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Dark clothing, black on black embroidery, the chapel's half-darkness deepening his eyes to a shade Aerion has never seen before. That flush sits warm across his nose, and his hand is still on Aerion's face, as if he's forgotten to move it.

“We may begin," says the priest, and then adds, after a few pointed seconds: "If the Alpha would be so kind as to step slightly to the side. Away from the groom. Thank you. Now. Let us proceed.”

"He was going to." It comes out broken, a whisper with no strength behind it, because Aerion cannot lie about this and cannot survive much more of what he's hearing. "He told me himself. More than a month ago. He said that you… that you were…"

One of a kind. The words won't come. His lips are trembling too badly to shape them.

"…He would never have let me truly have you." Duncan's head shakes slowly, heavily. "Just being allowed near you—that would have been enough. The bare chance of seeing you would have kept me loyal until I stopped breathing. But your father was killed. And I took every opportunity. Every one." Nearly a snarl. "I knew it was now or never. And that only the strongest Alpha alive could deserve a place beside you, so I had to become that, overnight. Every dream collapsed into one. I wanted everything for myself. And yes—yes, you're the heir of the Targaryens, the most valuable mafia prince—so I wanted everything, because everything is you to me—"

"There's something… wrong with you." Aerion summons every remaining scrap of consciousness. "Not right in the head! I'm not little. And not—a sweetheart!"

i’ve written a lot of angst in my time, but there is something fundamentally unhinged about writing duncan and aerion. like, the vulnerability of this pairing??? unreal. this dynamic is something else entirely. at their core, as the canon characters, they are both defined by a staggering, reckless stubbornness

think about it:

Duncan: refusing to compromise, desperately trying to be an actual honorable knight in a corrupt system that only cares about titles

Aerion: refusing to compromise, white-knuckling his humanity away, trying so hard to convince everyone (and himself) that he’s a living, breathing dragon in a world where dragons already became a myth