I wanna hear about arranged marriage and Knight!Draken 🥺 pls and ty
knight!draken doesn't consider himself a man who gives in to temptation but he can't say he's been tempted by many other than you, and he failed quite spectacularly at resisting you.
he'd been assigned to protect you on your journey to a neighboring kingdom. you're being married off; you're the king's cousin, a member of the royal family, and with war on the horizon it's necessary to form alliances. if draken had been born into nobility you and he might have grown up together. he tries not to linger on that thought; tries not to yearn for a nonexistent childhood spent with you, innocent and more free. he tries to be okay with sending you off, in the midst of political turmoil when your own family has already been targeted.
yet his protective nature is a double-edged sword. certainly it's the reason he's been chosen for such an assignment—he would, after all, fall on any sword for any woman—but he grows far more attached to you than he ought to. perhaps it's inevitable, with the sheer amount of time the pair of you spend together. fondness, he believes, is an inherent byproduct of being required to watch you sleep nightly. it's only natural for him to fall in love with you when for days, weeks on end he has only you for company in the carriage.
you're the one who initiates. it's late, only the pair of you in the room of the inn where you've stopped for the night, and you confess that you're terrified. you've never met the man who you're to marry, you've never experienced courting, you know it's always been your fate but that knowledge is hardly preparation. you whisper that you feel safer with him than you've ever felt in your life, and you beckon him closer, and you ask him to hold you while you sleep.
it isn't appropriate, i know, you say, and you sound small, but please. nobody will have to know. just you and me.
he knows he shouldn't but he agrees. and he holds you close, feels your trembling slowly stop, pushes down the urge to kiss your hairline.
it's a line crossed, a step he can never take back. suddenly you're sitting pressed into each other in the carriage, riding together on horseback when you request air. suddenly he's holding you every night as you sleep (sometimes he gathers his resolve and refuses, and still ends up kneeling by your side and holding your hand anyway, because he is stalwart and brave and caves to your every whim). it's hardly a surprise when you begin to kiss him goodnight–on the cheek first, then the lips. he's in far too deep by then to turn away because the way those kisses steal his breath are well worth the heavy sinking in his heart in the rare moments he has alone.
but of course it ends, as all things must. he has a duty, as do you. and though rage flares up within him when he catches the leer in your betrothed's eye while you curtsy in introduction, he is aware there is nothing he can do. in this castle, surrounded by strangers—potential enemies or allies, the difference resting in your hands—he hasn't a choice. all he has are the final lingering looks, his last goodbye in bow to you, and ghost of your last touch on his fingers as he pulls away.
he returns home brokenhearted and heads off to war mere weeks later. a part of him might be thankful to have something other than the loss of you on his mind.
