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The night air is cold enough to chill your bones.
It is pitch dark in here, so devoid of light that you fear if you could take a step, outward, out into the capacious path… you would dissolve. The darkness would swallow you like a thing. As you stare, standing here on the edge of the alleyway, willing the darkness to form shapes—a pillar there, a hedge bush, the path that leads to another tavern. The sounds from the street—laughter, quarrels, screams—are more muffled than ever. You do not know what you were hoping for when you detached yourself from your betrothed, but you know it wasn’t anything good.
The cold does not bother you now, not as it did when you first came into the Red Keep. Little by little, the foreign air has made its home inside you. Why would it not? you think. After all you are marrying into it—King’s Landing, Red Keep, the Iron Throne.
The Targaryens.
The night air swirls around you and there’s a burst of scent, sudden and strange—of roses and dandelions. The sleeves of your gown flow behind you. You are just about to walk toward the darkness of the alleyway, when a voice—rough and callous and familiar —stops you in your tracks.
“Running away, sister?”
You still—every part of you stops. Your lungs do not draw breath, your heart does not pump blood, your skin, cold and goose-fleshed, crawls at the sound. There is only one man who can elicit such cursed response. And you close your eyes before you answer to him.
“Aerion.”
You can hear him step closer, feel the sudden bent in the atmosphere. “What are you doing?”
“Exploring.” You bite your tongue. “Not that it is any of your business.”
“Anything my good-sister does is my business.” His words, heard separately, would sound sweet. Would sound kind and gentleman-like. But there is the matter of his voice—it is sharp and cutting like a silken blade.
“What are you doing here?”
“Following you,” he says, and there’s a danger in his tone. Something flickering, burning like spice. It tastes of treason.
“Did Valarr send you?” you ask, knowing very well that Aerion is the last person your betrothed would send to look for you. Yet, you wanted to say his name. You wanted the reminder—that you are bound to Valarr Targaryen. And anything that comes out of his cousin’s mouth should regard this fact very carefully.
“My cousin does not even know you are gone.”
Your heart pricks, and you feel foolish. The sentence is intended to hurt you, to disquiet you. Yet the knowledge does not make it better.
“I was… exploring,” you say slowly, still not turning, “I wanted a moment alone.”
“Alone from the good prince?” he says cruelly.
“Alone from all the noise.”
“Ah, because there is enough noise inside your head.”
You shiver. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Look at me.”
The command comes sudden and stark. His cursed voice slithers inside your skin, like a bad word, a malediction. You feel your blood warm as you turn back, unable to disobey.
Aerion Brightflame stands, leaning against the other pillar of the alleyway. His head is tilted, violet eyes boring into you. And even in the dark, the silver in his head shines. The red from his chainmail shirt sends blisters of spark on his face. The moonlight always does inexplicable things to his complexion. That Valyrian paleness, the light eyes, that sharpness in his face are cut from marble—from something ancient that hasn’t been replicated in another creature quite so alluringly. When you first saw him, you thought he was the most beautiful person alive.
You tell yourself that it was because you were promised to him.
“I know what you mean. I know what you want. Because you were betrothed to me first.”
His words, accusations, burn your skin. “Aerion—”
“Before you betrayed me and went to him.”
“That’s a vile accusation.”
“Vile, is it?” He comes closer, and you still yourself, you don’t back away because you don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how he affects you still. “Am I vile? Is that why you ran away to precious, golden Valarr?”
“I went to Valarr because I love him.”
He chuckles. It is a dangerous, joyless sound. “You did not love me, then?”
“No,” you lie.
His eyes flash cold. He steps closer and closer until you feel yourself step back, just to delay the gap between you. You feel your heart skid to a stop when your back meets with the stone of the alleyway. You will yourself to stare at him with force. With some of the fire everyone keeps telling you is inside you too.
Aerion reaches his hand to smooth the rough hair fluttering over your forehead. You stay still, not even breathing as he leans down, down, down until his pale nose touches your throat.
He sniffs, predatory, insane. “You smell the same—cardamon, vanilla. Valarr likes that, does he?”
“Yes,” you hiss out, turning your face.
Aerion’s hand comes to touch your throat, his thumb brushes over your pulse point at the junction of your jaw. “But there’s something else, too. Something my good cousin cannot even fathom.”
“Aerion—let me go…” you breathe out.
“Blood,” he says, and you can feel his tongue lap out, for a fraction of a second. Tasting you. “That tangy, metallic taste of it. Something forbidden. Something rotten.”
You scoff in anger, pushing him back on instinct. “You are unbelievable.”
He leans back, undeterred, as if your hands weigh nothing. “He cannot smell that. He cannot smell you.”
You say nothing. There is nothing to say. Because whatever argument he has concocted inside his maggot-infested head is fallacy. Is nothing. You wish you never loved Aerion, never laughed at his cruel jokes, never touched his hand, never ran with him in the nooks of the Red Keep hiding from everyone else. You wish you never let him kiss you, pressed agaisnt his chest, his hands roaming everywhere in your body before settling on your face.
You still wake up in sweat at night, feeling his tongue drinking you in—claiming you, maiming you.
“You cut off the finger of Lord Redwyn,” you say, surprised to find your voice calm despite the tremor in your heart.
“He brushed his hand against your skin.”
You shake your head in disbelief. “It was a dance.”
He laughs, and the sound echoes off the stone with razor-sharp intensity. “I do not like sharing…”
“That is insanity—”
“... and they have given you to someone I cannot fight. Cannot kill.”
“This is treason.”
“All my life Valarr was the one I pitied,” he hisses, clutching your wrist so hard it sends a stab of pain through your skin. “The good one, that docile lamb, the one those boring septons praised. He never had the courage to look inside his head, never had the courage to feel the dragon in his blood—a waste of an heir. I thought.” His grip tightens. But you stay still. “Yet he got the only thing I ever wanted without even trying.”
“I am not a thing you can possess,” you bite back, tilting your head to challenge him. “I am a woman and I would not have someone who deemed me any less.”
“Oh you are not a woman,” he hisses. “You are my doom.” The violet of his iris is burning bright, burning through you. “I tried to soften myself for you. I stopped cursing for you. I turned away from brawls whenever I wanted to pick up my knife and slit someone’s throat, I let that demon Egg maim my hand and did nothing. I let those meandering maesters give me potions for sleeping when I wanted to bash their heads and burn their useless hands. I wanted to appear sane for you. And yet the one time I slipped, you left me and went to bed with my dear, green cousin. The only one who I cannot touch. You are a witch, a temptress, a vile seductress. You say I could not possess you? You possess me.”
You want to be mad at him, want to pull him apart with your bare hands. And yet, the pain in his poisonous speech touches a deep, dark part of you. The one that was betrothed to him, the one that thought you could tame him.
“You scared me,” you whisper. “I realised I couldn’t change you.”
He stares at you, his eyes turning softer. For a quirt, forgiving moment, you think you see him again, the way you saw him first time. You were fresh off your ship and your feet barely touched the squalor of King’s Landing. He was there, standing by the royal carriage, head tilted at you in palpable surprise. As if he did not expect you.
The months after, you saw him, again and again. He was willful, he was cruel. He was forever cursed with the blood of the dragon. You thought you saw inside him, that supple, rotten core of his heart. The seeds of madness swon so deep he could not extricate it without damaging himself. You thought you saw him softer, too. Yet. The lines blurred. More often than not. His softness becomes his cruely. His words become his blade. His kiss at once romantic and bruising.
“I wonder if you could… love me,” he says, there is a tender pang hanging there at the end of it. “Because you seemed the only one who could.”
The word—that cursed word—shakes you. Reverberate inside your head like a coin. Even in this momnet of damning clarity, you cannot tell him the whole truth. You did. “I wanted to love you good. I tried to.”
“And you failed,” he says, and the words are curiously flat. “And you left. Like everyone else.”
You chest pricks, it bleeds. Because that is the truth. You failed, like everyone else—everyone before you. People see him and they touch him and then they leave him in his own little prison. People see the curse and the pain and they decide that he is not worth the trouble. That his malice is both the question and the answer. And he stays there, wallowing in his own darkness, wondering what is wrong with him. Alone.
Without quite thinking what you are doing, you reach out your hand, the one he hasn’t gripped in anger, to touch his hair. It is soft, smooth, silken. It feels like a boy’s hair, it feels dangerously malleable. He feels ruinously malleable at the mouth of the darkened alley.
His breath hitches. There is an almost imperceptible shift in his expression. Almost not there. But you see it, and you feel your heart break clean in two. Because despite everything, the betrayal and the humiliation, Aerion Targaryen still loves you.
“Why are you lurking the shadows?” he asks.
“I do not know,” you reply truthfully.
“I do. It is because the darkness calls you, too. It is because you liked when you were the only one who could chain me. Because the thought of a suitable life with a doting husband scares you almost as much as the opposite scares you. You want a gentle prince? Or do you want one who burns for you?”
Your voice is lower than a whisper. “You’d burn anyway.”
“I still love you.”
And you love him, too. But not enough to spend the rest of your life trying to soften his blows, trying to save him from ruining himself and others. Valarr, when he found you crying in the royal garden, scratching your wrist where Lord Redwyn had touched—you thought it was the reason of it all, you were the reason of all the violence— knelt in front of you. He touched your hand and soothed the brun of the scratch. You decided to love him, for the moment. And then, you decided to love him forever.
The man in front of you is staring at you in utter infatuation. You look at him and realise that you have never known your heart, not fully. You do not know how much you can bear. Your hand is still in his hair, and you lean in to press a chaste kiss to his cheek. You whisper that you are sorry. That someone brave enough to tame his mind would come. That his heart will not burn. That he will find reason, just not through you.
“They’re sending me off to Lys,” he says. “That far enough for you?”
“I never asked for that.”
“Your betrothed did.”
Surprise hits you with a blunt force. Your breath hitches. When Aerion notices it, he chuckles.
“So he did not tell you.”
“I am sure he plans to.”
“When, I wonder? My ships leaves on the morrow.” He leans in again, resting his mouth on your neck. You feel your knees buckles, without a will of their own. You almost fall over before his hands bracket your waist.
“Aerion.” His name on your lips is both a plea and a warning.
“I know you love him,” his words drench your skin. “Just pretend for a minute. Pretend you are mine.”
You nod, haze covering your senses. You find your hands reaching up to catch his neck, hold him in place. He is right, you love Valarr, and this is only pretend. You have been called a mad child enough in your life to avoid all intensities. You do not want the burn of Aerion’s fire, do not want his passion, do not want to feel the graze of his teeth marking his territory on your skin. You don’t want his madness or his desires because you know he’d ruin you. So you only pretend, you allow yourself to pretend as he holds you, as you pull him close for one last time.
When his teeth close around your skin, it is surprisingly tender. You whimper as he bites you, marks you, ruins you. The night wind flutters your clothes, the smell of the dark alleyway is intoxicating, ruinous. But you stay there, you stay his for this moment.
Because for one, strange and sparking moment, it feels disastrously like true love.