Ivy

He finds you to be a quiet, shy, gracious thing. Quiet, shy, gracious, presumably drenched in lavender and vanilla. Possibly something hazel-esque, something floral, but it's a pleasant feminine oil, he tells himself. Nothing more than an indulgence that any disciplined man like himself could withstand. He has dealt with the likes of common whores throwing himself at him. Your scent, your beauty. No fucking matter.

But...you bow your head, eyes lowered. Is he the first man of the day to make you timid?

The thought soothes Ormund from the way your scent seeps into his throat as you do.

What had seemed floral grows intimate on your skin, as if the sweetness rises from the pulse at your throat and escapes your lips! It clings, clings, clings to the inside of his nose. He can even still smell you after you leave the room, this isolent savor of a Targaryen girl. Have you left it to linger to test him? Must be.

Ormund's resentment of you grows quickly. Quiet, shy, gracious. He'd rather you be brazen, but no, no---you are what he deduces to be silently deceptive. How else would the Gods challenge him?

"I praise you for your propriety, princess."

A Targaryen princess cannot simply be gentle. If there is gentleness in such blood, it must be a lure. It could very well be that your Valyrian instinct has been only made subtle by Alicent's upbringing. In his time in the Red Keep, he witnesses all the signs of your mother's influence.

There is your careful words, reverence for the Seven...

Alicent has done commendable work. At the very least, she has managed to raise one dragon properly. You laugh when he tells you so.

"Your mother’s influence is apparent. She did well in caring for one Targaryen. As have I."

Well enough that the boy is more Hightower than anything.

"I presume my little brother is perfect?"

You humor Ormund with your tease behind your fingers, shyly. Do you think even your amusement requires apology? How intolerable.

How good.

The conversation delves into your wonder about your brother. Beneath all your courtly restraint is a painful hunger to know the boy. Ormund does not know what to make of your questions. Is he happy? Does he have friends? Why has he stopped drawing dragons and swords in his letters to you?

It is a mutually beneficial talk, as he answers with more pride than the questions warrant. He'd ask for forgiveness in the light of the Seven if his claims weren't true.

Daeron is very diligent. Courteous and devout. Well with a sword, regardless of the humble lies within his correspondence with you.

He speaks of you more than he speaks of his other siblings. Yes, that's not saying much, but it's as if he could possibly have any memories to miss you by.

"Oh, good! I'm glad he has had your love and care to bear, Lord Ormund."

At that, Ormund begins imagining what might have happened had you been sent to Oldtown too.

...He could have raised you more than properly.

The guardian he could've been to you, a firm hand set upon a promising but dark flower. The girl he imagines, rising in the Starry Sept and repeating prayers after him.

You'd learn his approval is a priority...

And that his displeasure demands the occasional punishment. He could've cut away every filthified tendency inherited from your father’s blood before it bloomed, even though he has not seen much of it from you, saved for the cunning scent.

By womanhood, obedience would come so naturally that you would never think to call it surrender or suffering, as young women who deny the natural order of things so often do. His voice might have lived inside your currently unknowable mind.

These thoughts horrify him, but only because they are a fucking waste. They are nothing more than fantasy, and it is fantasy that makes him feel cheated of the opportunity of taming you to be rewarded until pleasing him feels no different from virtue itself, if your mother did well enough to teach you virtue's importance.

Nevermind, to the bane of his being here.

"Might I ask what perfume it is that you wear, princess?"

You place a palm on your chest, and Ormund's gaze follows in a way he will never name as helpless.

"I do not know the exact mixture, my lord. My handmaid prepares it differently every other morning. Sometimes I think it is lavender, but I believe she will use vanilla. Do you...mislike it?"

"I find it pleasant, but excessive." He nearly slaps your hand when you reach for your neck, where you must've applied it earlier. "But there is no need to apologize or to alter your habits on my account."

You nod.

"...As you wish, my lord."

Those words follow him into the night. Your scent does too, along with the dangerous, indulgent thought that, perhaps, you are not beyond salvage.

Your soul, despite the dark of your blood, might still be trained into something as lovely as the way you smell.

It lingers in galleries after you have left and blooms in halls where you passed an hour before. He swears on it! It is through no fault of his own that he can scent your movements through the Red Keep like a fucking hound dog---which chair the princess has occupied at supper, that the flight of stairs he walks upon just had her in its grasp.

No. It is not his fault. You linger, and if this is all done with sneaked intention, Ormund would have every right to call you a cunning whore. To lead the overseer of Oldtown astray with some perfumed concoction, to play sweet and innocent to have him believe you good. Yes, every right indeed.

It gets to the very point that Ormund could also have every right to claim he is merely observing a threat. Temptation should be studied before it can be mastered, yes?

Yes, he shall lecture Daeron on this when he arrives home.

"You are the princess's handmaid, yes? I require a favor of you. She has informed me that you mix her oils yourself. What does it contain?"

The need to find the exact ingredients that cause him to bear this dangerous curiosity is great enough that he corners---happens upon your handmaid in a quiet passage.

She lists them. Ormund smiles.

"I require a vial. Just one."

"...A vial?"

"For examination only."

He certainly does not appreciate the cautious look that grows on the young woman's face. She blinks in confusion. "...My lord?"

"Do you require me to repeat everything? The fragrance is unusually strong, and I only wish to determine whether it may affect those sensitive to such things. I will compensate you for your efforts...as long as you do not trouble the princess with the matter."

The maid agrees. And how funny is it that a successfully coerced cooperation of a young bitch maid who can't keep her expressions to herself makes him fear the possibility that he was...diminished by said conversation.

No matter, he was not, even a scholar such as himself bears insecurities. The vial arrives that evening, carried by a servant in a cloth.

Ormund opens it and brings it to his nose. It is, up close, a wonderful scent.

...And utterly fucking lifeless!

Every ingredient is present, yes, yet it does not seize him nor make his blood simmer hot beneath his divine flesh as it did when you first bowed to him, and he to you.

There is no instant thought, with the vial to his nose, of your neck against his tongue or your skirts pushed above your thighs that he has yet to see. Where is it, sweet whore? That ravenous need to bury his face in your bosom and how deeply your perfume seeps?

The missing ingredient is you. Is it your warmth that causes your scent to thrive? Your skin? May the Seven forbid that it might be your filthy, ancient blood he has spent his life regarding as savage.

The irony in the thought is strong when Ormund knows you pass his chamber.

He is only rubbing the oil into his wrist with force just before you do, damning the thing to take him whole as you did, sniffing the---alright, pathetic attempt to reconstruct you from its lifeless ingredients while the fantasies worsen and turn his temper to frustration.

The laugh he hears you give as you pass follows your true scent.

It somehow floods the room and puts the counterfeit oil to shame. It upon his nose, his wrists...his elbows, it all turns offensive, to the point where Ormund rises from his chair so quickly that it screeches against the stoney floor as the life of your lush, warm savor burns itself into the back of his throat.

The moment when he nearly makes the weak mistake of opening the door is wild. The only moments a somewhat untrained Targaryen can produce, it seems.

He has half a tempted mind to call you inside under some pretense concerning your little brother. He imagines your eyes of startled confusion when you find the vial in his hand, your stammer when you realize he has obtained the scent you wear on your skin?

Would it give you a fright? Would it flatter you? Would sweat deepen the scent as blood rushed to your cheeks?

...And, hopefully, untouched cunt?

Ormund's cock hardens painfully at the thought.

He braces himself against the desk, breathing the last traces of you from the corridor. Cruelly, barely...it is enough to turn your slightest corruption of him into bodily need. Ormund thinks it fair, he has given you the satisfaction of his temporary ruin, as well as happy thoughts of the brother you can only remember as a babe.

It is just enough.

He opens his breeches by the laces, yanking them and letting his cock spring free. He's already leaking at the tip when he turns the vial down to slather the thick oil over the length of his shaft. It's slick, warm, how he imagines the glide of your cunt would be.

He wraps his fist around himself and strokes at a brutal pace. His eyes close, and there is only the picture of you beneath him---shy no longer, your knees parted with force, your mouth trembling those little my lords until you are brave enough to say his name.

As he pumps with friction, the skin of his cock pulling in the twist of his sticky palm, there you are, arching your back as he claims you in fantasy. He would be gentle at first, you have to be with a woman in the beginning. He's sure he must convince you that there is no shame in yielding to a man better equipped to govern you.

The whole of you.

Ormund presses his scented wrist against his mouth. The oil is bitter upon his lips. Still wrong, and the inadequacy only drives him to pump faster, near frantic---he humps his own stroking, precum-covered hand.

Imagination is what he must make do with to supply your warm skin where there is only his own. The man can almost feel your cunt, tight, dripping the way the oil does against his thighs. Oh, how you would welcome his thickness while he whispers filth into your ear. Filth that will be forgiven.

Or easily justified. Well, welcomed? Welcomed...that Ormund cannot be too sure of. Even with the mother of bastards leading the line to the throne as your half-sister, which is why he cannot also be sure of your own virtue...would you welcome him so easily? Seems unfathomable that you wouldn't, but...

...Once again, a firm hand comes to mind.

Only as his hips begin to jerk, boots sounding out against stone as he hunches over the desk.

Ormund would have to make you acknowledge what your scent has done to him, make you hold his gaze while your breath against the leftover mess you leave upon his aching cock, and if you were good enough, he would tell you how wickedly sweet you must taste, and that you must try you for yourself.

Firmness would do well enough to make you understand that kindness does not leave you harmless, nor does it mean you can move through any hall he paces, leaving your scent for him to find, and expect him to think you honorable of wholesome fucking thought!

...But there can be redemption if you confess what you have done.

Ormund's breath turns harsher, the tight knot in his balls demanding release. The thrusts into his fist burn violent, and he can only bite his lip and groan against his teeth. The oil fills his nostrils fully, and it brings him to the brink of his own pleasure.

"Gods!"

Past the point of no return, you bring him.

With one final, squeezing stroke, Ormund lets out a calmorous groan as his body shudders. His breaths come in quickened hitches, but his ropes of cum splattered across stone and wood in long ropes, long enough that he can pump himself through the mess.

He milks his cock and leaves himself completely spent once finished. If sin had a smell, it would be what he has to wash his shaft of. His wrist. His lips. He looks at the vial with disgust. He must be rid of the rest, surely...

The matter requires further thought, at least until morning---where, in your own chambers of the Red Keep, you wake without the faintest fucking idea that Lord Ormund Hightower has begun resenting...

september 3, 1985

new girl transferred today. junior, like us. you walked into homeroom twelve minutes late with your bag strap sliding off your shoulder and sat down in the empty desk by the window and i forgot what mr. hendricks was saying. i still don't remember. it might have been about the civil war. it might have been about literally anything. you glanced out of the window, sunlight golden on you, and opened your notebook. i missed twenty minutes of american history.

this is probably not important enough to write down.

i'm not sure why i did.

september 8, 1985

i have three friends. bobby, terrence, and the library.

i'm not popular. i'm the thing that happens to popular when you drain all the charisma out of it and replace it with advanced calculus and the inability to make eye contact. bobby got the face AND the personality. i got the face and a brain that won't stop noticing details nobody asked for and a body that flinches when people touch it without warning.

identical twins. completely different experiences of being alive.

bobby walks into a room and the room lights up around him. i walk into a room and can't figure out where to stand. people talk and i miss the cues. the pauses where i'm supposed to laugh, the shifts in tone that signal a joke, the invisible dance of human interaction that everyone else learned naturally, and i'm still studying from the outside like a foreign language i can read but can't speak.

most people forget i'm in the room. teachers mix us up. girls look through me to find him. i've been called "bobby's brother" so many times it might as well be printed on my birth certificate.

i envy him sometimes. the effortlessness of it. the way connection comes to him like breathing. for me every conversation is a translation exercise: hear the words, decode the meaning, calculate the appropriate response, deliver it, check the face for signs i got it wrong. and it's so exhausting.

the library doesn't require any of it. the library doesn't care if i'm awkward.

september 11, 1985

her name is—

actually, i don't think i should write your name in this. just in case bobby finds it despite the very clear warning on the cover. i know you. that's enough.

bobby talked to you first because bobby talks to everyone first. you were sitting alone at lunch and he just walked over and sat down and said something that made you laugh (this startled, bright, involuntary sound) and by the time i got to the table you were already part of the group.

terrence likes you. bobby likes you. everybody likes you. you're warm in a way i don't have a word for. not loud-warm. just warm.

you said hi to me and i said hi back and that was the entire interaction.

i've been replaying it for three hours.

september 17, 1985

you sat next to me in calculus today. not because you had to. the desk was open and you chose it from three others, and sat down and smiled at me. you said, "hey, benny" like we've known each other for years.

benny.

nobody calls me benny.

september 29, 1985

you asked me to help you with calc after school. we sat at the kitchen table for an hour and a half and you leaned into my shoulder while i walked you through derivatives. your hair smelled like vanilla and you looked at me like i'd performed a miracle when you finally got it right.

nobody looks at me like that. bobby gets those looks. terrence gets those looks. i get the polite nod. the strained, patient smile. the "oh, you're bobby's brother" face that i've learned to expect.

you looked at me like i was a person who knew things you wanted to know. like the knowing mattered. like i was someone and not just adjacent to my twin.

i am in so much trouble.

october 14, 1985

you call me brendan. full name. sometimes benny when you're teasing. never BB, which is what everyone else calls me. never "the other twin." never "bobby's brother."

brendan.

i could live off the way you say it for a very long time.

october 22, 1985

kyle weber called me a freak in the hallway today. not the first time. i was carrying a stack of AP textbooks and he shoulder-checked me and they went everywhere and he laughed and said, "watch it, freak." i was on my knees picking up books and trying to disappear into the linoleum.

and then you appeared out of nowhere. i don't know where you came from. one second i was alone on the floor and the next you were crouching beside me, stacking my books, and then you stood up and turned to kyle. you said something so quiet i couldn't hear it and his face went white. paper white. he looked at you and then at me and then he stalked away and he hasn't spoken to me since.

i asked you what you said to him. you handed me my books and shrugged. "i told him if he touches you again i'll make sure the whole school knows he cried during the sex ed video in freshman year."

"...did he?"

"oh, absolutely. terrence told me. the power of information, benny."

and you linked your arm through mine and walked me to class.

people touch me and i flinch. always have. bobby's arm around my shoulder makes my skin crawl. terrence's back-slaps make me clench my jaw. casual contact (a stranger's elbow on the bus, a classmate brushing past in the hallway) registers in my body as a low-grade alarm.

i don't know why. i've never known why. my skin has always been too loud for other people's hands.

you linked your arm through mine and i didn't flinch. i didn't tense. i didn't have to override the instinct because the instinct wasn't there. your touch landed on my skin and my whole nervous system went quiet. warm. calm. like coming inside after hours in the cold and standing next to a fire and feeling the tightness in your muscles release one strand at a time.

you're protective of me. you took one look at the quiet twin who can't make eye contact and decided he was yours to defend and nobody asked you to and you did it anyway.

i have never felt warm the way i feel warm when you do this. like the warmth isn't just temperature but a person. like i've been standing outside in the cold my whole life and you opened the door to a warm house.

november 2, 1985

you found me in the library during a free period. everyone else was at the pep rally. i was reading and you sat down across from me and said "i don't really do pep rallies" and opened your own book and we sat there in silence for an hour.

i've never been quiet with another person and had it feel like a gift before.

silence with other people feels like a failure. like i'm supposed to be filling the space and i can't find the right thing to fill it with. every pause is a question i'm getting wrong. with you the silence felt like a room we were sharing on purpose.

the noise in my head (the constant humming calculation of how to be a person in front of other people) it stops when you're near. just stops. like a machine powering down. and underneath the silence there's this calm i don't have a name for. this sense that i can stop performing and just exist and you won't find the existing strange or off-putting.

when you left you squeezed my shoulder and said, "this was nice, benny."

i put my forehead on the table and stayed there for a while.

november 9, 1985

a thing i've never told anyone:

i hate being touched, and i am desperate to be touched. both at the same time. all the time.

other people's hands on me feel like static. wrong pressure, wrong temperature. i pull away from hugs. i stiffen under friendly arms. mom stopped trying to hold my hand when i was eleven because i kept pulling free without meaning to and the hurt on her face was worse than the contact.

but when you touch me (your hand on my arm, your head on my shoulder, your fingers fixing my collar) my body does the opposite thing. it leans. toward you. into you. like i've been cold for sixteen years and you're the first source of heat and the relief of it is so overwhelming i could cry.

i want more. always more. every touch you give me i hoard and replay and it's never enough. i want your hand in my hair. your arms around my waist. your forehead against mine. i want to be held by you until the static stops and it only stops with you and i don't understand why.

i don't think i need to understand why. i just need more.

november 15, 1985

i can see it happening. you and bobby. the way you orbit each other is starting to change shape.

the group hangs out and i watch your eyes find him across the room. i watch his find you. there's a gravity forming between you two that everyone can feel and nobody's named yet but they will. terrence already calls you bobby's girl behind your back and you're not, not yet, but the "yet" is so, so heavy.

you light up when he walks in. i know that brightness because i feel it when you walk in and i have to look away before anyone sees.

you're going to end up with bobby. everyone in this school can see the shape of it forming. bobby and the new girl. the twin everybody notices and the girl everybody likes.

i'm being dramatic. it's only been two months. i barely know you.

except i do. i know you hate the crusts on sandwiches but eat them anyway because wasting food makes you feel guilty. i know you hum when you're concentrating and you don't realise you're doing it and the song is never one i recognise. i know you bite your bottom lip when you're nervous and the left side harder than the right.

i know you. i've been paying attention since september.

i need to stop.

december 19, 1985

christmas party at terrence's. you wore a red sweater too big for you and had a stupid reindeer pin on your collar. bobby was doing his thing. arm around you, charming and bright, making the room laugh. i watched you lean into him. two bodies learning how to fit together.

you found me hiding in the kitchen and bumped your hip against mine with a crooked smile. "you're hiding."

"i'm making a drink."

"you're hiding. come back out. i miss you."

you said i miss you and i'd been in the other room for ten minutes.

you dragged me back by my sleeve and sat me down next to you and kept your hand on my knee for the rest of the night. i don't think you noticed you were doing it.

i noticed nothing else.

january 9, 1986

i've started dreading the question. the one bobby and terrence throw around like a football. "so when are you gonna get a girlfriend, bennett?" bobby grins when he says it. means it lovingly. doesn't know the answer is a slow knife.

terrence is worse. "bro there are girls literally lining up for the bobby franklin face and you're just... sitting there. reading. with that face. it's criminal!"

i laugh it off. they laugh. everyone laughs. good old brendan. hopeless with girls. still a virgin. probably going to be a virgin forever because he can't string two sentences together in front of a pretty girl.

except that's not it. that's not it at all.

something is wrong with me.

i can't find anyone attractive. i've tried. jenny park is objectively beautiful and when she talked to me at lunch i felt nothing. matt from chem lab is objectively beautiful and when he sat next to me i felt nothing. the magazine under bobby's bed that he thinks i don't know about—nothing.

my body doesn't respond to people. it doesn't want anyone. i look at classmates the way i look at furniture. vague acknowledgment that they exist. no heat. no pull. no interest.

except you.

you walk into a room and every nerve ending in my body lights up. you touch my arm and my skin hums for an hour. you lean into my shoulder and i stop breathing. you, exclusively. only you. like my body was made with a single setting and the setting is you and there's no alternative use.

i don't know what this means. i don't know if this is normal.

i'm really scared it isn't.

march 8, 1986

bobby asked you out today.

he told me first. came into my room and sat on my bed and said "i'm gonna ask her" and his voice was trying to hide the fact he was scared. going casual, going loose, like if he holds the words lightly enough they won't be able to hurt him. and i knew what he was really asking. because dad is still fresh. the cheating. the years of lies, mom finding out, the divorce that split the house in half.

bobby was fourteen when he decided love was the thing that wrecks you. swore he'd never open that door. never let anyone close enough to do what dad did to mom.

and now he wants to try. for you.

he deserves this. after everything dad did, after watching his ability to trust get gutted by a man who was supposed to teach him how to love, bobby deserves someone who makes him brave enough to try.

i told him to go for it. meant it.

he came back an hour later. grinning so wide his face couldn't hold it. you said yes.

of course you said yes. you've been saying yes to bobby since the day you sat down at our lunch table.

i hugged him. told him congratulations. meant it.

went to my room. closed the door. sat on the floor with my back against the bed and stared at the wall until my eyes ached.

march 22, 1986

movies. bobby and you, me and terrence. your first group outing as a couple.

bobby had his arm around you. you had your head on his shoulder. you shared popcorn. your leg was pressed against mine the whole film. probably because the seats were small. i didn't move.

i should have moved.

april 5, 1986

you had a fight with your mom. showed up at our house at 10 pm, crying. bobby wasn't home.

you stood on the porch and i opened the door and your face crumpled and you blurted out, "is it ok if i just sit with you for a while?"

i made you tea. you talked and i listened. after an hour you ran out of words and leaned sideways and put your head on my shoulder and fell asleep.

you slept for two hours. your hand curled in the fabric of my shirt. your breathing slow and deep. i sat perfectly still. did not adjust my position even when my arm went completely numb. i would have let my arm fall off before disturbing you.

bobby came home at midnight. "thanks for taking care of my girl, man."

my girl.

the dent where your head rested stayed warm for a long time after you left.

april 12, 1986

short entry.

you fixed the collar of my shirt in the hallway today. just reached up and folded it down. your knuckles brushing my neck. "there. can't have you walking around looking rumpled, benny."

i can still feel your knuckles. four hours later. a stripe of contact burned into the side of my throat.

june 18, 1986

pool party at terrence's. you were in a bikini.

i'm not going to describe it. i'm going to acknowledge that you were in a bikini and that i spent four hours in a california swimming pool and was never warm. because all my blood had relocated to the problem of not looking at you and the secondary problem growing in my swim trunks from the failure of the first problem.

you asked me to put sunscreen on your back. i did it. my hands were steady. nobody watching could have told that the inside of my head was a five-alarm fire.

"thanks, benny." and you went back to the pool and bobby threw you in. you screamed and laughed and i excused myself to the bathroom and put my head between my knees.

august 30, 1986

senior year. last year of being in the same building as you every day.

bobby and you are solid. you're good together. he opens up around you in ways he doesn't with anyone else. you soften him. you make his edges less defensive. when he's with you, bobby is almost the person he'd be if dad hadn't shattered his faith that the people who love you will stay.

i want to be selfless about this. the good brother. the one who steps aside and means it.

i'm not that person.

i love you. i love you and it's getting worse. it was supposed to fade. crushes fade. this isn't fading. this is setting foundations, pouring concrete into the ground floor of my chest and building upward.

september 14, 1986

bobby made a joke today at dinner. mom was asking about girls at school and bobby grinned and elbowed me and said, "bennett here is saving himself. for what, we're not sure. science, probably."

everyone laughed. mom. bobby. even terrence, who was over for dinner.

i laughed too. good old brendan. the virgin. the nerd. probably going to lose it to a textbook.

i went upstairs and sat on my bed and thought: there is something seriously wrong with me. because i'm seventeen and i've never kissed anyone and i don't WANT to kiss anyone. i look at every other person in my school and my body is silent. flat. dead. no heat, no curiosity, no pull. and then you walk into a room and i can feel my heartbeat in my fingertips and my mouth goes dry and i want to put my hands on you so badly my joints ache with it.

it's only you. it has only ever been you. and the exclusivity of it terrifies me because what if this is broken? what if i'm wired wrong? what if the reason i can't want anyone else is because something in me got stuck, got fixed in place the day you sat down in homeroom, and it will never unstick?

what if i'm going to want you, only you, for the rest of my life?

what if i already know the answer?

october 31, 1986

halloween. you dressed as an alien. green face paint, antennae that kept falling sideways. you asked me what i was and i said "a serial killer, they look like everyone else" and you laughed so hard you doubled over and grabbed my arm.

"brendan that's the funniest thing you've ever said. you have to say that to everyone who asks."

so i did, and people laughed. because you told me to deliver the line and so i did and the fact that people laughed at my joke felt good but the fact that you gave me the joke felt like being handed a lit candle in a dark room.

you fixed my hair at one point. reached up and pushed a strand off my forehead. casual. meaningless to you. your fingertips grazed my temple and i can still feel it hours later. a warm line where your hand was.

november 8, 1986

some senior from the baseball team cornered me after school. not kyle, a new one. shoved me into the lockers and called me a faggot because apparently reading in public is a sexual orientation now.

i didn't tell anyone. didn't need to.

you found out anyway. i don't know how. terrence, probably.

you didn't say anything to me about it, but two days later the senior apologised. to my face. in the hallway. with stiff, terrified demeanour. an angel of wrath had informed him of the consequences of future behaviour.

i asked you what you did.

"nothing." you were doing your homework, not looking at me. "he just had a change of heart."

"a change of heart."

"people grow, benny."

you're terrifying when you want to be, and i'm so in love with you i could die.

november 21, 1986

a guy at terrence's party wouldn't leave you alone. i don't know his name. some friend of a friend from out of town. he kept touching your arm after you pulled away. kept leaning into your space. you smiled politely and shifted sideways, and he followed.

bobby was across the room with a group of guys smoking something he shouldn't be and didn't see it. and you did that thing you do. that swallowing thing. that "it's fine, i can handle it" thing, and i watched your shoulders tighten, your smile going strained, and my vision narrowed.

i don't remember crossing the room. i don't remember what i said.

i remember his face. the way his expression shifted when he looked at me. i'm used to people looking through me, looking past me. this was different. this was a person looking at me and seeing a locked door they did not want to open.

i don't know what i said. that should scare me. it doesn't.

you found me in the kitchen after. leaned against the counter next to me. didn't ask what happened. just knocked your shoulder against mine and said "my hero" in that teasing, soft voice and i felt the anger drain out of me so fast it left me lightheaded.

but it's still in there. i felt it. a cold, patient, completely calm willingness to do damage if anyone puts their hands on you again. it doesn't feel like rage. rage is hot and loud. that's bobby's territory.

this is different. this is a door i didn't know i had, and behind it is a version of me that would do very quiet, very permanent things to protect you.

i don't know what to do with that information. so i'm putting it here.

december 1, 1986

i hate this

why can't i just be normal

everyone around me is dating. kissing. losing their virginity in backseats and bedrooms and talking about it at lunch like it's a rite of passage i keep failing to reach.

and i sit there and i listen and i feel nothing. no envy for the act itself. only this hollow awareness that i'm watching a movie everyone else is in and i'm still in the audience.

bobby asked me last week if i'd kissed anyone yet. gentle about it, for once. no joke. just "hey man, you doing okay? you know it's fine if you haven't, right?" and the kindness of it made it worse because he was being a good brother and i couldn't tell him the truth.

the truth is that there is one person i want to kiss until my lips go raw, and she's dating you and every other mouth on earth repulses me and i don't know why i'm built this way. i can't talk to anyone about it because the answer ("i'm not attracted to anyone except my twin brother's girlfriend") sounds like a confession that would get me committed.

what is wrong with me? genuinely. is this a disorder? is there a name for wanting one person so completely that everyone else might as well be furniture?

is this what love is or is this what obsession is and how do you tell the difference when you're eighteen and you've never been touched before

december 24, 1986

christmas eve dinner. you gave me a book. wrapped in paper you decorated yourself. little silver stars drawn by hand all over the blue.

"i saw it and thought of you."

six words. i saw it and thought of you. six words now living inside my chest cavity.

it was a first edition of a book i mentioned wanting three months ago. in passing. once. you remembered.

i held on to the wrapping paper after. folded the stars inside a textbook. i'll keep them.

february 1, 1987

i woke up at 3 am from a dream about you and i can't go back to sleep.

i'm not going to write down what happened. i'm not going to describe the way you looked or the sounds you made or what i was doing to you when you

no.

cold shower. stood under the water until my teeth chattered. didn't help. i can still feel the ghost of your body against mine. my brain invented the weight of you, the heat, the way you would arch into me if i

STOP.

this is just biology. i'm eighteen. this is normal.

it's not normal. nothing about how i want you is normal. the depth of it, the weight. i didn't dream about a body. i dreamed about YOUR body. your curves. the pitch of your laugh gone breathless. the way you'd say my name, not bobby's, mine, brendan, with your hands in my hair.

i want you so badly i can't breathe and i have no right to and the wanting is going to eat me alive.

february 14, 1987

valentine's day. bobby gave you a necklace. you nearly cried and kissed him and terrence heckled you both.

i watched from the kitchen doorway.

i didn't get you anything. getting you a valentine would be insane.

march 15, 1987

you told me today that you think i'm going to change the world.

we were sitting on the back porch. just us. you were eating an apple and reading over my harvard application essay and you put it down and looked at me and said seriously, "brendan, this is incredible. you're going to get in and then you're going to change the world and i'm going to tell everyone i knew you when you do."

and i thought: you know me now. you're the only person who knows me now.

may 14, 1987

bonfire at the beach. bobby and terrence went to get more wood. you were sitting next to me. close. your knee touching mine. the fire was low and orange and the light was painting your skin gold, catching the shadows in the dip of your collarbone, the curve of your neck.

and all i could think was: your throat. the soft patch below your ear where your jaw meets your neck. if i leaned over, if i put my mouth there. just my lips. how you would taste. salt and warmth and the lingering smoke from the fire. how your pulse would feel against my tongue. how your breath would catch.

i sat next to you with the dying fire and the crashing waves and bobby's laugh carrying from down the beach and i thought about putting my mouth on your throat for forty-five straight minutes.

you leaned your head on my shoulder. "i love nights like this."

"yeah," i said.

the fire burned to embers. i could still feel your pulse in my imagination. beating against a mouth i will never put there.

may 28, 1987

you held my hand today. just for a second. we were crossing a parking lot and a car came too fast around the corner and you grabbed my hand and pulled me back and then you didn't let go for the whole walk to the truck. just your fingers laced through mine. swinging between us. you were talking about finals and i was listening and your hand was in mine and it was a tuesday and i would sell my soul to feel this on a wednesday.

june 1, 1987

i want to touch you so badly my hands hurt

not ONLY sexually. i want to brush the hair off your face. i want to hold your hand in the car. i want to fall asleep with your head on my chest. i want the casual touches. the ones bobby gets without asking for them, the hand on the arm, the head on the shoulder, the absent fingers tracing patterns on skin while watching tv.

i want to be allowed to touch you the way he's allowed. not stolen moments dressed up as friendship. real ones. with intent. with honesty.

god i'm so fucking pathetic

june 9, 1987

graduation. we did it. senior year, done.

you found me in the crowd after. pushed through bobby and terrence and your parents and my mom and everyone else and grabbed me in a hug so tight my cap fell off. "WE DID IT BENNY" screamed directly into my ear with enough force to cause permanent hearing damage.

i hugged you tight and you laughed and your gown was billowing in the wind, and your hair was in my face. i could feel your ribs expanding with laughter against my arms and for ten seconds the world was only this. you in my arms. laughing.

bobby got the kiss. terrence got the secret handshake. i got the scream and the spin and i would trade everything i own for a lifetime supply of being the person you run to first.

july 4, 1987

sparklers at the beach. you were sitting next to me in the sand. our shoulders touching. the sky exploding in gold and red above us.

you turned to me, sparkler in hand, gold light on your face. "are you happy, benny?"

"yeah. i'm happy."

and right then i was. the wanting was still there, bedrock-deep, permanent. but for ten minutes it was quiet enough to hear the waves over it.

you put your head on my shoulder. i put my cheek on your hair.

i am never going to love anyone else. i know this the way i know chemical formulas. fact. fixed. tested and proven across every variable.

you are the only constant in my universe.

august 7, 1987

acceptance letter came. harvard. full ride.

you were the second person i showed. bobby first, because brotherhood, but you were right behind him. you took the letter and read it, your hands were shaking and you looked up at me and your eyes were full. you threw your arms around my neck and squeezed so hard i couldn't breathe.

"i knew it," you whispered wetly into my collar. "i knew it. i told you. i told you, benny."

and underneath the pride and the joy, so clear i could taste it... sadness. that's really far away. that's the other side of the country. and you didn't say it but your arms tightened and you held on longer than you needed to and i could feel the grief of it in your grip.

bobby grinned and hugged me. terrence lifted me off the ground cheering loudly. mom cried.

you held my hand under the table at dinner that night. three straight hours. nobody saw. your thumb tracing circles on my palm while everyone talked about the bright, impossible future.

i'm going to remember your thumb on my palm long after i've forgotten the letter.

august 28, 1987

last night before harvard.

you came over. just you. bobby was working late and terrence had a gig down at santa cruz. you knocked on my door and held up a wrapped package and decalred, "before you go."

it was a mixtape, but not just a mixtape. the case was hand-decorated with tiny drawings. inside jokes, all of them. a stick figure at a desk labeled "nerd at work." a tiny calculus equation with a heart instead of an equals sign. a drawing of me with ridiculous oversized glasses. on the spine, in your handwriting: "for benny. so you don't forget us."

i turned it over. on the back you'd written every track title and next to each one a note.

track 3 — this is the one i was humming during the calc final that made you glare at me. track 7 — for driving at night with the windows down. track 12 — listen to this one when you miss home. and by home i mean me.

and by home i mean me.

i stared at it for so long you got nervous. "is it stupid? it's stupid. you probably have a walkman with actual good music and this is—"

"it's perfect."

you looked at me. i looked at you. the room was very quiet and very small. you were very close and i could have kissed you. the distance between your mouth and mine was six inches and i could have closed it and everything would have changed.

i didn't. because i couldn't do that to bobby. i couldn't.

"i'm really going to miss you, benny."

"i'll call every week."

"you better."

i listened to the tape in bed that night with headphones on. track 12. over and over and over. your voice in the liner notes. and by home i mean me.

i held the case against my chest and closed my eyes, pretending your hand was there instead.

september 2, 1987

you hugged me at the truck. held on for a long time. your face in my neck and your hands gripping the back of my shirt.

"every week, brendan. if you forget about me—"

"i won't forget about you."

too fast, too serious, too much truth packed into a sentence that was supposed to be light. you pulled back and looked at me and your eyes were searching my face for something.

i don't know if you found it.

you kissed my cheek. close enough that if i'd turned my head half an inch your lips would have been on mine.

i didn't turn my head.

i got in the truck. bobby drove. i watched you in the side mirror, standing in the driveway with your arms wrapped around yourself, getting smaller and smaller.

september 18, 1987

i thought distance would help.

three thousand miles between your body and mine. no more shoulder-touches. no more vanilla smell. no more knee-against-knee in dark movie theaters. the theory was sound: remove the stimulus, reduce the response. basic conditioning.

the theory is wrong.

i miss you like an organ. like something was cut out of me at the airport and i'm walking around with the wound still open. i reach for the phone every hour. i play the mixtape until the ribbon starts to wear. i sit in lectures surrounded by brilliant, interesting people and i feel nothing. flat. grey.

here's what's strange though. i'm getting better at the other thing. the people thing.

harvard is full of people like me. the ones who read too much and talk too little and know the periodic table better than their classmates' names. for the first time in my life "quiet and intense" isn't the wrong setting. it's the default. i can hold a conversation in a study group without running the translation the whole time. i can sit in a dining hall and not feel like i'm performing personhood for an audience that isn't buying it.

i'm finding myself here, in small ways. figuring out which parts of my strangeness are flaws and which are just features nobody had a use for in santa clara.

but you remain the eye of the storm. the one quiet place where everything inside me unwinds.

harvard is teaching me how to exist around other people. you taught me that existing around another person could feel like rest instead of labour. and no amount of social growth, no amount of learning to make small talk in a dining hall, will ever replicate what you give me just by being near.

the silence that isn't empty. the touch that doesn't sting. the calm.

i am homesick for a person, not a place.

october 3, 1987

a girl in my organic chemistry study group asked me out. claire. smart. funny. objectively attractive.

i said yes because i'm supposed to say yes. because normal people say yes. because bobby would say yes and terrence would say yes, and this is what nineteen-year-olds do.

we got coffee. she was kind. she laughed at my poor jokes. she touched my hand across the table.

i felt nothing. absolutely nothing. like pressing my palm against a wall and waiting for warmth that never comes.

she leaned in to kiss me at the end and i let her and her mouth was on mine and all i could think was: wrong. wrong lips. wrong pressure. wrong taste. wrong person. WRONG.

i pulled away and said i was sorry and walked home. stood in the shower and scrubbed my mouth raw, and felt sick with how much i wanted it to have been you.

october 19, 1987

you called tonight. bobby was at work and you were bored and you called. we talked for two hours. my roommate left after twenty minutes because apparently i was "smiling weird."

you told me about your week. clark's being terrible. terrence's band. the stray cat on your porch. you told me everything and i held the phone with my eyes closed and you were there. in my ear. telling me about a cat like it was the most important news in the world.

"i miss you, benny." soft. sleepy.

"i miss you too."

the safest true thing i've ever said. because i miss you is allowed. i miss you lives in the acceptable zone. i miss you is what a friend says.

i miss you the way a lung misses air. i miss you so much i have rearranged my entire week around the possibility that you might call again.

but "i miss you too" is what i said.

november 12, 1987

there's a guy in my anatomy class. david. he's been friendly. eating lunch together, studying. today he put his hand on my knee under the table and looked at me with a question in his eyes.

nothing. nothing nothing nothing. i am broken or i am built wrong or i am simply, irrevocably, yours in a way that excludes every other human being on this planet regardless of what they look like or what's between their legs.

i told him i was flattered. i meant it. i am flattered that anyone wants someone like me.

i just can't want them back. the machinery only runs for you. i've tested it now. both genders. kind people, attractive people, people who deserved better than the hollow version of me sitting across from them. and every single time the same flat nothing. the same grey wall.

then you call and the wall dissolves and every colour rushes back in, and i think: oh. there i am. i was here the whole time. i just only exist when you're nearby.

distance was supposed to fix this. i was supposed to get better.

i'm not getting better. i'm getting worse. three thousand miles and i am worse.

november 26, 1987

thanksgiving. came home. you saw me in the doorway and your face lit up. you ran at me and jumped and i caught you. your arms locked around my neck, your face buried in my shoulder. you were laughing and squeezing me so tight i couldn't breathe.

i could have held you like that until the sun burned itself out.

bobby was right behind me. you let go of me and hugged him and kissed him and you stood in the hallway with your foreheads together and i carried my bag upstairs.

you run at me. you kiss him. the running is enthusiastic and warm and genuine. the kissing is intimate and private and his.

i want the kiss. i'd burn for the kiss.

and i hate myself for wanting it because bobby is my brother and he's happy and he deserves this after dad.

he deserves this more than me.

december 3, 1987

i think loving you is going to kill me.

i wish i could take my heart out and set it aside. put it in a jar on a shelf. come back for it when it's safe. but it's never going to be safe, is it? there's no version of my life where loving you is safe. there's only the version where i carry it and i'm going to carry it till my heart stops.

february 14, 1988

valentine's day. i mailed you a book. astronomy. because you said once, in october, that you wished you knew more about constellations. the note said: "saw this, thought you'd like it — B." casual. friendly.

you called to thank me. "brendan bennett franklin, you're the sweetest person alive."

i sat on my dorm room floor with the phone cord wrapped around my finger and thought: i am not sweet. i am a liar. i bought you a valentine and called it casual and you believed me because you don't see me. you look right at me with those warm eyes and you see a friend. a brother. a good person.

you don't see the thing underneath that wants to kiss you until neither of us can stand.

april 16, 1988

a girl at a party. i don't remember her name. i was a little drunk and she was pretty and i thought: just try. just try to be normal. to want someone attainable. someone who isn't your brother's girlfriend.

we went to her room. she kissed me and took her shirt off and i looked at her and felt... revulsion. not at her. at the wrongness of it. at my own body's flat refusal to participate in anything that wasn't you. i made an excuse. left. walked home in the cold.

the distance was supposed to make this better. the new people, the new context. a fresh start without you in every room.

but you're in every room. you're in the phone on my desk and the mixtape in my walkman and the book on my shelf with the silver stars on the wrapping paper that i kept like a goddamn shrine. you're in the way i scan every crowd for your face. you're in the hollow feeling when i don't find it.

what is wrong with me? what is fundamentally, structurally wrong with me that i can't want anyone who isn't you?

i sat on my bathroom floor and put my head in my hands and asked myself if this is what the rest of my life looks like. a series of empty rooms with the wrong people in them. a body that only responds to one person. a lock with one key and the key belongs to my brother's girlfriend.

yes. that's what it looks like. i know the answer already. i've always known.

april 30, 1988

i made a list today. of reasons to stop.

she's bobby's girlfriend.

bobby is my twin.

bobby loves her.

she loves bobby.

i am betraying him with every thought i have about her.

i am betraying HER with every thought i have about her because she trusts me and i'm lying to her.

i am twenty years old and i have never had a normal sexual or romantic interaction with another human being because my body won't cooperate with anyone who isn't her.

this is not love. this is fixation. i'm sick. i'm sick in the head.

if she knew what i think about when i hear her voice on the phone she would never speak to me again.

i am a bad person.

i stared at the list for a long time. each point is factually accurate. logically sound. irrefutable.

you called an hour later and called out happily, "benny, tell me about your day" and the list caught fire and burned to ash before you finished the sentence.

i am a bad person who loves a good person and the loving makes me worse.

may 19, 1988

my roommate has a girlfriend. they have sex in our room while i'm at the library and they think i don't know. i know because the sheets are different when i come back and the room smells like sweat and perfume and he's got that dazed, satisfied grin.

i looked at him last night (happy, spent, normal) and thought: why can't i be like that? why can't i want someone who wants me back? someone available. someone whose last name isn't franklin.

tried again in my head. conjured up every attractive person i've met at harvard. ran through them one by one, tried to imagine kissing them, touching them. like flipping through a catalogue of locked doors.

and then i thought about your hands in my hair and my whole body responded so violently i had to excuse myself to the bathroom.

why am i like this

why am i like this why am i like this why am i like this

three thousand miles. eighteen months of distance. dozens of kind, attractive, available people and my body is a locked room with your name on the door and no other key fits and i have tried every key and they all feel like violations.

i'm so tired of trying and failing and trying and failing and coming back to the same truth every single time:

it's you. it was always you. it will only ever be you.

and i can never, ever have you.

june 7, 1988

summer. home again.

bobby and you have been together two years and the cracks are starting to show. you don't talk about it. that's your flaw, the swallowing. the folding up of hurt into small squares and tucking them away.

i see it though. the way you wait for bobby to call and he doesn't. the way you make plans and he forgets. the way you press your lips together for one second when you're disappointed before the smile goes back on. nobody else catches it.

i catch it every time.

i hate him for it. my twin. who i love more than anyone except you. i hate him for having the thing i would dismantle myself to have and treating it like it'll always be there.

you won't always be there. patience has a floor and one day you'll hit it.

i can't say this to him. he'll hear what it really is. jealousy dressed up as concern.

july 22, 1988

you came over while bobby was at work. back porch. popsicles. you were telling me about a movie and your lips were stained red and a drop ran down your wrist and you licked it off and i—

i need to stop writing these down

"you're staring, benny."

"you have popsicle on your chin."

you wiped it off, laughing.

you don't know. you genuinely don't know what your mouth does to me, what your hands do to me, what the sound of my name in your voice does to me.

if you knew, you'd stop coming over. you'd stop touching my arm and leaning into me and putting your head on my shoulder. and losing those things would end me faster than never having had them.

good old brendan. safe brendan. bobby's quiet brother who helps with calculus and always has a book.

the mask stays on.

august 3, 1988

you fell asleep on my bed today while i was studying. lying on your stomach with one arm hanging off the edge and your face turned toward me and your mouth open and you were drooling on my pillow.

drooling. on my pillow.

the love i feel for you hit me so hard i couldn't move for half an hour.

august 15, 1988

please let me stop loving her

please. whoever is listening. let me stop.

let me wake up one morning and feel nothing when she says my name. let the hugs feel like hugs instead of slow immolation. let me sit next to her without mapping every centimetre between our bodies. let me be the friend she thinks i am instead of the liar i know i am.

i don't want this anymore. it hurts too much. please, it hurts. three years and it's only getting deeper and i can't

i can't switch it off. i don't know how. i don't think there is a how.

i think this is just what i am now. a boy who loves a girl who loves his brother.

september 6, 1988

back at harvard. unpacking. found one of your hair ties tangled in my clean laundry. you must have left it when you were over last.

i put it on my wrist. wore it all day. took it off before bed and put it on the nightstand and looked at it and thought: this is the closest thing i have to wearing a ring from you.

a hair tie. on a nightstand. in a dorm room in harvard.

september 22, 1988

i want to be normal i want to be normal i want to be normal i want to be normal i want to be happy please i just want to be happy

bad day.

october 10, 1988

you called at 1 am. crying. fighting with bobby. your voice thick and wet.

"i don't know what to do, benny. i love him so much and he won't let me in."

and i sat on my dorm room bed with the phone pressed to my ear until it ached and told you:

"you're the strongest person i know."

and you said: "why can't he just say it, brendan? why can't he just say he loves me?"

i love you. i love you. i love you. three words bobby can't get past his teeth and i can't get past my conscience.

"he loves you. he's just scared."

"i know."

"give him time."

"i always give him time."

and i wanted to say: stop giving him time. stop waiting. he's wasting you. he's burning daylight with a girl made of sunlight and he doesn't even see it.

i said: "you deserve someone who says it."

long pause. your breathing slowing.

"thanks, benny. you always know what to say."

i don't know what to say. i know what not to say. there's a vast, dark, freezing difference.

march 30, 1989

spring break. you picked me up from the airport. standing at arrivals in a sundress holding a sign that said NERD in huge letters.

you dropped the sign and ran and i caught you and your laugh was in my ear and the sundress was thin and your body was warm against mine.

you drove us home. windows down. radio on. singing badly. your hand squeezing my arm at a red light.

i would burn harvard to the ground for this. for your hand on my arm, shaking me because you were so happy to see me. for the wind in your hair. for your voice saying my name like it's your favourite word.

i would give up everything. the degree. the future. the carefully constructed life three thousand miles away.

i would give up all of it for one day where you're mine.

one day. and then i'd give you back. i'd carry the memory for the rest of my life and it would be enough.

it would have to be.

HE FUCKING FORGOT, 1989

bobby forgot your birthday.

you didn't tell me. you wouldn't. i found out because terrence called me, and said "dude, bobby got too high and forgot" and his voice was tight with the anger he rarely shows.

i called you from the payphone in the hallway and said happy birthday and you said "thanks, benny" in that voice. that bright, fine, everything's-fine voice that i can see through like glass. and i heard the crack underneath it and the love hit me and the rage hit me in the same breath.

i called bobby after, and i don't raise my voice. i have raised my voice maybe five times in my life. but i said his name in a way that made him go quiet immediately on the other end and i said "you forgot her birthday" and the silence that followed was long and guilty.

"shit," he said. "shit, benny, i—"

"call her. right now. and if you ever do this again—"

i didn't finish the sentence. didn't need to. bobby heard what was underneath it. heard the edge i keep so carefully hidden, the cold thing that lives behind the shyness, and for a second i think he heard the OTHER thing, too.

the reason the anger was so hot, the reason it came so fast, the reason his twin brother was calling from three thousand miles away trembling with fury over a forgotten birthday that wasn't his to remember.

he called you. sent flowers the next day, took you out for dinner. you forgave him because you always forgive him.

i sat in the phone booth for ten minutes after with my head against the glass. my hands were shaking. not from anger. from how close i'd come to saying too much. from the size of the feeling pressing against my ribs. from the knowledge that i would burn my relationship with my brother to the ground to protect you from pain and the fact that this doesn't make me a good person.

it makes me a dangerous one.

may 2, 1989

your voice on the phone tonight, laughing about a terrible customer at clark's, imitating his voice, making me laugh until my stomach hurt.

i pressed the phone so hard against my ear it left a red mark and i thought: i don't want to die without having kissed you. i don't care about anything else. the degree. the career. the future. i just don't want to die without knowing what your mouth tastes like.

that's all.

june 14, 1989

you were lying on a blanket in the back yard. reading. the sun was on your legs and your feet were bare and you was chewing on a pen cap. your hair was pulled up and the back of your neck was exposed.

i sat on the porch steps and watched the back of your neck for twenty minutes.

twenty minutes. the back of your neck.

i am beyond help.

july 4, 1989

short one.

sparklers again. your shoulder against mine. same beach. same sand. same sky.

different year. same ache. same shape. same boy sitting in the dark loving the same girl who doesn't know.

happy fourth of july.

september 20, 1989

second year of pre-med. my hands shake from caffeine. i forgot to eat yesterday.

you called. i picked up on the first ring. i will always pick up on the first ring.

"brendan bennett franklin. eat something, drink water, and go to bed."

"i have a paper—"

"go. to. bed. if you sound this wrecked tomorrow i'm driving down myself."

i ate a sandwich. drank water. went to bed. fell asleep holding the phone.

you mailed me a care package last month. my favourite snacks. a note that said: "don't die. i need you."

i folded the note and put it in my wallet. i'll probably be buried with it.

november 23, 1989

thanksgiving. you saw me in the kitchen and your face did the light-up. the full-body brightening.

my hair is longer, brushing my ears and curling at the nape. you reached up and pushed it back from my forehead. your fingers dragged across my scalp and my whole body went rigid.

"look at you. all grown up and scholarly." you tugged a strand behind my ear. "very handsome, benny."

i said "thanks" to the refrigerator. my ears were burning.

bobby came in. you kissed him. i excused myself.

i sat on my bed and pressed my hand to my scalp where your fingers had been and breathed in through my nose for a count of four, and out through my mouth for a count of four for ten minutes because my heart rate would not come down.

handsome. you said handsome. you touched my hair and called me handsome.

next three lifetimes. i'm carrying this.

january 6, 1990

i had a dream about you. i'm going to write it down because i have to put it somewhere that doesn't judge me.

you were in my dorm room. sitting on my bed. and you said "benny, come here" and i went. you put your hands on my face and kissed me and i could feel it. the pressure of your mouth. the warmth of your breath. your lips parting and your tongue finding mine and the small sound you made when i pulled you closer.

and then you were under me. your legs wrapped around my waist. i was inside you. and you were saying my name. not bobby's, mine, brendan. over and over while your nails dragged down my back and your head fell back and i could feel you around me, tight and warm and perfect. every time you said brendan i went deeper and you arched into me.

i woke up so hard it hurt. sheets ruined.

i lay in the dark and put my hand around myself and thought about you beneath me and came in under a minute with a pained groan, and felt like the worst person alive.

you trust me completely. and i'm lying in the dark getting off to dreams about being inside you.

i'm sick

i'm not sick. i'm in love. but from here they feel the same.

march 2, 1990

your voice on the phone last night, sleepy and warm: "night, benny. love you."

casual. friendly. the way you say it to terrence. the way you say it to your friends.

i hung up and pressed the phone against my chest and stared at the ceiling.

love you. you say it so easily. like the words are light. like they cost nothing.

for me they cost everything.

march 15, 1990

you visited for my birthday. flew out alone. bobby couldn't make it.

you were standing outside my dorm with a bakery box and a toothy grin. "happy birthday, benny! it's lopsided because TSA manhandled it."

three days. you slept in my roommate's bed. wore my harvard sweater because you forgot to pack layers, too used to cali heat. it was too big on you. sleeves past your fingertips. collar slipping off one shoulder. bare legs. padding around my room.

i very nearly put my fist through a wall.

we stayed up until 4 am. lying in the dark on separate beds. your voice floating across the room. you told me things you haven't told bobby. things about your childhood. your fears. you talk to me differently than you talk to him. with bobby you're warm but with me you're open. like i'm the one place you can put things down.

"you're my favourite person." half asleep. murmured. "don't tell bobby."

i won't tell bobby. i won't tell anyone. i will take that sentence and compress it into a diamond and keep it in my chest forever.

on the last morning you hugged me at the airport. held on. your face in my neck and your hands gripping the back of my shirt and i breathed you in. vanilla and that warm unnamed you scent. stored it. another moment that belongs to me in all the wrong ways.

"come home soon."

i'm always coming home. you're there. there is no other reason needed.

april 27, 1990

you called me crying last night. bobby again. another fight. another door closed in your face.

and i sat on my bed and held the phone and listened and said the right things and the kind things and the things a good friend says. but underneath every word was this screaming, roaring, monstrous want to say: LEAVE HIM. LEAVE HIM AND LOVE ME. I WOULD NEVER DO THIS TO YOU. I WOULD NEVER FORGET YOUR BIRTHDAY. I WOULD NEVER MAKE YOU CRY. I WOULD SAY I LOVE YOU EVERY SINGLE MORNING BEFORE YOU FINISHED OPENING YOUR EYES.

i said: "he's an idiot but he'll come around. give him time."

i'm such a coward

i am such a fucking coward

may 15, 1990

two entries in quick succession because i need to put this somewhere before it eats through my chest.

i came home for the weekend. you were at the house. bobby was at work. you were in the kitchen making lunch and you turned and saw me and made that sound (that little happy gasp) and threw yourself at me.

and i held you. my face in your hair. your body against mine. and you pulled back and looked at me with those eyes, and put your hand on my cheek, and said worriedly, "you look tired, benny. are they working you too hard?"

and your hand was on my face. your palm on my cheek. your thumb brushing the skin under my eye. and you were close enough to kiss. and i could feel my pulse in my throat and my fingertips and the backs of my knees and i was drowning in the scent of you, vanilla and warmth and clean laundry. my hands were on your waist and yours was on my face and the kitchen was empty and quiet, and i could have leaned forward two inches and—

bobby's truck pulled into the driveway.

you dropped your hand. smiled. went to greet him.

two inches. i was two inches from ruining everything and saving everything, and i don't know which it would have been and i'll never know. i stood in the empty kitchen and pressed my hand to the cheek you touched and breathed through my teeth until my heart rate dropped.

june 3, 1990

i love my brother. i love bobby since we were born seven minutes apart and he came out screaming and i came out quiet. i love him for his warmth. his courage. the way he tried to shield me from dad even when we were too small to name what was happening. how he always stood up for me, always tried to understand me even when he never could.

but when it comes to you.

when it comes to you i hate him too.

i hate that he has what i want. i hate that he doesn't always value it. i hate that he gets to hold your hand and kiss you and fall asleep with your head on his chest but doesn't understand what a miracle that is because he's never stood on the other side of it watching.

i hate myself for hating him. he didn't steal you. he asked and you said yes and i never opened my mouth. the silence was my choice. every single day i choose it and every day it gets heavier.

i love him. i hate him. i love you. i can't have you.

four facts. a box with no door.

july 14, 1990

i've gotten better at being a person.

three years of harvard and i can navigate a party without wanting to leave within five minutes. i can make friends. i can read a room without running the translation in real time. the machinery is smoother now. the performance takes less effort.

but it's still a performance. everywhere except with you.

you're the only place where i don't have to translate. the only person whose presence makes the noise in my head go quiet instead of louder. everyone else, even the people i've grown to love at harvard, requires a version of me. you just require me. the real one. the strange one. the one who needs silence and can't handle being touched by anyone except you ,and notices too many details, and feels everything at the wrong volume.

you've never once asked me to be different. you've never once made me feel like the way i'm wired is a problem to be solved. you just sit with me in the quiet and let me be strange and call me benny. hold my hand and everything inside me goes still.

the eye of the storm. every time. the one calm place in a world that's always too loud.

july 28, 1990

if i could have one day.

one day where you wake up next to me. where you reach for me in the dark. where you say brendan in the voice i've only heard in dreams. where i can put my hands on your face and say it out loud, in daylight, without shame, without the weight of brotherhood crushing the words before they leave my mouth.

one day where the "i miss you benny" becomes "i love you brendan." where the hugs don't end because you're pulling away to go back to him. where i can press my mouth to the skin on your throat i've imagined ten thousand times. where your hands are in my hair because you want them there.

just one day.

and then i'd give you back, and carry it forever.

i am twenty years old. pre-med at harvard. full ride. a life that looks like everything a person could want.

and every night i fall asleep missing a girl who sleeps in my brother's bed. and every morning the missing is the same size. the same depth. the same fixed point that everything else orbits.

i don't know how to stop.

i don't think i'm supposed to.

[undated, late 1990]

i love you

i love you

i'm in love with you

i've been in love with you since september 3rd, 1985, homeroom, twelve minutes late, window seat

i love you and i can't say it and the not saying is killing me, it is actually, physically, killing me

i love you more than he does. i love you better. i would never make you cry, i would never forget, i would never close a door in your face

no. that's not fair. he loves you. he does. he just doesn't know how. and i do know how and i can't and that's

i love you

i love you and i'm so tired of not saying it

i love you and i've never kissed anyone who wasn't wrong

i love you and you call me benny and it's the closest i'll ever get to hearing my name in your mouth the way i need to hear it

i love you and i tried to stop and i can't stop

i love you and i don't want anyone else and i've tried and i will never want anyone else

i love you and you held my hand under the table and i almost told you then

i love you and you slept on my shoulder and i memorised your breathing

i love you and you made me a mixtape and wrote "and by home i mean me" and i have listened to track 12 four hundred times

i love you and i am so afraid you'll find this notebook

i love you and i am so afraid you won't

i love you and bobby is my brother and i love him and i hate him and i love you and i can't

i love you i love you i love you i love you

i should write it down. the real way. once. clearly. not crossed out.

for every time i didn't say it but should have. for every hug where i held on too long and you didn't notice. for every time you fell asleep on my shoulder and i sat perfectly still and memorised the pattern of your breathing. for the mixtape and the silver stars and the way you said and by home i mean me.

for every phone call at 1 am when your voice was the only warm thing in my whole life. for every time you ran at me in an airport. for every time you touched my hair and called me handsome, and i said thanks to the refrigerator because looking at you while you said it would have ended me. for the parking lot where you held my hand. for the two inches in the kitchen. for the dream where you said my name. for the popsicle on your wrist. for your head on my shoulder at every bonfire. for your palm on my cheek and your thumb under my eye and the truck pulling into the driveway.

for the hair tie on my nightstand. for the book with the silver stars i still keep pressed flat inside a textbook. for the three thousand miles that were supposed to fix me and only proved that i am unfixable.

i love you.

i love you. i love you. i love you. i love you. i love you. i love you. i love you.

i love you and i should have said it in the kitchen when your hand was on my face. i love you and i should have said it in my dorm room when you were wearing my sweater and the collar was slipping off your shoulder. i love you and i should have said it at graduation when you screamed in my ear. i love you and i should have said it at the bonfire when you asked if i was happy.

i love you and i have never once been brave enough to say it and writing it down is the closest i will ever come and even now, even in a notebook nobody will read, the words feel too large for the page.

they feel too large for my hands. they feel too large for my chest which has been holding them for five years and is so full the seams are splitting and i am so tired. i am so tired of carrying this. i am so tired of being good and quiet and safe while the love sits behind my teeth and rots there because i will not let it out.

i love you. there. for every time i didn't.

i lo

[the entry ends here. the last two letters trail off the line, the pen stroke dragging sideways across the page before stopping. the ink on this page and the one before it is warped and buckled. the paper has dried stiff and rippled in places, the way paper does when it gets wet and dries again. the distortion is heaviest around the final lines, where the ink has bled and feathered outward, blurring the words at their edges. it is not water damage.]

Three squad cars were angled badly out front because patrol had arrived first. Now there were barricades, news vans sniffing at the edges, uniforms pushing civilians back, radios talking over each other, and a command post being built out of wobbly folding tables. 

Usually, this was the part where everyone got grim. People knew that one bad word, one twitch, one wrong movement could turn a lobby full of frightened people into a massacre.

And then you arrived carrying two coffees and three boxes of pastries.

“Okay,” you said, stepping under the tape and handing two boxes to the nearest tech like you had just walked into an inconvenient staff meeting, “I brought croissants! If this goes horribly, at least we’d all have had a decent last meal.”

Three people turned and nobody laughed.

You looked around at the armoured vehicles, the blocked street, the negotiator phone being unpacked, the SWAT team moving into position across the road, and sighed. “Tough crowd.”

Your supervisor shot you a look. “Agent.”

“I know, I know.” You tucked the pastry bag under your arm and started shrugging into your vest. “Hostages, firearms, massive public safety issue. I’m taking it very seriously. I’m also saying you all probably haven’t eaten since six.”

“That’s not relevant.”

“It will be when I start making decisions with low blood sugar.”

That got half a smile out of one of the younger agents.

Good.

That was why you did it.

You weren’t careless. You understood what was happening behind those doors. You knew there were women and children inside lying on marble, trying not to cry. You knew someone had a gun in their hand.

But panic did not need more panic, and fear did not calm fear.

“Where’s my line?” you asked, clipping your radio into place.

The commander pointed toward the opposite building. “Fifth floor. SWAT sniper position has the best view into the front lobby. You can set up with them if you need eyes while you’re on the phone.”

“I do need eyes,” you said, nodding at him.

“Suspect one’s name is Eddie Marlow. Twenty-nine with prior for armed robbery. No confirmed fatalities today, but a guard took a round to the shoulder, still moving as of two minutes ago.”

You nodded, taking that in as you looked back at the bank.

“Right,” you said, almost too calmly. “So, normal Thursday.”

“Agent.”

“What?” You took a sip of coffee. “It’s Thursday.”

You took one last look at the bank, grabbed the phone, then crossed the street with two tactical agents shadowing you toward the building opposite.

—

Dex was stationed across the street on the fifth floor of an empty office building, flat behind his rifle with the blinds cut just enough for a sightline.That was where he belonged: above from the noise, above the mess. His scope was steady, breathing steady.

He could hear command in his ear. Entry team holding. Negotiation line was being established. Sniper one in position?

Dex didn’t answer until he needed to. “In position.”

The room behind him was dim and mostly empty, littered with grey carpet, abandoned desks, and a tactical gear set. His spotter murmured updates into comms as someone on the ground, a junior agent probably, dropped something metal. Sirens pulsed red and blue against the ceiling.

Then the door opened.

Dex didn’t look away from the scope at first.

People came in and out all the time during operations. Sometimes it was commanders, other times it was spotters or techs with updates, maybe agents carrying folders. Dex ignored them, usually.

That’s when you said,  “Oh. Hi.”

He knew that voice. His eyes lifted from the scope.

You stood in the doorway with a vest half-zipped over your blouse, a negotiator phone tucked under one arm, and a pastry box balanced against your hip like you had wandered into the wrong brunch and decided to make the best of it.

Your eyes brightened. “Special Agent Poindexter.”

His spotter glanced over. In that moment, Dex forgot how to be normal about his own name. “You know me?” 

Your smile widened.  The New York office was big, but not that big. “Your reputation precedes you.”

His spotter looked down at his clipboard as if it became very interesting all of a sudden.

Dex knew you, too, though not personally.  But he had seen you around the office forever. In elevators, at the coffee machine, walking through glass-walled conference rooms with files against your chest. You were always moving, always talking, always being pulled into conversations because people liked you.

Agents smiled when you passed and techs forgave you for stealing pens. Your supervisors pretended to be annoyed but really, they loved you. Even Ray Nadeem had spoken highly of you, said that his wife liked having you over for tea and that his kid liked you because you brought sweets to brunch. Dex had wanted to talk to you after that. So many people admired you, he just needed to see for himself, right?

He had stood in the same hallway as you, watching you laugh with a clerk from crisis response and thinking that he could say something. Anything. Nice work with the Port thing. Ray mentioned you. Are you training the new HRT recruits?

But there had never really been a clear reason to talk to you. And without a reason, there was no script. Without a script, there was only the blank space where courage was supposed to go. So Dex had never said anything.

“Is this the best view?” you asked.

Dex nodded. “Yes.”

“Can I?”

He shifted, even though there was barely enough space for two, which meant when you lowered yourself beside him, your knee pressed against his thigh and your shoulder brushed his arm. 

“Sorry,” you murmured.

Dex looked at the place your knee touched his, then at you. “It’s fine.”

You leaned toward the cut in the blinds, careful not to touch the rifle. Your cheek came close to his shoulder, close enough that he caught a whiff of fragrant coffee on your breath, sugar on your fingers, and city air clinging to your uniform. Dex decided not to think too much about that.

“Talk me through it,” you said.

He looked back into the scope. “Suspect one in the green jacket is Eddie Marlow. Right hand dominant, pacing near the teller counter.”

“Is he scared?”

“Agitated,” Dex corrected.

“Mm.”

Dex glanced at you. “Suspect two,” he continued, “with the red cap. He had a shotgun and had been sitting behind the manager’s desk.”

Your face changed, only slightly. “And suspect three?”

“Not visible. He was last seen by the west wall with hostages.”

You leaned in closer, trying to see through the narrow slice of the lobby. Your shoulder pressed more firmly into his arm as hip bumped his side. “Sorry,” you said again, absentmindedly.

“You’re not,” he said.

“No,” you admitted. “But I keep doing it cause’ it sounds right.”

His spotter made a tiny laugh, and Dex ignored him.

Finally, you opened the pastry box. The smell of butter and sugar swirled into the dusty room, absurd and warm. You pulled out a croissant like there were not three armed men across the street. 

His spotter stared. “Are you eating?”

You took a bite as the pastry cracked softly between your teeth. “I’m preparing.”

A few crumbs fell onto your vest. One landed on his sleeve. Both of you looked down at it. “Oh,” you said.

Before he could move, you reached over and brushed it away with your thumb. It was a tiny touch, almost nothing but your knuckle grazing the inside of his wrist.

Still, Dex’s fingers tightened once against the rifle.

Your gaze dropped to his hand, then rose back to his face. Your smile changed, smaller now. 

“Sorry,” you said, quieter. This time, it almost sounded sincere.

Dex didn’t know why, but his mouth had gone dry. “It’s fine.”

You held the pastry box toward him. “Croissant?”

“No.”

“You sure? You look like a plain pastry kind of guy.”

Dex tilted his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Instead of answering, you only shrugged and took another bite. Dex noticed your vest was crooked because you had clearly zipped it in while walking. You looked entirely too kind for a sniper’s nest.

You settled closer again, eyes returning to the bank. “Eddie looks reasonable.”

“They’re criminals,” Dex scoffed, unimpressed. “When are they ever reasonable?” It was really just a line he repeated from his coworkers.

“Hey,” you joke-scolded, nudging his arm lightly with your shoulder. “We’re all people here.”

Dex didn’t look convinced. 

Downstairs, command crackled in your ears. “Negotiation line almost ready. Stand by.”

You exhaled once and set the half-eaten croissant carefully beside his gear bag like it belonged there. Then you wiped your fingers on a napkin and stood up, reached for the phone on the table in the middle of the room.

Before lifting the phone, you glanced at him. “ Poindexter?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to need your eyes.”

For one second, he understood why people liked you. You made people feel wanted, needed. Then, briefly, he thought about telling you he already knew your voice. He already heard your laugh. He knew he had wanted to speak to you for months and never managed it because wanting was not the same as knowing how. 

Instead, he lowered himself back to the scope. “You have them.”

You smiled at him one last time as you picked up the phone and the line clicked alive. 

Pressed the receiver to your ear, one hand braced on the table, you said, “Hi, Eddie, I’m Special Agent—”

“I’m not talking to feds!” The shout cracked down the line loud enough that even the spotter looked up.

You didn’t flinch. You didn’t pull the phone away from your ear. You didn’t take offense to being screamed at by a man with a gun and a room full of innocent civilians.

You only nodded, like Eddie could see you.

“Okay,” you said. “That’s okay.”

“I said I’m not talking to you!”

“I heard you.”

“Then shut up!”

Dex’s jaw tightened.

Across the street, through the scope, Eddie Marlow was pacing so hard he almost tripped over his own foot. He could take him out so easily, Dex thought, but that wasn’t why he was here. 

Because if he did, the other two suspects would probably open fire. There would probably be a bloodbath. That was why you were holding the phone, not him. 

You leaned against the table like this was a normal phone call. 

“You sound really upset,” you said thoughtfully.

“No shit!”

“Yeah,” you chuckled. “Fair.”

Dex blinked. His spotter stared at you for half a second, then remembered his job and murmured into comms, “Negotiator has contact. Suspect one highly agitated, still engaged.”

Eddie was breathing hard into the phone and you let him. 

You were… patient. It was tender. You were letting this man be loud and terrified, and you weren’t punishing him for it. Dex had never understood that kind of kindness.

“Eddie,” you said, after the worst of his breathing settled, “what did you have for breakfast?”

Dex looked up from the scope. The spotter mouthed, What?

On the phone, Eddie went silent. “What?” he finally snapped.

“What did you have for breakfast?”

“What the fuck does that matter?”

“It might not,” you said. “I’m just trying to figure out if you’ve eaten today.”

“I’m in the middle of a fucking robbery.”

“I know. But you’re also a person with a body, and bodies make stupid decisions when they’re hungry.”

Dex’s mouth parted slightly. Oh, you were charming.

He understood what you were doing with that stupid, sweet little question, that was really a thread to his humanity. Just to calm him down, get him to think about something else other than the crime he was committing. 

“I had coffee,” Eddie muttered.

“Okay. Just coffee?”

“Yeah.”

“No food?”

“I don’t know. A cigarette.”

You winced faintly. “Eddie.”

“What?”

“That is a terrible breakfast.”

For one bizarre second, Dex’s spotter made a strangled noise into his fist. Even Eddie went quiet, confused out of his panic. “You judging me right now?” He asked.

“A little,” you admitted.

Dex almost smiled.

Then Eddie’s voice cracked back into anger. “You think this is funny? You think I’m stupid?”

“No.”

“You think I’m some junkie idiot with a gun?”

“No, Eddie.”

“You don’t know me!”

“You’re right,” you said. “I don’t.”

That stopped him again. Then, you lowered your voice. “But I know you don’t really want to kill anyone, do you now?”

Through the scope, Dex saw that Eddie’s pacing has slowed down. It… worked.  “You don’t know what I want,” Eddie said, smaller this time.

“No,” you said. “But you fired into the ceiling.”

“It was a warning.”

“I know.”

“I had to.”

“Okay.”

“I had to make them listen.”

“I hear you.”

Dex’s throat tightened. I hear you.

It was such a simple thing, and yet it sounded so easy coming out of your mouth. It was as if you were giving him a blanket, as if you were lowering yourself beside him on the floor instead of standing over them with a clipboard and a gun.

He wondered, suddenly, what it would be like to have your voice turned on him like that. And not your jokes or bright comments you tossed across rooms full of coworkers. This voice. 

Dex wanted it so badly it almost made him angry.

The thought hit him hard enough that his finger twitched beside the rifle. He forced his eye back to the scope.

Eddie had stopped near the teller counter. His gun hung at his side now, loose in his hand.

“Green jacket has stopped pacing,” Dex said, “Weapon still in hand.”

The spotter relayed it immediately. “Suspect one stationary. Weapon lowered. Negotiator has him slowing down.”

You glanced at Dex and he held onto it like an idiot.

“Eddie,” you said, “the guard needs medical attention.”

“He’s fine.”

“Is he?”

“He’s moving.”

“That’s good,” you said. “Moving is good. But he’s bleeding, right?”

No answer.

“Eddie?”

“I didn’t shoot him.”

Your face changed into a compassionate frown. Dex hated how beautiful it looked on you.

“I know,” you said.

“He went for his gun. Rob panicked.”

The spotter’s head snapped down to his notes. “Second suspect possibly Rob. Pass to command.”

You didn’t react to the name. You didn’t make Eddie feel like he had made a mistake, or make him feel like he was snitching on his friends. You only said, “That must have scared you.”

Eddie laughed, but it came out ruined. “Scared me?”

“Yeah.”

All you got back was silence, longer his time. Dex watched Eddie through the scope and saw the second the your words got under his skin. His shoulders moved, head dipping. The gun lowered another inch.

You kept going, careful as hands over broken glass. “People make worse choices when they’re scared. That doesn’t mean you have to keep making them.”

“You don’t get it.”

“Then tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Okay,” you said. “Then breathe with me for a second.”

Eddie scoffed. “Fuck you, lady.”

“C’mon, man,” you said mildly. “Just… breathe.”

Dex’s eyes flicked to your mouth before he could stop himself.

You smiled faintly, not because it was funny, exactly, but because you were giving Eddie somewhere to put the panic, somewhere that was not a trigger. “Breathe in,” you said.

“I’m not doing that.”

“That’s okay. I’m doing it anyway.”

Then you did. Slow inhale. Slow exhale. Once. Twice.

On the other end of the line, Eddie cursed under his breath. But after a few seconds, his breathing started following yours. Dex heard it. Without realising it, Dex started to follow it too.

There was something hypnotic about your calm. The whole room had frozen around it. Even the radios seemed quieter, like the world was leaning into your warmth. Then, through the phone, you heard someone crying out inside the bank.

Eddie snapped away from the phone. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

Dex was back in the scope immediately. “Weapon coming up,” he said.

The spotter relayed fast. “Weapon rising. Suspect one agitated. Hold positions.”

Your hand lifted slightly, saying Wait.

Dex saw it and went still.

The shot was clean. Eddie was turned three-quarters away from the hostages, arm visible, head exposed. Dex knew exactly where the bullet would go. He knew what it would do. But your hand was up, so he waited.

“Eddie,” you said, firmer now.

No answer.

“Eddie, come back to me.”

The shouting on the other end cut off. 

Come back to me. Dex gripped the rifle harder.

“Eddie,” you repeated, softer. “Come back to me. Don’t follow the noise. Follow my voice.”

He heard ragged breath. Then Eddie, frustrated now, said, “She won’t stop crying.”

“They’re scared.”

“I didn’t want this.”

“I believe you.”

“I didn’t want it like this.”

“I know.”

And somehow, you made it sound true, even though you weren’t forgiving him. You were not excusing him. You were simply giving him one human corner to stand in before the whole day swallowed him.

Dex had seen people beg. He had seen people lie. He had seen people pray. He had never seen someone be talked back into themselves.

“Eddie,” you said, “I think you can still keep this from getting worse.”

“It’s already worse.”

“It is,” you said. “But worse has levels. We don’t have to go lower.”

Eddie breathed hard.

“The guard,” you continued. “If he dies in there, this gets so much harder for everyone.” You paused. “You included.”

Eddie made a sound that was almost a sob, except he swallowed it too fast. “I’m fucked anyway,” he whispered.

“Yeah,” you said, so gently it hurt. “But not as fucked as you could be.”

Dex’s spotter blinked at you, but you kept your eyes on the bank.

“You can make one good decision,” you said. “Just one. I’m not asking you to become a different person in the next thirty seconds. I’m asking you to help the guard.”

“If I open that door, they’ll shoot me.”

“No.”

“They will.”

“They won’t unless there’s an immediate threat.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Eddie. There are guns outside.”

Dex’s teeth tightened again.

“There are snipers,” you said, glancing at the nest.

Dex blinked. What the hell were you doing?

“But they are there because people need to live,” you continued. “Not because anyone is excited to kill you.”

Eddie said nothing. You looked at Dex, knowing he wouldn’t hesitate to kill him if you gave the command. 

“So,” you said, “put the gun down. Tell Rob to stay back and let the guard out slowly. You help me keep everyone calm, and I promise no one shoots unless there is an immediate threat.”

“You promise?”

Dex heard it, and Eddie almost sounded like a child.

“I promise,” you said. “But you have to help me keep that promise true.”

Across the street, Eddie turned toward the guard.

“He’s looking at the guard,” Dex said.

The spotter relayed, “Suspect one looking toward injured guard. Possible compliance. Medical team stage.”

“That’s it,” you whispered. “That’s good, Eddie. Stay with me.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to die!”

“You’re not going to die, this isn’t The Town,” you said, gentle and absurd, “It’s real life, not a Ben Affleck movie.”

Eddie let out a broken little laugh.

Dex closed his eyes for half a second. Jesus Christ. You were going to ruin him.

“Okay,” Eddie said shakily.

Your hand tightened around the phone. “Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll send him out.”

The spotter straightened his posture. “Possible hostage release. Guard extraction. All units hold.”

Dex went fully still behind the rifle.

“Calm,” you told Eddie. “Nice and calm.”

Through the scope, Eddie moved like his bones had turned to water. He bent toward the guard, said something Dex couldn’t make out, then flinched when the guard recoiled from him.

“He’s helping the guard stand,” Dex said. “Left hand on guard’s arm. No immediate threat.” The spotter repeated every word.

You nodded as if Eddie could see you. “You’re doing good.”

The door opened. Every rifle outside seemed to hold their breath. Dex tracked Eddie’s face in the crack of the doorway. He was pale, wet-eyed, terrified. A criminal, yes. But for the first time that day, he was not beyond reach, be you had put your hand into all that fear and pulled until what was left of his humanity surfaced.

“Send him out,” you whispered. “Then step back.”

The guard stumbled forward and medical moved in.

“Guard is clear,” Dex said, though his own voice sounded distant to him. “Medical has him.”

The spotter echoed, “Guard clear. No shots fired.”

You exhaled, and it was so small nobody else would have noticed. But Dex did.

“Eddie?” you said into the phone.

He let out a shaking breath. “Yeah?”

“You did the right thing.”

“I’m still going to prison.”

“Probably,” you said.

Eddie gave another broken laugh, almost crying now.

“But not for murder,” you said. “Not today.”

Dex looked at you then, like he couldn’t help it. You were standing in a dusty room, and down an armed man like kindness was not weakness, And Dex wanted to be spoken to that way.

He wanted your patience, your belief that there was something worth saving even in people who had done unforgivable things. Especially in people who had done unforgivable things.

Then you breathed in and kept going. “Okay,” you said. “Now I’m going to want some of the people out too.”

Eddie went quiet.

You gentled your voice even more. “Women and children first, okay?”

“I can’t just—”

“I know.”

“Rob’s going to lose his shit.”

“I know, Eddie.”

“And David, he’s—” Eddie stopped abruptly, like he had realised he had given you another name, before continuing, “I have to talk to them.”

“That’s okay,” you said, looking at the spotter to relay the third suspect’s name. “Talk to Rob. Talk to David.

“They think I’m folding.”

“You’re not folding,” you said. “You’re thinking. You’re making sure everybody, including them, makes it out of there alive”

Dex watched Eddie through the scope. The man had backed away from the doors, one hand over his mouth, gun at his thigh. He looked less like a criminal now and more like a man finally realising the size of the hole he had dug.

You leaned closer to the phone. “I’m going to let you go for five minutes,” you said. “Okay?”

Eddie’s breathing hitched, as if you were his one and only life support right now. “You’re hanging up?”

“Just for five minutes. You need to talk to them, and I need to talk to my people.”

“What if—”

“I’ll call back,” you said. “And you’re going to pick up.”

Eddie said nothing.

“Eddie.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re going to pick up.” It wasn’t even a question anymore. 

After a while, you heard a small and frightened, “Okay.”

“Good,” you whispered. “We’re counting on you.”

Dex felt it like a hand around his throat. We’re counting on you.

You gave that trust to Eddie like a burden and a gift at the same time.

On the other end of the line, Eddie exhaled shakily. “Five minutes,” he said.

“Five minutes,” you promised.

Then the line clicked dead. Then, you glanced at Dex over the phone, and he felt the look land directly under his skin.

“You still with me, Agent Poindexter?” you asked, sighing. 

Oh, so this did take a toll on you, however much you try to hide it.

Dex lowered his eye back to the scope because looking at you was becoming a distraction.

“Yeah,” he said, voice rougher than he meant it to be. Then, because he couldn’t help it, he repeated your tone, “I’m with you.”

—

Afterward, everyone kept calling it a success.

The guard had gotten out. Three hostages followed twenty minutes later, two women and a little boy with one shoe missing, shaking so hard the paramedics had to guide them by the elbows. Eddie had picked up every time you called. He had argued with Rob, shouted at David, disappeared from the phone twice and come back both times breathing like he had run through a wildfire.

But he came back. By the fourth call, his voice had started to sound empty. By the sixth, he was crying and pretending he wasn’t. By the end, the remaining hostages came out with their hands over their heads, Eddie was the one who told Rob to put the shotgun down.

It wasn’t perfect, but it ended without another shot fired. So people congratulated you.

Your supervisor clapped a hand on your shoulder. The commander called it “excellent work.” Someone from crisis response said, “That was textbook,” even though it hadn’t felt textbook. It felt like pressing your palm to a cracked dam and smiling while water pushed through your fingers. You smiled anyway.

You accepted the praise and filled in the early notes. You let people tell you how good you were, how calm you were, how you had saved lives.

And for a while, you let yourself believe them, because the only injured person— the guard— had been alive when they loaded him into the ambulance.

He had been breathing. So it counted. It had to count.

Four hours later, you heard a knock on your office door.

You were halfway through typing your report when your supervisor stepped in with sweat beading on her forehead.

Your hands went still over the keyboard. “No,” you said.

She didn’t answer fast enough then, and that’s how you knew the guard had died at the hospital.

Not from the bullet, exactly. That was what she told you, as if the distinction mattered. It was a mix of vascular complication and too much blood loss, which in your head translated to: too much damage already done by the time you had convinced Eddie to open the door.

Still, you nodded like a professional. 

“Okay,” you said.

Your supervisor watched you carefully. “Agent.”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t have to be.”

But you smiled anyway, because if you didn’t smile, you were going to cry, and a full grown woman was not supposed to cry for doing her job well. “I’m fine,” you repeated.

She didn’t believe you, but she left anyway.

For a while, you just sat there. The HRT floor was quieter at night, reduced to the hum of printers, distant phones, the occasional murmur from junior agents walking past with a folder tucked under one arm. Your office smelled faintly like cold coffee.

Your report blinked on the screen, trying to finish it up: Guard extracted at approximately…

You stared at the sentence until it blurred. You pressed the heels of your hands against them hard, like you could shove the tears back where they belonged. Like grief was just a reflex you could discipline out of yourself.

What a fucking joke. You didn’t even know the guy!

Then, a knock came at the door.

You inhaled quickly, wiped under one eye with the side of your thumb, and sat up in your chair. “Come in.”

To your surprise, Dex opened the door.

He was out of the tactical gear now, in his dark quarter zip with his badge clipped at his belt, hair slightly mussed like he had dragged his hand through it too many times. He stood in the doorway awkwardly, too tall for a room this small.

“Special Agent Poindexter,” you said, and your voice came out almost normal.

“I wanted to check on you,” he said. It was a lie. Or not a lie exactly. This was just an excuse to hear your voice again.

In truth, he had rehearsed the sentence and hated every version of it. He had walked past your office twice before gathering enough nerve to knock.

You tried to smile and it almost worked. “Oh,” you said. “I’m okay.”

Dex looked at you, seeing your smile trembled at the corner.

His eyes dropped to your hands, clenched too tightly together on top of your desk. He knew the anatomy of a smile. Yours was not real. 

“You’re not,” he said.

Your smile stayed on because it had nowhere else to go. “I…” you started. Fuck. What was the point in lying? He had been there. He had seen the injury. He deserved to know, too, if he didn’t already. “The guard didn’t make it.”

Dex froze. “Oh.”

You nodded once, a bit too quickly. “Complications or something, I don’t know. They said a lot of words and I retained absolutely none of them.”

Your laugh came out wrong. Dex hated it immediately. He hated the way you were trying to make the room easier for him. Even now, with your eyes threatening to spill with tears and your mouth trying not to shake, you were still smoothing your own hurt down so he else would not have to feel awkward around it.

You looked exactly like you had on the phone with Eddie towards the end of the call. 

Dex stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He was in the room with you, mission accomplished. What was he supposed to do now? “You got him out alive.”

You nodded. “And it still didn’t matter.”

Dex only looked down, unsure of what to say.

You shook your head, smiling harder now, which was worse than crying. “I know. We saved the hostages. We de-escalated the situation.” Your voice thinned. “All things considered, it was a good outcome”

Dex didn’t know what to do with his hands. He wanted to touch you, though he didn’t know if that was the right call.  Maybe he should put a hand on your shoulder. But he didn’t know if that would help. He didn’t know if he was allowed. He didn’t know how to comfort you without making it strange.

So he stood there uselessly, watching you try not to fall apart.

“Poindexter, I…,” you said, quieter, “I talked to him for hours.”

Dex swallowed. “Dex.”

You blinked at him. “What?”

“My name.” His voice came out rough. “Call me Dex.”

For some reason, that was the thing that broke your smile, just enough for the tears to gather properly.

“Dex,” you repeated.

His name in your voice was catastrophic. He had wanted you to say it all day. He had it in that warm, coaxing tone you had given Eddie through the phone. Now you said it like you were standing at the edge of crying. And he would have given anything to fix it.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he admitted.

That surprised you, maybe because people usually tried to fill grief with more grief. But Dex only stood there, honest and stiff and visibly uncomfortable with his own helplessness.

“I don’t either,” you whispered, and your face fell for half a second. You turned it away immediately, pressing your fingers under your eyes. Your smile was still trying. Dex had never seen anything braver or more painful in his life.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Smile.”

For a second, you forgot you were an agent in her office, staring at a report waiting on the screen. There was only you, too full of grief to keep pretending it was professionalism.

The first tear slipped before you could stop it. You looked furious with yourself, so Dex did the only thing he could think of.

He pulled the chair from the corner of your office, sat down across from you, and stayed.

You looked down, laughing under your breath as another tear fell. “You’re accidentally very nice, Dex.”

He swallowed. It was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him. “I’m not trying to be accidental.”

You laughed again, and this time, it sounded a little less ruined as Dex sat there, listening to your voice tremble and come back to itself, pretending he had only come to check on you. Pretending he hadn’t come because he wanted to hear you again.

That night, after he walked you to your car, Dex didn’t go home right away.

He wandered back into the building instead, into your supervisor’s office. Dex knew where the recordings were kept. He knew the system, he knew the labels, he knew exactly how to make it look like nothing had been touched. The hostage negotiation tape was logged under case number, time, location.  His hand hovered over it for one second, before he copied it into his private drive.

At home, he sat on the edge of his bed with his headphones on in the dark and listened to your voice, steady and impossibly kind.

“Eddie,” your recording voice said, gentle as a hand against a fevered forehead. “Come back to me.”

Dex closed his eyes, jaw tightening. His hands curled over his knees. He knew it was wrong. He knew normal people didn’t steal recordings just to hear a woman speak kindly before bed. But then your voice came again. “Come back to me, Eddie.”

And in the dark, with his breathing gone shallow, Dex let himself change it in his mind: Come back to me, Dex.

For the first time in days, he slept well.

—

Dex kept finding reasons to talk to you. 

At first, they were almost believable: A clarification for the report. A detail about Marlow’s prosecution. A question about the hostage order, even though he had heard every word of it through comms and then, later, through the stolen tape in his apartment.

Then the excuses got worse. Apparently, he found one of your pens near the fifth-floor sniper position and returned it. He asked whether you wanted a copy of the incident timeline, then stood awkwardly in your doorway while you told him you already had three. He brought you a file that belonged to someone else entirely.

You looked at the name on the tab, then up at him. “Dex,” you said carefully. “This is for Agent Alvarez.”

He tried to look confused, which failed. “Right.”

“Different floor,” you smiled. He hated how much he liked that you were kind enough to pretend not to notice.

For two weeks, he learned the sound of your laugh. He learned that you clicked your pen when you were thinking. He learned that you always forgot your coffee until it went cold, then drank it anyway. He told himself it was harmless. It was most definitely not. 

Then one morning, he showed up at your office holding a paper bag.

You looked up from your desk tiredly, hair a little loose around your face. “Morning.”

Dex stepped inside and the bag crinkled in his hand. “I got you breakfast.”

You blinked. “Oh.”

He placed the bag on your desk like it might explode. “A croissant,” he said.

Your mouth into a small smile. “You remembered.”

Of course he remembered the crumbs on your sleeves and the sugar on your thumb. He remembered everything about that day. “Yeah,” he said.

You opened the bag and looked inside, then back at him. “Thank you, Dex.”

He nodded too quickly. “You’re welcome.”

He should have left. This was the normal time to leave. Instead, he stood there in the doorway, hands empty now, heartbeat hard in his throat.

You tilted your head. “Was there something else?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

He paused, then turned back“Yes.”

Your eyebrows lifted, and Dex looked briefly furious with himself.

Then he said, all at once, “Do you want to have dinner with me?”

You went very still. He immediately wanted to die.

“Not professionally,” he added.

Your lips parted. Did he… make it worse?

“I mean, it can be professional if that makes it less—” he stopped himself now, sighing to himself, “No. I don’t want it to be professional. I’m asking you on a date.”

You stared at him. Dex stared back, rigid and  catastrophically earnest.

Then you looked down at the croissant, before looking back up at him. “Did you bring me a pastry as a bribe, Special Agent Poindexter?”

His face fell slightly, and you chuckled a little. “Dex,” you corrected gently.

His breath caught in itself.

You smiled properly then, almost merciful. “I’m just teasing.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t look like you know that.”

“I’m… processing.”

A sweetlaugh slipped out of you before you could stop it. There it was, the sound he had been trying to earn for two weeks. Dex’s shoulders loosened by a fraction.

You leaned back in your chair, still smiling, when you looked up at him through your lashes and said, “Okay.”

His face went blank. “Okay?”

“Yes, Dex. I’ll have dinner with you.”

For one second, he looked almost boyish and stunned. Little did you know, he had prepared for rejection, confusion, pity, maybe even HR involvement, but not you saying yes.

“Oh,” he said.

You bit back a smile. “That’s usually the desired outcome when you ask someone on a date.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I think so.”

You laughed again and reached for the croissant.

“Tonight?” he asked, a little too fast.

You raised an eyebrow.

He swallowed. “Or another night.”

“Tonight is good.”

He nodded once, then turned like he was going to leave before either of you could ruin it.

“Dex?”

He stopped immediately.

You held up the croissant. “Thank you for breakfast.”

His eyes lowered, barely. “You’re welcome.” Then he left your office with his heartbeat still pounding.

Behind him, you took one bite of the croissant and smiled into your coffee. Absolutely terrible at flirting. Very good pastry, though.

—

The date was cute, even though it had every right to be awkward. You were both still in work clothes, making it feel less like a date at first and more like two agents walking down the street after a long day, badges tucked away.

When you sat down at the restaurant, you noticed that Dex looked… nervous. “You look like you’re about to be interrogated,” you chuckled.

“I’m not.”

“Dex.”

“Am I?” He looked concerned for a second, because he knew you handled interrogations sometimes.

That made you laugh, and his shoulders loosened slightly, like he had survived the first round of af a boxing match.

When the waiter came, you ordered first. Dex closed his menu immediately. “I’ll have that too.”

You blinked at him. “You don’t even know what I ordered.”

“I heard.”

“You can order something else.”

“I want what you’re having.”

You looked at him for a second, then smiled into your water glass, thinking that’s either very sweet or very concerning.

And then, it got easier. It didn’t go smooth, exactly. Dex answered questions like he was afraid there was a correct version and he had missed the briefing. But he listened like every word out of your mouth belonged carved in a stone tablet.

You told him about terrible tea on the HRT floor. He told you about a sniper qualification day where a rookie threw up behind a barricade. You laughed so hard you had to press your napkin to your mouth, and Dex looked at you like he had just learned a new way to breathe.

By the time the food came, the candle between you had burned golden. You took one bite, hummed happily, and pointed your fork at him. “Okay. Can I tell you a secret?”

Dex stilled, a little more alert. “…Yes.”

You leaned forward over the table. “I went to Quantico a year after you.”

His eyebrows drew together. “You did?”

“Mhm,” you grinned. “Our shooting instructor mentioned you all the time.”

Dex froze.

You sat back, delighted. “Oh my God. You didn’t know how much he loved you?”

“No.”

“Dex.” You put your fork down. “You made my life a living hell.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“You were spiritually there”

His lips parted slightly, offended and confused. “How?”

You dropped your voice into a gruff instructor impression. “‘Poindexter could do this with his eyes closed.’ ‘Poindexter cleared this drill ten seconds faster.’ ‘Poindexter didn’t need three tries.’ Poindexter this, Poindexter that.” You pointed at him. “Fuck, man.”

Dex stared at you before  the corner of his mouth lifted. “You were bad at shooting?”

You gasped. Was that… a joke? “I was not bad at shooting.”

“Sounds like you were.”

“I was excellent,” you swallowed your food, “I was just not you.”

His smile got worse, almost smug.

“Our instructor once said, and I quote, ‘Poindexter could hit this target in a blackout with a concussion.’”

Dex looked down at his plate, but you saw the smile pull at his mouth anyway.

“He was exaggerating,” he said.

You raised an eyebrow, unconvinced, before laughing. And there it was again — that look on his face. He didn’t know how to hide his adoration fast enough.

“You made my target practice time a living hell,” you admitted. “Agent Benjamin Poindexter. Destroyer of confidence. Patron saint of aiming at moving targets, apparently.”

The restaurant noise blurred around the two of you. The cutlery, conversation, music from the speakers, all of it bled into the background.

“But then I saw you in New York,” you continued. “and thought, oh. That’s him.”

Dex’s throat moved. “And?”

“And,” you said, gentler now, “I thought you looked lonely.”

Dex glanced down at the table, fingers curling once near his glass. For a second, you worried you had gone too far, too honest.

Then he said, very quietly, “I noticed you too.”

You lowered your eyes a little, suddenly shy in a way you had not expected to be. “Yeah?”

Dex nodded once. “Yeah,” he said. “Ray talked about you a lot after that Wall Street blackmail corruption case you both worked on together.”

Your face softened at the mention of him. “Ray’s lovely.”

Dex nodded.

“I get along with his wife better, actually,” you added, glancing back up. “Seema gave me a really good chole recipe and now we’re bonded forever.”

Dex looked faintly confused by that detail, but he listened anyway, like he was storing it somewhere important.

“She said I was doing the spices wrong,” you continued, your smile widening. “Which, to be fair, I was. That, and I handled the chickpea wrong, apparently.”

That got a small laugh out of him, eyes flicked from your mouth back to your eyes.

“I’ve… wanted to talk to you for a while,” he admitted.

Your smile faded into a furrow of your brows. “You have?”

Dex looked down at the table, at his untouched water glass, at the candle between you, anywhere that wasn’t your face. “I just never had reason.”

The words sat there, painfully honest. He didn’t even try to be charming in the way guys usually tried to be with you. Still, it was sincere enough that it made your heart ache.

The candle flickered between you, gold light catching along the sharp line of his cheekbone. For a second, Dex looked almost panicked by the silence, like he had accidentally handed you a confession and had no idea what you were going to do with it. So you reached across the table and touched your fingers lightly to his wrist.

“Well,” you said softly, “good thing you finally brought me a croissant.”

Dex looked at your fingers, then back at you. And this time, when he smiled, it was not an imitation of anything or anyone. 

—

You agreed to a second date. That was the easy part. The hard part was actually having one.

The next week turned into a mess before either of you could do anything about it. HRT got pulled into a fugitive barricade situation in Queens. Dex got sent out on a protection detail that lasted two days longer than expected. Your supervisor dumped three active threat assessments on your desk.

So the second date kept moving. Tuesday became Thursday. Thursday became Saturday. Saturday became, “I’m so sorry, Dex, I might actually die under this paperwork.”

Dex, who had appeared in your office doorway with his jacket still on, only looked at the files stacked across your desk and said, “That would be inconvenient.”

You stared at him before laughing so hard you dropped your pen.

After that, you started finding time to take your lunch together.  The first time, Dex showed up with two coffees and a paper bag from the place down the street.

“I was passing by,” he said.

“On the HRT floor?”

“Yes.”

You let him in, obviously. Then it kept happening.

Sometimes you ate in your office with the blinds half-closed and your shoes kicked off under the desk. Sometimes you found him in the break room already sitting at the corner table, pretending not to wait for you while leaving the chair beside him empty. Sometimes he brought you pizza because you had forgotten to eat again. Sometimes you brought him coffee because he drank his like punishment and you had made it your mission to introduce him to flavour.

So the second date never officially happened, but he knew your lunch order. Still, Dex kept appearing during your break, and you kept pulling the extra chair closer to your desk until eventually he was sitting beside you instead of across from you, both of you hunched over paper bags and plastic containers and case files like this was a normal blossoming relationship.

One afternoon, you were both sitting so close your chairs were practically conspiring. Dex had brought sandwiches and one pain au chocolate “in case,” which made you stare at him until his ears went faintly pink.

“You really know how to treat a girl, Dex.”

Dex looked down at his pastry. “I’m being practical.”

You laughed and bumped your shoulder into his.

He looked at you then, and the whole office seemed to shrink. You were close enough to see the little shift in his breathing, close enough to notice his pupils  drop to your mouth and shoot back up like he had been caught committing a federal offence.

“Oh,” you said, grinning. “That’s what’s happening.”

Dex went very still. “What?”

“You’re trying not to kiss me.”

“I’m not.”

“Dex.”

“I…” he trailed off. What was the point in lying anymore. “I’m trying not to do a lot of things.”

That startled a laugh out of you so badly you had to cover your mouth. And then he smiled.

You leaned closer, still laughing a little. “You can, you know.”

His face changed. All the awkwardness turned… stunned. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He leaned in like he was afraid you might disappear if he did it too quickly. One hand came up, careful against your cheek, and then his mouth was on yours, almost polite at first. It lasted maybe three seconds before you smiled into it, grabbed lightly at the front of his shirt, and kissed him properly.

Dex made a tiny sigh against your mouth.

The kiss went from sweet to a little desperate all at once, like both of you had been starving for weeks and then remembered you both kinda fell too much too quickly. His hand slid from your cheek to the side of your neck. Your chair squeaked as you shifted closer. His knee pressed between yours and you laughed into his mouth because the whole thing was ridiculous, hot, and happening in your office beside a half-eaten sandwich.

Dex pulled back just enough to breathe.

You both stared at each other, “Hi.”

He looked utterly ruined. “Hi.”

You laughed again, breathless, and his forehead dropped lightly against yours.

“This is not lunch,” he said.

“No,” you agreed, still holding his shirt. “It's not.”

—

The second date happened two months after the first.

By then, calling it a second date felt ridiculous. You had eaten lunch together a dozen times. He had kissed you in your office, in the stairwell, once against your car with his hand braced on the roof.

Dinner was a little awkward, still, because Dex would probably be a little awkward until the end of time, but sweet. He listened to you talk about your week like it was testimony under oath. He remembered tiny things you had said offhandedly weeks ago. So, when he took you home that night, it didn’t feel sudden.

He was sweet about it at first. His hands hovered before they touched, his mouth kept coming back to yours like he was checking he was still allowed, and every time, you sighed.

Then he got braver and messier.  His shirt was half-open, your hands were in his hair, and he had you pressed back against his pillows when he suddenly leaned close to your ear, voice serious, and said, “You like that, sweetheart? Tell me you’re mine. Tell me nobody else gets to make you feel this good.”

It might have been fine if it hadn’t come out of nowhere, weird and aggressive, zero to a hundred with absolutely no warning. Hell, your trousers weren’t even off yet. So what the fuck?

You went still. Dex went still too. There was a little pause before you slowly turned your head to look at him. “Dex.”

His eyes widened. “What?”

“What was that?”

His face fell. “Was it bad?”

“It was…” You pressed your lips together, trying not to laugh. “It was very committed.”

“Was it bad?” He insisted.

“I just…” you held back a chuckle, “Where did you learn that?”

Dex looked like he didn’t want to answer. He eventually did, though. “I… researched.”

You stared at him. He stared back, very embarrassed, and very clearly hoping the word researched would be enough of an explanation.

“You researched sex?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God,” you whispered. “Dex.”

“I wanted to be prepared.”

“That sounded like it came from a man named Stepbrother Number Four.”

His ears actually went red. You covered your mouth, but the laugh escaped anyway.

Dex looked wounded, almost confused. “I thought it was appropriate.”

“It was… something.”

“It worked in the video.”

You stopped laughing and raised your eyebrows. “Video?”

His teeth locked. He had said too much.

Little did you know, a week earlier, Dex had gone through your phone in the office while you were in the bathroom.  He had found your browser history, your saved tabs, your filthy little private collection. He sent them to himself and deleted all evidence of it, of course. He wasn’t an amateur.

And then he had watched six hours of porn, studying it like a psychopath. It was not pleasure or fun. It was Dex in the dark, dead serious, analysing the links you saved, what you watched, even if some of them might have been an accidental click. He was taking notes in his head, trying to become a sex symbol you would want.

Now he was above you, flushed and mortified, realising that pornography was apparently not a good idea to imitate.

“Dex,” you said carefully. “Is this your first time?”

His whole body went tense under your finger. “Yes,” he admitted, barely a breath.

Your heart folded in on itself. “Oh, baby.”

His face tightened like your kindness hurt. “I should have told you.”

“Yeah,” you whispered. “You should’ve.”

“I didn’t want you to change your mind.”

You reached up and cupped his cheek. “C’mere.”

He hesitated, so you said it softer. “Come here, Dex.”

He came down to you, like your voice had hooked into his ribs and pulled. You kissed him again, slower this time. Your hands smoothed over his shoulders until he stopped waiting to be corrected.

“No more lines,” you murmured against his mouth.

As you wished, he stopped performing. He stopped trying to be the man from whatever awful tab he had studied too seriously. He touched you like himself instead: careful, intense, a little overwhelmed, listening to every sound you made as if it mattered more than anything. And fuck, that was better.

His mouth against your skin, your fingers in his hair, his name leaving you in sighed until he started to understand that was what you liked.

Afterward, he lay beside you in the dark, warm one arm tucked carefully around your waist like he was still asking permission to exist in your vicinity.

You brushed your thumb over his wrist. “Good job, pornstar,” you teased.

Dex groaned into your shoulder, but struggled to hide his smile at the praise. “Please don’t.”

“You were so brave.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

He went silent, arm tightened just a little. “No,” he admitted with his lips against your skin. “I could never.”

It was quite the opposite, actually. 

He would tell you that for years after. Sometimes with his words, sometimes with his hands, sometimes with the way he looked at you like you were the only fixed point in a world constantly trying to move away from him.

But you were a federal agent who argued and calmed down very bad men for a living. Of all people, you should have known better. You should have known good things rarely ever lasted.

—

Ten Years Later...

You came home with blood on the heel of one shoe and a headache lodged so deep behind your eye it felt like someone had driven a nail into your skull.

You weren’t a federal agent anymore. You hadn't been one for a very long time. There were still people who talked about what happened ten years ago like it had just been one bad year. One scandal, one chapter the Bureau could close with a press conference and a few resignations.

If you closed your eyes, you could see everything clearly. 

It happened three years after your started dating. Wilson Fisk in a white suit. FBI agents on his payroll. Dex told you, in confidence, that he had killed the remaining Albanians on the motorcade. You told him that you needed to go on a break because of that. You put in your annual leave to visit family because your boyfriend had just confessed to using lethal force after the enemy surrendered. Apparently, that’s why and when his spiral started, because when you came back, Ray Nadeem had a bullet in his head. Daredevil was framed and hunted while your boyfriend wore the suit. The Bulletin. The church. Father Lantom, who you didn’t know of but learned of later.

After that, faith in anything became difficult. Faith in institutions, faith in badges, faith in men who said they were protecting people while selling their souls behind closed doors.

So you left and built your own private security company from spite, savings, and sheer exhaustion.

You did everything from executive protection to crisis negotiation. Threat assessment, asset recovery, and corporate extraction. All very nice words for work that often felt like pulling teeth. And the thing about running your own company was that the job didn’t stop when you clocked out. 

You still had payroll to approve and contracts to review. Clients to placate, insurance renewals, background checks, three missed calls from your operations manager, and junior associate who had accidentally offended la Russian client’s nephew. Just yesterday, you had a driver who quit over text as you received invoice from an arms consultant that made you genuinely consider crime in a more administrative capacity.

Sure, sometimes less-than-ethical people hired you. Triads, Russians, Italians, Irish. But at least, unlike the bureau, they never pretended to be saints. Monsters, you had learned, were never the real danger. It was hypocrites.

Tonight, you had spent fourteen hours in the back room of a private club, brokering a deal between a triad member and a client too rich to be as stupid as he was. Everyone had been polite. Everyone had been armed. You had spent the whole night dragging grown men away from their own worst impulses one careful sentence at a time.

No one died, and the client paid double. By your current standards, that was almost a success.

Still, by the time you got home, you were so tired your body felt like it was running on borrowed time. Your blouse clung damply to your back and your feet were screaming. Your phone had not stopped buzzing once, and you had started fantasising about throwing it into the river.

You unlocked your front door in the dark.

You stepped inside your apartment, dropped your keys into the ceramic bowl by the door, and kicked it shut behind you with one exhausted foot.

You stood barefoot in your own hallway and sighed. 

You had listened to the radio the whole way home, a force of habit, really. Its just today, you found out that your ex-boyfriend had broken out of prison and tried to shoot Fisk at some gala.

Wow. Shocker.

Honestly, you would rather shut all of it out and go to bed. Thinking about him, about the man you had loved more than anything in the world, would only break your heart all over again.

Then you saw the paper bag on the kitchen table with your favourite bakery’s logo stamped neatly on the front. Your favourite croissant was inside.

For one long second, you only stared at it and a Post-it stuck to the paper bag, written in a familiar, careful handwriting: You haven’t eaten today.

You stared at the croissant for a long time, long enough for your phone to buzz itself toward death inside your bag.

You didn’t touch the paper bag, and not because you thought it was poisoned. Dex didn’t need poison. If Dex wanted you dead, which he almost certainly did not, you would already have a knife in your throat. 

You were thinking more about how Dex had been inside your apartment. It wasn’t surprising, unfortunately. You exhaled, using the name you reserved only when you were mad at him. “Jesus Christ, Benjamin.”

You moved through your own home like you were clearing a client’s building. First the hall closet. Then the bathroom, bedroom, ensuite, guest room, and kitchen. You checked under the bed because you weren’t stupid, behind the shower curtain just in case, and the balcony because Dex had always been incapable of using a normal door when being unhinged would do.

Nothing. 

Still, you found the kitchen window open three inches. You stood in front of it for a second, staring at the gap before you shut it and locked it. Then, you checked the lock twice.

Then, because you were tired and petty, you went around the apartment and did every other lock too. You even checked the little latch on the tiny laundry room window that no full-grown man should have been able to fit through, although Dex had a history of doing things no full-grown man should be able to do anyway. 

Eventually, you took the croissant out of the bag, held it for one long second, then put it back.

“No,” you told the empty kitchen. “I have standards.”

You made it exactly five minutes before you came back, tore off one angry bite, and ate it standing over the sink because he had been right. You haven’t had a proper meal today.

What were you going to do now? Call the cops? And say what? Hello, officer, my ex-boyfriend broke out of prison, tried to kill the mayor, apparently swung by my apartment, broke in, and left me a croissant because he noticed I skipped dinner. Yes, that Benjamin Poindexter. No, I am not currently being held hostage. Yes, I own a private security company. No, I don’t need medical attention. Yes, this is going to jeopardise my brand and I’ll probably never get a client ever again. 

Ha!

You threw the Post-it into the kitchen drawer then you went to bed.

You slept badly. Once, half-asleep, you thought you heard your name in the hallway, and your hand slid under the pillow before you remembered you had put the knife in the bedside drawer because apparently some part of you still believed in “healthy boundaries.”

By morning, you were still exhausted. Your alarm went off at six-thirty. You slapped it silent, lay there for ten seconds, then dragged yourself upright with the suffering of a woman who had payroll, a prison break, and a quarterly review of her employees all waiting for her before breakfast.

The city outside your window was grey and wet. New York rain hit the glass in thin lines. Your head still hurt. Your phone had nine missed calls, four news alerts, and one message from Seema that simply said: Please tell me you’re alive.

You typed back: Unfortunately.

Then came the three firm knocks on your door and you froze in the middle of tying your robe.

You moved to the door, silent on the wood floor, and checked the peephole to see an empty hallway.

You undid the locks one by one, slow enough to make a point to nobody, and opened the door with the chain still on.

There was no one there. Only a coffee cup sitting neatly on your doorstep. Beside it, a burner phone.

You stared. The coffee was from your favourite place. Extra shot with, because you had once mentioned a decade ago that nutmeg tasted like dust and cinnamon was better.

On the cup, in careful black marker, were three words: Can we talk?

You stared at it for so long the neighbour’s door opened at the end of the hall.

Mrs. Banerjee from 4B peered out, hair wrapped in a scarf, eyes immediately dropping to the coffee, then to the burner phone, then back to you.

“Morning, love,” she said.

“Morning.”

She looked at the cup again. “Secret admirer?”

You looked down at the burner phone. The screen lit up to one message.

Unknown Number: Please.

You closed your eyes and Mrs. Banerjee made a small, interested noise. You picked up the coffee and the phone. “Ex-boyfriend.”. 

—

You really did think about turning in the burner phone. Or maybe you should call your lawyer. You could call your operations manager, who was a former private investigator. You could walk it straight to 15th precinct, drop it on Brett’s desk, and say, congratulations, you have one prison escapee’s attempt at courtship. You even considered crushing it under your heel and leaving the pieces in the hallway like a very clear, very mature message: Get the fucking hint.

But because you were an idiot, because apparently ten years of therapy, firearms training, and owning a private security company had not cured you of Benjamin Poindexter, you did not crush it.

You brought it inside and locked the door.

Then you sat at your kitchen table, took the back off the phone, and found the tracker chip in under twelve seconds. Of fucking course the burner phone he left like some pathetic little peace offering was also a locator. Of course Dex could not simply say can we talk without also making sure he knew where you were when you ignored him. You should have expected nothing less of him. 

You held the tiny chip between your fingers, looked at it under the kitchen light, and felt both rage and nostalgia twist behind your ribs. “Romance really is dead,” you muttered.

When you dropped the chip into a glass of water, the phone buzzed in your hand almost immediately.

Dex: Did you take it out?

You stared and sent nothing back, shoving it into your bedside junk drawer beneath batteries, old keys, a tape measure, and three expired pepper sprays.Over the next week, Dex kept finding ways to leave things for you.

On Monday, you found a paper bag with your favourite chocolate bar between an invoice and a threateningly glossy real estate flyer. You stared down at it in the lobby while Mr. Kowalski from 2A walked past with his pug. “Breakfast?” he asked.

“I think so,” you said.

On Tuesday, there was a carton of chocolate milk waiting on your window sill. Outside. Four floors up.

You opened the curtains and nearly had a stroke.The carton was balanced there neatly, like New York wind, gravity, and basic human decency didn’t exist. 

You opened the window, grabbed it, and looked down at the street and found no sign of a psychopath in a tactical black suit making eye contact from across traffic like this was a part of the healing process. You drank it anyway, because you were angry, not wasteful.

On Wednesday, you found a book on your balcony.

That one actually pissed you off, and not because it was on your balcony. You had accepted, against your will, that Dex was apparently treating your apartment like a very emotional obstacle course. It pissed you off because it was a first edition of the stupid out-of-print novel you had complained about not being able to find for years. You had mentioned it once, maybe twice, back when you were still together, curled into the corner of his couch with your feet under his thigh and your hair wet from his shower.

There was a note tucked inside the front cover: I saw it and thought of you.

You looked at the note. Then at the sky. Then back at the note. “Are you kidding me?”

You brought the book inside. You didn’t read it. You put it on the kitchen counter, facedown.

On Thursday, there was a pastry box on your office desk.

Your actual locked private security office with cameras, keycards, a receptionist, two former Marines on the morning shift, and a very expensive alarm system you had installed.

You walked in at eight-fifteen, stopped dead in the doorway, and stared at the little white box sitting beside your keyboard.

Your assistant, who had followed you in talking about insurance renewals, went quiet. “Is that yours?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do we need to evacuate?”

You opened the box. Inside was one pain au chocolat and a folded napkin. You unfolded it: You forgot lunch yesterday.

You sighed, “no.”

You spent the next hour reviewing security footage and getting progressively more furious because, of course, there was nothing useful. There was nothing more than a camera flicker and a ten-second blind spot. The side door alarm that had been disabled and re-enabled so quickly it looked like a system error.

By Friday, you were in a mood so bad people started physically moving out of your way when you walked down the hall.

You went home late, half hoping there would be nothing and you were right. For once, your hallway was empty. Your mailbox was empty. Your windowsills were empty. Your balcony was empty. You checked all of them twice anyway, because apparently this was your life now. Nothing.

You made actual dinner out of spite: rice, protein, vegetables. You ate it standing in your kitchen because sitting down felt too intimate. Then you showered, changed into sleep shorts and an old quantico T-shirt, and tried not to think about the fact that you were kind of disappointed by the lack of gifts.  Which was humiliating.

You were a grown woman. You ran extractions for millionaires and negotiated with armed mob bosses before breakfast. You were not going to have feelings because your escaped-convict ex-boyfriend skipped one day of stalking.

Then, at eleven at night, you heard tapping against your window.

No one was there when you opened it, but there was an envelope stuck to the outside of the glass.

You stared at it, then walked over, opened the window, and peeled it off. Inside was a note: Why are you mad at me?

You blinked and read it again.

For a second, you genuinely thought you were hallucinating. Then you looked down to your fire escape below your window to see a bouquet of daisies, the ones he used to buy from the deli down the street because you said you always like them.

“Oh my God,” you whispered to the empty apartment. “He actually thinks I’m playing hard to get.”

You picked up the flowers. And, because you were a very reasonable person, you leaned out the window into the damp New York night and shouted, “DEX!”

Somewhere below, in the dark, a car alarm chirped. A dog barked. Someone yelled, “People are sleeping, lady!”

You ignored them. You held up the flowers like evidence at trial. “‘WHY AM I MAD AT YOU?’ IS THIS A FUCKING JOKE?!”

Nothing, for a moment. Then your burner phone buzzed from the drawer. You stormed over, yanked it open so hard the batteries rattled, and dug the phone out from under three dead pens.

Dex: Are they the wrong flowers?

You stared and slowly  sat down on the kitchen floor, because if you didn’t, you were going to throw the phone through a wall.

Because surely, surely, you had misread that. Surely the man you once had thought of as the love of your life, had not just asked if you were mad after he killed your mutual friend seven years ago.

The phone buzzed again.

Dex: I can get different ones.

You closed your eyes. For a moment, you thought you could feel your soul physically leave your body, look down at the situation, and decide it wanted no part in this, because he kept acting as if the issue was floral. As if this whole thing could be solved by a better bouquet and not, for example, an apology, a therapist, a complete understanding of privacy, and maybe not breaking into your apartment.

“Fuck,” you muttered. 

Whatever, you thought. I don’t give two shits

You very much gave two shits. You gave several shits. You gave a whole municipal waste facility’s worth of shits. 

In truth, you cared so much it made you furious. You had spent seven years telling yourself Benjamin Poindexter was not your problem anymore. Seven years building a life from the ruins he left behind. And now he was back in your life!

The phone buzzed again 

Dex: Please talk to me.

You stared at the screen before you stood up. “No,” you said aloud.

You were not doing this through a burner phone. You were not typing out a long, literate paragraph about boundaries to a man who had apparently decided stalking was a valid love language. You were not texting your fugitive ex-boyfriend the basics of human decency. If he wanted to talk, he could talk face to face.

And because you knew Dex better than anyone should know a man like Dex, you knew exactly how to make that happen without sending a single message.

You went to your bedroom and changed, pulling on jeans, boots, a warm coat, and the black scarf with hidden pockets because practicality was important, even during emotional breakdowns. You hid a knife in your sleeve and a compact pistol at your back.

You walked back into the kitchen and looked at the burner phone on the floor.

Dex: Are you there?

You picked it up, turned it over once in your hand, then dropped it into the fruit bowl like it deserved to be punished among the bananas.

“I’m going for a walk,” you said to your empty apartment, before grabbing your keys and left.

—

Central Park at midnight was, objectively, a stupid place to go. You knew that. You literally charged people money to know that.

You had written entire security briefs for clients with more cash than survival instinct, and half the advice boiled down to: do not go into isolated places at night to meet emotionally unstable violent criminals.

Still, there you were, walking through the park under a wet black sky, boots clicking against the pavement, the city humming behind the trees like it was pretending not to watch.

Every instinct you had spent the last seven years wanted to look back: look at the tree line, benches, shadows. Check reflection in puddles and windows across the street. But you didn’t look, because looking meant admitting you cared whether he was there.

The path curved ahead of you, slick with rain and scattered leaves. A few lamps burned gold through the mist. The park was not empty, exactly, but it felt emptied out. You could hear footsteps and cyclists passing too fast. You kept walking. Past the fountain. Past the little bridge, until you reached the bench.

It had the same black metal arms, same damp wooden slats, same stupid plaque dedicated to someone’s grandfather who had loved chess and spring mornings.

You and Dex had found this bench years ago after a date went wrong because work interrupted dinner. He had been stiff beside you, still in his work shirt, tie loosened. You had shared cold fries out of a paper bag. You stole one from his carton and he let you.

After that, the bench became yours in the stupid unofficial way things became yours when you were in love. After late shifts and bad days, arguments you both pretended were not arguments. You kissed here stolen under orange lamplight, hand hovering near your lower back before finally touching. 

You sat down anyway. The bench was wet. “Perfect,” you muttered. 

You crossed one leg over the other and leaned back, looking straight ahead.

For one minute, nothing happened. Then two. Then three.

You almost laughed. Maybe this was it. Maybe you had finally overestimated him. Maybe Dex had left the flowers, sent the texts, and vanished into the night.

Maybe you had dragged yourself into Central Park at midnight for nothing. Maybe you were the unwell one.

Then, a sound came from the trees behind you, barely anything at all.

You didn’t turn around. 

From the darkness behind the nearest tree, Benjamin Poindexter stepped out of the shadows. He looked older, bigger, still beautiful in that awful, inconvenient way that made you want to throw something at the sky.

Dex stopped a few feet away from the bench. For once, he didn’t come closer.

The mist clung to his shoulders. The lamplight caught the scar on his cheekbone. Then, he said, “Hi.”

Your mouth felt dry. “Hi,” you said back. Stupid. Pathetic. Human.

Dex looked at the empty space beside you, then at your face. “Can I sit?”

You almost laughed. Now he wanted permission? “Sure,” you said, voice flat. “Why start respecting boundaries now?”

He flinched like you’d rub salt in a wound. He sat anyway, carefully, as if the bench belonged to you now and he was only borrowing the edge of it. His thigh was too close to yours, so scooted away.

Dex noticed. His eyes dropped to the wet space you’d put between you, then lifted again.

For a while, neither of you said anything. The park filled the silence: dew ticking through leaves, traffic muttering.

Dex’s hands rested between his knees, visible, like he knew you were checking and armed.

“How are you?” he asked.

Of all the things he could have asked. Of all the impossible, cruel, stupid things.

How dare he ask like  this was a coffee run. Like seven years had not happened. Like he had not crawled back into your life through windows and burner phones and pastry boxes, leaving little proofs of memory everywhere, every single one saying, I still know you, I still know you, I still know you.

You smiled and it was fake, Dex could tell. 

“Oh,” you said brightly. “Great. Coping. The last seven years have been very normal and relaxing for me.”

Dex looked down.

You kept going because if you stopped, worse thingswould come out.

“I built a company. Paid taxes. I learned how to read insurance contracts without wanting to walk into traffic. Got eight hours of sleep, never. Oh, and I developed a fun little stress headache that lives behind my right eye.” You looked back at the path. “You know. Girl stuff.”

“That must have been hard,” he said quietly.

Your eyes closed. Fuck off. That one repetition you knew Dr. Mercer gave him that you told him was cute once. You opened your eyes and rolled them instead. “Don’t sound sad on my behalf.”

“I am sad.”

“That’s the fucking bare minimum. Catch up”

He took that, and you almost wished he wouldn’t. You almost wished he would snap back like you had always expected him to. 

But seven years had changed parts of him. Dex, whose anger had been manipulated, had sat down on the prison floor and trained himself not to succumb again. Then he said, “I saw your apartment.”

You looked at him. “What about it?”

He hesitated, and you could see him trying to choose the right words, which was almost funny, considering he had broken into your home without needing words at all.

“It’s.. modest,” he said.

For a second, your brain refused to process it. Then you turned toward him fully. “I’m sorry?”

Dex’s eyes flickered. “That came out wrong.”

“You’re insulting my apartment?”

““I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Oh, please.” You laughed once. “Go on, Bullseye. Tell me what the fugitive home inspector thinks.”

His face changed at the moniker. “I meant,” he said carefully, “you always talked about more.”

Your throat tightened before you could stop it.

Dex looked past you toward the path, like maybe the memory was sitting there too.

“You said you wanted a house in the suburbs,” he said. “You said you wanted no less than five bedrooms and big windows. A kitchen with the blue tiles you liked. A bathroom with a copper bathtub that would’ve been hard to clean.”

You had been half-asleep when you told him that. Years ago, your legs in his lap, his thumb moving over your ankle bone, the TV murmuring some terrible late-night movie neither of you were watching. You had been talking nonsense because you were tired and happy and safe. 

You swallowed the memory down hard. “I can’t afford more,” you said.

Dex frowned. “You can.” You owned a private security firm. You should be able to. Dex had seen the numbers you were bringing in. 

“You don’t know anything about my life anymore,” you said, and your voice cracked just enough to make you furious. 

His eyes stayed on you.

“I can’t because I… I pay two mortgages,” you said, words coming out quieter than you meant them to.

Dex’s brow furrowed.

“One for my apartment.” Your hand curled against your knee. “One for Seema.”

He stopped breathing for half a second.

You kept your eyes on the wet path because if you looked at him, you would see exactly when he understood, and you didn’t want him to see that. 

“And I…I’m putting Sami through college, too,” you added, proud of the boy he had become. “He’s going to be a structural engineer.”

You thought of visiting Seema once in a while. You folded bills into drawers and pretended it was nothing. Seema pretending she didn’t notice. You were just two women building something survivable out of the wreckage men left behind.

Dex stared at his hands. “Oh.” 

You smiled without looking at him. It hurt. “Yeah,” you whispered.

He looked smaller, though not physically. Dex still took up too much space. But he was folding inwards, like he had finally stepped on a loose floorboard and realised there was a whole room underneath the house.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

“No.”

“I would have—”

You turned to him then, anger saving you from the softer thing trying to crawl up your throat. “Don’t tell me what you would have done,” you said. “Don’t sit here and offer me imaginary help from prison like that does anything for anybody.”

Dex wanted to say the right things so desperately, you could tell. 

You held up a hand before he could speak, “Stop.”

He knew that voice, that tone. He had stolen it from evidence and slept to it in the dark.

You saw the moment it hit him, so you hardened again. “Why are you here?” you said. 

Dex looked at you for too long. “I wanted to see you.”

“Cut the shit,” You leaned closer, not because you wanted to be near him, you told yourself, but because you needed him to hear you. “Why are you here, Dex?”

Barely above a whisper, he said, “I wanted to see my girlfriend.”

For one second, you couldn't move. Girlfriend? 

You stared. “I’m not your girlfriend anymore.”

Dex looked genuinely confused, not pretending or  manipulating.

“We never broke up,” he said.

Your stomach turned. “Oh, fuck.”

“We didn’t.”

“We were on a break when you got arrested! I never visited you in prison, either, Dex!” you snapped. “Take the fucking hint.”

His face went sout first. Then his eyes changed, helplessness flashing there, quickly buried, but not quick enough. He was hurt, almost boyish in its disbelief, like it had never occurred to him that your absence was a hint at all.

“No, no,” he insisted, and you could almost see the story he made up in his head. “You didn’t visit because it wasn’t safe,” he said.

Your mouth opened slightly.

He kept going, voice gaining force desperately. “Because of the Bureau and your firm. Because if anyone saw you with me—”

“No.”

“I know why you didn’t visit,” he said “You had to protect yourself. I understood that.”

“No, Dex.”

“You needed time.”

You scoffed. “I needed more than time.”

“You were angry.”

“I was grieving.”

“You loved me.”

“Yes!” you snapped, and the word tore out of you so violently both of you went silent. It was the ugly, irredeemable truth. You swallowed, but it did nothing.

“Yes,” you repeated, smaller. “I loved you. I loved you so much I almost ruined my life because of it.”

His face broke open for half a second and You couldn’t look at him

“I sat outside that prison once, after you killed Nelson,” you said.

Dex let out a deep breath. 

You laughed under your breath, but it came out nearly ruined. “I drove there after work. I parked across the street. I was in my car for forty minutes like an insane person.”

“You came?” he whispered.

“I didn’t go in.” you said, finally looking at him. Your eyes burned so badly it made the lamps blur. “Because I knew if I walked inside, I was done. I knew if I saw you, if you looked at me, if you said my name in that voice, I would forgive things I had no business forgiving.”

Dex was breathing shallowly now.

Oh. 

He reached for you, too quickly, when he realized he was losing your attention. His fingers closed around your wrist and pulled, hard enough to hurt.

“Don’t,” he said.

For half a breath, you froze. Seven years ago, you might have let him. Seven years ago, you might have let him pull you close because he was hurting and Dex hurting had always made you stupid. You might have said his name. Might have touched his face. Might have coaxed him back to you gently, patiently, like he was one of your frightened men with a gun and a locked room full of hostages.

But you were not that girl anymore.  Your wrist turned, thumb pressing to a weak point. You twisted down, stepped in, and pivoted, making him release you.

His eyes flashed, more surprised than hurt. 

You caught his arm, moved behind his shoulder, and slid the knife from your sleeve with one clean motion, pressing the blade on the curve of his neck .

Dex went still, some part of him, some sick part of him, had been waiting seven years to be close enough for you to hurt him, if that was all you would ever give to him. 

Your mouth was near his ear. “Don’t,” you said, “grab me like that again.”

Dex swallowed. You felt it against the blade. His eyes were fixed forward, dark in the lamplight.

Even now, you could feel yourself trying to regulate the room. Keep him calm. Keep yourself calm. No sudden moves. Name the feeling. Give him a choice. Bring him back to his own.

You almost laughed. Once a hostage negotiator, always a hostage negotiator. Even when you were brokering arms deals most of the time now.

“I left you alone,” you said. “For seven years, I left you alone. That was the kindest thing I could do for both of us.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

Your hand tightened around the knife. For a second, you couldn’t speak, because you knew what he meant. You had not given him closure. You had not given yourself closure either. You had simply walked out of the burning building and refused to look back in case he was still inside screaming.

He said your name, like he still had the right to use it. “You don’t want to kill me,” Dex said.

Your eyes burned so badly it made the park blur at the edges. You laughed once, but it came out broken. “Don’t be so sure.”

Dex didn’t flinch. He looked at the knife in your hand, then back at you, and his voice dropped.“If you wanted me dead,” he said, “I would already be dead.”

Fuck. Fuck.

Your heart broke again, and this time you almost heard it.

“Leave me alone,” you whispered. You stepped closer, teeth clenched, tears hot on your face. “Leave me alone, or I’ll fucking kill you.”

Then you flipped the knife in your hand, turned the butt of it toward him, and struck him hard under the temple to knock him out.

You stood over him for one second too long, breathing like an animal, waiting for yourself to regret it. You did, but you left anyway.

When Dex woke up, you were gone.

—

For the next couple of months, Dex actually left you alone. Which was good, right? You had to remind yourself that you did tell him to leave you alone or you’d kill him. It was a very clear instruction, a very reasonable boundary. It was very mature of him to respect it.

So why did it make you feel insane? 

You told yourself this was healthy. You told yourself that, actually, most women would be thrilled if their escaped-convict ex-boyfriend respected a boundary after years of moral devastation. But apparently, you were not most women. Apparently, you were a fucking idiot.

At work, people started noticing. One of your freelancer caught you staring at a blank wall for too long and said, carefully, “You okay, boss?”

“Hm?”

“You’ve been holding that folder upside down for five minutes.”

You looked down. Ah.

Seema called twice asking you to come over for dinner. Both times, you said no. “It’s not safe,” you told her.

Then Seema sighed, and that hurt worse than yelling. “You always say that when you are punishing yourself.”

You hung up after promising to call again. You didn’t call, even though you kept the checks going.

Then one morning, every phone in your office buzzed at once. That was never good. Apparently, many of your clients wanted extra protection against an “unknown threat.

You wondered why until your assistant handed you a newspaper with the headline: THREE ANTI-VIGILANTE TASK FORCE AGENTS FOUND DEAD IN BROOKLYN.

Your whole body went cold.

You read the article, and that was all the confirmation you needed. You knew what Dex’s violence looked like. You knew he did this. 

Your assistant said your name again. You looked up, and whatever was on your face made her stop talking.

“Cancel my morning calls,” you said as you phone buzzed.

Brett Mahoney: Do not get involved.

You almost laughed.

You knew then, that he had not left you alone because he stopped loving you. He had left you alone because he was trying to be good. And something, or someone, had just reminded him he wasn’t.

—

You started following Dex on his little crusade. It didn’t take you long to find him, really. You had once loved him too thoroughly to be normal about him now.

You knew which rooftops he would choose because they gave him height and had three clean exits. You knew he hated wet alleys unless they led to fire escapes. You knew he would never use the obvious door. You knew the little rituals he had during work. 

So yes. Fine. You started stalking Benjamin Poindexter.

Fuck. How pathetic. You were a grown woman. You ran a firm. And now, apparently, you had a new hobby: following your fugitive ex through New York like a ghost with a concealed carry permit.

Oh, how the tables have turned.

You told yourself it was professional. AVTF had been leaning on your clients hard, forcing them into hiding, turning protection details into extraction jobs, calling it public safety while they raided apartments without warrants and threatened families in parking garages. They were dickheads, so yeah, you had no sympathy for them.

You followed the bodies, the rumours, the gaps in camera footage, the silence in neighbourhoods that had been loud twenty minutes before. And the more you followed him, the more you felt him following you back. 

You noticed a shadow on a rooftop opposite your office, a reflection in the window of a closed deli. The certainty that when you walked home at night, something in the dark was following you.

You knew Dex had clocked you the first night and, instead of losing you, instead of warning you off, the sick bastard started letting you get closer, though not enough that you could grab him, never enough that you could put a bullet in him if you finally developed common sense. But enough.

Apparently, even when you kept saying you wanted him gone, your body didn’t get the memos 

And Dex… Dex wasn’t any better.

Dex was worse. Dex was leaving you openings like love notes. He would stop too long on rooftops. He let you see the edge of his shoulder before he vanished. He let a camera catch half his face, just enough for you to know he was thinking of you.

Once, you found a dead AVTF agent slumped in an abandoned office with a heart shot into the wall beside him. 

Fuck. 

Eventually, you stalked his home. Well. Home was generous.

Dex didn’t have a home so much as he had a room to return to when the city stopped needing him bloody for five consecutive minutes.

It was a third-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, rented under a name so fake it was almost insulting. Tony? Where did he get that, huh? 

He had no doormats or plants. He had no personal mail.   You found it in four days. You told yourself that was because you were good at your job.

You watched the building from across the street with coffee going cold in your hand. Like a creep, like him. 

The first night, he didn’t come home until 3:12 a.m.You saw him slip through the alley, hood up, shoulders tense, blood dark on one sleeve. He paused before unlocking the side entrance.

Dex knew you were there and the bastard still turned his head slightly, just enough for the streetlamp to catch the side of his cheek, the bruising near his mouth. Then he went inside.

You sat there with your hands curled around the steering wheel and hated him for being alive.

After that, you came back, but every night. You had clients to protect and employees to encourage into filling out paperwork properly. 

Obviously. 

—

One night, you followed him to the docks.

You told yourself it was reconnaissance. You told yourself it was work. You told yourself a lot of very reasonable, very professional things while walking into a half-rotted maintenance building with a pistol at your back and your heart trying to climb out of your throat.

But by then, you had stopped pretending you weren’t actively choosing him.

The building sat by the water like a body left to die, with rusted metal, wet concrete, and black windows. Task Force had picked it because they thought isolation made them clever.

It didn’t. Instead, it made them predictable.

You slipped through the side entrance and knew immediately something was wrong when you smelled blood, oil, and gunpowder in excess.

Your stomach turned. Not him, a terrified part of you thought before you could stop it. Please, not him.

When you were fully in, he had already been through the first two. One agent was at the bottom of the stairs. Another near the service corridor. A third was dragging himself across the floor, one hand pressed to his side, the other reaching for his radio.

He saw you, a stranger, and desperately rasped, “Help me.”

You looked at the badge on his vest; AVTF.

Then you looked toward the room ahead, where another gunshot went off so loud the whole building seemed to echo around it.

Your blood went cold. Dex.

You stepped over the agent, who was begging for you to save his life. “No.”

You ran instead, because you knew, somewhere in that building, Dex could be hurt. Dex could be cornered. Dex could die.

And the thought was so unbearable it stripped every lie out of you.

No. No. No. Not him. Not after a decade of caring about him. Not after you spent all that time hating him just to realise that hate was probably just you punishing yourself.

You reached the room and saw him. Dex was backed near the far wall, one hand braced against a pipe, blood at his mouth, shoulders heaving. His eyes were dark and wild, and still, somehow, he found you the second you entered.

For half a second, nothing stopped.

The agents. The prison. The motorcade killing of surrendering men. Ray. Fisk. The suit. None of that mattered anymore. Not really. 

Then you saw the agent next to him, lifting his gun, Finger tightening to the trigger.

Dex didn’t see. He was distracted. He was watching you. Dex was watching you like you were the only thing in the room that mattered.

But you saw the gun, the angle. You saw the split second before the world took him from you.

No.

There was a sawn-off shotgun on the floor beside a dead man’s hand.

You picked it up before morality could catch up. The blast tore the room open.

The agent dropped. Your hands moved on instinct efficiently. You loaded in another shotshell. Another shot. The second agent went down before he could turn his weapon. Then the third.

Then nothing but smoke and ringing silence and your own breath coming out broken and a little too loudly.

Dex turned toward you slowly with blood on his cheek, mouth parted, his eyes locked on yours.

You had saved him, yes. You had crossed a line for him, yes. But Dex didn’t look surprised, not even a little.

He looked at you like he had always known, like he was waiting for you to come out of the dark and choose him. Like he had loved every version of you: the woman with pastries in a federal sniper nest, the woman with a knife under his jaw in Central Park, and now this woman, holding a shotgun because the idea of him dying had made her forget every boundary she had ever built.

Your throat closed. You wanted to scream at him. You wanted to kiss the blood off his mouth. You wanted to hit him for making you care this much. You wanted to fall apart against him and have him hold you like no time had passed at all.

You hated him. Or maybe you loved him so badly it felt like a heart attack.

Dex’s eyes dropped to the shotgun in your hands, then rose back to your face, so in love with you it was almost frightening.

You swallowed hard. “I don’t actually want you dead,” you admitted. 

Oh. Oh, fuck.

Then the shotgun slipped from your hands. It hit the floor with a dull clatter, and it made you flinch for the first time in years. 

Dex said your name, but you didn’t answer.

Your knees gave out before you decided to kneel. One moment you were standing there with smoke in your lungs and blood ringing in your ears, and the next you were on the concrete, palms braced against the floor.

Fuck. Fuck! What did you do? What the fuck did you do?

The agents were dead because you had killed them. You didn't even try negotiating or de-escalating. You didn’t even try buying time.

You had picked up a gun and blown three men apart because he had been about to shoot Dex.

“Oh my god,” you whispered, sounding thin and very much unlike the person you had convinced yourself to be. 

Your eyes dropped to the shotgun on the floor, then up to your bare hands. Your… fingerprints were on it. Shit! 

Your DNA and your hair maybe, your shoe prints in the blood and river grime. You had stupidly dragged your goddamn life into this room because you had followed a man you swore you hated into a trap and saved him as if he was still yours to save.

You had jeopardised everyone; your employees, the contracts and the clients. Seema and Sami and their mortgage payments and tuition fees.  If you went down, they went down with you.

Your breath hitched so hard it hurt. “No,” you said, but it came out like a sob. “No, no, no.”

Dex moved toward you, boots scraping concrete, his body dropping down beside yours. You jerked back on instinct. “Don’t,” you choked out, though you didn’t know what you were telling him not to do.

Dex stopped for half a second, but he reached for you anyway, carefully this time.

His arms came around you from the side, one hand sitting between your shoulder blades, the other wrapping around your back like he could hold your life together by force if you just asked him to.

“It’s okay,” he said, even though it was the wrong thing to say. Nothing was okay, but in the end it was still Dex’s voice.

“It’s okay,” he said again. “I’ve got you.”

You made a sound, and you would have been embarrassed by it if you had any semblance of self preservation. 

“Dex,” you gasped.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t- my fingerprints, I touched it, I touched the gun, I…. ” Your words tripped over each other, useless and frantic. “They’ll find me. They’ll know. My firm finished. Seema won’t… I-I—Sami’s tuition, Dex, I pay his tuition, I can’t— fuck! M-my employees, they’ll lose their jobs, I,… everything is tied to me, everything…”

“I know,” he said.

“You clearly fucking don’t!”

“Listen to me,” he said again, hand pressed against your back. 

You shook your head, because listening meant being in the room. Listening meant admitting this had happened. It was basically a fucking confession. 

Dex moved ever closer, until his chest was against your shoulder, his lips by your temple. “Nobody has to know,” he said.

Your breathing stopped abruptly, looking at him through the blur of your own tears.

His face was bruised, blood at the corner of his mouth, eyes so focused on you that it made you want to collapse all over again.

“Nobody has to know,” he repeated. “I’m going to help.”

You were terrified. You were relieved. 

Dex knew what to do. Dex knew what to do with bodies, right? He can make this all go away, right? Right?

You needed him. Needed.

You turned into his chest, hands grabbing at the front of his jacket, fists twisting in the fabric, clinging to him with a desperation you had not shown to anyone in years. Your forehead hit his chest and then, before you knew it, you were letting out full-bodies sobs into his tactical suit. 

Dex’s arms tightened around you immediately. “I’ve got you,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

You buried your face harder against him, shaking so badly you swore your teeth were gonna fall off. “I need you,” you said into his chest, barely audible.

Dex froze for a second, his hand sliding up to the back of your head, holding you there. “I know,” he whispered.

You clutched him harder. “I need you.”

—

Your body had been buzzing with too much adrenaline, your vision swam in and out of existence, and you barely remembered what happened. When you came back to yourself, you were in Dex’s bed.

His studio was small, nothing but one dim lamp in the corner, one chair, and one table. It should have felt temporary, but the sheets smelled like him,and that alone made you feel comfortable enough to ignore everything he had done in the past decade. 

You were wearing his old FBI shirt, fabric hanging too loose on your shoulders, logo cracked from years of washing, like a cruel relic from a life neither of you got to keep. Your own clothes were gone: coat, jeans, scarf, and everything that had touched that you, or that warehouse. 

The shotgun was gone, too, and you were willing to bet the same for the bodies. All of it had been taken care of by the one man you had spent seven years trying not to need.

Maybe he burned the clothes and sunk the agents. Maybe he sunk the shotgun, too. There was horror, but you felt sick, shameful relief all the same.

He stood near the sink with his shoulders slightly hunched, blood still drying near his mouth. He had washed his hands too many times; you could tell from the red and raw skin around his knuckles, as if even he could not scrub tonight off completely. When he turned the tap off, the apartment went quiet again.

You stared at him, and he stared back, and suddenly seven years were in the room with you. Seven years of pretending he was just another ex. Seven years of saying you hated him because hating him was easier than admitting that some nights you still reached across the bed in your sleep and woke up furious that he was not there to hold you. 

You started shaking again. What the fuck were you doing here?

Your whole body felt like it was stuck on vibrate, teeth clenching, hands curled uselessly in the hem of his shirt. You hated yourself, because even after the hard-earned distance you tried to keep, you tried to earn, piece by piece, it was Dex’s room you fell apart in.

Dex walked toward you carefully, as if he had learned the hard way what not to do.  He wasn’t going to let himself be taken over by sudden movement, so he just sat on the edge of the mattress, waiting for your next move.

You should have told him to stay away. You should have said thank you and left. You should have put your feet on the floor, gone home, burned his shirt and called this what it was: A mistake, or a relapse. It was just a catastrophic, near career-ending lapse in judgement.

Instead, a little sob came out of you. And that was all it took for his arms to come around your body.

You were so angry at how badly you needed that touch that you grabbed him, by way of both hands in the front of his shirt, fists twisting in the fabric, dragging him close like you were drowning and he was the only source of oxygen left in the world. 

You cried into him. It was a heartbroken chest-breaking sob that you couldn’t swallow down. You cried because you had killed three men that hadn’t even been looking at you. You cried because you had wanted Dex to live so badly you have compromised the safety of everyone else in your life.

He held you tighter, hand finding the back of your head like muscle memory, fingers sinking into your hair with a familiarity that hurt so much you might as well have been stabbed.

“Come back to me,” he whispered.

You hated him for saying your line, but you hated more that it fucking helped. So you pressed your face deeper into the crook of his neck, breathing him in like a pathetic kitten that had been abandoned on the side of the road starving for years. 

You missed your Dex, and not the one you had made into a monster, and not Bullseye. You missed this one.

“You shouldn’t have helped me,” you said, but it barely came out as a cohesive.

His mouth planted a kiss on your hair.

“I-I shouldn’t have needed you.”

Dex said your name so kindly it didn’t even sound like him.

You pulled back enough to look at his red-rimmed eyes. You had seen men beg before. You had heard confessions, threats, and prayers. You had talked far more dangerous killers into handcuffs and frightened boys away from ledges.  But nobody had ever looked at you the way Dex looked at you now.

“But I did,” you whispered, then kept going because you had already bled too much to pretend you were fine.

“I needed you to make it go away. I needed you to know what to do. I needed you to hold me, and I hate that after everything, I still knew you would.”

Dex didn’t look away. “We have always needed each other,” he said.

You wanted to slap him for that, because he was right. Even when you stayed away from the prison,some shameful, locked-up part of you had always known that if the world suddenly wanted to swallow you whole, it was Dex you would look for in the belly of the beast.

Because he was yours. And love, real love, did not follow reason. It didn’t care what made sense or what was deserved. It barely had to read case files or prison records or moral philosophy. It just… endured.

You touched his face with shaking fingers. His eyes closed instantly. You brushed the dried blood away with your thumb.

You leaned in first. Maybe you meant only to press your forehead to his, or you had only meant to sync his breath to his.

But when you felt his breath on yours, you couldn’t help but kiss him.

Dex made a surprised little sound, caught off-guard. 

Soon enough, his hand tightened in your hair and he kissed you back. It was desperate and clumsy with relief, his mouth opening against yours as he couldn’t believe you were letting him have you like this again. 

You grabbed at him harder, morals be damned.

He shifted closer immediately, angling his body toward yours with one knee pressing into the mattress. His hand slid to your waist through the old shirt. 

He was careful, even when you could tell he was losing control. Fuuuuck.

Dex, who had broken into your apartment, tracked you, killed for you, covered up a triple homicide for you, still needed to know that you wanted him as much as he wanted you. 

At this point, his lips were split. You tasted blood and yet didn’t pull away. You kissed him until the room blurred into a void.  And when you pulled back, you only did it because you had to breathe. Still you didn’t pull back far.

“I… I don’t know what I’m doing,” you whispered.

He had no answer to that. 

You were doing this against your better judgement, against every red flag that had been waved to warn you. But in the end, you were doing it anyway. 

“You’re a fucking criminal,” you said, as if thinking out loud. Dex saw it exactly for what it was: you, trying to talk yourself out of this, and failing miserably. Still, you continued, “you were the one who told me once that they’re never reasonable.”

In that moment, you saw the memory pass through him.  He remembered it as vividly as you: that first proper meeting on the fifth floor of an abandoned building. You were both much younger then, much more naive in what the world would eventually offer to the two of you. 

His hand slid up to the side of your neck, finding your artery and pressing his palms there. 

“We’re all people here,” he said.

Oh. 

You were just a person. You were just human.

You could not be reduced to a principle or a badge anymore, not when you were willingly staying in the bed of the horrible man you loved, wearing his shirt, unable to regret what you had done to keep him alive. And maybe because you were human, it wasn’t your fault that you could not resist him. 

So, this time, when you kissed him again, you kissed him with a genuine smile.

—end. 

Note: these are the five songs I listened to over and over again while writing this!

Dex taglist: @itsdynotdaddy @diabolicallydownbad @doesanyonereadthis @meicore @pixie2k5 @bibiishin @starlitflora @pearlstiare @glorybeat @stardustworlds @castawaybarnes @supervampireflame @not-the-teen-witch @billybonesxx @ultimatewolverine @treetrees-world-of-imagiation @bitch-spaghetti-o @lostinthes4uce @cotton-eee @weallhaveadestiny @awesome-badass-cafeteria-sauce @moonbug333 @yujyujj @mattdexx @lostfallenangelsblog @bloomsberryfairy @flimsysquid @abbotfan @leonetta2014 @ficcharsimpsblog @odairtrqsh @ugh-whytho @noonenuts @akiyhara @genya1617 @itzrachel04 @avidreader73 @quicksilver21 @lmg-stilinski24 @magnificentlymoltenpatron @natalia42069 @eaumyth @hxdxs @cemeterystardust @alligatortears87 @outpostsworld @scarlet48 @lunarbandwidth @star-yawnznn @smorgasbrods

Maekar

The halls of Summerhall were quiet, that much Maekar remembered. The hour was deep, the kind that blurred the boundary between night and morning, and he had worn a groove into the stone floor of the antechamber. His boots scuffed against the same flags, the torchlight casting his shadow long and restless against the walls.

Inside, his wife labored. He was not accustomed to waiting. Maekar Targaryen was a man of action, of swordplay and saddle, of hard leather and harder judgment. He had little patience for courts and ceremonies, for the slow dance of ravens and whispers that his father the king conducted so deftly. But this was a different sort of trial, there was no enemy to face, no tourney to win. Only the muffled sounds beyond the door, and the rhythmic pace of his own feet.

Dawn crept pale through the high windows. The birds of Summerhall began their chorus. And then, at last, a cry.

Thin and furious, a needle of sound piercing the heavy oak. Maekar stopped mid-stride, his hand finding the doorframe before he could think better of it.

The midwife emerged, flushed and smiling. “A daughter, my prince. Born first, and fierce as any dragon, and then a boy, quiet but healthy and strong.” He did not wait for permission. The room was warm, too warm, the fire stoked high against the morning chill. His wife lay propped against pillows, her hair damp at the temples, her smile tired but true. In her arms, a small bundle stirred and squalled.

Maekar approached the bed as though it were a battlefield. He had faced armed men with less trepidation. “She has your temperament,” She murmured, her voice worn soft. “She has not stopped protesting since she entered this world.”

He looked down at his daughter. She was impossibly small. Her face was creased, her fists clenched tight, her cries fierce and unrelenting. Maekar had held infants before but he had never felt this particular weight settle in his chest.

“She does not like me,” he observed. She laughed, a sound like water over stone. “She does not like anyone yet” The cries continued, sharp and insistent. The wet nurse stepped forward, but the babe would not be soothed. She would not take milk, would not be rocked, would not be swaddled tighter or looser or any of the thousand small adjustments the women attempted.

Maekar stood apart, useless. He had fought in wars, rebellions, had earned his spurs and his scars, had proven himself a thousand times over. And yet he could not quiet his own daughter. “Let me,” he said. She lifted the bundle, her arms steady despite their exhaustion, and offered their daughter to her father.

Maekar took her. He was not certain, afterward, what he had expected. Perhaps that she would continue to wail, and he would be forced to return her, confirmed in his suspicion that he was ill-suited to this particular tenderness. Perhaps that the weight of her would shatter him entirely, this small and furious thing that he had somehow helped create.

Instead, she quieted. Not slowly, not reluctantly. The cries ceased as though they had never been. Her face, still creased turned toward his. Her eyes searched for something in his own.

And then her tiny hand found his beard. It was not a gentle touch. Her grip was immediate and absolute, her small fingers curling into the short-cropped hair at his jaw with surprising strength. She held fast, and she did not let go.

Maekar did not move. He scarcely breathed. He stood at his wife’s bedside, his armor shed but his leathers still stiff, his hands callused from sword and saddle, his reputation hard-won and carefully maintained and he was utterly, completely captured by a newborn babe who had seized his beard and would not release it.

His wife watched him. Her smile had deepened. “I think she likes your beard” she said. Maekar looked down at his daughter. She looked back at him, her grip unyielding, her expression—if such a small face could be said to possess expression—one of perfect satisfaction.

“I may have to cut it off,” he said. His voice was rougher than he intended. “To survive her.” But he did not move to free himself. He did not call for shears, did not summon a servant, did not even shift his weight to ease the insistent tug of her fingers. He stood, and he held her, and he let her hold him.

“What will you name her?” Maekar looked at her. His wife had her eyes closed now, her breathing slow and even, one hand resting on the small bundle that was their son. The maesters would attend to him shortly, for now, he slept, unaware of the world he had entered.

“Y/N,” She had said, in the brief moments between the births. If she is a girl, I would call her Y/N. Maekar had agreed without hesitation. “Y/N,” he said now. “Princess Y/N of House Targaryen.”

In the days that followed, the courtiers gossiped. Prince Maekar, they said, had always been the hardest of the king’s sons, the sharpest edge, the least yielding. He had no patience for softness, no time for tenderness. He was his father’s most dutiful son and his least affectionate.

But they watched him walk the halls of Summerhall with his daughter cradled in the crook of his arm, her small fingers tangled in his beard, and they revised their judgments. They watched him sit through council sessions with her asleep against his chest, his hand steady on her back, his attention divided between reports from the marches and the gentle rhythm of her breathing.

They watched him rise in the dark hours to pace the corridors when she would not be soothed by any other, his shadow long and patient, his voice—that voice they had heard only in command and reproach—murmuring quiet words they could not quite catch.

The years turned, as years do, and Summerhall ripened around them. Maekar watched his daughter grow as he had once watched the battle frontier. with vigilance, with attention, with the quiet certainty that something precious was being shaped and he would not let harm find it.

She was small. She would always be small, he suspected; His wife laughed and said her blood ran true in her, that her kind had never been giants. But what she lacked in height she answered in presence. Her step was quick, her gaze quicker, and she had a way of tilting her chin when she considered a question that reminded him of his father the king.

This was not, he reflected, a comfortable comparison. He saw it most clearly on the mornings when he passed the solar where her lady lessons were held. Septa Marcherys had a voice like a rusted hinge and a disposition to match, and through the crack in the door Maekar would hear her reciting the virtues expected of noblewomen: patience, obedience, silence. And he would hear his daughter's voice, perfectly polite, perfectly attentive and perfectly full of questions.

Septa Marcherys did not know how to answer these questions. She knew how to stitch, not how to explain stitching. She knew how to instruct, not how to illuminate. And his daughter, who had been born with her small hand curled in his beard and her eyes searching for something to hold, did not accept instruction without illumination.

She was seven when she first asked to join her brothers' lessons. "They are learning histories," she said. "I have finished my stitching." "Have you." He asked. "The septa said my work was exemplary." She delivered this without pride, as simple fact. "She said I had nothing more to learn from her today." "And the harp?"

"I played until my fingers ached. Mother said I might rest them." Maekar looked at the door. Beyond it, he could hear Maester Vyman's droning voice and the occasional shuffle of his sons—Daeron, eight now, and Aerion, six—attempting to remain attentive. His daughter looked at him with her steady gaze and her patient silence and her absolute certainty that he would find a way to grant her request.

He opened the door. Maester Vyman paused mid-sentence, his wispy eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. Prince Daeron turned in his seat, relief plain on his round face. Prince Aerion's attention sharpened with the particular interest he reserved for disruptions.

"My prince," said Maester Vyman. "Is there—"

"My daughter will join the lessons from now on."

It was not a request. Maester Vyman, who had served House Targaryen long enough to recognize the particular immovability of Prince Maekar's pronouncements, simply nodded and continued his lecture on the Unification of the Seven Kingdoms.

His daughter settled onto the bench beside Daeron, her hands folded, her attention absolute. She did not smile. She did not fidget. She listened as she did everything, completely.

Maester Vyman, to his credit, adjusted his instruction. When he spoke of Aegon the Conqueror, he spoke not only of battles and crowns but of governance, of the weight of rule, of the thousand small decisions that kept kingdoms from fracturing. And when he posed questions, he posed them to all three children alike.

His daughter answered each one correctly.

She was eight when she asked to learn archery. Maekar appointed Ser Gerold Lannister, a master bowman and he arrived with his finest yew bow and his most patient demeanor, prepared to instruct a princess in the gentle art of target shooting.

He left three hours later with a profound respect for Prince Maekar's daughter and a request to be informed if she ever wished to compete in a tourney.

She was nine when she asked to learn the sword. Maekar taught her himself. He cleared the solar of furniture, laid down mats of woven rush, and stood before his daughter with a blunted practice blade in each hand. She was so small. The sword, even the lightest he could find, seemed almost too heavy for her grip.

She was not naturally gifted. Her arms tired quickly, her wrists lacked strength, her height put her at constant disadvantage against any opponent of size. But she listened, and she learned, and she improved. And when she finally managed to land her blunted blade against his guard—not a hit, not truly, but contact enough to count—her smile was the brightest thing in Summerhall.

Maekar did not tell her that he had let her succeed. He did not tell her that he had slowed his parry, had left his guard a fraction lower than necessary, had given her the opening she needed. He simply nodded, and took the practice sword from her tired hands, and sent her to her mother for supper.

He did not tell her, either, that every day he watched her master some new skill—history, archery, the careful mathematics of household accounts—he felt the same sharp twist in his chest.

If only she had been born a boy.

The thought came unbidden, unwelcome, impossible to banish. If she had been born a boy, she would be his heir. She would inherit Summerhall, with its warm halls and its growing libraries and its gardens that she had mapped in such careful detail. She would carry his name forward, would rule with the same quiet competence she brought to everything she touched.

If she had been born a boy, he would not have to give her away. The letters came monthly. Sometimes weekly. From lords great and small, from the Reach and the Stormlands and once, audaciously, from lords of the free cities. Each letter praised Prince Maekar's daughter, her virtue, her beauty, her impeccable blood. Each letter proposed a match. Each letter offered gold and land and alliance.

Each letter received the same reply: Princess Y/N's hand is not presently available for discussion.

His father did not press. King Daeron was many things—patient, shrewd, possessed of a long view that Maekar had never quite mastered—but he was not cruel. He knew what the letters cost his son. He did not add to the weight.

But the letters kept coming. And every time Maekar dictated his refusal to the same long-suffering maester, he felt the same cold certainty settle into his bones.

He could not keep her forever.

She saw the ledgers his stewards brought and found the discrepancy the maesters had missed. She walked the gardens with the head gardener and asked why the western terrace received less sun, and by the following spring the terrace had been replanted with shade-loving varieties. She listened to the petitions Maekar heard as prince of Summerhall and, afterward, recounted each petitioner's name and grievance and the subtle tells that revealed which spoke true and which did not.

She was ten years old. His father, who had made peace with Dorne through marriage and diplomacy. His father, who had bent the realm to his will not through conquest but through patience. His father, who looked at his granddaughter and saw something Maekar was afraid to name.

"A remarkable girl," the king said, when she had been sent to bed. "She has your mother's mind." "She should be fostered," his father continued. "A year or two in a great house would broaden her experience. The Lannisters have daughters near her age. The Tyrells have expressed interest—"

"No." The word was out before Maekar could stop it. His father's pale violet gaze settled on him, patient, waiting.

"She is ten years old," Maekar said. "She is too young to leave home." "She is ten years old. She is not too young to begin preparing for her future." The king's voice was gentle. "You cannot keep her here forever, my son. You know this."

Maekar knew this. He knew that she would one day marry, would leave Summerhall for some other lord's castle, would bear some other house's children and answer to some other name. He knew that the letters would not be refused forever, that his father's patience had limits, that the realm required alliances and the princesses of the blood were currency in that endless negotiation.

He knew all of this. "She is ten years old," he repeated. "We will speak of fostering when she is older."

But the words lingered.You cannot keep her here forever. Maekar went to his daughter's chamber that night. She was asleep, her face peaceful, one hand curled against her pillow as it had once curled in his beard. The fire had burned low; the room was soft with shadow.

He sat beside her bed and watched her breathe. She was so small. She was so fierce. She was so utterly, completely herself, and every day she grew a little more toward a woman he would not recognize, a life he could not share.

She would leave, and the halls of Summerhall would grow quieter, and there would be no small hand reaching for his beard in the morning light. No voice asking why and how and what if. No patient correction of sums, no quiet triumph on the archery range, no chin tilted at that particular angle. She would leave. And he would let her. Because he was a prince of the realm, and his duty was to his house and his king, and fathers did not keep their daughters forever.

But not yet. He reached out and smoothed the hair from her forehead, careful not to wake her. She stirred slightly, murmured something unintelligible, and was still.

Maekar withdrew his hand. He sat in the darkness, watching his daughter sleep, and did not think about the letters on his desk or the weight of his father's words or the future he could not prevent.

He thought about tomorrow morning, when she would wake and find him breaking his fast in the solar. She would ask him about the new shipments from the Reach, or the correspondence with Lord Swann, or the progress of the garden terrace. She would pour his tea without being asked, the way she had done since she was old enough to lift the pot.

And when she passed his chair, she would reach out and tug, once, at his beard. She had not outgrown the habit. He had not encouraged her to. He sat in the darkness, and he waited for morning, and he did not think about the future at all.

YN

You called him Val. You met him when you were six and he was seven, a formal introduction in the great hall of King's Landing while your father stood stiff behind you. Prince Baelor had smiled, broad and warm, and ruffled his son's dark hair. Valarr had stared at his shoes.

"Your cousin," said Baelor. "Princess Y/N of Summerhall." Valarr had looked up, briefly, and then down again. His face had been very red.

You had studied him with the frank assessment of a child who had not yet learned that staring was impolite. He was shorter than you, which you found interesting. He was round in the cheeks and round in the middle, his fine clothes straining slightly at the seams. His hands were small and soft, clasped tightly before him. "Hello," you said.

"Hello," he whispered. And that was that.

Or it was, until you discovered him hiding behind the tapestry in the corridor outside the small council chamber. He had not been difficult to find. The tapestry billowed slightly, betraying his presence, and when you pulled it aside he was pressed against the stone wall with his hands over his face and his breathing quick and shallow.

"What are you doing?" you asked. He did not answer. His shoulders shook. You considered the situation with the same practical attention you brought to your lady lessons. He was hiding. He was sad. He was your cousin, and his face was very red, and his hands were pressed so tightly against his eyes that his knuckles had gone white.

You sat down beside him. "I don't like it here either," you said. "Everyone is very loud. My father says the courtiers talk more than fishwives and have less sense."

A pause. His breathing slowed slightly. "My mother made me wear this tunic," he whispered. "It pinches."

You examined the tunic. It was velvet, deep blue, embroidered with silver thread in the pattern of dragon scales. It did, indeed, look very pinched.

"My mother makes me wear dresses with too many buttons," you said. "I told her buttons are inefficient. She said I would understand when I was older."

"She always says that."

"Who?"

"Mother." His hands lowered slightly, just enough to reveal one watery eye. "She says I will understand when I am older. But I don't think I will. I think I will just be older and still not understand."

You considered this. It seemed, to you, a perfectly reasonable fear.

"Maybe," you said, "we will both be older and neither of us will understand anything, and everyone else will be very confused."

Valarr looked at you. His eyes were different, one blue, a pale shade like the sky on winter mornings, and one a warm chocolate brown. His lashes were wet. "That would be funny," he said.

"It would be very funny."

He smiled. It was a small smile, hesitant, as though he were not entirely certain he was permitted it. But it was there.

He did not hide behind the tapestry again. Not while you were at court, at least.

You teased him. You could not help it. He was so easy to tease, his round cheeks flushing pink at the slightest provocation, his gaze dropping to his shoes whenever someone spoke too directly to him. The courtiers called him solemn, you called him pudding-face, and watched his blush spread from his cheeks to his ears to the very tips of his ears.

"I am not," he protested, but his mouth was already twitching toward a smile.

"You are. You have pudding where your chin should be." You poked the soft curve of his jaw. "And pudding here, and pudding—"

He swatted your hand away, laughing despite himself. "You are very mean."

"I am honest. There is a difference."

"You are mean, and I do not have to listen to you."

"You do not have to listen to me," you agreed. "But you will anyway, because you like me."

His blush deepened. He did not deny it.

He was ten when he informed you, with great solemnity, that he had decided to marry you.

You were nine, which was old enough to know that marriage was something adults arranged and children did not decide. You were also old enough to know that Valarr's mother had been speaking of betrothals, and that he had been listening more carefully than anyone realized.

"You cannot marry me," you said. "You are my cousin."

"So?" His brow furrowed. "Targaryens marry each other all the time. Father says it keeps the blood pure."

You had no argument for this. You had heard the same reasoning yourself, though you found it unconvincing. The Targaryens had been marrying each other for centuries, and they were no less peculiar for it.

"Even so," you said. "You cannot marry me unless you can beat me with a sword."

He blinked. "A sword?"

"Any man who wishes to be my husband must prove himself worthy." You had heard this somewhere—perhaps from Septa Marcherys, perhaps from one of the romances the older ladies whispered about when they thought the children weren't listening. "He must defeat me in honorable combat."

"But you are a girl."

"And I practice with my father every morning. I can already parry a low thrust and execute a basic riposte." You had learned these words yesterday and were very pleased with them. "Can you?"

Valarr could not, his sword lessons consisted primarily of being knocked to the ground by his father's master-at-arms and told to try again. He was not bad, precisely, but he was not good, and he knew it.

"I will learn," he said, with more determination than you had ever heard from him. "I will practice every day. And when I can beat you, you will have to marry me."

"I will have to consider it," you said, with great dignity.

He nodded, satisfied. "That is fair."

He did practice. You watched him from the gallery, his small round form struggling through the same drills your father had taught you. He fell. He rose. He fell again. His master-at-arms shouted, his face grew red, his grip on the practice sword remained clumsy and uncertain.

But he did not stop.

He was eleven when he finally reached you.

It was not dramatic, no sudden spurt, no overnight transformation. But one morning you stood beside him in the corridor and realized, with faint surprise, that you no longer had to look down to meet his eyes.

You were the same height.

"I told you," you said. "I am still taller."

"You are a weed," he muttered, but there was no heat in it. His gaze lingered on the top of your head, measuring the distance. "I will catch up. And get taller."

"Perhaps. Or perhaps you will be short forever, and I will be very tall, and everyone will think you are my little brother."

"I am older than you."

"By a year. That is nothing. When we are old, a year will not matter at all."

He considered this. His face, still round, still prone to blushing, had begun to lose some of its baby softness. His jaw was taking shape; his shoulders were broadening, though slowly. His mother's indulgence had not diminished—she still sent sweetcakes to his chambers and fretted over his health—but he had grown into himself, somewhat.

"When we are old," he said, "I will be a great knight, and you will be my lady wife, and we will live in a castle by the sea."

"What sea?"

"Any sea. All seas. I will conquer one for you."

"That is very impractical. Castles by the sea are difficult to defend and prone to salt damage. Also, I don't like fish."

He laughed. He laughed often, now, when he was with you. It was a soft sound, easily startled into silence, but genuine.

"You are impossible," he said.

"I am practical. There is a difference."

He looked at you for a long moment. His eyes were hypnothising, and there was something in them you could not quite name.

You were twelve when your father took you home.

Summerhall was your home, had always been your home, and you had known this visit to court would end as all visits ended. But the knowledge had been abstract, distant, a fact without weight. You had not felt it in your chest, pressing against your ribs, until your father stood before you in the Red Keep's solar and told you to pack your things.

"Your mother misses you," he said. "Summerhall misses you. It is time to come home."

You nodded. You were a princess of the realm; you knew how to nod at commands you did not wish to obey.

Valarr found you in the library. He simply sat beside you, close enough that your shoulders nearly touched, and waited.

"My father is taking me home," you said.

"I know."

"Summerhall. Not court. Not—" Your voice caught. You had not expected it to catch. You were not a child who cried easily, had not cried since you were very small and your father had taken you into his arms and quieted you with his presence alone. "Not here."

"I know," he said again.

"I do not want to go," you whispered.

"I know."

You turned to look at him. His face was very still, very pale, his jaw set in a line you had never seen before. His eyes were bright, though he did not let them spill over.

"You will write to me," you said. It was not a question.

"Every week."

"And you will visit."

"When I can. Father says—" He stopped. Swallowed. "He says I am old enough to accompany him on progress. Perhaps we will come to Summerhall."

"Perhaps."

Silence. The library was dim, the afternoon light filtered through high windows, dust motes drifting lazily in the golden shafts.

"I am still going to marry you," he said.

His voice was steady. His gaze was steady. His hands, clasped tightly in his lap, were not steady at all.

"I have not forgotten," he said. "I practice every day. Master Arlan says my footwork has improved. I can parry a low thrust and execute a basic riposte." His voice trembled slightly on the words, the ones you had taught him three years ago. "I am not good enough yet. But I will be. I will be good enough, and I will come to Summerhall, and I will beat you, and you will have to marry me."

You looked at him. His round face, his chocolate-sky eyes, his soft hands that were slowly growing callused from the sword. His earnestness, his determination, his absolute certainty that if he only tried hard enough, he could shape the world to match his wanting.

You had taught him that. You had pulled him out from behind his tapestries and taught him that wanting was not weakness, that reaching for things was not shameful, that the world might sometimes yield to those who asked it properly.

You had taught him, and now you were leaving.

"All right," you said.

He blinked. "All right?"

"All right. I will wait." Your voice was very small. "I will wait, and you will practice, and when you are good enough you will come to Summerhall and beat me. And then I will consider marrying you."

His smile was slow, hesitant, as though he were not entirely certain he was permitted it. But it was there.

"All right," he said. "It is a promise."

"It is a promise."

You left at dawn.

Your father's hand was warm on your shoulder, steadying you as the carriage lurched into motion. You did not look back. You had learned, from years of watching courtiers come and go, that looking back only made the parting harder.

But you felt it, all the same. The weight of the Red Keep receding behind you, the distance growing between your heart and the boy with winter-sky eyes. You felt it settle into your chest, heavy and cold, and you did not know what name to give it.

Your father did not speak. His hand remained on your shoulder, his grip sure, his silence more eloquent than words.

You were twelve years old. You were going home.

And somewhere, in the castle behind you, a boy was standing at a window, watching your carriage grow smaller and smaller until it vanished into the morning mist.

The years between were letters.

They came weekly, as promised. Valarr's script was careful, precise, each word formed with the same earnest attention he brought to everything. He wrote of his lessons—swordwork improving, history mastered, sums still troublesome. He wrote of his brothers, Matarys growing like a weed and just as wild, of his father's travels and his mother's health and the small, daily rhythms of life at court.

You wrote back. Your own hand was quicker, less polished, sprawling across the page in your haste to capture everything before it escaped you. You wrote of Summerhall's gardens and the new terrace that flourished in the shade. You wrote of your father's ledgers and the discrepancies you had found, of your mother's laughter and your brother Daeron's dreams. You wrote of Aerion's sharp edges and Aemon's quietness, of the twins Daella and Rhae who had just begun to talk.

You did not write that you missed him. You did not need to.

He visited when he could.

Twelve, and he came to Summerhall with his father for the autumn progress. He was taller—you noticed immediately, with a strange twist in your chest—taller than you now, as he had always promised he would be. His face had lost its roundness, his jaw sharpening into the shape of a young man's. He was still soft, still gentle, still prone to blushing when you looked at him too long.

But his shoulders were broader. His hands, when he helped you down from the garden wall you had climbed for old times' sake, were stronger.

"You grew," you said.

"You shrank."

"I did not. You are just taller now. It is very inconvenient."

He smiled, that same hesitant smile, as though he were still not certain he was permitted it. "I told you I would catch up."

"You took long enough."

You walked the gardens together. He told you about King's Landing, about the small intrigues and daily dramas you had missed. You told him about Summerhall, about the changes your father had made at your suggestion, about the satisfaction of seeing your ideas take root and flourish.

He listened. He always listened, his attention absolute, his gaze steady on your face as though you were the most important person in any room.

You had missed that. You had not known you missed it until it was there again.

Thirteen, and you came to court for your nameday.

The Red Keep was the same—loud, crowded, full of whispers and glances and people who wanted things you could not name. But Valarr was different. He moved through it with more ease than you remembered, his shyness faded into something quieter, more controlled. He still blushed when courtiers addressed him directly, but he no longer hid behind tapestries.

He showed you the places only he knew: a hidden balcony overlooking the bay, a corner of the library where the light fell golden in the afternoons, a spot in the godswood where the heart tree's leaves whispered secrets to anyone quiet enough to listen.

"Do you remember," he said, "when you found me behind the tapestry?"

"You were very small."

"I was six. You were five and very bossy."

"I was practical. There is a difference."

He laughed. The sound was deeper now, but still soft, still easily startled into silence. "You always say that."

"Because it is always true."

He looked at you for a long moment. His eyes were still that pale winter blue, but there was something new in them, something you could not quite name.

"You have changed," he said.

"So have you."

"Have I? I do not feel changed. I feel like the same person, only—" He gestured vaguely, helplessly. "Only more."

You understood. You felt it too—the strange sensation of growing into oneself, of becoming more fully the person one had always been. It was disorienting, sometimes, to look in the mirror and see the same face, only sharper, older, more defined.

"More is good," you said. "I think."

"I think so too."

Fourteen, and he came to Summerhall again.

You met him in the courtyard, and for a moment you did not recognize him. He had grown again, taller still, his frame filling out in ways that spoke of hours in the training yard. His dark hair was longer, brushing his collar, and there was a new confidence in the way he held himself.

But his smile was the same. Hesitant, hopeful, as though he were still afraid you might turn away.

"Val," you said, and something in your chest eased at the way his name felt in your mouth.

"Y/N." He said it softly, like a prayer. "You look—" He stopped, color rising in his cheeks. "You look well."

"Summerhall suits me."

"It does." His gaze lingered on your face a moment too long. "It always has."

That night, you sat together on the battlements, watching the stars wheel slowly overhead. The stones were warm from the day's sun, the air soft with the promise of summer. His shoulder was warm against yours, and you did not move away.

"I missed you," he said quietly. "More than I thought I would."

"I missed you too."

"I know. Your letters—" He stopped. Started again. "They help. They help more than you know."

You turned to look at him. The starlight caught his features, softening them, making him look younger than his fifteen years. "Then I will keep writing."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

Fifteen, and you returned to court for his nameday.

He was sixteen now, officially a man grown, though he still carried himself with that same quiet hesitance. The tourney in his honor had been grand—his father's doing, you suspected, Baelor's quiet pride in his eldest son manifesting in silver and silk and the finest knights in the Seven Kingdoms.

Valarr had not won. He had never been a great warrior, and you knew he never would be. But he had held his own, had lasted three rounds against knights twice his age, and you had cheered louder than anyone when he finally yielded.

Afterward, he found you in the gardens.

"You embarrassed me," he said, but he was smiling.

"I did not. I was supportive."

"Supportive is quiet encouragement. You were—" He laughed, shaking his head. "You were very loud."

"You deserved loud. You fought well."

His smile softened. "You think so?"

"I know so. I watched every moment."

He looked at you for a long moment. The garden was quiet, the sounds of the feast distant and muffled. His hand found yours, tentative, questioning.

You did not pull away.

"Y/N," he said, and his voice was different. Thicker, somehow. "I—"

"Val." You squeezed his hand. "I know."

You did know. You had known for years, in the way that you knew the shape of your own thoughts. He loved you. He had always loved you, from the moment you pulled him out from behind that tapestry and sat beside him in the dust.

And you—you loved him too. Not the way you loved your father, or your brothers, or Summerhall. Different. Deeper. A thing that had grown so slowly you had not noticed it until it was too large to ignore.

He did not say the words. He did not need to. He simply stood there, in the quiet garden, holding your hand as though it were the most precious thing in the world.

And you stood with him.

Now you are seventeen, and it is his eighteenth nameday.

The celebrations have been ongoing for three days. Tourneys and feasts and dances, endless dances where you have been partnered with lordlings and heirs and one very persistent Tyrell who does not seem to understand that your smiles are merely polite. Your feet ache. Your head aches. Your patience has long since fled.

Valarr finds you in the corridor outside the great hall, where you have escaped for air.

"You look like you are planning someone's murder," he observes.

"I am planning many murders. The Tyrell boy is first."

He laughs. It is a good sound, warm and genuine, and it eases something in your chest. "He is harmless."

"He is tiresome. There is a difference."

"There always is with you." He glances around, lowers his voice. "Come with me."

"Where?"

"Away." He holds out his hand, that same tentative gesture, as though he still fears you might refuse. "I want to show you something."

You take his hand without hesitation.

He leads you through passages you do not know, past kitchens and storage rooms and up a winding stair that seems to go on forever. The air grows cooler, the sounds of the castle fading behind you. Finally, he pushes open a door, and you step out onto the roof.

The night sky opens above you, vast and brilliant, more stars than you have ever seen. The city sprawls below, a thousand tiny lights flickering in the darkness. The wind is sharp up here, carrying the salt scent of the bay.

"What is this place?" you breathe.

"My secret. I found it years ago, when I needed to hide." He gestures at the sky. "No one comes here. No one knows it exists. Just me."

"And now me."

"And now you." He looks at you, and his eyes are very blue in the starlight. "Happy nameday to me."

You laugh. "You brought me a gift for your nameday?"

"The best gift. You, alone, with no Tyrells." He pauses. "I have something else, actually. But it can wait."

"What is it?"

He shakes his head, smiling. "Later. First—" He draws something from his belt, and you recognize it with a start. A practice sword, blunted but familiar. "I have not forgotten."

"Val—"

"When I can beat you with a sword, you said. You would marry me." His voice is light, teasing, but there is something underneath it. Something serious. "I am eighteen now. A man grown. It seems past time I collected on that promise."

"You cannot be serious."

"Deadly serious." He tosses the sword lightly from hand to hand. "One bout. Right here. No one to see but the stars."

You stare at him. He stares back, that hesitant smile playing at his lips, his eyes bright with something you cannot quite name.

"You will lose," you say.

"Probably." He shrugs. "But I have been practicing."

You have no sword. You have no intention of fighting him on a rooftop in your feast clothes. You have every intention of telling him exactly how foolish this is.

Instead, you laugh. "You are impossible."

"I learned from the best."

You find a length of wood near the door—an old broom handle, discarded and forgotten. It is not a sword, but it will serve. You settle into your stance, the same stance your father taught you years ago, and face him across the moonlit roof.

"Rules?" you ask.

"First to disarm."

"First to disarm," you agree. "Begin."

He is better than you expected. Not good—not truly good, not the way your father is good, not the way a warrior is good—but better. His footwork is solid, his guard consistent, his attacks measured and careful. He has been practicing. He has been practicing a great deal.

You circle each other on the rooftop, the city spread below, the stars wheeling overhead. Your broom handle meets his practice sword again and again, the sound sharp in the night air. He presses forward; you yield ground, testing him. He follows; you parry, riposte, force him back.

"You have improved," you admit.

"I told you." He is breathing hard, but smiling. "I always keep my promises."

You press your advantage. He is stronger than he was, but you are faster, more skilled, more experienced. Your father taught you well, and you have not let those lessons rust. You drive him back toward the edge of the roof, your broom handle a blur of motion.

He is going to lose. He knows he is going to lose. You can see it in his eyes, the acceptance, the determination to fight on anyway.

And then—

He moves forward instead of back.

It is unexpected, bold, utterly foolish. He steps inside your guard, inside the reach of your broom handle, and for a moment you are too surprised to react. His free hand comes up, not to strike, but to cup your face.

His lips meet yours.

The kiss is soft, tentative, exactly like him. His mouth is warm against yours, and for one breathless moment you forget everything—the sword, the rooftop, the city below, the stars above. You forget your name, your training, your father's voice in your head. There is only him, only Valarr, only the impossible sweetness of his mouth on yours.

Your broom handle drops from nerveless fingers.

He pulls back, just slightly, his forehead resting against yours. His eyes are very blue, very close, very bright. His breath is warm on your lips.

"I win," he whispers.

You look down. His practice sword is pressed gently against your wrist, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to count. Your broom handle lies forgotten at your feet.

He disarmed you.

You should be angry. You should call him a cheat, a trickster, a dishonorable wretch who would rather steal a victory than earn it fairly. You should—

You kiss him again.

This time it is not soft. This time it is not tentative. This time you put into it everything you have not said, everything you have not admitted, everything you have been too afraid to name. You kiss him like the years of letters, like the stolen moments in gardens, like the weight of his hand in yours and the warmth of his shoulder against your own.

He makes a sound against your mouth—surprise, pleasure, something deeper—and his arms come around you, pulling you close. The practice sword clatters to the roof, forgotten. His hands find your waist, your back, your hair. He kisses you like he has been waiting his whole life for this moment.

Perhaps he has.

When you finally break apart, you are both breathless. The stars spin overhead. The city glitters below. His face is very close, very flushed, very beautiful in the moonlight.

"That was—" he starts.

"A cheat," you say, but you are smiling. "A trick. Dishonorable."

"I won."

"You cheated."

"The rules did not say I could not kiss you." His voice is soft, wondering. "I checked. Very carefully. Many times."

You laugh. You cannot help it. The sound echoes across the rooftop, bright and free, and he watches you with an expression you have never seen before. Tenderness, yes. Love, certainly. But something else—something like triumph, like wonder, like he cannot quite believe you are real.

"I have loved you," he says quietly, "since I was six years old and you sat beside me behind that tapestry. I have loved you every day since. I will love you every day until I die."

"Val—"

"You do not have to say it back. I know—I know you care for me, I know you—but you do not have to—"

You kiss him again, just to stop his rambling.

When you pull back, his eyes are very bright. "I love you too," you say. "You impossible, ridiculous, wonderful man. I have loved you for years. I was just waiting for you to catch up."

He laughs. It is a wet sound, a little broken, absolutely joyful. "I caught up."

"You did." You touch his face, trace the line of his jaw. "Eventually."

"I won."

"You cheated."

"I won, and now you have to marry me."

You consider this. The stars wheel overhead. The city glitters below. His arms are warm around you, his heart beating against your chest, his eyes the blue of winter sky.

"I suppose," you say slowly, "I did make a promise."

"You did."

"And I always keep my promises."

"I know." He kisses your forehead, your nose, the corner of your mouth. "I know you do."

"Then I suppose—" You smile, and it feels like coming home. "I suppose you had better speak to my father."

He groans, dropping his head to your shoulder. "Your father. The man who sharpens his sword every morning while glaring at anyone who looks at you too long."

"He likes you."

"He tolerates me. There is a difference."

"There always is." You run your fingers through his hair, and he sighs against your shoulder. "But he will say yes. He knows—he knows you make me happy."

"He does?"

"He notices everything. It is very inconvenient." You pause. "Also, you are a prince of the realm, grandson of the king, heir to Dragonstone after your father. There are worse matches."

He lifts his head, mock-offended. "You are marrying me for my title?"

"I am marrying you despite your title. There is a difference."

He laughs, and kisses you again, and the stars spin on.

The weeks blur into something golden.

Three weeks of Valarr's nameday celebrations—feasts and hunts and tourneys and balls, each one grander than the last. Three weeks of smiling at the right moments, dancing with the right partners, saying the right things to the right people. Three weeks of pretending that everything is exactly as it should be.

And three weeks of stealing moments.

The gardens at dawn, when the rest of the castle sleeps. A hidden alcove behind the tapestry in the library. The abandoned tower room where the maesters once stored their books, now empty and forgotten. These become your sanctuaries, your secret kingdom, the only places where you can stop being princess and prince and simply be yourselves.

You meet him whenever you can.

In the mornings, before anyone thinks to look for you. In the afternoons, when the court naps through the heat. At night, when the feasts finally end and the corridors grow quiet and the guards know better than to question the prince's late-night walks.

He is always waiting.

His arms open. His smile private. His eyes warming the moment they find you.

"You're late," he says one afternoon, pulling you into the alcove behind the tapestry.

"I'm not late. You're early."

"I've been waiting for an hour."

"You have not."

"I have. I counted every heartbeat." His arms circle your waist, drawing you against him. "Seven thousand, two hundred and forty-three."

"You're ridiculous."

"I'm in love. There's a difference."

You kiss him. It is the only reasonable response.

The alcove is small, barely large enough for two, but you have grown to love its cramped intimacy. The stone wall at your back. His warmth at your front. The muffled sounds of the library beyond the tapestry, scholars and scribes going about their business unaware that the heir to the Iron Throne is three feet away with his hands in your hair.

"I have to go back soon," you murmur against his lips.

"Not yet."

"Your mother will notice."

"My mother has noticed everything since i was eight. She's just waiting to see what happens next."

"And what is happening next?"

He pulls back just enough to meet your eyes. His expression has shifted, the playfulness fading into something deeper, more serious.

"I'm telling my father in the morrow."

Your heart stops. "It's been three weeks. The celebrations end tomorrow. If I wait any longer, you'll go back to Summerhall and I'll—" He stops. Swallows. "I'll lose you again."

"You won't lose me."

"You know what I mean." His hand cups your face. "I want to do this properly. I want to ask for your hand. I want your father's blessing and my father's approval and the king's consent. I want to marry you in the light, in front of everyone, with no more hiding and no more secrets."

"Valarr—"

"I know it's fast. I know we've only had three weeks. But I've loved you for ten years. I've waited for you for ten years. I'm not waiting anymore."

You look at him—this man who was once a shy boy hiding behind tapestries, who grew tall and strong and sure, who kept his promise to practice every day and wrote you a hundred letters he never sent. This man who held you in a tent and kissed you like you were the answer to every question he had ever asked.

"You're sure?" you whisper.

"I've never been more sure of anything."

You kiss him again. Deeper this time, slower, pouring ten years of waiting into a single moment.

His hands roam your back, your waist, your hips. Yours tangle in his hair, pull him closer, hold him there. The tapestry muffles your soft sounds. The library continues its quiet business. The world spins on, oblivious.

Your hand drifts lower.

He catches your wrist. Gently. His forehead rests against yours, his breath coming quick.

"Not yet," he says.

"I want to."

"I know." His thumb traces slow circles on your palm. "But not like this. Not in a hidden alcove, stealing moments between duties. Not when I have to let you go in an hour and pretend nothing happened."

"I don't care about—"

"I care." His voice is soft but firm. "I won't take your maidenhood like this. After the celebration, I'll tell my father. I'll propose to you properly. I'll do this right."

You want to argue. You want to tell him that you don't need proposals or permissions, that you have waited long enough, that the only thing that matters is him.

But you look at his face—the sincerity in his eyes, the steadiness of his gaze—and you understand.

"Only our wedding bed," he says slowly, "will have the honor of our first love. I promise."

"You and your promises."

"You and your waiting." He pulls you close, tucking your head beneath his chin. "We're quite a pair."

"We are." Your arms circle his waist. "A pair of fools in love."

"The best kind of fools."

---

The morning light falls soft through the windows of Prince Baelor's solar.

Valarr stands before his father's desk, his heart full, his intentions clear. He has rehearsed this conversation a hundred times—in the garden, in the alcove, in the quiet hours of the night when sleep would not come. He knows exactly what he will say.

Father, I want to marry Y/N. This is not an infatuation. I have loved her since we were children. I want to spend the rest of my life with her. I want your blessing.

Baelor looks up from the papers on his desk. His expression is unreadable, it has always been unreadable, the face of a man who has spent his life learning to hide his thoughts. But there is something in his eyes today. Something Valarr cannot name.

"Valarr." His voice is gentle. "Sit down."

"I'd rather stand." A pause. "Father, I need to speak with you about something important."

"And I need to speak with you." Baelor sets down his quill. He gestures to the chair across from his desk. "Please. Sit."

Something cold settles in Valarr's stomach. He sits.

Baelor is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is careful—too careful, the voice of a man delivering news he knows will wound.

"I have been in discussions with the Archon of Tyrosh," he says. "For several months now. Trade agreements, military alliances—the usual dance." He pauses. "And a marriage."

Valarr goes very still.

"The Archon's daughter, Kiera. She is of an age with you. Well-educated, well-mannered, well-connected. The match would strengthen our ties with the Free Cities, secure our southern trade routes, and provide a counterbalance to the growing power of—"

"No."

Baelor stops. His eyes meet his son's.

"No," Valarr repeats. "I won't marry her."

"You haven't even met her."

"I don't need to meet her." His voice is rising, though he fights to keep it steady. "I am going to marry Y/N. That is what I came here to tell you. I want your blessing to propose to her."

Baelor's face shifts, something flickering across his features that might be regret, might be understanding, might be the echo of his own youth.

"Y/N," he says. "Maekar's daughter."

"Yes."

Baelor is quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is softer.

"I understand what you feel. I do. Young love is powerful—I remember what it was like to be your age, to look at someone and think they were the only person in the world who mattered." He leans forward. "But you are not just any young man, Valarr. You are my heir. You will be king after your grandfather. The realm needs more than love—it needs alliances, treaties, bonds that cannot be broken."

"I don't care."

"Valarr—"

"I don't care about Tyrosh. I don't care about trade routes or military alliances or any of it." He is on his feet now, though he does not remember standing. "I have done everything you asked. Every lesson, every duty, every expectation. I have been the perfect son, the perfect heir, the perfect prince. I have never asked for anything."

Baelor rises too. His expression is pained. "I know."

"Then give me this." His voice cracks. "Give me Y/N. She is the only thing I have ever wanted. The only thing."

"Valarr—"

"Father, please." He is begging now, and he does not care. "I love her. I have loved her since I was eight years old. I waited for her for five years while she was in Summerhall. I wrote her a hundred letters I never sent because I was afraid. And now she is here, and she loves me, and you cannot ask me to give her up."

Baelor's jaw tightens. "The negotiations with Tyrosh are nearly complete. The Archon expects—"

"Then marry Matarys to her."

"Matarys is fourteen."

"Then Daeron. I don't care. Marry her to Daeron. Marry her to anyone. Just let me have Y/N."

"You are not thinking clearly."

"I am thinking more clearly than I have ever thought." He steps closer to his father, his voice dropping. "I will marry Y/N. Whether you want it or not. Whether the king wants it or not. Whether the whole realm wants it or not."

Baelor's eyes widen slightly. "You cannot—"

"I can." His voice is quiet now. Steady. Absolute. "I can, Father. If you refuse me, I will elope with her. We will find a septon somewhere, some village no one has heard of, and we will marry in secret and spend the rest of our lives paying for it."

"You would throw away everything?"

"I would throw away everything for her." He meets his father's eyes without flinching. "The succession. The throne. My name. Everything. I don't care about any of it without her."

Silence stretches between them.

Baelor stares at his son. At this boy who was once shy and round-cheeked, who hid behind tapestries and blushed at every teasing word. This boy who has grown into a man, a knight, a prince—and who stands before him now, trembling with the force of his conviction.

"If you refuse me," Valarr says, "I will abdicate. Matarys can be heir. He would make a fine king—better than me, probably. He has the charm I lack, the ease with people, the—"

"Stop." Baelor's voice is rough. "Stop."

Valarr stops.

His father looks at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, he sits back down. He presses his palms to his eyes and rubs, hard.

"Your mother is going to kill me," he mutters.

Valarr blinks. "What?"

"The Tyroshi negotiations." Baelor drops his hands. "I am going to have to undo months of work. The Archon will be furious. Your grandfather will be disappointed. The entire court will talk."

"Father—"

"She is Maekar's daughter." Baelor is not looking at him. He is looking at the papers on his desk, the careful lists of alliances and agreements. "Maekar. My brother. Who will probably also want to kill me, for an entirely different set of reasons."

Valarr's heart is pounding. "Are you saying—"

"I am saying that I have never seen you like this." Baelor looks up. His eyes are tired, but there is something else there—something that might be pride. "I have never seen you fight for anything. You have always accepted what you were given, done what you were told, followed the path laid out for you."

"I—"

"Today, you fought." He almost smiles. "Today, you told me what you wanted. What you were willing to sacrifice for. What you would burn down rather than lose."

Valarr says nothing. He cannot speak.

"If this is what you want," Baelor says slowly, "if she is truly the one—then I will not stand in your way."

The words take a moment to register. When they do, Valarr's knees nearly buckle.

"I will need to speak with Maekar. With your grandfather. With the Archon, who will be furious, and with your mother, who will have opinions." Baelor shakes his head. "But if you are certain—if you are absolutely certain—then I will support you."

"I am certain." His voice is barely a whisper. "I have never been more certain of anything."

Baelor nods. He looks older suddenly, wearier, as though the weight of the conversation has settled into his bones.

"Then go," he says. "Go find her. Tell her. Before I change my mind."

Valarr does not need to be told twice.

He is out the door before his father finishes speaking, running through the corridors of the Red Keep with his heart soaring and his future bright before him.

He is going to marry Y/N.

Nothing else matters.

---

Four years.

You count them sometimes, in the quiet hours before dawn, when your husband's arm is heavy across your waist and the world has not yet remembered to demand anything of either of you. Four years of marriage. Four years of waking beside him, of falling asleep beside him, of learning the shape of his days and the weight of his silences and the thousand small ways he shows you he loves you.

Three years of moon tea.

You had not expected it. Had not even considered it, in those giddy weeks before the wedding, when everything was light and promise and the future stretched before you like an unrolled map. Children, of course. There would be children. You were Targaryens, heirs to a dynasty, and children were the currency of your bloodline.

But Valarr had asked.

Not commanded. Not demanded. Asked, in that quiet way of his, his hands cupping your face, his eyes searching yours for understanding.

Not yet, he had said. Please. Not yet.

He had waited ten years for you. Ten years of wanting, of longing, of building you into something almost mythical in his mind. And now you were his—finally his, truly his, in every way that mattered—and he could not bear to share you.

Not yet.

You had agreed. It seemed a small thing, at the time. A year or two, to have him to yourself, to be young and in love and unburdened by the weight of motherhood. The maester had provided the tea without question—it was common enough, for noble ladies who wished to space their children, to control the timing of their fertility. No one thought anything of it.

A year became two. Two became three.

The court began to talk.

The Princess Y/N has been married four years and still no child. Perhaps she is barren. Perhaps the blood runs thin. Perhaps the gods have cursed her for some slight, some sin, some—

You heard the whispers. You could not help but hear them. They followed you through corridors, through gardens, through the great hall where you sat beside your husband at feasts and pretended not to notice the speculative glances.

Valarr heard them too. His jaw would tighten. His hand would find yours beneath the table. But he did not suggest stopping the tea.

He was greedy. You knew this about him—had always known it, from the first moment he told you he had waited ten years and would wait ten more. He wanted you. All of you. Every moment, every thought, every breath. He wanted to make up for lost time, for the years when you were only letters he never sent, only a face he tried to remember, only a promise he was not certain you had kept.

And you had let him. Because you were greedy too. Because you had waited just as long, wanted just as fiercely, needed just as desperately. Because the thought of sharing him—of pushing your body through the transformations of pregnancy, of dividing your attention between husband and child—felt like a loss you were not ready to face.

But the talks grew louder.

And your body, independent of your wishes, began to ache for something more.

Now you sit in the window seat of your chambers, the afternoon light warm on your face, your hand resting on the curve of your belly. Eight months. Ten months since you stopped taking the tea, since you told Valarr it was time, since you watched his face cycle through fear and joy and fear again.

He had not argued. He had kissed your belly instead, reverent and terrified, and promised to love this child as fiercely as he loved you.

The child kicks. Strong and insistent, a reminder that you are no longer alone in your own body. You smile, though your back aches and your feet have swollen and you cannot remember the last time you slept through the night.

Valarr will be back soon. He has been gone all afternoon, attending to some matter with his father, some duty of the heir that cannot wait. He hates leaving you. He tells you every time, pressing kisses to your forehead, your cheeks, your lips, promising to return as quickly as he can.

Stay, he always whispers. Wait for me. I'll be fast.

You always wait.

The door opens. His footsteps cross the room. His hands settle on your shoulders, warm and familiar, before he circles the bench to kneel before you.

His face. You never tire of looking at his face. Four years, and it still makes your heart stutter.

His hands find your belly. His lips follow, pressing soft kisses to the swell, to the place where his child grows.

"Hello," he murmurs against your skin. "Hello in there. Your father is home."

The child kicks. Right where his mouth is. He laughs, startled, and looks up at you with eyes that are still the same winter sky you remember from a library, from a promise, from a lifetime ago.

"She knows me," he says.

"It could be a boy."

"It's a girl. She knows me." He presses another kiss to your belly. "She's impatient. Like her mother."

"You have no proof of that."

"I have four years of proof." He settles more comfortably, his cheek resting against your belly, his arms wrapping around your hips. "Four years of you being impatient for everything except the one thing I asked you to wait for."

You run your fingers through his hair. The silver streak is still there, bright against the dark. You have always loved that streak.

"Are you glad?" you ask quietly. "That we waited?"

He is silent for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is muffled against your belly.

"I'm glad we had the time. Just us. Four years of just us." He lifts his head to look at you. "But I'm glad we stopped waiting too. I'm glad—" His hand presses more firmly against your belly. "I'm glad for this."

You pull him up. You kiss him. Soft and slow and full of everything four years has taught you about loving him.

The child kicks again.

Valarr laughs against your mouth.

"Eager," he says. "Definitely your daughter."

"Definitely yours."

He kisses you again. The afternoon light fades. The whispers of the court drift away, unimportant, irrelevant.

There is only this. Only him. Only the life growing between you, the future you built from waiting and wanting and four years of greedy, selfish love.

The argument starts quietly.

It always does, with you. You have never been one for shouting, for dramatics, for the kind of fights that echo through corridors and become court gossip. You state your position. You wait for his response. You counter. You wait again.

But this time, his response does not come.

Instead, he stares at you. His face has gone very still, very pale, in a way you have learned to recognize over four years of marriage. It is the face he wears when he is trying very hard not to show how deeply something has affected him.

"You cannot be serious," he says.

"I am completely serious." You keep your voice steady, reasonable. "The Ashford tourney is two weeks away. The journey is not long—four days at most, with proper accommodations. The maester said travel in the later months is possible, as long as one is careful."

"Possible." He repeats the word as though it tastes strange. "Possible is not safe. Possible is not—" He stops. Runs a hand through his hair. "Y/N. You are eight months pregnant."

He steps closer, his hands reaching for yours. "You are heavily pregnant. The maesters said—"

"The maesters said many things. They also said I might have difficulty conceiving, and we both know how wrong they were." You let him take your hands, but you do not soften. "I want to be there. The whole family is going—your father, your brothers, my father, everyone. I don't want to sit alone at King's Landing while you all ride off to Ashford."

"You would not be alone. You would be safe. Here. In our chambers. With maesters and midwives and—"

"Valarr."

"Y/N." His grip on your hands tightens. "Please. Please do not ask me to watch you ride off on some tourney progress when you are this close to your time. I cannot—" His voice cracks. He stops. Swallows. "I cannot."

You have seen your husband afraid before. You have seen him face his father, face the king, face the weight of his name and his duty and all the expectations that come with being heir to the Iron Throne. You have never seen him look like this.

"I would be careful," you say, softer now. "I would take every precaution. The roads are good this time of year, and—"

"Please."

The word is barely a whisper. He drops to his knees.

You stare at him. Valarr—your husband, the heir of the heir to the Iron Throne, the man who has never begged for anything in his life—is on his knees before you, his hands still gripping yours, his face tilted up to meet your eyes.

"My love." His voice is rough, scraped clean of all pretense. "My soul. I am begging you."

"Valarr, get up—"

"No." He shakes his head, his grip tightening. "No, I will stay here until you agree. I will stay here all night if I have to. I will—" He stops. Takes a breath. "You are everything to me. You and this child. Everything. If something happened on the road, if something happened at Ashford, if you were hurt and I was not there—"

"You would be there. You would be right beside me."

"And if I could not reach you in time? If something went wrong and I was on the other side of the tourney grounds, or in the middle of a tilt, or—" His voice breaks again. "I cannot. I cannot lose you. I cannot lose either of you. Please."

You look down at him. At his mismatched eyes, bright with unshed tears. At his hands, white-knuckled around yours. At his knees, pressed against the cold stone floor because he refused to wait for a cushion, refused to wait for anything except your answer.

Four years of marriage. Four years of greedy, selfish love, of moon tea and whispered promises and a jealousy so fierce it sometimes stole your breath. You had thought you understood the depth of his need for you.

You had not understood this.

"You are ridiculous," you whisper.

"I know." His voice is hoarse. "I am ridiculous. I am pathetic. I am on my knees begging my wife not to leave me, and I do not care who knows it. Please, Y/N. Please stay."

The child kicks. Hard. Right against your ribs, as though agreeing with its father.

You close your eyes.

You think about Ashford. The tourney. The chance to see your family, to be part of something larger than these quiet chambers and the endless waiting. You think about four days on the road, about the jostling of the carriage, about the crowds and the noise and the thousand small dangers you had convinced yourself were negligible.

You open your eyes.

Valarr is still there. Still on his knees. Still waiting.

"I will stay," you say.

The breath leaves him in a rush. His forehead drops to your belly, pressing against the swell, against the child who kicks in response.

"Thank you," he whispers. "Thank you. Thank you."

You run your fingers through his hair. The silver streak. The dark strands. The familiar shape of his head beneath your hands.

"Get up," you say gently. "You are going to ruin your knees."

"I do not care about my knees."

"Get up anyway."

He rises. Slowly. His hands find your face, cupping it with the same reverence he has shown you since the first moment he held you in that tent four years ago.

"I love you," he says. "I love you more than anything. More than the throne. More than my name. More than—"

"I know." You cover his hands with your own. "I know."

He kisses you. Soft and desperate and full of everything he cannot say.

You kiss him back.

The child kicks again, and you laugh against his mouth, and the argument is over.

The letter arrives a week before they return.

You know something is wrong the moment you see the maester's face. He is pale, paler than you have ever seen him, and his hands tremble slightly as he holds out the folded parchment.

"A raven from Ashford, my princess," he says. His voice is not steady. "You should sit down."

You do not sit. You take the letter. You read it.

Baelor Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone, is dead. Killed by a blow to the head during a trial of the seven. The king has been informed. The party will return within the week.

That is all. Official words, carefully chosen, stripped of emotion. A prince is dead. Your uncle is dead. The man who smiled at you when you arrived at court, who clapped your brother's shoulder with easy affection, who raised the boy you married to be the man he is—

Dead.

You read the words again. They do not change.

Your father's hand. Your father, who taught you to ride, who held you when you cried, who told you that you would have made a better prince than any son in the kingdom.

Your father killed his brother.

You do not remember sitting down. You do not remember the maester leaving. You only know that suddenly you are on the floor, the letter crumpled in your hands, and the child is kicking and kicking and kicking as though trying to remind you that life continues even when the world has ended.

They return on a grey morning.

You stand in the courtyard of the Red Keep, wrapped in a cloak that does not quite keep out the chill. The child shifts within you, restless, as though sensing your tension. Around you, the court gathers in somber silence. No music. No banners. No celebration.

The gates open.

They ride in slowly, a procession of mourners rather than victors. Black banners hang from lances. Horses walk at a funereal pace. Faces are drawn, pale, marked by grief.

You see Valarr first.

He is at the front, as befits his new station—heir to the Iron Throne now, though the title tastes like ash in your mouth. His face is grey. His eyes are empty. He looks at you as though you are the only solid thing in a world that has turned to water.

your gaze searches the procession for your father.

You find him near the back.

He is alone. The other riders have given him space, a wide berth as though his grief might be contagious. His horse moves mechanically, responding to cues he probably does not remember giving. His face—

You have never seen your father's face like this.

He looks old. Broken. Hollowed out by something worse than grief—by guilt, by knowledge, by the unbearable weight of having killed his own brother with his own hand.

His eyes find yours.

For a moment, neither of you moves. The procession continues around you, horses and riders and mourners flowing past like a river around stones. But you and your father are still, frozen in each other's gaze.

Then he looks away. His horse carries him forward, toward the stables, toward whatever solitude he can find in a castle full of people.

You want to follow him. You want to hold him. You want to tell him that it was an accident, that no one blames him, that Baelor would not want him to carry this weight alone.

But the child kicks. Valarr is approaching, his grey face breaking into something almost like relief at the sight of you. The court watches. The world continues its terrible turning.

You stay where you are.

And you wait for your husband to reach you.

Three weeks pass.

The sickness spreads like fire through dry grass. Servants first, then guards, then nobles. The maesters work day and night, their faces growing more grim with each report. The Red Keep becomes a labyrinth of quarantined chambers and forbidden corridors, of doors that open only one way and close forever.

Valarr has you locked in your room before the first noble falls ill.

You do not argue. You cannot argue—he is already gone, standing in the doorway with his hand on the frame and his eyes fixed on you like a man saying goodbye.

"I will not risk you," he says. "I will not risk either of you. Only the maids I trust. No one else. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

He wants to cross to you. You see it in the way his fingers curl against the wood, in the way his weight shifts forward before he forces it back. He wants to hold you, kiss you, press his face to your belly and feel the child move.

He does not.

"I love you," he says. "Stay safe."

The door closes.

You do not see him again for twelve days.

He uses other chambers. You know this because Lyra tells you, her voice carefully neutral as she brings your meals and changes your linens and checks that you are still breathing. The prince sleeps in the Tower of the Hand now, in rooms far from yours. He sends messages—short notes in his familiar hand, I am well, I miss you, Stay safe—but he does not come.

You understand. You hate it, but you understand.

The child grows heavier. The days grow longer. The sickness takes more names each morning, each evening, each hour between.

One morrow you wake to Lyra's face.

It is wrong. You know it immediately, the way you know things are wrong in that moment between sleep and waking. Lyra never comes this early. Lyra never looks like this.

"What?" You are already sitting up, your heart pounding, your hand flying to your belly. "What is it?"

"It's Prince Valarr."

The world stops.

"He's sick." Lyra's eyes are bright, too bright. "The fever took him last night. He's in his chambers. The maesters are with him but—" She stops again. "They don't know if he'll—"

You are already moving.

"My lady, you cannot—" Lyra reaches for you, but you are faster, stronger than you have any right to be. "The sickness, the baby, you cannot risk—"

You do not hear her. You are already through the door.

The corridors blur past you.

You do not remember walking. You do not remember the guards who step aside, their faces shocked, their protests dying unspoken. You do not remember the stairs, the turns, the doors that should be locked but are not, because someone has forgotten in the chaos of the night.

You remember only him.

Valarr. Your husband. Your heart. The boy who waited ten years, who begged you to stay, who cried in your arms each night since his father died. The man who locked you away to keep you safe, who used other chambers so he would not breathe the same air as you, who wrote you notes each day saying I am well when he must have known, must have felt the sickness creeping toward him even as his pen touched the paper.

The door to his chambers is open.

You step through.

He is alone.

This is the first thing you notice, the thing that cuts deepest. He is alone. The heir to the Iron Throne, the Prince of Dragonstone, the Hand of the King—and he lies in his bed with no one beside him, no hand to hold, no voice to comfort.

The maesters have been here. You see the evidence—the bowls of water, the cloths, the half-empty cups of potions that have not worked. But they are gone now. Called away to other patients, other crises, other lives that might still be saved.

Valarr lies in the center of the vast bed, drowning in sheets, drowning in fever.

His face is flushed. His hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat. His breath comes in short, shallow gasps, each one a struggle. His lips move, forming words you cannot hear.

You cross to him.

Your body protests. The child kicks hard, fierce, angry at being jostled. You ignore it. You ignore everything except the man on the bed, the man who is everything to you, the man who might be dying while you stand here doing nothing.

You climb onto the bed.

The sheets are damp. His skin is burning. You settle beside him, fitting yourself against his side the way you have done a thousand nights, a thousand times. Your arm crosses his chest. Your head rests on his shoulder. Your belly presses against his hip, and the child kicks again, and you do not care.

"I'm here," you whisper. "I'm here, my love. I'm here."

He stirs. His eyes open—just slightly, just enough to show the fever-bright blue beneath. His lips move.

"Y/N?"

"I'm here."

"You can't—" His voice cracks, barely a whisper. "Sickness. The baby. You have to—"

"I'm not going anywhere."

He tries to push you away. His hands are weak, useless, falling against you like leaves. You catch one of them, press it to your chest, hold it there.

"I love you," you say. "I love you, and I am not leaving you alone."

"Y/N—"

"Stop." Your voice is fierce. "Stop trying to protect me. Stop trying to send me away. I am your wife. I am carrying your child. And I will be here, with you, no matter what happens."

He stares at you. His eyes are glassy, unfocused, but something in them shifts. Something like understanding. Something like relief.

"I was so scared," he whispers. "Not of dying. Of leaving you alone."

"You're not leaving me."

"But if I—"

"You're not." You press your lips to his burning forehead. "You cannot sleep."

Your voice is firm, though it trembles at the edges. You are propped beside him in the bed, your hand still wrapped around his, your body pressed against his side. The fever burns through him like a fire, but his eyes are open now, cloudy, exhausted, but open.

"I'm so tired," he whispers.

"I know." You squeeze his hand. "But you cannot sleep. Not yet. Just a little longer."

He smiles. It is a weak thing, barely there, but it is a smile. "You're bossy."

"I'm your wife. It's my job."

"Mm." His eyes drift closed. You shake his shoulder gently.

"Valarr. Look at me."

He forces his eyes open. They find yours. Even now, even burning with fever, they hold you like you are the only thing worth seeing.

"Tell me something," you say. "Anything. Tell me about the first time you saw me."

"You were six." His voice is a rasp, barely audible. "You walked into the great hall like you owned it. Looked at me like I was furniture."

"I did not."

"You did." A ghost of a laugh. "I was hiding behind my mother's skirts. You came right up to me and told me hi, i was too shy back then"

You kiss his forehead again. His skin is too warm, too dry. You try not to think about it.

"Tell me more," you say.

"I wrote you letters." His eyes drift again, and you let him keep them open this time—he is still looking at you, still present. "Hundreds of them. After you left. I never sent any."

"Why not?"

"I was afraid." His voice cracks. "Afraid you would reject me."

"Foolish boy."

"Foolish man." He smiles again. "Still foolish. Still yours."

"Always mine."

You kiss him. You do not care about the fever, the sickness, the risk. You kiss him because he is here, because he is breathing, because you do not know how much longer you will have either.

He kisses back. Weakly. Desperately. His hand cups your face, and you feel the heat of his skin, and you do not care.

When you break apart, his eyes are brighter. Not just from fever.

"We never chose names," he says.

"What?"

"For the baby." His hand moves to your belly, resting on the swell. "We never chose names."

You laugh. It is a wet sound, half sob. "You want to name our baby now?"

"Now is all we have." He looks at you. "Tell me names."

You think. The child kicks beneath his hand, strong and insistent.

"If it's a girl," you say slowly, "I thought—perhaps—"

"Baela." He says it quietly, reverently. "For my father."

Your throat tightens. "Valarr—"

"She will be a pretty girl." His voice is soft, dreamy. "I know that already. A brave girl, like her mother. She will have your courage and my—" He stops. Smiles. "My complete inability to say no to her."

"She will have you wrapped around her finger."

"Good. That's how it should be." His hand presses gently against your belly. "Baela. Our daughter. Baela Targaryen."

"And if it's a boy?"

He is quiet for a moment. His eyes drift, and you shake him gently again.

"Valarr."

"Sorry. Thinking." He focuses on you. "If it's a boy—you choose."

"Me?"

"I chose the girl. You choose the boy." His thumb traces circles on your belly. "But it's a girl. I can feel it."

"You cannot feel it."

"I can." His smile is stubborn, even through the fever. "She kicks like you argue. Constant and insistent."

You laugh. You cannot help it.

"What about Baelor?" you ask quietly.

Something flickers across his face. Pain. Loss. Love.

"No." His voice is soft but firm. "No, that would bring me too much grief. I don't want our child born into sadness. I don't want to look at him and see—" He stops. Swallows. "I don't want that."

You understand. You squeeze his hand.

"Then you choose," you say. "When he's born. If he's born. You choose."

"If he's born." He looks at you. "But it's a girl."

"You are impossible."

"I am correct." His eyes are closing again. You let them close this time, just for a moment. "Baela. Our daughter. She will be beautiful."

"She will be stubborn."

"Like her mother."

"Like her father."

He smiles. It is peaceful, that smile, even through the fever and the fear and the uncertain hours ahead.

You hold his hand. You watch his face. You wait.

The child kicks.

You wait.

He falls asleep.

You feel it happen, the slow slackening of his grip, the evening of his breath, the way his body sinks deeper into the mattress. Your heart seizes. Your hand tightens around his.

"Valarr." Your voice is sharp, too loud in the quiet room. "Valarr, wake up."

He does not move.

"Valarr!" You shake his shoulder, harder than you should, desperate and afraid. "Wake up. Please. Please wake up."

His eyes open.

Slowly. Blinking against the light. But open.

"You're so loud," he whispers. His voice is weak, but it is there. He is there.

You collapse against him, your face pressed to his chest, your body shaking with relief. His hand rises slowly, heavily, to rest on your head.

"I had a dream," he says. His voice is dreamy, distant, still half-lost in whatever world he visited. "A beautiful short dream."

You lift your head. His eyes are glassy but focused on you, and you need him to stay awake, need him to keep talking, need anything that will keep him here with you.

"Tell me," you say. "Tell me about the dream."

He smiles. It is a soft thing, peaceful, untouched by the fever that burns through him.

"I was a dragon."

You almost laugh. It bubbles up, unexpected, breaking through the fear. "Did Aerion infect you with his delusions?"

He chuckles. It is a weak sound, barely there, but it is a laugh. "No, no. I was a dragon. A big dragon. I was—" He pauses, brow furrowing. "Green. I was green."

"You dislike green."

"I still looked good." His smile turns teasing, even through the exhaustion. "Very handsome. Very intimidating. All the other dragons were jealous."

"I'm sure they were."

"And you were also a dragon." His hand moves from your head to your face, cupping your cheek. "You were beautiful. Cream and gold at the same time, like—" He pauses, his gaze drifting to the wall.

You follow his eyes.

The painting hangs there, commissioned in the first year of your marriage, capturing your wedding day in oil and pigment. You stand at the center, your cream and gold dress catching the light, Valarr beside you in black and red. The artist captured your expression perfectly—the joy, the love, the absolute certainty that you were exactly where you belonged.

"Like our wedding day," he whispers. "You looked so beautiful. You were so strong."

"Valarr—"

"But even though you were strong, I was still your protector." His eyes return to you, bright with fever and love. "I flew beside you. Above you. Around you. I kept you safe. You had eggs—you were pregnant with our children, like now. And I loved you." His voice cracks. "I love you. I love you so much."

You cannot speak. Your throat is too tight, your eyes too full. You lean forward and press your lips to his, soft and desperate and full of everything you cannot say.

He kisses you back. Weakly, but he kisses you back.

When you break apart, his eyes are closing again.

"No." You shake him gently. "No, stay with me. Tell me more about the dream."

"Tired."

"I know. But stay with me. Please."

He forces his eyes open. He looks at you—his wife, his heart, the cream and gold dragon who carries his child—and he smiles.

"Beautiful," he whispers. "So beautiful."

Then his eyes close, and this time, when you shake him, he does not wake.

But his chest still rises and falls. His hand still holds yours. He is still here.

You settle beside him, your face against his chest, listening to his heart. The child kicks. The fever burns. The world waits.

You wait with it.

You do not know how long you lie there.

Time has lost meaning. The candles burn lower, gutter, die. New ones are lit by hands you do not see. The window darkens, lightens, darkens again. Hours or minutes or days—you cannot tell.

All you know is him.

His chest rising and falling beneath your cheek. His hand limp in yours. The heat of his skin, the rattle of his breath, the terrifying stillness between each inhale and the next.

You hold him. You do not let go.

The child kicks. You barely feel it.

Something is wrong. You know this distantly, the way you know the sun rises and sets, the way you know winter follows autumn. Something is wrong with your body. Pain, low and constant, building like a wave. But you cannot move. You cannot leave him.

You hold him. You do not let go.

The pain grows.

It starts as a ache, a pressure, something easy to ignore when all your attention is fixed on the man in your arms. But it grows. Deepens. Becomes something sharp and insistent, demanding attention you cannot give.

You ignore it.

You hold him. You do not let go.

The scream tears from you without warning.

It is not a sound you recognize. It is raw and desperate and animal, ripped from somewhere deep in your chest. Your body convulses, arching against him, and your grip on his hand tightens until your knuckles go white.

The pain. Gods, the pain.

But you do not let go.

You curl around him, pressing your face to his chest, breathing him in. The fever, the sweat, the familiar scent of him beneath the sickness. You hold him and you scream and you do not let go.

More screams. Yours. You cannot stop them. They come with each wave, each contraction, each terrible pulse of your body trying to do what bodies do even when the world is ending.

You hold him. You do not let go.

Time passes. You do not know how much.

The door opens.

You do not look up. You cannot look up. All your focus is on him, on the rise and fall of his chest, on the heartbeat you can still feel beneath your cheek.

Hands on you. Gentle at first, then firm.

"Y/N."

A voice you know. A voice from childhood, from Summerhall, from a thousand memories you cannot reach right now.

"Y/N, you need to let go."

You shake your head. Your face presses harder against Valarr's chest. Your arms tighten around him.

"No."

"Y/N—"

"No. I won't leave him. I won't."

The hands try to pull you away. You fight them. You scream—not from pain now, but from fury, from desperation, from the absolute certainty that if you let go he will die.

"Y/N, please. You're hurt. The baby—"

You do not care about the baby. You do not care about anything except him.

The hands stop pulling. Instead, they touch your leg. Your thigh. Your—

They freeze.

You feel it too, distantly. Wetness. Warmth. Blood.

"Gods." Your father's voice, rough with fear. "Y/N, you're bleeding. You're in labor. The baby is coming."

No. No, it is too early. Weeks too early. The baby cannot come now, cannot come while Valarr is dying, cannot—

Another wave of pain tears through you. You scream again. Your body curls, convulses, presses you harder against Valarr's unmoving form.

"I won't leave him." The words are broken, gasped between contractions. "I won't. He'll die. He'll die alone."

"Y/N." Hands grip your shoulders. You are lifted, pulled, torn away from the warmth of him. You fight—kicking, screaming, clawing—but your father is stronger, and the pain is overwhelming, and you cannot—

"NO!"

You are in his arms. Cradled against his chest like when you were small, like when you fell and scraped your knees, like when the world was too big and he was the only safe place.

But he is not safe. He is taking you away from him.

"Put me down! Put me DOWN!"

He does not put you down. He carries you through the doorway, into the corridor, away from Valarr's room, away from Valarr's body, away from—

"MAESTERS!" His voice roars, filling the corridor. "MIDWIVES! NOW!"

You are still screaming when he carries you into another room. Still screaming when they lay you on a bed. Still screaming when hands begin to pull at your clothes, check your body, prepare you for something you cannot face.

Still screaming.

Because he is alone.

Because you left him.

The pain takes you. The screaming stops. And there is only the dark.

The labor takes hours.

You are aware of it only in fragmentspa, in, then darkness, then pain again. Voices shouting. Hands pressing. Your father's face, close to yours, his voice rough with an emotion you have never heard from him.

"Stay with me. Stay with me, daughter. You're strong. You're so strong."

You want to tell him that you are not strong. That you left Valarr. That you are nothing without him.

But the pain takes you again, and you cannot speak.

She comes at last.

A cry. Small and fierce, cutting through the chaos. You hear it distantly, like a sound from another room, another life.

"A girl," someone says. "A healthy girl."

They place her on your chest.

She is tiny. Perfect. Her skin wrinkled, her fists clenched, her mouth open in a wail that already sounds like a demand. Her hair—what little there is—is dark. So dark. Just like his.

You touch her face with trembling fingers. She turns toward your touch, instinctive, seeking.

"Baela," you whisper. "Your name is Baela."

Your father's hand rests on your shoulder. Warm. Steady. You had forgotten he was there.

"She's beautiful," he says. His voice is thick. "She looks just like him."

"She does." You cannot stop looking at her. At the shape of her face, the curve of her cheeks, the dark hair that matches his exactly. "When Valarr wakes up, he'll be so glad. He'll be so happy. He wanted a girl. He said he could feel it."

Silence.

You do not notice it. You are too focused on Baela, on her tiny fingers, on the way her cries are quieting as she settles against your skin.

"He'll be so glad," you repeat. "He'll wake up and I'll show her to him and he'll—"

"Y/N." Your father's voice is careful. Too careful. "Y/N, love, Valarr is—"

"He's sleeping. He was so tired. The fever—" You look up, searching his face. "But he'll wake up. He always wakes up. I just have to wait. I just have to—"

Something is wrong.

The room is too quiet. Everyone is looking at you with the same expression—careful, pitying, afraid. Your father's face is grey. The maesters exchange glances. The midwives have stopped moving.

You look down at Baela. She has not opened her eyes yet. They are still closed, those tiny lids, hiding whatever color lies beneath.

"I don't feel well," you say.

The maester steps forward. He is old, experienced, his face weathered by decades of delivering babies and pronouncing deaths. He presses a hand to your forehead, checks your pulse, nods to himself.

"It is normal, Your Highness," he says. "The body has been through great strain. You are distressed. Rest will help."

"No." The word comes out sharper than you intended. "No, there is something wrong. I can feel it. Something is—"

"Princess." His voice is gentle, the voice one uses with frightened children. "You have just given birth. Your body is exhausted. Your mind is overwhelmed by grief. It is natural to feel unwell. Rest, and it will pass."

Grief.

The word hits you like a blow.

"What grief?" You look at your father. "Father, what grief? Why did he say grief?"

Your father's face crumbles.

"Y/N—"

"Where is Valarr?" You try to sit up, but your body will not cooperate. "Why isn't he here? He should be here. He should be—"

"Y/N, please—"

"Valarr!" You are shouting now, your voice raw. "Valarr! Someone get Valarr! He needs to see her! He needs to see Baela!"

Hands hold you down. Gentle but firm. The maester's face appears above you, and in his hand is a small cup.

"Drink this, Princess. It will help you rest."

"No. No, I don't want to rest. I want Valarr. I want—"

The cup presses to your lips. Liquid slides down your throat. Poppy, honey, something to dull the edges of the world.

"No," you whisper. But it is too late. The darkness is already creeping in.

You look at Baela one last time. Her eyes are still closed. Her dark hair. Her tiny fists.

"She looks so much like him," you murmur. "When he wakes up, he'll be so glad."

Your father takes Baela from your arms. You try to hold on, but your hands will not obey.

"Rest," he whispers. "Rest, my love."

The darkness takes you.

You do not wake up.

Hours pass. The maesters check on you, nod, leave. The midwives tend to Baela, who sleeps in a cradle nearby, her dark hair soft against the white linen. Your father sits beside you, holding your hand, waiting for you to open your eyes.

You do not.

The sun sets. The candles are lit. Your mother comes, her face wet, and sits on your other side. They hold your hands together, these two people who have loved you longest, and they wait.

You do not wake up.

Your father's hand tightens around yours.

"No," he says. "No, she's strong. She's always been strong. She'll wake up. She has to wake up."

Baela cries in her cradle. Someone picks her up, soothes her, feeds her. The sound fades. The room grows quiet.

Your father does not leave your side.

During the night your heart stops beating.

The pyre burns for two days.

Their bodies lie together, entwined as they were in life. Their hands are clasped. Their faces are peaceful.

Maekar stands at the front of the mourners and does not weep.

He cannot weep. The tears are frozen somewhere inside him, locked behind a wall of ice that will never fully thaw. He watches the flames consume his daughter, her husband, the future they should have had. He watches and he does not move.

In his pocket, his fingers close around a ring.

Gold, with a red ruby. The one Valarr placed on her finger during their wedding ceremony. The one she loved so much, that she touched absently when she was thinking, that she spun around her finger when she was nervous. The one they removed before the pyre, because Maekar could not bear to see it burn.

He remembers when Valarr came to him.

Months before the wedding. The boy had sought him out in the training yard, nervous and formal, asking for a private word. Maekar had expected a discussion of alliances, of dowries, of the endless practicalities that accompanied royal marriages.

Instead, Valarr had asked: What kind of rings does she like? What would she love?

Not what was traditional. Not what would impress the court. What she would love.

Maekar had told him. And Valarr had listened.

The ring in his pocket is proof of that.

Baela came to him after the funeral.

She is small. So small. Wrapped in blankets, held by a wet nurse who looks terrified to be anywhere near the grieving prince. But Maekar takes her. He holds her against his chest, this tiny creature who has his daughter's face and his daughter's husband's coloring.

She opens her eyes.

Blue and brown. Just like Valarr.

But her face,the shape of her cheeks, the curve of her chin, the way her brow furrows in thought,that is Y/N. That is his daughter, looking at him from the face of her child.

"Baela," he whispers. "Hello, little one."

She blinks. Her tiny hand escapes the blanket, reaching up, finding his beard.

Just like her mother used to do.

Maekar does not weep. But something cracks, deep inside.

He raises her as his own.

---

maekar

The hour is late.

Summerhall sleeps around him, quiet and still, but Maekar cannot rest. He sits in the nursery. The fire burns low in the hearth, casting long shadows across the walls. In her cradle, Baela sleeps. She is so small. So perfect. So terribly like her mother.

A goblet rests in his hand. Wine—Arbor gold, the same vintage he shared with Y/N on her sixteenth nameday, when she had laughed and told him it was too sweet and he had pretended to be offended. He drinks. The wine does nothing.

Baela stirs. A small sound, a shift of blankets. He sets down the goblet and rises, crossing to the cradle before he is fully aware of moving.

She looks up at him.

Her eyes are open, Valarr's eyes, the eyes that looked at his daughter with so much love it had sometimes made Maekar uncomfortable to witness. But her face. The shape of her cheeks. The curve of her chin. The way her brow furrows slightly, studying him.

That is Y/N.

That is his daughter.

"Y/N," he whispers.

The name falls from him without thought, without control. He is tired. He has had too much wine. The firelight is low and treacherous, painting shadows that lie.

"Y/N, I'm sorry." He reaches into the cradle, his big, scarred hand gentle as it ever was with her. His fingers brush her cheek. "I should have been there. I should have protected you. I should have—"

Baela makes a sound. Not a cry—something softer, questioning. Her tiny hand escapes the blanket and finds his fingers, gripping with that same fierce hold her mother had, the hold she had used since the moment she was born.

He freezes.

For a moment—just a moment—he lets himself believe.

"You used to hold my beard," he murmurs. "When you were small. You would grab it and not let go. I told your mother I would have to cut it off to survive you." A sound escapes him, something between a laugh and a sob. "I never did. You loved it too much."

Baela blinks up at him. Her grip on his finger does not loosen.

"You grew so beautiful," he continues. "So smart. So fierce. I watched you become everything I could have hoped for, and I was so proud, and I never told you enough." His voice cracks. "I never told you enough."

The door opens.

Daeron stands in the threshold, his face soft with sleep and sorrow. Daeron looks at him—his father, bent over the cradle, speaking to his granddaughter, as though she were Y/N—and something in his face breaks.

"Father." his voice is gentle. "Father, that's Baela."

He does not move.

"I know." His voice is rough. "I know. I just—for a moment—"

"I know, Come to bed."

"Daeron—"

"Go to bed." He tugs gently. "Baela will be here in the morning. She will always be here."

He lets Daeron lead him away. At the door, he looks back.

Baela's eyes are still open. Still watching him. Still so like her mother.

"Goodnight, little one," he whispers. "Goodnight, Y/N."

In the nursery, Baela sleeps.

She will not remember this night. She will not remember the way her grandfather looked at her and saw someone else, the way his voice broke on a name that was not hers, the way her grandmother led him away like a wounded animal.

But she will grow up knowing she was loved.

By both of them.

Always.

300 A.C

The Meereenese sun hangs heavy in the sky, thick and golden through the open arches of the pyramid. Daenerys Targaryen sits on her cushions, a bowl of grapes beside her, her silver-gold hair loose around her shoulders. She has been listening for hours.

Ser Barristan Selmy stands before her, his heavy armor pristine despite the heat, his weathered face marked by the weight of the story he has just finished telling.

Silence stretches between them.

Daenerys plucks a grape from the bowl. She looks at it for a long moment—small, purple, perfect. Then she throws it at him.

It bounces off his white breastplate and falls to the floor.

"I asked you for a love story," she says. Her voice is light, but there is something beneath it. "A funny story. Something to pass the time before the next round of petitions."

Barristan does not flinch. He has served too many Targaryens to flinch at a thrown grape.

"I told you the story you asked for, Your Grace."

"I asked for a love story. You told me a tragedy." She gestures vaguely, encompassing the pyramid, the city, the whole of Meereen. "They died. Both of them. On the same day. Before they could even see their daughter's face."

"Yes, Your Grace."

"And then her father—my great-great—" She stops, counting on her fingers. "Maekar. He raised the girl. He wore the ring. He died feeling guilty for something that wasn't his fault."

"Yes, Your Grace."

"And the girl—Baela—she lived happily. That part was nice." Daenerys reaches for another grape. "But everyone else died."

"That is often the way with Targaryen love stories, Your Grace."

Daenerys laughs. It is a surprised sound, pulled from her against her will. "You have a dark sense of humor, Ser Barristan."

"I have served your house for a very long time, Your Grace. One develops certain… perspectives."

She pops the grape into her mouth. Chews. Swallows.

She is quiet for a moment. Then she looks past him, through the open arches, toward the top of the pyramid where her dragons rest.

Viserion lies sprawled across the warm stone, his cream-and-gold scales gleaming in the sun. He is comfortable, relaxed, one wing draped carelessly over the edge of the platform. Asleep, perhaps, or simply basking in the heat he loves.

But it is Rhaegal who catches her attention.

The green dragon is not resting. He is curled around Viserion, his long neck wrapped protectively across his brother's back, his head resting against Viserion's neck. His eyes are half-closed, but every few moments they open, scanning, checking, ensuring that Viserion is still there, still safe, still his.

It is not unusual for dragons to cluster together. They are siblings, littermates, bonded in ways even she does not fully understand.

Rhaegal has always been the wild one. The angry one. The one who snaps and bites and seems to carry some ancient fury in his green scales. He does not cuddle. He does not curl protectively around anyone.

Except for Viserion.

Always Viserion.

The cream-and-gold dragon who is gentle where Rhaegal is fierce, calm where Rhaegal is storm, the only living creature who can approach Rhaegal without drawing blood.

Daenerys watches them. The green wrapped around the gold. The protective curl of his body. The way he shifts whenever Viserion stirs, making sure his brother settles back into comfort.

They look like they have been doing this forever.

Daenerys smiles. It is a small thing, soft, nothing like the commanding expression she wears for petitioners and ambassadors.

"Thank you, Ser Barristan," she says. "For the story. Even if it was a tragedy."

"It was a love story, Your Grace. The two are often the same."

They look peaceful.

Daenerys watches them for a long time.