𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝

i am half afraid to hope what i long for

[vensianbae]

welcome ˚˖𓍢𓇼⋆₊

EVE ── a blog for my fav writings nd all things lovely ⋆ . ࿔ ˚

23 𖦹 ethiopian 𖦹 libra 𖦹 intp 𖦹 she!her

best viewed in light mode! ⋆ . ࿔ ˚ minors dni

[alicewiththreefingers]

Inspired by one of the greatest tweets of all time.

[vensianbae]

aerion pilled… sorry friends

[vensianbae]

read so much fic please free me from the shackles of an especially evil targaryen man 🫩 my REAL husband robb stark misses me…

[daenerys-stormborn]

— A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS // 1.06 "The Morrow"

[warmdragonstew]

my first contribution to the AKotSK fandom

[vensianbae]

aang… thinking ab writing… his struggle with his vow of celibacy through his interactions with you. his monkhood being one of the last few connections he has to the air nomads— yet you’re always in his orbit, to his unfortunate demise...

he prays for strength when he's able, but prayers only work if he wills it.

[kuviraissues]

not your nikki

[vensianbae]

aerion pilled… sorry friends

[aerrions]

♞ SURRENDER OF THE STAR / AERION TARGARYEN

aerion targaryen x targaryen reader

SYNOPSIS: as proposals flood the court for baelor breakspear’s beloved daughter, the realm sees only a targaryen princess beautiful enough to worship. but beneath her perfect image burns a crueler fire, and aerion brightflame is the only one who dares to name it. as his obsession turns violent, possessive, and proprietary, baelor fights to save his daughter from the cousin who mistakes shared blood for destiny and love for claim.

WARNING: targaryen incest themes

WORD COUNT: 8k

NOTES: possessive aerion making me actually insane rn. wrote down so many fic ideas yesterday and finished writing this after it took me all night/day, so hopefully i can start rolling out a bunch of other stories throughout the week for you guys. also aerion is horrible in this...my murderous prince making everyone’s lives worse…and i had the time of my life writing him lol. baelor is literally fighting for his life, and the targaryens are doing what targaryens do best....making bloodline issues everyone else’s problem.

part one

The court learned slowly that Aerion Targaryen’s love was not a garland to be worn, but a collar meant for another throat.

At first, they mistook it for the usual madness of young dragonblood. A prince’s temper. A cousin’s jealousy. A boy’s old fondness grown sharper with manhood. They had seen him follow you through childhood like a flame follows oil...they had seen the quarrels, the laughter, the bruises hidden beneath lace, the strange devotion that looked almost charming when viewed from a safe distance. The court loved to soften danger by naming it romance. It loved to polish knives until they caught candlelight prettily.

So when Aerion watched you too closely, they smiled behind jeweled fingers. When he interrupted your dances, they murmured of youthful passion. When he stood beside your chair as if the place had been carved for him alone, they called it loyalty of blood. Blood explained everything, when men wished not to think too deeply.

You were Targaryens. Cousins. Dragon to dragon. The realm had swallowed stranger unions from your house and named them sacred once crowns were set upon the right brows. No one gasped merely because Aerion’s eyes followed the line of your throat when you turned your head, or because his hand lingered too long when he took a cup from your fingers, or because the sight of another man standing near you made his beautiful mouth go cruel. These were old customs in an old house. Old flames. Old songs. The blood of Valyria did not run in straight lines, it circled itself like a serpent eating its own tail.

But even serpents knew when to stop swallowing.

Aerion did not.

You had grown into the full terror of your beauty by then. Girlhood had not left you so much as been crowned. The soft wonder of childhood had sharpened into command. Your face, once praised as pretty by indulgent women, had become the sort of face that altered rooms. You entered, and conversation learned humility. Men forgot which cup was theirs. Ladies watched the fall of your hair with resentment disguised as admiration. Knights stared as if songs had lied all their lives and then, at last, been proven true in flesh.

Your gowns became matters of state.

If you wore red, lords whispered that Baelor meant to remind the realm whose blood ran nearest the throne. If you wore white, septas sighed over your purity, blind to the amusement in your eyes. If you wore black, Aerion stared as though you had dressed yourself in his own thought. If you wore jewels from Dorne, men remembered Baelor’s mother and spoke of alliances. If you wore pearls, suitors doubled.

They came now not in trickles, but in floods.

Ravens flew. Fathers requested audiences. Mothers sent compliments folded in silk. Younger sons dreamed beyond their station, elder sons dreamed within it. Great houses offered horses, ships, relics, ancient swords, promises, flatteries, songs composed badly and performed worse. A lord of the Reach compared you to the Maiden and the morning star in the same sentence, which made Valarr cough into his wine and you smile so sweetly the poor man mistook mockery for mercy. A storm lord swore that no rain would touch you beneath his roof. A river lord said your beauty had haunted him since a tourney three years before, though you could not remember his face. A Westerlander sent a necklace of yellow diamonds, gaudy as pride.

Baelor returned it.

He returned many things.

Your father’s desk became a battlefield of parchment. Every morning brought new petitions, new offers, new careful suggestions from men who believed themselves subtle because they did not write the word marriage too early. Baelor read each letter with a stillness that frightened his attendants more than anger would have. He burned some. He answered others. He delayed most. And when you came to him in his solar, trailing silk and sunlight, he would cover the papers with one hand as though shielding you from arrows.

“You know I can read,” you told him once.

“I have long suspected it,” he said.

“You cannot hide every proposal from me.”

“I can try. A father must have his hobbies.”

You laughed, and his face softened as it always did when your laughter sounded young. Then your gaze fell to the seal half hidden beneath his palm. A black boar upon green wax.

“Crakehall?” you asked.

Baelor sighed.

“Is he hideous?”

“He is ambitious.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the answer that matters.”

You came around the desk and plucked the letter from under his fingers before he could stop you. Not because you cared for Lord Crakehall, whose face you vaguely remembered as square, red, and damp with effort, but because you liked watching even Baelor Breakspear fail to command you sometimes. Your father leaned back in his chair, resigned and fond and troubled.

You read enough to learn that Lord Crakehall praised your grace, your lineage, your father’s honor, and the womb you might lend to his house, though he dressed the last in phrases soft enough for court.

Your mouth curved.

“Ah,” you said. “He admires my soul.”

Baelor took the letter back. “He admires proximity.”

“To me?”

“To power.”

“Same thing, in this case.”

Your father’s eyes lifted to yours then, and there it was again...the grief of being seen by someone good.

“Do not let them teach you that,” he said.

“They did not teach me. They only confirmed it.”

Baelor folded the letter slowly. “Power is not the same as worth.”

“No. But men kneel to both if the light is dim enough.”

For a moment he only looked at you.

Then he smiled sadly. “You have your mother’s face when you are being wicked.”

“And yours when I pretend not to be.”

That won him. It always did, though never completely. He laughed, but the worry did not leave his eyes. It had lived there longer now, deepening each season, taking root each time Aerion’s name passed too close to yours.

“You are receiving more attention,” Baelor said.

“I had noticed.”

“You encourage some of it.”

“I am courteous.”

“You are lethal.”

That pleased you. You tried not to let it show. Failed, perhaps. Baelor saw. Baelor always saw.

Before he could speak again, a voice came from the doorway.

“She is bored,” Aerion said. “That is why she does it.”

You did not turn at once.

You had known he was there. Not by sound, for Aerion could move softly when he chose, not by sight, for you had your back to him...but by the tightening of the air, the old animal knowledge in your blood. Aerion entered rooms the way fire entered curtains, first as heat, then as inevitability.

Baelor’s face became courteous stone. “Nephew.”

“Uncle.”

Aerion stepped into the solar without waiting to be invited. He wore black that day, severe and lovely, the red at his throat dark as clotted rubies. There was no mark upon his cheek anymore, but sometimes you still saw your own handprint there in memory, bright as a banner.

His eyes went first to you. They always did. Then to the letters on Baelor’s desk.

“How many today?” he asked.

“That is not your concern,” Baelor said.

Aerion smiled. “Everything concerning her eventually becomes mine.”

Your father rose.

It was not dramatic. Baelor did not need drama. He merely stood, and suddenly the room remembered that he was the better prince, the truer knight, the man the realm would have followed into fire because he would never ask them to burn alone.

“Careful, Aerion,” Baelor said.

Aerion’s smile did not falter, but something sharpened behind it.

You moved between them before either man could name the thing already standing there.

“Lord Crakehall offers admiration,” you said lightly. “And presumably pigs.”

Aerion looked at you. “Do you want pigs?”

“I might. They are loyal creatures.”

“They root in filth.”

“So do princes.”

Baelor closed his eyes for the briefest moment.

Aerion laughed. Not pleasantly. He almost never laughed pleasantly. His amusement was a blade drawn halfway from its sheath.

“There you are,” he said.

Baelor’s eyes opened. The words were nothing, to anyone else. To your father, they were a key turning in a lock he had hoped remained hidden. You saw his fear before he could bury it. Aerion saw it too, and loved it.

That was another of Aerion’s sins...he enjoyed frightening men who were hard to frighten. Servants, stableboys, squires, little lordlings, girls too low in rank to defend themselves, those were sport. But Baelor Breakspear’s fear was a feast. Aerion did not want your father dead. Not then. Perhaps not ever, in any simple sense. He wanted him defeated. He wanted Baelor to understand that all his honor, all his love, all his patient discipline could not reach the part of you Aerion touched with two words.

There you are. As if you had been lost before him. As if your father had loved only the wrong shape of you.

After that day, Baelor began arranging your days with a care that looked accidental only to fools.

You were invited to ride with ladies when Aerion had sword practice. You were sent to visit the queen’s apartments when Aerion dined with Maekar. You were asked to accompany your father to small councils where no one had thought to include you before. You sat beside Baelor while men spoke of roads, levies, harvests, disputed boundaries, Dornish tempers, Ironborn petitions, and the endless trembling web of rule. You listened more than you spoke. When you did speak, men turned toward you in surprise, then interest, then caution.

That was how power tasted best...when others noticed too late you had already swallowed it.

Baelor watched you in those meetings with pride and pain together.

“You learn quickly,” he said afterward.

“I listen.”

“You listen like a spider.”

“Would you prefer a dove?”

“I would prefer my daughter.”

You paused beside him in the corridor, where late afternoon light fell in long golden bars across the floor.

“You have her,” you said.

Baelor touched your cheek, and for a moment the court, the proposals, Aerion, all of it seemed distant. He looked tired. Not weak, never that, but tired in the way honorable men became tired when they were made to guard what they loved from dangers with familiar faces.

“Do I?” he asked softly.

You had no answer worthy of him. So you kissed his hand and smiled as though that could mend it.

But Aerion hated being managed.

He noticed every closed door. Every changed hour. Every walk you took without him. He noticed when your horse was saddled and his was not. He noticed when your ladies lied badly. He noticed when servants glanced away too quickly. He noticed when Baelor’s guards appeared at the end of corridors where once only shadows had stood.

Most of all, he noticed absence.

One morning, you rode beyond the city with your father’s men, Valarr, two ladies, and a little train of attendants. It was innocent enough. A hawking party. A bright sky. A temporary escape from stone walls and hungry eyes. Baelor had meant to come, then been detained by a dispute between two crownland lords who had both perfected the art of being intolerable. Aerion had not been told.

That was the insult. Not that you rode. Not that Valarr rode beside you. Not even that a young knight of House Mooton held your stirrup and looked up at you as though you had descended from the heavens to ruin him.

No. The unforgivable thing was that Aerion learned of it secondhand. From your maidservant. Her name was Jeyne, a soft eyed girl with nimble fingers who knew how to lace your gowns tightly without pinching and how to keep silence without looking afraid of it.

Aerion caught her in the passage outside your chambers with a bundle of pale riding gloves in her arms.

“Where is she?” he asked.

Jeyne curtsied too quickly. “Princess?”

Aerion smiled.

The girl went white.

“There are many princesses in this keep,” he said. “Do you think I ask after all of them?”

“She has gone riding, my prince.”

“With whom?”

“My prince, I—”

His hand moved. Not to strike. That would have been too easy, too crude in a hallway where witnesses might multiply. He only took one of the gloves from the top of the bundle and examined the pearl buttons at the wrist.

“With whom?” he repeated.

Jeyne told him.

You learned later that he laughed when she said Valarr’s name. That laugh followed him all the way to the stables.

The boy he found there was named Tommen, though no one of rank had troubled to remember it until Aerion made the name dangerous. He was freckled, quick handed, and kind to nervous horses. He had been your favorite stableboy since you were young enough to sneak sugared apples in your sleeves and too proud to admit you were afraid of a new mare’s teeth. Tommen never spoke to you improperly. He never stared too long. He knew the names of your horses, the moods of your palfrey, the way you preferred your saddle checked twice but not fussed over. You liked competence. You liked quiet devotion. Tommen had both.

Aerion knew this. Of course he knew. That was why he chose him.

No one ever told you precisely what was said. Servants stories came in fragments, as frightened stories do. Aerion asking who had saddled your horse. Tommen answering that he had, my prince. Aerion asking whether the boy had touched your boot when helping you mount. Tommen stammering. Aerion smiling. A riding crop lifted from the wall. The horses screaming in their stalls when the first blow cracked not against wood, but flesh.

By the time you returned, the stable yard had been washed, poorly. Blood diluted by water leaves a pink memory. You saw it before anyone spoke.

Valarr dismounted beside you, his laughter fading. Your ladies went quiet. The groom who came for your reins would not meet your eyes.

“Where is Tommen?” you asked.

No one answered.

Then Aerion emerged from the shadowed stable door. He had changed his gloves. That was the first thing you noticed. The second was the riding crop in his hand. The third was the speck of blood he had missed near the cuff of his sleeve, small and dark, nearly hidden by black fabric.

The world became very still.

“What did you do?” you asked.

Aerion looked at Valarr, then at the young knight of House Mooton, then back to you.

“You rode without telling me.”

A lady gasped.

Valarr took one step forward. “Aerion.”

Aerion ignored him. “You took my morning and gave it to dogs.”

“You hurt him because I went riding?”

“I hurt him because he touched what was mine and thought himself alive enough afterward to continue breathing easily.”

The silence that followed was different from court silence. Court silence was silk. This was iron.

Everyone heard it. Everyone understood something then, though not yet all of it. The grooms, the ladies, the guards, Valarr, the pale knight still holding his reins, they understood that Aerion’s jealousy was not a lover’s foolishness, not a cousin’s temper, not a pretty scandal to be whispered over wine. It was ownership made visible. It was punishment by proxy. It was a prince placing his hand around the throat of the world because he could not place it around yours in public.

You dismounted without help. Aerion watched, eyes bright.

“Where is he?” you asked.

“In the straw, if he has not crawled elsewhere.”

Valarr swore and pushed past him into the stable. One of your ladies began to cry. The Mooton knight looked as if he wanted to draw steel and remembered just in time that princes were not obstacles ordinary men survived.

You walked to Aerion. Not quickly. You would not give him haste. Haste was confession. When you reached him, he tilted his head, studying your face like a man reading scripture in a language only he knew.

“You are angry,” he said.

“You wanted me angry.”

“Yes.”

“You hurt someone I favored.”

“Yes.”

“You wanted me to know you knew.”

His smile deepened. There you are, his face said, though his mouth did not.

You lifted your hand. He did not flinch. That infuriated you more than fear would have. So you did not slap him. Instead, you took the riding crop from his hand as gently as though accepting a flower. He let you. Then you struck him across the face with it. The crack rang through the yard. A thin red line opened along his cheek, lower than the old mark from your palm. One of the horses screamed again. Someone behind you whispered a prayer.

Aerion’s head had turned with the blow. Slowly, he looked back. His eyes were fever bright.

“You should not leave me behind,” he said.

“You are not my keeper.”

“No,” he said. “I am worse.”

You stepped closer. “If Tommen dies, I will never speak to you again.”

Aerion’s smile vanished. There. At last. Not guilt. Not remorse. Not pity for the broken boy in the straw. But fear of deprivation. Fear of silence from you, which to Aerion was worse than any wound.

“He will live,” Aerion said.

“You had better pray he does.”

“I do not pray.”

“Then learn.”

You turned from him before he could answer and entered the stable.

Tommen lived.

He was carried to the maester with his back torn, one eye swollen shut, and three fingers broken where he had raised his hand against the crop. Baelor heard before sunset.

Your father came to your chambers that evening with no guards, no herald, no softening smile. He found you seated by the window, still in your riding gown, hands folded in your lap. You had not cried. That seemed to hurt him too.

“Tell me,” he said.

So you did. Not all. Never all. But enough. Baelor stood through the telling like a man being carved in stone.

When you finished, he turned away and looked out over the city. The sun was setting behind him, turning his profile dark against fire. For one wild moment you thought he looked like the sort of prince singers believed Aerion wished to be...a dragon made noble by restraint.

“He cannot be permitted to continue,” Baelor said.

“No.”

“You say that as though agreement costs you.”

“It does.”

He turned back. You hated how sorrow moved through his face. You hated that he knew before you knew what you would say.

“He did it because of me,” you said.

“He did it because of himself.”

“He chose Tommen because of me.”

“Yes.”

“So I am not absent from it.”

Baelor came to you then. He knelt before your chair, though princes did not kneel to daughters. He took your hands in his. His were warm. Yours were cold.

“My star,” he said, “do not mistake being desired by cruelty for causing cruelty. Aerion would make the sun guilty for casting his shadow.”

“But he does not look at the sun the way he looks at me.”

“No.” Baelor’s voice lowered. “He does not.”

You looked down at your joined hands.

“He sees me,” you whispered.

Your father closed his eyes. That was confession enough.

The days after Tommen’s beating changed the court.

Not openly. Nothing in courts changed openly until blood forced it. But servants moved differently around Aerion now. Ladies ceased smiling behind fans when he entered beside you. Knights watched him with the careful hatred men reserved for princes they could not challenge. The story spread, as all stories did, acquiring embellishment and losing none of its truth. Some said the stableboy had died. Some said Aerion had ordered his tongue cut out, though Tommen still had his tongue and, once the swelling receded, used it to curse beautifully when the maester changed his bandages. Some said you had struck Aerion hard enough to draw bone. Some said Aerion had laughed.

That last was almost true. He did not laugh in the yard. But later, when he found the bloody line on his cheek in a mirror, he smiled. You knew because he told you.

He found you two nights later in the old queen’s gallery, where portraits of dead Targaryen women watched from dim walls with the patient disappointment of ancestors. You had gone there because the court below was too loud, because Baelor had begun placing more men near your chambers, because Valarr kept looking at you as if he wanted to say something brotherly and impossible, because Tommen’s injuries had become a weight you could not set down.

Aerion came from the darkness as if made by it.

“You have been avoiding me,” he said.

“I have been enjoying peace.”

“You lie better when you care less.”

“You overestimate your importance.”

“No.” He came closer. “I estimate it exactly.”

The cut on his cheek had darkened, a narrow line beneath one eye. It made him look even more like something from a doomed song, all beauty marred by violence and improved by it. You hated that your gaze went there.

He noticed.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“No.”

“Liar.”

“You are very proud of being struck.”

“By you? Yes.”

You turned away, but he caught your sleeve. Not your wrist this time. Your sleeve. Silk between his fingers. A concession so small another woman might have missed it. You did not.

“Tommen lives,” he said.

“No thanks to you.”

“He will heal.”

“And if he does not?”

“Then you will be angry longer.”

You looked at him with revulsion so sharp it nearly became wonder. “Is that all it is to you?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

His fingers tightened in the silk. “Proof.”

“Of what?”

“That even your pity can be made to turn toward me.”

For a moment, the gallery seemed full of ghosts listening. You should have been horrified. You were horrified. But beneath horror, beneath fury, beneath the moral shape your father had tried so carefully to give you, something cold and honest understood him. Aerion had not wanted Tommen’s pain. Not truly. The boy was nothing to him. A cup broken after drinking. A door slammed for sound. What Aerion wanted was your attention dragged back by the hair. Your anger, your disgust, your threat never to speak again...all of it was still yours. All of it meant he had reached into your day and seized the center of it.

“You are a child,” you said.

“I am a dragon.”

“You are a child with prettier delusions.”

His mouth twitched. “Say it again.”

“No.”

“Say something cruel.”

“You are begging for me.”

That struck him. For a heartbeat, rage flashed across his face so nakedly that you thought he might forget where he stood. Then he laughed under his breath.

“You were made for me,” he said.

“I was made by my mother and father.”

“You were made by blood older than both.”

There it was again. Blood. That sacred obscenity. That inheritance Aerion wore like a crown and wielded like a knife.

He stepped nearer, and this time you did not retreat.

“Look at them,” he said, nodding toward the portraits. “Our grandmothers. Our great grandmothers. Queens who married brothers, nieces who married uncles, cousins joined to cousins so the dragon would not thin itself into mud. They knew.”

“They knew duty.”

“They knew purity.”

“They knew loneliness.”

He smiled. “So do you. ”

That was the danger of him. Not that he lied. Lies you could have dismissed. Aerion’s horror was that he found truths and dragged them through blood until they looked like permission.

“You think every hunger holy if it has a Targaryen name,” you said.

“And you think every hunger can be dressed in silk until your father blesses it.”

You slapped him then. Not because he was wrong. Because he had come too close.

His face turned, then returned. The mark joined the cut, red over red. He smiled with his mouth closed, as though keeping something precious behind his teeth.

“There,” he whispered.

“Do not say it.”

“There you are.”

You hated him. You hated the heat that moved through you when he said it. So you punished him the only way that mattered.

At the next feast, you gave your favor to someone else.

Not a boy this time. Not a harmless courtling whose hope could be crushed beneath your heel by morning. You chose Ser Jon Wylde, a stormlands knight with a scar through one brow and shoulders broad enough to carry his own arrogance comfortably. He had asked for your favor twice before and been denied with courtesy. On the third attempt, before half the court and beneath Aerion’s watching eyes, you removed a ribbon from your sleeve and tied it around his arm yourself.

Ser Jon went crimson with triumph.

Aerion went still.

You did not look at him afterward. That was the art of it. Any fool could provoke openly. Real cruelty required restraint. You smiled at Ser Jon. You asked him whether he meant to win. You let him say something gallant and foolish about victory being worthless unless laid at your feet. You lowered your lashes at exactly the right moment.

Across the hall, a silver cup bent in Aerion’s hand.

By midnight, Ser Jon Wylde was drunk on hope.

By dawn, he was found in an alley below the Street of Silk, alive but ruined for tourney glory, his sword hand broken in two places and three teeth missing from his handsome mouth. He swore he had been set upon by men in cloaks. He swore one of them laughed like a prince.

No proof was found. None was needed.

You received the news while your ladies dressed your hair.

One gasped. Another crossed herself. Jeyne, pale as milk now whenever Aerion’s name hovered near the room, dropped a comb.

You looked into the mirror. Your reflection looked serene.

“Poor Ser Jon,” you said.

The ladies stared. You selected a ruby pin and slid it into your hair.

That afternoon, you found Aerion in the training yard. He was watching two squires beat each other bloody with blunted swords, though his attention was elsewhere. It was always elsewhere when you were near. He stood with his arms folded, black doublet unfastened at the throat, sunlight turning his hair into white flame. When you approached, the squires faltered.

“Continue,” Aerion snapped.

They did, badly.

“You are predictable,” you said.

“I am constant.”

“You broke his hand.”

“He touched your ribbon.”

“I tied it there.”

“I know.”

“Then perhaps you should break my hand.”

The squires stopped entirely.

Aerion turned to them slowly. “Did I tell you to stop?”

They resumed with panic. Then he looked back at you.

“You would like that,” he said.

“You think you know what I like.”

“I know you better than your suitors.”

“My suitors do not leave men in ditches.”

“Only because they lack imagination.”

You stepped closer, lowering your voice. “One day you will do this to the wrong man.”

Aerion’s eyes gleamed. “Then he will become the right warning.”

“You are not invincible.”

“No,” he said. “I am royal. It is better.”

“Dunk a prince in enough blood and he looks like any other butcher.”

His smile thinned. You liked that. You liked finding the seam.

Then, as if sensing the pleasure in you, Aerion leaned nearer.

“You are angry for him?”

“No.”

“You are angry because I answered.”

“I am angry because you think every man who looks at me owes you pain.”

“They do.”

“And what do I owe you?”

His gaze moved over your face slowly, with terrible reverence and terrible greed.

“Truth,” he said.

Before you could answer, Valarr entered the yard.

Aerion stepped back at once, not from shame but strategy. Valarr looked between you, handsome face tightening. The prince and the monstrous one shared a moment of silent hatred bright enough to light the yard.

“Cousin,” Valarr said.

“Cousin,” Aerion returned, making the word sound like an insult carved in silver.

Valarr offered you his arm. “Father asks for you.”

Aerion laughed softly. “Of course he does.”

You took Valarr’s arm without looking away from Aerion.

That night, Aerion made you jealous. He did it with the exactness of a man placing poison in a cup.

Her name was Lady Helicent, a narrow waisted girl from a proud but nervous house that had learned to survive by attaching itself to greater flames. She had pale brown hair, quick eyes, and the kind of beauty that became sharper when reflected near someone more beautiful. She had spent months pretending admiration for you while hating you with all the quiet devotion of a lesser star orbiting a sun.

Aerion chose her because she had once said your beauty was “almost unnatural” in a tone that made almost do all the work.

You found them in the gardens. Or rather, he arranged to be found.

The moon was thin above the cypress trees. The fountains whispered. You had gone there after supper with only Jeyne trailing at a distance, your mind full of Baelor’s warnings and Aerion’s latest violence and the strange suffocation of being guarded by love on one side and hunted by obsession on the other.

Then you heard laughter. A girl’s laugh. Breathless, flattered, false.

You turned the corner.

Aerion stood beneath an arbor of white roses, one hand braced against the stone beside Lady Helicent’s head. He was close enough to ruin her reputation if anyone kinder than you had found them. He wore indolence like a cloak, but his eyes flicked to you the instant you appeared.

He had been waiting.

Helicent’s mouth was flushed. Aerion’s smile was lazy. The girl saw you and stiffened.

“Princess,” she said, curtsying too late.

You looked at Aerion. He looked back. No shame. No apology. Only challenge. It was almost funny, how badly he wanted to hurt you and be punished for it.

“Lady Helicent,” you said. “How brave.”

Her eyes narrowed before she could stop them. “My princess?”

You smiled.

Aerion’s expression sharpened faintly. Warning, perhaps. Interest, certainly.

“To walk alone in gardens where princes wander hungry,” you said.

Helicent recovered enough to smile. “Prince Aerion has been perfect courtesy.”

You nearly laughed. Aerion did.

“Has he?” you asked.

“To me,” she said, and there was the little blade. The foolish little blade. “Though perhaps some ladies do not inspire gentleness.”

The garden went silent.

Jeyne, behind you, stopped breathing. Aerion’s smile vanished.

It was a small thing. A court girl’s spite, sharpened by jealousy and ignorance. But Lady Helicent had misread the entire world. She had mistaken being used by Aerion for being favored by him. She had mistaken his cruelty toward you for permission to be cruel herself.

Only Aerion could do that.

The thought crossed his face before he moved.

He took Helicent’s chin in his hand. Not tenderly. The girl froze, confusion blooming into fear as his fingers pressed just enough to make her understand the difference between being touched and being handled.

“Apologize,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “My prince?”

“To her.”

“Aerion,” you said.

He did not look at you. “Apologize.”

Helicent’s lips trembled. “I meant no offense.”

“That is not an apology.”

You watched her realize, too late, that she had never been standing beside a man. She had been standing beside a beautiful cliff edge and calling the fall romantic.

“My princess,” she whispered, “forgive me.”

You regarded her for a long moment. Then you smiled with all the sweetness court had ever taught you.

“No.”

Aerion looked at you then. The delight in his eyes was immediate and terrible. Helicent fled before either of you could decide what else she deserved.

When she was gone, the roses seemed whiter.

“You used her poorly,” you said.

“She was useful.”

“You kissed her.”

“I wanted to see if you would bleed.”

“Did I?”

His gaze lowered, then rose. “Not where others could see.”

You stepped toward him. “You chose a stupid girl.”

“I chose a jealous one.”

“You chose a mirror with cracks and hoped I would hate my reflection.”

“And did you?”

You reached up and touched the place on his cheek where the crop had marked him. He went still at once, every line of him tightening under your fingers.

“No,” you said. “I hated that she thought you gentle.”

Aerion’s breath changed.

There were moments when his arrogance fell away not into humility, never that, but into something more naked and more dangerous. Want without performance. Hunger without theatre. He caught your wrist and turned his mouth against your palm, pressing a kiss there like a brand.

“You are jealous,” he said.

You curled your fingers against his cheek, nails biting lightly.

“Do not flatter yourself.”

“Lie better.”

“You first.”

He kissed you then, beneath the white roses, while Lady Helicent’s apology still trembled somewhere in the dark.

This kiss was colder than the first and worse because neither of you could pretend surprise. You knew the shape of him now. The violence in his grip. The worship hidden inside command. The way he seemed always to be punishing you for having power over him. You kissed him back because you wanted to win, because you wanted to wound him with wanting, because part of you had been waiting since the terrace and hated him for making that true.

When you bit his lower lip hard enough to draw blood, he made a sound almost like laughter.

“There you are,” he breathed against your mouth.

You pushed him away.

“Say that again and I will give your next scar somewhere less convenient.”

His eyes burned. “Promise?”

You left him there smiling.

Your revenge upon Helicent came three days later. Not with blood. Blood was Aerion’s crude instrument. You preferred ruin with clean hands.

Lady Helicent had a brother seeking appointment among Valarr’s companions, a cousin hoping for a marriage in the Reach, and a mother desperate to appear nearer the royal women than she was. All three ambitions rested upon perception, and perception was a silk thread...beautiful, useful, easily cut.

At the queen’s embroidery circle, you praised Helicent.

That was the beginning of the end.

You praised her discretion in such careful tones that the older ladies glanced up. You mentioned, with sympathetic vagueness, that young women could hardly be blamed for losing judgment when princes made games of them. You said nothing directly. You never needed to. By evening, half the court believed Helicent had been caught in the gardens with Aerion. By morning, the other half believed worse. By the next feast, her mother’s smile had gone brittle, her brother’s appointment had quietly vanished, and the Reach cousin’s family had begun remembering urgent reservations.

Helicent passed you in the corridor with red eyes.

You stopped her. She curtsied. Poor thing. She had learned.

“My lady,” you said, and adjusted the fall of her veil yourself, a gesture so kind that every watching woman softened. “You must be more careful where you place your trust.”

Her eyes filled with tears of hatred.

“Yes, princess.”

You kissed her cheek. The court saw mercy. Aerion, watching from the far end of the corridor, saw the corpse beneath the flowers.

Later, he found you in the sept.

That amused you. Aerion in a sept always looked like blasphemy had dressed itself for court. He moved beneath the painted eyes of the Seven with no reverence whatsoever, boots quiet against stone, face lit by devotional candles. You were kneeling before the Maiden, though not praying. Prayer had never come naturally to you unless you wanted something badly enough to be dishonest with gods.

“You destroyed her,” he said.

You did not turn. “She destroyed herself.”

“You smiled while doing it.”

“I smiled while forgiving her.”

“You are monstrous.”

Now you looked back. Aerion stood in the aisle, silver hair bright in candlelight, expression almost reverent. The word monstrous should have sounded like accusation. From him, it sounded like beloved.

“Careful,” you said. “Only you may call me that?”

“Yes.”

“How proprietary.”

“Yes.”

You rose. “You say that too easily.”

“I say true things easily.”

“No. You say ugly things easily and hope truth will admire it”

He came closer, stopping beneath the gaze of the Father. “You enjoyed it.”

“I did.”

“You are not sorry.”

“No.”

“Good.”

That word moved through you like a hand along a locked door.

Good.

Baelor would have asked whether justice had required cruelty. He would have asked whether mercy might have served better. He would have looked at you with that terrible tender disappointment and made you feel, somehow, both loved and summoned upward. Aerion looked at your revenge and approved. Not despite its coldness. Because of it.

That was the seduction.

Not his beauty. Not only his blood. Not only the shared past, the childhood violence, the kisses that felt like wounds learning to speak. The seduction was this...Aerion never asked you to be better. He asked you to be more. More proud. More vicious. More honest. More dragon. And dragons, in all the old songs, were never asked to apologize for flame.

The weeks that followed became a courtship made of shadows.

No one named it. Naming would have made it vulnerable to judgment. Instead it lived in glances, absences, sudden cruelties, and the quiet rearrangement of other people’s lives around Aerion’s desire.

A young knight from the Vale who wrote you three poems found his lute floating broken in a fishpond. A Tyrell cousin who asked you to dance twice in one evening was challenged by Aerion to a sword practice bout the next morning and left the yard with his pride bleeding worse than his nose. A page who delivered you a love letter from his master vanished from court service and reappeared months later in Maidenpool, refusing to say why the sight of dragon banners made him shake. A lordling who cornered you beneath a stair and spoke too warmly of your mouth was discovered before dawn tied to the same stair by his own belt, gagged with his own love token, his face swollen purple.

No one saw Aerion do it. Everyone knew. That was how power worked best...when proof was unnecessary because fear had already testified.

Baelor knew too. His patience began to thin.

Your father summoned Aerion after the stair incident. You were not meant to hear, but you had learned from court that doors were only suggestions and servants only obstacles when treated kindly enough. You stood in the passage behind a tapestry, still as a carved saint, while Baelor’s voice came through the wood.

“You shame your house.”

Aerion answered lightly. “Men shame themselves. I only assist.”

“You terrorize boys who cannot answer you.”

“I instruct them in distance.”

“You injure men for looking at my daughter.”

A pause.

Then Aerion said, “They should look elsewhere.”

The silence after that was colder than winter.

“She is not yours,” Baelor said.

Aerion’s reply came softer, “No?”

“No.”

“She is Targaryen.”

“So are many.”

“She is my blood.”

“She is mine.”

You closed your eyes.

Inside the room, Aerion laughed once.

“There,” he said. “At last, we are honest.”

Baelor’s voice lowered. “Do not confuse my love for weakness, boy.”

“Do not confuse my wanting for a boy’s game.”

“She is not a prize to be taken because you desire her.”

“No,” Aerion said. “She is a dragon pretending to be a prize because it pleases court to bid.”

Your heart struck hard. Baelor said nothing.

Aerion continued, each word quieter and more poisonous than the last. “You dress her in honor. They dress her in songs. I know what she is beneath both.”

You had to press your hand over your mouth.

The door opened so suddenly you nearly failed to move. Aerion stepped into the passage and looked directly at the tapestry. Directly at you. He had known. Of course he had known. He walked away smiling. Baelor did not come after him.

That night, your father found you in the dragon gallery.

It was always the dragons you returned to when torn between men. The skulls rested beneath the Keep like old crimes too large to bury, black and vast and silent. Balerion’s skull loomed above all others, a darkness shaped like memory. Torchlight crawled along his teeth. You stood before him with your arms wrapped around yourself, feeling very small and not small at all.

Baelor approached without speaking.

For a while, the two of you stood together beneath the dead dragon.

“Were you listening?” he asked at last.

“Yes.”

“I should reprimand you.”

“You may.”

“I am too tired.”

That hurt.

You looked at him then. “Father.”

He turned to you, and whatever speech he had prepared seemed to die when he saw your face. He reached for you, then stopped, as if uncertain whether you would permit comfort. You hated that uncertainty. You stepped into his arms before pride could stop you.

Baelor held you tightly.

Not as court held you. Not as suitors imagined holding you. Not as Aerion seized you, with hunger disguised as destiny. Your father held you as though you were alive and breakable and beloved beyond usefulness.

“My star,” he murmured into your hair.

You shut your eyes.

“I am not what they think,” you said.

“I know.”

The words should have soothed. Instead they terrified.

“I am not gentle.”

“I know.”

“I wanted Ser Jon punished.”

His arms tightened, but he did not release you.

“I know.”

“I ruined Helicent because she angered me. Not because she deserved it.”

A long breath. “I know.”

“Then why do you still look at me as if I can be saved?”

Baelor drew back enough to hold your face between his hands, as he had when you were a child with blood on your palms.

“Because needing discipline is not the same as being damned,” he said. “Because darkness in the blood is not commandment. Because you are mine, and I will not surrender you to the worst thing that recognizes you.”

You looked away. “Aerion says you love a star.”

“I love my daughter.”

“He says he sees me.”

Baelor’s eyes shone then, not with tears quite, but with something too deep for pride to bear.

“He sees what flatters his own hunger,” he said. “And perhaps he sees some true part of you, yes. I will not lie. That is why he is dangerous. Lies are weaker than truth. But he would take that true part and feed it until it consumed every other thing you are.”

You thought of Aerion’s mouth stained with his own blood beneath the roses. Aerion’s voice in the sept calling you monstrous as though laying a crown at your feet. Aerion telling Baelor that he knew what you were beneath honor and songs.

“And if I want to be consumed?” you whispered.

Baelor’s face broke.

Not fully. Baelor Breakspear was made of stronger stuff than that. But something in him flinched, and you felt crueler than you had with Helicent, crueler than with Ser Jon, crueler than any time you had smiled while men destroyed themselves hoping for you.

“Then I will stand in the fire as long as I can,” he said.

You could not answer. Far above you, the dead dragon grinned.

After that, Baelor tried to send you away. Not far. Not cruelly. He suggested Dragonstone first, with companions and guards, under the pretense of visiting old household shrines and taking sea air. When you refused, he suggested Summerhall. When you refused that, he spoke of Dorne, of your kin, of sun and distance, of court growing too crowded and your name too often on unworthy tongues.

“You mean Aerion,” you said.

“I mean danger.”

“You mean Aerion.”

Baelor did not deny it.

Aerion heard by nightfall.

You had begun to suspect the walls loved him more than you. They carried him every secret. Or perhaps secrets, like lesser creatures, feared what he would do if kept from him.

He came to your chamber door after midnight.

Jeyne tried to bar him. Poor brave Jeyne, who still trembled when he entered a room yet stood before him with one hand on the latch because she loved you in her small mortal way. You heard his voice from within.

“Move.”

“My prince, the princess is retired.”

“Move.”

“She cannot receive—”

The door opened.

Not violently. That was almost worse. Aerion had not broken it. He had simply made the guard open it. Your guard. Baelor’s guard. The man stood outside looking sick with shame.

Aerion entered.

You were by the window in a silver robe, hair unbound, the moon making you look like something already dead and sung about. Jeyne remained near the door, pale and shaking.

“Leave,” Aerion said.

She looked to you. You nodded once. Jeyne fled.

Aerion closed the door.

“You are not coming into my chamber at night like some sellsword in a bad song,” you said.

“I am already here.”

“Leave.”

“No.”

You almost smiled despite yourself. “You do enjoy being simple.”

He crossed the room. “Baelor means to send you away.”

“My father means to protect me.”

“From me.”

“Yes.”

He stopped before you. The moonlight loved him too, traitorous thing. It silvered his hair, hollowed his cheeks, turned his eyes into dark violet flame. He looked less like a man than a curse dressed in royal skin.

“You would go?” he asked.

“If I wished.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one you deserve.”

His hand closed on the window ledge beside you. Stone scraped beneath his ring.

“You will not leave me behind.”

“You keep saying that as though the world obeys repetition.”

“It obeys blood.”

“No. You obey blood because it tells you what you want to hear.”

“You want it too.”

You looked at him sharply.

Aerion leaned closer. “Do you think I do not feel it? When we are in a hall and every lesser creature vanishes? When some lord speaks and you smile like a painted idol, but your eyes are empty until I make you angry? When your father calls you star and you soften, yes, but some part of you looks past him for fire?”

“You are vile.”

“I am right.”

“You are vile because you are right only often enough to make your wrongness dangerous.”

His smile came then, sudden and brilliant.

“You should have been born my sister.”

The words struck the room like a dropped torch.

Not because they were impossible. In your house, impossibility had long ago been made subject to royal will. But because he spoke them not as jest, not as scandal, not as wicked flirtation. He spoke them with envy. As though cousinhood were too weak a chain. As though he resented even the small distance blood had placed between you. As though he wished the old dragonlords had bound you closer before either of you drew breath.

“You are mad,” you said.

“No. I am devout.”

“To yourself.”

“To us.”

“There is no us.”

Aerion touched your hair then.

You should have stopped him. Instead, you watched his fingers move through silver gold strands as though handling a holy relic he intended to steal from its shrine.

“There has always been us,” he said. “Before words. Before shame. Before Baelor tried to make you good and court tried to make you harmless.”

“I am not harmless.”

“I know.”

“You do not make me powerful.”

“No.” His hand tightened slightly in your hair. “I make you honest.”

You caught his wrist.

For a moment, you were children again over a dying beetle, over a broken horse, over blood in a rosebush. For a moment, there were no proposals, no guards, no fathers, no dead dragons beneath the Keep, no future tourney waiting to open its jaws. Only Aerion looking at you as if you were the only altar he had ever approached without mockery.

Then he kissed you.

This time, it was almost gentle at the start, which made it more frightening. His mouth touched yours like a question he would punish you for answering incorrectly. His hand remained in your hair. Yours remained around his wrist. The whole room seemed to hold its breath.

Then you bit him again. He laughed into the kiss, and gentleness died.

You pushed him back first. Not far. Enough to make refusal plausible. Enough to make wanting deniable.

“You do not come here again,” you said.

“I will come wherever you are.”

“My father will kill you.”

“No,” Aerion said, touching his bleeding lip with his thumb. “Your father is too honorable to kill what he fears before it sins publicly.”

You went cold.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he will wait. Good men always wait. They call it justice while the world catches fire.”

You stared at him. Perhaps some god leaned close then. Perhaps some dead dragon stirred in whatever hell housed old Valyria. Perhaps fate, bored of subtlety, placed its hand upon the board. Because for a moment you saw it. Not clearly. Not enough to name. But something...a tourney field, shouting, bright armor, Baelor’s face beneath a helm, Aerion laughing somewhere beyond reach, blood on ground.

Then it was gone. Aerion saw the change in you.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Lie better.”

You turned away. “Go.”

This time, after a long silence, he did.

At the door, he paused.

“If Baelor sends you away,” he said, “I will follow.”

You did not look back.

“If he locks you in a tower, I will climb it. If he gives you to a lord, I will make you a widow before you learn to sign your new name. If he sends you across the sea, I will teach the sea to burn.”

“You cannot burn water.”

Aerion smiled faintly.

“Then I will become the first dragon who can.”

The door closed behind him. You stood alone in moonlight with your heart beating like wings trapped beneath bone.

The next morning, you told Baelor you would not leave court.

He looked at you for a long time. Then, slowly, he nodded, as though you had confirmed something he had prayed to be wrong about.

That evening, the court gathered for another feast, because courts do not cease feasting merely because ruin has taken a seat among them. Musicians played. Lords drank. Ladies glittered. Valarr laughed too loudly with friends. Maekar sat stern and unsmiling beside men who feared him. Baelor watched you from the high table with love sharpened into vigilance.

Aerion stood across the hall in black and red. He did not approach you at first. He let others do so. That was worse.

He watched a young lord from the riverlands bow over your hand. Watched a Reachman praise your gown. Watched a knight ask whether you would honor the lists at the next tourney. Watched you smile, answer, withdraw, grant nothing while seeming to grant warmth enough to keep them alive another day.

Then a lordling too drunk on wine and courage leaned close and said something no man should have said to Baelor Breakspear’s daughter. You did not flinch. You smiled. The lordling smiled back, relieved, stupid, doomed.

Across the hall, Aerion began to move. You lifted one finger. Barely. A command so small no one else saw it. Aerion stopped.

The lordling continued speaking, unaware that his life had just passed through your hand like thread through a needle. You leaned nearer, listening as though amused. Then you answered him softly enough that no one else heard. Whatever you said drained the color from his face. He bowed. Stumbled. Left the hall before the next song began.

Aerion watched him go. Then he looked at you. For the first time all evening, you smiled at him. Not sweetly. Not gently. Not as the perfect princess. His face changed. There you are, his eyes said.

But this time, beneath the dragon banners, with Baelor’s gaze upon you and half the realm unknowingly gathered around the mouth of a tragedy, you did not look away.

You raised your cup. Aerion raised his. Blood calling to blood. Fire answering fire.

And somewhere beyond the walls, beyond court and candlelight and all the fragile laws men made to keep princes from becoming monsters, Ashford waited.

© aerrions

[fluttervoid]

✦ — ALL HE WANTED ..!

summary: breaking up with aerion targaryen was the easy part. though nothing was truly ever easy when it came to him. it was everything after that nearly broke you, but you found out too late that it had only just began. (6k+)

pairing: aerion targaryen x fem!reader

content: modern au, dark themes, obsessive/possessive behaviour, stalking, harassment, abusive relationship, physical violence, non-con (implied/non-graphic), coercive control, threats, toxic relationship, unhealthy dynamics, drug use, alcohol use, blood mention, 18+ (MDNI)

note: please take in consideration this is a dark fic! if you aren’t comfortable with the tags (it’s aerion what do u expect), please scroll past. any hate will be blocked! i also wanted to give credits since i was inspired by a scene of one of rafe’s fic @/cherienymphes had written, for the ending of the last scene of my fic!

Nobody warned you that breaking up with someone didn’t necessarily mean they left. 

You had done everything right, technically. You had the conversation, said what needed to be said, walked out when it was done. You had not cried in front of him, which you were quietly proud of. You had gone home and sat on the bathroom floor and cried there instead, which felt like a more dignified arrangement. And then you had gotten up and wash your faced, telling yourself that was the hard part over with.

What nobody mentioned was the part that came after. 

Aerion had not argued when you ended it. That was the thing you kept turning over in the weeks that followed, lying awake at two in the morning while your phone lit up on the nightstand with yet another number you didn't recognise. It was probably the thirtieth number you had blocked throughout the whole month.

You understood now that his silence had not been acceptance. 

It had been Aerion deciding he was going to handle this his own way, on his own timeline, and that your opinion on the matter wasn't something he particularly cared about.

The messages were the worst part. When he was high off whatever his friends put in front of him, or whatever he got from the provider he had been loyal to since college, you knew it immediately from the way the texts came in.

UNKNOWN: you're going to fucking run back to me. you always do. 

UNKNOWN: you think hiding away forever is the solution. i need you. that night was a fucking mistake.

That night.

You hadn't even noticed your eyes beginning to water until they were. The memory of it arrived the way it always did, without permission. Him drinking, sniffing whatever was put in front of him after yet another argument with his father, a man who expected everything from a son who had already given up everything trying to prove he was worth it. Aerion had been wound tight all evening, looking for somewhere to put it.

And he found that  somewhere.

Valarr, his cousin, your friend since you were teenagers, had called you pretty. The same way he always did, the same easy compliment he had given you a hundred times over the years. It had never meant anything. It had never been meant as anything. But Aerion had not been in the mood for context that night, and you had paid for it.

It wasn't like the other times, where his hands would find your throat until your vision spotted and then he would let go, coming back to himself, apologising over and over in that way that left you no room to do anything but accept it because of the hold he had on you even in those moments. Those times you had told yourself it was the drink, or the coke, or his father, or something outside of him that turned him into that. You had been very good at finding things to blame that weren't him.

That night he had taken you forcibly, ignoring your pleas, ignoring your apologies, and you still didn’t fully understand why you had apologised at all. Like the instinct to make yourself smaller had been so deeply worn into you by then that it came out even that, even in that. He ignored all of it. Took you over and over again, leaving bruises each time, his hand at your throat until the edges of everything went dark and you weren't sure for a moment which way it was going to go.

That night was different. That night he did not come back to himself. Or maybe he had, and that was the thought you couldn't stop sitting with.

You had never wanted to forgive him for it. You had wanted out before things got to a place there was no coming back from. So you left. And then you found out that leaving and being free were not the same thing at all.

You stared into the pool, eyes fixed on the way the sun moved across the surface of the water while your best friends Kiera and Ella talked beside you. You were not in the mood to talk but you were not in the mood to be alone either. You had been alone for the past few months, barely leaving your room, half convinced that if you went anywhere he would find you. That somehow, no matter where you went, he would already know.

Which was not as irrational a fear as it probably sounded.

He had always known things he shouldn't. Where you were, who you were with, what time you finished work on any given day. When you were still together you had told yourself it was because he paid attention, that it was a kind of love, the obsessive cataloguing of you. Now you understood it for what it was. A man who had decided a long time ago that you were something he owned, and had acted accordingly ever since.

The bruises had faded. That was the thing about bruises, they always faded, and then there was nothing left to show anyone and you were just a girl with a story that sounded worse every time you tried to say it out loud.

You had not told anyone. Not Kiera, not Ella, not a single person. They knew something had happened, you could tell from the way they looked at you, that careful soft-footed way people looked at someone they thought might shatter if they pressed too hard. They thought you were heartbroken. You let them think that because heartbroken was something they could understand and sit with, heartbroken had a shape to it, a timeline. What you were carrying did not have a shape. It just had weight.

There was another reason you hadn't said anything, one you didn't like to look at directly. Aerion had never made an explicit threat. He didn't need to. It was in the way he had looked at you once, early in the relationship, when you had mentioned offhand that you had told your mother something small and private about him. Nothing serious. Just a passing comment. The way his expression had gone very still spoke volumes. 

He had told you that time that you should be more careful with what you said to people about him. 

You had understood the shape of that perfectly. You had not needed it repeated. Some part of you, the part that had learned to read him the way you read weather, knew without being told what it would mean if the wrong person heard the right thing. Aerion did not make empty gestures. He did not say things he didn't mean.

So you smiled and nodded when Kiera asked if you were okay. You sat in the sun and let Ella talk and made the right noises at the right moments and kept everything that mattered locked somewhere behind your sternum where it was at least safe, even if it wasn't comfortable.

Your phone was face down on the lounger beside you. You had stopped turning it over to check it because checking it had started to feel like something he had trained you to do. Like a reflex that belonged to him rather than you. Screen lights up, stomach drops, and somewhere across the city Aerion Targaryen gets exactly what he wanted. You were trying, very deliberately, to stop giving him things he wanted.

UNKNOWN: i know where you are.

That one had come through at eleven last night. No follow up. Just that, sitting there on your screen, and you had put the phone face down and stared at the ceiling for an hour and told yourself it was a bluff. That he was just saying it to see what you would do. That he didn't actually know.

You were not entirely sure it was a bluff.

"You've gone quiet," Ella said beside you.

"I'm always quiet," you said.

She nudged your shoulder and said something about the guy across the pool and went back to talking to Kiera, and you smiled at the right moment and nodded and let the conversation wash over you like background noise.

Your phone buzzed against the lounger.

You felt it before you saw it. That specific dread, low in the stomach, that you had developed somewhere around the second week after the breakup and had not been able to shake since. You reached over and turned it face up without letting your expression change.

UNKNOWN: i'm sorry. you know i'm sorry. i just need you to talk to me, five minutes, that's all i'm asking. you can't keep doing this to me. 

UNKNOWN: you're seriously going to throw away two years over one night. one night. 

UNKNOWN: pick up the phone. i know you're seeing these.

UNKNOWN: i love you. why are you doing this to me.

You turned the phone back over.

One night. That was what he called it. One night, like it was a misunderstanding, like it was something that had happened to both of you equally, like you were the one being unreasonable for not getting over it. You had noticed he never said what that night actually was. Never named it. Just called it a mistake, called it one night, kept it vague in a way that made it easier for him to believe whatever version of it he had constructed for himself.

You stared at the water.

Even if you had wanted to do something about it, the thought of it was almost funny in a way that had no humour in it at all. The Targaryens had money that went back further than anyone in this city could trace, and what came with that kind of money was the kind of reach that meant things disappeared. Complaints. Records. People, sometimes, you suspected, though you had no proof of that and did not want proof of that. His father sat on the board of half the institutions in the city. His uncle had been a judge for twenty years. You had heard Aerion mention, once, casually, the name of the chief of police at a dinner like it was someone he had known since childhood.

Because it was someone he had known since childhood.

You had nowhere to go with any of it. That was the thing nobody told you about this kind of situation, the particular helplessness of it. It wasn't just that you were scared. It was that being scared was completely rational and there was nothing you could do with that except sit with it.

It was a gathering where you saw him next.

Your parents had given you no real choice in the matter. It was Aerion's father's birthday celebration, held at the Targaryen estate the way all their events were, because the Targaryens did not go anywhere to be entertained, people came to them. Your parents had been close with them for long enough that declining was not a conversation anyone was willing to have. Not that they had asked you. They had told you, the way they told you most things, with the assumption that you would arrange yourself accordingly.

You had tried anyway.

"I don't feel well," you had said that morning, which was true in every sense that mattered.

Your mother had looked at you over her coffee with the expression she reserved for things she had already decided. "You'll feel better once you're dressed."

"Mum."

"We're not doing this today." She had set her cup down and that was the end of it.

So here you were, walking through the doors of a house that had always made you feel small, not because it was unwelcoming but because it was the kind of place that was designed to remind you of the distance between what you had and what the Targaryens had. Every room was immaculate. Every surface deliberate. You had been here before, plenty of times, and it had never stopped feeling like walking into somewhere you had to behave yourself in a dress your mother had picked out, with your back straight because she had tapped it twice and looked at you in the way that meant she was watching.

"Put a smile on your face," she said now, fixing your dress strap with brisk efficient hands. "You look miserable."

"I feel sick," you said. "I told you I didn't want to come. Maybe that's why I look miserable."

"You're here now so make the best of it." She smoothed the strap and stepped back to look at you. "You're representing this family tonight, act like it."

"I'm always representing this family," you said, quietly enough that she chose not to hear it.

Your father had already drifted toward a group of men near the bar, that particular energy he got at these things, the one where he became slightly larger than his usual size, louder, readier to laugh. He and two other men were already congratulating each other on something, the way they always did, finding new occasions to celebrate the fact of their own wealth. It made your stomach turn in a way that had nothing to do with Aerion and everything to do with the simple fact that you had been brought to this place like an accessory and were now expected to perform accordingly.

"Go and say hello to the Strongs," your mother said, already turning toward someone she recognised across the room. "And smile, for god's sake."

You smiled. It didn't reach anywhere near your eyes but it was a smile, technically, and that was what was being asked of you.

You took a glass from a passing tray and stood near the edge of the room and kept your back to the door and told yourself you were fine. That he was probably not even here yet. That you could get through one evening. That you had gotten through worse.

You had, in fact, gotten through worse.

You were still telling yourself that when you felt it. That pressure at the back of your neck. The feeling of being watched by someone who wanted you to know they were watching.

You did not turn around.

You took a sip of your drink and fixed your eyes on the middle distance and kept your face completely still and thought, very clearly, do not turn around.

Your mother reappeared at your elbow with the bright social smile she wore at these things like a second outfit. "Doesn't this look wonderful," she said, meaning the room, meaning the flowers, meaning all of it. "The Targaryens really do know how to put on an event."

"They really do," you said.

"Are you going to stand here all evening or are you going to circulate?"

"I was going to stand here for a few more minutes," you said. "Then circulate."

She gave you a look. "Your father and I didn't raise you to stand in corners."

"I'm not in a corner, I'm near a wall."

"Don't be smart." But there was a flicker of something almost amused in her face before she smoothed it away. She touched your arm briefly. "I know you didn't want to come. I know things have been hard lately." A pause, the closest she was going to get to asking. "Are you alright?"

You looked at her. Your mother, who loved you in the practical unsentimental way of someone who had never quite learned how to say it plainly. 

"I'm fine," you said. "I promise."

She looked at you for a moment longer than usual. Then she nodded and someone called her name across the room and she was gone, and you were alone again with your drink and your straight back and that feeling at the back of your neck that had not gone away.

You turned around.

He was across the room, glass in hand, talking to someone you didn't recognise, and he was already looking at you. He had probably been looking at you since the moment you walked in. His expression was unreadable in the way it always was when he was being careful, and he did not look away when your eyes met his, and neither did you, for three seconds, four, and then you looked away first because you always looked away first and you hated yourself a little for it every time.

You took another sip of your drink.

You were fine.

As time passed and your mother finally stopped circling back to check on you every ten minutes, you slipped out unnoticed. No one saw you go. That was the thing about these gatherings, everyone was too busy performing for each other to notice when someone left the room.

You had always loved their garden. Even as a child coming here with your parents you had liked it, the scale of it, the way it felt like a different world from the noise inside. The lawn was immaculate the way everything the Targaryens owned was immaculate, and the pool lights cast everything in shifting blue, and the party behind you became background noise, then less than that. You sat down on one of the tanning beds beside the pool and set your drink on the stone beside you and looked at the water and let yourself just breathe for a moment.

You let yourself think about it out here, away from the performance of being fine. How he had not always been like this. As children he had been different with you than he was with everyone else, quieter, less sharp. In the years at the private academy he had looked out for you in ways that had felt, at the time, like straightforward kindness. You had thought you were special to him. You had thought it meant something.

Now you wondered if it had just been the earliest version of what came later. Control dressed up as care, years before he had anything to control. The thought sat in your chest like something cold.

He wasn't always the way he was now. You knew that. But you also knew that people who had been given everything their entire lives had a particular way of turning when something didn't go the way they expected. When the thing they wanted didn't come easily. When someone had the nerve to leave.

"Finally stopped hiding from me?"

You went rigid. The voice came from directly behind you, low and unhurried, and every muscle in your body locked at once. You could not make yourself stand. You could not make yourself turn around. You just sat there with your hands in your lap and your eyes on the water and said nothing.

He came around to the side of the tanning bed, not in front of you, beside you, and when you still would not look at him he waited. He was patient like that. He had always been patient when it served him.

"Look at me," he said.

You looked at the pool.

He made a quiet sound, not quite a laugh. He reached out and put two fingers under your chin the way he used to and turned your face toward his, and you let him because resisting felt more dangerous than not resisting, and that was the calculation you had learned to make without thinking.

He looked awful and beautiful the way he always did, pale eyes and that jaw and the specific way he held himself when he was angry and keeping it contained, which you recognised because you had seen it enough times to know what came after it. There was a muscle working in the side of his face. His eyes moved over you the way they always did, like he was taking inventory of something that belonged to him.

"You've been avoiding me all night," he said.

"I just needed some air," you said. Your voice came out steadier than you felt, which was the one small mercy.

"You've been avoiding me for three months actually." His thumb pressed once against your jaw, not painful, not yet, just there, just reminding you it was there. "Did you think I was going to let that go on forever."

You said nothing.

"Answer me."

"I didn't think anything," you said. "I just needed space."

Something shifted in his face. The contained quality cracked slightly at the edges and what came through underneath it was wose than anger, it was the particular cold of someone who had already decided how this was going to go and was now just moving through the steps of it.

Without much thought, you stood up, putting distance between you too, because sitting while he stood felt like exactly the wrong position to be in, some instinct you had developed along the way you couldn’t have explained but trusted. 

He was taller than you and he used it, stepping closer so you jad to tilt your head back to look at him, the pool light catching the pale of his eyes and making them look like something not quite warm.

"Space," he repeated, like he was tasting the word and finding it ridiculous.

"Aerion."

"Three months," he said. "You blocked my numbers. You had your mother turn me away at the door, telling me some bullshit excuse of how you're sick. You stood inside that room tonight and looked at me like I was someone you didn't know." His voice was very quiet, which was worse than if it had been loud. "And now you want to tell me you needed space."

"I want to go back inside," you said.

"No you don't."

"I'm going back inside."

You moved to step around him and his hand closed around your wrist,quite roughly, and you stopped. You both stood there in the blue light of the garden with the party a distant murmur behind the glass and his hand around your wrist and you not pulling away, your feet being stuck on the ground by some invisible force. The grip on your wrist became tighter as you tried pulling on it. Tears threatened to spill that moment, but you didn’t want him to think he still had a effect on you.

"I'm not done talking to you," he said.

"Aerion, let go."

He didn't.

"I have been patient," he said, and something in the word patient made your skin go cold, the specific way he said it, like patience was something he had extended to you as a favour and was now considering withdrawing. "Three months is patient. Most people would not have been patient."

You looked up at him and kept your face very still and said nothing.

"Nothing." He let out a short breath through his nose, something that might have been a laugh if it had any warmth in it. "After everything. After two years. You've got nothing." His voice climbed slightly on the last word, not loud enough to carry to the house, just loud enough that you felt it.

"Please let go of my wrist."

He looked at you for a long moment. Then he released it, slowly, one finger at a time, watching your face the whole time he did it.

"You can hide in your room," he said, his voice dropping back down to that quiet register that was worse than the louder one. "You can ignore every number I call from, stay inside, pretend I don't exist. But we both know, princess, that I'll get my way eventually." The smile that came onto his face then did not reach his eyes at all. "I'm giving you the choice. That's me being generous. But if you make me force my hand." He tilted his head slightly. "You know how I get when you force my hand."

He raised one finger and pointed it at you, slow and deliberate, the way someone corrected a child who had done something stupid.

"You've never been dumb. Don't start now."

Your voice came out before you had decided to use it. "You think I'm going to come running back to you." It cracked on the last word. You felt it crack and hated it.

"You almost killed me." The words came out of you like something that had been sitting behind your teeth for three months waiting. "That night. Because my friend complimented me. Your own cousin said I looked pretty and you almost killed me for it."

Something moved across his face. He stepped forward and you stepped back and then his hands were on either side of your face, both of them, palms against your cheeks and fingers pressing in just past the point of comfortable, and he put his forehead against yours and looked at you from an inch away.

"I told you it was an accident." His voice was rough at the edges in a way that might have sounded like remorse if you didn't know him. "I'm sorry. I told you I was sorry. I needed you and you left me like I was nothing." His fingers pressed harder into your cheeks. "Like I was some dog you got tired of."

The pool light made strange shadows of his face this close. You could feel his breath. Your hands came up and pushed against his chest and he stepped back, one step, two, and let you create the distance, and you understood without being told that he was letting you because he was choosing to and not for any other reason.

"I said sorry." His jaw was tight. "How many times do I have to—"

"I don't care." Your voice was steady now, steadier than it had any right to be. "We're done. Leave me alone."

You turned and walked back toward the house. Even pace. Head up. You did not look back and you did not run, because if he got his hands on you again out here in the dark with nobody watching, some part of you understood very clearly that the walk back inside might not happen at all.

You were a mess.

That was the only honest way to put it. Kiera and Ella had dragged you to some college party at a house that belonged to somebody's parents, which meant every surface was sticky and the drinks were strong and nobody was being careful about anything. You had told yourself it would help. Getting out of your room, being around people, letting the noise of it drown out the noise of your own head for a few hours.

It had not helped.

It had been another month since the birthday party. Another month of the truck appearing two cars back when you drove to the store. Another month of watching Kiera's driveway from her bedroom window and seeing headlights sitting at the end of the road that didn't belong to anyone on the stree, except for a certain someone. You had started checking the bears he had given you throughout the relationship, the stuffed ones that sat on your shelf that you hadn't been able to throw out, pulling at the seams and turning them inside out looking for something small and black and electronic. You had found nothing. You didn't feel better for finding nothing.

The paranoia had weight to it now. It sat on you even when there was nothing to justify it, which maybe meant you were losing your mind, or maybe meant you had simply learned to read him well enough that your body stayed afraid even when your eyes couldn't find a reason.

Nobody at this party knew any of that. They knew you and Aerion had broken up. You had said something vague about it not working out, the kind of language that closed a conversation before it could open. Your mother even still lit up hopefully every time his name came up, convinced that whatever had happened was the kind of thing that sorted itself out with time. You had stopped correcting her. It was easier.

You sat on the porch steps with a bottle of water Kiera had pressed into your hands and tried to make the world stop tilting.

"You look ill," she said, watching you with that expression she had been wearing for months, the soft worried one she thought you didn't notice.

"I'm okay," you said, which was not true, but was the answer that ended the conversation fastest.

"Do you want anything else before I go?"

You looked up at her. Your eyes felt glassy, oversized, like they were taking up too much of your face. "Where are you going."

She caught the tone immediately. "I'm getting the car and taking you home. Ella can come too, this party's terrible anyway." She smiled. "I haven't had a drop of alcohol, I promise, scouts honour"

You nodded. Saying something that sounded like okay.

She went back inside. You sat with the water bottle and watched the dark end of the driveway and waited.

Fifteen minutes passed. More. You called her and listened to the dial tone, four rings, five, and then she picked up and behind her voice was wind and music and other voices and the specific ambient sound of a car already in motion.

"Hey, sorry," she said, slightly too loud. "I ran into that guy from the golf club and he's with some people and they're heading out, so—"

"Kiera, you were my ride."

"It's fine, it's sorted." The way she said it told you she already knew it wasn't. "I ran into Aerion inside. He said he'd take you home."

The porch went very still.

"He said you'd already talked and you said it was fine."

"I never spoke to him." Barely above a murmur now. Your eyes were already moving across the driveway, across the cars, scanning the dark between them. "I never said that."

"It'll be—"

"I'll call Valarr." You hung up.

You were already moving, off the steps and into the driveway, putting distance between yourself and the house. The music dulled behind you. The street ahead was dark and quiet and you walked fast with your phone in your hand and your bag pulled close, telling yourself that if you could just get far enough before he noticed you were gone you would be fine.

You called Valarr. It rang out.

Again. Four rings, five. 

Nothing.

You tried a third time and kept walking and your fingers wouldn't stop shaking and you were still looking down at the screen trying to think of someone else, anyone else, when the headlights appeared at the far end of the road behind you.

You didn't have to look up to know. You had spent enough nights lying awake listening for that engine from your bedroom window that your body recognised it before your mind finished the thought.

And so before you could register what you were doing, you ran.

Behind you his voice came out of the open window, calling your name, and there was no urgency in it at all. It was hurried and patient,  like he was calling after someone who had forgotten something and hadn't noticed yet. The engine revved once and then the car door slammed and his footsteps hit the pavement and the sound of them was already wrong, too fast, stride too long, the distance between you closing in a way that made the running feel almost pointless.

You kept going anyway because there was nothing else to do.

His hand closed around your arm and he pulled you back hard and you fought him, properly, in a way you hadn't let yourself at his father's party where there were windows and people and a whole house full of reasons to stay contained. Out here the street was empty and dark and there were no reasons left. You scratched at his hands and twisted and tried to get your weight low enough to break his grip, your bag sliding off your shoulder somewhere in the process, your phone hitting the ground behind you with a crack you felt more than heard. He got both arms around you then and you threw your elbow back as hard as you could and heard the breath go out of him and when you brought your knee up between his legs he made a sound and his hold went loose.

You ran again. It had been three steps, maybe even four.

He came down on you from behind, full weight, and the pavement came up fast and hard and the impact went through your palms, your knees and rattled your teeth together. You lay there for a moment because your body had decided that was what was happening now, the world tilting at the edges, something warm starting at your hairline and threading slow and certain down toward your temple.

You pressed your fingers to your head. Pulled them away and looked at them in the dark.

Dark, and unmistakably red.

He got up first. He stood over you breathing hard and his face had that quality you had learned to be most afraid of, the one that was worse than the loud angry version, where everything on the surface went flat and still and whatever was underneath got colder and more decided.

He didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at you on the ground.

"You forced my hand," he said. "I told you not to."

Your arms shook as you tried to push yourself up. He grabbed you before you managed it, got his hand under your arm and hauled you upright in one motion and you stumbled against him and he was already walking, his grip on your wrist locked in a way that didn't leave room for anything else. 

“Aerion–no, please.” The words came out already broken and he didn't slow down.

He put you in the passenger seat himself. Reached across and did your seatbelt like it was just something that needed doing, calm and efficient, and then he closed the door and you sat there watching him through the windscreen as he walked back down the street to where your things had fallen.

He picked up your bag. He picked up your phone, or what was left of it, and turned the cracked screen toward the light.

His jaw went tight. The muscle in the side of his face moved once.

He looked up and found your eyes through the glass. You knew in that moment that Valarr's name was still on the screen. The call log open, four attempts sitting there unanswered. He held your gaze through the windscreen for a long moment and you pressed yourself back against the seat without deciding to, some reflex that no longer needed a decision attached.

He took his time walking back.

He got in. Started the engine. Put his seatbelt on slowly, deliberately, clicking it into place and then letting his hands rest on the wheel for a moment, and you understood without it being said that he was doing it slowly on purpose. That he wanted you to watch him take his time. That he wanted you to understand there was no rush. That he had all of it.

You tried your door handle, though it was to no avail as it was locked.

You tried it again, with both hands, ignoring his voice telling you quit it. Without thinking much of it, you reached across toward the centre console, though as you did that he jerked the wheel without warning. The car lurched hard into the oncoming lane and snapped back, and you hit back into your seat with your heart slamming against the inside of your chest.

"I said stop." Eyes on the road, while the speedometer continued to climb.

You pressed yourself against the door and watched the streetlights start to blur and said nothing.

He drove without speaking for a while. His silences had different volumes and you had spent two years learning to read them. This one had that quality of him organising himself, finding the shape of what he wanted before he said it. That kind had always been more frightening than the loud kind. The loud kind you could see coming.

"I told you not to be dumb." Almost conversational. Like he was reminding you of something you had both agreed on a long time ago. "I said it to your face."

He scratched his jaw, a habit he did when he was pissed. 

"Valarr." He let the name sit by itself in the air for a moment. A short sound left him that was not quite a laugh. "You really thought Valarr was going to get you out of this one."

The tears spilled over and you turned your face toward the window so he couldn't see them, because crying in front of him had always felt like handing him something and you had been trying for months to stop giving him things.

"Take me home," you said, as evenly as you could manage. "Please, Aerion. Just take me home."

"Why would I do that."

He exhaled slow and heavy through his nose and when he spoke again the controlled surface of his voice had started fraying at the edges, that quality it got when he had been holding something back past the point where holding it was possible.

"I apologised. I did everything right, I said sorry, and then you stood there and ended it anyway. Right when things with my dad were the worst they've ever been." His palm came down on the wheel. The car jumped with it. "Right then. That's the moment you chose." He glanced over at you and the car drifted before he corrected it. "Do you hear me."

You nodded. Small. Just enough.

"Slow down," you said. "Please slow down."

He was not slowing down.

"I tried to talk to you at my dads party. I tried and you looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was something you'd scraped off the bottom of your shoe." Another hit on the wheel, harder. "After two years." The speedometer kept moving. "But we're talking now. Now you're listening."

"You almost killed me." The words broke out before you could catch them, two months of keeping them down and they came out thin and raw and you couldn't stop them. "That night. You almost killed me because Valarr said I looked pretty. Your own cousin." Repeating the words from the party.

"I'll kill us both right now.”

He said it quietly. Plainly. The same voice he might use for anything, no performance in it, no rise or drama, just stated like a fact, and at the same moment he pulled the wheel left and the car crossed the centre line and the headlights ahead were white and enormous and still growing and the truck's horn tore the night open and you pressed both hands flat on the dashboard and the sound that came out of you didn't sound like your voice at all.

"Say the words." Completely calm. Eyes on the light coming toward you. "You know what they are, you know i’ll kill us both if i wanted too."

You looked at him with shock, eyes widened as tears fell freely now, not caring if he saw them. You shook your head no, being stubborn, but then he started speeding even more.

“Okay– okay! I’m sorry,” You say, your voice not sounding like yours. Though you knew that wouldn’t be enough to convince him. "I'm sorry, I love you, I swear, please, Aerion, please—"

He pulled the wheel right after a couple seconds.

The truck thundered past like a wall of sound and the car shuddered hard in its wake and then there was just the road ahead, and your own crying filling the space where all that noise had been. You couldn't stop it. You had stopped trying.

The silence came back slowly, settling around you both.

Then he laughed. Low and quiet, almost to himself.

"You know I was joking," he said. "Right?"

You pressed your forehead to the cold glass of the window and closed your eyes.

You said nothing. You both knew he wasn't joking and you both knew that. The silence it the car was loud. Something had shifted in you in those few seconds of the white light and blaring horn. Some last part of you that had still been holding on, still telling itself there was a door somewhere you hadn't found yet, a way through this if you kept looking. It had gone quiet. Not broken exactly. Just still in a way that felt like it might be permanent.

“I told you not to be dumb baby, I told you…”

There was no escape from him, now you had to pay for the consequences, and let it happen.

[a-certain-slant-of-the-light]

Aerion in Lys

After his brother Baelor’s tragic death in the Trial of Seven at Ashford, Maekar exiled his son Aerion Targaryen to Lys. Now he sends you to fetch Aerion back.

Pairing: Aerion Targaryen x Reader

Reader: A Targaryen, cousin to Aerion.

Warnings: Sexual content.

Word Count: 5.9k+

-

Damn Aerion. You watch the sea spray off the ship.

Days ago, Maekar summoned you to his solar. The guard opened the door for you. Maekar sat at his desk, head in one hand, the other writing. He rose and greeted you, never losing his scowl. Maekar had always been grumpier, but the something in him that could be brought begrudgingly to laughter had gone forever cold by the time the flames of his brother funeral pyre had burnt out at Ashford. 

“I’m sending for Aerion.” He corrected, “I’ve sent for Aerion. We’ve yet to get a message to him, or one he will listen to, at any rate.” You wait, hands clasped before you. “I ask you to go to Lys and bring him back.” 

And you see it: Aerion has listened to no messenger; Maekar cannot leave his duties here; Aerion’s brothers, the ones old enough to go, wouldn’t suit: Daeron drunk, Aemon at the Citadel, and Aerion unlikely to listen to either. So, it is you, a cousin with fewer responsibilities, no drinking habit, and, one hopes, more clout than a messenger.

Maekar continued, “Mayhap he’ll listen to you. If not, you have my permission to have him captured and brought back as cargo.”

 The ship docks in Lys as the sun set orange. You inform the guards, “We’ll eat dinner on the ship and start our search tonight.” You hope to have Aerion in hand as soon as possible. From reports, he spent mornings sleeping, afternoons training, and then out to the taverns and pleasure houses. No rest for the wicked—or for those searching for them.

The captain is of Westerosi extraction, in service to the Targaryens out of Blackwater Bay, but some of his crew hailed from Lys and most of the men had been there before. You question them about which sort of establishments a Targaryen prince would be most likely to visit. You get various answers, mostly from sailors who would not look you in the eye—speaking to a lady of the royal family about such things, oh no. You finally take the expedient of a mug of ale and standing off behind the hold stairs while a guard did the questioning. 

One of the sailors, however, has no qualms about speaking to you. He is old, a few strands of scraggly gray hair, one eye, and three teeth, more or less. You slide the ale across the table and don’t even have to ask the question, it’s already been spread about the ship. 

“I’ll tell you where to find that prince. He’ll be in the Aviary. That’s where.” He takes a big swig, smacks foam from his lips. “You just head southeast from the docks and you’ll smell it, yes you will.”

“Smell it?”

He giggles. “Yes, yes, your ladyship, once you start smelling all them perfumes and flowers, you’re near. Looks like a big gold bird cage it does.” He describes some curves in the air with his broken and bruised fingernails.

“Thank you for your time.” 

He grasps at the ale, trying to drink it all down. “You can take that with you,” you say. He grins with all three of his teeth and hobbles out of the hold, ale in hand.

“We’ll start with the Aviary,” you tell the guards. 

“Yes my lady. We’ll report back.”

“No. Maekar sent me; I am going.” The guards shift behind you but don’t say anything.

 The old sailor was right—you did smell it. Compared to the Street of Silk in King’s Landing. Lys has a more sprawling pleasure district. Rougher, cheaper brothels double with taverns near the docks for just disembarked sailors. Further away from the water, the pleasure houses grow ornate, particular. Something for every sort of sinner. 

The guards walk at your shoulders; one slightly ahead and the other slightly behind. People bump in and out of doors, laughing. The choking perfume makes you miss the muddy salt and urine smell of the docks.

And, at the top of the street: the Aviary. The building itself is set within a structure of columns, fluted and gilded to look like a birdcage. Marble fountains splash. Multi-colored birds perch. You wonder who cleans up all the bird droppings. Music comes from somewhere inside through the white lattice work, a lighter, flitting sound over top with something sinuous underneath.

Inside, the birds turn human. Hanging from the ceiling on gold swings, girls with dresses made from plumage, purples and reds spilling down behind them, twist and writhe. Men and women lounge on pillows spread about on rugs. Slight serving girls with small silver bells circling their ankles and dressed in feathered skirts flit from patron to patron with trays of drinks. A dark man brushed past, catches your attention. Paint of gold outlines his eyes, a gold earring, brown hawk feathers fall in a short cape from his bare shoulders. He gives you an appraising look.

You scan the crowd looking for that pale bit of Aerion’s hair. “Looking for someone dear?” You look down. Beside you, a short, heavy woman stands, speaking close. She is older, large breasts pushed up in a low-cut, tight purple dress, the fabric wrapped about her. Her pale, thick makeup creases, eyes lined kohl, dark hair piled in curls on her head. The perfume of the street seems to emanate from her.

“Perhaps I could arrange a peacock for you?” She glances down your dark, simple clothes. “Or a peahen?”

“I’m looking for a man with hair like mine.” You push the hood of your cloak back. She takes in your straight silver and gold hair. Targaryen. Her eyes flit to the guards. You can feel the price ticking up. “I have just the—”  

You cut her off: “No, he’ll be a client.” 

“We don’t give out information about patrons.” Her accent seems to slip with each line. She rubs her white, pillowy hands together, each finger ringed, and you are sure her hands can count coin by weight alone without even looking. 

You gesture to one of the guards. You had arranged coin for bribes beforehand. You told the guard to keep the coins separate, only take out one at a time, no need to pull out a whole purse and let them see how much you had, how hard they ought to negotiate.

The guard has the coin in his hand and then its between the madame’s fingers and tucked away so rapidly you hardly catch it. Well, if the brothel business goes under, she always has pickpocketing to fall back on. 

“He’s upstairs with the dragon,” she says.

Of course he is. “Strange sort of bird,” you murmur.

There is a scuffle across the room. A large man already shoulders his way to the disturbance. “Excuse me.” The madame sails sway toward it. You lift your eyes and stalk through the crowd, the guards struggling to keep pace. 

Through open double doors, you make your way up the wide, white marble staircase, steps low and deep. The staircase corners round the perimeter of a courtyard garden below. Another fountain is in the center and, amongst the citrus trees, gilded cages with more bird-women. A man opens the door to one and the women steps out, lands a hand on his arm. Overhead, you can see the night sky through more open lattice work. No flying free here.

Upstairs, on a sort of wide balcony, there are fewer people and fewer clothes. Men and women twist together in the torchlight. You can feel the guards’ discomfort and are sure, in part, it has less to do with the nudity itself and more that you are here with them. If you were a man, on your return home, you’d ask Maekar for a knighthood. “Wait here,” you tell the guards. The hallway is short and you’d rather not have them sweating behind you.

The hall is lined with curtained rooms. You start lifting curtains. Inside, men and women couple. Scratch the knighthood, you’d ask for a lordship; and not one of those in-name-only ones, one with lands and income. Fewer people protest your intrusions than you’d think. Most are too occupied and too far gone on drink and whatever else they serve in Lys. You even get one invitation to join. Hospitable folk. One by one you lift and let fall the curtains. 

Toward the end of the hall, you lift a curtain to the largest room yet. A big, low bed set on a platform across the room. The back of a woman, her dark hair braided in a ridge down the center of her head. A netted web of rubies across her back. And you can imagine it: dragon scales. And there, lying naked in bed: Aerion. His pale hair and pale skin like stardust. You can see up his body, over the woman slithering low, his throat, the underside of his chin, and Aerion looks…bored. Like a man trapped by the dullest, most long-winded guest at the feast; a lord listening to the septon drone when he’d much rather be out hunting. A man imprisoned with no hope of either escape or release; the prisoner has stopped shouting for someone to come, given up looking for a loose stone in the dungeon, waits with nothing to wait for. 

He sees you. He says your name with a sort of perverse pleasure like mentioning something shocking at the dinner table, rolling it over his tongue like learning a new word in a foreign language—and a salacious one at that—like greeting an old friend long missed, like a gasp at unexpected news. And someone more interesting to talk to has come along at the feast; the sexton has stopped droning and the lord is out in the wood, hunting horn blowing; someone has come along with the key. Oh yes, Aerion would come back with you. 

The woman notices by now. She says to him, “Is that your wife?” 

“Worse,” you reply, “leave us.” The woman glances at Aerion, who only looks at you, and she slips out of the room. Aerion had nearly jerked to a seat when he saw you, but, remembering himself, relaxes back, lounging on the bed, making no effort to cover himself. You say with a sort of mock formality: “Prince Aerion Targaryen, your father has requested your presence in Westeros.”

“You came to fetch me,” he says.

Back to your normal tone: “Your father sent me.”

“Come here.”

You approach the bed and look down at him. Aerion’s pupils are wide and his eyes are too bright. He says, “Since you sent the girl away, you ought to finish what she started.”

“You’ve gotten too used to girls who take coin to do whatever you command.” You lean closer, say in almost a whisper,“You don’t pay me.” Aerion can feel the dance of your breath over his ear and his eyes widen. 

You straighten. “Get dressed.”

Aerion rises from the bed. You scoop his clothes from the floor and press them to him, go wait by the exit. Aerion considers his bundle of clothes, shoots you a look: “Dress me.” 

“Do you want me to send for one of the guards?” You don’t tell him what for. 

But Aerion stands there, challenging, with that little smirk on his face. You sigh and cross to him, pull his clothes from him, drop the pile on the bed. You shake loose his trousers. You can smell the alcohol coming off him. You bend, holding his trousers low. “Step in.” 

He plants a weighted hand on the back of your shoulder for balance. One foot, then the other. He lurches and bumps his bare hips into your cheek, pretending a stumble. You place a flat hand low on his stomach, just above, bend your knuckles so your fingernails dig into his abdomen, claws, look up at him sidelong: a warning. His bratty grin turns opened-lipped. Who’s the dragon now. 

You draw his trousers up, hands on either side of his hips, chest to chest. You pull his laces tighter than necessary. He sways into you with each tug of the laces. You pull his shirt over his head. When your knuckles graze his ribs, he arches into them. He leans his head forward into your neck as you settle the shirt on his shoulders. “Aerion.” You press him upright, hands to his upper arms. You don’t bother with the rest of it. He can walk barefoot to the ship. 

You gather his remaining clothes, boots, and sword. “Come,” you order. When Aerion stays, swaying on the spot, you shift the bundle of his belongings to one arm, grasp his elbow and march him out of the room. The whole routine pleases Aerion.

“You found him,” one of the guards says. You hope their swords aren’t as dull. Aerion wrests his arm from your grasp, flings it over your shoulder, rests his weight heavy on you like he has a twisted ankle or a broken leg, or maybe he’s just a prick. The guards hold out hands as if they might assist, take his clothes, hold Aerion. Their sword arms will be occupied, and it is like to cost you Aerion’s compliance, not getting to hang on you, instead you say, “Let’s go.”

The four of you head downstairs. Aerion is grinning against your ear. The guards help part the crowd and some curious, some glazed eyes follow you, as you stagger under Aerion’s weight and his listing stumbles.

Out in the street, you contemplate handing him to the guards anyway, because you do not see making it back to the ship in the current manner. Aerion pulls you towards a group of carts, two wheeled, long-handled contraptions held by wiry men. “Let’s take a rickshaw,” he slurs. You frown, but Aerion is already climbing in. Fine. “My lady,” he says holding out a hand with a mocking bow. You take it and step in, settle Aerion’s things on your lap. “To the docks,” you lean to tell the driver. The guards walk alongside.

With each lurch of the rickshaw, the full length of Aerion’s thigh, knee to hip, bumps against yours. He’s got his upper body twisted sideways and squints one-eyed at your profile. He lets out something like a snort and untwists his body, slumps, lets his head loll on to your shoulder, and he takes a big inhale. 

You glance down at him. You can see the straight line of his nose, the cut of his cheekbones. And, in the intermittent torch light, his pale hair, still the same. You don’t know what you expected. Maybe you thought he’d go softer. Softer with drink and loose living. Instead, he seems to have gotten sharper. Aerion has always be cutting, but someone has put an edge on him. He did not seem a prince just drug off silk in a perfumed pleasure house. No, he seems a man brought back from a long campaign of low rations, long marches, and brutal fighting.

Aerion’s eyes have closed now, pale eye lashes forming two crescent moons on his cheeks. His breathing has deepened. You have a strange urge to set your hand on his head: a benediction. Instead, you tighten your fingers in his bundle of clothes. The perfume fades and the sea returns.

At the docks, you shift under Aerion, give him a nudge. “Aerion.” He grumbles into your neck. You pass his clothes and sword to a guard. The other pays the rickshaw man. 

You get Aerion under his arms, work yourself back out of the rickshaw. Aerion steps out landing chest against chest, arms about you like a loose hug. He really was going to make you work for this, wasn’t he? You shift him to your side, his arm about your neck, shoulder up into his armpit. You loop an arm about his waist, the other hand on his stomach to hold him steady. The two of you set off up the gangplank, walking like you are already on a moving ship, swerving from one side rail to the other.

On the ship, you order the servants, “Arrange the prince a room.” Why this was not already done, you have to wonder. 

You let Aerion slide off onto one of the raised hold vents. He continues to lean against you, head to waist, shoulder to hip. You bump him with your hip, “Do you still have belongings at your house?” 

“I haven’t been there in ages,” he drawls.

You say to a guard: “See that someone retrieves the prince’s belongings from his house. Have them packed and brought to the ship tonight. Close out the lease. The Captain is most like asleep at this hour, so inform whoever is the awake senior-on-duty we’d like to leave as soon as the ship can be resupplied and ready.”

A servant has come back, “The room’s ready, my lady.”

You let two servants walk Aerion down and follow. They have prepared the room beside yours. They deposit Aerion on the bed. “That’ll be all,” you dismiss them.

By the single candle, you can see his outline sitting on the bed, edges all pale and silver. “Undress me,” Aerion commands. A great weariness settles over you. You stand before him. Aerion peers up at you, “You seem tired.”

“Have you learned empathy in your time abroad?”

“No. I say it because you look awful.”

“Having to chase after you. Go to sleep”

With two hands on his shoulders, you press him back onto the bed. You bend and swing his legs up, lift the sheets over him. “Good night, prince.” You blow the candle out and leave Aerion in the dark.

Before you retire, you have a guard posted outside Aerion’s door. No sense in letting the quarry escape.

The next morning, you come up onto the deck. The sea breeze lifts your hair. The captain needed a few hours of daylight to put the ship in order, but you got underway in good time only a few hours after dawn. 

It is late morning now and the sun is bright, glittering off the dark water. In all the glorious sea air, you find Aerion bent to the side of the ship, forearms folded, forehead resting on the rail. Lys didn’t let go so easily. You say, “For the wages of sin is feeling very sick on the ship the next day.” 

Aerion cuts eyes at you underneath his arm. He turns to look at you better, still using the ship rail to stay upright. You have looked off at the horizon, so he takes in your face, pale, thinner, shadows under the eyes the color of a faint bruise. It’s what niggled at him last night, even in the dark, even with his addled brain. Now here, in the full sunlight with a clear head (marginally), he sees it: eyes far off and a sort of bone-tiredness for which a few days at sea cannot account. And, Gods, you were still beautiful, your hair bright in the sunlight, a few pieces blown across your face. You lift a hand to brush a strand from your eyes, eyes like his eyes. Eyes he missed seeing, and you look back at him, and now he’s too far mired for his muddled morning-after mind, so Aerion turns again to the sea.

That night, as Aerion sleeps, better than he has all his time in Lys, he is woken by a sound, a voice.

You are in the dark again. And somewhere worse than the dark: the dreams. It is loud, so loud, and you must fix it, there must be a way. And then, above, underneath all the noise, you hear someone whisper your name, say your name, a voice you know. 

And you are back.

“Shh, it’s me, it’s me.” 

You’ve got a knife at Aerion’s throat; tip into his pulse point. You look from the knife to his level, glittering eyes. You lower the blade and Aerion extracts it from your hand, sets it aside.

And then you gasp like a swimmer breaking the surface after too long under. It is not really breathing like you’ve exerted yourself. More like your breath moves too fast and you heave just to stay on top of it, to keep up. The sheets are a tangle down at your feet and you realize you shiver.

The good people of Westeros would fain believe it, but the volatile Targaryen prince gathers you like a child into his arms, speaks soothingly. He sits on the bed and you press yourself into his chest like it might be a fortress you can escape into from whatever enemy assails you, if only you can get inside and close the gate in time. Your hands twist his clothes. He has got his arms around you, steady against your gasping. 

After a few moments—or maybe part the night, you cannot tell—when your breathing begins to quiet, you realize what he speaks into your hair: whispers of High Valyrian, all soft, hushing hisses and sibilant words. You take a shaky breath, getting mostly him—his skin, him, straight from sleep—and sigh. No longer pressing into him, just resting there.

“How long have you had the dreams?” He knows. He has seen them, the dreamers. His brother going half mad, trying to escape into his cups. You speak into his shirt, into his chest, “Since Baelor’s death.” He stays quiet with you.

And the next moment you are conscious to, is lying in the white light of dawn, golden arrows of light sliding across the opposite wall with the movement of the ship. Despite the cool sea air, you feel warm. Aerion is there against you. Your hands are loosely fisted in his shirt. 

He lies—awake, still, eyes to the ceiling. You can see his profile like a distant mountain range, his forehead to nose, over his lip to his chin, a valley steep to his throat. How long you have known that face, since childhood. It was always all the Targaryens, Baelor’s and Maekar’s families, yours, the brothers and cousins. You and Aerion sat at feasts together, travelled to tourneys together, rode on horseback and in wheelhouses together. You played as children together: cyvasse, fishing, imaginary games of dragons. All your life. Changed, of course, from young to grown, but still Aerion.

Your breathing has shifted enough for him to know you are awake. He glances at you, a check, then he gently releases your hands from him, gets out of bed, and walks out of the room like he had just come for a short, day-time visit or maybe like he had not been there at all.

 The next night, you go to Aerion’s room, barefoot in your shift. You do not knock, just open the door. He lies on the covers of his bed, legs extended, ankles crossed, hands behind his head. He lies like an effigy on a tomb, some stone-carved king reclined above his own bones in a hushed sept. His eyes cut to you and hold. The ship creaks, moves with the swell. 

You step toward Aerion, and he has a fleeting vision of you, dressed in white, as a phantom, some old sailor ghost story, some tale about a woman. But, you are real enough when you sit and your weight dips his pallet. 

You place your hands flat, even and level, fingers together, near his shoulders on either side of his chest. And you bow your head to Aerion. For a moment, you are profile to profile, foreheads, eyes, noses, lips, all pale familiarity in a sort of silvered mirror. You both go near colorless in the dark. 

Then, with breath of sea foam you touch his lips with yours. Aerion has a roar in his ears not of the sea, something continual and consuming. You pull back. 

Aerion lifts his pale head now, arms still behind him like a man in chains, reaches up for you, lips parted and brushes a breath of his own against your mouth. It is a moment pale and still. Then Aerion unbends an arm, reaches a hand for your face. He touches you like he reaches out for smoke from some extinguished candle, the white curves, the after-bones of fire that you can run a hand through and let twist and curl around your fingers. But his fingertips find the solid of your face, and he is a blind man at a statue, hands on a carved marble face, feeling the features, wanting more than eyes can see. His eyes follow his fingers across your cheekbones, along your jaw, a brush over brow bones—he might number your eyelashes—a pass over temples. His fingers leave the bones for the silk, a skim of your hair falling straight and pale, his hair. 

Then, he moves his fingers back to your face, to your lips where something warm and living breathes through all the pale stone. And his fingers hover there in that heat. The candle still burns. You look at each other, the dark glimmer. You close your eyes, lips which you press to his fingers as to the extended hand of a conquering king, on your knees, as to the forehead of a child. Aerion trembles.

He moves his hand full against you, palm and all, to cup your cheek, flush, and this is no spirit brush but contact, hot and complete. You tilt your head into his hands, cradled there. Your brow furrows and you turn your head into his palm. Forehead presses like the heat of his hand might burn away all the dreams. You can hear Aerion breathing now. His legs shift beside you, but he stills again and speaks, “Is it me you want or distraction from the dreams?”

Your gaze shifts from one of his eyes to the other and then finds somewhere in the space between you. Why did he ask, Aerion thinks, gods, he does not want the answer. The proud prince, the arrogant prince is, here, a thirsting man, who is offered water he refuses for a dislike of the taste, because the cup it is poured into is dented. And here you are, pouring him wine into a goblet, him gasping for want of drink, and he has the stupidity to ask for the origin of the wine. When he knows—he knows—he should drink it down: sweet, bitter, poisoned, tip it all back to the dregs because it comes from you. 

And behind that, the accusation. The dreams you cannot choose, either for or against, but must have. And he wonders how long he has. Not himself but you. Of course, the times are the same. The Targaryen dreamers go mad, die young. And its your mind he has relied on, he knows, the steady and strategic. He could wander through it, turning corners unexpected, into hanging gardens and columned buildings, a whole world bounded, and to have it all taken by the dreams as Valyria by the Doom. Something—to Aerion—hallowed made hollow. And the prospect, the potentiality burns through him like drinking wildfire. If you go, he will go. He knows it like an oath. Will follow you into madness, into death, into the dark abyss beyond, and, if he must, he will negotiate, fight, cheat his way through, out of, each of the seven hells to find you. 

But, here, his thumb presses into your cheek. You close your eyes and kiss his palm there where they made bloody cuts in ancient Valyrian wedding ceremonies. You back your wrist behind his and move to the inside where his blood flows thin to the surface, skin flickering, and there, you kiss, bite, teeth and lips close over the tendon, tongue to measure the beat of his pulse, holding his hand to you like it is something dear and sacred and necessary to your existence. 

Aerion brings his other hand up to thread through your hair. He pulls you down to him, and, lips to your lips, he drinks full and long and deep. 

You pull back. And you stand, lift hands to opposite shoulders, arms crossed, your own sept statue, and push your shift off your shoulders. It slides down arms, off waist and hips, and puddles there about your bare feet. Aerion looks, watches, sees, rapt. Then you return to the bed, his bed, lie your body down full and flat on his, flesh and blood. You lie down carefully as if onto a hard, stone surface with a long way to fall. Ribs to ribs, arms along his, hips meet, legs drape. You turn your head and he turns his so you rest cheek to cheek. 

Each of his breaths numbered oh so much more carefully now you rise and fall with them. Your hair skims loose on your back and falls to his arms. Something inside Aerion, some noisy part always seeking offense, stimulation, something prickly and proud, goes still. And it is just your weight and breathing. 

Your fingers curl against his, lifting your cheek, you run your palms over his face, eyes going with hands like you might mold his face in clay, and you breathe, “Aerion.” You replace your palms with lips, the tip of your nose brushing. 

There is so much territory to explore, to fill your head with: his pale eyebrows, the slight silver scar on his temple, the small divot under his nose, the shadow curve under his lips. And to his lips themselves you go open-mouthed, urgent. Your hands climb his jaw, cheekbones, into his hair there to twine, twist, hold, while his hands still rest on the bed. 

You pull yourself closer, knees bending, to straddle him, crouching like some kneeling, praying supplicant. Aerion opens his lips to you but stays still. You look into his eyes, hands on either side of his face like cupping water. “Aerion.” Then you bow your head along his jaw like it might be easier to speak without looking directly at him. There, you break, plead, nothing desperate it is past that. Desperate would be wheedling, crying, threatening, demanding, begging. So its really just an ask and maybe its for something more than the here-and-now, but an ask: “Aerion,” a breath, “Aerion.” 

His hand finds the back of your head. He grasps your hand and pulls you out, pulls you free, and maybe its selfish—his life takes its measure with yours—but then he thinks he would take the dreams, step in front of a sword swing meant for you, so he does what he can. He kisses you. It is fatalistic living, a dark light. But it is living, it is a light. For all the thought of darkness, dreams, cold stone, and stillness, there are still in both of you, dragons. The fire flickers warm from your stomachs, tongues of flame up your throats and it is enough to keep off the night, to keep out the dark and whatever beasts prowl there. 

You lift Aerion’s shirt clear of his head, blond hair tousling, eyes pale with watching. He watches you move down his body, not just mouth now, but teeth, over his pulse, down his throat from blood to bones, across his collarbone, his ribs, finding his hip bone like a landmark on a map, removing the rest of his clothes till he is pale as moonlight on the bed. Wrapping your hand around his ankle bone, you slide his foot up, bend his leg. Your other hand wraps, drapes, loose under and around his leg. You drag your nose up his calf and, at the crease of his knee, place your lips there in a pulling press, eyes closed, brow furrowed, and just the smell of Aerion’s skin, pressing deeper, holding tighter like an embrace after a nightmare. 

Aerion watches. Then he sits up and gathers you to him. Hands hold either side of your head, tangled deep in your hair, he crushes your face to his. He has you tight against his ribs, between his legs, and he turns you down to the bed. He puts his lips soft then teeth sharp to the side of your neck. You wrap your legs about him, a bent-fingered claw grasp to his back, set your own teeth against the top of his shoulder. And Aerion is there. He scrapes fingers up your neck into your hair and slides lower bites across your chest, but you do not want the full weight of him gone.

A desperate pull, a clutch at the shoulder, like someone who missteps, stumbles, on a narrow mountain path and reaches for the one thing within their grasp. Aerion raises his head, just, eyebrows lifted, and he see you, lets you pull him back even. He brushes the back of his fingers to your lips. I’m here. 

And you open your self up, Aerion to fill every gap, stopping leaks and places for drafts, anywhere the dreams could slip through like cold water, bone-chilling wind. Instead, you take Aerion, all heat and flames, into you. 

And you’d near forgotten what it was like to have fire in you. The dreams had damped your fire to an unendurable smolder, all choking smoke and miserable cold. You almost understood why Daeron drinks. If you could not have a full fire, better to pour onto it, dumping spirits by the cupful, extinguish it and go out with it. It was the surviving that hurt: not enough warmth, but you could not blink out into the encompassing darkness either, so you sat, still feeling the cold. 

And Aerion had fire to burn. His whole life had been setting the wrong things on fire: burning his family, burning at tourneys, seeing imagined slights and offenses that he fans into conflagrations. But here, with you, he could burn. Put fire into something that had been made to withstand it because it once had its own, into something that wanted it, someone who said ‘yes’, someone who said ‘Dracarys’ with their arms held wide because burning was preferable to the cold.

So Aerion burns through you, never back and away, but up and in. The flames move through your belly, limbs, fingers. You keep your face against his, turned into his neck where the blood runs blazing. As he moves, you can nearly smell the flames in the heat of his skin. And when you close your eyes, this time it is not that nightmare noise you hear but just a voice you know, Aerion’s voice, saying your name. This time it is not darkness that you see but a blinding white, the color of Aerion’s hair.

The fire settles to a warming glow, the natural heat that rolls of a dragon—or so the stories say. Aerion has his weight on you, each breath easier with him than without, rests his head in the hollow of your throat. His breath warm over your breasts. You bring a hand absently to his hair where it touches the underside of your jaw. And Aerion, in his twisted but devout sensibility, swears to himself, swears, he will keep the darkness, the coldness of dreams at bay, as long as he can he will burn. And, if you do go into the cold, into the dark, he will follow you, embrace the end in one final burn, drinking it down like a draught of wildfire.

[singse]

tagah immediately telling you that it's your job to repopulate the air normads as it's an honour to be chosen as the avatar's bride.

he's quite surprised by how strong your right hook is and maybe a little (very) turned on by your rage.

[vensianbae]

i have several requests that i plan on writing but there has been a car/pet emergency that occurred these past 2 days and im so drained from that but ill be trying my best to finish them :D

reqs are now closed bc i dont want to get burnt out .ᐟ.ᐟ

[tteokdoroki]

thinking about aang and how he'd purposely blow wind towards his sweethearts skirt to make it fly open or sumn

very much agree with this … he’s always using the twitch of his fingers to turn the breeze so that your skirts flip up and he can see the colour of your panties. he only does it if you’re walking alone together because whilst mischievous aang is the avatar and you are the love of his life !!!

“oh, blue today? they’re pretty.” he says all big and mountainous towering over you with a grin as easy as the breeze. “can’t wait to take them off with my teeth later — ow!”

he’d be sooo cheeky with it you have no choice but to slap him in the chest or hit him with your bending and aang just laughs because his chest is so firm and plush he hardly feels a thing against you. gripping your wrists in one big hand, voice tipping into a lower timbre tone. “careful now, sweetheart.”

and then later he’s burning through your clothes and down to your panties with fire bending on one hand and the other hand uses air bending to blow a calm coolness over your clit that has you writhing in place begging him for more ow

[vensianbae]

i wanna write but alas writers block

[vensianbae]

send in requests :P pleeeeeek .ᐟ.ᐟ nothing is too small or too big for me to handle i just wanna writeeeee

[vensianbae]

aang begging the spirits for mercy when he finds you bathing in the secluded waterfall you frequent. he cant help his body being glued shut on the ground, all while hiding behind the wall of forestry that conceals his very presence.

he eyes the glossy skin covered in suds of the soap you purchased last time you were in the city, putting them up to his nose for a sniff test, as you take the avatars opinion very seriously. he thinks about the scent and your natural essence being the perfect mixture— and has a certain eagerness he almost cant contain to feel it waft beneath his nose.

he knows how to keep quiet, very mindful of the twigs and bushes that could alert his being— but he doesn’t think that would be such a bad thing. besides, it seems like you’re having trouble cleansing harder to reach places. he hopes you don’t mind him lending a hand.

© vensianbae

[vensianbae]

i wanna write but alas writers block