, sliding an arm around your waist as he carefully guided you down the stairs.
You rolled your eyes, remembering how you stepped on a parchment the night before. “It was a harmless accident— and for the last time, no, I wasn’t slipping!”
Truthfully, beneath your outward annoyance, deep inside, you were sort of delighted. Because truly, who would have imagined that the arrogant dragon prince would express concern in ways that were somehow endearing?
Or more like, inconveniently endearing.
“Huzzah,” you declared with the flattest tone the moment your feet reached the bottom step, folding your arms dramatically as you turned to him. “I have survived the dreadful staircase, lord husband. Thanks to you.”
Aerion leveled you with a scathing look.
. . .
Soon, it was evident before the rest of Summerhall too.
You lifted your chin, eyes flashing with righteous indignation. “You dismissed a maid yesterday because she served me tea that was slightly too hot. Aerion, this has become ridiculous!”
The Bright Prince, however, remained unmoved, believing his actions were perfectly sensible. “She had one job yet failed to perform it properly. It could have scalded you.”
“You also confiscated my riding boots!”
“You are not riding, wife—”
Behind the half-open door of the solar across the hall, two spectators to your marital quarrel were your husband’s brothers. Daeron raised an eyebrow while young Aegon looked moments away from bursting into hysterical laughter.
“You are enjoying this far too much, Egg,” Daeron muttered dryly.
“Can you blame me?” he whispered back. “This is Aerion we are talking about. Aerion!” He gestured dramatically towards the door with both hands. “The same brother who once claimed affection was ‘a weakness designed by the gods to humiliate men’!”
Well, neither Daeron nor Egg had ever imagined they would witness their notorious middle brother reduced to hovering over his wife. This was indeed a sight.
“I have ridden since childhood!”
“And now you are carrying my child, woman—”
Daeron gave up at last, a chuckle escaping him too. “I never thought I would live long enough to see Aerion become a mother hen.”
“A dragon hen,” Egg corrected conspiratorially, as he strained his ears, thoroughly enjoying your marital dispute.
Another moon passed by, and the maester advised you to get more rest from now on as later moons will prove far more taxing on your body.
However, a royal summons arrived from King’s Landing not long after. The King himself intended to host a grand celebration tourney in honor of the birth of your first child—and both you and your husband were commanded to remain at court for the remainder of your confinement.
You were leaving Summerhall behind, but that was the least of your concerns.
Aerion would be entering the lists.
You had known he would before he even said it aloud. Aerion Brightflame would sooner stop breathing than ignore an opportunity to prove himself before the realm. Under ordinary circumstances, you would proudly bestow your favor upon him and watch him ride with your head held high, but—
Your labor pains could begin while he was in the field. He would be absent from the birthing chambers. Worse, he could get injured—
The thought should not have affected you as much as it did. Men rode in tourneys, princes fought for glory, and discomfort in childbed is how women served the realm.
And there was also another matter that occupied your mind—
“The shape sits high,” the midwife in King’s Landing had declared while measuring your belly, now heavier and more pronounced than ever in your seventh moon. “And my lady craves salted meats more than sweets. It should be a boy.”
Everyone seemed most pleased by the possibility. Aerion himself made it clear he favored a son. You, however, found yourself uncertain what to feel.
. . .
“Where is my lady wife?”
Contrary to what most might have assumed, Aerion was not particularly pleased to be back in King’s Landing.
The long journey from Summerhall had exhausted you so thoroughly that you had scarcely risen from bed for several days. Sure, the grand tourney stirred his excitement— his grandsire honoring the birth of his firstborn with such spectacle was a distinction not even his cousin Valarr had received.
But King’s Landing was still where rumors of another Blackfyre uprising drifted through like smoke, and with your confinement only weeks away, Aerion found himself increasingly ill at ease. These days, peace only came when you were somewhere within his sight.
“The Lady Lannister is bathing in the royal spring, my prince.”
The spring behind Aegon’s High Hill had long since become property of the royal family, secluded from common visitors and hidden behind walls of stone and tangled greenery. It was meant to be a place of relaxation— but still not somewhere his heavily pregnant wife should be wandering unattended.
His irritation simmered all the way through the winding path. The afternoon sun filtered through the trees overhead as Aerion pushed past hanging branches with impatient steps. He had half a mind to rebuke you the moment he arrived—
But every thought dissolved into dust the instant he saw you.
You stood waist-deep within the pristine spring waters, your body half-submerged in the cool waters. A white shift covered your breasts, but the generous swell of your stomach was exposed under the sunlight. Layers of skirts floated around you like scattered clouds, preserving your modesty while doing very little to dull the breathtaking sight before him.
The sight of you beneath the open sky, drenched in sunlight and water was ethereal. He was rooted near the edge of the spring, spellbound.
At nights, he had worshipped that divine body of yours with greedy hands and wandering lips, had learned every sigh you tried to hide, had savored the softness of your thighs, and the sleepy way you clung to him.
But, in the light of day, the temptation of you felt almost cruel.
His gaze lowered shamelessly over the curve of your figure, lingering upon your barely concealed breasts first, before trailing lower. Pride unfurled hotly in his chest at the sight of your rounded belly, heavy and almost ripe. You carried his blood there.
Aerion exhaled slowly through his nose, though it did little to calm the sudden heat crawling beneath his skin.
You noticed him then.
Your eyes lifted towards to him, and the moment your face softened at the sight of him, whatever remained of his irritation died completely.
“Well?” you asked with a coy smile, tilting your head slightly. “Are you merely going to stare, husband… or are you going to join me?”
Like some bewitched mortal lured by a river nymph from old Valyrian tales, the Bright Prince descended the stone steps without hesitation. His boots scraped against damp stone as he shrugged off his doublet with careless impatience, dark eyes never once leaving you.
By the time he stepped into the spring, he was clad only in his dress shirt and breeches, the cool water curling around him as he crossed towards you and drew you effortlessly into his embrace from behind.
“Standing there as though the Maiden herself rose from the spring,” Aerion murmured against your ear, lips brushing the damp skin beneath it. A faint smirk tugged at his mouth. “Did you intend to torment me in broad daylight?”
“I needed time to think,” you countered softly, though your breath caught when his wandering hands settled upon your chest beneath the wet fabric.
“To think? About what?”
You bit your lower lip as the waters lapped gently around the two of you. The way your face now marred with a frown made him click his tongue.
“Speak, wife. I dislike that look upon your face.”
“You are going to join the tourney,” you admitted at last, turning to face him. “While I may very well be laboring alone.”
“I shall return victorious,” he vowed, his violet irises blazing with conviction. “I shall place every honor I win before you and our child, just as it should be.”
Yet he could feel how you were unsatisfied with his answer. Aerion sighed quietly before lowering his mouth to your shoulder, brushing a kiss against your damp skin.
“You fret too much. The midwives will attend you day and night. You have nothing to fear— I will make certain of it.”
You pursed your lips, feeling foolish for being sullen knowing his presence would be demanded in the field regardless, but you just couldn’t help it.
Aerion fell silent for a moment, his hold around you tightening almost instinctively beneath the water.
“Look at me,” he commanded suddenly, and you did reluctantly, your lips still puckered in dissatisfaction.
Gods, how sweet could you be?
“Stop filling your little head with nonsense. I will return to you unscathed. Your task is to rest, eat whatever strange cravings seize you, and carry my child safely.”
His thumb traced the line of your jaw, tilting your chin up so you couldn’t stray from his gaze.
“Aerion—”
“I’m not finished.” His tone sharpened, though the hand cradling your face remained gentle. “I have ridden in tourneys since I was barely tall enough to hold a lance. I have been thrown from horses, split open, battered, and yet I remain standing before you now. And you think some hedge knight or a lordling’s second son could best me?”
A ghost of arrogance curved his lips. “I think not.”
His violet eyes swept over your face then. Gods, you looked painfully sweet like this— so soft with vulnerability.
“You carry blood of the dragon,” he murmured, his palm spreading over the curve of your belly beneath the water. “Do not insult either of us by imagining I would fail to return to you. And if your labor does begin while I am away...”
The thought seemed to sour his expression. “Then you will endure it exactly as I know you will. Know this, I will return to your side the moment I am able.”
You frowned faintly. “That is hardly comforting.”
Aerion snorted, his lips curling into a smirk. “You married the wrong man if you expected sweet comforts from me, wife.”
You let out a soft scoff despite yourself, some of your spirits finally lifting seeing his infuriating confidence.
“There,” he murmured smugly, poking your cheek when you broke into a little smile. “Are you done sulking now?”
“Perhaps not for long,” you countered lightly, throwing him a look. “If my husband fails to comfort me properly, perhaps I ought to find another man willing to do so.”
Aerion’s expression hardened at once, violet eyes narrowing as his grip around your waist tightened beneath the water.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“I would.”
A dark look crossed his face, then—
He devoured your lips, one powerful arm locked securely around your waist while his other hand tangled in your hair, cradling the back of your head. The cool spring water rippled sharply around you as he deepened the kiss with blatant possessiveness, as though determined to remind you exactly who you belonged to.
When he broke the kiss, you breathlessly clutched his body for support. Breathing heavily against your lips, his voice dropped to a fiercely low growl—
“I wouldn’t let another man touch you while I still draw breath... oh sweet wife of mine.”
“My lady, I trust you are well?”
House Targaryen hosted a grand luncheon several days later within the halls of the Red Keep, gathering notable lords and ladies from across the realm.
You had been navigating the crowd with practiced grace when a warm, familiar voice cut through the ambient noise. Turning, you found yourself facing your cousin-by-law, the Prince Valarr Targaryen.
“Your Grace,” you greeted with a bright smile and slight curtsy. “Yes, I have been well.”
The Young Prince had arrived from Dragonstone with his wife. From where you were, you could see the princess consort mingling with other guests with radiant smile and perfect decorum.
She truly is beautiful, you often thought to yourself. Delicate features, graceful bearings, eyes that seemed almost luminous beneath the candlelight— it was easy to understand why bards wrote songs about her beauty.
Valarr’s gaze dipped towards the unmistakable swell of your stomach, far too prominent now to be concealed beneath your dress.
“Good to see you, really. How far along are you now?”
A wistful smile came to your lips. “Near enough that everyone has begun hovering over me as though I might break apart at any moment.”
That earned a quiet laugh from him. “Still, you are in your most delicate state now. I imagine my cousin can’t stay still as well.”
“Well, one can hardly blame the prince!”
You were still smiling when another voice suddenly joined the conversation. You turned to find Lord Manderly, stout and red-faced from the midday wine, waddled over with an easy grin, goblet in hand.
“With a wife as lovely as you, oh lady—” he slurred, “I imagine Prince Aerion guards you like a dragon atop treasure!”
“You flatter me, my lord,” you answered politely.
Lord Manderly waved a dismissive hand, laughing boisterously. “Not at all, not at all! Though I confess, recalling how the Prince Aerion making quite the spectacle of himself—” he turned to Valarr, “with you, my prince, years ago...”
Ah, that story you once heard in a passing too. The tourney in King’s Landing, in which Valarr and Aerion fought each other in a contest of arms, supposedly, over pride.
Valarr’s expression shifted almost immediately. “My lord—”
But Lord Manderly, either oblivious or too deep in wine to notice, continued on cheerfully enough—
“For a long time, everyone was talking about how the Bright Prince was quite captivated by Her Grace’s beauty! Enough to demand her favor and fight her husband!”
You blinked, realization settled over you with sudden, uncomfortable clarity.
“My lord, if I may.” Valarr cleared his throat, a restrained but cross look on his face. “Words are wind. A tourney floor is full of grand gestures and exaggerated flattery. I assure you, everyone would do well not to concern themselves with such baseless rumors.”
Lord Manderly’s red face drained of color all of a sudden as the weight of his social blunder finally registered.
“Oh Seven— forgive me, my lady!” he said quickly, turning towards you with genuine embarrassment. “A foolish old man’s rambling, is all! My deepest, most sincere apologies— I meant absolutely no disrespect to you, nor to Prince Aerion!”
“Think nothing of it, Lord Manderly,” you replied smoothly, your voice a perfectly crafted mask of composure. “The wine is indeed potent today.”
Relieved to be dismissed, Manderly excused himself with hasty bows, and Valarr quickly steered the conversation back to safer waters before he also excused himself from you.
You appeared to be smiling, but deep inside, you were perturbed.
Your eyes involuntarily scanned the crowded solarium, searching through the sea of silks and velvet until they landed on your husband standing amongst a cluster of knights and courtiers.
And right in that moment, you caught how his gaze followed not you, but the princess consort at the far corner of the hall.
Something inside your chest curled unpleasantly, but you decided not to dwell in it. Whatever might have existed between them once, they meant nothing now, you assured yourself.
So, to distract your wandering thoughts, you reached for the tea the server had offered to you, thinking to calm your nerves—
Until the citrus scent suddenly turned rancid in your senses, so putrid it made your stomach lurch violently that you spit it out and let go of the porcelain cup.
. . .
When a loud crash rang through the solarium, Aerion’s attention snapped instantly toward the disturbance.
And much to his surprise— in the middle of it stood you.
Standing amidst shattered porcelain, you had one hand covered your mouth while the other clutched at your abdomen, your face drained of all color as though you might collapse where you stood.
He immediately dashed towards where you were, nearly sending one poor lord stumbling aside in his haste. The crowd parted instinctively for him as he crossed the hall at frightening speed.
By the time he reached you, his hands were already on you.
“What happened?” he demanded immediately, gripping your arms as his eyes swept frantically over your form.
You swallowed hard against another wave of nausea. “T-The tea…”
“What?”
You shook your head weakly, leaning into him. “It tastes so foul—”
His gaze snapped toward the shattered mess beside your feet. Without hesitation, Aerion crouched and snatched up what remained of the broken cup from the floor. The pungent scent hit almost immediately, and his expression darkened in realization.
Moon tea. He recognized it instantly—it had once been his most reliable safeguard during his years frequenting whorehouse before he wed you. He had forced it into those unkempt women after he was finished with them.
However, even a single sip could have made you miscarry. Someone has intended exactly that.
Aerion surged back to his feet at once, turning towards you so quickly with wild eyes.
“Did you drink any of it?” he demanded harshly. “Did you?”
You shook your head immediately. “No—”
Relief struck him so violently it almost looked painful.
Aerion closed his eyes briefly before gripping the back of your head, pulling you to his embrace. You breathed in his scent, your nausea receded somewhat.
Around the two of you, the solarium had begun to descend into chaos. Voices overlapped in alarm while guards moved swiftly through the hall. Servants looked petrified, several nobles already retreating from the tables entirely as whispers of poison spread like wildfire.
Moon tea. At a royal luncheon. You. When Aerion lifted his head again, the relief in his expression had vanished entirely, and in its place was pure fury.
“Seal the hall,” Aerion ordered sharply, but at first, no one moved quickly enough for his liking. “I said seal the fucking hall!” he roared, his voice cracking through the hall.
Kingsguard immediately surged into motion. Doors slammed shut. Panic rippled through the gathered guests as guards began seizing servants and blocking every exit from the hall.
“No one leaves this place,” Aerion continued, drawing you protectively against his side while his vengeful gaze remained fixed upon the crowd.
“I want every servant, cook, and miserable soul here questioned. One step forward— and I will have your head severed and hung to rot in Flea Bottom for all to see.”
You could feel the hammering of his heart in your ears. His expression still murderous, it was only when he looked back down at you did some fragment of restraint finally return to his face.
“You are certain you swallowed none of it?” he asked again, quieter and softer this time.
You looked up at him, eyes wide and glassy. “I am certain.”
Aerion searched your face carefully, as though trying to convince himself you truly stood unharmed before him.
And in that moment, you found yourself clinging to him instinctively—your steadfast protector amidst the chaos.
The entire castle remained in uproar long after you had been escorted back to your chambers. The server who had handed you that accursed tea was apprehended with ease, and Aerion had gone personally to beat the fear of the gods into him in the dungeons.
Yet another Blackfyre loyalist hidden amongst the castle’s walls like a serpent. No one told you exactly what became of him, but when your prince returned not long after, there had been blood across the cuffs of his tunic that certainly had not belonged to him.
By then, relief and exhaustion had finally overtaken you, dragging you into a light and restless sleep. You awoke sometime later in his arms, to the soft crackling of the fire.
His deep violet eyes were fixed on you, dark shadows under them as if he hadn’t been resting at all.
“You’re not sleeping...?”
“Was about to.”
Though he tried to conceal it, exhaustion lingered plainly across his face. It was rare to see Aerion so bare and vulnerable like this.
The memory came rushing back all at once then. The putrid stench, the panic in the hall, the horrifying realization that someone had wanted you and your child dead before they had even drawn breath—
A tremor ran through you before you could suppress it and your husband engulfed you in his embrace, holding you tightly.
“Cease this at once, wife,” he whispered in your ear, sounding almost irritated despite his obvious and clumsy attempt at comfort. “So long as I draw breath, no one will harm you.”
Your eyes burned. “What did you do to him?”
“What? You expected mercy from me tonight?”
“No.” You shook your head against his chest, your voice small and bitter. “Make him suffer first, and only then do you give him a painful death.”
That actually managed to pull a dark smile from him. “No,” he murmured, his chest rumbling against you. “I will make him rot first. Death is a mercy he has to earn.”
A faint smile tugged at your lips when you pulled away from his hold, though worry still lingered beneath your ribs.
“There.” Aerion brushed a stray tear from your cheek with his thumb, his violet eyes warmer than you had ever seen before. “Better already.”
How both of you reached this point astonished even you. The mad boy who had terrorized your childhood, your enemy who had become your destined husband— Aerion Brightflame was your greatest bane of existence too.
Yet here you were, trusting him more than anyone else alive in Westeros. You knew his cruelty, but you also knew his loyalty—and you knew, just as surely as he would make anyone who ever came close to harm you rue the day they ever did, he would guard you like a dragon atop treasure.
And because of that, the doubt in your voice was softer than it might have once been when you finally asked:
“…What if the babe is a girl?”
Aerion’s brows furrowed immediately, as though the question itself puzzled him.
“A princess,” you explained, fingers drifting protectively over your stomach. “You value a son and heir above all else. But who could have known the will of the gods?”
Aerion stared at you for a long, unreadable moment, as though carefully weighing your words before at last letting out a scoff.
“Mark my words now, wife, for I will not repeat them. I require that this child, boy or girl, survives.”
You blinked, caught off guard by his words. However, his expression hardened slightly afterwards.
“And the same goes for you. If you don’t, I will never, ever forgive you.”
In that moment, you thought you would willingly give everything of yourself to place this child safely into his arms. You would give him a son too, gods willing.
You reached for your husband then, pulling him down into the purest and sweetest of a kiss.
“Be welcome, noble knights and lords of the realm!”
Commoners and nobles alike buzzed with excitement for the grand tourney, their cheers echoing throughout the stands. High up on the royal dais, King Daeron stood, his voice amplified by the roaring acoustics of the arena as he opened the games with salutations.
“...and this glorious day has been made all the more blessed by joyful news,” the good king proclaimed proudly. “My beloved granddaughter has begun her labors! May the Seven grant fortune to every combatant this day!”
Down on the field, however, the King’s words brought no celebration to the man affected most.
Aerion sat atop his warhorse, motionless. Beneath his dark armor, his chest rose and fell in sharp, shallow breaths. While other knights waved jovially at the crowd, his gaze was locked entirely on the opposing end of the lists.
Your pains had started since last night. Through the early hours of midnight, you had endured them in silence, determined to hold yourself together a little longer, yet occasionally curling into him for comfort. By dawn, however, you were in tears, and every hour after that became a new torment for you.
But when it came time to see him off this morning, you had refused to look weak. Sweat clung to your face, and your eyes were glistening, but a fierce light burned right through them. Gripping his armor, you had hissed a command through gritted teeth:
“Win that fucking tourney, and only then are you allowed come back to me, husband.”
“Son of Prince Maekar of Summerhall—”
A violent, dark impatience overtook him.
“Grandson to King Daeron the Good—”
If he had to tear through every knight in the Seven Kingdoms to get back to your side, he would do it. And he would do it quickly.
“Prince Aerion Brightflame of House Targaryen—”
Lowering his visor with a sharp, echoing snap, Aerion gripped his lance. He would come back as a victor, exalted and feared, and you would give him his child.
Your child too. He knew already they would be sweet, just like you.
“—will choose his first opponent!”
. . .
The air inside your birthing chambers was thick by midday, smelling heavily of copper, sweat, and the sharp scent of crushed lavender oil the maids used to soothe the air.
But there was no soothing the agony ripping through you.
Another of your heartbreaking wails filled the air when another violent contraction hit, seizing your spine and twisting your abdomen with a malice that stole the breath straight from your lungs.
“Push, my lady! You must push!” the midwife urged, her hands busy prodding you beneath the heavy linens. “The child is close, but you cannot lose your strength now!”
Your body felt broken, torn apart from the inside out. Your eyes were rimmed with tears of pain and pure exhaustion, blurring the stone walls of your chambers into a hazy nightmare.
Your prince was out there tearing through the realm’s finest knights just to earn the right to return to your side. He was conquering the field for you. For this child.
And you would not fail him on your own battlefield.
“Again!” the midwife commanded when that familiar, iron grip curling and seizing your womb once more. “Now, my lady!”
But the next wave was the most terrible pain you had ever experienced, and your voice cracked into raw scream as you pushed with every last shred of strength left within your body.
You could feel the crushing pressure, the burning fire, the blinding and unforgiving sensation of your very body being split apart—
The midwife cried, her voice rising in triumph over the distant rumble of the arena:
“I see the head! One more, my lady! Give me everything you have!”
. . .
“The Prince Aerion wins!”
He had done it. The second he threw the other knight off his horse and he yielded, he had ridden his warhorse, torn his helmet off, and marched towards your chambers like a specter of death.
In his frantic rush to end his final foe, he had made one careless mistake though— leaving his guard down just enough for a lance to slice a deep gash down his forearm, and now crimson blood dripped steadily onto the pristine floors with every step towards your chambers.
He had been told that you had tethered between life and death—shivering before falling unconscious the moment the child was born.
“My prince! You cannot go in there!” a maid cried, stepping in front of the heavy oak doors, her hands raised in horror. “You are covered in filth! The lady must be kept clean, the babe—”
“Get a maester to dress my wound,” he spat viciously, making the poor girl recoil. “Now.”
The maester came soon, scrambling to pour a wine over the wound to cleanse it, hastily wrapping a fresh linen binding over the gash. It was a rushed job, done in mere seconds. The white linen instantly bloomed with a fresh patch of red. His attendant quickly wiped the sweat and grime from his face and helped him out of his armor as fast he could.
Aerion shoved them away after they were done, turning back to the heavy doors, but the midwives still stood there, hesitant between duty and fear.
His arm burned, exhaustion and blood loss leaving him half-delirious, and they knew better than to deny him his right. Aerion stormed into the chambers, drawing gasps from the wet nurses and your maids. Instinctively, every gaze in the room flickered toward the small bundle wrapped in linen within the cradle beside the hearth.
They expected him to demand his heir. They expected him to look for the son he had so desperately coveted—
But to their surprise, he didn’t even spare a glance at the cradle. Instead, he crossed the room in a few long strides and went straight to where you lay still.
“Wife,” he breathed hoarsely, reaching for you at once. “I am here.”
You were deathly pale. Your eyes fluttered open weakly, as if you were pulling yourself back from a long, deep sleep.
Then, you looked up and smiled at him— so beautiful and tender it nearly broke him.
He gathered you into his arms, engulfing you in a fierce, crushing hug— pressing a hard kiss to the crown of your head. You let out a watery laugh, clutching at him too.
“It is a son,” you told him with pride. “He looks just like you.”
Aerion let out a quiet, disbelieving chuckle at that. In truth, the idea of a daughter didn’t seem terrible to him at all right now.
In fact, now that the thought had crossed his mind, he found himself wanting a pretty little girl too... one who had your eyes and your smile.
History would fondly remember the romance between the bitterest enemies who found the truest of love, for the realm had borne witness to that auspicious day—
The dragon prince has won his triumph, and so has his princess.
tagging @marianntorres2611 @starkleila @huntmewithdogs @pinkfunland @dauntlesshereticleviathan @laylavynna @dabishou @ireneisbored @menacing-pfeffernusse @xxvelvetxxx @icebearcucumber as per request! thank you for reading if you have reached this far <3
This outfit was stiff. Really, really stiff. And it wasn't in the colours that you liked. But it was for a gala with your family, the first one where you had been allowed to come with them instead of being left at home. Everyone was wearing matching outfits to be cohesive. Damian looked at you with satisfaction.
"About time you came with us. You're going to be the centre of attention," he said. "Nothing less befitting of a Wayne."
"Really?" You looked at yourself in the mirror. "I'm worried that they'll all stare at me."
"Your family will protect you, Y/N. Have faith in us," Damian said. It took a lot for you to not burst out laughing. Sure, they'd protect you. The only thing the Wayne family had shielded you from was happiness and familial love. But you smiled a small, strange little smile and buttoned up your outfit.
When you got into the car, Dick grabbed you and dropped you into the seat next to him. "Stay close to me, baby bird, the first gala is always the worst one," he soothed.
"So I've heard," you said, curiously.
The gala took place in a swanky country club that nearly glittered as you stood in front of it. Everyone looked so fancy.
And they were all looking at you.
Dick and Jason stayed on either side of you, frogmarching you in. "Stuck-up snobs," Jason muttered under his breath. "If they're mean to you, you tell us. Tell. Us."
"Yes, Jason," you say, knees buckling.
The staring intensified once you were inside. "What do I do?" you hissed to Bruce.
"Socialise," Bruce said. "Don't worry, you'll be with me. I'm going to introduce you to some of my colleagues." With a tug, you were taken to a group of disinterested socialites. "Irene, Derek, how good to see you. Meet my second-youngest, Y/N Wayne."
"Good evening," you say, staring up at them. "This is my first ever gala, so I'm sorry if I mess things up."
"Goodness, you're adorable!" a lady gasped. "Where has Bruce been hiding you all this time?"
"Wayne Manor," you said. They laughed like you were joking. You weren't.
"It's been so difficult adjusting Y/N to family outings, but they seem to be getting it really quickly," Bruce said, as the adoring smiles became grimaces of annoyance towards him.
"Well, I've never been on a family outing before," you say, with all honesty. "Normally, I just got left at home."
"Bruce left a child unattended?" someone muttered.
"Alfred was with them the whole time," Bruce hurriedly insisted. "They were never in any danger."
"I had such a nice time with Alfred. I learned how to bake and sew and about the monarchy!" you said, hoping that it would make things better and people would stop pitying you.
It didn't work.
"Oh, you sweet angel. I wouldn't mind adopting you myself," one woman said. "Oh, just look at those eyes!"
You felt your hair gently caressed, your hands held, your cheeks pinched. "What's happening?" you asked, but you were only met with more cooing. You were everybody's favourite now.
"Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please," the organiser said. "Thank you all for coming. In light of recent events, we'd like to give a warm welcome to Y/N Wayne at their first ever gala. It's about time that we were introduced to you." The crowd applauded, but all you could do was shrink into yourself.
"They're accepting them. This is such a relief," Bruce said.
"We were all following your story on the news, and it really hit us where it hurt. Most of us are parents ourselves, and we would have been besides ourselves with worry if that had been our child," the host continued. "Your remarkable case had influenced this year's charitable cause."
"What charitable cause?" you dared to ask.
"Bruce Wayne's vasectomy fund."
The assembled members burst into laughter, while you stood there, confused. "How is this a charitable cause?" you asked.
"Well, after the atrocious job of parenting he's done with you, I'd say he needs this," the host said.
"Oh, great. They've become the butt of a cruel joke," Damian said.
"No, Damian. We've become the butt of a joke," Jason clarified. "Y/N's the only one that will escape unscathed. They love them. They're Gotham's favourite."
"I'm very sorry, everyone, but I don't quite understand the point of this," you said. "I was always under the impression that my biological father was a beloved figure of Gotham due to all his charity work."
An awkward silence settled over the room. "What exactly are you saying, Y/N?"
"I'm saying he can pay for his own damn vasectomy."
Raucous laughter bellowed out of the attendees. Bruce's heart sank. Even you were cracking jokes.
"There's no way that this can get any worse for us," Damian muttered.
"Where's my little dove?" Penguin asked.
"PAPA, YOU CAME!" you squealed, nearly teleporting into the monocled villain's arms. "How did you find me?"
"I've got the navigational skills of a homing pigeon," he bragged, as you hugged him tightly.
"This has been a complete failure, hasn't it?" Tim asked.
"Yes, Tim," Bruce said, watching Penguin sweep you into a dance. "We have failed."
Now that they knew how painful it was to be discarded and compared to the villains they faced, it was time for everyone to step up the pace. Naturally, you wouldn't be going outside or reading the news. You didn't need to know what people thought of your family.
Surprisingly, it was Damian who was first to attempt bonding. He picked his moment perfectly, accosting you just before you retired to your room at night. "Y/N," he sniffled, arm in a cast and cheeks streaked with tears. He'd even gone to the trouble of wearing age-appropriate Batman pyjamas. "I keep worrying about you. The villains you hang out with scare me."
"You're . . . worried about me?" You looked down at Damian, who looked nothing like the hardened, heartless demon child you'd always known him to be.
"Yes." Fresh tears bubbled up and out, and he hugged you tightly. "I wanna stay with you, Y/N! Please, say I can stay with you! Please! Just for one night!"
"OK, OK," you said. It was only for a night, you told yourself.
Damian crawled into your bed and wrapped himself into your blankets. "Y/N, your room is cold," he said.
"I've asked Bruce to fix the ventilation issues in here, but he said it was frivolous," you said. "I've been using blankets when it gets super cold. I'll get you some."
"Shared body heat is preferable during cold stretches." You felt Damian latch onto your body, nuzzling closely. "I learned about it in school. Can I tell you something else?"
This was getting way out of hand, but you had to say something in reply. "Sure, what is it?"
"You're my favourite sibling, Y/N."
You gasped. "Oh, that is so sweet of you, Damian!" You toyed with a spike of hair as he nuzzled so close. "Can I tell you something?"
Damian was internally celebrating. "Of course, Y/N!"
You leaned in close. "I know about you being Robin, Damian. I know about everyone's secret identities. This is all an act you're putting on, and I know it."
You allowed yourself to fall asleep, while Damian stayed awake, shivering in a cold room while covered in blankets. He wasn't going to be sleeping tonight.
You, however, would be sleeping like a baby.
_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
Damian wasn't the only one to attempt to infiltrate your life. Tim teamed up with Barbara to get into your room while you were taking a shower. The target? Your diary.
"It has to be in here somewhere," Tim groaned. "Where do they hide their stuff?" He flopped onto your bed in frustration, only for his head to hit something . . . hard underneath your pillow. "No. No, it can't be. Is that what I think it is?" He flung your pillow away and chuckled. "Come to Papa, diary!" Using a bobby pin to unlock the little heart-shaped lock on the sides, he opened up the book with glee.
He got a face full of black powdered paint.
"AAAAAAAAAH! MAYDAY!" Tim screamed. "BABS! BABS!"
Within the bathroom you had made your base, you rolled on the floor laughing.
_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
"Baby bird . . . where did you get that umbrella from?" Dick asked.
"Papa gave it to me. He doesn't want me to catch cold when I'm out." You cradled the umbrella lovingly. "Isn't my dad the sweetest?"
"Very nice," Dick said. His stomach rolled and twisted, but he couldn't tell whether it was from the envy or disgust at Penguin being referred to as his baby bird's adoptive father.
"Anyway, I'm going to go upstairs. I have plans to make about the Ice Block and then I'm hitting the hay. See you in the morning, Grayson."
Grayson. You didn't even call him by his name. He wanted to grab you, or follow you, or something. And then he spotted the umbrella, the one that your 'papa' had given you.
It was mocking him. That umbrella was a literal inanimate object, and yet it was mocking him. It mocked him with its proximity to you. He had to end this madness.
"You think you're so special, huh?" Dick grabbed the umbrella and shook it. "You're a present from Papa, and Papa's so sweet! Well, we're in Gotham, and umbrellas in Gotham don't last long!" Ignoring every piece of superstition he'd ever heard, he opened the umbrella indoors . . . and was coated in a strange powder. "Great, a prank. Hardy-har-har, Y/N. Colour me amused."
Dick was about to go upstairs and clean himself off when he first felt it.
The itching.
The umbrella had been filled with itching powder. As Dick scratched and contorted himself into impossible configurations for the sake of relief, he wondered who could possibly have rigged your umbrella like that. Penguin was a strong contender, but Scarecrow and Riddler were also some of his biggest haters now, both in and out of costume. One of them had sent you home to Wayne Manor with a booby-trapped umbrella in the hopes of getting one of your negligent family members. He was going to find out who did this and make them pay.
"Damn those villains," he cursed, as he itched like a flea-infested dog.
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