Thirsty for Fictional Men

She/Her 25 👱🏾 an outlet for my thirst of of fictional male characters.

[gutsby]

X

Pairing: Simon “Ghost” Riley x Reader

Summary: Simon finds your G-spot.

Warnings: 18+. Unprotected p-in-v. Disgustingly loving sex (sorry). Soft dom!Simon Talks You Through It™️ Creampie. Brief mention of Reader’s insecurities w sex

Note: I’m on Instagram now (kinda), come say hi :-)

Word count: 2.1k

It wasn’t like you hadn’t tried before.

You’d had your fair share of lovers and experienced more than a good deal of fun. With everyone in the past, climax came the same way, every single time: clitoral stimulation, and clitoral stimulation alone.

By this point in your life, you suspected your g-spot was probably just a figment of your imagination, no more real than Atlantis, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

That was, until, you met your boyfriend, Simon.

And things had only been official for a week.

You and him had fooled around a handful of times—made love, as he called it, and kissed and cuddled and occasionally dry-humped until the two of you were both panting, groaning messes—but all of this was new. Simon was still learning you, as you were him.

He finished between your tits. You came on his tongue. He fingered you to the point of tears, and you learned how to touch his sac just right to get him to blow his load in seconds. On this night in particular, you were fucking missionary, and holding hands while you did.

Lovesick puppies, Price would say. Neither one of you seemed able to unglue your lips or unlace your fingers or keep your hips from colliding again and again and again in frantic search of the other’s furthest depths. You were perfectly wrapped up, with no desire to move

Except, you needed to reach down between your bodies to actually get off. That was a minor detail.

You didn’t think the man above you would mind if you moved your touch from his, but then that grip tightened the second you tried pulling away.

“Keep it there, lovie. Like holding you like this,” he said.

You enjoyed it, too. It was intimate, and sweet, and with your hands pinned on either side of you, locked securely in his, you felt safe. You just couldn’t finish.

“But I…I need to come,” you whispered against him. You rolled your hips and felt his cock twitch inside you.

Simon grunted, then swallowed. Nodded slowly.

“Yeah. I’ll get you there. Feel this?”

He slid deeper for emphasis.

You didn’t.

You rarely did, or at least not in the way you figured you were supposed to get when something pressed there.

“I think…sort of, yeah,” you hedged your answer.

Don’t bruise his ego, don’t hurt his feelings.

This is all on me, Si, I promise it’s not you.

Cutting in over your thoughts, Simon moved swiftly. Took your hips in his big, strong hands, lifted up, and plunged his cock to the hilt. The girth of him was enough to knock the air out of your lungs, and you felt your walls stretch, sting, and weep sweet liquid warmth around that intrusion. You moaned.

“Better?” The man’s question was simple.

Before you could answer it, he was sliding a pillow underneath your backside. Sawing his long, thick, leaking cock in and out of you, he reached a new spot.

You made a face, feeling good from that but…strange.

Simon snatched your hands up again and planted them beside your head on the mattress. He thrusted steadily. He peppered kisses all over your face and your neck while the bed frame squeaked in time, and you had to dig your heels into his ass to ground yourself.

“Talk to me, baby. Can’t make it better if you don’t.”

“I—I know, I just can’t—”

At the same time, Simon tilted your hips slightly once more, and the tip of his cock kissed something soft and wet and dizzyingly pleasurable inside your body. A loud, embarrassing cry slipped out between your lips.

You wanted to clap a hand over your mouth, hating the way you’d just sounded, but your fingers were stuck to his. Simon grinned down at you, toothy and approving.

“Can’t do what, now, darlin’?”

The warm, bulbous head of his cock had found its mark, and he just kept prodding that spot, like it entertained him to do it. The fingers laced between your own constricted their grip even more, and Simon leaned down to kiss you while his cock carved a mind-numbing path. In between kisses, he praised you.

“That’s my girl. She’s likin’ it now, isn’t she?”

“Feel good when my cock hits that spot?”

“Your pussy’s fuckin’ soakin’ me, baby.”

But still, somehow, it just wasn’t quite enough.

Maybe you’d never found that place after all.

This was where most men gave up—after a few good minutes of fucking when their balls had gotten to be as swollen as stones and their bodies were aching for release, more often than not, they’d go off chasing their own high. That was when you usually started rubbing your clit, or waited for your partner to finish so they could get you off with their tongue or something.

You hated to feel like a burden, and you really despised the thought of being the reason your sweet Simon couldn’t get to orgasm. So you squirmed again.

Straining to reach down, to try and touch yourself, you whimpered, “Si, please, it just—it takes me too long—”

“Good thing we’ve got all night,” Simon replied bluntly.

Then, once again, he twisted your bodies like you were as soft and malleable as putty in his hands, and this time, he hitched one of your legs around his hip, high.

With one slow-rolling thrust and an audibly squelching sound, Simon’s cock stretched your hole to maximum capacity, and then a little more. Your juices leaked down his shaft, aiding the slide, and he stabbed in a few shallow strokes. Probing. Testing the waters, as if he were trying to find something hidden inside you.

You sucked in a breath. Simon’s gaze slid to yours.

“Let’s find that precious spot, lovie. Easy, now.”

Gently coaxing your body open, he drove a slow, measured pace. He split your cunt like it was the easiest thing in the world, delving within your wet, velvety heat to tease every contour and crevice of your pussy. His tip leaked precome. His balls glistened in your arousal and landed with the gentlest plap, plap, plaps while he explored your insides with his member.

It really was as simple as that, nothing more and nothing less than poking around. Having patience.

“S-Si,” you stammered, nose wrinkling slightly.

“What’s’at, baby? Got something to tell me?”

Like a teacher, almost, he pressed for more.

Like his cock was showing you something new about your body but he needed your help to tell him just how and where to find it, Simon took care to be kind. He smoothed a hand over the crown of your head and then cradled the back of it, one massive set of fingers splayed out against your skull and engulfing it wholly.

He still held onto your other hand tight.

Your cunt pulsed. Ached. Fluttered around him.

Stuffed to the brim, you had only to feel, and murmur:

“Higher.”

“Higher?”

“Um, to the…to the left.”

Simon tilted his hips left.

Yes.

That was just it. So close.

Almost…

Or, maybe…

“Maybe it just…isn’t there,” you huffed out, deflating. “Know you’re trying so hard, baby, but I think I can’t—”

Then Simon hit the same spot as before, only higher.

Just like you’d told him: to the left, and then…

“Oh, fuck,” you cursed. “Oh, fuckfuckfuck.”

The grin above you stretched even wider.

“There, lovie?” Simon goaded you on.

“Right there.” You nodded furiously.

A wave of pleasure swept through your limbs, from your core down to the soles of your feet. Your toes curled, and you squeaked, feeling Simon’s cock graze that soft, spongy, sensitive place—except he’d pushed in deeper. The sensation made your eyes roll back.

“Little dove doesn’t mind my pokin’ after all, huh?” Simon’s words were a tease, but you heard a strain in them, too. The second you were caught in the throes of real pleasure, your cunt must’ve clamped like a vice.

“Keep…keep pokin’, Si,” you choked out. “I like it.”

Your lover kept at it—poking from the inside.

The routine almost felt like losing your virginity all over again, together. Simon cradled your head, told you how good you were doing, how sweet you were for him, and you whimpered under his hold. Squirmed and clung to him for dear life, then kissed him feverishly.

Simon’s mouth was hard and hungry, his thrusts deep. His cock throbbed within the wet, clenching confines of your pussy, and he seemed to be going wild at the feeling. With the idea that he was driving you wild, too.

You realized as much when he whispered it to you.

“Could lose my bloody mind when you’re like this—” Another sharp, labored breath. Another shudder passing through his body when your insides squeezed. “—so why didn’t you talk? Ask for what you needed?”

Your voice was small. “Didn’t wanna be a bother.”

Your eyes were locked with Simon’s, and in his irises, you caught a shade of concern. It flared, hot as anything, then mixed with disbelief. Disappointment.

“Don’t be angry, Si, I—” you started, hurried.

“‘M’not.” Simon blinked. But he gritted his teeth, and he withdrew his cock until the head was bumping and teasing between your folds, then he shook his head. “It’s those fuckin’ pricks who should be sorry, yeah?”

The ones that you’d been with before.

You wanted to protest, insist that you were at least partly to blame, but you never got the opportunity.

Simon was back inside you in a blink.

Hitting that same spot again, and again, and again.

He grinned, the tic of a muscle in his jaw telling you that he was less amused this time around, but proud.

Vindicated.

“Well. It’s not like they’re ever gettin’ a chance in between these pretty legs again, are they, lovie?”

You nodded in agreement.

You smiled back at him, only to have that gentle curve falter a little when you felt Simon’s thrusts accelerate.

“Only thing that’s gonna touch this spot other’n my cock is my seed, splatterin’ all over your walls, right?”

When he gave a playful nip to your lower lip and squeezed your hand tighter, you knew that he meant it. The man had plunged so deep inside you that his pubic bone was now grinding against your skin, and the rest of him was buried. His balls, all full and warm and heavy with his release, rested firmly in your cleft.

And the steady, measured strokes of his cock landed with near-surgical precision on the G-spot you’d convinced yourself up until tonight didn’t exist.

Simon beamed. You were overcome with ecstasy.

“This it, lovie? This spot right ‘ere?” he cooed.

His cock bobbed against that gummy and indescribably dizzying place, causing your last moan to morph into something more akin to a shriek.

You nodded your head: “Y-Yes. Yes.”

“Feel good when I hit it?”

“Fucking perfect, Si.”

You sighed when the man bottomed out for what felt like the millionth time, and the pleasure never waned. He felt just as good now as he did when he first got in.

“Yeah? Gonna come on my cock then, pretty girl?”

“Yeah. I’m— I’m so close.”

“Go on then, love.”

And, shortly, you did.

Maybe three, four, five more stabs of his cock to your most precious, intimate place and you were unraveling beneath him, stars bursting in your line of vision. It seemed dramatic to say, but that was really what it came to—your mouth hanging open, eyes wide, gaze peering into Simon’s while he fucked you through the most intense orgasm of your life. You clung to him, and your walls spasmed again and again and again, milking the man’s release in the next few seconds. Simon shuddered and grit his teeth as he unloaded a thick, gooey load inside, dousing that spongy, body-numbing spot and then some. The two of you moaned in unison.

Your body was boneless, your head a hazy mess.

It took several seconds for your conscious mind to come back online fully, and when it did, Simon was leaning in again and planting kisses along your face.

“That’s my girl,” he murmured, breath fanning hot across your skin. “My perfect girl. You did so good.”

You smiled and caught his mouth for a proper kiss.

“Thank you,” you murmured against him.

Then Simon squeezed your hand—the one he’d been holding this entire time. He lifted it gently, like he was afraid too rough of a movement might split you in two.

He turned your wrist and kissed the back of your hand, eyes locked on yours and expression soft while he did.

“That’s what I’m here for, lovie.”

[rhaenyras-crown]

HOME IN THREE DAYS. DO NOT WASH ormund hightower x wife!reader

synopsis: returning victorious from the battlefield, the lord of oldtown, ormund hightower, sends a most intricate request to his lady wife

warnings: mdni. spoilers for dance of the dragons, canon divergence, timeline that makes absolutely zero sense but it’s called fanfiction for a reason okay guys pls don’t come at me, oral (f receiving), mentions of war and death, ormund is lowkey a perv, piv, emotional sex, touch of breeding kink, religious motives

word count: 6.8k

a/n: honestly after writing this, all i have to say is enjoy 😭 (and thank you for all the ormund girlies for putting me onto this idea) there are two direct quotes from george martin so ofc all credits go to him 4 that

You are seated in your solar when the letter arrives.

The messenger carrying the sealed parchment bows his head low before placing it into your hands.

“A message, my lady, from your Lord husband.” He declares, the heavy wool doublet covering his frame bearing the flame sigil of your house.

You offer a brief nod of dismissal. He retreats in silence, leaving you with a handful of your highborn companions and servants in the sunlit chamber. You can feel the weight of their wandering eyes and curious gazes trying to discern what exactly your husband has sent. They long to catch a glimpse of the ink, doubtless to trade it for gossip later over their embroidery.

“That will be all for today, thank you.” Your eyes turn to the perfumed women in their vibrant, colorful silks. Your tone leaves no room for argument, and truth be told, none would dare disobey the lady of the castle.

You can see the light dim behind their eyes, their spirits deflating at being dismissed and denied a glimpse into your private marital affairs. Yet, they all rise quietly, murmuring the proper courtesies and offering to remain at your service. You thank them, as politeness dictates.

Finally, the heavy oak doors thump shut behind them as the last of the ladies files out. Only then does the tension in your shoulders ease, the careful, rigid posture you were taught to maintain since childhood melting away. The remaining household servants are as silent as stone, and they know better than to sneak glances at the parchment. Not that most of them possess the letters to read it anyway.

You shift quietly, settling into the silken cushions where you have sat for hours. Your ringed fingers make short, careful work of breaking the green wax seal; the parchment parts with a soft, crisp tear.

Yet, before you even unfold the missive, it is the scent that finds you first. It is the unmistakable, intimately familiar fragrance of your husband’s scented water—the blend he carries with him everywhere.

In the early days of your marriage, you had often made his habit a point of jest, teasing him for clutching an incense filled thurbil like some prissy lady of the court. But through years of shared bed and counsel, you had come to accept it as an essential part of him; your husband simply possessed a rare appetite for the finer things. For sweetness, mostly. In time, you had even learned to love it, for it spoke so entirely of his presence.

Safe to say, the parchment is utterly drenched in it.

You feel an involuntary quickening in your blood—a sudden warmth spreading through your belly at the sheer intimacy of the vapor. He knew precisely what he was doing, all but bathing the very pages he intended for your eyes.

A breathless laugh nearly escapes you, imagining Ormund clad in heavy steel, quill in hand amidst the dirt of the commander’s pavilion, deliberately dousing the sheet with his essences while soldiers marched and shouted just beyond the canvas.

“Always so mindful,” you murmur to the empty air, for the servants remain as silent as stone and would scarce understand the jest regardless.

Your eyes skim over the lines, a familiar sense of comfort washing over you at the sight of your husband’s heavy script. You fail to stifle the smile that softens your lips.

Much of it is the usual talk of how dreary and dull the campaign has proven. He makes mention of the Queen, his cousin Alicent, his other cousin Gwayne, and Ser Criston Cole, the Lord Commander whose host they are soon to join. He writes, too, of the battle at Tumbleton that is likely to follow.

At that, your heart squeezes painfully in your chest. Ormund is one of the finest soldiers and commanders in the realm, but he is a mortal man still; his flesh can bleed, and his bones can break. And after all it is only natural for a wife to fear for her husband.

Naturally, he complains bitterly of the camp—the wretched stench of unwashed men, muck, and horseflesh that hangs thick over the pavilions. In his words it is utterly unbearable.

He speaks of his squire, prince Daeron as well. Noting that he can spy the nervousness in his young nephew, though both the boy and Tessarion stand ready for battle.

Ready to take the Iron Throne itself, should Prince Aemond fall and the burden descend to them—since word has reached the camp that Aemond has proclaimed himself Protector of the Realm. You care little and less for who sits upon the Aegon's seat, you only pray for your husband to return to your arms in one piece.

And then, at the very end, he closes the letter with something that steals the breath straight from your lungs.

Home in three days. Do not wash.

A sudden heat flushes your cheeks a deep crimson.

He is so terribly sure of himself, so entirely confident that no harm will find him, that Tumbleton will be won, and that he will ride back to Oldtown safe and whole. It is so undeniably Ormund.

You bite your lip, the warmth in your belly turning to a dull ache, knowing all too well that a safe return is a promise no man can truly make while the Dance rages on.

At the end of the parchment, he had signed his initials in a bold, dark hand: OH

You softly traced the ink with the tip of your finger, as if the stroke of his quill could somehow bridge the leagues between you. Yet as the moment of sentiment passed, you quickly folded the sheet, pressing it tight within your fist.

Rising from your seat, you paced over to the hearth. It made your heart ache to tear the missive into fragments, but you cast the pieces into the embers nonetheless.

You watched as the parchment caught flame, curling and turning to gray ash, even as your husband’s familiar fragrance still hung heavy upon your tongue. Alas, you knew the scent of water could never compare to the musk of his skin, or the steady thrum of his heart pulsing beneath your fingertips.

A sudden, dark thought pricked your mind—a fleeting wonder if those ashes were the last pieces of him you would ever hold should he fall in the Reach—but you fiercely willed the shadow away.

No, your Ormund would return to you. Or he would die trying.

You inhaled sharply, steadying yourself. The letter had to be destroyed. Its contents were far too scandalous for any prying septa or maester to accidentally stumble upon.

Clasping your hands behind your back, you turned your gaze to one of the remaining maids. “I shall be having no need of the bath after supper today.” you declared.

The woman’s eyes sought yours, a flicker of confusion crossing her face at the unusual command, yet she quickly lowered her head. “As my lady commands it.”

“Very well.”

And with that, you turned your back on the hearth and set off toward the quiet sanctuary of your bedchambers.

It is perhaps, the first day that is the easiest.

You go about your usual duties, overseeing the keep and holding audience with the lesser lords in your husband’s stead. You seek out the sept nestled within the great stone walls of the Hightower, lighting tallow candles and praying to the Mother for your husband’s safe return.

Your hours pass largely uneventful. No fresh ravens from King’s Landing or the battlefield arrive to disturb the peace.

The realm is still in great peril, locked in the throes of a bloody succession, yet you are among those rare, fortunate few whose daily lives do not yet feel the cruel shift of war. Your husband’s absence is the only true sign that the world is bleeding.

It is only when twilight deepens into night, and the hour for your evening bath approaches, that you must dismiss your handmaidens once again.

“But, my lady,” one of the elder women frowns, her hands clasped nervously over her apron. “I mean no insolence, but… you have foregone the hot waters since yesterday morn—”

You cut her off with a look as sharp as Valyrian steel, and she freezes instantly.

“I should find it most pleasant if you did not question my choices,” you say, your voice clipped as you force a veneer of stiff politeness over the reprimand. “Thank you.” You offer a single, final nod.

“Of course, my lady.” A sudden heat flushes her cheeks in embarrassment at her own boldness. “Forgive my insolence.” She mutters.

You hum in cold acknowledgment before bidding her lay out your linen shift so you might change for the night.

Thankfully, none of the others dare question you further, leaving you to slide into the great, empty bed in silence.

On the second day, the irritation truly begins to fester.

It is not even the scent of your own sweat or the slight, muskier heat of your skin that unsettles you most, but rather the heavy, lingering glances from both the highborn ladies and the serving girls. The lords fail to notice, of course. Men are blind to the subtle shifts of the solar. But women... women possess a hound’s nose for such things.

“Forgive my curiosity, my lady,” one of your companions ventures during the mandatory hour of afternoon wine and needlework, her spine stiff and a sharp, a calculating glint in her eyes. “But are you... quite well? Has some sudden ague or illness been troubling you these past few days?”

A few of the younger girls stifle titters behind their silk handkerchiefs, while a seasoned lady snorts softly at the sheer boldness of the question.”

“Nothing has troubled me,” you reply coldly, your gaze sweeping over the circle like winter frost. “And I confess I do not fathom what should prompt such a thought.”

“Of course not, my lady. Forgive me.” she murmurs quickly, dipping her chin and retreating back into the safety of the embroidery circle.

Yet, the silence does not last. Once their heads are bent back over their frames, the murmurs begin—whispers that your wits have been murked by the absence of your lord, or that you have simply grown neglectful of your proper duties as wife now that his eye is far from Oldtown.

One or two even dare breathe the word slothful. But they are only whispers, drifting like smoke through the high stone arches.

You owe them no accounting of your lord’s desires. So you let them whisper.

But without a doubt, it is the third day—the very day your lord husband is expected to ride through the gates—that proves the worst.

It is not the ever-growing musk of your unwashed skin that irks you most, but rather the heavy black raven that arrives with the morning mists, bearing tidings of a grim victory at Tumbleton.

The greens have triumphed, or so the parchment claims. In a twist of monumental treachery, the Dragonseeds—Rhaenyra’s own dragonriders—had turned their fires upon her own host.

Yet, despite the grand declarations of victory, the remaining lines are stripped of any joy.

The sack of the town has been anything but a noble affair. It has been an exercise in absolute butchery. Houses put to the torch, infants slain, and women—even holy septas and silent sisters were not spared— being subjected to the brutal whims of a victorious, drunken army. It is a horror to even contemplate, let alone witness.

You feel a sharp pang of selfishness when your eyes skip past the carnage, desperately searching for a single name. When you find it, confirming that your lord husband lives, unwounded, and is already riding hard for Oldtown with a vanguard of his personal household guard, a ragged sob of relief escapes your throat.

The Dance is far from ended, and the realm will continue to bleed. But the battlefield would have to wait. There are plenty of hungry lords and capable men who can take your husband's place in the mud, if only for a night.

By the time night falls, your husband has still not arrived in Oldtown.

No news has reached the gates, and no scouts have brought sign of his riding party.

Your entire day has been spent pacing the drafty halls of the Hightower, seeking out any task to keep your mind from fracturing with anticipation.

You have seen to it that the entire household is in order, the stones scrubbed clean, and every tapestried hall set aright. You have ordered a plentiful feast prepared to greet his vanguard. You even went so far as to take up your needlework, in a desperate attempt to stave off the madness of the wait.

Alas, the effort ended miserably; shaky fingers and an unsteady mind are poor tools for fine embroidery. Sitting with your highborn companions proved more tedious still, and you dismissed them scarce a quarter of an hour into tea-time.

The whole of the castle is charged with a heavy, restless air, every servant and man at arms waiting on a knife's edge for the return of their Lord.

Your nails are bitten down to the quick, and you have endlessly twisted the rings upon your fingers. When the handmaidens arrive for the evening, they practically beg to prepare the bath.

“But the Lord Ormund—” one of them ventures, her voice hesitant.

“Do you suggest you know the needs of mine own husband better than myself?” Your patience is utterly frayed, and you can no longer keep the sharp edge of your tongue from snapping like a whip.

“My lady.” she murmurs, bowing her head in hasty obedience before scurrying away.

“And take away this boar meat. Leave the arbor gold,” you command, and the remaining servants quickly clear the table.

You turn to the household guards standing post at your door—the men in steel who have trailed you through your duties all day. “Leave the chambers. Let no one inside. You are to enter only to notify me when my Lord husband is at the gates.”

The man in the iron half-helm nods, drawing the thick oak doors shut. The heavy latch falls into place, leaving you alone in the awful, suffocating silence. Waiting.

What must have been minutes felt like hours. Time takes on a strange, twisted shape when one is locked in such nervous anticipation. Yet, the sands in the glass trickle down regardless.

Left with nothing but the loud thrumming of your own thoughts, you tried to lose yourself in a leather-bound history, though you managed scarce a few pages before the letters swam before your eyes.

You smoothed the heavy furs and linens upon the high bed perhaps a dozen times.

You combed out your hair, adjusted the laces of your linen evening shift, and even debated opening the door to ask the guardsmen if they had forgotten your command. But you checked yourself, knowing such frantic fretting would be incredibly unbecoming of the Lady of the Hightower.

And still, in that agonizing stillness, the unmistakable musk of your own unwashed flesh caught up with you. It was no longer a mere unpleasant odor. It was a heavy, ripe scent that hung thick in the small hours of the night.

For a fleeting second, you debated calling the servants back to prepare a hasty basin of hot water before Ormund arrived.

But his written instructions had been absolutely clear. Home in three days. Do not wash. He had kept his part of the covenant; three days had passed and he was riding back to you, whole and alive. It remained only for you to hold up your end of the bargain.

You sought the sanctuary of the castle sept once more, then retreated back to your chambers, the chill air of the drafty stone corridors offering a strange, cooling comfort against your sticky, stale skin.

By then, the hour of the owl had long since passed, and still there was no sign of your husband.

You wanted to wait for him—desperately so. You wished him to find you awake and waiting, so that you might see with your own eyes that the Stranger's steel had spared him.

But exhaustion and the tumultuous toll of the day’s anxiety were fast catching up to you. All that frantic pacing, coupled with a belly empty from a lack of appetite, had sapped the last of your strength. With every blink, your eyelids grew heavier and heavier, like lead.

You tried splashing your face with cool water from the basin and flung wide the shutters to let in the midnight breeze, but even the salt and tar air of Oldtown drifting up from the harbor did little to rouse you.

Defeated by weariness, (alas reluctantly) you finally laid your head atop the silken pillows, burying the heavy scent of your unwashed skin into the linen sheets, which your maids had surely doused with an extra measure of rosewater.

You were drifting in that liminal, strange place where one is not entirely awake yet no longer asleep when you heard it—the distinct, muffled grunt of a guardsman greeting his lord, and the heavy creak of oak hinges before the thick door closed once more with a dull thud.

You just barely managed to stir, shifting clumsily beneath the furs to sit up and rub the sleep from your tired eyes.

The chamber was drowned in half-darkness. Most of the candles you had lit hours ago had long since guttered out; only a handful remained ablaze, casting a scarce, flickering amber light across the stone walls.

Even through the gloom of the late hour, you could make out the great shadow of his figure moving about the room, his movements weary but urgent as he unbuckled and discarded the heavy sword-belt from his hips. The Valyrian longsword of his house Vigilance, which he cherished so deeply, fell to the ground with a dull thud.

“Ormund?” you breathe. The name is both a prayer and a question.

A desperate thing you need to hear spoken aloud to believe. You need to know that it is truly him standing there before you, alive in the flesh, at the foot of that shared bed which has stood cold for far too long.

Your vision is still blurred with sleep, but the moments that follow unfold with such fierce intensity that you know you will remember them for the rest of your days.

In two long, hurried strides, he collapses onto the silken sheets atop you.

Once again, it is his scent that finds you first.

Except this time, it is no spiced water or pleasant courtly incense, all of that is buried beneath an overwhelming stench of dirt, stale sweat, and the unmistakable, coppery tang of blood. Whose… you pray to the Gods, is anyone’s but Ormund’s.

Your hands scramble for leverage, finding the damp nape of his neck and gripping him so fiercely that it must bruise. The skin there is slick—either with the sweat of the road or from some futile, hurried attempt to wash away the field of battle before reaching your chambers.

Perhaps it is both. But you care little and less. He is your husband. Your Ormund, here in the flesh, breathing and alive, smelling of what all men smell of when they have looked upon the face of death and survived.

A sudden rush of tears gathers in your lashes, and a ragged sob threatens to tear from your throat at the pure, blinding elation of his presence.

Narrowly escaping the butchery of Tumbleton and witnessing thousands of men yield up their lives has awakened something primal within him. You can feel it in his shallow, ragged breaths, and in the way his calloused hands grip the bare skin of your arms, even through the heavy layers of your linen shift.

His touch will surely leave marks—blooming into dark blues and purples on the morrow—but you do not care. You would let him carve a place for himself inside your very ribcage if he wished it.

You feel that same desperation as he buries his face into the crook of your neck, inhaling the heavy, ripe musk of your unwashed skin like a drowning man catching his last taste of air.

“Ormund.” You speak his name again, clearer this time, the certainty finally settling into your bones. He is here. With you.

You card your fingers through his tangled hair, which hangs damp and messy with sweat, pulling him closer still—impossibly close, until there is not an inch of air between your bodies.

He is heavy, his armor-stiffened frame nearly crushing you into the bedding, but you do not mind. If the ceiling were to collapse upon you now, you would die content.

“I prayed...” you murmur against the rough stubble of his cheek. His eyes remain closed, his lips silent; he says nothing, needing these few stolen moments of quietude to wash the horror from his mind. “I prayed every morrow and every twilight to the Seven, begging them to return you to my arms,” you confess, your voice shaking with the weight of the tears you can no longer hold back.

A half-choked laugh escapes him at your words, a brief flash of delight breaking through his exhaustion at the knowledge that you kept him in your prayers, that you had spoken to the Seven with his face in your mind.

Gentle Mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war, we pray, stay the swords and stay the arrows, let them know a better day. Gentle Mother, strength of women, help our daughters through this fray, soothe the wrath and tame the fury, teach us all a kinder way.

He nearly groans at the thought, the holy words a stark contrast to the butchery he has just left.

Instead, he buries his face lower, pressing his lips straight against your collarbone. He inhales the deep, unmistakable scent of your skin—the salt of your sweat, the rich, built-up musk of three days without the basin. To a highborn court, it might seem uncouth, but to him, it is simply, purely woman. And woman means alive and real.

To breathe you in is to know he has escaped the cold clutches of the Stranger and found sanctuary in the arms of the one he loves.

What is honor compared to a woman’s love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms... or the memory of a brother’s smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.

In this singular, breathless moment, Ormund feels the truth of those words more fiercely than ever before.

He has won his share of victories, commanded hosts, and broken lances in grand tourneys, but none of it compares to this. Nothing in the Seven Kingdoms or the lands beyond could make him feel more entirely alive than the strain of narrowly escaping the slaughter, riding his stallion hard through the night even as his thighs ached and his sore muscles screamed at him, begging him to simply stop, to yield to the weariness. But he could not. He would not.

Not when you were waiting for him in the Hightower, his lady wife, keeping your quiet vigil until he could return to the warmth of your shared bed. Your shared life.

“Husband,” you nudge his head with a gentle hand, attempting to draw him back only for his grip to tighten. “I have not...” Your cheeks flush a hot, sudden crimson. “I have not bathed,” you admit quietly, the confession tasting heavy on your tongue. “It is most unbecoming of a lady—”

For the first time that evening, he raises his head and pierces you with his gaze. Those familiar eyes, which you have looked upon a thousand times before, are lined with a solemn, bone-deep tiredness, frayed at the edges by war.

Yet, at the very same time, he looks utterly, fiercely alive, the sharp line of his nose and the strength of his jaw all too intimate.

“You received my letter.” He states, his voice gruff and thick with the dust of the road. His fingers do not cease their exploration, trailing over every inch of skin and linen they can find, before his hand bunches up the heavy fabric of your shift within his fist.

“I did.” You reply softly, your eyes dipping toward the sheets, but you feel the firm pressure of his thumb and forefinger catching your jaw, forcing your chin up into stillness.

“Look at me.” He commands. The words bear the weight of a lord, yet they sound far more desperate than any commander who has just tasted victory should ever sound.

You can see it takes everything within him to restrain from simply crashing his lips against your own. “I have ridden hard across the Reach to be here. I have escaped the cold clutches of the Stranger, I have left my men and my host behind, all to return to your side. To rest in your arms. And no one, not the septons, not you, dear wife, not even the Gods themselves will forbid me the luxury of gazing upon you or breathing you in.”

Before you can offer any further reason or protest, his calloused hands bunch the linen of your shift upward, pulling the fabric past your hips and exposing your bare skin to the chill air of the chamber.

Beads of perspiration still cling to your brow, and your fingers instinctively seek leverage, carding through his tangled auburn locks as he bends his weight down between your thighs.

“Husband—”

He groans at the title, his mouth pressing fiercely against the soft flesh of your inner thighs. He marks you with the heat of his lips, tasting, touching, and inhaling sharply as the ripe, unwashed musk of your intimacy and sudden arousal mingles in the heavy air.

“Gods be good,” he rough-whispers against your skin, just loud enough to pierce the quiet of the room. “No host, no King—not even the Seven themselves could have kept me from this. From you.”

He takes his time, deliberately savoring every stolen second, his tongue tracing the tender skin just on the cusp of your heat while he buries his face deep against you.

“I thought of you,” he murmurs, his breath hot against your thighs as he presses a trail of slow, heavy kisses upward. “I thought of you every single wretched hour upon the road. Amidst the reek of horseflesh, muck, and dying men. Amidst the blood of the field, and the fires of the dragons.”

The confession is a heavy, ragged thing, and your breath hitches sharply—not merely from the mounting pleasure, but from the raw weight of his words.

“I closed my eyes and thought only of your smile, your touch... the sweetness of your cunt.” As if to prove his point, he presses his face entirely into the soft folds of your womanhood, inhaling your deep, concentrated musk before his tongue flicks out with a sudden, devastating stroke.

An unrestrained cry escapes your lips, echoing off the high stone arches.

“Only you... my lady wife...” he mutters against your wetness, his tongue exploring you with a fierce, starved hunger. “I prayed to the Mother to keep you whole... prayed to the Father to make your womb fruitful and clean, so that my seed might finally take root within you.”

At his words, a sudden tremor ripples through your entire body, and your thighs instinctively clamp tight around his head as the heat begins to break over you.

“Ormund!” You cry his name, the sound laced with a desperate, breathless heat that echoes shamelessly through the quiet bedchamber.

The household guardsmen standing post beyond the thick oak doors will have surely to play the fool on the morrow, but you care little and less for the gossip of smallfolk.

You can think only of your husband—of the wet fire of his tongue between your thighs and the bruising grip of his fingers pinning your legs wide to keep you open to his hunger.

He works you apart with a starved intensity, making you unravel from the seams, pulling you apart thread by thread as the coil in your belly tightens to an agonizing point. Ormund had ever been skilled at bringing you to your peak with his mouth, but tonight the familiar rhythm is entirely transformed. Gone is the careful, courtly teasing of a lord in his solar; this is something primal. Fierce, and animalistic. Born from the mud and blood of the battlefield.

Seven forgive us, the thought flashes like a desperate prayer in the dim recesses of your mind.

He is not merely pleasuring you; he is quite literally drinking you in, drenching his face in the ripe, unwashed scent of your climax and indulging in every slick, heavy stroke.

Your vision begins to swim, the amber candlelight blurring into streaks of gold as he drives you ruthlessly toward the edge.

“Come for me, sweet wife...” his voice buzzes low against your skin, and you feel as though your entire body has been set ablaze. “Let me taste you... bury me in your scent...”

His words, matched with the fierce, unyielding work of his mouth, finally topple you over the edge. You break with a ragged cry of his name, your fingers knotting tight in his hair as you instinctively grind your weight against his face.

He does not stop. Continuing his relentless strokes even as the climax ripples through you and you ride out the peak of your release. The firm muscle of his tongue drives through your sensitive walls, your juices slicking his cheeks and spilling onto the linen sheets beneath.

Your thighs tremble so fiercely you are certain your legs will no longer bear you. At last, after what feels an age, he comes up for air, though he keeps his face pressed close against the soft mound of your womanhood.

The damp hairs there are heavy with the rich, concentrated musk of your arousal, and you feel the hot expansion of his chest as he breathes it deeply into his lungs.

“Always so good for me...” he murmurs, pressing a final, lingering kiss against your skin while you are still reeling, your pulse hammering in your ears.

Through the faint buzzing in your head, you fail to notice him reach for a square of clean linen discarded by the bedside. You only realize his intent when you feel the cloth pressing against your center. You hiss softly at the contact, your flesh still far too tender from the peak of your release.

“Ormund?” Your eyebrows furrow in the gloom. “What are you—”

“Shh, let me,” he hushes you, his voice thick, and your wits are far too scattered to offer any true protest, nor do you truly wish to do so.

You feel the slow, deliberate swipe of the linen through your folds. You think at first he means to clean you, but as he pulls the cloth away and brings it directly to his nose, the truth settles into your mind.

He is gathering the very essence of your release, letting the fabric drink it deep so that he might preserve it—a token of your flesh to carry with him into the mud and smoke of the next campaign. A soft moan escapes you at the sheer, desperate intimacy of the act.

Yet, you have little time to dwell upon it as his hands are already framing your waist, urging the linen shift up and over your head, before he turns to frantically strip away his own heavy doublet. You lend your shaking hands to the task, helping him loosen the laces until the wool drops somewhere to the floor.

Your bare breasts are caught in the amber glow of the candlelight, and you watch Ormund's gaze fix upon your perked nipples. Reaching out, you catch his calloused hand and guide it to your flesh. He takes the weight of you, squeezing and caressing the soft curve with a starved sort of reverence.

Alas, his patience has reached its end. The heavy, rigid evidence of his hunger presses hard against his breeches, and he makes hasty work of the laces, cursing softly under his breath as he discards the last of his garments into the shadows.

He takes his manhood into his palm, giving it two firm strokes before lining himself up with your entrance. You bite your lip, your body slick and more than ready to welcome the familiar, heavy stretch of him filling you up.

“Tonight,” he murmurs, his words catching you off guard in the dark. “If the gods should grant me, as their humble servant, a reward for serving the Realm and the true King... I pray it be the planting of a son inside your womb.”

His hand reaches up, his calloused thumb gently brushing a stray lock of hair from your damp forehead. “Do you understand, sweet wife?” he whispers, leaning down upon his elbows, his weight pressing you into the bedding as he kisses the corner of your lips. “That you will grow round and swell with child... so that the next time the war calls me away, you will ever have a piece of me with you.”

Before you can muster a breath to reply, he drives forward, pushing deep inside and bottoming out with a barely suppressed groan. A sharp cry escapes you at the sheer, sudden width of him stretching your sensitive walls.

He gives you no time to adjust to the intrusion, mercilessly beginning to pound into you, the cords and tendons in his neck straining with the sheer force of his movements.

Your head is thrown back against the pillows, and he chases your mouth with his own, sealing your lips in a desperate, hungry kiss—a fierce clash of teeth and skin. In his starved frenzy, you are certain he would eat you alive if he could, losing himself entirely within your flesh to wash away the memory of the sword.

“Please, Ormund!” you cry his name for what feels the thousandth time that evening. Your nails claw at his bare skin, gripping his back in a desperate attempt to pull him closer still, and this time it is you who buries your face against him, inhaling the sharp, earthy musk of his sweat-slicked skin. “I need you to—”

“Hush, sweet girl, I know...”

He slows his frantic thrusts for a brief moment, focusing his strength to set a steadier pace, finding a deeper, more deliberate rhythm. With every long, unyielding push, he ensures you feel every single inch of him.

The old endearing term brings a sudden flock of memories rushing back to you—sweet, distant memories of the days when he was still courting you in the high gardens of Oldtown.

“I know...” he whispers hoarsely against the column of your throat, and your thighs lock tight around his hips, anchoring him to you.

“Give me your seed, husband,” you manage to gasp against his ear, the ragged shakiness of your voice betraying the depth of your undoing. “Please, by the gods—I need you, I need it inside me—”

He groans fiercely at your words, at the sheer intoxication of being buried deep within your warmth after weeks of staring into the dark abyss of death.

He feels the sudden, heavy quickening in his blood, signaling that his release is near. He is a man of formidable stamina, possessed of a soldier’s hard-bitten body, but tonight he is reduced to a mere mortal. Acutely aware of the frailty of his flesh and the preciousness of this life.

He manages only a few more messy, desperate thrusts before you feel the sudden, hot pulsing of his release spilling deep inside you, the thick ropes of his seed coating your inner walls.

You wrap your arms and legs even tighter around him as the phantom touch of his climax triggers your own second peak of the night, your body shuddering in perfect unison as you hold him fast, willing him never to let you go

When you part at last, you are both a tangled mess of limbs, reluctantly breaking your interlocked lips to catch your breath. Ormund rests his heavy head onto the pillow beside you—his rightful place—and does not hesitate for a single beat before pulling you securely into his side.

Your soft breasts press flush against the hard, unyielding plates of his chest as he idly cards his fingers through your tangled hair.

For a long while, you remain wrapped in silence, the quiet of the chamber filled only with your heavy, ragged breaths, the musk of your passion and shared lust thick in the air. You glance up, noting the faint smile that softens his tired eyes.

Finally, it is you who speaks first, breaking the serene calm of your shared silence. “Never, ever even dare to leave me again.” You push yourself up slightly, cupping the rough stubble of his cheek with your palm.

He presses his face into your hand, planting a heavy kiss there. “You know I cannot promise such a thing, sweet wife,” he replies solemnly. “Duty...”

“Your duty,” you begin shakily, your voice thick with emotion, “is to be by your wife’s side. Here in Oldtown.” You finish the thought, tilting your chin slightly.

A huff of quiet, weary laughter escapes him at your words.

“You think I jest—”

“No, my sweet wife, it is not you I laugh upon. It is simply...” He pulls you back down against his bare chest, his embrace iron-tight. “It is simply that duty is no simple matter. My family needs me, needs us. The realm and the King—”

You know he speaks the truth. You know he is bound by an unbridled sense of holy purpose and devotion that is utterly unbreakable, with his love for you coming second only to the honor of his house. At times it angers you, but a part of your heart understands that it is a thing so deeply ingrained into Ormund's bones that he cannot help it.

“Who will defend honor, hm? Righteousness, justice—” he reasons softly.

You sigh, the fight draining from you. “All I wish...” you begin, all your barriers and defenses melting away from your gaze, leaving your rawest emotions laid bare before him. “All I mean to say is... I wish it did not have to be you.”

He smiles at that—one of those easy, confident smiles that are so entirely him, making your chest squeeze with a painful fondness. The green silk of the pillows beneath your head suddenly feels as soft as a cloud, and you let out a long breath, settling back into the quiet.

“I know... sweet girl... I know...” That is all he offers, knowing too well that he cannot give you the false comfort of a lie.

After a few moments, you feel his calloused hand trail down from the curve of your hip to where the slick evidence of your coupling still lies fresh. He plunges a finger between the folds of your center, gathering the mixed cream of your releases. At the sudden intrusion, your hips instinctively buck against his hand.

He beams at the movement, a flash of white teeth in the gloom. “Always so jumpy for me…”

You can feel the battle-worn stiffness and the lingering shadow of death finally washing out of the room as he brings his hand back up to his lips, not hesitating for a moment before pressing his fingers into his mouth to taste you.

“You are utterly depraved.” You manage to whisper, watching him lazily lick the pads of his fingers.

He ignores the reprimand, choosing instead to anchor you even closer into the warmth of his chest.

“We will bathe on the morrow, together,” he promises, his voice dropping into a sleepy rumble. “Oh... and remind me, sweet wife, to order a thousand squares of linen from the merchants, so that every last one of them might be drenched in your scent.”

“Ormund.” You let out a breathy laugh at the sheer absurdity of the idea, but as you gaze into his dark eyes, you realize he is entirely serious.

“This way... I shall carry a piece of you with me into the field. Everywhere. Always.” he reasons, pressing one last, lingering kiss into the crown of your head. Finally, his heavy hand moves lower, his palm flattening out to trace the soft skin of your belly. “And you of me.” he whispers against your ear.

©RHAENYRAS-CROWN 2026: I DO NOT APPROVE OF MY WORK TO BE COPIED OR TRANSLATED ANYWHERE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION

gif credits: @ormund-hightower

TAGS:

[arpegging]

see what sticks

Pairing: husband!valarr x f!reader x kingsguard!dunk

WC: 7.2k (don't look at me, i'm ovulating)

Summary: After years of struggling with infertility, you and your husband discover he is the one impeding your efforts. An heir is needed for his eventual reign, and he has noticed your eyes on a certain noble Kingsguard...whatever shall you do?

Warnings: 18+/NSFW/MDNI; heavy mentions of infertility/impacts, brief mentions of child loss, pregnancy and children are discussed HEAVY, VERY brief and non-graphic mentions of slavery/creepy ass valyrian rituals/child sacrifice (not done by anyone here, just a history excerpt), dunk is described as bigger than you but he's pretty much bigger than everyone so all's well, established relationship, open relationship, porn w/ plot, angst, smut, masturbation (f! & m!), fingering (f!receiving), unprotected p-in-v sex, multiple partners, the cuck chair makes an appearance, useage of ye olden lube, squirting, breeding kink, voyuerism, exhibitionism, multiple orgasms, creampie. not beta'd. lmk if i missed any tags and i'll update!

Author's Note: a little somethin' somethin' to celebrate all the love on my first fic! tysm to any and everyone who interacted. y'all wanted more valarr but that big man has rather enchanted me icl so we're having our cake and eating it too honey!!! likes, reblogs, and comments are greatly appreciated! ty for reading! dividers are by @priestboy!!!

Blots of sunshine decorated the royal pavilion at Summerhall, light stucco walls reflecting every ounce of light that shone down on the castle. Vines covered its flat roof designed with white stone rafts, rays coming through the small blocks of open air that were methodically dotted into the material overhead. You let out a small, refreshed sigh as you felt the sun’s warmth on your face, eyes shut as the breeze flickered through your  thin dress. It was layered and cut like how the Dornish women wore theirs, sectioned panels of purple silk spanning from your shoulders to the floor, arms uncovered. 

You couldn’t have been more grateful for it, with your husband tracing your bare arm up and down, as if you were his housecat. He tsked and hummed as he read aloud a history detail, some transcription of ancient Valyrian traditions. A favorite of his, he claimed, though he was finally reading past a certain point now. A tome that he and his brother would pour over as children, buck-toothed and freckled babes that fought over who got to look at the illustrations first. His hands moved to your stomach, delicately stroking the planes of it as he listed off some of the old pantheon that had been worshipped in the utopia of his ancestors.

“Vhagar was the god of war. Like every god under Valyria, she had a dedicated day for devotion and shows of faith. It was known that her greatest blessings came from the largest displays of sacrifice. For man to gain, they must lose under his watch,” he breathed out, brows drawn together in concentration. 

You reached for the platter of oranges that the serving girl had brought, silently beckoning for his knife. He looked puzzled, setting the book down.

“No need, darling, I’ll just do it,” he said quietly, gesturing for you to pass over the tray.

“But I love hearing you read,” you said, a shy smile tucked his shoulder. He sighed, plucking the tray from your  hands, and replacing it with his book, his thumb keeping track of the page. 

“Hold it out for me, and I can do both,” he said, unsheathing his hunting knife and starting on one of the fruits. 

“The gifts to Vhagar that brought more anguish to the men that carried the blade the better. A common saying amongst those who frequented Vhagar’s temples was fourteen sons for a thousand men. Every mother’s wail should be matched in regard for the countless enemy lives lost in battle,” he continued, holding off a chunk of orange to your mouth. You happily took it and pressed a kiss to his finger, both to taste the juice left of it and to watch red across his chest. He cleared his throat, staring at you flustered as you enjoyed the snack before turning back to his place.

“Every year, the city’s leaders would seize all of the babes born to slaves. The fourteen women that fought the fiercest to stop their child from being taken were unlucky, however. Their children would each be taken to the tops of the temples and slain on Vhagar’s altar. Only then, could the Valyrians expect a successful year of battle. Despite the protests of the slaves, it worked, with those of Old Valyria remaining undefeated for nearly five thousand years.”

He finished the paragraph in near silence, a somber expression painting his features as he anxiously tapped his knife. 

“What’s wrong, my love?” you said, taking another piece of fruit he had hand over. 

“I rather hate these parts of the histories,” he finally proclaimed, eyes downcast as he arranged the slices of orange out for you on the tray. “We praise the dragons and the power of Old Valyria, but some of their evils are so great I cannot say it was worth it. If ripping children from their mothers’ breasts to turn and kill them is what led to power in Valyria, to my family even being alive to come here, I do not wish for any of us to exist at all. It seems the gods keep punishing us for our cruel sins, and we seem to never learn.”

You threaded your fingers in his hair, pulling his head onto your shoulder so you could kiss the silver streak in it. 

“That compassion is what will make you a wonderful king,” you smiled sympathetically into his scalp, and you rolled your eyes at his subsequent scoff. 

“You’ve too much faith in me, wife,” he said, facing you and licking some of the orange juice from your lips. You pressed a finger to his lips before he could kiss you in full.

“Valarr,” you spoke seriously, eyes level with his. “Do not torture yourself with the sins of your forefathers. You cannot turn the hands of time to undo every wrong wrought across the world. You are to be the king of your time. Curb your passions for this lifetime alone.”

He gave you a downtrodden look before a sad smile twitched at his lips. 

“You are right. Perhaps you should be my Hand.”

“Oh, gods above, Valarr,” you huffed, lightly shoving his head onto the cushioned seats.

“What?” he said incredulously, attempting a kiss on your cheek between his laughs. 

You wiped off one he managed to get in, casting it off with a wipe on your fingers. At the sad little glimmer in his eye, you then presented your lips. He gladly accepted the conciliatory gesture. Slow and soft, not entirely chaste, but one of a brave knight claiming his princess’ favor. 

“I was not joking,” he said softly, thumbing the hair by your ear. “You are wise. Much wiser than me. I only laughed because of how cross you get with me.”

“Indeed, I’m wiser,” you said, tipping your chin up. “Such is why you think having me as Hand would be a marvelous idea, and I do not.”

He conceded, nudging your nose with his. You could feel the heat of his freckles branding onto your skin.

“Besides, my battlefield is the birthing bed, should the gods make a little more haste than they have of late.” You smiled, but he did not see his favorite creases in the corner of your eyes. He traced them with his ring finger.

“They will,” he reassured. “I will do everything in my power to ensure it.” A kiss to each of your fingers. “And if they do not, we shall take every measure, every maester’s solution. And until then,” he sighed, bringing another slice of fruit to your lips, adoration in his eyes, “You should eat. The babe and you need both your energy in spades.”

That night, your dreams troubled you. Valarr had spoken of his cousin Daeron’s affliction, and Egg had looked one dinner to you speaking of the Red Mountains cracking in half not but two days before his Dornish grandmother was found cold and limp in her bed. Yours did not consist of prophecy or glimpses into the future, however, for that was a gift reserved for the blood of the dragon. 

You dreamed of the Ashford tourney, years ago, maybe ten or eleven now. It was a bruise upon your mind that had been pressed every time you closed your eyes, your husband’s father and the pieces of his head that were missing. All of his wisdom and grace, the man you knew, poured out over small, uneven stones, cradled in the hedge knight’s blood-stained hands. 

Ser Duncan. That is his name, the Tall tacked on at the end in order to enter the lists. You had childishly giggled at that moniker when Valarr told you of the torrid situation, how Aerion had tortured that poor puppet player. The knight seemed something out of a tawdry print, a half-man, half-aurouch crafted in the hands of the Seven, their servant of heroism emerging from humble beginnings. Egg had recounted his character to you, panic in his voice as he rushed to find a seventh knight. You and Valarr did not speak that night when he refused your suggestion that he fight for the poor man. You  had only seen him the next day at the trial, sword in hand as he lumbered around the field, striking your lord husband’s brat cousin into the mud where he belonged. 

You had cheered the loudest when Aerion yielded, and his cries matched yours when you looked to the stables later, where he had Prince Baelor’s body in his arms, a man of such greatness dwarfed in the shadow of his champion. You’d half a mind to comfort him, until you remembered Valarr, still sat in the stands. Your feet carried you, frantic and blistered. 

It was not until many months ago that you saw him in truth, though he had come to court many sporadic times before with Egg. You dreamed you were sitting at the great fountain in the middle of the gardens. A valley of rainbows around me, you thought. Every shade and species of plant freshly bloomed just in time for spring. Your peace was undisturbed, your head slumped against the third stone ring of the fountain, the wind stirring your hair here and there. However, you soon heard a clank of armor approaching from around the corner and shrugged the sleep from your shoulders, composing yourself  into a more presentable sight. 

A knight in gleaming white broke into the yard, tall as some of the columns that held up Summerhall itself. The stories had not done him justice. He was thick around the waist, with his forearms combined measuring the same as your torso. Stubble decorated his lower features, thin lips with a large nose, a stubbed hook when he turned to the side to survey for any more nobles in the vicinity. He turned back to you, hand resting on the greatsword at his hip, and his eyes were in contrast to the rest of him. Soft, round, and kind, even from here as he peered at you puzzled. 

Propriety seemed to take over his senses, though, and he quickly bowed when he spotted the fabric mimicking a dragon’s maw around the collar of your dress. 

“M’lady, apologies,” he blurted out. “My young ward, he’s…he’s gone off. I believe he is somewhere around here. I am happy to let him be, but his lord father would like a word on his return.” 

He looked at you, anxiety evident as he tapped his sword’s sheath not out of impatience, but weariness under your watchful eye.

“Egg is here?” you beamed, body lit up in excitement. You had always held such joy in entertaining the mischievous boy. He was now a man, but surely you wished to see the one he had grown into. 

He seemed taken aback at your enthusiasm, but his smile quickly matched yours as it burst out of him, etched onto his face as if he could not remove it. 

“Yes, m’lady. He is here. If I could only locate him, I shall send him to you after he talks with Prince Maekar.”

“He is in the rookery,” you said, a knowing smile playing across your face. “He would fall asleep in there when he was a boy waiting for the ravens to return his letters from Aemon at the Citadel. He’s befriended three of them, if I can remember. Cloves, Salt, and Saffron. One brown, one white, and one red.”

He chuckled to himself at that,  some of the long, ginger hair falling forth from the nape of his neck. 

“Well, I shall look for him there. If I find him, I shall send him to you for a reception,” he assured.

“I will see you then, I suppose, Ser…” 

“Dunk,” he finished for you, a blotch of pink spreading from his neck. “Jus’ Dunk.”

He had been a complete gentleman from then, the months passing in a blur. A hand at your back when you got out of the royal carriage in town, a swift strike to a smallfolk man who had pulled at your dress. His presence was calming. Life at Summerhall’s court had little interruption or cause for concern, but his being in a room seemed to quiet the dull thrumming in your veins. The overwhelming breaths that came upon you quick as ever, wrenched away by his hand on your shoulder and a simple “M’lady, are you alright?” 

You dreamed of him over and over, his chivalry branded on your ribs like you were his cattle. You could not escape it that night, suffocating in the pacifying waves of his comfort, his space taking up yours. 

Your mind had finally taken to conjuring up moments untouched, not an ounce of truth to them. A fantasy. You dreamed he had returned you to your chambers after a night of celebration, Prince Daeron’s wedding to a woman whose face nor name you could recall. You were  consumed by the heat that Ser Duncan’s armored hand was burning into your back, swiftly walking you to your door. You arrived soon, though you could not bring yourself to turn around and bid him goodnight as he opened the door.

“M’lady?” he said, checking on you.

His chest was at your back, his breaths feeding into yours. You slowly turned around, looking up into his eyes.

“Come enjoy some wine, ser,” you offered, ticking your head in the direction of the canister set beside your bed.

“I….” he seemed ready to refuse, but you bounded into the room, ready to pour him a glass. He accepted it from you tentatively, and soon his hands were all over you. Ripping off your corset down the back’s seam, casting aside your shift, pulling you down the bed as his head drifted between your legs. 

You woke up not too long later, cringing at the squelch you found in your underclothes when you moved, and your nipples poking hard against the silk nightgown. An uncouth heat stirred in you that would not be tempered as you laid there, suffering and hips stilling against your sheets. You looked to your husband next to you, asleep in bed. Plush lips and an array of beautiful freckles. Your jaw hung open as you started to touch yourself, and three blue eyes and one split into gold and brown occupied your mind as you moaned into your pillows.

The next day, your ladies-in-waiting flitted around you as they adjusted a revisioned fitting of your finest dress. Prince Aegon’s wedding was quickly approaching, the Blackwood procession that had trickled in and out of Summerhall for the past fortnight painted the countryside black, white, and red. 

You clenched your jaw as Jeyne Tarbeck tried her best to will the skirts of dress concocted by the royal tailor to lay flat. The damned things kept poofing out and the hems were uneven, a rush job due to all the commissions flocking in for an event as large as a prince’s wedding.  

Three simple knocks rang out against your chamber door before it swung open to reveal your husband and two knights, Ser Donnel of Duskendale and Ser Roland Crakehall. 

You caught a look of your husband in the vanity’s mirror, and he soon captured your eyes through the veil of glass. The shadows of his long lashes stretched across his cheek as he quickly averted his gaze, a furrowed brow and pursed lips.

“I require my wife’s presence. Alone,” he said, tilting his head to the ladies. 

An edge was present in his voice, but he seemed intent on hiding it, smoothing their confused looks with a polite smile. He stepped out of the way for all of them as they took leave out the door, with Ser Donnel and Ser Roland following swiftly behind them. 

He turned to you stiffly, a shine misting his mismatched eyes and several bobs in his throat as he seemed to choke on words yet unsaid. You stood and were by his side in an instant, clutching his face and wiping away a tear that threatened to fall from the corner of his eye. Heart pounding, unsure of what was wrong.

Had it been his health? Had someone passed? You thought of the way he had slumped and heaved in your arms when news of Matarys and the late king reached them one morning. You had seen them carry the sheets of the poor boy’s sickbed and light them aflame, the orange matching his hair. 

This was more reserved, face wracked with some kind of disgust and contortion as you calmed him. He looked down at you, devastation in his eyes. He drew your fingers up to his lips, clutching them as if they were his mother’s seven-pointed star.

“It’s me,” he finally said, voice gravelly and tone grim. 

You could only stutter in confusion at his vagueness, moving to speak but he soon continued. 

“I had the maesters conduct a few trials some time ago. They gave me the conclusions just at noon,” he said, wiping his nose with a cloth, red eyes peering at you with untameable guilt. “The old wives’ tales, the new research they’ve found at the Citadel, I had them test me on all of it. Just out of curiosity, to see if I was-”

He stopped to cradle your head, kissing the top of it, then your cheeks, then your forehead. He turned his nose side to side there as if he could make a mark on you. Devotion and reverence, hoping for atonement.

“You’ve endured every snide remark over the years, all those poultices and salves and tests…..and it was me,” he laughed mirthlessly into your hair. 

You could not say anything of comfort, just to simply hold him, stunned. Your womb labeled barren, desolate. The rumors of your sons strangled in your stomach, your fault. And yet, it was fiction. You did not know if you could speak.

“Please forgive me,” he breathed out, tears croaking his voice, hands cradling your  head. His whole world in his palms. You could only nod.

You simply held each other.

In the following days, your chest settled, weighed with the danger of giving yourself resentful hope. You were not the afflicted, Valarr was. Whether it was a product of nature, an interference of the gods, or some halt from his family’s rather close genes, all of the fault fell on him. You could have a child, but it would not be his. Then it would be no child of mine, you decided. No child that would have his eyes, or perhaps even the streak of silver in his tresses. You swore yourself to think no more of such things, but imagining a child within your belly to satisfy both the crown, your husband, and yourself filled your veins with a warm buzz. 

You spent most of the morning indulging in snacks and poetry, rather taken by a sonnet from a Free Cities poet. It told of the Summer Isles, their lush, tropical forests, and even more, their provocative traditions. The people of the Summer Isles, were the poet to be believed, worshipped their gods through pleasure, and would often engage in group proclivities, wives shared with another woman’s husband, and the reverse to be true. You could not stand to think of Valarr with another woman. Hands all over him, undoing his doublet, taking his cock into her mouth or putting it inside her. 

The very notion of it made you wish to march into his quarters and admonish him. And yet, you never felt the same shock and horror when your eyes flitted over drawings of men watching their own women be claimed, mounted from behind. It stirred a deep heat within your chest, and yet you flipped to the next poem. You were your husband’s and your husband’s alone. 

As the day dragged into the afternoon, Valarr joined you in the pavilion once more. He had been rather melancholy in the days since his discovery, ordering your favorites from the kitchen and toying with the small bobbles and trinkets that had taken up three drawers in the dresser of the still empty nursery. He stroked your hair, following your gaze as he read behind you. 

“We should talk of it, then, should we not?” he said quietly.

You stiffened.

“Valarr, please. I wish to cast it from my mind.”

Silence filled the space between you. You cleared your throat and made a poor show of continuing your story. 

“We shall be a very lovely aunt and uncle to Egg and Betha’s children, should they come soon. And Daeron’s, when he finally does his duty.”

“But we should not have to be,” he said, curtly, a bitter tone in his voice only softening as he looked at you. “You should not have to be. You are perfectly capable of bearing a child. It is not your fault you have been saddled with a husband who cannot perform his most basic duty. A man’s own most basic want.”

“There are many children in the world without parents. We need not make our own,” you sighed, mouth tucked to the side as you fought the sadness brewing within you. “If I must not have one of my blood, we can help a less fortunate child.” He did not speak for some time, and you breathed out a sigh of relief.

“What if you could have one of your own blood?” he posited, an eyebrow raised at you.

“And I would love to have world peace,” you said humorlessly, tracing the line of the page with your thumb. You did not take his meaning. “You could. You would be the mother, and I would be the father. In the ways that matter.” 

Your page fell limp against its spine as your chest thrummed.

“What?” you huffed out, wide-eyed and astonished at what he was suggesting. “Y-You mean to pass off another man’s child as your own heir? Valarr, that is treason!”

“If I will wear the crown, then no harm shall come of it,” he said swiftly, scooping your book out of your lap and turning more to your side. “And the child shall be mine, through law and through love. But it will be yours, most importantly. I admit, the conception would be unconventional, but we have wished for this for years.”

A stunned laugh forced its way out of your throat and you whipped your head around to ensure no one else was listening. You scooted closer to him, your mouths nearly touching.

“And who would you even let into our marriage bed?” you whispered, half-mortified, half-entranced with the hot warmth of his thigh on yours. 

He gave a timid smirk at your horror, eyes dancing around your face, taking you in. If he could not have the honor of this duty, it should fall to the most honorable man he knew. Someone who would only bend his vows for the good of the family, who was close, and who would keep such a secret. Valarr pecked your nose, moving to claim your lips. A man he has caught you gazing at more times than he cared to admit. 

“Ser Duncan.” 

You fretted with your hair, the only distraction you could grant yourself. Valarr had given you a week to decide, and for all of it, you had cloistered yourself inside of your room, humiliated at the prospect of him knowing your husband had possibly propositioned him about your coupling. You gave Valarr the signal at dinner that night, a tug to your ear just as he had told you. 

You scrubbed your body vigorously with every perfumed cream and salt you could summon from your handmaidens and checked thrice to make sure the hall had been emptied to where no witnesses could catch a glimpse of the large knight nor your husband. 

You discarded your underclothes, perhaps believing that it would be best to present yourself plainly, but then put them back on out of shame. A simple white frock, though you felt ingenuine in it, no bastion of purity walked your chambers. Valarr said he would be quick, and will have the man’s answer no sooner than midnight. You took to picking at your fingers incessantly, half-raw skin around your nails burning by the time you were done.

When the door opened, you had set yourself in a chair by the fire, your back to them. You presumed it would be them, and not just your husband. Or perhaps Ser Duncan had rejected you both out of disgust, on his way to tell the entire court. Your nails themselves were quickly bitten to nubs.

You stood, slowly turning around and saw Valarr pacing around, setting out jars and cloth, and perched at the door, already red in the face was Ser Duncan. He did not meet your eyes, face set forward at the window, supposedly guarding the door from the inside. 

The silence was heavy with implications, and you willed Ser Duncan to look at you before casting your eyes down. It would not be wise to ogle at him with your husband in the room, even despite the circumstances. 

Valarr finished his fussing around, debating between the chaise lounge and the plushy armchair both sat at the fireplace before choosing the latter, setting two particular bottles at the foot of it. He turned to you pacing, wiping his hands on his tunic and clasping them behind his back.

“I will take care of you first. Get you comfortable,” Valarr tutted, a glimmer in his eyes as they flicked down at you. “Then, Ser Duncan will take my place and…do a great favor for us.”

Your eyes flickered over to Ser Duncan again, only to see him looking as well this time. His usual slouching was gone, as if a string in his back had been pulled taut, and his chest was held high before he looked away. 

“If at any point it becomes too much, or you are uncomfortable, say the word and it stops,” Valarr said, a genuine concern in his eyes. “I understand how unconventional this may be, so this is just an attempt.”

He turned quite formally, his front to Duncan and his back to you. It seemed he was the first man alive to treat sharing his wife with the same amiability and grace as one would with a foreign alliance meeting.

“Ser, if you wish to look during the process, you may. If not, there’s always the balcony or the washroom, and if so, I will fetch you when I am done. Whichever is your choosing.”

Ser Duncan looked perplexed at the notion that he would be privy to such a thing, even if he was to find himself inside by the time the night was done. His eyes flickered up and down the little of you he could behind Valarr’s shoulder. 

“I’ll…um,” he mumbled, looking down again, not seeming to know where to put his eyes. “I’ll take the chair, if that’s fine w’ye. Won’t look much, just’a…women like different things, might be best to see what works before…”

The poor man looked as if he could not bear to say the truth of what the three of you intended to do, more like to turn eight more degrees of red than anything else. You forgot yourself, a curious smile creeping onto your face despite your nerves.

“Jus’ don’t want ye to suffer,” he clarified, eyeing you before bearing a hole into the ground with his eyes. 

“Are you alright with that?” Valarr checked, peering at you behind him. Regardless of the awkward tension in the room, you softened just the slightest bit at his tenderness. 

“Of course.” Your tongue moved with certainty before you could think, and you were surprised with how sure you were at the thought of having Duncan watch the two of you. The picture of Valarr pleasuring you while the knight watched from the corner of the room sent a buzz down your spine, and you shifted your legs to get the smallest friction between your thighs, squirming a little under Valarr’s gaze. 

He locked onto the movement, eyes turning a touch hungrier, and he cleared his throat before removing his cloak. He wordlessly motioned for you to turn around, and your breath hitched as you heard the loud clanking of armor moving over the other side of the room. To the chair right behind Valarr, plush leather creaking and groaning under the weight of a giant.

Your husband made quick work of your nightgown, pulling it over your head and setting it aside on the floor. He smoothed his hands down your arms, indulging in his own selfish glance as he took in your bareness. He physically shook the distraction from his mind, his mouth tucked to the side in serious thought as he guided you to climb onto the bed. You sat at the head, settled against a crowd of pillows and cushions. It was there that you froze, feeling completely exposed under Ser Duncan’s regard. He only spared you a few glances as Valarr rounded the bed, but they held you completely, quick glimpses at your body now that all of it was exposed. Your legs felt ironed shut, the cool air pebbling the tips of your breasts.

Valar came by your side, peppering your lips with soft kisses, chaste enough in nature but so deeply intimate that it burned your cheeks to think someone else was witnessing this. These were reserved for when the two of you fell into bed after dinners, your baths finished and the day slipping off your tired backs. It occurred to you that you would not just be letting Duncan inside of you, but inside of your marriage as well. The thought - surprisingly - did not deter you , rather making you surge into Valarr’s kiss, planting a firm hand in his hair. They grew fiercer, messier, and he moaned when you swiped your tongue into his mouth, tasting his devotion. 

His hand wandered in between your legs, slightly parted now from the small thumps emanating from between them, faster and heavier now. A deep creature coiled behind your stomach, hungry and burning you from the inside as Valarr swiped his fingers through you, a small groan seeping into your lips when he found how wet you already were.

His forehead tucked against yours, thumb starting to concentrate on rubbing small circles while the rest of his hand wandered down. He crawled onto the bed, still focused on his ministrations as he settled over you and started to kiss his way up your neck. You let out a small, tepid whine into his hair as he slipped two fingers inside you, palming at your breast with his other hand.

Your head rolled back against soft cotton, eyes closing as you gave yourself over to the steady thrum of pleasure, dripping and boiling hot through your mind. The sense that someone was watching made you clench around Valarr’s fingers, chest rising up to greet him pinching your nipple. Chasing, chasing, chasing the easy thrill of his attention as his mouth made its way down the frame of you, lips tucked at your collarbone.

A humiliating, wet squelch reverberated in the chamber’s hollow walls, his hand rocking against groin, fingers searching, once, twice. There. You keened in a broken pitch, hands attempting to wrench Valarr’s hair from his scalp as the feeling overwhelmed you. Back arching, shoulders digging into the mattress as Valarr massaged the spot inside of you, thrusts forceful, eyes stinging. You could faintly hear sloshing accompany the disgusting sounds he was dragging out of you. 

“V-Valarr,” you panted, out of breath, finally opening your eyes. Brows drawn together, barely able to lift your head, you looked out from your bed to see Ser Duncan fixed on your face, impossibly wrecked. He was permanently sat near the edge of the seat. A knight’s vigilance, or virility, you could not say. His lips were parted, breathing fast, and he cast his eyes down when you caught him. You were not sure if the possession your husband’s work had put you under had emboldened you, but you used your last lucid thought to speak.

“Look, p-please.” Desperation grated on the edge of your voice. 

Both Valarr and Ser Duncan’s heads snapped up, the former with a shy smile and a continued effort to pleasure you, the latter looking as if he’d been struck dumb. Valarr had made his way down to your stomach, lavishing it with kisses to the womb that would surely be fed and be etched with his child in name and heart through enough trial. His hand left your chest to hold your hand, the other only intensifying in its pace as you practically hunched over him, trying to slip from the white-hot buzz slipping its way up your spine. You angled your head up, dazed and nearly drunk off of your cunt being bullied open and came slack-jawed staring into Duncan’s eyes. 

It was quick, your brain going completely silent sans the thrum of your hindbrain telling you to beg for more. When you drifted back, clutching Valarr’s sleeves, you felt the wetness first. Your bottom half was still dripping, pooling in the weight of your hips and ass. Sitting up was an arduous task, and you registered a hand wiping the sweat on your hairline back before losing the pressure of your husband draped over you.

You finally emerged from the fog made of thin wrapped silks when you registered clinking and crisp clips. Valarr was unpinning Duncan’s white cloak and eyeing the man’s nape before turning to you, rag in hand. The continuous scrape of metal as Duncan undressed himself soothed the anxiety deep in your stomach, returning with your clarity. Valarr balanced you on him halfway, wiping at your legs and parts of your groin with a surgical precision, examining you as he laid you back out. 

The both of you, still nervous of what to come, could only look at each other as Duncan reached his undershirt and trousers. The first part of the night was natural, a facet of almost every evening since your wedding, just with a guest. This, however, was something entirely new. You could see your blown pupils mirrored in his, and at that, you couldn’t help your smile. The one thing you’ve desired, just in reach. He traced your chin, and tilted his head down. A silent are you still alright? Is this what you still wish? Have I been good to you? Will my failure be forgotten? 

You simply kissed his knuckles and nodded. 

Duncan drew off his shirt and you caught a glimpse of his build, broad, strong muscles stretched over planes and paddings of just enough fat to widen him out. You bit down on the very edge of your tongue when you saw the small, soft pouch at the bottom of his stomach as he moved over to the bed, a path that trailed below his breeches decorated in wiry hair. He still did not keep his eyes on you and Valarr retreated over to the armchair, sitting down with a huff. 

It seemed the great knight wished for you to move first, and, steeling your resolve, you crawled across the bed to the end corner facing Valarr. Flopping onto your stomach and only hitching up your hips, you resisted the urge to giggle at how the tiredness had suddenly left Valarr in a manner of seconds, sitting pin-straight in his chair at the sight in front of him. 

You heard a faint grunt of surprise behind you, and a huge weight sunk around you as you assumed the former hedge knight shambled his way on the bed with you. It was only until hairy knees met your calves, and the both of you jumped a little before settling back into the unfamiliar touch.

“Princess,” Duncan grumbled. His large hands fitted over the span of your waist, fingers coming to touch around the front of you. He could have branded you right there, hot coals seeping into the cold press of your stomach, soon to be filled with him. You felt near to burst with anticipation, and second with anxiety. 

The knight handled you with shaky hands. For as much as your breaths started to draw with a shallow quickness, body almost itching uncomfortably under his gaze, you did not want him to stop.

“Y’e gotta relax, m’lady,” he said, a sympathetic glance down at you. “Won’t know if you like it or not.”

His thick thighs bracketed the back of yours, and you willed yourself to not look back at his naked form. Your whole body felt flushed with equal parts shame and arousal, red skin blooming under the heat of your husband’s careful watch and Ser Duncan’s skin against yours. You were weak, and your eyes drifted behind you to his cock. He was thick from the base to the root, the pink of his cheeks matching his groin. 

Had that flush been staining the skin under his white armor every time you had innocently touched him before? You could not help but admire how pretty it looked on him. The mushroom head was red and strained, a clear liquid that you had licked off of Valarr so many times before dripping down the side of him. Duncan looked a little ashamed at the fact when he saw the path of your gaze, and started positioning your legs to open more, pressing your shoulders and the top of your back deeper into the bed.

He was only a bit longer than Valarr but much wider, the weight of it smacking against your thigh roughly as he shuffled himself over you. You wished to shut your legs, but only in the fear that Duncan would find the humiliating mess between them from his presence and your husband’s labours. He raised an eyebrow as he admired your drenched cunt and looked back at the prince.

“S’she ready, m’lord? Not really too familiar with how much she requires.” 

You looked up at Valarr, your head down resting sideways against the mattress. He looked wrecked, swallowing deep as he scooted further back into the chair, hand teetering dangerously on the outside of his thigh. 

“I prepared her thoroughly,” he said, voice punched out despite him trying to imbue it with some sense of grace. He pointed to the nightstand. “I have laid out some of the maester’s oils in case more is needed.” 

Duncan moved behind you, and all you could hear was the clink of a vial and before you knew it, you felt his cock up against you, the wet tip moving up and down, taking some of the cream already there with it, forcing a small whimper out of you as it caught the edge of your clit on every downward pass. More nectar seemed to leak out of you before Duncan finally notched himself and slowly breached you, the sheer width of him sending a burn through your skin that slowly settled in a crude buzz at the pit of your stomach. Your cunt kept clenching, wanting to suck him in completely, to have the rest of you full and bullied open. He fed himself to you in increments, slowly inching and pushing a bit more in every time, his cock starting to shine with your slick. 

You closed your eyes and dug your nose into the bed’s linens when he finally settled in entirely, both of you groaning as he held himself there, fully submerged, and ground himself into you, something deep blooming in the clutch of your hips. He gave you a minute to adjust, both already coated in small sheens of sweat and panting. He resumed his hips, starting to thrust in and out in earnest, though still quite gentle. 

A soft, humiliating plap-plap-plap started to sound out in the chambers, and you let out a pathetic moan as you felt a finger that spanned the length of your whole cunt make messy circles around your clit. Another one of Ser Duncan’s fingers joined him, covered in your cum, speeding up in pace as his hand dug into your waist, watching the plush of your ass and stomach spill through his hand. Your hips started to meet his own, spearing yourself back on him, and you lost all abandon with holding your cries in. You had never felt this stretched out before, more burning towards the outside as he grew a slight bit rougher, but it quickly slipped into honey in your head.

You glanced up from the mattress to look at your husband, panting and palming himself through his breeches, hair slumped against the back of the chair. Your own clouded some of your vision, landing every which way in response to Duncan’s thrusts, but you whined, your own mouth salivating at the clear outline of him hard against cloth.

The heat of your own husband lust drunk at another man taking you, claiming you, had your head spinning, clenching more until rivulets started to splash out from you every time Duncan pressed back in. Eyes rolled to the back of your head, your clit numb, cunt stretched to its limits, fingers gone slack in the sheets, drool pooling below your chin. 

Your shrieks only grew in pitch, and Duncan let out his loudest groan yet as he felt the force of you nearly pinch him off from the inside.

“T-Thas’it,” he said, hips clapping into yours with a fury. He fell down to his forearms, pinning you to the bed with his weight as your ears filled with the deep grunts roiling out from his chest. Your legs could not sustain you any more, completely smushed into the bed, half-broken pleas and sobs into the linens, barely there whispers of Yeah? from Duncan in your ear.

“Look ‘a him,” the knight managed to groan, bringing his hand forward to wipe the hair and sweat from your face, holding your chin up with a finger. Your eyes and Valarr’s locked as you fell apart for the second time that night, the heat on his face tipping you over. Duncan soon followed you, seeming to come to his senses enough to quiet his moans as he pumped into you, hips rolling until the both of you felt boneless.

You slightly whined at the loss of his weight on top of you, and even more when he slid out of you, but it was worth it to feel him dripping out, pooling in the wet bedsheets. One thing was for certain: you and your husband would soon be made parents, your greatest wish, and Ser Duncan was to be called on daily until that promise was made full. No other reason, you thought, a lazy grin creeping onto your face as you looked up to see Valarr short of breath, a wet patch forming on his crotch. He only returned your smile in a shy spade. Perhaps the knight ought to be brought in even after. Just to make sure it sticks.

[batmanlovesnirvana]

— “ let me pray my way. ”

♠️ LORD ORMUND HIGHTOWER x FEM! WIFE READER

summary : one last night together before the dragons called your husband to war

warnings : smut, breeding kink, oral, religious imagery and other things I probably forgot MINOR DNI!!!

words : + 4,5k

a/n : wrote this instead of studying… 😭 there is a serious lack of ormund and gwayne fics in this fandom, and frankly, someone has to do something about it…. i guess that someone is me 🫦

ORMUND HAD ALWAYS LIKED THINGS SWEET SMELLING.

Like you, he would murmur on those rare evenings when the two of you shared a bath, the steam curling about you both.

You had known that since the day you wed him. He could not abide foul odors, nor the people who carried them. A man who stank of sweat and horses, a servant with dirty hands, a fisherman fresh from the docks —Ormund would wrinkle his nose at them all. It was a lordly failing, though hardly one unique to him.

A Hightower through and through, your husband was: pious, dutiful, ever respectful of the Faith. Septons were as common at his table as salt and bread, forever discoursing on the Seven, morality, and the duties of men. You had listened to such talks all your life. Being the daughter of a lesser lord, you had been raised in the Faith no less than he.

You had been his second wife. Not a marriage forged solely for duty or advantage, but one in which affection had found room to grow. You loved him. Of that much you were certain. And he had loved you too, in his own quiet way.

The Hightowers stood close to the Iron Throne in those days. Not as close as they once had, perhaps, yet close enough. Ormund's cousin had been queen, and now sat as the Dowager Queen Mother. Many a noble house would have counted such kinship a blessing beyond measure. Even you, as a girl, might once have thought so. What daughter of a minor lord would not have dreamed of wedding into so illustrious a line?

Today, you cursed it.

Cursed the dragons and their fucking crown. Cursed the blood ties that forever seemed to drag good men into wars that were not theirs.

For it was those same ties that had called Ormund to battle once again.

And not only Ormund.... Daeron as well. Kind and ever dutiful Daeron. Your husband's cousin's son, though Ormund had always cherished the boy as if he were his own. He spoke of him with pride, worried over him, laughed at his jests. A second son in all but name.

Now both rode toward war, and you remained behind, left to pray that the gods would prove kinder than kings.

The master bedchambers smelled of tallow wax and the crushed lavender you pressed into the linens each morning, the one Ormund loved so much.

Outside, the campfires of the Reach's host flickered against the city walls like a ring of captured stars. Ten thousand men. A dragon.... and your husband at the head of it all.

You sat at the edge of the bed, fingers worrying at a loose thread on your shift. The lilac silk slipped cool against your skin. Ormund had gifted it to you for your nameday. You had been accustomed to plain cotton shifts all your life, but this one had come all the way from Lys, or so he had proudly told you.

The seven-pointed star hanging from a delicate gold chain rested against your chest, emeralds glimmering in the candlelight. Another gift. Ormund was fond of gifts.

You took the pendant between your fingers before raising it to your lips, worrying the gold gently between your teeth.

Somewhere below, deep within the Hightower's vast foundations, a smith's hammer rang against steel.

Clang.

The sound traveled through stone and timber alike. You felt the faint vibration through the gold pendant, against your teeth and jaw.

Clang.

The forge never truly slept. Not in Oldtown. Not in the shadow of the Hightower.

You let the pendant fall back against your breast and listened, wondering how many swords were being hammered into shape for a war you wished had never come.

Ormund stood at the window, still in his green expensive leathers. The candlelight carved deep hollows under his cheekbones. He'd been standing there for nearly an hour, watching his army, one hand braced against the stone like he was already holding the realm's weight.

"I could still ask the Dowager Queen to appoint another commander."

Ormund turned toward you. The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile.

"Do not be ridiculous, my love. I would refuse. This is a matter of family. My cousin has need of me." He paused. "And I must set an example for Daeron."

Of course he would.

You knew it as surely as you knew the silver seven-pointed star he wore beneath his tunic would find its way to his lips before dawn, before he mounted his horse and rode to war. You knew he had already sent letters to the Citadel, to the Starry Sept, and to half the septons in Oldtown besides, asking for prayers. Prayers for victory. Prayers for protection. Prayers for his soul.

Ormund Hightower trusted in steel, but he trusted in the Seven more.

"And what of Daeron?" you asked, folding your arms across your chest. "Isn't it dangerous for him?"

"It is war. There is danger in that by its very nature."

The answer did not soothe you.

"He'll be disguised," Ormund continued hands behind his back. "His hair will be dyed, and he will serve as my squire. No man beyond those who need know will recognize him."

"A prince playing at being a squire."

"A future king learning what war truly is." There was no hesitation in his voice. "The boy has spent his life hearing songs of battle. It is time he learned the difference between songs and reality."

You looked away.

Daeron was scarcely more than a boy, no matter what crowns and prophecies awaited him, but then again, wars had never cared much for the age of the boys they swallowed.

"And your own children?" you asked quietly. "What of them?"

Ormund's gaze softened.

For all his piety, all his duty, there were few things he loved more fiercely than his children.

"They will remain here, where they belong."

"In Oldtown?"

"In Oldtown," he agreed. "Beneath the Hightower's protection. Surrounded by kin, and by men I trust."

Would they understand why their father had gone? Would they forgive him if he did not return?

"The younger ones will miss you." A shadow crossed his face. "As I will miss them." It was the closest he had come all evening to admitting fear.

Neither of you spoke then. The wind rattled softly against the shutters.

"Have you told them?" you asked, playing with your necklace.

"Not all of it."

A sad smile touched his lips, and you looked down, shaking your head.

"I dreamed of fire," you said quietly. "Three nights running. I wake with my hands aching, and I think — "

"I know what you think, my love." He crossed the room, his boots heavy on the flagstones. His hand cupped your jaw, rough and warm, and he tilted your face up. The lavender on your skin rose to meet him. "I have thought it too. Every hour of every day," His thumb traced your lower lip. "But all will be well."

"You cannot promise that."

"I can." He bent, pressed his forehead to yours. "I am promising you. I will burn this war down to cinders if it means I come home to you."

The words should have terrified you. Instead they settled somewhere deep in your chest, hot and alive.

His other hand found yours, brought your palm to his mouth. He kissed the center of it, then another kiss, and another, his lips lingering.

"I will miss you dearly," he said roughly. Like it cost him. "Every sunrise I do not wake to your hair tangled across my pillow, every night I do not hear you breathe beside me. I will think of you when I am wading through mud and blood and fire. You will be the thing that keeps me walking forward."

Your throat closed, but you nodded, because speech felt impossible.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, then he stood up. The candlelight caught the hard line of his jaw, you thought as you looked up at him. High Lord of Oldtown. Commander of the largest army left in Westeros. A man who had outlived a wife, buried a father, and inherited a war.... and he was looking at you like you were the only altar he had ever knelt at.

"One night," he said. "Give me one night of forgetting the fire."

You slowly stood up and reached for the laces of his tunic. Your fingers knew this work — had done it a hundred times, a thousand. But tonight every brush of knuckle against his chest felt like a prayer.

"You think too much," he murmured against your hair.

"One of us must."

He chuckled, and the sound of it sent heat pooling between your thighs. His hands found your waist through the silk, gripped, pulled you in your toes. The shift pooled against your body, and he followed the line of it down with his eyes.

"This scent." His voice dropped. Rough. Almost reverent. "Lavender and honey and something I cannot name. Something that is only you." He bent his head to the curve of your neck, inhaled. "I could drown in it. Drink it until I forget every other thing the world has to offer."

Your hands found his hair — thick, dark, threaded with silver at the temples. You tugged, just enough to pull his face to yours.

"Then drown."

His mouth crashed against yours. No gentleness now, no, this was hunger, the kind a man carries when he does not know when he will taste his wife again. His teeth scraped your lower lip, and you opened for him, let him in, let him take.

His hands found the ties of your shift. He pulled, and the silk whispered down your shoulders, caught at your breasts, fell to pool at your feet. The air hit your skin, cold and alive.

He broke the kiss to look at you.

Ormund Hightower had seen you bare a hundred times. He had mapped every freckle, every scar, every curve. But tonight he looked at you like he was memorizing the geography of you for a journey he might not return from.

"You are beautiful," he said. And then, quieter: "You are the only thing I have ever been certain of."

He lowered himself.

First to his knees. The commander of armies. The head of House Hightower. On his knees before you in the candlelight, his hands gripping your hips, his mouth pressing a line of kisses down your stomach.

"Ormund — "

"Hush." His voice against your skin. "Let me pray my way."

He guided you backward until your knees hit the bed, until you sank onto the furs. He stayed on the floor, pulling you to the edge, your legs falling open around his shoulders.

The first touch of his mouth made you gasp.

He didn't rush. Ormund had never rushed with you. He pressed open-mouthed kisses along your inner thigh, slow, deliberate, his shaved skin scratching the sensitive skin. Lower and closer. His breath hot and damp against you.

"Tell me what you want."

You knew what he wanted to hear. "Your mouth."

"My mouth where?"

You reached down, fisted your hand in his hair. "Between my legs. Now... " He didn't move, "... please."

He smiled against your skin. "There. That was not so difficult."

And then his tongue found you.

You bit your lip hard enough to taste copper. His hands had your thighs spread wide, his grip firm enough to bruise. He licked you like a man dying of thirst — broad strokes of his tongue through your wetness, then tighter, circling the place that made your hips buck.

"Ormund—"

"Quiet. Let me taste you."

He buried his face deeper, and the sound he made — a low, guttural groan, something feral and hungry — rumbled through your whole body, through your bones, through the slick heat of where his mouth was. His nose ground against your clit, hard, while his tongue pushed inside you, fucking into your hole, and your hands tangled in his hair, in the furs, in anything you could claw at to keep yourself from dissolving.

His thumbs spread your folds wide, pinning you open, and he licked the full flat of his tongue from your entrance all the way up to the swollen bud, then circled it, once, twice, before sucking it between his lips. Your back arched off the furs. You yanked his hair. He only hummed — that vibration drove straight through your clit, down your spine, wet and deep into your cunt. He did it again, harder, just to feel you clench around nothing.

He pulled back for a breath. His chin was soaked. His lips were slick with you.

"Your cunt tastes like fucking honey, my love." His voice was rough, wrecked.

"The Septon," you gasped, and he bit your clit — sharp, not gentle — a warning and a promise pressed between his teeth, "would not approve of such — fuck — such blasphemy from his most faithful lord."

Ormund lifted his head. Just enough. His chin glistened, strands of your wetness hanging in a thin thread from his lower lip. His eyes were black, pupils blown wide, no whites showing around the edges.

"The Septon is not the one who will make you scream my name tonight."

He drove two fingers into you without warning — no tease, no circling, just the thick stretch of them filling you to the knuckle, cold steel of his rings pressing against your entrance, against your stretched rim. You cried out, a broken sound, and he crooked them, found that rough spot inside you that made your vision splinter, and set a rhythm (hard, deep, relentless) that had you grinding against his palm, riding his fingers, your slick running down his wrist.

"Filthy," you managed. "The things you say."

"Filthy things." He curled his fingers again. "About how your cunt grips me. About how I want to fill you so full of my seed that you carry another Hightower in your belly when I ride to war. About how every man in my camp will look at my swelling wife and know that I have claimed her. That I marked her and that she is mine."

The words, low and rough and spoken against your wet flesh, pushed you to the edge. You felt it building : a coil in your gut, tightening, burning.

"Let go," he murmured. "Let go for me, I want to taste it."

His mouth closed over your clit, and he sucked, and the world finally shattered.

You came with a cry that you barely recognized, your back arching, your thighs clamping around his head. He did not stop. He licked and fingered you through it, slow and patient, drawing out every pulse, every shudder, until you collapsed against the furs, gasping.

He rose over you, still in his leathers, his chin wet, his pupils blown wide. He pulled his fingers out slow, dragged them up through your slick, painted it across your stomach in a lazy smear. 

"Now," he said, and his voice was barely human, "I am going to fuck you."

He stripped with rough efficiency — leather hitting the floor, belt buckle clattering against stone.

When he was bare, the candlelight caught the scars on his body: a pale line across his ribs from some forgotten skirmish, a circle of mottled skin on his shoulder from a burn.

He climbed onto the bed, his weight pressing you into the furs. His cock slid through your wetness, not entering, just… there, hard and hot against your thigh.

"You have no idea," he said, his voice a low rasp against your lips, "what it does to me. Knowing you are mine. Knowing I am the only man who has ever been inside you." He pushed the head in just enough to stretch you, just the tip, and held there. "The only man who ever will be."

Your hand wrapped around his shaft. He was hot, pulsing against your palm, and you spread his pre-cum from the slick tip down the length of him, fisting him slow, feeling every thick inch of his vein press against your fingers.

"Then prove it." Your voice came out wrecked already, and you hadn't even taken him yet. You squeezed, dragged your thumb over the head, and he ground his hips forward, buried his face in your neck, nipped at the skin there hard enough to bruise. "Prove it to me," you breathed.

He caught your hand, pinned it above your head, fingers laced through yours against the furs. And then he pushed in.

Slow and torturous. Inch by inch you felt every ridge of him, every vein dragging against your walls, stretching you open from the inside. Your body yielded for him, gripped him, your cunt clenching around the invasion, trying to pull him deeper even as he fed himself into you. Your mouth fell open and he was there — swallowing the sound, kissing you deep, messy, his tongue pushing past your lips the same way his cock pushed into your cunt, both of you full of each other.

When he bottomed out, he broke the kiss, forehead pressed to yours, breath ragged.

"Fuck," he said. Just that. Like the word had been punched out of him.

He stayed there, buried to the hilt, letting you feel the weight of him, the fullness, the way your body kept spasming around him in small, desperate clenches.

Then he pulled back (almost all the way out) and drove back in. Hard. The sound of it wet and deep, your body taking him, your nails raking down his back.

When he was fully seated, he stopped.

He rested his forehead against yours, taking your jaw, making you look at him. His breath came ragged. "Look at me."

So you did.

"I love you," he said. "If I do not come home — "

"You will."

"If I do not come home, I want you to know that I loved you. Every day. Every hour. Every breath."

You wrapped your legs around his waist, pulled him deeper.

"Show me." You whispered, not wanting to say something that may make you weep.

He did.

He fucked you like a man possessed. Hard and deep. His hips slammed into yours, the bed groaning beneath you, the headboard knocking against the stone wall. He grabbed your wrists, pinned them above your head, and drove into you with the same focus he brought to a war council.

"You feel that?" His voice was wrecked. "Feel how deep I am? That is where I will live. Inside you, even when I am a thousand leagues away."

He let go of your wrists, and your nails raked down his back. He hissed, bit your shoulder, hard enough to leave a mark.

"I want to leave bruises on you," he growled. "I want you to look at your body in the morning and see evidence of me. Every mark, bite, and drop of my seed."

He drove deeper. The angle shifted, and suddenly he was hitting somewhere new, somewhere that made stars burst behind your eyes.

"Yes — there — "

"I know." His voice a broken laugh. "I know your body better than I know my own prayers."

He dropped his hand between your bodies. His thumb found your puffy clit, rubbed tight circles in time with his thrusts. The double sensation (his cock filling you, and fingers working you) dragged you back toward that edge.

"Come for me," he said. "Come on my cock... let me feel you."

You shattered again, harder this time, your inner walls clenching around him. He groaned, low and long, and kept fucking you through it, chasing his own end.

"I am going to fill you." His voice broke. "I am going to pour every drop into you, and you are going to take it. All of it."

His rhythm faltered. His hips stuttered. He sank deep, buried to the hilt, and you felt it — hot and thick, pulsing inside you, wave after wave. He cried out, a sound caught somewhere between a prayer and a curse, his body shuddering against yours.

The two of you lay together in the darkness, the warmth of his body a comfort against the chill creeping in from the sea.

After a time, you shifted, pressing a hand against him and gently urging him onto his back.

Ormund let out a low sound of amusement but offered no resistance. He settled against the pillows, looking up at you with a weary smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

His hand found your hip, giving it a gentle squeeze.

"There she is," he murmured, his voice rough with fatigue.

You smiled back at him — lazy, wrecked, your hair plastered to your forehead in dark sweaty strands. You pushed them behind your ears, lifted yourself off his hips, and the first thing you felt was it: his seed, hot and thick, sliding out of you, dripping from your puffy, overstimulated folds down the inside of your thigh.

His eyes caught it immediately. The way it glistened, the way your cunt was still clenching around nothing, trying to hold onto what he'd left in you.

He didn't say a word. He just reached down, two fingers sliding through the mess, gathering it — white and warm and slippery — and pushed them back into your hole. Pumped them once, twice, forcing his own cum deeper into you, plugging you with it.

You bucked against his hand, grinding down, chasing the pressure, but he pulled his fingers out and brought them to your lips instead.

"Suck."

You opened your mouth. Took them. Tasted yourself on his skin — salt and slick and the bitter-thick taste of him, the taste of what he'd filled you with. You sucked clean every drop, your tongue working between his fingers, your eyes on his.

He watched you. Jaw tight. Breathing shallow.

And while you sucked, your other hand found his cock. Still hard and thick and wet with the both of you. You wrapped your palm around the shaft and pushed yourself down, positioned yourself over him, and sank down in one motion.

Both of you groaned, the sound of him filling you again, the stretch of it, the way your walls were already so sensitive they gripped him like a fist.

His fingers slipped from your mouth with a wet pop. A string of spit connected your lower lip to his knuckle, then broke.

You didn't waste a second.

You rode him, hips circling, grinding, taking him deeper with every roll of your pelvis. Your walls clenched around him in rhythmic pulses, milking him, and he moaned through clenched teeth, his hands finding your bare back, nails dragging down your spine.

The bed frame groaned beneath you both, a wooden rhythm that matched the wet sound of your bodies slapping together. His hand slid to your ass, squeezed the flesh hard enough to leave prints, and used the grip to guide your pace : faster, harder, deeper.

The sept burned around you, or maybe that was just the fever in your blood. The chamber you'd made into a shrine — the carved rosewood bed, the seven-branched candlestick flickering on the table, the crystal in the window that scattered the moonlight into a thousand fractured rainbows across the sheets.... and the two of you, tangled in them, sweat-slick and sinning.

Around your throat, the seven-pointed star he'd put there — gold, heavy, warm against your skin, rising and falling with every labored breath. It swung forward each time you rose, caught the light each time you fell, its points pressed into the hollow of your throat like a brand.

On his chest, the silver star. Resting in the thatch of dark hair, rising and falling, the metal warm from his skin, glinting in the candlelight like a wet eye watching.

You braced yourself on him first — palms flat against the muscle of his chest, fingers splaying in the hair there, feeling the slick of sweat between your skin and his, feeling the seven pointed star's cool edges press into your left hand. Then you found the headboard : rosewood.

Up.

The length of him dragged against the inside of you — every ridge, every vein, every inch of him a promise and a threat. The air caught in your throat.

Down.

You took him to the hilt, felt him bottom out, felt the pleasure-pain of being filled to bursting. The star settled back against your throat. His breath punched out of him — a sound that was half a groan, half a prayer to gods who had long since stopped listening.

Up again.

Your breasts swung forward, the nipples dark and peaked and aching. Sweat ran between them, down your belly, slick on your thighs where they gripped his hips. The golden star danced at your throat.

To Ormund's eyes, you might have been the Mother herself, or the Maiden descended from the heavens. It made no matter which. No holy image painted upon a sept wall could ever compare to the sight of you above him, your hair spilling over your shoulders like a silken veil.

A sin, the septons would say. Perhaps it was.

Ormund had spent half his life listening to septons speak of duty, virtue, and temptation. Yet in that moment, with your hands upon him and the candlelight dancing across your skin, he found he cared very little for their judgments.

Let the gods condemn him if they must, so long as it was you.

Down again, and you watched him watching you — watched his eyes trace the path of the gold bouncing against your skin, watched the hunger settle into his face like a man starved who'd just been told there was more.

His hands found your hips. Found the curve where waist flared into thigh. His fingers bit in, hard enough to bruise, and he guided you — set the rhythm — made you take him deeper, and deeper still, until you couldn't tell where his body ended and yours began.

The silver star on his chest rose and fell. Rose and fell. You reached for it (for the chain, for the pendant, for the symbol of everything you were supposed to be sorry for) and wrapped your fingers around it. The metal bit into your palm. You pulled yourself down onto him using it, and he came up to meet you, drove himself deeper, and the sound you made was animal.

His mouth found yours. Tongues first — wet and searching, tasting yourself on his lips, tasting him on yours, then teeth. You bit his lower lip, drew blood, swallowed his groan. His hand fisted in your hair, yanked your head back, bared your throat to the moonlight and the rainbows from the crystal.

He kissed down. Over your jaw. Down the column of your throat. Tongue tracing the line of the golden chain, following it to where the star rested in the hollow below your throat. He breathed there — hot breath on the metal, on your flushed skin, and then his mouth closed over the star itself, his tongue pressing it against your thumping pulse.

Lower. Between your breasts, his light beard rough against the tender skin, his tongue leaving a wet trail down your sternum. He took his time; licked the sweat from the underside of your left breast. Traced a circle around the hard peak of your nipple without touching it, once, twice, until you were arching your back, pushing yourself toward his mouth, desperate.

He gave it to you. Closed his lips over your left nipple and sucked — hard, pulling it deep into the heat of his mouth, his tongue working the stiff peak, his teeth grazing, the sensation sharp and bright and holy all at once. You moaned, and the sound bounced off the walls, off the crystal, off the seven-pointed star at your throat.

And then his hand found your right breast. Squeezed, palmed the weight of it, felt how it filled his hand. Then his thumb and forefinger found the nipple there, found it hard and aching, and he pinched. Hard. Rolled it between his fingers like a man testing a ripe berry, feeling its texture, feeling the way it peaked and tightened further under his touch, feeling the way your whole body shuddered when he pulled.

Humming. The sound vibrated through his mouth into your left nipple, through his fingers into your right. Humming like a septon at prayer, like this was worship.

Then he broke away. Licked a wet path up your chest — tasted the salt and sweat pooled in your skin, dragged his tongue over your chest, over the jut of your collarbone.

You threw your head back, arched your throat, offered him the soft vulnerable hollow of it, and he took what was offered. His teeth grazed your pulse. His tongue pressed against the tendon. The golden star at your throat got tangled in his hair for a moment, and you felt the weight of it pull, felt the chain dig into the back of your neck, and you didn't care.

His lips found your ear. His breath came ragged and hot — a hunter's breath, the breath of a man who'd run you down and meant to devour.

"I would make a religion of you," he said, the words scraping out of some wounded place inside him. "Your scent.... The smell of your skin. The taste of your cunt, sweet and slick on my tongue. I would wear it like a holy oil. I would breathe it in until I forgot the names of every god who ever watched us sin. I would fuck you in every sept from the Wall to the Summer Sea and call that prayer enough."

You heard him. Felt the words land in your belly like stones dropped into still water. Felt them ripple through you, through the place where he was still buried inside you, through the golden star pressing against your throat.

You took his face in your hands. Felt the silver star dig into your palm where his chest pressed against yours. Felt the gold one warm against both of you.

And then you kissed him : open-mouthed and hungry, teeth and tongue, the taste of blood and sweat and something that might have been salvation — and you rode him like a storm, like a prayer, like a woman who had found her god and meant to keep him.

You cried out, rode him, up and down, up and down, circling him, then up and down again, arching into his touch, back bowing, your rhythm faltering, then you felt it : the burn in your thighs, the ache in your hips, your body begging you to slow down.

He saw it, no, felt it in the way your pace stuttered.

And then he had you flipped. You didn't even see it coming, just the world spinning, the furs catching your fall, his body heavy on your back, one hand yanking your hips up into the air. He hooked your leg over his shoulder, spread you open, and drove back into you without a pause.

The angle was different. He hit something that made your vision white out, your mouth open in a soundless scream against the furs. He didn't stop, didn't even slow. Just fucked into you with that same relentless rhythm, one hand gripping your hip hard enough to bruise, the other tangled in your hair, pulling your head back.

And when you finally came (when your body seized around him, your cunt pulsing and milking and begging) he followed. Buried to the hilt, his hips stuttering, his groan low and broken in your ear, his release flooding you, hot and endless, mixing with everything he'd already put inside you.

He stayed there. Breathing hard. Sweat dripping from his forehead onto your neck. Neither of you moved for a long moment. Just the sound of ragged breath and the slick, wet evidence of what you'd done.

He stayed inside you, weight pressed you into the furs, his breath hot against your neck.

"Stay," he whispered. "Let me stay inside you.... just a little longer."

You ran your fingers through his sweat-damp hair. "I am not going anywhere."

He lifted his head, his eyes, surprisingly, were wet.

"Marry again," he said. "If I fall. Find someone who — "

"No."

"Listen to me — "

"No." You pulled his face to yours. "I will not marry again. I will not lie beneath another man. I will be your widow, Ormund Hightower, and I will wear black until I die, and I will salt my pillows with tears for you, and I will not give any man what is yours."

He stared at you. Something in his chest broke open — you saw it happen, the crack in his composure.

"I do not deserve you."

You chuckled. "Then spend the rest of your life earning me."

"I intend to."

He pulled out gently, you gasped at the loss, and he rolled to his side, pulled you against his chest, tracing feathering touches to your back. The fire had burned low.

He pressed a kiss to your hair.

"One more thing," he said.

"Mmh?"

"Turn around."

You did slowly, and he pulled you close, spooned against him. His arm wrapped around your waist, hand splayed across your belly.

"I want to sleep like this," he said. "With my hand on where my seed rests. So that when I dream, I dream of you growing round with my child."

Your hand found his, smiling, fingers lacing together over your stomach.

"You are a wicked man, Lord Hightower."

"I am a man who loves his wife," he said. "The Seven can judge me for it in the afterlife."

You felt his lips press against the back of your neck. Felt his body relax against yours, the tension draining slowly.

"I will come home," he murmured, already half-asleep. "I swear it by the Father's justice and the Mother's mercy. I will come home to you."

You closed your eyes.

You did not sleep.... but you held his hand against your belly, and you let yourself believe.

a/n : ( i also have a gwayne draft… if anyone is interested lol) sorry if he seemed OOC … we’re still on ep 1 and we don’t know much abt him unfortunately ;)

[thirst4fictionalmen]

Holly shit this is good. Got me flustered

[rosescafe55]

When y/n does something so ridiculous you make this face

[levanswrites]

𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫

“Your what shower?” “My everything shower.” “The hell's an everything shower?”

𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠: gator tillman x reader 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: established relationship, touch-starved!gator, soft!gator, grumpy x sunshine, suggestive content, domestic fluff, mostly non-sexual nudity, hair washing, massaging, grumpy man gets exfoliated against his will, angst if you squint 𝐚/𝐧: shoutout to this ask for pushing me to finish this!

♡ · · · ♡ · · · ♡

“What the fuck is all that?”  

The question stops you halfway through the bedroom doorway.

You nearly lose your grip on everything at once. Three different bottles wobble dangerously in your arms, your oversized tub of vanilla sugar scrub pressed against your chest hard enough to leave an imprint. A fluffy white robe hangs from your elbow, and the container of hair mask is clenched between your teeth because you made the mistake of thinking you could carry just one more thing.

From the bed, Gator stares at you like you’ve just walked in hauling tactical equipment.

The room is dim except for the glow of the TV, some hunting show droning quietly in the background, forgotten the second he noticed you. He’s sprawled out on top of the comforter in gray sweats, one hand shoved under his shirt while the other holds his phone against his chest.

His eyes drag slowly over the pile in your arms.

You've been caught red-handed. 

“It’s... for my everything shower.” 

“Your what shower?”

“My everything shower.”

“The hell's an everything shower?”

You walk farther into the room, dumping everything onto the dresser with loud plastic clacks. “It’s my full routine. Hair mask, exfoliating, shaving, skin care. The whole thing.”  

“A hair mask,” he repeats slowly.

“Yes.”

“You put a mask on your hair.”

“Well, it’s basically just deep conditioner.”

“But y’call it a mask.”

“Yes, Gator.”   

He squints harder, visibly trying to work through the logic of that.

Honestly, you can’t even blame him. 

You’ve seen your boyfriend's shower routine. 

Well, calling it a routine is generous. 

One sad, dented bottle of cheap 3-in-1 shoved in the corner of the tub with the label peeling halfway off. Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, face wash—it probably doubles as dish soap and engine degreaser too. You once asked him what face cleanser he used and he looked at you like you’d started speaking French.

You walk over to the bed with a sigh, hooking your fingers into the waistband of his sweats.

“C’mere. I’ll show you.”

“I know how showers work.” 

“Do you, though?”

“Real funny.”

Still, he lets you tug him up. Peels off the mattress with a groan, warm and sleepy, hair sticking up everywhere from laying around all evening. His shirt rides up when he stretches, exposing a strip of skin and the soft trail of hair disappearing beneath his sweats.

He follows you toward the bathroom, scratching absently at his stomach while he grumbles under his breath. 

“You women use too much shit.”

“Yeah, and you use dish soap to wash your whole body.”

“It cleans me, don’t it?”

“Mm, debatable.” 

He snorts, stepping behind you as you twist the shower handle. Water blasts against the tile, steam already beginning to curl through the air. The bathroom warms quickly, mirrors fogging at the edges while you line up bottles along the shelf with practiced precision.  

Gator leans against the sink watching you.

The second your shirt hits the floor, he goes dead silent. 

You feel it before you even turn around—that heavy, heat-soaked stare settling low on your back and dragging slowly downward.

You glance up toward the fogging mirror and catch him watching openly, head tipped back while his eyes track the slow slide of your shorts down your thighs.

Teeth catching on his bottom lip, pupils gone dark.

There’s nothing subtle about the look on his face.

By the time your shorts pool around your ankles, he’s already pushing lazily off the sink.

You barely get half a breath in before his palm cracks sharply against your ass.

The sound echoes off the tile.

You jolt with a gasp, shooting him an unimpressed look over your shoulder while he just stands there grinning crookedly at you.

“Gator.”

“What?” he smirks, all fake innocence, though his voice has already dropped rough around the edges. His hand lingers where he smacked you, fingers spreading possessively over the curve of your hip. “You standin’ there lookin’ like that... ain’t my fault.”

You turn away before he can catch you smiling.

By the time you step into the shower, the room is thick with steam. Warm water pours over your shoulders the second you step under the spray, heavy enough to make you sigh. Heat slides down your spine, loosening every tight muscle in your body.

A second later, the shower curtain jerks open.

Then:

“Oh—jesus CHRIST—!” 

You burst out laughing as Gator physically recoils the second the water hits him, one hand slapping against the tile wall to keep from slipping on his bare ass.

“Why the fuck is it so hot?”

“It’s not that hot!”

“My skin’s peelin’ off!” 

“It’s just warm.”

“Goddamn, it’s like Satan’s asshole in here.”  

You laugh harder, grabbing his wrist before he can escape.

“C’mere.” 

“No, wait—hang on, hang—babe—”

You yank him fully under the spray.

Hot water drenches him instantly.

His hair flattens against his forehead, dark strands dripping into his eyes. He squints through it with a look of genuine betrayal while the spray beats against his shoulders.

“Shit—” He jerks slightly, hissing through his teeth when the water hits the back of his neck. “Y’tryna boil me alive?”

“Oh my god, you’re so dramatic.”

“I’m serious.” His hands land on your waist like he needs support through this deeply traumatic experience. “I’m literally cookin’ in here.”

The heat has already flushed his skin pink across his chest and up into his cheeks. Tiny beads of water cling to his lashes every time he blinks, steam blurring the usual sharpness of him—the hard set of his brows, the tension around his mouth.

He looks so soft like this.

Prettier, somehow.

Especially with those flushed, perpetually pouty lips.

You can’t help but smile.

“You’re such a baby,” you coo softly, reaching up to smooth his soaked hair back. “C’mere, you big baby.”

He grumbles something vaguely offensive under his breath, even while leaning into your touch.

Your palms slide over warm, wet skin, fingertips tracing through the damp hair over his sternum before your arms curl loosely around his neck. Water streams between your bodies in hot sheets, slicking your skin together every time he shifts closer.

And he is close now.

Chest pressed against yours, big hands spread over your waist. He’s radiating heat under your palms, muscles slowly relaxing despite all his complaining.  

You cup his face in both hands, rubbing your thumbs affectionately over his flushed cheeks.

He sniffs once, still pretending to pout, though his eyes have already started drooping heavier from the heat. A bead of water slides down the bridge of his nose before disappearing against his mouth.

God, he’s gorgeous like this.

Dripping wet, hair hanging in his face, lips pink from the heat and pulled into that stubborn little pout he gets whenever he wants attention but refuses to ask for it directly. 

You kiss him before he can start complaining again.

And, for all his dramatic huffing and bitching, a quick press to his baby-pink lips is all it takes.

The second your mouth touches his, he melts.

A low sound rumbles deep in his chest as his arm snakes tighter around your waist, hauling you flush against him beneath the spray. The kiss starts lazy, warm and lingering, and he sighs into it like he’s been waiting for it since the second he stepped under the water.

“Mm,” he mumbles, mouth curling against yours, “So this ‘everything shower’ thing…”

You already know what he’s about to say.

“…that include me bendin’ you over in five minutes or...?”

You laugh into his mouth.

“Gator.”

“What? You said everything.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“False advertisin’, then.” 

He steals another kiss before you can answer, smiling into it this time, all smug and pleased with himself. His hands spread possessively over the curve of your waist, thumbs rubbing slow circles against your hips.

When you shove lightly at his chest, he barely moves.

“Focus,” you tell him. 

“I am focused.”

“On the shower.”

“I can multitask.”

“No, you cannot.” 

He grins against your temple, pressing one lingering kiss there before finally loosening his grip enough to let you move around him.

Barely.

Even then, his hand stays planted firmly on your hip while you start reaching for products. 

And despite all his whining about how hot the water is—despite the way he keeps distracting you every thirty seconds by kissing your shoulder, squeezing your ass, groping your tits, dragging his hands over your stomach whenever you lean forward— 

He’s fascinated.

You can see it all over his face, clear as anything.  

His eyes follow every little thing you do. The loofah hanging from the hook. The jars lined neatly along the shelf. The soft clicks of lids opening and the thick, sweet scents blooming through the steam one by one: vanilla, cocoa butter, orange blossom, lavender.

“So what’s all this shit for?” he asks eventually.

“Language.” 

He snorts and picks up one of your body oils carefully, turning it over in his massive hand while water drips from his wrist.

“Why’s this bottle so fuckin' tiny?”

“’Cause it’s expensive.”

“How expensive?”

You hesitate.

His eyes narrow immediately. “How expensive.”

“…Thirty dollars.”

“For that tiny-ass bottle?”

“It’s good oil!”

He looks genuinely horrified.

“Holy shit. You could buy, like… a car part with that.”

“Yeah, because those are definitely comparable purchases.”

He rolls his eyes, turning his attention on the scrub jar in your hand.

He squints at the label through the water dripping into his eyes.

“Sugar scrub?”

“Yeah.”

“The hell’s that mean?”

You grin instantly. “Hold still.”

His eyes narrow with immediate suspicion. “Why.”

“You ask too many questions.”

Before he can move away, you scoop a handful into your palm. 

It’s your favorite scrub too—the ridiculously overpriced strawberry pound cake one that smells good enough to eat, warm brown sugar and whipped vanilla frosting.

You rub it over his forearm without warning. 

He flinches immediately. “Ow, what the fuck—"

"Relax."

Sugar crystals drag slowly across his skin while your hands work over the hard muscle of his arm. The scrub softens beneath the heat, turning slick and grainy between your fingers.

His brows pinch together while he watches you.  

“…What’s it even doin’?”

“Gets rid of dead skin.”

“I don’t got dead skin.”

“Everybody has dead skin.”

“I don’t.”

“Sure, babe.”  

He eyes the scrub suspiciously while you keep going. "Is this gonna make my arm all... glittery, or whatever?"

“...No.”

“You hesitated.” 

“No, I didn’t!" you insist, laughing. “I do have a glitter shower jelly though.” 

“A what.”

“A shower jelly.”

“The fuck is a shower jelly?”

The grin spreading across your face makes him immediately point at you.

“No.”

“Too late!”

You twist around beneath the spray, reaching behind him toward the crowded shower shelf. Your fingers close around the little plastic pot wedged between your body wash and conditioner. It jiggles in your hand when you pick it up—golden and translucent, packed with tiny flecks of glitter that catch under the warm bathroom light. 

You plop it directly into his palm.

The jelly slips against his skin, wobbling in his hand like a living thing, and his entire face twists in genuine alarm.

“What the fuc—why’s it doin’ that?”  

You dissolve into laughter, doubling over against him while he stares down at the jiggling soap with genuine distrust, holding it out at arm’s length like it might suddenly grow teeth. 

“This ain’t right,” he mutters, poking it cautiously with his thumb.

“It’s just soap!” 

Tears prick at the corners of your eyes while you hide your face in his shoulder, laughter shaking out of you in muffled bursts against his warm skin. His chest hitches once beneath you, reluctant amusement creeping in despite himself.

When you finally manage to pull back and look at him, his expression has changed completely.

Water slides slowly down his face in shimmering trails, gathering at his jaw before dripping down to his chest.   

He’s not looking at the shower jelly anymore.

He’s looking at you. 

Hazel eyes much softer than you’re used to, focused in a way that makes your laughter taper off.    

It still manages to catch you off guard, even after all this time.  

Because Gator’s never been good at saying things straight out. He jokes, he deflects, he fills silence with anger and attitude—whatever comes easiest.

But sometimes, when he looks at you like this, it feels like he doesn’t need to say anything at all. 

You’re still peering up at him when he blinks, huffing as he tosses the shower jelly toward the shelf without even looking where it lands. 

“Thing’s fuckin’ haunted.”

Then his hands settle on your waist.

Big, warm palms slide around your hips without hesitation, dragging you forward until there’s no space left between you.

You squeak when you lose your footing against the slick tile.

“Gator—!” you gasp, grabbing his shoulders to steady yourself, laughter spilling out of you again even as your pulse jumps.

“What?” he says, mouth curling into that lazy, knowing grin.

“I almost slipped,” you breathe, trying to find balance against his chest.

“Nah.” His smile widens. “Got you.”

Then his nose nudges along your neck, inhaling deeply.

“Why’s all this shit smell like food, huh?” 

You huff a laugh, squirming when his lips skim the damp skin just below your ear.

“Jelly,” he mutters between kisses. “Sugar scrub. Vanilla frosting. Coconut whatever… what’s next? Rotisserie chicken lotion?”

That gets another laugh out of you, helpless and bright, the sound buried as you press closer into his shoulder. Your arms slide up around his neck, fingers threading through the damp hair at the nape.

“I’m serious,” he mutters, though you can tell he’s smiling too. You hear it in the lazy drawl of his words, feel it in the way his chest vibrates beneath your cheek. “Like I’m showerin’ inside a damn bakery.” 

You love moments like this.

Doing nothing else but being close with one another, swaying under the steady press of warm water, cocooned in steam while the rest of the world falls away.

His hands move absentmindedly over your back, gliding up and down your skin in a comforting rhythm.

Then, naturally, his grip slides lower on your hips.

You feel the shift in him before you even see it, his grin turning cocky in a way that always spells trouble.

“So…” he murmurs, voice dropping low in his chest. “Can we fuck now?”

You snort, pushing lightly at his shoulders so you can look at him properly.

His expression is completely shameless, nothing but open, unapologetic confidence.

You wouldn’t expect anything less from your boyfriend.  

“No,” you say flatly.

His expression sours. “No?”

“We still have to exfoliate.”

Gator rolls his eyes so hard you’re surprised he doesn’t injure himself.

“You’re killin’ me.”

But he doesn’t let go. 

And honestly, the longer this goes on, the less he even pretends he wants out of the shower.

Especially once your hands slide higher over his shoulders.

The second your thumbs press into the tight muscle at the base of his neck, his whole body jerks beneath your hands. 

“Jesus…” he mutters under his breath.

“Too hard?”

“No,” he says immediately. “Just... keep goin’.”

That alone makes you smile again.

Because two weeks ago this man would’ve rather thrown himself into traffic than let something pink and strawberry-scented anywhere near him. 

Now he’s standing beneath scalding water while you rub sugar scrub into his shoulders, massaging the tension out of him like a spoiled housecat.

You take your time with him, working your thumbs into the tendons there. 

God, he’s tight everywhere.  

The muscles across his shoulders feel hard as stone beneath your palms, thick bands of tension packed so tightly they barely move under your touch. Every time your thumbs drag across another knot, his breathing catches slightly.

Your smile fades little by little.

“Baby,” you murmur quietly, “when’s the last time you relaxed your shoulders?”

“Uh, dunno.”

“You don’t know?”

He shrugs, though even that movement looks stiff. 

“Never really think about it.”  

Your fingers drag slowly down the back of his neck again, pressing into another rigid knot there.

“Gator,” you say softly, brows pulling together, “you’re hard as a brick back here.”

He snorts quietly at that. 

You roll your eyes, but the innuendo doesn’t land quite the same now. 

Because once you really start paying attention—really feeling him beneath your hands—you realize how tense he actually is.

Every inch of him feels wound tight.

His shoulders sit high even while he’s supposedly relaxed, thick muscles rigid beneath your palms no matter how much steam fills the shower or how hot the water runs over him. 

Like he’s always bracing for something. 

The realization tightens something in your chest in return. 

And maybe he notices the shift in you, because after that, he goes unusually quiet.

No more smartass comments. He just stands there under the spray while you finish working the scrub over him.

The pink sugar crystals melt gradually beneath the water, dissolving against warm skin while your fingers work over the hard planes of his chest and shoulders.

Gator watches your hands more than anything else.

You notice it every time you glance up.

His eyes tracking the slow circles of your palms, the drag of your nails lightly scratching through the damp hair on his chest. The way you smooth water over his shoulders afterward. 

You catch yourself wondering, briefly, if this is something he’s ever really experienced before outside of sex—outside of anything physical and fleeting. Being touched without it carrying an expectation, without it needing to lead anywhere else or turn into something more.

His shoulders begin to drop first. Then his jaw loosens. Then the permanent little line between his brows eases until he stops looking so guarded all the time.

"Kinda feels nice, I guess,” he admits after a while, voice quieter than usual.

You smile to yourself.

“Yeah?”

“Mm.” 

When you reach for the shampoo, he tips his head forward without being asked.

You work the product through his hair slowly, fingers sliding into damp strands as the scent of citrus and jasmine fills the steam around you. It lingers warm and clean, cutting through the heavy sweetness left from everything else.

Then your nails scrape lightly across his scalp.

And the sound he makes is... well.

Your gaze lifts slowly.

Gator’s standing completely still beneath the spray, eyes shut tight, brows pinched together while a slow breath slips through his parted lips. 

“Gates, was that...?”

His eyes snap open. 

“No.”

The denial comes way too fast.

You stare at him for exactly one second before laughter slips out of you.

“Oh my god, it was!”

“It was not.”

“Yes, it was!”

“No, it wasn’t. Shut up.”

You bite back another laugh at how seriously he suddenly sounds about it.

His cheeks are already flushed pink from the heat, but now the color creeps higher—up the tips of his ears too.

Interesting. 

Purple-tinted shampoo runs in slow trails down his temples as he glares at you through wet lashes, mouth twitching while water streams down the sharp slope of his nose.

“You’re annoyin’,” he murmurs. “I’m leavin’.”

“No, you’re not.”

To prove your point, you drag your nails lightly against his scalp again.

A gruff noise slips out of him before he can stop it this time, low and helpless, pulled up from somewhere deep in his throat. His eyes squeeze shut and his hands tighten briefly at your waist.

“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath. “I hate you.”

“Liar.”

He makes no move to leave.

If anything, his grip on your waist tightens when you start rinsing the shampoo from his hair, angling his head toward you so you don’t have to reach so far.  

You’ve known Gator long enough to understand how big this actually is.

Because for all his flirting and constant touching, genuine softness doesn’t always come naturally to him.

Not receiving it, anyway.

He’s good at grabbing your waist to pull you into his lap while you’re trying to cook dinner. Good at kissing your neck in the kitchen while murmuring filthy things against your skin just to hear you laugh.

He knows how to want, how to take up space. 

But this? 

Standing still while somebody takes care of him?

That’s different.

And for the first time since he stepped into the bathroom, he looks completely calm.

You don’t think you’ve ever seen him be this still for so long.

Usually there’s always something twitching in him somewhere—a bouncing knee, fingers tapping against his thigh, shoulder bunched up to his neck and his jaw locked tight like he’s perpetually gearing up for a fight. 

But right now, he just looks tired.

Like he doesn’t feel the need to bury it, for once. Safe enough to let the exhaustion sit in him without pushing it away.

So you keep touching him gently. Combing your fingers through his hair while water pours through the strands in dark rivulets, nails scraping softly over the base of his skull until he shivers.

By the time you finally finish rinsing him off, Gator looks completely wrung out.

His cheeks are flushed deep pink from standing under the heat too long, damp hair sticking up in uneven directions, his eyes gone heavy-lidded in that sleepy way they get late at night. 

You step out first, wrapping a towel around yourself while he stands there dripping on the bathmat, rubbing absently at his own forearm.

His brows furrow thoughtfully.

“Huh.”

You glance over while tightening your towel. “What?”

He rubs his arm again slowly, fingertips sweeping over the skin where you used the scrub earlier.

“…Feels different.”

The smile that breaks across your face is immediate.

“Right?!”

You sound so aggressively excited about it that he snorts quietly, shaking his head.

Still, he keeps touching his arm. 

Testing the skin with obvious confusion, thumb brushing over the softness there.

“Huh,” he says again, quieter this time. 

Then, because he physically cannot allow himself to sound too impressed for longer than thirty seconds, he shrugs and reaches for a towel.

“S’fine, I guess.”

Which, translated from Gator-speak, is basically a standing ovation.

You grin to yourself while he drags the towel roughly over his hair—

Then immediately shakes his head like a dog, spraying droplets all over the floor.

“Oh my—Gator!”

...

Afterward, you settle onto the bathroom counter in one of his oversized shirts, rubbing lotion into your legs while the room stays thick with leftover warmth.

Everything smells sweet, vanilla and strawberry sugar lingering heavy in the humid air. 

Gator sprawls across the closed toilet seat nearby in a fresh pair of sweatpants, elbows planted on his knees while he watches you through heavy-lidded eyes.

You try not to stare too much at how pretty he looks like this too, softened and comfortable, relaxed enough to practically fall asleep upright. 

You hold up a bottle.

“This one’s toner.”

“Uh huh.”

“This one’s moisturizer.”

He gives you a flat look.

“Yeah,” he drawls slowly. “I know what moisturizer is, babe.”

You ignore him.

“And this one’s hyaluronic acid.” 

“You put acid on your face?”

“It’s not that kind of acid.”

His skeptical hmph makes you laugh quietly while you pat serum into your cheeks.

And even though he’d rather chew glass than admit it out loud, something about all of this clearly gets under his skin in a way he doesn’t entirely hate.

It's starts small at first.

Lingering in the bathroom doorway while you do your nighttime routine, pretending he’s only there because he’s “waitin’ for you to finish the hell up already.”

He picks up random bottles in the meantime, squinting suspiciously at labels.

“What’s body butter supposed to be?”

“It’s moisturizer.”

“So lotion.”

“Thicker lotion.”

“That’s stupid.”

Three days later you catch him using it. 

Only because, apparently, “my hands are dry as shit.”

Then he uses it again the next night.

And the night after that. 

After that, it stops being occasional. 

You start catching him using your products without even asking first.

Rubbing lotion into his hands while standing in the kitchen. Swiping your expensive lip balm across his mouth while pretending not to notice you watching him.

And honestly, you think part of it stops being about the products pretty quickly.

You think he likes the familiarity of it. The closeness.

Smelling your body wash on his skin. Coconut lotion rubbed into his knuckles and vanilla sweetness clinging faintly to the collar of his shirts.

Little pieces of you following him around. 

It becomes most obvious after rough days.

The kind where he comes home exhausted down to the bone, shoulders slumped, smelling like sweat and engine oil.   

Sometimes he barely makes it through the front door before he drops, collapsing face-first into your chest with a groan. His forehead presses into your shoulder while his arms wrap loosely around your waist.

And when you run your fingers through his hair and murmur, “Everything shower?” he’ll let out a long exhale against your neck before mumbling a tired little, “Yeah,” into your shirt. 

Some nights he’s too drained for anything else. 

He just stands beneath the spray with his eyes closed while you wash his hair slowly, his hands resting heavy on your waist more for grounding than anything possessive.

Other nights, though, he’s more awake. 

More opinionated.

“Wait,” he says one evening, catching your wrist before you grab a scrub jar. “Not that one.”

You blink over your shoulder. “What, this one?”

“Nah.” He points lazily toward the shelf. “The other one.”

“The cotton candy scrub?”

“…Yeah.” 

You can’t help it—you grin a little, slow and knowing. 

“What? It smells better than that strawberry cake shit.”

Soon enough you’re rubbing cotton candy and shea butter into his skin, pink suds sliding down his tattooed bicep while he stands there acting like this is all one giant inconvenience he’s tolerating for your sake. 

And in return, he starts taking care of you too.

Not always gracefully, and definitely not innocently.

His hands wander plenty, soap-slick palms gliding over your hips, sudsing up your tits and ass under the excuse of “helping.”  

Sometimes it’s worse when he’s half asleep. Distracted kisses pressed against your shoulder while you’re mid-sentence, mouthing lazily along your neck as he absentmindedly drags the loofah across your stomach.

You’ll be talking about your day and suddenly realize he stopped listening five minutes ago because he got distracted kissing your collarbone.

But underneath all the flirting and grabbing and constant horny commentary, something softer grows there too.  

Comfort in the repetition of it.

In knowing that no matter how exhausting the week gets, eventually there’s this: warm steam, your skin pressed up against his, the familiar clutter of bottles lined along the shelf and your voice explaining what each one does while he pretends not to care—even though he remembers every single one.

It becomes yours. 

This quiet little thing that belongs only to the two of you.  

Most nights, things do escalate eventually. Slow kisses wrapped up in steam-heavy air, wet skin sliding together while his mouth finds your throat and your fingers tangle in his hair.  

But sometimes he’s honestly too tired for any of that.

Sometimes it ends exactly here. 

With dryer-warmed towels and sleepy silence afterward, the bedroom dark and cool against freshly showered skin while Gator stretches across the bed with a groan, head dropping heavily into your lap.

You scratch lightly against his scalp, carding your fingers through his damp hair while he drifts in and out of sleep.   

His arms slide around your waist eventually, a little clumsy with exhaustion before settling properly. He pulls you closer until his face presses into your stomach, breath warm through your shirt. 

“Mmfh…” he mumbles, words blurred heavily by sleep. “You’re the… the best thing that ever happen’ to me, y’know that?”

You know there’s a good chance he won’t fully remember saying it tomorrow.  

Not because he doesn’t mean it; just because honesty comes easier when he’s too exhausted to keep it buried. 

You smile, fingers never stopping their slow rhythm through his hair.

“I love you too,” you murmur back, just as gentle. 

And you think, as he drifts into sleep in your lap, that he looks most like himself when he stops trying to be anything at all.

♡ · · · ♡ · · · ♡

[eupheme]

— Penny For Your Thoughts (Masterlist)

[series - complete] | [ao3] | [playlists - his | hers]

Rated E | TB!Alfred Pennyworth x F!Reader

Tags: age difference, oral sex (f & m receiving), light daddy kink, praise kink, multiple orgasms, dirty talk, PiV, creampie, fluff and smut (angst later on), Alfred is a service dom and a gentleman. Later chapters follow the plot of The Batman (2022).

You’ve been wondering about the Wayne family, but it’s not Bruce you’ve had your eye on… it’s someone else entirely.

i. rendezvous | 5.2k

until we meet again (alfred pov + mini-prequel) | 5.3k

ii. reunion | 6.2k

iii. routine (part i) | 4.2k / (part ii) | 4.8k

iv. rescue | 5.8k

v. rift | 3.3k

vi. reconcile (part i) | 6.8k / (part ii) | 7k

vii. revelation (part i) | 8.2k / (part ii) | 4.8k

viii. ruin (part i) | 7.2k / (part ii) | 7.2k

ix. resilient (part i) | 8.6k / (part ii) | 6.9k

x. ruminate | 3.6k

— In For A Penny, In For A Pound

Drabbles that are set in the same universe

i. - opening act

ii. - beck and call

iii. - eaten up

iv. - something new

v. - like the movies

vi. all I want is you

— Other

soft thoughts | music preferences | comforting you | 5 sentence fics | what if | the sequel | easter eggs

[ickology]

𓏵 ┊ younger girlfriend squirting with jack abbot . 18+

you tell jack who’s been knuckles deep inside your pussy for the past hour that something feels weirder than usual, as you’re sitting in between his legs — your back pressed against his chest with your thighs parted giving him the perfect amount of access needed to pleasure you.

“what’s wrong, baby?” he murmurs against your temple with a gentle kiss as his calloused digits are rhythmically plunging in and out of your hole. curling his fingers sweet into that spongey spot inside of you, it’s almost cruel the way he knows exactly how to make you lose it. “it feels weird.” you testify, eyes fixated on the recurring disappearance of your boyfriend’s fingers inside of you.

“yeah? tell me what feels weird, hm.” he hums, feeling you shift and squirm against him as he holds one of your legs open by the backside of your knee. and you can barely utter the words from your mouth, “your fingers keep pressing against my bladder, its making me feel like i have to go— go to the bathroom.” you bite down on your bottom lip.

every time jack’s fingers plunge back inside you, it feels as if you’re peeing yourself already. as if the motion of his fingers are forcing that specific release from you. “that so?” you feel his chest rumble against you as he lets out a gruff chuckle, “that’s good then. that’s the feeling you want when it starts feeling good, sweetheart.” he reassures, as your walls pulse around his fingers.

you whine, throwing you head back against his shoulder. each drag of his digits bringing you closer, and closer towards the edge as you let out soft moans.

jack let’s out an impressed whistle once he starts to feel your hips rock into hand. “fuck— it feels good.” you moan warm against the side of his neck, “so good i might actually pee.” which earns a low, amused groan from jack.

“mhmm, you gonna make a mess on my hand?” he lifts his thumb up, before pressing mean against your swollen clit making you jolt. “w—wait!” you stammer, throwing your hands towards jack’s forearm in attempt to halt his movements as he shakes his head in disapproval. “uh-uh, can’t have you telling me to stop now.” he rasps, pressing circles around your nub as it twitches under the pad of this thumb.

“c’mon and show me how messy you can get.” his breath fans warm against your cheek, before your body’s involuntarily letting loose. your body is shaking, and your walls are caving in around jack’s digits as you’re whimpering. “thaat’s it, baby— give it to me.” he groans, targeting that sweet spot inside of you, before you’re making a wet mess all over yourself.

“mmgh, jack— jack.” you’re whimpering as slight humiliation fills your chest, though the pleasure is far too euphoric as he coaxes every last drop out of you. “atta girl.” he nudges his mouth against the side of your head to whisper in your ear. “i love nasty girls.” he groans.

[the-darklings]

RIPPED AT THE THIGH — VALARR TARGARYEN.

pairing: modern!valarr targaryen x f!stark!reader summary: Your boyfriend Valarr is a gentle lover. But not always. Not always. contents/warnings: smut (18+), established relationship, dom/sub power exchange, switch dynamics (fem!dom shifting to mal!dom for one night), oral (f receiving), fingering, orgasm denial, edging, multiple orgasms, insane amounts of overstimulation, praise kink, mild degradation, dirty talk (extensive), breeding kink (verbal fantasy only, not enacted), possessive behaviour, hair pulling, holding by the nape/hand at throat, biting/marking, rough sex, prone bone, carpet burns, physical exhaustion to the point of collapse, primal/depth play, cum watching, obsessive!dark!valarr, aftercare for dayssss, switch reversal in aftermath (needy!reader, fussy!valarr). notes: I feel like I got pregnant writing this, so enjoy! 🤪 ✶ modern/trailer trash au.

It’s just past eleven on a Wednesday in early March, and you’re in bed.

The lamps are dim, turned down to the lowest setting on the wall dial. The duvet is the cool slate grey Valarr bought because you said once, in a hotel in Pentos two and a half years ago, that you preferred greys to whites. A thing spoken in passing, the way you'd mention preferring the window seat. Three weeks later, the bedding in the apartment had quietly changed.

You’re propped on three pillows with a battered paperback open against the bare swell of your thigh, your head pillowed on the flat plane of Valarr’s stomach. The book is something forgettable, a thriller you started on a plane in February and haven’t bothered to commit to. Your other hand is hooked, lazily, in the loose linen at Valarr’s hip. He’s reading a memo on actual paper—marked up, because Valarr is the only man under forty who still likes to mark up memos by hand—and his other hand is buried in your hair, three fingers stroking idly through the strands at your temple. The unconscious pet he’s been doing in his sleep since month four of year one.

He hasn’t turned a page in eight minutes.

You’re watching him through your lashes.

He is, you have decided in the last forty seconds, ridiculously beautiful in this light. It’s not the first time you’re struck by how beautiful Valarr is. You decided it the first time, nearly three years ago, when he first crossed the room to greet you, and you had thought, briefly and without sentiment, oh, that face is going to be a problem. 

You’ve continued to think that in intervals since: when he wakes up next to you in the morning with the white streak at his temple sleep-mussed, when he comes out of his shower with nothing but a towel slung around his hips, when he laughs without performing it. He is, you have come to accept, simply a beautiful problem you’ve been living with for thirty-six months.

In the lamp light, he’s at his worst. The silver at his temple catches the dimmed bulb. The dark of the rest of his hair has gone floppy at the edges. His nose is long and elegant in shadow. The line between his brows surfaces when he reads. His lower lip is bitten where he’s been worrying it for the last forty seconds, and his eyelashes are long and dark. The long, elegant fingers of his left hand are tapping, faintly, at the edge of the page in a rhythm you don’t think he’s fully aware of.

He’s in a thin grey t-shirt and the loose dark linen pyjama bottoms you bought him for Christmas. The flat of his toned stomach pillows your cheek. A muted warmth comes up through the cotton when Valarr breathes. You can feel his pulse faintly against the corner of your jaw. A slow, steady, easy rhythm of him. The resting heart of a man who is, on every measurable metric, content.

You think, then, about the thing beneath the gold.

Even when you first met Valarr, he wasn’t all gold. You had thought he was, in October of year one. Through the flowers and the careful kisses and the can I. You had braced for the patient lesson plan, assuming the iron would have to come from you.

And then, at the edges, you had begun to find something else in your Valarr. 

The fixed, immortalising quality of his attention across rooms in those early weeks, which was not the gaze of a charming boy at all. The cufflinks lined up no matter how desperate he was. The phone call about the man at the bar.

You never shamed him for it. You had nurtured that dark edge in him, quietly, inch by inch. You were, after all, the one who taught him to bite in March of year two. The one who taught him to hold you down. To say mine, and good girl, and the unhurried narrating filth Valarr hadn’t known was in him. Each thing you had asked of him, he had folded into himself with the relief of a man being told that the dark thing behind his teeth was, in fact, allowed to exist. 

But he’s never fully taken. Not without you partially holding the leash. He’s always been asking.

You let the paperback fall closed.

“Val.”

He makes a small sound at the back of his throat.

“You haven’t turned that page.”

His stomach contracts under your cheek. A laugh, embarrassed.

“No,” he says in agreement. “I haven’t.”

“Where'd you go?” you ask.

He sets the memo on the nightstand with a papery whisper as it lands on the wood. His hand returns to your hair, brushing a strand off your temple with his knuckle.

“Work,” he replies, “Sorry, my love.”

You gaze up at him.

He looks down at you. Warm. A little tired. The crease between his brows softens as he meets your gaze. He does this when you look up at him. Three years, every time, the same expression: a man who can’t quite believe what he's been allowed to keep you.

“What's wrong?” he asks softly.

“Nothing.”

“You've got a face on,” he informs you sagely. 

Your eyes narrow, albeit playfully. “I haven't got a face on.”

“You've got the face on, my love.” His thumb traces the arc of your eyebrow fondly. “The thinking face. Tell me.”

You push up off his stomach, rolling onto your side. Prop on one elbow. You bend and press your mouth to the cotton over his sternum. Valarr’s heart picks up under your lips. 

“My love?”

You kiss him again, higher this time. The soft hollow at the base of his throat where his pulse drums. The clean baseline of his soap and the warmer chemistry of his skin underneath. You drag your mouth, unhurried, along the underside of his jaw, where the faint trace of his evening stubble drags lightly against your lip.

“Just thinking about you,” you tell him.

Valarr’s hand goes flat against your back, fingers spreading, settling. 

“Yeah?”

You hear the quiet pleasure in that. 

“Yeah.”

“What about me?”

You set your chin on his chest.

“That I love you,” you tell him frankly. 

Valarr’s face folds, the corner of his eyes tightening. His other hand comes up at once to find the side of your face, his thumb sweeping along your cheekbone.

“My love,” he says gently, fondly.

You lean into his touch. “That you're a wonderful lover.”

He looks down with a wry chuckle. “Where is this going?”

You hum, a slight twitch at the corner of your mouth. “Somewhere good. Promise.”

“You're making me nervous.”

“I know I am,” you breathe against his skin. “Stay with me.”

“Mm.”

“You are, Val. You're attentive. Patient. You read me better than anyone ever has. You know my body, and you treat it like—” You pause, stroking the silver at his temple with your fingertip. The white hairs are coarser than the dark; you’ve always found, slightly wirier, a small tactile pleasure you’re routinely smug about being the only woman in the world to know. “You’re stupidly, ridiculously, unfairly handsome. And the way you look at me. The way you have always looked at me, from the first time. As though I might dissolve under your hand.”

Valarr’s expression softens further. “Because I always think you might.”

“I know.”

“Three years and I still can't believe I get to have you.”

“I know, Val.”

He turns his face into your palm, shutting his eyes for half a beat. You feel the small grain of his stubble against your wrist. The warm press of his cheek into your hand.

“My golden Val,” you whisper lovingly. 

His mouth goes slack, pressing closer. “Yours.”

There’s a lull between you, and you let it sit for a while.

“There's an edge to you, though,” you remark carefully after several minutes. 

His eyes crack open. Valarr doesn’t flinch, but you watch his focus sharpen, his thumb stop moving on your cheekbone. He has gone, in the space of a breath, utterly quiet.

You examine him. “Don't go away from me.”

“I'm not,” he answers smoothly.

“You are,” you say. “A little. I can feel you leaving. Come back to me.”

He breathes out, his hand drifting down to rest at your jaw. The slow, careful press of his palm there follows, the heel of his hand against the side of your throat.

“I'm here.”

“Valarr.”

“I'm here, my love,” he repeats, but you hear the caution in his voice.

“Look at me.”

He looks at you.

“Don't be ashamed,” you tell him.

He works to swallow. “I'm not ashamed.”

Your eyes narrow slightly. “Val.”

His jaw moves, rippling once as his eyes drop. “A little ashamed.”

“I know.”

His brows furrow. “You shouldn't have to—”

“Stop.”

You take his face in both hands. You tip it down to you, setting your mouth on his. A sustained press, closed-mouthed. The kind of kiss whose only purpose is to tell him you’re not leaving, that you’re right here, his.

Valarr kisses you back with a low, throaty sound. His hand proceeds to the side of your throat, fingers gentle. You break the kiss with your forehead against his.

“I like that side of you,” you breathe against his mouth.

He stills.

“Do you hear me?” you pose. “I like that side of you.”

Valarr opens his eyes, searching your face. You’ve seen this expression perhaps eight times in three years.

“You like—”

You press your forehead closer against his. “I’ve always liked it, pretty thing. It’s part of you, Val. I've known about it since month four. I'm not afraid of it, or put off by it. I've been quietly encouraging it for two and a half years, and I want you to know I've been doing it on purpose."

He stares.

“On purpose.”

“Of course, on purpose,” you tell him, almost insulted by the disbelief in his voice. “I don't do anything by accident. Not with you.”

Valarr goes quiet, then. A stillness that tells you he’s processing something you’re not privy to just yet, an internal mechanism of him moving. Memory by memory works through the beautiful slopes of his face. Those times you’ve coaxed that silky, dark edge out of him or driven him to the edge where it would slip out, how you’ve never once pulled back, encouraging it in your own subtle way. 

“Do you prefer it?” he asks lastly, his voice pitched low. 

You stare. “What?”

“That side of me,” he clarifies cautiously. “Do you prefer it?”

You shake your head. “No.”

“My love—”

“No. Listen to me very carefully.” You hold his eyes. Neither of you blinks. “I like both. Equally. Completely. I love Valarr who brings me tea with honey when my sinuses hurt. I love Valarr who knows my body better than anyone has ever known it and treats it like a fucking cathedral. Because you do. I feel adored with you. I love Valarr who’s in this bed right now with his hand in my hair, looking at me like he can't believe I'm real.” His throat works, softening, almost bashful. Your voice pitches lower. “And I love Valarr who will fuck me hard when I ask him to. Who bites and grips and holds me down. Who comes inside me with his hand on my throat and tells me I'm his. That man is also you. That man has always been you, Val.”

He’s quiet.

A muscle moves in his jaw. Valarr looks shy, you realise. He does the wry duck of the head you used to get from him in year one when you'd catch him watching you across rooms. The boyish, unstudied embarrassment of a man who’s spent his entire life in front of cameras and is, only in this bed, only with you, occasionally caught.

You laugh gently. “Oh, come here.”

You pull him in. Wrap your arms around his neck, tug him down so his face is pressed into the side of your throat, and you can hold the back of his head.

Valarr folds into you without hesitation. His arms come around your waist. His face presses into the curve of your neck, and you register the unsteady breath he releases there. A long, quiet thing. One of those deep breaths he saves for the rare moments he is being held instead of holding.

You stroke through his hair, waiting until he steadies. Then you press your mouth to his ear.

“I want to try something.”

He shifts against you.

“What?” he wonders quietly.

You thread your fingers through his soft hair, caressing the silver streak. “I want you to use me, Val.”

The whole of him goes utterly, painfully still.

It takes over a minute for him to find his voice again. “Love—”

“Just listen,” you say with soft urgency, holding him to you. “I want you to use me. Fuck me raw and mean. Take complete control. Do all the things you've been thinking about and not allowed yourself to do. Every dark thought, the ones you think you can't ask me for.”

He doesn't speak.

“If you're not comfortable, that's the end of it,” you say softly. “I’ll never bring it up again. Not once. We continue exactly as we are. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

You kiss his hair. “Say it back to me, pretty thing.”

“You'll never bring it up again,” he says quietly, almost dazed. “If I'm not comfortable.”

“Right. But if you wanted to. If you wanted to indulge that side, explore it… Then I want to as well. You have permission, Val. You’ve always had permission because I trust you.”

A long quiet.

“My love.”

You press your mouth to his hair again. “Yes?”

“I don’t know what to—”

“Don't say anything yet,” you cut in gently. “Think about it. You have all the time you need. No pressure. None. Ever.”

He nods against your skin.

You tip his face up and kiss him. With a hand at the side of his face, the way you've been kissing him since year one. Valarr’s mouth is warm, familiar. His lower lip catches against yours, and you taste the faint chemistry of his evening. The espresso he had after dinner, the trace of mint at the corner of his mouth from his toothpaste.

“I love you, sweet girl,” he whispers against your mouth with quiet desperation.

“I know,” you reassure him.

“More than—”

You press another urgent kiss to his mouth. “I know, Val.”

You kiss the corner of his mouth. His temple. You let him pull you in and fold you against his chest in the careful, absorbed manner he’s always used, and you let him reach over and turn off the lamp without untangling himself from you.

He sleeps with his arms locked around you.

You feel him settle. The drawn breath of him against the crown of your hair. His hand at the small of your back has gone heavy. The smell of his skin warms against your face—Bergamot, cedar, and the warmer animal note that lives at the base of his throat.

But you can feel Valarr thinking. It hums in the faint tension that never quite leaves the muscle of his arm. His pulse, when you set your fingertips to the inside of his wrist, hasn’t eased all the way down for sleep.

You smile in the dark, turning your face into his throat and let him think.

He thinks for a long, long time.

You drift off before he does.

The week that passes is, on the surface, ordinary. 

Valarr goes to work. You go to work. He calls you on Tuesday on his way out of an offsite, and you talk for forty minutes about nothing. He brings flowers on Wednesday. Purple anemones, the ones you said you liked, and he enjoys giving you things you like. He kisses you Friday morning on the temple before leaving for the gym, attentive, fond, the warm press of his mouth in your sleep-tangled hair.

Throughout, you note the weight of his thinking.

He’s doing it under everything, a background hum. He’s even more attentive than usual. The hyper-focused warmth of a man who’s been given a piece of homework he intends to do well on.

You don’t bring up your late-night conversation once.

Saturday night, you’re out. A dinner with your old roommate and her husband. The dinner runs long. You drink more chianti than you planned. It’s nearly midnight when the cab finally pulls up to the building, and you let yourself in with your own penthouse key, calling out an automatic I'm home. You’re slipping out of your coat in the foyer when—

Wrong.

No. Not wrong. Different.

You pause with one arm half out of the sleeve.

The penthouse is dark. The lamps are turned down to the lowest setting, almost theatrical. The city is laid out in the long glass at the far end of the living room, golden but cold at this distance. The air carries him faintly. The woody base of his soap, something close to bergamot, at the base of his throat.

You finish slipping out of the coat, holding it on your arm. Then you step carefully into the doorway of the living room.

Valarr is on the couch.

Not in the centre. Off to one end, in the long shadow where the lamp light doesn't quite reach. Bare feet on the rug, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee. A glass of bourbon held loose between two fingers—index and middle, the others curled toward his palm—resting on his thigh. 

He wears a black shirt, barely buttoned, the collar open well past the second button so you can see the hollow at the base of his throat and the faint blue-shadowed line of his collarbones under the fine cotton. The sleeves are rolled, neatly, to mid-forearm, exactly the way you like on him. The rolled cuffs sit just below his elbow, exposing the long cut tendons of his inner forearm and the soft veins along the underside of his wrist where they vanish into his palm. Hair damp. Recently showered. The pale streak at his temple dark with it, plastered slightly to the side of his head, the rest of his hair falling forward over his brow in that loose post-shower way that you have, if you’re truthful, never been entirely able to look at without losing a small portion of your composure.

His face, when it turns to you, is—

You stop.

His gaze is not warm. It’s not the tired warmth of a man waiting up to ask you about your night. There’s something fixed about it. Steady. Dark in a particular register you’ve seen flicker, briefly, two or three times in three years, and have never, before tonight, seen settle for longer than a glimpse.

Less golden. More predator, more dragon.

Valarr doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t stand.

A tingling, cold shiver ripples the length of your spine.

In a quiet, private corner of yourself, you observe the following: your boyfriend has been thinking intently for six days. Your boyfriend has, in your absence, showered, drunk a few mouthfuls of bourbon, dimmed the lamps, and arranged himself on a couch in a half-buttoned black shirt with his sleeves pushed up. Your boyfriend has put a stage together for you, and your boyfriend has placed himself at the centre of it. When he turns his head to look at you, his face has a dark, collected quality to it.

In an even smaller, quieter corner of yourself, you observe: he’s so beautiful you can’t look at him directly. You have to look at him in pieces. The line of his throat first. Then the line of his sleeve. Then that veiny hand on the glass. Then his mouth.

You wet your lips.

“Hi,” you call out, testing.

Valarr doesn’t answer.

“You waited up.”

“I did,” he agrees, voice low.

His voice has gone smoky. Not the smooth, charming Valarr voice. Not the rawer, boyish one underneath when you take him apart. Something further down than both. The voice of a man who’s been sitting alone in the half-dark with a glass of bourbon and a thought, and has worked the thought through to its end.

“Valarr.”

“Come here.”

You hesitate.

A brief thing, but you hesitate. Not from fear. From a bright, unsettled curiosity that wants to test the boundary. You’ve been in charge of this room for three years. Even the few times he’s had you against a wall, even the few times he’s bent you over a counter and fucked you into it, you’ve been holding the reins.

You set your coat down on the bench. This is a test. You want to see him do it again, want to see if he can commit. 

“How was—”

“Come here.”

Sharper. The smoky voice has acquired an edge, an edge that lives just under the golden surface, and your breath catches before you have time to be embarrassed about it.

You go.

You walk across the rug. Stop in front of him. Valarr sits looking up at you, the bourbon set aside on the side table without a sound. He hasn’t put his hands on you yet. He drags his eyes over you instead. Leisurely, no apology, drinking in every line shamelessly, possessively. From the heels you haven’t stepped out of, up the dark stockings, the hem of the dress where the wool has ridden up an inch from the cab, the swell of your hips, your waist, your throat above the collar, your parted mouth.

The look lands as if it were a hand.

He stands. One motion. Suddenly too close. Valarr’s hands come up and take your face. Both of them. The long, elegant fingers along your jaw, his thumbs at your cheekbones, gentle in their hold but absolutely settled. He tilts your face up to him.

For the first time in three years, Valarr doesn’t ask.

He looks at you.

He looks at you for a long beat. You wait for the kiss he usually gives you, but it doesn’t come. He doesn’t speak. Only gazes at you the way he’s looked at you a thousand times—the immortalising look, the focused-fascinated drink—except now there’s something underneath it, something darker, and the reverent question that’s always lived at the bottom of that look is gone. The look is, for the first time, the look of a man who’s stopped asking.

This close, you can see his eyelashes. The long dark fan of them. The brown eye now almost black, the blue one bright under the lamp light. The faint shadow under his cheekbone where he’s been clenching his jaw for an hour. The slight parting of his lips. The fine bone at the bridge of his nose, half a centimetre from yours.

Your breath hitches.

Valarr hears it. His mouth moves. Just slightly. Not a smile, that dark corner tug again.

“Val—”

“Be quiet, my love.”

It comes out low, almost gentle. The endearment lands in its usual place. The instruction does not.

A bright shock runs through you. Valarr has never once told you to be quiet. You open your mouth, then let it close.

You decide—in the half-second of his thumb stroking once along your cheekbone—that you’ve asked him for this. That you’ve given him every key. That if you’re going to feel the edge of him, you have to let him hold it, fully, and he can’t hold it fully if you keep your hand on it too. You decide to let him have the reins for once. You decide to feel it.

You stay quiet.

His thumb strokes again. A pleased sound escapes him at the back of his throat. Valarr’s palm sets against the side of your jaw, the heel of it under your ear, his fingers spread back into the small, fine hairs at your nape. He turns your face, fractionally, the way a man might turn an art piece he’s examining in good light.

“Look at you,” he murmurs.

His voice has a brow furrow in it. You can hear it without looking. The line between his brows that’s been there all week, the same line that was there over the memo Wednesday, working a problem.

“Look at you in this dress. Out at dinner. Laughing. Drinking. With your friends. While I sat here for three hours thinking about you.”

You start to speak. He sets his thumb, gently, against your lower lip.

“No.”

You swallow.

A small, pleased sound hums at the back of his throat. “Good girl.”

His other hand drops to the buttons of your dress.

He undoes the first. Then the second. The cool air of the apartment reaches your sternum. Valarr doesn't look down at his hands. He keeps his eyes on you the entire time. The act of undressing you is a thing he’s set himself, tonight, to enjoy. You feel the faint warm brush of his knuckle against the bare skin of your stomach as the third button gives, and the fourth, and the fifth.

You watch his face the entire time.

You watch the small absorbed concentration in his expression. The faint line returns between his brows. His eyes follow the line of skin he’s uncovering, then return to your face, then back. His mouth has parted wider. The pink swell of his bitten lower lip is faintly damp now. He’s breathing through it, shallow, the long line of his throat working when he swallows.

He undoes the last button at your hip.

He sets his palms flat on your shoulders and draws the dress carefully off you. The wool slides down your arms, pools at your feet.

“Out of the heels.”

You step out. The world shrinks down by three inches. The weight of the room shifts around the lost height, and shifts again when Valarr steps in closer. He’s now noticeably taller than he was a moment ago, and the long line of his chest in the half-buttoned black shirt is at the level of your eyes.

“Valarr—”

“Quiet, my love.”

His hands find your waist, turning you. Controlled. Deliberate. He draws you back against him. Your spine to the front of his black shirt, and through the fine cotton, you register the solid line of his chest at your back. Through the linen of his pyjamas, you register that Valarr is hard. Has been. Possibly for the entire hour he’s been waiting for you.

His mouth comes down to the side of your throat. He breathes against you without kissing. The heat of his exhale at the hinge of your jaw burns. The faint grain of his stubble against the soft skin under your ear scratches.

His hands come up. Take hold of the front of your bra with both hands. Pull. The clasp is at the back, but Valarr isn’t interested in the clasp.

The seam at the front gives. The sharp tear of fine fabric tears through the room. The bra comes away in Valarr’s hand. You gasp before you can catch it. He sets the ruined thing aside on the side table without looking. His palms return, flat, to cup your breasts. The cool air of the apartment brushes against the bare skin of your chest, and you swallow down a gasp when Valarr rolls your breasts thoughtfully in his palms. 

He laughs. Once, low and dark. Right at your ear.

“You're going to talk back, aren't you, my love? You always do. You don't know how to be quiet. Such a difficult woman. Such a hard, beautiful, difficult woman.”

One hand drops down the line of your stomach. The other stays cupped over your left breast, his thumb working a slow drag across your nipple that pulls a faint, involuntary noise out of your throat.

“All week I've been thinking about you. Did you know? Of course, you knew. You always know.” You hear a silky, affectionate chuckle behind you. “You set it on me Wednesday night, and you went back to sleep. You knew I'd think about it. You knew I wouldn't sleep properly until I had an answer for you.”

His hand finds the top of your stockings.

“I have an answer for you, sweet girl.”

Valarr sets two fingers under the lace edge. The fine fibres go taut against his hand. Then—

He rips.

You gasp. The bright sound of stockings tearing reaches you. The lace at the top gives way, the long ladder running down the inside of your thigh, and his hand spreads flat against the bare skin of your thigh through the rip. Hot. Purposeful.

“Val—”

“I told you to be quiet, love.”

He rips the other side. The same gripping, unapologetic pull. The same brilliant sound of fabric giving up. The second stocking comes apart along the inside of your other thigh, and Valarr’s hand splays there too, and the cool air of the apartment finds the bare skin of your thighs through the shredded mess of what had been, two minutes ago, a hundred-and-forty pair of stockings.

You register, low and immediate, that you’re very wet.

So does Valarr. 

His hand has come up, exploratory, two fingers pressing flat over the thin silk of your underwear, and he goes still for half a second. A pleased hum comes out of him that you haven’t heard before in three years.

“Oh, my love,” he says fondly. “You're soaked.”

Silence. He has told you to be quiet. You bite your own cheek. 

“Look at you. I haven't done a single thing yet. I've torn a bra and a pair of stockings, and you're already —” His fingers press against the silk. “Were you wet in the cab? You knew what you were coming home to.”

Valarr hooks both thumbs in the silk at your hips. Pulls. The underwear gives at the side seam. He has to pull harder this time, and then it gives entirely. Valarr draws the ruined silk away from you and sets it on the side table on top of the ruined bra.

You stand naked in the half-light of the living room with Valarr Targaryen, fully clothed, pressed against your back.

“Down,” he says. “On your knees.”

His hand presses, low, between your shoulder blades, and you go.

You go forward awkwardly, your bare heels coming up off the rug, and you go down onto your knees on the heavy wool. The immediate roughness of the weave registers on the bare skin of your kneecaps, the dense pile against your shins. He follows you down. Not all the way. Valarr kneels behind you, and the linen of his pyjama bottoms is at the backs of your thighs, the fine cotton of his shirt at your spine, and the hard line of him, still clothed, against your bare lower back.

Both his hands come around. One settles flat and claiming on your stomach. The other goes up to your throat. Not gripping, his fingers are too loose, but the heel of his palm settles at your collarbone. The way you’ve set your hand on him a thousand times.

The way he has not, before tonight, set his on you.

“You like this so much,” he murmurs in your ear. “Don't you?”

You don't answer. You’ve been told twice now to be quiet.

A hum. “You can answer.”

“Yes,” you rasp.

Another hum. “Yes, what?”

“Yes, Val.”

A pleased chuckle. The hand at your throat strokes once with the long line of his fingers.

“You set this on me Wednesday night, and you went out for chianti tonight,” he says quietly. “You let me sit here and think about it for six days. You knew exactly how I'd be when you walked in. You wanted me like this.”

He nips lightly at the lobe of your ear.

“You think I haven't been hard for a week, my love. You think I haven't been on calls, in meetings, in the back of cars, thinking about every single thing I'd never let myself do to you. I've been picturing this. You. Naked. On my floor. Soaked through. Quiet, for once in your life, because I told you to be.”

His thumb drags over the centre of you, over the tight peak. You breathe out, unsteady.

“Don't be angry,” you whisper.

“I'm not angry.”

“You sound—”

“I'm not angry,” Valarr interrupts quietly. “I'm thinking. I've been thinking all night about you. Be quiet, my love. Listen."

His hand at your stomach drops, sliding deliberately between your hips. Valarr pushes your knees further apart on the rug, gently but purposefully. He arranges your hips at an angle he wants them. His other hand spreads at your nape. You feel, distantly, the warning of the carpet under your knees, the way it’s going to burn in the morning.

“Lean forward.”

He pushes. The flat of his hand at your nape, the gentle, insistent press that puts you down onto your forearms on the rug. Your back arches. Your hips rise. The cool air of the apartment hits the bare wetness of your cunt.

Behind you, the whisper of linen fills the air as Valarr undresses. The clean thud of cotton landing on the side of the couch sounds. He’s thrown the shirt. Valarr has never once thrown a piece of clothing in three years you’ve been together, and you file it; you file it; you’ll think about it later.

His hand returns to your nape.

He drags the head of his cock, leisurely, through the wet of you, and you suck in a breath. He doesn’t push in. Not yet. There’s only the unhurried drag, the burning heat of him along the slick of you. You bite the inside of your cheek. Hard. You’re not allowed to speak, and you’re not allowed to take the way you usually do. You’re forgetting how not to.

“My love.”

You try to find your voice as Valarr drags his cock between your folds again, coating himself in you. “Yes?”

“Tell me what you wanted,” he says calmly.

“I—Val, please—”

“Tell me.”

He drags the head of him through you again, using his thumb to part your folds, opening the slick of you against him. Valarr looks down. You can't see him, but you can feel the angle of his attention, the exact spot where he’s rubbing himself against you, at the slick mess of you against him.

“Use me,” you breathe.

A low, curious sound rumbles in his chest. 

You swallow over your dry tongue, tingling all over. “You… Use me. I asked you to use me.”

“You did, my love,” he agrees, almost lazily. 

“Please, Val. Need you.”

A pleased, dark sound builds at the back of his throat.

“I'm going to use you,” he confirms gently, the swollen head of his cock, dragging back and forth. You can feel his pre-cum mixing with your arousal, your pelvic tightening around the emptiness inside you. “I've been thinking about it for a week. I'm going to use you exactly the way I've been thinking about, sweet girl. I'm going to wreck you on this rug, my love, and I'm going to enjoy it.”

He pushes in.

To the hilt. One fluid stroke. No pause. No asking. No half-second of letting you adjust. The sound that tears out of you is loud, choked. Valarr doesn't soften for it. His hand at your nape holds you down where he wants you. His other hand finds the curve of your hip, fingers spread, and he stays in you. The deep stretch of him against the inside of you is shocking, the thick heat splitting you apart, the pulse of him against the tender walls. 

Valarr breathes out slowly through his teeth. A sound of pure, masculine satisfaction. 

“Oh,” he breathes. The half-word cracks.

He pulls out. Almost all the way, then pushes back in. Hard. Again. Harder. The slap of his hips against the back of your thighs echoes through the room. The drag of him through you leaves a trail of fire; the wet, slick sounds of how ready you are unmistakable, too loud. You try to focus on the cool stretch of your spine. The dense burn of wool under your forearms. 

Valarr fucks you the way a man fucks a thing he’s been told he’s allowed to wreck completely.

“Look at you taking it,” he drawls behind you, his voice silky, faint breathlessness catching the syllables. “Filthy thing. Greedy thing. You wanted this, didn't you? Tell me how long.”

“Months, Val—”

“Months. My pretty, polite, perfect girl. Sitting across from me at dinners, thinking about being on her knees on my carpet. All those nights I was being good to you, my love. Gentle. Patient. Asking. Were you wanting this then, too?”

“Yes—”

“Were you lying in our bed waiting for me to stop being so fucking gentle and just take you?”

You muffle a moan against your forearm when he thrusts into you at a particularly shallow angle. “Val—”

“Tell me.”

“Yes, I was—”

“Good girl. Look at how honest you are when I've got you like this,” he says, breathless, his fingers tightening at your hip, holding you in position. “Look at how truthful my good girl gets with my cock inside her. You're a different creature down here, aren't you, my love? All that steely composure. All that poise. And here you are with your face on a rug and your knees apart and your cunt dripping for me. What would anyone say if they could see you right now? They'd never believe you. They'd never believe what a filthy, desperate, greedy thing you are for me.”

Valarr’s hand at your hip slides up your back, across the wing of your shoulder, and grips at the back of your neck like the scruff of a creature he means to hold. His palm spreads. His fingers press into the muscle on either side of your spine. Holding.

He pulls out. Stops himself, catches the edge of his own discipline, and pushes back in with a slower, purposeful slip. He leans forward over you. His mouth comes down to the long curve at the back of your neck, and Valarr sinks his teeth in.

Just hard enough that you feel his teeth in your flesh. Hard enough that the sound you make is half a yelp.

He sucks the bite afterwards.

“All week, my love,” he says conversationally. “Do you want to know what I've been thinking about?”

“Yes, yes.”

“That’s my good girl.”

His hand, the one that had been at your hip, slides down between your bodies and finds the clenched, weeping centre of you. His finger works you with the precise, dedicated focus, exactly at the spot where his cock keeps pushing into you. A wrecked sound escapes you at the dual sensation. Valarr’s voice fills your ear. 

Low, smoky, silken, every consonant placed with the same patient attention he's giving the centre of you.

“I've been thinking about all the things I'd never let myself say to you. Filthy, ugly things, my love. The kind of things polite men aren't supposed to think. I've been thinking about you bent over my desk in the office.” He pauses at the hungry sound you let rip and huffs, low and fond. “About how I've watched men look at you for three years and sat there and smiled. About every time I touch you, I have to count the seconds before I'm allowed to move. About everything I could do to you if I just stopped counting."

A wet sound bubbles at the back of your throat between every lazy, rolling thrust. “Val—”

“I've been thinking about your mouth, sweet girl. About how it looks when you're talking to my mother at brunch. About how my mother thinks you're a perfect girl. The perfect heiress. The most well-mannered young woman she has ever met, she said that to me in October. Did I ever tell you?”

A laugh, soft, dark, genuinely amused.

“And here you are,” he coos. “On a Saturday night with your face on a rug and your perfect mouth on my floor. What would she say? What would anyone say, hm? They'd never believe what a filthy thing you are for me.”

“Val, please, Val—”

“I've been thinking about how good you'd look, anywhere, with my hand at your throat,” he goes on pleasantly.

His hand drops back to your hip. He pulls almost out. Slams in. The heat of him hammers through you, sending you forward by several inches. Your breath comes in punched pieces, your heart tripping over itself. The carpet burns, rough wool rubbing against your forearms and knees. The bone at the side of your hip, where it’s closest to the floor, aches pleasantly, mixing with blinding pleasure between your thighs where Valarr fucks into you. His chest is sweat-slick where it brushes your back when he leans in. The long damp line of him is hot, the smell of him gone fully animal now, the bergamot warmed by the salt of him. The hot, heavy musk of a man who’s been hard for an hour and is only now being permitted to claim what he wants.

Valarr’s hand slides up, splaying low on your stomach. He flattens his palm there under your navel. The heel of it pressed in. Then he stops moving—fully seated, deep—and holds.

You feel him through every inch of yourself. 

Through your own body, against his hand. The hot thick line of him deep inside you, pulsing. The insistent throb of him against your soft inner walls. His palm pressed flat on the outside. The impossible faint pulse of yourself between the two. Like he’s holding himself in his own hand through you, like your body is the thinnest possible distance between his cock and his hand. 

You’re aware, suddenly, of how full you are. Of how thoroughly Valarr has nestled himself inside you. Of the warm, wet stretch of yourself open around him, sucking him in deeper, of the slick of you running down the inside of your thigh, of the slow, constant clench of yourself trying to hold him deeper without your permission. Your back arches slightly, instinctively. Your hips lift the fractional hopeful inch.

“Feel that?” he breathes against the shell of your ear.

“Yes, I, Val—”

He kisses your damp skin. “Feel where I am. Feel how deep, my love. Feel my hand.”

He presses. Ever so slightly. The pressure makes you gasp, clawed hand tearing at the rug beneath you.

“That's me,” he rasps, his hot breath burning against your neck. “That's where I am inside you. Right there. Right under my hand.”

He starts moving again. Slower, more punishing this time. Each thrust drags the long, thick length of Valarr’s cock through you and presses you down against his hand again. His palm stays flat on your stomach the whole time so that you can feel him from inside and outside at once. 

The pulse of him against your inner wall washes away all else. You register the faint slick of his sweat against your belly under that hand. The unhurried withdraw—the sudden ache of emptiness, the rim of you fluttering helplessly around the head of him before he mercifully sinks in again, like he can’t be parted from you too long—and the slide back. The wet sound of him entering you fills your ears, over and over. Followed by a strangled, involuntary noise that escapes you each time.

“I've been thinking about you carrying my child.”

You go still, your breath catching.

Valarr doesn't stop.

He fucks into you on the word child—once, firm, deep, the head of him reaching the high pulse of you in a way that makes your toes curl on the rug—and his hand presses harder against your belly. His other hand at the back of your neck tightens. His voice has gone lower. Silken. The quiet register of a man who has, for six days, been thinking about nothing but this.

“I couldn't stop thinking about it,” he goes on, words turning more ragged. “I'd be on a call, I'd be in a meeting, and I'd be thinking about putting a child in you, sweet girl."

Another thrust. Deeper, all the way to the bottom. The press of his palm into your belly. A small wet whimper slips past your clenched teeth.

“About filling you up.”

A thrust. Valarr’s hand spreads wider. His long, careful fingers rubbing across the soft of your stomach. The head of him bumps that high, impossible place inside you that makes your spine arch and your hips push back into Valarr’s thrust, seeking more.

“About watching it take.”

A sound, maybe half sob, bubbles past your lips. Valarr pushes back into you. The wet smack of his hips against the back of your thighs making him sigh. A bead of his sweat drops between your shoulder blades, sliding into the dip of your spine.

“About your belly going round under my hand. Just like this. The same hand. Right here.”

Valarr drags his palm, flat, in a slow circle low across your stomach. His thumb traces the small soft rise where, in some imagined version of this, his child would be growing under his hand. Your hips give a small involuntary roll up into the press of his palm, seeking more pressure.

He registers it.

“Oh, my love.”

He presses harder, so hard your vision nearly blacks out, his cock pulsing inside you so hard that Valarr hisses behind you. He doesn’t stop thrusting into you despite it, going shallow and deep, so deep you could feel him at the back of your throat. 

“I want to spread you open, my love,” he gasps. “I want to spread you open and watch myself go into you. I want to do it again and again until your body learns. I want to make a habit of it. Every night. Every morning. I want to put myself inside you and not stop until you take. Until it takes."

He pulls out almost all the way, the long drag of him through your swollen cunt, and sinks back in to the hilt. He stays there.

“Look at how you open for me. Every. Single. Time. Look at how easy it is. Look at how your body knows me. Like we were made for each other.”

Valarr drags out again. Slower. Sinks back in. Even slower, gliding past every inflamed nerve. The deliberate watching cadence of a man who’s doing this so you can feel each individual stroke. So you can feel each filling. So you can register, in its leisurely deliberatness, that he’s taking you and giving you back to yourself, emptier, and then taking you again.

“I want to see you swollen with it, my love.” His voice is unravelling. The smooth, controlled Valarr is gone. This, you realise through your pleasure haze, is Valarr undone, speaking of his darkest, most private fantasies. “Heavy. I want my hand here for nine months, love. I want every man who looks at you to know what I am to you, what I've done. What you let me do. Every time I see you in a dress in a room of three hundred people, I want them to know that you go home with me, and you let me put myself inside you, and you let me keep me there until it takes.”

He fucks you harder. His hand presses hard against your stomach with each thrust now. Palm flat, the heel of his hand pressing the soft swell of you down onto the next slide of him.

“I want to keep you. I want to keep all of you. Every soft place. Every secret place. Every place a man would never see. I want all of it. I want to mark every inch of you I'm allowed to, and a few I'm not. I want my hand on your stomach in restaurants when you're eight months along, and I want everyone in the goddamn room to see it."

“Fuck, Val, Val—” 

Your voice cracks.

“Some day, my love,” he hisses. “I'm going to breed you exactly like this. I'm going to put a baby in you with my hand here and your face on the floor and your cunt clenching around me, and I'm going to keep you full until it takes, and then I'm going to do it again. Again. Again."

A strained, dazed noise comes out of you. Not a word. Your whole body has gone hot. Liquid. You can feel your face burning into the rug, your nipples burning against the wool, the bright wet ache between your thighs going molten, the absurd impossible pulse of want at the place where his palm is pressed flat to your stomach.

“Not tonight. I'm not going to tonight. I know. But I'm going to think about it. The entire time. Every time I'm inside you tonight. Every time I come in you. I want you to know that, my love. I want you to know what I'm thinking when I finish."

“Yes, yes.”

“Tell me you want me to think about it.”

You squirm, your whole body one massive coil of pleasure. “I want you to think about it, Val—”

He laughs softly, relieved. “My good, beautiful, ruined girl. My wolf.”

He fucks you harder.

His hand returns to your throat, his fingers loose. Valarr leans over you now, the length of his strong body along the length of yours, his mouth at your ear. His hips work in deliberate strokes. The burn of the carpet is getting worse. Your forearms feel like they’re on fire, your knees beginning to ache. Each thrust sends your nipples dragging on the rough wool of the rug, a bright burn that threads all the way down into the heat of your stomach and joins, somehow, to the place where his palm stays pressed. To the place where he’s just been telling you he wants to put a child.

You come.

You come with your face turned into the rug and Valarr’s teeth at the back of your shoulder, his hand at your throat. You come hard—a long shuddering ache of it, your whole body locking almost painfully around him, your spine arching up into the long warm pin of his weight—and Valarr fucks you through it without slowing, and his voice, in your ear:

“That's it. There's my filthy, perfect girl. Come on. All of it. Take it. Keep taking it.”

You moan weakly. “Val.”

“My greedy, perfect, filthy girl. Look at you,” he whispers, dazed. “Listen to you. I haven't even properly started, my love."

You’re still pulsing around him, the aftershocks, when his hand at your throat tightens fractionally, and he says—

“Not done. Stay open for me.”

You shudder. Valarr keeps going.

Valarr fucks you through the over-sensitive aftermath. Slower now but not gentler. His hand stays at your throat, his other hand splayed flat under your stomach to keep your hips up at the angle he wants. Dazed, reflexive sounds leave you. The drag of him inside you feels almost torturous when you’re still soft and pulsing. The bright unbearable —

You come again. Shorter, sharper, less prepared. You sob, faintly, against the rug.

“There we go,” he pants. “Look at how greedy you are for me. So greedy for my cock, sweet girl. Such a greedy, beautiful girl.”

Your tongue feels too heavy in your mouth, tied up by sheer pleasure pulsing through your limbs. 

“You can take more,” Valarr declares silkily. 

It’s not a question.

He pulls out, flipping you. The world spins, briefly—your back is on the rug now, the rough wool against your shoulder blades—nd he’s over you, his eyes black, the streak in his hair gone fully damp at the temple. His bitten mouth shines,  aflush high on his cheekbones, and Valarr is peering down at you with the fixed dark focus.

You drink him in.

You take him in for the first time tonight from this angle, and he’s…

He’s unfair, practically impossible. The most beautiful thing your eye has settled on in three years and possibly your life. The flushed, gleaming line of him in the lamplight fills your sight. The white streak, bitten swell of his lower lip where his own teeth have been. The long rope of muscle along the inside of his arm, where he braces by your head. The narrow cut of his hip. The long, lean torso slick with sweat. The wide spread of his shoulders bracing over you.

You make a sound. A small, hungry, appreciative noise. Valarr hears it, and the corner of his mouth crooks.

“Look at you looking at me,” he murmurs lovingly. Almost amused. “My perfect love. Look at you.”

He hooks one of your knees up. Sets it over his shoulder. Drives back in.

You arch, gasping, your mouth staying open.

He fucks you on your back with your knee at his shoulder, the angle deeper, the wool of the rug burning the bare skin of your back and the curve of your other thigh. Your breasts are exposed to him now. Valarr's mouth comes down. He bites—once, hard, on the upper swell—and sucks the bruise after, the long drag of tongue you taught him, then licks across to the centre of you and closes his mouth around a nipple. The shocked noise you make is all impulse.

“Val.”

“Mm.”

“I can't, I can’t, t’much—”

A gentle little hum, considering, then, “You can.”

“I—I’m… much—”

“Mm. I know, my love. I know.”

He lifts his mouth. Looks at you. Something patient, watching. Almost cruel. The boyish wonder is gone, replaced with something more predatory.

“Take it, sweet girl,” he says, a low order.

His pace picks up again, harder, deeper. 

You take it. You take it because there’s nothing else to do. You take it because everything in your body has reached the point of no resistance. You take it because somewhere underneath the oversensitive blinding burn of it, you’re coming again, coming a third time, smaller, longer, the rolling thing of having been used past your own sense of yourself, and Valarr—

Valarr keeps fucking you through it, and his voice, wrecked above you, the flush spreading down his throat, the long lean line of him gleaming, the streak in his hair black with sweat. He bows his forehead to yours.

He hasn’t finished.

He’s been holding off the whole time. The iron self-discipline of three years is now applied in the service of taking you for as long as he wants.

“Val—please—come—”

“Soon,” he drawls, almost dismissively. “You don't decide that anymore. Not tonight. I do.”

He flips you again. You go limp, let him handle your body. You’re entirely his to position by now. Your body gone soft and used, the distant remove of being fucked into the floor by a man who has, finally, stopped asking. Valarr puts you back on your knees, your forearms. His hand slots at your nape. He pushes back in, the wet sound of him sliding into swollen cunt you the loudest thing in the room.

“Stay there for me.”

You stay.

For a count.

You stay through ten thrusts. Twenty. You stay through the burn in your shoulders, the deeper ache in your hips—

And then your arms go.

The tremor at the elbow. The loss of feeling at the wrist. The bright fizz of overworked muscle, and your forearms simply slide forward on the rug. Your cheek hits the wool. Your shoulders come down. Your hips drop a degree—

And then your knees give. They simply quit. Both of them. You collapse forward onto your stomach on the rug with a muffled noise.

Valarr doesn’t stop.

He follows you down. His weight comes with you—the powerful, damp heavy length of him along your spine, his cock still buried in you, his hand still fisted at your nape—and he braces his other hand flat beside your head on the wool, and he—

He doesn’t pull out, doesn’t withdraw to thrust again.

Valarr sinks himself inside to the hilt and stays.

He grinds.

His pelvis presses flush against the curve of your ass. The bone of his hip against the soft of you. His cock buries as deep as he can put it, deeper than he has ever taken you, and he doesn't pull back. He doesn't stroke. He doesn't fuck. He works himself in short, blunt grinds and twitches—the unrelenting, slow press of a man who’s no longer interested in motion, only in depth, in trying with the entire animal focus of his body to push that impossible additional inch into you, to bury himself further than the biology of bodies allows.

The carefully articulate man is gone. There’s only silence behind you, only animal focus. 

What's left underneath is the instinct of a creature trying to put itself into another creature in a way that takes.

He grinds. He stays. He presses.

Valarr’s sweat slicks the long line of your back where his chest has come down on you. Another bead of it rolls between your shoulder blades slowly, and he doesn't notice; he’s somewhere deeper than awareness, the hot ragged broken pant of his breath at the back of your neck, the salt of him heavy in the air. His hand fists tight in your hair. The bone of his hip drives against the soft of your ass—again, again, again—in the constant ungovernable rhythm of a man trying to plant himself.

You can’t move.

You’re pinned. Hips flat to the wool. Knees splayed loose where they had given. Cheek pressed to the carpet. Valarr is heavy. He’s so heavy. The full damp warm crushing weight of him on you, his teeth set against the place where your neck meets your shoulder, and the impossible deep blunt pressure of his cock somewhere high inside you that you’ve not, in three years of being fucked by him, ever felt him reach. He’s not in motion.  There’s only pressure and depth. He’s sheer weight. The warm, wet impossibility of a man trying to get further inside you than he’s ever been.

You feel him through every inch of you.

Through your stomach against the rug, where his hand had been splayed. Through your hips against the floor. The high pulse where the head of him is grinding against the inner wall of you, the small, impossible spot that makes your toes curl. The angle that makes your eyes go wet against the wool, that makes you helplessly clench and flutter around him each time he presses deeper. Through the pulse of yourself between his cock and the rug, between his weight and the floor, the tight pulse of being completely and entirely held in place.

You sob into the wool.

You’re not in pain, you’re not scared, there’s only pleasure so consuming, your entire body has gone numb. Valarr opened your body past where you can hold any logic. There’s only the deep, blunt grinding pressure of him at a place you had not known existed. You’re going to come from this, you realise distantly, from being held down and pressed open and used like a thing that exists only to be filled by him.

The dark hunger gathers low in your stomach, where his hand is no longer splayed because his hand is at the back of your neck again, because he’s no longer narrating, no longer praising, no longer checking. He has, finally, stopped checking.

You are a thing he’s using.

You let yourself be it.

You make a wrecked, broken sound into the rug.

Valarr answers with a groan of his own. Half a word, half a growl, all of it animal. His grind goes harder, the tiny, frantic pressure of him going tighter against you, his hips driving forward in shorter and shorter pulses, and you feel him stutter.

His pace breaks. His rhythm fractures.

“Going to come,” he gasps. “Going to come, my love—inside—tell me—”

“Inside, Val—”

He groans deeply, and it sounds animal. “All of it —”

“All of it—”

Valarr finally breaks.

Teeth at the back of your neck. Weight pressing you flat. A ruined, broken sound at your ear that’s not a word, but instead something older than words. The helpless, drawn-out moan of a man whose body has given itself over to something deeper than reason. He holds inside you. Pulses. The long shuddering release into you, the hot spill of his cum going deep, his hips still working in those compact, relentless grinds long after he should be still. Pressing, pressing, pressing, the unconscious instinct to work himself further, to make sure of it, to push every drop into the impossible space he’s been trying to reach. You feel each pulse of him as a separate event. The shudder runs all the way down the length of his back, where your hand can’t reach.

Valarr stays.

His weight folds on you, his mouth hot at your nape. His pelvis presses flush against your ass, his cock buried to the hilt and softening but not yet leaving. His sweat-slick chest presses against your back, breath ragged in your ear.

He stays for a long time.

You can hear him come back to himself.

The breath against your neck slows. Gradually. The fist in your hair loosens. The hot, tight blind grip of Valarr at your nape unfists, his fingers spreading instead. That diligent, slow spread of a hand that’s remembered, somewhere, that it belongs to a man who loves you. The ragged, animal pant goes quiet. The grinding presses of his hips ease. Valarr sets his forehead down against the back of your shoulder. He breathes.

The shift is total.

You feel it in his body. In the room. In the air over you. The animal that had been pinning you to the floor—the heavy rutting pressing crushing thing that had been working itself deeper into you for the last however-many-minutes—is, all at once, gone. In its place: Valarr. Your golden Val. The attentive, tender man who’s spent three years asking before each thing returned to you between one breath and the next. 

The warm weight of him is a different creature entirely from the heavy, primal grinding thing of two minutes ago.

His hand, the one that had been fisted in your hair, opens. The long fingers spread, gentle, against the side of your skull. He strokes once, soft, behind your ear. His other hand slides off the rug from where it had been braced beside your head and settles, palm-flat and tender, at the curve of your hip. A possessive, soothing weight.

“Oh, my love,” he breathes. His voice has gone soft, frayed. Not a hint in it of the smoky predator from before. “Oh, my love. Look at what you let me do.”

He pulls out carefully. Cool air bites into your flushed skin. You whimper at the loss. He hushes you, soft, his palm flat at the small of your back. You can already feel him dripping out of you, streaking down your inner thigh in thick gushes. 

He kneels behind you.

His thumbs come to either side of you, and he spreads you. Gently. Both hands drawing you apart, and you feel the cool air between your stinging thighs. You feel Valarr looking. Examining. The slow leaking warmth of his cum, beginning to slip free of you, your cunt unable to hold everything he’s put in you inside.

A sound comes out of him. A low, drawn, broken breath. 

“Look at that.” His voice cracks, shaky. “Oh, look at that. Look at you. Look at what I've done to you. Look at how full you are of me, sweet girl.”

He keeps you spread. Scrutinising his work. His thumb rests—not pressing in, just resting—at the rim of where he just spent god knows how many minutes fucking you like an animal. What follows is long focused quiet of him drinking the sight of his own mess leaking out of you down the inside of your thigh.

“Mine,” he says, low, silky. “Mine. Mine.”

He lets it leak. He watches for a long time.

Then his hands ease. Valarr lets you close. He sets his palm flat on the curve of your hip. Smoothing. He drags his thumb tenderly through the wet on the inside of your thigh, lifting the thumb and pressing the warm wet print against the small of your back and marking you with the mess of yourself. He sets his mouth, after, against the place he has marked with his cum. Kisses it. A soft, loving, closed-mouthed press, almost reverent. The kind of kiss he gave you on the temple this morning before the gym.

The kiss undoes you.

You make a sound. A tiny, low wet sound. Not under your control.

He hears it. The whole quality of him changes like a switch.

“My love.”

He’s back.

Golden Valarr is back, returned, the soft, attentive boyish warmth of him flooding into the room as if it had only been waiting for permission. You feel, through the shift of his body over you, through the change in his breathing, that the dark thing he’s been holding for an hour has, at last, completed its work and stepped aside.

“My love. Hey. Hey.”

His hand comes up to cup the side of your face, where it’s still turned against the wool. His thumb strokes your cheekbone. His other hand settles, possessive but soft, low at your hip.

“Hey. Sweet girl. Look at me,” he urges. “Look at me, sweet girl.”

You make another sound.

“Oh, no," he breathes. “Oh, no, sweet girl. Oh—look at you. Please.”

His voice has gone high and concerned, the voice he uses in the rare instances you’re properly hurt. When you twisted your ankle last winter at Winterfell, when you cut your hand on a glass last summer.

“My love. Talk to me. Please. Are you all right?”

You try to find your voice, and it takes several attempts. “I'm—I'm fine.”

You hear the rush of breath leave him. “Yeah?”

“More than fine,” you whisper weakly.

“Are you sure?” he demands urgently, and you hear the fear in his voice. 

“Val.”

“Please tell me,” he chokes out. “I need you to tell me.”

“I'm sure,” you reassure him softly, your voice a croak. “I'm—Val, I'm more than sure. Come here, pretty thing.”

He gathers you at once.

He moves fully onto the rug and draws you into his lap. Both arms careful, the long careful arrangement of your limbs against his chest. Your head settles into the warm hollow under Valarr’s jaw. The strong, damp line of his chest is against your side. His arm under your knees. His other arm around your back.

You burrow.

You burrow the way you do not, ordinarily, burrow. You press your face into the warmth of his throat, set your fingers weakly into the fine hair at the base of his neck, and stay there. He smells like himself. The salt of his sweat. The clean baseline of his soap underneath. You inhale all of it. You inhale him.

Your eyes prickle.

You’re not a woman who cries easily. You’re a Stark; the cool one; the one who does the holding. You feel a small warm tear leak out of the corner of your eye anyway, run slowly into the fine hair of his throat where your face is pressed, and you feel Valarr’s whole body register it.

He freezes like someone’s struck him.

For one half-beat. Then—

“Oh, my love.”

His arms tighten around you. The hand at your back spreads, drawing you in tighter to his body. His mouth comes down to your hair, and he’s kissing the crown of your head with the small, frantic kisses.

“Oh, sweet girl. Sweet girl. Come here. Let me hold you, let me love you.”

“Val.” His name comes out soft, needy in a way it never is coming from your mouth.

“I've got you,” he whispers fiercely into your skin, glueing you to his body. “I'm right here. I'm right here, sweet girl.”

He rocks you. Faintly. Not a sway you’re sure he’s conscious of. This is the instinct of a man holding a precious thing, the small back-and-forth of his weight on the rug, his arms locked around you, his mouth pressed to your hair.

“My love. My sweet, brave, beautiful, perfect wolf.”

You don't speak. You can't, quite. Not yet. Everything is too big, too loud, and you’re floating in your own body. You make a muffled sound into his throat instead, and Valarr makes one back, low, almost a coo. The smallest endearing wordless noise, a sound you’ve never heard from him before in three years.

You hum into his throat.

The hum vibrates against his pulse. You feel—under your mouth, against his skin—his pulse jump. You feel his arms tighten another fraction, hear his breath catch in his chest.

Valarr kisses your temple. Once. Closed-mouthed. The press of his lips into the fine hair at your hairline.

You sigh. A long unguarded sigh, the kind you would never permit yourself in Valarr’s presence on any ordinary night. The kind he’s been waiting three years to hear.

He kisses your eyebrow.

Then the corner of your eye where the tear had been. Then the bridge of your nose, the small bone there. Each kiss is gentler than the last. You tilt your face into him, blindly, seeking each peck.

“Oh, sweet girl,” he breathes, sounding awestruck. “Oh, you sweet, sweet thing.”

You nuzzle.

You press your face deeper into his throat. You drag your nose unhurriedly along the line of his throat from the line of his jaw to the hollow at the base, and the slight grain of his stubble catches against your cheek, and you make another throaty sound. He shudders faintly. His hand at your back goes flat, those long fingers spread, holding more of you against him.

“Sweet girl.”

Your answering sound is lost in his throat.

“Look at you with me,” he whispers tenderly, pressing a chaste kiss to your skin. 

You drag your mouth slowly across the line of Valarr’s throat. The faintest closed-mouthed press, the slightest open of your lips against his pulse. He breathes out, ragged.

“My love—”

“Mm.”

“You're undoing me,” he jokes quietly, but it comes out strangled. 

You hum. Pleased. The low sound vibrates against the warm hollow at the base of Valarr’s throat, and Valarr—Valarr makes the smallest sound in answer, something low and destroyed that lives somewhere between a laugh and a moan, and his hand at your hip slides up your back and finds the back of your head and holds you there.

“My love. Christ. Look at you.”

You lift your face from his throat and stare at him.

Valarr peers down at you with an expression you’ve not, in three years, seen settle on his face this fully. His eyes are wet. The brown one is almost black, the blue one almost glowing. The white streak at his temple is sweat-darkened still. His mouth is bitten and pink and parted, breathing through it. His cheekbones are flushed. The frenzied colour has gone soft at the edges, less feverish than during the sex, more open, more raw, the high colour of a man whose careful interior fortifications have come down.

You set your hand on the side of Valarr’s face, stroking your thumb along his cheekbone. The way he’s done to you a thousand times in three years, drinking in the faintest tremor under his skin.

He shuts his eyes, turning his face into your palm. 

“Val.”

“Yes, love?”

“You’re so beautiful,” you tell him, and mean it.

His eyes snap open. Valarr laughs. Soft. Surprised. A startled wet laugh, the laugh of a man who’s not, on this evening, expected to be told that.

“Thank you, love,” he says.

“You are,” you insist, drinking his flushed, sweaty appearance. Golden, so golden. “Look at you. Just look at you.”

“I'm a wreck.”

“You're beautiful. My beautiful, golden Val.”

His entire body responds to those words, breath hitching. “You can’t say that to me.”

“Be quiet, Val,” you say sternly, kissing his pulse once. “You don't get to argue with me. Not about this.”

He smiles. The corner of his mouth tugs up. He bows his head, briefly, that wry duck that you’ve always loved on him, the small, modest gesture of a man being told a thing he doesn't quite know what to do with.

You stroke your thumb along the line of his lower lip.

He makes a quiet sound. He turns his face fractionally and catches your thumb with the smallest closed-mouthed kiss. Then he holds it there. His mouth pressed to the pad of your thumb. Eyes shut.

You watch him.

The long lashes lying against his cheekbone. The cut of his jaw under your wrist. The small private pleasure on his face that he is, for once in his life, allowed to be tender out loud. You’re so attracted to him that you almost cannot stand it. He has, in this state, all the careful, gilded beauty he has when he’s in front of a camera, but stripped of the polish.

You bend your face. You kiss his temple where the white streak begins.

Valarr’s breath catches.

You kiss the line of his eyebrow. The corner of his eye. The bridge of his nose. The bone of his cheekbone. You are doing back to him, in slow, exact echo, the kisses he’s been giving you. He registers it. His breath comes faster, his hand at your back tightening.

His mouth opens, but you beat him to it.

“Hush.”

You catch the corner of his mouth.

The faintest closed-mouthed press. Valarr turns his face in. He chases it. A small, unsteady noise comes out of him, not a word, and he kisses you properly. This time it’s soft, tender, his hand cradling the back of your head, his mouth pressing yours open just a fraction. You hum into the kiss.

He breaks. His hand has come up to cup the side of your face, thumb sweeping once along your cheekbone. 

“Sweet girl?”

“Yes, Val?”

“I want to take you to the bath.”

You feel yourself nod slightly. “All right.”

“May I?” he questions. 

“Yes, pretty thing.”

A small wet laugh rumbles in his chest, and he kisses the bridge of your nose.

“Good girl.”

He shifts, gathering you up off the rug, and stands. He stands with you in his arms naked, the firm line of him pressed against the long warm line of you, and you make a small sound and curl your face into his throat.

He laughs again. Full of wonder.

“Don't let me go,” you say faintly, barely audible. 

His arms tighten around you. “Never.”

“Promise.”

“I promise, my love,” he whispers fiercely into your damp hair. “I have you. Always. I'm not letting you out of my sight."

He pauses, briefly, at the linen closet, and somehow, without letting you go, he extracts the cashmere blanket and wraps it around your shoulders one-handed. Then he half-carries you toward the back of the apartment, the murmur of him in your hair the entire way: there we go, sweet girl, there, almost there, that's right.

The bathroom is warm.

Steam sits thick in the air. He’s put your bath salts in. The eucalyptus and the lavender one he buys for you specifically and pretends not to know the name of. The mirror is fogged. The lamps are low. He’s lit two of the candles you keep on the long marble shelf, the small flicker of flame doubled in the steam.

“You ran a bath,” you say, muffled against his throat.

“I did,” he says.

“For after.”

“For after,” he confirms.

You smile, pressing your forehead to him. “I love you, Val.”

A press of his mouth to your temple. “I love you. I love you. I love you, sweet girl.”

Valarr sets you gently on the wide, flat ledge of the tub. He kneels on the warm stone in front of you. He takes both your hands in his, kisses each of your knuckles in order, one to ten, and turns one of your hands over to look at the rug burn on the inside of your wrist, the crape down the underside of your forearm. He kisses it, kisses the next mark. Kisses each one. 

“Look at you,” he says after a beat, staring up at you, eyes hooded. “You’re so beautiful."

“Val.”

“Hold on. Don't move.”

He gets up, retrieving the small jar of cyclist's cream and a soft white washcloth. There’s a glass of water with a slice of lemon in his other hand.

He slots the glass into your hand.

“Drink, love.”

You drink greedily, mouth full of zingy lemon. You hadn't realised how thirsty you were until the water touched your throat. You drink half the glass without lifting your face from the air over it. Valarr watches you.

He takes the glass when you’re done and sets it down. He kneels again on the stone.

“Up, my love,” he instructs patiently. “Just for a moment.”

He stands you, keeping one hand at the small of your back, steadying. He bends slightly and draws the cashmere blanket off you, then sets it aside on the warm towel rack. Then Valarr lifts you into the water.

You sigh.

The heat hits the back of your knees, the rug burns, the stinging places along your ribs and your shoulders and the bone of your hip. The eucalyptus soaks into your skin. Valarr steadies you with one hand at your shoulder, one at your hip, and lowers you all the way down until you’re sitting in the warmth of the water with your back against the curved porcelain of the tub.

You groan, slumping at once into the steaming water. 

“Yeah?” Valarr murmurs, stroking your neck. 

“That's perfect,” you tell him. “Thank you.”

A slight smile twitches Valarr’s mouth, and he climbs in behind you. Naked and sculpted still. He lowers himself slowly, his body settling, his toned legs framing yours, and draws you back against his chest. His arms come around you, and you let yourself to fall back.

For a few minutes, neither of you says anything. 

“This is perfect.”

Valarr chuckles at your pleased little sigh. “You said that.”

“I'm saying it again,” you snark, relaxing fully into his solid chest. 

Valarr laughs quietly against your ear, followed by a kiss on your temple.

He scoops water in his cupped palm. Pours it over the line of your shoulder, where the wool of the rug burned you. Pours it over your collarbone next. Scoops more. Runs his hand, long-fingered and strong, along the bone of your hip. Works the warmth into the marks. 

He sets his palm flat over your sternum.

“Look at you.”

“You keep saying that,” you tease, repeating his earlier words. 

“Because look at you.”

This time you’re the one laughing softly. Tired. He kisses the side of your hair.

Valarr works methodically. He presses his fingers gently into every tight muscle at the side of your neck where they’ve gone tense from holding your head down on the rug. You groan again, shivering. He hums, pleased, at the back of his throat, and works the muscle out. Focused circles of his thumb, the warm spread of his palm against the side of your throat. He does this for a while. Down to the curve of your shoulder. The long line at the back of your neck where his teeth had bitten.

He talks to you. Quietly. Through it.

“You did so well, my love. I'm so proud of you. You did so well. I’ve never… oh, love that was… it was everything. What it felt like…” He laughs under his breath. “You were so beautiful, so perfect. I couldn’t stop, love. My beautiful, brave girl. Look at you."

You breathe through your nose. Your eyes prickle again, and you grind your jaw, annoyed now.

“Oh,” he exhales behind you, hearing it. He turns your face gently so he can see. “Oh, sweet girl.”

He sets his thumb at the corner of your eye. Soothes the small wet glaze of it away. Kisses the place his thumb’s just been. Kisses the bridge of your nose lightly. Valarr’s forehead rests against yours for a long count, the warm steam billowing between you, his breath against your mouth.

“Love?”

“Yeah?”

There’s slight hesitation. “Can I say something?"

“Of course.”

Valarr loosens a breath, like he’s afraid to speak. “You've never been like this with me.”

“Like what?” you ask, your nape prickling. 

“Like—this,” Valarr says softly, squeezing you close, and he sounds almost dizzy with happiness. “Tucked in. Needy. Letting me hold you. You're always the one who holds. Always the steady one. And right now you're—”

He pauses. You feel him searching for the word.

“Undefended,” he says, finally, his voice quiet, happy. “You're undefended.”

You’re quiet.

“It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen,” he adds quietly. 

“Val—”

“Listen,” he cuts in. “Please. Let me say this.”

You close your mouth. You wait. His arms tighten around you in the warm water. His chin rests against the side of your hair. When he speaks, his voice is mild, careful, stripped of any performance.

“You told me not to be ashamed,” he begins. “Of the dark thing. Of whatever this is in me. You told me you'd been nurturing it on purpose. And tonight I—I held it. I held it in my hands, and I used it, and I didn't—I didn't feel ashamed. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel like there was something wrong with me for wanting what I want because you trusted me. And I… I knew I was safe with you.”

He breathes.

“And now I'm looking at you, my love,” he goes on. “I'm looking at you crying in my lap on a bathroom floor. I'm watching you be vulnerable and needy in a way I’ve never, ever been allowed to see from you, and I—”

His voice cracks.

“I think you were teaching us both something. I think you were teaching me that I don't have to be ashamed of the dark. And I think you were teaching yourself that you don't have to be afraid of the soft. And I think those are the same lessons.”

You’re quiet for a long time. The water laps against the porcelain, steam kissing against your sensitive skin.

“When did you get this smart?” you mumble, your chin partially in the water and your chest full. 

He laughs. A warm, startled, relieved laugh. It comes up out of his chest behind you, his arms tightening around you again, the press of his grin against the side of your hair.

“I've been doing homework, my love,” he answers promptly. 

“I noticed.”

“Did I pass?” he asks, and you hear the boyish grin in his voice. 

You lace your fingers through his under the water. Bring his hand up. Set it, palm flat, over your sternum, where your heart is. Hold it there.

“You passed, Val.”

You turn your face into his throat, where you can reach. You set your mouth against the place just under his jaw and kiss it. You drag your nose along the line of his throat. His hand at your sternum closes over yours.

You smile against his throat, kissing the line of his jaw. You kiss the corner of Valarr’s mouth where the angle lets you reach, and his head turns, blindly, seeking more. He kisses you back—soft, the warm, reverent press of his mouth, the ragged, wobbling breath he releases between kisses.

Valarr works methodically through the rest of the aftercare while you do this. He scoops warm water over each mark. Opens the cyclist's cream and works it into the rug burn at your hip with careful circles of his thumb, kissing each spot before he doses it. 

You hum at each kiss. He breathes out, frayed, at each hum.

Each time you make a thin, needing sound, Valarr answers with a softer one. Each time he kisses a place, you nuzzle into him a fraction further. The two of you build, in the warm quiet of the bath, an entire small private vocabulary of pleased noises and answering kisses. His hand strokes up and down the bare line of your arm under the water. Your fingers thread through his.

“Does that hurt?”

“A little,” you reply honestly.

He sighs. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. I’m happy.”

“I'm still a little sorry,” he says

You stroke his forearm underwater, feeling the muscle relax at once. “Hush, pretty thing.”

“All right.”

He kisses the place again. Without apology this time. Claiming, approving. 

When the water cools, he nudges the warm tap with his toe—a manoeuvre you would, on any other evening, have laughed at, the small domestic competence of a man who’s done this for you before—and the warmth comes back. Valarr hushes you when you stir, pressing you back against his chest.

“Stay a little longer.”

You can hear the need in his voice. The desperation to keep you like this a little longer before your steel comes back again. 

“I'm staying,” you reassure him, lacing your fingers again.

“Good.”

You lace both your hands in his, setting them together, low on your stomach. Valarr stills. You feel him remembering. His thumb strokes, once, the curve of skin below your navel.

“Some day,” he murmurs.

“Some day,” you agree softly. 

He presses his face into the side of your hair. You feel the breath leave him. A long, shaky, unburdened breath, the breath of a man who’s been carrying something for a long time and has, tonight, been allowed to set it down.

“My love.”

“Mm.”

“I'm so happy.”

You smile. “I know, Val.”

“I’ve never been this happy. In my entire life."

You tilt your face up, and he bends his down. You kiss the corner of his mouth, his cheekbone, the bone of his jaw. Valarr kisses your hairline, your temple, your eyebrow, the corner of your eye. You kiss his mouth, and he kisses yours back. The unhurried kisses of two people who have, tonight, found something neither of them had quite known existed in the other.

an: lord fucking help me. hope y'all feel as insane after reading this as I did writing it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[the-darklings]

𝒈𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒆𝒏 𝒅𝒓𝒂𝒈𝒐𝒏, 𝒈𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒆𝒏 𝒘𝒐𝒍𝒇.

pairing: valarr targaryen x f!stark!reader wc: 16.3k 🚬🚬🚬 contents/warnings: 18+, explicit sexual content throughout (power play, d/s dynamics, femdom, shifting to switch/dom a round the middle, light bondage, hair-pulling, biting, choking, consensual rough sex, dirty talk, oral sex), modern/trailer trash au, corruption arc (valarr), emotional manipulation, obsessive love, possessiveness, morally grey!reader, dark!obsessive!valarr, themes of being "made" and "unmade" by another person; loss of autonomy framed as gift, grief references, this is a dark romance but there's NO non-con/dub-con, theyre just freaks fr an: This piece changed something in my brain. Been writing this nonstop for several days and just need it out in the world now. This can be read as a standalone but it's technically valarr!first alt verse to this and this. Thank you to the anon who sent that ask about how different things would be if you met/dated Valarr first.

✶ modern au/trailer trash masterlist.

[Alexa, play Les by Childish Gambino 🚬🚬🚬]

I. september, year one.

You haven’t yet been ruined by anyone when you first meet him. 

You’ve been fucked, and adored. You’ve been politely mishandled by boys in college bars who thought the word Stark was a pickup line. But you haven’t been known yet. Haven’t yet been consumed because you haven’t met anyone who dared.

You’re wearing black because your mother always said black was a Stark's kindest colour aside from grey. You’re holding a glass of something you won’t remember years later, listening to a hedge fund manager explain a political matter to you as if you have not, in fact, read more about it than he has.

Then a man with a white streak at his temple crosses the room.

He doesn't approach you directly. He works the floor. He nods at men twice his age, clasps a few shoulders, and laughs at a joke you're not close enough to hear. He lets you watch him do it.

The whole time, his eyes come back to you. Brown on one side. Pale blue on the other. Unsettling in a way you can't yet name. Not because his stare is cold or leering, but because it’s a curious stare. You’re not used to men looking at you curiously. Men look at you hungrily; they look with calculation. They look at you because of your father.

He looks at you like he’s found a page he didn't expect to find in a book he'd already read. By the time he's in front of you, you’ve already decided you will let him speak.

"You're the Stark heir."

You angle your head. "I am."

"Valarr Targaryen," he says in a smooth voice. "I own—"

"I know who you are."

You give him the inventory—Halcyon Holdings, the tech portfolio, the shipping arm his father had been trying to divest—and watch his face go through four different expressions in half a second, ending in something delighted. He laughs, and it’s a real laugh. Not the performed, polite kind he gave others.

"You've done your homework."

"I do homework on everyone in my father's orbit," you inform him bluntly, and his smile widens. 

Some small animal part of you sits up inside you, taking very careful note of what kind of man smiles wider when you show him your teeth.

He takes you for a drink. Just one. He doesn't try to make it two which surprises you. He’s charming and painfully handsome, the type of young man everyone in the room looks to while he looks only at you. He walks you out at the end of the night, doesn't touch you once, except to brush his lips over your knuckles goodbye. 

He sends a car to your dorm the following morning with a bouquet of peonies and a note that reads only: I'd like to see you again. No pressure. Valarr.

You call him because he sends peonies, not roses. Because there’s a thread of candour in his note that would be absent in another man's attempts to grab your attention. A man of his pedigree doesn’t need the embarrassment of chasing someone who doesn’t want him back. 

You still make him wait a week before you dial his number. 

You decide later that this was your first mistake, though you’ll revise that assessment many times over the following five years until you can no longer locate the mistake at all. Because the mistake will turn out to be him, in his entirety, and he’s not something you can extract from your life by then. 

He will have woven himself through you like a silver thread.

II. december, year one.

It happens at his penthouse. 

Everything that matters with Valarr happens at his penthouse in those early months. The apartment is a stage, and he’s the only actor who lives in it full-time. He likes you on his set, framed by his windows, lit by his lamps. There's loneliness in that, but also coldness.

Still, it's the first time you’ve slept with a man who chose his own light fixtures.

He asks if he can kiss you first. Actually asks. Means it, too. And that's the thing that sets your teeth on edge for reasons you don't understand yet. Because nobody’s asked you that in years, because the men who want you take, or they presume, or they pose the question as foregone. Valarr asks like it means something, like he needs the word for more than your comfort.

You say yes.

He kisses you slowly, then, like he’s mapping new terrain. His mouth is careful, too careful. His hands stay high. Respectfully so. One at your jaw, one at the curve between your shoulder and your neck. His restraint is so deliberate it reads as its own kind of pressure. You can feel him holding back. You note it even as it happens. He’s managing himself, you think, and then, what for?

You find out what for, eventually.

You fuck him in his bed. On his white, pristine sheets, art you haven’t bothered to identify on the wall behind his headboard.

Valarr undresses you with a reverence that edges on worshipful. He slides the dress off your shoulders, presses his mouth to the notch between your collarbones. There’s a soft murmur of god, look at you into your skin like a man who’s never in his life felt lucky and now does.

He kisses his way down your body. He’s generous and attentive. Eats you out patiently, focused, reading your body for its responses and adjusting. Not badly; he’s good at this, he’s been good at this with other women, he knows the mechanical shape of what he’s doing. You come, eventually, for him. Because he’s earned it, because your body is responsive and because he’s pretty and wanted you badly enough.

And then he rolls you under him, sliding inside you, and he fucks you like a man who’s been told, at some point in his life, that women like it slow and reverent. That's it. The only setting.

He looks into your eyes. Smiles. He says your name, moves with a careful cadence, a kind of technique. He’s performing a version of making love that he’s learned somewhere, from someone, and it is—you realise with a small, distinct pulse of dismay—soft.

Not bad. Soft.

And somewhere in the middle of it, around when his mouth finds the hollow of your throat and stays there like an apology, you get bored.

You don't mean to. It’s not a conscious act on your part. It’s the involuntary response of a Stark to being handled too gently: boredom, and under the boredom, the oldest thing in you, the wolf-thing, the predator, turning its head and noticing the room has a man in it. Realising how easy it would be to claim him, however you want to claim him. 

You flip him.

You put a hand flat to his sternum, shoving him back against the pillows, and Valarr goes. He goes easily, readily, with a surprised sound in the back of his throat that’s not displeasure. Then you climb him, and you pin his wrists above his head with one hand. You watch with great curiosity how his pupils dilate. The brown eye goes nearly black. The pale blue one goes almost luminous. You’ve never seen a physiological response happen this fast in a grown man's face, and you’ll remember it, in detail, for the rest of your life.

"Oh," he breathes.

"Shh."

His mouth parts. "Yes—whatever you—yes."

You take him apart for forty-five minutes. 

You ride him hard and mean, with his wrists held down and his hips pinned by your weight, and you watch him come undone in a way he clearly has never been undone before. 

Beautiful boys who’ve been beautiful their whole lives are used to being unwrapped. They’re not used to being handled. 

They’re not used to being made to earn anything. But you do. You make Valarr earn permission to move, to speak, to finish, and by the time you let him, he’s gone somewhere very quiet behind his eyes. When he comes, Valarr makes a sound like he’s dying, like you’ve broken something vital inside him. 

Afterwards, he lies on his back in the wrecked sheets and stares at the ceiling like he's trying to remember his own name.

"Where have you been all my life?" he asks, half-joking.

You don't answer.

Because this, right now, is the first crack. This is where you understand, somewhere wordless, that you’ve just shown a beautiful self-contained man a version of himself he didn't know was accessible, and that he’s not going to forget. 

Valarr is a cataloguer, a collector. And he’s just catalogued this—the weight of your hand on his wrists, the precise angle of your mouth as it bit, the particular heat of being made to wait, to plead—and he’s going to want it again. He’s going to want it differently. Going to want you with escalating need that, by the end of the week, will feel less like desire and more like a project plan.

You let him hold you afterwards. You lie against his chest, and you listen to his heart rate come down, wondering, dimly, what you’ve just let yourself into.

III. january, year two.

The second time is three nights later. 

You come to Valarr's apartment straight from a dinner your father made you attend. You’re still in a dress and heels, still carrying the particular tense irritation that two hours at such gatherings always loads into your shoulders. 

He opens the door with a glass of wine already in his hand for you, and the look on his face when he sees you—the one that’s half-devotional and half-hungry—somehow sharpens the irritation instead of easing it.

You don't let him kiss you hello.

You stalk past him into the apartment, set your bag down, turn around, and you say coldly, quietly, "Bedroom."

He doesn’t ask. Valarr's expression shifts once—the surprise, then recalibration, his pupils blowing—and he follows you without a word.

You’ve not planned this. You don't plan, with men. Generally. You’ve spent the cab ride home thinking about three nights ago, thinking about the sound he made when you let him finish. Remembering that precise glazed stupidity of his face when you finally let him speak. 

Something in you is hungry for it in a way that’s making you reckless.

You put him on his knees.

Not with your hands. With a single word and a small gesture of your chin. Valarr goes down onto the rug at the foot of his bed with a grace that’s almost unseemly. He looks up at you. The white streak at his temple catches the bedside lamp. His shirt is unbuttoned at the collar now, slightly crumpled. He must have undone it at some point between the door and the bedroom. Whether consciously or not. You can see the pulse in his throat moving faster than it should be. Almost smile at the sight.

"Is this what you want?" you ask.

His jaw works. "Yes."

"Say it properly."

"I want—yes, I want this, I want—" He stops, searching for the word. He doesn't find it because he's not yet fluent in the language you're about to teach him. "Please."

You let him undress you from that position.

You make him do it only with his hands. No mouth. Not yet. He hasn't earned his mouth yet.

His fingers find the zip at the side of your dress. He's used to undressing women, not to being made to do it without being permitted to touch them the way he wants. When the zipper finally gives, he peels the dress off you, knuckles skimming your ribs, your hip, the outside of your thigh. Not a caress, exactly. Something else.

You watch him swallow when the fabric catches on the curve of your hip, and he has to tug it gently, until it slips down and puddles at your feet. You step out of it with one hand light on his shoulder for balance. Valarr flinches faintly at the contact because it's the first you've given him voluntarily in almost ten minutes.

He folds it, of all things. Folds the dress and sets it aside, because he's Valarr Targaryen and even on his knees at his lover's feet, he can't not be neat, and the small domestic absurdity of it twists something warm in you that you weren't expecting to feel.

"Bra."

He reaches up, fingers shaking so faintly you would have missed it if you weren't watching for it. He has to slide his hands around your ribs to get at the clasp. You feel him go still for half a second when his palms bracket your sides—feel him fighting the urge to press his mouth to your sternum, to your stomach, anywhere—and then he masters it. He finds the clasp, unhooks it in one practised motion. The straps slide down your arms.

"Good boy," you hum gently.

His breath rushes out like you hit him.

It’s not a sound he meant to make or for you to hear. He makes it anyway, a short ragged thing, and his head tips forward so his forehead is almost touching your stomach. Valarr doesn't look up at you—can't, you conclude—but you see the flush rising up his throat. 

Oh, you think.

You file that away neatly.

You make him take your underwear off with the same rule. Hands only. He hooks his thumbs in the waistband, drawing them down your legs so slowly it’s almost cruel to both of you. When he has them at your ankles, Valarr pauses. His forehead nearly grazes your thigh, his breath hot on the skin just above your knee. Then he waits. Because he’s understood, now, without you having to say it, that he’s not to rise from this floor until you tell him he can.

"Very good," you tell him. "So good, Val."

Another shudder. Full-body. You feel it in your calf where his hand is still resting.

You let him put his mouth on you eventually. You make him earn it inch by inch.

First, he’s allowed, only, to press his mouth to the inside of your knee—closed lips, no tongue, you specify—and when he does it, Valarr’s eyes close and his whole face softens in a way that makes you warm.

Then an inch higher. Then higher.

You let him kiss the inside of your thigh in a slow ascending line. When he shakes faintly against the skin he hasn't yet been permitted to taste, you feel it go all the way through you.

By the time his mouth is at the crease of your thigh, you can feel Valarr’s breath against you. You’re already wet—embarrassingly wet, obviously wet, and he knows it; you see his eyelashes fluttering at the nearness of it—he’s visibly struggling not to turn his head the two inches he needs to turn and put his tongue where he wants it.

He doesn't. He waits.

That's the part that undoes you, in the end. That he waits.

"Look at you," you murmur fondly, almost to yourself. "You're so good at this already."

His eyes flutter closed. A small sound comes out of him, soft and hungry.

"Open your mouth."

He does. Just like that. Just parts his mouth, on his knees, and waits.

You press two fingers to his lower lip. Slide them inside. Valarr closes his mouth around them without being told, and sucks, his tongue working against the pads of your fingers with the same careful, thorough attention he applies to everything he does. His eyes—when he opens them and looks up at you—are gone.

Not dazed. Not drifting. Gone.

You pull your fingers out of his mouth slowly, wet and slick, dragging them lightly down his chin, down the line of his throat.

"Now," you say.

You stand over him with your fingers in his hair. His hair is silky in your grip, dark and thick, the white streak sliding between your knuckles like a bright ribbon. Beautiful. So beautiful. You guide him where you want him to be, and you hold him there.

Valarr makes a sound the instant his tongue finds your core.

Low in his throat, half-swallowed, not a sound he meant to make, either.

He wanted this, you understand now, for longer than the twenty minutes he’s spent on his knees. Wanted this for weeks, maybe months. The specific version of this where you hold him in place and don't let him lead, but he didn't know how to ask for it.

You feel him go slack with the permission of it now.

You feel him sink into your thighs. His hands come up and settle on the backs of your legs. Not gripping, not guiding, just resting there. The way a man rests his hands on something he’s grateful for, and then he begins.

He’s good at it.

He’s Harvard-good at it, in the same way he’s Harvard-good at everything. Which is to say, thorough and attentive to feedback; he learns the rhythm you want from the very first twitch of your hips, and he adjusts to it, he builds on it, and when he finds the stroke of his tongue against your clit that makes your breath catch, Valarr stays there with a focus that’s almost unnerving.

But this isn't what he's used to. You can feel it in him.

You can feel him trying, underneath the skill, to work out what you want from him now—not the technique, he has the technique; what you want from him as a person, in this position, in this reversal he hasn't rehearsed—and the searching of it is what's making his breath shake against you.

You tighten your fist in his hair and grind down against his mouth, once, experimentally.

Valarr moans.

Loud. Longer than he meant to. The sound breaks against your sensitive folds, and you feel it all the way up your spine. So you do it again, harder, and Valarr’s hands tighten on the backs of your thighs. His throat works, and you think he likes being used, he likes being used, he likes being used, and the knowledge of it makes you cruel.

"Take it."

He takes it.

"That's it,” you hum, gripping his hair tighter. “That's exactly what I want. Just like that. Don't move."

He doesn't move.

You ride his face.

There is no polite word for it, and you don't want one. You hold his head in place with both hands now—one fisted in his hair, one cupping the back of his skull almost tenderly—and you use Valarr’s mouth the way you would use a tool.

With intent, with pressure, a rhythm you choose for yourself and not for him. You don’t let him set the pace or pull back. When his breath goes ragged against you, you hold him through it, and when he makes a choked, wet sound into your skin, you tell him, "That's it, love, you’re so good for me," and you feel his whole body jolt.

When Valarr tries to pull back to breathe, you tighten your fist, and you say, "No. Like that. Don't stop."

He doesn’t stop.

His throat works. You feel it against you. He takes a breath through his nose, ragged and shallow, and goes back to what he was doing. You grind your hips down into his face and let him feel the weight of you against him. Valarr moans again, but this time it’s smaller. Lovelier, wetter, more ragged. This time, it’s closer to a whimper. It’s the sound of a man who’s just discovered something about himself that thrills him.

"Look at me."

His gaze snaps to you like you’ve yanked a leash.

Vlarr’s eyes are glazed, his mouth glossy. There’s wetness on his chin, his upper lip, the line of his elegant jaw. The blue eye has gone so pale it’s almost white, while the brown eye has gone almost black. He’s breathing through his nose in quick, desperate pulls, and when you look down at him, he looks up at you.

"You're doing so well for me," you tell him quietly, stroking your thumb against his temple. “You’re perfect, Val.”

Something in his face breaks open.

You don't know what exactly. You only see the aftermath of it. The way his eyelids flutter, the way his mouth parts against you in a shape that’s almost a smile. Then Valarr sets back to work with a renewed devotion that makes your knees wobble.

He’s putting the entire finish of his Harvard MBA and his twenty-six years of self-possession into the single project of making you come. By the time he manages it, working for it, struggling a little, his jaw trembling with the effort, his tongue gone soft where it was precise ten minutes ago, you’re coming against his mouth in long, cruel waves that you don't bother to be polite about.

"Fuck," you breathe, gasping for breath. "Fuck, Valarr—"

You hear him moan against you.

Dry, small, wrecked. He moans into your swollen cunt at the sound of his own name in your mouth, and he keeps going, keeps working you through it, lapping at your folds, drinking you in. You ride it out against his face without mercy because you know now, with absolute certainty, that mercy is not what he wants.

Valarr’s taking it like a gift. 

You have understood something.

He’s never done this before, exactly. Not like this. He’s gone down on plenty of women; his skill backs that up. But he’s never been used before, and the distinction is not lost on him; the distinction is what he’s just tripped face-first into.

He keeps going when you tell him to.

Through the aftershocks. Gentler now, but still there, still working, still mouth-to-skin and hands-on-thighs and not moving until you permit it. When it's too much—when your whole body flinches at the overstimulation—you say, "Stop." 

Valarr stops instantly. He doesn't move back. He just stops. Rests his mouth there, open, panting against you. Waiting.

"Good boy," you say again, softer this time, and his whole body shakes.

When you finally let him up, he’s dishevelled in a way you’ve never seen him. His perfect hair tousled where you tore at it, mouth wet and swollen, jaw shining, eyes blown. His collar is crumpled, damp mess at the throat. There's a red mark on his cheek where you pressed him into you too hard.

The pristine line of him, that Valarr-polish you've been looking at for four months, is gone. 

It's just a man on his knees with his mouth ruined.

He sways forward on his knees. He presses his forehead to your hipbone.

He whispers, "Thank you."

You freeze, briefly, because you hadn't expected the thank-you, and because you felt it in your whole body.

"Get up."

He does as he’s told. 

You fuck him against his bedroom wall. He puts his hands against the paint on either side of your head, and he holds himself there. Doesn't move them, doesn't touch you except where you’re letting him touch you. He looks into your eyes the entire time with an expression that's, more than anything, studying. He’s memorising what works. For every micro-expression your face makes, and he’s noting which movements of his hips produce which sounds from you, filing it all away, in real time, for next time.

You come a second time with his hand at your throat.

Not hard. He doesn't know how hard yet. You have to take his wrist, afterwards, and place his hand back there, more firmly, and say, "Like this. Not there. Here." And he corrects, he learns. When he comes, he comes with his face buried in your neck, and he’s whispering something, and you only catch the end of it.

—anything you want, whatever you want, tell me—

You stand in his bathroom ten minutes later, splashing cold water on your face, staring at yourself in his obscenely expensive mirror. Your hair is ruined. Your mouth is swollen. You still feel the ghost of his hands at the back of your thighs. 

You have the thought, then, for the first time:

I could make him into anything.

And under that thought, immediately and with the specific chill of an instinct you don’t yet trust:

I probably will.

IV. february, year two.

You wake up in his bed on a Saturday morning in February, and it’s snowing outside.

King’s Landing snow. The rare, good kind. Fat soft flakes drift past the penthouse windows in a slow hush, the city muted under them, the light in the bedroom gone grey. 

You’re under a cashmere throw because he pulled it over you sometime in the night. Valarr’s still asleep next to you, on his stomach, one toned arm thrown across your waist, his face half-buried in the pillow. The white streak at his temple is a pale slash in his dark, messy hair. His mouth gapes open slightly. He’s not handsome in sleep; he’s boyish, a little ridiculous, softened.

You gaze at him for a long time.

There’s no performance in him right now. No studying. No careful awareness of the angle of his own jaw. He’s just a man in his twenties, asleep next to a woman he’s in love with, and he’s breathing evenly, a small crease between his brows that you want to smooth with your thumb.

You smooth it with your thumb.

Valarr stirs at once. His mismatched eyes crack open. They focus on you slowly, without sharpening, and the first thing his face does is smile—helpless, unguarded, delighted.

"Hi," he mumbles.

"Hi."

"What time is it?" he croaks sleepily.

"Early," you tell him gently.

"Mm." He pulls you closer, tucks his face into your shoulder. His voice is rough with sleep, muffled against your skin. "Five more minutes."

You let him have five more minutes. You let him have a whole hour. You lie there with him curled around you like a very expensive dog, and you watch the snow come down outside. 

At some point, you understand, with no particular astonishment, that you’re happy.

Plainly happy. The kind of happiness your mother used to talk about. The quiet kind, the Sunday-morning kind, the kind that can't be captured or faked. You’re in a warm bed with a man who loves you, and it’s snowing. There’s coffee somewhere in your near future. There’s nothing you have to do today, nowhere to be. Valarr’s body is warm against yours, and he smells like cedar and clean skin, and you’re happy.

You turn your face into his thick hair, and you think: oh.

And then you think: oh, no.

Because you hadn’t expected this. 

You expected the sex, expected the dance, the expensive gifts, the careful strategic pursuit. You braced for all of it, watched yourself enter this relationship with a kind of distant curiosity. 

What you hadn’t expected was the five-more-minutes. Or the gentle urge to smooth the crease between his brows. You hadn’t expected the domestic, boring, ordinary, warm-bed happiness of a man who makes you breakfast and laughs at your jokes and holds you in his sleep.

You’ll remember this morning later, after it’s all over, as one of the ones that mattered. Really mattered. 

You’ll remember the grey light, the cashmere throw, the comforting weight of Valarr’s arm across your waist. You will not be able to explain to anyone how a man you eventually understood to be dangerous was also, unambiguously, someone you loved dearly.

But you did.

For a time, in that apartment, in the snow, in February of year two—you did.

Valarr eventually wakes properly, gets up with a groan, and stretches, making you appreciate the toned lines of his back. 

He makes you breakfast: eggs, toast, and the specific preserves you like from a small local shop that he had delivered last week. He puts a record on—jazz, soft, something his father used to play, he tells you—and he stands barefoot at the kitchen island in a t-shirt and sweatpants, and he cooks for you.

You sit at the counter with your chin in your hand and you watch him. Valarr catches you watching him, and his whole face does the thing it does when he’s happy: it goes transparent, briefly, and you see him, the man under the golden performance, and he’s not a man who’s been loved enough.

You see it that morning. You see it so clearly it hurts.

He’s a man who’s been adored and admired his whole life but never loved, and the difference is catastrophic. Because you’re the first person who’s bothered to know the difference. Valarr knows you know, and he is—in his careful, precise, terrified way—trying to let you inside.

You eat the eggs, spinning your fork with each mouthful. You kiss him on the jaw on your way to the coffee pot. Valarr catches your elbow and pulls you back and kisses you properly, deeply, consuming. Not hungry, not sexual, just a long warm kiss that means stay, and you do.

You stay the whole weekend.

You tell him, on Sunday night, in the dim of his bedroom with your head on his chest: "I love you."

You hadn't planned to. It comes out of you whole, unstudied, clumsy. His body stills under you.

"Say it again," he whispers.

"I love you."

Valarr is quiet for a long, long time. His hand is in your hair. When he speaks, his voice is not the voice he usually uses. It’s smaller, more cracked. "I've loved you since October."

You skim your lips over his chest. "I know."

"I know you know."

"I wasn't ready to say it back until now," you tell him.

"I know," he says again, and there’s such terrible gratitude in the words that you understand, lying there, that you could ruin this man simply by changing your mind. 

You could ruin him without trying. It’s already too late; he’s already folded into you past the point of extraction, and you’re only three months in.

You close your eyes and breathe against his sternum. You tell yourself, then, that you’ll be careful with him. 

You will not be.

But you mean it, that night, when you think it.

V. march, year two.

You teach him to bite.

You do it slowly. Patiently. One day at a time. You’re in no rush. You have months—you have years, it will turn out—and there’s a specific pleasure in taking your time, in shaping him in increments so small he doesn't notice the shape changing until the shape is already altered.

The first time, you’re sitting on his face. It’s something he asked for, quietly, after weeks of letting him earn it in smaller increments. Somewhere in the middle of it, bored with his stiff politeness, you grab his hair, hard, and you say, into the dim of the room: "Bite me."

Valarr hesitates. Two seconds. A full two seconds of hesitation, in which you can feel him not understanding the instruction.

"The inside of my thigh,” you clarify. “Bite me. Do it."

He does it. Lightly. A nervous, under-committed bite, more suggestion than action.

"Harder."

He bites harder.

"Harder, Valarr."

He bites until you gasp, until you feel his teeth sink in, hard. The skin will bruise in a faint shape that you will look at in the bath the next morning with a small satisfied curl at the corner of your mouth. He freezes after, holds too still, uncertain whether he’s overshot.

You tell him, "Again."

You see his eyes darken. You see him learn.

Two weeks later, in the middle of fucking you, Valarr bites the joint of your shoulder and your neck unprompted. He does it because he can feel you wanting it—reads it off you, reads it in the arch of your back, reads it like a language he’s becoming, slowly but thoroughly, fluent in. 

He does it without asking. He does it knowing you want it.

You come almost immediately, with your nails sunk brutally into his toned back. He kisses the bite afterwards tenderly, apologetic in a theatrical way that’s not actually apologetic, and you laugh—actually laugh—against his chest because you can feel him performing the tenderness for you. It’s cute and it means he’s yours.

You teach him to hold you down.

You put his hands where you want them. You tell him—not always with words; sometimes just with a look over your shoulder, sometimes just by lifting your wrists above your head and waiting for him to understand—and Valarr learns to pin you. He’s tentative at first, afraid of hurting you, his grip more like a suggestion than a hold. 

You break his wrist-grip one night just to show him he isn't trying. "Try again," you order, soft but firm. "Mean it this time."

He tries again. This time, he means it. The grip goes iron. You can’t pull free, and your breath catches with a slow, satisfied curl of heat in your belly.

"There," you rasp against his mouth. "There, Val. Like that. Don't let go."

He doesn't let go.

VI. april, year two.

You teach him to talk to you.

This one takes longer. Valarr's natural register in bed was praise (beautiful, you're so beautiful, god, look at you, I can't believe you're mine), and the praise is real. It’s genuine. It’s not a thing you want to remove from him. You just need to layer something underneath it. You need to teach him to be filthy under his perfect, golden shine.

You coax it out of him in small pieces.

You ask him what he's thinking about when he looks at you. You ask him questions in bed that he has to answer, and watch him struggle with the vocabulary. 

What do you want? What are you thinking about when you’re inside me? Tell me. 

He’s articulate. Valarr has been trained his whole life to be articulate. But this particular articulation—the dirty one, the possessive one, the one that lives under the golden boy and has never been spoken aloud—he has to find the words for first.

But you’re patient. You’re endlessly patient. You coach him like a man learning a language, and he learns it for you, because he learns everything for you.

The first time he manages mine in that low, smooth voice—against your ear, his teeth at your throat, his hand at your hip—you actually shudder. He feels it. His rhythm stutters. Then Valarr whispers it again, more certain this time, hungrier, and you feel him understand that he’s found a key that works.

By April, he's saying worse things.

Specific things.

The kinds of things you hadn’t known you needed to hear from him until he’s saying them, in that smooth voice, while fucking you against his windows with the city eighty floors below.

You feel so tight around me, love.

You're so wet for me. Listen to that. You’re making a mess.

Look at you taking it. Look at you. Perfect.

Some nights, you make him narrate.

You make him tell you, in his quiet voice, exactly what he’s going to do to you before he does it. You make him describe, out loud, in exact words, how he wants you. At first, he can’t do it without laughing a little—self-conscious, unused to the performance, the white streak at his temple catching the lamplight as he ducks his head—and you let him laugh, you kiss the laugh out of his mouth, smiling, and you urge him to try again.

Valarr tries again.

I'm going to put you on your back, and I'm going to eat your cunt until you're crying.

I'm going to make you come on my tongue so hard you forget your own name.

Then I'm going to fuck you so slow you'll be begging me, and I'm not going to give it to you. I'm going to make you work for it. I'm going to make you ride me until your thighs give out.

You reward him for that one. You reward him generously.

You let him put you on your back, let him take his time, watch him watch you the whole time he's doing it. His mismatched eyes burn, fixed on you, feverish with pride at himself. His mouth shines, the picture of a man delighted with his work, and you understand that you’ve started something. That there’s something inside this man that’s coming apart. Thanks to you. 

Some nights, he narrates before he's even touched you.

Sits across from you at the bar cart in his sitting room with a glass of something amber in his hand and tells you conversationally what he's been thinking about since lunch. In detail. Tells you what he wanted to do to you in the elevator, what he almost did in the car. Tells you about the board meeting he sat through that afternoon, where he couldn't stop picturing your mouth.

I had to cross my legs under the table like a teenager. Half-hard in a room full of old men, thinking about you on your knees. Thinking about the noises you made when I had my fingers in you this morning, and still won't let you come.

Thinking about how you taste after I've already made you come twice. How you go soft for me. How you let me do whatever I want to you when you're that far gone.

You drink your drink. You let him talk. You don't interrupt.

He's learning the cadence of it, learning what lands. He knows, now, to slow down on the parts that make your breath catch, to speed up on the parts that make you shift in your seat. By the time he stands up and crosses the room to you, he’s already fucked you twice in his head, and you’re already half-gone for him, and you haven't moved.

He takes the glass out of your hand, sets it down.

Come here, love. Let me show you what I've been thinking about all day.

I'm going to ruin you for the rest of the weekend.

And then he does. 

By May, Valarr’s saying them first. Without you having to prompt him. It’s then that you understand that you’ve succeeded completely. That you’ve taught him oh so well. That the version of Valarr who will now, unprompted, describe to you in graphic detail what he’s going to do to you across the dinner table is a version of Valarr you built, line by line, with months of patience.

You take him to a gala in late April at the Met. Black tie. His hand at the small of your back. At some point during dinner, with a lord on your left and a museum board member across from you, Valarr leans in, ostensibly to pour you more wine, and purrs, in a voice pitched just for you:

"I'm going to take you home and fuck you in that dress, my love. I'm going to put you face down on the bed, still wearing it and fill you up. I want to ruin that dress. I'll buy you another one, and then I’ll ruin that one, too."

You don’t spill your wine. There’s no change in your expression at all in fact. You just keep smiling at the lord.

But when you turn your head, just slightly, to look at him, Valarr’s face is smooth and pleasant, his mismatched eyes hooded, and you understand, with a bright, cold thrill: I taught him to do that. I made him into a man who could do that. I put that in him.

He ruins the dress.

You let him.

VII. may, year two.

You teach him to take.

This one is the hardest one. Because Valarr's natural instinct is to give. Everything inside him is oriented toward giving, toward worship, toward the specific pleasure of making you pleased, and learning to take requires him to suppress the reflex that’s organised his entire sexual life.

You make him anyway.

"Put me where you want me," you tell him one night. You’re standing in his bedroom in a silk slip he’d bought you, purposely crooked so he glimpses the curve of your breast and the crease of your thigh. "Don't ask. Don't check. Put me where you want me and fuck me."

He stares at you. "I won't know where—"

"Figure it out," you say bluntly.

He hesitates. Then, slowly, he crosses to you. He puts his hand at the small of your back, walks you backwards toward the bed. He turns you, at the last second, and puts you face down on the mattress. His hand grips the back of your neck, pressing you into the duvet. His other hand lands at your hip, yanking you up onto your knees.

Your breath catches.

"Like this?" he asks, tentative.

"Don't ask."

"—alright."

He fucks you like that. Face-down. Hand at the back of your neck the entire time. His other hand grips your hip hard enough to leave fingerprints. He doesn’t check in, doesn’t ask. He reads everything off your body—the tension in your thighs, the starved, half-animal sound in your throat—and he adjusts in real time. 

He takes, and you come harder than you’ve come in months.

Afterwards, he’s trembling faintly against your back, kissing the damp skin of your shoulder.

"Was that—"

You hum, pleased. "Yes."

"I didn't want to—"

You reach behind you, tangle your fingers in his hair, the roots faintly damp from sweat, and say, "It was perfect, Val. Shh."

Valarr is quiet for a while. Then, "I didn't know I could do that."

I know, you don't say. I know. I'm teaching you. I'm teaching you what you are.

You kiss him instead, kiss him slow and deep and long. He folds against you with that particular trembling gratitude, and you understand, in that moment, that you’re in the middle of remaking a man from the inside out, and that he’s letting you. 

That he’s thanking you for it every step of the way.

Over the next few weeks, Valarr gets bolder. He doesn’t ask anymore. Valarr puts you where he wants you, holds you there, and takes. He flips you in the middle of the night and fucks you half-asleep into the sheets until you’re gasping from pleasure, one hand collaring your throat, another pinching your clit. 

He pulls you off the couch and onto your knees without warning, parting your mouth with his thumb. He pins your wrist against the bathroom counter one morning. Fucks you unhurried and deep, looking at your own reflection while he whispers gently, chin on your shoulder, his eyes dark, what you look like when you come for him.

You’ve taught him, by the end of May of year two, to be the man you needed. You’ve spent six months in his bedroom remaking him, and the remaking isn’t done, but the structure is in place. The rest is finishing work. The rest is polish.

He’s so grateful you taught him.

That’s the part that, later, you will not be able to stop thinking about. 

That the whole time you were shaping him—the whole time you were pressing his hand to your throat with the right pressure, the whole time you were correcting his grip, his language, his angle, his tempo — he was thanking you. He was grateful. He was so happy. 

Valarr walked around the city feeling like he’d been given a gift and the gift was himself. He didn’t understand, yet, that what you were giving him was also a leash. Because you were the only woman who would ever know how to handle him like this. 

You were building a lock and holding the only key to it.

And he loved it.

He loved every fucking second of it.

VIII. summer, year two.

He flies you to Myr for ten days. Private plane. Private villa. A staff you will never see who puts fresh fruit on the terrace each morning before you wake.

Valarr is, in Myr, the best version of himself. 

He cooks you breakfast in the little kitchen overlooking the bay. He reads with you on the terrace, your hands occasionally brushing over the pages, his thumb tracing yours when he thinks you aren't paying attention. 

He asks you questions about your mother that no one has ever asked you. Not the polite questions, but the real ones, the ones that come from a man who’s lost his father young and who knows the particular shape of that absence. What was her laugh like? What did she smell like? What did she think of your father, honestly?

You answer him with more honesty than you’ve given anyone in years. You lie in a pool of sun on his chest, and you tell Valarr about the last Christmas before she died and about the way your father still mourns her. Describe the specific sharpness of grief that’s hardened inside you. Valarr listens, and his hand strokes the back of your neck, and you feel known.

You feel known.

It’s not the only time in the relationship you will feel it. It’s one of several. You will have a handful of mornings like this—on terraces, in beds, in cars, on planes—where Valarr will look at you and you’ll have the unmistakable sense that someone is listening. The listening is real, and the loving is real, and the man listening and loving you is not a performance.

It is, however, the first time you feel the wrongness alongside it.

Because that night, after sex—after he’s eaten you out until you were gasping and then fucked you until you couldn't feel your legs, after he’s let you mark his chest with your nails and kissed the inside of each wrist with that bowed, careful reverence that’s started to unsettle you a little—he lies behind you with his arm over your waist and he says, casually, into your hair:

"I want to marry you."

You go still.

"Valarr."

"Not tomorrow. Not next year, even, if you don't want. I know it's fast." His hand flattens over your stomach. His palm is warm. "I'm telling you because I want you to know that I'm serious about us. I've known since October."

October. You’ve been sleeping with him for eight months. He’s known since the second.

"I don't think you know me well enough to—"

"I know you perfectly well." There’s no defensiveness in his voice, only a calm, unwavering certainty. "I've been paying attention. I know what you take in your coffee and tea. I know the sound you make when you've had a bad call with your father. That you check your watch every forty minutes when you're bored, and that you laugh at bad puns you pretend not to laugh at. There’s a particular way you kiss when you want more and when you're being generous. I know, more or less, what you'd name our children. I've been listening."

You lie in his arms, and you feel the entirety of your body go cold, and then warm, and then cold again.

Because he isn't lying. He has been listening. For eight months, with a focus of a man building a dossier, and he’s assembled a working model of you accurate enough to be operational. He can predict what you will want for dinner, can predict what you will wear to a party. He can, demonstrably, predict what you will say when he does certain things in bed.

And none of it is knowing you. Not really. It’s the shape of knowing. It’s the model, not the real thing.

But he loves the model so completely that he can’t tell he doesn't love you.

You don't say any of that. You turn in his arms, and you kiss him. Because what Valarr has just said is, in some animal part of your brain, a thing you want to be flattered by. You’re a Stark heir. Men have been vying to marry you since you were sixteen, and none of them has ever meant it with this degree of genuine want.

You kiss him, whispering, "Not yet."

Valarr smiles against your lips. There's no bitterness in his voice when he says, "I'll wait."

He means it. That’s the other thing about Valarr. 

He means every single thing he says.

IX. autumn, year two into year three.

It happens at a bar near Maegor’s Holdfast. 

Valarr’s in the bathroom, and a man with a clean-shaven jaw and an expensive jacket sees you alone at the table and decides that’s an invitation. He’s not aggressive. Not even even vulgar. Just the kind of lawyer-ish, investment-ish man you’ve been politely deflecting since you were old enough to understand what men want from you. He puts his hand on the back of the chair next to yours and asks if you'd like a drink.

"I'm with someone," you dismiss him with practiced ease. 

"He's not here," the man replies.

"He is, actually,” you say coolly. “He's in the bathroom."

The man smiles, unbothered. "Long bathroom break."

You give him the Stark look—the one your father perfected and your mother refined—and he laughs, shrugs, already gone by the time Valarr gets back. You don’t mention it because it’s not worth mentioning. It was nothing.

Three weeks later, the man had moved across the country.

You find out by accident. A girl you know from your studies mentions, at a brunch, that so-and-so took a sudden role in Gulltown. Which is strange because he'd been up for partner at his firm in King’s Landing and everyone assumed he was going to take it. The change of heart was unexpected. Something to do with the timing, she says vaguely. His firm made him a very aggressive offer to leave.

You look at Valarr across the table. He’s drinking coffee, his expression serene. 

"You knew him," you say, later, in the car.

"Who?"

"The man,” you say tightly. “The one who's moved."

"Oh. That one." He doesn't glance at you. His eyes are on the street, and his hand is on your thigh, thumb stroking absently. "Was that his name?"

"Did you do something?" you ask bluntly. 

He’s quiet for a moment, only his thumb moving.

Then: "I made a phone call. That's all. A friend at the firm mentioned they were looking for someone to head up the Eastern office, and I mentioned that I knew a promising associate. That's all. Whether he took the role was up to him."

"Valarr."

"He wasn't coerced."

"You—" 

You don’t know how to finish the sentence. You exiled a man across the country because he flirted with me for forty seconds at a bar. It’s insane. It’s also, you realise with a cold ripple down your spine, entirely plausible. It’s exactly the kind of thing Valarr would do. Quietly, legally, unimpeachably, with deniability built in at every step. He’s probably not broken a single law doing so, and he’s almost certainly sent a man across the country.

"I didn'tt like the way he looked at you," Valarr says, mildly, as if it were a small dietary preference. "I handled it."

You’re silent for the rest of the drive.

That night, you make him fuck you on the floor of his foyer, because you’re too angry to get all the way to the bedroom. Because the only way you can process what you’ve just learned is to take. 

You yank him down by the tie. You bite his lip hard enough to draw blood. He takes it. Valarr takes everything like a black hole made solely for your consumption. He takes you roughly on the marble with his head at an uncomfortable angle against the baseboard, and when he comes, he whispers your name like a prayer. When it's over, he lies there under you and looks up at you with those mismatched eyes gone entirely dark, and he says softly:

"I love you. I'm sorry. I love you. Please don't be angry."

You understand, then, something true about Valarr that you will not articulate to yourself for another two years. 

You understand that sorry and angry are, for him, interchangeable currencies, because both of them end with him in your hands. He doesn’t actually regret the phone call. He would make it again. He’s only sorry that you’re angry, sorry that it has cost him something. The action itself, he’s not sorry for at all.

You roll off him and stare at the ceiling. You think, for the first time: This is not a good man.

Then you think: I don't know if I can leave him.

Then, more quietly, and even more honestly: I don't know if I want to.

X. winter, year three.

Valarr takes you to his mother's house at Dragonstone for Christmas. 

He’s never taken anyone there before. You know because his brother tells you, at the door, with a slightly dazed look on his face, as if he doesn’t quite believe you’re real at all.

Matarys Targaryen is three years younger than Valarr and auburn-haired. He and Valarr don’t look like brothers at first glance, not until you find the architecture of the face underneath, the same line of the nose, the same mouth. He got their mother's colouring. Valarr got their father's. Matarys is warm, where Valarr is polished, loose where Valarr is calibrated.

When he opens the door to you that first evening, he hugs you before you’ve finished stepping inside.

"The Stark heir," he calls out, pulling back, grinning widely. "God. You're actually real."

A surprised, amused snort builds in your throat. "I'm real."

"He's brought me girlfriends before. Valarr, I mean. I mean—he's mentioned girlfriends before. In passing. I'm not meant to know about most of them. But mother doesn't meet them. Mother hasn't met one, ever." He’s still holding your hand. His grip is warm and unselfconscious in a way his brother's grip has never once been. "You're a big deal, apparently. I hope you know."

You suppress another smile. "I'm fast getting that impression."

"I'm Matarys by the way,” he introduces himself, flushing when he realises he hasn’t yet given you a name you already know. “I'm the disappointment."

"He's not the disappointment," Valarr says behind you fondly, setting the bags down. "Don't believe him for a second."

"I’m definitely the disappointment,” Matarys disagrees, even as Valarr throws his arm around him and ruffles his hair in a gesture so brotherly it makes a pang go through your chest. “If I weren't the disappointment, he'd have to invent one." Matarys winks at you. "Come in. Mother's in the drawing room pretending not to care that you're here."

Their mother, Jena Dondarrion-Targaryen, has the same auburn hair as her younger son. A deep burnished red, streaked through with grey at the temples, pinned up with the careful artlessness of a woman who spent her youth in magazines. She’s slender and elegant, and eats one almond with every glass of wine she drinks. She examines you for precisely three seconds too long, assessing your face, your hair, your clothes, your posture. She approves. You see her decide as much in real time. 

The Stark heir. Northern ice. Old money. Good bones. Can give him beautiful children. 

She folds her hands.

"My son has spoken of you." Her voice is dry and dignified. "Extensively."

"I'm flattered."

"He doesn’t speak of women extensively,” she tells you pointedly. “This is new. I think you should know."

You feel Valarr tense, very slightly, next to you. Mother, his body says, without his mouth moving. His hand tightens at your waist a fraction.

Jena looks at her son, then she looks back at you. "He’s been patient his whole life, for lack of anything worth being impatient about. I had begun to fear he would never find anything worth impatience. It’s a relief to me that he finally has."

You say the polite thing and make equally polite conversation. You get through dinner. Matarys is at your elbow the whole time—making you laugh, feeding you gossip about the other guests, refilling your wine without asking—and you like him, immediately, in the instinctive way you like very few people. You understand that Matarys has been deployed gently by his brother, as your ambassador to the house.

Later, much later, after the dinner and the drawing room, in the guest bedroom (he’s been given the guest bedroom; no unmarried couples in the main wing, even for him), Valarr strips you out of your dress and lays you down and makes love to you so gently you could cry, and you do, silently, a few tears sliding into your hair. 

Valarr notices but asks nothing, simply kissing the tears from your temple. And you love him, in that moment, with a quality of love that’s terrifying. Because you don’t trust it, and you don’t trust him. You’re lying in his mother's house in a guest bedroom, and you’re crying, and he’s kissing your tears away with the tenderness of a man who’s been preparing for you his whole life.

He murmurs into your hair: I have never been so happy, love.

You believe him.

That’s the most frightening part.

The next morning, you come down for breakfast in one of his shirts over your own pyjama bottoms. Matarys is at the kitchen island in a sweater that used to belong to their father, and Jena is at the table with a cup of tea and a newspaper. The sun is coming in through the windows, and Valarr comes up behind you, kissing the top of your head absently while he reaches for the coffee, and you think—with a small, clear tremor of shock—this is what it would look like. If I married him. This is what the rest of my life would look like.

Jena lowers her newspaper. She looks at you over the rim of her teacup. You think she sees something in your face, then.

"He is better," she says mildly, "when you are in the house."

You don't answer.

You don’t know, that morning, that you will remember her saying that for the rest of your life.

XI. january, year three.

You come back to the penthouse late on a Tuesday night in January. Eleven, maybe later.

You’ve been to a dinner you hated. Your shoes are off before you’re fully through the door, your shoulders set in a rigid line. You peel off your coat impatiently, a moment later, glaring at nothing. You want a drink, a hot bath, and you want not to think about the man you sat next to at dinner for a full forty minutes. That’s how long it took you to realised he was the uncle of a woman whose deal your fund had just walked away from.

You drop your bag on the console.

You call out, "I'm home.”

And a voice behind you, low and leisurely, drawls: "I can see that."

You turn.

Valarr stands in the doorway of the living room. He’s still in the suit trousers, and the shirt from his own evening—rolled at the sleeves because you told him once you like how his forearms look bared, collar open at the throat, the white streak at his temple catching light. He has a glass of scotch in his hand, and he’s not smiling. 

He’s looking at you in that particular way Valarr looks at you now, which is different from how he looked at you two years ago.

Two years ago, he looked at you like a man who found something he’d not expected to find and was afraid, faintly, that it would be taken away from him.

Now he looks at you like a man who knows exactly what he has and is, quietly, keeping it.

"Hi," you call out.

"Hi." He takes a sip of his drink. His eyes do a single slow pass down your body, head to toe, unhurried. Shoes off, hair a mess, dress wrinkled, the faintest mascara smudge at the corner of one eye. "Bad night?"

"The worst," you admit tightly.

"Mm." He doesn't move from the doorway. "Come here."

You don't go, immediately. Not because you’re refusing, but because you like, these days, to make him ask a second time. Sometimes third. Because the small pause between the first instruction and the second has become its own private language between you, a thing he understands, a thing that turns the air in the room half a degree warmer.

His mouth does a small thing it does nowadays. The corner tugs slowly, something tender and dark in it.

Valarr waits a beat. Then, lower: "I said come here."

You cross the room unhurriedly.

Valarr sets his drink down on the side table without looking at it. He catches your jaw with the hand that was holding the glass—warm, faintly tacky from the condensation—and he tilts your face up. He looks at you. Just looks. No kiss yet. He’s reading your face, the way he always does now, doing his inventory of you: tired, wound tight, wants to fight something, wants to be handled.

Alright.

He tilts his head a fraction. "Who seated you next to him?"

You blink. "What?"

"At dinner. Who seated you next to him? Not by accident, I assume." His thumb is moving leisurely along the line of your jaw, his mismatched eyes hooded. "You wouldn't be this tense if it was an accident. So who did it?"

You stare at him.

You haven’t told him who you sat next to at dinner. You haven’t told him anything about dinner. You’ve only been home for forty seconds. He’s read it off you, you realise. The angle of your shoulders, the particular tension in your mouth, the fact that you dropped your bag instead of setting it down. He’s reconstructed, from this, a whole sequence of events he wasn’t present for, and he’s landed with uncanny precision on the actual problem.

"How do you—"

"You'll tell me later," he says, dismissive, almost bored.

He’s not interested in dinner anymore. He’s already set it aside. It’s a thing he’s logged for later. You know there’ll be a phone call later in the week, you know someone will find himself suddenly unavailable for a seating arrangement, and that will be that . 

He’s already turned his full attention back to you.

"Not now,” he goes on idly. “Now you're going to take off that dress, my love."

Tonight you do. 

Because you want to, because you need this, and he sees it in you. 

Valarr watches you, but he doesn't help. Two years ago, he would have helped—would have reached for the zip, would have knelt to slide it down you, would have made a little production of it—and now he just watches. He leans back against the doorframe, head tilted back, and watches. His eyes go steadily darker as you work the zip. The dress slides off your shoulders, and you step out of it, kicking it aside.

"Bra. Underwear. All of it. Slowly."

You obey, keeping eye contact throughout. You reach behind your back for the bra clasp, taking your time. Because he said slowly, and you are, these days, a woman who rewards specificity. 

The straps slide down your arms. You feel Valarr’s attention on your breasts when the bra comes loose. There’s a small sound he makes—not a word, just a silky exhale—and you hook your thumbs into the sides of your underwear and drag them down your legs. You step out of them, and when you straighten, he’s looking at you the way men in paintings look at things. All consuming, devout.

"Stay there."

You stay.

He crosses the room, still half-dressed, and walks once around you. A full slow circle. His eyes on your back, the line of your spine, the curve of your ass. Valarr stops behind you. You feel his breath at the nape of your neck. His hand, warm and dry, slides down the length of your spine leisurely, following the bumps of each vertebra down to the small of your back.

He palms your ass.

Squeezes, almost thoughtfully, appreciatively. Then, without warning, he hits it—one sharp, precise smack, not hard enough to really hurt but hard enough to make you gasp. You feel the heat of his handprint bloom instantly across the skin, and you feel his breath at your ear dip a half-register lower.

"Hm," he hums, pleased, as if confirming something. "I thought so."

He comes back around to the front of you.

His eyes have gone entirely black now. He slides the back of his knuckles down your sternum, between your breasts, over your stomach, and between your legs. When his fingers come away wet, he looks at them for a long contemplative second, then pops them in his own mouth.

You watch his eyes close.

You watch his throat work as he sucks his own fingers clean of you, and when Valarr’s eyes open again he’s smiling. It’s small, private, the smile of a man who’s just had his first sip of a very good wine he was looking forward to all evening.

"Tell me what you want," he says quietly. "The short version."

"Valarr—"

"I said the short version."

"Rough," you answer breathlessly.

"Mm." His thumb, still wet, strokes the side of your throat, almost tender now. "Is that so?"

He manoeuvres you against the wall.

One hand at your throat—exact pressure, the pressure you taught him, two years of calibration behind his thumb—and one hand at your hip, gripping hard enough to bruise. He’s not kissing you yet. He’s just looking at you, up close, his forehead almost to yours, his breath warm against your mouth, and then Valarr kisses you.

It’s not the kiss of a man asking permission. 

Instead, it’s a kiss of a man who’s fucked you several hundred times and who knows, from the rhythm of your breath and the angle of your chin and the specific way you had dropped your bag, precisely what you need from him tonight.

He kisses you hard, with teeth. With hunger. He bites your lower lip and drags it between his own. And when you bite his lip back, Valarr laughs against your mouth, low and pleased, as if you’ve just confirmed a diagnosis he was already fairly sure about.

The hand at your hip slides between your legs. No preamble. Two fingers into you in one long, slow push, knuckle-deep, and the wet sound of it is obscene in the quiet of the entryway. His mouth goes still against yours for a half-second as he catalogues how wet you already are.

"All through dinner?" he wonders.

You don't answer. You can't answer. He’s curled his fingers, and you’re breathing through your teeth, your forehead pressed to his collarbone.

"Answer me."

You make a small, hungry sound. "Valarr."

"Were you sitting across from him, thinking about this?” he demands, working his wrist. “About coming home to me like this?"

"Yes," you breathe out.

"About what I'd do to you?" he probes further. 

"Yes."

His lips skim your temple. "Good. I’ve been thinking about you, too."

He adds a third finger.

You feel yourself stretch around him, and your knees go for a second. Valarr catches you with the hand at your throat, holds you up, keeps fucking you on his fingers without breaking rhythm. He’s not going easy. He’s decided, somewhere in the last three minutes, that tonight is not a night for going easy. His thumb finds your clit at the same moment his fingers hit the spot inside you that he’s mapped years ago. 

You come on his hand against the entryway wall less than ninety seconds after walking through the door.

Valarr doesn't let you ride it out. He pulls his fingers out of you before you're done, wet and glistening, and holds them up between you.

"Open."

You open your mouth.

He slides his fingers in. You taste yourself on him, tangy and clean, and you close your mouth around his knuckles, sucking slowly, because you know what it does to him, watching his pupils dilate. Valarr’s breath catches, and his cock twitches visibly under the fabric of his trousers.

"You're going to kill me, my love," he murmurs fondly, already slightly breathless. "Turn around."

He half-turns you himself. Face to the wall. One hand between your shoulder blades, holding you there, the other sliding up the inside of your thigh, keeping you open.

"Stay."

You swallow, staying in your spot.

He undresses behind you without hurry. You hear it—the soft drag of his shirt, the clink of his belt being drawn from his trousers, the considered way he puts his cufflinks down on the side table because Valarr doesn’t throw cufflinks.

No matter how hard he’s about to fuck you.

You hear the whisper of fabric when he steps out of his trousers. You hear him take himself in his own hand, a single slow stroke, and the small catch of breath that follows.

You hear all of it, and you can’t see him, but listening is part of it, and he knows it’s part of it. This play between you. He’s taking his time on purpose.

When he comes back to you, he’s fully naked, skin hot against your back, the length of his cock sliding heavy between your thighs before he's even angled himself. He drags his length through the wetness of you, slow, once, twice, and you hear him groan low behind your ear at the feel of it.

"Look at you," he breathes. "Come undone. All for me. Just for me."

Valarr puts one hand back at the nape of your neck, pressing you forward against the wall, and the other hand he slides down to check—thorough, unhurried, two fingers back inside you like he’s making absolutely sure you’re exactly as ready as he wants it—and he makes a low, satisfied sound against the back of your shoulder.

"My good girl."

Good girl is new.

He would not have said good girl in year one. He wouldn’t have said it in month eighteen. He’s arrived at good girl through long study, through months of testing adjacent phrasings, through watching your face when he tried things, abandoning the ones that didn't land. Good girl landed. For a different reason good boy landed with him. 

You feel yourself react to it now, with a small, involuntary shiver. Valarr feels it against your back, and you hear the small pleased huff he makes when he catches it.

He fucks you against the wall.

He pushes into you in one long, deliberate stroke, to the hilt, no mercy, and the sound you make is raw and loud. You would, on a better night, be embarrassed about it.

He doesn’t give you a moment to adjust. He doesn’t ask. Valarr pulls almost all the way out and pushes back in again just as hard. Then again, setting a pace he’s chosen for you. You feel the flat of his pelvis hit your ass with every stroke, his balls heavy against you, and you feel yourself already starting to build again against the wall.

He fucks you with the hand at your nape, holding you exactly where he wants you, and the other hand reaching around and down to work your clit with a precision that comes from two years of specific practice. His mouth brushes at the join of your shoulder and your neck where he had, once, been taught to bite.

He bites now. He bites hard enough that you yelp. There’s no pause, no apology. Valarr sucks the bite afterwards, a long, relaxed drag of his tongue, and you know you’ll have a bruise there tomorrow in the exact place your collar will not cover.

He fucks you through it, and his voice low in your ear is not a voice he had in year one, is not a voice he knew was in him in year one, because it’s a voice you made.

Listen to yourself. Listen to how wet you are for me.

You're so fucking tight tonight, my love. Did you miss me this much?

That's right. Take it. Take all of it. That's my good girl.

You're mine. Say it.

You let out a breathy gasp. "Yours."

"Again."

"Yours, Val, I'm yours—"

"Louder."

He reaches up, his fingers sliding into your hair, and pulls. Not brutally but with intent. Forcing your head back against his shoulder so your spine arches and your breasts push forward against the cold of the wall, and the angle of him inside you changes. You make a sound that’s not a word, exactly, and he fucks you through the sound of it anyway, his mouth at your ear again.

"Come on my cock."

You do. 

You come with your forehead pressed to the cold of the wall, his hand at your throat, and his cock pulsing inside you. When you do, Valarr makes a small sound behind you that’s not thank you anymore, not the way it was in year one.

It’s something else now. Something more possessive, darker, closer to yes.

He doesn't let you down from it. He keeps moving. He fucks you through the aftershocks, slower but not gentler, his hand still working your folds, and when you whimper and try to close your legs, he murmurs, "No. Stay open for me, love," and you do.

He pulls out of you only when he's decided to.

He’s still hard. You feel it against the curve of your ass as he presses a slow kiss to the bite mark on your shoulder—almost tender now, almost apologetic—and then he turns you, bodily, with a hand on your shoulder. Still controlled, still in command, walking you backwards to the couch and puts you on it.

Knees open, thighs spread. On display. One hand flat against your sternum to keep you lying back.

He kneels between them.

He looks up at you.

And this—this is the moment you don't quite expect.

His mouth is wrecked from your mouth, floppy hair mussed from your fingers, the white streak at his temple dark with sweat. His cock is still hard and flushed, glistening where he pulled out of you a minute ago, stomach tight with the effort of not finishing in you against the wall. Looking down at him on his knees between your thighs, still entirely composed even now, his mismatched eyes blazing, you feel, for a second, a small bright flare of something you have to call wonder.

Plain wonder. The kind you feel looking at something you didn't know could exist.

Because this isn’t the man who came to your dorm with peonies in September of year one. Not the man who asked if he could kiss you.

This is a particular, meticulous, terribly capable man who’s just fucked you against a wall with the exact intensity you needed on a bad Tuesday, without being told a single thing about the said Tuesday. Who’s now kneeling between your thighs with his own release still unspent, looking up at you like he’s waiting for the next instruction.

Valarr sees your face change.

His own face shifts, just a fraction in response, eyes going soft. His mouth tugs at the corner. Not a smile, exactly, but the shape of one. You’ve seen this expression on him maybe four times in two years. It’s the expression he makes when he catches you looking at him with that particular stunned, wondering, what are you look on your face.

He loves it. He loves it more than anything.

He loves being seen by you. That’s the deepest thing in him, you understand in that instant. That’s the mouth of the well. He loves being seen. And you’re the first person who’s ever looked at him and seen what was under the gold. You’re the only person who knows what to do with it, with him. And when you look at him this way—with wonder, with the small stunned what have I made gleam in your eyes—his whole face goes soft.

"What?" he asks, almost a whisper.

"Nothing."

"Tell me," he urges, more needy than ordering. 

"I was just—"

You don't have the word. A part of you doesn’t want to give him the word. The word is organising itself in your mouth anyway. You know, if you say it out loud, he will keep it, he will treasure it, will pull it out on bad days and press it against his chest like a warm stone.

"I was just looking at you."

His mouth softens further. His hand, big and warm, slides up the inside of your thigh. It’s a slow movement, fingers still slick from you, and his hand settles high. Not yet where he wants it. He holds it there. You can feel the faint tremor in him; he’s not as composed as he’s pretending to be. He’s still hard, wound up tight without release. But you know he’s not going to come until he’s made you come again, and the decision is written into every beautiful line of him.

"I like it when you look at me like that," Valarr admits quietly. His eyes don’t leave yours. "Keep doing it. Look at me like that forever please."

You keep doing it.

He puts his mouth on you.

He’s messy about it tonight. Deliberately so. Two years ago, he was precise about eating you out—careful, technical, a man demonstrating his competence, selling himself—but tonight he’s sloppy. In a specific way he’s learned you like, open-mouthed and wet, tongue flat and lazy, a filthy worship.

He licks into you, tongue curling. He licks you clean of his precum. He makes a low sound against you when he tastes both of you mixed together, and that sound goes through you like a current.

Valarr hooks your knee over his shoulder and opens you wider, taking you apart, all while you watch him. The whole time he’s working you with that specific precision—which was yours, which you gave him, your gift—he keeps glancing up at you through his lashes to check that you’re still watching him with that face.

And every time he catches you still looking, Valarr’s mouth curls minutely against you, pleased. You feel his throat hum with it.

He’s thriving on it, feeding on it. He’s a man who’s happiest when he’s being looked at like this, and this look—the slightly stunned I did this to you, didn't I look—is the only look in the world he wants. More than anything. More than oxygen, more than food. 

He slides two fingers back into you while his mouth sucks and nibbles between your folds. You hear how wet you sound. He hears it too and makes a small choked sound against you at the evidence of it. His free hand, slotted between his own legs, you realise with a hot jolt, tightens on himself. Not to stroke himself, but to clamp down on his own orgasm. He refuses to waste himself like this, even now. 

You come again. Slower this time, longer, messier, twitching and rigid against the couch. Your hand goes tight in his hair, and Valarr’s face is a mess of you and his own fingers slick to the knuckle. He fucks you through it with his mouth and his hand until you push his forehead away with your own hand because you can't take any more.

He sits back on his heels.

His cock is visibly pulsing, wet and leaking at the tip. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist, not breaking eye contact.

"Come here," you order quietly.

He comes up.

He climbs onto the couch with you. He puts his head in your lap. You stroke his hair, your fingers finding the white streak at his temple, sliding through it. Valarr closes his eyes. He makes a small contented sound, almost a hum, and you feel the warm press of his mouth against the skin of your inner thigh. It’s lazy and affectionate, not meant to start anything, even though he’s still hard against your leg.

You reach down with your other hand.

You close your fingers around his hot, slick length, and you start to stroke him, working up a steady rhythm. He shudders against you, breath stuttering against your thigh. He doesn't ask for it; he wouldn't; he’s learned, over two years, to take only what you hand him.

"Who was it?" you ask, after a long, quiet moment. 

Valarr twitches in your hand, hot and throbbing. You’re calmer now, more settled and watch his beautiful face as his brows furrow.

"At dinner?"

You hum.

"Later," he whispers, eyes still closed, mouth moving against your thigh. Little nibbles and kisses. "Tell me… later. I'll take care of it."

You tighten your hand on him, an almost cruel grip, and Valarr makes a small, wrecked sound.

You stroke him like that, slow but relentless, and you feel him starting to tremble. When he comes, he does so quietly. Spilling hot and sudden into your hand, face pressed into the meat of your thigh, breathing your name into the crease of your hip. It’s not the way he came in year one, either. In year one, he made a production of it. In year one, it was all theatre.

Now it’s almost silent. It’s private. Now he comes into your hand like it’s the only place in the world he’s permitted to.

And he will take care of it.

You believe him. Completely.

You stroke his hair with your clean hand, spreading his cum back across his softening cock with your other, marvelling at the groan that vibrates in his slender throat as you do so.

You look down at the top of Valarr’s head, and you think—with the same quiet wonder you had a minute ago, not yet frightened, not yet aware of what the wonder is going to cost you one day—look at you, look at what you've become, look at what I've made of you.

He hears you thinking it.

He turns his face into your thigh, kissing the skin there, once, and he says, almost too quietly to hear, "Thank you."

And you understand he’s not thanking you for letting him do what he just did to you.

He’s thanking you, specifically, for the look on your face.

He’s thanking you for making him whole. 

XII. spring, year three.

It’s not all wrongness. 

That's the thing you have to remember. That's the thing you’ll have to remember, later, when you’re trying to explain to yourself why you stayed.

There’s the morning in Pyke, at the house his father left him on the coast. You wake to find him on the porch with two cups of coffee and a book he’s not reading (he’s watching the water with a faraway look you’ll remember forever). When you come out barefoot in his t-shirt, Valarr pulls you into his lap without a word and kisses your temple. Lightly, lovingly. You sit there together for forty minutes while the fog burns off the bay, neither of you speaking, and it’s one of the quietest hours of your life.

There’s also the night in the penthouse kitchen when you’re both drunk, and he tries to teach you to make his grandmother's pasta by hand (my father's mother, her side was Dornish, this is how she taught him, this is how he taught me) and you ruin the dough twice.

Valarr laughs so hard he has to brace himself against the counter. You throw flour in his face, offended. He catches your wrists, still laughing, flour on his cheek and in the white streak at his temple like snow. He backs you against the refrigerator and kisses you until you can’t breathe. The pasta is forgotten, and you eat cereal for dinner in his bed at one in the morning, and he tells you, softly, that his father would have liked you.

There’s the afternoon at Maidenpool, when you both go to a gallery, and Valarr watches you more than the art. You catch him, in the reflection of a glass case, looking at you with an expression of undiluted wonder, and that look is so naked, so unguarded, that you have to turn your face away because you can’t bear the weight of it. Later, in the cab home, you put your hand in his. He lifts it to his mouth and kisses your knuckles, one by one.

There’s the weekend in late spring of year three when your father has had a small cardiac event, and you fly up to the family estate. Valarr comes with you without being asked. He handles the logistics and makes himself useful with your father's staff. Warm and competent.

He charms your uncle, Brandon, who’s not an easy man to impress. No Stark ever is. He doesn’t charm your grandmother, who’s far worse, but he’s respectful, and your grandmother tells you, at the end of the weekend, in her dry northern way, that he’s sufficient. 

It’s the highest compliment she’s ever given a man.

Barthogan Stark, in bed, propped on pillows and recovering, watches Valarr from the doorway and then looks at you and says, "He'd take good care of you."

"I know," you reply.

"He'd do it well,” he continues. “He'd do it with everything he has. I can tell. He has that look about him, that boy. It’s how I once looked at your mother. Just… more intense. He’s charming, alright, but I can see the dragon in him, deep beneath that shine. Maybe that’s good. That edge. You’re a wolf, pup; a weak man won’t survive beside you. You’d eat the bastard alive."

"I know, Dad."

Your father's face softens, and he grips your hand. "I'm only saying, I want you happy."

You hesitate, squeezing his hand back, and admit, because you love him more than anyone, because he’s everything to you, "I'm thinking about it."

And you are thinking about it. Through year three, you think about it more and more. 

You think about it in the penthouse and in his mother's house. On the plane coming back from a weekend in Pentos, and in the cab on the way to a friend's engagement party. An evening where Valarr holds your hand all night and introduces you, everywhere, as my girl, low and fond, with a small proud angle of his jaw. You think about it at 2AM in his bed when you can’t sleep, and he pulls you into him without waking, his arm going heavy across your waist. 

You feel, underneath everything, the specific warmth of a life that you could have and keep, if you wanted it.

There’s another night in June of year three, after a charity gala, where you end up barefoot on his penthouse terrace at two in the morning. He’s in his shirtsleeves, you’re in your gown, and he glances at you and says, "I'd like to ask you something. I'm not going to. Not yet. I'm telling you that I'd like to."

He hasn’t mentioned marriage once since Myr, put no pressure on you about the subject. "I know," you tell him.

"I've had a ring for a year," he reveals calmly.

You meet his gaze. "Val"

"I'm telling you so you're not surprised. When I do ask. I don't want you to be surprised. I want you to have had time to think it through." He reaches over, tucking your hair behind your ear. His hand stays there, warm against your jaw. "I'm not asking now, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you to have known. I want a lifetime with you. Just that. This, us."

You stand on the terrace with him, and you gaze at him, your heart torn inside your chest. The night is balmy, and the city is lit up below you. He’s so beautiful, and he loves you more than anything, and you think, I could say yes. I could. I could marry him tonight. I could have this forever.

You almost tell him yes, then.

You don't.

You kiss him instead, long and deep, holding his cheek in your palm, and whisper against his lips, "Ask me again in a year."

Valarr smiles softly, "Alright."

He means that, too.

He has the ring.

You could marry him, you know you could. He would be a good husband, by every standard that can be measured. His loyalty to you goes beyond anything you’ve ever found in any other lover. He would be attentive, he would be kind. He would fold himself around you and your future children like a man building a fortress. 

He would spend the rest of his life learning you.

You think about it seriously for months.

And then, somewhere in year four, you stop.

XIII. winter, year four.

It begins quietly. 

You don’t wake up one morning having decided to leave Valarr. You wake up one morning, and you’ve been not-quite-looking at him for three weeks, and you realise, over coffee, that you’ve stopped laughing at his jokes.

Stopped looking up when he enters a room, started staying late at the office. You’ve started picking small fights about unimportant things, the way you used to do as a teenager with your father when what you actually wanted was to go outside and scream. Wolf-blood, you father always huffed, it runs thick in you, pup.

You don’t know why you feel this way. 

Valarr is the perfect lover. Attentive, kind, rich, devastatingly handsome. He is, in bed, precisely the man you shaped him to be. In public he’s a proud, ambitious young dragon prince, and in private with you he’s a devoted puppy who would drink from your palm if you offered it. He anticipates your moods. He brings you tea with honey without being asked on the mornings your sinuses hurt. He’s memorised the names of your father's men. 

He’s faultless.

And you’re so bored.

Not sexually—the sex is still, somehow, excellent, because he keeps iterating, he keeps learning, he keeps studying you like a language he’s determined to master—but existentially. 

You’re bored in that specific way that a person is bored when their lover has become a mirror. 

Valarr reflects you back at yourself exquisitely, but there’s no him anymore that’s not also you. He’s folded himself so completely to your shape that when you reach for him you find only your own reflection staring back.

You want to be met. Challenged. You want to be met by a thing that’s not you. You don't know this yet, then. You know only that the penthouse has started to feel like a tomb.

And you know only that sometimes, increasingly, when he’s inside you and he’s saying your name, pressing his forehead to yours with that total worshipful absorption, you want to tear his throat out.

You want to bite him until he bites you back.

But he won't.

Valarr will open his mouth. He'll moan, let you draw blood. He'll thank you for it afterwards. Genuine and polite.

But he’ll not bite you back, not really.

He doesn’t know how.

You gave him every other tool. That one—the one he would have had to bring himself, the one that can’t be taught—he doesn’t possess, you realise. He never did. The whole core of Valarr is receiving, refining, and reflecting. He can’t originate, he can’t surprise you.

He’s not a match that lights the room. He can only ever be the mirror you light yourself in.

And you’re tired of lighting yourself.

XIV. spring, year five.

You end it in May. 

You do it at the penthouse, on a Sunday afternoon, in his kitchen, with sunlight coming in through the windows and striping the floor in gold. You’re wearing jeans and one of his old t-shirts. Valarris making pasta. His grandmother's recipe. The one he taught you badly, the one you now make together sometimes on Sundays. It’s domestic and ordinary.

You feel vaguely sick. 

"Valarr,” you say, “I can't do this anymore."

He stops stirring.

He carefully sets the wooden spoon down on the rest, turning off the burner. He turns to face you fully, his hip leaning against the counter, his full attention on you. There’s no pain, no panic, no anger. He doesn’t even look particularly surprised.

"Tell me why."

"I can't explain it," you reply. “I’m sorry—”

"You can,” he cuts in softly. “You just don't want to. Please tell me."

"Val—"

"Please." His voice pitch hasn’t changed. It’s the please that kills you, because the please is precise. It’s the please of a man who’s asking for data, not mercy. He’s asking because he wants to understand what happened so he can adjust. Even now. Even now, at the end, his first instinct is to find out what the input was so he can recalibrate his output. "Please tell me. I'd like to understand."

But you understand, in that moment, why you have to leave him. You understand it with full clarity for the first time in five years that almost staggers you.

You can’t leave him in a way Valarr can understand. Because if you do, if you leave him in a way he can understand, he’ll simply become the thing you left him for. And if that happens, you’ll be back in his bed within six weeks. You will fold him again, then again, and you'll be married to yourself more than ever.

So you give him nothing. You give him, It's not working. You give him, I'm sorry. You give him, I need time.

His jaw works, his eyes tracking your face.

Then, Valarr says quietly, "I know you're lying. I don't know about what. But I know."

"I'm not—"

His voice is soft but there’s iron underneath. "Whatever it is, I deserve at least not to be lied to. Keep your reasons. I won't make you explain, but don't lie to me, my love. Please."

You stand in his kitchen, staring at him and you feel the shape of what you’re leaving. You feel it with full weight. Four and a half years. The silver thread he’s woven into your life pulses faintly, painfully.

You sense each place where, if you pull it out, the fabric of you is going to tear. The snowy morning in February. The porch in Pyke. The night with the flour. Matarys winking at you in the doorway. Jena saying he is better when you are in the house. The terrace in June, and the ring he’s had for a year. 

The life you almost chose, and the life you will never now have.

You whisper, "I'm sorry."

For doing this to you, for remaking you, but I can’t live with myself anymore, seeing what I’m turning you into.

"I love you," Valarr says, so simply you feel yourself exhale, pained, "I will always love you. You should know that. I'm not going to stop. I don't have that in me, I’m afraid."

You nod because you can’t speak.

"When you're ready to come back," Valarr says quietly, "I'll be here."

"Val—"

"I heard you. You need time. I'll give you time." His voice is low, almost tender. "However long it takes. Take years if you need. I have nothing but time. I'll be here."

You leave, hesitating for exactly four seconds at the door, chained by four and a half years. Valarr inhales, and you yank the door open before he can speak again.

You walk through the lobby and out onto the street, where a car is waiting for you. A car he called, because he called it before you even finished leaving him, and you ride all the way to your father's townhouse with your hands shaking in your lap.

You know, even then, that he meant what he said.

I'll be here.

He will be. For years. He’ll be exactly where you left him, in the specific shape you left him in, made to precisely your specifications, patient, waiting. Valarr will not move on, will not date, or forget. He’ll do what he’s always done: build businesses, sit on boards, attend galas and smile that golden smile of his and underneath it all, he’ll be a man at the bottom of a well waiting for the sound of your footsteps.

He’ll wait.

And he’ll not be becoming someone else while he waits. He’ll stay exactly who he was on the day you left him. Because the man he was on the day you left him was you. He finished becoming himself the minute you unlocked him, and the self he became is the self you made. 

There’s nowhere else for that man to go now.

That’s your last mistake with Valarr Targaryen.

Not the leaving.

The making.

XV. later.

You will meet Aerion Targaryen a year later. 

In a bar. In nowhere, Ashford, off a highway, on a road trip you took because you couldn’t sleep in your own beds anymore.

You’ll meet him and your whole body will go still. Because his jaw will be the shape of Valarr's jaw, and his mouth will be the shape of Valarr's mouth, and his eyes will be the wrong colour—both of them pale, icy, mean—and his hands will be callused in a way Valarr's never were. He’lll look at you like nothing at all and everything, simultaneously, and you’ll understand, immediately, that this is the other branch of the family.

The failed one. The cautionary tale Valarr told you about once. 

You will understand immediately, that this is the man you’ve been looking for your whole life. 

Because Aerion will bite you back.

Aerion will not have been made by you. He’s been shaped by his own wounds, his own father, his own failures. You’ll be dropped into his life like a match into dry grass, and he’ll burn, and you will burn with him. It’ll be the first time in years you’ll feel met. By something that’s not yours, that wasn’t shaped by you. 

That existed independent of you and that still, somehow, wants you more than air.

You’ll never tell Aerion about Valarr. You’ll keep Valarr like a grave in the back garden of your life, water it and tend to it but you’ll never speak its name aloud.

But the whole time, in the city, in a penthouse that still has your toothbrush in a drawer he’s never emptied, Valarr will be waiting.

Because he’s a man of his word. 

He has nothing but time.

And he remembers everything.

an: I.... I really don't know chiefs. This sure was something. [paces in a little circle] Also if you wanted theoretical part 2 where you meet Aerion in this verse and how that goes, let me know, I might write it after HW10. I'm so deep in the sauce ough. embarrassing.

[thirst4fictionalmen]

So good!!! This took a turn I wasn’t ready for. lol I didn’t read the tags

[catbayunthestoryteller]

The Family Brand (Part 10 - the end)

Aerion Targaryen x f!reader - modern AU (see part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here, part 6 here, part 7 here, part 8 here, part 9 here)

Kiera had been sprawled across your bed, scrolling aimlessly through listings while you sat cross-legged on the floor with your laptop balanced on a stack of textbooks.

“Look at this one,” she’d said, turning the screen toward you. “It’s small, but it’s five minutes from campus.”

You leaned closer. The photos showed a narrow galley kitchen and a window that faced brick. “It’s still too much,” you murmured. “Even split. And I don’t have anyone to split it with.”

“Ask around?”

“I have. Everyone either renewed their leases in May or already paired off.” You shut your laptop with a soft click. “I don’t want to be forty minutes out again. I wasted half my life on trams last semester.”

Kiera propped her chin in her hand. “You could always...”

“No,” you cut in gently, knowing exactly what she was about to say. “I’m not moving into his father’s townhouse indefinitely. That’s not a plan.”

Kiera studied you for a moment, then nodded once. “Fair.”

You hadn’t realized the door to the corridor had been ajar. Aerion had. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t slam doors or demand explanations the way he might have a year ago. He waited until Kiera left, then he appeared in your doorway, leaning one shoulder against the frame like he’d been there all along.

“You’re apartment hunting,” he said.

It wasn’t accusatory. It was too even for that.

You closed the wardrobe you’d been rummaging through. “I’ve been looking.”

“For somewhere closer to the university.”

“Yes.”

“And it didn’t occur to you,” he went on, very carefully, “to discuss that with me before discussing it with Kiera.”

There it was, the sting, thinly concealed.

You sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. “I wasn’t hiding it from you. It’s just logistics.”

“Logistics,” he repeated, as though the word offended him personally. He stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. “You want to move because the commute is exhausting and the rent is unsustainable. That’s not logistics. That’s a problem. And I am, apparently, not part of the solution.”

You looked up at him. “I don’t want to live here forever.”

He blinked. “Neither do I.”

“That’s not what I mean.” You rubbed your temple. “I don’t want to be the girl who drifts from her parents’ house into her boyfriend’s family home and never actually stands on her own two feet. Your father is generous. Your house is enormous. But it isn’t mine.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you remain in my father’s house,” he said. “Gods forbid I remain in it.”

You frowned faintly. “Then what are you suggesting?”

“That I move out.” He said it as though it were obvious. “I’m graduating this year. I was planning to anyway.”

You stilled.

“My father has finally conceded,” Aerion continued, tone dry, “that I am not, in fact, an ornamental disaster. He’s offering me a position in one of the companies. Nothing ceremonial. Actual responsibility. He also believes...” his mouth twisted, “...that I should learn to function without three people anticipating my breakfast preferences.”

“That will be a shock,” you said lightly.

“It will be a liberation.” His gaze sharpened. “And I intended to ask you to come with me.”

“You…what?”

“I was waiting until I had something concrete,” he said. “An address. A lease. Something that didn’t sound like I’d improvised it five minutes prior. But apparently I’ve misjudged the timeline.”

You searched his face for flippancy and found none.

“Aerion,” you began carefully, “the kind of place you would choose and the kind of place I can afford are not the same.”

“I’m aware.”

“You would want space. Light. Something central.”

“And?” he asked.

“And I cannot contribute equally to something like that,” you said, more firmly now. “Not to the kind of apartment you’d consider livable. I don’t want to be carried.”

He stared at you for a long moment, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped, steadier, stripped of theatrics.

“I don’t want a roommate,” he said. “I don’t want a financial arrangement. I want to live with you.”

“That doesn’t negate the financial reality.”

“It does for me.”

You shook your head. “That’s easy to say when you’re the one with the salary.”

“It won’t be an allowance,” he said, irritation flickering through. “It will be my income. Earned. And I would be paying for an apartment whether you lived in it or not.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It is entirely the point,” he countered. “If I choose a larger place because I prefer space, that’s my preference. You are not obligated to subsidize my taste.”

“And if we argue one day?” you pressed. “If you get angry? I don’t ever want to wonder whether I owe you for the roof over my head.”

He looked hurt. “Do you think I would weaponize that against you?”

“No,” you said immediately. “But I don’t want the imbalance to exist in the first place.”

He exhaled slowly, as though recalibrating.

“You would contribute,” he said at last. “Just not in the way you’re measuring.”

“That’s vague.”

“You would bring your books and your half-finished essays and your impossible tea rituals and your tendency to occupy the center of my bed as though it’s a throne. You would bring yourself.” His jaw tightened faintly. “And I would bring the lease.”

You tried not to smile. “That’s not a financial plan.”

“It is my plan.”

You studied him, the set of his shoulders, the stubborn lift of his chin that had softened over the summer but not disappeared.

“And you refuse to let me split rent?”

“Yes.”

“Or utilities?”

“Yes.”

“At all?”

“At all.”

You leaned back on your hands, staring at the ceiling. “You’re infuriating.”

“I’ve been told.”

“You’re certain?” you asked finally.

“I am.”

“This isn’t just you being reactive because you overheard me complaining?”

He gave you a look. “If I were being reactive, we would be having a very different conversation.”

You believed him.

Your resistance wasn’t gone, but it had shifted, less about pride now, more about fear of stepping into something that felt very adult, very permanent.

“You’ll let me pay for groceries,” you said after a moment.

He considered it as though you’d proposed a treaty.

“You may,” he conceded, “occasionally.”

“And I choose the mugs.”

“That seems excessive.”

“I’m serious.”

He huffed a faint laugh. “Fine. You may curate the mugs.”

You held his gaze a second longer, then nodded once.

“All right,” you said.

The apartment was exactly what you had both pretended it wouldn’t be.

Too spacious. Too central. Too expensive.

It stood a fairly short walk from the university and even closer to the company offices where Aerion would begin working after graduation. High ceilings. Tall windows that let the city spill in through pale afternoon light. The kind of place estate agents described as tasteful in a voice that implied generational wealth.

You had to admit, it was quite elegant. The dining area held a long polished table neither of you truly needed. Aerion claimed it was for hosting. You suspected he liked the way it made him feel like a man who hosted.

One of the spare bedrooms disappeared almost immediately under garment racks and mirrored wardrobes.

“I refuse to compete with your dresses for space,” he’d declared, measuring the walls with the intensity of a military campaign. “It’s inefficient.”

“You’re turning an entire room into a closet.”

“Yes.”

“For both of us?”

“Obviously,” he threw over his shoulder, already directing movers where to place a full-length mirror. “I’m not a barbarian.”

The result was obscene. Floor-to-ceiling shelves. Shoes aligned with near-maniacal precision. His suits arranged by shade; your skirts and blouses hung with space to breathe. It felt less like a closet and more like a private boutique no one else was allowed to enter.

The rest of the apartment remained restrained: muted tones, polished surfaces, curated art.

And then there was the bedroom.

The bed itself was enormous, the bedside tables were dark oak, minimal. The lamps, warm and understated.

But at the head of the bed, arranged with suspicious neatness, sat a small army of plushies. A small bear he’d brought back from a business trip because it had reminded him, inexplicably, of you. Then a rabbit from a boutique you’d paused in front of for too long. Then a ridiculous velvet cat. They accumulated.

At the very center sat the build-a-dragon you’d given him at the beginning of your relationship, its wings slightly crooked from being hugged too often.

The rest of the apartment could have belonged to a restrained, dignified couple in a design magazine.

The bed belonged to you.

Aerion tolerated the plushies with a kind of long-suffering indulgence, right up until the moment he intended to touch you.

You were watching with open amusement as he gathered them briskly.

“Are you serious?”

“They’re observing,” he muttered, sweeping them into the top drawer of the dresser.

“They are stuffed.”

“They have eyes.”

He worked from home more often than he needed to.

Officially, it was because the company allowed flexibility. Unofficially, it was because he’d memorized your timetable and knew precisely which days you had only one afternoon lecture and would be home by noon.

On those mornings, he’d be seated at the dining table with his laptop open, sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms.

You’d pass behind him on your way to make tea, fingers brushing the back of his neck. He would not look up immediately, but his hand would catch your wrist and press a brief, absent kiss to your knuckles before releasing you.

Sometimes he forgot you were there and spoke under his breath at spreadsheets. Sometimes he noticed you watching him and leaned back in his chair, eyeing you with lazy appraisal until you felt warm under it.

When he returned from the office, though, there was nothing subtle about it.

The front door would open with a decisive click, the sound of shoes being set aside with far less care than the rest of the apartment received.

“Darling, I’m home!” he would call, voice carrying through the rooms with theatrical flourish.

You would appear from wherever you’d been, sofa, kitchen, bedroom, and he would stop in the entryway as though he had just returned from war.

“There’s my beautiful girl,” he’d say every single time, as though it were a revelation.

Even if you were in old leggings. Even if your hair was half-dried and frizzing around your shoulders.

He never crossed the room without expectation.

“Come here,” he’d demand softly.

“For what?”

“A kiss. Obviously.”

“As payment?”

“As tribute.”

You’d pretend reluctance for exactly three seconds before he cupped your jaw and kissed you properly, slow when he’d had a long day, impatient when he hadn’t. He tasted faintly of coffee and city air and something unmistakably him. Only after that did he relax.

You only cooked when time allowed it. On rare evenings when neither of you had deadlines or early meetings, you’d stand side by side in the kitchen attempting recipes neither of you had perfected. He approached cooking the way he approached negotiations: overconfident, meticulous, faintly disdainful of instruction manuals.

“You’re reading it wrong,” he’d say, peering over your shoulder at the recipe.

“I’m not.”

“You skipped a step.”

“I did not.”

He would reach around you to adjust the stove, breath warm against your temple, and you’d both forget what you were arguing about.

Half the time you ended up ordering food anyway, eating cross-legged on the living room floor carpet despite owning a perfectly respectable dining table.

At night, Aerion slept on his back at first, one arm thrown loosely over your waist. As the hours passed, he gravitated closer, until you were half tucked against him, his breath steady at your crown.

He talked sometimes. Not clearly. Not in coherent sentences. Low mumbles, fragments of words shaped against your hair. Once, when you’d been half-awake, you thought you heard your name threaded through the haze. Another time, something that sounded suspiciously like a reprimand delivered to an invisible colleague.

If you shifted or made a small sound, he would quiet instantly, as though sensing he’d been overheard.

In the mornings, he remembered none of it.

“You were arguing in your sleep,” you told him once.

“With whom?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

He frowned faintly. “Did I win?”

“Unclear.”

He accepted that with a nod, as though it were an acceptable outcome.

The city beyond your windows glowed in amber and glass, but your bedroom was warm and dim, the lamps turned low. The plushies still sat at the head of the bed, temporarily spared, because Aerion had been in an unusually gentle mood from the moment he’d come home.

He hadn’t made his usual theatrical entrance. He’d simply found you already in bed with a book, shed his jacket, and climbed in beside you with the quiet determination of someone seeking comfort.

Now he was half draped over you, pressing idle kisses along your shoulder, your collarbone, the underside of your jaw. His fingers traced slow paths over your waist as though memorizing terrain he already knew by heart.

“You’re clingy,” you murmured, eyes still on your book.

“I’m reflective,” he corrected against your skin, brushing his mouth over your throat.

He shifted, propping himself slightly on one elbow so he could look at you properly. His expression wasn’t sharp or mischievous tonight. It was thoughtful in a way that made you close the book and set it aside.

“I wish I’d met you sooner,” he said quietly.

You studied him. “You hated most people sooner.”

“Exactly.” His mouth curved faintly. “That’s the problem.”

He leaned down to kiss the corner of your mouth, then your cheek, then your temple, as though punctuating his own thoughts.

“If we’d met when I was seventeen,” he continued, “it would have been a catastrophe. I was intolerable.”

“You’re still intolerable.”

“Yes, but now it’s curated.”

You laughed softly, and he smiled at the sound before his gaze drifted somewhere more distant.

“You would have liked parts of it,” he went on. “The circles I grew up in. The events. The absurdity of it all. There’s a certain…theater to high society.”

“I can’t imagine you in theater.”

“Oh, it’s exactly that,” he said. “Everyone pretending not to be watching each other while watching obsessively. The dresses alone would have delighted you. Designers flown in, custom fittings, jewels that looked like they belonged in museums.”

You raised a brow. “Are you attempting to sell me on your adolescence?”

“I’m giving you the brochure,” he replied smoothly. “You would have enjoyed the music. The orchestras. The ridiculous string quartets tucked into corners of ballrooms.”

“And what would I have hated?”

He didn’t hesitate. “The scrutiny. The way conversations are layered with implication. The mothers evaluating you like a stock investment. The sons who believe charm is a personality.”

You grimaced faintly. “That does sound exhausting.”

“It was.”

He rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling, one hand still resting lazily at your hip.

“My first time was at a debutante ball,” he said, as though commenting on the weather.

You turned your head slowly. “Of course it was.”

He huffed a quiet laugh.

“They present us like show horses,” he continued. “All polished and trained. It was dreadfully boring. Speeches. Toasts. Fathers congratulating each other for producing viable heirs.”

“And you,” you prompted.

“I was seventeen. Arrogant. Restless.” His lips twitched faintly. “She was from the south. Daughter of some titled relic who’d reinvented himself as a CEO. Three years older. She looked at me like she was bored out of her mind.”

“That must have wounded you deeply.”

“It intrigued me,” he corrected. “We slipped away when our fathers were distracted. There was a guest wing no one was using.”

He said it plainly, without embellishment.

“It wasn’t romantic,” he added after a moment. “It was…opportunistic. We were curious. We were unsupervised.”

“How did it go?”

“She didn’t speak to me again that night.” His tone remained even. “Which I respected. Years later, when people began paying more attention to me for reasons unrelated to teenage novelty, she took great pleasure in informing certain circles that she’d had me first.”

You snorted. “How dignified.”

“Very.”

He turned his head toward you then, studying your expression carefully.

“Does that bother you?”

“No,” you said honestly. “It sounds like you.”

He smiled at that, unexpectedly grateful.

“You wouldn’t have liked her,” he mused.

“Is that your diplomatic way of calling me inexperienced?”

“It’s my way of saying you don’t perform for an audience.”

His thumb brushed your waist absently.

“Daeron vomited on the dance floor at that same ball,” he added, the corner of his mouth lifting.

You blinked. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not. Too much champagne, not enough food. It was catastrophic.”

You laughed, imagining it.

“And Egg,” Aerion continued, warming to his nostalgia, “decided the day before his first debutante event that he hated his hair. He found Maekar’s electronic beard shaver and shaved his head.”

“No.”

“Yes. Father considered pulling him from the presentation entirely.”

“What happened?”

“They slapped a beret on him and pretended it was avant-garde.”

You were fully laughing now, and Aerion watched you like he’d orchestrated the story solely for that outcome.

“It was ridiculous,” he said more softly. “All of it. The rules. The expectations. Who you’re seen with, how long you dance with them, what it implies.”

His hand drifted higher, brushing a slow path along your ribs.

“You would have hated that part,” he murmured. “The implication that proximity equals possession.”

You shifted closer to him instinctively.

His gaze dropped to your mouth.

“I was worse then,” he admitted. “More careless. I liked the attention. I liked knowing I could walk away and someone would still be waiting. It matters little now. I have you.”

Aerion disliked complete silence. But he liked a low, comfortable hum of existence, the faint clicking of keys beneath his fingers, the distant clatter of someone in the street outside, the soft rustle of pages when you turned them.

He sat at the table with his laptop, half-reclined in his chair like a bored king forced to do paperwork. One sleeve pushed up, the lamplight catching along the silver of the rings on his fingers. Every so often he spun one idly as he read something on the screen.

You watched him from the couch. At first without thinking about it. Then with a slow, creeping realization. You wanted him.

Not vaguely. Not later. Not the usual awareness that he might decide to pull you into his arms at some point that evening.

You wanted him now. Which was…a problem.

Because it occurred to you, with growing irritation, that you had absolutely no idea how to start something like that.

Before you had moved in together, intimacy with Aerion had always happened in one of two ways.

Either it was stolen: quick, reckless moments when no one was supposed to notice. Or you were somewhere completely alone and Aerion behaved like a man who had been starving for days.

He had never exactly waited for an invitation. After you moved in together, things had only escalated. The kitchen counter. The couch. Once, scandalously, the washing machine while it was still running. Aerion had approached it all with the enthusiasm of someone determined to test every available surface. You, meanwhile, had simply been…swept along.

Which meant that now: watching him sit there, sleeves rolled up, completely absorbed in his work, you realized you had never once actually initiated anything yourself.

You stared at him. Aerion scrolled through something on the screen, brow faintly furrowed. The ring on his index finger spun lazily. You shifted on the couch. He didn’t look up. You stood. Still nothing. You crossed the room slowly. Aerion noticed when your shadow fell over the keyboard.

He looked up immediately.

“Yes?” he asked.

You froze.

He tilted his head slightly, studying you.

“Did you need something?”

Your brain, which had been very determined two seconds ago, suddenly provided nothing helpful.

“…No.”

Aerion’s brow creased faintly. “No?”

You hovered awkwardly beside him.

His expression sharpened. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You look like something’s wrong.”

You opened your mouth. Closed it again.

Aerion leaned back in his chair, attention fully off the laptop now. “Did something happen today?”

“No.”

“Did someone say something to you?”

“No.”

“Then...”

You made a small, frustrated sound.

Aerion blinked. This was not the response he had expected.

“You’re hovering,” he said slowly. “Which you only do when you either want something or are trying not to tell me something.”

You stared at him. He waited. You looked at the laptop. Then at him. Then, very slowly, you closed the screen.

Aerion’s eyebrows lifted.

Your face was warm. This was already going terribly.

“Are you done working?” you asked.

“I was just about to be,” he said mildly, “until someone assaulted my computer.”

You hesitated again. Aerion’s gaze softened slightly. He reached for your wrist.

“Come here,” he said. “What is it?”

That did it. The frustration that had been building for the past five minutes snapped. You climbed straight into his lap. Aerion blinked. Once. Twice.

“Well,” he said after a beat. “That’s new.”

You ignored the heat crawling up your neck and leaned forward, pressing a kiss to his cheek. Aerion went very still. Then another, a little lower along his jaw. His hands automatically moved to your waist, steadying you.

“Sweetling,” he murmured slowly, “if you needed attention you could have simply...”

You kissed the corner of his mouth. Aerion stopped talking. Your lips brushed down to his neck. And very carefully, trying to be subtle about it, you shifted your hips against him.

There was a pause. A very long pause. Aerion looked down at you. Then back up again. His mouth slowly curved.

“Oh,” he said softly.

You wished the floor would swallow you. But Aerion’s hands tightened around your waist, drawing you a little closer.

“Is that what this is?” he murmured.

You did not answer. Instead you hid your face against his shoulder.

Aerion huffed out a quiet laugh. “Darling girl.”

One hand slid up your back, fingers warm through the fabric. “You could have said something.”

You mumbled something incoherent into his collar. He tilted your chin up with two fingers. Your expression was somewhere between determined and mortified. Aerion’s smile widened.

“You’re asking me,” he said slowly, “in the most roundabout way imaginable.”

“I’m not asking,” you muttered.

“Oh?”

You shifted slightly again in his lap. Aerion inhaled sharply. His thumb brushed under your chin, amused warmth in his gaze.

“Well,” he murmured. “This is certainly effective.”

You glared at him weakly. He leaned closer, voice dropping. “And here I thought you only came over because you had a question.”

Your hands grabbed his collar. “I did have a question.”

He raised a brow. “Yes?”

You leaned closer, nose brushing his. “Are you done working?”

Aerion laughed under his breath. “Yes,” he said.

His arms tightened around you, lifting you slightly so you settled more comfortably in his lap. “Very done.”

Then he pressed a slow kiss to your temple, voice low and teasing. “Next time, though…” His thumb traced lazily along your waist. “…you can simply ask.”

You gave him a look. Aerion grinned.

“Or,” he added, clearly delighted, “you can continue climbing into my lap like this. I certainly won’t complain.”

Aerion did not move to stand. Which, in hindsight, should have been your first warning.

Instead, he leaned back further in the chair, adjusting his grip on your waist as if settling in for something he intended to enjoy thoroughly.

You were still straddling him, embarrassed, stubbornly refusing to retreat now that you had started this.

Aerion watched you with open amusement. The expression slowly spreading across his face was absolutely insufferable.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “this is fascinating.”

You narrowed your eyes. “Oh?”

“Yes.” His thumbs traced small circles along your hips. “You’ve lived with me for months now.”

You shifted slightly. Aerion’s hands tightened, steadying you as he lazily rocked his hips upward once.

Your breath hitched.

“And yet,” he continued calmly, “you still seem to believe communication is optional.”

“Aerion...”

He rocked his hips again, just enough to interrupt the rest of the sentence.

That grin spread wider. There it was. The biggest, most self-satisfied expression imaginable.

“My girl,” he murmured, “climbs into my lap looking like she’s about to faint from embarrassment instead of simply asking for what she wants.”

“I did ask,” you muttered.

“That,” he said, “was not asking.”

Another slow upward roll of his hips. “You looked like you were attempting a burglary.”

You shoved lightly at his shoulder. “I am not burglarising you.”

Aerion laughed quietly. “You shut my laptop, climbed onto me, and started kissing my neck without explanation.”

“That was the explanation.”

“No,” he said patiently, “that was a hint.”

“And hints,” he added, rocking his hips again in a slow, unhurried rhythm, “are inefficient.”

You glared at him. Aerion looked completely delighted.

“So,” he continued conversationally, “we’re going to fix this.”

“We are not.”

“We are.”

“You’ve been with me long enough,” he said lazily, “that you should know how to express yourself properly.”

You tried to keep your expression neutral. It was not working.

Aerion leaned closer, voice dropping slightly. “So.” “How would you like to communicate from now on?”

“I was communicating.”

“No.” He shook his head, still smiling. “You were improvising.”

You opened your mouth to argue. He rocked his hips again. The words disappeared entirely.

“See?” he murmured. “You lose your train of thought immediately.”

“You’re distracting me on purpose.”

“Yes.”

No shame whatsoever. He settled deeper in the chair, clearly in no hurry. “So let’s try again.”

His tone was calm. Almost instructional. “How,” he asked lightly, “would you like to ask me?”

You stared at him. Aerion waited. His fingers tapped idly along your side. Then he nudged his hips upward once more.

“Use your words,” he said sweetly.

You buried your face briefly in his shoulder.

“Oh, no,” he murmured. “You started this. You don’t get to hide now.”

You stared at him. Aerion raised one expectant eyebrow.

“Go on,” he coaxed. “I’m listening.”

You exhaled slowly. “…Aerion.”

“Yes?”

Your fingers tightened in his shirt. “…can you stop being a smug prick for five seconds.”

Aerion burst into laughter. “Absolutely not.”

Aerion’s laughter took a moment to subside. You glared at him the entire time. When he finally caught his breath, he leaned back in the chair again, still holding your waist so you couldn’t escape.

“Well,” he said lightly, “that was certainly one attempt.”

“It was not an attempt.”

“Oh, it was,” he assured you. “Just not a successful one.”

You shifted on his lap, partly because you were annoyed and partly because the position was becoming increasingly distracting.

His hands tightened slightly as he helped guide the motion without even looking down, his attention fixed on your face.

“See?” he said with smug satisfaction. “You already know what you want.”

Aerion watched the entire internal battle unfold across your face like a man enjoying a theatre performance.

“Take your time,” he said pleasantly.

You leaned forward slightly, lowering your voice. “…Aerion.”

“Yes?”

“…can we go to bed?”

“Technically polite,” he admitted.

“But.” There was always a but.

“That’s still vague.”

You groaned. “How specific do you want me to be?”

“Well,” he said slowly, “if you’re asking me for something, it’s only fair that you actually ask.”

You finally muttered under your breath, “…Aerion, I want you.”

The words were quiet enough that someone standing two feet away probably wouldn’t have heard them.

Aerion heard them perfectly.

“That,” he said softly, “was much better.”

You immediately looked like you regretted everything. Aerion leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to your cheek.

“See?” he murmured. “Not so difficult.”

You shoved lightly at his shoulder again. “Stop being pleased with yourself.”

“I can’t,” he said. “You’ve just made my entire evening. “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “You’ll get better at asking.” His grin turned wicked again. “I’m a very dedicated teacher.”

The soft click of the front door was the first sound to break the silence of the evening, a familiar, comforting noise that told you Aerion was finally home. You didn’t get up to go greet him, which was the indication that you could not look up from the book you were reading on the couch, a chunky fantasy novel you’d been trying to finish for weeks.

You simply called out, your voice carrying into the hallway, “You’re late. Daeron called, by the way. He wanted to know if we’d seen his spare set of cufflinks from the wedding.”

There was a pause, longer than usual for a simple question about cufflinks. You heard the jingle of keys being placed in the ceramic dish on the console table, the soft thud of his leather messenger bag hitting the floor, and then his footsteps on the hardwood.

“And what did you tell him?” Aerion’s voice was a smooth tenor, but there was a strange, tightly-wound quality to it.

“I told him the truth,” you said, still scanning the page, “that you probably stole them out of spite because he beat you at the groom’s pre-wedding go-kart race.”

Aerion appeared in the archway that led from the hall into the living room. He’d shed his suit jacket, leaving him in a crisp white shirt with the top button undone and his sleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing the sinewy forearms of a former championship fencer. His silver-gold hair, usually immaculately styled, was slightly disheveled, and his violet eyes, the most startling legacy of his ancient Valyrian bloodline, were fixed on you with an intensity that made you finally lower your book.

“That,” he said, a ghost of his characteristically sharp smile playing on his lips, “is a vicious and entirely accurate accusation.”

You laughed. After three years of dating and one year of sharing this sun-drenched apartment with its high ceilings and a view of the city’s bay, you knew his rhythms as well as your own. The past weekend had been a whirlwind: Kiera’s wedding to Valarr. As her best friend, you’d been a bridesmaid, a mediator, a last-minute seamstress, and a human shield against Kiera’s wonderfully overbearing mother. Aerion, as a cousin of the groom, had been swept up in the Targaryen family machine.

It was a grand, beautiful, and profoundly public affair, a union of two old families that had dominated local news and social media feeds for a solid week. You were both still recovering.

He walked over to the couch, but instead of collapsing next to you as he normally would, he stood there, looking down. His hands were in his pockets. This pensive stillness was unnerving.

“Are you going to just stand there and loom?” you asked, marking your page and setting the book aside. “It’s very off-brand. You’re an ‘immediately horizontal after work’ kind of guy. You’re being a ‘standing up’ guy. It’s weird.”

His smile flickered again, more genuine this time, but it didn’t reach his eyes, which were still searching your face. He was looking at you as if he was trying to memorize a piece of art, and he saw something everyone else had missed.

“I was just thinking,” he began, “about the wedding. About all of it.”

You pulled your legs up, making room for him. “It was a lot. Beautiful, but a lot. I think your father smiled exactly once, when he was checking the security detail’s perimeter sweep.” Maekar Targaryen, the former and famously formidable minister of defense, treated family weddings with the same strategic solemnity he’d once applied to national security briefings.

Aerion nodded. “He and Baelor have already started the debriefing process. A full post-mortem on the media coverage. They were on a call with the family’s PR firm for two hours today, analyzing the official photos. The reactions were ‘appropriately muted and respectful.’”

He recited the phrases with a mixture of dry amusement and genuine relief. Baelor, former mayor, was a master of public image. With him and Maekar running interference, the story of Kiera and Valarr’s wedding had been one of timeless romance, not a circus. There had been no social climbers selling stories to gossip sites, no shit-stirring distant cousins leaking unflattering anecdotes to the press. It was a fortress of good publicity.

“Well, mission accomplished,” you said. “It was a perfect day for them. And the most important part is that I’ve finally retired my chief bridesmaid hat. Now, come here. You’re hovering, and it’s making me anxious.”

Aerion didn’t move. He took a deep, centering breath, and his right hand shifted in his trouser pocket. The motion was subtle, but you saw it. He’d been doing this for weeks, a secretive, almost compulsive checking of his pocket, as if reassuring himself something was still there. You’d put it down to a new phone or a nervous habit related to a complicated case at work.

“I made a promise,” he said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “To myself. And to my father.” He let out a short, breathy laugh, shaking his head. “Gods, the number of times he’s caught me in his study this month…just staring at his desk drawer. He said I was like a dog waiting for a bone I wasn’t allowed to have yet. He locked it, eventually. To put me out of my misery.”

Your heart gave a sudden, hard kick against your ribs. Your mind raced back to a conversation from months ago, a careful, hypothetical-sounding inquiry he’d made one lazy Sunday morning. 'What do you think of big, splashy proposals versus something just for the two of us?' You’d scoffed, kissing his shoulder. 'A public spectacle is my literal nightmare. Anyone who needs an audience to ask the most important question of their life is asking for the wrong reasons.' You’d been half-asleep. You barely remembered saying it. But he had heard you. He had filed it away and built his plan around it.

“Aerion,” you whispered.

“I had to wait,” he continued, his voice gaining a desperate, confessional momentum. “I’ve been carrying this…this thing around for months. But you love Kiera. And I couldn’t, because you would never let your own happiness cast a single shadow on her day. You wouldn’t have wanted it, and it would have killed you to keep a secret like this from her. So I had to wait for the wedding to pass. And I gave it to my father because I knew, with every fibre of my being, that I’d ruin my own plan. I’d get impatient on a Tuesday morning over breakfast, or after a perfect dinner, and I’d just blurt it out. I couldn’t trust myself with it.”

He slowly pulled his hand from his pocket. It was a clenched fist. He knelt, right there, on the old Persian rug you’d bought together at a flea market. The silence was deafening, filled only with the distant sound of the city and the pounding of your own blood in your ears.

He opened his fist. A ring box, a deep red velvet, sat in his palm. It wasn't new. It was an heirloom, you could tell. His hands, usually so steady, trembled as he opened the lid.

Inside was a ring that stole your breath. A central, perfectly oval sapphire, the same deep, violet-blue as his eyes, was set in a delicate halo of diamonds on a band of what looked like platinum. It wasn't ostentatious. It was elegant and powerful and deeply, profoundly personal. It was a piece of his history, chosen for you.

“I had a whole speech prepared weeks ago,” he admitted, his voice cracking slightly. “It was brilliant. About patience, and family legacy, and how you, impossibly, saw a man worth loving when the world saw a headline for trouble. But it’s gone. All of it. It’s just…gone.”

He looked up at you, his violet eyes, the eyes of the dragon, were brimming with a vulnerability you’d only ever seen in your most private moments. “I don’t remember a single word of it. All I know is that I can’t wait another second. This morning, I walked to my father’s house at six a.m. and demanded he unlock the drawer. I couldn’t leave it there for one more day. It belongs here, with you.”

He took a ragged breath, his gaze never leaving yours.

“I don’t want the press. I don’t want the cameras. The announcement will be nothing but two lines from the family office, ‘Aerion is engaged. He’s happy. That’s all.’ I don’t speak for the man I was. I speak for the man I am, who loves you more than his own life, and who wants nothing more than to come home to you, just like this, every single day for the rest of forever. So…” He took the ring from the box and held it, a tiny, glittering promise. “This is it. This is my random, ordinary, perfect moment. Will you marry me?”

You moved to him, tears blurring the image of his beautiful, anxious face, And you reached for it, your thumb brushing the sharp line of his cheekbone.

"You're shaking," you whispered.

"I'm not," he lied, his voice a rasp. "It's just… cold in here."

"It's June," you said, a wet, choked laugh bubbling up from your chest.

"Well, then it's clearly a medical condition," he retorted, a flash of his old, prickly defensiveness appearing for a moment before dissolving again into raw, open hope. "You haven't answered. You're just sitting there, holding my face, and you haven't actually said..."

"Yes," you said.

It was a breath, a gift handed directly from your heart to his. It was the only word that had ever existed in this singular, suspended moment.

He blinked. "What?"

"Yes, Aerion. Yes, I will marry you."

The air in his lungs rushed out of him. His head dropped forward for just a second, his forehead pressing against your knees as he collected himself. When he looked up again, the fear was gone, replaced by a luminous, almost disbelieving joy.

"Okay," he said, as if affirming it to himself. "Okay. Good. Excellent decision."

The ring fit perfectly. He likely had it resized. The sapphire gleamed in the soft lamplight, catching hues of deep violet and ocean blue. It was heavy, a solid, tangible weight that felt instantly, inexplicably right, as if it had always belonged there. It had belonged to a Targaryen ancestor, a princess from a forgotten time, given to her by a dragonlord husband who had crossed the narrow sea. It was a piece of history you were now a part of.

Aerion held your hand in both of his, staring at the ring on your finger. Then he lifted your hand to his lips and pressed a long, fervent kiss to your knuckles, just above the band.

"I love you," he said against your skin. "I don't say it enough. I say it, but not enough. I should have a skywriter announce it. I should..."

"Absolutely not," you interrupted, laughing. "No skywriters. No press releases with eight paragraphs of florid prose. You promised me. Two lines."

He lifted his head, a mischievous glint entering his eyes, the smirk you knew and loved returning to its rightful place. "Three lines. 'Aerion is engaged. He's happy. He is, frankly, insufferable about it.'"

"That's the truth, at least," you conceded.

He surged upward then, his mouth finding yours in a kiss that was deep and desperate and tender all at once. He tasted of the spearmint gum he was always chewing to curb the old, lingering urge for a cigarette, a habit he'd kicked years ago. His hands slid from your face, one hand pressing flat against the small of your back, pulling you to the edge of the couch to be as close to him as possible. You were still perched on the cushion, he was still kneeling on the rug, and the position was awkward and his knees would probably ache later, but it was perfect. It was stunningly perfect.

"I love you," he repeated when you broke apart, the initial frantic energy settling into a deep, resonant calm. "I've loved you since the day you told me, after that disastrous family dinner my father made you attend, that I was a 'preening peacock with the intellect to back it up but absolutely no sense of self-preservation.' Do you remember that?"

"You insulted my sweater," you recalled. "You said the color made me look like an under-ripe orange."

"It was a terrible color," he said, unrepentant. "But you were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I just didn't know how to say it then. I didn't know how to say anything then."

He finally stood, wincing slightly as he straightened his knees, and pulled you up with him. He didn't let go of your hand. He looked down at the ring on your finger once more, as if to reassure himself it was really there, then he looked around the apartment. The last of the sunset had faded, leaving the room in the soft, intimate glow of the single reading lamp you'd turned on. Your book was still splayed open on the couch cushion, your mug of tea had gone cold. It was, by any objective measure, an ordinary Friday night.

"I should tell my father," he said, but he made no move to get his phone. "And Baelor. They'll need to draft that statement. The concise one. The one that gives the press nothing but the truth they absolutely do not deserve to know." He paused, a thought striking him. "And Kiera. You'll want to tell Kiera yourself. Before the announcement. I know you will."

"Thank you," you said, squeezing his hand. "For waiting. For all of it. For making this ours before it becomes anyone else's."

He pulled you into his arms, wrapping you in a tight embrace. You could feel his heart hammering against your chest, still racing, still processing. He buried his face in the crook of your neck.

"I would have waited forever," he mumbled into your skin. "But I'm profoundly glad I didn't have to. My father's study was starting to feel like a second home."

You laughed, the sound muffled by his shoulder, and held him tighter.

a/n: Okay, we've reached the end, hope you enjoyed the series! I had to stop because I kept putting this modern AU Aerion into random situations and this fic series could go on to have 80 parts. This could come off a little choppy I fear because once again, I kept putting him in random situations.

You can donate on Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3

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[thirst4fictionalmen]

So wholesome. so cute my heart…

[lexaprojoy]

the motion i can handle

⤷ daeron targaryen x fem!reader 6.5k words ⤷ cw/tags; modern au, smut, cheating, piv sex, cunnilingus, semi-public, drunk sex, pathetic dom daeron, mild ooc?

summary; when you had suspected aerion of cheating on you, you sought comfort in his older brother, and slept with him- but without proof, you spiraled into guilt. a month later, daeron approaches you at a targaryen gala, with the evidence to absolve the two of you.

'We shouldn't do it again.'

The statement takes human form in Daeron, as it's the first thing that crosses your mind when you're faced with him time after time at Targaryen events. It's almost as though the Gods are punishing you for your sins, Maekar's sudden interest in keeping tabs on his sons through proximity leading to more garden parties, more galas, everything— and he's sure to invite his sons and their plus ones, every time.

The guilt had led you to hiding yourself under modest dresses and light makeup, much to Aerion's chagrin. He'd surely have more to complain about, if he knew exactly why you had ditched the previous bombshell style that he found himself enjoying to look at the most, so you tell him not the truth of it. You tell him something he won't care to listen to.

"I feel like I've gained weight."

"I just don't feel so confident anymore."

"I want to look more professional, more mature."

Each lie you fed to him like candy; each lie he ate up without a second thought, because he doesn't truly know you. He doesn't care to know you. He notices you so little, that he cannot be bothered to recognize the way a sick pallor flashes across your face at the sight of his older brother.

It's inescapable. It's been almost once a week now, some excuse for the men to see each other, each interaction between the two making zero progress in the mending of their adult relationship and only leading to more efforts from Maekar. Gods, the poor little one, Aegon— he looks positively out of place in a tailored suit meant to fit his puny body tonight, and the more he grows into a young man over the year you've known him, the more disdain you can see on his face when looking at your dear partner.

Aerion surely could tell the way his brothers hold a bad taste in their mouths for him, which is why he had been trying to flaunt you like some sort of trophy for the past hour. Bringing you into every group photo, tucked into his side as tightly as possible. Being each other's arm candy wasn't the worst part, really, it was the easy part. The hard part was avoiding the eldest sibling who you had swapped saliva with about a month ago.

Daeron looks good, he always looks good, that being part of the reason you found yourself betraying the social, biological, moral pact you had made once upon a time with Aerion. You've been punishing yourself so much for it, that you've started to believe it was your own shallowness alone that created the environment that would allow you to be an unfaithful partner. Guilt that ate at you so badly, you had forgotten all about the signs you had noticed in him long ago, his phone always face-down on a table and texts that read like a woman's dialogue under male names he had never once mentioned to you. But without evidence, you're sicker with guilt than he's ever seemed.

Which is why you had blurted out that thought to Daeron as soon as you had finished violating the sanctity of a supposed exclusive relationship. "We shouldn't do it again."

You can still remember the look on his face when you said it. Resignation, a bit of indignance, even. He knew you'd find some way to freak out about it all and make every future interaction harder on yourself. Because he knows you. He knows you better than Aerion does, and he's only spoken to you in private a handful of times. In a total of maybe a few hours of conversation with Daeron over the entire year you've been with Aerion, he's come to know you a hundred times better than Aerion has ever tried to. He's always been a delight, with his quips that drive tensions down in any formal conversation between you and his family, faithful Instagram story-liker, the only one who has ever checked on you through something as small as a text during the time that you thought your relationship with Aerion wasn't going to make it.

The resignation came from Daeron being a more decent person than he let on— you could see the guilt in his face too, especially the first time you had seen him again since the inciting event. Daeron had drunkenly confided in you once, referring to Aerion as a monster, something he must have successfully hidden the extent of from you during your relationship, and even so— Daeron the drunken degenerate, the lecher his family portrays him to be, looked at you with similar guilt for what he had done to his supposed monster of a brother.

Regardless, tonight he seems different. He's been all too casual with you, like nothing happened. Aerion had even taken note of this, a mocking whisper in your ear out of sight of the family about how Daeron seems to have finally recovered from what ever sort of bender he must have been on for the past month and returned to normal. Relief washed over you more quickly than offense at the attack on Daeron's honor could have taken hold, a promise of a few more weeks without suspicion and overpowering guilt until the next clue presents for Aerion to perhaps pick up on.

"All right, yeah?"

You almost jump at the sound of Daeron's soft voice practically whispered as he makes his way to your other side as instructed by the paid photographer— hired by Maekar, most likely. The relief leaves as quickly as it had come.

"Hey, hi, Daeron," you say it meekly, feigning a shyness toward the man who had been inside you only a month ago, "we're good, yeah. Been fun so far."

Aerion is unfazed, practically smouldering just for a family photo and seeing nothing out of place in the interaction. Good, it's working.

"Right, okay because—" Aerion has completely lost focus of keeping you tucked into his side, now that pictures have been snapped, and some friend of their father had taken his attention in a professional-like conversation about who knows what. "I wanted to— well, I wanted to talk to you, if that's—"

You can't tell if the moisture on his skin comes from too much wine by eight in the evening, or pure nerves. With the way he speaks, though, it seems like it must be both.

Before you can turn to Aerion for some sort of grounding, like a dog waiting to be wrangled into a harness for a walk, Daeron places a hand on you, an action that causes a psychosomatic searing heat on the exposed skin from your off-the-shoulder dress. "Without being weird about it, is best." He does whisper it this time, with a cynical smile, but you hear him quite clearly despite the rabble about.

You're nearly frozen on the spot now, something Daeron takes advantage of by addressing his brother directly. You don't even have the time to stop him from throwing you into it all.

"Aerion, we're going to get another drink, you want anything?"

Aerion almost looks taken aback at the offer, not used to taking favors from his brother. Your superimposed smile manages to present some image of normalcy, though, Aerion putting two and two together that Daeron is attempting to steal you away for a second, figuring nothing but a conversation about a common interest you share which he had never cared to discover about you.

"You already know what I like, hon."

Aerion really lays it on thick in front of his family. He never uses pet names on you, but he's sure to tack on a 'babe,' or a 'hon,' when his relatives are watching. It's something hard not to notice. You make your mental note of a gin and tonic to be ordered before you return to the white-haired brat after the impending final conversation, a concept that's starting to send your stomach into flips.

Daeron leads you to the open bar with a hand on the middle of your upper back, a touch that likely reads as nothing beyond friendly in the eyes of anyone around. Everyone knows you get on well with Daeron; the fear, though, is people deducing exactly how well you got on with him.

When he finds a cozy corner to stow you away in, after trading his empty wine glass in for two new full ones for the both of you, your heart drops even further into your stomach. The look on his face seems like confrontation— confrontation about which part, you can't tell. It sends your mind racing, worst-case scenarios flying around in your brain and unable to wrangle back down to reality.

Had Aerion been asking questions? Is this jealousy now? Did Daeron finally come to his senses, and start figuring that I'm a gold-digging harlot, with no love for his broth—

"He doesn't know."

There's his cynical smile again, and you almost want to chastise him for finding a way to smile at all in the current situation. But the reassurance does help for the moment, along with his always-soft tone not changing into one of disgust.

"What do you want, then?" You snap at him, shocking yourself. You aren't doing very well having to guess what he's decided to come out of his shell to talk to you about. Something in you hopes it's something mundane, an attempt at returning to normalcy by pretending nothing had ever happened between the two of you.

Daeron's violet eyes trace over your face for a second, a look you know all too well. He looked at you the same way when you had come crying to him about the things you suspected Aerion had been getting up to, a mix of pity and a desire to steal you away like he had tried when you were already weakened. Had your mind not been built to endure endless punishment, you may have let him take you away forever that day, but the immorality of it all gnawed at you until you decided the only solution was to pretend he no longer existed. You let him stare for a few seconds, and you don't care to admit how long you had been craving his tenderness since you had experienced it for yourself.

He finally speaks up, and once you hear the words come out, it's as though your mind blocks them out manually.

"I saw him."

"What?"

"I saw him."

"You saw him what?"

Daeron knows that you know exactly what he means, but he humors you still. "I saw Aerion, doing something he was not supposed to be doing, just as you suspected."

You almost feel worse about the fact that you don't feel much of anything at the revelation. Before you accept it, though, you open yourself up to hearing the gruesome details first.

"Doing what?"

"Does it really matte—"

"Daeron."

The demand of his name sets him straight, knocking that irony-laced smile right off of his face, an almost solemn look overtaking. "I don't think you want to hear it."

"Tell me I didn't fuck you in retaliation for something far less serious."

There's the resignation again, paired with a wince at the volume of your words. Daeron looks around for gawkers for a second, and once he's satisfied with the lack of attention, he doesn't try to find a way to spare you this time. The stubbornness in your tone created an impenetrable brick wall, a wall he knows you to be strong enough to uphold until you hear what you clearly need to hear.

"I would have sent you the picture, but you blocked me, remember?" You almost grimace when he reminds you of your panicked decision-making one drunken night, but settle on a brow furrowed so badly it could deepen your elevens. "Yeah, that one was hard to weasel out of, when Aerion had asked me to lie for him again and I had no way of contacting you."

Daeron starts navigating his camera roll, and you start to feel sick when you realize just how bad it could really be.

"I think… she forgot I was on her private story," he says, sort of concealing the screen from anyone around as he passes the phone towards you, showing a photo he took of another screen displaying a picture of the white-haired man facing away from the camera, lying on his side, shirtless.

In some woman's bed.

You almost gasp when you see it. Not from shock, more so from the fact that you'd been vindicated at all.

"I told you, it's not good."

"Yeah, the picture—" you feel sick again, so sick you're starting to sweat, "—the picture is enough."

"You knew this was happening, though," he says, his own brows furrowing as he watches your reaction, bending down to whisper now, "you knew this was happening, and that's why you fucked me."

"You knew too."

"I did not—"

"You said, lie for him 'again.'"

"Well I had to say something, when Aerion made it sound like he was trying to arrange some kind of surprise for you."

Your stomach drops, for a thousandth time in one night.

“What?”

“He said he would be arranging something all night,” Daeron continues, clearly annoyed with himself now, “something he didn’t want ruined before your birthday. Or your anniversary. I don’t remember which excuse he used. I was blackout, I wasn't in the right mind to figure it out.”

"Gods, I'm a fucking idiot." You can't hide it anymore, your face going hot and sweat beading at your neck. "I'm a fucking idiot, and you are too. We still did it without knowing for sure."

Daeron can tell you're just grasping for more self-punishment, trying to find some way to deny that the man you had loved would be the real villain of the situation. He can tell, too, that you're ready to beat yourself up further for letting this slip by, not believing the rumors nor the personal experiences from Daeron himself that could have foreshadowed such a thing.

The guy is a complete dickhead, for fuck's sake, of course he would do this to me.

"I must be the bigger moron here, don't you think?"

Daeron's tenderness returns. How you had missed that look in his eyes, the way he practically apologizes on his brother's behalf when you find yourself tortured by him. He's even trying to make you feel better about being stupid enough to not heed his warnings.

"I guess you are." Your glass of wine is nearly empty by now, the sips you had started taking more resembled gulps as you used alcohol to keep yourself tethered to sanity. For now, though, you're still able to crack a smile at his attempts of comforting you, something he clearly finds solace in as he returns said smile. "Can't believe you'd think he was actually doing something nice for me."

His face drops when your words come out, a sobering reminder of the fact that you've been accepting treatment like this without the trade-off of loyalty. There may even be a trace of anger in his frown, but for now, it mostly just looks saddened.

"You're going to leave him, right?"

You look down at your shoes for a second. The obvious answer should be 'yes, I will leave the relationship without loyalty on either side,' but that nauseating anxiety still grips you.

Adverse to change, you suppose.

"You're going to leave him," Daeron decides, and you can't find any sane reasoning to argue against his choosing what you do with your life. It is the right decision, he knows it, and so do you.

"How well do you know her?" You find yourself blurting out, a question that will only make you feel worse if the answer suggests this woman is a threat on each front of your life.

"Not well."

"Is she pretty?"

Daeron sighs, rolling his eyes so hard it irritates you. He smooths a hand over his face in exasperation at the stupid question, one he knows that you are already aware is the last thing you want answered truthfully right now. "Who cares?" He says, knowing the answer to that rhetorical is you.

A guest nearly stumbles backward into you as he seems to tipsily teeter out of the bounds of his own conversation, mumbling an apology as he regains his composure. The interruption reminds you of just how exposed you are here, surrounded by potential gossips who wouldn't hesitate to start a rumor if you stood here any longer, spoke any further above a whisper on this topic. Daeron notices the shift in your demeanor immediately.

His hand returns to the small of your back, steering you towards the bar to drop off your now-empty wine glass along with his. "You're shaking," he murmurs, and you realize he's right, your fingertips seem to tremble when you have nothing to hold in your hands.

"Whatever," you grumble, allowing him to keep walking you along, a different route from where you came.

"We could leave," he muses, and it's clear he's almost as antsy as you, "just let them wonder where you've run off to."

There's whimsy in his voice, even he knows it's a stupid idea, but it's not one that you have it in you to argue against.

"I already have to make a shitty decision tonight," you let the words flow honestly from you, laced with a certain decisiveness that makes Daeron turn his head to watch you speak, "what's another?"

You aren't exactly sure how it had gotten to this.

From walking through the empty hallways, laughing together about the mess you're in, to shoving you into a secluded restroom tucked into a more desolate corner of the venue, the details become quite hazy.

The hesitant words you want to speak, the same ones that echoed in your mind the first time you had locked eyes with Daeron tonight, fizzle out and die on the tip of your tongue when he slips his own along your lips. He's always been a messy kisser, you find yourself thinking, which ties something ugly and sickly-sweet in your gut. Your familiarity with him shouldn't feel so wrong anymore, now that you have your confirmation, but it does all the same.

He had pushed you against a wall as soon as he had locked the door behind you, something you ponder chastising and pushing him off of you for, but his presence is so heavily intoxicating that it leaves you begrudgingly pliant to him. He's so much bigger than Aerion, you can't push the thought down as he looms over you, stronger, too. You find yourself wondering if he would fight for you, giving his brother a good shiner to claim you as his now, with all that size he has on the man.

"Daeron, we can't—" you finally manage to let some of your reluctance slip out between his wet, drunken kisses as he allows you to catch some of your breath back, "—not here."

"No one will know." He concludes the statement with another kiss, one resembling an attempt to nearly swallow you whole. It makes you dizzy, sending jolts of arousal throughout your body until they buzz along your fingertips. He's very persuasive, if not simply imposing. His hot breaths trail from your lips down to your jaw, an action he had taken that first time without a second thought; the memory of which making itself known on lonely nights in the form of pulsing between your legs.

Nights where Aerion had slept facing away from you, the space between your designated sides of the bed feeling colder than usual. It took everything to stop thinking about Daeron those nights.

He can tell you're losing your focus on him, the mental torture you've been putting yourself through the entire night threatening to kill off more grey matter. When he gently nips at your neck to break you out of your trance, you don't have the mental faculties to chastise him and worry about the possible print of his teeth left on your throat— instead, a little sound that resembles approval slips out of you, and he looks satisfied, of course he does. Daeron looks positively infuriating with his drunken and smug little grin, but all it does is turn you on more, the further-generating body heat threatening to make you sweat if he doesn't just get on with it and lift the skirt of your dress up past your hips.

"You missed me, didn't you?"

It comes out as a whisper, that dreamy voice he doesn't realize he's using with you once he's significantly buzzed, but it's deliberate now. He knows it makes you squirm, evident in the way you brace a hand on his chest and look at him with almost half-lidded eyes. It's humiliating, really, the way he can get you this weak mere moments after you had nearly told him to get his hands off of you in the not-so-intimate setting. Here he is, greedy hands and enroaching gaze, violet eyes undressing you like you're a delicious morsel there just for the taking. How it infuriates you, and threatens to have your knees buckling all the same.

"Didn't you?" Daeron continues between more kisses to your neck, ones that he manages to display some sort of self-control through not sinking his teeth in a second time, and you know him— you know him too well— he's not going to relent until you give him an answer. "Missed being treated well, huh?"

If he weren't currently distracting you through all his many known ways of pressing your buttons, your heart may have stopped for a second when the words came out, the obvious truth of the matter turning the reunification of your fingers and his golden locks bitter rather than relieving. But Daeron has you on an island now, far away from his brother, as far as tens of meters go.

Allowing yourself to make more of those tiny, encouraging sighs only sates him for a few mere moments— he wants the words, wants to hear you say that you had missed him in his absence, would have you go as far as admitting that blocking him was a mistake if he had his way.

"Yes, yes—" you begrudgingly let the words out, if it'll cut the teasing short, "I missed you—"

Before any more arousal-clouded rambling can flow past your lips, you're cut off with the faintest shiver when his hands start to grip at your waist, so warm and tingling at your skin even through the fabric of your dress. He's beyond smug now, he looks like he's getting off just from the way your body speaks to him for you, painfully aware of the fact that he's able to reduce you to putty after your feigned composure displayed out there just minutes ago.

"I know."

You could almost hit him, he's testing just how far he can go with his mocking, and he's treading thin ice now. Much like your more innocent interactions, he knows his limits with you but he still makes a game of it. It's sickening, how much this only makes you want him to ruin you, worse than the first time you went down this road. Daeron the fucking Demon, they should call him, you think as he starts to pull at the dress, ready to bunch the skirt up at your waist, his lips still smearing across any erogenous patch of skin accessible to him.

Barreling past your apprehension to make your debilitating desire known to him, Gods know he doesn't need another ego boost, you replace his hands with your own, lifting the skirt yourself— he pulls away, just to watch, eyes half-lidded and hazy with his own arousal. You miss the warmth of his mouth on you, but what you're lacking there is made up for in the way he looks at you with pure hunger. Just the sight of the lace panties under the frills of your skirt has his eyebrows furrowing in a sort of pained-pleasure, and under all those smug layers he had put up, you know he missed you too, probably even more than you missed him.

You were going to say something demanding, tell him to finally get on with it, an administrative request for him to make it quick, just to push his buttons right back— but you're left speechless when he slowly drops to his knees in front of you.

Before you can ask Daeron what the fuck he thinks he's doing, kneeling pathetically in front of you on the floor of a public restroom, your train of thought is once again cut short by his actions. Those warm hands, contrasted by the cool silver of his randomly-arranged rings, slide up your thighs and leave the faintest ghost of gooseflesh in their wake. His fingers hook at the lace on your hips, and if he were any more intoxicated he probably wouldn't have the minuscule self-control being exercised right now to not immediately pull them off of you without question. Instead, he looks up at you with those dusty-violet eyes, pupils noticeably larger than they had been before. You hadn't even realized you could be any more aroused, but he managed to surprise you.

He's already proving to give you a more thorough experience than your previous instance of desperate rutting against each other, taking his time to tease you by resting a stubbled cheek against your thigh, breathing in your scent. It's egregious, the way he makes a show of this desperation, enough to all but sniff you like a fucking animal. Your mind trails off somewhere else, something to grip onto for sanity, and you're finding yourself pondering the importance of pheromones and their effect on the man on his knees in front of you— he must have really missed the smell of you, taking you in without shame.

Your attention is snapped back to him when he settles on torturing you further, pressing a kiss to your cunt through the lace.

"Seven fucking hells, Daeron—"

He doesn't show the satisfaction this time, too focused on the task in front of him, but you know the sound of his name breathed out shakily is leaving him painfully hard under the designer trousers he's currently denigrating on the restroom's floor.

When pressing wet kisses to the garment is no longer enough for him, he pulls at the lace his fingers had been hooked in this whole time, eventually exposing your most intimate area to the cool air of the tiled room. Your more rational thoughts have finally escaped you, fully, to the point you have no protests when he has you step out of your panties for him, leaving you no choice but to go bare there for the rest of the night. It barely even registers to you when he shoves them in his pocket, and you wonder if he'd ever give them back. Likely not— oh well, let him have them.

Everything comes naturally to the both of you now, the way you instinctively stand in a more exposed form, your thighs spread for Daeron to slot his face between them. He doesn't dare waste a single moment to tease you further, the heavy waves of lust crashing over him once he's gotten a good look at your soaked pussy, using two fingers to spread you open to see. You'd have felt too exposed if he had you like that for more than a few seconds, so he quickly replaces the hand that had been there with his mouth.

You gasp when he makes contact, the kisses he started with now unabated by any layers. The warmth from his mouth transfers directly to the pit in your stomach, something so intimate churning there, something that makes the sensation even more torturously pleasurable.

"Daeron, fuck—" you almost wince as you moan his name, too loudly, which seems to be all the encouragement he needed to lick a stripe from your opening to your clit. It makes your hips jump when he reaches that apex, and he steadies you against the wall with those large, decorated hands. Your hips want to disobey, but if he didn't keep you still, your legs would likely buckle under you. Something like adrenaline, closer to your own hot blood rushes through your veins when you look down at him, gorgeous face buried between your thighs.

It's almost too much when he looks up at you again, making intense eye contact while he starts to suck on your clit— he's fucking torturing you, that's the only explanation you can find as you watch the scene unfold, he's torturing you with a sight so beautiful.

Daeron is clearly the more seasoned lover between himself and Aerion; the thought only fuels your desire rather than dimming it now, the realization that you had been missing out on this treatment encouraging your indulgence. You're thankful that he hadn't tied his long hair back tonight, allowing you to entwine your fingers in the blond locks, giving you the right leverage to buck your hips, an instant reminder that his torturous grip on you keeps you from simply fucking his face.

When he teases at your pussy with two fingers, you know you're not going to last much longer if he decides to slide them inside you. But there's nothing you can do now, at his mercy and under his strong hands.

You tip your head back with a drawn-out moan, resting against the cool tile when Daeron finally presses a finger inside, the sensation of the metal on his index finger eliciting a squirm from you when it kisses your entrance. He's still kissing and sucking at your most sensitive spot, almost to a point of causing oversensitivity, and it's so much all at once. Your moans are closer to whines now, an attempt to indicate to Daeron that you can't be held down like this, it's painful. Either he doesn't get the memo, or he doesn't mind continuing the torture— he works his middle finger in now, his grip on your hip with the other hand threatening to leave bruises where his fingers press harshly into your skin.

You lose all sense of time, your own sighs and moans tuned out as all of your attention is honed in on watching. That feeling in your gut is starting to resemble a dull pain, the pleasure and adoration melding into a sickeningly sweet syrup flowing through your body— you're surprised you aren't completely drenched in sweat now.

As much as Daeron seems to be exactly where he wants to be, he can't kneel on this floor forever, and he finally releases his grip on you as he continues his ministrations. It feels as though you've been crawling up to the peak of a rollercoaster, waiting to be thrown down the hill, and the exhilaration is proven when you're able to grind yourself onto his face, your moans becoming a cacophany of heaving breaths and whimpers as you finally come on his tongue.

He says nothing when he finally pulls away from your oversensitive cunt, and he looks absolutely filthy, with his expression in a half-trance of lust and intoxication, wetness coating his chin. He wipes away the mess with the sleeve of his blazer as he rises from the floor, a sight so casually filthy and so completely him. Daeron the Demon, the alliterative chant returning to your mind as you watch him, so casual about making a mess of a woman.

Daeron isn't done with you yet, something made obvious when his lips come crashing back into yours, forcing you to taste yourself on his tongue. You don't mind, though, savoring the filth of it all and allowing him to continue having his way with you. You could do the responsible thing— push him away, stop risking the noises that he extracts from you making the restroom sound like a porn studio, but you're too far gone now. For all you care in this moment, you'd let the whole venue listen in on the way Daeron pleases you, with more effort and skill than his brother ever had.

Daeron seems like he'd stay attached to you forever if he could, barely allowing himself any time to unbuckle his nice leather belt and free his cock from its confinement under the dress pants— no underwear, you dirty man, the thought amuses you— before latching his mouth back to your neck, trying his hardest not to nip around your collarbone and leave a mark that would certainly be visible to everyone.

You aren't sure what you had been expecting, but it certainly wasn't Daeron hoisting you up against the wall to align your core to be at just the right level for him. Your memory of his strength is instantly refreshed by this action, an action that makes you nearly ache from need. He must be aching, too, because he can't even grant you a few moments of acclimation before he's sliding his leaking cock along your folds.

"Daeron, Gods, calm down," you half-chastise, half-mock, and he doesn't seem to be in the right mind to quip back at you. He's far too focused on his own release from the frigid ice you had blocked him out with for the past month. He's already groaning into the crook of your neck, and all he's done so far is grind against your cunt. He's so far gone in his desperation, you have to reach down between your bodies just to guide him toward your entrance rather than allow him to continue rutting against you, finishing all over your stomach and the fabric that covers the rest of your torso.

It's not the first time you've taken him, but the stretch as he eases in still stings just as deliciously as it did then. It's a wonder he hasn't lost it and slammed into you already, and your insides twist into knots as you realize just how much he cares. You can't tell if the feeling that forms inside you is the fluttering of butterflies, or the epiphany that you may have gone so long being with the wrong Targaryen.

He's starting to thrust in and out, slowly, easing you into the rhythm. His heavy breaths that tickle your neck and carry light moans make you dizzy, already tired out from your first orgasm, now being pushed toward a second. His intoxication certainly isn't helping his stamina, you can tell from the increased weight of each breath, but he barrels on— he's too desperate to let that ruin this moment.

You can't tell if it's his skin or your own hands that have grown so clammy, likely a mixture of both, but what you can tell is he's already teetering on the edge. You reach down once more to rub at your sensitive clit, an action that causes you to start clenching around him, and he sounds like he's going to die if you keep it up.

He's pressed his forehead to yours now, and the eye contact is bringing a similar feeling for you— if he continues to look at you like this while thrusting into you, you could die right there. His pupils are blown so wide you could get lost in the black voids, nearly hiding his irises in their expanse.

Then, he says something that nearly turns you inside-out.

"You're mine now," he says it breathlessly, so dramatically it feels like you're in some raunchy movie, "tell me you're mine."

"Yes," you breathe out, and it's not the response he's asking for, so he smothers you with more sloppy kisses. Your moans as you push yourself over the precipice once more sate him only for the moments your orgasm lasts, and he's still burying himself into you when it's passed. He wants to hear you say it directly, so he takes it up another notch.

"Tell me you belong to me now," Daeron's voice is usually so sweet, dreamy and airy, but now it comes out with a gravelly undertone. He's losing his patience, evident in the way he's eyeing your neck as though he's threatening to put marks into your skin that you wouldn't be able to hide, just to mark you as his possession if you won't say it yourself.

"I'm yours," you finally choke out— it's the truth, no matter how humiliating it is to admit. He's successfully defeated that pale-haired brat, and taken you as some sort of conquest trophy, an objectification that you're far too fucked-out to ponder the ramifications of. So, you tell the truth, if not to sate him, then to confirm it to yourself.

It happens a lot quicker than you had expected, Daeron pulling out of you and releasing onto your pussy with a strangled moan. He must have been so pent-up, and the words you spoke finally sent him over the edge.

Daeron finally sets you down, visibly exhausted from it all. He's still breathing heavily, and your legs are weak enough that they could buckle under you and send you crashing to the floor. He manages to catch you despite his exhaustion, letting you collapse into his weak embrace and lean against his shoulder.

"Fix yourself up, now," he says, hands on your hips to keep you standing upright. It would seem cruel to say, if you weren't both covered in sweat in the middle of a public restroom, with guests waiting in the main hall for your return. That, and the fact that he clearly doesn't want to push his luck by going sappy on you after what you'd just done.

His hand rakes through your hair, fixing some strands that had gone astray in it all, and you can't ignore the intimacy of it, leaning on him for stability and allowing him to practically pet your hair back into place.

A few minutes of resting on a toilet seat was far from aftercare, but it got the job done, just as the moments spent preening each other to a presentable state had. Leaving the restroom was as nerve-wracking as you had expected it to be, trying to find a non-suspicious moment to emerge after Daeron, but you both managed.

The fresh air outside the venue, where you and Daeron find Aerion— still smiling superficiously in the faces of investors— is enough to clear the smell of sex off of your bodies, evidenced by the lack of even a second look thrown your way when you hand your (ex-?)boyfriend his requested drink.

"I'm getting the fuck out of here," Daeron tells Aerion once the mind-numbing conversation starts to dwindle, and Aerion barely acknowledges the statement— nor does he see the look sent your way by his brother. An uninterested 'goodbye' is the only response he gets, and the understanding glare paired with an eye-roll from Daeron manages to pull a giggle from your throat, which you couldn't suppress in time.

"Something funny, dear?"

"Nothing," you mutter, and the glance he sends your way doesn't last long enough to see the way you stare back at Daeron, "just remembered a stupid joke."

a/n: hi!! new blog! i hope you guys enjoyed. i take requests, especially for the akotsk men, and i am open to writing a part two for this if enough of you enjoyed<3 thanks for reading

[thirst4fictionalmen]

Ate this right up!

[lovebugism]

✶ — THE WRONG THING !

summary: on the eve of your arranged marriage to baelor targaryen, your childhood best friend, daeron, indulges you in one final night of defiance before he loses you for good - and baelor does not take kindly to learning that his nephew has taken his future bride to a brothel. (6k)

characters: daeron targaryen / fem!reader, baelor targaryen / fem!reader, maekar targaryen

contents: friends to lovers, arranged marriage, angst, implied age gap, so much yearning, depressed!daeron (fork found in kitchen), also baelor would absolutely talk you through it cw for vague mentions of ocd and smut 18+ (MDNI): public sex kinda, fingering, dry humping

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

You were to be wed on the morrow, and Daeron sank into his cups.

He had long lived in the folly that he would marry you someday — his first ever friend, and the only girl he ever dreamed of. But then the crown fell into great debts to your father, who managed all the gold mines from Oldtown to Summerhall; and the only way the king saw to foot the bill was to wed the man’s daughter to his own heir.

By all accounts, you were taking your betrothal far easier than your best friend. You had no other choice but to keep your wits about you, to plaster an artificial smile on your face and mindlessly agree to everything everyone ever told you to do, or to think. Even now, you let Baelor Targaryen — the husband you did not ask for — give you a tour of the newly decorated throne room where you would have your reception — which you had no say in.

The orante sea of Targaryen red and Highgarden gold blur together, along with Baelor’s words, as you avert your gaze to your hands, where you scratch fresh marks to your already raging nail beds.

“What do you think about it, princess?”

You only vaguely hear Baelor’s words through the metaphorical cotton in your ears. You blink hard and whip your head to face him, smiling before you’ve even registered his question. “I think it’s beautiful, Your Grace— Your mother did a wonderful job decorating.”

“While I appreciate the compliment, my lady, I was referring to our… arrangement,” Baelor corrects with a polite smile, half-hidden behind his greying beard. He slows to a stop in front of you, and you catch a whiff of the musky oils he’d bathed in — a stark contrast to your much lighter, floral aromatics.

“Oh. Right. I think— I think that it’s…” You stumble over yourself to find the words; not the ones you want to say, perhaps, but the ones you’ve been groomed to. Baelor ducks his head to flash you a patient look, and your cheeks flare with embarrassment. “I think that it is wise, Your Grace. If our marriage can ease the crown’s debts, I’m glad to be of service.”

“Is that you speaking, my lady?” he presses with a soft squint in his blue-brown irises. “Or your father?”

Your breath stutters. “I— I’m not sure what you mean, Your Grace.”

“What is it you want, princess?”

Your mouth parts to answer him. But, before you can stutter out a response you only halfway mean, the sound of chair legs scraping the cobbles rings through the expansive room. Your heads whip in tandem in the direction of the raucous noise, where you find Daeron trying and failing to catch himself on a table by the door.

He’s well drunk despite the early afternoon, wearing the ale in his wild golden hair, glassy blue eyes, and flushed red cheeks. He struggles to readjust the ornately decorated bench he’d run into with sloppy hands. It takes him several seconds too long to notice the looks he’s getting in response.

“My apologies…” he slurs, pink lips curling into a sloppy grin that doesn’t match the solemn look in his light eyes. “I seemed to have— Lost my way…”

“Aye. That much is quite clear,” Baelor sighs, much too used to his nephew’s antics by now.

The boy had always favored his ale, but never quite this much. He’s been haunting the halls of the Red Keep for some weeks now — the Kingsguard once found him in a ditch off of Flea Bottom the day it was announced Baelor would be wed to you, all bruised and bloody from the fighting pits. He hasn’t been fully sober ever since.

“Apologies, princess,” Baelor murmurs to you. “Do forgive my nephew.”

“No forgiveness needed, Your Grace—”

There’s another grating scrape, followed by a dull thud of a heavy body hitting the ground as Daeron trips over his graceless feet. He groans when he hits the unforgiving ground, writhing with only his long legs visible from your view of him.

Your features crumple with a mixture of annoyance and sympathy as you look on at the drunken boy. “I should take him to his chambers before he hurts himself—”

“The knights can escort him, my lady,” Baelor tells you.

“He’s much too fragile for that,” you quip with a tender smile. “And as I said— I don’t mind helping, Your Grace.”

Daeron doesn’t make it easy for you.

He never has, in truth, but least of all now.

He smells of musk and sweet ale as he falls heavily to your side, forcing you to carry the brunt of his weight as you help him back into bed. He falls heavily onto the feathered mattress, limp and unmoving. You exhale an exasperated breath and reach for his legs to situate him properly on the unmade sheets.

“Why must you make everything so difficult?” you huff.

Daeron’s head lolls against the pillows, golden hair sitting wildly around him.

“Why must you wound me so?” he argues in indistinct slurs. His glassy, red-rimmed eyes blink slowly up at your towering figure. He musters a trembling grin at the confused look you give him in return. “We both know it is not my uncle you want, petal…”

His eyes flutter shut as he lifts a sloppy hand to his face, trying and failing to find the rogue strand of hair clinging to his lashes.

“What I want doesn’t matter, Daeron,” you sigh and help him brush the golden tress back behind his ear.

Your breath catches in your throat when the boy’s warm hand wraps suddenly around your wrist, fingers warm and gentle as they linger on your wild pulse. He peers up at you with a pair of wet, ocean-colored eyes and murmurs quietly, “I don’t matter?”

“You know that isn’t what I meant,” you whisper and jerk your hand from his grip. “The decision is already made. The hall is already decorated. I’m getting married whether I like it or not—”

“You could always change your mind,” Daeron lilts, as if it were so simple. “And it would all be done with…”

“Not all of us are allowed to be so selfish, my prince,” you mutter bitterly and turn on your heel, heading the short distance for the pitcher of water and bowl of dates left on the table by the balcony. “Some of us actually have to think about other people from time to time.”

Daeron scoffs sloppily, folding his lanky hands across his lean stomach. “I think about other people,” he argues like a child.

“Do you?” you hum with a palpable lack of enthusiasm, beneath the sloshing of water you pour for him in a chalice.

“Aye, my lady… You,” he answers, smiling lazily when you glare at him over your shoulder. “I dream only of you— My Flower of Highgarden.”

“The Flower of Highgarden,” you correct him of the silly nickname that’s haunted you since birth, and walk the water and dates back over the drunken boy. You leave both at his bedside, with an air of distance about you that makes his chest ache. “I am getting married on the morrow, Daeron. It’s happening. So please, get a hold of yourself— if not for your sake, then for mine.

The evening air outside the Red Keep swells with the scent of sage and fresh flowers. A silken breeze rushes through the skirt of your dress as you lean over the balcony, bathing in the sweet scent down below, where the smallfolk leave bouquets and handmade trinkets by the castle’s entrance.

“I don’t understand,” you murmur to the man beside you, with your gaze still lingering on the shuffling crowd. “We don’t do this in Highgarden.”

“It’s custom for people to leave their blessings the night before a royal wedding,” Baelor explains. “Though, to be true, I have never quite seen it like this… They have taken quite a liking to you, it would seem.”

The kind smile he gives you makes your cheeks flare red-hot. You despise his attention as much as you crave it, desperately so. You fake a smile and swallow hard, picking again at the scarred skin of your nail beds from where your hands rest on the balcony. “Well, I am— pleased that the realm is, Your Grace—”

Your breath catches in your throat when Baelor’s wide hand splays suddenly over both of yours, effectively ceasing your assault on your delicate fingers. You peer timidly at him from beneath your lashes and cower at the warmth in his mismatched eyes.

“You are the most comely girl at court,” he tells you, gutwrenchingly gentle, as his fingers smooth over the red marks on your skin. “Why must you destroy yourself this way?”

“Apologies, Your Grace,” you murmur shyly, clearing your throat as you slide your hands from his grip, clasping them behind your back. “It’s a habit I haven’t quite been able to break, it would seem…”

Baelor softens and takes a step closer, pervading the scent of the late evening with his mixture of leather and musk. “I understand that… that I am not the husband you wished for,” the man starts slowly, calculating each word from his mouth. “But I will do right by you, princess. I can assure you of that.”

“I know you will, Your Grace. You’re a good man,” you say with an honest smile. “Even if it was not what I desired, I am no less pleased that it turned out to be you, Your Grace—”

“Baelor,” he corrects with a soft grin, taking a step closer and swiping an eyelash for your cheek. Your skin flares when his hand lingers there. You wonder if he notices.

“Baelor…” you repeat, far more timidly in comparison.

His mouth parts to speak, but he stops himself short. A flicker of confusion dances over his scruffy face before he wonders aloud. “Pardon my forwardness, my lady, but… Have you ever been kissed?”

Thoughts of Daeron flash instantly across your mind at his question. He’s always there in some way or another, stashed somewhere within each of your fondest memories — how he held you when you were younger; how he kissed you, how he touched you.

But that was all make-believe, you figure, a game of house you knew was always bound to end.

So you shake your head against the man’s softly calloused palm and answer, half-truthfully, “Never in a way that mattered, Your Grace…”

The answer seems to please him as his kind smile slowly returns.

“May I?” he offers vaguely.

You know you can’t say no. You’re not sure if you want to. So you nod and whisper back, “Of course…”

You tilt your chin to meet him halfway when he ducks down to kiss you. His beard tickles your delicate skin, a rather foreign sensation compared to Daeron’s shaven face. His lips are thinner than his nephew’s, too, tasting of sweet mint leaves and bitter whiskey. It’s different — good different — and you finally forget to be nervous as you reach suddenly for his bearded jaw.

Baelor freezes against you when you lick into his mouth, with far more expertise than someone who had never been kissed before. It surprises him as much as it excites him; the notion that there is still so much he doesn’t know about you. You catch him smiling softly to himself about it when your kissed lips part with a quiet click.

Your glassy eyes widen into a not-so-subtle look of shock at yourself. You bring your trembling hands back down to your sides again. “Forgive me, Your Grace. I— I forget myself—”

“No. Don’t apologize,” the man murmurs in an achingly gentle voice that does not match the fire in his blue-brown irises. “If you apologize every time I kiss you from now on, you’ll be spending a lifetime doing so, won’t you?”

His words, the solemn promise in them, make your stomach do a backflip.

“Aye,” you nod on bated breath. “I guess so…”

You’re still reeling from the adrenaline rush of kissing a somewhat stranger — both your soon-to-be husband and future king — when you return finally to your chambers. Your heart lurches to a fluttering stop at the shadowy figure you find lying in your bed, bathed in a golden sea of flickering candlelight. You exhale a relieved sigh when you find it’s only Daeron making himself at home in your bed, but you are still no less aggrieved to see him this way.

“What are you doing here?” you snap and quickly close the door behind you.

“Waiting for you, of course,” the now mostly-sobered boy responds through a groan, stretching out his tired limbs as if he’d just been sleeping. His thin chemise rises up his torso when he folds his arms behind his wild head, revealing his pale skin and the tuft of golden hair trailing down into his trousers.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” you argue. “What would people think if they saw the two of us in here like this?”

“Who cares?” he scoffs with all the carelessness of a young prince, smiling wider when you scowl at him. “We know the truth of it— What anyone else has to say on the matter doesn’t concern the two of us.”

“That’s because no one ever taught you that it’s not about the truth of it,” you spit and storm his way, yanking your silken sheets from beneath his dirty boots. “It’s about perception. And you know your father would be cross if he found you in here—”

“My father is always cross,” Daeron scoffs.

“Only because you make him so.”

“Tell me, petal…” the boy begins, swinging his long legs off the mattress and peering up at you with a pair of glittering blue eyes. “Have you ever done the wrong thing?”

Your eyes narrow. “I’m looking at him,” you deadpan.

“Ouch,” he grimaces, grabbing at his heart over his baggy tunic. “But I presume I deserve that…”

“Aye. You do.”

He reaches for your hand when you try to turn away, wrapping his warm fingers around your smaller ones to keep you in place. “Come with me. To Flea Bottom.”

“Flea Bottom?” you repeat with an incredulous twist to your features, scoffing out a faint laugh. “Why would I go to—”

“To do the wrong thing,” Daeron finishes for you, tender with a lingering hope. “With me.”

You shake your head and try to pull your hand out of his, but he only holds you tighter. “I can’t, Daeron…”

“Live for yourself for a change,” he tells you, begs you. “Just once. And I will never speak to you of my heartache again, I swear it.”

By all accounts, you probably should’ve known by the subtle glimmer in his soft blue eyes that he only met trouble. Maybe that’s why you went with him in the first place, you think, for a bit of trouble — god knows, that’s all he’s good for. But, even still, you let him dress you in his trousers and baggy shirt, removing any remnants of your status, before stealing you away to the labyrinth that is Flea Bottom.

He keeps your hand clutched in his larger one as he leads you through the unpaved streets of twisted alleyways, reeking of stables, mud, and baked bread. You laugh like a pair of children as you chase gracelessly behind him, forgetting for a fleeting moment that you are to be wed on the morrow — that you will soon be expected to become a wife and a mother before the season is through.

Eventually, the loud chatter and swirling smoke from flickering fires gives way to something quieter, dimmer; smelling of sweat, sex, and soft perfume. Daeron tucks you into his warm side as you duck into a narrow hall, where moans and cries of pleasure bounce off the cobblestone walls. Your footsteps stutter in shock.

“You didn’t tell me you were taking me to a pleasure house—”

“Aye. I didn’t,” Daeron hums with a lazy grin. “Because you wouldn’t have agreed to come otherwise…”

The brothel is dark, lit only by rogue torches growing slowly dim on the walls. The naked bodies surrounding you on either side are bathed in shadow. The hand not clutching the back of Daeron’s cloak rises instinctively to cover your eyes, shielding them from the lurid sight of sex that sits everywhere you look.

“No. Don’t,” Daeron says and reaches for you with his free hand, curling his lanky fingers around your wrist to gently urge your hand from your face. “I want you to watch— To see what it looks like when you take what you want…”

Your eyes are slow to part from his lighter ones. You glance tentatively all around you — at the woman riding the face of a man on a nearby couch, of another man sandwiched between two masculine bodies by the wall, of two women caressing their naked bodies with gentle touches. It’s completely and utterly scandalous. And you can’t bring yourself to look away.

“No princes, no thrones…” Daeron whispers with his mouth pressed to your ear, and his chest against your back. “No debts, no weddings… Just—”

“Fucking?” you tell him.

“Pleasure,” he corrects. “So, ask yourself, petal, and be truthful… What do you want?”

It’s a simple question. One you couldn’t answer if you wanted to.

You want to be queen, like your father always groomed you to be — you want to marry Baelor, to be rich and powerful and idolized. But another, not-so-distant part of you yearns to be without responsibility and consequence — you want to be with Daeron in some far-off place by the sea, you want to fuck and drink and travel the world and never stick around long enough to learn anybody’s names.

You want all of it. And even though you know you cannot possibly have it, you try hard to take it anyway.

You reach out for Daeron and cradle his shaven jaw like you’re holding the sun in both hands. You drag him to you and press a searing kiss to his mouth, wasting little time in tasting him as your tongue licks suddenly between his parted lips, entwining with his own like velvet twisting with velvet.

Daeron grumbles a moan against you. He slides his warm hands beneath your borrowed shirt, up your stomach, and over your ribcage. He leaves faint trail marks along the skin of your back when he scratches his dull nails down your spine. You shiver against him, and he smiles into your kiss — inhaling your gasped breath when he pushes you suddenly into a cobbled wall, breaking the impact with a hand behind your head.

His mouth pulls away from yours with a low smack, lips swollen and rosy and shining with your spit. His eyes are heavy-lidded as he traces the bridge of your nose with the tip of his.

“What do you say, My Flower of Highgarden?” he slurs, panting hard against your mouth. “Are you going to take it?”

“Depends,” you challenge on bated breath. “Are you going to give it to me?”

The blonde boy nods, with a pink smile blooming lazily on his mouth. “Aye… I am.”

He ducks down before you can blink, kissing you hard enough to bruise. He swallows each of your quiet moans as his fingers creep toward your borrowed trousers, loosening the knot there with eager hands. Your fingers wrench the thin fabric of his tunic into fists to keep him impossibly close while his sneak beneath the hem — past your stomach, over a tuft of coarse hair, and down towards where you need him most.

You coat his middle finger in a thin layer of honey when it slots between your velvety folds, whimpering when he nudges softly at your sensitive clit.

“I can feel you throbbing,” he slurs against you. “’S like a heartbeat…”

“Please…” you sigh, though you’re not sure exactly what you’re begging for — please don’t tease me, please make me feel good, please fuck me.

“I’ve got you…” Daeron murmurs, panting against your mouth and swallowing your moans when his long finger slips finally inside you. His lip quirks into a crooked smile at the pretty noise you make for him.

You only vaguely feel him rutting against your thigh, pressing his stiffening cock against you to ease his own ache while he continues to pleasure yours.

“I’ve got you… Let me have it…”

Your moans fill the shadowed hall, and entwine with all the others.

You scrub the remnants of the sinful night from your body and prepare to become a dutiful bride by early morning. You’re still buzzing from the adrenaline rush as you writhe restlessly beneath your silk sheets. You can almost still feel Daeron’s fingers inside of you, if you think about it hard enough, as well as the outline of his hard cock pressed against your outer thigh, from where he’d gotten off humping your leg like a hound.

You revel in the night as much as you mourn it — pleased to have experienced it at all while simultaneously grieving that you’ll never be that girl again; and still a little surprised that you got away with it at all.

Almost.

A quiet knock from a delicate hand echoes through your expansive, pitch-black bedroom. Your heart lurches into your throat — a fleeting horror that turns into ice-cold panic in your veins a second later. You rise slowly, propping your weight on your elbows, and gazing wearily at the shadow looming beneath your door.

You swallow hard and pray your voice doesn’t shake as you call out, “Come in.”

The heavy door creaks open. A sliver of golden light from the torches in the hallway fills the room as one of your handmaidens shuffles in, gaze averted and hands clasped together. She curtsies and clears her throat, “Pardon me, my lady— but the Lord Hand has requested your presence in his study.”

You hope it’s still too dark for her to see the look of fear that flashes across your features. “The hour is quite late…” is the only thing you think to say, with an audible waver in your voice.

“Aye, my lady,” the young girl nods with an apprehensive gaze. “But he said he was urgent.”

“…Alright, then,” you nod once and hold your breath until the maid scurries off back the way she came. She closes the door behind her with a dull click, and the room returns to a velvet black darkness, with only your trembling breath to fill it.

You’re still in your thin white slip when you make the long trek to Baelor’s study, weaving through the candlelit maze of the Red Keep with two knights flanking you on either side. They work for your father, sworn to protect you and you alone, yet you can’t help but feel a bit like they’re leading you to a slaughter now.

They open the double doors of the expansive study for you and remain just outside of it while you saunter slowly in — slippers scuffing the cobbles like your feet are made of bricks, sweaty hands picking at your worry-worn nailbeds. You wear the guilt all over, like a bad dog with blood on its muzzle.

The fear in your stomach blossoms something fierce in your chest when Baelor’s eyes meet yours from across the way, sitting at his desk with Maekar and Daeron standing just before him. The older men are still in their day garb, made of Targaryen red and black, while the blonde boy remains in the baggy tatters he’d taken you to Flea Bottom in.

Daeron wears the sin all over still, hardly bothering to wash it off his skin, lest some of you go with it.

You cower on instinct when their gazes snap suddenly in your direction. You know you’ve long been caught, even when Baelor gives you a kind smile as you approach him.

“Thank you for coming, my lady,” he says in a gentle voice and sets his quill into the inkpot at his side. “I know the hour is late. I hope I did not disturb you.”

“Of course not, Your Grace,” you assure him and clear your throat when the words get stuck there.

“I thought it prudent to make you aware of some rather… troubling accusations,” the man continues with a knowing glint in his brown-blue eyes, flickers of candlelight dancing in his gaze. “You and my nephew were spied, some hours ago, beyond the walls of the Red Keep, engaging in behaviors that were… unbecoming of a woman of the court…”

“So we snuck out and drank a bit of wine,” Daeron laughs at your side, not yet showered and still reeking of sex and ale. He glances at you with glassy eyes and a lopsided grin before turning back to Baelor. “It’s hardly enough to warrant such arbitration, wouldn’t you say, uncle?”

“You were seen defiling the princess the day before her fucking wedding,” Maekar spits from the boy’s other side, jaw clenched tight behind his silver beard. “You’re lucky I’m not shipping you off to the Free Cities to make a man out of you.”

“Right,” Daeron scoffs. “Punish me for going to a brothel by sending me to the sex capital of the Seven Kingdoms— Ow!”

Maekar’s ringed hand slams hard into the back of the boy’s wild head. He grimaces, rubbing at the crown of his golden tresses with a pale hand.

“Do you not deny it?” Baelor asks you, with a suspicious squint in his gaze, as if he were distantly hoping you would.

“No, Your Grace,” you mutter with an averted gaze, etching new marks onto your delicate fingertips. “I did sneak out—”

“She lies,” Daeron blurts before the words have properly left your mouth. “She did not leave of her own volition, uncle. I forced her out… Wouldn’t take no for an answer…” Daeron’s drunk slurs trail off as he turns to flash you a lazy grin and a pair of squinted eyes. “Better a liar than a whore, right, petal?”

“Watch your tongue,” Maekar scolds from his other side.

“But there was no defiling, father, of that I’m sure,” Daeron continues anyway, head swiveling as he turns to face the other man. His smile widens beneath the strands of blonde hair hanging over his eyes. “I only used my fingers—”

“You idiot,” the father hisses, scooping his son up by the collar of his shirt and dragging him back towards the entrance.

Daeron’s stumbled footsteps echo in the otherwise silent study as he staggers behind him on graceless feet. He’s all but thrown out the door when Maekar swings it open again, only to slam it shut behind him with a booming thud a second later.

The sound rings through the suffocating quiet that you and Baelor are soon left alone in — the kind of quiet that snatches all the air out of a room; the kind of quiet that makes it suddenly very hard to breathe.

“Does he speak the truth of it?” the man wonders after a few long moments, with one arm propped along the arm of his chair and the other folded along the table’s edge.

You inhale a wavering breath.

“He does, Your Grace,” you murmur, lacking the courage to meet his eyes. “I had not planned it— Nor did Daeron, I think— It was simply the circumstances of the moment in which we found ourselves in that—”

“Did you like it?” Baelor interjects your rambling, which he knows is only full of the words you’ve been conditioned to say, and not the ones you truly mean.

You falter at the simple question. “I-I’m not entirely sure what you mean, Your Grace—”

“I’m entirely sure that you’re entirely sure what I mean,” the man hums with a kind smile, chair creaking under his weight when he slouches further into it. “Did you like being undone in a pleasure house like a common whore?”

His words, foreignly brash, and his eyes, foreignly hardened, make your stomach do a backflip.

“I… I don’t know—”

“You never do, do you?” Baelor mutters with a sympathetic squint to his mismatched eyes. “You’re always so concerned about what everyone else wants— What everyone else thinks of you— That you never learned how to form your own opinions…”

You shift uncomfortably before him, feeling utterly dissected under his prying stare and grimacing when you dig a fresh mark onto the skin of your pointerfinger.

“So I’ll ask you again, princess,” the man continues, leaning forward in his seat and never once taking his eyes off you. He peers at you over the flickering candles and repeats, more slowly this time. “Did you… like it?”

You swallow hard and nod once.

“Yes,” you hear yourself say on bated breath. “I think I did…”

“What about it did you like?”

You struggle to catch your breath, more so to find an adequate answer.

“I think that I— I just spent so much time worrying about my duties as the… the wretched Flower of Highgarden,” you laugh bitterly at the stupid nickname. “That I forgot what it meant to feel good. That I was allowed to feel good, and suddenly I was surrounded by people just taking what they wanted, and I felt so…”

“Free?” Baelor finishes for you, brows raised to his hairline.

“Powerful,” you correct, squinting like the word is half-foreign on your tongue.

Something flickers in his brown-blue eyes, something more than just the candlelight, as if he were finally seeing you for the first time.

His chair legs scrape the cobbles as he rises slowly to full height, rounding the table in measured strides, ambling towards you like a predator stalking its prey.

“Is Daeron who you want?” he asks with lowered brows. “Is that where your loyalties lie?”

“My loyalty is to the crown, Your Grace—”

You clear your throat and tilt your chin to meet the man’s gaze when he towers over you, smelling of leather and the old books he spends most of his days studying. Your breath stutters when he suddenly reaches for your face.

“Don’t answer from here,” he murmurs lowly, tapping gently at your skull. His pale pointer finger trails down — past your cheek, over your jaw, and down your thrumming pulse — until it rests along your sternum, just over your racing heart. “Answer from here.”

You inhale a wavering breath, glassy eyes darting back and forth between his unblinking ones.

“In a… In a perfect world…” you start in a trembling voice, struggling to keep the man’s gaze as you turn instead to your reddened nail beds. “Daeron and I would take off for Sunspear or Casterly Rock— Somewhere by the sea, where the sun is always shining— And the world would just be the two of us, fucking and drinking and loving all we want…”

Baelor’s brows perk at your sudden brashness. “Then why don’t you?”

“Because this is not a perfect world,” you answer plainly, half-morose. “And I’m not so selfish as to pretend that I don’t have my own duties here…”

Baelor’s lip quirks in a gentle smile beneath his greying beard as he exhales a laugh through his nose.

“A trait rather befitting for a future queen, perhaps…” he hums and points his mismatched gaze to the silk bow sitting at the chest of your slip, tracing it with the tip of his pointerfinger.

“Despite my… regrettable actions…” you trail off, just barely able to meet the man’s gaze as you peer up at him from beneath your lashes. “My racing mind did inevitably run into thoughts of you, Your Grace…”

“Really?” he hums. “Pray tell.”

“Daeron asked me what I wanted, and I thought first of you,” you confess. “And I realized I had grown quite attached to the thought of becoming your wife. Of ruling beside you— some many years on, of course, but— The sheer thought of it made me… It made me feel like I could conquer worlds.”

“Aye,” Baelor nods, with a fire in his brown-blue gaze that matches your own. “We will.”

He’s kissing you before you can blink, pressing his mouth to yours and cradling the back of your neck in a calloused hand, urging your jaw upward with his thumb. He steals the breath from your lungs under the weight of his searing kiss, as fierce and merciless as taking a bite out of an apple. It’s all tongue and teeth and spit — a passion you weren’t sure a man as wooden as Baelor was able to give, or otherwise cared to.

A string of saliva connects your mouths when he pulls away from you. Baelor smiles softly to himself when you try hopelessly to chase his kiss, swiping the thread of spit away with the pad of his thumb when it clings to your chin.

“Did you cum?” he asks you, then follows quickly at the look you give him. “When my nephew fucked you with his fingers at a whorehouse— Did you cum?”

His prying gaze darts rapidly between your glassy one as you struggle to answer — unsure of whether to be honest or to tell a feeble lie in hopes of placating his ego. You decide, finally, to tell the truth.

“Yes,” you answer and nod once into his hand.

“And I trust it will be the last time?”

“As you command, Your Grace—”

“Baelor,” he corrects.

“As you command, Baelor.”

There’s a twinkle of subtle mischief in your gaze that makes his lips curl into a quiet smile. He leans down again, and you think he’s going to kiss you, but he only traces the bridge of your nose with the tip of his.

“You are not as soft as the tales would tell it, are you? Flower of Highgarden,” he hums in a melodic voice, breath fanning over your mouth. “Gentle, yes. But not soft.”

“What’s the difference?” you whisper, and he feels the breath of it over his bearded chin.

“A soft person wouldn’t dare touch a knife, would they? But you… You’d kiss my forehead before pressing a blade to my neck— That’s gentle,” he explains, walking you backward with meandering footsteps that rhyme with your own.

Your breath catches in your chest when the backs of your thighs collide suddenly with the edge of the table. It scrapes once on the cobbles, and then again when Baelor urges you suddenly around with a firm hand on your elbow. He spins you away from him and presses you further into the wooden edge with his chest flush against your back.

“And I am— The idiot who would thank you for slitting my throat…” he mutters in your ear, scruff scratching at your neck as his calloused hands crawl up your thighs, pushing up the hem of it as they go. “As long as it meant you touched my skin…”

His wide palms trail over your hip bones, up your stomach, and past your ribcage. They settle finally under your breasts, just lingering there, and you wonder if he can feel the way your breathing stutters beneath them — if he can feel the way you fight the urge to grind your ass against his cock.

“Is this wise, my lord?” you whisper, nose brushing his bearded jaw when you peer hesitantly over your shoulder. “Our wedding is at dawn— They’ll be expecting a bedding ceremony—”

“Aye. They will. And you can pretend to be the sweet, virgin wife for the people on the morrow all you want,” Baelor hums, reaching for his belt with one hand to undo the buckle there. “But there’s no use in pretending when we’re alone, is there?””

Excitement stirs in your flaring chest and down into the pit of your swirling stomach, throbbing somewhere in the depths of your loins the same way you had for Daeron. You keep his stare when he pulls his half-hard cock from the confines of his trousers, mouth watering for a taste of him.

“No… I suppose not,” you say on bated breath and let Baelor fuck you stupid in the middle of the candlelight study — moaning his name within the cobbled walls, mere hours before you recite your sacred vows before the gods.

[damn-stark]

Chapter 1 I wonder

Chapter 1 of Dangerous Liaisons

A/N- I really hope you guys like it. I love how this turned out and have so much planner!

Warning- Spoilers, swearing, yearning!! Eye color is described as amethyst (that’s all though!) Age gap with Lyonel.

Pairing- Daeron Targaryen x Targaryen!Fem-reader, Lyonel Baratheon x Targaryen!Fem-reader

Episode- 1x01

(Let me know if you want to be tagged)

————

The air is crisp. The air is invigorating with each inhale. The air is unlike anything else.

The body is perhaps not meant to breathe from so high within the clouds, but it’s different for you…you were meant to fly with the birds and dance amongst the stars. Once.

If your husband, Daeron is right, just like he was right about the two of you getting married, then one day the dragons will sing their mighty song and rule the skies again. One day.

Until then you will let your mind relish in a carefree fantasy and pretend that the breeze flowing through the long arch windows is coming from the endless sky, and that the delicate approaching footsteps are the sound of flapping dragon wings.

You will stay there until your father, Baelor’s gentle voice brings you back behind the tall arch window.

“Fantasing again are we?”

You don’t deny it. You can’t. “Mhm. I dreamt of him again. He was bigger this time, but he was no different otherwise. He was just as beautiful with his scales black as midnight that glimmer like silver stars under the moonlight.”

You sigh and gently hit the stone windowsill with your hand as you're reminded that your dream could never be anything but a stupid fantasy.

“It’s torture dreaming of something I can’t have,” you let yourself complain. “Why do we have to live punished and not have dragons? Not even small ones?”

Your father finally falls at your side and admires the calm horizon ahead of you. “Because our ancestors made a grave mistake that cost us what we worshiped, but ended up putting us on the path.”

“Well,” you scoff. “That’s truly despicable,” you grumble and bend down to prop your elbows on the stone windowsill and plop your chin on your palms.

“So,” your dad chuckles lightly. “You’d rather us not exist to have dragons instead?”

“Who says we wouldn’t exist? We exist because Dorne finally and truly decided to join the realm through marriage. Back then,” you wave your hand back. “All those years ago, Dorne hadn’t joined the rest of the realm, but they would have eventually. Sooner perhaps.”

“And you see, my daughter, that’s where our troubles commence. Any sooner and we would cease to exist,” he tries to be wise, but you’re not listening to reason. You’re not in the mood to think of it logically.

“But we would have dragons,” you insist. “We don’t though and all because they couldn’t fathom letting a woman rule.”

“Well, amongst the many other problems, yes, that is true,” he finally sides with you, letting you turn your head to glance at him before you stand up straight and turn to face him with a faint smile that lights up his kind mismatched eyes.

“Tired?” You ask as you remember his very taxing day.

“Not quite,” he says what you assumed he would say and what he has always said since you’ve learned to ask that question or anything similar.

Truly exhausting days are when you’re fighting for your life in a war, he says. Days doing my duty as Hand are taxing, but nothing short of enlightening, he says. It’s a bunch of bullshit, but he’s never been one to let you see his weakness.

He is like every other man though, you know that and have never respected him any less because of it. In fact, him showing how to hold his head high despite all the troubles being heir and Hand of the King brings is a quality you admire.

“Walk with me?” He asks and offers his arm.

You know that there isn’t always a reason to take a stroll. You enjoy your leisurely strolls together, but this time you see that he’s hiding a reason behind his invitation.

“Of course,” you accept and hook your arm around his to let him lead the way down the bright hall.

“As you may already know, I am to attend the tourney at Ashford,” he starts out, piquing your curiosity

“Yes,” you say lightheartedly and grow far more curious as to where this is going. “Grandfather asked if you could go in his stead.”

He scoffs. “He asked out of courtesy, but I was already planning to go because it is my duty…do you know why?”

You draw in a deep breath and with an amused smile you give his question some thought, earning his prolonged stare as he watches with admiration as your fierce amethyst eyes burn even more radiant as the wheels turn behind them.

“Lord Ashford may be a lesser lord, but even so it’s just as important that we show that we care about all our lords and ladies. Small or big,” you start to explain your thoughts out loud as you make sense of them. “It strengthens their respect and loyalty to the crown. And it shows our strength. That we are a united realm. After such a bloody war, it offers the people a sense of reassurance and hope,” you muse with such a fierce passion that he can’t help but be enveloped in it.

“Lastly, it shows that we can all sit around the same table. In a sense of course. We can all have fun together.”

Your father hums, causing you to realize what you just said and making you look at him with your breath caught in your throat as you wait to hear or see what he thinks.

He’s good at masking his face though so he makes it hard for you to read him. Thus, you’re left on the edge.

“Why me though?” He piles on another question, making you draw in a long breath and think for a second before you respond. “Why not the king as well or any of his other sons who are also princes?”

“The King is the King. He could send any of his other sons, but you are the King’s Hand and heir. Who better than you? A man who holds just as much respect.”

Your father points his chin to the air and nods slowly, turning your stomach in knots and making your heart race.

“Very well said,” he finally says, letting your heart and your breath calm while your stomach slowly unravels. “Spoken like an heir.”

Oh no. It’s all in shambles again.

“Father?” You question because maybe you didn’t hear him right.

“I have not misspoken,” he asserts himself as he comes to a stop just under the great Iron Throne. You hadn’t even realized he had brought you to the Great Hall until you came to a stop and the Iron Throne cast a large shadow over the both of you.

“You are my firstborn child—”

“But a woman,” you cut him off uncertainly. “And Valarr...”

“Had your grandmother not been Queen she would have ruled as princess in Dorne like many of the other women that came before her,” your father quickly explains. “If that’s what she would have wanted of course.”

You look at the Iron Throne basked in glorious sunlight and think of all the Kings that have sat there and ruled before your time. You then try to think of Queens, but you only come up with three if you count Princess Rhaenyra’s short and unofficial reign.

There is a reason why there haven’t been many Queens…because the people don’t like the idea of being ruled by one so what would make you so different?

“But the realm will never accept me,” you say quietly as you look back at your father.

He holds your gaze and draws out a deep breath before he raises his hands off his sides to grab your hands with an assuring look that lets you find your breath.

“I know it’s unfair for me to say this,” he speaks softly, making your racing heart ease. “But that’s why you will have to make them accept you. Earn their respect. Their admiration. Make them want no one else but you after me.”

You sigh deeply and tighten your hold around his hands to seek more comfort in this storm of confusion and perplexity. “But why?” You ask meekly.

“You have potential. I see it in you every day,” he responds without hesitation. “And…you are everything our house needs now that we don’t have the strength of our dragons. That’s important to note now. You know that just as much as I do.”

You swallow thickly and shake your head. “And…and if I don’t want to? What if I am content as I am now? What if I am content being passed over?”

He chuckles breathlessly and gives your hands a gentle squeeze. “What great ruler ever wants to wear the crown? But.” He pauses and smiles softly with admiration. “If that’s what you wish then that’s fine too.”

You scoff. “Will it?”

He lets one of your hands go to stroke your cheek. “Yes, because you will still be everything to me. Nothing will change that.”

You smile through the lump that forms in your throat and your watery eyes.

“It will be your decision,” he adds. “Hopefully not until a long time from now, but if you choose that it’s your calling…the offer will be yours to take.”

You nod. “Okay,” you answer shakily before you can’t help but throw your arms around him and embrace him.

Nothing is said between the two of you. You just relish in the comforting silence and the bliss for a moment until you pull away and take him by the arm to walk side by side.

“Will you be competing in the tourney?” You ask even if you know the answer to the question.

“No,” he states, but you still press on to get across what you have to say.

“No? Is it because you’re getting old? They’d have to call you, Baelor Rustedspear.”

Your father chuckles and you can’t help but smile giddily at the rich sound of it.

——

*SOMETIME LATER. ASHFORD MEADOW*

How incredulous…

And ever so marvelous…

There could probably be nothing more terrifying to a small creature with the heart the size of your thumb than a towering stag with large pointed antlers, but the brown little bird stays propped peacefully on the stag's antlers basking in the soft sunlight that shines through the tree tops.

There’s no mistaking the gentle giant for a tree branch either. Not for a wary bird so dangerously close to the ground. The stag chews loudly on its afternoon lunch, he breathes in and out loudly through his nose, and flicks his ears every now and then. Any little creature would know what it is and scurry the other way, but the little bird doesn’t seem to care. It cares only for its peace, and the sun, and that’s good because it allows you to sketch their portrait.

How could anyone pass such a stupendous sight and not want to mark it down so the moment could live forever, even past human memory?

Nevertheless, as always, peace is ruined by something you don’t catch, but both creatures do.

As the brown little bird takes no risks and flies off, the stag points his ears up to the tree tops and then quickly points them towards you. Only it’s not you that it finally noticed. That would’ve happened long ago when you first found it and hid behind the thinning shrubbery.

It hears something else. Someone? Not so far away lies Ashford Keep and currently it’s buzzing with many people. It wouldn’t be odd for some of them to wander into the woods. It’s actually expected of them before all the games commence, so if it’s someone are they dangerous?

Should that even be a question you should ask yourself without guards nearby to come to your rescue?

They make far too much noise in their shiny armor so you ordered them to wait past the woods and to only come search for you once the sun starts going down. Right at this instant the sun is high in the sky, not even close to going down, so maybe you should be like the bird and take no risks.

Or should you be cautious like the stag who stands so incredibly still to listen and watch.

No…maybe. What if it’s nothing? Creatures are spooked easily.

But wouldn’t the stag continue eating if it was nothing? It stays still and twitches his nose to smell the air, but doesn’t give anything away.

If only it could speak and say what it smells and hears, but it doesn’t so after two heartbeats you secure your sketch book under your arm, pull out a hidden dagger, and scare the stag off by cutting through the shrubbery you were hidden behind to stalk through the close knitted woods until you spot a flash of black moving to where you had been watching the stag and the bird, letting you know that it’s something intelligent pursuing the stag…or you?

If they caught you hidden amongst the shrubbery they would’ve seen you sneak away, so you keep moving slowly, making sure to avoid any dry leaves or branch littered on the forest ground so as not to be caught as you make your way around them.

You should just take this chance to book it out of the woods, but you’re far too curious as to what it is that had alerted the stag and scared off the bird, so you manage to find a way around them without being caught and discover that it’s a man.

Not just any man, he’s tall and lean. He’s not too muscular, but not thin either. You can see the curves of his shoulder muscles under his black and expensive leather, something that tells you he’s high-born or a well-off knight.

He’s older too. Older than you anyway. You can see his black curls that stop on his neck peppered with white hairs.

Perhaps if you could see his face you would know who it is, but his back is to you. Or at least it was until he suddenly spins around, causing your breath to catch, and causing your heart to jump when his dark eyes immediately find you as if he had been called.

There’s no mistaking it either. He’s found you hidden in between the trees and stands up straighter before he tilts his head, letting you see him clearly, not just a part of him, and right away, you put a name to his…face. You’ve made it your job to know all the great lords after all; he’s Lord Lyonel Baratheon. The Laughing Storm. Heir to Storm’s End.

You should be safe with him alone…

If he’s as good as they say he is…

“My Lord,” you greet with your nose pointed to the air, making sure not to show any fear or suspicion.

“Princess,” he surprises you by saying before the corner of his lips start to pull into an amused smile. “Are you alone?” He asks.

“No. My guards are near,” you remain guarded so as to not give anything away, but either way he glances around before he relaxes his arms and puts his hunting bow down.

“Forgive me for saying this, but you are a liar. Guards are easy to spot in their shiny armor. It’s why we don’t wear any whilst hunting. Besides, they would have already shown themselves the moment I walked out of hiding, but,” he scoffs and puts his arms out. “It seems it is just you and I here.”

You swallow thickly and never once falter. You keep your head up and your eyes fixated on him.

“And it is because we are alone that I will tell you that you have no need to fear me. I won’t harm you.”

“Forgive me for saying that, but I cannot take your word. I do not know you or your intentions. No matter how great a lord you are. My Lord.” You bow your head, making him chuckle before he takes a step closer to you. Just one.

“You’d be wise then, but I am true to my word. I will not harm you. If you wish to leave then do so. I won’t stop you but I will have to escort you. Even if you don’t see me. I don’t wish to be scorned by your father or your grandfather.”

“You’d be wise then.”

That earns another charming smile that makes your muscles relax before you put away your dagger and slowly walk out and join him in the middle of the woods, making his smile deepen and his dark eyes glimmer with that charming smile.

“May I ask how you were quick to recognize me, my Lord?”

His thick dark eyebrows pinch together, and wrinkles draw around his eyes as he squints before his face brightens with smugness. “Well, how could I ever forget you? The Beloved of the crown and the realm. And your eyes? They are remarkable. Truly one of a kind, like the rare and extraordinary glimmering amethyst crystals that people only wish to possess.”

You blink with surprise and can’t help the corner of your lips from twitching upwards.

“How were you so quick to recognize me?” He then redirects, making you shrug.

“I have made it my job to remember every great lord. Besides, I remember you from my wedding,” you point outand meet his gaze, noticing how deep they are. You get caught up in them quickly as if they were a raging storm and you were a sailor on raging waters.

“You outdrank my husband and every other drinking man that celebrated with us. Almost as if you had made it your job.”

“Or they were lesser men who cannot withstand a couple of drinks,” he retorts, making you giggle.

“I wouldn’t say you drank a couple of drinks. I’m sure you drank through almost half of the stock we had for the wedding. And well, all anyone could talk about was how incredibly impressed they were by your tolerance.”

“It seems you were to,” he remarks smugly, making your eyes flicker to the ground, and making a smile flicker on your features.

“Or did you make it your job to know?” He teases as he leans in close, drawing your eyes back to him and finally notice how handsome he is.

You never noticed that before. You were too smitten with Daeron to notice then, but now. Now that he’s standing before you, you note Lord Lyonel's strong jaw and his smooth tan skin. The pointed peppered beard he wears adds to his charm while also making him look rugged. And that is only more true with the gold dangling earring he wears on one ear.

It’s almost like he’s a legendary and handsome pirate come to life. Except he is more refined than a pirate. Wilder, and far more enchanting too.

Or is that just because of his eyes? They’re a lighter brown up close, but still harbor a storm that you’re not intimidated by. You should be. Anyone else would be, but you're anchored and easily enticed.

Which is…silly…you’re married…

But…ever so alone without Daeron and with him also being in another one of those states where he distances himself from you and is nothing but mean.

That’s all it is though, loneliness that has your heart swooning like a naive young girl swooning over knights from old stories.

“Well,” you respond with an innocent smile. “It was my wedding so how could I not notice?”

He hums and shakes his finger at you before he looks around as if in search of something. When he doesn’t find anything he faces you again with curiosity in his bright eyes. “What is it that you are doing out here? All alone.”

“Alone?” You query. “I was not alone at least not until you scared off who I was with.”

Lord Lyonel scoffs with amusement before he counters. “That was no friend. That was today’s game.”

“Was until you scared him off,” you make it clear, earning an amused look before he finds your book under your arm and probes further.

“If you were not hunting then what were you doing? Frolicking? Do you frolick princess?”

You giggle and shake your head before you show him what he was curious about. “I was out here drawing. You scared away my model.”

He hums before he points at the leatherbound book. “May I?” He asks and without asking for clarification you hum in agreement and pass him the book.

Lord Lyonel then, without invitation or a care in the world, surprises you by plopping himself on the ground to open the book, coming across a clear and precise drawing of a bright red dragonfly standing on a thin branch.

Under the drawing, it’s labeled with the type of dragonfly and notes you had jotted down.

The dragonfly doesn’t catch his interest though, so he continues to flip through the pages while you sit on your knees beside him, letting your dark purple gown spread over the ground.

“These are very good,” Lord Lyonel notes as he also sees drawings of Daeron, your brothers Valarr and Matarys, your father, your cousins, and anyone else you had drawn in the book he’s flipping through. There’s many more back in the Red Keep, filled with so many of the same and yet different things.

“You truly have a talent.”

“You don’t have to flatter me, my Lord. You may speak freely,” you remark as you watch him flip through all your drawings without ever thinking twice about them. He’s carefree without a doubt. Maybe it’s because you are who you are, because it’s simply his nature, or it’s felt like you’ve known each other far longer than just mere minutes. Whichever it is, you enjoy it and mirror him because he makes it easy to.

“No, no.” He shakes his head. “I am speaking truthfully. These are remarkable. I do notice that besides dragons there’s a lot of…critters…and creatures, and nature and whatnot.”

You giggle and lean closer to him to flip a page for him and show him one of your favorites you have only recently drawn.

“Well, what can I say? They are beautiful muses and those critters and creatures are far easier to draw than people. If you know how to move with them that is,” you muse happily as he’s speaking on your interest. “They are sensitive, but it all comes from here,” you hover your hand over his chest before you flip another page to show him a wide-eyed owl.

“And the fact that you may smell like Lilly’s of the Valley?” He notes as he keeps his eyes on your delighted face. “You’re masked well. Any hunter would wish to have their scent masked as naturally as yours.”

You glance at him with a bright smile before you reveal your secret. “It’s on purpose so they aren’t easily spooked. I don’t wish to smell like dirt just to be close to them, so I choose floral and other naturally sweet scents. It doesn’t always work, but it helps.”

You look back at your sketchbook and he does the same to turn a page and grin brightly right away at the drawing of a great stag.

“Ah-ha!” He exclaims. “I should be honored. A second stag in your book of beautiful paintings. Are you fond of them too?”

You meet his gaze and sit back before you look at him teasingly. “Honored, but my lord I’ve never drawn a laughing stag. That’s what you are, no?”

His face falls and your lips only tremble as you stifle your laugh and smile at him tauntingly.

After a moment of seriousness, he breaks. At first, his lips slowly curl into a smirk before he chuckles and returns to look through the book. “Nor should you ever draw a laughing stag. That would be a mad sight.”

“Oh, I agree.”

Lord Lyonel comes across the drawing you were just sketching and then flips over to an empty page and grins before he puts his hand out and points at your pencils. “Give me one here,” he beckons and with amusement and curiosity you hand him one and watch him shift away so he can face you and start drawing quickly and with a heavy hand that would most likely mark the other page as well, but alas, you don’t say anything. You just watch him and notice his eyes dart up to you once and twice before he focuses solely on what he’s doing to finish quickly.

Once he’s done he turns the book around and shows off a drawing of two…lumps with dark circles in them.

“Oh,” you frame the word as you bat your lashes and draw in a breath between your teeth as you purse your lips together.

“My Lord that,” you mutter and sigh. “Well.” You tilt your head to take a better look at the drawing. “I have to say it’s not that appropriate.”

“What?” He gasps and leans forward to hold the book beside your face. “They’re your eyes. Is it not obvious?”

You meet his gaze and then snort before you break into a laugh. “Oh my lord,” you say between laughs. “I thought it was, well it’s not important.” You giggle and take the book and the pencil. “Let me sketch something now.”

“Well, it won’t be fair will it? You have the talent.”

You flick your wrist and do as you said. You make a quick sketch before you turn it around to show him with a bright smile that comes easily. “Look,” you point out. “A laughing stag.”

Lord Lyonel grabs the book and brings it close to study it for a moment before he meets your gaze and says lightheartedly, “see, absolutely absurd.”

You giggle and turn the book back at you. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re the Laughing Storm then.” You flash him a smile before you turn the page back to your unfinished drawing.

In the silence, he watches you study and thinks about the strange yet amusing way you found each other before he falls back to thinking about the moment you just had. An easy moment that didn’t make you feel like strangers talking to each other.

It was easy to laugh with you, and perhaps the same could be said for anyone else. He’s not a serious and intimidating lord. He likes to have a good laugh. But maybe it was also because you share your father's charisma that made this moment flow so naturally. He doesn’t know truly, but he knows he wants more of this moment. More of you.

“I’ll be holding court later in my tent,” Lord Lyonel takes your attention. “Come. We will have some gay fun. Good food and strong drinks. I remember you also enjoyed a good festivity.”

You hold your book to your chest and lift a brow. “On one condition. You promise that there’ll be dancing.”

He gasps and touches his chest. “You wound me by thinking there won’t be any. It’s a fucking requirement.”

You smile at him and then offer him your response. “I will try to make it. My husband is not here so I do not know if I should wander in a campground at night all alone.”

He scoffs. “No one would dare harm you. No one with sense. Not unless they want to see the wrath of many a dragon,” he whispers with a soft intensity that makes a chill run down your spine before you smile at the ground for a moment before your eyes flicker back to him.

“I will try. Thank you, my Lord.”

Said man then gets up and offers you his hand. “Come on then, I will escort you out. I was serious about not wanting to be scorned.”

You keep your hands around your book and turn him down. More so demand him so he’ll listen. “I will remain here. You may go. I command it. I will leave shortly.”

“Command?” He asks with a faint smirk.

You nod and narrow your gaze to an intense look so he knows you mean what you say and you’re not to be questioned.

“Good day, My Lord,” you bid him sweetly before you bring your book down and continue to sketch your drawing.

“Princess.” He bows and having to listen to your command, he turns and walks away, but not without looking back and meeting your gaze as you look over at him too.

When your eyes lock you heart skips a beat and you end up quickly looking back at your drawing without making it a big deal. It’s only once you don’t hear him anymore that you look back at the now empty space where he had once stood and draw out a deep breath whilst you can’t help but smile giddily.

Which is truly a travesty. Maybe even more than your dad wanting you to be his heir because Lord Lyonel is twice your age. Maybe more? It doesn’t matter because he’s also married and you’re married too and…perhaps it would be better to think about what your dad has to offer you. Heir, and Queen one day if that’s what you want…

It’s…something almost unfathomable. You know your place after all. Many women from your family have been passed over in favor of their brothers and you have two, so it’s never something that you desired. It’s something you never even thought of and can’t stop thinking about ever since your father brought it up.

Your response should be easy; no, but he said he saw potential. Potential in you. Who would you be if you wasted it right before the very eyes that see it so clearly in you?

But how can you accept? It’s such a heavy burden. A burden no one should want. A burden that you don’t know if you want.

A major part of you doesn’t want to consider it anymore, and your father said that if your response was no, then it wouldn’t matter, but what if it is your calling?

How…does one even know if it is?

It’s all so taxing and you should throw that at your father because he’s the one who has your mind all jumbled up now.

Albeit he’d only say that it’s good that you’re having so much trouble thinking if it’s what you want, so it wouldn’t work in your favor if he doesn’t feel bad for causing you such stress.

Thus, you just let it all build up in your mind as you eventually leave your spot in the meadow and trudge back to the Keep before the sun goes down and sends your guards after you.

On your way back however, as you approach a nearby river that’s close to the keep, you hear the sound of horses nickering in the distance before you catch a long slippery snake painted black with white stripes slithering towards that noise.

As always, you don’t fear the innocent creature. There’s far more terrifying things out there than defenseless creatures, so you approach it with a fascinated smile and gently pick it up with the lightest touch.

“Come on you,” you muse as it slithers over your arm as it tries to investigate what had picked it up. “You’re going towards danger.”

The snake keeps investigating and tries to slither up your arm, but you keep it down in your hands and then raise it slightly, catching your reflection in its tiny black eyes as you note that with the way it’s painted, it’s non-venomous, so you take it with you towards the hedge that the horses stand behind.

“Queen, can you believe it?” You speak your thoughts out loud to the painted snake since there’s no one else with you and you haven’t told anyone else. “My father wants to make me Queen.”

The snake wraps itself around your wrist, making you grin at it with awe as you mindlessly pass the hedge and fail to see the giant man bathing in the river until he makes himself known by gasping loudly.

“Oh!”

Your eyes fly up, but when you see that the incredibly tall man is nude, you snap your eyes up to look at his face dripping with river water since well, there’s so much of him that you can avoid seeing his manhood by simply shifting your eyes higher up. Even though, you’re tempted to look back down and remark on how…well it wouldn’t be proper to remark on such a thing.

Instead, you shift your focus to how impressively giant he is. You’ve seen men as tall as him and some even taller than him, but even so, you can’t help but be surprised by the size of him. Moreover, his toned muscles add to his size.

However, the way he fumbles with his words makes him look less intimidating.

“Please forgive me, my…uh, my Lady, I did not know there would be people in these parts of the woods!”

The water splashes around his feet as he starts moving, so you quickly shake your head to assure him. “Do not trouble yourself…” you pause and peek around you, noticing nothing more than his roughspun clothes laid out to keep dry while he’s bathing. There’s no tent or more men either. Just him, three horses, a long sword, and an old wooden shield resting against a green tree, telling you that he’s probably nothing more than a hedge knight with big dreams at the tourney.

“…Ser. I was just passing by. Please stay where you are. I am leaving.”

“It does not matter. I am still very sorry!” He stammers and bows his head. “You have caught me indecent. I did not—”

“Stop,” you cut him off before he could keep rambling his apologies. “I am averting my eyes. You are a very,” you chuckle breathlessly. “Giant man, so trust that I did not see anything.”

It’s a lie. You caught a glimpse, but you won’t tell the big blushing man that.

“And I will continue down my path before I can. Be as you were, ser. Good day to you,” you wave him off and shift around to stride away.

Albeit before you can put the giant man and the river behind you, you turn to meet his ashamed face to add one more thing. “Oh, and I should tell you. Warn you I should say, there are snakes around here. I just saved one from being trampled by your horses,” you share and lift your hand to show off the snake wrapped around your wrist to the man with incredibly bright blue eyes.

“Oh? Okay. Thank you…” he trails off awkwardly and you meet his gaze again and offer him a sweet smile.

“I will see you around, Ser. Good day now. Enjoy your bath.”

You then finally stride away without adding anything else, leaving the man to his bath in the river and taking the docile snake with you until you reach the end of the woods where your guards are relieved to see that you haven’t been lost, saving them a search in the woods and an explanation to the King's heir.

——

*LATER*

After much back and forth and once the guards think you’re in bed and won’t notice you’re gone, you find yourself before the very lively tent of Lord Lyonel Baratheon.

The plan was to stay in the keep. It would save poor Lord Ashford a headache since he’s been tormenting himself over you ever since you arrived at Ashford with only a couple of guards and no husband, but after much consideration, you figured that what he doesn’t know won’t kill him now will it?

Thus, you walk into the loud tent and immediately get greeted by warm candlelight throughout the tent, the smell of sweat and ale, and the sight of a crowd of people swarming a dancer in the middle of the circle. Or at least you think that's what they're watching, there’s too many bodies blocking what’s going on, so you can’t be positive, but from the sound of clapping hands and shouting, Lord Lyonel was true to his word. There is dancing.

That’s why no one cares about you when you walk inside, but you prefer that way. The music would stop, all the shouting and excitement would stop, leaving the tent deafeningly quiet while all eyes fell on you.

And it’s not that you don’t like it. You’re a princess of the realm, you’ve been accustomed to being gawked at the moment you were conscious of all the stares. Right now though, all you want is to have fun. You want to be like one of them in a sense so having the fortune of not going noticed yet, you take a cup of ale and stick to the side, avoiding joining the big crowd just yet, and avoiding walking too close to the main table because you can see the great host there looking grand and spectacular.

Lord Lyonel is easy to spot after all since he's surrounded by his people and wearing an impressive antler helm he must have had made from a great stag.

Honestly, he looks like a painted portrait. The warm candlelight sitting around him only makes that more true and makes him that much more enticing. If you could, you would paint him as he is right now, but all you can do is memorize the tantalizing scene and watch him, noting that he looks quite bored sitting there so you wonder why he hasn't joined the fun just yet. Is he not drunk enough? Is he waiting for someone? Is the crowd not too aroused just yet?

You want to know but don’t want to take the steps to do so, so you watch and wonder.

You wonder what he’d say if he saw that you were here.

You wonder if you could make him laugh again. It was easy to do so before, but then again you were alone then, away from the prying eyes. You’re surrounded by people this time.

Either way, you also wonder if his touch is as warm as he looks. If his lips taste like the wine or ale he’s drinking and if they’re as soft as they look.

Does he smell like that musky earthy scent that clung to him before?

Does his heart race like yours as all you can do is be captivated by him?

Perhaps not…

No, not at all.

How stupid. Foolish.

You are married. He is. You are! And Daeron…told you to leave him alone the last time you spoke. He was mean…

But should you punish him too hard for the way he acted the last time you saw him considering you know that his dreams torment him because they’re never clear and such a burden?

Perhaps you were the mean one for leaving him behind and not trying harder to understand why he went into another drinking binge.

But…

But…

You groan and chug the rest of the ale to clear your mind from all your thoughts, and focus back on the fun when you get your cup refilled.

Nevertheless, as you turn back around to watch the crowd, you spot none other than the incredibly tall man from the river. Albeit he looks even more impressively giant now that you’re closer. Gods.

Now that he’s here nevertheless, you can’t just go on and not address what happened. He looked like he was being tortured. Poor creature.

“Ser!” You call out loudly so you can be heard over the music and clamoring as you approach him, catching his attention right away and making him grow stiff.

“My Lady,” he greets you as he covers his mouth to swallow his food. “Apologies.”

You shake your head to reassure him and then get right to the matter. “I’m glad I found you. I just wanted to apologize for earlier. I really did not mean to intrude.”

“Oh!” He exclaims without seeming to notice that his voice carries louder than he expected. “Well…I am actually also sorry.”

You giggle and he blinks with surprise as if he’s surprised that he was able to get that reaction from you.

It’s truly endearing.

“Well, then let’s just forget about the entire matter or else we’ll spend the entire night just apologizing to each other,” you offer and he immediately looks relieved to hear that.

“Yes! Good.” He nods and seems to finally meet your gaze because he looks taken back by you as he holds your gaze.

However, besides dropping his jaw, he doesn’t react any other way. It's almost as if he doesn’t recognize you which is quite fascinating since you’re renowned for the deep and rare color of your eyes just like Valarr is renowned for his single strand of silver hair and mismatched eyes like your father. Yet, this man doesn’t realize. He doesn’t sputter or grow even taller and stiffer. He doesn’t bow, avoid his eyes, or grow perfectly cordial either. He remains awkward and it’s just another endearing thing about him.

“What's your name, Ser?”

“It’s, uh, Dunk—Ser Dunk.”

As he says his name you finally catch the attention of the great man sitting nonchalantly at his table and watch surprise pass through him before he seems to grow more alive; his eyes brighten and the corner of his lips tug upward faintly as he sits up slowly.

You pass him a warm smile before you look back at the man you’re talking to for a second before you’re looking at the floor and smiling giddily at the thought of Lord Lyonel and his reaction.

When the moment passes you drift all your focus back to the man you’re talking to and immediately remark on him. “You’re a green boy indeed. Is Dunk short for Duncan?”

He swallows thickly and nods. “Yes, it is.”

“Great, I like that. Ser Duncan, it’s a pleasure meeting you.”

“Likewise…” he trails off and silently asks for your name, so all you give him is your first name. You almost spill out your title but you hold back on it because it’s quite amusing that he doesn’t recognize you.

“Enjoying the festivity, Ser?” You probe as you turn to watch the crowd and drink a sip of your ale.

“Well, I am enjoying the food and drinks more,” he admits, making you smile before you question his comment.

“Is this not to your liking?”

“Well,” he says as he shrugs. “It’s not that. I just don’t know anyone.”

“And you don’t need to,” you assure him as you glance at him, catching Lord Lyonel’s distant glance and holding it for a second before you look away.

“Just have some fun. You probably won’t see these people tomorrow either way. This is what tourneys are for. Fun.”

“Well that’s certainly a part of it,” Ser Duncan says.

“Will I be seeing you participating in any of the games, Ser?” You inquire. “Perhaps I could cheer for you.”

Ser Duncan glances at you with some surprise before he responds. “Uh, well that’s what I am trying to work on. I need a Lord or a knight to vouch for me. I’ve been trying to talk to Lord Dondarrion, but I haven’t been able to meet with him.”

Lord Dondarrion. Pft.

“Well, if you stick around you will probably run into him here. If not he will probably be drinking with another great lord.”

“I’ve been told he wakes up late,” he shares. “So perhaps I will have luck here.”

You scoff. “Well, good luck to you, Ser. I mean it.”

“Thank you.”

He has no idea how much he’ll need it. Bless his heart.

Regardless you watch the clamoring crowd for a second before you slowly steal a glance at Lord Lyonel. This time he’s not looking over at you, so you let your eyes linger on the side of his face as he sits there nonchalantly.

It’s so perfectly carved. His jaw is perfectly defined and his nose is straight and perfect.

“Pardon, my Lady,” Ser Duncan steals your attention. “I am being summoned.”

You follow his gaze to the main table and huff softly before you take a drink of your ale and watch him go from the corner of your eye.

When he’s halfway there and you’ve finished your drink, you put the cup down and glance at the table again, noticing Lord Lyonel’s gaze and making sure to keep it on you as you slowly walk past bodies of people before you lose yourself in the crowd.

You’re almost tempted to weave through the crowd of people to make it to the other side and be in direct sight of the great lord, but you notice that Ser Duncan is with him so you don’t bother. Instead, you finally match the high energy of the festivity.

Your once-empty cup is filled with ale some man was carrying in a flagon, and a permanent smile decorates your features. With one hand occupied with your cup of ale however, you can’t clap along, but you do cheer and exclaim excitedly for the various dancers that dance in the middle of the circle or on the table.

It’s easy then to forget whose tent you’re in. It’s easy to forget that you are meant to be an example for the realm. You are meant to uphold yourself a certain way especially if you do want to be your father's heir, but how great is it to have fun without having to hold those expectations and without caring what people think? Is it so bad to be drunk off the ecstasy that fills the tent like everyone else? Just for tonight.

Daeron is not here in need of being taken care of after he’s had too much to drink. There’s no limitations to how much you should have. No judgmental eyes. It’s just you, them, and…him.

“I was promised a dance.” You hear his smooth voice by you unexpectedly.

“No.” You chuckle. “I said I would come as long as you assured me that there would be dancing,” you remind him, making him scoff.

“Same thing! Dance with me!” He cries excitedly before he spins around swiftly and climbs on the table beside him. “Dance with me,” he says again and crouches to offer you his hand. “How can you say you had fun if you don’t dance?”

“By being a part of the crowd.”

He flicks his wrist and blows out a huff of air. “Pft! Boring. Are you boring?” He asks cockily, making you pout as you look at him in annoyance before you take his hand to let him swiftly pull you on top of the table.

Once you’re standing on top he takes your hands in the attempts to lead you, but you pull your hands away to lift up the skirt of your gown and follow the beat of the music that’s playing by showing off a couple steps of a jig dance you learned a while ago, making the once preoccupied crowd turn their focus on you while Lord Lyonel swipes his tongue over his teeth before he shows off a couple steps of his own.

You beam at him before you follow by showing off a couple more quick steps that make him let out a booming laugh. The rest of the crowd claps and hollers before they continue doing their own thing, letting Lord Lyonel then take your hand, and making you take his other one before you cross them over the other and start spinning around with grins on your faces and deep hearty laughs escaping past your lips.

Nothing matters then. You’re too high off the ecstasy, starting to get tipsy with the drinks you quickly swallow down, and drunk off him; how carefree he is. How incredibly fun he is, and how beautifully dazzling he is.

There does come a point in the night where you do grow concerned because Lord Lyonel comes face to face with Ser Duncan and seems to be challenging him or getting him to dance. You don’t know, but you watch him suddenly step on Ser Duncan and wait.

When Ser Duncan doesn’t react the way he wants he throws his foot again and again, but Ser Duncan is quicker time and time again. After they go about the floor, Ser Duncan finally seems to gain courage and throws his foot forward, managing to step on Lord Lyonel.

Yet as the tent erupts in cheer, you bring your cup to your lips and meet Ser Duncan’s wide-eyed and panicked face as Lord Lyonel bends over with pain.

You have no words of comfort because you don’t know how it will turn out, but then as Lord Lyonel faces the big knight, the big knight offers instant relief as he begins laughing before he pushes Lord Lyonel back as he starts to laugh too.

After, with much higher spirits, Ser Duncan and Lord Lyonel start to dance around each other. They spin. Lord Lyonel throws his arms out like a bird throwing out its wings as he spins around, and you continue dancing, with him, with Ser Duncan on occasion, and others who would pull you to dance.

Your heart is just close to bursting for the rest of the night. You can’t remember when was the last time you had fun like the fun you were having in that tent. You don’t remember when was the last time someone ever paid you so much attention or made you feel so many burning and thrilling sensations, but it is addicting. You want more of it. You want so much more, but you know your limits as well, so after a while, when Lord Lyonel is off getting more to drink you sneak off into the night, but don’t walk back to the keep.

You take a seat under a tree in the shadows and try to cool down. You need to keep him off your mind. You need to leave the perimeters of the tent grounds and no longer think of him or the way he makes you feel, so you take time to take deep breaths and let the brisk night air embrace you so your body can cool down.

It’s hard to do though. Five deep breaths turn to twenty and the cold air doesn’t do shit.

If only Daeron had been here. You wouldn’t have come out. You would have stayed in your chambers while he was probably out, or you would have been with him watching over him and making sure he doesn’t end up in some ditch, but he’s not with you. You were left to your own devices and you can’t breathe because you can’t stop thinking about the dazzling man that Lord Lyonel is.

“Lord Manfred Dondarrion.”

You raise your head at the sound of that name and see Ser Duncan talking to Lord Manfred on the pathway.

“I wish to speak with you about Ser Arlan of Pennytree. He served your Lord Father to hunt the Vulture King in the Red Mountains.”

That’s rather to the point, but Lord Manfred is paying attention even with two…brothel workers clinging to him.

“I was only a boy, but—”

Paying no mind to the fact that Ser Duncan is speaking, that tall brunette woman clinging to Lord Manfred cuts him off. “I thought you said you were a Dornishman.”

Lord Manfred doesn’t respond, he just goes in to kiss her while the shorter woman with red hair interjects. “No, he said he’s hung like a Dornishman.”

“No, I said I’ve hung Dornishman,” Lord Manfred finally interjects before he kisses the redhead too.

“Perhaps we would speak on the morn,” Ser Duncan tries to offer a solution so he can escape the awkward encounter.

“I know your penny knight not,” Lord Manfred disappoints the tall hedge knight. “Nor you, brother. Be gone.”

Well, you didn’t expect this to go any other way.

“But Ser Arlan took a wound in your father's service,” Ser Duncan steps up to argue after Lord Manfred turned away. “How could you have forgotten him?”

Lord Manfred turns to counter. “My lord father took 800 swords into those mountains. We’ve forgotten men who reaped much more than a wound.”

“Please, Ser, I will not be allowed to challenge unless a knight or a lord will vouch for me.”

“And what is that to me?” Lord Manfred quips and walks away with his whores, leaving Ser Duncan to his lonesome in the night with a solemn look on his face that gives you pity.

There’s only a few men who would beg for help as he did just now. Their ego and pride get in the way, or they find other ways to enter the lists, but he asked for help and every word sounded desperate and sincere.

Thus, you get up from your seat under the tree and make sure Lord Manfred is not in earshot to walk out of the shadows and address Ser Duncan as he’s walking away. “You would have better luck dying your hair red.”

The tall knight stops in his tracks and turns around with a confused, “what?” leaving his lips.

You clasp your hands behind your back and lean your head forward to share something you’ve heard about the stuck-up Lord, whom you’re actually related to because of your mother. “He has a fetish you see? He tends to fancy women with red hair like his. So you would have better luck dying your hair red.”

“I,” he pauses and shakes his head. “I cannot do that.”

You smile with amusement. “Good. That’s very good Ser.”

You stand up straight and study him. Yes, you can’t know much about a person by simply studying them, but you can know that it looks like he doesn’t have a lot by his rough-spun clothes and his thin, smelly, and torn cloak. You can tell he’s quite shy by the way he keeps averting his eyes and by the way a blush paints his cheeks. And maybe it was the way he was acting in the tent, but you can also tell he’s sweet through his bright blue eyes.

You just hope you’re not wrong about him.

“I’ll talk to my father for you,” you offer him some consolation, making Ser Duncan’s gaze snap to you before he starts sputtering as he questions you.

“What?”

You giggle. “I will talk to my father in the morrow so do not get discouraged and leave. Alright, Ser?”

Ser Duncan doesn’t look like he’s processed what you told him, but he still queries. “Why? I mean I am grateful, but you do not know me. You do not owe me anything.”

“No, that is true, but from what I’ve seen you appear to be a good man. It’s rare to meet good and honorable men. We need good and honorable men to be knights of the realm. Men like you.”

Besides, if you help him, maybe he’ll be eternally loyal to you.

“My Lady—”

“Princess!” You hear a booming slurring voice, making you peer back to see Lord Lyonel crossing the bridge. “There you are. I have been searching for you.”

You start to smile before you hear Ser Duncan gasp. “Princess?”

You look back at him and he’s already going down on his knee.

“I am such a brute! My deepest apologies, your grace. I did not know!”

“Did not know?” Lord Lyonel remarks as he reaches your side. “It’s quite obvious is it not? I mean her eyes are…one of a kind.”

You scoff before you address the tall knight. “Rise, Ser. There’s no need for that. It was I who was deceitful about my identity when I realized you did not recognize me.”

Ser Duncan hesitates, but he then slowly stands on his feet and towers over you and Lord Lyonel.

“I will talk to my father on the morrow. He should be arriving in the morning. If the gods are good. If you wish to ask the other lords for their favor you may do so just in case something goes awry. But I will speak to my father,” you assure him, making him bow his head.

“I do not know how to thank you, Princess. Truly.”

“With words. I ask for nothing more,” you offer him some relief since he was already looking troubled over the matter.

“Thank you!”

You offer him a sweet smile and bow your head lightly. “Goodnight, my good Ser.”

“Come then I’ll escort you back to the keep,” Lord Lyonel then chimes in before he starts leading the way, making Ser Duncan bid you a goodnight.

“Goodnight Princess. Thank you once again.”

You offer him a soft hum before you catch up with Lord Lyonel and accept his offer to escort you back to the keep. Even though not long ago you were struggling to get him out of your mind.

“Are you sure you do not need an escort to your tent?” You tease, making Lord Lyonel look at you with an offended look.

“Why would you ever say that?”

You giggle. “Because you are quite drunk,” you point out the obvious.

“Me?” He points at his chest. “Well, you would be right. I am quite drunk, but it is nothing. I can walk you to the keep just fine.”

You hum and nod slowly as you watch him and notice that he can’t even walk in a straight line. Which is hilarious considering what he just spat out.

“I met a pirate once,” you say abruptly and stifle your mischievous smile. “A very nice pirate who taught me this trick to know how drunk you are. Do you want to do it?”

He scoffs. “Of course.”

You both stop in your tracks and he brushes his hair back with his fingers before he claps and clears his throat. “All right, I’m ready.”

You stifle your laugh and step back. “The trick is to spread your arms out,” you tell him. “And lift one foot off the ground and press it on the side of your knee so you can balance on one foot. If you don’t wobble it means you're sober—or sober enough anyway.”

“Okay, okay, I can do this,” he says breathlessly before he dramatically throws his arms out and then looks down at his feet, making his black and white peppered hair fall over his face before, without hesitation or question, he starts to raise one foot, making you cover your mouth with your hand to hide your mischievous smile.

Although if he were looking at your eyes he would be able to notice that you’re up to no good. He doesn’t though. He throws his head back and looks ahead to concentrate as he slowly drags his foot up to the side of his knee.

Nevertheless, when it comes to balancing he fails right away. He’s too drunk, so he loses balance and falls forward, making you throw your hands out to try and catch him.

Albeit, he catches himself quickly by managing to steady himself on your shoulders and in turn making you hold onto his shoulders as well.

“I lied,” you whisper as you stay connected.

Lord Lyonel slowly raises his head and when his light brown eyes meet yours, you feel his breath unfurl over your lips.

“I made it up,” you admit with a mischievous smirk tugging on your lips while Lord Lyonel just holds your gaze with disbelief before he starts to chuckle without moving away. His face hovers over yours as his chuckle grows deeper and as you start to laugh along with him.

You should be the one moving away if he doesn’t, but you can’t move. His breath smells like sweet wine and it keeps you reeled in.

“You mischievous trickster!” He exclaims.

You finally push him away and defend yourself. “There was a pirate! He had a ruby brooch holding up his golden cape that he said was woven with real gold.” You chuckle. “His thinning hair was gold and his long beard was gold too. I asked him if he ever sank his boat because he carries his weight in gold.”

“That’s so stupid,” Lord Lyonel chuckles and you nod.

“I know, but he was foolish too for thinking we believed him.” You laugh as you continue walking. “He said that the next time he saw me he’d gift me a golden dragon egg he found on the shores of Old Valyria. He died not so long after he left. It’s said that he was robbed for his gold. Turned out it was all fake though.”

“What a foolish man.”

“Aye, but he was loads of fun.” You do give the old dead pirate that. “Have you ever drunk with a pirate?”

“Many and they are loads of fun, but unfortunately I meet far more dangerous ones so I have to kill them. It seems that all the fun ones are at King’s Landing though.”

You hum. “You will have to return to the capital. I know the taverns they frequent,” you share smugly as you fiddle with your fingers.

“Oh? Is that so? The Beloved Princess?”

You shrug. “I often go to the taverns with my husband. Not to worry though, he doesn’t tend to hold on for long.”

“I remember. Which is a shame, he’s good fun.”

“When he wants to be,” you mutter before silence accompanies you for a while, but it’s anything but deafening. It’s a loud silence as you keep stealing glances at one another. There’s nothing specific you focus on in either glance. You just glance at each other as if you’re drawn to do so.

There comes a time when you steal a glance at him and feel a heat unfurl over your cheeks immediately, so you look ahead. And it’s while you’re looking ahead that Lord Lyonel steals a glance at you. You notice so you have to bite your lip to keep from smiling whilst you keep looking ahead as you also note that you’re getting close to the keep.

“The night is not yet over. Have you noted that?” He asks and even though you notice the implication to prolong this walk. You don’t take him up on his offer.

“I have, but it is for me. I have much to do on the morrow. My day is quite full.”

He hums.

“Not that it means I do not somehow find my escape in between. I have much to tolerate so I will need it,” you reveal softly and steal a glance at him.

“Hm.” He simply hums with a smirk and you respond the same way.

You soon then reach the keep and before you can disappear inside, you stop and face him with a grateful smile. “Thank you, my Lord. I am sorry I can not escort you to your tent,” you tease.

“That would defeat the purpose of me escorting you here would it not?”

You respond with a shrug. “I am not opposed to the back and forth.”

He chuckles softly before he takes your hand from your side. “I will not keep you. As fun and unexpected as you are,” he says with a charming smile before he brings his lips to your knuckles. “Goodnight, Beloved Princess.”

He presses a light kiss on your knuckles, but it does not matter how fleeting it is. Your body still lights up in a burning fire at the feeling of his wet and warm lips on your flesh, and your heart still skips a beat as he holds your attentive gaze for that short moment before he leaves you gasping for air under the starry night.

.

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A/N- 👉🏼👈🏼

@carpinchootaku

[punk-in-docs]

I’ve seen this written a few times but I’m interested to see you’re take. I can totally see Lyonel with a Reader that can 100% match his freak and they’ve been together for a while. Maybe Lyonel x reader with the prompt “Every time you touch me, it feels like the first time all over again. ” but one of them responds “which first time?” all cheekily?

The lightning and the rose

Lyonel Baratheon x Pregnant!Lady Dondarrion

Forgive the random tags but I’m Tagging some phenomenal akotsk babes whose fics gave me life. @the-darklings @jintaka-hane @mynameistocool @lovebugism @maekarsmistress @pearlessance @noxiiousstrawberriies @ingystark @oakleafing @marsrambles @just-some-random-blogger @vhagars-dementia @escapic-mezzanine @tearsweetenedtea @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @adumbgirlinloove @moonlitmaester @silens-oro @feral4youu @s-u-t

I did slightly play around with the prompt for this one nonny. I hope it still suits. Also please know this was made very much in collab with a conversation I had with my darling @adumbgirlinloove for which I would like to thank her very much; we were chatting about how much Lyonel would loveeee Highgarden fashions on his dear lady wife.

MASTERLIST - PROMPTS - AO3

Highgarden was a change of air you didn’t know you’d needed. It was virtually the opposite to what you were so used to at Storms End.

Fresh spring air. A sky so blue it makes you wonder how you could ever be so at ease under perpetual cover of grey swollen storm clouds.

The trees brim with ripe fruit, and verdant gardens choking with roses. As far as you can see the fields surrounding the castle are all wheat and grass, stunning gold and emerald green like some patchwork quilt. The Mander runs blue as cobalt ribbon over those fruitful hills.

It is all warmth and ease. Baking you under a sun that only knows how to shine and delight. The keep walls glow white as bone with thorny yellow roses strangling every inch. It’s almost sickening in its perfection. You were so used to sturdier, stormier things.

Mereya is going to be a spring bride. And this place couldn’t suit her more if it tried.

She had a veritable flock of lovely tempered Highgarden ladies at her beck and call for court. Not a bad word to say about her. She was sweet as spring blossoms, you can’t imagine her finding fault with anyone. Or vice versa. Ladies gathered around her who loved nothing more than to talk about their handsome crushes, ribbons, and new dresses.

You and Lyonel travelled with some of your Baratheon bannermen on the rose road. Treasured guests. Arriving a week before hers and Thoren’s nuptials.

You’d dined on low tables in lush gardens with harpists playing nearby, lulled by music and wine, under the spreading reach of peach trees, with the trickle of fountains nearby. Strolled the rose gardens in the golden hour, arm in arm, and taken a leisurely, gentle sail on the sunlit mander. Attended the Spring Equinox masquerade ball, bathed under moonlight, the night sky strung with a net of glittering stars.

And on the bright, dazzling morn of her wedding. The sun rose as golden as the Tyrell sigil. She could think of none better to help her ready for her ceremony, but you. Even when she had a whole garrison of meek, eager handmaids to tend her every whim.

You were stood behind her as she sat to her vanity. Both your reflections in the looking glass. Her dress trailing over the stool, a huge glowing train of gold embroidered roses entwined up her sage green dress.

Not a lightning bolt in sight. Flowers had always suited her far better.

“I hope it’s not been too trying. It’s quieter than Storms End to be sure. Even with the revelries before the wedding.” She supposed.

“Lyonel will always be the loudest thing around here for miles. It is his way. Peace ill suits him.” You grin. Working on smoothing a curl by her temple to help it hang better.

She smirks. Snorts very unladylike laughter. “Is he finding it terribly tedious?” She seeks. Eyes flicking up to find you in the glass.

“I won’t repeat his exact words. But I think it’s just the heat getting to him.” You decide.

Your handsome stag of a husband didn’t fare so well in the polite, cloying and kind gardens of the reach. No wilderness. No tempests to chase. No storm to battle through. Just acre upon acre of polite gardens and roses. You can almost hear one of his rants;

Flowers. Sunshine. More fucking flowers. It’s like the place is made of roses. And what of the air? I can hardly feel myself breathe it’s so humid. Don’t they have rain here? Or clouds? Something that doesn’t smell and taste like it’s been swilled in a fucking rose bush.

Another thing that was getting to your husband; in a different manner, was the somewhat more relaxed nature of fashions in Highgarden. The thick wool gowns and brocades layered with thick cotton shifts won’t serve you well here. You’d boil alive in them.

You’d had several more gowns commissioned to better combat the heat - that, and to considerate the ever growing bump that was your firstborn.

You’d quickened so much over the past moon. Now three moons gone. Belly rounding out and convincing everyone around you that the low hang of it meant for certain you were carrying a boy.

Lyonel was having a hard enough time keeping his hands off you as it was. And now you added a cursed flimsy passel of dresses to the mix. And a pregnancy that had just gotten over the rigid hump of nausea and tenderness.

He was ravenous. Night and day.

These summery climes doing nothing to aid in his discomfort. Air sticking to you both like hot honey. Leaving you both slipping away for a moments repose. Or a cool bath.

You noticed the way he changed his pace to linger. Always in step beside you. Looking for you across a crowd to check you were hale.

When he moved to your side. He was all touch. Hand on the back of your hip like a warm kiss. Arm tucked in his. A brand. Whispering into your ear in a husk that you were dressed in sheer sin, and telling you how that flimsy fabric would make such a satisfying pile on your bedchamber floor.

The dress you are wearing now is a soft, frothy shade of lilac. Harping back to your Dondarrion name. With dark lavender thorn vines woven and crossing in embroidery down the bodice. It is sleeveless, and virtually backless. He hasn’t yet seen it on you this morn; when he does, you reckon he’ll have some sort of heart episode.

Your hair has been carefully styled for the wedding by your maid. Spilling down your back and off your face. The skirts split open over your swollen stomach, with a darker fabric spilling down in a triangle to the floor. Sheer gossamer layered over your hips. Giving a wispy train to the side and back when you walk. These too entwined with more embroidered thorns.

“Please give my apologies to Lord Lyonel for the rude change of scenery.”

You roll your eyes. “He’s a fully grown Storm Lord. I refuse to baby him. He shall have to adjust and remember he is here to pay respects to his dear sister in law. Soon to be Lady paramount of Highgarden.” You answer. Smiling in that clever stern way you do.

She grins. Fidgets with her hands in her lap. Rings on each finger. Pearls and gems and jewels in every colour of green or blue there was. She was twiddling with the gold and stones that shone on each dainty finger.

“To tell you the truth. I am entirely wracked with nerves.” She raises her eyes to you in the mirror.

You meet her gaze. Hands drop to her round shoulders. “About marriage?” You check. Eyes intent and honing in on her shrinking down. Curled shoulders. Hands fidgeting. Nerves.

“About being a great lady. What if I’m not enough. I’ve watched you train and train for years you make it look so natural. So in charge. You do it with iron. You storm through people and you don’t back down. I hope I don’t, disappoint…anyone.”

“Mereya. That is folly.” You tell her.

“I’m not like you. I don’t have the courage. I couldn’t have been the Lady to master storms end. It was too much and not me.” She shakes her head as she speaks.

“You speak like it is you who is lacking. As if it is a fault.” You add.

She fidgets with her hands again.

“Mereya.” You urge. Stern. Your best motherly tone - you’d been practicing after all.

She finally lifts her eyes to meet yours in the glass.

“You are kind. Generous. Gracious. You have been waiting for this role your whole life. There’s none more ready than you. And there is more than one way to be a fine lady. You don’t have to walk with an iron spine, and have a tongue like a sword to command respect. Thoren adores you. Anyone whose seen you two knows of it. It is a love match. You can conquer the whole seven with a good person by your side. You will find your way.” You reach and touch her shoulder.

“Don’t fret about the future now. Just enjoy this lovely day. And this very expensive, very beautiful big wedding.”

She slides her to cover yours where it lay on her.

“I’m so glad you’ve come. I’ve missed your stout advice and hale sense. Some of the ladies here are rather…trite.” She tells. “None of them quite set me straight as you do.”

You snort laughter. If that didn’t sum you up. You don’t know what will. “Nowhere I’d rather be.”

She opens her mouth. Again. Looking mousy and unsure. “What is it like?”

“What is what like?” Your hand stills with a comb through one of her curls.

Her eyes flick down to your belly.

“Oh.”

“Please?”

“That is a whole other conversation.” You warn. One you don’t intend to sully her innocence with.

Stepping back and going to the bed to fetch a ribbon. A gauzy sea froth blue one that she’s going to tie around her neck to wear a heavy round pendant with a rose engraved on. You had one made for her wedding. And one for yourself. Naturally, a stag surrounded by lightning bolts on yours.

“I’m going to be a bride after all. It’s expected to lay with one’s husband.” Whispers close and terrified, like you’ll be overheard. Like the whispers will fly out the window like butterflies and horrify the maids.

“The ladies tell me from their married friends or mothers it is painful at the very first, but it eases after a time. I need to be familiar with the… particulars.”

“I’m struggling to know how to answer that.” You admit.

You’re stuck between a rock and an anvil.

Either you can weild her the plain truth as sharp as a sword. Or you can let her ideals of the marriage bed stay rose tinted and soft.

“What was it like for you and Lord lyonel ? He’s a big, passionate man, is he not?” She states.

You’ve no idea. You quip to yourself. Mouth opening as you gape for a clutch of the right words.

“He uh, is. It was-“

“Was it… brief?” She stumbles.

You blink. Pausing. “I wouldn’t term it as that. No.”

Truth was, Lyonel had kept you abed for nearly a solid week after you married.

Every meal and glass of wine arrived on a tray. Left outside the door for safety’s sake. You were sure the poor maids cursed your name daily-

You had to escape for a ride to the woods or even a walk along the cliffs to avoid cabin fever of staring at your bedchamber walls. Or the window. Or the wall. Over the tub. On the floor beside the hearth. He’d laughed like a storm when you said your thighs were too delicate, love bitter and sore, to take to the saddle. Bastard.

“I imagine it was an adjustment.”

You turn back. Maybe you can half bury the sharp truths in a cotton wrapped cushion for her.

“It was different when I was married to Jacor. It was not a love match. That was brief and loveless. It was for duty. It was so quick, and then he was gone, so I wasn’t granted the time to judge. With Lyonel it’s…” you struggle to find the appropriate words.

Oh, it’s definitely not stiff, dull, duty that draws you to his bed.

“It’s different when you love someone so deeply. When someone truly arouses you, it is like nothing else. You can’t speak when they’re near. The thought of them makes you weaken. Your breath catches when you hear their name. And when you kiss and touch it somehow never seems enough. Wedded passion is just- fucking wonderful.” You laugh. As does she.

She laughs with you. “When he kisses me it does oft make my knees weak.” She admits. “And he’s tender. He’s never rushed me. Or asked for more than I gave.”

You wink at her. “There you are. A good man then. A great start.”

She turns back to the mirror. Places her hands on the vanity edge. “I hope so.”

“Not long now. My sweet.” You smile. Finishing arranging her hair to sit just right. She exhales with nerves. But her grin doesn’t veer from her lips for one second.

You’re interrupted by a flock of her ladies coming into the room. A flurry of wine and gauzy dresses. Skirts like jewel tulip petals swaying on a breeze. Compliments coo off their tongues as soon as they see her like honey-wine. Her beauty. Her dress. The lush style of her hair.

It touches you deep. How much she is beloved.

You take the opportunity to let her be swarmed by their love and attentions. You clasp her shoulder. “I’ll leave you in more capable hands. I’ll go and see how the groom fares.”

“After last night I should think his head will be pounding sore.” One of the dark haired maids, giggles. Grin a bright straight flash of friendly teeth.

“We heard they were up celebrating til near the dawn.” Another pipes up. Helping Mereya tie her necklace. “Dancing on tables. Singing. Rowdy as a pack of wild stallions.”

“I think I can guess who encouraged that.” Mereya beams. Finding your eyes cleverly in the mirror. Grinning.

You give a wry shrug. “What I get for marrying a Storm. And not an apple.” You jest.

She smiles. You pause with a hand on the door to her chambers. Summer air lapping at your heels. Air rife with flowers and sun and every good summery thing.

It suddenly strikes you, in an overwhelming rush, a strong tugging tide, how radiant she looks. A golden rose bride indeed.

You know the gods to be unjust. Mayhaps even cruel. Unyielding. But for today, you’d struggle to your knees, and stay on them for hours to praise them for this fortune. If there was some small gold kernel of goodness in this world, she heartily deserved every glorious scrap of it. And more.

Your search for your husband at first, proved fruitless. A rarity, when usually he can be found by sheer clamour alone.

For all his noise, today it’s not what drew you toward him. You catch sight of him way across the gardens. The sheer dark width of his back. You’d know that broad span of shoulders and storm tossed curls anywhere.

He’s suitably garbed for any occasion. Here is no different. Dripping wealth. A long line leather jerkin in crow black. Pointed out at the shoulders to make him look that much wider. Stroked at the edges with a little strike of Baratheon gold. Antlers on the golden closures down his chest. Golden bracers on his wrists. His usual chunky rings adorning his thick fingers. Chain around his neck tucked under his shirt. Boots buffed to a high shine.

His skin offset with a new sun-kissed glow to it, that made him look entirely too weathered and scandalous from your time bathing in the suns heat up here. He looks so fucking handsome you hardly know what to do about it.

You’ve a feeling it will later involve a locked door, and perhaps riding him til he’s hoarse and your legs can’t take it.

You note he’s in confidence with someone. His hand cupping the back of a golden haired man’s neck as they walk arm in arm. You can’t make out his company from such a distance.

You tread towards him. Shade and sunlight freckle your skin under the pass of the rose arches. Hair swaying down your shoulders.

One thing you had come to appreciate at Highgarden, was its propensity for thorns and mazes. You weave your way through. It awards you the chance to approach Lyonel virtually unseen.

It’s his voice that carries to you first. Dancing on the summer, petal stroked winds.

“I must…. Everyday?” You hear the incredulous tone. A young man’s voice. All wavering uncertainty. Thoren. Your very shortly to be brother-in-law.

“Every day. Boy. If there is one day you do not go down on your wife. Consider it the saddest day indeed.”

That makes you slow your steps. Sandaled feet fall softer on the crackling shingle path. Hiding amongst the roses. So you may better hear. Your mouth falls open. Did he just?

“Trust me. One day you’ll thank me. As will your wife.” You hear Lyonel impress on the lad. You can hear his smirk. Picture the way he’d shot a wink.

They skirt a fountain together. Water arching from its spouts, blue as robins eggs. The marble so ice white in the sun it was blinding.

“How on earth do you think I won Lady Baratheon…. A man, nay, a husband, should always be receptive to his lady’s more, carnal, appetites. Even should she not exhibit such wild behaviour. No woman can turn down a tonguing so good she’ll damn near faint from pleasure with her thighs strangling your neck. Even the sturdiest maiden can be brought to tenderness with a cunning tongue trick.” He cackled.

“But what if I am no good at… uh.” Thoren stammers. Seeking the right words without a vulgar inclination on his tongue.

“That’s what a honeymoon is for. Time to practice. Learn of each other. I don’t believe either me or my wife made it downstairs for at least a week at the start. Married love. Thoren. It’s fucking bliss.”

“A week?” Thoren squeaks.

“Mmmhmm.” Lyonel assures.

“By the end of said week I could make her succumb in a matter of minutes. Like clockwork. I knew exactly how to use my tongue in order to make her melt into my mouth.”

You don’t know how you’ll ever look Thoren in the eye again.

“But surely there is ugh, more than one’s tongue to be thinking about. Surely we will need to… be thinking, well expected, to be producing heirs.”

There’s a shift of gravel. A crackle of it harsh under a boot as your husband spins to round on the man.

“There is more to the marriage than making heirs. Though the making of them certainly is fun.”

“There’s more?”

“Fucking geld me. What do they teach you boys up here?” He asks. Imploring the seven. “Wooing your wife is not merely the act of getting her gown off, and sticking your cock in. Not to mention it’s the height of rudeness, but it would pain her, and it is also increasingly short-sighted.”

“You must arouse her. Excite her. Get her so dripping wet with fingers or mouth before you even consider your own needs. If you can’t satisfy a woman, you don’t deserve a place in her bed, or her trust. Let alone inside her cunt. Of which by the way, I can assure you, will feel like heaven on earth. The closest thing we men can come to seeing our gods.” He laughs. Big and boisterous.

You close your eyes and shake your head. All this he shares with such ease. Fucking seven hells.

“We. Haven’t been left alone enough to try such… attentions in each others company. It wouldn’t be decent.” Thoren explains.

“Well. What have you done?”

“We’ve kissed. And hugged. It’s all very pleasant.”

“Oh dear lord. Sit the fuck down with you.”

He concluded. Shoving poor Thoren down onto a marble bench. His lanky knees give and he sits as obedient as a gangly puppy. Eyes wide with awe.

“Kissing and hugging will not a marriage make. You need passion.”

Lyonel stands afore him. Ready to impart his wisdom.

“These are the rules. And you better heed them. Firstly. Go down on your wife. Lots. It’s not only polite. It is essential. As she is letting you inside her body and lets you finish inside her. And that is of the highest honour. You’d better be deserving of it. And you do not even touch her cunt if she is not slick wet and begging? Understand?”

“Yes. Ser.”

“Secondly. Just because you put your mouth to her, it doesn’t follow she should be required to do the same for you. That’s rotten thinking, boy, and will get you naught. If she wishes to do it, it is the sweetest gift a man can earn from his wife. Trust me. They wrap you like ribbon around their little finger with it. My wife is a certain minx to that particular art.”

You roll your eyes. Now Thoren will definitely be scared of looking you in the eye. If that’s what he will imagine when he next sees you.

“Thirdly. When you do argue and believe me. Not matter how well you’re suited. You will. You get on your knees before the lady. Use your tongue fiercely on her cunt. Then fuck like you hate each other. And go back down on her to make sure everything is fine between you two. You should aim to ensure she has no breath left to chide you with.”

“Shouldn’t we settle the argument with a sound discussion?” Thoren asks.

“Pfft. No” Lyonel bats a hand. “I see no reason to change a good thing. The way me and Lady Baratheon do it has been successful thus far.” He tells. “Nearly broke our bed one time. It was ravenous.”

You’re going to strangle him. You’re unequivocally going to round the rose bush, calmly walk over, and strangle him with your bare hands. Or drown him in the fountain.

They’ll never find the body. You’ll make sure it’s well hidden, and the reek of the corpse shall be masked by the thorny roses.

Thoren gulps. “Be there a fourth, my Lord?” He asks. Querelous.

“I think that’s all the advice I can give a young groom. If there is a fourth it is only this….”He starts.

You dread the filth he’ll spew out next. Maybe he’ll grab a stick and draw filthy images in the shingle dirt. Like a bloody lesson.

“You are marrying a rare and great woman. Thoren. Just as I did. And when you truly, madly, love someone that way, it’ll be the making of you.” Lyonel tells him. Reaching forwards to clap his shoulder again.

That touches you deeply. As did the rest of your husbands, albeit filthy, confession.

“I do love her. I find I am impatient to make her my wife.” He says gently. A smile on his lips. He speaks like he’s giddy with it. Bare and honest.

Lyonel cackles. Deep and true. Like the rolling peel of a sept bell.

“Good. Because if you don’t, I’m fairly certain my wife would come geld you herself with her bare hands. and I would be there to hold the knife for her.” He grins. Laughs at Thorens horrified face.

He looks scared again. “Your wife is. Uh. Quite the terrifying woman. Is she not?”

Lyonel smirks. Wide, filthy and so proud.

“I know. She’s a goddamn wild storm that one. It’s so damned fucking arousing.” He leers.

You can take no more of this. You make sure your step is loud. Turning the corner and coming into plain view. Clearing your throat as you round the path from the fountain.

“Lyonel. Let the poor boy go. He’s getting married in half an hour.” You beckon kindly. Smile brushed on your lips.

He spins back. Twists to face you. Smirk climbing across his mouth. “Sweeting.” He remarks with joy. His eyes sweep you. Staying for a long moment on your chest. And then the slit to one side of your dress.

“My lord. I do believe your father was seeking you for a word. I heard he was headed for the Sept.” You encourage his departure. Rescuing the poor boy from your husbands clutches.

Thoren flushes a bright red. Bobs a quick bow to you before taking off quick through the gardens. “My Lady. My Lord.”

You smile as he hurried past. All blushes and wide eyes. When you round on Lyonel you look newly stern. Narrowed eyes, a stern set jaw. It makes him smile. Trouble suits him just fine.

When you come close enough, you cuff your husbands shoulder. “Was it your intention to give the poor boy a hard on for his wedding ceremony.” You chide. Hissing at him.

“I was instructing the lad. He’s greener than grass. Heaven forfend he learns a little cunnilingus goes a long way.” He decided.

He slips a hand to your waist, hooks you in and kisses you firmly on the mouth before you can have a chance to grow truly angry with him. Tugs you in like he knows you’ll melt.

Impresses on you a slow kiss that made stars shoot to your toes. You detest how he keeps that skill in his arsenal to wield against you so often.

When you peel away, his lips chase yours. Tickle of that beard against your mouth. Your hands sink to the cool leather on his chest.

He shakes his head at your dress. Can’t believe he is intended to survive seeing you in this flimsy, expensive, perfect dress with his sexual sanity intact.

“Not you. Gods be good. The fucking roses have got you too. Though in truth to your nature, this place is swimming in them and you choose to wear the thorns.” He leers. Winks at you. “I’ll be sure to tear those thorns off you later.”

You roll your eyes.

He sighs like a man in pain when he skims his hands over your shoulders and finds it virtually backless too. He kisses you again. Nearly devours your lips.

“My savage storm you mean to kill me do you not.” He hushes as he drags his mouth up your neck. Nuzzling your hairline. You smelled like fig soap and that honey nectarine perfume of yours. It absolutely kneecaps him. Weakens him.

“I could. When I overheard what details you so willingly shared with Thoren.”

“You’re not truly mad?” He seeks. Hands resting on your hips. The bones and lush curves of you fitting so decently in his big hands.

“Haven’t decided yet.” You snip. All acid eyes and narrow stares that are supposed to rebuke him.

He’s all smiles. Tucking your hand to his side. Letting you stroll gently under the rose arches with him. The sept bells started to toll. The wedding will not be long.

“You know. Something about all this, reminds me of our first time.” He announces. As you come around the lip of the fountain. The cool spray drifts in the rose scented wind.

You grin. “Which first time would that be, my dear lord husband.”

“Well we do have such an array to choose from now don’t we.” He tells. Merry as ever. Eyes sinking into yours.

“There was our first stolen kiss. Slick from dancing. Under the stars like two fucking poets wrote out our scene. Giddy off too much wine.”He reminisces.

“You were drunk. I merely obliged to try and hold you up.”

“That second, equally as sultry kiss. In the rain. Up against the side of that tent. When you were trying so hard to scurry away after I first learnt how angry you were with me. You were seething like a spitting viper.”

“Yes. But you were being absolutely bold, and stubborn as an ornery ass. So my anger was well justified.”

“Then there was the rather blissful interlude when I paid call on you when you were bathing. You clawed my back so hard I shall never forget the like.” He leans in. The heat of his breath ghosts your ear.

“I will get you back for that one day. You know.” The turn of your head is lethal. You side eye him, dangerously.

“As will I. For that other occasion of making me lose all sense of decency and sanity when you welcomed the attentions of that copper haired, apple, Fossoway cunt.” He snips.

You pull him to a reeling halt. Hand linked in his elbow. Petals and thorns arcing over your head.

That night had ended in him pursuing you as you tried to hurry back to your tent by cutting through the woods. He had followed you. Even though you had bit his head off and warned him back.

He was seething from having to watch you dance with Ser Steffon. To take dinner with him. Ride with him. Watching your family act like you were already sewn into the apple tree family branches.

You were furious from how he kept up the act of trying to be a good suitor to Mereya, when his eyes followed you round the room all night. When he sipped back more wine anytime Ser Steffon took your hand in his.

It could only end in one thing; a screaming match. Which then culminated in you both having angry, fiery hate sex up against a tree. Snarling moans, clawed hands and swearing that you hated each other.

“You won’t let me forget that will you. At my age and station of spinsterdom. It was made perfectly plain to me, by my family, that no such other offer of respectable marriage might come my way. Cider hall was the best option.”

He’s laughing. His hand is warm on the back of your neck before you can finish speaking. Nearly drawing you brow to brow.

“And now look at you.”

“You’ve snared a Storm Lord stag for a husband. And his babe grows everyday bigger in your belly.” He leers.

Hands cupping you so close. Free hand smoothing down the bump through your dress. He would be entirely lying if he said his eyes did not linger on your - now swollen tits. Absolutely not his fault how the low neckline of your dress bared them so well.

You bump your nose to his. Sneak up on tiptoes and press your mouth to his for a brief kiss. He smiles to it. Hand still on your bump.

“That sounds awfully boastful.” You speak out when you pull back.

“It’s what I’m good at.” He leers. Tongue captured between his teeth.

“Come along.” Your hand covers his. Reels him behind you in your path. “I don’t wish us to be late for this wedding. Knowing you, I’ll be dragged somewhere secluded in these gardens for some scandalous activity.”

“Only a little.” He sulks.

You ignore him.

“It’s sure to be the grandest event for many a year. It might even outdo our own.” You explain.

He holds your hand still as you keep your skirts from your feet coming up some marble steps. Hand under yours for support.

“In one measure my storm, it could never top our wedding….” He remarked.

You twist back to face him. “What respect is that?”

He stays below you. Takes your hand and kisses the back of it. The look in his eyes is nothing short of dastardly.

“No way on earth is that Rose boy as lucky as I am.” He grins.

“You will stop gloating when we’re in that Sept? Will you not?” You check.

He shrugs. Like it’s a challenge. You recognise that gleam in his eye. It’s the one that comes from someone telling him to behave. And then he turns around and does the exact opposite-

Draws up to come along beside you. Hand hot across your bare back. He squeezes you close in step.

“Depends…” He answers your question.

“On?” You seek.

“Whether or not we are sat within earshot of one Lord Steffon.” He beams.

“For fucks sake Lyonel.” You can’t help it. You laugh.

You receive a very animated letter from your sister not two weeks after the wedding.

You are back at Storms End. Breaking your fast in bed with Lyonel. Golden morning light streams through the windows in a rare shaft of sunshine. Though the storms will close in later, of that you have no doubt.

You are sat up. A heap of cushions at your back. Covers folded at your waist. A breakfast tray balanced on the bed next to you.

Lyonel lounged on his side. Easily within arms reach. Nearly naked. Golden robe open at his chest. Necklace sat on his sternum. Raven and grey chest hair bared in swirls over his skin aswell as his nipples. His necklines nearly matched yours in plunging nature often.

He leans over and steals a bite of the toast from your fingers. Being sure to suck the jam and butter off your fingertips. You ignore the throb of longing that shoots through you with the way his mouth closes around your fingers.

He sucks till all sweet flavour is gone. You absentmindedly cup the side of his face. Eyes on your correspondence.

“It’s from Mereya…” You sigh happily. Unfolding the golden rose wax seal to read more of it.

“How does Lady Tyrell fare?” He asks.

He watches your eyes skim across the written lines in the letter. The more you skim. The more the smile slowly drops from your face.

Your hands fall to your stomach. Letter in your grip. You turn and give him a spiky look.

“My sister is writing to me to sing your praises.” You state.

“Uh.”

You hold the letter aloft. And read from it. “Please thank Lyonel, in the most sincere and strongest terms for his advice. It has proven most useful this past week.”

You turn at him and glare. “Something to do with the advice you gave Thoren, presumably?”

He chuckles. Slides his hand over your thigh. “I could give you a precise demonstration if you like…”

“You are a fiend.”

“A fiend with a great tongue.” He winks.

[thirst4fictionalmen]

Im cackling 😂😂😂

[tcrgarien]

BOUND TO BE. — DAERON TARGARYEN

pairing: daeron targaryen x fem!blackfyre!dragondreamer!reader

synopsis: when king daeron ii arranges a marriage between the concerningly lost eldest son of maekar targaryen, and the eldest daughter of daemon ‘the pretender’ blackfyre, the gods celebrate as the union they’ve been awaiting for finally takes place. 

tags: yearner!daeron, drunk-in-love!daeron, soulmates au, mentions of violence, blood, alcohol, no mentions of y/n, asshole!aerion, father-figure!baelor, i can fix him trope, no description of reader other than hair, mutual pining, hurt/comfort, reader is grieving, SMUT MDNI 18+, penetration, p in v, switch!reader, switch!daeron, pathetic!daeron, slight praise kink, virgin/inexperienced!reader, daeron talks you through it, sloppy makeout, ejaculating inside. 

word count: 10.5k

based on this request. gif credits to rightful owner. [inbox/requests: open]

a/n: you guys don't understand how many versions of this fic existed before this becoming the final one. sorry for taking so long, let me know your thoughts and whether the story has mini-fic potential or not :') likes, comments and reblogs are appreciated. english isn’t my first language. <3

You walked through what looked like the Red Keep. Oh, how you missed all of it. Someone would call you entitled, some Targaryen loyalist perhaps, you were merely a former princess sent to exile. Daughter to the ultimate traitor. Daemon ‘The Pretender’ Blackfyre.

You wanted to soak it all in. Had the utmost desire to lay on the ground and rest your back on the marble floor of the castle. Eager to feel something you used to occasionally feel as a child whenever you’d secretly have sparring sessions with your father. Eager to see his face once more. 

As you run your hands through the lines of columns the ancient building consisted of, you heard a roar. Something that you’ve only heard in your dreams. And then you knew, the Gods were taking their chances in informing you about an important matter. And having these dreams for as long as you could remember, it was never for a good reason.

No one else knew about the dreams that you’d have. Other than your father, who had now become nothing but a part of the ground you step on. You had told him in a moment of trust, and in reality, you deeply wish you hadn’t. Since your father decided to profoundly hold you to your “gift”, as he’d like to call it, and use you for it every time he needed guidance regarding his war. The rebellion he had started in hopes of claiming the Iron Throne. 

You grew sick of it. So sick that you almost considered it your biggest flaw, or when feeling too miserable, your greatest curse. Along with being born to a man who seemed to have his ambitions rank higher in his priorities rather than the well-being of his wife and children. 

The Gods had been cruel to you. You had been convinced of that the minute they dared to show you how your father would die. How the black dragon would fall under the red dragon’s claws. How the red dragon so mercilessly was gnawing on the insides of the black one, how two little identical dragons had been evidently waiting for the beginning of their eternal sleep, Aegon and Aemon. With the audience of all kinds of wolves and lions staying idle. Almost glaring at the black dragon, even during the peak of his downfall, as if the red dragon should feel honoured that the others didn’t have the courage to intervene. 

He’s yours, make sure everyone sees what happens when they try to take our privileges. We own all of the seven kingdoms. 

So after his death, you tried to bury it, the guilt of not alarming Daemon soon enough and of course, your curse. No matter how many nights you’d stay awake, the dreams would find you. Every single time. You thought it wasn’t fair. Why would the Gods put you through such torment while having caused no harm? Why had they chosen you to give this power to? Would there be a singular time where your premonitions would be beneficial to you, and not to merely inform you about the greatest misfortunes awaiting you? 

You quickly realized that those questions wouldn’t be answered. At least for a long time. 

Another roar. You turned your head towards the source of the sound, to observe the clear blue sky with very few clouds in it. You swallowed thickly, afraid of what you were about to witness. You had grown too aware of that roar, the last time you’d dreamt of it, was when you were watching your family get eaten alive. Is it my turn now? Was your doom officially on its way? You thought. 

There it was. A red dragon, medium sized, with forest green lines etched on its skin. You thought it was beautiful. Was this what your ancestors would see with their bare eyes on a random day? Maybe you were a Valyrian afterall, in spite of all the Targaryen loyalists trying to alter the narrative.

However, there was something different about this dragon. You hadn’t seen this one before. Strangely, the feeling of warmth and comfort filled your body while your gaze raked upon the creature. And as time seemed endless, you could’ve sworn the dragon turned its gaze upon your figure. 

Your breath inevitably hitched, intimidated at the dragon’s fiery eyes piercing through your skull. Even with a great distance between you two, you took a small step back, instinctively hiding behind the shadows of the castle to feel more protected. 

You felt your pulse quicken. The deep burgundy red dragon approached you midair, its wings sending waves of cold air your way, making a few strands of your hair and the hem of your gown push backwards. Oddly enough, this time you took a step forward, feeling some kind of strange familiarity between you and the ancient Valyrian creature. 

One beat. 

At some point, you had walked to the spot where your vision was allowing you to fully witness the dragon in all of its glory. It let out another roar and flew an inch back, almost afraid of you. Your eyebrows furrowed in curiosity. 

Two beats.

You raise your hand, extending your palm out to the dragon, feeling the need to showcase your care for it. The presence of the unjustified need of comforting the dragon and taming it too intense to evade. Surely, you had gone out of your mind, had you not? 

Three beats.

The dragon tilted its head in evident confusion, approaching you even more, shadowing your entire figure now. You were sure you had begun shaking, not sure of what, since you were wholeheartedly in awe by the actions of one of what were called; the most violent creatures to befriend humans. 

Four beats.

The dragon couldn’t possibly land inside the gardens of the Red Keep, as it would destroy everything. But the dragon ceased to move. Its wings suddenly froze forcing the creature to drop to the nearest surface. Which was inevitably the peak of the castle, the material crumbling under its weight. 

Five beats.

You gasped, panicking as you approached the peak, pieces of sandstone dropping a few feet away from you. The dragon had now begun to cough, so viciously you could swear it was fatal. The dragon spared you one last glance, releasing a desperate roar from its throat, as if to propel you in assisting it. 

Your breath had gotten heavier, your eyes prickling with tears feeling useless that you were just standing watching the dragon actively take its final breaths. And you realised; this happened every time. Dream or not, this is how it always worked out for you. You would get all of these premonitions the Gods giving you sacred information for you to use them to your advantage and you never did. Never had the courage to. 

In reality, you always stepped back last minute, as if your throat could never release the words that needed to be said in order for you to prevent bad from happening. It’s your fault, you thought, your fault your family’s dead. Your fault that the rest of your blood is being crucified on the daily. Everything’s your fault. Everything—

You jumped up from your mattress, strands of your hair stuck on your forehead and neck caused by the sweat your body had produced. You sat up, breathing heavily, slowly processing your surroundings. Something was about to happen, you just couldn’t decipher what. And you weren’t sure if that frightened you or not. 

—————————

You wanted to vomit. Truly, you did. 

It had gotten to a point where you kept replaying the arrangement in your head. “The Blackfyre girl shall marry one of our own,” the Hand of the King transferred his Grace’s words to your mother, Rohanne. As her eyes filled with tears, wondering whether to deny and continue risking your life in Essos, or accept and sleep every night in hopes of giving you the life you deserve.

But then again, who was she to be able to decide so freely? Who was she to deny King Daeron’s order? The man who put a sword right through her husband’s heart for considering himself righteous to the Iron Throne? 

Rohanne could not deny the realm. Could not deny its orders. So of course, she had to let Prince Baelor know that the arrangement be settled. “My Prince,” she carefully asked, feeling an unusual sense of softness from the Targaryen before her, “please wed her to someone kind. Protect her if you wish. My daughter is merely a child—“, “I do not have a say in this manner, my lady.” Baelor replied softly, a close look of sympathy laying upon her.

“My father,” he let out a sigh, finding a proper way to word his demand, “wishes to take one of your children not for unity. On the contrary, as punishment.” Rohanne laid one of her palms across her mouth muffling her sobs. Attempting at her best not to show any vulnerability to the Targaryen who played a part in butchering her family and its supporters. 

“I’ve heard whispers that she is to be wed to my brother’s oldest.” the Breakspear informed her, wanting to ultimately assist the mother, broken and wrecked sitting opposite him. “Daeron is a category on his own, my lady.” he said, his lips almost pressing into a thin line at the image of his alcoholic niece slurring and stumbling around appearing in his mind. 

On the contrary, Rohanne became even more terrified at the Prince’s words. As she had been expecting the worst from a line of men despising her blood. Her children and her legacy. Reminding herself that the same hate killed her two precious baby boys and her husband, Daemon I Blackfyre, ready to reign and conquer Westeros by claiming his right to the throne. As it seemed, the Gods had other plans, permitting the Targaryen dynasty to further continue with King Daeron II and his fellow allies slaughtering every Blackfyre while successfully exiling the rest to Essos. 

So there she was, Rohanne of Tyrosh, speaking to Prince Baelor Targaryen, attempting to decipher whether the man meant well for her daughter, or not. Trying to understand whether the young lord was patronising her by boasting about the incidents her daughter would have to endure. The punishment for being a Blackfyre she mandatorily had to witness. However, Rohanne couldn’t seem to detect such intention from him.

She had observed Baelor during the very few days of peace and harmony among the two Valyrian houses, where he would talk to her husband like a brother would. The memory made her heart ache, in a way that she’d hoped there would be someone to protect her. To protect her little girl. 

The man’s two-toned eyes slightly frowned at her expression, noticing and reminding himself that the woman is in clear distress. Sending an immediate realisation that he had been practically negotiating the betrothal of one of her children. The young Prince made a mental note to himself, to not act in such an ignorant way ever again, towards any human being. As he had been dreaming to become the fairest King since he saw the atrocities he was forced to commit a few years prior, because of his father’s command. “To protect,” King Daeron II would claim, “to take what is rightfully ours.” and just like that, those phrases his Grace would constantly mutter loudly or under his breath, would not stop echoing in the dungeons of Baelor’s mind.

Baelor swallowed softly, a worried expression etched on his face. He leveled down to Rohanne’s height, placing his palm gently on her shoulder, seemingly convincing enough to grab the sobbing mother’s attention. “My lady,” he raised his eyebrows in an attempt for her to be slightly comforted, “excuse my words. I only meant that my nephew has undutiful tendencies. He would not hurt your daughter, wouldn’t even consider it.” he told her and his gaze hardened. “I wouldn’t allow it.”

Rohanne’s eyes continued to tear up. Not necessarily because of dread. Now, it had become a feeling of both fear and relief. Fear of her daughter walking around the Targaryen’s royal court completely submitted to them. And relief, because the young Prince seemed promising. She should’ve expected this, the gentle and heart-warming aura of the King’s heir. Rohanne had noticed it long ago, just a while after being integrated into the Blackfyre family line. Maybe, just maybe, the woman had to hope for more now. Afterall, she knew her daughter was no fool. 

The first-born daughter of Daemon Blackfyre and Rohanne of Tyrosh, was disciplined. Not loud or demanding,but observant and strategic. Rohanne had made sure of that. Hiring secretly Maesters—who had presented themselves as Blackfyre loyalists—that enhanced the intelligence and the political senses of her remaining children. Rohanne would make sure they would matter, that all seven kingdoms would see that her and Daemon’s blood was no usual combination. There was no other reason she was even open to hearing such a proposal from the young lord across from her. 

“I hope you won’t, my Prince.” Rohanne choked out, “I hope you will not have to stain your hands with your people’s torment and blood.” she gritted through her teeth. 

What neither of them knew was that the aforementioned Lady Blackfyre had been listening behind the door, with tears threatening to spill from her eyes, as she witnessed her entire future unfold right before her. Not to mention, watching her mother break down hearing such news, having not seen her be so emotional since the assassinaton of her late husband and sons. 

You tried to muffle your choked out sobs of pure guilt. Your existence had brought your own pained mother here, your survival had made her negotiate your future which forced her to practically ship you away from Essos. Away from home, away from your family and\ soon marry a Targaryen and carry his babes. A Targaryen who’s a part of a lineage that destroyed yours, that demolished everything that was promised to you. And yet, this sort of life seemed better compared to the one the rest of your blood was living. 

Lost in your thoughts, the Prince had departed from your small traditional Essosi apartment, and your mother was left on her own. Wiping her tear-stained cheeks, sniffling and fixing her attire. You were already guessing that she was on her way to break out the news to you. But you already knew. You already had heard. That you were to be married to a man with whom you’ve never met. That all of your dreams had been thrown out since the minute your father had been murdered, and it wasn’t going to get any better. Not for former princesses like you with a traitor’s blood running in her veins. 

Or so you thought.

And therefore, here you were, days after an emotionally charged conversation with your mother took place, in your bright colored Essosi room, discussing the plans of the wedding ceremony and your arrival—or perhaps return—to Westeros, specifically at the Red Keep. Initially, you wouldn’t meet your soon-to-be husband before your wedding. The following week, you would pack your things, wear the Valyrian gown Westerosi handmaidens would specifically sew for you and get married. 

Get married to Daeron Targaryen. You were told his name was. The oldest of The Anvil’s children and sons. A drunk fool who was named mad by the council because of his nonsensical comments about his dreams. Family and society deeming him as doomed that half of it was owed to his wine consumption.

With this information, you might have seen why Baelor Targaryen proclaimed your future husband as “a punishment” or that Daeron belongs “in a category of his own”. However, the Prince had also mentioned the lack of harmful behavior in his nephew. And that specific sentence of Baelor’s alone played some role of comfort in your mind. As long as he wouldn’t hurt you, or embarrass you—which essentially seems too much to ask for—you could easily settle within the Targaryen family currently conquering the Seven Kingdoms.

Your mother tried to reassure you by telling you that the feast would be a celebration in the name of the Blackfyre-Targaryen bond. The reintegration of the Blackfyres into nobility. But you weren’t sure about anything, actually. You wanted to scream and protest and yell and do whatever you could that would indicate your hatred for this wedding. The fact that you would be enforced into an eternal bond, supposedly to unite two lovers—as the sacred vow states, at least—while this was all occurring for your humiliation and to simultaneously celebrate the bend of the remaining Blackfyre line, continued to infuriate you as the day grew closer.

Your curiosity peaked and you would often find yourself, especially a few days before the wedding, asking your mother questions about your betrothed. Is he beautiful? Is he adored by the royal court? Would he be considered prepared regarding any sudden acquisitions of power? Interesting questions that you would often state to your mother and receive nothing but a shrug or a simple nonchalant answer from her. 

As it was said, you were furious. You’d grown furious during all of these years of losing family, friends and allies over your father’s rebellion. You had every reason to even attempt to make political moves and present yourself strategically, as the court would also agree. As much as the capital was expecting a former princess, fragile and vulnerable, they also weren’t stupid not to expect a dragon full of fury. Hatred, metanoia and dread. Daeron II Targaryen was aware that you would do the most to see his head on a spike, but he also knew how his grandson was. 

How Daeron Targaryen carried himself, mad and semi-conscious because of the alcohol overpowering his blood in his dragon body. Even before the rebellion, you were known as kind, friendly and sweet. The king knew too well about your tendencies to look after people. To take care of them even when they didn’t fully deserve it. A ladylike behavior of a princess, one would rightfully say. However, this was innate of you. Something you probably had inherited from your Tyroshi roots and your mother specifically. 

The king was aware of the match he had arranged, of the benefits that would come out of it. And certainly, the strength of the bond between you would serve the realm and mostly the ongoing Targaryen dynasty. 

So here you were, in your final journey to King’s Landing. Standing in what seemed a Valyrian carriage, merely alone. Your mother couldn’t be present, she wasn’t needed and the court simply didn’t want to witness the wife of the traitor and the mother of his children. On the contrary, they wanted to see her daughter, prey on her and comment on her. Enjoy the sight of Lady Blackfyre willingly getting wed to a real dragon, unlike her family, which would inevitably transform her into one too. Hosting a celebration additionally for the further elimination of pure-blooded Blackfyres. 

It was only you and your handmaidens present in the carriage, occasionally listening to their chatter about the wedding they were heading to and you paying no mind to it. You had no energy or strength to utter a single word. Potentially, this could’ve been the worst day in your lifetime so far. But surely, it was one of them, since your collection of those seemed to be growing since the day your family’s name was associated with the word “rebellion”. 

Westeros remained as beautiful as you had remembered it to be, with its fertile valleys inhabiting so many beautiful creatures and their offsprings, a piece of your heart was glad to be back. Since the minute you settled in Essos, hiding from danger at all times, you had made it clear with yourself that it was no place for you to live in. 

You were born and almost fully raised in Westeros, mostly at Blackwater Rush. This is where you were supposed to live and grow into the beautiful woman you always aspired to be. Very similar to your own mother, she seemed like. Therefore, witnessing the raw beauty of Westeros once more almost made your eyes spill tears from the intense nostalgia clouding your brain. It was as if you never left, nothing truly changed. Maybe, just maybe, your twin brothers were missing. Young and free without a care running around the gardens of the Red Keep and the sounds of their laughter echoing around the castle.

For now, you pushed those thoughts away, seeing the Royal castle approach in your vision making the knot in your stomach tighten so intensely, you were in awe of your ability to keep breathing. Your wedding was supposed to happen in only a matter of time. Therefore, the only thing you could do was brace yourself for the teasing remarks from other noblemen and practically for your humiliation ritual. 

Daeron. The name that has been circling around in your mind for days since you heard it slip past The Breakspearer’s lips. You wished, truly wished, by all the Gods, old and new, that your Daeron would be your soulmate. Someone who you could grow to love instantly and have the feelingreciprocated. Even so, that seemed very unlikely.

Or so you thought. 

—————————

As you stepped out of your carriage, your ceremonial wear grew heavier with every step you took to approach the Great Sept of the Red Keep. You wanted to cry, scream, perhaps steal a blade from the nearest knight or anything sharp enough to protect yourself and leave. Escape and never be seen in the South ever again. Maybe you’d go to the North, you’d heard it’s quite cold there, mayhaps too cold for you. But you’d take anything other than this, than practically throwing all of your life away just so the Targaryen dynasty would safely continue. 

But you couldn’t. You didn’t even have the energy to slightly act upon those thoughts. You merely walked towards the entrance of the sept, feeling two knights a few inches behind you. How terrible must they feel to be protecting the Blackfyre girl. 

As you reached the portal of the sept, you saw an honourable presenting man. Dark curls falling on his forehead, two different shades painted on each eye of his, he turned around to look at you. And yet, you didn’t feel that he was pitying you with his gaze, it was as if he was trying to comfort you.  

The corner of the man’s lips slightly lifted, giving you a small smile and extending his arm towards you. You felt a bit lucky to have him to escort you to your husband. Everyone’s gaze was about to be on you, so you were even grateful for the little things. Including the man beside you. 

As you linked your arms with his, your Blackfyre cloak seeming suffocating now that you were one step away from the interior of the sept, you turned your head to observe the man. His side profile was breathtaking, visible lines of a few wrinkles accompanied by a sharp jawline and—

And then it hit you. It was Baelor Targaryen. 

This was the man that tried to comfort your mother in the news of your arranged marriage by his own father. The man who insisted that he protects you whenever it is necessary. Now it all made sense. Of course the man whose heart was full of empathy had smiled at you right before walking with you towards the unexpected. Of course the same man who your father grew fond of, as you recall him expressing so, had to introduce himself to you this way. You find yourself highlighting the irony to the Gods internally, knowing there was a possibility they might actually hear your thoughts. Dragon dreamer and everything.

As your eyes started getting watery again at the realisation, you subconsciously tightened your grip around Baelor’s arm, staring ahead. And there he was.

Daeron Targaryen in all his glory.

Daeron’s eyes slightly brightened landing upon your figure. You were gorgeous, a gift that had been sent from the Gods. He had himself wondering whether he was deserving of it. However he couldn’t help but detect something familiar in you. He couldn’t exactly define what, but something made him think he was meeting you for the second time in his life, and a flicker of hope glistened in his doe starry eyes.

The first time you meet his glance, you feel a spark rush through your body. Your breath quickened and your eyes stopped to sense the need to fill with tears. Daeron was breathtakingly beautiful. You couldn’t help but notice the worn out expression on his face, your eyebrows frowning at that observation. Daeron had somewhat visible dark circles under his abyss-like eyes. Previously, wearing a look on his face that seemed to have been miserable.

Daeron uncontrollably straightened his posture, his hands tightening around each other behind his back, getting lost in your gaze, something he was sure he would constantly crave as your marriage went along. 

You made your way next to him, tearing your gaze away from his, meanwhile feeling his still stuck on your face. As if he was actively trying to process how someone like you would have to put up with his situation. 

Your gaze shifted from him to the Septon standing a few inches away from the both of you. The Septon judgementally observes the groom, with his sights still set on his wife, having already forgotten of his ceremonial duties. 

You heard a breathy chuckle come from attendees, as you turned your head to see the source of the noise, you saw a silver-haired Targaryen wearing a smug grin on his face. Seemingly having just stopped mocking your husband. You glared daggers at the cocky Targaryen relative, which propelled him to raise his eyebrows at your reaction when his eyes found yours. Please don’t let it be one of his brothers, you swiftly wished. If that was the case, that would mean you’d have to tolerate someone like him for days on end. And right now, you were certain it wasn’t something you needed.

The Septon cleared his throat and Daeron finally let his eyes rest from painting you in the canvas of his memory with a shaky breath. You exhaled deeply and turned around, closing your eyes as you slightly flinched when the tips of his fingers made contact with your shoulders. His pupils dilated at your reaction, his assumption being proven right, you had already been scared of him. Oddly, he found himself deeply affected by it, usually behaving in a careless manner. Daeron wasn’t so sure yet if you had meant to be good for him or not, but he was sure that you would turn his life upside down. 

The groom softly removed your cloak, letting it fall on the floor. The Black Dragon on it now crumpled and weak, just like you had dreamed many times. The Prince grabbed a cloak whose crimson red and ebony black colors were warmly welcomed by the sweet candlelight of the sept. An almost intimidating red dragon, a shade slightly lighter than the rest of the cloak, sewn into the middle. 

You felt Daeron’s hands on your shoulders once again, now clipping the Targaryen cloak on you. Your back proudly now carries the Red Dragon who brought the doom of your family. Lost in that thought, you managed to applaud yourself internally for not breaking down right there and then. 

As his hands distanced themselves away from your body, you swiftly looked around and noticed the intense silence prevailing in the sacred temple. The ritual presented itself as too powerful, almost as if the Gods were present, staring at the two of you who had been cursed with the same blessing. The union of their chosen ones. 

It felt too heavy for you, everything felt too heavy. Your husband’s gaze, the Targaryen cloak, the presence of the Gods, your dream, everything was coming all at once. You turned around, your shoulder almost touching with Daeron’s and waited for the Septon to begin his speech. This is it then, you thought.

“Let it be known that Lady Blackfyre and Daeron of House Targaryen are one heart, one flesh, one soul. Cursed be he who would seek to tear them asunder.” the Septon spoke fiercely. You and Daeron turned to face each other, “With this kiss I pledge my love…” speaking in unison, “and take you for my lord and husband…” you followed as composed as you could and Daeron already thought your voice was the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard. “a-and take you for my lady and wife.” Daeron added, his face lifting slowly to meet your gaze. 

“I declare you man and wife, one flesh, one heart, one soul, now and forever.” the Septon finished and indicated that Daeron should proceed with the traditional gesture.

And there he was, Daeron felt all too giddy to make the move. He was feeling overwhelmingly blessed to be able to touch his lips with yours so freely. Oh how if Daemon The Pretender had won the rebellion, men would lay on your feet. And somehow, Daeron was the man capturing you like this. 

He let out the quietest noise in frustration of this feeling as he leaned in close to you. With you having to raise your chin high enough to assist him. Daeron wanted to devour you, he wasn’t sure of his purpose, of his greatest desire, but now he was able to define it. Consume you one way or another. Because what he was also sure about; was the fact that he would become more addicted to you rather than wine or rum. 

Daeron’s lips locked your top one between them, letting himself kiss you sweetly and have him hoping you’d feel his hidden whispers through it. You closed your eyes and started moving your lips against his, almost as if you had done so numerous times before, as if you had even kissed another person. Let alone like that.  

The attendees erupted into applause as your union had officially been declared solid in the presence of the Seven Gods. As you pulled away from each other, your expression turned melancholic the minute you tasted some grape-like flavour on his lips. When you raised your face to look at Daeron, it’s like he knew that realization had hit you there and then. So he looked away with flushed cheeks and a troubled expression. 

You had a long night ahead of you and this had been just the tip of the iceberg.

—————————

You and your husband had long sat at the head of one of the many tables placed across in the Great Hall of the Red Keep. It had been a few hours since you had been wed and you still hadn’t spoken a word or even turned to glance at your husband. You had been lost in your thoughts, simultaneously too aware of your surroundings, hearing another clank of a golden goblet roughly being placed on top of the wide table. 

Had this been the fourth drink Daeron had downed in the span of the last few minutes? You weren’t so sure. Perhaps you’d lost count already since the faces of your twin brothers couldn’t stop appearing right before you. Looking at you all angry and bloodied. 

Something snapped you out of your thoughts as someone sat on the empty seat next to you. Instinctively looking at the person responsible for the commotion and the irritating noise the chair made when it was pulled.

Oh. Of course. 

The smug looking dragon who had laughed in pity at your husband earlier during the ceremony. Perfect. This is all you need right now. 

Daeron had been too oblivious to realise what had occurred a few inches away from him. Replaying the view of your eyes in his mind, since you hadn’t looked at him since. And he’d survive off of the crumbs he’d had. He could ask you why that was the case, but he also  couldn’t stop thinking about how easily you flinched when he lightly pressed his fingers on your shoulders. And he would hate to scare you away even more, despising living up to the reputation that named him “useless” and “a failure”.

“Lady Blackfyre.” the smug prick looked at you in mischief. With you choosing to completely ignore him, he let out a breathy chuckle, similar to the one he had let out earlier. “I see you’re not much of a talker yourself.” he commented in mockery. 

“Although since I am your husband’s own brother,” he emphasized on the last word and you could feel yourself getting sicker, “I suggest we live on friendly terms. We’ll see each other quite a lot.” he saw no response from you still and leaned in close to your ear. 

“It’s a shame you know,” his voice hardened, “I’ll have to put up with the whore wife of a traitorous bastard.” the Targaryen exclaimed. “I rebelled against it—against our family welcoming your blood back to our dynasty.” he hummed in fury, replaying the memory of him opposing the idea to Maekar intensely.

Your jaw tightened in fury as well, you wanted to scream; You think I want to be here?! You think I had a choice?! You remained quiet once more now staring your dead twin brothers ahead of you in the eyes, them still invading the line of your sight. “You will be the downfall of us. You will infect us, so you better not dare to—“

“Aerion.” a low voice was heard from your other side. Your husband now having abandoned his intimacy session with his drinks and glaring at the man invading your personal space. His shadow looming over you. Aerion, as you learned his name was, leaned back. Taking a few beats to shift his glare from you to his brother, his smirk now widening. 

Aerion stood up, with you now being sat in between them. “Brother,” he called out to him, “I see you’re done daydreaming for the day—“, “Leave her.” Daeron growled in a low tone. Aerion let out a humourless chuckle at his older brother, almost in disbelief at this unusual behavior towards him. You had just been married and Daeron was a changed man, Aerion noted.

“Pardon me, Daeron?” his eyes blazed with growing irritation. Aerion had been commanded by his brother to leave you, making him seem smaller to the rest of the guests, something he truly despised. “Leave her, Aerion. She’s not yours to torment.” Daeron had stepped closer to him now, looking down at his face, Brightflame’s eyes had now widened in surprise.

Rarely had the Drunken dragondreamer behaved so boldly especially to his younger brother. Aerion made a mental note to himself that perhaps having you here would be better than not having you at all. At least something had manned up his brother, and had given him balls heavy enough to stand up to him.

The corners of Aerion’s mouth lifted, his gaze intently observing Daeron. “I was merely speaking to her wasn't I, brother?” his eyes move to your figure, seated perfectly still on your chair. “I am sure she can speak for herself,” he let out a humorless scoff, “the Gods granted her a tongue. Did they not-“

“Enough, nephew." 

And surely, that’s what convinced you to execute the movement of turning your head towards the man whose command belonged to. The\ heir of The Iron Throne spoke fiercely, the man who made the ultimate promise to your mother that he would protect you. Any chance given. 

You stared at him, almost ridiculously one would say, a glimmer of hope evident in the orbs of your eyes. Daeron had noticed, of course he has, it’d only been a couple of hours since he’s been graced by your presence for the first time and you hadn’t even bothered to look at him fully. Your starry eyed husband sensed a feeling of envy, examining the admiration you had for the man. And yet, for once more, Daeron couldn’t help but feel ashamed.

He had gained the courage to prove himself to you, to a woman he had just married, to a woman that had already convinced him to drink two cups less than usual, and he’d failed. Daeron pulled his attention away from the both of you, his fist curling in disappointment. He could feel his uncle’s eyes swiftly absorbing him closing off to himself, and Baelor let out a short sigh. 

Aerion had now dropped every mischievous element from his expression, intimidated by the Prince’s command while also noticing the shift in your stance. Being reminded once more of the effect Baelor Targaryen had on every living person. His uncle simply was aware of the way he should carry himself, a trait every other relative and Aerion wished they had inherited. 

Brightflame looked down in embarrassment, the blood rushing up to his cheeks, his pale skin brightening with a soft shade of red. “I think it’s high time we let your brother and his wife carry on their wedding night in their chambers.” Baelor insisted smoothly, giving you an out of Aerion’s claws and you couldn’t be more grateful. 

Baelor looked over at you, still stuck in the trance his voice had put you in, and then to Daeron. The Prince indicated your husband takes you to your newly renovated shared bedroom, by tilting his head towards you, his gaze locked on his newly wedded nephew. Daeron’s eyes swiftly widened and turned towards you, “My lady, if you will-“ before your husband could finish his sentence, you scraped your chair backwards harshly. Quickly walking in the direction of the guards awaiting to escort you to your room.

—————————

Daeron stuttered, slightly taken aback by your gesture and followed you right after like a lost puppy. 

You both had been walking for a bit, and you had been awfully ahead of Daeron. How could you be walking in such a haste without becoming worn out by the non-stop movement of your feet. The Blackfyres should’ve been known for their speed, he thought to himself, otherwise your need to be away from him had been too much for you to bear. A scenario he didn’t like the sound of. First one it is then. 

In reality, the truth was far from his thoughts. Well, the Blackfyres were certainly not recognized for their speed in any aspect and secondly, you didn’t feel the intense need to have a fair distance from him. In fact, you weren’t sure what caused your speed. Perhaps the way the halls of the Red Keep felt all too familiar. Maybe because you remember running in the same halls with your brothers and you swore you could still hear their pants and little steps amidst the noise of your own right now. 

The way your mind wandered back to when your life had been colorful, you hadn’t taken account of your almost collision with the door of your private chambers. You only did when the warmth of two hands settled on your shoulders, firmly enough to stop you from moving and potentially hurting yourself. Your whole body went numb, you could sense your husband towering over you and panting heavily near your neck. 

“Be careful, wife.” His voice had lowered, quiet enough only for you to hear. You felt a shiver run down your spine at the name he had called you by, your breathing got heavier and your gown even more suffocating. 

Daeron had remained there, hesitant and left in awe by his very own gesture. Perhaps the Blackfyres were also affiliated with witchcraft, because he couldn’t explain the sudden change in his behavior when it came to you. However, if this is how he’d come to be in his life, Daeron didn’t necessarily deem it as something negative. 

He swallowed thickly and extended his hand over to the doorknob, twisting it around painfully slow. Almost as if his intention was for you to observe his hands, you internally cursed him for that. You couldn’t deny that your husband had neat hands, however. His veins contrast to his fairly pale skin, pushing themselves up against the force caused by his movement of twisting the doorknob. The way his fingers curled around the knob, almost caressing it but simultaneously gripping it tightly. Those same fingers holding your other shoulder firmly and—

The door opened, revealing your private chambers, Daeron’s hand that had been placed on the doorknob had returned back to your shoulder, and the realisation hit you. You were actually warm, concerningly warm. His cold hands lowered themselves to rub the sides of your shoulders comfortingly and by instinct, you shrunk them to yourself. 

You heard him mumble a small apology and step back, his hands now off of your body entirely. Letting out the breath you've been holding this entire time, you took the initiative to step inside the room, Daeron following you suit. 

Your eyes explored the room, reminding yourself how long it had been since the last time you’d witnessed a bedroom like this. Your chambers in Essos were the complete opposite of the place you were currently stepping foot on. Which oddly enough, propelled you to understand that you would probably never see your former residence again. And if you would, it probably wouldn’t be under pleasant conditions.

You heard the door softly slam and moved towards the vanity placed near the medium-sized windows. As Daeron stopped in the middle of your room, the sound of his steps on the wooden floor disappearing, he noticed the way your ceremonial wear was clinging to your figure. Showing off carefully what could be easily called every man’s desire. As time went on, it truly had become harder for the Targaryen man to consider accurately the reason the Gods paired the both of you. 

What could he give you that would live up to what you actually deserved? He’s painfully aware of how he’s let practically everyone down, and he deems it inevitable that he also lets you, his wife, down. Although Daeron had no idea when that would occur, he was sure of it. Perhaps, he’d dream about it sooner or later, and drown himself in royal wine until his mind forgets his incapacity to satisfy you. 

Daeron imagined the way your waist would fit perfectly around his grip, the way you’d shudder feeling his weight pressing into yours and the man had to practically swallow a desperate groan. He threw his head back in frustration and let out a swift sigh.

You softly caressed with your fingertips the jewelry placed on top of the vanity, seemingly untouched and prepared for your scent to mark them. You’d long noticed the stillness of your husband and distanced your fingers from the royal wealth staring right up at you.

Before your brain could process, your mouth functioned quicker. “You are my husband.” you began and you could feel the sudden snap of Daeron’s gaze piercing your skull, being met with your beautifully braided silver hair. “Precisely, my lady, it seems that-“,“You called me wife a moment ago.” you fiercely pointed out. As if demanding him to call you that for the rest of his time breathing. 

“I-I suppose I did-”, “So why ‘my lady’?” you interrupted once more. You turned around, almost glaring and angry at Daeron for such a thing. “If you desire to make my time here, as your wife, any less insufferable than it already has been, you cease to use such formalities to call me.” Daeron’s mouth parted slightly, feeling a tiny sense of warmth settle in his stomach. And here he thought you hated it. He nodded quickly, “Of course, my lady-“ he was met with a raise of your eyebrow, “My wife. I mean.” Daeron quickly corrected himself, cursing his stupid heart that seemed to slow down whenever you’d give him the slightest attention. 

You let out a sigh, feeling sorry for the way you’d behaved to him just now, but you had met him for the first time earlier today. This was your first legitimate conversation after your marriage, you still wouldn’t let your walls down that easily and allow him to witness your vulnerability shine. 

Daeron felt his heart skip a beat with every step you took that brought you close to him, awfully close. Close enough that made his knees weak, his eyes attempting to etch every single detail and line on your face to his memory. You boldly placed your palm on his shoulder, in an attempt to even his heavy breathing, “It almost seems as if you are afraid of me, husband.” you purred.

You looked up at him and gained the instant feeling of recognition, almost as if you have looked at these eyes before, and you dismissingly turned that thought down by thinking it came from a collision between the two of you during the time you were a noble. But it wouldn’t be too long until you realised the reality of things. 

“No! You’ve mistaken me, my wife.” Daeron was quick to deny your claim, which had suddenly made him more sober than ever. “I purely want to ensure your feeling of safety.” you let out a humourless scoff as you turned around, now your back facing his body. 

“You want to ensure my feeling of safety, husband? Then, help me take this ridiculous dress off.” You knew the consummation of your wedding was to be expected of you in the following day, so you might as well make it worthwhile. Deep down, you felt lucky that it would have been Daeron and no one else. Had you not been so defensive of your admittance of this intense connection you had already felt to him, you would’ve been gentler, softer. 

Daeron felt heat sprawl all over his cheeks, his hands suddenly going numb and the strength of his arms shrinking with every passing second. “Yes,” he let out a shaky breath, almost passing out at the thought of what was about to follow. “allow me to…” he trailed off, losing the ability to form coherent sentences the moment he untied the knot holding your dress together. 

The sight of your bare back immediately made him feel the painful rise of his crotch. He let out a low groan, desperate to feel your skin kissing his own. Daeron’s eyes lingered on your bare rear, shortly enough until you turned around to catch him doing so.

You were incredibly surprised by your own movements, you’d never done this before, your instincts were merely basing your decisions off the whispers you’ve heard from noble ladies on seducing their husbands, and also by a little vague piece of advice your mother had given you weeks prior to your wedding. The basics, as she claimed herself.

Absorbing the way your husband was now staring at you with such hunger and desire, you felt shyness consume you. While your lower body was all tingly and hot, you felt a heat pool between your legs. Inevitably pressing your thighs together in seek of any kind of friction that would relieve the pressure away. 

Daeron Targaryen was a gorgeous looking man. With his enchanting pleading brightest eyes and every other single one of his features complimenting them satisfyingly, it almost felt like being worshipped by a God. And damn all seven kingdoms, Daeron felt like dropping to his knees right there and then. 

Attempting to maintain your bold demeanor and instinctively biting your lower lip out of pure anxiety, you swept the fabric softly off of both your shoulders. The clothing now long gone from your body, hitting the wooden floor gently. Feeling the way the cold air raised every strand of hair in your body and harden your nipples. Your bare figure was now fully exposed to your husband’s gaze, and Daeron dedicated a quick prayer to whatever superior power conquered them all. His eyes raked your body intently, fully convincing your boldness to disappear from your attitude. 

As you went to cover your body, your arms obscuring your breasts to his gaze, Daeron immediately grabbed ahold of both of your wrists, “Please,” it almost sounded like he was begging, “let me take care of you. My sole desire is to make you content, dearest.” another name you’d realise sooner or later you adore endlessly. 

Your breath hitched, suddenly at loss for words observing that the roles have reversed. Your doe eyed gaze collided with his pleading one, and after a few beats had passed, you softly nodded. Allowing him to take care of you the way he intended to since the second he laid eyes upon you. 

His arms snaked around your waist slowly, moving carefully with absolutely no haste with the intention to make this moment the longest he’s ever experienced. If Daeron Targaryen could decide what drink he’d want to keep consuming for the rest of his life until he drowns in it, he would choose his wife. With no hesitation. 

He pulled you closer, your palms landing on his chest, your exposed own pressing on his torso as he placed a firm grip on the back of your neck. Forcing you to stare up at him fully, Daeron leaned in closer with the desire to claim your lips with his own, but just before doing so, he looked into your eyes once more, “I shouldn’t have you. I am not deserving of it.” he breathed out.

You frowned softly at his remark, “You’re my husband.” you leaned in even closer, both of your lips now almost touching feeling his swift breaths meet with yours. “And I’m your wife,” he let out what almost sounded like a whine, and you swear you could feel his hardened clothed cock press into your bare cunt. You moved your face next to his ear, whispering to him the rest of your sentence, “show me how a man cares for his woman.” you distanced your face from his and absorbed the way his eyebrows had frowned as if he had been dying of thirst. Needing to drink you whole.

Daeron’s hips inevitably bucked against your clit, experiencing the new sensation that sent jolts right through your body. With that, you uncontrollably let out a soft whimper, subconsciously asking for more, and that was the confirmation your husband needed. Having remained the grip on the back of your neck, he pushed your face so his lips could collide with yours.

Instantly, Daeron let out a soft groan in the middle of tasting your perfectly shaped lips. You and him moved with perfect sync, while he slid his other hand on your back down to your bare bosom. Making it your turn now to let out a sound of satisfaction, with your back arching and your body leaning against his touch. Daeron squeezed the soft flesh there and moved his mouth from your own down to your neck. 

With your eyes closed, you titled your head backwards, giving him full access to shower your neck with all the love it craves from him. You felt your husband’s mouth working hard to create marks on your neck, taking his sweet time with staining your pretty skin with different shades of purple. At some point, you slid your fingers through his silver golden locks, gently pulling them which forced out a soft growl from the back of his throat. 

You let out a sweet noise when Daeron gave extra attention to a specific spot on your neck, making you feel all kinds of things, and also the need to grind your clit on your own thigh, feeling light waves of pleasure rush through your body. Daeron could feel some kind of commotion coming from you, making his eyes snap open.

Your husband took in the image of you practically rutting against your own thighs and almost cursed at himself for getting carried away in your neck long enough you’d seek any kind of relief on your own. But you were so intoxicating, so much that he had acknowledged the fact that the list of things he adored about you wouldn’t end anytime soon.

“Allow me to take you to our bed, wife.” Daeron suggested, his voice making you snap out of practically getting off on your own. As inexperienced as you were, you hadn’t properly realised that this sort of movement was very close to giving you the pleasure you needed to feel.

As you looked at him, for what seemed like the thousandth time tonight, heat flooded your cheeks once more ashamed of the state your husband had probably been observing you in for a short while. “Please.” He begged for the second time clearly so far, so how could you not let him? 

“Take me.” You said and it almost seemed like a demand, you wanted to untie the knot in your belly as soon as possible and the existence of that tension was nothing but the offspring of Daeron’s attitude towards you since the moment you entered this room.

Daeron swept you softly off of your feet, his gaze locked on yours, nothing else worthy enough of it. Your husband placed you softly on your shared bed, now having your fully exposed and bare body in full display right before his eyes. 

You saw Daeron untie his breeches and as they dropped down, you could feel your mouth weirdly drool at the sight, curious as to why that may be. Daeron’s cock was now on display a few inches away from you. You couldn’t help but feel a bit intimidated, Daeron’s size wasn’t small but he wasn’t big. Maybe too big for you, no wonder you were intimidated. Daeron was well groomed, few silver golden curls around his cock, tip all angry and needy for some kind of release. And all at the same time, you desperately needed to be the one who’d give it to him. You were his wife after all.

“Take off your shirt.” You stated straightforwardly, making Daeron’s eyebrows raise for a split second, and executing your command right after. Exposing his well toned upper body to you, suddenly getting the will to run your fingers all over it. “Is that better, wife?” Daeron asked in almost a nervous demeanor, and you hummed approvingly, getting warmer by the minute. The sexual tension was so sharp it could cut like a sword.

“Open your legs for me, sweet wife.” Daeron instructed, sensing the feeling of your inexperience especially having witnessed a few seconds ago your reaction to his own cock. As you obeyed his order, Daeron almost moaned at the sight of your glistening cunt. He hadn’t even done anything to you and he could almost see you dripping and staining your freshly washed bedsheets. 

“Gods,” he let out a soft moan slowly approaching your cunt with two of his fingers, running them up and down your folds, merely testing your slickness. You were so wet Daeron was about to embarrassingly come right there and then, as if it wasn’t embarrassing enough how hard he had been prior to even kissing you. “you’re soaking.” He remarked, almost confirming it to himself. 

“Daeron,” you moaned out, feeling his fingers make contact with your folds, leaning against his touch. “please make it go away. It aches.” and with those words of yours, Daeron was sure he wouldn’t last very long. He nodded at your request, “I’ll take care of it. Trust me, wife.” he reassured you as he spit gently on his palm, leading it to his hardened cock. Driving his shaft up and down twice, he softly placed his knees under your thighs, his cock now inches away from your pulsing hole. 

“This may hurt at first,” he lovingly warned you, his cock pulsing in his palm thinking about how tight you’d probably be, with him being your first. “tell me to stop and I will.” Daeron informed you, and you softly nodded. Oddly fully trusting him with your body in such an intimate way already. 

Daeron entered his tip inside of your cunt and it already began to squeeze him, hissing softly as you grew worried for the man. Have you done something wrong? Daeron went completely still, not moving an inch while you felt your cunt stretching and adjusting to his size making you let out a soft whimper in pain.

Your husband held his weight by resting both of his palms on either side of your face, your legs now folding higher than when he was sitting upwards. “You’re so tight. Fuck.” he let out a desperate whimper, “Won’t last at all if you keep squeezing me like that.” he said against your shoulder moving an inch forward. Now almost half of him was inside of you, making you hiss in pain, complaining about it with the sounds you made. 

“I know sweetest, I know.” Daeron pressed a soft kiss on your shoulder to reassure you, moving as slow as possible not just to extend his time left, but to also make it as less painful as he could for you. “It’ll feel good, I promise.” He continued as he felt your fingers run through his locks once more, noting that it almost played a role of comfort to you.

You could gradually feel the pain disappear as Daeron began to move with more ease and an increased pace. Not too much but not too little. Your cunt had now adjusted to his size comfortably enough to welcome the pleasure in your body and getting closer to untying that damned knot in your belly. 

Your husband was now busy with your breasts, thrusting as slow as needed to suit your comfort and he seemed to have found it judging by your needy moans of pleasure. Even with his tongue circling around one of your nipples and his fingers pinching the other, he could sense your enjoyment. 

“So perfect,” he murmured against your breast, “don’t know what good I’ve done to have you here like this.” he said and felt your cunt clench around his cock, now almost fully inside of you. Giving him the courage to speed up a little bit more as he felt his climax approaching, his moans mixing with yours.

The knot in your lower body wasn’t just about to untie now, snap perhaps was a better word to describe it. You’ve grown to enjoy the feeling of being filled up so perfectly by your husband, seemingly moving on your own against his thrusts for him to go even deeper. With that movement of yours, you assisted Daeron in finding the spot that would finally relieve you from this ache.

Daeron thrusted a few more times in that same spot and the grip you had on his hair evidently tightened, your eyes snapping shut and letting out a high pitched moan with your back arched and your legs trembling. “It’s alright sweetest, I’m here. Look at me.” Daeron talked you through your orgasm right after you finished observing the white light that your closed eyelids presented to you. You’ve never felt like this before, and if Daeron Targaryen could make that happen, you never wanted it to stop.

Daeron stayed still until you came down your high, ensuring your proper satisfaction. As you recovered Daeron moved inside of you a few more times until he let out a low moan against your shoulder and painted your insides white. You thought to yourself, that you hadn’t seen a prettier sight before, which was your husband, all sweaty and panting finishing inside of you as you felt your womb welcoming the warmth of his seed and settling in it. 

Daeron looked up and pressed a kiss to your lips, despite being worn out. Shortly after, he pulled out his softening cock and laid his head on your chest. Roughly falling asleep on the spot, as finishing inside of you might have been the most intense orgasm he’d ever experienced so far. 

You observed your sleeping husband, still feeling his load claim its spot inside of you, realising this man that you’d been so worried about would also be the man that you’d potentially spend the rest of your life with. And maybe, just maybe, that didn’t seem as bad as you expected. It was still too early to tell, and for some reason, you felt that the Gods would be knocking on your door with some news soon enough. Therefore, you allowed yourself to let loose, appreciate the peaceful moment you were currently in and prepare for your life amongst the Red Dragons. 

With all the strength you had, you pulled the duvet over you and your husband, who continued to lay his head on your bare chest, as sleep took over you only a few moments later. And for the first time in years, you sensed that the Gods wouldn’t be at your door tonight, that for once you’d have a peaceful sleep, free of premonitions and visions regarding your future.

—————————

You assumed it’d been a while since you fell asleep, however, you could feel movement near you and worried grunts fill the silence of your chambers. 

You softly opened your eyes, letting them adjust to the lightning of the few candles decorating the space around you, and they quickly darted toward the man whose head was still on you. 

Daeron had now been sweatier than earlier, his body shaking and twitching as if he was trying to get away from something, and fierce inaudible mumbles were escaping his twitching mouth. You placed your palm on his cheek and he was concerningly cold and that made your eyes widen in worry.

You had just made the observation your mother did to you right after she’d wake you up from one of your visions. Your mother would always tell you how sick and worried some of your dreams would make her, because during them, you’d be in the exact state your husband was right now next to you.

And then it hit you, the Red Dragon in your dream, the Gods have been telling you all along. And the more you think the more you realise his need to drink, to forget, an urge you’d find yourself often to fulfill. You just didn’t have anything at your disposal, other than daydreaming and seeing your dead family appear in front of you on many occasions. The lack of sanity has caught up to you on a concerning amount, its most recent presence being your wedding feast the day before. 

The Gods have a funny way of planning things. And only then did you understand what that meant.

Daeron Targaryen shared the same gift you’d been cursed with for as long as you could remember. 

© tcrgarien, 2026

[valarrswhitestreak]

thinking about how baelor talks in bed...

thinking about baelor being forced to marry once more to a younger maiden from a wealthy house, and being made to have a bedding ceremony. he'd never had to have one before, but now, the lords seem worried that he will refuse to consummate his marriage with her.

thinking of baelor instructing her through their first time together, his words low for only her to hear, guiding her through each movement as she looks up at him, frightened every time a noise comes from behind the sheer curtains, reminding her of the eyes watching them.

"settle yourself like this" "lower your hips for me" "relax into it" "let me in just a little more, darling"

thinking of how even if it's not a night born from love, he's kind to her, helping his new wife through what is an unpleasant experience for them both, but especially for her.

and mostly, i'm thinking of baelor returning to his chambers the next night and finding his new wife waiting for him on his bed, all dolled up in a silky nightgown, and her timidly asking him,

"how would you like me, husband?"

gods, he should send her back to her room; he knows that, but he finds himself inching towards her, tugging at the laces of his doublet.

"on your back... so i might see your face," he commands.

thinking of baelor who hasn't felt a woman's touch in years, and now his pretty young wife is trembling in his arms, her nails scratching at his sides as he slides himself inside of her once more, filling her up so much that he can see her brows pinching at the stretch he gives her, her mouth parting in a strained gasp.

"you can take it, darling. breathe into it... let me in"

he's all about the praise too, telling her she's a good girl for him, and that she's doing well, and baelor quickly learns that his praise helps her loosen up, but it also makes her wetter, her wetness coating his cock more with every kiss and word of praise.

and at the end of it all, once he's spilt inside of her and lies panting beside her?

"you've done very well, darling. you've pleased me greatly on this night"

she's flushing under his attention, and quietly she asks,

"would you like me to return tomorrow night as well, husband?"

he's pausing for a moment, and then nodding. he needed to carry out his duties, did he not?