CHERRY

You set the book down as he stepped closer, your heart still doing that familiar flutter despite all those years.

Aerion closed the distance, his fingers reaching out to cup your chin, tilting your face up.

“You look so small in this massive bed,” he murmured, pointing out the change in furniture. “And so terribly lonely. Did you think I wouldn’t come to you tonight?”

“I didn’t know if you would be occupied with father, or… your training,” you replied, voice softer than you intended, showing just how easily your resolve melted the second he touched you.

Aerion let out a chuckle, tapping your cheek lightly before pulling his hand away to pace the length of your mattress.

“Father concerns himself with tedious matters of state, and the knights in the yard are dullards. None of them understand what truly matters.”

He stopped, turning his gaze back to you.

“But you understand, don’t you?” He stepped closer, the fabric of his doublet rustling as he leaned down, placing his hands on either side of your thighs, effectively pinning you into your own bed.

“Or have you been listening to the idle gossip of the septas again? Tell me you haven’t let those foolish people fill your pretty little head with their nonsense.”

You swallowed, gaze flickering back to his eyes. The weight of his presence was already making it hard to think straight. Your body instinctively curved into the space he occupied.

“They only speak of duty, brother. Of what is expected of a lady of our house when she comes of age.”

“Duty?” Aerion scoffed, shifting his weight so that his knees would sink into the soft mattress right between your thighs, parting them just enough to spark heat deep in your stomach.

“They know nothing of our duty. They worship a new god and preach to the common filth. They want to break us until we are nothing more than their ordinary selves.”

He reached out, fingers tangling into your hair, tugging it gently to force your head back.

His expression softened in a way that always made your chest ache with a desperate need to please him.

“It frightens you, doesn’t it?” Aerion whispered, his free hand coming down to stroke your thigh. “The thought of duty… being given away to some Lord. To have a man with foul blood touch you.”

You shivered, a small whimpering breath escaping your lips. You shook your head slightly against his grip. “I don’t want that. You know I don’t. I want to stay here with you.”

“I know you do, my clever girl,” Aerion murmured, leaning in until his lips brushed yours, leaving you breathless. “Your blood cannot be tainted. It is meant to stay pure, inside these walls. You know you are meant for me.”

But then the tender air vanished.

His hand on your thigh tightened, fingers digging in with bruising pressure that caught you off guard. His eyes darkened, a sudden cutting edge of disappointment slicing through his voice.

“Yet you still keep that final piece of yourself guarded,” he hissed softly, “you let the words of other people linger in your mind. I give you everything, and yet you withhold the one thing that ensures our bloodline remains pure. You do not live up to your claims. It wounds me, sister.”

The accusation cut straight through you.

The mere thought of displeasing him just because you didn’t understand the full weight of his demands made your chest tighten. You couldn’t bear his disappointment.

“No, Aerion, that’s not true,” you pleaded softly, hands automatically reaching up to grip his forearms. “I love you, more than anything.”

Aerion didn’t relent. He kept his gaze heavy and punishing as he looked down at your wide eyes.

“Do you?” he titled his head, a skeptical drawl that made tears prick the corners of your eyes.

“Words are easy, little sister.” He moved closer, his intoxicating scent engulfing you entirely. His lips brushed against the tip of your ear, sending a shiver down your spine.

“You said you love me?” he whispered filthily against your skin, the tone of his voice making your body ache in that foreign way.

“Of course I do,” you choked out, instinctively tilting up toward his knee as you practically begged for him to stop being angry with you. “Aerion, please, I do…”

You were instantly at his mercy, unraveled by nothing but your big brother’s words.

Aerion pulled back to look into your glassy eyes, a satisfied smirk finally breaking across his features.

“Then show me,” he commanded, his chin nodding upwards in your direction.

You didn’t even have time to nod before Aerion’s mouth slammed into yours. It was anything but gentle, his tongue forcing its way inside.

You whimpered into his mouth as his hands moved to the laces of your gown.

He didn’t tear them—not yet, but his fingers were slick and impatient, loosening the fabric until it pooled around your shoulders, exposing the curve of your breast.

His eyes raked over your skin. “Beautiful,” he purred, “So pure. So untouched.”

He leaned down, his hair brushing your cheek as his lips found the skin beneath your jaw. You made a light gasp, hands latching onto his shoulders.

Aerion chuckled softly against your skin, clearly pleased by how easily you melted under his touch.

He trailed a line of wet kisses down the column of your neck, his tongue tasting the frantic pulse ticking in your throat before moving lower.

When the fabric of your dress got in the way, he ripped it apart completely, throwing it somewhere onto the floor of your chamber.

Aerion paused at the sight of your naked body, his lips parting as his eyes explored every curve.

His mouth found its way back to your skin. Closing over the sensitive peak of your breast, his tongue began circling snd sucking, leaving marks.

A broken whimper escaped your lips, your fingers tightening in his hair.

He dragged his hands over your sides, smoothing over your waist before his fingers brushed your inner thigh, moving higher until he pressed against your center.

You were already slick, a needy wetness coating his fingers.

“See?” Aerion whispered, his eyes dilating with primal lust. “Your body knows exactly who it belongs to. You’re this wet and I haven't even touched you.”

The intensity in his gaze made your throat tight. He started undressing as you laid beneath him, chest heaving.

You couldn’t help but look down as he took his pants off, eyes trailing his every move.

You knew you desperately needed his approval, but as he positioned himself between your thighs, a sudden wave of panic hit you. You’d never felt anything so large pressing against your entrance.

“Aerion, wait,” you breathed, your voice small as you looked into his eyes. “I’m scared… It’s too.. it’s going to hurt.”

“It will,” he growled softly, “But you’re going to take it aren’t you? You’re not going to disappoint your brother, hm?”

He didn’t give you a chance to protest further. Placing one hand beside your head, Aerion pushed himself forward with heavy deliberation.

The barrier of your maidenhead gave way with a painful burning sting. A cry tore from your throat, tears immediately pricking your eyes as he drove deeper, breaching you completely until he was fully buried in.

The fullness was staggering, a deep ache forming around your walls as they stretched to make room for him.

Aerion stayed still for a moment, letting you absorb the size of him. He looked down at your tear stained face, a terrifyingly soft, mocking smile splayed on his face as he watched you tremble beneath him.

“Look at you,” he cooed, his voice a low, sweet purr of mock sympathy. “Crying over a little sting? My poor, fragile sister. It hurts, doesn’t it?”

You could only nod weakly as your hands clutched at his shoulders.

“But you bore it for your brother, didn’t you?” Aerion murmured, his tone shifting to give you the validation you so badly needed.

He leaned down, pressing a lingering kiss to your damp cheek. “Good girl. Such a loyal little dragon.”

Before you were able to process his words, his hands locked onto your hips. With a sudden roll of his hips, he began to move inside you.

The abrupt friction hit your freshly torn walls and you let out a needy wail, your head tossing back into the pillows.

The sensation was overwhelming. A blurry rush of heat and a sharp blinding pleasure began to form deep in your lower stomach.

“Aerion–ah! Please, it’s too–”

“Too much?” he tutted, a breathy laugh escaping him as he quickened his pace, his thrusts getting deeper, harder, driving you into a euphoric state. “It’s exactly what you deserve. You belong to me now, you always have.”

You moaned, whimpering at the onslaught of his words and the brutal force of his thrusts. Your walls clenched frantically around him, pulling him deeper with every stroke.

Aerion’s features were taut, his jaw clenched as he stared down at you.

He was consumed by the sight of your submission, his eyes roaming all over your body while he delivered heavy strokes that hit the sensitive spot of your cunt.

A high, breathless cry broke from your throat. You clawed into the muscles of his back and your vision went blurry as your climax crashed over you.

You buried your face in his neck, sobbing his name into his skin as you drowned in the sensation.

“There it is,” Aerion praised as he felt you pulsing around him. He didn’t slow down, chasing his own release with ruthless friction.

It didn’t take long before his frame went rigid, his hips shuddering as he released his seed deep inside your freshly claimed warmth.

Aerion remained heavy and unmoving over you, his breathing slowly steadying against your neck.

He didn’t pull away, keeping you anchored under him, making sure you felt every ounce of his weight.

After a while, he shifted, lifting his head to look down at you. His fingers traced a lazy path up your arm, ignoring the way you still trembled.

“Look at what we’ve done,” he murmured as his thumb caressed your flushed cheek. “You were so frightened over nothing. All that worrying, and for what? You liked it, didn’t you, my sweet girl?”

A deeper blush burnt through your face, but you didn’t look away. “Because it was you,” you responded, still breathless.

Aerion grinned at that, thoroughly satisfied. “Never forget that, little dragon.”

"Tell me what you want."

Not an opening to negotiation. Baelor asked the way he did everything — with the full weight of his attention, those mismatched eyes on your face in the candlelight, his hands resting on your waist with the deliberate stillness of a man who had decided to be patient about this and meant it.

"You know what I want," you said.

"I want to hear you say it." His thumb tracing a slow circle at your hip. "All of it. Clearly."

You held his gaze. The particular quality of him in this register — the soft authority of it, the composure present but carrying heat underneath, the patience that was also its own kind of pressure — did something immediate to your ability to be composed about any of this.

You told him. Clearly. All of it.

He listened without interrupting, which was somehow more devastating than any response would have been. When you finished he was quiet for a moment, those eyes doing their reading of your face.

"And if you want to stop," he said.

"I'll say silver."

"And I will stop immediately."

"I know you will."

He looked at you for another moment. Something in his expression — the private warmth of him, the specific quality that had no diplomatic function — settled into something more focused. More certain.

"Lie down," he said. "On your back."

He took his time with the silk.

Three pieces — he had them ready, which told you something about how long he had been thinking about this, the particular planning of Baelor evident in the way he shook each one out with unhurried hands. Deep blue, thin enough to be soft against skin, long enough to give him what he needed.

He tied your right wrist to the bedpost first. Not tight — enough to hold, enough to give the restraint meaning, but with the careful precision of a man who had thought about the difference between symbolic and damaging and had strong opinions on the subject. He ran his thumb under the silk after he knotted it, checking the space, checking your face.

"Alright?"

"Yes."

The left wrist. The same care. The same check. You pulled lightly against both and felt the silk hold and felt something in your chest loosen into something warm and specific.

He picked up the third piece.

"Last chance to tell me no," he said.

"Baelor."

"Humour me."

"I do not want to tell you no."

He folded the silk carefully — his hands moving with the attention he gave everything — and came to sit beside you on the bed, and his hands found your face with a gentleness entirely at odds with what was coming, and he pressed his lips to your forehead before he covered your eyes.

The world went dark.

The silk was smooth and warm and smelled faintly of cedar and the specific quality of not being able to see him — of hearing his breathing and feeling his weight on the mattress and knowing he was looking at you without being able to look back — hit you somewhere immediately and thoroughly.

His hands moved to your shoulders. Traced down your arms. Checking, still, the quality of attention he gave this no different from the quality of attention he gave everything — the full and undivided weight of it, now that you couldn't see it, somehow more present than ever.

"Good?" he said quietly.

"Very," you said. Your voice had already changed register.

You heard something that might have been him almost smiling.

Then his hands moved, and the patience ended.

He started with his mouth.

Your throat, your collarbone, the curve of your breasts — working with the thoroughness that was specific to him, the unhurried mapping of a man who intended to know every response before he did anything requiring a response. The blindfold made it worse, or better, the not-seeing meaning every point of contact arrived without warning, his mouth finding places that made you pull against the silk and make sounds you had not prepared.

His hand moved to your breast. Cupped it. His thumb across the nipple, once, twice, feeling your back arch toward him.

Then he drew back his hand and brought it down.

Not hard. Precise. The sharp crack of it and the specific bright sting and the sound you made was immediate and bypassed every managed layer — and his hand returned immediately, palm flat and warm, soothing the sting with a pressure that was almost worse than the hit.

"Again?" he said. Conversational.

"Yes."

Again. The same precision. The same immediate soothing. Your hands pulling at the silk not to escape but because you needed to do something with them and had nothing, and the restraint of it was its own specific thing, the helplessness of being held open to whatever he decided to do next.

He moved lower.

His fingers found you without preamble and the sound he made at what he found there was low and immediate — a sound of satisfaction, of a man whose assessment has confirmed something he already suspected.

"Already wet, my heart?" he observed. Not quite a question in its entirety.

You said something that was not technically a word.

"Good," he said, and his fingers began to move.

Two fingers. The particular certainty of Baelor when he had decided on an objective — not building, not testing, going directly to the places he had mapped on other nights and knew with absolute confidence. Curling, pressing, finding the rhythm that made your hips lift toward his hand. His thumb on your clit. Working both simultaneously with the focused attention that was always him, always this, even now.

You came apart relatively quickly. Ten days of context. The blindfold. The silk at your wrists. The specific quality of Baelor's fingers when they were doing this without patience — and the sound you made when you came resonated off the walls and you felt him still his hand and work you through every tremor before he drew back.

A moment.

Then his hand came down on your cunt.

The sound you made was not dignified. The sting of it, sharp and immediate, the specific vulnerability of the target — and his hand returned, palm pressed flat, the heel of it grinding against your clit before he pulled back again.

"Baelor—"

"I have you," he said. Calm. Certain.

Again. The crack and the sting and the immediate warm pressure of his palm. Your back arching off the bed, your wrists pulling against the silk, the whole of you responding in a way that had no composure left in it.

"Good?" he said.

"More," you moaned

His fingers returned. Three this time — the stretch of it immediate and significant, a sound leaving you that was half complaint and entirely not, your body adjusting, accommodating, the fullness of three fingers and his thumb on your clit building something considerably less patient than the first.

He worked you with the thoroughness of a man who had been given a task and intended to complete it to his own exacting standards. Not varying, not teasing — the relentless focused rhythm of Baelor when his patience had been replaced by intent, hitting the same place with the same pressure with the same consistency until the thing coiling in you had nowhere to go except where he was directing it.

You came harder the second time. The silk biting into your wrists as you pulled against it, his name leaving your mouth in pieces, his fingers not stopping — working you through it, past it, into the oversensitised shaking aftermath without pause.

"Stop— Baelor— please—"

"One more," he said pleasantly.

"I can't—"

"You can." His fingers still moving, slower now, gentler, but not stopping. "I know you can. I will not stop until you give me another one."

The sound you made at that was not a protest. Not entirely.

He brought his hand down again — the breast this time, then the other, then once more on your cunt with the precision that suggested he had been thinking carefully about sequencing — and the combination of his fingers inside you and the sting and his thumb on your clit built something that had no architecture, no careful approach, just the blunt overwhelming accumulation of everything at once.

The third orgasm was less structured than the others. It arrived with less warning and more force, your whole body pulling against the silk, Baelor's name completely unraveled in your mouth, and he worked you through every second of it with his fingers and his thumb and the steady certain presence of him until you were shaking and entirely speechless and had nothing left that resembled composure.

His fingers slipped free. His hand stilled.

The room was very quiet except for your breathing.

Then his hands found the blindfold.

He removed it slowly. Gave you a moment to adjust to the candlelight, to find his face — and when you did, the expression on it was something that went directly through the post-orgasm haze and landed somewhere warm and immediate. The careful attention of him, the mismatched eyes dark and fixed on your face with an intensity that had not diminished, the slight flush of him, the specific quality of Baelor very thoroughly undone and very thoroughly in control simultaneously.

He looked at you for a moment.

Then his eyes moved down.

The sound he made was involuntary and immediate.

"Gods," he said. Low. The composure entirely gone from his voice. "Look at you."

You were aware, dimly, that you were a considerable state. Flushed from throat to chest, still shaking slightly, wrists still held by the silk, the evidence of three orgasms and his hands unmistakable.

He touched you — his fingers returning briefly, barely a touch — and the sound he made this time was rougher.

"You are absolutely soaking," he said, with the tone of a man making an observation he cannot quite believe and intends to address. "Do you have any idea—" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "I have been thinking about this for an hour and somehow you've still managed to—"

He reached for his laces.

"Tell me," he said, pushing the clothing away with rather less ceremony than usual, "if you need me to stop."

You looked at him from your thoroughly wrecked state and said something that was not technically a word.

"I will take that as a no," he said amused, and positioned himself, and pushed into you.

The sound you made echoed.

He groaned — low and long and stripped of everything managed, his forehead dropping briefly to your shoulder at the specific fact of you, soaking and warm and clenching around him with the oversensitised responsiveness of someone who had already come three times and was apparently entirely prepared to do so again.

"You feel—" He stopped. Moved. The groan that followed was not a word. "You are absolutely—" another thrust, deep and certain— "Gods."

He was not gentle. He had not been gentle since the moment he unfolded the first piece of silk and you had not asked him to be gentle and he was, at this point, in absolutely no condition to be gentle — his cock driving into you with the focused urgency of a man who had been patient for an hour and had exhausted his supply of it entirely, each thrust full and deep and certain.

Your wrists still held. The silk still present. The specific helplessness of it — of having no hands, of being able only to receive whatever he gave you — with the three orgasms behind you and his cock buried in your cunt and his thumb returning to your clit because apparently Baelor intended to be thorough about this as well—

"Baelor—" The word came out slurred. "I can't— I'm— please—"

"You can," he said. Breathless now, the composure entirely absent, fucking you with the single-minded focus of a man who has ceased to be the Hand of the King and is simply this — here, undone, present. "You absolutely can. You have been doing it all evening." A thrust that punched the air from your lungs. "One more. Give me one more."

You gave him one more.

He followed you immediately after — his rhythm breaking, his face pressed to your neck, his cock buried as deep as it would go as he spent himself with a sound that had nothing of the diplomat in it, nothing of the composure, nothing of any version of him that existed outside this room.

For a very long time afterward neither of you moved.

His weight on you. His breathing slowing against your neck. Your wrists still loosely held by the silk, the restraint somehow comfortable now, familiar, the silk warm from your skin.

His hands moved — finding the knots at your wrists with careful fingers, working them loose with the same precision he had used to tie them, and when the silk fell away he drew your arms down slowly and held your wrists in his hands and pressed his lips to each in turn, checking, attending, the Baelor who thought about everything reassembling himself quietly in the aftermath.

"Alright?" he said.

You stared at the ceiling.

"I have," you said, after a moment, "lost the ability to form complete sentences."

He pressed his lips to your temple. "I will take that as a yes."

"It is emphatically a yes."

He settled beside you, drew you against him, his arm around your shoulders with the careful warmth that was always his in the quiet after. His thumb tracing slow absent circles against your arm.

"The silk," you said, eventually.

"What about it."

"Keep it."

A pause in which you felt against your side the specific quality of Baelor fully smiling. "I had every intention of keeping it, my heart," he said.

You laughed. It came out slightly wrecked.

His arm tightened around you once, briefly, and then relaxed.

Outside, the castle went about its evening. Inside, the candles burned low and the silk lay on the covers and Baelor held you with the full and undivided attention he gave everything that mattered to him, which was its own specific kind of bondage, and one you had never once wanted to escape.

A.N.: in my mind, reader in Three Heads of the Dragon AU is primarily a dom when it comes to Maekar, but one touch from Baelor and it's all reversed oopsies

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd

he’s not gentle.

it had started gentle, as it usually did, but after pulling you apart on the flat of his tongue, followed by the stretch of two thick fingers, he knew exactly what he wanted and how he was going to get it. good thing you liked it like that.

maekar curls you over the edge of the bed, your body completely bare as you bend and lay amongst the silks and furs. a strong, calloused hand holds the back of your neck, anchoring you to the feathered mattress as he stretches your pussy open around the thick of his cock.

he groans, feeling your pussy pull tight around him as he ruts in. silk walls draw inwards, heavy against the ridges along his shaft and the vein, pumping hot with blood, that runs along the underside. his other hand is a vice on your hip, dimpling the flesh as he forces you back onto him, the slapping sounds of skin-on-skin loud in the evening silence of your chambers.

you mewl into the sheets beneath you, a string of saliva already catching out the side of your mouth as your husband thrusts into you, the movements deep and far-reaching. heavy balls nudge against the swollen pearl of your clit, and you mewl again, startled, when the head of his cock punches up towards the plug of your cervix.

“don’t fuss,” maekar grumbles, rutting into you, eyes trailing down the line of your spine and over the curve of your arse as he holds you down by the nape. your pussy drools around him, his flushed shaft slick as he pulls out, then shoves back in. he groans, “fuck, you always take me so well, don’t you?”

he doesn’t really want a response when he questions you like this, cock splitting you open as he pins you to your shared bed. you gape, breathy moans falling free of your throat as your fingers tangle in the silken sheets and sweat builds tacky down your back and thighs. he listens to you gasp and mewl, a crooked smile on his face as he kneads the fat at your hip.

“how many times…” maekar begins, sentence breaking momentarily as the wet squelch of your cunt becomes audible in the flame-soaked silence, the open hearth flickering nearby. you whimper, and your husband groans. “will i have to spill in this tight cunt before you’re full, huh? how many times will she have to take me before you’re round with my child?”

you let out a pathetic sound, some mix of a gasp and a moan, the syllables showing some semblance of his name, but it’s lost in the heat of your pleasure. a third orgasm sparks at the ends of your nerves, flames flickering across the walls of your womb, deep in your pelvis.

maekar grunts, strands of white hair falling loose over his forehead, cheeks hued with pink beneath the candlelight. he palms the flesh of your arse now as the hand on your neck pushes you deeper against the bed.

“is that what you want, little dove?” he asks as his hips rock, the leaking head of his cock pushing right up against that perfect spot inside you. your back arches and you cry out his name, pussy fluttering as heat fills the base of your tummy. he grunts, continuing as you squirm. “you want me to fill you? spill deep inside this tight cunt ‘til she makes a right mess of herself, yeah?”

“maekar,” you manage out, and it’s low and tense and strung across a high-pitched moan. you fist the silks and furs for support as he rocks against you, bed creaking.

“i’m right here,” he whispers, barely audible over his hips slamming against your arse. the fingers on your neck give you a gentle squeeze, and you suck in a shallow breath. then, he groans, the thick of his cock sucked in tight as your pussy flutters around him. “oh, she wants it, little dove. wants me to fill her—wants me to make you a mother.”

you cry out at his words, your release strung taut across your sparking nerves. it’s right there, your entire body growing rigid beneath him as he spears you apart on his cock. you grow hot, and hotter still, tension deep through the lines of your pelvis as you angle your hips to meet his thrusts, heartbeat heavy in your clit.

maekar huffs and grunts behind you, his voice breaking across a poorly hidden whine. “fuck, fu-uh-ck, oh, little dove, here we go, here we go…”

he coaxes you through your orgasm as it ignites and overwhelms you. your body shakes, trembles like a picked flower, as heat bursts through your pelvis and the depths of your womb, your pussy squeezing tight around him. you moan, his name and his title up in the air around you, as stars burst behind your lowering lids and your legs threaten to give out.

but he’s not far behind you—as you come, he groans his praises, guiding you through the fissuring of pleasure with “that’s it, there we go” and “good girl, just like that” as he ruts his cock towards the base of your womb. with each thrust into you, slick dribbles out around his shaft, and he feels it along the seam of his balls as they draw up, visions of you fat with his child at the forefront of his mind.

maekar groans loudly. “gods, you’ll look perfect round with my child—fuck, i’ll be good to you, little dove, an’ i’ll keep you full all—the—fucking—time—” thrust, thrust, thrust, with each word, before he’s letting out a hoarse moan of your name and shoving himself to the hilt inside you.

he rolls his hips, sliding against you in lazy movements as he spills right against your cervix. still fizzling down from your own orgasm, you let out a shaky moan as he fills you, seed too warm in the base of your pelvis. his cock twitches, jerks inside you as your walls flutter, then pull him in even tighter as his seed fills you, fills you still, then settles.

he doesn’t pull out, but he collapses half way on top of you—the hand on your neck moving to bracket your head. you shift a little, panting as he plants a wet kiss to the corner of your mouth. you whine, turning your head to slide your lips to his. he grunts into your mouth as your tongues meet, and you taste yourself on him as your heart begins to slow beneath your ribs. he pulls away, resting his dewy forehead against your temple.

“it’ll take,” he says like he’s sure of it. like he knows it will.

“and if it doesn’t?” you counter through a mumble, limbs lax as you melt into the silks and furs, his body a firm press atop yours.

maekar chuckles. it’s a deep, low sound that vibrates through his chest, and it makes a little whine slip past your lips.

“then we keep trying,” he mutters, rolling his hips and nudging his cock deeper. you whimper, a shudder racking through you in response. he kisses your warm cheek. “i’ll fill you again and again, every fucking night, until you’re too full to even move… understood?”

you nod, words evading you as he noses your cheekbone, kissing you softly there too as his cock twitches where it sits deep, plugging you full of him.

———

me next

daeron who's either gotten a little too mouthy or too pathetic with it, so you make him wear the cage and sit in the cuck chair (he is exactly where he wants to be!). and you start making out with dunk on the bed and daeron's just watching the two of you kiss and touch and dry hump each other (well as dry as humping dunk can be when that man gets soaked in his own pre-cum fast). then dunk's going down on you and daeron is WHINING because he could eat you out! his cock's locked up but his mouth is free and so eager to be used! and he's already sliding off the chair and crawling towards you when you tell him to be a good boy and sit back down and wait his turn. you're sat on the edge of the bed with your legs over dunk's shoulders, playing with dunk's hair, the entire time switching between looking at dunk and daeron.

dunk makes you cum on his mouth a few times, so you reward him by riding him. big man gets so pussy drunk. it's a struggle for you not to go dumb on his cock but you are determined to stay in control. whole time the key to daeron's cage is nestled on a chain between your bouncing tits and daeron cannot stop staring at it. dunk reaches up to touch it and you lightly slap his hand away, oh daeron would be moaning at the thought of you owning and being protective of him.

you and dunk cum and daeron is just shaking and sweating. his hand running on his abdomen and thighs like he's trying to please himself, but every time his fingers make contact with the metal cage, he whimpers and whines.

he meets you at the supermarket closest to his farmhouse. dunk had seen you around before, but never had the wits about him to approach or strike a conversation with you. luckily for him, it seemed you were more perceptive than he was. dunk supposes it wasn't not hard for anyone, especially you, to realize how lingering his looks were, having caught him a handful of times, big, wide baby blues trained on you in wonder and trepidation. his cheeks have been red too, dammit. but dunk wouldn't beat himself up too much for his clumsiness, for it had landed him your phone number! he could've sworn his smile was about to split his face when you pressed a slip of paper with the neat handwriting on it, urging him softly to contact you whenever he wished. your name was also scribbled on it. dunk blushed. you had such a pretty name. it was only fair of him to offer his own in response with the eagerness of a child.

he wonders, absentmindedly, if you have any social media. maybe you will be curious and look up his name? you do know what he looks like, but maybe you would be curious for more? dunk feels silly for thinking so ahead when he only now got your number. but the thought lingers.

maybe a few more pictures of him on his page wouldn't hurt. what if the pretty lady is curious, after all?

turns out, you are not fond of posting yourself on social media much, dunk learns in the following weeks he spends with you. that's alright, he thinks. nothing wrong with not wanting to be seen! he agrees, after all, more or less, but does tell you about the account he has, shy and reluctant to show you the pictures he posted, feeling like a fool under your scrutiny.

his blush only deepens when you start cooing over his pictures, praising how handsome he looks and how much you love them! dunk feels like he could combust right then and there under all the compliments. the way you pinch your fingers and zoom on some of the photos to see his face better or ogle his muscles. he almost passes out when you comment how strong he looks when he works on the farm. even offer to take his pictures for him next time he feels like snapping a few.

it'll be a win-win for both, you say. he gets to look handsome and you get to look at him.

dunk swears his ears are fuming from how flushed he is, but he nods eagerly anyway, secretly loving the concept of you being the one behind the camera, smiling so prettily at him, your eyes shining.

taking pictures becomes one of his favorite things to do.

a couple of weeks later, and dunk is fumbling with his words, expressing his feelings for you in the most ardent, clumsy way. it's sweet and lovely and so, so honest. just like him.

you two are inseparable afterwards. dunk is over the moon to have you visit his farmhouse more often, showing you every corner and crevice and getting you acquainted with the place. he loves seeing you walk around, interacting with the horses and livestock, and asking about every flower and plant you see. dunk is so in love that he feels like he could burst. you are the loveliest thing he has ever seen, and he wishes to one day take pictures of you, too, just like you do of him. but for now, he's more than happy to be on the other side of the camera, smiling at you and feeling like the luckiest man on earth.

slowly, traces of you start appearing in the pictures. it makes dunk's heart soar in his chest when he posts them for the first time. now people can see that there is someone precious helping him take such beautiful photography, even if it is mostly of himself.

more and more of you start bleeding into the photography, and dunk gets a rosy tint in his cheeks every time someone comments under his post, asking who the other person is.

dunk wants to tell everyone about you. he's not hiding you. never. he is so proud of being your lover, thanking every god out there for bringing you into his path.

he is just... a little nervous. maybe you do not want to put yourself out there so much for people to see. maybe you wish things to be more private, and dunk understands and respects that. he is happy with how things are now.

maybe in the future, he would ask if he can have one or two pictures of your pretty face on his page so people can see who owns his heart and soul.

one day, you mention offhandedly that you two barely have any pictures together, and should take more.

dunk's heart almost stops in his chest out of pure joy and delight, agreeing so, so earnestly, hands already fumbling for his phone.

he keeps all of those in a separate folder, which he names with a cute, simple heart. but it's a heart in your favorite color. he thinks it's cute and romantic. you agree.

dunk does not flood his social page with all the pictures at once. he does not want to make it too overwhelming for you, just in case.

but he cannot help himself as he drops one or two here and there every time he feels like updating his page. now people can see how beautiful his lover is! he's so happy.

sometimes, he sneaks pictures of you, candid and sweet. those might be his favourites.

you look every bit of yourself, relaxed and pretty. capturing you at your most authentic makes butterflies swarm in his stomach, threatening to choke him from how much tenderness he feels for you.

it feels like he has pieces of you with him. he does post those, but also makes sure to print them out and tuck them somewhere in his car where he can see them at all times. the lonely drives feel better now because he gets to look up and see the person he loves most.

dunk's neighbour, egg, often jokes that you two should get married soon.

"you look like those old married couples, anyway!" he would say, and every time, dunk would get this faraway look in his eyes for a few moments, as if imagining it. you, as his pretty, beautiful wife, living happily in his farmhouse and sharing your life with him.

the blush on his cheeks is so bright and warm when his eyes flit to you, already imagining waking up to you every morning and getting to kiss you silly as he comes back for dinner after a hard day of tending to the farm.

maybe he starts making cute, makeshift rings from plants or grass he picks up around his property. and maybe dodges your soft looks and inquiries as to why he suddenly picked up this cute hobby.

secretly, dunk loves feeling like he can protect you, even if you can take care of yourself. he's so proud when he sees you stand up for yourself, even though he wants nothing more than to do it for you. he respects your autonomy and encourages you to be independent.

but he loves feeling needed and wanted.

loves to see how much stronger he looks beside you. how taller. how bigger.

it's a small, shameful part of him that he keeps hidden, like a dirty little secret.

when he can clearly see the difference between your physiques in pictures, he gets so flustered, red from the tips of his ears to the valley of his pecs.

asking you to start a live together is so nerve-wracking, he feels like all the blood rushed to his face, and he cannot find the right words to express how happy that'll make him.

dunk loves you so much, and even though he is happy with how things are, he can only wish to have you closer. so much closer. much more often.

it's a greedy, selfish feeling, but he cannot help it. you are everything to him. the first rays of sunshine at dawn and all the glittering stars in the sky at dusk.

you are his forever girl.

Endless questioning. That was all he had heard, and it was just about enough to drive him crazy, past the point of insanity if possible.

You were no fool, he knew of it. He would not have stepped foot into another marriage let alone being forced to take a bride, if she was dimwitted. And you were far from it.

Callous, stern and prickly many called him, and yet you and what followed had wandered round him like a buzzing fly. Though it was not your company he despised, he liked that more than he could admit, but it was the mockery. For a man of his age, not old and yet not young with six children in his stead, you had been incessant in wondering exactly.

How.

He was handsome, far more than people had mentioned or cared to, striking in that fierce way. Hardened by battles and fatherhood alone. And you were captivated, and curious. And luckily for you, you were the thing, the creature, the pest that consistently managed to get under his skin.

The way you walked, talked, the way you made eyes at him across the feasting table, the way you’d so perfectly slotted into the family and how everyone, including the children adored you. For that he was thankful, truly, but it didn’t stop the fact you drove him mad.

“She is a new addition to the family, and she is fitting in quite well I should say.” Baelor countered as both men walked through the punctured halls of Maegor’s Holdfast.

“She has taken over.” Maekar muttered with a roll of his yes , stalking slowly beside his brother.

“Your senses perhaps.” Baelor replied coolly, an edge of amusement following.

Maekar slowed, squinting piercing eyes at his brother as they moved to stand over the edge, overseeing the court below where you and the children had played. Egg and Rhae had tugged at your hands, making you stand to play and duck behind the plant pots with them in small strides, with Daeron watching on. Even Valarr stood at the corner with a smile, whispering no doubt pleasantries and flattery about you. Some said you would have been more suited to one of the younger Prince’s, perhaps there would be more in common, a likeness, but even though he remained shadowed, the idea made his blood boil. A possessiveness over territory he had yet to claim.

Not a chance.

“What I mean is, she does no harm. It has been a long time since they have all looked like this.” Baelor reasoned, picking at the stone underneath his palm as he eyed Maekar.

“Around you she may not.” The grumble came fast, quick to override his brother’s words. But his throat felt dry, tacky and stuck like the words could barely come out. Like what he had heard was true.

His senses, overtaken his senses. How?

What with your cunning ways, your ability to charm and please, and weasel your way in without needing to, to be so beautiful and too good for him. It needled at him. The marriage both of you had been so blessed with was not necessity, not by anyone’s means, but yet it came anyway.

Swift and secure, as all things should be, strengthening alliance or something else they had bothered to give title.

The loss changed him, hardened him in ways that most wouldn’t be able to understand, but you had tried to. Endlessly. Attempts to break down the brick wall that was your husband became futile, and so you decided to go around him. For it was jsut as new to you as it was to him, and with him years your senior, you had expected him more forthcoming.

And yet he was not.

He was reserved and callous, moving through the halls of Summerhall like a gust of wind more than a steady hand, ignoring all of your questions insisting they were nothing but “nonsensical whims.”

But you had longed for something different. Perhaps not the chivalrous fanciful lords and their ways, but his own.. the longing looks he had given you across court, the fleeting touches at your lower back and arm when duty had warranted it. But you wanted more, you wanted him, not duty. And he had been rather intent on keeping it from you.

But one thing he didn’t deny, was that his brother may well have been right. None of them had looked like it in such a long time, nor had he felt the way he had in so long. So.. undone, having to pry himself from his thoughts, especially when you caught his gaze from across the din.

Your smile bright and curved, more like a smirk, knowing and tempting. His jaw ticked harshly, tongue pressing deep into his cheek, only for a fleeting moment before you had looked away, and his fingers had all but gripped the stone under his fingers enough to chip it.

Baelor had caught it, a single glimpse to his side and back onto you and the children again. The heat that burned from the man beside him was enough to scold and he had not lingered on the thought of what had wandered through his head.

Nor did he need to, because before pulling away, Maekar’s eyes barely left you.

His thoughts were, you.

——

The chamber was cool, years of aged stone encasing you more than you’d have liked. The day had .. wonderfully, breaking your fast with your ladies and the children, tending to them in the gardens and watching over some of their lessons, and retreating back to your ladies once more. For them you were thankful, able to wander the lower halls without question or prying eyes, and the ability to talk as freely as you wished.

“If only he wasn’t so prickly.”

“Careful, he is our Prince after all.”

“It is a miracle he has fathered children of his own at all, not near as pleasant as his brother.” Quickly followed by, “Apologies my lady, we only wish to see you happy..”

You had confided in them briefly, private chatter between you of how exactly to woo the prince, or rather atleast to accept his affections that so many had claimed to have seen. Also that so many had claimed the Prince did not have a heart to give.

But they were wrong.

Not with the way he looked you, so dark and delicate, like he could snap at any moment..

You must have made him feel green again, one had giggled, as you did.

You had asked him to visit your chambers many nights, and yet he did not, instead your maid came to you, always. She bathed you often, brought tea and a fresh pitcher of water, even sat with you a while when you had wanted it. Almost as if it had been sent for you, and for that you were thankful. But there was no sign of him.

And alas, you had had enough.

They were not wrong, you had noticed it too. Such fighting for restraint and the tension that lingered was inevitable, a livin thing that made you ache.

And so you had taken their advice.

If he will not make such a move, perhaps you should.

And you liked that idea, you liked it very much. Because out of all the talk and gossip, the questioning of your husband’s want for you was dwindling, and yet you did not give in.

Your chambermaid, Niamh, had just finished setting out the tray in the small table, a glass bowl of fruits beside a candle, a hand towel and your bodily oils. She stood straight backed and patient for what her ached body would allow, resting her arms at her middle with a small, expectant smile.

“I have run you a bath, should you require assistance, my lady?”

“That will be all thank you Niamh, you are dismissed.”

She nodded curtly, and with the turn of her heel the oak creaked behind her softly. You had waited a further few moments to let the echoes of her footsteps die out before you moved, stepping into the thinness of your laced nightgown with a devilish grin.

Because it was not the bath you were ready for.

Your steps patterned the lines of the corridors you’d mapped out for some time, every corner and shortcut that was hidden beneath stone. Maekar’s own chambers was not far from your own, a whole stretch of hall and a turn away. Every outline of jagged rock shadowed with a trail of sconces and the few tapered and coloured tapestries that hung from the walls.

Your heart thrummed harshly in your chest with adrenaline, your fingertips flexing as you clutched your arms around yourself from the cold night air. And once you arrived outside of his chambers, the feeling only seemed to grow, goose pimples trailing your skin. But with a single look, defiant and what confidence you could muster up, the two men standing vigil outside had stepped aside without protest for you.

Seemingly aware of the mission you had embarked yourself on.

The chambers were darker than your own, everything lined perfectly and sparse just as you had remembered it from your night together moons ago. The last time he had truly touched you. You stepped inside carefully, snaking yourself around the door before closing it shut with a heavy click.

The hearth warmed the room, dimming it in golds and oranges across banners of red and black. Your breath stuttered as you turned, so taken with breathing the space in you hadn’t known the figure staring right at you. And a look of confusion etching the striking, miserable features.

His robe was a dark and velveted crimson, one that wrapped to his shins and broadened his shoulders. His eyes glistened in that light, twinkling more tender than they had let on, almost enticing.

“Husband.” You greeted innocently.

“Who let you in?” Maekar spoke sharply, like the words were a bad taste on his tongue.

“Your kingsguard, very thoughtful of them.” You gestured behind you at the door as you moved further into the room, closing the gap between you as much as you could dare.

“You should be asleep,” His eyes raked over you for a single moment, rather all he could allow himself before he turned to his side, back facing you as he made for the bed, “in your own chambers.”

Your nightdress was of the finest silk, cream and a lightness that hugged your curves in the most torturous way, your hair clung to your shoulders and your skin bared.

Something he should not have seen, should not have wanted as much as he did.

“I have come to see you.”

You dared a foot forwards, planting it across the cool floor and onto the myriah carpet just at the end of the bed, a small smile peeking at your features. He had rested himself onto the edge of the bed, sitting hunched as his legs trailed far and long in front of him, shoulders sagged and tense.

“Well now you have seen. Now leave.”

But you did not, you couldn’t. He was far too close, and you had not yet begun.

You didn’t answer to that, instead you had crawled toward him on the edge of the bed, a mere arms length away.

“I have missed you.”

He only looked at you as he took a heavy inhale, a simple look, displeased and thrown. Why. You blinked up to the violets that bore into yours, a face like statue and stone. How could you. After all that was placed on you both, all the gossip and venomous words that spilled behinds backs, after how much he had attempted to keep from ruining you.

“What are you saying?”

“Well you hardly spend any time here.. with me.” You kicked your legs in front, swinging just beside his, close enough to knock together where yours didn’t meet the length of his own.

“Do not pretend to be so stupid.”

“It scares you.” You inched closely, carefully, arms reaching toward him, through the robe. And he allowed you to, legs spread wide and shamelessly as you settled yourself over him, a knee perched on either side.

“What?” He blinked up through lidded eyes, pupils blown and decisive, even if he would not speak as such. He would let you have your fun, amuse yourself and find out what you had so longed to have.

“The thought scares you.” You continued, fingers running along the collar of his robe, lining the silk just across the hem where his skin was bared. Few silver hairs littered his chest where the material opened, hard planes of pale muscle rising and falling sharply.

“What thought woman? Speak.” Maekar snapped through the quiet, impatience clawing at his skin like a fire.

“Surrendering yourself.”

He almost laughed, almost, a short incredulous huff bubbling from his throat.

“It is not my duty to surrender.”

“But it is your duty to put a babe in me is it not, the marriage was consummated moons ago and you had done so little as touch me.” Your fingers worked at his shoulders, taut muscle pulling between your nails. He stayed rigid, batting your hand away with a flick.

But you moved it back, placing it right back to where you had it.

“Do not test me.”

You could feel him there. The warmth of his breath, the burning glare that did not leave your face, the heat brushing between you through thin layers of fabric. Arousal flooded your core, and you had half the mind to bite back a moan. You had not had him like this, and he was not denying you.

“I’am not testing you.” You shrugged, hands slowly circling to meet around his neck. A brave move, even if not wise. He swore he could hear the hammering of your heart, and still see the curve of the smirk he had not from forgotten hours earlier, the one that plagued his mind.

The one he wished to wipe off of your face and take you over his lap in an instant—

“Perhaps it is more than duty you require..” Your fingers continued at his collarbones, humming dreamily at the thought. “Perhaps it is want.”

Your eyes met, bearing down into one another as your breaths mingled, your faces somehow rocked closer together on instinct, where your lips neared touching.

“Though if you do not wish for more, nor to consummate this marriage.. I wouldn’t be offended. Perhaps you are scared.. and after having so many it would be more than enough for an old man to—“

That was enough. The pure breaking point he’d sure he’d lost a long time ago. All resolve had seemed to snap with a heavy punch in his gut.

You didn’t have time to contemplate another word before he had shifted you both roughly. Long, thick fingers circled around your throat, your back shoved down into layers upon layers of silken sheets and furs. The tassels of his robe had fallen in his swiftness, bearing his chest completely leaving him only in his breeches and you had completely lost your breath.

You were pinned, folded with your legs pressed into his thighs as he kneeled over you.

“Do not anger me, girl.”

You blinked up at him, gasping at the pressure against your throat. You could smell him from there, more than before. And he was intoxicating. His scent, the smell of woodsmoke and pine, and need.

“You know well that is not it.” He gritted, glaring down at you with a gaze that made the pressure in your belly pinch hot.

“Then what is it.. mayhaps that you are older—“

The fingers tightened at your throat as he leaned down, body rising over yours as more weight anchored you down.

“Seven hells no. Tell me what you want. Say it, tell me you want this as I do, before I change my fucking mind.” The hand at your waist clamped tighter, stretching the seams of your nightgown. Your skin was ablaze, ignited under his touch and the aching deep in your core.

There was much you could have said, even struck him for making you wait so long, for denying himself of you for reasons he couldn’t even begin to name, but you had forgotten all else, raw need buzzing through your skin.

“Want you to put a babe in me husband.. want you to show me how well you fuck.”

You breathed out with a whine. And he growled, deep and beastly, like a primal instinct that could not be tamed. So guttural it sounded almost dragonlike.

His grip curled around the back of your neck, shoving you up to face him with bared teeth as he pressed himself further down, nose nudging harshly into yours.

“Good girl.”

His lips crashed to yours, fierce and unyielding, the force shoving you both back onto the bed as he bent over you. Your tongues swept together before his pushed his between your lips, tasting you, savouring and claiming all at once.

“You have driven me mad, wife.” With one hand he reached between you, unlacing the confines of his breeches in one heavy tug. They fell away down to his knees, the sharp ‘v’ of muscle trailing down to his cock defined and pulsing with vein. Even through lidded and lusted eyes you could see him, all of him. He was thick as he was long, the tip reddened with an aching blush and the beading sticky stream of precum.

Maekar waited a moment, slowing as he rose, releasing his grip on your neck, tracing his fingers over the bunched hem of your nightgown. He pushed it up, inch by inch until he brought it to your chest.

“Off.” Was all he called gruffly, and the command made you dizzy, raising your arms shakily as he snaked it off of you before tossing it somewhere to the floor where neither of you had cared to look for it.

He had longed for this sight. You had lingered long in his memory since the first time, the swell of your breasts and nipples pebbling under the cool air, the dip of your waist and curve of your stomach. The flush of your face under the firelight flickering behind you, silhouetted only by his shadow above you. Gods you did drive him mad.

And he was a fool to wait so long, to make you wait.

Hands brushed down your sides, callouses scratching along your skin as you shivered under his touch, fingers splaying over your belly and parting your thighs.

“All of this teasing.. and talk with your ladies who do not know fuck all.”

His fingers dug into the flesh of them, ignoring the way you inched downward to him, the hard press of his length just above your aching cunt.

“She must be so needy for me for being desperate like some common whore...” He tutted sharply, running a finger from your navel to your heat, slipping through the wetness that gathered over your clit and entrance. Flush crept your cheeks brazenly, hips arching instinctly as he curled two inside of you.

You moaned loudly, digits filling you at once as your cunt sucked them in greedily, rocking back onto them as he flexed them. He worked you open like that, scissoring as you bucked and humped yourself back onto his hand restlessly. And again he let you, urging you on, pumping his fingers deep while his thumb circled at your clit, letting your sticky sweetness coat his hand.

The sounds were lewd, a squelch against his palm where it filled you, motioning and massaging at your g-spot over and over until you had broke a sweat across the sheets, working yourself up with a desire that needed to be sated.

He didn’t let you finish, couldn’t, not even the satisfaction of having you come undone on him was enough. He had to have you, and there was only way it was going to happen, with having you wrapped around his cock and buried deep inside of you.

“Why the fuck did you—“ Your words caught on your tongue, dying as he angled himself, heavy length rubbing through your folds with a sickening tease. He slipped himself inside, thickness filling you with a burning stretch as you took him. His mouth moved back over yours, catching your whines and enduring the way your nails clutched at his back with a groan.

He stilled only to feel all of you, sheathed so far inside you swore you could feel him in the your belly. His cock punched deep, fingers gripped in a swarm around your hips to only anchor himself further, tongue sweeping over yours in a feverish haze. You could hardly breathe, the air punched from your lungs as he thrust inside of you, pulling out gently just to shove himself back deeper, and purposefully until stars blurred your vision.

Your thighs curled at his hips, muscle tensing and straining where he fucked into you like a man possessed, grunts muffled into the curve of your jaw as you begged and whined for him, wrapping yourself tight at his middle as he huddled himself over you. The hard bone of his knees braced at the bottom of your thighs, stretching you further for him to get more of you, your body on full display and all for him.

You tried to speak, to rise over the lack of words as your mouth parted, but it failed you, he was merciless.

“Take. It.” He rasped, rising over you to tug your legs upward, resting them onto his chest and up to his shoulders. Your husband was undone, completely. Silver flattened hair had fallen into his eyes, pale skin flushing with a sheen of sweat and desire, his eyes burning as he took you in. As if to study you so deeply and commit you to memory, finally having you in his arms, unable to spout those stupid questions and irk him further.

But it did not last long, not until he had you flipped again, this time with your face pressed into the furs, a heavy palm smoothed over your back.

“You want to know how hm?” His breath hit the shell of your ear, cock sliding over your arsecheek.

Your blood ran cold, a shiver wracking your body as fingers twisted into your hair, forcing you up along with his hips. He had you bent beneath him, his hips dragging into your arse as he lined himself up once more. You were arched up into him, breasts bunched into the mattress and your cries muffled into the sheets.

The angle there hit deeper, fuller, settling that spot inside of you with every snap of his thrusts. The sound of slapping filled your ears, punctuated only by his grunting and your moans. He tugged you back onto him where you fell completely boneless, his cock spreading you open as your arms spread wide, clutching and fisting at the pillows as you moaned into the mattress.

“This is what you wanted is it, to fuck you full..” A hand cracked down onto your arscheek and you mewled, arching your back to meet the stinging pressure. He fucked into you still, sinking in and out so deeply it was certain to kiss your cervix.

“Perhaps this will shut you up.. spilling inside of this cunt.”

Your whines became babbles, a plea of “yes yes yes” falling from your lips needily, and he gave you it, everything you desired, begged for, everything you deserved. His head fell, a hand moving over the trail of your spine, cinching at your waist to bring you closer.

You couldn’t take it.

The pair of your fell apart together, every slap of skin and pant sending you over the edge. His teeth bit into your shoulder from behind, tongue smoothing over the marks that punctured your skin.

“Please..” You whined, your walls spasming wildly around him as your climax crashed over you.

“Let go for me, my girl..” He groaned through gritted teeth, grabbing a harsh fistful of your arse as you clenched around him, your swollen cunt milking him dry as he chased his own high. He gave few more thrusts before spilling inside of you, fucking it back into you as you shook round him, legs limp beneath him.

He did not let go of you right away, pulling from you carefully, your wetness and his spend leaking from you as he rested your hips back onto the bed. A pillow was placed under your middle as he lifted you without fuss, tilting you ever so slightly downward. So it will keep. Your heart eased its hammering as your body began to rest, heavy warm arms tugging you upward and onto his chest.

The sheets were pulled over you carefully in silence, only his ragged breaths and the crackling of the hearth filling the heavy silence in the room.

“Rest.”

A hand combed through your hair, smoothing over your face as you looked up at him, and this time he found yours, and really looked. Your arm wrapped over his as his hooked under your legs, sweeping you closer, together wrapped in your warmth.

He felt you looking, and he waited, expecting another quip as per usual.

“Are you done with the nonsense now?” He mumbled, resting his head back onto the wooden headboard.

“Mhm.. maybe.” You hummed, tracing the silver hairs at his chest.

“For fucks sake..”

“I believe you’ll have to do it again.”

There it was.

The mouth that drove him mad. His arm tightened around you, but he said nothing.

Though he didn’t need to, his exhales grew harsher, his spend still dripping from you as you rubbed your thighs together, and over the hardening of his cock.

Not as duty, not as requirement, but as your husband, and the pure unrestrained need for wanting you, and how he wasn’t to deny it again.

The hour had grown shamefully late by the time you decided you were done waiting.

Three weeks. Three weeks of turned backs and engineered absences and the particular cruelty of a man who could fill a room with his presence even while pretending to be entirely unreachable within it. Three weeks of watching Prince Maekar Targaryen look straight through you with those violet eyes and finding nothing in them that acknowledged what had been building between you for months.

You found him at dusk.

The armoury sat quiet at that hour, the training yard beyond it emptied of squires and knights alike, nothing remaining but the last copper light bleeding through narrow windows and the distant sounds of the castle settling into evening. Torches guttered softly along the walls, catching the dull gleam of hanging steel and leather.

Maekar stood at the far end with his back to the door, methodically checking the edge of a blade with the focused attention of a man determined to be unreachable.

He had been unreachable for weeks.

“You have been avoiding me,” you said. The words landed flat in the quiet. Maekar did not turn around.

“I have been occupied.”

“You walked out of a room yesterday because I entered it.”

“I had somewhere to be.”

“Maekar.” His name left you with enough weight that his shoulders stiffened visibly. “Look at me.”

He set the blade down with deliberate care and turned. His expression was exactly what you had expected — closed, guarded, wearing that particular blankness he deployed when he wanted to be mistaken for someone who did not feel things.

You knew better. You had always known better when it came to him.

“Whatever you believe you need to say,” he said flatly, “I would ask you to reconsider.”

“I have reconsidered for three weeks.” You closed the door and stepped further into the room. “I am done reconsidering.”

“Then be brief.”

“Why are you pulling away?”

“I am not pulling away. I am exactly where I have always been.”

“You are a liar.”

Something dangerous flickered in his violet eyes. “Mind yourself.”

“Or what?” You crossed your arms. “You will glare at me? You have been doing that for months and I am still here.”

“Clearly.” The word came out clipped, almost cruel. A deliberate blade.

You refused to flinch from it. “Something happened. Three weeks ago you were—” You stopped, steadied yourself. “And then suddenly you were gone. Present in body and completely absent in everything else. I want to know why.”

“Nothing happened.”

“You are lying again.”

“I am not accustomed,” he said with cold precision, “to being called a liar repeatedly.”

“And I am not accustomed to being deliberately shut out by someone who—” You stopped again.

Maekar’s eyes sharpened immediately. “Someone who what?”

The silence stretched taut between you.

“Someone who matters to me,” you finished quietly.

Something moved across his face so quickly you almost missed it. Pain, naked and immediate, there and gone before he could fully suppress it. His gaze dropped briefly to the floor.

“You should not say that.”

“Why not? It is true.”

“It is—” He stopped. Started again. “Unwise.”

“Unwise.” You stared at him. “That is what you have for me.”

“It is the honest answer.”

“No.” You took another step closer and watched him resist the instinct to step back. “It is the coward’s answer, and you are not a coward. Try again.”

Fury crossed his face instantly, the way it always did when he felt cornered. “You presume too much.”

“Then correct me.”

“I am correcting you by telling you this conversation is finished.”

“It is not finished.”

“I say it is.”

“And I say you are running away and dressing it up as dignity.” Your voice had risen now, heat climbing through your chest. “For weeks, Maekar. Weeks of barely a word, barely a look, and you cannot even give me the courtesy of an honest reason—”

“The honest reason,” he said sharply, “is that this—” his hand moved between you, a short furious gesture— “should not continue.”

“What should not continue? We have done nothing—”

“Exactly.” The word came out ragged at the edges. He turned away from you immediately, a hand pressed hard against the nearest table. “Exactly nothing. And it should remain that way.”

You stared at the rigid line of his back.

“Why?” you asked quietly.

“Because I am not—” He stopped.

“Say it.”

“Leave it alone.”

“Say it, Maekar.”

“Because I am not built for this.” The words came out low and furious and slightly broken at once. “Is that what you wanted to hear? I am the fourth son. I have been trained since birth to be useful, to be the sword, to stand behind better men and serve the family’s purpose. That is what I am for.” His shoulders had drawn up tight beneath his doublet. “Not—” A rough breath. “Not this.”

The silence that followed was enormous.

You stood inside it and felt something build in your chest that you did not immediately have a name for. Hot and painful and expanding outward until your hands had begun to shake with it.

“Not this,” you repeated softly.

“No.”

“You are not built for being cared for.”

“I am not built for—”

“You are not enough.” The words came out barely above a whisper. “That is what you mean. That is what you actually believe.”

Maekar said nothing. Which was its own answer.

And that was when it happened.

Something white and furious ignited behind your ribs entirely without permission. Not sadness. Not heartbreak. Pure blazing rage on his behalf, at every person who had ever let him believe that, at every comparison and every dismissal and every moment that had carved this particular damage so deep into him that he recited it now like scripture.

You crossed the distance between you before thought intervened.

Your hands hit his chest and pushed.

Maekar’s back met the stone wall with a dull impact, his eyes flying wide with pure shock — not at the force, though that seemed to surprise him too — but at you. At the fact that you had done it at all. That the person standing before him with their hands fisted in his doublet and fury written plainly across every feature was you, someone half his size, someone he could have moved aside with one arm—

He did not move at all.

“Do not,” you said. Your voice shook with it. “Don't you dare say that to me.”

“I—”

“No.” Your hands tightened against the fabric of his doublet, knuckles pressing hard against the solid warmth of his chest beneath it. “You do not get to stand there and tell me you are not enough. You do not get to decide that. You do not get to spend weeks pulling away from me because some ancient cruelty convinced you that you were made only for function and nothing else—”

“You do not understand—”

“I understand perfectly.” Your eyes were burning now. Furiously. “I have watched you for months. I have seen what you are when you stop performing severity for long enough to simply exist. And you are—” Your voice cracked slightly. You pushed through it. “Maekar, you are extraordinary. Not despite what you are. Not in comparison to anyone. Yourself. And the fact that you cannot see it—”

“Stop.” His voice had gone rough. Unsteady.

“The fact that you have been standing in this family your entire life believing yourself a sword and nothing more—”

“I said stop.” Rougher now.

“It makes me want to—”

“Stop.”

He kissed you.

Not gently. Nothing like gently. His hands came up and caught your face and his mouth found yours with the sudden desperate urgency of a man who had simply run out of other options — who had used every deflection available to him and found you still standing there, furious and certain and refusing to let him be small, and had no idea what to do with that except this.

It lasted one stunned breathless second.

Then he pulled back.

His hands still cradled your face. His breathing had gone ragged. Those violet eyes searched yours with something almost panicked in them — the expression of a man who had just done something irreversible and was only now calculating the consequences.

“I should not have—” he began roughly.

You kissed him back.

Not as apology. Not gently either. You pulled him down by the front of his doublet and kissed him with the full force of everything you had just said and everything you had been holding quietly for months and felt the exact moment the last resistance went out of him completely.

Maekar made a sound against your mouth that you felt in your spine.

His hands slid from your face into your hair, tilting your head back, and suddenly he was kissing you like a man discovering water after a drought — not with careful reverence but with something rawer and more desperate beneath it, like he could not quite believe this was allowed and intended to have all of it before someone told him otherwise.

He broke the kiss with a ragged breath, forehead dropping against yours. His hands were shaking. You could feel it where they cradled your head.

“I have been—” His voice was wrecked completely. “Gods. I have been trying—”

“I know,” you breathed.

“You should have let it be.”

“No.” Your hands slid up his chest, feeling the hard planes of him beneath the fabric, the rapid thumping of his heart betraying every bit of composure his expression had ever pretended to. “I should not and I will not.”

A rough sound escaped him.

His eyes searched your face in the torchlight — violet and open and utterly unguarded in a way you had never seen from him in any council chamber or training yard or castle corridor. The severity was gone. The careful blankness gone. Just a man, terrified and wanting and finally, catastrophically out of excuses.

“You mean this,” he said quietly. Not quite a question.

“I have meant it,” you said, “for a very long time.”

Something in his expression broke entirely open.

His mouth found yours again, slower this time, deeper — and gods, the difference of it. Still hungry but the panic beneath it easing now into something that felt dangerously close to wonder. His hands moved through your hair with a care that contradicted every rough and prickly thing he had ever said or done, like beneath all of it, beneath the sword and the severity and the practiced distance, there had always been this.

Someone who simply needed to be told he was allowed.

“Maekar,” you murmured against his mouth.

A shudder moved through him at his own name spoken like that.

“Gods help me,” he said roughly. “I do not know how to—” He stopped. The admission visibly cost him. “I do not know how to do this.”

Your heart turned over completely.

“Yes, you do,” you whispered. Your hands found his face, thumbs brushing the line of his beard, the old scars beneath it. He exhaled shakily at the contact, eyes falling briefly closed. “You already are.”

That alone seemed to cost him — you could feel it in the rigid tension held through his entire body, in the way his hands remained carefully at his sides where he had lowered them despite the kiss deepening between you. Like he had given himself permission for this much and was terrified of reaching for more in case it proved too much to ask.

So, you decided for him. You took his hands. He went completely still as you lifted them from his sides and placed them — slowly, deliberately, holding his gaze the entire time — against your waist.

Maekar stared at you like you had done something incomprehensible.

“You are allowed,” you assured quietly.

His throat moved. His fingers remained motionless against your waist for one suspended moment, barely making contact, as though the fabric between his hands and your skin was the only thing keeping him tethered to composure.

Then, haltingly, his grip tightened.

Just slightly. Just enough to feel the warmth and solidity of his hands spanning your waist, large enough that his fingers nearly met at the small of your back.

The breath that left him was unsteady.

You rose onto your toes and kissed the corner of his jaw. Felt the muscle there jump immediately beneath your lips. His hands tightened further at your waist, involuntary, like his body was responding entirely without his permission.

You kissed along the sharp line of his jaw toward his ear, unhurried, feeling the roughness of his beard against your lips and the warmth of his skin beneath it.

“You are—” His voice had dropped to almost nothing. “You should not—”

“Maekar.” You pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was flushed, violet eyes dark, every line of him radiating the strain of holding himself still. “Stop telling me what I should not do.”

His jaw tightened. But he said nothing.

You kissed his cheekbone. The high plane of it, just above the beard, where the old pox scars tracked faintly beneath your lips. He made a sound so quiet you almost missed it. Something helpless and involuntary swallowed almost before it could exist.

Your hands moved to the front of his doublet, working the fastenings with steady fingers while his breathing deepened above you. Each button gave way and Maekar stood and let it happen, stood and watched your face with those dark eyes like a man waiting for the dream to end.

You pushed the doublet from his shoulders. It fell in the narrow space between his back and the wall, behind him. Beneath it, linen stretched across broad shoulders and a chest that rose and fell with increasing unevenness. You spread your palms flat against it and felt his heart hammering beneath them, rapid and entirely beyond his control.

Something deeply fond moved through you at that.

“Still with me?” you murmured.

“I think so,” he said roughly.

You laughed softly and felt him exhale shakily in response, his hands sliding fractionally further around your waist like they were making decisions independently of him.

You kissed his throat then. Open mouthed, slow, just below his jaw where his pulse beat rapidly against your lips. Maekar’s head tipped back slightly, an involuntary concession, his fingers pressing harder against your waist.

You kissed lower. The rough scrape of his beard gave way to the warm skin of his neck, and you felt the shudder that moved through him at the contact, felt his grip on you tighten to something that was no longer gentle—

You bit him.

Not hard. Not cruelly. A deliberate scrape of teeth against the curve where his neck met his shoulder, your lips pressing warm against it immediately afterward.

The sound that left Maekar was nothing like anything you had heard from him before. Low and rough and dragged from somewhere entirely beyond his composure. His entire body went rigid for one suspended second—

Then it was like watching a dam break down.

His hands moved.

Suddenly, completely, with a decisiveness that stole the breath from your lungs. One arm swept around your waist and hauled you flush against him with a sureness that made the floor feel uncertain beneath your feet, the other hand sliding into your hair and tilting your head back, and then his mouth was on yours and gods—

Gods.

Nothing hesitant in it. Nothing careful. He kissed you like the last three weeks of distance had been a physical pressure he had been holding back with both hands and your teeth against his skin had finally, catastrophically, released it all at once.

You made a startled sound against his mouth. Maekar just swallowed it and kissed you harder.

He walked you backward through the armoury with complete certainty, steering you through the low torchlight without breaking the kiss, one hand spread wide and immovable at the small of your back and the other still tangled in your hair. The back of your thighs met the edge of the long wooden workbench, and he lifted you onto it without apparent effort — large hands spanning your waist and depositing you there like you weighed nothing of consequence — and stepped immediately between your knees.

The new height brought you almost level with him and he took immediate advantage, cupping your face in both hands and kissing you with a thoroughness that made rational thought extremely difficult.

“Maekar—” you managed between kisses.

“No.” The word came out low and absolute. “You had your turn to talk.”

You laughed and he caught the sound with his mouth and made a rough noise against your lips that sent heat rushing straight through you.

His hands left your face and began moving — not hesitantly now, not waiting for guidance. Large and warm and entirely purposeful, sliding from your jaw down your throat, tracing your collarbones with a focus that suggested he intended to learn every inch of you and had decided to begin immediately.

When his fingers found the lacing at the back of your gown he paused for just a moment, just long enough to pull back and find your eyes. The question was there without words. Still him beneath the urgency. Still that fundamental core of a man who needed to know he was not taking something without being allowed to.

“Yes,” you said before he could ask it.

Something moved across his face. Raw and unguarded and painfully honest.

Then his hands resumed with steady, certain fingers, unlacing slowly at first, then faster as the fastenings gave way.

“You have no idea,” he said roughly against your temple, voice low enough to vibrate through you, “what you have done to me.”

“Tell me,” you breathed funnily.

His hands stilled briefly at your back. “Months.” The word came out almost pained. “I have spent months trying to—” He exhaled roughly. “And you simply—” A sound of frustration. “You walked into a room and I forgot how to be sensible.”

The confession hit somewhere directly behind your sternum.

“Good,” you whispered.

A rough laugh escaped him. Short and startled and entirely real. You felt it against your cheek and stored it somewhere permanent.

His hands resumed their work.

“You are,” he muttered, the lacing finally giving way entirely, “the most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to me.”

You pulled back to look at him. The torchlight caught the flush beneath his beard, the dark intensity of his eyes, the silver threaded through pale hair falling slightly over his forehead. He looked thoroughly undone and absolutely furious about it and so devastatingly his that your chest ached with it.

“Likewise,” you said softly. The look he gave you afterward nearly stopped your heart.

Because beneath the urgency and the feral edge of finally having broken loose — there it was. What lived underneath all of it. What had been living underneath all of it for months in training yards and castle corridors and cold battlements at dusk.

Not just wanting. Something far more dangerous than that.

His forehead dropped against yours.

“I do not know,” he said quietly, the roughness in his voice now carrying something almost bewildered beneath it, “how to be careful with you.”

Your hands rose to his chest. “Then don’t be.”

The breath that left him was long and shaking.

“I may not be able to stop,” he warned lowly.

“Maekar.” You held his gaze. “Do not make me bite you again.”

He stared at you for one moment.

Then something shifted in his expression — the last fragment of restraint dissolving into something that was equal parts exasperated and consumed and desperately fond — and he kissed you again with the full and undivided attention of a man who had just been given permission to stop pretending he wanted anything else.

The lacing gave way beneath his hands with gratifying speed.

Maekar worked with focused single-mindedness, fingers steady now where they had mildly trembled earlier, the fabric loosening incrementally as the fastenings came undone. You sat on the edge of the workbench and let him, your hands resting against his chest, feeling the heat radiating through the linen still covering him and the rapid thumping of his heart beneath it.

The gown loosened around your torso.

Maekar’s hands moved to your shoulders, sliding beneath the fabric to push it downward, and then his patience — which had already survived considerably more than it was built for tonight — ran completely out.

The sound of tearing fabric split the quiet armoury like a small thunderclap.

Maekar went absolutely still.

You bit the inside of your cheek against the laugh trying to escape you.

A beat of silence.

“I—” he began.

“Don’t,” you said.

“The seam—”

“Maekar.”

He looked at you. The expression on his face was genuinely extraordinary — caught somewhere between mortification and the barely contained urgency of a man who had not actually stopped wanting what he had been reaching for, the two things warring openly across his features in the torchlight.

“I will have it mended,” he said roughly.

“I am sure you will,” you agreed pleasantly.

His eyes narrowed slightly at your tone. Then the fabric shifted and his gaze dropped and every coherent thought visibly left his head at once.

You were bare beneath it.

Completely. Deliberately. The torn gown pooled at your waist, the torchlight warm and gold across your skin, and there was absolutely no question that this had not been accidental.

Maekar stared. The silence stretched long enough to become something else entirely.

“You,” he said. His voice had dropped to something low and rough and barely functional. “You planned this.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you mean,” you said serenely.

His eyes dragged slowly back up to your face with an expression that suggested he was reconsidering everything he thought he knew about you and finding the revision both alarming and catastrophic in equal measure.

“You came here tonight,” he said slowly, “without—”

“Maekar.”

“Deliberately.”

“The armoury can get quite warm,” you offered.

Something shifted in his expression then. The mortification burned away entirely, replaced by something darker and more focused, and the look he gave you was nothing like anything you had seen from him before. Not the prickly severity. Not the careful blankness. Something that had been living underneath all of that for months, patient and hungry and entirely done waiting.

“You,” he said quietly, “are going to be the absolute death of me.”

Then his hands were on you.

No hesitation this time. None. Large and warm and completely certain, sliding up from your waist and cupping your breasts with a directness that dragged a sharp breath from your throat. His thumbs moved and your head fell back immediately, a sound escaping you that echoed faintly off the stone walls.

Maekar made a low rough noise in response.

“Gods,” he breathed. The word came out reverent and wrecked at once, his eyes moving over you in the torchlight with an intensity that felt almost tangible. His hands moved with growing urgency, learning the weight and warmth of you, and you could feel in every touch the months of restraint finally broken loose — not gentle, not careful, just present and consuming and entirely focused on you.

His head bent.

His mouth found the curve of your breast and your fingers flew immediately into his hair, loosening whatever order remained in it and sending pale silver-threaded strands falling forward as he pressed an open mouthed kiss against your skin.

The groan that left you was embarrassingly immediate.

Maekar responded to it like a man receiving confirmation of something he had suspected and filed carefully away — his mouth moving with sudden purposefulness, tongue warm against your nipple while his hands held you steady against him.

Your grip tightened in his hair.

He groaned against your skin and the vibration of it shot straight through you.

“There,” he murmured roughly against your breast, the word low and satisfied in a way that was entirely new from him. Like he had discovered a language he had not known he spoke. “I want to hear that again.”

You gave him exactly what he asked for.

His mouth moved across your chest with growing confidence, learning what made you gasp and returning to it with focused intent, his large hands spanning your ribs and holding you exactly where he wanted you with an ease that made you feel impossibly, wonderfully small against him.

At some point his mouth travelled upward again, kissing the curve of your throat, the line of your jaw, finding your mouth with sudden renewed urgency while his hands remained occupied and his thumbs moved in ways that made coherent thought genuinely difficult.

You broke the kiss with a rough breath. His forehead dropped against yours, both of you breathing unevenly in the warm torchlit dark.

“The dress,” you managed. “You owe me a dress.”

A sound escaped him. Short and low and startled — that real unguarded laugh again, the one you had been collecting like something rare.

“Add it to my debts,” he said roughly against your mouth.

“Your debts are mounting, my prince.”

His right index and thumb pinched the sensible mount of your breast and stole whatever you had been planning to say next directly from your throat.

“Then,” he murmured, low and certain and devastating, “allow me to begin repaying them.”

Your hands found the hem of his linen shirt. Maekar pulled back slightly at the contact, just enough to look down at your hands, then back up at your face. Something flickered briefly in his expression — that old reflex, the instinct to stop this before it became something he did not know how to carry.

You held his gaze and pulled the shirt upward.

He let you. Lifted his arms without being asked, a concession so simple and so enormous from him that something ached sweetly in your chest at the sight of it. The linen cleared his head and you dropped it somewhere behind him without ceremony.

Then you looked at him and forgot, momentarily, what you had been about to say.

The torchlight caught him gold and shadow — broad shoulders, the hard planes of a chest dusted with pale hair, the evidence of years of training written into every line of him. A scar crossed his left side, old and long-healed, another at his shoulder. Marks accumulated quietly over years, worn without comment, without complaint.

Your hands rose before thought intervened.

You pressed your palms flat against his chest the way you had through the fabric earlier, except now there was nothing between your skin and his and the warmth of him nearly stole your breath.

Maekar went very still beneath your hands. You felt his heartbeat. Rapid and entirely beyond his control, hammering against your palm with a candour the rest of him would never willingly allow.

“You are—” He stopped. Something worked in his jaw. “You should not look at me like that.”

You dragged your gaze up to his face. “Like what?”

“Like—” The words seemed to cost him. “Like you find something worth looking at.”

The ache behind your ribs sharpened immediately into something almost painful.

“Maekar.” Your hands slid slowly upward across his chest, feeling the warmth of him, the solid reality of all that restrained strength beneath your palms. “I have found something worth looking at since the first time you glared at me on a battlement.”

His throat moved.

“That was not—” He stopped again.

“You are breathtaking,” you said quietly, a faint smile accompanying your words.

Something shifted in his face. The vulnerability flickering through before the familiar impulse to suppress it could fully engage. Your fingers traced slowly across his shoulder, following the line of the old scar there with deliberate gentleness. Maekar’s breath caught.

“Does it bother you?” you asked softly. “When I touch them?”

A long pause.

“No,” he said roughly. Then, quieter, “That is the problem.”

Your heart turned completely over. You leaned forward and pressed your lips against the scar at his shoulder. Felt the sharp intake of breath above you, felt the hands at your waist tighten convulsively.

Then you kissed across his collarbone. His chest. The old, healed line at his ribs, your lips warm and unhurried against each mark while Maekar stood and endured it with the expression of a man being quietly and thoroughly dismantled and lacking any remaining means of defence.

“You are doing it again,” he said. Strained.

“What?”

“Being—” A rough exhale. “Kind. About things that do not require kindness.”

You looked up at him from where your lips rested against his ribs. “They require it from me.”

The flush that climbed his face was immediate and violent, spreading beneath his beard and straight to the tips of his ears. He looked furious about it in the way he always did when caught feeling something he had not prepared for.

You rose back up at the workbench’s edge and kissed the line of his jaw, his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth.

His hands slid up your bare back, warm and spanning and pulling you closer against the heat of his chest, your skin against his now with nothing between you and the contact stole a soft sound from you both simultaneously.

Maekar pressed his mouth against your temple.

“You are going to ruin me,” he said quietly. Not an accusation. Something far more honest than that.

Your arms wound around his neck.

“I think I already did,” you murmured against his jaw. Then you found his throat again — the place you had bitten before, still faintly marked — and pressed your tongue there deliberately.

The sound that left him resonated through his entire chest as his arms tightened around you completely.

“Again,” he said. Low and immediate and entirely without shame this time. The commanding quality back in full force, the vulnerability of a moment ago folded back underneath it — except now you knew it was there, now you had seen it, and no amount of authority in his voice could fully conceal it from you anymore.

You smiled against his throat and obliged.

His hands had been moving through your hair, your mouth still warm against his throat, when you leaned back from him and slid slowly, deliberately, from the edge of the workbench.

You felt the exact moment he realised what you intended when he looked down and saw how your knees met the stone floor.

The expression that crossed his face was unlike anything you had ever seen from him. Not the flush of embarrassment. Not the guarded severity. Something rawer than open shock, moving through every feature while his hands remained suspended where they had been, hovering uselessly in the air where your hair had been a moment ago.

“What are you—” His voice came out entirely wrong. Rough and halting and stripped of every trace of the commanding certainty of moments ago. “You do not have to—”

“I know,” you said simply.

Your fingers found the laces of his trousers.

“I want to,” you added, and looked up at him while you said it, held those violet eyes deliberately while your fingers worked the fastenings loose, and watched the words land somewhere so deep inside him that his jaw tightened against whatever sound tried to escape.

“You—” He stopped. Tried again. Failed again.

The laces gave way.

Maekar inhaled sharply through his nose, a sound so controlled it betrayed exactly how much effort the control was costing him. His hands had found your shoulders now — not pushing, not guiding, simply resting there as though he needed something to hold onto and you were the only solid thing available.

You freed him slowly.

The rough sound that left him at that alone nearly undid you entirely.

He was already hard — he must have been for some time, you suspected, given the considerable evidence — and warm and heavy and when you wrapped your hand around him and simply held for a moment, looking up at his face, the expression you found there stopped your breath completely.

Wrecked did not cover it.

Maekar looked like a man who had been struck. Colour high beneath his beard, eyes dark and blown wide, chest heaving with the effort of breathing evenly. His hands on your shoulders had tightened to something that might leave marks and you found you did not mind that even slightly.

But beneath all of that — beneath the hunger and the shock and the barely contained urgency —

Something bewildered. Something terribly, painfully young. Like he was genuinely unable to comprehend that you were here, on your knees, looking up at him like this. Like the image of it did not fit inside any version of himself he had ever been allowed to imagine.

“You do not—” he tried again, jaw working. “I am not—”

“Maekar.” Your thumb moved over the tip of his cock and his entire sentence dissolved instantly. “Let me.”

A shaking breath left him.

You held his gaze one moment longer. Making sure he saw it — the intention in your eyes, the complete and utter absence of reluctance, the certainty that this was chosen and deliberate and wanted.

Then you leaned forward and took him into your mouth.

The sound he made was immediate and violent and nothing like anything that had left him all evening. His head fell back against the shelving behind him with a dull impact he seemed entirely unaware of, a rough broken noise tearing free from his chest as his hands flew from your shoulders into your hair — not gripping, not guiding, just holding, fingers tangled and shaking against your scalp like he needed the contact to confirm this was real.

You took your time. Deliberately. Thoroughly. The way you had kissed his scars earlier — with a focused attention that communicated unmistakably that this was not obligation, not performance. That you were here because you wanted to be here, on these cold stone floors, with this impossible prickly furious man coming completely apart above you.

“Gods—” The word came out shattered. “Gods—”

His hips shifted forward fractionally, involuntary, immediately arrested as though he had caught himself. Still trying to restrain even now. Still terrified of taking too much.

You took him deeper in direct response.

“Seven hells—” The curse left him in a rough exhale, every muscle in the hand tangled in your hair tensing simultaneously. “You— I cannot— gods, you have to—”

He did not finish the sentence. Could not, apparently. You looked up at him through your lashes and that was what finished it.

Meeting his eyes from where you knelt — watching the full devastating wreckage of his composure written openly across his face, the flush and the parted lips and the shaking jaw and the violet eyes looking down at you with an expression that contained hunger and wonder and something so much larger than either that it had no clean name—

Maekar made a sound that came from somewhere entirely beyond dignity.

“Please,” he said roughly. Barely audible. The word seemingly startling him as much as you, like it had escaped without permission — Prince Maekar Targaryen, the sword of the family, the prickly unmovable fourth son, pleading to the ceiling of an armoury with his hands shaking in your hair.

Something triumphant and tender and desperately fond moved through you simultaneously.

You gave him everything.

He lasted considerably less time than his pride would probably prefer, which you found entirely endearing. The hands in your hair tightened with sudden urgency, a rough warning that was also half a question, and you answered it by staying exactly where you were and he broke apart above you with your name leaving his mouth like something torn free from the centre of him.

Not gods. Not a curse. Not a prayer. Your name. Just your name, rough and wrecked and reverent all at once.

The silence that followed was enormous.

Maekar stood against the shelving breathing like he had run a considerable distance, chest heaving, one hand still tangled loosely in your hair and the other against the wall, almost as if he needed it to keep balance. You rose slowly from the floor, brushing stone dust from your knees with the composure of someone who had absolutely planned all of this, and looked up to find him staring at you.

The expression on his face nearly made your heart stop.

Not the satisfied blankness you might have expected. Not even the lingering hunger. Something bewildered and open and completely undefended, sitting raw across every feature in the torchlight. Like what had just happened had rearranged something fundamental inside him and he was still taking inventory of the damage.

His mouth opened. Closed.

“You,” he said finally. His voice was completely destroyed. “You are—” He stopped. Seemed to genuinely lose the words.

His hans moved to your face, slowly, cupping your jaw with fingers that still trembled slightly. His thumb traced once beneath your cheekbone.

“I did not know,” he said quietly, “that someone would—” He stopped again. Jaw tight. “That I could—”

“You can,” you said softly.

His eyes closed briefly. You rose onto your toes and kissed the corner of his mouth. Maekar exhaled shakily against your cheek.

Then his hands found your waist with renewed purpose and he walked you backward toward the workbench again. The look in his eyes when he pulled back to find yours was nothing like the bewildered wreckage of a moment ago.

Certain. Focused. Warm beneath the hunger in a way that was entirely new from him.

“Your turn,” he said quietly.

He lifted you back onto the workbench like you weighed nothing.

The ease of it still sent heat rushing through you — the casual certainty of those large hands spanning your waist, the complete absence of effort, the way he stepped immediately between your knees and looked at you in the torchlight with that focused unhurried attention that had migrated from training yards and council disputes and settled here, on you, with its full undivided weight.

“Maekar—”

“No,” he said. Quiet and absolute. “You had your turn.”

“You said that already.”

“And I meant it both times.”

His hands found the fabric pooled at your waist — the ruins of your gown, the torn seam still hanging where his impatience had destroyed it — and pushed it further down your hips with steady purposeful fingers. You lifted slightly to allow it and the fabric fell away entirely, leaving you in nothing but the torchlight and his gaze.

Maekar looked at you.

Slowly. Completely. With the focused thoroughness he gave everything — as though you were something that deserved to be properly examined before anything else could proceed.

The flush climbed your own face this time.

“You seem to be gaping, my prince,” you said conceitedly.

"Perhaps," he said lowering his mouth again to your sternum and upwards. "Or perhaps I am simply wondering how you manage to be so insufferably, distractingly beautiful," he murmured against your lips and closed the distance again.

His kisses were slower than before. Deeper. With the particular quality of a man who has just had something enormous confirmed and is no longer in any hurry to pretend otherwise. His hands moved across your bare skin with a thoroughness that suggested he intended to learn every inch of you and considered this a reasonable allocation of his evening.

His mouth left yours and travelled downward yet again.

Your throat. Your collarbone. The curve of your breast where he had been earlier, returning with renewed focus, and the sound you made when his mouth found your nipple again was immediate and entirely undignified.

Maekar made a low satisfied noise against your skin.

“There,” he murmured. The word vibrated warm against you. “I have been thinking about that sound.”

“You—” Coherence was becoming genuinely difficult. “You have?”

There was no response to your question, him being entirely focused on savouring your breasts to a point where you thought he would devour them entirely,

“Maekar—” you pressed whining.

“Mm.” Not really listening. Occupied.

His hands slid down your sides, your waist, the curve of your hips, with an attentiveness that made your skin feel oversensitive everywhere he had not touched yet. He took his time. Deliberately. Like he was paying something back with interest and intended to be thorough about it.

His mouth followed the same path downward, pressing open kisses across your stomach while you sat on the edge of the workbench and tried to remember how breathing worked.

When he lowered himself to his knees in front of you the sound that escaped you was involuntary and immediate.

Maekar looked up.

The sight of him there — this enormous severe prickly man, on his knees, violet eyes finding yours from below with an expression of complete and utter focus — nearly stopped your heart entirely.

“Consider it returned,” he said quietly.

Then he pulled your thighs over his shoulders and lowered his head to tour core, and every coherent thought you possessed simply ceased to exist.

He was not tentative. Not uncertain. Maekar approached this the way he approached everything — with complete commitment and zero interest in half measures — and the wet, filthy sounds filling the quiet armoury within moments were yours and entirely beyond your control.

His hands held your hips with firm certainty, keeping you exactly where he wanted you with an ease that made you feel helplessly, wonderfully at his mercy. His mouth and tongue moved with focused intent, learning what made your breath catch and returning to it immediately, cataloguing every reaction with the same attentiveness he gave a training yard or a tactical problem.

“Gods—” Your hands flew into his hair, fingers tangling in the pale silver-threaded strands. “Maekar—”

He made a sound against you that vibrated through your entire body. Your grip tightened. He did not seem to mind even slightly.

“Look at me,” he said against your inner thigh, pulling back just enough to speak. His voice had dropped to something rough and low that resonated somewhere in the base of your spine. “I want—” A brief pause. Something working in his jaw. “I want to see you.”

You looked down and found his eyes already waiting.

He held your gaze and resumed and the combination of it — those violet eyes watching your face with naked focused intensity while his mouth worked with devastating thoroughness — unravelled the last remnants of your composure completely.

The tension coiled so tight it became almost unbearable.

“Maekar—” His name came out broken. “Please—”

Something moved in his eyes at that.

He pressed closer, arms wrapping around your middle and pulling you against his mouth with sudden decisive urgency, and the tension snapped apart all at once. You came with his name on your lips and your hands fisted in his hair and your entire body shaking with it, and Maekar held you through every tremor with steady certain hands like he had always been built for exactly this.

Like he had been built for you specifically and simply not known it yet.

The silence afterward was soft and golden and full of your uneven breathing. Maekar rose slowly from his knees.

He stood before you in the torchlight, flushed and thoroughly dishevelled, pale hair falling loose around his face, and looked at you with an expression so open and unguarded that it nearly made your eyes sting.

Not the bewilderment of earlier. Something that had moved past bewilderment into something quieter and more settled. Like a man who has just understood something he had been refusing to look at directly for a very long time.

You reached for him.

He came without hesitation — no flinching, no deflection — and let you pull him in until his forehead rested against yours and his hands settled at your waist and the warmth of him surrounded you entirely.

“Still think,” you murmured softly, “that you are not built for this?”

A long pause.

“No,” he said roughly. The word came out almost wondering. Like the answer had surprised him.

Your hands found his face. Thumbs tracing the line of his now wetted beard, the scars beneath it, the high flush still colouring his cheekbones. He closed his eyes briefly the way he always did when you touched him there.

“Good,” you whispered.

His hands tightened at your waist.

“We are not finished,” he said. Lower now. The commanding quality returning beneath the softness, threading through it rather than replacing it.

Heat rushed through you immediately.

“I thought so,” you agreed.

He pulled back to look at you, something certain and hungry and devastatingly focused sitting in those violet eyes. He had you on your back against the workbench before you had fully processed the movement.

One moment upright, the next flat against the worn wood with Maekar’s hands braced on either side of your head and the full commanding weight of his attention pinning you as effectively as anything physical could have managed.

The torchlight caught him from above — flushed, breathing hard, pale hair falling forward around his face, every trace of the prickly guarded prince burned away entirely — and gods, the sight of him like this did something catastrophic to your ability to think clearly.

His forehead dropped briefly against yours.

“I want—” He stopped. Something working visibly in his jaw. “I need you to tell me.” His voice came out rough and strained and carefully controlled. “If I—”

“Maekar.”

“I am not—” Another stop. The flush deepening. “I do not want to hurt you.”

The vulnerability beneath the urgency hit somewhere directly behind your sternum. You reached up and took his face in both hands.

“You will not hurt me,” you said clearly.

“You do not know that.” His eyes searched yours with an intensity that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with that bedrock quality of him — the thing that made him reposition himself between danger and others without thinking, that made him remember injuries, that made him protect fiercely everything he considered his. “I am—” A rough exhale. “It has been some time. And I—” He stopped completely. The flush had reached his ears. “I do not do things gently when I—”

“Good,” you said. He blinked. “I do not want gentle,” you said. Plainly. Clearly. Holding his gaze so he could see every word landing true. “I want you. All of it.” Your thumb traced his jaw and felt the muscle jump beneath it. “Do you understand what I am telling you?”

Maekar stared at you.

“You are—” The words seemed to fail him entirely.

“I am certain,” you said. “I am telling you I want it rough. I am telling you I have been waiting weeks for this and I am done waiting.” A beat. “I am also telling you that I am considerably less fragile than you seem determined to believe.”

Something shifted in his expression so completely it was almost visible as a physical thing — the last protective restraint dissolving, replaced by something dark and focused and entirely done being reasonable.

“You are certain,” he repeated. Not a question this time.

“Maekar.” You held his gaze. “I came here tonight practically naked.”

A sound escaped him that was almost a laugh and almost something else entirely. Then his mouth found yours and whatever he had been about to say disappeared completely.

He kissed you with the full pent up force of weeks of deliberate distance, of every turned back and every carefully engineered absence and every moment he had spent convincing himself he was not allowed — and you felt every single day of it in the urgency behind it, in the hands sliding beneath your thighs and repositioning you against the edge of the workbench with sudden decisive purpose.

He settled between your thighs and you felt him — all of him — and the sharp breath that left you was immediate and involuntary.

Maekar stilled.

“Still—”

“Yes,” you said firmly.

His jaw tightened. His hands gripped your hips. And he pushed forward slowly, carefully despite everything, a concession to that bedrock protectiveness that apparently even weeks of pent up wanting could not fully override—

The sound you both made simultaneously when his cock went smoothly into your dripping cunt echoed off the stone walls.

“Gods,” he breathed. Barely audible. The word stripped of everything except pure involuntary honesty. His forehead dropped to your chest, both hands gripping your hips hard enough to anchor you both to reality, every muscle in his body held in rigid check while he gave you a moment to adjust.

You felt— full. Completely. Wonderfully overwhelmingly full, the stretch of him settling into something that sat on the precise edge between too much and exactly right.

“Maekar.” You wrapped your legs around him. “Move.”

Something in him simply let go.

He drew back and thrust forward and the workbench scraped against the stone floor with the force of it and you cried out into the quiet armoury with absolutely zero remaining concern for who might hear.

Maekar groaned low against your throat.

“Again,” you managed.

He obliged.

And again. And again. The careful deliberateness of moments ago burning away entirely as the rhythm built — deep and certain and relentless. The workbench protested steadily beneath you while his hands held your hips exactly where he wanted them with a grip that would leave the memory of his fingers on your skin for days and you found you wanted that. Wanted the evidence of it. Wanted to carry it back to Queen Myriah’s chambers tomorrow like a secret pressed beneath your skin.

Maekar was not quiet about it.

That surprised you — this man who guarded every reaction, who suppressed every sound, who had spent a lifetime performing composure — coming apart above you with rough broken noises pressed against your throat that he seemed entirely beyond managing. Low and urgent and devastatingly real, dragged free by every movement, every sound you made in response, every time your hands gripped the back of his neck and pulled him closer.

Like he had been holding all of it for so long that now the dam had broken there was simply nothing left to hold with.

“You feel—” His voice came out wrecked and wondering against your jaw. “Gods, you feel—”

“Don’t stop,” you breathed.

A rough sound. “I could not.” Said with complete and utter certainty. “I physically could not.”

Your back arched off the workbench.

His hand slid beneath it immediately — that same instinct, even now, even like this — supporting you, keeping you from the hard edge of the wood while the other gripped your hip and his rhythm deepened into something that stole rational thought entirely.

“Look at me,” he said roughly.

You found his eyes.

Violet and dark and completely unguarded, holding yours with an intensity that had nowhere left to hide — every wall down, every practiced blankness burned away, just Maekar looking at you like you were the only solid thing in the room and he was holding on accordingly.

The expression on his face finished you.

Not the hunger, though that was there, overwhelming and undeniable. But underneath it — wonder. Still wonder. Even now. Like he still could not entirely believe this was real and had decided to look at you directly until it became impossible to doubt.

“I see you,” you whispered. His rhythm faltered for one broken moment.

Then his mouth found yours and he kissed you with everything he had left and the hand at your hip tightened, the workbench scraped and you stopped thinking in words entirely.

The tension had been coiling for weeks — through every turned back and every engineered absence and every moment of deliberate distance — and when it finally broke it broke completely, your whole body arching against him while his name tore free from your throat in a way that would absolutely echo and you found you did not care even slightly.

Maekar followed you over the edge moments later, his cock throbbing inside you and filling you up so deliciously.

Your name again. Just your name, the same as before — rough and broken and said like it was the only word he had ever been certain of.

The silence afterward was vast and golden and full of ragged breathing.

He did not move immediately. Simply rested his forehead against yours, both hands gentling from their grip to something that was almost cradling, chest heaving against yours while the torchlight flickered its slow indifferent commentary across the walls.

You lay on a workbench in an armoury with a discarded torn dress and a thoroughly dishevelled prince and the distant sounds of the castle carrying on entirely without you.

“Maekar,” you said eventually. Soft, nails gently caressing his scalp.

“Mm.” Not fully returned yet.

“The workbench survived.” A long pause.

Then that laugh. Low and startled and utterly real, resonating through his chest and into yours where you were still pressed together.

“Barely,” he said.

You smiled into his shoulder. "Think this thing is sturdy enough for a second assault?"

His laugh deepened against your throat where his face had finally landed. His arms tightened around you once — brief, fierce, communicating something he did not yet have words for — before he pulled back enough to look at your face with that new expression. The one that had moved past bewilderment into something quieter and more permanent.

“You are—” He stopped. Looked almost frustrated by his own inability to finish the sentence.

“I know,” you said gently.

He looked at you for a long moment.

“No,” he said quietly. “You do not.” His thumb traced once across your cheekbone. “But I find myself— wanting to explain it to you.” A pause in which he seemed to surprise himself. “Eventually.”

Your heart turned completely over.

“I am not going anywhere,” you said.

Something settled in his face at that. Deep and slow like a foundation finding solid ground.

“No,” he agreed. “You certainly are not.”

The next morning, you had managed the dress. Barely.

The torn seam had required creative pinning in places that would not have survived close examination, which meant you had changed entirely before dawn and disposed of the evidence with the focused efficiency of someone who had absolutely thought this through.

You had not, however, thought about what your face could tell.

Queen Myriah’s chambers sat warm and bright in the morning light, the fire already built up against the early chill, and her grace herself sat composed and unhurried before her mirror while you worked through the familiar ritual of her morning hair with hands that were almost entirely steady.

Almost.

You had been telling yourself for the better part of an hour that you were perfectly fine. That nothing in your bearing communicated anything unusual. That you were a consummate lady in waiting with complete command of your own expression and the events of last night were entirely invisible on your person.

You were doing very well at believing this.

Until the door opened and Maekar stepped into the room.

He had managed himself considerably better than you — composed, dressed, every trace of last night’s dishevelment erased, only the faintest shadow beneath his eyes suggesting the hour at which he had eventually sought his own chambers. His gaze found you immediately, the way it always did now, and something shifted briefly in his expression before the careful blankness reasserted itself.

Your hands stilled in Myriah’s hair for exactly one betraying second. Heat climbed your face with the subtlety of a siege engine.

You resumed immediately. Smoothly. Professionally.

In the mirror, Queen Myriah’s eyes moved from her son’s face to yours. Then back to her son’s. Then back to yours.

The silence lasted approximately four seconds.

“Maekar,” she said pleasantly. “How unexpected. You rarely visit before council.”

“I had correspondence to discuss.” His voice was admirably even. “If you have a moment.”

“Of course.” Myriah’s eyes returned to her own reflection, her expression settling into something that was almost serenity and was in fact the most dangerous thing you had ever seen on a human face. “Though you look tired, my son. Did you sleep poorly?”

A beat.

“I slept adequately.”

“Mm.” Her grace examined her reflection with great interest. “And you—” this to you, in the same pleasant tone— “you look rather flushed this morning. Are you well, my child?”

“Perfectly well, your grace,” you said. With tremendous composure. “The fire is just warm.”

“It is, isn’t it.” A pause. “Maekar, does she not look remarkably well this morning?”

The silence that followed was catastrophic.

You did not look up from her hair. You focused on it with the complete and total dedication of someone whose life depended on a particular arrangement of pins.

“She looks—” Maekar stopped. Cleared his throat. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Myriah repeated thoughtfully.

You could feel her smiling in the mirror without looking at it. The specific quality of it radiating outward like heat from a particularly self-satisfied fire.

“Your correspondence,” you said to her reflection. Firmly. “Shall I fetch it after I have finished your hair, your grace?”

“There is no hurry.” Her grace was the picture of morning leisure. “Maekar, sit. You are making the room feel crowded standing in the doorway like a man who wishes to be somewhere else.”

He sat. With the expression of someone accepting a siege they know they cannot win.

You finished the final pin with hands that were absolutely trying not to shake.

“There,” you said. “Your grace.”

Myriah examined her reflection. Turned her head slightly left. Then right. The gesture of a woman entirely satisfied with her hair and entirely unconcerned with that being the subject under discussion.

Then she looked at you directly in the mirror.

“You may take a moment as well,” she said pleasantly. “You have been standing since dawn.”

“I am perfectly—”

“It was not a suggestion, my dear girl.”

So you sat.

The three of you existed in the warm morning quiet of the solar for one extraordinary moment — Queen Myriah composed and radiant, you studying the middle distance with tremendous focus, and Maekar to your left apparently finding the grain of the table deeply fascinating.

“Well,” said Myriah eventually. In the tone of a woman setting down a winning hand at cards. “This is very pleasant, is it not?.”

Maekar’s ears went red. You became very interested in your own hands.

Her grace looked between you both with the expression of a woman who had navigated the politics of two great houses, raised four sons, and survived the court of King Daeron with her dignity entirely intact — a woman, in short, who had seen absolutely everything and could not currently be less surprised by any of it.

The smile she was not quite suppressing was the most Dornish thing you had ever witnessed.

“I always did think,” she said lightly, returning to her own reflection and touching one pin with a satisfied air, “that the armoury at dusk was terribly romantic.”

The silence that followed had texture.

“Mother—” Maekar began.

“The correspondence can wait,” said Myriah serenely, already rising from her seat and making for the door. “Enjoy your morning, children.”

I just had to make Maekar's version more reader-domineering, I could not resist myself. So, what are your thoughts on this one??

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns

The gardens in late morning had that particular quality of light that made everything look slightly more significant than it was.

Baelor had always appreciated this in the abstract way of someone who noticed beautiful things and filed them appropriately. The spring sun at this hour caught the stone paths and the new leaves and turned the whole space into something unhurried and golden and easy to breathe in.

He was finding breathing moderately straightforward today.

This was not always the case when he walked with you.

You moved beside him with the ease of someone who had decided simply to enjoy the morning, which he found — as he found most things about you — both uncomplicated in its surface and entirely undoing in its effect. You had been pale recently. His mother had noticed and said so. He had noticed considerably before his mother said so and had said nothing, because saying I notice everything about you with a specificity that has become somewhat consuming was not a thing he had found an appropriate moment to say.

He was still looking for the moment, though.

"Your lady mother was right," you said, tilting your face briefly toward the warmth with an unselfconsciousness that he appreciated and tried not to look at too directly. "It is a very fine morning."

"It is," he agreed.

You glanced at him. That look — the one that found his composure slightly amusing without being unkind about it. He had catalogued this look. He had not found a way to be unaffected by it.

"You did not have to escort me," you said. "I am quite capable of a garden unaccompanied."

"I am aware," he said. "I am here because I wished to be."

You held his gaze a moment longer than necessary. Then you smiled warmly and returned your attention to the path.

He kept his breathing even and said nothing and walked beside you in the comfortable silence that had developed between you across months of proximity, the kind that did not require filling, the kind he had come to think of privately as one of the better things his life currently contained.

Then you stopped. He stopped beside you. And he followed your gaze to the dog.

A perfectly ordinary dog — medium sized, brown and white, the amiable expression of an animal constitutionally incapable of suspicion. It sat on the path ahead regarding you both with the mild optimism of something whose tail had already decided how this encounter was going to go.

You made a sound. Baelor looked at you.

Your face had changed completely. Not performed delight — nothing so managed. Something simpler and more total than that, like a part of you had recognised the dog and responded before the rest of you had been consulted. An immediate and unconditional softening that arrived in your expression and stayed there, warm and unguarded and entirely itself.

He had seen you in many registers across many months. He had not seen this one before.

You crouched.

"Oh hello," you said. In a voice he had also not heard before.

Soft. Warm. Unconscious of itself in a way that most things about you were not — you were an observant person, a careful person, someone who knew what they were doing in most situations. This was you not knowing and not caring and it was—

The dog came to you immediately.

"Hello, you," you said, holding out your hand for the animal to sniff. "Where did you come from then?"

The dog offered its answer through the medium of attempting to climb into your lap.

You laughed.

Baelor felt the laugh somewhere in the region of his sternum, which was not new — your laugh had been doing things to him for several months — but the combination of the laugh and the voice and the expression on your face and the spring morning and the general accumulated weight of having feelings about you that he had been managing carefully for a very long time—

"You are very friendly," you told the dog, with great seriousness, catching it with both hands. "Yes you are. Aren't you."

Baelor stood very still. He was good at standing still. It was one of the things he did well — composure under pressure, stillness in difficult circumstances, the management of his own responses in situations that called for management.

"Who's a good boy?" you innocently said.

It turned out that his composure was not immune to this specific kind of pressure.

He could not have described what happened to it precisely. A structural event, somewhere beneath the surface — the careful architecture of five months of management developing, not a crack, but a quality of strain that had not been there before.

"You are," you told the dog warmly. "Yes you are. You are such a good boy."

Such a good boy.

Said in that voice. That specific soft certain warm voice that he was aware, with sudden and total clarity, he had never heard directed at anything before and that his entire nervous system had apparently been waiting for without his knowledge or consent.

Something happened. Not managed at all. Not the careful noting of a detail to be examined later in the appropriate privacy of his own solar. Something immediate and specific and entirely beyond the reach of the system he had constructed for exactly these kinds of situations.

He felt it in his hands first — the sudden awareness of them, the desire to do something with them that was not standing correctly at his sides. Then in his chest, which had developed a quality of tightness that breathing did not entirely resolve. Then lower, which was—

He looked at the middle distance.

"Such a good, good boy," you said. Warmly. Certainly. Like you had no idea — and you did not, you could not, you were talking to a dog — what those words in that voice were doing to a man standing three feet behind you who had been quietly in love with you for the better part of a year.

The middle distance was not helping. He looked at the line of trees to his left. Those were not helping either.

He was a prince of the realm. He had sat in war councils. He had ridden into battle. He had managed himself under pressures that would have unmade lesser men and he had done it with the composure that was perhaps his most reliable quality.

"Who's the best boy?" you said. "You are. You are the best boy." The dog let out an entirely too pleased bark, lolling its tongue at your words.

He closed his eyes briefly. Opened them. Stared at the trunk of one particular tree. The trunk remained entirely uninstructive on the subject of how a grown man was supposed to conduct himself when the woman he loved used a particular voice and a particular phrase to talk to a dog and his body responded as though the words had been meant for him, which they had not, which was the entire problem, which was—

The kennel master arrived, and Baelor had never been so grateful to see a kennel master in his life.

The man appeared at the far end of the path with the apologetic efficiency of someone who had been looking for an animal for some time, attached a lead, offered pardons, and departed, taking the dog with him.

You stood, brushed your skirts and turned to him with the easy manner of someone who had simply enjoyed a pleasant interlude and was entirely unaware of having caused a significant structural event in the composure of the man standing behind her.

You looked at his face. Something in your expression shifted.

"Is something amiss, my prince?" you asked.

"No," he said.

The word came out — not as it usually did. Usually, his words came out with the considered evenness of someone who knew what they were saying before they said it. This one came out slightly — unsteady. Not enough for most people to notice.

You were not most people.

"You look—" You tilted your head. Reading him the way you always did, with that observational patience that had been one of the first things he had catalogued about you and one of the things he had since found both most compelling and most dangerous about being in your company. "Strange."

"I am perfectly well," he offered a smile.

He added nothing more. Baelor was generally good at saying nothing in a way that communicated composure. He was not entirely certain he was managing this currently.

You looked at him for a long moment.

He watched the thought arrive in your expression — assembling itself from available evidence with that precise intelligence — and felt the specific sensation of a man observing an inevitable thing and having no means of stopping it.

"Has this," you said, very carefully, "got something to do with being called a good boy?"

The tree trunk to his left.

"I don't know what you mean," he said. His voice did the thing again and you looked at him with a slight frown on your brow.

You looked at his face, which was — not composed. Not in the way it usually was. Something had happened to the composure, somewhere between who's a good boy and this moment, and he could feel its absence the way you felt the absence of something load-bearing and could not immediately identify what was holding things up in its place.

"I am quite sure," you said softly, and the softness of it was — not helping, the softness was the precise problem, the softness was the voice, adjacent to the voice, close enough that his hands were doing something at his sides that he was choosing not to examine — "that you are a good boy too, my prince."

Something in his expression did something he was not in control of. He was aware of this. He could not, for the life of him, stop it.

Your eyes widened very slightly — not with surprise exactly, more with the quality of someone who had made an educated guess and found it confirmed beyond what they had quite anticipated — and then something warm and wondering moved across your face and you pressed your lips together against what was clearly a smile you were choosing not to deploy immediately.

"Oh," you said quietly. Simply. The full comprehension of it in one syllable.

He said nothing. There was nothing available to say.

You held his gaze for one long suspended moment in which he stood in a garden in the middle of a fine spring morning and felt five months of careful management simply — absent. Not destroyed. Not abandoned. Just temporarily unavailable, which amounted to the same thing.

Then you smiled.

Not the court smile. Not even the real one he had catalogued. Something new — warm and slightly wondering and threaded through with a tenderness that arrived in his chest and stayed there.

"Are you coming, my prince?" you said softly as you turned and walked along the path.

Baelor stood where he was. The morning continued around him. Somewhere distant a bird. The spring light doing what it did.

He looked at the path ahead of him, where you were walking with that ease that had been undoing him since autumn, and he thought — with the honesty he tried to bring to most things, including the inconvenient ones — that his emotional integrity had not survived the morning intact.

He was not certain he minded.

He walked after you and said nothing, and felt, underneath the considerable wreckage of his composure, something that was warm and slightly terrifying and — when he looked at it honestly — not entirely unwelcome.

The good boy thing was going to be a problem.

He was fairly certain it was going to be a very specific and recurring problem.

He found too, to his own surprise, that he was not entirely opposed to this.

The gardens had been his mother's idea.

Maekar had not needed the explanation — Myriah had simply said she has been indoors too long, take her for some air with the serene authority of a woman who considered her suggestions equivalent to directives and had been proven correct often enough to have earned this — but he had received it with the standard combination of mild irritation and complete compliance that characterised most of his interactions with his mother's instructions.

He was not irritated now.

This was the thing he was choosing not to examine.

You walked beside him with the ease of someone comfortable in silence, which he appreciated more than he would say, which was consistent with how he appreciated most things about you — thoroughly, privately, without any apparent intention of doing anything about it. The morning was fine. The gardens were doing whatever gardens did in spring. You had your face tilted slightly toward the warmth with an unselfconsciousness that he was filing alongside everything else he filed and not looking at directly.

"Your lady mother worries," you said.

"My lady mother manages," he said.

"Is there a difference?"

He considered this with more genuine attention than the question probably warranted. "Not in practice." You made a sound that was almost a laugh. He filed that too.

You had been walking for perhaps twenty minutes when he heard it.

Not you — something ahead of you on the path. A sound he placed immediately and without enthusiasm: large animal, heavy movement, the particular quality of something that had not been trained to be quiet about existing.

He looked up.

The dog was enormous.

Not dangerous — he assessed this in the first two seconds with the automatic threat evaluation of someone who had spent considerable time in situations where assessment speed mattered. Large, yes. Powerfully built, yes. The kind of animal that had clearly been bred for something serious rather than companionship. But its ears were soft and its tail was doing something that could generously be described as wagging and its overall bearing was that of a creature that had simply not yet encountered a situation it found concerning.

Maekar had encountered concerning situations. He recognised the absence of one.

He was going to say something about continuing along the other path, yet he did not say it. Because you had made a sound.

He turned and your entire face had — changed. Not subtly. Not in the careful managed way of someone controlling their reaction. Completely and immediately, like every professional composure you carried had simply stepped aside for something more fundamental.

"Oh," you breathed. "Oh, look at you."

You were already moving toward the dog.

Maekar watched this happen with the focused attention of a man observing something he had not anticipated and was rapidly recalibrating around.

The dog, for its part, had identified you as a person of interest and was giving the matter its full enormous attention.

You crouched.

The dog came to you immediately, with the confidence of an animal that had never been given reason to doubt its welcome, and you received it with both hands and an expression that he was going to need to stop looking at if he intended to maintain any of his current functioning.

"Hello," you said, in a voice he had not heard from you before. Soft. Warm. Entirely unconscious of itself. "Hello, you enormous thing. Aren't you magnificent."

The dog agreed with this assessment enthusiastically.

"You are," you confirmed, with great seriousness, apparently conducting a conversation that satisfied you both. "You are very magnificent. And very large. And very good, aren't you?"

He should look somewhere else. He could not.

"Who is a good boy?" you said, in that voice — that voice — warm and certain and soft in a way that arrived somewhere in the centre of him and did something he was not going to examine in a garden in the middle of the morning. "You are. You are such a good boy."

Maekar went completely still.

This was not a conscious decision. His body simply — stopped. Everything stopped. The reasonable function of a man going about a morning in a garden ceased operating at the specific combination of that tone and those words directed at a creature that was not him but that his entire nervous system had apparently decided was close enough for the distinction to become briefly irrelevant.

He was aware this was not rational. He was aware of very little else, in all honesty.

"Such a good, good boy," you told the dog warmly, and Maekar looked at the wall to his left with the focus of a man who has identified an architectural feature as his primary means of survival and is committing to it fully.

The wall was unhelpful.

The dog made a sound of profound contentment. He envied the dog with an immediacy that was deeply undignified.

The kennel master arrived — thank gods, thank every god that had ever been worshipped in any corner of the known world — with the apologetic efficiency of someone who had been looking for an animal for some time and had found it in the company of people whose patience he hoped he had not exhausted.

"Begging your pardons," he said, managing the lead. "He's a wanderer, this one. I hope he wasn't any trouble."

"None at all," you said warmly. You gave the dog a final thorough pat — small hands, large dog, the dog was enormous and you were — you were not enormous and the contrast was — he was looking at the wall again — and then you stood and brushed your skirts and turned to him with the easy manner of someone who had simply enjoyed a pleasant interlude.

You looked at his face. Something shifted in your expression.

"Are you well?" you asked.

"Yes," he said.

You looked at him with that specific quality of attention that he found, on the best days, compelling and, on days like today, genuinely dangerous.

"You look strange," you said.

"I am perfectly—"

"You did not strike me as someone afraid of dogs, my prince,” you tried for that explanation.

He said nothing and you looked at him for a long moment.

He watched a thought arrive in your expression — assembling itself from available evidence with that observational intelligence that had been causing him problems for months — and felt the specific sensation of a man watching an inevitable thing approach and having no means of diverting it.

"Has this," you said carefully, treading an uncharted path, "got something to do with being a good boy?"

The wall to his left remained structurally unchanged.

"No," he said.

You looked at him.

"My prince," you said, with a lightness that was doing nothing to conceal the precision underneath it. "I am quite sure that you are a good boy too."

His jaw tightened.

Something in his expression did something he was not in control of.

You held his gaze for one more moment — something moving through yours that was amusement and warmth and the specific satisfaction of someone who had understood something they perhaps should not have understood and found it delightful — and then you laughed, genuine and unguarded, and turned and walked along the path as though you had not just fundamentally destabilised an entire person.

"Are you coming, my prince?" you called, several steps ahead, without looking back. The ease of it. The complete unbothered ease of it.

Maekar stood on the garden path.

The kennel master had gone. The dog had gone. The morning continued around him with complete indifference. He looked at the horizon and conducted a rapid and unflinching assessment of the preceding five minutes and found the results both clear and deeply inconvenient.

You did not look back at him, but he could see, from where he finally walked behind you, the quality of your shoulders — the faint remnant of suppressed amusement still present in them — and he looked at that for a moment and felt, underneath the considerable weight of his current situation, something that was almost fond.

He was going to need to think about the good boy thing later. In private. At length.

He was fairly certain it was going to be a problem.

A.N.: something in these two makes me just raaaaaa i can't help it i need to watch them come apart with just the smallest details. This was a shorter, lighter work. I practically wrote it this morning at the gym whoops

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns

The solar smelled like ink and dried flowers.

You had learned, in the months since your betrothal was announced, that it was the safest room in the Red Keep. Not because of the guards posted outside — though there were always guards now, ever since your name had begun appearing in the same sentences as Targaryen and heir and threat — but because of what the room was. Baelor's space. Ordered and deliberate, every object placed with intention, the kind of room that felt like its occupant even when he was absent.

You had taken to spending afternoons there when he was in council. You read. You wrote letters home that grew less frequent as the Reach began to feel farther away and the Red Keep began to feel more like your home. Sometimes you left small things behind without thinking — a ribbon marking a page in one of his books, a sprig of dried lavender pressed between the leaves of his notes, the cup you always used left on the same corner of the desk. You did not do these things deliberately. They simply happened, the way warmth happened, the way light found the corners of a room without being asked.

Baelor had never mentioned the ribbon or the lavender. But the cup was always clean when you arrived.

This was how you had learned to read him. In the things he did not say.

You were in a good mood that day, which was perhaps why you did not notice sooner.

The morning had been kind: a letter from your youngest sister, full of news about the harvest and a new foal and three paragraphs about a boy she swore she did not like, and you had laughed alone in your chambers in a way that made your handmaiden smile. At breakfast you had made the Queen Mother laugh — genuinely, not the polished court-laugh — with something you said about the pigeons on the windowsill, and Queen Myriah had looked at you across the table with those dark, perceptive eyes and said, very quietly, you are good for this house, and you had felt it like sunlight between your ribs.

Even the walk to the solar had been good. A kitchen boy had shown you a stray cat he'd been feeding. You'd spent ten minutes crouched in the corridor making friends with it, and arrived at Baelor's rooms with grey fur on your sleeve and no particular urgency about anything.

The day had felt like a gift. You had thought I am happy here. I did not expect to be happy here.

You should have noticed sooner that there was something wrong with one of the servants.

The hands were the thing, in retrospect. Too still. The posture too practiced — the way he moved through the room without the particular learned invisibility of someone who had spent years trying to become furniture. You noticed it the way you noticed a wrong note in a familiar melody. Not a conscious recognition. Just a small wrongness, registering somewhere below thought.

You were still registering it when he moved.

There was a blade.

There was the sound of your own breath, caught and held, and the desk's edge finding the small of your back, and a cold so complete it felt almost like clarity. Your mind did something strange — sharpened, narrowed, cleared entirely of everything that was not this room, this man, this moment.

You did not scream.

Later you would not be able to explain why. Some instinct older than thought, maybe. Some understanding that noise spent breath you might need, that stillness bought seconds, that seconds were the only currency that mattered right now.

He stepped toward you.

You stepped sideways.

It was not graceful. It was not brave. It was pure animal refusal, your body deciding before your mind caught up, and your hand found the ink pot on the desk — heavy, solid, completely by accident — and you threw it.

It caught him on the shoulder. Not hard enough to stop him. Hard enough to make him stagger, to break the straight line of his advance, to buy you the half-second you needed to get the desk between you. Ink bloomed across his clothing, across the floor, across the corner of your sister's letter, and you were already moving — shoving the chair into his path, sending the stack of books sliding — creating noise, chaos, the beautiful unglamorous mess of someone who did not know how to fight but understood, distantly and desperately, that the guards outside needed a reason to open the door.

"Help—"

Not a scream. Your voice came out sharp and flat, the single word, and it was enough.

The door opened. Two guards. The ugly, brief, necessary violence of it, and then he was on the floor and the blade was beside him and you were standing at the far end of the room with your back against the bookcase and your chest heaving and ink on your hands and the grey fur still on your sleeve from the kitchen cat.

You looked at the man on the floor. He looked back at you with eyes so full of rage that they did not resemble something human. You did not understand — and perhaps you never would — how someone could hate with such depth. It was like he carried it in his bones.

"Bind him, please," you said, and your voice was steady. You did not know from where.

You held yourself together through the wait.

It did not feel like bravery. It felt like a door held shut by both hands, all your weight against it, and you knew very well what was on the other side but you could not open it yet because there were still things that required you to be upright. The guards. The questions.

You stood at the window. You watched the courtyard below. You counted the pigeons.

Baelor arrived in eleven minutes.

You knew because you counted those too.

He did not make a sound when he came through the door.

You had expected something. Command. The controlled authority he wore so naturally, sharpened into purpose. Some version of Baelor Targaryen, Hand of the King, managing a situation with the same quiet efficiency he brought to everything.

He was silent.

He took in the room in one sweep — the guards, the man bound on the floor, the blade, the ink spreading its dark stain across the stone — and the silence was not composure. Not quite. It was something that wore composure's shape, the way a fire wore a grate.

Then his eyes found you.

He crossed the room. His hands came up to frame your face before he had finished closing the distance, that particular gesture, hovering just short of touch.

"Are you hurt," he said. Not a question. The space before one.

"No," you said.

He looked at you anyway. His mismatched eyes moved over your face with the focused attention of a man checking for damage he could not allow himself to find — your face, your throat, your hands, the ink stains, the grey fur on your sleeve, back to your face.

"Certain," he said.

"Baelor," you managed a smile, just for him, "I promise I am not hurt."

He exhaled. His hands settled, finally, barely — fingertips at your jaw, your temple, lighter than they had any right to be for hands that size. You felt the careful in them. The tremendous, effortful careful.

"You fought back?" he said.

It was not quite a question, even if posed as one.

"I threw the ink pot," you said. "It wasn't—"

"Thank you," he answered, and you didn't really know why. Something moving through his expression that you did not have a full name for. Something that looked, underneath the relief, like it was being filed away somewhere permanent and important.

Then he turned, and you watched it happen.

He stepped back from you — one step, deliberate, a boundary drawn between what you were to each other and what he was about to do — and he looked at the man on the floor, and the fracture happened.

Not loudly. Not visibly, to anyone who did not know his face. But you knew his face. You had spent months learning it, the careful version and the rare unguarded version and every gradation between, and you saw the single clean line that ran through his composure now, and through it — brief, absolute, unmistakable — something that was not Baelor the Hand, not Baelor the principled, not Baelor the deliberate and restrained.

Something older than all of that.

He crouched down beside the man on the floor. And then — unhurried, without heat, with the particular calm of something that had never needed heat to be dangerous — he took a fistful of the man's hair and turned his face up.

The man made a sound.

Baelor looked at him the way you might look at a problem you had already solved. Patient. Absolute. Completely without the performance of menace, which was so much worse than menace, because performance implied there was something to prove and there was nothing here that needed proving.

"You came into my house," Baelor said, quietly.

The man said nothing.

"You came into my house," Baelor repeated, in the same tone, "and you dared to raise a blade to her."

A pause. Long enough to be deliberate.

"I want you to understand something," he said, softly, still holding the man's face up, still meeting his eyes with that fractured calm. "Not as a warning. Warnings are for situations where the outcome is still uncertain. I want you to understand it simply as a fact." His head tilted, slightly. "There is no version of what happens next that does not take everything from you. There is no mercy available here. There is no appeal." A breath. "What you chose to do in this room today — you will spend the rest of your life regretting it. However long that is."

He released him.

Stood.

The composure sealed itself back over the fracture like water closing over a stone. So complete you might have imagined it.

He turned back to you, and he was Baelor again — careful, deliberate, the mismatched eyes quiet — and he said, to the guards: "Get him out of my sight," and to the empty room, to the ink-stained floor, to the ruined afternoon: nothing at all.

You held yourself together through all of it.

Through the maester who confirmed you were unharmed. Through the questions, which Baelor deflected before they could overwhelm you, placing himself between you and everyone who entered with unhurried, immovable certainty. Through the hour of necessary proceedings — the Hand of the King resuming, fractionally, the work of being the Hand of the King, because it did not stop, it never stopped, and you watched him manage it from the window with the part of your mind that was still observing from a slight remove.

You held yourself together until the room emptied.

Until it was only you and him, and the light had gone gold and thin, and the solar was quiet again — except it was not the same quiet, it would never quite be the same quiet — and your sister's letter was ruined under the ink, and there was grey fur still on your sleeve from a kitchen cat you had met that morning when the day still felt like a gift.

Your legs stopped participating.

You sat down on the floor.

Not gracefully. Not deliberately. The stone was cold and real, and you pressed your palms flat against it, and the first breath shook, and the second one broke entirely, and by the third you were crying in a way you had not cried since you were small — the kind that had been waiting in your chest since the moment you saw the blade and threw an ink pot because it was all you had.

Baelor was beside you before you had completed another full breath.

He sat — this careful, composed man, in his court clothes, on the floor — and he put his arm around you, and you turned into it with complete gracelessness and no embarrassment whatsoever.

He held you through all of it.

His hand moved in slow deliberate strokes down your hair. His chin rested against the top of your head. He said nothing because you did not need words yet. You needed the solid fact of him. The reality of his heartbeat under your ear, steady and present and real.

You cried until you could not anymore. Until you were wrung out and still, and the light through the windows had shifted, and his arm had not moved.

"I should have—" he began, and stopped himself.

You felt the breath he took. The way he made himself start again more honestly.

"I knew there was still risk," he said. "I told myself the precautions were sufficient."

"It wasn't your fault," you said, into his chest.

"No," he agreed, quietly. "It was theirs." A pause. "I intend for that to be made very clear."

The mildness of it. The absolute, bottomless mildness.

You lifted your head and looked at him.

"I saw it," you said, trying to fight against your runny nose. "When you turned to him. I saw how you looked at him."

He looked at you steadily.

"I'm not frightened," you told him. "I want you to know that. I'm not frightened of you."

Something moved through his expression — that nameless thing, between relief and grief, the shape of a man who had spent a very long time being careful about what he was. What he was truly capable of being.

His forehead dropped to yours.

"You threw an ink pot at him," he said, very quietly, after a beat.

"It was within reach," you simply said with a slight shrug.

A breath. Warm against your face.

"Within reach," he repeated. And there was something in his voice that was not quite a laugh and not quite undone and was entirely, helplessly fond. "Of course it was."

His arms tightened around you. Not carefully. Not with his usual deliberate lightness.

Fully. Like something that had stopped pretending it needed to hold back.

"You can rest now," he murmured, into your hair.

So you did.

You stayed on the floor of his solar until the light failed completely, and he stayed with you, and his heartbeat was steady under your ear, and outside the pigeons were still on the windowsill, and somewhere down the corridor there was a stray cat waiting by a kitchen door, and you were here, and you were safe, and the man who held you would have — you understood this now, completely and without question if it came to it — burned everything down to keep it that way.

The thing about you, Maekar had decided sometime in the second month, was that you did not know you were doing it.

That was the part he could not account for. He understood deliberate charm — had grown up watching it deployed at court, had learned early to recognise the difference between warmth offered as currency and warmth offered as itself. He had become, by necessity, very good at spotting the seam. The moment where the performance showed its stitching.

With you there was no seam.

You had smiled at his squire on your third day at court — not the careful measured smile of a girl learning which relationships would be useful to her, but the full unguarded thing, because the boy had said something that struck you as funny and you had simply laughed, and the squire had stood there looking like he'd been lit from the inside. You had learned the name of every guard on your rotation within a fortnight. Not strategically. You had just asked, and then remembered, and then asked after their families, and Maekar had watched his own men become devoted to you with a speed that should have alarmed him.

It did not alarm him.

This was, precisely, the problem.

He had spent his entire life under no illusions about what he was. The fourth son. A sword. An anvil. Useful in the specific way that instruments of force were useful, which was to say when something needed breaking, and set aside after. He had made his peace with it — or something he had mistaken for peace, which held its shape well enough if you didn't press on it. He did not reach for things. He had learned not to. Reaching was for men who had been told the world held something for them, and no one had told Maekar that, and he had decided, quietly and finally, sometime in his adolescence, that it was simpler not to want.

And then you had sat down in his armoury.

Not in a calculated way. In the exact opposite of a calculated way — you had wandered in by accident with a book under your arm and a slightly lost expression, and when he'd looked up from the whetstone you had said, very politely, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realise you were here, and then simply stayed. Sat on a crate in the corner and opened your book and said nothing else, and the silence had been — he had not known what to do with it. He had waited for the agenda to reveal itself. For the reason behind the staying.

There was no reason. You had just stayed.

He had let you, and told himself it meant nothing, and the next afternoon you had come back.

That had been three months ago.

He did not know what to do with you.

This was the blunt truth of it, the thing he turned over in his mind in the early mornings when the yard was empty and the work of the day hadn't yet crowded everything else out. He did not know how to hold the fact of you — this girl from the Reach with her unguarded laugh and her genuine questions and the way she looked at him, straight on, like she was not afraid of what she found there. Like the scars beneath his beard were simply part of the landscape. Like the sharpness he aimed at everyone was something to be waited out rather than fled from.

Nobody waited him out. In his experience, people did not do that.

You did. Patiently, warmly, with apparent total serenity, the way sunlight waited out a cloud — without effort, without agenda, simply continuing to be what it was until the obstruction passed.

He was not accustomed to being the cloud in this metaphor.

The betrothal was not his doing — nothing in his life was entirely his doing, his life had been arranged by other hands since birth — but he had looked at you across the table after your arrival at dinner and you had looked back with those clear eyes, not calculating, not performing, just looking, and he had thought that this is either the best thing that has ever happened to me or it will ruin me entirely.

He had not, at the time, understood that these were the same thing.

He was in the yard when the messenger came.

Drilling. The repetitive honest work of it, the thing that had been the fixed point of his life since he was old enough to hold a practice sword — this, at least, was simple. His body knew what to do. There was no ambiguity in a blade, no subtext, no bewildering warmth that required him to exist in ways he had not been prepared for.

He was mid-form when the man crossed the yard at a run, and that was the first alarm he noticed.

Maekar was trained to read approaches — speed, posture, the quality of urgency in a man's movement — and this one read as wrong before the messenger had covered half the distance. Something in Maekar went very still before a single word was spoken. The way it went still before a battle. Not calm — the opposite of calm, every sense sharpening to a single point.

The man said your name.

He said solar and blade and unharmed, my lord, she is unharmed and Maekar was already moving before the sentence finished.

He did not remember crossing the yard.

He did not remember the corridors, the stairs, the guards stepping aside. He remembered only the thing that had replaced thought, which was not quite rage and was not quite fear and was something underneath both of those, older than both of those, the part of him that had been the sword of this family since before he chose it, turned now toward a single point with a focus that was total and absolute and not entirely human in its quality.

She is unharmed had been said. He heard it. It did not change anything.

Because she could have been. Between the sending of the messenger and the saying of those words there was a distance, and in that distance someone had decided to put a blade near you, had decided that you — you, with your face full of joy and your laughing at his squire and your patient unhurried presence in his armoury — were a target. Had decided that what was beginning, quietly and terrifyingly, to be the only good thing in his life was a variable to be eliminated.

That was what boiled in him as he ran.

Not injured pride. Not political calculation. Not the cold strategic fury of a Targaryen prince responding to an act of aggression against his house.

Something much simpler, much less governable.

He filled the doorframe and took in the room the way he always took in rooms — all of it, instantly, the threat assessment automatic and immediate — and found: guard, man on floor, blade, overturned ink, scattered books, a slightly crooked candlestick, and you.

Standing.

Ink on your arm. A careful stillness to the way you held your left side that told him immediately, with the eye of a man who had catalogued a thousand injuries, that something had caught your ribs. Your expression — and this was the thing, this was the thing that did something he could not account for — was not the expression of a girl who had been helpless and then rescued.

"Step away from him," he said to the guards that were pining that man, that wretched man, to the ground

"My prince—"

"Step away."

He crossed the space in an unhurried pace. Did not crouch. Did not negotiate with the geometry of it. He reached down and took the man by the collar and lifted, one hand, and felt nothing about the effort because there was no effort, because every piece of him that was not focused on you had narrowed to this, to the man in his grip and what was going to happen now.

He held him up and looked at him.

And the thing that lived in the Targaryen blood — the thing that had not died with the dragons, that had no outlet left except this, the cold and total and absolutely merciless thing that was not cruelty because cruelty required emotion and this was beyond emotion, this was simply the oldest part of him stating a fact about the world — looked back.

The man in his grip understood. Maekar saw the moment he understood.

"Who sent you," he said.

The man refused to tell Maekar anything, just decided to stare at him with a smug grin painted on his lips. You noticed, from where you stood, that it was a deliberate thing, that taunting. Even if the man — you could see it in the way both his hands tried to relieve the pressure from Maekar's hand on his neck — was trembling as a leaf.

You couldn't hear what Maekar said to him then, because his voice sounded as if he were underwater. You made out something about rotting and cells. Maekar called the guards back in and gave his instructions and they moved fast, the way men moved when they had felt what was in the room and wanted very much to be on the right side of it.

Then he turned to you, and all of it — every cold ancient terrible thing — had only one place left to go.

He looked at you for a long moment. You looked back, steady, chin still up, ink drying on your arm.

The shaking started in his hands first.

He had not expected that. He was not a man who shook — had not, in thirty-odd years of soldiering and sparring and riding into things that ought to have killed him, experienced his hands as anything other than reliable. They did what he needed. They did not develop opinions.

They were shaking now.

He crossed the room and his hands came to your face before he had decided to do it, both palms, tilted up to look at him, and he felt the tremor in them and knew you felt it too and could not find it in himself to care.

"You are not hurt," he said. Rough. The wrong way round — statement when it should have been question, because he needed to say it, needed to hear it in the room, needed to make it real with sound.

"A bruise," you said. "The desk caught my ribs. The blade did not—"

"Show me."

The words came out before he'd dressed them in anything acceptable. Raw need, that was all, no armour on it, and the back of his neck went hot and he knew his ears were red and he looked somewhere past your shoulder for a moment because he could not currently manage your expression on top of everything else.

"Maekar." Your voice, gentle. "It is only a bruise. I promise."

He made himself look back at you.

Your eyes were clear and steady and you were not afraid of him, had never been afraid of him — not of the scars, not of the sharpness, not of whatever had just been in this room with you — and the thing that did to him, the specific unbearable thing—

"I know," he said, roughly. "I know. I just—"

He didn't finish.

He stepped back. Turned away, one hand at the back of his neck, and stood there looking at nothing, breathing, doing the slow effortful work of becoming something other than what he'd been for the last several minutes.

"You could have been killed," he said. To the wall.

"I was not."

"You could have been." He turned back. His jaw was very tight. "Someone decided that you were expendable. That you were—" His voice did something he did not sanction. He pushed past it. "You are not."

He said it the way he said things that were simply true. Flat, final, not up for interpretation.

You looked at him, and something in your expression softened, and you said, quietly: "I know."

"I am not certain you do," he said.

You held his gaze. "Then perhaps you should keep telling me."

The silence that followed was very loud.

Maekar looked at you — this girl, this unbearably warm impossible girl, who had sat in his armoury and asked for nothing and come back the next day and remembered the names of his guards and laughed with her whole face and made him feel something shift in him. Permanently. The way foundations shifted.

He had spent his life not reaching.

He crossed the room and his arms went around you and he held on.

Not gently. Not with the careful tentativeness of a man who was uncertain of his welcome. He held on the way he did everything once he'd decided, which was completely, which was without reservation, which was with the full weight of a man who had been keeping himself at arm's length from good things for thirty years and had just run out of reasons.

Your arms came around him, and he breathed, and the solar was quiet.

The rest of it came out sideways. In the wrong order. The way things always did with him.

He did not say: I have not known how to want things and then you sat on a crate in my armoury and I have been undone since.

He said it in the arms that did not loosen. In the chin tucked against your head. In the six guards he would assign in the morning — six, and then when he thought about it longer, more, and he did not care if it was excessive, he did not care at all.

He did not say: the thought of losing you turned me into something I do not entirely recognise.

He said it when he pulled back enough to look at your face, and looked at it, and said nothing, and looked anyway.

You had hit a Blackfyre loyalist with a candlestick, he came to know.

You had stood with your chin up and told him that what sat on your ribs was a bruise, only a bruise, with the same serenity with which you did everything, as though the world could throw you whatever it liked and you would simply remain warm through it.

"You did well," he said, finally. Into the quiet. Roughly, like the words had cost him something.

Your smile, when it came, was small and real and did what your smiles always did to him.

"Thank you," you said.

He looked away. His ears were red again.

"Six guards," he said, to the middle distance. "Starting tomorrow."

"All right," you said.

"Possibly more."

"All right."

He nodded. Looked back at you, and there was something in his face — not open exactly, Maekar was never quite open, but the layers so reduced that what was left was simply him, the unarmoured version, the one he almost never let into the light.

"You will tell me," he said. "If anything—"

"I will tell you," you said. "I promise."

And that was, for now, enough.

The sun went long and amber through the window, and somewhere down the corridor something settled into quiet, and Maekar Targaryen — the anvil, the one who had learned not to reach — stood in your solar with the candlestick still crooked in its place and understood that reaching had happened anyway.

That it had been happening for three months.

That it was, now, irrevocable.

And found, to his own considerable surprise, that he did not want it any other way.

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker

the reason is that you want to know what he feels like. you want to know what it's like when there's nothing between you. you've been thinking about it since the second time, when the condom broke for about ten seconds before he noticed and pulled out to change it, and in those ten seconds you felt the difference and it's been living in your brain ever since.

"you're—" he starts, and then stops. his hand is still frozen halfway to the nightstand. "you're sure?"

"are you clean?"

"yes. i got tested last month, i can show you the—"

"i'm clean too," you cut him off, because you are, because you're not stupid. "so unless you want to use one—"

the look aerion gives you could melt glass.

"do i want to use one," he repeats flatly, like you've just asked him the most idiotic question in the history of human kind.

"well?"

aerion laughs. it's a short, disbelieving sound, and then he's sinking into you, and the noise he makes when he feels you (actually feels you, no latex, just heat and wetness and the clench of you around his cock) is something you'll remember for the rest of your life.

"fuck," he breathes, and his whole body shudders. "oh, fuck—"

"yeah?" you manage, but your voice has gone breathy and thin because you're feeling it too.

the difference, the intimacy of it, and it's so much more intense than you expected that for a second you can't think.

"you feel—" he pulls out halfway, sinks back in, slow, experimental, and his eyes have gone glassy. "you feel so—christ, why did we ever—"

he doesn't finish the sentence. he just starts moving, and whatever control he had the first two times is gone. he fucks you like he's trying to crawl inside you, deep and desperate and relentless, and you meet him thrust for thrust because you're just as far gone as he is.

and here's the thing: aerion was going to pull out. you know he was. he's not an idiot, he knows the risks, and even in the heat of the moment some small, rational part of his brain was probably doing the math on timing and odds and—

but then you feel him getting close. you feel the way his rhythm starts to stutter, the way his breath catches, and without thinking about it you wrap your legs around his hips and dig your nails into his ass and hiss, "inside."

aerion makes a sound.

it's not a word. it's barely human. it's the noise of a man whose entire nervous system just shorted out because the girl he's buried inside just gave him permission to do the one thing his lizard brain has been screaming at him to do since the second he sank in bare.

"fuck," he chokes out, and his hips snap forward, grinding deep. "fuck, are you—are you sure—"

"inside," you repeat, and you pull him closer, nails biting into skin, and that's it. that's all it takes.

he comes with your name in his mouth and his hands bruising your hips and his cock buried so deep you feel it in your spine. and the sensation of it (the heat of him spilling inside you, the pulse of it, the utter intimacy of it) tips you over right behind him.

it's the kind of orgasm you remember for the rest of your life. the kind that rewires something in your brain. the kind that makes every other orgasm you've ever had feel like a rehearsal for this.

afterward, he doesn't pull out.

he can't pull out, not immediately, because you won't let him. your legs are still locked around him, your hands still gripping his ass, keeping him exactly where he is. and aerion, who's usually so tightly wound, so controlled, just... softens. goes boneless on top of you. his forehead drops to your shoulder and he makes this small, exhausted sound that's almost a laugh.

"you can't—" he starts, voice wrecked. "you can't do that to me and expect me to ever use a condom again, you know that, right?"

"good," you murmur, and you feel him twitch inside you at the animal satisfaction in your voice.

"good?" he lifts his head enough to look at you, eyes still hazy. "did you plan this, princess?"

"i didn't plan anything."

"liar." but he's smiling, just barely, and then he's kissing you, deep, unhurried devouring, and his hips shift. just a small movement, a shallow thrust, because he's still half-hard and you're so sensitive it makes you gasp into his mouth.

"aerion—"

"shh." another shallow thrust. and another. not trying to fuck you, not really, just... feeling it. feeling you. the mess of both of you, the oversensitivity, the way you clench around him every time he moves. "just—let me—"

"it's too much," you whimper, but your hips are rolling up to meet him anyway, and he knows it, he knows, the bastard.

"i know," he breathes against your mouth, and he keeps moving, these tiny, exhausted thrusts that are more torture than pleasure but you can't stop, neither of you can stop. "i know, i know, just—just a little more, fuck, you feel so good like this—"

you come again. smaller this time, a soft rolling thing that's more aftershock than orgasm, and he follows you with a choked sound, barely anything left to give but still pulsing inside you.

this time when he tries to pull out, you let him. barely. he collapses beside you, breathing hard, and you're both just... wrecked. sticky and oversensitive and completely undone.

"you're insane," he says eventually, staring at the ceiling.

"you loved it."

"i hated it." but his hand finds yours, fingers lacing together, and he squeezes once. "we're doing that again."

"i know."

"like. immediately. as soon as i can move."

"i know."

"you're ruining me," aerion mutters, but there's no heat in it. just exhausted honesty. sated, animal satisfaction.

you roll onto your side, press your teeth and mouth to his shoulder. "good."

—

you take care of it the next morning. because you're not stupid and you're not trying to get pregnant at seventeen by a man who owns more leather jackets than emotional regulation skills. but the principle has been established. the line has been crossed.

from now on, aerion fucks you bare and finishes inside, and every single time he does it he looks at you like you've performed a miracle.

and you... you press him closer every time, nails sunk into his ass, no pulling out allowed, because the feeling of him spilling inside you is yours now and you're not giving it up.

it drives him insane.

Prince Baelor Targaryen first realized something was wrong with him when you did not speak to him for an entire afternoon.

It should not have mattered that much to him.

People did not exist for his attention simply because he had grown accustomed to it. You served Queen Myriah, not him. There was nothing strange in your absence from his immediate surroundings.

And yet by the time court dismissed, he found himself distracted enough by the silence of you that Lord Rowan had needed to repeat a question twice.

That annoyed him more than the distraction itself.

Baelor was not careless with attention. Years at court had trained discipline into him so thoroughly it had become instinct. He listened carefully. Spoke deliberately. Noticed things because an heir to the Iron Throne could not afford not to notice them.

Which meant he noticed your absence immediately. Worse, he continued noticing it.

You had not stood beside the Queen during petitions that morning. Another lady attended her instead, pleasant and forgettable and entirely wrong somehow, in your place.

At midday meal, your seat near the windows had remained empty.

By evening, Baelor had become acutely aware that he had spent an unreasonable amount of time searching rooms for someone who was under no obligation to be in them.

That realization followed him unpleasantly into the library.

The chamber stood quiet at that hour, lit only by scattered candles and fading sunset spilling through high arched windows. Baelor had intended to read reports from Dorne in peace.

Instead, he found you asleep in one of the alcoves.

He stopped walking and for a moment he simply looked at you.

You sat curled sideways beneath the window with a book half-open in your lap, cheek resting against the carved stone beside you. One candle burned low nearby, gilding the edges of your face softly in amber light.

Asleep, you looked younger somehow. Less sharp. The thought almost made him smile. Almost.

Instead, something quieter settled in his chest. Relief. The emotion arrived so swiftly and instinctively that it startled him.

There you are.

The words crossed his mind before he could stop them.

Gods.

Baelor looked away immediately, as though distance alone might restore sense to the situation. This was becoming a problem.

Not desire exactly, but something more dangerous. Something that resembled dangerously to attachment.

He had begun expecting your presence. The realization should have alarmed him more than it did.

You stirred slightly then, lashes fluttering before your eyes opened slowly toward the candlelight. For one brief moment, still caught halfway in sleep, you simply looked at him. Not Prince Baelor. Not heir to the Iron Throne. Just him.

And gods, that look alone nearly undid him.

“My prince,” you murmured, voice rough with sleep.

Baelor became abruptly aware that he had been standing there silently watching you for an indeterminate amount of time.

“I did not mean to wake you.”

“You did not.” You blinked once, gathering yourself. “I seem to have betrayed myself voluntarily.”

That earned him the faintest smile despite himself.

“You vanished today.”

The words escaped before he could reconsider them. Your expression shifted immediately into surprise.

“I vanished?”

“You were absent from court.”

“I had a headache.”

Concern arrived before caution. “Are you unwell?” The question came too quickly, too personally.

Baelor knew you noticed because your gaze softened at once in that dangerous way it always did when you observed something truthful in him.

“I am well now,” you said quietly.

Relief followed instantly. Again, too instinctive. Too honest.

Baelor moved toward the shelves beside your alcove to disguise the reaction, pretending interest in a row of histories he had already read twice.

“You should have rested in your chambers.”

“I intended to.” A pause. “But then I opened a book.”

“That was your first mistake.”

You laughed softly. The sound warmed the room strangely and gods, this truly had become disastrous. Because Baelor realized suddenly that the library had felt empty before he found you in it. Not just quiet, but crushingly empty.

The distinction unsettled him.

“You are staring at books without truly looking at them,” you observed.

“I am thinking.”

“Coming from you, my prince, that usually means trouble.”

His mouth curved faintly. “You speak as though you know me well.”

“I think I do.”

The answer came simply and without hesitation, without performance. Baelor looked at you then. Properly looked at you.

The candlelight caught warm gold against your skin while shadows softened the edges of your features. You still looked slightly sleepy; hair loosened from its careful arrangement after hours alone in the library.

Comfortable.

With him.

The realization struck unexpectedly deep. Most people behaved carefully around him, but you simply behaved honestly. And somehow, he had become greedy for it.

“You worried,” you said softly. It was not a question.

Baelor exhaled quietly through his nose. “A little.”

Your expression gentled immediately. “That is kind.”

“No,” he said before he could stop himself. “It is selfish.”

You blinked. The admission hung between you.

Baelor was not entirely certain why he had said it aloud. Perhaps because exhaustion weakened discipline. Perhaps because you had developed an alarming habit of making honesty feel less dangerous than it ought to.

“How is concern selfish?”

“Because I spent most of today distracted by your absence.”

Silence followed. Not awkward, yet worse in its nature. Your eyes widened slightly, and Baelor realized with sudden horror that he had spoken far more plainly than intended.

Heat rose immediately along the backs of his ears. You stared at him, and because the Seven had clearly abandoned him entirely, the flush deepened under your attention.

“Baelor,” you said softly.

No title, just his name. The sound of it nearly stopped his heart.

“I did not realize,” you murmured, something unbearably tender entering your voice, “that my presence mattered so much to you.”

Baelor looked down briefly, composure slipping in small dangerous fractures. Neither had he, if he was being honest. And, perhaps, that was the worst part.

“I think,” he admitted quietly, “I noticed the absence before I understood the reason for it.”

Your expression changed then. Not triumph and not surprise, but something gentler.  Something that made him feel suddenly, terribly vulnerable.

You closed the book carefully and set it aside before standing from the alcove. Even then, you remained close enough that Baelor could catch the faint scent of parchment and orange blossom lingering around you.

“You make rooms feel calmer,” you said softly. “Perhaps you deserve to feel that sometimes too.”

The words struck him with terrifying precision. Because there it was again: that impossible habit you had of speaking directly into the hidden centre of him.

Baelor laughed once under his breath, helplessly. “You truly are dangerous.”

“And yet,” you murmured, stepping just a little closer, “you came looking for me, my prince.”

His pulse stumbled hard against his ribs. Because the worst part, the most dangerous part, was that he had.

Prince Maekar Targaryen first noticed the problem when another man made you laugh.

An absurd realization, yet a deeply irritating one. Worse, entirely unavoidable once it occurred.

The sound carried across the training yard unexpectedly one cold afternoon while Maekar corrected a squire’s stance near the far wall. Your laughter rose briefly above the clash of wooden swords —warm, unguarded and unmistakably yours.

Maekar looked up immediately. That alone annoyed him.

You stood near the well with one of Queen Myriah’s younger stewards, smiling at something the man had said while servants crossed busily through the yard around you.

Nothing improper. Nothing remarkable. And yet irritation settled beneath Maekar’s ribs with swift and unreasonable force.

“Your grip is wrong.”

The squire startled. “My prince?”

“You are holding the sword as though you fear it.”

“I—”

“Again.”

The boy hurried to obey and Maekar’s attention returned to the lesson. At least, it should have.

Instead, against his will, his gaze kept dragging back toward you. Still speaking. Still smiling.

Why did he notice your expressions so easily now?

At some point over the past months, your presence had ceased being incidental to him. Maekar had not realized the exact moment it happened. Only that now he expected you in certain places instinctively: beside his mother during court, near the gardens at dusk, lingering outside the library with ink stains on your fingers and opinions no one requested.

And when you were absent—

The thought stopped there sharply.

No.

Maekar disliked unfinished thoughts because they tended toward honesty.

The squire fumbled another strike. “You are distracted,” Maekar snapped.

The boy looked moments from death already. “Forgive me, my prince.”

Annoyance flared immediately afterward. Not precisely at the squire, but at himself.  Because in truth, the distraction had not been the boy’s.

Across the yard, you laughed again and Maekar tightened his jaw hard enough to ache.

This was becoming intolerable.

By evening, the irritation had followed him into the castle. And what was worse, it had sharpened.

You had crossed paths twice in the corridors and both times you had offered him the same easy smile you always did before continuing on your way without stopping to speak.

That should not have mattered either, but it mattered enormously.

By the time Maekar found himself standing outside Queen Myriah’s solar under the pretence of delivering correspondence that could easily have waited until morning, he was in a truly foul temper.

The guard admitted him immediately.

The solar beyond stood warm with firelight and the scent of sandalwood. Queen Myriah herself was absent, though voices drifted faintly from an adjoining chamber.

You sat alone near the hearth embroidering something disastrously uneven.

Maekar stopped in the doorway. Immediately, you looked up and there it was, that expression. That slight softening around your eyes that appeared only when looking at people you cared for.

The sight of it hit him with such sudden force that for one alarming moment he forgot why he was angry at all.

“My prince,” you greeted. “You look positively murderous.”

“I often look murderous.”

“Yes, but tonight you seem committed to it.”

Maekar shut the door harder than necessary behind him and your brows lifted slightly. “What has offended you now?”

You.

The answer nearly escaped him. Humiliating, he thought to himself.

Instead, he crossed the room toward the fire, tossing the rolled parchment onto a nearby table with more force than required.

“You were distracting the squires today.”

You blinked once. Then, astonishingly, amusement flickered across your face.

“I was standing at the far wall.”

“You were laughing.”

“…Forgive me?”

Maekar realized abruptly — horribly — what he had just implied. Heat climbed instantly beneath his beard.

Gods damn it.

Your eyes widened slowly. “Oh,” you simply said.

That single syllable nearly killed him. Maekar turned sharply toward the hearth before you could fully see his face. The fire had become unbearably warm.

Behind him, your voice gentled in the exact way he distrusted most. “You were jealous.”

“I was not.”

“You sound jealous.”

“I sound irritated.”

“You are always irritated.”

“That proves nothing.”

A dangerous silence followed.

“You noticed me all the way across the training yard?”

The question struck directly into the centre of him. Maekar stared fixedly into the fire.

This was a disaster.

Because the answer was yes. Not only today. Always. He noticed when you entered rooms. When you were quiet. When you were tired. When your attention belonged elsewhere.

Worse, he had begun organizing entire days around the expectation of seeing you without consciously meaning to. The realization had unsettled him for weeks now.

You waited for an answer.

Maekar hated that you waited quietly. Most people rushed to fill silence around him. You simply watched until truth cornered him.

“It is difficult not to notice you,” he muttered at last.

The room fell still. Completely, utterly still. Maekar realized too late how honest the admission sounded and he closed his eyes briefly.

“You say things strangely when upset,” you said softly.

“I was not aware I was speaking at all.”

That earned the faintest laugh from you. There it was again, that awful warmth in his chest at the sound.

You set the embroidery aside carefully before standing. Maekar became immediately aware of your proximity as you crossed toward him. Not frightened. Never frightened of him. That alone had already altered something permanently inside his brain.

“You have been avoiding me,” he said before he could stop himself.

Your brows drew together. “I have?”

“You spoke to everyone in the yard today except me.”

Understanding dawned slowly across your face. Then something unbearably fond followed it.

“Oh,” you murmured. Maekar’s ears burned hotter instantly. “You wished me to speak to you.”

The gentleness in your voice made it worse.

“I did not say that.”

“No,” you agreed softly. “And I am sure that you did not glare at everyone else who did.”

Mortification collided violently with longing somewhere beneath his ribs. Because the worst part, the truly humiliating part, was that you were right.

You stepped closer then, close enough now that Maekar could see the candlelight catching warm gold in your eyes.

“You know,” you said quietly, “most people become softer when they miss someone.”

“I did not miss you.”

“Then why are you blushing?”

Maekar nearly choked on air.

His face felt unbearably hot beneath his beard now, warmth spreading all the way toward the tips of his ears. He turned away immediately, furious at himself for reacting at all.

Behind him, your smile became audible. He could almost picture the mirth in your eyes without looking.

Catastrophic.

“You are insufferable,” he muttered.

"It really does not look that way to me, my prince," you simply answered.

Gods be damned, Maekar could feel the mirth radiating from your tone through your lips.

You were never quite sure why, suppose it was the fears of youth creeping up when thunder struck loudly. But Baelor was always gallant in his step, he did not falter. Or the way it would stir everyone unpredictably like the lightning that followed it. And yet Maekar still remained close.

You'd often joked it was their undoing. That of years of being side by side, much less at yours was merely a metaphor, the only difference was that where thunder crashed and lightning struck, you were there, mediating everything. And holding it down.

Horns sounded upon their arrival, horses stomping impatiently through the grounds early into the afternoon, a mere hour after they've left you. With word passing around the castle that a storm, the worst they had seen in moons, was to turn over King’s Landing they had been ushered right back to where they started from. The day's council had proven the same outcome as most. Talks of stores, alliance, ships and coin.. and not much else other than another lord proclaiming fancy words at the King.

And so for the first time in a long time, both princes had decided to go for a hunt, a break most welcomed, though such endeavours clearly did not come so simply. And in that moment of realisation, they had unsaddled themselves and strode through the rain with only one thought of respite.

You.

Instead you were all to be confined indoors for the rest of the day. Not that you had entirely minded, with them leaving you alone in an empty bed at dawn with no more than a kiss and gentle word, and with the children running about idly and skipping lessons, no doubt, you rushed to welcome them home, meeting at the doors of the lower quarters.

Raindrops dripped relentlessly from their coats in a heavy pour from where it lashed just outside of the gatehouse and stables. You had barely turned the corner, skirts swishing as you stepped the long hallway out into the cold air where you found their shadows. The sky had greyed, a distant rumble in the distance as both of your men had stood there, under lantern and longing for warmth. A warmth not needed to be mentioned.

“For fuck sake get this off."

The squire ducked behind Maekar where he snatched the cloak himself and fumbled it to the floor, silver hair beading across his forehead in droplets, making him look much like a drowned rat. The sight made you giggle, covering your hand as you reached them, shaking your head at the poor young man who ha wrung the clothing out.

"Husband.."

Baelor had embraced you first, unclasping the button of his surcoat and handing it aside, politely, into the arms of another squire. His doublet was damp but he took you in arm anyway, pressing a kiss to the crown of your head with a gentle smile. "My heart." He breathed, the pair of you looking up when a mumble sounded beside you.

“Husband." You announced, stepping a stride to your other grumbling, still placing a hand at Baelor's chest. Your lips brushed against Maekar's when he mumbled a short curt and quiet, "Wife" but it softened in his kiss, the words whispered back into your lips only for you.

They were both cold, not shivering or sickly, but the kind that burned to the touch, as if they hadn’t just rode pace after pace just to get back to you.

“Get us out of here." Your eyes glanced back to Baelor, and he nodded, simple and small urging you forward as he followed beside. Maekar took your arm, stepping idly on sunken shoulders as you traipsed your way back to your chambers.

Decidedly, not to be bothered for the rest of the day, at least for some time.

Their eyes flickered between each other as you reached the room, allowing you to step first, eyeing the Kingsguard that stood vigilant at the sides. As they always had. Maekar's face remained as stern as ever until all others had left, remaining some sort of composure not to shoo them out the door right there and then. He flopped himself down into the armchair with a heavy "ugh" and a huff where his brother stepped beside him, standing to pour wine into three chalices of gold, jewelled around its edges that had been neatly placed for you all.

You settled the door closed behind you as you thanked the final maid scurrying from the room. Thankfully, she had also left you few towels folded from the washroom, white and soft as silk, you took the few smaller dry washcloths from the pile.

You knew that he would protest, and so before he could notice you, just as he had taken in hand the cup of wine Baelor had passed his way, you snuck up on him. An arm curled at your waist instinctively, tugging you closer into his lap as you shoved the linen over his head.

"Must you—" Maekar hissed in displeasure, though he dared not move you, bringing the cup to his lips.

"Yes." You huffed, bringing the small washcloth to the mussed and damp strands of his hair, wiping through it roughly to dry it as much as possible. He tensed in your hold, the arm circled at your waist gripping, not moving, but you didn't let up, not until you had collected the drops from his neck and the few droplets at his jaw. 

"And all done.. you child." You stroked his jaw as he narrowed his eyes at you but he said nothing. A chuckle came from behind you, the shadowy figure of your lover standing restfully opposite the open windows.

"Perhaps I shall come next time, maybe then you wouldn't be so grumpy."

"Right, because you’d rather get pinned to a fucking tree than hunt.” Maekar spoke plainly with a smirk etching his voice from beneath you and the cadence made you shiver, swatting his chest sharply. It was weeks ago when you had last accompanied them for a ride, a sweet morning just as spring had been turning to summer, wildflowers and ivy growing off of every branch hanging in the wood. But you had barely time to take in the beautiful sights by the time you had brought your mare to a stop, hauled to the ground and into your husbands' arms. 

Gods know how it happened, perhaps it was the eyes you had given Maekar, or the lingering brush of hand at Baelor’s arm, but both men had entirely lost it.

And it was safe to say that there was no triumphant catch that day, only the reward that settled in a smirk on the three of yours' faces.

Baelor said nothing but met you with a knowing glance as he turned slyly, placing the cup from his his own hands onto a small table that barely met his knee. You hopped from Maekar's lap with a gentle kiss to his head, rolling your eyes as your cheeks flushed, feet pattering as you found him

You had met him with a separate washcloth you had done so with Maekar, though less of an ambush, and more of an embrace.

"If you could call today hunting, we had to return as soon as we had left. There was no fucking point in leaving to begin with." He continued, propping his feet up with a heavy boot onto the table below him.

"Well perhaps you could go tomorrow instead." You mentioned in focus, wiping the soft linen at Baelor's cheek, the dampness still seeped at his collar. Few droplets caught at his cheek underneath his eye and you slipped them away with a single swipe, the lines of his face easing at your touch.

“Our father's master of ships intends to be seated with us at council on the morrow. We will have to be in attendance if there is to be any decisions made in Dorne and the Westerlands.”

"No fucking time at all." Maekar mumbled behind you, resting back into the chair, blinking at you through lidded eyes. Baelor stared still out of the window, and your eyes followed the mismatched twinkle of them. Where the rain pattered onto the balustrade rolling in from the sea, and darkness curled where the clouds moved in patterns through the sky. He had only turned slightly when your hand finally brushed his shoulder, placing the cloth in your grip beside his cup.

"Well did you have a good time my love..?" You wondered, resting your chin over your hand with a lax smile, his arm curling around your waist. 

"It is always pleasant to go hunting again.. much less to be back beside you.” His voice was warm, even softer as your arms wrapped around his middle, head tilting down to meet your gaze. 

"And yours..? I trust the children got on well."

With no sight of them to be found, that was often a good sign, some omen by some grace that they had been behaving enough not to break down the very door.

"They did indeed. Matarys was congratulated by his master at arms with his brother. A fast learner as there are many.. I do believe Aegon beat him however.." You chuckled as you turned, tightening in his hold as he tucked you underneath him watching the waves roll and crash over Blackwater Bay. The waters turned a deepened grey, the sky splitting with distant rumbles as you continued in conversation, sharing wine and the few sweet peaches that had been left in the bowl into the afternoon. 

It was rare for those times, when it was just the three of you, without duty or courts pulling you away. But with the storm came a pause, and it only burned desires and yearning deeper.

None of you had wanted to leave your chambers after those small hours, no interruptions, only lazing with each other and preferring a supper alone, but it had been refused, at your own hand no less. The children would only wonder, and no doubt such peace and quiet would soon be interrupted. 

But a certain restlessness laid root between the three of you. One to be sated.

—

The night continued on, and such restlessness only seemed to grow.

By the time supper had been finished, seated at the smaller hall just outside of the gardens, a light feast had been prepared. Sweet tarts and vegetables, roasted duck and fruits, there was much to be had but it seemed the entire castle had been outdone by the storm. Tiredness creeping everyone around you, leaving the room mostly in a calm silence. The children prevailed however, whispering and gossiping at table, near flicking peas from their spoons and forks before they had been scolded.

The sight had made you smile nonetheless, even as your little ones curled into your side with the crack of thunder and whistling of the wind, there was a gentleness between all of you. One that you’d husband’s noted fondly, your eyes meeting from the table every once in a while.

There was something else there too, longing, needing.

The children were soon all taken to bed, like clockwork, and you embraced them one by one, your girls curled around your legs in one tight squeeze, with Daeron hugging you tightly from the side around them. Aerion stood at his side as he nodded to his father, your hand gracing his cheek gently as he softened, and then Valarr who did the same, longing a little at your side before bidding goodnight.

Aegon and Matarys were last, blinking up at you with tired eyes as you wished them sweet dreams, the pair of them taking off after their chambermaids wildly. Which in turn reminded you to write the next morning, such a fondness you had felt guilty for at times for the only one of your blessings that had been missing. Aemon.

Not long after, you had taken your own leave along with your husband’s following suit, bidding their mother and father goodnight as you stepped through the corridors.

You could breathe, at last, all was well, at least so it had seemed until the hours climbed and so did the rise of the storm.

——

The humidity is what broke you. The windows wide open with dampened sheer curtains and lace floating in on the warm summer breeze, still thick and sticky. And in such times you wondered why you had shared a bed at all.

Baelor lay draped at the headboard, your head barely touching his damp chest as Maekar sprawled out on the other side, a foot dipping toward the floor. Clothes had shed by layer every hour. First their doublets which you had carefully undone and folded over the chairs, and then their breeches, then your dresses, unlaced by rough fingers and skirts you were all in the bed under thin sheets and bare. 

You had huffed and rolled back and forth in a frenzy, "Was it this hot earlier..?"

“Careful, wife.”

Maekar’s voice was rough with drowsiness and heat as he caught your wrist against his chest, flailing as you attempted to fan yourself. The storm outside cracked low across the hills, the kind of summer storm that sat heavy in the air first, thick as syrup, making every sheet cling and every breath feel shared.

And gods, were they shared.

You were trapped between them.

Maekar lay behind you all broad warmth and restless muscle, forever moving as if battle lived in his bones even in sleep. In front of you, Baelor barely stirred at all, though his eyes had opened to slits, bright in the firelight.

“You are both furnaces,” you complained, attempting to shove at Maekar’s arm where it had slung itself across your waist again. “I’m being slow roasted alive.”

Baelor huffed a laugh.

“A cruel fate,” he murmured. “Smothered by devoted husbands.”

“Devoted?” you scoffed. “One of you kicks and the other growls in his sleep.”

“I do not growl.” Maekar growled.

“You absolutely growl.” As if to prove your point.

Another roll of thunder sounded outside, nearer. The rain had not yet broken, but the wind had begun pushing against the shutters and curtains in slow, warm breaths. The room smelled of smoke, and summer air anticipating and linen, and it all but heightened your senses to a point.

Maekar shifted again behind you with a low irritated sound, pressing closer, like he sought coolness and found only more heat. In which he did. His forehead dropped briefly between your shoulders.

“Storm’s keeping him awake,” Baelor said lazily.

“The storm is making him unbearable.”

“You wound me.”

“You flipped me over like a roast pig two moments ago.”

“That,” Maekar muttered into the air, “was necessary.”

You laughed despite yourself, breath catching when his hand spread over your stomach afterward, heavy and possessive, in the soft sleepy way he never was during daylight. That was the dangerous thing with them, not the sharp looks across halls or the hands dragging you close in hidden corridors.

It was the softness, the slow burning tease.

Baelor reached out then, fingers brushing damp hair from your temple. His touch was cooler somehow, gentler, though the look in his eyes was beginning to sharpen awake by degrees.

“You’re flushed,” Baelor called out to you softly, studying you.

“It is thirty degrees in this room.”

“Hm.” His thumb traced your lower lip slowly.

“Suppose it may not only be the weather.”

Behind you, Maekar gave a quiet amused grunt at that, finally stilling for the first time all night. And somehow that stillness was worse. His chest pressed solid along your back with Baelor watching from mere inches away. The storm rolled closer and closer until the whole world felt suspended, one heavy waiting moment as your eyes flickered upward and down toward his lips.

“Come here my heart..” His arms opened, the sheets pooling at your waist as he inched you slowly into his lap, settling you with knees over each of his side. A palm brushed at your cheek, circling it as eyes bore into you from beneath, the familar burn of silver hairs prickling at your thighs.

His mouth pressed to your knee, a heavy hand bracing onto your backside as Baelor brushed the hair from your face.

“Tell us what you need..”

You whined as you pressed down, feeling the ache between your thighs, heat hovering right where you needed them both, needed them since the very morning they had left you.

Baelor did not answer to that, instead his eyes followed yours, pupils dilating a dark black before curling his fingers around the back of your neck to inch you closer.

“Need you.. both of you.” One hand braced to Baelor’s shoulder, the other reached around catching the line of Maekar’s jaw, drawing him up nearer to you as he rose, a single absentminded push from his forearm to meet you.

Your mouths pressed together, lips tangling as Baelor’s heartbeat thrummed into yours. He squeezed your thighs tighter around him, pads of fingertips trailing up and down your sternum to your stomach. Maekar’s tongue sliped into your mouth with an impatient fervour, dragging you back down to him until you folded between them, landing with your back pressed into the mattress.

There was a silence between them, barely a pause of knowing before they moved. Baelor settled between your legs, tanned muscles sliding over you until he pried your legs apart, revealing you to him. His hardened cock hit the base of his stomach where he had torn his clothes off earlier, silhouetted by the dark hairs that trailed his navel.

Maekar followed after you, the white sheets catching across his pale skin as he moved over you.

Baelor’s kisses drifted higher, slowly undoing you, as another hand reached for your face instead. Rough fingers slid beneath your jaw, thumb brushing your lower lip until your mouth parted for him instinctively.

"There she is," Maekar said quietly and Baelor exhaled softly against your skin, the sound alone makin you twitch in his hold. The storm outside cracked loud enough to shake the windows, but neither brother looked away from you.

Not once.

Then Baelor finally pressed his mouth to you properly, slow enough to draw a gasp from your throat and Maekar caught it instantly with a kiss of his own, deep and consuming, swallowing every sound while his hand tightened possessivelv at vour waist.

You reached your hand between you, Maekar’s cock aching and a blushed red by the time you pulled him to you, his hips pressing into your face. The throbbing ache of his length slipped past your lips where you suckled, working your tongue around its head as he fed himself into your mouth.

"There you are.. our girl."' His fingers caught where the spit dribbled around him and down to your chin, smearing it messily around. Your hips bucked as you whined, Baelor catching you as you did so, anchoring you back against his mouth, licking you through every shock and shiver your body gave.

"Fuck I have missed this.." He inched deeper and deeper, growling as he rocked into you, “Missed you..” Your lips wrapped delicately around him as he thumbed your cheek, cradling to face him blinking up through small tears. The heat pooled deep in his belly, curling hotter than the fire before he pulled from your mouth with a pop, slowing, low and primal.

He wasn't giving in, not yet, not when he wasn’t inside of you.

Wet muscle swirled harsher around your folds, sucking at your clit as you arched, thighs shaking around his head as you clamped tightly. Your eyes squeezed shut, crying out as the heat tore through you, throwing you over the edge against his lips. He did not pull away licking you through your high with every jolt against him. He inched up with a kiss to your thighs, kissing up to your knee as he made room.

They both took their turns each side of you, incoherent whispers kissed all over, sucking marks over your skin, teeth baring and catching over your muscle threatening to dig in. But it wasn’t rivalry that caught them between you, it was far from it, they worked in tandem. Trailing adoring kisses over every curve and every pull of flesh they managed between their fingertips, grasping you closer until none of you could take it any longer.

The candles had long blown out, leaving the room only in a hazy moonlight. Wet linen sheets were damp with sweat and sex as lips found your neck and chest, suckling around your sensitive buds drawing every whine and sound from you.

Baelor had taken you first, barely leaving distance between you as he carefully pressed himself into your entrance, collecting your wetness onto the blunt head of his throbbing cock.

“Baelor..”

“Shh shh, you have me..all of me. “ He shushed as he thrust in, feeling the stretch around him. You felt the burn, deep and alight, your cunt sucking him in greedily as he began to move. It was a fervour, intense and unhurried, hipbones rocking into yours as muscle bunched and expanded with every movement.

His nose nudged into the dip of your temple, his chest sliding over your breasts tightly as he locked you together. He inhaled sharp and low, hands finding your hips as your legs locked around him as he braced them to his sides.

Maekar slid around his brother, his hands settling on Baelor’s shoulders as he watched from above. Beneath him, you were cradled against warm sheets and stronger arms, one hand digging into your back as Baelor drove deeper into you with a low, broken groan.

Thunder rattled the chamber, shadows casting across the room as your head lulled back onto the pillows, your mouth parting where your breath caught.

“How well you take us..” Baelor murmured, dark eyes fixed on where your bodies joined.

“Should’ve known, with how perfectly she fits between us.” Maekar hummed from the side, his fist curled around his cock as he pumped it slowly.

“Indeed she does.”

Our beautiful wife.

Their voices mangled into one, but you heard each, breathless and full of passion and desire, full of love.

Baelor’s hand rose to your chin, rough fingers tilting your face upward before he kissed you hard enough to steal the breath from your lungs. “Have to keep you like this, all fucked out and pretty..” Your moans broke helplessly against his mouth, swallowed entirely into the heat of him. The room became a mess of sweat and silk, damp strands of hair clung to your forehead and throat, firelight shining gold against your skin while the storm roared beyond the windows.

Their hands gripped at you everywhere they could, your hips, your waist, possessive and worshipful enough to leave marks as deep as the wedding band upon your finger. Their mouths fought for you when Maekar claimed it just Baelor fell into your shoulder, pleasure tearing through you as he groaned, the mind spilling from your lips drowned out by your breaths mingling.

“Seven..”

His hips stuttered into yours, rolling deeply with every slow thrust he gave you. Once, twice before he stilled inside of you, filling you with his spend. And he only pulled from you when Maekar rumbled between you.

"Think you can give us one more, my love..?"

He slid from you carefully, bracing your legs back down onto the mattress and Maekar moved to his place, kneeling between your legs as his eyes raked over you. They followed your face, flushed and needy, your eyes lidded as his brother already made attempts to kiss over your face.

Though he couldn’t help himself as he looked down, two thick fingers parting your heat as his head dipped. His tongue slid through your heat, tasting the sweet stickiness that mixed between you, his brother's spend and you, your juices curling onto his lips as he drank you down, placing one final sharp kiss to your swollen pearl before he rose. 

Their expressions were dark, watching you with a heightened sense of longing, desire creeping their striking features no matter how opposite. Eyes of violet and gold bore into your own, raking over your figure with a delicate adoration. All you could do was feel, consumed and worshipped, exactly as they had sworn to make you feel, vowed to with every breath and moment that had passed, just as they always had.

And as Maekar took his place, carefully positioning himself as he slid the remnants of your leaking cunt over his cock, pressing inside of you in one steady thrust, a hand curled at the back of your neck, you breathed life into that vow once more.

--

The rain pattered lightly on the windows, small flights passing across the stone, at last a cool breeze settling. The hours had long since passed, each one moving more eased than before, your bodies tangled in the sheets now cool and only the warmth shared from you entangled.

Baelor rested against the headboard, an arm carefully around you as Maekar’s splayed across your stomach with his head shoved into the pillow. They both towered over you, curling their bodies as they always had, but tighter, listening for every pass that the weather slowly cleared.

“If only it stormed all the time.” You mumbled, clutching the two arms slung around you gently, your fingers finding them through the dark and tracing over the curve of wrist and palm. Maekar only hummed against you, his lips pursed into your shoulder as Baelor chuckled, nodding silently, “It would have nothing on us, my love.”

The castle eased that night more than it had for a long time, the children sound asleep and the three of you soon pulled into a lull that only comes with certain things.