CheezeCake

i just can't stop thinking about how BAELOR is older than the men you usually date, and the way he'd have you gripping the bedframe as he circles the tip of his tongue across your needy, throbbing, swollen clit.

it would be morning—the sun has barely risen and he's lying in bed, with your clothes thrown carelessly around the vintage frame and his arms circled around your thighs. sunlight, warm and golden, would seep in through the blinds, bleeding across the wooden floor little by little, occupying the space as a clock, somewhere nearby, ticks, and ticks, and ticks.

it had rained the night before: not too violently, not for too long, just hard enough for a faint chill to remain whenever the wind blew in through a set of wooden blinds that were left open half-way. it makes the beams creak and the walls whistle, and it brings a shiver up your spine.

it is, after all, the beginning of summer.

BAELOR’s hands, however, feel hot against your skin. his fingers are splayed along the expanse of your thighs, digits pressing into the plush skin as he circles them in a caress. and his tongue, running along your puffy, glistening folds, feels the warmest of all.

"look at how pretty she is," he murmurs, pointing his words with a lick. "how she throbs and leaks, begging for my touch. tastes so sweet, too. could just—mhm, could just lick her for hours."

he just about has been.

he’d started just as you were waking up, dragging his fingers along your slit under your sleeping shorts, sucking them into his mouth before asking you to ride his face instead. and how were you supposed to refuse?

"no, no," he hums, sucking your clit into his mouth as he pulls you down lower against his face. "i didn't say hover, pretty girl. i said sit."

a moan rips through your lips as his tongue enters your hole, and he circles it around as he revels in the sound. he gulps, savoring your taste, feasting on your slick, whimpering against your skin at the way you begin to move your hips over his head. he sucks around your hole as he kneads at the bottom of your ass, working his lips in tandem with his tongue.

his hands move again, making you gasp, making your teeth sink into your bottom lip the moment he uses them to land a spank just over the place he was kneading. and, as if feeding off of your response, as if growing only from your pleasure, does it again the moment you begin to move faster.

"that's right. mhm, take what you need. yeah, just take what you need," he moans against your skin, moving his face upwards to rest his tongue beneath your throbbing clit. he lays it flat, feeling you move against it, your cunt dripping down his chin.

and there’s a part of him that’s still ashamed. there’s a part of him that still whispers and grumbles in the back of his head, telling him that he’s too old for you, that you deserve better, that you should want better—

you quiet it, moaning over him. he puts it to rest, willing it away if only for a moment, nibbling on your clit as he treads a hand between your folds, collecting moisture with his fingers.

he moves his thumb back, digit dripping with your slick, and circles it, softly, tenderly, along your asshole. he hears you gasp, feels you tremble, and tongues at your clit as he applies more pressure with his finger. the tight, puckered ring of muscle clenches under his digit, and he presses in, and a moan, broken and hoarse, echoes across the room.

yours. or his?

BAELOR laps at your cunt, moving his finger in slow, delicate motions, accompanying your moans with the wet, debauched sounds of his sucking.

“i’m so—BAELOR, i’m—”

“yeah? gonna cum?” he groans, moving his finger in deeper, sucking your clit in harder. “soak my face, yeah? gonna do that for me?”

you want to answer. you try to.

but then BAELOR’s tongue flicks along your pearl once more, and you’re weightless, and you’re sinking down, and you’re soaring up. your hands grip the headboard so tight your knuckles begin to hurt, and you’re seeing blue, and pink, and white, and all the colors of the rainbow on the back of your eyelids as you move faster against his face, riding out the bliss.

your orgasm ripples through you in a way that has him all but feeling his, almost succumbing to it, almost coming untouched.

he’s careful when he pulls his finger out of your hole, caressing it once more when it starts to clench at the loss.

his cock rests over his stomach, soft and heavy, bright red and leaking. you lean back, opening your mouth as you spit on your palm, and he groans into your clit. your head is fuzzy with want when you take reach back and him in your hand, hot, throbbing, wet against your palm as you grip on his base.

“can i ride it?”

BAELOR stops. he halts in his movements at your question, his brain trying to make sense of the words as he tastes you on his lips.

“pretty girl, i can’t—”

“i know,” you say, noticing the way he moves his hand back up so they both rest on your hips. “i saw something online, and i want to try—you don’t have to be hard. and i’ll stop if it doesn’t feel good for you, i promise.”

there’s a pause.

seconds trickle by raindrops on his skin, and he feels them drip, drip, drip away as the voice, speaking louder, being meaner, pops back inside his head. you shouldn’t have to settle. he should be able to make you feel good, his cock should be—

“please. i really want to try it.”

and then, there’s that. there’s you, quieting it again, almost as if sensing his shame before he can let it fester. before he can let it burrow.

"alright,” BAELOR says, parting from your cunt so he can speak, breath hot against your tender skin. “try whatever you want, love.”

he presses one last kiss upon your clit, smiling when it throbs, and he knows he would have given in either way. you take in a breath, deep, and stretch your back to move down against his figure.

your fingers map down your descent: kissing his clavicles, feeling the mat of hair on his chest. they trail down his stomach, caressing his belly, following the path set by a graying happy trail.

and then, with your eyes set on his, you let yourself hover over his lap for a brief, fleeting minute. your skin is still buzzing in the aftershocks of your orgasm, charged with electricity, eager for more.

"go on. rub yourself off on my cock. make yourself cum on it again," a pause. he takes in a breath, moving an arm to have it rest under his head.

there is something he doesn't say—he does not need to. it lingers between you, restless, charged, and you lower your cunt onto his cock, your lips glistening with his spit, his cock covered in yours, and feel the head of it come in contact with your clit.

you don't need him to be hard get him off. it feels just as good, just as he is.

"that's it. that's my girl. rub that perfect pussy all the way along my cock. cum on my—fuck, cum on my cock."

it throbs under you, twitching as your clit runs all the way down from the base to his sensitive tip. you move your hips in a slow, circling motion, putting down pressure, and a moan catches in his throat. you move your hips back, rubbing yourself faster against him, and it breaks free.

and there’s no shame in this moment. he doesn’t overthink. he doesn’t let himself stray away from the way your tits move with each and every one of your movements. he doesn’t let himself stray away from the sound of your moans, soft and melodic, loud and violent, each and every one existing as a response to him.

he doesn’t let himself stray away from the way your folds, dripping and puffy, swallow the humiliation whole as they take on his cock.

he is not feeble. he does not fade away.

he watches as another orgasm rips through your body: making you shake, making you shiver, making you rut down against his cock in fast, desperate motions that have him choking on air. you look beautiful like this. otherworldly. he decides to treasure the sight for as long as he lives.

and he cums like that. you’re hunched over, stiff nipples pressing down against his chest, hips still moving down against his cock as he begins to spill. white messy ribbons paint the outside of your cunt, and you don’t stop moving, and he feels like he’s on fire.

your hands find his over the mattress.

a sound is born somewhere along the bottom of his stomach, traveling upwards, ripping past his lips as a breathless moan. he doesn't close his eyes, doesn't dare to miss a moment—just stares at you as he pants.

he looks at you, lost in your pleasure, with your eyes closed and your head laid to rest over his figure. his cock is soft, beating with a pulse, resting between your slit the way a heart would inside a ribcage. he still smells like you. his cum is smeared across the inside of your legs, warm and thick, and his fingers close in around yours, tight and sure.

and bringing these up again because #MyTruth

anyways!

you can apply this to your thoughts too. your thoughts are no less your cr self’s than your senses are. if you start getting doubts mid attempt or can’t let go of the thought or feeling that you’re not in your dr, remind yourself that you are not your feelings or thoughts or doubts. you are simply observing them. of course your cr self will think that they’re still in their cr, they are. just ignore them and shift your attention elsewhere. your focus and awareness are what dictate what you experience, if you relinquish your focus from your cr and direct it to your dr instead, that’s where you’ll “be”.

obviously there’s no one set way to shift, so if you want you can stop reading here and apply this information to your shifting journey in whatever way suits you. if you’re interested in my method though, here’s the compilation of all this info into practical steps you can actually take to shift.

get comfortable somewhere you won’t be disturbed. close your eyes and focus on what you can see. the light behind your eyelids, shapes, colours, whatever. but instead of automatically interpreting these sensations as belonging to your cr, allow them to become sensory input from your dr. light? that’s coming from the lamp by the xyz in your dr bedroom. or maybe your in a field if that’s a fitting setting for your dr, and it’s the sun shining down on you. shapes? that’s because you’ve been lying down with your eyes closed for a while now, you’re tired after your classes or job or whatever you do in your dr. even if it’s nothing at all, let it be your drs nothing. just feel it. do this for about a minute.

then move onto your body. whether it’s sinking, lightness, tingling, focus on it. and do the exact same as you did for the previous step, interpret it as input coming from your dr. don’t worry if you can still feel your body lying in your bed, because your surroundings aren’t going to change—at least not physically. again, those sensations belong to your cr self, and they don’t prevent awareness from directing itself elsewhere. the goal here is to shift your focus away from them and onto something else, so hyperfocusing on your cr and worrying about your surroundings is counterintuitive. just gently guide your attention back to your dr, really try feel your dr surroundings and what your dr body is currently feeling. if you can’t fully avert your focus away from your cr, that’s fine, at the very least just try receive/tap into the input coming from your dr alongside your cr.

finally focus on what you can hear. if you’ve already managed to make a connection with your dr through your sight and physical senses just build up on what you’ve already got. feel grass tickling your skin? deepen the connection there by focusing on the sound now too, the wind blowing through it. see light behind your eyes? focus on the hum of the lights.

repeat these exercises over and over, deepening the connection with each cycle. if you don’t manage to get anything the first cycle just keep going until you do. it might take some practice. like i mentioned before, after spending so much time here and being in constant attunement with your cr self, the sense that your cr is the default starts to take root and it can be difficult to shake the feeling that you’re just indefinitely “here”. it’s normal for it to take some time to learn how to question this feeling and push past it. since you've never (technically?) been aware of anything outside of this reality, learning how to do so can be a bit like learning how to use a muscle you've never used before.

this method operates on the idea that reality is something that is tuned into through focus & narrowed awareness and not something metaphysically travelled across, so for the most success with it, i’d recommend starting to make a conscious effort to see your dr less like a place and more like a wavelength or channel, a perspective already existing beyond your current focus. shifting to your dr then becomes an effort to notice and receive input from this channel/wavelength, input that already exists out there and that simply needs to be acknowledged. you’re just picking up on what’s already there, feeling something that a version of you already feels.

However, having watched you play with Maekar’s youngest children with a look of adoration and a nurturing, guiding hand, Baelor felt a tendril of longing wrap around his heart to witness you behave in a similar manner with children whose physical traits, as well as other attributes, were a perfect mixture of both yours and his.

“You mustn’t move,” he chided quietly, arm tightening around your waist to discourage squirming.

The soft fabric of his silken robe caressed the bare flesh of your stomach with every shift and rearrangement of your bodies, causing an eruption of goosebumps to rise over your flesh.

“It feels so–,” your words were cut off by a whimper escaping your throat, head lolling over his shoulder at the sensation of his pulsating appendage within your passage.

The dizzying sensation of being wholly engulfed by him, whilst enveloping his own fullness within your walls caused your eyes to become unfocused and watery.

Baelor was reclining comfortably into the cushioned thickness of his armchair, the tie of his night robe undone, revealing his loosened silken trousers and thick torso to the heated space of your shared bedchamber.

He had you completely bared and sprawled atop him with your thighs hooked on the arms of the seat, mounted on the twitching, redden length of his cock.

“This is the best way,” Baelor moaned lowly when you wriggled your hips, “to guarantee success." 

You felt his voice as a physical sensation that entered your ears, trickled down your body and settled pleasantly at the base of your spine, level with where it felt like he was piercing you.

“I know, my love, I know,” the wanton raspiness that laced his words elicited another shiver out of your trembling form. 

It felt like he was residing within the deepest depths of your soul, the fat head of his cock pressing into a sacred part that resided deep within you, one that you had not even known existed until he discovered it.

“I feel–gods, I feel everything.” you confessed, turning your face to place kisses along the column of his flushed, damp neck, paying extra attention to the visible vein that ran along the length of it.

He had brought you to completion several times and had released inside of you three times in various positions, yet he remained fully, and more than readily, erect with an ever growing and desperate desire to ensure that his seed took. His dedication to seeing you swollen with his child appeared to have given him an insatiable hunger.

Every tiniest movement caused the short, coarse, dark and grey hairs dusted across his chest to ticklishly poke into the flesh of your back. 

The combination of your fluids had soaked into the cloth of his trousers and dripped down your inner thighs; each time you imagined the lewd scene the two of you had created, a new spread of heat would travel across your chest, neck, and face.

Baelor’s wide, calloused hands slid up your body, not stopping their upwards voyage until they cupped your breasts.

“Have you thought of a name?” 

You nodded in reply, fingers threading through the soft hair near his nape, “But, it’s a secret.”

He playfully nipped at the flesh of your earlobe, “Is it now?” his arms returned to their embrace around your torso, holding you firmly to him and the warmth he provided.

“Yes,” you sighed, tightening around him until he let out a quiet groan, “one that you will only learn when we are expecting.”

“Then,” Baelor began, moving his hands to support the underneath of your thighs as he rose from his seat, holding you wide open and split apart on the girth of his shaft, “I should make certain that you are with child after tonight.”

“I suppose you should,” was your cheeky response, a teasing grin etched into your face. 

your husband only grumbled, rough hands trying to stop you from revealing more skin. still, you were determined, swatting every attempt away with a disgruntled sound, making maekar even more annoyed.

"have you no shame at all, woman?" he grouched, face pinched in irritation as you lifted the tunic until it pooled under his armpits, revealing his chest and belly in all its glory. "disrobing me and pawing at my flesh like i'm nothing but a toy to be played with when i'm exhausted from the bloody fucking—"

but you were barely listening to what your husband was saying, and frankly, in that moment, you had no qualms about paying mind to what came out of his mouth. all you cared about was how good he looked in that moment, leaning back against the pillows of your bed, still sweaty and dirty from the royal hunt he attended, looking every inch a man. all muscle and sinew and gods, the smatterings of fine silver hairs all over his chest and belly, and all the way lower on his navel, where a white trail of hair led right beneath the waistband of his breeches, to his cock.

you almost sighed thinking of it. you loved your husband's cock. it was one of the best things about him.

"you're exhausted," you parroted, humming as your soft hands continued to caress his stomach, pressing your fingers in, kneading at the skin like a cat, leisurely and appreciative, eliciting a displeased groan from your husband. "so sit back and indulge me for a few moments, dear husband."

maekar only scowled at you, the furrow between his brows deepening, lip curling in a snarl as he leaned forward, trying to loom, to intimidate in hopes you would cease pestering him. "don't dear husband me, you aggravating woman," he gritted, teeth barred, akin to a dragon before it unlatched its jaws to breathe fire and ash in anger. it made you warm under your chemise. you loved when your husband was all snappy and indignant.

you leaned forward, undeterred by his little intimidation tactic, noses almost brushing as you spoke, your tone soft and persuasive, as if beckoning a wild animal that might bite. "you were gone for so long, and i have been here, all alone, missing you like a limb," you lamented, distracting him from the way your fingers trailed along the waistband of his breeches now, prodding at the pudgy roll of fat there, loving the soft feel of it. "the least you could do is yield to my whims for a while."

aware that it wouldn't be enough to placate your husband, you leaned in, pressing your lips to his scarred cheek, leaving chaste, sweet kisses on the skin as you murmured. "you always look so good after a hunt, husband," you appeased, relentless in your pursuit of what you wanted, especially when it was something as delicious as touching maekar freely without him grumbling in your ear incessantly. "makes me want to devour you whole," your tone was on the precipe of resembling a purr, lips descending towards the strong line of his jaw and down his neck, nuzzling at the sweaty skin in delight.

as always, he tried to persist, even as you felt his skin warm and flush under your lips, making your mouth curl into a satisfied smile. you had him exactly where you wanted him, even if he was still resisting.

"you're being ridiculous," and oh, he was already panting softly, broad chest heaving along with the warm breaths that brushed your temple as you littered his ruddy-skinned throat in wet kisses. "pouncing on me like a cat in heat the second, ah—fuck," he cursed right when your tongue laved at his skin, tasting the remnants of the hunt. the sweat, the grime, the dirt—him, musky and manly and oh so palatable. “stop. i reek of filth and—”

“and i love it,” you moaned against his throat, mouth parting to press open—mouthed kisses to the skin of his throat, tongue licking at every remnant of perspiration, catching it against your palate and savoring it like the finest arbor gold. “you smell s’ good, husband, gods. i want to lick you all over.”

it always got like this. the more disheveled he returned, the more aroused you got. shame had deserted you moons ago, being absurdly vocal about how much you enjoyed when your husband was anything but presentable and pristine.

maekar made an aborted sound at your words, already flushed all the way to the tip of his ears, one rough hand moving to clasp the back of your nape and squeeze in hopes of deterring your assault on his senses, but it seemed in vain. the touch only spurred you, a soft sound resembling a purr rumbling against his throat as you continued to press your tongue to his skin, dipping it to taste the touch of grime gathered in the hollow of his throat.

“filthy,” maekar snarled, fingers squeezing just so at your nape and pulling upwards, eliciting a disgruntled sound from you; a whine. your lips were slick with spit, cheeks flushed and eyes blown wide, hazy with heat and adoration, which only made the pressure of his hand increase, reprimanding you for how far gone you already looked. “you’re a filthy, dirty woman, you know that?” he spat, tone brooking on a growl. “always have been,” maekar continued, tightening his hold onto your nape, the pads of his fingers restricting your breath for just a moment, just enough to make you gasp, before he eased it. “getting hot and bothered by your soiled husband like a degenerate,” his thumb brushed against your throat, where he gripped prior, the closest thing to quiet tenderness you could get in that moment, but it made warmth spread through you regardless.

“what of it?” you challenged, dipping your head back to his throat, nosing along the flushed skin, your soft fingers resuming their pawing along his belly, pressing and prodding at the pudgy flesh there, nails scraping along the trail of fine hairs leading below his waistband, making your husband hiss. “it’s your smell i crave, your taste,—” another filthy lick, along the jut of his collarbones, before moving downwards towards his chest, where the smattering of hair was thicker, the smell of sweat and musk more pungent.

maekar tensed as soon as he felt your lips brush against one of his pecs, and you could feel the shiver that ran through him when the tip of your nose nudged a nipple, willing it to harden.

“don’t you fucking dare—”

you did it again, nosing at the pebbling bud once, twice. then, you licked it, slow and wet, circling the nipple with the tip of your tongue, flicking teasingly.

a garbled moan punched out of maekar’s chest, his hold on your nape tightening anew, his other hand fisting the sheets under him, white—knuckled and trembling with restraint. you could tell he wanted to shove you away, to haul you as far as possible from his body so he wouldn’t be able to feel all this, to have to succumb to your whims and depravity. but you also knew he liked it. craved your attention like poison in his veins. hated that he needed it. snarled and snapped his jaws while being half—hard already beneath his breeches, blushing from the tips of his ears to where your mouth was currently busied, lips parting to suckle noisily at his nipple, drawing out another restrained, delicious grunt from your husband.

“look at you,” he managed to bite out through gritted teeth, broad chest heaving under your mouth, voice thinner, breathier. “licking and sucking like a common whore,—”

but you didn’t let him finish, letting your teeth scrape against the bud, nipping at it enough to sting, halting his crude words, making him curse, back arching, pushing his chest more into your awaiting mouth. it was a reprimand, but also a sick, twisted pleasure. seeing your husband bucking and snarling under your lips and tongue was a sight you could never get tired of, much like right now, as you laved one last lick to his wet, swollen nipple, before nosing between his pecs through the fine hairs there, inhaling the scent of him like a woman possessed.

“how would you know what common whores do, mhm, husband?” you murmured, nuzzling along the underside of his pecs, letting your lips press against the skin in damp kisses as you descended towards his stomach, fingers still trailing along the hairs leading towards his navel. “have you been indulging without my knowledge?”

each question was a taunt, like dangling a hunk of meat under a dragon’s nose, waiting for it to bite. and you loved nothing more than to taunt your dragon until he bit, until you could feel his teeth sink in, metaphorically or not.

and he always bit.

“you think i would debase myself with some pleasure house wench?” he snarled, violet eyes glinting with something close to offense, which made you preen quietly, warmth spreading through your chest like drizzled honey.

as you nosed along his stomach, you couldn’t help but breathe him in again, mouth parting in soft pants as your eyes fluttered, the musk of him stronger the closer you got to the V—shape of his hips. “i would hope you wouldn’t, dear husband,” you mouthed along his belly, tongue poking out to lick at the skin, tasting him again. “i would be thoroughly scorned if you so dared,” another lap of your tongue, slow and filthy, this time along the trail of hair near the waistband of his breeches, feeling a slight tickle onto your palate.

but, gods, the scent. the taste of him.

musky and sweaty and man.

it drove you wild, lips pressing to that tempting silver line, open-mouthed and slow, savoring him on your tongue again and again, as if you couldn’t get enough.

a groan slipped unbidden from maekar’s mouth, fingers tightening at your nape, as if remembering he still had a hold on you, blunt nails biting at the skin light enough to make you shiver as he pressed with firmness, as if scruffing a cat. “don’t need some perfumed, wanton wench when i have my hands full with you,” he panted, eyes trained on you, almost unblinking, having watched you the entire time, despite his protests. lavender hues half—lidded, glinting, part anger, part heat, eyeing you like a predator stalking prey.

his words made you purr against his skin, a satisfied sound, your fingers moving to tug slightly at his waistband, revealing more of his navel to you to lick and kiss. “good,” you murmured into his skin, dipping to nose at the cincture of his pants, and lower, nuzzling against his crotch, where you could feel him hard and throbbing already.

“woman, you—” but his protest dissolved into a shuddering moan as you rubbed your cheek against his clothed cock insistently, eyes fluttering, gaze holding his, molten and smoldering with heated affection. the friction was delicious, and it only made more bitten off pleasured sounds fall from his lips, broad chest heaving, splotched red from how hard he was blushing, skin ruddy and flushed. he looked good enough to eat. and maybe later, you intended to do just that.

the scent of him was strongest there, musk so strong it made you dizzy with want, lips parting to mouth at his crotch, feeling his cock throb beneath the cloth, only spurring you on. “smell s’ good,” you mumbled as you continued to map the hard ridge of his arousal with your mouth, tongue laving at the material, wetting it with your spit, making the outline of his cock even more visible. “taste s’ good, husband.”

“gods, fuck—” came from above you, the grip at your nape firming, pressing down, almost smushing your face into his crotch, but you couldn’t be happier to succumb to maekar’s guidance, feeling his hips twitch upwards, rutting weakly against your face.

it made you moan, the action so debauched, so depraved, making you nose along his clothed cock in time with the clumsy grinding of his hips against your face, the scent of him thickening, clogging your senses and coating the back of your throat from how greedily you inhaled.

“c—can’t believe you’re, shit—” he could barely get his words out, too impaired by the way you looked, the blissful look on your face as he humped against it. “can’t believe you’re getting off on this, you wanton woman,” maekar continued, his hips picking up the pace, forcing you slightly more against his clothed cock, grinding against your cheek, the corner of your mouth, your nose; anything he could, the pleasure tingling down his spine way too rapid for his taste. “mouthing at me like a filthy animal, letting me hump—fuck.”

you could tell he was getting close, the thought satisfying you more than you could tell. seeing your husband so unraveled by this alone, hips grinding against your face, hand holding you down for more delicious friction, chasing more but not being able to get it. a delicious torture that was way too exquisite not to witness.

“mhm,” you hummed against his crotch, rubbing your cheek harder against his clothed cock, feeling it throb incessantly, the smell of him more pungent, the precum leaking steadily through his breeches and staining your cheek. “not my fault my husband left me unattended for so long,” you lamented, fluttering your lashes, continuing to rub against him. “i’ve been so lonely,” the words were mouthed against him, breath warm against his crotch, pushing him closer and closer to the edge.

“always so fuckin’ demanding,” he groaned, long and suffering, humping against your face with more fervor, so close to his peak, face and throat flushed and splotchy, hand firm against your nape as he pushed your face deeper into his crotch. “n—never satisfied, ah, fuck, fuck, wife—,”

wife. the word strained and close to a whine as he lost control, rutting against your plush cheek once, twice, before he came with a pained groan, as if someone clawed the sound from deep in his chest, his spent dirtying his breeches, wetting the fabric against your cheek.

his chest was heaving, mouth parted wide as he tried to catch his breath, his grip still firm, but trembling against your nape, his thumb now brushing along the side of your throat, just like before, as if rewarding you silently, thanking you for letting him use you like this.

it made you smile and you nuzzled into his now damp crotch, the smell of him more powerful than ever, making you moan against the cloth. the sound seemed to bring maekar back from his post coital bliss, his violet eyes blinking down at you, hazy but attentive.

“lick it,” he breathed out, voice strained and heaving still, the fingers at your nape guiding you towards where his cum stained his breeches most, a wet patch visible where the head of his now softening cock was under the cloth. “can’t let good spend go to waste, wife.”

you only hesitated for a heartbeat, mind not wrapping around his words for a moment, before you moaned, mouth parting eagerly, tongue pressing to the damp material and licking, feeling the taste of him invade your palette. “yes, yes,” you sighed, overly pleased, too preoccupied and greedy, lips wrapping around the wet spot and suckling it into your mouth, the essence exploding onto your tongue.

“fucking filthy woman—,” maekar cursed, the sight of his wife, so desperate and eager, making him equal parts flustered and astounded.

you knew the night was going to be a long one when you felt a twitch under your tongue, your husband’s cock throbbing back to life, making your lips curl.

Nor had she met any adult princesses who might be able to teach her how to bear this burden as of yet. Both King Daeron and Prince Baelor had been widowers for a long time, therefore leaving the realm without a queen for many years to come. She knew two of Valarr's uncles still roamed the castle, and that they were both wed, but she had not yet met either of them. Their carefully hidden absence at both the wedding and the feast had not escaped her notice, though she had not dared to ask Valarr for the reason. Servants and nobles alike often whispered harsh words about both of the princes in the halls, so she knew better than to address such a sensitive topic on a night like tonight.

She was pulled from her thoughts when Valarr stopped in front of the doors to his bedchambers. He had a timid smile on his face, though it did not seem to reach his eyes. She briefly wondered why, before realizing he must be nervous as well. He had admitted as much to her, though she had presumed that had more to do with the prospect of the marriage as a whole, and not necessarily the bedding. Perhaps he was inexperienced as well, though surely he knew more than her about their marital duties. She still had no clue about what exactly it was that was awaiting her in his bedchambers. She understood it was not likely to be a pleasant experience, going off of her sisters' overly vague stories, but she doubted Valarr would ever be cruel to her. Whatever was going to happen, he would surely do it with as much kindness and compassion as possible.

He briefly glanced at her face, his expression unreadable, before he opened the doors. He gestured with his hand for her to enter before him, and she walked in with awe clear on her face.

Where her old chambers had been filled with her house colors, these were covered in her own favorite color instead. Tapestries filled the walls here as well, though these were less in the Targaryen style and more in the style of her own home. They had entered into the solar first, though she could see the bedroom through a large door to her right. A large fireplace, already lit, bathed the the comfortable-looking sofa and chairs in front of it in soft yellow light. Bookcases that nearly reached the ceiling stood on the opposite side of the room, as well as a large desk that was already decorated with the keepsakes she had brought with her from home. To her left she saw a peek of the bath and dressing room. She took a couple steps to see into the bedroom, where a large canopied bed stood against the opposite side of the room. Valarr followed closely behind her, a soft smile on his face at her wonder. A sizeable vanity stood near the large windows on the other side of the room, and the mirror above it softly reflected the moonlight, bathing the room in silver light.

"These chambers used to be my late mother's. I took the liberty to fill the shelves with some books I thought you might enjoy. I also asked your father to bring some of his own tapestries, to make you feel at home. I hope you like it."

She took a moment to take in the sight before her, and what it meant. It was stunning, and a tender act of love that she did not feel she deserved. And yet, were they not supposed to go to his chambers on this night? Why was he showing her this now?

"T-thank you. It's absolutely perfect," she stuttered out. She quickly turned to him, wrapping her arms around his neck, pulling him into a hug. He seemed shocked by it at first, but he recovered quickly, wrapping his strong arms around her waist, keeping her close.

"You're very welcome, my love," he murmured into her hair.

Her face was buried into his chest now, and she never wanted him to let her go. He smelled of everything she loved: the smell of fresh ink on paper, old books, a lit fireplace, the gardens in the spring. She did not think she could ever get enough of it. She closed her eyes as she took his presence in.

All too quickly, however, he gently untangled his arms from her. He took a careful step back, his warm gaze returning to the unreadable expression from earlier. He quickly cleared his throat, his eyes avoided her gaze. He took a couple steps out of the bedroom, to her confusion, and towards the exit of her chambers.

"Well, I shall leave you here. My chambers are just across the hall, and one of the Kingsguards shall guard your rooms at all times. Should you need anything, you need only ask them. Have a good night, my love."

It took her a second to process his words, not understanding them in the least. He had already turned his back on her and approached the door before she found the words to respond, quickly following after him.

"W-what? I-, I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand. So you shall spend the night in your own chambers?"

He reluctantly turned back to her, and she could see on his face that he had hoped, in vain, that she would not argue with him.

"Yes," he simply replied. His tone was painfully neutral, lacking all the warmth he had shown her before.

"It is our wedding night. Are we not meant to spend this night together?" She asked, her face clearly showing how puzzled she was by his sudden change in behavior. "My septa said that is what happens on a wedding night."

"Gevie, please, it is late. I think we should both get some sleep."

Dread was starting to pool in her stomach. Did he no longer want her? Perhaps he was starting to regret his decision to marry her. While she did not know exactly what was supposed to happen during the bedding, she knew one was not truly married if it had not been performed. She was suddenly reminded of a rumor she had heard around the Keep this last week. Valarr's uncle, Prince Aerys, had supposedly never consummated his marriage with his wife, the lady Aelinor Penrose. This failure to perform their duty would allow him to cast her aside one day, if he had cause to do so. Tears formed in her eyes at the thought. Is that what he intended to do with her? Wait until the excitement of the wedding had calmed down, only to then cast her aside?

"No, Valarr. We are supposed… We are married. Are we not supposed to do what married people do?" She could hear the desperation in her own voice as she felt a tear slip down her cheek. Gods, she had never wished to know what the bedding entailed as much as now.

Valarr clenched his jaw at her words. His stance had turned rigid and his expression was still unreadable. He had never once seemed eager to leave her presence until now.

"Have I done something wrong?" Her voice cracked, but she could not get herself to care. "If I have, please, please tell me. Whatever it is, I am truly sorry."

Those words made his nonchalant facade crack. She could see the hurt in his eyes, before he cast his eyes to the floor as he quietly spoke.

"You have nothing to be sorry for, my love. I just… I…"

"Then what is it?" She bowed her head in an attempt to make him meet her gaze. "Whatever it is, you know you can tell me, right?"

He clenched his jaw again, and he finally met her eyes, though he seemed almost angry now.

"Are you demanding I perform my marital duty to you?" He said harshly.

"What? No!" She replied quickly, another tear falling down her face as she took a step towards him in desperation. He did not let her approach, however, and quickly took another step back. "I-I am not demanding anything. I just…" She was truly lost for words now, and he took that as his opportunity to turn his back on her again, his face a blank canvas.

"I am truly sorry if I have hurt your feelings, but I promise you that this is for the best. I do not wish to hurt you further. We shall speak of this another time. Have a good night."

He took another step towards the door. Her anguish turned to exasperation now, and she quickly walked towards him, not allowing him to reach the door. She stood in his way, forcing him to meet her eyes.

"Valarr… Is this how our marriage is to be? Both of us living in separate chambers, never…"

Doing our duty, like your uncle Aerys, she thought, though she did not say it.

He took a deep breath, his mismatched eyes gazing at her tear-stained face with a painful expression on his face. His eyes had become damp as well, eyebrows knit as he looked at the pain he had caused his beloved.

"For now, yes," he said gently.

"Why?" She whispered, her gaze pleading. She did not wish anything of him except to understand. Why is this what he wanted, and why did he claim it was 'for the best'? She had felt out of her depth her entire time at court, but this was the thing that had confused her the most. Is this truly how their married life was going to start?

"I thought it… it would be easier." He muttered, anguish visible on his face now.

"For whom?" She quickly resorted. It would certainly not make her life at court easier, she knew that much. Nothing could hurt the precious Young Prince's reputation, of course, but she did not wish to end up as all the other ladies who had been easily disregarded by their husbands. Nobody would ever respect or forgive her if she failed at her duties in this manner. Even the eternal scorn she would have faced, had she actually successfully fled the Red Keep would have likely been better.

"What?" He said, confused.

"Easier for whom? You or me?"

The annoyance became visible on his face again, and he turned his face away from her.

"I will not be debating this with you tonight," he said, his tone final.

"This is not a debate, Valarr, I merely want to understand. You need to tell me–" She replied, exasperation evident in her voice.

"I do not need to do anything. I have decided! I am your prince!" He suddenly shouted out, his face turning red in anger.

She had never heard him raise his voice to anybody, let alone her. It immediately silenced her. She looked at him in disbelief, before she quickly managed to put a guarded look on her face. She took several steps back, folding her hands in front of her, as if to shield herself from his hurtful words.

It was evident that he immediately regretted his words, but she no longer cared. He put his hands up as if in surrender, trying to take a step towards her. This time, she was the one to take a step back from him. She put one hand up, a gesture for him to remain silent.

"My mistake. I thought you were 'just Valarr'. Pray forgive me, Your Grace."

His face crumbled at her cold words, a silent tear streaming down his face.

"Gevie–."

"I think it is best you retire to your bedchambers now, Your Grace, as you said."

He attempted to step towards her again, but she continued the cruel dance, stepping further back. His eyes begged for her to stop, but her face had gone carefully blank, her stare distant.

"My love… I promise you, this is what is best for both of us."

"Of course, Your Grace. Whatever you wish," She turned her back to him as she said, "Now, I kindly ask you to leave my chambers."

Her voice and eyes had lost all of its warmth. Where she had once thought him to be different from all of her previous suitors, he had quickly proven that his kindness was nothing more than a pretense to trick her into marrying him. For what purpose, if he did not intend to bed her, she did not know yet, but she supposed she never truly knew him at all.

Valarr seemed lost for words. He looked at her for a while, realizing she was being sincere. She no longer wanted him near her, as she always had before. He swallowed the lump in his throat before abruptly turning away from her, towards the door.

He did not look back before he softly closed the door behind him, but he did not have the courage to move from his spot for quite a while, either. He could feel the inquisitive gaze of Ser Roland Crakehall as he stood there, but he did not care to explain himself to the knight. When he suddenly heard her quiet cries come through the solid wooden door, however, he made haste across the hall and quickly entered his own chambers.

Gods, he was such an fool. He had only ever wanted to make sure she was safe, that she would never feel any pain, and yet he had been the only one to cause it. He hadn't expected her to react so strongly, as he would expect most women to be relieved that they were spared a bedding. Instead, his beloved had only seen it as an insult.

He had let his anger, his fears and his own insecurities get the best of him, and now he had hurt the very person he was meant to protect from harm.

He had watched his own mother perish in the birthing bed, and he had no intention of inflicting that on his love. He knew it was inevitable for him to eventually need heirs, but he could not bear to put her at risk. Not when he just got her. He wished to enjoy her presence for many more years to come. Now, he might have lost her now regardless, just in a different way.

He had believed she would understand that risk and the fear that came with pregnancy, but it seemed to him she hadn't considered it in that way. Perhaps she thought it was her duty and she did not believe she had a choice in the matter, simply facing her fate with her head held high. Well, he did have a choice, and he was not going to lose her.

He only wished he had not hurt her in the process. He had yelled at his wife, something he swore he would never do. If he had failed to be a good husband after less than a day, what does that say of his prospects as king? How could he be a just ruler if he could not even do right by his own wife? A true dragon for the first time, he mused to himself bitterly, burning down everything in its path.

In an attempt to distract himself, Valarr decided to busy himself with making his bed seem like it had witnessed a true bedding. He cut his own arm to bloody his sheets, watching the crimson stains spread out on the sheets. The blade hurt much less than seeing the heartbroken look on his beloved's face, he thought bitterly.

That night, the newlyweds both cried themselves to sleep, each wanting nothing more than to be by the other's side.

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aerion goes rigid. because this is the one thing he has never, ever given anyone.

he'd rather bleed. he'd rather bite through his own tongue. and you're not asking for it sweetly across a pillow. no, you're demanding it while his cock is inside you and his brain is soup and every single defence he has ever built is in ruins around him and there's nowhere left to hide.

his jaw works under your grip. grinds. his eyes are wet and furious all at once. you don't let go. you roll your hips, slow and devastating, and tighten your fingers on his chin and say it again, harder. say it.

and the sound that comes out of him is barely human. scraped from somewhere behind his sternum, dragged out of him like you're reaching into his chest and pulling. i love you. rough, wrecked, pure fury. like it's being stolen, like you're taking something he swore he'd die before giving.

again.

i love you. louder, raw, his hips stuttering up into you because his body has outrun his pride entirely. he can't separate the pleasure from the confession anymore. it's all one thing. you've made it all one thing.

again.

and by the third time he's not fighting it. i love you, i love you, fuck, i love you. it's all pouring out of him messy and broken, his eyes squeezed shut. his whole body shakes, and he comes like that. with your fingers on his jaw and the words still wet in his mouth. an expression on his face like you've flayed him open and found something tender underneath all that rot and held it up to the light.

afterward: silence. his chest heaving. his eyes fixed on the ceiling. the humiliation seeping in like cold water because he begged. aerion targaryen (who would rather swallow glass than be vulnerable) just told you he loves you three times in a row because you rode him stupid and demanded it with your hand on his face and he couldn't not.

the shame of it is a living thing in the room.

you trace his tattoo and don't mention it. he loves you so much for that mercy it makes him sick. he shoves your hand off his jaw and calls you a bitch with no heat in it whatsoever. you smile against his chest because you both know what just happened and neither of you can take it back.

he'll be meaner to you for days. more defensive, more sharp-edged, more cruel. and you'll let him, because you understand: he's not punishing you for hearing it. he's punishing himself for meaning it.

gdgw!valarr.

valarr is a different species because valarr has no shame about love. he says it freely. over coffee, against your hair, in texts from boardrooms. i love you is not a secret valarr keeps. it's his native language. so you can't weaponize the confession itself.

what you weaponize instead is the context.

because valarr overstimulated is valarr with his inner world in collapse.

the narration is gone. the composure, the eloquence, the precise controlled cadence he maintains even while he's inside you. all of it, dissolved.

you've been riding him slow and thorough. so well for long enough that the man who runs a company and speaks in complete paragraphs during sex has been reduced to breath and nerve endings and the wet, desperate sound he makes every time you grind your hips.

and he's looking up at you with awe. the brown eye is black. the blue one is swimming. the white streak is plastered to his temple with sweat and his cheekbones are flushed. his lips rest parted and he is, in this moment, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. because valarr is completely, perfectly unmade, and he isn't even trying to rebuild himself. he trusts you that much. he's given you this.

so you grab his chin.

and his breath hitches. audibly.

not in fear or in resistance, but in shock. because for ally our cold edges, you don't do this. you're the one who cups his face gently, who strokes his cheekbone, who pulls him in lovingly. grabbing his jaw, fingers pressing hard enough to dimple skin, forcing those glassy mismatched eyes to meet yours—that's a register of you he hasn't met before, and you can see the recognition move through him. the understanding that something has shifted.

tell me you love me.

low, with your teeth bared, a command from someone who expects to be obeyed, and you watch his whole body react to your voice like it's a physical thing. his cock twitches inside you, throbbing almost violently, his stomach muscles pulling tight. his hands shake where they grip your thighs.

i—I love you —

look at me. mean it.

and you grind down, slow, merciless, and hold his jaw tighter. and valarr who is always so articulate, who has a word for every shade of what he feels, makes a sound like a sob. overwhelm. because he means it so much and he's so deep in the pleasure, so deep in you. and you're demanding devotion from him like something enthroned. something consecrated, and he's never in his life been more willing to worship.

i love you, he rasps, and his voice splits clean down the middle. i love you, i love you—

again.

i love you, my love, I love you, please—

and the please is what undoes you both, int he end.

because he's not asking you to stop or to let him finish. he's asking you to keep going.

to keep demanding it. keep making him say it. he wants to live inside this moment where your hand is on his jaw and you're taking the words out of him one by one and each time he says it the pleasure crests higher. the two things become indistinguishable.

the love and the feeling of you, fused into one sensation he couldn't separate if he tried.

he comes saying your name. not my love, not sweet girl. your name. the real one. the one underneath the wolf and the Stark armour. and he holds your face in both shaking hands afterward and looks at you with devastated, tear-tracked, transparent wonder and says, quietly: you are the most terrifying woman alive.

He kisses your nape. Warm, reverent. Then again, lower, where your neck meets the curve of your shoulder, lingering, his lips parting against your skin like he means to leave something there.

His arm tightens until there's no space left between you at all. His knees fit into the hollows behind yours. He's wound so tight you can feel it even in the way Valarr holds you, a fine tremor running through him.

You don't say anything.

You let him have it. Let him hold you and breathe you in and press those quiet kisses into your skin. Because you understand, in the wordless animal way you understand most things about Valarr, that he needs this more than he needs you awake.

He needs to arrive. To come home in his body, not merely on his calendar. So you keep your breathing even and your eyes shut. You let him pour six days of want into the back of your neck in the dark.

His breathing slows. The tremor fades little by little. The last of the week leaves him in one long exhale, and somewhere in the warm dark before you both go under, his lips move against your nape one final time.

"My love," he whispers, like a man setting down something he'd been afraid to lose.

You sleep with his arm a dead weight across your waist and his mouth still buried in your hair.

You wake, hours later, before Valarr does.

The light is grey, the first thin wash of it through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the apartment quiet around you.

You've turned in the night. You're facing him now, the duvet pooled around your waist. Valarr sleeps on his back with one arm flung up across the pillows and the other still curled, even unconscious, toward the warm dent where you'd been.

You look at him.

You allow yourself this, in the rare grey hours when he doesn't know you're doing it: the luxury of looking at Valarr Targaryen without performance, without his mismatched eyes on you cataloguing every flicker of your reaction, without the game the two of you are always, on some level, playing.

You let your gaze move over him the way his moves over you when he thinks you aren't watching.

He's beautiful. An almost insulting quantity of it for one man to carry, the kind that made you think, the first time you watched him cross a room toward you, oh, that face is going to be a problem.

The dark hair ruined against the white pillow, falling across his forehead. The white streak at his temple that you know runs coarser to the touch than the rest of the floppy strands. The long sweep of his dark lashes. The pink mouth gone soft in sleep.

It is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing about Valarr, for what comes out of it.

Next comes the dips and lines of his trained, maintained body. Every inch of it claimed and tasted by you.

But this morning there's something else, too.

He didn't shave in Essos. Hasn't shaved, you'd guess, in four days (overrun, he'd said on FaceTime, drowning, back to back, I'll call again when I surface, love) and he never surfaced, never sent the usual photographs. The week swallowed him whole.

So the lower half of his face has darkened. A heavy shadow of stubble crowds along his jaw, his chin, above the bow of his lip, the clean architecture of him roughened and obscured, the boyish gloss sanded clean off.

It changes Valarr completely.

The golden dragon is gone.

The polished, attentive boy who brings you tea with honey and in his place is a dark jawline, a harder set of hollows beneath the cheekbones. A face with weight and shadow in it. The other Valarr. The silky dark one who slips loose when you fist your hands in his hair, when you growl low in your throat, when you push your fingers into his mouth and watch the brown eye go black. When you ask him to fuck you so hard you can't walk the next day.

The one you've spent three years coaxing into the light, luring up out of deep water inch by inch, nurturing the edge of him your father once glimpsed under all that shine and called the dragon, deep beneath. The one you love no less than the golden one. Perhaps more, in some senses, because he's the one Valarr lets no one else in the world see.

He looks, asleep with four days of stubble in the grey light, like the man who lives underneath the man.

You want to touch it.

So you do. You lift your hand and lay your palm flat against the side of Valarr's jaw, against the rough dark grain of him, and the texture catches and drags at your skin, coarse and entirely new under your fingers.

His eyes flutter open.

By degrees, unfocused at first, the blue one catching the light first. Then they find your face and sharpen. Valarr takes in your expression, whatever it is, whatever you didn't have the warning to school it into, and a deep, knowing pleasure unfurls across his features.

"Good morning, my love," he says, his voice wrecked from sleep, dropped half an octave and rough at every edge. "You're staring."

"I am."

"You like it." His mouth curves into something that isn't quite the golden boy's smile. He turns his face into your palm, drags the stubble across it deliberately, and watches you feel it. Takes in the small, involuntary thing your eyes do. "Tell me you like it."

You don't answer right away. You trace your thumb along the dark line of his jaw, learning the rasp of it. Valarr's eyes hood, his attention sharpening on you with the lazy, predatory patience that belongs to the other one.

"Don't shave," you tell him.

He laughs, low and delighted, the sound rumbling up out of his chest. "No?"

"No." You drag your thumb across his lower lip, feeling the place where smooth gives way to rough. "I want you like this."

"Like this," he repeats, tasting it. He catches your wrist, and turns his head to press his mouth to the heel of your hand. The stubble scrapes, his eyes never leaving yours. "Tell me what this is, then. Be specific. What is it you want, sweet girl?"

"You know what it is."

"I want to hear you say it out loud."

You hold his gaze. Neither of you blinks; you've never been the one to blink first, and he's learned not to expect it. "It's the other one," you say evenly. "The one you keep underneath. He's closer to the surface like this. I can see him from here."

An emotion moves through Valarr's face at that. The pleasure goes darker, banked-coal warm, the brown eye dropping a full shade, and his grip on your wrist tightens by a fraction that says he heard exactly what you meant.

"Then come and get him," he says huskily, and it isn't a request.

"I'm right here."

"Not close enough, my love. Nowhere near."

He's already drawing you in, his arm sliding around the small of your back, gathering you across the short distance until you're flush against the bare warm length of him under the duvet, every inch against every inch.

"Six days. Do you have the faintest idea what six days does to me?" Not a question. Valarr's mouth is already moving. Your temple, your cheekbone, the corner of your jaw, leaving that rough new abrasion wherever it lands. "I needed you in every room I walked into. Every meeting. Every dinner. I'd be mid-sentence, closing the deal I flew out there to close, and all I could think was your hands. The sound you make when I first—"

You kiss him quiet.

Valarr kisses you back like a man surfacing from underwater. Nothing careful in it, nothing of the I won't presume he gave you in year one. Just open and immediate and starving, his hand coming up to cradle the back of your skull and hold you exactly where he wants you.

And the stubble burns. It scrapes your mouth, your chin, the soft skin around your lips, raw and hot, and Valarr does it on purpose. You feel the intent in it. Feel him angle his jaw to grind the rough of it across your cheek, watching for your reaction even with his eyes half-shut and his mouth fused to yours. When you moan into the kiss, when the sting of him drags a low, helpless sound up out of your chest, you feel Valarr's mouth curve against yours in dark satisfaction.

"There it is," he murmurs. "I've missed that sound. I've been starving for it, sweet girl."

He does it again. Harder. Drags his jaw down the line of your neck, the burn blooming heat across your skin in a spreading wash, and you tip your head back and bare your throat to him and let him, your fingers driving up into his hair.

The sound Valarr makes against your throat is nothing like the boyish, contented murmurs you usually coax out of him in the half-dark. It's lower than that. It has teeth in it. It belongs to the other one.

"Missed your skin," he breathes into the hollow of your throat, mouthing at the pulse. "Missed the heat of you, my love. Missed every noise I can pull out of you once I stop being polite." His mouth travels down, the rasp of his jaw scoring a hot path to your collarbone and you arch into the sensation with a sigh. "I'm not doing this quickly. I've thought about it for a week. I've earned the long version."

"Val—"

"Six days," he says against your sternum, and keeps moving down, peeling off your linen sleeping shirt.

Valarr kisses the soft swell of each breast, dragging his rough jaw against the tender underside until you arch off the sheets and gasp. He works lower, open-mouthed and wet down the curve of your ribs, the trembling plane of your stomach.

He's leaving that scrape everywhere he's been so your whole body lights like a struck match, nerve by nerve. Valarr's hands settle on your hips and spread wide, thumbs hooking into the points of bone. He kisses one, then the other. Then rubs his stubbled jaw against the soft inner skin of each thigh, back and forth, watching your face the entire time. Until you're squirming under the weight of his hands, slick and aching, your breath frayed into ragged uneven pulls.

Then he settles between your legs and lifts those shadowed eyes to your face.

"Hands off the sheets," he say, low, certain, your golden Valarr momentarily away. He takes your wrists and sets your hands in his hair himself, deliberate, then flattens his palms over your hips and pins you to the mattress. "Hold on to me instead, sweet girl. I want to feel it when you come apart for me."

The first stroke of Valarr's tongue tears a sound out of him that's worse than yours.

A deep, broken, drowning groan against your core. The noise of a man tasting the only thing he's wanted for a week and finally being allowed to have it. He moans into you. He keeps moaning into you. The flat of his tongue, then the point of it, slipping between your folds, relearning you as though he's been kept from this for years and not days.

He's drunk on it, you can feel him going under, the careful man dismantled by the first taste of you, leaving only this: a starving creature with his face buried between your thighs, breathing you in like he can't remember how to do it any other way.

And he uses the stubble. The calculated contrast of his hot, soft mouth and the raw burn of his unshaven jaw against the most sensitive skin of your inner thighs. He sucks on the nub, pressing his cheek against the crease of you, pleasure and sting braiding into something so acute you cry out and your fists clench in his hair.

He won't let your hips move. Every time you try to chase more friction, Valarr presses you flat down, holding you precisely where he wants you, making you take it at the pace he's decided on. His eyes stay on your face through all of it: fevered, drowned-dark, drinking down every helpless thing it does.

"Valarr—"

He hums against you, low and ragged, the vibration bowing your spine off the bed. "I know," he slurs, kissing the swollen folds gently. He sounds raspy, half-pained "I know, sweet girl. God, I know. Let me—just let me have you. I need you."

And then he goes deeper into you. You feel him slip the last of his composure like a coat dropped to the floor.

Whatever was left of the boy is gone; what surfaces is the dark thing he keeps buried, the worshipful animal at the bottom of him, and it doesn't kiss you so much as it adores you.

He noses against you, dragging his open mouth through you bottom to top. Valarr's tongue twists, slower now, then ravenous again, no rhythm any more, only hunger. There's nothing elegant about it now. It's wet, his tongue working you furiously, your arousal dripping into his awaiting mouth.

Valarr keeps making sounds against you, low and broken, sounds that aren't meant for you to hear, the unguarded noises of a man undone by what he's tasting.

"My love," he breathes against you, reverent, dazed. "The taste of you... I've been parched—"

And that's when you feel it: Valarr starting to rut down into the mattress beneath him, helpless, instinctive, grinding the aching length of himself against the sheets because the want has overrun him entirely.

Because eating you out has reduced him to something primal and shaking. He doesn't seem to know he's doing it. His hips move on their own, a slow, shameless grind he isn't aware of. His fingers dig harder into the flesh of your hips, and his whole body has gone fevered and greedy for more. Lost in the taste of you with four days of stubble searing your thighs and both pupils blown to black.

Valarr drags his mouth back just far enough to speak, chin slick, lips swollen like your cunt, eyes barely focused. "More. Give me more. Pull—pull my hair—please, I need to feel it—"

You fist both hands in his dark hair and you yank. Hard enough to sting.

Valarr groans—wrecked, grateful, half-feral, the sound vibrating straight through you and making you clench—and the pull snaps something loose at the core of him.

He drags you back against his mouth and goes after you with a renewed, ravenous greed, his jaw working, the stubble searing. Valarr's tongue turns relentless and exact, and the edge comes rushing up faster than you can brace for.

You tighten your fists until the dark strands strain through your fingers, and you arch off the bed. Your insides clench, coiling, and he takes you over the edge with his hands pinning you down and his mouth never once relenting.

You come apart with his name torn out of your throat and the rough burn of him branding the inside of your thighs, your whole body drawn taut as wire and then breaking. Valarr makes a sound against you that is purely starving, a deep desperate groan as the first wave of you hits his tongue, and he laps at you, parched, greedy, refusing to miss a single drop.

He licks you through it like a man drinking after days in a desert. His tongue working slow and devout against the slick of you, gathering every shudder, every pulse, every spill, drinking down every last thing your body gives him. He doesn't gentle, not really. Valarr worships, drunk and patient in his devotion. Kissing where he's been licking, licking where he's been kissing, refusing to let go of you until you're trembling and oversensitive, whispering his name and he's certain he's had all of it.

Only then does his mouth soften, turning gentle, pressing one final lingering kiss to the trembling inside of your thigh.

You lie there undone, your limbs still trembling, your hands still loosely tangled in his ruined hair, your chest heaving.

"Val," you whisper, when you find your voice.

He crawls back up the length of your body, and there's something dark and unhurried in the way he does it. Almost predatory. His mouth finds yours and you kiss him deeply, holding his face to you. A wet kiss, sloppy, finesse abandoned, you tasting yourself on his tongue, the stubble blazing against your already-tender lips, and neither of you cares in the slightest.

"You're going to be raw," Valarr murmurs against your mouth, sounding obscenely pleased about it. "Every time you feel it today you'll think of me, sweet girl."

"That's the idea," you tell him, and he makes a low sound and kisses you harder.

He's hot and solid above you. He's also, you note with a slow curl of satisfaction, still achingly hard. His length presses to the crease of your hip, untouched, ignored, leaking against your skin.

You reach down between your bodies and close your hand around him.

Valarr hisses sharply through his teeth, hips jerking into your grip.

You hum, low and pleased, and kiss the corner of his mouth tenderly, working him in a firm, unhurried stroke, feeling him pulse hot and heavy in your fist. "You missed me," you say against the rough line of his jaw. Not a question.

"Yes." Valarr's smooth voice is destroyed. He says it the way the dark one says everything—quiet, certain, more dark silk drawn taut than golden charm. "More than anything. More than is reasonable. More than I—" His breath catches and breaks as your hand twists at the wet head of him. "It was a sickness. The whole week. I'd have burned the deal to the ground to come home a day sooner if I could've found good enough excuse. I lay in that hotel every night and reached for you but you weren't there and it was... unbearable, love. You unmade me from an ocean away."

The admission lands somewhere low and bright in your chest, and you bare your teeth at it, pleased to your bones. You roll him.

You roll Valarr onto his back beneath you in one clean motion, legs wrapped around him, and Valarr blinks up at you, startled. For half a heartbeat the golden boy surfaces, the reflexive courtesy, the you've only just—

"Love," he starts, his hand finding your hips. "You don't have to, you just came apart, you—"

"Quiet."

You set your mouth to his throat.

You kiss down the strong column of his neck, dragging your lips over the jumping pulse, and Valarr's protest dies unspoken in his chest. You press your mouth to the curve of his jaw, the hollow under his ear, the spot beneath his jaw that never fails to undo him.

"Val," you say against his throat, and you let him hear the raw need in your voice. "I missed you too. Every night. I kept turning over to feel for you and you weren't there. The bed was wrong and the room was wrong and I was wrong without you." You kiss the corner of his jaw. "Do you understand me? I missed you the entire week."

Valarr groans deep in his chest, a wrecked thing, and his arms come up around you immediately. Both of them, urgent, gathering you in.

He's trying to pull you flush against him, trying to fold you in close, his hand splaying wide between your shoulder blades like he means to crush you to his chest and hold you there. The dark Valarr has gone vulnerable in an instant. The hunger has folded itself around something softer.

He wants to bury his face in your hair and breathe you in and stay like that, just hold you, just have you against him, the way he held you when he first slid into bed last night.

You feel him try to pull you up.

You stop him.

You set your palm flat to his sternum and you press him back to the mattress, kissing his pulse one more time. Then you start moving down.

"Sweet girl—" his voice cracks. "Love, come up—come back up here, let me hold you, that's all I want, just let me hold you—"

"Not yet."

"I don't need anything else, I swear, I only want you in my arms—"

"I know, pretty thing." You kiss the centre of his chest. "And you'll have that. After."

You move lower. The sharp line of his collarbone, then lower still, your mouth finding one flat, pink nipple and closing over it. His hand fists in your hair, no longer pushing you off, holding you to him now, his breath gone short and uneven.

"Sweet girl, please, I'm fine, I don't need—"

"Val." You lift your head just enough to meet his eyes. The blue one is glassy. The brown one is gone black. "I want to taste you too. I've been waiting six days. Let me have my turn."

The sound Valarr makes at that is wrecked. His head drops back against the pillow. His hand stays buried in your hair, holding tight.

"Fuck," he breathes at the ceiling. "Yes. Yes... anything. Yes."

You drag your open mouth down the centre of his chest, his stomach, feeling each band of lean muscle leap and tense beneath your lips. The sharp catch of his inhale, the way Valarr's whole body has drawn taut and trembling and waiting under you.

"There he is," you murmur, pleased, against his skin, giving him his own words back. "Closer to the surface now, isn't he?"

A broken sound is your response, his hand tightening in your hair.

You reach the jut of one hip bone and press your lips there. Then the other, kissing each one in turn, letting your teeth graze the bone, and you feel his stomach hollow out on a sharp indrawn breath, his fingers trembling against your scalp.

"Sweet girl," he rasps again, and there's no refusal left anywhere in it.

It's a plea, low and dark, the golden one and the silken one finally collapsed into a single, helpless want.

"Tell me what you want."

Not an opening to negotiation. Baelor asked the way he did everything — with the full weight of his attention, those mismatched eyes on your face in the candlelight, his hands resting on your waist with the deliberate stillness of a man who had decided to be patient about this and meant it.

"You know what I want," you said.

"I want to hear you say it." His thumb tracing a slow circle at your hip. "All of it. Clearly."

You held his gaze. The particular quality of him in this register — the soft authority of it, the composure present but carrying heat underneath, the patience that was also its own kind of pressure — did something immediate to your ability to be composed about any of this.

You told him. Clearly. All of it.

He listened without interrupting, which was somehow more devastating than any response would have been. When you finished he was quiet for a moment, those eyes doing their reading of your face.

"And if you want to stop," he said.

"I'll say silver."

"And I will stop immediately."

"I know you will."

He looked at you for another moment. Something in his expression — the private warmth of him, the specific quality that had no diplomatic function — settled into something more focused. More certain.

"Lie down," he said. "On your back."

He took his time with the silk.

Three pieces — he had them ready, which told you something about how long he had been thinking about this, the particular planning of Baelor evident in the way he shook each one out with unhurried hands. Deep blue, thin enough to be soft against skin, long enough to give him what he needed.

He tied your right wrist to the bedpost first. Not tight — enough to hold, enough to give the restraint meaning, but with the careful precision of a man who had thought about the difference between symbolic and damaging and had strong opinions on the subject. He ran his thumb under the silk after he knotted it, checking the space, checking your face.

"Alright?"

"Yes."

The left wrist. The same care. The same check. You pulled lightly against both and felt the silk hold and felt something in your chest loosen into something warm and specific.

He picked up the third piece.

"Last chance to tell me no," he said.

"Baelor."

"Humour me."

"I do not want to tell you no."

He folded the silk carefully — his hands moving with the attention he gave everything — and came to sit beside you on the bed, and his hands found your face with a gentleness entirely at odds with what was coming, and he pressed his lips to your forehead before he covered your eyes.

The world went dark.

The silk was smooth and warm and smelled faintly of cedar and the specific quality of not being able to see him — of hearing his breathing and feeling his weight on the mattress and knowing he was looking at you without being able to look back — hit you somewhere immediately and thoroughly.

His hands moved to your shoulders. Traced down your arms. Checking, still, the quality of attention he gave this no different from the quality of attention he gave everything — the full and undivided weight of it, now that you couldn't see it, somehow more present than ever.

"Good?" he said quietly.

"Very," you said. Your voice had already changed register.

You heard something that might have been him almost smiling.

Then his hands moved, and the patience ended.

He started with his mouth.

Your throat, your collarbone, the curve of your breasts — working with the thoroughness that was specific to him, the unhurried mapping of a man who intended to know every response before he did anything requiring a response. The blindfold made it worse, or better, the not-seeing meaning every point of contact arrived without warning, his mouth finding places that made you pull against the silk and make sounds you had not prepared.

His hand moved to your breast. Cupped it. His thumb across the nipple, once, twice, feeling your back arch toward him.

Then he drew back his hand and brought it down.

Not hard. Precise. The sharp crack of it and the specific bright sting and the sound you made was immediate and bypassed every managed layer — and his hand returned immediately, palm flat and warm, soothing the sting with a pressure that was almost worse than the hit.

"Again?" he said. Conversational.

"Yes."

Again. The same precision. The same immediate soothing. Your hands pulling at the silk not to escape but because you needed to do something with them and had nothing, and the restraint of it was its own specific thing, the helplessness of being held open to whatever he decided to do next.

He moved lower.

His fingers found you without preamble and the sound he made at what he found there was low and immediate — a sound of satisfaction, of a man whose assessment has confirmed something he already suspected.

"Already wet, my heart?" he observed. Not quite a question in its entirety.

You said something that was not technically a word.

"Good," he said, and his fingers began to move.

Two fingers. The particular certainty of Baelor when he had decided on an objective — not building, not testing, going directly to the places he had mapped on other nights and knew with absolute confidence. Curling, pressing, finding the rhythm that made your hips lift toward his hand. His thumb on your clit. Working both simultaneously with the focused attention that was always him, always this, even now.

You came apart relatively quickly. Ten days of context. The blindfold. The silk at your wrists. The specific quality of Baelor's fingers when they were doing this without patience — and the sound you made when you came resonated off the walls and you felt him still his hand and work you through every tremor before he drew back.

A moment.

Then his hand came down on your cunt.

The sound you made was not dignified. The sting of it, sharp and immediate, the specific vulnerability of the target — and his hand returned, palm pressed flat, the heel of it grinding against your clit before he pulled back again.

"Baelor—"

"I have you," he said. Calm. Certain.

Again. The crack and the sting and the immediate warm pressure of his palm. Your back arching off the bed, your wrists pulling against the silk, the whole of you responding in a way that had no composure left in it.

"Good?" he said.

"More," you moaned

His fingers returned. Three this time — the stretch of it immediate and significant, a sound leaving you that was half complaint and entirely not, your body adjusting, accommodating, the fullness of three fingers and his thumb on your clit building something considerably less patient than the first.

He worked you with the thoroughness of a man who had been given a task and intended to complete it to his own exacting standards. Not varying, not teasing — the relentless focused rhythm of Baelor when his patience had been replaced by intent, hitting the same place with the same pressure with the same consistency until the thing coiling in you had nowhere to go except where he was directing it.

You came harder the second time. The silk biting into your wrists as you pulled against it, his name leaving your mouth in pieces, his fingers not stopping — working you through it, past it, into the oversensitised shaking aftermath without pause.

"Stop— Baelor— please—"

"One more," he said pleasantly.

"I can't—"

"You can." His fingers still moving, slower now, gentler, but not stopping. "I know you can. I will not stop until you give me another one."

The sound you made at that was not a protest. Not entirely.

He brought his hand down again — the breast this time, then the other, then once more on your cunt with the precision that suggested he had been thinking carefully about sequencing — and the combination of his fingers inside you and the sting and his thumb on your clit built something that had no architecture, no careful approach, just the blunt overwhelming accumulation of everything at once.

The third orgasm was less structured than the others. It arrived with less warning and more force, your whole body pulling against the silk, Baelor's name completely unraveled in your mouth, and he worked you through every second of it with his fingers and his thumb and the steady certain presence of him until you were shaking and entirely speechless and had nothing left that resembled composure.

His fingers slipped free. His hand stilled.

The room was very quiet except for your breathing.

Then his hands found the blindfold.

He removed it slowly. Gave you a moment to adjust to the candlelight, to find his face — and when you did, the expression on it was something that went directly through the post-orgasm haze and landed somewhere warm and immediate. The careful attention of him, the mismatched eyes dark and fixed on your face with an intensity that had not diminished, the slight flush of him, the specific quality of Baelor very thoroughly undone and very thoroughly in control simultaneously.

He looked at you for a moment.

Then his eyes moved down.

The sound he made was involuntary and immediate.

"Gods," he said. Low. The composure entirely gone from his voice. "Look at you."

You were aware, dimly, that you were a considerable state. Flushed from throat to chest, still shaking slightly, wrists still held by the silk, the evidence of three orgasms and his hands unmistakable.

He touched you — his fingers returning briefly, barely a touch — and the sound he made this time was rougher.

"You are absolutely soaking," he said, with the tone of a man making an observation he cannot quite believe and intends to address. "Do you have any idea—" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "I have been thinking about this for an hour and somehow you've still managed to—"

He reached for his laces.

"Tell me," he said, pushing the clothing away with rather less ceremony than usual, "if you need me to stop."

You looked at him from your thoroughly wrecked state and said something that was not technically a word.

"I will take that as a no," he said amused, and positioned himself, and pushed into you.

The sound you made echoed.

He groaned — low and long and stripped of everything managed, his forehead dropping briefly to your shoulder at the specific fact of you, soaking and warm and clenching around him with the oversensitised responsiveness of someone who had already come three times and was apparently entirely prepared to do so again.

"You feel—" He stopped. Moved. The groan that followed was not a word. "You are absolutely—" another thrust, deep and certain— "Gods."

He was not gentle. He had not been gentle since the moment he unfolded the first piece of silk and you had not asked him to be gentle and he was, at this point, in absolutely no condition to be gentle — his cock driving into you with the focused urgency of a man who had been patient for an hour and had exhausted his supply of it entirely, each thrust full and deep and certain.

Your wrists still held. The silk still present. The specific helplessness of it — of having no hands, of being able only to receive whatever he gave you — with the three orgasms behind you and his cock buried in your cunt and his thumb returning to your clit because apparently Baelor intended to be thorough about this as well—

"Baelor—" The word came out slurred. "I can't— I'm— please—"

"You can," he said. Breathless now, the composure entirely absent, fucking you with the single-minded focus of a man who has ceased to be the Hand of the King and is simply this — here, undone, present. "You absolutely can. You have been doing it all evening." A thrust that punched the air from your lungs. "One more. Give me one more."

You gave him one more.

He followed you immediately after — his rhythm breaking, his face pressed to your neck, his cock buried as deep as it would go as he spent himself with a sound that had nothing of the diplomat in it, nothing of the composure, nothing of any version of him that existed outside this room.

For a very long time afterward neither of you moved.

His weight on you. His breathing slowing against your neck. Your wrists still loosely held by the silk, the restraint somehow comfortable now, familiar, the silk warm from your skin.

His hands moved — finding the knots at your wrists with careful fingers, working them loose with the same precision he had used to tie them, and when the silk fell away he drew your arms down slowly and held your wrists in his hands and pressed his lips to each in turn, checking, attending, the Baelor who thought about everything reassembling himself quietly in the aftermath.

"Alright?" he said.

You stared at the ceiling.

"I have," you said, after a moment, "lost the ability to form complete sentences."

He pressed his lips to your temple. "I will take that as a yes."

"It is emphatically a yes."

He settled beside you, drew you against him, his arm around your shoulders with the careful warmth that was always his in the quiet after. His thumb tracing slow absent circles against your arm.

"The silk," you said, eventually.

"What about it."

"Keep it."

A pause in which you felt against your side the specific quality of Baelor fully smiling. "I had every intention of keeping it, my heart," he said.

You laughed. It came out slightly wrecked.

His arm tightened around you once, briefly, and then relaxed.

Outside, the castle went about its evening. Inside, the candles burned low and the silk lay on the covers and Baelor held you with the full and undivided attention he gave everything that mattered to him, which was its own specific kind of bondage, and one you had never once wanted to escape.

A.N.: in my mind, reader in Three Heads of the Dragon AU is primarily a dom when it comes to Maekar, but one touch from Baelor and it's all reversed oopsies

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd

And here you were, nearly a decade after he had saved you that rainy afternoon, seated on a cushion near the hearth of his solar with your legs folded neatly by your side, watching your saviour fight to stay awake.

Baelor was opposite you, perched comfortably on his wide reading chair, scanning scrolls and various other letters that demanded his immediate attention, all while visibly battling not to succumb to sleep’s awaiting embrace. His eyelids gradually sank lower until the gaze he used to assess the parchment turned into narrowed slits; shadows coloured the skin beneath his eyes, their presence proving how tired he truly was despite his stubborn refusal to admit it.

You had long since abandoned your book, finding his struggle far more entertaining than “The History of the North”, the contents of which he had insisted he would quiz you on during breakfast the following day.

His hair had grown significantly greyer since you had first laid eyes on him all those years ago. 

He had been the first person your vision had settled upon once you had awoken from a two moon long slumber, the startling contrast of his one blue and one brown eye had your eyelids fluttering open and closed repeatedly, their unusual pairing, as well as his distinct features, had made you believe he was a figment of your imagination.

The soft, amused lines that often creased around his eyes when you would visibly convey your visceral loathing towards a particularly old-fashioned court custom had also deepened as he had aged. 

Whilst you had had your lessons on etiquette, history, and embroidery since you were young, there were many things you did not have the chance to learn before entering the court’s watchful eye, and it was the older prince who took the time to educate you with patience and guidance.

He had confessed to you one spring evening, after two years of being under his care and guidance, that he had always wanted a daughter.

“How many chapters have you completed?” Baelor’s soft timbre wrought you out of your musings, his gaze moving from the words in front of him to your undivided, star-struck stare.

Your head whipped down, opening the book back to where a feather had held your place, and indicated with your fingers how far you had delved before becoming distracted.

“Six?” his brows furrowed, a hand rising to absentmindedly stroke his beard. It was a habit, you had learned long ago, that he did when he was unsatisfied with your progress, “I imagined you would be nearly done by now.”

It was your turn to communicate your disapproval of his excessive expectations with a shrug of your shoulders and a jut of your lower lip. Feeling brave, you pointed at him, made a motion that represented sleeping, and fixed him with an accusatory look.

“My fatigue has no bearing on your studies,”  Baelor responded, his own reading long forgotten as he discarded the scroll on a nearby table. 

“I should confess,” he began suddenly, appearing uneasy, “that there have been some discussions amongst my council concerning your best interests.”

You placed the book beside you, uncaring that you hadn’t marked your place, and leaned forward.

“You are,” Baelor’s fingers tightened around the arms of his chair, his digits pressing so harshly into the soft fabric that you were certain there would be residual indents long after he had released his hold on them, “at an age where it would no longer be appropriate for you to remain under my care.”

As though you had eaten expired food, your stomach churned violently; the overwhelming lightheadedness that assaulted your senses made you grateful you were already seated on the floor.

“I have found quite a few amiable suitors, all of which you will have the opportunity to get to know before you make your final decision to.. marry one of them.”

You moved to a kneeling position, the majority of your weight resting on your calves, as you stared at the older man with a betrayed, anguished look on your face.

A desperate wish to speak once more filled your heart, it had been your sole prayer for years, one that you hadn’t silently begged for since the day Baelor told you that you did not need an audible voice to relay a message worthy of being heard. Now, as you were subjugated to his decree, you wished for your voice to return to you with a quiet sob.

“You will be happy,” he spoke gently, “as well as generously taken care of.”

You wanted to confess to him that you longed to remain by his side until the end of your days, listening to his mild complaints concerning the realm all the while gladly completing the reading he would assign you.

Of course, you could send him letters outlining your opinions on the novels you had finished, which would not be much different from how you communicated your thoughts to him presently, but you did not want to be away from him. 

Baelor refused to look at you, his jaw clenching beneath his beard as he revealed that arrangements for you to meet each one of your suitors would be made in the upcoming days.

Distraught, you moved forward, skirts tripping you as you closed the distance between yourself and the man whose decisions you had once obeyed blindly.

When Baelor’s gaze finally returned to yours, your vision was too blurry to notice the glossiness to his own eyes–he was not unaffected by your uncharacteristic outburst.

Desperately, both of your hands grasped at one of his hands, a tingling of sparks traversing up your limbs and settling heavily over your heart at the feel of his calloused, large hand cradled within yours. You could count on one hand the number of times you had touched him since he had found you, most of which had been accidental.

“I will not allow anything to befall you, if that is what burdens your heart,” was Baelor’s strained reply to your hushed cries.

Frantically, you shook your head and bowed your face to kiss the top of his hand, your hold tightening.

“Rise,” Baelor ordered and for the first time since your heart had opened to the older man, you refused to follow his command.

His knuckles against your lips suppressed the sound of your cries; your warm tears flowed freely onto his limb, running down the length of his fingers to collect at the tip of his digits before falling into the chaotic mess of your skirts below.

Baelor spoke your name in a low, pained tone, his available hand moving to push your chin upwards until your tear-stained, puffy face was visible to him once more.

“Do not be afraid, sweet girl,” he offered you a kind smile, one that once would have had your heart racing and stomach fluttering pleasantly.

Now, it evoked unwanted, distressing thoughts.

What if you never saw it again?

“On the morrow, after you have slept on it, you will see that–,”

The older man was cut off by the abrupt collision of your mouth against his parted lips.

Baelor’s startled form remained still when you awkwardly enclosed his upper lip between both of yours, inexperience evident in the clumsiness of your movements.

Less than a beat later, Baelor had moved you backwards with a firm hold on your shoulders, his breath leaving him in quick huffs as the gravity of what you had done hit both him and yourself like a bolt of lightning.

His alarmed expression caused a wave of dread and humiliation to cascade over you, an ice cold pit of regret now replaced the frightened swirl that had afflicted you only moments prior. 

In a flurry of movements, you twisted out of his light grip and fled.

The following weeks were torturous, to say the least.

You silently endured the distance Baelor had created between the two of you, his solar and private library no longer welcoming sanctuaries that you could seek peaceful solitude and warmth within.

Suitors met you and, once you ignored them thoroughly enough, disclosed their reluctance to move forward. 

Initially, each one was more determined than the last to be the one who, if they could not steal your affections, would earn your respect and willingness to form a strategic alliance with their house.

Of course, there were some suitors who believed themself above you, reiterating words you had heard countless times.

“A traitor’s daughter is provided refuge by the very man whose life her father had plotted and treasoned against,” one had said during a stroll of the gardens, “how ironic.”

“If I were the prince, you would not have been shown mercy, of that, I am certain,” another had mumbled underneath a tree after you had accepted his offer to watch the sunset.

The final suitor you would grant your precious time had been the most filthy of his vulgar predecessors.

“Has he tasted you? Is that why he kept you to himself all these years? A silent mouth to fuck?” 

Before you had the time to process his crude allegations, he pressed his unpleasant mouth hard against yours, inciting a startled sound from deep within your chest.

Of its own accord, your hand rose and firmly struck his cheek.

Days later, when you refused to meet another suitor, despite the desperate pleas of your lady’s maids and chaperone, Baelor himself was forced to take matters into his own hands.

“You must be willing,” were the first words he had spoken to you in weeks, exhaustion evident in the slump of his shoulders and heaviness of each step he took, “I had expected you to behave more mature regarding this subject.”

You moved to your desk to scribble several sentences, occasionally stopping to glare up at his patiently waiting form, before holding it out for him to retrieve.

“I do not wish to be married, especially not to a man who is incapable of behaving like a gentleman.” 

Baelor read your words aloud, a grimace tugging at the side of his mouth as he looked at you pointedly, “Who has behaved ungentlemanly towards you?”

You motioned for him to continue reading.

"He kissed me without permission, that is why I struck him."

A livid look passed over Baelor's face before he schooled his expression back into a mask of composed neutrality.

"I was not informed that he behaved in such a manner towards you, but I assure you he will be dealt with."

You reached for a fresh piece of paper to jot down another message before you held it up for him to read from where he stood.

“I will take meeting each suitor more seriously if, and only if, you offer your assistance in the teachings of one, final subject of my choosing.”

“Very well,” Baelor agreed with a tilt of his head, a weight settling over his shoulders as he watched you continue to write.

You hesitated once you finished, placing the stiff quill down firmly as an onslaught of thoughts plagued your mind. Finally, you turned over the note to his outstretched hand, the tip of your finger tingling pleasantly when it brushed against his heated palm.

“I will not marry until you have taught me how to properly and thoroughly–,”

Baelor’s voice cut off, his figure stiffening until you could nearly feel the flustered indignation rolling off of him in waves.

“You cannot be serious.”

When you made no movement to reveal you were jesting, Baelor gave a firm, disapproving shake of his head.

“No,” was his adamant reply.

Immediately, your hand returned to the quill, a hurriedness to each stroke you wrote.

“I have never asked anything of you, except this. I ask for your guidance one last time, on a subject that I wish to be better acquainted with. It is merely a peck that I wish for.”

The look of disbelief and then contemplation that reflected within Baelor’s eyes told you that he was truly considering it.

“A peck?” he questioned, taking a seat on the cushioned chair in the corner of your bedchamber, “Then, you will return to your suitors?"

You could have dislocated your neck from how enthusiastically you nodded, your hands rising to press over your chest as a silent vow to uphold your end of the deal.

He sighed frustratedly, a hand moving to pat the short hairs atop his head downwards.

“Very well,” he held out a ring adorned hand when you bounced over to him, “but as soon as I say stop, you will stop.”

Once more, you nodded your agreement and moved to hunch over his frame.

Baelor stared up at you pensively, his lips tightly pressed together as he waited for you to get this urge out of your system.

As though he were a sacred gift sent directly from the Gods to you, you carefully cradled his face in your hands and leaned forward to plant a light kiss over his tense mouth.

For a moment, neither one of you moved, the cool exhale of his breath tickling the top of your lip. 

You had kept your eyes open because he had, but soon enough your lashes were fluttering until you could no longer hold the heavy weight of your eyelids up.

A low sound left his throat in response to your sigh, his eyes drooping when you cautiously pulled at the flesh of his bottom lip.

Baelor’s mouth parted, wide enough to allow you access to lick the front of his teeth. 

You had spent countless evenings watching them appear and disappear as he read to you; equally having imagined what his tongue would taste and feel like against your own each time it had swiped across his lips to moisten them.

“Stop,” Baelor’s raspy voice entered your ears and settled heavily between your legs, a visible tremor moving across your limbs as he shifted beneath your hold.

Urgently, you held him in place, a secure loop of your arms around his neck as your head turned sideways to press a kiss below his right eye.

“You appear to be–,” you cut him off, tongue swiping at his temple to taste the saltiness of his skin.

A mewl left your throat when you returned to his lips, the messy melding of your mouth against his was unpracticed but willing and desperate to please. 

You were certain he had had past lovers whose skill when it came to something as simple as kissing would put your experience, or rather, lack-of, to shame. However, it did not matter, not now that you had finally fed your desire to know what he tasted like.

A deep noise rumbled through Baelor’s chest, scattering your thoughts into nothing except how he felt.

When you pulled back to regard his face you found his darkened, mismatched eyes already on you, his lips moistened from your spit and reddened from your nibbles.

“Have you had your fill?”

His cropped, dark grey and silvery hair stood in messy clumps atop his head, courtesy of your fingers and their ceaseless tugging. Though, it was the dusky pink hue that coloured the tops of his ears and cheeks that fascinated you.

A sharp intake of air filled Baelor’s lungs when you drew closer, your thumbs caressing the sides of his eyes before you bent to place kisses against the heated flesh of his cheekbones. He exhaled your name unevenly, the huskiness to his voice made it sound like a plea and a prayer mixed into one word.

Would he be upset if you marked his flesh?

Determined to leave a remembrance of this encounter into his skin, you suckled a large, colourful spot into his throat. 

Baelor’s subtle shift of his head, his body instinctively submitting to your ministrations, was all the permission you needed to continue. With a newfound hunger, you returned to his mouth to suck on the wet muscle of his tongue, the suction of your cheeks slipping it further past your lips.

In a lapse of momentary judgement, Baelor pulled you over him, your knees resting comfortably on the cushion below, a calf pressed to either side of his thighs.

The sound of teeth clashing, saliva obscenely mixing, low sighs and deep moans filled the chamber; the lewd combination of noises created a swirl of arousal within your abdomen. 

Baelor’s reluctance to view you as the woman you had gradually grown into under his tutelage was now forgotten as your hips bucked against his thigh, fingers grasping roughly at the coarse hair of his beard to angle his head how you wanted it.

Unthinking, you unlatched your lips from around his tongue and leaned backwards, pulling his face to your neck. 

Baelor’s tongue swiped across the scar that horizontally marked your throat, the sensitive flesh tingling under his attention.

“Sweetling,” he rasped, panting against the marred skin that had once been your most painful insecurity.

His affections were laved heavily over the length of your neck, the stifled murmuring of “I would have never,” was followed by an array of kisses and light nips, and then, “let this happen.”

The underlying insinuation of his words had you pulling him back upwards, your open mouth fitting against his with a frenzied neediness. 

It felt like you could kiss him for days and not feel an ounce of hunger or fatigue.

“Wait–,”

You scarcely heard him over your loud whimpers.

“Sweet girl,” Baelor called, gently pushing you backwards to examine your features and took a shuddering breath at the sight that greeted him; his widened pupils dragged down to lock on the string of spit that still connected your mouth to his, “this has gone on far enough.”

A look of hurt passed over your face, an embarrassed whine bubbling up in your chest when he turned his head to the side when you attempted to kiss him once more.

“You are more than proficient at..” he trailed off, his throat bobbing as he leaned further back, “well, you know.”

Nudging closer, your mouth made contact with his again, a twist of your torso releasing his already loosened hold on your arms.

Baelor’s quiet complaints fell on deaf ears, his lips moving against yours even as he repeatedly assured you that you did not require any more of his teachings.

Haphazardly, your hips continued to shift against his firm thigh, the feeling of your wet core dragging against the heat of his limb proved to be too much when you felt the quickly approaching tendrils of a release begin to wash over you. The scorching temperature of his leg somehow seeped through the layers that separated the both of you, his hands moving to help you find your completion despite the occasional murmurs of protests he exhaled against the skin of your burning cheeks, extended throat, and swollen lips.

“Baelor,” you struggled to stutter aloud, his name was barely discernible and strange on your heavy tongue, but his head snapped up at the sound of it regardless.

An indecipherable look spanned across his face, his heated, wide hands rising to cradle your face. 

Baelor leaned forward, his hesitancy forgotten as he assisted you with reaching your peak. 

He lifted his solid thigh to press more snugly between your legs, the strength of it sending wisps of pleasure that began at your core and dispersed throughout each of your limbs left you malleable above him.

During the onslaught of pleasure, you would later recall your lips returning to his, the depth of his open mouth swallowing your cries of ecstasy to replace them with guttural groans of his own.

Baelor’s lips moved down to your throat a final time, licking at it over and over again until the skin felt raw and tender beneath his care; he lapped at it as though he could replace the large scar that rested there with an even more noticeable one of his own making.

Dark spots danced around the edges of your peripheral, their size growing until your vision was rapidly tunneling. 

Your hips ceased their movements as a blanket of satiated bliss enveloped you; your limbs weightless and tingly in the aftermath of your release.

Valarr's chambers were quiet. Only the occasional crackle of the hearth disturbed the silence as shadows of the flames danced lazily across the stone walls.

Valarr sat near the fire, one leg stretched before him while the other remained bent beneath the chaise. A goblet of wine rested loosely in his hand, the dark red liquid catching the glow of the flames. The linen shirt he wore hung open slightly at the collar, far less formal than the silks and velvets he was expected to wear before the court.

Since arriving at Winterfell, peaceful nights had become a rarity. But tonight, his thoughts were proving far more troublesome than ever.

Valarr dragged a hand across his face and shut his eyes briefly.

It had been two days since the council meeting.

Two days since he had somehow looked you directly in the eyes and called you charming.

His ears still burned at the memory.

For two days he had avoided you with a determination that would have impressed even his father. Whenever he heard your voice echoing through the corridors, he found another path. Whenever he spotted your dark cloak crossing the courtyard below, he suddenly remembered somewhere else he needed to be. Once, he had turned around so abruptly that Daeron had asked if he was being hunted.

Valarr had nearly thrown a goblet at his brother.

The worst part was that nobody appeared to have noticed.

Or at least, he hoped they had not.

With a sigh, he looked down at the wine in his hand.

He was not here for you.

The thought had become a prayer of sorts. A reminder repeated so often that it had begun to lose its meaning.

And Lady Berena deserved better than a husband whose attention wandered elsewhere.

And yet it feels as though a treacherous part of him kept looking elsewhere, kept wanting another conversation- to hear your thoughts on matters that had nothing to do with war or politics.

It simply wanted to know you more.

And that frightened him more than anything else.

Because if he allowed himself to follow that desire, he feared he would discover something he could not afford. Something capable of reducing years of duty, expectation and discipline into little more than ash.

And Valarr was not yet ready to watch it burn.

His fingers tightened around the stem of his goblet as a memory of the morning surfaced.

The training yard.

He should have simply ignored Aerion.

William Stark had been sparring that morning when Aerion, in all his infinite wisdom, had remarked that this was what a proper heir looked like. Valarr had taken the bait immediately.

Looking back, it might have been the stupidest thing he had done all week.

Half the yard had stopped to watch.

The duel between him and William itself had been friendly enough. Wooden swords with no real danger.

Yet each exchange only made the difference between them more obvious.

William moved with the confidence of a man who had spent his life carrying steel. And Valarr did not.

He had managed to hold his own for a time.

Then William disarmed him.

Then again.

And again.

And by the fourth time, Aerion was no longer bothering to hide his amusement.

Valarr had accepted the defeat with as much dignity as he could muster and congratulated William on his skill.

Then he left.

Not because of Aerion.

Not because of the crowd who were probably judging him.

But because from the corner of his eye, he had noticed you watching.

You were standing at the far edge of the yard, giving archery lessons to Errold, the youngest Stark. Before your attention had turned towards them.

And he had not wanted to know what you thought.

Of the prince whose father was called Breakspear.

Of the prince who could never quite seem to live up to the name.

A heavy sigh escaped him as he chugged the wine in a go. Sleep was clearly not coming tonight.

Valarr rose from the chaise and set the goblet aside with a quiet clink. Pulling his fur cloak around his shoulders, he made his way towards the door.

The moon hung high in the sky. Though the snowfall had stopped, the chill still lingered in the air. The last thing Valarr wanted was to fall ill and embarrass himself further.

He opened the door to his chambers, and Ser Crakenhall straightened immediately.

"Your Grace," the man in the white cloak greeted.

Valarr gave him a nod and stepped out of the warmth of his chambers, the cold air striking his face at once.

"I wish to take a walk," Valarr said with a small smile. "Alone."

"But Your Grace-"

"It is an order. And I will remain within the castle walls, Ser. There is no need to worry."

Ser Crakehall looked hesitant for a moment, but eventually bowed his head and stepped aside.

Valarr moved through the corridors, his thoughts swimming somewhere between the humiliation of the morning and the uncertainty of the future.

He descended the stairs with the ease of a man who knew his way around. Over the past few days, he had developed a habit of haunting the halls of Winterfell whenever sleep refused to come.

Within minutes, he found himself at the rear of the castle, standing upon the balcony that had slowly become his sanctuary in the cold North. He had discovered it during one of his nightly wanderings and quickly decided he loved the silence.

Valarr rested his elbows against the railing and exhaled slowly, watching his breath disappear into the night air. After a moment, he leaned forward, resting his face in his palms as his eyes drifted towards the dark woods stretching beyond the castle walls.

The Wolfswood.

Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled.

Valarr could not help but wonder what else wandered through those woods after dark.

Just as his thoughts began to drift, he heard footsteps.

Light and careful.

Like someone trying not to be heard.

His hand instinctively moved towards the pommel of his sword as a shadow slipped across the level below him.

Valarr's feet moved before he could think. He descended the stairs quickly and rounded the balcony where he had seen the figure pass.

Nothing.

The corridor stood empty.

Valarr frowned. He was certain he had seen someone. Yet there was nothing there but stone walls and the ever present northern cold.

A pair of Stark guards were approaching from the opposite end of the corridor. Valarr considered asking if they had seen anyone.

Before he could open his mouth, someone seized his wrist.

The world lurched.

Valarr was pulled into a nearby room.

The door shut behind him.

Before he could protest, a hand covered his mouth.

Your scent reached him first. Then your voice.

"Shh."

His back hit the door as you pinned him against it, one hand over his mouth while the other remained wrapped around his wrist.

The moonlight filtering through the lone window was too weak to illuminate the room properly. He could only make out fragments of you.

A dark cloak. The outline of your shoulders. And the way you craned your neck towards the window, muttering curses beneath your breath as the clanking of armor echoed past outside.

Valarr could feel his heart hammering against his ribs. Seven above, he was certain you could hear it too.

He breathed through his nose, trying desperately to steady himself. The brush of your palm against his lips did things to him he did not care to examine too closely.

It was all too much.

The woman he had spent two days avoiding. The woman who had occupied every spare corner of his thoughts.

And now she was pinning him against a door in an empty room.

Seven Hells. If someone were to see them-

Valarr abandoned that thought immediately. He could not move or speak. He could barely think.

All he could do was stare at you as something traitorous twisted happily inside his chest.

Valarr gulped when your attention finally shifted towards him.

He could feel you staring back.

For perhaps the first time in his life, he cursed the darkness for hiding your eyes.

"Shit," you muttered beneath your breath. Your hands slipped away from his mouth and wrist.

And Valarr found himself strangely disappointed by the loss of contact.

"My prince, I apologize. You see- I- me- it's just-"

"My lady, is everything alright?" Valarr somehow managed, a flush creeping across the back of his neck.

You laughed awkwardly and stepped away from him, moving into the moonlight.

Only then could he properly see you. You were dressed in common clothes. A rugged dark cloak hung around your shoulders, and a sword rested at your hip.

You looked nothing like a noblewoman. And somehow that only made the sight more fascinating and beautiful.

"I am alright," you said, glancing back towards the window. "I simply need to go somewhere. It is rather...important. I just did not wish to alert the guards."

"My lady, it is rather dark outside. Is everything truly alright?" Valarr took a cautious step closer, trying to get a better look at your face.

"I am certain, my prince. It is nothing."

You moved towards the door and pushed it open. Valarr watched as you carefully scanned the corridor before pulling your cloak tighter around yourself.

"I shall see you later, my prince."

You turned and headed towards the stairs leading down into the courtyard.

Valarr should have stopped there.

You were not his concern.

He should have returned to his chambers and forgotten this ever happened.

Instead, he followed.

He told himself it was because it was dark, and a lady should not wander alone at night.

At least that was the excuse he offered his heart.

"My lady, wait."

You stopped and turned towards him.

Valarr could see your face scrunch in frustration.

"Your Grace, you should really go back. I promise there is no need to worry."

"But my lady, it is not safe for you to wander alone. I know you are a skilled warrior, but still—"

The distant clanking of armor interrupted him. Valarr saw your eyes widen. Panic etched across your entire face.

And then suddenly you were dragging him across the courtyard. Your hand wrapped tightly around his wrist as Valarr nearly tripped over his own feet.

"My lady- I- what- "

You ignored him entirely as the two of you hurried across the courtyard towards the eastern gates.

"Please. Please. Please. Let them not be there," you muttered beneath your breath.

Valarr scarcely knew where he was being taken.

His mind had stopped functioning several moments ago. All he could focus on was the warmth of your hand seeping through the sleeve of his shirt.

The eastern gate came into view. There were no guards there.

Likely a shift change.

And before Valarr fully realized what was happening, the two of you were beyond Winterfell's walls.

You led him through the sleeping town until you suddenly darted into an alleyway and pulled him in after you.

Your hand finally released his wrist, and you bent forward slightly, laughing as you tried to catch your breath.

Your laughter faded as you leaned against the wall of the alleyway, catching your breath.

Valarr stood several feet away, looking thoroughly lost.

The alley was narrow, squeezed between two weathered buildings. Snow had gathered in uneven piles along the stone walls, while lantern light from the nearby streets spilled weakly into the darkness.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. Valarr merely blinked at you, as you blinked back.

Then your expression changed.

Valarr watched confusion give way to realization, and then realization gave way to absolute horror.

Before either of you could speak, a voice suddenly cut through the silence.

"What the fuck?"

Valarr's hand flew instinctively to the hilt of his sword. Beside him, yours did the same.

A shadow stepped forward from deeper within the alley, draped in a dark cloak just like your own. Snow clung to the figure's shoulders as he stopped beneath the lantern light.

Valarr tensed, and then he heard you let out a quiet groan. The stranger pulled back his hood.

William Stark.

Valarr felt even more confused than before. William looked at him, then at you and then back at him.

The silence stretched.

"Your Grace?" William finally asked.

Valarr offered an awkward nod.

William stared for another heartbeat before slowly turning toward you.

"What is he doing here?"

You muttered something under your breath. Unfortunately for Valarr, whatever you said was too quiet to hear. William's eyes widened.

"What?"

You moved closer to your brother, lowering your voice further.

Valarr took a cautious step forward.

"-followed me," he finally caught. "I panicked and dragged him here."

For a long moment William simply stared at you. Then he dragged a hand down his face.

"Have you completely lost your mind?"

"What would you have me do?" Valarr heard you hiss back. "Let the guards find me sneaking out again? And then what? Spend the next moon trapped in my chambers while mother lectures me every morning?"

William opened his mouth and closed it before sighing heavily.

"Gods help me," he muttered.

Valarr cleared his throat. Both siblings turned toward him so quickly that he nearly forgot what he had been about to say.

"I apologize for interrupting, but I feel I should mention that I am still very confused."

You narrowed your eyes at him. Valarr immediately wished he had remained silent.

"We cannot go back now," you declared.

"My lady—"

"There are soldiers searching the grounds."

Valarr blinked.

"What?"

You pointed vaguely back toward Winterfell.

"If they find me sneaking out, I am doomed." You crossed your arms. "There is only one solution."

Valarr did not like the confidence with which you said that. Neither, judging by his expression, did William. Slowly, you pointed your finger towards him.

"We take him with us."

Valarr opened his mouth, before closing it again.

William stared at you.

Then, to Valarr's immense confusion, amusement flickered across his face.

"Oh, this should be interesting."

"You agree?" you asked.

"I think we are beyond good decisions at this point."

You nodded as though that settled everything. Then your attention shifted towards Valarr. And Valarr could not help but admire the way you looked under the moonlight.

"Do you enjoy music, Your Grace?"

Valarr stopped.

"What?"

"Music and ale."

"I am afraid I do not understand the question."

Valarr can see a grin tugging at the corner of your lips, and he could not help the flush on his cheeks.

"My prince," you said, clasping your hands behind your back, "have you ever been inside a common tavern?"

"N-No."

Your grin widened.

Beside you, Valarr can see William suddenly looking far too entertained.

"Well," you said, turning toward the lantern-lit street beyond the alley, "it appears tonight is your lucky day."

And for some reason, despite every warning screaming inside his head, Valarr followed.

The tavern was loud. The moment Valarr stepped inside, it felt as though he had entered an entirely different world.

Warmth immediately wrapped around him, washing away the bitter cold that had clung to him since leaving Winterfell. The air smelled of woodsmoke, roasted meat, spilled ale and damp wool. Music drifted through the crowded room, carried by a fiddler tucked into a corner while men and women laughed loudly around him.

Tankards slammed against tables.

Someone was singing.

Someone else was arguing over a game of dice.

And somehow, despite the chaos, everyone seemed content.

Valarr sat stiffly at one of the tables near the bar, his hands wrapped around a mug of ale he had yet to touch. Beside him, you looked entirely at ease.

One arm rested lazily atop the table while the other held your tankard. The hood of your cloak had long since been pushed back, revealing your face in the warm glow of the lanterns hanging overhead.

Valarr found himself staring again.

He needed to stop doing that.

Across the tavern, William had already disappeared into the crowd.

Valarr could see him laughing with several men near the hearth, a tankard raised high in one hand while someone attempted to drag him toward the musicians.

Valarr watched him vanish into the crowd before looking back down at his untouched ale.

"My lady?"

You hummed in response. Valarr hesitated.

"You do not have to remain here with me."

That earned him a confused look.

"I merely meant," Valarr cleared his throat awkwardly. "Your brother appears to be enjoying himself. You need not sit here in my rather boring company."

For a moment you simply stared at him.

Then you snorted. Actually snorted.

Valarr immediately felt his ears burn.

"My prince," you said, shaking your head. "If I wished to be elsewhere, I would be elsewhere."

You took another drink from your tankard.

"I only came because William wished for it."

Valarr glanced toward the dance floor where William was now attempting something that could generously be described as dancing.

He found that difficult to believe.

"And besides," you continued, setting your tankard down. "I do not find your company boring."

Valarr froze. His mind promptly stopped working.

"Oh."

You rolled your eyes. The movement was simple and ordinary. Yet Valarr found himself watching it anyway.

The lantern light softened your features, casting warm golden hues across your face while shadows danced against your skin from the nearby hearth. A loose strand of hair had escaped and now rested against your cheek.

Beautiful.

The thought arrived uninvited, and Valarr nearly dropped his mug.

He quickly looked away. His heartbeat stumbling somewhere inside his chest.

You took another drink before glancing towards him.

"My prince."

Valarr straightened immediately.

"You have been holding that mug for ten minutes."

Valarr looked down at his mug.

"I was observing."

You raised an eyebrow.

"The ale?"

"The tavern."

A smile tugged at the corner of your lips.

"And what conclusions have you reached?"

Valarr glanced around once more.

A serving girl laughed as someone spun her around. A group of laborers were singing badly enough that it might have been considered a crime. Someone dropped a mug.

Nobody cared.

"It is..." Valarr paused, "very loud."

The laugh that escaped you was bright and genuine. Valarr hated how much he liked that sound.

"That is your grand observation?" you asked.

"I have others."

"Oh?"

Valarr nodded solemnly.

"The man near the hearth is definitely cheating."

You blinked.

Then followed his gaze toward a dice game happening across the room. The older man quickly slipped a die into his sleeve. Your eyes widened.

"He is."

Valarr looked pleased with himself.

"And the fiddler has missed the same note six times."

You stared.

"You can hear that?"

"I was taught music."

You shook your head slowly.

"What?"

"You truly are a prince."

Valarr couldn't help but laugh. For the first time that day, the nervousness in his chest eased slightly.

And for a moment, surrounded by music and laughter and the warmth of the tavern, he almost forgot that he was supposed to be avoiding you.

Valarr finally gathered enough courage to take a sip of his own ale.

Immediately he coughed. Yhe drink was far stronger than he had anticipated. Ypu laughed and Valarr scratched the back of his neck.

"Do you come here often?" Valarr found himself asking.

You shrugged, "Sometimes."

Your gaze drifted around the tavern.

"When I wish to feel..." you paused briefly. A small smile formed on your lips. "Free."

Valarr looked down at the ale in his hand.He understood that feeling more than he cared to admit.

The conversation faded after that. Neither of you seemed particularly bothered by the silence.

Then suddenly you spoke.

"You did quite well today."

Valarr frowned.

"Hm?"

"In the training yard."

Your head now rested lazily atop your folded arms as you looked at him from across the table.

Valarr nearly choked.

"You cannot be serious."

"I am."

"My lady."

You raised an eyebrow. Valarr snorted into his mug.

"Please do not humour me because I am a prince."

The words escaped before he could stop them. You immediately rolled your eyes.

"I am not humouring you."

"You witnessed the same duel I did."

"I witnessed William sparring against someone who has never seen actual battle."

Valarr opened his mouth, but you cut him off before he argue.

"My brother has spent years fighting raiders, wildlings and bandits."

You gestured vaguely toward the crowd where William had somehow acquired another tankard.

"He has been training for actual combat since he was old enough to hold a sword."

Valarr remained unconvinced. And he can see your expression softening.

"My prince."

Reluctantly, Valarr looked up.

"You need to give yourself more credit."

He laughed quietly, almost sarcastically.

"I mean it."

Your finger tapped lightly against the wooden table.

"Many men cannot stand against William for more than a few seconds."

"The men people remember are the ones who win."

"That is not true."

The certainty in your voice made him glance back towards you. You were already looking at him.

Not with pity or sympathy. But with certainty. As though you truly believed every word leaving your mouth.

Valarr felt something tighten in his chest.

"Remember what i said back at the godswood. The strongest people I have known were not always the most skilled."

Your gaze drifted briefly toward the crowd.

"They were simply the ones who kept getting back up."

The tavern seemed quieter for a moment. Or perhaps Valarr simply stopped hearing it. Because once again, you had unknowingly said exactly what he needed to hear.

His eyes lingered on you longer than they should have.

The hours passed quicker than Valarr expected.

At some point, William had disappeared entirely into the crowd, only appearing every now and then with another mug in his hand and a different group of friends around him.

The tavern remained loud. But Valarr found himself smiling.

Not the polite smile he wore during feasts, or the practiced smile expected from a prince.

A real one.

The realization startled him, and his gaze drifted toward you. Your head still rested lazily against the table. One hand wrapped around your mug while the other traced absent patterns into the wood.

You were watching the crowd now. A small smile rested upon your lips. And for a moment, Valarr forgot everything else.

The expectations. The crown. The future waiting for him beyond Winterfell.

All of it seemed distant.

Far away.

Like a dream someone else had lived.

A laugh escaped your lips at something happening across the room.

Valarr felt his heart stumble.

You were beautiful.

Not in the way court ladies were beautiful. Not polished and perfect beneath jewels and silks.

You looked alive.

And somehow that made it worse. Because Valarr could feel himself drifting closer with every conversation.

Every smile.

Every shared moment.

Like a ship slowly being pulled toward rocks despite knowing exactly what awaited it.

His fingers tightened around his mug.

You turned your head suddenly.

Valarr looked away so quickly it made him lightheaded.

"You are staring again, my prince."

The tips of his ears burned.

"I was not."

"You were."

"I was merely thinking."

"About what?"

Valarr opened his mouth, and then closed it. Because he could hardly tell you that all his thoughts somehow seemed to begin and end with you these days.

A grin spread across your face as you watched him struggle.

And Seven Hells.

Valarr was doomed.

But for the first time in his life, the realization did not fill him with dread, but warmth.

And Prince Valarr Targaryen found himself hoping the night would never end.

Chapter 6 [Weekly Updates (every saturday!)]

Taglist: @snowwythegloww @supermanshand @shouto-raki @cassandra-reborn-anew @bloomballet @bubblegupyy @darling-darling3 @targaryenamour @boundandbrews @onlyrealjoy @qardasngan @rather-melodramatic @appalost @writingshae @uixhzzzi @ch3ska0 @lasylady @jjubilee-fluff @noilusionsblr @062292 @kiszexo-blog @arutsumu @bloomfaery

It all started, as most inadvisable things did, with your mouth.

You had been walking the gardens with two of the other ladies, taking the late morning air before the Queen's afternoon appointments, and the conversation had wandered — the way conversations wandered when the court was between crises — toward the maze. Someone had mentioned getting lost in it the previous week, going around the same hedge three times before a gardener had the mercy to redirect her, and you had laughed and said it was not so complicated once you knew the trick of it.

Maekar had been nearby. He was frequently nearby, in the particular way that you had long since stopped pretending was coincidence. He was not part of your group — he was never part of groups, he existed at their edges, a gravitational presence that declined to announce itself — but he was close enough to hear, leaning against the stone balustrade with his arms folded and the expression of a man who was not quite listening and was, in fact, listening to everything.

"The trick of it," he said.

You looked at him. "The left-hand rule. You keep your hand on the left wall and follow it. You'll find the centre in under ten minutes."

"That works in simple mazes."

"This is a simple maze."

Something shifted in his expression. Not offense — Maekar did not take offense the way other men did, did not bristle and puff. He went very slightly still instead, and his lilac eyes acquired a particular quality of attention that you had learned to recognise as interest dressed in flat clothing. "You think you know it better than I do."

"I know I do," you said, pleasantly, and the other ladies went very quiet in the way of people who could see where a conversation was heading and wanted a good view. "I have walked it a hundred times. You have walked it—" you tilted your head "—twice? Three times?"

"I have a sense of direction."

"So do I. And I also have the left-hand rule." You smiled. "I'd wager I could lose you in there inside five minutes."

His eyes held yours. The stillness in him had changed quality — something underneath it now, something that was considering the dare rather than the offense.

"You'd wager," he repeated.

"If you would like to test it, my prince." You kept your voice light, easy, the voice of someone proposing nothing more serious than a morning's entertainment. "I go in first. You give me two minutes and then follow. If you catch me before I reach the centre, you win. If I reach the centre first—"

"What does winning look like for you?"

"You admit I know the maze better than you do."

The corner of his mouth did not quite move, but something happened in the vicinity of it. He looked at you for a long moment with those flat violet eyes and the quality of attention that was never entirely flat, and then he unfolded his arms and said, "Two minutes."

You went in laughing.

You could not help it — the absurdity of it, the brightness of the morning, the particular pleasure of having made Maekar Targaryen accept a dare as though it were a matter of personal honour. Your slippers were quiet on the gravel path and the hedges rose green on either side, eight feet high and dense as walls, and you put your left hand out and touched the leaves and moved.

The maze unfolded the way it always did for you — familiar, almost comfortable, the turns coming where you expected them, the dead ends already known and avoided without thought. Left at the first junction. Straight through the false turn. Right at the narrow passage that looked wrong but wasn't.

You were smiling to yourself, moving briskly, when you heard him enter behind you.

Earlier than two minutes, you thought. Which was either impatience or confidence, and with Maekar it was impossible to always tell the difference.

You moved faster.

The maze had three distinct sections — the outer ring, which was straightforward; the middle, which was where most people lost themselves; and the inner passage, which was tight and doubled back twice before opening into the centre garden. You were through the outer ring already, turning into the middle section with your hand on the left wall, and you could hear him somewhere behind you — not close, but not distant either, footsteps even and unhurried, which meant he was not panicking and had not yet lost himself.

You took the double-back without slowing.

For a few minutes there was nothing — just the green walls and the morning light falling in columns between the hedges, and your own breathing and the distant sound of birds. Then footsteps again, from a different direction than expected, and closer.

You felt the first small flutter of something that was not entirely amusement.

He had not taken the double-back. He had gone around it. Which meant he was not following your path — he was cutting across the geometry of the maze by instinct, not rule, and either he would hit a dead end inside forty seconds or he had somehow mapped the structure of the thing from the outside and was working from a mental picture rather than direct navigation.

You turned left again and moved faster, and the laughter in your chest had shifted slightly — still there, still genuine, but with an edge to it now that had not been there before.

He was not flailing. He was hunting.

The realisation arrived quietly, the way important realisations sometimes did. The footsteps behind you were not the footsteps of a man consulting the left-hand rule or backtracking from dead ends. They were the footsteps of a man who had assessed the terrain and was moving through it with purpose, and they were getting closer with a consistency that spoke to someone who had spent a professional lifetime navigating hostile ground and was simply applying the same skills to a garden maze.

You made three fast turns in a row, the sequence you knew best, the one that doubled back and came out on the diagonal and lost almost everyone — and heard, perhaps twenty feet away through the hedge, footsteps that paused for barely a second and then adjusted.

The flutter sharpened.

You ran.

Not entirely — not the full commitment of actual flight, not yet — but your steps quickened into something just below a run, your hand dropping from the wall as you took the turn by memory instead of touch, cutting left and then immediately right and then through the narrow passage that smelled of damp earth and cut greenery, and behind you the footsteps did not quicken into confusion.

They quickened into pursuit.

Something in your body answered to that before your mind had finished processing it. An old knowledge, older than thinking — the particular electricity of being followed by something that had decided to catch you. Your heart was going faster than the exertion warranted. Your slippers were nearly silent on the path and the hedges blurred green at the edges of your vision and you were still smiling except that the smile was different now, had moved from the amusement of a known outcome to something more breathless and less certain.

You took the last sequence before the inner passage — the one that required knowing which of two identical-looking turns was the correct one, the final test of anyone who claimed to know the maze — and you took it correctly, by instinct, without slowing, and you heard him behind you take it too.

Immediately. Without hesitation.

Oh, you thought.

The inner passage was narrow. Single file. Eight feet of dense hedge on either side and the path barely wide enough for two people to pass. You turned into it and moved as fast as you dared and the gravel was loud underfoot now, no masking it, and behind you the footsteps were close. Close enough that you could hear the quality of them — not the measured even tread of a man in public but something else, something quieter and more focused, and when you glanced back over your shoulder the passage curved and you could not see him yet but you could hear him and the distance was—

His hand caught your arm just as the passage opened into the centre garden.

Not roughly. Not quite. But with the complete certainty of a man who had known exactly where you were for the last sixty seconds and had been closing the distance with patience rather than speed, letting you tire yourself on the last turns, and the momentum of it turned you and suddenly you were against the hedge wall with his arm braced beside your head and Maekar Targaryen was very close, breathing harder than usual, and looking at you.

You looked back.

His eyes were dark.

Not the flat colour of the Maekar who stood at the edges of rooms and said little. Not the controlled, deliberate watchfulness he wore in public like armour. This was something underneath all of that — something that had come up through the layers during the last ten minutes, called up by gravel and laughter and the specific animal satisfaction of a chase successfully completed, and it sat in his eyes now with an intensity that made the inside of your chest feel very warm and very strange.

He was breathing heavily. So were you.

You were not afraid. That was the first clear thing. You looked at him — at the dark intensity in his face, the particular way he was looking at you, the fact of his size and his proximity and the arm against the hedge that was not quite trapping you and was not quite not — and you were not afraid at all. What you were was something considerably more inconvenient.

You were looking at him the way his prey might look at him, and something in you was answering to that in kind, and the warmth in your chest had moved considerably further south.

"I nearly made it," you said. Your voice came out quieter than intended.

"You did make it." His voice was low. Rough in the way it got rougher sometimes, when something had gotten past the wall. "Centre garden."

"Then I win."

"I caught you."

"The terms were—"

"I caught you," he said again, and there was nothing argumentative in it. It was simply a fact he was stating, looking at you from very close with those dark eyes, and the fact had nothing to do with the terms of the dare and both of you knew it.

The space between you was very small.

You watched his face — the old pox scars beneath the silver beard, the weathered set of his features, the muscle in his jaw that was working slightly with the effort of something, and the darkness in his eyes that was not going anywhere, that had been lit, you guessed, during the chase and was still burning with nowhere to go. He looked like a man standing at the edge of a decision with both feet.

You lifted your chin.

It was not a large movement. It was the smallest possible thing — a degree of tilt, a fraction of angle, barely anything. But it was not nothing, and he read it the way he read everything, with the complete attention of a man who had been paying close attention for considerably longer than was safe.

His hands found your waist and your back met the hedge wall and his mouth came down onto yours with a certainty that had no hesitation in it whatsoever — not the frozen stillness, not the careful bracing of a man managing himself. The chase had burned through all of that. What was left was Maekar without the management, and that was consuming in a way that made your hands fist in the front of his doublet and your whole body lean into him before you had made any conscious decision to do so.

He made a sound against your mouth that was low and not composed at all.

His hands found the fabric of your gown.

The centre garden was empty — it was always empty at this hour, too deep in the maze for casual visitors, and the high hedges cut the sound from the rest of the gardens — but the awareness of where you were was still present at the back of your mind, the low thrum of exposure that should have made you careful. It did not make you careful. It made your heart beat faster, and when his hand found the hem of your gown and pulled it up with an unhurried and entirely purposeful movement, you exhaled against his mouth with a sound that was frankly not quiet.

He covered your mouth with his other hand.

Not hard. Not frightening. Just — present, his palm warm against your lips, his eyes on your face with that dark intensity, watching you.

You looked back at him over the edge of his hand. You held his gaze. You let him read you. His eyes darkened further.

His hand moved beneath your gown, and the first touch of his fingers against the skin of your inner thigh made you close your eyes and make a sound that he successfully contained, his palm firm against your mouth. His fingers moved upward with a patience that was almost cruel, learning the soft skin of your thigh with the same unhurried attention he gave to everything he decided to do properly — no fumbling, no uncertainty — until he found you and his breath went out hard and quiet against the top of your head.

"Gods," he said, very low. Not a prayer. An inventory.

You were wet. You were embarrassingly, thoroughly wet, because you had spent ten minutes being hunted through a garden maze by a man who moved like a predator and caught you like it was inevitable, and your body had apparently been reaching its own conclusions throughout.

He traced your wet folds and your hips moved forward and the sound you made against his palm was the kind that did not pass for anything else than what it was.

His fingers moved. Slowly at first, with the focus of a man learning something new and intending to learn it thoroughly, and you gripped the front of his doublet with both hands and pressed your forehead against his chest and breathed through your nose in the careful, controlled way of someone trying very hard not to be audible. His hand on your mouth shifted — still present, still firm — and his thumb touched the corner of your jaw in a gesture that was almost tender in the middle of everything else.

With your free hand — one still fisted on his chest — you found the lacing of his breeches.

He went still for a moment. The fingers between your thighs did not stop but something in his breathing changed, became more deliberate, and when you worked the lacing open and got your hand inside his breeches and wrapped your fingers around him he made a sound against your hair that was quiet and completely undone.

He was hard. Fully, achingly hard, which was its own kind of information — that the chase had done this to him too, that whatever had woken up in him during the last ten minutes was not only in his eyes. You stroked once, slowly, learning the weight and warmth of him, and felt him exhale in a long careful breath.

"You—" he started, and stopped.

You stroked again. He lost the thread of whatever he had been going to say.

His hand moved against you with a focus that made your knees unreliable, his fingers learning what you responded to and returning to it with the systematic dedication of a man who does not do anything halfway, and you were very glad of the hand at your mouth because the sounds trying to get out were not small. Your hand around him stroked in a rhythm that matched what he was doing to you and his hips moved into it with a helplessness that was remarkable on him, on Maekar who was never helpless, and you felt him press his face into your hair and breathe.

"I need—" he tried to say, very low.

You nodded against his palm. He hooked your leg over his arm. The lift was easy for him — the fact of it sent heat flooding through you from somewhere deeper than thought. He pressed you back against the hedge wall, your leg over his arm and your skirts rucked up, and he looked at you over the hand still at your mouth with those dark eyes, making sure, waiting.

You held his gaze and nodded once again.

He pushed inside you.

Your head went back and the sound that came out of you was well and truly muffled by his palm, which was the only reason it did not reach the outer ring of the maze. He was — a lot. The stretch of him, the weight, the way your body had to accommodate something significant.

Then he began to move.

It was not gentle. It was not what you would call gentle, exactly — he was too focused for gentle, too present, the full consuming attention of him directed entirely at this, his eyes on your face watching every response you gave him, and the pace built quickly into something that required the hedge wall for structural support. The hand at your mouth was unwavering. Your arms were around his neck and your face was close to his and you were looking at each other from inches away with an intimacy that was almost unbearable on top of everything else.

He watched your eyes go glassy and his jaw went tight.

He watched you try to muffle a moan against his palm and something in his face came apart.

He moved harder and you took it and your fingers found the back of his neck and your nails pressed in and he made a sound that was short and low and nothing like composed, his hips driving into you against the green wall of the maze, and you thought distantly and somewhat incoherently that you had been right about knowing the maze better than him and also that the winning felt considerably different than you had anticipated.

When you came it was in silence — enforced, effortful silence, his hand at your mouth and your own teeth biting down against your lip beneath it, your whole body pulling tight and then releasing in a long slow wave that started somewhere deep and moved outward, and you felt him groan into your hair, quiet and rough, and follow.

He kept you against the wall after.

Not immediately releasing the leg he held, not stepping back. His forehead came down against yours and his breathing was uneven against your face and his hand finally fell from your mouth, not because you needed it to anymore but because he apparently needed to put it somewhere else, and it ended up at your jaw, thumb at the corner, the same almost-tender gesture from earlier.

You breathed.

He breathed.

The centre garden was very quiet around you. Birdsong, distantly. The sound of a breeze moving through the tops of the hedges.

He set your leg down with a carefulness that was incongruous with the previous ten minutes and entirely characteristic of him — the protectiveness that lived underneath everything, that persisted through all the walls coming down. His hands smoothed your gown back into place with a focus that was perhaps slightly unnecessary but that you understood as something other than practicality.

You looked at him.

His ears were red. Both of them, deeply, unmistakably red, and the colour was down to his jaw and probably further, and he was not quite meeting your eyes in the way of a man who has done something he does not regret and is not yet sure what to do with that.

"You still took a wrong turn at the diagonal," you said.

He looked at you.

"The identical junctions," you said. "You hesitated. Half a second."

"I caught you," he insisted.

"Eventually."

The muscle in his jaw moved. His eyes were doing something complicated. Then he said, "Next time I will not hesitate," and the words landed warm and certain in your chest, because next time was doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and both of you knew it.

"Next time," you said, "I will have a longer head start."

He looked at you, and the red was still at his ears and his jaw, and the dark intensity was still in his eyes, and the corner of his mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile and was considerably more devastating than one.

"Good," he said.

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide

Endless questioning. That was all he had heard, and it was just about enough to drive him crazy, past the point of insanity if possible.

You were no fool, he knew of it. He would not have stepped foot into another marriage let alone being forced to take a bride, if she was dimwitted. And you were far from it.

Callous, stern and prickly many called him, and yet you and what followed had wandered round him like a buzzing fly. Though it was not your company he despised, he liked that more than he could admit, but it was the mockery. For a man of his age, not old and yet not young with six children in his stead, you had been incessant in wondering exactly.

How.

He was handsome, far more than people had mentioned or cared to, striking in that fierce way. Hardened by battles and fatherhood alone. And you were captivated, and curious. And luckily for you, you were the thing, the creature, the pest that consistently managed to get under his skin.

The way you walked, talked, the way you made eyes at him across the feasting table, the way you’d so perfectly slotted into the family and how everyone, including the children adored you. For that he was thankful, truly, but it didn’t stop the fact you drove him mad.

“She is a new addition to the family, and she is fitting in quite well I should say.” Baelor countered as both men walked through the punctured halls of Maegor’s Holdfast.

“She has taken over.” Maekar muttered with a roll of his yes , stalking slowly beside his brother.

“Your senses perhaps.” Baelor replied coolly, an edge of amusement following.

Maekar slowed, squinting piercing eyes at his brother as they moved to stand over the edge, overseeing the court below where you and the children had played. Egg and Rhae had tugged at your hands, making you stand to play and duck behind the plant pots with them in small strides, with Daeron watching on. Even Valarr stood at the corner with a smile, whispering no doubt pleasantries and flattery about you. Some said you would have been more suited to one of the younger Prince’s, perhaps there would be more in common, a likeness, but even though he remained shadowed, the idea made his blood boil. A possessiveness over territory he had yet to claim.

Not a chance.

“What I mean is, she does no harm. It has been a long time since they have all looked like this.” Baelor reasoned, picking at the stone underneath his palm as he eyed Maekar.

“Around you she may not.” The grumble came fast, quick to override his brother’s words. But his throat felt dry, tacky and stuck like the words could barely come out. Like what he had heard was true.

His senses, overtaken his senses. How?

What with your cunning ways, your ability to charm and please, and weasel your way in without needing to, to be so beautiful and too good for him. It needled at him. The marriage both of you had been so blessed with was not necessity, not by anyone’s means, but yet it came anyway.

Swift and secure, as all things should be, strengthening alliance or something else they had bothered to give title.

The loss changed him, hardened him in ways that most wouldn’t be able to understand, but you had tried to. Endlessly. Attempts to break down the brick wall that was your husband became futile, and so you decided to go around him. For it was jsut as new to you as it was to him, and with him years your senior, you had expected him more forthcoming.

And yet he was not.

He was reserved and callous, moving through the halls of Summerhall like a gust of wind more than a steady hand, ignoring all of your questions insisting they were nothing but “nonsensical whims.”

But you had longed for something different. Perhaps not the chivalrous fanciful lords and their ways, but his own.. the longing looks he had given you across court, the fleeting touches at your lower back and arm when duty had warranted it. But you wanted more, you wanted him, not duty. And he had been rather intent on keeping it from you.

But one thing he didn’t deny, was that his brother may well have been right. None of them had looked like it in such a long time, nor had he felt the way he had in so long. So.. undone, having to pry himself from his thoughts, especially when you caught his gaze from across the din.

Your smile bright and curved, more like a smirk, knowing and tempting. His jaw ticked harshly, tongue pressing deep into his cheek, only for a fleeting moment before you had looked away, and his fingers had all but gripped the stone under his fingers enough to chip it.

Baelor had caught it, a single glimpse to his side and back onto you and the children again. The heat that burned from the man beside him was enough to scold and he had not lingered on the thought of what had wandered through his head.

Nor did he need to, because before pulling away, Maekar’s eyes barely left you.

His thoughts were, you.

——

The chamber was cool, years of aged stone encasing you more than you’d have liked. The day had .. wonderfully, breaking your fast with your ladies and the children, tending to them in the gardens and watching over some of their lessons, and retreating back to your ladies once more. For them you were thankful, able to wander the lower halls without question or prying eyes, and the ability to talk as freely as you wished.

“If only he wasn’t so prickly.”

“Careful, he is our Prince after all.”

“It is a miracle he has fathered children of his own at all, not near as pleasant as his brother.” Quickly followed by, “Apologies my lady, we only wish to see you happy..”

You had confided in them briefly, private chatter between you of how exactly to woo the prince, or rather atleast to accept his affections that so many had claimed to have seen. Also that so many had claimed the Prince did not have a heart to give.

But they were wrong.

Not with the way he looked you, so dark and delicate, like he could snap at any moment..

You must have made him feel green again, one had giggled, as you did.

You had asked him to visit your chambers many nights, and yet he did not, instead your maid came to you, always. She bathed you often, brought tea and a fresh pitcher of water, even sat with you a while when you had wanted it. Almost as if it had been sent for you, and for that you were thankful. But there was no sign of him.

And alas, you had had enough.

They were not wrong, you had noticed it too. Such fighting for restraint and the tension that lingered was inevitable, a livin thing that made you ache.

And so you had taken their advice.

If he will not make such a move, perhaps you should.

And you liked that idea, you liked it very much. Because out of all the talk and gossip, the questioning of your husband’s want for you was dwindling, and yet you did not give in.

Your chambermaid, Niamh, had just finished setting out the tray in the small table, a glass bowl of fruits beside a candle, a hand towel and your bodily oils. She stood straight backed and patient for what her ached body would allow, resting her arms at her middle with a small, expectant smile.

“I have run you a bath, should you require assistance, my lady?”

“That will be all thank you Niamh, you are dismissed.”

She nodded curtly, and with the turn of her heel the oak creaked behind her softly. You had waited a further few moments to let the echoes of her footsteps die out before you moved, stepping into the thinness of your laced nightgown with a devilish grin.

Because it was not the bath you were ready for.

Your steps patterned the lines of the corridors you’d mapped out for some time, every corner and shortcut that was hidden beneath stone. Maekar’s own chambers was not far from your own, a whole stretch of hall and a turn away. Every outline of jagged rock shadowed with a trail of sconces and the few tapered and coloured tapestries that hung from the walls.

Your heart thrummed harshly in your chest with adrenaline, your fingertips flexing as you clutched your arms around yourself from the cold night air. And once you arrived outside of his chambers, the feeling only seemed to grow, goose pimples trailing your skin. But with a single look, defiant and what confidence you could muster up, the two men standing vigil outside had stepped aside without protest for you.

Seemingly aware of the mission you had embarked yourself on.

The chambers were darker than your own, everything lined perfectly and sparse just as you had remembered it from your night together moons ago. The last time he had truly touched you. You stepped inside carefully, snaking yourself around the door before closing it shut with a heavy click.

The hearth warmed the room, dimming it in golds and oranges across banners of red and black. Your breath stuttered as you turned, so taken with breathing the space in you hadn’t known the figure staring right at you. And a look of confusion etching the striking, miserable features.

His robe was a dark and velveted crimson, one that wrapped to his shins and broadened his shoulders. His eyes glistened in that light, twinkling more tender than they had let on, almost enticing.

“Husband.” You greeted innocently.

“Who let you in?” Maekar spoke sharply, like the words were a bad taste on his tongue.

“Your kingsguard, very thoughtful of them.” You gestured behind you at the door as you moved further into the room, closing the gap between you as much as you could dare.

“You should be asleep,” His eyes raked over you for a single moment, rather all he could allow himself before he turned to his side, back facing you as he made for the bed, “in your own chambers.”

Your nightdress was of the finest silk, cream and a lightness that hugged your curves in the most torturous way, your hair clung to your shoulders and your skin bared.

Something he should not have seen, should not have wanted as much as he did.

“I have come to see you.”

You dared a foot forwards, planting it across the cool floor and onto the myriah carpet just at the end of the bed, a small smile peeking at your features. He had rested himself onto the edge of the bed, sitting hunched as his legs trailed far and long in front of him, shoulders sagged and tense.

“Well now you have seen. Now leave.”

But you did not, you couldn’t. He was far too close, and you had not yet begun.

You didn’t answer to that, instead you had crawled toward him on the edge of the bed, a mere arms length away.

“I have missed you.”

He only looked at you as he took a heavy inhale, a simple look, displeased and thrown. Why. You blinked up to the violets that bore into yours, a face like statue and stone. How could you. After all that was placed on you both, all the gossip and venomous words that spilled behinds backs, after how much he had attempted to keep from ruining you.

“What are you saying?”

“Well you hardly spend any time here.. with me.” You kicked your legs in front, swinging just beside his, close enough to knock together where yours didn’t meet the length of his own.

“Do not pretend to be so stupid.”

“It scares you.” You inched closely, carefully, arms reaching toward him, through the robe. And he allowed you to, legs spread wide and shamelessly as you settled yourself over him, a knee perched on either side.

“What?” He blinked up through lidded eyes, pupils blown and decisive, even if he would not speak as such. He would let you have your fun, amuse yourself and find out what you had so longed to have.

“The thought scares you.” You continued, fingers running along the collar of his robe, lining the silk just across the hem where his skin was bared. Few silver hairs littered his chest where the material opened, hard planes of pale muscle rising and falling sharply.

“What thought woman? Speak.” Maekar snapped through the quiet, impatience clawing at his skin like a fire.

“Surrendering yourself.”

He almost laughed, almost, a short incredulous huff bubbling from his throat.

“It is not my duty to surrender.”

“But it is your duty to put a babe in me is it not, the marriage was consummated moons ago and you had done so little as touch me.” Your fingers worked at his shoulders, taut muscle pulling between your nails. He stayed rigid, batting your hand away with a flick.

But you moved it back, placing it right back to where you had it.

“Do not test me.”

You could feel him there. The warmth of his breath, the burning glare that did not leave your face, the heat brushing between you through thin layers of fabric. Arousal flooded your core, and you had half the mind to bite back a moan. You had not had him like this, and he was not denying you.

“I’am not testing you.” You shrugged, hands slowly circling to meet around his neck. A brave move, even if not wise. He swore he could hear the hammering of your heart, and still see the curve of the smirk he had not from forgotten hours earlier, the one that plagued his mind.

The one he wished to wipe off of your face and take you over his lap in an instant—

“Perhaps it is more than duty you require..” Your fingers continued at his collarbones, humming dreamily at the thought. “Perhaps it is want.”

Your eyes met, bearing down into one another as your breaths mingled, your faces somehow rocked closer together on instinct, where your lips neared touching.

“Though if you do not wish for more, nor to consummate this marriage.. I wouldn’t be offended. Perhaps you are scared.. and after having so many it would be more than enough for an old man to—“

That was enough. The pure breaking point he’d sure he’d lost a long time ago. All resolve had seemed to snap with a heavy punch in his gut.

You didn’t have time to contemplate another word before he had shifted you both roughly. Long, thick fingers circled around your throat, your back shoved down into layers upon layers of silken sheets and furs. The tassels of his robe had fallen in his swiftness, bearing his chest completely leaving him only in his breeches and you had completely lost your breath.

You were pinned, folded with your legs pressed into his thighs as he kneeled over you.

“Do not anger me, girl.”

You blinked up at him, gasping at the pressure against your throat. You could smell him from there, more than before. And he was intoxicating. His scent, the smell of woodsmoke and pine, and need.

“You know well that is not it.” He gritted, glaring down at you with a gaze that made the pressure in your belly pinch hot.

“Then what is it.. mayhaps that you are older—“

The fingers tightened at your throat as he leaned down, body rising over yours as more weight anchored you down.

“Seven hells no. Tell me what you want. Say it, tell me you want this as I do, before I change my fucking mind.” The hand at your waist clamped tighter, stretching the seams of your nightgown. Your skin was ablaze, ignited under his touch and the aching deep in your core.

There was much you could have said, even struck him for making you wait so long, for denying himself of you for reasons he couldn’t even begin to name, but you had forgotten all else, raw need buzzing through your skin.

“Want you to put a babe in me husband.. want you to show me how well you fuck.”

You breathed out with a whine. And he growled, deep and beastly, like a primal instinct that could not be tamed. So guttural it sounded almost dragonlike.

His grip curled around the back of your neck, shoving you up to face him with bared teeth as he pressed himself further down, nose nudging harshly into yours.

“Good girl.”

His lips crashed to yours, fierce and unyielding, the force shoving you both back onto the bed as he bent over you. Your tongues swept together before his pushed his between your lips, tasting you, savouring and claiming all at once.

“You have driven me mad, wife.” With one hand he reached between you, unlacing the confines of his breeches in one heavy tug. They fell away down to his knees, the sharp ‘v’ of muscle trailing down to his cock defined and pulsing with vein. Even through lidded and lusted eyes you could see him, all of him. He was thick as he was long, the tip reddened with an aching blush and the beading sticky stream of precum.

Maekar waited a moment, slowing as he rose, releasing his grip on your neck, tracing his fingers over the bunched hem of your nightgown. He pushed it up, inch by inch until he brought it to your chest.

“Off.” Was all he called gruffly, and the command made you dizzy, raising your arms shakily as he snaked it off of you before tossing it somewhere to the floor where neither of you had cared to look for it.

He had longed for this sight. You had lingered long in his memory since the first time, the swell of your breasts and nipples pebbling under the cool air, the dip of your waist and curve of your stomach. The flush of your face under the firelight flickering behind you, silhouetted only by his shadow above you. Gods you did drive him mad.

And he was a fool to wait so long, to make you wait.

Hands brushed down your sides, callouses scratching along your skin as you shivered under his touch, fingers splaying over your belly and parting your thighs.

“All of this teasing.. and talk with your ladies who do not know fuck all.”

His fingers dug into the flesh of them, ignoring the way you inched downward to him, the hard press of his length just above your aching cunt.

“She must be so needy for me for being desperate like some common whore...” He tutted sharply, running a finger from your navel to your heat, slipping through the wetness that gathered over your clit and entrance. Flush crept your cheeks brazenly, hips arching instinctly as he curled two inside of you.

You moaned loudly, digits filling you at once as your cunt sucked them in greedily, rocking back onto them as he flexed them. He worked you open like that, scissoring as you bucked and humped yourself back onto his hand restlessly. And again he let you, urging you on, pumping his fingers deep while his thumb circled at your clit, letting your sticky sweetness coat his hand.

The sounds were lewd, a squelch against his palm where it filled you, motioning and massaging at your g-spot over and over until you had broke a sweat across the sheets, working yourself up with a desire that needed to be sated.

He didn’t let you finish, couldn’t, not even the satisfaction of having you come undone on him was enough. He had to have you, and there was only way it was going to happen, with having you wrapped around his cock and buried deep inside of you.

“Why the fuck did you—“ Your words caught on your tongue, dying as he angled himself, heavy length rubbing through your folds with a sickening tease. He slipped himself inside, thickness filling you with a burning stretch as you took him. His mouth moved back over yours, catching your whines and enduring the way your nails clutched at his back with a groan.

He stilled only to feel all of you, sheathed so far inside you swore you could feel him in the your belly. His cock punched deep, fingers gripped in a swarm around your hips to only anchor himself further, tongue sweeping over yours in a feverish haze. You could hardly breathe, the air punched from your lungs as he thrust inside of you, pulling out gently just to shove himself back deeper, and purposefully until stars blurred your vision.

Your thighs curled at his hips, muscle tensing and straining where he fucked into you like a man possessed, grunts muffled into the curve of your jaw as you begged and whined for him, wrapping yourself tight at his middle as he huddled himself over you. The hard bone of his knees braced at the bottom of your thighs, stretching you further for him to get more of you, your body on full display and all for him.

You tried to speak, to rise over the lack of words as your mouth parted, but it failed you, he was merciless.

“Take. It.” He rasped, rising over you to tug your legs upward, resting them onto his chest and up to his shoulders. Your husband was undone, completely. Silver flattened hair had fallen into his eyes, pale skin flushing with a sheen of sweat and desire, his eyes burning as he took you in. As if to study you so deeply and commit you to memory, finally having you in his arms, unable to spout those stupid questions and irk him further.

But it did not last long, not until he had you flipped again, this time with your face pressed into the furs, a heavy palm smoothed over your back.

“You want to know how hm?” His breath hit the shell of your ear, cock sliding over your arsecheek.

Your blood ran cold, a shiver wracking your body as fingers twisted into your hair, forcing you up along with his hips. He had you bent beneath him, his hips dragging into your arse as he lined himself up once more. You were arched up into him, breasts bunched into the mattress and your cries muffled into the sheets.

The angle there hit deeper, fuller, settling that spot inside of you with every snap of his thrusts. The sound of slapping filled your ears, punctuated only by his grunting and your moans. He tugged you back onto him where you fell completely boneless, his cock spreading you open as your arms spread wide, clutching and fisting at the pillows as you moaned into the mattress.

“This is what you wanted is it, to fuck you full..” A hand cracked down onto your arscheek and you mewled, arching your back to meet the stinging pressure. He fucked into you still, sinking in and out so deeply it was certain to kiss your cervix.

“Perhaps this will shut you up.. spilling inside of this cunt.”

Your whines became babbles, a plea of “yes yes yes” falling from your lips needily, and he gave you it, everything you desired, begged for, everything you deserved. His head fell, a hand moving over the trail of your spine, cinching at your waist to bring you closer.

You couldn’t take it.

The pair of your fell apart together, every slap of skin and pant sending you over the edge. His teeth bit into your shoulder from behind, tongue smoothing over the marks that punctured your skin.

“Please..” You whined, your walls spasming wildly around him as your climax crashed over you.

“Let go for me, my girl..” He groaned through gritted teeth, grabbing a harsh fistful of your arse as you clenched around him, your swollen cunt milking him dry as he chased his own high. He gave few more thrusts before spilling inside of you, fucking it back into you as you shook round him, legs limp beneath him.

He did not let go of you right away, pulling from you carefully, your wetness and his spend leaking from you as he rested your hips back onto the bed. A pillow was placed under your middle as he lifted you without fuss, tilting you ever so slightly downward. So it will keep. Your heart eased its hammering as your body began to rest, heavy warm arms tugging you upward and onto his chest.

The sheets were pulled over you carefully in silence, only his ragged breaths and the crackling of the hearth filling the heavy silence in the room.

“Rest.”

A hand combed through your hair, smoothing over your face as you looked up at him, and this time he found yours, and really looked. Your arm wrapped over his as his hooked under your legs, sweeping you closer, together wrapped in your warmth.

He felt you looking, and he waited, expecting another quip as per usual.

“Are you done with the nonsense now?” He mumbled, resting his head back onto the wooden headboard.

“Mhm.. maybe.” You hummed, tracing the silver hairs at his chest.

“For fucks sake..”

“I believe you’ll have to do it again.”

There it was.

The mouth that drove him mad. His arm tightened around you, but he said nothing.

Though he didn’t need to, his exhales grew harsher, his spend still dripping from you as you rubbed your thighs together, and over the hardening of his cock.

Not as duty, not as requirement, but as your husband, and the pure unrestrained need for wanting you, and how he wasn’t to deny it again.