he makes it worse by being cruel about it. not to you (never directly, not yet, he's watching too carefully for that) but in court, in the way he handles other people, in the way he occupies a room.

aerion has the particular talent of making everyone around him feel slightly less, and watching him do it is horrifying because part of you, the part that doesn't answer to reason, finds it compelling in the same way a fire is compelling. it will hurt you. you know this. it's still beautiful.

the first time he speaks directly to you is at a feast.

he takes the seat next to yours without invitation, without asking, without any acknowledgement that the seat belonged to anyone else. you turn and look at him. he meets your gaze and his eyes say, flatly: yes. and? your jaw tightens. a lord to your left is watching the exchange with visible anxiety. you say, rather pleasantly: i don't believe we've been introduced, my lord.

aerion smiles, nothing warm in it, and says: I know who you are. a beat. wolf's daughter. I could smell you from the door. the lord to your left makes a small, involuntary sound. you hold aerion's gaze and say, even more pleasantly, almost venomous now: what a coincidence. so could I. the smile cracks, just slightly. you turn back to your food. aerion doesn't speak again for twenty minutes but he stays in the seat for the entire meal.

you discover, over the following fortnight, that he's only honest when he's being most difficult. aerion layers himself in performance. the cruelty, the arrogance, the magnificent terrible beauty of him deployed like armour. but underneath it, visible to anyone paying close enough attention, is something that wants with such violence it's never once known what to do with itself.

you're paying close attention. you cannot seem to stop.

he begins finding reasons to be wherever you are. not following (aerion would rather be skinned) but coincidentally present.

you're in the library; he needs a particular book, hadn't planned to stay, finds himself staying. you're in the yard watching the practice; he had intended to leave an hour ago, keeps practicing so your eyes are on him. you're in a gallery at a function and he's somehow, inexplicably, at the other end of it, and when you glance over he looks away with the deliberate boredom of a man who's been watching you for ten minutes. you say nothing. you don't smile. but something has shifted in your chest and you both know it.

the moment it becomes undeniable it's three in the morning, a cold night, and you're awake because something woke you.

a sound, the wind, nothing. you open your door and aerion is in the corridor. he's not walking past. he's standing there, slightly too still, no guards in sight, and the expression on his face when he sees you open is one he's never going to forgive you for witnessing. raw. undone. like a man who went somewhere in his sleep and couldn't find his way back.

he says: I wasn't— and stops.

you study him for a moment. then you open the door wider and stand aside. he doesn't move for three full seconds, and you watch him fight it. watch the pride work against the wanting, watch him try to find a cutting thing to say that'll let him walk away from this with himself intact. he can't. he's never been able to walk away from you and you're both just now understanding how long that's been true.

he comes inside. he sits on the window seat, three feet of careful distance between you. you don't touch him and you don't ask what happened.

you just... stay. present. alpha-still, the kind of quiet that's not absence but weight, and you watch his breathing even out over the course of an hour and you understand, with something that isn't quite satisfaction and isn't quite sadness, that his body has already decided you're safe. that some animal part of him has been reading you as safe since before either of you had a name for it.

he leaves before dawn. he doesn't thank you. the next morning at court he's vicious and bright-eyed and says something cutting about northerners in your earshot, loud enough to carry. you let it land. you watch him watch you let it land, and his jaw tightens because you understood it perfectly.

that the cruelty is the apology, the performance is the panic, and your understanding of that is worse to him than any retaliation would have been.

this happens again. and again. not always the corridor. sometimes it's a heat of temper rather than a literal night-panic after a nightmare, sometimes it's him finding you in some quiet corner of the keep and simply standing there, radiating misery and fury in equal parts, until you say something grounding and he snaps at you for it and then doesn't leave.

you let him snap. you don't yield and you don't soften and this, perversely, is the thing that keeps him coming back. that you hold him to a shape, that you don't rearrange yourself around the edges of his moods. that you're constant in a way nothing else in his life has managed to be.

he tells you, once, that he hates you. unprompted, in the middle of nothing, with his back against the same wall and his shoulder three inches from yours.

I hate you, he says, like a confession. you say: I know. the silence afterwards is enormous. then, quieter: I hate that I can't be something you'd choose on purpose. you turn your head and look at him for a long moment. you say, carefully: you were always going to be the thing I couldn't choose. he closes his eyes. he doesn't speak. but his shoulder shifts until it touches yours and stays there for a long time.

the claiming doesn't happen neatly. nothing between you ever happens neatly.

he goes into a heat. badly, suddenly, in a way that tells you he's been suppressing it with whatever he has available, because aerion brightflame would rather quietly destroy himself than admit to biological need in this court with these people watching. by the time you know it's happening it's already dire.

the heat has been burning him for hours before you arrive. the scent hits you when you open the door and it's nothing like what you expected.

you've scented omegas in distress before: the court has them, your father's keep had them, you know the particular sweetness of it. aerion's is not sweet. aerion's heat smells like the inside of a struck flint, like resin burning, like something feral that has been caged too long and is now trashing. it's aggressively, almost offensively him. it hits the back of your throat and stays there and your body responds before your mind can weigh in, a low clench of want that you breathe through carefully, pressing your palm flat to the door behind you, grounding yourself in the cold wood. you need your wits. with aerion, you always need your wits.

aerion is at the window, forearms braced on the stone, forehead nearly touching it. his shirt is clinging. his feet are bare. his hair is loose and damp against his neck and the nape of it—that pale, unguarded line—is the most vulnerable thing you've ever seen on him. more than any expression, more than any word said in the dark. you stand and look at it and note the wanting that moves through youy. later.

he registers you. his whole body knows before he turns. you see the change move through him, a ripple from the shoulders down, something that's not quite a flinch but not relief. when he turns his pupils are blown nearly full black and the flush sits high on his cheekbones, his lip split where he's bitten it through, dried blood at the corner. he looks at you with that expression that cycles too fast to catch (relief, fury, the rawness underneath both) and settles on the fury because that's the one he knows how to use best.

get out, he snaps. no, you say. you're already crossing the room and he watches you come the way a man watches something inevitable. like something he's been simultaneously dreading and wanting for so long the two have become indistinguishable.

you stop an arm's length from him and look at him properly, which he hates, which he can't stop.

you look terrible, you say. it surprises a sound out of him, not quite a laugh but in that neighbourhood, too pained for real humour but reaching for it anyway.

you're not supposed to be here, he manages. you're here for the—

I'm here, you say, because I have been trying not to be here since the morning I arrived and I am tired of it. silence. he stares at you.

how long, he asks carefully. since the first week, you tell him. a ripple moves through his face that he can't conceal and doesn't try to.

you lift your hand and put it flat on his chest, over his heart, the way you would steady a horse that's worked itself into a lather. nothing condescending, not tentative, just present.

his heart under your palm is a frantic thing. the shaking that he's been managing is worse up close, fine and continuous, the kind that takes real effort to suppress.

I'm going to take care of you, you say. I want you to let me. the word let does a great deal of work and you both know it. you're not asking permission. rather, you're offering him the dignity of not fighting it.

his throat works. you'll regret this, he says spitefully. probably, you agree pleasantly. the breath that comes out of him is nearly a laugh and then his legs take him back to the bed and you follow.

clothing is its own ordeal. aerion has always weaponised his beauty. deployed it with full awareness, used it to control how rooms look at him. but being undressed carefully is something entirely different from any of that.

when your fingers find the laces of his shirt he says don't and you look up at him and hold his gaze and say nothing and he falls silent. you ease it over his head. you look at him without performing indifference or hunger, just looking, and he watches your face the way he watches everything (intensely, waiting for the angle, the tell, the thing he can use) and finds nothing to use because you're simply present with him and he has no framework for that.

you put your hands on him and learn him slowly. the old burn at his collarbone. the fine symmetry of his ribs. the way his breath catches when you find the inside of his wrist, the hollow of his throat, the thin skin at his hip.

you catalogue every place that makes his control slip and you return to each of them with patience, and he makes a sharp frustrated sound when you pause somewhere deliberate, his hips pushing up involuntarily. you're doing this on purpose, he grits. yes, you hum. stop, he snaps. you don't. his hands fist in the sheets.

I hate you, he hisses, at some point, not the performance version, the real one. low and scrubbed raw and addressed to the ceiling. I know, you say.

you push the hair back from his face. he lets you. you watch him let you and watch what it costs him and do it again, slower now, your thumb tracing his temple. aerion closes his eyes because if he can't see it he can pretend he didn't allow it. I hate that you're here, he says. I know. I hate that it— he stops. swallows. helps. you say nothing. you keep your hand where it is.

the begging arrives in pieces.

the first please is bitten off almost before it exists, barely audible, and he seems to hear himself say it and goes rigid with humiliation. you put your hand on his jaw and turn his face back to yours. don't, you say quietly. let me hear you. his expression is a man handing over something he can't afford to lose. he does it anyway.

the second please is clearer. by the third it has your name attached and by then he's stopped managing his expression at all and what you're looking at is the real face. younger, beautiful, rawer, the want stripped of all its poison. you lower your head to his shoulder and say against his fevered skin: I have you. he shudders from his crown to his feet. his hands pull you closer with painful force.

when you finally move between his thighs and against him the sound aerion makes tears out of somewhere deep within and involuntary. then his legs wrap around you and pull you in and he swears, low and broken, because his own body has betrayed him and he can't claim otherwise and you have felt all of it and know.

I know, you whisper. it's alright. you hold still and look at his face and his face is pure fury and naked relief in proportions so close they're the same thing. you don't have to— you begin. don't stop, he says immediately, and the please that follows it is the quietest thing he's ever said to you. you won't tell him you heard it. he already knows.

you set a pace that's deliberately, mercilessly patient and he wants faster. you feel it in his hands and his trebling thighs and in the breathy sounds aerion makes when you move a certain way.

you don't, because this is yours, because watching him take it is extraordinary, because every time he tries to force the pace with his grip or his hips you press him down. gentle, absolute, with a soft growl against his throat. your full weight a simple reminder of who is holding who here. he drops back with a sharp exhale and something in him clenches with wanting, his eyes going briefly, beautifully unfocused.

at some point aerion stops rebuilding the wall. you feel the moment. the quality of his breathing changes. the grip of his hands shifts from desperate to something that's simply holding, and he turns his face into your neck and breathes, just breathes you in, your scent, and the frantic grinding tension that runs him like an engine has gone almost still.

you put your mouth to his hair. you feel him come apart quietly against you, without sound, just a long shudder and the slow unclenching of everything he has been holding.

the claiming is the thing you hesitate on. not from lack of want. you have thought about this. you've thought about where and how because it matters and he matters and you're not going to mark him carelessly.

you put your mouth to the curve of his throat and aerion goes completely arrested. just stopped, everything in him suddenly paying absolute attention. his hands grip harder. his pulse under your lips is very fast. yes, he breathes, barely above a breath, but with absolute burning greed. it's not permission. acknowledgement. like confirming something to himself that he's known for a long time. yes.

you bite him carefully. the mark is deliberate because you're always deliberate, and because part of you knows he will feel this for days, will find his own fingers pressing to it in private, will feel the particular combination of rage and longing that's his relationship with everything you make him feel.

for a moment, nothing. just his breath and yours and the sting of the mark and the two of you suspended in the aftermath of it.

then it begins.

warmth. starting at the mark and moving through him slowly, not heat exactly, not pain. something that has no word, like something thawing that's been frozen for a long time. his brow furrows. aerion makes a sound of confusion before any other sound, low and bewildered, because this is unlike anything he's felt and he genuinely doesn't have language for it. you stay still and let it move through him.

his heat (which has been frantic and furious, almost angry for hours, throwing sparks in every direction, a fire with no proper direction) begins to settle. not stop. settle. something finding its right shape at last.

the desperate edge of it smooths into something deeper, something that's still warmth and wanting but without the suffering underneath. he doesn't know what to do with wanting-without-suffering. he's never had it before.

his hands open. the grip releases. his shoulders drop a full inch, the set of them changing completely, all the braced-against-the-world tension draining out at once.

his breathing changes. slower, deeper, the controlled careful breathing he's been doing since you walked in replaced by something that's simply breathing. aerion looks at you with an expression that's... lost. genuinely lost, like something he's been bracing against his entire life has simply stepped aside and left him standing in the open where it used to be.

what is that, he asks. not alarmed, almost flat. asking.

that's the bond, you reply. that's what happens when your body knows.

knows what, he demands.

you look at him for a long moment. that you're not alone anymore, you say.

he closes his eyes.

the stillness that follows is entirely his own. no mechanism, no lock, no biology forcing him horizontal. just aerion brightflame (the most relentlessly unquiet person you've ever known, a man who's run on rage and want since before you can remember) lying still, because something in him has finally been answered, and the answer is you, and he's too undone to decide yet whether that's salvation or catastrophe. so he holds both, quietly, with his eyes closed and the mark cooling at his throat.

you watch him. the real face. the one underneath everything. he looks, for the first and perhaps only time you have seen it, like something that's laid a weight down. laid it down, with intention, because something has finally made him feel safe enough to. it'll be back in the morning. you're a realist and you know aerion and you know the weight. but right now it's gone.

his hand finds your wrist. the familiar reflex, always the wrist. always for you, you think, the old words arriving without warning. his fingers curl around it loosely, not gripping, just resting. holding. you turn your hand over and let him. you feel the bond humming through the mark, new and warm, near molten, the particular frequency of him. volatile and bright and even now not fully quiet, always at some low simmer, because aerion at peace is still more alive than most people at full pitch.

you put your mouth to the mark very gently. a breath, barely pressure. he makes a small unconscious sound and turns toward you, his brow smoothing, and his hand tightens once on your wrist and releases into rest.

you stay. you watch him. you think: this is what he is when nothing is watching.

you think: I would burn a great deal down to keep him.

he doesn'tt speak to you for two days. you allow this. on the third day he finds you in the library, and he stands in the doorway for a long moment before he says: you don't get to feel smug about this. you look up. you say: I don't feel smug.

then what do you feel, he demands, and his voice is scraped raw in a way that the two days of silence clearly haven't fixed. you consider. you say: responsible. the word hits him somewhere undefended and he looks away, jaw working, and says nothing for a full minute. then: that's worse. yes, you say. I know.

the claim mark changes things physically in ways neither of you were entirely prepared for. he can feel where you are in the keep now. not exact, but directionally, a pull in his chest like a compass needle, which he discovers on day four when he tries to be somewhere you aren't and finds himself rerouting without deciding to. he stands in a corridor staring at the wall for a moment, furious, understanding exactly what his body is doing, and goes to find you rather than fight it because fighting it is worse.

you're in the great hall. you look up when he enters and your expression tells him you felt it too—the tether, the tug, the new and inconvenient awareness. you hold his gaze. he sits down at the bench across from you without a word and accepts the cup of wine a servant pours him and you both pretend this is unremarkable.

touching you now is different for him in ways he can't fully articulate and certainly won't try to. he's always wanted to touch you. wanted it in the way he wants everything, with his whole fist, urgently, with no patience for limits.

now there's something underneath the want that's almost unbearable in its simplicity: when he has his hand on you, the particular grinding darkness that runs his engines goes quiet. not gone. never gone, that's not how aerion works. but quieter than he has known it to be in memory.

he discovers this the second time you're alone together when he reaches for your wrist (the familiar grab, the reflex) and doesn't feel the ground-level hum of tension that usually underlies every moment of his waking life. he stares at where his hand circles your wrist. you let him hold it. you don't comment. he stays like that for three minutes and then releases you and walks away. you understand that you're going to be careful with this, with him, because he's handed you something fragile without knowing he was doing it and you're not sure he can afford to lose it.

he's awful to everyone else. worse than before, if measurable. daeron gets it worst; egg, who finds it privately hilarious and says only dry remarks, gets it second worst.

the court gives aerion a wider berth in these weeks and puts it down to temper because they have no framework for what is actually happening. which is that a man who's never successfully shared a room with his own feelings is now bonded to someone he can't manipulate, can't frighten, and can't make love him safely from a distance.

you're not unmarked by it either. the claiming runs both directions. you feel him now, and the feeling is not comfortable. it's demanding, it's constant, and it's specifically his. which means it's volatile and bright, occasionally alarming and always, always too much.

you hold your northern composure around it because that's what you have and what you are, but there are moments, quiet moments alone, where you feel the full weight of what your instincts have gotten you into and you breathe through it slowly and think: you knew. you always knew what he was. you bit him anyway.