!

His hands grip the flesh of your hips, guiding you as you ride him as if there is no tomorrow. Sometimes your poor, sad man just needs that. For you to mount him like a disposable plaything, made only to serve your pleasure.

And yet, you're still fucking him in his favorite position. With your back facing him, your hands holding his knees tightly in place so he can't spread them apart, your legs on either side of his thighs, bouncing up and down on his lap, your arse jiggling deliciously for him to feast his eyes on.

He's your spoiled little prince, after all.

Your favorite boy.

And the recent days have been a struggle for him, leading him to shut you out to spare you from his own battles with his mind.

But not tonight. You'd had enough. And so had he.

“Oh—my love—hmph!” he wails miserably from behind you, drooling on his own chin with his spit as he cries, his pretty violet eyes rolling back in his skull when your hips give him a particularly heavy bounce, taking him all the way in, so deep you can feel him grazing your very soul. 

His hands are leaving imprints on the curve of your hips, digging into your tender flesh to feel you, to be sure this isn't some sort of crazy dream.

“That feels so— so good!” he hiccups. “You feel so g–good, my dream—my sweetest dream.”

He is so doomed by his own lineage, always gloomy and hopeless. But that's what you're here for! To make his life a little better, to take away his concerns and tensions.

And Daeron loves you for that, with every piece of his aching heart. In his hazy, twisted mind, you're always there to break through the darkness of the curse that holds him back as a dreamer.

He always talks about how happy he'd be if he could just dream of you. And your body. And the way you always know how to soothe him.

“How I long to dream only of you...” he utters breathlessly, big tears running down his flushed cheeks, his blissed-out eyes following the beautiful arch of your spine all the way up to search for your face. His eyes light up when you look at him over your shoulder, flashing him a sly, affectionate little smile. “Only you...”

It's only you now. All he sees. All he thinks. His dream come true.

Next thing that happens, it's you facing him now, kissing his tears off his gorgeous face. And he gazes up at you with an all-consuming adoration that always makes you melt, waves of pleasure sweeping over you and making him weep even harder as your cunt clenches impossibly tight around him.

He finishes with you, of course. He always makes sure he does. Always with you, always keeping close, it's all for you. His body is made for you, his heart is entirely yours from the moment he opened his eyes. 

He is so deeply broken and aching for your love.

Your cunt milks him dry as you sit down on his twitching thighs and hold him close as he cries into your shoulder, hugging you fiercely. On bad days like this, that always happens, he always ends up crying.

“Don't leave me,” he chokes out, pleading and babbling incoherently into your skin, you can only figure out what he's saying by the way his lips move on your flesh. “I can't—”

You deny with your head, one of your hands soothingly caressing the back of his neck, fingers sinking into the smooth strands of his hair as you lavish loving kisses on his sweat-drenched forehead. Your other hand skims along the top of his back, your nails scraping across his skin just the way he loves it.

“Please don't leave me—”

“I'd rather be dead, my love,” you soothe him, cupping his face in your hands so you can gaze deep into his beautiful, sad eyes, and leaning in to kiss them as he closes them. “Shhh... I've got you, dearest”

The salt of his tears tasted like devotion on your lips. That, for some reason, gets you all fired up inside.

“I love you, I love you, I love you...” he keeps repeating, and every time he does, he kisses your lips gently, fluttering his eyelashes very slowly. “You're so good to me.”

To some hell, Daeron is not doomed. He is destined to paradise itself. To you.

Then he presses his face against your chest, focusing all his senses on the sound of your heart beating, and the rest of the world just fades away.

For a moment, there are no voices, no fears, no darkness, no nightmares.

VALARR.

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

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

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

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

DAERON.

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

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

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

LYONEL.

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

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

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

DUNK.

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

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

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

The room is loud enough that, for a while, it almost passes for mercy. 

Not quiet, never quiet. Quiet rooms are for men who have made some peace with closing their eyes, for men who can surrender themselves to sleep and trust that sleep will not open its maws and bite pieces off them. Quiet rooms are for honest and welcome exhaustion, for hearths gone low and beds that promise warmth, rest. 

Daeron has never known what to do with quiet except drink against it. 

So, he remains where the noise is thickest, pressed into the heat and smoke and laughter of the room until the borders of himself grow mercifully indistinct. Someone is singing near the hearth, too loudly and badly enough that every other voice must rise to drown it. Cups strike against tables. Dice skitter over wood. A woman cheers with her head tipped back, throat bare and warm in the candlelight, and somewhere behind her a man curses over a lost throw. 

“That was never a six.” Daeron says, or thinks he says. 

The man across from him looks up, affronted. “You accuse me of cheating, my prince?” 

“I accuse you only of optimism, ser.” Daeron returns, and that is enough. The table laughs, comes alive. 

For one small, tolerable moment, he is almost there with them. 

Not whole, not well, nothing as miraculous as that. Just present enough to watch the man theatrically clap a wounded hand over his chest as if Daeron’s accusation has pierced him clean through, present enough to notice the woman beside him chuckling into her cup, present enough to feel the crooked pull of his own mouth and know, distantly and awkwardly, that this part is not always false. 

He can do this. Often. Sometimes. 

He can sit in a room and make a man laugh over dice, he can tilt his cup in lazy surrender when someone declares him cruel, he can answer a joke with another and let the room mistake it for the ease of a man comfortable in his own skin. He can be pleasant company, when enough wine has softened the edges of him and no one asks him to be anything sturdier. 

There is wine in Daeron’s cup. There is always wine in Daeron’s cup. 

He does not remember who filled it last. That is one of the smaller graces of rooms like this. Hands move, cups empty, cups fill, someone leans too close, someone speaks with sickening familiarity and he focuses on the familiar instead of the nausea. Nothing is required of him here, except the shape everyone has already agreed he occupies. 

The drunken prince, the ruined prince. The man with eyes gone soft and unfocused, with his collar open and his mouth wet with wine, laughing half a breath too late at jokes he has not entirely heard. 

It is, strangely, a kinder fate than being listened to, than being believed. 

If he’s drunk, no one asks what else he is. If he smiles, no one asks what he has seen. If his hand trembles when he lifts the cup, there is a reason for it already waiting in the room, a reason simple enough for other people to carry. Too much wine, too little sense. Daeron the Drunken, poor Daeron, useless Daeron, sweet enough when he is too far gone to make trouble and clever enough only in ways no one has use for. 

Better that. Better wine-sick than frightened, better ridiculous than prophetic, better a familiar disappointment than a thing anyone thinks of looking at too closely.  

He drinks. 

The taste is long past mattering, it has turned sour at the back of his throat, thick with smoke and something coppery where he has bitten the inside of his cheek without noticing. He swallows anyway. Past pleasure, past taste, past the little dignity he once had of refusing a cup when his stomach has begun to turn against him. 

He knows he is not drinking toward pleasure, if he ever did. Pleasure is too delicate a word for what he is doing. 

He is drinking toward the point where sleep cannot find him whole. 

That is the hope, if such a thing can really be called that. Not rest, for rest would require trust, and trust would require a world that has not taught him what awaits him. Rest would require the innocence of believing that closing his eyes is only closing his eyes. 

So he drinks. Until the path between wakefulness and sleep is damaged, until thought loses its clean edges, until whatever waits in his dreams must claw through wine and exhaustion. He drinks, so he will not have to go to bed a willing man. He drinks so that, when sleep comes, it will have to take him by force. 

It is one of the last means of defense he has, one of the few remaining mercies he wrenches from this world. 

Around him, faces come apart. 

A mouth red with wine. A ringed hand thumping the table. Teeth flashing in decadent joy. A sleeve brushing his wrist. A curl of dark hair stuck damply on someone’s temple. Gold at a throat. The blurred oval of a face turning toward him and away again before he can decide whether he knows it. 

Whole people require a kind of presence he knows he does not have to spare. 

Fragments are easier, fragments cannot ask to be remembered. Fragments do not return, covered in blood and soot, screaming and dying, in his dreams. Fragments do not claw their way to him and accuse him of having known and done nothing to save them. Fragments do not stand whole and warm before him while some future flame licks at their hems. 

A cup is only a cup. A hand is only a hand. A laugh is only a sound. 

Until it isn’t. 

The laughter rises suddenly from the far end of the room, many voices at once, sharp and bright and too high. And for the smallest part of a breath, the sound twists. 

Not laughter any longer. 

Screaming. 

Daeron goes still. No one notices. Or perhaps they do, and they call it drunkenness, which is kinder. 

The man beside him is still laughing, shoulders shaking, face flushed and stupidly alive. Someone pounds the table, someone shouts for more wine. The song near the hearth falters and begins again from the wrong verse. 

Laughter, then. Only laughter again. 

His fingers have tightened around the cup, and when he notices he makes the mistake of looking down. 

Wine has spilled over the rim and onto the table, dark where it gathers in the grooves of the wood. It spreads slowly, patiently, finding every carved line, every knife-mark, every small injury men have left behind without meaning to. For a moment it is only wine, but then the candlelight catches in it, and the red deepens, thickens. 

Daeron lifts the cup before the thought can finish forming, and drinks what remains.  

Across the room, the door opens. 

Cold air pushes in, alive and sudden. The nearest torch flares as if taking a breath, and its flame leaps high, gold-white at the heart, and the smoke twists hard toward the ceiling. The smell catches in his throat. 

Burning. 

No. Tallow, smoke. Nothing more. 

His body does not believe him, and his mind has long since been lost to him. 

For a moment the room tilts, enough that he has to set the cup down or risk dropping it. The table is beneath his palm, the wood rough and sticky. Someone’s knee knocks against his under the table. Someone’s hand claps his shoulder, hard and friendly, and the weight of it lands like a command to remain. 

There. Here. Now. 

The present returns by force of contact, by the truth of a human touch. 

Daeron lets out a breath that almost becomes a laugh. It must be close enough, he gathers, for the man beside him grins as if they have shared some joke between them. Perhaps they have. Perhaps Daeron has said something, perhaps he was amusing. He often is, when enough of himself has been put away. 

The hand remains on his shoulder a moment longer than necessary. 

Daeron does not move away. 

“Still with us, my prince?” 

The question comes from somewhere almost close enough to touch him. Almost. 

Daeron turns his head because turning is easier than answering, and finds the man beside him smiling with the loose, ruddy affection of someone who has never had cause to distrust his own sight. His hand is still on Daeron’s shoulder. Broad palm, heavy rings, a thumb pressing once, companionably, against the bone. 

“I try not to be.” Daeron answers. It earns him another laugh. 

Good. There, at last. Proof of life.  

The room accepts the answer and moves around him again, forgiving the stillness it had not understood enough to condemn. The man’s hand falls away and Daeron tells himself he doesn’t miss the touch. Dice are thrown again and Daeron pretends they don’t sound like horses galloping for war. Someone calls for another round, someone protests a debt with all the wounded dignity of a lord dispossessed. 

He smiles at that, because for a moment, the room is only a room again. 

That is the trick of it, the cruelty and the mercy at once. Because it does not fail all at once, no ruin is kind enough to come with one gust of wind, with one beat of a dragon’s wings. The wine turns to blood and then back to wine, the laughter sharpens into screaming and then becomes only joy again, the smoke catches in his throat like a memory of burned flesh and then thins into tallow. 

The world gives itself back in pieces, and Daeron has learned to hoard them. 

A cup. A table. A song. A joke. A hand. 

Especially a hand. 

The next one comes to his wrist. 

Not hard, not even possessive, at first. Fingers touch the inside of his sleeve, just where the cuff has slipped loose, and linger there as if by accident. Daeron looks down before he looks toward the person it belongs to. 

A narrow, thin hand. No rings. Nails bitten short beneath the stain of wine. Warm fingertips against the place where his pulse is making a fool of him. 

“There you are.” A voice says, amused. He does not know if they mean the words kindly or not. He does not know if it matters. 

For the space of one breath, perhaps two, everything that had been spreading too wide and too thin inside him narrows to the small, ridiculous fact of fingers at his wrist. Not fire, not blood, not whatever waits beneath sleep with its patient mouth. Wrist, sleeve, skin. The simple, almost animal certainty of pressure, of contact. 

He should pull away. Not because there is danger in it yet, not exactly, but because he knows all too well the treachery of small mercies, how quickly the body begins to ask for the thing that quiets it, how shamelessly it learns. 

He does not pull away. 

Instead he lifts his gaze, slow enough that the room blurs in the corners of it. 

The face above the hand is a face only for a glimpse. A mouth first, curved as it has been smiling for some time, a cheek warmed by wine, hair escaping pins -or perhaps never pinned at all-, eyes he cannot hold onto. The candlelight moves, and the features moves with it, rearranging themselves before they can become anyone he might have to remember. 

“Am I?” He asks. 

The mouth smiles wider. 

“With us.” They clarify. 

A reasonable thing to say, he’s certain. A harmless thing. The kind of thing people say to drunk men when they have gone quiet at the table. 

Daeron looks down at the fingers still resting at his wrist. 

“With someone.” He says, aimlessly, helplessly, and does not know until the words have left him whether he meant them as jest or confession. 

The mouth laughs. 

So it was a jest, then. He lets it be. 

The fingers tighten once, gently. Reward or answer, he cannot tell. Warmth moves into him through that narrow point of contact, absurdly powerful for how little of it there is. It does not comfort, no. comfort is too large a word, too clean. This does not make the room safe or the night shorter or sleep less hungry. 

But it gives the panic somewhere to land, and that is enough to make him choke with something like gratitude. 

Someone fills his cup again. Wine sloshes dark against the rim, and Daeron watches the red tremble without letting it become anything else. The hand at his wrist remains.  

Daeron laughs quietly, because this time he means to. 

It comes out low and a little ruined, but real enough that the mouth beside him softens with interest. 

The fingers at his wrist slide, only slightly, until they rest over the jump of his pulse.  

Daeron lets them. 

“Careful with him,” Someone says from across the table. “He’s promised now, is he not?” 

The words should be nothing. 

They are spoken over dice and wine, tossed into the room with the same carelessness that has tossed everything else tonight: accusations, cups emptied too quickly, songs begun without knowing the words. 

A harmless comment, really. A passing cruelty so ordinary no one thinks to call it cruel. 

Daeron does not look up once. 

Promised. 

It is a strange word for a thing that has never belonged to him. Promised makes it sound soft, almost holy. A ribbon tied at a wrist, a hand offered before a septon, a cloak gently covering shoulders, a vow spoken with firelight trembling against the walls. Promised makes it sound as if there is wanting somewhere in the arrangement, as if there is anything in it but names and ravens and seals pressed into wax by men who will not be made to lie beside the consequences. 

Still, the thought idly lingers in his mind. 

He is promised. 

No. 

He has been given. 

That is not right either. 

Somewhere, there is a woman who has been given to him. 

That is worse. 

The thought settles with a weight wine cannot soften. It sits beneath his ribs, quiet and exact like a knife, more solid than the hand at his wrist, more real than the room around him. You. A woman. A name he has heard and deliberately not held onto, a House a father and a deal, a date moving toward him with all the patient cruelty of things decided elsewhere. 

Poor thing. 

The pity comes at once. Cleanly, so cleanly it nearly feels like a wound. 

Poor woman, poor stranger with your future folded and sealed and sent ahead of you like a letter. Poor thing, to be delivered into the hands of a man who cannot keep hold of a cup without trembling when the room turns wrong; to be told there is honor, privilege, in this; to be dressed, veiled, named wife, and bound to whatever Daeron has made of himself. 

He wants to laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because it is the only sound he can allow his throat to release. 

“You look stricken, my prince.” Says the person beside him. 

The fingers at his wrist move again, a small stroke over the veins. Too gentle to be an accusation, too intimate to be nothing. 

Daeron lifts his gaze. 

The face is still difficult to hold. Mouth, cheek, lashes lowered briefly over eyes he cannot name the color of. The candle behind them makes a halo out of stray hair, then smoke moves between them and the shape loosens. 

“Do I?” He asks. 

“You have the look of a man being led to virtue.” 

That earns laughter from the table. 

Daeron smiles, because the room expects him to. He lets the smile come crooked and mild, lets his eyes lower toward his cup as if the joke has landed where jokes are meant to land. 

“Then someone has taken a wrong turn,” He says, “I have never been accused of knowing the way.” 

Another burst of laughter. A cup hits the table. Someone declares that if virtue has any sense, it will bolt the door before he arrives. 

And just like that, the room accepts him back into the shape of himself that amuses it. The hand at his wrist remains, wine gleams in his cup, the spilled red on the table has gone dark and sticky around the edges.  

And like a beast hungry and denied of a taste the thought circles its way back to him. 

His betrothed. 

No, not his. His betrothed, as if language can make possession clean. His betrothed, as if you have walked willingly into the title. 

He pities you most of all. 

Not because he is kind, he does not trust kindness in himself enough to name it. He pities you because he knows with the bitter intimacy and inescapable certainty of a man looking down at his own ruin, what is being tied to you. The wine, the dreams, the days after nights like this. The laughter that comes too late, the silences that come too early. The body absent from itself, the mind never his to begin with. The name Daeron the Drunken, carried before him like stink, like song, like warning. 

You have done nothing to deserve him. That is the truth of it. 

And still.  

The thought arrives so softly he almost misses the sheer violence of it. 

Still, there will be a room somewhere. A marriage bed, a door closing, a woman breathing near him because the world has arranged it so. A presence that does not leave at the end of an hour, a hand that might remain because it has nowhere else it is expected to go. 

No. 

He cannot think that. 

The hope is obscene here, under the fingers of a stranger, with wine souring on his tongue and laughter thick around him. Obscene, because pity should be cleaner than want. Obscene, because he knows you are being forced to be bound to him and still some starved part of himself lifts it head at the thought of being less alone. 

Someone, you, might stay. 

Not love him, he is not yet drunk enough for that kind of stupidity. Not want him, not see him and find anything worth keeping. 

Only stay. 

The word opens inside him, like a reopened wound. 

He looks down at his cup before he can imagine it bleeding. 

The hand at his wrist tightens, mistaking the movement for invitation or weakness or both. A thumb presses over his pulse, and for a moment the touch is useful again. Wrist, skin, pressure. Here. 

“Will your betrothed mind?” The mouth asks, voice lowered now, near enough that the words are more breath than sound. 

Daeron should ask what they mean, but he knows. 

The room has begun to narrow around the place where they touch him. 

“My betrothed.” He repeats, as if testing a language that his mouth has no right to. 

It is a foolish phrase, too courtly for this room, too clean. It should call to mind banners, courtyards, hands folded in laps. 

Instead, because he is drunk and ruined and cruel in all the ways hunger makes a man cruel, he thinks of a hand in the dark. 

He drinks before the thought can become more than that. 

“She would be wise to mind a great many things.” He says instead. 

The person beside him laughs softly. 

“And you?” 

Daeron looks back at the hand on his wrist. If he focuses for too long on the touch, it feels as if it is pressed over exposed nerves, as if some unbearable coldness is seeping from it. 

But it would take something from him to move away. Some intact and sober little piece of himself would have to rise, gather itself, decide against warmth, decide to be alone again inside his own skin. 

He cannot find it. 

“I have never been wise.” He says instead. 

It is treated as permission. Perhaps, he knew it would be. 

The mouth does not ask him again. It should matter, he thinks, or almost thinks. It should matter that the question has passed and no answer clear enough to warrant the name has followed it. It should matter that his betrothed is still there as certain as another body sitting at the table, faceless and wronged and impossible, and that his own words have done nothing to move her aside. 

The room does not think it matters. 

Cups strike wood. Someone makes a low, approving sound.

The table has only heard the shape of a jest, and Daeron has given them enough of those tonight to make this one easy to accept. I have never been wise, a fine answer from a drunken prince. 

They laugh, and the sound is pleasant enough. Low, near, human. It does not turn into screaming this time, and for that alone he could forgive a great deal. 

The hand finally leaves his wrist. He feels the absence of it at once. 

It is absurd, humiliating. A small withdrawal of warmth no more meaningful than a candle guttering in a room on fire, and still some part of him notices the absence with the quick, starved attention of a dog hearing a door close. 

Then the hand is at his cup instead, easing it from his fingers. 

“There are stronger things than wine, my prince.” 

The table laughs. Not cruelly, not entirely. There’s affection in the sound, or something close enough to pass as it in a room like this. Someone else says something he does not catch, something vulgar enough to be answered with another burst of amusement. The words move around him, warm and indistinct, and the woman smiles as though all of this has been agreed upon by everyone who matters. 

The loss of the cup should trouble him more. And it does trouble him, more than he can admit, more than he can understand. Somewhere beneath the wine, beneath the heat, beneath the thumbprint of vanished pressure at his wrist, an instinct lashes out, an animal lifts its head and takes note. No cup, no hand, no clear path back to the thing he had been using to keep sleep damaged and silent. 

The fingers touch his sleeve again. 

The instinct sleeps again, the animal quiets. 

“Come away from the table.” The person says. Or orders, commands, sentences. It is not a question and Daeron is almost grateful. 

Daeron turns his head, slowly, and the room takes a moment to follow. 

A face, nearer now. Still not whole. Mouth first, wine-dark lower lip, a cheek with a. faint mark near the jaw. Eyes catching candlelight and giving none of it back in any color he can hope to remember. A face assembled from fragments. 

“Careful,” A man from the other side of the table calls out, grinning, “His bride might send assassins after you.” 

More laughter. 

His bride. 

The words move through him more cleanly this time, perhaps because they have found the wound already made for them. 

Poor thing, he thinks again. 

It is immediate, almost steadying. Poor thing, who will be told that vows make sense of what men have already decided; who will be given a place beside him and be expected to stand near enough to inherit the smell of wine and ash from his skin; who has not yet seen him like this and already deserves apology. 

And beneath it, worse than pity, worse than shame, the thought he had tried to drown before it learned its own shape. 

If you stayed… 

The woman beside him has risen, and Daeron notices only when the hand at his sleeve becomes a hand at his elbow, urging rather than touching now. 

It would cost so little to resist. 

A turn of the wrist, a laugh made sharper, a prince’s coldness, if he could find it. Even a drunk man can refuse a hand, Daeron knows this. Men refuse things all the time. Cups, debts, Gods, women, warnings. 

Daeron does not refuse. 

Refusal asks of him to gather himself from every place the room has scattered him. From the wine soaked grooves in the table, from the smoke above the hearth, from the laughter that for a breath was screaming. From the thought of the woman who will be made his wife. From the warm place at his wrist where fingers had been. From the mouth near his ear saying come, my prince, come now. 

He cannot gather that much of himself. He is not even certain he wants to. 

The hand at his elbow tightens. 

“There,” She murmurs as he rises too quickly and the room lists hard to one side, “Easy.” 

Easy. 

The word lingers somewhere bitter in him. 

His knee catches the bench, but someone steadies him with a loud chuckle and a congratulatory slap to his back. Another hand. The table cheers with the lazy vulgarity of men who believe they are watching a willing prince be led toward a familiar sort of pleasure. 

Perhaps they are. He certainly wants them to be. 

Other nights, the story has been true enough. 

He has sought it, bought it, gone willingly to hands and mouths and the blessed numbness of a body given something simple to do. There are women in this city who know the look of him after a dream that finds him despite his best efforts, who know how quickly he drinks after, how little he likes quiet, how easily pleasure -his or anyone’s- gives him an escape from himself. 

Daeron lets himself be pulled upright. 

For a moment his hand finds the edge of the table. Sticky wood beneath his palm, wine drying black-red in the knife marks. The room bends around him: faces, mouths, cups lifted, teeth flashing, flame catching on rings and eyes and spilled drink. 

The hand pulls, and of course, he goes. 

Daeron the Drunken goes where he is led if the hand is warm enough, if the room lough enough, if the night has not yet finished with him. 

The woman at his side says something to the others. He does not catch the words, he catches only the amused tone. The table answers with another cheer. 

His cup remains behind. 

That, if nothing else, should make Daeron stop. 

Instead he looks once toward it and then away. 

The hand has found his wrist again. Warmth closes over the pulse, firm enough now that it is no longer only anchoring. 

She leads him toward the back of the room, where the shadows are thicker and the song from the hearth arrives softened by smoke. The floor is uneven beneath him. His shoulder brushes a hanging curtain. Someone’s perfume burns his nose, sweet and stale. The air changes. 

Behind him, the room continues without injury, without hiccup. 

That is another thing Daeron has learned to expect, to almost find comfort in: how little the world changes when he leaves it. He promised Egg not to linger on such thoughts, though. 

At the edge of the corridor, he turns his head once, though he does not know what he means to look for. The table is already closing over the space where he thinks he had been, a man reaches for his abandoned cup. Someone laughs, and the dice begin again. 

No one calls him back, no one looks his way. 

The hand at his wrist tugs lightly again. Daeron follows. 

The curtain does not lead to a room, Daeron understands that late, and only in pieces. 

A hanging of dark, moth-eaten wool. A sliver of a passage behind it. Barrels pushed against the wall, their iron hoops dull with old damp. Linens thrown over something shapeless on the floor, greyed by dust and old spills, more rag than cloth. 

Not a room, but a place behind a room, a place for things no one wants to look at while candles are lit. 

The woman who has brought him here does not let go of his wrist until he is inside. Some disgusted, self-flagellating part of himself thinks to tell her she need not secure a leash, the faint unspoken promise of a warm touch is enough to make him obey, always has been. 

Her touch changes before he can make a joke at his own expense. 

That is the thing Daeron notices first, before fear, before shame, before anything in him can gather itself into a shape worth naming. At the table, the hand was an anchor, but here it becomes something with intention. 

By the time the curtain falls closed behind them, she has become a woman in pieces. 

A mouth, wine-dark and smiling. A hand at his collar. A voice low with amusement, telling him to look at her as if looking is a simple thing, as if faces have not been coming apart in the candlelight all night. 

“There,” She says, when his gaze finds hers for half a breath before he loses it again. “You are very far gone, aren’t you?” 

He is. 

The truth of it moves through him without force, without malice. He could agree with her, perhaps. He could tell her that far gone is the point, that he has been drinking toward absence with all the desperation better men reserve for prayer. But his tongue is thick behind his teeth, and the room keeps arriving late, and her hands are already making decisions before his body has decided to make one. 

He has to lean against the wall before he knows he has reached for it.

The wood meets his shoulder hard enough to make him blink. His head is too heavy, his mouth too slow, his hands full of delayed intentions. Every part of him seems to arrive after itself: breath after fear, shame after touch, thought after the body has already been moved.

She makes useof his weakness, and presses his body against the wall, unfastening what is easiest first. 

For some reason, he lingers on the lack of care in the undressing. There is no cruelty great enough to blame, only the practical confidence of someone accustomed to being obeyed by loosened laces and drunken men. His collar gives way beneath her fingers, his coat is pushed from one shoulder, the belt at his waist is handled before he has finished noticing her hand has left his throat. 

Daeron looks down. 

Her knuckles. His waist. The dark line of fabric pulled from his body. The pale inside of her wrist. The place where his body is answering as if reminding him that not even his own flesh is his.  

He should say something, he thinks that very clearly. Or almost clearly.  

Something. 

Not wait, not stop, perhaps. The thoughts do not form with enough shape to be chosen. They drift beneath the wine, beneath the heat, beneath the immense exhaustion weighing at his very heart. 

She says something with the shape of a question. Daeron does not answer. 

She smiles as if he has. 

That is how it happens, or how it begins to happen. No force great enough to give him something to resist, only a warm mouth and a body that answers, only the loss of the pieces of himself where refusal might have lived if he had been sober enough to build it. 

Hands guide him backward until the wall presses against his back, the cold seeps past his clothes. The figure before him presses closer, leg slotting between his. 

Daeron looks at the wall over her shoulder. 

For a moment, the shadow there is dragon-winged. 

For a moment, the room smells of smoke. 

For a moment, the noise beyond the curtain becomes something else. 

Then a hand enters his hair and pulls, not cruelly, but not gently either, and the world once again narrows to a single point of sensation. 

Scalp, neck, breath. Body. Here. 

The relief of it is so immediate that he hates himself for it. 

His body has always been easier than his mind. More treacherous, perhaps, but simpler. The body can be given instructions. Touched here, moved there, made to answer even when he is absent from the answering. The body does not need prophecy explained to it, nor sleep made safe. It knows pressure, heat, pain, the bluntness of another body close enough to block the dark. 

The woman says something, but Daeron does not catch the words. 

He catches tone instead, and it is enough. Amusement, want, satisfaction with his pliancy. With the way his head tips when fingers tighten in his hair, with the way he does not move away when she falls to his knees before him, with the way he lets her decide what will happen now that the wine has done most of the work of hollowing him out. 

Her own clothes are adjusted with the same efficiency. A loosened tie, a shift of fabric, a glimpse of skin he does not know what to do with. She does not feel indistinct in the way his own body feels. She is -frighteningly- present in pieces. In a mouth biting too hard, in hands freezing and scalding at once. In a thigh against his knee, in hair slipping forward as she leans over him, in breath warm at his cheek.  

“Stay with me.“ She murmurs. 

It is almost funny. Almost. 

He might laugh, if he trusted laughter to come out of him as laughter.

But there is something else too near his throat, something rawer and wetter and far less useful, and he swallows it down because even now, even here, some part of him understands that there are sounds a body should not make in front of another person.

Her hand takes his and puts it where she wants it. Daeron lets it be put there. 

The shame of that arrives late, and weaker than it should. His fingers curve because fingers curve when guided. His breath catches because breath is a thing the body does before the mind can forbid it. She makes a pleased sound, small and close, and the sound goes through him but it hurts too much to become pleasure. 

It becomes instruction instead. 

There is, at last a role. And with it comes relief, and horror at the relief. 

He does not have to know what he wants, he does not have to gather himself. He does not have to explain the wine, the smoke, the laughter that became screaming, the thought of you, of his betrothed, like a closed door with light beneath it. Someone else has decided what he is for, and there is relief, and there is grief, in that. 

His body knows old instructions. 

His body can be guided, coaxed, made to answer pressure with movement, breath with breath, touch with the dull, obedient reflex of living flesh. The body can remain, can be present, even if he is not. The body can betray him. 

It is not the same as wanting, and her mouth on his is not the same as a kiss, and her hands on his skin not the same as a caress. But this place has no use for distinctions that delicate, and neither, it seems, does she. 

The night loses sequence, loses sense. 

It comes to him in fragments. 

The wall cold through his shirt. 

The floor hard beneath his knees, then his hip, then his back, each change arriving before he has agreed to the last. Dust and old linens caught beneath his fingers. Her hand at his jaw. His name breathed too close to his ear. Fabric caught beneath his hip. The curtain moving.  

The distant room, laughing as if nothing in the world has changed. The world remains assembled. 

A cup strikes a table, a man shouts the end of a song. Someone laughs again, ordinary and drunk and alive, and the sound passes over the curtain as if there is no reason it should stop. 

Daeron tries holding onto the floor because it, at least, does not ask him to answer. It is only there. Hard, filthy, but certain. A place for the body to be when the mind has gone too far to keep it. 

The candlelight moves against the fabric. Her mouth says something. 

Her weight. Her breath. His own hand clutching the linen. 

The thought of his betrothed appearing and vanishing, faceless and impossible. Poor thing.  

Forgive me. 

No. Not forgive. 

You owe him nothing, especially not forgiveness. 

He tries not to think of you. He fails. 

Not because the woman touching him resembles you. She does not, she cannot. You have no face in him yet, no voice, no hand he has any right to imagine. 

That is what makes it worse, somehow. 

You are not there, and still the thought of you stands somewhere beyond the room, like a warm hearth behind a pane of glass. 

Some touch might not feel like it takes. Some presence might feel like safety. Someone might stay. 

Hope opens its mouth, bares its teeth. 

Daeron turns his face away. 

The woman above him mistakes it for something else and follows. Good enough. 

Let the body be misunderstood if misunderstanding it keeps it occupied. Let hands make use of what everyone has decided he is careless with. Let the night spend him down past dignity, past pleasure, past the instinctual recoil that has nowhere to go. 

At some point, his eyes close. 

Not in rest, never in rest. 

Only because keeping them open has become one more choice he cannot make. 

When he opens his eyes again, the light from the outside is dimmer. 

The corner is colder than it was. Or perhaps he is, he isn’t sure. The noise beyond the curtain has thinned into something distant and shapeless, a few voices, a burst of laughter, the dull strike of a cup against wood. Life continuing on elsewhere. 

The woman is no longer touching him. 

For a moment, Daeron does not understand the absence. His body has arranged itself around pressure, around hands, and now the pressure has gone. The shape remains, but not the weight, not the warmth. Like a handprint left on skin, like a door closed after light. 

He turns his head. 

She is standing now, straightening her skirts. Not hurriedly, not guiltily. There is a moment of comfort in the ease of her, in the practiced fastening of laces, the smoothing down of fabric, the small satisfied exhale through the nose as she reaches for a discarded sleeve. 

She looks whole, in a way he does not feel. Pleased, in a way he doubts he’s capable of. 

His mouth is dry. 

There is something he should say, but he does not know what it is. 

She glances at him and smiles. He resists the urge to flinch. 

“There you are,” She says again, softer now, “I thought I had lost you for a moment.” 

For a moment. 

As if it is charming, as if his absence had been a tricked played for her pleasure, as if she had noticed him slipping away and found it sweet, or useful, or simply not important enough. 

Daeron looks at her, and the effort it takes is immense. 

She laughs under her breath and leans down, close enough that her shadow falls over his chest. 

“You really are far gone, aren’t you?” The words land plainly this time. 

She touches his cheek with the backs of her fingers, almost fondly, almost mockingly. His skin does not seem to belong to him quickly enough to flinch. 

“Sleep it off, my prince,” Then, after a pause, with a glance towards his rumpled and loosened clothes, the old linens and rancid wood beneath him, the wreckage of him, “Your bride will have her hands full.” 

The curtain barely stirs as she leaves. 

A gasp leaves him as if with her she takes the air of the room. Or perhaps with her absence he can breathe again, he isn’t sure.  

She goes as easily as she came, taking her warmth with her, taking the shape of the corner they occupied with her, taking the last false use of this body with her. 

The space does not become empty at once, and instead it empties by degrees. 

First the space where he lays, the scattered linens over hard wood. Then the air where her voice had been. Then the place on his skin where the last touch cools. 

The curtain falls still behind her. 

Beyond it, the room continues. 

A cup struck against wood, someone calling for more wine, the end of a song dragged loose and crooked from a dozen drunken mouths. Ordinary, familiar sounds, the same sounds that held him together earlier, or close enough to together that the difference had not mattered. 

They do not hold him now. 

Daeron lies where she has left him and listens to the room living past him. 

It is almost funny, how little the world requires of him in order to go on. A cup abandoned, a chair filled by someone else, a prince missing from a table, a body behind a curtain. 

The floor is hard beneath him, that is the first thing that seems willing to remain true. 

Not kind, not warm, not safe, only true. 

Hard boards beneath his shoulder, old linens against his cheek, dust caught in the damp of the back of his neck. His clothes loose where she left them, his skin cooling in the places where the night has touched him too much and not enough. 

He had been led away. He had been made useful. He had been left to sleep it off. 

The story is so simple when told from outside his body. 

Inside it, nothing is simple. 

Inside it, the wine is sour behind his teeth, and his pulse is still trying to answer a hand that is no longer there, and the place where the old wood digs into his back feels less like the floor than evidence. His body has been forced present and then abandoned with the present still clinging to it. 

He had wanted collapse, he had wanted to be overcome, he had wanted sleep to come without asking anything of him. 

And now he is closer to it than before, emptied out and heavy-limbed, eyes burning, skin cooling the room tilting gently around the edges as if the world is considering finally letting him fall. 

But the dreams will find him anyway. 

And now, with the last clear cruelty the night leaves him, Daeron thinks they will find him like this. 

Not whole, not defended, not even properly absent. Only spent. 

The word comes to him without mercy. Spent, as a cup is spent, as a candle is spent, as a body is spent. The floor holds him because he has not yet found the strength to rise from it, the linens beneath him have become cool in places and damp in others. His skin knows where hands have been before his mind can decide what to do with the knowledge. 

He does not move. 

Movement, he thinks idly, irrationally, would make the body his again, and he is not certain he wants it again. 

The candle gives a weak little jump, and for a moment, the shadows move across the wall like wings. 

Daeron closes his eyes, and forces them open half a breath after. 

Sleep is too near now.  

He has brought himself here with such care. Cup after cup, smile after smile, touch after touch. Past pleasure, past taste, past dignity, past himself. He has made of himself a road toward collapse, and walked it willingly, knowingly, and so no one ought to be found guilty for leading him the last few steps. 

And still. 

His body is heavy enough for sleep now, yes. His limbs feel poured into the hard floor, his mouth sour, his thoughts slow and fraying at the edges. He has succeeded, in that small and miserable way. The body has been worn down, the body has been used up, the body will not be able to fight sleep for long. 

And yet the worst of it is that some dull, animal part of him understands this as success. 

Not happiness, not mercy, nothing so beyond him as comfort. Only success in the small and miserable terms that he had given the night. The body has been brought low, the mind has been dulled, and the road to sleep has been damaged enough that perhaps the dreams will have to crawl through wine and exhaustion and shame before they can find him. 

He has gotten what he was after, and it should feel like relief, like mercy. It does not. 

The floor presses hard beneath his shoulder, the linen has twisted under his cheek, rough with old dust and the damp warmth his body left in it. His clothes sit wrong on him, loosened and crooked and cooling where hands had made careless work of them. The air behind the curtain is close, stale with smoke and wine and perfume, but the warmth is going out of it. 

Nothing gathers around him. No hand returns to his wrist, no voice lowers near his ear, no weight settles beside him and makes the ground less hard by simply sharing it, no one draws the linen over him despite the fact it would make a poor covering. No one remains long enough for the dark to become anything else. 

No one has stayed to make this collapse into rest. No one has remained to turn the spent thing back into something worth keeping, no one has made a shelter of scattered linens on the ground, or a mercy of the dark, or a hand of the weight pressing down on his chest. 

The dark is only dark. The floor is just the floor. 

His hand moves before he gives it permission. 

Not far. Only to his own wrist, where your fingers -no, not you, not you, the woman from the room, the woman whose face he cannot keep, the woman who had known he was far gone- had held him. 

His fingers close around his own wrist, loose at first then tighter, until the pulse beats against his palm. 

There. Here. Now. 

It does not work the same when he is the one doing it. Of course it does not. 

He almost laughs, it catches somewhere in his throat and stays there, dry and ugly and small.  

His betrothed. 

The thought arrives without a face. Perhaps that is why it can come at all. 

Not a woman yet, not a voice, not eyes to disappoint or a mouth to turn away from him. Only a title, a fact, a vague shape of a future. His betrothed, as if words can make any worthy thing out of what will be done to you. 

The pity is duller now, exhausted by its own return, but it is still there. Poor thing, somewhere in the world, perhaps asleep right now in a bed that has not yet learned his name. Poor thing, who will be brought to him and told there is honor in standing close to ruin if ruin has a dragon’s blood in its veins. 

You have done nothing to deserve him, he knows this with the same certainty with which he knows the dreams come true. 

And still, because he is cruel, cruel in the private ways starvation makes a creature cruel, the thought of you reopens an already-bleeding wound. 

Betrothed. Wife, soon. 

Not the woman from the room, who has left. Not the voices beyond the curtain, everyone’s and no one’s. 

Betrothed, wife. His. 

A word that means a presence expected to remain after the candle gutters. A body not hired by the hour, not carried away by amusement, not gone once the use has been through. A touch that might linger when the room empties, a hand that might not withdraw simply because the night has ended. 

He turns his face onto the hard ground before the thought can become a wish, turns his body on its side and ignores the stabs of pain from making out of nothing a shelter. 

It is obscene to want that of you. It is obscene to pity you and need you in the same breath. 

Obscene to lie in this corner, in this body with the room still holding the shape of what has been done to him, and let some ruined part of himself lift its head toward a woman who has not yet had the chance to hate him. 

You will not stay because you want to, you will not touch him because you see in him something worth keeping. He knows that. 

He knows that. 

His fingers tighten around his own wrist anyway. 

For a moment, he lets the pressure pretend to be another hand. Only for a moment, only because the dreams are near, and the room is empty, and the title has no face to be harmed by what he does with it in the dark. 

His wife. 

The words are too soft, too dangerous, too close to prayer. 

Daeron opens his hand. 

The pulse beneath his skin remains, foolish and living and impossible to quiet. 

Beyond the curtain, someone laughs again. This time, it is only laughter, and this time, that makes it worse. 

He lies still on the ground, curled in on himself on a corner that has not become shelter, with the dark gathered close and sleep coming for him at last, and tries not to imagine anyone beside him. 

He fails before his eyes close.

VALARR.

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

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

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

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

DAERON.

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

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

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

LYONEL.

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

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

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

DUNK.

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

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

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

Not like a courtier making a show of it, like you’ve seen dozens do over the years to gain your favour. He kneels the way a devout man might kneel before a shrine; slow, careful, almost reverent. His head bows deeply. His huge hands rest on his thighs, palms open, offering before he even speaks.

“Your Grace,” he says, voice shaking in its quietness.

You reach for him automatically, to make him stand, to remind him he doesn’t need to offer himself to you, but he catches your hand in both of his, holding it as though it is a sacred thing, as though touching you is the riskiest thing he’s ever dared.

“I am your man,” he declares, lifting his eyes to meet yours at last.

There is nothing hungry in it. Nothing greedy or selfish. Only devotion so earnest it threatens to break him in half.

“Please,” he breathes, not begging for your affection, but for the right to serve you. “Your man. Your protector.”

He lowers his forehead to your knuckles in a gesture so old, so honest, it feels like a ritual older than any throne.

“I’ll guard you,” Dunk murmurs, voice thick. “With my life. Until you send me away, I am yours.”

And the pure sincerity of it—the way he means every word with the whole of his enormous, gentle heart—settles around you like a finest cloak.

BAELOR

You don’t mean anything by it.

It’s little more than a courteous exchange, a lord offering some practiced compliment, his hand hovering a fraction too close to your waist. You step back before it becomes improper, but Baelor notices it. He always does. His posture never breaks, his face never shifts, yet something in him tightens like a bow quietly drawn.

He finishes his conversation with perfect civility, but his gaze finds you across the hall with an intensity that pins you in place.

“My wolf,” he says when he reaches you, voice low, velvet-edged. “Walk with me.”

Not a question. Not truly a command, either. Something gentler, deeper; a request he expects you to honour.

You follow him into a quieter alcove, torchlight haloing the stretch of his shoulders. He waits until the sounds of the hall soften into a distant hum before turning to you fully.

He doesn’t look angry. He looks steady, frighteningly so.

“Tell me,” he murmurs, stepping close enough that your breath catches, “did you welcome his attention?”

Your denial rises instinctively, but Baelor shakes his head once, too slow and knowing.

“No,” he cuts it in smoothly. “I already know your answer.”

He reaches up, brushing your cheek with the backs of his fingers. The touch is soft, but his eyes are not. They burn, some relentless, contained thing, but blazing from within all the same.

“He looked at you as if he had earned the right,” Baelor continues, voice a quiet burn. “As if you could be swayed by someone who has never learned the shape of your silences. The strength of your will.”

Your pulse stumbles. He feels it, his hand drifting from your cheek to the delicate column of your throat, fingertips skimming with a reverent, soft pressure.

“Baelor—”

His thumb presses lightly beneath your jaw, stilling the word.

“You forget,” he says, leaning in until your lips almost brush, “why you choose me. Every day.”

Heat flares through you. He sees it, tastes it in the hungry little hitch of your breath, and something shifts in his expression, too; something tender and devastating all at once.

“I see you,” Baelor murmurs. “Not the title. You. The woman who stands like winter and burns hotter than any summer sun. The one no man commands.”

He leans closer, his breath ghosting your mouth.

“The man in that hall saw what he wanted.” His voice drops, darkening. “I see what is.”

Your hands curl into the front of his tunic without conscious thought. His fingers linger against the flutter of your pulse, feeling, counting.

“I am your man,” he breathes, the words rich and rumbling in the quiet between you, “and you are my wolf.”

His head bows, your brows almost touching. “And I am not in the habit,” he whispers mildly, “of letting anyone mistake that.”

His thumb strokes your pulse once, reverently, like he’s memorizing the beat of belonging he feels there. When he finally draws back, his voice is barely more than breath.

“You choose me,” he finishes softly, “and gods willing, I will spend every breath proving why you were right to.”

LYONEL

You catch him lounging again where he shouldn’t be. Sprawled across a cushioned bench in a sun-soaked corridor, boots up, tunic half-laced, every inch of him radiating the smug indolence of a man who has escaped three meetings and one summons from the Hand.

“Stormlord,” you call his title on purpose, arching a brow. “You are meant to be in council.”

He brightens instantly, as though you’ve delivered him from execution.

“Ah,” Lyonel sighs, hand over his heart, “and here I thought you’d come to rescue me.”

You don’t dignify that with an answer. You only stand there, waiting, tapping your fingers lightly against your hip. He watches the movement with far too much interest.

Then, with a groan clearly meant to amuse you, Lyonel pushes himself upright, stretching like a cat waking from a pleasant nap.

“You know,” he says, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve, “it’s a terrible burden, serving the crown as Stormlord.”

“Oh?” you ask, dry as northern tree bark.

“Mm.” He nods gravely. “Endless storms. Endless paperwork. Endless dull old men droning in my ear about grain.” His eyes sparkle, sharp and devious. “One wonders why I ever agreed to it.”

“Your duty?” you offer. “Your birthright?”

He scoffs. “Hardly that. Duty is for respectable men.”

“And what are you?” you ask.

Lyonel steps closer, grin tilting, voice dropping just enough to slip under your skin.

“Hopeless.”

You blink, genuinely puzzled and wary. “Hopeless?”

“Utterly.” He leans in, brushing a loose strand of hair from your cheek with the back of his fingers, a gesture so soft it contradicts every careless word he’s ever spoken to you. “Hopelessly devoted. Hopelessly distracted. Hopelessly inclined to ignore half the realm if you’re standing in the same room.”

Your pulse jumps. He notices it, drinks it in with a knowing little twitch of his lips. And still he keeps smiling that bright, infuriating smile of his that hides a blade.

“You think I bend knee to the crown?” Lyonel wonders, soft and idle, near ponderous. “Gods, no. I serve because you sit beside it.”

You open your mouth, but he cuts you off with a laugh, shaking his head.

“Don’t look so startled,” he says. “I’ve never pretended to be honourable. Only reliable.” His voice softens, the joke thinning into something bare and earnest. “For you, at least.”

Then, with a ridiculous, court-mocking flourish, he drops into a half-bow, pressing your hand to his lips.

“Your man,” Lyonel announces lightly.

It should sound unserious, perhaps ridiculing, coming from him. It should be nothing but flirtation. But the way Lyonel looks up at you from under his lashes ruins that lie completely, because his eyes are warm, molten, and far too honest.

“Please,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Your man.”

You feel the truth of it like a physical thing. And Lyonel—reckless, radiant, irreverent Lyonel—straightens with a wink, already turning toward the corridor as if he hasn’t just cracked open something dangerous between you.

“Well,” he tosses over his shoulder, “if I must endure council for the crown, I expect you to repay the suffering with at least one smile.”

He pauses mid step.

“And perhaps,” he adds, voice dipping sweet and sinful, “a reminder later that being your man is not entirely thankless.”

Then he disappears around the corner, leaving you standing in a wash of sun, breath unsteady, pulse still chasing the shape of his words.

AERION

You hear him long before you see him.

A shift of floorboards, a breath held too long. That sharp, restless presence you know like you know your own heartbeat. The hour is late, the castle asleep, and the fire in your chamber has burned down to embers when he appears in the doorway. Barefoot, shirt half-laced, pale hair mussed as if he has raked his hands through it a hundred times.

“Aerion,” you speak quietly into the dark. “You should be asleep.”

He huffs a soft, humorless laugh. “I can’t.”

Of course he can’t. He never sleeps well when something stirs in him. He’s half longing, half nightmares, and mostly just dark, destructive desire. All of it bruises him the same way.

He stands there a moment as though deciding whether he should leave.

He doesn’t.

He crosses the room in three slow steps, and when he reaches you, he doesn’t ask permission. He never asks. He waits, just long enough to be denied if you choose to deny him, and when you don’t speak, he sinks down beside the chair and lays his head in your lap.

The breath you draw catches.

Aerion exhales like someone drowning who has finally reached air. His cheek presses to your thigh. One hand curls loosely at your knee, not gripping, only holding, as though he needs the anchor more than he needs dignity.

“Nightmares?” you ask.

He shakes his head. His voice is low, dark, a whisper cracked at the edges.

“No. Just… you weren’t in my dreams tonight.”

Danger coils under the words, but so does something fragile, something almost childlike in its honesty.

Your fingers hesitate above his hair. He waits, more patiently than he does for anything in the harsh honesty of daylight. The moment you finally touch him—lightly, barely—Aerion’s entire body loosens. His eyes slip shut. He turns his face a fraction toward your hand, toward the warmth, toward you.

“Aerion,” you murmur warningly.

He smiles into the fabric of your nightrobe. A slow, wicked, aching thing.

“Don’t send me away,” he says. “Not tonight. I can’t bear it.”

You thread your fingers through his pale hair despite yourself, and the sharp, thrilled breath he sucks in nearly undoes you. He nuzzles closer, his voice dropping to something fevered:

“You have no idea what you do to me when you touch me like this.”

Your pulse kicks, and he hears it. You know he does. His fingers trace a line along your calf, ever so slowly, savouring, nothing like the arrogant confidence he wears by daylight.

Then, muffled against your lap, dangerous and tender in the same breath:

“Aunt.”

An aching little prayer, a bruise, a surrender.

“I am your man.”

The words scrape out of him like confession, not performance, a truth he can’t hold back in the dark. His hand tightens just slightly at your knee, enough to tremble, not enough to trap.

“Please,” he whispers, silky and dark, breath hot against the thin cloth. “Your man.”

There is hunger in it—wildfire desire that could consume a kingdom, you think grimly—but beneath that, horrifyingly, unmistakably, is need. The kind he would burn the world to keep hidden. The kind he brings only to you, only when the night strips him down to something raw and desperate and hungry.

Aerion turns his head just enough to look up at you, eyes molten, lashes casting shadows on his cheek.

“If you send me away,” he tells you softly, “I’ll go mad.”

Your hand is still in his hair.

And Aerion leans into it like a creature starved for gentleness, letting the fire paint his features in gold and ruin.

“Let me stay,” he breathes. “Let me be yours. Just for this hour. Just until the sun comes.”

He closes his eyes again, as though surrender is safer than looking at you.

“As if,” he murmurs, voice dark silk, “I was ever anything else.”

MAEKAR

It starts in the hall.

Snow has fallen from the hills all day, light at first, then heavier, thickening on the stone steps and clinging to men’s beards as they come in off the yard. The fire roars pleasantly; the air smells of smoke and wet wool and something stewing in a great black pot at the back. Men are loud with drink and the comfort of their own safe keep.

Which is always when someone decides to be brave and foolish.

“He wears our colours well enough, m’lady,” one of your father’s bannermen says, not quite slurring yet. “Talks like he means it, too. But steel’s still southern under it, my lady. Dragon’s a dragon. We’ll see if he holds when the winter truly bites.”

It’s not meant as an insult, not even as an accusation. Northerners are too blunt for such games. It’s worry, spoken poorly but sincerely. The words find their way across the firelight well enough regardless.

At the high table, Maekar pauses with his cup halfway to his mouth.

He doesn’t look over. Doesn’t ask the man to repeat himself. There is just the smallest tightening along his jaw, as if something in him has clenched and he’s set his teeth around it.

You answer, because it is expected of you and because you would have done so even if it weren’t. Your voice is even, and your words are Winterfell’s words, your father’s words, as sharp and cold and sure as the stones underfoot.

The matter dies, on the surface. Men shift, placated. Someone calls for more ale. The conversation turns again, as it always does, back to harvest and levies and some poor fool’s misjudged hunt.

Maekar does not speak for the rest of the meal unless he has to. He listens instead, and that’s worse. He listens with his face turned slightly away, the nape of his neck corded, his hand around his cup as if he’s holding onto it so he doesn’t reach for something else.

You do not touch him there. Not with eyes on you. Not when he is wound that tight.

Later, when the hall thins out and the cold sting of the corridors closes around you, he walks beside you without speaking. His strides are heavy on the stone. He does not offer his arm. But he doesn’t need to. You know precisely how to fall into step with him now. You’ve learned each other well enough.

Only when the door to your chambers shuts behind you and the latch drops does he stop.

The room is dim, lit by one low fire and two candles guttering on the table. Your shadow crosses his when you shrug off your cloak. He stands just inside the door a moment longer, as if deciding whether to leave again.

He doesn’t leave.

He unbuckles his sword belt and sets it aside. Shrugs out of the heavy Stark grey. Underneath, his shirt is dark at the throat where snowmelt and sweat have soaked the linen; his forearms are bare and scarred where he’s rolled the sleeves up. His movements are clipped, agitated. Only the muscle jumping in his jaw betrays anything else.

You hang your cloak. Turn back towards him, eyeing him for a breath.

“What they said—” you begin.

“Did you agree?” he demands.

It’s blunt in a way you’ve stopped flinching from. Maekar is a man who cuts straight to the bone once he’s decided to cut at all.

You cross the space between you until you are close enough to see the pale nick along his knuckles from this morning’s drills, the faint, fresh line at his throat where some boy’s blade slid too close.

“No,” you say.

He studies you. As if weighing that on its own, no other argument offered. Something eases in him, but not much.

“They’ll talk,” you add evenly. “They always have. New lord, new snow, new grumbling. You know this.”

“They can grumble about my manners,” he snaps back. “Or my face. Plenty there.” His mouth twitches, brief and humourless. “They start grumbling about whether I’ll hold the line when it breaks, that’s different.”

“You’ve never broken,” you remind him.

He huffs. “You weren’t there for every year.”

You tip your head, waiting.

He drops his gaze. Not out of shame. Maekar doesn’t waste time on that. It’s something else. A man digging in his heels before he says more than he means to.

“I know what they see,” he says suddenly. “Southern prince in a borrowed cloak. Dragon’s son. Man who rode north on a king’s word and a treaty, not because the old gods whispered in his sleep.”

Your throat tightens. “Is that what you think this is? A treaty?”

“Not now.” The answer comes too fast; he looks almost annoyed with himself for that much softness, for how quick he is to give it to you. His fingers flex at his sides. “Now it’s… different.”

You wait, but he doesn’t elaborate. You bite back an impatient sigh.

“Maekar.”

He finally looks up.

You’ve seen this look on him in battle drills, when he has decided a thing and then decided it will be done even if it costs him blood and bone. Old. Stubborn. Unyielding. He takes two steps and then you have your back to the wall and him in front of you, not trapping so much as blocking out the rest of the world. His hands plant on either side of your hips on the stone, bracketing you without touching.

“Your father wants to know if I’ll stand when winter comes,” he says. “Your bannermen want to know if I’ll bleed for some hill they can’t see on a map.” His head dips, shoulders hunched just enough to bring him nearer, to make his voice a rasp between you. “I don’t give a shit about hills.”

Your breath catches; his eyes flick to your mouth, then back to your eyes.

“I care if you’re on them,” he adds tightly.

That lands heavier than any oath could.

“If the snows come in and the dead are walking, if the gods themselves climb out of those woods to take a piece of this place—” his mouth twists, the words grinding out, “they’re welcome to try me. They’ll find me where you are. They’ll have to go through me first.”

The way he says it, like a simple fact, makes something in your chest ache and something in your belly coil, low and hot.

“I’m not good with speeches,” he mutters. “You know that.”

“I had… suspected,” you answer, dry despite the tightness in your throat.

“Good,” he grunts. “Then you know I don’t say this because it sounds pretty.”

His hand leaves the stone. Settles, heavy and warm, at your waist. Fingers spread, thumb pressing once into the bone as if to prove to himself you are here, tangible and his.

“I am your man,” Maekar says.

He doesn’t dress it up. Doesn’t soften the rough edges. The words are as plain as any he’s ever given you.

“Not your father’s,” he goes on, staring at you. “Not your kraken-eyed bannermen’s. Not even my own Father’s, not anymore.” His jaw clenches, bones rolling. “Yours.”

You stare up at him. “Mine?”

He makes a low, frustrated sound. “Don’t make me say it twice, woman.”

You can’t help it. You smile, small and sharp. He sees it, and something in him steadies. His shoulders drop the barest fraction. The corner of his mouth threatens a curve he crushes before it can fully form, much to your disappointment.

“I’ll stand where you tell me to stand,” he says, a shade quieter now, but no less stern about it. “I’ll swing on whatever poor bastard you point at. I’ll freeze on these walls and bleed in these gods-cursed woods and eat boiled leather before I let anything take what’s under this roof from you.”

His thumb strokes once, rough, at your side. It could almost be accidental, but you know better than that. Nothing with Maekar is accidental.

“That’s my loyalty,” he finishes. “They can call it northern or southern or madness. Doesn’t matter to me. It’s yours.”

You lift a hand and catch his jaw in your palm. He goes still under your contact. You feel the scrape of stubble, the heat of skin, the way his throat works once under your fingers like he’s swallowed something sharp.

“Maekar,” you say quietly. “It’s more than enough.”

His eyes shutter for a beat, then open again, clearer and still hard.

“Good. They can keep their questions,” he says, softer now. “You know the answer.”

His hand tightens at your waist, something claiming and steady at the touch in the same breath.

Dunk didn’t mean to stare. But how could he not?

You were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he watched with rapt attention as you draped yourself—covered only in a thin black nightgown, embellished in gold—across your husband’s lap. Your husband Lyonel Baratheon, the Laughing Storm, of all men. Your fingers worked the ties of his trousers, Lyonel’s large hand caressing the back of your neck as you kneel against the pillowed floor seating of the Baratheon tent. Dunk’s mouth has long gone dry, his tongue heavy in his mouth, watching, waiting as your fingers spin the knots free and dip beneath the fabric.

Lyonel groans loudly, head rolling back on his shoulders as you pull his hard cock from his trousers. Dunk watches you bite your lip to hide a smile as you pump him, eyes fixed on the flushed reddy-purple of the head. With a wiggle of your hips, you arch further forward, taking it into your mouth, hollowing your cheeks as you drop down.

Lyonel groans again, the hand on the back of your neck tightening.

Dunk stands rigid with his back pressed to the closed flap of the tent. He can feel his own cock, heavy and hard, pitching a tent in the front of his coarse cotton trousers. His hands ball into fists at his sides, the muscles in his forearms pulling tight as he listens to the wet sounds of your mouth and the characteristically unabashed moans of the Storm Lord himself.

Lyonel had summoned Dunk to his tent just moments ago. Lord Baratheon requests your presence in his tent, ser, the guard had said with a light nod of his head. And of course Dunk is a man to come when he is called upon.

Lyonel’s head hangs forward now, and he opens his eyes slowly, pupils wide. They lock on Dunk, who stares back with his mouth agape and a lurid flush across his cheeks. Lyonel just smiles, the points of his teeth flashing, before he was using his hold on the back of your neck and shifting your line of sight towards the tent flap, his cock still deep inside your mouth.

“Here’s our knight, little doe,” Lyonel breathes softly, petting the back of your head. You moan around his cock, watery eyes finding Dunk’s with a silent plea that has the giant man’s cock jerking within his breeches. Lyonel hums, eyes fluttering closed for just a moment before they open, and he was looking Dunk up and down. “He’s a big lad, isn’t he?”

You moan your agreement around his cock again, your fist gripping the base in short, jagged strokes. Dunk can’t maintain the heaviness of Lyonel’s eye contact, and his eyes drop to watch the stretch of your mouth and the shine of spittle coating the lord’s cock.

He can’t speak. An invisible hand has seized his throat.

“Must I extend a formal invitation?” Lyonel utters, leaning back against the floor-level chaise with one arm stretched across the back. That arm raises two fingers, crooking them in Dunk’s direction, while his other hand pets the back of your head.

Dunk takes one step forward, almost out of instinct, but then stops. He swallows thickly, eyes darting between your pretty face and Lyonel, who was staring at him with a predatory glint in his eyes. Less the preyed buck, more the hunting wolf.

“M-my lord…” Dunk finally manages to grind out, but it tapers off when you whimper around Lyonel’s cock, the tip nudging towards the back of your throat. Your hand is tugging your husband’s trousers too, fingers and palm shifting to cup his balls, earning a rumbling groan from Lyonel’s chest.

“You have won the attention of the buck and his doe,” Lyonel drawls, hand brushing across the back of your head as if he were petting a cat. “We would care for you to join us, if you so wish. If not, leave now so I can get my cock sucked by my pretty wife in peace.”

You moan something around Lyonel’s cock, brows furrowing just so, and that makes Lyonel chuckle. His hand returns to the nape of your neck and pushes, eliciting a gag from the back of your throat as his tip hit inwards.

Dunk gapes, flexing his fingers. Of course he wants this. Of course he wants Lyonel, but most of all, of course he wants you. Only a stupid man would let this opportunity slip through his grasp.

So he takes another step forward, and something mischievous flashes in Lyonel’s eyes.

“That’s a good lad,” the lord utters, watching as Dunk willfully crossed the tent. The hedge knight slowly drops to his knees, just on the edge of the cushions, his light eyes roaming along the arch of your back, following the dip of your spine and the curve of your arse. Lyonel smiles, nodding down at you. “You can touch her, Ser Duncan. As a matter of fact, I believe she would have my head if I did not allow you to.”

At your husband’s words, you hum around him, squeezing his balls just tightly enough for him to release a shuddered exhale.

Dunk’s arms tentatively extend, and reach across to trail his hands down your sides. Your eyes close in bliss as the warmth of his palms and fingers smooth down your waist, running hot against the threadbare material. Dunk watches closely as your body reacts, curiosity boiling-hot within him as your back arches further as his two large hands run across the curve of your arse. The material of your nightgown sits just where your arse meets your thigh, and Dunk drops his head to the side, finding you bare of any smallclothes.

His mouth drops open, your pussy slick between the fat of your thighs. “Oh, Seven above…”

Lyonel watches Dunk carefully, his tongue pressing to the corner of his mouth as he smiles. He notices the way the hedge knight’s hands still at your hips, as well as the thick imprint of his cock in his trousers.

“Take what you need,” Lyonel says, his hand leaving the nape of your neck. Palm coarse with sword-hilt callouses, he drags it along your spine slowly until he finds Dunk’s hand. He grasps it then, and Dunk’s breath hitches, as he allows the lord to shift his hand over the split of your arse and dip between your thighs. Lyonel presses Dunk’s hand onto your wet core, and you let out a loud moan around his cock.

“Gods,” Dunk whispers, the pads of two of his fingers finding your clit. You keen at the feeling as your husband’s hand pushes incessantly.

“Have you ever seen a pussy as pretty as this?” Lyonel asks, cocking his head and watching the heat that rises up Dunk’s neck. The larger man’s eyes don’t leave you, watching obediently as Lyonel’s hand begins to move, guiding Dunk’s fingers to grind circles into the bud of your clit.

“I—” Dunk breathes. “I—I haven’t, uh—”

Lyonel pauses, and so do you.

Slowly, you drag your mouth off of Lyonel’s cock, wiping the back of your hand across your mouth as you look over your shoulder at the blushing knight. Lyonel’s strong hand keeps Duncan’s pressed firmly to your core.

“Have you lay with a woman before?” Lyonel questions. There’s a subtle, mocking humour in his tone, but it is largely overwhelmed by genuine gentleness. You watch with watery eyes as Dunk’s ears flush a brilliant red, his eyes snapping away from the slick heat of your pussy to find both yours and Lyonel’s eyes on him.

He groans, attempting to draw his hand away, but Lyonel doesn’t let him. The lord’s mouth curves into a wolfish grin, eyes flitting between Dunk’s bashful expression and the large tent in the front of his trousers. Then, he bends, and presses a tender kiss to the top of your head.

“Our poor knight, little doe,” Lyonel mutters, hand finally releasing Dunk’s. It finds your hip as he guides you into a sitting position between his spread legs. “Has never been inside a cunt in all his life. Never tasted one, hm? Never had a pretty mouth wrap around that big cock.”

The lewdness of Lyonel’s words make Dunk moan, the sound strangled in his throat as the lord angles his leg and presses the ball of his foot against the knight’s covered cock. You watch the interaction with butterflies ravaging your stomach as Dunk’s head drops, lips parting in pants, strands of his shaggy hair brushing over his furrowed eyebrows.

“Our poor boy,” you whisper, and Dunk’s head shoots back up to look at you. His pupils are so wide in the bright candlelight that his irises appear black.

Slowly, you spread your legs, hooking them over Lyonel’s, exposing your core. You can feel the way your hole drools—courtesy of Lyonel’s tongue and fingers prior to Dunk’s arrival—and coats the soft curve of your arse. Dunk’s breath hitches.

Lyonel drags a hand down your front before wrapping his fingers around the hem of your nightgown. In one deft movement, he rips it over your head, your breasts spilling out into the warm air of the tent.

“Come on, Ser Duncan,” Lyonel says as his two large hands shift to pinch at your slowly hardening nipples. You whine, hips twitching, and the sound makes Dunk’s cock leak into his breeches. Lyonel kneads the flesh of your breasts as he speaks. “Put your mouth on my wife.”

Dunk pulls his tunic over his head, burning hot before he’s crawling between your spread legs. His muscles ripple as he drags himself onto the ground, chest raised slightly against the cushions as his hands find the flesh of your thighs. He lifts his eyes to watch your face as he massages you there, big hands strong and firm.

You moan softly, rolling your head back to capture your husband’s mouth. You moan again, louder this time, as your tongues meet, and Dunk feels something tighten in his gut as he watches the way your mouths move together, tongues meeting in flicks and curls. The sound of spit swapping has his ears burning hotter too, and he watches, transfixed, on the way Lyonel kisses you and cups your breasts simultaneously. Your body trembles in his hold, and Dunk marvels at the rapid rise and fall of your chest.

Then, a hand finds his head. Blindly, you thread your fingers into his hair and grip tight enough for Dunk to whimper. Smiling against Lyonel’s mouth, you push down on the knight’s head and guide him towards the heat of your pussy. Dunk whimpers again when he breathes in the smell of you, warmth washing over his lower face as he dips forward. He presses a chaste kiss to your bud, before he nuzzles it with his nose as he shifts his head downwards. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but this feels right.

Your head tips back, and Lyonel’s teeth nip along the line of your jaw. Your fingers tighten in Dunk’s soft hair, your hips twitching as you urge him closer.

“Just like that, Dunk, just like that,” you whisper, Lyonel sucking kisses down the curve of your neck now, rolling your nipples between his thumb and forefingers.

Dunk opens his mouth against you, the thick of his tongue pushing through your slick folds. He groans when he tastes you—heady, warm, a clean-water musk—on his tongue, and his stomach clenches tightly again at the way his vibrations make you quiver.

After licking a trail of wet kisses along your neck, Lyonel pitches his chin on your shoulder, beard tickling your skin, peering down at the large man nestled between his wife’s thighs. He watches the way Dunk’s hips jerk against the firm floor, the way his bare back, littered with small scars, tenses with restrained strength as his hands grip you. Lyonel listens to the way small, breathy moans fall from your lips as Dunk’s tongue works down, and down still, until finally, the lord knows when his tongue enters you, as your body tenses up and a high-pitch whine fills the tent.

“That’s a good lad,” Lyonel utters, sinking his teeth into your shoulder for a moment before licking over the shallow indents. “Make my wife come.”

Dunk moans into your heat, and you moan back. Lyonel’s wet cock twitches heavily against your back as one of his hands moves from your breasts and trails over your stomach. It travels over your mound, and then finds your pussy, middle and ring finger pressing tightly to your puffy clit. You whine, and Dunk’s eyes lift to find Lyonel’s hand inches from his face.

Lyonel draws circles across your clit, your stomach clenching tightly, pleasure quickly tingling up your spread legs. Dunk’s tongue is warm and thick and big inside you, your pussy stretching around the muscle as he curls and thrusts without a discernible rhythm. You dry to guide him, to settle his nerves, with your hand in your hair, and it works for the most part. He bobs his head, eyes falling closed as he whines through his panting as his tongue moves in and out. The sounds are wet and obscene, and it makes his ears burn even hotter than before.

“Dunk,” you whine out, hips bucking to meet his face. “Please, please, I’m—”

Lyonel kisses behind your ear as he works his fingers over your clit. “Good girl, little doe, tell our knight you’re going to come for him.”

You choke on a moan, body fiery hot. “Oh, gods, Dunk, I’m—ah, you’re going to make me—make me come.”

Your words force a groan from the deepest part of Dunk’s chest as he continues to work his tongue. He doesn’t dare change the pace, or the rhythm, or the pressure. He keeps steady, jaw practically unhinged as he laps up the ichor of your pussy. He’s never had anything like this before, and he’s not sure if he’ll ever be able to get enough.

You shake, body strung tight, before the pressure in the base of your belly is splitting into thousands of pieces and you come with a shaky moan into Dunk’s mouth. He moans into you as you gush, pussy drooling across his tongue and dribbling out the corners of his mouth. Lyonel’s fingers work you through it, tapping your swollen clit a couple more times before his hand is pushing Dunk’s head away.

Dunk whines, petulant, as Lyonel’s fingers dip into the slick that leaks from your hole. He shoves himself all the way to the knuckle, and you stutter around a surprised gasp as he pumps you once, twice, three times before retracting. Then, while your hand still grips Dunk’s hair, he presses his fingers to the knight’s lips.

“Suck,” Lyonel orders simply, and Dunk’s mouth opens instantly. A dog following the orders of his master. Lyonel pushes his fingers into Dunk’s mouth as you fizzle down from your high, the taller man’s tongue instinctively wrapping around the digits. His eyes are glossy, brow pinched as he looks up at Lyonel. The tears that well in his lashline have you moaning for him, hands shifting to cup his flushed face.

“Oh, gods, Dunk, you’re such a good boy,” you tell him, patting his cheeks.

He closes his eyes, leaning into your touch as he sucks on Lyonel’s fingers. You can hear Lyonel puffing against you, feel the deep rise and fall of his chest at your back, feel the heavy twitch of his cock behind you as well.

You run your thumb over Dunk’s cheekbone, directing your next sentence at your husband. “I need his cock inside me.”

Dunk’s eyes wrench open as Lyonel pulls his fingers away.

“You heard the lady, Duncan,” Lyonel says boldly. “Now take your fucking trousers off.”

Dunk scrambles to his feet, and you crane your neck to watch him untie his trousers and shuck them down his legs. His breeches follow, and both you and your husband moan softly at the knight’s cock, hard but drooping under the weight. The giant sinks back to his knees, one large hand clutching the base of his cock, the side of his hand lowered against the thatch of light hair at the base. Even swallowed by the size of his hand, Dunk’s cock is huge: thick and long, ridged with veins along the underside, head a painfully bruised red, slit wet with precum.

“Mm–uh,” Dunk breathes through a moan, clutching his heavy cock, eyes staring at your wet cunt. “S’not—It won’t… uh, m’too big.”

Lyonel laughs, the sound making Dunk shrink back a little. The storm lord tuts as his hands rub up and down your sides idly. “Oh, you’ll fit, sweet boy. Our little doe isn’t as fragile as you think—isn’t that right, my lady?”

You nod eagerly, eyes on Dunk’s cock. Despite your enthusiasm, the muscles of your stomach clench with nerves, your pussy tightening around nothing as you take in the sight of him. He’s bigger than Lyonel, bigger than the guard your husband practically spit-roasted you with three moons ago, and bigger than anyone you’d ever even seen.

But it’ll fit. You know it will.

“I’ll show you,” you utter softly, pulling yourself up and away from your husband, who lets you go with a smack to your arse. 

You wrap your hand around Dunk’s wrist and guide him over to the chaise, clambering onto his lap and pushing him down against the pillows. His head finds Lyonel’s chest, and he looks up with round eyes and parted lips as Lyonel’s hands find the sides of his face. As that happens, you’re taking Dunk’s cock in your hand, fingers barely reaching all the way around his girth, and the foreign contact makes Dunk groan. It’s whiny and desperate, and mirrors the way his cock drools in your hand, leaping with each small squeeze of your fingers.

Lyonel holds Dunk’s face tenderly and leans down. His lips press a small kiss to the larger man’s cheek, then his cheekbone, then the corner of his mouth. Dunk whines, and it’s him that turns his head to push their lips together. It’s brief, but wet and deep, Lyonel’s tongue too dominant, too strong. Their teeth clack together, and Dunk’s pulling away with a whimper when the lord’s teeth find his bottom lip.

You huff, stroking Dunk’s cock. “Lyonel.”

Lyonel lifts his head, eyes sparkling. “What?”

“You have to be gentle,” you say pointedly, straddling Dunk’s hips and leaning forward with your other hand pressed to the warmth of his bare chest. “Need to take care of him.”

Dunk ducks his head to meet your movements, his mouth slotting to yours and the sound he makes has pleasure searing up your spine. It’s a breathy whimper of your name as your tongues meet, and you’re so much more gentle than your husband. So much sweeter, so much softer. There’s no teeth, just the languid stroke of your smaller tongue against his, your lips across his, as your hand idly strokes along the length of his cock.

A grumbling purr leaves Lyonel’s chest. “Yeah, that’s it. That’s a good girl, being so gentle with our poor knight.”

His hands stroke Dunk’s face as you pull away slowly, a string of saliva connecting your lips. Dunk pouts when it snaps and you sit straighter in his lap. Suddenly, you’re grinding your wet slit across the heat of his length, and his breath stutters against his ribs at the flush of pleasure that overtakes him.

“Now…” Lyonel leans down to whisper in Dunk’s ear, teeth skimming the shell of his ear. “Our pretty little doe is going to show you just how good she is, okay? And you’re going to be a good lad and count the inches. You can count, can’t you?”

Dunk nods dumbly.

“Good boy. Now hold her hips.”

He does. The hedge knight reaches up and places two massive paws on your hips as you angle his cock to your hole, the fat head hot against you. You whine out, chewing on your bottom lip as you lower yourself gently until the tip all but pops inside you with only a small amount of slick resistance. The pressure is heavenly, and Dunk feels his eyes threaten to roll to the back of his head as heat envelops him. His balls twitch, the muscles in his lower abdomen contracting harshly. His fingers grip against your hips.

“That’s it, now fucking count,” Lyonel utters darkly, tone heavy with lust.

Dunk blows out a breath as you begin sinking down, your brow furrowed as you take him an inch at a time. Dunk doesn’t quite know his exact measurements—or numerical measurements, really—but you help him. Each time you stop and tremble against him, a soft mutter of Duncan or so big leaving your mouth, he whispers out a number.

“One… two…” He grits out, and he watches as your pretty little pussy swallows more and more of him. He holds you firmly, scared of hurting you, eyes finding your face as it screws up. Not in pain, but in pleasure. He continues breathlessly. “Three… f-four…f-uh-five…”

Another inch, and then another.

One of Lyonel’s hands strokes Dunk’s chest, thumb brushing a scar beneath the curve of his pectoral muscle. Dunk’s counting becomes stuttered, more of him sucked into the tight, wet clutch of your cunt as Lyonel’s finger flicks over one of his nipples.

And he’s still whispering in his ear all the while. “You’re a proper knight now, huh? Got a pretty sheath for that big fucking sword, yeah? S’all yours, lad. What’s mine is yours.”

Another inch, and gods, then another.

He fits.

By the Seven, he fits, and he lets out the loudest fucking groan as you finally take all of him. You whimper his name so sweetly that he’s scared he’ll spill straight away, pleasure hot in his belly, balls painfully tight. He’s never felt anything like this. It’s euphoric.

“Tell her to move,” Lyonel orders. “She won’t move until you tell her. She’s a good girl like that.”

You sit so pretty on his lap, waiting patiently. Your hands are on Dunk’s stomach, your legs trembling either side of his wide hips.

Dunk whispers your name. “Please move. Please.”

You smile down at him, before raising yourself, dragging your cunt upwards and then slamming yourself down onto him. Dunk’s moan gets caught in his throat as you lift yourself again, then drop back down. The stretch knots pleasure tight above your womb, a dull pain lingering at the edges as the thick head of his cock rams against your gummy posterior wall, nudging towards the plug of your cervix. His hands are impossibly heavy on your hips, the muscles in his arms working as he helps lift your weight.

Your pussy is so slick that his ruts begin to glide, slick dripping down his balls as his hips start to lift. He meets you as you work yourself onto him.

“Uh, uh, fuck—” he moans as he watches the way you practically bounce in his lap.

Meanwhile, Lyonel’s hands feather across the larger man’s ribs, his mouth sucking harsh, bruising marks along the strong curve of his shoulder. He presses his nose to the thrumming pulse beneath Dunk’s ear, kissing it gently.

“Tell me how good she feels,” Lyonel whispers to his knight.

“S-so good, my lord,” Dunk replies, words strained, strung taut with pleasure. “Feels—uh, fuck—feels so fucking good.”

Lyonel lifts a hand from Dunk’s side and beckons you to him. With a huff, you lean forward, anchoring your hands against Dunk’s broad chest. Your husband’s hand wraps around the front of Dunk’s throat as he meets you at his shoulder. You kiss, and Dunk turns to watch your lips slot together, the two of you panting into each other’s mouth as Lyonel grinds his cock against Dunk’s lower back, and you continue the stuttering movements of your hips. Dunk slants his head up, his forehead pressing to the warm skin of your cheek as he whines for the both of you.

Lyonel smiles into your mouth, and you return it. The hand on Dunk’s throat tightens a fraction as it forces his chin up. You hum out from the back of your throat as you and Lyonel both press your mouths to Dunk’s, lips parting against his, tongues converging. Dunk groans into the kiss, his hips bucking faster to meet your lazy grinding, hands trailing downwards to knead at the fat of your arse. He’s drunk on the taste of you both; Lyonel’s tongue mellowed with the taste of arbor gold, yours sweet with honey.

The hedge knight is quivering beneath you, and you pull out of the kiss to drop your hips onto him faster. Skin-on-skin, hurried slapping. You pant, mewling his name as you chase the high that builds thick amongst the warmth of your womb, pleasure blurring the edges of your vision like a black-lined tunnel.

“Told you you’ll fit,” Lyonel utters, fingers swiping up and down the column of Dunk’s throat. He feels the bob of the knight’s nervous swallowing beneath his palm. “Gods, fits like a fucking glove, doesn’t it? Our little doe’s pussy’s just made for you—made to take that big fucking cock, huh? Just look at her, Duncan. Look at the way she takes all of you.”

Dunk moans. “Gods—”

His cock twitches inside you, and you whine, looking down at the knight below you with soft eyes. “Dunk, need you to spill inside me. Please.”

Dunk’s mouth drops open. When he doesn’t hear a response from the lord behind him, he peers up, finding Lyonel smiling, canines flashing as he watches his wife.

“Well?” Lyonel looks down at Dunk, still smiling. “You heard our lady. Be a good knight and do what you’re told.”

Dunk knew what it felt like to release, mainly over his knuckles in the privacy of a forest clearing, or a dilapidated room in a quiet inn. But he knew this was about to be a whole different experience as something hot burned through the base of his belly, zapped along his spine and bloomed through his chest.

The warm clutch of your cunt sucks his cock in with each thrust, the head rutting up against the base of your cervix, and he can’t help the moan of your name that falls from his lips as he comes. His balls tighten and his cock twitches, seeming to swell inside you as he releases—pump after pump, filling you as you continue to move.

You groan, thrusts quickening as your orgasm builds, spurred by the warmth flooding you. “Fuck, Dunk—that’s it, that’s a good boy.”

You come apart not long after. The knot in your belly springs apart again and you clamp down around him, fingers curling against the soft muscle of his abdomen. Your head rolls back and your wanton moans fill the tent, a mixture of curses, pleas, and whimpers of his name as you rock yourself in your lap, chasing the shadows of your retreating orgasm as it slips from you slowly, slowly, until you still. You pant above him, and he caresses your hips as you lean forward, collapsing onto his chest with a grunt.

Dunk presses a kiss to your forehead, arms wrapping around you. His cock remains wedged inside of you though, only half-soft.

Above you both, Lyonel chuckles. His hands pat along Dunk’s head, and down your back, soothing his wife and his knight, bathed beautifully in the candlelight of the tent.

After allowing a moment of respite, the lord grows slightly restless, cock still painfully hard against Dunk’s back. So, he takes his hands and grips the two of you on the backs of your necks, guiding your heads to one another until he’s all but forcing you to kiss.

It is welcomed, and you and Dunk drink in each other’s whimpers as your mouths meet, lips lax with pleasure. You barely move, just swapping air and spit with lazed tongues as Lyonel watches, rutting his hips against the strong, firm muscles of Dunk’s back.

“That’s it, that’s it,” Lyonel mutters, before he’s using all of his strength to push the two of you to the side. You squeak as Lyonel switches the position of you both until you’re splayed either side of his lap, still holding the napes of your necks. Then, with as much boldness as you would find usual of your husband, he guides your kissing mouths to the head of his hard cock, your lips meeting against the sensitive skin of the tip. Lyonel groans, “That’s it, doing so well for your lord, just fuckin—hngh—”

He spills against you and Dunk’s conjoined faces, seed splattering your lips and skin in warm spurts. He groans your name mainly, but Dunk’s is thrown in there too, as his hips rock against the cushions and his hands go limp on your neck. You and Dunk pull apart, staring at one another with glossy eyes and parted, kiss-swollen lips.

“Are you okay?” You ask Dunk gently, reaching a hand up to wipe some of Lyonel’s cum from Dunk’s cheek.

Dunk nods. “This… this was great.”

You can’t help but laugh.

Lyonel pats the knight on the top of the head like a puppy. “We told you, Ser Duncan, you’re our knight, and you’ve got our attention. I think you’ll look good in black and gold, wouldn’t you agree, little doe?”

“Mhm,” you hum, kissing Dunk as he blushes.

———

He stares at you. "You wanted to?"

"Mmhm." You poke his chest. "Everyone does it… Just wanted to see what it was allabout."

His expression is torn between frustration and concern. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

You pout. "You're mean."

"I'm not mean. I'm honest. There's a difference."

You turn your face away, your bottom lip trembling. Totally not trying to break down "You're always so mean to me."

"I'm not-" He stops. Sighs. Rubs his forehead. "Fine. I'm sorry. There. I said it. Are you happy?"

You peek at him. "You never say sorry."

"I know. That's how you know I mean it."

You eye him suspiciously. "You're only saying it because I'm drunk and won't remember."

He doesn't deny it. He just hauls you over his shoulder and carries you out of the tavern.

"You're impossible," he mutters.

"You love me."

He also doesn’t deny that. But his arm tightens around your legs, pulling you closer, and you feel him press a kiss to your hip through your dress.

Daeron - Daeron is used to being the drunk one. He's the one who stumbles, who slurs, who needs to be carried home. He's the one who wakes up with a headache and no memory of the night before. That's his role. That's who he is.

You're the one who helps him. You hold his hair back when he's sick, bring him water when he's dry, stroke his forehead when the world won't stop spinning. You never complain. You never make him feel guilty.

So when he finds you swaying on your feet, your cheeks flushed, your words running together, he doesn't know what to do.

"You're drunk….?" he asks, staring at you, ABSOLUTELY bewildered.

"Mmhm." You grin at him, wobbling slightly. "I wanted to see what the fuss was about."

"The fuss?"

"Being drunk. You do it all the time. I thought it might be fun."

He blinks. "Is it?"

"So far." You hiccup. "My head feels funny."

He reaches out to steady you, his hands on your waist. You lean into him, your face pressed against his chest.

"You're warm," you mumble. "Daeron?"

"Yes?"

"I think I'm going to be sick."

His eyes widen. He grabs a bucket, shoves it under your chin, and holds your hair back as you empty the contents of your stomach. He's done this for himself a hundred times before he met you. Doing it for you is different. Worse. He hates seeing you like this.

When you're done, you slump against him, your face pale, your eyes closed.

"I don't like being drunk," you whisper.

"I know."

"How do you do this all the time?"

He doesn't have an answer. He just carries you to bed, helps you drink some water, and lies down beside you.

"Please stay," you murmur, already half asleep.

"I'm not going anywhere."

He holds you until you fall asleep. And for the first time in a long time, he thinks maybe he should drink less. For you.

Duncan - Duncan has never seen you drunk before so he’s really curious and veryyyy amused. You're usually so composed, so put together. The epitome of class. But tonight, you're a giggling, stumbling, mess and your words are an incoherent mess. But not all of it.

"You're very tall," you inform him, poking his chest.

"Thank you."

"S'not a compliment. 'S an observation."

He bites back a laugh. "My apologies."

You tilt your head, studying him. "You have pretty eyes."

Now he's definitely blushing. "Thank you."

"Heh, you’re blushing!”

"It's cold."

"It's not cold." You reach up and cup his face in your hands. "You're warm. Everything about you is warm."

He doesn't know what to say to that. So he just stands there, letting you hold his face, your thumbs stroking his cheekbones.

"I like you," you say. "I like you a lot."

"I like you too."

"No, I mean-" You huff in frustration. "I like you. Like... like like."

His heart swells and he gulps. "I know."

"You know?"

"I know."

You beam at him, he thinks it’s the cutest thing ever, and he decides right then that he's going to marry you someday. It’s been on his mind for awhile, anyway. This is just encouragement.

Valarr - Valarr is in his study, a stack of old scrolls spread across his desk, when you stumble through the door. You're flushed, giggling, your hair a mess.

"You're supposed to be in bed," he says, setting down his quill.

"I missed you."

He looks at you, observing you suspiciously. Your cheeks are pink, your eyes are glassy, and you're swaying slightly on your feet.

"You're drunk.” he says a matter of factly

"Mmhm." You cross the room and try to climb into his lap, but you're unsteady, your movements clumsy. He catches you before you fall, his hands firm on your waist, guiding you down onto his thighs.

"You're going to hurt yourself," he murmurs.

"You're going to catch me."

He sighs, but his arms come around you, pulling you close. "What am I going to do with you?"

You shrug, nestling into his chest. "Love me?"

"I already do."

You look up at him, your eyes wide and earnest. "Say it again."

"I love you."

You smile, bright and blinding. "Again."

He kisses your forehead. "I love you."

"Again."

He kisses your nose. "I love you."

"Again."

He kisses your lips, soft and slow. "I love you. Now go to sleep."

You shake your head. "Don't wanna."

"Too bad." He stands, lifting you easily, and carries you to bed. He lays you down gently, pulling the blankets up to your chin.

"Stay with me," you murmur.

"I'm not going anywhere."

He lies down beside you, pulling you against his chest. His hand finds yours under the covers, fingers interlacing.

"You're so warm," you mumble.

"Go to sleep, sweetheart."

"Will you be here when I wake up?"

"Always."

You smile, your eyes already closing. "Good."

When you wake the next morning, your head is pounding and your mouth is dry. You groan, rolling over, and find a tray on the bedside table. Water. Fresh bread. A bowl of honeyed porridge. A small vial of hangover medicine from the maesters, already measured out. And Valarr, sitting in the chair by the window, watching you like he’s been up for hours.

"Good morning," he says.

"You did all this?"

He shrugs, but his ears are pink. "You needed it."

You sit up, reaching for the water. "Thank you."

Not like a courtier making a show of it, like you’ve seen dozens do over the years to gain your favour. He kneels the way a devout man might kneel before a shrine; slow, careful, almost reverent. His head bows deeply. His huge hands rest on his thighs, palms open, offering before he even speaks.

“Your Grace,” he says, voice shaking in its quietness.

You reach for him automatically, to make him stand, to remind him he doesn’t need to offer himself to you, but he catches your hand in both of his, holding it as though it is a sacred thing, as though touching you is the riskiest thing he’s ever dared.

“I am your man,” he declares, lifting his eyes to meet yours at last.

There is nothing hungry in it. Nothing greedy or selfish. Only devotion so earnest it threatens to break him in half.

“Please,” he breathes, not begging for your affection, but for the right to serve you. “Your man. Your protector.”

He lowers his forehead to your knuckles in a gesture so old, so honest, it feels like a ritual older than any throne.

“I’ll guard you,” Dunk murmurs, voice thick. “With my life. Until you send me away, I am yours.”

And the pure sincerity of it—the way he means every word with the whole of his enormous, gentle heart—settles around you like a finest cloak.

BAELOR

You don’t mean anything by it.

It’s little more than a courteous exchange, a lord offering some practiced compliment, his hand hovering a fraction too close to your waist. You step back before it becomes improper, but Baelor notices it. He always does. His posture never breaks, his face never shifts, yet something in him tightens like a bow quietly drawn.

He finishes his conversation with perfect civility, but his gaze finds you across the hall with an intensity that pins you in place.

“My wolf,” he says when he reaches you, voice low, velvet-edged. “Walk with me.”

Not a question. Not truly a command, either. Something gentler, deeper; a request he expects you to honour.

You follow him into a quieter alcove, torchlight haloing the stretch of his shoulders. He waits until the sounds of the hall soften into a distant hum before turning to you fully.

He doesn’t look angry. He looks steady, frighteningly so.

“Tell me,” he murmurs, stepping close enough that your breath catches, “did you welcome his attention?”

Your denial rises instinctively, but Baelor shakes his head once, too slow and knowing.

“No,” he cuts it in smoothly. “I already know your answer.”

He reaches up, brushing your cheek with the backs of his fingers. The touch is soft, but his eyes are not. They burn, some relentless, contained thing, but blazing from within all the same.

“He looked at you as if he had earned the right,” Baelor continues, voice a quiet burn. “As if you could be swayed by someone who has never learned the shape of your silences. The strength of your will.”

Your pulse stumbles. He feels it, his hand drifting from your cheek to the delicate column of your throat, fingertips skimming with a reverent, soft pressure.

“Baelor—”

His thumb presses lightly beneath your jaw, stilling the word.

“You forget,” he says, leaning in until your lips almost brush, “why you choose me. Every day.”

Heat flares through you. He sees it, tastes it in the hungry little hitch of your breath, and something shifts in his expression, too; something tender and devastating all at once.

“I see you,” Baelor murmurs. “Not the title. You. The woman who stands like winter and burns hotter than any summer sun. The one no man commands.”

He leans closer, his breath ghosting your mouth.

“The man in that hall saw what he wanted.” His voice drops, darkening. “I see what is.”

Your hands curl into the front of his tunic without conscious thought. His fingers linger against the flutter of your pulse, feeling, counting.

“I am your man,” he breathes, the words rich and rumbling in the quiet between you, “and you are my wolf.”

His head bows, your brows almost touching. “And I am not in the habit,” he whispers mildly, “of letting anyone mistake that.”

His thumb strokes your pulse once, reverently, like he’s memorizing the beat of belonging he feels there. When he finally draws back, his voice is barely more than breath.

“You choose me,” he finishes softly, “and gods willing, I will spend every breath proving why you were right to.”

LYONEL

You catch him lounging again where he shouldn’t be. Sprawled across a cushioned bench in a sun-soaked corridor, boots up, tunic half-laced, every inch of him radiating the smug indolence of a man who has escaped three meetings and one summons from the Hand.

“Stormlord,” you call his title on purpose, arching a brow. “You are meant to be in council.”

He brightens instantly, as though you’ve delivered him from execution.

“Ah,” Lyonel sighs, hand over his heart, “and here I thought you’d come to rescue me.”

You don’t dignify that with an answer. You only stand there, waiting, tapping your fingers lightly against your hip. He watches the movement with far too much interest.

Then, with a groan clearly meant to amuse you, Lyonel pushes himself upright, stretching like a cat waking from a pleasant nap.

“You know,” he says, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve, “it’s a terrible burden, serving the crown as Stormlord.”

“Oh?” you ask, dry as northern tree bark.

“Mm.” He nods gravely. “Endless storms. Endless paperwork. Endless dull old men droning in my ear about grain.” His eyes sparkle, sharp and devious. “One wonders why I ever agreed to it.”

“Your duty?” you offer. “Your birthright?”

He scoffs. “Hardly that. Duty is for respectable men.”

“And what are you?” you ask.

Lyonel steps closer, grin tilting, voice dropping just enough to slip under your skin.

“Hopeless.”

You blink, genuinely puzzled and wary. “Hopeless?”

“Utterly.” He leans in, brushing a loose strand of hair from your cheek with the back of his fingers, a gesture so soft it contradicts every careless word he’s ever spoken to you. “Hopelessly devoted. Hopelessly distracted. Hopelessly inclined to ignore half the realm if you’re standing in the same room.”

Your pulse jumps. He notices it, drinks it in with a knowing little twitch of his lips. And still he keeps smiling that bright, infuriating smile of his that hides a blade.

“You think I bend knee to the crown?” Lyonel wonders, soft and idle, near ponderous. “Gods, no. I serve because you sit beside it.”

You open your mouth, but he cuts you off with a laugh, shaking his head.

“Don’t look so startled,” he says. “I’ve never pretended to be honourable. Only reliable.” His voice softens, the joke thinning into something bare and earnest. “For you, at least.”

Then, with a ridiculous, court-mocking flourish, he drops into a half-bow, pressing your hand to his lips.

“Your man,” Lyonel announces lightly.

It should sound unserious, perhaps ridiculing, coming from him. It should be nothing but flirtation. But the way Lyonel looks up at you from under his lashes ruins that lie completely, because his eyes are warm, molten, and far too honest.

“Please,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Your man.”

You feel the truth of it like a physical thing. And Lyonel—reckless, radiant, irreverent Lyonel—straightens with a wink, already turning toward the corridor as if he hasn’t just cracked open something dangerous between you.

“Well,” he tosses over his shoulder, “if I must endure council for the crown, I expect you to repay the suffering with at least one smile.”

He pauses mid step.

“And perhaps,” he adds, voice dipping sweet and sinful, “a reminder later that being your man is not entirely thankless.”

Then he disappears around the corner, leaving you standing in a wash of sun, breath unsteady, pulse still chasing the shape of his words.

AERION

You hear him long before you see him.

A shift of floorboards, a breath held too long. That sharp, restless presence you know like you know your own heartbeat. The hour is late, the castle asleep, and the fire in your chamber has burned down to embers when he appears in the doorway. Barefoot, shirt half-laced, pale hair mussed as if he has raked his hands through it a hundred times.

“Aerion,” you speak quietly into the dark. “You should be asleep.”

He huffs a soft, humorless laugh. “I can’t.”

Of course he can’t. He never sleeps well when something stirs in him. He’s half longing, half nightmares, and mostly just dark, destructive desire. All of it bruises him the same way.

He stands there a moment as though deciding whether he should leave.

He doesn’t.

He crosses the room in three slow steps, and when he reaches you, he doesn’t ask permission. He never asks. He waits, just long enough to be denied if you choose to deny him, and when you don’t speak, he sinks down beside the chair and lays his head in your lap.

The breath you draw catches.

Aerion exhales like someone drowning who has finally reached air. His cheek presses to your thigh. One hand curls loosely at your knee, not gripping, only holding, as though he needs the anchor more than he needs dignity.

“Nightmares?” you ask.

He shakes his head. His voice is low, dark, a whisper cracked at the edges.

“No. Just… you weren’t in my dreams tonight.”

Danger coils under the words, but so does something fragile, something almost childlike in its honesty.

Your fingers hesitate above his hair. He waits, more patiently than he does for anything in the harsh honesty of daylight. The moment you finally touch him—lightly, barely—Aerion’s entire body loosens. His eyes slip shut. He turns his face a fraction toward your hand, toward the warmth, toward you.

“Aerion,” you murmur warningly.

He smiles into the fabric of your nightrobe. A slow, wicked, aching thing.

“Don’t send me away,” he says. “Not tonight. I can’t bear it.”

You thread your fingers through his pale hair despite yourself, and the sharp, thrilled breath he sucks in nearly undoes you. He nuzzles closer, his voice dropping to something fevered:

“You have no idea what you do to me when you touch me like this.”

Your pulse kicks, and he hears it. You know he does. His fingers trace a line along your calf, ever so slowly, savouring, nothing like the arrogant confidence he wears by daylight.

Then, muffled against your lap, dangerous and tender in the same breath:

“Aunt.”

An aching little prayer, a bruise, a surrender.

“I am your man.”

The words scrape out of him like confession, not performance, a truth he can’t hold back in the dark. His hand tightens just slightly at your knee, enough to tremble, not enough to trap.

“Please,” he whispers, silky and dark, breath hot against the thin cloth. “Your man.”

There is hunger in it—wildfire desire that could consume a kingdom, you think grimly—but beneath that, horrifyingly, unmistakably, is need. The kind he would burn the world to keep hidden. The kind he brings only to you, only when the night strips him down to something raw and desperate and hungry.

Aerion turns his head just enough to look up at you, eyes molten, lashes casting shadows on his cheek.

“If you send me away,” he tells you softly, “I’ll go mad.”

Your hand is still in his hair.

And Aerion leans into it like a creature starved for gentleness, letting the fire paint his features in gold and ruin.

“Let me stay,” he breathes. “Let me be yours. Just for this hour. Just until the sun comes.”

He closes his eyes again, as though surrender is safer than looking at you.

“As if,” he murmurs, voice dark silk, “I was ever anything else.”

MAEKAR

It starts in the hall.

Snow has fallen from the hills all day, light at first, then heavier, thickening on the stone steps and clinging to men’s beards as they come in off the yard. The fire roars pleasantly; the air smells of smoke and wet wool and something stewing in a great black pot at the back. Men are loud with drink and the comfort of their own safe keep.

Which is always when someone decides to be brave and foolish.

“He wears our colours well enough, m’lady,” one of your father’s bannermen says, not quite slurring yet. “Talks like he means it, too. But steel’s still southern under it, my lady. Dragon’s a dragon. We’ll see if he holds when the winter truly bites.”

It’s not meant as an insult, not even as an accusation. Northerners are too blunt for such games. It’s worry, spoken poorly but sincerely. The words find their way across the firelight well enough regardless.

At the high table, Maekar pauses with his cup halfway to his mouth.

He doesn’t look over. Doesn’t ask the man to repeat himself. There is just the smallest tightening along his jaw, as if something in him has clenched and he’s set his teeth around it.

You answer, because it is expected of you and because you would have done so even if it weren’t. Your voice is even, and your words are Winterfell’s words, your father’s words, as sharp and cold and sure as the stones underfoot.

The matter dies, on the surface. Men shift, placated. Someone calls for more ale. The conversation turns again, as it always does, back to harvest and levies and some poor fool’s misjudged hunt.

Maekar does not speak for the rest of the meal unless he has to. He listens instead, and that’s worse. He listens with his face turned slightly away, the nape of his neck corded, his hand around his cup as if he’s holding onto it so he doesn’t reach for something else.

You do not touch him there. Not with eyes on you. Not when he is wound that tight.

Later, when the hall thins out and the cold sting of the corridors closes around you, he walks beside you without speaking. His strides are heavy on the stone. He does not offer his arm. But he doesn’t need to. You know precisely how to fall into step with him now. You’ve learned each other well enough.

Only when the door to your chambers shuts behind you and the latch drops does he stop.

The room is dim, lit by one low fire and two candles guttering on the table. Your shadow crosses his when you shrug off your cloak. He stands just inside the door a moment longer, as if deciding whether to leave again.

He doesn’t leave.

He unbuckles his sword belt and sets it aside. Shrugs out of the heavy Stark grey. Underneath, his shirt is dark at the throat where snowmelt and sweat have soaked the linen; his forearms are bare and scarred where he’s rolled the sleeves up. His movements are clipped, agitated. Only the muscle jumping in his jaw betrays anything else.

You hang your cloak. Turn back towards him, eyeing him for a breath.

“What they said—” you begin.

“Did you agree?” he demands.

It’s blunt in a way you’ve stopped flinching from. Maekar is a man who cuts straight to the bone once he’s decided to cut at all.

You cross the space between you until you are close enough to see the pale nick along his knuckles from this morning’s drills, the faint, fresh line at his throat where some boy’s blade slid too close.

“No,” you say.

He studies you. As if weighing that on its own, no other argument offered. Something eases in him, but not much.

“They’ll talk,” you add evenly. “They always have. New lord, new snow, new grumbling. You know this.”

“They can grumble about my manners,” he snaps back. “Or my face. Plenty there.” His mouth twitches, brief and humourless. “They start grumbling about whether I’ll hold the line when it breaks, that’s different.”

“You’ve never broken,” you remind him.

He huffs. “You weren’t there for every year.”

You tip your head, waiting.

He drops his gaze. Not out of shame. Maekar doesn’t waste time on that. It’s something else. A man digging in his heels before he says more than he means to.

“I know what they see,” he says suddenly. “Southern prince in a borrowed cloak. Dragon’s son. Man who rode north on a king’s word and a treaty, not because the old gods whispered in his sleep.”

Your throat tightens. “Is that what you think this is? A treaty?”

“Not now.” The answer comes too fast; he looks almost annoyed with himself for that much softness, for how quick he is to give it to you. His fingers flex at his sides. “Now it’s… different.”

You wait, but he doesn’t elaborate. You bite back an impatient sigh.

“Maekar.”

He finally looks up.

You’ve seen this look on him in battle drills, when he has decided a thing and then decided it will be done even if it costs him blood and bone. Old. Stubborn. Unyielding. He takes two steps and then you have your back to the wall and him in front of you, not trapping so much as blocking out the rest of the world. His hands plant on either side of your hips on the stone, bracketing you without touching.

“Your father wants to know if I’ll stand when winter comes,” he says. “Your bannermen want to know if I’ll bleed for some hill they can’t see on a map.” His head dips, shoulders hunched just enough to bring him nearer, to make his voice a rasp between you. “I don’t give a shit about hills.”

Your breath catches; his eyes flick to your mouth, then back to your eyes.

“I care if you’re on them,” he adds tightly.

That lands heavier than any oath could.

“If the snows come in and the dead are walking, if the gods themselves climb out of those woods to take a piece of this place—” his mouth twists, the words grinding out, “they’re welcome to try me. They’ll find me where you are. They’ll have to go through me first.”

The way he says it, like a simple fact, makes something in your chest ache and something in your belly coil, low and hot.

“I’m not good with speeches,” he mutters. “You know that.”

“I had… suspected,” you answer, dry despite the tightness in your throat.

“Good,” he grunts. “Then you know I don’t say this because it sounds pretty.”

His hand leaves the stone. Settles, heavy and warm, at your waist. Fingers spread, thumb pressing once into the bone as if to prove to himself you are here, tangible and his.

“I am your man,” Maekar says.

He doesn’t dress it up. Doesn’t soften the rough edges. The words are as plain as any he’s ever given you.

“Not your father’s,” he goes on, staring at you. “Not your kraken-eyed bannermen’s. Not even my own Father’s, not anymore.” His jaw clenches, bones rolling. “Yours.”

You stare up at him. “Mine?”

He makes a low, frustrated sound. “Don’t make me say it twice, woman.”

You can’t help it. You smile, small and sharp. He sees it, and something in him steadies. His shoulders drop the barest fraction. The corner of his mouth threatens a curve he crushes before it can fully form, much to your disappointment.

“I’ll stand where you tell me to stand,” he says, a shade quieter now, but no less stern about it. “I’ll swing on whatever poor bastard you point at. I’ll freeze on these walls and bleed in these gods-cursed woods and eat boiled leather before I let anything take what’s under this roof from you.”

His thumb strokes once, rough, at your side. It could almost be accidental, but you know better than that. Nothing with Maekar is accidental.

“That’s my loyalty,” he finishes. “They can call it northern or southern or madness. Doesn’t matter to me. It’s yours.”

You lift a hand and catch his jaw in your palm. He goes still under your contact. You feel the scrape of stubble, the heat of skin, the way his throat works once under your fingers like he’s swallowed something sharp.

“Maekar,” you say quietly. “It’s more than enough.”

His eyes shutter for a beat, then open again, clearer and still hard.

“Good. They can keep their questions,” he says, softer now. “You know the answer.”

His hand tightens at your waist, something claiming and steady at the touch in the same breath.

Now his hands hang loose at his sides, too large for the boy you remember because he's stopped being a boy long ago, his fingers muddy, knuckles scraped raw. His hair has gone flat grey with rain. It clings to his temples and jaw in wet strands. He looks carved out of shadow: shoulders hunched, spine bowed slightly forward, trying to make himself smaller and failing because he's never been small a day in his life.

The lightning makes him briefly stark—pale face, sharp bones, mouth set in a line that looks like it was crafted by the gods for cruelty.

You venture closer. The grass is slick under your boots, soaked through and flattening beneath you, cold water creeping into the seams. Your cloak is already heavy, darkened with rain, pulling at your shoulders like a hand trying to drag you back.

“Aerion,” you call, firmer this time.

He doesn’t turn his head. You can’t tell at first if he’s heard you or if he’s simply choosing not to react. Then he answers, voice low and hoarse, pitched just for you even from this distance.

“I knew you’d come.”

A tightness pulls through your chest. It’s equal parts anger and something colder, older. Of course he knew. He always knows. It’s the most frightening intimacy between you; he can vanish and still be certain of the line you’ll follow to find him, you can vanish, morph, and he'll still recognise you.

“You’ve been gone all day,” you say, closing the last few paces. Rain beads on your lashes; you blink hard to clear your swimming vision. “They were looking for you.”

“I wasn’t lost.” His tone is flat, almost bored. He still won’t look at you. “They just didn’t know where to search.”

You stop a few feet from him, not close enough to be in reach, close enough that you can see the tremor in his fingers when the thunder rolls.

The meadow is the same and not the same. The old picnic hill is still there. The place where Egg once tried to steal cakes from Aemond and Maekar barked at him that gods punish greed, where Baelor had laughed beside you, cradling Valarr close, where you sat with damp hair and grass stains on your skirt beside Dyanna, both of you laughing, and thought, for one foolish moment, that happiness could be uncomplicated. That you could have this forever.

Now the grass is flattened around Aerion like something has been pacing here, circling and circling until the earth gave in.

“You’re soaked,” you say.

“So are you,” Aerion answers, and there’s a faint edge to it, something that wants to be cruel and fails because his voice is too tired to lift the knife all the way.

A sharp gust pushes rain sideways and it stings your cheek. Your cloak snaps with another gust. Aerion’s shoulders coil at the sound.

That tiny reaction does more to you than any of his pretty words ever have. He’s always been a storm of his own making; seeing him react like an animal to weather is… wrong. It makes him look wounded, makes him look human.

You swallow. “Look at me.”

No movement.

“Aerion.” You put steel in it, let his name in your mouth hook around him. “Look at me.”

He exhales—ragged, irritated, as if you’ve asked him to do something impossible—and finally tips his chin up. Lightning threads the sky behind him, pale and vicious, throwing his face into clarity for half a breath.

He looks wrecked.

Not injured, or bruised, worse. Like something inside him has been clawing at his insides for hours and has finally drawn blood. His eyes are fever-bright without fever, pupils wide, lashes wet. Rain tracks down his cheekbones and gathers at the corner of his full mouth. His lips look raw, chewed and licked too much, his jaw tight enough to ache just looking at it.

Dangerous, yes, always that above all else.

But there’s something softer under it, something raw and unarmoured, fractured in a dangerous way that whispers you need to thread softly with him right now.

“Happy?” he drawls, voice too gentle despite his cutting, mocking tone. “There. I’m looking. I've never stopped.”

Your stomach knots. “What are you doing out here?”

Aerion’s gaze flicks past you, into the dark and the trees. Into the storm beyond the hills. The way he doesn’t answer is an answer in on of itself.

“You came here,” you say slowly, “because this is where you remember being… safe.”

His mouth twitches. Not a smile. A grimace, almost.

“Safe,” he echoes, like the word tastes foreign to him, his lips curling into something biting. “Is that what you call it?”

“What do you call it?”

Aerion stares at you for a long beat, rain pattering on his lashes until he blinks it away. Then, suddenly, his voice goes quiet in a way that makes your skin prickle.

“I call it the day I learned you can get soaked to the bone and still laugh,” he says, almost wishfully. “I call it the day Father carried Egg like a sack and pretended he wasn’t enjoying it. I call it—” He breaks off, jaw working, as if the next words don’t want to fit through his teeth. “—I call it the last time I remember believing things stayed.”

Because of his mother, because Dyanna died only few moons after that day, and the world altered its shape. The thunder that follows is deep enough to vibrate in your ribs, in the soles of your feet. You hold still, watching him for a long moment.

“And today?” you ask carefully. “What do you believe?”

Aerion’s gaze drops to the grass at his knees. His fingers dig into it, ripping a clump up, crushing it into wet pulp. It’s an ugly, unconscious gesture, destruction as self-soothing, a habit he's had all his life but one that usually ends with servants covered in blood or sobbing.

His voice, when it comes, is fractured.

“Today I believe…” He laughs once, a jagged, awful sound, his eyes too wide. “Today I believe I’m a bad dog they keep on a leash and call it mercy.”

Your breath catches. “Aerion—”

“Don’t.” His head snaps up. His eyes are sharp again, furious, offended by your sympathy like it’s a hand reaching toward a wound. “Don’t start with the aunt voice. Don’t start with it will be fine and you’re only tired and think of your brothers.”

You keep your tone flat. “Then tell me what you want.”

He looks at you like you’ve offered him a blade and dared him to take it.

“I want—” He stops, his gaze blown wide, fixed on your face. “I want it to stop feeling like there’s a fist in my chest. Like something is missing and I can’t even name what shape it is without—”

He bites the rest off so sharply you hear his teeth click. You don’t fill in the blank, there's no need to. The storm fills the gap instead. Rain drumming harder, the smell of electric charge thickening in the air. Aerion’s shoulders rise and fall on a rough breath. Then his voice drops into something almost childlike in its petulant honesty, almost shocked by itself.

“I didn’t think you’d actually find me,” he admits.

Anger sparks, bright and immediate. “Then why did you come here?”

His eyes flick to your face and hold.

Because I knew you’d come, he’d said earlier.

Now he just looks like a boy caught in a lie he wants desperately to be true.

“I didn’t want to be found,” Aerion says, each word dragged out like it hurts. “And I did, but only by you.”

Your throat tightens around a hundred answers.

You crouch slowly, careful with your skirts, until you’re at his level. Close enough now that you can feel the heat leaking off him despite the cold rain. Close enough that if he moved an inch your knees would brush. Aerion’s gaze darts to the proximity, a starved thing searching for food, then away, like he can’t stand how much your nearness undoes him.

You keep your voice low. “Talk.”

His laugh is quiet, biting, his mouth sneering. “Order me again.”

“Yes,” you say. “Talk.”

Aerion stares at the grass silently. His fingers flex, muddy and scraped, then again. You notice the small tremor, the way his hand seems to want to curl into a fist and doesn’t quite have the strength to commit.

“I watched you,” he says suddenly. “At supper last night. With him.”

You don’t ask who. The name sits in the air anyway, invisible and heavy, the shape of both your lives. Baelor.

Aerion’s mouth twists around it without speaking it anyway.

“The way you tilt toward him when you’re listening,” Aerion continues, voice going distant, almost dazed. “Not even on purpose. Like your body knows where to go before your mind has decided it’s allowed.” He swallows, throat bobbing and he sounds so envious, in that moment, like he could be sick from it. “And I thought—” Another harsh laugh. “I thought, seven hells, I have spent my whole life circling a door that will never open.”

You force your face into stillness.

Aerion looks up at you again, and in his eyes there’s something bright and sick and pleading.

“I can’t believe it would ever be returned,” he admits bitterly, and it comes out like confession, like accusation and surrender all at once. “Not from you. So I—” He spreads his muddy hand, helpless, the gesture small and obscene and yours, so painfully yours, because he would tear anyone else apart with his bare hands before letting them see this. “So I learned to live with the absence. I learned to carry it until it felt normal. But it’s still heavy, and I’m still carrying it, and I’m—”

His voice breaks. Just slightly. He turns his head abruptly, as if ashamed of the sound, and stares out at the black meadow.

“Go on,” you say, too quietly.

Aerion’s shoulders shake once with laughter that doesn't find a way out.

“I’m tired,” he whispers in a horrible, strangled hiss. “I’m so tired of being me. Because it’s never enough. I’m a dragon and instead you make me weak.”

The words land in you with a blunt, horrible weight. You reach out—slowly, deliberately—toward his wrist. Aerion’s whole body goes taut, his breath halting. His eyes drag down to your hand like you're brandishing a weapon.

You don’t grab, and you don’t soothe him like when he was younger. You simply rest two fingers on the inside of his wrist, where his pulse hammers hard and fast, undeniable as life itself. Aerion’s eyelids flutter, slumping into the minute, featherlight contact. Like he's finally coming up for air after being unable to breathe for too long. He looks like something feral and dangerous forced to accept gentleness and not sure whether to bite or lean in further and ask for more.

“You’re freezing,” you note.

Aerion’s lips curl, faint and bitter. “Am I?”

“Yes,” you answer briskly. “And you’re coming back with me.”

He stares at your fingers on his wrist like he still can’t decide if it’s cruelty or mercy.

“What if I don’t?” he whispers.

Your gaze holds his. Stark-steel against Targaryen fire, a balance between you humming.

“Then I’ll drag you,” you tell him simply, because there are moments when honesty is the only thing sharp enough to cut through his spirals. “And you’ll hate me for it, but you’ll survive.”

Aerion’s throat works. His eyes shine—rain, not tears, but the shine looks too much like tears anyway. For a heartbeat, he leans into your touch so slightly you almost miss it, tense in a way that tells you he's waiting for you to pull back, to drag the wall between you up once more.

Then Aerion forces himself upright, the wounded animal dragging itself back onto its feet because pride won’t let him stay down. He doesn’t stand fully, but he shifts closer, just a fraction, so your knees brush his through wet fabric. His hand twitches at his side—fingertips flexing, as if they want to close around you, to chase the spark of contact, to make the absence in him stop screaming.

He doesn’t.

He holds himself back so hard you can see the strain in his forearm, in the curve of his throat.

“Fine,” Aerion says, voice rough. “Fine. I’ll go.”

You withdraw your hand before he can decide to take it.

You rise, offer him nothing but your presence and the unspoken certainty that you will not leave him to rot alone in a meadow with the darkness inside his head.

Aerion gets to his feet in a slow, controlled motion that still somehow manages to appear elegant. He stands beside you, rain pouring off you both. For a few seconds you simply exist there together in the storm—two figures on the old picnic hill again, soaking in the storm side by side.

Then Aerion turns his head slightly and says, very softly, almost as if it pains him to let the words out at all:

“You always find me.”

You keep your gaze forward, toward the dark line of trees that leads back to Summerhall’s warm lights.

“Yes,” you answer quietly, almost lost in the roaring thunder. “And you’re always surprised by it.”

He huffs something that might be a laugh.

You start walking.

After a beat—just one—he follows, close enough that the heat of him brushes your side with every step, anchor points balancing each other.

an: I do love me my war criminal Aerion who's an obsessed little freak but something about these quiet moments between them that bind them so deeply together and show exactly why he's built his life around you are arguably my favourites. This was inspired by this ask.

VALARR.

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

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

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

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

DAERON.

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

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

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

LYONEL.

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

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

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

DUNK.

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

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

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

It’s spilling from some indecipherable corner of his mouth. He can taste the salty, metallic zing just as well as he can smell it. There is a ringing sound in his ear, sloshing of blood against his eardrums in defiance. How is he still standing? With each step of his, shots of pain rushes to his chest, his stomach, his head. And there’s nothing else there but a blunt, chiding anger, pushing him forward into the night. He even sees red with that one eye that’s still working. Blood red. Blood. Sometimes he feels that’s all he’s made up of.

Aerion doesn’t quite understand how it happens, but through the pain and the burning, bruising inferno in his head, he always manages to crash against your door. It makes a thudding noise, sending shocks of pain to his head.

“Open up,” he says harshly. More blood spills from his mouth. 

There is a sound of something breaking, a loud curse—the door slides open. He falls in pathetically, to the only source of gravity in the world.

“Aerion,” you whisper. “Aerion, what happened?”

He mumbles something against your neck. You hold him up, letting him thrust his weight to you as you lead him inside. With his brain only a bundle of nerves and his entire body alight with them, he follows you blindingly. After hours, it seems, you sit him down and go away. The world goes cold again. He wants to reach for you but his shoulder burns. What had happened to it? He tries to open his eyes to see, but there’s only one yellow light blurring everything else.

Still he knows it’s your kitchen. 

“I am here,” you say as you come in again. Something levitates in front of his nose. A strong smell of ginger. “Drink this.”

He complies. It burns as it passes through his throat. But after he coughs and curses you through it… he stops shaking. His eyes clear a little. Enough to open them and see that he is right, it is your kitchen. With the wooden counters, the overhead yellow light, the french press whizzing mechanically all hours of the day. There is a first aid kit on the table. You are standing in front of him in only your chemise. The nakedness of your nightshift is barely hidden under a dark shawl. You are watching him the same way you always do—with undivided attention. Your hair is pulled up in a half-bun with your cheek flushed and indignant. Your eyes are clearer than they were a moment ago. If you weren’t so mad at him, he would tell you that you’re beautiful.

“Do not look at me like that,” he commands weakly.

“I dare not,” you say impassively.

Suddenly, he feels ashamed. It’s an entire new fiasco on top of his already bruised ego. He suddenly remembers his name. He fidgets in his chair. “Well, I fought.”

“You fought.” 

“With… mongrels.” He coughs, and it shot a stab of pain in his chest. “It felt good before it went to shit.”

“Okay.”

Aerion feels, with a desperate rush, the inadequacy of that sentence. He fears that you wouldn’t understand. “It felt good, darling.”

“I understand.” 

He tries to hold onto the tone, the tune of your voice. There is disappointment. Anger. And it has a tender pang hanging in the end of it. There’s a question there, too. Before he can ask that, you are closer, your fingers trace over the cut on his forehead, the underside of his left eye, his right cheekbone, and the pain sizzles with your touch. He wants to sleep in this warmth. He could sleep forever if he wasn’t in so much pain.

“You lost a fucking tooth,” you’re saying, pulling him out of his mind, prodding at his busted lips to see. “Where is it? Did you swallow it?”

He moves around his tongue to figure it out, and catches the lone, blunt stub with his tongue. He spits it out as you hurry over with a cloth in your hand. He watches you quietly, riddled with ache, as you wash his wounds, sponge over the scratches. There were four men, he tells you. Large and beefy. He had not called for help, he used his fists and his teeth. You nod at his words. But he knows you aren’t listening, not really. You are too busy cleaning him up. Your eyelashes flutter—he’s too close to you again. Too close to your button nose, the heart shaped lips, the mole on the edge of your cheek.

The world shrivels from his view. It bends on its hinges, screeching a desperate, useless question at him.

“Stop,” his voice catches from your proximity. “Why are you alone?”

You do not say anything. At first, you only stare. It is not a strange question. It is just that he had never asked that of you before, not like this—with a squeal of pain behind. 

“Why are you alone?” he insists, his voice ragged.

You blink, slowly moving away from his face. “I am not alone,” you say, not entirely convincing.

“There is no one here.”

“You are here.”

“Oh no.” He laughs pathetically. “I’m not.” He isn’t. Aerion Targaryen isn’t here in Lys. He hasn’t been exiled because he killed his uncle—he isn’t groping through bars to feel something behind his knuckles. “I am dead,” he says, “I died. And I am not here.”

Your eyes sweep over him—all over him, and he feels himself shrink. You take his hand in yours, suddenly. He hisses out in pain. He feels his heart thump painfully. You bend down, now, on her knees. “I think something’s dislocated here—”

“Ugh!” A sharp, overwhelming pain stabs at his arm as she pushes up his index. It burns for one moment in his hand before he feels it cross his arm, spread to the rest of him. “Fuck!”

“It’s okay,” You say quickly. “It was dislocated. I have fixed it.”

“ Fuck!” Spits dribble out from his mouth. “Fuck you, cunt!”

A blind, erratic panic currents through him as soon as the words come out. Your expression flutters from careful to hurt, but he cannot bring himself to look away. He did not mean that. You know. You have to know. Scared people are often careless. And they don’t realise it until their fangs are out and biting—until it’s too late. He opens his mouth to apologize but only a groan comes out. It’s loud, it rustles all over his mouth. It’s an ugly sound and it ends in a helpless, guttural cry before he has a chance to swallow it.

“Oh gods. Shit. ” He looks down, a sob crawls up from his throat. “ Gods. I’m all—I’m all fucked up.”

His throat burns as he cries. After a minute, or a thousand harrowing nights, You wrap your arms around him, not making a sound. He holds your waist, heaves into the cotton, breaks out in a million pieces and almost asks you to never let go.

Three years into his exile, he is back in that darkness. The cold surrounds him, the flash of wind, the trees rustling in premonition and the bone-deep surety that he has been dead all this time. It heaves into him now, at your voice. It clamoured inside him when those mongrels at the bar had called him Brightflame.

-----------

“How are you feeling?”

He sighs, wistfully listening to your concern. It feels unbearably soft. It feels right. 

He stays silent.

His body aches in all the places it shouldn’t. All he’s able to do is tilt his head, and you are there. Here. Already looking at him from the other side of the bed. The moonlight always does inexplicable things to your skin. You glow, pearly and white, like a translucent dream.

Aerion whispers, “You weren’t like this when we met, were you?”

“What was I like?”

“A storm.”

He wonders if you understand what he means. He means—a storm. The dark, inscrutable blue of it, fifty fathoms deep in the Narrow Sea. Wild and capricious and iridescent. A dazzling splash of something remarkable in the bleak reality of his life. Something destructive. There were no weather charts warning him of you. Him. Out on the street of Lys drinking and trying not to sleep because of the dreams plaguing him to madness. Hot of head with fire in his blood. Dragonflesh. Wildfire. A headless mutt of the old Valyria. Nothing had told him that he’d follow you  to ridiculous places. Empty parking lots, the skeletons of abandoned homes, crowded beaches in Lys, and your very personal, strikingly lonely kitchen, lost of every sense and every time. How was he supposed to know that you were already here, in the free city, working yourself to the bone for some insensible degree? When he first saw you, some man had tried to roofie your drink. Something in him flickered, it felt like being splashed awake after a terrible nightmare.

The man went home missing a finger. And you stared at him as if he were something else. Something better. 

You were a simple student. You were alone. You liked reading and you liked the colour of his eyes and you did not seem to know his middle name and what a mess he had made of it. Aerion saw you, and something in him shifted. You had cleaned his face after the first fight. You have not stopped since. You were unnoticeable to other men, but he knew better. You were born to be admired in your brittle laugh, the way your eyes shone, a drop of sea at storm. You were good in a way that scared him and enthralled him. Like driving a hundred miles per hour on a secluded, barely visible road; cupping his face with a smile too bright, too brilliant and promising that nothing else matters but him and his rage and his pain. 

He thinks you were searching for something like him—something brittle you can fix. Something that might bite you if you are careless enough. He does not know why, not yet. Only knows that he needs you like air.

“And what am I now?”

He remembers how that promise felt. How it feels now. “Safety.”

You blink. Your face opens up in surprise. You open your mouth, almost saying something. Something. But then decide against it. You slide closer. Holds the side of his face. There’s an inkling of pain but he makes sure to not flinch. It feels good anyway.

“I am sorry I cursed you.”

You consider it for a moment. “I forgive you. I think that’s part of the problem here.”

“It wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t—”

The terrible thing is, he can remember a time it wasn’t so. He can almost limp back to the time he was better, he dreamed less, the nights did not hurt, he did not hurt. He could remember times when his uncle Baelor had actually smiled at him, and Valarr shared his slice of pie with him. He could see himself fishing with Daeron. He liked fishing.

“I know, darling,” you say. And even your softness hurts him. Reminds him that he is rotten in all the ways you aren’t—you are an infinitely better person than him.

He knows you want to touch him there, his heart, brittle and cruel and lovely and full of contradictions. But you don't. There's always this sparse bit of friction between you. You have touched each other, sure, on various breathtaking occasions with you operating under different levels of inebriation. But he holds back for a moment, transfixed by some age-old spell.

“I think I should’ve died,” he says, and feels the pressure leave his body like air through a pressure spot. “I think I am already dead, and the things I see in my head are real.”

“I am real.”

“I dreamed I was a dragon.” He cringes at his own words, feeling a cruel laugh bubble in his throat. “They say half the Targaryens are mad. They are true.”

“Aerion…”

“My grandsire won’t look at me. They send me money and they hope I stay buried here like a roach. Valarr hates me. My father spits at my name. My uncle—” his voice breaks. “All my fault.”

Your heart breaks for him. on, eyes soft, “You can’t change the past, Aerion. No matter how much you drink. But you can be better. And mayhaps that won’t be enough for anyone else, but it might be enough to live on. Might be enough to breathe.”

“Why do you even help me?”

The truth of it is—he doesn’t get you. He doesn’t understand that innate goodness. That makes you pick up a stray cat into your home, that makes you smile at a stranger. He can’t fathom why you’d waste yourself on him. His tainted brain and his cursed family name. Targaryens are wealthy and soulless. They are built for collecting assets and managing damage… not for someone like you.

“You know why, Aerion,” you say. “You are not all bad and we’re not all alone, I promise.”

Your promise hangs like an echo. Like a long forgotten incantation. 

He can see a shine rippling in the spaces between you. That every time you are together, the feeling that this could not be quite real wells up in him like a great, twisting tornado. 

If he leans in, he can kiss you. “Sometimes I think I made you up, too. Too good for me. Might ruin you.”

“Might let you.”

There’s a trace of hesitance in your eyes, as well as it should be, turbulent as he’s been. Destructive. He wants to tell you he knows what you are feeling, because he feels it as well. Words are fickle, though. And scared people are often ruthless. He doesn’t want to rush it, but oh he wants to kiss you. With his lips and his tongue and all his pain—he wants to grab your hair and make greedy noises in your mouth. He wants to fuck you slow and sweet and let you touch his heart—in its rotten centre. Your bun has come apart from its centre. If he reaches out, he can run his hand through the length of your hair.

Aerion can taste the sweetness. 

It’s spilling from some indecipherable corner of his mouth. Of your mouth. As if the space between your faces are suddenly liquified. As if in extraordinary storms, in unfathomable depths of sea, lonely people can really find each other. He can taste the sugar-drip anticipation just as well as he can smell it. There’s a ringing sound in his ear, your words vibrating through him in a daze. 

“Aerion,” you say, your breath fans on his eyelash. 

Now he can only see you, the face glimmering in the moonlight, eyes the bright, impossible sea at storm, hands anchoring his face. Even though the pain in his body reminds him of all the people out into the world, the ones who don’t understand, the ones who never would, who are alone just like him. But at this moment, in this room, the trace of the inexplicable goodness in you is enough.

It’s all he wants to hold on to.

more of my akotsk stories

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palindrome

first light

kismet

grief bodies

MONKEY D. LUFFY ── .✦

Luffy is sprawled across the Sunny’s deck, half-listening to Usopp’s exaggerated story when she suddenly appears beside him and wraps her arms around his neck from behind. Her cheek presses against his as she hums softly, swaying them side to side. Luffy pauses mid-laugh, surprised, before immediately grinning. “Hey! What’re you doing?” She just giggles and squeezes him tighter, and Luffy’s smile grows even wider.

──

Sometimes she simply walks up to him without warning, cups his face with both hands, and plants a quick kiss on his lips. Luffy blinks once in surprise before bursting into delighted laughter. “You’re weird!” he says happily, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her close. Instead of letting her walk away, he returns the affection enthusiastically, pressing loud, playful kisses all over her cheeks until she’s laughing breathlessly.

──

Sanji bans Luffy from the kitchen as usual, but she often sneaks out with a small plate of food hidden behind her back. She approaches him quietly and holds it out with a shy smile. Luffy’s eyes immediately light up. “For me?!” he asks, already grabbing the plate. She nods, and before she can say anything else he throws his arms around her in an excited hug. “You’re amazing!”

──

On new islands she has a habit of linking her arm with his while they explore. Luffy notices immediately, glancing down at their arms before looking back up at her with a pleased grin. “You wanna see everything too?” he asks eagerly. When she nods, he grabs her hand and takes off running through the town. Even when they get chased for causing trouble, they’re both laughing too hard to care.

──

Sometimes when Luffy is sitting quietly watching the ocean, she climbs up beside him and rests her head on his shoulder. Her fingers absentmindedly play with the hem of his sleeve while she hums softly. Luffy glances down at her and smiles, unusually calm for once. “You’re really comfy,” he murmurs, leaning his head lightly against hers.

──

Luffy doesn’t think too deeply about affection, but with her everything feels bright and easy. The constant hugs, kisses, and laughter simply become part of his everyday life, something he welcomes without question. Whenever she clings to him or presses another spontaneous kiss to his cheek, he only laughs and pulls her closer. To Luffy, loving someone is simple: if she makes him this happy, then of course he wants her right beside him on every adventure.

RORONOA ZORO ── .✦

Zoro is in the middle of training when she quietly wanders onto the deck, watching him with interest. When he finally lowers his swords to rest, she walks straight up to him, rises onto her toes, and presses a quick kiss to his cheek. Zoro freezes mid-breath, clearly not expecting it. “…What was that for?” he asks, brows furrowing slightly. She simply smiles and says, “You looked cool,” before walking away, leaving him staring after her in silence.

──

She compliments him constantly, often at the most random moments. While he’s drinking sake one evening, she suddenly rests her chin on his shoulder and says softly, “You know you’re really handsome, right?” Zoro nearly chokes on his drink. “…Where’d that come from?” he mutters, turning his head away. She only laughs quietly, clearly amused by how easily she flusters him.

──

Sometimes she gets clingy when he’s relaxing on deck. Without warning she climbs into his lap sideways, wrapping her arms loosely around his neck and resting her head against his shoulder. Zoro stiffens immediately. “…Oi.” But when she sighs contentedly and squeezes him gently, his arms slowly settle around her waist anyway. “You’re heavy,” he grumbles, though he makes no effort to move her.

──

She loves interrupting his quiet moments with sudden affection. One evening while he’s cleaning his swords, she leans over and presses several small kisses across his jaw and cheek. Zoro tries to ignore it at first, focusing on the blade in his hand. “Knock it off,” he mutters, though his voice lacks any real irritation. When she laughs and keeps going, he finally grabs her chin lightly and pulls her into a proper kiss. “…Now you’re done.”

──

Sometimes she simply stands behind him and wraps her arms around his waist while he’s looking out at the sea. Zoro glances down at her hands before letting out a quiet sigh. “…You’re clingy,” he says. She only hums happily and rests her cheek against his back. After a moment his hand moves back to rest over hers, holding them there.

──

Zoro pretends her constant affection is troublesome, but the truth is he’s grown used to it. The random kisses, the compliments, the way she clings to him like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Even if he grumbles or looks away to hide the faint red on his ears, he never actually stops her. And when she wraps her arms around him, Zoro always ends up holding her back just a little tighter than necessary.

VINSMOKE SANJI ── .✦

Sanji is already devoted to her, but her affection catches him off guard constantly. One moment he’s carefully plating a dish in the kitchen, the next she leans across the counter and presses a quick kiss to his cheek. “Thank you for cooking,” she says sweetly. Sanji freezes completely, plate still in his hands. “…My love,” he whispers faintly, clearly overwhelmed by the simple gesture.

──

She often wanders into the kitchen just to hug him while he works. Her arms wrap around his waist from behind, cheek resting gently against his back. Sanji stops moving immediately, heart pounding. “If you hug me like this while I’m cooking…” he murmurs dramatically, “…I may never survive.” Yet his hands gently cover hers where they rest around him.

──

Sometimes she fixes his appearance without saying anything. She straightens his tie before meals, smooths his hair, or brushes a bit of flour from his cheek. Sanji stands perfectly still during these moments, watching her with soft, stunned eyes. “…You treat me far too kindly,” he says quietly. She only smiles and presses a quick kiss to his jaw before stepping away.

──

Whenever they’re sitting together on deck, she tends to lean against him without hesitation. Her head rests on his shoulder, fingers laced through his arm while she talks softly about small things she noticed during the day. Sanji listens carefully to every word, occasionally glancing down at her with an expression full of warmth. “You make even the quietest moments feel special,” he tells her sincerely.

──

Sometimes she cups his face with both hands and kisses him out of nowhere. Sanji goes completely still, eyes widening slightly before he melts into the moment. When she pulls away, he looks dazed, as though the world briefly stopped spinning. “…You’ll be the death of me, my love,” he says with a soft smile.

──

Sanji has always loved expressing affection, but receiving it so freely from her feels different. Her constant hugs, kisses, and gentle touches make his heart race every single time. Even when he acts dramatic about it, he treasures every moment of it deeply. To Sanji, her affection feels like the purest form of love, something he will always return tenfold.