#valarr fluff

The sun had no right to be shining.

Valarr Targaryen knew this with every fiber of his being, the certainty of it settled deep in his bones as he lay sprawled across the vast, empty expanse of his marriage bed. Outside the windows of Maegor's Holdfast, the morning light spilled across Blackwater Bay in a display of golden indifference, painting the room in cheerful hues that made him want to scream.

It had been four days.

Four days since his wife—his sun, his moon, his very reason for drawing breath—had climbed into a wheelhouse and rolled away from him, bound for whatever minor keep happened to be housing her brother and his excessively fertile wife. A daughter. They had produced a daughter, and apparently this was cause for such celebration that Y/N simply had to attend.

He understood this, theoretically. In the same way one understood that the sun would eventually set or that winter would someday come. He understood that sisters loved brothers and that new nieces were supposedly wonderful creatures worth traveling for. He understood all of this with his mind, which was a traitorous organ that had clearly never been in love.

His heart, however—his poor, neglected, Y/N-less heart—understood nothing except that she was gone.

Valarr rolled onto his stomach and pressed his face into her pillow.

It still smelled like her.

He had forbidden the servants from changing the linens. They had looked at him strangely, which was absurd. Who wouldn't want to preserve the last traces of their wife's scent? The faint floral notes of whatever oil she used in her hair, the warm sweetness that was simply her, the way the fabric seemed to hold the memory of her cheek against it—

A knock at the door.

"Go away," he said into the pillow.

"Your Grace, the King requests your presence at the small council meeting." It was his squire, a boy of twelve who sounded far too cheerful for someone whose master was clearly in mourning.

"I'm ill."

"You said that yesterday, Your Grace. And the day before."

"And I remain ill. It's a persistent illness. Very serious. Possibly fatal."

A pause. "Should I fetch a maester, Your Grace?"

Valarr considered this. A maester would poke at him and ask questions and inevitably conclude that he was suffering from nothing more than a severe case of missing his wife. Which was true, but also humiliating to have spoken aloud by a man in grey robes.

"No. Tell my grandfather I am... indisposed. With grief."

"Grief, Your Grace?"

"My wife is gone." He said this with such profound tragedy that the boy actually went silent for a moment.

"Ah. Yes. For... four days now, isn't it, Your Grace?"

"Four days, seventeen hours, and—" He squinted at the window, trying to gauge the sun's position. "Approximately six and a half hours. Not that I'm counting."

"Of course not, Your Grace."

"The counting would imply that I have nothing better to do than track her absence, which I don't—because she took my purpose in life with her when she left."

Another pause. Valarr imagined the boy standing in the corridor, shifting from foot to foot, wondering if the prince had finally lost his mind. He probably had. It didn't matter.

"Shall I bring you breakfast, Your Grace?"

"No."

"Lunch?"

"I said no."

"Dinner? Perhaps some wine? Bread? A boar? Anything at all?"

Valarr lifted his head just enough to glare at the door. "Do I sound hungry to you? Does a man whose heart has been ripped from his chest and carried away to some distant keep where he cannot reach it sound like he wants bread?"

The boy wisely retreated.

Alone again, Valarr flopped back onto the pillow and resumed his vigil of misery.

---

An hour later—or perhaps three; time had lost all meaning—he found himself in his chambers, seated at the desk where he had once, in a former life, attended to correspondence and other tedious duties. Now it served a far more important purpose.

He opened the locket.

It was a beautiful thing, commissioned three days ago from a goldsmith who had clearly thought him mad but was wise enough not to say so. The outside was simple enough, a smooth disc of gold that fit perfectly in his palm. But inside, nestled against the fine enamel work that had cost him a small fortune and the goldsmith's entire week, was her face.

Her face.

The painter had captured her perfectly—the curve of her smile, the warmth in her eyes, the way one eyebrow always lifted slightly when she was about to tease him. Valarr had described every detail with the precision of a maester cataloging a rare specimen, and the man had somehow managed to translate those fevered descriptions into art.

He kissed it.

Then he kissed it again.

Then he held it against his chest and stared at the wall, imagining that she was here, that she was laughing at him for being so dramatic, that she would wrap her arms around his neck and press her forehead to his and tell him that four days apart was nothing, that he was being ridiculous, that she loved him anyway.

He would take that. He would take her calling him ridiculous a thousand times over if it meant having her here.

The door opened.

"I told you I don't want—"

"Brother." It was Matarys, his younger brother, standing in the doorway with an expression of unholy amusement. "Still alive, I see. The servants were placing bets."

"Get out."

"I've come to save you from yourself." Matarys strode in as if he owned the place, flinging himself onto a chair with the careless grace of someone who had never known true suffering. "Four days, Valarr. Four. She'll be back in another fortnight, at most."

"A fortnight?" Valarr sat up so fast the locket swung wildly on its chain. "You said a sennight yesterday."

"I was being optimistic. Babies are unpredictable. Births take time. Celebrations take longer. You're looking at ten more days, minimum."

Ten more days.

Ten more days without her laugh, without her hand in his, without the way she hummed while she brushed her hair at night, without—

"I'm going to die," he said flatly. "I'm going to expire from lack of her, and they'll find my body here, clutching this locket, and the maesters will write treatises about it. 'The First Recorded Case of Death by Wife-Absence.' They'll name it after me. Valarr's Malady."

Matarys snorted. "You're pathetic."

"I'm devoted. There's a difference."

"There really isn't." His brother leaned forward, expression shifting to something almost like concern. "Valarr, listen to me. You need to do something. Anything. You haven't left these chambers in days—"

"I left yesterday."

"To stand on the battlements and stare at the road south for three hours. That doesn't count."

"It counted to me."

Matarys pinched the bridge of his nose. "Father is worried. Grandfather is worried. Even Aerion looked mildly concerned, and he's usually too busy practicing his cruel smile to care about anyone's wellbeing. You're making a spectacle of yourself."

"Let them watch." Valarr touched the locket again, tracing the outline of her painted smile. "She is my wife. I love her. I am not ashamed to miss her."

"No one expects you not to miss her. We expect you to miss her like a normal person. Go to council meetings. Eat food. Bathe, for the love of all the gods, you're starting to smell like a stabled horse."

Valarr sniffed his own armpit. It was... not pleasant. But that was beside the point.

"The small council can function without me. Food is unnecessary without her to share it. And bathing—" He paused, considering. "Would it be strange if I used her soaps?"

"Yes."

"They smell like her."

"I know. That's why it would be strange."

Valarr disagreed fundamentally with this assessment, but he was too tired to argue. He slumped back against the pillows, pulling the locket out to gaze at it once more. Her eyes. Her smile. The little mole near her left eyebrow that he kissed every morning without fail.

"She's so beautiful," he murmured.

"We know. You tell us constantly."

"Do you think she's thinking of me? Right now, at this moment? Do you think she misses me too?"

Matarys stood abruptly. "I'm leaving. I came to help, but I find I have no stomach for watching my brother dissolve into a puddle of sentiment. If you need me, don't find me."

The door closed behind him.

Valarr hardly noticed. He was too busy imagining her in some distant keep, holding her new niece, perhaps glancing toward the window and thinking of him. Perhaps touching her chest where a matching locket—because of course he'd had two made, one for each of them, so she could look at his face too—rested against her heart.

He hoped she was looking at it.

He hoped she missed him even half as much as he missed her.

Another knock.

"What?"

A servant entered, this one older and wiser to his moods. She carried a tray with bread and cheese and a cup of wine, which she set on the table without comment.

"Your Grace," she said, her tone carefully neutral. "The Princess Y/N's wheelhouse was spotted on the Rosby road an hour ago. Moving south. Away from the city."

Valarr's heart plummeted through the floor.

"Away?" He sat up, clutching the locket like a talisman. "Why would she be moving away? She's supposed to be moving toward me. The world is meant to bring her closer, not farther. That's the natural order of things."

"The messenger said the princess decided to accompany her brother's family part of the way to their next destination. She'll be delayed by another few days."

Another few days.

He was going to perish. Truly and completely. They would find him dead of yearning, his cold fingers still wrapped around her painted smile, and on his lips would be her name, and the singers would compose ballads about his devotion, and—

The servant was still there, watching him with an expression that might have been pity.

"Leave the bread," he said weakly.

She left.

Valarr stared at the tray. The bread looked dry. The cheese looked plain. The wine looked like the kind that would make him maudlin rather than numb, and he was already so deep in maudlin that any further descent would require ropes and a guide.

He reached for the locket again.

Four more days. Possibly five. Possibly a whole sennight of additional Y/N-less existence stretching before him like an endless grey sea.

He could do this.

He could survive.

He had her locket. He had her pillow. He had the memory of her voice, which he replayed in his mind constantly, and the way she laughed, which he conjured up whenever the silence grew too loud.

He would be fine.

He would be fine.

---

He was not fine.

Three hours later, he had migrated to her solar, where he sat surrounded by her things—her books, her embroidery, her little pots of color for painting, her shawl still draped over the back of her chair. He held the shawl in his lap, stroking the soft wool, breathing in the fading scent of her.

"Y/N," he whispered to the empty room. "Y/N, Y/N, Y/N."

It helped, somehow. Saying her name. Keeping her present through sheer force of vocalization.

"You have to come back soon," he continued, addressing the shawl. "I'm running out of things to do. I've stared at the locket so much I might have worn a hole through the enamel. I've read every letter you ever wrote me—twice. I've counted the floorboards in our bedchamber. There are forty-seven. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I know it now."

The shawl offered no response.

"I talked to your pillow this morning. Told it about my day. Which was nothing, because you weren't here, but I described the nothing in detail. The pillow was a good listener. Better than Matarys, certainly."

He sighed, slumping lower in the chair.

"Do you remember our wedding? Of course you do. But do you remember how I couldn't stop staring at you? How they had to nudge me to say my vows because I was too busy looking at your face? The septon thought I was nervous. I wasn't nervous. I was just—you were so beautiful. You're always so beautiful. I'm not sure you understand how beautiful you are. I should tell you more often. I'll tell you every day when you come back. Every single day. Multiple times a day. You'll get tired of hearing it."

He paused, considering.

"No, you won't. You love me. You think I'm wonderful. You tell me that all the time, and I never get tired of it, so why would you get tired of—"

A knock. He was going to have words with whoever kept interrupting his mourning.

"Your Grace?" A different servant, this one young and nervous. "There's a raven. From the princess."

Valarr was on his feet before the sentence finished, crossing the room in three strides and snatching the tiny scroll from the servant's hand. He unrolled it with shaking fingers, devouring the words:

My love,

My good sister is recovered and the babe is healthy and beautiful. They have named her Valerya, after you. (I may have suggested it.) We will be delayed another few days as we travel with them to—

He stopped reading.

They had named the baby after him.

A tiny girl, carrying a piece of his name. Because his wife had suggested it. Because his wife thought of him even while holding a newborn, even while surrounded by her own kin, even while separated by miles and miles of road.

He read the sentence again.

They have named her Valerya, after you.

"Your Grace?" The servant was still there, hovering uncertainly. "Is all well?"

Valarr looked up, and for the first time in four days, he smiled.

"All is well," he said. "All is very well. Tell the kitchens to prepare a feast. Tell my brother I'll be at council tomorrow. Tell my grandfather I've recovered from my illness."

The servant blinked. "You have, Your Grace?"

"I have." He pressed the letter to his chest, right over his heart, where the locket rested against his skin. "My wife has sent word. I am cured."

---

That night, he wrote her a letter.

It was very long. It contained approximately seventeen declarations of love, twelve descriptions of how much he missed her, three jokes that she probably wouldn't find funny but he hoped she would anyway, and a detailed account of his conversation with her pillow.

He did not mention the forty-seven floorboards. That seemed excessive even for him.

At the end, just before sealing it with wax, he added a postscript:

I have commissioned a third locket. This one will have two paintings—one of you, one of me—side by side. So that when I look at you, I can also imagine you looking at me, and we can be looking at each other even when we're apart. I know it's not the same as having you here. But it's something.

Come home soon.

Your devoted husband,

Valarr

P.S. If you see this baby Valerya, tell her her uncle loves her already. Not as much as I love you. Nothing could be that much. But a respectable amount for a niece.

He sent it with the fastest raven in the rookery, then climbed into bed—her side, always her side now—and fell asleep with the locket pressed to his lips and her name on his tongue.

Five more days.

He could survive five more days.

Probably.

---

Author's Note:

Normalize men being this pathetic about their wives. The dragons may be gone, but dramatic devotion should not be.

You're sitting on his kitchen counter in one of his shirts and nothing else. The white linen one, the soft one, the one he wore to dinner three weeks ago and left here on the back of the bathroom door. Your bare legs rest crossed at the ankles, and you have toast in one hand and coffee in the other. 

May sun spills through the eastern windows of his apartment in long gold panels, lighting up the cut peonies on the island, lighting up the smooth marble, lighting up, especially, the sweat at Valarr's collarbones.

You watch him. You take your time about it, too. Your eyes drag—deliberately, calculated, unsubtle—from the wet hair down to the line of his throat, across the soaked t-shirt where it sticks to him. Your attention lingers on the lean cut of his torso under the cotton, down to the shorts, finally to his bare feet on the dark wood floor. You make sure he sees you doing it. 

You bring your eyes back up to his, and you raise one eyebrow, calmly, as if you’re reviewing a piece of property.

Valarr’s jaw ticks once, the brown eye darker by half a shade than it was a minute ago.

"Love."

"Yes?"

"I'm going to shower," he informs you.

You take a sip of your coffee. "Are you?"

"I am, yeah," he says, half a laugh in it, drinking you in with that fascinated focus that's become his default in your presence. "I'm—I'm fairly gross, I just got off the rower and the trainer was a sadist this morning. I won't subject you to—"

You crook two fingers at him.

It's a small gesture. Two fingers, lifted, curled. Just once. Come here.

Valarr stops talking.

He stops talking with the visible suddenness of a man whose train of thought has just been derailed by the simplest possible signal. Your two fingers, one small motion, the kind of summoning a woman might do to a dog she's fond of. You watch him do exactly what you knew he would do, which is start across the kitchen toward you without thinking about it.

"You don't actually want to—" he begins.

You sigh. "Valarr."

"—I really am sweaty, love, give me five minutes—"

"Valarr."

He's at the counter. His hands land on your bare knees, automatic, because your knees are at the level of his hands and because he can’t stand near you and not touch you. The contact is hot and slightly damp, not unpleasant, and you watch him register the heat of his palms on you and not pull them back.

"Yes, love?" 

Your eyes narrow. "Come here."

His brows wrinkles a little. "I am here."

"Closer."

He laughs. Soft. A little wrecked already, and you've barely started. He steps in between your knees, his hands sliding up your thighs an inch and stopping with that intentional, leashed restraint that’s the central tic of his physical presence. The way he always pauses an inch before he means to land, the calibration he’s constantly performing in the millisecond before he touches you.

Valarr leans down and kisses you.

It's a careful kiss. It's a good morning, sweet girl kiss. Closed-mouthed, warm, his hand coming up to cup your jaw, his thumb stroking once along your cheekbone. He tastes like salt, like the espresso he downed before he left for the gym, like the mint in his pre-workout gum. His nose nudges yours, and Valarr makes a small contented sound in his throat that’s so unbearably boyish that for half a second you almost let him have his shower.

Almost.

You set the coffee down beside you, and set the toast down right after. You free both your hands and you put one of them in Valarr’s damp hair—high, at the crown, where the sweat is—and you fist your fingers in it, and you pull, just enough.

He makes a sound.

It's a small thing, coming out of him like he didn't know he was going to make it at all. A short involuntary catch in his throat—half a groan, half a question—and you feel Valarr’s whole body go still against you. Feel his hand at your jaw arrest, feel the breath leave him and not come back.

You growl.

You don't mean to. It comes out of your throat low and warning and entirely without your permission. A thin rough sound at the back of your tongue, the kind of noise something with teeth makes when it's decided what it wants, and Valarr stops moving altogether.

He stops kissing you, stops breathing. He stops, full stop, his mouth a half-inch from yours, his hand cradling your jaw. The towel still hangs from his neck, his pupils dilating in real time so fast you can watch the brown one go almost black, the blue one going luminous.

"Love," he breathes hotly.

You don't answer.

You hook your bare legs around the back of his thighs, and you pull him forward into you. Yank him in until his hips are pressed against the edge of the counter and against the inside of your thighs. Until the soaked cotton of his t-shirt is against the linen of his shirt you're wearing, and you can feel the heat of him through everything. The post-workout furnace of his body, the damp cling of sweat-warmed cotton against your bare skin.

"You said you needed to shower," you say mildly.

Valarr swallows. "I did say that."

"Do you?" you question, deceptively mildly.

"I—I think I—love."

You're already pulling at the hem of the t-shirt.

You drag it up slowly. You make Valarr lift his arms for you, and he does it instantly, his eyes locked on your face, and the wet cotton peels off him with that particular reluctance damp cotton has. Sticking, releasing, sticking. Until you've got it bunched at his shoulders and then over his head and then balled in your fist and then dropped, wet, to the marble counter beside the toast, where it lands with a small slap that neither of you registers.

He is. He is—

You knew. You've known what Valarr looks like under the t-shirt for three months now.

You’ve catalogued every line of him, watched him strip down in the dim of his bedroom, and traced your hands over him in the dark. You have, several times, watched him swim laps in the building's pool while pretending to read by the glass. 

You know what he looks like. But you haven't ever seen him in this light before.

The eastern sun is fully on him, illuminating him fully, painting him golden. 

He’s the long, lean, particular shape of a man who works out with the discipline of someone who has time and money to consider his body a project. Not bulky, never bulky, that wouldn't suit him, but cut. 

Every line of his body is beautiful and deliberate. The cut of his hipbones above the waistband of the shorts, the smooth, lean stomach with that faint dark and white trail of hair below his navel you've licked twice now. The lift of his chest, where his breath is going uneven, and the long, elegant lines of his toned arms.

There’s sweat in the hollow of his throat. Sweat gathers at his sternum, too, gathers and trails down. There’s a small mole low on his ribs that you’ve kissed three times in three months, and that catches the light now in a way that makes you want to sink your teeth into him.

He’s beautiful. Absurdly beautiful. Valarr is the kind of beautiful that’s been worshipped his whole life and has therefore developed no real defence against being wanted. 

You can see it in his face. In the slight parting of his mouth, in the held quality of his breathing. The way Valarr stares at you like you’ve just announced war against him.

Nobody has ever wanted him quite like this before. Not for his wealth or name, or pretty boy looks, but in an older way, the animal way.

You put both hands on him.

You start at the jut of his collarbones. Both palms flat on the slick of him. You drag them down leisurely over the planes of his chest, your thumbs grazing the small dark points of his nipples because you can’t help yourself and because he makes another small sound when you do. Ragged, swallowed; then over the cut of his ribs, the flat of his toned stomach, the line of his sides where his obliques narrow into his hips; down to the waistband of the shorts, where you stop, where you let your fingers hook into the elastic for one held second.

He’s shaking faintly under your hands.

"Love," he rasps again, like it’s the only word left available to him.

"Shhh."

You lean forward.

You put your mouth on his throat.

Right where the sweat gathers. Right at the hollow at the base of Valarr’s throat, where you can taste salt and the dark woody thing that’s his soap and underneath both of those, the warmer animal smell that is just him, just Valarr. The thing you've known by scent since the third week of knowing him by name. 

You suck. You set your teeth, very lightly, against the tendon at the side of his neck, and you suck until the skin there gives a little. Until you feel the heat rise to the surface of his skin, until you feel his pulse pound against your tongue. His hands come up and land hard on your hips, fingers digging in, ungoverned.

Valarr groans.

No perfect control in that sound.

It comes out of him into your hair, your throat, the bare line of your shoulder where the linen has slipped. It’s the sound of a man whose composure has finally—finally, after three months of every careful, courteous can I, sweet girl, may I, my love—slipped its leash entirely.

His hands tighten on your hips. He goes hard against you instantly. You feel it happen through the thin shorts, against the inside of your thigh where you've pulled him in between your legs. The heat of it shoots up your spine and turns your vision white at the edges.

"Oh," he breathes against your hair. "Oh, fuck."

You keep your mouth at his throat, mouth twitching with satisfaction. You drag your teeth. You suck a second mark, lower this time, near the cut of his collarbone, and feel his hips push forward involuntarily against yours. Then jerk back as he tries to remember himself, tries to remember he's gross and sweaty and was going to shower.

You don't let him remember.

You hook your legs harder around the back of his thighs, rolling your hips against his. Once. Slow and hard. You make sure Valarr feels the line of you against him through the thin linen of his shirt, through the thin cotton of his shorts and through the heat of his own ridiculous body. His hand at your hip slides up your back, under the hem of the shirt, finds the bare skin there, and his fingers spread, and he holds. Possessive, dazed, cradling you close.

You pull back enough to look at him.

His face. Gone soft, completely glazed. Those mismatched eyes are blown, his mouth parted slightly. His hair is pushed back from his forehead where you've fisted it, his pulse going at his throat so visibly you can count it. 

Valarr’s gazing at you the way he looks at you across rooms, the way he looks at you when you laugh at something he said, the way he looks at you when you walk in late to a dinner he’s set up. That immortalising look, the one where he’s making a permanent record of you.

Except now there’s no polish on it. None. The look is stripped down to the thing underneath, which is hunger, which is wonder, the dazed, unguarded face of a man who’s not, in twenty-six years of being adored, ever been taken.

You rake your nails down his chest.

Just enough to leave four faint pink lines that will pink up red within a minute, that he’ll notice in the shower later and trace with his fingers when he looks at himself in the mirror. That will make him hard again four hours from now in some meeting he’ll remember nothing of.

"My love," he says softly. "Christ, what—what are you —"

"Need you," you rasp. “Need you right now, Val.”

It comes out of you low, rough, without softness. Not I'd like, or will you, or any of the carefully negotiated phrasings you’ve used with Valarr for three months, because that’s the register he speaks in. You’ve dropped the register. 

You’re looking at him with your eyes gone dark and your mouth wet from his throat, the linen of his shirt slipping off your shoulder, and you have told him exactly what you require.

He stares at you.

The brown eye is so dark now you can't see the iris anymore, the blue one lit from within. He’s breathing through his mouth in shallow pulls, and his hands have not let go of your hips. You can feel him, hard, throbbing, against the inside of your thigh, and you watch the last of his composure go.

You watch it. You watch the moment.

It’s extraordinary.

Nothing slips or cracks. He's too dignified. It’s a handing-over. Three months of careful patient attentive I won't presume, love, and you’ve asked him for one thing in two words. He has, without taking his eyes off your face, simply given you the leash he’s been holding on to himself the entire time, set it down at your feet.

"Whatever you want," he says.

His voice has gone low and ragged. Half-octave under his usual register. Reverent.

"Whatever you want, sweet girl. Whatever you want. I'll—anything. Tell me."

You lean forward. You put your mouth to his ear. You feel the shiver that goes through him when you do.

"Counter," you murmur, lips brushing against heated skin. "Here. Now."

"But—"

"Now, Valarr."

"Yes, yes."

You barely hear it. He's nodding into your hair. His hand is sliding down the back of your thigh and lifting you slightly and pulling you to the very edge of the counter, the marble cool under the back of your thighs and Valarr’s hand hot under them. 

His other hand comes up, going into your hair, grabbing a fistful at the nape of your neck. Then his mouth comes back to yours, and this time he’s not polite. There’s nothing careful about this at all. The kiss is open and wet, a little desperate, and it tastes like salt and espresso. Valarr’s making small, devastated sounds into your mouth that he doesn't seem aware of, and his hips roll forward against yours without his permission. 

He doesn’t pull them back this time, hasn't apologised, hasn't asked.

You bite his lower lip. Lightly. He groans and you swallow the sound. 

"Sweet girl."

You let out a small, pleased hum at the hungry groan in his voice.

"Sweet girl,” he says again, pecking you, then again, one hand at your jaw. "I—what are you—"

"You said anything?"

He murmurs against your lips, "Anything."

"Then stop talking."

He nods with a low groan, his forehead dropping to yours. His hand tightens in your hair. His other hand has come up under the hem of his shirt and slides up the bare skin of your back, splayed hot against your spine.

You roll your hips against his again. Harder, this time. His whole body shudders.

"Oh."

You peck the corner of his mouth. "Shh."

"You can’t,” he whispers, ragged, “you can't do that—"

"I can."

"—you can't, you'll—"

"Valarr."

His breath hitches. "Yes?"

"Be a good boy."

The sound that comes out of him is going to live in your head for the rest of your life.

You smile.

You bring his face up to yours. You make him look at you. He’s looking at you like you’re a miracle he gets to claim for himself, and you look back at him, letting him see your face. You let him see the wolf in you that you’ve been carefully keeping behind glass since he met you, let him see the thing he’s been suspecting was in there and not been allowed to see until now.

His mouth parts.

"Where," he says quietly, wrecked. "Where have you been all my life?"

You smile gently, dragging your thumb across his swollen lower lip.

"Right here, pretty thing," you say lovingly.

A groan rumbles in his throat. "Pretty thing," he repeats, dazed. 

Your mouth curves, and you kiss the corner of his mouth again, cradling his cheek. "Mm."

Valarr laughs. Silky, ruined. He turns his face into your hand and kisses your palm, then your wrist and then the inside of your forearm. His eyes, when they come back to your face, are dazed and adoring in a way that’s bordering, you realise distantly, on something more dangerous than adoration. 

He drops to his knees. He kneels there, on the dark wood floor, and looks up at you.

For one suspended second, Valarr doesn't move. His hands are at your knees, splayed wide, and he’s on the floor of his own kitchen, gazing up at you. He is, you realise after a beat, waiting.

He’s waiting for you to tell him what you want from him.

Three months of carefully negotiated can I, sweet girl, may I touch you here, may I taste you, will you let me, and you’ve stripped that out of him in eight minutes flat. He’s on his knees, bare-chested, sweat-slick, the early sun gilding the long lean lines of him.

You spread your legs. Just enough. You shift your weight onto the marble and let your knees fall a fraction wider, watching Valarr’s eyes drop to where the linen of his shirt has ridden up. His breath leaves him in one long, painstaking exhale through his nose.

"Love," he breathes. “Anything for you. Just ask.”

You say nothing for a full minute. "Then eat, Valarr."

The sound he makes goes through you like a struck bell.

He surges forward. There’s no other word for it. Doesn't crawl, doesn't lean, he surges, both hands pushing your knees wider as he comes, his mouth opening against the bare inside of your thigh first. High, where you’re softest, and biting, not hard, just enough to make you arch off the marble. Just enough to leave a small crescent he’ll be staring at later in the bathroom mirror like evidence.

Then his mouth is on you.

A sound you don’t recognise slips past your clenched teeth. 

It comes out of your throat broken and surprised, unbearably loud in his quiet kitchen, the morning sun slanting across both of you, and Valarr—who’s been so unfailingly polite for three months, who’s asked permission for every step, and eaten you out before with that slow reverence—Valarr eats you now like a man who’s been waiting his entire life for someone to tell him he can do this.

His hands drag across your body, devouring each curve. One comes up under the linen shirt, spreading hot and wide across the small of your back, anchoring you, pulling you to the absolute edge of the counter. 

The other hooks under your thigh and lifts, draping your leg over his shoulder, the bare back of your knee against the slick, damp skin of him. Valarr’s hand grips your other thigh hard enough that you'll have small fingertip bruises by lunchtime, four neat ovals in a row on the inside.

And his mouth. His mouth. He’s using his teeth in a way he hasn't before. Lightly, with calculation. He’s using his tongue with the same focused accuracy he’s always used it, but he’s shed the carefulness; he’s shed the I won't presume, he’s going at you with the dazed greed of a man who wanted this for a long, long time.

You fist your hand in his hair.

You pull. Hard. You drag his face deeper into you because you can’t help yourself. 

Because the sun is full on both of you and the marble is cold under your thighs, his hair damp under your hand, and his mouth is exactly where you need it, and Valarr moans into you, the sound vibrating against you. His hand on your thigh tightens, and his shoulder presses harder under your knee, making him go at you with renewed focus, as if the pull of your hand in his hair were an instruction he;s just gratefully received.

You come embarrassingly fast.

With one hand fisted in his damp hair and one hand braced flat behind you on the marble. Your back arches, your toes curling, the linen of his shirt sliding off one shoulder, your thighs clamping around his head, and Valarr’s hands grip you through it, holding you exactly where he wants you while you go to pieces against his mouth. He doesn't stop. Doesn't slow. He keeps going through it, soft and persistent, his mouth gentling but not lifting, his tongue dragging through the aftermath of your release with the same dazed, reverent focus.

"Valarr—"

He hums against you, and your hand spasms in his hair.

"Valarr."

He lifts his head a fraction, mouth wet, chin wet too. The white streak at his temple is plastered with sweat, and the dark of his hair is sticking up in places where you’ve been pulling, and his eyes, when they meet yours, are destroyed.

He licks his lower lip.

"More," he states, voice low. “I want more. All of you, sweet girl. Let me taste you. More.”

It's barely a word. More so, a request, a question, and a small wrecked plea rolled into one. You watch Valarr’s face, and you feel—sharply, delightedly, with a clean cold satisfaction in the centre of your chest—that you have him.

That you’ve just had him in a way you haven’t had him before. 

Those three months of polished, restrained worship have just been redrawn, definitively, in your favour.

You drag your thumb across his wet lower lip, holding his eyes. You let him see you.

"Up," you tell him softly.

"But I’m not done—"

"Up."

Valarr rises. Like a man who’s forgotten how legs work and is figuring it out in real time, sluggish, stupefied, his hands sliding up the backs of your thighs as he comes, his mouth coming up to yours. He’s kissing you before he’s fully standing, his mouth open against yours, and you taste yourself on him. Sharp and bright and warm. You make a low sound of approval in your throat, biting his lower lip, hard enough to leave a mark, and he whimpers into your mouth.

Oh, that sound.

That sound is going to live in your head until you die. 

A beautiful, rasping sound of a man who hasn’t known he was capable of producing that sound until a moment ago. Your hand fists tighter in his hair in reward, and you yank his head back. Your mouth goes to Valarr’s throat where you’ve already marked him once, but you bite him there a second time, harder now, dragging your teeth across the place his pulse is pounding, sucking until you taste salt and the faint copper-edge of where you've broken a capillary, and Valarr—

Valarr's hips jerk forward against yours.

Once. Twice. Hard. Involuntary.

You feel him through the thin gym shorts, against the bare wet of you on the very edge of the counter, and the heat of him is shocking. His gasping breath breaks against your hair in ragged little catches, so you set your teeth into the muscle at the side of his neck and bite. 

Hard, unapologetically, the way you would bite into something you intended to keep, and Valarr makes a sound you haven’t heard from him before in your life, low and shocked and delightfully animal. His hips jerk forward one more time and stop, his whole body going rigid against you, his hands clamping on your hips, his forehead dropping hard to your shoulder, and you feel him—

You feel him come.

In his shorts. Through his shorts. Against the inside of your thigh, the bare wet of you, the marble counter underneath. You feel the pulse of it through the thin cotton, and you feel the heat of it bloom against you. He’s shaking, properly shaking, his fingers digging into your hip. Valarr’s mouth slacks open against your collarbone, making small ragged pained sounds into your skin.

You go very still.

You watch his face, eyes wide. His face angles into your throat and stays there, hidden, his shoulders shaking finely under your hands.

You feel the wet heat of him soak through the cotton against your inner thigh, slow and too warm and absurdly intimate, and you understand—with a low, bright pleasure that has nothing to do with reciprocation—that you’ve just made Valarr Targaryen come in his pants in his own kitchen on a Tuesday morning by biting his neck.

He’s gone, distinctly, several shades pinker.

"Fuck," he chokes out, faintly, into your throat. "Oh, fuck."

Your mouth curves into a pleased, feline smile.

You already hear the apology forming on his tongue when he whispers, "I didn't mean—"

"Look at me," you drawl.

"I—"

"Look at me, Val."

He lifts his head.

His face is wrecked, cracked open by pleasure. His mouth gapes, his perfect hair destroyed. His pupils are blown so wide his eyes are nearly black, both of them, even the blue one, and there’s colour high on his cheekbones and the hollow of his throat is heaving. There’s a fresh red bruise blooming under the line of his jaw where you’ve just sucked it into being, and he’s looking at you, just looking like you’ve cracked something open in him. 

He swallows.

"I—" His voice is ruined, quiet, faintly embarrassed. "I'm sorry, that has—that hasn’t happened to me since I was—"

You stroke your thumb up his jaw. "It’s alright. I liked it."

"—fifteen, love, I—" 

"Valarr, I liked it," you tell him. "I like making you fall apart just as much as you enjoys doing the same to me."

His eyes sharpen, focusing on your face. "You do?"

You drag your hand down his chest in response, watching his eyes track the path of your hand.

You feel him still hard against you—still hard, even through what just happened, the impossibility and the inevitability of him, twenty-six years old and beautiful and on a strict regimen, his body already rallying—and you drag your fingers down across his stomach. Down to the soaked waistband of the shorts, and you slip two fingers into the waistband, and you tug playfully.

"Off."

"Are you sure?" he croaks.

"Take them off."

He nods, fumbling with the drawstring. His hands are shaking—actually shaking, you can see them, his fingers can't manage the knot at first—and you watch him laugh once, breathless, embarrassed, and it makes you smile at him fondly. His own expression softens further when he catches you looking at him like that, some tension melting from his shoulder blades. 

The knot finally loosens, and he pushes the shorts down, stepping out of them. He kicks them aside, naked and sweat-streaked. Wet at the front of his thighs where he spilt moments ago, but still hard, gloriously, almost insolently, his cock heavy and flushed dark against the cut of his hip. 

You look at him.

You take your time looking at him.

He stands there in his own kitchen and lets you. Valarr’s hands hang at his sides. His face is naked in a way that pricks inside your chest, so you take your time with him. 

You let your eyes drag inch at a time. Over the planes of his chest, the four pink lines down his sternum where you scratched him five minutes ago, the two darkening bruises at his throat, the smoothness of his stomach, the trail of hair below his navel. You watch him bear your hungry examination. Watch him stand there and let you look, watch a small, almost-shy smile pull at the corner of his mouth.

"Sweet girl," he says quietly.

You tilt your head. 

"You're—"

"Hush, pretty thing," you say instead, still drinking him in. 

You reach down between your own thighs.

You don't break eye contact. You drag two fingers through the wet mess of you—your own, his, the slick of both of you mixed at the edge of the marble where his shorts had pressed against you—and you bring your fingers up between you, glistening, and see his face change.

"Oh."

"Open your mouth, Valarr," you instruct gently. 

He opens.

He opens with the same dazed, automatic obedience he’s been giving you for the last fifteen minutes.

His head tilting back a fraction, his lips parting, his eyes locked on your face, and you slide your two wet fingers into his mouth, and you push—past his teeth, past his tongue, two knuckles deep—and Valarr's eyes flutter half-shut. 

He makes a tiny, muffled sound around your fingers and his hands come up to brace on the counter on either side of your hips. His tongue moves against your fingers, sucking at them, lapping up the wet of himself off your skin with such immediate pleasure that something hot and possessive unfurls in your chest.

You push your fingers a fraction deeper. He takes them. Valarr’s throat works around the heel of your hand. He keeps his eyes on yours.

You pull your fingers out slowly, dragging the wetness across his lower lip, leaving a slick smear.

He makes a small, ruined sound.

"You taste yourself, pretty thing?" you ask quietly. 

"Yes," he answers, breathless, eyes hooded.

He leans forward and kisses you.

He kisses you with his mouth still wet from your fingers and your wet still on his tongue, and he kisses you the way he ate you ten seconds before. Open, urgent, no carefulness anywhere in him. You taste him in your own mouth, salt and bright and warm and slightly bitter and him, and his hands have come up off the counter and gripped your hips again, fingers digging in. You feel him roll his hips forward against the bare wetness of your core and groan into your mouth.

He’s so hard. Again. Still. His cock is hot and heavy against the inside of your thigh, and there’s wetness against your skin, and you don't know whose anymore. Valarr’s mouth moves against yours, slick and fully open-mouthed. 

You break the kiss after another moment. You hold his face in both your hands.

"Harder," you order huskily. 

He groans against your lips. "My sweet girl."

"Harder, Val."

He nods. He kisses you harder. His teeth catch your lower lip, and he sucks at it, tentative, and then—when you make a hungry, pleased sound into his mouth—bolder, biting, the carefulness sliding off him in real time as he learns that you want this. That you’ve wanted this for a while. That the ferocity he’s been keeping behind glass for three months because he was afraid of frightening you was, in fact, the thing you were waiting for.

You drag your hand down between you. You wrap his length in your fist.

Valarr chokes.

"Shhh." 

You kiss his cheek, stroking him, once, slow, grip tight. He’s hot and slick at the head from his own coming, from his own anticipation. Valarr shudders against you, his forehead dropping to your collarbone. His hand fists in the linen of his shirt at your back.

"You can't,” he groans, barely audible, “I'll come again, I'll—"

"You will," you agree softly, kissing the shell of his ear. 

He loosens a groan. "Love."

"You will, pretty thing,” you say again, thumb rubbing over the slit of his cock. “As many times as I want."

He makes a sound, a ragged half-groan, and you smile against the side of his head, kissing the spot where his white streak meets his temple and you feel him shudder under your mouth.

You keep stroking him. Just at the edge of unbearable. You watch Valarr’s face turn into your shoulder, his hips pushing forward into your hand. You watch the discipline of him—the man who deadlifts at five in the morning, who runs his portfolio with surgical precision, who has never not been in control of a room—fall to absolute pieces against the linen of his own shirt on your shoulder.

"Show me," you murmur into his hair.

"Mm?"

"Show me, Valarr," you whisper into his ear.

Valarr ruts into your fist, a hot, wet pant burning the hollow of your throat, "Show you what, sweet girl?” he croaks. “I—anything, for you—"

You hum, twisting your wrist as you exhale, "Show me your strength."

He stills.

You feel it. He stills against you, his face still pressed to your shoulder, his cock heavy and pulsing obscenly in your hand, his hands locked at the small of your back. You can hear him breathing. Can hear the pulse in his throat against your shoulder. 

You feel him register the words, feel him understand them, exactly.

"You're a dragon, aren't you?" you wonder idly. “My golden, beautiful dragon.”

"—yes." 

No hesitation. 

"Then claim me."

He lifts his head.

The stupified, shocked compliance of the last fifteen minutes is gone. 

What’s in its place is something you haven’t seen on Valarr's face yet. He’s not the polished, smiling, immaculate boy who brought you peonies and asked permission to kiss you; what’s in its place is the thing his very polite Targaryen ancestors used to be before three generations of money and manners stripped it out of them, the thing he’s been told all his life he’s too well-bred to be. 

The thing he didn't know was in him until you put your two fingers in his mouth and said hello to it.

He doesn't say anything.

He yanks you up off the counter.

One motion. His hands are on you, and your back hits the cold marble of the kitchen island. His mouth is on your throat, and he’s biting you, properly biting you, hard enough to make you gasp. His hand fists in your hair at the nape of your neck, and he’s angling your head exactly where he wants it, and his other hand drops between you. Between your legs, two fingers, no asking, sliding into you with the slick that’s half him and half you and the heel of his hand grinds hard against your core. Your vision goes white.

"Yes," you breathe. “There, yes, Val.”

He kisses your throat, jaw, and tip of your nose. "Sweet girl."

"Yes—"

He pecks your mouth, curling his fingers. "Tell me again."

"Claim me. Use me, Val."

He kisses you. Bruising. He kisses you like he’s furious with you, like he is grateful to you, like he’s been holding his breath for three months and you have only just told him he’s allowed to use his mouth.

Valarr’s fingers work you with the kind of precision that asserts he’s been studying you the entire time and remembers every signal you’ve ever given him.

His thumb—Christ, his thumb—is exactly where you want him, mean and relentless, and he’s learning you all over again. Learning what you sound like when he’s rough with you, learning what you look like when you stop being careful with him, his eyes on your face the whole time, immortalising, committing the whole thing to a permanent record he will not let himself forget for the rest of his life.

You come around his fingers in under a minute.

You come with your forehead pressed to his, moaning loudly, and his mouth open against yours, swallowing the sound.

The fingers buried in you keep moving, and his other hand stays fisted in your hair, and you’re making sounds that are not words, and he’s murmuring into your mouth (that's it, my sweet girl, there she is, my beautiful girl, give it to me, that's mine, you’re mine) in a tone of voice you haven’t heard before. Low and hoarse, certain of himself, and you feel the mine hit something in your chest that makes you bare your teeth with pleasure. 

He pulls his fingers out of you, pushing them into his own mouth.

Valarr sucks them clean while watching your face.

You stare at him, still panting, your nerves on fire.

He smiles around his fingers, slow, crooked.

"Love," he says, drawing his fingers out with a wet pop, "tell me where you want me."

"Inside," you tell him. "Need you dripping out of me, pretty thing."

Valarr squeezes his eyes closed, counts mentally, then, croaked, "Counter or floor?"

"Floor."

He doesn’t lower you carefully.

Valarr goes down with you. Goes down to his knees on the dark wood floor with you locked around his waist, and he tips you back, one hand braced behind your head, the other splayed wide at the base of your spine. 

He lays you down on the wood with the gentleness of a man laying out a relic and the greed of a man about to break it open. 

The wood is cold under your back, the linen of his shirt crinkled up around your ribs. The morning sun is on you both, gilding the slick lines of him, lighting up the white streak at his temple, painting the bruises you've left on his throat in dark purple.

He braces above you.

His hair falls forward over his face. His hand slips between your thighs, lining himself up, and his eyes are on your face, and he’s waiting for the word.

"Now," you urge him.

He pushes into you.

You arch off the floor.

Valarr watches your face, he gives you the half-second to adjust, reading you in real time the way he reads everything. But he doesn’t give you the deliberate measured slowness he’s given you for three months. 

He pushes in to the hilt in one long slow stroke that has you fisting your hands in his hair and tipping your head back and making a sound that is going to embarrass you in approximately twenty minutes when you can think clearly again, and Valarr—sweat-slick, marked, beautiful,so beautiful, gone—drops his forehead to yours and breathes against your mouth and doesn't move.

"You’re so perfect," he exhales, a silky sound.

You breathe out a small, pleased sound.

"You drive me insane," he whispers, and there’s a hint of laughter in his ragged voice. “You undo me, love. Do you understand that?”

"Val,” you breathe out, feeling how the fond shortening of his name makes him pulse inside you. “Move."

He does. 

He moves the way you’ve asked him to move, the way you’ve told him he’s permitted to move. 

He fucks you on the kitchen floor, his hand fisted in your hair. Valarr’s other hand hooks under your thigh, pushing your knee up against your chest, opening you wider for him. His mouth is on your throat, your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder where the linen of his shirt has slipped, biting and sucking and leaving marks of his own, finally, claiming you along the line of your throat the way you’ve just claimed him.

His hips snap forward. Again. Again.

You feel him in your teeth. The tempo is so painfully efficient that it drives you insane. You feel him through your spine in every stroke. The wood of the floor is cold against your back, and your shoulder blades are going to be bruised by tonight, but you can’t bring yourself to care.

His pelvis grinds against yours on every powerful thrust and his hand slips between you, circling where he’s pushing into you, and his thumb is—his thumb is— 

You come again, your walls fluttering around his cock, embarrassingly, helplessly, with your nails dragging four red lines down the middle of his toned back. Valarr groans into your throat, yes, yes, that's it, sweet girl, my wolf, that's mine, that's it, give it to me, and he’s fucking you through it without slowing, his rhythm only stuttering for a second and then catching, his eyes wild on your face, his mouth open against yours.

He’s sweating. He hasn’t stopped sweating since he came back from the gym. 

The whole of him is slick and hot, the morning sun on him and you feel the salt of him against your mouth when you pull his head down to yours. His hair is a complete wreck where you’ve been yanking at it. His back is going to be a map of your nails by tonight and his throat is going to be a map of your mouth and you almost laugh in delight.

You arch under him instead. You hook your heel into the base of his spine, dragging him deeper.

"Harder, dragon."

The sound that comes out of Valarr is barely human.

A low broken thing. His name lands exactly where you placed it, dragon, not pretty thing, not sweet boy, dragon, the old word, the one his blood has been waiting for. 

Valarr’s eyes darken, impossibly so, and his hand at your hair tightens and he gives you exactly what you asked for. 

He gives it to you so completely that the world around you becomes very narrow and very sharp and he’s fucking into you with the strength he’s been hiding for three months, the strength of a man who deadlifts at dawn and rows until he aches, the strength of the thing in him that his ancestors used to ride into wars on, and it is—

It is exactly what you needed.

You bite his shoulder. Viciously. Copper burns on your tongue and you feel Valarr’s whole body lock against yours and his hand fist convulsively in your hair and his hips drive forward one last time hard enough to push you up the floor by several inches, and Valarr—

Valarr comes inside you with a sound that’s torn between a sob and a roar, his face pressed into your throat, his other hand braced flat on the wood beside your head with his fingers spread wide and white at the knuckles. 

He shakes. Through the whole thing, his hips jerking against yours in small uneven thrusts, and you can feel the heat of him filling you up, gushing deep, and you can feel the pulse of him and you can feel his teeth set into the side of your throat at the very end, marking you, finally properly marking you. Your answering moan sounds more animal than woman, your body coiled around his.

You both go still.

The kitchen is suddenly painfully silent. 

It takes you several minutes to come back to your body. 

You blink up at the ceiling blearily, squinting. You’re on the dark wood floor of Valarr’s kitchen with his weight on top of you and his face buried in your throat. The linen of his shirt is soaked through at the ribs with sweat that’s now also half his and half yours. 

Valarr breathes against your throat. 

Then he lifts his head.

He’s looking at you with an expression that’s not quite settled into anything yet. Not fully shock, or joy, not even fear. There’s only the unguarded face of a man whose entire model of himself has just been rearranged by the woman pinned under him on a kitchen floor.

He laughs. Gentle, breathless, fond. He drops his forehead to yours.

"My sweet girl," he says, and his voice is hoarse, "what the fuck have you done to me?"

Your mouth curls into a pleased grin.

You bring his mouth down to yours, kissing him gently, lingering at the seams of his lush mouth. You taste yourself on his mouth, and you taste sweat and salt and the metallic edge of where you broke skin on his shoulder, and you keep your hand fisted lightly in his hair.

"My golden dragon," you murmur fondly. “My beautiful, perfect Val.”

He laughs into your mouth, a terrible, broken sound. He shakes his head against yours.

"Christ."

You only tighten your arms around his shoulders in response. 

"You're going to ruin me," he rasps, mouth on your collarbone. "You're my ruin, sweet girl."

"Yes," you agree lightly, stroking his flushed face.

"My love, I need—"

You know what he needs; even if his body is spent, he still wants more, always more. Your knuckles fondly skim over the white streak against his temple. 

"Yes, Val," you say quietly, closing your eyes when he begins jerking his hips inside you again, pleasure raking through your oversensitive nerves as his cum drips onto the kitchen floor between you. “Take what you need.” 

You stopped dead in the doorway, a smile already spreading across your face. There, in the center of the room, sat your husband, perched on a low, cushioned stool, his long legs stretched out before him, looking for all the world like a captured dragon. His head was tilted back, his eyes squeezed shut, and his lips were pressed into a thin line of exaggerated patience.

And on his lap, wielding a small, paint-smeared brush with the utmost gravity, was your daughter. Little Rhaenys, barely three years old, was dressed in a miniature gown of soft blue silk that was already sporting a fresh daub of crimson paint. Her dark hair, so like her father’s, was a wild cloud of curls around her cherubic face, a few stray strands sticking to her cheeks. Her tongue poked out from the corner of her mouth, a sure sign that she was engaged in a task of monumental importance.

"Rhaenys, ñuhys qēlītsos” you said softly, announcing your presence. You were utterly captivated by the scene before you and didn't want to startle her into ruining her masterpiece. "What are you doing?"

Her head snapped up, her violet eyes—mismatched—lighting up with pure joy. "Mama! Mama, look! I'm making Papa into a princess!"

Valarr’s eyes flew open, and he gave you a look of such comical, long-suffering despair that you had to clap a hand over your mouth to stifle a laugh. A smear of bright, rouge-like red was daubed unceremoniously across his cheekbones, and what appeared to be kohl—your precious, expensive kohl from Lys—was smudged inelegantly around his eyes, making him look like a very handsome, very startled raccoon. His hair was a disaster, tufts of it pulled into tiny, lopsided braids that stuck out at odd angles, secured with ribbons of red and black.

"Princess” he repeated "I am a princess. A very pretty one, apparently." He shot you a desperate look. "Help me."

"Oh, I don't know” you said, gliding into the room, you crouched down beside them "You make a rather lovely princess, my love. Though I think the rouge is a little heavy on the left side."

Rhaenys nodded sagely, her little brow furrowed. "It's war paint, Mama. Papa is a warrior princess."

"Of course” you agreed , biting your lip to keep from laughing. "A Targaryen warrior princess. Visenya envies your braids from the dark lands of the afterlife”

Valarr groaned, a sound of pure suffering. "Gods, you are both conspiring against me." He tried to shift, but Rhaenys immediately placed a small, paint-covered hand on his chest.

"No, Papa! You have to sit! I'm not done!"

"But sweetling," he tried, his voice wheedling, "your mother is here. Surely she should be the princess. She's much prettier than I am."

Rhaenys considered this, tapping the paintbrush against her chin and leaving a small red spot. She turned her head to look at you, her gaze critical.

"Hmm," she said, the sound so much like a miniature maester that you nearly laughed again. "Mama's hair is too neat. Princess hair has to be messy. And she doesn't have a crown."

"Ah, but I do” you said, winking at Valarr. You reached up and pulled out the ornate silver-and-ruby pin that held your braids in place. "See? A crown for a princess."

Rhaenys shook her head with such violent certainty that her curls bounced. "No, that's not a crown. There’s a better one." She gestured to the large, heavy circlet of Valyrian steel and rubies that sat abandoned on a small table nearby.

Your eyebrows shot up. "You want to put that on your Papa's head?"

"Papa needs a proper crown” she declared. "A princess crown." She scrambled off his lap and toddled over to the table. Valarr and you shared a look of pure parental panic as she strained on her tiptoes to reach it. The crown was heavier than she was, and you were already moving to intercept her when she grabbed it, grunting with effort.

"Rhaenys, careful, darling” he said.

"Papa, lower your head!”

Valarr, who would command armies and face down enemies without flinching, immediately obeyed his three-year-old daughter. He leaned his head forward, and with a solemn reverence that was hilarious, Rhaenys placed the crown upon his head. It was, of course, far too big. It slipped down over his brow, covering his eyes and coming to rest on the bridge of his nose.

"There” she declared, her voice full of pride. "Now Papa’s a beautiful princess."

Valarr pushed the crown up with a finger, peering out from beneath it. He looked at you, "A princess” he repeated. "Am i a pretty princess, my love?"

You couldn't hold it in any longer. A laugh bubbled up from your chest, uncontrollable. Valarr’s lips twitched, and then he was laughing too. Rhaenys, hearing you, began to giggle.

"Let me see” you said, wiping tears of mirth from your eyes. "The complete picture." You stepped back to take them in. There was your husband, the Prince of Dragonstone, with his dark eyes, his red cheeks, his lopsided braids, and the crown perched on his head.

"Papa is the best princess” Rhaenys announced, throwing her arms around his neck. Valarr caught her, holding her close, careful not to transfer too much paint to her gown. He pressed a kiss to her temple, leaving a faint red smudge on her skin. The single action made you want to give him 10 more children.

"I am the luckiest princess in all of Westeros."

You walked over to them, your own eyes stinging. You knelt down, wrapping your arms around them both, breathing in the scent of your family.

"And I” you whispered, "am the luckiest lady in the world, to have such a beautiful princess for a husband and the bravest little dragon for a daughter."

Valarr kissed your hair softly, looking at you through those raccoon eyes.

"Just wait until the small council sees me”

he promised himself he would be better than the rest. better than those lecherous lords who had nothing in their heads but thoughts of some new whore's tits.

but he held back for so long. every time he saw you, he simply offered a sweet smile, enduring the unbearable ache and the urge to rub himself against you right then and there.

all lads his age did it, was he truly not allowed to sin just once?

his cock was heavy, flushed with blood and hot in his grasp. it looked almost daunting ⸺ skin stretched tight, veins standing out, the head was wet with pre-cum, slicking his fingers.

he let his hand slide down slow. his fingers touched the heated, throbbing flesh almost shyly, near reverent.

he felt shame for the way his hands trembled, but the image of you ⸺ breathless, skin damp, loose strands of hair clinging to your face ⸺ burned away what little sense he had left.

he barely held back a loud groan when skin met skin. at first it was slow, teasing strokes — his palm moving from the base all the way up.

“seven hells…” he breathed, squeezing his eyes shut as the image of you at the feast came back to him.

you were dancing at the center of it all, and the way the silk of your dress clung to your hips had made his own twitch in answer.

the hem of your gown had lifted higher than it ought. he had near came right there in his — bloody expensive ones, stitched with gold — breeches.

he remembered how you smiled at him — innocent, so true — thinking he was some sort of saint.

it near made him laugh, how wrong you were. you thought him different, didn’t you? better than those lords?

he remembered the way he’d spoken to you, all righteous, claiming he despised men who saw women as nothing but objects of desire.

what a hypocrite he was. every time you came close, every time your scent hit him, he grew just as hard and hungry as any other man.

you looked at him like he was something better, some ideal — a proper gentleman, above all this foul man-greed.

if you could see him now — legs spread, breath unsteady, gaze clouded, his cock so hard it ached.

would you be disgusted? or would you shrink back in horror at the perv hiding behind that mask of politeness? he didn't know.

his hand moved faster, rougher now, his fist working up and down, the sound of skin on flesh seeming far too loud in the quiet.

valarr arched his back, his hips jerking forward into nothing, and he near wanted to weep with how badly he wished he was inside you.

he pictured you on your knees before him, looking up at him while he did it.

“yes... like that, mghmm, please, please — ” his voice came out hoarse, nothing like before ⸺ low, rough, almost animal.

he saw all those times you looked at him with those bright eyes, never knowing your neck scarf was hidden away in his chambers, and that he breathed it in every night, or that he knew that one crack in your bathing chamber.

he imagined lifting your skirts right there at the feast. he saw himself taking you from behind, rough, gripping your hair, forcing your back to arch.

his hand moved at a frantic pace, he barely felt his fingers anymore — only that growing, unbearable heat low in his belly.

"fuuuuccckk — haaaaah, nnnh...so good ⸺" valarr threw his head back, his neck drawn tight, the veins standing out clear.

his hips started jerking forward on their own, he was bloody well swiving the air, picturing your warm mouth or your ⸺ he was certain of it ⸺ sweet pussy in place of his palm.

just a few more sharp, desperate tugs of his fist, fingers squeezing his flushed cock until they went white, and he came, shuddering through a hard, overwhelming release.

his seed stained his palms, his belly, and the sheets in thick, hot spurts.

and the next day, when you gave him that innocent smile and took his hand, you had no notion of what that hand had been doing.

“just friends” you both would say, when valarr would run his fingers through your hair whilst you waited in a queue, loving the way you breathed so deeply at the contact.

“just friends” you both would say, when he would take such good care of you on a night out. making sure to buy and hold your drinks, take your hand to guide you through the crowd, holding you as you danced.

“just friends” you both would say, when the both of you crawled into his bed, tipsy and giggly. you, in nothing but your underwear and one of his shirts.

“just friends” you both would say, when you asked him which nude seemed the better one to send to a guy. and you would wait innocently, for upwards of twenty minutes, until he would choose.

“just friends” you both would say, when you would take suggestive pictures with him to make your ex’s jealous. his fingers hooked under the sides of your bikini bottoms, his hands on your ass in a mirror selfie, taking a picture against his very toned back.

“just friends” you both would say, when you would be broken up with. and he would tell you to come over, shower you with much needed affection, letting you crawl into his arms in bed, taking your socks off for you at the end of the night and kissing your ankles.

“just friends” you both would say, when he would stand behind you at the bar as you ordered, feeling him press himself into you. to make sure no other man did.

“just friends” you both would say, when he would spoil you rotten. with gifts, with remembering your coffee order, reminders on his phone for the latest drop of a new collection you’d been waiting for.

“just friends” you both would say, when you were dizzy with drinks and the thumping of music. when his hands would hold you so nicely against him, to keep other men from ogling at you.

“just friends” you both would say, when you’d lose yourself in a haze of a drunken makeout. bodies dancing around you, his tongue fighting with yours to learn your mouth.

“just friends” you both would say, when he’d have a really shitty date. immediately texting or calling you to talk about it.

“just friends” you both would say, when he would turn up at your house, and you’d drag him to your room. when you would let him lay on your bed and whine about how every girl was missing something.

“just friends” you both would say, when you would tease him about having such high standards. straddling him with your arms folded to scold him for speaking of other women in such a way.

“just friends” you both would say, when he would have you pinned under him, fingers shoved into your wetness to find what was truly missing in every other girl.

“just friends” you both would say, when he would fuck you so hard your headboard would slam against your wall, no doubt concerning your parents.

“just friends” you both would say, when he would tell you how beautiful you looked, and how you had ruined every other girl for him.

“just friends” you both would say, when he would spill onto your breasts, or into your mouth. and tell you how you were trouble, and that you’d be the death of him.

“just friends” you both would say, when since that day, every date you both went on with others, had always ended in him fucking into you with such ferocity, such newfound desire.

“Do you need some help?” You whisper with a sleepy smile to your brunette boy, who like his father, has a streak of white running through it. At his nod you move forward to pick him up, ignoring the grumbling from your husband as he tries to pull you back to him. “What are you doing awake my little dragon?”

“Sleep was yucky.” He says climbing over you so he could lie in between you and Valarr. Waking his father in the process when he accidentally kicks him in the face.

“How was it yucky?” You ask stroking his hair out of his face. Valarr rubbing sleep out of his eyes knowing his son wouldn’t be going back to the nursery tonight.

“Just was.” Is all the response you get to that as the toddler moves the sheets down so he can look at you baby bump. “How’s baby?”

“Baby’s been good.” You say letting him poke you through your night dress, as baby is moving in you kicking Jace’s hand making him giggle. “Moving a lot though.”

“She moves even more than you did.” Valarr says voice rough with sleep before he gives you a quick kiss to the side of your head. Tired but loving these rare moments of just the three almost four of you.

“We don’t know it’s a girl.” You tell your husband also wanting a girl but not wanting to get your hopes up as you know you’d be fine with either.

“I have a feeling.” Valarr states with a smile kissing you before leaning forward to pick up Jace pulling him for a cuddle. “Now my little menace of a dragon.” He says pressing kisses all over the toddlers face making him giggle again. “In the morning you will tell me how you got out of the nursery, but now it’s sleep time. So I’ll read you your book but you have to let me and mama sleep, is that a deal?”

“Deal.” Jace says still giggling as you pass Valarr the book so he can read to you both of a change, Jace snuggling down in between you both.

“There once was a school many moons ago-.”

“Papa your doing to wrong.” Jace tells him mater of factly crossing his arms over his chest. Looking like Valarr when a lord has annoyed him in court.

“He’s not doing it wrong sweetheart.” You tell your dramatic toddler kissing his head. Valarr giving you a look of pure disbelief at his son’s statement. “Papa reads differently to me maybe you’ll end up preferring it, let him read us the story I can read it again tomorrow.” You offer just wanting to get some sleep.

“Fine.” He says with a humph but resting his head on Valarr anyway so he could continue. “But you will do the voices right?” He asks softly looking so adorable you feel like crying. Stupid pregnancy hormones.

But you also know better than anyone that rumors could be fickle things, easily molded to fit the recipient’s favorite form. That is why you give him a soft smile when he comes to pay his respects, a feeble attempt at disregarding his leering gazes from across the room.

Sitting beside you, your new husband Prince Valarr tightens his grip around your trembling fingers. Fingers that had trembled for as long as you had existed behind the walls of King’s Landing and could not seek to be stilled no matter how much wine you drank from your goblet.

“Cousin,” Prince Valarr greets him, not unkindly, but not without a trace of suspicion falling off the lilt.

The grin that curls upon Prince Aerion’s face in that instant makes you regret ever giving him a benefit of the doubt. His eyes move away from yours to rest upon his cousin and it feels like a weight has been lifted from your shoulders.

“I just came to offer congratulations,” Prince Aerion says. His bright amethyst eyes hide something behind them that you are not entirely sure you want to know the answer to. “It’s not every day you see a stag in a den of dragons. I wonder how long they will last until they catch hold of her scent?”

You try not to let the loosely-disguised threat bother you, but it makes the back of your neck prickle with goose flesh.

You notice Prince Valarr’s cordial smile fades as he considers his cousin’s words. His eyes, much warmer and without deception coating their film, narrow only slightly. You silently stroke the back of his hand and he squeezes yours in return.

“I look very much to the bedding ceremony,” Prince Aerion continues, his attempt at cordially devolving into a lascivious grin. His eyes fall on yours again for only a brief moment before they trail down to your bust. You suddenly feel like not much more than a whore roaming the Street of Silk, a commodity to abate the noblemen’s lewd impulses. 

“There will not be a bedding ceremony,” Prince Valarr replies simply. No dissuading of Aerion’s flirtations or a chiding, just a laying of the facts. 

You feel your heart drop to your feet. Truly? He is not going to defend your honor any more than that? 

Prince Aerion rolls his eyes as if it were all some minor inconvenience to him. Your body, a toy ripped from his hands.

Your eyes drift away from the white-haired prince to where his father sits across the room. His cold eyes stare daggers in the back of his son’s head, like a part of him could sense from there the impropriety of his second son.

“Well,” Prince Aerion says, “welcome to the family, cousin.”

The prince leaves before either of you can say much else. His lithe form disappears with the throngs of people milling about like a vapor cloud disappearing under the sun.

You remove your hand from within the grasp of your new husband’s without really even realizing it. You have the want—no, need to hide away. To not be seen in that objectifying way ever again.

His mismatched eyes fall onto yours with startling intensity, as if he were peeling back your skin layer by layer and could see straight to your very core.

“I apologise for Aerion,” Valarr says with half a smile, “he never learned to hold his tongue.”

You feel what seems to be something lodged in your throat. It steals your very breath from your lungs. If you were to describe Aerion, it would be less in jest and more in disgust.

“Is he always that… crude?” you ask him quietly.  

Valarr lets out a sigh that borders on being laborious. “He’s not always been that way, but he has for so long now I can scarcely remember his personality before it.”

You frown as you take in your husband’s profile. It would have been easy to disregard Aerion as being the black sheep of the white flock, but a part of you wonders whether or not he is just more confident with his desires than his family—if within every dragon, slumbers a flame waiting to erupt.

Perhaps your husband had just learned to control his flame better. The thought makes you push away the rest of your dinner.

“Forget Aerion,” Valarr tells you, “his only lot in life is to get under others’ skin. Don’t let him.”

Easier said than done, you think. Your skin burns with shame and prickles with anxiety. Not an uncommon concoction of feelings for young women on the precipice of their wedding nights, but less common for the same reason you feel it.

A moment passes in silence. You watch, half-dazed, as family and friends and Targaryens mesh together in a hypnotizing display of red and black and yellow. It is a ceremony that has passed since the beginning of time, yet only a fair few women could say they were as blessed as you were in marriage. 

Still, a pit weaves itself deeply into your stomach.

“Ah, is that my darling niece I see?” the voice cuts through the fog of your somber thoughts and immediately brightens your mood like the sun chasing away a storm.

“Uncle Lyonel!” you exclaim breathlessly. 

The Laughing Storm is a fitting name for such a figure of roaring humor and physical prowess. You recall your father speaking fondly but with a touch of jealousy at the free will his brother was able to exert as the secondborn son. You did not see him often, except in big gatherings such as these, but whenever you did he held a drink in his hand and a wide grin on his face.

You stand to give him a hug over the table. It is warm and comforting and just what you need at this exact moment. You pull away and sit back in your chair.

“I’m so glad you could make it,” you tell him, “I heard you had just been to a tourney and…”

“And miss my only niece’s wedding?" Lyonel scoffs as if the notion itself were preposterous. “Your father is rolling over in his grave at just the mere notion.”

He turns his eyes toward your new husband. His grin still takes up half his face as he takes the prince in. 

You know what he’s thinking. Prince Valarr is all straight-edges and proper social etiquette. He is not the prince to be found wandering the Streets of Silk like Aerion or the local watering hole like Daeron. He is incredibly handsome, as all Targaryens are, but it is a carefully controlled beauty that makes one do a double-take to wonder how in the Seven Kingdoms he is related to the rest of the riff-raff. 

“You are Baelor’s son, yes?” your uncle asks. It is not the question you had been expecting. 

Your husband’s face sobers at the mention of his recently-deceased father. The father that had missed his eldest son’s wedding and would miss everything else in his future.

“He was a good man,” Lyonel says, “the best of them, really.”

Prince Valarr’s smile is tight. You can tell he has reached his limit of what he wants to speak about regarding his father, but you do not intervene.

“If you are anything like him, you will make a good husband to my niece,” Lyonel continues, “and if you don’t, I’ll hang you by your stones from a tree.” 

Valarr’s face drops. 

His face is deadly serious before he breaks out in raucous, drunken laughter. “You should have seen your face!” he wheezes.

Valarr smiles only slightly, seemingly off-put by the brazenness of the Baratheon.

Your uncle stumbles away without another word, giggling to himself all the while. You watch him go with an affectionate pang to your chest and with it, the only security and normalcy you felt within the room’s four walls. 

You look away from your uncle to the rest of the party goers, and inadvertently get hung on a pair of purple eyes staring daggers at you from across the hall. You feel a spike of fear hit your heart like a dagger.

“—Perhaps we should retire,” your husband says, offering forth possibly the best suggestion of the night, “before anyone else comes to enlighten our meal.”

If he notices your fear, he does not show it. You nod almost catatonically as you stand beside him. He grabs your hand and squeezes it gently in what should have been reassuring, but only makes you realize how sweaty your palm is.

All eyes in the room follow the two of you as you exit the room. A chorus of cheering erupts from behind you, but you do not look back to see the commotion. You did not need to know that all those people were looking forward to you losing your maidenhead. Even the thought makes your body cringe like a grape left in the sun for too long.

As you take your first steps into the heir prince’s bedroom, you gaze around in awe at the large four-poster bed and the array of burning candles that bathe the walls in flickering shadows. At the far wall, an ornate copper mirror reflects your visage back to you and you only realize from it the speed of your heaving chest.

You hear the door click shut behind you. Your hands tremble as you try to clutch at the laces at the back of your gown, attempting to unravel them.

Prince Valarr comes up behind you and wraps a gentle arm around your quivering middle, stilling your hastened movements. He presses a soft, barely-there kiss to your shoulder and his hot breaths against your flushed skin make you shiver in anticipation. He chuckles softly at your reaction and you smile.

As he continues to leave soft kisses across every inch of exposed skin, you feel a deep burning beginning to form at the base of your stomach. 

In that moment, you remember the mirror and your eyes dart to see the lewd display in a fulfillment of some voyeuristic impulse, but you jolt when you see not your husband behind you but a light streak of hair and a familiar eye that cuts through the night. You let out a sharp gasp before your brain can process that all you are seeing is your husband’s streak of silver in his auburn locks and his own one purple-blue eye, but the damage is done. 

The slight hint of arousal you began to feel is gone and has been replaced by the fear and disgust from earlier in the evening. 

Valarr pulls away and looks at you with furrowed brows. “Are you all right, my love?”

You go to reply, but find your mouth seems to be filled with cotton. You swallow and try again. “My apologies, my prince. I just… thought I saw something.”

Valarr follows your gaze to the mirror and he takes a step back from you. You turn to meet his gaze unobstructed by the distorted reflection.

“You seem anxious,” your husband says, “we… do not have to consummate tonight.”

You begin to protest, but he interjects.

“I would rather it be a happy occasion, not one wrought with fear.”

You do try to hide the sudden rush of relief you feel from your face, but some of it must slip through as he quickly averts his eyes to the floor.

Valarr strides over to the end table in his room where two goblets of wine sit untouched on its surface. He hands one to you as he passes your side to the bed. He tilts his goblet until a few drops land on the sheets, giving the impression of a perfectly sound marriage night.

He lifts a finger over his lips with a teasing smile. “Shh. No one will know.”

You cannot find it within you to return the smile. You worry your lip between your teeth and set the goblet back down. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, watching his hand slide away from the goblet to gently grasp your heaving shoulder, “I do not know what has come over me.”

Valarr smiles and gives your arm a gentle squeeze. “Come, let me help you untie your laces.”

As you eventually are able to lay in bed beside your new husband, listening to his quiet exhaling snores, you cannot ever fully relax for every time you do, you see a pair of predatory eyes staring back at you and a silent husband watching from the side. 

The anxiety has all but left your mind after a few days' distance from the wedding and, more importantly, Prince Aerion. 

You begin to fall in a sort of rhythm that takes your mind off all other pressing matters by weaving between embroidery and lengthy lessons on the history and founding of the Targaryen rule. The lessons had not been something required, but as the future queen, you thought it especially prudent to be educated in all there was to know about the kingdom. 

It makes you feel a bit like a child again, being taught an extensive curriculum on the language and culture and social etiquettes expected of a young noblewoman. It becomes a nice escape from your adult worries.

By the fifth day, you realize an important thing, however, and that is that in King’s Landing, no one can disappear completely.

“You have been working hard,” your husband says, surprising you as you step outside of the makeshift classroom. 

You stare at your husband for a moment in mute shock. His usually-quite tidy hair is unruly and standing in every direction on his head. He’s wearing a thick breastplate and underneath a thin shirt of cotton that is rolled up to his elbows, exposing his muscled forearms. His face is flushed and perspiring as if he ran all the way here. 

You swallow back a groan at the sudden rush of heat to your head at the sight. Who knew your sweet, disciplined husband had the ability to look so… well, wild?

It makes you wish for a moment that you had never postponed your wedding consummation—something that still had not been amended.

“I’ve been trying,” you finally force yourself to reply, “though not as much as you have, apparently.” You gesture to his sweaty, heaving body.

Your husband grins and cocks his head to the side. “Oh, this?” he says, pointing to his tunic, “I’ve just been warming up. Perhaps you’d like to join us, cheer me on from the stands?”

You bite your lip to try to hide the smile creeping up on you. “You’re quite vain, has anyone told you that before?” you say teasingly, “needing a pretty woman to cheer you on while you play with swords.”

You tuck your arm in the crook of his elbow as he leads you down the hall.

“Not just any pretty woman,” he says, “just my wife will do.”

You duck your head and grin like an unflowered girl of ten and two.

You follow your husband through the winding hallways of the castle before he stops in front of an open archway leading to a large, outdoor courtyard. Several men of the kingsguard take turns battering dummies and dueling each other with dull blades and thin armor. 

You gaze around at the open courtyard with a swell of excitement that quickly disappears when you notice a familiar head of white hair standing near the sidelines. His eyes find yours almost immediately and your stomach drops to your feet.

“Your cousin is here,” you say in a lilt that almost sounds like a question.

Valarr nods as his eyes sweep across the courtyard to where his cousin stands. “Yes, Aerion often trains with me.”

You swallow thickly and take a step back. Your husband cocks a brow toward you in a silent question.

“I can watch from here,” you tell him, your enthusiasm at seeing your husband in his element all but dissipating with the next spring breeze.

Valarr opens his mouth as if to say something else, but he’s interrupted.

“I thought I saw a little doe wandering around here.”

You angle your head toward Prince Aerion as he approaches. There’s a swagger to his walk that accentuates his crass words in a way that no other person’s movements can. You realize in that moment, if you show any slight outward expression of fear, he will find it and exploit it.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” you tell them, “just here to watch.” It’s your polite way of saying to Aerion, ‘fuck off.’

He grins as he takes in your presence. “Disturb me?” he laughs. “Now how could a doe disturb a dragon?”

You look over at Valarr, who seems annoyed but not giving the impression he is going to do anything to tell him off. Your blood boils with indignation.

You clench your fists into the fabric of your dress as your eyes meet Aerion’s again. Your husband won’t protect you? Then you will have to protect yourself. “You might be surprised, Aerion,” you tell him in a sickeningly-sweet tone, “a stag still has antlers plenty sharp enough to pierce a dragon… or an arsehole pretending to be one.”

If Aerion were truly a dragon, you would be but a pile of ash from the fire alight in his eyes. “Did you just threaten me, wh–”

“Enough!” your husband shouts. You fall silent at the violent eruption. You quickly look over at Valarr, expecting him to be finally protecting your dignity.

You hadn't noticed the three of you had drawn in quite the crowd. It only makes you feel more abused by the words of  the prince in that he does not care to antagonize you in front of other people. 

“You two have done nothing but make childish insults toward each other since our wedding night,” Valarr says, “apologise and move on.”

“I – what?” you croak, your heart thundering in your ears. You, apologise? For what? Defending yourself?

You feel a bit like a young doe caught in a bramble as a pack of wolves stalk forward from the shadows. Each of the kingsguard stares at you in expectation–not at Prince Aerion, at you. They all expect you to be the bigger person, to bridge the gap between you and Aerion because you are the woman and of course you should always seek to solve issues even if you did not create them.  

You look over at your husband as if half-expecting him to change his mind. He does not. You clench your jaw and shake your head. You look at Aerion who stares at you with that same shit-eating grin on his face and you realize like being struck with lightning that even though you had been welcomed into the fold by all appearances, you are still the outsider.

You do not say anything as you turn your back, pick up your dress ends, and begin to walk away.

“My love?” your husband calls out as you stride away. You hear the grating laughter of Prince Aerion as you step back inside the castle. You do not turn around.

The inside of the castle seems colder than it had just a short few minutes ago. As people pass you in the halls, you think anyone looking at you for a moment too long is plotting your demise. It is an awful feeling, you think, to not feel truly welcome in any part of the castle you now had to call home.

You do not regret marrying Valarr. Far from it, actually. But it would be wrong to say you did not feel some trepidation. Perhaps if you had known all those moons ago that your husband would not protect you and that your new cousin by marriage would be such a contemptuous bastard, you would not have agreed so hastily, leaping at any chance you could to bring notoriety to the Baratheon name.

“Princess?” you hear a voice say from behind you.

You turn to see Prince Maekar standing there in his signature black and red robes, his arms crossed behind his back and his eyebrows furrowed. Considering you knew very little about the man or his personality, you had not been keen to interact with him in the lingering fear that perhaps every Targaryen is a bit off in the head. The stark white hair and the gleaming violet eyes strike a chord of fear deep within the instinctual part of your brain that still has not fully recovered from the incident moments before. 

The little you did know about the prince makes you nervous. You had heard one of your handmaidens imply that he had played a role in his older brother’s untimely death. You think if he is at all similar to his second son, then perhaps he had played a bigger role than anyone could realize.

The man standing before you does not seem guilty, though. He looks tired. Weak in a way you did not know many nobles to appear.  

“Prince Maekar,” you greet, trying to hide the anxiety from leaking into your voice. What it ends up coming out like sounds a touch shrill.

His light eyes dart across your face. He comes to your side and tilts his head inquiringly. “What is the matter?”

To tell Maekar of his son’s warped obsession with seeing you suffer seems misplaced and so you just sigh and avert your eyes. “Just busy,” you tell him with a forced chuckle, “if I had known I’d be doing so much, I’m not sure I’d have agreed to be a princess.”

You aren’t sure what spurs the confession and if it is entirely removed from the truth. You are tired and overwhelmed in a way you’d never known before. 

Prince Maekar’s face does not shift from stoicism. “Walk with me.”

He turns his back and begins to walk down the hall. You have to speed-walk to catch up to him.

You fall into step with the prince—which is easier said than done, considering the length of his strides—and try to focus your attention elsewhere so as to not become too nervous in his presence.

“My sons have always struggled with their responsibility to the throne,” Prince Maekar says, his voice graveled and tense. “One copes with liquor, one with whores, while the last two will do anything they can to abdicate.”

You swallow thickly, trying to understand the point of what he is saying.

“Their cousin is not that way, he never has been. He takes everything he can in stride, hides his weaknesses behind duty and honor. He cares deeply about what others think to his own detriment.” He pauses, an emotion cringing across his lips. “Just like his father.”

Prince Maekar shakes his head. “I’ve never been good with words,” he says with a sigh, “just… what I’m trying to say is, you do not have to worry about Prince Valarr. He is the best of the lot.”

You frown. “Why… are you telling me this?”

Prince Maekar comes to a stop, staring at something over your shoulder. You look to where he stares at a framed gold portrait of Prince Baelor and his young boys and wife. You study the smiling faces, the naïve unknowingness of the horrors they would face in the future. You avert your eyes, feeling a well of hurt on behalf of your husband.

“They are all products of their experiences,” Maekar tells you, “Valarr was taught from a very young age to value his family above all else. Even when that family is the source of his suffering.”

He pauses, eyes roving over yours in search of understanding. “Do you see what I am saying?”

“I… believe I do.”

He leans forward. “My son does not deserve his concessions, yet he gives them anyway. Give your husband grace, but do not let him tear you down in the process.”

You nod silently and Prince Maekar heaves a heavy sigh as he looks back at the portrait hanging on the wall. You gather from his silence that is all he had to say as his eyes move as slowly as painting drying on a canvas.

You slip away with a mind more dizzied with conflicting thoughts than before. 

The Red Keep’s library is the one place you can always escape to when you have nowhere else to go. Its framework of dusty tomes and leather-bound books makes it incredibly easy for you to spend hours at a time there, sinking your teeth into the mottled pages and reading them until your eyes begin to hurt and the words blur together.

But now the books that used to provide comfort now just seem pretentious. You stare at the favorite you’d chosen from the collection—Ancient Targaryen Rulers and Legends—but nothing about it cheers you up. The usual delight you’d felt at reading about Aegon the Conqueror or Jaehaerys I’s accomplishments just makes your stomach turn today.

Were all Targaryens, even the ones known to be honorable by all accounts, corrupted by a dragon's desires? 

Every time you study the expressive eyes of his forefathers, you cannot prevent your mind from wandering to Valarr. If a man cannot even stand up for his wife in fear of backlash, how would he stand up for his kingdom?

Time passes slowly in the library. Although it is your safe haven, it starts to feel more like a prison the more time you spend inside. There’s nothing preventing you from leaving, and yet you can’t find it within yourself to do so, like invisible bars surrounding you on all sides. What would be there to greet you once you leave? An angry husband at your disobedience? Aerion, coming back to finish you off? Your maesters wondering when you would come back to your lessons? Nothing at all, and therefore a subsequent feeling of suffocating self-worthlessness?

When amber light begins to creep across the floors through the ornate windows, you finally think you might be mustering the courage necessary to leave. Then, the doors to the silent library creak open and your eyes dart to the person walking in.

Valarr tumbles through the doors like he’d been looking for some kind of refuge for eons. He hasn’t seen you yet—or he’s incredibly adept at playing coy—and he stands leaning up against the door for a moment, his chest heaving and eyes closed.

You are not used to seeing this side of him. The vulnerability, the raw anguish wrought across his face. You avert your eyes when his finally open.

You do not look up at him again, even though you are sure he’s seen you at this point. 

You can hear him shuffling around the room for several minutes. You re-read the same sentence thrice before you ignore the rest of the page and simply skip forward.

Your mind is too focused on the sound of his heeled boots against the floor as they go from bookshelf to bookshelf—and as they inch closer and closer to you.

“May I sit?”

His voice sounds like a little boy’s, soft and underlined with anxious tension. It makes your heart wrench. But you stay stoic as you nod curtly.

Valarr sighs at your silence and takes a seat diagonal to you, dropping a heavy book onto the table. He hasn’t changed since you last saw him, aside from the addition of a black and red cloak—one you recognize distantly as having belonged to his father. You swallow thickly and force your eyes down to the book. It’s a simple, unimpressive thing—no title or extra flair, with crumpled pages and dog-eared corners.

Your fingers itch to break the spine and delve into its contents.

You look back at your own book, a book you’d practically memorized at this point. The page it has been flipped to is about Rhaenyra Targaryen, The Realm’s Delight. Her violet eyes cast a magnificent glower onto your own. You get immediately sucked in, as you always do, to her story and how she fought in the Dance of the Dragons.

You do not notice your husband's eyes burning a hole into the side of your face until he speaks.

“Are you going to ignore me?”

Your eyebrows furrow and you slowly lift your head to look at him. 

You are at once struck by how tired he looks. Dark circles you hadn’t noticed before rest under his eyes. His hair is all but stuck to his skin from the perspiration. However, as you think about earlier, your skin crawls all over again and you cannot muster up sympathy. His throat bobs under your heated gaze.

You purse your lips and look back down at your book. “I have nothing to say.”

“Is… this truly about earlier?” he asks. “I misspoke, saying you ought to apologise, but surely…?” he trails off, his meaning left to interpretation.

You can feel your jaw clench beneath your skin. A tension-fueled ache pulling at your temples. 

You cannot contain the storm brewing beneath your skin. Baratheons had never been very good at that.

“I have lived around men like Aerion my whole life,” you start, your voice carefully controlled, “they break you down, strip you until you are nothing, and cut you until you bleed. All with a laugh.” You swallow thickly. “But the problem isn’t Aerion. It is you.”

Your husband’s eyes widen at this. 

“Have you truly never noticed?” you ask, “how your men always look to you when a problem is at hand? How they laugh at my pain, at my womanly insults, but praise Aerion for his quick wit with his own?” 

Your eyes begin to overflow with tears. “How do you think it looks when their own heir prince, the only man of higher standing than Prince Aerion in presence, does not stand up for his own wife? Like I’m worth less than dirt? It is humiliating.”

Your husband ducks his head as if he has been struck. His fingers clutch at the table, knuckles white and bursting at the seams of his skin.

“I… did not realize the breadth of my power,” he replies softly, “of what it matters for me to speak up on matters such as this.”

His eyes dart to yours and a muscle in his jaw jumps beneath his skin. “The problem is, I do not know how to react in those moments,” he says, eyebrows furrowed, “and it kills me because it is expected of me to know how to react in any uncertain situations. Like a king would. Like my father would.”

Your own eyes widen at the confession, and at the tears beading in your husband’s eyes. Tears that seem so unused to falling. 

“My father would have been able to handle this so much better than I could. You, the throne, Aerion,” he tells you, “I… I’m just a boy playing with his father’s sword.”

You shake your head. “Don’t say that.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?” Valarr says, “Father would have been able to handle everything so much better than I. It makes one wonder why I am here and he isn’t.”

You reach forward to place your hand upon his. Valarr drags his gaze to meet yours. “You cannot think that way,” you tell him, eyes serious, “it is destructive. It eats you alive. What happened, happened. The Seven took your father for a reason just as much as they allow you to live and breathe as you are now.”

You pull away once your husband nods. 

“I did not know him,” you say softly, “but I would imagine you live up to his estimations quite well.” You pause. “At the very least, you are not Aerion.”

He smirks at that comment.

When you finally take your leave a few minutes later, you wrestle with conflicting ideas of marriage, family, and nobility, and balancing those with your own personhood and demands for respect. And if it is an ideal that can even be realistically achieved and how. 

As you go to relax in your bath, you decide to let your worries sink for the moment. It is a notion you have not had since you first came to the Red Keep and you welcome it with open arms.

Later that night, you sit halfway folded over a piece of parchment, dragging your quill across the page. You are making a list of all the new things you have learned in your studies. Targaryen naming customs, the common verbiage of High Valriyan, the locations of all the important facilities in the Red Keep. 

You pause for a moment to stretch your fingers, but overshoot your arm and knock your ink well and can only watch in mild horror as it spills on the table. 

“Shit,” you say, quickly pulling the inkwell to sit upright again. You look around for anything to stop the puddle from seeping, but your eyes get caught on a figure lingering in the doorway.

Your eyebrows furrow and you look away.

“Am I allowed to come in?” your husband asks, “or should I resign to sleep with the hounds?”

You do not crack a smile at the quip as you often do. You simply nod and begin to wipe away the ink with a nearby cloth.

The door shuts with a soft click that reverberates through your skull. You hear a rustling of clothing and watch with solemn eyes as your husband begins to untie the laces holding his form-fitting shirt together. His densely muscled back is revealed to you in one fell swoop as he removes the shirt and begins straightening out his sleeping outfit. The softened candle light flickers across his pale skin, highlighting faded scars and moles that form a constellation across his skin.

You avert your eyes before you can feel yourself losing your nerve, beginning to read over your notes untouched by the ink spillage.

Your husband has other ideas.

“I suppose I should apologise,” you hear him say, his voice slightly muffled through the mild preoccupation of changing his breeches, “for… earlier.”

You swallow thickly, the parchment’s corners crumpling under the weight of your grip. Your voice is quiet as it comes out next. “Thank you, but that is not necessary.”

“No.” He turns half his face toward you. His one brown eye glows amber under the firelight, whilst his other remains bathed in the cloak of night. “Allow me to rephrase… I need to apologise.”

You look down at your parchment and place it quietly onto the table, folding your hands onto the sheer shift covering your legs. You hear his footsteps creak across the wood floor as he steps closer, taking a seat next to you on the chaise. He stays a respectable distance apart, enough that you can feel his presence without being oppressed by it.

“You… do not deserve to be spoken to like that,” Valarr says softly, “no one does, but certainly not you.”

You shrug one shoulder. “Prince Aerion is foul-mouthed and ill-tempered, you said so yourself,” you say, “I should have expected it.”

“Listen to me,” he tells you sternly. Your eyes move on their own accord. You are startled at once by the intensity of his mismatched gaze, his set jaw, and his furrowed brows. “You are to be queen. Prince Aerion has acted entirely out of line and I have made excuses for him because of his relation to me but I cannot any longer. You deserve better.”

“Where is all this coming from?” you ask, your lips pulled into a frown. “Just a few hours ago, you made it seem like I was the embarrassing one, not him.”

“I…” he pauses and his intensity dims, “took a walk to the Great Sept after our conversation in the library. I was reminded of something my father often said…” he looks pained, “that while family is important, a good knight always stands up for the innocent. And I want to be a good knight—a good husband, for you.”

You feel a rush of joy surge within you. You could cry, you think, but you force it down. Not out of shame, but out of not wishing to see the moment broken.

“I’m glad to hear that,” you say through a voice laden with strong emotion, “I… have been very stressed lately, but this will help.”

He places a finger underneath your chin to angle your head toward his—to capture and hold your full attention. You can feel his hot breath flush across your cheeks.

“Tell me what I can do to help more,” he tells you earnestly, “tell me so I can help unburden you.”

You trace the sincerity of your husband’s eyes down his lightly-freckled nose to the heart-shaped lips opened just barely to allow his breaths to escape. You should not forgive him so quickly, you know. Not without knowing if he would follow through with his promises. But all you can think is how delicious he looks on his metaphorical hands and knees and how much you wish you could kiss him senseless with one hand while (lovingly!) strangling him with the other.

“Kiss me,” you whisper, a small smile curling on your lips.

Valarr’s eyes widen almost comically before his senses return to him and he meets your lips with a soft grunt. 

It is a bit clumsy at first. Like the kissing between two virgins—but perhaps you both are ones and in that case, it is incredibly on point. Your teeth clip and your noses bump as you try to figure out the perfect position. He tastes like the red wine he’s been sipping from all night and it feels like you’re drowning in him.

You can feel everything all at once. The heat from his skin burning against yours. That sly hand seeping through your clothes. The smell of sweat gleaning off his skin.

He pulls you closer with the palm of one of his hands against your back, reclining his body against the cushion of the chaise as you cover him. You bring your hand up from where it was leaned against the arm of the chair to his neck, keeping him perfectly poised to receive your affection.

When you finally pull away to catch your breath, his eyes are so dilated that you can no longer tell which one is brown and which is blue. His chest heaves from the exertion. 

“I want to…” you start to say, but trail off.

He regards you seriously. “Are you sure?” his eyes look back and forth between your own, “we do not have to.”

You reach forward to place a hand against his cheek. He leans into your palm to place a gentle kiss against where your pulse thrums.

“I want you,” you tell him softly, reverently, “I want you more than life itself.”

Your husband's throat bobs and you notice a line of sweat cross the sharp line of his jaw to slide down his neck. You lean forward before you can stop yourself to plant a kiss to where it stops. You pull away, a bit flustered, but your husband does not allow you to stew in your thoughts for very long before he surges forward, kissing you hard and fast and with teeth clipping and nose bumping but landing just right all the same.

As you kiss, you feel his warm, calloused palm drag up the side of your thigh to hike up your shift. When it reaches the top of your hip, you feel yourself unconsciously shiver. He breaks away.

“Cold?” he murmurs against your lips.

“No,” you whisper, “hot.”

He lets out a laugh through his nose as he leans back to take in your newly-exposed skin. Not ever one to be enthralled by exposition, rather more interested in the climax, (pun definitely intended) you grab the end of the shift and pull it over your head. You throw it to the side and immediately you feel the cold air hit your exposed skin and cause a flurry of goose flesh to rise upon your limbs.

You glance up at your husband’s expression to find his face to have darkened considerably. You swallow thickly at the complete absence of light within his eyes as they leave a trail of flame from your thighs to your stomach to your breasts to your face, where he blinks slowly, eyes hooded, as if existing within a dream. In between his thighs, you notice a suspiciously hard lump.

“Much better,” you say with a mischievous grin.

He grabs your chin in his hand and looks you deeply in the eyes. “I need you to heed me when I say this,” he says solemnly, “you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever had the pleasure of laying my eyes upon.”

You avert your eyes in a sign of bashfulness, though your heart strums behind your ribs like a drum. “I’m sure that’s not true. There are plenty of beautiful women that wander the Streets of Silk.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he says, “never been.”

Surprised, your eyes find his again. “Honest? I thought all princes went at least once.”

He lets out a soft chuckle. “You are the first woman I’ve laid with, love. I’m surprised you couldn’t tell.”

You lean forward to seal your mouths back in a passionate kiss. He wraps an arm around your back and you fall forward onto him like a newborn fawn finding its feet for the first time. 

His clothes are removed just as quickly and thrown to where your shift lays limply in the corner. For a moment after it is all laid bare, you stare at your husband’s masculine form in complete silence. His chest heaves with each breath he takes, his stomach is lined with lithe muscles and deep scars. As your eyes trail south, you get caught on the white hair at the base of his incredibly impressive…

“Perhaps we take this to the bed?” Valarr suggests. He rubs the back of his neck and he looks like the picture of a blushing boy caught with his hand in the pastry plate. Your stupidly angelic, devilishly handsome husband. He was truly going to kill you. “My back does not approve of this arrangement currently.”

You follow him to the bed as if in a trance. How far gone did one have to be to find even the bare backside of a man to be attractive? You did not remember your mother mentioning that in her sexual education crash course. To think back on it now, she mostly lingered on the logistical side of baby-making because she really wanted grandchildren.

You fall back on the plush bed and dissuade yourself from thinking anymore of your mother in a time like this. It is like you are purposefully trying to ruin the moment again.

Valarr places his hand gingerly on the side of your inner thigh, eyes staring at yours as if beckoning some kind of unspoken permission. You give him a nod. He slides his hand up toward your cunt and the warmth is so immediate and strong that you recoil at first.

“Sorry,” you say with a nervous laugh, “not used to hands there that are not my own.”

“I will be gentle,” he says quietly.

“I know you will.”

Your skin feels like it is on fire as he works one long finger into your sex. You let out a sharp gasp when he brings it all the way out to go in again.

“Gods be good,” your husband groans, bringing his finger to the light of the nearby candle. It glistens beneath the flickering flame.

You thought it was impossible for you to become more aroused in that moment until your husband sinks the finger into his mouth to suck it clean. You suddenly feel close to bursting into flames.

“Just… would you fuck me now?”

Valarr’s eyes shoot open and his finger falls from his lips. He grins, pulling his body to lean over yours, his throbbing cock leaned on your thigh.

“Who am I to deny the orders of a future queen?” he whispers against your lips. 

He seals your mouth with his and at the same time, carefully lines his cock to your cunt. He slides in with one quick thrust that has you gasping and tearing away from the kiss. A momentary pain dulls swiftly to an aching throb. You squint your eyes shut until the pain disappears completely.

“Are you okay, my love? Did I hurt you?”

You nearly forget yourself at the sweet lilt in your husband’s tone. It is so pure, so kind, you feel close to tears. What were you mad at him for, again? You couldn’t remember your own name much less that with his hard-as-steel cock throbbing inside you.

“Move,” you grit out, “fuck me, Valarr.”

Your husband does not need to be told twice and soon he’s hitting his rhythm. Every thrust of his hips feels like bliss. His hand slides up your arm to grasp your own and you watch, enraptured by his facial expressions. As he picks up speed, however, you can no longer fully focus on anything but your building release.

The grunts and groans and moans and the shaking of the bed frame collapse into one long, obscene melody.

A thought pops into your head at that moment that does not fully pass all the required checks and balances of every other sentence you say and it tumbles out before you can stop it. 

“I wish Prince Aerion was here to see this,” you say, the words gritty and raw and broken off by a loud moan tearing its way through your vocal chords, “I think his horrified expression would-ah!-make my year.” 

“Fuck Aerion,” your once-chivalrous, now completely debauched husband bites out. His eyes are alight with a fury you had never seen before. Hm, you think, perhaps he did harbor some dragon fire.

“Seven hells,” you moan, “you’ve never said anything more attractive.”

“Tomorrow,” your husband grunts out, “I’m going to kill him for denying me this pleasure.”

“Oh, please let me be there to see it!” you gasp. You can feel your climax quickly approaching.

“I’m going to—“ your sentence breaks off as you are enraptured by pleasure. Your husband leans down to stuff his face into your neck as he thrusts one last time before his seed fills your cunt.

Your husband rolls off of you at the end of his peak, heaving a labored sigh of well-earned pleasure. Your limbs tremble with a mix of exertion and delight, and you suddenly let out a giggle.

“What’s so funny?” your husband mumbles as he turns on his side to peer closely at your face. His reddish hair sticks to his forehead like a second skin and a small grin curls at his lips at your amusement. 

You put your hand over your mouth in an attempt to calm your laughter. “Did we just…” you let out another snort, “get off to killing your cousin?”

Valarr’s grin takes over the entire bottom of his face as he remembers the conversation from just moments before. “I guess we did,” he says with a soft, disbelieving laugh of his own.

Once the laughter calms and the quilt is pulled to cover your bodies and the candles are extinguished and the only thing you can hear is the sound of your own breaths, you realize your husband has not drifted asleep yet.

He strokes his fingers across the back of your hand in his comforting hold against your back. “I meant what I said, y’know? before we consummated," he whispers into your neck, “I will not tolerate it again.”

You turn to face Valarr and your heart skips a beat at the devotion reflected in his hooded eyes and the small smile on his face. “Thank you,” you say just as quietly. You place a barely-there kiss to his mouth. “Sleep well.”

He repeats the sentiment back to you and you close your eyes and drift to sleep with a pleasant ache between your thighs and a hope for a promise to remain fulfilled.

Bonus:

Prince Aerion sits across from you and Valarr in the dining hall. He looks between the two of you with suspicion clear on his face.

He goes to call out what is an obvious afterglow clinging to your skin, but his cousin’s eyes dart to his with a startling glare that halts him in his tracks.

“Not a word,” Valarr grumbles.

Aerion’s hands shoot up in the universal “I come in peace” symbol. “What’d I do?”

“I know what you were thinking,” Valarr says, “don’t say it or I will go straight to Maekar.”

Aerion scoffs at the childish threat, but he abides by it. He looks down at his plate wondering who in the Seven hells had pissed in his cousin’s goblet.