#iceflame

[the-darklings]

PLEASEEE ' Your grace, I am your man. Please. Your man ' this is so relevant for all of the men in ls adoring circle -dunk -baelor -lyonel -aerion -maeker

DUNK

You’re tending him again.

He came back from the yard scraped raw, bleeding in that careless way you know he does because he can’t help it—too willing to throw himself between danger and anyone smaller, too stubborn to admit when he’s hurting, too. You sit him down, tilt his face toward the light, clean the cut along his brow while he tries not to flinch more from your nearness more than the sting of the cloth.

“Ser Duncan,” you murmur, brushing mud from his cheekbone. “Hold still.”

He does. Gods, he tries. But you feel the tremor run through him anyway. Not fear, never fear, but something softer and far more perilous for him.

When you finish binding the scrape, he looks at you with that wide, unguarded devotion that always seems to spill out of him before he can catch it and tuck it back. His mouth works soundlessly for a moment, as though the words in him are too large to pass through his throat.

Then he shifts off the stool, and sinks to his knees before you.

Not like a courtier making a show of it, like you’ve seen dozens do over the years to gain your favour. He kneels the way a devout man might kneel before a shrine; slow, careful, almost reverent. His head bows deeply. His huge hands rest on his thighs, palms open, offering before he even speaks.

“Your Grace,” he says, voice shaking in its quietness.

You reach for him automatically, to make him stand, to remind him he doesn’t need to offer himself to you, but he catches your hand in both of his, holding it as though it is a sacred thing, as though touching you is the riskiest thing he’s ever dared.

“I am your man,” he declares, lifting his eyes to meet yours at last.

There is nothing hungry in it. Nothing greedy or selfish. Only devotion so earnest it threatens to break him in half.

“Please,” he breathes, not begging for your affection, but for the right to serve you. “Your man. Your protector.”

He lowers his forehead to your knuckles in a gesture so old, so honest, it feels like a ritual older than any throne.

“I’ll guard you,” Dunk murmurs, voice thick. “With my life. Until you send me away, I am yours.”

And the pure sincerity of it—the way he means every word with the whole of his enormous, gentle heart—settles around you like a finest cloak.

BAELOR

You don’t mean anything by it.

It’s little more than a courteous exchange, a lord offering some practiced compliment, his hand hovering a fraction too close to your waist. You step back before it becomes improper, but Baelor notices it. He always does. His posture never breaks, his face never shifts, yet something in him tightens like a bow quietly drawn.

He finishes his conversation with perfect civility, but his gaze finds you across the hall with an intensity that pins you in place.

“My wolf,” he says when he reaches you, voice low, velvet-edged. “Walk with me.”

Not a question. Not truly a command, either. Something gentler, deeper; a request he expects you to honour.

You follow him into a quieter alcove, torchlight haloing the stretch of his shoulders. He waits until the sounds of the hall soften into a distant hum before turning to you fully.

He doesn’t look angry. He looks steady, frighteningly so.

“Tell me,” he murmurs, stepping close enough that your breath catches, “did you welcome his attention?”

Your denial rises instinctively, but Baelor shakes his head once, too slow and knowing.

“No,” he cuts it in smoothly. “I already know your answer.”

He reaches up, brushing your cheek with the backs of his fingers. The touch is soft, but his eyes are not. They burn, some relentless, contained thing, but blazing from within all the same.

“He looked at you as if he had earned the right,” Baelor continues, voice a quiet burn. “As if you could be swayed by someone who has never learned the shape of your silences. The strength of your will.”

Your pulse stumbles. He feels it, his hand drifting from your cheek to the delicate column of your throat, fingertips skimming with a reverent, soft pressure.

“Baelor—”

His thumb presses lightly beneath your jaw, stilling the word.

“You forget,” he says, leaning in until your lips almost brush, “why you choose me. Every day.”

Heat flares through you. He sees it, tastes it in the hungry little hitch of your breath, and something shifts in his expression, too; something tender and devastating all at once.

“I see you,” Baelor murmurs. “Not the title. You. The woman who stands like winter and burns hotter than any summer sun. The one no man commands.”

He leans closer, his breath ghosting your mouth.

“The man in that hall saw what he wanted.” His voice drops, darkening. “I see what is.”

Your hands curl into the front of his tunic without conscious thought. His fingers linger against the flutter of your pulse, feeling, counting.

“I am your man,” he breathes, the words rich and rumbling in the quiet between you, “and you are my wolf.”

His head bows, your brows almost touching. “And I am not in the habit,” he whispers mildly, “of letting anyone mistake that.”

His thumb strokes your pulse once, reverently, like he’s memorizing the beat of belonging he feels there. When he finally draws back, his voice is barely more than breath.

“You choose me,” he finishes softly, “and gods willing, I will spend every breath proving why you were right to.”

LYONEL

You catch him lounging again where he shouldn’t be. Sprawled across a cushioned bench in a sun-soaked corridor, boots up, tunic half-laced, every inch of him radiating the smug indolence of a man who has escaped three meetings and one summons from the Hand.

“Stormlord,” you call his title on purpose, arching a brow. “You are meant to be in council.”

He brightens instantly, as though you’ve delivered him from execution.

“Ah,” Lyonel sighs, hand over his heart, “and here I thought you’d come to rescue me.”

You don’t dignify that with an answer. You only stand there, waiting, tapping your fingers lightly against your hip. He watches the movement with far too much interest.

Then, with a groan clearly meant to amuse you, Lyonel pushes himself upright, stretching like a cat waking from a pleasant nap.

“You know,” he says, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve, “it’s a terrible burden, serving the crown as Stormlord.”

“Oh?” you ask, dry as northern tree bark.

“Mm.” He nods gravely. “Endless storms. Endless paperwork. Endless dull old men droning in my ear about grain.” His eyes sparkle, sharp and devious. “One wonders why I ever agreed to it.”

“Your duty?” you offer. “Your birthright?”

He scoffs. “Hardly that. Duty is for respectable men.”

“And what are you?” you ask.

Lyonel steps closer, grin tilting, voice dropping just enough to slip under your skin.

“Hopeless.”

You blink, genuinely puzzled and wary. “Hopeless?”

“Utterly.” He leans in, brushing a loose strand of hair from your cheek with the back of his fingers, a gesture so soft it contradicts every careless word he’s ever spoken to you. “Hopelessly devoted. Hopelessly distracted. Hopelessly inclined to ignore half the realm if you’re standing in the same room.”

Your pulse jumps. He notices it, drinks it in with a knowing little twitch of his lips. And still he keeps smiling that bright, infuriating smile of his that hides a blade.

“You think I bend knee to the crown?” Lyonel wonders, soft and idle, near ponderous. “Gods, no. I serve because you sit beside it.”

You open your mouth, but he cuts you off with a laugh, shaking his head.

“Don’t look so startled,” he says. “I’ve never pretended to be honourable. Only reliable.” His voice softens, the joke thinning into something bare and earnest. “For you, at least.”

Then, with a ridiculous, court-mocking flourish, he drops into a half-bow, pressing your hand to his lips.

“Your man,” Lyonel announces lightly.

It should sound unserious, perhaps ridiculing, coming from him. It should be nothing but flirtation. But the way Lyonel looks up at you from under his lashes ruins that lie completely, because his eyes are warm, molten, and far too honest.

“Please,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Your man.”

You feel the truth of it like a physical thing. And Lyonel—reckless, radiant, irreverent Lyonel—straightens with a wink, already turning toward the corridor as if he hasn’t just cracked open something dangerous between you.

“Well,” he tosses over his shoulder, “if I must endure council for the crown, I expect you to repay the suffering with at least one smile.”

He pauses mid step.

“And perhaps,” he adds, voice dipping sweet and sinful, “a reminder later that being your man is not entirely thankless.”

Then he disappears around the corner, leaving you standing in a wash of sun, breath unsteady, pulse still chasing the shape of his words.

AERION

You hear him long before you see him.

A shift of floorboards, a breath held too long. That sharp, restless presence you know like you know your own heartbeat. The hour is late, the castle asleep, and the fire in your chamber has burned down to embers when he appears in the doorway. Barefoot, shirt half-laced, pale hair mussed as if he has raked his hands through it a hundred times.

“Aerion,” you speak quietly into the dark. “You should be asleep.”

He huffs a soft, humorless laugh. “I can’t.”

Of course he can’t. He never sleeps well when something stirs in him. He’s half longing, half nightmares, and mostly just dark, destructive desire. All of it bruises him the same way.

He stands there a moment as though deciding whether he should leave.

He doesn’t.

He crosses the room in three slow steps, and when he reaches you, he doesn’t ask permission. He never asks. He waits, just long enough to be denied if you choose to deny him, and when you don’t speak, he sinks down beside the chair and lays his head in your lap.

The breath you draw catches.

Aerion exhales like someone drowning who has finally reached air. His cheek presses to your thigh. One hand curls loosely at your knee, not gripping, only holding, as though he needs the anchor more than he needs dignity.

“Nightmares?” you ask.

He shakes his head. His voice is low, dark, a whisper cracked at the edges.

“No. Just… you weren’t in my dreams tonight.”

Danger coils under the words, but so does something fragile, something almost childlike in its honesty.

Your fingers hesitate above his hair. He waits, more patiently than he does for anything in the harsh honesty of daylight. The moment you finally touch him—lightly, barely—Aerion’s entire body loosens. His eyes slip shut. He turns his face a fraction toward your hand, toward the warmth, toward you.

“Aerion,” you murmur warningly.

He smiles into the fabric of your nightrobe. A slow, wicked, aching thing.

“Don’t send me away,” he says. “Not tonight. I can’t bear it.”

You thread your fingers through his pale hair despite yourself, and the sharp, thrilled breath he sucks in nearly undoes you. He nuzzles closer, his voice dropping to something fevered:

“You have no idea what you do to me when you touch me like this.”

Your pulse kicks, and he hears it. You know he does. His fingers trace a line along your calf, ever so slowly, savouring, nothing like the arrogant confidence he wears by daylight.

Then, muffled against your lap, dangerous and tender in the same breath:

“Aunt.”

An aching little prayer, a bruise, a surrender.

“I am your man.”

The words scrape out of him like confession, not performance, a truth he can’t hold back in the dark. His hand tightens just slightly at your knee, enough to tremble, not enough to trap.

“Please,” he whispers, silky and dark, breath hot against the thin cloth. “Your man.”

There is hunger in it—wildfire desire that could consume a kingdom, you think grimly—but beneath that, horrifyingly, unmistakably, is need. The kind he would burn the world to keep hidden. The kind he brings only to you, only when the night strips him down to something raw and desperate and hungry.

Aerion turns his head just enough to look up at you, eyes molten, lashes casting shadows on his cheek.

“If you send me away,” he tells you softly, “I’ll go mad.”

Your hand is still in his hair.

And Aerion leans into it like a creature starved for gentleness, letting the fire paint his features in gold and ruin.

“Let me stay,” he breathes. “Let me be yours. Just for this hour. Just until the sun comes.”

He closes his eyes again, as though surrender is safer than looking at you.

“As if,” he murmurs, voice dark silk, “I was ever anything else.”

MAEKAR

It starts in the hall.

Snow has fallen from the hills all day, light at first, then heavier, thickening on the stone steps and clinging to men’s beards as they come in off the yard. The fire roars pleasantly; the air smells of smoke and wet wool and something stewing in a great black pot at the back. Men are loud with drink and the comfort of their own safe keep.

Which is always when someone decides to be brave and foolish.

“He wears our colours well enough, m’lady,” one of your father’s bannermen says, not quite slurring yet. “Talks like he means it, too. But steel’s still southern under it, my lady. Dragon’s a dragon. We’ll see if he holds when the winter truly bites.”

It’s not meant as an insult, not even as an accusation. Northerners are too blunt for such games. It’s worry, spoken poorly but sincerely. The words find their way across the firelight well enough regardless.

At the high table, Maekar pauses with his cup halfway to his mouth.

He doesn’t look over. Doesn’t ask the man to repeat himself. There is just the smallest tightening along his jaw, as if something in him has clenched and he’s set his teeth around it.

You answer, because it is expected of you and because you would have done so even if it weren’t. Your voice is even, and your words are Winterfell’s words, your father’s words, as sharp and cold and sure as the stones underfoot.

The matter dies, on the surface. Men shift, placated. Someone calls for more ale. The conversation turns again, as it always does, back to harvest and levies and some poor fool’s misjudged hunt.

Maekar does not speak for the rest of the meal unless he has to. He listens instead, and that’s worse. He listens with his face turned slightly away, the nape of his neck corded, his hand around his cup as if he’s holding onto it so he doesn’t reach for something else.

You do not touch him there. Not with eyes on you. Not when he is wound that tight.

Later, when the hall thins out and the cold sting of the corridors closes around you, he walks beside you without speaking. His strides are heavy on the stone. He does not offer his arm. But he doesn’t need to. You know precisely how to fall into step with him now. You’ve learned each other well enough.

Only when the door to your chambers shuts behind you and the latch drops does he stop.

The room is dim, lit by one low fire and two candles guttering on the table. Your shadow crosses his when you shrug off your cloak. He stands just inside the door a moment longer, as if deciding whether to leave again.

He doesn’t leave.

He unbuckles his sword belt and sets it aside. Shrugs out of the heavy Stark grey. Underneath, his shirt is dark at the throat where snowmelt and sweat have soaked the linen; his forearms are bare and scarred where he’s rolled the sleeves up. His movements are clipped, agitated. Only the muscle jumping in his jaw betrays anything else.

You hang your cloak. Turn back towards him, eyeing him for a breath.

“What they said—” you begin.

“Did you agree?” he demands.

It’s blunt in a way you’ve stopped flinching from. Maekar is a man who cuts straight to the bone once he’s decided to cut at all.

You cross the space between you until you are close enough to see the pale nick along his knuckles from this morning’s drills, the faint, fresh line at his throat where some boy’s blade slid too close.

“No,” you say.

He studies you. As if weighing that on its own, no other argument offered. Something eases in him, but not much.

“They’ll talk,” you add evenly. “They always have. New lord, new snow, new grumbling. You know this.”

“They can grumble about my manners,” he snaps back. “Or my face. Plenty there.” His mouth twitches, brief and humourless. “They start grumbling about whether I’ll hold the line when it breaks, that’s different.”

“You’ve never broken,” you remind him.

He huffs. “You weren’t there for every year.”

You tip your head, waiting.

He drops his gaze. Not out of shame. Maekar doesn’t waste time on that. It’s something else. A man digging in his heels before he says more than he means to.

“I know what they see,” he says suddenly. “Southern prince in a borrowed cloak. Dragon’s son. Man who rode north on a king’s word and a treaty, not because the old gods whispered in his sleep.”

Your throat tightens. “Is that what you think this is? A treaty?”

“Not now.” The answer comes too fast; he looks almost annoyed with himself for that much softness, for how quick he is to give it to you. His fingers flex at his sides. “Now it’s… different.”

You wait, but he doesn’t elaborate. You bite back an impatient sigh.

“Maekar.”

He finally looks up.

You’ve seen this look on him in battle drills, when he has decided a thing and then decided it will be done even if it costs him blood and bone. Old. Stubborn. Unyielding. He takes two steps and then you have your back to the wall and him in front of you, not trapping so much as blocking out the rest of the world. His hands plant on either side of your hips on the stone, bracketing you without touching.

“Your father wants to know if I’ll stand when winter comes,” he says. “Your bannermen want to know if I’ll bleed for some hill they can’t see on a map.” His head dips, shoulders hunched just enough to bring him nearer, to make his voice a rasp between you. “I don’t give a shit about hills.”

Your breath catches; his eyes flick to your mouth, then back to your eyes.

“I care if you’re on them,” he adds tightly.

That lands heavier than any oath could.

“If the snows come in and the dead are walking, if the gods themselves climb out of those woods to take a piece of this place—” his mouth twists, the words grinding out, “they’re welcome to try me. They’ll find me where you are. They’ll have to go through me first.”

The way he says it, like a simple fact, makes something in your chest ache and something in your belly coil, low and hot.

“I’m not good with speeches,” he mutters. “You know that.”

“I had… suspected,” you answer, dry despite the tightness in your throat.

“Good,” he grunts. “Then you know I don’t say this because it sounds pretty.”

His hand leaves the stone. Settles, heavy and warm, at your waist. Fingers spread, thumb pressing once into the bone as if to prove to himself you are here, tangible and his.

“I am your man,” Maekar says.

He doesn’t dress it up. Doesn’t soften the rough edges. The words are as plain as any he’s ever given you.

“Not your father’s,” he goes on, staring at you. “Not your kraken-eyed bannermen’s. Not even my own Father’s, not anymore.” His jaw clenches, bones rolling. “Yours.”

You stare up at him. “Mine?”

He makes a low, frustrated sound. “Don’t make me say it twice, woman.”

You can’t help it. You smile, small and sharp. He sees it, and something in him steadies. His shoulders drop the barest fraction. The corner of his mouth threatens a curve he crushes before it can fully form, much to your disappointment.

“I’ll stand where you tell me to stand,” he says, a shade quieter now, but no less stern about it. “I’ll swing on whatever poor bastard you point at. I’ll freeze on these walls and bleed in these gods-cursed woods and eat boiled leather before I let anything take what’s under this roof from you.”

His thumb strokes once, rough, at your side. It could almost be accidental, but you know better than that. Nothing with Maekar is accidental.

“That’s my loyalty,” he finishes. “They can call it northern or southern or madness. Doesn’t matter to me. It’s yours.”

You lift a hand and catch his jaw in your palm. He goes still under your contact. You feel the scrape of stubble, the heat of skin, the way his throat works once under your fingers like he’s swallowed something sharp.

“Maekar,” you say quietly. “It’s more than enough.”

His eyes shutter for a beat, then open again, clearer and still hard.

“Good. They can keep their questions,” he says, softer now. “You know the answer.”

His hand tightens at your waist, something claiming and steady at the touch in the same breath.

“Your man,” he repeats, low and sure. “That’s all I know how to be.”

[falling-through-a-trapdoor]

Hyper fixation so bad I’m evolving beyond the need for solid food. Just photosynthesizing using the blue light from my phone screen. Nourished by Ao3

[sunrayssunspears]

illuminating

Aerion Targaryen x f!stark!reader

cw: modern!politics!au, that's it.

He was jealous every single time the sun kissed your skin. The sun seemed to lay against your skin a lot, as though it was drawn to you, illuminating you as though you were an angel sent down from the heavens just for him. That did not change the truth of his jealousy, though, for the sun got to kiss you every single time he couldn't will himself to. His own cowardness was now being thrown in his face as he watched the sunrays scorch your skin. 

You were laying back on the lounge chair as though it was the only place you had wanted to be in months, he wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Aerion was cocky, he knew this, but with his cockiness came an irritating self awareness. He knew what people thought of him, that he was irrational, easily angered, never pleased, spoiled, and so on, and he was willing to admit — only in the confines of his mind — that it probably wasn’t easy for you to try and control public opinion of him. 

He was almost glad that  you were taking this vacation to your full advantage and pushing away all of your work duties so you could relax, he just wasn’t exactly thrilled that you considered his mere existence a work duty. He would be a fool not to notice that you had been avoiding him at all costs. 

It was funny though, he had been sitting in the lounge chair next to yours for the last fifteen minutes, staring at you as though he was some sort of perverted creep, and you hadn’t made a snide comment, gotten up to smack him, or just stormed off yet.Your breaths were even, he noticed, and you weren’t doing anything in particular; you were staring up at the sky lifelessly, your sun glasses protecting your eyes from the glaring sun, your hands rested on your stomach, and for the first time in a long time your face wasn’t set in a scowl. You looked somewhat peaceful. 

His lips quirked up into a small, barely there smile.  

You were asleep.

divider from @/cursed-carmine

I've been working on this story for a few weeks and I wanted to see if anyone would actually read it if I posted it. Please let me know if this is pathetically bad xoxo

[ask-littleclan]

Welp most of you said wait three days in the poll, and it has been so here you go

The complete first moon of LittleClan

Moon 0 [start]

Moon 1 [here]

Moon 2 [next]

[the-darklings]

your thoughts on ls tracing AKOTSK men's features while they're asleep....? 🙏

*explodes*

oh, these made me YEARN like a mf.

BAELOR.

Baelor sleeps wrapped around you. One arm under your neck, the other banded around your waist, his chest a broad steady heat along your spine. This man doesn’t just sleep next to you. He gathers you, hoards you, his forearm snug across your middle as if he’s shielding something from sight. Some part of him still doesn’t quite trust the world not to steal you while he dreams. So to trace his features you would have to disentangle yourself, slowly, without waking him, which is its own minor heist in truth. And when you finally got your hand free, what you would find, in sleep, is a face that has finally let go of duty.

His brow unknits. That crease between his brows (the one that lives permanently in the daytime, the crease that comes from carrying a kingdom on his shoulders) is gone. You would touch it lightly with your thumb because the absence of it is so striking. And you would trace the line of his nose, the slight bump where it was broken once in a tourney mishap he refuses to discuss. You would map the shape of his mouth, which in sleep falls slightly open, vulnerable in a way it never is when he speaks. You would touch the silver at his temples that the southern light at the Red Keep kisses, as if the gods simply meant to mark him there. And you would feel, with a sharp and unbearable tenderness, the thinness of the skin beneath his eyes. The bruised hollows of a man who’s not slept properly in years until he started sleeping with you. The wonder of it would land on you like cold water: I am the reason this man rests.

He would catch you at it. Baelor sleeps the lightest of any of them despite being the most exhausted, because part of him is always listening for the realm. His hand would close gently around your wrist mid-trace and his eyes would crack open. That strange mismatched gaze, dark and pale, dazed with sleep, and he would smile, slow, delighted. What are you doing, wife? And you would, mortified, try to retract your hand, and he would not let you. No. Carry on. I should like to see what conclusions you reach.

MAEKAR.

Sleeps like a soldier. On his back, one hand resting on his stomach, the other near where his sword would be. Even now, even in your bed, even years into a marriage he’s come to want with all the fierce surprise of a man who didn’t expect to want anything again, he still sleeps in formation. Braced. His body has not unlearned the war. And to trace his face in sleep is to trace a map of every fight he’s been in, because Maekar’s face is evidence of them. The faint pox scars across his cheeks. The new split scar along the ridge of his knuckle from a sword hilt that bit him years ago. The cut along his cheek that has faded but not gone from Redgrass Field.

His hands are the part that would steal your breath, though. Rough, scarred and callused from years with a sword in his hand, from battles he’s had to fight. You would lift his hand from where it rests on the coverlet and you would turn it over in yours and you would map the calluses with your fingertip. The place where the pommel sits, where the reins lie, where the bowstring pulls. And somewhere in this, he would wake. Maekar wakes fast. Soldier-fast. He would wake with his other hand moving toward where the sword should be, and then he would register it was you, and the readiness would drain out of him in a single long exhale, and he would look at you with that gruff bewildered tenderness he can never quite hide and he would grunt, voice rough with sleep: what. Not a question, exactly. More a statement of presence. And you would say, softly: go back to sleep, husband. And he would, but only after pulling you closer, his big hand settling at the small of your back, his face turning into your throat where he can smell you.

AERION.

Catastrophic. And not in the way you’d expect, because Aerion doesn’t sleep braced or guarded the way a man with his obsession ought to. Aerion sleeps curled toward you, every line of him already oriented your way, like a flower that grew toward the sun in the dark and has not bothered to dissemble about it. One hand fisted in the fabric of your shift. One leg hooked over yours. His face turned into the pillow you share, lashes pale against fever-warm skin, breath stirring the loose hair at your temple. And the moment your fingertips graze his cheek (the moment you have the audacity to touch him while he sleeps)he doesn’t startle, doesn’t flinch. He leans into it.

Greedy is the only word for him. Aerion in sleep is greedy for you, in a way his waking self has spent years trying to disguise. Awake, his obsession comes barbed, sneering, costumed in cruelty so he doesn’t have to admit how badly he wants. Asleep, none of that machinery is running. So when your thumb traces the line of his jaw, he turns his face into your hand. Open-mouthed. Half-conscious. Like a dragonling rooting toward heat. His lashes flutter. He makes a small, rumbling sound in his throat. And he moves. That lean dangerous body shifting closer, closer. Until you understand he’s not simply asleep beside you but winding himself around you, leisurely and deliberate. His face is inches from yours and his forehead nearly brushes yours and you’re nose-to-nose in the dim, his breath on your mouth.

Presenting himself. Offering himself. Look at me, the whole shape of him says, even in sleep. Map me. Mark me. It has always been yours.

And so you do. You trace the cropped softness of his hair at the nape, where it grows in stubble-pale from the time he cut it for you. You touch the scar on his jaw. Smooth your thumb along the high arrogant ridge of his cheekbone, the place that goes flushed when he’s feverish or furious or wanting. You touch the corner of his full mouth, and his lips part for you, automatically, the same way they parted for the cup of water you held to them when he was sick. And his eyes are open by then, of course they are (Aerion sleeps shallow, the dark thing in him will not let him sleep deeper than that) and they’re pale and blown wide, fever-bright in the dark, watching you map him with the desperate attentiveness of a man who’s been waiting for this his entire life and would die before he admitted it.

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t break the spell. He simply lies there, curled around you, face inches from yours, and lets you have him. Lets you claim him. The whole tableau of it. The hot dragonish body coiled into yours, the parted mouth, the eyes that have not blinked in what feels like minutes. He’s a man being handed over to you in the only language he’s ever been able to speak: the language of stillness while you do what you like. He’ll be vicious about it tomorrow, say something cutting about your sentiment. Your softness, your northern habits. He will perform the disdain so you can’t take from him what he was unable to refuse you tonight. It won’t work. And the next night he’ll be curled into you again, fiercer, before the candle is even out.

VALARR.

Sleeps boyish. There’s no other word for it. For a man so polished in waking (the careful cultivation of charm, the lingering look he gives you across rooms, the deliberate way he holds himself even at rest) Valarr in sleep is softened to the point of foolishness. His mouth is slightly parted, dark hair mussed. The white streak at his temple is a pale slash through the tousle. The polish that defines him by day has completely deserted him, and what’s left is a man in his twenties with a small crease between his brows and an unguarded face that you can’t stop looking at.

So you touch him. Just your thumb at first, smoothing the crease between his brows the way you’ve wanted to all day. And Valarr (who’s the most attuned to you of any of them) doesn’t so much wake as soften further under your hand. He makes a small sound, sleep-thick and pleased. Turns his face into your palm, slow, instinctive. His lashes don’t lift. His eyes don’t open. He’s still mostly asleep. But his mouth finds the pad of your thumb, and his lips trace it, unhurried, half-conscious, learning the shape of you with the same devotion he gives every other inch of you when he’s awake.

Then he nuzzles deeper. His cheek against your palm. His nose at the heel of your hand. A man who is, you realise with a quiet jolt, presenting himself for petting. Presenting himself to be claimed. I’m yours, take stock, do as you like. Said with no words, only the small shameless tilt of his head into your hand, the tiny kiss he plants in the centre of your palm when his lips happen to find it. And when his eyes finally do crack open, mismatched and unfocused, they find your face and his whole expression breaks open into that helpless unguarded delight you only ever see from Valarr in sleep. The man under the prince.

He wants to be kept. That’s the secret of Valarr in sleep. The performance is intricate, the polish is real, the immortalising gaze is genuine. But underneath all of it is a man who wants to be a thing you keep on the bed and stroke when he’s good. And tracing his features while he sleeps gives him exactly that, and he goes utterly liquid under your hand. He’ll let you do it as long as you want, and he’ll purr small wordless sounds into your palm, and somewhere in this hour you’ll understand that you have ruined him for any other woman who’s ever lived, because no one else has ever touched him like this. Without performance, without ceremony, without payment due, and no one else ever will again.

DAERON.

Oh, oh, oh. Daeron sleeps with his hand curled near his face, knuckles white, holding something back. And his face in sleep is the only place you ever see him young. Waking, Daeron is older than his years. Wine-aged, dream-gnawed, carrying the weight of visions that crawl out of him in his sleep and walk into the world. He has a face that’s going to be ruined by drink before he’s forty if no one stops him. But in sleep, before the drink hits, before the dreams come, before the hand pours the next cup… Daeron looks young, handsome. He looks like the boy he was before the gift cracked him open.

So to trace his features in sleep is to map the wound the dreams have been chewing on. You would touch the dark crescents under his eyes. Deep, blue-black, constant now. You would touch the soft hair at his temple, damp at the roots. You would touch the corner of his mouth, which in sleep does this terrible thing. It twitches, downward, as if the dreams are already starting, as if even unconscious he’s bracing. And you would know, with a sinking that is its own kind of love, that you can’t save him from what is in his head. You can only sit with him afterwards. You can only hold him while he sweats it out.

He will wake mid-trace. He’ll wake with his eyes already wet, dream-disturbed, half a word in his mouth that he swallows when he sees you. And he will look at you for a long moment and then his face will crumple (just briefly, just for a heartbeat) and then he’ll laugh, that bitter wine-aged laugh, and say darling, you should not look at me like that, you’ll spoil me for the rest. And you will say, levelly, Daeron, and he’ll stop laughing, his hand coming up to cover yours where it rests against his cheek. He’ll hold it there for one long silence, and that will be the closest thing to I love you he’s capable of giving you.

LYONEL.

The opposite of all of these men. Lyonel sprawls. He sleeps the way he laughs: loud, generous, taking up the entire bed and apologising for none of it. One arm flung above his head, the other across your waist with a possessiveness so unselfconscious it reads as thoughtless, his frame radiating heat like a hearth. He’s the man who falls asleep faster than anyone you know, because Lyonel doesn’t lie awake worrying. Lyonel has never lain awake worrying. That’s one of the great gifts of being Lyonel Baratheon.

So to trace his features is a different kind of project entirely. It’s not heartbreak. It’s wonder. He’s almost obscenely beautiful in sleep. The stag’s pride of him, the strong jaw gone slack, the dark lashes fanned against tanned skin, the mouth that’s always grinning in waking finally at rest. You would map his face slowly. The small white scar through his eyebrow from a tourney. The flattened bridge of a nose broken twice. The soft place at his temple where his pulse beats steady and unhurried. And Lyonel, who sleeps deeply and long, would not wake. You could trace him for an hour and the man would simply continue to breathe, mouth open, lashes still.

He would wake eventually (late, slow, irritated by sunlight) and he would catch your hand without opening his eyes and bring it to his lips and kiss the palm and rumble what’re you about, she-wolf, and when you told him, I was looking at you, he would crack one eye open, grin like sin, and say aye? And what’s the verdict? And you would have to lie to him, because Lyonel doesn’t need to be told he’s beautiful, Lyonel already knows, Lyonel will dine out on it for a week. So you’d say the verdict is you snore, and he’d roar with laughter, and pull you on top of him, and that would be the end of any further tracing.

DUNK.

Dunk is the only one on this list who sleeps completely undefended. Dunk, all seven feet of him, all knotted muscle and scarred knuckles and broken-nosed sweet-eyed enormity. He sleeps like a child. On his side, one big hand tucked under his cheek, his face slack and peaceful in a way that takes your breath. The largest man you have ever seen, and in sleep he’s the softest, and the dissonance of it is so profound that the first time you saw it your eyes burned.

So you trace his features slowly. Oh so, very slowly. Because Dunk is a man who’s been touched without tenderness his entire life. Bruised, broken, struck by others, and to be touched gently while he sleeps is something he’s never received, ever, not in all the years of life. You would trace the cauliflowered curl of his ear, scarred from training. The ridge of his nose, broken so many times it has settled into its asymmetry. The pale lines of old scars across his cheek, his jaw, his brow. And you would touch his mouth last, most gently, because Dunk has the softest mouth of any man you know, and in sleep it lies parted and trusting like a boy’s.

And Dunk would wake. Slowly. Blinking up at you in the dim light, confused at first, his big body stirring carefully because even half-asleep Ser Duncan the Tall is afraid of breaking small things. And when he registers what you’ve been doing (when he understands you’ve been touching his face) he would go still, the way he goes still when something gentle happens to him that he doesn’t know how to receive. And his eyes, which are honest blue and absolutely without guile, would fill. Genuinely fill. And he would say, in that quiet rumble of a voice, m’lady. You don’t… you don’t have to do that. And you would say, I know. And he wouldn’t be able to speak after that for a long time.

And he would, carefully, very tentatively, lift one of his enormous hands and lay the back of it against your cheek. A fraction of the gentleness you just gave him, a fraction of the same gift returned in his clumsy, sincere way, and he would not say anything, but you would understand that he’s just made you a private vow no septa would recognise but every god in the seven heavens would.

[the-darklings]

SHE'S MY COLLAR — AERION TARGARYEN.

pairing: aerion targaryen x wife!stark!reader summary: Your husband is the most beautiful man in the seven kingdoms. It's only right you collar him to make sure he knows! contents/warnings: smut (18+), pwp, collaring/leashing, rough sex, biting / blood (minor), breath play/choking, degradation (mutual, lowkey affectionate 😭), marking/bruising, creampie/come play, possessive dynamics (mutual), power play/power exchange (femdom-leaning), verbal humiliation (mutual <3), as always when it comes to these two, the ultimate freak4freak. notes: Inspired by this beautiful art. I missed my evil lububu and his handler <3 ✶ devour me verse.

The collar comes from Lys.

Some merchant's trunk, silk-lined, smelling of rosewater and foreign incense. A slim, jewelled thing meant for the long, elegant throats of courtesans. Gold links fine as thread, set with chips of dark amethyst that catch candlelight like little bruises. A pretty leash for a pretty creature. The sort of adornment pillowhouses clasp around their most expensive offerings before presenting them to men who want the illusion of owning something beautiful.

You find it amusing.

That's the whole of it, really. You turn it in your fingers while Aerion is mid-sentence about something inconsequential—a hunt, a petition, the tedium of some lord's complaint—and you hold it up between you with the kind of idle, speculative look that makes his mouth stop moving.

"Come here," you call out casually. Almost sweet.

Aerion's eyes drop to the collar. Track the glint of gold, the faceted stones, the delicate clasp. His jaw sets, eyes narrowing into slits.

"No."

"It's pretty," you tell him, tilting it so the amethysts wink. "I want to see it on you."

"Then put it on your wolf and admire it there."

But he doesn't move away. That's the thing about your temperamental dragon. The refusal is always louder than the retreat, and the retreat never comes.

He stands exactly where he is, tension drawing his slender shoulders tight beneath his tunic, pale eyes narrowed to slits. You rise from the bed and cross the distance between you, bare feet quiet on the stone, and he watches you come the way a hawk watches an approaching hand, nostrils flaring.

You reach up without an invitation and he catches your wrist in a vicegrip. Hard enough that the bones grind.

"I said no." His voice has dropped into something serrated, all edge, no breath. "That is a whore's ornament. You will not put a whore's collar on a prince of the blood."

"I'm not putting it on a prince of the blood," you say, and your thumb finds his pulse, hammering, frantic, a traitor drumming against your skin. "I'm putting it on my husband."

His lip curls. Genuine, blistering contempt, the kind he wears like armour, the kind that has made grown men step back from him and whisper he's mad. "You've lost your mind, wife. This is beneath me. Take your Lysene filth and—"

"And what?"

You don't raise your voice. You tilt your head and watch him, patient as winter frost, while his mouth keeps shaping poison but his hand hasn't tightened, hasn't shoved you back, hasn't done any of the things Aerion is so very capable of doing when he means his refusals.

His body knows you even when his pride won't permit him.

You can see it in him, the war happening behind his eyes. Hatred and want tearing at each other like dogs. His breathing has gone uneven, the tendons in his neck taut as bowstrings. He's furious, genuinely furious, and he's half-hard already, and the combination is doing something to his expression that looks almost like anguish.

"You also haven't moved," you observe mildly, pressing a little closer.

Aerion's nostrils flare. But his grip on your wrist loosens. It's not a permission, never permission, just the muscles giving out under the weight of what he wants and won't ask for.

You step into the space he hasn't made for you and he lets you, jaw clenched so tight you can see the bone beneath that smooth pale skin, and when your fingers brush his throat he flinches like you've put a blade there, sneering down at you.

You fasten the collar with steady hands. The clasp clicks, quiet as a lock turning. Gold settles against Aerion's skin like it was poured there. Fine links pooling into the hollow of his throat, amethysts glowing dark against all that pale, furious warmth, the delicate chain trailing down his collarbone. His pulse jumps so hard beneath the metalwork you can see it in the tremor of the links.

He is, objectively, the most striking thing you've ever seen.

You let him watch you realise it. You don't hide the way your gaze tracks the gold against his jaw, the flush climbing his neck beneath the chain, the way his platinum hair glows against the gleam of metal.

You take your time with it. Look at him the way you'd look at something you own. Appraising, proprietary, openly pleased with what it's infront of you.

"My beautiful dragon," you murmur, and there's nothing teasing about it. Just a wolf admiring what belongs to her.

Aerion's whole body locks up. there's a crack in his expression and for a half-second you see the raw thing underneath, stunned and starving, before the hatred slams back down like a portcullis.

"Quiet," he warns, voice scraped thin. "Don't call me that."

"Beautiful?" You trace the line of gold with one finger, following it along the tendon in his throat. His skin is burning. "But you are. All collared up for me. All that pride and fury wrapped in gold like a gift." Your finger reaches the chain and curls loosely around it. "Like something I bought. Something I'm keeping."

"I will break your hand," he snarls, but his voice has fractured somewhere in the middle of it, gone hoarse and bitten, and his hands are fists at his sides that aren't moving, aren't reaching, aren't doing anything at all because his body has chosen you over every hateful word in his mouth.

"Look at you," you breathe, and you let your admiration sit open on your face, undisguised, almost tender. "My prince. My pretty, collared husband. Wearing a courtesan's chain because his wife asked and he couldn't say no."

"I said no—"

"Your hateful mouth said no." Your eyes drop, pointed, unhurried, to where the evidence of his body's opinion is unmistakable. "The rest of you has a different answer, husband."

The sound he makes is closer to snarl, like he's about to leap forward and throttle you.

"They tell me these are put on courtesans in the pillowhouses," you tell him, conversational, your thumb stroking idle circles against the chain at his throat. "On the loveliest ones. The ones men cross the Narrow Sea just to kneel before." You lean in, your mouth near his ear, close enough to feel the heat pouring off him. "A collar to say this one is precious, this one is wanted, this one has been claimed by someone who can afford the price of them."

Your lips brush the shell of Aerion's ear. He's shaking. Fine, continuous tremors he can't control, running through him like current through wire.

"But you're not a courtesan, are you?" you murmur. "You're a dragon. My dragon. Collared and flushed and hard for me, and all I've done is call you pretty and put gold on your throat."

His hips snap forward, involuntary, vicious, a jerk of motion so sharp the chain shivers in your grip and his breath tears out of him ragged. You feel the length of him grind against your thigh and the confirmation of what you already knew floods you with something hot and deeply, viciously satisfied.

You smile. Wolfish. The smile of a predator who's found the exact place her teeth fit best.

Aerion's hand comes up and seizes your face. A capture, fingers digging into your jaw, your cheeks, wrenching your head so you're forced to meet his eyes. They're blown black, the pale lavender almost gone, eaten alive. His mouth is a shaking, vicious line.

"You think this is funny?" he rasps, and there's something fraying in his voice, an edge that sounds like it's being held together by nothing but spite. "You think you can play with me, collar me like some—some Lysene bed-slave and then smirk at me—"

You don't stop smiling. You let him see every inch of it. The smugness, the heat, the cool Northern certainty that you've claimed something he'd sooner die than hand over. You turn your face into his grip and press your lips to his palm, unhurried, greedy, and feel his fingers twitch against your skin.

"I think," you say knowingly against his hand, "that you liked it when I called you beautiful. I think you liked it so much your whole body told me before your mouth could catch up." Your tongue skims his palm, just barely, tasting salt. "I think my pretty husband wants to be admired. I think he always has. And I think if I told him he was good right now, he'd come apart."

His hand tightens on your face until it almost hurts. His chest is heaving, every breath hauling through him like he's physically fighting something inside him. You can feel the chain taut between your fingers, connecting your hand to his throat like a leash, like a lifeline.

Aerion stares at you and you stare back. The room is so quiet you can hear the candles gutter and the chain clink, once, with the tremor running through him.

Then he crashes his mouth onto yours.

His teeth catch your lower lip and bite, hard enough that copper blooms on your tongue, and you hiss into it, fingers tightening in the chain. He licks the blood off your mouth and comes back for more, tongue pushing past your gasp, his free hand fisting in the back of your hair so hard your scalp sings.

He's trying to take it back—every sound you pulled from him, every tremor, every helpless grind of his hips—kissing you like he can swallow the evidence of what you've done to him and burn it.

You let him have the violence of it. You open your mouth and take his tongue and bite it, feel Aerion jolt, feel the groan rattle through his teeth into yours. Your free hand comes up and grabs his jaw, holds him still, and you kiss him back with teeth and intention, licking into his mouth with the focused, unhurried authority. You catch his bottom lip between your teeth and pull, dragging it out, and the noise he makes is humiliating and so gorgeous you smile.

He breaks away panting, wild-eyed, mouth swollen and blood-smeared, and you don't let him get far.

You tug the chain.

A measured pull, the gold biting into the back of his neck.

Aerion's head tips forward, forced, the angle dragging him down toward you, and you hold him there, his mouth hovering over yours, breathing your air. The chain pressed firm against his throat. His pulse hammers against the links hard enough that you can feel it thrumming through the gold into your fist.

"Stay," you murmur against his mouth. A command. A wolf's word.

You pull again. Harder. A real pressure now, the collar snug against his Adam's apple, gold links creasing the flushed skin, and you watch Aerion's eyes go glassy and his lips part on a breath that has nowhere to go.

He moans.

Not behind his teeth. A real, wrecked, open sound, the kind of sound courtesans are trained to coax from their wealthiest patrons, obscene and helpless and utterly without dignity. The kind of sound a prince of the blood should never make. If anyone else heard it, it would ruin him, you know.

He moans like a whore with your hand wrapped in his leash, and the vibration of it travels through the chain and into your fingers and settles, hot, at the base of your spine.

You hold the chain taut. His throat works against the pressure, swallowing around gold. His mouth finds yours again. Wetter this time, messier, all desperation and no technique, his teeth clashing against yours, biting at your lips like he can punish you for this even as his body bows into you.

You kiss him back with blood on both your mouths and one hand in his hair and the other wrapped in gold links, holding his throat, keeping him exactly where you want him.

Your collared, shaking, furious, beautiful husband. Yours.

Aerion doesn't break the kiss so much as redirect it. One moment his mouth is on yours, blood and spit and the taste of his own undoing, and the next his hands are at your waist, hauling you backwards. You feel your spine hit the edge of the bed frame hard enough to knock the breath from your lungs.

"On the bed," he snarls against your mouth. "Now."

You could resist. He knows it. The chain is still wrapped around your fist and his throat is still collared in gold and if you pulled right now he'd have to stop, have to kneel, have to wait. You could make him beg for it if you felt like it.

You choose not to.

You let yourself fall back onto the furs and he follows you down like gravity, one knee between your thighs shoving them apart. He wrenches them apart, graceless, nothing courtly about it.

His hands find the laces of your gown and yank. Fabric tears. You hear stitching give, the soft rip of silk surrendering, but Aerion doesn't care, doesn't pause, just drags the ruined bodice down your shoulders and off your arms with the efficiency of a man stripping armour.

"Wretched thing," he breathes, and the words land hot against your collarbone. His mouth follows the words. Teeth scraping the jut of bone, tongue dragging through the hollow of your throat. "Wretched, insufferable—"

He bites the swell of your breast through your shift and your back arches off the bed. His hands are everywhere, pulling linen, shoving wool, ripping where pulling isn't fast enough. Cool air hits your skin in patches—your stomach, your ribs, the tops of your thighs—and his mouth chases every new inch of you like he's starving and you're the only thing left in the larder.

"You think you can collar me," he hisses, dragging the shift over your head and throwing it somewhere behind him. His eyes rake down your body, naked now, spread beneath him on the dark furs, and for one raw second the hatred in Aerion's face cracks and what's underneath is so hungry it looks like pain. "Think you can put a leash on a dragon and smile about it? You smug, superior—"

"Beautiful," you interrupt softly, admiring. Your eyes trace the collar at his throat, the way it catches candlelight as his chest heaves.

His jaw locks so hard you hear the teeth grind.

"—vicious little wolf," he finishes, and his voice has gone thick with something that isn't anger anymore.

He's still dressed. His tunic is rucked, his breeches straining, and when you glance down you can see the dark stain spreading at the front of the linen where he's leaking, where his body has been ahead of his pride since the moment you fastened the clasp.

You let your gaze settle there. Deliberate. Hungry.

"You know," you say conversationally, tracing one finger down the chain at his throat, "in the Lysene houses they auction the prettiest ones. The patrons bid all evening. Wine and silks and perfumed halls, and the courtesans walk among them, collared just like this—" your nail taps a single amethyst "—so everyone knows the goods are spoken for."

Aerion's nostrils flare. A muscle jumps in his cheek.

"They'd have bid high for you." You tilt your head, considering him. That platinum hair mussed, mouth bitten raw, gold at his throat, cock straining wet against his laces. "Very high. A prince with a face like that? Those eyes? That mouth?" You smile, slow and wolfish, briefly dragging your thumb over his full bottom lip. "I'd have outbid them all. Every merchant prince and magister in the room. I'd have bought you for myself and taken you home in your collar and kept you exactly like this. Hard, and furious, and all mine."

A sound rips from Aerion, rumbling through his frame.

His hand shoots to his laces, fumbling, tearing at the ties with shaking fingers, and you watch him strip his breeches down his hips with none of the control he prides himself on. His cock springs free flushed and dripping, slick at the head, twitching with his pulse, and the evidence of what your words have done to him is obscene and unmistakable.

He doesn't give you time to admire it.

His hands seize your thighs and wrench them open. Wide, wider, until the stretch burns and your hips cant off the furs. He settles between them and you feel the blunt, wet head of him drag through the slick mess of you once, catching at your entrance, and then he drives in.

One stroke. All of him. No preamble, no patience, no tenderness.

Your head snaps back. The sound that leaves your mouth is half gasp, half snarl. He's thick and hard, furious inside you, every inch of him a declaration, and your body seizes around him in a clench that makes Aerion's shoulders shudder.

"There," he grits out, teeth bared, hips already pulling back for the next thrust. "Is this what you wanted? Your collared whore between your legs?"

He snaps forward. Hard. Your body jolts up the bed, furs bunching beneath your spine. His hands pin your hips, thumbs digging into the hollows, holding you open, holding you still while he fucks into you with furious, punishing strokes. The narrow cant of his hips drives a rhythm that's all fury and no mercy.

"Spoiled—" Thrust. "—conniving—" Thrust. "—wolf—"

Aerion bites the junction of your shoulder and your neck. Sucks the skin between his teeth hard enough to bruise, hard enough to mark, and the sound you make is shameless, back bowing, your fingers scrabbling at his ribs.

He bites lower. The top of your breast. The ridge of your collarbone. Everywhere his mouth lands he leaves evidence. Welts, teeth-marks, the wet shine of his tongue, mapping you like territory he's conquering even as the collar at his throat says otherwise.

You let him have it. The fury, the pace, the bruising grip. You let him think he's reclaiming himself.

Then you wrap the chain around your fist and pull.

The collar bites into his nape. Aerion's head jerks forward, forced, and the angle changes, drives him deeper, and the sound he makes is guttural and broken, so far from princely it would make his father weep.

"My pretty whore," you murmur up at him, and your voice is steady even with him buried to the hilt inside you, even with your thighs shaking around him. "My beautiful, expensive, collared—"

Aerion's hand closes around your throat.

His fingers find the column of your windpipe with the precision of a man who's t done this before, who knows the anatomy, who's imagined the give of it. Real pressure follows his grip and your airway narrows to a reed.

You lean into it.

Your chin tips up, back arching. You press your throat harder against his palm and moan. Open-mouthed, loud, the kind of sound that fills a room and stains the air. The look on Aerion's face when he realises you're not afraid, that you like it, that the compression of your breath is making you clench tighter around his cock, is something you will keep behind your teeth for the rest of your natural life.

"You," he manages, and his hips haven't stopped, punishing rhythm gone ragged at the edges now, his voice husky. "You're the whore of the two of us. Acting like this. Taking my cock like this. Listen to the mess of you. Moaning with my hand on your throat like a—a dockside—"

You yank the chain. Harder than before. Hard enough that the gold bites welts into his skin, hard enough that Aerion's breath cuts short and his eyes roll and his next thrust goes so deep you feel it in the back of your teeth.

Your hips snap up to meet him—deliberate, brutal, grinding him into the deepest, most sensitive part of you—and the wet sound of it is filthy, unmistakable, the slick drench of your body taking his echoing off the stone walls.

His composure shatters.

What's left is animal, narrow hips pistoning, the obscene slap of his skin against yours, his fingers spreading you wider, thumbs hooking your thighs and pulling until you're split open around him in a way that's almost too much. The stretch burns. The fullness borders on pain. You're going to ache tomorrow, going to feel every brutal inch of this for days, and the knowledge of it—the phantom soreness already gathering in your hips—makes you wetter, makes you greedier, makes you tighten around him until he chokes.

"Fuck—"

He hooks your legs over his shoulders. The angle goes deeper, filthier, the wet sound of his cock working in and out of you loud enough that you can hear every thrust, every slick drag, the rhythmic slap of his balls against you keeping time like a drumbeat.

You reach up and wrap both hands in the chain and haul him down toward you, bending yourself nearly in half, pulling him deeper by his collar until Aerion's forehead presses against yours and you're breathing the same ragged air.

"Come in me," you tell him. An order, a wolf's command.

"Do not order me—"

But his hips stutter, his jaw going slack. The muscles in his neck cord tight against the gold links and you feel him break. The first hot pulse of him inside you floods you, thick and sudden, and Aerion's whole body seizes above you like a man struck by lightning.

He spills in deep, wrenching surges, hips grinding against yours with each gush, and there's so much of it—gods, so much—you feel it flood the space where you're joined, feel it overflow, feel the hot trickle of it escape around his cock and drip in slow rivulets onto the sheets beneath you.

The heat of it, the sight of your pretty dragon shaking apart above you, collared, spilling himself into you, desperate and greedy, pushes you over.

You come snarling. Your back arches off the bed, your teeth bared, your fingers coiled in the chain. The pleasure tears through you in savage waves and your body clenches around him. A vice-grip that wrenches a shocked, gutted noise out of his chest.

Aerion's hips slam forward on instinct, burying himself as deep as he can go, and both hands grab your backside, full handfuls, fingers sinking into the flesh, dragging you onto him like he can crawl inside you.

"Fuck—fuck, you're—gods—" Greedy and petulant even now, grinding into your contractions, chasing the squeeze of you. His cock pulses and you feel the fresh hot leak of him, not a full release but close, dangerously close, his body trying to spend itself again just from the clench of yours. "Take it—take all of it, you greedy—perfect—fucking —"

The filth spills out of him unchecked, half-words and fragments, praise tangled up in profanity. His arms lock around you, both hands still full of your ass, and he folds over you, curling, coiling, a dragon wrapping around his mate with his face buried in your throat and his hips still rocking in small, helpless pulses.

Burrowing into you. Trying to get closer when closer doesn't exist.

You hold him through it. Chain slack in your fist now, your other hand in his silver hair, your legs still trembling where they're hooked over his shoulders.

He stays inside you through every aftershock, twitching, half-hard, refusing to pull out even as the mess between you gets obscene. His spend leaks around his cock, dripping in slow pearly rivulets down through your folds, pooling beneath you on the sheets.

You reach between your bodies and touch yourself, fingers sliding through the slick ruin of his release and your own, spreading it over your core, your navel, the trembling plane of your stomach. Painting yourself with the evidence of him.

Aerion watches you do it. His chest heaving, his mouth open, his eyes tracking your fingers with the dazed, shattered focus.

You bring your fingers to your mouth. Hold his gaze. Taste.

His cock twitches inside you. He makes a low, growling sound.

Then, slowly, as if his bones have turned to water, he collapses. Aerion's weight comes down on you in a controlled fall, his face dropping into the curve of your neck, his breath coming in long, shuddering pulls against your pulse. The chain goes slack between you. The collar shifts, warm against your collarbone where his throat presses.

For a long moment there's nothing but breathing. The guttering candles. The cooling sweat between your bodies. His heartbeat thuds against your ribs, gradually slowing.

You burrow into him. Turn your face against his chest and press your mouth there. Teeth grazing his sternum, his collarbone, the smooth skin over his ribs. You nip. Suck a patch of skin between your lips and release it flushed. Your tongue drags through the salt-sheen of his sweat, tracing the cut of muscle, and your hand drifts up to stroke his chest, his throat, fingertips trailing the chain at his collar, the ridge of his Adam's apple, the hollow beneath.

Petting him. Mapping the territory you've claimed.

Aerion's hand comes up and cradles the back of your head. His fingers thread through your hair, and he shifts, angling his neck, tilting his shoulder down, offering you more skin. Easier access.

"You're an animal," he informs you, voice scraped raw and dry as bone. His thumb traces the curve of your skull. "A feral, uncivilised creature who should have been left in the kennels at Winterfell."

You suck a bruise into the ridge of his collarbone. He exhales through his nose, slow and controlled, and tips his chin higher, baring the collared line of his throat to your mouth with an ease that contradicts every word coming out of it.

"Disgusting habit," he adds, as you nip the tendon below his ear. His fingers card through your hair, untangling, smoothing. Stroking, greedy and possessive. "Gnawing on your husband like a bone. Do they teach you that in the North? Is it in the wedding vows, hm?"

You hum against his skin. Your teeth graze his pulse point and his breath catches—just barely, just enough—and his hand gentles at your nape, cradling rather than holding.

You can feel him preening under it. The commentary is armour but his body is liquid, angling into every scrape of your teeth, every press of your lips. Offering himself up piece by piece while his mouth pretends outrage.

You press a kiss to the hinge of his jaw. Soft. Almost sweet.

Then you pull back just enough to meet his eyes.

"My pretty whore," you murmur fondly.

The reaction is instantaneous.

His eyes flash, pale lavender burning through the blown-black aftermath, and his hand snaps from the back of your skull to the nape of your neck, gripping hard, fingers digging into the tendons. He drags you up and kisses you. Bruising. All teeth, his tongue pushing into your mouth, tasting himself on you, tasting everything on you.

His other hand slides down your body. Between your thighs. Through the mess of his own spend. He pushes two fingers into you easily, so wet you barely feel the stretch of him, just the sudden fullness and the obscene sound of it, his seed squelching around his knuckles as he curls deep.

"Whore," he repeats against your mouth, low and dangerous, his fingers pumping into you with a rhythm that's already building toward something. "You want a whore, wife? I'll fuck you like one." His teeth catch your lip. His fingers twist and you gasp. "Over and over. Till you can't walk. Till the whole Red Keep knows what I've done to you. Till you're dripping with me for days."

You laugh. Breathless, warm, the sound vibrating between your mouths. Your hand finds the chain and you pull him closer—not hard, just a steady pressure, a reminder of what's still fastened at his throat—and your legs wrap around his hips, drawing him in, fitting your body against his like a key turning in a lock.

"Good," you say.

His fingers curl inside you, his mouth finds yours again. The collar gleams between you in the candlelight.

Neither of you sleeps for a long, long time.

[the-darklings]

THIRST TRAP!!! — AERION TARGARYEN.

pairing: modern!aerion targaryen x f!stark!reader summary: Aerion Targaryen is a vain, vain man. Unfortunately for him, his thirst traps work better on himself than they do on you. contents/warnings: smut (18+), switch!aerion, switch!reader, mean!bratty!aerion (gotta compensate for the fact he's down bad horrendously ykyk), banter as foreplay, mentions of smoking/drug use, russian lit as foreplay (😭), oral (m receiving), deepthroating, spit play, choking, hair pulling, marking/biting, fingering, multiple orgasms, possessive!aerion, edging/orgasm denial (brief), dirty talk, praise kink, degradation (mild), rough sex but they're both so into i'm not sure it counts, ultimate freak4freak... they're genuinely demons in this 😭 #freakmatched notes: I missed writing these two so much. This is the verse where you never walked away, so Baelor never happened and you two are just gross and in love. So enjoy! By a crazy coincidence, we also hit 15k followers today, so HAPPY 15K AND THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE MY LOVESSSS 💕

✶ valarr's version. ✶ modern au/trailer trash masterlist.

The text comes through at three in the afternoon.

You're curled into the corner of his couch in nothing but his t-shirt. Black and expensive, the cotton so thin it's almost translucent. The hem hits mid-thigh with absolutely nothing on under it because that's a small private cruelty you've been cultivating for weeks now. 

You've got your knees drawn up, Aerion’s copy of Demons open across your thighs. The spine is cracked from repeated reading, the margins so densely annotated in his cramped hand that the printed text is sometimes hard to find beneath the ink. Three different pens. Half-Russian, half-English, the occasional Valyrian word slashed in furious black when no other language would do. 

self-pitying, he's written next to one of Stavrogin's monologues, and then beneath it, smaller, almost reluctant: and yet—

"And yet," you read out loud with a quiet, huffing laugh. "Relatable, huh?"

Your phone buzzes against the cushion. You set the book aside, careful with the worn pages, and pick it up.

ari 🐉 [image]

You click on the image preview, waiting for the full thing to load. 

He's in the gym bathroom. That obscene private one in the basement of the building, all black tile and recessed lighting that he probably picked specifically for this exact purpose. Shirtless. Pale hair damp and pushed back from the sharp angles of his face. One arm braced against the counter, the other angled up to hold the phone. His head is tipped slightly, that flat, bored expression he wears when he's hunting your attention and pretending he isn't. 

The lighting catches every single line of him. The lean, wiry musculature he works obsessively to maintain, the cut of his hipbones disappearing into low-slung shorts, the platinum at his nipple, and, lastly, the faint sheen of sweat still clinging to his sternum. Four silver hoops in his left ear glint, his full mouth parted. A glimpse of the dragon's tail is just visible, curling over his hipbone where the back tattoo crests. 

"You vain, conceited bastard."

He's beautiful. He's outrageously beautiful, and he knows it, and that’s exactly why he’s never going to hear it from you. Still, you can’t help but drink the lines of him in, heat curling low in your belly, a laugh still caught in your throat.

The caption, when it comes, is one word.

well?

You roll your eyes, humming under your breath. Unbelievable. Annoying. You let the phone fall face down on the cushion, getting comfortable again.

You go back to Demons.

Aerion gets home an hour and twenty minutes later. 

You hear the elevator chime, the soft hiss of the door, and then the particular cadence of his bare feet on marble. Aerion never wears shoes in his own home, finds it gauche, a peasant's habit, sweetheart, only idiots wear shoes indoors. 

You don't look up as he enters, turning another page instead. A hum builds in your throat at one of his marginalia (Tikhon is the only honest man in this novel, and Dostoevsky knew it), and you feel, more than see, the moment Aerion registers what you're wearing.

The pause is small. A fraction of a beat. He covers it almost instantly, but you catch it.

"Oh, fuck off," he says pleasantly, dropping his gym bag beside the door. "Really. The shirt? And the book? You're being deliberate."

You make a vague, distracted sound, finger tracing another note he’s made.

"You've left no note unstruck. The little tableau of it, look at her, positively domestic—" He's coming closer, voice dripping with that mean, lilting drawl. "Tell me, did you set this up before or after I sent the photo?"

"Before."

"Liar."

You turn another page. "I was already wearing it. I'm always wearing it."

"Yes," he says, and his voice has gone darker, lower, the performance briefly slipping. "I know."

You finally look up.

He's leaned against the back of the couch behind you, both hands braced on the leather, peering down at you upside-down. You have to be careful, immediately, not to let him see what your face does at the sight of him.

Aerion hasn't showered.

The shirt he pulled on after the gym is loose and unbuttoned, hanging open down his chest, and you can see the gleam still catching at his collarbones, the faint sheen down his sternum. Clean sweat, cooled now, the smell of him filtered by the elevator ride into something concentrated and warm. Beneath the warmth of his skin lingers the faint cigarette he definitely smoked in the parking garage on the way up. 

There's still a vein up the side of his bicep where the pump from his last set hasn't fully dropped. The dragon's wing is half-visible where the shirt has fallen open, the ink across his skin stark and detailed, scales catching the light. The piercing glints. He's wearing his rings—the heavy platinum Targaryen signet, the cluster of thinner bands on his middle finger—and the hoops in his ear gleam. 

His hair has dried slightly damp at the temples, and he’s so unbelievably hot you could choke on it.

You arrange your face into perfect blankness instead.

"What are you reading?" he asks, though he already knows.

"Your annotations sound like the ramblings of a madman,” you inform him graciously. “I hope you know that."

"My annotations are analytical."

You snort. "You wrote self-pitying next to Stavrogin and then immediately walked it back."

"He is self-pitying."

You tip your head back, pitching your voice to match his. "And yet—"

"Shut up." His mouth twitches despite himself. "Don't quote me at myself. It's beneath you."

"Is it?" you pose.

You tilt your head back further against the couch cushion to look at him properly. Upside-down, Aerion’s features look even sharper. The devastating cut of his jaw, the strong line of his nose, the pale lashes lowered. His eyes look almost lavender in this light, washed pale, gazing down at you with an expression that’s half-irritation, half something he would rather die than name.

"You didn't text me back," he remarks casually.

You bite the inside of your cheek to stop yourself from laughing at the disgruntlement you hear simmering beneath the faux casual statement. 

"You sent me a thirst trap," you say flatly. 

"I sent you a photograph."

"Of yourself. Shirtless. Flexing."

"I was checking my form," he says, with the magnificent affront of someone who absolutely was not, in fact, doing that.

"You wrote the caption well?" you remind him.

Aerion’s eyes flash, mouth twisting sourly. "That was… a separate enquiry," he insists, irked. 

"Into what, exactly?"

"Your aesthetic opinions, sweetheart,” he drawls dryly. “I have a body, and you, allegedly, have taste, and the two intersect at—"

You hum. "Aesthetic opinions. Right, right."

"Yes."

"On your form."

"Yes."

You smile slowly, all teeth. You watch Aerion’s pupils widen at it—the involuntary little dilation, gone before he can mask it—and feel, low and warm in your stomach, the answering pull of yes, there you are, hello, pretty dragon.

He registers the smile, registers what it means, and his mouth tightens.

Aerion drops his head and bites your jaw.

Just sinks his teeth in, no playfulness in it. His teeth find you just below the curve of bone, where the skin is thin, with enough pressure that you feel the warning in it. A small, vicious nip designed to make you make a sound. 

He's been annoyed for an hour and twenty minutes. He went to the gym, worked out, rode up in his own elevator, let himself in, and found you wearing his shirt, reading his book, still not giving him what he wants. The bite is the smallest, pettiest way to communicate as much. You can smell him properly from this angle. The salt of his sweat, the warm damp of his hair, the faint cologne underneath that's gone hours-old and tacky. 

You don't react.

You let him bite, let Aerion hold there, jaw locked, his breath hot and moist against your skin. You let the silence stretch between you.

Then you turn your head lazily and press a single, light peck to his cheek.

You feel him seethe.

It's a tiny, beautiful thing, really. The way Aerion’s whole body goes rigid against the back of the couch, his teeth releasing with an audible click. He makes a soft, furious sound in his throat that’s nearly a hiss.

"Are you fucking serious?" he demands.

You shrug against the cushion, stretching your toes out with a wiggle. Readjusting your weight, you turn another page of the book.

Aerion’s hand catches your jaw.

He comes around the couch in one motion, fast, his fingers closing around your face. Thumb under your chin, fingers spread along your cheek, gripping with the kind of pressure that says look at me right now as he tips your face up and kisses you.

Properly, this time.

Aerion’s mouth is hot and slick against yours. It always is. Kissing him is like kissing an open flame. His tongue slips into your mouth before you've finished registering the intrusion. 

He tastes like whatever gum he chewed earlier, and underneath, Aerion tastes like him, that particular warm-skin-and-cigarettes thing that lives on his tongue. He kisses you like he's making a point. He kisses you with his hand still gripping your jaw, holding you exactly where he wants you. You let him for two full seconds, let him have the satisfaction of taking it, and then you bite his bottom lip.

He hisses, but he doesn't pull back.

"There," he mutters against your mouth, lips dragging on yours when he speaks. "That's better. Stop patronising me."

You lick at his bottom lip, and he chases the sensation, leaning closer. "You bit me."

"You deserved it."

You snort despite yourself. "Are you five?"

"Don't peck me on the cheek like I'm your fucking grandmother, you absolute —"

You drag your mouth, slow, off his.

Down. Along the line of his jaw. Past his ear—you feel him tense, the curse caught on his tongue, his hand still locked on your face—to the side of his throat where the vein is. Where the sweat is. You set your tongue against his pulse point and lick, leisurely, a flat wet stripe up the side of his neck. You taste the salt of him. The clean musk under it. The metallic edge of the chain at his throat, where the links lie cold against hot skin.

Aerion sucks in a deep breath. 

"Christ, you—"

You pull back, meeting his eyes. They’re glazed, lavender almost gone now, and you lean closer at an angle and spit in his mouth.

You've still got the salt of his sweat on your tongue, and you push it past his parted lips with your own, the wet of it landing and making him go completely still.

A whole beat passes as you stare at each other. You see Aerion’s pupils blow even as a sneer twists his mouth.

"Oh," he breathes. "Oh, you—"

You smile innocently. "Yes?"

"Did you just—"

"Did I what?" you question lightly. “Use your words, baby.”

"Did you just lick the sweat off my skin—"

"And spat in your mouth, yes." You smile at him, blinking innocently. “Do keep up, dear.”

"—and spat it back into me—"

"Yes, naturally."

His grip on your face has gone slack. He looks, for a beat, like he's been clubbed across the head—eyes wide, mouth slightly open, throat working—and you can feel the heat rolling off him in waves now, can see the colour rising up Aerion’s neck above the open collar of his shirt.

"You absolute minx," he says, his voice dropping two registers, and his hips press forward into the couch behind you, fully hard now, the line of him visible through the thin shorts. "You filthy—you think you can just—"

You smirk at his indignation. "You liked it."

"I hated it."

"That’s not very convincing," you note gently, poking his cheek. 

"Disgusting. Actually. Disgusting, I'm going to have to—"

He swallows.

You watch it happen. You watch Aerion’s throat move, deliberately, swallow the spit down, eyes still locked on yours, and his hand hasn’t left your jaw, his other hand coming up to brace on the couch beside your head. He swallows everything you gave him, and his lashes flutter. Flutter. Just briefly. The smallest tell.

"Hated it, huh?" you echo mildly.

"Shut up."

Your grin widens. "You swallowed."

"Shut. Up."

"You're going to let me come here—"

"Come where?"

You hook your finger into the open collar of his shirt and pull.

He comes.

Not easily because Aerion never comes easily, never gives you the satisfaction of obedience without a fight. But he lets himself be drawn forward over the back of the couch, his hands sliding down to brace on the cushion on either side of you, his face dipping toward yours. He stops, his mouth a breath from yours.

"You're being," he murmurs darkly, "insufferable."

You roll your eyes. "You're the one who sent—"

"I sent a picture—"

"Of your abs—"

"—of my form, you obscene little—"

You kiss him.

Aerion makes a sound against your mouth that’s half-laugh, half-snarl, and his hand fists in the back of your hair, tilting your head where he wants it. You bite his bottom lip again. Harder this time, and he bites you back, harder still, making you taste copper faintly. He's nicked the inside of your lip with his canine, and you feel him smile against your mouth when he tastes it too.

"Wolf," he murmurs, low and pleased. "I feared you’d gone all docile on me."

A snarl builds in your throat. "Shut your mouth."

"Make me."

You pull him over you. 

He goes. Laughing now, properly, that rare, ugly, delighted laugh that only comes out when you've genuinely surprised him. Aerion lands half on top of you, one knee braced on the cushion, one hand catching himself against the leather beside your head. The book falls. Neither of you cares. He's radiating heat through the thin shirt. Gym-warm, sweat-warm, the smell of him concentrated now where his open collar has fallen against your face. Underneath everything, he smells like himself, that particular skin-scent that you'd know with your eyes closed in a dark room.

He braces over you. His pale hair shines in the light, a single bead of sweat caught at his temple.

"On your back already," he observes smugly. "Predictable."

You kick him. "You're on me."

"You pulled me," he sniffs. 

"You came."

"I fell."

Snorting, you shove your hand up under his shirt. Your palm goes flat against his stomach, the muscle there tightening immediately at the coolness of your skin against his hot one. You drag it slowly upward. Over his ribs, the platinum bar at his nipple, up to splay flat across his chest. Aerion’s skin is faintly damp under your hand, heart hammering. He hates that you can feel it. You watch him decide whether to bite at you about it and see him, for once, choose not to.

You push the shirt off one shoulder. Slowly. The hem snags on his elbow where it's braced beside your head.

"Show me, then," you say. "Your form."

His eyes go dark.

"Greedy thing," he murmurs, and his voice has dropped into that register you only get in this room, in this apartment, in the moments when his performance starts to crack. "Insatiable. You'd think I never gave you anything."

"You give me almost nothing," you remark dryly.

"I gave you my shirt."

The bastard even manages to sound magnanimous about it. You almost kick him again. 

"I stole your shirt," you say flatly.

"I gave you the key to my apartment. Ungrateful—"

He pushes himself back. Just enough to drag the open shirt off entirely, tossing it somewhere over the back of the couch, and then he's bare-chested above you, and the dragon's tail curves around his ribs, and you can see every line of him. The lean lines of him, the indent of his hipbones, a trail of pale silver hair below his navel disappearing into his shorts, the pink of his nipples and the platinum bar through the left one.

He sees you looking. Aerion’s grin tips into a slow, lazy thing, feline at the edges. 

"Now she looks."

You roll your eyes. 

"Aesthetic opinions, sweetheart?" he questions, tipping his head slightly to one side. 

You extend your hand. "Get back here."

"No." He huffs, bracing his arm on the couch. "Look properly. You wouldn't text me back. Suffer a little."

You drag your fingertip down the centre of his chest. Purposefully. Through the faint damp of his sweat, between his pectorals, down the ridge of his sternum, over each rib. Aerion goes still above you. His abs flutter when you drag your nail across them, just barely.

"You're disgusting," you conclude pleasantly. 

Aerion bares his teeth, but you hear the shallow pitch of his breathing. "You licked me."

"Tasted like gym equipment," you say ruefully. 

"You liked that.” He presses into your hand, his skin burning and damp beneath your palm. “You spat it into my—"

You arch into him. "Aerion."

He drops his head to your throat.

His mouth opens against the skin under your jaw, hot and wet, tongue dragging slowly across your pulse before his teeth close. Light at first, testing. Then harder, harder, until you suck in a breath and Aerion hums against your throat like a man who's eaten well. 

He sucks a mark there. The pressure of it is obscene, the wet drag of his tongue working the skin between his teeth, and you feel the bruise rising under his mouth and know it'll be on display tomorrow and know, distantly, that this is the entire point. He moves down. The hollow of your throat, the dip at the base where he likes to bite. Your collarbone. His tongue traces the bone, then his teeth, and you feel him laugh quietly against your skin when you arch into it.

"Mine," he murmurs against your throat, but petulantly, possessively, the way a child claims a toy. "Pretty. Stupidly pretty. You think I sent you that picture for fun?"

“For attention.” You huff. “Because you’re so damn vain.”

"For yours." His mouth moves to your other collarbone, teeth scraping, lapping at the skin greedily. "Hate that you make me work for it. Hate it. I should be bored of you by now. Should've moved on. It's been—" He bites down. "—months."

"Are you?" you breathe, arching into the sensation.

He bites the bone. Hard. You hiss, and his hips press down, and you feel him through his shorts, hot and hard against your inner thigh. His breath stutters against your skin like he wasn't expecting his own response.

"No," he hisses, like it's been wrung out of him. "Obviously not. Look at you. Look at the—"

His hand finds the hem of the shirt. Pushes it up. Stops dead in his tracks when he sees nothing beneath.

"Oh," he says, so quietly you barely hear it. "Oh, you absolute creature."

"I told you. I was already wearing it."

"You were not wearing anything under it."

Your lips twitch, and you fail to hold back your grin. "No."

"All afternoon?” Aerion hisses. “On my couch? Reading my Dostoevsky?"

"Obviously."

He drops his forehead against your sternum and laughs. Low, wrecked, almost helpless. You feel the laugh move through his whole body. When Aerion lifts his head, his eyes are bright in a way you don't get to see often, that brief crack in the cruelty where the obsession leaks through.

"You'll be the fucking death of me," he declares.

You hum. "Probably."

"Don't sound so pleased about it."

He pushes the shirt up slowly. Inch by inch. Drags the hem up over your stomach, ribs, the underswell of your breasts, like he's unwrapping a present. He doesn't take it off. He just bunches it up under your collarbones and looks. His mouth parts slightly. His hand splays wide across your stomach, thumb dragging slowly across the soft skin, and you watch Aerion’s eyes track over you with the unbearable, greedy attention of a man who is, despite everything, still surprised every time.

"Greedy," he mumbles, and he isn't talking about you this time.

He doesn't go for your breasts first. He drags two fingers slowly down the centre of your stomach, then back up the side of your ribs, mapping. His knuckles brush the underside of your breast. Pull away. Come back. He's making you wait.

"Aerion—"

"Patience."

"Aerion."

"You made me wait an hour and twenty minutes," he murmurs spitefully, watching his own hand move across your skin. "I checked. You opened the photograph right away. You read it for—" his thumb drags across your nipple, lightly, just once, and you arch, making him smile "—the seventeen seconds it takes to commit it to memory. Then you put your phone down. You went back to my book. You didn't text. You didn't even—"

"Fuck—"

"—send a single emoji. Insulting."

His slick mouth closes around your nipple.

You suck in a breath so hard your throat hurts. Aerion’s tongue is hot and unhurried, the curve of his teeth an excruciating tease, while his other hand comes up to cup your other breast. His thumb drags across the peak, rough and testing, while he sucks slow and dirty at the first. Aerion takes his time. He sucks until you feel the heat building, until you're squirming under him, and then he switches, mouth on the other one, and the cold of his saliva on the first against the air makes you shudder. He works the second nipple harder. Tongue flat. Teeth scraping. He pulls off with an obscene wet sound and looks down at the slick peak of you, glistening, and exhales hot air across it just to watch you twitch.

"Aerion."

"Look at you," he rasps, low and pleased. "Sensitive little—"

"Will you stop?"

"Stop what, wolf, you're—" he licks, greedily, just the one stripe. "—gorgeous, stop complaining—"

His hair brushes your skin. The piercing scrapes against your ribs as he works lower, then back up. You drag your fingers up into his hair—damp at the roots, soft at the ends—and tug. Aerion makes a small, wounded sound against your breast and bites you in retaliation. Your hand slides down the back of his neck, across the top of his shoulder, and you feel the raised edge of ink there where the dragon's wing crests over his shoulder blade. You trace it. Lightly, gently, ever so carefully. You feel Aerion shiver.

"Remember," he murmurs, lifting his head just enough to speak, mouth still wet, eyes hooded, consuming, "the night of the gala. Last month. You came home in that black thing, the silk—"

You almost hit him because you know exactly what he’s doing. 

Your mouth parts, and you gasp, "I remember."

"You let me put my hand under it in the elevator."

"I did—"

"Your thigh." His teeth find your other nipple. His whole body presses into you, slick and burning above you, all encompassing. "Slick already. By the time we got upstairs, you were dripping for me. Down your leg. Onto my hand. Begging for it before I'd even—"

"I wasn't begging."

"You were. Don't lie to me. You said Aerion, please against my mouth. I have that shit memorised. I think about it in traffic. I had to—" he sucks, hard and mean, then drags his teeth slowly over the peak "—pull off the freeway last Tuesday because of it."

"That’s disgusting," you choke out, nails sunk into his back. 

"Wasn’t disgusting when I bent you over the kitchen counter. Remember that part? Pulled the silk up around your waist. You weren't wearing anything underneath that one either, you absolute—" Aerion bites the underside of your breath, and you jerk, gasping. "Came on my fingers before I even got my mouth on you. Twice. You soaked the marble, sweetheart. Wouldn't even let me touch myself, just sat me on the floor and rode my face until I—"

"Aerion—"

"—couldn't breathe—"

"Stop—"

"—made me come in my own hand without you even looking at me—" His voice cracks open completely now, strangled and frayed at the edges. "Made me wipe it on the kitchen floor like a fucking animal—"

"Aerion."

"—which makes me wonder," he goes on, lifting his head fully now, eyes wicked and dark, "if you'd be that wet for me right now or if I'm going to have to—"

You shove him.

He careens backwards, startled, laughing. Back into the couch cushions, and you climb him, hands flat to his chest, and slide down his body. His shirt, your shirt, has fallen back down around your hips and bunches obscenely at your waist. His shorts are loose. You can see, clearly, how hard he is through the thin fabric, a wet patch already darkening the front of them. Aerion’s face when you look up at him from between his thighs is gorgeous. Flushed high on the cheekbones, mouth bitten red, hair an absolute mess, sweat starting to gather at his temple again from the heat of you both.

"Don’t you dare," he snaps, but you know he doesn’t mean it.

“What’s wrong, dragon?” you wonder innocently, one finger tracing his thigh. “Afraid you can’t hold out the way I did?”

His head falls back against the cushion as you slide your hand up his thigh. "Fuck."

You don't pull his shorts down right away. Just like he didn’t put his mouth on you right away. You drag your palm over the front of them, noting the heat of him through the thin fabric, the wet patch where he's leaking through. He twitches. Aerion’s hand fists into the cushion at the slip. You drag your knuckles up the length of him leisurely, watching his abs flutter. Elegant line of Aerion’s throat work, and his hips press up into your hand without his permission.

You turn your head and bite the inside of his thigh.

He makes a sound.

You set your tongue against the spot. Suck. Just enough to bruise, to claim. You feel his thigh trembling under your mouth, the muscle still warm and tight from his workout, and you lift your head and look up at him. He's watching. He's gone half-undone with it. Head tipped back against the cushion, throat exposed, the chain at his neck catching the light, lashes lowered.

"Greedy," you echo softly. “Such a greedy dragon.”

He snarls under his breath.

"You're so wet, Aerion." You put your mouth to the bite, lick it, then kiss it gently, speaking into the skin. “So hard for me, baby.”

"Quiet."

"For what? Just a photo? Did you think about me touching myself to your little photo, baby, is that it? You're dripping through your—"

His hand tangles in your hair, "Shut up."

You laugh under your breath, hooking your fingers in the waistband to pull them down slowly. Aerion’s cock springs free, flushed pink and hard, the head wet and shining. You wrap your hand around the base of him and watch Aerion’s head fall back against the leather. His abs are tightening rhythmically with every breath as he fights for control. The dragon tattoo across his back bunches where his shoulders are pressed into the leather, his throat working. 

His hand leaves your ahir to fist into the cushions like he doesn't trust himself to put them on you yet.

You lower your mouth.

Not to take him in. You’re not that nice. You drag your tongue up the length of him from base to tip first. Once. Aerion shudders. You do it again—slower this time, flat tongue, the whole length of him from root to head—and he hisses something through his teeth. You circle the head playfully with your tongue, then again. You taste the salt of him, the faint bitterness of him, lick it clean and watch fresh wetness bead at the slit almost immediately. You lean down and lick that, too, kissing it. He twitches, throbbing insistently in your palm. The whole length of him jumps.

"Christ, you absolute—"

You hum, swiling your tongue around the wet, pulsing length of him.

"Take me. Properly. Stop—"

"You said patience," you remind him evenly.

"You fucking—"

You take just the head into your mouth. Suck softly. Swirl your tongue around the slit again, gathering the precum beading there. Pull off with a wet pop, and a string of saliva connects your bottom lip to him for a beat before it breaks. Aerion makes a noise like he's been gut-punched, and his hand finally flies up to your hair, gripping, not pulling, just holding on for stability.

"Please," he rasps, and immediately catches himself: "—fuck. Don't tell anyone I said that."

You smirk. 

You take him deeper this time. Slower. An inch at a time, and you watch Aerion’s face, you watch his eyes lose focus, you watch his mouth fall open. His hand tightens in your hair. You take him almost to the back of your throat and pull off, slow, dragging your tongue along the underside. A sound escapes him that he absolutely would kill someone for overhearing, high and keening. 

You set the rhythm. Slow first, mean, the kind of pace designed to make him beg. You hollow your cheeks, one hand sunk into the flesh of his thigh. 

You drag your tongue up the underside as you pull off, and watch his stomach flutter, his head falling back. Aerion’s throat works as he tries, visibly tries, not to make any of the sounds you can feel building in his chest. You know how loud he can be, how deliciously descriptive in a way that can make you squeeze your thighs together.

You let your spit run down him, let it pool at the base, slick and obscene. You take him deep again and pull off, letting spit and precum drip down the length of him, using your hand to spread it, sliding wet through your fist, working him slowly while your tongue circles the head. His thighs tremble on either side of your shoulders.

"Fuck, fuck, your mouth, your fucking mouth—"

You suck him down, going as far as you can, and stay there. Hold. Swallow around him, throat working tight around the head, and Aerion’s hips jerk up involuntarily, choking you for a breath. You let him. Your throat eases around the throbbing hardness, tears pricking at the corners of your eyes. The wet of your spit runs down your chin, and Aerion makes a strangled sound.

"Sweetheart—"

You pull off unhurriedly. Drag your tongue up, take Aerion back into your mouth, sucking lightly, insistently.

"You're going to—" Aerion’s voice catches, cracks. "Slow down. Stop. I'm going to—"

You hum sympathetically, mockingly, as the taste of him burns on your tongue. 

"Fuck—don't you dare—"

But you do dare.

You take him all the way down one last time. You set a rhythm now, fast, dirty, your hand working what you can't fit, and you can feel it in him. The way Aerion’s thighs are starting to lock, the way his stomach is trembling, his hand gone vice-tight in your hair.

"Fuck, fuck, I'm—fuck, I'm going to—"

He comes with a sound that’s almost a laugh but mostly a curse. Entirely undone. His body goes taut beneath you, fingers tight in your hair. You hold him through it. You wait. Feel him pulse against your tongue, hot and thick, salt-bitter, filling your mouth in pulses. You wait for him to finish, wait patiently for the last twitch. His fingers loosen from your hair, and Aerion’s head falls back, his eyes closed. He’s gone. There’s a split second of complete peace on his face, his mind having gone somewhere far away.

Then, eyes locked on his when he finally cracks them open to look down at you, you lift your head, mouth still full, and let his cum drip off your tongue.

Down his length. 

A long, white string of it, sliding crudely over the head and down his shaft, and Aerion’s eyes go wide.

You smear it with your thumb. Spread it. Make a show of it. Work it slowly down the length of him, slick and pearly, watching Aerion’s expression crack through a hundred emotions. 

"What," he begins hoarsely, "are you doing?"

"Helping." 

There’s a pleasant rasp in your voice from him hitting the back of your throat, and you smile when Aerion’s breath hitches slightly. 

You see him puzzling out the word. "Helping."

You stroke him gently, your fingers slick and dripping, eyeing his hips twitch involuntarily. He's still half-hard, fluttering with aftershocks, and going to be hard again very fast at this rate. "In case you can't get me wet enough on your own, baby."

There’s a beat of utter silence.

Then Aerion lunges.

He hauls you up—roughly, hand around your wrist, the other in your hair—and flips you face-down into the couch cushions in one motion. You're laughing, practically cackling, half-muffled into the leather, as he yanks the shirt up over your hips and shoves your knees apart with his own. The leather is warm where he was sprawled across it; you can feel the body heat soaked into the cushion against your stomach.

"Get me wet enough," he spits, low and venomous, mouth at your ear from behind. "You insolent—"

You’re still laughing, muffled. "You came in thirty seconds—"

"I came in two minutes—"

"It was thirty—"

His hand closes around your throat.

A warning, a brand, the cold press of his rings against your pulse where they're still warm from his own skin. He drags you back up against his chest, your spine to his sternum, the dragon's wing somewhere behind you against your shoulder blades, and he holds you there. You can feel the sweat on him now properly—fresher, the heat of exertion not the gym anymore, the slick of his stomach against the small of your back.

"Behave, wolf," he murmurs against your ear.

"Make me," you mock.

His other hand slides between your legs.

Aerion hisses softly against your neck. You're already wet. You've been wet since the photograph. He drags two fingers through your folds, gathering evidence, and then he pushes them inside you, and your knees give a little against the cushion. His grip on your throat tightens by a fraction. Not cutting off your air, just holding. Claiming.

"Pretty liar," he whispers viciously. "I didn't have to do anything. You’re ready. Look at this—listen to it—" He works his fingers mercilessly, and the sound is lewd, wet and slick, and you can feel yourself dripping down his wrist. "Soaking my hand. Down to my elbow in a minute. Pretending you needed me to—"

You moan, the sound caught in your windpipe, your hips pressing forward for more friction.

"Greedy thing,” Aerion hisses into your nape. “Pretty greedy thing. Couldn't even let me catch my fucking breath—"

He pulls his fingers out. He drags them up, glossy and wet, across your stomach, your ribs. He brings them to your mouth and pushes them past your lips, and you suck, and he makes a sound against your neck that’s genuine hunger.

"There," he breathes out softly, mockingly. "Taste it. Taste how wet you are for—"

"Aerion."

"—a man you claim is insufferable—"

"You are."

You feel his smirk against your skin when he mocks lowly, "And yet."

He pushes inside you in one slow, mean stroke, hand braced on your hip.

You both make sounds as he sinks in. You feel the ridiculous, absurd intimacy of him—the heat, the stretch of him slick with the cum you spread on him with your mouth—and his hand flexes around your throat. He holds very still inside you and breathes, breathes, like a man trying to talk himself out of something foolish.

"Look at you," Aerion drawls, and you hear the naked pleasure in his voice, can feel his burning stare along your body. "Bent over my couch in my shirt. Reading my book. Took my come out of your mouth and put it back on me like you were doing me a favour—"

He starts to move.

He never goes slow when he wants you like this, when the dragon-thing in him has slipped its leash. He fucks you hard. Hand at your throat, other hand braced on your hip, fingers digging in with every thrust. You brace yourself against the back of the couch and let your spine arch, listening to the obscene wet sound of it and the bitten-off curses he's mumbling into your hair. His chest is slick against your back. The chain at his neck is hot now, dragging across your shoulder blade with each thrust.

"Mine," he's saying, mostly to himself. "Mine. Pretty mine. Pretty greedy mine. Look at—look at how you take me. You'd let anyone watch you like this, wouldn't you, wolf? You'd let me film you—"

You moan at the visual, clenching around him so hard Aerion snarls against your ear. "Aerion, harder—"

His thrusts turn bruising, and you melt into him, into the feeling, your walls gripping him close, clenching tighter, tighter.

"You're close," Aerion breathes into your ear knowingly. 

"Yes, yes—"

"Not yet," he breathes sharply. 

He pulls out.

You let out a snarl of genuine fury, and Aerion laughs—wrecked, breathless, the laugh of a man who's enjoying himself far too much—and flips you onto your back, pulling you up into his lap in one motion. Your knees settle on either side of his hips, his hands at your waist, his cock notching back inside you before you've finished registering the absence.

"There," he murmurs, mouth at your jaw, the same place he bit you earlier. You can feel him press his lips against the bruise. "Better. Wanted to see your face."

"Fuck you, I was about to—"

"I know, I felt it, I'm not charitable—"

What he said a moment ago registers fully in your pleasure-addled brain, and your eyes narrow. "Wait. Did you just say you wanted to see my face?"

He rolls his eyes. "Did I?" he poses dismissively. 

You catch his face in your hands.

Aerion goes still. Looks at you. His eyes are dark despite their paleness, hungry and lidded. There's colour high on his cheekbones, and his hair is a disaster. The proud curve of his mouth is swollen from being bitten, and there's still a faint wet shine on his throat where you licked him. He is, in this moment, the most undone you’ve ever seen him. You stare at him, and you say, quietly:

"You missed my pretty face?"

His hand cracks down on your ass.

You yelp, laughing, and he grins at you, full and mean and absolutely delighted, grabbing your jaw between his thumb and forefinger.

"Don't get ahead of yourself," he says dismissively. "Wanna suck your pretty tits, actually."

But you're both laughing. Properly, stupidly. He's still inside you, and you're laughing into each other's mouths. Aerion’s hand slides up to cup your breast, and his mouth drops to the other one, and he's working you, slow now, the rhythm changing—deep, grinding, the angle suddenly exactly right to hit that one spot inside you—and you feel it building again, faster this time, helpless.

You feel his rings against your nape, quiet, panting breaths escaping you. A whine working up your throat as he ruts into you. "Aerion—"

He hums at the need he hears in your voice, pulling you flush to him, burning somewhere in the middle. 

"Aerion, please, I need—"

"I know," he murmurs around your nipple, and you can feel the smile against your skin, "yes, sweetheart, I know what you need, let go for me, wolf—"

The coil inside your belly snaps. You come clutching him.

Both arms around his neck. Face buried in his hair. Body locking, shaking. Aerion fucks you through it, slower, his hands splayed wide across your back, clutching you, and you feel him follow a moment later. Quiet this time, no theatrics, just a starved, broken sound into your shoulder, his whole body shuddering and stilling.

For a while, neither of you moves.

Aerion’s heart hammers against your sternum. His hair is damp with sweat at the nape. You can feel the platinum of his piercing pressed against your ribs and the heat of him everywhere else. His arms are wound around your waist in that tight, possessive way that says don't move, don't go anywhere, stay.

You lift your head, eventually. To look at him. 

He's already gazing at you. No smirk, not posing, gazing, with that rare, naked expression you only get for half-seconds before he remembers himself and smothers it. His full mouth is slightly open, eyes gone soft at the edges. 

"What?" you mumble.

Aerion blinks, his mouth twitching. He doesn't smother it this time—too tired, maybe, or too undone—and just keeps looking at you.

"Why were you reading my book?" he asks suddenly.

You shift in his lap. He's still inside you, going soft, and your body aches pleasantly. Your forehead is against his. His hand come up to cradle the back of your skull, fingers in your hair, and his thumb is moving along the curve of your jaw.

"You annotate everything," you say vaguely.

"I know I do."

"In three languages."

His brows twitch. "I know."

"In ink so cramped, half of it's barely legible."

"Get to the fucking point, sweetheart."

You breathe out, let yourself look at him, let yourself say it. "I wanted to know how you see the world."

He goes rigid underneath you.

"I read your margins because… that's where you actually are. The real you. The book you're arguing with. The lines you double-underline. What you cross out and rewrite. The places where you've gone back years later in different ink and answered yourself." You shrug, a tiny movement, against him. "It's the closest you let me get without making me work for it."

There's a long beat where Aerion doesn't say anything at all. His thumb has stopped moving on your jaw. He's just looking at you, lavender-pale in the late afternoon light, mouth slightly open.

His arms tighten around you, hauling you flush against his chest so suddenly a breath escapes you. He drops his face into the curve of your neck. He breathes there. You feel him breathing. A ragged thing, the kind of breath a person takes when they’re trying very hard not to let anything else show on their face.

You stroke his hair. 

When Aerion speaks again, his voice is hushed, mouth against your throat. You can feel the words form against your pulse before you hear them.

"You can't do that," he says.

"Do what?" you question quietly.

"That.” It’s practically a snarl. “Say things like that to me."

"Why?"

"Because." You feel his throat move against your collarbone. "I can't—you can't say things like that and then leave."

There’s a pinch deep inside your chest, and your fingers tighten in his hair. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Ever." Aerion’s arms have gone so tight his hold is almost painful, and his voice muffles into your skin. "I mean ever. If you say things like that to me, I'm going to—fuck— I’m not built to—"

You soften because he can’t see your face, and it’s easier to be open like this. "Aerion."

"—let go. Of you. I'm not going to. You understand that. You understand it, don't you? Ever."

"I do."

"I'm telling you. I'm telling you now." He lifts his head, and there’s predator’s grace in the movement. "If you stay, then I’ll burn down anything you ask me to. I will buy us a country. I’ll set my name on fire. But I’m not going to—"

"I know," you tell him quietly.

"—let anyone near you, do you—"

You cup his face in your hands again. "I know, Aerion."

His eyes are burning, lit up from inside. "—and if you ever—if you ever decided to—"

"I'm not."

"Ever?"

"Ever."

He stares at you, searches your face the way he reads. Annotating. Underlining. Cross-referencing in three languages against everything he already knows about you and him, and you two together.

Then he kisses you.

No teeth, no performance, no game. His hand comes up to cup the back of your head, and his mouth moves against yours like he's memorising it, and against your lips, half-mumbled, almost reverent now where before it had been petulant:

"Mine."

But it's different this time. It isn't the dragon claiming a coin. It isn't pretty mine or greedy mine or any of the small possessive cruelties he's been muttering all afternoon. It's quieter than that. Lower. It sounds like kept. It sounds like known. It sounds like a thing a man says when he has just understood that he will not, in any version of his life going forward, be the one to walk away.

You hum, the word closing around your heart like a fist.

"Yours," you agree softly against his mouth.

"Mine," Aerion says again, into your mouth, into your jaw, into the soft skin under your ear. "Mine. Mine. Mine."

His arms don't loosen.

He keeps his face buried in your throat and doesn’t let go once.

You stroke his hair, and Aerion doesn't tell you to stop.

He won't, you realise, ever again.

an: i'm having whatever they're having 🚬🚬🚬

[the-darklings]

oh yeah baby daddy aerion with baby maegor agenda is alive and well ‼️