Chapter Text
The rain followed them out of the Mud Gate—a relentless, grey sheet that turned the Kingsroad into a slurry of clinging clay. Outside the relative shelter of the Red Keep’s high walls, the world smelled of wet horses, sodden wool, and the salt-stung tang of the Blackwater. It was a bleak morning to begin a progress, the sky a bruised purple that promised no relief before nightfall. The smallfolk had huddled under eaves and canvas awnings as the royal retinue passed, their eyes wide and hollow, staring at the polished forged fittings of the Targaryen wheelhouse. They looked not at the princes inside, but at the mud churning beneath the wheels, perhaps wondering how many of their winter stores had been taxed to pay for the gold-leaf detailing on the doorframes.
But inside the wheelhouse, the air was entirely different. It was trapped, suffocatingly warm, and choked with a volatile brew of competing scents that made the nostrils burn.
Valarr sat with his spine pressed rigidly against the padded bench, his gloved hands resting heavily upon his knees. Every jolt of the carriage rattled his teeth, the metal-shod wheels catching on the deep ruts of the road, but he refused to slouch. To slouch was to yield, and he would not yield an inch of his posture in this box. He kept his eyes fixed strictly on the small, square window, watching the endless, bleak parade of the Kingsroad’s ancient pines, their dark boughs weeping under the downpour. He did not want to look across the narrow width of the carriage. He did not want to acknowledge the creature sharing his cage.
Across from him, lounging lengthwise upon the bench with heated, glittering eyes boring into him, was Aerion.
The prince had scorned his proper traveling leathers, dismissing his squires with a stream of colorful Valyrian curses when they had tried to present them that morning. Instead, he had opted for a loose tunic of crimson silk, fine enough to show the contours of his chest, lined at the cuffs and hem with thick black fox fur. The collar was left intentionally unfastened, exposing the smooth column of his throat—and, more provocatively, the jagged, crusting mating mark upon his shoulder.
The wound was still angry, weeping a faint pink fluid in places where the scabs had pulled during his restless sleep. It had been slathered in a pungent herbal salve by the Grand Maester’s acolytes, leaving a greasy, golden sheen across his pale skin. The scent of the herbs—cloves, wintergreen, and willow bark—did little to mask what lay beneath.
Aerion’s musk was sharp today, sour with a bitter irritation that clawed at the back of Valarr’s throat like turned vinegar. Claiming him three nights ago had been a bloody, wretched business; the omega had thrashed so violently during their bedding that Valarr had nearly been thrown off the mattress entirely. The alpha had used his knees, his elbows, and his teeth like a wild dog from the Flea Bottom gutters, his shaft slipping from the omega’s heat twice before Valarr could finally master his weight and pin him down by his silver hair. Even now, with the bond settled like a heavy iron collar around Aerion’s soul, the younger prince was still fuming. He was furious that the laws of nature forbade an omega from sinking his own teeth into an alpha’s neck in return, furious that the constraints of the blood itself had deemed him the vessel rather than the master.
Such was the law of the blood, as it had always been since the days of Old Valyria. Aerion would belong only to Valarr, bound by the phantom shackle of the bite, yet Valarr could take another omega to his bed should some mishap befall his consort, or simply if the fancy took him. It was the way of the world, ancient and unyielding as the Wall. Valarr could not comprehend why Aerion wasted his breath fuming over things no man, not even a prince, could ever alter.
But then, Valarr understood very little of his mate. They had known one another since Aerion’s birth, raised in the same shadowed corridors of Maegor’s Holdfast, yet in all the years since, Valarr had failed to see beneath the prince's skin. He often wondered if there was true flesh and blood beneath that cold, arrogant hide, or only wild fire and the creeping madness that the Commons whispered always claimed every second Targaryen. Aerion was a dangerous creature—a vicious, cruel prince. Valarr had seen the way Aerion looked at servants, the way he handled his mounts, using the spur until the beast’s flanks bled.
Valarr wished, with a quiet, crushing desperation that tasted like ash, that the gods had given him a mate who understood the burden of the crown. An omega who offered peace after a long day in the council chambers, a soft scent of lavender or lemon to soothe his brow, not a constant, grinding battle of wills that left his blood hot and his jaw aching from clenched teeth.
“If you stare any harder at those pines, cousin, I fear they might burst into flame,” Aerion said. His voice cut through the rhythmic rumble of the metal-shod wheels like a whetted dagger slicing through silk. He did not look up from his boots, which were propped carelessly on the edge of a cushion, his long fingers scraping the road-mud from the buckles with a silver-handled pick. “Though I suppose a fire would be welcome. This wretched box is as chilly as a winter grave.”
Valarr did not turn his head. He kept his gaze locked on the grey pines. “The curtains are drawn, Aerion. If you are cold, pull your furs tighter around your shoulders.”
Aerion let out a short sound, entirely devoid of mirth. “Furs. Always the dull, plodding solution from our future Lord Protector. You truly are Baelor’s son, aren't you? So dreadfully proper. So utterly tedious.” He finally raised his violet eyes, their depths glittering with an almost predatory, malicious intent in the dim light of the carriage. “Look at you. Sitting there like some low-born steward counting sacks of grain in the cellars. Is this how the great Crown Prince prepares for the Tourney at Ashford Meadow? By boring his consort to death before we even cross the Reach?”
“Someone must ensure the gold is allocated, the outriders are fed, and the realm does not fall to ruin while you spend your days dreaming of your own magnificence,” Valarr replied evenly. His voice was steady, the perfect cadence of a prince trained to rule, though beneath his leather gloves, his knuckles whitened until the seams of the hide groaned.
“Oh, you sacrifice much for us all, I am certain,” Aerion mocked, leaning forward. The shift in his position was deliberate, a slow, feline unfurling that caused the collar of his silk tunic to flare wider, exposing the full line of his collarbone and the raw, unhealed skin near his shoulder.
His musk flared with the movement—a wave of sour milk and crushed roses that filled the small space of the wheelhouse. It was a deliberate provocation, an omega using the sharp distress of his scent as a weapon, meant to shake Valarr’s stoic calm and force his alpha to react. “The singers will make a grand, weeping ballad of your patience, no doubt. The Pious Prince and His Burden.”
Valarr’s jaw tightened until the muscles at his temples throbbed with a dull ache. He could feel his inner alpha stirring—a dark, angry beast that lived in the lower belly, waking at the scent of defiance. It wanted nothing more than to lunge across the narrow space, wrap its hands around Aerion’s slender throat, and choke the insolence from his pretty mouth until those violet eyes went wide with true submission. The bond between them pulsed like an open, salt-rubbed wound, demanding a dominance that Valarr, driven by a fierce resolve to remain a man of honor and not a beast of the field, refused to claim through brute force.
“We have a long journey ahead of us,” Valarr said, his voice dropping into a low rumble that vibrated deep within his chest, a subtle warning tone that usually made squires drop their gaze. “If the accommodations of the royal wheelhouse are not to your liking, I can easily have a horse saddled for you. You may ride in the downpour with the vanguard and see how your silks fare against the Reach's mud.”
Aerion’s mouth curled into a triumphant sneer. He had drawn blood—or at least a crack in the armor—and to him, that small reaction was victory enough for the afternoon. He sank back into his cushions with a lazy grace, a smug, glittering creature of silver and silk.
“You wouldn't dare,” Aerion taunted. “What would your precious father say if his darling heir left his delicate new consort to drown in the mud like a baggage mule? No, cousin. You will sit there, and you will endure me.”
Valarr closed his eyes, inhaling the stifling, bitter-sweet musk of the omega, and prayed for the sun to set quickly.
The roadside inn they reached by nightfall was a miserable, drafty structure called The Broken Shield. Its timber was rotting from decades of river damp, and its common room reeked of sour ale, woodsmoke that wouldn't draw properly, and the unwashed wool of local smallfolk who had been cleared out to make room for the royal guards. Because they were newly mated—no matter how ill-matched their temperaments remained—propriety demanded they share one of the few habitable rooms the inn possessed.
The chamber was small and cramped, dominated by a sagging four-post bed with a moth-eaten mattress that smelled of old feathers. A single, sputtering tallow candle provided the only light, casting long, shivering shadows across the whitewashed stone walls.
Valarr stood by the unglazed window, having shed his traveling cloak. The rain was still drumming against the exterior shutters, a low, maddening static. His head still throbbed, a relentless stabbing behind his eyes. Enduring Aerion's biting jabs, his mocking insults, and his weaponized scent throughout the long hours in the wheelhouse had stretched his patience to its absolute limit. His skin felt too tight for his frame, his blood hot and restless with a thwarted alpha pride that had no outlet save violence or lust, neither of which he wished to give in to.
Behind him, the soft padding of cloth-shod feet on stone signaled the small army of servants attending to Aerion. They moved like ghosts in the dim light, terrified of the younger prince's temper. They unlaced his mud-spattered finery with trembling fingers and wiped a damp rag over the nape of his neck, as though the prince had endured some grueling labor rather than a comfortable, padded ride. They draped him in a fresh robe—a garish thing of Myrish orange silk that offended Valarr's eyes by its very sight. Valarr himself changed into a simpler tunic of grey wool, refusing a single hand to aid him, preferring the solitude of his own labor. When the servants finally withdrew, bowing low until their noses nearly touched the floor, they were left staring at one another in the gloom.
Before Aerion could launch another barb from his tongue, a scullion returned with their supper tray. The innkeeper had tried to make the spread as grand as his meager stores allowed, but it remained a poor, rustic affair: a pewter platter of grey salt-beef swimming in congealed oil, a bowl of withered mealy apples, and dense, coarse barley trenchers that could double as cobblestones.
Aerion sneered at the offering, turning his face away in open disgust before reaching across the small trestle table to snatch the single sweet winter-cake—a dry thing preserved with honey and lard—from Valarr’s own plate, leaving the rest untouched. Valarr did not care about the food; his stomach was tied in knots. He watched Aerion chew with a slow, deliberate insolence, and thought that he would have gladly shoved the entire tray down Aerion’s throat if it would only shut his arrogant gullet for an hour.
When the dismal meal was done, Valarr wiped the grease from his hands on a rough linen rag. The tallow candle was burning low, its wick drowning in its own melted fat, and a leaden weight settled deep in his gut. By all the laws of the Seven, he was an alpha with a comely, high-born omega in his chamber to do with as he pleased, yet instead of the warm anticipation that should have accompanied a new marriage, all he felt was a lingering dread.
That dread only deepened as Aerion rose from the bench and paced toward the meager bed. He unfastened the sash of his Myrish orange robe with a fluid, theatrical gesture and carelessly tossed the expensive silk onto the dirty floor, leaving it in the dust for some nameless servant to find and fold come the morrow.
The flickering candlelight danced across his exposed form. His smallclothes were of thin, sheer Lysene linen, pale as milk and clinging to the slender, deceptively soft lines of his body. He looked more like a creature carved from marble than a living man of flesh and blood, his skin gleaming with an unnatural light in the dark room. The smile upon his lips was sharp, curved with a mocking knowledge of his own power, and it was anything but welcoming.
“Are you going to sit there all night like a sentry, or do you intend to perform your rites?” Aerion asked. His voice was a silken purr that vibrated through the small room, but his violet eyes were cold, evaluating Valarr’s form like a captain assessing a horse before a wager. He tilted his head back against the wooden post, deliberately baring the side of his neck, the angry redness around the mating bite a shade calmer than it had been that morning, but still swollen. “Come closer, Valarr. Let’s see if the road has given you any more vigor than the Red Keep.”
Valarr’s manhood showed no signs of stirring, remaining stubbornly soft and flaccid beneath his linen tunic. He felt an immense detachment from his own skin. He walked toward the bed as one approaches a mountain viper coiled in the high grass, waiting for the rattle.
A derisive laugh cut the gloom this time—echoing off the low ceiling. Aerion looked down at Valarr’s waist and found him wanting, of course.
“You need not approach me like a man walking to the gallows, Valarr. Your restraint is no virtue.”
Only Aerion would mistake weary disinterest for restraint, though Valarr was not surprised, given how the omega was fawned over by every courtier and hedge knight from Sunspear to the Wall. They saw the silver hair and the royal blood and fell to their knees. Would it have been better, Valarr wondered bitterly, to pretend he did not see behind the mask? To live a life of courtly delusion where Aerion pretended to be a gentle, dutiful consort and Valarr acted charmed by his beauty?
It was far too late for that now, he supposed. They had spilled blood on the sheets three nights ago, and the bond was sealed in the marrow of their bones.
Valarr shed his own clothes, his movements methodical as Aerion scoured him with eyes like blades. Did the omega wish that Valarr was taller, broader of shoulder, or had skin that matched the unblemished, milk-white pallor of Aerion's own? Valarr did not know, and did not rightly care. Let his consort feed his vanity with whatever delusions pleased his twisted mind, so long as it kept him pliant for the night and his claws sheathed.
He stepped out of his smallclothes. At last, a faint, unwanted ember was stirring within his groin. Whether it was the concentrated potency of the omega’s scent at such close quarters—now shifting from bitter irritation to the sweeter musk of a body preparing for ingress—or merely his own body’s begrudging instinct to perform the animal duty expected of it, he could not say. The raw instincts of the blood were simple, stupid things; the alpha smelled the open heat of an omega, and it prepared to mount, regardless of the hatred in the soul.
He climbed onto the sagging mattress, the old ropes groaning beneath his heavier weight. He nudged Aerion backward onto the pillows, a firm pressure of his forearm against the omega’s chest that earned him a venomous glare from those violet pools.
How do you expect me to take you when you look at me with such murder? The words almost snapped from Valarr’s lips, but he swallowed the retort down into his chest, tasting bile. Aerion could never be reasoned with when he was in search of trouble, and Valarr refused to bring that petty, exhausting warfare into their marriage bed tonight. He wanted it done. He wanted to sleep.
He reached down and forced Aerion’s thighs apart, his hands gripping the insides of the prince's knees. The omega let him, though his legs were incredibly tense—stiff, pale columns that felt as though they might snap closed like a bear trap and crush Valarr’s ribs if he lowered his guard for a second.
Valarr reached between them, his fingers parting the soft flesh to find the source of the scent. The silver hair between Aerion's thighs was damp, coated with a meager, thin slick that looked like melted lard in the candlelight. It was a poor, cold offering—the product of his ancient nature rather than any true arousal or desire for Valarr—but it was better than nothing. It would prevent the tearing that had ruined their first night.
He guided his length to the entrance, the tip of his crown catching on the tight, unyielding ring of the omega's passage. He leaned his weight forward, bracing his forearms on either side of Aerion’s head. When he pushed inside, it was undeniably easier than before; the path had been broken, and there was less resistance from the omega's body, yet the moment his girth began to stretch the walls, Aerion’s fingers flew upward and dug into the meat of Valarr's braced arms.
The prince's short nails bit deep, pressing into the muscle until it was tight enough to bruise—a spiteful, silent anchor in the dark. Aerion was still in pain, then; his body was not truly welcoming the intrusion. If the omega was doomed to suffer the indignity of submission, he would ensure Valarr was dragged down into the misery with him, forcing the alpha to feel the sting of his resistance. Though, in truth, Valarr knew Aerion likely wished him harm regardless of the cause.
What would you have me do? Yet another bitter question rose in Valarr’s throat, but he kept it trapped behind his teeth as well, his breath coming in a low, controlled hiss through his nose. He began to move, thrusting shallowly, pulling back until only the head of his shaft remained within the wet velvet, then sliding back in as carefully as he could manage.
He knew well enough where he might touch with his fingers or how he might angle his hips to provoke a stronger reaction from the omega—he had read the Maesters' scrolls on the mysteries of the blood—but he had no desire to test Aerion's volatile temper tonight. Would Aerion hiss at him like a wildcat? Strike out with bared nails across his face, or try to fling Valarr off his body entirely? Valarr would not risk the chaos in this miserable tavern room; he preferred to finish this coupling as swiftly and cleanly as possible. Let him spend his seed, let it take root in that cold womb, and let them be done with this forced intimacy for a season.
Let it take, he prayed fiercely, his eyes locked onto the dark timber corners of the ceiling where the cobwebs hung. By the Smith who shapes the future and the Mother who grants life, let it take tonight so I may leave his bed.
Sounds began to filter from Aerion’s parted lips—breathy hitches that caught in the back of his throat. Valarr could not safely assign them to either pain or pleasure; they sounded like the cries of a bird caught in a net, desperate and small. The fingers dug into Valarr's forearms remained locked in place, though they did not break the skin. No blood this time, Valarr noted with a grim sort of relief; on the night of their bedding, the prince's nails had torn his shoulders to bloody ribbons that had stained his ceremonial shifts.
His own breath began to hitch in his chest, the potent scent of the slick rising between their bellies, driving his alpha instincts into a higher gear. His pace quickened against his own will, his hips moving with a smoother, harder rhythm as he slid in and out of the omega's tight, swallowing heat. At the very least, that secret part of Aerion remained warm, a stark contrast to the ice that seemed to fill the rest of his character.
“Harder,” Aerion said.
The single word cut through the fragile silence of the room like a whip crack across a horse's flank.
Valarr froze for a fraction of a second, his weight balanced precariously inside the omega. He had known that Aerion was beneath him, of course, yet until that moment, they had moved together in a dead silence, as detached as two faceless strangers coupling in the dark of a brothel. He looked down into those violet eyes again, his breath hot on Aerion's cheek.
Aerion’s face was flushed, a high, rosy color rising along his cheekbones and spilling down to the pale column of his throat. Once again, Valarr could not distinguish whether the color was born of discomfort or some true pleasure the prince derived from the friction. The omega's long silver hair had fallen loose from its braids, spreading like a fine silk veil across the linen of the pillow, softening the harsh line of his jaw. He looked almost beautiful like this, illuminated by the dying candle—a tragic, mythical prince of Valyria—though Valarr knew it would be a grievous, fatal error to ever say as much aloud to a creature who fed on weakness.
“Harder,” Aerion repeated, his teeth bared in something that looked like a snarl but sounded like an invitation. His hips gave a slight, upward twitch, a deliberate, wicked adjustment that aligned their bodies perfectly, drawing Valarr deeper into his core than he had traveled before.
The small spark in Valarr's blood erupted into a sudden, wild blaze. He thrust harder, as commanded, abandoning his careful restraint. He drove into the omega with his full weight, his thighs striking against Aerion’s slight hips with a wet, heavy slap that filled the chamber. The old wooden bedframe shifted under the violence of the movement, its headboard striking the thin lath-and-plaster wall with a rhythmic, damning thud.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
A sudden, freezing jolt of panic seized Valarr's mind, even as his groin burned with approaching release. Who was housed in the adjoining chamber? The inn was small, the walls no thicker than a finger's width. His father, Baelor, was sleeping somewhere in this wretched structure. Or perhaps Maekar, Aerion’s formidable father, was just on the other side of the timber wall. Valarr could not recall the layout of the hallway.
A hot flush of intense shame crept up his neck at the thought of his elders hearing the him pounding his cousin like a common camp follower in a roadside hovel. Yet, to his internal surprise, the sheer peril of the discovery did not wither his strength. Instead, the danger only stoked the fire in his blood—a forbidden, shameful spark that quickened his pulse to a frantic race and lent a sudden, furious urgency to his movements. The risk of being heard by the men who ruled the realm made his shaft throb, growing larger, stretching Aerion until the omega let out a high gasp that was purely carnal.
More sounds began to spill from Aerion’s parted lips, his white teeth sinking fiercely into his own bottom lip until a bead of dark blood appeared against the swollen flesh. He was taking every inch of the furious drive, his hands moving from Valarr's arms to clutch at the rough wool of the mattress beneath them, his head throwing back as his back arched off the bed. The relentless, deafening tempo of the bed frame hitting the wall echoed in the dim room like a drumbeat of war, breaking the last of Valarr's royal decorum.
He could not stop. He did not want to stop. He drove home three more times, buried to the root, his breath coming in ragged grunts that matched the wet friction between their hips, until Valarr was finally clenching, his entire body going rigid as stone. He threw his head back, a low groan trapped in his throat, as he spilled his hot seed deep into the omega's depths, filling him until it overflowed onto the sheets.
For several long moments, the only sound in the room was the labored breathing of two princes and the steady, endless drumming of the rain outside the walls of the inn.