#The Order of Things | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

barbieaemond · 3 months

Text

The order of things

Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x fem!reader

Warnings: mild angst, masturbation, oral sex (m receiving), grinding

Word count: 3k

Taglist: @zae5 @multyfangirl @arcielee @credulouskhaleesi @bunbunbl0gs @alphard-hydraes-blog

MASTERLIST

There is a raven that flies towards the rookery as soon as the sun is high enough to bathe the Keep in orange. It always comes at the same split minute, Aemond sees it every day, because it is the same split minute in which his training ends. Sometimes he even manages to get the better of the bird, then looks up as he sheathes his sword and awaits him. As soon as it crosses the sky he leaves the courtyard.

His day is like a prayer, devoutly tenacious and unchanging. A bath, breakfast, a flight on dragonback, a book. A visit to Helaena and the twins if the reading bores him.

Someone might say that even his walk is always the same. Rigour and order, to be everything Aegon is not.

This time, he disarms Ser Criston well in advance, so much that the raven has yet to show itself, and when it does, Aemond will be blind to his passing.

"Mother," he says curtly as the Queen passes by. She goes to pray as she does every morning, always at the same time. She too is a creature devoted to rigour, and duty; she has seized her days and clutched them in her fist to prevent them from floating through her.

She pauses to greet him, her voice as mellifluous as ever and her eyes just as warm, and then suddenly, he turns to look at her as if he is looking at a stranger, as if she is speaking a language he does not know. "I wanted to tell you that I'm going to see some girls today, to choose your new maid."

"What's wrong with my maid?"

"Well, I figured she might ask for a leave as the wedding approaches."

He blinks, he stalls, he bogs, unnaturally, the sand stops in the hourglass. The raven glides over the towers, unnoticed.

"Yes, of course." he says, sheathing his sword, and the sand flows again, grain by grain; the funnel shrunk.

Everything in his life is part of that rigour, even people, even her.

She has been in his service long enough to know without asking when the scar pulls to the point of requiring medication. She has been in his service long enough to know that a slight frown in his eyebrows is enough to make her close the curtains and prevent the light from worsening the pain in his head, to know that he likes his venison rather raw, that he hates that doublet because the sleeves are puffed and he feels like a court jester. And she tacitly made it disappear.

She does everything without uttering a word. She doesn't need to ask, she moves when he moves, she has adapted to him like a second skin, and she doesn't seem harmed by the edges.

Yet he is harmed by something, as she pulls off his boots in front of the fireplace. He sees a flat sea where he would like to see a storm. He sees grains flowing and wishes to crash the glass.

"Do you need anything else my Prince?" she has a seraphic expression on her face, and he sees deception. She speaks in a firm, devoted voice, and he hears betrayal.

He stares at her with the eye that looks like a needle, feels like it, then shifts his gaze to the fire and says "I will be in need of your assistance tomorrow, for the whole day."

"The whole day?"

"Yes. Why? Do you have something better to do than the duties you are paid for?"

She is no novice to his bitter tongue; somehow, stupidly, naively and recklessly, she is able to imbue it with treacle when it enters her head. It doesn't matter anyway, her foolishness will end as soon as she takes her vows.

"No. Of course not. I'll be at your service, my Prince."

"Hmm, until?"

"Until?"

"You should be the one to tell me. When is the wedding due?"

Her eyes widen like two large moons and she seems to crumple in on herself, on the floor she is kneeling on, under the Prince's unwavering, iron eye. She feels her throat tighten and yet his hands are steady along the armrests. She feels her lungs crackle against her ribcage. "I—"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Why didn't she?

"My prince, I thought your Grace should not be bothered with such trivial matters."

"I decide what to be bothered about." He says in an imperative tone. "When would you have bothered to inform me? Is this how you show loyalty to your prince? Keeping things from me?"

She glues her eyes to the floor, she cannot hold the Prince's gaze, not when he is like this, even though he has never been like this. He looks angry, he looks outraged? As if he has been wronged. That look makes her blood run cold, and then it melts in red down her cheeks and neck. It would be too easy to blame the chimney behind her back, easy but necessary, to keep things in order. Prince and servant, nothing more. What else is there?

There are heavy sighs falling in the dark, stranded between the sheets as his bones boil and tense at the climax, desire spilled, wasted. But that's fine. To not be all that Aegon is. This too has become rigour, part of the order of things.

It is the order of things to watch her kneel at his feet and wish to spill his desire into her mouth. As is seeing her nails always neat and tidy scratching the floor as her back arches against him, as is seeing the blood reddening her cheeks and neck, and wanting to lick it as far as it goes.

Someone else will do it. An ordinary man of no consequence in the order of things, the real one.

"You may go." he says coldly, hoping the frost of his tongue will cool the feverish blood under his skin.

She rises from the floor with a bowed, desolate head. "I bid you good night, my Prince."

The next morning he asks her to change the sheets, and he turns his back on her, ashamed, as if she knows she is in those sheets.

He takes a bath while she does her chores, finishing exactly when he does, because she moves when he moves. She helps him put on a dark green robe, unperturbed by his nudity, because that is her duty and it no longer makes her blush.

There's never been clumsiness in her hands, but there is today. Aemond feels her hands heavy as boulders when she prepares the ointment for his eye, when she leans over him to remove his eyepatch. She doesn't speak to him as she always does, oozing that glimmer of amusement when she brings up the servants' petty feuds and wars.

"You're rather quiet today." He asserts later, as she buttons his doublet "Has the armistice been reached in the kitchens?"

She opens in a brief smile, but it doesn't reach her eyes. "I don't know, Your Grace. I find myself spending a lot more time outside the Keep these days."

"Is that so?” He retorts, narrowing his eye “Hmm, is that why my books are still on the desk?"

She finishes her buttoning and ties her hands on her modest skirt. "I am sorry, Your Grace. I will see to it that they are put in order at once."

"I have no use for your apology. Why didn't you do it when I told you to?"

"Your mother gave me a leave for a few hours yesterday."

"And why did you ask my mother and not me? You are in my service, not hers."

She keeps looking down like a suspect on trial and swallows. "I went to Flea Bottom to buy some fabric for my wedding dress. I was ashamed to ask you for a leave for something so frivolous. As a woman, I thought your mother would understand."

"You will do no such thing in the future. Hide things from me and leave the Keep without my permission, or I'll have you punished. Am I being clear?"

"Your Grace, I…” she pauses, she looks down, she swallows, but it’s now or never. “You should know that I will no longer be here after the wedding. I am going to formally resign my position. Your Mother has already-"

His eye goes wide, and wild, and he breathes loudly until he is snarling. "Are you deaf or dense? Did you not hear me? You will not leave my service."

The moons in her eyes are full now. She looks at him, begging him to let her go, because that is the natural course of things. She will marry a common man, give him a couple of children and live a quiet life in the country, where her groom has a smallholding of land, their only source of wealth if they do not want a life of misery in Flea Bottom. And she is fine with that. She has accepted it. She is like any other common girl, she cannot dream, her blood is only red, there's no castle nor crown waiting for her.

She has accepted her fate with the calmness of a stream that lets itself be carried along by its current. She is happy like this, because as far as she could, in that silly way in which all ordinary girls dream, she dreamed, even though her dream is made of flesh and blood.

She had shivered when he had leaned over her when he taught her to read. She had breathed in deeply to know what he smelled like. She had felt ice in her stomach under his gaze when she read a few pages to him. And that is more than dreaming.

She cannot remain in his service, because she is an ordinary girl and more than dream, she cannot want.

"Your Grace..." she begs, going down to the floor "I beg you. Let me go my way. I believe I have always served you to the best of my ability and if I’ve ever failed you in something, name it. I will do anything to make it right."

Aemond bogs again, but in something far more paralysing and at the same time overwhelming than all his rigour. Perhaps it is the sight of her on her knees again, her head bowed and devoted, and the fact that he wants to touch that devotion, wants to taste it and swallow it.

Slowly, he lifts her chin with two fingers, eye blind to everything else; his thumb moves over her lower lip as if to know its edges, as if he has wanted to do this all his life.

"Anything?" he asks in the voice of another, the one stranded in the sheets.

She nods slowly, and the movement rubs his thumb against her teeth for a moment, forcing him to swallow, to give himself control, not to push his finger in. He is not Aegon, He is not Aegon, he is not Aegon.

"Would you be willing to please me?" he asks, and his question reaches some remote place in her, that place where a girl can dream and want freely. In that place, if he had asked once, twice, a hundred times, she would have bent to his will, not to the duty of the servant who must please her lord. Sure, that too. But first of all to her will. It is a question that need not be asked, for there is but one answer.

"Yes..."

Blood flows into her cheeks, breathing out fire from her lips. "How...? How do you want me to please you, my Prince?"

"With this..." he replies, pushing his thumb over her lip.

Her hands move fluidly over the belt and buttons of his breechers as if she had done this countless times before. She helps him dress, she knows his body even though she has never touched him. She has never touched a man in her life, not like this. Aemond reads the embarrassment on her cheeks and he basks in it with a glimmer of pride, because he will be the first.

Gently, he places a hand behind her head, tilting it a little, and looks at her with his heavy, clouded eye, enthralled. "Open your mouth..."

He knows she's never done this before, but the hot alcove of her mouth is enough to make him open his mouth and let out air in a broken cadence. She raises her eyes as if to ask if she is doing something wrong, and the sight, real and not the outcome of some delusion hidden in the dark, smothers his breath. He begins to thrust into her mouth slowly, hardening quickly as she continues to look at him and welcome him into her mouth with the devotion with which one kneels to the Seven.

"Gevie..." he pants hoarsely, brushing his fingers through her hair "You look more beautiful than I thought like this..."

His hand in her hair never tightens, though his hips move faster and the wet sound is the only one that keeps his panting company.

"Your cheeks..." he instructs her "Hollow your cheeks..."

And just as when he was teaching her to read, she listens , sucking agonisingly slowly. “Fuck—” he curses, threading his long fingers through her hair and pulling at the roots; he thrusts faster so that she has to grip his waist with her hands but when he senses she can’t breathe, he lets of her head and slips out of her scorching lips, hissing at feeling the cold air of the room.

She’s panting hard, with her mouth open and slick with him. But she has little time to catch a puff of air. He thrashes her on the carpet, with a rough kiss full of teeth and growls, and his hands move like talons, pulling her modest skirts up to her waist.

“No—My Prince—” she muffles on his mouth, pleading but desperate all together “We can’t—”

“I won’t ruin you, I promise.” he says rummaging through her garments “Just let me feel you this once—”

He finds her core with his large hand, hot and slick, and she whimpers loudly in his open mouth. “Do you get this wet for your groom, hmm? Or just for your Prince?”

She unconsciously bucks her hips against his hand and he smiles, delightfully, against her neck, licking a stripe down her throat. “I’m in need of an answer, my sweet girl…” he says raising his head, the leather piece is about to fall behind his disheveled hair. “Have you touched yourself thinking of me?”

Shame washes over her as well as pride does him. “You did, didn’t you?”

His retrieves his hand and licks her off his fingers as if he was waiting for nothing else, staring at her with his eye pitch black.

“Do it.”

“M-my Prince?”

“Touch yourself. Now.”

She looks away, reddening even more, but he grasps her chin and forces her to look at him. “Do you want that permission to leave my service?”

It takes her a minute to swallow her shame, and then her hands is slipping between them. He pulls himself up on one arm to give her space to spread her legs some more, to watch closely as she starts to move her little hand on her bundle of nerves. “Look at me.” He commands, and she flutters her eyes with a bit of prudery before obliging.

Her breathing becomes heavy, just as his, slowly touching himself to mimic her, as he has done countless of times before but this is different. This is like the first time. He can watch her chasing her pleasure because of him, with him. He can watch the sweat beading her neck, her lip trembling. He can hear the sweet lewd sounds she makes for him.

She grows more desperate by the moment, swaying her hips on the carpet, grabbing his shoulder and neck until he falls on her. He groans upon feeling her cunt against his cock and by now they’re both too close to need hands anymore. He starts to grind against her, his hard flesh slicking ever so easily on her wetness, swallowing her whimpers and moans as he pants and rasps on her lips “Go on, sweet one. Come for me, hm?”

She does so, gripping his shoulders until digging her nails on the fabric, moaning with her mouth slack open.

He keeps grinding against her, frantic, panting, the eyepatch is somewhere on the ground and she watches him in the stupor of pleasure, like she’s experiencing a vivid dream, but the weight of the prince on her is real, his cock rubbing against her core making it twitch for more, his coarse voice as he rasps “Gods—‘M so close…” and then the jolt of warm seed on her belly.

He falls on her breathing hard, making her wince, but she can't find the strength to slip away, to pull down her skirt or move the long silvery lock that has gone into her mouth. She must leave everything as it is, and then leave it to be the ordinary girl without dreams.

For two days, her presence around the Keep is rather scarce, barely traceable in the Prince’s chambers. But his breakfast is always ready on his desk, his clothes always clean and well folded on the chair.

Aemond does not send for her nor does he seem to care where she is. He returns to his rigour, to his books, to his training as soon as dawn breaks.

One of the Kingsguard shows up in the courtyard and stands there to watch, waiting for the Prince to finish his duel.

"My Prince, I've done some research after our last conversation."

"Well?"

"Just as you said, your Grace. A modest cottage and a piece of land near Duskendale."

"Good." He says, sheathing his sword and glancing up upon hearing a distant caw. "I want you to send two city guards there, and burn it all down."

The guard blinks, widening his eyes. "My Prince?"

"You heard me."

The guard leaves and Aemond hears cawing again, closer this time. He glances up and the raven greets him, flapping his wings in the newborn sun.

Everything is in order.