☽ Magpie ● Song ☾

VALARR.

Sleeps boyish. There’s no other word for it. For a man so polished in waking (the careful cultivation of charm, the lingering look he gives you across rooms, the deliberate way he holds himself even at rest) Valarr in sleep is softened to the point of foolishness. His mouth is slightly parted, dark hair mussed. The white streak at his temple is a pale slash through the tousle. The polish that defines him by day has completely deserted him, and what’s left is a man in his twenties with a small crease between his brows and an unguarded face that you can’t stop looking at.

So you touch him. Just your thumb at first, smoothing the crease between his brows the way you’ve wanted to all day. And Valarr (who’s the most attuned to you of any of them) doesn’t so much wake as soften further under your hand. He makes a small sound, sleep-thick and pleased. Turns his face into your palm, slow, instinctive. His lashes don’t lift. His eyes don’t open. He’s still mostly asleep. But his mouth finds the pad of your thumb, and his lips trace it, unhurried, half-conscious, learning the shape of you with the same devotion he gives every other inch of you when he’s awake.

Then he nuzzles deeper. His cheek against your palm. His nose at the heel of your hand. A man who is, you realise with a quiet jolt, presenting himself for petting. Presenting himself to be claimed. I’m yours, take stock, do as you like. Said with no words, only the small shameless tilt of his head into your hand, the tiny kiss he plants in the centre of your palm when his lips happen to find it. And when his eyes finally do crack open, mismatched and unfocused, they find your face and his whole expression breaks open into that helpless unguarded delight you only ever see from Valarr in sleep. The man under the prince.

He wants to be kept. That’s the secret of Valarr in sleep. The performance is intricate, the polish is real, the immortalising gaze is genuine. But underneath all of it is a man who wants to be a thing you keep on the bed and stroke when he’s good. And tracing his features while he sleeps gives him exactly that, and he goes utterly liquid under your hand. He’ll let you do it as long as you want, and he’ll purr small wordless sounds into your palm, and somewhere in this hour you’ll understand that you have ruined him for any other woman who’s ever lived, because no one else has ever touched him like this. Without performance, without ceremony, without payment due, and no one else ever will again.

DAERON.

Oh, oh, oh. Daeron sleeps with his hand curled near his face, knuckles white, holding something back. And his face in sleep is the only place you ever see him young. Waking, Daeron is older than his years. Wine-aged, dream-gnawed, carrying the weight of visions that crawl out of him in his sleep and walk into the world. He has a face that’s going to be ruined by drink before he’s forty if no one stops him. But in sleep, before the drink hits, before the dreams come, before the hand pours the next cup… Daeron looks young, handsome. He looks like the boy he was before the gift cracked him open.

So to trace his features in sleep is to map the wound the dreams have been chewing on. You would touch the dark crescents under his eyes. Deep, blue-black, constant now. You would touch the soft hair at his temple, damp at the roots. You would touch the corner of his mouth, which in sleep does this terrible thing. It twitches, downward, as if the dreams are already starting, as if even unconscious he’s bracing. And you would know, with a sinking that is its own kind of love, that you can’t save him from what is in his head. You can only sit with him afterwards. You can only hold him while he sweats it out.

He will wake mid-trace. He’ll wake with his eyes already wet, dream-disturbed, half a word in his mouth that he swallows when he sees you. And he will look at you for a long moment and then his face will crumple (just briefly, just for a heartbeat) and then he’ll laugh, that bitter wine-aged laugh, and say darling, you should not look at me like that, you’ll spoil me for the rest. And you will say, levelly, Daeron, and he’ll stop laughing, his hand coming up to cover yours where it rests against his cheek. He’ll hold it there for one long silence, and that will be the closest thing to I love you he’s capable of giving you.

LYONEL.

The opposite of all of these men. Lyonel sprawls. He sleeps the way he laughs: loud, generous, taking up the entire bed and apologising for none of it. One arm flung above his head, the other across your waist with a possessiveness so unselfconscious it reads as thoughtless, his frame radiating heat like a hearth. He’s the man who falls asleep faster than anyone you know, because Lyonel doesn’t lie awake worrying. Lyonel has never lain awake worrying. That’s one of the great gifts of being Lyonel Baratheon.

So to trace his features is a different kind of project entirely. It’s not heartbreak. It’s wonder. He’s almost obscenely beautiful in sleep. The stag’s pride of him, the strong jaw gone slack, the dark lashes fanned against tanned skin, the mouth that’s always grinning in waking finally at rest. You would map his face slowly. The small white scar through his eyebrow from a tourney. The flattened bridge of a nose broken twice. The soft place at his temple where his pulse beats steady and unhurried. And Lyonel, who sleeps deeply and long, would not wake. You could trace him for an hour and the man would simply continue to breathe, mouth open, lashes still.

He would wake eventually (late, slow, irritated by sunlight) and he would catch your hand without opening his eyes and bring it to his lips and kiss the palm and rumble what’re you about, she-wolf, and when you told him, I was looking at you, he would crack one eye open, grin like sin, and say aye? And what’s the verdict? And you would have to lie to him, because Lyonel doesn’t need to be told he’s beautiful, Lyonel already knows, Lyonel will dine out on it for a week. So you’d say the verdict is you snore, and he’d roar with laughter, and pull you on top of him, and that would be the end of any further tracing.

DUNK.

Dunk is the only one on this list who sleeps completely undefended. Dunk, all seven feet of him, all knotted muscle and scarred knuckles and broken-nosed sweet-eyed enormity. He sleeps like a child. On his side, one big hand tucked under his cheek, his face slack and peaceful in a way that takes your breath. The largest man you have ever seen, and in sleep he’s the softest, and the dissonance of it is so profound that the first time you saw it your eyes burned.

So you trace his features slowly. Oh so, very slowly. Because Dunk is a man who’s been touched without tenderness his entire life. Bruised, broken, struck by others, and to be touched gently while he sleeps is something he’s never received, ever, not in all the years of life. You would trace the cauliflowered curl of his ear, scarred from training. The ridge of his nose, broken so many times it has settled into its asymmetry. The pale lines of old scars across his cheek, his jaw, his brow. And you would touch his mouth last, most gently, because Dunk has the softest mouth of any man you know, and in sleep it lies parted and trusting like a boy’s.

And Dunk would wake. Slowly. Blinking up at you in the dim light, confused at first, his big body stirring carefully because even half-asleep Ser Duncan the Tall is afraid of breaking small things. And when he registers what you’ve been doing (when he understands you’ve been touching his face) he would go still, the way he goes still when something gentle happens to him that he doesn’t know how to receive. And his eyes, which are honest blue and absolutely without guile, would fill. Genuinely fill. And he would say, in that quiet rumble of a voice, m’lady. You don’t… you don’t have to do that. And you would say, I know. And he wouldn’t be able to speak after that for a long time.

The feast slowly started to come to an end as Baelor moved taking a seat next to his brother. Dyanna had long since retired to put the boys to bed, causing you to now sit on his other side, your husband next to you.

Baelor opened his mouth to speak, but then you began to count down and suddenly you and your husband were both holding a fist. Both brothers turned to you, eyebrows furrowed together.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Maekar asked, which Baelor was grateful for as he knew you were more likely to answer his brother than himself.

“To see who get to wear the antler crown tonight,” you answered before counting down from three once again and both of you now holding your hands flat.

“And what does that mean?”

You glanced back, over your shoulder smiling at Maeaker, but did not answer. It was your husband’s voice that cut through, “Wanna find out dragon prince?” he asked, winking.

Suddenly the pair of you held out your hands once more, but you held two fingers out as your husband held a fist,“Ha, ha!” Lyonel exclaimed in victory, leaning forward with a wide grin.

Then he was scooping you up into his arms and carrying you from the Hall with a loud laugh. Very few guests turned to look at you as if this was normal behavior in Storm’s End.

“My chambers is next to there’s tonight,” Maekar sighed, closing his eyes.

“Why is that bad?”

The silver hair, raised a brow, “They’re going to fuck. That was what they were deciding who is going to fuck the other.”

Baelor’s eyes widened, the tip of his ears turning red in embarrassment, “She was going to fuck him?” he questioned, whispering lowly as if suddenly their conversation was wrong.

“Yes. They do it all the time I do not know why you look so surprised. He sticks it up her ass she sticks stuff up his,” Maekar grumbled, with a dismissive hand, repositioning himself.

“He sticks it up hers too?” he the asked.