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.”