╰┈➤ˎˊ˗ Your husband Peter may be behind bars, but that won't stop him from keeping you exactly where he wants you.
The fluorescent lights sting your eyes the moment you step into the hallway. You’re running on about three hours of sleep. Your 1 year old son, Jack is slightly heavy on your hip. His tiny fingers curled in the collar of your shirt like a lifeline.
Pepper tried to talk you down.
Happy tried to take your keys.
Tony tried to block the elevator.
As you drove away, Tony had screamed after you, "He's in a goddamn high level maximum security prison Y/n! I will not have my daughter and grandbaby go-"
None of them succeeded in stopping you.
The guard at the final checkpoint swallows hard when he sees your badge.
“Miss, are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” you manage to say without trembling too much, “My husband is waiting for me.”
He glances at the steel door and nods. "Go right ahead."
The visitation room is cold and much too quiet. A wall of reinforced glass splits the room in half. On the other side sits Peter Parker, hands cuffed, posture perfect, expression calm in that infuriatingly elegant way he has. He looks like he is waiting for a reservation, not sitting in a concrete holding cell.
His eyes light up the second he sees you.
“There she is,” he says, voice warm and smooth. “How’s my pretty girl?”
You glare at him. “Peter.” You hold a stoic expression, silently telling yourself not to cry.
He grins, leaning back like he has all the time in the world. “Sweetheart, you look gorgeous. Tired, but more gorgeous than ever.” He smirks as he appraises you selfishly. “Did your breasts get even bigger?”
Before you can react, Jack babbles at the sound of his voice, reaching toward the glass. Peter’s expression softens instantly, like someone flipped a switch inside him.
“Hey, my little man,” he murmurs, pressing his palm to the barrier.
Jack slaps his tiny hand against the same spot, giggling.
“Babe, I’m just so glad you’re here,” Peter murmured, smiling too naturally. “I just wish I could hold you two.”
"Pete-"
“He’s gotten so big, Y/n,” Peter breathed, eyes locked on Jack’s sweet little face. “I can’t believe we made the cutest kid on this planet. ”
"Peter," you tried again, beginning to lose your patience.
“Y/n…” Peter mocked softly, leaning back in the chair as far as the restraints allowed. His hands were bound together, but that didn’t stop him from stretching, rolling his shoulders like he wasn’t in a jail interview room. “I could really go for one of your famous back rubs right now. My muscles are killing me.” He arched again, those gorgeous back muscles flexing under the jumpsuit like he was showing off on purpose.
You take a breath, steadying yourself. “Peter, we really need to talk.”
He hums, eyes still on Jack. “About how much you missed me?”
“About why you’re in jail?”
He finally looked at you, smirking. “Oh. That.”
“Yes! That!” you whined.
“Don’t worry about me,” he says, waving it off like it’s nothing. “I was just teaming up with Frank.”
You blink. “Frank?” you take a deep breath, “As in Frank Castle?”
“Yeah.”
“The Punisher?"
“Yeah.”
“The man who carries grenades in his coat pockets?”
Peter shrugs, smiling like he’s discussing a regular golf buddy. “He’s not that bad once you get to know him.”
“Peter, he got you arrested! ”
“No,” Peter corrects gently, “I got me arrested. Frank just… assisted.”
You stare at him. “So you think this is funny?”
“I think you’re cute when you’re mad, pretty girl.”
You want to scream.
You want to kiss him.
You want to throw a chair at the glass.
“Peter, you cannot keep doing this! You have a child! You have a pissed off wife! You can’t just run around with murderers and get locked up like it’s some kind of hobby!”
He leans forward, eyes warm and annoyingly sincere. “Sweetheart, I’m fine. I promise.”
“You’re in jail.”
“Temporarily!”
“You’re handcuffed!”
“Fashion statement, come on Y/n, you’re always prancing around in those little sundresses. Why don’t you cut me some slack? He hums thoughtfully, pressing his palm to the glass and tracing where your hair falls. “After all..” he wiggles the wedding ring on his left finger in front of the glass, “Last time I checked, you’re still bound to me, baby.” he smirked.
You open your mouth. Close it. Open it again.
Then the words slip out before you can stop them.
“Peter… I feel like I should divorce you.”
The room goes silent.
Peter blinks once.
Then he laughs.
Not mocking.
Not cruel.
Just amused.
Like you told him the sky is green.
“Baby,” he says, shaking his head, “No way.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re adorable when you’re trying to rile me.”
“I’m not trying to rile you! Pete-”
“Babe, babe, come on. Just a few more weeks and I'll be out of this place!”
Before you can respond, the door on his side bursts open. Two guards step in, tense and hurried.
“Parker. Let’s go.”
Peter sighs dramatically. “Gentlemen. I’m in the middle of a conversation with my wife.”
“Now,” one of them says.
Peter stands, slow and elegant, like he’s humoring them. He gives you one last lingering look. The smile just barely met his worn out eyes.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he says. “You’re stuck with me.” He wiggles the wedding band yet again.
“Peter—”
He winks. “I’ll be home soon.”
The guards grab his arms and start pulling him toward the door. Jack starts crying, reaching for him, tiny hands shaking.
“Dada!” he wails.
Peter twists just enough to look back at you both.
“I love you,” he says.
Then he’s gone.
Dragged out of the room.
The door slams shut.
Jack sobs into your shoulder.
Your heart feels like it’s splitting open.
And all you can think about is how the man wasn’t even scared, not for a damn second.
Peter Parker is planning something.
And whatever it is…
he’s making sure you stay exactly where he wants you.
Tags: readers first makeout🫶 fingering F reviving, Handjob, cuddling, fucking on the floor👏, arranged marriage, Maekar doesn’t want a 2nd wife (what else is new), near drowning incident, PnV sex, unprotected sex, losing virginity, brief mention of blood, Maekar experiencing guilt (and reflecting on it *shocker*)
Summary: you’ve married Maekar but the only people who have really welcomed you to Summerhall are his youngest three children. When you risk your own life to protect them Maekar finally has to admit that you do have a place here!
word count: 6.1 k
A/N: I loveeee grumpy Maekar but am shit at writing those snappy quips so that’s why he’s always troubling enamored so quickly by the reader in my fics 🙈
“Don’t-“ you were so winded when you grabbed Aegon’s arm that you needed to breath for a solid moment before continuing on. “Don’t run off like that.” You scold him bending a bit so you two were eye to eye.
You’d been lucky to not need to do much scolding of your husbands children. Which had benefitted you greatly while navigating the complexities of running a hall that had been devoid of a lady, a mother for some time. The little ones probably liked you because of the attention you gave them, because of how you enjoyed playing their silly games when their father had no time…or patience for it.
Though with the cold weather their temperaments changed. They never seemed to have enough avenues to exert their energy since their playing was all stuck inside.
The cold did not feel as suffocating to you. It was just apart of life in the north and the storm land hardly got as frozen and bitter as things got back home. Which was why you had decided to bundle the younger ones all up and take them for a walk. You thought they might like to see the frozen leaves, perhaps look for one of the robins that’s feather became easy to spot again the white forest floor.
Maekar had not looked up from his papers when you suggested it at break of fast. The only way you knew he had even heard your proposal was the warning he grumbled out to Egg, Daella and Rhae to behave for you.
Perhaps you should have then them each out individually because the three of them together just led to far to much energy.
“There pond is around here somewhere and the last thing you need is to wind up under broken ice!” You warned him. It was serious, you did not want to see them injured….and it was your responsibility to see to them.
Maekar had made that clear. You knew before the wedding that he had not sought you out. You’d just been conveniently there when the topic of him taking a second wife came up. It was all rather flattering, the Queen herself suggested you to Maekar. She’d seen you knelt down in the gardens helping his children catch little red lady bugs and worms. His mother had convinced him of the value a maternal figure might bring to his household…that additional stability from another an adult could temper issues before they began.
You’d been so excited, foolishly so, but he was a prince it made sense that you were flattered and thrilled by it all. You’d even found yourself remarking on his serious but striking apperence, on the deep tome of his voice…you’d told your lady maids, with flushed cheeks, that you were looking forward to your wedding night.
You hadn’t been looking forward to the bedding ceremony…being grabbed at by random men and touched. Though when he deny the event at the end of the feast you had known something was off right away. He had not asked you of your feelings in the matter so it did not come across like he was doing you some great kindness by avoiding it.
He denied it for himself. You found that out the moment you entered his chambers and he handed you a cup of wine. He did not sit with you on the edge of the bed…did not even look up when you got down to your chemise and chewed your lip eagerly waiting for him to make some sort of advance. You knew what happened in a marriage bed but not enough of the specifics to initiate anything yourself. He stay in the chair by the fireplace that entire night. Not moving as he told you he had taken your hand for his children, so they could have another person looking after them, he told you he wanted no more children, did not need companionship and had no desire to bed you.
Maekar was many things but he was not a liar. All those things he had made painfully clear to you on the wedding night had remained true. You were not here for him, just them.
“Look mother! There’s a red feather!” Rhae exclaimed. She and Aegon had each slipped and called you that. It always made you feel quite important but you were truthfully worried about Maekar hearing it. What would he think? Had you been to involved with them? Should you correct them?
Slowly you let go of Aegon’s arm after giving him one more warning look and then you followed Rhae towards the tree that had a vibrant feather laid on one of the branches. You were mid lifting her up so she could try and grab it when you heard a piercing shriek.
It was so loud, in an otherwise quiet woods, that every bird suddenly flew up out of the trees just as started as you were.
Rhae looked around, gripping onto your shoulders. “What was that?” She whispered her legs winding around your midsection as you began to move in the direction of the sound.
“Daella?!” You called. It sounded like her shout.
When there was no answer to your call you began to run in the direction of the sound. Dropping Rhae down the moment you saw the pond.
Gods, oh gods. You were here to look after them.
Before your eyes Maekars oldest daughter was grasping at the edge of broken ice, her upper body was above the water but everything below her hips was submerged. The air infront of you was clouded white from how quickly you were breathing, your lungs burning a bit from brining in so much of the cold air.
“help!” She cried and you instantly started out onto the pond. It wasn’t nearly cold enough here for the ice to get so thick that it could safely support a person. You should have been watching them better.
“Rhae, go back to the hall, tell the first person you come across about this.” She urged the child and heard her little feet pad against the frozen ground back up to the keep.
You bent down, basically crawling out to her, knowing you needed to distribute your weight so the ice would give out under you as well.
“I’ve got you, just-“ you grabbed her wrists trying to pull her towards you. “Can you kick your legs?” Her skirts were waterlogged and that made them very heavy.
“Come on Daella!” You grunted as you got closer and grabbed her under the arms hoisting her up over the jagged edge of of the hole and she landed right over you. Both of you panting, Rhaella shaking and her teeth chattering loudly.
“Breathe, I’ve got you.” You were holding the back of her head, squeezing her against you as your adrenaline came down. “I’ve got you.” You kissed her head and started to try and sit you both up.
“Egg…” she whimpered. Her teeth were rattling so much it was hard for her to speak. “Egg fell in.” She eventually got out and you scurried out from under her quickly looking at the hole and freezing water.
“Go to the bank!” You directed her sternly and knelt over the edge gasping as you reached your arms down into the water feeling for him. The fact that there was no thrashing around made you uneasy. Had he sunk down to the bottom? Did he breathe in the water?
You took in the largest breath you possibly could and willed yourself right down into the water. The air was pushed out of your lungs almost Instantly from the shock but you attempted to keep moving as much as you could.
It would destroy this family…another loss. Especially rambunctious but loving egg!
Your long dark hair swirled around your face in the water making it hard to see but your foot bumped Into something and you grabbed at it. The only warmth, as mild as it was, in the blinding cold. The pond was not that deep, and so on your tip toes your hands could breach the surface. You shoved Aegon on and somehow dragged your own self up onto the ice.
“no…no wake up.” You started to shake at the little boy a bit and when you saw his hands and lips were purple you found the strength to lift him up into your arms. His feet dragged as you carried him through the woods but it was the most you could manage. Daella shaking, terrified and dazed from it all held to your stiff heavy skirts as you went. He had to get inside, needed to be warmed and see the maester. He was coughing into your chest now, water heaving from his lungs.
You were one of sorts yourself from being submerged and althought you heard shouting you did not actually see anybody coming your way. Not until suddenly Aegon was being lifted off of you and Daella was snatched up as well.
“get her inside!” Maekar, who had been informed after the first guard had been alerted to the issue at the pond, managed to barrel ahead of any other person heading down toward the forests edge. At the time all that was known was that Daella had been on the pond and the ice cream as broken. That was more than enough to put him in this state. The knight would get there, but not as quickly as he would.
The prince was sprinting up the pathway to the keep and you started right after him before any guard reached you to assist. Aegon looked limp in his father’s arms and you were so terrified that you just continued through the hall after the three of them despite maids urging you to stop.
“get off of me!” You warned pushing their hands away and successfully getting into the maesters work room. Aegon was already stripped and being covered in blankets and warmed stone and you saw Rhaella shaking in one of her septa’s arms as she was brought away to be changed and looked over. She seemed, scared and if that was all than she was quite lucky because her brother had still not opened his eyes.
“I told them to stay away from the pond-“ you began trying to squeeze your way closer to the bed the little prince was laid out it. “H-he was coughing when I pulled him out, there was water in-in his lungs.” You managed to shared with the maester, dark eyes wild and frantic as you spoke.
“Get her out of this bloody gown” Maekar directed the comment towards a young women stood near the door, clearly unsure what she should be doing in the mist of this chaos. “now!” He barked snapping his hand against the side table to jostle the maid from her stagnant position. He had pulled his hand off of its spot on his sons head, he’d been stroking the light silver hair back since getting him into this bed.
“I’m quite a-a-alright.” You told the maid quickly, teeth were clattering so much that it took you so long to get that sentence out that the use of ‘alright’ was quite unbelievable.
Maekar could feel the chill that was emanating off your body behind him and suddenly he turned at once, wide shoulders clearing his way as he grabbed the soaked fabric around your waist and backed you up towards the bathing chambers.
“m’lord-Aegon needs you.” You start but are quickly turned around. You supposed it made sense that he could move you and your heavy waterlogged dress so easily, his strength during the rebellion had resulted in songs after all!
“Fucks sake”
You gasp when his fingers sink between the little spaces in the lacing down your back and he pulls the fabric and strings apart. All the grommets would be torn, it was completly wrecked. it was also handing down at your feet now, some relief did come from no longer being squeezed in by such cold fabric.
“He needs you to still be breathing when he wakes…” Maekar muttered out grabbing your chemise and tearing that fabric as if it was nothing more than a single piece of parchment.
He wasn’t wrong, staying dressed like this would have you catching your death. Had you been less panicked you would have likely attempted to get some of the layers off of you down by the pond but the adrenaline had not allowed for proper thinking.
“Your grace,” the maester called from the other room. There was alot of coughing and voices of people telling Aegon to lay back down. You shivered in front of him, back still turned away and your arms had wrapped around yourself half for warmth and half for shielding. You’d never been undressed with him present.
Your eyes facing forward was a gift to the prince because it gave him a moment to take in the sounds of life that were obvious in the other room. His son was alive. He wasn’t losing somebody else, he had not failed again. His chest deflated a bit as his eyes closed and he took in the coughing. They opened again when the maester called once more and he pressed his hands down against your shoulders.
The touch warmed you so much you whimpered a bit, his palms did not retract at the noise right away but when he heard your teeth begin to clatter together again he gave you a squeeze before letting go.
“Get in the bath.” He demanded, there was not alternative option that could even be thought of in your mind when you heard his tone. Instantly the maid came towards with warmed buckets of water and began filling the soaking tub that you had obediently stepped into.
He closed the door on his way out and as the warmth engulfed you your eyes began to close, the feeling of being okay mixed with the combination of your adrenaline crashing left you utterly exhausted.
The next thing you felt was a rumbling against your cheek. Which made you groan and shift about some.
“Give me that,” Maekar sighed pulling the blanket from the maids hands, his forhead had not relaxed for one second since the knight had entered his study two hours prior and told him what his youngest had been shouting as she came up towards the stables.
You leaned towards the sound and your arms, which finally felt less stiff, wrapped around your husbands neck as he lifted you from the now room tempature bath. The towel was draped over you but he was holding you to his chest so you were getting him quite wet.
“Have broth be brought to my chambers.” He directed and carried you from the maesters quarters through the keep. You hadn’t fully smarted to the concept that your husband, you husband who had not even kissed you on the lips when you married was holding you…letting you nuzzled your face against his warm neck. He knew you were seeking more heat.
Gradually, when he set you down in his bed, tucking the towel around the front of you now, you realized Maekar had been the one taking you from the bath. He did not like how red your cheeks still were of that your fingers were still slightly blue.
He’d had a conversation with Daella, an interrogation was more correct of a name for it thought because Maekar demanded to know exactly what had happened. How this, possibly deadly, mess came to be. He’d waited until she was in her thickest dress, wrapped in a fur and being given her favorite tea before he started but he had not given her any time to rest, he needed to know it all as soon as possible. He did not like having to use his imagination to fill in the blanks.
You grabbed the ends of the towel and pulled the fabric around you tighter brining your feet up as well so your knees were tucked into your chest. You’d never been in his chambers. It felt odd…almost intimate.
“you jumped into the water?” He was laying a dark fur across a chair near the fireplace.
“is he alright?” You finally spoke, voice a bit horse from all the shouting earlier.
“Do Starks believe they cannot freeze?” He glanced over his shoulder at you.
“no more than Targaryen think they cannot burn.” You exhale and straighten your shoulders. “Is Aegon well?” You insist to know. Surely he would not be speaking to you if the boy was dead, right?
Maekar shoulders raised a bit, like he had chuckled at your attempt to demand something from him but the sound did not quite reach your ears.
“he is already telling stories of fish frozen in place in the water.” He informed you, finally looking back at you and seeing the relief flood through you.
You smiled, a bright real thing and you chuckled a bit. He was as such a clown of a little boy, it was charming to you even if it came with some wreckless behavior.
“I think he was the only frozen thing in that pond.” You remark shaking your head a bit.
“I think my son is alive because you went down in that water to save him.”
The comment stopped your giggling instantly. It was serious and honest and…this was more sensitive than you had ever known him be. The intensity of his eyes on you, the shock witnessing his forehead ease, it made your skin tingle and every hair on your rise.
“you could have died attempting to rescue them from something that I know they have been warned about.”
You swallowed looking down gripping a bit tighter to the damp towel and you took a moment to figure out what it was that you should say…what you wanted to say.
“I love them Maekar, I could not just watch it happen.” You looked back up to him finding that he had made his way from in front of the fire back to the bedside, that he had taken his cloak off and had as currently undoing the laces that kept his tunic on.
“Thank you.”
You blinked, he’d not thanked you for anything in the 7 moons that had come to pass since you wed. It was obvious that he was not the type to lean to flattery in conversation. That did not bother you, not as much it might some other lady, it wasn’t as if people in the north were exceptionally warm.
Actually when you thought about it they were quite kind, deeply loyal and unmistakably dedicated to people…if they deserved it. If they had good reason to value the person infront of them.
Maekar was not much different. He did. Or bother with unwarranted flattery. You could appreciate that.
“You can go see them later, once you’re warm enough.” He assured you when it seemed like your attention drifted to the door.
“I will dress, I’m warm enough.” You made to stand but his hand was back on your shoulder again, stopping you in your tracks.
“I will deem when you are warm enough wife.”
His jaw tightening gave away that your surpised reaction to the title made him feel bad. Had he truly never used the term once? Was denying you any affection for his first wife’s sake or was it just him being cruel. He’d always told himself he was distance out of respect for Dyanna’s memory. What would she thinking about the women caring for her children never being thanked? Never being welcomed as she should have been into their family?
You watched his light eyes water and stayed still and silent. She must have been very kind…very beautiful. You had heard from the staff of the hall how deeply he had loved her, how he laughed with her.
When he cleared his throat and looked back down at you there was some new found understand of himself in his eyes. He’d hated you, simply because he resented that the longer you were around the more he noticed how attractive you were and worse…that he felt genuinely drawn to your personality. But What favor was he doing Dyanna, or his family by becoming more cold and bitter simply because he wanted to deny anything that brought him joy while she was not beside him?
When your shoulders shook twice, the shiver impossible to suppress Maekar came back to the moment. Back to you.
He motioned for you to stand up and finally undid the last tie that kept his chest covered.
“Clothes and a blanket would do.” You assured him, but your eyes were looking at the expanse of his chest..the pink skin there that you knew would be so warm.
“Body heat is best, I thought you’d know that. What did they teach you in Winterfell woman?” He raised a brow while you got up on your feet. Once you were up he touched your side, grunting at the damp towel that was wrapped there and he pulled it away, quickly pulling you in front of the fire. He sat down first in the chair and then looked to his lap. When you hesitated he sighed. The exasperation that you were used to seeing from him flaring up.
“you are my wife, it is not indecent to sit down.” He rolled his eyes a bit and his hand touched your bare back urging you down to his lap. Pulling the fur that had been warming in front of the flame over you at once. He felt your freezing fingers nervously grabbing at the fur, brushing against his stomach in the process. Quickly Maekar gathered them in one hand and brought them up to his neck cupping them there in that hot region.
You kept your eyes on him, waiting for his feeling for change, for him to suddenly decide again being so close to you. Especially in this state of undress. When he lifted your fingers up to his mouth and cupped them against his lips so he could blow warm air onto the icy digits you realized belatedly that he was not likely to push you away. You relaxed some as that understanding sunk into your mind, and you allowed yourself to sink back against him. Back naturally bent instead of all rigid to keep your figure away from his.
“your warm.” You breath out eyes closing as your cheek rested against one side of hai chest.
“Aye” he grunted in agreement. He would not of been sat beneath you if he wasn’t, he of found something warmer.
He could feel your legs curl up a bit so that your knees pressed to his side. He quickly brought a hand under the fur and wrapped it across your back and around your waist. Hand rubbing over your side pushing the chill off of you.
You savored the heat he offered and eventually you pulled your hands from his palm and held his shoulders rubbing slightly as you gained feeling back. It let him have use of his other hand to rub down the length of your leg and give your feet a few squeezes to ensure blood was flowing there as well.
His hand settled at your hip rubbing the join firmly as he looked down at you. His breathing had gotten a bit deeper, his nostrils flared some when he exhaled and you found that despite your mind telling you to look away from him your eyes were trapped on his. Your hands slowly sliding down from his muscular shoulders to his chest under the blanket and you trailed your fingertips over his pectoral muscles. Straightening some of the hair there as you went.
“I thought of this, before today.” He gripped you hip a bit harder and you pushed yourself instinctually against him more, chest to chest. He could feel how hard and cold your nipples were as they dragged across his chest. He knew how to warm those. It made his mouth salivate a bit.
“of what m’lord?” You blinked once before he slumped his head and down sought out your lips with his. Somehow that part of you was pink and warm and now he craved more contact there. Quickly raising his hand to hold your jaw up towards him so he could devour you in a kiss.
Your lips were clumsy and deeply unsure of what they should be doing but when he felt your soft tongue suddenly slip against his he groaned. You wanted him. He’d been to blind on the wedding night by his own mourning and guilt to notice that that nerves you were showing were those of uncertainty…and excitement. Not anxiety and disinterest. He felt even more guilty for his coldness now knowing that you would of been open to advances over that past many moons.
He groaned when you sat up some more to try and reach his mouth better, you’d been putting quite a bit of weight right over his lap…right over the growing bulge he had and now that that contact was lifted he could suddenly feel that aching need!
You moaned at his calloused hands drifting to your back, warm and thick fingers trailing against either side of your spine and you straighten up a bit which let the fur slip off of your shoulders, letting him see you better. The way her looked you up and down made you feel warmer than the bloody bath did.
When Maekar’s eyes raised back, finally, to meet your own after cataloging every inch of you he smiled, small, but it was unmistakably affection.
You lurched forward and kissed at the corner of his mouth where his lips at tilted up and you grinned the moment his hands found your bottom, callouses from his hilt feeling rough against that delicate pale skin.
You let your head fall back between your shoulders when his beard tickled your neck and his lips pressed pecks until he reached your collar bone and began to lay wet hungry kisses there. Your hand dropped from his chest and shoulder and one hand kept you stead in this position by holding his firm stomach, the other found its way to his breeches. Looking briefly up at him for assurance.
He groaned, deep and throat rattling and it was so assuring to you that you sunk your hand right down into the cloth and felt for him. He was hard and pulsing and extraordinarily erect so your fingers simply needed to fan out to feel him.
“it’s so hard…” you breath out, the earnestness of your surprise had his head spinning and pratically all of his blood rushing down to his cock.
“I am old, but not so old that my prick remains soft.” He lectured and you giggled a bit at the feeling of his hand squeezing your bum as a warning. Acknowledging your innocence, that he had denied you the understanding of how husband and wives function was to much for him to address internally at the moment so he’d decided to pretend you had been taunting him. That was easier for him!
“harder-“ he grunted hand sliding up your side looking for the handhold he wanted while your small fist wrapped around his shaft. “You can grip me tighter than that.” He breathed out nodding as you instantly corrected. “Good, that’s a good girl.” His four fingers settled wrapping against your ribs and his thumb splayed out under your breast lifting it up slightly and he puffed his chest out some to feel your hard nipple slide over his scarred skin.
“like this?” You looked at him bitting your lip as you squeezed much harder at his pulsing length and brought your hand up and down. Your fingers glided easily, he was producing plenty of lubricant himself. when his eyes closed while trying to reign in a moan and you leaned forward kissing the tension away. He held it in lines at the top of his noses bridge.
“I don’t deserve you.” He lowered his head when you kissed his forhead and his mouth dragged against the tops of your chest. It seemed like he was finding the perfect spot before settling in but when he did you gasped at the feeling of his tongue streching out to graze over one of your nipples.
“no…” you breathed out nodding a bit as you stroked him faster. “You don’t.” Your voice was breathy from how nice his mouth felt on your skin. How his nose nuzzled into the soft meat of your tits and he consumed as much of you as he could fit between his lips.
“Easy.” He warned you while his hand let go of your arse and he slipped his hand under your thigh finding your spot instantly because that part of you was radiating heat. You were wet as well, enough that he could feel that the raven black hair on your cunny was slicked into a mess.
When your hand faltered in its motion and your breath hitched at the suddenly presence of his fingertip dipping between you, breaching into your body, Maekar felt the shiver. Unsure if it was genuine chill or nerves he kissed your jaw and lifted you up with him as he got off the chair and then was over you on the fur rug infront of the fire.
“it’ll hurt-won’t it?” He could feel you tensing, feel your core squeezing at just the first bit of his finger entering. It was the princes turn to kiss you worry away, to stroke your cheek and hush you.
“it will hardly be worse than a frozen pond.” It was the truth, he wouldn’t offer you lies, and for that you were glad.
You breathed slowly, to calm yourself and soaked in the feeling of his hand on your hip, his weight leaned strategically against you, how he panted into your neck while slowly working two fingers into your core.
“Ahh!” You gasped at how filling they felt, at how odd…and electrifying it was to be able to feel him moving within you.
“Seven save me-“ he grunted kissing your lips and rubbing soothing with his thumb against your pearl. You realized quickly when an inner warmth began to bloom in your belly, that you would benefit greatly from his experience. He knew how to please a women. You suppose a man did not end up with as many children as he had without his wife wanting him in her bed!
He recognized the expression right away, the parting of your lips…the scrunching of your brows and how the column of your neck hallowed out a bit from how you tensed.
Your climax rolled through you before he could even comment on it. One moment you were getting stiff and tense under him, your knees rising up to push against into his sides and then next you were panting and as soft as dough under him.
Maekar pulled his soaked fingers from you and nodded at your whinny breathing. For a moment when you had clearly reached your release he considered ending it there. Letting you simply enjoy what had just happened. Though that whimpered strained noise you man when his hand was removed from you had the last good sense in him dissolving. You wanted more of him, wanted to feel him there between your legs.
“while you’re still calmed,” he pushed your hair back and then planted his bent elbow beside your head “I’ll- fuck me” he groaned his hand pulling his straining cock free from his breeches and instantly it slapped down against your swollen lips.
“please…” you mewd hands splayed out over your stomach where you had felt the intensity just moments ago.
Between your soft begs and the fact that he her not felt a women, in this way, for years Maekar could not resist a moment more. His eyes closed as he fed himself into your fluttering core. Pratically growling at how the warm squishy sensation of you hugged his prick so deliciously. His hand was fisted at your side, helping to keep him hovered above you some so he would not be fully engulfed by your sweet pussy.
“Oh gods” your teeth were clenched and your fingers dug in a bit to your stomach as it felt like his length began to displace things within you. He seemed large, it felt quite giant to you. Maekar’s hand suddenly went back to your hair the moment he saw your eyes fly shut and felt a warmth flood within you.
“That’s?” He picked up on the unease in your tone and saw how a little tear squeezed its way out of your shut eye. His hips stopped pushing ahead instantly. Actually he pulled out of you an inch or so. Glancing down to see the ring of blood around his shaft.
“it’s just blood…same as a cut.” He assured you, fingers flowing through your raven hair trying to bring you comfort. He wasn’t an overly affectionate or gentle man, and from what he saw you northern women did not want coddling. It made it easier for him to give you some small comforting remarks, ease that worry because this had been the first time he ever sense anxiety within you.
You breathed a bit slowly as the hand he had at your side rubbed under your clenched fingers to ease the tension in your lower belly. You opened you eyes now looking up at him, he was sweating some…the end sod his hair glued to his temple and the stern line between his brows was back. That worry was there for you, his concern and attention was on you in this moment, not the papers in his study, or a mess bis children created.
“it doesn’t really hurt.” You finally told him, it hadn’t ever really hurt, it was just pressure and a feeling you hadn’t anticipated.
“such a strong women.” He murmured. The affectionate tilt to his voice was not covered up at all by some put on huffing and puffing that you imagine he had not actually meant to say it outloud.
You looked down to see half of his cock was out of you and his body was being held up away from you. You wanted all of him-not just half!
“you are meant to be keeping me warm m’prince” Shivering for good measure before wrapping your feet up over him trying to weigh his back down so he would sink down against you.
He grinned some, hand shifting from your stomach to the small of your back and lifting you up towards him a bit more.
“Very well, wife.”
Finally Maekar pushed into you completely, in the manner that had started to haunt his mind over the past few moons when you were near him. He’d begun to have distasteful daydreams of pinning you to the break of fast table in his solar, stoping you on your walk to to rookery and pressing himself to you u til your back was flush against the stone wall. All of these imaginary scenarios ended the same.
His cock pressed fully into you. Tip twitching against your cervix and his stones slapping against you as he rocked in and out of you.
His mind has let him conjure up details about these various situation and still not one had come close to capturing how wonderful you felt beneath him, how dizzying the feeling of his cock engulfed fully within you left him!
“mmmm fucking hells” you swore when he continually bottomed out within you. The cursing made him kiss your jaw. He liked that you had a mouth on you, that you weren’t some sensitive flustered lady. Perhaps this pairing had been made with more thought, on his parents part, than just political strengthening?
“I can finish in my hand-“ your eyes searched for his instantly when he said that. “If you wish me too” he added after seeing the wave of worry in your eyes.
“n-no, I need-please keep going Maekar.” If not for a babe than at least for the orgasm that was building up in you so heavily that the tops of your ears felt heated.
Maekar kissed you, for a moment on the lips and then he pressed one to your temple, hand brushing down your hair and keeping your body pressed down towards his pelvis so your body took each thrust he gave, instead of getting bumped back and forth against the rug.
He felt how your hands squeezed at his sides, they were trembling a bit so he knew you were quite close to another peak. Finally you felt him start to lose his restraint, his weight was heavier over you, his hips rutting more than fully thrusting in and out. But you enjoyed that motion because it provide lovely contact for your clit against his pelvis. It had you moaning quite loudly-your eyes closing because you needed to focus on the intense wave building within you.
“ugh-“ he came with a low grunt, so deep that it came out muddled by vibrations and you gasped. Feeling him come appart, feeling his warm seed squish within you, it made you see stars.
Both of you were breathing heavily though your youth allowed you to revived before him.
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Warnings: Brief mention of sex
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I wish you all a good read!
When your father told you that you would be going to King's Landing and marrying Prince Aerion, you weren't exactly thrilled about the idea. You knew you should be grateful for such a good match, but you were afraid to leave Winterfell, your home. You had always imagined yourself growing old in the North, married to a northern man from another noble house.
But now, moons later, you were glad your father had arranged this marriage. You are happy with Aerion.
When you first met him, you didn't know exactly what to expect—the truth is, the ladies and maids of the court didn't help calm your nerves and uncertainty when they told you to be careful around him while they were preparing you for your wedding—but Aerion had surprised you. During your wedding, he had asked the singers and musicians to play northern songs. You danced together for much of the celebration, and he showed you the artist he hired to take portraits of the two of you during the celebration. But Aerion completely won you over when he defended you from a lord who was getting a little too handsy during the bedroom celebration.
Oh, and your wedding night also held a pleasant surprise. You were afraid he'd go straight to the point and treat this solely as his duty to produce his heir. You were also afraid he'd be too rough and hurt you. But Aerion took his time with you and made you feel things you never imagined you could feel.
Aerion had shown you how a man could please a woman with just his mouth. He had spent what felt like hours with his head between your thighs, savoring your flower until he was satisfied, then kissed you with your arousal still on his lips. You kissed again and again as he prepared you with his fingers until he thought you were ready to take his cock. He whispered compliments, like how beautiful you looked to him and how lucky he was to have you all to himself, promising to make you feel good as he entered you.
The next day, you didn't understand why the maids looked at you with concern when they came to help you get ready for your day. Yes, Aerion had left many love bites all over your body, but you didn't see anything wrong with it. He hadn't been rough with you.
You thought that with time, the people at court would stop staring at you so much. You believed it was because your northern dresses were different and more salvaged than those of the court. Also, your northern accent was too strong. You thought that perhaps that drew people's attention, but you had no idea that the real reason for their stares was that they couldn't believe how happy you looked with Prince Aerion.
For the noblewomen of the court and the servants, it felt surreal to see you strolling through the halls, your arm linked with Aerion's. To see the two of you laughing and kissing as if you were a normal couple. Perhaps people wouldn't be so shocked if it were another man, but everyone had seen how cruel the prince could be. That's why, during the first weeks of your marriage, your maids kept asking if you were alright while discreetly searching for any bruises, until they saw you were becoming irritated and stopped.
It didn't go unnoticed that since Aerion married you, he no longer seemed to cause nearly as much trouble as before. He didn't look for any excuse to punish or mock the servants or other nobles.
Some began to think that perhaps you were what Aerion had always needed. A loving wife to soothe the monster.
King Daeron also noticed the change in his troubled grandson, so in the middle of a family dinner, he innocently remarked that he was glad he had chosen you as Aerion's bride instead of Prince Valarr or Prince Daeron, as he had initially considered.
You were surprised. Perhaps you were too caught up in your own head because you didn't notice the discomfort and tension at the table.
"It's unfair. Why didn't you ask me? I would have liked to have such a beautiful wife," Daeron said, clearly joking, trying to lighten the mood.
You laughed, knowing it was just a simple joke.
But Aerion didn't find it funny.
After that scene, you saw the change in your husband. You noticed how Aerion now seemed more aggressive in the yard when training with Valarr, how he seemed to look for any excuse to make a tasteless comment or a "joke" to his cousin or brother, as if he wanted to prove to everyone, especially you, that they were inferior to him. You didn't like it. He had never shown you this side of himself before. You hated seeing this attitude in Aerion.
You reached your breaking point after seeing Daeron's sad expression when Aerion made a joke about him potentially choking on his own vomit from drinking so much at dinner. That's why, as soon as you two returned to your shared quarters, you confronted your husband directly.
“You have to stop. Right now,” you said firmly, your eyes never leaving his. Your gaze was icy, mimicking the look your father had whenever he judged someone.
For the first time, you weren't looking at him like a sweet girlfriend, but like a Stark ready to fight.
“Stop what?” the prince asked, still somewhat surprised by your attitude. He didn't recall ever seeing you look at someone like that during your entire stay.
“Ever since your grandfather mentioned he considered marrying me off to Valarr and Daeron, you've been acting like an idiot. You're mean to everyone for no reason,” you said, crossing your arms, your annoyance evident in your voice.
“I…”
“But nothing,” you interrupted, not wanting to hear excuses. “The way you've been acting lately, instead of making me think well of you, is only ruining the image I had of you.” Your words left him speechless.
Aerion didn't want to lose your affection. He had worked hard all these moons to show you his good and charming side to win you over. He didn't want to lose all the progress you had made together, and he let himself be carried away by his anger and jealousy.
“I’m sorry, my lady. You’re right, my actions were terrible,” he said, because he knew it was the right thing to say and what his wife expected him to say, as he approached you, wanting to close the distance between you.
“I can forgive you, but I won’t yet,” you said, though you allowed him to put his arm around your waist. “Your attitude offended me deeply. You don’t need to boast or try to improve yourself in my eyes by humiliating other men, your family. I’m your wife now, my eyes are only for you,” you said seriously, taking his chin in your hand. “Remember that next time you’re tempted to be an idiot, I’m yours now.”
Aerion can't help but smile when he hears you call yourself his. Even so, he starts thinking about getting you a necklace with his initial. He was glad to know you were clear that you belonged to him, but he needed men to understand that too.
"I'll remember it," he promises, and kisses you. You barely manage to resist before melting in his arms.
Taglist for all my A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms works: @tanzierina @leftdreamprunewobbler @qardasngan @sentryvvorld @fromsaltandsea @onlybells1 @cocooola @flyinglama @outpostsworld @sil1
What would happen if Areion becomes somewhat obsessed with Valarr's wife (of course she only has eyes for Valarr), I feel like he would low-key go batshit crazy lol
I love the way you think, Anon!!!
This got graphic real quick and it uses the Stark reader from another story—linked here—because that reader insert seemed to fit the best.
Hope you like it (sorry if it sucks. Wrote this after writing a five hour final so...yeah.)
You Are Everything that Ever Was
Yandere!Valarr x Stark!wife!reader—in which Aerion wants you and grabs your wrist, Valarr sees and goes absolutely insane.
TW: 18+ MDNI. Mentions of sex, extreme graphic violence. Valarr takes Aerion's eye, possessive obsessive behaviour, the reader matches Valarr's freak.
Aerion was the kind of person who did not understand themselves, left unmoored and wandering because everyone else seemed to have their paths carved out for them and yet he didn’t. He was the reckless, dangerous child who was his mother’s darling, his one saving grace.
And then his mother died, taken by a baby with her hair and her eyes. And then his mother died and he was left with nothing yet again, no one there to see the potential in him, rather everyone looked at him and saw the Dragon Prince that he pretended to be.
So, he became what people saw. He became the cruel prince with the tongue of barbs. He became the cruel prince with fists of iron, pride and victory the only things that mattered to him.
Until you.
Until you arrived in a carriage, your hand looped around his cousin’s arm, bringing the bite of winter and ice and the scent of snow with you on the breeze, skirts the colour of House Stark upon you.
He saw you and saw someone new, someone who didn’t know him, only knew of him. He saw you and he wanted you because he saw the way you looked at his cousin, he saw the way you looked at Valarr—looking at him like your saviour, like he hung the sun and the stars and the moon in the sky just for you.
He wanted you to look at him like that. He wanted someone to look at him like that, like he was everything. He wanted what he could never have.
But that didn’t stop him from trying.
***
“Valarr,” you whisper, your hand resting between his shoulder blades, your voice soft, still carrying the sound of the ghost you used to be, the ghost that lingered in the halls of people who never saw you. “Valarr, it’s morning.”
“Must we be so noble?” he murmurs, stirring and shifting, his hand grasping yours, pulling you down against him, his lips pressing kisses into your neck, feverish and warm and slightly crazed like a starving man.
“You have council meetings,” you remind him, your voice cracking in a giggle as his hands run up and down your body.
“Let the kingdom burn to the ground,” he whispers against your skin, each press of his lips an exquisite kind of torture, “so long as I have you in my arms.” You sigh against him, wriggling from his grip, giggling as he reaches out, trying to pull you back against him, keep you in his arms for just a little bit longer.
“You may be willing,” you counter, your voice light and tinged with laughter, with mirth, “but I am not. Get up! Your father was against this marriage to begin with, let us not make him like it even less.” But Valarr did not listen, merely reaching you successfully, pulling you back against him, pressing kisses to every inch of you that he could reach, much to your delight, your giggles echoing from the room and down the hall.
Down to the ears of one Dragon Prince, one prince whose finger curl around the stone walls so hard that his knuckles turn white and stone grit lines underneath his nails.
Because he wants to be the one you giggle for.
The one you smile for.
Why can’t he have someone who sees the good in him?
***
Aerion watches you always, everywhere that you are whenever you are out. He watches and prowls outside where you are when he cannot be there with you and sometimes he fools himself into thinking that the two of you are man and wife, that you are there with him even when you ignore him.
When you don’t see him.
It’s that which changes him now. Because he could handle with you ignoring him or sneering at him, but pretending he does not exist, or not even realizing he exists at all is too much. Just too much.
He has spent weeks watching you, weeks learning your routines, what colours you favour, what rooms you like to get lost in. He has spent weeks learning you and you have spent weeks not even realizing he exists at all except for a vapid smile at dinners.
Well no more.
You may be something he cannot have but he will be damned if he does not try.
“Hello, Lady Stark,” he calls out now, his voice echoing off the stones of the library, the walls which form the archives of the Keep, the walls in which you nestle during the day, hiding from anyone and anything except Valarr.
Perfect, precious Valarr.
“It’s Princess, actually,” you reply, not even looking up from your book, simply flipping another page. “My titles are my lady, Princess or, for you Prince Aerion, cousin.” Your tone is dispassionate, not that of someone who actively despises him just someone who doesn’t care.
“Well then,” he replies, his tone dropping lower, growing seductive, dangerous but in the best way, “how are you, cousin?” He watches as you stand, your gown of black and deepest red flowing over every curve in a memorizing display, your face a mask of displeasure.
“I was wonderful until you began to pester me,” you answer, grabbing the book you were reading after snapping it closed and storming past him, radiating ire behind you as he follows like a helpless lapdog beholden to you in entire.
“Where do you run off to, cousin dearest?” he calls out, his hand snaking forwards and grabbing your wrist, halting your progress and you turn back to him, glaring at him with the force of a thousand fires, a thousand suns. A fire so hot it freezes.
“Unhand me, Prince Aerion,” you call out but he does not, simply tightening his grip. “I am not your dearest; I am not your friend. I am the wife of your cousin and the future queen so. I suggest. You. Unhand. Me. Now.” Every word is carefully enunciated but it matters not because you are not what causes Aerion to let go.
No, that would be Valarr.
Valarr who arrives, watching as his beloved, his beautiful, his wife and light and life and fire and flame is accosted by a prince who never learned what the hand of discipline feels like. But that is something easily remedied.
Valarr does not typically let you wander the castle alone, but this morning had been different. This morning had been one he had off from council duties and so he dismissed the guards he normally had following you, tracking your every move, preventing anyone from getting close enough to hurt you or talk with you or simply bother you—allowing you to not be a ghost while also ensuring your safety. He had dismissed the guards believing you would be safe, believing that while he fetched the pastries you had wished for—a romantic gesture, the kind he tended to do all of the time—you would be safe.
And yet, he arrives to this. To his cousin touching you, looking at you, speaking with you. Speaking to you as though you would be his when you were Valarr’s.
This would not stand.
“Let go of me, Aerion!” you snap as his fingers tighten more, the words and frantic edge striking straight to Valarr’s heart and he doesn’t even think, just dropping the silver tray of pastries and running to you, his hand straying to his dagger, fiddling with the hilt before he pries Aerion’s hand from your wrist, slowly and torturously bending each finger back until he hears the crack of the base of the finger, hears his cousin grunt in pain every time, the sound satisfying an animalistic part of Valarr, one he didn’t want you to see, one that first came to life when he stabbed a dagger into your father’s hand to ensure your hand in marriage.
Your love for eternity that Aerion thought he could take.
It was then when Valarr had pried every finger loose from your wrist that he pushed his cousin up against the stone wall, his forearm braced against his throat, cutting into his windpipe. His other hand reaches for the hand which had touched you, gripping it and twisting it until that sinister snap echoes through the hall, Aerion whining in pain, face contorting and violet eyes lining with tears.
“She said,” Valarr whispers, voice low, gaze locked on his cousin yet hyper-aware of the way you stand behind him, arms crossed over your chest not in comfort but defiance. Strength. “To unhand her.”
“And…you have to fucking—ah! —break my wrists and fingers…in response?!” Aerion cries, his eyes shut, screwed tight against the pain, against the sight of his cousin and the fury in his eyes, the danger in his face.
“This is the least I’m going to do. You attempted to take my wife from me. Wars have been fought over less, cousin. And Targaryen’s have hurt one another over far less.” Valarr’s voice is perfectly measured, perfectly calm and even while inside he is a storm of emotions, his one hand pulling his dagger free from his belt, dragging the tip of the Valaryian steel across his cousin’s face, tracing every inch of it, not enough to draw blood—yet—but enough that Aerion feels the pinch of the cold steel, the pressure and the impeding pain.
“What will…you…do?” Aerion breathes out as Valarr presses his forearm deeper into his cousin’s throat. Valarr is conscious of you watching him, of the way your breathing is hitching but he doesn’t know if it’s in fear or anger or desire. He just doesn’t know.
He hopes it’s not fear.
Anything but fear.
“I think,” Valarr muses, dragging his dagger back to his cousin’s eye, circling around the left one, digging in deeper, watching with a cool dispassion as his cousin flinches away from the bite of the blade, body quivering in fear, “that I shall do what our ancestors did. After all…” he digs the dagger into the skin underneath Aerion’s eye, his cousin crying out in pain as the steel bites in, digging between flesh and nerves and blood, “Luce did remove Aemond’s eye over a dragon. I think…that you trying to harm my wife is even worse than a dragon egg so, I shall do as Luce did and…take your eye.” And then Valarr digs the dagger in all the way, carefully cutting through the flesh, severing the eye from the socket, pulling it away, his fingers coming away covered in viscera, fingers holding one bloody violet eye.
And Aerion’s scream of pain is as pitiful as Valarr knew it would be. As pitiful as the coward that he is.
“I should take both your eyes for even looking at my wife but I will have mercy. Should you touch her again, I will not be this merciful. Should you do it again…” he leans forwards towards his cousin, the cousin currently sliding down the wall, blood trickling from between his clutched fingers, dripping from his eye, “I will not simply break the hand which touches her but remove both of them and I shall take your other eye. And if you still do not learn your lesson, I shall have your head.”
“MONSTER!” Aerion cries, the rest of what he wanted to say disappearing into whines and mewls like a pitiful dying animal. One that does not know when it has been beaten but still clings hopelessly to the idea that it will survive, that it will win.
“He is no monster, Prince Aerion,” Valarr hears you whisper, voice timid and slightly frightened, yet still strong like the girl who claimed to be a ghost while being the most alive thing he had ever seen. “He is my savior.” Those words are said with more heat, more strength, more belief. Like they are truth, perhaps the only one you truly know.
“Go to the Maester, cousin,” Valarr tells Aerion as he wipes his dagger off on Aerion’s sleeve, tucking it back in its sheath before straightening and turning away from him, to you, his beloved, tossing one final remark over his shoulder, “and do not tell what occurred here because if you do…I will end you. That’s not a threat, that’s a promise, cousin. Just tell the Maester that you were being…a dragon, proving something.”
Valarr focuses upon you, upon the tears lining your eyes and the way you bite your bottom lip in nerves, hands fisting your gown as if afraid. Afraid of…him? He goes to you, his hands coming to rest upon your waist, thumbs tracing circles on your stomach, calming the way you like and he watches you as you bring your gaze up to him, those tear-lined precious eyes burning with the fire of a thousand suns focused entirely on him.
“I did not do anything to encourage it, my husband,” you whisper, voice thick with unshed tears and Valarr feels stricken, cut to the core, realizing that you do fear him in part. Fear that he thinks you encouraged this, wanted it. “I swear.”
“I know, my darling,” he whispers, ducking his head to be level with yours, his eyes holding your gaze, keeping it focused on him, only him. “I know. I am not angry at you, never you. I just simply need to protect you and that’s what I did. I protect you, always. So that you need never be a ghost in these halls, my fire.” He watches as your face changes, brightens, the tears beaten back by his words, his devotion.
His love.
“You keep saving me, Valarr,” you whisper, your hand coming to rest on his cheek, the touch enough to drive him mad, that precious tender gesture of love, pure love made for him by the Seven. “And what have I done to deserve it?”
At your question, Valarr sweeps you in his arms, turning and running, your arms twined around his neck, giggles echoing through the hall as the two of you burst into your room, his foot kicking the door closed as he sets you down, gently ever so gently on the floor, his hands anchored to your hips, body fused to yours.
“You need not do anything to deserve my love, my fire,” he whispers, pulling you tight against him, pressing his body to yours, lips finding your neck. “You were made for me by the Seven and by the Seven, I shall protect you. You are my life, my love, my…everything.”
“And you are mine,” you whisper and Valarr feels something inside of him crack at your words, your admission that the two of you are the same. Not only made for each other, but formed of each other.
That one cannot exist without the other.
And while Aerion drags himself to the Maester, claiming that he did it to himself to test the limits of his dragon’s strength, his immortality, the threat hanging in his mind, Valarr takes you to bed.
While Aerion is stitched up, a ruby placed in his eye socket like that of his ancestor Aemond with his sapphire eye, Valarr presses into you, your bodies joining, limbs twining.
While Aerion takes the milk of the poppy, you confess to Valarr that seeing him protect you made you want him more.
While Aerion succumbs to the blackness, the darkness of the pain, of the loss of a piece of himself, Valarr is inside of you, a rhythm between the two of you acting as a reminder that each of you belongs to the other.
That one cannot exist without the other.
It is after, when the two of you are twined with one another that he holds you close, his hands on your back, your front pressed to his, that he whispers, “you are everything that ever was.”
The words are a confession and a declaration. A threat and a promise and a truth of how deeply he loves you because to him it is truth.
There is nothing without you and there never will be.
You are his everything at the Seven’s decree and he will burn the world down to keep you in his arms. He will take the head of every man who dares to look at you, speak to you or heaven forbid, touch you.
He will destroy the world if it tries to take you from him.
Because there is no Valarr without you and no you without Valarr.
You are everything that ever was because there is no version of the two of you without each other.
Summary: "The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives." But what happens when a lone wolf yearns to truly live before dying? Trapped between her noble birthright and the impending army of the dead, a daughter of Winterfell finds an unexpected refuge in the fierce and untamed Tormund Giantsbane. Their connection forces her to confront the woman she is versus the woman she could be, if only she dares to want more than revenge.
Rating: Mature/Explicit
Category: F/M
Warnings: Explicit sexual content, mentions of past trauma and violence (canon-cypical), descriptions of grief and vengeance, explicit language, emotional turmoil.
Dividers: @firefly-graphics
Words: 13k
!!!English is not my first language!!!
The concept of death had become a constant term. At least for you. Death had been there, present in your life and in your family, since the very beginning. Like a cursed mark, it had always been there.
Father, mother, brother, uncles and aunts, loyal friends...
Death was no stranger, not a tale whispered here and there, nor a distant reality that made you wonder if and when it would happen around you. No, death was so present that you had almost grown accustomed to it at one point.
You yourself had caused a few.
Perhaps your political skills weren't as exceptional and (when convenient, especially) as pernicious as Sansa's. Perhaps you didn't wield a sword as formidably and lethally as Arya or Jon. And perhaps you weren't like Bran, who was...well, whatever he was now.
But the truth was, you used what you had at your disposal to make things happen, to bring vengeance to those people who had made the mistake of taking your loved ones away.
And you made sure they knew who was bringing death to them. Death was your pain and your retribution. And death would come for you too, eventually. It was the only certainty everyone could count on in life, even if most couldn't say when or how it would happen.
One way or another, death was an old acquaintance.
And that's why you didn't understand why, suddenly, the prospect of not surviving what was coming was distressing you so much. Putting everything into perspective in an annoying and inconvenient way.
The dead were marching towards Winterfell, and the armies were prepared — the last men from the Wall had already arrived, as had the remaining wildlings guarding Eastwatch. The warriors already had their swords sharpened and ready, the battlements in position, the catapults at their posts, trenches dug and reinforced.
You felt ready for a battle — The Battle. A battle that could start at any moment. Perhaps, if you were lucky, there would be another day or two to prepare. But maybe it would happen before dawn, in the next few hours. The men from the Wall said it would be soon. The anticipation was making you as sick as the increasingly real prospect of death.
It couldn't be fear. You weren't afraid to die — at worst, it would be a rest in absolute nothingness for you. At best, you would reunite with your loved ones, wherever they were.
It couldn't be fear that was keeping you so tense and uncertain.
You find yourself wandering, your fingers tightly gripping the wine goblet, wide eyes restlessly watching the people scattered throughout the great hall.
Despite the downright ominous cloud hanging over their heads, the men laugh as they eat. They drink ale and wine and speak loudly, as if this were an absolutely normal night.
Although the cold and snow are harsher than anything you've ever seen, the inside of the castle is filled with light and warmth, windows glowing and chimneys smoking — and you can't remember the last time you saw it so full of life. Which is, to say the least, contradictory, since death had never been such a likely outcome for everyone in Winterfell as it was now.
You wonder if it had less to do with them not fearing death and more to do with them being prepared for it.
Your eyes blink at the broad smiles on their faces, at the fierce gleam in their gazes, at the voices echoing loudly off the castle's grey walls. Out of the corner of your eye, you see that even Jon and the Dragon Queen are smiling at each other.
And, as you poke at a splinter in the large wooden table where you sit with your siblings and the Dragon Queen, a thought cuts through the confused fog of assumptions in your head, like lightning buzzing across a dark sky.
Perhaps they truly didn't fear death, because they had lived until now. They didn't want to die, of course, and they would probably fight as long as there was any remaining spark of energy in their bodies to avoid joining the Night King's army. But, in the worst (and most realistic, unfortunately) case of their deaths, they would be ready for it — because their lives had had some meaning.
Your lips part, and your heart feels too big for your chest as you sink, agonizingly slow, into that realization. You weren't afraid of death. You were frustrated at the thought of dying without having even truly lived to begin with.
What had you accomplished to this day, besides loss and vengeance?
Since the fateful day Robert Baratheon came personally to Winterfell to fetch your father, Ned Stark, to serve as Hand of the King in King's Landing, you had experienced nothing but pain and anger.
And then, when you finally return to the North and retake Winterfell, your home, alongside your siblings, ready to finally rest and at least try to find some sense of peace and satisfaction in life, the threat of death from Beyond the Wall emerges to put an end to that too.
You would die without having found any joy in life. Without having felt peace. Without having loved. Without having been loved.
As if drawn by a pulsating source of the feeling, your head turns to where Jon and the Dragon Queen are seated to your right. You watch them with a narrowed gaze, your heart beating painfully hard in your chest.
It's quite true that, despite the massive army of Unsullied, Dothraki, and the dragons — you, like every Northerner worth their salt, didn't know if you trusted the silver-haired woman.
But one thing had been evident from the first moment.
She loved Jon. Just as he loved her. The feeling shone in the way they looked at each other, as evident as the flames of a bonfire on a dark, freezing night.
You blink at the couple, feeling almost...
...jealous?
Gods, not that you didn't want Jon to experience that feeling. You were genuinely happy that he had found something good in this cruel and bloody world. Happy that he had loved and been loved in return, at least once.
But what about you? Would your entire life have been just an exhausting journey of deaths, vengeance, and duties?
You startle when Jon calls your name, your gaze quickly snapping up to him.
"Hey, are you alright? You've been staring for a while." He asks, tilting his head, one hand gently grasping your shoulder, his dark eyes narrowed with concern. Behind him, the Dragon Queen drinks some of her wine, violet eyes blinking slowly at you over the rim of her goblet.
"W-what? Yes, it's fine! I mean, as fine as it can be given the situation." You squeak, blushing at being caught in your stupid reverie, grabbing a slice of bread to disguise the nervousness bubbling underneath. "I guess I'm just not feeling very well, that's all."
Jon's expression grows even more concerned, worry evident on his pale features.
"What are you feeling? Should I call the Maester to see you?"
"Oh no, there's no need to bother the old man; the gods know he's probably filled his chamber pot twice by this hour and is snoring in his bed." You're quick to deny, rising from your chair in a graceful movement while trying to laugh, despite your nerves, to ease his worry. "It's just a bit of discomfort, nothing more. I just need some rest. I'll be in my chambers if you need me."
Jon barely blinks in the seconds that follow, staring at you with those big, dark eyes, as if he could read your soul. You subtly shift your weight from one foot to the other, wringing your hands in front of your body, trying to keep your face as impassive as possible under that gaze.
"Alright." He sighs finally, relaxing his tense shoulders, giving you a small nod of his chin. "But don't hesitate to ask one of the maids to fetch me if you feel you need anything."
"I will, brother." You agree with a forced smile, looking past his shoulder to nod slightly at the silver-haired woman. You don't wait for any response from her before turning your back on them, walking out of the great hall.
People laugh and slam their mugs on the table as you pass, nodding at you with respect and fierce pride — but you barely notice, too busy trying to leave the hall before anyone notices your state.
You stumble when you finally reach the corridor, feeling almost suffocated, as if your mind had been completely thrown off balance. It's ridiculous, and you have no idea where this untimely epiphany came from, you only know it's there and it seems to have come to stay. Suddenly it's as if...as if you were trapped, chained to duties and conduct, or something like that, but that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And yet...
You're so absorbed in your own feelings that you startle when you bump into someone else. Your forehead ricochets ungracefully off someone's hard chest, making you stumble backward with a humiliating sound of shock. Before you trip and fall, however, large hands close around your arms, steadying you.
"Easy there, little wolf."
You look up, your fingers frozen halfway to smoothing your sore forehead, your heart stumbling a beat in your chest.
Tormund Giantsbane stands before you, immense, his red beard wild and untamed like the very land he came from. His blue eyes stare at you with that curious and unsettling gleam — a combination of fire and ice that shouldn't exist, but burns nonetheless.
His hands still hold your arms, and you feel the heat seeping through your dress sleeves, as if his skin knew where you were cold and decided, unceremoniously, to warm you.
"You're looking like a deer surrounded by wolves, ironic as that may be," he comments with a lopsided half-smile, his voice too low and rough for the oppressive silence of the corridor. "If I were a suspicious man, I'd say you're running from something."
You open your mouth, ready to retort with your usual sarcasm, but nothing comes out. Because the truth is, he's right. And, worse than that, he saw. He always sees — with eyes that never pretend, that never disguise. Tormund may be crude, unpredictable, and inconvenient, but he is, above all, honest. And there's a part of you that envies that...fiercely.
"I'm not running. I just needed some air."
He lets out a small noise in the back of his throat. A sound that isn't exactly skeptical, but isn't agreeing either. It's a sound that strips you bare, as if saying: Lies aren't necessary between those who might not see tomorrow, little wolf.
You take a step back, but he still holds your arms. Lightly, but firmly. And when you look at his face again, you realize he's watching you as if he's waiting for something. A word. A gesture. A truth.
"You're not like them," he says, and for a moment, your mind races trying to understand if he meant the nobles, the soldiers...or the living in general.
"Not like who?" your voice comes out softer than you intended.
"Like everyone who pretends not to be afraid." He releases your arms slowly, as if the touch had been inevitable, but the absence was too. "You feel too much. That scares you, doesn't it?"
You take a deep breath, as if the air were thin. Tormund is too close. Not just physically, but emotionally too close, and that's what really makes you tense. It's what kept you away from the inconvenient and persistent man all this time. He speaks as if he could see things you yourself avoid facing. As if he could feel what's poorly hidden behind your pose of control and your lineage of ice.
"You don't understand," you say, shaking your head, and this time your voice has steel, has bitterness. "It's not that easy. I can't simply..." You wave your hand, as if you weren't even free enough to formulate the thought out loud.
"Because you're a Stark?" He understands and counters anyway, nearly knocking the air from your lungs.
"Because I'm a lady." Your reply comes out sharper than you intended, and its echo feels like a judgment in itself, something that sounds too loud in the empty corridor. Lady. As if it were a curse. As if it were a prison.
Tormund doesn't laugh, nor does he mock you — which was perhaps the most surprising thing, maybe even worse. He just looks at you for another moment and then says, with a seriousness you didn't expect from that loud, chaotic man:
"When the darkness comes and the dead are breathing down our necks, little wolf...it won't matter what they expected of you. It will only matter what you wished for and never had the courage to take."
Your chest aches, your eyes widen, and your lips are parted with an offended retort that never truly escapes. As if his words had struck a point you didn't know existed, a hidden corner between duty and emptiness.
He had always been inconvenient and sarcastic, a huge, crude man who never hesitated to say exactly what he thought to anyone, no matter how noble the person was. You envied how free he was with his own feelings, however irritating it was sometimes — which was most of the time, to be honest.
But now? His sincerity hits the icy walls around your heart, shatters the defenses carefully built over the years, leaves you as exposed and raw as a nerve. It's humiliating. Like a weakness that was always there, hidden and silent, yes, but blessedly a shame only you knew of. Until that moment...
But no more.
Now the damned Tormund Giantsbane knows it too.
"This..." you begin, steps unsteady and trembling as you stagger back, away from him and his irritating ability to see right through you. "This conversation...this...this never happened, do you understand? Just go your way and I'll go mine, wildling."
You turn before he can answer, walking with quick steps to your bedchamber, your breath catching in your throat.
You feel nauseous. Feet tapping through empty corridors, pressing the cold stone floor hard so you wouldn't turn around and do something stupid and reckless like go back to him...but you don't.
It was a familiar feeling to you, the pain of wanting something deeply but knowing it could never be.
When you reach your bedchamber and turn your head to look at the door to close it...there stands Tormund. Because of course he's there.
"Have you ever in your life listened to and obeyed a single thing anyone ever told you?" you ask breathlessly, frowning, your shoulders tense with frustration and anger.
Tormund is leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, his broad body taking up more space than it should. He doesn't answer immediately. He just looks at you. His blue eyes are darker in the hearth fire and candlelight of the room, and the gleam in them...isn't mocking, as you'd expect from someone as undisciplined as him. It's quiet. Almost...careful.
And that irritates you more than any taunt.
"I do listen," he says finally, his voice deep and low, as if he didn't want to wake something that was already about to rise within you. "But I also see. And what I saw out there isn't something I can just ignore."
You shake your head, your fists clenched at your sides, as if that could contain the internal avalanche threatening to destroy you. "You saw nothing."
"I saw someone trying to hide a scream behind a pretty smile." He takes a step forward. Slow. Careful. As if you were a wounded wolf that might attack or flee at any moment. "I saw a woman who is tired of dying slowly just to seem strong and unshakable."
"You know nothing about me, Giantsbane."
"I don't know what you had for breakfast, if that's what you mean." He smiles, just one corner of his mouth. A stupid smile on his stupid bearded face. "But I know how to recognize when someone is about to shatter. I've seen it before. In men before battles. In women who lost everything. In myself."
You find yourself taking a step back. Not because you're afraid of him. You never were, to be honest, however chaotic and unpredictable the man was. But because you're afraid of yourself. Of what you feel. Of what you want. And of what you're about to admit, even if only in thought.
"What you're doing..." your voice is low, almost a whisper. "This is cruel."
He takes another step. Now he's inside the room. The shadows move around his broad shoulders as if the castle itself were breathing around his presence.
"No. Cruel is you continuing to pretend you don't want anything, little wolf. That you don't need anything." He stops a few steps from you, the air between you two thick, saturated with something that has no name. Something that is just body and heat. "But you do want. And I...I am here. And that won't change just because you said you can't."
You stare at him, feeling every beat of your heart like a drum inside your chest. You want to scream, punch something, run away.
But you also want to yield. You want to feel. You want...him. And that is unthinkable. Unforgivable.
"You don't understand...I-I am a Stark," you say, as if the name were a chain tied to your wrists, as if reminding yourself of that would bring back your sanity. "I cannot afford to want. To...feel, this way."
"Feel for me anyway." His voice is now a rough murmur. A grave, earthy thing that resonates right in your bones. "Let me show you, just once, what it's like to live. Before death comes knocking at our doors."
You are so close to him now. When did that happen? You don't know. Perhaps you were always destined for this moment. Or perhaps you're just…tired of denying the inevitable.
But then, as if something icy touched the center of your chest, reality returns, swift and cruel. You pull away, a sharp, almost trembling step, as if you had touched a live flame and been burned.
“No,” you whisper. And the word comes out like a blunt blade that cuts from within, tears irregularly and painfully. “It can't happen.”
Tormund raises a red eyebrow, the wild smile returning — slow and provocative.
“Can't?” He repeats, as if it were the funniest thing he's ever heard. “At this point in our lives, princess, do you really still care about what you can or cannot do?”
You turn your face away, your eyes burning wet, fists clenched as if holding a scream in your joints.
“You don't understand. I am a noble. And you…” your voice fails for a second, almost hesitant to utter the next words, knowing they weren't what you truly thought. But what did it matter what you thought, right? “You're just a damned wildling.”
He lets out a short, mocking laugh and scratches his thick, calloused fingers through his disheveled beard, as if he expected no less from you.
“Ah, there she is...there's the little wolf I know, biting with the right little teeth.”
“Tormund...”
“You want to know what I really am, pretty little thing?” He takes a step forward, his blue eyes sparking, crackling like the wood burning in your bedchamber's hearth fire. And, in that moment, you see how different you really are - there's something beyond mere numerical age in that gaze...there's the weight of experience, of burdens, of time. “I'm the guy who survived the cruel northern storm by eating rats and sleeping inside a dead bear. I'm the man who tore a wight's arm off with my bare hands while pissing in the snow.” He tilts his head, smiling with sharp, teasing teeth. “But if you think being a 'wildling' stops me from seeing the way you look at me...then you're blinder than a crow with no beak.”
You narrow your eyes, offended, confused about what, by the old gods and the new, he means, and...captivated? His controlled anger has a heat that invades, even without permission. And the way he speaks...so shameless, so raw. That's what drives you insane. That's what scares you.
“You are unbearable,” you murmur, your voice choked, the whole body trembling with the effort of not throwing yourself into the abyss he represents.
“And you are a liar,” he snarls back, low and rough, his large, tall body covered in leather and wild furs shadowing your much smaller, more delicate one. “Standing there with that voice of ice and that gaze of iron, but inside...inside you are burning, little wolf. I can feel it. Every time you pretend you don't want to kiss me. Every time you look at me as if you're ashamed of desiring what your people say is wrong.”
You look away, but he continues - he always continues.
“Let me tell you something, Princess of the North," he says the last part with a kind of amused disdain, as if it were a joke that never gets old you thinking you belong to the true North. "The world doesn't give a fuck about what's right. Nor about what's decent and proper. And it certainly doesn't wait. Not for nobles, nor for titles or permission. The world just takes. Tears away. Kills. And leaves you alone with the 'what ifs' echoing until your last breath, which, guess what? Might be much sooner than you thought.”
You stare at him, your chest heaving, your heart hammering against your ribs like a panicked prisoner. He is irritatingly articulate and coherent, far more than you would expect from any wildling, judging by the stories told.
“I can't.” Your voice is almost inaudible, a near-desperate whisper cast into the air. “Even if I wanted to...”
“You do want.” He says, firmly. Without hesitation. As if it were a truth as ancient as the winter that plagues the North itself.
You don't answer. You just stare at him with wide eyes and parted lips, your heart racing in your chest — and for the first time in a long time, you have no sharp reply, no excuse. Only silence.
He approaches once more, but doesn't touch you. Doesn't cross the final distance. He merely whispers:
“You know where to find me…if you want to know what it's like to be truly free before the battle against death begins.”
And then he turns and leaves, his footsteps echoing like muffled thunder down the stone corridor.
The door closes with a soft sound.
But inside you,nothing is quiet anymore.
---
You do not sleep.
How could you?
The war approaches like a creature with teeth of ice, growling in the distance, waiting for the right moment to devour everything. But, more than that, it's what had happened within the walls of Winterfell that keeps you awake — what he said, more precisely. What he made you feel.
You lie in bed, wrapped in soft, comfortable furs, but your whole body feels rigid, as if even the feather pillow had thorns. The chamber is almost dark, the embers in the hearth fire dying slowly, casting restless shadows on the stone walls. The hours pass, and your eyes remain stubbornly open, fixed on the ceiling. Fixed on him.
"Standing there with that voice of ice and that gaze of iron, but inside...inside you are burning, little wolf."
His words hammer in your head like a war drum. You turn over, pull the blanket up to your chin, turn over again. But there is no comfortable position when it is your soul that is restless.
Why did he have to say that? Why did he have to see something no one else saw...that no one else cared about? Why did he have to hit so true?
You hate that he's right. You hate even more that he knows he's right. He read you as if your skin were made of crystal, as if every crack were wide open.
And you are not used to being seen. Nor touched. Nor...examined in that way. Not at all, really.
You sit up in bed, your feet touching the icy floor. Your heart beats hard, frustrated and irritated. You think of everything you are about to lose: your siblings, your home, the peace you never had. You think of how you spent your whole life being everything they expected of you — noble, correct, cold, untouchable. How you mourned and fought tooth and nail for vengeance, even though you were too young for such things.
And you also think of how you never lived. Not really.
And now…now, because of a damned wildling who thinks he knows you better than anyone, it all feels like an even heavier burden than it already was.
You leap to your feet, your bare feet running across the stone floor. You grab the oil lamp with trembling hands, your thin, cold fingers slipping for a moment before managing to grip the iron handle. The flame rises, trembling too, as if it felt what was to come.
You throw a cloak over your nightgown, but not with the patience and delicacy of a lady. With anger. With haste. With fury. Your hair falls over your shoulders, loose and untamed after so much tossing and turning in bed. Your footsteps echo on the stone corridor as you cross the castle with a single purpose.
He is lodged in the east wing — where the less noble guests, the soldiers and foreigners who came to die together in this infernal battle, stay. The walls seem damper there, colder, if that was even possible. The air carries the smell of iron and smoke and doom.
You arrive before the door of rough, crude wood, coarser than those in the noble wing. And then you knock. One, two, three times. Bordering on impatience.
The door opens with a dry crack, revealing Tormund — hair disheveled, broad torso exposed, wearing only his wild leather pants, eyes slightly wide with surprise. The red beard looking even wilder in the lamplight.
"Look at that…" he says, blinking slowly, that damned mischievous smile forming. "The little wolf actually came."
You enter uninvited, pushing the door with your shoulder, your chin raised with indignant, petulant pride.
"You had no right to say the things you said," you blurt out, your chest heaving, the lamp shaking in your hand.
"Don't tell me you came here in the fucking middle of the night to tell me that?" He scratches the sparse hair on his defined stomach and gives you a slow once-over — from the cloak covering your body to the fire burning in your wide eyes. "Or did you come because you couldn't stop thinking about me?"
"You are unbearable, wildling."
"You've said that." He shrugs, walking to the corner table with a metal mug half-full of ale, or whatever horrible piss he drinks. "And yet, here you are."
"You messed with me, Tormund, and I want an apology!" Your voice rises, but it's hoarse with frustration, with emotion. "You...you made it seem stupid and wrong to be who I am. You scorned me for trying to do the right thing!"
He turns to you, finally serious, his intense blue eyes piercing yours like spears.
"I never said it was wrong to be who you are, little wolf. I just said you're pretending you're not something more."
"Gods, you are so dense! You just don't understand!" Your scream echoes off the cold walls. "I am a Stark! I was raised with rules, with expectations. I must serve my house, as is the duty of a noble lady. I have lived exclusively for that and for vengeance these past years. I...I never had the luxury of a choice!"
"You do now."
The silence after those two words is absolute. It cuts you deeply, leaves you breathless and stammering.
He takes a step toward you, and this time you don't retreat. Your body is tense, frozen, your eyes brimming with anger and frustration — not only at him, but at yourself. At everything.
"You think you can just show up and..." your voice fails. "...make me want something I can't have?"
"You can have it. You just don't have the courage."
He is before you now. The heat of his body is palpable. And yours is trembling.
"Are you going to kiss me?" he asks, his voice rough like the cutting northern wind. "Or are you going to keep pretending you came here just to yell at me?"
Your heart hammers so hard it feels ready to explode. The silence that follows is thick and sticky, like warm honey poured over an open, painful wound.
You stare at him, the lamp shaking in your hand, and only then do you realize — as if seeing for the first time, with eyes that seem to belong to someone elseb— how...bare he is.
The broad chest, covered in a layer of red hair, marked by scars that cut across his pale skin like trails of ancient battles. The shoulders are so wide they seem made to carry the world. The muscles in his arm contract slightly as he raises the mug to his lips, and even this simple gesture has a wild strength, a virility that frightens you.
You should look away. You should turn your back and run.
But you can't.
Your mouth goes dry. A blush explodes across your cheeks as if you'd swallowed fire.
You feel a strange pang in your stomach. Something alive. Something...dangerous.
He notices.
Of course he notices.
The smile that forms on his lips isn't as openly mocking this time. It's more restrained. As if he, too, is treading carefully on this cracked ground. As if he knows a single sudden movement would make everything collapse, would send you running out that door — the one you never should have crossed in the first place.
“Never seen a man without a shirt before, little wolf?” he asks, with that deep, rough voice that slides under your skin.
“Of course I have, idiot.” You answer automatically, but your own voice betrays you. Weak. Tense. Almost trembling.
He raises an eyebrow, taking a step closer. He still doesn't touch you, and that, for some reason you can't catalog, is worse than if he did.
“Men from your world don't have scars like mine. I bet they're all clean and polished, with hands as smooth as the soft sheets on your bed.”
“And you think that impresses me?” Your retort is more acidic than intended, said too quickly. A desperate defense against something that's already inside you, warm and pulsing, shamefully exposed.
“No. I know it doesn't.” He takes another step. Now you feel the heat of his body radiating against yours. The lamp trembles along with your hand. “But I think you're tired of living as if nothing could shake you. As if nothing could pierce those barriers you've built.”
Your eyes meet his.
You want to say something. Deny. Affirm. Cry. Spit. Scream. But all you can do is stand there, face raised, chin firm, and eyes brimming with frustration and desire. And he sees it all. Everything.
“You were raised to be perfect, weren't you?” he whispers. “To be some well-born lord's little doll, who will never know the scent of your desire, raw and true...nor the taste of your anger, alive and hot, the way it is right now.”
You squeeze your eyes shut for a moment, as if that could push away what you feel. As if it could silence the body trembling beneath your skin, begging for a mistake.
“You know nothing about me.”
“I know enough to know that your body, right now, is being far more honest than that head of yours, little wolf.”
The air between you becomes impossible to breathe. Your heart beats too loud. Your parted lips feel the heat of his breath so close.
But you take a step back.
Unsteady and confused.
He doesn't stop you, however. He doesn't immediately chase after you. He just watches, his eyes burning in silence, like a patient predator who knows it will reach its prey eventually...inevitably.
"I-I can't," you say, as if the phrase were an anchor chained to your ankles, holding onto your sanity. "It shouldn't be like this. I…I was raised to belong to someone. To be given. And only then touched. And only then...loved."
The words come out trembling. Almost rehearsed. Almost...childish. Empty words, embedded in your mind over the years by society and duty. Words you don't even believe yourself, a notion of duty you never truly wanted.
But he doesn't laugh. He doesn't mock. He doesn't contradict you. Tormund just moves closer again. So close you can smell his skin — smoke, leather, and a wild hint of forest.
“What if, for one single night, you belonged to yourself?” he asks. “Not to your house or your duties. Nor to the dead. Nor to the fucking world. Just to yourself."
You want to say “no”. You need to say “no”.
But all that comes out is a sigh. Low. Deep. Painful. He doesn't kiss you. He merely bends his tall frame to rest his forehead against yours, letting your breaths mingle intimately.
A gesture almost reverent. Almost...pure.
"And maybe...a little bit mine?"
He whispers, and, not for the first time that night, you wonder if the mistake isn't in letting yourself be reached, but in living and dying without ever having felt anything.
And then, shattering the meditative, profound, and still disturbingly intimate silence, Tormund breathes, inappropriate and horribly sincere, as always:
"Tell me, little wolf, have you ever had a man before? Ever felt a cock inside you? Or would I be your first—"
"S-shut up!" you protest, your cheeks on fire and eyes wide, giving Tormund's chest a hard shove — which does nothing but make him stagger back slightly, barking out an annoyingly, deeply satisfied laugh. The horrible man! You know he knows perfectly well you've never lain with a man. That's the whole damn point of this moral debate! He was just being provocative and inconvenient, as always.
"Sweet girl," Tormund continues, despite your obvious embarrassment and the sharp look you shoot him. "I could fuck you 'til you couldn't walk. Oh, hell. No one's had this sweet cunt before, no one's seen this body without all the fine furs and clothes covering you. What a gift you'd give me, little wolf. All my—"
You make a noise somewhere between a disapproving grunt and a humiliated choke — flushed and utterly horrified by the man's vulgarity, who simply started spewing indecencies like a river spring. And horrified especially with yourself, for the sudden heat that courses through your body in response to that verbal depravity. Your slender fingers rise to your face to hide the scalding blush exploding across your skin. As if that could protect you, as if there were still salvation against what he is. Against what he awakens in your body.
“You are unbearable,” you repeat, your voice muffled between your fingers. “You…you can't just say those things to a lady, Tormund!”
“'Course I can,” he retorts, his laughter reverberating like thunder between the walls. “I can, and I will. Why the hell would I hide what I feel, huh? Never understood you southerners' habit of pretending you don't want to cum just because you're wearing pretty clothes.”
You choke, your eyes widening behind the cage of your fingers, shocked by the audacity, the crudeness — and, damn it, by the heat that runs down your thighs at the mention of something so explicit and dirty. Your body is betraying you in every possible way, and it's unfair. So unfair.
“By the gods, Tormund,” you snarl, pressing your fingers tighter against your eyes and flaming cheeks. “You are a depraved brute!”
Tormund laughs again, a guttural sound echoing off the damp walls of the room, as if your indignation were the best blanket for the sepulchral cold of that night. He doesn't move back, nor does he pretend regret for the boldness of the words he just spat out. Instead, he tilts his head slightly, his blue eyes narrowing with a mixture of amusement and something sharper, hungrier.
"Depraved, huh? Maybe. But at least I'm honest about what I want. You there, trembling like a leaf in the wind, pretending you don't feel the same heat rising up your legs right now." He tilts his head back as he takes another swig of ale and, beneath the disheveled strands of his reddish beard, you can't help but notice how the movement makes the tendons in his pale neck stretch, his Adam's apple bobbing slightly, a vein pulsing visibly under the skin marked by years of battles and merciless winters.
You lower your hands from your face slowly, your fingers still warm from the blush that spreads like wildfire across your chest, reaching the base of your neck where the dark cloak parts slightly. The air in the room seems thicker now, laden with the smell of smoke from the fireplace and his earthy odor – sweat, mixed with leather, fire, and something indefinably masculine that makes your stomach twist.
"Honest? That's not honesty, it's pure crudeness. You talk as if I were one of...one of your wildling women, ready to be taken in the snow without a second thought." Your voice comes out sharper than intended, laden with a frustration that goes beyond his words; it's the anger at yourself for feeling that treacherous throb between your thighs, a subtle pulsation you've never experienced with such intensity, as if your body were waking from a sleep forced upon it by years of duties and accumulated griefs.
He sets the mug down on the table with a dull thud, the sound echoing like a deliberate provocation, and crosses his arms over his bare chest, the red hairs bristling slightly with the movement.
"Crudeness, she says." He rolls the word lazily on his tongue, as if tasting it. "Ah, little wolf, if that's crudeness, then tell me what it is you're doing here, in the dark of night, with only a thin nightgown under your cloak, your hair messy as if you'd wrestled a wight in bed. You didn't come here to discuss salon etiquette with me." His eyes travel slowly down your body, not with immediate lust, but appraisingly, as if cataloging every involuntary tremor, every rushed breath that makes your chest rise and fall. You feel the weight of that gaze like a phantom touch, raising goosebumps on your skin under the light fabric, and for a moment, you hate how he seems to read every secret you keep – the untouched virginity, the repressed desire, the loneliness disguised as nobility.
"I came because you made me uneasy, you bearded idiot," you retort, taking a step forward without thinking, your chin raised in defiance, even as your heart beats like a war drum. The cold stone floor under your bare feet sends a shiver up your legs, contrasting with the heat radiating from him, now just an arm's length away. "You get in my head with this absurd talk about living before dying, as if it were that simple. As if I could just throw it all away – my house, my name, my...decency – just because a wildling with an inflated ego thinks he knows what I feel."
The words come out fast, punctuated by short breaths, and you realize, with growing panic, that you are closer to him than ever, close enough to feel the heat emanating from his exposed skin, to see the thin scars that cross his defined abdomen, marks from claws or blades that tell stories of survival you've only heard in tales around the hearth.
Tormund doesn't retreat; instead, he uncrosses his arms and slowly extends a hand, his thick, calloused fingers hovering in the air for a second before lightly brushing your arm, just above the elbow. The touch, even through the cloak's fabric, is surprisingly gentle for a man of his size, but electric, sending a spark that makes your muscles contract involuntarily.
"Decency is the word you use to hide, isn't it? To avoid admitting that you want to be touched, kissed, fucked until you forget the shackles that keep you chained to these...duties." His voice drops a tone, hoarse and laden with an intensity that is no longer just provocation; there's a vulnerability there, masked by the rough accent of the Free Folk, as if he were exposing not just desire, but the urgency to connect before the world ends. You feel his thumb trace a slow circle on your skin, and the simple gesture awakens a tingling that travels down your arm, reaching the center of your chest, where your heart seems to want to leap out.
You swallow dryly, your throat as dry as the Red Waste's sand, and try to pull your arm back, but your muscles don't obey immediately, betrayed by the spreading warmth.
"You think it's easy for me? I grew up watching my family be torn apart – a beheaded father, a murdered mother, a mutilated brother. I avenged what I could, killed those who deserved it, but it didn't set me free. It left me empty. And now you come, with your brutish ways, saying I should...what, exactly? Give myself to you as if it were a conquest? As if there were no consequences?" Your eyes fix on his, and for the first time, you see beyond the rough facade: there's a sadness there, an echo of the losses he himself suffered beyond the Wall, friends devoured by wights, clans destroyed by the eternal cold. It's this that disarms you a little, the realization that he's not just an inconvenient, ginger clown, but someone who understands the closeness of death in a way few nobles comprehend.
He lets out a long sigh, his chest rising and falling, and the touch on your arm firms, not possessive, but anchoring, as if wanting to keep you in the present.
"It's not a conquest, little wolf. It's a choice. Your choice. I'm not asking you to be mine forever – the gods know tomorrow we could be food for the dead. I'm asking you to be honest with yourself, just once. To set aside this armor of 'Lady Stark' and feel what your body is screaming for." His fingers move slowly up your cloaked arm, tracing a path to your shoulder, where the fabric naturally opens more, revealing the thin strap of your nightgown. The contact sends waves of heat that concentrate in your belly, an insistent throbbing that makes you instinctively squeeze your thighs together, mortified by the physical response you cannot control. He notices, of course – his blue eyes, irritatingly perceptive, darken, the pupils dilating in a way that frightens you as much as it excites you.
"Choice..." you repeat, your voice coming out as a hoarse whisper, your lips parted as your gaze involuntarily drops to his chest, tracing the lines of his scars with a curiosity bordering on fascination. One of them, thick and irregular, runs from his left shoulder to the center of his chest, as if something had literally tried to tear his heart out – and it probably had. "And if I choose wrong? What if this destroys me more than the battle coming our way?"
It's a perfectly sensible question, but even as you speak, you take a tiny step forward, your body betraying your mind, the cloak slipping a little more, exposing the curve of your neck where your skin contrasts with the blush rising there. The air between you vibrates, charged with tension, and you smell him more strongly now, invasive, mingling with the very scent of lavender and herbs from your bath.
Tormund leans his body down, his forehead almost touching yours again, but this time there's an urgency in the gesture, his warm breath grazing your cheek.
"Wrong would be dying without having tasted anything but pain. Let me show you, little wolf. Let me make you come so hard you forget the weight of your name for a while." The words are crude, explicit, but spoken with a sincerity that cuts like Valyrian steel – it's not just lust, it's an offer of escape, a moment of pure life amidst the chaos. His fingers slide from your shoulder to your neck, tracing the line of your collarbone with surprising delicacy, and you arch slightly, a low moan escaping before you can contain it, the sound echoing like a confession in the quiet room. His hand is large on your soft, immaculate skin, almost a profanation.
You close your eyes for an instant, the world reducing to his touch, to the heat building at your core, damp and insistent. When you open them, you see the desire mirrored in his eyes, but also a patience you didn't expect – he doesn't advance further, waiting for your consent, even as his body betrays the tension, his muscles rigid, the disturbingly visible bulge in his wildling leather pants. The sight makes your stomach churn with a mix of fear and excitement.
You bite your lower lip, lowering your hand to clench your fist against your chest, over the clasps of your cloak.
"I don't know how..." Your voice fails. The truth escaping through the crack in your armor. "I don't know how...how to do this."
Tormund stills, so close he breathes the same puff of air you exhale.
"Do what?" he asks, with a slight tilt of his head. His voice is lower now. "Want? Feel? Love?"
You hesitate. The air is so heavy it hurts to breathe.
"To be touched," you whisper, a confessional admission to the last person you ever imagined you would make it to. "To be touched. To let someone...see who I truly am. It was always a sin to me. Something to be avoided. Guarded. Used as a bargaining chip."
He moves even closer, raising his hand until his index finger and thumb fit under your chin, tilting your head upward. Slowly. As if facing a wounded, skittish wild animal – hurt, but wary.
"You're no bargaining chip, little wolf," he says, his rough voice carrying more tenderness than you expected to hear from a brute like him. "You're a woman. With flesh, blood, and will."
You look up. Your wide eyes meet his. And in that moment, you are trembling. But it's no longer fear.
It's something much, much deeper.
With his other hand, he captures yours, the one that was protectively curled against your chest, his long, thick fingers intertwining with your delicate, slender ones, squeezing with a gentle firmness, and guides it to his own chest, pressing it against the warm flesh where you feel his heart beating strong and rhythmic, like yours. He lowers his head slowly, his lips brushing your forehead in a surprisingly tender kiss, contrasting with the earlier crudeness, and you close your eyes, inhaling his scent, letting the moment stretch, your body relaxing involuntarily against his.
The kiss moves down to your temple, then to your cheek, each touch light, each moist, warm puff of his breath, each brush of his tall, broad body against yours, sending waves of heat that concentrate at your core, making the wetness increase, trickling down your thighs in a sticky, shameful sensation you try to ignore but can't.
He releases your hands and slides his own down your back, tracing the curve of your spine over the cloak, his firm fingers pressing into your tense muscles, relieving the rigidity accumulated from sleepless nights and repressed fears.
"Relax, little wolf. I won't bite...unless you ask." The tone is provocative, with a stupid humor that lightens the weight of the situation a little, making you huff a reluctant laugh, your shoulders relaxing an inch.
You feel his hands descend to the small of your back, lightly squeezing your buttocks through the fabric, a gesture that sends a shock straight to your clit, making it pulse with urgency.
"Tormund..." you whisper, his name a plea mixed with a warning, your hips moving involuntarily forward, grinding against the hard bulge in his pants, feeling the thick length through the leather, warm and pulsing.
He grunts low, the sound vibrating in his chest against yours, and immediately, he returns the motion, rolling his hips slowly, creating a friction that makes you gasp, the air escaping in short bursts as pleasure builds slowly, layer by layer. Shame burns in your cheeks, knowing you're rubbing against him like an animal in heat, but desire overpowers it, feverish and insistent, erasing internal dilemmas for an instant.
He captures your lips then, the kiss starting slow, exploratory, his beard scratching the sensitive skin around your mouth and chin as his tongue grazes yours, asking for entry with a patience that doesn't match the urgency in his eyes and the rough grunt in his throat. You open, hesitant at first, but soon reciprocating, tongues intertwining in a wet, hot dance, his taste invading – bitter ale mixed with something earthy, masculine – making you moan low, the sound muffled by the kiss.
His hands undo the cloak's tie with agile fingers, the fabric falling to the stone floor, exposing the thin nightgown, your breasts pressed against his chest, your hardened nipples rubbing against the red hair in a sensation bordering on torment. You feel the wetness between your legs increase, trickling slowly down your inner thigh, and guilt surges again – how can you be so aroused, so ready, with a man like him? – but the kiss deepens, his hands moving up to cup your breasts over the fabric, his thumbs circling your nipples slowly, sending sparks that make your hips move faster against his.
"That's it, feel," he murmurs against your lips, breaking the kiss for a second, his warm breath mingling with yours. "Your body knows what it wants, even if your stubborn little head insists on denying it."
You rise onto your toes and wrap your fingers around the back of his neck, pulling his head back down, kissing with more hunger now, your teeth lightly nibbling his lower lip, a bold, instinctive act that surprises even you, making him grunt in approval. The fingers of your other hand, remarkably trembling despite the surge of boldness, descend to his pants, hesitant, tentatively touching the bulge through the leather, feeling the heat and rigidity, the subtle pulse that responds to your touch.
"Gods, you're...oh," you whisper against his mouth, your voice breathless, choked with curiosity and a noticeable trace of fear, your fingers slowly tracing the outline, exploring the unknown shape pulsing under the pressure. He laughs low against your mouth, the sound vibrating on your lips, and guides your hand into his pants without any preamble, quickly undoing the laces with his other hand, freeing the thick, erect member, the skin warm and silky under your fingers, prominent veins pulsing to the rhythm of his heart.
You swallow dryly, the blush intensifying as you wrap your fingers around it, feeling the circumference your hand can barely contain, a viscous, pearly liquid trickling from the tip, lubricating the slow movement you initiate, pumping slowly, mortified by your own wantonness, but fascinated by his reaction – blue eyes half-closed, long, light eyelashes fluttering, the rough moan escaping his kiss-swollen lips.
"Careful, little wolf, or you'll make me come before it's time. That would be a bit disappointing, wouldn't it?" he warns, his voice tense, making you smile like an idiot against his neck, where you bury your face to hide the shame.
He returns the favor, his hands descending under your nightgown, lifting the hem slowly, exposing your thighs to the room's air, his fingers tracing the inner skin, climbing until they find the wetness between your legs, parting the folds with delicacy, his thumb finding your swollen clit and circling slowly. You gasp loudly, the sound echoing in the room, your legs buckling as pleasure explodes in waves, his middle finger sliding inside slowly, feeling the virginal resistance, the tight canal contracting around him.
"So wet for me," he murmurs, his voice feverish now, his eyes fixed on yours as he adds another finger, stretching you carefully, the rhythmic movement creating wet sounds that embarrass but also excite you further. You cling to his shoulders, your nails digging into his flesh, moaning against his chest as pleasure builds, your body moving against his hand, seeking more depth, more pressure. Guilt throbs in the back of your mind – this is wrong, a Stark doesn't debase herself like this – but desire overpowers it, feverish and uncontrollable, erasing everything except the sensation of his fingers curling inside, touching a spot that makes stars explode behind your eyelids. Your other hand, still around his penis, freezes, unable to continue.
He slowly withdraws his fingers, bringing them to his mouth, licking the taste with a satisfied moan, his eyes never leaving yours, an act that makes the blush burn like fire on your face, mixing colossal embarrassment with an excitement that makes your clit pulse emptily.
"Sweet, just as I imagined," he says, his voice hoarse, and you laugh, flushed and feeling completely insane for letting this happen. You push him onto the bed in a weak impulse he obeys without preamble, your bodies falling together onto the furs, laughing between kisses as hands explore, touch, squeeze, discovering every inch. He rolls on top of you, the kisses trailing down your neck, his beard scratching your skin, making you shiver all over.
The furs on the bed are warm from the hearth fire, but nothing compares to the heat exploding under your skin when he rises and kneels between your legs, still with his leather pants open, his penis frighteningly erect and wet, his chest heaving like an animal kept too long in a cage. His blue eyes don't leave yours for a single second.
"The whole world can freeze tomorrow," he snarls, his voice rough, laden with a promise both obscene and reverent at the same time. "But tonight...fuck...tonight you're all mine, little wolf."
You open your mouth to respond – to protest, perhaps – but he is upon you once more. The rough beard grazing your collarbone, the weight of his body pressing you into the furs in a firm, almost possessive, yet careful manner. As if testing your limits with every touch, every sigh, every low growl in your ear.
The difference in size between you is absurd. His shoulders cover you completely, his arms strong as tree trunks around your body, fragile compared to his. He is brute, warm, and heavy – the complete opposite of everything you were taught to desire.
And yet...it's all you want.
"You're so small," he murmurs, as if reading your thoughts, his lips sliding along your jawline. "So fucking delicate. A little southern flower...and yet, you came hunting me in the middle of the night, trembling with lust and rage. What a beautiful thing you are."
You moan, squeezing his shoulders, burying your fingers in his red hair, not knowing what to do with all the heat spreading through your belly, between your legs, all over your body. It's new. It's intense. And it's good. Frighteningly good.
His hands descend – too large for your body, fingers too rough to be gentle, and yet, and yet he is. He touches like a man who wants to learn your language. And you feel naked before you even are.
When he finally undresses you, it's painfully slow. It's nothing you'd expect from a wildling.
His fingers undo the ties of your nightgown, and a shiver runs up your spine as the fabric slides from your shoulders and reveals your skin to the flickering hearth light. He stops for a moment. His gaze fixed on you as if he'd just found a treasure.
"Look at this," he breathes, his voice failing for a moment, his eyes burning with pure fire. "No southern lord deserved to see you like this. No noble-born son with silken hands would know what to do with a body like this."
You close your eyes for a second, blushing to the roots of your hair. Shame envelops you like a wave, but you push through it as never before. Your hand, trembling, touches his chest again, explores the paths of his scars, and then slides down his belly. The muscles contract under the touch. He grunts low, his eyes fixed on you.
"That's it," he encourages, his voice low, warm. "Touch what's yours."
And then, he lowers himself.
His lips trace a wet path from your neck to your breasts, which he takes into his mouth like a thirsty man, his beard rubbing the sensitive skin, moans catching in your throat. He explores every part of you as if he wants to memorize it. As if he were saying goodbye to the world and this was the only piece of it worth remembering.
And when he finally touches you again between your legs – slowly, teasingly, knowing you – you let out a moan you've never heard come from your own mouth. A guttural, primal sound that seems to come from the depths of your soul.
"You're so wet for me," he says, his voice ragged, almost lost in the sheer pleasure of touching you like this. "So ready…so tight…"
He speaks without stopping against your breasts, sucking your nipples hungrily, his tongue swirling while one hand keeps your thighs open, his fingers focused on preparing you, stretching you with the two fingers he'd used before, adding a third with patience, his thumb lazily circling your clit, growling as he hears a mewl of pain from you. The wet sounds fill the air along with your moans, the pleasure building to the breaking point without rupturing, leaving you panting, sweaty, begging in incoherent whispers. You felt as if you were on the edge of a cliff, about to jump. But Tormund doesn't let you. All he does is let you dance on the edge.
The whole world seems to have stopped as you writhe on the furs, sweaty and panting, trembling and flushed, begging for things whose meaning you didn't even know. There is no more castle. No more war. No more dead marching beyond the Wall.
There is only heat. There are only two bodies – one wanting to learn, the other wanting to teach. And a desire that finally, finally, doesn't ask for permission to exist.
It feels like a lifetime of sweet, painful torture has passed before he deems you "ready" enough and rises from between your legs.
Tormund positions his body over yours with deliberate slowness, his knees sinking into the straw mattress covered with soft furs, his weight distributed so as not to crush you, yet still imposing, like a living mountain moving with an unexpected precision for a man of his stature. His blue eyes fix on yours, intense and laden with a mix of raw desire and a patience forged in battles beyond the Wall, where every thoughtless move could cost a life. The orange glow of the hearth makes his hair and beard seem on fire, highlights the darkness of desire in the clear blue of his eyes, casts shadows on his pale skin. He is beautiful in a way that steals the air from your lungs – a vision of beauty in its rawest form, forged by hard labor and the harsh winter that rules the wildlings' lives.
The tip of him, warm and pulsing, presses against your wet entrance, grazing the sensitive folds still throbbing from his previous touches, sending a shiver that makes your inner muscles contract involuntarily in anticipation. You feel his width there, thick and intimidating, the silky skin stretched over prominent veins pulsing to the rapid rhythm of his heart, and a subtle panic mixes with the excitement, making your stomach churn – will it fit? Will it hurt like the stories whispered by the maids in Winterfell suggested? He notices the hesitation in your gaze, the way your pupils dilate, and gives a lopsided smile, one corner of his mouth lifting beneath his disheveled red beard.
"Breathe deep, little wolf. It'll be a tight fit at first, but I promise you'll be begging for more after," he murmurs, his voice hoarse, tempered with that typical mischief, as if he were telling a sarcastic anecdote about boar hunting and not about to take your virtue, but his eyes betray genuine care, a vigilance that allows no rush.
He advances slowly, the broad head pushing against the initial resistance of your entrance, stretching your inner walls with a pressure that burns like a slow fire, a sharp pain radiating from your core to your thighs, making you gasp loudly, your lips parting in a sound resembling a night cat's mewl, half moan, half protest. His thickness is overwhelming, filling you inch by inch, the veins rubbing against your sensitive folds in a way that amplifies the sensation of invasion, as if your body is being molded around him, forced to adapt to a circumference that seems impossible to accommodate.
Tears well in the corners of your eyes, trickling slowly down your temples, warm and salty, mixing shame for the exposed vulnerability with the confused pleasure beginning to intertwine with the pain, a deep tingling that promises more if you can endure it. Your nails sink into his broad shoulders, digging into the flesh marked by old scars, leaving red half-moons on the pale skin, something he doesn't even seem to notice if not for the muscles contracting under the touch, as if absorbing your pain.
"Shh, easy now, my stubborn Stark," he whispers, halting his advance for a moment, his whole body tense with the effort of restraint, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead as he lowers his face to kiss the tears streaming down, his tongue grazing the salty skin with a tenderness that contrasts with the pulsing rigidity inside you. "Breathe with me, it'll pass, and then it'll be like riding a purebred for the first time – scary at first, but then you don't want to stop."
You inhale deeply, your chest rising and falling against his, your breasts pressed against his warm skin covered in red hair that itches lightly, relieving some of the tension as your body slowly adjusts to the intrusion. He resumes his movement with patience, pushing in a little more, his thickness making its way through the wetness that facilitates but doesn't eliminate the initial burning, a stretching that makes your inner muscles contract in involuntary spasms, sending waves of pain mixed with pleasure radiating to your still-sensitive clit. A low moan escapes your throat, hoarse and ragged, as the tears continue to flow, blurring your vision of his face above, his blue eyes now half-closed in concentration, his beard rubbing against the flushed skin of your cheeks and chin with each heavy breath he releases. Your nails dig deeper, tracing red lines on his shoulders, and he finally reacts, grunting low, a guttural sound that vibrates in his chest and echoes in yours, but instead of recoiling or showing any discomfort, he kisses your exposed neck, lightly nibbling the skin to distract you, his voice coming out in a mischievous whisper:
"That's it, mark your wildling, little wolf. If it hurts too much, tell me, but I bet you're feeling that good tingling now, aren't you? Your body knows what it wants, just relax and give it what it wants." The humor in his voice is light, like a taunt between friends in a tavern, but laden with an intimacy that soothes, making you laugh weakly through the tears, the tremulous sound easing the tension as your body relaxes a little more, allowing him to advance another inch.
Finally, with a controlled thrust, he buries himself completely, his base pressing against your outer folds, his thickness filling you to the limit, a sensation of fullness that transforms the pain into a bearable, almost pleasurable throb, your inner muscles contracting around him in waves that make you both moan simultaneously – yours high and surprised, his deep and satisfied, like a rumble of approval. He remains still for a moment, allowing you to grow accustomed, sweat running down his back as his large hands envelop your hips, his thumbs tracing gentle circles on your skin to distract from the residual burning.
"Fuck, you're killing me," he whispers, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. "The tightest, the hottest...fuck, no one's ever had you before," he murmurs, his voice hoarse now, laced with that explicit malice that deepens your blush, but also with a clear care in the way he tilts his head to inspect your face, wiping the tears with his calloused thumb. "There, little wolf, the worst is over. Now it's just the good part, I promise. Tell me when you're ready. Or don't. I don't mind staying here the rest of the night, just feeling you pulse around me. Warming my cock with that tight cunt." The words are dirty and explicit enough to make you look away and pout in feigned offense, but they're spoken with a light, sarcastic tone, as if he's mocking his own impatience, easing your embarrassment with humor, making you nod slowly after a moment, your eyes meeting his in a silent connection that goes beyond the physical.
You signal with a subtle shift of your hips, testing the sensation, and he begins the initial rhythm slowly, pulling back just a little before pushing back in, a gentle back-and-forth that allows your body to adapt, his thickness brushing against sensitive inner spots that send sparks of pleasure up your legs, transforming the aching throb into rising waves of ecstasy. The sounds start low – yours a hitched sigh, mixed with soft moans that escape with each thrust, his rough grunts echoing in the room, accompanied by the wet sound of friction, a subtle schlick that is both embarrassing and arousing.
Your nails relax a little on his shoulders but remain dug in enough to anchor you, while the tears slowly dry, replaced by a flush of pleasure spreading across your chest. He gradually accelerates, the rhythm gaining strength, his hips meeting yours with more insistence, making the bedwood creak against the stone floor, a rhythmic sound punctuating each thrust.
"That's it, feel how you swallow me whole?" he growls low, his voice feverish now, his eyes fixed on yours as one of his hands moves down to circle your clit with his thumb, amplifying the pleasure, making you arch your back with a loud moan that echoes off the grey walls. The malice returns full force in his words, whispered between heavy breaths: "You're moaning like a wolf in heat, Stark. I bet the guards outside are wondering if I'm killing someone in here."
You open your mouth to reprimand him for such humiliating vulgarity, but all that comes out is a louder moan when he pushes particularly deep. The rhythm intensifies, the thrusts deeper and faster, his thickness filling and retreating in a cycle that builds unbearable pressure, the wet sounds louder now, mixed with your moans growing in volume, hoarse and desperate, and his grunts becoming more primitive, like the snarls of a wild animal. The bed begins to thump against the wall more forcefully now, a dull, repetitive bang echoing like a war drum, the wood groaning in protest as bodies collide with increasing force, sweat running down glued torsos, mingling your scents. He doesn't speak anymore, and that must mean something - he only makes sounds you thought, until that moment, only an animal would make.
Your nails dig deep again, tracing red grooves on his back as the pleasure peaks, your inner muscles clenching around him in spasms, milking him, making him groan loudly, the sound echoing like a triumphant roar as he speeds up even more, the thrusts irregular now, strong and deep, the bed banging hard against the wall in a crescendo that culminates in his climax, warm, thick, and pulsing inside you, filling you with a sensation of completeness that leaves you gasping.
The silence that follows is heavy. Not with guilt, but with intensity. As if nothing else mattered. As if, for a moment, the whole world had stopped spinning. Tormund collapses partially on top of you, supporting his weight on his forearms, panting, his face buried in your neck. His beard prickles, his chest rises and falls in a frantic rhythm against yours, which is in no better state. His breath hits your skin warm, his fingers still gripping you as if fearing you might disappear.
And you...
You feel more alive than ever before.
He finally collapses beside you, pulling you to his chest, heavy breathing mingling with yours in the post-climax silence, the room filled only by the distant echo of the old bed settling. Bodies still glued, damp with sweat, intoxicated by pleasure, muscles soft and trembling. The hearth fire crackles beside you, casting golden shadows on the stone walls.
You curl into him. There are no words or sarcastic, inappropriate comments from him now, and strangely, it feels right, the silence. Just skin, heat, and ragged breath.
Sleep comes without warning.
You fall asleep right there, wrapped in the furs of the bed and the scent of Tormund — wood, sweat, leather, and a hint of wild fire that is his alone. The last thing you feel is the weight of his large hand stroking your hair, surprisingly gentle for such a brute man.
---
The next morning, the cold seeps through the window cracks like a cruel warning. You wake with a slight shiver, your eyes opening slowly, adjusting to the grey light of dawn. For a confused, sleepy moment, you don't know where you are.
The first thing that helps you regain clarity is the heat. Not from the furs. Not from the hearth fire still burning weakly in the corner of the room. But the heat of his body, of the muscular leg entwined with yours, of the large hand resting unceremoniously on your bare waist. Of the warm breath hitting the nape of your neck, soft, rhythmic.
Tormund Giantsbane is sleeping deeply. And you should thank the gods for that. Because if he were awake...he would certainly comment. It's what he does. Talk, talk nonstop.
You turn your head slowly and carefully to look at him, avoiding sudden movements so as not to wake him. His chest rises and falls slowly, the red hair clashing blatantly with the light color of the pillow. There's something peaceful about him now. Almost beautiful, if you didn't know the kind of chaos that lived under that skin.
You sit up even more slowly, your muscles sore and sensitive betraying the intense night, a burning between your legs that makes you blush in response. You pull the blanket up to your chin and look around with the eyes of a frightened deer, as if someone might be spying — which is absurd. No one would dare enter there. But the weight of reality arrives like a muffled, yet dangerous, thunder.
You spent the night in the arms of a wildling. The natural enemy of your people. A man most would consider unfit even for a maid. And you are a Lady Stark. Daughter of the North. Sister to a king. Oh, you needed moon tea, urgently.
You move slowly, as lightly as possible, gathering every shred of your dignity as you slip out of bed. Your legs still annoyingly shaky. Your body marked where he held, kissed, possessed.
You hold your breath as you pick up the crumpled nightgown from the floor, eyes frantically searching the space for the cloak, stumbling silently as you dress. Every rustle of fabric seems deafening.
You don't dare look at him during the entire process — but you feel him waking before you even hear him.
"The day has barely broken and you're already trying to run away, little wolf?"
His voice shatters the silence like the grunt of a beast. Low. Dragged by sleepiness and laden with something dangerously satisfied.
You freeze.
"Never took you for a fool, princess," he grumbles, turning over in bed, the sheets slipping enough to reveal his bare chest covered in red hair. "After last night, you really thought I'd let you leave without even a good morning kiss?"
"It's not as if this...meant anything," you murmur, hurrying to dress now that subtlety is gone. "It was a mistake. A moment of weakness. The world is ending and I...I lost my head."
He laughs. A deep, hoarse, lazy, even disdainful sound. Utterly insolent.
"If that was losing your head, I want to see you completely insane next time."
His laugh drags to the end of the words."Fuck, what a night. My little wolf Stark moans loud. Trembles. Digs her nails in. You were born for this, you know? For me."
"Gods, shut up," you snarl, turning to him, eyes narrowed, heart racing for a thousand reasons, cheeks stained crimson. "You can't...you can't just say these things, as if everything were fine! I am a Stark. A noble. And you...you are Free Folk!"
"Precisely," he replies, sitting up, the sheets falling dangerously around his hips. The muscles of his abdomen contract as he rests his forearms on his knees, a crooked smile playing on his lips. "You spent your whole life being what others told you to be. Last night, for the first time, you were who you wanted to be. Honestly, I thought a bit of kisses and a good fuck would make you less...rigid, little wolf. Clearly, I underestimated your Stark stubbornness. My bad."
You try to look away, blushing even more. But the way he speaks, as if he sees you, truly sees you, is unbearable.
"You don't understand," you whisper, your voice choked. "If they find out…if they see…I could lose everything. My name. My honor. My place among my people."
"And what do you gain, then? A cold title? An empty bed? A husband chosen by some political dance and formal dinners?"
He stands up slowly, his feet touching the icy stone floor, his eyes fixed on yours. Naked. Shameless. A pagan god forged in snow and battle.
You swallow dryly, your face now blushing violently, averting your gaze — but he is there, coming towards you. One step. Another. You retreat until your back touches the cold wall.
"You don't have to love me," he says, his wild eyes burning. "You don't have to promise me anything. But don't tell me you didn't like it. That you didn't want it. Because I felt it. Every fucking inch of your body screamed for me last night."
"I..."
You want to deny it. You want to run. You want to forget. But all you can do is stand there — with your back against the stone, your body half-dressed, your eyes locked on his, and your heart racing like a warhorse in battle.
He stops a few inches away.
"What scares you more, little wolf?" he whispers, his hand rising to touch your face with a gentleness that shouldn't belong to that man. "The dead outside...or what you feel in here?" His palm slides down and touches the space over your chest, your heart.
You close your eyes. A stubborn tear escapes, but he catches it with his thumb.
Silence.
And then, instead of fleeing, as you probably should, you lean upward. Your lips meet. Softer this time. Slower. As if sealing something silent between them, a pact made between the beast and the wolf. There is no hurry in this kiss. Only heat. Only discovery.
Tormund kisses you with restrained hunger, as if savoring you. And when his hands slide down your waist again, you not pull away.
He breaks the kiss for a moment, just enough to look into your eyes, his breath warm and moist on your lips. He holds your face more firmly, looking deep into your tear-filled eyes before growling:
"Survive this. Stay alive," his voice turns into a hoarse murmur as he says your name, "and then you'll be mine again. One night, one month, or forever. Just survive this and we'll see about the rest. Promise me."
Your heart clenches in your chest, a tightness that isn't just fear of the impending battle, but something deeper, more treacherous – the recognition that he sees beyond the facade of the untouchable noble you built over years of loss and vengeance. You swallows dryly, your throat parched, and looks away at the uneven stone floor, where the scattered furs bore witness to the night's chaos.
How to answer that? How to promise anything when the whole world seems about to collapse under the weight of the marching dead? Your mind spins in circles, remembering Septa Mordane's lessons on honor and duty, the countless cold nights in Winterfell listening to stories of Northern heroes who, in none of those stories, not once, yielded to wild impulses. But here you are, you body still marked by his hands, his scent imprinted on your skin, and a treacherous part of yourself wants to grab that promise like a shield against the emptiness that has always accompanied you.
Your eyes return to his, meeting that intense blue gleam, now softened by a vulnerability you didn't expect – as if he, the giant who often laughs at death, was genuinely afraid of losing you.
You knows you shouldn't promise anything. Not that you would survive, and certainly not that you would think of an "after" the battle that included...him. In the remote chance you were both alive after the Night King, what kind of future could there be for a Lady Stark and a wildling? The prospect was laughable.
And yet...
You scoffs, pushing his hand away from your face lightly, but without any real force, your fingers brushing his for a second longer than necessary.
"Don't get your hopes up, wildling." You murmur, half-sulking, half-moved. "But...but I will try. To survive, of course. Both of us. And after...yes, after we'll see."
The words come out as a reluctant concession, not exactly a promise, but enough to make his eyes shine with disguised triumph. He nods, pulling you into a bear hug, making you struggle and gasp for air while cursing him, his warm, solid body against yours, the smell of fire and leather invading your senses once more, before releasing you with a kiss on the forehead. You roll your eyes, relaxing your body against his, returning the hug, a blush rising again, mixed with a frustration bordering on laughter.
You deny yourself any blossoming feelings, labeling them as mere physical attraction, a distraction, a taste of true freedom before the end. Yet, the longer he holds you there, caged in his strong arms, the more it sounds like a lie, your heart tightening with a concern that goes beyond duty or attraction.
Yes, you both would survive.
And after that? Well, after that you think you might come to like the inconvenience of thinking of a version of your life that included Tormund Giantsbane in it, if fate allowed.
𝜗𝜚⋆ Misread signals | Authors Note! okay so rn i've been so excited for the bnd and obsessed with Spider-man lately. And this kind of took a while to write, so I hope you enjoyed reading it and much as I enjoyed writing it.
pairing : mcu peter parker x stark!reader
genre : minor angst, fluff,
warnings : pining, underage drinking, sexual innuendos, text with italics are inner thoughts.
word count : 9213K words
summary : you've dropping hints that you like peter, but he just doesn't seem to be picking up what you're putting down
The moment could be pinpointed with embarrassing precision.
Not the vague, cinematic kind of falling. No slow-motion hair toss, no swelling orchestral score. It happened on a Tuesday, third period, in a chemistry lab that smelled like sulfur and the industrial lemon cleaner the janitor used too liberally on the countertops. The fluorescent tube above bench six had been flickering for three weeks straight, casting Peter Parker's face in this stuttering, almost strobe-like quality that made him look like a stop-motion version of himself.
You had been his lab partner since September. Six months of proximity. Six months of his elbow brushing yours when you both reached for the graduated cylinder. Six months of his handwriting, cramped, slanted left, the kind of penmanship that suggested a brain moving faster than the hand could manage, filling the margins of your shared notebook with corrections you didn't need but never stopped him from making.
Six months, and you'd filed him under friend with the same ruthless efficiency you filed everything. Stark women, well, Stark woman, singular, since it was just you, didn't pine. They strategized. They acquired. They did not sit in chemistry class watching a boy from Queens chew on the end of his pen and think about his mouth.
Except.
Except.
Peter was hunched over the Bunsen burner adjusting the flame height, his lower lip caught between his teeth in concentration, safety goggles pushed up into hair that was doing something devastating and entirely accidental. Brown curls gone bronze where the overhead flicker hit them, messy from the way he kept shoving his fingers through when he was thinking. He wore a flannel over a science pun t-shirt that read I THINK, THEREFORE I AM… PROBABLY WRONG in cracked white lettering, the flannel rolled to his elbows, forearms bare.
And then your solution over-bubbled.
The beaker lurched, and your hand shot out on instinct, and Peter's hand shot out faster, impossibly faster, fast enough that the motion didn't quite track, and his fingers closed around yours and the beaker simultaneously, steadying both. Hot glass. His palm against your knuckles. The faint, damp smell of his deodorant, something cheap and woodsy, cedar maybe, the kind that came in a two-pack from CVS, cutting through the sulfur.
"Whoa, got it, got it." He laughed, this breathy, startled sound, and his thumb grazed the inside of your wrist before he let go. "You okay? That would've been, like, a really lame way to get a scar."
You looked at the pink bloom spreading across your knuckles where his grip had been and felt something tectonic shift behind your sternum.
"I'm good," you said, and your voice came out normal, which was a miracle, because inside your skull a very calm, very detached voice was saying oh, no.
Two rows behind you, MJ turned a page in her sketchbook without looking up.
She's drawing him again. The third sketch this week where Parker's in frame. She doesn't even realize she angles her stool toward him. MJ's charcoal pencil moved in short, deliberate strokes. Give it two weeks before she cracks.
It took nine days.
The cafeteria ran on its own ecosystem: burnt pizza grease, industrial dish soap, the ghost of every energy drink ever spilled on the linoleum. Someone's Bluetooth speaker leaked tinny reggaeton from the far corner. Two freshmen were having a loud argument about whether a hot dog was a sandwich. The lunch line snaked past the salad bar nobody used.
You set your tray down across from Ned Leeds and next to Peter, close enough that your knee bumped his under the table. Deliberate. Calculated. You let it stay.
"Pete." I said it low, the way you'd say someone's name if you wanted them to feel it in their sternum. His eyes came up. Brown. Not just brown, the kind of brown that looks almost amber when the light catches the outer ring of the iris, like someone had poured honey over coffee and held it up to a window. He blinked once, twice, the way he always did when I addressed him directly, like his operating system needed a second to switch modes. "Yeah?" "You look like you slept in a dumpster".
Peter blinked at you, mid-bite of a sandwich that appeared to be peanut butter and something questionable. Shadows sat heavy beneath his eyes, bruise-purple, the kind that spoke to nights spent doing things significantly more strenuous than homework. His hair was unwashed, curling at the temples where sweat had dried. A faint scratch ran along his jaw, pink and freshly healed.
"I didn't, I was up late. Studying."
"Studying." You leaned your chin on your palm, elbow on the table, angling your body toward him. "Is that what we're calling it?"
She's teasing, Peter thought, stabbing a limp carrot with his fork and very deliberately not looking at the way your sweater had slipped off one shoulder, exposing the strap of something underneath. Black, thin. Don't look, don't look, Parker. This is what she does. She teases everyone.
"Calc exam," he said. "Vectors."
"Mmm." You reached over and picked a piece of lint off his flannel collar, your fingertips grazing the side of his neck. Lingering one half-second longer than necessary. "You've got… there. Better."
Ned's eyes went wide across the table, the size of the cookies on his tray. He looked from your hand to Peter's neck to the space between you, which was approximately four inches of charged, electric nothing.
OH MY GOD. She just touched his neck. She TOUCHED his NECK. That was not a friend-touch. That was a… I need to text MJ. Where's my phone. Where is my PHONE. Ned's hand dove into his pocket so fast he elbowed his milk carton.
"So, the compound this weekend." I said it like it was an afterthought, like I hadn't been engineering this invitation for a week and a half. "Dad upgraded the training sim. New obstacle sequences, recalibrated resistance sensors. He wants fresh data from non-enhanced users, but honestly, it's way more fun than that sounds." I pointed my fork at Ned and MJ. "You're both invited. Obviously." Then at Peter, holding his gaze one beat longer than necessary. "You too. Unless you're busy."
Peter's jaw tightened. Just fractionally. I knew what he was calculating, the mental arithmetic of being in Tony Stark's house, near Tony Stark's daughter, under Tony Stark's surveillance system, doing anything that could remotely be interpreted as flirtatious by the most paranoid man in North America. "I'm in," Ned said instantly, milk carton rescued.
Peter hesitated. The compound meant Tony Stark's home turf. Tony Stark, who had once looked Peter dead in the eye during a suit fitting and said, "You know she's off-limits, right? That wasn't a question." And then had laughed like it was a joke. It was not a joke.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Yeah, I'll come."
You smiled at him. Not the performative one you used for press events, the one Tony called your camera-ready kill shot, but the real one. Small. Lopsided. A dimple on only the left side.
Peter forgot what food was.
The training floor smelled like rubber mats, ozone from the arc-reactor powered sim projectors, and the sharp, metallic bite of recycled air pushed through vents two stories up. The space was massive, cathedral ceilings, reinforced walls scarred with blast marks nobody bothered to patch, a viewing gallery behind tempered glass where Natasha Romanoff sat with one ankle crossed over her knee, peeling an orange.
Below, you were getting your ass handed to you.
The sim had spawned six holographic hostiles, basic humanoid models, glowing that eerie Stark-tech blue, and you'd dropped four with the compact repulsor gauntlet Tony had designed for you. Precise, efficient, two shots each. The fifth you'd caught with an elbow strike that would've made Steve Rogers nod approvingly.
The sixth clipped your shoulder, and you hit the mat hard enough to knock the air out. The smell of rubber filled your nose, warm and dense. Above you, the ceiling lights buzzed.
"Shit," you muttered, rolling onto your back.
"You dropped your elbow." Peter's voice came from the sideline. He was leaning against the wall in a t-shirt that was doing criminal things to his shoulders. When had his shoulders gotten like that, wide and defined, the cotton straining across them when he crossed his arms. Track pants slung low enough to show the elastic band of his boxers. One ankle crossed over the other. Casual. Like he wasn't a six-foot catastrophe of brown curls and earnest eyes.
"Excuse me?"
"On the sixth one. You dropped your lead elbow after the fifth takedown. Left your whole right side open." He pushed off the wall and walked onto the mat, feet bare, and you were suddenly very aware that you were flat on your back, sweaty, breathing hard, and he was standing over you, backlit like some kind of absurd Renaissance painting.
He extended his hand.
You took it. His grip was warm, slightly calloused across the palm, webshooter calluses, you'd learned to recognize the pattern, and he pulled you up with an ease that made your stomach flip, the kind of effortless strength that reminded you what he was under all the stuttering and self-deprecation.
"Show me," you said, and didn't let go of his hand.
Peter blinked. Looked at your hands. Looked at you.
She's still holding on. Okay. That's… she probably just hasn't noticed. Her hands are sweaty from the sim. She's not thinking about it. Don't make it weird, don't make it…
"Uh. Yeah. So, here." He stepped behind you, and his chest was right there, not touching but close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating off him through his t-shirt. He adjusted your arm, fingers wrapping around your elbow, positioning it. His breath hit the back of your neck, damp and warm. "Keep this locked. Like, yeah. Like that. And when you rotate…"
His other hand found your hip. Light. Guiding. His thumb pressed against the jut of bone above your waistband.
You forgot the entire English language.
"…you pivot from here. Not the shoulder. The hip. See?"
"Mhm." It came out approximately two octaves higher than intended.
Up in the gallery, Natasha bit into an orange segment and watched with the detached precision of a woman who had made a career out of reading body language.
His hand's been on her hip for six seconds longer than instructional. Respiration elevated on both. Pupil dilation visible even from here. She chewed slowly. Stark's going to lose his mind.
In the adjacent corridor, Tony Stark was walking toward the gallery with a tablet in hand, arguing with FRIDAY about power distribution ratios, completely oblivious to the slow-motion romantic disaster unfolding on his training floor.
Spring compressed into a montage of escalation.
You did not do things halfway. You were, after all, your father's daughter, and Tony Stark's approach to any problem was to throw increasingly sophisticated resources at it until the problem either solved itself or caught fire. So you threw everything at Peter Parker, and Peter Parker, bless his dumb beautiful face, caught none of it, zero, nada, nothing.
You started wearing his flannel. The gray one he'd left draped over his chair in the lab after a late session. You wore it to school the next Monday, sleeves rolled to your elbows, collar popped, still smelling like his cedar deodorant and the faintly sweet, papery scent of his apartment. Peter saw it. Peter said, "Oh hey, I was looking for that." You said, "It looks better on me." Peter laughed and said, "Yeah, it sure does," and then turned back to his textbook.
You started finding excuses to touch him. A hand on his forearm when you laughed, pressing in, your thumb drawing a small circle against the inside of his wrist. Straightening his collar before Decathlon meets, your knuckles brushing his Adam's apple. Leaning into his side during movie nights at the compound, your head finding the hollow between his shoulder and his neck, fitting there like the space had been engineered for you.
"You're being pathetic," MJ said one Thursday, not looking up from Beloved, her bookmark a torn receipt from the bodega on 42nd. You were sitting on the bleachers during a free period, the track below empty, the air thick with cut grass and warm asphalt.
"I'm being strategic."
"You literally sniffed his hoodie yesterday."
"I was checking if it was clean. He asked me to hold it."
"He didn't ask you to bury your face in it."
You stared at the empty track. A bird landed on the long jump pit, pecked at nothing, left.
"He doesn't see it," you said quietly. "I keep putting it right in front of him and he doesn't see it."
MJ closed her book, finger holding her place. She looked at you with an expression that, on anyone else, would've been soft.
She's genuinely hurt. Not performing it. There's no audience here, just me and a bird. MJ studied your profile, jaw tight, eyes fixed forward, the barely-there tremor in your lower lip that you were clamping down on with every ounce of Stark composure you had. I should say something useful. Something that isn't sarcastic.
"He sees it," MJ said. "He's just scared."
"Of what?"
"Of your last name. Of the fact that you're the best thing in his life and if he reads the signals wrong, he loses you." MJ opened her book again. "Boys are stupid. Even the spider ones."
"She keeps touching me, Ned."
Peter was pacing. The apartment was small. May was working a double, so it was just him and Ned and the remains of two pizzas on the coffee table, the room smelling like cardboard and garlic and the faint mildew of the window unit AC that never fully worked. Outside, Queens hummed its nighttime frequency: a car alarm three blocks over, someone's music bleeding through the walls, the distant clatter of the 7 train.
"She keeps touching me, Ned."
Ned sat cross-legged on the couch, a pizza crust in one hand, watching Peter wear a groove into the carpet.
"Dude. She likes you."
"She doesn't… you don't know that."
"She wore your shirt to school."
"She was cold!"
"It was sixty-eight degrees."
Peter stopped pacing. Ran both hands through his hair, leaving it standing in every direction. The scratch on his jaw from last week's patrol had faded to a thin silver line. He was shirtless. He'd been shirtless when Ned arrived, fresh from a shower, and hadn't bothered to put anything on because the apartment was stifling and his brain was short-circuiting. The light from the single floor lamp caught the lean, defined topography of his torso, the faint scars mapped across his ribs like a constellation of near-misses.
He's doing the hair thing. He only does the hair thing when he's really freaking out. Last time was when Mr. Stark found the suit under his bed. Ned set down his crust. I should be supportive. I should also be honest. Both? Can I do both?
"Pete. My guy. My brother in Christ. She literally traced a circle on your wrist with her thumb while staring into your eyes."
"She's tactile. She's like that with everyone."
"She is not like that with everyone! She high-fives Sam. She nods at Bucky. She drew circles on your wrist."
Peter dropped onto the couch, the cushion exhaling under his weight. He tipped his head back, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like Italy.
"If I'm wrong," he said, and his voice was quieter now, stripped of the frantic energy, "I lose her. You get that, right? If I say something, and she laughs, or she's just being friendly, and I made it weird, she's my best friend, Ned. After you. She's…" He swallowed. "I can't lose her."
The apartment was quiet except for the AC's rattle and the distant train.
"You're gonna lose her anyway if you keep pretending you don't feel it," Ned said softly.
Peter closed his eyes. His hand rested on his bare stomach, rising and falling with his breathing, and he pressed his thumb into the space just below his ribs where the ache lived.
The party was already a living thing by the time you arrived.
Here’s your passage rewritten fully in second person, keeping your tone, flow, and intensity intact:
The bass hits your chest before you even make it through the front door, physical, a pressure wave that vibrates in your molars and throws your heartbeat into something syncopated and unfamiliar. Flash’s townhouse sprawls across three stories of marble floors, too much furniture, and the specific kind of wealth that announces itself through recessed lighting and a sound system strong enough to rattle windows.
The air inside is thick, body heat, spilled beer, someone’s cologne applied with the subtlety of a crop duster, and underneath it, the sweet-sour funk of cheap vodka and Red Bull that seems baked into the walls. Clusters of bodies move through rooms that are too warm, too loud, too much.
You dressed with intent.
Hair down, loose, freshly washed with shampoo that smells like vanilla and something darker, woodsy, maybe sandalwood or amber, the kind of scent that clings to fabric for days. And behind your ears, at the base of your throat, on the inside of each wrist: Mon Paris. The YSL perfume saved for exactly this kind of night, raspberry, peony, and a musky drydown engineered by people who understood desire at a molecular level.
You are not here to be subtle.
MJ stands beside you just inside the entrance, surveying the room with the detached focus of an anthropologist studying a culture she finds vaguely repellent. Her dark curls spill over a vintage leather jacket, and she holds a red cup she has no intention of drinking from.
“You’re doing it again,” she murmurs, not even looking up.
You don’t take your eyes off Peter.
“Doing what?”
“Mentally undressing him or planning his murder. It’s a very fine line.”
Your head snaps toward her. “I am not—”
“Just go talk to him before I get an aneurysm,” MJ says calmly, nodding toward the living room.
“Michelle.”
“You’re Tony Stark’s daughter. You’ve addressed the United Nations. Walk over there and tell the boy you want to sit on his face.”
You choke on your vodka cranberry.
Peter’s at the dining table, playing beer pong.
Of course he is.
Ned texted you the location fifteen minutes ago.
He’s wearing a dark long-sleeve that actually fits, rare cotton pulling across his shoulders and chest in a way that makes you realize, not for the first time, that whatever the spider bite did to his DNA also did something borderline obscene to his deltoids. His hair is slightly less chaotic than usual, like he tried, and his jaw is set in that half-smile he uses when he’s being social but running eight separate calculations in his head.
You don’t tell him what MJ suggested.
Instead, you finish your drink, pour another, heavier this time, and cross the room.
You slide into the space beside him at the table.
Your hip bumps his.
“Hey.” You tilt your chin up. Smile.
Peter looks down at you. The height difference forces you to angle your face just slightly, putting your mouth dangerously close to the hollow of his throat. Even through the beer-and-sweat haze of the party, you can smell him.
“Hey yourself.”His voice is barely audible over the music, felt more than heard, and his gaze drops. Just for a second. A flicker. From your eyes to the curve of your chest, then snapping back like he’s been burned. His throat works.
She smells like, God, what is that? Something sweet and warm. I want to bury my face in her neck and just breathe. Don’t look down. Don’t look at her chest. Don’t think about the fact that her hip is against mine and I can feel the heat of her through two layers of denim. Think about the game. Think about the trajectory. Physics. Physics is safe.
“Room for one more?” You pick up a ping pong ball, rolling it between your fingers.
“You any good?” someone across the table asks, AP Gov, maybe. You’ve forgotten his name.
“Terrible,” you say easily. “Peter’s going to have to carry me.”
You shoot him a look.
He catches it.
His ears turn red.
"Cool," Peter said. "Cool cool cool. Great."
Ned, across the table, locked eyes with MJ in the crowd and mouthed HELP ME with theatrical desperation. MJ raised her cup in a silent, sardonic toast.
The game started. You were, by objective measure, terrible at beer pong. You'd been raised around repulsor technology and quantum computing; your spatial reasoning was excellent when applied to ballistic trajectories involving actual projectiles, but the lightweight, air-caught float of a ping-pong ball confounded you. Your first three throws went wide. One hit Flash in the back of the head, which you did not apologize for.
"Okay, you're… here." Peter moved behind you. The same configuration as the training floor, but closer. No mat between you. His chest pressed against your back, solid and warm through the thin cotton, and you could feel the distinct topography of him. The firm plane of his pectorals, the ridged line of his abs against your lower back. His right hand closed over yours, the one holding the ball, and his left settled on your waist. His fingers spanned from your hip to the edge of your ribs.
His mouth was next to your ear. You could feel each exhale, humid, slightly beer-sweet.
"You're releasing too high. Drop your elbow," his hand guided yours down, "and flick from the wrist. Like this."
The ball arced, dropped, plunk into the center cup.
"That was all me," you said, turning your head, and your faces were right there, inches apart, close enough to count his eyelashes. Brown, long, faintly gold at the tips.
"Sure it was," Peter murmured, and didn't move.
The music shifted to something slower, R&B, heavy on the bass, and the party throbbed around them like a second heartbeat.
From across the room, Flash stared at the both of you. "That's supposed to beer pong, not foreplay. My table. My house. That is just disrespectful."
It happened fast.
You had gone to refill your cup, your third, maybe fourth, the vodka someone had added to the punch making the count unreliable, and when you came back through the archway between the kitchen and the living room, you saw them.
Peter. And a girl.
Blonde. Pretty in that effortless, unlabored way that you had never managed to achieve. Hair straight and shining under the warm overhead light, falling past her shoulders like silk. She was tall, almost Peter's height, with delicate features and a laugh that carried. She had her hand on Peter's arm. Not casually. Purposefully. Her fingers wrapped around his bicep, squeezing, and she leaned into him to say something near his ear, and Peter smiled.
Gwen Stacy. Lab partner. Biochem. You knew the name, knew the face from the few times you'd picked Peter up after late labs and seen them walking out together, Gwen's notes in Peter's handwriting, Peter's coffee in Gwen's hand.
The cup in your grip dented.
It's nothing, you told yourself. Your vision swam at the edges. The vodka was hitting now, heavy and warm, turning the room syrupy. She's his lab partner. They're friends. People touch their friends' arms. You touch his arm. This is…
Gwen laughed again, and Peter ducked his head in that shy, pleased way he did when someone complimented his work, and Gwen's hand slid from his bicep to his chest, resting flat against his sternum, and your throat closed.
You turned. Walked. The hallway was crowded and you shouldered through, someone saying "hey, watch it," the bass vibrating in your molars, the smell of beer and sweat and too-sweet perfume cloying, suffocating. You found the kitchen. Poured vodka into your cup. More than you should have. Drank. The burn hit like a slap, your eyes watering, and you poured again.
Ned found you twelve minutes later, leaning against the kitchen island with mascara tracking down your left cheek, cup empty, a sixth or seventh pour of straight vodka sitting in your bloodstream like a slow-detonating charge.
"Whoa, hey." He reached for your arm. "Are you okay? You look…"
"I'm fine."
She is not fine. She is the opposite of fine. Her makeup is… oh no, she's been crying. She's been CRYING and I wasn't… was it Peter? It was Peter. Something happened. Oh god. Ned's gaze darted to the living room archway. Where is he? What did he do?
"You're not fine, you're…"
"Ned." Your voice was flat, stripped of its usual warmth. "Is Peter with Gwen right now?"
"What? No. I mean, she came over to talk about their final project. Something about enzyme inhibitors or… she has a boyfriend. She literally has a boyfriend named Miles."
You blinked. The information processed slowly, swimming through vodka.
"She was touching him."
"She touches everyone! She's from California!"
But the damage was done. The alcohol had dissolved the careful architecture of compartmentalization you had maintained for three months, and underneath it was something raw and desperate and young. A seventeen-year-old girl in a cropped top and weaponized jeans who had spent ninety-two days learning the exact temperature of a boy's skin against hers and never once heard him say he wanted to stay.
"I need to go," you whispered, and your face crumpled.
The patio was concrete and dead potted plants, a string of fairy lights half-burned out sagging between the fence posts. The air was different out here. June nighttime, humid and heavy, smelling like the neighbor's jasmine bush and distant exhaust and the mineral-wet of a garden hose someone had left running. The sounds of the party were muffled, bass thumping through the walls like a drugged heartbeat.
You sat on the steps. Crying.
Not the pretty kind. Not the single-tear, chin-wobble, photogenic grief that happened in movies. You were drunk-crying, the ugly, gasping, can't-catch-your-breath kind where the sobs came from somewhere below the diaphragm and brought everything with them. Snot and mascara and spit. Your shoulders heaved. The concrete step was cold through your jeans, and you could feel every ridge of it, every crack, pressing into the backs of your thighs.
You didn't hear the door open.
"Hey."
Peter stood in the doorway, backlit by the kitchen's warm spill. His expression was something you'd never seen on him before. Not worried, exactly. Something deeper. Something wrecked. His jaw was set hard enough to make the muscle jump in his cheek, and his hands hung at his sides, fingers curling and uncurling like he was fighting the impulse to reach for you.
"Go away, Peter."
He didn't go away. He stepped outside, let the door close behind him, and the party sound dropped to a murmur. He crouched in front of you, elbows on his knees, putting himself below your eyeline. Close enough that you could smell him. The cedar, the laundry detergent, the faint tang of beer. Close enough that the heat from his body pressed against your shins.
"Ned told me you were upset," he said carefully. "He said you saw me talking to Gwen and…"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Listen…"
"I said…"
"She has a boyfriend." His voice was steady. Quiet. "Miles, uhh I don't know his last name. Anyways, but they've been together since sophomore year. She was telling me about their anniversary plans. That's what she was saying. When she was close. She was showing me a picture of a necklace she bought him."
You stared at him through blurred, waterlogged vision. The fairy lights painted him in faint gold, catching the worry lines between his brows that shouldn't exist on an eighteen-year-old's face.
"That doesn't matter," you said, and your voice broke on the last word.
"What do you…"
"It doesn't matter if she has a boyfriend, Peter! It matters that…" A sob tore through you, bending you forward, and you pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes until you saw static. "It matters that I've been trying, for months, and you don't, you never…"
The words came out mangled, half-drowned, but Peter heard every one.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Oh, no no no…
"You think I don't notice," you gasped. You were past the point of dignity. The vodka had burned through every wall, every defense, every Stark-inherited instinct for composure, and what was left was just you. Raw and terrified and shaking on a stranger's back porch. "You think I just touch you like that because I'm friendly? I wore your shirt, Peter. I wore it to school. I slept in it first. I sleep in it every night. I…"
"Please just…"
"I put on sex perfume for you tonight. Natasha's. The Tom Ford. I put it on my knees, Peter. Who puts perfume on their knees? I do. For you. Because I'm… because I…"
You couldn't finish. The sobs swallowed the rest, and you folded forward, forehead nearly touching your knees, shaking so hard the fairy lights blurred into a single wavering line.
Peter didn't move for four seconds. Later, he wouldn't remember those four seconds. His brain whited out, a full system crash, every synapse firing and misfiring simultaneously, three months of she's just being friendly and don't ruin this and you're not good enough for Tony Stark's daughter detonating in a single chain reaction.
Then he was on his knees on the concrete, and his hands were on your face, tilting it up, thumbs sweeping through the wreckage of mascara and tears and snot, and his own eyes were bright, red-rimmed, suspiciously wet.
"I'm an idiot," he said.
"Yes! Yes you are!" you cried.
"I thought you were joking. I thought, every time you touched me, I told myself you were just like that, because the alternative… if I let myself believe it…" His thumb caught a fresh tear, tracked it to your jaw, held there. "You're a Stark. You're the smartest person I've ever met. You're funny and you're kind and you're everything, and I'm a kid from Queens with a secret identity and a one-bedroom apartment and I thought there was no way…"
"Peter Benjamin Parker, if you finish that sentence I will throw up on you and it won't be from the alcohol."
He laughed. Wet and broken and real, this cracked-open sound that had no performance in it, and you could feel it in his hands where they held your face, the vibration of it, the aliveness.
"I like you," he said. "I like you so much it makes me stupid. Ned's been yelling at me for weeks."
You hiccuped. It was not attractive. "How much?"
"How much what?"
"How much do you like me? Be specific. I'm a scientist."
His forehead dropped against yours. His nose bumped your nose. The jasmine and exhaust faded until there was nothing but cedar and clean laundry and the salt of your tears drying on his thumbs.
"Enough that I've rewritten my college essay three times because I keep accidentally writing about you," he whispered. "Enough that I swung past your window twice last week just to make sure your light was on. Enough that I…"
You kissed him.
Or tried to. You were drunk and crying and aimed slightly wrong, catching the corner of his mouth, and he made a soft mmph sound of surprise against your lips before his hand slid from your cheek to the back of your neck and corrected the angle, drawing you in, and…
He pulled back.
"You're drunk," he said softly. "You're really, really drunk."
"I'm emotionally compromised, there's a difference."
"Come on."
"Okay, I'm also very drunk."
His thumb stroked the nape of your neck. He exhaled, shaky, controlled, like a man disarming a bomb.
"When I kiss you for real," he said, "and I am going to kiss you for real, you're going to remember every second of it. That's not negotiable."
You stared at him. Blinked. A tear slid free.
"You're not my boyfriend yet," you said, which was a stupid thing to say, and you knew it was a stupid thing to say even as it came out.
The corner of his mouth lifted. "Not yet, I'm not."
Yet. The word sat between you, warm as a held breath.
Then you pitched sideways and threw up into one of Flash Thompson's dead potted plants.
"Okay. We're going."
Peter hoisted you off the patio steps with an efficiency that betrayed exactly how many injured civilians he'd carried off rooftops. You protested, a garbled, slurred "m'fine, 'm totally…" that dissolved into a hiccup, and he ignored you completely, one arm hooking under your knees and the other around your back, lifting you in a single motion that drew stares from the kitchen stragglers.
You were not cooperative. You squirmed. You swatted at his shoulder. You declared, loudly, to no one in particular, that you were "a Stark and Starks don't get carried."
"Your dad literally has a suit that carries him."
"That's different, that's engineering…"
"Okay, change of plans."
He shifted your weight, effortless, insultingly effortless, the kind of casual strength that came from regularly stopping buses with his bare hands, and flipped you over his shoulder in a over the shoulder carry. You yelped. Your face pressed against his back, the dark henley warm and smelling like cedar and beer and him, and the blood rushed to your head, and you went limp.
"Peter. Peter Parker. Put me down."
"No."
"I am going to…"
"If you throw up on my back, we're over before we started."
You made a choked sound that was half-laugh, half-sob, and gripped the back of his shirt with both fists.
The crowd parted for you. Or more accurately, the crowd was too drunk to notice except for two people. Ned, standing by the speaker with a cup in his hand, watched Peter carry you over his shoulder toward the front door and experienced what could only be described as a religous awakening.
This is the greatest thing I have ever witnessed with my own two human eyes. THANK YOU JESUS. This is better than when he caught the bus. This is better than when he showed me the suit. I need to remember every detail. I need to JOURNAL about this. Ned's mouth hung open. Should I help? Should I follow? He's got her. He definitely… yeah, he's got her.
"Pete!" Ned called. "Do you need…"
"I got her."
"Her purse is…"
"Ned. I got her."
MJ appeared beside Ned like a shadow materializing, Margaret Atwood tee slightly rumpled, arms crossed. She watched Peter's retreating back, you draped over it like a very expensive, very drunk scarf, and took a slow sip from her still-full cup.
Finally. MJ's mouth twitched at the corner. Took them long enough.
"Should we be concerned?" Ned asked.
"No," MJ said. "That's a boy who's not going to let anything happen to her."
The front door closed. The party swallowed the space they'd left behind. The bass kept thumping.
The apartment was dark when he shouldered the door open, you still draped over his back, your protests having faded somewhere around 68th Street into a mumbled, intermittent monologue about how his shoulder blade was "architecturally hostile to human cheekbones."
He flicked the light with his elbow. The single floor lamp came on, casting the small space in warm amber. The couch with its sunken middle cushion, the pizza boxes Ned had left three days ago stacked by the door, the window AC rattling its permanent death rattle. May's shift didn't end until 6 AM. The apartment smelled like it always did: slightly stale, slightly warm, the ghost of dish soap and the fabric softener May bought in bulk, lavender something.
Peter carried you to his room, small, just a twin bed and a desk buried under textbooks and web-fluid cartridges, and set you down on the mattress with a gentleness that contradicted the fireman-carry energy of the previous twenty minutes. You sank into his pillow, and the sound you made was barely human, a long, dissolving "mmmnngh" that came from somewhere primal.
"Stay here."
"Where'm I gonna go? Mars?"
He left and came back with a glass of water, two ibuprofen, a warm washcloth, and a t-shirt of his. The soft, worn MIT one May had gotten him as a joke, washed so many times the cotton felt like tissue paper.
"Sit up."
"No."
"Come on."
"The room is spinning and I need it to stop spinning before I engage in vertical activity."
He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight, tilting you slightly toward him. He pressed the washcloth to your face, and you flinched at the warmth, then sighed, a real sigh, the kind that released something held too long. He wiped away the mascara, the tear tracks, the smeared foundation, with the same steady, precise hands that rebuilt web-shooters and rewired circuit boards. Methodical. Tender.
"You look like a raccoon," he said quietly.
You smiled. Small and wobbly, your eyes still glassy, makeup half-removed, hair tangled from the shoulder carry. He thought you were the most devastating thing he'd ever seen, and that included the time he'd watched a star collapse through Mr. Stark's orbital telescope.
She's so beautiful. Even now. Especially now. She put perfume on her knees for me. Who does that? Who thinks of that? She does. She sleeps in my shirt. She SLEEPS in my…
"Can you change? You'll be more comfortable in this." He held up the MIT shirt.
He turned. Studied the web-fluid equations on his desk with an intensity they did not warrant while behind him you wrestled with your top, swore, dropped it, swore again, and eventually said, "Okay."
He turned back. You were swimming in his shirt. The collar gaped, showing your collarbone, and the hem hit mid-thigh. You'd kept your underwear on. Your jeans were crumpled on the floor.
"Water," he said. "Drink."
You drank. Took the ibuprofen. He eased you back against the pillow, pulled the comforter up to your chin, the blue one, slightly threadbare, smelling like his fabric softener, and you caught his hand.
"Stay," you murmured. Your eyelids were heavy, dragging.
"I'm not going anywhere. I'll be on the couch."
"No. Stay."
"Hey." His voice was soft. His thumb traced your knuckles. "I'll be ten feet away. You'll hear me snoring. I'm told it's, quote, 'medically concerning.'"
You tried to glare. Achieved a sleepy squint.
"You're the best person I know," you whispered.
Something moved across his face, fast, raw, there and gone, and he lifted your hand and pressed his lips to your knuckles. Brief. Warm. You felt the shape of his mouth against the ridges of your fingers and memorized it.
"You're the best person I know," he said. "Get some sleep. I'll be right here."
Your eyes closed. His hand slipped from yours. You heard him pad out, heard the couch creak, heard the AC rattle and the distant nighttime hum of Queens through the window.
You fell asleep in his bed, in his shirt, with the taste of toothpaste water and ibuprofen on your tongue and the ghost of his lips on your hand.
Morning arrived like a blunt instrument.
You opened your eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. A crack that ran from the overhead light fixture to the wall like a river on a map, water stain in the corner shaped like something, Italy maybe, too hungover to assign geography. Sunlight came through the window in aggressive, unfiltered slabs, warming the sheets and painting the small room in shades of amber and white. The AC had surrendered at some point in the night; the air was close, warm, thick with the smell of laundry detergent and something cooking. Butter, eggs, the unmistakable char of toast that had been in the toaster seventeen seconds too long.
Your head was a war crime.
The pain lived behind your eyes and radiated outward, a pulsing, architectural pressure that felt structural, like the bones of your skull had been rearranged. Your mouth tasted like copper and bad decisions. You were wearing, you looked down, a t-shirt that was not yours. MIT. Worn thin enough to see your own skin through the fabric.
Memory returned in fragments. Not sequentially. More like shrapnel.
Beer pong. Peter's hands. Gwen. Vodka. Crying. Concrete steps. His thumbs on your face. "Not yet, I'm not." Oh god. Oh god you threw up in a plant. He carried you. Over his shoulder. In front of EVERYONE. You said… what did you say? Sex perfume. You said sex perfume. You told him about the KNEES.
You pressed your face into the pillow and made a sound like a dying animal.
The pillow smelled like Peter. Cedar, clean cotton, the faintly warm, specific scent of his skin that you'd been cataloguing for months. You breathed it in, and the ache behind your eyes softened marginally, and you hated yourself for finding comfort in it because you'd told him everything last night and now he probably…
Footsteps in the hallway. The creak of the bedroom door.
"Hey. You're up."
You lifted your face from the pillow.
Peter Parker stood in the doorway holding a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, a glass of water tucked in the crook of his elbow with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to multitasking while wall-crawling. He was shirtless.
He was shirtless.
The morning sun hit him like it had a personal agenda. Golden light poured across the planes of his chest, broader than his t-shirts suggested, defined without being bulky, the lean musculature of someone whose core strength came from swinging between buildings rather than lifting weights. A faint trail of dark hair ran from his navel downward, disappearing into gray sweatpants that sat low on his hips, revealing the twin ridges of muscle that framed his lower abdomen like parentheses.
The scars she'd glimpsed before were fully visible now: a starburst of silver-pink tissue below his left collarbone, a thin line along his ribs, a cluster of smaller marks across his right shoulder like he'd been hit with something that fragmented. His shoulders caught the light, smooth and warm-toned, and the muscles in his forearm flexed as he adjusted his grip on the plate.
You stared. All the blood in your body relocated to your face.
"I made… it's just eggs. And toast. The toast is a little burned because the toaster's been weird since Ned tried to make a grilled cheese in it, but…" He set the plate on the nightstand. Set the water beside it. Straightened. Noticed you staring. Looked down at himself.
I forgot to put a shirt on. I forgot to… I was cooking and it was hot and I… she's looking at me. She's looking at my… is she looking at my stomach? Her face is so red. She's the color of the ketchup bottle. Should I go put a shirt on? Do I want to put a shirt on? Honestly? No. Absolutely not. She's wearing MY shirt and looking at me like that and I am not putting on a single additional garment.
"Sorry, I… the kitchen gets hot when I use the stove, and…"
"Don't you dare put on a shirt."
It came out before you could edit it. Raw. Hoarse. Morning-voiced and hungover and entirely, devastatingly honest.
Peter's ears went red. The blush spread down his neck, across his collarbones, and you watched it travel with the academic fascination of a woman studying the migration patterns of a phenomenon she'd caused.
He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. The plate of eggs steamed gently on the nightstand, and the burnt-toast smell mingled with his skin. Cedar and warmth and sleep.
"How's your head?" he asked.
"Like someone filled it with concrete and then played drums on it."
"That's the vodka."
"That's the bad decisions."
"Were they all bad?"
The question sat between you. You pulled the comforter up to your chin, as if his MIT shirt and a threadbare blanket could constitute armor.
"I said things last night," you started.
"You did."
"I told you about the perfume."
"The knee perfume. Yes." He was fighting a smile. Losing.
"And the shirt."
"The sleeping-in-my-shirt thing. Yeah."
"I'd like to die now, please."
"Request denied." He turned toward you on the bed, one leg folded beneath him, the other hanging off the edge. His knee brushed your thigh through the comforter, and he didn't move it. His eyes were soft, brown in the morning light, with flecks of gold near the pupil that you'd never been close enough to catalogue before. "Did you mean it?"
"Which part?"
"All of it. Any of it."
You looked at him. The light was too bright and your head was splitting and your mouth tasted like a biohazard, and he was sitting there shirtless and beautiful and asking you if you meant it, as if there were a universe where you hadn't meant every single syllable.
"I meant all of it," you said. "I mean all of it. Present tense."
The smile broke through. Not his shy one, not the ducked-head one, not the performative one he used when adults praised him. The real one. The devastating one. Full mouth, crinkled eyes, the left dimple that matched yours.
"I meant what I said too," he told you. "The 'not yet I'm not' thing."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He reached for your hand where it clutched the comforter's edge, threading his fingers through yours, his palm warm and calloused. "Eat your eggs. Drink your water. And when you're not actively dying…"
"What?"
"I'm taking you on a real date. A proper one. Not a party. Not a training floor. An actual date, where I pick you up and you meet May, I mean, you've met May, but like, officially, and I hold your hand the whole time because I've wanted to hold your hand for three months and I'm never letting go of it again."
Your eyes burned. Not from the hangover.
"You're going to make me cry again."
"Happy tears this time."
"Still ugly. Fair warning."
"I've seen the worst of it. I'm in."
You laughed, a broken, waterlogged, beautiful sound, and tugged his hand until he leaned down and pressed his forehead against yours. His nose bumped your nose. His breath was warm, toothpaste-mint and something sweet, and the closeness was the same as the patio but entirely different. Sunlit and sober and yours.
"Eat," he whispered.
"Kiss me first."
"You have morning breath."
"And you have no shirt on. We all have our crosses to bear."
He kissed you.
Gentle. Close-mouthed. Tasting like mint toothpaste and burnt toast, his hand coming up to cradle the side of your face the way it had on the patio, thumb against your cheekbone.
And you meant to let it be that. A first real kiss. Tender. Sweet. The kind of thing you'd replay in your head for weeks, soft-focus and cotton-candy.
But three months of wanting had calcified into something heavier than tenderness, and the moment his lips touched yours the weight of it cracked open, spilled. Your fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck, short and warm and still sleep-mussed, and you pulled. Not hard. Just enough.
Peter made a sound against your mouth. Low, involuntary, caught somewhere between a groan and a sigh, "nnh," and his hand slid from your cheekbone into your hair, fingers threading through the tangled mess of it, cradling the back of your skull. The kiss changed. His lips parted, and you felt the soft, slick heat of his tongue trace your bottom lip, tentative, asking, and you opened for him without thinking.
He tasted like toothpaste and something darker, warmer, the black coffee he must have had while he cooked, and the sound you made was embarrassing, a breathy, broken "ahh" that vibrated between your mouths. His tongue slid against yours, slow, exploratory, then deeper, and your back arched off the pillow, your free hand finding his bare shoulder, his skin hot and smooth under your palm, the scar tissue beneath his collarbone a raised ridge under your fingertips.
"Come here," you whispered against his lips. Not a request.
His weight shifted. He braced one hand on the mattress beside your head, forearm flexing, and his other arm hooked under your lower back, pulling you up into him as he settled his body over yours. The twin bed groaned. The comforter bunched between you and you kicked at it, shoved it down, until there was nothing but the worn cotton of his MIT shirt on your body and nothing at all on his chest, and the contact when it came was electric. The heat of his bare torso pressing through the thin fabric against your breasts, your stomach, your ribs. You could feel his heartbeat, rabbit-fast, hammering against your sternum.
"God," he breathed, and his hips settled between your thighs, the gray sweatpants doing absolutely nothing to disguise what was happening to him. He froze. Pulled his mouth back an inch. "Sorry. Sorry, I…"
You grabbed his face with both hands and pulled him back down.
The kiss turned messy. Wet. Open-mouthed and graceless in the way only real wanting could produce, teeth catching on lips, his tongue curling against the roof of your mouth, your hips tilting up into his on instinct and dragging a sound out of him that was barely human, this guttural, wrecked "fuhhck" gasped between your teeth. His hand fisted in the sheets beside your head. The mattress springs whined beneath you both.
His forehead dropped to your shoulder. He was shaking. Fine, full-body tremors, the muscles in his back twitching under your palms, and you realized with a lurch of something enormous and tender that he was holding back. Holding himself still. Every superhuman ounce of strength in that body directed at the singular task of not moving.
Three months. Three months of her hands and her perfume and her sleeping in my shirt and she's under me. She's under me in my bed wearing my shirt and making those sounds and I'm going to lose my mind. I am going to lose my actual mind. Slow down. Slow down, Parker. Don't ruin this. Don't…
"Hey," you murmured. You cupped his face, brought it up. His eyes were blown, the brown almost entirely swallowed by black, his lips swollen and wet, a flush painting his cheeks and throat and chest. He looked destroyed. You wanted to destroy him further. You kissed the corner of his mouth. His cheekbone. The bridge of his nose. "Hi."
"Hi." His voice was wrecked. Gravel and want.
"You're shaking."
"Yeah, I… I'm aware." A stunted laugh, his breath fanning warm across your chin. "You're, uh. You're kind of a lot."
"Too much?"
"Not enough." He said it with his whole chest, no hesitation, and then his mouth was on yours again, slower this time but no less deep. His hand slid down your side, fingertips tracing the curve of your waist through the MIT shirt, the dip and flare of your hip, the bare skin of your thigh where the hem had ridden up. His palm spread wide against the outside of your thigh, warm and calloused, and he hitched your leg higher around his waist, changing the angle, and the pressure of him against you turned precise, deliberate, your breath hitching into a choked "oh."
His answering groan was muffled by your mouth. "Mmnh, yeah, okay… okay."
You kissed like that until the eggs went cold on the nightstand. Until the sun climbed higher and the amber light turned white. Until your lips were swollen and raw and his neck was marked in three places and your hair was a catastrophe and his sweatpants had shifted low enough that the defined V of his hips was fully visible above the waistband, and at some point your hand had flattened against his lower abdomen, feeling the muscles tense and jump under your touch, and he'd made a sound so close to begging that you tucked it away in the deepest vault of your memory to revisit for the rest of your natural life.
He pulled back. Finally. Panting. Hovering over you on trembling arms, his chest heaving, a bead of sweat tracing the line of his sternum. His lips were bitten-dark, nearly bruised. The scratch on his jaw from patrol had gone pink again from the friction of your chin.
"Eggs," he managed.
"What?"
"Your… the eggs. They're cold now."
"Peter Parker, if you think I care about eggs right now…"
"You need to eat. You drank enough vodka to kill a horse."
"You can't just kiss me like that and then pivot to breakfast."
"Watch me." He dropped one more kiss against your mouth, quick and firm and smiling, and rolled off you onto his back. The twin mattress barely held them both. His shoulder pressed against yours, hip against hip, the narrow bed forcing a closeness that neither of you fought. He stared at the ceiling. You stared at the ceiling. The crack shaped like a river. The water stain shaped like Italy.
"I'm going to reheat those eggs," he said to the ceiling.
"You're going to kiss me again after."
"Yeah." He turned his head. Looked at you. The gold flecks in his eyes caught the morning sun, and his smile was so open, so unguarded, that your chest ached like a bruise. "Yeah, I am."
He swung himself off the bed, bare feet hitting the floor, and offered you his hand. You took it. He pulled you up, steadied you when the hangover swayed the room sideways, and kept hold of your fingers as he walked you to the kitchen.
The apartment was small and warm and smelled like cold eggs and burnt toast and cedar and the faint lavender of May's fabric softener. Sunlight flooded the narrow kitchen window, catching the dust motes, catching the pink marks on Peter's neck where your mouth had been. He moved the plate to the microwave with one hand. His other hand stayed tangled with yours, thumb pressing slow circles into the cup of your palm, and you leaned against the counter beside him, shoulder against his bare arm, the MIT shirt hanging to your thighs, his warmth bleeding into your side.
The microwave hummed. The AC rattled. Somewhere below the window, Queens woke itself up in layers: a delivery truck backing into the alley, a dog barking three flights down, the 7 train threading its distant steel-on-steel melody through the walls. Peter lifted your joined hands and pressed his lips to your knuckles, lingering, his eyes closing, and you turned your face into his shoulder and breathed him in.
| Authors Note! Okay that's it, also let me know if you want me to write more spider-man. okayy baiii
summary: peter and y/n stark are in a secret relationship. one night he sneaks into her room at the avengers tower after a patrol shift as spider-man. accidentally setting off the silent alarm making tony burst into her room to find them together, misunderstanding the situation…
warnings: kissing, nudity?, reader has powers (healing), stark!reader, pet names (baby)
You were curled up in bed wearing your favorite oversized Stark Industries tee and flannel pajama shorts, trying to focus on the novel in your lap when you heard the gentle thud of a landing on your balcony.
You didn’t even flinch. You knew that sound like your own heartbeat.
With a smile tugging at your lips, you padded to the window and opened it just wide enough for Peter to slip through. He stumbled inside, half-limping, his mask already off and his curls damp with sweat.
“Hey,” he whispered, breathless.
“Hey, baby,” you whispered back, helping him inside.
You spotted the way he was holding his side and frowned. “You’re hurt again.”
Peter winced as he tried to shrug off his suit. “I got thrown into a dumpster. Not my best moment.”
You rolled your eyes and reached for him. “Sit down. Let me see.”
“Are you sure? I didn’t mean to—”
“Peter,” you warned, voice already soft with energy as your fingertips began to glow with the warm shimmer of your healing powers. “Shut up and sit.”
He obeyed with a smile, stripping down to his boxers so you could get a clear look at the forming bruise across his ribs. The moment your fingers touched his skin, the bruise pulsed with a dull light, and he hissed before sighing in relief.
“You’re getting better at that,” he murmured.
“You keep showing up broken,” you said. “I have a lot of practice.”
He grinned. “Still worth it.”
Once you were satisfied with the healing—at least enough that he wouldn’t wake up groaning—you leaned over and kissed him. Soft. Familiar. Comforting.
It was one of those slow kisses, the kind that made your heart skip and forget the fact that you were sneaking around your genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist father. Peter’s arms circled around your waist as he leaned into you, gently pulling you back toward the bed.
“Can I stay?” he whispered against your lips.
“You’re already half-naked and in my bed. Might as well.”
He chuckled and pulled you onto his lap his arms circling your waist. Your hands crept up his neck playing with the curls that laid on the nape of his neck. Just as he was about to kiss you again—
You barely had time to register it before the door flew open.
“WHAT THE—ARE YOU SERIOUS RIGHT NOW?!”
Tony Stark stormed into the room in a tank top, sleep pants, and sheer rage. His arc reactor pulsed brighter than usual—definitely not good.
Peter immediately stood up covering his growing boner with his hands. You fixed your shirt, eyes wide in pure shock.
Tony’s eyes locked onto Peter. Then to you. Then to Peter’s half naked body.
Then to your red swollen lips.
“What. The. FUCK.” he growled.
You walked towards him. “Dad, wait—it’s not what it looks like!”
“Really?” Tony snapped. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks a hell of a lot like Bug-Boy is half-naked in my daughter’s bed!”
Peter raised both hands. “Mr. Stark, I swear—”
Tony pointed a finger at him. “Don’t Mr. Stark me! I gave you mentorship! I gave you tech! And this is how you repay me?!”
You stepped between them, glowing hands already pulsing slightly. “He was injured. I healed him. That’s why he’s here.”
“And the kissing? Was that part of the healing process too?!” Tony barked.
“Dad,” you said, forcing calm into your voice. “We’re together. We’ve been together. We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d freak out. Just like you are right now.”
Tony stared at you. Then at Peter. Then back at you.
“You think I’m freaking out now?” he scoffed, hands on his hips. “You’re my daughter. He’s like—a friendly neighborhood science nerd with a motor mouth. There are rules.”
“Sorry, sir.”
You exhaled and grabbed Tony’s shoulders. “We’re not being reckless. I know how to take care of myself. And Peter—he’s not just some guy. He’s my boyfriend. He’s been there for me when I was overwhelmed by my powers. He’s protected me. He loves me.”
Tony froze.
Peter froze.
You froze.
Tony blinked.
“You love her?”
Peter straightened like a soldier. “Yes, sir. I do.”
Tony sighed, dragging a hand down his face. “God, I miss the days when all I had to worry about was alien invasions.”
You let go of him after a squeeze on his shoulders. “We’re okay. Really.”
He stood there stiffly, then relented with a sigh. “Fine. You’re adults. Mostly.”
You smiled. “Thank you.”
“But if I ever catch you sneaking into this tower again after midnight, I’m taking away your suit. Both of yours!”
Peter nodded quickly. “Understood.”
Tony glanced at Peter’s boxers again and shook his head. “Next time, wear pants, for god’s sake.”
And with that, he turned and left, muttering, “Friday, remind me to reinforce the silent alarm with something that actually works.”
The door shut.
Peter let out the longest exhale of his life. Sitting down on your bed rubbing his eyes. “That… could’ve gone worse.”
You sat on the bed beside him, heart still racing. “Yeah. But now he knows.”
Peter smiled, laying down and pulling you close into his embrace. “I’d get yelled at by Tony Stark a hundred times if it meant I could still have this.”
You kissed him again. “Good. Because you might just have to.”
