Chapter Text
Prince Maeker did not allow for any of his family to travel for Vallar’s name day, but he could not very well decline his father’s jubilee a few months later, and the family arrived at Maegor’s Holdfast in a throng as equally sullen as they were rowdy.
Valarr could hardly contain himself at the excitement of more companions, but he held himself in, straight and mild and polite as was expected, banking on the currency of good behavior for a lenient allowance later.
It paid off. After only three hours of grueling feasting and making pleasant with various Lords, their timid maiden girls and their simpering wives, his father leaned over to him and told him he might go enjoy himself.
He did not bolt for the dance floor, but he made his way there with alacrity, all the same, allowing Daella to pull him along in the intricate pattern of a sword dance. He then danced with Lady Celtigar’s girl, too, and a Florent who made excellent conversation, for she took an interest in his fletching and he in her embroidery, and unironically he was sad to part from her.
“I might bring you some refreshment?” he suggested, and she beamed at the offer.
At the sideboard, where pages filled tankards with ale and smaller, daintier goblets with the wine of one’s choosing, his tall phantom was reclining against the wall, watching his progress over the brim of a tankard filled with wine.
He knew that because he asked, for he didn’t think Daeron liked ale and it was upsetting not to be well informed.
“I don’t.” his cousin answered thickly, and tipped forward the mighty vessel so that he might see the swirling red. It was over half gone. “I hear you’ve become fixated on twins, cousin.” he slurred next, and Valarr froze with his two goblets of arbor gold in hand, sending the page a sharp smile of dismissal.
A new sensation, something hot in the cheeks and unsure in the heart, had him wanting to deny it. Deny in fact, that he’d cared or spared a single thought for Daeron, or Daeron’s grief, or the weight of Daeron’s body on his in the mudflats, these past many months. Nay, for shame, it had been over a full year since Lady Dyanna had passed, and his maddening cousin had not sent him hardly five missives in return. Until he was standing before him now, untidy and guzzling wine like it was ale, Valarr had not felt any embarrassment for his devotion, but it struck sharp now.
“How would you know this?” he kept his tone snippy and his sharp chin aloft.
Daeron leaned in close, closer than any other young man his age might, closer than the page or Aelor ever could, for Daeron was taller than before, and when he leaned he also loomed, near him but also above Valarr. Valarr’s heart quaked in a million ways at the change.
“I know it because you are in trouble, cousin.” Daeron replied, and Valarr could almost taste the soured wine off his breath alone, and for a pathetic moment he did not find himself put off by it. “Everyone is worried you’re turning inward, Sweet Naerys,” he evoked the nickname of their old game cruelly, or maybe it was that Valarr had grown up and put away such games so it seemed cruel, but Daeron was not done, he went on, “I hear them say that you crave Dragonblood. And that you want a Dragon to ruck up your little night shift and have its way with you- like a girl.”
Daeron might have been a head taller by now, but it did not keep him out of reach of Valarr’s well trained fist. The Young Prince smoothly dropped the goblet meant for him and cut his cousin up under the chin, just as Black Dan had taught him, knocking that beautiful head of hair back into the wall, slamming it against a candle sconce and worsening the blow until crimson dyed the wheat gold tresses.
Valarr did not know what Daeron meant by any of it, not really, he’d not been told the common mysteries of such things for fear of his acting on them. But he knew from his father there were sneers that needed answering, and he was of an age to resent being compared to a girl.
Even by Daeron, even by his Aemon the Dragonknight.
And he had not touched Daeron since he arrived. Somehow this seemed inevitable. Perhaps love with the lack a care became a violent thing, Valarr didn’t know anything at all other than that he was not sorry for the punch and now that it was done, he wanted to lap at the blood pouring from his cousin’s reddened nose.
Prince Maeker interrupted such thoughts, he took them both by the shoulders and pried them apart, heedless of Valarr’s status and the fragile stitching on his velvet doublet.
“Fucking lard brains, the both of you.” he hissed to them, and amidst the shaking about he was being given by the great warrior, Valarr only heeded the way Daeron’s eyes danced merrily from between locks of disheveled hair, as if he too were glad at being touched at last, however the method.
“You make a spectacle of yourselves,” Prince Maeker pushed Daeron away, towards the low hall where the maids brought in the refreshments, “Go, your Father has not taken notice,” he then told Valarr with unconcealed aggravation and perhaps a smidge of fear, “-as yet. Go before he does. Daeron! With me.”
Valarr took care not to watch them go, not wanting to be rebuked twice in a night for this, and carefully kept aloft the one goblet still in hand and called back the page, “Another! Spiced.”
By the time father had cast his eyes over to that side of the gargantuan hall, Valarr was very primly presenting the erstwhile abandoned Florent girl with a proffered goblet.
“Fine boy.” The Good King murmured to his eldest son sat beside upon him on the dias, admiring his perfect little grandson and future heir, poised in his black doublet and red hose, streaked hair brushed back to perfect tidiness. Although his youthful gallantry might have the Florents unrealistically encouraged at their prospects.
It could not be helped; it was better than Aerion’s ferocious diatribe at Lord Darklyn at the far end, or Daella’s spinning excuse for dancing on the floor, or Aemon’s meek disinterest in his surroundings, or the bizarre manner in which Rheagal’s twins were attempting to drink from the same glass at the same time, their tongues entwined like lizards.
“Not a boy for much longer.” Prince Baelor remarked, something mournful and unsure tinging the pride in his words, as he watched Rheagal’s Lady wife Alys attempt to pinch her children apart. It was unsettling, the way that even apart those two seemed as tethered as they had been in the womb, being disconnected from the mouth did nothing to make them seem any more appropriate for feast. Prince Baelor gave Lady Alys a nod of his and with a relieved expression, he saw her urge her children up from their public seats and away from the royal dias.
“Getting zesty, is he?” King Daeron chuckled knowingly about Valarr. “Poor boy hasn’t got a war to expend himself in, like you did.”
And that was likely it, Baelor agreed.
Peacetime brought a different set of troubles, and it produced different sorts of men. If he did not fully understand his son, beyond the good graces and earnest kindness he knew to be fully true of him, it was likely a matter of upbringing, and his own fault in assuming they would be alike. Speaking of wars, where was his brother?
“Did you see Maeker leave, father?” Baelor asked, scanning the sea of guests.
“No,” nothing could dim the old man’s pleasure on this day, “likely off disciplining one of his clutch. He’ll be back.”
It was so late that few of the servants yet roamed the halls when Valarr, thinking better than to return directly to his own apartments, left his parents solar where it was common for he and Matarys to bid them goodnight, and made for those above. Where he rarely went, unless calling upon guests. Where only those guests prestigious and familiar enough warranted apartments. Guests such as family come from far away.
Guests such as Prince Maeker and his children.
The guard made no comment, only a salutary grunt that sounded like ‘Prince’ as Valarr passed and made bold with the door he guarded. The furnishings within were much like his own, though without those personal touches that spoke of home and not just guest-right. A fire was crackling merrily on the hearth and turning the cold winters night into something cozy and soft.
His quarry was lounging upon the sofa, feet propped up upon the arm and a woman, one Valarr recalled vaguely as the nurse for Uncle Maeker’s girls, dabbing at his feet with a cloth, a basin in her lap.
The cloth came away tinged in pink each time.
Daeron only glanced over to him with mild interest at his entry, his mouth taut in a wince. He had wiped the blood from his nose, it looked only slightly swollen.
“Cousin.” he greeted with the same maddening disinterest of before. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
Valarr fiddled with his cuticles and glanced back to the maid, wishing she were not present for the completely unscripted urge that had sent him wandering the halls and entering his cousins’ chambers at the hour of the wolf. “Cousin.” he greeted in return but failed to say more.
With a short snicker at Valarr’s expense, the elder boy raised himself enough to take the cloth from the maid and murmur lowly, “My thanks, Lady Wyl, that ought to do.”
She bobbed a curtsy, one to each, and passed back into the connecting chamber through the adjoining door.
“Wyl?” Valarr hummed in her wake.
Daeron was still sucking his teeth in suppressed pain each time he swiped the cloth over his oozing heels.
“She’s Rhea and Daella’s nurse.” he corrected Valarr’s tone pointedly, something annoyed lacing it.
“And your’s too, it seems.” Valarr sniffed.
“What’s that?”
“Your nurse. She nurses you.” he floundered, his heart rabbiting in his throat from some maniacal need to stop standing here in the middle of the floor like a fool while imagining throttling Lady Wyl so he might take her place on the stool before the low couch and bathe Daeron’s bloodied feet.
“Have you come to make obvious statements, cousin?” Daeron asked patiently, his breath coming out huffily as he remained bent over his father’s handiwork.
Valarr did not know why he was here, but he wasn’t too awful at thinking on his feet. “I came to say sorry.”
The rag dropped to the floor with an emphatic splat, a suitable accompaniment to Daeron’s disbelieving stare leveled at him.
“I am sorry.” Valarr insisted.
“No you fucking aren’t.” Daeron retorted, mouth curling up all ugly in distaste.
Valarr wanted to kiss that mouth so badly he was going to find his bowels twisted up tomorrow from the pining, hence why he was here in the first place. “No, not for the punch. I’m not sorry for that.” he tried again, for if Daeron wanted honesty he could be honest, if Daeron wanted him to be a maid he could be a maid, if he wanted Valarr to kiss his feet in abject apology, he would.
It was worth wondering how much of this shown on his face. Daeron kept staring, a harsh cast to his usually genteel features.
“I’m sorry for your feet.” he clarified, because he was. It was the terrible and predictable thing that Daeron should get punched and then have his feet whipped for his trouble.
“You didn’t whip them.”
“No, but I’m sorry about them.”
He was sorry that no matter how he acted out, it never seemed to amount to much more than gentle amusement and mild reproof. He was sorry, in essence, for being born to favor.
The silence dragged on. He was too choked up to remedy it, Daeron was too drunk or possibly too sane to think anything more needed saying. Yet still Valarr stood there with clasped hands like an idiot, or like a kicked dog, yearning to be allowed closer. He stood and stood, heedless of the ticking minutes, the dead silence, the disbelieving stare directed at him.
“Do you need some fucking penance prescribed to sleep or something?” Daeron finally asked, jarring him from a daydream regarding the heat and their bodies as bare as swimmers and flailing similarly.
He ignored that. “I could help you to bed?” he suggested hopefully; it would make for a terrible business trying to walk on such blisters.
“Why are you here, Valarr? Did the girl you entertained not give you what you wanted?”
He had expended all his foibles and niceties, it seemed. The raw truth remained and with desperation born of a youthful surety in his feeling, Valarr dared murmur aloud, however abashedly- “I’ve missed you.”
A softness overtook Daeron at his honesty, and the body once lounging suddenly stirred into gentle animation, “I missed you, as well.” he conceded, sad smile back in place.
Valarr had missed it like a missing limb. “You wrote few letters.” he mumbled.
“I know.” Daeron sighed, “I’m sorry.”
“T’is alright.” he insisted, “I wrote too many.”
“Not too many for my liking.”
“I wrote some they didn’t let me send.”
“Gods,” Daeron’s eyes glinted in genuine interest for the first time in this stilted interview, “now you have me intrigued. Whatever blasphemous thing did you put down in them, foolish boy?”
He had written to ask if he —Daeron— ever wished he had a twin, a soul connected by the gods or whoever it was that connected souls, a twin flame none could object to for the gods themselves had made them so. If like the only twins Valarr knew, if like them Daeron ever wished their bellies had once been tethered and the hollow well in the center puckered out in a gruesome display of their nearness, if he ever wished now to share beds and hold hands to have that odd communion of merging atop each other to some supreme and ecstatic culmination of nearness.
It made his chest ache even now, through the sentiments were seven months obsolete in a crumpled wad in the bottom of Maester Yormwill’s cavernous waste bucket. “It was foolish.” Valarr realized shakily; his embarrassment almost strong enough to have him quit the field and retire to his own room. But…gods he had wanted…something…when he came looking for him.
“Suit yourself.” Daeron grumbled dryly, taking his silence for reticence.
Then another bright thought struck. Valarr did have news, on the topic of twins even: blasphemous and debaucherous if that’s what Daeron wanted.
“I might tell you better than that if you recalled your manners and offered me a seat.” he intoned primly, calculated to aggravate.
Oh seven- Daeron’s face was a beautiful thing of lax disgust at his snobbery and Valarr’s body thrilled all over at it. He did not wait then to act on impulse or invitation, he did what he had wanted to do since entering and strode across the floor with light steps. Gathering Daeron’s flagrantly long legs in his hands like he might a cord of wood -if the young prince had ever had the sad necessity of carrying his own- he sat himself astraddle the couch.
The bleeding appendages were thus pillowed there atop his lap, staining his fine crimson hose. The drips were darker than the red, a gross oversight as the red was supposed to represent the blood aspect of their family sigil.
He’d have to have a word with the tailor.
This was better. Closer. Daeron’s face was no longer sneering either.
Valarr kept a loose but secure hold on the boney ankles as if his hands were shackles; the thought did not occur to him but it seemed to occur to Daeron who stared down at where he was being touched like he wasn’t entirely sure he was witnessing a real phenomenon.
Nothing broke the stillness for some time until Daeron’s gentle mutter, “You’re hard.”
There under his heel, he must feel it. The hose were not substantial and his doublet was short, as was the fashion for his age. Soon he’d grow into the longer cuts, he dearly desire to be allowed them, as a marker of age if not to hide these persistent aches he endured of late- so obvious even without one’s feet in his lap.
He had not been informed of the use of his urges, in fact he was still quite unsure how one went about curing them at all. He’d seen the twins, yes, but in that case he’d seen something that to Valarr looked far more like Aelora having Aelor, than the other way around. Aelor’s cock repeatedly stiffened and then plunged into nothingness, swallowed up by some mysterious place between her legs. He now told Darron of these trysts.
“Is this what you wrote in your letters?” Daeron let out a laugh so shocked and genuine, Valarr wished he deserved it.
“No.” -he’d written about navals and puckered bellies and twin souls.
He’d wanted to write of pricks and tongues and tearing flesh only to kiss it better.
Valarr stared down at the torn flesh in his lap and his belly gnawed.
He wanted to watch Daeron’s head toss back the way Aelor made Aelora’s, he wanted to cradle Daeron’s back and cry out in grievous happiness as he took his cock deep and made it disappear like Aelora did when Aelor moved atop her. He wasn’t sure if that were possible in his case, he didn’t know how she did it and he was worrisomely concluding it was because she was a woman and he might lack capacity.
Gods was he born wrong twice over? Born alone and born uselessly male?
“Did you join them in this…” Daeron asked gently, still seeming disquieted by the tale.
Valarr shook at the memory of being swallowed all wrong once. “No, no!” Valarr still felt grieved by it, and he felt like lying, but he didn’t. “Only once.” he admitted, “They are for each other.” He thought them terribly beautiful in that, relatable too. If he could have Daeron, if they were twins, he would happily let all the world see their love but none might mix their own into it.
“And you wish for a twin.” Daeron surmised, his voice still utterly careful, even in his wine drunk haze. “Are you so lonely?”
Valarr stared down at the lacerated feet he held and found a rush of tears forming too fast and too hot and too awful. He flung his head back lest they fall, staring up at the ceiling and blinking them, burning and full, back into their traitorous ducts.
“Seven fucks we must get you a maid.” Daeron chortled in his observation of it.
Valarr only shook his head fiercely. “I want no maid. Have you…had…Lady Wyl?” he whined in utter misery at the thought.
“Wha- no. She’s the girl’s nurse.” Daeron huffed, offended at the suggestion and Valarr got the disgusting sense she might be one of the only females off limits to his attentions. “We wouldn’t get you someone like Matarys’ nurse, either, Val. We’ll get you a nice girl, someone it won’t ruin but who isn’t particular-“
Valarr couldn’t bear it. He didn’t want to be fucking cured by a maid. It would not work.
That was the sort of talk for Maester Yormwill to grind him down with.
He wanted the boy who’d played his champion to kiss him again, he’d wanted the boy who chased his lips outside the baths to chase them again, and he wanted the boy who laid atop him in the bullrushes on the muddy bank to keep him warm, to press himself all along him once more or tell him of spring.
He didn’t want to die hungry and unloved. He didn’t want to die untaken. Couldn’t anyone understand that?
Madly, he took up the foot he held anchored to his lap, the one atop his thigh and not the one betwixt, and with the boldness of an angry novice, lathed his tongue across its patchwork of cuts and blisters with a sycophant’s desperation.
Daeron let out a startled cry; Valarr tasted copper.
He flattened his tongue yet firmer, Daeron jerked bodily. The movement came up between his legs, that one foot wedged where the ornately stitched gore held each leg’s covering together, right over where all the young prince’s blood and faculties pounded and twitched in desperation to be heeded. Valarr let out his own gasp at the violent relief, at the firm press of the foot to him, he puffed open mouthed against Daeron’s tender arch and rutted in desperation at the proffered heel between his legs.
Perhaps he had not even meant to give him that, Valarr realized, perhaps Daeron had only jerked by instinct at the salty sting of Valarr’s spit upon his open cuts. He felt himself sob, another heavy puff against the bleeding hollow of the arch; Daeron was the one with the foot whipping, he ought to be the one to cry. Grinding his teeth, Valarr folded his hand around the other foot and ground all the firmer, defiant and abashed.
“Valarr.” Daeron’s call, full of wonderment, made him flutter apart his tear clumped lashes and look to his cousin. “What in gods name is this?”
On reflection, Daeron did not look like someone who had anticipated Valarr’s need for his heel against his cock. He did not look like someone who expected his bloody arch to be lathed at like dripping fruit. He looked stunned and possibly worried, his dreamy eyes wide alert, his mouth parted as if winded by the depravity. His body shook in a minute tremble, and his cheeks were reddened as a girl’s.
“I don’t want a maid.” Valarr pleaded with blood reddened lips, his sticky cheek pressed to Daeron’s aloft ankle, “I don’t want…anyone. None but you. I had thought you wanted me, too.”
Daeron whispered through glossy lips, pleading too, “We were boys, cousin.”
“Does love take into account such things?” Valarr cried out desperately, “I know not how it grows, only that I do nothing to feed it, yet it consumes me. Mayhaps it’s not love, it’s not at all how father loves mother, I know it.” he admitted ashamed, Father would never inflict such madness on his mother. “I dare say it’s worse than whatever Aelora feels for Aelor. But it’s strong, gods Daeron it’s— it’s strong.”
Strong enough to spur him to rut against his cousin’s foot.
The shame of it folded the young prince in half, bent over in his seat to hide his face from Daeron’s blazing study. The movement put his face right where Daeron’s tunic his rode up to expose his own breeches. Right in the cradle where his belly would pucker if the gods had any kindness in them or pity for Valarr’s wicked heart.
“I wish we were twins.” he moaned there, the foot digging into him so harshly at this angle that he keened in happy agony.
“And what would that solve?” Daeron inquired, but he was breathless.
Valarr pet at his cousin’s hips, strong and lean and very like Melys’ round rump, full of lethargic power. “So I could take you deep inside me.” Valarr replied with the obvious, not a thought or drop of blood left in his brain. “As Aelora does Aelor.”
He heard Daeron choke on his breath. He was breathing hard, his cousin, Valarr could feel his heaving belly beneath his cheek.
“Do they truly fuck?” he asked him.
“They have me watch them.” Valarr wasn’t entirely sure it was the same as fucking, whatever it was they did, but he really didn’t know what either was. So he began to rut again, since Daeron had not pushed him away. “They are so loved by each other.” he only wished Daeron could watch them with him, that he might understand and want it, too. “As I love you.”
“You love me as a puppy in heat.” Daeron scoffed, but for the first time that evening he made a motion to touch Valarr of his own inclination. And when he did, it was a fond and comforting hand to the crown of Valarr’s muddled head, deft fingers swirling in his dark locks that had begun to grow past his ears. “You pretty little lunatic.”
Valarr shook at the endearment, moaning throatily into Daeron’s damp shirt. “Call me that again, call me… call me the old one.” he raved in pleading tones.
“The one that had you punch me? I think not.”
“Please, please I won’t this time. Call me, call me it- please.” Valarr cried, so chafed in his hose he wondered if the blood upon them was from his cockhead or Daeron’s feet alone.
-Call me Naerys, see I have grown my hair out for you? We shall both have long locks soon enough, they’ll say we are unfashionable together, they will say we are alike.-
“I shall call you Valarr,” Daeron denied him even as he took pity, more pity than the gods ever had upon his desperate heart, flexing his foot harsher against him, almost up under where his stones were so tender that he let out a sob at the touch, “and you’ll wet your hose for me like the good little prince you are, won’t you? Yes, you heard me, do it puppy. It’s what you came here for, no? You want no maid, you want only me? Then do it, Valarr, spill yourself on my father’s handiwork.”
A cheerful oblivion he had only experienced upon waking some mornings, sticky and half firm, overtook him then, replacing the seed he relinquished in numbing spurts against the insistent press of bloody toes.
Valarr did not know when he had been moved, brought up by deceptively strong arms and cherished, no longer an outcast upon the plains of Daeron’s belly, but cradled to his heart. He only knew of the change for he could hear the pounding beneath his ear, echoing his own exultant pulse.
“You’re no Naerys to me.” Daeron murmured into his cheek with a voice Valarr had never heard him use before, warm and wicked and unsorry. “We’ve made a terrible mistake— You’re my Alyssa.” he realized aloud and dipped his fingers into Valarr’s ruined hose, dragging his fingers through the mess he’d made and torturing the boy’s spent cock only further.
Valarr mewled plaintively upon his chest, overcome by it all. But then fearing that his small cries might be mistaken for those of discomfort over Daeron’s hand thumbing at the tender head, he raised his face and declared his agreement, open mouthed and dumb. Nodding vigorously and making himself dizzy with it.
“I’d be your anything.” he assured earnestly.
He heard Daeron laugh at him. “Voracious little darling, aren’t you? And bold- ye gods.”
Daeron left off torturing him to torture his own cock in turn, flogging the thing senselessly fast, to judge by the jostling Valarr felt as he lay inert upon his shoulder.
“Does that not hurt?” he said, timidly curious but mostly tired.
He was making great study of the curve of Daeron’s lips; he had never been so near them without mashing his own to them shortly after and ruining the observation.
“I want it to hurt.” Daeron on grit out.
But Valarr knew that he had become gruff because his throat was closing up, choking on the need to spurt. Valarr felt the same often when he woke half mad with rigid need, and mounted whichever pillow was nearest. It made for a dry and chafing rub, and most recently Valarr had conceded to making a great mess and actually using his own spittal to aide the slide.
“Are you using my seed?” he inquired meekly.
Daeron choked on his answer and went rigid beneath him and Valarr was filled with a sudden regret that he had not stripped out of his hose fully so he might feel the hot splash bare against his thighs.
Then he kissed him. Daeron did. And it sounded like agony and a relief all at once. Valarr swallowed this groan greedily. “Yes,” Daeron panted against his lips, “I used your seed.”
Valarr, with his heart offered as if on a plate by his actions, reached downwards and collected what had been spilt, bringing it up with a lifetime's worth of need in his expression, and pressed the salt to Daeron’s primrose pale lips.
He not only accepted it without rejection, but as if ravenous, he took his coated fingers down to his very gullet. And it was the closest Valarr had gotten to being inside him.
Strange how such a reception only made him want something more.