cw:Β smutΒ (+18,Β MDNI!). canon divergence, modern!au, age difference (baelor is in his late 40s and reader in her late 20s), erectile dysfunction, oral (female!receiving), pussy pronouns, pussy worship, spanking, slight anal play, outercourse.Β |Β wc:Β 1633
modern!baelor targaryen x female!reader.
part one.
i just can't stop thinking about how BAELOR is older than the men you usually date, and the way he'd have you gripping the bedframe as he circles the tip of his tongue across your needy, throbbing, swollen clit.
it would be morningβthe sun has barely risen and he's lying in bed, with your clothes thrown carelessly around the vintage frame and his arms circled around your thighs. sunlight, warm and golden, would seep in through the blinds, bleeding across the wooden floor little by little, occupying the space as a clock, somewhere nearby, ticks, and ticks, and ticks.
it had rained the night before: not too violently, not for too long, just hard enough for a faint chill to remain whenever the wind blew in through a set of wooden blinds that were left open half-way. it makes the beams creak and the walls whistle, and it brings a shiver up your spine.
it is, after all, the beginning of summer.
BAELORβs hands, however, feel hot against your skin. his fingers are splayed along the expanse of your thighs, digits pressing into the plush skin as he circles them in a caress. and his tongue, running along your puffy, glistening folds, feels the warmest of all.
"look at how pretty she is," he murmurs, pointing his words with a lick. "how she throbs and leaks, begging for my touch. tastes so sweet, too. could justβmhm, could just lick her for hours."
he just about has been.
heβd started just as you were waking up, dragging his fingers along your slit under your sleeping shorts, sucking them into his mouth before asking you to ride his face instead. and how were you supposed to refuse?
"no, no," he hums, sucking your clit into his mouth as he pulls you down lower against his face. "i didn't say hover, pretty girl. i said sit."
a moan rips through your lips as his tongue enters your hole, and he circles it around as he revels in the sound. he gulps, savoring your taste, feasting on your slick, whimpering against your skin at the way you begin to move your hips over his head. he sucks around your hole as he kneads at the bottom of your ass, working his lips in tandem with his tongue.
his hands move again, making you gasp, making your teeth sink into your bottom lip the moment he uses them to land a spank just over the place he was kneading. and, as if feeding off of your response, as if growing only from your pleasure, does it again the moment you begin to move faster.
"that's right. mhm, take what you need. yeah, just take what you need," he moans against your skin, moving his face upwards to rest his tongue beneath your throbbing clit. he lays it flat, feeling you move against it, your cunt dripping down his chin.
and thereβs a part of him thatβs still ashamed. thereβs a part of him that still whispers and grumbles in the back of his head, telling him that heβs too old for you, that you deserve better, that you should want betterβ
you quiet it, moaning over him. he puts it to rest, willing it away if only for a moment, nibbling on your clit as he treads a hand between your folds, collecting moisture with his fingers.
he moves his thumb back, digit dripping with your slick, and circles it, softly, tenderly, along your asshole. he hears you gasp, feels you tremble, and tongues at your clit as he applies more pressure with his finger. the tight, puckered ring of muscle clenches under his digit, and he presses in, and a moan, broken and hoarse, echoes across the room.
yours. or his?
BAELOR laps at your cunt, moving his finger in slow, delicate motions, accompanying your moans with the wet, debauched sounds of his sucking.
βiβm soβBAELOR, iβmββ
βyeah? gonna cum?β he groans, moving his finger in deeper, sucking your clit in harder. βsoak my face, yeah? gonna do that for me?β
you want to answer. you try to.
but then BAELORβs tongue flicks along your pearl once more, and youβre weightless, and youβre sinking down, and youβre soaring up. your hands grip the headboard so tight your knuckles begin to hurt, and youβre seeing blue, and pink, and white, and all the colors of the rainbow on the back of your eyelids as you move faster against his face, riding out the bliss.
your orgasm ripples through you in a way that has him all but feeling his, almost succumbing to it, almost coming untouched.
heβs careful when he pulls his finger out of your hole, caressing it once more when it starts to clench at the loss.
his cock rests over his stomach, soft and heavy, bright red and leaking. you lean back, opening your mouth as you spit on your palm, and he groans into your clit. your head is fuzzy with want when you take reach back and him in your hand, hot, throbbing, wet against your palm as you grip on his base.
βcan i ride it?β
BAELOR stops. he halts in his movements at your question, his brain trying to make sense of the words as he tastes you on his lips.
βpretty girl, i canβtββ
βi know,β you say, noticing the way he moves his hand back up so they both rest on your hips. βi saw something online, and i want to tryβyou donβt have to be hard. and iβll stop if it doesnβt feel good for you, i promise.β
thereβs a pause.
seconds trickle by raindrops on his skin, and he feels them drip, drip, drip away as the voice, speaking louder, being meaner, pops back inside his head. you shouldnβt have to settle. he should be able to make you feel good, his cock should beβ
βplease. i really want to try it.β
and then, thereβs that. thereβs you, quieting it again, almost as if sensing his shame before he can let it fester. before he can let it burrow.
"alright,β BAELOR says, parting from your cunt so he can speak, breath hot against your tender skin. βtry whatever you want, love.β
he presses one last kiss upon your clit, smiling when it throbs, and he knows he would have given in either way. you take in a breath, deep, and stretch your back to move down against his figure.
your fingers map down your descent: kissing his clavicles, feeling the mat of hair on his chest. they trail down his stomach, caressing his belly, following the path set by a graying happy trail.
and then, with your eyes set on his, you let yourself hover over his lap for a brief, fleeting minute. your skin is still buzzing in the aftershocks of your orgasm, charged with electricity, eager for more.
"go on. rub yourself off on my cock. make yourself cum on it again," a pause. he takes in a breath, moving an arm to have it rest under his head.
there is something he doesn't sayβhe does not need to. it lingers between you, restless, charged, and you lower your cunt onto his cock, your lips glistening with his spit, his cock covered in yours, and feel the head of it come in contact with your clit.
you don't need him to be hard get him off. it feels just as good, just as he is.
"that's it. that's my girl. rub that perfect pussy all the way along my cock. cum on myβfuck, cum on my cock."
it throbs under you, twitching as your clit runs all the way down from the base to his sensitive tip. you move your hips in a slow, circling motion, putting down pressure, and a moan catches in his throat. you move your hips back, rubbing yourself faster against him, and it breaks free.
and thereβs no shame in this moment. he doesnβt overthink. he doesnβt let himself stray away from the way your tits move with each and every one of your movements. he doesnβt let himself stray away from the sound of your moans, soft and melodic, loud and violent, each and every one existing as a response to him.
he doesnβt let himself stray away from the way your folds, dripping and puffy, swallow the humiliation whole as they take on his cock.
he is not feeble. he does not fade away.
he watches as another orgasm rips through your body: making you shake, making you shiver, making you rut down against his cock in fast, desperate motions that have him choking on air. you look beautiful like this. otherworldly. he decides to treasure the sight for as long as he lives.
and he cums like that. youβre hunched over, stiff nipples pressing down against his chest, hips still moving down against his cock as he begins to spill. white messy ribbons paint the outside of your cunt, and you donβt stop moving, and he feels like heβs on fire.
your hands find his over the mattress.
a sound is born somewhere along the bottom of his stomach, traveling upwards, ripping past his lips as a breathless moan. he doesn't close his eyes, doesn't dare to miss a momentβjust stares at you as he pants.
he looks at you, lost in your pleasure, with your eyes closed and your head laid to rest over his figure. his cock is soft, beating with a pulse, resting between your slit the way a heart would inside a ribcage. he still smells like you. his cum is smeared across the inside of your legs, warm and thick, and his fingers close in around yours, tight and sure.
A knight of the seven kingdom : Maekar Targaryen x Evangeline βEveβ Graves ( original character )
Summary: Maekar Targaryen left town almost ten years ago Long enough for Evangeline Graves to learn how to survive without him. Long enough to become someone neither of them wouldβve recognized back then. Now heβs backβolder, divorced, carrying the same tired smile that once convinced her the world might not be so cruel after all.
The town hasnβt changed. The bars still smell like stale beer and cigarette smoke. The church bells still ring every Sunday morning. And Eve is still trying to make it through another day without falling apart. Maekar says he just wants to catch up. A drink. A conversation. Maybe dinner. But some ghosts donβt stay buried. And some people keep finding their way back to each other, no matter how many times they try to leave. A Southern Gothic story about addiction, grief, lost years, and two people who never quite learned how to stop looking for each other.
Chapter one , two , three
Warnings: This fic deals heavily with themes of addiction, depression, trauma, emotional neglect, and mental illness. Both protagonists are deeply flawed adults carrying years of unresolved baggage. Evangeline Graves is a woman in her late 20s to early 30s struggling with substance abuse, self-destructive tendencies, and the lasting effects of an abusive upbringing. Maekar Targaryen is a divorced man in his forties returning home after years away, forced to confront a past he thought he had left behind. This story features an age-gap relationship between consenting adults, former lovers reconnecting under less-than-ideal circumstances, unhealthy coping mechanisms, emotional dependency, grief, loneliness, regret, and complicated feelings that refuse to stay buried. Expect cigarettes, bars, church parking lots at midnight, awkward conversations, old wounds reopening, and two people circling each other like ghosts. There are no perfect victims and no perfect heroes hereβonly damaged people trying, and often failing, to find their way through the dark.
A/N: Inspired by Ethel Cain, Lana Del Rey, old church parking lots, empty gas stations at midnight, cigarette burns on motel balconies, and the feeling of seeing someone you used to love in every corner of your hometown. This story contains themes of addiction, mental illness, emotional neglect, and unhealthy relationships. Please read the tags before continuing. Thank you for giving Eve and Maekar a chance. Theyβre both disasters.
part 3 (2 here) of the modernAU drabble in which we jump these sexy men. if this isn't a disorder classified in psychology manuals, then there's nothing wrong with it. period.
Includes: modern!Baelor x f!reader // modern!Maekar x f!reader
Warning(s): modernAU, +18 MDNI, explicit sexual content, implied age gap, I gave them tattoos whoops. Baelor: kinda friends-to-lovers (?), mutual pining, praise kink, fingering, nipple play, PinV sex. Maekar: brat tamer Maekar, dom/sub undertones, edging, PinV sex.
The text exchange with Valarr took approximately four minutes and was, you felt, one of your better performances.
going over to yours to drop something off for your dad
His response came fast.
oh I'm out with kiera actually, won't be back til late. can it wait?
You looked at the book on your kitchen table. A first edition β not ancient, not priceless, but specific. The kind of specific that required knowing what someone was looking for, and you had known what Baelor was looking for since the bookshop three weeks ago when he had mentioned it in passing, the particular rueful tone of someone who had been searching for something for a while and had mostly made peace with the search.
You had found it in a secondhand shop two streets from your flat on a Tuesday and had stood in the aisle for approximately thirty seconds before buying it.
that's even better π₯΄
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
wait
are you
OH MY GOD
please tell me you're not about to
he's my DAD
You were already putting your coat on.
I don't know what you're talking about
I'm just dropping off a book
YOU BOUGHT HIM A BOOK
it's just a book Valarr
people don't just buy specific books for people they're JUST dropping books off for
I genuinely have no idea what you mean
I am begging you
have a good one with Kiera
You sent your final text, and turned your phone face down in your bag and left before he could respond.
Your phone buzzed four times on the tube.
You did not look at it.
Baelor answered the door in reading glasses.
Just one pair, which was almost worse β there was something about one pair of glasses that was considerably more devastating than two, something about the specificity of it, the domesticity of a man who had been sitting reading in his own house on a weekday evening and had answered the door without thinking to take them off. He was also in a dark grey jumper that was doing things it had no business doing and had clearly not been expecting anyone because the composed public quality was not fully assembled β just him, in his jumper and his glasses, looking at you on his doorstep with an expression that moved from surprised to warm in about two seconds.
"I found something," you said, and held out the book.
He looked at it.
You watched the recognition arrive β the specific title, the edition, the fact of it existing in your hand on his doorstep β move through his expression in stages. He took it with the careful automatic reverence he gave books he considered important and turned it over and looked at the back and then looked at you.
"Where did you find this," he said.
"Shop near mine. Tuesday." You shrugged. "You mentioned it at the bookshop."
"I mentioned it once."
"You mentioned it specifically," you said. "The 1987 Ashgate edition. You said it was difficult to find secondhand."
He looked at the book. Looked at you. Opened his mouth and appeared to reconsider what he had been going to say and said instead: "Come in. I'll make tea."
His kitchen was warm and slightly cluttered in the specific way of a house that was lived in thoroughly rather than managed for appearance β papers on the table, a second book open and face-down on the counter which made you want to say something about spines but you restrained yourself, a mug that had clearly been there long enough to be architectural.
He filled the kettle with the focused attention he brought to small tasks and you sat at the kitchen table and watched him and thought about what you were going to do and felt, underneath the planning of it, the warm uncomplicated fact of how much you liked being in this kitchen.
"The 1987 edition has the corrected footnotes," he said, to the kettle. "The original 1983 printing had an error in the bibliography that propagated through most of the secondary literature for about a decade before anyone caught it."
"That's genuinely horrifying," you said.
"It is." He turned around and leaned against the counter while the kettle worked and looked at you with the glasses and the jumper and the warm composure of a man in his own kitchen on a weekday evening. "How did you know which edition to look for?"
"You were very specific about it," you said.
"I wasn't trying to β" He stopped. "I didn't expect you to actually look."
"I wasn't not looking," you said.
A brief pause in which he appeared to process the grammar of that and arrive at the implication and choose, carefully, not to follow it all the way to its conclusion.
The kettle boiled.
He made tea.
You were on your second cup when you said it.
"Can I say something without it being weird," you said.
He looked at you over his mug. "Probably depends on the thing."
"Right," he said, in the tone of a man who was not sure where to file this information.
"History nerds specifically," you continued. "There's something about someone who cares that much about something that's justβ" you let the sentence do its work without finishing it.
Baelor looked at you with the expression of a man who had received information he was attempting to process through several different frameworks simultaneously and was finding the process slower than usual.
"That'sβ" he started.
"And the glasses," you said.
He stopped.
"Men in glasses," you said. "I have a thing. I'm aware it's not a particularly original thing but it's a consistent thing."
His hand moved very slightly toward the glasses and then stopped, which was the best thing you had ever seen another person do, the specific gesture of a man who had momentarily considered taking them off and had caught himself and now needed somewhere to look that was not your face.
Baelor set his mug down with the careful precision of a man performing an action slowly enough to buy time for his thoughts to catch up with the situation. He looked at the table. Then at you. Then at the table again.
"You're Valarr's friend," he said.
"I know."
"You'reβ" He stopped. Started again. "This is complicated."
"I know," you said. "I've thought about the complicated."
"And?"
"And I'm still sitting in your kitchen on a Tuesday evening having told you I find you attractive." You looked at him steadily. "So."
He looked at you.
The composure was there but it was doing less than usual β the edges of it uneven in the specific way you had first noticed in the bookshop aisle. His jaw moved once. He opened his mouth to say something.
You leaned across the table and kissed him.
Not tentatively. You had been thinking about this for three weeks and tentative had not featured in any version of the thinking. You kissed him with the clear intention of someone who had made a decision and was implementing it, and felt in the first half second the specific quality of his absolute stillness β the shock of it, the composure going offline all at once β and then in the second half second the moment he stopped being still.
He made a sound against your mouth.
Low and involuntary and nothing like the curator or the composed man in the doorway with his book. Just a sound, pulled out of him by the simple fact of your lips against his, and then his hand came up and caught the back of your neck and he kissed you back and every careful principled argument that had been assembling itself somewhere in his head simply didn't.
He pulled back after a moment. Breathing slightly uneven. Looking at you from very close with the glasses slightly displaced and an expression that was trying to locate the counterargument and finding nothing available.
"I was going to sayβ" he started.
"Was it a good reason?" you said.
A pause.
"I can't currently remember what it was," he said.
"That's probably fine then," you said, and kissed him again.
This time he did not pull back.
This time his hand slid from the back of your neck into your hair and he kissed you like a man who had found the counterargument and assessed it and decided it was insufficient, thorough and unhurried in the way he did everything, and you made a sound against his mouth that he swallowed and responded to immediately.
At some point the table stopped being between you.
There was a period of rearrangement that involved chairs and the brief navigation of the table's corner and his hands at your waist β and then you were against the kitchen counter and he was in front of you with his hands braced on either side and was looking at you with the glasses still on and the jumper and the expression of a man whose counterargument had not returned and did not appear to be coming back.
"On the counter," you said.
His brow furrowed slightly. "What aboutβ"
You put your hands on his shoulders and pushed yourself up onto it. Something happened in his expression.
"Oh," he said quietly.
"Yes," you smiled and bit your lip.
He kissed you again and this time it was different β the composure fully gone, replaced by something more direct and more urgent and considerably less managed, his hands sliding from the counter to your thighs with a purposefulness that made your breath catch. You pulled at the jumper and he shifted to help you get it off and you pushed it up over his head and threw it somewhere and thenβ
You stopped.
His ribs. The left side. Dark ink against warm skin, the letters precise and deliberate and clearly old enough to have settled into him like they had always been there.
ΞΞ½αΏΆΞΈΞΉ ΟΞ΅Ξ±Ο ΟΟΞ½.
You stared at it for a moment. Then you looked up at him.
Something in his expression had shifted β a different quality of vulnerability, not the composure being stripped away but something more specific, the particular exposure of something private being seen for the first time by someone he had not planned to show it to and found he did not mind showing it to.
"How long have you had that," you said.
"Twenty years," he said. "Approximately."
"Know thyself," you said softly.
Something moved in his face. "You read Greek?"
"My grandmother," you said. "She had opinions about a lot of things."
He looked at you for a moment with that expression β the unguarded one, the one that kept arriving and staying longer each time β and then you reached out and traced the letters with your fingertips, following the curve of them against his ribs, and felt him exhale sharply at the contact.
You then pressed your lips to it.
The sound that left him was low and immediate and completely unmanaged, his hand flying into your hair, and you felt him shudder under your mouth and filed the knowledge away with the specific satisfaction of someone who had found something important and intended to return to it.
"You are going to be the end of me," he said roughly. To the ceiling.
"Not yet," you said, and pulled him back.
This time when he kissed you it was with the full unmanaged weight of someone who had stopped looking for the counterargument and had no intention of finding it. His hands worked at your shirt with a focus that was no longer patient in the unhurried sense but patient in the specific sense of a man doing something he intended to do thoroughly, and your shirt ended up somewhere and his hands were on your skin and he exhaled against your mouth like the contact had knocked something out of him.
"God," he said quietly. Not to you. To the situation. To the fact of his hands on your waist and yours on his chest and the kitchen warm around you.
"Still thinking about that counterargument?" you said.
"There is no such thing in my brain anymore," he said, and kissed your jaw and then your throat and you tipped your head back and felt his mouth open against your neck β warm and deliberate β and then he did something and you gasped and felt his teeth and his mouth and then the specific bloom of pressure that meantβ
He pulled back. Looked at your neck, then looked at your face.
"I'mβ" he started, the composure making one last valiant attempt to reassemble itself. "I didn't mean to β I shouldβ"
You grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him down and bit his throat.
Not hard. But deliberate. Specific. In the exact register of what he had just done to you, your mouth open against the warm skin of his neck, your teeth grazing the muscle there, and you felt the full body shudder that went through him and heard the sound β low and rough and dragged from somewhere he had not given it permission to come from β and when you pulled back his expression had nothing of the apology left in it.
Just β gone. All of it. The composure, the apology, the counterargument, the curator.
"Right," he said. His voice was wrecked. "Alright."
The bra went somewhere. His hands cupped your breasts with a directness that made you arch into him immediately and he made a sound at that β low and immediate and specifically responsive, like your body's reactions were doing something to him that he had no management available for.
"You'reβ" he started.
"Tell me," you said.
Something shifted in his expression. The specific thing he had with praise that you suspected was right there, sitting just under the surface, and you had put your finger directly on it and he knew it and was not even slightly trying to deflect anymore.
"Better," he said against your skin. "So much better than whatever Iβ"
He kissed your breast and his tongue found your nipple and the sound you made was immediate and unguarded and he groaned against you β a genuine moan, low and resonant, vibrating through his chest into yours β in direct and unmistakable response to the sound you had made, like your pleasure had a direct line to something in him that bypassed every system he had.
"There," he breathed. "God β thereβ"
"Baelorβ"
"I know," he said. "I know, Iβ" another moan, lower, as you shifted against himβ "you have no idea what you sound like. What you feel like. I've been β Fuck, I've been trying not to think about this for weeks and it'sβ"
His hands found your jeans.
He dealt with your jeans and your underwear with hands that were steady and purposeful and not entirely in his control β the steadiness of focus rather than composure, the focus of a man doing something he had thought about and intended to do properly. His fingers found your clit and you grabbed his shoulder and made a sound that echoed off the kitchen tiles and he moaned in response β low and broken and entirely involuntary, his forehead dropping to your shoulder.
"You're so wet," he said, rough. Wondering. Like the fact of it was doing something specific to him. "God. Already β I've barelyβ"
"The hickey helped," you said.
A sound that was almost a laugh and almost not. His fingers moved and your hips rolled forward and the almost-laugh dissolved into something lower and more wrecked. "I'll keep that in mind," he said, against your throat, and did it again β the deliberate press of his mouth to the mark he had already left, tongue tracing it β and the sound you made was embarrassingly immediate.
"Baelor," you said.
"Mm," he said, not stopping.
"If you keep doing that I'm going toβ"
"I know," he said. Warm. Certain. His fingers working with the focused attentiveness of a man who had decided this was worth studying thoroughly. "That's the idea."
He learned you quickly and used what he learned without mercy β the specific pressure that made your hips roll, the rhythm that made your breathing go ragged, the precise application of his thumb that made you clench around his fingers and made him moan against your throat like your body's responses were the best thing he had ever encountered and he intended to catalogue every one.
"You feelβ" he started.
"Tell me," you said again, because you had found the thing and you were not letting go of it.
His breath caught. "Perfect," he said, low and rough and deliberate. "You feel perfect. Every time you clench like that β every time you make that sound β I can'tβ" a low moan as you did it againβ "I've been thinking about having you like this since β fuck, since before I should have been and I can'tβ"
"Don't stop," you said.
"I'm not stopping," he said.
He didn't stop.
You came with his fingers inside you and his mouth on the hickey he had left on your neck and his voice in your ear saying your name and then saying perfect, exactly that, god, you'reβ in a low broken stream that your brain was going to be replaying for a very long time, and he held you through every shudder of it with his free hand spanning your lower back, steady and certain, and the sounds he made while you came apart around his fingers suggested that your orgasm was doing as much to him as it was to you.
He was hard against your thigh and had been for a while and the specific evidence of it when you reached for him made him say your name in a way that had clearly been waiting to sound like that.
You got his boxers out of the way.
He made a sound that came from somewhere deep and his hips pressed forward into your hand involuntarily and he made another sound at that, lower, his forehead dropping to your shoulder while you wrapped your hand around his cock and felt him twitch and felt him breathe and felt the specific shudder that went through him when you moved your hand.
"Christ," he said.
"Good?" you teased.
"Don't be smug," he answered, voice completely destroyed.
"I'm not being smug," you said. "I'm asking."
"Yes," he said. "Obviously yes. You feel β your hand feelsβ" he made a sound that interrupted whatever he had been going to say and you filed the sound somewhere permanent. "I need toβ" He stopped. Gathered himself with visible effort. "If you keep doing that this is going to be embarrassingly short and I have β I have specific intentions."
"Specific intentions," you repeated.
"I'm a thorough person," he said roughly.
You released him. He exhaled shakily.
Then he was between your thighs and positioned and looking at you with the glasses still on β crooked, both lenses catching the kitchen light β and the hickey you had left on his throat and the tattoo on his ribs and the completely dismantled expression of a man who had retired the counterargument and every system downstream of it.
He pushed inside.
The sound he made wasβ
Long. Low. Broken entirely open, dragged from somewhere below every layer of management he had ever built, arriving with the helpless totality of something that had been contained for too long and had finally, completely, stopped being contained. His head dropped forward to your chest. His jaw was working and his eyes were closed and he stayed there for a moment just β breathing, or attempting to, his chest rising and falling unevenly.
"I intend to," he said, and then he moved and you both made sounds simultaneously and the intentions became very clear.
He fucked you slowly at first, with the specific deliberateness of a man who had said he was thorough and intended to prove it, and made sounds that you were going to think about for the rest of your life β low and continuous and arriving one after another with complete disregard for composure or management or anything else he had previously used to keep himself contained. Every movement produced something from him. Every time you clenched around his cock he moaned β properly, openly, the sound resonating through his chest into yours.
"You feelβ" he said, against your throat. A low moan interrupted him. "God. Every time you β when you do that β I can't β you're soβ"
"Tell me," you said.
His breath caught.
"Perfect," rough and specific and chosen with the care of a man who selected words deliberately. "You feel perfect. Your pussy feels β god β every time you clench I can feel exactlyβ" another moan, longer this time, as you did it intentionallyβ "there. Exactly there. You have no idea β I've been trying not to think about this and it's so much β you're so much better thanβ"
"Than what," you managed.
"Anything Iβ" he started, and his hips found a rhythm that interrupted the sentence and made you grab his shoulder and hold on.
He fucked you on his kitchen counter with his hands on your hips and his glasses crooked and the Greek tattoo on his ribs catching the light and made sounds that belonged to nobody you had met before this evening β unguarded and unrestrained and arriving in response to everything, your sounds, your movements, your hands in his hair, every time you said his name which you did frequently and with purpose because of what it did to him.
"Say my name, please," he said at one point, breathlessly, against your jaw.
"Baelor," you said, deliberate.
The moan that left him at that was long and low and you felt it everywhere.
"God," he said. "Again."
You obliged.
"Fuck," he said, and his rhythm deepened and you stopped being able to say anything coherent for a while.
You came a second time somewhere in the middle of it, which you had not planned for but which arrived with the inevitability of something that had been building since the kitchen wall and the edging and the hickey and the tattoo and all of it, clenching around him with his name on your lips and your nails in his shoulder, and the sound he made at the feel of itβ
Was the most undone thing you had ever heard from another person.
A long low broken moan that he pressed into your throat and that shook through his entire chest and that had absolutely nothing of the museum curator or the composed man on the doorstep in it β just Baelor, stripped entirely down, making sounds he had never made in front of another person because nobody had ever gotten past the composure far enough to find them.
"You feel so good," he said, rough and wrecked and honest. "When you come around my cock β fuck β I can feel everything β you feel soβ"
"Baelor," you said, and pulled him closer.
He came shortly after with your name and then perfect and then something that was not quite a word pressed into your throat, shuddering through him completely, his hands holding you like you were the thing he was anchored to and he intended to stay anchored.
The kitchen was quiet after.
Both of you breathing.
His forehead against yours.
The glasses β still on, still crooked β catching the kitchen light in a way that made you feel something specific in your chest that you were choosing not to examine until you were in a better position to handle it.
You reached up and straightened them.
He looked at you.
The expression on his face was entirely, completely undone and entirely, completely unbothered about being undone, which was new from a man who had been managing his expression for as long as you had known him.
He reached up and touched the hickey on your neck. Lightly. Just his fingertips.
"I should probablyβ" he started.
"Don't apologise," you said.
He looked at you. You tilted your head and traced the one you had left on his throat. Something in his expression did something entirely unmanageable.
"Fair point," he laughed.
Your phone was in your bag. Valarr had sent approximately seventeen messages. You did not check your phone.
You traced the tattoo on his ribs instead and felt him exhale slowly against your hair.
Know thyself.
You thought, with the warm certainty of someone who had just watched a man find out something true about himself on his own kitchen counter, that he was getting there.
(i'm truly sorry i did not find a gif that vibed with the vibes)
Daeron was, by any reasonable metric, completely gone.
You had established this approximately forty five minutes ago when he had attempted to explain to you why the Fibonacci sequence was secretly a conspiracy and had made, briefly and alarmingly, a compelling case. Since then he had progressed through several distinct phases β philosophical, then mournful, then inexplicably delighted by a lamppost β and had arrived at the current phase which was primarily characterised by his inability to walk in a straight line and his arm around your shoulders being the only thing keeping him approximately vertical.
"You are," you told him, dragging him up the front path, "an absolute disaster."
"I am having," he said, with great dignity, "a very good evening."
"You can barely walk."
"I'm walking fine."
"Daeron. I am carrying you."
"That's very kind of you," he said, and attempted to pat your head and got your ear instead.
You rang the doorbell with your elbow.
The door opened after about thirty seconds and Maekar stood there in a dark t-shirt and jeans with the expression of a man who had been doing something else and had come to the door expecting approximately anything other than this specific situation.
He took in Daeron.
Daeron, to his credit, attempted to stand up straight. He managed about forty percent of upright before gravity reasserted itself and he leaned back onto your shoulder.
"Hi dad," he said.
The silence that followed had considerable weight.
"For the love ofβ" Maekar started, and then said several other things in rapid succession that were not appropriate for general audiences and that you were filing away for later because the specific combination and delivery was genuinely impressive.
"He's fine," you said. "Just drunk."
"He's absolutely hammered," Maekar said flatly.
"Okay he's absolutely hammered," you conceded. "But fine. He didn't do anything stupid, he just had about four drinks too many and started explaining mathematics to strangers."
Something moved through Maekar's expression that was exasperation and reluctant parental resignation in equal measure. He held the door open. "Get him in."
Getting Daeron up the stairs was a collaborative project.
You had his left side and Maekar had his right and Daeron contributed by providing commentary on the staircase, which he found architecturally interesting, and by stopping twice to make points about things that had not been raised.
"Dad," he said, at the second landing, with the abrupt subject change of the extremely drunk.
"What," said Maekar, in the tone of a man concentrating on a task.
"She thinks you're really sexy," Daeron said, conversationally, then turning his face to you. "That's the thing you said, right?"
You stopped walking.
"Keep moving," Maekar said, apparently to both of you.
"Like, really sexy," Daeron continued to you, with the relentless honesty of someone for whom the filter between brain and mouth had completely dissolved. "You told me. After the pipe thing. You were like Daeronβ wait no that's me. You were like your dad isβ"
"Daeron," you said, through your teeth.
"What? It's a compliment. I'm sure dad will take the compliment."
"I'm going to fucking kill you," you told him pleasantly.
"You're literally carrying me, you're not going toβ"
"I will drop you on this landing."
"But you saidβ" Daeron started.
"He's fine," you said loudly, to Maekar, who was β you checked β focused entirely on navigating Daeron through the bedroom door with the focused efficiency of a man who was too irritated at his son to be processing anything else. His jaw was set in the specific way of someone managing several feelings at once and prioritising the most immediate one, which appeared to be get this man horizontal before he falls over.
Good.
Fine.
He had not heard. Or had heard and dismissed it because Daeron was drunk and Daeron said things and the more pressing concern was the logistics.
You were going with that.
You got Daeron onto his bed with the cooperative efficiency of two people who had identified a shared goal and were pursuing it without further conversation. He landed with the boneless satisfaction of someone whose relationship with gravity had become philosophical rather than practical, made a sound of profound contentment, and was asleep within approximately ninety seconds.
You both stood at the foot of his bed looking at him.
"He'll be fine," you said. "Water and paracetamol in the morning."
"I know," Maekar said, in the flat tone of a man who had done this before with various combinations of his six children. He reached down to pull the duvet up and his t-shirt rode up at the backβ
You saw it.
Just the bottom edge of it β the tail, curling at the base of his spine, scales rendered in deep red and black with the fine detail of something that had taken serious time and serious money and serious commitment. The colour was extraordinary even in the low light of Daeron's bedroom, vivid and deliberate, and it disappeared back under the t-shirt when he straightened but it was too late.
You had seen it.
You were thinking about what was above it.
"Right," Maekar said, turning around and finding you with an expression that was still mostly parental irritation and some baseline tiredness and not whatever your face was currently doing. "Tea? Or I've got whisky if you need it after that."
"Whisky," you said immediately.
His kitchen was warm and quiet and he poured two glasses with the economical ease of someone who knew his own kitchen and did not need to perform anything in it, and you sat at the table and took the glass he set in front of you and felt the whisky do its immediate work and thought about the tail of a dragon at the base of his spine.
"He's an idiot," Maekar said, sitting across from you.
"He's your idiot," you said.
Something that was almost the almost-smile. "Unfortunately."
You drank your whisky. He drank his.
The kitchen was quiet in the specific way of two people who had just performed a task together and had not yet decided what happened next.
You were happy tipsy β the warm uncomplicated kind, the kind that made you feel slightly more yourself than usual rather than less β and the whisky was good and Maekar was sitting across from you in his t-shirt with the dragon underneath it and you had been thinking about this for weeks and Daeron had, drunk and disastrously, already said half of it anyway.
"He wasn't wrong, by the way," you said.
Maekar looked at you over his glass. "About what."
"What he said on the stairs."
A pause. The quality of Maekar's stillness shifted slightly β not the irritated-at-Daeron stillness, something more attentive than that.
"He said a lot of things on the stairs," Maekar said. "He said the banister was load-bearing in an interesting way."
"The other thing," you said. "I think you heard."
He looked at you, eyes doing that funny thing they do when they grow darker. You looked back.
"You're Daeron's age," he said.
You rolled your eyes. "You're not that old."
"I have six children."
"I know. I've met them. They're fine." You swirled the whisky. "That's not actually a reason not to."
"It's a context."
"Still not a reason, is it?."
His jaw tightened slightly. He set his glass down. "You should probablyβ"
"Probably what?" you said, and tilted your head, and watched him clock the tone and reassess.
There was a beat.
"Don't," he said. Flatly. The specific flat of a man who has identified a dynamic and is issuing an early warning.
"Don't what?" you said, with the complete innocence of someone who knew exactly what.
His eyes narrowed fractionally.
"You're being a brat," he said.
"I'm asking a question."
"You're being a brat," he said again, and this time it was not a warning exactly, it was something else β something that had arrived from a different place, lower and more specific β "and you know it."
You smiled at him over your glass.
Something shifted in Maekar's expression with the finality of a decision being made.
He stood up.
He crossed to your side of the table with the direct purposeful movement that characterised everything he did physically and you stood because sitting while he was standing felt suddenly like a tactical disadvantage and then you were both standing in his kitchen at a distance that was not a distance anymore and he was looking at you with those violet eyes that had stopped being the grumpy-at-everything eyes and had become something considerably more focused.
"Last chance," he said. Not a threat. Just β information, delivered with the flat certainty of a man who meant what he said.
"I don't buy it" you said staring directly at him.
He kissed you.
Not the way you had imagined it β you had imagined it various ways over various weeks β but harder than any of the imaginings, more immediate, with the specific quality of a man who had been holding something at arm's length for too long and had decided, definitively, to stop. His hand came up and caught your jaw and he kissed you like punctuation, like a full stop at the end of something, and you kissed him back with equal fervour and felt his other hand find your waist and pull you in and the size of him wasβ
There. Immediate. Real. His hands spanning you, his chest against yours, the specific overwhelming quality of being pulled against someone that much larger and feeling it in every nerve.
He broke the kiss and looked at you.
"Still being a brat?" he said, low.
"Oh, abso-fucking-lutely," you laughed.
His jaw moved. "Right."
His hands moved to your hips and walked you backward with a calm deliberateness that left you no input into the direction of travel, and your back met the kitchen wall with a solidity that was not rough but was very definite, and Maekar braced one hand beside your head and looked at you with the expression of a man who had made several decisions and was implementing them in order.
"Maekarβ"
"You wanted to be a brat," he said. "Fine."
His other hand slid down your stomach and your breath caught.
"You can be a brat," he said, his mouth dropping to your throat, "and I'll teach you what happens."
His fingers found the waistband of your jeans and dealt with the button with one hand and the efficiency of someone who was not performing patience because he had the real thing, and then his hand was inside your underwear and finding your clit with a directness that made you grab his shoulder and make a sound that was embarrassingly immediate.
"There," he said, against your throat. Not pleased exactly β satisfied, in the specific way of someone whose assessment has been confirmed. "That's it."
His fingers moved and you stopped being able to think about much else.
He was β thorough. That was the word. In the way the garden spreadsheet had been thorough, in the way the pipeline had been thorough β focused and attentive and completely committed to the task with a patience that was somehow more intense than urgency would have been. He learned what made you gasp and returned to it. He learned what made your hips roll forward and used it deliberately. He paid attention with the same quality of attention he had given the raised bed and the isolation valve except directed entirely at your clit and it was β a lot. It was a frankly unreasonable amount.
"You're close," he said, low. Not a question.
"Yes," you managed. "Yes, keepβ"
He stopped.
You made a sound.
"Whatβ" you whined.
"Told you," he said, against your jaw. Calm. Completely, infuriatingly calm. "Brats don't get to come that easily."
"Maekarβ"
"Mm."
"That's notβ"
"Not what?" he said, and his fingers moved again, barely, just enough, and you grabbed his shirt with both hands.
"Not fair," you said.
"No," he agreed, and did it again β built you up with that focused relentless patience, got you to the edge with the specific efficiency of someone who knew exactly where the edge was and had decided to park you there indefinitely, and then stopped again.
The sound you made was not dignified.
He made a low noise against your throat that was the closest thing to satisfied you had heard from him and you were furious about how much you liked it.
"Maekar," you said, with feeling.
"When you're ready to stop being difficult," he said pleasantly.
"I am not beingβ"
"You walked into my kitchen at midnight and told me you knew exactly what you were doing," he said, pulling back enough to look at your face. His eyes were dark and completely focused and there was nothing grumpy-at-inanimate-objects about his expression now, just β direct, and certain, and very specifically aimed at you. "You were being difficult on purpose."
"Maybe," you managed.
"So." He tilted his head. The movement was so deliberate it made something in your stomach clench. "Consequences."
He edged you a third time against the kitchen wall.
By the end of it you were gripping his shirt with both fists and making sounds that had nothing to do with dignity and he was pressing his mouth to your temple and saying there, that's it, stay there in a low voice that was simultaneously the hottest thing you had ever heard and the most aggravating and when he stopped for the third time you actually whined.
"Please," you said when he removed his hand from your jeans entirely.
"Please what?" he said.
"Please, you absoluteβ"
He picked you up.
Not with ceremony, not with warning β simply put his hands under your thighs and lifted you off the floor with the casual ease of someone for whom this was not a significant physical undertaking and carried you out of the kitchen while you were still processing the fact that you were no longer on the ground.
"I hate you," you informed him.
"No you don't," he scoffed, and sat down on the sofa with you in his lap.
The living room was dark except for the light coming through from the hall and Maekar was solid and warm underneath you and you were straddling him and looking at each other and the aggravation had transmuted into something else entirely in the twenty seconds it had taken to get from the kitchen wall to here.
He kissed you again.
Slower this time. His hands on your hips, thumbs tracing small movements against the fabric, and you kissed him back and felt the kiss change as it went β finding its own depth, its own pace β and then you were pulling at his t-shirt and he lifted his arms and you got it over his head and threw it somewhere in the dark andβ
You stopped.
The dragon covered his entire back. You could only see the front of him from where you sat but the tail curled around his ribs on the left side and there were scales at his collarbone and it was β in the living room dark with the hall light catching the colour β extraordinary. Deep red and black and the fine detail of something built over years, the kind of tattoo that had been added to incrementally, that had grown with him.
"How," you said.
"How what," he said.
"This." You traced the scales at his ribs. Felt him breathe in. "How does nobody know about this."
"People know," he said. "They just don't see it unless Iβ" he stopped, because you had leaned forward and pressed your mouth to the scales at his collarbone and his sentence dissolved.
"Unless you what?" you said against his skin.
"You're still being a brat," he said, low.
"Yes," you smiled, and kissed across his collarbone to the scales on his ribs and felt him exhale sharply, his hands tightening on your hips, and heard the low sound he made that was different from the gruff default and considerably better.
You pulled back and looked at him.
"Your turn," he said.
He dealt with your shirt with the same one-handed efficiency as before and unclipped your bra and looked at you with the direct thoroughness he brought to things he was assessing seriously, which should not have been as effective as it was.
You laughed at the way he was staring at you. "That look is getting dangerously close to a compliment."
"And you're getting dangerously close to being pleased about it," he said back, this time the smile almost coming fully to his face.
"Says the man who hasn't looked away from my tits."
"If I had looked away, we both know you'd be disappointed," he said, which was so flat and so Maekar that you laughed, and he watched you laugh with that fractional almost-smile and then pulled you in and kissed you and his hands were everywhere and you stopped laughing about anything.
Clothes ended up in various parts of the living room over the next several minutes β yours, his, everything β with the mutual efficiency of two people who had both been thinking about this and were done with the intermediary steps. His jeans went somewhere near the coffee table. Your underwear ended up on the arm of the sofa.
You were straddling him again, properly now, and he was looking up at you with those dark focused eyes and his hands were on your hips and the size of him was β there. Present. Impossible to be casual about.
"Well?" he said.
"Well what?" you mimicked.
"You wanted to be a brat," he said, low. The almost-smile at the corner of his mouth, barely there, completely deliberate. "Show me."
You held his gaze.
"You're a brat too, you know," you smirked.
"I know," he answered. "So show me."
You sank down onto him slowly and the sound he made was β long and low and entirely without the management of any of his usual composure, his head going back briefly, his jaw clenching, his hands gripping your hips with a pressure that was going to leave something and that you were entirely fine with.
"Fuck," he said. Rough. Genuine.
"That good?" you breathed, because turnabout was fair play and because you wanted to hear what he did with it.
His jaw tightened. His eyes, which had closed briefly, opened and found yours. "Don't push it."
"I'm just asking," you chirped sweetly, and moved, and the sound that left him then wasβ
Not managed at all.
You rode him with his hands on your hips and his eyes on your face and the low continuous sounds he was making against every instinct to contain them, and it was β the power of it, the specific pleasure of being the one setting the pace while he sat there and took it and made those sounds β was something you had not anticipated and intended to revisit extensively.
"You feelβ" he started, low.
"Tell me," you said.
His jaw worked. His fingers dug into your hips. "You feelβ" the words seemed to cost him, dragged out by the combination of the movement and something else, something more fundamentalβ "good. Christ, you feelβ" he stopped. Made a sound. Started again. "Perfect. Exactlyβ" his hips rose to meet yours and you both made sounds simultaneouslyβ "exactly what Iβ"
"What you what?" you said.
"Thought about," he managed roughly. "For weeks. Christ."
That was the most words you had ever heard Maekar say in a single emotional direction and you filed it somewhere permanent and moved again and felt his entire body respond.
One of his hands left your hip and found your clit.
"Ohβ" you started.
"You're going to come," he stated, low and flat and completely certain. "And then you're going to come again. And we're going to seeβ" his thumb moved and you grabbed his shoulderβ "how difficult you feel like being after that."
"Maekarβ"
"Yeah," he said. The almost-smile. Devastating. "Yeah."
His thumb worked your clit with the same focused patience he had employed against the kitchen wall except now there was no stopping, no edging, just β direct and relentless and entirely committed, and you rode him and felt everything build simultaneously and heard his sounds and felt his hands and looked at the dragon scales on his ribs and came with his name in your mouth and your nails in his shoulder and everything clenching around him and the sound he made when you didβ
Was the best thing you had ever heard from another person.
Low and rough and entirely wrecked, his head dropping back, his hands gripping you like you were the only fixed point available.
"Again," he said roughly. "You canβ"
"I literally justβ"
"Again," he insisted, and his thumb was still moving and you found out he was right.
You came a second time somewhere shortly after with less warning and more intensity and said something that you would have been embarrassed about if you had had any available capacity for embarrassment, which you did not, and Maekar said your name and then said there, exactlyβ and followed you over the edge with a roughness and a totality that shook through him completely and left you both in the specific stillness of people who have just dismantled something and are taking stock of the wreckage.
The living room was quiet. Your forehead was against his. His hands had moved from your hips to your back, large and warm and spanning you completely, holding rather than gripping.
"Still being a brat?" he teased.
His voice was completely wrecked.
"Ask me in a minute and we'll see," you said.
The almost-smile. Full this time. Real. Directed entirely at you in the dark living room with the dragon on his ribs and his hands on your back and the evidence of your underwear on the arm of the sofa somewhere to your left.
"Tea," he asked eventually.
"Yeah," you said.
"Then you're staying." Not a question. The flat certainty of a man making a reasonable determination.
"Feel like you'll need me again that much?" you teased.
He looked at you.
"Brat," he scoffed.
"You love it," you said.
He said nothing, but the almost-smile stayed.
The text came at half eleven the following morning.
You were in Maekar's kitchen drinking coffee while he read the paper with the focused attention of someone who had entirely recovered their composure and was pretending the living room situation had not occurred, which was belied only by the coffee he had made you without being asked and the way his hand had rested briefly on the small of your back when he passed.
Your phone lit up.
so daeron targaryen here
your best friend???
who you dragged home last night???
and who apparently passed out in his room while something was happening on his sofa????
i have no memory of the stairs but apparently i said some things
anyway
i need you to know that i heard you last night
specifically i heard you say [and then a direct quote of the thing you had said while riding his father that you were not going to repeat even internally]
i just want you to know that i will never recover
ever
are you okay? are you alive? do you need extraction?
You looked at the message for a moment.
You looked at Maekar, who was reading his paper with his coffee and his recovered composure and that fucking hot dragon underneath his t-shirt.
You typed back.
get used to it i'll pay for your therapist x
And then you added an emoji that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
Daeron's response was a string of increasingly unhinged capitalisation followed by what appeared to be genuine laughter rendered in text.
i literally cannot believe you
okay fair enough
is he making you coffee tho
You looked at the coffee.
yes why
He waited a few seconds to reply.
good
he only makes coffee for people he likes. he made mum coffee every morning for fifteen years
daeron
I'm just saying
daeron
okay okay I'm going back to sleep my head is KILLING me
drink your water
Three dots. None. Three dots again.
yes mum
also oh my god I cannot believe you rode my
You turned your phone face down on the table. Maekar looked up from his paper.
"Daeron?"
"Daeron," you confirmed.
He looked at you for a moment with those violet eyes and the recovered composure and the almost-smile sitting at the very corner of his mouth.
"How bad?" he asked.
"He'll be fine," you said. "Mostly horrified."
"Good," Maekar said, and returned to his paper. "He should have kept his mouth shut on the stairs."
You laughed and picked up your coffee.
Outside the morning continued with its business entirely indifferent to the fact that you were sitting in Maekar Targaryen's kitchen the morning after, drinking coffee he had made without being asked, while he read his paper and pretended to be completely normal about it.
You were both completely normal about it.
You were both, underneath the completely normal, not even slightly normal about it.
A.N.: listen i had a very productive day and couldn't stop writing. also, there's a little β¨extraβ¨ coming tomorrow (if i can proofread it). how do y'all feel about sexting Baelor and Maekar???
hello! here with a request. i'd love to see something about overstimulating maekar if that's alright! like making him whimper and squirm and tear up. i just want to dom that big anvil lol
is it possible make an anvil yield?? let's find out (yo these requests are getting freakier by the minute and i LOVE it)
what breaks an anvil
Summary: you tie Maekar to the bedpost with silk and edge him until he is a whimpering mess before finally letting him come apart completely under your hand
Pairing: Maekar x sister-wife!reader
Warning(s): +18 MDNI, explicit sexual content, smut, bondage, edging, orgasm denial, overstimulation, hand job, praise kink, soft dom/sub dynamics, consensual kink, negotiated consent, established relationship, brief emotional vulnerability, dacryphilia (a little if you squint), reader insert (no use of y/n)
It had started as a negotiation, as most things with Maekar did.
"Do not touch me," you had said. "That is the only rule. Whatever I do β you will not reach for me."
He had looked at you with those violet eyes doing their assessment and said, with the particular flatness of a man delivering an honest appraisal: "I will not be able to do that."
"You could try."
"I am telling you in advance that I will fail." A pause. "I will reach for you. It is not a question of discipline. It is a question ofβ" he stopped, the honesty costing him slightlyβ "you. Specifically. I cannot keep my hands off you when you are doingβ" he gestured, briefly, at the general situationβ "anything."
You looked at him for a moment.
Then you reached for the box on the table beside the bed.
He watched you remove the silk β two pieces, the deep blue of the ones Baelor had used, and the specific recognition that moved through his expression at the sight of them was extraordinary. Not apprehension. Something considerably warmer than apprehension.
"Not the blindfold," you said. "I want you to see everything."
His throat moved.
"Agreed?" you said.
The word took a moment to arrive. "Agreed."
He held still while you tied his wrists β or held still in the way that Maekar held still, which was with the specific controlled quality of a large man exercising considerable discipline, every line of him radiating the effort of not simply taking over the proceedings. You tied the right wrist first, then the left, the silk making two soft loops around the bedpost that would hold without damaging, and you ran your thumb beneath each knot the way Baelor had shown you and watched Maekar watch your hands with those dark violet eyes.
When you finished you sat back and looked at him.
The sight of it β all that contained authority, the broad scarred chest, the white hair against the pillow, those eyes fixed on your face with an intensity that had not diminished one fraction for being tied to a bedpost β did something immediate to your composure that you declined to show.
"Pull against them," you said.
He did. The silk held. Something moved through his expression.
"Comfortable?"
"No," he said. Truthfully. "But not β no. It is fine."
"Tell me if it starts being too much."
"I will." A beat. "Are you going to do something, or are you going to sit there andβ"
You put your hand on him.
The sentence ended.
You had not rushed to get here. You had taken your time with his throat and his chest and the old scars that mapped his history β tracing them with your fingers and your mouth while he breathed carefully above you and kept his hands precisely where they were and occasionally made sounds that suggested the keeping was not without cost. By the time your hand wrapped around his cock he was already hard and had been for some time, the evidence of it insistent against your thigh for the last several minutes.
You took your time with this too.
A slow stroke from base to tip β learning him, or performing learning him, because you knew this as well as you knew anything, but the relearning had its own value and you watched his face while you did it and collected every response. His jaw tightening. The slight lift of his hips that he suppressed immediately with the discipline of a soldier. The breath that left him at the twist of your wrist at the top of the stroke, where you knew β had always known β he was most sensitive.
"Look at me," you said.
He was already looking at you. He had not stopped looking at you.
"Good," you said, and tightened your grip slightly, and began to move in earnest.
The rhythm you set was not merciful. Not fast β that wasn't the point β but consistent, the steady purposeful pace of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and intended to do it for as long as it suited them. Your thumb tracing the underside on the upstroke, the pressure varying just enough to keep him from settling into the rhythm, to keep every stroke slightly surprising. His cock hot and heavy in your hand, the evidence of wanting him slick at the tip, and you used it, spreading it with your thumb in a way that made his head press back against the pillow and a sound leave him that had no composure in it.
"Tell me what you want," you said.
"You know what Iβ"
"Tell me."
His jaw worked. The flush was climbing his throat, his ears, the tips of them vivid. "Faster."
"Not yet."
A sound of frustration that was also, unmistakably, something else. His wrists pulling once against the silk β not to escape, you understood, but because he needed somewhere for it to go and had nothing else. "ThenβΒ harderβ"
You loosened your grip slightly.
The sound he made was extraordinary.
"You were saying?" you said pleasantly.
"You are doing this deliberately."
"Yes." You restored the grip. Resumed the pace. His hips lifting toward your hand and you let them, let him have the friction of it without increasing anything, and watched his face β the specific agony of a controlled man losing his control by degrees, Maekar who held everything tightly finding that this particular grip was stronger than his. "You are doing beautifully," you said.
He made a sound at that β the praise landing somewhere it always landed with him, beneath the severity and the pride, in the place that didn't know what to do with being told he was doing well and wanted it anyway.
"More of that," he said, roughly. Not the physical. "Say βΒ more of that."
"More of what?" you asked, as though you didn't know.
His eyes closed briefly. Opened. "You know what."
"Tell me."
"Tell me I'm βΒ godsΒ β tell me I'mβ"
"You are perfect," you said, and tightened your grip, and felt him shudder. "You're doing exactly what I want. You look β Maekar, you have no idea how you look right now."
The sound he made resonated at the base of your spine.
You felt him approaching it the way you felt everything about him β in the specific tension that moved through his thighs, the slight change in his breathing, the way the sounds he was making had gone from frustrated to something with more urgency in them. Close. He was close. The rhythm of your hand and the heat of him and ten years of knowing exactly how to read him β close.
You stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Your hand going still, wrapped around him but motionless, and the sound he made at the cessation was nothing like dignified β a broken exhale that was almost a word and did not make it, his hips pushing forward into the grip of your hand and finding nothing moving.
"Noβ" The word dragged out. His wrists pulling hard against the silk. Those violet eyes finding yours with an expression of genuine anguish. "Don'tβ"
"Not yet," you said.
"I wasΒ almostβ"
"I know."
"YouΒ knewΒ and youΒ stoppedβ"
"Yes." You loosened your grip entirely. Just held him, warm and present and entirely motionless, and watched him breathe through it β the particular suffering of a man pulled back from the edge and left there, the flush of him deepened to something that had reached his chest, his jaw set with the effort of not simply demanding.
"Please." The word arrived with difficulty. "Please, justβ"
"Just what."
"Move."
"Say it properly."
The expression on his face β desire and frustration in equal devastating measure, the composure entirely gone, Maekar who held everything tightly reduced to this: tied to a bedpost and looking at you with violet eyes that had lost every pretence of management.
"Please move your hand," he said. Each word extracted. "Please. I needβ"
You moved your hand. He made a sound that belonged to no public space, but to that chamber specifically.
You built him back up with the same consistency β the same pace, the same pressure, your thumb tracing the places you knew, watching him climb back toward it with the focused attention of someone conducting an experiment and noting the results. Faster this time, slightly, the rhythm more insistent, and his breathing came faster to match it and the sounds he was making had gone past language entirely, just Maekar, stripped of everything, reduced to wanting and the specific mercy of your hand.
Close again. Closer than before.
You stopped.
The sound he made this time was wrecked in a way the first hadn't been β something in it that was almost past frustration into something rawer, the specific quality of a man who has been brought to the edge twice and denied twice and is finding that the third time will be worse still.
"Please." Immediate. No preamble, no pride left to negotiate around. His wrists against the silk. His eyes on yours. "Please, I cannot β you have to βΒ pleaseβ"
"Look at you," you said softly.
He looked at you. The expression β open, unguarded, the severity entirely absent, everything he kept managed and contained simply gone, violet eyes dark and wet at the edges with the sheer physical accumulation of it β made something in your chest ache with fondness so specific it had its own weight.
"You are so beautiful," you said. Meaning it completely. "Right now, like this β do you have any ideaβ"
"Please." Rougher. The word cracking slightly. "I amΒ askingΒ you. I am βΒ please."
You wrapped your hand around him again.
"Alright," you said quietly. "I have you. Come on."
This time you did not stop.
The pace you set was different β faster, the grip firmer, your thumb at the head of his cock on every upstroke with the specific pressure that you knew and had been deliberately withholding and now gave him without reservation. Your other hand at his chest, feeling his heartbeat, the rapid certain thud of it. His hips moving with your hand now, the discipline entirely gone, just Maekar chasing the thing you were finally allowing him to chase.
"That's it," you said. Low. Watching his face. "Come on. I've got you β that's it β you're perfect, you're soβ"
He came apart.
The sound he made was not triumphant. It was not the satisfied certainty of Maekar having won something. It was something with no victory in it at all β just release, just the specific devastating relief of a man who has been held at the edge three times and is finally, finally being allowed over it, his whole body shuddering with the force of it, his cock pulsing in your hand, his back arching off the bed as much as the silk would allow.
"Beautiful," you said, and meant it, watching him. "Look at you. You'reΒ beautifulΒ β Maekar, look at meβ"
He looked at you.
The tear was so quiet you almost missed it. A single line of it from the outer corner of his eye, tracking down his temple and into his hair β the accumulated frustration of three edges and however many days of being Maekar, of holding everything tightly, of being severe and controlled and the man who did not need things, finally finding its single outlet.
You leaned forward.
You pressed your lips to the subtle teary stream and licked it away β the salt of it, the specific tenderness of the gesture, your mouth gentle at his skin while he shuddered through the last of it beneath you.
He was very still when you drew back.
His breathing was uneven. The flush everywhere. Those violet eyes finding yours from close range with an expression that was the most naked thing you had ever seen on his face β exposed in a way that the crawling and the begging had not quite managed, because those had been theatrical, had had the structure of a scene, and this had been simplyΒ real. Simply him.
You reached up and worked the knots at his wrists. The silk fell away. You drew his arms down slowly and held his hands in yours and felt the slight tremor in them.
He looked at his own hands for a moment.
"That," he said. His voice had not recovered. "Was."
"Mm," you mumbled. A long silence.
"You lickedβ" he tried.
"Yes."
"I wasn'tβ" He stopped. His jaw worked. "I don'tβ"
"Don't worry, I know," you said.
Another silence. His hands turning in yours, his thumbs tracing across your knuckles in the slow absent way that meant he was processing something he didn't have immediate language for.
"The silk," he said finally.
"Mm?"
"Keep it," he said.
You looked at him with a funny, curious glare.
"Keep it," he said again, with the flat certainty of a man delivering a logistical instruction, and you understood that this was the closest he was going to get tonight toΒ I would like to do that again, and you received it accordingly.
"I'll keep it," you said.
His hand tightened briefly on yours. The smallest thing. The whole of him in one gesture.
Outside, the castle moved through its evening. Inside, Maekar lay in the quiet with the silk warm on the pillow beside him and you holding his hands and the single track of salt already dried at his temple, and he said nothing further, and he did not need to.
You already knew.
P.S.: yeah, it is the same pieces of silk that Baelor used with you Λα΅Λ
cw: filth!!, licking, sniffing, dry humping, nipple play(m!receiving), degradation, praise, body worship(m!receiving), breath play(f!receiving), scent kink!!, coming in pants, face humping, (2.7kw).
n/a: idk what came over me. based on this post!! u can read this as a piece from the my hot husband au/universe or a stand alone!! i just wrote this with their dynamic in mind lol! enjoy! < 3
"mhm, you didn't bathe after the hunt," you mumbled, fingers lifting maekar's tunic upwards impatiently, revealing his stomach, with that soft pudge of fat at the bottom that you loved. the one pinched by his breeches, making the soft flesh hang just a little over the band of his pants. "good. that's how i wanted you."
your husband only grumbled, rough hands trying to stop you from revealing more skin. still, you were determined, swatting every attempt away with a disgruntled sound, making maekar even more annoyed.
"have you no shame at all, woman?" he grouched, face pinched in irritation as you lifted the tunic until it pooled under his armpits, revealing his chest and belly in all its glory. "disrobing me and pawing at my flesh like i'm nothing but a toy to be played with when i'm exhausted from the bloody fuckingβ"
but you were barely listening to what your husband was saying, and frankly, in that moment, you had no qualms about paying mind to what came out of his mouth. all you cared about was how good he looked in that moment, leaning back against the pillows of your bed, still sweaty and dirty from the royal hunt he attended, looking every inch a man. all muscle and sinew and gods, the smatterings of fine silver hairs all over his chest and belly, and all the way lower on his navel, where a white trail of hair led right beneath the waistband of his breeches, to his cock.
you almost sighed thinking of it. you loved your husband's cock. it was one of the best things about him.
"you're exhausted," you parroted, humming as your soft hands continued to caress his stomach, pressing your fingers in, kneading at the skin like a cat, leisurely and appreciative, eliciting a displeased groan from your husband. "so sit back and indulge me for a few moments, dear husband."
maekar only scowled at you, the furrow between his brows deepening, lip curling in a snarl as he leaned forward, trying to loom, to intimidate in hopes you would cease pestering him. "don't dear husband me, you aggravating woman," he gritted, teeth barred, akin to a dragon before it unlatched its jaws to breathe fire and ash in anger. it made you warm under your chemise. you loved when your husband was all snappy and indignant.
you leaned forward, undeterred by his little intimidation tactic, noses almost brushing as you spoke, your tone soft and persuasive, as if beckoning a wild animal that might bite. "you were gone for so long, and i have been here, all alone, missing you like a limb," you lamented, distracting him from the way your fingers trailed along the waistband of his breeches now, prodding at the pudgy roll of fat there, loving the soft feel of it. "the least you could do is yield to my whims for a while."
aware that it wouldn't be enough to placate your husband, you leaned in, pressing your lips to his scarred cheek, leaving chaste, sweet kisses on the skin as you murmured. "you always look so good after a hunt, husband," you appeased, relentless in your pursuit of what you wanted, especially when it was something as delicious as touching maekar freely without him grumbling in your ear incessantly. "makes me want to devour you whole," your tone was on the precipe of resembling a purr, lips descending towards the strong line of his jaw and down his neck, nuzzling at the sweaty skin in delight.
as always, he tried to persist, even as you felt his skin warm and flush under your lips, making your mouth curl into a satisfied smile. you had him exactly where you wanted him, even if he was still resisting.
"you're being ridiculous," and oh, he was already panting softly, broad chest heaving along with the warm breaths that brushed your temple as you littered his ruddy-skinned throat in wet kisses. "pouncing on me like a cat in heat the second, ahβfuck," he cursed right when your tongue laved at his skin, tasting the remnants of the hunt. the sweat, the grime, the dirtβhim, musky and manly and oh so palatable. βstop. i reek of filth andββ
βand i love it,β you moaned against his throat, mouth parting to press openβmouthed kisses to the skin of his throat, tongue licking at every remnant of perspiration, catching it against your palate and savoring it like the finest arbor gold. βyou smell sβ good, husband, gods. i want to lick you all over.β
it always got like this. the more disheveled he returned, the more aroused you got. shame had deserted you moons ago, being absurdly vocal about how much you enjoyed when your husband was anything but presentable and pristine.
maekar made an aborted sound at your words, already flushed all the way to the tip of his ears, one rough hand moving to clasp the back of your nape and squeeze in hopes of deterring your assault on his senses, but it seemed in vain. the touch only spurred you, a soft sound resembling a purr rumbling against his throat as you continued to press your tongue to his skin, dipping it to taste the touch of grime gathered in the hollow of his throat.
βfilthy,β maekar snarled, fingers squeezing just so at your nape and pulling upwards, eliciting a disgruntled sound from you; a whine. your lips were slick with spit, cheeks flushed and eyes blown wide, hazy with heat and adoration, which only made the pressure of his hand increase, reprimanding you for how far gone you already looked. βyouβre a filthy, dirty woman, you know that?β he spat, tone brooking on a growl. βalways have been,β maekar continued, tightening his hold onto your nape, the pads of his fingers restricting your breath for just a moment, just enough to make you gasp, before he eased it. βgetting hot and bothered by your soiled husband like a degenerate,β his thumb brushed against your throat, where he gripped prior, the closest thing to quiet tenderness you could get in that moment, but it made warmth spread through you regardless.
βwhat of it?β you challenged, dipping your head back to his throat, nosing along the flushed skin, your soft fingers resuming their pawing along his belly, pressing and prodding at the pudgy flesh there, nails scraping along the trail of fine hairs leading below his waistband, making your husband hiss. βitβs your smell i crave, your taste,ββ another filthy lick, along the jut of his collarbones, before moving downwards towards his chest, where the smattering of hair was thicker, the smell of sweat and musk more pungent.
maekar tensed as soon as he felt your lips brush against one of his pecs, and you could feel the shiver that ran through him when the tip of your nose nudged a nipple, willing it to harden.
βdonβt you fucking dareββ
you did it again, nosing at the pebbling bud once, twice. then, you licked it, slow and wet, circling the nipple with the tip of your tongue, flicking teasingly.
a garbled moan punched out of maekarβs chest, his hold on your nape tightening anew, his other hand fisting the sheets under him, whiteβknuckled and trembling with restraint. you could tell he wanted to shove you away, to haul you as far as possible from his body so he wouldnβt be able to feel all this, to have to succumb to your whims and depravity. but you also knew he liked it. craved your attention like poison in his veins. hated that he needed it. snarled and snapped his jaws while being halfβhard already beneath his breeches, blushing from the tips of his ears to where your mouth was currently busied, lips parting to suckle noisily at his nipple, drawing out another restrained, delicious grunt from your husband.
βlook at you,β he managed to bite out through gritted teeth, broad chest heaving under your mouth, voice thinner, breathier. βlicking and sucking like a common whore,ββ
but you didnβt let him finish, letting your teeth scrape against the bud, nipping at it enough to sting, halting his crude words, making him curse, back arching, pushing his chest more into your awaiting mouth. it was a reprimand, but also a sick, twisted pleasure. seeing your husband bucking and snarling under your lips and tongue was a sight you could never get tired of, much like right now, as you laved one last lick to his wet, swollen nipple, before nosing between his pecs through the fine hairs there, inhaling the scent of him like a woman possessed.
βhow would you know what common whores do, mhm, husband?β you murmured, nuzzling along the underside of his pecs, letting your lips press against the skin in damp kisses as you descended towards his stomach, fingers still trailing along the hairs leading towards his navel. βhave you been indulging without my knowledge?β
each question was a taunt, like dangling a hunk of meat under a dragonβs nose, waiting for it to bite. and you loved nothing more than to taunt your dragon until he bit, until you could feel his teeth sink in, metaphorically or not.
and he always bit.
βyou think i would debase myself with some pleasure house wench?β he snarled, violet eyes glinting with something close to offense, which made you preen quietly, warmth spreading through your chest like drizzled honey.
as you nosed along his stomach, you couldnβt help but breathe him in again, mouth parting in soft pants as your eyes fluttered, the musk of him stronger the closer you got to the Vβshape of his hips. βi would hope you wouldnβt, dear husband,β you mouthed along his belly, tongue poking out to lick at the skin, tasting him again. βi would be thoroughly scorned if you so dared,β another lap of your tongue, slow and filthy, this time along the trail of hair near the waistband of his breeches, feeling a slight tickle onto your palate.
but, gods, the scent. the taste of him.
musky and sweaty and man.
it drove you wild, lips pressing to that tempting silver line, open-mouthed and slow, savoring him on your tongue again and again, as if you couldnβt get enough.
a groan slipped unbidden from maekarβs mouth, fingers tightening at your nape, as if remembering he still had a hold on you, blunt nails biting at the skin light enough to make you shiver as he pressed with firmness, as if scruffing a cat. βdonβt need some perfumed, wanton wench when i have my hands full with you,β he panted, eyes trained on you, almost unblinking, having watched you the entire time, despite his protests. lavender hues halfβlidded, glinting, part anger, part heat, eyeing you like a predator stalking prey.
his words made you purr against his skin, a satisfied sound, your fingers moving to tug slightly at his waistband, revealing more of his navel to you to lick and kiss. βgood,β you murmured into his skin, dipping to nose at the cincture of his pants, and lower, nuzzling against his crotch, where you could feel him hard and throbbing already.
βwoman, youββ but his protest dissolved into a shuddering moan as you rubbed your cheek against his clothed cock insistently, eyes fluttering, gaze holding his, molten and smoldering with heated affection. the friction was delicious, and it only made more bitten off pleasured sounds fall from his lips, broad chest heaving, splotched red from how hard he was blushing, skin ruddy and flushed. he looked good enough to eat. and maybe later, you intended to do just that.
the scent of him was strongest there, musk so strong it made you dizzy with want, lips parting to mouth at his crotch, feeling his cock throb beneath the cloth, only spurring you on. βsmell sβ good,β you mumbled as you continued to map the hard ridge of his arousal with your mouth, tongue laving at the material, wetting it with your spit, making the outline of his cock even more visible. βtaste sβ good, husband.β
βgods, fuckββ came from above you, the grip at your nape firming, pressing down, almost smushing your face into his crotch, but you couldnβt be happier to succumb to maekarβs guidance, feeling his hips twitch upwards, rutting weakly against your face.
it made you moan, the action so debauched, so depraved, making you nose along his clothed cock in time with the clumsy grinding of his hips against your face, the scent of him thickening, clogging your senses and coating the back of your throat from how greedily you inhaled.
βcβcanβt believe youβre, shitββ he could barely get his words out, too impaired by the way you looked, the blissful look on your face as he humped against it. βcanβt believe youβre getting off on this, you wanton woman,β maekar continued, his hips picking up the pace, forcing you slightly more against his clothed cock, grinding against your cheek, the corner of your mouth, your nose; anything he could, the pleasure tingling down his spine way too rapid for his taste. βmouthing at me like a filthy animal, letting me humpβfuck.β
you could tell he was getting close, the thought satisfying you more than you could tell. seeing your husband so unraveled by this alone, hips grinding against your face, hand holding you down for more delicious friction, chasing more but not being able to get it. a delicious torture that was way too exquisite not to witness.
βmhm,β you hummed against his crotch, rubbing your cheek harder against his clothed cock, feeling it throb incessantly, the smell of him more pungent, the precum leaking steadily through his breeches and staining your cheek. βnot my fault my husband left me unattended for so long,β you lamented, fluttering your lashes, continuing to rub against him. βiβve been so lonely,β the words were mouthed against him, breath warm against his crotch, pushing him closer and closer to the edge.
βalways so fuckinβ demanding,β he groaned, long and suffering, humping against your face with more fervor, so close to his peak, face and throat flushed and splotchy, hand firm against your nape as he pushed your face deeper into his crotch. βnβnever satisfied, ah, fuck, fuck, wifeβ,β
wife. the word strained and close to a whine as he lost control, rutting against your plush cheek once, twice, before he came with a pained groan, as if someone clawed the sound from deep in his chest, his spent dirtying his breeches, wetting the fabric against your cheek.
his chest was heaving, mouth parted wide as he tried to catch his breath, his grip still firm, but trembling against your nape, his thumb now brushing along the side of your throat, just like before, as if rewarding you silently, thanking you for letting him use you like this.
it made you smile and you nuzzled into his now damp crotch, the smell of him more powerful than ever, making you moan against the cloth. the sound seemed to bring maekar back from his post coital bliss, his violet eyes blinking down at you, hazy but attentive.
βlick it,β he breathed out, voice strained and heaving still, the fingers at your nape guiding you towards where his cum stained his breeches most, a wet patch visible where the head of his now softening cock was under the cloth. βcanβt let good spend go to waste, wife.β
you only hesitated for a heartbeat, mind not wrapping around his words for a moment, before you moaned, mouth parting eagerly, tongue pressing to the damp material and licking, feeling the taste of him invade your palette. βyes, yes,β you sighed, overly pleased, too preoccupied and greedy, lips wrapping around the wet spot and suckling it into your mouth, the essence exploding onto your tongue.
βfucking filthy womanβ,β maekar cursed, the sight of his wife, so desperate and eager, making him equal parts flustered and astounded.
you knew the night was going to be a long one when you felt a twitch under your tongue, your husbandβs cock throbbing back to life, making your lips curl.
Water trailed slowly down the tall glass windows overlooking the skyline, while the twenty-eighth floor of Targaryen Corporation remained painfully bright under cold white office lights. The sounds of keyboards, ringing phones, and heels clicking against carpet echoed through the afternoon like background noise no one paid attention to anymore.
You sat behind the same desk you had occupied for almost three years now.
Or at leastβthat was what the headlines liked to call you.
Stacks of documents sat neatly beside your computer monitor, color-coded schedules open across two different tabs. Maekar had six meetings today, two investor interviews, and a dinner with the board at eight.
You remembered all of it without needing to check twice.
βMs. y/n, legal sent over the revised contracts.β
βThank you. Just leave them here.β
You offered the intern a polite smile before immediately flipping through the paperwork. Everything was normal. Predictable. The same exhausting cycle your life had been trapped in for years.
βDid Mr. Targaryen get his coffee yet?β
Another assistant leaned over your desk quietly.
You glanced at the time.
3:36 PM.
βIβll take it myself.β
You stood, grabbing the black ceramic mug from your desk before walking toward the pantry near the back hallway. The smell of roasted coffee filled the air as the machine hummed softly in front of you.
You stared at your phone while waiting.
No new messages.
Nothing.
With a quiet sigh, you turned the screen off again.
At some point, your relationship with Maekar had slowly changed.
You used to chase after him constantlyβmemorizing his schedule, waiting outside meetings, staying late just to make sure heβd eaten something before midnight.
Now, you barely spoke unless it was work-related.
And honestly?
It was easier this way.
Easier than waiting for him to look at you the same way he looked at Dyanna Dayne.
Easier than pretending those photos online didnβt hurt.
Easier than hoping.
The coffee machine beeped softly.
You picked up the mug and headed back toward your deskβ
Only to stop the moment you turned the corner.
Maekar was standing there.
Tall. Exhausted. One sleeve rolled halfway to his elbows, silver hair slightly messy like heβd run his hands through it too many times today. He was leaning against your desk while scrolling through your tablet as if it belonged to him.
βSince when do you go through other peopleβs things without asking?β
Your voice was calm as you approached.
Maekar looked up immediately.
His pale violet eyes settled on you in silence.
βI pay your salary.β
βThat doesnβt mean you own everything.β
You placed the coffee down in front of him.
He glanced at the mug, then back at you.
βYou added sugar.β
βYouβve been in meetings for six hours straight.β
βI drink americanos.β
βAnd youβll get a migraine by five.β
You answered without looking up from the documents in your hands.
Silence.
Then the quiet scrape of movement as Maekar casually sat on the edge of your desk like he had every right to.
You sighed instantly.
βGet off the desk, Maekar.β
βItβs technically my desk.β
βNo, accounting approved the budget for it.β
The corner of his mouth twitched slightly.
Barely a smile.
You hated that you still noticed things like that.
βAre you leaving early tonight?β
The question made you pause.
Because it wasnβt about work.
And Maekar almost never asked questions that werenβt about work.
You finally looked at him.
βWhy?β
βAnswer me first.β
βThat depends on how much more you plan on using me tonight.β
Your tone stayed perfectly polite.
Too polite.
Maekar stared at you for a moment before taking a sip of coffee.
βYouβve been talking to me differently lately.β
A quiet laugh escaped you.
βOh? Was I supposed to stay sweet forever?β
βYou used to be.β
The answer came too quickly.
Too honest.
Both of you seemed to realize it at the same time.
Maekar looked away first, turning toward the rain-soaked city outside the windows.
βWhen we first got engaged, you never argued with me.β
You stared at him for a long moment before answering quietly.
βWhen we first got engaged, I was younger.β
Young enough to believe that loving him hard enough might someday make him love you back.
Young enough to wait outside his office until midnight just to walk him home.
Young enough to break every time Dyannaβs name lit up his phone screen.
Now?
You were just tired.
The silence stretched between you until his phone vibrated suddenly across the desk.
You didnβt even need to look.
Because Maekarβs expression changed immediately.
Softer.
Warmer.
Like it always did.
Dyanna.
He answered the call almost instantly.
βHey.β
Even his voice sounded different.
Gentler.
You lowered your eyes to the paperwork in front of you, pretending not to listen even though he sat less than a meter away.
βIβm still at the officeβ¦ yeah, probably another hour.β
A pause.
Then that smile again.
Small.
Real.
βI told you not to wait up for me.β
Your grip tightened slightly around your pen.
Maekar continued talking quietly, voice lowering even more as the conversation went on. The kind of voice he had never once used with you.
And somehow, that was the cruelest part of all this.
You were the one wearing his ring.
But half the time, you felt more like a stranger in his life than anyone else in this building.
You stood abruptly, gathering the folders against your chest.
βIβm taking these to legal.β
You kept your voice steady.
Maekar was still on the phone.
βMm. Iβll call you back.β
But before you could walk past himβ
His hand wrapped around your wrist.
You froze instantly.
Not painfully tight.
Just enough to stop you.
You turned to him in disbelief.
Maekar kept the phone against his ear, pale violet eyes lifting toward yours like this was the most natural thing in the world.
βYeahβ¦ itβs nothing.β
Your gaze dropped to his hand.
Warm.
Annoyingly warm.
βMaekar.β
You lowered your voice because he was still talking to her.
βLet go.β
He ignored you.
Instead, his thumb pressed lightly against your wrist as if telling you to wait.
You nearly laughed.
What was this supposed to be?
Did he want you to stand there while he spoke softly to another woman?
Did he want you to hear exactly how gentle he could be with someone he actually loved?
You rolled your eyes before turning away toward the rain outside.
βIβll probably be late tonight.β
His voice stayed soft against the phone.
βYeahβ¦ okay.β
A brief pause.
Then finallyβ
βIβll call you later.β
The call ended.
Silence crashed into the room immediately afterward.
Only rain and the hum of the air conditioner remained.
But Maekar still hadnβt let go of your wrist.
You slowly looked back at him.
βHow long are you planning on holding me here?β
Maekar leaned back slightly against the desk, eyes fixed on yours.
βWhatβs your problem?β
You let out a short laugh.
βMine?β
βYouβve looked pissed at me all afternoon.β
βMaybe youβre imagining things.β
βYou rolled your eyes at me.β
βBecause youβre annoying.β
The answer slipped out before you could stop it.
And judging by the slight shift in his expression, Maekar hadnβt expected you to say it out loud either.
He kept staring at you quietly, fingers still around your wrist like he was trying to figure something out.
βYou never used to talk to me like this.β
βBecause I grew up.β
Your voice remained calm.
Then, slowly, you peeled his hand away from your wrist one finger at a time.
Gentle.
Polite.
Final.
You stepped back immediately afterward, putting space between the two of you again.
Maekar glanced briefly at his now-empty hand before looking back up at you.
The tension in the room felt unbearable.
βIf thereβs nothing else, Iβll deliver these now.β
Your tone stayed perfectly professional.
Maekar stayed quiet for a second too long.
Then finallyβ
βI wasnβt trying to upset you.β
You studied him for a moment.
The dark circles beneath his eyes.
The wrinkled sleeves.
The exhaustion he carried around like armor.
Once upon a time, that version of him wouldβve made your heart ache.
Now?
βYou do it all the time, Maekar.β
And with that, you walked away without looking back.
The office door closed softly behind you.
But the heaviness in your chest stayed there long after.
β
Monday morning at Targaryen Corporation felt tense in a way everyone noticed immediately.
βMr. Targaryenβs in a horrible mood again.β
βHe sent finance back three times over formatting.β
βI heard PR got yelled at because the font size was wrong.β
You heard every whispered conversation as you walked past the cubicles carrying coffee.
But you ignored all of it.
Over the past two weeks, Maekar had become impossible to please.
He snapped during meetings.
Changed schedules last minute.
Rejected presentations over microscopic mistakes.
And somehow, the worst part wasnβt even his temper.
It was the way he kept looking at you.
Every meeting.
Every hallway.
Every room.
Youβd feel it before you saw it.
That heavy stare from across the table while you worked.
And every single time you looked upβ
Maekar was already watching you.
Like he wanted to say something.
But never did.
So eventually, you stopped looking back altogether.
During meetings, you no longer sat beside him.
You chose the far end of the conference table instead.
A subtle difference.
But everyone noticed.
Especially Maekar.
Because the moment you sat down, you could feel his gaze settle on you again.
Sharp.
Silent.
Uncomfortable.
βCan we begin?β
His voice finally broke the silence.
The meeting moved forward normally after thatβnumbers, investments, quarterly reports.
You answered questions professionally whenever needed, never once looking directly at him longer than necessary.
Then halfway through the presentationβ
βy/n. Come here.β
The room went quiet immediately.
Before, you wouldβve stood beside him without hesitation.
Now?
βThe report you need is on page sixteen.β
You didnβt even look up.
Silence.
Then his voice again, lower this time.
βy/n.β
A warning.
You finally lifted your eyes to meet his.
βIs there a problem, Mr. Targaryen?β
Your tone was painfully polite.
Like a wall carefully built between the two of you.
Maekar stared at you for two long seconds.
Then looked back down at the documents.
ββ¦No.β
But after that, the atmosphere inside the room never recovered.
Because even if nobody knew the full storyβ
Everyone could tell something between you and Maekar Targaryen was falling apart.
And somehow, he seemed to hate it more than anyone else.
Being an Account of Certain Strange Discoveries Made by a Maid of the Keep
Summary: as a new maid in the Red Keep, you go looking for the truth behind the rumours about princes Baelor and Maekar. When you eventually find it, you make the catastrophic mistake of not leaving when you still could. But, did you really want to leave?
Pairing: vampire!Baelor Targaryen x maid!reader x vampire!Maekar Targaryen (slight Baelor x Maekar if you squint)
WC: 19.3k (as a wise Ao3 author once said, i hope you guys like this because some day i'll die and i'll have to explain all this shit to the lord)
Warning(s): vampire!AU, +18 MDNI, explicit sexual content, AFAB reader, blood play, biting/blood drinking, threesome (you visit paris), size kink, hair pulling, mild power imbalance, overstimulation, multiple orgasms, oral sex (f and m receiving), unprotected pinv sex, fantasy violence adjacent (bite marks/blood), mature themes, not beta read
Dividers by @thanathecreator and @honeyluvsw
The rumours had preceded you.
This was the nature of great houses β their reputations travelled ahead of them like outriders, announcing their arrival long before the thing itself came into view. You had heard of the Targaryens before you had ever set foot within the Red Keep's walls: the silver-haired dynasty of old blood, descended, so the smallfolk said, from something older than men and closer to flame. Dragonlords. Conquerors. Peculiar, every last one of them, in ways that defied ordinary description.
You had not taken much account of it. You were a practical creature by nature, and practicality had taught you that the stories attached to noble families were more often the invention of idle tongues than the record of truth. Lords were lords. They ate and slept and quarrelled over coin and precedence like any man. The mystique was a performance, you had told yourself. Nothing more.
You had been in the Keep three weeks before Marta set you straight.
Marta was the oldest of the senior maids β a woman of indeterminate age with sharp eyes and the particular economy of movement that came from decades of navigating other people's spaces without disturbing them. She had taken to you with the cautious approval of someone who was not easily impressed, and it was this, perhaps, that led her to speak plainly when another might have kept her silence.
You were in the linen corridor, carrying a stack of freshly pressed sheets, when she fell into step beside you without preamble.
"You've been assigned to the princes' wing," she said. It was not a question.
"I have."
"Then there are things you ought to know." She paused. The corridor was empty in both directions. Her voice, already quiet, dropped further. "The brothers. Prince Baelor and prince Maekar. You've seen 'em, I expect."
You had. Everyone had. They were impossible to miss β not for any loudness of manner, but for precisely the opposite. They moved through the Keep with the unhurried certainty of men who had never been required to justify their presence anywhere, and they drew the eye the way a still, deep river draws it: not dramatic, but commanding in some way that bypassed ordinary understanding. You had observed them at a distance twice, perhaps three times. You had noticed, on the second occasion, that the elder β Prince Baelor β had smiled at something his brother said, and that the smile had revealed, briefly, a sharpness to his canines that had registered as curious before your attention had been called elsewhere.
You had thought nothing more of it.
"I have seen them," you allowed.
Marta was quiet for a moment that stretched past comfortable.
"They've a taste," she said at last, "it ain't β common. Among men." You waited a beat. "For blood."
You stopped walking. She did not.
"Apparently not in violence," she continued, without looking back at you. She paused, searching for something in the middle distance, "but in pleasure. The way other men have their appetites."
You stared at her retreating back.
"That is simply absurd," you said.
She glanced over her shoulder with an expression that was entirely without apology.
"Aye," she agreed. "It is. And yet." She rounded the corner and was gone.
Truth was, you had heard the stories before you ever set foot inside the Red Keep.
Every girl in the city had. They were passed along in the manner of all forbidden things β in whispers behind cupped hands, in the breathless hush of market stalls, in the dark corners of taverns where the candles burned low and the wine flowed freely. The Targaryens were not as other men. This much had always been known, had always been woven into the fabric of the city's understanding of its own rulers. They were the blood of Old Valyria, the last remnant of a civilisation so ancient and so terrible that even its memory had been swallowed by fire and sea. They had ridden dragons. They had looked upon the face of death and named it kin.
But the stories about the princes β about those princes, the Crown Prince and the fourth son of King Daeron β those were of a different order entirely.
They drink, the old women said, and they said it in a way that made clear they did not mean wine.
You had not believed it.
You had been sensible about it, which was to say you had been practical, and practicality had served you well in your years of life in a way that superstition had not. You were not the sort of girl who saw omens in the flight of birds or pressed garlands of flowers over doorways to ward off ill luck. You had been educated enough to know that the strange and the frightening had a habit of becoming, upon closer inspection, merely the unusual. The Targaryens were peculiar. Everyone agreed on this. Their eyes were wrong β washed-out lilac or liquid purple β and they were too still in the manner of men who had learned to be very, very careful about moving, and they smiled in ways that did not always reach those unsettling eyes.
But they were men. You had told yourself this with great conviction.
You had continued telling yourself this for approximately the three weeks after taking your position in the Red Keep, during which time you had seen Prince Baelor at court twice and Prince Maekar at a distance from across a training yard, and you had noted with the dispassionate clarity of a sensible woman that yes, both of them were precisely as strange as advertised, and no, this did not constitute evidence of the supernatural.
It was Elara who finally shook your conviction, though not in the way you might have expected.
Elara was the oldest of the chambermaids, a compact and weathered woman of some fifty years who had served the Keep long before you were born and who wore her accumulated knowledge of its inhabitants with the air of someone carrying a very heavy and not entirely pleasant burden. She had taken to you with a brisk, unsentimental practicality that you had recognised as her version of affection, and it was in this spirit that she had drawn you aside one evening in the corridor outside the western solars and informed you, in a voice so flat it bordered on the theological, that you were not to enter one particular room after dark.
"Not after dark?" you had repeated.
"Not after dark," she had confirmed.
"Becauseβ"
"Because," she had said, with the air of a woman who had decided that direct communication was preferable to the performance of delicacy, "the princes use it in the evenings, and what they do in it in the evenings is not something a girl your age ought to witness."
You had wanted to ask. The wanting had been so sharp it was almost painful. But Elara's expression had been so thoroughly closed β not embarrassed, not frightened, simply closed, the way a door is closed against weather β that you had swallowed the question and nodded and gone about your duties.
But the question had not gone away. It had, in fact, grown.
If there was anything that hadn't helped to dispel that question from your mind, it was the prince's teeth. You had noticed Prince Baelor's teeth before.
This was not something you had allowed yourself to dwell upon, because to dwell upon it would have been to admit that you had been paying the sort of attention to Prince Baelor that a chambermaid of appropriate professional distance ought not to pay. But they were difficult not to notice β sharper than they should have been, the canines in particular, and when he smiled (which was rarely, and always in a way that suggested the smile was only a small visible portion of something much larger happening beneath the surface) they caught the light in a manner that was, if one were being honest, faintly predatory.
You had told yourself this was a trick of the light.
You had told yourself this on three separate occasions when revisiting the image from your memory.
On the fourth occasion, you had told yourself to stop being ridiculous, and had proceeded to think about his teeth for the remainder of the afternoon.
It was this, more than anything else β this accumulated, irritating, entirely-unwilling preoccupation β that finally drove you to do the thing you had been sensibly not doing for three weeks.
It was not difficult to learn their habits. Servants were, by professional necessity, students of routine, and you had spent three weeks learning the rhythms of the Keep's upper floors.
It was a Thursday evening, and the candles in the corridor had burned low, and from beneath the door of that particular room of the western solar there came a line of warm, amber light. You could hear voices inside β low, unhurried, unmistakably the princes' β and beneath the voices, something you could not quite name. A sound that was nearly nothing. A sound that was, nonetheless, the kind of nearly-nothing that the body registers before the mind does.
You pressed yourself to the wall beside the door. You were not going inside. You were simply β listening.
The door was old. The wood had warped in some long-ago winter and had never properly been repaired, and the gap between door and frame was, if one positioned oneself correctly, sufficient to see through.
You positioned yourself correctly.
The solar seemed to be warm.
This was the first thing you noticed β the warmth of it, golden and deep, emanating from the great fireplace along the far wall. The room was larger than you had imagined from the outside, lined with shelves of books that reached to the ceiling, and in the centre of it, arranged before the fire, were two chairs and, between them, a low chaise.
Prince Baelor occupied one of the chairs.
Prince Maekar sat on the edge of the chaise, turned toward his brother with one arm resting on his knee.
They were speaking, though too quietly for you to make out the words, and there was between them that quality of ease you had never seen either of them display in public β an absence of the particular tension that both men wore like armour in daylight, as though in this room, in this light, they could afford to set it down.
You were watching them with the focused attention of someone who has decided that what they are seeing is perfectly ordinary and is determined to continue believing this despite mounting evidence to the contrary, when Prince Maekar turned his head toward the door.
He did not look at you directly. He looked at the door. He looked at the door in the manner of a man who knows precisely what is on the other side of it, and his expression β sharp and silver and thoroughly unreadable β settled into something that might, in a different light, have been amusement.
"We have a visitor," he said.
Your blood went cold.
You stood very still in the way that animals stand still, with the primitive instinct that if you did not move then whatever had noticed you might un-notice you, and you were acutely, paralysingly aware of how foolish you had been and how very far from your own chamber you stood.
"I know," said Prince Baelor.
His voice was β unhurried. That was the only word you had for it. Entirely, unsettlingly unhurried, the way a man is unhurried when he is perfectly certain of the outcome.
"Come in," he said. And then, when you remained frozen. "You will find it considerably less comfortable to spend the evening in the corridor."
You had entertained, in the three seconds between the invitation and your hand upon the door, a very reasonable thought, which was that you could simply walk away.
Yet you did not walk away.
This was the part you could not explain β not then, and not in any of the quiet hours that followed when you turned it over and over like a stone with something written on its underside that you could not quite read. You were not a foolish girl. You were not the kind of girl who mistook danger for excitement or confusion for desire. You had, in your years of life, made a number of decisions that other people might have called boring, and you had made them gladly, because boring decisions had a very high survival rate and you had always thought survival underrated.
And yet, your hand was on the door.
The fear was real β you want to be precise about this, because it matters, because the alternative account of events (the one in which you were simply not frightened enough to be sensible) is not the true one. The fear was present and it was specific: the cold understanding that you were about to walk into a room with two men who were not, in some fundamental and as-yet-unquantified sense, entirely men, and that you had no particular means of leaving if leaving became necessary. Your pulse was elevated. Your palms were not entirely steady. These were the physical facts of your fear, and they were real.
But beneath them β deeper than them, in a register that fear had not managed to reach β there was something else.
You had felt it from the first time you had seen Prince Baelor at court, though you had not had a name for it then. A pull. That was the closest you could come to describing it, though the word was too small and too mechanical for what it actually was. Not attraction in the ordinary sense β or not only that β but something that operated below the level of attraction, something that was less I want and more I am drawn, the way iron is drawn to a lodestone without having any opinion about the matter. He had been across the room, and you had felt it as a kind of pressure, as though the air between you had acquired a grain, a direction, a preference.
With Prince Maekar it was different in quality but identical in effect. Where Baelor pulled you like something vast and patient β a tide, a gravity β Maekar was more immediate. More specific. The one time his pale eyes had found yours across the training yard, the sensation had not been so much a pull as a collision, something that struck rather than drew, that said here, this, now with a directness that your body answered before your mind had been consulted.
You had told yourself, on each occasion, that this was simply the effect of their strangeness. That peculiarity, sufficiently concentrated, could produce in the observer a kind of vertiginous fascination that might be mistaken for something more intentional. You had found this explanation quite satisfying to your standards.
You found it considerably less satisfying now, standing at the door of their solar with your hand on the latch and both princes waiting on the other side, because the pull had become β in proximity, in the immediacy of this β something altogether less metaphorical. It was physical. It moved through you like a current, like the feeling of standing at the edge of a great height not because you intend to fall but because some ancient and irrational part of you is conducting an argument with the rest of you about the nature of falling.
They will hurt you, said the sensible part of you, the part that had made all the boring decisions.
They will not, said whatever part of you had answered the current.
You don't know that.
I know it, said the other, with a certainty so absolute and so sourceless that it was more frightening than the fear it was displacing, and then it said nothing else, because you had opened the door.
The warmth of the room hit you first.
Then the light. Then the two princes, turning toward you as one β and the quality of their attention, when it landed, was sufficient to stop you three paces inside the door.
You understood it then, in that moment, with something that was not quite clarity but was adjacent to it: the pull was theirs. It had always been theirs. Not a trick, precisely, or not only a trick β something older than trickery, something that had been doing what it did long before it needed a name. They were not doing it consciously, or perhaps they were and it had simply become so natural to them that consciousness had nothing to do with it anymore. But it was in the room the way warmth is in a room, the way light is in a room, and it was in them the way warmth is in a fire β not performed, not separate from the thing itself, but the thing itself.
You should have been more frightened than you were.
You noted this with the detached precision of someone cataloguing their own responses for later examination. The fear was still there β still present, still specific, still entirely justified β but it was losing ground. It was losing ground to the pull, and to the warmth of the room, and to the way Prince Baelor was looking at you with those mismatched eyes that had too much in them for a single expression to contain, and to the way Prince Maekar's jaw had tightened very slightly when you walked in, in the manner of a man exerting control over a reaction he had not intended to have.
They were dangerous.
You knew they were dangerous in the way you knew anything as a simple fact β without the need for further evidence. They were dangerous and the room was warm and the current moved through you like something that had always been moving and had only now found its direction, and you were standing very still in the manner of a girl who has made a decision without being entirely certain when she made it.
"Close the door, please," said Prince Baelor.
His voice was β it moved through you. That was the only adequate description. It moved through you in the same register as the pull, and you understood that the voice and the pull were the same thing, or versions of the same thing, and that understanding did not help at all.
You closed the door.
"I β" Your voice came out steadier than you had any right to expect. "I meant no intrusion, my lords."
"My lords," Maekar repeated, and something in his tone suggested the title amused him β not unkindly. "You are new to the wing."
"Three weeks, my lord."
"And someone has been filling your head with stories."
You said nothing. He took your silence for the answer it was and the slight smile returned β slower this time, and more private, and the canines caught the firelight in a way that sent the blood racing up the back of your neck.
"We will not hurt you." Baelor said simply, in the tone of a man stating a fact about the weather. "If that is what you feared, coming in."
You had feared it. It seemed ridiculous now, in the specific quality of his stillness, in the careful way he held himself at a distance that was generous enough to be deliberate. But you had feared it β the image Marta and Elara had planted, the old stories, the things that lived in the blood of old houses and older legends.
"Sit down," said Prince Maekar, and his voice was rougher than his brother's β less deliberate, more direct, the kind of voice that had not learned to soften itself and had no particular interest in doing so. He gestured toward the chaise with a movement of his chin, and there was something in his lavender eyes that might have been irritation or might have been something else entirely.
You sat.
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable in the way that silences usually are β it did not press on you in the manner of something requiring to be filled. It simply was, present and waiting, while both princes regarded you with the patient, undivided attention of men who had nowhere else to be.
"You have been wondering," said Prince Baelor at last.
It was not a question.
"Iβ" You stopped. Collected yourself. "I have heard the stories."
"Everyone has heard the stories." Prince Maekar's voice was dry. "Stories are not the same as questions."
"What were you hoping to see?" Prince Baelor asked, and the genuine curiosity in his voice was somehow more frightening than accusation would have been.
"I don't know," you said, which was the most honest answer you had.
Prince Baelor's mouth curved β not the formal smile you had seen at court, but something smaller and more real, and his teeth caught the firelight, and you saw the canines clearly for the first time, properly, without the distance of a crowded room to soften them. Sharp. Too sharp. The teeth of something that had once needed them.
Your heart did something complicated.
"The stories," Prince Maekar said, leaning forward slightly, elbows to knees, silver hair falling across his brow. "What do they say we do?"
You looked at him. The firelight caught the old pox scars beneath his beard and threw them into relief, and his eyes were very pale and very steady. He was asking, you realised, not because he did not know, but because he wanted to hear you say it.
"They say," you began, and your voice was steadier than you had any right to expect, "that you take blood."
Neither prince moved.
"And that you take it," you continued, because you had started and there was no particular dignity in stopping now, "in a manner that is nβ not violent."
The silence stretched.
Then Prince Maekar made a sound β short and low and involuntary, the ghost of a laugh that had escaped before he could recapture it β and looked at his brother with an expression that said, plainly, well.
"Not violent," Prince Baelor repeated, with a thoughtfulness that suggested he was weighing the description. "No. That is β accurate enough."
"Are you frightened?" Prince Maekar asked.
You considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
"Yes," you said. "But not as much as I expected to be."
Something shifted in Prince Maekar's expression. Something that had been held carefully, at a controlled distance, moved β fractionally, but perceptibly β closer to the surface.
"That," he said, "is either very brave or very foolish."
"I think it may be both, my lord," you said.
Prince Baelor looked at you for a long moment, with those quiet, particular eyes, and when he spoke his voice had changed β lower, more deliberate, the unhurriedness of it taking on a different quality entirely. "You understand what we are."
"I don't think I do entirely."
"But you are still sitting."
"I am still sitting," you agreed.
He rose from his chair then, and the movement was β not fast, precisely, but somehow uninterrupted, the kind of movement that does not negotiate with space the way ordinary movement does. He crossed to where you sat and stood before you, and the fact of his height and the fact of his stillness and the fact of those mismatched eyes at this proximity produced in you a sensation that was not, you noted with some surprise, primarily fear.
"May I sit beside you?" he asked.
The asking was so courteous, so genuinely and carefully courteous, that it produced in you a sudden and entirely inappropriate urge to laugh.
"Yes," you said.
He sat. The chaise accommodated him without difficulty, but the effect of his proximity was β considerable. He was warm in the manner that fires are warm, a heat that had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with something older, and when he reached up and touched your jaw with two fingers β the lightest possible contact, barely there β you felt it from your face to the base of your spine.
"The stories are not wrong," he said quietly. "But they are incomplete." His thumb traced the line of your jaw, slow and deliberate, and his eyes were on your face with a quality of attention that made you feel, in the most unnerving possible way, seen. "We do not take. We are given."
"And if I were to give?" you asked, and you did not entirely recognise your own voice when you said it.
Behind you, you heard Prince Maekar get to his feet.
"Then," said Prince Baelor, "we would be very, very careful."
He said it the same way he said everything: calmly, with that quiet authority that seemed to come from some bedrock certainty rather than any desire to impress. And his eyes were on you in a way that was attentive and steady and β warm, you thought, which was not what you had expected from any part of this evening.
"You are not going toβ" You stopped again.
"Kill you?" The slight smile. "No, dear girl." A pause. "That is not what this is."
You believed him.
And that was precisely the problem.
You believed him in the way you believed a fire was warm β not as an article of faith but as a simple, physical, immediately verifiable fact β and the believing of it was what finally sent the sensible part of you, the part that had made all the boring decisions, scrambling back to its feet after the long and losing battle it had been fighting all evening.
This is where it ends, it said, with the clipped authority of something that has been ignored for too long and has decided to compensate with volume.Β This is where you stand up. This is where you leave.
You stood up.
The movement surprised even you β sudden, unplanned, the body executing a decision the mind had not quite finished making. Your feet found the floor. The room was warm and the fire was gold and Prince Baelor was looking at you from with those mismatched eyes, and none of this was sufficient to stop you taking one step toward the door, and then another.
You were almost proud of yourself.
You had taken four steps, possibly five, and the door was close enough that you could see the grain of the old wood, the warped edge of it that had never properly been repaired β and the sensible part of you was composing, already, the account of this evening that you would give to no one, ever, the account in which you had been briefly foolish and then promptly and admirably sensible β when his voice came.
"Would you like to know how it feels?"
Quiet. Unhurried. Not a command, not a plea β simply a question, asked with the same genuine and careful curiosity with which Prince Baelor appeared to approach everything, as though the answer mattered to him in the way that true things matter, and as though he would accept it, whatever it was.
You stopped.
Your hand was not quite at the door. Not quite.
"There are no stories that describe it accurately," he continued, and his voice was so calm, so deliberate, so entirely without the quality of a man who is trying to prevent your departure, that it produced in you the paradoxical effect of making departure feel less urgent. "This is not a manipulation. It is simply true. What you have heard β the cold, the violence, the taking β those are the stories people tell about things they have not experienced. What I am offering you is the thing itself."
You did not turn around.
You were not certain, if you turned around, that you would be capable of the subsequent steps toward the door. This was an honest assessment of your own structural integrity.
"And if I stay," you said, to the door, "and find that I do notβ that it is notβ"
"Then you leave," he said. Simple as that. "You leave, and we will think no less of you for it, and we will not speak of this again."
The silence held.
The fire shifted in the grate and threw a new warmth across the room and somewhere in it you heard yourself, with a clarity that was almost external, ask the question you had been not-asking all evening.
"Does itβ hurt?"
A pause. Considered. He was not going to lie to you; you understood this about him without having to verify it.
"Briefly," he said. "And then it does not hurt at all. And thenβ" Another pause, shorter, and in it something that was almost β almost β a loss for words. From a man who was never at a loss. "There is not a word in the Common Tongue that is adequate. I have looked for one."
You pressed your fingers, lightly, against the old wood of the door.
Then you turned around.
He had stood.
You had not heard him rise β of course you had not, movement was not something that announced itself in him β but he was standing now, and the distance between you was less than you had believed to walk, and the firelight was behind him and it caught the silver threads in his dark hair and threw the lines of his face into relief, and he looked β he looked like something that had been waiting. Not impatiently. Not with any quality of demand. Simply waiting, the way very old things wait, with the certainty that time is not a constraint.
His mismatched eyes were on you. Steady.
"Come back," he said.
NotΒ come here.Β NotΒ stay.Β Simply: come back. As though you had merely stepped away for a moment and the place beside him was still yours, was still warm, was not going anywhere.
Your feet moved.
You crossed the room and the warmth of it rose around you with each step, that particular warmth that was not the fire's warmth and not any warmth you had a name for, and when you stopped before him the proximity of him β the height and the stillness and the quiet certainty of him β settled over you like something laid gently across your shoulders.
He did not touch you. Not yet.
He simply looked at you, with those careful eyes that had too much in them, and you understood that he was waiting for something from you β not permission, precisely, but the thing that lives before permission. The acknowledgement that you were here because you had chosen to be. That you had turned around.
"All right," you said.
His expression did the thing β the small, real thing, the one underneath all the others β and his canines caught the light when his mouth curved, sharp and particular and no longer startling to you in the way they had once been.
And behind you, so quietly you had not registered the approach, you felt the warmth of Prince Maekar β solid and certain and already there, already close, his presence at your back like the answer to a question you hadn't known you were asking.
"Give me your hand," said Baelor.
You did. He took it with both of his β and the hands were cooler than you expected, and more careful, the grip of them neither tight nor loose but exact, as though he had considered the precise amount of pressure and applied it deliberately.
He turned your wrist up. The firelight found the inside of it β the pale skin, the blue shadow of the vein beneath.
You watched his mouth.
You could not have looked away. This was not a failure of will but a simple fact of the situation, the way it is a simple fact that you cannot look away from lightning β not because you lack the capacity but because the body has already decided, has already committed its full attention to the thing that is about to happen, and the mind follows because there is nowhere else worth being.
His lips pressed to your pulse point first.
Just that. Just the warm, closed press of his mouth against the inside of your wrist, and the precision of it β the fact that he had found the pulse without searching, without hesitation, as though he had always known exactly where it was β sent a shiver from your wrist to your shoulder that had nothing to do with cold. You felt your own heartbeat against his mouth. Or perhaps you only imagined it. Perhaps the awareness of your own pulse was simply what happened when someone pressed their lips to the place where it lived and waited.
His lips parted.
His tongue traced the length of your inner wrist in a single, slow, deliberate movement β from the heel of your palm to the soft skin at the crease of your elbow, and then back, following the pale blue map of you with an attentiveness that made it feel less like a gesture and more like a question being asked in a language you were only beginning to understand. The warmth of it. The specific, unhurried warmth of his tongue learning the inside of your wrist as though it was something worth knowing.
Behind you, Maekar's hands settled at your waist.
You registered this distantly β the weight of them, the size of them β but the registering was distant because the foreground of your entire awareness was occupied by Baelor's mouth. His hands had moved too, one cradling your elbow, one holding your wrist steady, and the care of the hold β the way it was supportive rather than restraining, the way it said I have you in the quietest possible register β made your knees unreliable in a manner that was becoming a recurring theme of the evening.
Maekar's hands at your waist were β not quite shy. Maekar was constitutionally incapable of shy, you suspected. But they were tentative in a way that his hands had not been in your imagining of how this evening might go, resting rather than gripping, as though he was very carefully deciding how much of himself to allow into contact with you. As though the wanting of him was so large that he was rationing the expression of it. The pads of his thumbs pressed, lightly, against the small of your back. Staying. Simply staying.
Baelor's tongue stilled.
You felt his lips part further. Felt β this was the part that would not fit into any category of prior experience β the soft, dragging grace of his canines against the skin. Not biting. Not yet. Simply present. Making themselves known. The points of them, precise and particular, tracing the same path his tongue had traced, and the gentleness of it was somehow more frightening than force would have been, because force you could have braced against.
This, you could have never braced against.
This required you to simply β stand there, and feel it, and trust that the careful hands holding your wrist knew what they were doing.
You were trusting them. The realisation arrived without drama. You were trusting them entirely.
Baelor lifted his eyes to yours, and he held your gaze, and in his expression was the question β the last question, the one that needed no words β and you gave him the answer the same way, without words, simply by not looking away.
He bit.
The pain was brief and bright and specific β real, fully real, not something to be minimised or explained away β and then Maekar's hands at your waist tightened, both of them, the tentative quality gone entirely, replaced by the certainty of a man who has decided that if your body faltered he would be the reason it did not reach the floor. The grip of him. The comprehensive, steady grip of him, and you felt his chest expand against your back as he exhaled.
Baelor's teeth were in your wrist.
You were aware of this as a fact with several dimensions simultaneously: the pressure of it, the precision of it, the extraordinary and specific intimacy of it β and his tongue, still moving, tracing the skin caught between his canines with a tenderness so focused it seemed almost reverential, as though the access you had given him was something he intended to honour with his full attention.
The pain was already β it was already somewhere else. It was not gone, but it had moved to the periphery, the way a sound moves when something louder begins, except the something louder was not a sound at all.
It began at your wrist and moved inward.
A wave. That was the closest word, though waves were cold and this was the opposite of cold β deep and slow and total, moving up your arm and into your chest and then further, further, reaching places that had no business being reached by anything happening at your wrist, settling low in your belly with a warmth so specific and so sudden that your body's response to it was entirely beyond your governance.
You moaned.
The sound surprised you. It came from somewhere unguarded, somewhere that had not been asked for its opinion and had given it anyway, full and unambiguous, and it left your mouth before any part of you had thought to moderate it.
Maekar made a sound against your hair. Low. Almost inaudible. The sound of a man receiving information he had been trying not to want and finding that the wanting of it was considerably larger than he had accounted for.
His arms came fully around you.
And Baelor, at your wrist, pressed his mouth closer, and his tongue moved, and the wave moved with it.
Eventually, he lifted his mouth from your skin.
The separation was β you felt it as an absence, which was not something you had anticipated, the sudden and specific absence of his mouth, the cool air reaching the skin where his warmth had been. His hands did not move. They remained exactly where they had been, cradling your arm with that same careful, unhurried tenderness, one at your elbow and one at your wrist, as though the holding was not contingent on the biting, as though he had every intention of holding you long after the other thing was finished.
You looked at him.
His pupils were blown. Entirely, comprehensively blown β the dark eye and the pale eye both, the mismatched irises reduced to thin rings around black, and the effect of it was that he looked, for the first time all evening, like something that was working very hard at a thing and was not entirely certain of the outcome. His chest moved. Harder than before, heavier, the breath of him audible in the quiet room. A single trail of blood had escaped the corner of his mouth β your blood, the thought arrived with a clarity that should have been frightening and arrived instead as something else entirely β and it ran a slow line down from his lip and lost itself in the dark beard at his jaw.
He was, you thought, the most extraordinary thing you had ever seen.
He looked at you for a long moment. Looking at you the way he had been looking at you all evening, with that complete and specific attention, except that now the attention had an edge to it β something that had been thoroughly composed until that moment and was no longer as quite. Something that had tasted you and was in the process of deciding what to do about it.
"I need to ask you something," he said. His voice was β it was still his voice, still that low and deliberate instrument, but the deliberateness was costing him something now. You could hear the cost. "And I need you to answer honestly."
"Yes," you said.
"Do you want to continue."
Not a question. The inflection of it was a question but the shape of it was something more serious than a question β an accounting, a reckoning, a door being held open for the last time with full awareness that it was the last time.
"Iβ"
"Understand what I am telling you." His thumb moved, once, across the inside of your wrist. The bite there. The small, precise mark that was yours now, that you would carry. "I have tried your blood." He said it plainly, without drama, which made it more dramatic than any performance could have. "It is β sweeter than I expected. Considerably sweeter." The thumb stilled. "If you allow me another bite, I cannot promise you the same degree of β governance. I will not hurt you. That I can promise absolutely. But the stoppingβ" A pause, and in the pause the honest admission of a man who does not make admissions lightly. "The stopping will be harder."
The last sensible part of you β the part that had made all the boring decisions, the part that had walked four steps toward the door and nearly made it, the part that had been conducting a losing rearguard action against the rest of you all evening β went quiet.
Not defeated. Not frightened into silence.
Simply β finished. Done. It had made its case and the case had been heard and the verdict was in and the verdict was that you were standing in a warm room with this man's hands around your arm and his blood-traced mouth watching you with blown-dark eyes and every cell in your body was a simple, unanimous, uncomplicated yes.
"I want to continue," you said.
Something moved through Baelor's expression. Deep and quick and there-and-gone. He closed his eyes for a single moment β brief, like a man accepting something β and when he opened them again they were darker than before.
He looked past you.
"Maekar," he said.
You felt the name land. Felt the quality of attention behind you sharpen.
"Gently," said Baelor, and the word was quiet and absolute in equal measure. Not a suggestion. Not a request. An instruction from an older brother who knew his younger one and was making the parameters clear before the parameters became relevant.
A pause behind you. Then, very low, "I know."
"Gently," Baelor said again.
"I know," said Maekar, and the repetition carried, this time, not impatience but something that was almost β chastened. As though the instruction had reached the part of him that had been trying to be careful all along and had found it already waiting there.
His hands moved from your waist.
Slowly. You felt each point of contact shift β the warm weight of his palms traveling upward along your sides, your ribs, until they found the shoulders of your gown. He gathered the fabric with his hands and for a moment he simply held it, and you felt his breath against the back of your neck, and the breath was not steady.
He pulled.
The gown parted at your shoulders and the cool air found your skin and then β immediately, replacing the cool β his breath, closer now, and then his mouth. He did not bite immediately. He pressed his lips to the curve of your shoulder first, closed and warm, in a gesture that echoed his brother's so precisely and yet felt so entirely different β rougher, less patient, the tenderness in it more effortful and more costly β and then his tongue, tracing the line from the curve of your shoulder to the place where your neck met it, slow and deliberate and thorough.
He growled.
It was not a sound you had ever heard a man make and it was not, precisely, a sound you could catalogue as human, low and resonant and felt more in your chest than heard with your ears, and it moved through you from the point of contact outward in a wave that rearranged your understanding of what your body was capable of feeling.
His mouth descended.
The bite arrived with less warning than Baelor's β not careless, nothing Maekar did to you was careless, but less ceremonial, more immediate, the act of a man who had been patient for as long as patience was available to him and had reached the end of the supply. His canines found the juncture of your neck and shoulder and the pain was β sharper than the wrist, brighter, and then the wave hit.
It was larger than the first one.
You did not moan this time. You did not make any sound that had a name. Your free hand went back β the one that was not cradled between Baelor's palms β reaching behind you with a specificity that surprised you, fingers finding Maekar's silver hair and diving in, gripping. An anchor. Something to hold while the wave moved through you and the room tilted on its axis and the fire blurred at the edges of your vision.
He made a sound against your shoulder. Your fingers in his hair had done something to him β you felt it in the sound, in the sudden stillness of him, in the way the arm that came around your waist was fierce and immediate and absolute.
And Baelor.
Baelor, who had been watching you β watching your face through all of it, with those dark and patient eyes β lowered his head again. Not to bite. His lips found the inside of your wrist, the mark that was already there, already his, and his tongue traced it. Slowly. With that quality of attention that was his alone, that made everything he did feel like it was being done for the first time and the last time simultaneously, as though the moment deserved to be treated as singular because it was singular, because you were singular, because this β all of this β was something he intended to remember in detail.
Maekar at your shoulder, fierce and present and holding you like something he had been given and intended to keep. Baelor at your wrist, tracing the evidence of his own wanting with the reverence of a man who had not expected to want this much and was choosing, deliberately, to let himself.
You held Maekar's hair and you gave Baelor your pulse point and the fire burned, and the wave moved through you and did not recede. It simply grew.
Maekar's mouth stilled.
The absence of it registered the way the absence of Baelor's had β as a specific, textured thing, the sudden quiet after sound, and you became aware in the silence that followed of several things simultaneously. The marks on your skin, tender and present. The warmth that had not receded. The fact that you were standing upright, which felt like more of an achievement than it should have.
And underneath all of it, threading through everything like a current through water: the wanting.
It wasβ you tried to examine it, which was a mistake, because examination required a degree of cognitive distance you did not currently possess. You tried regardless, because something in you β the last working remnant of the girl who had walked into this room wanting to understand β needed to make sense of it. You were turned on in a way that had no precedent in your experience. Not simply aroused in the ordinary way that an ordinary evening might produce, butΒ saturatedΒ with it, the wanting so comprehensive it had ceased to be a feeling and had become a condition, the way wet is a condition of something submerged.
Why.
The question surfaced with genuine urgency. Why this, why them, why the biting β why had pain become warmth and warmth becomeΒ this, this dripping, aching, consumingΒ thisΒ that was making it very difficult to think about anything else with any degree of clarity or rigour.
Something was wrong with your thinking.
Or β not wrong, precisely, but βΒ altered. Like a room you knew well, rearranged in the dark. Everything present, everything accounted for, but the familiar paths between one thought and the next no longer running quite the way they should.
They were doing something to you.
The thought arrived with a clarity that cut briefly through everything else. Not a new thought β it had been present in some form since the beginning, since the door, since the corridor β but it arrived now with more specificity, more urgency, and you turned it over with the portion of your mind still capable of turning things over and tried to follow it to its conclusion.
But the conclusion kept dissolving.
Because the other portion of your mind β the larger portion, the portion that had been steadily annexing territory all evening β was not interested in conclusions. It was interested in the fact that you were wet. Comprehensively, unmistakably, extraordinarily wet, and had been for some time, and this fact occupied the foreground of your awareness with an insistence that made analytical thought feel like a very small voice in a very loud room.
You were confused.
The confusion was visible, apparently.
Baelor was looking at you.
He had been looking at you β he was always looking at you, had not stopped looking at you all evening with that quality of attention that saw things β but he was looking at you now in a particular way, the way of a man who can read a face the way other men read text, and whose reading has arrived at something that amuses him. The amusement was β soft. Entirely without unkindness. But it was there, unmistakably, in the lines at the corners of his eyes and the curve of his mouth, the blood-traced mouth, and when he exhaled it came out as a laugh.
Low. Brief. Genuine.
"There it is," he said, quietly. Not to you, precisely. Or not only to you.
"What," you said. Your voice came out less steady than you intended.
His eyes moved. Deliberately, unhurriedly, from your face β your eyes, which apparently contained the entire readable history of your current confusion β downward. To the colour that had risen in your cheeks, which you could feel without seeing, the deep flush that you were now aware had spread not only to your cheeks but further, to the column of your throat, to the upper swell of your chest, the visible parts of you flushed dark and warm in the firelight.
He looked at the mount of your breasts.
He did not look away immediately.
When he did look away it was back to your face, and the quality of his breathing had changed β imperceptibly, almost, but you were very attentive to him now, had calibrated yourself to him over the course of the evening with a precision you hadn't intended, and you heard it. Heavier. The deliberateness of it the deliberateness of a man managing something.
"The colour," he said, "has reached your chest."
The observation was so plainly made, so entirely without the performance of seduction, that it was more devastating than anything more deliberate could have been.
"Something is β you are doing something," you said, and you heard yourself and recognised that this was not your most articulate moment and could not locate the means to improve upon it.
"Yes," he said. Simply. Without apology or elaboration.
"Whatβ"
"Nothing that is not already in you," he said. And then, before you could follow that thought anywhere: "We just amplify the feeling."
Behind you, Maekar had not stopped.
His mouth was still at your neck β not biting now, simply tracing, the wet drag of his tongue along the curve of your shoulder, your neck, the place beneath your ear, unhurried and thorough in the way that Maekar was thorough about things he had decided to do properly. He appeared entirely uninterested in the conversation happening over your shoulder. He was occupied. He had his priorities.
The trails his tongue left cooled in the air and then the warmth came back and you could not think about what Baelor had said βΒ nothing that is not already in youΒ β because the thinking kept dissolving into the sensation of Maekar's mouth at your neck and the wanting that had no floor.
You looked at Baelor.
At his face. At the dark eyes and the pale eye and the genuine, quiet amusement still present in them alongside something that was not amusement at all, something that had been there since he had lifted his mouth from your wrist and had not diminished. At the line of blood at the corner of his mouth, dried now, rust-dark in the firelight. At his mouth.
His mouth.
Your hand β the one he had been holding, the one he still held, the inside of your wrist cradled in his palm β moved.
Not consciously. Or not only consciously. The wanting made the decision and the rest of you followed, the way you had followed everything tonight that the wanting had decided, and your fingers closed around his hand and youΒ pulled.
He came forward β a step, two β and the surprise on his face was real and brief and entirely worth it, that flicker of something that was not composure passing through the composed face, and you rose to the tips of your toes.
You kissed him.
Hard.
Your mouth against his and the metallic warmth of your own blood at the corner of his lips and your hand gripping his and the taste of him β dark and specific and old, somehow, a taste with depth to it, a taste that had been many things over many years and was now, simply,Β hisΒ β and your mind spun.
It spun completely.
All the remaining architecture of coherent thought β the confusion, the analysis, the last dim voice askingΒ whyΒ andΒ whatΒ andΒ are you certainΒ β came apart at once, cleanly, the way something comes apart when it has been waiting to. The warmth of his mouth and his hand gripping yours back now, returning the grip with a certainty that said he had been waiting, that the patience had been a choice and the choice had been generous and the generosity had a limit and you had just found itβ
Behind you, Maekar stilled.
Then his arm came around your waist, and he pressed his mouth to the back of your neck, and he said nothing, and the nothing was everything.
You kept kissing Baelor.
Your mind spun and the room was warm and the fire burned and you stopped asking why.
Maekar's stillness did not last.
You felt the moment it broke β felt it in the quality of the arm around your waist, the single breath he drew against the back of your neck, and then the decision that moved through him like weather, like something that had been building offshore for a very long time and had finally made landfall. His mouth left your skin. Not gradually. All at once, the way Maekar did everything once he had decided to do it.
His hands moved.
From your waist, downward β past your hips, finding the fabric of your skirt with a purposefulness that admitted no ambiguity about his intentions. You felt him gather the material in both fists, felt the warmth of his hands through it before the fabric gave way, before the night air of the room reached the skin of your thighs and was immediately replaced by something warmer.
You broke from Baelor's mouth.
Not entirely β his lips were still close, his forehead dropping to yours, his breath unsteady against your face in a way you had not heard from him before tonight and intended to hear again β and you looked at him with eyes that were past asking questions and had become simply, purely present, and he looked back at you with those blown-dark eyes and did not move away.
Maekar's right hand found you.
The cup of his palm against your sex β large, warm, certain β and the sound you made was swallowed by the small space between your mouth and Baelor's. Your hips moved without permission. Toward him. The instinctive, uncomplicated forward press of a body that knows what it wants and has stopped being embarrassed about it, and Maekar exhaled against your neck, sharp and short, a sound that was not quite a word and contained the meaning of several.
His fingers moved.
Slowly at first β slowly in the way that suggested the slowness was costing him something, that the wanting of him was considerably less slow than his hands were currently being β and the sensation of it, the specific and focused sensation of those calloused fingers learning you with the same thorough attention he had brought to everything else tonight, produced in you a heat so immediate and so total that you gripped Baelor's hand hard enough that he felt it.
He looked at you.
Past the closeness of your faces, past the unsteady breath between you, he looked at you and read whatever was written there β which was, you suspected, not subtle β and then he looked past you, over your shoulder, at his brother.
"Maekar," he said.
"I know," said Maekar, against your neck, and his fingers did not slow.
"Gently."
The word landed differently this time. Not the preemptive instruction of before, but the specific, present-tense intervention of a man who was watching his brother come apart and was calling him back from the edge of it. The authority in it was quiet and absolute and entirely without judgment, and you felt Maekar receive it β felt the breath he drew, felt the deliberate, effortful recalibration that moved through his hands, the fingers that had been building toward urgency finding, again, their patience.
Or something resembling patience.
His thumb moved, and the resemblance became somewhat theoretical.
You made a sound against Baelor's jaw β open-mouthed, unguarded β and Baelor's hand came up to the back of your head, cradling it, keeping you close, and his mouth found the corner of yours and stayed there. Breathing you in.
"There," he said, very quietly. Only for you. "We have you."
Maekar's fingers curled inside you.
What happened next did not feel like a decision so much as an inevitability β the way a dam does not decide to break, but simply reaches the point at which holding is no longer a structural possibility.
You had understood, in some theoretical way, that Maekar was the less governed of the two β that where Baelor moved through the world with the deliberate, conscious restraint of a man who had chosen patience as a discipline, Maekar's control was more precarious. More costly. He maintained it not because it came naturally but because the alternative was something he was not willing to inflict upon anyone, and the effort of it was, up close, visible in the set of his jaw and the careful, deliberate placement of his hands.
But he had been watching his brother's mouth at your neck, and the effort was becoming β apparent.
"Tell me," he said against your skin, rough and low, "if you want to stop."
"I don't want you to stop," you said. Your voice came out steadier than you had any right to expect, given the state of the rest of you.
Something broke, very quietly, in Maekar's composure.
You whined in protest as his hand retreated from your cunt to the laces at your back. He found them with a directness that suggested he had thought about this, or something very like this, and was no longer of a mind to pretend otherwise. Baelor watched him for a moment, something complicated and warm moving through his expression, and then he reached for you too β his hands framing your face, tilting it up, his mouth finding yours with that same slow and devastating patience that had undone you the first time and undid you again just as thoroughly the second.
"Let us take care of you," he murmured against your mouth. Not a command. An offering. Everything Baelor did came as an offering.
Between the two of them β Baelor's careful hands at your front and Maekar's certain ones at your back β your unlacing was accomplished with a thoroughness that you might, in other circumstances, have found embarrassing. There was no fumbling. There was no haste, precisely β even Maekar, even now, managed something that was less than haste β but there was a focus to it, a unified and uncomplicated intention, that left you with very little to do except breathe and allow it.
The gown pooled at your feet. The thin shift followed β Maekar's doing, a single decisive movement, and the brief graze of his knuckles against your ribs as he lifted it away produced in you a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. The room was warm. You were warm. You were extraordinarily, uncomplicatedly warm, standing in the firelight between two princes who were looking at you with an attention so total and so uncomplicated in its appreciation that the reflex toward self-consciousness simply β did not come. There was no room for it. Their looking crowded it out.
"Gods," said Maekar, and that was all he said, and the single syllable was sufficient.
Baelor did not say anything. He simply looked at you with those mismatched eyes, and then he took your hand, very gently, and drew you toward the vast bed.
This registered dimly, in the portion of your mind still engaged in cataloguing practical facts: a great carved thing hung with dark fabric, wide enough that three people might sleep in it without inconveniencing one another. You noted this and then stopped noting it because Baelor was drawing you down onto it and Maekar was following, and the noting of practical facts became very difficult to sustain.
They arranged themselves on either side of you, and the warmth of them β the specific, particular warmth that was more than body heat, that had nothing to do with blood in the usual sense β came around you from both directions like the closing of something you had not known was open.
Baelor's mouth found the line of your collarbone. Slow. Deliberate. Each press of his lips a full stop, a considered pause, as though he were reading you β learning the grammar of you β and intended to be fluent before he proceeded. His hands moved over you with that same quality, mapping rather than grasping, and when he found a place that made you draw breath too sharply he stilled, and then returned to it, and then remained there until the breath came easier.
Maekar, beside you, had his mouth at your shoulder. The old bite there β still tender, still present β and he tended to it with a care that was almost at odds with the urgency you had felt in him moments ago, as though the site of it had become something that required a different kind of attention. Reverent, nearly. You had not thought Maekar capable of reverence and you were revising this assessment comprehensively.
Then he bit again β lower, the upper curve of your breast β and the revision became difficult to maintain.
The sharp, precise pressure of it and then the warmth blooming outward and you heard yourself make a sound that you did not attempt to contain because there was no point, no audience to perform composure for, only these two men and the firelit room and the accumulated, extraordinary sensation of being so completely attended to.
Baelor lifted his head to look at you. His canines sharp in the warm light. "All right?" he asked, and the question was so genuine β so entirely without performance β that it produced in you a tenderness wholly inappropriate to the situation.
"Yes," you said. "Don't stop. Neither of you."
Maekar made a sound against your breast that was an answer and not a word.
They did not stop and you eventually lost count.
This was the only honest account of what followed. You lost count in the way you lose count of waves at the shore β not because they cease to be discrete things, each one real and specific and felt, but because the accumulation of them becomes a sea, becomes a condition of the world, becomes something you are inside rather than something you are observing. Each bite was precise and careful β they were meticulous in this, both of them, in their different ways, Baelor with the deliberate economy of a craftsman and Maekar with the focused intensity of a man who will not do a thing badly even when undone β and each was followed by the same spreading warmth, the same dissolving of the boundary between pain and something that was so far from pain that calling it by pain's name seemed almost comic.
The inside of your other wrist. The soft place below your ear. The crook of your elbow, which Baelor found with a precise and almost clinical gentleness and then looked up at you afterward with an expression so unguarded it stopped your breath. The jut of your hip, where Maekar pressed his mouth without biting β only pressing, only breathing β and then bit, and then held you still with one large hand when you arched, because you had arched and he had β he had made a sound, low in his chest, that moved through the mattress and through you and settled somewhere that made thinking impossible.
Their mouths and hands moved across you with the unhurried thoroughness of men who had nowhere to be and nothing to want except this. Except you. The understanding of it β that this wanting was real, was specific to you, was not transferable or approximate β settled into you alongside the warmth of the bites, indistinguishable from it.
You were β Gods. You were desperate.
The wanting had been building since you had walked through the door, had been building since before that if you were being entirely truthful, and it had reached a point that made the word wanting seem grotesquely inadequate. You were wet β comprehensively, embarrassingly, thoroughly wet β and had been for a long time. And the accumulated attentions of both men to every part of you except the part of you that most required attention, had moved you from desperation through something beyond desperation into a kind of blank, shimmering need that had stopped being complicated and become simply the primary fact of your existence.
Maekar, who was closest to you now, raised his head.
He looked at you. His silver hair had fallen across his brow, his chest rising and falling with an urgency that his composure had entirely stopped pretending to govern. His pale eyes moved over you β the marks on your neck, your shoulder, your breast, your wrist, your hip, each one a small and deliberate claim β and something in his expression when he took you all in was so undefended, so stripped of every layer of prickly and guarded and carefully maintained distance, that it was almost painful to look at directly.
"You areβ" he began, and stopped.
"I know," you said, because you did. "I know what I am. Do not stop."
On your other side, Baelor pressed his mouth to your temple β so soft, so deliberate, so entirely him β and said, against your skin, his voice lower than you had ever heard it. "Tell us what you need."
You told them. They listened.
Baelor moved first. You did not quite register exactly when he had discarded his clothes, but your brain allowed you enough focus to acknowledge that he was now bare from his waist up.
He shifted behind you with that quality of motion that belonged entirely to him β unhurried, uninterrupted, the movement of something that does not negotiate with space β and arranged himself at your back, drawing you against his chest with hands that were large and very certain at your waist. The position settled around you like something that had always existed and had simply been waiting for you to find it. Your back against his chest. His arms a frame. His mouth at your ear, your temple, the curve of your jaw β not biting, not yet, simply present, simply making of himself a thing you could lean into.
"I have you," he said, against your hair. Low. Steady. The most straightforward sentence in the world and the most devastating.
You believed him.
Maekar knelt.
There was something β you registered it distantly, through the warmth and the wanting and the accumulated undoing of the past uncountable minutes β something extraordinary about watching Maekar kneel. He was not a man built for kneeling. He was a man built for standing at the perimeter of things, contained and guarded and taking up exactly as much space as he had decided to allow himself, which was never quite enough. And yet here he was, at the edge of the bed, at the edge of you, and the silver of his hair caught the firelight, and his pale eyes moved up the length of you with an expression on his face that had entirely stopped being guarded and had become something raw and uncomplicated and entirely his.
He pressed his mouth to your knee.
Just that. Just his mouth, closed, at the inside of your knee. The gesture was almost formal in its deliberateness, and then he moved β inward, upward, along the soft skin of your inner thigh β and it became something else entirely.
You felt his breath first. Warm, measured, controlled in the way that the rest of him was currently not quite managing to be. His hands settled at the tops of your thighs β those large, calloused, certain hands, spanning you with an ease that rearranged something in your chest and lower β holding you open and holding you still and the combination of the two, the being held and the being open and the inability to do anything about either, produced in you a sound that you released directly into the warm air of the room without apology.
Behind you, Baelor's arms tightened fractionally.
"Easy," he said, into your hair. Not a restraint. A reminder that he was there.
Maekar's mouth moved higher. His beard grazed the tender skin of your inner thigh, and you felt the deliberate slowing of him β the way he paused, pressed his lips to the skin there, warm and open-mouthed β and then you felt his teeth.
Tender. That was the word. You would not have thought to apply it to Maekar under any previous set of circumstances, and yet β tender. The bite was so careful, so precise, placed with such specific and unhurried intention on the soft skin of your inner thigh that the line between tenderness and devastation became entirely theoretical. The warmth bloomed. Your thigh. Your hip. Your spine. Everywhere at once, the way it always was, the way you had stopped being surprised by and had simply begun to inhabit.
"Maekarβ"
He lifted his head just enough to look at you. His mouth. The faint evidence of you at the corner of it. His eyes very pale and very dark at once, which should not have been possible and was simply one more thing about him that did not obey ordinary logic.
"I know," he said. His voice had gone rough in a way that was entirely past refinement, past any pretence of the controlled and weathered composure he wore in daylight. "I know what you need."
He pressed his mouth to your other thigh. The inside of it, higher. His teeth grazed β a warning, a promise, something between the two β and you felt Baelor's chest expand against your back as he exhaled.
"Please," you said, and the word came out with a simplicity that surprised you, stripped of everything except its own precise meaning.
Maekar bit. Higher. Closer. The warmth of it radiated inward and you gripped Baelor's forearm with both hands β his arm banded across your stomach, an anchor β and he turned his head and pressed his lips to your temple and said your name, soft and certain, like the truest thing.
Then Maekar's mouth moved to where you needed it.
No more biting. His mouth open against you, his tongue deliberate and certain, and the transition from tenderness to this was so immediate and so complete that you stopped being capable of cataloguing it and simply β fell into it. His hands held your thighs apart with that effortless, comprehensive certainty, thumbs pressed to the skin just at the crease of your hip, and he attended to you with the same focused and total intention he brought to everything he allowed himself to want. Which was to say: absolutely. Without half-measures. Without the performance of restraint.
Baelor held you through it.
His arms around you, his chest at your back, his mouth moving along your neck and the curve of your jaw with slow and careful attention that was its own form of undoing β different from Maekar's, different in every quality except the essential one, which was that it was entirely and specifically for you. His canines grazed the skin below your ear and you turned your head to give him better access and he took it β precise, deliberate, the bite so controlled it barely registered as pressure and registered as everything else β and you were between the two of them, held from behind and attended to from below, and the warmth of the bites and the warmth of Maekar's mouth and the warmth of Baelor's arms were indistinguishable from one another, were a single continuous fact, were simply the condition of the world.
"There," Baelor said, against your neck β soft, almost to himself, the way a man speaks when he is watching something that is undoing him and has not yet decided what to do about it.
Maekar made a sound against you. An answer. Low and rough and so thoroughly unguarded that it moved through you like the bites had, like the warmth had, like everything they did to you did β everywhere at once, total and sourceless.
You held Baelor's arm and you held the sound in your chest, and you stopped thinking entirely. You let it happen.
You came apart quietly.
This surprised you β you had expected, given the accumulated state of you, something less contained. But it was quiet: a long, shuddering exhale, your hands tightening on Baelor's arm, your whole body pulling inward and then releasing, and Maekar held you through it with both hands firm at your thighs, not relenting, not rushing, simply β present, attending, giving you every last measure of it until you made a small broken sound that meant enough and he lifted his head.
He looked up at you.
His expression, in the firelight, was β you did not have adequate language for it. Something had happened to his face. The prickly, guarded, carefully maintained distance that was his habitual architecture was entirely absent, and what was underneath it was so undefended and so wanting that looking at it directly felt like an intimacy beyond everything else that had already passed between you.
He lasted approximately four more seconds.
"Centre of the bed," he said. Not a suggestion. The voice of a man whose patience has reached its structural limit and has made peace with this fact.
"Maekar," said Baelor, from somewhere behind you, and there was something in his voice β not quite amusement, not quite warning, something that lived comfortably in the space between them.
"I know," said Maekar, for the third time that evening, which appeared to be his standard response to his brother's voice when the voice in question was suggesting moderation, and which appeared to mean, consistently, that he knew and had weighed the information and found it insufficient to change his current course of action.
Baelor's arms loosened around you β not reluctantly, or not only reluctantly β and Maekar was already moving, already reaching for you, and the efficiency with which he repositioned you β hands at your hips, drawing you to the centre of the bed, settling you exactly where he wanted you β would have been almost impersonal except for the way his hands lingered, the way his thumbs pressed briefly at the small of your back as though unable to immediately relinquish contact.
Not gently β or not only gently, which was to say that the care was present, was always present in him, that bedrock protectiveness that ran beneath everything he did, but the urgency had overtaken the gentleness in terms of sheer momentum and the result was that you found yourself repositioned with a thoroughness and a speed that left you blinking. His hands at your hips. Decisive. The brief, warm press of his mouth to your shoulder β the bitten one, the first one, an acknowledgement β and then he was arranging you on your hands and knees with the focused efficiency of a man who has run entirely out of patience and has decided to be honest about it.
His hands were at your hips. Large and certain and β Gods, the span of them, the effortless way they encompassed you, the casual comprehensiveness of his grip that said I have you in an entirely different register than Baelor's arms had said it but with no less conviction.
"Still all right?" he asked, and the roughness of his voice made the question almost funny β this man, this barely-contained man, still asking β except that it wasn't funny at all, it was the most devastating thing, and you felt it in the same place you had felt everything else tonight.
"Yes," you said. "Maekar, I swear toβ"
He pushed into you. You did not register exactly when he had discarded his breeches.
The sound you made was not a word. It was not anything that had ever aspired to be a word. It was simply the sound of your body receiving him β full, so immediately and completely full, the stretch of it pulling all the breath from your lungs in a single rush, and then the breath came back and with it a wave of sensation so comprehensive it temporarily reorganised your understanding of what sensation was for.
"Seven hells, woman," Maekar said, above you, and his voice was wrecked. Entirely, completely wrecked, and the sound of it β the sound of composed, guarded, contained Maekar wrecked β was its own separate thing that moved through you alongside everything else.
He stilled. Giving you a moment. His hands at your hips trembling, slightly β the fine tremor of a man exerting the last available portion of his self-governance β and the trembling of him, the evidence of what this cost him to hold, made something fierce and tender rise in you simultaneously.
"Move," you said. "Please move."
He obliged.
Baelor had repositioned himself.
You became aware of this gradually, through the increasing fog of Maekar behind you β the rhythm he had found, deep and steady, each movement deliberate in the way that only a man who knows exactly what he is doing can be deliberate β and what you became aware of, specifically, was that Baelor was before you. Kneeling, close and completely, humanly naked. His mismatched eyes on your face with that quality of attention that had not diminished in the slightest and had, if anything, intensified in ways that made the firelight seem insufficient for all the things happening in his expression.
You were not, as a rule, a bold girl in these matters, but something had happened to the usual sort of person you were over the course of this evening, had been gradually and comprehensively replaced by something more direct, and the something more direct looked at Prince Baelor kneeling before her and found the situation structurally inadequate.
You reached for him.
Later, you would not be entirely able to account for the boldness of it β you, who had always been shy in these matters, who had always found the direct expression of want difficult, reaching for a prince of the realm while another prince of the realm drove the coherent thought from your head with every thrust of his hips. But want had been simplified tonight into something that did not require accounting for. You reached, and your hands found his proud cock, and his sharp intake of breath was the most gratifying sound you had heard all evening, which was saying something considerable given the evening's existing catalogue.
His eyes went dark.
Both of them. The mismatched pair of them, the dark one and the pale one, both flooding with something that had been carefully contained all evening and was now, at the simple fact of your hands, straining very hard against its containment.
"You don'tβ" he began.
"I know I don't," you said, which was very nearly a Maekar answer, and you saw the corner of Baelor's mouth do something complicated, and then you pulled him closer.
Your mouth found the jut of his hip first.
You were not sure why. Perhaps because it was what was before you, what presented itself, and something in you had decided that before anything else you were going to leave a mark of your own on this evening. Something that was yours. Something that was not a question.
You bit him.
Your teeth, blunt and human and entirely incapable of breaking the skin, pressed into the jut of his hip with a firmness that surprised even you. No blood. No warmth blooming outward in that extraordinary way that theirs did. Simply the pressure of your mouth, your very human and un-extraordinary mouth, making its claim.
You looked up at him.
From below. Through the curtain of your own disarray, with Maekar's hands at your hips and Maekar's rhythm making thought a theoretical exercise, you looked up at Prince Baelor with eyes that were β you knew what they were, you could feel what they were, hot and dark and entirely without the shyness that had governed you some hours ago β and you held his gaze and kept your teeth at his hip and did not look away.
Something in Baelor snapped.
There was no other word for it. You felt it before you saw it β a quality shift in the air around him, in the stillness that had always been so deliberate and so controlled and so carefully maintained. The stillness did not leave, precisely. But it changed. It became a different kind of stillness. The stillness of something that has stopped calculating.
His hand came to your hair. Not gentle, threading through and gripping, and the grip was certain in a way that Baelor had not been certain all evening, or had been certain in a different way, the patient and deliberate and asking way. This certainty was something else. This was the certainty underneath all the others. The one he kept further down.
"Look at me," he said, and his voice β Gods, his voice, it had shed something, some final layer of the composed and the refined, and what was left was so much more him that the composed version seemed, retroactively, like a translation.
You looked at him.
"Open," he took his shaft in his hand and pressed it against your half-opened mouth. You obliged, and your lips fell around his cock.
What followed was β Baelor, was the only way to frame it. Still him. Still that quality of attentiveness, still the awareness of you that never left him, but the restraint had been bitten away β you had bitten it away, with your blunt human teeth, and the knowledge of this was so satisfying it bordered on the triumphant β and what remained moved in you with a decisiveness that coexisted with the tenderness rather than replacing it.
You had not known Baelor could sound like that.
This was the thought that surfaced and submerged, surfaced and submerged, through everything that followed. You had heard him quiet and deliberate and carefully, devastatingly tender. You had not heard him undone β not fully, not like this, not the sounds he made now that had bypassed every layer of governance and were simply β him, stripped to the essential thing, the wanting and the warmth and the rawness of a man who has been extremely restrained for an extremely long time and has just been bitten away.
He fucked your mouth. Not with the patient deliberateness that had characterised everything preceding this. With something more immediate, more urgent, the surprise of your small human bite having apparently located a door in him that he had not known was there and opened it without consultation.
His hand in your hair was not rough, but it was certain, and the certainty of it, the absence of hesitation, was β you felt it everywhere Maekar's hands were not already making themselves comprehensively known.
Maekar, behind you, had not slowed.
If anything, the opposite was true. He had found his rhythm β deep, unhurried in its own way but entirely without restraint, the rhythm of a man who has spent a very long time not allowing himself to want things and has decided, definitively, that it was over β and his hands at your hips told the whole story of what you were doing to him in a language that required no translation. The sounds he made were not contained. Maekar, it turned out, was not quiet when the dam broke β you had suspected this, had glimpsed the edges of it in the brief unguarded sounds he'd made earlier β but the reality of it was more comprehensive than your suspicion had been, and every sound he made moved through you in a register that had nothing to do with hearing.
You were between them.
The full, overwhelming, extraordinary fact of it. Baelor before you, hand tightly gripping your hair while fucking your mouth and those sounds you had not known he could make, and Maekar behind you, all urgency and comprehensive devotion and the size of him that reduced you to a moaning, whimpery mess, that is, if your mouth had any way of emitting sound.
The warmth of the bites was still in you. Would be in you for hours, you understood β each small mark a site of that dissolved, extraordinary heat β and it was indistinguishable now from everything else, from the warmth of them and the wanting of them and the simple animal fact of being so thoroughly, completely attended to by two people who wanted nothing in the world except this.
Maekar's hand found your hip bone and gripped, and he said your name β not a prayer, not the way Baelor said it, but the way a man says the only word he was ever completely certain of β and the rawness of it cracked something open in your chest even through everything else.
Baelor's other hand found your jaw. Tilting. His eyes finding yours, and even now β even undone, even past the careful and the deliberate β the quality of his attention was so present, so completely and specifically you, that it was almost unbearable.
"Look at me," he said. Low. Certain. The command of a man who has stopped offering and has begun, at last, to simply want.
You looked at him. You held his gaze.
Maekar's rhythm broke.
That was the only way to describe it β the controlled, devastating steadiness of him simply fractured, replaced by something that had no interest in rhythm or control or any of the careful architecture that had governed the preceding minutes. His thrusts became harder. Deeper. Each one a full and comprehensive fact, the kind that rearranged your understanding of your own body, and the sounds he made behind you were past language, past governance, past anything except the raw and immediate truth of what you were doing to him.
You struggled.
Not against him β never against him, your body had entirely stopped entertaining the concept of against β but against the logistics of it, the difficulty of maintaining anything coherent with Maekar coming apart behind you in the most spectacular and thorough way you had ever witnessed a man come apart. Your concentration fractured. Your own rhythm fractured. Baelor felt it β of course he felt it, he felt everything, he had been feeling everything all evening with those mismatched eyes that missed nothing β and his hand loosened in your hair, and he withdrew, and the cool air of the room replaced the warmth of his mouth and youβ
You moaned.
Uncontrollably, helplessly, the sound tearing out of you with no consultation and no restraint β long and broken and nakedly honest, the sound of a girl who has been taken entirely apart and is not in any condition to pretend otherwise. It filled the warm room. It bounced off the books on their shelves and the carved dark wood of the bed and the amber light of the fire and came back to you strange and intimate and entirely your own.
Maekar heard it.
His hand found your hair now that it was free from Baelor's grip.
The pull was not rough β it was never rough, not really, not with the bedrock of care that ran beneath everything he did β but it was certain, completely and comprehensively certain, his fist closing in your hair and drawing your body upward and back until your spine met his chest and the new angle of him inside you produced a sound from both of you simultaneously that the room absorbed without comment.
His chest against your back. His arm coming around your stomach, holding you against him β holding you up, you understood, because your capacity to hold yourself up had become genuinely theoretical β while his other hand gripped your breast firmly, his fingers toying with the pebbled nipple, and his mouth at your ear, and thenβ
Words.
Not words you knew. Not the Common Tongue with its familiar shapes, its navigable grammar. Something older and stranger and more beautiful than that β liquid and sharp at once, the way fire is liquid and sharp, syllables that fell against your ear like warm water and like small deliberate cuts simultaneously. High Valyrian. You knew it only by reputation, by the sound of it at court in formal ceremony, but you had never heard it like this β private and ragged and stripped of ceremony entirely, the desperate cadence of a man saying things in the only language that, in this moment, was sufficient.
You did not understand a word of it, yet you understood all of it at the same time.
His tone was past desperate. It was the tone of a man confessing something he had not known he believed until the moment he said it, the words tumbling against your ear in that beautiful wrecked language, and you felt them in your sternum, in the backs of your knees, in every small warm mark he and his brother had pressed into your skin over the course of this extraordinary night.
Baelor moved.
He had been watching β those mismatched eyes taking in everything with that quality of attention that was its own form of undoing β and now he moved toward you with a deliberateness that had not left him, that was perhaps the one thing incapable of leaving him, and his hand found the place where you most needed it.
His fingers, slow and certain, began to circle your clit.
You made a sound that was not a word.
"There," he said, softly. To you, or to himself, or to the room β it did not matter. His eyes were on your face, and they were very dark, and the careful thing in him had been stripped back far enough that what was underneath was visible and unguarded and so full that it was almost painful to look at.
His mouth found your neck.
The side Maekar had not claimed. He pressed his lips to the skin there first β that courtesy, that asking-without-asking β and you turned your head, offering, and he bit.
It was different from the others.
You could not have explained the difference with any precision. Physiologically it was the same β the sharp and specific pressure, the immediate bloom of warmth, the dissolution of the boundary between that small bright pain and something that was its precise opposite. But the context of it β Maekar's arm around you, Maekar's voice in your ear in that wrecked and beautiful language, Maekar's hips against yours in that broken and comprehensive rhythm, and Baelor's fingers and Baelor's mouth and the thin red line of blood that he drew with such careful devastation β the context made it something else. Something total.
The pain and the pleasure were not two things.
They had never been two things, not tonight, not once β but now the fact of it was so complete, so thoroughly established in every register your body possessed, that the distinction became not merely academic but meaningless. There was only this. The warmth and the sharp and the full and the circling and the voice in your ear saying things in an almost dead language with the urgency of something very much alive, and Baelor's mismatched eyes finding yours over the small distance between you, dark and wanting and so completely presentβ
Your orgasm arrived without warning and without mercy.
It started somewhere at the base of your spine and it did not build so much as detonate β outward, total, consuming every peripheral thing until there was nothing left at the edges, no room for anything except the white and overwhelming fact of it. You screamed. You were not a girl who screamed β this had been your understanding of yourself, based on what limited evidence you had previously had available β but you screamed now, his name and his name and no name at all, just sound, just the raw and helpless output of a body that had been taken entirely beyond its own borders.
Maekar followed you.
The arm around your stomach tightened to something absolute. He said your name β once, only once, rough and broken and certain, not a prayer, not a question, the only word he had ever been sure of β and then he pressed his face against your hair and the sounds he made were private in a way that felt like a gift, like something given rather than observed, like something he would not have permitted himself to give in any other circumstance or to any other person.
Baelor's mouth lifted from your neck and his fingers withdrew from your sex. He took them to his mouth and, to your absolute pleasure, tasted them. If you'd had any way of getting inside his head, you would have known that he found the nectar between your legs much sweeter than he'd said your blood was.
When he was satisfied, his forehead came to rest against yours β gentle, barely there β and his eyes closed for a moment, the only time you had seen them not looking at you, and his exhale was long and slow and full of something that did not have a name in any language, Valyrian or otherwise.
The three of you stayed like that.
Maekar's chest at your back, still, finally still, his arm an anchor. Baelor's forehead against yours, his hand moving now β slowly, carefully β from where it had been to rest open-palmed against your sternum, as though checking for the beat of you.
The fire had burned lower.
The room was warm and dark and full of the aftermath of things that could not be taken back and that none of you, you understood with a clarity that surprised you with its completeness, had any intention of taking back.
Maekar exhaled, against your hair.
Then, very quietly, in the Common Tongue this time β as though he had used up the other language and this was what remained β he said something that was not your name and was not the desperate beautiful Valyrian syllables and was not anything you could have predicted from the man you had observed at a careful distance for three careful weeks.
"Stay," he simply mumbled.
Just that. Just the one word, rough and low and stripped of every layer of armour that ordinarily surrounded him, and you felt Baelor's hand press fractionally more firmly against your sternum in what might have been agreement, in what might have been a second asking of the same question.
You looked at the fire. You felt the warmth of them.
"Yes," you managed to say.
The world reassembled itself slowly.
You were aware of things in fragments β the warmth of the room, the low burn of the fire, the small bright constellations of every mark they had left on you, each one a site of that dissolved and particular heat. You were aware of Maekar moving β the absence of him at your back registered as a kind of atmospheric change, a shift in the room's gravity β and you turned your head enough to see him settling against the pillows at the head of the bed, silver hair dishevelled, one arm folded behind his head, his pale eyes on you with an expression that was so thoroughly, helplessly unguarded that you looked away from it not because it was unwelcome but because it was almost too much to hold alongside everything else.
Your thoughts had not gathered.
This was the precise and honest account of your mental state when Baelor's mouth found your breast.
Wet, warm, unhurried β of course unhurried, he was constitutionally incapable of hurrying, it was perhaps the most consistent thing about him β pressing kisses against the skin there with that quality of deliberate attention that had been undoing you all evening and showed no signs of exhausting itself. His hands were at your sides, and he was moving you β gently, incrementally, with the patience of a man who knows exactly where he is going and has no anxiety about arriving β pressing you back until you were lying flat, his weight settling over you with a completeness that drove the remaining air from your lungs in a way that was not remotely unpleasant.
You looked up at him.
His mismatched eyes were very dark, as it seemed was their natural hue now, and he looked β undone, still, in the way he had been since your bite had opened that door in him, but the deliberateness had come back into it, that quality of intention that was entirely his own. He looked like a man who knows precisely what he wants and has decided, finally and without reservation, to want it.
His mouth closed over your nipple.
The sound you made was embarrassing in its immediacy β a sharp, helpless whine that you had no mechanism for containing β and your back arched off the bed of its own accord, your body conducting its own conversation with him entirely independent of your higher faculties. His tongue moved, slow and thorough, and the oversensitivity of you β the accumulated, extraordinary oversensitivity of everything that had preceded this β made the sensation enormous, made it fill every available space, made the distinction between too much and exactly enough so fine as to be navigable only by instinct.
"Baelorβ"
He lifted his head just enough to look at you.
His expression, when he looked at you, was so soft and so wanting simultaneously that it constituted its own category of undoing. And then he smiled β not the formal one, not the small careful one, but the real one, the rare one, the one you supposed lived underneath all the others and only appeared when every layer of governance had been set aside β and it was, as it had always been on the rare occasions you had glimpsed it, completely and thoroughly ruinous.
"Come on," he said, low and warm, his mouth curving around the words. "My sweet girl." His thumb stroked along your hip, slow and certain. "You can give me another."
Your head moved.
You had not decided to nod. Your body had simply β agreed, had answered him the way it had been answering both of them all evening, below the level of decision, in that register that preceded thought. Your head moved, once, against the bedclothes, and the nod was so small and so complete that it might have been the most honest thing you had done all night.
Something moved in his eyes.
He pressed his mouth briefly, softly, to your sternum β directly over your heartbeat, you understood, directly over the place where his hand had rested while you came down β and then he shifted his weight, and his hand came beneath you, and he lifted your hips with a ease that rearranged something in your chest, and thenβ
He pushed inside you.
Your breath left you entirely.
Your walls β oversensitised, still adjusting, still carrying the comprehensive memory of Maekar β accommodated him with a slow and extraordinary friction, and the difference was β not lesser, simply different, different in the way that two true things can be entirely different and entirely true simultaneously. Where Maekar had been urgency, had been the breaking of a dam, had been everything that happens when a man stops refusing himself what he wants β Baelor was intention. Each movement considered. Each thrust placed with the same quality of attention his hands had carried all evening, seeking and finding, learning the specific geography of you with a thoroughness that suggested he intended to know it completely.
His hands slid beneath your hips. Lifted.
The angle shifted, deepened, and you felt it β
There.
That place. That particular and extraordinary place that made thought impossible and language approximate and your own name something you had to be reminded of.
"Ohβ"
"Yes," he said, soft and certain, and did it again.
His thrusts were not rough in the way Maekar's had been β not the broken, desperate, dam-burst urgency of a man who has been holding back something and has finally, definitively stopped. They were hard and they were deep and they were deliberate, each one landing with a precision that was its own form of devastation, and the spot he had found he returned to with the focused and unwavering attention of a man who has identified the thing that matters and has no intention of being distracted from it.
It was, you thought distantly, entirely lethal.
You were overstimulated β this remained true, remained a fact your body was communicating with some urgency β but overstimulation, you were discovering, had a threshold beyond which it ceased to be a warning and became simply the condition of the world, the new baseline, the level at which everything operated. And Baelor was operating at that level with the patient and devastating certainty of a man who had heard your body say yes and had decided to take it entirely at its word.
You screamed his name.
The first time involuntarily, pulled from you by a thrust that found that place with a directness that bypassed every intervening layer. The second time deliberately, because you were past the performance of composure and his name in your mouth felt like the only adequate response to what he was doing to you. The third time it dissolved into something that wasn't quite a name anymore, just the shape of it, just the sound of a girl who has been taken entirely beyond herself and is calling back toward the last landmark she recognises.
His hands tightened beneath you.
"Look at me," he said β and there it was again, that certainty, that quality of command that was not aggressive and was not harsh but was so completely sure of itself that refusal seemed not merely unlikely but structurally impossible. "Look at me."
His mismatched eyes felt very present. His hair fallen across his brow. That real smile, still there, transformed now into something that was past tenderness and into something rawer β wanting and certain and so entirely focused on you that you felt it like a physical thing, like warmth, like the bites.
"There you are," he said softly, and hit that place again, and your vision whitened at the edges.
From the head of the bed, very quiet, you heard Maekar say something in High Valyrian β a single syllable, low and rough β and you did not know what it meant and you knew exactly what it meant and the knowledge of being watched by him, of being seen by both of them, of being entirely and comprehensively known in this room by these two men who had been patient and then had not been patient and had taken you apart with the thoroughness of something that knew precisely what it was doingβ
The orgasm built differently this time.
Not the detonation of before β not the sudden and total white. This was an accumulation, a long slow gathering of everything the evening had been, every bite and every warmth and every careful deliberate touch and every broken unguarded sound, everything pooling and rising with the rhythm of Baelor's hips and the pressure of his hands and the focus of those mismatched eyes that would not let you look awayβ
It crested.
You screamed his name again.
Clearly, this time. Completely. The full shape of it, two syllables, his name in your mouth like a prayer you had not known you were saying, and his answering sound was low and broken and entirely his β the sound of a man who has held something carefully for a very long time and has finally, finally set it down.
He followed you over.
His forehead dropped to yours. His hands, still beneath your hips, held you through it β held you up, held you together, held you with the same quality of care he had brought to every single thing he had done to you tonight. His breath came ragged against your face and he said your name β like a prayer, like the truest thing β once, twice, and then again softer, like the last note of something.
Silence.
The fire breathed. The room held still.
Then Maekar's voice, from the head of the bed β dry, rough, and underneath the dryness something that was not dry at all: "Come here."
And Baelor lifted his head, and looked at his brother, and the look that passed between them over the wrecked and trembling fact of you was β not something you could fully read, not yet, perhaps not ever, but it contained more than you had words for and it was warm, deeply and entirely warm, and it was not finished.
None of this, you understood with great clarity, was finished.
You let Baelor draw you up the bed. You let Maekar pull you in.
The ceiling of the solar was painted.
You had not noticed this before β had not, in fairness, been in any condition to notice anything so peripheral as ceiling decoration for the better part of the evening β but you noticed it now, in the slow and extraordinary stillness of the aftermath, your eyes tracing the faded constellations above you while Baelor's hand moved along your arm. Slow. Methodical. Not going anywhere, not trying to do anything except be exactly what it was β the gentlest possible return to earth, administered with the patience of a man who understood that falling from a great height required careful management.
You were, if you were being honest, thoroughly wrecked.
This was not a complaint. It was simply the accurate account of your condition β oversensitised from crown to sole, every nerve ending still conducting its own private assessment of the evening, the small warm marks of their bites distributed across your skin like a map of something you did not yet have the cartographic vocabulary to name. Your thoughts were not so much scattered asΒ unhurried, drifting at a remove from their usual efficient selves, content to observe rather than conclude.
Baelor's hand moved along your shoulder blade. The backs of his fingers, impossibly gentle.
You exhaled.
Maekar stood.
You registered his absence the way you registered warmth when it leaves a room β immediately, and with a specificity that suggested you had become, over the course of this evening, more attuned to the fact of him than you had fully accounted for. You turned your head enough to track him, but he had already moved beyond the edge of your vision, somewhere in the further dark of the room, and you let your head fall back and watched the painted stars and listened to Baelor breathe.
He returned.
The sound of him first β unhurried footsteps, deliberate β and then the warmth of his presence at the edge of the bed, and then the entirely unexpected fact of his hands. The towel was warm. Of course it was warm β he had thought of that, had apparently thought of it in the thirty seconds he had been out of your sight, had managed to think of it amid everything else his brain was presumably processing, because he was Maekar and beneath all the prickly and guarded and carefully maintained distance there had always been, you understood now, this. This bedrock attention. This quietly comprehensive care.
He cleaned you with a reverence that bore no relationship to anything that had preceded it.
That was the only word βΒ reverent. His hands, which had gripped your hips hard enough to leave their own small marks, which had pulled your hair and held you open and touched you with the urgency of a man who had stopped refusing himself anything β those same hands moved now with a gentleness so thorough it constituted its own form of intimacy. Careful. Unhurried. Tending to you as though you were something that deserved to be tended, which was, you were beginning to understand, simply how he thought of you, underneath everything else.
You watched his face while he worked.
He did not look up. His expression was focused and interior and very quiet β the real quiet, the set-down quiet β and the old pox scars beneath his beard caught the low firelight and you looked at them without flinching, the way you had been looking at everything about him all evening, with the uncomplicated attention of someone who has stopped performing distance.
When he was finished, he set the towel aside and looked at you. For a moment neither of you said anything. Then he got into bed.
You were between them.
This was simply the fact of the arrangement, arrived at without negotiation or discussion β Baelor at your left, Maekar at your right, and you in the centre of the great dark bed with the painted stars above you and the low fire beside you and the warmth of both princes pressing in from either side like the closing of something that had, since you crossed that door, been meant to close.
Baelor's hand resumed its slow passage along your arm.
Maekar lay on his back with one arm behind his head, not touching you except where your shoulder met his, which was a form of touching you had come to recognise as specifically his β contact that presented itself as incidental and was anything but.
You took inventory.
It was the reasonable part of your brain β that practical, persistent, thoroughly sensible part that had been raising its hand at intervals throughout the evening and being consistently overruled β making its return. You could feel it reconvening, shuffling its parchments, preparing to resume normal operations. You took inventory of the bites with a drowsy and comprehensive attention: your neck, both sides now, each prince having claimed his territory with a precision that suggested this had not been accidental. Your shoulder. Your breast. The soft skin of your inner thighs, which bore the tenderest marks of all, Maekar's doing, and which you suspected would remain tender for some days. Your wrists. The crook of your elbow.
You smiled.
It was a dumb smile β you were aware of this, were aware that your face was doing something that a woman of ordinary dignity would not permit her face to do β but you had been, in the most comprehensive and literal sense of the phrase, fucked dumb, and this seemed to you not only logical but entirely reasonable given the evidence.
The reasonable part of your brain cleared its throat. It had a question.
"I need to ask you something," you said, to the painted ceiling, in a tone that was not entirely worried. Mostly curious, in the way of someone who has just conducted an extremely thorough practical experiment and wishes to understand the theoretical framework.
Baelor's hand stilled on your arm. Then resumed. "Ask."
"The bites," you said. "The blood." You paused, assembling the question with the care it deserved. "Am I going to becomeβ" you gestured vaguely at the general fact of both of them, "βthe same thing that you are?"
A silence.
Then Baelor laughed warmly.
You had heard him laugh before β the low, startled, genuine one that he could not contain β but this was different. This was a laugh pressed into your hair, warm and tender and so unself-conscious that it undid you in an entirely new and gentler way. His arm came around your shoulders, drawing you fractionally closer, and the laugh subsided into something that was almost a sigh.
"No," he said, into your hair. "No, my sweet girl." The endearment arrived with the same naturalness it had earlier, unperformed, simply true. "It requires considerably more than that. There is a ritual. A specific and deliberate act β one that both parties must choose, with full knowledge of what is being chosen." A pause, his fingers resuming their slow path along your arm. "What we did tonight does not begin the process."
"Oh," you said.
You considered this.
It was, you thought, quite good news from a practical standpoint. Reassuring, in the way that the confirmation of a reasonable hypothesis is reassuring β not surprising, exactly, but satisfying to have confirmed.
You turned it over in your mind, examining it from several angles with the unhurried attention of someone in no particular hurry to reach a conclusion.
Maekar shifted beside you.
"If you wanted," he said.
His voice was very flat. Not cold β you knew the difference now, had learned the full register of him over the course of this extraordinary evening β but careful, in the manner of a man placing a very fragile thing on a surface and removing his hands slowly. Not a suggestion. Simply a door, left ajar. He did not look at you when he said it.
Baelor's hand stilled.
You felt the breath he drew β measured, the intake of a man marshalling a response with care β and you could hear, underneath it, the shape of what he was about to say. The hesitation. The gentle, principled, deeply characteristic concern that would clothe itself in warmth and still be, at its core, a reprimand for his brother's carelessness.
You laughed first.
Not the dumb smile β this was a proper laugh, small and genuine, surprised out of you by the realisation that you had already arrived at your answer and had not needed any time at all to find it.
Baelor stopped.
You turned your head toward him. His mismatched eyes were uncertain in a way that was so rare and so human that it made your chest ache pleasantly. Then you turned to look at Maekar, who had his gaze fixed on the ceiling with the expression of a man who has said a thing and is now conducting a thorough internal audit of the decision to say it.
"I would not dislike it," you said. "In the least."
Silence.
Baelor made a sound β not quite a laugh, not quite the alternative β and pressed his mouth to your temple, and held it there, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that his silence did not already contain.
Maekar turned his head.
He looked at you. Pale eyes, quiet, the real thing β the unguarded thing, the thing underneath all the others β entirely visible, entirely present.
The corner of his mouth moved.
Not quite a smile. Something more interior than a smile, something that belonged to the same family as that rare and devastating laugh but was quieter than that. Something that he would not have permitted to be visible in any other room, in any other light, to any other person.
"Good," he said.
One word. Flat and certain and full to the edges with everything he did not say at volume.
You looked back at the painted stars.
Baelor's hand resumed its slow movement along your arm. Maekar's shoulder pressed, with perfect steadiness, against yours. The fire breathed its last amber breath.
Outside, the Red Keep slept, and the city below it turned in its own dark dreams, and the stories went on being wrong in all the ways that stories are wrong when they try to account for things that can only be understood from the inside.
You closed your eyes.
You felt the warmth of them, left and right, steady as tides.
You did not dislike it at all.
A.N.: If you have reached this point, thank you for reading that endless monstrosity, i guess Baelor and Maekar's pull also worked with me whoops.
So, yeah, that was... something. Sorry it it reads kind of slow-paced at some points, you know I really like to delve in emotions and feelings.
I'd love to read your thoughts on this, it would really help me improve!
dailybridgerton
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jacobvanloon
dededos
theartofmadeline
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