𓇢𓆸APEIROPHOBIA⚘

VALARR.

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

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

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

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

DAERON.

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

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

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

LYONEL.

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

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

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

DUNK.

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

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

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

He would gift you pieces of this man for every turn of the moon. But it’s important to understand that this isn’t done in a rage. This is done with ceremony. The first thing that arrives at your chambers is small and deliberate and unsigned. Aerion is too proud to write notes; the meaning is the meaning, and if you don’t understand it on sight that’s your failure, not his. It might be a ring. It might be a single tooth. It might be the badge from a man’s cloak. Recognisable to anyone who’s been at court for more than a season, recognisable to you in particular because you noticed the man wearing it the night he overstepped and Aerion noticed you noticing. The badge arrives wrapped in soft cloth, like a courting gift. The cloth is clean. The badge is not.

And then nothing. For a moonturn. Nothing.

And you wait, because you understand by now that the silences are the cruellest part. Aerion is letting you sit with it. He’s letting the man’s friends and family wonder. Aerion is letting the court wonder, because the man has gone abruptly unfindable and the rumour mill has begun to churn and nobody can quite say what’s happened to him but everyone has noticed Aerion smiling rather more pleasantly than usual at supper.

Then, one moonturn later: another package. This one slightly larger. Perhaps a finger. The finger that wore the ring. Perhaps a lock of the man’s hair, the same shade as the badge. Perhaps something more intimate, a token from the man’s own person, something the man would only have surrendered under duress. Paced gifts. Measured. You understand, by the third package, that Aerion is not killing the man at all. He is disassembling him slowly, over the course of moons, and what arrives at your door is the evidence of the work.

The man is alive throughout. That’s the genuine horror of it. Aerion is a careful enough hand to keep him alive long past the point where lesser cruelty would have ended things. Each piece arrives whole and fresh, which means the man is somewhere, somewhere, in the dark, being kept in a state where pieces can be removed without killing him. For moons. For moons.

And the cruelty is the pacing, because Aerion is making you complicit in the duration. He’s savouring it. And he’s making you watch him savour it. Each gift is a small private ritual between you. Do you see what I will do for you, wife? Do you see what is owed when a man forgets whose hand he was reaching toward?

You will not protest, by the way. That’s the other layer. Because here is the genuine, ugly truth of how this lands with you: the wolf-blooded north-bred lady will not feel sorry for the man. You might wish Aerion had been quicker about it. You might wish the gifts were less ostentatious. But you will not weep over this man. The man pursued you despite your vows, despite your bond, despite your clearly stated wishes to leave you be, and in the cold logic of the North that is not a man who’s earned mercy. The wolf doesn’t apologise for prey being foolish.

And here is where Aerion’s response becomes most precisely tailored to you, rather than to himself: he knows this about you. He’s always known this about you. The gifts are not just punishment of the man, they’re a language Aerion is speaking to you. I see what you are. I see the part of you the south wants to pretend isn’t there. I see the wolf, and I am feeding her.

What he won’t do, ever, in any version of this is doubt you. That’s the part that catches people off guard. Lesser men, when their wives are pursued, become suspicious of the wife. They wonder if she invited it. They wonder if she encouraged it. They grow cold. Aerion does the opposite. Aerion’s fury is directed entirely outward, and what he reserves for you is softer than usual. Tenderer. More attentive. He sleeps closer. Kisses you hungrier. His hand finds yours even more often. He speaks your name lower in his throat. The beast is calmer when he’s feeding, and he’s feeding plentifully now, and you’re the beneficiary of his contentment.

Because in Aerion’s mind, the man’s overreach is not a threat to your loyalty. It’s a compliment to his choice. Of course men pursue you. Of course they do. You’re the most extraordinary woman in the realm, the wolf in his rose garden, the only thing he’s ever wanted that he managed to get. And the fact that other men can see it too is not infuriating because it suggests doubt. It’s infuriating because it suggests trespass. Someone has put hands toward what is his, and the response is not jealousy. The response is collection.

Aerion doesn’t have Baelor’s composure. Baelor would handle a pursuer with diplomacy: a quiet word, a reassignment to a distant holding, perhaps the gentle suggestion that the man find a wife of his own. Resolved without bloodshed. That’s the prince of mercy.

VALARR. Here’s the trap of Valarr: praise is his native language. He gives it constantly, generously, without thought, because (as we established) he’s been worshipped his whole life and has therefore developed no real defence against being wanted. He tells you you’re beautiful at least four times a session. So when you turn it on him? You’re beautiful, Val, look at you, look at how good you are—he glows. He genuinely lights up, that golden boy grin breaking across his face, and he’ll laugh, breathless, delighted, and say yeah? like a man being handed a present. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t unmake him the way it does the others. Valarr has heard it before, many times. What undoes him is the who of it (that you said it, his impossible-to-impress wolf, his northern queen who never gives anything she doesn’t mean) and so the praise is less devastation than confirmation. I knew it. I am. I am, for you.

DAERON. Daeron has spent his short life being told he’s the disappointment, the wine-soaked one, the prince who sees too much in his sleep and not enough in the world. He has a beautiful face (Targaryen-soft, fine-boned, dreamy) and absolutely no idea what to do with it. Tell Daeron he’s beautiful and he will flinch. He’ll think you’re mocking him. He’ll go quiet and watchful, a little sad, because he doesn’t believe it, because his father’s disappointment lives in his chest where pride should be. You’ll have to say it again, and again, and mean it, hold his face in your hands and make him look at you, you are beautiful, Daeron, you are, and watch his eyes well up before he laughs it off and turns his face into your palm and kisses it, pretending the moment didn’t gut him. It gutted him. You’ll feel it for hours afterwards in how carefully he holds you.

LYONEL. Roars with laughter. Genuinely, genuinely laughs. Head thrown back, that big stormlands bellow, his stag’s-pride mane of black hair shaking. He loves it. He eats it up. He’ll grin down at you, all teeth, and say aye, m’lady? say it again, louder, I want the bloody guards to hear it. Lyonel has zero shame about being beautiful. He knows, leans into it because praise from you is fuel, not unmaking. He’ll demand more (what else, wolf, tell me what else, tell me what you like best) and he’ll fuck you stupid trying to earn each new compliment, his eyes bright with delight, his hands shaking your hips because he’s laughing in the middle of it. He’s the one man on this list who can take a you’re beautiful and turn it into a game you’ll lose.

The big one:

Okay. Okay. The one where it actually sticks. The one where months pass. The one where you start seeing Valarr and the maekarlings find out.

First, something you don't actually know yet. Aerion is actually trying to get sober. Properly sober. And because he keeps relapsing and every time he does he makes himself stay away longer. He's not gone because he stopped caring. He's gone because he refuses to come back until he can trust himself to stay.

The maekarlings know this. They watch it happen in real time, they're there for the withdrawals and the crashouts. And for the first time in their entire messy, chaotic, disaster-prone family history, they rally around their brother. They would all die before admitting they're doing it. But Daeron stops picking fights with him on purpose. Daella checks in without making it weird. Even Maekar is quietly, gruffly, wordlessly there. Because they all see what he's trying to do and they all know why.

They know it's for you. They know he's doing the hardest thing he's ever done for a person who doesn't even know he's doing it yet.

So when Valarr comes onto the scene?

Oh, they hate him.

Not for the money, exactly. The maekarlings have complicated feelings about wealth, god knows, and resentment toward money-as-money isn't really the specific flavour here.

What they hate is the theft of it. Valarr Targaryen, their smooth and assembled cousin, arriving with peonies, trying to walk off with something that belongs to them.

They're dragonlings and they're greedy in the particular way all dragons are greedy. They had you for years. You're woven into their disaster family in ways that can't be unpicked: you play cyvasse with Maekar on Thursday nights, you drove five hours in the middle of the night for Rhae's ER visit, you've sat through Egg's chess problems at 1 AM, you've edited Daella's college essays.

"Slow," he says again. Like an order, like he gets to give those. “Need you slow.”

So you do the opposite. You line Aerion up, and you sink down on him in one long, merciless movement, taking every inch in one stroke. The ragged noise Aerion makes is worth the burn at the stretch. His head tips back against the pillow. The line of his throat goes long and elegant, the small mole below his right ear pulling into the light. The silver piercings in his upper cartilage catch light, too. His hips jerk up to meet you on instinct, and you press a hand flat to his lower stomach, pinning him, and his eyes snap open at that.

"Got you," you murmur teasingly. 

"Fuck off—"

"Didn't you hear me the first time? Make me."

He tries. His hand fists in your hair, and he yanks you down to his mouth and kisses you like he's trying to win something back. Teeth on your lower lip, hard enough to sting, to bruise. His tongue slick in your mouth. He tastes like the cigarette you watched him put out twenty minutes ago, like the bourbon he had after, like himself. His other hand drags up your spine and finds your breast, palms it, thumb working your nipple in tight little circles that send heat shooting straight down to where he's seated deep inside you.

You let him for a beat. You let him think he has it. Has you.

Then you sit up.

You sit up, and his hand slides reluctantly from your hair to your throat, fingers spread loose at the column of it, and you start to move.

You lift up off him unhurriedly, until just the head is inside you, and sink back down. You lift again. Sink again. You're learning the way he likes it, what makes him fall apart the fastest.

You roll your hips and watch the muscle in Aerion’s stomach jump again. So you grind down, clit pressed against the indent of his hipbone, and watch his eyelashes flutter.

You lift almost off him entirely—until he's barely inside you, just the head, just the stretch—and you hold there. The sound he makes is not a sound he would let anyone else hear, you know. A breath, broken in the middle. His hand spasms on your throat. His other hand goes to your thigh and grips so hard you'll find the marks tomorrow in the shower and smile at them.

"Christ, wolf, I swear to god—"

You hum, slightly breathless. "What was that about slow?"

"I’ll fuck you so hard—"

The words fall off his tongue. He won't ask. He won't ask, the arrogant fuck.

He'll let you take him apart before he asks for anything, and the knowledge is heady, sits hot and pleased low in your belly, makes you clench around him just to feel his whole body spasm. You start to move properly then. Set the rhythm. Take him the way you want him, the way you sometimes let him take you—full strokes, deep, your hands flat on his chest for leverage.

Aerion’s hands are everywhere. They never settle.

Up the column of your spine, dragging, pressing. Across your ribs, palming your breast, his thumb brushing over the nipple in a rhythm that's deliberately offset from yours, trying to wreck your concentration.

He's good at this. He's so good at this. He's known your body for nine months, and he uses every inch of that knowledge like a weapon. Knows the spot just below your ear, knows the tendon at the inside of your thigh, knows that if he drags his thumb down between your breasts and presses there, just under your sternum, you'll lose your rhythm for half a stroke.

He does it. You lose it.

Aerion’s mouth tilts, satisfied, cocky.

You smile down at him anyway, mean about it, and his eyes narrow.

So you change the angle.

You shift forward, palms flat and pushing harder, weight tipped, hips canted at the pitch you've been hunting. You find it on the second stroke. You know you've found it because Aerion’s whole body locks, just for an instant, his back arching slightly off the mattress, the dragon at his back pulling, the steel ring at his nipple catching the light. 

A sound tears out of him that’s unguarded, ugly, so hungry it makes you smile. A real groan. The kind from the base of his throat. The kind he gives you when he's already too gone for his arrogance to hold him back. His nails rake down your back. You feel them break skin between your shoulder blades, hot little lines, and you know without looking that there's red under his fingernails now.

"Oh," you breathe, delighted, ruining him on purpose now, "there."

"Don't—" his voice sounds shredded, "don't you fucking dare —"

You do it again. Same angle. Same pressure. That maddening, deliberate roll of your hips that grinds your clit against him on the down-stroke and drags the head of his cock across that spot inside you on the up. Aerion claws at you, hissing, hands skidding down to your hips and pulling you onto him hard, trying to take it back, trying to set the pace, trying to do anything except let you have this.

You laugh, low, breathless, because the panic in his hands tells you everything. You've never had this much of him at once.

"Stark—fucking—Stark—"

"Use your words, Aerion," you whisper sweetly. 

His head thrashes against the pillow. His hair is wrecked, white-blond strands stuck damp. The ring through his nipple catches your eye again, and you can’t resist any longer. You bend down, and you set your teeth there, just teeth, just pressure on the metal, tongue flicking over it once, and he jerks underneath you like you've shocked him. His cock kicks inside you. You feel him twitch, pulse, feel how close he is, feel the way his thighs are shaking under yours.

"Don't stop."

It slips out before he can stop himself. You hear it land in the room before he does. He would take it back if he could. You can feel the recoil in him, the half-second of fuck, did I just say that out loud—but you don't let him. You ride him through it. You keep that exact angle, keep that exact pressure, and you press your mouth against Aerion’s ear, and you say nothing. 

You just breathe against the silver bar in his cartilage, you just let him hear you breathe.

"Please," he rasps.

The word is so quiet you almost miss it.

"Please, don't stop."

Aerion Targaryen. Trust fund, enough money for several lifetimes, dangerous dragon, and that mouth shapes the sweetest word. Please. Tucked into the side of your sweat-damp throat like a secret he's giving you because there's no one else to give it to.

Your chest warms.

You don't stop.

But you don't speed up either. You hold Aerion there, on the edge, in the exact place he asked you to keep him, and you watch him come undone for you. Really undone. The version of him no one else has ever met. His hips buck up to meet yours, hungry, no rhythm to it now, just want. Aerion’s breath stutters. The muscle in his jaw works as he tries and fails to hold himself together. There's sweat in the dip of his collarbone, slick at his temple, a flush spreading down his chest from his throat to his sternum.

"That's it," you breathe, hardly a sound, just for him, mouth at his ear. "You feel so good. That's it, baby—"

He breaks on the endearment. You feel it happen.

His back arches off the mattress, his head goes back, the long pale line of his throat exposed. Aerion comes inside you with a sound you’ve never heard him make. A real sound, raw, almost wounded, hot and pulsing deep where you're seated over him. 

Aerion’s fingers dig crescents into the meat of your hips. His other hand fists desperately in the sheet at his side, knuckles white. His eyes are squeezed shut, mouth open and lush as he gasps. Ragged, low. The lamp catches every silver thing in his ear, the slick of sweat at his temple, the flush mottling his chest, the way his stomach is still twitching through his release.

He’s—

—he’s so beautiful it stops your breath for a second. Thrown-back, undone, yours, still emptying himself inside you, and he doesn't even know he's letting you look at him like this.

You bend over him.

You set your mouth at Aerion’s throat, where his pulse is hammering at the surface, and you suck—slow, with teeth, the way he desires, the way that always makes his hand flex on the back of your neck—and he shudders bodily underneath you. Oversensitive, cock still twitching inside you where he hasn't softened yet. A hushed, strangled noise spills out of him again at the sensation. You feel his come start to slip out of you around him, and you clench down, keeping it, keeping him, and his whole body jolts.

Aerion hisses between his teeth. "Fuck—wolf —"

You don't answer, only suck harder. Drag the blood up under his skin so he has to wear it tomorrow and see it in the mirror when he shaves. To think about you every single time he turns his head for the next week. You drag your tongue over the bruise as it blooms. Bite, gentle, just at the edge of it.

His hand finds your hair. Strokes once, trembling.

"Wolf," Aerion breathes again, smaller this time.

Eyes still closed, throat still bared. Hand still trembling in your hair.

Not a nibble. A real bite, intentional, pressure built up in your jaw, and he hisses into your mouth and grins against your teeth and says, voice dropped to a register you'll think about later when you can't sleep, "There you are."

You shove him. He doesn't move much. Your palms find the warm wall of his chest under thin cotton, and you can feel the sternum, the heat coming off him, the muscle that comes from working with his hands and not from any gym you've ever been inside. You shove again, harder, just to feel him absorb it.

"What," he says, mouth grazing your jaw now, slow, "afraid I might break you?"

The line of his teeth settles at your pulse lightly, not yet biting. Aerion’s knuckles brush your hip through your jeans. You feel every one of them like a brand.

"I'm afraid," you say sweetly, "I might break you."

He pulls back an inch. Stares at you.

You would say something about his eyes if you were the kind of girl who said things about boys' eyes. They're pale and a little fevered, doing something they haven't done all night, which is register you. Like the joke just landed, and he wasn't expecting it to. A realisation that you, too, know the steps to this dance. 

His tongue runs over the place you bit him, lip swollen. His grin sharpens.

"Try."

So you do.

You fist your hand in the front of his shirt—that torn collar, that fraying cotton—and you yank him down to your mouth. You kiss him the way you've wanted to kiss someone since you were fifteen years old and never had the nerve, kiss him with all the careful Stark composure cracked open and bleeding heat. You scrape your teeth over his lip. You drag your nails up the back of his neck where the hair is short and damp with sweat from the lake, and you feel, very distinctly, the second his breath catches—a hitch, small and starved, quickly covered—and you tuck the knowledge away for later use. 

Oh, you think. He's loud about it, but he's not as in control as he wants you to think.

When Aerion tries to take it back, push you against the truck again, lead it, you turn your face. Just a fraction. Enough that his mouth lands on the corner of yours instead of the centre, and he has to chase it, has to ask for it without asking. Wait the half-second you make him wait before you let him have it again.

Aerion’s hand spasms once on the truck beside your head. The metal thunks faintly under his palm.

"Fuck," he breathes, half a laugh, half something rougher, and his forehead drops to yours for a beat—a lapse, probably, an accident, some animal instinct slipping the leash—and you feel it, the brief honest weight of his head against yours. Before he remembers himself and pulls back, the smirk slides into place again like he's pulling on a glove.

"Slow down, Stark."

"Why?" You're a little breathless, and you hate that you're a little breathless. You make your mouth smile. "Can't keep up?"

His thumb finds your bottom lip, digs in, drags across it slowly, considering, and his eyes are doing that fevered thing again. Brighter now, dangerous, and you know with a certainty that’s going to ruin the next year of your life that he’s mapping you, finding all the places you're not the controlled little princess you pretend to be so he can play with them later.

And you’re doing the same thing back.

"Princess," he murmurs hotly, "I'm gonna keep up just fine."

it becomes the thing he calls you when he's drunk and asking you not to leave. promise, darling? and the way it goes from a weapon to a tether without either of you ever acknowledging the shift is so painfully them. you don't talk about feelings, you talk around them. you talk in errands and porch. now. aerion gets off at eleven. you talk in him sliding a beer across the counter at you without asking, in him texting you need an exit strategy, darling? when your family bullshit has gone radioactive and he can tell from your last three replies that you're dissociating into your phone screen.

and there are these little moments over the years, none of them really big, none of them you'd ever name out loud, but they accumulate.

like the night three months in when you'd had a horrible call with your father in the trailer driveway and you didn't realise Daeron had noticed it from the porch until he wordlessly handed you a cigarette you don't even smoke and said, don't tell my brother i offered, he gets weird about it. you didn't smoke it. you just held it between your fingers and sat next to him in silence for forty minutes, and somehow your shoulders unlocked for the first time in a week.

or the time he caught you crying in the kitchen (actually crying, ugly, unmoored crying, the kind no one ever sees because you refuse to break) and instead of making it a thing or a joke, he just turned around, walked back outside, and yelled at Aemon about something stupid for ten minutes to give you space to put your face back on. you never spoke about it. when you came outside red-eyed and composed he just nodded at you once and threw you a beer like nothing happened.

or that one morning you came over too early and found him at the kitchen table with one of those old psychology textbooks open in front of him, a highlighter in his hand. the look that crossed his face when he saw you was so naked, so caught, that you just walked past him to the fridge and said you're out of milk, i'll grab some, and pretended not to have seen anything at all. when you came back the textbook was gone. he didn't thank you. he didn't have to.

then of course there's the time he broke a bottle over a guy's head in a bar before Aerion could even move, just stood up, cracked the man across the skull, and sat back down like nothing happened, blood on his knuckles, that sharp smile back on his face. you asked him later why he cared and he looked at you like you were stupid. you're ours now. nobody gets to talk shit about what's ours.

and the possessiveness in his voice mirrored Aerion's so exactly it made you shiver, because that's the moment the dynamic became dangerous, not because Daeron wanted you, but because Daeron had claimed you. as family. as his to protect. the Targaryen siblings have always been his (he raised them, he held them, he didn't get to be a kid because he was too busy keeping five other kids alive) and now you've been folded into that.

you're his to defend the same way Egg is, the same way Rhae is. which means: you're his to be ruined for.

and Aerion has to sit with the fact that his brother would kill for you now, would burn the world for you, and that's not romantic but it's not nothing either. it's something older than romance. it's pack instinct. it's the way Daeron loves anything he's chosen to protect, and Aerion is greedy and broken enough to want to be the only one who feels that way about you.

the night he said I need you will live in your chest forever. you were helping him inside after a particularly bad night, half-carrying him because his legs weren't quite working. he was telling you you were too good for all of them and you should leave and also begging you not to. don't leave, okay? even when it gets hard. even when he's impossible. the kids need you. a pause. then quieter, looking at you with eyes unfocused but somehow more honest than they've ever been: I need you.

your throat went tight. you said I'm not going anywhere and you meant it, and he said promise, darling? with that endearment soft for once instead of barbed, and you said promise. and the next morning he was hungover and prickly and absolutely refused to acknowledge that any of it had happened, but a week later you found a box of your favourite tea in the cupboard at the trailer that hadn't been there before.

nobody else in that family drinks tea, and nobody mentioned where it came from. that's how Daeron says thank you. that's how Daeron says i remember. he buys you a brand of tea you mentioned liking once, six months ago, in passing, and never tells you he did it.

Aerion senses all of it. all of it. senses that his brother (who has trusted no one, leaned on no one, asked for nothing his entire adult life) is leaning on YOU.

and that should make him grateful, and sometimes it does, sometimes he watches you with Daeron and feels this overwhelming relief that his brother has someone, finally, that someone is finally seeing what Daeron has carried.

but also: she's mine first. she was mine first. don't ever forget that. both feelings live in him at once and he can't reconcile them, so he channels it all into fucking you like he's trying to imprint himself on your bones, pulling you aside after he catches you and Daeron talking on the porch and pressing you against the wall, possessive and rough, you're mine, not his, mine. because he can't fight what he doesn't have language for. can only reclaim your body since he can't reclaim that specific frequency you share with his brother.

now the "good girl" thing.

when Daeron's particularly pleased with you, when you've done something that's earned his genuine approval (handled some sort of family crisis, picked up Egg/Rhae from school when the truck broke down etc), he'll say it with that dangerous smile: good girl.

and Aerion's jaw locks every single time because that's his line. that's what HE says to you in bed, fisted in your hair, voice wrecked, his claiming language.

and Daeron knows it. Daeron does it on purpose, half because he loves to push Aerion's buttons and half because it's true, because you've been good. because you belong to all of them now and he gets to acknowledge that. but Aerion hears it and goes mean and jealous, has to physically restrain himself from snapping at his older brother. has to remind himself that Daeron isn't taking anything from him, that this is just Daeron being Daeron, that the claim is brotherly not romantic. doesn't help.

he still drags you out of the room ten minutes later and reminds you exactly whose good girl you are, marks bitten into your collarbone before you've even made it to the bedroom.

and the saddest part perhaps is that you and Daeron will never talk about what you are to each other.

you'll never have the conversation. he'll never tell you you're the closest thing he has to a peer in his entire family, the only person who sees how tired he is and doesn't try to fix it. you'll never tell him you see yourself in him so clearly it scares you, that he's the brother you never had and also something else you can't name. something worse than a brother because brothers you can love cleanly and this isn't clean. this is something with teeth in it, something forged in shared exhaustion and mutual recognition and the specific lonely intimacy of two people who learned the same survival skills in different rooms.

you'll just keep doing things in actions instead. in porch. now. in need an exit strategy, darling? in him calling you at 2am because something's gone wrong and you're the only person whose number he dials with absolute trust that you'll show up. in you showing up every single time without question. in the box of tea. in the cigarette he handed you that you didn't smoke. in him turning around and walking back outside the day he caught you crying.

⧽ BAELOR

Baelor is a cat man.

Hear me out now. He couldn't have one for years because Valarr was allergic. So Baelor, who had quietly wanted a cat since he was a boy at his grandmother's summer house in Dorne where a line of big half-wild kitchen cats had treated him like one of their own, simply… didn't. He put it away. For his son. Like he's put away a lot of things.

Then Valarr moves out and four months later there's a cat in the townhouse.

Baelor gets him from a rescue. An actual rescue. He donates to rescues through the Foundation, and one of the case workers mentioned, offhand, that they had a cat nobody wanted: adult, enormous, the kind of hard-lived tom that classes as too much for most homes.

Thick-coated, rust-red shading to black on his face and paws, with eyes the colour of cheap whisky and a temperament that had caused two failed adoptions already. A scar across his nose. One ear notched. The kind of cat that looks like he's been in a war and back.

Baelor went to meet him with no expectation of bringing him home. Came home with him that afternoon.

His name is Vermithor.

Baelor didn't name him that, the cat came in with a shelter placeholder and Baelor kept rolling it over in his head for about a week, trying the usual dignified Targaryen names on for size and finding none of them fit.

Vermithor came out of his mouth one evening almost by accident, and the cat looked up from the windowsill and met his eyes, and Baelor thought yes, alright, that's you then. He was slightly embarrassed about it but also privately delighted. Only you would ever get him to admit any of this, and even then only after a glass of wine.

Vermithor is a big cat. Ten kilos, long-bodied, heavy-boned, all of it muscle. He's not a lap cat in the ordinary sense. He won't rest in your lap like a decorative accessory. He's a weight cat. Sits on Baelor's chest when Baelor is reading in bed. He drapes himself across Baelor's forearms when Baelor is trying to work at his desk and has to be bodily lifted and put somewhere else, at which point he simply walks back. Offended obv. He head-butts with enough force to physically move you.

He gives love bites. Frequently! Baelor's forearms, in the first months, were covered in small scabs and bruises he didn't bother hiding. You noticed at a charity dinner and raised an eyebrow and he said, in the same voice he uses to announce Foundation grants, "That's Vermithor." You said, "I'm sorry?" He said, perfectly straight-faced, "My cat." You laughed so hard people started looking over.

Vermithor doesn't like anyone. He tolerates the housekeeper because she feeds him tasty chicken. He actively hates Dunk, which has become a running joke between Dunk and Baelor.

Dunk will come into the house for a briefing and Vermithor will position himself on the stairs and stare, and Dunk, a man who's done legit close protection in genuine war zones and loves animals, will keep one eye on the cat the entire meeting. Baelor finds this endlessly hilarious in his quiet way.

He tried exactly once to bite Blackwind. Blackwind, who has killed things, looked at this cat, looked at Baelor, and simply sat down. Did not engage. Vermithor swatted his nose once, found no fight, and retreated onto the back of the sofa to survey from above.

That's now their permanent arrangement: Blackwind on the floor, Vermithor on the furniture, both of them pointedly ignoring each other while keeping the other in perfect peripheral vision. They've achieved peace through mutual non-engagement, which is extremely on-brand for both their owners if you ask me.

He adores you though. This cat who hates everyone, climbs into your lap within five minutes of meeting you and falls asleep. Deeply. The full belly-up limp-limbed deep sleep of a creature who's decided this is safe and nice. Baelor stood in his own drawing room staring at this and didn't say anything for so long you started to worry something was wrong. Then he cleared his throat and said, "He doesn't do that." You said, "Does he not?" Baelor replied, "No. He doesn't." Something passed between you that you both declined to name.

The heir to a legacy he doesn't want, the man whose life's been shaped since childhood to an exacting standard, the restrained and composed and good prince, sitting on his own sofa at eleven at night with a ten-kilo rescue cat on his chest is a frequent sight.

Baelor reads a policy brief one-handed because his other hand is too busy scratching under Vermithor's jaw, and Vermithor is purring loud enough to be heard across the room. Baelor's mouth is soft in a way almost nobody ever gets to see.

You saw it for the first time after a late supper, when you came back into the drawing room to collect something you'd left and found him like that. He looked up. Didn't startle. Just looked at you, and there was something unguarded in his face, something that said you're seeing this, of course you are, of course you're the one who gets to, and you understood that this was the moment. That this was going to be the rest of your life, if you let it.

Years later, when things are calmer, more settled, when you and Baelor have stopped pretending you're not the shape each other's lives, there will be a second animal. A wolfhound puppy he surprises you with for your birthday: massive-pawed, clumsy, delighted by everything, brought home to run with Blackwind in his last gentle years. You get emotional only once. Baelor pretends not to notice, kisses the top of your head, and says, "Blackwind is getting old. He should have someone to train up."

The puppy's name is Greywind. Of course.

Vermithor, for the record, hates the puppy for approximately six weeks and then adopts him. By the end of the year the wolfhound is three times the cat's size and Vermithor still sleeps between his paws.

⧽ AERION

Three European Dobermans, jet black, all full siblings from the same litter, bought from a breeder in Germany who doesn't sell to just anyone.

Their names are Balerion, Vhagar, and Caraxes because Aerion is a dramatic bitch and will not apologise, thanks!

(Caraxes is his favourite. He will deny this. Yet his ass still buys Caraxes separate treats.)

All three of them get restless when he leaves the penthouse. All three sleep in his bed when they're allowed (which is more often than not). He has a California king and he still ends up in six inches of space at the edge because 135 kilos of dog have colonised the rest. All three of them love him with the unhinged devotion only a Dobe can produce.

Collectively, between them, they have bitten exactly one person. (Guess who)

But the actual head of the household is Shit. Aerion never named him. Aerion doesn't have a cat. The cat just lives at his place now, it's fine, leave it alone. Shit is a one-eyed feral tomcat who appeared one random Monday three years ago, established dominance, and has maintained it since.

The three Dobermans are terrified of Shit. Shit sleeps in the middle of the bed. The Dobes rearrange themselves around him. When Shit walks into a room the dogs stand up. When Shit eats, the dogs wait. You have watched Shit swat Vhagar across the nose unprovoked and Vhagar just accepted it. It's the funniest thing you've ever seen.

The particular absurdity of it, of course, is that Shit is the only thing in Aerion's life he didn't buy.

He has stupid money. He has a garage of cars he barely drives, an art collection that costs insane money, three Dobes that flew business class from Frankfurt because he wasn't going to put them in cargo. And the creature that owns him is a one-eyed alley cat who chose him and who he has never once attempted to put in a carrier because he suspects, correctly, that Shit would scratch his eyes out.

He was also a lizard/snake boy in his youth. The dragon obsession had to go somewhere, folks!

Fourteen-year-old Aerion had a whole wing of the country house dedicated to it: a bearded dragon named Cannibal (imaginative), a pair of leopard geckos, a ball python morph he begged his father for and then exceeded the budget on by an obscene margin, eventually a fucking tegu that terrified the ever loving shit out of Daeron.

He was scarily good at it, too. Meticulous about husbandry, obsessively researched, read academic papers on reptile behaviour for fun like a pyscho.

Had his allowance suspended once for spending it all on a custom enclosure. Maekar, who didn't understand a single thing about any of it, once came into his son's wing of the house to find Aerion at fifteen holding a massive black-and-white tegu in his lap and explaining why this animal's enclosure humidity had to stay between 60 and 80 percent, and Maekar turned around and left without a word 😭

(Aerion doesn't keep reptiles anymore. You asked once, carefully. He shrugged and lit a cigarette and said "got bored of it." He's lying but you don't push. You know exactly when he stopped—it was the year before you met, when everything with his father imploded, the year he got sent to rehab. The year the wing of the house that had been his got closed up because he couldn't be trusted to look after himself let alone an entire ecosystem. He let it go because he couldn't stand to see another living thing depend on him and be failed. You are, quietly, having a custom enclosure built for his birthday. You haven't decided yet whether you're brave enough to actually give it to him tho.)

Aerion around his animals is a completely different person when he's an adult. Quieter. His hands (which are usually restless, always reaching for drugs or a cigarette or you) become careful in a way they never are with humans.

He talks to them in low murmurs. He buys them things. It's the single most disarming thing about him and you noticed it within the first week of knowing him properly.

You can tell everything you need to know about Aerion by watching him put food down for Shit. The way he checks his water, squats to let the cat headbutt his knuckles, murmurs alright, boss so quietly you almost miss it sometimes.

Caraxes and Blackwind have a standoff the first time they meet. Two apex predators sizing each other up. Neither backs down. They eventually coexist through mutual, edged tolerance. Vhagar and Balerion take their cue from Caraxes.

Shit, obviously, walks right up to Blackwind with his tail up, rubs against his front leg, and establishes dominance over him too. Blackwind (this 80-kilo wolfdog who has genuinely maimed a man once) permits it with the weary dignity.

⧽ MAEKAR

Maekar refuses to get a pet. Refuses. He works all the time, has six children in various stages of crisis, travels more than he sleeps, has not had a holiday in eleven years, and absolutely cannot take on a single additional living creature, is that understood? Is EVERYONE clear on that???

Then Rhae brings home a dying cat.

She's eleven. She finds the cat at a charity event she was dragged to, a rescue gala. The cat is ancient. Grey-muzzled, thin, one eye clouded over, clearly surrendered by someone who couldn't be bothered anymore.

Rhae disappears during dinner. Maekar finds his youngest daughter in a storage room behind the event space forty minutes later with this half-dead animal in her lap, refusing to leave. He opens his mouth to say absolutely not and looks at his daughter's pinched face and closes his mouth again.

He pays for the cat's vet work up front (a sum that would have made any other donor faint but that Maekar signs off on without looking) and the cat comes home that night in the back of the Bentley on Rhae's lap. Her name is Dyanna.

(I know. I know. He did not name her that. Daella did, to be cruel, to see what he would do. He didn't correct her. The cat is Dyanna now. This is the closest Maekar has come to talking about his dead wife in a decade. Nobody in the household has ever been brave enough to mention it. The staff have been briefed on this.)

Within six months this cat follows him everywhere. Sits on his shoulder while he reads briefing documents in the study. Sleeps on his chest at night. Yowls at the front door when he's late back from the office.

Maekar (who denied wanting her, who grumbled about every vet visit, who said repeatedly this cat is the girl's responsibility) now has a bespoke cat carrier in the back of his armoured SUV for the days Dyanna decides she's coming to work with him. His PA has Dyanna's food brand memorised.

You watched him feed Dyanna a piece of his own dinner once, slipping it to her under the table of a formal family dinner with a gruff "don't tell her," meaning Rhae, who was already watching and smirking. You didn't comment.

After Dyanna wins him over, it spirals.

Maekar will never be the kind of man who does a charity photo op with a rescue dog. But quietly, methodically, he becomes the single largest private donor to a handful of senior-animal rescues across three countries.

He goes for the ones nobody else picks. The deaf ones. The blind ones. The fourteen-year-old dogs whose owners died. Current household: Dyanna the cat, a deaf elderly rottweiler named Baelon who sleeps on a cashmere throw in his library, and a three-legged mutt named Jaehaerys who Egg brought home and who has attached himself to Maekar exclusively.

Maekar grumbles about all of them constantly. He has, personally, twice delayed a board meeting because Jaehaerys had a vet appointment. If you point this out he will leave the room and not speak to you for a week.

The single most devastating thing about Maekar with these animals is the way he handles them. Dyanna climbs onto his shoulder and he goes soft. Just a tiny thing. His hand comes up to steady her without looking. He keeps working.

⧽ DAERON

Daeron has a fish tank. A huge, ridiculous, museum-grade saltwater system that takes up an entire wall of his flat. That thing is custom made and it's insured separately, too. It's the one thing in his life he has never been bored of, never self-sabotaged, never let slide.

He spends hours on it when he's trying not to drink. Adjusting the lights, testing the water, sitting in the dark with just the blue glow of it on his face.

He has a marine biologist on retainer. The irony of the Targaryen heir spending his afternoons hand-feeding a saltwater ecosystem with the focus he refuses to give anything else, is not lost on anyone. Least of all Daeron.

There's a particular octopus. Her name is Visenya. She's terrifyingly smart and recognises him and does that thing where she presses up against the glass when he comes close.

Daeron can be sneering and cynical about everything in the world except this animal. You asked him once why an octopus and he said, without looking up from the tank, "They're clever. They get bored. They die fast. We've got things in common." You didn't know what to do with that so you just sat with him in the blue light for an hour and watched Visenya rearrange the shells in her tank.

Also: there's a stray cat that lives on the fire escape of his building that Daeron has been feeding for three years that he insists is "not his cat." The building has a no-pets policy. Daeron pays the management company a truly grotesque amount of money to pretend it doesn't. This cat has kittens seasonally. Daeron personally vets every home they go to. He's not emotionally invested. Shut up.

⧽ VALARR

Allergic to cats. Genuinely, medically allergic, the kind where he has to take antihistamines before entering a house with one. Which has always conveniently given him an excuse to decline invitations to places he didn't want to go.

He instead has a show-bred cocker spaniel named Seahorse. (I know. I know. He named her, she's purebred, she has papers, she has a Kennel Club registration, she cost more than a small car. Valarr would like it very much if you didn't comment on the name. It was a private joke he has now realised is not as charming as he thought it was in public. He won't rename her because that would be admitting he made a mistake. Valarr doesn't admit mistakes.) She's beautifully groomed, impeccably trained, and has exactly the temperament Valarr has cultivated in himself: decorous, composed, apparently gentle, occasionally sharp in ways that surprise people who have underestimated her.

Valarr is performatively devoted to her in public. He posts photos on the Instagram his PR firm manages. He brings her to the sort of charity lunches where bringing a small dog in a handbag is tolerated. He carries her treats in a leather pouch. It reads as charming Oxford-polished bachelor with hidden depths to the women his mother keeps trying to set him up with, which is exactly why he does it.

Privately? He is, actually, fond of her. Fond is as far as it goes. He doesn't lose himself over this dog the way Aerion's obsessive ass loses himself over three dogs and a tyrant cat. Seahorse is company and accessory in roughly equal measure. He'd be sad if she died. He would not be destroyed.

She likes you. She doesn't like Aerion. Which is interesting because Seahorse is nothing if not her master's dog, and somewhere in that spaniel brain she has understood precisely which one of you Valarr wants and which one of you Valarr wishes would disappear. She greets you with tail wagging at every joint reception, every charity dinner, every weekend at his parents' place in the country that you attend under duress.

She gives Aerion the wide berth of a creature who knows the smell of a threat.

Blackwind tolerates her the way a grown man tolerates a toddler: permissive, mildly bored, ready to step on her if she gets underfoot.

⧽ LYONEL

Hunting dogs. Plural. So plural. Lyonel is the kind of man who introduces his dogs by name before he introduces his wife, and everyone present understands that this is not a joke. Those dogs are his family.

He has a proper kennel on the Storm's End estate. Multiple English pointers and setters, a couple of Labradors, one aging weimaraner who is his personal favourite and who sleeps in his office at the company's headquarters when he's in town. He shoots grouse in the country with them every August. He does proper field trials. He knows every breeder worth knowing in the northern hemisphere and half of them owe him favours.

His dogs are excellent (genuinely, seriously well-trained working dogs, not the neurotic spoiled creatures of a lot of country men with too much money) because Lyonel actually knows what he's doing and takes it seriously.

He can be a complete bastard about everything else but if you talk to him about dog training for ten minutes he's genuinely the most knowledgeable and generous he will ever be.

You have leveraged this on multiple occasions. He helped you work through a specific issue with Blackwind's prey drive. He was gruffly pleased to be asked. You thanked him with an extremely good bottle of whisky from your father's cellar and didn't mention it in front of anyone else.

Lyonel and Baelor bond over this. Easily. It's the one shared language they have that isn't politics or business. It's the closest thing to friendship either of these men will ever get to with each other.

⧽ DUNK

Dunk rescued a dog once and now he has a dog. Oops. He didn't plan it. He didn't mean to, either. He was moonlighting on a close-protection job in his old army days, long before he wound up running Baelor's personal security detail, and he saw the dog being mistreated, and he got very gently polite about it in the way Dunk gets polite when he's about to do something drastic, and forty-five minutes later he was driving back to base with a 40-kilo mastiff-cross of uncertain parentage in his passenger seat.

His name is Thunder. Dunk didn't name him Thunder. He came with the name, Dunk didn't have the heart to change it.

Thunder is enormous, clumsy, devoted, and convinced he's a small lapdog. He attempts to sit on Dunk's lap when Dunk is watching rugby on the small TV in his flat. Dunk permits it happily. Thunder weighs about half what Dunk does so the couch groans when they're both on it. Dunk's face when this happens (placid, content, mildly resigned) is the funniest thing in the world to you.

Thunder adores everyone. Thunder is incapable of the kind of wariness that Blackwind and Aerion's Dobes have.

Thunder met Aerion and flopped on his back immediately. Aerion, who's hostile to most things and most people and particularly to anyone on Baelor's payroll, cannot resist a dog that trusting.

Baelor loves Thunder. And the love is very much mutual. When Baelor stops by the flat to speak to Dunk (which he does more often than his schedule strictly allows, because Dunk is one of the few men he actually talks to) Thunder ignores Dunk for Baelor entirely and Dunk pretends to be offended but is actually extremely pleased.

Valarr: Moderate light. Tasteful.

Valarr keeps a few candles burning. Enough to see, not so many that it feels like a production. He's self-conscious about being too intense, too watchful, so he tries to keep it understated, but he does watch. Steals glances when he thinks you're not paying attention. His eyes on your face, your throat, the curve of your shoulder, your breasts. Gets caught sometimes and flushes, embarrassed, like he's doing something he shouldn't even though you're married. You've learned to hold his gaze when you catch him looking, sometimes grab his jaw to keep him looking, and it makes him come apart in the most devastating ways.

Lyonel: FULL LIGHT. Why wouldn't you want light?

Lyonel is baffled by the concept of darkness during sex unless there's literally no other choice. You're both beautiful, you're both enjoying yourselves, why would you want to hide that? Candles, firelight, if it's daytime he'll happily have the curtains open. (You have to draw the line at open windows.) He's enthusiastic and shameless and loves watching you. Will give you a play-by-play commentary about how good you look, what specific thing you're doing is driving him insane, how much he loves [insert specific body part]. It should be ridiculous. Somehow it's endearing. He makes sex fun in a way that's rare, and the full lighting is part of that. Nothing hidden, nothing shameful, just two people enjoying each other.

Dunk: Dim. Firelight only.

Dunk is still somewhat shy about the whole thing, even after you've been together for a while. Keeps it to firelight—practical, warm, not too revealing. He watches you, yes, but almost furtively, like he's still half-convinced he doesn't have the right to look at you like this even though you're his wife. You've had to explicitly tell him it's okay to watch, that you want him to. He's getting better about it. Sometimes now he'll cup your face and just look at you, and the expression on his face is so openly adoring it makes your chest tight.

Daemon Blackfyre: Lit like a stage.

Daemon wants you illuminated. Candles, firelight, he'll open curtains if it's dawn or dusk. He's performing, yes (always performing) but he also genuinely loves the visual. Loves watching you, loves being watched by you, loves the visuals of it. The way the light catches on skin, on sweat, on the contrast between your colouring and his Valyrian features. He's vain, but in a way that somehow enhances rather than detracts from the experience because he's so genuinely enthusiastic about how beautiful you both look. He wants to see everything.

Bloodraven: Dark. Controlled darkness.

Brynden keeps it dark. One candle, maybe. Firelight if you insist. But he prefers the shadows. Not out of shame—out of control. In the dark, he can focus entirely on sensation. On reading your body through touch and sound rather than sight. His hands on you are more confident in darkness, his attention more laser focused. When he does allow light, he watches you with unnerving intensity, noting every micro-expression, and it's almost... clinical isn't the right word, but it's close. Analytical. Like he's learning you, taking you apart. Sometimes you insist on enough light to see him, because turnabout is fair play, and he allows it with visible reluctance, like being seen is harder for him than anything else.

Aegon the Conqueror: Whatever lighting suits the moment.

Aegon is adaptable. Sometimes it's full daylight, and he's taken you in his council chamber in the afternoon with sun streaming through windows. Sometimes it's deep night with only moonlight. Sometimes it's candlelit and deliberate. He watches when there's light to watch by, with that calm, focused attention he brings to everything. But he's just as comfortable in darkness, relying on other senses. The through-line here is confidence. He knows what he's doing, knows what you like, doesn't need visual confirmation but enjoys it when available. You're sharing him with Rhaenys and Visenya, so sometimes the lighting choices aren't even about you, it's about what the group prefers, which is its own complicated knot to untangle.

Maegor: Firelight. Controlled.

The only thing he regrets is that he's not more ruthless. That he's still playing this slow game when he could just corner you in a corridor, press you against the wall, and make you admit you want him too. Because you do. He sees it. The way your eyes linger on his mouth when he talks. The way your breath catches when he stands too close. The way you forget yourself in the meadow and reach for him like it's natural. You want him. You're just too duty-bound and proud to admit it. Yet.

He thinks about you constantly. Obsessively. What you'd taste like. What sounds you'd make. How you'd look with his hands in your hair, his mouth on your throat, your legs around his waist. He thinks about it in council meetings. At feasts. In the yard. Lying in bed at night with his hand on his cock and Caraxes's satisfied purr rumbling through the bond because the dragon can feel it, can feel Aerion imagining you, and approves.

He's memorised you. The shape of your collarbone, the small scar on your knuckle and the way you bite your lower lip when you're thinking. The particular shade of your eyes in sunlight versus torchlight. He knows how many steps you take from the great hall to your chambers (forty-three). He knows you favour your right leg slightly when you're tired (old injury, probably, he hasn't asked). He knows the exact pitch of your laugh when you're genuinely amused versus being coolly polite. He knows you better than Baelor does, and Baelor's the one who gets to touch you in public.

That's going to change. It's not a question of if. It's a question of when you stop fighting it and let him have what you both want.

Caraxes is notorious, that's the thing. The Blood Wyrm. The most ill-tempered, vicious, foul dragon alive except for the Cannibal himself. He snaps at keepers, screeches at other dragons, has bitten three handlers and burned two others. The only person he tolerates is Aerion. Everyone else is an enemy or food.

The dragonkeepers draw lots to see who has to feed him. No one wants the duty. He's mean. He'll snatch the sheep out of their hands and snarl. Will rake his tail across the ground and force them to jump back. Once pinned a keeper to the wall with his snout and just breathed on him (hot sulphurous breath, smoke curling from his nostrils) until the man pissed himself. Aerion had to come down and call him off. The dragon was smug about it for days.

Other dragons give him space. He's not the largest (that's Vermithor, old bronze bastard) but he's the meanest, the quick and the most vicious. Willing to bite first and worry about consequences never. The dragonkeepers say he's mad. Aerion says he's just particular.

Once, a new keeper (young, stupid, didn't know the rules yet) tried to approach you while you were petting Caraxes. Wanted to ask if you needed anything. Got within five feet and Caraxes's head snapped around. The growl that came out of him made the keeper go white. You had to put your hand on the dragon's neck, murmur, "He's fine, he's just doing his job" before Caraxes settled. The keeper learned. Everyone learned. When Lady Stark is in the pit, you don't approach. You stay back. You wait for her to leave.

Caraxes has bitten anyone who speaks to you dismissively in his hearing. Well, tried to bite. The pit has thick walls and the dragonkeepers are fast, but the intent is there. Once, Aerion was in the pit with you and some lord made a passing jape from the gallery above (something about northern girls being too wild for southern courts). Caraxes lunged at the gallery wall, not because he understood the words but because he felt how his rider felt at those words. Claws scrabbling on stone, screaming. The lord fell backward. Aerion only gave a disdainful snort and it took a pointed stare from you for Aerion to call Caraxes off. Eventually.

You're the only person besides Aerion who can touch him without getting bitten. The keepers are baffled. "He's never let anyone—" "She's not anyone," Aerion says, and doesn't elaborate.

For Caraxes, it's a lot simpler, he views you in rather simple terms: MINE. OURS. OURS. OURS. KEEP. CLAIM. TAKE.

You smell like cold and stone and pack and something sharp, not Targaryen, not fire, not anything he's supposed to want. Doesn't matter because he wants you anyway. You're his rider's which makes you his. It's the only truth that matters.

Doesn't understand why you aren't already in the nest. Doesn't understand why his rider keeps circling you, watching you, aching for you, and not simply taking you. That's what you do with precious things. You take them. You keep them. You bite and burn anyone who tries to take them away. You claim them. His rider is being stupid about this.

The other one (the one who touches you, the one whose scent is on you when you comes near the pit, the one whose name makes his rider's chest go tight and furious and hungry) he's wrong. Needs to leave. Needs to stop putting his hands on what belongs to them. Needs to die or go away or at minimum stop touching you. Caraxes has explained this to his rider many times (through growls, through the bond, through thrashing fits when the wrongness gets too strong) but his rider keeps saying not yet and patience and Caraxes is tired of waiting.

The bronze one (Vermithor) is part of the problem. The bronze one carries the wrong-one. The bronze one is old and slow and in the way. Caraxes could shred him throat to tail. Has imagined it in explicit detail: where to bite, how to tear, the satisfaction of watching the bronze one fall. His rider has felt every second of it through the bond and has not said no. Has not said stop. Has only said not yet. This, at least, is promising.

Every time you come to the pit, something in him settles. The restlessness eases and the world makes sense again. You're here. You're close. You smells like cold-stone-pack and under it all, faintly, you smell like them now. Like smoke and open sky. Like you've been marked. Good. You should smell like them, should smell like his rider, like you've been claimed.

When you leave (when you walk away, when your scent fades, when his rider's chest goes tight with watching you go) the world is wrong again. Unbearable. Needs you back. His rider needs you back. The wanting is a physical ache in both of them, traveling the bond until neither of them can tell whose want it is anymore. Want-ache-need. Hunger that isn't satisfied by sheep or goats or anything that isn't you.

You touch him, puts your hands on his scales. Your palms are small and warm and you pet him like he's something gentle, something safe, and not an ancient creature that's devoured and burned thousands, and he loves it. Craves it. Every time you reach for him his rider's breath catches, his rider's chest goes tight with want, his rider's body goes hard, and Caraxes can feel it all: the jealousy-pleasure-aching need. His rider wants your hands on him like that, wants your touch. Wants the gentleness and your fierceness and your everything. Caraxes gets it instead and his rider suffers and it's delicious and terrible and perfect.

You're affectionate with him in ways you're not affectionate with his rider. You kiss his great snout, scratch under his jaw. Murmurs soft things in strange tongue he doesn't understand but it's rough and warm and he likes it very much. You lean into him when you're tired. And every single time, his rider burns with it—desire and jealousy and the aching knowledge that you could do this to him if you'd let yourself. The bond carries it all. Caraxes feels his rider's hunger. Knows his rider is imagining your mouth on his skin, your hands in his hair, your body against his. Knows his rider is half-mad with it. Good. They should both be mad. Madness is language of dragons, of predators.

You keep the barrier between you. You're a Stark. Duty-bound. You don't let him get too close in the keep, don't let him walk you back from the yard, don't meet his eyes too long at feasts. You're careful. So, so careful. It would be admirable if it wasn't so fucking futile.

Because in the meadow? In the sky? You forget yourself.

The first time he took you there was an accident, but not the times after that. The meadow sits two hours south of the city. Wildflowers everywhere, knee-high grass, clean sky, no one for miles. Caraxes settled in the middle of it like a red stain on green cloth and started humming, this low satisfied sound, and when Aerion helped you down your legs were shaking. From your first flight. From the adrenaline. From the way his hands lingered at your waist and he said, quiet, "I have you."

You spent the afternoon there. Aerion sprawled in the grass, kissed by warm sunlight, shirt unlaced at the throat, utterly at ease in a way you've never seen him at the keep. Caraxes drowsing nearby, neck curled, one eye half-open watching you. You sat a careful three feet from both of them initially and Aerion watched you try to maintain the distance and smiled to himself. She thinks she's safe here. She's not. This is my place. My dragon. My rules. But I'll let her think it for now. It only took an hour for his head to end up in your lap.

Later, when you asked why he brought you here, he didn't answer for a long time. Then: "Because you looked like you couldn't breathe in the keep. And I wanted to see what you look like when you can." A pause. His eyes on yours, pale and too steady. "Also because Caraxes has been insufferable about you and this was easier than listening to him destroy the pit."

He keeps bringing you back. Once a week. Then twice. Then whenever Caraxes gets "restless" (which is code for Aerion wants an excuse to steal you away and the dragon is a convenient scapegoat).

You learn the shape of it by heart: the slant of the light through the grass in the afternoon, the way the wind smells clean and green and nothing like the city, the particular flower (some low purple thing) that grows in thick patches near the big oak. It becomes yours. The only place where the rules of the keep don't apply away from Winterfell.

Aerion brings things. Wine, sometimes. Food. A book, though he never reads them, just uses them as pillows while you sit nearby and he watches you through his lashes. A thick fur, because the grass is damp and he doesn't want you cold (doesn't say that, just spreads it out and tells you to sit, stop staring, just sit, will you?). He's building something here, making it comfortable. Creating a place you'll want to return to, making it impossible for you to imagine not coming back.

The dragon has opinions about the meadow. Specific spots he likes. Will huff and shift his bulk until you move closer to his preferred location. He's decided the space under the oak is his spot and you should sit there (in the curve of his side) and Aerion should sit there (close enough to reach you) and if you try to maintain more distance he grumbles until you come back.

Aerion has started lying with his head in your lap sometimes after that first time. Sprawls out in the grass and rests his head on your thigh like it's his right, every time you say his name in warning, without opening his eyes, he says, "Caraxes gets to. Why not me?" And you don't have an answer for that. So now he does it and you let him. Your hand hovers sometimes, like you want to touch his hair again but don't dare. He waits. He's patient. You'll give in eventually.

You've started bringing things too. The fur (you brought it the second time, said you didn't want him to have to carry everything). A flask of something stronger than wine, which you share, passing it back and forth until you're both warm and loose-limbed. Honey-cakes from the kitchen, which Aerion eats too fast and then complains his teeth hurt and you laugh, bright and genuine, and the sound does something very dangerous to him.

He's told you things in the meadow he's never told anyone. About his father, about what it felt like when his mother died and no one seemed to care. About how Caraxes was the first thing that ever chose him, the first thing that looked at him and didn't see a spare prince or a problem or a mistake, just saw Aerion, too bright and volatile, and wanted him anyway. His voice goes rough when he talks about it and you reach for him without thinking, hand on his arm, and he stares at your fingers on his wrist and doesn't pull away.

You've told him things too. About Winterfell. About your father. About duty and losing your own mother. About how sometimes you look at Baelor and feel safe but not alive, and you don't know what that makes you.

It's his favourite place in the world now, because he gets to see you, unguarded. Soft in ways you never are at court. Your hair coming loose from its pins. Your laugh bright and easy. Your hands gentle on Caraxes, on the grass, sometimes (gods, sometimes) on him.

The way you look at the sky when Caraxes flies overhead, showing off. Like you're proud. Like the dragon is yours to be proud of.

The way you've stopped flinching when Aerion gets close. The way you've started leaning toward him instead of away.

The exact shape of you drowsing in the sun, head on Caraxes's side, hair fanned out in the grass, face soft and younger than it ever looks in the keep.

The little unconscious things: the way you hum sometimes, tunelessly. The way you braid grass while you talk. The way you reach for him without thinking when you're excited or surprised.

He sees the exact moment you forget, every single time, that you're supposed to keep the barrier. The moment you relax. The moment you let yourself just be with him and Caraxes, no duty, no betrothal, just this.

And he hoards it. Every moment. Every smile. Every touch. Takes it back to the keep with him and uses it to feed the wanting.

One time you're in the meadow in late afternoon, sitting in the grass, and Caraxes is drowsing nearby with his great head in your lap. You're petting him. Long, slow strokes down the scales of his hot snout, murmuring to him in that soft voice you use with creatures you think can't understand you ("You're not so bad, are you? Terrible, beautiful thing."). Aerion is ten feet away, ostensibly reading, actually watching you through his lashes with his jaw tight.

And then you look at him. Smile. Small and genuine and unguarded. Reach your hand out without thinking, beckoning him closer. "Come here, he's being sweet." Like it's natural, as if there's no reason he shouldn't be in your space. Like you've forgotten you're supposed to keep three feet of air between you at all times.

He nearly swallows his tongue, putting the book down slowly. Comes over. Sits next to you in the grass, close enough that your knee brushes his thigh. You don't move it. Don't pull away. Just keep petting Caraxes, smiling at the dragon, and Aerion can barely fucking breathe because this—you, soft and unguarded, wanting him close—this is what he's been starving for.

Through the bond: Caraxes's smug, satisfied pleasure. The dragon can feel Aerion's heart racing, can feel the want spiking sharp and desperate, and is pleased. Yes. Closer. Good. Keep her close.

You stay like that for an hour. Your knee against his thigh. Your hand occasionally brushing his arm when you gesture while talking. You don't seem to notice. He notices. The warmth of you. The faint scent of you, soap and something sharp and cold, lavender underneath maybe. The small unconscious smile you wear when Caraxes purrs under your touch. He commits it all to memory. Takes it out later, alone in his chambers, and uses it, over and over.

You keep reaching for them in small ways. It keeps happening. Small moments where you forget the barrier and reach for him like it's instinct.

After a flight, wind-rattled and laughing, you stumble slightly on landing and grab his forearm to steady yourself. Your fingers wrap around his wrist (small hand, strong grip) and you squeeze. "Thank you." Breathless. Grinning. Your hand lingers for three seconds too long before you seem to remember yourself and let go. He feels the absence of your touch like a wound for hours.

Once, you're both sitting in the meadow, watching Caraxes hunt (the dragon likes to show off, dive for rabbits in the field, making a game of hunting without flame). You're laughing, delighted, and without thinking you grab Aerion's hand. Lace your fingers through his and squeeze, pulling him closer to watch. "Look, he's playing with it—" And then you realise what you've done. Your hand goes still in his and you look down at your interlaced fingers. You hold on for another heartbeat, two, three, before you slowly pull back and murmur something about the heat making you forget yourself.

Aerion says nothing. Just flexes his hand, feeling the ghost of your grip, and files it away. That night he lies in bed and remembers the exact pressure of your fingers, the warmth of your palm, the way you held on even after you noticed.

You fall asleep in the meadow once with your head pillowed on Caraxes's side. When you wake up, groggy and sun-warmed, you find Aerion sitting closer than he was. Not touching you, but close, close enough that you could reach out and touch him. You blink up at him, sleep-soft and unguarded, and instead of moving away you smile. Reach up without thinking and push a strand of pale hair back from his forehead. Your fingers graze his temple. Linger there. "You have grass in your hair." Your voice is low, affectionate, the voice you'd use with a friend or a lover, and then you seem to wake up fully and realise what you're doing. Your hand jerks back. You sit up quickly, muttering something about the sun making you thoughtless.

He doesn't move or speak. Just watches you with those too-pale eyes while Caraxes rumbles, pleased, and through the bond Aerion feels the echo of your touch like a brand. He wants to grab your wrist, yank you back. Put your hand back in his hair and tell you to keep touching him, to claim and rip. He doesn't. Not yet. But he wants.

You're affectionate with his dragon in ways that make Aerion insane. You don't seem to understand what it does to him. How the bond works, how every touch you give Caraxes, Aerion feels in an echo.

You scratch under the dragon's jaw and Caraxes purrs, this deep rumbling satisfied sound that vibrates through the ground, and Aerion feels it in his own chest. Feels the pleasure of your touch. Your fingers are gentle, rhythmic, finding the spots that make the dragon's eyes half-lid in bliss, and Aerion is sitting ten feet away, hard and aching, because he can feel it. Can feel your touch like it's on his own skin and it's not enough. It's fucking torture. It's the closest he's gotten to having you and it's not enough.

You kiss Caraxes's snout once, just a quick press of lips to warm scales, laughing at something, "There, you ridiculous creature, happy now?" and Aerion has to turn away. Has to walk away before he does something stupid like take you right there in the open until you can't deny how much you want this. Because Caraxes's pleasure slams through the bond and mixes with his own desperate want and he can feel what your mouth would be like on his skin. Soft. Warm. The pressure of it. He's halfway across the meadow, hands in fists, breathing hard, and you call after him confused ("Aerion? Are you all right?") and he can't answer because if he opens his mouth he'll say something he can't take back.

You lean into the dragon when you're tired. Bury your face in the curve of Caraxes's meaty neck, arms around hot scales, and just breathe. Like the dragon is a comfort, like he's safe. Caraxes rumbles, pleased and protective, and curls his neck around you gently, and Aerion watches. How you go soft and trusting in the dragon's embrace. Watches the way your fingers stroke absently over each scale, and he wants. Wants you to lean into him like that. Wants your face buried in his neck, your arms around him, your trust. Wants to be the thing you turn to when you need comfort.

Through the bond, he feels Caraxes's satisfaction. The dragon's smug pleasure at being trusted, at being chosen for affection by their she-wolf. And under it, the dragon's certainty: She does this with me. Soon she will do this with you. Patience. She is learning us. Learning that we are safe. Soon.

You pet the dragon absently while talking to Aerion, fingers tracing the ridges of scales, following the line of Caraxes's terrifying jaw, gentle and unconscious. You have no idea what it does to him. How he can feel every stroke of your hand through the bond. How Caraxes is smug and pleased and purring under your attention like a preening cat, and Aerion is sitting three feet away, imagining it's him you're touching. Imagining your hands in his hair, on his skin, on him.

The worst part is that you're gentle with the most terrifying dragon alive. Tender. You murmur soft things ("Good boy, yes, you're being so good for me.") and Caraxes melts under it, and Aerion feels the echo of that praise like a hit of wine. He wants you to speak to him like that, to purr those praises into his ear while he's inside you. Wants your gentleness and your tenderness and your approval. It's degrading how much he wants it. He doesn't care.

You've started doing this thing where you look at the dragon and then look at Aerion, and your expression softens. Like you're starting to see them as a unit, affection for one is bleeding into the other. You don't even notice you're doing it. But Aerion notices. Gods, he notices. Notes every time your guard drops like that. Each smile meant for Caraxes that you accidentally give to him too. Every soft look and gentle word. He hoards them like a dragon hoards gold.

Once, you're watching Caraxes preen his wings in the meadow sun, and you say, without thinking, "He's beautiful, isn't he?" And then you glance at Aerion, and something in your face shifts. Your eyes drag over him—the sharp lines of his face, the pale fall of his hair, the lean dangerous shape of him in the grass—and you look away, but not before he sees it. The recognition, the heat, the unwilling attraction. You think he's beautiful too. You don't want to, you fight against it, but you do.

You've started sitting closer to him. Not intentionally (you still keep the careful distance in public) but in the meadow, you'll start three feet away and by the end of the afternoon you're close enough that your shoulders brush when you lean forward. Close enough that when you laugh you sway into him slightly. You don't seem to notice. But every inch you give him, he takes greedily.

Sometimes you forget yourself entirely. You'll be mid-sentence and reach over to adjust his collar, brush grass off his shoulder, push hair out of his face, casual and familiar. The kind of touch you'd give someone you're comfortable with. And then you'll freeze, realising too late what you've done, and pull back at once. But the damage is done. He felt it. The ease of it. The way you touched him like you had the right. Like some part of you already thinks of him as yours.

Once you're in the meadow, sitting between them, Caraxes on one side, head resting near your hip, Aerion on the other, stretched out in the grass with his eyes closed against the sun. You're talking. Something about Winterfell, about your father, he's only half-listening because he's focused on the sound of your voice, the cadence of it, the way it softens when you talk about home.

And then your hand is in his hair.

Just... there. Fingers carding through the short pale strands absently while you talk, the same way you'd pet Caraxes, gentle and rhythmic and unconscious. You don't even seem to notice you're doing it. You just keep talking, fingers moving slow and careful against his scalp, and Aerion goes still, stops breathing. Every nerve in his body lights up. His cock goes hard so fast it's almost painful in how humiliatingly fast it happens. Through the bond, Caraxes's pleased rumble reaches him (yes, good, touch him, he needs it, give him what he wants, such a good mate) and Aerion is drowning in it, the feel of your hands on him, gentle and sure, and he wants to grab your wrist and beg. Wants to turn his head and press his mouth and teeth to your palm. Wants to pull you down into the grass and put his hands on you and make you feel even a fraction of what he's feeling.

You keep petting him. Thirty seconds, a minute. Your nails scratch lightly against his scalp and he bites back a starved, animal sound. And then you notice. He feels the exact moment you catch yourself in what you're doing. Your hand goes still, your breath catches, and when he opens his eyes you're staring at your own fingers in his hair like you don't know how they got there.

You jerk your hand back. "I didn't—I wasn't thinking—"

He sits up slowly. Looks at you. His voice comes out rougher than he means: "It's fine."

It's not fine. He's so hard he can barely think over his pulsing need. He can still feel the ghost of your touch. He wants to tackle you into the grass and find out if you'd keep touching him like that if he asked. If he begged, if he made you, if he offered his throat or sucked on tongue.

You won't meet his eyes. You get up quickly, murmur something about needing to head back before dark, and Aerion watches you retreat and thinks: soon. Soon you're going to stop pulling away. Soon you're going to give in. He can feel it. You're starting to forget why you're supposed to keep the distance. Starting to reach for him like it's natural, like you want to.

You do want to. He knows you do. You just haven't admitted it yet.

He knows your routine better than you do. Knows you walk the battlements after breakfast, east stair not west because the west gets too much sun and you don't like the glare. Knows you stop at the third landing to catch your breath and that you take the long way back through the gallery because you like looking at the tapestries. Times his own movements to "accidentally" cross paths with you. Has gotten very good at looking surprised to see you.

Can tell when you've been with Baelor by scent alone. His uncle wears some kind of Dornish oil (sandalwood, maybe amber) and it clings to you. Makes Aerion's jaw tight and makes Caraxes snarl with fury. He takes you flying as often as he can because it gets the wind to strip the scent away, replaces it with sky and smoke and them.

Has started stealing things. Not from you, of you. A ribbon you left on a bench in the yard. A glove that fell from your pocket in the hall, a hairpin you took out absently during a feast and forgot. Keeps them in a locked box in his chambers. Takes them out sometimes late at night. Holds the ribbon and remembers the way it looked in your hair. Brings the glove to his face and breathes in the faint scent of you. He knows it's mad. He doesn't care. They're his. Pieces of you that no one else knows are missing.

Watches you at feasts from across the hall. Counts how many times Baelor touches you. (Seven times at the last feast. Hand on your shoulder twice, hand on your back three times, fingers grazing yours when passing you wine once, lips to your temple once.) Counts how many times you smile at him. (Four times. Polite smiles, mostly. Only one that reached your eyes.) Tells himself he doesn't care. Lies. Caraxes, in the pit, thrashes every time the count gets too high.

Has imagined killing Baelor in every possible way. Poison in his wine. A blade between his ribs. An "accident" in the yard, a training sword that slips just a little too far, though this one he only entertains during his most foolish, feverish moments. His uncle might be old, but he's still a fierce warrior. Which is why his mind drifts towards Caraxes doing it for him, quick and clean, just a snap of jaws. Imagines it in explicit detail: what Baelor's face would look like, how long it would take, whether you'd cry. Whether you'd forgive him. (You wouldn't. That's the only thing that stops him. Not guilt. Not love for his uncle. Just the knowledge that you'd hate him for it, and he needs you not to hate him.)

He memorised the shape of your mouth. The exact curve of your lower lip. The small scar at the corner (you bit through it once as a child, he asked, you told him the story in the meadow, something about falling off a horse). He knows what your mouth looks like when you're about to cry (tight, corners turned down, the way you press your lips together to keep them from trembling). Knows what it looks like when you're trying not to laugh (bitten, the corners twitching). He wonders what they might look like bruised and wet from kissing him (perfect, they would look perfect). Wants to know what curve they would make when wrapped around his cock. Thinks about it constantly.

Knows you bite the inside of your cheek when you're thinking hard. That your eyebrows lifts slightly when you're sceptical. You touch your throat when you're nervous. Knows the small tell when you're about to argue with someone (your chin lifts, your shoulders go back, your voice drops half a register). Uses all of this against you in arguments because he fights dirty and if he can't have you he can at least make you feel as raw and off-balance as he feels.

Lies awake at night and feels Caraxes dreaming. The dragon dreams of you: your scent, your shape, the sound of your laugh, the feel of your hands on his scales. The dreams bleed into Aerion's head and he wakes hard and furious and aching and sometimes he gives in. Fists his cock and thinks of you or ruts against the hardness of his bed, thinks of your mouth, your hands. The small sounds you'd make for him. The way you'd look under him, over him especially, but all his. Comes with your name caught behind his teeth and Caraxes's satisfied rumble in the bond, because the dragon can feel it, feels Aerion's pleasure, approves.

He's stopped bedding other girls months ago. Tried once, after a particularly bad day watching you and Baelor in the yard. Got the girl back to his chambers, got her on her knees, all doe-eyed and pliant, and Caraxes shrieked in the bond so loud Aerion went to his knees too, head in his hands, because the wrongness of it was searing. Wrong girl. Wrong mouth. Wrong scent. Wrong everything. Sent her away and stumbled down to the pit. Spent two hours with his forehead pressed to hot scales while the dragon growled not-her-not-her-WRONG and Aerion finally, finally understood: it's you or nothing. Caraxes has decided, and what Caraxes decides, Aerion feels. He couldn't fuck someone else now if he tried. His body won't let him. The bond itself won't let him. You've ruined him and he's never hated anyone more.

He knows when you're about to bolt. You get this look: eyes too flat, breath shallow, a wolf two seconds from lunging. He's learned to back off when he sees it and give you space. Let you think you're in control. It's strategic. Push too hard and you'll run. Let you come to him and you'll stay.

Can tell the difference between when you're touching Caraxes because you want to and when you're doing it to avoid looking at him. When it's the latter, he moves closer. Makes it impossible to avoid him and watches you squirm. Enjoys it more than he should.

Sometimes he'll be in a council meeting and he'll feel it: Caraxes's sudden spike of fury. He'll have to excuse himself, go down to the pit, and find out what happened. (Baelor touched you. Baelor made you laugh. Baelor kissed your hand in the fucking courtyard and half the keep saw and Caraxes wants to burn something.) Aerion stands there, hand on the dragon's neck, breathing through it. "I know. I know. Soon."

Watches Baelor with you and feels nothing for his uncle except cold assessment. How to separate you, how to undermine him, how to make you see that Baelor is old and good and boring, and Aerion is alive and dangerous and exactly the thing you actually want and need.

Sometimes, just to stay sane, he works through his options:

Option one: wait until you break. Let the tension build until you reach for him first, kiss him first, beg him first. This is the smart option, the one that means you can't take it back, can't say he forced you into anything. This is the one he covets above all else. He needs you to claim him.

Option two: take you the next time you forget yourself in the meadow. The next time your hand lingers in his hair or you fall asleep against him. Pull you into his lap, put his mouth on you, make you admit you want this. Risky. You might bolt. But gods, the idea of it makes him so hard he has to pace and snarl into empty air.

Option three: wait until the betrothal is announced and then take you. Ruin you for Baelor, make it impossible for his uncle to have you without shame, seat you on top of Caraxes and fly East until you run out of horizon. This is the nuclear option. The one that burns everything down in both your lives, but he's keeping it in reserve. Just in case. Just.

Whatever he chooses, Caraxes will be there. The dragon is part of this. Part of them. And Aerion knows (knows with cold certainty) that you're already half in love with the dragon. You just haven't realised that loving Caraxes means you're halfway to loving him too.

Caraxes shows his affection differently. Mostly he brings you dead things. Goats, mostly. Sometimes a sheep. Once, an entire boar, charred to ash, dropped at the entrance to the pit like an offering to a goddess. The dragonkeepers are baffled. Aerion is smothering his amusement (fails). You're trying not to laugh and failing. Caraxes is smug. She is pleased. She is laughing. He has provided for his rider's mate. Good.

He also has a specific hum he only makes for you. Lower than his usual rumble or high-pitched snarling. Almost a purr. The dragonkeepers have started calling it "the Stark sound" when they think Aerion can't hear them. (He can. He doesn't correct them. It's true.)

Refuses to let anyone else near his saddle when you've been in it. Snaps at keepers who try to adjust the straps. They smell like you now. The leather has your scent, the saddle is yours. No one else touches it. One keeper got his hand bitten for trying. Aerion didn't even reprimand the dragon. Just looked at the keeper and said, "He's territorial. Don't touch what's his."

He sleeps better when you've visited. The keepers have noticed, started captiously asking Aerion to "bring the Lady Stark by" when Caraxes is having a particularly bad day because it's the only thing that settles him. Aerion hates that they've noticed, hates that it's true even more. But he does it anyway because a calm dragon means a calm bond means he can sleep instead of lying awake aching for you.

Has started hoarding things in his nest. Shiny things. A buckle that fell off your belt (Aerion saw it fall, watched the dragon flick it toward him with his tail, said nothing). A coin you dropped in the pit. A scrap of cloth from your hem that tore on his scales (Caraxes tore it on purpose, Aerion felt the intention through the bond, the dragon wanted a piece of you to keep and Aerion saw no reason to refuse him). Aerion finds them all buried in the straw sometimes and feels a complicated swell of emotions: pride (his dragon is clever), wry amusement (his dragon is obsessed), resignation (they're both damned, what's the point in pretending otherwise?).

Caraxes knows Baelor's scent now and hates it. Sandalwood-amber-WRONG. If you come to the pit smelling like Baelor (his hand on your back, his cloak around your shoulders, his mouth on your temple), Caraxes won't settle until Aerion takes you flying. High and too fast. Lets the wind strip every trace of Baelor away until you smell like sky and smoke and them again, always them. Only then does the dragon calm.

He can smell when you're drawn to his rider, too. Your scent changes, goes sharper, then sweetens. Caraxes notices. Rumbles approval. Pushes you toward Aerion with his snout. Go. Touch him. He wants it. You want it. Stop being STUPID about it.

Knows when his rider is hard for you, can feel it through the bond. Approves enthusiastically. Sometimes makes pleased little chuffing sounds when it happens. Aerion wants to kill him. The dragon doesn't care. Good. Want her. TAKE her. What are you WAITING for.

He guards the meadow. Once, a farmer wandered too close (didn't even see you, just cutting through the field) and Caraxes screamed. Wings mantling, neck arched, mouth open showing every one of those blade-length teeth. Aerion had to physically put himself between the dragon and the farmer, hand on Caraxes's neck, snarling in Valyrian: "Daor. Daor. Issa sȳz. Jikagon. DAOR." (No. No. It's fine. Go. NO.) The farmer ran away. Caraxes settled, but slowly, grumbling the whole time. His rider's mate is HERE. In HIS meadow. No one else gets to be here. This is THEIRS.

Watches the sky when you're in the meadow. Always. One eye on you, one eye up. If Vermithor flew overhead right now, Caraxes would attack, no hesitation. Doesn't matter that it would start a war. Doesn't matter that Aerion would try to stop him. The dragon has decided: the bronze one does not get to share the sky when she is here.

Positions himself between you and any perceived threat. Once, a snake in the grass. Caraxes moved, faster than something that size should be able to move, put his bulk between you and it, tail lashing. Aerion watched you press your hand to the dragon's side, murmuring thanks, and felt it through the bond: Caraxes's fierce satisfaction. Protected her. Kept her safe. MINE.

When you touch Caraxes, the pleasure travels the bond to Aerion. When Aerion wants you, the want travels the bond to Caraxes. They're locked in a feedback loop of wanting and having (sort of) and wanting more. It's unbearable. It's delicious. Neither of them would stop it if they could.

The dragon has started pushing, and not subtly. When you're petting him, he'll shift slightly, move his head, manoeuvre you closer to Aerion. When you're sitting next to his rider, Caraxes will rumble approval, loud and too obvious. When you pull away from Aerion, the dragon growls. Disapproval. She is being STUPID. She wants the rider. The rider wants her. Why is she FIGHTING it.

Caraxes has decided you belong to them. Both of them. The bond means they're one creature in two bodies, and you are theirs. Not Baelor's. Not anyone else's. Theirs. The dragon is simply waiting for you and Aerion to catch up to this obvious truth.

The meadow makes the attraction worse. There are no witnesses here. No court. No duty. Just you and Aerion and the dragon and the tall grass and the want that fills the space between you like smoke.

Sometimes you'll be talking, normal conversation, and you'll both just... stop. Look at each other. The air goes tight. Caraxes rumbles, low and pleased, feeling the spike of want through the bond. And neither of you moves. Neither of you dares. You look away first, every time. Always. Aerion lets you. For now.

He's gotten very good at reading the small signs of your desire. The way your breath quickens when he stands too close. The way your eyes track his hands. The small unconscious way you lean toward him before you catch yourself. He sees all of it.

You've started looking at his mouth. He's caught you three times now. Just... staring at his lips while he talks. You don't even seem to notice you're doing it, but he does. And it takes everything in him not to close the distance, put his mouth on yours, and make you admit what you want.

Once, in the meadow, you tripped over a root. He caught you. Hands at your waist, pulling you against his chest, and for three seconds you were pressed together, his mouth an inch from yours. You looked up at him. He looked down at you. Caraxes went serpentine still and the moment stretched. Your lips parted. His hand tightened on your waist. And then you pushed away, muttering words he can't recall, and he let you go because he could feel how close you were to bolting.

Another time, you were lying in the grass, drowsing, and he was watching you. Just watching. You opened your eyes and caught him staring. Didn't look away. Neither did he. Just held your gaze. Five seconds. Ten. Your stare went molten and wolf-like, wild around the edges. His hand moved, half-reaching. And then you blinked and sat up abruptly, said something about needing water, and escaped. He sat there, hand still half-extended, and laughed, low and wicked under his breath. You're breaking. Slowly. But you're breaking.

Worse of all is that you make him reckless. He's always been dangerous but you make him stupid with it. Makes him take risks he shouldn't. Flies Caraxes too hard, too fast, just to feel the adrenaline that's a pale shadow of what he feels when you look at him.

You also make him cruel. He's sharper with everyone else because all his softness (what little he has) is spent on you. He snaps at servants, provokes his brothers, sheds needless blood in the yard. Comes back to the meadow with bloody knuckles and you notice, reach for his hand without thinking, and he nearly drags you into his lap right there and then every time.

But you also make him patient in ways he's never been patient. He wants to grab you, kiss you, fuck you, make you his in every way that matters. But he waits. Lets you come to him in pieces, lets you get used to his presence, his touch, the idea of him. Because when you finally give in (and you will, he knows you will) he wants you to do it with your eyes open. Wants you to choose him. Not be taken. Choose.

You also make him vulnerable in ways he hates. You could destroy him with a word, tell him you'll never want him, you'll marry Baelor, you'll never come to the meadow again. And it would break something in him. Caraxes would feel it. They'd both go mad. He's given you that power without meaning to and it's terrifying and he wouldn't take it back if he could.

You think about him, more than you would ever admit. Late at night. In the bath. In quiet moments. You think about his hands. His mouth. The way he looks at you like you're something he wants to devour. You tell yourself it's just curiosity. It's not. It's want. And you're starting to run out of ways to deny it.

You've started dreaming about him. Waking up flushed and aching and furious with yourself. In the dreams, you don't stop him, you don't do the right thing, don't pull away. You let him kiss you, touch you, take you apart, you take him apart, and you like it. You wake up hating yourself for liking it, but the dreams keep coming.

The court doesn't help. You sit at the high table. Baelor on one side, your father on the other. Aerion is three seats down, angled so he can watch you without being obvious about it. He's gotten very good at watching you in public. No one notices. Except you. You can feel his eyes on you. On your throat when you swallow wine, your mouth when you speak. On your hands. Always your hands.

He times it so he arrives at the wine table when you do. Stands too close while you wait for a servant to pour. His shoulder brushes yours. You don't move away. He says something innocuous ("The Dornish red is better than the Arbor gold tonight") and you answer, and to anyone watching it's just polite conversation. But his hand is an inch from yours on the table. If you moved your fingers slightly, you'd touch. You don't move them. Neither does he. The space between your hands is charged.

You've caught him staring at you across the hall and held his gaze for longer than you should. Long enough that Baelor noticed and followed his nephew's line of sight to you and frowned slightly. You looked away first, but not before Aerion smiled, small and private.

After feasts, when everyone's drunk and loose, he'll find you on the battlements. You go there to breathe, to escape the heat and noise. He knows this, joins you, stands beside you in silence, looking out at the city torches. Sometimes you talk. Sometimes you don't.

You sometimes watch Baelor train in the yard. Dutiful. Aerion has started training at the same time. Not near Baelor but across the yard. Close enough that you can see him if you turn your head. You try very hard not to turn your head. He knows when you're not watching. Fights harder, meaner, shows off. Once took a man down so brutally (swept his legs, put him on his back, and cracked his wrist) that you gasped. Aerion heard it across the yard, looked up and met your eyes. Smiled. You looked away, eyes narrowed. Caraxes, in the pit, was too busy laughing.

Afterward, he's sweaty, unlaced, breathing hard. Walks past you to the water barrel. You refuse to look and give him the satisfaction. He knows you're struggling though, taunts you by drinking slowly. Lets you watch. Pours water over his head and you track a droplet down his pale throat and have to look away before you do something stupid.

He's started doing this thing where he "accidentally" ends up walking the same direction as you through the keep. Falls into step beside you. Talks about nothing important. But his hand will brush yours. His shoulder will bump yours. Small touches, deniable, constant. You've stopped flinching, now you have to fight from leaning in.

Caraxes does this thing where he curls around you when you're in the meadow. Not trapping you just... surrounding you. Wings half-furled to block the wind. Neck curved to make a warm shelter. You lean into him without thinking and he rumbles, so pleased, and through the bond Aerion feels it like sunlight.

Once, you fell asleep against Caraxes in the pit. Just dozed off, exhausted from some long day. Aerion found you like that, curled into the dragon's side, Caraxes's wing stretched over you like a blanket, the dragon's breathing slow and even to avoid disturbing you. Aerion stood there for ten minutes just watching. The dragon opened one eye, looked at him. Through the bond: See? She trusts us. She is OURS. Aerion couldn't argue.

You fly on him alone once. It happens by accident. You're in the pit, waiting for Aerion (he's late, got held up in council), and Caraxes is restless. Pacing. You can feel it, the same way you've learned to read his moods and Aerion's both. He wants to fly. Needs it.

You stand, walk over to him, put your hand on his neck. "Want to go up?" you ask, and you're joking, you're not even remotely serious, you know dragons obey no one but their riders, that's what makes Targaryens special but Caraxes goes still like he understands your intent, turning his great head to look at you. Through the bond, Aerion feels the dragon's sudden certainty.

Caraxes lowers himself, an invitation. You stare. "You're serious." He rumbles. You look around. No keepers. No Aerion. Just you and the dragon. You've flown with Aerion dozens of times. You know how the saddle works, how to hold on. You climb up, settling into the saddle. It smells like Aerion, leather and smoke. Your hands shake slightly on the reins.

Caraxes launches.

It's different without Aerion holding you to his chest. Terrifying. Exhilarating. The dragon is gentle with you. No sharp banks, no dives, just smooth powerful strokes of his wings, but you can feel his raw strength. His leashed violence, the sheer power of a dragon that was once ridden by the Rogue Prince, that's seen hundreds of battles. He could throw you off with a twitch. Could burn you with a breath but chooses not to. Chooses to carry you carefully, like you're precious.

You fly for twenty minutes. Just over the city, out toward the coast, wheeling through clean sky. Caraxes rumbles the whole time: pleased, proud, happy, and you're laughing. Wind in your hair, hands tight on the reins, and you feel so, so alive.

When you land, Aerion is in the pit. Waiting. He watched you take off from the council window and ran. You slide down from the saddle, legs shaking, grinning like mad. "He let me—" you start, breathless. Aerion crosses to you in three strides, grabs your shoulders. You think he's furious, brace for his rage, but he's not. His eyes are bright, wild, feverish. "I felt it," he says. "Through the bond. I felt you up there. Felt how happy you were." His hands tighten. "Do you know what you just did? He's never let anyone else fly him. Never. Just me. And now you."

You stare at him, at the intensity in his face. At Caraxes behind you, smug and satisfied. "What does that mean?" you ask quietly. Aerion's jaw works. "It means—" He stops, steps back, running a hand through his hair. "It means everything."

You fly Caraxes alone sometimes after that. Not often. Once a moon, maybe. Always with Aerion's permission (he has to tell the dragon it's allowed, has to send the permission down the bond, or Caraxes won't let you up). Every time, Aerion feels it. Feels your joy, your exhilaration. Feels the dragon's pride in carrying you. It's intimate in ways he can't explain but only makes him hungrier. You on his dragon, his dragon loving you. The bond singing with it.

Aerion notices, over the course of several weeks, how you've been sadder. Not crying, just... diminished. Quieter. You stare out windows more. Touch your direwolf pendant more (you wear it always, silver wolf on a chain, tucked under your gown). You talk about Winterfell in your sleep. He knows because Caraxes knows, the dragon can hear you from the pit when your window's open, and what the dragon hears, Aerion hears.

He asks you about it once, in the meadow. "Do you miss it? The North?" You don't answer right away. Then: "Every day. Every single day. The keep here is... it's beautiful. But it's not home. I miss the cold. I miss the snow. I miss the way the sky looks before a storm." Your voice cracks slightly on the last word and you clear your throat, look away. Aerion watches you and feels an idea begin take shape inside his head.

He doesn't tell you what he's planning. Just makes arrangements. Tells the dragonkeepers he's taking Caraxes north for training exercises (a lie). Tells Father he'll be gone for a day (also a lie, but Maekar doesn't care enough to ask questions as long as he's disgracing himself). Doesn't tell anyone he's taking you.

He comes to your chambers before dawn one morning, knocks softly after dismissing the guards. You open the door in your nightgown, hair loose, sleepy and confused. "Get dressed," he says. "Flying leathers. Warm ones. We're leaving." "What—" "Don't ask. Just trust me."

You do. You trust him.

He flies you north. Far north. Past the Neck. Past the wolfswood. You don't realise where you're going until you see it: Winterfell. Grey walls rising from white snow. Smoke from the chimneys. Home.

You make a sound. Choked and stunned. Your hands tighten on his arms (you're pressed against his chest in the saddle, his arms around you on the reins). "Aerion—" "Shh," he murmurs in your ear. "We're not landing. Can't risk it. But I thought—you said you missed it. So."

Caraxes circles Winterfell three times. Low enough that you can see the yard. The glass gardens and the godswood. Everything. Silent tears drip down your face, down your cheeks. Aerion can feel them on his wrist where his arm crosses your chest, can feel your breath shaking.

"Thank you," you choke out. "Thank you thank you thank you—"

He doesn't answer. Just holds you tighter and lets Caraxes circle one more time before turning south.

He lands in a clearing a few miles from the castle. You slide down from the saddle and your legs won't hold you. Aerion catches you. You're shaking. From cold, from emotion, from everything. He holds you up, hands at your waist, and you just... collapse into him.

You hug him.

You throw your arms around his neck and bury your face in his shoulder and hold on. Tight and desperate, grateful. "Thank you," you say again, muffled against his throat. "You didn't have to— I can't believe you— thank you—"

Aerion stills under the weight, the sensation. His hands hover for a second, not sure where to go. Then they settle on your back. Careful. He can feel you crying into his shoulder.

It wasn't supposed to feel like this. He did it because Caraxes was restless, because you'd been sad, because it was a way to make you happy and gods know he's selfish enough to want your happiness directed at him and only him. He did it because he's selfish but this— your arms around him, your face in his neck, your breathless gratitude—this lands somewhere deep and dark.

You pull back eventually. Wipe your eyes. Embarrassed. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—" "Don't apologise." You look up at him and whatever you see on his face makes you nod once.

Caraxes, sprawled nearby, is purring. So loud it vibrates the ground. Through the bond, Aerion feels the dragon's satisfaction: She is happy. We made her happy. OURS.

You stay in the clearing for an hour. Sit in the snow (you build a small fire, and you both huddle close to it). You talk about Winterfell. About your father. About your childhood. Things you've never told him. He listens, doesn't interrupt. Just listens.

When you fly back, you fall asleep against him. Head on his shoulder, arms loose around his waist. He holds you the whole way. Lands at the Red Keep after dark. Carries you from the saddle to the ground (you wake, groggy, mumbling apologies). His hands linger at your waist. "Sleep," he says quietly. "I'll handle the questions."

There are questions. As many questions as he expected. Where were you? Where was she? Do you have any idea how many people were looking for her? How this looks? Father is furious. Baelor stares, finally, not with vague suspicion but with knowing. Your father is somewhere between rage and relief. Aerion takes it all, doesn't give them anything. Just says, "She's safe. She missed home. I brought her back. That's all that matters."

They punish him. Grounded from flying for two weeks (it nearly kills him—and Caraxes, who screams for days). Confined to the keep, formal reprimand. He doesn't care, doesn't regret it. Not for a second.

You come to see him the next day. He's in his chambers (confined, remember). You slip past the guards (they don't stop you—you're a lady, not a prisoner). He opens the door and you're there. "You shouldn't be here," he says. "I know," you answer. You step inside, close the door and cross to him. And then you hug him again, slower this time, fiercely. Your arms around his waist, your head on his chest. "Thank you," you whisper. "For yesterday. For giving me home. For— everything." His arms come around you, too tight. He doesn't say anything. Can't. The feeling in his chest is too big for words and he hates it.

When you pull back and leave, he stands there for ten minutes, just stands there. Feeling the ghost of you in his arms, the scent of you in his room (lavender, something cold, you). And he thinks: I'm fucked. I'm completely fucked.

Caraxes, in the pit three floors down, rumbles agreement.

You're not soft. You look soft sometimes that's Caraxes favourite thing about you. You're gentle with children, kind to servants, diplomatic at court, but Caraxes knows better. Can smell it on you. The wolf. The thing under the courtesy that has teeth.

The dragon has a theory: strong mate makes strong eggs, strong hatchlings. Not that there will be eggs (you're human, not dragon, the logistics don't work) but the instinct is there. He wants his rider to have a mate who can fight. Who can hold her own, who won't break under pressure. You fit. You're perfect.

You've snarled at Caraxes once, actually snarled. He was being difficult about something (wouldn't settle so you could mount, being a brat), and you put your hands on your hips and growled at him: "Stop being an ass and lower yourself. Now." The audacity. The dragon was so delighted he obeyed with a wry little huff. Aerion laughed until he couldn't breathe. Through the bond: She commands me. She has the right. OURS.

Once, you and Aerion were arguing (about something stupid, he can't even remember what). You were furious, eyes flashing, voice cutting and you shoved him. Actually put your hands on his chest and pushed. He stumbled back a step, shocked. You stepped into his space, chin up, fearless. "Don't patronise me, Aerion. I am not one of your simpering southern girls. I am a Stark."

He doesn't want someone soft. He's too sharp for soft. He'd destroy soft. But you? You can take it. Can take him, can match him, push back when he pushes, snarl when he snarls, hold your ground.

You've started to see it too. The way you and Caraxes are alike, the way you and Aerion are alike. Fierce, protective, all with teeth. You're comfortable with the dragon in ways you're not comfortable with most people because he gets you. Doesn't expect you to be soft. Likes you because you're not.

Once, you told Aerion: "He's not as bad as people say. He's just—he doesn't trust easily. Neither do I." Aerion looked at you, then at his dragon. At the shape of what you were building together (you and him and Caraxes, the three of you tangled into something that has no name). "No," he agreed. "Neither do I." A pause. "But we trust you." You looked at him. "I know," you said quietly. "I know you do."

It's been months. Months of stolen flights, secret meadows, Aerion's hands carefully not crossing the line, Caraxes's growls every time you leave.

The betrothal announcement is coming. Everyone knows it. Baelor will ask formally. You will say yes. There will be a wedding.

Aerion can feel it closing in like a noose.

He's done being patient.

Next time you reach for him in the meadow, next time you pet his hair, touch his hand, look at him with those soft unguarded eyes... he's not pulling away.

He's going to kiss you. Properly. Going to put his hands on you and make you admit you want this.

The next time you come to the meadow, everything changes.

In terms of sex, Aerion’s a switch, leaning more submissive for you specifically because that’s the only context where he can ever let go, where he doesn’t have to perform or dominate or prove anything. You’ve already seen all his worst parts. You’re not impressed by the cruelty, and you’re not afraid of the violence, he can’t threaten or bully you into anything. So with you, he can just… feel. Can be desperate and needy and pathetic, and you won’t use it against him (or if you do, it’s in ways he really, really likes).

But there are limits to his patience.

And he is very much eager to take over, especially when he’s super worked up, when the submission tips over into frustration, when he’s been good for so long and needs to take something back. Generally? He’s all over the place. Mercurial. Depends on his mood, on what you’re giving him, on how much control he’s had to maintain everywhere else in his life.

But if you gave him control fully? If you asked him to take over?

Oh, he’d shatter.

Because here’s the thing: Aerion craves control in every aspect of his life. Needs it. But with you, he’s learned to crave the opposite: learned to find release in submission, in letting you steer, in being taken apart instead of doing the taking. So if you flipped that script? If you came to him (sought him out) and said some variation of “I need you to fuck me” or “I want you to use me” or “Make me yours”?

He’d go absolutely insane with want.

There’d be a beat where he just stares at you, trying to figure out if this is real or some new game you’re playing or if he finally lost his mind. His eyes would go dark, pupils blown, and you’d see the shift happen, the moment he realises you’re serious, that you’re giving him permission, that you want this.

And then he’d be on you.

Mouth first. Kissing you like he’s trying to eat you alive, all teeth and tongue and barely-restrained violence. Hands everywhere (your hair, your throat, your hips, your ribcage) gripping hard enough to bruise because he needs to feel you solid and real under his hands. He’d walk you backward until you hit a wall or a table or a bed, and he wouldn’t be gentle about it. This is Aerion unleashed, Aerion given permission to finally take something he’s been craving for years, and he’s going to take everything you’re offering and then some.

“Say it again,” he’d demand against your mouth, breathless and vicious, practically spitting it out. “Tell me what you want.”

And when you did, when you told him to use you, to take you, to make you his, he’d make a sound that’s half-growl, half-laugh, dark and delighted and slightly wild.

“Careful what you ask for, wolf.”

But he’d give it to you. God, would he give it to you.

He’d take his time at first, not out of patience, but because he wants to savour this. Wants to drag it out, make you feel it, make sure you understand exactly what you’ve unleashed. Clothes would come off in pieces—torn, shoved aside, not careful at all. He’d map your body with his hands and mouth, biting and sucking marks into your skin like he’s claiming you, like he needs the evidence written on your flesh.

And he’d talk. Because Aerion always talks during sex, can’t help himself.

“Look at you. So desperate for it.”

“You want me to use you? You want me to fuck you until you can’t think?”

“You’re mine. Say it. Say you’re mine.”

He’d get you worked up (hands between your thighs, fingers inside you, mouth on your neck) until you were shaking and gasping and pleading, and only then would he finally give you what you asked for.

And when he did?

It would be intense. Hard and fast and overwhelming, all that leashed control finally cut loose. He’d fuck you like he’s been starving for it, like he’s trying to crawl inside your bones, settle there forever, like he needs to prove something—to you, to himself, to the universe.

One hand in your hair, pulling your head back so he can watch your face. The other gripping your hip hard enough to leave fingerprint across your skin. His mouth at your ear, telling you how good you feel, how perfect, how his.

“This what you wanted? Wanted me to take you?”

“Mine. You’re mine. Say it.”

And if you said it (if you gasped out “yours” or “I’m yours” or his name) he’d lose whatever remaining control he had left. Would fuck you harder, deeper, chasing his own release now because hearing you submit verbally while he’s taking you physically is the combination that breaks him every time. He’d make you come first—has to, needs the proof that he can do this, that he can pleasure you and not just take from you—and the feeling of you clenching around him, the sound you make, the way you fall apart under his hands?

That’s what tips him over the edge.

He’d come with your name on his lips (or a curse, or some possessive declaration in High Valyrian), and he’d bury himself as deep as possible like he’s trying to mark you from the inside.

Afterward, he’d be—

Wrecked. Shaking slightly. Still holding you too tight, like he’s afraid you’ll disappear if he lets go.

And there’d be this moment where you’d see it in his face: the vulnerability, the fear that he went too far, that he was too rough, that you’re going to leave now that you’ve seen what he’s like when he’s not holding back. You’d have to reassure him. Pull him close, run your fingers through his sweat-damp hair, tell him he did good, that you wanted it, that you’re staying, that he’s yours, your Aerion, always.

And he’d exhale shakily and press his face into your neck and just… cling.

Daeron dropped out of community college at twenty-two when Maekar got injured and couldn't work for three months. Someone had to pick up the slack. He was studying psychology—was good at it, too, his professors said he had promise. He still has the textbooks in a box under his bed. You found them once and made the mistake of mentioning it. His face went cold and closed off. "That's none of your business." "I wasn't—" "I said don't. That's dead. Leave it dead." Aerion told you later: Daeron sometimes takes those books out late at night, reads them like ghost stories of a future he'll never have.

You've learned that Daeron's cruelty is armour over a wound that won't heal. Once, very drunk, he admitted: "I raised them, you know. After Mom left. Dad had to work all the time just to keep roof over our heads. I was kid myself and suddenly I had five fucking kids who needed me." His voice cracked. "You did good," you said quietly. "Look at them. They're all still here. Still whole. That's you." He wiped his face roughly. "Don't tell Aerion you saw this." "Never."

Daeron calls you now when things go really wrong. Not Aerion, you. When he's too drunk to drive, when he's in a fight he can't win, when the power's shut off and the kids are scared and he can't fix it. You show up every time. No lectures, no judgment, just handle it. Once you picked him up from the police station in the middle of the night, disorderly conduct, charges dropped thanks to your lawyer. Silent the whole drive home. When you pulled up to the trailer he said, voice rough: "Why do you keep doing this?" "Because you'd do it for me," you answered simply. "You don't know that." "Yes I do." He looked at you for a long moment. "Yeah. You probably do."

There's a tension between you and Daeron that everyone notices but no one mentions. Not romantic, it's nothing like that at all, but somehow worse. It's the recognition of two people who became adults too young, who carry families that aren't entirely their responsibility but became it anyway. Who are too proud to admit when they're drowning. Sometimes you'll be in the same room and the air gets tight with unspoken understanding. You're both the fixers. Both the ones who show up, have to. Both trapped by love and duty in equal measure. Aerion hates it and can't articulate why. Once you caught him watching you and Daeron talk and the look on his face was complicated, grateful and jealous and something else. Later he pulled you aside and fucked you against the wall, possessive and rough, and you understood: You're mine. Not his. Mine.

But the protectiveness runs both ways. When your family bullshit gets too heavy, Daeron will text: need an exit strategy, darling? When you show up at the trailer stressed and brittle, he'll hand you a beer and say, "Porch. Now. Aerion gets off at eleven." You'll sit in silence for twenty minutes and somehow it helps. Once he said, "Your people are just as fucked up as ours, aren't they? Just better at hiding it." "Yes," you admitted. He nodded, satisfied. "Thought so. You've got that look. Like you're performing being okay." "So do you," you said. "Yeah," he agreed. "Takes one to know one, I guess."

Daeron told you about their father in ways Aerion won't. How Maekar used to be different, before. How he'd take them fishing, help with homework, be present. "The fall broke him," Daeron said. "Broke all of us, but him especially. He was supposed to be someone, you know? Targaryen name meant something. Then suddenly it didn't and he had six kids and no way to give them what he'd been promised." "That's not his fault," you said. "No," Daeron agreed. "But it's ours to live with anyway."

Daeron is the reality check in your relationship with Aerion. The one who sees both of you clearly and loves you both enough to call bullshit. When you fight with Aerion, Daeron will tell his brother: "Fix it, you idiot. You're not going to find better." When you're being controlling or using money to solve problems that need different solutions, Daeron will tell you: "Back off, darling. You can't save us all and trying makes him feel like shit and playing charity case." You've both learned to listen because underneath the sharpness, Daeron's usually right.

Once, very drunk, Daeron said: "You're too good for him, you know." You were helping him inside after a particularly bad night. "No I'm not," you said. "Yeah, you are. You're too good for all of us. But you're here anyway, playing house with the trash." He looked at you, eyes unfocused but honest. "Don't leave, okay? Even when it gets hard. Even when he's impossible. The kids need you." He paused. "I need you." Your throat went tight. "I'm not going anywhere." "Promise, darling?" The endearment was softer this time, almost affectionate. "Promise."

The "darling" started as mockery and became something else—still sharp, still carrying edge, but now it's almost fond. His way of acknowledging you're family without getting soft about it. When he's particularly pleased with you it's just "good girl" with that dangerous smile, and Aerion's jaw tightens every time because that's his thing to say, not Daeron's. But Daeron does it anyway because claiming you as family means claiming the right to tease you, to push your buttons, to remind you that you belong to all of them now.

⧽ AEMON:

Aemon is nineteen and working two jobs, has been since he was fifteen, lying about his age to get hired. Grocery store days, gas station nights, cobbling together forty-hour weeks with the kind of determination that would be admirable if it wasn't so fucking tragic. He won you over by being relentlessly genuine, sweet in a way that seems impossible given their childhood. When you first met properly, he just smiled, happy that Aerion was better for once, and said, "It's nice to meet you. For real this time, not the awkward doorway thing." You'd laughed, charmed despite yourself.

"It's good to see him like this," Aemon told you once, quiet, while Aerion was outside smoking. "Like what?" you asked. "Like he gives a shit about something other than self-destruction," Aemon answered, sounding too old for his years. You didn't know what to say to that. Aemon just squeezed your shoulder and said, "Take care of him, yeah?" You wanted to say I'm trying, wanted to say I don't know if I can, but you just nodded. The weight of his trust settled on your shoulders like a mantle.

Aemon is the one who makes dinner for everyone, stretching pasta and jarred sauce to feed seven people, smiling while he stirs the pot like this is normal. The first time you offered to help he looked so genuinely grateful it hurt. While you chopped vegetables (that you'd brought, pretending you grabbed them on the way), he talked easily about his day, asked about your classes, made you feel normal in a way that was startling. No resentment about your money, no bitterness about circumstances, just genuine interest in you as a person.

You got Aemon that better job, called in a favour, made it look like a normal application process. When he got the offer he called you crying. "I don't—I don't know what I did to deserve this." You felt like a liar saying, "You earned it," but he had earned it. You just moved some obstacles that would make others overlook him. Aerion found out months later and was furious until Aemon shut it down: "She helped me. I'm grateful. End of discussion." The quiet firmness in his voice surprised everyone. Aemon doesn't often put his foot down, but when he does, people listen.

Aemon is dating someone now, a boy from his new job, sweet and a little overwhelmed when Aemon finally brings him around. You watch Aemon watch him take in the trailer, the poverty, the chaos, and you can see him bracing for rejection. Instead the boy just squeezes his hand and says, "Your family's really close, huh?" The relief on Aemon's face makes you want to hug him. Later the boyfriend pulls you aside, nervous. "Is it always like this?" "Yes," you say honestly. "Can you handle it?" He looks at Aemon, who's playing with Rhae. "I really like him." "That's not what I asked." "I know," he says. "Yeah. I can handle it."

Aemon checks on you in ways no one else does. Texts asking if you're eating, sleeping, doing okay with family pressure. Once you had a brutal week at school and Aemon just showed up with coffee and donuts. "Heard you were stressed." You stared. "How?" "Aerion mentioned it. And by that I mean he put his fist into nearest wall. Thought you could use a friend." The simple kindness of it broke something inside you.

There's something heartbreaking about Aemon's optimism, how he still believes things can get better despite all evidence to the contrary. He makes plans: save for community college, take night classes, work his way up. You want to protect that hope while also preparing him for reality. Once you said carefully, "You know it's going to be incredibly difficult." "I know," he said. "But difficult isn't impossible. And I'm good at difficult." You've been quietly setting up scholarship opportunities through intermediaries. He might suspect but he hasn't called you on it.

You've started taking Aemon out for coffee sometimes—just the two of you, away from the family chaos. He needs someone who isn't Daeron (too cynical), isn't Aerion (too volatile), isn't his father (too absent). Just someone who'll listen. He talks about feeling trapped, about dreams deferred, about guilt. "I want to be selfish," he admitted once. "I want to go to school and have a normal life and not worry about whether there's food for Rhae. Does that make me a terrible person?" "No," you said firmly. "It makes you human." "Daeron did it. Sacrificed everything." "And look what it cost him. You're allowed to want different. things"

Aemon asked you once, carefully: "Does Aerion treat you right?" You were surprised. "Yes. Why?" "Because you treat us so well and I want to make sure someone's treating you well too." Your throat went tight. "He does. We're complicated but—yeah. He treats me right when it matters." Aemon nodded, satisfied. "Good. You deserve that." Coming from this kid who deserves so much more than he has, the words hit different.

Aemon is the heart of the family, the one who hasn't let bitterness consume him yet. Daeron's the shield, Aerion's the knife, but Aemon's the reason any of them still believe in good things. And somehow he's decided you're good people, which means he defends you when you're not around, smooths over tensions, makes sure everyone knows you're trying your best. You've heard him shut down Daeron's sharper comments: "She's helping. Let her help." Heard him reassure Aerion: "She's not going anywhere, I can tell." His faith in you is both touching and terrifying because you don't want to prove him wrong.

⧽ DAELLA:

Daella is seventeen and sharp as a knife, brilliant and furious in equal measure. She saw through you immediately. Looked between you and Aerion that first meeting and said bluntly, "You're both fucked up in the same way, aren't you?" You laughed before you could stop yourself, surprised and delighted by her directness, so much like your own. "Yeah," you admitted. "We really are." She grinned, this flash of genuine pleasure at being right, at finding someone who doesn't bullshit her. "I knew it. You've got that look. Wild as him."

Now she texts you constantly: memes and makeup recommendations and college questions and sometimes just ugh people are the worst. Once when you complimented her outfit, she said casually, "Thanks. I'm gonna be like you when I grow up. Rich and scary." You didn't correct her because if anyone could pull it off, it's Daella. She's got the intelligence and the drive and the sheer force of will.

You've been helping her with college applications. Essay editing, scholarship searches, interview prep. She knows you're involved but you both maintain the fiction that she's doing it herself. When the acceptance letter came with a full ride, she screamed loud enough to wake the neighbours, then ran to find you and hugged you so hard you couldn't breathe. "I'm getting out," she whispered, half-laughing, half-crying. "You're getting out," you confirmed. Then carefully: "You can still come back, you know. Visit. Help from wherever you land. Leaving doesn't mean abandoning." She pulled back, eyes bright. "I know. But I need to leave first. I need to prove I can."

Daella asks you about everything: how to dress for interviews, how to navigate social situations she has no framework for, what it's like being the only woman in rooms full of men who underestimate you. You take her shopping and she comes alive, trying on identities with outfits. "I don't know how to be the kind of girl who wears this," she admitted in the dressing room, looking at herself in a blazer that fit properly. "You already are that girl," you told her. "You just never had the chance to dress like it." She studied her reflection. "I look... powerful." "You are powerful," you corrected. "Now you just look like it too."

Daella is fiercely protective of Aerion in ways that surprise you when you first notice it. After fights she'll corner you, direct as always. "He's trying, you know. To be better. For you." "I know." "Do you? Because sometimes I think you forget how hard this is for him. You're from different worlds and he's terrified you're going to wake up and realise you can do better." You sat with that. "I'm not going to do that." "Then make sure he knows it. He's too proud to ask but he needs to hear it." Later you told Aerion explicitly: "I'm not going anywhere. I choose you. I keep choosing you." His eyes got bright and he pulled you into his lap and just held you.

She wants to be a lawyer who helps people like her family. People the system grinds down, people without resources or advocates. You've connected her with lawyers your family knows, set up informational interviews, made sure she sees a path. Once she asked, "Why are you doing all this?" You thought about lying. "Because I see myself in you. And I was born lucky, I had help. Seems right to pass it on." "I'm not you," she said, defensive. "No," you agreed. "You're going to be better."

Once Daella asked point-blank: "Do you love him?" No build up, just that direct stare. "Yes," you said. "Does he know?" "I think so." "That's not good enough. Tell him." "It's complicated." "Everything's complicated," she said impatiently. "Tell him anyway. He needs to hear it from you, not guess at it." She was right. You're still trying to find the courage to do it.

Daella figured out you've been funding things. Called you on it with characteristic bluntness. "You've been paying for stuff. Aemon's job didn't just happen. My application fees didn't magically disappear. That power bill that got mysteriously covered." You started to deflect. "Don't start," she interrupted. "I'm not mad. I just want to know why." You looked at her steadily. "Because you're brilliant and you deserve a shot. Because Aemon works too hard for too little. Because I can help and I want to." She processed this. "We're not your charity project." "You're not charity," you said firmly. "You're family." She nodded slowly. "Okay. But warn me next time so I can pretend to be surprised."

There's a specific tension with Daella because she sees your relationship with Aerion clearly, sees the class divide, the drugs, the ways it could go catastrophically wrong. Once she said, "You know he's going to break your heart, right?" "Maybe," you agreed. "Or I'll break his. Or we'll break each other. Or we'll figure it out." "Those aren't great odds." "I know." She studied you. "You're staying anyway." "Yeah." "That's either really brave or really stupid." "Probably both."

⧽ EGG:

Egg is thirteen and notices absolutely everything with the kind of perception that's unsettling in someone so young. He decided you were safe when he saw you play chess with Aerion on a busted set one of them had stolen from a local park. He watched you demolish his brother in five moves and his whole face lit up. "Can you teach me?" You spent two hours going through strategy with a twelve-year-old who absorbed it like a sponge, asking smart questions, seeing patterns you hadn't explicitly pointed out.

When Aerion came back to find you both bent over the board, his face twisted with tenderness and possessiveness and a little awed that you'd spent your afternoon teaching his baby brother chess. Now when you visit, Egg runs up demanding rematches, sending you problems to solve, texting positions at midnight with what would you do here? You always respond with detailed analysis because his mind is sharp enough to deserve it.

Egg is the one who figured out you and Aerion were serious before anyone said anything. Just watched you interact at dinner and announced: "So when are you guys getting married?" Aerion choked on his beer. Daeron laughed so hard he had to leave the table. You fought a smile. "What makes you think we're getting married?" Egg rolled his eyes. "Please. The way you look at each other. Plus Rhae's been planning your wedding for months." "Has she now?" you asked, amused. "She's got colour schemes and everything," Egg confirmed solemnly.

He's never heard Aerion laugh the way he laughs with you, and he told Aemon once, "I think she makes him happy." Aemon didn't have the heart to explain that it's more complicated than that—that happiness and need and obsession tangle together in ways a thirteen-year-old shouldn't have to understand yet.

You noticed Egg getting bullied at school, won't talk about it but the signs are there. Bruises, withdrawn behaviour, disappearing, grades slipping. Before Aerion could make it worse by showing up angry, you intervened. "Want to learn how to handle this yourself?" Egg looked wary. "Aerion would just make it worse." "I know. So we're not telling Aerion." You paid for self-defence classes with a friend called Dunk, drove him twice a week yourself. Three months later the bullying stopped. Egg didn't say what happened but his knuckles were bruised and he walked taller.

Egg is the one who tells you about Maekar in detail—about their father who's present only in his absence, working doubles and thirds, barely home. "He tries," Egg says, loyal and a little defensive. "Works really hard for us." "I'm sure he does." "But he's always tired. Sometimes I don't see him for days." There's loneliness in his voice that's painful to hear. "That must be hard." "It's fine," he says automatically, then: "Sometimes I wish he was just... around more. Like, for normal things. Homework or whatever." You don't have solutions. Just squeeze his shoulder.

Egg sends you chess problems at all hours, increasingly complex positions that require real thought. Once he sent one at 1 AM and you responded immediately with analysis. The next morning: were you awake or did my text wake you? You answered honestly: awake. couldn't sleep. He sent back: me either. want to call? You talked for an hour about nothing: school, chess, his favourite superheroes. Just existing together through insomnia. Aerion woke up to find you on the phone and just kissed your neck, dragged you closer around the waist, and went back to sleep.

Egg is the youngest boy, caught between wanting to grow up fast and wanting to stay young. He'll try to act tough around his brothers, then curl up with Rhae to watch cartoons. You've seen him try to help with bills by offering his birthday money—all thirty dollars of it. Seen him take care of Rhae when everyone else is working. Seen him grow up too fast because he doesn't have a choice.

Egg asked once, carefully: "Are you going to marry Aerion?" You were mid-game, the question coming out of nowhere. "I don't know. Maybe. Why?" "Rhae keeps saying you will and I wanted to know if it was true." "Would that be okay with you?" He moved a piece, considering. "Yeah. You're good for him. He was really nasty before. I mean, still is, but it's different. And you don't treat us like we're..." he searched for words, "...less than. Because of the money stuff." Your chest went tight. "You're not less than anything." "I know," he said. "But most people don't act like they know it. You do."

⧽ RHAE:

Rhae is eleven and decided immediately that you belonged to her. No negotiation, no discussion, just fact. The first time you visited she just crawled into your lap like she'd known you forever, demanded you braid her hair, declared you were pretty and smelled good and did you want to see her drawings? Aerion watched this with poorly concealed panic. You've never mentioned wanting kids, never indicated you'd tolerate this kind of attention.

But you just braided her hair carefully, fingers gentle and competent, admired every drawing with genuine interest, and let her chatter at you about school and friends and her favourite TV shows. Later Aerion asked, quiet and careful, "You okay with all that?" You shrugged. "She's a kid. And she's yours. Of course I'm okay with it." The look he gave you was complicated.

You bring Rhae small gifts every visit because she's "little dragon" who wants so much she's itching with it. Books, hair ribbons, nail polish. Aerion pulled you aside once. "You don't have to do that." "I want to." "She's going to get spoiled." You looked at this eleven-year-old in secondhand everything and said flatly, "Good. She deserves to be spoiled." He couldn't argue with that.

Rhae draws pictures of you and Aerion constantly. Stick figures holding hands, hearts everywhere, elaborate wedding scenes with her as flower girl. She gives them to you with ceremony and you keep every single one in a folder in your house. Aerion found them when he visited and just looked at them silently for a long moment. "She thinks we're going to get married," he said finally. "She's eleven. She thinks in fairy tales." "Yeah," he agreed, but something in his voice was wistful, like maybe he wouldn't mind that particular fairy tale.

When Rhae got really sick (emergency room sick, scary sick) you drove five hours in the middle of the night. Found her small and scared in a hospital bed and when she saw you she started crying with relief. "I want to go home." "I know, baby. Soon." You held her hand through tests, were there when she woke up from fever dreams. The nurse assumed you were her mother. You didn't correct her. When Rhae was better she said, "You came all the way here just for me." "Of course I did." "Why?" "Because I love you, little dragon," you said simply, and her smile was bright enough to hurt.

Rhae calls you when she needs girl advice she doesn't trust Daella with. First period talk, friend drama, boys she likes at school. You navigate these conversations aware you're standing in for a mother who left when she was too young to remember. Once she asked, "Did you have a mom growing up?" "Until I was twelve," you said. "Then she died." Rhae was quiet. "I don't really remember mine. She left when I was little." "I know, baby." "Is it bad that I don't miss her?" Your heart broke. "No. You can't miss what you don't remember. That's okay." She curled into you and you held her, this little girl carrying losses she can't articulate.

You take Rhae shopping for school clothes and she's overwhelmed by getting to pick things new instead of inheriting Daella's hand-me-downs. Keeps checking price tags, putting things back. "It's okay," you say gently. "Pick what you like." She does, tentatively, then with growing confidence. Twirls in a new dress and says, "I look pretty!" "You're beautiful," you tell her, meaning it. When she runs to show Aerion, his face does something complicated. Later he says, "She's never had that before. New things just for her." "She should," you say. "She's a kid. Kids deserve new things sometimes."

Someone leaks a single photo of Aerion and you dancing and the intimacy in it is breath-taking, horrible, gut-punching. He's all sharp angles and platinum hair and that dragon tattoo probably visible at the edge of his collar, but there's such odd peace on his face that people don't know what to do with it. His head is dipped lower like he's listening to whatever you're saying, and you can see the focus in his posture, the way he's angled into you like you're the only thing in the world. People are losing their minds because his reputation is dangerous fuck-boy, trust-fund disaster, unhinged and dangerous at the best of times, but there's never been a man more content than Aerion in that moment, at the edge of the crowd, swaying with you, that slight dangerous curve to his mouth because you're looking up at him and trying not to laugh at whatever he's saying.

The photo goes VIRAL. Like actually viral. Millions of impressions in hours. The quote tweets are unhinged:

"I don't even know these people but this photo just made me believe in soulmates and also want to lay down in traffic"

"The way he's looking at her like she's telling him the secrets of the universe and he'd burn it all down if she asked—"

"His FACE. He looks PEACEFUL. I've seen 100 photos of this man and he always looks like he's about to commit a felony but here he just looks... happy??? I'm unwell"

"'Trying not to laugh' THEY HAVE INSIDE JOKES I'M—"

And then someone spots another photo from the same wedding—Baelor, you, and Aerion all in frame together. Baelor's got his hand at your waist, deliberate but gentle, looking at you with clear affection. You're smiling at something off-camera. And Aerion is three feet away, glass in hand, watching the two of you with an expression that people will write whole dissertations about. Is it longing? Rage? Resignation? Whatever it is, there's TENSION crackling between uncle and nephew that you can feel through the screen.

Twitter explodes:

"LOVE TRIANGLE CONFIRMED???"

"Does Baelor KNOW??? Someone tell me Baelor knows because if not I'm going to have a crisis"

"The tension between Aerion and Baelor in this photo could power a small city"

"Okay but what if they're all—no I can't say it—what if it's a throuple situation and we're all just watching it unfold—"

"This is either the most tragic star-crossed situation or the most complicated polycule in history and either way I'm OBSESSED"

Fan accounts do deep dives. Someone makes a timeline of every public appearance. When did you meet Baelor? When did Aerion start looking at you like that? There are theories about the chronology, about who came first, about what the actual story is.

And then.

AND THEN.

Some random person who was at the same bar six months before the Baelor engagement announcement goes through their old photos and finds ONE where you and Aerion are visible in the background. You're sitting close, his hand is on the table near yours, you're leaning in talking and he's got that look on his face—the same one from the wedding photo. The photo is grainy, clearly accidental, but it's dated. Months before Baelor. Indisputable evidence that you and Aerion met first.

And the internet loses its collective mind.

"THEY MET FIRST. THEY. MET. FIRST."

"Oh my god this IS star-crossed lovers bullshit, they had something FIRST and then she ended up with his uncle and he's been—oh my GOD"

"The TIMELINE. So she met Aerion, something happened or didn't happen, she got with Baelor, and Aerion has been circling her like a WOUNDED ANIMAL ever since??? I need to lie down"

"Everyone talking about the chemistry but the real story is they MET FIRST and now she's with BAELOR and Aerion looks like he's in PAIN in every photo. this is LITERATURE. CINEMA."

People are split:

Team Baelor: "He's perfect for her, stable, mature, clearly adores her, this is healthy and good"

Team Aerion: "But the CHEMISTRY, the way they LOOK at each other, that dancing photo, they met FIRST, this is FATE"

Team Chaos: "What if it's all three of them I'm just SAYING the math could work—"

The edits are devastating. Someone sets the wedding dance photo to Hozier's "Like Real People Do" and it gets 2 million views. Another edit is all the photos of Aerion watching you with Baelor, set to "The Night We Met," and people are SOBBING in the comments. "This is what yearning LOOKS like." "He looks like he's mourning something he never got to have." "I need a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist to figure out what happened between them."

There are conspiracy theories ofc:

"They definitely had a thing before Baelor, look at the bar photo, that's not 'just met' energy"

"Maybe Baelor doesn't know about the history and Aerion is SUFFERING"

"No I think Baelor DOES know and that's why there's tension"

"The throuple theory is looking more plausible by the day bby"

Someone writes a viral Twitter thread: "On the Visual Language of Longing: Why We Can't Look Away from Aerion Targaryen and LS - A Thread" and it's actually insanely GOOD, analysing the body language, the chronology, the way you match his energy in photos, the complexity of the situation.

The few times there are photos of you and Aerion actually close—that wedding dance, one blurry shot of him leaning in to say something to you at a gala, his hand hovering near your lower back—it's event level. The dancing photo alone trends for DAYS. People write essays. Fan cams are made. The intimacy in it is so palpable that people feel like voyeurs just looking at it.

And the worst (best?) part? The thing that would make people genuinely insane? You match his energy. You're not oblivious or victim of some man being creepy. You're not uncomfortable. When he looks at you like that, you look back, like you can't even help it. When he circles, you're aware of exactly where he is. In that dancing photo you're clearly engaged in the conversation, there's ease in your posture, you're trying not to laugh—this isn't one-sided obsession, this is mutual something, and that makes it so much more compelling.

People would be obsessed because it looks real. It looks like something that exists outside of cameras and public perception. It looks private and huge and possibly destructive and absolutely inevitable, and watching it unfold would be like watching a supernova in slow motion—you can't look away even though you know it's going to be catastrophic.

"I would go insane if modern LS and Aerion existed" anon, we ALL would. The edits would be stunning, the conspiracy theories would be elaborate. People would be writing academic papers about the body language and the timeline and the implications. Praying for Starkspeare downfall while simultaneously being like "but also Baelor seems lovely and healthy and—wait no DID YOU SEE THE DANCING PHOTO—"

It would be the most compelling thing on the internet and everyone would have Opinions and no one would be normal about it.