lonliness my master ★ i bow to him alone

Baelor has been standing at the foot of your bed for… much longer than he intended to. There's a tilt to his head, seventy-six degrees and counting, and a rise and fall to his chest that seems to be getting slightly faster with each passing exhale.

You do not see it. You are, as it is, asleep.

You're wearing his shirt. This is what has him still as stone, drawing his eyes over you in slow drags that he just can't seem to put an end to.

It's not an elaborate shirt. It's not even one of his best ones— the royal seamstresses have laden him with shirts of silk and fine woven cotton, embellished with hours of needlework or, in some horrifying cases, even beading. He has shirts of every color and shade, shirts of damask and velvet, shirts for summer and shirts for winter. Tunics from Dorne. Doublets from the Reach. Myrish robes. Qartheen samite vests.

You have chosen none of those. The one you have chosen is as simple a garment as he would choose on any given day, to wear against his skin beneath his doublet. White linen gauze, unembellished, unadorned. Its sleeves almost as billowing as its body, coming to plain rectangular cuffs. A simple collar, a sturdy yoke across the shoulders, double-stitched to keep it from unraveling. It is, in a word, efficient. Standard.

He knows, without having to ask you, that you chose to wear this shirt specifically because it is standard. Because it is one that he wears often. The cuffs have gone slightly soft with the wear, the neckline just a bit stretched along the bias. The felled seams are coming undone just a touch at the hem, a fact that he always sees but hasn't brought to the attention of his attendant, because it would mean a week of waiting to have it repaired. It is unfussy. But it is his.

And you are curled up in it like a kitten, asleep in his bed, your leg thrown over a pillow that you had moved toward his side of the bed in his absence. He has spent too long at his work, he knows. You spent too long waiting for him— long enough that you removed your nightgown and donned one of his shirts, and you fell asleep like that. Alone. In the bed you are meant to share with him.

Baelor feels a tightness in his chest that is ringed with fondness, an aching longing for you that hadn't stopped after your wedding, and doesn't seem like it will any time soon. He is too taken with you, too in love and consumed by it for that intrinsic sense of need for you to fade. It is a tender thing, tied around his heart in an intricate knot, with a tail that you hold the end of. You twirl it around your little finger and he buckles like a man who has never seen combat, who doesn't know what it is to stand his ground.

Baelor sighs as he undresses, but he keeps one eye on you all the while, as though you may disappear if he moves too far away. But you don't move. You don't even stir, when his belt hits the stone floor, or when his breeches follow. You are caught up in a world of dreams, unaware of what the sight of your sleeping form is doing to your husband, bringing him to the brink of something he has never quite been able to put a name to.

You do not stir when his hand presses into the mattress.

You do not stir when his weight dips the bedding and he moves slowly, purposefully, over you.

You do, however, stir just the smallest bit when his fingers dance over the curve of your hip through the fabric, feeling its drape over the soft plush of your skin. The meat of your ass, the swell of your thigh. Baelor feels, smoothing and caressing with a languid stroke that is not intended to rouse you, although he knows very well that it might and he does it anyway. Your fingers flex on the pillow that you clutch instead of him.

He finds himself, at that moment, inordinately envious of a pillow. A lump of fabric and feathers in your hands, between your thighs.

His hand grows bolder, a broad stroke over the small of your back, into the dip of your waist. You make a small noise in your throat, twitching the slightest bit as he passes over a particularly sensitive area.

"Shh, my sweet girl," Baelor whispers quietly, a lulling murmur in the darkness. Everything about you is soft— your skin, the fabric of his shirt as it lays over you, your hair, the expression on your face, the candle light on your sleeping body. It overwhelms him. It turns him into something that he's not normally, unless he is with you: a man. Not a Prince, and not the Hand of the King or heir to the throne. Not a warrior and not a subject of songs and poetry, myths and stories. With you, in this bed, he is simply a man in love with his wife, devoted beyond measure.

By the time his hand reaches your nape, your eyes are fluttering open the barest amount. Your face is still pressed slightly into the pillow, but you shift, a perking of your head as awareness returns to you. "Baelor?"

"It's me," he tells you, his voice low enough to not even constitute words.

"Mm. Waited for you," you mumble, confirming what he already knew.

His eyes crease at the corners, his smile overly tender. "I know. I'm here now."

Even as he says it, his hand is finding the hem of his shirt draped over your thigh, its frayed edge tickling against the smoothness of your skin. You hum quietly, dropping your eyelids against the feeling of his warm hand, burrowing between pillow and fabric and skin to find you, bare and wet and waiting for him.

"Oh," you sigh when his fingertip draws a slow circle around your clit.

"I know," he reassures you again, pressing a chaste, sweet kiss to the back of your neck. "I know, my love."

You turn your head further into the pillow beneath you, letting out a small whine at the feeling, your hips arching into his touch. He responds in kind, laying his weight flush to your back, his hand pinned between you and the pillow below.

"You're wearing my shirt," he remarks, his fingers finding your entrance and sliding in, stretching you open quick enough to make you keen softly. He gives you a few shallow strokes, feeling you grind back into the press of his cock against your tailbone. "My beautiful wife, wearing my clothes."

"W-Wanted to— to feel you— mm." Your voice is still slightly slurred with sleep, the heat of his body and the slowness of his movements doing nothing to rouse you more. You are still somewhere between awake and dreaming, pleasantly lulled, drowsy in your responses to him. Still, you moan at the curving of his fingers. "Wanted you… close to me…"

"Then let me be close," Baelor whispers, dragging the wilting fabric of his shirt up over your hips. He puffs a sigh through his nose, the ghost of it breezing against your neck. "What am I to do with you, hm?"

You make a pathetic noise when he moves your thighs apart to fit himself between them, his chest pressed to the curve of your spine, the thin fabric of his shirt separating you. He kisses you beneath the ear.

"You can sleep, darling," he tells you quietly, a whisper into your ear as his cock settles heavy between your thighs, the head sliding hotly against your cunt. Even though his voice is low, it booms through you like a thunderclap. "You need rest."

"I need you," you retort, but your own voice is far off, dipping towards the fogginess of sleep already.

Your eyes flutter shut, a gentle sigh of relief leaving you when he enters you slowly, stretching you open around him. Pressure on your back, pressure between your legs, pressure where his hand is pinned and lifting your hips from the front, angling them back towards him. Baelor's arm comes up to brace beside your head, and the scent of him surrounds you— the same scent that always drives you crazy, juniper and peppercorn, and something slightly like the salt of a raging sea.

You breathe in deep, exhale on a contented, fulfilled hum. Your entire world is Baelor, your mind and body consumed by him completely. His body spanning the length of you, bone to bone, naked skin to thin, ineffectual fabric.

You clench around him, and Baelor makes a noise as though you've punched him. So close to your ear, the headiness of it is echoed tenfold. Then he shifts his weight, dropping his hips ever-so-slightly, and then just grinds into you. His cock nestles into the deepest part of you and you groan, your mouth dropping open and face turning towards the breadth of his arm beside you.

"Baelor," you whimper, soft and broken, slurred from the recesses of sleep. Your hand finds his bicep, drawn taut from the muscle holding him up, keeping him from crushing you completely. Your fingers dig in, pull. A silent plea, a command that he follows like a dog on a leash.

Baelor fits his forearm under your head and lifts, letting you rest your chin there against the crook of his elbow, getting you into a loose headlock. Your hand wraps loosely around his upper arm, your body lax, letting him rut his hips shallowly into yours.

"My beautiful girl," he breathes into your ear, and you feel his teeth, bared with intent. His nose pressed to the shell, his beard scraping rough against your cheek. "My heart. My soul."

His arm tightens. Just a tad, but just enough. You mewl like a wounded animal, stretching your limbs so that he can move closer in, can fit his mouth to the curve of your throat, while he throbs somewhere deep in you that makes your head spin and your breath stick in your chest. His weight on you turns full, crushing, an all-over press that pins you flat to the bed, the pillow tucked beneath your stomach.

You are no longer asleep.

"Say it," he tells you, a primal rasp to his voice that wasn't there before. Low, smoky. A dragon. It's dragged from the pit of him, from some hell that lurks deep inside his body. His groan slinks down your spine and pools as raw energy right above where his cock hollows out and reaches the end of you. "Say that you're mine."

"M'yours," you murmur into his arm, breathing in the hot air that radiates from him. "Baelor. M-My heart. My soul—"

A guttural sound leaves you, your open mouth muffled by the bite you take of his bicep when he pulls his hips back and ruts into you hard, hard enough to shake the bed. Baelor's breath in your ear is shaky, stilted with the desperation of his movements, the purpose for which he collects himself.

"Gods above," he groans, his face turned into your neck just as yours is turned into his arm. With great effort, he loosens his hold on you. He presses an apologetic kiss to the curve of your shoulder. "I'm sorry. So sorry, my love."

You make a short noise, shake your head once. "Do it again."

Baelor does as you tell him. He pulls back slowly, letting his cock drag through your walls just before rushing back in with a jolt up the bed. Soft hair grinds against the plush of your ass, his mouth open and heaving with gasps against your shoulder, covered in the fabric of his shirt.

You can taste his need in the salt on his skin, beads of sweat forming in the crook of his elbow, fiery heat pressed flush to your back. "I need to— to wear your clothes more often."

"Yes." The word is hungry. It leaves no room for defiance. "You will."

The hand pinned between you and the pillow moves, snakes down to find your clit again. You are blinded with white light behind your eyelids, your breath gone still in your chest. Then, you pant like your air has no place to go, your hand tightening on his bicep, his arm tightening around your throat.

"Mm. There." The sound of his voice in your ear, while he fingers at your clit and his cock makes you so full that you can barely think, undoes you. Tremors take over your body, and you feel him smile as he continues to work at you. "That's what you get. I want you shaking."

"Baelor." You cum around him, with his full weight holding you down with nowhere to go. You are held hostage to it, to the slow, seductive movements of his hips, the lazy strokes of his finger against your clit.

"That's it. My good girl," Baelor purrs into your ear, and you sob as you clench around him. "My good, sweet, beautiful—"

He runs his tongue lightly across the nape of your neck and groans, ducking his head as he cums. His moans are muffled by his shirt on your back, his body curled over yours like fog. He presses his hips hard against yours, as though he can become a part of you if he gets close enough, deep enough.

"Oh, my love." His whisper falls upon your ears like a dream, like you may wake up and not remember it. But he's real, and he's there on top of you with his heart pounding against your back, and his fist in the fabric of his shirt, the one that started all of this.

He stays there for a breath, and then two. His hips are still flush to yours, but he's stopped moving, stopped the slow grind and the desperate, cloying attempt to get as far inside of you as he possibly could. He simply holds there, with his arm still around your throat, but not pressing in anymore. Just holding. Just cradling.

"I don't know if you noticed," Baelor says after a moment, his voice tremulous and padded by a wad of fabric between his teeth, at the nape of your neck. He releases it. "But I quite like it when you wear my clothes."

You huff a laugh, and press a kiss to the inside of his elbow. "If you do that every time, I may never get any sleep."

Baelor hums. "The chances are very slim, indeed."

Even so, you wear the same shirt the next night. And the one after that.

You don't get much sleep.