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The first sign to Valarr that something was not normal with you was the first time you missed class. It was a lecture the two of you shared—a history class on the Dance of the Dragons—one where he looked forward to seeing you. It was a lecture that he only enjoyed because of you, because of your presence, because of the way you lit up, countering and expanding on the professor’s points, your eyes unfocused, solely focused on the past as if you watch it unfold before you.
That day when Valarr had arrived to the class, promptly five minutes early, two coffees in his hand, one for you and one for him and saw your empty seat, he knew something was off. He just didn’t know what and when he saw you next, you said nothing of the day you were missing, just hunching deeper into your hoodie when he brought it up.
“It’s no issue to give you my notes, love, but what was wrong? What happened?” he had asked, watching as you slunk in your seat, a sickly tint to your skin, your hood up and over your face as you shook your head.
“Nothing, Valarr. Please…leave it alone,” you had replied, but Valarr could never leave anything alone. Not when you were his, not when he had seen you as his from the moment he had met you on the first day of class, your body seated beside his and you turned to him, hand outstretched, a grin on your face saying “hi. Since we have a semester stuck together, do you want to be study buddies? I make sure to have one in every class, just in case.”
No one had ever sought him out for a reason other than his wealth, for his name, for what his connections could do for them and yet there you were, asking him to be study buddies, not out of want for his wealth, but simply to cover your bases for your education.
And when he had asked you, why him, you had replied that he looked studious. Not rich or smart or intelligent or worthwhile, but studious. You had said that someone who looked studious was bound to take good notes—and he did. For you.
And because you saw him, Valarr, he saw you as his. Because he did not want to ever part with the only person in his life who saw him and did not see him lacking or see him as nothing but a last name. He vowed then that he would not lose you—to anyone—when you were the only person who had ever just seen him and decided that he was enough.
The second sign to Valarr that something was off was the first time he had worked up the courage to ask you on a date and twelve hours prior to the date, you cancelled. On unspecified grounds.
You Sorry, Val. Can’t make it tonight. Don’t feel great and don’t want to get you sick too. Another time??
He had spent far too long staring at his phone the moment the first text came in, watching as the others came in rapid-fire after. He had spent far too long looking at your simple, yet somehow evasive excuse. Don’t feel great and don’t want to get you sick too.
He had gripped his phone so tightly he was surprised it didn’t crumple in his fist, glass and metal shards sticking in his hand. A part of him hoped it would have so he could stop torturing himself by looking at your messages.
Sick.
He knew that that wasn’t the whole story and yet it was part of the story. He knew you didn’t outright lie having looked at him once, so astonished when he mentioned lying, asked the wildest lie you ever told. You had said, “I don’t lie, Val. I feel icky when I do and there’s no point. You can’t tell the whole truth so you still tell a truth. That’s the only thing I can do.”
He just didn’t understand the whole story, what piece of the story sick fell under.
The third sign that something was off was when Valarr saw you leaving the hospital, hunched into a hoodie, shoulders rounded, hood up as you walked, steps slow and body shaking. Your face looked tear-stained and your body slimmer than it was before, than when he met you.
He had been going for a meeting with the hospital board, one of the seats that of the Targaryen’s, the first business section he had ever taken over and there you had been. Pained and teared and greying, washed out of your normal colours—like you had once been in high resolution, but were now turned down, colours grainy and fading.
He had watched you leave, not wanting you to know that he had seen you. Not wanting you to know that part of your secret was taken by coincidence. Not wanting you to know that whatever you wished to keep secret no longer truly was.
That was not motivated by any form of guilt of misguided sympathy, rather a calculation that if you knew he had found out when you were not ready, you would push yourself away from him. And he could not have that.
Because you were his.
And he did not lose that which was his own.
The fourth sign that something was off when you showed up to class one day, near the end of the semester, your hoodie sleeve pushed up, skin bruised both with ageing and fresh.
“Who has hurt you?” he had asked you, his hand just gently catching your wrist, turning it to reveal the bruises on your skin, the signs of hurt. He had looked at the bruises on your skin and felt a deep and burning feeling in his chest, in his stomach, in his throat. He recognized it, after a time, as rage. Not anger, but rage, a deep unbridled rage because someone had hurt you. And you were his.
People did not get away with hurting what was his.
“No one, Valarr,” you had hissed, pulling your arm from his grasp, pulling away from the thumb rubbing tenderly across the largest bruise that spread across your forearm. “Do you need to push all the damn time?!” You had been angry, tone a hiss, words venomous, but he ignored it, ignored the warnings you were trying to give.
Because no one got away with hurting you.
“Yes,” he had told you, no inflection in his tone, simply straight-forward and to the point. Blunt. “Because I care for you and will not watch you get hurt. If someone is hurting you, let me help.”
The fifth sign was when you didn’t argue him on that point, only sighed and pulled your sleeve down, fisting it in your hand, bundling it up against you palm as if the press of the fabric was enough to calm you down.
All you had said was, “meet me after class. The Archive.”
It was there, in the stacks of past dissertations both for Master’s and Ph. Ds that you spoke to him, told him of your immunosuppressed body, the way you bruise easily because you’re weak. The way you get transfusions and are on medication. The way sometimes you’re just too sick to leave your house unless it’s for the hospital.
You told him that was why you cancelled on the first date—you were sick. You just didn’t have anything he could catch. You told him it was you missed a day. You told him it’s why you’re constantly at the hospital.
You told him this like a confession, like it was something bad or wrong or gross. You told him this like you were used to getting destroyed after speaking. You told him this like it made you lesser when in his eyes, it made you that much greater. That much stronger.
“This changes nothing for me, love,” he had told you, taking your face in his hands, thumbs tracing back and forth along your cheekbones, tender and kind. Gentle. “It just makes me want to show you that I’m worthy of loving you.” He had meant what he had said, but it didn’t hurt that it made you soften, made you more pliant.
Made you willing.
And that was the beginning of his control. The beginning of his closing all your exits until the only path was him, the only door, the only window, the only thing was him.
Because you needed him.
Or, perhaps, he needed you, but if you were his…then you would need him anyways. You would have no other way to survive for he would be everything.
He would be your everything.
But control is a tedious thing. It is delicate and fragile and there is a balance that must be struck. A give and take if you will. One cannot control without granting leniency. One cannot close all doors without allowing one to be opened.
Your health was the one thing Valarr could not control, the one thing he had to grant to you. The very thing that made you love him was also the only thing with the potential to tear you apart. To take you from his arms when you grew healthy enough to leave him.
And he could have that.
So, he began small. He began with asking you to limit your hours at work, to rest more, to let him take more care of you. He began with driving you to your medical appointments and offering to pick up your medications from the pharmacy.
He began small because he knew that beginning larger, beginning with more overt control would simply scare you away. Would make you run.
Make you believe you could flee.
It began with conversations of late hours at work, things that take a toll on your ill health, the one thing you are determined to fix. To better.
“You need to work less,” he had said, “the more tired you are, the more rundown you get and that’s what you want if you want to get stronger, after all.”
It hadn’t worked the first time, but he was patient. He was willing to play the long game; to take however long it took to have you completely his—dependent on him alone, totally reliant on him and only him.
“I cut my hours back,” you had told him six months after the first time he broached the subject. “The doctor agreed with you.” And nothing more had been said between the two of you but for Valarr, nothing more had needed to be said.
Because he had his way. His control.
You.
But control is a tedious thing. It is delicate and fragile and there is a balance that must be struck. A give and take, if you will.
It is a balance such as that that exists between life and death; dark and light; sickness and health.
It is a balance such as that of dialectical thought—two opposing ideas can be held as truths together.
For in one, the other becomes true.
“Val!” he hears you call now, your voice echoing through the foyer of the home the two of you have made, the house he made you pick when the doctor told you that an apartment was not the best. You needed somewhere easier to move around in, a place less strenuous.
“What is, darling?” he asks, his voice loud in reply, the sound of your footsteps his reply as you walk from the entrance, down the hallway to his office, poking your head around his doorframe, a smile on your perfect, brilliant face.
“The doctor says I’m getting better!” you squeal as you step into the room, feet dancing just slightly in a rhythm that exists in your head alone.
“Wonderful,” he breathes as you approach him, settling upon his lap behind his desk, your arms around his neck, body on his yet he cannot delight in this.
Because it is the first sign of his careful balance, his precious control, being broken.
And he does not know, quite, what to do with that.
Control is tedious but necessary.
Control is what keeps the world moving, turning; that balance between gravity and the objects, weight and pull. Control is what keeps society moving.
It is what keeps you beside him.
And yet, he can feel it slipping away; slipping between his fingers like sand in an hourglass. No matter how he strives to catch the grains that slip between the cracks in his fingers, he falls short.
Some pieces always leave.
No matter how you plan to prevent it.
“You must, at least, see the specialist, I’ve found,” Valarr says now, his hands on your waist, your chest pressed against his, arms around the back of his neck, his mismatched eyes peering into yours, begging you in the way he has.
The kind without words, the kind without true surrender.
“My doctor is fine, Val,” you counter but he merely presses his lips into a thin line and his hands deeper into your waist, fingers pressing into the skin, leaving marks upon your flesh. “I’m fine.”
“Forgive me for being overly cautious with the woman I love,” he whispers, his eyebrows arching and he knows by the pushing out of your bottom and the softening in your eyes that he has won. That he can begin to close these exits.
He can begin to seal you in again.
Control is an art. It needs to be performed by a gentle hand and not overwhelmed or choked. It needs to be delicate yet heavy-handed.
It needs to be precise and yet general.
It is where one because true in the other, many facts held true in once.
Control is having other people in your power. Having doctors and nurses and hospitals in your pocket. Specialists who will do whatever words leave your lips when you speak so.
People who will close all exits for you.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Targaryen,” the specialist says now, his voice faux somber, part played well—as well as his payment allows. “But your partner here is not better. I recommend she works from home.”
Control needs to start small after all.
“Non, je ne parle pas français. Vous parlez anglais? Oh, uh, je étudie le français à l’université.” Valarr can hear you speaking, your French just slightly rusty, not often used in the office. “Oui, yay. Wonderful. I’m so sorry, I’m not often on the international calls.”
You sound in your so in your element that Valarr is almost sorry for what must come next.
Control must evolve.
It is never personal yet at the same time so completely personal.
But it never aims to hurt.
“Val…” he can hear you call late into the night, your voice dazed and sick and pained and he rises from the bed, walking as quickly as he can to find you in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, bloodied bile resting the bowl. “I think something’s wrong.”
He didn’t mean for it to hurt this much, but one must do what must do. And he had to ensure that you could not leave him.
He forgot that poison injures as much as ensures you stay.
Control is a delicate balance until it isn’t.
Control is delicate until it can’t be anymore.
And Valarr had found the exits opening again and he could not have that. He could not have that long before you were his.
And he could have it now that you were his, entire.
“She needs blood! A transfusion of O-neg!” calls the ER doctor, his voice harried as you lay upon the gurney, head lolling slightly, your body weak from loss of blood. It does not matter what any test finds here, what any finding the doctors made for the hospital belongs to the Targaryen’s and never will what Valarr has done be made public.
His keeping of you will remain just that—him keeping you.
“Val,” you whisper, your voice quiet and breaking, hand reaching for his, fingers stretching out to his, the muscles weak yet still flexing, trembling and twitching underneath your skin.
“I’m here, love,” he whispers, his words fierce and low and strong, his hand enfolding yours, holding tight to you, to the feeling of your skin against his, your fingers around his. There is no guilt inside of him, only that twirling, swirling storm of worry in his gut, rising into his chest, constricting his breath. “Right here. Always.”
And your face softens as it always does when he reminds you that what you fear will drive him away only makes him love you more. Only makes him more loving, gentle.
Only gives him exactly what he needs to keep you with him.
“Whatever you find,” Valarr hisses, pulling the attending to him by the collar of his scrubs, “never gets heard by her.”
That was another thing about control—you never gave it up.
Even when it was entirely out of your power, you held onto the appearance.
You never gave anyone any room to doubt you.
Control is a delicate balance.
And it can never be doubted.
“I’m sorry, but it seems you’re just too sick. It would be best…” the doctor trails off, sighing in a way that is not fake, the true reason simply hidden from you, exactly as Valarr ensured.
“It would be best if what?” you ask and Valarr can hear the brittle notes in your voice, the notes of I know what’s coming, I just want to pretend.
“If you stay at home and don’t stress yourself. Perhaps enough rest will mean that…that you can go back to normal.” The doctor flicks his gaze back to Valarr before looking down hurriedly at the iPad holding your patient chart, fear evident in that small flicker.
“You mean…” Valarr looks over at you, watching as your precious eyes line with tears, your bottom lip trembling just slightly as you draw in a breath. “You mean I’m a dependent now, right?”
“Unfortunately,” the doctor breathes. “At least for the time being.” And then the doctor’s eyes flick back to Valarr, not fear in his eyes, but anger. Anger at Valarr for his control, for his tender keeping of you.
“It’s alright, sweetheart,” Valarr breathes, his hand rubbing circles on your lower back. “I’m always here to take care of you.”
Control needs not be delicate once it’s achieved its ends.
Then it need only be vigilant.
“And what if you resent me?” you whisper, your throat thick, lined with tears as you look up at him, eyes glistening. “What if you suddenly realize that this is all too much to handle?” Valarr can feel his breath hitch as you press the heels of your hands into your eyes, sighing and shaking your head, blocking out the rest of the world, the rest of the light.
“That will never happen,” he breathes, reaching across the island to take your hands in his, pulling them from your eyes and interlacing your fingers with his, palms up. “I love you.”
“Love doesn’t last forever,” you whisper and he pulls on your hands, just enough to draw your eyes up to him, away from the marble countertop, the space between you two, too much.
“This one does,” he vows, his heart clenching and nostrils flaring as you shake your head. He doesn’t understand why you don’t realize how much he loves, how much he would go to in order to keep you, but he will not push.
“And what if you end up falling for someone else?” you ask him, your voice achingly quiet. “What if you end up wishing for someone who was healthier?”
“I love you even more for being as strong as you are,” he tells you and when you still look unconvinced, he stands and crosses to stand in front of you, his hands warm on your waist, his head bending, lips pressing against yours—your plush and perfect lips.
The kiss starts out gentle before he deepens it, nipping at your bottom lip, his hands palming your waist, one moving down to your ass, the other moving up to your breasts, mouth still moving against yours as his tongue licks into your mouth, stroking against yours, the touch enough to make you gasp.
It’s not that he hasn’t been touching you, it’s simply that one cannot pleasure someone else in a hospital bed. It’s just improper and he had already done far too much at the hospital.
Control is sometimes about realizing when you need to draw back.
And when you need to hit the accelerator.
Valarr guides you from the kitchen, up to the bedroom, setting you down gently on the edge of the bed, removing first your slippers—pale blue ones that he insists you wear as your toes are always far too cold—and then your pants. His touch is gentle, but he watches as your breath hitches, as desire darkens in your eyes, as your limbs tremble not only from weakness, but also anticipation.
He, himself, can feel the blood pulse through his body, centering upon his cock, the hard length throbbing in his pants as he guides your underwear from your body, then your shirt—one of his which you stole, that excites him when he sees it upon your body, that sign of a mark. He can see your body bare before him, the desire in your eyes, in your limbs, in your cunt.
He can see it glistening as you recline upon the bed, your legs spreading just enough that he can see it, that mouth-watering sight of miraculousness, of you. He can see it and he wants it, falling to his knees before you, his hands working loose his shirt and pulling it from his body before his grips your legs and pulls you forwards as gently as he can.
“Are you sure?” he asks you, his tone very clear. He does not joke about consent.
“Yes,” you breathe and the way your breath hitches on the final exhale is enough to have his cock throbbing even more painfully as he licks through your folds, careful to give attention to your sensitive areas there, pausing in his motion for the touch to resonate through you before licking up to your clit, his tongue circling the bud, the taste of you too much and yet not enough. Not ever enough.
He circles on your clit, one hand warm on your thigh, fingers spanning possessively, the other straying to your pussy, a single finger sinking into you, up to the knuckle.
“Oh, fuck, Val!” you moan, your voice cracking as he looks up at you, taking in the way you close your eyes as he pumps the finger out, adding a second on the go in, his tongue never stopping its tender circling on your glans.
He pumps the two fingers in and out, feeling the wetness of you upon his hand as he licks and sucks upon your clit. He can feel it throb upon his tongue, the blood coursing through you exactly as it courses through him. He almost swears that your clit throbs exactly as his cock does.
He adds a third finger, sinking all three up to the knuckles, starting up a steady, grazing rhythm, making sure to stimulate as much of you as he can, elicit as much of a response as he can.
And he doesn’t have long to wait, you soon shattering around him with a muted cry as you come, your juices upon his fingers and his mouth. He withdraws, licking his lips and standing, his breaches far too tight as he sticks his three fingers in his mouth, licking off the taste of you, the ambrosia wine flavour.
“Need you…inside me,” you breathe out and he is all too happy to oblige, shedding himself of his trousers, his boxers and standing there for a moment in all his naked glory, delighting in the way you lick your lips, heavy-lidded eyes assessing.
“Do you want me to wear a condom?” he asks and he can see by the flare in your eyes that you are irritated that he is still coherent, despite the painful hardness of his cock.
“No,” you whisper, biting your lip as you shake your head and that is all he needs to hear as he climbs over you on the bed, the head of his cock rubbing from your entrance to your clit, circling it as his mouth finds yours, dragging from your lips down your neck, licking and sucking and biting.
And when your nails scratch his back, he sinks in up to the hilt in one thrust. He stays there for a moment before he begins to move, changing the angle of his hips, hitting a different spot of your walls every time, aiming to touch every part of your clitoris, the sensitive internal regions as much as the external ones, his mouth hot on your neck and your collarbone and your breasts and he thrusts in and out, your moans and his mingling while his hips slap up and into you.
He loves this, the press of his body against yours, this moment of complete intimacy, complete joining. He loves being with you.
Just like this.
He continues to thrust in, one mouth toying with your right breast, licking and sucking and biting and flicking the nipple with his tongue as one hand braces him on the bed and the other applies pressure to your clit.
Your walls are wet and snug and tremor with his thrusts, letting him know you’re close and he presses down on your clit feeling your walls begin to clench and spasm, your orgasm washing over him, milking him to his own release and he collapses beside you, satiated.
He holds you close and you nestle in his arms, your face just inches from his own.
“Are you sure you won’t resent me?” you whisper, one finger tracing the lines of his face.
“I promise.”
That’s the thing about control.
It always knows when it has won.
It was easy after that. You still dosed with poison, just enough to keep you weak, but never too sick. You kept safe in his home, free to do what you wanted.
You as the only thing in his life, truly his.
The only thing that mattered.
And when he slowly began to wean you from the poison? There was no threat of you leaving for you had been broken long ago.
A bird only longs to escape its cage when it knows of the outside world. Not when it only knows those bars.
And that was you.
You knew his love and nothing else. You knew him and no one else. You knew what he had given you and no other life.
So, when you were healthy again?
You were exactly where you wanted to be.
He had made it so.
That’s the thing about control.
It always wins when handled like the delicate thing it is.
And Valarr has always been skilled with the delicate.