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𝒈𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒆𝒏 𝒅𝒓𝒂𝒈𝒐𝒏, 𝒈𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒆𝒏 𝒘𝒐𝒍𝒇.

pairing: valarr targaryen x f!stark!reader wc: 16.3k 🚬🚬🚬 contents/warnings: 18+, explicit sexual content throughout (power play, d/s dynamics, femdom, shifting to switch/dom a round the middle, light bondage, hair-pulling, biting, choking, consensual rough sex, dirty talk, oral sex), modern/trailer trash au, corruption arc (valarr), emotional manipulation, obsessive love, possessiveness, morally grey!reader, dark!obsessive!valarr, themes of being "made" and "unmade" by another person; loss of autonomy framed as gift, grief references, this is a dark romance but there's NO non-con/dub-con, theyre just freaks fr an: This piece changed something in my brain. Been writing this nonstop for several days and just need it out in the world now. This can be read as a standalone but it's technically valarr!first alt verse to this and this. Thank you to the anon who sent that ask about how different things would be if you met/dated Valarr first.

✶ modern au/trailer trash masterlist.

[Alexa, play Les by Childish Gambino 🚬🚬🚬]

I. september, year one.

You haven’t yet been ruined by anyone when you first meet him.

You’ve been fucked, and adored. You’ve been politely mishandled by boys in college bars who thought the word Stark was a pickup line. But you haven’t been known yet. Haven’t yet been consumed because you haven’t met anyone who dared.

You’re wearing black because your mother always said black was a Stark's kindest colour aside from grey. You’re holding a glass of something you won’t remember years later, listening to a hedge fund manager explain a political matter to you as if you have not, in fact, read more about it than he has.

Then a man with a white streak at his temple crosses the room.

He doesn't approach you directly. He works the floor. He nods at men twice his age, clasps a few shoulders, and laughs at a joke you're not close enough to hear. He lets you watch him do it.

The whole time, his eyes come back to you. Brown on one side. Pale blue on the other. Unsettling in a way you can't yet name. Not because his stare is cold or leering, but because it’s a curious stare. You’re not used to men looking at you curiously. Men look at you hungrily; they look with calculation. They look at you because of your father.

He looks at you like he’s found a page he didn't expect to find in a book he'd already read. By the time he's in front of you, you’ve already decided you will let him speak.

"You're the Stark heir."

You angle your head. "I am."

"Valarr Targaryen," he says in a smooth voice. "I own—"

"I know who you are."

You give him the inventory—Halcyon Holdings, the tech portfolio, the shipping arm his father had been trying to divest—and watch his face go through four different expressions in half a second, ending in something delighted. He laughs, and it’s a real laugh. Not the performed, polite kind he gave others.

"You've done your homework."

"I do homework on everyone in my father's orbit," you inform him bluntly, and his smile widens.

Some small animal part of you sits up inside you, taking very careful note of what kind of man smiles wider when you show him your teeth.

He takes you for a drink. Just one. He doesn't try to make it two which surprises you. He’s charming and painfully handsome, the type of young man everyone in the room looks to while he looks only at you. He walks you out at the end of the night, doesn't touch you once, except to brush his lips over your knuckles goodbye.

He sends a car to your dorm the following morning with a bouquet of peonies and a note that reads only: I'd like to see you again. No pressure. Valarr.

You call him because he sends peonies, not roses. Because there’s a thread of candour in his note that would be absent in another man's attempts to grab your attention. A man of his pedigree doesn’t need the embarrassment of chasing someone who doesn’t want him back.

You still make him wait a week before you dial his number.

You decide later that this was your first mistake, though you’ll revise that assessment many times over the following five years until you can no longer locate the mistake at all. Because the mistake will turn out to be him, in his entirety, and he’s not something you can extract from your life by then.

He will have woven himself through you like a silver thread.

II. december, year one.

It happens at his penthouse.

Everything that matters with Valarr happens at his penthouse in those early months. The apartment is a stage, and he’s the only actor who lives in it full-time. He likes you on his set, framed by his windows, lit by his lamps. There's loneliness in that, but also coldness.

Still, it's the first time you’ve slept with a man who chose his own light fixtures.

He asks if he can kiss you first. Actually asks. Means it, too. And that's the thing that sets your teeth on edge for reasons you don't understand yet. Because nobody’s asked you that in years, because the men who want you take, or they presume, or they pose the question as foregone. Valarr asks like it means something, like he needs the word for more than your comfort.

You say yes.

He kisses you slowly, then, like he’s mapping new terrain. His mouth is careful, too careful. His hands stay high. Respectfully so. One at your jaw, one at the curve between your shoulder and your neck. His restraint is so deliberate it reads as its own kind of pressure. You can feel him holding back. You note it even as it happens. He’s managing himself, you think, and then, what for?

You find out what for, eventually.

You fuck him in his bed. On his white, pristine sheets, art you haven’t bothered to identify on the wall behind his headboard.

Valarr undresses you with a reverence that edges on worshipful. He slides the dress off your shoulders, presses his mouth to the notch between your collarbones. There’s a soft murmur of god, look at you into your skin like a man who’s never in his life felt lucky and now does.

He kisses his way down your body. He’s generous and attentive. Eats you out patiently, focused, reading your body for its responses and adjusting. Not badly; he’s good at this, he’s been good at this with other women, he knows the mechanical shape of what he’s doing. You come, eventually, for him. Because he’s earned it, because your body is responsive and because he’s pretty and wanted you badly enough.

And then he rolls you under him, sliding inside you, and he fucks you like a man who’s been told, at some point in his life, that women like it slow and reverent. That's it. The only setting.

He looks into your eyes. Smiles. He says your name, moves with a careful cadence, a kind of technique. He’s performing a version of making love that he’s learned somewhere, from someone, and it is—you realise with a small, distinct pulse of dismay—soft.

Not bad. Soft.

And somewhere in the middle of it, around when his mouth finds the hollow of your throat and stays there like an apology, you get bored.

You don't mean to. It’s not a conscious act on your part. It’s the involuntary response of a Stark to being handled too gently: boredom, and under the boredom, the oldest thing in you, the wolf-thing, the predator, turning its head and noticing the room has a man in it. Realising how easy it would be to claim him, however you want to claim him.

You flip him.

You put a hand flat to his sternum, shoving him back against the pillows, and Valarr goes. He goes easily, readily, with a surprised sound in the back of his throat that’s not displeasure. Then you climb him, and you pin his wrists above his head with one hand. You watch with great curiosity how his pupils dilate. The brown eye goes nearly black. The pale blue one goes almost luminous. You’ve never seen a physiological response happen this fast in a grown man's face, and you’ll remember it, in detail, for the rest of your life.

"Oh," he breathes.

"Shh."

His mouth parts. "Yes—whatever you—yes."

You take him apart for forty-five minutes.

You ride him hard and mean, with his wrists held down and his hips pinned by your weight, and you watch him come undone in a way he clearly has never been undone before.

Beautiful boys who’ve been beautiful their whole lives are used to being unwrapped. They’re not used to being handled.

They’re not used to being made to earn anything. But you do. You make Valarr earn permission to move, to speak, to finish, and by the time you let him, he’s gone somewhere very quiet behind his eyes. When he comes, Valarr makes a sound like he’s dying, like you’ve broken something vital inside him.

Afterwards, he lies on his back in the wrecked sheets and stares at the ceiling like he's trying to remember his own name.

"Where have you been all my life?" he asks, half-joking.

You don't answer.

Because this, right now, is the first crack. This is where you understand, somewhere wordless, that you’ve just shown a beautiful self-contained man a version of himself he didn't know was accessible, and that he’s not going to forget.

Valarr is a cataloguer, a collector. And he’s just catalogued this—the weight of your hand on his wrists, the precise angle of your mouth as it bit, the particular heat of being made to wait, to plead—and he’s going to want it again. He’s going to want it differently. Going to want you with escalating need that, by the end of the week, will feel less like desire and more like a project plan.

You let him hold you afterwards. You lie against his chest, and you listen to his heart rate come down, wondering, dimly, what you’ve just let yourself into.

III. january, year two.

The second time is three nights later.

You come to Valarr's apartment straight from a dinner your father made you attend. You’re still in a dress and heels, still carrying the particular tense irritation that two hours at such gatherings always loads into your shoulders.

He opens the door with a glass of wine already in his hand for you, and the look on his face when he sees you—the one that’s half-devotional and half-hungry—somehow sharpens the irritation instead of easing it.

You don't let him kiss you hello.

You stalk past him into the apartment, set your bag down, turn around, and you say coldly, quietly, "Bedroom."

He doesn’t ask. Valarr's expression shifts once—the surprise, then recalibration, his pupils blowing—and he follows you without a word.

You’ve not planned this. You don't plan, with men. Generally. You’ve spent the cab ride home thinking about three nights ago, thinking about the sound he made when you let him finish. Remembering that precise glazed stupidity of his face when you finally let him speak.

Something in you is hungry for it in a way that’s making you reckless.

You put him on his knees.

Not with your hands. With a single word and a small gesture of your chin. Valarr goes down onto the rug at the foot of his bed with a grace that’s almost unseemly. He looks up at you. The white streak at his temple catches the bedside lamp. His shirt is unbuttoned at the collar now, slightly crumpled. He must have undone it at some point between the door and the bedroom. Whether consciously or not. You can see the pulse in his throat moving faster than it should be. Almost smile at the sight.

"Is this what you want?" you ask.

His jaw works. "Yes."

"Say it properly."

"I want—yes, I want this, I want—" He stops, searching for the word. He doesn't find it because he's not yet fluent in the language you're about to teach him. "Please."

You let him undress you from that position.

You make him do it only with his hands. No mouth. Not yet. He hasn't earned his mouth yet.

His fingers find the zip at the side of your dress. He's used to undressing women, not to being made to do it without being permitted to touch them the way he wants. When the zipper finally gives, he peels the dress off you, knuckles skimming your ribs, your hip, the outside of your thigh. Not a caress, exactly. Something else.

You watch him swallow when the fabric catches on the curve of your hip, and he has to tug it gently, until it slips down and puddles at your feet. You step out of it with one hand light on his shoulder for balance. Valarr flinches faintly at the contact because it's the first you've given him voluntarily in almost ten minutes.

He folds it, of all things. Folds the dress and sets it aside, because he's Valarr Targaryen and even on his knees at his lover's feet, he can't not be neat, and the small domestic absurdity of it twists something warm in you that you weren't expecting to feel.

"Bra."

He reaches up, fingers shaking so faintly you would have missed it if you weren't watching for it. He has to slide his hands around your ribs to get at the clasp. You feel him go still for half a second when his palms bracket your sides—feel him fighting the urge to press his mouth to your sternum, to your stomach, anywhere—and then he masters it. He finds the clasp, unhooks it in one practised motion. The straps slide down your arms.

"Good boy," you hum gently.

His breath rushes out like you hit him.

It’s not a sound he meant to make or for you to hear. He makes it anyway, a short ragged thing, and his head tips forward so his forehead is almost touching your stomach. Valarr doesn't look up at you—can't, you conclude—but you see the flush rising up his throat.

Oh, you think.

You file that away neatly.

You make him take your underwear off with the same rule. Hands only. He hooks his thumbs in the waistband, drawing them down your legs so slowly it’s almost cruel to both of you. When he has them at your ankles, Valarr pauses. His forehead nearly grazes your thigh, his breath hot on the skin just above your knee. Then he waits. Because he’s understood, now, without you having to say it, that he’s not to rise from this floor until you tell him he can.

"Very good," you tell him. "So good, Val."

Another shudder. Full-body. You feel it in your calf where his hand is still resting.

You let him put his mouth on you eventually. You make him earn it inch by inch.

First, he’s allowed, only, to press his mouth to the inside of your knee—closed lips, no tongue, you specify—and when he does it, Valarr’s eyes close and his whole face softens in a way that makes you warm.

Then an inch higher. Then higher.

You let him kiss the inside of your thigh in a slow ascending line. When he shakes faintly against the skin he hasn't yet been permitted to taste, you feel it go all the way through you.

By the time his mouth is at the crease of your thigh, you can feel Valarr’s breath against you. You’re already wet—embarrassingly wet, obviously wet, and he knows it; you see his eyelashes fluttering at the nearness of it—he’s visibly struggling not to turn his head the two inches he needs to turn and put his tongue where he wants it.

He doesn't. He waits.

That's the part that undoes you, in the end. That he waits.

"Look at you," you murmur fondly, almost to yourself. "You're so good at this already."

His eyes flutter closed. A small sound comes out of him, soft and hungry.

"Open your mouth."

He does. Just like that. Just parts his mouth, on his knees, and waits.

You press two fingers to his lower lip. Slide them inside. Valarr closes his mouth around them without being told, and sucks, his tongue working against the pads of your fingers with the same careful, thorough attention he applies to everything he does. His eyes—when he opens them and looks up at you—are gone.

Not dazed. Not drifting. Gone.

You pull your fingers out of his mouth slowly, wet and slick, dragging them lightly down his chin, down the line of his throat.

"Now," you say.

You stand over him with your fingers in his hair. His hair is silky in your grip, dark and thick, the white streak sliding between your knuckles like a bright ribbon. Beautiful. So beautiful. You guide him where you want him to be, and you hold him there.

Valarr makes a sound the instant his tongue finds your core.

Low in his throat, half-swallowed, not a sound he meant to make, either.

He wanted this, you understand now, for longer than the twenty minutes he’s spent on his knees. Wanted this for weeks, maybe months. The specific version of this where you hold him in place and don't let him lead, but he didn't know how to ask for it.

You feel him go slack with the permission of it now.

You feel him sink into your thighs. His hands come up and settle on the backs of your legs. Not gripping, not guiding, just resting there. The way a man rests his hands on something he’s grateful for, and then he begins.

He’s good at it.

He’s Harvard-good at it, in the same way he’s Harvard-good at everything. Which is to say, thorough and attentive to feedback; he learns the rhythm you want from the very first twitch of your hips, and he adjusts to it, he builds on it, and when he finds the stroke of his tongue against your clit that makes your breath catch, Valarr stays there with a focus that’s almost unnerving.

But this isn't what he's used to. You can feel it in him.

You can feel him trying, underneath the skill, to work out what you want from him now—not the technique, he has the technique; what you want from him as a person, in this position, in this reversal he hasn't rehearsed—and the searching of it is what's making his breath shake against you.

You tighten your fist in his hair and grind down against his mouth, once, experimentally.

Valarr moans.

Loud. Longer than he meant to. The sound breaks against your sensitive folds, and you feel it all the way up your spine. So you do it again, harder, and Valarr’s hands tighten on the backs of your thighs. His throat works, and you think he likes being used, he likes being used, he likes being used, and the knowledge of it makes you cruel.

"Take it."

He takes it.

"That's it,” you hum, gripping his hair tighter. “That's exactly what I want. Just like that. Don't move."

He doesn't move.

You ride his face.

There is no polite word for it, and you don't want one. You hold his head in place with both hands now—one fisted in his hair, one cupping the back of his skull almost tenderly—and you use Valarr’s mouth the way you would use a tool.

With intent, with pressure, a rhythm you choose for yourself and not for him. You don’t let him set the pace or pull back. When his breath goes ragged against you, you hold him through it, and when he makes a choked, wet sound into your skin, you tell him, "That's it, love, you’re so good for me," and you feel his whole body jolt.

When Valarr tries to pull back to breathe, you tighten your fist, and you say, "No. Like that. Don't stop."

He doesn’t stop.

His throat works. You feel it against you. He takes a breath through his nose, ragged and shallow, and goes back to what he was doing. You grind your hips down into his face and let him feel the weight of you against him. Valarr moans again, but this time it’s smaller. Lovelier, wetter, more ragged. This time, it’s closer to a whimper. It’s the sound of a man who’s just discovered something about himself that thrills him.

"Look at me."

His gaze snaps to you like you’ve yanked a leash.

Vlarr’s eyes are glazed, his mouth glossy. There’s wetness on his chin, his upper lip, the line of his elegant jaw. The blue eye has gone so pale it’s almost white, while the brown eye has gone almost black. He’s breathing through his nose in quick, desperate pulls, and when you look down at him, he looks up at you.

"You're doing so well for me," you tell him quietly, stroking your thumb against his temple. “You’re perfect, Val.”

Something in his face breaks open.

You don't know what exactly. You only see the aftermath of it. The way his eyelids flutter, the way his mouth parts against you in a shape that’s almost a smile. Then Valarr sets back to work with a renewed devotion that makes your knees wobble.

He’s putting the entire finish of his Harvard MBA and his twenty-six years of self-possession into the single project of making you come. By the time he manages it, working for it, struggling a little, his jaw trembling with the effort, his tongue gone soft where it was precise ten minutes ago, you’re coming against his mouth in long, cruel waves that you don't bother to be polite about.

"Fuck," you breathe, gasping for breath. "Fuck, Valarr—"

You hear him moan against you.

Dry, small, wrecked. He moans into your swollen cunt at the sound of his own name in your mouth, and he keeps going, keeps working you through it, lapping at your folds, drinking you in. You ride it out against his face without mercy because you know now, with absolute certainty, that mercy is not what he wants.

Valarr’s taking it like a gift.

You have understood something.

He’s never done this before, exactly. Not like this. He’s gone down on plenty of women; his skill backs that up. But he’s never been used before, and the distinction is not lost on him; the distinction is what he’s just tripped face-first into.

He keeps going when you tell him to.

Through the aftershocks. Gentler now, but still there, still working, still mouth-to-skin and hands-on-thighs and not moving until you permit it. When it's too much—when your whole body flinches at the overstimulation—you say, "Stop."

Valarr stops instantly. He doesn't move back. He just stops. Rests his mouth there, open, panting against you. Waiting.

"Good boy," you say again, softer this time, and his whole body shakes.

When you finally let him up, he’s dishevelled in a way you’ve never seen him. His perfect hair tousled where you tore at it, mouth wet and swollen, jaw shining, eyes blown. His collar is crumpled, damp mess at the throat. There's a red mark on his cheek where you pressed him into you too hard.

The pristine line of him, that Valarr-polish you've been looking at for four months, is gone.

It's just a man on his knees with his mouth ruined.

He sways forward on his knees. He presses his forehead to your hipbone.

He whispers, "Thank you."

You freeze, briefly, because you hadn't expected the thank-you, and because you felt it in your whole body.

"Get up."

He does as he’s told.

You fuck him against his bedroom wall. He puts his hands against the paint on either side of your head, and he holds himself there. Doesn't move them, doesn't touch you except where you’re letting him touch you. He looks into your eyes the entire time with an expression that's, more than anything, studying. He’s memorising what works. For every micro-expression your face makes, and he’s noting which movements of his hips produce which sounds from you, filing it all away, in real time, for next time.

You come a second time with his hand at your throat.

Not hard. He doesn't know how hard yet. You have to take his wrist, afterwards, and place his hand back there, more firmly, and say, "Like this. Not there. Here." And he corrects, he learns. When he comes, he comes with his face buried in your neck, and he’s whispering something, and you only catch the end of it.

—anything you want, whatever you want, tell me—

You stand in his bathroom ten minutes later, splashing cold water on your face, staring at yourself in his obscenely expensive mirror. Your hair is ruined. Your mouth is swollen. You still feel the ghost of his hands at the back of your thighs.

You have the thought, then, for the first time:

I could make him into anything.

And under that thought, immediately and with the specific chill of an instinct you don’t yet trust:

I probably will.

IV. february, year two.

You wake up in his bed on a Saturday morning in February, and it’s snowing outside.

King’s Landing snow. The rare, good kind. Fat soft flakes drift past the penthouse windows in a slow hush, the city muted under them, the light in the bedroom gone grey.

You’re under a cashmere throw because he pulled it over you sometime in the night. Valarr’s still asleep next to you, on his stomach, one toned arm thrown across your waist, his face half-buried in the pillow. The white streak at his temple is a pale slash in his dark, messy hair. His mouth gapes open slightly. He’s not handsome in sleep; he’s boyish, a little ridiculous, softened.

You gaze at him for a long time.

There’s no performance in him right now. No studying. No careful awareness of the angle of his own jaw. He’s just a man in his twenties, asleep next to a woman he’s in love with, and he’s breathing evenly, a small crease between his brows that you want to smooth with your thumb.

You smooth it with your thumb.

Valarr stirs at once. His mismatched eyes crack open. They focus on you slowly, without sharpening, and the first thing his face does is smile—helpless, unguarded, delighted.

"Hi," he mumbles.

"Hi."

"What time is it?" he croaks sleepily.

"Early," you tell him gently.

"Mm." He pulls you closer, tucks his face into your shoulder. His voice is rough with sleep, muffled against your skin. "Five more minutes."

You let him have five more minutes. You let him have a whole hour. You lie there with him curled around you like a very expensive dog, and you watch the snow come down outside.

At some point, you understand, with no particular astonishment, that you’re happy.

Plainly happy. The kind of happiness your mother used to talk about. The quiet kind, the Sunday-morning kind, the kind that can't be captured or faked. You’re in a warm bed with a man who loves you, and it’s snowing. There’s coffee somewhere in your near future. There’s nothing you have to do today, nowhere to be. Valarr’s body is warm against yours, and he smells like cedar and clean skin, and you’re happy.

You turn your face into his thick hair, and you think: oh.

And then you think: oh, no.

Because you hadn’t expected this.

You expected the sex, expected the dance, the expensive gifts, the careful strategic pursuit. You braced for all of it, watched yourself enter this relationship with a kind of distant curiosity.

What you hadn’t expected was the five-more-minutes. Or the gentle urge to smooth the crease between his brows. You hadn’t expected the domestic, boring, ordinary, warm-bed happiness of a man who makes you breakfast and laughs at your jokes and holds you in his sleep.

You’ll remember this morning later, after it’s all over, as one of the ones that mattered. Really mattered.

You’ll remember the grey light, the cashmere throw, the comforting weight of Valarr’s arm across your waist. You will not be able to explain to anyone how a man you eventually understood to be dangerous was also, unambiguously, someone you loved dearly.

But you did.

For a time, in that apartment, in the snow, in February of year two—you did.

Valarr eventually wakes properly, gets up with a groan, and stretches, making you appreciate the toned lines of his back.

He makes you breakfast: eggs, toast, and the specific preserves you like from a small local shop that he had delivered last week. He puts a record on—jazz, soft, something his father used to play, he tells you—and he stands barefoot at the kitchen island in a t-shirt and sweatpants, and he cooks for you.

You sit at the counter with your chin in your hand and you watch him. Valarr catches you watching him, and his whole face does the thing it does when he’s happy: it goes transparent, briefly, and you see him, the man under the golden performance, and he’s not a man who’s been loved enough.

You see it that morning. You see it so clearly it hurts.

He’s a man who’s been adored and admired his whole life but never loved, and the difference is catastrophic. Because you’re the first person who’s bothered to know the difference. Valarr knows you know, and he is—in his careful, precise, terrified way—trying to let you inside.

You eat the eggs, spinning your fork with each mouthful. You kiss him on the jaw on your way to the coffee pot. Valarr catches your elbow and pulls you back and kisses you properly, deeply, consuming. Not hungry, not sexual, just a long warm kiss that means stay, and you do.

You stay the whole weekend.

You tell him, on Sunday night, in the dim of his bedroom with your head on his chest: "I love you."

You hadn't planned to. It comes out of you whole, unstudied, clumsy. His body stills under you.

"Say it again," he whispers.

"I love you."

Valarr is quiet for a long, long time. His hand is in your hair. When he speaks, his voice is not the voice he usually uses. It’s smaller, more cracked. "I've loved you since October."

You skim your lips over his chest. "I know."

"I know you know."

"I wasn't ready to say it back until now," you tell him.

"I know," he says again, and there’s such terrible gratitude in the words that you understand, lying there, that you could ruin this man simply by changing your mind.

You could ruin him without trying. It’s already too late; he’s already folded into you past the point of extraction, and you’re only three months in.

You close your eyes and breathe against his sternum. You tell yourself, then, that you’ll be careful with him.

You will not be.

But you mean it, that night, when you think it.

V. march, year two.

You teach him to bite.

You do it slowly. Patiently. One day at a time. You’re in no rush. You have months—you have years, it will turn out—and there’s a specific pleasure in taking your time, in shaping him in increments so small he doesn't notice the shape changing until the shape is already altered.

The first time, you’re sitting on his face. It’s something he asked for, quietly, after weeks of letting him earn it in smaller increments. Somewhere in the middle of it, bored with his stiff politeness, you grab his hair, hard, and you say, into the dim of the room: "Bite me."

Valarr hesitates. Two seconds. A full two seconds of hesitation, in which you can feel him not understanding the instruction.

"The inside of my thigh,” you clarify. “Bite me. Do it."

He does it. Lightly. A nervous, under-committed bite, more suggestion than action.

"Harder."

He bites harder.

"Harder, Valarr."

He bites until you gasp, until you feel his teeth sink in, hard. The skin will bruise in a faint shape that you will look at in the bath the next morning with a small satisfied curl at the corner of your mouth. He freezes after, holds too still, uncertain whether he’s overshot.

You tell him, "Again."

You see his eyes darken. You see him learn.

Two weeks later, in the middle of fucking you, Valarr bites the joint of your shoulder and your neck unprompted. He does it because he can feel you wanting it—reads it off you, reads it in the arch of your back, reads it like a language he’s becoming, slowly but thoroughly, fluent in.

He does it without asking. He does it knowing you want it.

You come almost immediately, with your nails sunk brutally into his toned back. He kisses the bite afterwards tenderly, apologetic in a theatrical way that’s not actually apologetic, and you laugh—actually laugh—against his chest because you can feel him performing the tenderness for you. It’s cute and it means he’s yours.

You teach him to hold you down.

You put his hands where you want them. You tell him—not always with words; sometimes just with a look over your shoulder, sometimes just by lifting your wrists above your head and waiting for him to understand—and Valarr learns to pin you. He’s tentative at first, afraid of hurting you, his grip more like a suggestion than a hold.

You break his wrist-grip one night just to show him he isn't trying. "Try again," you order, soft but firm. "Mean it this time."

He tries again. This time, he means it. The grip goes iron. You can’t pull free, and your breath catches with a slow, satisfied curl of heat in your belly.

"There," you rasp against his mouth. "There, Val. Like that. Don't let go."

He doesn't let go.

VI. april, year two.

You teach him to talk to you.

This one takes longer. Valarr's natural register in bed was praise (beautiful, you're so beautiful, god, look at you, I can't believe you're mine), and the praise is real. It’s genuine. It’s not a thing you want to remove from him. You just need to layer something underneath it. You need to teach him to be filthy under his perfect, golden shine.

You coax it out of him in small pieces.

You ask him what he's thinking about when he looks at you. You ask him questions in bed that he has to answer, and watch him struggle with the vocabulary.

What do you want? What are you thinking about when you’re inside me? Tell me.

He’s articulate. Valarr has been trained his whole life to be articulate. But this particular articulation—the dirty one, the possessive one, the one that lives under the golden boy and has never been spoken aloud—he has to find the words for first.

But you’re patient. You’re endlessly patient. You coach him like a man learning a language, and he learns it for you, because he learns everything for you.

The first time he manages mine in that low, smooth voice—against your ear, his teeth at your throat, his hand at your hip—you actually shudder. He feels it. His rhythm stutters. Then Valarr whispers it again, more certain this time, hungrier, and you feel him understand that he’s found a key that works.

By April, he's saying worse things.

Specific things.

The kinds of things you hadn’t known you needed to hear from him until he’s saying them, in that smooth voice, while fucking you against his windows with the city eighty floors below.

You feel so tight around me, love.

You're so wet for me. Listen to that. You’re making a mess.

Look at you taking it. Look at you. Perfect.

Some nights, you make him narrate.

You make him tell you, in his quiet voice, exactly what he’s going to do to you before he does it. You make him describe, out loud, in exact words, how he wants you. At first, he can’t do it without laughing a little—self-conscious, unused to the performance, the white streak at his temple catching the lamplight as he ducks his head—and you let him laugh, you kiss the laugh out of his mouth, smiling, and you urge him to try again.

Valarr tries again.

I'm going to put you on your back, and I'm going to eat your cunt until you're crying.

I'm going to make you come on my tongue so hard you forget your own name.

Then I'm going to fuck you so slow you'll be begging me, and I'm not going to give it to you. I'm going to make you work for it. I'm going to make you ride me until your thighs give out.

You reward him for that one. You reward him generously.

You let him put you on your back, let him take his time, watch him watch you the whole time he's doing it. His mismatched eyes burn, fixed on you, feverish with pride at himself. His mouth shines, the picture of a man delighted with his work, and you understand that you’ve started something. That there’s something inside this man that’s coming apart. Thanks to you.

Some nights, he narrates before he's even touched you.

Sits across from you at the bar cart in his sitting room with a glass of something amber in his hand and tells you conversationally what he's been thinking about since lunch. In detail. Tells you what he wanted to do to you in the elevator, what he almost did in the car. Tells you about the board meeting he sat through that afternoon, where he couldn't stop picturing your mouth.

I had to cross my legs under the table like a teenager. Half-hard in a room full of old men, thinking about you on your knees. Thinking about the noises you made when I had my fingers in you this morning, and still won't let you come.

Thinking about how you taste after I've already made you come twice. How you go soft for me. How you let me do whatever I want to you when you're that far gone.

You drink your drink. You let him talk. You don't interrupt.

He's learning the cadence of it, learning what lands. He knows, now, to slow down on the parts that make your breath catch, to speed up on the parts that make you shift in your seat. By the time he stands up and crosses the room to you, he’s already fucked you twice in his head, and you’re already half-gone for him, and you haven't moved.

He takes the glass out of your hand, sets it down.

Come here, love. Let me show you what I've been thinking about all day.

I'm going to ruin you for the rest of the weekend.

And then he does.

By May, Valarr’s saying them first. Without you having to prompt him. It’s then that you understand that you’ve succeeded completely. That you’ve taught him oh so well. That the version of Valarr who will now, unprompted, describe to you in graphic detail what he’s going to do to you across the dinner table is a version of Valarr you built, line by line, with months of patience.

You take him to a gala in late April at the Met. Black tie. His hand at the small of your back. At some point during dinner, with a lord on your left and a museum board member across from you, Valarr leans in, ostensibly to pour you more wine, and purrs, in a voice pitched just for you:

"I'm going to take you home and fuck you in that dress, my love. I'm going to put you face down on the bed, still wearing it and fill you up. I want to ruin that dress. I'll buy you another one, and then I’ll ruin that one, too."

You don’t spill your wine. There’s no change in your expression at all in fact. You just keep smiling at the lord.

But when you turn your head, just slightly, to look at him, Valarr’s face is smooth and pleasant, his mismatched eyes hooded, and you understand, with a bright, cold thrill: I taught him to do that. I made him into a man who could do that. I put that in him.

He ruins the dress.

You let him.

VII. may, year two.

You teach him to take.

This one is the hardest one. Because Valarr's natural instinct is to give. Everything inside him is oriented toward giving, toward worship, toward the specific pleasure of making you pleased, and learning to take requires him to suppress the reflex that’s organised his entire sexual life.

You make him anyway.

"Put me where you want me," you tell him one night. You’re standing in his bedroom in a silk slip he’d bought you, purposely crooked so he glimpses the curve of your breast and the crease of your thigh. "Don't ask. Don't check. Put me where you want me and fuck me."

He stares at you. "I won't know where—"

"Figure it out," you say bluntly.

He hesitates. Then, slowly, he crosses to you. He puts his hand at the small of your back, walks you backwards toward the bed. He turns you, at the last second, and puts you face down on the mattress. His hand grips the back of your neck, pressing you into the duvet. His other hand lands at your hip, yanking you up onto your knees.

Your breath catches.

"Like this?" he asks, tentative.

"Don't ask."

"—alright."

He fucks you like that. Face-down. Hand at the back of your neck the entire time. His other hand grips your hip hard enough to leave fingerprints. He doesn’t check in, doesn’t ask. He reads everything off your body—the tension in your thighs, the starved, half-animal sound in your throat—and he adjusts in real time.

He takes, and you come harder than you’ve come in months.

Afterwards, he’s trembling faintly against your back, kissing the damp skin of your shoulder.

"Was that—"

You hum, pleased. "Yes."

"I didn't want to—"

You reach behind you, tangle your fingers in his hair, the roots faintly damp from sweat, and say, "It was perfect, Val. Shh."

Valarr is quiet for a while. Then, "I didn't know I could do that."

I know, you don't say. I know. I'm teaching you. I'm teaching you what you are.

You kiss him instead, kiss him slow and deep and long. He folds against you with that particular trembling gratitude, and you understand, in that moment, that you’re in the middle of remaking a man from the inside out, and that he’s letting you.

That he’s thanking you for it every step of the way.

Over the next few weeks, Valarr gets bolder. He doesn’t ask anymore. Valarr puts you where he wants you, holds you there, and takes. He flips you in the middle of the night and fucks you half-asleep into the sheets until you’re gasping from pleasure, one hand collaring your throat, another pinching your clit.

He pulls you off the couch and onto your knees without warning, parting your mouth with his thumb. He pins your wrist against the bathroom counter one morning. Fucks you unhurried and deep, looking at your own reflection while he whispers gently, chin on your shoulder, his eyes dark, what you look like when you come for him.

You’ve taught him, by the end of May of year two, to be the man you needed. You’ve spent six months in his bedroom remaking him, and the remaking isn’t done, but the structure is in place. The rest is finishing work. The rest is polish.

He’s so grateful you taught him.

That’s the part that, later, you will not be able to stop thinking about.

That the whole time you were shaping him—the whole time you were pressing his hand to your throat with the right pressure, the whole time you were correcting his grip, his language, his angle, his tempo — he was thanking you. He was grateful. He was so happy.

Valarr walked around the city feeling like he’d been given a gift and the gift was himself. He didn’t understand, yet, that what you were giving him was also a leash. Because you were the only woman who would ever know how to handle him like this.

You were building a lock and holding the only key to it.

And he loved it.

He loved every fucking second of it.

VIII. summer, year two.

He flies you to Myr for ten days. Private plane. Private villa. A staff you will never see who puts fresh fruit on the terrace each morning before you wake.

Valarr is, in Myr, the best version of himself.

He cooks you breakfast in the little kitchen overlooking the bay. He reads with you on the terrace, your hands occasionally brushing over the pages, his thumb tracing yours when he thinks you aren't paying attention.

He asks you questions about your mother that no one has ever asked you. Not the polite questions, but the real ones, the ones that come from a man who’s lost his father young and who knows the particular shape of that absence. What was her laugh like? What did she smell like? What did she think of your father, honestly?

You answer him with more honesty than you’ve given anyone in years. You lie in a pool of sun on his chest, and you tell Valarr about the last Christmas before she died and about the way your father still mourns her. Describe the specific sharpness of grief that’s hardened inside you. Valarr listens, and his hand strokes the back of your neck, and you feel known.

You feel known.

It’s not the only time in the relationship you will feel it. It’s one of several. You will have a handful of mornings like this—on terraces, in beds, in cars, on planes—where Valarr will look at you and you’ll have the unmistakable sense that someone is listening. The listening is real, and the loving is real, and the man listening and loving you is not a performance.

It is, however, the first time you feel the wrongness alongside it.

Because that night, after sex—after he’s eaten you out until you were gasping and then fucked you until you couldn't feel your legs, after he’s let you mark his chest with your nails and kissed the inside of each wrist with that bowed, careful reverence that’s started to unsettle you a little—he lies behind you with his arm over your waist and he says, casually, into your hair:

"I want to marry you."

You go still.

"Valarr."

"Not tomorrow. Not next year, even, if you don't want. I know it's fast." His hand flattens over your stomach. His palm is warm. "I'm telling you because I want you to know that I'm serious about us. I've known since October."

October. You’ve been sleeping with him for eight months. He’s known since the second.

"I don't think you know me well enough to—"

"I know you perfectly well." There’s no defensiveness in his voice, only a calm, unwavering certainty. "I've been paying attention. I know what you take in your coffee and tea. I know the sound you make when you've had a bad call with your father. That you check your watch every forty minutes when you're bored, and that you laugh at bad puns you pretend not to laugh at. There’s a particular way you kiss when you want more and when you're being generous. I know, more or less, what you'd name our children. I've been listening."

You lie in his arms, and you feel the entirety of your body go cold, and then warm, and then cold again.

Because he isn't lying. He has been listening. For eight months, with a focus of a man building a dossier, and he’s assembled a working model of you accurate enough to be operational. He can predict what you will want for dinner, can predict what you will wear to a party. He can, demonstrably, predict what you will say when he does certain things in bed.

And none of it is knowing you. Not really. It’s the shape of knowing. It’s the model, not the real thing.

But he loves the model so completely that he can’t tell he doesn't love you.

You don't say any of that. You turn in his arms, and you kiss him. Because what Valarr has just said is, in some animal part of your brain, a thing you want to be flattered by. You’re a Stark heir. Men have been vying to marry you since you were sixteen, and none of them has ever meant it with this degree of genuine want.

You kiss him, whispering, "Not yet."

Valarr smiles against your lips. There's no bitterness in his voice when he says, "I'll wait."

He means it. That’s the other thing about Valarr.

He means every single thing he says.

IX. autumn, year two into year three.

It happens at a bar near Maegor’s Holdfast.

Valarr’s in the bathroom, and a man with a clean-shaven jaw and an expensive jacket sees you alone at the table and decides that’s an invitation. He’s not aggressive. Not even even vulgar. Just the kind of lawyer-ish, investment-ish man you’ve been politely deflecting since you were old enough to understand what men want from you. He puts his hand on the back of the chair next to yours and asks if you'd like a drink.

"I'm with someone," you dismiss him with practiced ease.

"He's not here," the man replies.

"He is, actually,” you say coolly. “He's in the bathroom."

The man smiles, unbothered. "Long bathroom break."

You give him the Stark look—the one your father perfected and your mother refined—and he laughs, shrugs, already gone by the time Valarr gets back. You don’t mention it because it’s not worth mentioning. It was nothing.

Three weeks later, the man had moved across the country.

You find out by accident. A girl you know from your studies mentions, at a brunch, that so-and-so took a sudden role in Gulltown. Which is strange because he'd been up for partner at his firm in King’s Landing and everyone assumed he was going to take it. The change of heart was unexpected. Something to do with the timing, she says vaguely. His firm made him a very aggressive offer to leave.

You look at Valarr across the table. He’s drinking coffee, his expression serene.

"You knew him," you say, later, in the car.

"Who?"

"The man,” you say tightly. “The one who's moved."

"Oh. That one." He doesn't glance at you. His eyes are on the street, and his hand is on your thigh, thumb stroking absently. "Was that his name?"

"Did you do something?" you ask bluntly.

He’s quiet for a moment, only his thumb moving.

Then: "I made a phone call. That's all. A friend at the firm mentioned they were looking for someone to head up the Eastern office, and I mentioned that I knew a promising associate. That's all. Whether he took the role was up to him."

"Valarr."

"He wasn't coerced."

"You—"

You don’t know how to finish the sentence. You exiled a man across the country because he flirted with me for forty seconds at a bar. It’s insane. It’s also, you realise with a cold ripple down your spine, entirely plausible. It’s exactly the kind of thing Valarr would do. Quietly, legally, unimpeachably, with deniability built in at every step. He’s probably not broken a single law doing so, and he’s almost certainly sent a man across the country.

"I didn'tt like the way he looked at you," Valarr says, mildly, as if it were a small dietary preference. "I handled it."

You’re silent for the rest of the drive.

That night, you make him fuck you on the floor of his foyer, because you’re too angry to get all the way to the bedroom. Because the only way you can process what you’ve just learned is to take.

You yank him down by the tie. You bite his lip hard enough to draw blood. He takes it. Valarr takes everything like a black hole made solely for your consumption. He takes you roughly on the marble with his head at an uncomfortable angle against the baseboard, and when he comes, he whispers your name like a prayer. When it's over, he lies there under you and looks up at you with those mismatched eyes gone entirely dark, and he says softly:

"I love you. I'm sorry. I love you. Please don't be angry."

You understand, then, something true about Valarr that you will not articulate to yourself for another two years.

You understand that sorry and angry are, for him, interchangeable currencies, because both of them end with him in your hands. He doesn’t actually regret the phone call. He would make it again. He’s only sorry that you’re angry, sorry that it has cost him something. The action itself, he’s not sorry for at all.

You roll off him and stare at the ceiling. You think, for the first time: This is not a good man.

Then you think: I don't know if I can leave him.

Then, more quietly, and even more honestly: I don't know if I want to.

X. winter, year three.

Valarr takes you to his mother's house at Dragonstone for Christmas.

He’s never taken anyone there before. You know because his brother tells you, at the door, with a slightly dazed look on his face, as if he doesn’t quite believe you’re real at all.

Matarys Targaryen is three years younger than Valarr and auburn-haired. He and Valarr don’t look like brothers at first glance, not until you find the architecture of the face underneath, the same line of the nose, the same mouth. He got their mother's colouring. Valarr got their father's. Matarys is warm, where Valarr is polished, loose where Valarr is calibrated.

When he opens the door to you that first evening, he hugs you before you’ve finished stepping inside.

"The Stark heir," he calls out, pulling back, grinning widely. "God. You're actually real."

A surprised, amused snort builds in your throat. "I'm real."

"He's brought me girlfriends before. Valarr, I mean. I mean—he's mentioned girlfriends before. In passing. I'm not meant to know about most of them. But mother doesn't meet them. Mother hasn't met one, ever." He’s still holding your hand. His grip is warm and unselfconscious in a way his brother's grip has never once been. "You're a big deal, apparently. I hope you know."

You suppress another smile. "I'm fast getting that impression."

"I'm Matarys by the way,” he introduces himself, flushing when he realises he hasn’t yet given you a name you already know. “I'm the disappointment."

"He's not the disappointment," Valarr says behind you fondly, setting the bags down. "Don't believe him for a second."

"I’m definitely the disappointment,” Matarys disagrees, even as Valarr throws his arm around him and ruffles his hair in a gesture so brotherly it makes a pang go through your chest. “If I weren't the disappointment, he'd have to invent one." Matarys winks at you. "Come in. Mother's in the drawing room pretending not to care that you're here."

Their mother, Jena Dondarrion-Targaryen, has the same auburn hair as her younger son. A deep burnished red, streaked through with grey at the temples, pinned up with the careful artlessness of a woman who spent her youth in magazines. She’s slender and elegant, and eats one almond with every glass of wine she drinks. She examines you for precisely three seconds too long, assessing your face, your hair, your clothes, your posture. She approves. You see her decide as much in real time.

The Stark heir. Northern ice. Old money. Good bones. Can give him beautiful children.

She folds her hands.

"My son has spoken of you." Her voice is dry and dignified. "Extensively."

"I'm flattered."

"He doesn’t speak of women extensively,” she tells you pointedly. “This is new. I think you should know."

You feel Valarr tense, very slightly, next to you. Mother, his body says, without his mouth moving. His hand tightens at your waist a fraction.

Jena looks at her son, then she looks back at you. "He’s been patient his whole life, for lack of anything worth being impatient about. I had begun to fear he would never find anything worth impatience. It’s a relief to me that he finally has."

You say the polite thing and make equally polite conversation. You get through dinner. Matarys is at your elbow the whole time—making you laugh, feeding you gossip about the other guests, refilling your wine without asking—and you like him, immediately, in the instinctive way you like very few people. You understand that Matarys has been deployed gently by his brother, as your ambassador to the house.

Later, much later, after the dinner and the drawing room, in the guest bedroom (he’s been given the guest bedroom; no unmarried couples in the main wing, even for him), Valarr strips you out of your dress and lays you down and makes love to you so gently you could cry, and you do, silently, a few tears sliding into your hair.

Valarr notices but asks nothing, simply kissing the tears from your temple. And you love him, in that moment, with a quality of love that’s terrifying. Because you don’t trust it, and you don’t trust him. You’re lying in his mother's house in a guest bedroom, and you’re crying, and he’s kissing your tears away with the tenderness of a man who’s been preparing for you his whole life.

He murmurs into your hair: I have never been so happy, love.

You believe him.

That’s the most frightening part.

The next morning, you come down for breakfast in one of his shirts over your own pyjama bottoms. Matarys is at the kitchen island in a sweater that used to belong to their father, and Jena is at the table with a cup of tea and a newspaper. The sun is coming in through the windows, and Valarr comes up behind you, kissing the top of your head absently while he reaches for the coffee, and you think—with a small, clear tremor of shock—this is what it would look like. If I married him. This is what the rest of my life would look like.

Jena lowers her newspaper. She looks at you over the rim of her teacup. You think she sees something in your face, then.

"He is better," she says mildly, "when you are in the house."

You don't answer.

You don’t know, that morning, that you will remember her saying that for the rest of your life.

XI. january, year three.

You come back to the penthouse late on a Tuesday night in January. Eleven, maybe later.

You’ve been to a dinner you hated. Your shoes are off before you’re fully through the door, your shoulders set in a rigid line. You peel off your coat impatiently, a moment later, glaring at nothing. You want a drink, a hot bath, and you want not to think about the man you sat next to at dinner for a full forty minutes. That’s how long it took you to realised he was the uncle of a woman whose deal your fund had just walked away from.

You drop your bag on the console.

You call out, "I'm home.”

And a voice behind you, low and leisurely, drawls: "I can see that."

You turn.

Valarr stands in the doorway of the living room. He’s still in the suit trousers, and the shirt from his own evening—rolled at the sleeves because you told him once you like how his forearms look bared, collar open at the throat, the white streak at his temple catching light. He has a glass of scotch in his hand, and he’s not smiling.

He’s looking at you in that particular way Valarr looks at you now, which is different from how he looked at you two years ago.

Two years ago, he looked at you like a man who found something he’d not expected to find and was afraid, faintly, that it would be taken away from him.

Now he looks at you like a man who knows exactly what he has and is, quietly, keeping it.

"Hi," you call out.

"Hi." He takes a sip of his drink. His eyes do a single slow pass down your body, head to toe, unhurried. Shoes off, hair a mess, dress wrinkled, the faintest mascara smudge at the corner of one eye. "Bad night?"

"The worst," you admit tightly.

"Mm." He doesn't move from the doorway. "Come here."

You don't go, immediately. Not because you’re refusing, but because you like, these days, to make him ask a second time. Sometimes third. Because the small pause between the first instruction and the second has become its own private language between you, a thing he understands, a thing that turns the air in the room half a degree warmer.

His mouth does a small thing it does nowadays. The corner tugs slowly, something tender and dark in it.

Valarr waits a beat. Then, lower: "I said come here."

You cross the room unhurriedly.

Valarr sets his drink down on the side table without looking at it. He catches your jaw with the hand that was holding the glass—warm, faintly tacky from the condensation—and he tilts your face up. He looks at you. Just looks. No kiss yet. He’s reading your face, the way he always does now, doing his inventory of you: tired, wound tight, wants to fight something, wants to be handled.

Alright.

He tilts his head a fraction. "Who seated you next to him?"

You blink. "What?"

"At dinner. Who seated you next to him? Not by accident, I assume." His thumb is moving leisurely along the line of your jaw, his mismatched eyes hooded. "You wouldn't be this tense if it was an accident. So who did it?"

You stare at him.

You haven’t told him who you sat next to at dinner. You haven’t told him anything about dinner. You’ve only been home for forty seconds. He’s read it off you, you realise. The angle of your shoulders, the particular tension in your mouth, the fact that you dropped your bag instead of setting it down. He’s reconstructed, from this, a whole sequence of events he wasn’t present for, and he’s landed with uncanny precision on the actual problem.

"How do you—"

"You'll tell me later," he says, dismissive, almost bored.

He’s not interested in dinner anymore. He’s already set it aside. It’s a thing he’s logged for later. You know there’ll be a phone call later in the week, you know someone will find himself suddenly unavailable for a seating arrangement, and that will be that .

He’s already turned his full attention back to you.

"Not now,” he goes on idly. “Now you're going to take off that dress, my love."

Tonight you do.

Because you want to, because you need this, and he sees it in you.

Valarr watches you, but he doesn't help. Two years ago, he would have helped—would have reached for the zip, would have knelt to slide it down you, would have made a little production of it—and now he just watches. He leans back against the doorframe, head tilted back, and watches. His eyes go steadily darker as you work the zip. The dress slides off your shoulders, and you step out of it, kicking it aside.

"Bra. Underwear. All of it. Slowly."

You obey, keeping eye contact throughout. You reach behind your back for the bra clasp, taking your time. Because he said slowly, and you are, these days, a woman who rewards specificity.

The straps slide down your arms. You feel Valarr’s attention on your breasts when the bra comes loose. There’s a small sound he makes—not a word, just a silky exhale—and you hook your thumbs into the sides of your underwear and drag them down your legs. You step out of them, and when you straighten, he’s looking at you the way men in paintings look at things. All consuming, devout.

"Stay there."

You stay.

He crosses the room, still half-dressed, and walks once around you. A full slow circle. His eyes on your back, the line of your spine, the curve of your ass. Valarr stops behind you. You feel his breath at the nape of your neck. His hand, warm and dry, slides down the length of your spine leisurely, following the bumps of each vertebra down to the small of your back.

He palms your ass.

Squeezes, almost thoughtfully, appreciatively. Then, without warning, he hits it—one sharp, precise smack, not hard enough to really hurt but hard enough to make you gasp. You feel the heat of his handprint bloom instantly across the skin, and you feel his breath at your ear dip a half-register lower.

"Hm," he hums, pleased, as if confirming something. "I thought so."

He comes back around to the front of you.

His eyes have gone entirely black now. He slides the back of his knuckles down your sternum, between your breasts, over your stomach, and between your legs. When his fingers come away wet, he looks at them for a long contemplative second, then pops them in his own mouth.

You watch his eyes close.

You watch his throat work as he sucks his own fingers clean of you, and when Valarr’s eyes open again he’s smiling. It’s small, private, the smile of a man who’s just had his first sip of a very good wine he was looking forward to all evening.

"Tell me what you want," he says quietly. "The short version."

"Valarr—"

"I said the short version."

"Rough," you answer breathlessly.

"Mm." His thumb, still wet, strokes the side of your throat, almost tender now. "Is that so?"

He manoeuvres you against the wall.

One hand at your throat—exact pressure, the pressure you taught him, two years of calibration behind his thumb—and one hand at your hip, gripping hard enough to bruise. He’s not kissing you yet. He’s just looking at you, up close, his forehead almost to yours, his breath warm against your mouth, and then Valarr kisses you.

It’s not the kiss of a man asking permission.

Instead, it’s a kiss of a man who’s fucked you several hundred times and who knows, from the rhythm of your breath and the angle of your chin and the specific way you had dropped your bag, precisely what you need from him tonight.

He kisses you hard, with teeth. With hunger. He bites your lower lip and drags it between his own. And when you bite his lip back, Valarr laughs against your mouth, low and pleased, as if you’ve just confirmed a diagnosis he was already fairly sure about.

The hand at your hip slides between your legs. No preamble. Two fingers into you in one long, slow push, knuckle-deep, and the wet sound of it is obscene in the quiet of the entryway. His mouth goes still against yours for a half-second as he catalogues how wet you already are.

"All through dinner?" he wonders.

You don't answer. You can't answer. He’s curled his fingers, and you’re breathing through your teeth, your forehead pressed to his collarbone.

"Answer me."

You make a small, hungry sound. "Valarr."

"Were you sitting across from him, thinking about this?” he demands, working his wrist. “About coming home to me like this?"

"Yes," you breathe out.

"About what I'd do to you?" he probes further.

"Yes."

His lips skim your temple. "Good. I’ve been thinking about you, too."

He adds a third finger.

You feel yourself stretch around him, and your knees go for a second. Valarr catches you with the hand at your throat, holds you up, keeps fucking you on his fingers without breaking rhythm. He’s not going easy. He’s decided, somewhere in the last three minutes, that tonight is not a night for going easy. His thumb finds your clit at the same moment his fingers hit the spot inside you that he’s mapped years ago.

You come on his hand against the entryway wall less than ninety seconds after walking through the door.

Valarr doesn't let you ride it out. He pulls his fingers out of you before you're done, wet and glistening, and holds them up between you.

"Open."

You open your mouth.

He slides his fingers in. You taste yourself on him, tangy and clean, and you close your mouth around his knuckles, sucking slowly, because you know what it does to him, watching his pupils dilate. Valarr’s breath catches, and his cock twitches visibly under the fabric of his trousers.

"You're going to kill me, my love," he murmurs fondly, already slightly breathless. "Turn around."

He half-turns you himself. Face to the wall. One hand between your shoulder blades, holding you there, the other sliding up the inside of your thigh, keeping you open.

"Stay."

You swallow, staying in your spot.

He undresses behind you without hurry. You hear it—the soft drag of his shirt, the clink of his belt being drawn from his trousers, the considered way he puts his cufflinks down on the side table because Valarr doesn’t throw cufflinks.

No matter how hard he’s about to fuck you.

You hear the whisper of fabric when he steps out of his trousers. You hear him take himself in his own hand, a single slow stroke, and the small catch of breath that follows.

You hear all of it, and you can’t see him, but listening is part of it, and he knows it’s part of it. This play between you. He’s taking his time on purpose.

When he comes back to you, he’s fully naked, skin hot against your back, the length of his cock sliding heavy between your thighs before he's even angled himself. He drags his length through the wetness of you, slow, once, twice, and you hear him groan low behind your ear at the feel of it.

"Look at you," he breathes. "Come undone. All for me. Just for me."

Valarr puts one hand back at the nape of your neck, pressing you forward against the wall, and the other hand he slides down to check—thorough, unhurried, two fingers back inside you like he’s making absolutely sure you’re exactly as ready as he wants it—and he makes a low, satisfied sound against the back of your shoulder.

"My good girl."

Good girl is new.

He would not have said good girl in year one. He wouldn’t have said it in month eighteen. He’s arrived at good girl through long study, through months of testing adjacent phrasings, through watching your face when he tried things, abandoning the ones that didn't land. Good girl landed. For a different reason good boy landed with him.

You feel yourself react to it now, with a small, involuntary shiver. Valarr feels it against your back, and you hear the small pleased huff he makes when he catches it.

He fucks you against the wall.

He pushes into you in one long, deliberate stroke, to the hilt, no mercy, and the sound you make is raw and loud. You would, on a better night, be embarrassed about it.

He doesn’t give you a moment to adjust. He doesn’t ask. Valarr pulls almost all the way out and pushes back in again just as hard. Then again, setting a pace he’s chosen for you. You feel the flat of his pelvis hit your ass with every stroke, his balls heavy against you, and you feel yourself already starting to build again against the wall.

He fucks you with the hand at your nape, holding you exactly where he wants you, and the other hand reaching around and down to work your clit with a precision that comes from two years of specific practice. His mouth brushes at the join of your shoulder and your neck where he had, once, been taught to bite.

He bites now. He bites hard enough that you yelp. There’s no pause, no apology. Valarr sucks the bite afterwards, a long, relaxed drag of his tongue, and you know you’ll have a bruise there tomorrow in the exact place your collar will not cover.

He fucks you through it, and his voice low in your ear is not a voice he had in year one, is not a voice he knew was in him in year one, because it’s a voice you made.

Listen to yourself. Listen to how wet you are for me.

You're so fucking tight tonight, my love. Did you miss me this much?

That's right. Take it. Take all of it. That's my good girl.

You're mine. Say it.

You let out a breathy gasp. "Yours."

"Again."

"Yours, Val, I'm yours—"

"Louder."

He reaches up, his fingers sliding into your hair, and pulls. Not brutally but with intent. Forcing your head back against his shoulder so your spine arches and your breasts push forward against the cold of the wall, and the angle of him inside you changes. You make a sound that’s not a word, exactly, and he fucks you through the sound of it anyway, his mouth at your ear again.

"Come on my cock."

You do.

You come with your forehead pressed to the cold of the wall, his hand at your throat, and his cock pulsing inside you. When you do, Valarr makes a small sound behind you that’s not thank you anymore, not the way it was in year one.

It’s something else now. Something more possessive, darker, closer to yes.

He doesn't let you down from it. He keeps moving. He fucks you through the aftershocks, slower but not gentler, his hand still working your folds, and when you whimper and try to close your legs, he murmurs, "No. Stay open for me, love," and you do.

He pulls out of you only when he's decided to.

He’s still hard. You feel it against the curve of your ass as he presses a slow kiss to the bite mark on your shoulder—almost tender now, almost apologetic—and then he turns you, bodily, with a hand on your shoulder. Still controlled, still in command, walking you backwards to the couch and puts you on it.

Knees open, thighs spread. On display. One hand flat against your sternum to keep you lying back.

He kneels between them.

He looks up at you.

And this—this is the moment you don't quite expect.

His mouth is wrecked from your mouth, floppy hair mussed from your fingers, the white streak at his temple dark with sweat. His cock is still hard and flushed, glistening where he pulled out of you a minute ago, stomach tight with the effort of not finishing in you against the wall. Looking down at him on his knees between your thighs, still entirely composed even now, his mismatched eyes blazing, you feel, for a second, a small bright flare of something you have to call wonder.

Plain wonder. The kind you feel looking at something you didn't know could exist.

Because this isn’t the man who came to your dorm with peonies in September of year one. Not the man who asked if he could kiss you.

This is a particular, meticulous, terribly capable man who’s just fucked you against a wall with the exact intensity you needed on a bad Tuesday, without being told a single thing about the said Tuesday. Who’s now kneeling between your thighs with his own release still unspent, looking up at you like he’s waiting for the next instruction.

Valarr sees your face change.

His own face shifts, just a fraction in response, eyes going soft. His mouth tugs at the corner. Not a smile, exactly, but the shape of one. You’ve seen this expression on him maybe four times in two years. It’s the expression he makes when he catches you looking at him with that particular stunned, wondering, what are you look on your face.

He loves it. He loves it more than anything.

He loves being seen by you. That’s the deepest thing in him, you understand in that instant. That’s the mouth of the well. He loves being seen. And you’re the first person who’s ever looked at him and seen what was under the gold. You’re the only person who knows what to do with it, with him. And when you look at him this way—with wonder, with the small stunned what have I made gleam in your eyes—his whole face goes soft.

"What?" he asks, almost a whisper.

"Nothing."

"Tell me," he urges, more needy than ordering.

"I was just—"

You don't have the word. A part of you doesn’t want to give him the word. The word is organising itself in your mouth anyway. You know, if you say it out loud, he will keep it, he will treasure it, will pull it out on bad days and press it against his chest like a warm stone.

"I was just looking at you."

His mouth softens further. His hand, big and warm, slides up the inside of your thigh. It’s a slow movement, fingers still slick from you, and his hand settles high. Not yet where he wants it. He holds it there. You can feel the faint tremor in him; he’s not as composed as he’s pretending to be. He’s still hard, wound up tight without release. But you know he’s not going to come until he’s made you come again, and the decision is written into every beautiful line of him.

"I like it when you look at me like that," Valarr admits quietly. His eyes don’t leave yours. "Keep doing it. Look at me like that forever please."

You keep doing it.

He puts his mouth on you.

He’s messy about it tonight. Deliberately so. Two years ago, he was precise about eating you out—careful, technical, a man demonstrating his competence, selling himself—but tonight he’s sloppy. In a specific way he’s learned you like, open-mouthed and wet, tongue flat and lazy, a filthy worship.

He licks into you, tongue curling. He licks you clean of his precum. He makes a low sound against you when he tastes both of you mixed together, and that sound goes through you like a current.

Valarr hooks your knee over his shoulder and opens you wider, taking you apart, all while you watch him. The whole time he’s working you with that specific precision—which was yours, which you gave him, your gift—he keeps glancing up at you through his lashes to check that you’re still watching him with that face.

And every time he catches you still looking, Valarr’s mouth curls minutely against you, pleased. You feel his throat hum with it.

He’s thriving on it, feeding on it. He’s a man who’s happiest when he’s being looked at like this, and this look—the slightly stunned I did this to you, didn't I look—is the only look in the world he wants. More than anything. More than oxygen, more than food.

He slides two fingers back into you while his mouth sucks and nibbles between your folds. You hear how wet you sound. He hears it too and makes a small choked sound against you at the evidence of it. His free hand, slotted between his own legs, you realise with a hot jolt, tightens on himself. Not to stroke himself, but to clamp down on his own orgasm. He refuses to waste himself like this, even now.

You come again. Slower this time, longer, messier, twitching and rigid against the couch. Your hand goes tight in his hair, and Valarr’s face is a mess of you and his own fingers slick to the knuckle. He fucks you through it with his mouth and his hand until you push his forehead away with your own hand because you can't take any more.

He sits back on his heels.

His cock is visibly pulsing, wet and leaking at the tip. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist, not breaking eye contact.

"Come here," you order quietly.

He comes up.

He climbs onto the couch with you. He puts his head in your lap. You stroke his hair, your fingers finding the white streak at his temple, sliding through it. Valarr closes his eyes. He makes a small contented sound, almost a hum, and you feel the warm press of his mouth against the skin of your inner thigh. It’s lazy and affectionate, not meant to start anything, even though he’s still hard against your leg.

You reach down with your other hand.

You close your fingers around his hot, slick length, and you start to stroke him, working up a steady rhythm. He shudders against you, breath stuttering against your thigh. He doesn't ask for it; he wouldn't; he’s learned, over two years, to take only what you hand him.

"Who was it?" you ask, after a long, quiet moment.

Valarr twitches in your hand, hot and throbbing. You’re calmer now, more settled and watch his beautiful face as his brows furrow.

"At dinner?"

You hum.

"Later," he whispers, eyes still closed, mouth moving against your thigh. Little nibbles and kisses. "Tell me… later. I'll take care of it."

You tighten your hand on him, an almost cruel grip, and Valarr makes a small, wrecked sound.

You stroke him like that, slow but relentless, and you feel him starting to tremble. When he comes, he does so quietly. Spilling hot and sudden into your hand, face pressed into the meat of your thigh, breathing your name into the crease of your hip. It’s not the way he came in year one, either. In year one, he made a production of it. In year one, it was all theatre.

Now it’s almost silent. It’s private. Now he comes into your hand like it’s the only place in the world he’s permitted to.

And he will take care of it.

You believe him. Completely.

You stroke his hair with your clean hand, spreading his cum back across his softening cock with your other, marvelling at the groan that vibrates in his slender throat as you do so.

You look down at the top of Valarr’s head, and you think—with the same quiet wonder you had a minute ago, not yet frightened, not yet aware of what the wonder is going to cost you one day—look at you, look at what you've become, look at what I've made of you.

He hears you thinking it.

He turns his face into your thigh, kissing the skin there, once, and he says, almost too quietly to hear, "Thank you."

And you understand he’s not thanking you for letting him do what he just did to you.

He’s thanking you, specifically, for the look on your face.

He’s thanking you for making him whole.

XII. spring, year three.

It’s not all wrongness.

That's the thing you have to remember. That's the thing you’ll have to remember, later, when you’re trying to explain to yourself why you stayed.

There’s the morning in Pyke, at the house his father left him on the coast. You wake to find him on the porch with two cups of coffee and a book he’s not reading (he’s watching the water with a faraway look you’ll remember forever). When you come out barefoot in his t-shirt, Valarr pulls you into his lap without a word and kisses your temple. Lightly, lovingly. You sit there together for forty minutes while the fog burns off the bay, neither of you speaking, and it’s one of the quietest hours of your life.

There’s also the night in the penthouse kitchen when you’re both drunk, and he tries to teach you to make his grandmother's pasta by hand (my father's mother, her side was Dornish, this is how she taught him, this is how he taught me) and you ruin the dough twice.

Valarr laughs so hard he has to brace himself against the counter. You throw flour in his face, offended. He catches your wrists, still laughing, flour on his cheek and in the white streak at his temple like snow. He backs you against the refrigerator and kisses you until you can’t breathe. The pasta is forgotten, and you eat cereal for dinner in his bed at one in the morning, and he tells you, softly, that his father would have liked you.

There’s the afternoon at Maidenpool, when you both go to a gallery, and Valarr watches you more than the art. You catch him, in the reflection of a glass case, looking at you with an expression of undiluted wonder, and that look is so naked, so unguarded, that you have to turn your face away because you can’t bear the weight of it. Later, in the cab home, you put your hand in his. He lifts it to his mouth and kisses your knuckles, one by one.

There’s the weekend in late spring of year three when your father has had a small cardiac event, and you fly up to the family estate. Valarr comes with you without being asked. He handles the logistics and makes himself useful with your father's staff. Warm and competent.

He charms your uncle, Brandon, who’s not an easy man to impress. No Stark ever is. He doesn’t charm your grandmother, who’s far worse, but he’s respectful, and your grandmother tells you, at the end of the weekend, in her dry northern way, that he’s sufficient.

It’s the highest compliment she’s ever given a man.

Barthogan Stark, in bed, propped on pillows and recovering, watches Valarr from the doorway and then looks at you and says, "He'd take good care of you."

"I know," you reply.

"He'd do it well,” he continues. “He'd do it with everything he has. I can tell. He has that look about him, that boy. It’s how I once looked at your mother. Just… more intense. He’s charming, alright, but I can see the dragon in him, deep beneath that shine. Maybe that’s good. That edge. You’re a wolf, pup; a weak man won’t survive beside you. You’d eat the bastard alive."

"I know, Dad."

Your father's face softens, and he grips your hand. "I'm only saying, I want you happy."

You hesitate, squeezing his hand back, and admit, because you love him more than anyone, because he’s everything to you, "I'm thinking about it."

And you are thinking about it. Through year three, you think about it more and more.

You think about it in the penthouse and in his mother's house. On the plane coming back from a weekend in Pentos, and in the cab on the way to a friend's engagement party. An evening where Valarr holds your hand all night and introduces you, everywhere, as my girl, low and fond, with a small proud angle of his jaw. You think about it at 2AM in his bed when you can’t sleep, and he pulls you into him without waking, his arm going heavy across your waist.

You feel, underneath everything, the specific warmth of a life that you could have and keep, if you wanted it.

There’s another night in June of year three, after a charity gala, where you end up barefoot on his penthouse terrace at two in the morning. He’s in his shirtsleeves, you’re in your gown, and he glances at you and says, "I'd like to ask you something. I'm not going to. Not yet. I'm telling you that I'd like to."

He hasn’t mentioned marriage once since Myr, put no pressure on you about the subject. "I know," you tell him.

"I've had a ring for a year," he reveals calmly.

You meet his gaze. "Val"

"I'm telling you so you're not surprised. When I do ask. I don't want you to be surprised. I want you to have had time to think it through." He reaches over, tucking your hair behind your ear. His hand stays there, warm against your jaw. "I'm not asking now, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you to have known. I want a lifetime with you. Just that. This, us."

You stand on the terrace with him, and you gaze at him, your heart torn inside your chest. The night is balmy, and the city is lit up below you. He’s so beautiful, and he loves you more than anything, and you think, I could say yes. I could. I could marry him tonight. I could have this forever.

You almost tell him yes, then.

You don't.

You kiss him instead, long and deep, holding his cheek in your palm, and whisper against his lips, "Ask me again in a year."

Valarr smiles softly, "Alright."

He means that, too.

He has the ring.

You could marry him, you know you could. He would be a good husband, by every standard that can be measured. His loyalty to you goes beyond anything you’ve ever found in any other lover. He would be attentive, he would be kind. He would fold himself around you and your future children like a man building a fortress.

He would spend the rest of his life learning you.

You think about it seriously for months.

And then, somewhere in year four, you stop.

XIII. winter, year four.

It begins quietly.

You don’t wake up one morning having decided to leave Valarr. You wake up one morning, and you’ve been not-quite-looking at him for three weeks, and you realise, over coffee, that you’ve stopped laughing at his jokes.

Stopped looking up when he enters a room, started staying late at the office. You’ve started picking small fights about unimportant things, the way you used to do as a teenager with your father when what you actually wanted was to go outside and scream. Wolf-blood, you father always huffed, it runs thick in you, pup.

You don’t know why you feel this way.

Valarr is the perfect lover. Attentive, kind, rich, devastatingly handsome. He is, in bed, precisely the man you shaped him to be. In public he’s a proud, ambitious young dragon prince, and in private with you he’s a devoted puppy who would drink from your palm if you offered it. He anticipates your moods. He brings you tea with honey without being asked on the mornings your sinuses hurt. He’s memorised the names of your father's men.

He’s faultless.

And you’re so bored.

Not sexually—the sex is still, somehow, excellent, because he keeps iterating, he keeps learning, he keeps studying you like a language he’s determined to master—but existentially.

You’re bored in that specific way that a person is bored when their lover has become a mirror.

Valarr reflects you back at yourself exquisitely, but there’s no him anymore that’s not also you. He’s folded himself so completely to your shape that when you reach for him you find only your own reflection staring back.

You want to be met. Challenged. You want to be met by a thing that’s not you. You don't know this yet, then. You know only that the penthouse has started to feel like a tomb.

And you know only that sometimes, increasingly, when he’s inside you and he’s saying your name, pressing his forehead to yours with that total worshipful absorption, you want to tear his throat out.

You want to bite him until he bites you back.

But he won't.

Valarr will open his mouth. He'll moan, let you draw blood. He'll thank you for it afterwards. Genuine and polite.

But he’ll not bite you back, not really.

He doesn’t know how.

You gave him every other tool. That one—the one he would have had to bring himself, the one that can’t be taught—he doesn’t possess, you realise. He never did. The whole core of Valarr is receiving, refining, and reflecting. He can’t originate, he can’t surprise you.

He’s not a match that lights the room. He can only ever be the mirror you light yourself in.

And you’re tired of lighting yourself.

XIV. spring, year five.

You end it in May.

You do it at the penthouse, on a Sunday afternoon, in his kitchen, with sunlight coming in through the windows and striping the floor in gold. You’re wearing jeans and one of his old t-shirts. Valarris making pasta. His grandmother's recipe. The one he taught you badly, the one you now make together sometimes on Sundays. It’s domestic and ordinary.

You feel vaguely sick.

"Valarr,” you say, “I can't do this anymore."

He stops stirring.

He carefully sets the wooden spoon down on the rest, turning off the burner. He turns to face you fully, his hip leaning against the counter, his full attention on you. There’s no pain, no panic, no anger. He doesn’t even look particularly surprised.

"Tell me why."

"I can't explain it," you reply. “I’m sorry—”

"You can,” he cuts in softly. “You just don't want to. Please tell me."

"Val—"

"Please." His voice pitch hasn’t changed. It’s the please that kills you, because the please is precise. It’s the please of a man who’s asking for data, not mercy. He’s asking because he wants to understand what happened so he can adjust. Even now. Even now, at the end, his first instinct is to find out what the input was so he can recalibrate his output. "Please tell me. I'd like to understand."

But you understand, in that moment, why you have to leave him. You understand it with full clarity for the first time in five years that almost staggers you.

You can’t leave him in a way Valarr can understand. Because if you do, if you leave him in a way he can understand, he’ll simply become the thing you left him for. And if that happens, you’ll be back in his bed within six weeks. You will fold him again, then again, and you'll be married to yourself more than ever.

So you give him nothing. You give him, It's not working. You give him, I'm sorry. You give him, I need time.

His jaw works, his eyes tracking your face.

Then, Valarr says quietly, "I know you're lying. I don't know about what. But I know."

"I'm not—"

His voice is soft but there’s iron underneath. "Whatever it is, I deserve at least not to be lied to. Keep your reasons. I won't make you explain, but don't lie to me, my love. Please."

You stand in his kitchen, staring at him and you feel the shape of what you’re leaving. You feel it with full weight. Four and a half years. The silver thread he’s woven into your life pulses faintly, painfully.

You sense each place where, if you pull it out, the fabric of you is going to tear. The snowy morning in February. The porch in Pyke. The night with the flour. Matarys winking at you in the doorway. Jena saying he is better when you are in the house. The terrace in June, and the ring he’s had for a year.

The life you almost chose, and the life you will never now have.

You whisper, "I'm sorry."

For doing this to you, for remaking you, but I can’t live with myself anymore, seeing what I’m turning you into.

"I love you," Valarr says, so simply you feel yourself exhale, pained, "I will always love you. You should know that. I'm not going to stop. I don't have that in me, I’m afraid."

You nod because you can’t speak.

"When you're ready to come back," Valarr says quietly, "I'll be here."

"Val—"

"I heard you. You need time. I'll give you time." His voice is low, almost tender. "However long it takes. Take years if you need. I have nothing but time. I'll be here."

You leave, hesitating for exactly four seconds at the door, chained by four and a half years. Valarr inhales, and you yank the door open before he can speak again.

You walk through the lobby and out onto the street, where a car is waiting for you. A car he called, because he called it before you even finished leaving him, and you ride all the way to your father's townhouse with your hands shaking in your lap.

You know, even then, that he meant what he said.

I'll be here.

He will be. For years. He’ll be exactly where you left him, in the specific shape you left him in, made to precisely your specifications, patient, waiting. Valarr will not move on, will not date, or forget. He’ll do what he’s always done: build businesses, sit on boards, attend galas and smile that golden smile of his and underneath it all, he’ll be a man at the bottom of a well waiting for the sound of your footsteps.

He’ll wait.

And he’ll not be becoming someone else while he waits. He’ll stay exactly who he was on the day you left him. Because the man he was on the day you left him was you. He finished becoming himself the minute you unlocked him, and the self he became is the self you made.

There’s nowhere else for that man to go now.

That’s your last mistake with Valarr Targaryen.

Not the leaving.

The making.

XV. later.

You will meet Aerion Targaryen a year later.

In a bar. In nowhere, Ashford, off a highway, on a road trip you took because you couldn’t sleep in your own beds anymore.

You’ll meet him and your whole body will go still. Because his jaw will be the shape of Valarr's jaw, and his mouth will be the shape of Valarr's mouth, and his eyes will be the wrong colour—both of them pale, icy, mean—and his hands will be callused in a way Valarr's never were. He’lll look at you like nothing at all and everything, simultaneously, and you’ll understand, immediately, that this is the other branch of the family.

The failed one. The cautionary tale Valarr told you about once.

You will understand immediately, that this is the man you’ve been looking for your whole life.

Because Aerion will bite you back.

Aerion will not have been made by you. He’s been shaped by his own wounds, his own father, his own failures. You’ll be dropped into his life like a match into dry grass, and he’ll burn, and you will burn with him. It’ll be the first time in years you’ll feel met. By something that’s not yours, that wasn’t shaped by you.

That existed independent of you and that still, somehow, wants you more than air.

You’ll never tell Aerion about Valarr. You’ll keep Valarr like a grave in the back garden of your life, water it and tend to it but you’ll never speak its name aloud.

But the whole time, in the city, in a penthouse that still has your toothbrush in a drawer he’s never emptied, Valarr will be waiting.

Because he’s a man of his word.

He has nothing but time.

And he remembers everything.

an: I.... I really don't know chiefs. This sure was something. [paces in a little circle] Also if you wanted theoretical part 2 where you meet Aerion in this verse and how that goes, let me know, I might write it after HW10. I'm so deep in the sauce ough. embarrassing.

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