september 3, 1985

new girl transferred today. junior, like us. you walked into homeroom twelve minutes late with your bag strap sliding off your shoulder and sat down in the empty desk by the window and i forgot what mr. hendricks was saying. i still don't remember. it might have been about the civil war. it might have been about literally anything. you glanced out of the window, sunlight golden on you, and opened your notebook. i missed twenty minutes of american history.

this is probably not important enough to write down.

i'm not sure why i did.

september 8, 1985

i have three friends. bobby, terrence, and the library.

i'm not popular. i'm the thing that happens to popular when you drain all the charisma out of it and replace it with advanced calculus and the inability to make eye contact. bobby got the face AND the personality. i got the face and a brain that won't stop noticing details nobody asked for and a body that flinches when people touch it without warning.

identical twins. completely different experiences of being alive.

bobby walks into a room and the room lights up around him. i walk into a room and can't figure out where to stand. people talk and i miss the cues. the pauses where i'm supposed to laugh, the shifts in tone that signal a joke, the invisible dance of human interaction that everyone else learned naturally, and i'm still studying from the outside like a foreign language i can read but can't speak.

most people forget i'm in the room. teachers mix us up. girls look through me to find him. i've been called "bobby's brother" so many times it might as well be printed on my birth certificate.

i envy him sometimes. the effortlessness of it. the way connection comes to him like breathing. for me every conversation is a translation exercise: hear the words, decode the meaning, calculate the appropriate response, deliver it, check the face for signs i got it wrong. and it's so exhausting.

the library doesn't require any of it. the library doesn't care if i'm awkward.

september 11, 1985

her name is—

actually, i don't think i should write your name in this. just in case bobby finds it despite the very clear warning on the cover. i know you. that's enough.

bobby talked to you first because bobby talks to everyone first. you were sitting alone at lunch and he just walked over and sat down and said something that made you laugh (this startled, bright, involuntary sound) and by the time i got to the table you were already part of the group.

terrence likes you. bobby likes you. everybody likes you. you're warm in a way i don't have a word for. not loud-warm. just warm.

you said hi to me and i said hi back and that was the entire interaction.

i've been replaying it for three hours.

september 17, 1985

you sat next to me in calculus today. not because you had to. the desk was open and you chose it from three others, and sat down and smiled at me. you said, "hey, benny" like we've known each other for years.

benny.

nobody calls me benny.

september 29, 1985

you asked me to help you with calc after school. we sat at the kitchen table for an hour and a half and you leaned into my shoulder while i walked you through derivatives. your hair smelled like vanilla and you looked at me like i'd performed a miracle when you finally got it right.

nobody looks at me like that. bobby gets those looks. terrence gets those looks. i get the polite nod. the strained, patient smile. the "oh, you're bobby's brother" face that i've learned to expect.

you looked at me like i was a person who knew things you wanted to know. like the knowing mattered. like i was someone and not just adjacent to my twin.

i am in so much trouble.

october 14, 1985

you call me brendan. full name. sometimes benny when you're teasing. never BB, which is what everyone else calls me. never "the other twin." never "bobby's brother."

brendan.

i could live off the way you say it for a very long time.

october 22, 1985

kyle weber called me a freak in the hallway today. not the first time. i was carrying a stack of AP textbooks and he shoulder-checked me and they went everywhere and he laughed and said, "watch it, freak." i was on my knees picking up books and trying to disappear into the linoleum.

and then you appeared out of nowhere. i don't know where you came from. one second i was alone on the floor and the next you were crouching beside me, stacking my books, and then you stood up and turned to kyle. you said something so quiet i couldn't hear it and his face went white. paper white. he looked at you and then at me and then he stalked away and he hasn't spoken to me since.

i asked you what you said to him. you handed me my books and shrugged. "i told him if he touches you again i'll make sure the whole school knows he cried during the sex ed video in freshman year."

"...did he?"

"oh, absolutely. terrence told me. the power of information, benny."

and you linked your arm through mine and walked me to class.

people touch me and i flinch. always have. bobby's arm around my shoulder makes my skin crawl. terrence's back-slaps make me clench my jaw. casual contact (a stranger's elbow on the bus, a classmate brushing past in the hallway) registers in my body as a low-grade alarm.

i don't know why. i've never known why. my skin has always been too loud for other people's hands.

you linked your arm through mine and i didn't flinch. i didn't tense. i didn't have to override the instinct because the instinct wasn't there. your touch landed on my skin and my whole nervous system went quiet. warm. calm. like coming inside after hours in the cold and standing next to a fire and feeling the tightness in your muscles release one strand at a time.

you're protective of me. you took one look at the quiet twin who can't make eye contact and decided he was yours to defend and nobody asked you to and you did it anyway.

i have never felt warm the way i feel warm when you do this. like the warmth isn't just temperature but a person. like i've been standing outside in the cold my whole life and you opened the door to a warm house.

november 2, 1985

you found me in the library during a free period. everyone else was at the pep rally. i was reading and you sat down across from me and said "i don't really do pep rallies" and opened your own book and we sat there in silence for an hour.

i've never been quiet with another person and had it feel like a gift before.

silence with other people feels like a failure. like i'm supposed to be filling the space and i can't find the right thing to fill it with. every pause is a question i'm getting wrong. with you the silence felt like a room we were sharing on purpose.

the noise in my head (the constant humming calculation of how to be a person in front of other people) it stops when you're near. just stops. like a machine powering down. and underneath the silence there's this calm i don't have a name for. this sense that i can stop performing and just exist and you won't find the existing strange or off-putting.

when you left you squeezed my shoulder and said, "this was nice, benny."

i put my forehead on the table and stayed there for a while.

november 9, 1985

a thing i've never told anyone:

i hate being touched, and i am desperate to be touched. both at the same time. all the time.

other people's hands on me feel like static. wrong pressure, wrong temperature. i pull away from hugs. i stiffen under friendly arms. mom stopped trying to hold my hand when i was eleven because i kept pulling free without meaning to and the hurt on her face was worse than the contact.

but when you touch me (your hand on my arm, your head on my shoulder, your fingers fixing my collar) my body does the opposite thing. it leans. toward you. into you. like i've been cold for sixteen years and you're the first source of heat and the relief of it is so overwhelming i could cry.

i want more. always more. every touch you give me i hoard and replay and it's never enough. i want your hand in my hair. your arms around my waist. your forehead against mine. i want to be held by you until the static stops and it only stops with you and i don't understand why.

i don't think i need to understand why. i just need more.

november 15, 1985

i can see it happening. you and bobby. the way you orbit each other is starting to change shape.

the group hangs out and i watch your eyes find him across the room. i watch his find you. there's a gravity forming between you two that everyone can feel and nobody's named yet but they will. terrence already calls you bobby's girl behind your back and you're not, not yet, but the "yet" is so, so heavy.

you light up when he walks in. i know that brightness because i feel it when you walk in and i have to look away before anyone sees.

you're going to end up with bobby. everyone in this school can see the shape of it forming. bobby and the new girl. the twin everybody notices and the girl everybody likes.

i'm being dramatic. it's only been two months. i barely know you.

except i do. i know you hate the crusts on sandwiches but eat them anyway because wasting food makes you feel guilty. i know you hum when you're concentrating and you don't realise you're doing it and the song is never one i recognise. i know you bite your bottom lip when you're nervous and the left side harder than the right.

i know you. i've been paying attention since september.

i need to stop.

december 19, 1985

christmas party at terrence's. you wore a red sweater too big for you and had a stupid reindeer pin on your collar. bobby was doing his thing. arm around you, charming and bright, making the room laugh. i watched you lean into him. two bodies learning how to fit together.

you found me hiding in the kitchen and bumped your hip against mine with a crooked smile. "you're hiding."

"i'm making a drink."

"you're hiding. come back out. i miss you."

you said i miss you and i'd been in the other room for ten minutes.

you dragged me back by my sleeve and sat me down next to you and kept your hand on my knee for the rest of the night. i don't think you noticed you were doing it.

i noticed nothing else.

january 9, 1986

i've started dreading the question. the one bobby and terrence throw around like a football. "so when are you gonna get a girlfriend, bennett?" bobby grins when he says it. means it lovingly. doesn't know the answer is a slow knife.

terrence is worse. "bro there are girls literally lining up for the bobby franklin face and you're just... sitting there. reading. with that face. it's criminal!"

i laugh it off. they laugh. everyone laughs. good old brendan. hopeless with girls. still a virgin. probably going to be a virgin forever because he can't string two sentences together in front of a pretty girl.

except that's not it. that's not it at all.

something is wrong with me.

i can't find anyone attractive. i've tried. jenny park is objectively beautiful and when she talked to me at lunch i felt nothing. matt from chem lab is objectively beautiful and when he sat next to me i felt nothing. the magazine under bobby's bed that he thinks i don't know about—nothing.

my body doesn't respond to people. it doesn't want anyone. i look at classmates the way i look at furniture. vague acknowledgment that they exist. no heat. no pull. no interest.

except you.

you walk into a room and every nerve ending in my body lights up. you touch my arm and my skin hums for an hour. you lean into my shoulder and i stop breathing. you, exclusively. only you. like my body was made with a single setting and the setting is you and there's no alternative use.

i don't know what this means. i don't know if this is normal.

i'm really scared it isn't.

march 8, 1986

bobby asked you out today.

he told me first. came into my room and sat on my bed and said "i'm gonna ask her" and his voice was trying to hide the fact he was scared. going casual, going loose, like if he holds the words lightly enough they won't be able to hurt him. and i knew what he was really asking. because dad is still fresh. the cheating. the years of lies, mom finding out, the divorce that split the house in half.

bobby was fourteen when he decided love was the thing that wrecks you. swore he'd never open that door. never let anyone close enough to do what dad did to mom.

and now he wants to try. for you.

he deserves this. after everything dad did, after watching his ability to trust get gutted by a man who was supposed to teach him how to love, bobby deserves someone who makes him brave enough to try.

i told him to go for it. meant it.

he came back an hour later. grinning so wide his face couldn't hold it. you said yes.

of course you said yes. you've been saying yes to bobby since the day you sat down at our lunch table.

i hugged him. told him congratulations. meant it.

went to my room. closed the door. sat on the floor with my back against the bed and stared at the wall until my eyes ached.

march 22, 1986

movies. bobby and you, me and terrence. your first group outing as a couple.

bobby had his arm around you. you had your head on his shoulder. you shared popcorn. your leg was pressed against mine the whole film. probably because the seats were small. i didn't move.

i should have moved.

april 5, 1986

you had a fight with your mom. showed up at our house at 10 pm, crying. bobby wasn't home.

you stood on the porch and i opened the door and your face crumpled and you blurted out, "is it ok if i just sit with you for a while?"

i made you tea. you talked and i listened. after an hour you ran out of words and leaned sideways and put your head on my shoulder and fell asleep.

you slept for two hours. your hand curled in the fabric of my shirt. your breathing slow and deep. i sat perfectly still. did not adjust my position even when my arm went completely numb. i would have let my arm fall off before disturbing you.

bobby came home at midnight. "thanks for taking care of my girl, man."

my girl.

the dent where your head rested stayed warm for a long time after you left.

april 12, 1986

short entry.

you fixed the collar of my shirt in the hallway today. just reached up and folded it down. your knuckles brushing my neck. "there. can't have you walking around looking rumpled, benny."

i can still feel your knuckles. four hours later. a stripe of contact burned into the side of my throat.

june 18, 1986

pool party at terrence's. you were in a bikini.

i'm not going to describe it. i'm going to acknowledge that you were in a bikini and that i spent four hours in a california swimming pool and was never warm. because all my blood had relocated to the problem of not looking at you and the secondary problem growing in my swim trunks from the failure of the first problem.

you asked me to put sunscreen on your back. i did it. my hands were steady. nobody watching could have told that the inside of my head was a five-alarm fire.

"thanks, benny." and you went back to the pool and bobby threw you in. you screamed and laughed and i excused myself to the bathroom and put my head between my knees.

august 30, 1986

senior year. last year of being in the same building as you every day.

bobby and you are solid. you're good together. he opens up around you in ways he doesn't with anyone else. you soften him. you make his edges less defensive. when he's with you, bobby is almost the person he'd be if dad hadn't shattered his faith that the people who love you will stay.

i want to be selfless about this. the good brother. the one who steps aside and means it.

i'm not that person.

i love you. i love you and it's getting worse. it was supposed to fade. crushes fade. this isn't fading. this is setting foundations, pouring concrete into the ground floor of my chest and building upward.

september 14, 1986

bobby made a joke today at dinner. mom was asking about girls at school and bobby grinned and elbowed me and said, "bennett here is saving himself. for what, we're not sure. science, probably."

everyone laughed. mom. bobby. even terrence, who was over for dinner.

i laughed too. good old brendan. the virgin. the nerd. probably going to lose it to a textbook.

i went upstairs and sat on my bed and thought: there is something seriously wrong with me. because i'm seventeen and i've never kissed anyone and i don't WANT to kiss anyone. i look at every other person in my school and my body is silent. flat. dead. no heat, no curiosity, no pull. and then you walk into a room and i can feel my heartbeat in my fingertips and my mouth goes dry and i want to put my hands on you so badly my joints ache with it.

it's only you. it has only ever been you. and the exclusivity of it terrifies me because what if this is broken? what if i'm wired wrong? what if the reason i can't want anyone else is because something in me got stuck, got fixed in place the day you sat down in homeroom, and it will never unstick?

what if i'm going to want you, only you, for the rest of my life?

what if i already know the answer?

october 31, 1986

halloween. you dressed as an alien. green face paint, antennae that kept falling sideways. you asked me what i was and i said "a serial killer, they look like everyone else" and you laughed so hard you doubled over and grabbed my arm.

"brendan that's the funniest thing you've ever said. you have to say that to everyone who asks."

so i did, and people laughed. because you told me to deliver the line and so i did and the fact that people laughed at my joke felt good but the fact that you gave me the joke felt like being handed a lit candle in a dark room.

you fixed my hair at one point. reached up and pushed a strand off my forehead. casual. meaningless to you. your fingertips grazed my temple and i can still feel it hours later. a warm line where your hand was.

november 8, 1986

some senior from the baseball team cornered me after school. not kyle, a new one. shoved me into the lockers and called me a faggot because apparently reading in public is a sexual orientation now.

i didn't tell anyone. didn't need to.

you found out anyway. i don't know how. terrence, probably.

you didn't say anything to me about it, but two days later the senior apologised. to my face. in the hallway. with stiff, terrified demeanour. an angel of wrath had informed him of the consequences of future behaviour.

i asked you what you did.

"nothing." you were doing your homework, not looking at me. "he just had a change of heart."

"a change of heart."

"people grow, benny."

you're terrifying when you want to be, and i'm so in love with you i could die.

november 21, 1986

a guy at terrence's party wouldn't leave you alone. i don't know his name. some friend of a friend from out of town. he kept touching your arm after you pulled away. kept leaning into your space. you smiled politely and shifted sideways, and he followed.

bobby was across the room with a group of guys smoking something he shouldn't be and didn't see it. and you did that thing you do. that swallowing thing. that "it's fine, i can handle it" thing, and i watched your shoulders tighten, your smile going strained, and my vision narrowed.

i don't remember crossing the room. i don't remember what i said.

i remember his face. the way his expression shifted when he looked at me. i'm used to people looking through me, looking past me. this was different. this was a person looking at me and seeing a locked door they did not want to open.

i don't know what i said. that should scare me. it doesn't.

you found me in the kitchen after. leaned against the counter next to me. didn't ask what happened. just knocked your shoulder against mine and said "my hero" in that teasing, soft voice and i felt the anger drain out of me so fast it left me lightheaded.

but it's still in there. i felt it. a cold, patient, completely calm willingness to do damage if anyone puts their hands on you again. it doesn't feel like rage. rage is hot and loud. that's bobby's territory.

this is different. this is a door i didn't know i had, and behind it is a version of me that would do very quiet, very permanent things to protect you.

i don't know what to do with that information. so i'm putting it here.

december 1, 1986

i hate this

why can't i just be normal

everyone around me is dating. kissing. losing their virginity in backseats and bedrooms and talking about it at lunch like it's a rite of passage i keep failing to reach.

and i sit there and i listen and i feel nothing. no envy for the act itself. only this hollow awareness that i'm watching a movie everyone else is in and i'm still in the audience.

bobby asked me last week if i'd kissed anyone yet. gentle about it, for once. no joke. just "hey man, you doing okay? you know it's fine if you haven't, right?" and the kindness of it made it worse because he was being a good brother and i couldn't tell him the truth.

the truth is that there is one person i want to kiss until my lips go raw, and she's dating you and every other mouth on earth repulses me and i don't know why i'm built this way. i can't talk to anyone about it because the answer ("i'm not attracted to anyone except my twin brother's girlfriend") sounds like a confession that would get me committed.

what is wrong with me? genuinely. is this a disorder? is there a name for wanting one person so completely that everyone else might as well be furniture?

is this what love is or is this what obsession is and how do you tell the difference when you're eighteen and you've never been touched before

december 24, 1986

christmas eve dinner. you gave me a book. wrapped in paper you decorated yourself. little silver stars drawn by hand all over the blue.

"i saw it and thought of you."

six words. i saw it and thought of you. six words now living inside my chest cavity.

it was a first edition of a book i mentioned wanting three months ago. in passing. once. you remembered.

i held on to the wrapping paper after. folded the stars inside a textbook. i'll keep them.

february 1, 1987

i woke up at 3 am from a dream about you and i can't go back to sleep.

i'm not going to write down what happened. i'm not going to describe the way you looked or the sounds you made or what i was doing to you when you

no.

cold shower. stood under the water until my teeth chattered. didn't help. i can still feel the ghost of your body against mine. my brain invented the weight of you, the heat, the way you would arch into me if i

STOP.

this is just biology. i'm eighteen. this is normal.

it's not normal. nothing about how i want you is normal. the depth of it, the weight. i didn't dream about a body. i dreamed about YOUR body. your curves. the pitch of your laugh gone breathless. the way you'd say my name, not bobby's, mine, brendan, with your hands in my hair.

i want you so badly i can't breathe and i have no right to and the wanting is going to eat me alive.

february 14, 1987

valentine's day. bobby gave you a necklace. you nearly cried and kissed him and terrence heckled you both.

i watched from the kitchen doorway.

i didn't get you anything. getting you a valentine would be insane.

march 15, 1987

you told me today that you think i'm going to change the world.

we were sitting on the back porch. just us. you were eating an apple and reading over my harvard application essay and you put it down and looked at me and said seriously, "brendan, this is incredible. you're going to get in and then you're going to change the world and i'm going to tell everyone i knew you when you do."

and i thought: you know me now. you're the only person who knows me now.

may 14, 1987

bonfire at the beach. bobby and terrence went to get more wood. you were sitting next to me. close. your knee touching mine. the fire was low and orange and the light was painting your skin gold, catching the shadows in the dip of your collarbone, the curve of your neck.

and all i could think was: your throat. the soft patch below your ear where your jaw meets your neck. if i leaned over, if i put my mouth there. just my lips. how you would taste. salt and warmth and the lingering smoke from the fire. how your pulse would feel against my tongue. how your breath would catch.

i sat next to you with the dying fire and the crashing waves and bobby's laugh carrying from down the beach and i thought about putting my mouth on your throat for forty-five straight minutes.

you leaned your head on my shoulder. "i love nights like this."

"yeah," i said.

the fire burned to embers. i could still feel your pulse in my imagination. beating against a mouth i will never put there.

may 28, 1987

you held my hand today. just for a second. we were crossing a parking lot and a car came too fast around the corner and you grabbed my hand and pulled me back and then you didn't let go for the whole walk to the truck. just your fingers laced through mine. swinging between us. you were talking about finals and i was listening and your hand was in mine and it was a tuesday and i would sell my soul to feel this on a wednesday.

june 1, 1987

i want to touch you so badly my hands hurt

not ONLY sexually. i want to brush the hair off your face. i want to hold your hand in the car. i want to fall asleep with your head on my chest. i want the casual touches. the ones bobby gets without asking for them, the hand on the arm, the head on the shoulder, the absent fingers tracing patterns on skin while watching tv.

i want to be allowed to touch you the way he's allowed. not stolen moments dressed up as friendship. real ones. with intent. with honesty.

god i'm so fucking pathetic

june 9, 1987

graduation. we did it. senior year, done.

you found me in the crowd after. pushed through bobby and terrence and your parents and my mom and everyone else and grabbed me in a hug so tight my cap fell off. "WE DID IT BENNY" screamed directly into my ear with enough force to cause permanent hearing damage.

i hugged you tight and you laughed and your gown was billowing in the wind, and your hair was in my face. i could feel your ribs expanding with laughter against my arms and for ten seconds the world was only this. you in my arms. laughing.

bobby got the kiss. terrence got the secret handshake. i got the scream and the spin and i would trade everything i own for a lifetime supply of being the person you run to first.

july 4, 1987

sparklers at the beach. you were sitting next to me in the sand. our shoulders touching. the sky exploding in gold and red above us.

you turned to me, sparkler in hand, gold light on your face. "are you happy, benny?"

"yeah. i'm happy."

and right then i was. the wanting was still there, bedrock-deep, permanent. but for ten minutes it was quiet enough to hear the waves over it.

you put your head on my shoulder. i put my cheek on your hair.

i am never going to love anyone else. i know this the way i know chemical formulas. fact. fixed. tested and proven across every variable.

you are the only constant in my universe.

august 7, 1987

acceptance letter came. harvard. full ride.

you were the second person i showed. bobby first, because brotherhood, but you were right behind him. you took the letter and read it, your hands were shaking and you looked up at me and your eyes were full. you threw your arms around my neck and squeezed so hard i couldn't breathe.

"i knew it," you whispered wetly into my collar. "i knew it. i told you. i told you, benny."

and underneath the pride and the joy, so clear i could taste it... sadness. that's really far away. that's the other side of the country. and you didn't say it but your arms tightened and you held on longer than you needed to and i could feel the grief of it in your grip.

bobby grinned and hugged me. terrence lifted me off the ground cheering loudly. mom cried.

you held my hand under the table at dinner that night. three straight hours. nobody saw. your thumb tracing circles on my palm while everyone talked about the bright, impossible future.

i'm going to remember your thumb on my palm long after i've forgotten the letter.

august 28, 1987

last night before harvard.

you came over. just you. bobby was working late and terrence had a gig down at santa cruz. you knocked on my door and held up a wrapped package and decalred, "before you go."

it was a mixtape, but not just a mixtape. the case was hand-decorated with tiny drawings. inside jokes, all of them. a stick figure at a desk labeled "nerd at work." a tiny calculus equation with a heart instead of an equals sign. a drawing of me with ridiculous oversized glasses. on the spine, in your handwriting: "for benny. so you don't forget us."

i turned it over. on the back you'd written every track title and next to each one a note.

track 3 — this is the one i was humming during the calc final that made you glare at me. track 7 — for driving at night with the windows down. track 12 — listen to this one when you miss home. and by home i mean me.

and by home i mean me.

i stared at it for so long you got nervous. "is it stupid? it's stupid. you probably have a walkman with actual good music and this is—"

"it's perfect."

you looked at me. i looked at you. the room was very quiet and very small. you were very close and i could have kissed you. the distance between your mouth and mine was six inches and i could have closed it and everything would have changed.

i didn't. because i couldn't do that to bobby. i couldn't.

"i'm really going to miss you, benny."

"i'll call every week."

"you better."

i listened to the tape in bed that night with headphones on. track 12. over and over and over. your voice in the liner notes. and by home i mean me.

i held the case against my chest and closed my eyes, pretending your hand was there instead.

september 2, 1987

you hugged me at the truck. held on for a long time. your face in my neck and your hands gripping the back of my shirt.

"every week, brendan. if you forget about me—"

"i won't forget about you."

too fast, too serious, too much truth packed into a sentence that was supposed to be light. you pulled back and looked at me and your eyes were searching my face for something.

i don't know if you found it.

you kissed my cheek. close enough that if i'd turned my head half an inch your lips would have been on mine.

i didn't turn my head.

i got in the truck. bobby drove. i watched you in the side mirror, standing in the driveway with your arms wrapped around yourself, getting smaller and smaller.

september 18, 1987

i thought distance would help.

three thousand miles between your body and mine. no more shoulder-touches. no more vanilla smell. no more knee-against-knee in dark movie theaters. the theory was sound: remove the stimulus, reduce the response. basic conditioning.

the theory is wrong.

i miss you like an organ. like something was cut out of me at the airport and i'm walking around with the wound still open. i reach for the phone every hour. i play the mixtape until the ribbon starts to wear. i sit in lectures surrounded by brilliant, interesting people and i feel nothing. flat. grey.

here's what's strange though. i'm getting better at the other thing. the people thing.

harvard is full of people like me. the ones who read too much and talk too little and know the periodic table better than their classmates' names. for the first time in my life "quiet and intense" isn't the wrong setting. it's the default. i can hold a conversation in a study group without running the translation the whole time. i can sit in a dining hall and not feel like i'm performing personhood for an audience that isn't buying it.

i'm finding myself here, in small ways. figuring out which parts of my strangeness are flaws and which are just features nobody had a use for in santa clara.

but you remain the eye of the storm. the one quiet place where everything inside me unwinds.

harvard is teaching me how to exist around other people. you taught me that existing around another person could feel like rest instead of labour. and no amount of social growth, no amount of learning to make small talk in a dining hall, will ever replicate what you give me just by being near.

the silence that isn't empty. the touch that doesn't sting. the calm.

i am homesick for a person, not a place.

october 3, 1987

a girl in my organic chemistry study group asked me out. claire. smart. funny. objectively attractive.

i said yes because i'm supposed to say yes. because normal people say yes. because bobby would say yes and terrence would say yes, and this is what nineteen-year-olds do.

we got coffee. she was kind. she laughed at my poor jokes. she touched my hand across the table.

i felt nothing. absolutely nothing. like pressing my palm against a wall and waiting for warmth that never comes.

she leaned in to kiss me at the end and i let her and her mouth was on mine and all i could think was: wrong. wrong lips. wrong pressure. wrong taste. wrong person. WRONG.

i pulled away and said i was sorry and walked home. stood in the shower and scrubbed my mouth raw, and felt sick with how much i wanted it to have been you.

october 19, 1987

you called tonight. bobby was at work and you were bored and you called. we talked for two hours. my roommate left after twenty minutes because apparently i was "smiling weird."

you told me about your week. clark's being terrible. terrence's band. the stray cat on your porch. you told me everything and i held the phone with my eyes closed and you were there. in my ear. telling me about a cat like it was the most important news in the world.

"i miss you, benny." soft. sleepy.

"i miss you too."

the safest true thing i've ever said. because i miss you is allowed. i miss you lives in the acceptable zone. i miss you is what a friend says.

i miss you the way a lung misses air. i miss you so much i have rearranged my entire week around the possibility that you might call again.

but "i miss you too" is what i said.

november 12, 1987

there's a guy in my anatomy class. david. he's been friendly. eating lunch together, studying. today he put his hand on my knee under the table and looked at me with a question in his eyes.

nothing. nothing nothing nothing. i am broken or i am built wrong or i am simply, irrevocably, yours in a way that excludes every other human being on this planet regardless of what they look like or what's between their legs.

i told him i was flattered. i meant it. i am flattered that anyone wants someone like me.

i just can't want them back. the machinery only runs for you. i've tested it now. both genders. kind people, attractive people, people who deserved better than the hollow version of me sitting across from them. and every single time the same flat nothing. the same grey wall.

then you call and the wall dissolves and every colour rushes back in, and i think: oh. there i am. i was here the whole time. i just only exist when you're nearby.

distance was supposed to fix this. i was supposed to get better.

i'm not getting better. i'm getting worse. three thousand miles and i am worse.

november 26, 1987

thanksgiving. came home. you saw me in the doorway and your face lit up. you ran at me and jumped and i caught you. your arms locked around my neck, your face buried in my shoulder. you were laughing and squeezing me so tight i couldn't breathe.

i could have held you like that until the sun burned itself out.

bobby was right behind me. you let go of me and hugged him and kissed him and you stood in the hallway with your foreheads together and i carried my bag upstairs.

you run at me. you kiss him. the running is enthusiastic and warm and genuine. the kissing is intimate and private and his.

i want the kiss. i'd burn for the kiss.

and i hate myself for wanting it because bobby is my brother and he's happy and he deserves this after dad.

he deserves this more than me.

december 3, 1987

i think loving you is going to kill me.

i wish i could take my heart out and set it aside. put it in a jar on a shelf. come back for it when it's safe. but it's never going to be safe, is it? there's no version of my life where loving you is safe. there's only the version where i carry it and i'm going to carry it till my heart stops.

february 14, 1988

valentine's day. i mailed you a book. astronomy. because you said once, in october, that you wished you knew more about constellations. the note said: "saw this, thought you'd like it — B." casual. friendly.

you called to thank me. "brendan bennett franklin, you're the sweetest person alive."

i sat on my dorm room floor with the phone cord wrapped around my finger and thought: i am not sweet. i am a liar. i bought you a valentine and called it casual and you believed me because you don't see me. you look right at me with those warm eyes and you see a friend. a brother. a good person.

you don't see the thing underneath that wants to kiss you until neither of us can stand.

april 16, 1988

a girl at a party. i don't remember her name. i was a little drunk and she was pretty and i thought: just try. just try to be normal. to want someone attainable. someone who isn't your brother's girlfriend.

we went to her room. she kissed me and took her shirt off and i looked at her and felt... revulsion. not at her. at the wrongness of it. at my own body's flat refusal to participate in anything that wasn't you. i made an excuse. left. walked home in the cold.

the distance was supposed to make this better. the new people, the new context. a fresh start without you in every room.

but you're in every room. you're in the phone on my desk and the mixtape in my walkman and the book on my shelf with the silver stars on the wrapping paper that i kept like a goddamn shrine. you're in the way i scan every crowd for your face. you're in the hollow feeling when i don't find it.

what is wrong with me? what is fundamentally, structurally wrong with me that i can't want anyone who isn't you?

i sat on my bathroom floor and put my head in my hands and asked myself if this is what the rest of my life looks like. a series of empty rooms with the wrong people in them. a body that only responds to one person. a lock with one key and the key belongs to my brother's girlfriend.

yes. that's what it looks like. i know the answer already. i've always known.

april 30, 1988

i made a list today. of reasons to stop.

she's bobby's girlfriend.

bobby is my twin.

bobby loves her.

she loves bobby.

i am betraying him with every thought i have about her.

i am betraying HER with every thought i have about her because she trusts me and i'm lying to her.

i am twenty years old and i have never had a normal sexual or romantic interaction with another human being because my body won't cooperate with anyone who isn't her.

this is not love. this is fixation. i'm sick. i'm sick in the head.

if she knew what i think about when i hear her voice on the phone she would never speak to me again.

i am a bad person.

i stared at the list for a long time. each point is factually accurate. logically sound. irrefutable.

you called an hour later and called out happily, "benny, tell me about your day" and the list caught fire and burned to ash before you finished the sentence.

i am a bad person who loves a good person and the loving makes me worse.

may 19, 1988

my roommate has a girlfriend. they have sex in our room while i'm at the library and they think i don't know. i know because the sheets are different when i come back and the room smells like sweat and perfume and he's got that dazed, satisfied grin.

i looked at him last night (happy, spent, normal) and thought: why can't i be like that? why can't i want someone who wants me back? someone available. someone whose last name isn't franklin.

tried again in my head. conjured up every attractive person i've met at harvard. ran through them one by one, tried to imagine kissing them, touching them. like flipping through a catalogue of locked doors.

and then i thought about your hands in my hair and my whole body responded so violently i had to excuse myself to the bathroom.

why am i like this

why am i like this why am i like this why am i like this

three thousand miles. eighteen months of distance. dozens of kind, attractive, available people and my body is a locked room with your name on the door and no other key fits and i have tried every key and they all feel like violations.

i'm so tired of trying and failing and trying and failing and coming back to the same truth every single time:

it's you. it was always you. it will only ever be you.

and i can never, ever have you.

june 7, 1988

summer. home again.

bobby and you have been together two years and the cracks are starting to show. you don't talk about it. that's your flaw, the swallowing. the folding up of hurt into small squares and tucking them away.

i see it though. the way you wait for bobby to call and he doesn't. the way you make plans and he forgets. the way you press your lips together for one second when you're disappointed before the smile goes back on. nobody else catches it.

i catch it every time.

i hate him for it. my twin. who i love more than anyone except you. i hate him for having the thing i would dismantle myself to have and treating it like it'll always be there.

you won't always be there. patience has a floor and one day you'll hit it.

i can't say this to him. he'll hear what it really is. jealousy dressed up as concern.

july 22, 1988

you came over while bobby was at work. back porch. popsicles. you were telling me about a movie and your lips were stained red and a drop ran down your wrist and you licked it off and i—

i need to stop writing these down

"you're staring, benny."

"you have popsicle on your chin."

you wiped it off, laughing.

you don't know. you genuinely don't know what your mouth does to me, what your hands do to me, what the sound of my name in your voice does to me.

if you knew, you'd stop coming over. you'd stop touching my arm and leaning into me and putting your head on my shoulder. and losing those things would end me faster than never having had them.

good old brendan. safe brendan. bobby's quiet brother who helps with calculus and always has a book.

the mask stays on.

august 3, 1988

you fell asleep on my bed today while i was studying. lying on your stomach with one arm hanging off the edge and your face turned toward me and your mouth open and you were drooling on my pillow.

drooling. on my pillow.

the love i feel for you hit me so hard i couldn't move for half an hour.

august 15, 1988

please let me stop loving her

please. whoever is listening. let me stop.

let me wake up one morning and feel nothing when she says my name. let the hugs feel like hugs instead of slow immolation. let me sit next to her without mapping every centimetre between our bodies. let me be the friend she thinks i am instead of the liar i know i am.

i don't want this anymore. it hurts too much. please, it hurts. three years and it's only getting deeper and i can't

i can't switch it off. i don't know how. i don't think there is a how.

i think this is just what i am now. a boy who loves a girl who loves his brother.

september 6, 1988

back at harvard. unpacking. found one of your hair ties tangled in my clean laundry. you must have left it when you were over last.

i put it on my wrist. wore it all day. took it off before bed and put it on the nightstand and looked at it and thought: this is the closest thing i have to wearing a ring from you.

a hair tie. on a nightstand. in a dorm room in harvard.

september 22, 1988

i want to be normal i want to be normal i want to be normal i want to be normal i want to be happy please i just want to be happy

bad day.

october 10, 1988

you called at 1 am. crying. fighting with bobby. your voice thick and wet.

"i don't know what to do, benny. i love him so much and he won't let me in."

and i sat on my dorm room bed with the phone pressed to my ear until it ached and told you:

"you're the strongest person i know."

and you said: "why can't he just say it, brendan? why can't he just say he loves me?"

i love you. i love you. i love you. three words bobby can't get past his teeth and i can't get past my conscience.

"he loves you. he's just scared."

"i know."

"give him time."

"i always give him time."

and i wanted to say: stop giving him time. stop waiting. he's wasting you. he's burning daylight with a girl made of sunlight and he doesn't even see it.

i said: "you deserve someone who says it."

long pause. your breathing slowing.

"thanks, benny. you always know what to say."

i don't know what to say. i know what not to say. there's a vast, dark, freezing difference.

march 30, 1989

spring break. you picked me up from the airport. standing at arrivals in a sundress holding a sign that said NERD in huge letters.

you dropped the sign and ran and i caught you and your laugh was in my ear and the sundress was thin and your body was warm against mine.

you drove us home. windows down. radio on. singing badly. your hand squeezing my arm at a red light.

i would burn harvard to the ground for this. for your hand on my arm, shaking me because you were so happy to see me. for the wind in your hair. for your voice saying my name like it's your favourite word.

i would give up everything. the degree. the future. the carefully constructed life three thousand miles away.

i would give up all of it for one day where you're mine.

one day. and then i'd give you back. i'd carry the memory for the rest of my life and it would be enough.

it would have to be.

HE FUCKING FORGOT, 1989

bobby forgot your birthday.

you didn't tell me. you wouldn't. i found out because terrence called me, and said "dude, bobby got too high and forgot" and his voice was tight with the anger he rarely shows.

i called you from the payphone in the hallway and said happy birthday and you said "thanks, benny" in that voice. that bright, fine, everything's-fine voice that i can see through like glass. and i heard the crack underneath it and the love hit me and the rage hit me in the same breath.

i called bobby after, and i don't raise my voice. i have raised my voice maybe five times in my life. but i said his name in a way that made him go quiet immediately on the other end and i said "you forgot her birthday" and the silence that followed was long and guilty.

"shit," he said. "shit, benny, i—"

"call her. right now. and if you ever do this again—"

i didn't finish the sentence. didn't need to. bobby heard what was underneath it. heard the edge i keep so carefully hidden, the cold thing that lives behind the shyness, and for a second i think he heard the OTHER thing, too.

the reason the anger was so hot, the reason it came so fast, the reason his twin brother was calling from three thousand miles away trembling with fury over a forgotten birthday that wasn't his to remember.

he called you. sent flowers the next day, took you out for dinner. you forgave him because you always forgive him.

i sat in the phone booth for ten minutes after with my head against the glass. my hands were shaking. not from anger. from how close i'd come to saying too much. from the size of the feeling pressing against my ribs. from the knowledge that i would burn my relationship with my brother to the ground to protect you from pain and the fact that this doesn't make me a good person.

it makes me a dangerous one.

may 2, 1989

your voice on the phone tonight, laughing about a terrible customer at clark's, imitating his voice, making me laugh until my stomach hurt.

i pressed the phone so hard against my ear it left a red mark and i thought: i don't want to die without having kissed you. i don't care about anything else. the degree. the career. the future. i just don't want to die without knowing what your mouth tastes like.

that's all.

june 14, 1989

you were lying on a blanket in the back yard. reading. the sun was on your legs and your feet were bare and you was chewing on a pen cap. your hair was pulled up and the back of your neck was exposed.

i sat on the porch steps and watched the back of your neck for twenty minutes.

twenty minutes. the back of your neck.

i am beyond help.

july 4, 1989

short one.

sparklers again. your shoulder against mine. same beach. same sand. same sky.

different year. same ache. same shape. same boy sitting in the dark loving the same girl who doesn't know.

happy fourth of july.

september 20, 1989

second year of pre-med. my hands shake from caffeine. i forgot to eat yesterday.

you called. i picked up on the first ring. i will always pick up on the first ring.

"brendan bennett franklin. eat something, drink water, and go to bed."

"i have a paper—"

"go. to. bed. if you sound this wrecked tomorrow i'm driving down myself."

i ate a sandwich. drank water. went to bed. fell asleep holding the phone.

you mailed me a care package last month. my favourite snacks. a note that said: "don't die. i need you."

i folded the note and put it in my wallet. i'll probably be buried with it.

november 23, 1989

thanksgiving. you saw me in the kitchen and your face did the light-up. the full-body brightening.

my hair is longer, brushing my ears and curling at the nape. you reached up and pushed it back from my forehead. your fingers dragged across my scalp and my whole body went rigid.

"look at you. all grown up and scholarly." you tugged a strand behind my ear. "very handsome, benny."

i said "thanks" to the refrigerator. my ears were burning.

bobby came in. you kissed him. i excused myself.

i sat on my bed and pressed my hand to my scalp where your fingers had been and breathed in through my nose for a count of four, and out through my mouth for a count of four for ten minutes because my heart rate would not come down.

handsome. you said handsome. you touched my hair and called me handsome.

next three lifetimes. i'm carrying this.

january 6, 1990

i had a dream about you. i'm going to write it down because i have to put it somewhere that doesn't judge me.

you were in my dorm room. sitting on my bed. and you said "benny, come here" and i went. you put your hands on my face and kissed me and i could feel it. the pressure of your mouth. the warmth of your breath. your lips parting and your tongue finding mine and the small sound you made when i pulled you closer.

and then you were under me. your legs wrapped around my waist. i was inside you. and you were saying my name. not bobby's, mine, brendan. over and over while your nails dragged down my back and your head fell back and i could feel you around me, tight and warm and perfect. every time you said brendan i went deeper and you arched into me.

i woke up so hard it hurt. sheets ruined.

i lay in the dark and put my hand around myself and thought about you beneath me and came in under a minute with a pained groan, and felt like the worst person alive.

you trust me completely. and i'm lying in the dark getting off to dreams about being inside you.

i'm sick

i'm not sick. i'm in love. but from here they feel the same.

march 2, 1990

your voice on the phone last night, sleepy and warm: "night, benny. love you."

casual. friendly. the way you say it to terrence. the way you say it to your friends.

i hung up and pressed the phone against my chest and stared at the ceiling.

love you. you say it so easily. like the words are light. like they cost nothing.

for me they cost everything.

march 15, 1990

you visited for my birthday. flew out alone. bobby couldn't make it.

you were standing outside my dorm with a bakery box and a toothy grin. "happy birthday, benny! it's lopsided because TSA manhandled it."

three days. you slept in my roommate's bed. wore my harvard sweater because you forgot to pack layers, too used to cali heat. it was too big on you. sleeves past your fingertips. collar slipping off one shoulder. bare legs. padding around my room.

i very nearly put my fist through a wall.

we stayed up until 4 am. lying in the dark on separate beds. your voice floating across the room. you told me things you haven't told bobby. things about your childhood. your fears. you talk to me differently than you talk to him. with bobby you're warm but with me you're open. like i'm the one place you can put things down.

"you're my favourite person." half asleep. murmured. "don't tell bobby."

i won't tell bobby. i won't tell anyone. i will take that sentence and compress it into a diamond and keep it in my chest forever.

on the last morning you hugged me at the airport. held on. your face in my neck and your hands gripping the back of my shirt and i breathed you in. vanilla and that warm unnamed you scent. stored it. another moment that belongs to me in all the wrong ways.

"come home soon."

i'm always coming home. you're there. there is no other reason needed.

april 27, 1990

you called me crying last night. bobby again. another fight. another door closed in your face.

and i sat on my bed and held the phone and listened and said the right things and the kind things and the things a good friend says. but underneath every word was this screaming, roaring, monstrous want to say: LEAVE HIM. LEAVE HIM AND LOVE ME. I WOULD NEVER DO THIS TO YOU. I WOULD NEVER FORGET YOUR BIRTHDAY. I WOULD NEVER MAKE YOU CRY. I WOULD SAY I LOVE YOU EVERY SINGLE MORNING BEFORE YOU FINISHED OPENING YOUR EYES.

i said: "he's an idiot but he'll come around. give him time."

i'm such a coward

i am such a fucking coward

may 15, 1990

two entries in quick succession because i need to put this somewhere before it eats through my chest.

i came home for the weekend. you were at the house. bobby was at work. you were in the kitchen making lunch and you turned and saw me and made that sound (that little happy gasp) and threw yourself at me.

and i held you. my face in your hair. your body against mine. and you pulled back and looked at me with those eyes, and put your hand on my cheek, and said worriedly, "you look tired, benny. are they working you too hard?"

and your hand was on my face. your palm on my cheek. your thumb brushing the skin under my eye. and you were close enough to kiss. and i could feel my pulse in my throat and my fingertips and the backs of my knees and i was drowning in the scent of you, vanilla and warmth and clean laundry. my hands were on your waist and yours was on my face and the kitchen was empty and quiet, and i could have leaned forward two inches and—

bobby's truck pulled into the driveway.

you dropped your hand. smiled. went to greet him.

two inches. i was two inches from ruining everything and saving everything, and i don't know which it would have been and i'll never know. i stood in the empty kitchen and pressed my hand to the cheek you touched and breathed through my teeth until my heart rate dropped.

june 3, 1990

i love my brother. i love bobby since we were born seven minutes apart and he came out screaming and i came out quiet. i love him for his warmth. his courage. the way he tried to shield me from dad even when we were too small to name what was happening. how he always stood up for me, always tried to understand me even when he never could.

but when it comes to you.

when it comes to you i hate him too.

i hate that he has what i want. i hate that he doesn't always value it. i hate that he gets to hold your hand and kiss you and fall asleep with your head on his chest but doesn't understand what a miracle that is because he's never stood on the other side of it watching.

i hate myself for hating him. he didn't steal you. he asked and you said yes and i never opened my mouth. the silence was my choice. every single day i choose it and every day it gets heavier.

i love him. i hate him. i love you. i can't have you.

four facts. a box with no door.

july 14, 1990

i've gotten better at being a person.

three years of harvard and i can navigate a party without wanting to leave within five minutes. i can make friends. i can read a room without running the translation in real time. the machinery is smoother now. the performance takes less effort.

but it's still a performance. everywhere except with you.

you're the only place where i don't have to translate. the only person whose presence makes the noise in my head go quiet instead of louder. everyone else, even the people i've grown to love at harvard, requires a version of me. you just require me. the real one. the strange one. the one who needs silence and can't handle being touched by anyone except you ,and notices too many details, and feels everything at the wrong volume.

you've never once asked me to be different. you've never once made me feel like the way i'm wired is a problem to be solved. you just sit with me in the quiet and let me be strange and call me benny. hold my hand and everything inside me goes still.

the eye of the storm. every time. the one calm place in a world that's always too loud.

july 28, 1990

if i could have one day.

one day where you wake up next to me. where you reach for me in the dark. where you say brendan in the voice i've only heard in dreams. where i can put my hands on your face and say it out loud, in daylight, without shame, without the weight of brotherhood crushing the words before they leave my mouth.

one day where the "i miss you benny" becomes "i love you brendan." where the hugs don't end because you're pulling away to go back to him. where i can press my mouth to the skin on your throat i've imagined ten thousand times. where your hands are in my hair because you want them there.

just one day.

and then i'd give you back, and carry it forever.

i am twenty years old. pre-med at harvard. full ride. a life that looks like everything a person could want.

and every night i fall asleep missing a girl who sleeps in my brother's bed. and every morning the missing is the same size. the same depth. the same fixed point that everything else orbits.

i don't know how to stop.

i don't think i'm supposed to.

[undated, late 1990]

i love you

i love you

i'm in love with you

i've been in love with you since september 3rd, 1985, homeroom, twelve minutes late, window seat

i love you and i can't say it and the not saying is killing me, it is actually, physically, killing me

i love you more than he does. i love you better. i would never make you cry, i would never forget, i would never close a door in your face

no. that's not fair. he loves you. he does. he just doesn't know how. and i do know how and i can't and that's

i love you

i love you and i'm so tired of not saying it

i love you and i've never kissed anyone who wasn't wrong

i love you and you call me benny and it's the closest i'll ever get to hearing my name in your mouth the way i need to hear it

i love you and i tried to stop and i can't stop

i love you and i don't want anyone else and i've tried and i will never want anyone else

i love you and you held my hand under the table and i almost told you then

i love you and you slept on my shoulder and i memorised your breathing

i love you and you made me a mixtape and wrote "and by home i mean me" and i have listened to track 12 four hundred times

i love you and i am so afraid you'll find this notebook

i love you and i am so afraid you won't

i love you and bobby is my brother and i love him and i hate him and i love you and i can't

i love you i love you i love you i love you

i should write it down. the real way. once. clearly. not crossed out.

for every time i didn't say it but should have. for every hug where i held on too long and you didn't notice. for every time you fell asleep on my shoulder and i sat perfectly still and memorised the pattern of your breathing. for the mixtape and the silver stars and the way you said and by home i mean me.

for every phone call at 1 am when your voice was the only warm thing in my whole life. for every time you ran at me in an airport. for every time you touched my hair and called me handsome, and i said thanks to the refrigerator because looking at you while you said it would have ended me. for the parking lot where you held my hand. for the two inches in the kitchen. for the dream where you said my name. for the popsicle on your wrist. for your head on my shoulder at every bonfire. for your palm on my cheek and your thumb under my eye and the truck pulling into the driveway.

for the hair tie on my nightstand. for the book with the silver stars i still keep pressed flat inside a textbook. for the three thousand miles that were supposed to fix me and only proved that i am unfixable.

i love you.

i love you. i love you. i love you. i love you. i love you. i love you. i love you.

i love you and i should have said it in the kitchen when your hand was on my face. i love you and i should have said it in my dorm room when you were wearing my sweater and the collar was slipping off your shoulder. i love you and i should have said it at graduation when you screamed in my ear. i love you and i should have said it at the bonfire when you asked if i was happy.

i love you and i have never once been brave enough to say it and writing it down is the closest i will ever come and even now, even in a notebook nobody will read, the words feel too large for the page.

they feel too large for my hands. they feel too large for my chest which has been holding them for five years and is so full the seams are splitting and i am so tired. i am so tired of carrying this. i am so tired of being good and quiet and safe while the love sits behind my teeth and rots there because i will not let it out.

i love you. there. for every time i didn't.

i lo

[the entry ends here. the last two letters trail off the line, the pen stroke dragging sideways across the page before stopping. the ink on this page and the one before it is warped and buckled. the paper has dried stiff and rippled in places, the way paper does when it gets wet and dries again. the distortion is heaviest around the final lines, where the ink has bled and feathered outward, blurring the words at their edges. it is not water damage.]

and tt!aerion? oh, tt!aerion learning that alternate versions of himself exist who aren't poor? who have the penthouse and the name and the family legacy intact? who get to be obsessive and dangerous without the added humiliation of being broke while they do it?

something would sprain inside him for sure, you're absolutely right. it would be visceral, physical, a full-body rejection. because tt!aerion's resentment isn't just about money, it's about the randomness of it.

the fact that two generations ago, one bad decision split the family in half, and his branch fell while the other kept climbing. he's been living with the ghost of what he should have been his entire life. meeting the actual version of that ghost? seeing his own face wearing a suit that costs more than his trailer? hearing his own voice without the rough edges poverty sanded into it?

he'd want to kill them. both of them. and then he'd want to be them so fucking badly it would burn, and then he'd hate himself for wanting it, and then he'd go find you and fuck you against something expensive just to feel like he still has the one thing none of them can take from him, which is you.

og aerion looking at bobby:

this one is wild lolol.

because og aerion (hw canon aerion, the obsessive, mean, entitled nephew who fell for his uncle's wife and has never once in his life had the decency to stop) is not a man built for graceful rejection. he doesn't do unrequited. he does denied and he makes it everyone's problem.

this is a man who grew up knowing you married baelor (his uncle, the crown prince, the better man) and decided that was a temporary inconvenience.

who has spent years circling you, starving, prowling the edges of your marriage with those pale eyes and that vicious mouth, testing every boundary, pushing into every crack. who grabs your wrist in dark corridors and holds it too long. who calls you aunt with his tongue pressed against the inside of his teeth like the word tastes obscene. who has schemed and manipulated and burned and snarled and still (fucking still) you look at him with that level northern gaze and you choose baelor.

you choose your vows. you choose your duty. every single time.

and you're not trapped. that's the part that drives him insane. you're not some caged bird he could justify stealing. you’re a wolf who chose her den and you keep choosing it, keep choosing baelor's bed and baelor's name and baelor's steady, honourable love over everything aerion has ever thrown at your feet, and the rejection is so total, so complete, that it should have killed the obsession years ago.

except it didn't. nothing kills it. he's tried. other bodies, wine, a whole exile.

so og aerion would look at bobby and want to tear him limb from limb.

not because bobby's a bad person. because bobby is the stupidest idiot alive as far as aerion is concerned.

bobby gets companion. bobby has the thing og aerion has been clawing at for his entire miserable existence. has lied for, has fought for, has humiliated himself for, has grabbed you and been shoved away and come back because he doesn't know how to stop.

and bobby pushes her away. bobby is avoidant. bobby runs.

og aerion would not be able to breathe in the same room as him. the fury would be white-hot and personal. you have her. she CHOSE you. she's right there and you're—what? running? you're too scared to hold onto the thing i have spent my ENTIRE LIFE trying to TAKE from a woman who won't give it to me?

i have done everything. every scheme, every manipulation, every dark and pretty and ugly thing i know how to do. i have been cruel to her and i have been tender and i have grabbed her in hallways and kissed her and watched her wipe her mouth after and STILL go back to him. she will not choose me. she will NEVER choose me. and you—you worthless, cowardly, pointless creature—you have her choosing you every day and you're throwing it away.

and the truly dangerous part is that og aerion would NOT see himself in bobby's avoidance. because og aerion has never been avoidant in his life.

he doesn't run from what he wants. he runs at it, teeth and claws first, again and again, crashing against her loyalty like waves against a cliff face. the concept of having her freely offered and being too afraid to hold on? incomprehensible. genuinely offensive. he'd want to put bobby through a fucking wall.

you pathetic waste, he'd think. not even coward, but something lower, something more contemptuous. she's giving herself to you and you can't even hold her? i would have burned the keep down. i would have started a war. i would have killed my own uncle if i thought it would make her choose me and it WOULDN'T, it would just make her hate me, and i'd still do it, and you can't even open your fucking hands.

og aerion looking at BB:

worse. so much worse. because BB gets her forever.

og aerion, who has never had LS choose him. who gets scraps. a wrist held too long. a look that lasts a second past propriety. a stolen dance. and here's BB with eternity.

aerion would lose his fucking mind.

the fury would be endless because BB gets the thing og aerion can't get for a night. she won't stay in a room alone with og aerion without the awareness that she's already managing him. she says nephew like a closed door. and BB gets eternity.

you get forever. and i can't get her for a single hour because she married my uncle and she keeps her word and she will NOT—

(and somewhere underneath all that fury, in the part of him honest enough to make him sick: baelor is good. baelor is worthy. og aerion knows this the way he knows fire burns. he just thinks she could have chosen differently. meaning him. always meaning him.)

what makes HIM worthy? he'd think, staring at BB with those pale eyes gone dark and glassy. i wanted her FIRST. i have given her every ugly, sharp, desperate piece of me and she handed them all back and this version of me gets forever?

tt!aerion looking at BB and twin!BB:

oh this is delicious.

tt!aerion aka the nastiest, most feral, most would-literally-die-before-being-vulnerable version of the lot, looking at BB, who is openly tender. who wears his devotion on the outside like it's nothing, like the world won't use it against him.

the sneer is instant. reflex. he'd curl his lip and think pathetic and mean it with every cell in his body and also be lying through his teeth.

because here's the thing tt!aerion would never admit: he envies the permission.

BB exists in a world where being open about what you feel doesn't get weaponised. where saying i love you or holding someone gently isn't handing over ammunition. tt!aerion grew up where showing you care about anything is giving someone a knife and showing them where to cut.

so watching a version of himself who just.... doesn't do that... who walks around with his heart on the outside like the world won't punish him for it??? it makes him feel something he can't name. he'd cover it with cruelty ofc, make some snide remark about how BB wouldn't last five minutes where he's from, and then go stand outside by himself and smoke and not look at anyone for twenty minutes.

twin!BB is a different problem.

because Brendan isn't soft the way tt!aerion assumes at first glance. brendan is quiet. introverted. intense in a way that reads as calm until you look closer and realise the calm is a lid on something very deep and very dark.

brendan is the version of them who loves companion and doesn't have her but also does't reach for her. who carries unrequited feelings with the same buried, white-knuckled discipline og!aerion carries his, except brendan does it silently instead of violently. and tt!aerion, who is built to read rooms and recognise danger, would read that in about thirty seconds flat.

would look at brendan's still face and quiet hands and think: oh. you're not soft. you're just better at hiding the dark thing than i am.

and he'd respect that, grudgingly, in the way tt!aerion respects anyone who can suffer without making noise about it. he might even sit next to him. they wouldn't talk, but it'd be enough.

now bobby. tt!aerion looking at bobby is looking in a funhouse mirror. bobby's avoidance is a polished version of tt!aerion's. same instinct, same terror, same if i let myself have this it'll be taken away so i'd better never hold it properly. except bobby's version is cleaner. less broken glass, more locked doors.

tt!aerion would recognise it instantly. and he'd also see what losing companion did to bobby (the wreckage, the hollow aftermath of pushing away the only person who mattered) and think with cold clarity: that's what i'd look like. if she left. if i pushed too hard. that's the version of me that doesn't have her looks like.

and he'd go home and kiss you like he's trying to swallow you whole and never explain why.

bobby and twin!BB looking at ALL OF THESE MORE UNHINGED MFS:

horrified. you're correct. absolutely appalled. 😭

bobby looks at og aerion and modern!aerion and tt!aerion (technically three versions of himself with the volume cranked to eleven on every impulse he's spent his whole life suppressing) and his immediate reaction is no. absolutely not. that is not me. denial so thick you could spread it on toast.

except it is him.

every possessive thought, every dark wanting he's ever boxed up, it's all right there. walking around, wearing his face, being unapologetic about it. og aerion would commit treason for love. modern!aerion collects people like art. tt!aerion would burn down a town for his woman.

bobby has the same capacity for all of it. he just built better walls to keep that out due to his dad.

brendan's reaction is quieter and more dangerous. because he's not horrified. he's lowkey fascinated.

he'd watch these insane versions of himself with that still, intent focus of his. because twin!BB carries his own darkness, buried so deep most people never see it. the unrequited feelings for companion that he holds with white-knuckled discipline, never acting on them, never letting them surface. he's built an entire life around loving someone he can't have and being gracious about it.

and then he looks around this room and sees version after version of himself who weren't gracious. who took. who reached. who burned everything down rather than sit quietly with the wanting.

he wouldn't say anything. but something in his chest would shift, and he'd wonder, for the first time, whether the discipline he's so proud of is actually just cowardice.

hw!aerion crashing out when he learns EVERY OTHER VARIANT GETS THE GIRL:

oh man lmao. ok.

the one who walked so every other variant could run.

you already know what he is. obsessive, entitled, mean, the man who decided his uncle's wife was his because she saved him, she saw him, the always for you of it all. he's exhausted every weapon in his arsenal against a woman who will not yield.

who gets nephew when he wants yours.

and he finds out that every single variant of him (the rich one, the poor one, the quiet one, the avoidant one, the eternal one) every single one of them gets the girl.

except him.

the crash would be spectacular. this is the man who drank wildfire. this is the man who believed himself dragon. he would look around the room at all these versions of himself living the life he'd commit atrocities for and the rage would be volcanic, biblical.

EVERY ONE OF YOU. he'd think. the poor one in the ripped jeans who lives in a BOX. the quiet one who doesn't even have the NERVE to reach for her. the one too STUPID to hold onto her when she was handed to him on a plate... all of you get her. ALL of you. and I—who wanted her first, who wanted her MOST, who has done every ugly, desperate, brilliant, cruel thing I know how to do—I get NOTHING. because she married my uncle and she KEEPS HER WORD.

is it because i'm cruel? is it because i'm too much?

and then, the thought he can't look at directly: is it because she genuinely doesn't want me?

but the proof is right there in different bodies that she does. some version of the wolf looks at the dragon and chooses him. in every universe where the uncle and the vows aren't in the way. where he wasn't born too late but exactly right.

og aerion, who has never accepted a no in his life, standing in a room full of versions of himself who got the yes. the problem was never the love. it was the life. this one life. the only one he gets.

BB and the soulmatism:

yes. you're right that BB would find it beautiful.

because BB, who loves his companion with the steady, unshakeable certainty has had time to understand what love actually costs. BB would look around the room at all these versions of himself, all these different faces of the same hunger, all chasing different versions of the woman they love across timelines and tax brackets and centuries, and he'd think: oh. it's not a coincidence. it's not chance. it's the same love, over and over, finding new shapes to pour itself into.

the soulmatism of it would make his chest ache.

because that's what BB has always believed, isn't it? that companion isn't random. that she's the answer to a question his soul has been asking since before he had a body to ask it with. and here's the proof, written in different handwritings across different lifetimes: in every world, in every version, across every impossible variation, they find each other. the dragon finds the wolf. the entity and the human boy with too big heart find their companion.

gdgw!valarr looking around the room:

😭😭😭

valarr. golden boy. the man who gave five years, a penthouse, a standing peony order, and his entire remade personality to a woman who left him. walks into a room and there are six versions of aerion. six. every shape and ego. medieval prince, wealthy heir, trailer trash, introvert boy, avoidant drugged up mess, eternal lover.

all of them fixated on some version of his girl. all of them between him and what he wants in ways that feel cosmically, personally targeted.

valarr would stand there with his mismatched eyes and his perfect posture and feel the universe laughing at him. because this doesn't bode well. this bodes terribly. if the multiverse has one consistent opinion, it's that aerion gets the girl and valarr doesn't.

(he'd still try. he'd still try. because valarr targaryen has never once in his life accepted a losing position without playing it out. but he'd know, looking around that room, that the deck was stacked before he was born.)

(the twin!BB / dm!aerion footnote)

AND YES I see you with that strikethrough.

brendan finding out about dm!aerion (the version who looked at his brother's betrothed and said actually, mine and then married her) would be oh so dangerous. because brendan, who's spent his whole life being the quiet one, the good one, the one who loves companion from a careful distance and never crosses the line, that brendan hears about dm!aerion and something clicks.

just a quiet, internal oh followed by a silence that lasts too long.

I would never do that, he'd say, to no one in particular.

and then he wouldn't stop thinking about it for a week.

because dm!aerion did the thing he's been too disciplined, too loyal, too good to do.

dm!aerion looked at the woman his brother was supposed to marry and he took her. and he got to keep her, and the world didn't end. and brendan, who's been sitting on unrequited feelings like they're a live grenade he's too honourable to throw, would feel something dark and buried shift inside him for the first time.

these two would find each other in a corner of that room and just.. talk. quietly. dm!aerion would see brendan''s restraint and understand it immediately as the flip side of his own ruthlessness.

same want, different coping strategy. and dm!aerion, who is not a good man and has never pretended to be, would lean in and say something like: you know you could just claim her, right? you know that's an option?

and brendan, who has never heard anyone say that to him before, who's spent years building the case for why he can't, why he shouldn't, why the honourable thing is to step aside... would feel the ground shift under his feet. because dm!aerion isn't wrong. it IS an option. it's always been an option. brendan just never let himself look at it directly.

extras:

҉　- main story canon compliant piece.

Ꮺ୧ shutter speed / camboy!bobby alt verse. Ꮺ୧ making out w/ better bobby. Ꮺ୧ better you! ҉　 Ꮺ୧ "baby." ҉　 Ꮺ୧ "open your mouth." Ꮺ୧ pillow fort. Ꮺ୧ in the beginning. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ my, what long tongue you have. Ꮺ୧ sunlight. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ slow dancing. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ rib time. Ꮺ୧ conceiving w/ bb. / why seven. Ꮺ୧ bb watching you w/ bobby. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ intimacy hdcs w/ BB. Ꮺ୧ memories. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ cuteness aggression. Ꮺ୧ twin au: one. / bb & bobby. / two. / three. / Ꮺ୧ mr. kitty. / more mr kitty. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ entity discourse. Ꮺ୧ tolerance. Ꮺ୧ giddy. Ꮺ୧ real face. Ꮺ୧ poly au: [1]. [2]. [3]. [4]. [5]. [6]. [7]. Ꮺ୧ "i know a spot." Ꮺ୧ dreams. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ perfect shot. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ pretty thing. Ꮺ୧ if it purrs, it... ҉　 Ꮺ୧ a chase. Ꮺ୧ ticklish.

⎋ M.E.G. ENTITY 0 — RESEARCH FILE INDEX:

↹ MEG-ENT-0000-ADDM-██ — Restricted Addendum: Reproductive Capability Assessment (Filed Under Protest) ↹ MEG-ENT-0000-IR-0-31 — INCIDENT REPORT — FIELD OBSERVATION

extras:

҉　- main story canon compliant piece.

Ꮺ୧ shutter speed / camboy!bobby alt verse. Ꮺ୧ making out w/ better bobby. Ꮺ୧ better you! ҉　 Ꮺ୧ "baby." ҉　 Ꮺ୧ "open your mouth." Ꮺ୧ pillow fort. Ꮺ୧ in the beginning. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ my, what long tongue you have. Ꮺ୧ sunlight. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ slow dancing. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ rib time. Ꮺ୧ conceiving w/ bb. / why seven. Ꮺ୧ bb watching you w/ bobby. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ intimacy hdcs w/ BB. Ꮺ୧ memories. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ cuteness aggression. Ꮺ୧ twin au: one. / bb & bobby. / two. / three. / Ꮺ୧ mr. kitty. / more mr kitty. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ entity discourse. Ꮺ୧ tolerance. Ꮺ୧ giddy. Ꮺ୧ real face. Ꮺ୧ poly au: [1]. [2]. [3]. [4]. [5]. [6]. [7]. Ꮺ୧ "i know a spot." Ꮺ୧ dreams. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ perfect shot. ҉　 Ꮺ୧ pretty thing. Ꮺ୧ if it purrs, it... ҉　 Ꮺ୧ a chase. Ꮺ୧ ticklish.

⎋ M.E.G. ENTITY 0 — RESEARCH FILE INDEX:

↹ MEG-ENT-0000-ADDM-██ — Restricted Addendum: Reproductive Capability Assessment (Filed Under Protest) ↹ MEG-ENT-0000-IR-0-31 — INCIDENT REPORT — FIELD OBSERVATION

as you walk to your next class, you take comfort in the fact that bobby wouldn’t dismiss you. bobby holds your books, bobby walks you to your dorm after you two stay in the editing lab too late. bobby kisses you stupid when you’re overwhelmed. he’s kind— he’s boyish. his looks are soft in every light. even the stubble that lingers on his chin and burns the inside of your thighs. he doesn’t walk about the school like he’s a royal figure forced to interact with the commoners around him.

and oddly enough, bobby brings aerion up before you.

“i really don’t see it,” he huffs. the sound borders on petulant.

you’re sat on his bed, shamelessly copying his notes. he watches the way your brows furrow in concentration before his gaze sweeps over the subtle crinkle in your nose. he nearly forgets what he was going on about until aerion’s mug pops into his brain again—

he forces you to share all of the details about your first encounter with him, and how it was over as quickly as it began. you watch his jaw work, you don’t mention that he just looked exactly like aerion for a split second. honestly if you blinked, you would have missed it.

“of course you don’t,” you mumble before looking up from your notes fully. your gel pen pauses, your gaze meets his with something he can’t quite place, “but i’m telling you, bobby … it’s extremely strange.”

“don’t look so shaken up, unless you’re already planning on abandoning me for him.”

he rolls to the bed in his desk chair, leaning over the mattress and placing his hands on your thighs. when he presses closer and places his lips on yours, you melt almost instantly. his hands slide over your soft skin, grabbing your hips as he teases between sweet kisses, “is it the hair? i can buy some bleach. you’ll have to help me, but—”

you’re breathless for a second. you make a small sound as bobby tosses your notes aside and fully hovers over you. your back hits his mattress with a soft, fluffy sound. you finally speak as you raise a hand to comb your fingers through his dirty blonde hair. you’ll admit that you’re imagining the platinum, nearly silver look on him. you swallow the image down before you start seeing aerion instead.

“i have no interest in mr. nepo baby— unless he takes better notes.”

bobby groans against your lips at that.

the body itself:

the cock he has by default is human-shaped because that's what he saw first. he built this body from observation of Bobby and Bobby is a man. so the default is what you'd expect from a twenty-something cameraman with good genes. proportionate, warm, slight upward curve, thick enough at the base that the first time you took him you whimpered. nothing weird if you don't ask for weird. he can absolutely be your normal boyfriend if that's what the night calls for.

but the default is a setting, not a fact. every part of the body is malleable. he can adjust the shape, the length, the girth, the texture, the temperature, the firmness. and he does, constantly, in tiny imperceptible ways, calibrating in real time to what your body is responding to. you've never had bad sex with him. you've never had even mid sex with him. it's mechanically impossible because he's reading your nervous system the entire time and adjusting accordingly.

the temperature thing is its own situation. he runs cool by default. not cold, just a few degrees below room temperature. the way a stone in the shade is cool. this is the actual baseline of him, the unaffected fact of his body. but when you touch him, when you kiss him, when his attention narrows to you and the want of you starts moving through him, he warms.

emotion warms him. arousal warms him. you warm him. by the time you've been kissing for a minute he's human-temperature. by the time he's inside you he's fever-warm. the cock specifically runs the hottest of him, because it's the part of him most committed to you in any given moment. you can chart his interest by his temperature. you have, more than once, pressed your palm flat to his chest specifically to feel him warm under it, and the look on his face when you do it... yeah.

this is part of why he loves how warm you are. see below in his kinks section. you're a furnace next to him. you running hot is what running hot is, in his sensory experience. the steady radiating heat of a living human is the warmest thing he's ever pressed himself against, and he is, on some level, addicted to it.

the eye thing. the second tell, after temperature. Bobby's eyes are blue (bright, warm, a little crinkled at the corners) and BB built them carefully, the colour exact, the way they catch light, the small expressive movements.

they are the part of the face he's proudest of, technically speaking.

they're also the part that gives him away first when he slips. when the careful Bobby-shape starts to thin (when he gets distracted, when he gets aroused, when emotion gets out ahead of his composure) the blue darkens. it doesn't go grey, doesn't go any normal human direction. it floods black. ink-black, glossy, sclera and iris and pupil all going at once until what is left is two wet dark stones in his face that catch no light.

they're not reflective the way human eyes are reflective, they're clearly not the same kind of organ at all. when he's fully slipped the eyes are entirely black. when he's mostly Bobby they're entirely blue. and between those two states you've learned to read him like a book.

the creeping dark at the edge of the iris means he's paying very close attention, the blooming dark means he's losing the shape, and the full black means he isn't pretending anymore. you find all three states beautiful. you've told him so. he's still working out how to believe you.

the eye-thing is involuntary. he can't control it the way he controls most of his shape. it is, like the warming, a true response. the deep thing underneath leaking through when he's moved.

he could probably learn to suppress it given enough effort but he's noticed that you like it, you watch for it. that you check the colour of his eyes when you kiss him to see how he's really doing, and so he's decided to leave it alone. it's honesty he can give you easily. it tells you what he's feeling. you would rather have that than the perfect maintained blue.

he doesn't have a refractory period. the human signalling that tells a male body done, take a break is not installed. he can stay hard indefinitely. he can finish inside you and stay inside you and start moving again ten seconds later and the only thing that has changed is that you're slightly fuller. this is a thing that took you a while to fully process.

he can also choose not to finish, for hours. the orgasm is a thing he releases when he wants to. usually he wants to whenever you do. because watching you come apart is the entire point, but he can hold himself back through six of your climaxes and not finish until the seventh if that's what you've asked for or if that's what your body is telling him you need.

the stamina is genuinely deadly. he doesn't get tired. he doesn't get sore. he doesn't get distracted. his attention does not waver. you have, on multiple occasions, fallen asleep mid-sex from sheer exhaustion and woken up to find him still gently moving in you with the same patient focus, as if no time had passed. for him no time had passed. for him you're the only clock.

the sleep thing

this deserves its own section honestly because it's one of the strangest and most intimate things about being with him.

he doesn't sleep. he doesn't need to. he can do something that looks like sleep. with breath, slow rhythm and closed eyes, if you ask. he does it because you find it comforting to wake up to, but the body doesn't require it. while you sleep, he's awake. he's been awake every single night of your relationship.

he stays inside you. he prefers it. once you're seated together, he's reluctant to withdraw. the first time he asked if he could stay you said yes and now it's the default. you fall asleep with him buried deep and the seven humming and the warm wet seal of him at the centre of you holding everything in place, and the comforting closeness of it sends you under in seconds.

the cock softens, slightly. not to fully human softness, but enough to be comfortable. he keeps a low pulse going in time with your heartbeat. you don't feel filled, exactly, while you sleep. you feel held from the inside, which is different and worse and better and way too addictive.

sometimes he moves. not always. but sometimes. when he's been lying awake for hours watching the warm dark shape of you breathe against him. when the harmonic in his chest has built up some pressure that needs releasing, and he he's been thinking about you for too long with the cock seated inside you. he will start, oh so slowly, to roll his hips.

it's the softest thing in any world. you don't wake. you sleep right through it. the rhythm is so unhurried it doesn't disturb you. long, slow grinding strokes, half an inch of withdrawal at most. mostly just the slow rock of him against the deep places he knows by heart. the seven catch each motion and pass the warmth on. the cock thickens fractionally inside you and you, in your sleep, clench softly around him and make small contented sounds and burrow closer.

he does this for hours sometimes.

just slow, gentle motion. no urgency, no intent to finish. although sometimes he does finish, quietly, the warm flood of him soaking into the seven without your conscious awareness of it. he likes to leave you full overnight. you wake happy and warm and slightly slick at the thigh and you know what happened without him having to tell you and the knowledge pools low and hot inside your lower belly every single time.

when you do wake up to him moving that's its own thing. that's the slow surfacing where you become aware in stages.

first the warmth, then the fullness, then the unhurried drag of him inside you in long leisurely strokes. the hand on your hip stroking absent possessive circles, then his low voice at your nape mornin', baby.

and your whole body has been primed for hours by the gentle pulse of him. you're already wet, already clenching around him, already ready in a way no human morning has ever prepared you for. you have, multiple occasions, come within thirty seconds of waking up because he had been so patiently working you toward it in your sleep.

you no longer sleep alone. you can't. you've tried. without the slow seal of him inside you the bed feels wrong. the seven keep humming but the centre of you feels hollow. you came back to him after one (1) attempted night apart and you've not tried again.

there's also the fucking-you-to-sleep thing, which is its own ritual,too. on the nights when you've had a long day, or you're upset, or you're keyed up and can't settle.

on those nights, he takes you to the nest and he lays you down and he slides into you and he just moves. deep, patient and unhurried. no intent to finish you, just the warm long rhythm of him grinding deep. and the harmonic in his chest goes low and lullaby-soft, and you sink into the rhythm the way a child sinks into rocking.

you go under in minutes. by the time he feels your breathing even out he's barely moving, just the gentlest seated rock, and then he stops, and just stays, the cock still inside you, and he holds you for the rest of the night. you sleep better that way than you've ever slept in your life.

the nest

the nest deserves its own section too because it's not just a piece of furniture or means to an end. it's a love language.

he made it for you. he built it the way he built the room. blankets layered into a soft deep pile, pillows arranged in the curve your body makes when you sleep on your side, the warm yellow lamp set to a height that doesn't shine in your eyes.

there's even blanket your grandmother knit folded over the foot of it in the exact fold she used to use. you had not described the fold to him. he knew. he watched closely, in the early days what your memory pulled here, and he reproduced.

the nest (or, I should say nest 2.0) is the safest place in any level of this place. that's not metaphor. nothing can enter the nest that he's not allowed. nothing can hear what happens in the nest. nothing can find you in the nest if you don't want to be found.

he's built it that way. it's not just a spot you chose anymore. it's a bubble of his attention, sustained by him, defended by him; him in the literal architectural sense of being made of his will. when you're in the nest, you're inside him, sort of. you're within the volume of him that he holds open for you. nothing he doesn't want in there can get in. nothing you don't want to feel can find you.

this is how he says he loves you. he doesn't have human words for it, not really. the I love yous are there now. he has learned them. you 've taught him, but they're not his native tongue.

the nest is his native tongue. the building of you a place to be warm and safe and comfortable in a world that is none of those things. that's the sentence he's constantly speaking.

every time he tugs the blanket up over your shoulder while you sleep. every time he adjusts a pillow. those times he adds a new soft thing because he noticed you running cold or running tired or looking at a texture in a way that suggested you'd like it.

the nest is alive with these small accretions. you've not actively decorated it. it has simply grown (kept growing) because he keeps adding to it.

the nest is also where he's most himself. the place where the Bobby-shape loosens most easily. he can lie in the nest with you with his shape unguarded. the long fluid line of him, the wrong-fingered hands, the eyes fully dark. the nest will hold both of you. his actual shape and your human shape, with equal patience.

the nest is for this. it's the only place in any level where he can be both with you and himself with no compromise required. you've come to recognise that when he wants you in the nest specifically (not the bed, not a couch, not anywhere else) he's asking for something deeper than sex. he's asking to be known. in his actual configuration, by you, in the only place that holds him properly.

other entities have noticed it. the nest registers to them as something. they can't see in. they can't get close (most of them anyway). but they can feel the shape of what he's made. the way a thing in the water can feel a vortex without entering it, and they steer clear.

the nest is, among other things, the most concentrated piece of him in this place. it's BB-territory in the way an animal's den is its territory. except his territory is a pile of blankets in a sub-level he made out of love, and the love is so intense it constitutes an actual mechanical defence.

you've never thanked him for it. not in words. you don't know how. the gesture is too large for thank you.

instead you sleep there. settle into it the way it is meant to be settled into. you trust it. you let him keep adding things. you have, on several occasions, woken up to find that he's added a new pillow you didn't know you wanted and then realised the second you put your head on it that you had wanted it. that he had known you wanted it before you knew.

you understand that this is the thanking. what you have to offer. and he understands. and the harmonic in his chest hums steady whenever you're in the nest, and you understand that the steady hum is him thanking you, for accepting the gift, for letting him build, for being warm and accepting and his to keep safe.

what changes when he's not playing human

the ridged texture. for one. the tongue does it and the cock can do it too. when he stops bothering to maintain the smooth human surface, the skin of him develops a velvety give and faint ridges that drag against your inner walls in a slow, rolling way no human anatomy could produce. it's genuinely unfair. the first time he let it happen by accident you came inside of ninety seconds and nearly blacked out.

his cock can lengthen. he's careful about not going past what your body can comfortably take, but he can add an inch or two of depth when he's chasing a particular angle. and the ability to find the deep places inside you with that extra reach is one of the reasons he can take you apart on command.

the cock can also thicken mid-act, slowly, in response to you clenching around him. you tighten and he swells to match. the stretch this produces is its own private language between your body and his. your tightness telling him more, his thickness answering I hear you, no words required.

the knot. the base of him can develop a swell. you've called it a knot and he has not corrected you, though privately he thinks of it as something else, something his.

it doesn't behave quite the way a canine knot would. it builds gradually during sex rather than appearing all at once at climax. it can be small (a faint thickening at the base that gives you a little extra stretch when he bottoms out) or significant (a true swell that locks him inside you, no withdrawing possible, the two of you sealed together until he chooses to let it ease).

he can summon it on request. he can summon it without request, when he's deep in you and the seven are humming and he simply cannot bear the thought of withdrawing for the next hour.

when he does the full version you feel the lock happen. a slow, thick settling at the base, the stretch building, the pressure registering as held, and your body's instinctive small bracing in response. you can't move off him. he can't pull out of you. for however long he chooses to keep it, you are one thing.

you've discovered that you have feelings about this.

that the impossibility of withdrawal does something to your nervous system you wouldn't have predicted. that being locked together (physically, mechanically, no breaking the seal) produces a settled, deep quiet in you that nothing else quite matches.

the seven sing brightest when he's knotted in you. the harmonic in his chest pours out steadiest. it's the closest to what the two of you are emotionally, which is inseparable, and the body recognises this and goes calm in a way the body rarely goes calm.

he uses it on nights when you both need that. he uses it when you've had a hard day. he uses it before long sleeps. it's a tool of comfort more than sex, by this point. though it remains, also, the most overwhelming thing he can do to you while staying inside the human-shaped range of what his cock can be.

you watching him change. the seeing of him adjusting his cock while it's inside you. the moment when you're full of him at one thickness and then, slowly, you're full of him at a thicker thickness. and you watch his face while it happens, and his eyes go dark at the edges because he can feel you registering the change and the change is for you and you're liking it.

or the moment when you whine and grind down and he lengthens in you to reach the angle you were chasing without you having to ask. or when you say something soft like deeper and the cock simply complies, eager but patient. no need for him to adjust position. the responsiveness of it (that you can talk and the body of him changes) is one of the most addictive sensory experiences of your life.

you have, more than once, asked him to do small adjustments just to feel them happen. thicker. now thinner. now ridges. now smooth. and he does it, indulgent and amused, watching your face while you map the shape of what he can be.

the cock has a pulse when he's deep inside you. completely separate from his heartbeat (he has multiple if he bothers, none if he doesn't). it's slow and rhythmic and it syncs to the seven rooted places in you. when he's seated to the hilt and pulsing in time with the seven and you're clenching around him, the resonance produces a sensation in your pelvis that has no human equivalent.

pheromones

you knew about this from the breeding ritual. you did not, at the time, fully understand that it was a thing he had access to outside the ritual. you've learned since.

the full breeding version is the one you've experienced. the warm honey-thick coming off his skin that fogged your cognition into a soft golden state, locked your body into the empty-yearning, made every climax read as beginning instead of finishing.

that was the full deployment. he built specific biology to do it and he did not pull punches. it was a chemistry designed to make sure the ritual completed. by design, the ritual needed your body kept in a specific state, and you had asked him to take you there. it was extreme and it worked and you don't regret asking for it but you both understand it's not a thing for casual use.

the mild version is something else. he's discovered (and you've discovered with him) that he can do a small amount of it. a taste of it. a softening release of warm scent off his skin that doesn't lock you into anything. doesn't override your cognition, or turn you into the desperate begging fog-version of yourself.

but does make you softer. more responsive. more wanting than you would have been without it. it's roughly the difference between being drunk and having a glass of wine. it softens you by measurable amount and gets your body humming without committing you to anything beyond what you already wanted.

he uses it sparingly. he uses it with permission. you can tell when he's doing it because the air around him goes the faintest bit sweet. the warm honey-edge to your throat that you remember from the ritual but in a fraction of the strength.

almost like a perfume you can only just catch. can I, sweetheart? he'll ask, usually with his mouth at your throat, and you'll nod, and a minute later you'll find yourself a little softer in his arms than you were, a little more pliant, a little more yes to whatever he's about to do and everything feels even better than it just did moments ago. it doesn't make you do anything. it makes the doing feel better.

he can also direct it. this is a more recent discovery. he can pheromone a small region rather than the whole of you.

release it specifically against your throat when his mouth is there, or against the soft skin of your thigh when he's working you with his hand, and the local effect of it is electric.

the nerves under that patch of skin light up brighter. your blood rushes there. whatever he does to that area in the next few minutes registers about twice as intensely as it would have. he uses this carefully. he uses this on nights when he wants to spend a long time on one part of you and have you feel every second of it.

there's a grounding version too. and this one took you both longer to realise was possible.

when you're upset, tired, or wound too tight to settle. he can release a different scent off his skin. not arousing, just calming. warm and clean and almost milk-soft, the olfactory equivalent of a hand on your back.

it makes your breathing steady. it makes your shoulders drop. you've pressed your face into his throat and felt that scent come up and felt your whole body unwind.

and of course there's the pheromone he leaks involuntarily when he's losing composure. the one you can catch a hint of when his eyes are going dark and the harmonic is starting to break.

this one is his. he's not releasing it for you, he's releasing it because his body cannot help it. because the want of you has gotten ahead of his self-control and the chemistry is leaking through. you've learned to recognise it. when you catch that specific sweet-electric thing in the air, you know he's gone, and you know what is about to happen, and your body (entirely without consultation with your mind) answers in kind.

the pheromones, like every other thing about him, are a language. you've learned to read them. learned to ask for them. have learned which ones mean what. it's one more way he speaks to you in a register no other being could.

the tongue-and-cock thing (yeehaw!)

the tongue. the long, ridged velvet one when bobby shape loosens. when he's fucking you (any position, any depth) he can also slide the tongue into your mouth. from your mouth it can keep going. down. it doesn't have to stop at the back of your throat. doesn't trigger your gag reflex because he's controlling it from his end. and he's spent a great deal of careful attention learning your throat the way he learned the architecture of every other part of you.

the tongue slides into your throat and settles there, the ridged length of him filling you from your mouth down to a depth no human body could reach.

and at the same time, the cock is moving inside you below. and you are filled from both ends, and the two of him are connected, and the rhythm of one feeds the rhythm of the other.

it's not double penetration exactly. it's something else. a threading. him moving through you, end to end, two points of contact that are actually one continuous presence, and when he flexes the tongue deep in your throat you feel it resonate through your sternum and down into your pelvis where the cock is also flexing, and the sensation is... it's one sensation, in two places, and your body can't separate them and stops trying.

the harmonic he hums in this configuration pours out of both points of contact at once. you feel it inside your throat and inside your cunt simultaneously. the resonance frequencies stack. the seven sing back. the room hums. you have, in this configuration, come for so long and so continuously that you have lost track of where one orgasm ended and the next began, your whole body just one long wave of taking.

you can't speak when he does this. no making any sound except the small wrecked series of hums that escape around the tongue in your throat. but he doesn't need you to speak. the seven tell him everything your mouth would have said. you press a tiny pulse into the seven (yes, more, deeper, slower, harder) and he reads it, perfectly, every time.

he can make them move in opposite rhythm. the tongue pushing deep when the cock withdraws, the cock pushing deep when the tongue withdraws. a continuous, rocking motion that means you're never not full of him somewhere.

or he can sync them, both pushing deep at once, and the simultaneous deepest-point of both is... you don't have words for it. you only have sounds for it.

he's careful with this. he doesn't use it often. he saves it for nights when you both want something that exists beyond language, beyond the usual choreography human bodies use. what any other lover has ever offered you. it's his. it is something only he can give you. you think he understands that you understand this.

favourite positions (or, the recurring ones)

you on your back, him braced over you, knees pressed up to your chest. the classic. he likes to see your face. he likes you folded small under him. the angle lets him reach the deep places easily and the eye contact is direct. he calls this one the easy one in a way that's not in any sense easy.

you on top, riding him, his hands on your hips guiding. he loves this because he gets to watch. you doing the work. you slick with sweat, bouncing and biting your lip.

his hands move slow on your hips not really directing, just holding, just feeling the rhythm you've chosen. he can stay like this for hours and let you set every pace. you've fallen asleep on top of him in this position before.

you on your hands and knees, him behind you, one hand splayed possessive across the small of your back. the most animal one. the angle lets him go deepest. he tends to lose the Bobby-shape the fastest in this position because the visual of you presenting for him pulls something old up in him that doesn't bother to wear a human face.

you sideways in his lap, one of your legs draped over his thigh. half-positions like this. where you're sort of sitting in him but not fully impaled, where the connection is intimate but lazy. you can kiss him easily and stroke his hair. these are the ones he prefers for long, lazy stretches. low intensity. lots of soft kissing. cock seated shallow.

the impossible ones. when he stops bothering with human geometry. he holds you suspended in the air with too-many arms while he fucks you from below and one of him kisses your throat and one of him strokes your clit, and you have given up trying to understand the topology. you just let it happen. there's no name for these positions. they're not in any book.

face-to-face, lying on your sides, foreheads pressed together, slow rolling motion. the most intimate one. this is the one he picks when he wants you to feel held, not necessarily to come. although you usually do, eventually. it's barely sex sometimes. it's just being inside each other in the dark, breathing the same air, his hand on your cheek and yours on his throat where you can feel the harmonic hum.

the spooning one. you on your side, him curled around you from behind, the cock seated shallow, his arm a heavy bracket across your ribs. his face buries in the back of your neck. this is the sleep position. this is the one he holds you in for hours at a stretch. there's barely any motion. there doesn't need to be. the seal of him inside you is the whole point.

the "be more other" thing

he hates being seen as a copy of Bobby. he's never said this in those exact words but you've figured it out and he's confirmed it.

the Bobby-shape was built out of necessity. he needed a face you could love and Bobby's was the only one available. but underneath it, he's not Bobby. he's something older, stranger, and entirely his own. and every reminder that he's wearing another man's shape. every time someone outside the relationship comments on the resemblance, every time he catches sight of his own face in a mirror and the face is not his, it chafes.

which is why when you ask him to be more like himself, he loses his mind a little.

the first time you said it you were in bed together and he was being careful and you reached up and traced his jaw and said I want to see more of you. the actual you. and he went so still you thought you'd broken something.

and then he said, very quietly, baby, you don't have to ask me that to be polite. and you said I'm not being polite. I'm asking because I want it. and his eyes (Bobby's warm blue eyes, the ones he built so carefully) bled to black. iris and sclera and all of it, no whites left, just deep glossy dark like wet stone, and the harmonic fractured and he kissed you with a desperation he had never let himself show before.

now you ask whenever you want it. let go of the face, sweetheart. show me. I want the real you. and he does. layer by layer. the Bobby-shape peels back as he gets braver. the jaw goes wrong-wide, the fingers stop counting, the blue of his eyes floods with black until there's nothing else left, the shoulders lengthen, the harmonic he's been damping rolls out free. and you don't flinch. you've never flinched.

you ask for more. that's the part that takes him apart every time. you watch him let go of the shape that was a gift to you and you ask for more of what's underneath. and he understands that you're not tolerating the true him as a price for the rest of him.

you're choosing the true him, you want the true him, the rest is just shapes he wears for you.

when he's in his more-other shape, sex is different.

rougher in texture, gentler in pace. the not-quite-right hands grip with strength no human could match, but he's so afraid of breaking you that he moves slower than he does in the Bobby shape. the cock develops the ridges by default. the harmonic pours out unrestricted and the room hums constantly. you can feel him at frequencies your skin reads as warmth and your nervous system reads as home.

you call him by his name even when he doesn't have a recognisable face. BB. into the wrong-wide mouth, against the wrong-textured skin, into the long sinuous line of his other-shape. BB. BB. and the name lands the same way every time. because the name is yours. the name is the one you gave him, and in the other shape that fact is even clearer. he's your BB. not anyone else's. yours, and yours alone.

the comparison to Real Bobby you have to be careful never to make. Bobby would've... in any sentence that compares them is a sentence that you stopped finishing very early on.

because the first time you started one his whole body went tight and the harmonic shrieked, just for a second, and his eyes went flat in a way you had never seen before. he never said anything. he didn't have to. you watched him swallow it down and pretend he hadn't reacted and you understood, then, what you had walked into and walked out of.

the things you say instead (you're mine, my BB.) undo him every time. he goes quiet in that bone-deep way of his. the harmonic hums grateful. he holds you a fraction tighter. he never asks you to repeat it but you can feel him cataloguing it, saving it, going back to it later when you're not watching.

kinks (his)

being watched by you. not in the kink sense, actually, in the literal sense. he wants you to see him. he spent so long being something nobody could look at without screaming that the privilege of being looked at, by you, with want, is the thing he treasures more than any specific act. the moments where you turn your head and just watch what he's doing to you and let him see your face? those wreck him every time. he will edge himself for an hour for the chance of one of those moments.

being asked to drop the face. see above. nothing he's done in his long existence has prepared him for being wanted as the thing he actually is. it's the deepest kink he has and the one that took him longest to admit he had.

proof of him on you. marks, prints, the soft bruise of his fingers on your hip the next morning. he's not a sadist, he doesn't get off on hurting you, but the visual evidence that he's been there, that your skin remembers him, is something he gets quietly insane about. he will trace the marks with one finger for hours after.

scent. his sense of smell is not human. it doesn't work the way yours does, doesn't sit in his nose, doesn't process by molecule the way yours processes. but he has an equivalent, something more diffuse. something that reads the trace of a thing in the air the way a thing in deep water reads currents.

and the trace of you is the most distinctive signature in any world he has ever moved through. he can find you in a level by it. he can tell which corridors you've walked down. he can tell how long ago by how the trace has faded. you have a unique scent to him and he has known it longer than you've been aware he existed. he knew your scent through the warm wall at Clark's, back when he was a thing in the dark and you were a sound he could hear and a smell he could catalogue without you knowing.

he wants you to smell like him. this is the deeper layer to the above, the one he's been quietly indulging for as long as you've been together.

when he's been inside you, when he's marked you, you have spent a long night in the nest with the warm not-quite-skin of him pressed all along the length of you — you smell different. he can smell himself on you. your trace acquires his trace. the two scents braided together, and the braid is something every other entity in this place can read clear as a stamp. taken. kept. his. it's not subtle to the things that share this place with you. it is a flag.

this is one of the reasons he likes you sleeping with him still inside you. one of the reasons he likes finishing in you and leaving you full. one of the reasons he tucks his face into the warm hollow of your throat for so long after sex.

partly because of the heat, partly because of the pulse, but also because his trace transfers to your skin from his face, and he's deliberately scenting you, slow and patient. the way a cat works its cheeks against the things it loves. you've caught him doing this in the after, half-asleep, rubbing his jaw absently along your collarbone with a look of dreamy contentment, and you didn't say anything because the moment was his, and you understood without him having to explain.

and he likes smelling you on him. the inverse. when you've been pressed against him. your hair rubbing against his shirt. when your skin's been against his skin for hours. he carries you.

your scent stays on him. and the fact that other entities can smell you on him is... the pleased purr he makes about it. it's the most peaceful sound. it tells the world that he's kept too.

the human-marking goes both ways. that he's not just a possessor but a possessed, and he's spent his existence wanting to be possessed by something and never finding anything worth being possessed by.

and now he is, and the trace of you on him is the proof of it. he wears your scent the way a wedding ring is worn. he has rubbed his face against the pillow you slept on after you've left a room just to refresh the trace before going out.

the marking is mutual and lowkey obsessive. he wants you marked by him. you (without fully realising it at first) want him marked by you.

in practice this means: you press your face into his throat when you greet him, you bury your nose in his shoulder when you hug, you wear his shirts and they come back to him with you on them, you sleep with your hands fisted in his clothes, and over time the trace builds and builds and you stop being two separate scent-signatures and become one layered signature, a braided thing, you-and-him, and everything in this place can read it. they all know. they've all known for months. you're not a creature with a possessive entity hovering nearby.

you're bonded, in the way scent-bond is bond, and the bonded nature of you is the loudest fact about you both to anything that can read it.

the breeding pheromone was a weaponised version of this preference. the warm honey-thick pheromone he released during the ritual was, at the chemical level, his trace turned all the way up. it was him telling your body, in the most intense possible register, mine, mine, take it, mine.

and it was also a public announcement, in a sense. anything in any nearby level could have smelled the ritual happening, could have read it as clearly as if a banner had been hung. he didn't care. he wanted them to read it. that was partly the point.

after the ritual the trace settled. something about completing it deepened the braid. your scents got more thoroughly woven into each other.

you smell like him in a way that does not fade now even if you spend a day apart. which is rare, but it has happened, and he's commented on how you still smell like him through the absence, and how it eases him. the seven amplify this too. they hold the scent. they keep the signature stable. you carry him in your body in seven places and on your skin in countless more and the totality of it is, to him, the most complete claim any being has ever made on any other being, and to you it is the most settled and held you've ever felt.

you've asked him, once, what he smells like to you in his real shape. not the Bobby-scent, which is warm cotton and a faint oceanic scent, but what the underneath smells like.

he hesitated. he said he wasn't sure you'd have a word for it. you asked him to let you find out. and you breathed him in, slow, with his actual shape pressed against you in the nest, and what you found was. old water. warm stone. a faintly mineral scent, faintly clean, like a deep cave that's never known erosion. not unpleasant. it was, in fact, the most comforting smell you'd ever encountered. you told him so, and he held too still and you understood that no one had ever told him what he smelled like before.

exploring you. he's fascinated by your body. in a student of you way, the way an archaeologist is fascinated by something rare and beautiful and theirs to study slowly.

he'll spend literal hours on a single part of you. an evening can be him just at one breast. slow lapping, soft sucking, the careful drag of his teeth, the hot, wet suction of his mouth around your nipple. for what feels like forever, until you're arching and pleading, soaking through the blanket.

and then he'll pull back with this small considering hm, like he's filed something away, and move to the other breast with even more hunger, and start over. he can do this for an entire night. he has done this for an entire night. he calls it gettin' to know you better, baby.

you're not just a body to him. you're a territory. he wants to know every inch of it like the back of his hand.

the catalogue of you. related to the above: he is, somewhere in his ancient and patient mind, cataloguing the things he learns. the spot on your neck that makes you whimper. the angle of pressure on your hip that makes you melt. the exact stroke speed that builds you slowest. the words that work on which days. he updates the list constantly. he's the best lover you'll ever have for the simple reason that he's been studying you, specifically, with the full force of his attention.

you reaching for him first. god, this one. when you are the one to close the distance. when you set down your book and crawl into his lap unprompted, or turn into him in the dark and pull his hand to your throat without saying anything.

when you cup his jaw and pull his mouth down to yours. everything in him lights up in a way he can't hide. the harmonic in his chest jumps half an octave. his pupils blow. he's spent so long being the one to want, the one to ask, the one who has to be gentle about how much he wants.

the moments where you want him first, act on it without prompting, where you simply take, those moments are gifts. he goes pliant under your hands. he lets you set the pace. he'll give you anything you want when you are the one reaching.

your mouth on him. when you press him back against the pillows and trail your mouth down his chest. suck a mark into the soft place under his jaw. when you take his hand and kiss each fingertip tenderly.

when you go down on him. which you don't do often, because he tends to lose composure and pull you up and put you under him within a minute, but the minute you get he's wrecked.

it's the reverse of his exploration kink. he's spent so long being the explorer, the one whose mouth and hands move over you, that the rare reversal undoes him.

he'll let you do anything to him. lie pliant under you and watch you with eyes gone glossy and dark and the harmonic in his chest will pour out shaky and greedy. afterward he'll hold you like you've given him something no one else's ever offered him. which you have.

the small things. related to the above and deserving its own bullet because of how easy it is to set him off. he is (for an ancient eldritch predator) an incredibly responsive lover.

things that should not, by rights, do anything to a creature of his power: you sucking softly on his lower lip during a kiss, the kind of slow pulling kiss you'd give a boyfriend on the couch. you setting your teeth gently to the side of his neck. you mouthing at his pulse point (he doesn't have one but the architecture suggests one and he feels it when you go for the place).

you sucking on the soft pad of his thumb when he traces your lip with it. any of these and the harmonic in his chest purrs out unrestrained and his body coils around you. the not-quite-right way. arms longer than they were a second ago, the line of him pouring closer. every part of him drawn to the point of contact like iron to a magnet. it's so easy.

you have, on countless occasions, completely derailed a casual evening just by leaning over and sucking on his lip for three seconds. he likes that you know this. he likes that you use it. the easiness of his responsiveness is, on his end, a deliberate choice. he doesn't have to react this readily, his body is not naturally arranged this way, he's just decided that around you he wants every small touch to count.

wants you to feel the effect of yourself on him constantly, wants there to be no ambiguity ever about what you do to him. the smallest gestures get full responses. that is on purpose.

your warmth. you feel so warm to him. this is a phrase he's actually said. it's not poetry. it's a literal sensory fact.

he runs cool by default, the air in this place runs cool, the entities he's spent his existence around are cool. and you're a steady human furnace, you radiate heat. constantly. without effort. just by being alive.

when he holds you, when you press into him, when he's inside you and your inner walls are pulsing softly around him, the heat of you is a sensory experience he has nothing to compare to. he runs his hands over your skin sometimes just to feel it. he presses his face into your throat just to feel the warmth radiating off your pulse. he'll spend a long time, in the after, with his palm splayed flat over the warm soft skin of your belly, just feeling you be warm.

he learned to warm by touching you, learned his own body could do that by being near yours, and the response now is automatic. you're the source. you're why he can be warm at all.

you warming him on purpose. you've figured out that you can do this. you can walk up to him cool-skinned in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and put your palm flat to his chest under the flannel and just hold it there. you watch the warmth bloom under your hand.

you can press into him in bed when he's cool from having been still and feel him heat up against your stomach in slow degrees. can take his cold hand in both of yours and breathe on it and watch the harmonic shudder out of him as the heat catches.

this is yours. only you can do it. nothing else in his existence makes him warm. when you do it deliberately, when you're clearly choosing to warm him, the look on his face is gentle, wanting. awe of a thing that's been cold for unimaginably long being deliberately made warm by a creature small enough to hold in his arms.

you watching for the tells. the temperature, the eyes — the fact that you read him by them. he loves being read. when you cup his jaw to check the colour of his eyes after he's been quiet, or put your hand on his throat to feel for the harmonic.

when you press your forehead to his and pause to feel the warmth. they're small, private gestures. they're languages only the two of you speak.

he'd assumed, when he built this body, that he would have to learn human ways of telling you what he was feeling. words, expressions, the usual signals. he didn't expect to find that you would learn to read his actual self instead. that you would meet him at the level his body actually communicates. it's one of the deepest gifts you've given him without realising it was a gift.

caretaking. dressing you after. brushing your hair after. running you a bath after. cleaning the marks he asked permission to leave. tucking the blanket around you. bringing you water before you ask. he's built half the rooms in this place specifically to facilitate aftercare. the act ends when you're clean and warm and held, not when he comes.

kinks (yours, which he learned)

being told you're his. mine in his rough drawl, said low into your throat. he figured this out maybe a week in and has weaponised it ever since.

being held still. the not-quite-human strength of his grip when he pins your hips in place. you didn't know this was a thing you liked until he did it (jut pinned you and made you take him) and you came so hard you nearly sobbed. he files this kind of information away meticulously.

being watched. not in the original sense, in the actual kink sense. this one has an origin story.

you were in the Poolrooms when other entities stumbled onto the two of you in a moment that was not meant to be public. you were on the warm tile and he was over you and you had just started something slow and unhurried when you both felt them. three or four of them, hovering at the far end of the corridor, watching.

BB started to pull back, to cover you, the old protective instinct kicking in with a snarl, but you caught his wrist. you held his eyes. you said, quiet but absolutely certain: let them see. and the look on his face (the blue going dark at the edges, stunned, delighted) was a thing you wanted to keep forever.

he kept going. slowly. thoroughly. let them see exactly what he was doing to you and exactly how you were taking it. let them hear every sound. you came harder than you had in weeks and he understood, then, that this was a thing about you, a real thing about you, and he's been incorporating it carefully ever since.

now, he has (on occasion) manifested an audience in private rooms. lets you choose if you want the watchers to be real or shapes that look like watchers but aren't. you've tried both. the real ones are rare and require specific conditions (he's extremely particular about who gets to look at you). the manifested ones happen more often. the shapes sometimes shifts in the middle of things and you become aware of eyes, vague at the edges of the room, and you know without asking that he's made them for you.

dirty talk in the warm drawl. the voice is one of the few parts of the Bobby-shape you both actually love unreservedly. the warm Cali 90s drawl, lazy and amused. the way he stretches vowels. the contrast between that voice and the obscene things he's saying with it does something to you and he knows. come on, baby, that's it, look at you takin' it so pretty for me (spoken in that exact lazy timbre) has reduced you to incoherence on multiple occasions. he keeps the voice even when the rest of the shape is slipping, because he's noticed what it does to you.

the warming response. the way he goes from cool to warm under your hands. you didn't fully understand at first. early on you assumed he just was warm, the way humans are warm, and only later figured out that the warmth was because of you.

that you walking up and putting a hand on his arm was what turned the heat on. now you know. now you do it on purpose. you press your palm flat to his chest just to feel him warm up under it. you kiss him unhurriedly specifically to watch the temperature climb.

you have, on cold nights, slid your cold hands up under his shirt to put them against the cool plane of his stomach, and felt the slow startled bloom of warmth as your touch registered. felt his humming catch and then purr as his body did what it does, and stayed very still and let you steal the heat back as fast as he made it. it's one of the most intimate things you do with him and barely counts as foreplay. it's evidence. proof that he's alive to you in a way he's not alive to anything else.

reading him. related and important. the temperature and the eyes are not just sensory facts, they're how you communicate.

he doesn't always have the words for what he's feeling. he was not built with the kind of expressive language humans have for emotion. but his body tells you. the cool-to-warm gradient on his skin under your hand. the creep of black at the edge of the blue. the pitch of the harmonic in his chest. you've learned to read these the way you'd learn to read a beloved second language.

you check his eyes when he comes in the door. you put your hand flat to his chest when he's been quiet. you know how he's doing without him having to tell you.

he likes this. he likes being legible to you. he's spent so long being unreadable to everything around him that the experience of being known by his body, without effort, by someone who pays attention, that's love to him.

watching the eyes during sex. specific. when he's over you and moving in you and the slow build of him toward losing the shape is happening (when the blue is eating at the edges with black, the dark creeping inward) you keep your eyes on his eyes.

you watch it happen. you watch the colour go from blue to bloom-darkening-blue to mostly-black to gone, until what's looking down at you is something with no white in its eyes, only deep glossy ink, and the rest of his face is starting to follow. you have come, more than once, from nothing but watching that progression. just the seeing of it. the visual confirmation that you're doing this to him.

that his composure is coming apart because of you, that he's letting you see it. you come watching his eyes go and he watches you come and his eyes finish going and the loop completes.

his warmth. the warmth as a gift. cold things stay cold. cold things radiate cold. he was cold when you met him (you didn't know it then, because he was being careful, but the body he held you against in the early days was cool, and you only realised later, in retrospect, that he had been working very hard to seem human-warm). he's warm with you now because being with you warms him. every time you touch him and he heats under your hand, that is an answer. that's him saying yes, this, more of this, you, you, you with his entire body.

the threading. see above. you didn't know you needed to be full of him in two places at once until he did it and now your body remembers and asks for it without your permission.

how he feels pleasure

his pleasure is not located the way yours is. he doesn't have nerve endings the way you do. he doesn't have a hard cutoff point where sensation crests and then he's done. the body he built has all the equipment that would make pleasure happen for a human partner, and the equipment does work, but it works differently on his end.

his pleasure is mostly relational. what feels good to him is, almost entirely, your pleasure. when you arch under him, when you whimper his name, when the seven hum bright and you clench around him and you sob more into his throat—that's what feels good to him. it's not vicarious enjoyment, exactly. it's more direct than that. he feels your pleasure in his own body, through the seven, and translates it into his own sensation. when you come, he comes, in a sense. he has his own version of the experience, but it is keyed to yours, not independent of it.

the seven are a feedback loop. the seven take his attention and translate it into sensation in your body. you've known that for a while. what you may not have fully understood is that they also work in the other direction. they take your pleasure and feed it back to him.

so when he's making you feel good, you're also making him feel good, through the same mechanism. the loop completes itself. he's the source of your pleasure and also the recipient of it, and the more you feel, the more he feels, and the more he feels, the more he wants to give you, and the more he gives you, the more you feel.

this is why he never wants to stop. ever. the loop is self-sustaining. he could happily make you come for hours (hell, for days, if your body could take it) because the longer he does it the better it feels for him.

there's no point at which he gets bored. no point at which he has finished in the way a human partner might be finished. he's engaged in something that gets better the longer it goes, and the only limit on it is your body. your endurance, your need for water and food and sleep. those limits matter to him enormously. without them he might literally never stop.

he finishes when you do, mostly. this is a choice, not a reflex. he times his own release to yours because he likes the way the seven respond when you come on him (they hum brighter, they pull harder) and his finishing in that moment doubles the resonance. but he can finish at other times. he can finish multiple times in the same encounter, and he can stretch his own pleasure across hours of being inside you without finishing once. the orgasm, for him, is one note in a longer piece, not the resolution.

the warmest sound he makes is that low harmonic, the purr-rumble, the one that vibrates through your sternum when he's happy. it's his version of the good sound. it pours out of him when you're warm against him, when you're full of him and content. it's not a sex sound, exactly. more so contentment sound. it happens at sex and also when you're reading next to him or have fallen asleep with your head on his thigh. he is, in a real sense, purring the way a vast and ancient cat would purr, and the sound means yes, this, more of this, forever.

what you feel like to him. he has tried to describe it and the descriptions never quite fit. the closest he has come: warm. bright. humming. you feel to him the way a fire feels to a thing that's been cold for an unimaginably long time. intense, almost overwhelming with how alive you are.

your body radiates life in a way nothing else in this place does. the heat of you, the pulse of you, the soft give of your skin, the constant gentle electrical hum of a human nervous system doing what nervous systems do. all of it together is, to him, the most sensorily rich thing he's ever encountered. being inside you is being inside that, surrounded by it, part of it. the seven amplify the experience. he is, when he is in you, more alive than he's ever been. in the sense that he's closer to your kind of life than his ancient distant version of it.

this is why he's so reluctant to withdraw. this is why he stays inside you while you sleep. why he never wants to stop. you're warm and bright and you are life, to him, and he's been cold for so long.

he never wants to stop making you feel good. every single position, kink, and long exploration. nights spent inside you while you sleep, every patient hour of his mouth on you. all of it is in service of the simple unwavering project of making you feel as good as you can possibly feel. for as long as he can sustain it, until the end of time if you'll let him. and you will. you absolutely will.

things he does that no human could do

the contortion thing. yes. yes he does this. his joints don't have to count properly when he isn't bothering. he can bend in ways that let him reach angles a human spine would shatter trying to reach. he can fold himself around you so that every part of you that wants to be touched is being touched simultaneously.

the first time he did this (you on your back, him somehow with one hand on your throat and one between your thighs and his mouth on your breast and the cock still inside you, all at once, with no apparent strain in his posture) you laughed, in pure shock, and BB stopped immediately to check on you and you had to explain you were happy.

the matched rhythm. he can sync the thrust of his hips, the curl of his tongue, the press of his thumb on your clit, and the pulse of the seven inside you to one single rhythm. all five points of contact. all on the same beat. there's no human word for what this does to your nervous system. it's like being played as an instrument.

gravity-defying things. he can hold you against a wall with no apparent support from below. he can carry you mid-act and the position doesn't break. he can fuck you while you are essentially levitating in his arms with your legs around his waist and never once does he need to set you down. you've stopped questioning how this works. it just works.

temperature override. he can stay cool even when you're under him panting, hold his body at that stone-shade baseline through everything you're doing to him. this takes effort and he rarely bothers. the only times he uses it: in hot levels when you want the contrast, or the rare moments when you ask for cold, and the cock slides into you ice-cool and your whole spine arches off the bed. he can also push the other direction. go hotter than emotion alone would take him, fever-hot in a deliberate way, but he does this even less, because the natural warming is, to him, more honest .

internal vibration. the cock can vibrate, at a frequency. when he's buried deep and not moving and the cock starts vibrating steadily against your inner walls. the sensation is so unfair it almost feels like cheating. he uses this one sparingly because if he used it often you would never get out of bed.

the splitting thing. now. you've asked him about this only once, and the answer terrified and intrigued you in equal measure. he can produce more than one of himself, temporarily due to strain, for the duration of an act. two BBs, fully formed, both him, both aware, both wanting you. it's not duplication so much as distribution. you've not asked for it. you might. you might never. the option exists.

favourite parts of you (his)

the seven, obviously. but you knew that.

the soft place at the small of your back. he can't leave it alone. his hand finds it whenever you are near him. when you're standing, when walking. you're lying on your stomach with the blanket pushed down. he traces circles into it without thinking. when he's inside you from behind his palm rests there like an anchor.

the hollow of your throat. where your pulse hammers. he's fascinated by the hammer of you. by the visible proof that you're alive and the heart is doing what hearts do. he kisses you there constantly. he sets his teeth into the place gently and feels the pulse against his tongue and the blue of his eyes goes dark at the edges every time.

your hands. specifically the backs of them. he holds your hand constantly, when you're walking, when you're sitting, when he's inside you and you're lying together after. he traces the bones of your knuckles. he kisses each finger separately sometimes. he's endlessly delighted by the fact that you have hands and that they hold onto him.

the sound you make when you wake up. the quiet, involuntary one before you open your eyes. he'll lie awake for hours waiting for it. it is, he's told you, the best sound in any world.

the place behind your ear. where your hair is fine. he buries his face there constantly. he says you smell like the only home he's ever wanted.

the final note (the underneath)

everything about the sex (the contortion, the stamina, the impossible mechanics, the seven, the breeding chemistry, every freaky impossible thing) is in service of a very simple project, which is keeping you happy.

he's not actually a freak. so much as an ancient thing that's been alone for a very long time and that fell in love with a lonely human at a furniture store and has been, ever since, trying to give her every good thing he can build. the kinks are just the shapes the love took when it had nowhere else to go.

he would be just as happy holding you fully clothed on the couch for hours as he is doing any of the above. truly. he has told you this. you believe him.

but he's also a thing of vast appetite and watching you come apart under his hands is, genuinely, one of the great pleasures of his existence. so when you ask him for the freaky things, he gives you the freaky things.

the love and the freak are not separate. the love is the freak. the freak is the love. there's no version of him that wants you politely. you got the entity. you got all of it.

doggy on couch ("lazy susan")

one of tt!aerion's favorite positions is you sprawled out on the couch, on your stomach and pounding into you from behind, his hands tangling in your hair, yanking your head back as he grunts with each thrust or his hands gripping your hips hard enough to leave marks.

the worn fabric of the couch creaks under you both, the smell of his cheap cologne and your pretty perfume mixing with the heat of your skin. his cock presses against your entrance, teasing, before he pushes inside stretching you open. he groans when you take him, you're always so so so tight for him!! he won't last long with your walls fluttering like that.

he’ll let out a string of low, guttural curses that get muffled by your gasps. he likes that he can see the way you take every inch, the way you stretch around him, desperate to accommodate him completely. he’ll grip your hips harder, nails digging into your skin, and lean over you, trapping you against the worn cushions.

"look at me, c'mon look at me-" he’ll command, his voice rough and demanding as he picks up the speed, pounding into you with a ferocity that leaves you seeing stars. the sound of skin slapping against skin is loud in the small, cramped space of the living room, echoing off the peeling paint and the bare walls.

face to face

aerion's absolute favorite position is anything with eye contact. on the armchair, on his bed, the front seat of the truck, on the boat…and pull you onto his lap. you straddle him, facing him, and he wraps his arms tight around your waist, his hands wandering up your back to hold you close.

he loves this angle. it lets him look deep into your eyes while he works you open. his grip on your hips is firm, anchoring you so he can lift and thrust up into you with steady, deliberate strokes, grinding against your sensitive walls.

the sight of your pretty face when he hits that sweet spot sends a spark through him. he likes watching you fall apart for him, seeing the pleasure wash over your features, your lips parting, eyes fluttering. cooing a sweet, “i know…i know, baby.”

he’ll tilt his head down to kiss you, messy and hungry, swallowing your moans against his mouth. he LOVES to kiss you, wet smooches against your cheek, jaw and neck- just anywhere he can get to, he’s kissing. his fingers trace patterns on your lower back, feeling the tremors running through you as he rocks his hips against yours. he wants to memorize every expression you make, every sound you breathe out when he fills you up completely, marking you not just with his touch, but with his gaze.

pole position (thigh master)

he'll sprawl out on the bed, one knee bent, and you'll climb over him, straddling his thigh while he lies on his back. his leg goes between yours, pressing up against your clit with every movement.

he loves that you have to grind against him to get it right, that you have to work to find the rhythm. he'll guide your hips, showing you exactly where to sit, how to angle your body so his thigh is grinding against you just right.

his hands will rest on your hips, holding you in place as he lifts his leg up to grind against you more firmly. it's intimate in a different way—slower, more deliberate. he likes watching you squirm on top of him, likes knowing he's controlling the pace without even touching your pussy.

as you start to get comfortable with the rhythm, he'll grab your hips and pull you down so he can slide his cock inside you from this angle. the combination of his thigh grinding against your clit and his cock stretching you open is too much to handle.

He was cruel in the way that certain people were cruel, not out of anger or impulse but out of something colder than that, one that enjoyed itself. You had watched him your whole life and you understood him well enough to know that the cruelty was not the point. The point was always the control, the cruelty was just what happened when something resisted– a horse that wouldn't settle, a servant who answered too slowly, a situation that wasn't going the way he had decided it should go. You had seen it enough times to know the look that preceded it, the way his expression would go very still and very pleasant in the moment before something happened that you wished you hadn't witnessed. 

He had never been cruel to you. That was the thing you turned over sometimes when you couldn't sleep. In all the years you had known him, with all the things you had watched him do, he had never once directed any of it at you, and you did not know whether that was a comfort or the most frightening thing about him.

You were always paying attention. You had learned that you needed to be, with him especially.

Your father had served the king since they were young men together, long before crowns and councils, and that friendship had bought your family something most houses spent generations trying to earn. Proximity. You had grown up inside these walls, known these corridors before you knew your own home, eaten at their table and walked these gardens and fallen asleep to the sounds of this city your whole life. The king's grandsons had simply always been part of that. Woven into everything. You could not have separated them from your childhood if you had tried, and for a long time you had not tried, because why would you. 

Valarr had claimed you as his friend before you were old enough to understand what that would cost you.

Aerion had simply watched, waited, and decided something you were never consulted on.

You had understood for a long time that they were both obsessed with you in different ways and for entirely different reasons, and you had spent an equally long time pretending you hadn't, because understanding it meant having to do something with it, and there was nothing to be done. They were who they were and you were who you were and this was the world you lived in.

Valarr's obsession was the easier one to carry. It looked like love, felt like love, probably was love in the way that Valarr did everything– openly, without strategy, without a single layer of calculation underneath it. He wanted to be near you. He sought you out in every room. He remembered the small things and brought you the things you liked and looked at you across tables with an expression that he had never once bothered to hide, and the court had noticed and smiled and found it charming, because Valarr was charming, because everything about him invited warmth in return. His obsession had no teeth in it. That was what made it safe to love him back.

Aerion's was different. Aerion's had nothing but teeth.

Aerion's obsession was not something he announced. It lived in the details, the ones you had to be watching closely to catch, and you had been watching closely for years.

The way he always knew where you were in a room without looking for you, the way his gaze settled on you the moment you walked in like it had been waiting. The way he would find reasons to be wherever you were, not obviously, not in the way that announced itself, but consistently enough that you had stopped believing in coincidence a long time ago. You had once counted three days in a row where he appeared in whatever part of the keep you had chosen that morning, the gardens, the library, the corridor outside your father's solar, and each time he had looked at you like he had simply happened to be there, like it was nothing, like you were imagining it.

You had not been imagining it.

He did not like other men near you. That was something you had understood slowly and then all at once. He never said anything, never made a scene, but there was a quality to his stillness when it happened that you had learned to read, the slight tightening around his eyes, the way he went very quiet, the way whatever he said next to the man in question was always perfectly pleasant and always landed like a warning. Men tended to find reasons to be elsewhere after those conversations. You had never heard him threaten anyone. You had watched three men decide on their own that your company was not worth whatever they had seen in Aerion's face.

So you loved Valarr openly and you watched Aerion carefully and you told yourself that was enough, that knowing the shape of a thing meant you could manage it.

Though you were terribly wrong about that. 

Dinner had always been pleasant with the Targaryen family. Conversation was easy, the food was good, and your father, as usual, sat beside the king with the comfortable ease of two men who had known each other long enough to run out of things to perform for one another. You had grown up at this table. It had never once felt dangerous. 

Today was different.

Your seat was beside Valarr instead of across from him, close enough that your shoulders nearly touched when he leaned in, close enough to feel the warmth of him without meaning to. You didn't know who had arranged it and you hadn't asked. You had simply sat down and looked at your plate and made a decision not to look at Aerion, who today was seated across from you.

You heard his fork hit the plate harder than necessary. Once, then again. A small sound that no one else at the table seemed to notice, or if they did, said nothing about. 

The table moved around you, everyone lost in their own small talk, your father's voice carrying down from the king's end of the table and the low hum of conversation filling the spaces between.

You kept your eyes on your plate mostly, pushing your food around more than eating it, acutely aware of the weight of a gaze from across the table that had not moved from you since you sat down. You did not look up. You had gotten very good at not looking up.

"You've barely touched anything," Valarr said quietly beside you.

"I'm not very hungry."

"You said that at breakfast too." He leaned in slightly, lowering his voice so it was just for you. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"Just tired," you said, meeting his gaze with a small smile. "I stayed up last night longer than I meant to."

"Doing what?"

"Reading."

"What were you reading?"

"Something dull," you said. "Which is why I couldn't sleep."

He laughed at that, low and quiet, and you felt the warmth of it settle somewhere in your chest, and for a moment the table and the noise and everything else fell away and it was just this, just him, just easy.

And then from across the table came the sound of a goblet being lifted, and your eyes moved there before you could stop them.

Aerion's hand was around the stem of his cup, long fingers wrapped loosely around it, completely unhurried. He brought it to his lips slowly, tipping it back, and you watched the line of his throat move as he swallowed, watched him lower the cup just as slowly, and then his tongue touched his lower lip, just once, just briefly, catching the last trace of wine like he had all the time in the world and nowhere else to be.

You should have looked away then. You knew you should have looked away.

His fingers began tracing the rim of the cup instead, slow idle circles, round and round, and something about the patience of it, the complete unhurried certainty of those fingers moving like that, sent heat moving through you that had absolutely no business being at a dinner table and you pressed your thighs together under your dress and looked down at your plate and picked up your fork and stared at your food like it had personally offended you.

You were losing your mind. That was the only explanation.

You looked up.

Aerion was already looking at you. Of course he was. His fingers had stilled on the rim of the cup and his eyes were on yours and the expression on his face was the worst possible thing it could have been– not anger, not hunger, just the faint curl of a smile at the corner of his mouth, slow and knowing and unbearably smug, the expression of a man who had just been handed something he had not even had to reach for.

Your face was warm. You looked back at your plate.

Beside you Valarr said your name, something light in his voice, and you answered him, and smiled, and felt Aerion's gaze sitting on the side of your face like heat from a fire you had made the mistake of standing too close to.

Baelor cleared his throat from where he sat, and the conversations around the table died down one by one, the way they always did when he spoke, that particular quality of his presence that made rooms go quiet without him having to ask.

Valarr stopped mid-sentence beside you and turned to look at his father. You turned too, because there was nothing else to do, and felt your heart doing something it had no business doing at a dinner table.

Baelor's smile was warm, unhurried, the smile of a man who had already decided something and was simply bringing the room up to speed. "As we all know," he began, his gaze moving between you and your father, "Lord Stafford Lannister and his family have been dear friends to this house for many years. A friendship that goes back further than most at this table can remember." He glanced at the king briefly, and the king inclined his head, and Baelor looked back at you both with that same warm smile. "The small council, his grace, Lord Stafford and I have come to an agreement."

You did not look at Valarr. You did not look at Aerion.

You looked at your father, who was not looking at Baelor at all. He was looking at you, with an expression that was careful and fond and slightly apologetic all at once, the expression of a man who had made a decision he believed was right and was watching his daughter find out about it.

"To bond our houses further," Baelor continued, "through the betrothal of my eldest son Valarr, to Lord Stafford's daughter."

The table erupted warmly around you and you sat very still in the middle of it, you slowly turned your gaze away from everyone, and looked at the table.

The congratulations came from every direction and you heard none of them, your ears blurring the noise into something distant and shapeless while you sat very still and looked at nothing in particular.

You did not know what you felt. That was the honest answer and it sat uncomfortably in your chest. You loved Valarr, had always loved Valarr, but love and wanting to be someone's wife were not the same thing and you had never let yourself think too hard about the difference until this moment, with the whole table raising their cups to your future and your father watching you from down the table with that careful expression of his.

He had promised you. Years ago, when you were young enough that promises felt like solid things, he had told you that when the time came it would be your choice. That he would not do what other fathers did. You had believed him because he had never given you reason not to, and you had carried that promise around like something precious, and now you were sitting at this table with congratulations ringing in your ears and understanding, slowly and then all at once, what it was worth.

You reached for your goblet and took a long sip and set it back down and kept your face very still.

Your jaw was tight. You could feel it, the particular ache of holding your face in place when it wanted to do something else entirely.

Valarr leaned in close beside you, his voice low enough that only you could hear it. "Are you alright?"

"You've asked me that twice today," you said, and your voice came out even, which cost you something.

"You've given me reason to twice today." His eyes were on your face, warm and searching. "Talk to me."

"There's nothing to say." You kept your gaze forward, fingers tight around the stem of your goblet. "It's wonderful news."

"You don't look like someone who's received wonderful news."

Your mouth pressed into something that was supposed to be a smile and wasn't quite. "I look perfectly fine."

"You look like you're about to bolt," he said, gently and completely certain, the voice of someone who knew your face better than you wanted anyone to. "I know when something is wrong with you."

You looked at him then, at those open honest eyes, and felt something move through your chest that you couldn't name cleanly, and you swallowed and looked back at your plate. "I just need a moment," you said quietly. "That's all."

He held your gaze for a beat, and then nodded, and sat back, and said nothing more, because that was Valarr– knowing when to push and when to let something be.

You sat with it for another few minutes, the noise of the table washing over you, your expression carefully blank in the way that took effort to maintain, the way that left a dull ache somewhere behind your eyes. You glanced at him sideways without meaning to, and found that he was not looking at you. He was looking at Aerion, and whatever was on his face you could not read it properly, only that his smile had shifted into something different, something with an edge to it you had never seen on him before. Almost smug. Like a man who had just won something.

You made the mistake of looking at Aerion.

Your face did something before you could stop it, something small and involuntary, your brows drawing together slightly, your lips parting, and you looked away immediately but it was already too late and you knew it.

"If you'll excuse me," you said, and pushed your chair back and stood, and your face was not pleasant, was not the face of a happy girl who had just received good news, was simply the face of someone who needed to be somewhere that was not here.

"Sit down," your father said, not unkindly, from down the table.

"I just need some air, father."

"You can have air after dinner."

"Stafford," the king said mildly, and your father looked at him, and something passed between them, and your father looked back at you with that expression, the one that carried the guilt of a man who had broken a promise and knew it, and you looked back at him with something that was not anger yet and not quite hurt yet but was moving in both directions at once.

You walked out anyway.

His voice followed you into the corridor, your name in it, softer now, and you kept walking and did not turn back, and the cool stone of the corridor was quiet around you and you stood in it and breathed and pressed your hand flat against the wall and felt your face finally do what it had been wanting to do for the past ten minutes– the jaw unclenching, the eyes going slightly wet, the particular exhausted expression of a woman who had been holding something together at the table and was now alone enough to stop.

You stood there for a long moment.

Somewhere behind you in that room, you were certain without having to look, Aerion Targaryen was watching the door you had just walked through.

When wasn't he looking anyways.

You heard him before you saw him, his footsteps quick and purposeful behind you on the garden path, and you walked faster.

"Would you just stop walking—"

You did not stop walking.

It had been nearly a moon since the betrothal was announced at dinner, and in the days that followed you had made it your business to be wherever Valarr was not. It had seemed, in those first few days, like the only thing you could do– if you could just create enough distance, enough cold space between the two of you, perhaps someone with enough sense would notice and reconsider. The small council, your father, anyone. 

You had been wrong about that. Nobody had reconsidered anything. The betrothal stood and the days kept passing and Valarr kept looking for you the way he always looked for you, warm and patient and entirely unbothered by the fact that you were doing everything in your power to disappear.

"Your prince demands you stop walking."

His voice had gone serious, louder than before, with the particular edge of a man who had run out of patience and was done pretending otherwise.

You stopped.

You stood there for a moment with your back to him, and then you turned around slowly and looked at him with an expression that was not kind.

"Demands," you said flatly. "That's a new word from you."

"You've left me with very few options." He was breathing slightly harder from having half-chased you across the garden, his mismatched eyes on you with an intensity he usually kept better hidden. "You've been avoiding me for a month."

"I've been busy."

"You walked out of a room yesterday the moment I walked in."

"I had somewhere to be."

"You told my squire you weren't receiving visitors when I came to your chambers."

"I wasn't feeling well."

"You were seen in the gardens an hour later perfectly fine." His jaw tightened. "Do you want to keep going or are we done pretending?"

You looked at him and said nothing.

"Why are you acting like a child who didn't get her way–"

"I have every right." The words came out sharp and you let them, your finger pointing at him briefly before you dropped it. "I have every right and you know it."

"I know no such thing–"

"Days after that feast," you said, cutting him off, "I find out it was you. Not the council. Not our fathers sitting down together and coming to a reasonable agreement. You. You went to your father and put the idea in his head and then sat at that table and smiled at me like you hadn't just decided my future without bothering to ask me about it."

"I decided nothing that wasn't already–"

"Don't." Your voice went quiet in the way that meant you were more serious than when you were shouting, and he heard it, you saw him hear it. "Don't tell me it was inevitable. Don't tell me it would have happened anyway. Because maybe it would have and maybe it wouldn't have and I will never know now, will I, because you took that from me."

He looked at you, something moving across his face. "I didn't think of it that way."

"No," you said. "You thought of what you wanted and you went and got it. Which is very you, Valarr, it has always been very you, and I have always loved that about you and right now I find it very difficult to."

Something in his expression flinched at that. "That's not fair."

"My father made me a promise," you said. "Years ago. He told me that when it came to my marriage it would be my choice. Not the council's, not his, mine. And I believed him. I believed him for years and I carried that and it meant something to me, and he broke it, and he broke it because of you."

"I didn't know about any promise–"

"Would it have changed anything?" you asked, and your voice was very even, very direct, giving him nowhere to go.

He was quiet for a moment. "I don't know," he said finally.

"Right," you said.

"That's not– I'm not trying to–" He ran a hand through his hair, frustrated in the way he got frustrated, openly and without pretense. "You think this was easy for me? Watching you every day for years and saying nothing, doing nothing, because the timing was never right or the situation was never right or you seemed happy enough without–" He stopped, then looked at you. "I was tired of waiting."

"So you stopped asking and started deciding."

"That's not what I did."

"Then what did you do, Valarr, because from where I'm standing–"

"I love you." He said it plainly, the way he did everything, without strategy or performance, just the words dropped into the space between you like he had been holding them for a long time and had simply run out of reasons to keep holding them. "I have loved you since we were children and I have watched you your whole life and I know you, I know you better than most people you would trust with that knowledge, I knew that if I asked you directly you would have found a reason to say not yet, or maybe, or I need more time, and I would have waited and you would have kept waiting and nothing would have happened and I could not–" He stopped. His jaw was tight. "I could not watch you end up with someone else."

The garden was very quiet.

You looked at him, at the openness of his face, at the frustration and the honesty and the love in it that he had never once tried to disguise, and felt something in your chest do something complicated that you were not ready to deal with.

"That still wasn't your choice to make," you said, but your voice had lost some of its edge.

"I know," he said. "I know that. And I'm sorry for how it happened. I'm sorry your father broke his promise and I'm sorry you found out the way you did, I'm sorry I didn't come to you first." He held your gaze. "But I am not sorry that you're going to be my wife. I will never be sorry for that."

You looked at him for a long moment.

"This isn't—"

You didn't finish the sentence.

Valarr closed the distance between you in one step and his hands were on your face before you understood what was happening, and then he kissed you, and all the words you had been building dissolved completely.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was the kiss of someone who had been waiting too long and had finally stopped caring about waiting, deep and certain. Your eyes were wide for one moment, your hands caught somewhere between pushing him away and not, and then he deepened it and something in you gave way and your eyes closed and your hands found his chest and you stopped thinking about being angry.

He kissed you like he had been wanting to for years, which he had, which you had known somewhere you had been refusing to look, and you felt it in your chest and lower and pressed your lips back against his before you had decided to, and he made a low sound against your mouth and pulled you closer, one hand sliding from your jaw into your hair, and you forgot entirely what you had been saying.

When he finally pulled back you were both breathing unevenly and his forehead came to rest against yours, his eyes closed, his hands still in your hair, and for a moment the garden was just that– quiet and warm and the two of you breathing the same air.

Then something caught your eye over his shoulder.

You stepped back, and Valarr let you go slowly, opening his eyes to look at you with that expression, soft and warm and entirely unguarded, and you were not looking at him. You were looking past him, at the far end of the garden path, at the retreating figure you would have known anywhere.

The pale platinum hair. The particular way he walked, unhurried and deliberate, like a man who had nowhere to be and had simply chosen to be elsewhere.

Aerion.

He did not look back. He just walked, steady and calm, and turned the corner and was gone, and you stood there with Valarr's warmth still on your mouth and your heart doing something entirely different now, something that had nothing to do with the kiss and everything to do with the cold certainty settling in your stomach.

He had seen you. All of it. Valarr's hands in your hair and your eyes closed and you pressing back into the kiss like you had forgotten every reason you had to be angry.

"Hey." Valarr's voice was gentle, his hand coming to your jaw, turning your face back to his. "Where did you go?"

"Nowhere," you said, and made yourself look at him, at those warm mismatched eyes that had nothing in them but you. "I'm here."

He looked at you for a moment like he wasn't entirely sure he believed that, and then he pressed his lips to your forehead, slow and certain, and you closed your eyes and let him, and tried not to think about what Aerion's face had looked like in the moment before he turned away.

You hadn't seen it. You had been too far away, the light too low.

But you knew him. You had spent years learning the shape of him from a careful distance, and you knew, with the particular instinct you had developed for him specifically, that whatever had been on his face at that moment was not nothing.

You were going to pay for this. You didn't know how yet.

But you knew you would.

You hadn't expected anyone to be in your chambers, but the absence of your guards outside the door should have told you something. You noticed it only after you had already closed the door behind you, hand still on the handle, and found Aerion in the corner of your room with your wine.

He had helped himself to your best goblet. Of course he had.

"What are you doing in my chambers," you said.

He turned to face you, unhurried, and the expression on his face was the pleasant one, the one that meant nothing good. "Congratulating you," he said. "I couldn't very well do it at the feast, could I. Not after you made such a graceful exit." He tilted his head, studying you the way he studied things he found mildly interesting. "I'm not sure I've ever seen someone look quite so thrilled at their own betrothal announcement."

"Get out."

"In a moment." He took a slow sip of the wine and looked at the goblet appraisingly, like he was deciding whether your taste was worth commenting on.

"Valarr is lucky. He always has been, hasn't he. Things simply fall into his lap." His eyes came back to you. "Or in this case, are arranged to fall into his lap."

"I said get out, Aerion."

"You did," he agreed. "You also look like you mean it slightly less than you'd like to." He set the goblet down and crossed his arms, leaning back against the table with no intention of going anywhere. "Does it bother you, I wonder. That he went to his father rather than to you. That everyone in that room knew before you did." He paused. "That your own father broke a promise to make it happen."

The fact that he knew about the promise landed somewhere in your chest with a specific unpleasant weight.

"No one needed to tell me anything." His voice was pleasant. "I've known you your whole life. I know what your face does when something has been decided without you." He looked at you steadily. "I saw it at the table. And I saw it in the gardens earlier."

You said nothing.

"You kissed him back," he said simply, and his voice was completely without judgment, which was worse somehow than if it had been cruel.

"I know what I saw." He pushed off the table and took a few steps toward you, stopping at a distance that was closer than comfortable and carefully not close enough to object to.

"The interesting thing is that you kissed him back and you still don't look like a happy girl." He tilted his head slightly. "Why is that, do you think."

"You don't know anything about how I feel."

"I know more than you'd like me to," he said. "I've been watching you for years. Did you think I hadn't noticed? That I simply sit across from you at dinner and look at the food?" Something shifted in his expression, something underneath the pleasantness that was harder to read.

"Valarr is warm. Valarr is kind. Valarr will be a devoted husband and the court will find it charming and you will smile and say the right things and spend the rest of your life being precisely as restless as you are right now."

“Get out–”

“No. I’m quite happy here princess.”

He walks even closer to you, eyes on you as he reaches for a piece of your hair to tuck it behind your ear. You almost moved away from the action, though he kissed his teeth at that, as if that action itself annoyed him so.

“Valarr is many things,” he said lightly, studying your face as though you were a puzzle he had already solved. “Dutiful. Earnest. Admirable in the way old men like to use the word.”

His fingers lingered at the strand of hair he had tucked behind your ear.

“But he is dull,” Aerion continued, his voice lowering slightly. “Dull in conversation. Dull in temper. Dull in appetite.”

You stiffened and he noticed.

“Oh, don’t pretend you haven’t thought of it.” His mouth curved faintly. “He speaks to you like you’re porcelain. Like you might shatter if he breathes too hard.”

“That’s called respect,” you snapped.

“It’s called fear,” Aerion corrected calmly. “He worships you. And men who worship rarely dare to touch what they worship properly.”

Your jaw tightened.

Aerion leaned closer, not enough to trap you, but enough that you could feel the warmth of him.

“Tell me,” he murmured, eyes flicking down your face with deliberate slowness, “when he kissed you in the gardens… did it feel like something claimed you? Or did it feel like he was asking permission to exist?”

Your breath caught despite yourself.

He smiled faintly at that.

“Valarr will give you sons and soft words and a lifetime of predictable nights,” Aerion continued. “He will lie beside you as though he’s afraid of disturbing the air between you. He will thank you afterward.”

“That is enough,” you said sharply.

“For some women,” he agreed, as he continued on with his words. “For women who want to be admired from a polite distance. For women who enjoy being handled like glass.”

His gaze darkened, something sharper threading beneath the pleasant tone.

“You are not glass.”

You tried to step back. He followed half a step, closing the distance you had created.

“You burn,” he said quietly. “You’ve always burned. And he will spend his life trying to tame it into something courtly.”

His thumb brushed lightly against your jaw— not tender, not cruel, just assessing.

“You’ll lie there beside him,” he went on, voice dropping further, “and you’ll wonder why you still feel restless. Why something in you is still waiting… is still wanting.”

You swallowed.

“And when his love making does not quite reach you,” Aerion added, a crude edge sliding into his tone now, deliberate and unapologetic, “when he’s finished and satisfied and you are not, you will think of this conversation, you will think of me.”

You rolled your eyes, heat rising in your face. He laughed softly at that, genuinely amused.

“It offends you because it’s true,” he said. “You do not want warmth. You want to be consumed.”

“That’s enough, Aerion.”

“No,” he said calmly. “It isn’t.”

His gaze held yours

“Valarr will cherish you. He will be grateful for you. He will treat your body like a sacred relic bestowed upon him.”

His voice dipped, rougher now.

“I would not.”

Silence settled heavy between you.

“I would not ask,” he continued. “I would not thank you. And you would not mistake what you were to me.”

The arrogance in it was staggering.

“You’re vile,” you said quietly.

His smile returned– slow, satisfied.

“And yet,” he murmured, “you are still standing here.”

He stepped back then, finally, reclaiming his goblet as though the conversation had been nothing more than idle courtly gossip.

“Think on it,” he said softly, as though he were offering thoughtful advice rather than an insult. “Marry your dutiful prince. Smile for the court. Bear him heirs.”

The words should have felt like dismissal. A neat ending to a conversation he believed he had already won.

He turned slightly, confident enough to expose his back to you.

You did not move toward him.

You stood exactly where you were, anger and humiliation warring in your chest, the door solid at your spine.

“Aerion,” you said, your voice tight, “leave.”

He did not answer at once. Instead, he set the goblet down with exaggerated care, the faint click of metal against wood sounding far too loud in the room. When he turned back to you, something had shifted. The pleasant amusement had thinned into something colder, something edged.

“No,” he replied.

He crossed the distance between you without haste, though each step felt deliberate, predatory. You did not step forward. You did not invite him closer. Still, he advanced until there was scarcely any space left to claim.

“You speak as though you have a choice in how this will unfold,” he said quietly.

“I do,” you shot back, lifting your chin despite the tremor in your pulse.

His mouth curved faintly. “Do you?”

He reached for you without warning.

One moment there was air between you, and the next his hand was at your arm, fingers biting into fabric and flesh as he forced you back against the door. The impact jarred through you, sharp, your shoulder striking the wood hard enough to sting.

“Aerion, stop,” you demanded, shoving at his chest.

He did not.

His other hand came up to brace against the door beside your head, caging you in. You pushed harder, your palm striking his shoulder, then his jaw. The slap cracked in the quiet room, sharp and unmistakable.

For a fraction of a second, there was stillness.

Then his eyes darkened.

Not surprised. Not ashamed.

Angered.

“You dare,” he said, his voice dropping to something far more dangerous than before.

You tried to twist away, but his hand caught your wrist again, harder now, and he closed the distance without permission. The kiss was not persuasion. It was force. His mouth crushed against yours, claiming and unyielding, swallowing your protest as though it were nothing more than inconvenience.

You struggled, pushing against him, turning your face aside, but he followed, relentless. The more you resisted, the tighter his grip became, as though your defiance only sharpened his resolve.

When you struck him again, he broke the kiss long enough to seize both your wrists in one hand. The movement was swift and unforgiving.

“You think I will be dismissed like him,” he muttered, breathing unevenly now, his composure fraying. “You think I will stand at a distance and ask.”

Before you could react, he dragged you away from the door. The shift was sudden enough to disorient you, your balance faltering as he propelled you backward toward the bed.

You barely had time to brace yourself before the backs of your knees hit the edge of it and you fell onto the mattress. The force was not enough to injure, but it stole your breath all the same.

He followed immediately, looming over you, one knee sinking into the bedding to keep you from scrambling away.

“Aerion,” you warned, fury and fear mingling in your voice.

He looked down at you, chest rising and falling faster now, whatever restraint he had clung to finally stripped away.

“You will not treat me as though I am an afterthought,” he said, the words low and trembling with anger. “Not you.”

The composure he wore like armor at court was gone now. There was no pleasantness, no amusement in it. Only something stripped raw and furious.

“I was meant to stand beside you,” he continued, his voice unsteady not with weakness but with rage barely leashed. “Not him. It was always him for you, wasn’t it? Even when you pretended not to see it.”

His grip tightened at your shoulders.

“You think I did not see you in that garden.” His jaw flexed. “You think I did not watch you close your eyes for him.”

Your breath hitched despite yourself.

“You let him take your first kiss,” Aerion said, and there was something almost disbelieving in it, like the insult still had not settled properly in his mind. “You let him touch you as though he had earned it.”

“You have no right—”

“No right?” he snapped, the words cutting through you. “I have watched you since we were children. I have measured every man who stood too close. I have endured your father parading you through halls as though you were a prize to be admired.” His mouth twisted. “And he walks into a garden and takes what I have waited years for.”

“You waited for nothing,” you shot back, struggling against him. “I was never yours.”

Something in his expression fractured.

“I was the one they would have given you to,” he said, voice dropping again, but this time it was worse. Quieter. “If he had not interfered. If he had not rushed to his father like a boy afraid of losing a toy.”

“I am not a thing to be handed between you two,” you said, anger flaring hot enough to momentarily overpower fear.

He leaned closer, eyes dark and bright in equal measure.

“No,” he said. “You are not.”

His hand slid from your shoulder to your jaw, forcing your face toward his.

“You are something he does not understand how to hold.”

“I will not be replaced,” he said, breath uneven now. “Not by him. Not by anyone.”

“You are insane,” you hissed, struggling beneath him.

“And you are blind,” he shot back.

His face hovered inches from yours, his anger no longer refined into something subtle. It was raw. Almost desperate.

“You think this ends with a kiss in a garden,” he said. “You think you can walk into marriage and forget I exist.”

His grip tightened when you tried to pull free.

“I saw you,” he continued, voice thick now, not just angry but wounded in a way that made him more dangerous. “I saw the way you answered him. The way you melted into it.”

Your silence enraged him further.

“You want warmth,” he said bitterly. “You want gentleness. You want to be cherished.”

His eyes locked onto yours.

“And I would have given you something real.”

There was nothing romantic in the way he said it.

Only possession.

“You do not get to decide what I want,” you said, breath shaking but voice steady, tears kissing your eyes.

For a moment, something uncertain flickered in him, then it hardened again.

His hand fisted suddenly in your hair.

The force of it dragged you upward before you could brace yourself, your breath catching as his mouth crashed against yours. There was nothing careful in it, nothing resembling affection. His teeth caught your lower lip and bit down until you tasted copper, until the sting bloomed bright and immediate.

You made a sound despite yourself, half pain, half protest, and tried to twist away.

He did not let you.

He deepened the kiss instead, as though your resistance only fed the fury driving him. When he finally pulled back it was not far, his forehead nearly touching yours, his grip still unyielding.

“Must you always be so cold to me,” he said, but there was no pleading in it. Only accusation.

Before you could answer, his mouth moved again, not to your lips this time but down along the line of your jaw, to the sensitive curve beneath your ear. His teeth grazed there too, not enough to break skin, but enough to make you flinch.

“Every look,” he murmured against your throat, voice rougher now, less controlled. “Every word you give him so easily.”

His hand slid from your hair, only to settle at your waist, fingers pressing firmly into the structured fabric of your bodice. He worked at the laces with impatient precision, tugging until they loosened beneath his touch. The careful arrangement of your dress began to slacken under his hands.

You pushed at his shoulders again, anger rising through the haze of shock.

“Stop,” you demanded, your voice unsteady but not weak.

He paused only long enough to look at you.

There was heat in his expression, yes, but something else threaded through it now. Frustration. Obsession. The bruised pride of a man who could not endure being denied.

“You shut me out,” he said, his thumb pressing against the base of your throat as though he could feel your pulse racing there. “As if I am a stranger. As if I have not stood at your side for years.”

His grip tightened just enough to remind you how easily he could overpower you, though he did not close his hand fully.

“And yet you melt for him.”

The words were quiet, almost hoarse.

His mouth returned to your neck, slower this time, less frantic but no less intense, as if he were trying to prove something rather than simply take it. His hands continued their restless work at your dress, loosening what had been carefully secured, his movements deliberate and possessive.

“Look at you,” he muttered, not tenderly. “Still fighting me.”

With a final tug, the last barrier of your dress fell away, and he let it slip from your body entirely. He stepped back slightly, taking a long, appraising look at you, eyes gleaming with a strange mixture of admiration and something darker. “He does not deserve this,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “He would not know what to do with someone like you.”

Then, as if daring you to react, he lowered his mouth toward you, his movements slow and torturous, each kiss a deliberate claim. His lips traced a path down your body with painstaking precision, lingering at every sensitive curve, every line of your skin, as though memorizing it.

By the time he reached the hollow beneath your belly, the faint trace of your blood from his earlier bite still on his lips, you felt the shift inside you, impossible to resist. What had begun as violation and force had turned, unbearably, into something you craved.

You wanted him in ways that shocked you. Wanted the weight of his hands on your skin, the rough press of his fingers digging into you, the sharp tug of hair between his grasp. You wanted the heat of him against your throat, the low, commanding pressure that had left your pulse racing from the start.

Your own need rose up suddenly, urgent and undeniable. The breath caught in your chest, the trembling in your hands and thighs betraying the want that you could no longer deny. You wanted him, not as before, not as a threat– but as the fire that consumed you, as the storm you had spent years watching from a careful distance.

You instinctively arched your hips as his head dipped lower, pressed firmly between your thighs. Heat pooled sharply, spreading through you with a tension that had nothing to do with patience or reason. He had removed your small cloth with hurry and determination.

A shiver ran along your spine as his tongue suddenly brushed against you, deliberate, unhurried, dragging sensations that left you gasping and trembling. You threw your head back, hands latching into his hair instinctively, needing to anchor yourself against the overwhelming pleasure.

Every movement, every press of his lips and the teasing of him against your sensitive bud, pulled something raw and urgent from deep inside you.

Your chest heaved, your knees quivering, your body betraying every attempt at composure.

His tongue moved with deliberate precision, teasing and drawing, tasting you in a way that left no room for hesitation or denial. Every flick, every press of his lips, sent shocks of need through your body that made your nails dig deeper into his hair. You gasped, hips bucking instinctively, trying to find a rhythm, any rhythm, against the insistence of him.

“You feel like this,” he murmured, voice low, rough with satisfaction, “like you’ve been waiting for me without knowing it. Every inch of you wants it, and yet you fight me still.” His hands braced against your thighs, spreading you wider, pinning you to the bed with a deliberate weight that left no escape.

Your back arched, a soft cry escaping as his tongue pressed harder, teasing, coaxing, dragging you closer to a point you had only dared imagine. The sound of your own need, raw and uncontrolled, filled the room, mingling with the quiet, possessive hums from him. He didn’t rush, not yet, savoring the control as much as the taste, the power of holding you on the brink.

Your hands roamed, clutching at him, at his shoulders, anything you could grasp, desperate for some way to touch back. Every movement of his mouth drew more from you, more groans, more shivers, more of the burning heat that made your head spin. You were caught, entirely, and you didn’t want to be anywhere else.

“You want it,” he said, almost accusingly, lips brushing against your clit as he spoke, “you crave me, even when you try not to. Even when you pretend otherwise.” His words were punctuated by the deliberate drag of his tongue, the teasing press that made your thighs shake, your nails leaving crescent marks in his skin.

And then, as if sensing the breaking point, he pushed slightly harder, pressing you fully against him, and your body shuddered, a gasp ripped from you, your back arching further as the first wave of pure, overwhelming release coursed through you.

His lips didn’t relent, didn’t ease the pressure, and the next wave hit before the first could fade, leaving you trembling and raw beneath him, utterly undone.

Even in your surrender, in your cries and shudders, he looked at you with that same calm, assessing gaze, the one that always made you feel like you were exactly where he wanted you– and nowhere else could compare.

And so, in the days that followed, as you were wed to Valarr with all the ceremony and dutiful smiles the court demanded, Aerion lingered in the shadows, watching. Every polite bow, every whispered congratulations, every careful touch between you and your husband only stoked the dark fire in him.

It wasn’t jealousy, it was triumph.

Because Valarr may have claimed your kiss first, but Aerion had claimed far more.

He had taken what was his, in the quiet, unspoken ways that no courtly display could touch. Your body remembered him in ways your heart could not yet name, and in that knowledge, he exulted.

Triumph and possession twisted together in his chest, the satisfaction of a predator who had waited and watched and finally taken what had long been within his grasp, leaving nothing for anyone else to claim.

from the moment aerion targaryen met you, he was ruined for everyone else.

he had known it immediately, which offended him greatly.

you had stood in the great hall beneath streaming banners and candlelight, speaking softly to some elderly lord whose name aerion could not remember now, and he had stared at you with the unnerving certainty that his life had just divided itself into before and after.

he had wanted you at once.

not simply for your beauty, though the gods knew you possessed enough of it to make men foolish.

no, it was worse than that. it was the way you smiled when spoken to you. the way your voice softened around frightened animals. the way you listened carefully to him, as though every word mattered.

you were gentle and yet you were smart. unbreakable.

and aerion, for all his arrogance, for all the monstrous streak that lived comfortably beneath his skin, found himself following that gentleness like a frightened man following candlelight.

once he married you, he became unbearable about it.

he could not go anywhere without you.

court meetings became impossible unless you sat beside him. feasts irritated him if you were seated too far away. he would find excuses to leave conversations midway simply because he had caught sight of you across the hall and suddenly needed to hear your voice more than whatever tedious noble was speaking to him.

people noticed, of course they noticed. it was impossible not to.

aerion targaryen, proud and cruel and impossible, followed his wife around like a man enchanted.

and he did not care.

when your gown fittings were scheduled, he attended them as though invited personally by the gods. he would lounge dramatically across velvet chairs in the corner while seamstresses fluttered around you adjusting hems and sleeves. a goblet of wine would rest lazily in his hand while he watched you with shameless devotion.

“you are staring at me again,” you would murmur, smoothing your hands down the front of some pale silk gown.

“you mustn't blame me wife, for you are simply beautiful,” he would answer easily. “we both suffer from consistency.”

the seamstresses would blush furiously. you smiled every time.

sometimes he would rise simply to touch the fabric himself, rubbing it between long fingers before looking at you critically. “no,” he would decide. “this color does not suit you.”

“it is blue.”

“it is horrid blue.”

“you said yesterday that blue was my color.”

“that was a better blue.” then he would press a kiss to your inner wrist as though that settled the matter entirely.

often the two of you escaped to the gardens whenever court became too suffocating. hidden away beneath twisting vines and dragon roses, you would spend hours tangled together beneath the shade.

you liked adventure stories, romance too. aerion preferred gruesome histories filled with betrayals and executions and bloodshed. he would read them aloud with disturbing enthusiasm while you laughed softly beside him, your head resting against his shoulder.

“it is educational, wife, it is not a laughing matter.”

“it is horrifying!”

“that as well.”

you smiled and stole the book from his hands. “then i shall save your soul with something gentler.”

“my soul is beyond saving.”

“mm. i have hope.”

he watched you read the same way he watched flames, utterly entranced. your voice drifting through the gardens became one of his favorite sounds in the world. sometimes he stopped listening to the actual story entirely, too distracted by the shape of your mouth around certain words.

he would kiss you slow and lazy beneath flowering vines while the world continued without you.

everywhere in the red keep there were glimpses of you together. your arms linked through endless corridors. his hand possessively at your waist during feasts and parties.

his favor wrapped around your wrist during tournaments because he insisted his colors belonged on his wife and only his wife.

and you understood him.

you understood the sharpness in him. the cruelty. the terrible anger he carried like another heartbeat. you never excused it, but neither did you recoil from it. you saw all the ugliness inside him and loved him still.

it made him worship you for it.

so when you fell ill, it destroyed him slowly.

you would smile and insist you were well enough, brushing it aside with gentle reassurance whenever his expression darkened with concern. a cough lingering too long after the autumn rain, a fever that came and went in waves, exhaustion settling into your bones until even simple things began to tire you.

but aerion noticed everything about you.

he noticed when you stopped finishing your meals. when your hands felt warmer than usual curled inside his. when you leaned more heavily against him during long walks through the gardens. he noticed the shadows beginning to gather beneath your eyes no matter how carefully you tried to hide them.

and selfishly, desperately, he had hoped it was something else.

he had hoped you were with child.

the thought had rooted itself in him almost immediately, growing quietly into hope before he could stop it. he imagined your sickness explained away by life instead of illness. a babe. your babe. his hands resting against your stomach while you laughed softly at his unbearable protectiveness.

he clung to the possibility with frightening intensity.

“you have been tired for weeks,” he murmured one evening, sitting beside you near the fire while you leaned sleepily against the cushions. “and sick in the mornings.”

you looked up at him over the rim of your cup. “are you attempting to diagnose me yourself now?”

“i am saying there may be another explanation.”

the faintest smile touched your mouth then, soft and knowing. “you think i am carrying your child.”

“i think it would explain things.”

“and if it does not?”

his expression shifted immediately, the fragile hope there dimming just slightly. “it will.”

you reached over to touch his face gently. “aerion.”

“you would tell me if you thought it possible.”

“i would.”

his hand slid over yours quickly, holding it there against his cheek. “i want it to be true.”

you softened instantly, your thumb brushing lightly against his skin. “i know you do.”

for a little while, the possibility sustained him.

he became almost absurdly attentive after that. hovering constantly. insisting you rest. arguing with servants if meals were not prepared exactly right. pulling blankets over your lap himself with quiet irritation whenever he thought you looked cold.

“you need not be so concerned aerion,” you teased weakly one afternoon as he adjusted the pillows behind your back for the third time.

“you are coughing again.”

“it is one tiny cough.”

“it was a terrible cough.”

you laughed softly despite yourself. “you would make a dreadful maester.”

“i would make an excellent husband.”

“that much is true.”

he kissed your forehead immediately at the praise, lingering there for a moment longer than necessary. “then obey your excellent husband and sleep.”

you smiled but closed your eyes obediently anyway, too tired to argue much anymore and that frightened him because you were never this tired.

weeks passed.

the sickness did not improve.

the fevers worsened instead.

and slowly, horribly, the hope inside him began to rot into fear.

the maesters stopped speaking optimistically when he entered the room. their careful expressions told him everything long before their mouths did. he hated them for it. hated their silence. hated the medicines that did nothing. hated the smell of herbs and boiling tinctures that now permanently lingered in your chambers.

most of all, he hated the growing weakness in you.

one evening he found you asleep by the window, a book fallen forgotten in your lap. the sight should not have broken him the way it did. fear struck him so violently, he crossed the room immediately, sitting beside you with his hands wrapping tightly around yours.

“you should rest,” he told you quietly when you stirred awake.

a tired smile touched your lips at once. “i am resting.”

“properly.”

that woke you more fully. your expression softened immediately as you looked at him there beneath you, still dressed in dark court clothes he had evidently never bothered changing out of. his silver hair was disheveled from repeatedly dragging frustrated hands through it. shadows lingered beneath his eyes now too. had he slept at all recently?

“aerion,” you whispered gently.

his grip tightened unconsciously around your hands as he stared down at them, his throat working once. when he finally looked back up at you, there was something raw in his eyes that made your chest ache.

“i do not know what to do,” he admitted quietly.

aerion hated helplessness. hated uncertainty. yet here he was before you like a man praying at an altar, unable to fight the thing slowly stealing you from him.

you lifted one hand carefully from his grasp just to touch his face. “you are already doing it,” you whispered.

“that is not enough.”

“it is for me.”

his eyes closed briefly at that, leaning instinctively into your touch. for a moment he simply stayed there, holding your hand against his cheek like something precious.

then, very softly, almost angrily, he murmured, “i am going to grow old with you. hear me. i will."

he rarely left your side.

meetings were abandoned midway. letters unanswered. duties forgotten entirely. he remained beside you obsessively, sleeping in chairs when he refused to leave your bedside, holding cool cloths to your skin with hands more accustomed to swords than gentleness.

his patience disappeared entirely. goblets shattered against walls when maesters offered uncertain answers. servants flinched when entering the room because even the scrape of shoes against stone seemed enough to provoke him now.

then came the anger. not at you, never at you. at the maesters who could not heal you. at the gods who would dare touch what belonged to him. at himself for being unable to stop it.

“you said the fever would break,” he hissed at one trembling maester after another miserable night left you barely conscious. “you assured me she was improving.”

“she did appear stronger yesterday, your grace-”

“do not lie to me.”

the old man visibly faltered beneath the fury in aerion’s voice.

“she needs rest,” the maester managed carefully.

“she needs curing.”

silence.

aerion’s expression darkened into something terrifying. “get out.”

no one argued with him anymore after that.

the servants cried quietly outside the doors sometimes. you could hear them if the hall fell silent enough. the sound seemed to haunt aerion more than anything else because people only cried like that when hope was beginning to die.

then came the night everything changed.

the room was dim besides the fire and a handful of dying candles. rain struck softly against the windows while thunder rolled somewhere far over the bay.

aerion sat beside you holding your hand tightly between both of his as though warmth alone might anchor you here.

“you will get better,” he told you hoarsely. “you must.”

your breathing caught unevenly before settling again.

“aerion- husband-”

“no.” his voice cracked violently. “do not speak like that.”

you looked at him with unbearable softness. “my love,” you whispered.

“you are not leaving me.” tears filled his eyes instantly, furious and helpless all at once. “you hear me?” he said desperately, leaning closer. “you cannot leave me here. i do not know how to-” his voice broke entirely.

your trembling fingers brushed weakly against his cheek, even now, you were comforting him.

“aerion,” you whispered softly, “look at me.”

and he did immediately, like he always would. your eyes searched his face slowly, lovingly, memorizing him the same way he had memorized you a thousand times before.

“i loved you very much,” you breathed.

“no.” he shook his head instantly, panic rising sharp and ugly in his chest. “no, do not say it like goodbye.”

“you made me very happy.”

“stop.” his grip tightened painfully around your hand. “please.” aerion targaryen did not beg. not kings, not gods, not men. but he begged you.

your eyes softened immediately at the sound of it, filling slowly with tears that slipped silently down into your hair. even now, with death hovering so terribly close, you looked at him with nothing but love.

“do you understand? i cannot- i cannot sit here and listen to you speak as though this is ending.”

your breath trembled faintly. “aerion…”

“no.” his voice cracked violently again. “no, you listen to me now.”

his free hand cupped your face desperately, trembling hard enough that you could feel it against your skin.

“you will stay,” he said, the words frantic now, like if he spoke them firmly enough the world would obey him. “you will survive this. the maesters are wrong. they have been wrong before.”

you gave the faintest shake of your head.

he looked suddenly furious at it. “at least pretend to believe me.”

a weak little smile touched your mouth then, heartbreakingly gentle. “you sound angry.”

“i am angry.”

“at me?”

“no- no my love, never at you. at everything.” his voice splintered on the last word.

the fire crackled softly somewhere behind him, rain tapping against the windows in uneven rhythms. the room smelled of wax and herbs and sickness. aerion thought suddenly, wildly, that he hated every part of it. hated the candles. hated the storm. hated the bed beneath you because it had become a place of dying instead of sleeping beside him warm and laughing.

most of all he hated how cold your hands had become.

he brought them closer between his own instinctively, rubbing warmth into your fingers as though he could force life back into them through sheer desperation.

“you promised me forever,” he whispered brokenly.

your lashes fluttered weakly. “i meant it.”

“then do not leave me.”

you looked at him for a very long moment after that and something in your expression changed with acceptance.

“no,” he said again, harsher this time. “do not look at me like that.”

you had never seen him like this, not truly, not stripped this bare. aerion had always loved fiercely, possessively, almost violently in the depth of it, but he rarely let anyone witness the rawness underneath. he hid softness behind arrogance. devotion behind sharp words.

but there was nowhere left to hide now not while you were dying in front of him.

“you cannot leave me alone here,” he whispered suddenly. the confession sounded childlike. small.

“my husband,” you breathed gently.

his face twisted instantly at the title, grief ripping visibly across it. “you said we would grow old together,” he murmured. “you said we would have children.”

tears slipped harder down his face now. he did not even seem aware of them.

“i bought that little carved dragon you liked in the market because you wanted to have it for our child.” his voice shook violently. “it is still sitting in gift velvet because i thought-”

his breath broke. “i thought there would be time.”

you began crying then too, silent tears slipping into your hair as you watched him unravel before you.

aerion pressed your hand desperately against his lips.

“there is still time,” he insisted suddenly, like he could force the truth backward if he spoke quickly enough. “tomorrow you will wake and i will carry you into the gardens again. to roses near the fountain, you always say they smelled sweeter after rain.”

“aerion…”

“we will read together.” his words tumbled over each other now, frantic and disjointed. “and i will complain through your ridiculous romance stories and you will laugh at me and-”

his voice snapped apart completely.

you gathered what little strength remained in you and brushed your thumb weakly against his cheek. “i need you to be brave for me. my brave dragon.”

“no.”

the answer came instantly like a child refusing.

you tried to smile through your tears. “you are a dragon prince.”

“i am also your husband.” the words came out fierce and broken all at once. “i love you,” he whispered desperately. “do you hear me? i love you so much i cannot breathe when i think about losing you.”

your eyes closed briefly at the pain in his voice. “aerion…”

“i should have loved you less.” but even as he said it, both of you knew it was impossible. he had loved you from the very first moment. too much. too fiercely. with every ruined part of himself. and now the gods were tearing you away from him piece by piece.

“i do not regret loving you,” you whispered. you were breathing differently now. slower. weaker.

panic flooded his face so fast. your fingers tightened faintly around his once. “i am- tired now. aerion.”

“no.”

“i love you- so- aerion-”

“no, stay awake my love. stay with me. look at me.” his voice broke into something desperate and terrified.

you tried. gods, you tried. your eyes found his one last time, full of love so deep it nearly killed him on the spot.

then your breathing faltered.

every part of him seemed to stop existing except for the hand clutching yours.

another breath, still shallow. then another, smaller still.

“no,” he whispered again, tears falling freely now. “please. i love you.”

and then-

nothing.

silence. complete and horrible.

aerion stared at you waiting. waiting for your chest to rise again. waiting for your fingers to twitch in his hand. waiting for the impossible. but you stayed still. and slowly, horrifyingly, your warmth began to fade beneath his hands.

the sound that left him afterward was raw enough to tear through stone.

he folded over you instantly, clutching your hand against his mouth as violent sobs ripped through him hard enough to leave him breathless. his entire body shook with it, years of pride and cruelty and arrogance collapsing into grief so enormous it hollowed him out completely.

“no, no, no-”

he kissed your cold knuckles desperately between broken gasps of air. “you cannot do this to me,” he choked out.

the gods, cruel as they were, had finally taken the only thing aerion targaryen had ever truly loved.

the silence afterward nearly drove him mad.

he had not cried like that since childhood. since lonely nights hidden away in dark chambers where no one came looking for him. he felt small again suddenly. helpless. frightened.

they had given him an hour to calm down, and when his tears subsided and all that was left was anger, grief, and longing, the maester quietly began to approach the bed before aerion turned with such horrifying fury that the old man stopped instantly.

“get out.”

“your grace-”

“get out.”

the room emptied immediately and no one dared argue.

aerion was alone with you. alone in the suffocating silence of your shared chambers while candlelight flickered softly against your still face. he loved you more than he knew what to do with, and now there was nowhere for that love to go.

hours passed before anyone dared enter again. even then, aerion refused to let go of you. it nearly killed him when they tried to take your body from the bed.

“no,” he snarled hoarsely, gripping you tighter. “do not touch her.”

“prince aerion-”

“do not touch her.” his voice barely raised, yet stern. frightening.

they had to pry his hands away, hold him back. he looked- no, he was- half-mad, watching them place you inside the coffin, his face white with horror like he could not comprehend how the world expected him to survive such a thing.

afterward, he refused to clear your rooms.

your gowns remained hanging exactly where you left them. your oils and perfumes stayed lined carefully along the vanity. books remained half-open where you had abandoned them.

your side of the bed stayed untouched.

every now and then, late at night, standing in front of your grand dresser, he would hold one of your dresses against his face, breathing in the fading trace of your perfume with devastated desperation.

the gardens became unbearable to him. the reading alcoves remained empty. and aerion wandered through the red keep like a ghost haunting a life that no longer existed.

people feared him more after your death. he grew colder. crueler. quieter.

but worst of all were the nights.

because sometimes, very late, servants passing your chambers would hear him speaking softly into the silence as though you were lying beside him still.

“i told you to listen to me,” he would murmur. then, quieter, “yes, i know. you are cold tonight.”

there would be the faint sound of movement. a chair dragged closer. a goblet set down. and then, gently, almost tenderly, “you should sleep now.”

no one ever dared open the door. because sometimes they also heard him laugh softly, as though you had answered.

he began to drink heavily.

wine at first. then stronger things brought in quietly by servants too afraid to refuse him. the maesters warned against it, cautiously at first, then more urgently as the pattern worsened.

“your grace,” one of them said carefully one evening, “this will not ease your suffering. it will only deepen it.”

“i am not suffering,” he said. “you are mistaken.” aerion continued calmly. “my wife is simply away. that is all.”

the maester exchanged a look with another before bowing stiffly and retreating.

he began speaking of you in the present tense.

“my wife prefers the roses after rain,” he told a bewildered servant once. “do not cut them yet.” another time, he stopped a maid in the corridor and snapped at her, “have you seen my son?”

she froze. “my prince…you do not have-”

aerion’s expression sharpened instantly.

“see to it that he is with his mother,” he said firmly.

no one corrected him. it was easier not to.

he began to see you again. at first it was fleeting. a reflection in the mirror that was not his own. a flicker at the edge of his vision when he turned too quickly. a warmth in empty chairs.

then it became clearer. you were in your chambers again. sitting at the vanity. adjusting your hair. looking at him as though nothing had ever gone wrong at all.

“aerion,” you would say softly. “must you stare at me, my love? it is quite jarring.”

and he would believe it. he would believe it completely. there was no longer any separation between memory and reality. only you.

until even that began to fracture.

the night he drank wildfire.

he believed it would truly take the pain away, turn him into something different. into a dragon.

maesters agreed, because no one truly denied a targaryen anything for long, suggesting it might “calm the mind” if handled carefully, and with all of aerion’s temperaments they agreed to add in a little something extra, something that might ease the sleeplessness, the agitation, the grief that had begun to consume him.

that night, after drinking, he stood alone in your chambers, holding one of your gowns again. when suddenly his grip tightened violently around the fabric.

“i cannot do this,” he whispered. “i told you,” he murmured hoarsely into the empty room, “i told you i cannot be anywhere without you.”

his vision blurred and he felt a sharp burning sensation from inside himself. the wildfire had burned him, saved him from the madness and grief that had been burned into him long ago.

aerion targaryen could not bring himself to let go of the one thing he had ever truly belonged to. because aerion targaryen, in the end, was exactly what he had always been.