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lovebugism · 5 months ago

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✶ ┄ PAIR OF WINGS, GENTLY USED !

part one | part two

summary: following the aftermath of rook's rest, aemond struggles to convince you of his innocence while aegon struggles to stay alive. the three of you come to the striking realization that love is not always soft – sometimes it feels like dragonfire. (12k)

pairing: aemond targaryen / f!reader / aegon targaryen

contents: established realtionship(s), enemies to lovers, arranged marriage, angst, hurt/comfort cw for mentions of gore and violence, swearing, cheating, smut 18+, threesome (sorta? but not really?), cuckholding, exhibitionism & voyeurism (aegon likes to watch)

The battle waging across the sea startles you from sleep. You rouse before sunset to your heart unfurling behind your ribcage, pierced and bleeding out, as though you were one of the many soldiers reaching their end on the battlefield.

You wake from the nightmare only to enter the next — a raven, sent at dawn, from an allied house along the bay. Written in splattered ink along the worn parchment is a report of injuries sustained by the king. Alicent reads them aloud to you and Helaena, with shaking hands and a trembling voice. Your heart’s beating too loudly in your ears to understand her.

“His Grace fell violently from many leagues above the ground,” she managed to recite through choked-back cries. “Riddled with dragonflame, His Grace’s armor has melted heartily to his flesh—”

You find yourself planted firmly on the steps of the Dragonpit without a clue of how you got there, dressed only in your thin nightgown and thinner slippers. You suppose it was muscle memory that carried you there. You think it must be muscle memory, still, that has kept you standing in the same place — unmoving as the lilac sunrise turns sickly grey with rainclouds, without any food or drink offered by the handmaidens you have since sent away.

It is a profound and heavy thing, you realize, to be alive in the fresh early morning, when the world is so broken and ending for so many. The thought of Aegon dying in the sweetness of late summer makes you weep. You choke back burning tears in wait for his brother’s return — Aemond Targaryen, your husband, your wound — from which there has been no word.

A black, ponderous cloud of worry fogs your mind. You can see it all so vividly; feel it all as if you lived it — a death so horrid and beyond your comprehension. You wait and ache while your brain hums with madness.

You hear Vhagar before you see her.

The great beast shifts storm clouds with its leviathan wings, shaking the ground with each slow and heavy flutter as she nears the ground. Even from here, you can see the holes piercing her thin, satiny skin.

Your racing heart drops to your swirling stomach at the thought of Aegon falling from such a height — still saddled to a dying Sunfyre, looking directly at a certain death, unable to stop its coming. The thought of Aemond being with him during what the survivors of Rook’s Rest are calling The Night of A Thousand Suns fills you with agony.

Your worry for each of them pricks your skin, from the tips of your fingers to the bottoms of your feet. The entirety of your grief consumes you.

The ground trembles when Vhagar lands in the depths of Dragonpit, just barely fitting within the stone confines of her stable. The beast stills long enough for Aemond to unclip himself from her saddle and slide off her back. Then she’s off again, to the northernmost forest of King’s Landing, to heal by herself in the nest she made a century or so ago.

The gust of wind from her wings takes your breath away. Or perhaps it’s just the sight of Aemond, in the flesh, seemingly unharmed despite the worries that had been plaguing you all morning. Your mind swirls with deeper concerns instead, with horrid thoughts you’ve been choking back like bile since the Raven arrived.

You stand in place on the top step while Aemond stalks towards you. He peels off his leather gloves and dismisses the dragonkeepers with a wave of his pale hand. You feel like your heart’s in your throat when he stands before you, two steps downward, and of nearly equal height to you.

You grip his sharp jaw between your fingers, wild eyes darting over his face in search of any sign of harm. Aemond lets you observe him. He knows you need it.

“I’m alright,” he promises in a soft monotone.

You take hold of both his arms then, despite his assurances, like you have to see them for yourself. Your gaze falls up and down his form as you hunt for remains of an injury — a scrape on his skin, a tear in his leather garb, a smear of ash from a dragon’s flame.

You find nothing.

It is hard to be relieved by such a notion when his brother verges on death at this very moment.

“I am alright, my love,” Aemond repeats, firmer now, as if it’ll lessen the leaden weight in your chest.

He lifts his lanky fingers and wraps them around your wrist, guiding your hand away from his jaw when your nails start to dig unknowingly into his skin.

He peers at you with his lone eye and waits for you to kiss him — or to hug him, perhaps — something overtly affectionate that comes so naturally to you that has hitherto been very foreign to him. He expects you to be gladdened by his presence after such a tumultuous battle, of which he presumed would bring you closer.

With his brother now mutilated by dragon flame, Aemond flew back to the Red Keep with the understanding that there would be a bed and a throne for him — both empty and cold, waiting to be warmed with you by his side.

They said love was intensified by absence, but your face crumples under the weight of your emotion instead. Glassy tears fill your eyes, which squint with something short of fear as you turn away from him. Your hand slips from his without a single word uttered from you.

A very distant ache twists somewhere deep in his chest. A wildfire burns in the ether behind his ribcage, far away but scorching all the same. Watching you leave is a fate far worse than the hell his dead or dying brother must be facing at this very moment — hidden in a box somewhere in a throwaway carriage.

Aemond chokes down his jealousy like bile. He’s spent his whole life wishing he and Aegon could trade places, and now isn’t any different.

Even as his brother languishes in a mangled, bloodied, and ashened pile of flesh, it is he you still long for. Aemond still cannot compete with him — not even as your husband, not even as a living-breathing thing standing before you.

Because you would always be searching for Aegon. Even in his death. Even in yours.

“Behold! The traitor dragon Meleys!” a knight bellows beneath the sounds of a tolling bell and trumpeting horns.

The Kingsguard marches into the city with a beheaded dragon carted behind them. The smallfolk fall silent at the sight of the majestic beast, slaughtered from its scarlet body. You can’t remember a time when King’s Landing was ever so quiet. Something about it feels ghostlike.

“Slain at Rook’s Rest, by your king!” the man shouts, raising his fist in triumph. “To Aegon!”

You can barely hear any of it from here, where you stand at the highest balcony of the Red Keep, which overlooks the entire city — but the hushed silence is deafening, and the fear is achingly palpable.

Aemond stands just beside you, between you and his mother, with several inches of cautious space between you. He curls his pale hands around the railing and leans over the parapet. A late summer breeze ripples through his silver hair and leather jacket as he tilts his chin to peer at the crowd from the bridge of his nose — looking like he could swallow the whole of the King’s Landing if he wanted.

“Do they not realize we won the battle?” he wonders quietly.

“I don’t believe there are any winners here,” Alicent murmurs after a few long moments, oddly steady despite the worry that threatens to strangle her completely. “This is no victory, Aemond.”

You shake your head in agreement as burning tears gather at your waterline. “No. This is a dark, dark omen.”

You sniffle once, then exhale a shuddering breath from your mouth. Your hand reaches for your tightening chest to curl your fingers around the dainty necklace between your collarbones. A gift Aemond had made upon your betrothal — a golden rose to match the sigil of your old house, with an emerald sitting in the center to represent the one you married into.

Alicent looks past Aemond and over to you. Her wide brown eyes flit back and forth from your teary features to your tremoring fingers. She squints and tucks a rogue auburn curl behind her ear when it billows in her face. “How do you mean?”

“Growing up, I was taught that dragons were gods,” you confess, voice wet with unshed tears. “And this… This is not a victory march, Your Grace. This is an abomination.”

Your words hang heavy over the three of you for several long moments. The weight of them is palpable, like a pillow to the face. They force the breath from your lungs and demand to be acknowledged. And as the rest of the city recoils in fright, bowing their heads as though this was a funeral procession, the truth behind your words becomes indisputable.

Behind the beheaded Meleys is a cart carrying an unmarked box. There is no fanfare surrounding it, no horses or knights or signs of life. It is hardly more than a grim crate blanketed by a few tattered rags. A casket, perhaps.

“Is that him?” you try to ask, though the words get stuck in your throat. You clear it and try again. “Is— Is that Aegon?”

Alicent blinks back tears and nods until she chokes them down again. “’Tis likely,” she answers plainly.

“Do they know if he’s still alive in there?”

The mother thinks for a moment. Her tongue darts across her bottom lip, feeling the ridges where she’s nipped at them from anxiety, before shaking her head in a wordless response.

You spare one last look at the maimed Meleys and the casket trailing behind her as the soldiers march closer to the Red Keep. The sight grows blurry with burning tears, like pastel watercolors all bleeding together. You step back from the balcony with a shuddering breath and scurry off without another word.

Aemond watches you disappear in the corner of his eye but makes no move to stop you. He’d sooner cut off his hand than profess his need for you. It’d be easier, anyway.

You rush down the twisting stone steps of the Red Keep with the skirt of your dress in your hands. As your pretty pink gown flows behind you, you can hear your racing heart in your ears — a vigorous woosh, woosh, wooshing as your adrenaline spikes and pricks at your skin like flames.

You can hear Ser Branton Selmy’s armor clinking behind you, too, as your personal protector rushes to keep up with your rapid strides in such heavy garb.

You run into Criston Cole when you reach the west wing. Beside him is a nameless face you only vaguely recognize. He’s a Hightower, no doubt, so you figure he must be Gwayne. The pretty man looks strikingly similar to his sister, the Queen Dowager. And he has all the hardened features of his father.

You vaguely notice the horrors of war etched onto their otherwise handsome faces just before your eyes look past them — to the white cloaks heaving a wooden box down the corridor.

“Where are they taking him?” you ask with bated breath, fists tremoring where they clench the tulle of your skirt.

Ser Gwanye runs a pale hand through his auburn locks, pushing the long strands over his forehead. Both his hair and his hands are stained with bits of blood and dirt. “The far west end, princess,” he answers politely. “That is as much as I’ve heard, anyway.”

Your breath catches in your throat. “Our bedroom?” you wonder aloud before you mean to, eyes wide and full of apprehension.

Gwayne, too, looks on in shock. He blinks at you for a moment, before turning to Ser Criston for a surer answer.

The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard (and, most recently, the Lord Hand) peers at you with a sympathetic gaze. He ducks his scruffy chin to his chest as his dark eyes swim with apology.

“It is the closest bedroom to the Maester’s quarters, princess,” Criston tells you. “And right now, His Grace needs all the help he can get.”

You hurry to the furthest end of the Red Keep, knowing its only importance before now was being the outermost point from the bedroom you shared with Aemond. It was a very intentional decision you made when Aegon insisted the two of you share a room like any true couple would. (You figured if you were going to fuck his brother, it’d be polite if you didn’t make him bear witness to it.)

You stand in the doorway while the knights lift Aegon’s body from the crate, all wrapped in a burlap sack, as though he was presumed to die on the way home from battle. They lie him tenderly in the center of your shared bed. His blood stains the silk where you have laughed and cried and pleasured each other.

He’s still in his armor, though half of it is singed and nearly melted, and the maesters make quick work of tending to his fragile body. You can hardly see him now, with all the people rushing about, but you think perhaps it’s best that way. You know if you saw him in such a state, you’d never be able to forget it — and if Aegon was going to die today, he didn’t deserve to be remembered that way.

“Is he alive?” you gasp quietly into the chaos.

“His Grace remains with us,” Maester Orwyle answers carefully, dark eyes meeting yours from across the room. “For the moment.”

He’s still breathing, is what he’s really saying. But who knows for how long?

When the maesters start to peel the armor from the boy’s burned body, you feel a warm hand on your shoulder.

Ser Branton appears suddenly behind you and comforts you with a weathered touch, which is not typically permitted for knights. Touching the nobility was strictly off-limits unless completely necessary, and Ser Branton knows it. He’s been a member of the Kingsguard since before you were born. Long enough to earn the name Branton the Brave. But he figures this moment is as necessary as any other.

“Best look away, princess,” he advises in a gruff and gentle voice. “Let me escort you back to your chambers until the work is done.”

You will yourself to answer him, to let him whisk you away completely, to let him take you on a horse ride outside the city walls — anything to get you away from the unsightly horrors before you. But you remain still and silent despite yourself, watching the skin of your first love come off in melted strings as the maesters peel his armor away.

The smell of burnt flesh fills the room, along with the coppery tang of blood.

A pair of hurried footsteps sound behind you as Alicent rushes into the room. “Is he breathing?” she frets as she migrates to her eldest boy’s bedside, trying to peer past the bustling bodies for a glimpse of him. Her breath hitches at the sight of his charred chest, rising and falling with shallow and uneven breaths.

“Is my son going to die?” the mother rephrases with her hand to her mouth.

“I’m afraid I cannot say,” Maester Orwyle answers. He works with steady enough hands, but the waver in his voice is not reassuring. “If you’ll excuse me, Your Grace, these next hours are most critical.”

Alicent nods and takes a stumbling step back. “Of course,” she murmurs inaudibly.

You gravitate closer to the foot of the bed with wide and glazed-over eyes, perceiving nothing and everything all at once. You feel a bit like you’re dreaming, or like you’re underwater — like none of this is real.

But you still flinch at the sharp click of his broken bone being snapped back into place. And your chest still aches at the sound of his raspy breaths as he fights hard for each one of them.

You don’t notice Aemond entering the room until he caresses you with an icy hand. You fight back a shiver under his touch. His fingers are oddly gentle as they curl around the back of your neck, like he’s comforting you and reminding you to whom you belong simultaneously.

“He’s alive,” he observes indifferently.

“For now,” Alicent nods from the other side of the bed.

“By the grace of the Gods, no doubt,” Aemond monotones. He smooths his thumb over your skin in a reassuring pet as he looks past you to his mother. “But still… Someone will have to rule in his stead.”

For the first time in several minutes, your eyes part from Aegon’s body to glare at the boy beside you. Your gaze turns glassy as it swims with newfound tears. They burn at your waterline — not with grief now, but with anger.

You say nothing as you swat his hand away, turning on your heel and storming out of the room with Ser Branton close behind. Your hands ball into trembling fists at your sides. Your nails bite into the soft skin of your palm as you struggle to breathe through your rage.

The people have called you the Rose of King’s Landing since you first arrived to the city, some years ago now. You were as pretty and as delicate as they come — at least, that’s what they told you. But as your fury builds like bile in your throat, you no longer feel as fragile as a flower. You feel like Wildfire, green and flammable and volatile, moments away from being set ablaze.

Rain beats in fat droplets against the stained glass windows of the Sept. The wild cadence of the brewing storm mixes with the crackling of lit candles — the only two sounds filling the silent church. Lightning flashes and basks the expansive room in vivid purple hues for a moment before darkness returns again.

Aemond watches the flickering amber flames paint you in shades of gold as you kneel before them.

Your hands are entwined, but he knows you’re not praying. You haven’t prayed since you arrived to the city, as far as he understands it. You confessed to him, once, that you lost the need for all that when you lost your home.

He surmises that you came all this way to escape him — or, perhaps, the Red Keep in its entirety. The smell of death has overtaken the castle. The chaos within it has similarly refused to cease. Though he does not blame you for running, he cannot abide by your attempts to elude him.

His boots scuff the stone as he walks further into the Sept. The soft sound echoes through the quiet church. Your head whips over your shoulder in its direction.

Aemond swipes his rain-soaked hood from his silver head. The candlelight dances over his narrow features, softening the sharpened edges of them.

“I didn’t think you’d be here,” he confesses as he stalks closer to you, hands clasped behind his back, hidden beneath his heavy cloak. “I’ve been searching all over for you, to be sure.”

“Have you?” you hum unenthusiastically, rising to full height and smoothing the skirt of your dress. You tilt your chin to follow Aemond’s eyes when he towers over your smaller form.

“Normally, when you’re absent, I find you with the king. But considering my brother’s… current predicament…” he lilts cautiously, though the words spill from his mouth with a very intentional venom. “I struggled to place your whereabouts. I was moments away from sending the gold cloaks after you.”

You would be touched by his worry if you believed it to be true.

Your husband has always been intrinsically difficult to read, but you feel like you no longer know him now. As he looms before you — a pretty boy who always thought himself too ugly to be loved — he becomes an unrecognizable thing. Your stomach swirls at the uncanny feeling.

“I didn’t mean to worry you, husband,” you say with a pretty smile that verges on cynical. “I know you have much on your plate at the moment. What with trying to find a regent to take Aegon’s place and all.”

The banter is familiar, though it’s not typically so weighty — so backhanded and so filled with unspoken rage. The two of you fake smiles at each other while simultaneously biting your tongues so hard that blood pools in your mouths.

You take slow and unsure steps towards him, until your wringing hands brush his clothed torso. You peer up at him from beneath your lashes in a suddenly solemn look, which sparkles with hope and fear and dread.

“Can you tell me what happened to him? Please,” you murmur sheepishly, all but begging him now. “So I can stop imagining it.”

Aemond hums to himself, tilting his head curiously to the side. “And what are you imagining in that pretty little head of yours, hm?”

You avert your gaze to your fidgeting hands, where your fingers wring themselves into knots. Your tongue grazes your anxiety-bitten lip as you inhale a shaking breath, fighting for the courage to answer.

“Before your mother told me of the raven we’d received… About Aegon’s health, I was having… the most awful dream,” you confess for the first time aloud. “A nightmare— about you and Aegon flying together on dragonback. Aegon was… struggling to take on Meleys while you…”

Aemond waits with bated breath as you trail off. “While I what?” he presses.

“Watched,” you agonize, face twisted as you recall the vivid dream that feels like a memory now. “You set Vhagar on him, and you watched.”

“Hm,” Aemond hums apathetically. “A nightmare indeed.”

You meet his flat face with teary eyes. “So tell me what happened to him,”you repeat, firmer now. “Please.”

“I’m afraid it is quite boring— talk of war,” the boy lilts as he walks past you and toward the burning candles. “But, if you must know, we took the castle at the cost of… some nine hundred men.”

“And what of Aegon?”

Aemond lays his palm flat over a flickering flame and looks at you over his shoulder, like he doesn’t feel any of it — or, at the very least, like he wants you to think he doesn’t.

“His Grace fought valiantly. But he was drunk when he mounted Sunfyre, and Rhaenys... She was no stranger to battle. Aegon was long in the dying, I’m afraid— the outcome was surely inevitable.”

“And where were you?” you blurt with the courage strikes you suddenly. “What was your part in all this?”

Something in Aemond’s eyes flickers, as though in surprise of your subtle accusation. Though, perhaps it’s only the candlelight.

“I set Vhaghar on The Queen Who Never Was,” he shrugs plainly. “I distracted her from my brother, and slaughtered her dragon.”

You muster a wavering grin. “What a heroic tale.”

“I wouldn’t wish such a sight on my worst enemy,” Aemond tells you solemnly as he swipes ash from his calloused palms. He thinks for a moment, then corrects himself. “Well… Perhaps I would…”

The edges of his lips lift in a barely-there smirk. The one you give him in return is weighed down with an obvious emotion, which is etched now across your delicate features.

“I want to believe you had no part in this, Aemond… But my mind refuses to relent on the matter.”

Aemond’s face hardens. Lightning flashes in violet hues and casts daunting shadows over the sharp edges of his face. His words are accompanied by rolling thunder that trembles the earth under your feet. “I loved my brother—”

“I think someone like you can care a lot about a person and still be able to kill them,” you confess, so gently it feels like a proclamation of love.

“Maybe so,” he hums indifferently.

His apathy is unsurprising, but it doesn’t hurt you any less. The familiarity of it pierces you like a dagger and presses its lips to your forehead like a kiss all at once. There is intimacy, hidden somewhere in his detachment — and if it’s all because he loves you, does it matter if it hurts?

“I used to love you, Aemond,” you tell him because it feels necessary now, considering you can’t get anything tangible out of him. “Even when you didn’t believe I did. Especially when you didn’t believe I did.”

The blatant use of the past tense feels like a cold hand wrapped around his throat. “What changed?”

“You did.”

“No,” Aemond insists with a stubborn shake of his head as he closes the distance between you. His footsteps are as light and as measured as the late-summer rain raging outside. “I’m the same as I ever was… You only see me completely now. That’s all.”

He curls his cold hands around your waist to pull you closer. His touch is familiar in a way that makes your stomach ache — like an old house that used to be yours, but isn’t anymore; like a place that you should remember, but barely can.

Your breath catches in your throat because his words feel like a confession.

The corner of his mouth quirks in a proud smile because he is confessing, and you’re still letting him hold you.

“We have seen the worst parts of each other, have we not? And yet…” Aemond trails off, ducking softly down like he intends to kiss you. Your lips part in wait for his despite yourself. He trails the tip of his chiseled nose over the bridge of yours instead. “We understand each other in our bones. We cannot help but to live inside of one another, like… A snake… doomed to swallow its own tail.”

His chapped lips duck to graze your pulse point. You exhale a trembling breath as your hands ball into fists at your sides. You make no attempt to stop him, however, as though paralyzed by your deep-rooted affection for him.

“Or a fish hook… into an open eye,” Aemond continues cynically, breath fanning warm over your collarbones. Chill bumps pebble over your delicate skin in his wake. The sight makes him swell with pride. “Or a decaying corpse and its maggots… Mutual destruction—”

He rises again to kiss you, mouth parted like he plans to swallow you whole.

Your senses return, and you pull back from him — just enough for your lips to graze but not fully meet. You realize, then, that you’re holding your breath. You exhale a wavering sigh as you stand obediently ahead of him. Nose to nose, chest to chest, heartbeart to heartbeat.

“You’re a nightmare,” you pant against his mouth, eyes fluttering shut as you raise a hand to his face. The pad of your thumb smooths over the marred skin beneath his patched eye. “There is deeply wrong with you, Aemond. And I think whatever is… is wrong with me also.”

Lightning strikes with a resounding crack some leagues away — or, perhaps, in his own chest, which warms at the thought of being understood by you.

He kisses you with the fire behind his ribcage, breathes the smoke from his lungs into yours. The Kinslayer licks into your mouth, and you let him.

You’re doomed to it, you realize — doomed to acknowledging the very worst parts of him and never being able to abandon him. To spending a lifetime unwrapping his misdeeds and kissing them away like a baby with a scraped knee.

You will spend the rest of your life holding his darkened soul up to the light and trying hard to understand him. And as Aemond kisses the breath from your lungs in the middle of the candlelit Sept, in the epicenter of a raging summer storm, you think it must be better than not having him at all.

The days anticipating Aegon’s waking are ruthless and bloodstained.

You don’t need sleep for many of them, and you only part from his bedside long enough to tend to your wifely duties. The castle sees little of you otherwise. You become a ghostly thing instead — a phantom of your own regret, a shadow of all your sins.

And even when it’s full of so much love, all a ghost can do is haunt. You idle at Aegon’s bedside accordingly. Solemnly, silently, softly. While melancholy stains your hands like blood.

You feel as though you’re cleansing your impure touch every time you dip your hands into the steaming bowl of water at your side. You soak Aegon’s bandages in its medicinal contents until it burns your skin raw. Until you find repentance in the ache. And then you smooth them carefully over his raging wounds the way Maester Orwyle taught you.

Your unworthy hands run gently over his lithe, burnt, and death-touched body, finding holiness in his pale skin. You kneel at his side and hold his unhurt hand in both of yours — not to pray, but to atone.

“If you’re going to die here, in our bed, I hope very much that you intend to haunt me,” you whisper through tears, bringing his hand to your mouth and running your lips over the grooves of his knuckles. “I would much rather you drive me mad from the spiritual plane than go where I cannot follow you.”

Your handmaiden knocks softly on the door, then. She peeks just enough inside to tell you the high council meeting has finished — the council of which your husband now sits at the head.

Aemond, crowned newly regent, wears the weight of kinghood like he was always meant to do it. You hate how well it fits him. You hate what lengths he’s gone to steal a crown that no person should ever aspire to possess.

Still, though, you part from Aegon with a kiss to his unburnt cheek and walk to the other side of the castle to tend to your husband — like a sheep led to slaughter.

“Dove?” Aegon calls in a raspy voice, the name like gravel in his throat, when he feels you disappear from his side.

You do not hear him.

Aegon slips back into the lonely abyss.

You retire the following morning to the Godswood — the only place in King’s Landing where you’re free from pitied glances and words of sympathy. You sit against the white bark of the old weirwood tree with a heavy book propped on your knees. The rising sun filters in golden rays through the orange leaves, which rustle in time with a calm summer wind.

Aemond finds you there when you don’t arrive to break your fast. Something about the sight of you forces him back into childhood — all bathed in the late morning sun, in a pretty pink dress that sits in a perfect circle around you, like a painting that breathes with life.

In that moment, he’s a kid who still has both his eyes — who doesn’t startle people when he looks at them — who hasn’t hurt anyone yet because no one’s yet hurt him. For a flicker of a moment, the two of you are strangers. Strangers who haven’t ruined each other by being together.

Aemond chokes down the nostalgia and strangles it in a clenched fist. “The table is set,” he calls to you, in place of any real greeting.

You don’t look up from your book as you flip the page. “I’m not hungry.”

“You haven’t eaten in days,” the boy tells you, trying hard to bite back his misplaced anger. “You’ll soon be withering away with my brother if you aren’t careful.”

“I’d rather,” you murmur cynically as your chin tilts to meet his eyes.

You don’t mean to glare at him the way you do, but it’s hard to look at the mirror of yourself any other way. A part of him slipped into you that night at the Sept, like lightning through the stained glass windows, and now it’s hard to stomach the sight of him.

“What are you reading?” Aemond asks, changing the subject entirely, as he nods to the heavy book covering the expanse of your lap.

You avert your gaze then, like you’re ashamed of the answer. He walks closer to peek at the thick parchment pages and finds a hand-drawn diagram of a maimed body with increasing levels of burnt skin. His chest pinches as he seethes.

“Even in death, my brother is still the one you want,” Aemond scoffs a bitter laugh. “He is always where your loyalties will lie— ”

“Well, Aegon is not dead,” you correct with an eerily steady voice as your eyes hardened into an unwavering squint. “Though I know how much it must pain you.”

“You’re meaning eludes me, I’m afraid. You’ll have to speak more plainly.”

“You are easily the smartest man I have ever met,” you confess with a gentle smile. “So please do not patronize me by playing the fool.”

Aemond opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He is, instead, interrupted by hurried footsteps that crunch crunch crunch atop the falling leaves. “We’re busy,” he snaps as he whips his head over his shoulder.

Maester Orwyle cowers. His chain rattles as he bows his bald head in apology. “Excuse me, Prince Regent— Princess— But I am happy to report that His Grace, The King has regained consciousness this morning.”

Your heart lurches into your throat, making it very suddenly hard to breathe. Your feet scramble for purchase on the ground as you stand to full height again. Dirt stains your hands as you clutch the heavy book between them.

“Only for a few moments,” the man amends before he overexcites you.

“But he is awake?” you press with bated breath.

The Maester nods. “He is.”

“I knew it,” you say, laughing giddily to yourself. “I knew his breath was coming easier to him.”

Maester Orwyle struggles to keep his emotions at bay with your infectious excitement. “Aye. The King is much stronger than I gave him credit for,” the man nods, hands clasped as though in prayer. “He may yet live— thank the Gods.”

“What happy news,” Aemond hums when he realizes he hasn’t yet said anything.

His thin lips purse in a quiet smile as his glacial gaze flits over to you. He stares mostly from the side of his patched eye, so ardently it feels like he’s looking at you through the covered sapphire hidden behind it.

“Perhaps you should accompany Maester Orwyle to my brother’s chambers. I will inform the family as we break our fast,” the boy tells you with purely selfish intent.

He figures it’ll be easier to watch you rush back into Aegon’s arms if he’s commanding it of you. His chest threatens to swirl with warmth, however, at the relieved look you give him.

Your eyes soften for the first time since he returned from Rook’s Rest. You don’t care whether he’s holding an olive branch in his hand or a dagger. You’re thankful for it, either way.

“Of course, Your Grace,” you say with an obedient bow of your head.

You go to kiss his cheek before you part from him, if only to maintain appearances in front of the Maester.“Thank you,” Aemond hears you whisper before your mouth meets his skin. The plush of your lips grazes the pink scar beneath his eye in a softer touch than he expects, in a softer touch than he deserves.

You burst through the ornate double doors of the west-end bedroom like a million glittering sun rays.

Aegon can only see you through the bleary haze of his one good eye, but he knows you put The Night of a Thousand Suns to shame. He’s seen dragonfire closer than most people have, and not even that can rival the vividity of his glittering Dove.

The bustling maesters part wordlessly for you like breaking rain clouds. You rush like sunshine past them and straight to his bedside. “Aegon!” you call, teary-eyed and giggling at the sight of his woken state.

He expects you to flinch when you’re closer to him, to recoil at the sight of his melted flesh. He wouldn’t blame you for it — it’d hurt, of course, but he wouldn’t blame you. It shocks him most when you bend at the waist to kiss him instead.

Your lips graze the unburnt skin of his right cheek. Aegon can smell rose petals in your hair and lavender on your skin when you lean over him. It smells like home when everything around him reeks of death.

“I’m surprised you still recognize me—” Aegon jokes dryly, then drags in a ragged breath when his lungs start screaming. The inhale rattles through his bare chest, covered partially in the bandages you helped dress before break of day. “—After all this.”

You sit at his side and smile so hard your eyes squint at the edges. “Don’t be absurd. I was born knowing you, Aegon,” you argue with his jaw cradled in a gentle hand. You look over your shoulder to the nearest maester and request, “Can you fetch me some marigolds? And dandelion, please? Oh! And a pot of hot water to make tea in?”

The older man bows his head obediently and asks no question as he stalks out of the room.

You turn back to Aegon. “I hear it may help treat your burns. It’ll at least ease the pain of them, I’m sure.”

The boy shifts in a feeble attempt to get comfortable, which is an impossible feat considering his current state — with half of his body riddled with oozing burns and an elevated leg, shattered and likely never the same again. The only comfort he finds is your warm hand on his cheek. He leans into it like a sunflower to sunshine.

“How do you know all that?” he rasps.

“I read it in a book.”

His remaining eye flits to the edge of the bed, where you’ve laid a thick volume at his feet. He scoffs at the sight of it, then coughs when his lungs burn (which, of course, only adds to the sting.)

“A boring book,” the boy insists as you ease a cup of water to his dry mouth, cupping his chin to catch the dribble.

“Only slightly,” you joke with a quiet smile. “But I fear I was quite motivated in learning how to treat you.”

Aegon smacks his chapped lips when you pull away, watching attentively as you sit the chalice back at his bedside. His chest blooms with something warm: his affection for you, perhaps, or maybe the lingering ash in his lungs.

“You’re slaving over the Grand Maester’s books—” He inhales a wheezing breath that leaves in a rattling exhale. “—To learn how to take care of me?”

“Yes.”

“What wretched work.”

“Not to me,” you insist with a blossoming grin. “Not if it’s you.”

Aegon’s ocean eye goes glassy with burning tears he tries hard to blink away. A furrow forms in the marred skin of his forehead as his brows pinch together — one singed off and the other half gone. His features crumple as he forces himself to choke down his emotion like bile.

He hasn’t cried about it yet. About any of it. His manhood has already been stripped from him — he’s scared that if he cries about it now, it’ll be like admitting some kind of defeat.

You seem to know this without words. Like you can read it all in his very expressive face, which he knows is so much different now than the one you fell in love with. You don’t look at him like he’s any different, though, and something about it makes his head spin.

“Will you lay with me?”

“I can’t, Aegon— I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t hurt me,” he wheezes. “You can’t.”

Despite your better judgment, you round the mattress to lay at his unburnt side. The muscle memory that carries you there feels strange. You’ve been rounding this very bed to lay to the right of him for many moons now — a side you claimed wordlessly as your own, as Aegon did with the left. Nothing has changed. Only, at the same time, everything has changed.

You recline gingerly along the feathered mattress, careful not to jostle the boy too much. When you turn to rest on your side, Aegon shifts on the mattress to be level with you. He doesn’t get too far, what with his elevated leg and the rest of him much too stiff. He turns his chin to his shoulder to face you instead. His eyes flutter shut when you lift your hand to his face, tracing the edges of his bandages with a featherlight touch.

“How can you still look at me like that?” Aegon croaks as your pointer finger trails down the slope of his nose.

“Like what?” you murmur distantly.

“I don’t know,” he answers before a wheeze racks through his chest. “Like you still love me.”

His words hit you like a fist to the stomach. Something about them makes your throat tighten with a welling emotion.

“Because I do love you, Aegon,” you answer through a teary giggle, resting a very delicate hand over his bandaged jaw. “I can’t help it. I knew I was doomed to it since I was ten-and-three— when you told me you were betrothed to Helaena, and yet I was still searching for you in all the eyes of my potential suitors.”

“Do you search for me now?” he mumbles with a hopeful gleam in his remaining eye.

Your smile widens. “I search for you always.”

“Even now?”

“Always,” you repeat.

“What if I…” he trails off, smacking his dry mouth and averting his gaze.

He looks, instead, at the green silk draping the ceiling — where he insisted a mirror be hung some days ago. He said he wanted to see you from every angle when you were riding him, said that was of utmost importance. All that feels pretty moot now, though, and the notion makes his chest ache.

“What if I’m different after this?” he wonders through the ash trapped in his lungs. You know it must hurt for him to talk, so you grimace when he continues. “What if I’m immobile? What if I— I can’t pleasure you anymore?”

A giggle sputters past your lips. Aegon flinches. He doesn’t know what he expected you to say to that, but he hadn’t expected you to laugh.

“If you think I am only at your side because of my… carnal urges,” you lilt teasingly, rising on your elbow to peer down at him with sparkling eyes. “Then you are sadly mistaken, my king. Surely, you’re forgetting the many, many years it took you to learn my body… wherein your rendered services were, perhaps, less than pleasurable.”

Aegon tries to laugh until his chest stings. The air rushes suddenly from his lungs and leaves a burning sensation in its wake — drier than the sands of Dorne, hotter than dragonfire.

He grimaces and struggles to catch his breath. He’s only able to relax when you lay your hand over the right side of his chest, where his skin is pale and supple and still normal.

“Meaning no offense, of course,” you continue with a lazy smile. “You’ve undoubtedly become an expert of me over the years.”

Aegon tries not to cower under the sincerity twinkling in your eyes. He can’t tell if you’re just ignoring his freakish nature, or if you’ve already adjusted to it entirely. He prays for the latter. He’s grateful, however, for either.

“Will you kiss me?” he rasps in a breathy whisper.

You don’t answer with words. You only lean forward and press your lips to the flushed apple of his cheek, lingering there for several long moments. The foreign act of tenderness makes him sigh hard through his nose.

You part from him to find his lips quirked in a very distant smile. It isn’t nearly as bright as you’re used to — not as pink or as mischievous — but you can see it still, beneath the layers of bandages and marred skin.

“Not there,” he jokes with a rattling breath.

Your hand lifts to caress his cheek. Your thumb grazes the grooves of the plaster sticking to his skin there. Your eyes flit from his sparkling gaze to his parted lips. You lean down and kiss him gently — enough for him to feel you, but not enough to feel the ache on his burnt side.

And even as you’re kissing him, and Aegon’s kissing you back, you can’t help but wish that you were kissing him still.

Aemond sits alone at the head of an ornate dining table and glares at the ghost of you across the room. Past the flickering candles, and the goblets of wine, and the trays of your most favorite desserts — to where an empty chair waits for a body that’s never coming to fill it.

It’s his fault, he knows. He’s the one who refused to summon you for supper, yet he still finds himself blaming you for your absence. As the blade of self-made solitude pierces his sternum, he imagines it’s your pretty hand twisting the dagger. The plates before him remain untouched and go slowly cold as the wound bleeds out.

The thought of supping without you makes him too sick to eat. His empty stomach swirls with the waves of his grief.

Aemond knew that, were his brother to ever wake, he would be left with only the barest scraps of you. He thought he was used to picking at the flesh and bones of your affection like a vulture to decaying flesh, but he feels the lack of you most ardently now. To the point where he’s made a weapon of your leaving.

He sends you away most nights, when you part finally from Aegon’s bedside to attend to your wifely duties. It was easier to wave a dismissive hand while you undressed for him — to tell you that he had war plans to discuss with Ser Criston or whores at the brothel awaiting his arrival. The former was sometimes true, the latter almost never. Never ever, to be exact.

You’d re-tie the lace of your slip, covering the petaled skin you were baring for him, and muster a wavering smile to cover up your aching. And though Aemond wasn’t entirely fond of hurting you, there was a certain gratification in making you feel an ounce of the heartache he was drowning in.

But the cycle of woe continues on, and he finds himself floundering for you all over again.

He spares one last glare at the empty seat reserved for his wife — who, like her love, would never truly be there — and rises abruptly from the table. The legs of his wooden chair scrape the cobbled floors. The harsh sound echoes through the empty throne room.

“What shall we do with the food, my pri— Your Grace?” a servant boy stammers when Aemond walks by.

“Feed it to the hounds,” the boy monotones.

Aemond just barely manages to keep his head above water long enough to find you. He storms to the west wing of the Red Keep and bursts through the double doors of the bedroom you and Aegon share. He feels like he’s been set aflame every time he passes the threshold. He figures he belongs here about as much as a demon at a Holy Sept.

He finds you, unsurprisingly, tending to the sleeping king at his bedside. You dip a thin cloth into a steaming bowl, soaking it in the aromatic medicinal bath, before smoothing it over his burns with a practiced touch.

Aegon’s left side is not nearly as raw and raging as it was some weeks ago, perhaps because of your gentle hands. His skin is still marred, though — features gnarled and blurred and disfigured. Half of his hair has been singed off, along with his ear and most of his eye. He’s a monster on all accounts, but you tend to him with loving hands anyway.

Your head whips over your shoulder at the sudden intrusion. You find Aemond lingering at the doorway; fists balled at his sides, chest heaving with panted breaths. Your brows raise expectantly, and Aemond searches for something to say.

“The table is set for supper,” he blurts.

“Alright,” you hum in a quiet voice. “I’ll join you in a moment.”

You turn away, and the thin fabric of your nightgown flows behind you. It’s made of a pale pink cotton, with long sheer sleeves, and a tie at the chest that reveals a sliver of your skin.

You’re typically only so casually dressed with him. It’s almost like you’ve trained him to salivate at the sight, knowing you’d be taking it off for him under any other circumstance. His hunger for you builds despite himself.

“Will you?” he presses, feigning indifference, as he saunters into the room with his hands behind his back. “You’ve hardly left this room, I’ve heard.”

“Well, I heard that you’ve spent the entire day in council meetings,” you argue while wringing damp plaster between your fists. Hot water trickles back into the bowl, stirring now with golden petals and dandelion fluff. You glance back at him, this time with something mischievous twinkling in your eyes. “What would have me to do, hm? Wait for you well into the twilight hour until you decide you have enough time for me? With my legs spread for you like a common whore?”

“You used to,” Aemond quips as he stills at the foot of the bed.

You scoff and turn away again, laying the moist cloth over Aegon’s bare chest and smoothing it flat until it seals to his skin.

“You’ve never been this gentle with me,” the boy observes, mostly light-hearted, though the words come out too deadpan to be as playful as he means them.

A smile hints at the corner of your mouth. “You never wanted me to be this gentle with you, Your Grace.”

The title falls from your mouth like sweetened venom. Aemond feels it sparkling in his veins as he rounds the bed to be nearer to you.

“Hm. Maybe so,” he murmurs with a wide hand pressed to your lower back. You feel his fingers fist the delicate fabric of your nightgown as he whispers, “But His Grace has needs.”

“Well, His Grace has whores,” you spit back, chin tilted defiantly.

“Careful,” Aemond lilts with his lips pursed in a nearly undetectable smirk. “I’d start to think you were jealous.”

You only shrug in response, hoping your envy isn’t as obvious as it feels. “I have naught to be jealous of… Not when your cock tastes of my cunt—”

“Mm. Such vulgar words from such a pristine girl.”

Aemond ducks down like he intends to kiss you, but stops short with his nose pressed to the side of yours — willing you to make the first move.

You smirk against his mouth, refusing to give him the satisfaction, as you grip his leather jacket in your fists. “If you think I’m pristine… Then you obviously haven’t been paying attention.”

The boy’s mouth parts to swallow you whole. You almost let him — until the bed behind you creaks with movement, and you jerk suddenly back from him.

Aegon smacks his lips as he stirs from sleep. He shifts on the mattress, then grimaces at the harsh reminder of his current state. “Don’t stop on my account,” he mumbles, less raspy than before, but still gravelly in speech.

“We were just leaving,” Aemond insists as his long fingers curl around your wrist.

You try to snatch yourself out of his grip and fail. “The Prince Regent was just leaving,” you correct.

Aegon tries to smile. It feels like he is, anyway, though it looks more like a wince beneath his burns and bandages. “Perhaps you should both stay… I was growing quite fond of the show, actually.”

“I’m sure you were,” Aemond scoffs, peering down at the boy from the bridge of his nose. “But I’m afraid you’ll get nothing here.”

When he tugs you away from Aegon’s bedside, you have little choice but to follow him. He’s much too strong for you to fight — though you try, still, to pry his taut grip with your free hand.

“He’s lying, you know?” the king croaks from behind you. “About the whores.”

Aemond stops in his tracks at the doorframe. You stumble over your feet behind him. When neither of you says anything, Aegon continues.

“I tried to take him to a brothel once. Some days after he was betrothed to you, I believe…” he trails off to take a ragged breath. “He nearly keeled over when he passed the threshold. He’s much more dutiful to you than he’d have you believe… Unfortunately.”

Your wide eyes flit from the bedridden boy to the one towering over you. “Is that true, husband?” you murmur.

Aemond falters for a moment. “The king is obviously half-cut. The Milk of the Poppy’s warped his mind, no doubt—”

“I am perfectly temperate, brother.”

“My sincerest apologies, Your Grace.”

“Well, when the Dove gives orders, I am not inclined to disobey,” Aegon quips and tries to smile, though the expression is only audible in his voice.

Aemond’s stoic eyes flit back to you. “Giving orders to the king now, are you?”

“Aye. I am,” you answer, trying to fight back a smirk and failing. “And his regent, perhaps. Though he is much less acquiescent than his brother.”

“Is that so?” Aemond hums with his chin tilted upward, amusement glittering in his otherwise hardened gaze.

Your smile sits lazy and lopsided on your mouth. You look once to Aegon, whose one-eyed stare is expectant and unwavering, and then back to your husband. “Haply,” you shrug with your chin to your shoulder, peering through your lashes with the whole universe in your eyes.

“Kiss me,” you command.

The words fall over Aemond like stars.

He cradles the back of your neck and licks into your mouth without warning. Your head tips back as he pries through your lips with his tongue. His chiseled nose smushes into the side of yours while he steals the breath from your lungs.

Aegon watches from afar and writhes pathetically on the mattress across the room. His chapped mouth parts in time with yours, tongue lolling in his mouth as he tries to remember what it felt like to kiss you. His hands curl into fists under the weight of his yearning — the ache in his healing left-hand goes unnoticed over his much louder desire for you.

“Closer,” he calls in a gravelly voice, then clears his throat when the word gets stuck there. “Come closer.”

Your lips part with an audible click. A string of saliva threatens to keep the two of you connected, glimmering faintly in the candlelight. A whine sounds in Aegon’s throat at the sight of it.

Aemond wipes his chin with the back of his hand, mouth rosy and shining with your spit. “Surely you aren’t so desperate, brother… You’ll be parading ‘round the brothels in no time, I’m sure.”

Aegon does not admit aloud that his intermittent pleasure house visits were hardly for his own urges. He enjoyed the smells more than anything, of primal pleasure and cheap wine — and the feeling of pride as he introduced new squires to the most skillful madames. He’s watched many boys become men through an opened curtain with a belly full of ale.

He corrects, instead, “Did the maesters not tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“My cock was burnt like a sausage on a spit,” Aegon admits with a clenched jaw. “I can hardly piss without it trickling down my leg—”

“An unfortunate circumstance, indeed,” Aemond hums.

“A circumstance you ought to atone for,” Aegon sneers.

The calloused palm cradling your neck slips away as the youngest brother turns to face the eldest. Candlelight flickers over the sharpened edges of his face like hellfire. “I thought you recalled none of it,” he murmurs with a knowing squint in his lone eye.

“Perhaps my memory serves me now,” Aegon retorts, wincing as he sits further up on the pillows. It’s much easier now, without his leg tied and elevated, but the ache there makes every movement impossible. He talks through heaving pants when the breath leaves him suddenly. “Perhaps— Perhaps I am in need of something to ease my mind.”

Silence slips into the room like moonlight through the opened window. Your eyes flit back and forth between the two men, narrowed softly in confusion. The two of them seem to speak in riddles, in remnants of a conversation you weren’t there to witness.

“Mm. Perhaps,” Aemond concludes emotionlessly. “But I don’t believe it is up to me.”

His head turns slowly to you, and your heart lurches into your throat. Your hands shake with the sudden power placed within them.

Fingers trembling, you reach wordlessly for the lace at your chest. You tug at the ends of it until the knot loosens entirely. The top of your gown slacks to reveal the peaks of your pillowy breasts. Aemond’s mouth parts with the want to kiss them as he migrates behind you to work at the tie along your back.

“Take it off,” Aegon tells you through heavy breaths. “All of it.”

You feel Aemond’s hands smooth under your untied nightgown, cold and calloused along your warm and supple skin. He urges the fabric off your body as you slip the sheer sleeves down your arms.

The delicate cotton pools around your feet. The evening breeze brushes your bare body like satin. The unabashed leers from the silver-haired boys create pebbling goosebumps on your skin.

Aegon swallows through a dry throat. His trembling hands flex to pierce through the weight of his longing. “Come closer,” he commands. Though, when his voice breaks halfway through, it sounds more like a plea.

Your bare feet pad along the cobbles in slow and hesitant steps. You stop at the foot of the bed and try not to fidget too much as Aegon’s remaining eye rakes over your body.

The sight of you before him — your naked breasts begging to be kissed, your soft stomach waiting to be caressed, your plush thighs begging to be clutched — makes a sigh rattle in his chest.

“Closer.”

“How much closer can I get, Your Grace?” you ask him, giggling when Aemond presses his clothed body flush against your back. The tip of his nose traces the shell of your ear as he cradles your hips between calloused palms. His breath fans warm over your neck, and you fight back a shiver.

“Crawl,” Aegon answers as he shifts on the mattress, raising his chin like he means to beckon you forward. “Crawl to me.”

You feel Aemond’s thin lips curl into a smile as he mouths at your pulse. “And here I thought you were the one giving orders,” he quips against your skin.

“She is no stranger to my direction, brother. I assure you,” Aegon rasps. His gaze pauses its trek down your naked form and hardens when it meets your eyes again. “Crawl,” he repeats.

Your body seems to move on its own accord. You blink, and your palms are pressed suddenly to the silk blanket — knees digging into the downy mattress to push you closer to the bedridden king.

Aegon’s unscarred hand cradles the back of your head when you’re finally in reach. You straddle his thighs, careful to avoid the healing bone in his left leg, as he urges you further into him. Your mouth parts for a kiss. A whimper sounds in your throat when his lips lock on your pulse point instead — feeling too unworthy to kiss something as pretty as you with such a sullied mouth.

His lips are chapped, but his tongue is warm and smooth against your skin. The contrast between the two is dizzying.

Aegon’s teeth graze your throat as his hand falls to your chest. He cups your breast in his palm, smoothing the pad of his thumb over your pebbled nipple. He knows how sensitive you are there — he’d always remember your body, even in death.

Your moan echoes through the silent room, as silky as the moonlight streaming in rays through the window. You feel the effects of his touch in a shiver down your spine — in a warm feeling that pools in the pit of your stomach.

Aemond only watches for a moment, motionless and observant. He can’t see your face from here, but he can see each of your reactions to Aegon’s subtle touches. Your cunt drools with neglect, begging to be touched and fluttering every time the boy pinches your taut nipples.

Aegon ducks down for your chest just as the command to do so sits on Aemond’s tongue. The older boy mouths sloppily at your tits, slurping audibly at your plush skin and licking over the fleeting bites he scatters there.

You cradle the back of his head and whimper at the feeling of his tongue. Your pussy weeps for more just as you do, leaking a glimmering honey that shines on your thighs when it catches the candlelight.

Aemond’s mouth waters for a taste of you. His pale hands begin working at the buckles of his leather jacket, steady but unusually hasteful as he rushes to fuck you.

Aegon catches sight of him and smirks into your breasts. He pulls off of you with an audible smack, licking his lips like he can still taste you on them. His cheeky smile is somewhat hidden in the burns on his left cheek, but you can hear it in his voice.

“That is very presumptuous of you, brother,” the boy rasps.

Finally freed from his jacket, Aemond shrugs off his undershirt and works at the buttons of his pants. “Well, someone has to fuck her,” he murmurs mindlessly before flashing a mischievous glare with his lone eye. “And I hear your cock was burnt like a sausage on a spit—”

“You’re doing it again,” you lilt in annoyance, only partially playful, as you glance at him over your shoulder. Your stomach swirls when you find Aemond already leering at you. You smile and arch your back, making an utter show of it. “I can hear you, you know?”

Aemond smirks and drops his breeches. The thick fabric falls heavily to the floor to reveal the expanse of his milky white legs and the half-hard cock hanging between them, glowing red at the tip with need. He wraps the stiffening limb in his fist and works it harder for you.

“I’m glad for it,” the boy insists as he kneels on the bed behind you. The mattress creaks and dips under his weight. “It only means you can hear everything I intend to do to you—”

“Use your fingers on her first,” Aegon blurts, made impatient with desire and the lack of your attention. “Get her ready for it— It drives her mad.”

Words of protest turn to dust on your tongue when Aemond’s fingers migrate immediately to your weeping cunt. He runs his middle and ring finger between your velvet lips, coating them in your honey before sticking the former inside you. An airy sigh spills from your open mouth at the feeling. Aemond snarls when your pussy tightens around him, all but swallowing his finger.

You accept a second one with ease — hardly noticing another when Aegon slips his right hand between your thighs. He massages your clit with the pads of his fingers, much softer in comparison to his brother’s. He rubs you there rapidly and with very little rhythm while Aemond fucks his fingers into you with languid strokes.

The variation between the two makes you keen.

“Well, I do believe she’s ready enough,” Aemond quips in a monotone as your honey runs down his wrist. “Feel her— She’s practically weeping for it.”

Aegon’s hand dips instantly, shoving his brother’s out of the way. He shifts on the mattress and grimaces softly at the strain on his bandaged side. The pain, however, goes largely unnoticed as he slips his fingers into you. A groan rumbles in his throat when your eager cunt takes both of his fingers with little effort.

The feeling of your silky walls wrapped around him — the notion that he will never again feel you on his cock — makes him grieve. His marred features twist with something hard and soft, with grief and anger maybe, before he pulls out of you again.

“Fuck her,” Aegon commands like a true king, before inhaling a rattling breath. “Fuck her now— Make her scream.”

Aemond chuckles at his brother’s enthusiasm, of which he often has too much. He wraps his hand around his stiff cock, now ardently wet with you, and uses his sticky fingers to lubricate himself.

“As you wish, your grace,” he murmurs quietly to himself.

Your chin tilts to your shoulder to look back at him. You whimper when the head of his cock presses itself at your entrance — smooth and warm and leaking with precum. Aegon’s fingers grip suddenly at your jaw. The tips of them dig aggressively into the skin there as he forces you to look at him. Despite his hardened features, his eyes gleam with something more pleading.

“Say my name while he fucks you,” he commands, begs, through gritted teeth. “Pretend it’s my cock inside you.”

You nod rapidly into his hand. Your eyes remain locked with his while Aemond slips into your waiting pussy. Your mouth falls softly agape as he fills you. A moan spills from your lips when he buries himself to the hilt. Aegon’s bandaged head tilts back against the pillow, jaw clenched, like your pleasure is his own.

“Does that feel good?” the king asks.

You nod again into his hand, whimpering when Aemond pulls all the way out only to thrust completely back into you again. Your body jerks on top of Aegon’s like you’re riding him — only his cock is hardly more than mangled skin now, which buzzes faintly with a desire he’ll never be able to give you.

Aemond curls a calloused hand around your shoulder to steady you while your hands fist at the pillow on either side of Aegon’s head.

“Tell me.”

Your lips open to make out the words, though only moans fall from them. It takes much more effort to speak than usual, with Aemond punching the breath from your lungs with his expert thrusts. “I— It feels so good, Aegon—” you manage through labored breaths just before a whimper sounds in your throat.

His hand leaves your face to trek down the length of your body. He finds your clit more swollen now — and more sensitive, it seems, when his touch makes you instantly squeal. Your eyes squeeze shut as your head tosses back, mouth parted in a silent moan while both boys work at the most sensitive parts of you.

Your pussy flutters around Aemond’s cock. Honey seeps from your cunt as you grow impossibly tighter around him. He braces his hands on your hip and shoulder, squeezing you there just as you squeeze him. His silver hair falls around his face when he drops his head forward to rumble a deep groan. It sounds like thunder in his throat.

A foreign sense of pride swells in Aegon’s chest at the sounds of your entwining pleasures — which he feels as though he’s orchestrating, despite his misbegotten impotence.

“My Dove is so needy for it, isn’t she?” Aegon coos when your thighs start to tremble.

“You should feel her, brother,” Aemond says, though the words are choppy as they leave his mouth. “She’s so tight— I can barely move—”

Grief sparks in his chest at the bitter reminder that he will never again have you the way his brother has you now. His throat tightens with an emotion he forces himself to choke down. “What does she feel like?” he murmurs pitifully when he struggles to remember.

“Like velvet,” the younger boy answers, punctuated by the dull clapping of his hips meeting your ass. “Like honey. Like sin—” Aemond angles his hips to pierce you deeper. You whine when his thrusts reach an impossible depth.

“How poetic,” Aegon sneers.

“How shall I say it in your language, then, hm?” Aemond manages to tease despite his looming pleasure, which threatens now to strangle him. He tries to keep his face steady despite that as he glares at his brother with his remaining eye, never wavering in his assault on your throbbing pussy. “Her cunt’s milking me dry,” he spits. “I may just breed her yet.”

You’d scold him for speaking over you as if you weren’t there, but you’re much too far gone for that now. His thrusts are steady and measured and merciless. The bulbous head of his cock hits relentlessly at a spongy depth inside you until you have to remind yourself to breathe.

Despite Aegon’s largely bedridden state, he pleasures you with an expert hand just as he always has. His ruthless fingers press hard at your delicate clit until a scream wells in your throat. You grit your teeth to fight it back, but it leaves in a feeble cry anyway.

“Aegon!” you gasp.

“Aw, I know, sweet thing,” Aegon coos. “It’s far too much for you, isn’t it?”

You nod rapidly, with a pout pinching your pretty face. You grip the pillow with one trembling hand and bring the other to his unscarred cheek, cradling him gently there despite the aggressive way Aemond’s fucking you on top of him.

Despite his burns and his bandages and his disfigured features, you look at him the way you always have — like you’ve loved him forever, like you’ve spent entire lifetimes studying his face. The softness in your gaze makes his chest warm like he might cry.

“Do you love me, Dove?” Aegon murmurs.

You nod again, without an ounce of hesitation.

“Then prove it to me,” he whispers, fingers caging your swollen clit. “Make a mess on his cock for me.”

Your orgasm rushes over your body like the waves of a Dornish sea. Like a riptide that pulls you under and under and under. You bury your face in Aegon’s neck while you tremble on top of him, forced to ride through each merciless rush of pleasure.

“Good girl,” you hear Aegon praise with a laugh in your ear, though he sounds much further away than that. “Always so good for me, aren’t you, Dove?”

Aemond can feel every ruthless aftershock as it racks through your body. Your pussy flutters with each of them and leaks more honey that makes his cock glitter in the candlelight. It forces an orgasm from his body despite the heartache ripping through his chest.

He watches you and Aegon share a moment of bone-crushing intimacy while he impales you with his cock. Even while you fuck another, even with the silent understanding that Aegon with never again have you this way, you’re able to share something much deeper than sex.

Despite Aemond’s distant worry that he’ll never understand you in the same way, his orgasm tears through his body.

His hips stutter against your thighs as his cock jerks within your throbbing confines. He thrusts into you once, hard, and then stills against your hips, groaning with each load of cum your velvety cunt milks from him.

Aemond slumps when his cock begins to soften. You rise from Aegon’s neck to sit upright, cupping his cheek in a steady palm while the boy holds your hips in both of his — one smooth and the other scarred.

Aemond’s heaving chest twists with the dagger of self-loathing until you reach blindly for him, too.

Your free hand cradles his marred cheek and urges him closer. He noses at your neck while your mouth grazes his temple — a moment of connection that feels somehow more intimate than his flesh melting with yours.

The three of you bask silently in the honey-lit room, breathing harmoniously together, with candle-like souls that will forever set each other aflame.

Mutual Destruction.