#blackice

VALARR

Love language: Gift-giving and quality time but the gift is always attention, which is the most expensive thing he has. He collects you. He files away details: your preferred wine, the precise tension in your shoulders when you’re suppressing something, which conversations drain you and which ones don’t. He uses this information with perfect precision and calls it care. It is care. Its also possession.

What makes him jealous: Being outpaced. Someone knowing something about you that he doesn’t. Men who have history with you. Not romantic history necessarily, just the casual, unguarded intimacy of people who knew each other before performance. He’s always slightly behind the inside joke. He’s always, just barely, on the outside of the thing, and it drives him quietly, completely mad.

First time: Watching you and a childhood friend (some Stark bannerman or family retainer) collapse into laughter about something so old and specific that there were no words, just the shorthand of years. Valarr smiled pleasantly and felt something cold and hard settle under his sternum and started planning, without entirely meaning to, how to become indispensable to you.

DAERON

Love language: Words of affirmation but mostly the honest, unwanted kind. He says true things at the worst possible times. You’re too good for all of us. You’ve got that look. Like you’re performing being okay. His love language is seeing you, which is not something he can turn off even when it would be better for everyone if he could.

What makes him jealous: Almost nothing, because Daeron has learned to not want things too much. What cuts through that is: watching someone fail to see you. A man in a room full of your intelligence who still talks over you, who misses the thing you actually said. Daeron’s jaw goes tight and he gets quiet, in that terrible clear-eyed way he has when he isn’t drunk enough yet, that the man doesn’t deserve you.

First time: Not jealousy exactly. The first time he felt something he had to put away: the night you stayed until he was lucid, brought him water, didn’t lecture, just existed beside him. He looked at you and thought, very clearly, oh, and then reached for the bottle, because Daeron has always known which things to leave dead.

LYONEL

Love language: Physical touch and words of affirmation. Loud, unambiguous, entirely himself about it. He pulls you close in public because he wants to. He tells you you’re beautiful like he’s noting weather. He’s not subtle and doesn’t try to be, and the consistency of it is its own language: every day, every room, never performative, always real.

What makes him jealous: Men who intimidate you. Not because he doubts you (he doesn’t, not for a second) but because he’s built to stand between things he loves and things that threaten them, and watching you navigate something dangerous with your politeness-armour on while some lord or commander talks down to you hits something ancient and Baratheon in his chest. He goes painfully, coldly… pleasant. You’ve learned to give him something to do with the energy.

First time: Some lord at court making a comment about Northern women—something smooth and dismissive, just barely insult enough to note—and you smiling through it with that Stark composure, your eyes going nowhere, giving him nothing. Lyonel was furious before he understood he was furious. He interrupted so abruptly that the lord never finished his sentence.

DUNK

Love language: Acts of service. Enormous, clumsy, completely sincere. He carries things. He stands where you need him to stand. He apologises if he takes up too much space and then forgets and does it again because his body operates slightly independently of his self-consciousness. He will not tell you how he feels because the feelings are large and he’s not sure he has the right words for something this big. He will, however, do anything you ask without complaint and several things you didn’t.

What makes him jealous: Men who know what to say. Smooth-tongued lords who make you smile at a party, who find the right phrase easily, who don’t have to stop and chew over every sentence before it comes out. Dunk watches this and his great hands curl and he feels very specifically like himself (large and blunt and honest and not enough) and then you look over at him from across the room and smile in a different way entirely, and he loses the thread of why he was upset.

First time: A tourney. Some lordling helping you from your horse (unnecessary, you were perfectly capable) and your hand in his for a moment longer than needed. Dunk didn’t punch anyone. He considered it very seriously, which was new, and the considering unsettled him more than anything.

BLOODRAVEN

Love language: Words of affirmation, but the version that is indistinguishable from threat. He names what you are with precision and without softening it. The bait bites back. A piece who moves herself. He gives you the most dangerous gift: being seen by the cleverest man in the realm and found genuinely interesting. He will not touch you more than necessary but he will never stop watching.

What makes him jealous: Nothing, technically. What catches (infrequently, like a hook in cloth) is your fearlessness directed at someone else. You walking toward a dangerous man without hesitation is a thing Bloodraven usually considers as useful or foolish. Once or twice it has catalogued as something else, something with an edge to it that he finds moderately annoying and sets aside.

First time: You walked toward him. When he was still building his read on you and expecting the usual fear-and-composure combination that people show him, and instead you walked directly at him with your chin up like he was simply a man in a room who happened to know useful things. He didn’t react. He did, however, revise his entire assessment of you on the spot, which is not something he often has to do.

AEGON THE CONQUEROR

Love language: Words of affirmation and physical touch. the conqueror’s version, which is possession declared aloud, in public and often. He names you. He speaks you into rooms before you’ve arrived. His touch is constant, the casual ownership of a man who has never understood the concept of something he cannot have. He’s also, surprisingly, a good listener. Not out of sensitivity but out of strategy that has curdled, over years, into something like genuine interest.

What makes him jealous: Defiance that isn’t aimed at him. Men who earn your actual respect. Not just your courtesy, which you extend to everyone, but the specific quality of your attention that means you have found someone worth taking seriously. Aegon has unified a continent. He expects to be the most interesting thing in most rooms. The dragon don’t share well.

First time: You looked past him (not really rudely, or deliberately, just past) to assess the room when you first met. He noted it. He thought about it for three days. He decided he would make himself impossible to look past, and he’s been doing so ever since with the full force of the most powerful man in Westeros.

MAEGOR THE CRUEL

Love language: He would not recognise the concept. What he does instead: he makes himself indispensable through force. He makes the world around you smaller until he’s the only thing in it. He protects with a ferocity that’s indistinguishable from threat and expects you to understand the difference. He is, in his way, consistent. Cruelly, completely, exclusively focused. Whether that constitutes love is a philosophical question he doesn’t entertain.

What makes him jealous: Tenderness from you toward anything he can’t control. A kindness given freely to someone he sees as beneath notice. The wolf in you that cares for wounded things. It baffles and infuriates him because he can’t conquer it, cannot make it stop, and anything he cannot conquer he eventually tries to destroy.

First time: You were kind to one of his men. Some low soldier who had done something small and forgettable, and you were simply kind, in that easy and unthinking way, the way you are with people you don’t fear. Maegor watched you do it and felt something that was not quite rage and not quite want but was definitely both, and the poor man was demoted by nightfall for reasons no one could quite articulate.

DAEMON BLACKFYRE

Love language: Acts of service and physical touch. The chivalric kind, which in Daemon is entirely genuine and entirely tortured. He’s the truest knight in his own story and he loves accordingly: with honour codes and devotion and the specific agony of a man who wants something he has decided he’s not permitted to want. He would die for you. He would not take from you. These two things live in him in constant, miserable tension.

What makes him jealous: Baelor. Of course Baelor. Daemon and Baelor are mirror images of each other in the realm’s imagination (the golden one who should have been king, the golden one who is) and every time Baelor stands near you, Daemon feels the whole unfairness of his position with fresh acuity. He handles it with more grace than Aerion would. He handles it badly enough.