— summary: your father sends you to the ashford tourney to meet your prospective betrothed, prince aerion targaryen. you expected a challenge to endure; not a puzzle to solve.
— pairing: aerion targaryen x stark!reader
— word count: 1.8k
— content: pre-arranged marriage, afab!reader, political (and another type of) tension, set on the tourney at ashford, aerion being an entitled little asshole as usual, stubborn and very northern!reader.
— notes: debut fic in this acc, hello everyone! been on tumblr for years and I love creating multiple accs lmao. please request me fics! this will be probably a series, I have a few ideas for my stark!reader so... she's gonna be back. reblogs and comments are encouraged!
ﾟ。₍ᐢ..ᐢ₎ ｡ﾟ WORKS / RULES / ABOUT / TAGS / RECS
You arrive at Ashford the way you do everything: early, quiet, and already watching.
The Stark party is not large. Your father sent you with a maester who is already sweating through his robes, two guards whose names you know because you bothered to learn them, and a septa who has not stopped praying since you crossed into the Reach. The specific gods she is petitioning are left unnamed, and you’ve chosen not to ask.
The tourney grounds are a physical wall of sound. In Winterfell, noise travels and dies in the cold air, swallowed quickly by the expanse of the North. Here, it accumulates. It bounces off heavy canvas pavilions and limestone walls until the bright, blinding quality of Reach sunlight seems to physically press the chaos against your skin like a weight. You notice it all without judgment. You will acclimate. You always do.
The Targaryen pavilion is less a tent and more a declaration of violence. Crimson silk and cloth-of-gold trim flap aggressively in the warm wind, a sharp, bleeding contrast to the heavy, deep cobalt wool of your own Northern cloak. A personal sigil is worked into the canvas in thread so fine it shimmers when the fabric moves; a three-headed dragon rendered in a way that manages to be both heraldic and appetitive, as if the embroiderer had distinct opinions about the creature's hunger. Two guards in matched livery stand at the entrance with the heavy stillness of men paid to be ornamental. One is handsome enough; the other, not so much.
You are escorted to a holding position near the edge of the Targaryen enclosure. It is the only honest phrase for it. The maester hovers, the septa mutters her endless prayers, and you watch the pavilion.
He comes out before you expect him.
You haven't actually seen his type before, but you've heard enough descriptions to construct a version of him in your mind. The gap between your imagination and the physical reality of him is what you notice first. You expected the swagger of a spoiled prince. What he actually possesses is a contained, intentional grace. It is the fluid, unhurried movement of an apex predator who has never needed to run because everything waits for him to arrive. Silver hair catching the noon sun, crimson and gold layered over his broad frame, with heavy rings on nearly every finger. He seems eager to have some type of blunt weight on his hands, as if the dagger strapped to his belt simply isn’t enough.
He is clinically, objectively beautiful. You keep that strictly to yourself.
He's speaking to a lord who is trying very hard not to appear to be trying. Aerion Targaryen listens with his chin slightly lifted, wearing an expression of such highly polished courtesy that it takes a second to identify the absolute contempt beneath it. He isn't looking at the man he's speaking to. He watches the tourney field, tracking the movement of the horses, as though giving the lord his eyes would imply the man actually deserved them.
The lord finishes a sentence with an ingratiating laugh. Aerion smiles, a sharp curve of his mouth that doesn't come anywhere near his eyes. The lord's laugh immediately subsides, dying in his throat, and he finds somewhere else to be within the minute.
What a coward.
You watch Aerion turn back toward the pavilion. For one half-second, his violet gaze drags across the space between you. It doesn't stop. It doesn't quite register. But the air shifts, and you understand, abruptly, that you need to lock in.
A man in Targaryen colors materializes at your elbow and murmurs that Prince Aerion would like to receive you now. You arrange your face against the sheer entitlement of it all, and move.
Up close, the jeweler's attention is suffocating. He watches you approach. He isn’t aggressive, but he is entirely devoid of warmth, thoroughly turning you in the harsh light to check the gemstone for flaws. You've been looked at before by men from your father's bannermen who thought a girl of marriageable age in a great house must want something from them. You know how to hold your spine under a heavy gaze. You look back sternly.
He recovers the gap with the ease of someone who has been performing composure since before he could walk.
He hums, a low vibration in his chest, before speaking. "My lady Stark," he finally says.
The pause before my lady is deliberate. You hear it, noting the condescension alongside the heavy gold rings and the hollow, perfectly cordial smile he is currently wearing.
"Your Grace."
You do not add anything to it. You were not raised to fill empty air with useless noise, and you are not going to start now to manage his comfort.
Aerion's thumb catches against the heavy gold of his signet ring, the metal scraping faintly.
There are lords watching. A cluster to the east, two more near the Fossoway banners, and someone important standing twenty feet away, attempting to look casual. You are both performing for them. You are both performing for each other.
The formal business is brief. Words about honor and alliances are delivered by the maesters in the dry, practiced tones of men who drafted the language carefully. Aerion stands through it with a rigid patience that somehow communicates utter, mind-numbing boredom. You stand with your hands folded and your eyes forward, projecting an aura that indicates you find this entirely satisfactory.
When the droning ends, there is a heavy pause.
"I understand," Aerion says, "that you have not attended a southern tourney before."
His voice isn't the weapon you expected. You'd been told about the cruelty and the incident with the puppets, expecting something jagged and sharp. Instead, his elocution is so thorough, so perfectly measured, that the melody of it becomes its own kind of edge.
"You understand correctly."
"Then you'll find it a great deal to take in."
"I expect I'll manage," you say, matching his exact, unhurried register.
Aerion shifts his weight, the stiff silk of his doublet whispering. "Of course. The Stark constitution is famously resilient."
"The Targaryen constitution," you reply pleasantly, "is famously… exceptional."
The pause before exceptional is the exact length as his before my lady. You watch him hear it.
He does not smile. The assembled, flawless performance of him simply halts. Then, he tilts his head, violet eyes narrowing by a fraction, and offers his arm. "Shall we walk, my lady?"
The walk is staged with the transparency of a morality play for the lords gathered at the edge of the tourney field. His sleeve is heavy silk, the kind that costs more than your septa makes in a year. You rest your hand lightly against it, acutely aware of the rough calluses on your palms, hoping your axe hands won’t rip the delicate fabric apart by some miracle.
"You have brothers," he says. You are far enough from the cluster of lords to speak freely, but not far enough to be private. The tension of the audience remains. "I've heard things. They say the second one has your father's temperament."
"They're not wrong."
"And the third?"
"A different sort of temperament."
"How diplomatic," Aerion says, his gaze fixed straight ahead on the lists. "You answer questions about your family the way a maester answers questions about medicine. Technically accurate and completely uninformative."
You permit yourself the ghost of a smile, but absolutely nothing more. "What would you prefer, Your Grace?"
"Honesty would be a novelty."
"I'm honest frequently. I'm simply precise about what I'm honest about."
Aerion’s eyes flick from the dusty tourney field down to you. "A valuable quality in a Stark."
In a Stark.
This little asshole.
"And in a Targaryen," you reply. "I imagine."
He turns his head then, bringing the full, crushing weight of those purple eyes to bear directly on your face. Aerion lets the silence stretch. His expression is a carefully blank mask, but the air between you suddenly feels thick enough to choke on.
"You've been briefed about me," he says plainly. It is not a question.
"Of course," you say. "Have you not been briefed about me?"
"Extensively. The reports were incomplete."
"Reports always are."
You reach the end of the stretch they've set out for you, turning together in smooth choreography to begin the return walk. The ambient noise of the tourney, the sharp clang of practice armor, the shouts of the crowd, the whinny of a destrier, rumbles heavily beneath the murmur of the watching lords.
"May I ask you something, my lady?"
"You may."
His thumb brushes across the back of your hand where it rests on his heavy sleeve. It is a motion so brief and so agonizingly light it might have simply been the friction of walking.
"What did they tell you," he says, his voice carrying the same unhurried, dangerous music, "that you should expect from me?"
You consider the trap for three steady steps.
"They told me you were brilliant," you say. "They told me you were cruel. They told me you had no interest in being managed. They told me you believed yourself to be something other than human."
Silence hangs between you, suspended in the heat.
"And," you continue, using the exact, flat tone you would use to note a change in the weather, "they told me that you had hurt people. Badly."
Aerion says nothing for a long moment, letting the raw accusation bleed into the bright air.
"And you came anyway."
"My lord father asked it of me."
Aerion’s arm flexes subtly beneath your hand, the muscle hardening under the silk. "That is a coward's answer from a woman who doesn't appear to be one."
Somewhere down the line, a horse screams briefly and then cuts off. You look out at the dirt field.
"I came because it seemed interesting."
"Interesting," he repeats.
"Most things are, if you're looking at them correctly."
You are nearly back to the machinery of the formal introduction. The walk will end, the performance will conclude, and you will not be alone with him again today.
"My lady Stark," Aerion says. He places the syllables carefully, like setting broken glass on a table. "I find I am looking forward to knowing you better."
The lords are close enough to hear a Targaryen prince expressing genuine, courtly pleasure at a prospective match. The escort materializes at your elbow to separate you. Aerion releases your arm with a slight inclination of his head, his heavy rings catching the brutal sunlight as he withdraws his hand.
You do not watch him walk away, because you are not that careless. But you hear the deliberate, predatory crunch of his boots against the gravel until he disappears.
SUMMARY - You don't answer any of Aerion's messages but that backfires as he talks to you in person. But even then, you still don't give him much.
CONTAINS - reader is slightly avoidant, aerion is aerion, banter (crack to a point), read part one
A/N - i couldn't tag most of your accounts for some reason so instead i replied to your comments hehe. Also i got carried away ahahahha can you tell...
You remained seated in your car. Staring at the notifications, you didn’t move until your screen turned back to black.
You jammed the keys into the ignition and backed out of the parking space. The drive back home was scary. You kept looking back at your phone, expecting another text to pop up but thankfully none did.
When you finally got home, you locked the front door and leaned against it.
“What the fuck…” You whispered to yourself, closing your eyes.
It was a good thing the next two days were a weekend. A temporary shield. For the next forty-eight hours, you didn’t have to step foot on campus and risk catching a glimpse of his silver hair across the building.
But hiding out in your room didn’t stop your mind from racing. A full day hadn’t even passed when you finally gave in and opened instagram. You pressed the search bar and typed his username into it.
You weren’t mutuals, he never followed you and neither did you follow him.
There wasn’t much to see. He only had one post and a highlight. It was strange trying to match that version of him with the guy who had texted you for the past month.
Though on sunday, while your phone was open on a groupchat, your peace was interrupted.
👻: youre online, i know you see my texts
You stared at the small block of text, your chest tightening. Again, you didn’t reply.
By monday morning, you had braced yourself to go to campus again. It was packed as you walked with Tanselle.
“So I told him if he thinks I’m letting that happen, he’s out of his mind,” Tanselle was saying, before her hand suddenly clamped down hard on your forearm. “Wait. Don’t look but Aerion is heading right to us.”
You looked up anyway.
Aerion was cutting through the crowded walkway. As soon as you looked, his eyes were already on you, his face tense and unreadable.
The people next to you instinctively quieted down, stepping back as he closed the distance and stopped in front of you.
You tried pivoting to the right but he blocked the way, cutting off your route.
“We need to talk,” he said, voice low and rough.
“I’m trying to get to class,” you replied, keeping your voice even, refusing to let the panic show on your face.
“Don’t do that,” he muttered, stepping closer. His form completely covered yours, and you felt suffocated in the open area. “You know exactly why I’m standing here.”
You kept your arms folded around your waist, your posture rigid. A few students walking past were already slowing down, noticing the interaction. “I have to go,” you mumbled.
“No–”
“Aerion!”
A sharp voice broke the tension between you. A girl with long, blonde hair walked over, calling his name as she hurried over. It was Jess—you knew because your friends had told you she was someone he used to talk to before things apparently ended badly.
“Aerion, hold on,” she said, totally ignoring you as she reached him. “Did you get my messages? You haven’t replied to any of–”
Aerion didn’t look at her. He tilted his head slightly, his jaw tight as he dropped a flat, impatient, “not now.”
It was a short distraction, but it was enough. You didn’t hesitate as you grabbed Tanselle’s wrist, pulling her with you as you turned on your heel. You moved as fast as your legs could carry you.
“Whoa–hey! Slow down!” Tanselle stumbled slightly, scrambling to keep up as you dragged her toward the stairwell.
Once you got on the platform between the stairs, you let go of her wrists, your heart still pounding hard.
Tanselle adjusted her tote bag, looking at you with wide eyes.
“What the hell is happening?” She demanded. “You barely explained a thing to any of us and now Aerion is doing this? Since when do you two even speak?”
“I’ll explain later, I promise.” You looked down to make sure he wasn’t anywhere close. “Let’s just go.”
“You’re a terrible friend,” Tanselle grumbled, though she immediately followed you up to the remaining steps.
Five minutes later, the bell rang and you were already sitting at your usual row in Davis’s class.
“Settle down,” Davis silenced the class. “Like I said, today we’re starting the peer reviews on the personal assignment from the start of this semester. You’ll be working with the same partner from the previous project, find them and get moving.”
Your stomach dropped.
Before you could even think about moving, the chair next to you moved. Tanselle was gone, shooting you a sorry look as she settled next to her partner.
You searched around the room when suddenly, Aerion sat down, his shoulder brushing yours as he turned his upper body toward you.
“How long?” he asked, keeping his voice low, but his eyes were drilling into yours.
You turned your head, gaze fixing on your laptop, your fingers resting still on your keyboard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Stop,” Aerion leaned closer. He looked guarded, a defensive edge tracing his words. “The text about the project. You knew it was me. How long have you known before that?”
The accusation stung, but you didn’t raise your voice. You looked over at him, offended by the fact that this was his main concern.
“A few days before that.” You furrowed your brows. “I didn’t know anything at the beginning. I put the pieces together when I saw you pull out your phone.”
Aerion watched your face, his brows drawing together as he searched your expression. “Then why did you go silent on monday?”
“Seriously?” You paused, “I don’t know, maybe because you basically called me boring.” You scoffed, looking right back at him.
“You barely even acknowledged me, and then what? You texted that your partner who happens to be me was just whatever. Why would I want to keep talking to you after that?”
Aerion flinched. The words seemed to hit him, the defensive wall in his eyes fracturing into genuine surprise. He opened his mouth to say something, his hand shifting on the desk, but a shadow fell over your screen.
“Are you guys actually working, or what?”
Jess had walked up the tiered steps, stopping at the edge of your row. She leaned on the desk, looking down at you with a fake, dismissive smile.
“Don’t take it personal,” Jess said, her voice loud enough for the people in the next row to hear. “He won’t even remember your name next week.”
The comment was explicitly meant to embarass you, and it worked. You felt your face warm up as a few classmates looked over.
But before the silence could stretch, Aerion turned.
The change in him was instantaneous. He looked up at Jess, his face turning cold.
“Go.” His voice wasn’t loud, but it brooked no refusal.
Jess’s smile faltered slightly. “I was just saying–”
“I don’t care,” Aerion interrupted, his stare landing on her in a way that made her step back. “Leave. We’re working.”
The people watching started whispering and nudging each other. Jess’s cheeks flushed a bright red. She wanted to snap back, but caught the total lack of interest in Aerion’s eyes, and quickly turned around.
You sat there, your hands unmoving. The frustration that had been building up since last week slowly started to ease, replaced by a strange, heavy feeling.
Aerion had just defended you in front of the whole class. You blinked twice, trying to process what had just happened.
He took a slow breath. Not looking at anyone else in the room, he turned back to face you.
“Thanks,” you murmured, swallowing as your eyes landed back on the screen of your laptop. You clicked open the peer review rubric Professor Davis had shared to the group. You had to find a way out of talking with him.
“Davis wants us to evaluate the thesis of the intro first,” you pointed out, acting as if nothing happened.
Aerion licked the bottom of his lip, caught off guard by the abrupt shift. His shoulders shifted as you continued looking through the rubric. “What?”
“Is your document open, or do you want to look at mine first?” you answered, tapping your trackpad to highlight the first section of the bibliography.
A frustrated sigh escaped him, you could see his confusion from your peripheral vision, his jaw clenching as he realized you were shutting him out.
He was used to people reacting to him by either backing down or trying to stay in his favour. This indifference was clearly a new territory for him. A difficult one too.
For a second, it looked like he might push past it anyway, his hand tightening on the edge of the desk. Yet he let out a heavy, defeated exhale, pulling his laptop closer. “Mine is open.” His voice was clipped.
For the rest of the period, you kept your barrier firmly in place. You weren’t sure why it was so hard for you to hold a proper conversation with him.
You two texted nonstop for a month. It wasn’t like he was a complete stranger. But somehow it felt like it.
Aerion complied, though his compliance was tense. His fingers tapped against the desk whenever you took too long to read through a paragraph. His focus was entirely divided between the text on his screen and your face.
Every time your fingers accidentally brushed his while adjusting the laptop, he would wait to see if you’d pull away. You always did.
When Davis dismissed the class at last, relief coursed through you.
Snapping your laptop shut, you slid it into your bag and slung the strap over your shoulder. “I’ll upload the comments to the docs by the end of the week.” You stood up, looking him in the eye for a brief, passing second.
Aerion stared up at you from his seat, his throat bobbing as he swallowed whatever he wanted to say.
“Okay.”
You walked to the exit, where Tanselle was already waiting for you. Turning your head for a moment before exiting, your eyes met his.
Reluctantly, you had to tell your friends everything as they kept demanding. No, almost everything.
You conveniently left out the part where you had grown to have this strange, unexplainable, and impenetrable feeling for him.
Tanselle then pointed out how she hasn’t seen Aerion with any girls recently. Everyone agreed, which didn’t help your case.
Yet two days passed without a single notification.
By wednesday, the silence had turned from peace into an uncomfortable, distracting weight. You spent the night trying to study, but your mind kept drifting back to him.
Eventually, you couldn’t resist and opened his chat. You scrolled all the way back to the start, back when he was just an anonymous stranger who made you laugh.
Just as you got to the part where you started icing him out, a new message came through.
You frowned, lips parting as you clicked on the button to the most recent chat.
👻: if you wont talk to me in person, fine
👻: lets do it here
Your heart skipped a beat at the sight of the text. You sat up and paced your room for a full minute before warily typing back.
YOU: What do you want aerion
It felt weird to actually acknowledge who you were talking to.
👻: do me a favour
👻: talk to me like you did before finding out. pretend you dont know who i am
Your eyes narrowed at his message. It was a bizarre request, but the familiar look of the text thread made it entirely too easy to slip back.
YOU: What???
YOU: Fine
👻: tell me everything
YOU: Ok u wanna know what i think?
YOU: I think the guy im paired with in davis’s class is an arrogant prick
There was a long pause. The typing bubbles appeared, vanished, then appeared again.
👻: an arrogant prick? really?
YOU: Yes
YOU: He refuses to talk to anyone outside his immediate circle, he walks like he owns the world, and most importantly he treats his project partners as if they were invisible
👻: maybe hes just focused
YOU: Nope, he didn’t even look at my face
YOU: Can you believe it
YOU: Then he has the nerve to say that im a whatever.. Like sorry i didnt juggle for your entertainment??
A couple minutes passed and you thought he wasn't going to respond, but he was still online.
👻: huh
👻: he sounds terrible
A small, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of your mouth, and you tried your best to fight it down.
YOU: He is, hes mean
👻: i didnt mean to be
The sudden drop of the bit you two were doing made your breath hitch. The text continued.
👻: im sorry about monday
👻: and the thing i said
👻: youre not whatever
You stared at his texts, the honesty of it surprising you. You typed out a reply then deleted it. While trying to formulate a reply, another message popped up.
👻: i have to go
The chat went dead. You sat back on your pillows, staring at those four words, your mind spinning into a frantic spiral. I have to go. What did that mean? Go for the day? Or was this his dramatic way of saying goodbye to whatever you guys were?
You slammed your phone down on the mattress, irritated by the sudden exit. You needed to clear your head.
Sighing, you grabbed a towel and headed into the bathroom to take a long, hot shower, letting the steam wash away the stress of the week.
By the time you stepped back into your bedroom, it was already dark outside. Drying your hair and changing into your pajamas, you picked your phone up from the bed to check the time.
There was a new text, sent just a minute ago.
👻: open the door
You froze, reading the message over and over again to make sure you weren’t hallucinating.
You walked into the living room, your bare feet making no sound against the floor.
You never gave him your address.
The only people who knew the exact apartment complex you lived in were your closest friends.
Fuck, you thought. Tanselle…
Panic flooded your body as you approached the entryway, and right on cue, a knock came from the other side of the door.
Taking a shallow breath, you unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open.
Aerion was standing under the dim hallway light. He was wearing a tight gym shirt, his silver hair slightly messy from the harsh wind of the night.
He wasn’t empty handed. His right hand was carrying a bag that looked to be from a bakery. He saw your gaze switching from his face to the plastic. “You mentioned last week that you were eating cheesecake.”
Your brain refused to believe that Aerion Targaryen was standing at your door with a whole cheesecake because of a passing comment you had made a whole week ago.
The wall you had built felt incredibly fragile right now, but you had to keep your composure. Slowly, you stepped aside, opening the door just wide enough for him to move past.
Aerion walked into the apartment, getting his shoes off by the door. He looked at you, taking in your damp hair and pajamas, then walked to stand near the edge of the kitchen table, setting the bag on the counter.
You stared at him, your mind trying to catch up. The tips of your ears went red at the realization that you were wearing only your pajamas in front of him.
“How do you even know where I live?”
“Tanselle,” he said bluntly. “Don’t start a fight with her, I didn’t give her much of an option.”
“Of course...” You huffed mostly to yourself.
You walked past him to the water dispenser, grabbing a clean glass from the drying rack and filling it with cold water. You set it on the counter near him.
“Thanks.” He picked up the glass. Taking a slow sip, his eyes scanned the living room before settling back on you.
“Look,” he started, voice dropping an octave, sounding rougher in the quiet apartment. “I’ll get to the point. I know you think I'm a piece of shit. It's just that I... didn’t know it was you.” His shoulders shifted slightly as his muscles got less tense.
You raised a brow at that. “So just because you didn't know it was me you treated me like that?”
“No. It sounds terrible I know. I guess I was already comfortable talking to you online that I figured I didn't need to talk to anyone in person,” he explained, his tone stripped of its usual cold edge. “When you started ignoring me, it drove me crazy.”
“At first, I thought you knew the entire time. I assumed the worst, but then I started worrying. And I didn’t wanna stop talking to you.” His voice got quiet toward the end.
You didn’t know what to say. The honesty of his words rang through your mind, effectively breaking down the image you have already built of him in your head.
“...And what about Jess?” You asked after a beat and immediately regretted it.
Aerion’s eyes flickered with genuine disgust and annoyance before he shook his head.
“She’s nothing.” He leaned against the counter. “We used to talk,” he hesitated, “then I stopped but she couldn't accept it. She’s nothing.” He repeated, noticing the fidgeting of your hands.
“Oh,” was all you could say. Aerion seemed to recognize the shift in the air. He finished the rest of the water and set it back on the counter.
“I should let you get some sleep,” he cleared his throat, eyes lingering on your lips.
He walked toward the front door, putting his shoes back on. You opened the door, unsure if you even wanted him to leave.
The curiosity that had been lingering in the back of your mind all week finally slipped out. “Before you go... I wanna know something.”
Aerion paused, an amused spark gleaming in his eyes. “Yeah?”
“What did you think of me at the start? Like after you found out I wasn't Michael.”
He let out a low chuckle, a smirk splaying across his face. “I thought you had a ridiculously sharp mouth. You always called me out on my attitude, it was infruriating. But it was intriguing.”
Aerion then tilted his head, turning the tables. “My turn. Why'd you even reply to an unknown number?”
A smile broke through your expression, you no longer felt the need to put on a mask in front of him. “Mmm... being real I'm pretty sure I was just bored and couldn't sleep. I thought it'd be funny and it absolutely was.”
He laughed softly and paused at the threshold, turning back to look at you. “So you're saying you're glad you replied?”
You pretended to think for a second, looking up. “Maybe,” you teased, the familiar banter coming back.
A tiny smile touched his lips—the first real one you’ve seen from him in person. He let out a hum. “Right. I'll remember that. Go sleep now.” He backed up to the threshold, his eyes only leaving yours as he turned around.
“Goodnight.” You called out to him as you closed the door and locked the deadbolt, hearing the thud of his footsteps slowly fade.
An hour later, you tried to go straight to sleep, but you kept tossing and turning. Giving up, you got out of bed and walked to the kitchen, pulling the box out of the bag. You recognised the logo on the box as you opened the lid, it was from the expensive bakery near campus.
The cheesecake looked so incredible, you didn’t bother with a plate. Grabbing a fork, you stabbed the cake and took a massive bite.
After eating a solid half of it directly out of the box, you stared at the remaining mess and pulled your phone out to snap a quick photo.
YOU: [IMAGE ATTACHED]
YOU: I forgot to thank you lol
You didn’t expect him to reply immediately, assuming he was already asleep. But the bubbles popped up almost instantly.
👻: youre welcome
👻: did you save me a bite or are you selfish
YOU: Nope its all for me
👻: next time ill just make you feed it to me
You bit your lip to contain your smile, sliding down onto the living room rug and propping your back on the sofa.
YOU: Hm
YOU: Depends on how well u behave the rest of the week
👻: im always well behaved
Giggling, you quickly texted back.
YOU: Liar
YOU: Anw out of curiosity what do u have me saved as
👻: unknown
👻: until about a day ago
YOU: Huh what is it now
👻: thats for my eyes only
YOU: Oh rly
YOU: Ok then im saving u as row four lol
👻: how creative
YOU: It fits
YOU: Reminds me that ure an arrogant prick everyday
👻: good
👻: think about me everyday
Your heart did a violent flip.
Going to his profile, you debated on actually renaming him as row four, but you decided on Aerion 🎱. The emoji just felt right.
YOU: Just changed it
Aerion 🎱: row four?
YOU: No and im not telling u
YOU: Thats unless u tell me minee?
Aerion 🎱: oh thats how it is
Aerion 🎱: never
YOU: Wow!! Ur impossible im gonna off myself
YOU: Ok im going to sleep before u piss me off more
Aerion 🎱: lmao alright
Aerion 🎱: goodnight dont die
You let out a content huff before getting up and heading back to your bedroom.
YOU: Goodnightt
The next morning, the lecture hall was filled with pre-class chatter. It was history class but your professor fell sick and Professor Davis was there as a substitute.
As usual, you sat beside Tanselle who was vibrating with anxiety, staring at you sideways ever since you arrived.
Leaning in close, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Okay, you’re scaring me. You haven’t mentioned him once. Are you not going to kill me?”
You let out a small giggle, shaking your head. “Nope. It’s all settled.”
Tanselle clicked her tongue, utterly puzzled. “Wait… really?” So he didn’t actually go to your house then?”
“No, he did,” you corrected smoothly, as if it was completely normal.
A noise of confusion escaped her, her eyes bulging. “What!? He actually came over? And you’re acting like this isn’t wild?”
Just then, the doors swung open, and Aerion walked in. He was late, and Professor Davis didn’t bother calling him out, simply beginning the lesson.
You watched as he walked up the main aisle, expecting him to stop in row four, but he continued walking. He moved past his friends without a second thought.
Then without tilting his head up, his eyes locked onto yours. A warmth instantly bloomed in your chest, a smile growing on your face, and you quickly bit your inner cheek to hide it.
He reached your row and without saying a word, he pulled the chair beside you and slid effortlessly into the seat.
Nudging your chin toward the lower row, you pointed at a few familiar faces who had turned around their chairs to watch him. “Your friends are literally staring at you. They’re waiting for you.”
Aerion followed your glance for a split second before looking back at you. “So?”
Before you could reply, the screech of the microphone caught everyone’s attention. “You two,” Davis barked into the mic, his voice echoing. “If you two have matters that are more pressing to discuss then feel free to take it out of the class.”
The weight of Davis calling you out together made the class go extremely silent, staring back and forth between you and Aerion. You could see Jess staring menacingly from the other side of the room.
Your lips formed into a pout as Davis finally looked away, continuing his talk. Aerion, on the other hand, did not take his eyes off you, his smirk widening slightly at the sudden audience.
He slowly leaned back in his chair and for a moment you thought the distraction was over. But under the desk Aerion shifted. The side of his thigh bumped firmly against yours, deliberately pressing in with lingering heat. A sharp jolt shot straight up your spine.
You shot him a warning glare, but he was already busy on his phone.
A second later, your phone buzzed in your lap.
Aerion 🎱: z
Aerion 🎱: z
Aerion 🎱: z
You hid your hands under the desk, looking down to make sure Professor Davis wasn’t looking.
YOU: Wtf
Aerion 🎱: we cant talk out loud
Aerion 🎱: i have to find other ways to get your attention
You glanced at him out of the corner of your eyes, but his face looked to be absolutely calm and concentrated as he pretended to analyze the projector screen.
YOU: Oh ure a pro
YOU: Wait move ur leg ppl r staring
Aerion 🎱: doesnt matter
Aerion 🎱: if you care move yours then
YOU: Ok nevermind
Aerion 🎱: mhm
Aerion 🎱: what are you doing after class
YOU: Its a free period im probably gonna go to the cafe
Aerion 🎱: wrong
Aerion 🎱: we’re going somewhere
YOU: ??? Hello why wasnt i informed
Aerion 🎱: i just informed you
You almost laughed at that but managed to keep it in, not wanting to draw even more attention from Davis.
YOU: Stop before i get kicked out of the class
YOU: Ok im leaving u bye
Aerion 🎱: stay
Aerion 🎱: hes not gonna see
YOU: If he does im blocking u
Aerion 🎱: i know where you live it doesnt matter
Your lips parted at the sheer audacity of his last message, a rush of heat hitting your cheeks as the memory from last night flashed through your mind.
Looking up from your phone, you caught the subtle twitch at the corner of Aerion’s lips. It was then that you realised that replying to a random message was easily the best mistake you’ve ever made.
a thumb stroking over your lips, followed by a kiss dropped onto your mouth before they pull back— and kiss you again because they can’t help themselves
⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ summary: Lonely, heartsick, and desperate to be chosen, Prince Daeron Targaryen makes a drunken wish at an old fountain, never believing the stories about it could be true. By morning, the woman he has loved in silence looks at him with all the devotion he has ever craved. But as her love turns possessive and unstable, Daeron begins to realize the woman reaching for him is not truly the woman he loved at all.
⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ wc: 8.9k
⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ note: my take on the movie Obsession with Daeron! obviously, not my idea, all credit for that goes towards curry barker!
⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ warnings: graphic depiction of injury, heavy themes, angst, hurt/no comfort
⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ tag list: @deaddovelovely <3 @shadowypizzasuit @ynnlvrs @rxiwrites @c0c0nutbiscuit
⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ songs: Love is a Stranger by Eurythmics & Play Dead (Tim Simenon 7" remix)
Daeron Targaryen had heard the story first as a boy. A fountain in the eastern courtyard of Summerhall, pale as old bone and cracked along the edges, older than the castle itself if the servants were to be believed. Rainwater gathered in it even during dry weeks. No one filled it. No one cleaned it. No one liked to pass it after sunset.
“It grants a wish,” one serving girl had whispered to him when he was young enough to be frightened and proud enough to pretend he was not. Daeron had laughed. “One wish,” she had said, very seriously. “Only one.”
He had laughed harder then. It was a children’s tale. A servant’s story. Some foolish thing meant to frighten little boys away from courtyards where they might crack their skulls on wet stone.
Years later, drunk and heartsick and far less wise than he thought himself, Daeron remembered it. He had not gone there with a purpose. Or that was what he told himself afterward.
He had left the feast because he could no longer bear to watch you smile at another man. The man was nothing. Some handsome little lord with clean hands and better prospects, exactly the sort of man your house would welcome. Exactly the sort of man no one would whisper about if he danced with you twice.
Daeron had watched you laugh at something the man said. Then he watched your eyes flick, briefly, toward him. There had been warmth there.
There was always warmth with you. That was the cruelty of it. You cared for him. You defended him when others made jokes. You took cups from his hand when he had drunk too much and told him, softly, that he did not need to finish everything placed before him. You spoke to him as if he were not already ruined.
But caring was not loving. And loving was not choosing. You would never choose him, not truly. Not when he was what he was. Daeron the Drunken. The name followed him like a stain. A woman like you might pity him. Might even want him in some quiet, shameful corner of herself. But you would not destroy your name for him. You would not become a warning to other women of your house. You would not love him more than your own good sense.
That was the thought that led him into the eastern courtyard.
The fountain waited beneath the moon. Daeron stopped when he saw it, then gave a bitter little laugh. He crossed to it and braced both hands against the cold stone edges. The water inside was dark, reflecting the night. He could see the stars and the light of the full moon reflecting off the stilled liquid. The longer he looked, the more he began to notice his own reflection staring back at him. Daeron, drunk and wanting and pathetic enough to ask stones for mercy.
He thought of you then, though he had been trying not to all night, which is how he ended up here.
That was the trouble with you. You were never where he left you. He could walk away from the feast, from the music, from the sight of your hand resting politely in another man’s, but you followed him anyway. Not in body, but in memory. In the soft turn of your mouth when you were trying not to laugh at him. In the quiet firmness of your voice when you told him he had had enough wine. In the way you looked at him sometimes, almost tenderly, before good sense returned and shuttered the expression away.
Almost.
That was the word that had undone him. You almost loved him. Or he had convinced himself you did. You almost reached for him. Almost stayed too close. Almost said the thing neither of you was foolish enough to say aloud.
And Daeron was so tired of almost. He wanted to be chosen without hesitation, looked at without caution. Wanted, for once, to be more than the ruined prince people pitied, laughed at, or endured. He wanted you to forget every sensible reason you had for keeping him at a distance. Your house. Your name. His reputation. His drinking. His father’s disappointed eyes. All of it. He wanted your carefulness gone. Not because he did not know it was part of you, but because he hated that it stood between you.
Standing there over the fountain, drunk enough to be cruel and lonely enough to mistake cruelty for longing, Daeron let himself imagine what it would feel like if you stopped resisting. If all that warmth you kept hidden finally turned toward him without fear or shame. If you loved him the way he wanted to be loved. Completely. More than anything. The way he loved you.
He stared into the fountain as if looking for a warning, hoping that an answer would present itself clearly through the dark water. The fountain did not answer.
He leaned over it. His reflection trembled on the surface. Silver hair loose around his face. Violet eyes bright with wine. A prince, if one was feeling generous. A waste, if one were being honest.
“I wish she loved me,” he said. The words came out too soft, too true. His mouth twisted. “I wish her heart would know no devotion greater than me.”
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the water turned black. It was not a shadow or moonlight moving behind clouds; it was blackness so complete that his reflection vanished from the surface. The fountain looked suddenly bottomless, like a hole cut into the world.
Daeron felt like he couldn’t quite catch his breath. He stumbled back. “Seven hells.”
The courtyard was silent. Nothing rose from the water, no hand or voice presented itself to him as he had foolishly expected. It was simply nothing.
After a while, shame came creeping back. He was drunk. That was all. Drunk and jealous and frightening himself with old stories. He went to bed telling himself that.
By morning, he almost believed it. Then you came to him.
You were waiting in the main garden, alone beneath an arch of white roses, your hands clasped before you, your eyes searching the path he always took from his chambers.
Daeron slowed. “My lady?”
You turned. The instant you saw him, your face opened. That was the only word for it. Opened. All your timidness had vanished. All your restraint, the composed little walls you had built around yourself as a woman of noble blood and better judgment. It was just gone.
You looked at him like he was the only thing in the world that had ever mattered. “Daeron,” you breathed. His name sounded like a prayer leaving your lips.
He knew something was wrong. Not clearly or enough to give it shape. But some deep, ugly part of him knew you would not look at him like that overnight. Not in a garden where anyone might see.
You came to him quickly, taking his hands in yours. Your fingers trembled as though you had been waiting all your life to touch him. “I was looking for you,” you said.
“For me?” He couldn’t hide his confusion. Was he dreaming? Did the Gods finally bless him with something peaceful for once?
Your face fell, wounded by the question. “Of course for you.” There it was again. Too much, too sweet. Daeron thought of the fountain for a brief moment. Perhaps he wasn’t dreaming after all. Perhaps the wish had truly come to fruition. His mind began to race with all of the possibilities that could have made the wish real. Then he chose not to.
For three days, he was happy. You adored him openly now. You sat beside him whenever you could. You watched his mouth when he spoke, laughed too quickly at his jokes, and quieted too sharply when others spoke over him.
At first, Daeron told himself it was not his wish. He told himself that you had always loved him. Perhaps he had been too drunk, too ashamed, too used to rejection to notice. Perhaps all the fountain had done was give him courage to see what was already there.
It was a weak lie. He clung to it anyway.
The first time you kissed him, it was in the passage behind the library. You had followed him there after supper. Normally, you never would have done such a thing. You were too careful for that. Too aware of who might see. Now you came to him as if caution had become meaningless.
“My lady,” Daeron said with warning, though his voice had already softened.
You smiled. “I noticed that you left. I wanted to make sure you were alright, my prince.”
“I wanted quiet.” He let out a small laugh. For one foolish, shining moment, Daeron felt chosen. You had sought him out as if being apart from him was the most unbearable thing. The thought filled him with such aching joy that he could hardly breathe. He had spent so long wanting you quietly that he did not know what to do now that you seemed to want him back.
“Mm, I think you wanted me to follow.” You mused, a soft smile lit up your features. It was beautiful because it was yours. The curve of your mouth, the gentle lift of your eyes, the warmth blooming across features he had studied too often to mistake for anyone else’s. Daeron could think of nothing but the sweetness of it, that you were looking at him like this, that all the careful distance between the two of you had finally fallen away.
He was so overcome by these feelings that he did not think to question why the smile sat strangely on your face, almost perfect but not quite. As though someone had remembered your beauty exactly and forgotten the way your soul moved beneath it.
When you stepped closer, Daeron felt the world narrow to the space between your mouth and his. He had imagined this too many times to count, always with shame, always with the bitter certainty that it would never happen. But now you were looking at him as if you wanted it too, as if you had always wanted to, and the sweetness of that lie was so perfect that he leaned toward it before he could think better of himself.
Your mouth was warm beneath his, eager and certain, and Daeron felt the last fragile thread of sense in him snap. You kissed him as if there had never been any doubt between you, as if all your careful glances and measured smiles had only been a long prelude to this. Your hands rose into his hair, fingers curling there with sudden need, and the sound he made against your mouth was almost pathetic.
He found your waist and drew you closer, helpless against the taste. You came willingly, too willingly, pressing into him as though distance had become unbearable. For one bright, impossible moment, he forgot the fountain. He forgot the black water. He forgot every reason this should have frightened him.
All he knew was that you were kissing him back.
Then you stopped. Not slowly or with any warning. One moment, your mouth was moving against his, your fingers tangled in his hair, your body leaning into his as though you had wanted him all your life. The next, your hands ripped away from him.
You shoved him hard enough that his shoulder struck the wall. You staggered back, one hand clasped over your mouth, eyes darting over him, then around the passage with a dawning horror so raw it emptied your face of everything else.
Daeron stared.
You looked at him, really looked at him, and whatever you saw made you scream. The sound ripped from you before you seemed to know you were making it. Daeron froze, unable to understand how a kiss could have drawn that kind of terror from you. You looked at him with wide, wet eyes, and for one awful moment he felt less like a man who had been wanted and more like something you had found waiting in the dark.
You stumbled backward, knees striking the stone, one hand scraping against the wall as you tried to catch yourself. For a heartbeat, you crouched there on the floor, shaking, staring up at him.
You shook your head once. “What is going on?” you whispered. Your voice was thin and labored.
“My lady?”
Your body snapped still. Daeron had no time even to breathe before you rose. You came upright all at once, pulled to your feet in a sharp, boneless motion that made his stomach turn, as though invisible strings had caught your spine and yanked you back into place.
For one brief moment, your eyes were empty. Then you blinked. Tears still streaked your cheeks, but the terror was gone so completely it might never have existed. A smile spread across your lips as if it had always been there.
“Oh,” you breathed, smoothing your skirts with trembling hands. “Daeron.” You gave a small, embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
Daeron could not move. You stepped toward him, sweet and tearful and almost shy. “Did I frighten you?”
Yes. That should have been his answer. Yes, and then he should have found help. Instead, he took a cautious step. You reached for him with such relief that something sick and grateful opened in his chest. He let you kiss him again.
After the kiss, something in you became harder to follow.
At first, Daeron told himself it was only passion. You were overwhelmed, perhaps. Frightened by your own boldness. Made strange by feelings you had spent too long denying. It was easier to believe that than to think too closely about the way your tenderness could sharpen without warning, how one moment you would be touching his sleeve with almost worshipful softness, and the next your eyes would fill with tears because he had looked away too long.
You became all extremes. Sweet enough to make him ache, then wounded so suddenly he felt accused before he understood the crime. You would smile at him as if he had hung the moon, then go cold and trembling because he had answered a servant before answering you. The smallest distance between you seemed to open some terrible pit inside you, and Daeron, the fool that he was, kept stepping close to soothe it.
The changes came quietly at first. Small things. Things Daeron could explain away because he wanted to explain them away.
At breakfast one morning, he reached for his wine before the meal had properly begun. You saw the movement at once. Before his fingers touched the cup, your hand covered his. Gently, almost lovingly.
“You do not need that,” you said.
Daeron looked at you, startled. Once, you might have said something similar. You might have taken a cup from him with quiet concern, then looked away before anyone could read too much into it. There would have been restraint in it. Kindness, yes, but distance too. Now your fingers threaded through his.
“You have me,” you added softly.
The words should have warmed him. They did. That was the problem. Daeron smiled before he could stop himself, and when you saw it, your whole face brightened as if his pleasure had fed something starving in you.
“There,” you whispered. “Better.”
It was strange.
It was sweet.
He chose sweet.
Later, in the yard, one of the squires made a careless joke about Daeron’s cups always being fuller than his courage. It was nothing he had not heard before. Daeron had even begun to laugh, because sometimes laughing first was easier than letting others know they had struck flesh.
You did not laugh. The air around you seemed to cool. “What did you say?” you asked.
The squire went red. “My lady, I meant no offense.”
“Yes,” you said. “You did.”
Daeron touched your sleeve. “Leave it.”
But you did not look at him. Your eyes stayed on the boy, steady and bright and terribly calm. “You should apologize.”
The squire swallowed. “My lady, please forgive me.”
“Not to me,” you said.
Daeron’s smile faded. The boy looked confused. “My lady?”
“To him,” you said. “For making him hear it.” It was too sharp. Too possessive. Unlike the way you had once defended him once with wit and grace. You were never cruel. But when you turned back to Daeron, your face softened. “There,” you said, almost proudly. “No one should speak to you that way.”
Daeron told himself he was moved, and he was. But beneath it, something cold had begun to stir.
Soon, you had begun to follow him. Not always obviously. Not enough that others could accuse you of impropriety. But Daeron would leave a room, and moments later you would appear in the corridor. He would go to the stables, and there you would be near the archway, pretending to admire a horse you had never shown interest in before. He would excuse himself from supper early, and before he reached the end of the hall, he would hear your footsteps behind him.
At first, it made him feel wanted. Then it made him feel watched.
One evening, he paused halfway down a passage and turned.
You stopped too. A smile appeared on your face immediately, too quick and too bright.
“Were you looking for me?” he asked.
“Yes.” The answer came without shame.
Daeron’s breath caught.
You stepped closer. “Should I not?”
“I only wondered.” He muttered.
“Do not wonder.” You reached for his hand. “I will always look for you.”
He should have laughed or teased you. Instead, he stood there while you lifted his hand to your cheek and held it there, eyes closing as if his touch alone had steadied the whole world.
Daeron’s chest ached. The sight of you, with the impossible softness of your cheek against his hand, with the terrible sweetness of being needed so openly. He loved you. Gods help him, he loved you so much that at one point it felt like pain. And yet now, beneath the warmth spreading through him, something rotten had begun to fester.
This was you, surely it was you. Your face, your voice, your hand wrapped around his. But the wanting in your eyes was too bare, too bottomless, too unlike the careful woman he had adored from afar. Guilt pricked at him, faint but sharp, and Daeron tried to smother it beneath the wonder of your devotion. He had wanted this. He had wished for this. And now that you were holding his hand as if it were the only thing keeping you tethered to the earth, he could not bring himself to pull away.
The next change was not as easy to dress as romance.
A serving girl came to his chambers with fresh linens. She was young, nervous, and pretty in a forgettable way. Daeron barely noticed her beyond a vague nod of thanks.
You noticed everything. The moment she left, your hand slipped from his. “Do you like her?”
Daeron glanced up. “Who?”
Your face tightened. “The girl,” you said, the words coming slowly, as if you were trying to keep them gentle and failing at it.
Daeron’s brow furrowed. “The maid?”
“She smiled at you,” you said, your eyes searching his face for guilt before he had even answered.
Daeron glanced toward the door where the girl had gone, then back at you. “She was being polite.”
“She smiled at you,” you repeated, softer this time, but your mouth trembled around it.
Something in Daeron’s chest sank. He stood slowly, already wary of the way your voice had thinned. “My lady.”
“Do you like her?” you asked, lifting your chin as though bracing yourself for the answer.
“No,” Daeron said at once.
“Do not lie,” you whispered, tears gathering too quickly in your eyes.
“I am not lying,” he said, though his own voice sounded less certain than he wanted it to.
“You looked at her,” you said, one hand curling against your stomach.
“She entered the room,” Daeron answered carefully.
“You looked at her,” you said again, sharper now, and your voice had changed. Not much. But he knew you. He knew what you used to sound like. The softness had thinned. Something sharper was pressed beneath it, something that made the hair at the back of his neck rise.
Daeron stepped toward you carefully, palms open as though approaching something wounded. “You are upset over nothing.”
Your eyes filled instantly. “Nothing?” you echoed, as if he had struck you.
He regretted the word at once. “I did not mean-”
“I am nothing now?” you asked, your voice cracking apart in the middle.
“No,” he said quickly, taking another step toward you.
“Is that what I am to you?” you asked, looking at him with such sudden devastation that his stomach twisted.
“No,” Daeron said again, firmer this time, though he could already feel the conversation slipping out of his hands.
You began to shake your head, slowly at first, your breathing turning shallow.
“No, no, no,” you whispered, as if denying something only you could hear. The repetition came faster, each word more frantic than the last.
Daeron’s stomach turned. “Stop,” he said quietly, but the word had no strength behind it.
You did not seem to hear him. Your hands clenched in your skirts, twisting the fabric until your knuckles paled. “I saw the way she looked at you,” you said, your eyes shining with feverish certainty. “I saw it. I saw it, Daeron.”
“She did nothing,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “She brought linens.”
“She wanted you!” you cried, the words cracking through the room too loudly, too sharply.
Daeron flinched before he could stop himself. You saw it. Your face changed at once, hurt flashing across it so suddenly that it almost looked as if he had struck you. Upon the realization, your voice broke into something horrible, shoulders shaking as you cried out. The sobbing worsened until it no longer sounded like ordinary crying.
It came out of you in great, broken gasps, too loud for the small chamber, too raw for the softness of your face. Daeron stood frozen as you pressed both hands to your chest, fingers clawing at the fabric as though the feeling inside you had become something physical, something trying to split you open from the ribs.
“I feel like you don’t love me as much as I love you,” you cried.
His throat tightened. “My lady, I can assure you that-”
“No,” you sobbed, shaking your head so hard loose strands of hair stuck to your wet cheeks. “No, you don’t. You say it, but it doesn’t feel mutual.”
The word came out shattered. Mutual. As if love were a balance. As if you had placed your whole bleeding heart on one side of the scale and found his heart missing.
Daeron took a step toward you, then stopped when your eyes snapped to his. Your face was still yours, the same mouth he had kissed, the same eyes that had once looked at him with careful, quiet kindness, but sorrow had warped something in it. Not enough to make you monstrous. Worse. Enough to make you almost right. Your expression seemed pulled too tight around the edges, your eyes too bright, your mouth trembling too widely around each sob, as though some unseen hand had tried to arrange your features into heartbreak and had gotten the shape of it slightly wrong.
“It does not feel the same,” you said, voice rising again. “I love you more than anything. I just want you to love me too. Why can’t you?” You broke off with a sound that made him flinch. Like an animal struck, something too old and too wounded to be human.
Daeron’s hands lifted helplessly, hovering between you. Part of him wanted to catch you, to draw you against him and quiet the terrible sound of your crying. Another part of him wanted to back away until stone met his spine. He was frightened of you. He was frightened for you. He was frightened, most of all, by the sick ache in his chest that still warmed at the thought of being loved this violently.
“I do love you,” he said, and hated how quickly the words came.
Your sobbing hitched. For one trembling second, you only stared at him. Then you whispered, “Say it again.”
Daeron crossed the space between you before he could think better of it, gathering you into his arms with a kind of frantic tenderness. You came apart against him at once, sobbing into his chest, your hands fisting weakly in the front of his tunic as if you did not know whether to cling to him or push him away. He held you tighter.
“I love you,” he said quickly, too quickly, the words spilling out of him like a prayer said over a wound. “I do. I love you. I love you.”
He kissed the crown of your head, then your temple, then pressed his mouth into your hair and kept it there as though he could force peace into you through touch alone. One hand moved over your back in desperate, uneven strokes. The other held the back of your head, keeping you tucked beneath his chin while you trembled.
“Please,” he whispered, though he did not know what he was asking for. “Please, do not cry like that. I am here, my love. I am right here.”
Slowly, your sobs began to quiet. Your body still shook against his, but the terrible, broken sounds faded into smaller gasps. Daeron felt the change and hated the relief that went through him. He hated how quickly his own panic eased when yours did. He hated that some part of him was grateful he had found the words to soothe you, as if this were only a lover’s quarrel and not something darker wearing the shape of one.
“I love you,” he said again, softer now. This time, the words hurt. Because they were true. That was the awful part. He did love you. He had loved you before the wish, before the fountain, before your eyes had begun to look at him with that terrible bottomless devotion. He had loved you when your affection came carefully, when every small kindness from you felt like something he had no right to keep.
He loved the real you. The woman who would have stepped back. The woman who would have chosen her words. The woman who would have cared for him without surrendering herself.
And still, he held this version of you. Still, he kissed your hair and whispered comfort because your tears frightened him and your need fed something starved in him. Still, he let you cling to him like he was the only solid thing in the world, though some quiet, sick part of him knew he was the reason the world had become so unstable beneath your feet.
Your fingers loosened in his tunic.
“There,” he murmured, pressing another kiss to your head. “There. I have you.”
The moment he said it, guilt twisted sharply through him.
I have you.
It sounded too close to the truth. Not I love you. Not I will help you. Just, I have you.
He shut his eyes, his jaw tightening against the thought. You were calming in his arms, breathing him in, trusting him, needing him. And Daeron, the coward that he was, held you closer instead of letting the guilt make him brave. Because if he was gentle enough, if he kissed you softly enough, if he said he loved you enough times, perhaps he could pretend he was not holding the ruin of the woman he had loved and calling it devotion.
After that, Daeron learned to soothe you.
Not help you. Not save you. Soothe you.
There was a difference, and he knew it, though he hated himself too much to name it plainly. He learned which words made your breathing slow, which touches softened your hands from fists into trembling fingers, which promises could pull you back from the edge before the screaming began. He told himself he was protecting you from your own distress. From the court. From shame.
But each time he calmed you, he only taught himself how to keep you.
So when the feast came, Daeron already knew the warning signs. The too-tight grip. The sudden silence. The way your gaze sharpened whenever another woman looked at him too long.
The hall was crowded and bright with music. You sat beside him because you had insisted, your hand resting possessively on his thigh beneath the table.
Across the hall, a young woman of House Baratheon approached with a careful smile.
She was pretty in a bright, harmless way, all dark curls and nervous eyes, and Daeron had barely noticed her before she dipped into a curtsy before him.
“My prince,” she said, “would you honor me with a dance?”
Before Daeron could answer, your hand tightened around his beneath the table. Not enough for anyone else to see, but enough for him to feel the bite of your fingers.
He glanced at you. You were smiling. That was what unsettled him first. Just a small, pleasant smile that did not quite reach your eyes.
“He does not need another partner,” you said.
The Baratheon girl blinked, startled. “My lady, I meant no harm.”
“No,” you said sweetly. “I imagine you did not think far enough ahead for harm.”
A few heads turned. Daeron’s face warmed.
He leaned closer, voice low. “Please, do not do this.”
Your smile faltered, but only slightly. “She asked you to dance.”
“You are embarrassing me.” Daeron murmured.
You turned back to the Baratheon girl as though his words had meant nothing, leaned close to Daeron, and pressed a kiss to his cheek in front of half the hall.
“There,” you said softly, your lips still near his skin, “now she knows.”
Daeron sat frozen as you doted on him. That struck something in you.
Then suddenly, the smile fell from your face. Not faded. Fell. One instant you were standing before him, flushed and pleased with yourself, your mouth still close enough that he could feel the ghost of your kiss on his cheek. The next, your whole body recoiled as if waking beneath a blade. Your eyes went wide, so wide he could see the whites all around them, and the sound that tore out of you was not embarrassment or regret, but terror. You stumbled backward from him, knocking into the chair hard enough to send it skidding, then went down onto the stone with a cry.
The hall erupted around you, but you did not seem to hear it. You scrambled away on your hands, skirts tangling under your knees, palms slipping against spilled wine, your gaze fixed only on Daeron as though he were the monster in the room.
“That’s not me!” You screamed. The words cracked through the hall.
Daeron could not move.
You were crying now, shaking so violently that your whole body seemed at war with itself. You looked around at the staring faces, at the Baratheon girl, at your own hands, then back at him with a horror so complete it stripped every trace of the other version from your face. And in that instant, Daeron knew. Whatever had kissed him, clung to him, loved him with that bottomless, suffocating devotion, it was not the woman on the floor. It was not the woman he had loved. This was her, the real her, trapped inside her own mind as this thing his wish had conjured lived in her body. And the real you was trying to tell them. Trying to tell him. Crying out in the middle of a hall full of people who could not possibly know what you meant.
“That’s not me, please!” You screamed again. Then your body jerked. Your sob cut off mid-breath. The terror vanished as suddenly as a candle snuffed between two fingers, and when you blinked up at him through tears, the softness had returned. A smile broke across your tear-streaked face.
“Oh,” you breathed. Then you laughed. A small, breathless, embarrassed little laugh that made the silence around you feel colder. “Oh my gods,” you said, pressing your fingers to your lips as if you had merely stumbled over a dance step. “I am so sorry.”
No one spoke. You looked around at the faces staring back at you, tears still shining on your cheeks, and laughed again. “I do not know what came over me,” you said, voice trembling with a sweetness that did not belong after what had just happened. “How dreadful of me. I must have frightened everyone.”
The Baratheon girl looked close to tears.
Your smile turned toward her. “I am sorry,” you said softly. The apology should have eased the room. It did not.
Daeron stood frozen, nausea crawling up his throat.
You turned to him then.
He caught your wrist. Not gently.
Your smile faltered. “Daeron?”
He leaned close enough that only you could hear him.
“We’re leaving. Come with me, now.” He said firmly, voice hushed.
For one second, hurt flashed across your face. Then confusion. Then shame. All of it too fast, too neatly arranged.
“I said I was sorry,” you whispered.
He tightened his grip and began pulling you from the hall. You stumbled after him willingly, almost eagerly, one hand gathering your skirts.
Behind you, the hall remained silent. Daeron could feel every stare against his back.
The moment they were alone in a side chamber, he pulled away from you.
“You cannot act like that,” Daeron said, his voice low and strained as soon as the chamber door shut behind them.
You stared at him, still breathing too quickly from the hall. Your lips parted. “What?” you asked, the word small and wounded.
“At feasts,” he said, gesturing sharply toward the closed door. “In halls. In front of people. You cannot act like that.”
Tears filled your eyes at once. “I embarrassed you,” you whispered.
“You frightened them,” Daeron said.
“I did not mean to,” you said quickly, shaking your head.
“She would not act like that,” he said. The words came out before he could stop them.
You went very still. Daeron’s heart pounded.
“She?” you whispered, your eyes searching his face.
He swallowed. “The real you,” he said.
Your expression twisted with confusion. “I am her,” you said.
“No,” Daeron answered, too quickly.
“I am,” you insisted, taking one step toward him.
“No,” he said again, his voice sharpened, panic turning cruel. “No, she would not say those things. She would not behave like that. She acts…she would not insult a woman for asking me to dance.”
He turned to walk towards a far corner of the chamber, hoping the physical distance would bring him some relief.
Your face crumpled. “Do you still love me?” you whispered.
Daeron looked towards you once more, his face softening before he could think better of it. “This is all I have ever wanted.” His answer was truthful. He foolishly hoped that his honesty would change things somehow.
“Me too.” Your voice was dripping with a sickly sweetness that made him physically cringe.
“No it’s not,” he said, shaking his head. His voice was hollow with something that was not quite anger and not quite grief.
“Yes it is, Daeron,” you said quickly, your voice rising with desperation. “Its always been you.”
He closed his eyes. “I want this to work, I do,” he said, tears brimming in his violet eyes. “I love you.”
“So what’s the problem, I don’t understand?” You cried, more urgently now.
“Why can’t you just be her?” Daeron asked. The question left him like a wound.
For a moment, your cries stopped. Then they began again, harder. “I am her,” you said, nodding frantically through your tears. “I can be. I can be her, Daeron, please, I can.”
“No,” he said, his voice breaking with frustration and fear. “She would not beg like this.”
“I can be her,” you sobbed.
“She would not cry like this,” Daeron said.
“I can be,” you pleaded, your knees beginning to buckle underneath you. The sobs clawing their way from your throat were agonizing. “I’ll be anything you want me to be.”
Seeing you on your knees broke something in Daeron. Not because you looked weak, because you looked like something he had made. Your hands clutched at his legs, your face wet with tears, your voice cracking around promises no one should ever have to make. Daeron felt the horror of it settle into his bones.
This was not the woman he had loved from across halls and candlelit tables. This was not the careful, proud, gentle creature who had once looked at him with warmth and chosen restraint anyway. This was the thing his wanting had carved out of you, sobbing at his feet and begging to be shaped.
Tears blurred his vision before he could stop them. He loved you. Gods, he loved you so much it made him sick. But looking down at you then, Daeron understood that his love had not saved you from ruin. It had become the hand that dragged you there.
“Please, don’t say that, okay?” He pleaded, crouching down to place soothing hands over your shoulders. “You don’t have to be anything. You just need to be you.”
“Anything you want me to be,” you sobbed again, your voice thinning into something desperate and pathetic.
“She wouldn’t say that, okay? I just want you to act like her. ” Daeron murmured cautiously.
Your whole face erupted in agony. “I CAN BE HER!” you screamed.
The sound split the room. Daeron stumbled back.
The voice was not your own. It was too vast. Too broken. Too full of something that had never learned how to fit inside a human throat.
Daeron’s back hit the wall. For one terrible moment, he could only hear you breathing. Then moonlight caught your face, tears shone on your cheeks.
Your expression had gone slack with horror at his fear.
“You’re scaring me,” he whispered.
At once, the rage vanished. “Oh,” you breathed, your voice softening into immediate grief. “Oh, my love.” You came toward him slowly, hands raised as though soothing a frightened animal. “I’m sorry,” you whispered.
“Stay there,” Daeron said, his voice shaking.
You stopped immediately. The obedience was worse than defiance. “I’m sorry,” you whispered again, tears slipping down your cheeks. “I did not mean to scare you. I only wanted you to understand. I can be good. I can be sweet. I can be whatever you need.”
Daeron was shaking. You noticed. Your face crumpled with grief. “Please do not cry because of me,” you begged.
He said nothing. You took one careful step. Then another. When he did not tell you to stop, you touched his face. So lovingly, as if you had not just screamed the room into darkness. “I love you,” you whispered, your thumb brushing tenderly over his cheek. “I love you so much.”
Daeron closed his eyes. He let you comfort him.
That night, you slept in his bed. Daeron lay awake beside you, staring into the dark. Your body was curled against his, one arm across his chest, possessive even in sleep. He did not dare move.
Near dawn, he must have slept, but when he woke, you were gone.
He learned of the death before breakfast. The young Baratheon woman from the feast had been found near the gardens. Her dress was missing. Her skull had been ruined with a stone. Chunks of rock were found embedded into the skin of her face.
The words came to Daeron from a guard with a pale face and shaking hands, and for a moment, he could not understand them.
Then he remembered your smile at the feast. He turned and vomited into the grass.
He avoided you all day. As best he could, and it was not easy.
You came looking for him after breakfast, soft-eyed and anxious, asking a maid whether Prince Daeron had eaten. Then again in the afternoon, when he heard your voice outside the solar and slipped out through the servant’s passage before you could see him. Then near dusk, when he glimpsed you at the far end of a corridor and ducked into an empty room like a boy hiding from punishment.
He told himself he needed time to think. That was not true.
He needed time to be afraid without you seeing it. He needed time to hate himself without your hands reaching for his face, without your tearful mouth asking if he still loved you, without that terrible, bottomless devotion looking at him as though he were the only thing in the world worth suffering for.
All day, his mind circled the same impossible thought. There had to be some way to fix it without losing you.
Some gentler undoing. Some careful correction. A second wish, perhaps, that would soften the edges of what he had done without taking it all away. He imagined, shamefully, a version of this where you still loved him, but quietly. Normally. Where you smiled at him across tables with warmth instead of hunger. Where you reached for his hand without trembling. Where you could want him and still be yourself.
The thought made him sick. Because even now, even after everything, some part of him was still trying to keep the stolen thing.
He wanted the real you back. The woman who had once cared for him with clear eyes and careful hands. The woman who could tell him no. The woman who could leave a room without looking back to see whether he would follow. He had loved you then, loved you better then, though he had not understood it at the time. What he had now was everything he had begged the dark for, and it had become unbearable in his hands.
By evening, Daeron found himself alone in a narrow alcove, one hand pressed over his mouth to keep from making a sound. Tears burned behind his eyes, then spilled despite him. He hated the thing inside of you for needing him so terribly. He hated himself more for still wanting to be needed. He thought of the way you had looked at him when you came back to yourself, the terror in your face, the certainty that he had done this to you.
And he knew, with a grief so heavy it felt almost physical, that if he found a way to end it, you would hate him. The real you would hate him.
Perhaps you should. Perhaps that was the only honest thing left between you.
Still, the thought nearly bent him in half. To save you, he would have to lose even the possibility of you. No more careful smiles. No more almosts. No future day where you might have chosen him freely, had he been patient, had he been brave, had he loved you enough to let you decide.
His hand found the wall. His knees weakened as he sank down against the cold stone like a man wounded, one hand pressed hard over his mouth. The first sob broke through anyway despite his efforts to smother it.
It was ugly. Quiet at first, then not. His shoulders shook with it, his breath catching so violently that it hurt. Daeron bent forward, fingers digging into his own hair, and tried to force the sound back into himself, but there was no wine to soften it now, no laughter to hide behind, no careless grin to turn grief into something more acceptable.
Daeron wiped at his face with a shaking hand. He had wanted you to love him more than anything. Now he understood the cost. You had loved him more than yourself, and that was not love at all.
By nightfall, he returned to the eastern courtyard. The fountain waited beneath the moon. Daeron approached it like a condemned man.
The water inside was still. Clear. Ordinary.
He gripped the cracked rim with both hands. “I wish,” he whispered, “that she had never loved me.”
Nothing happened. His throat tightened as the possibility of undoing his wrongs began to seem impossible. “Please. I take it back. I cannot do this anymore.”
A sound came from the archway behind him. Daeron turned.
You stood in the moonlight.
For one second, he did not understand what he was seeing. Then he did.
You were wearing the Baratheon girl’s dress. It did not fit you properly. The fabric hung wrong at the shoulders, stained dark near the hem. It was not yours. It should never have touched you. And yet you stood there in it, shivering beneath the moonlight, trying to smile at him with tears streaking your cheeks.
In your right hand, you held a stone. The same stone you had killed her with, he knew without needing to ask. Blood had dried dark across it.
Daeron could not move.
You tried to smile. “Do you like me better now?” you asked, your voice small and hopeful in a way that made the blood drain from his face. The desperate look in your tearful eyes wrecked him.
Daeron’s gaze moved over you helplessly. His body went cold from crown to heel. “No,” he whispered, the word scraping out of him.
Your smile trembled. For one awful second, you looked only confused, as if you truly could not understand why this had not pleased him.
“I thought…” you began, then stopped. You looked down at yourself, at the dress, at the blood on the skirt. Your fingers tightened around the stone. Then you looked back at him, tears spilling faster now. “I thought perhaps this was what you wanted,” you said, your voice cracking with wounded earnestness.
Daeron shook his head, horrified. No, he wanted to say. No, no, no, never this. But the denial caught in his throat, because some part of him knew the truth was uglier than that. He had not wanted the dress. He had not wanted the blood. He had not wanted the ruined face of a harmless girl lying somewhere in the dark.
But he had wanted the devotion that had done it. He had wanted to be chosen so completely that nothing else mattered. And now you stood before him, wearing the proof of what that meant.
“I need you to listen to me,” he said, lifting one shaking hand toward you. “Please. Just listen.”
Your face collapsed. Not into anger. Into pure, wrecked devastation.
“Why can’t you love me?” you asked, the words falling out of you like something broken loose.
His breath caught. “I do,” he said quickly. “I do love-” Daeron felt his eyes burn.
Your sobbing worsened, raw and terrible, your whole body shaking around the sound. Your face looked almost like yours and not yours at all, grief pulling your features into something too wide, too wounded, too desperate to be you.
Daeron stepped toward you, both hands raised, tears blurring his vision. “Stop,” he begged. “Please, stop.”
You shook your head violently, clutching the stone to your chest as if it were something precious.
“I just want to be loved,” you sobbed, and the words came out small beneath the horror of everything else.
“I do,” Daeron said, crying openly now. “I love you. I have always loved you.” But even as he said it, guilt tore through him. Because he meant the real you. The version of you he had ruined with his impatience. As he looked into your eyes, pleading with you to understand, he knew that you didn’t. Your head shook feverishly, as though you did not believe him.
“WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?” you screamed, desperation seething through you as you stepped toward him. Your fingers gripping the bloodied stone with such ferocity your knuckles were white. Without hesitation, you slammed the stone into your own face.
Crunch.
The impact was sickening. Bone gave way beneath the force. A spray of hot blood exploded across your cheek and temple, splattering the pale fabric of the dress in vivid crimson arcs. The stone’s edge tore through skin like wet parchment, splitting your forehead open in a ragged, gaping wound that exposed the gleaming white of shattered occipital bone beneath. Blood poured in thick, pulsing streaks down your neck, soaking the bodice, dripping from your chin in heavy ropes.
Daeron screamed, a sound of pure horror. “Gods, please, stop!”
You let out a furious, broken sob and hurled the stone away from you, not in surrender, but in frustration, as if even that had failed to make him understand. It skidded across the courtyard, leaving dark marks against the pale stone, and then you came toward him, swaying on your feet, blood slipping down your face while you wailed like something wounded beyond reason. Tears mixed with the blood streaming down your ruined face, turning it into a grotesque mask of red and salt.
“I just want to be loved,” you wept, voice thick and bubbling through the blood filling your mouth. “I need you to love me, Daeron.”
You took one unsteady step toward him, then another. Blood continued to pour from your wound, dripping gore onto the courtyard stones with soft, obscene plaps.
Daeron backed away, bile rising in his throat. He hated himself for this. This was not love. This was something devouring. You were bleeding out for him, destroying yourself for him, and still he recoiled.
Your body suddenly seized. Every muscle locked rigid. Your face changed.. There was no pride or madness. Only the realization of what was happening to you. Your eyes flickered around the courtyard, wide and bloodshot, with desperate clarity, as if begging someone to save you from the thing wearing your skin.
“STOP!” The scream tore from your throat like it was being clawed out.
Daeron froze. He didn’t know if you were shouting at him or the parasite that had taken host in your body.
You screamed again, raw and guttural. “STOP IT!”
Your face collapsed into fresh grief, the terror swallowed once more by the monstrous love. Blood still streamed from the wound, now a pulsing crater of torn flesh and exposed bone. You wailed, a sound of utter desolation, and lurched toward him again, arms outstretched.
Daeron stumbled backward until his spine slammed into the stone basin. There was nowhere left to run..
“I love you,” you sobbed again, voice cracking as fresh blood bubbled from the ruin of your mouth. “Please, Daeron…”
Daeron turned to the fountain. The water had gone dark. He bent over it, gripping the rim so hard the stone cut his palms.
His breath came out in a broken sob .“I wish she had never loved me,” he begged. “I wish I had never asked. I wish I had never done this.”
Behind him, you cried his name again.
The black water rippled. For one heartbeat, relief tore through him so violently his knees nearly gave. The fountain and whatever magic it possessed had heard him. The old story was true. There was still a way to undo this, to unmake the horror standing behind him, to give you back to yourself before his wanting finished devouring whatever remained of you.
Then the voice came. Not from the fountain. From inside his skull. Ancient, cold, and unmoved.
You only get one wish.
Daeron went still. The courtyard seemed to vanish around him. “No,” he whispered.
The water rippled again.
You already used it.
Something in Daeron broke. “No!” His scream tore through the courtyard, raw enough to hurt his throat. He bent over the fountain, sobbing now, gripping the stone until it cut into his palms.
“No, no, no, please,” he choked out. “Please, I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
But he had. Not at first, perhaps. Not fully. But enough. He had seen the terror in your eyes. He had heard you scream that it was not you. He had known something had crawled into the shape of your love, and still he had held it. Still he had kissed it. Still he had let it call him beloved because he was too weak to surrender the devotion he had stolen.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, though he did not know whether he was speaking to the fountain, to the Gods, or to the real you buried somewhere beneath the thing he had made. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The fountain gave no answer.
Behind him, your sobs softened into something almost tender. Then your arms slipped around his waist.
Daeron froze.
You pressed yourself against his back, trembling and warm and wet with blood. Your cheek came to rest against his shoulder, and he felt the slow spill of it there, blood from your split mouth, your torn face, soaking into his tunic and running down over his chest like some awful parody of a lover’s embrace.
“Oh Daeron,” you whispered, voice thick and ruined. “I love you.”
Daeron could not move. Your arms tightened around him.
“You see?” you breathed against him, almost relieved. “My heart knows no greater devotion.”
His tears fell silently into the black water. You nuzzled closer, smearing blood against his shoulder as you held him like he was the only safe thing left in the world.
summary: daeron flees his home and family, trading the privilege of his surname for the anonymity of working a dead-end diner job. his carefully crafted isolation is broken when a pretty customer starts getting close enough to notice the parts of himself he's been trying to leave behind
or
daeron works at papa's cheeseria lmaooo enjoy chapter one
The smell of frying oil was making him sick. He looked over at the clock, which rushed ever so slightly. 12:24. Minus the three minutes it was ahead. He could go out for his break in 9 minutes. Great. Just in time to finish the order.
A kid’s head popped up through the pass.
“Hey, could we have some napkins?” the teen asked with little regard to the tone of his voice. Daeron held back an annoyed sigh.
“Right there on the counter,” he replied rigidly, pointing to the napkin holder right in front of the kid, who grabbed some and went back to his table without a word. The blond’s eye twitched.
He suddenly remembered every time that he too had, as an entitled teenager, disregarded service workers, or downright mistreated them. This was his payment for that, he supposed. He finished plating the sandwich and fries, placing them on the counter and ringing the bell.
Looking around, he saw that the woman at table 4 had no intentions of getting her food herself, so he begrudgingly took the plate and exited the kitchen. The door swinged closed behind him as he carried the order, careful so as to not spill any fries this time. He hoped his boss would hire another person soon. The previous server quit early into Daeron’s time at the diner, so he had been managing all the work in his shift for the past three months.
Not that it was that hard, with how little traffic Papa’s Cheeseria got these days. Probably because of the cancer-in-processed-cheese scare among Facebook moms a few years back. He recalled his aunt Jena cutting his cousins off from store-bought pizza because of it. Valarr’s 10th birthday had these cottage cheese concoctions their personal chef had cooked up.
He knocked on the ajar door of Louie’s office, where the old man was stationed. He was snoozing at his desk, but saw when Daeron popped his head in. He motioned to the pack of cigs in his hand. “Going for the break,” he mumbled.
His boss frowned for a moment, frustrated that he would have to take over the dead restaurant for twenty minutes. He looked at his watch, and upon seeing that it was time for his break, waved Daeron off in approval.
He redid his man bun while stepping over the scattered boxes of Summer Luau decorations in the back room. Those would for sure qualify as cultural appropriation, he thought as he opened the door with his elbow. Fresh air, finally.
Well, as fresh as you could get in the trashed, tire-stained parking lot. Better than the smell of dirty sunflower oil and cancer cheese, anyway.
Daeron Targaryen had never considered himself a prideful or spiteful person, but there were no other explanations for his behaviour. His father was one of the wealthiest men in Westeros, his surname the equivalent to a black card in any respected institution. He had a diploma from a top University, with a job at his uncle and father’s company lined up. And he was currently smoking through a bitter pack of Iron Lungs, probably imported illegally through the Ironman’s bay, deposited at a port in the middle of the night, to end up at the sketchy corner shop in the bumfuckville town he had drunkenly settled in almost six months ago. All because of a single fight with his father.
At least that was what Maekar would say.
The truth was, Daeron would take this greasy, dead-end job and a slightly moldy studio apartment in a drive-through part of the Reach over the alternative any day.
Call it rich boy entitlement, sure. On paper, he would always have money to fall back on, if he so decided. But that would involve begging his way back into his father’s good graces, and that’s where the aforementioned pride would come into play.
He had needed an escape. At twenty-four, Daeron felt none of the freedom adulthood had promised him. He had finished the business school his father had insisted on, albeit with two years of overstay, thanks to his drinking problem.
When he declared he would be enrolling in the art school after that, a prize his father had been dangling over his head at every intervention and family event, the father and son duo got into a fight.
Daeron found the email declining his acceptance letter in the sent part of his account by accident, and far too late. He packed his bag and left without a word, leaving his bugged phone behind.
A week later, he bought a YiTish Xiaomi Mi 6, and, after equipping it with a temporary sim card, texted his little brother Egg. He let the family know that he was fine, but needed to step away from everything for a while, and asked not to be sought out until he was ready. Ready to finally do his duty of joining the company, or ready to forgive his father, he himself did not know.
He was sure they knew where he was. His great-uncle was the CEO of the most renowned security company in Westeros, and the family had ears everywhere. It rendered his seclusion to this little town useless, but he tried not to dwell on things that were out of his control.
Upon careful consideration as to what he should do with the blood money on his account, as he called it, he got drunk one night and spent it all on random GoFundMes. Down to zero. Congrats to a Pete for getting his DnD prop business off the ground!
He was worried he would start drinking again once he ran away. It didn’t turn out to be that bad. It was social, he reassured himself, arguing that the only place to meet people in towns like these was the bar. He tried limiting himself to two nights a week. It worked for the most part.
He still kept his sobriety chip. Only because he had grown used to fidgeting with it in his pocket. The memory of the while-lid, luxury AA meeting room he was forced to be in once a week for the year prior held no nostalgia. Vodka tonic did.
He took a drag of the cheap cig, the warm wind blowing the smoke back in his face. His foot was tapping repeatedly, a habit he picked up during his road to sobriety. Payday was two days away, he calculated in his head. He had enough cash for one more pack, two if he sneaked some food out of the restaurant. Though he had no desire to eat the slop they sold here, after months of making it every day.
He felt stiff, like he had just woken up. He thought about going for a run tonight. The small river that ran through the town was actually nice. A bit polluted, but beggars can’t be choosers. Then he remembered the last time he went on the run at sunset there. The view was beautiful, but the mosquitos absolutely ate him up. He would have to pick up a repellent at the pharmacy beforehand, but then he wouldn’t have the money for another pack. He opened the one in his pocket, assessing if it would hold him over for two days.
His break was quickly over, and he was back in the kitchen. Louie was bent over a sandwich, grilling it to perfection while giving unsolicited life advice, as all old men loved to do.
“This is the most important part, Darren,” he nagged. “I hope you aren’t overcooking them. That would be terrible for business.”
What business, Daeron thought, but held it back and mumbled out a, “No sir.”
The boss filled the sizzling silence again.
“What do you do outside of work, son? You got yourself a girlfriend? Boyfriend?”
Daeron chuckled, “No, no girlfriend or boyfriend, sir.”
“No?” the man mused.
“Business first,” he imitated his father, unbeknownst to Louie.
“Well that’s no good,” he shook his head as he flipped the grilled cheese. “Love first, boy. Then everything else,” he scolded in good nature.
Daeron thought about ending the conversation there, but he found the old man’s advice very amusing. It reminded him of his own grandfather.
“Haven’t really met any girls in this town yet, if I’m being honest,” he confided in the man. “I feel like everyone’s either twelve or sixty four.”
True, towns like these had little to offer to young people. Teenagers usually left for university and never came back, leaving their mothers alone and sad. He felt it when he passed older ladies on his runs, the women smiling at him in surprise, happy to see a fine young man for the first time in a while.
Louie chuckled at his comment, “Of course there’s girls. You young people just have your faces glued to your phones, you walk right by each other!” Daeron rolled his eyes. Just as his boss finished the order he was making, he smiled under his mustache and pulled Daeron closer to the pass window.
“There’s a girl ‘round your age right there,” he pointed to the customer at table five waiting for her meal. “Go on,” he pushed, “Bring her her food, tell her she’s pretty. Boom, you got yourself a girlfriend!” He patted him on the back in encouragement and turned back to go to his office, leaving Daeron to deliver the food.
He wanted to scoff his brain out at the notion of flirting with a random girl who walked into the restaurant. It had the same energy as old people thinking you can just send an email to a CEO of a company and get a job there. Though he probably could, but that wasn’t the point.
The girl, he thought as he walked out with her sandwich, was far too pretty to even be eating in this shithole. He hadn’t seen her around before, and it was true that she was the only girl around his age he had seen thus far. The last thing she deserved was for him, greasy and sweaty, in his silly work uniform, to give her a side of unsolicited creepy compliments with her crappy food. He placed the plate on the table with a polite, “Enjoy your meal,” and let the thought go. She thanked him with the same practiced politeness and turned to her food. He went back into the kitchen.
That evening, he decided to fire up Tinder again. He hadn’t used it since his early days in uni. Who knows, maybe there were girls nearby and they were just hiding. Or they just didn’t congregate in the run-down diner.
He chose a few photos that would do. One selfie of him and Valarr, with the latter cut out. Sorry cuz. One photo of him painting Rhae took for a snap. He was shirtless, so what. He looked good. Though his abs weren’t that defined anymore. Three more generic photos of him, which revealed nothing about his previous way of life. He filled out the bio, going for a basic catchphrase, not much thought in it. The shirtless painting photo should speak a thousand words.
He prepared for swiping, hoping to find a date nearby. He had a free day to fill tomorrow. And, truth be told, he missed casual dating, not having done it in a while.
46 miles away, 70, 142, 64… There really are only children and old people in this town. He threw the phone to the coffee table and prepared for the run, skipping the bug repellant.
He spent his free day in the apartment he was renting, bedrotting and doomscrolling. He painted a little in the evening, accompanied by some wine. It was the first time he drank that week.
The next day, after running out to grab a pack with his delivered salary, he worked his usual tempo. One or two customers would come in an hour. Some chose their own ingredients, some asked for the daily special. Today it was the bird buster, as Louie had decided to call it. After making it once, with the help of the recipe of course, Daeron’s stomach decided that it was just what it needed to get over the slight hangover, so he decided to make it for himself when the restaurant seemed quiet.
He sat on the counter, feet dangling, probably breaking a few health regulations. Louie had gone out for the day, stating an emergency, so he could break a rule or two. It also meant no break out back, so he had to eat here.
Just as he was basking in the taste of chicken and ranch on his tongue, the door opened, snapping him out of his intimate makeout session with the sandwich. He hurried to get back down, placing the food on a napkin as the customer approached.
“Sorry, let me just-” he jittered, rounding to the door to get the order.
It was the girl from two days ago, he noticed once he took his position. He wiped the ranch he had slobbered around his mouth. Embarrassing.
“What can I get for you?” he looked at her finally, meeting her amused gaze.
“Hi, um, could I have a-” she ordered slowly, confirming his theory that she wasn’t a regular here. “Rosemary bread.” She seemed sure about that. “Swiss cheese, and sausage,” she ordered, almost as if she was asking him.
“Uhh, can you get more than one cheese?” she questioned.
“Sure,” he replied. You couldn’t.
“Okay, I’ll have swiss and gouda, sausage, tomato,” he wrote everything down, having time to scribble little drawings of the toppings with her delayed choosing. “And, um, jalapeños, with the onion sauce, please.” Fuck, that sounded good too.
“Fries?” he asked.
“No thank you. Make that to go.”
“Alrighty,” he got to work.
To his horror, she stood by the counter the entire time, essentially watching him prepare the food. He never worked well while being watched. Unbeknownst to him, she wasn’t waiting to catch an error in his sandwich-making, but was instead gathering her courage to start small talk.
He had to stand near her to add the sauce, an opportunity she took.
“Hey, um, so,” she started nervously, “I just moved here,” she paused when his eyes met hers as he worked, looking for any annoyance or judgement in them. When she didn’t find any, with a nod from him, she continued. “Are there any places you would recommend?" she asked finally.
Daeron tried not to butcher her sandwich, think of an answer for her, and not laugh at the question at the same time. The concrete wall by the creek, he wanted to joke. Instead, he tried to form a coherent sentence.
“Um, to be honest, I moved here recently as well,” he confessed. “Haven’t seen much. I’m pretty sure there’s not much to see anyway,” he chuckled, and met her eye when he felt the chuckle come off as cruel.
“Really?” she replied with genuine interest at their commonality. “What brings you here?”
His intrusive thoughts told him to stick his head into the fryer full of hot oil. Only a spoiled brat like him could complain about a pretty girl asking him questions about himself, especially after his failed attempt at Tinder. He had little time to come up with a lie, so he chose to be vague.
“I’m not really sure.” When he saw her raised brow, he decided to add, “Just always dreamed of working at a diner that only serves one type of food in a town of four thousand people, you know?”
She chuckled at that, the smile reaching her eyes. “I bet.”
He remembered small-talk etiquette, “How about you?”
“Yeah, same, for work,” she fidgeted with her keys, leaning on the counter. “I’m a teacher. English and History. Well, just English, but the school doesn’t really care about qualifications, so I got both. Fifth graders.”
Daeron pretended to shiver, thinking of all the kids from that school who would come to the diner. He made her laugh again.
“They’ve been fine so far,” she reassured, before going back to asking him about himself, feeling like she was talking about herself too much. “So, where are you from?”
He was leaning on the other side of the counter now, waiting for the sandwich to grill. He lied on instinct, though there was no reason to.
“Starfall.”
“Ooh, a Dornishman,” she mused, coming across as awfully flirty. He didn’t know if that was her intent, but he played aloof, shrugging his shoulders.
“My mum’s side, yeah,” the attention felt nice. Perhaps Louie was right in pushing him to talk to her. “You?”
“Oh, I’m from Gulltown. Not as exotic as Starfall.” He felt kinda bad for lying. “But hey, we’re both from mountainous coastal cities,” she offered. He smiled at her making comparisons, feeling his cheeks blush a little.
He didn’t know what to say next. He was usually good with women. There wasn’t an event during the past few years to which he didn’t have a date. From other students to fashion models, Daeron had definitely pulled.
But that was rich Daeron. Trust fund Daeron. Daeron who could afford to be a prick. He didn’t know how to impress a girl over a slimy counter while oil sizzled in the background. He was pretty sure there was no way to do it. That thought might’ve been influenced by his brother Aerion, who insisted that only men with money got girls. It felt right in the moment, as he stumbled over what to say.
“I’ve been so disoriented here. Everything is so… flat,” she complained, continuing to offer him opportunities to respond.
“Yeah, it’s like,” he tried to think of something clever to say, “a pancake for dinner,” fucking idiot.
“A pancake for dinner?” she repeated with a laugh at his weird comparison. He stood by his words.
“Yeah. After work, when you’ve only got pancake mix and tap water on hand. No syrup. No butter. Rawdogging them at 10pm while you reconsider your life choices.”
She continued to giggle at his words, leaning on the counter more in bewilderment. Shaking her head, she said, “That’s the stupidest analogy I’ve-,” she tried getting her words out through the laughter, “-ever heard.”
He broke into laughter softly at the sound of her own. Her giggles were infectious. “You’ve never done it?” he asked rhetorically, tilting his head. She only managed to shake her head, clutching her chest in an attempt to silence her laughter. It only worked to entertain him more, his own cackles growing louder. Laughing like two lunatics.
She wiped her eye, which had begun to water, calming herself a bit.
“Oh my gods. I’m sorry. It’s been a long day,” she explained her fit, though he did not mind at all. It was more than welcome. It’s been a while since a girl laughed at his jokes anyway. He confirmed that she was good, flipping the sandwich.
“But for the record,” she added, “I’ve never made bad pancakes.”
He raised a brow, “Yeah? I’d love to try them,” slipped out before he could think about it. Turns out his default setting with girls was to flirt. A nice little souvenir from his bar crawl days.
She smiled, that initial shyness returning. “I’m sure you make better pancakes than I do, though,” she motioned around him, pointing out his job. He raised his brows.
“Yeah, I don’t think making sandwiches at Papa’s translates to any culinary skills.”
“You shouldn’t talk down on your abilities,” she teased.
“You’re right. I’m above this. Went to the Culinary Institute of Sunspear for this shit.”
“Really?”
“No??”
They broke out into laughter again. Two insane strangers, for sure. It was nice.
He smelled something burning and jolted out of it.
“Shit!”
They looked at the sandwich he flipped onto a paper plate, the dark brown side staring at them. Her laugh slipped through her restraint in small snorts this time, until he comically pinched the bridge of his nose. Laughter again.
“I’ll make you a new one,” he assured.
“No, it’s fine!” “I’ve gotta.” “It’s fine, trust me.” “It’s completely burnt.” “I’m in a hurry.”
They bargained, and he searched for anything genuine in her eyes, skeptical that she would want to eat this.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, 100%” she said as she opened her wallet. He raised his hand as he placed the paper bag on the counter.
“It’s on the house.”
“No.”
“I am not letting you pay for that.”
She sighed, giving him a tight-lipped, but grateful smile. She placed a bill in the tip jar instead, which he wanted to argue against as well, but failed at the certainty in her eyes. He nodded at her as she turned to leave, at a loss for words.
“Enjoy your meal,” he replied as he did last time, not knowing what else to say. She repeated her thanks as well, this time with a smile. It was a pretty smile.
When the door closed, he let his head fall against the cold counter with a grunt. Fucking loser.
synopsis: you help him build his confidence so he can ask his crush out while he helps you get back into the dating scene, a deal set between you and your neighbor – what could go wrong?
cw: alcohol consumption, aerion mention, mentions of cheating, mentions of sex, more men being shitty
other parts: one
playlist: choke by idkhow | i disagree by poppy | catch these fists by wet leg | peach by kevin abstract | a girl like me by flowerovlove
a/n: hey everyone, here's part two! after coming back from vacation and catching up on sleep and work, i finally managed to finish this. this part feels a bit filler-ish but we're building chemistry between the pairing – it gets juicy later i swear! as always, let me know what y'all think and i hope you enjoy! :)
"tell me about tanselle."
"she's an illustrator at our company – so she's very artsy and creative. she's really passionate about her work, that's why i admire her." duncan explained as he sat slightly uncomfortable on your desk chair, watching you get ready from your bathroom. you smiled at the sparkles in his eyes as he talks about her from the mirror.
"that's sweet. ask about her art more! since she's passionate, maybe stop by her desk and ask what she's working on. it's a start to getting closer to her and helping her feel more comfortable around you." you nodded, finishing the last curl you ironed through your hair.
"what else should i talk to her about?"
"you gotta be nonchalant with it at first. just casually pass by her, say hi and simply ask what she's working on. let her talk and then compliment on it, and then walk away. make it a routine and eventually she'll be expecting it, waiting for you to stop by," you guided while putting on a pair of simple earrings. you turned from the mirror to face duncan. "how do i look?"
duncan looked you up and down, observing the dress that hugged your body. he gave an impressed smile and nodded, approving of your attire.
"looks nice, very fancy for a dinner."
"yeah – at a very fancy restaurant. where did you find this guy anyways?"
"met him at a rugby game once...he's also my best friend's cousin." duncan pressed his lips into a thin line.
"oh so you took the easy route." you joked.
"it's something." he shrugged, feeling bad that he couldn't get you the perfect date on the first try. you could read his face and sighed.
"hey," you put a hand on his shoulder. "i appreciate you setting me up either way." you gave him a small smile. he smiled back, getting up from the chair.
"no problem," he said as he spun you around and walked you towards your door. "come on, you got a very fancy dinner to go to!"
-
"hey," you smiled at the man in front of you. you arrive at the restaurant, only lit by candles and dimmed bulbs and velvet curtains draped along the walls – very fancy. "you must be steffon."
"y/n," the curly-haired man simply said, giving you a warm handshake before getting up a pulling your chair out for you. "a pleasure to meet you."
the night went by with a couple of entrées and a bottle of wine ordered for the table. you and steffon briefly talked about where you're from and what you two do for work. nothing too exciting but nothing too bleak either – until steffon finished his first glass of wine.
you went into detail about the creativity that went into your work and that you were grateful for a career you could enjoy. steffon thought having an artsy job was bullshit, his scoffs offending you. he worked in finance and invested in stocks as a hobby, bragging about the daily increases and how you should start too (essentially calling your job useless).
you were immediately turned off. that's when you decided to keep a smile on your face and tuned him out as he explained to you how the stock market worked. his words went through one ear and out the other. you couldn't care less, but at least you got a free meal.
date status: failed.
"and then he what?" duncan cringed as he saw his reflection in the washer, watching his clothes spin at a slow speed. you decided to kill two birds with one stone and debriefed duncan about your horrible date with steffon in the shared laundry room of your apartment building.
"he said my company wouldn't last that long since it's basically an artist job and nonessential. he's a fucking douchebag." you spat out, duncan feeling guilty for giggling at the last sentence.
"i'm sorry i set you up with that bastard, should've listened to raymun when he said it was a bad idea." he scratched his neck.
"it's fine, i don't expect you to set me up with my perfect match on the first try," you shrugged it off, knowing that you've dealt with worse. "anyways, how did it go with tanselle?"
after completing a couple of tasks, duncan repeated what you said to him like it was a plan.
get up.
duncan got up to head towards the break room, making sure to take the route that passes by tanselle's desk. he looked over to see her hunched over her drawing tablet. luckily, she popped her head up and locked eyes with him, giving him a small smile.
make small talk.
"hey," duncan smiled back, stopping in his tracks in front of her desk. "whatcha working on?" he easily looked over her cubicle wall, noticing official prints and rough sketches that surrounded her.
"got some design requests for a children's book." she answered, turning her monitor for him to see. he awed at the perfectly detailed doodles with a vivid yet harmonizing color palette.
compliment her.
"that looks really nice! it's a cute style, i think they're gonna love it." duncan smiled through his eyes.
"thanks, duncan." her smiled widened.
"of course." he nodded, starting to pick his feet back up from the floor.
"duncan?" tanselle called out, making duncan immediately halt.
"yeah?" his eyes sparkled as he turned towards her.
"weren't you going that way?" she pointed in the opposite direction towards the break room.
"right," he nervously chuckled, turning himself around. "i'll see you around." he quickly walked away, mentally punching himself.
"nice!" you high-fived your neighbor and your washer finishes it's cycle.
"it's not much, but it's a start." duncan humbly states as he watches you transfer your clothes into the dryer.
"progress is progress!" you say as you quickly toss your wet garments, letting a few drop to the floor. duncan slid over to help you pick them up, grabbing a crumpled shirt with a peculiar design on it. curious, he unfolds the bright pink shirt to see a comically large cartoon cat taking over most of the front. it was loud and a bit tacky – something he would never imagine you wearing even on your off days.
"what is this?" duncan laughed as he showed you the oversized shirt. your eyes widened in embarrassment. "that is adorable, i didn't think this was your kind of style."
"oh my gods, give me that right now!" you scolded. before you could snatch the garment out of his hand, he raises his arm all the way up; using his tall height to his advantage as the shirt nearly touches the ceiling. "duncan, it's my pajama shirt. give it back!" you whined, jumping at your highest but failing to get even near his hand.
"come on, y/n, i know you can jump higher." he teased.
"you bastard." you tried jumping one last time, but then you remembered about gravity – feeing your body falling forward in the air. your face slammed onto duncan's chest. the bigger guy was able to catch himself (and you) before you two could land on the ground, instinctively holding your waist to secure you. with wide eyes, duncan set you back onto the ground, taking a step back to let you catch your breath. he cleared his throat to break the silence and handed your shirt back to you. "now was that so hard?" you threw the shirt into the dryer. "now where were we?"
"oh, yes," duncan nodded as his washer beeped. "how about we try a dating app?" he suggested.
"oh gods," you felt a headache forming. "tried that back in college. attracted a lot of weirdos and men who were only down to fuck." you winced, getting flashbacks.
"it's a tool! maybe now that you're older there won't be as many weirdos and men who might take commitment more seriously. you'll never know unless you try." he explained as he moved his clothes over to the dryer. you bit your lip in thought. what do you have to lose?
"fine," you sighed, opening the app store on your phone. five minutes passed while you set up your profile, duncan patiently waiting as he started the dryer and took a seat next to you on the bench. "how does my profile look?" you handed your phone to him. he tapped through the photos you uploaded, feeling his face heat up at the images of you with less clothing than he's used to seeing you (or any woman to be honest) in. makeup enhanced your features as cropped tops complimented your chest, revealing hidden tattoos that gave your body character. he gulped while trying to keep a straight face as he examined the rest of your profile. your bio and prompt answers perfectly portraying your personality.
"looks good." he simply said. before he could hand you back your device, you told him to swipe for you. he obeyed, looking through each stranger's photo and evaluating if they're good enough for you. he'd occasionally joke around and show you ones who are far from your type. "how about him?" he supressed a laugh.
"gross, get that away from me. how dare you think i would go for someone like that." you whined, lightly pushing his shoulders as he laughed. he kept swiping left until he found one that was deemed handsome enough to set you up with. the profile displayed a slightly older age but duncan didn't think you would mind. he finally swiped the opposite way only for the screen to show that you had instantly matched with him.
"i got one!" he exclaimed victoriously. you looked over his shoulder to see the man you had connected with. you agreed that he was handsome – a bit older, but handsome nonetheless. duncan started messaging the man for you. "got you a coffee date set for tomorrow afternoon." he nodded, earning another high-five from you.
-
you sat across from the salt-and-pepper haired gentleman who introduced himself as lyonel. sipping on your usual caffeinated drink, you both started off with the basics – where you're from, what you do for work, any hobbies. even though you two were just getting to know each other, you had already mentally noted that this date was already going better than the first one. you found yourself smiling at lyonel, cheeks warming up after taking in how strikingly handsome he is – especially when he smiles.
"can i be honest with you?" he stopped your train of thought.
"yes, of course."
"i'm going to lay all my cards out on the table," lyonel started as he leaned in. "i'm dating to marry, and i can already tell you're a great candidate." he caught you off guard.
candidate? for marriage?
"i'm sorry?" you blinked in confusion.
"i can see it right now," he gazed over you, visualizing a delusional future with you. "a house just outside the city, enough privacy for us. four bedroom, three and a half bath. two kids – a third if you wanted." he winked. your jaw hung ajar, surprised that he arrived with a whole five year plan in mind.
"slow your horses there," you stopped him. "don't you think that's a lot to lay onto someone for a first date?"
"i don't think so," he shook his head, laughing. he means business. "we both know i'm on the older end of your preferences, so i'm just trying to make my intentions clear from the start." he explained as he naturally twisted the ring that wrapped around this right pinky ring. you noted his action as you observed the ring, an engraved letter that belonged to neither his first nor last name catching your eye. you slightly looked over to see a paler stripe on his other hand – specifically his left ring finger. you scoffed as the dots connected.
"you're married." you blurted out loud, eyes still stuck on the band. lyonel pulled his hands back to himself, rubbing them in nervousness.
"i have no idea what you're talking about." lyonel's exhaled, his eyes suddenly somewhere else.
"i know that's a wedding band – the tan line on your other hand gave it away. you placed it on your other hand on purpose so you wouldn't give yourself away for being a cheater," you spat. "but you also didn't want to lose the ring either so your poor wife doesn't notice it ever moved when you see her after this date, i assume?"
"it's not-"
"then who is 'm?'" you raised an eyebrow at him. before he could come up with an excuse, you continued. "you had a planned another life with another woman but not a lie to cover up why you're wearing a wedding band." you huffed, a familiar feeling bubbling up when you found out about aerion's fiancé.
"i can explain." lyonel pleaded with you, but you weren't having it. you got up, now looking down on him.
"your wife deserves better." you walked out, making sure to block the older man on your phone.
date status: major fail.
"give me two more slices now!" you drunkenly yelled at duncan despite him sitting next to you on the couch. after another disastrous date, you immediately texted duncan as soon as you got home. his guilty conscience led him to buying four boxes of pizza and two six-packs for you to share in the comforts of your living room (who cares if it was a wednesday night?). lyonel's eerily similarity to aerion had struck a nerve in you, affecting you more than it should have. now you're on your fourth slice and third drink while a comedy movie played (duncan thought you needed a break on the rom-coms and just needed a com).
"i can see you're already feeling the booze." duncan laughed, stuffing his face with a slice.
"anything to not think about how all men are fucking assholes. you'd think because lyonel was older he'd be more mature – but no! just another cheating bastard like aerion." you ranted, eyes glued to the screen as you took another swig.
"i'm sorry, y/n. it's my fault you went on that shitty date with that bastard." he slumped. your slightly squinted eyes looked over at him and placed a hand on his back, rubbing it. duncan froze, trying to not react to your sudden touch.
"it's okay, dunk," you slurred, unaware of the nickname you called him. "you didn't know." you gave him a couple of reassuring pats.
"you're right, but i feel like a shitty wingman."
"it's only been two dates, dunk," you giggled. "i'm sure there's someone out there for me. we just need to keep looking."
"yeah." he simply said.
"now can you hand me another drink?"
an hour into the movie went by as you felt yourself feeling full from all the food. the alcohol taking over your mind as your mouth opened.
"why won't anyone love me?" you said out loud, catching duncan's attention. he looked at you in confusion, surprised by the sudden switch in mood. "dunk, am i ugly? am i too much?" you pouted as duncan panicked once he noticed your eyes getting glossy.
"no, not at all!" he exclaimed. "you are beautiful with nothing but the best going for you. you're too good for all those bastards. they're too weak to handle someone as strong and intelligent as you." he reassured, unable to tell if your flushed face was from his kind words or the alcohol. he turned back to the tv as he waited for your response. he was unsure if what he said sounded like a confession, but to him, it was the truth.
"that's so sweet, dunk," you lazily smiled at him as your eyes fought to stay open. "tanselle is such a lucky gal. i wish i had someone like you crushing on me." you giggled as you aimlessly talk, not knowing the effect it had on your neighbor. it was duncan's turn to blush, ears perking up in a bright red tint.
"thanks." he turned to you, only to be met with your head leaning to the side as you knocked out. the drinks and pizza caught up to you and now you were in a deep sleep. duncan couldn't help but laugh as he picks your body up, not wanting you to sleep in an uncomfortable position. he laid you gently on your bed and pulled over the blanket before heading back out into the living room and quietly cleaned up.
once your apartment was reset, duncan laid on the couch since he didn't want to leave your apartment knowing it was unlocked. he bent his knees up for his legs to fit before drifting into slumber.
you woke up feeling groggier than usual, a slight pounding rang through your head. you sat up, not remembering how you got in your bed. you smelled coffee being made from outside your bedroom, your legs instinctively pulling yourself off your bed and towards the door. you head into your open living room and kitchen to see duncan stirring into a mug. you noticed the extra mug of coffee resting on the opposite side of the counter with a glass of water next to it. you took a seat on your bar stool, immediately taking a sip of your coffee.
"make sure to drink some water too." duncan said.
"thanks, you didn't have to stay." you said into your mug.
"couldn't leave you alone, had to make sure no one broke in." he half-joked.
"do you know how i got to my bed? last thing i remembered i was still on the couch." you asked. duncan's ears slowly turned red.
"oh, i, uh, carried you there. didn't want you to wake up with a sore neck." he explained, quickly sipping his cup.
"oh." you softly said. the thought of duncan carrying you made you shy all of the sudden.
"yeah, you knocked out after your little breakdown." he chuckled. that, you did remember.
"right. sorry about that," you cringed. "guess all that booze made me more sad than usual. you didn't have to kiss my ass." you joked, referencing to duncan calling you 'beautiful' and 'strong.'
"it was only the truth," he brushed it off. "you're too good for the dating pool in this town." he said. you laughed at his unfortunately true statement. duncan spoke up again. "a couple of friends and i are heading to the pub this weekend. i think you should join us." he suggested.
"that's nice of you, duncan," you raised your brows. "but i don't want to intrude."
"not at all. i was thinking that maybe there's a potential suitor for you there. i can be your wingman on the spot," duncan proposed. "you can even bring a friend or two if you'd like." you stared into your coffee in deep thought, not sure if you were ready to deal with another man. you were already 0-2 on dates and was scared for another lost.
but hey – maybe third time's a charm?
"i don't know duncan-"
"tanselle's also coming." he said as if it was his last tactic to convince you. your eyes brightened.
"alright i'm in. that," you hinted at tanselle interacting with duncan. "i definitely need to see."
"great, we got ourselves a deal." he held his hand towards you from his side of the island. you reached out and grasped his hand, both of you giving a firm shake.
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