#winterhall

[the-darklings]

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

DUNK

You’re tending him again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BAELOR

You don’t mean anything by it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Baelor—”

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

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

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

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

He leans closer, his breath ghosting your mouth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

LYONEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what are you?” you ask.

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

“Hopeless.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your man,” Lyonel announces lightly.

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

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

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

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

He pauses mid step.

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

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

AERION

You hear him long before you see him.

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

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

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

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

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

He doesn’t.

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

The breath you draw catches.

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

“Nightmares?” you ask.

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

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

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

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

“Aerion,” you murmur warningly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aunt.”

An aching little prayer, a bruise, a surrender.

“I am your man.”

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

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

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

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

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

Your hand is still in his hair.

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

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

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

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

MAEKAR

It starts in the hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He doesn’t leave.

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

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

“What they said—” you begin.

“Did you agree?” he demands.

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

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

“No,” you say.

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

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

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

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

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

You tip your head, waiting.

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

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

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

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

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

“Maekar.”

He finally looks up.

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

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

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

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

That lands heavier than any oath could.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am your man,” Maekar says.

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

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

You stare up at him. “Mine?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[the-darklings]

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

*explodes*

oh, these made me YEARN like a mf.

BAELOR.

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

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

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

MAEKAR.

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

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

AERION.

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

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

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

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

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

VALARR.

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

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

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

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

DAERON.

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

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

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

LYONEL.

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

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

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

DUNK.

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

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

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

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

[the-darklings]

Thoughts on the AKOTSK boys being told how beautiful they are during dirty talk? 👀

BAELOR. Baelor has spent his life being told he’s good, honourable, dutiful and brave, never really beautiful. Half-Dornish at a court that whispers about his mother’s blood, the heir who carries the weight of legitimising his father’s reign, the man who can’t want for himself because wanting is what Aegon the Unworthy did. Nobody has ever looked at this man as a body to be admired just for himself, only a king-in-waiting to be measured. So when you tell him he’s beautiful (and you have to whisper it, soft against the line of his jaw, your hand on his face so he can’t turn away) he stills. completely. like the word doesn’t quite compute. and then his eyes change, that particular flicker, where the dark one goes almost black and the pale one goes almost silver, and he says your name, low and rough, because the praise is too much, because he doesn’t know how to receive it without it feeling like he doesn’t deserve it. So you have to make him take it. Press your mouth to his ear and say it again, you are so beautiful, my love, and feel him shudder like you’ve struck him.

MAEKAR. Scoffs. Scoffs. Genuinely can’t accept it without deflection. You say you’re beautiful, husband, and he grunts and says don’t be daft, woman, and shoves his face into your throat to hide the fact that his ears have gone pink. But you’ll feel his hands tighten on you. You’ll feel the way his next thrust comes harder, deeper, like he’s retaliating for the compliment, like he has to fuck the embarrassment back into you. Maekar has been the spare and the soldier his whole life, the gruff one, the not-Baelor, beauty is for his eldest brother, his older brothers, never him. But you keep saying it. You say it when he’s flushed and breathing hard against your collarbone, you say it when his silver hair has fallen out of its tie and stuck to his temples with sweat, when he’s looking at you like he’s afraid you’ll vanish. And one night, very late, he’ll mumble into your hair say it again and you will know you’ve won.

AERION. oh, catastrophic. This is a man who’s weaponised his beauty his entire life because it’s the only thing about himself he’s ever been allowed to like. He knows he’s beautiful. He’s been told it, casually, by every courtier and serving girl since he was a boy, and he holds it at arm’s length like a coin he doesn’t trust the weight of. Compliments from strangers slide off him. But from you? From his wolf, from the woman who saved him, the woman whose mouth he’s imagined the shape of for years? Whe you tell him he’s beautiful (properly tell him, with your hand splayed against his cheek, looking him dead in the eyes, you are so beautiful, Aerion) he will break apart. He’ll go feverish, his pupils will blow wide, he’ll grip you too hard and bury his face in your neck because he can’t let you see what’s happening on his face. He’ll say something cruel about it after (careful, sweetling, I’ll grow vain) but you’ll feel him trembling. You’ll feel the truth of it in his hands. And the next time you fuck, he’ll be worse. Needier, more vicious, more desperate to extract it from you again, because now he knows you’ll give it and he’ll spend the rest of his life chasing the high of it.

VALARR. Here’s the trap of Valarr: praise is his native language. He gives it constantly, generously, without thought, because (as we established) he’s been worshipped his whole life and has therefore developed no real defence against being wanted. He tells you you’re beautiful at least four times a session. So when you turn it on him? You’re beautiful, Val, look at you, look at how good you are—he glows. He genuinely lights up, that golden boy grin breaking across his face, and he’ll laugh, breathless, delighted, and say yeah? like a man being handed a present. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t unmake him the way it does the others. Valarr has heard it before, many times. What undoes him is the who of it (that you said it, his impossible-to-impress wolf, his northern queen who never gives anything she doesn’t mean) and so the praise is less devastation than confirmation. I knew it. I am. I am, for you.

DAERON. Daeron has spent his short life being told he’s the disappointment, the wine-soaked one, the prince who sees too much in his sleep and not enough in the world. He has a beautiful face (Targaryen-soft, fine-boned, dreamy) and absolutely no idea what to do with it. Tell Daeron he’s beautiful and he will flinch. He’ll think you’re mocking him. He’ll go quiet and watchful, a little sad, because he doesn’t believe it, because his father’s disappointment lives in his chest where pride should be. You’ll have to say it again, and again, and mean it, hold his face in your hands and make him look at you, you are beautiful, Daeron, you are, and watch his eyes well up before he laughs it off and turns his face into your palm and kisses it, pretending the moment didn’t gut him. It gutted him. You’ll feel it for hours afterwards in how carefully he holds you.

LYONEL. Roars with laughter. Genuinely, genuinely laughs. Head thrown back, that big stormlands bellow, his stag’s-pride mane of black hair shaking. He loves it. He eats it up. He’ll grin down at you, all teeth, and say aye, m’lady? say it again, louder, I want the bloody guards to hear it. Lyonel has zero shame about being beautiful. He knows, leans into it because praise from you is fuel, not unmaking. He’ll demand more (what else, wolf, tell me what else, tell me what you like best) and he’ll fuck you stupid trying to earn each new compliment, his eyes bright with delight, his hands shaking your hips because he’s laughing in the middle of it. He’s the one man on this list who can take a you’re beautiful and turn it into a game you’ll lose.

DUNK. See, Dunk genuinely believes he’s ugly. Has believed it his entire life. Seven feet tall and not a handsome bone in him, that’s how he thinks of himself. A hedge knight with cauliflower ears and a broken nose and hands like shovels. Nobody has ever told Ser Duncan the Tall he’s beautiful. Nobody. The word is not in his vocabulary as it pertains to him. So when you say it (and you would have to say it carefully, you would have to say it without any joke in your voice you’re beautiful, Ser) he will go absolutely still, this enormous mountain of a man, still. His face will soften in a way that you’ll feel in your sternum. He will think, briefly, that you’re teasing him. Then he’ll see your face and understand that you are not. And then this huge quiet man will bury his face in your stomach, your chest, wherever he can hide it, because he can’t let you see his eyes shine, and he’ll hold you so carefully, so carefully, like you’re the most precious thing that’s ever told him a lie that turned out to be true. And he won’t say anything for a long time. Not a word. And then he’ll say, muffled, you shouldn’t say things like that to me, m’lady. it’ll go to my head.

[the-darklings]

Ooh to contribute to pervy times-- do you have an idea of who would be most to least into cockwarming? (Apologies if I've missed this one somewhere! I did try to search for it first.)

Got about halfway through this and realised it's hard because I actually see them all being into it but for different reasons. So instead I'm gonna be talking about general interest and cockwarming before vs after sex. I got super carried away with this, been at it all goddamn day so it's NOT proofread, we die like Baelor 💀

includes: baelor, maekar, aerion, dunk, lyonel, valarr, daeron, aegon the conqueror, maegor the cruel, daemon blackfyre && brynden rivers (bloodraven) x f!stark!reader. 18+. mdni.

BAELOR

Baelor is a fascinating puzzle here, because on the surface he should be high interest and in reality he's medium-high, and that's on purpose.

Baelor has spent his entire life rationing his own hunger. He's practised at wanting without taking. The austerity is its own pleasure to him in a way. The control, the discipline, the earning of the next moment by not seizing this one. So cockwarming, in theory, fits him beautifully: sit inside her, want, do not take, breathe. And he likes it. He genuinely does. But the thing that makes him not top-of-list is that he already has a complete internal discipline around not taking you, and cockwarming is (for him) an expression of his everyday ethic rather than a revelation of a hidden one. He's already good at this. It doesn't break him open the way it breaks open others.

But. But. The way he does it is so beautiful it belongs at the top of a different list and that's the list of who makes cockwarming the most romantic.

Picture him. He's taken too long at a council. He hasn't come to bed yet. You've waited until you're tired of waiting and gone looking for him in his solar, and you find him at the window with a cup of wine he hasn't drunk, watching the Blackwater. He turns when you come in. His face (that mismatched-eyed, handsome half-Dornish, tired face) softens in the specific way it softens only for you.

"My wolf," he says, low.

And you say come to bed, and he says I'm not — and you say no, now.

You don't make him undress fully. You don't let him get lost in ritual of things. You pull him to the chair by the fire, push him down, climb over him, unlace him only enough, and sink down. And his hands (his big warrior's hands, the ones that have broken a man's jaw with a single punch) come to rest gently on the small of your back. He makes a sound. Low, half-wrecked. Oh. Just that. Oh.

And then he settles. He wraps around you like a man folding himself around a small flame he's terrified to smother. His forehead drops to yours. He breathes you in.

He murmurs something in Valyrian and you won't understand the words but you'll understand the tone. It's reverent the way Baelor always is. It's ache. It's a man who has spent his whole adult life being careful with everything he loves and is, in this moment, permitting himself to want very badly without acting on it.

The longer you make him wait, the more tender he gets. This's the paradox. Other men fray under sustained wanting; Baelor softens. His voice goes quieter, his hands go gentler. He'll trace the line of your spine with a thumb so slowly you can feel him counting vertebrae. He'll tell you, in that low rough voice:

"You are a marvel. Do you know that? You are a marvel, and I do not know what I did to be allowed to hold you like this."

And you'll have to hide your face in his shoulder because the reverence of it is unbearable.

He likes the discipline. He likes proving to himself that he can sit inside you and not take. He likes the small cruelty of denying himself. It makes the eventual having of you, when it comes, feel almost like a sacrament. And when you finally kiss him and say now (when you lift and lower yourself with intention) he comes apart for you sweet and ragged and half-broken, whispering my love, my love, my wolf into your hair.

Post-sex is him perhaps at his most possessive. This is where the dragon blood comes through. He will not pull out, pull covers around you both and keep his forehead against yours and breathe slow. Mine, his blood hums at him, a voice he's spent a lifetime refusing to heed, and in these quiet minutes he permits it. He permits himself to hoard. His arm heavy across your waist while he dozes with your hair in his mouth. He's the happiest man alive. He would die for you. You know this.

MAEKAR

Maekar doesn't rest. Maekar hasn't rested since he was a hard little boy whose brothers outshone him at everything. He spent his youth being the least-loved son; he spent his adulthood being useful, being hard, being reliable in a way that demanded nothing of anyone around him and was, therefore, thanked by no one. Maekar has never in his life had something soft that didn't require him to test it to destruction to confirm it was actually real.

You make him still. That's the whole of it. That's the axis of your universe.

Maekar would never ask for cockwarming. Maekar doesn't have the language for such things with you, doesn't know it's an available thing because it implies intimacy you don't have with him. You have to do it to him, and because he's Maekar, and because the thing underneath the granite is tender in a way that would break him if he ever let it out, he receives it without fully understanding what you've given him.

So, scene. You've been married long enough that you're past the awkwardness. Past the stilted nights where he didn't know where to put his hands, the grim determination of duty-sex. You've found, slowly, a thing that works between you. You're patient, he's grateful in a wordless way, he's learned to watch your face and adjust. You've had him. You've let him have you. You know his body. You've discovered low burning but steadily building passion with him.

Tonight is different. Tonight he came in from the yard scraped raw—a bad training bout, one of his men stupidly hurt, his own shoulder aching—and he's quiet in the way that worries you, the way that means he's grinding something in his teeth. You take his sword-belt off him. You unlace his doublet. You push him down onto the bed and you climb onto him without letting him undress the rest of the way, just unlacing him enough, and you sink down onto him and you stop his hands when they come up to move you.

"No," you tell him, low but firm. "Not tonight. Let me."

He stares at you. Violet eyes, hard and bright. He'd argue if he could find an argument. He can't. He also can't understand, yet, what you're doing. He's expecting you to start riding him, or to let him ride you himself. He's waiting for the tipping point, the road to take. None comes. You just sit on him. You lean forward until your forehead is against his and you breathe, and he watches you, baffled, waiting.

After maybe a minute, he mutters, "This is foolish."

"Yes, husband," you answer serenely, but don't move.

His hand finds your back. Big and calloused and warm, resting low on your spine, not directing, not pushing... just there. His breathing uneven. He stares at the ceiling like it has answers. You feel him twitch inside you, a slow involuntary pulse, and he makes a small rough sound he immediately hates. His jaw tightens. You press your palm flat over his heart and feel it, hammering like a horse's. You say nothing. You kiss the corner of his jaw, soft, and then settle again.

Five minutes in, he starts to unspool. You feel it happen. The tension goes out of his shoulders in increments. His hand on your back relaxes and spreads, fingers splaying over the small of your spine in a possessive half-circle. His breathing evens. His eyes close. And his cock (hard, patient) throbs slowly inside you, and he doesn't try to thrust. He just stays. Like a soldier finally permitted to sit down.

The most tender part: he starts holding on to you. Both hands now. One on your back, one in your hair. Not demanding, just holding. Like you're the only warm thing left in the world. This is the man who does not know how to hug his own sons. This is the man who has not been held in years. And here, buried inside you, with you silent and still on top of him, he's accepting being held for the first time in decades. He would not call it that. He will never call it that. But his hand in your hair is unsteady, very faintly, and his breath is catching in a way that has nothing to do with sex.

You stay like that a long time. You might be there twenty minutes. You might be there an hour. He doesn't move and neither do you. Eventually (when you're ready) you shift, and kiss him properly, and ride him slow, and he comes with his face buried against your throat and a sound that is half-growl, half-sigh, and neither of you mention it later.

Post-sex: "Stay." One word. Gruff, almost embarrassed. His hand clamps on your hip when you try to move. He doesn't say I want to hold you inside me a little longer. He says stay. You still understand. You drape yourself across his chest and his cock softens inside you and he makes a low rumbling sound that might, in another man, be called contentment. His hand finds the small of your back again. He sleeps deeper than he ever sleeps, even after battles. You feel him drift off under you.

You've given this gruff stone-hearted man the thing his life has refused him. He'll never thank you, but you'll know.

AERION

As mentioned before several times: he's insanely into cockwarming. This is a man who believes that he has dragon blood in a sense the rest of them have forgotten how to feel, and dragons are hoarding creatures. They find a thing worth guarding and they coil around it and they do not move. Their whole body becomes the vault. That's what he wants with you. That's what he needs with you, and he'll never forgive you for giving it to him, because the need itself is a humiliation.

Because every other version of sex you give him is bright and violent and magnificent and he still feels like he's losing. When he pulls out of you, the world comes rushing back, and the world has never been quiet to Aerion. Cockwarming is the one act where he gets to stop losing and thinking. Which means cockwarming is the one configuration where he feels the full weight of how much he needs you to not-lose, and the neediness eats him alive. He'd rather not want it. He wants it anyway. He hates you a little for making him want it this much for years. He'd kill anyone else who witnessed him wanting it. The want is uglier than he lets it look.

The setup. It's late. You're at your desk in the little room he haunts you in, the one with your maps and the wolf pelt on the chair, the lamp throwing warm light across one side of your face. You haven't been waiting for him but you're not surprised when he appears in the doorframe. Barefoot, tunic half-laced, short hair shining like spun silver in the light.

"Wolf," he says, the word bitten off at the edges like he resents having to use it.

"Come here," you answer without looking up, and he comes.

He hates that he comes. He came the second he heard your footsteps three rooms away. He was already on his way before you called.

You don't make a production of it. You let him strip, let him unlace your gown only enough, let him climb onto the bed behind you while you keep reading over your correspondence. You sit on him. You sink down slow, inch by inch, and by the time he's buried his hips are already shaking. Tiny fine tremors that travel up his spine and into his arms, which are locked around your waist too tight, fingers digging in hard enough that you'll have small crescent bruises on the points of your hipbones tomorrow. He's marking without thinking about it because he marks you with his teeth if you let him. He wants to leave something on you that the rest of them will see.

He's making a sound. Small, punched-out. A nnn at the back of his throat that he couldn't suppress if he tried, and he hates that he can't suppress it, and the hate is part of what makes his cock pulse inside you.

And then... nothing. You keep reading. You prop the dispatch on your knee, reach for your cup of northern small-beer and sip it. You feel him twitching inside you (involuntary, tender little pulses of his cock against your walls) and you don'tt move. You don't shift your hips. You don't even acknowledge him. You simply sit on him and occupy your evening.

He lasts about ninety seconds before he grinds his forehead into the back of your neck and makes a noise that is half-want, half-snarl.

"You're doing this on purpose," he hisses, mouth on the knob of your spine, teeth almost catching skin. "You're a cruel fucking creature, you know that, wolf, you know exactly what you're doing."

And he means it venomously and he means it as a love letter, he doesn't know the difference anymore, if he ever did. You don't answer him with words. You just tilt your head slightly and let your hair fall across his cheek and he shudders, a full-length body tremor that collapses through his whole skeleton, and says, "You hate me, you must hate me to do this to me," and his voice is raw. "Say you hate me. Say it."

You don't say it, which is worse. You just keep reading. His cock throbs inside you and he grits his teeth against the back of your neck and you feel the sharp edge of one canine drag, not quite biting, but itching with urge to do so.

What he'd be thinking, if you could see inside his head: this is the only place in the world where nothing is being taken from me, and I resent her for being the one to give it to me. Because if anyone else had been the one who made him feel this (steady, quiet, held, home) he could have dismissed them, killed them, broken them.

You, he cannot dismiss. You, he chose, so long ago now. You, he's stuck with forever, a disease of his own making. And the fact of being stuck is a rage he cannot name because underneath the rage is gratitude, and he refuses to be grateful. He refuses. He'd burn the room down before he'd let you see the gratitude bare-faced.

So he makes it ugly instead. The things he murmurs into your skin when he can finally speak again are cruel, venom dressed up in Valyrian grammar so you won't catch all of it. Whole litanies of high and low Valyrian. Half-remembered verses from dragonlord poems no one reads anymore. Filthy things hissed into your hair (kessa, ñuha jorrāelagon, ñuha dārilaros, and then, meaner, you've ruined me, you wolf, you've ruined me for every other woman who ever lived, I hope you die before me because I will not survive you.) He means it as the worst thing he can think to say, but it comes out as a vow. Because he knows, he knows there' s no world for him without you in it, there is no him without you.

He'd describe what your cunt feels like around him in language that would make septas faint. He'd tell you he can feel your pulse through his cock. He'd tell you he can feel you thinking, that your body has a rhythm he's learning to read the way he reads weather, and that he hates that he's learned you, he hates that he's become the kind of man who studies a woman's breathing, he hates that you've made him attentive.

"Look what you've done to me," he'd spit against your shoulder blade, and his hand would splay flat across your lower belly like he could feel himself through the wall of you, and his voice would crack on the next word. "Look what you've made me."

The filthiest confession, the one he only makes with his mouth buried in the damp hair at your nape: he wants his cum to take.

He wants to stay buried in you long enough that it roots. He wants to put a child in you, and the want for that is bound up so completely with the wanting to stay inside you that he can't separate the two. It's superstition. It's dragon blood talking. It's the ugliest, most honest part of him: he wants to ruin you for anyone else. He wants to plant something in you that no one can remove. He wants the rest of them to look at you and know, in some wordless way, that he was here. That he got there first. That he stayed. His palm on your belly is not tender, it's claiming.

Post-sex is where he becomes actually unbearable. He will not pull out. Will physically prevent it even. His arm cinches around your waist, his leg hooks over yours, and he snarls no into your hair when you so much as shift. He'll keep you pinned for hours if you let him, softening slowly inside you, his breathing going deep and uneven, his cum staying exactly where he put it.

"Stay," he mutters, and then (meaner, because he can't help himself), "you owe me this." You don't. You both know you don't, how easily you could remove yourself from this. He says it anyway. It's the only way he can admit he wants it.

He dozes that way with his forehead against your temple and in those minutes of half-sleep his face smooths out entirely. The arrogant little cruelty goes out of his mouth. He looks his age. He looks peaceful, which on Aerion looks almost like a different person. You've seen it maybe a dozen times in your life and you remember every single one because he hates that you've seen it. He hates that you have access to that face, that anyone does. You are the only witness to the version of him (the glad child) and he cannot permit to exist in daylight and he resents you for it in a way that is indistinguishable, in his chest, from love.

He wakes up meaner. He has to. Can't bear to have been that naked in front of you; he'll pick a fight at breakfast to rebalance. Some small cruelty aimed at Egg, some venom spat at Daeron, sharp-edged comment over the rim of his cup designed specifically to remind you that he is, still, a problem. You'll understand, and he hates that too. He hates that you understand. He hates that you don't rise to it. He hates that he has to escalate to get any reaction out of you and that no escalation ever works, because you know exactly what last night cost him, and you're not going to let him take it back.

DAERON

Let's be honest about who he is. He's tired, he's bitter, he's got a cup in his hand he'll claim he's not drinking and he is, he's sharp-tongued when he's in the right mood, soft and bleeding when he's in the wrong one, and he'd lie to your face about the smallest things just to see if he could. This is the prince who drinks to put himself to sleep because the alternative is lying awake thinking about his dreams.

And he loves cockwarming. Genuinely. Top-tier love. Possibly the only thing in his whole indolent life he's unambiguously enthusiastic about besides wine and bitter jokes. He loves it because it requires nothing of him. It requires nothing of him and it gives him you (your warmth, your weight, your cunt, your patience) and you don't need him to perform for any of it.

He doesn't have to be witty. He doesn't have to be a prince. He doesn't have to get it up on command and impress you. He can be lazy, and being lazy is his favourite state, and you're rewarding him for it. It's a miracle. You're a miracle. He'd tell you so and mean it and also not mean it, because that's the Daeron way.

He'd ask for it, too. Unlike the others. Daeron has no shame about his own comfort; that part of him has been sanded smooth by wine years ago. He'll sprawl in his chair by the fire (the big dark one, the one that fits him like a shell) and he'll beckon you over with two lazy fingers and a crooked half-smile and say, "Come sit on me, wolf, I've had a day."

And you'll say you've had a day, or you've had a cup and he'll say both. Come here anyway.

And you will because there's something about being openly used for comfort by a man who doesn't bother pretending it's anything else that appeals to the cold wolf in you.

You'd unlace him yourself. He wouldn't lift a finger. He'd watch you do it with those heavy-lidded violet eyes, half-amused, that mouth of his curled at one corner like he's about to say something cutting. Sometimes he does.

"Efficient," he'd murmur, as you worked his laces open. "My lady wife's efficiency. Terrifying, really."

And you'd ignore him, which is the only way to handle Daeron, and guide him out and climb over him and sink down, and then... ah. There it is. The little shudder that runs through him. The drop of his head back against the chair. The slackness that runs from his jaw to his knees in one long exhale. "

"Oh," he breathes. "Oh, there's my girl."

Meaning you, meaning your cunt. He doesn't distinguish because it amuses him not to. He'd kiss the corner of your mouth when you glared and say, both, I meant both, don't scowl at me, wolf, you'll give yourself lines.

And then he settles. Daeron actually, physically, lets go. You can watch it happen in real time. The tension leaves his shoulders. His hands (which he'll claim, wrongly, that he keeps perfectly steady) stop their fine tremor. His cock, soft when you took him in, hardens slow and lazy inside you, not urgent, just interested, the way a well-fed cat stretches. He doesn't try to move or try to do anything. He's just inside you, held, warm, and he closes his eyes and tips his head back against the chair and mutters, half to himself, gods, finally, like he's been waiting for this since breakfast.

You'd comb your fingers through his silver-gold hair, the hair that's always a little too long, a little messy, that he cannot be bothered to have properly attended to, and he'd make a low pleased hum, eyes still closed, and say, dry as old parchment, "Keep doing that, you'll make me your creature."

"Aren't you already?" you'd ask, and he'd crack one eye open and drawl, careful, wolf. Men have been hanged for less. And you'd feel his cock twitch inside you when you laughed, and he'd grin, that lopsided drunken grin, and tell you, that's not fair, that's not remotely fair, you cannot laugh while you're sitting on me like this, have mercy.

He'd talk, of course. Daeron always talks when he drinks and he's always drinking. But the talk in this posture is different, not the performative wit he trots out at his father's table, not the bitter quips he uses to keep others at arm's length.

It's lower, slower, meaner in ways that are private to you. He'd complain. He'd gossip, viciously and accurately, about every member of the council and his own family. He'd do a devastating impression of some lord who'd bored him that afternoon and you'd laugh against his throat and he'd feel your laugh around his cock and have to swallow hard and say, oh, that's not fair either, wolf, you're cheating. He'd tell you stories about his brothers that were half-true at best and wholly cruel at their edges and you'd have to pinch his ear and say Daeron and he'd grin unrepentantly and say, "What? I told you I was a bad man, you married me anyway."

He'd lie. Sometimes about small things. He'd tell you he'd only had one cup when you could taste three on his mouth; he'd tell you he wasn't tired when his hand was trembling against your hip. You'd call him on it. He'd shrug, cock still buried in you, and drawl, "Yes, well, I lie, you know this about me, it's part of my charm." And you'd say is it and he'd say I think so. You haven't left me yet.

The nastier register comes out when he's had more to drink or had a worse day. He'll get his teeth into something. He'll trace a lazy finger up your spine and murmur something mean against your throat: "Do you know how many men in this keep would kill to be where I am right now, wolf. Half of them have watched you walk past and composed whole epics in their heads. My brother pretends he hasn't but he has."

And you'd say stop and he'd say, "Why? It's true. You like it when it's true. You like knowing what you do to them."

And he'd have your hips in his hands now, not moving, just holding, his cock throbbing slow inside you. "I like it too. I like that they can't have it. I like that Aerion thinks about you and can't touch you."

You'd stop him. You'd press two fingers to his mouth and say enough, and he'd nip your fingertips lazily and say, yes, my lady, as you wish, my lovely lady, mocking you sweetly, and fall quiet with his cheek against your breast and his cock still warm inside you, perfectly content to have been scolded. Daeron loves being scolded by you. It's one of his favourite things. He'll provoke for it deliberately.

The soft register comes later. Sometimes after the nasty. Sometimes instead. When the wine is wearing off and the tiredness is surfacing underneath and his mouth goes looser and his eyes go wetter and he says things he shouldn't.

"They're so loud, the dreams,", he'll murmur into your hair, with his cock softening inside you and his arm loose around your back. "I'm a disappointment. Father thinks so."

You'd stroke his cheek and say Daeron and he'd say Don't comfort me, wolf. I'm not worth it. Just sit on me. That's what you're good for. And you'd understand that was him at his most tender, which is a horrible thing to understand about a man but you married him knowing, so.

The tender things he says only when he's genuinely drunk and genuinely sad and you'll never get him to say it sober, though you've tried.

You're the only thing that's mine.

Not the only thing I love, which he wouldn't admit, but mine. He means it in a small private way. Daeron has his cups and his wife and his wife is the one he likes better. He'd bury his face in your throat and say only mine, you're only mine, aren't you and you'd say yes, Daeron, only yours, and he'd make a small broken sound and stay inside you and not say anything for a long time.

Post-sex he's the undisputed champion of staying inside you. He'll stay every time. He'll slur don't go into your collarbone with his cock softening and his cum warm inside you and his hand tangled clumsily in your hair. He falls asleep that way half the time. You have to nudge him. He grumbles, but he stays inside you anyway.

You've woken up at dawn with him still buried in you and his face gone soft and open in sleep. The only time you ever see his face without the wit or the bitterness or the pose, just a tired man breathing against your throat, and you've stayed still, those mornings, so you don't wake him. You cherish it. He'd die before admitting how much he cherishes it too. But he'd ask for it again tonight. He'll ask for it every night for the rest of your lives. You've given him the one thing wine couldn't: a place to rest.

VALARR

Valarr is his father's son in all the deepest ways: careful, measured, aware he has to be worthy of you, aware that every touch is freighted with dynasty and expectation. He's Baelor's firstborn. He's being raised to be the next king who isn't a disaster. Everything about his conduct (in council, in courtesy, in his letters) is immaculate. He wants to be good. He wants to be worthy. He wants to do everything correctly. And he brings this energy to bed, which, unfortunately for him, is the exact wrong energy to bring to you.

Because you don't want correct or measured. You don't want a performance. You want him to shut his beautiful anxious brain off and let you use him, and the only way to make that happen is to do it to him. He can't give it up voluntarily. He'd try. He'd try so hard he'd tangle himself. You have to impose.

Here's the scene. You've summoned him (summoned him, plainly, like a ruler) to your chambers. He arrives in a dark doublet still faintly creased from council, his dark hair damp from where he splashed his face on the way over to compose himself. He stands in the doorway and he's nervous. Valarr is twenty-two and already carries himself like a man of forty, except when he's alone with you; then he's twenty-two again, the softness around his eyes that his father has trained out of himself in public. He starts to say my lady and you say undress, prince. And his breath catches.

You watch him. You make him stand in the middle of your chamber and take every layer off while you sit on the edge of the bed in a silk robe and watch. He does it because you told him to, but his hands shake a little at the laces. When he's naked (long, lean, dark-haired, pale) he stands there and doesn't know where to put his eyes, and you say come here, and he comes, and you guide him down onto the bed on his back.

You climb over him. You sink down. His mouth falls open and his eyes roll back and his hands fly up to your hips to—to help, to participate, to do something, because he can't bear to just receive—and you catch his wrists in one hand and pin them to the mattress above his head.

The flush hits him instantly. You watch it climb his throat, his jaw, his ears. He's scarlet.

"No," you tell him, mouth close to his ear, nose brushing that silver streak of hair. "I'm going to use you. Do you understand?"

His breath stutters. A little catch, hh-hh, like he can't find the rhythm of air.

You repeat it, slower, meaner: "I'm going to use you, Valarr. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to be good at anything. You're just here because I want you inside me. That's all you are right now." You rock your hips once, experimentally, and his whole body shudders beneath yours. "A nice warm cock for me to keep."

His throat works, his eyes squeezing shut. The embarrassment is so acute it's a physical phenomenon. The blush has reached his chest now, a pink bloom down his sternum, and you feel him twitch inside you, helpless, a pulse of his cock that he couldn't control if his life depended on it. You laugh low against his ear, soft and not kind. Oh. You like that. His breath catches again. My prince likes being used. You nip the shell of his ear playfully. Look at you.

"Please," he whispers. You're not sure he knows what he's asking for.

You tell him what he looks like, what he sounds like, what he's doing for you. You describe, in awful detail, what his body is good for in this moment. How warm he is, how hard, how pretty underneath you, what a good job he's doing holding you open. You tell him you picked him because he's obedient. You tell him you picked him because you knew he'd lie still when you told him to. You tell him you could keep him like this for hours and he'd let you, wouldn't he? Wouldn't you, Valarr? And he makes some broken sound and nods frantically against the pillow because he cannot speak.

You tell him the filthiest things in the sweetest voice you can muster up. "Such a good cock, my pretty prince, so thick and warm, such a nice place to sit."

And he flushes and twitches and breaks and begs and doesn't come, because you haven't told him to, and part of being good is waiting. You whisper that against his temple. Be good, sweet prince. Wait. And his cock pulses inside you and his hips jerk once, a spasm, and you press him down with your hand flat on his sternum and remind him: stay. And he groans and obeys.

Here is his darkness. It's the need to be reduced. Valarr wants to be an object of use. He wants to be told what he's for because he's lived his life like this (a prince, a heir,a future king). He wants to be good at something small and precise instead of expected to be good at everything large and impossible.

He wants someone to take the crushing weight of being Baelor Breakspear's heir off his shoulders for an hour and replace it with a single simple instruction: hold still and let me use you. The relief of that (the permission of that) undoes him in a way nothing else can. You've seen it in his face. The softness after. The way he looks at you like you've given him something sacred. You have.

He comes, eventually, when you allow it. Untouched, just from your voice. He sobs once into your collarbone when he does (a real, keening sound) and his whole body shakes through it, and he says thank you before he can stop himself, and then flushes so hot you can feel it against your own skin, and buries his face in your throat so he doesn't have to look at you.

Post-sex is his favourite though. By far. This is the version he prefers. You're sated, he's spent, he's softening inside you, and you're both breathing slow, and he tucks his face into the curve of your neck and refuses to move. Please, let me stay. Please. And you stroke the back of his neck and say beautiful prince and he shivers and clenches around nothing because there's no shame in his body anymore. He's been used. He's been good. He's earned the softness from you.

He sleeps better inside you than anywhere else in the Red Keep. You'll wake up and he's still there, still soft inside you, your fingers still in his hair, his breath slow against your throat. He is (for these hours only) exactly what he wants to be. Himself. Held. Used up. Safe. He'd never tell anyone about it. He'd die protecting it.

BLOODRAVEN

Bloodraven is the ideal cockwarmer in a way that transcends kink and becomes something closer to his actual native language. The man is a collector and this man is a watcher. He spent a thousand years (not literally yet, but you feel it) gathering tiny exquisite details from the world and storing them in some vast internal archive that no one else will ever see.

Cockwarming is, at its core, a kink about attention, and Bloodraven's attention is a scalpel. The stillness is his entire milieu.

Imagine this scene: it's late in his solar, the candles are burning low. Ravens shift and settle in their cages. He's at his desk in that dark velvet doublet, one pale hand around a quill, and he's been there for three nights running. You come in unannounced. Because you're possibly the only person in this castle who doesn't knock, and he doesn't look up, but his quill pauses for a half-heartbeat, which is, from him, a great concession.

"I thought you might have forgotten where my chambers were," he murmurs, in that voice like cold water, smooth and low.

"I never forget anything, you taught me better," you say, and he almost smiles. It's the curve of a single muscle at the corner of his mouth. You'd miss it if you didn't know to look.

You walk around his desk and stand in front of him. He raises his one red eye to yours, perfectly patient, perfectly unreadable, and you take the quill out of his hand and set it in its stand. Then you climb into his lap.

And he permits it, but the permitting is a kind of worship.

His hand finds your hip and stays there, thumb on the jut of bone, and he watches you unlace him with that terrible intelligent attention that misses nothing. When you rise up and guide him in and sink down, his one red eye goes darker and his lashes lower, but he makes no sound. No gasp. No exhale. Just one single, very slow, very deep breath, as if he's measuring the experience against all the experiences it resembles in his vast internal archive and finding it, somehow, new. Which is something he genuinely thought had stopped being possible for him.

And then, because you have understood what this is with him, you reach for his quill, put it back in his hand, and tell him, too calmly: keep working.

His breath catches. Just audibly. The only, almost human tell.

And he does. He goes back to his correspondence. One hand on your hip. The other on his quill. You are seated on his cock, fully sheathed, your arms looped loosely around his shoulders and your cheek against the soft silver-pale hair at his temple, and he is reviewing dispatches. He reads them aloud to you, sometimes, in that low even voice (a report from Gulltown, a note from some informant in Braavos, do you think I should have him killed, not yet—) and you can feel the minute vibration of his voice through his chest against yours and the way his cock twitches, very faintly, at certain words.

"Interesting," he murmurs, mostly to himself, making a mark in the margin, and you feel him throb inside you, and you laugh low against his throat and he goes perfectly still for one heartbeat before resuming.

You ask him questions and he answers. The absurdity of the scene, that you're talking about statecraft with him buried to the root in you, is part of the erotics.

You're doing something only you're permitted to do. You're one of maybe three living people allowed to disrupt his concentration. He's savouring it. Every small shift of your hips, every exhale you make against his neck, every time you adjust your weight. He catalogues all of it. You can feel him cataloguing. His body is perfectly still; his mind is drinking you down.

What he wants, underneath it all, is the one thing his life has denied him: company without agenda, full acceptance. He's surrounded by men who fear him, by informants who want something, by cousins and nephews who owe him and resent him. No one comes to Brynden Rivers to simply be with him. Except you.

And when you sit on him quiet and warm and patient while he does his work, you are giving him the one thing he cannot extort or spy out of anyone else in the world. He's aware of this with his whole mind. He catalogues that, too.

When he eventually does set the quill down, when he's finally finished the last dispatch, or when you've pressed a kiss just below his ear and he decides, with great deliberation, to attend, he does it like a man unsheathing a blade. Unhurried and measured.

His hand slides up your spine, counts each vertebra (you feel him count, his fingertip making tiny deliberate pauses), and settles at the nape of your neck.

"My lady Stark," he murmurs. "You are exceedingly patient with an old man." And you say you're not that old and he says no?, softly amused, and that's the closest to a laugh he ever gets.

Then he moves. And then you understand what all that stillness was holding back. The thing no one expects about Bloodraven and sex is that it's precise to the point of surgical. Every thrust exactly where you want it, angle adjusted by a fraction to wring a new sound out of you. Because he's been studying you the whole time he was pretending to read dispatches.

He knows now, in pinpoint detail, how your body works. He's spent two hours inside you learning the map, and now he reads it aloud.

After, he keeps you on him, doesn't pull out. Tucks you against his chest with his cock softening inside you and his arm around your back, and he hums. Almost silent, a vibration more than a sound, some old Valyrian melody lost to everyone else still alive.

His hand rests flat over your heart. He closes his single red eye. He is, for perhaps the first time since his childhood, unguarded. You feel it in the minute slackening of every muscle in his body. You've given him something no one else can. He knows it. You know it. Neither of you mentions it.

He likes his own spend inside you not because he wants to mark you (Bloodraven has no need of such vulgar proofs) but because it's evidence. A thing that happened, a fact he can return to in the cold quiet of his tower-work later and know, absolutely, that it was real. That you were there, that h he was held. He'll return to the memory again and again for years. You won't know but that's just how it is with him.

MAEGOR THE CRUEL

Maegor is the most dominant man on this entire list by a wide margin, and it's not even close. He's a bull in human skin who has spent his adult life taking what he wants, hurting what resists, and expecting the world to rearrange itself around him. He does not, ordinarily, yield. He doesn't kneel or obey anyone else. The idea that any woman would tell him stay in his own bed would (on any other night, with any other woman) be met with cruelty or a trip to the dungeons.

The fact that it isn't, with you, is the whole story.

Maegor doesn't get cockwarming. Sex, for him, is a performance of possession—he enters, he takes, he finishes, he withdraws, he leaves. The transaction is clean and the transaction is his. He's never lain quiet inside a woman in his life because it never occurred to him to want to. Stillness looks, to Maegor, like weakness. Stillness looks like waiting to be killed. And Maegor does not wait.

So you'd have to sell him on it, and selling Maegor the Cruel on anything requires a specific strategy: you don't persuade, or coax. You don't explain. You simply tell him what's going to happen and you do it in a voice cold enough that he pauses long enough to let it happen. The wolf way. The Stark way. The way your father would have handled a large and dangerous hound.

Scene: you've ridden him (because you do, rarely but you do, because you're not shy, you know your own body and he picked you for your strength, not meekness) and when he tries to roll you over, to finish on his terms, to flip the posture back to his rightful dominance, you plant a hand on his chest and press him back down and say, flat: no. stay.

Silence. Vast, cold silence. Maegor's black eyes fix on yours. The air in the room changes temperature. His nostrils flare and his jaw locks and for one full second you are not sure whether he is going to obey or kill you. Then his upper lip twitches into something that's not quite a snarl and not quite a smile and he rasps, low and dangerous: "What did you say to me, wife."

"I said stay," you repeat, not raising your voice.

You're your father's daughter and your father's daughter does not explain twice. "Inside me. You'll stay. You'll be patient. You'll indulge me."

He laughs. A single hard bark of a laugh, genuinely amused, because no one has ever spoken to him this way and survived.

"Indulge you," he echoes. "Indulge you." He has your wrist in his hand now, enormous, the grip just short of cruel. "I could break this," he says conversationally, looking at your wrist like it's a twig. "You know that."

"Yes," you say, perfectly calm. "Are you going to?"

He looks at your face and he does so for a long time. And he doesn't release your wrist—Maegor never releases anything—but he doesn't tighten his grip either, and after a moment of absolute stillness the decision settles in him with an almost audible click.

He's going to let you have this. Because no one else has ever asked. Because it's novel. Because the wolf in you is amusing in a way most women cannot access and he's curious where this goes. Maegor is many things, but he is not without intellectual appetite; you have served him something he's never tasted, and he wants to see what it is.

"Fine," he says, voice like gravel. "Indulge yourself, wife. I'll entertain it. For a while."

And you settle on him, and you do not move, and Maegor the Cruel submits to stillness for the first time in his miserable life.

And he likes it. He doesn't want to and he resents it, but he does. His jaw stays locked for a long time and his purple (near black now) eyes stay fixed on some point above your shoulder, not looking at you, because looking at you would require acknowledging what his body is doing.

His cock is hard inside you and not going down and his hips are not moving and his hands (huge, scarred, the hands that have done every horrible thing hands can do) are resting on your thighs with a deliberate stillness that is, for him, effortful. He's holding back. Actively. By choice. And the choice is a sensation he hasn't had in decades and it is, horrifyingly, good.

His breathing changes by degrees. You feel it under your palm on his chest. The great hammering slowing, a little, then more. His heart is a drum. His pulse is visible at the hollow of his throat. He's so present in his body that it disturbs him, because normally sex is a thing he does while thinking about fourteen other matters, and now he's inside you and there is nothing else. Your cunt around him. Your weight on his hips. Your cold patient face looking down at him. The faint crackle of the brazier in the corner. His own heartbeat.

You'd hold him there for a long time. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. You'd stroke his chest lazy and slow. You'd trace the white scars across his ribs without asking after them. He watches your hand like it might be a trick. It isn't. You're just there, warm and patient and cold all at once, and he's inside you, and no one is taking anything from anyone, and the longer it goes on the less he understands what is happening to him.

And then the thing that gets him (the thing that actually reframes this whole act in his mind and makes him want it) is a sentence you'd deliver halfway through, dry, half-amused, looking down at him like you own him: "I want you inside me, husband. I'll have you inside me when I want."

His cock jumps inside you. Hard. You feel it. His eyes flick to yours and they are, for the first time all night, open. Interested, intent, sharp in a way Maegor's eyes don't usually get in bed. "

"Say that again," he says in a low snarl. And you say it again, colder: "I want you. Inside me. When I want it. Are you going to give me what I want, husband?"

He makes a sound, something guttural. His hand tightens on your thigh and he says, in a voice you'll remember, yes.

"Good," you say.

And that word (good) does something to Maegor the Cruel that three wives and a hundred conquests never managed. Not because he's discovered he likes being praised. He doesn't. He loathes being praised. It's because good coming from you in that cold wolf-calm tone means you approve of him as a possession.

You are acknowledging him as a thing you intend to keep, and the keeping is on your terms, and Maegor's entire inner life has been organised around being the keeper. Being the kept (by you, specifically, in this cold way) tilts something in him. He finds, to his enormous inconvenience, that he wants to be kept by you. He wants to be the thing you reach for when you want. He wants to be available. He wants you to use him, because the using is a form of having, and being had by you is the only having he has ever consented to in his whole bloody lifetime.

He doesn't say any of this, obviously. Maegor would die before saying any of this. But you'd see it in his eyes. You'd see it in the way his hand found your hip and stayed there, heavy and placed. You'd see it in the way his breathing evened and deepened, and his shoulders, which have been braced since he was a boy, eased, by a fraction, into the bed.

Now. The part that seals it for him completely is easy: breeding.

Because Maegor is Targaryen to the bone and Maegor is a second son who has spent his entire life being measured against his weaker brother and Maegor wants a son. Badly. The wanting is not a kink, it's a legacy, and it's one of the few things in his life he is genuinely anxious about.

Three wives, no heir. The wanting has gone from ordinary to gnawing. When you introduce him to the idea that staying inside you—not withdrawing, not finishing somewhere else, not treating the act as complete the moment he's done—increases the odds, he locks onto it with an intensity that would alarm you if you weren't already familiar with the quality of his focus.

So post-sex cockwarming is not a sell at all. Post-sex cockwarming becomes, almost overnight, the standard. Maegor comes. He does not pull out because he will not pull out. He'll grip your hip in that enormous scarred hand and pin you against him and say, flat, cold: stay. Here. Like an order. Because it is an order.

He wants his cum in you and he wants it kept there, deep, and he will lie beneath you or above you or behind you for an hour afterwards, cock softening slowly inside you, one hand splayed flat and heavy across your lower belly, pressing hard, watching the wall with his jaw set, thinking about an heir.

You'd find this, in a darker man, disturbing. Maegor is a darker man. You find it, instead, useful, because it's the one form of affection he's learned to voluntarily stay in, and you'll take what you can get.

You stroke his forearm. You let him keep his hand on your belly, you let him press until he can feel himself inside you. You don't pretend it's romantic. Maegor isn't romantic. What this is, instead, is functional tenderness. The tenderness of a king who has decided you are the woman who will bear him sons, and is therefore treating your body like the holiest thing in his keep. He won't let a servant bring you cold food. He won't let anyone raise their voice near you. And he won't pull out after sex, ever, because his cum is meant to be inside you, and inside you it will stay.

He's good at it, too. Surprisingly good. He'll hold you against his chest with his cock still buried in you and he'll rumble, low, something that is almost a purr—a deep chest-sound, not quite language, but satisfied. His enormous hand on your belly moves in slow absent strokes. Occasionally he'll mutter something in High Valyrian you only half-catch and suspect is probably obscene. He's speaking to whatever he thinks is listening. He's telling it to take root.

Once he's accepted post-sex cockwarming as the natural order, selling him on the pre-sex version becomes easier but still requires strategy. You frame it correctly. You don't call it patience. You don't call it tenderness,either. You call it access.

"I want you inside me," you tell him, in your cold voice, settling onto him. "Don't make me wait for it. Don't make me want you and not have you available. You're mine. Be useful."

And Maegor—who once would have killed a man for saying useful to him in a bedroom—looks up at you with those black eyes and likes it. Likes the idea that you want him enough to need him on demand. Likes that you're claiming him as an appliance of your own pleasure the same way he would claim you.

There's a symmetry to it he can respect. And the filthiest, coldest register of it—the one that actually makes him hard just thinking about it later when he's in council, which is an indignity he has never before suffered— is the thought that you can't be without him inside you. That you need him that badly. That your cunt is a place he is required to be. That his wife, the cold wolf-bitch he married, is so possessive of his cock that she will sit on him and keep him there not for her own pleasure, really, but because having him elsewhere is intolerable to her.

DAEMON BLACKFYRE

Daemon wants to win you. That's the point. He's performative where Aerion is hoarding, dramatic where Brynden is precise, public where Baelor is private. Daemon's love language is conquest, and cockwarming is not a conquest, it's a having. Which is the catch. Pre-sex cockwarming confuses him the first time (where's the challenge? What's he earning?) and he'll get restless within a few minutes if you don't frame it for him.

So you frame it. That's the trick with Daemon.

You make it a prize. You tell him, as he climbs into bed: you did well today. Come here. You guide him into you and then hold him still—your hand flat on his chest, your voice low—and you say: "You've earned this. Sit inside me. Let me reward you. Don't move."

And his eyes go dark and hot and he grins against your mouth because now it's framed correctly: he's earned your patience. You're giving it to him as a trophy of the day's successes. He'd brag about it if he could. He does brag about it, in a small private way, into your hair: "Got you, didn't I, my queen? Won you all over again today."

The boasting is part of what he gets out of it. Daemon can't do quiet reverence the way Baelor does; his love comes out loud, even when it's whispered. He'll narrate. He'll tell you what he did today to deserve you. He'll tell you what he's going to do tomorrow. He'll run his mouth against your throat while his cock stays buried in you, describing (with that filthy swagger) all the ways he's going to make you come later, once you let him move. He'll grin into your skin. He'll nip. He's having a wonderful time.

He twitches inside you constantly, can't help it. Every time you say his name he pulses. Every time you so much as shift your weight he throbs. His body is a drum being struck. He laughs about it against your hair (feel that? all you, wolf, all you) and you can feel how pleased he is with himself for being so affected, like his own arousal is a compliment he's paying you.

Post-sex is where he becomes proprietary. Winning is done. The prize is in his bed. He'll roll you onto your side and spoon behind you with his cock softening inside you, his arm heavy across your middle, and he'll go smug, drowsy and possessive.

"Got you, wolf," he'll say into the back of your neck, and nip, a small satisfied bite. "You're not going anywhere."

He'll stay buried in you until he falls asleep. He'll be annoyed in the morning if you've shifted away in the night. He'd want to wake up still inside you every single time if biology allowed it. Some mornings you'll indulge him. He grins through breakfast after.

LYONEL

All thunder and physicality, and you'd expect him to be bad at stillness and you'd be wrong. Because Lyonel's actual kink, underneath all the bluster, is being close. He wants you crushed a little against his chest. He wants his breath in your hair. He wants to feel your heart against his ribs. Cockwarming fits into that worldview beautifully, so long as you pitch it the right way.

You'd introduce it to him differently than you'd introduce it to Aerion or Bloodraven. With Lyonel, you don't frame it as a kink at all. You just climb into his lap while he's lounging on his bed after a hunt and say want you to hold me a while, and he grunts come here, she-wolf and hauls you in, and you arrange it so he's inside you, and he laughs. Actually laughs. A big warm shaking laugh against your hair.

"You wolves have strange games," he says, delighted, and settles back against the headboard with his arms locked around you and his cock buried in you and his mouth against your temple and he is, instantly, perfectly content.

What's lovely about Lyonel is that the stillness doesn't torment him. He's not like the others. He's not fighting his own body to stay still. He's home. He's got you. He's in a warm bed, he's inside his wife, he's got his arms full of the one person he'd die for—why would he move? Why would anyone move?

He'd talk through the whole thing. Lyonel talks through everything. He'd tell you about the hunt, about a horse he's thinking of buying, about something stupid one of his cousins said, about a dream he had. The conversation is part of the cosiness. His chest rumbles against your cheek when he speaks. His hand traces up and down your back absent-mindedly.

Occasionally—because he's Lyonel, and he's a healthy man with a beautiful wife in his lap—he'll shift his hips a fraction, just to feel you, and grin when you gasp.

"Sorry, she-wolf," he'll say, not sounding sorry at all. Couldn't help myself. You're too sweet."

And you'll swat him and he'll laugh and go still again and press a big warm kiss to your temple.

Post-sex he stays inside happily. Would probably doze off. Lyonel loves a post-coital nap. You'd prod him. He'd mumble and not move. You'd eventually have to either give up or extract yourself with effort. He'd grumble and he'd pull you back. His whole worldview is I have a warm wife in my lap, what else is there?

DUNK

Dunk would be shy about cockwarming. Profoundly shy. Pinker than you'd think possible for a man his size. The concept that you'd want to keep him inside you for no practical reason (just because it felt nice) would bewilder him for about three minutes, and then delight him so completely he'd flush from neck to ears.

The first time, you'd have to explain it. Not technically (he'd get the mechanics) but why. Why someone would want this. He'd frown a little, earnest, working through it, and then his face would clear and he'd say oh. You just want me close. And you'd laugh at the simplicity of it and pull him down and kiss him and say, yes, Dunk. I just want you close.

And then it's the easiest thing in the world. You climb onto him or he climbs onto you (honestly, the logistics of being in Dunk's lap when he's approximately the size of a small mountain are worth discussing) and you arrange yourselves so you're folded against his chest with his arms around you and his cock buried in you soft and warm. He'd rest his enormous hand flat on your back, covering most of it, and he'd press his cheek to the top of your head, and he'd sigh. A huge contented sigh, the kind of exhale only a really big person can produce, deep from his chest, and you'd feel it all the way through your bones.

He'd keep checking on you. You comfortable, m'lady? Is this all right? Leg all right? and you'd have to shush him with a kiss. He'd flush every time. He'd be mortified at his own softness, at the fact that his body is responding to you, at the fact that you're allowing this. He's very aware that you're a great lady and he is a hedge knight from Flea Bottom, and the disparity never fully leaves his mind. You'd stroke his hair (his coarse, badly-cut hair that he never knows what to do with) and tell him it's good, Dunk, it's good, and he'd relax in increments.

Once he's there, once he's settled, he'd be perfectly happy. He doesn't crave cockwarming. He doesn't need it. But sitting inside you with his arms around you and your head under his chin is, genuinely, one of the happiest set ups of his life, and he'd agree to it whenever you asked, every single time, without fail. He'd trace your spine with one clumsy finger. He wouldn't talk much (Dunk isn't a talker) but what he said would be small and tender. You smell nice. Your hair's soft. I like this. The last one is as close to a declaration as he gets, and you'd feel it in your sternum.

He'd get shy during, too. His cock would twitch inside you and he'd flush and mutter sorry, mortified, and you'd laugh and kiss his jaw and tell him it's all right. He can't help it. You don't want him to.

Post-sex is the same but sleepier. He'd stay inside you if you asked. Wouldn't have thought of it otherwise. Dunk's instinct is to pull out and clean up and be courteous, because that's what he understands a knight should do, but if you said stay, he'd stay. No questions. He'd tuck you against his chest and hold you and you'd fall asleep with literal mountain around you, safest woman in the Seven Kingdoms.

He'd never think to ask. He'd spend his whole life with you asking for things and being delighted by each one. He's the only man on this list who is fundamentally uncomplicated about you. He just loves you. He just wants you close. Whatever shape that takes, he'll be in it, and he'll be grateful for it, for the rest of his life.

You're safe with him.

AEGON THE CONQUEROR

Aegon is a man built for conquest, and he compartmentalises sex with an efficiency that borders on cold. His body is a tool and he uses it. He comes to bed when he has time; when he doesn't, he doesn't. But this framing only tells half the story, because Aegon doesn'tt come to bed alone. Aegon comes to bed within the living, breathing organism that is the four of you—him, Visenya, Rhaenys, and you—and any consideration of cockwarming has to reckon with that first, before it reckons with anything else.

You came to Aegon first in dreams. That's what he told you the first time he put his hand on your face in a way that wasn't political. He'd seen you. For years before the Conquest was even plotted, he'd seen a northern woman with winter in her hair and a voice pitched for calling wolves out of the treeline, and he'd understood that she was his. Not as a prize. As a completion. Ice to their fire. The fourth element they had been missing. He saw the Prince That Was Promised in those dreams, a child born specifically from you, no one else, no substitute, no other bride from any great house in any kingdom would do.

He didn't tell Visenya or Rhaenys at first. He held the dream alone for years. It made him sharper. It made him hungrier. When the Conquest began in earnest and his eyes turned north it was not only for strategy; it was for you, the wolf-woman, the one his blood had claimed in sleep before he'd ever laid eyes on you.

And then he found you. And you were, infuriatingly, exactly as the dreams had shown—cold-faced, sharp-tongued, your father's daughter to the bone, and unafraid. You looked at Aegon Targaryen across a negotiation table with Torrhen Stark at your shoulder and you didn't flinch when his violet eyes settled on you the way his eyes did not settle on most people.

You understood, eventually, what he was doing. You understood he was looking at you the way a man looks at something he has seen in a dream and is finding, to his strange grim satisfaction, intact in the waking world. You did not soften. You were your father's daughter, but you understood.

The marriage was, of course, political. North bent to flame; ice folded into fire; the realm unified. But it was also, privately, a claim Aegon staked in his own bloodline.

He told you so, on your wedding night, in his low even voice with his enormous hand cupping the back of your skull: "You are mine because I saw you before I had you. You are the ice to our fire. The child you will give me will save the world."

And you, cold-blooded northerner that you are, had said only: we'll see about that, husband, which had, unexpectedly, made him smile.

The sisters accepted you in their own time. Visenya, with a single hard look that measured you and found you worth the measuring, and then a curt nod that said you are the fourth now, do not make me regret it.

Rhaenys, with that bright mischievous laugh and a hand cupping your cheek: oh, sister-in-ice, you're going to be wonderful.

They were never going to love you the way they loved each other and him; that kind of love is forged over decades of shared blood. But they made room. They made real room. Because they trusted Aegon's dreams, and because they understood their brother had been waiting for you.

So the four of you exist in a shape that is, in its own way, stable. The siblings share you. The sisters share Aegon. You are the Stark wolf folded into a Targaryen triangle, and the shape holds because everyone involved is too old and too powerful to waste energy on pettiness, and because Aegon, the hinge, will not permit it to crack.

Now. Cockwarming.

It would not occur to Aegon unprompted. It's not in his repertoire, not because he lacks tenderness but because his erotic life has been efficiently organised for years and no one has ever introduced the concept.

Visenya does not cockwarm. Visenya rides him, masterful and fast, and then rolls away and begins discussing strategy before his breath has slowed.

Rhaenys does not cockwarm; Rhaenys plays, light and laughing, and afterward curls up on his chest and chatters and teases until he falls asleep with her hair in his mouth.

Neither has ever held him still inside her, because neither has ever been in the particular position of needing the stillness of him the way you are. The sisters are his native tongue. You are a foreign language he's still learning.

Cockwarming, for Aegon, will be a thing you introduce. A northern custom, he'll call it, half-joking, the first time. A wolf's play. He will not push back against it. He is, always, curious about you—the way he was curious about the dreams, the way his whole self has been tuned to your specific frequency since before he touched you—and he will submit to the novelty as a form of investigation.

The first time, you'd come to his chambers after he'd spent a long evening with some envoy, his shoulders set in that particular tightness that means the king has been occupying his body for too many hours and Aegon has not been able to surface.

Visenya is away on Vhagar; Rhaenys is at her own tower tonight, which she keeps for reading and writing and occasionally for Orys.

You and Aegon are alone, which is rarer than people assume. You climb into his lap where he's sitting by the brazier and arrange yourself. He lets you. He always lets you. You guide him into you without ceremony. He exhales (a low, controlled breath) and his strong hand comes to the small of your back and stays there.

And then you do not move.

After a moment, in that deep even voice: "You are not riding me, wife."

"No," you'd answer. "I am not."

A long pause. His thumb strokes once across the base of your spine. "Is this a northern kindness?"

"It is a northern preference," you'd tell him. "Be still."

He would be still. Not because you told him (Aegon does not take commands from anyone alive, not even his sisters) but because he was curious what it meant. What you wanted, what you were doing. Aegon is, above all, a strategist, and his wife doing something unfamiliar in his lap is a strategic puzzle he intends to solve by observation. So he observes. His breathing slows. His hand stays warm at your spine. He studies you the way he studies a map.

And here is where it gets interesting, because what breaks him open (the crack in the enormous stone mythos of the great Aegon the Conqueror) is a thing the sisters cannot do for him, because they don't know to try.

Visenya does not let him be unguarded. She would view it as a tactical weakness in anyone, including herself, and her love for him is braided into the tactical.

Rhaenys does not let him be unguarded for long either; she would tease him out of it, make a joke, restore the bright laughing tone of their intimacy, because Rhaenys's love is motion and motion cannot tolerate too much stillness.

Neither of them has ever simply held him in stillness and asked nothing, because their relationship to him is too old and too complicated for that kind of rest. They knew him as a boy. They have watched him grow into the Conqueror. Their love for him is tangled up with what he is, and therefore, in their presence, he is always partly being Aegon Targaryen, brother-king, performing the shape of himself for the sisters who made him.

You did not know him as a boy. You don't care, particularly, about the Conquest. It happened before you were his, it's ledger work, it's done. You're a northerner; you're frost, a wolf, and you look at him not as a legend but as a very large tired man who hasn't stopped moving in years. When you sit on him and hold him still, you're giving him the one thing his sisters cannot: oblivion from being himself.

He wouldn't know this is what he wanted until he had it.

His enormous hand cups the back of your skull and he doesn'tt move it. He doesn't guide you anywhere. He just holds, and his eyes close, and he breathes. You feel his pulse through his cock, slow and heavy. You feel the great long exhale that empties his chest by inches. You feel the small, almost imperceptible loosening of his jaw (the jaw that holds the world on its hinge) as he permits himself, for perhaps the first time in a year, to sit down inside his own body.

He doesn't speak for a long time. Aegon's silences are not Visenya's silences; hers are sharp and weaponised, his are oceanic. He sits with you on him and he doesn't move and he doesn't speak and the brazier crackles and the wind scrapes at the tower windows and you can hear Balerion, somewhere far below, shift in his sleep with a sound like distant thunder.

After a long while he'd murmur, low: "This is a strange thing, wife."

"Is it unpleasant?"

"No." A pause, then a dry, "I will inform you when it is."

That is, from Aegon, very nearly a joke. His cock would twitch once inside you. He'd register your faint smile and file it away. The cataloguing never stops with him, even in rest. Then, after another long quiet: "You were in my dreams like this."

Your breath would catch. He rarely mentions the dreams. "Like this?"

"Quiet. Warm." A pause. "Holding me." His hand at the back of your skull flexes, once. "I did not understand it then. I thought it was a vision of peace. I thought peace was a place. It is not. It is a woman."

You wouldn't have a response to that, so you wouldn't offer one. You would simply stay on him, and breathe, and let him speak if he wanted to speak, and the silence afterward would not be uncomfortable. Aegon finding his way into sentiment is a rare enough event that you know to let it land without comment.

Later, when Visenya or Rhaenys asks what happened (because they always ask, in their different ways, about anything that pulls their brother's attention) he'll say only: "She gave me quiet."

And the sisters will exchange one of those looks they exchange, the silent ones that carry whole conversations, and Rhaenys will smile slightly and Visenya will nod stiffly once and neither of them will interfere, because the ice-wife giving the king quiet is a function they trust you to perform. You're the element they needed.

Now, the breeding register. Because we have to talk about this, given the dreams, given the prophecy, given the Prince That Was Promised.

Aegon believes that the child you give him will be the one his blood has been waiting for. Not Rhaenys's children. Not Visenya's, should she ever have any. Yours. Ice-and-fire in one body. The promised one. He told you this on your wedding night and he has not wavered from it.

Every time he finishes inside you, he is aware (not crudely, not possessively in the Maegor sense) that this is the act his line has been pointed toward for generations, that this is why they survived the Doom.

And so: post-sex cockwarming is not, in fact, something you have to sell him on at all. It was the norm from the beginning, without being named.

He comes inside you and doesn't withdraw. Ever. Because Aegon's dream-logic has always included the image of you folded against him with his seed inside you, and the dream doesn't resolve until he's held you long enough for the picture to settle. He will lie with you on his chest and his cock softening slowly inside you and his powerful hand splayed flat across your lower belly and he will breathe, slow, patient, and you will feel him thinking. Not scheming, not strategizing, but willing something into being. Take root, his stillness says. This is the one. This is the child.

It is, strangely, one of the most tender things anyone has ever directed at you. Not because Aegon is a tender man (he isn't, particularly) but because the weight of the attention, the prophecy-weight, the this is the purpose you were dreamed into my bloodline for weight, is an intensity no ordinary affection can match.

The sisters know about this and permit it. More than permit, they assist it, in the way of women who have accepted the shape of their shared household.

Visenya will sometimes send you to Aegon's chambers directly with a brusque go to him tonight, I've had him three nights running, he needs the quiet one. Rhaenys will laugh and pat your cheek and say our little ice-prophetess, go make the saviour of the world, we'll keep him for dinner tomorrow. The generosity is practical. They have his body and his rule and his dragon-fire. You have his prophecy and his rest.

Sometimes Aegon comes to you and it is only the two of you, the quiet, the private dream.

Sometimes Rhaenys is there, curled at your hip, teasing you both, her clever fingers tracing patterns on your thigh while Aegon is buried still inside you; Rhaenys loves to watch you cockwarm him, actually, finds it fascinating, says it's like watching a she-wolf sit on a dragon.

Sometimes Visenya is there, and Visenya is different because Visenya will lie beside you both and read dispatches in the lamplight and occasionally glance at the two of you with that sharp, satisfied expression and hold you down if you're being too patient for her liking. Visenya is the eldest and she likes her household arranged.

You and the sisters, occasionally, without Aegon, is its own matter for another ask. Suffice to say, Rhaenys is a delight and Visenya is an education and you have learned things from both of them about your own body that Aegon has not taught you and never could. The three women of the house have their own language now. Aegon knows it. Aegon encourages it. Aegon finds it, in his dry way, right.

[the-darklings]

“I do not want it. Is the type of shit Maekar croaks out through clenched teeth as his hands shake while unlacing your dress and getting too impatient for it so he just yanks hard to rip the material—“

Good woman, I beg thee, spare some of this delicious sacred texts in a longer version

⋆˚ 𝜗𝜚˚⋆ maekar/ls marry!verse. sexual content/18+. mdni. bear with me, I’m having to do this on my phone and it’s taking years off my life 😭🫩

“I do not want it.”

Maekar’s voice cracks like ice under a warhammer, low and raw, forced out between teeth clenched so tight the muscle jumps along his scarred jaw.

His hands—those same battle-hardened hands that have split helms and shattered shields—shake violently at the laces of your gown. The thick northern wool resists him, the cords rough and stubborn against his calloused fingertips, each tug sending tiny vibrations through the fabric and straight into your spine. You feel every tremor, every frustrated hitch in his breath against the nape of your neck, hot and uneven, carrying the faint scent of woodsmoke, steel, and the dark, musky salt of a man who has been fighting himself for hours.

The fire in the great hearth snaps and pops, orange light flickering across the direwolf tapestries and the heavy canopy of furs piled on the massive bed. Outside, the northern wind howls through the godswood, rattling the shutters like it wants to claw its way inside and freeze the heat rising between you. But the cold cannot touch this chamber. Not when Maekar’s body radiates fever behind you, his chest brushing your shoulders with every ragged inhale he takes in.

“I do not want it,” he repeats, the words a desperate snarl, as if saying them louder might make them true. The laces snap taut under his hands. His patience, already frayed to nothing, shatters with near audible crack.

With a guttural sound torn straight from his chest, he seizes the back of your gown in both fists and yanks. The wool and silk scream as they tear, a violent rip that splits the fabric from neckline to waist in one brutal motion. Cold air rushes over your bare spine like a slap, raising gooseflesh in its wake, but Maekar’s heat is already there. His palms shove the ruined gown down your arms, letting it pool at your hips in a grey-and-crimson heap that smells of faint lavender you crushed into the folds that morning.

You stand exposed in nothing but thin smallclothes, nipples pebbled tight from the sudden chill and the raw hunger rolling off him in waves. He spins you around so fast the room blurs around you, a hitch rising up your throat. Violet eyes—storm-dark, pupils blown wide—lock onto yours with something halfway feral and broken. His silver hair has come loose from its tie, strands sticking to the sweat already beading at his temples. The broken line of his nose casts a sharp shadow across his cheek in the firelight.

“I do not want to need you like this,” he rasps, backing you toward the bed until the edge of the furs hits your thighs. His hands are everywhere at once—rough, trembling, something possessive in the touch—cupping the heavy weight of your breasts, thumbs dragging over the sensitive peaks until sparks shoot straight to your core. The coarse hair on his forearms scrapes your skin, the heat of his palms branding you. “I do not want to wake every dawn wondering if you close your eyes and see him.”

The back of your knees buckle. You fall onto the furs—thick, soft, smelling of wild bear and wolf and the lingering musk of every night you’ve spent tangled here. Maekar follows like a man possessed, caging you beneath the solid, heavy weight of his body. He tears at his own tunic; seams rip with a sharp sound, dark wool splitting to reveal the broad, scarred expanse of his chest—old silver lines from tourneys and battles, pale hair dusting down to the hard ridges of his abdomen. His Breeches follow, shoved down just enough to free him. His cock springs into the air, thick and flushed dark, the head already glistening with precum that catches the firelight like liquid gold. It slaps heavy against your stomach, hot as a brand and your mouth parts in anticipation.

“But I do,” he growls, voice cracking on the confession. “Gods help me, I do.”

He does not bother with the rest of your smallclothes. Two thick fingers hook into the damp crotch and rip. Linen tears like parchment under his strength, baring your slick, aching folds to the cool air and his starving gaze. The scent of your arousal blooms sharp and musky between you, mixing with the smoke and his own dark musk. One large hand grips your thigh, spreading you wide, the calluses rasping deliciously over sensitive skin. The blunt head of his cock drags through your wetness—once, twice, thrice; eyes hard on your face—coating himself in the slick evidence that your body has never once lied to him.

Then he thrusts in to the hilt.

One single, punishing stroke that stretches you open so wide you feel every thick inch, every vein, the burn blooming deep and perfect. A broken cry tears from your throat; your back arches clean off the furs. He stills there, buried to the root, forehead pressed to yours, breath sawing hot and ragged against your lips. You can taste the salt on his skin, feel the thunder of his heartbeat against your breasts.

“I do not want it,” Maekar whispers again, the lie trembling as his hips begin to move—slow, grinding, then harder, faster, the wet slap of skin on skin echoing off the stone walls louder than the wind outside. Each thrust drags the thick head of his cock against that devastating spot inside you, sending sparks exploding behind your eyes as your nails dig into his back hard enough to leave him marked. Sweat beads between your joined bodies, slicking the coarse hair on his chest so it slides against your nipples with every snap of his hips.

Maekar’s large hand fists in your hair, tilting your head back so he can bite at the tender column of your throat—sucking hard, teeth scraping, leaving marks that will bloom dark by following morn. The other hand reaches between you, calloused thumb finding your swollen clit and rubbing in tight, merciless circles. The sensation hits like lightning; your first climax rips through you without warning, walls clamping down around his cock so hard his rhythm stutters and a curse in High Valyrian spills from his lips like prayer and profanity at once.

Still he doesn’t stop.

Maekar fucks you through the peak, hips snapping with all the restrained fury of a man who has spent moons pretending he feels nothing, wants nothing. The furs beneath you grow damp with sweat and slick, the wet, obscene sounds of him driving into you filling the chamber. Your nails rake down his back, leaving red lines that sting and make him groan deep in his chest. The guilt flickers somewhere deep—Baelor’s golden smile, the love you once carried for him—but it drowns beneath the heat of Maekar’s body, the way he fills you so completely it feels like he’s rewriting every memory inside your skin.

“Say my name,” he demands, voice hoarse and wrecked, thumb never slowing against your core. “Not his. Mine.”

“Maekar,” you gasp, legs locking around his waist, heels digging into the sweat-slick small of his back to pull him deeper. The second climax crashes over you harder than the first, a sobbing cry tearing from your throat as your walls flutter and milk him.

Only then does his control snap completely. His thrusts turn brutal, deep, grinding, chasing his own release with single-minded hunger. The hand in your hair tightens; the one between your bodies presses harder. When the third peak rips through you—sharp, blinding, leaving you trembling and boneless—he buries himself to the hilt with a guttural groan right against your ear. Hot pulses flood you, thick and endless, spilling out around his cock to soak the furs beneath your ass. His entire body locks above you, muscles trembling, violet eyes wild and raw in the firelight.

For a long moment the only sounds are your ragged breathing, the crackle of the dying fire, and the distant howl of the wind. Maekar’s arms give out. He collapses half on top of you, face buried in the sweat-damp curve of your neck, silver hair sticking to your skin. His cock is still buried deep, twitching with aftershocks. The fight drains from him all at once, leaving only raw honesty in its wake.

“I do not want it,” he whispers against your throat, voice small and cracked and utterly defeated, breath warm and shaky. “But I cannot stop wanting you.”

Your fingers thread through his hair, holding him there as the fire settles to embers and the cold rages on outside the walls. The guilt still lingers in the quiet spaces between heartbeats—Baelor’s ghost in the shadows, watching you over you both—but so does this: raw, messy, undeniable, burning brighter than any hearth in the coldest keep in the realm.

an: anyway—

[the-darklings]

AKOTSK men realising that LS gave them a hickey? Where would it be, somewhere easy to hide like their chest, or high like their jaw? Would they be embarrassed? Shy? I feel like Aerion would def be a little smug lmao

(¬‿¬)

BAELOR: Location: Chest, shoulder, somewhere that can be easily hidden under his doublet and high collar. You probably didn't even mean to leave a mark, things just got intense and it happened. Reaction: Discovers it the next morning while getting dressed and just stops. Stares at it in the mirror with this complicated expression that's equal parts embarrassment and pleasure. He's the Crown Prince, he can't walk around with visible hickeys. The scandal. The gossip. His father would have words. But also... there's something about it that makes him feel far too pleased in a way that's completely inappropriate for a man his age. Proof that you want him enough to mark him, that the passion between you is real and urgent and overwhelming enough that neither of you were thinking about propriety. Would definitely hide it, but might trace his fingers over it when he's alone, remembering how it got there. Might press on it slightly just to feel the tenderness and remember your mouth on his skin. Would give you this look later when you're alone, half reproachful, half affectionate. "You marked me." "I noticed." "I had to wear my collar higher today. In summer." But he's smiling slightly when he says it, and you both know he's not actually upset.

MAEKAR: Location: Collarbone, shoulder, ribs. Somewhere he can cover with clothes because Maekar is intensely private about his intimate life. Reaction: Sees it in the mirror and immediately mutters "Fuck." Not angry, just... he wasn't expecting it. Would definitely hide it. This is not information the world needs to have. Would wear his collar buttoned higher, make sure his doublet covers it completely. But privately? Privately there's this gruff satisfaction about it. You marked him, left evidence. It's possessive and claiming and part of him really likes that even though he'd never say it out loud. Might run his fingers over it when he's getting dressed, remembering. Might press on it slightly just to feel the ache again. Look at you later with this dark, heated expression that suggests he's thinking about how it got there and would like a repeat performance. If you asked him about it directly he'd just grunt and change the subject. But later, in private, he might pull you close and mutter against your ear: "Do that again and I'm giving you one back." Threat or promise? Both.

AERION: Location: Neck. Jaw. Collarbone. Somewhere visible. And if you tried to put it somewhere hidden he'd probably move so you'd mark him somewhere he could show off. Reaction: SMUG. Absolutely insufferably smug. This is proof. Visible, physical proof that you marked him, claimed him, left evidence of yourself on his skin. He'd catch sight of it in the mirror and get this satisfied, almost feral smile. Wouldn't even try to hide it. Would wear his collar open specifically so people could see. At family dinners. At court. Everywhere. And when people notice (because of course they notice, that's the point), he'd just smirk and say nothing, but his eyes would find yours across the room with this look that says mine, I'm yours, everyone can see it now. He'd try to give you one back immediately, just to make it mutual. Reciprocal claiming. If you let him, he'd put it somewhere just as visible because he wants the world to know you're his and only his just as much as he's yours.

DAERON: Location: Wherever you put it. He's not directing traffic here. Reaction: Probably doesn't even notice it at first. Gets dressed, goes about his day. Someone (probably Aerion, being a dick) points it out and Daeron just looks down at his chest or touches his neck with vague surprise. "Oh. Huh." Not embarrassed, not smug, just... mildly interested in this physical evidence of something that happened. Might forget to hide it because he's not particularly concerned with appearances. Might remember later and think oh right, probably should cover that but not with any real urgency. There's something almost sweet about how unconcerned he is. It's a mark. It'll fade. In the meantime, it's just a reminder of time spent with you, which is nice in a distant, abstract sort of way. Though if you pointed it out directly he might look at it with more focus and say something like "I didn't realise you did that" and there'd be this small smile, like he's pleased you left evidence even if he's not going to make a big deal about it.

LYONEL: Location: Honestly anywhere. Chest, shoulder, neck—he's not particularly worried about hiding it because he's Lyonel and subtlety isn't really his strong suit. Reaction: Discovers it in the mirror and grins. Like a genuinely delighted, slightly goofy grin. You marked him! That means last night was real and you wanted him and left evidence and how great is that? Probably wouldn't go out of his way to show it off like Aerion would, but also wouldn't be particularly careful about hiding it. If someone notices, he'd just shrug with this pleased expression like, "yeah, what of it?" Might bring it up to you later with genuine enthusiasm. "You left a mark." "I know. Sorry, I didn't mean to—" "Don't apologise. I liked it." Said with complete sincerity and warmth. Would probably want to give you one back because fair is fair and also because the idea of marking you the same way you marked him is appealing in a very straightforward, uncomplicated way. Just mutual claiming between two people who enjoy each other. The kind of guy who'd trace his fingers over it fondly when he's getting dressed, remembering the moment, and just feel happy about it.

DUNK: Location: Chest, shoulder. Somewhere he can definitely hide under his clothes because gods, the embarrassment. Reaction: Discovers it and turns bright red. Like full face flush, neck red, ears burning. He's a hedge knight. You're a Lady. This is... this is evidence of... oh gods, what if someone sees? Would be extremely careful about hiding it. Checks multiple times that his shirt covers it completely. Adjusts constantly throughout the day and genuinely anxious that someone will notice and think less of you for being involved with someone like him. But underneath the embarrassment there's this shy, warm pleasure. You wanted him enough to mark him. Left evidence on his skin. It makes him feel chosen in a way that's overwhelming and wonderful and terrifying all at once. Would probably be too flustered to bring it up directly, but you'd catch him touching the spot absently throughout the day, remembering it. And if you teased him about it later he'd turn red all over again but there'd be this small smile he couldn't quite hide. "You marked me, m'lady." "I did. Is that a problem?" "No. No, I just... didn't expect..." He'd trail off, too flustered to finish, but the warmth in his eyes would say everything. Definitely wouldn't reciprocate without explicit permission because he's too worried about overstepping. But if you asked him to? If you made it clear you wanted his mark on you the same way? He'd be honoured and careful and still somehow make you feel like you've given him the greatest gift.

[the-darklings]

on my hands and knees for any snowforged crumbs, queen 🙇🏻‍♀️

time to bring back the ogs since they haven't had the new format treatment yet. ... baelor targaryen x f!stark!reader x maekar targaryen

The marriage is legal, sanctified, and Old Valyrian by its very definition. One woman, two husbands, both princes of the blood.

The Seven gnash their teeth quietly through the ceremony at the Great Sept, and then the second rite happens privately, before the heart tree at Winterfell when you ride north. Wolves don't kneel at southern altars, and your fathers both know it.

Daeron the Good never says it was Bloodraven who suggested the second husband as restitution for the realm's blunder, but Bloodraven smiles like a man who's solved a long problem, and Maekar (who was meant to have you and lost you in the span of a single feast) gets to keep you anyway.

The order matters and they all know it: Baelor is your husband. Maekar is your husband too. Baelor is the heir, the future king, the man whose ring sits on your fourth finger.

Maekar is your sworn lord, your sword-arm, the one whose name comes second on the marriage contract because someone had to be second and he refuses to be insulted by a thing he chose.

Mornings are Baelor's. He wakes before either of you, reaches across to find your hair on the pillow, and presses his mouth into it like a prayer. Maekar sleeps with his back to the door, sword within arm's reach even now, and Baelor learned within the first week not to wake him by touch. Only by name, low and even, even now.

Breakfasts are loud or silent depending on who's been where. If Baelor has council, he eats standing, kissing your temple twice. If Maekar's been training the boys (his pages, your half-grown cousins when they visit, the household guard), he comes in with frost still on his cloak and eats more than both of you combined and never apologises for it.

You run the household. This's non-negotiable and both your husbands learned it before the marriage was a fortnight old.

Baelor was raised by Myriah; he understands a wife who governs, and those with frightening efficiency. Maekar was raised by his elder brothers and by the yard, and he is, frankly, relieved not to have to think about table linens or the dowry chests or whether the eastern bannermen's wives need separate solars when they visit. He defers to you on everything domestic with a gruff whatever you think, which is one of the most romantic things he is structurally capable of saying.

Baelor calls you wife in public. Maekar calls you my lady. In private, Baelor still calls you wife, sometimes love, sometimes nothing at all because he just looks at you and you know. Maekar calls you by your name when no one else can hear it, and goes quiet after. Like he has ration it down to once or twice an evening because he doesn't quite trust himself with the word.

They were brothers before they were your husbands and that doesn't stop mattering.

Baelor still rolls his eyes at Maekar's grumbling. Maekar still calls Baelor the soft one and means it as both insult and praise. They train together in the yard most mornings, and Baelor lets Maekar win more than he should, because Maekar fights better when he's a little angry and Baelor learned a long time ago that letting his brother bleed off the worst of his temper on a sword keeps him gentler with everything else.

Maekar would die for Baelor and Baelor knows it. Baelor would step in front of an arrow for Maekar without thinking, and Maekar would never forgive him for it. They have an understanding about who's allowed to bleed for whom, and it's older than you. You're smart enough not to challenge it directly.

They share you the way Targaryen brothers have always shared what mattered most. Not entirely without friction, but without poison. Baelor gives easily. Maekar takes what's allotted to him and doesn't ask for more.

You're the one who has to show to him, slowly, that you can give Maekar more than has been allotted, and the world will not crack open.

The first time you crawl into his lap unprompted in the privacy of your shared solar, in front of Baelor (who looks up from his ledgers and smiles) Maekar goes so still you think you've broken him. Then his hand settles at your hip like he's holding a wild bird. He doesn't speak for half an hour, but his thumb moves in slow, helpless circles against your gown the whole time.

Baelor courts you constantly. Even years in. He brings you small things: a particular northern apple he had ridden out to find at market, a copy of a book on weirwood lore he had a maester transcribe, a dried sprig of heather pressed between two pieces of parchment because he saw it on a ride and thought of you.

He kisses your knuckles when he greets you and the inside of your wrist when he's been gone more than a day. He likes to touch you in passing, palm at the small of your back, fingers grazing your nape, hand tucking a strand of hair back when no one is looking and sometimes when they are.

Maekar courts you in the only language he has. He polishes your knife. He takes the worst horse out for you because he's not letting you ride it until he's certain. He stands at your shoulder in any hall you enter where he doesn't trust the company, a half-step behind, bristling without seeming to.

He learned the basic courtesies of the Old Tongue because your father uses them and he wanted to be able to greet Barthogan Stark properly. He has never once told you he loves you outright. But he's also never once let you walk down a flight of stairs without offering his hand to you.

Maekar will not flinch from your moods. Baelor soothes; Maekar simply waits. If you're angry, he will let you be angry at him, even when it isn't really his fault, even when you both know it isn't his fault.

You weep against his chest the night news comes that one of your father's oldest friends and bannermen has died, and he doesn't say a single word. Buthis hand on the back of your head is the steadiest thing in the world.

You sit between them at every feast. Baelor's hand finds your knee under the table; Maekar's elbow brushes yours when he reaches for the wine.

The court has long since stopped whispering (you've given them no scandals, only the quiet, unflinching fact of a marriage that works) but they still watch, and you've learned to make the watching cost them. You laugh at something Baelor murmurs in your ear and feel Maekar's leg press, very deliberately, against yours under the table. Coordinated possession of dragons, framed as nothing.

They argue about you sometimes. Never bitterly, never cruelly, but the way brothers argue about things. Maekar thinks Baelor lets you ride too far ahead on hunts. Baelor thinks Maekar drills you too hard with the dagger and doesn't understand that your shoulder still aches in winter from the Kingswood.

You have walked into the solar to find them mid-disagreement about your wellbeing more than once, and the look they give you when they realise you've heard (Baelor sheepish, Maekar flat-mouthed and faintly red around the ears) is one of the funniest things in your marriage.

They've a system you didn't ask for and wouldn't change.

When you're ill, Baelor sits with you and reads aloud; Maekar guards the door and threatens the maesters. When you're sad, Baelor talks; Maekar walks with you in the godswood until you don't need to talk anymore. When you're furious, Baelor diplomatically removes whoever has angered you from your sight and Maekar quietly arranges for that person's career to suffer.

You have, on occasion, felt slightly afraid of how well they've learned to love you.

You have not, on any occasion, asked them to stop.

The first night, the wedding night, was always going to be Baelor's.

There was never a question to be asked. Maekar refused even to be in the same wing of the keep, took himself to the training yard at midnight and beat a pell to splinters and slept in the barracks like a green squire, because he's not a man who takes turns with his brother on a wedding night, and he wouldn't insult you by pretending he could.

Baelor undressed you with the patience of a man who'd been imagining this for longer than he ought.

He said your name once, low, against the hollow of your throat, and you felt it in your spine. He kissed every place his hands had touched you in public and not been allowed to linger. The small of your back, the flare of your hip, the inside of your wrist, the place behind your ear where his breath used to stir your hair when he leaned to whisper. He talked to you in High Valyrian, soft and rolling, and when you asked him what he was saying, he shook his head against your stomach and whispered, Later. I'll tell you later.

He still hasn't.

He took his time. He took all night, in fact, and at some point near dawn you laughed against his shoulder because you had not understood, until then, that pleasure could be a thing a man gave you the way one gives a cup of clean water to someone who's been thirsty without knowing it.

He kissed the laugh off your mouth and looked, just for a heartbeat, like he might cry from sheer relief and happiness. You held his face between both your hands and told him not to. He didn't.

First night with Maekar came nine days later. He didn't ask (Maekar doesn't ask). You did.

You went to his chambers in your nightdress with your hair loose and your hands shaking, because you had decided this was not going to be a thing he had to carry the weight of asking for. He opened the door and the look on his face (stripped, winded, like a man who'd been holding his breath since the wedding) broke something in you.

He didn't speak for the first quarter-hour. He just held your face like he was checking that you were real. Then he kissed you, and it was nothing like Baelor. None of the patience, none of the practised softness, all hunger and held-back force, his mouth opening against yours like a man who'd been starving and was being very careful not to show just how much.

He laid you down on his bed like you might break, and that was the part you couldn't bear. You took his hand and put it where you wanted it, and the sound he made (a strangled, half-bitten thing in the back of his throat) you've never forgotten. He shook the entire time he was inside you that first night. You held his face against your throat and told him it's all right, I'm yours, I'm here, until the shaking stopped.

He's never been gentle with you the way Baelor is. He has been gentle in his own way (which isn't the same thing) every single time since.

Baelor in bed is patient and devastating you learn.

He's read books (actual books 🤓) on the matter, because of course he has. He's humble enough to ask you what you like and arrogant enough to be very good at remembering. He likes to take his time undressing you, one ribbon at a time, his mouth following each new inch of skin as it appears, until you're shivering with it long before he's done.

He likes to talk to you, low and warm, in High Valyrian when he wants to feel like he's confessing something only the gods can hear, in Common when he wants you to understand exactly what he's saying.

He's attentive in a way that occasionally edges into reverent. Your pleasure is, to him, a thing he's honoured to attend to, and he attends to it thoroughly.

He goes down on you like you're his new altar. The first time he did it you were so startled you tried to pull him up by the hair. Husbands don't, you started to say, and he caught your wrist gently and pinned it to the bed and said, this husband does, wife, and then he ruined you with his mouth for what felt like an hour.

He likes to make you finish before he ever gets inside you. Sometimes twice. He says, the second time, with his beard rough against the inside of your thigh and his eyes burning up at you, I have spent a lifetime learning patience, my wolf. Allow me to use it.

He likes you on top sometimes. Likes to lie back and watch you, hands at your hips not guiding, just holding, mismatched eyes drinking you in like he's afraid you'll vanish if he blinks.

He likes you face-to-face, slow and deep, his forehead against yours, breathing the same air. He likes you on your side with him curled around your back, his hand at your throat without pressure, just there, while he moves into you with the kind of unhurried steadiness that makes you fall apart by inches.

He kisses you the entire time. He kisses you when he finishes. He kisses you afterwards, when you're sleep-warm and dazed, and tells you in three different languages how much he loves you. At least one of them is not a language you know.

Maekar in bed is none of those things and all of them.

He's quiet. Maekar is often quiet, but in bed he's silent in a way that becomes its own kind of intensity. All hot breath and bitten-off sounds and the rough catch of his hand at your hip. He doesn't narrate. Or flatter. He watches you like he's reading a battle map, and when he finds the thing that makes you arch, he does it again, and again, and again, with the same grim, dedicated focus he brings to a sword drill.

He's not (and you didn't expect this, and neither did he, you'd imagine) strong in a way Baelor is not.

Where Baelor savours, Maekar consumes. Where Baelor will draw it out for an hour, Maekar fucks you fast and thorough the first round, hands braced either side of your head or in your hair, jaw locked, eyes squeezed shut like he's afraid of what he might do if he looks at you.

He bruises sometimes (on your hips, on the inside of your thigh, the tender flesh just above your knee) and is appalled the next morning when he finds them, traces them with a fingertip and looks at you like he wants to apologise and doesn't know how.

You wear them like jewellery and he goes quietly mad over it.

The second round is when he kisses you properly. The second round is when his forehead rests against yours and he breathes your name once, like a confession, like a sin he's very glad of. The second round is slower, deeper, a man who's emptied the worst of himself into you and can finally be here. In you. Calloused palms learning the shape of your ribs, mouth moving against yours like he's trying to memorise the shape of it.

He likes you beneath him. He likes the weight of you under his hands, the proof of your body, the fact that he can cover you completely.

He likes you on your front with his chest to your back and his mouth at your shoulder, one of his arms banded across your waist holding you steady, and that's the position in which, twice now, he's said something into your hair he would never say to your face.

He's only ever finished inside you. Not a drop is wasted on anything else. His seed is for his wife only.

Both together at the same time is rarer, but still happens.

They're usually too busy to do it often (a few times a moonturn, sometimes less) and when they do, it's never planned.

It happens when the three of you've been in the same room too long with the firelight low. When Baelor's hand has been at your waist and Maekar has been watching from his chair with that look. The one where he hasn't moved in twenty minutes and his glass has gone untouched and his eyes have not left the line of your throat. When you turn your face up to be kissed and find both of them within reach.

Baelor leads, because Baelor always leads, and Maekar follows because following his older brother is a thing he was born knowing how to do.

You end up between them. Baelor at your front with his mouth on yours, slow and thorough, all those careful skills he's spent a year perfecting on you turned loose at once. Maekar at your back, beard rough against your shoulder, one of his hands flat and broad and hot at your stomach, holding you steady. Holding himself steady, you realise, the way a man holds a lit candle in a wind.

They don't crowd, they don't compete. There's a wordless choreography between them that you suspect was negotiated long before you noticed it: who kisses your mouth, who kisses your throat; whose hand is at your breast, whose is between your legs; who's inside you and who's just there, pressed close, breathing in the smell of your hair and waiting his turn with a patience that makes you squirm.

Baelor murmurs to you in three languages. Maekar doesn't say a single word. Both of them watch your face (both of them) like the only thing in the world that matters is whether you're still with them, still here, still theirs. When you finish, you finish with one of them inside you and the other holding you up, and you don't always know whose name leaves your mouth. They don't seem to mind.

Afterwards, Baelor talks. Are you all right, my wolf. Was that — did we — tell me, wife, tell me. Maekar doesn't. Maekar just keeps his palm flat against your stomach, where you can feel the steady, slow hammer of his pulse against your spine, and breathes.

The great bed at Kings Landing is a Targaryen heirloom and was not built for three (somehow). You had a new one made within the first month. You didn't consult either of them. They have not commented and you suspect they never will.

Maekar sleeps on the outside, sword still propped within reach, because someone has to guard the door and he's decided it's him. Baelor curls at your front, one arm slung across your waist, mouth half-pressed into your hair. You with one hand on Baelor's chest and your back warm against Maekar's, listening to the two of them breathe at slightly different rhythms.

Baelor's breath is light and even and a little quick when he dreams. Maekar's is slower, deeper, more silent. Until something startles him in his sleep, and then he goes from dead to waking in a single heartbeat, hand on the sword before his eyes are open. You learned, very early, to put your palm on his chest the moment he stirred. He settles for you. He doesn't settle for anyone else.

[the-darklings]

‘where is my wife?’

Maekar/LS pleaseeeee

“Where is my wife?”

Maekar’s voice cuts through the hall like an axe through fresh pine.

Winterfell answers its new lord and the prickly gruffness in his voice as it always does: heads turning away to avoid his impatient gaze, talk thinning to a hush, servants suddenly remembering errands elsewhere. Even the fire seems to draw inwards, its crackle turning quiet and distant.

He tracks you by instinct more so than direction. You can see it in the set of him when he appears with snow still caught in the dark fur at his shoulders, cheeks bitten red by cold, jaw tight with the kind of hunger that isn’t for food. A man made of iron and ice these days, and, more lately, of you.

His eyes find you.

You’re tucked near the hearth with Baelor, the prince’s visit wrapping your halls in old ceremony. He stands too close to the warmth, hands clasped behind his back, gaze steady in that gentle, unbearable way of his. Not touching you, because he would never dare to. But still—

Still the air between you carries the shape of what you used to be. Once, now a lifetime ago.

Maekar stops dead in his tracks as if he’s hit an invisible wall.

Baelor sees his brother and goes still at your side, the way a good man does when he understands he has wandered into another man’s life and has no right to it. His expression doesn’t change, but something in him tightens, some old restraint pulling the reins.

“Brother,” Baelor says quietly.

Maekar doesn’t answer him. He looks at you like you’ve been stolen instead.

Not by Baelor. But by the softness of your voice turned elsewhere when he’s been pacing the keep with your name burning behind his teeth. Stolen by the what-if and could bes you still catch him imagining some nights when you lay in bed together. He doesn’t ask, he doesn’t wonder aloud, but sometimes, he still lets himself be haunted.

You set your cup down. It’s a small, dull sound, but it seems to echo across the keep.

Then you go to him.

Skirts whisper over stone, heat falls away as you cross the space, and with each step his expression shifts—anger trying to hold its shape, failing at the edges, something raw showing through underneath. When you reach him, you don’t explain and you don’t apologise. You don’t offer him words he’d only have to chew to pulp.

You simply take his hand.

Maekar’s fingers are cold, rough, scarred as they were that late afternoon when septon first joined your hands together and bound you together before the gods. His grip closes around yours now, gentler, greedier than it was back then; when you and him were nothing more than cold duty to your respective houses. He stands too rigid despite the touch, like tenderness in public might shame him, but, eventually and carefully, his thumb moves, a single slow stroke over your knuckles that says more than his mouth ever will.

You hear a soft exhale behind you. When you glance back, Baelor’s eyes are on your joined hands, and there is pain there, hidden but not as throughly as he would have liked. He bows his head, just enough to be proper.

“My lady,” he murmurs.

You incline your head in return, because courtesy is sometimes the only mercy you can give.

Maekar leans down, his mouth near your ear, voice low as a threat but there’s something raw and honest underneath.

“I’ve been hunting you.”

“I know,” you whisper, and squeeze his hand once. “You found me, husband.”

His breath catches, just a tiny, involuntary hitch he still sometimes lets out when you claim him as your Lord husband for the world to hear.

He straightens, but his gaze doesn’t leave your face.

Then, with your hand still in his, he turns you away from the hearth and his brother with a slight nod in his direction, and leads you through Winterfell like you have always belonged at his side.

And this time—

You let him.