You see him on television, his face a fifteen second snapshot between Monday morning headlines, an ad-break in Thursday afternoon, his face on a magazine doing articles on young heirs, expression somber and confident. You see his smile magnified on the front page in Sunday special and you try to find the same boy you saw the night before, in your apartment, the shadows dancing on his face as he sat on your bed hunched, tired, sweat breaking off in forehead as he shook from the nightmare wrecking his head. His voice hums from pre-recorded messages from passing radio channels, talking about their new GPS prototype and their new satellite launch and their newest executive branch in Tyrosh. His face, and his name—Targaryen, Targaryen, Targaryen—echoes all around Westeros, and it doesn’t bother you, not quite. 

But the discrepancy… aches, somewhere deep inside you.

Because the news talks of his family’s company branching off to nanotechnology. The articles say that the young heir is treading into his father’s world with all the charm and wit expected from him by all the relevant analysts. The gossip columns talk of a rare, five second sighting with his ex-girlfriend outside their Dragonstone branch. You see all these and remind yourself how little of his life you know.

But then he stumbles into your apartment with alcohol in his breath and a small takeout box clutched surreptitiously in his right hand with a smile that has no charm and all teeth. It’s midnight. It’s too late. You stare at him, bleary eyed, trying to decipher if you should let him in—if you can continue to let him in and still contemplate saving yourself. If you can watch and wonder about his voice and his face and the hundred different persons you see him becoming in impersonal, technicolour spaces. You wonder if you will still try to collect the truth of him, the wet, supple core of his heart—when he eventually breaks yours and you are left alone in your dark apartment.

You tilt your head and stare at him. He is wearing the same suit he was wearing on the news—black with red-trimmed. The colour of his family, the emblem etched over him on the TV. But now, he looks different, sodden, malleable. And he has a smile that begs you like the first night he begged you to keep him. His hair is ruined, his lips are wet. The colours of his eyes are watered down, less than they were the night before. 

Moments pass. Valarr, finally, as a last sort of desperate effort, raises his right hand and shakes the sad, small takeout.

“I brought chinese, baby,” he says. 

Hand on your heart. With hand on your stupid heart, you slide away from the door. You let him in.

—---------------------------------------

There are nights you hold each other so tight you get fused—stuck into one being with two heads and two hearts and double the pain. You hold his hair back when he retches back the wine he gulped down before stumbling in your apartment. You give him cool compress and apple cider vinegar when the fever runs too high. You listen to him screech in his sleep and blame himself for his father’s death and you draw him a bath as if it ever solved anything.

“I was supposed to be there,” he spits out. His head is on your shoulder, droplets of water from his wet hair fall down your back with a tantalizing softness. The water in your bathtub is lukewarm, scented. You sit on his lap and Valarr’s hands bracketing your hips in a desperate attempt to touch everything he can, all at once. The water around you doesn’t ripple, none of you even move. “But I let my dad go instead. I was so done with Aerion and his fuckups. I was so mad at father for even caring. It should’ve been me. I was the one who should have died.”

You run your fingers through his hair and you think about all those sordid, broken things people do to each other. You tell him it wasn’t his fault, that no one can read the future, not even Targaryens. That still given the chance his father would’ve chosen this. He would’ve chosen Valarr to be alive.

There are better nights.

You watch his body, limp and boneless, lying at the edge of your bed and you don’t dare to touch him, to wake him up and tell him to sleep in proper place, beside you. You see his chest rise and fall and count his breaths and you fall asleep mimicking his breaths like your own. 

Hearts are treacherous things. You get too close to someone and you start to feel things simultaneously.  Your chest constricts when he vomits, your head aches when he whimpers in his sleep. You feel your nervendings stitching beside his and you feel it all twice over when he isn’t here. As if all that learning about his demons only made everything worse twice. You feel his demons hovering close by as his eyes flutter behind the closed lids. You ache.

You see him, over and over.

Press release, the packet of a new airpods, snapshot in your Instagram. He smiles and he charms and his hands stay steady in pixels in a way you haven’t seen in real time. 

He taps on your shoulder in an unsuspecting Wednesday afternoon as you try to sell a piece of painting to Tywald Lannister. 

You shiver in surprise, jolted back from your sophisticated saleswoman to a stuttering child. You turn back to find Valarr, cladded in casual jeans and t-shirt, seemingly surfaced from one of those television interviews, confident and beguiling. 

“Ah, found what I was looking for,” he says, staring at you. 

Tywald tilts his head at Valarr, his bright green eyes glint at the sudden competition. “Mr. Targaryen.”

Valarr squints his eyes, polite enough. But you can see the steel underneath. “Fancy finding you here, Lannister. I never counted you as a cultured man.”

The blond man smiles. “Ah. Not a lover of fine arts, sure. But you see, this pretty young lady very near convinced me of the piece in front of us.”

Valarr’s smile falters, just a moment, but enough for Tywald to sharpen his eyes. You feel a tension slither against your spine, caught somewhere in between two separate vertebrae. You don’t know what he’s doing here. You don’t know what you are supposed to say.

“I shall buy this one.”

You feel your tongue go dry. The painting beside you blurs in the edges. It’s a command, with no blunt edge, no finesse, no politeness in it. 

And you realise, too far into the mud that he has not specified why he’s doing this, why he is here and not anywhere else. He hasn’t even told Tywald Lannister who you are to him. You realise, with a shock as sudden and painful as a pinprick, that this is the language of money, of pride and jealousy. This is the voice he uses in talk shows—the I want it voice. But there is no sincere quiver in it. Valarr doesn’t even say that you are friends.

—------------------------------------------

“Who was that guy?” Valarr asks as soon as he enters your kitchen. 

You stare at him, dumbstruck. All the anger that’s been brewing inside your heart suddenly dissipates at sheer confusion. You were supposed to pick a fight with him. “What guy?”

He stands a foot apart from you as you lean against your counter, the steely edges digging against your skin. “The big one. Seven feet. Looks as though he can’t tell left and right if you don’t point it out.”

Your mouth presses into a thin line. You feel beyond enraged that you know who he is talking about. “Duncan?”

“Duncan.” Valarr scoffs. 

“He is a friend.”

“He was orbiting you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, that’s the truth. He was positively besotted…”

“Do not finish that sentence.”

His nose flares. “And Lannister. You were flirting with him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You can’t tell me you weren’t.”

“I was being nice. I was trying to sell something.”

“Yeah?” He snakes his hand through his hair, his skin shiny, his eyes wild. “And he was definitely trying to buy something.”

“And what did you try to buy?” you snap, and the last shred of composure in you shatters. You almost hear the exact moment your heart breaks. “Me?”

Valarr’s face goes white—paper white. It’s a moment and it changes everything. He looks scared. “No, I wouldn’t… not you.”

“Then what? My attention? My time? Because you sure bought something and it wasn’t a painting.” You scoff and instead of spite, you hear only a plea. “And what about the women orbiting you? I’ve never asked you about any of them.”

You regret the words as soon as they come out. Because out in the open, your spite is a plea. It is a desperately timed question, barely a squeal of pain. Valarr opens his mouth before promptly closing it. You feel a crippling heat cover your skin, head to toe, radiating all over you like a sprinkler. You fear, you fear, that if he takes even as much as a step toward you, he will feel that heat, that unnatural fear. And your secret will be out in pathetic display. 

“They are no one,” he says softly, so soft, and so unbelievably tender, that it blindsides you again. You forget to be angry in reply. 

You swallow the breath stuck in your throat. Because what are you doing? What are you even asking? You aren’t his girlfriend. You aren’t named. Nothing that transpires inside your skimpy one bedroom apartment has ever been voiced by either you or Valarr. And suddenly, the thin, permeable membrane separating all the truth from those nights before are breathing between you like a carelessly hidden secret. He stares, his mismatched eyes shiny, deeper in colour than they were a fortnight ago. You stare. Unable to say anything, or do anything else. Because even if he says that the woman photographed with him—beautiful women, women from money, from his world and his blood—are no one, he isn’t saying that you are the only one.

“I am sorry,” he says finally. “I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to tear him away from you.”

The sound that comes out of you might be the beginning of a cry. Because you realise how helpless you are, how in love you are. And the realization is stuck like blood in your throat. Because he can’t hear that you are in love with him. His heart, the one you pet, the one you stitch, the one you stare and observe and cater to in your own broken way, is not ready to hear this. He won’t know what to do with it. 

So instead, you reach your back pocket and take out the key to your apartment. You set the small, inconspicuous thing on the counter. It makes a slight metallic sound and it reverberates inside your home. 

“There,” you say, your voice raw, close enough to crack again. You tilt your head, the voices inside swirling chaos. Tywald Lannister doesn’t even know my last name, you think. And you have the key to my life.

He stares at the key, lips trembling, and his eyes—those uneven, fearful, wild things—move in the strangest rhythm. He seems to not be breathing, in awe of what you put forth, looking as if it was the most magnificent thing in the world.

—--------------------------------------------------

He comes into your place with no preamble and no warning.

And you allow it.

More than allow it. You revel in it. You make a mess of it. You gave your key to it. You find him asleep on your bed on a Saturday evening. You head limp and empty after work and the sight of him sprawled out on your bed is a sight for sore eyes. Him unraveled, him unguarded, him the rest of the world cannot see. He slips into your bed silently on a Tuesday night. In your sleep, you move in a strange rhythm, your body making a space for him before your mind even registers. In the morning, his body, all-suited up, dreary, dreary hair and upturned lips make you raw again. You kiss him goodbye in his sleep and get on with your day.

He comes and goes as he pleases. Slow and steady, Valarr makes a hole inside you and fixes himself there, safe and sound, unnoticed by anyone else. Alive for a blistering few hours after hours of healthy normalcy.

“I want you to know that I’m always here,” he whispers against your hair, a quiet confession on your balcony. You lean against him; you breathe him in. “Even when I can’t be.”

-------------------------------------

“You said you had a different language among the blood of old Valyria,” you whisper, stirring Valarr up from his afternoon nap. You snuggle closer until your chin touches his neck as he murmurs, semi-consciously, about what you are asking.

“Different language,” you say softly.

“Somewhat.”

“Do they have a name for what this is?” Valarr circles his arms around you and his eyes flutter for the briefest moment before he closes them again. You close your eyes, too. Your eyelids are warm from the setting sun, your head hazy. You let your hands brush over his abdomen and the sheet over you slips off like a charm.

What is this? You’d wondered. What’s the thing that is invisible to the world—inconsequential in the real world but everything in the imaginary one? 

When Valarr speaks, finally, he speaks in the language of his forefathers. Valyrian never sounded like a real language to you. It was a relic of thousands of years before, when dragons and magic were real, you presume. It is a breeze over a mountain, a hiss of nature. Yet, as he speaks, you understand what he’s saying. You have suffered through enough AP classes to discern the words even in your sleep-riddled mind.

“Sīr nūmāzmi sēte dāria gēndir nūmāzmi zūgī sōvegon gīmī sēte dāria mērī?” he’s saying. “Sīli? Gūre? Vūjita sētiar? Āeksio dōre? Bēvī lēda? Iksan kessa nūmāzigon?”

You stop breathing. His voice is smooth, calm, sure. His words set your soul alight.

What’s a single sun in the great nothingness of space? Respite? Intermission? Parasites latching onto each other? A summer affair? A secret? Purest thing I ever felt?

“No, sweetling,” he says finally as you don’t answer, don’t even breathe after the Valyrian dies out—leaving embers for your heart. His words are deep and heavy with sleep. “They don’t have a name for this.”

valarr definitely has some things he has to figure out :)

tags: @uixhzzzi @lilybear1-2 @serduncansdelight @jellyfrogz