𓇢𓆸APEIROPHOBIA⚘

singsong. bright. the way you used to say it when you came through his front door with something exciting to tell him. the way you’d stretch the vowels. boh-beeee. musical and delighted, always warm, calling his name like it was your favourite word.

his hand grips the porch railing, his knuckles white, his eyes scanning the dark street. the tree line. the shadows between houses. nothing. nobody.

but the warmth lingers, and his eyes sting. he stands on his porch for twenty minutes breathing air that smells faintly, impossibly, like vanilla.

he forces himself to go back inside, lies down beside kat and stares at the ceiling for another fifteen minutes.

across the street, in the dark, your eyes catch the light one last time before you turn and disappear.

brendan is awake when you get back, sitting up in bed. he doesn’t ask where you went. he already knows, he can see it on your face.

“you can’t do that again,” he says softly.

you climb into bed, press your face into his throat, your clicking thin and aching.

“I know,” you whisper. “I know I can’t.”

you do it two more times before you stop. brendan pretends not to notice. bobby stands on his porch at 2am each time and feels the static, smelling the vanilla and tells himself he’s losing his mind.

except he’s not losing his mind, but you’re losing yours. a little more each time you watch him through a window and see him hold a child that isn’t yours in a house that should have been.

the third time is the last time. because the third time, the baby cries, and bobby picks her up, and holds her gently against his chest, pressing his mouth to her hair. and the sound you make from the tree line isn’t human, making a dog three houses down start barking insistently, and so you run.

Valarr is not an easily jealous man. 

In fact, Valarr would say he is not jealous at all. Jealousy is for lesser men—insecure men. Men who fear losing what is theirs because, somewhere deep down, they know it was never truly theirs to begin with. Valarr has never counted himself among them. He is a prince of the blood, second in line to the Iron Throne after his father. He has had the world in his hands since the moment he was born. There has never been much that could be taken from him. 

Or, perhaps more accurately, there has never been much he cared enough about to fear losing.

So, when his wife spends an afternoon hawking with the twins and returns bright and smiling in a way that Valarr has hardly ever seen from her, he does not care.

When Aerion lingers around her, keeping her so engrossed in conversation that she does not even notice Valarr entering the room, he does not care.

When she laughs at Daeron’s jokes during a feast while Valarr is forced to entertain a balding marcher lord, Valarr does not care.

He notices, certainly, because Valarr notices everything, but noticing is not jealousy. 

In fact, it makes Valarr happy. It does. He knows that you have been struggling to adjust to life in Westeros. He knows that you are lonely. He is happy that his family is welcoming you, that they are making efforts so that you might feel comfortable. He is happy that the court is starting to warm up to you.

He is.

He really is.

He is glad that you come back to your shared chambers smiling more often than not now, because his heart ached every time he returned to find you sitting by the window in silence, staring east toward a sea that would never carry you home. There had been nights when he woke to find your side of the bed empty, mornings where your eyes were red, days where you smiled, strained at the corners, forcing yourself because courtesy demanded it. 

It had haunted him—truly haunted him. When he joined his father at meetings, he would find his mind drifting to you, wondering what you were doing, if you were alone, if he would have time to stop at the kitchens to have them make a Qartheen dessert to bring up to you. When the two of you were in the same room but separated, his eyes always followed you, searching for the cause of every frown and distant look, because maybe if he could identify who was upsetting you, he might be able to fix everything.

Valarr could win jousts and navigate court politics, but he had spent months watching you wither beneath loneliness and homesickness, and there had been little he could do about it. So, yes—he is happy that you are enjoying time with his family, and you return to your shared chambers with stories and smiles instead of tears.

He is. 

Mostly. 

The trouble is that sometimes he gets a little—well, peeved when he realizes you might enjoy spending time with his cousins considerably more than you enjoy spending time with him. Not that Valarr is keeping track of who you seem to enjoy spending time with the most and who you don't, because he isn’t, that would be absurd. He notices things. 

For example, he notices that you are quick to seek out Aelor and Aelora during events. He likes to believe that it’s because you know that he’s frequently occupied with princely duties and do not wish to burden him when the twins are more readily available company. It is a much more pleasant explanation than acknowledging that the twins care little for keeping up appearances, so you might feel more comfortable around them. They are quick to jump down someone's throat if they look at you the wrong way, whereas Valarr is bound by his duty and his future to keep the peace, so he is forced to take more civil approaches, even when every instinct is telling him to be considerably less diplomatic.

He notices how Aerion listens whenever you speak of home as though the subject genuinely interests him, asking questions and remembering details that Valarr himself sometimes struggles to keep straight, and he finds the realization oddly aggravating, especially because Aerion has never been known for his patience. His cousin is sharp-tongued and capricious, and he possesses a sort of cruelty that occasionally borders on artistry, yet somehow all of that seems to vanish whenever you are involved. 

And he especially notices how Daeron somehow always manages to appear wherever you are. If you are in the garden, Daeron is in the garden. If you are in the library, Daeron is in the library. If you are attending some unbearably dull feast that neither of you particularly wished to attend, Daeron will inevitably materialize at your side before the first course is served. 

Worse, you always seem pleased to see him. Valarr will look across a room, hoping to find your eyes on him, but will find Daeron leaning against your chair, saying something undoubtedly idiotic, and you will be smiling, and then comes the laughter—the real laughter, bright and unrestrained, not the polite courtly ones Valarr has become used to—and Daeron, naturally behaves as though drawing the sound from you is his life’s greatest achievement, and it—

It is irritating. It is deeply irritating. 

Not because Valarr dislikes seeing you happy—quite the opposite, really. For months, he would have given anything to hear you laugh like that. The aggravating part is that Daeron accomplishes it so effortlessly. Valarr spends hours carefully choosing gifts from home, remembering passing comments, searching for ways to ease your loneliness, while Daeron simply appears, says something absurd, and suddenly you are laughing so hard you can barely breathe.

Valarr thinks about it far more often than he’ll ever admit, but it is not jealousy.

If anything, Valarr is grateful, because Daeron is succeeding where he has failed. When you first arrived in Westeros, Valarr spent months trying to draw you out of your shell. He took you riding, and he brought musicians from Essos to court; he commissioned cooks to learn Qartheen dishes and listened patiently whenever you wished to speak of home.

Yet, it is Aelor and Aelora who convince you to leave your chambers when homesickness threatens to swallow you whole.

It is Aerion who can keep you talking about Qarth for hours without ever looking bored.

It is Daeron who manages to make you laugh until tears run down your face.

His eye twitches, knuckles whitening around the goblet in his hand as he stands at the window of the chambers he shares with you, staring out over the Blackwater. You have still not retired for the night; you left the feast early to join Aelor and Aelora in wandering the gardens, and Valarr had assumed you would be in your shared chambers waiting for him by the time he finished entertaining the Lord Tyrell and Lord Hightower with his father, so he’d brought up a Qartheen spiced liquor, hoping to share it and spend some time with you before bed.

Rationally, he knows you have done nothing wrong. 

You had smiled at him when you entered the hall earlier. You had kissed his cheek before taking your seat. You had even sought him out briefly between courses to tell him where you were going and who you would be with. He had just—he had hoped to spend time with you. That is all. 

Unfortunately, jealousy is not a particularly rational emotion.

Not that Valarr is jealous.

He straightens when the door finally creaks open, turning to look just as you slip into the room. It is awful, truly, the combination of fondness and bitterness that washes over him at the sight of the breathless smile on your lips as you enter the room.

“I hope Aelor and Aelora walked you back,” Valarr murmurs as he places his goblet down and makes his way over to you. He relishes the way your expression softens when you turn your attention to him. It’s almost enough to overwhelm the greenness eating away at his chest. Almost. “You should not be wandering the halls alone at this time of night, wife.”

You tilt your face up as soon as he draws near, and he dips his head down to brush his lips against yours. You make a soft noise into his mouth, curious, and he fights a flush when he feels your tongue dart out to lap at his lower lip.

You pull back, eyes alight as you ask, “Is that Qartheen?”

Valarr hums in agreement, hands sliding down to your hips as he looks down at you, thumbs smoothing easy circles over the fabric of your dress. 

“It is,” he says simply, and then he raises his eyebrows, beckoning a response to his initial unspoken question.

“Oh. Aelor and Aelora retired to their chambers early,” you tell him. Valarr’s brows immediately furrow, incensed by the idea of his cousins leaving you to make your way back alone. “Daeron walked me back.”

In Valarr’s defense, he truly does not mean to scoff. He doesn’t even realize he has until he sees your face change. You blink once before your brows raise questioningly, beckoning an explanation for the reaction.

“Is that a problem?” you ask after a moment, bemused. 

“No,” he says immediately, and he also does not mean for his voice to come across so strained, but from the way you raise your brows further, he fails miserably. He clears his throat and repeats more carefully, “Of course not.”

You study him for a moment too long. Valarr can hardly hold your gaze, so he resigns to looking at the painting to your left as though it’s the most interesting thing in the room. From the corner of his eye, he sees the moment your face smooths out in realization, and a pit forms in his stomach.

But all you say is, “I missed you today.” 

Valarr exhales through his nose, sinking into you when he feels your arms wind around his waist. What little fight remains drains from him immediately; for all of the time he spends stewing in his own thoughts, for all of the ridiculous conclusions he manages to draw from a few hours apart, it is remarkably difficult to maintain any sense of grievance when you are standing in front of him looking at him like this. 

“I missed you too,” he admits quietly, one hand lifting to cradle the back of your head as you prop your chin on his chest to look up at him. He dips down to brush his lips against the crown of your head, eyes sliding shut. “Lord Tyrell and Lord Hightower kept me occupied for the better part of the evening. I am beginning to suspect it was deliberate.”

“There was a conspiracy against you, was there?”

“There usually is,” Valarr agrees mournfully.

“My poor prince,” you coo, lifting your hand up to brush your fingers against his cheek. 

Valarr leans his face into your touch. “Your poor prince indeed. I am suffering terribly. You should do something to fix it.”

You laugh prettily, and Valarr feels the last of his irritation dissolve into something much uglier: guilt. Because here you are, smiling up at him, arms wrapped around his waist, telling him that you missed him, and all evening he had been sitting at the high table feeling resentful because you’d spent time with his cousins. 

You have spent months lonely in a foreign kingdom, struggling to find your place and navigate a court that had viewed you with disdain from the moment you arrived. Now, you finally have people who seek you out and make you laugh, people who make Westeros feel a little less cold, and Valarr, instead of being grateful for it, spent half of the evening sulking like a child over it.

The realization is profoundly embarrassing, and he cannot help the sigh that escapes his lips. 

“What is it?” you ask him, thumb stroking over his cheekbone in a way that only serves to make him feel worse, but he takes advantage of the comfort you offer him anyway, because he is greedy for anything and everything you deign to give him. “Valarr?”

“I was unfair to you,” he says after a moment, voice quiet. 

Your brows furrow, and you tell him, “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I have,” he insists, fingers tangling gently into your hair, nails scratching your scalp lightly in the way that always makes your lashes flutter shut, because he knows that you know what was bothering him when you entered the room, and he would prefer for you not to think you might be doing something wrong just because he is petty. “I am happy that you have my brother and cousins. Aelor and Aelora… Aerion and Daeron. I am, truly. I desperately wanted you to have friends here—wanted you to feel welcome. I spent months worrying about you; every time I saw you upset, I felt as though I was failing you somehow. I am glad.”

He hates that he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.

There is a terribly knowing expression on your face as you search his face, and then you press closer to him, arms tightening around his waist, face burying into his chest. Valarr sinks into the warmth of your embrace, pressing his face into the top of your hair and inhaling the saffron hair oil he’s become intimately accustom to. 

“You know I would always prefer to spend time with you than them,” you murmur after a few moments pass. “You need not be jealous.”

Valarr closes his eyes, mortification washing through him instantly.

Apparently, he is not nearly as subtle as he thought. 

“I am not jealous,” he mutters petulantly into your hair. “I only—”

What exactly is his defense here?

I only spent the entire evening staring across the feast whenever Aelor and Aelora made you laugh?

I only felt irrationally irritated when Aerion remembered some insignificant detail about Quarth that you mentioned months ago?

I only had a distinct urge to throw my own cousin into the Blackwater when you said he walked you back to your chambers?

I only wish it could be me with you instead of them? 

None of those sound particularly persuasive. 

“I am a little jealous,” he admits at last, shoulders slumping in defeat. Valarr grimaces when your shoulders begin to shake, face heating up again. He says, affronted, “You are laughing at me.”

“I am not,” you disagree, but he can hear the laugh in your voice.

“You are,” he accuses, pulling back to look down at you with a scowl that lacks heat, considering he cannot help the way his lips curve up at the sight of the smile on your face.

“I would never.”

The blatant lie is so outrageous that Valarr actually huffs. 

You lean up on your tiptoes to ghost your lips against his, and he sighs lightly into your mouth, one hand sliding to the small of your back as though drawn there by instinct. The annoyance that had been simmering beneath his skin all evening dissipates a little further when he feels you smile against his lips. 

He follows when you begin to pull away, stealing one more kiss before finally relenting. Even then, he cannot quite bring himself to put any real distance between the two of you, pulling you so that you’re flush to him, walking backward slowly until the back of his knees hit the edge of the bed. 

He sinks onto the mattress with a quiet exhale, drawing you with him until you’re comfortably settled on his lap. 

Impossible woman, he thinks fondly.

He can never get enough of you. He has known since he was young that his grandfather or father would arrange a marriage for him. It was simply the reality of being born who he was. Princes did not marry for love; they married for alliances, and for peace, and for duty. As a boy, he prayed that if he could not find love in whatever match he was assigned, he would find the same type of friendship his parents had found in one another. He would have ocnsidered that enough—more than enough.

Valarr knew the moment he laid eyes on you descending from your ship that he was doomed. The memory remains painfully clear—the harbor had been crowded that day, warm and sunny, and he was filled with dread and anxiety as he waited for the Qartheen ships to dock. Lords, ladies, gold cloaks, servants gathered nat the docks—all eager to catch a glimpse of the Qartheen daughter who had crossed half the world to marry into House Targaryen. 

Valarr remembers very little of them, but he remembers you. The sea wind had caught at your silks as you descended the gangplank. Gold and sapphire glimmered at your wrists and throat; chin lifted high despite the hundreds of unfamiliar eyes fixed upon you. You had looked terrified—you had hidden it beautifully, but he had seen the tension in your shoulders and the way your gaze swept over the crowd, searching for something familiar and finding nothing.

He rehearsed his introduction to you a thousand times before that day, and he still fumbled over his words the moment you were finally in front of him. He remembers the brief look of confusion that crossed your face, and the way he wanted the ground to open to swallow him hole.

Then you smiled, wide and bright, a laugh bubbling from your lips, and he lost whatever hope he had of approaching this marriage sensibly, because he has spent every day since chasing the memory of it, hoping to draw that sound from you a second, a third, a fourth time, hundreds of times, thousands. 

It became more difficult as court life weighed on you. He would seek out trinkets from Qarth in the market and commissioned a musician who knew songs from your homeland, but nothing ever seemed to be enough to wash away the morose expression on your face at the day's end. Every difficult day that ended with you smiling at him instead of staring silently out at Blackwater Bay felt like a battle hardwon.

Perhaps that’s why the jealousy cuts so deeply. It is not because he begrudges his cousins for making you happy; it is because they are enjoying something he spent months fighting for. But looking at you now, in his lap, eyes bright and lips curved up into a smile that exists solely because of him, Valarr finds that he cannot bring himself to resent any of them for long. 

“Perhaps I will join you next time then,” you muse, looping your arms around his neck. Valarr lets his eyes slide shut again when he feels you peck his jaw, trailing kisses along his flushed skin. “I can spend the entire day listening to Lord Tyrell discuss harvest, and Lord Hightower complain about tariffs from Braavos. Then we can be miserable together.”

“A compelling proposition,” Valarr replies, lips curving up into an easy, lidded smile as he looks up at you. “Though I fear you might start dozing off mid-conversation, wife.”

“I would never!” you gasp, faux-offended, and Valarr laughs, arms tightening around your waist, and he smiles when he hears the yelp that spills from your lips when he lays you back gently against the mattress, following you down until he is hovering above you, forearms braced on either side of your head. 

For a moment, he can only look at you. His wife, in his arms, in your shared bed, smiling and happy, looking at him as though he’s the only thing in the room worth seeing, and Valarr loves you. He loves you more than he knows how to articulate, so much that it scares him sometimes, because you awaken instincts in him that he scarcely recgonizes in himself.

Protectiveness, of course. Possessiveness, maybe. 

But also something much darker. 

Valarr has always considered himself a rational man, but that composure seems to evaporate whenever you’re involved. Every time he sees you upset, every time your smile falters because of some careless remark, something ugly stirs inside him. He wants to know who caused it; he wants names and answers. The urge is immediate and irrational, a vicious thing that he’s not particularly proud of, but it makes him understand why men have started wars for the woman they love. 

But you are smiling now, warm and happy beneath him, and for the moment, that is enough.

Valarr dips down to press his lips against yours again. He kisses you slower this time, savoring in the faint taste of lemon on your lips; when he pulls back slightly to take a breath, you chase his lips, nipping at his bottom lip before you pout and lay back against the mattress, looking up at him with big eyes that make Valarr’s heart jump. 

He lifts one hand to your face, cradling your cheek gently in one hand, thumb tracing absent circles against your skin. 

“I mean it,” you say after a moment, nosing into his palm briefly before looking up at him again. “The court probably expects it of me anyway—to be at your side while you handle all of your princely duties, I cannot keep running off with your cousins to socialize.”

Valarr’s expression softens. “No,” he says immediately. “Do not martyr yourself for my sake. I spend enough time trapped in those conversations for the both of us. You should enjoy yourself. The Seven know you’ve spent enough time miserable in this Keep already.”

You look unconvinced, and Valarr feels ashamed, because this is his fault, his pettiness, his jealousy that got you to this point. You are finally at a place where you are starting to feel comfortable; he has spent months wanting nothing more than to see you smile, and now that you finally are, he has somehow managed to make you question whether you should.

“I do not care what the court expects, and I certainly do not care what some lord thinks my wife should be doing during a feast,” he tells you. “I want you happy, and if that means spending an evening with my cousins while I suffer through discussions of grain yields, then so be it.” 

The court might slowly be warming up to you, but they still love to get their snide comments in just to see how you react. He would sooner carve out his own heart than watch that careful, guarded expression return to your face because he had been selfish enough to keep you at his side, forced around people who seek to remind you that you do not belong instead of the few people in this keep willing to bare their teeth on your behalf the moment someone forgets their manners.

He sighs lightly as he leans down to press his lips against yours again, hand sliding from the side of your face to rest at your throat. His thumb presses lightly into your skin, and he swallows thickly when you flutter your lashes up at him. 

“Will you come with me to the gardens tomorrow then?” you ask after a moment, lips curved up as you look up at him, and how is Valarr ever supposed to deny you when you look at him like this? “I saw a flower tonight. It reminded me of your eyes. I wanted to bring it up here to show you, but I didn’t want to kill it.”

A lump forms in his throat, because yes, you had spent the evening with his cousins, but you had still seen something beautiful and thought of him.

“Of course,” he says without hesitation, and your smile widens, bright and full of light in a way that Valarr will spend his life guarding. 

For a moment, he simply watches you—the way your eyes shine and the way your fingers toy absentmindedly with the hem of his tunic. You are his, and Valarr was never really a possessive man until he met you, but now there is no denying it, because the sight of your tears ruins his day, and a careless remark from a lord leaves him imagining increasingly creative ways to make someone regret opening their mouth. Because seeing you hurt awakens something so violent in him that he almost forgets that he is meant to be his father’s son. 

There is concerningly little that Valarr would not do for you if it meant making you happy.

So he will join you in the gardens tomorrow, because he cannot deny you at all, much less when you are laying beneath him with wide eyes and a small smile. Because you are his wife, and he loves you.

Tomorrow, he will abandon the small council meeting he’s supposed to attend with his father, and he will endure whatever disapproval is directed his way, because his wife found a flower in the garden and wants to show him it, and that is infinitely more important than whatever trivial issues that are going to be discussed in the Tower of the Hand.

Valarr is a prince of the blood, a dragon, a knight, but before anything else, he is a husband who is deeply and desperately devoted to his wife. 

“I am sorry if I kept you waiting tonight,” you say quietly after a moment, reaching up to tuck a dark lock behind his ear before absently running your fingers through the silver streak that runs through his hair. “I hope I didn’t ruin any plans you had for the evening.”

Valarr’s expression softens. He ducks his head down to press his lips against your forehead, lingering there for a moment before he replies, “You could never ruin anything, ñuha jorrāelagon. My only plan for the night was to spend it with you.”

My love.

“Well, you’ve got me all to yourself, husband,” you say with a teasing smile. “What do you plan to do with me?”

Valarr gives you a sharp, boyish grin. “Oh, I’m sure you have an idea, wife.”

“Tell me anyway please?”

he’s patient. endlessly. walking beside you through the grocery store at 6am when it’s empty, his hand on your lower back, murmuring “you’re doing great” while you grip a shopping cart like a weapon and stare at a wall of cereal with the thousand-yard gaze.

phase three: the part where he needs help. because getting a legally dead woman out of the country requires documents. fake ones. good ones, especially if you hope to start a new life. and brendan bennett franklin, priest, valedictorian, the biggest rule-follower, has absolutely no idea how to acquire fake documents.

but he knows someone who might know someone. a certain childhood friend. a man who has spent the last five years tearing apart every lead, every clue, every cold trail. a man who didn’t give up looking out of sheer stubbornness. a man whose name starts with T and whose moral compass has always pointed toward a nonchalant, “eh, whatever it takes.”

terrence wilson gets a phone call at 2am on a tuesday from a number he doesn’t recognise. the voice on the other end is brendan franklin. the quiet twin. the priest. the one who never calls anymore.

“I need your help,” brendan says. “and you can’t tell anybody, not even bobby. especially not bobby.”

the silence on terrence’s end is long and loaded.

“what kind of help, man?”

“the kind that requires you to not ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

“… bb, the hell did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.” a pause. the careful, measured pause of a man choosing his next words very carefully. “but someone came back. someone we thought was gone, and if the wrong people find out, she disappears again. permanently.”

the silence that follows is the silence of a man putting pieces together very fast.

“I’ll be there thursday,” terrence says.

he doesn’t ask who. he already knows. there’s only one she that would make brendan bennett franklin break his careful, structured, God-shaped life open.

terrence is going to walk into that rectory two days later, and see a ghost. and the first thing he’s going to do is cry, and the second thing he’s going to do is start making phone calls to people whose names he knows from places he doesn’t talk about because terrence has spent five years in the grey space between legal and illegal searching for a missing woman and the contacts he’s made in that grey space are exactly the contacts you need when you’re trying to move a dead girl across a border.

phase four is getting out of the country. phase five is a new identity. phase six is a small town somewhere with no threshold activity where nobody knows your face and the backrooms can’t reach you.

he hasn’t planned phase seven yet. phase seven is the part where he decides about the collar. the part where he chooses between God and you. the part the whiteboard doesn’t have space for because the answer is too big for a diagram.

but terrence is coming and for the first time since you showed up on his church steps barefoot and bleeding, brendan bennett franklin has something he hasn’t had since 1985.

Aerion’s mouth opens against yours, his head tilting, his tongue pushing past your lips before you’ve parted them, and the kiss is wet and furious, tasting of wine he was sipping minutes prior. He bites your lower lip (punishment) and sucks it into his mouth greedily (reward), and his hand hauls you closer by the nape until you’re in his lap, your knees bracketing his hips, his fingers twisted in your hair hard enough to sting.

He kisses you like you’ve insulted him. Deep and mean, his teeth scraping across your flesh, his tongue claiming ground, his free hand gripping your jaw to hold you at the angle he wants. He’s making a point. The point is that he’s in charge of this kiss, that he’s the one doing the kissing, that the fifteen seconds of stillness were a temporary aberration he has now corrected with force.

You let him think that.

You pull back. Just an inch. His mouth chases yours at once—instinct, reflex, the leash of his pride snapping before he can catch it—and the noise Aerion makes when your lips separate is small and offended and utterly furious with your gall.

“I wasn’t done,” he snaps.

You hum, head tilting slightly because he won’t allow you anything else. “Neither was I.”

“Then why are you leaving?” The question is punctuated by his fingers digging into the tendons of your nape, squeezing once. “You vile creature. Do you think you can escape me after toying with me?”

“I’m not leaving, husband,” you purr. “I’m an inch away.”

“That’s leaving,” he hisses, a flash of teeth appearing. “Come back this instant.”

“Make me.”

His eyes burn. His hand on your jaw tightens, and he yanks your mouth back to his and kisses you again, harder, wetter, his teeth and his tongue and the vibration of a growl you feel in your own chest. When you smile against his mouth, Aerion bites you for it, and when you laugh, he swallows the sound and bites you again, practically snarling.

He won’t let you pull back a second time. His hand stays locked at your nape, his mouth stays sealed to yours, and if you shift even slightly he follows, chasing, closing every gap before it opens. The prince who would not be kissed is now refusing to stop kissing, and the contradiction would be funny if his mouth weren’t so hot and his hands weren’t so tight and the sound he’s making against your lips (greedy, offended, helpless) weren’t doing unspeakable things to the pit of your stomach.

“Obviously,” he mutters between kisses, his voice rough, his pride attempting a posthumous rally, “if you’re going to put your mouth on me, wife, I should be kissed properly. This is a matter of standards. I have expectations. You can’t just—press your mouth to mine and linger there like some—”

You press your mouth to his again. Closed. Unmoving.

his knuckles go white on the armrests, clenching, trembling. he can feel sweat gathering at his hairline.

“you wanted to put your mouth on me,” you drawl, not reciting anymore. your voice your own again but the wrong version of your own. “for years. you wanted to press me against the kitchen counter when we were alone. you wanted to pull me into the library stacks and pin me against the shelves. you wrote it all down. every fantasy. every crossed-out confession. every time you imagined what my mouth tasted like.”

his breathing has gone shallow, hurried. “those were private—”

“you should have done it.”

brendan stops breathing.

“you should have pinned me down.” your voice drops to a register that makes the screen vibrate, silky and low. “you should have taken what you wanted. in the kitchen. the two inches. your hand on my face and my back against the counter and you should have kissed me and then you should have kept going. pushed my shirt up. put your mouth on that strip of skin. pressed me into the tile and—”

“stop.”

“you should have fucked me, brendan.” dark and cooing, each word purred into the shadows between you. “in the library. in the kitchen. in the back of bobby’s truck. every time you wrote I love you and crossed it out you could have been inside me instead. every time you were good and quiet and safe you could have had me on my back with your name in my mouth—”

“I said stop.”

the authority in his voice cracks through the confessional. not the pastoral voice. brendan’s voice. the real one. the one that called bobby from three thousand miles away shaking with fury over a forgotten birthday. the voice with a locked door behind it.

silence folds over you again, your breathing ragged on the other side of the screen.

“no.” his voice low and shaking but absolutely certain. “no. I could not have done that, and we both know why.”

a mocking little hiss. “because you were a coward—”

“because I love my brother.” blunt and honest, full of sincerity despite the tremble woven into the syllables. “and you loved bobby, and bobby loved you. and if I had pinned you against the kitchen counter and put my mouth on your skin you would have pushed me away.”

silence.

“you know you would have.” his voice cracks at the edges, making him suck in a steadying breath, “you were in love with my brother. genuinely, completely in love with him. and if I had tried—if I had taken what I wanted, if I had been selfish, if I had ignored your relationship and his trust and every boundary that existed between us… you would have looked at me with horror. you would have shoved me back, and you would have been right to.”

your breathing changes on the other side of the screen. the metallic edge fading from your scent.

“the fantasy was simple,” he says, quiet now, his lashes fluttering so he can see those images behind his eyelids. “in the fantasy you want me back. in the fantasy there’s no bobby. no consequences. no betrayal. but that’s not what would have happened. what would have happened is that I would have destroyed the only good thing in my brother’s life, and lost you in the same moment. because you loved him. not me. him.”

silence. a long one. the dark sharpness from before retreats minute by minute, softening into nothing.

“I wrote those things because writing was the only place I could be honest.” his voice goes quiet, sad, barely above a whisper. “the notebook was the only room where the wanting was allowed to exist. and it stayed in the notebook because that’s where it belonged. not because I was a coward but because I loved you enough to let you be happy. even when the happiness wasn’t mine.”

a sound through the screen. ragged. wet.

“and you were happy.” his voice cracks now, the tears audible in each word. “with bobby. in the golden years. you were happy and he was happy, and I sat in the library and watched and the watching hurt more than anything in the world but it was right. it was the right thing to do. the only right thing I’ve ever been sure of.”

your breathing goes thin on the other side, the charge from earlier fading completely.

“benny.” your voice is yours again. the real one. small and lovely, scraped clean of the darkness. “I’m sorry. I don’t—I don’t know why I—”

“I know why.” gentle. the priest voice returning. the tenderness that he learned from you reassembling itself around the words. “you came back different, and that means sometimes you say things you don’t mean.”

“I meant some of it.”

barely a whisper and oh how the whisper aches and burns.

“I know, and I meant what I said too. every word in that notebook was true. I wanted you. I have always wanted you.” he sucks in a steadying breath. “but wanting isn’t the same as taking. and the brendan who wanted you was the same brendan who loved bobby enough to keep the wanting in a notebook where it couldn’t hurt anyone.”

your hand appears at the edge of the screen, fingers curling around the lattice frame. he looks at them. your knuckles, your scarred fingers, the nails you file down every morning.

his hand lifts, covers yours on the screen, holding your fingers through the lattice. the wood between your palms. the closest you can get without the barrier falling.

“the notebook was the right call,” you say quietly. “I would have pushed you away. you’re right. I would have pushed you away and it would have broken everything.”

“I know.”

“but benny.” your fingers tighten on the lattice. “I’m not with bobby anymore. bobby has a wife. and I came back and the world thinks I’m dead, and you’re a priest and none of this is the kitchen in 1989.” a breath, then softly, “the reasons you stayed quiet don’t exist anymore. every single one of them is gone.”

silence. he stares at his hand on yours through the screen.

“I know,” he whispers, and the two words carry the weight of every prayer he’s said since you walked back into his life. every our father that was actually your name. every hail mary that was actually please. every amen that meant I love you and has always meant I love you and will always, always mean I love you.

and the flirting war is over. he won the battle but you won the war, and he's so into it his whole body is vibrating.

that becomes the pattern. he tries to fluster you and you fluster him back, and the volley between you is addictive. he'll say something cocky on camera and you'll raise one eyebrow and shoot something back, and he'll flush scarlet. his subscribers lose their collective minds because they've never seen bobby flustered. the charmer gets charmed and the comment sections fill up with people screaming about your chemistry and the blatant flirting.

and the shoots themselves are something else.

because nothing is faked. that's what makes them ten times hotter than anything else on his channel. every sound is real, every moan earned, every gasp genuine.

when he touches you, you respond because it feels good. you don't spare men's egos, never have, never will. when you touch him, he falls apart because you mean it. the camera catches two people who are so grossly into each other the performance disappeared somewhere around first kiss and what's left is just blinding, stupid, too-hot-to-handle want.

you give him head like you're trying to suck the soul out of his body. hand at the base, mouth everywhere else, taking him so deep and so mean about it that bobby's thighs are shaking and his hand is fisted in the sheets and he's moaning. loud, wanton, completely gone. you pull off just to look up at him with spit on your chin and that cold, pleased expression, and then go back down without missing a beat. he throws his arm over his face and makes sounds the neighbours hear.

and then he makes you sit on his face. grabs your thighs and pulls you up and settles you over his mouth and he's having the time of his life. hands gripping your hips, nose pressed to your clit, tongue working you open with the enthusiasm that borders on ridiculous.

"finally figured out how to shut you up," you say above him, breathless despite yourself.

bobby laughs against your cunt. this rumbling, genuine laugh, the vibration buzzing through you, and then sucks on your clit and you shudder so hard your hand slams against the headboard. he grins into you (you can feel that damn cocky grin) and does it again, and you grab his hair and grind down on his face and the footage of this particular moment becomes the most replayed four seconds on his entire channel.

he starts dressing for you shortly after that. before you bobby dressed slutty because he genuinely liked it. now he dresses slutty because he likes how you look at him when he does. that ravenous, possessive expression, eyes going dark, jaw tightening. he lives for that look. he'll change his outfit three times trying to trigger it.

and the marks...

you can't help yourself. you're possessive and you're greedy and you don't hold back with partners if they manage to meet you.

every shoot bobby walks away bitten, bruised, scratched to hell and back. hickeys blooming on his throat, his collarbones, the inside of his bicep where you grabbed him. bite marks across his shoulders and down his chest. fingerprint bruises on his hips and deep welts from your nails across his back.

he has to hide them for his solo content. concealer on his neck, higher necklines, strategic angles, because his body is a crime scene. his fans notice anyway. "why is his neck always wrecked after the mystery girl shoots?" becomes a running joke.

he doesn't cover the ones on his hips. those are for him. presses his thumb into the bruise your fingers left and grins at his own reflection like an actual idiot.

his comment section every single upload: "when is she coming back???" "bobby we know you're hiding hickeys we can SEE the concealer." "she looked at him like she was going to eat him alive damn."

he reads those ones out loud to you while you're lying in his bed in nothing but his crop top after a shoot, eating takeout. you don't look up from your noodles, licking the grease from the corner of your mouth, and say "they're right" and he grins so hard his face hurts.

and the thing underneath all of it, the thing that surprises you, is that you genuinely like him.

not just for the sex (though the sex is exceptional). not just for the body or the hip game or the way he moans your name (he does moan very prettily, it's kinda offensive). you like HIM. he talks enough for three people and he's cocky as hell and he can't be in a room for longer than four minutes without making a joke about something. but there's genuine sweetness to him. a boyish charm you never once thought you were particularly into and might have been wrong about.

he asks about your day and actually listens to the answer. he's shameless in how tactile he is. he makes fun of himself constantly and never makes fun of you. he fell asleep on your shoulder once after a long shoot and his face in sleep was so open and so young and so trusting that you sat perfectly still for forty-five minutes just watching him.

you don't do this. you don't do boyish charm. you don't do golden retriever energy and lopsided grins and men who talk too much. you do sharp, composed, dangerous men who match your edge. that's your type. that's always been your type.

bobby is not your type. bobby is something you didn't know you wanted until he was already under your skin, grinning up at you from between your thighs with that ridiculous face, and by then it was too late to do anything about it.

he calls you "my wolf" in a behind-the-scenes clip that was supposed to be cut. his editor left it in on purpose. the internet loses its mind.

you text him that night: "your wolf?"

he texts back: "yeah. mine. that a problem?"

you don't reply for six hours. he sweats through all of them.

you reply with your address. "come over. bring the camera. don't bring the crop top, you won't be needing it."

whatever faith you were raised in, whatever customs your family held, barth makes room for them. he doesn't understand most of it. he definitely finds some of it strange. he's a man of the old gods, bone-deep, and certain staunch northern lords grumble that a wife should take her husband's faith and his beliefs and that's the end of it.

barth listens to them grumble. barth doesn't particularly give a shit about their grumbling.

because barth has seen the way your face lights up when he tells you he's had a small space set aside for your prayers. he's seen your cheeks dimple when you realise he remembered the feast day you mentioned once. he's watched you try to get on your tiptoes to pull him down so you can kiss his cheek, and you can't quite reach because he's enormous, and so he has to duck his head for you every time.

the northern lords can grumble all they want. barth's ancestors built winterfell's walls thousands of years ago. he can put whatever he wants inside them.

now, the pregnancy sex.

yeahhh, you both went a little stupid! because barth's natural setting is rough. big-man-rough. the kind of rough that comes from being that strong and that large and that hungry, where even when he's trying to be gentle he's still gripping your hips hard enough to bruise. still fucking into you deep enough to steal your breath, still making the bed groan because that's just… the force his body generates. he can't help it.

you're underneath a wolf built for war and your body knows it every single time.

but the roughness has always been paired with passion. with intent. he's not rough because he doesn't care/is cruel, he's rough because he wants you so badly his body can't modulate it. and that passion, that intensity, goes into boiling point when you're pregnant.

because now you're not just his wife. you're not just the woman he's quietly obsessed with. you're carrying his child. his pup. his blood. and something ancient and wolfish in his stark brain looks at you, round and full, glowing with the life he put inside you, and just… goes a bit stupid.

he's gentler with you. that's the first thing you notice.

he's aware of the belly, aware of the weight you're carrying, and his hands move differently. still rough, still possessive, still gripping and pulling and spreading, but with this layer of restraint underneath that tells you he's holding back, and the effort is killing him. he wants to flip you over and drive into you the way he usually does but he can't because you're swollen with his babe and that fact is making him lose his mind in two completely opposite directions.

because he also can't stop looking at you. can't stop touching your belly, your new curves. can't stop pressing his mouth to the swell of your belly while he's inside you, while he's rocking into you in these deep, grinding strokes that make you see stars, growling low against your skin. and the things he says (barth who rarely says anything) the things that come out of his mouth when he's buried inside his pregnant wife are so filthy and tender it makes your chest ache.

"my wolf wife." low, rough, pressed into your throat while his hips roll against yours. "so full. so swollen with my babe." his hand on your belly, spanning the whole curve, feeling the taut skin under his palm while he fucks you slow and deep. "mine. both of you. mine."

and you're squirming beneath him, clawing at his shoulders, half-sobbing because the pregnancy has made everything more sensitive and he's so deep, and so thick and so present, this huge dark-haired wolf curled over you like he's shielding you from the entire world, and he won't stop talking.

he won't stop telling you what you are to him. and it's the most words he's strung together outside of a council meeting and every single one of them is being growled into the sweat-damp skin of your neck while he fills you up for the hundredth time.

it starts with him behind you, your face in the pillows, his hips driving into you from behind because you do love a good doggy. it's primal, deep, the angle hits everything. and bobby's hip game is lethal. that crook to the left, that rolling grind, finding the spot on the third thrust and hitting it on every one after.

you expected competence given his following, but you're getting artistry. your fingers are clawing the sheets and your composure is cracking and he leans down, mouth against your ear, and murmurs something filthy with that warm, easy confidence and your walls clench around him so hard your vision stutters.

that surprises you. genuinely. you are not easily surprised, especially not by men.

then you push back into him hard enough to break his rhythm and look over your shoulder and snap "harder" and he grins, wide and reckless, and gives you harder. gives you harder so well your arms give out and your face hits the pillow and you moan into it and he heard that, he absolutely heard that, and his hand gathers your hair and pulls just enough that your neck arches and he says "you sound good, baby" like he just heard exactly what he was looking for.

and then you flip him. because nobody gets to have you gasping for long without paying for it.

his back on the mattress, your thighs straddling him, sinking down in one roll. bobby's head falls back, mouth drops open, and the sound that comes out of him is pornographic in a way none of his solo content has ever touched. you ride him and he lets you and he's flushed from his ears to his collarbones, moaning loudly and unable to stop.

except he's not just lying there. his hands are on your hips, adjusting the angle, tilting you forward so his cock drags exactly where it needs to. even fucked out of his mind, even gasping and clawing at the sheets with his abs clenching, he's still working. still finding the angle that makes you falter. still rolling his hips up into you on the downstroke in a way that punches a sound out of you that you didn't give permission for.

he's good and even from underneath you, he's doing damage, and you're so fond of it you could bite him.

you lean down, press two fingers to his full lips, another little test. bobby opens his mouth on instinct, and you slide them in and he sucks, cheeks hollowing, eyes glassy, looking up at you while you bounce on him. you curl your fingers against his tongue and he groans around them, muffled, hungry. and then he bites your fingers, gently, and his hips snap up hard enough that your whole body jolts.

you gasp against his mouth and he grins around your fingers because even now, even ruined, he's still got a move left.

you pull your fingers out, press your forehead to his. you're both breathing hard, sweat-slick, the pace gone ragged, and you look at him from an inch away with his pupils blown, and his mouth kiss swollen, his golden skin flushed dark and you breathe against his lips:

"I like you a lot, robert franklin."

his hips stutter, eyes going wide. the cocky grin dissolves into something open and young, genuinely startled because for all the performing he does, for all the camera confidence and the easy charm, a woman like you saying that to his face while he's inside you is the one thing he didn't have a script for.

"yeah?" barely a whisper.

"yeah."

he kisses you. soft in the middle of all the rough, his hand cupping the back of your head, and when you start moving again it's slower and his eyes don't leave yours and the camera is catching everything but neither of you remembers it exists.

by the end you're both wrecked. he's gasping and clawing at the sheets and you're shaking above him and the footage is the hottest thing he's ever shot by a margin so wide it's embarrassing. but the part that breaks his channel's metrics isn't the filthy stuff. it's the forehead touch. the whispered "I like you a lot." the kiss that came after, soft and real in the middle of the performance.

he watches the footage back the next morning. alone, in his kitchen, half-hard, coffee going cold. rewinds the forehead moment three times, cursing under his breath each time.

the video breaks every number his channel has ever had. the comments are flood. he doesn't read them, but only because he's busy staring at his phone waiting for you to text back.

you text him back four days later. one line. "same time next week?"

and brendan doesn’t process his own pain. he processes other people’s. he watches bobby collapse. watches bobby go from the golden boy with that beaming grin to a kid who can’t hear the word “love” without his jaw tightening. watches bobby start flinching from commitment the way brendan flinches from touch. watches the trust disintegrate, the faith in permanence shatter, the slow rewriting of bobby’s operating system from “people stay” to “people leave.”

and brendan’s response isn’t grief for himself. it’s fury for bobby. because brendan can handle lonely. brendan has been lonely. loneliness is brendan’s factory setting. he walked into kindergarten lonely and he’ll walk into the grave lonely and the stretch in between has just been variations on the same theme. losing their dad didn’t make brendan lonely. brendan was already lonely. losing their dad took the one person who made the loneliness bearable and removed him, and the loneliness went from “I can manage this” to “I will manage this alone now” and brendan locked the door and swallowed the key.

but bobby. bobby wasn’t built for this. bobby was built for connection, for warmth, for the easy, instinctive, zero-effort intimacy. and watching the foundation crack under bobby’s feet while brendan stood on ground that was already broken… that’s the wound. not losing his dad. losing his dad’s ability to protect bobby from becoming the kind of man who leaves.

because that’s the horror isn’t it? the terror that sits in brendan’s brain running calculations at 3am: what if bobby becomes him? what if the leaving is genetic? what if the man who understood brendan best passed down not just the wiring but the exit strategy?

and then you come along. and you make bobby so happy. and brendan watches his brother come back to life. watches the trust rebuild. watches bobby lean into you the way he used to lean into the world before the world proved it couldn’t hold him. and brendan thinks: she’s fixing the thing I couldn’t fix. she’s giving him back the thing dad took. and she’s doing it without trying. just by being there, just by staying with him.

and that’s why he never tries. that’s the engine underneath all the crossed-out I love yous and the diary entries and the five years of silence. it’s not just that you’re bobby’s. it’s that you’re bobby’s happiness. you’re the thing that’s healing the wound their father left. and if brendan steps forward, if brendan says the thing he’s carrying, if brendan takes you from bobby (or tries to, or even admits he wants to) he becomes the thing he hates most.

he becomes his father. he becomes the man who takes love away from bobby franklin.

brendan would rather be lonely for the rest of his life than do to bobby what their dad did. brendan is terrified of becoming the person who leaves. terrified of being the reason bobby’s trust breaks again. terrified that the analytical brain he inherited from their father came packaged with the same capacity for destruction. and the only way to guarantee he doesn’t destroy bobby is to never reach for the thing that would make brendan whole. because the thing that would make brendan whole is the same thing that’s holding bobby together.